Drifting towards Cosmopolis

Abstract

This is an artist’s text where an experimental filmmaker explores cosmopolitanism in her own work and that of others. Talking about eclectic cosmopolitan theory, this article maps the role of the wanderer in literature and film. Investigating the cross-pollination of image, sound and text in experimental filmmaking, the writer charts her own position as a mediator of cultural elements in a globalised world, and the implications of feminist subjectivity. The article charts the making of the author’s cosmopolitan films made between the late 1980s and 2015, as well as the development of a practice that reflects a transnational consciousness. The text embeds a discussion of diaspora, and of appropriation and citation as the inevitable result of accelerated media profusion. Jewish identity is explored through text, and a dialogue with the world, refracted through subjective bricolage. A contextual introduction to the author’s films, this text explores diaspora, nomadism and Jewish and feminist consciousness in a globalised world. The film draws on eclectic sources to describe an identity in flux and a rhizomatic rather than rootless relation to diaspora. The text references Henry James, Rosi Braidotti, Jacques Derrida, Chris Kraus and others to sketch a transnational vision of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism and ecriture feminine.

Keywords:

• Cosmopolitanism
• feminism
• experimental film
• diaspora
• artists writing

Notes

1. James, Portrait of a Lady, 204.

2. We were barely a family. My mother and I would travel together while my brother was in boarding school. My first trip abroad, around 1963, was to the former Yugoslavia.

3. Cixous, “Namesakes – No!,” 1–5.

4. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, 1–4.

5. Bordowitz, “Programme Director’s letter for Low-Residency MFA.”

6. Stalin saw intellectuals who opposed patriotism as rootless cosmopolitans and this term is understood to be a euphemism for Jews during the Soviet purges.

7. Oz and Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words, 15.

8. Benjamin, Arcades Project.

9. Eiland and McLaughlin, Arcades Project, xi.

10. Children’s television at the time showed several adaptations of her diary, and often she was portrayed as a prim, middle-class English girl. Even then, in the 1960s, this perplexed me: she was assimilated!

11. Shamsie, Broken Verses, 144.

12. Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” 994–1003.

13. Kraus, I Love Dick.

14. D.J. Spooky, a.k.a. Paul Miller, came with his remixes and mash-ups that were a revelation for me in using media in an unorthodox way.

15. Stewart “Walking with Chatwin.”

16. Cottrell and Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age explain how we already cite, and perhaps our references are so deeply ingrained it would be bolder to refuse to cite, to consider borrowing or appropriation as a collective commons.

17. Boym, “Nostaligic Technology.”

18. Interview with Rosi Braidotti.

19. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, 5.

20. Appiah, Ethics of Identity, 239.

21. Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa.

22. Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 3.

23. Hamid. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 17.

24. Roth, Operation Shylock, 44.

25. Memmi, Dominated Man, 49.

26. Chatwin, The Songlines, 272.

27. Shamsie, Kartography, 180.