# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// The Element of Crime by Lars Von Trier

The Element of Crime is a 1984 movie by Lars Von Trier that dramatizes a post-apocalyptic (sepia) world where people lives in the ruins of the ancient one. The scenario focuses on a tense detective trying to find back the tracks of a serial killer. The result is an ambiguous mix of film noir and science fiction with a slight dose of influence by William Burroughs.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// The King is Alive by Kristian Levring

The King is Alive is one more movie in the desert (see previous post) and was directed by Kristian Levring. It takes place in the ghost town of Kolmanskop in Namibia which was originally built by a German (diamond) Mine Company in 1908 and was abandoned in 1956. Since then, the desert re-colonized the land and despite the pretty good state of the houses, they are invaded by the sand.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// The secret life of words by Isabel Coixet

The secret life of words by Isabel Coixet is a beautiful film that take place on a offshore oil rig situated in the West of Ireland. The rig's characteristic is to combine the ship's language with an obvious link to the ground and therefore the island's static aspect. Foucault's favorite example of heterotopia is the one of the ship probably in a historicist concern, nevertheless the rig has the advantage not to imply any arrival that would not depend on the human when the oil rig implies an entrance and an exist that are absolutely dependent to the considered character.
The small basketball field and the swings on the deck definitely participates to the sedentary aspect of the territory itself.

Thanks Ethel !

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Dark Days by Marc Singer

Dark Days (2000) is a documentary by Marc Singer traveling in the New York's underground in order to meet the "mole people", a group of homeless living underneath and along Penn Station's railway.
This zone is de facto not controlled by any instance of power, and life there is a mix of solidarity and conflict between people who chose this way of life.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Touche pas a la femme blanche by Marco Ferreri

Touche pas a la femme blanche (Don't touch the white woman) is an incredible satirist western by Marco Ferreri filmed in 1974 in...the center of Paris. In fact, the entire movie is taking scene in the sector of Les Halles which were currently transformed from the central food market to a huge mall that we still know nowadays. Since this period Les Halles are known as "Le trou" (The hole) due to this impressive crater which needed to be dug.
Marco Ferreri therefore used this enormous construction site as the settings of his parody in order to eventually reproduce the battle of Little Big Horn (1876) as a battle against modernity. Whoever lived in Paris for more or less time would be probably amazed by those following very contrasted images of a recognizable Paris hosting troops of Indians and XIXth century US Army.
One could possibly regrets that the final battle seems to happen in a quarry (see last picture) rather than in "the hole" but the transition Ferreri succeeds to achieve thanks to a play of zoom and montages depicts a very interesting imaginary setting.
It is also interesting to know that before being Les Halles, this site used to be a cemetery (Cimetiere des Innocents) composed of numerous common graves and hosting more than two millions dead bodies...This movie seems therefore to be a kind of fictitious memory of the site which reappears when the earth is being excavated.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// スチームボーイ (STEAMBOY) by Katsuhiro Otomo, 2004

Here is a movie we couldn't avoid for this thematic, Steamboy a masterpiece of the great mangaka & director Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) . This movie his presenting a retro futuristic view of the mid 19th century in England, where a family of genius is building a steam powered tower combining the most incredible technology for the Great exhibition of 1851 in London. One can notice the highly detailed mecanic parts and beautifull retro machinery (cf : Wild Wild West by Barry Sonnenfeld). More over the graphic quality is bringing the picture to the dream, the perfect mix between 2d , 3D animation and color tones gives a great feeling of depth and a perfect motion fluidity. The 19th century London as a background is just as amazing as the wonderfull scenes that takes place in Paxton's Crystal Palace... I will notwrite longer about this movie and let you discovering it, following few pictures to give you a quick overview.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// 砂の女 (The woman in the dunes) by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Following the previous article about the desert, let's stay in the realm of sand with the masterpiece 砂の女 (The woman in the dunes) by Hiroshi Teshigahara directly interpreted from Kobo Abe's novel.
The plot dramatize the captivity of a man in a house which lays at the bottom of a sand "dwell" in which lives a woman who needs each day to extract a certain amount of sand for the nearby village and in order to maintain her house out from being swallowed by the sand. It represents a daily fight for the existence of her life environment in order to survive against the intractable process of the sand.
Whether one talks about the book or the film, the sand descriptions are absolutely splendid and even comports a kind of metaphysical aspect to some degrees.
Here is an excerpt of the novel:

Sand: an aggregate of rock fragments. Sometimes including loadstone, tinstone, or more rarely gold dust. Diameter: 2 to 1/16mm

A very clear definition indeed. In short, the sand came from fragmented rocks and was interemediate between clay and pebble. But simply calling it an intermediate substance did not provide a really satisfactory explanation. Why was it that isolated deserts and sandy terrain came into existence through the sifting out of only the sand from soil in which clay, sand, and stones were thoroughly mixed together? If a true intermediate substance were involved, the erosive action of wind and water would necessarily produce any number of intermingling intermediate forms in the range between rock and clay. However, there are in fact only three forms that can be clearly distinguished from one another: stones, sand, and clay. Furthermore, sand is sand wherever it is; strangely enough, there is almost no difference in the size of the grains whether they come from the Gobi Desert or from the beach at Enoshima. The size of the grains shows very little variation and follows a Gaussian distribution curve with a true mean of 1/8mm.
[…]
Because winds and water current flows over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth.

Kobo Abe. 砂の女 Suna no onna (The woman in the dunes). Borzoi 1964

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Desert

Desert is something between an heterotopia and what I would call an atopia (a non-space). It defines itself as a territory whose limits seem to reach the infinite, which is not to say that it seems to have no limits. In fact, in the cinematographic desert, one always tries to reach the horizon as a tenacious impossible quest.

I think an appropriate author to quote here is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (see previous post) in his beautiful humanist novel Desert:

They appeared as if in a dream at the top of the dune, half-hidden in the cloud of sand rising from their steps. Slowly, they made their way down into the valley, following the almost invisible trail. At the head of the caravan were the men, wrapped in their woolen cloaks, their faces masked by the blue veil. Two or three dromedaries walked with them, followed by the goats and sheep that the young boys prodded onward. The women brought up the rear. They were bulky shapes, lumbering under heavy cloaks, and the skin of their arms and foreheads looked even darker in the indigo cloth.
They walked noiselessly in the sand, slowly, not watching where they were going. The wind blew relentlessly, the desert wind, hot in the daytime, cold at night. The sand swirled about them, between the legs of the camels, lashing the faces of the women, who pulled the blue veils down over their eyes. The young childre ran about, the babies cried, rolled up in the blue cloth on their mothers' backs. The camels growled, sneezed. No one knew where the caravan was going.
[...]
They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They had appeared as if in a dream at the top of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudness sky and carried the harshness of space in their limbs. They bore with them hunger, the thrist of bleeding lips, the flintlike silence of the glinting sun, the cold nights, the glow of the Milky Way, the moon: accompanying them were their huge shadows at sunset, the waves of virgin sand over which their splayed feet trod, the inaccessible horizon. More than anything, they bore the light of their gaze shining so brightly in the whites of their eyes.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Desert (1980). Verba Mundi 2009

pictures:
- Werner Herzog: Fata Morgana 1968
- Gus Van Sant: Gerry 2002
- Chuan Lu: Kekexili (Mountain Patrol) 2006
- Peter Watkins: Punishment Park 1971 (see previous posts)
- Michelangelo Antonioni: Zabriskie Point 1970
- Michelangelo Antonioni: Professione: Reporter (The Passenger) 1975

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Fahrenheit 451 by Francois Truffaut

The film Fahrenheit 451 is a 1966 cinematographic adaptation from Francois Truffaut of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel. More than a visualization of the book, Truffaut's movie is a real personal interpretation and brings something in addition of the original plot.
Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a system where firemen are burning every books they find since those records of knowledge are being prohibited.

The heterotopia here is this zone in the woods where rebels to the system are living and happen to have traded their name to a book they have read and remembered. Literature and knowledge are thus being transmit from generation to generation as both a hyper-personification of their content (since somebody actually embodies it) and a personification of this same content (since the author is not anymore the important thing here).
This heterotopia is then dramatizing a territory where culture is not contained by objects but by people and triggers thus a global solidarity and equality between them.

Here is a short excerpt from Bradbury's novel:

“Montag.” Granger took Montag’s shoulder firmly.
“Walk carefully. Guard your health. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastics. See how important you’ve become in the last minute!”
“But I’ve forgotten”
“No, nothing’s ever lost. We have ways to shake down your clinkers for you.”
“But I’ve tried to remember!”
“Don’t try. It’ll come when we need it. All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there. Simmons here has worked on it for twenty years and now we’ve got the method down to where we can recall everything that’s been read once. Would you like, some day, Montag, to read Plato’s Republic?”
“Of course!”
“I am Plato’s Republic. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons is Marcus.”
“How do you do?” said Mr. Simmons
“Hello”, said Montag
“I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confusius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
Everyone laughed quietly.
“It can’t be”, said Montag
“It is”, replied Granger, smiling. “We’re book burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they’d be found. Micro-filming didn’t pay off; we were always traveling, we didn’t want to bury the film, and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it’s here. And the hour is lat. And the war’s began. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors. What do you think Montag?”

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. Ballantine 1953

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Beyond by Koji Morimoto (Animatrix)

The haunted house is a paradigm of the heterotopia. A close environment, few clear accesses of entrance/exit and inside, a whole bunch of new behaviors and rules.
The short film Beyond by Koji Morimoto within the Animatrix set, seems to be particularly appropriate for what we are interested here. The plot introduces a bunch of kids who discover a house in the city which does not exactly respond to the same usual rules or norms. It is raining inside the house (even if the weather is nice), gravity is not as operative as it is usually, one room directly leads to the nil...if you replace that in the Matrix Universe, one can say that this house is a bug, a failing code which provokes the existence of a magic enjoyable world.
However, just like Georges Canguilhem illustrates in his The Normal and the Pathological, the norm is always trying to re-conquer the anomaly and here there is a special squad trained for the solving of this kind of bug.
It brought us back to our article on the so called madness of people and how, since the XVIIth century (according to Foucault, madness in the Middle Age was not symptomised), we live in a system which either exclude the anomaly or tries to re-educate it.