Based on Hito Steyerl’s bracing 2009 essay of the same name, Cut looks at how cinema and the assembly line both cut the body in new ways, organizing newly urban work forces. A dreamy collage essay made of scraps and fragments, with asides from Susan Sontag on Disney fascism, and Paul B. Preciado on the cost of living in a body.
“The lambs were branded on narrow bridges and then killed once they reached the top, where gravity drained their blood, causing the scraps to fall and reducing the weight of the carcass. Extermination at the Shanghai abattoir unfolded in several short, meticulously realized scenes: it was an obscene theatre of death, impervious to the slightest blunder or snag. The cold, perfect functionality of the Chinese slaughterhouse, its mechanized production and hyperrational stamp, had inspired the design of the first automotive assembly lines. The idea of a complex product created out of many small parts, like a mind dissected to infinity. Slaughter as psychoanalysis.”
Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado