By Night With Torch and Spear

Rare one, Cornell-meets-Susan Sontag s essay The Anthropologist as Hero. Score is desert moody at its most Calexico-ian. Not to be missed! Quote: The last film in the screening, By Night with Torch and Spear, was fascinating in that it shows Cornell symbolically exploring the possibility of reversing the flow of time. By running the footage of steel forging processes backwards, Cornell seems to want to literally halt the action of entropy—the loss of heat and energy in the universe—and perhaps transform our attitude towards time into something more like that of the cold cultures of primitive societies, represented by the brief image of two men hunting fish by torchlight. It is interesting to note in this context that Susan Sontag s Against Interpretation was one of Cornell s favorite books, and he certainly would have been familiar with her essay on Claude Levi-Strauss, The Anthropologist as Hero. I can t help but wonder what went through the mind of the man who lived most of his life on Utopia Parkway in Queens when he read, near the end of Sontag s essay: The hot societies are the modern ones, driven by the demons of historical progress. The cold societies are the primitive ones, static, crystalline, harmonious. Utopia, for Levi-Strauss, would be a great lowering of the historical temperature…in which man would finally be freed from the obligation to progress, and from the age-old curse which forced it to enslave men in order to make progress possible…. It is in this admittedly Utopian view that social anthropology would find its highest justification, since the forms of life and thought it studies would no longer be of mere historic and comparative interest. They would correspond to a permanent possibility of man, over which social anthropology would have a mission to stand watch, especially in man?s darkest hours. Cornell s work is magical, in the sense that Levi-Strauss means when he speaks of primitive magic as comprising a complete system of meaning unto itself, a treasury of ideas salvaged and assembled from the junkshops of our collective experience.