Metaphysics and Democracy or Popular Ontology.

60 min, Color, HD.

2015
A film by Pachanga Namu.

Presentation Text:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is
an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of
society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are
governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have
never heard of. (From Propaganda by Edward Bernays, 1928).
This movie is the first of a two-movies intended artistic research on ideology. It shows 57 shots of 1
minute long every one, they are observations of advertisements, texts, images and landscapes in the
city of Berlin, made in part in the time of the last european-parliament election and therefore they
have an interesting actuality with the democracy discussions in europa nowadays. In the first part
the images are accompanied by a voice reading the text Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a milestone of
the philosophical speculation in literature, by Jorge Luis Borges. In the second part we listen to
interviews took from the documentary film Encirclement. Neoliberalism Esnares Democracy by
Richard Brouillet, with guests like Ignacio Ramonet, Noam Chomsky and others. They discuss
Ramonet's concept of Pense Unique.
Every single one of the shots in this movie is one minute long. The average time for observing a
billboard on the street is set to 6 seconds by the advertising industry. The question of what happens
when one observes this boards for a longer time was one of the main impulses for doing this movie.
We can think about the effects of the velocity in a similar way as the philosopher Paul Virilio does,
the nature of the advertising change when one observe them for longer time, there is more time for
reflexion, a distance that is impossible to achieve in normal everyday is possible. Through this
deconstructive approach the emptiness of the modern-day capitalistic ideology its exposed.
The way how the images are composed is uncharacteristic too, all the shots are realized from the
hand. This aspects together with the atmospheric sound of the streets aim to develop questions
about the relations between reality and ideology. In a communion with the borgian text, asks how
they interact and how at the same the reality, but here only a "portrayed" reality, stays in in- and dependence relationships with ideas and languages. This aesthetic decisions are also an attempt to step
in a critical dialogue with the ontology of the advertising and the core metaphysical aspects of the
actual capitalistic and politic ideology.
Other of this attempts is also in the borgian point of view to be found. He wrote "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius" in part as a mockery of the european metaphysical tradition, exoticizing names and places,
showing how a non-european perspective of core european traditions can be done. This noneuropean view was retaken in this movie, for once through the point of view, that is the point of
view of a migrant living in germany and partly through contrasting different languages.