Dear all. Today I saw a real child birth. And an autopsy. A whole bunch of autopsy.

They call that "in media res". The Greeks invented it. I do Classics.

The Avant Garde cinema course is proving to be terribly, terribly pretentious, but unlike Noir, it's supposed to be. I had to fight with claws to get onto it, and even though I feel a little worried about my essays - what am I to write? - every time a film starts, I'm overwhelmed by the sheer rightness of the experience. I am meant to be here, because I love the experience of watching those films. Which is quite the opposite to the palpable sense of "what am I doing here?" caused by noir.

The makeup of the class is also interesting. Over my three years at uni, I've felt a bit isolated in both my courses by other people. I suppose that's no one's fault, as I'm a ghost in both my departments. I feel a sense of hostility off them, and I in turn feel hostile, normally directed towards specific people who just piss me off merely by existing. Friend 2 is right: I have rage issues. In any case, there is a noticeable subset of the film department who are proto-academics. They always engage with the most roundabout and bonkers parts of the texts. They evidently adore Ginsburg, Niezche and Kerouac. hey have moleskines, or recycled notepads with a checker pattern instead of lines. Many have leather satchels. Several are Marxists. They wear unflattering huge glasses, and grandad-sweaters - and that's just the guys.

Something else links them - they're all in this class, and I suppose it's because if you are a pretentious hipster, the course with the highest dropoff rate in the university which requires you to watch frequently offensive/dull/inconsequential/guano shorts is the place you gotta be. To prove your hardcoreness if nothing else. The type of people who, when your lecturer offers a one-off screening of a 7-hour long avant garde movie, actually take the offer up. I know I did, and all this is making me worry that I fit their company too well. I mean, who am I to criticise the way anybody dresses at all? This morning, I was inspired by William Holden in The Wild Bunch, which isn't even a film I liked: quite cowboyish, but very red.

They call that context.

Anyway, I started getting worried today when the lecturer suggested the high number of absences were caused by those who had read the articles about the movies in advance. I had not done the reading. I'd like to nobly say it was because I hated to spoil the surprise, and this is indeed true. I'm also lazy. We were informed that the first time she showed it, half her class walked out and one hurled, and that we were not allowed to leave. Although I'm sure we could have, if necessary. Not that it was necesssary: we're the American Underground class! The Hardcore Pretentious Hipster club! Why would we?

Of course, they'd all done the reading, so I missed out on what everyone was talking around until just before the DVD began. It came with a handy warning that the following movie contained "actual autopsy footage" - which in itself was interesting. As if the fact it was real changed something. I mean, it obviously does - but if you're going to be chilly about it, it's all just image, and you could have replicated that all with effects. Would it have been as uncomfortable to watch had it been identical, but with the comfort it wasn't "actual"? At the end of the day, all we saw in the cinema was a mechanical reproduction - only the word "actual" made the difference to us. You could have convinced us it was fake.

Not that I thought that at the time - that occured to me some four minutes through. And it wasn't even "Jesu, pass me a bucket", because there are some contexts where I know I have nerves of steel, and this was one of them. It was something like this:

I have some very strong, very ancient views about art, and I've never had a chance to properly test them. Let me explain:

Oscar Wilde fried my brain very early, with the concept that "art is useless". From that, and associated ideas of the aesthetic movement, I formed my own opinions which I today discovered are actually a form of modernist thought. Art is something not put to use (hence my hatred of realism/"message" movies), so anything can be art when divorced from its context. Everyone complains about the screaming groans on the Bakerloo line. It sounds like music to me, because I decide "this is music", and then suddenly there are cadences and rhythm. And it's here that I find my love of terrible, atonal music. And in my mind, this is associated with children. You know, how a three year old will get hold of a fork, and it's suddenly the best thing ever. I suppose if you've never seen a fork before (or a hat, or a ball...), it must be pretty damn exciting, and that's the joy kids find in life: they can see this beauty everywhere. And so can we all, if you start appreciating a fork as art divorced from context - it's lines, shapes, colours, forms, light bouncing off metal and shining. There's nothing intrinsically separating the sparkle of a fork from the sparkle of a diamond. To get back to the Bakerloo line, the adult commuter hears the noise and itches for the WD-40, dismissing it as painful and annoying. That's only because they haven't abstracted it out of it's context.

That's my position on art, in a nutshell, and I hope you followed it near enough. When I go around spouting things like "everything is beautiful", or "everyone is beautiful", it's not because I'm a big damn hippy. It's because 9 times out of 10, every time I see something my mind asks "is it art?", and then rearranges my thought until it is so.

I'd take this position to a pretty extreme extent. For my Sixth Form art project, I argued something similar and wanted to use images of 9/11 to prove my point. Not the black and white arty photos, just any photos. Clouds and fire are beautiful - its just the idea of what those photos are which is horrific. Understandibly, teacher didn't think that was such a good idea, and in the end, I did the same concept but on decaying buildings. A noncontrovertial version.

But you can't take an idea like that without pushing it far. And that brings me to the dog story, in which an artist chains up a dog in an art gallery and leaves it to starve to death "as art", the internet protests, and invites Unmutual to join a group expressing how much she protests. When viewing the inbox request, my gut reaction, my microresponse before anything logical kicked in, was "but...wow!" And then a sense of total horror, aimed mostly at myself and not the original artist. Felt dirty for days after that, but still did not join the Facebook group. This isn't a story I'm particularly proud of - it shows me in a very ugly light indeed. I only mention it to point out these beliefs are apparently innate. Or in any case, more innate than my hatred of animal cruelty.

So the question was: I'm about to watch some autopsies. How extreme can this position go? And if you're at all sensitive about hearing about said film, or me using my typical blase exaggerated cynical tone to discuss it, now is the time to click the little X in the top right and come back next time I write about kittens.

Answer: I need to watch some mondo. Because it turns out that yes, in the hands of a fantastic director, you can abstract the human body just like you can anything else. I feel strongly that, in his use of colour and close ups, he was trying to express just my position. So many of the shots you could not tell what they were at first - they were indeed just colour and shape. You couldn't even necessarily distinguish the live flesh of surgeon from the dead flesh. Turns out that yes, even here there is beauty. There was absolutely no context - no names, virtually no faces, certainly no politics or underlying ideas.

I also thought a lot about how else you could have shot the film - in order, from further away, with sound (what music could you possibly use?) or in detail like Channel Five's Celebrity Hysterectomy: Our Hands In Your Guts. I feel it was very carefully constructed so as not to be gross. As far as that's possible when you're watching a head reduced to a Gallifreyan skullcap made of actual skull. I noted that the first fewindividuals were old men. I would probably have naturally gone man, woman - the fact he didn't stood out. I think I would have felt differently about a woman - whether because I is one, or because female nudity is a bigger taboo (I've a feeling it would have suggested sexual violence automatically), or a white knight streak. And children go without saying. It also started with a body examination, which took me by surprise - I figured autopsies were gross-out scalpel affairs.

Turns out this was an act of genius, which eased you into the movie. Ultimately, there was all of the above, but I feel it got successively worse (according to my notes, men -> knives - > a child, but shot tastefully, from quite a distance - > women - > really unpleasant stuff you do not want to see, combined with faster editing). But even as it got worse, I felt you were better prepared to handle it - not desensitised, just calm about the process. I mean, is it really any worse to cut up a woman than a man, or a child? Not really. Does it really matter what it is they do? Again - not really.

Although there were some shots at the end which I do feel were too much - but was that the cumulation? And indeed, I felt the whole film was too long - it bothered me a bit to begin with, then not at all, but towards the end bothered me rather more. I felt more viscerally grossed out by the serial killer lecture - which I almost had to walk out of - even though there wasn't any remotely objectionable content. Perhaps because that asked you to consider death from an intellectual standpoint, and I feel here it was an impersonal artistic exercise. Interestingly, I'm having more of a reaction to it now as I write as I did while watching - my throat dries out, and then feels like it's coated with babybel - which suggests this is true.

I also felt vegitarianism changed things. Several people mentioned the aspect of meat during the seminar, which I had also considered while watching. Part of becoming a veggie is breaking down that wall between "animal meat" and "living animal". Once you break that wall, it's hard to replace, and it's not much further to connect "animal meat" to "living human" - I'd say it was impossible to turn your back on that. Very much in my mind as I viewed, and I was in part amused by everyone else's responses. Yes. Yes, exactly. Chew on that.

Was I affected? Was I not affected? I think my emotions tend come out in strange ways, not always attached to their causes (Is this repression, psychopathy, depression, or passive aggression? Or overanalysis?) I think a bit of both - I feel the film was too long, because there was a level at which I could watch it as dispassionate art but not for very long, certainly not the whole running time. And I did need fresh air and a chocolate milk afterwards. I'm feeling less well now, than I did a few hours previous. And I'm interested to see how it affects me in the next few days - whether the imagery fades, whether it matters more or less.

In any case, he's an inspiration - or rather, he does things I've already thought of doing, but proves they can be done. I'd rather beat rush hour than write about Window Water Baby Moving - the childbirth one - right now, but it achieves something I've dreamed of doing. Catching the emotions of an event on screen, without narrative or anything else. And I feel I've absorbed aspects of his style - i.e, lots of close ups force colour harmony.

Because I'm not a pretentious hipster at all.

Also. I just saw a brain scooped out of a skull.