Werner Mantz, Staircase Ursuliner Lyzeum, Cologne, 1928

Milan Knížák. Destroyed Music, 1963

Hélène Hoppenot, Hanging Fishnets

Jean Cocteau, July 5, 1889 – October 11, 1963.

1930 photo by George Hoyningen-Huene.

The past has to be continually re-narrated, and the political point of reactionary narratives is to suppress the potentials which still await, ready to be re-awakened, in older moments. The Sixties counterculture is now inseparable from its own simulation, and the reduction of the decade to “iconic” images, to “classic” music and to nostalgic reminiscences has neutralised the real promises that exploded then. Those aspects of the counterculture which could be appropriated have been repurposed as precursors of “the new spirit of capitalism”, while those which were incompatible with a world of overwork have been condemned as so many idle doodles, which in the contradictory logic of reaction, are simultaneously dangerous and impotent.

Mark Fisher, Acid Communism

Symphonie diagonale (1924) dir. Viking Eggeling

The Face of Another (1966) dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara