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control. Finally, Schnabel’s general tendency in both media has been to tell his own rather scantily disguised autobiography, using biographies, which did not focus on work which stems from the power of a pure, hegemonic, subject position, but instead dealt with the fate of the real life artist, whose artistic practice also includes, among other things, the role of a self-empowering, working artist who belongs to a minority group. Now, I think that all three of these issues point to the fact that Julian senses what is going on: no buyer is interested in the posturing of the painter-prince of the early 1980s anymore. It is only credible when the process of attaining a powerful position (and, indeed, the subject position) is staged as something else—as political selfempowerment, so to speak. As a rule, those who are pursuing the path to fame feel as if they are doing something for humanity. After he reaches the top, every entrepreneur tells his story as if he were Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. This approach only functions, however, in mainstream cinema, because there nobody thinks about the circumstances of production, but instead only about the stories that are told, which distract attention from

 

this topic. Control can only be maintained in fiction; in reality, it has to be given away to an increasing number of financiers. Currently, the number of producers in the mid-size, independent cinema is exploding, and as it increases, of course, the artistic independence of which Schnabel’s films speak, implodes. «The Caveman’s Valentine,» another recent independent film starring Samuel L. Jackson, boasts a record number of sixteen producers. We can only imagine the sheer number of power lunches, cell phone conversations, and test screenings that must have taken place in order to satisfy that many behind-thescenes producers, all of whom have different motives. Under these circumstances, anybody who tells stories about being called to solitary greatness also appears to be driven by the need to deny all familiar, painful conditions of production by claiming that they are the fairy tales. Schnabel inverts Anger (who represents the beginning of the love-hate relationship between Hollywood and the «other cinema«). Instead of parasitically deriving his own deeper truth from the concrete, social realities of Hollywood’s lies, as Anger does, Schnabel creates an individualistic, heroic fairy tale, (which acts

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