Tag: Culture

Categories
Uncategorised

Sublimations

Terence Davies, who died late last year, described the final film he made – though he had no way of knowing it would be that at the time – as a love poem. Passing Time was commissioned as part of a project that paired directors with composers, and in the music of Florencia Di Concilio he heard the ‘tentative bittersweet sensation of remembering’. Consisting of a single, still shot captured on an iPhone, Davies shows us a view of the Essex countryside, the spire of a church looming in the distance. Birds rise into the air, lowering to land on the branches of distant trees. Their song rings out and fades into Di Concillio’s score, overlaid with Davies’s rich, low voice:

If you let me know you’re there,

in silence’s embrace; breathe a sigh and tell me so,

for you are gone and not replaced

but echoes of your lovely self will bear us through life’s cruel stream,

and if I am to join you there,

oh what joy your face will bring.

Oh tell me now,

oh tell me all,

for my poor heart with tears is ringed.

We hear the flutter of pages, and then the music swells and the screen fades to black. ‘We recorded the poem twice in my study at home; the first take I dissolved into floods of tears on the final word, and the second take had me shuffling the pages’, Davies explained. ‘I think we chose the best one.’ In these three minutes, we see so much of what distinguished Davies as a director. A love of nature, of music, of poetry, of family – matched by an acute awareness of suffering and loss. The looming presence of religion. The presence of Davies himself, made explicit here by the use of his own poetry and voice. And memory, pressing down like a thumb on a bruise. The poem is dedicated to his sister Maisie – ‘Her loss broke my heart’.

It’s hard to talk about Davies’s films without reference to his biography because the two are so closely entwined. Born into a working-class Liverpool family two months after the end of World War II, Terence was the youngest of ten children. ‘I don’t want to watch violence. I had enough of that in my childhood’, Davies later reflected. ‘My father was a psychopath’. He died when Davies was seven. ‘For about four years, I lived in utter bliss. I was happy all the time. Then I had to go up to secondary school…’ It was around this time that Davies realized he was gay. He struggled enormously. ‘I prayed to God: “Please make me like the others. Why must I be different from them?” Being homosexual destroyed my life. Really destroyed it. In school, I was beaten for it for four years.’ He left at fifteen to become a bookkeeper, prayed until his knees bled, and finally left the church when he was twenty-two. ‘I can’t revisit that’, Davies said of this time in his life. ‘My teenage years and my twenties were some of the most wretched in my life. True despair. Despair is worse than any pain.’

Yet Davies began his cinematic career by revisiting it. His first three films were a trilogy of shorts, Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration (1976-83). They follow Robert Tucker, Davies’s surrogate, through an unhappy childhood into lonely adulthood. While we see the beginnings of Davies’s signature style – long, elegant tracking shots and dissolves, an obsession with the human face, an associative and dreamlike structure that mimics memory, musical anachronism – it is entirely in service of despair. Robert weeps on ferries and in the records room in his office. His sexual fantasies and encounters are haunted, his interest in masochism tormented rather than the playful transgression of a Kenneth Anger or a John Waters. Robert’s only comfort is the love of his mother, whose death devastates him and leaves him with nothing except his own death ahead of him.

When asked about the choice to shoot the trilogy in black-and-white, Davies mused that ‘the problem with colour is that it does prettify and soften everything – there’s an intrinsic richness you can’t get away from. And I don’t like pretty pictures.’ These are beautiful films, but entirely without solace. ‘I was not only exploring literal truth – my relationship with my mother and father, my religious and sexual guilt’, Davies wrote in the introduction to a collection of his early screenplays. ‘I was also examining my terrors’. It is remarkable that Davies’s next films transcend this mood not by looking to the present or the future, but to the past. As T.S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets, poems which Davies loved so deeply he apparently carried a book of them when he travelled, ‘This is the use of memory: / For liberation – not less of love but expanding/ Of love beyond desire, and so liberation/ From the future as well as the past.’

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) draw on the years of ‘utter bliss’ between the death of his father and the awakening of his sexuality. They remain his best-known films. The first was shot in two parts, two years apart, and concentrates on the lives of his older siblings: ‘they were all wonderful storytellers . . . They were so vivid that they became sort of part of my memory, I felt as though I’d almost experienced them’. Davies dramatizes this, reproducing events not as they happened but as he felt them; he shoots from the foot of the stairs, looking out like a child sitting by the door. The Long Day Closes then turns to his own experience. In this sense it covers the same ground as the first of the trilogy, but here the everyday is not haunted by pain but transfigured by the glimmering of memory. Streaks of rain on the windows, projected into oozing drips of light running down the wall. The voice of his mother singing softly in a darkened room; the sun flaring through the clouds for only a moment as they sail by. The whistle of a rod moving through the air as a teacher whips each student in turn. The shadows of two faces glimpsed behind the decorative glass of a door, uniting into one when their lips meet.

At the time of Distant Voices, Still Lives Davies explained that he made films ‘in order to come to terms with my family history’. But by 1992, he had reconsidered. ‘I thought it would be a catharsis, but it wasn’t. All it did was make me realize my sense of loss’. His next film – an adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s coming-of-age novel The Neon Bible (1995) set in rural Georgia – reflects this. The attempt to transpose his autobiographical concerns into an alien setting led to a strangely shaped film, which was a commercial and critical failure. In spite of moments of brilliance, it is at once too close to reality and too far from it. Davies accepted this, but he also saw it as a ‘transitional work’, insisting that he could not have made his subsequent Edith Wharton adaptation, The House of Mirth (2000), without it.

If The Neon Bible didn’t allow Davies’s style to expand fully, The House of Mirth is perfect for it. You can’t help but feel Davies is having fun, even as Lily Bart descends the social ladder into hell. How could he not, with a heroine firing off lines like ‘If obliquity were a vice, we should all be tainted’? On first viewing, the film plays like a standard melodrama – Davies’s trademark associative style replaced by plot and dialogue. Davies grew up watching ‘women’s pictures’, and the film has much in common with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or Frank Borzage. As Luc Moullet once wrote about Borzage’s I’ve Always Loved You, ‘the excess of insipidness and sentimentality exceeds all allowable limits and annihilates the power of criticism and reflection, giving way to pure beauty’. The House of Mirth succeeds on similar terms. The more hysterically defeated Lily is, the greater the power of the film – and the greater the power of Davies’s style. When Lily departs on a doomed trip to Europe, Davies slowly tracks through ghostly rooms filled with covered furniture, dissolving and moving through each one in turn until we see a garden doused in summer rain and then, finally, the liquid glitter of sunlight on water.

‘It seemed completely natural to me to make a women’s picture’, Davies said. When asked about his use of music, he revealed why it came so naturally:

I grew up with American musicals. It’s a woman’s genre, as people said then, but for me it was a frame of reference. That’s why there is so much singing in my autobiographical films. For minutes at a time, the camera stays on the singer’s face. Naturally, the songs didn’t do away with the brutality we were subjected to. Yet music was healing. That’s how women are in north England. They’re strong and capable, they have a sense of humour, and they sing. I grew up among these women. Neither the women nor I understood at the time that they expressed their feelings through their songs. Singing changed them, gave them a way to speak about themselves, without becoming too personal.

To suffer, to forgive, to learn the trick of transfiguration by turning experience into song. If autobiography had failed Davies, his identification with women’s lives and women’s suffering gave him the freedom of disguise. The House of Mirth was both an artistic breakthrough and a critical success, but Davies was unable to get another film made. He spent years shopping projects around, but they all fell through: ‘I’m sick of not working and having no money. Work is my raison d’etre, and if that’s taken away from me I don’t have a reason to be alive.’ His first films had been made with funding from the British Film Institute Production Board, which was abolished in 2000, and it was only through other sources of cultural funding that Davies found work again. His wonderful city symphony, Of Time and The City (2008), was commissioned as part of Liverpool’s tenure as European Capital of Culture. And his return to fiction, an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (2011), was commissioned by the Rattigan Trust to mark the playwright’s centenary.

The Deep Blue Sea and Sunset Song (2015) begin where House of Mirth’s sublimation of autobiographical concerns left off. Between them, they have all of Davies’s trademarks: tormented desire, a distaste for religion, groups of people bursting into song, abusive and unstable men, and women who somehow manage. Their heroines bear enormous suffering. Hester’s tormented, adulterous love affair and its painful consequences in The Deep Blue Sea; Chris’s abusive father, returned to her in the form of a doting husband transformed by World War I in Sunset Song. There is a rape scene in Sunset Song so horrible I found on revisiting the film that I remembered it almost exactly: the camera slowly moving closer as Chris weeps and struggles. She screams at her husband to put out the lights, and, mercifully, Davies puts the lights out too – the camera moving down to the darkness under the bed.

But there are also moments of perfect tenderness: Davies’s swooning camera moving through a pub singalong to ‘You Belong To Me’ in The Deep Blue Sea, the camera closing in on Hester and her lover. He sings to her, but she doesn’t know the words – stopping, laughing, watching his lips. And then just the two of them dancing in warm light, the camera pushing in closer still as they rotate slowly, her arms around his neck, clasping hands, kissing. Tenderness and suffering: the world will give you both, but not in equal measure. For Davies, the transformation of life into art was the only way to bear this fact. Perhaps this is why his last two feature films were about poets: Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016) and Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (2021). My favourite – perhaps of all his films, in spite of its occasional awkwardnesses – is A Quiet Passion, where Dickinson’s poetry hangs over the film like mist over water. In a scene where the young Emily sits in a firelit parlour with her family, she looks up at them with a faint smile on her lips. The camera follows her eyes, and we hear:

The heart asks pleasure first,

And then, excuse from pain;

And then, those little anodynes

That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;

And then, if it should be

The Will of its Inquisitor

The liberty to die.

It’s a moment that’s almost overdetermined – freighted with the relationship between Dickinson’s life and her work, between Davies’s life and his work, between pleasure and pain, life and death. The camera moves slowly around the room, lingering on the face of each family member in turn. It is perfectly silent except for the sound of a clock chiming and the crackle of the fire. And when the camera finally lights on Emily’s face again, something in her has changed. Her eyes glisten and shift side to side as if panicked, her lips turned down faintly. When asked about the scene, Davies said: ‘When we come back to her, I said to her, “But something in you has died,” and I didn’t explain it . . . Because I did that as a child, thinking one day, they will all be dead. And even as a child, I experienced the ecstasy of happiness, but knowing that it wouldn’t last.’

Read on: Ryan Ruby, ‘Privatized Grand Narratives’, NLR 131.

Categories
Uncategorised

Feminist Correctives

Nearly all novels remind us that the story of one person both is and is not the story of other people, each of whom is the main character of their own life. In the populous characterological world of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Hippolyte, a stableman at the inn in Yonville, must be pushed to the back of the crowd so Emma Bovary can seize the foreground. Hippolyte may in principle be worthy of a whole novel of his own, but that would be a different book; Hippolyte, not Madame Bovary. Rare exceptions such as Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, in which narrative agents take turns as primary and secondary characters, prove the rule: the bourgeois, legal principle that all men are equal under the law can’t be neatly transposed to the bourgeois novel, in which men and women are necessarily unequal under their creator.

The problems of narrative priority and characterological hierarchy – the axiomatic impossibility of every character achieving protagonist status – are especially rich in the realist novel, which emerges in an era of abstract equality among citizens, and simultaneous inequality in those citizens’ real conditions of life. Such problems don’t attend earlier forms (the ancient epic, for example, or the Elizabethan play) – quite natural that god-like heroes should get more air time than ordinary mortals, nobles more than commoners! It’s the legal principle of equality under the law, along with the democratic precept of equal dignity among human beings, that creates our uneasiness about the character system, as Alex Woloch calls it in his fundamental study, The One vs. the Many (2003), of the realist bourgeois novel. Since the flourishing of the realist novel in the nineteenth century, the form has exhibited what Woloch identifies as two apparently contradictory achievements: both ‘social expansiveness’ (encompassing everyone) and ‘depth psychology’ (usually reserved for just one person). To apply Woloch’s general formulation, Madame Bovary relies on this dialectic, at once casting ‘a wide narrative gaze over a complex social universe’ and depicting ‘the interior life of a single consciousness’.

When it comes to the identity of that consciousness – that is to say, who’s privileged with main character status – there exists an uncomfortable overlap or simultaneity between justifiable narrative efficiency on the one hand, and dishonourable existential or social priority on the other. At the level of the individual work, the former’s a simple matter of technique (we can only inhabit one consciousness at a time). At the level of the novel in general, however, it’s one of politics and even prejudice. Woloch’s readings of Balzac, Dickens and Austen suggest that in the realm of class, the two principles of narrative expediency on the one hand and social privilege on the other more or less coincide: protagonists are typically bourgeois subjects whose important interactions involve other bourgeois subjects, while the ranks of minor characters are filled out with silent, often nameless members of the working class. (John Lennon, in all the hale rancour of ‘Working Class Hero’, could have been singing about realist fiction and its character system: ‘As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small/By giving you no time instead of it all’.)

If this unequal apportionment of narrative attention is unsurprising – after all, it was the rich and educated who had the wherewithal to write and publish novels, and social solipsism means that their milieux were reflected in their fiction – we encounter something more complex in the realm of gender. While it would be a fair generalization to say the realist novel has neglected the proletariat, the same can’t be said of women: our socio-political subjugation did not correspond to narrative sidelining. For every serious young man pursuing the Napoleonic slogan of ‘la carrière ouvertes aux talents’, there exists a middle-class young woman whose intelligence and desire make her a main character, and whose social unfreedom (especially to marry and divorce, and to acquire and dispose of property) provides the novel its engine of tragedy. And to the ranks of the heroines of Eliot, Gaskell, Chopin and the Brontë sisters can be added an equally credible fictive sorority – that of male-authored women trying to get free: Emma Bovary, Isabel Archer, Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, plus a constellation of Hardy heroines among them. If gender difference hasn’t resulted in the same imaginative disability as class difference, this may be explained by the fact that men and women tend to get to know each other intimately in a way that property-owners and wage-laborers don’t. So it is that Flaubert, unable to get pregnant yet able to write persuasively of maternal ambivalence, could declare ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’

A few years ago, the critic Merve Emre tweeted about the Molly Bloom soliloquy that concludes Ulysses, writing: ‘I feel confident insisting that it is the best – the funniest, most touching, arousing, and honest – representation of a woman ever written’, adding, ‘this is shocking to me’. What’s salient here is not so much the testimony to a male author’s representation of a woman, as the word ‘shocking’. Such shock seems to emerge from a current intellectual mood of what might be called possessive identitarianism, which asks why should men speak for women, or indeed white people for people of colour, or cis people for trans people, or citizens for undocumented immigrants, when the latter groups can speak for themselves with more authority than any ventriloquist? Neither glib universalism, nor mutually incommensurable alterity, provide a satisfactory answer. And if such identitarianism were pursued to its extreme – dictating that fiction comprise only protagonists corresponding perfectly to their author’s identities – we’d be left with few novels.

In keeping with this anxiety, recent years have seen a proliferation of a type of work we might call the feminist corrective – the rewriting of canonical texts, ones originating in past paradigms of even greater sexism, from the perspective of an overlooked female character. An early instantiation came from Italian novelist Pia Pera, whose Lo’s Diary (1995) told the story of Nabokov’s Lolita in the voice of its eponymous teenager rather than that of her middle-aged male abuser. More recent examples include Pat Barker’s reimagining of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, The Silence of the Girls (2018), Jeet Thayil’s retelling of the New Testament as ventriloquized by its various women, Names of the Women (2021), Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships (2019) her version of the Trojan War from an exclusively female perspective, and her Stone Blind (2022), a reconstruction of Medusa – ‘the original monstered woman’ as its jacket copy has it.

These examples named above take ancient, non-novelistic forms of literature as their starting text, but the most interesting examples of the genre are to be found in novels that rework novels. Among them, one of the most overtly hostile to its predecessor text is Lucy Snyckers’s Lacuna (2022) which presents itself as agonistic redress to J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999). (Curiously, it seems to have been with the feminist corrective genre in mind that Coetzee wrote Elizabeth Costello (2003). That novel’s eponymous figure is a fictional Australian novelist best known for a book whose main character is Molly Bloom.) But what exactly is to be corrected in Disgrace? Much of the dynamism of Coetzee’s book lies in its troubling narrative symmetry. In the first half, a white professor, David Lurie, rapes one of his female students. Chillingly, in his own assessment David evades the term. ‘Not rape, not quite that’, he tells himself with repulsive ease and self-exculpation, ‘but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core’. Later, David’s ex-wife will accurately diagnose him: ‘you were always a great self-deceiver, David’. The author himself, however, is undeceived; Coetzee neither excuses nor anathematizes his creation. Exposed, David resigns and bolts to his daughter Lucy’s farm. When the novel’s second sexual crime occurs, it’s freighted by post-colonial history: Lucy is raped and the perpetrator is a Black man. Snyckers’s rejoinder to Coetzee is built around the conceit that there exists a real-life Lucy Lurie upon whom the author based his story. It’s this Lucy who narrates Lacuna and takes competitive pride in her trauma; at one point she fantasizes about dressing down another woman: ‘If they gave marks for rape trauma, mine would get an A-plus and yours would get a D-minus.’ Snyckers’s Lucy regards the narrative crimes committed by Coetzee as on par with the home invasion, arson and assault that she’s experienced. The author’s offenses, as Lucy sees them, include his appropriation of her suffering, his presentation of her fictional counterpart’s acceptance of rape as some sort of atonement for colonial sins, and – finally and least forgivably in her eyes – his reducing fictional Lucy to the titular ‘lacuna’ – a missing person in her own story.

There is, Snyckers/Lucy claims in Lacuna’s prologue, a ‘complete absence of the raped woman’s voice’ in Coetzee’s novel (‘the rape book’, as she refers to it.) The charge is readily refuted. Disgrace contains one of the more powerfully feminist orations of twentieth-century fiction: pregnant by one of her assailants and intent on keeping the baby, Coetzee’s Lucy makes a redoubtable speech to her horrified father: ‘You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn’t make an appearance until halfway through. Well, contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor’. With that, Lucy refuses minor character status, a refusal that seems directed at both her father and her author. When we compare Coetzee’s Lucy to Snyckers’s doubly-fictional Lucy, it’s as if Lacuna is dealing with a fictional, even fraudulent version of a real novel. In this way, Snyckers’s novel appears symptomatic of one of the least useful strains of identitarian politics, in which for a person characterized by one identity to speak for another person characterized by another amounts to the ‘erasure’ of the latter.

Snyckers seems to be replacing the idea of imaginative literature with literal testimony, which naturally can only be given by real people – a misprision arising from an over-hasty assimilation of literature to contemporary politics, in which the pieties of ‘listening’, and of ‘hearing from’ another voice can be conscience-salving substitutes for action. To invert this phenomenon: that we don’t have Lolita’s account, only that of her abuser, does not make Nabokov’s novel an endorsement of child rape. If Lo’s Diary was misbegotten it was perhaps due to an excessive belief in protagonism, in other words, the notion that hearing exclusively from one voice amounts to uncritical readerly sympathy. With Nabokov’s egregious and charismatic sex offender quite the opposite is true. When Humbert Humbert remarks, casually, and in passing, on the sound of Lolita’s sobs, it both indicts him and is grimly eloquent of his victim’s suffering.

A less antagonistic rewriting of a famous male author’s novel comes by way of Sandra Newman’s Julia (2003), ‘a feminist retelling’ of 1984 which boasts of being the first reworking of that novel to be approved by the Orwell estate. Unlike the original’s third person narrative, in which Winston is the main character and Julia his fellow party member and love interest, Newman’s novel is narrated by Julia herself, while hewing to the basic story of the original. If we take this work as exemplar, a merely cynical interpretation of the feminist corrective genre would attribute its rise to simple brand recognition. Orwell comes with seventy-four years of cultural cachet. The imprimatur of ‘feminist’ – having undergone its girlbossification via neoliberalism – also comes with dubious cachet, albeit a newer one. (Dubious since ‘feminist’ now too often describes something merely cosmetic, namely the substitution of some male executive with a female one who’ll oversee the corporation’s predations and exploitation just as efficiently as he did.) In this way, the conservative appeal of pre-approved prestige is given a little frisson of the putatively radical.

The totemic 1984, a book whose life has come to exist more beyond its pages than within them, is something more than canon; a work alluded to more than read. See the widespread abuse of the term ‘Orwellian’ to tar any political move found uncongenial – mostly from a book-banning right unwilling to acknowledge that Orwell was a committed socialist. Taking place in a future Britain in the grip of totalitarianism, and asking what possibilities of individual thought, freedom and selfhood exist under such circumstances, 1984’s protagonist, Winston, is necessarily more of a figure than a character; to borrow Forster’s term, he is ‘flat’, rather than a rounded, multi-dimensional person. This is also true of his lover, Julia. Brainwashed by the Party, neither has much ‘voice’ in a politico-literary sense. Orwell’s book is therefore a curious choice for a feminist retelling in that all its characters, whatever their gender, are effectively silenced. As Erich Fromm points out in the novel’s original Afterword: ‘the dehumanized characters of satire can be equated with the dehumanized subjects of totalitarianism. That is, the suffering of satirical characters is comical or inconsequential rather than tragic – because they are two-dimensional figures without a mature psychology, unable to inspire full sympathy in the reader.’ How does the Julia of Julia differ from the Julia of 1984? Not much. She remains chimerical. There is too meek and scrupulous a fidelity to the original. The wincing irony here is that of the sense of a novel written under Big Brother’s watchful eye – that of the Orwell estate. There are echoes, too, of the speciously feminist blockbuster reboot, albeit in higher-browed form. In the Hollywood formula, an established, profitable franchise exchanges men for women in the lead roles – usually resulting in a combination of select financial enrichment (a few studio executives) with mass cultural impoverishment. Part of that impoverishment is the way in which movies like Ghostbusters, Wonder Woman, and Ocean’s 8 trade on ‘feminist’ as if it were a synonym for ‘woman’ and vaunt the phrase ‘ass-kicking’ as though the violence enacted on screen by male characters becomes somehow emancipatory when perpetrated by female ones.

The faulty logic that views female liberation as a matter of personnel exchange (all men = bad, all women = good) is nonetheless aligned with a worthy epistemological question. Can a man rightly (in both senses: persuasively and justly) conjure the reality of a woman? This inquiry depends on the gender binary; it ceases to exist in a state of ungendered innocence. The closest a reader gets to that utopia is, paradoxically, when she is at her most impressionable. A girl reader of, say, Arthurian legend, not yet familiar with the terms ‘agency’ or ‘patriarchy’ and not yet exposed to the forces of a world whose problems include a pervasive erotics of female subordination, feels little impediment in imaginatively inhabiting the role of gallivanting hero rather than passive heroine. She’s valiant King Arthur, not maundering Guinevere; it doesn’t yet occur to her that empathetic allegiance should run along gender lines. This is both potentially emancipatory and possibly deleterious: soon she might wonder why Arthur is deemed a worthy protagonist and Guinevere isn’t. Is this a reflection or even endorsement of the exclusionary sexism of the world? Or, worse, does his maleness somehow, improbably, make him a priori more interesting than Guinevere in her femaleness? Later, this hypothetical girl reader might encounter the cohort David Foster Wallace damned as phallocrats – Mailer, Miller, Roth, and Bellow – and experience the cramping dismay of mostly finding women instrumentalized to either frustrate or gratify male protagonists. If these works make manifest their era’s ghastly sexism (one can delight in Bellow’s febrile high-low prose while also recoiling every time the word ‘bitch’ blights the page) what is to be fixed here is too amorphous to warrant a feminist rewrite – more a miasma of prejudice, rather than a formalistic problem of character and elision.        

The less successful feminist reworkings partake in the fallacy of ‘the one true story’, a monovocal ideology alien to literature, with its fundamental commitment to and reliance on intersubjectivity. Natasha Solomons’s Fair Rosaline (2023) for example, describes itself as not as a ‘retelling’ but an ‘untelling’ of Romeo and Juliet in which the title character (ditched by Romeo for her cousin in the original, lest you need a reminder) gets her own story. Shakespeare, so the implication goes, got it wrong. In Solomons’s novel, Rosaline ultimately saves Juliet from a man described in the author’s note as a ‘groomer’. In this way, Fair Rosaline seems to promote the idea that Shakespeare should be some kind of Esther Perel for teens, dispatching therapeutic pointers on healthy relationships. As the book’s press release reads: ‘it seems that forming an anxious attachment, and then suicide pact, with a controlling narcissist who comes and goes as he pleases may not have been the best model of true love to teach young literature students’. Even if delivered facetiously, such an attitude erases character in any meaningful sense of the term, by denying a fictional figure moral complexity and reducing them to something inert as a role model.

The presence of frustrating or misbegotten examples do not, however, make this a sterile genre. A rough typology emerges. The bad faith antagonism of Snyckers and Solomons presents one type, the redundantly respectful mode of Newman another. A third approach, in which the relationship to the original text is simultaneously complementary and critical, proves the most dynamic. Per Henry James: ‘really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw […] the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.’ No man or woman is an island, not even a person on a literal island — as demonstrated by Foe, Coetzee’s 1986 reworking of Robinson Crusoe narrated by a female castaway. With 2003’s Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee performed a similar sleight of hand. As Elizabeth explains from within the novel: ‘Certain books are so prodigally inventive that there is plenty of material left over at the end, material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to build something of your own’. The implication here of fiction’s generative capability is heartening. It is because Molly Bloom is such a rightly written woman that she invites response as complement, rather than impels it as corrective. Elizabeth’s fictional novel is an enthusiastic supplement to Joyce’s real novel, taking up Ulysses’ implicit invitation to ‘build something of your own’.

Within this third type, what we might call the critical complement, the most exciting new addition comes not from a woman rewriting a male narrative but from a black novelist reconfiguring a canonical white story. Percival Everett’s James, published next month, is a revision of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, narrated not by Huck, the young white boy runaway, but by his friend Jim, the fugitive slave with whom he takes a raft down the Mississipi. Everett is not so much silencing the original as engaging it in conversation. Dialogue, especially between Huck and the narrator, forms a large part of the book, and thrillingly, the latter is given not one voice but effectively two – the interplay of these two voices lends the book a mordant dynamism. First, there is the speaking voice our narrator uses with white people. This is Jim-the-slave, whose exaggerated vernacular resembles Twain’s original. Second, there is the inner voice – sagacious, circumspect, wry – of James-the-man, and it’s this voice, the one we understand as the character’s ‘true’ voice, that narrates the novel. So it is that our narrator can outwardly answer one white character perturbed by signs of a disturbance in the library like this: ‘No, missums. I seen dem books, but I ain’t been in da room. Why fo you be askin’ me dat?’ while later, reflecting on Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke, can privately think to himself: ‘How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.’ The book’s drama has less to do with Huck’s moral awakening via the plight of his enslaved friend (even if that narrative thread remains) and more to do with the way in which the self-actualized voice of James must be freed from interiority to literally speak, thereby vanquishing, or at least claiming primacy over ‘Jim’. In a Tarantino-esque final flourish, our narrator trains a pistol on a slaver and declares, before wasting the guy: ‘I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night. I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.’

James’ most obvious antecedent is Jean Rhys’s terrifying and indelible Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) which takes Jane Eyre as its predecessor, and proceeds in the same dialogic spirit as Everett’s novel. ‘Do you think’, Jane demands of Mr. Rochester in Brontë’s original, with all the indignation of Coetzee’s Lucy Lurie inveighing against her father a hundred and fifty years later, ‘because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart!’ Security, for Brontë’s soulful and impecunious heroine, finally comes by way of a dead wife – the banished ‘madwoman in the attic’ and in Wide Sargasso Sea that silenced voice finds full expression. The implication of Rhys’s book is not that Brontë’s needed to be put right, but that hidden behind Jane’s story is the story of another woman. Wide Sargasso Sea assumes its own priority, scarcely acknowledging the presence of Jane Eyre, in a way that Snycker’s Lacuna, for example – trapped in protest against a famous work, thereby ironically reinforcing that work’s power – cannot. Both Everett and Rhys seem to recognize, to return to Elizabeth Costello’s term, the prodigality of self in the figures of Jim and Antoinette. It’s this same abundance that also allows characters within novels to become more than the sum of their parts. In other words, this extramural phenomenon – taking a character from an existing novel and writing a whole new novel for them – redounds upon the intramural qualities of literature.

Norman Rush’s Mating (1991) for example, might read in precis as a howler of white saviourism and sexism: ideologue white guy (sporting a ponytail, no less) instigates a female-only utopia in Botswana, and is pursued by a besotted white woman. Yet the ways in which Rush’s main characters refract, alter and complicate one another mean they cannot be reduced to damning superficial readings – he is not merely an egoist with a ponytail, she is not merely an admirer with a slavish crush. The implication here – that fictional people are brought into greater aliveness by one another – sits uncomfortably alongside a predominant strain of liberalism in which scarcity logic presumes a zero-sum situation of attention and sympathy. Such logic does indeed apply to the hiring committee and the judging panel – only one person, after all, can be awarded the tenure track job or the lucrative prize – but the spoils of readerly attention are less bounded. Sympathy is not a discrete and finite resource, and the dialogic world of fiction is not one but many worlds.

To use an overtly gendered term, the critical complement’s mode is not one-upmanship so much as fellowship. Rhys is not suppressing Brontë’s Jane, but adding to what she called ‘the lake’ – as one of her grandest, somewhat humble-bragging, yet most quotable pronouncements has it: ‘There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake’. When it comes to rectitude, literature is about as biddable as water. It’s not to be corrected but rather complemented and kept flowing with fresh currents. If contemporary fiction and its reception are suffering from Procrustean applications of non-literary logic, there’s optimism to be found in this flow being reversed – in the thought of some countermanding undertow that would bring generative literary principles of polyphony and healthy disputation trickling back into the political discourse.

Read on: Rachel Malik, ‘We Are Too Menny’, NLR 28.

Categories
Uncategorised

Wenders, Canonized

The acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders was born in Dusseldorf in August 1945. These two biographical facts set the trajectory of his career. Along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, among others, Wenders became a key figure of the New German Cinema, a movement forged by that first postwar generation born into the ruins of the Third Reich. ‘I don’t think any country has had such a loss of faith in its own images, stories and myths as we have’, he reflected in 1977. ‘We, the directors of the New Cinema have felt this loss most keenly: in ourselves as the absence of a tradition of our own, as a generation without fathers; and in our audiences as confusion and apprehension.’ A society determined to forget its recent past and embarrassed by its cultural touchstones; with its own imagined community unavailable, another would have to do.

For Wenders, that would be America – or at least the version of America seen at the movies. This meant, especially, the endless highway, Coca-Cola, and rock music (starting with Little Richard and Chuck Berry, then continuing through the 1960s and long beyond). Like the woman in the Velvet Underground song whose ‘life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll’, Wenders observed ‘that was undoubtedly true in my case as well’. As well as, one imagines, the three years he spent at the University of Television and Film in Munich. Wenders had initially studied medicine, before switching to philosophy and then abandoning college and decamping to Paris to pursue a career in painting. But there, like the nouvelle vague directors before him he haunted the Cinémathèque Française – taking in as many as five films a day – and was nurtured by the influence of its legendary co-founder and director Henri Langlois, to whom he would later dedicate The American Friend (1977). Wenders too started out as a film critic, writing for the journal Filmkritik when he returned to Germany in 1967 (many of these essays are collected in Emotion Pictures: Reflections on Cinema) – and as a filmmaker, he was also eager to interrogate the form, reluctant to separate ‘the movies’ from ‘real life’, and saw a thin, nebulous line between documentary and drama.

Curzon Film (working with the Wim Wenders foundation which supervised meticulous restorations) has produced an impressive twenty-two-disc collection of his films. Each comes loaded with extras, including attendant interviews, featurettes and commentaries, with some supplemented by short films. Despite its imposing breadth, the set is, understandably, not ‘complete’ – but two early omissions are disappointing as each, notably, established many of the motifs that would characterize Wenders’s career. The short Alabama, 2000 Light Years (1969), was the first of his dozen collaborations with cinematographer Robby Müller. It’s not much, really, and the ‘plot’ needs to be intuited, but it’s all there: driving, smoking, jukeboxes, and, especially, music (including The Stones with ‘No Expectations’, Hendrix’s ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, and Dylan from John Wesley Harding). Summer in the City (1970), Wenders’s debut feature, also shot by Müller and edited by Peter Przygodda (the first of twenty collaborations) has its limitations too, but it is surely better than The Scarlet Letter (1973), a dreary film included in the set that was such an unhappy shoot it nearly chased Wenders from the business.

Like Alabama, Summer in the City was probably excluded due to the impossibility of securing music rights that were originally disregarded. Dedicated to the Kinks (and featuring five songs by that band), the movie, which sports some eye-catching night-for-night shooting, can be described as a bizarre cross between Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957). But it anticipates what would follow, with its lament for the shuttering of old movie houses, a visit to a photo booth, a prominently placed jukebox, a screening of Godard’s Alphaville and endless driving. In short order Wenders would do all of this again, often spectacularly.

Wenders’s bid for the pantheon ultimately rests on a quartet of brilliant, diverse, signature films: Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). Alice in the Cities, one of the cinematic achievements of the 1970s, remains his most intimate and personal. Journalist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, who often served as Wenders’s alter-ego) has wandered across America in search of a story he fails to write. Limping home to Europe by way of New York, circumstances leave him briefly responsible for young Alice (Yella Rottländer); a missed flight complicates efforts to reunite Alice with her mother, and, stranded, a search begins for her grandmother, which takes this odd couple on a road trip through Holland and Germany. One suggestion of this textured, subtle film is that America is far more alluring as an idea than as an actual place. Inspired by Wenders’s first two trips there, he would later write that the American dream is ‘a dream OF a country, IN a different country, that is located where the dream takes place.’ Describing experiences that parallel the journey of Philip Winter, he recalls ‘My second visit to America I just didn’t dare to leave New York . . . west of the Hudson, I knew now, lay wilderness’. Wenders would, however, subsequently develop an appreciation for ‘Arizona, Utah or New Mexico’ – that is, the West as seen in the films of John Ford, a figure that looms large in Alice in the Cities – and in Wenders’s filmmaking more generally. Shot by Robby Müller in impeccable black and white, two scenes stand out beyond the special sequences documenting mid-seventies New York City: an interlude where Philip takes in a Chuck Berry concert (all the more meaningful in that the song, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, about a father attempting to reconnect with his young daughter, was an important inspiration for the film); and a poignant, pivotal confession in a café, a location that also features an unmotivated shot of a boy, leaning against a jukebox, sipping a coke, which is undoubtedly an evocation of the filmmaker himself.

The American Friend, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, is Wenders’s most visually ambitious film, displaying an exquisite facility for shooting in colour, orchestrating a sophisticated palette that recalls Wenders’s one-time aspiration to be a painter. Music is, once again, an essential ingredient (and presumably the well-deployed songs by the Kinks and others were paid for this time around). The production also marked Wenders’s first collaboration with Bruno Ganz, an uncommonly gifted actor whose understated performance grounds the film, which is elliptical (especially on a first viewing) and distinguished by several bravura, suspenseful set pieces, many involving railways. Dennis Hopper fills the shoes of Tom Ripley, and though the performance is somewhat imbued with the actor’s own persona, it nevertheless works. American Friend is also distinguished by numerous cameo appearances, including nouvelle vague legend Jean Eustache and two directors from Wenders’s personal pantheon, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller. Of Ray, Wenders wrote, ‘There’s one thing wrong with Godard’s famous line that if there hadn’t been cinema, Nicholas Ray would have invented it . . . Ray did invent cinema, not many do’. Fuller, who appeared in several of Wenders’s films, was an important mentor (he helped rework the screenplay for Alice in the Cities). In Wenders’s estimation, he was not only ‘the greatest storyteller I ever met’, but ‘one of the great directors of the twentieth century’.

Paris, Texas won the grand prize at Cannes, among other accolades, yet it endures principally as a cult favourite. This is perhaps not surprising – Dirk Bogarde, the jury president that year, recalls in his memoir some dismay from the festival overlords: ‘We were to choose films which would please a family audience, not ones which would appeal to “a few students and a handful of faux intellectuals”’. Starring Harry Dean Stanton as a drifter reconnecting with his former life, the film loses a bit of its magic as it becomes more literal in its final third, and there is a structural wobble with the discarding of two key characters. Nevertheless, as often, the artists were right and the suits obtuse – this is a special film. Every frame is filled with purpose, and the ‘through the looking glass’ scenes between Stanton and his estranged wife (Nastassja Kinski) achieve rare heights. Ry Cooder’s score, featuring Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting blues instrumental from 1927, ‘Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground’, is inseparable from the performances, especially in the first half of the picture, where dialogue is sparse. Paris, Texas was co-written by Sam Shepard, who also wrote (and starred in, opposite Jessica Lange) the very fine Don’t Come Knocking (2005), another regrettable omission from the Curzon collection. Both films are very Fordian in their locations, visual disposition and as character studies of men who withdraw from society to re-emerge years later in search of some form of salvation.

Wings of Desire, Wenders’s best-known film, has also been justly lauded. Jonathan Rosenbaum describes a film that presents ‘an astonishing poetic documentary’ of its host city. It features Bruno Ganz (Daniel) and Otto Sander (Cassiel) as angels who hover over a divided Berlin. As witnesses to and chroniclers of history as it unfolds, they are unable to participate in human affairs (or prevent its horrors, epic or intimate); they can only observe, and in some cases (but, tragically, not all) provide a comforting presence to those in distress. The narrative swivels as Daniel decides he’s had his fill of immortality – so curious about the human condition that he wishes to experience it. Crashing to earth, he courts a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and encounters the music of Nick Cave. Peter Falk, whose affable celebrity has at times overshadowed his prodigious talent, excels playing a version of himself. His internal monologues feature some of the best writing (and line reads) to be found in Wenders’s oeuvre. The film was the third collaboration between Wenders and the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke. Handke co-wrote Wenders’s The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), an early landmark of the New German Cinema, based on his novel (Müller and Przygodda are also on hand, as are nods to Hitchcock, Americana, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Long as I Can See the Light’). Handke also wrote Wrong Move (1975), a wistful road film in which Germany’s dark past weighs more oppressively than in any other Wenders film.

It is fair to say, however ­– and this is reflected in the Curzon collection – that Wenders’s oeuvre, especially following the glory days of the seventies and eighties, is uneven. In the late 1990s, Roger Ebert would astutely describe ‘a gifted and poetic’ filmmaker ‘whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp’. Faraway, So Close! (1993), a post-reunification follow up to Wings of Desire, has some things to say, but is inconsistent and never quite works; The End of Violence (1997), though beautifully shot and well-cast, is an unfulfilling, ultimately incoherent affair (and a welcome omission from the set); The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), co-written by Bono, sees another fine cast wasted. These critiques can be taken too far, however, with commentators, perhaps understandably, grading on a curve – the way minor mid-career Dylan albums were often initially vilified, only to grow in esteem with the passage of time. In that spirit, Everything Will be Fine (2015), for example, widely dismissed upon release, is a welcome rediscovery. Had this small, thoughtful film been made by a young unknown, likely it would have been lauded as heralding the arrival of a promising new talent.     

Beyond Wenders’s four masterpieces, there is much to praise in the collection. Consider, most notably, two additional films that have the road as their theme (not surprisingly, Wenders’s production company is called ‘Road Movies’). Kings of the Road (1976), dedicated to Fritz Lang and running to three hours (plenty of time to touch base with the director’s familiar motifs, here adding an often-fraught homosocial relationship into the mix), follows its protagonists as they drive along the inter-German border, stopping at local, decaying cinema-houses. Until the End of the World (1991), at nearly five hours, is the ultimate expression of Wenders’s peripatetic urgency, traversing five continents and boasting an enormous, star-studded global cast (Max Von Sydow, Jeanne Moreau and Chishû Ryû among them). Perhaps less than the sum of its astonishing parts, the film nevertheless asks big questions, and presciently anticipated the worst aspects of twenty-first-century selfie culture. 

Arguably, all Wenders movies are in some sense road movies. Just as important as the road, however, is his fascination with the uneasy relationship between drama and documentary. Lightning over Water (1980), made with a dying Nicholas Ray, explores these themes most overtly. In the opening sequence, Wenders arrives at Ray’s SoHo apartment – in scenes handled so deftly the audience gets the impression that it is indeed privy to something very ‘real’ (though in retrospect there are multiple camera set ups). Soon enough, however, Wenders pulls back the curtain; the image shifts from pristine 35mm film to grainy video – and in the latter suddenly Ray’s lonely apartment is crowded with a film crew, harshly lit, and on a dime it’s that which seems real (though obviously, even that footage was shot and edited). But there are some inescapable realities here; Ray was indeed dying, and does not survive the shoot.

The State of Things (1982), which took home the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, is another meta-movie. Inspired by Wenders’s unhappy Hollywood interlude directing Hammett (1982), The State of Things, which opens with a movie-within-a-movie, follows a film crew stranded in Lisbon because the money has run dry while its director travels to Los Angeles to track down his furtive producer. Sam Fuller is a welcome presence, but the film really comes to life towards the end, when preternaturally intense seventies character actor Allen Garfield shows up as the missing money man on the run, monologuing in an R.V. A dozen years later, Lisbon Story (1994) explored similar themes in an informal sequel. An attractively shot trifle featuring Rüdiger Vogler, it is distinguished only by a pleasant musical interlude and welcome cameo from Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.   

Finally, and increasingly in late career, are excursions into straight non-fiction (as far as that goes), which showcase Wenders’s interests in and engagement with a panoply of the arts. These include cinema and music (of course), but also dance, architecture, fashion, and photography, a ubiquitous presence in Wenders’s life and in his films as well – photography plays an integral part not only in Alice in the Cities and The American Friend, but numerous later works, including, most explicitly, Palermo Shooting (2008). Of these productions, well represented in the set, two in particular stand out: Tokyo Ga (1985), Wenders’s moving homage to Japanese filmmaker Yasujirô Ozu (another important influence), and, irresistibly, Buena Vista Social Club (1999), which follows Ry Cooder, who travelled to Havana to lure long-forgotten Cuban musicians out of retirement. Wenders, now approaching his eightieth year, released two well received films last year, Perfect Days, a rumination on the experiences of a janitor in Tokyo, and Anselm, a documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer. With Nick Ray and Sam Fuller present in the pantheon, as Curzon’s impressive box set makes clear, surely there is a seat at that table for Wim Wenders as well.

Read on: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, NLR I/91.

Categories
Uncategorised

Vague Terrain

The Argentinian director Eduardo Williams’s first short, Tan Atentos (2011), appears in English filmographies as an alarming whisper, Beware. The Spanish title has its ambiguities: tan could mean ‘so’, acting as an intensifier (‘very attentive’), or ‘as’, indicating qualification or comparison (‘as attentive as that’, ‘attentive to this degree’). ‘Beware’ doesn’t resolve this ambiguity, and we should take the hint – the realm we’re entering will not provide clear answers – and maybe the warning, too. Many of Williams’s titles have this cryptic quality, as though missing a coordinate: Could See a Puma (Pude Ver Un Puma, 2011), That I’m Falling? (Que je tombe tout les temps?, 2013, I Forgot! (Tôi quên rồi!, 2014). Like their titles, much of these films’ dialogue sounds interrupted, fragmentary, half-sensical. Could See a Puma opens with a shot of a daytime crescent moon and a voiceover caught mid-sentence: ‘and believe it static and harmless as decoration’. Williams’s use of broken dialogue is destabilizing; his films can make you wonder if you’re paying enough attention, or the right kind.

The Human Surge 3 (2023) is Williams’s second feature, following 2016’s The Human Surge. The mischievous omission of volume two has the disconcerting effect of a missed stair. Like Williams’s shorts, they follow groups of young people as they hang out, work, chat and listlessly slink around disparate international locations which, like the scenes that play out in them, feel diffuse and unremarkable – under-tended public parks, train station waiting rooms, shared bedrooms, parking lots, deserted markets, drab beaches. ‘Following’ really is the operative word for what Williams’s camera does, sometimes keeping pace with his characters, sometimes falling behind, occasionally becoming distracted and wandering off.

The Human Surge begins by tracking a young Argentinian man called Exe around the suburbs of Buenos Aires as he visits friends and seeming strangers, works at a supermarket, and witnesses a group of men performing sex acts for a webcam. In a convenience store, the camera takes a languid interest in another shopper, slopes home after her, then follows her housemate into a dark room where a laptop is running a video chat with a group of men in Mozambique also trying to make money from half-hearted cybersex. Seeming to move through the laptop screen, the camera then follows these men out into Maputo, where they, too, wander around, seeing friends and looking for work. When one pisses on an anthill, the camera follows the stream, delving among the earth and insects before emerging in the Philippines, where a third set of characters walk through the jungle, swim and converse enigmatically: telling second-hand anecdotes about getting lost and being followed, or swapping arcane facts (such as the gigabyte weights of various animals’ genomes). Finally, we arrive at a factory that produces tablet computers, and the shots become long and static. It’s a film about young adults – underemployed, culturally peripheral – searching for connection and some kind of meaningful interface with the world, a theme the film puns on (the characters are always looking for signal, wifi, or somewhere to charge their phone).

Blending arthouse, documentary and slow cinema styles, Williams’s films are hybrid works that one could imagine being screened in a gallery as much as a cinema; like their characters, they seem resistant to settling. Born in 1987, Williams studied film proper rather than fine art – first at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, then under Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes in France – and there is a cinematic scale to his features, in tension with their lack of narrative. Watching his films you feel always on the cusp of perceiving some clearer shape, a story about to announce itself. Instead there are repeated motifs, images, phrases and scenarios: an accumulation of associations. The circumstances of the characters are never quite concretised. We gather that they struggle to make money – they live in shared, down-at-heel homes – but their situations do not seem desperate. They seem disaffected rather than alienated, rudderless not ground down. They exist in interstices – between major cities, jobs, stages of life, even between classes or social identities.

The Human Surge 3 is also set in three distant countries – Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Peru – and depicts groups of young friends walking, swimming, sleeping, sitting at empty cafés, and chatting disjointedly about their dreams and personal theories about life and the world. The conversations are not only hard to follow because they are fragmentary but because they take place in two or more languages. It’s not clear the characters can always understand one another. A viewer would need to speak Sinhala, Tamil, Mandarin, English and Spanish to do without the subtitles. Williams has spoken of his attraction to languages he can’t understand. Travelling abroad for the first time, he was entranced by the experience of hearing language as sound, and it is one he seeks to replicate in his films.

Rather than moving through settings consecutively as in the first film, The Human Surge 3 interweaves them. The locations are often hard to distinguish from each other: Williams continues to favour terrains vagues which might only be identified as Peru by a road sign, or as southeast Asia by a stall serving oyster soup. Augmenting this confusion, the protagonists begin to show up in other countries – inexplicably appearing on the other side of the world. This is one way that the film leans more towards science fiction, or even abstraction, than its predecessor. On several occasions, characters mention having dreamed of each other, and the film seems to partake of a dream’s hermetic, associative logic. In place of the previous film’s pricklier, restless energy is a sense of languorous contentment; in place of the machismo, a mixed, gender-fluid cast; in place of the bored, mercenary sex, tender, chaste flirtation. The restless search for connection has become a more melancholy search for home: a refrain of the film is ‘How do I go home?’, to which the enigmatic reply is a variation of ‘That’s complicated from here’. In the final scene at the summit of a Peruvian mountain, as one character looks at the view and wonders ‘Is that our home?’, another walks forward, picks up the camera, and rolls it back down the path, sending the image into a kaleidoscopic tailspin of figurative abstraction. Eventually the camera gets stuck in some undergrowth and the film ends.

Although his films have an otherworldly atmosphere, Williams uses non-professional actors and real settings. Fairly often, a passer-by will look right into the lens. There are hints that the latest film is set in sometime in the near-future; there are several references to a warmer climate – water being too hot to swim in, computers needing to be stored in the fridge. Many of Williams’s characters live in fragile, ephemeral dwellings – in thin-walled huts perched on the edge of water, or in shacks dotted around agricultural land, always overpopulated – and his films fluctuate between seeming like dreamy fairytales and frank portraits of precarity. There are allusions to Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force and the disappearances with which it is associated (a secondary character’s son is taken away). He could even be regarded as a practitioner of magical realism – of the kind Gabriel Garcia Marquez produced, with One Hundred Days of Solitude,in response to the massacre of striking banana plantation workers in Colombia and the terribly surreal way their deaths were institutionally forgotten.

As their drifting between countries emphasizes, Williams’s characters live in a globalised world where far-removed locations appear increasingly interconnected and homogenised, parts of a vast, elusive whole. The countries in The Human Surge are implicitly linked by the history of imperialism originating in the Iberian Peninsula. Distant as they are, there are echoes between the Argentinian Spanish, Mozambiquan Portuguese and Spanish-flecked Visayan. In the new film, the settings lack this shared historical thread but are relatively close latitudinally: their similar stormy equatorial weather and light makes it easier to confuse them. The anthropologist Anna Tsing has drawn attention to what she calls sites of ‘friction’ in the globalised world: the overlooked places where surreal, violent, often unconscionable activity takes place to facilitate the outwardly seamless flow of global capitalism. Williams is similarly concerned with the world’s less celebrated corners, away from capitals and trade centres. But the phenomenon he tracks is less friction than lassitude: places where the momentum of trade and empire has left absence and listlessness in its wake.

Though Williams’s is in this respect a global cinema, his filmmaking style is also appreciably Argentinian. His improvisatory, deadpan approach and unglamorous though occasionally beautiful suburban locations recall films like Martin Rejtman’s Rapado (1992),about a teenager wandering Buenos Aires in search of a stolen motorbike, or Alejo Moguillansky’s Castro (2009), whose protagonist is mysteriously chased through the city, mostly via its sprawling bus routes. Both films are about restless, uncertain men living in the prolonged aftermath of a military dictatorship, their country seeming alternately dismal, surreal, boring and full of dazzling possibility.

Williams’s interior scenes evoke another pivotal work of Argentinian cinema: Lucrecia Martel’s sultry debut La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), set in a holiday home in the north of the country belonging to an extended family whose relationships to one another – like those between Williams’s protagonists – are not entirely clear. Stunned by heat and alcohol, they spend much of the time lounging around. La Ciénaga memorably includes one of the least tempting swimming pools in cinema – opaque, still, fetid, green. ‘I ​think there are a lot of similarities in perception – between being in a pool and being in the world’, Martel has observed. ‘We usually forget that we are immersed in air.’ In The Human Surge, water tends to come up to about knee-height: Argentinian kids wade through flooded streets or the warm brown shallows of the Rio del Plata; Filipino families lie back in a pool below a waterfall in the jungle, talking about getting lost. In The Human Surge 3, characters are often up to their necks in water, but the film’s high-altitude climax on the mountain also heightens our awareness of air as a physical element. We can hear characters’ audibly laboured breathing in the thinner atmosphere, and at one point a character briefly takes flight, drawing our gaze up into the grey-blue expanse across the top of the frame.

As his films’ emphasis on water, air, the sound of language and digital technology suggests, Williams is concerned with how our experience of the world is mediated, and with our experience of that mediation. This is embodied in each film’s medium itself, or rather mediums. In The Human Surge Williams used a different camera for each country, with disorienting effects: Super 16mm film for Buenos Aires, which catches daylight in warm magenta tones but plunges interiors into fuzzy grey darkness; digital video shot on a tiny handheld camera in Maputo (then re-filmed on Super 16 from the laptop screen); and bright, brittle high-resolution digital video for the climactic Philippines section.

The medium of The Human Surge 3 is perhaps its most distinctive feature. Williams shot on a 360-degree camera whose footage he then edited into standard cinema frames by navigating it with a VR headset. The resulting image, stitched together digitally, is distended at its edges and in a few striking moments distorts the characters’ faces where they cross the image’s seams. The frame lilts right and left at its edges as the camera steps forward in pursuit of its subjects; whereas in the first film passers-by peered curiously into the camera, here they double-take, taking in a camera set-up that must have looked eccentrically elaborate, alien. At the heart of The Human Surge 3 is a long, enthralling sequence that moves between people swimming in murky water – an element, like the film itself, in which things are related, reciprocal, subject to pressures and freedoms, momentum and tension. Williams’s cinema makes us acutely aware (beware) of the presence of the filmmaker and of the fact we are watching a film: the looks into camera, the ungainly glitches, the 360-view and its occasional warping effect are like cold currents passing near the surface, or weeds brushing against your foot.

I first watched The Human Surge in 2017 on my wheezing old Macbook, the grime on its screen difficult to distinguish from the grain of the film stock, the intended quality of the sound hard to discern with the compression of the built-in speakers. I was nodding off by the anthill scene and woke up to the bright lights and repeating, computerised voices of the finale at the factory, over which the credits started rolling. Williams’s films encourage, if not sleep itself, then the ebbing and pooling of attention. While other films might seek to control our attention, Williams’s have a more insouciant grip on it, by turns looser and rougher. They catch it with a curious line or a vivid image, then invite it to drift with spells of inscrutable dialogue or shots that linger for twenty minutes. To recall one of his films is to remember a peculiarly porous attentive state – what you saw mingled with the circumstances of watching and the life around it. Trying to identify what exactly is compelling about The Human Surge or its wrong-footing sequel is like looking for the omitted pronoun in Could See a Puma. But something about the way the films cohere proves just as hard to forget.

Read on: Edgardo Cozarinsky, ‘Letter from Buenos Aires’, NLR 26.

Categories
Uncategorised

Conditional Tense

The history of feminist filmmaking in Germany is multifaceted, even messy. The career of its eminence grise, Helke Sander, subject of a recent documentary, is a case in point. Cleaning House (Aufräumen) captures Sander in reflective spirit, endeavouring to ‘tidy up’ (aufräumen) both memories and possessions. Directed by a former student, Claudia Richarz, the film made its debut at the Internationales Frauenfilmfestival in Dortmund to an audience of grey heads; alumnae, one imagined, of the German women’s movement (younger viewers were notably absent). It was an appropriate venue: the festival originated as a counterpart to the journal Frauen und Film, which Sander founded in 1974. An interplay between criticism, feminist research, activism and filmmaking has characterised Sander’s career across the decades, though her avowed desire was always singular: to make films.

A member of the first cohort at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, Sander’s classmates included future luminaries of the New German Cinema, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky, alongside Holger Meins, later a member of the Red Army Faction. Her approach, mixing documentary and fiction, the personal and the sociological, was a product of this milieu. She was in her late twenties when she joined the academy in 1966, having already worked as a theatre director in Finland, where she had a child and married a Finnish writer. Her work would draw upon these experiences. In her best-known fiction, The All-Round Reduced Personality – Redupers (Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit – Redupers, 1977), Sander herself plays Edda, a young mother and photographer. Short of time and sleep, having to juggle childcare, work and activism, Edda’s is a familiar struggle to balance domestic labour, financial stability and personal or creative fulfilment.

Edda’s romantic relationship unfolds in the gaps between these different kinds of work. In one scene she reads the newspaper in bed while sharing an orange with her lover. In her characteristically dry tone, Sander’s voiceover tells us that her attraction to him consists primarily in his being ‘so minimally exhausting that she can just barely tolerate him’. The gendered economics of art making are brought into focus. Edda’s photography collective at one point reflects on an assignment they have received from the city government. The politicians and bureaucrats want to demonstrate their openness to ‘women’s perspectives’, but the collective is aware that the commission is driven by another factor: the low cost of women’s labour. In Sander’s films, political reflection happens on many levels, often taking the form of meta-commentary; here, the precarious situation of female artists draws our attention to the limited resources available for the production of the film itself, on its director’s creative ambitions.

Political agitation within the film world came to seem a necessity during this period: the subjects and stories that interested Sander and her feminist co-thinkers did not appeal to the predominantly male committees that made funding decisions. Women simply did not have access to the same resources. In 1973, Sander and fellow director Claudia von Alemann organised the first edition of the Internationales Frauenfilmseminar in Berlin, which showed forty films on topics such as women’s struggles for workers’ rights, their representation in the media, abortion, sexuality and the dynamics of the feminist movement. The event not only inspired women all over Germany to organise screenings, but also helped to form new networks. Frauen und Film became a focal point for feminist discussion of film in Germany and beyond. To be a militant within film politics, however, had never been Sander’s ambition, as she makes clear in Fantasie und Arbeit (2009), a joint autobiography she co-wrote with East German director Iris Gusner. Becoming an activist was necessary in order to create the conditions in which she could become a filmmaker.

Sander’s organising within German film was, nevertheless, of a piece with her earlier participation in Berlin’s feminist and student movements. In January 1968, Sander, with a group including Marianne Herzog – also later a member of the Red Army Faction – established a network of Kinderläden. A hundred women turned up to the first meeting, and the first five childcare centres were set up across the city. ‘It was like a Big Bang’, Sander recalled, ‘the scales fell from our eyes. Nothing like this had ever happened before: women gathering to solve a problem without first seeking advice from a man.’ In an infamous episode that same year she confronted the men of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund: the lens of class struggle should be applied to relationships between men and women; action to redress this could not be put off until after the revolution. When the next speaker, a man, tried to proceed without responding to Sander’s point, a female member of the SDS threw ripe tomatoes at him (the incident became known as the Tomato Speech).

The dynamics of the student movement were at the centre of Sander’s second feature film, Der Subjektive Faktor (1980). Anni, the protagonist, moves into a commune with her child. The experience politicizes her, but she comes to realise that not only do women play a minor role in the movement, but their inequality is also considered merely an ‘additional contradiction’ (‘Nebenwiderspruch’), expected to resolve itself once the class struggle is won. Like most of Sander’s films, Der Subjektive Faktor presents one defined perspective – that of the protagonist – but many voices. These emerge primarily through dialogue and voiceover, but also through posters and flyers, diegetic video playing on a TV screen, and in documentary material woven into the film’s narration. In a long travelling shot, the film registers the various reactions – of women and men, ranging from disgust to disinhibited laughter – to the protagonist’s suggestion that women must be considered a ‘class’. A montage of documentary footage of men responding to the demands of the women’s movement follows. The combining of different materials and different aesthetic registers to present a set of political questions is characteristic. What does it mean to raise a young child in this politicised environment? What new forms of community are possible?

Though recognised as a pioneering filmmaker, today Sander is better known in Germany for her activism, in particular the Kinderläden project, which was foundational in the development of a nationwide network of childcare centres (the initiative was brought to completion by Ursula von der Leyen). The legal right to childcare – instituted in 2013 – is a great achievement, but it was only a part of what Sander and the West German women’s movement were fighting for. As a filmmaker, meanwhile, Sander remains little known outside of Germany. One factor may be her documentary Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rape, Children (1990) (Befreier und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigung, Kinder) detailing women’s experience of rape in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Sander was accused of historical revisionism, of wanting to weigh these rapes against Germany’s atrocities (an objection she anticipated). What drove her was the realisation that a huge number – an estimated 2 million, according to her research ­– of the generation of women before her had been raped after the war, but had remained silent.

What of the conditions for feminist filmmakers in Germany today? The network ProQuote Film, founded in 2014, demands gender parity in funding committees as well as in the distribution of funds, echoing the demands of Frauen und Film. Today ‘female stories’ and plots with ‘diverse casts’ have become marketable, and while the crisis of cinema is ongoing, streaming platforms overflow with content featuring ‘strong women’. Yet while women filmmakers in mainstream cultural production have been able to increase their share of a shrinking industry, for more experimental, political filmmakers, seeking to work with less commodified aesthetics, the situation has hardly changed. Activism to create the conditions to be a feminist filmmaker remains an urgent task. Sander’s work – both her political activism and her filmmaking – prompt us to continue this struggle.

Read on: Frigga Haug, ‘The Women’s Movement in West Germany’, NLR I/55.

Categories
Uncategorised

Studio Trickery

Money can’t buy you love, but in 2023, what it can buy you is AI-assisted time travel. Now in his eighties, Paul McCartney increasingly resembles one of those lost characters in a 1960s Alain Resnais or Chris Marker film, repeatedly thrown back into the past to re-experience a traumatic event; or perhaps the protagonist of J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, constantly re-enacting the assassinations of famous people so that they might ‘make sense’. As a piece of music, the ‘new’ ‘last’ ‘Beatles’ single, ‘Now and Then’, is of very little interest, but as a phenomenon, it is highly symptomatic. McCartney’s project of going back in time to the 1960s and 1970s and using advanced software to scrub the historical fact of the Beatles’ shabby, acrimonious end and replace it with a series of warm, friendly fakes is proof of another of Ballard’s claims – that the science-fictional future, when it arrives, will turn out to be boring.

The Beatles achieved something close to perfection from 1963 to 1969, gradually expanding out of entertainingly scrappy R&B into grand psychedelic vistas, then into strange, personal and oblique miniatures. They achieved this while maintaining a level of global popularity that is hard to imagine today. In a ridiculous American TV series from 1965 and a wonderful film, Yellow Submarine (1968), they appeared as cartoon characters, as instantly recognisable as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But in 1970, the year they split up, they spoiled the picture. Their final album, Let It Be, consisted mostly of bad songs, recorded for a ‘back to basics’ project which they had abandoned a year earlier, releasing the far superior Abbey Road (1969) instead. Let It Be’s defects were partially covered up by Phil Spector’s syrupy orchestrations; and its release was timed to coincide with a documentary of the same name in which the group showed their ‘real selves’: neither the hardscrabble British New Wave class warriors of their first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), nor the dreamy utopian wanderers of Yellow Submarine, but four morose rich men who had come to strongly dislike each other. The four then spent several years in court in an unseemly battle over the Beatles’ posthumous finances. The group’s fame endured, and their reputation grew – their status as ‘the greatest band of all time’ cemented by widespread imitation (especially in the Britpop movement of the mid-1990s). But that last moment of acrimony and litigation would always mar the fairytale. John Lennon and Paul McCartney agreed to stop insulting each other in public in the mid-1970s, but their friendship, let alone their collaboration, had not been resumed at the time of Lennon’s murder in 1980.

For years, McCartney appeared to have left all this behind and moved on; after all, it was he who had called time on the group in the first place, having tried gamely to keep it together in its last years when Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had all lost interest. McCartney personally announced the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, and launched the slinging of insults in song between the ex-members a year later. But in the mid-1990s, he told his side of the story in Many Years From Now, a book of bitter interviews with Barry Miles, in which he argued against the accepted history in which Lennon and Harrison were the ‘experimental’, ‘avant-garde’ Beatles, stressing his love for Stockhausen, Albert Ayler and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Lennon’s cultural conservatism, and his own authorship of some of the group’s more extreme work. Around the same time, he and the other two surviving Beatles accepted Yoko Ono’s offer that they record with Lennon from beyond the grave. She had handed McCartney a tape of three unreleased home demos – ‘Free As a Bird’, ‘Real Love’, and ‘Now and Then’. The songs were recorded, with the assistance of otherwise forgotten ELO frontman Jeff Lynne as producer (George Martin, wisely, refused to work on them) and digital editing technologies. Each was to be placed as the first track on one of the three volumes of Anthology (1995-6), a series of compiled outtakes and unreleased songs. The last song, ‘Now and Then’, was never completed, in McCartney’s account because Harrison declared it to be ‘fucking rubbish’.  

The two songs that were released sold well, though they are hardly remembered as classics. They are badly produced, but the main problem is that they are poor songs in the first place – dreary and predictable, of a piece with the forgettable songs of domestic contentment on Lennon and Ono’s 1980 joint album Double Fantasy. The group left these Frankensteinian tracks off their 2000 best-of collection and until recently it seemed that they had been quietly forgotten. McCartney focused his efforts on other means of making the story end happily. The sad denouement that was Let It Be was re-recorded on his insistence in 2003 as Let It Be…Naked, with Phil Spector’s kitsch embellishments removed, digital editing deployed and new passages inserted to hide how badly the songs were played, though none of this could salvage drivel like ‘Dig It’, or mitigate the solemn, religiose pomposity of the title song. Only McCartney’s ‘Two of Us’ ranks alongside the group’s best work, but at least now the album was less ostentatiously grotesque. The miserable Let It Be film, meanwhile, was taken out of circulation, and in 2021 was superseded by Peter Jackson’s vast Get Back, in which the moments when the group snipe at each other are swamped with over 400 minutes of footage of them behaving pleasantly, if seeming visibly bored (the most notable thing in this strange, challengingly uneventful film is its proof that George Harrison was by then writing by far the best songs, such as ‘Isn’t It A Pity’, rejected in favour of tossed-off dross like McCartney’s ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ or Lennon’s ‘Dig a Pony’, which the quartet would then have to work on for hours). Again, the film used new technologies including ‘MAL’, an AI devised by Jackson to isolate and amplify moments where the group’s conversations were inaudible on the original film strips.

AI was used extensively, and to impressive effect, on ‘Now and Then’, too, which was belatedly released last month. In the earlier two collages, especially the awful ‘Free as a Bird’, the joins were obvious, with Lennon’s vocal audibly coming from a different decade. Now, the joins have been smoothed over by machines with loving grace, and Lennon’s voice – or rather, the voice of Lennon and ‘Lennon’ the AI-avatar – comes through pure and clear. As a song, ‘Now and Then’ is generic late Lennon, one of many ponderous piano ballads. Its weary verses do have a certain poignancy, but the chorus was evidently an afterthought, now bloated into overemphasis by a pompous string arrangement. The result, despite a lovely, subtle backbeat from Starr, sounds a little like Coldplay, a terrible end for a group who once had the daring to try and emulate Little Richard, Ravi Shankar and Stockhausen all at once. The song is much more mediocre than most of what you’ll find in recent McCartney albums like New (2013) or McCartney III (2020). His grandiloquent attempt to time travel into Lennon’s late 70s apartment to erase the pain of their breakup perhaps involves a certain self-deprecation, preferring to rummage in his former partner’s depleted vaults rather than make use of his own songwriting talents. No ‘new’ Beatles song has been or, apparently, could be written by McCartney.

*

So what is McCartney trying to find in his cybernetic journeys into the past, and why is it that anyone might care? One answer could be found in the changes in the way music is consumed and understood in the 21st century. The last two decades have seen the near-total eclipse of what the more theoretically inclined British music press critics used to call ‘Rockism’ – that is, the belief in rock music as the bearer of authentic personal or political truth, best recorded in the raw, through guitar, bass, drums and the human voice, unmediated by studio trickery, synthesisers or artifice. By the late 1960s Lennon (and Harrison) were Rockists extraordinaire. Lennon especially was committed to a very ’68 combination of intense self-examination – one could call it, without too much unfairness, narcissism – and political agitation. His post-Beatles songs were all about something – about his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment, about the British working class’s continued oppression under consumer capitalism, about war being unjustifiable, about imagining the anarcho-communist future, and about McCartney being a fraud. They were melodically predictable and musically unimaginative compared to McCartney’s solo work, but they were invigorating, and in tune with the zeitgeist.

McCartney, by contrast, was never a ‘Rockist’, and had no commitment to any particular genre, hopping cheerfully between retro Tin Pan Alley schmaltz, Motown, orchestral pop, and, on songs like ‘She’s a Woman’ or ‘Helter Skelter’, the Beatles’ most aggressive proto-punk (or rather, proto-‘No wave’) rock. All of these were pure sensation, with surprising melodies and unusual sounds. Even others’ songs, like Harrison’s one-note moan ‘Taxman’, were made strange and thrilling by McCartney’s bizarre basslines and splenetic guitar solos. He had little interest in self-expression – his most moving and apparently sincere ballad, ‘Yesterday’, was a melody that came to him in a dream, and its refrain was for a time ‘Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs’, until he came up with something more appropriate. This was true of his solo albums, too, especially McCartney (1970), Ram (1971), and McCartney II (1980), which were quiet, casual, inventive, stylistically promiscuous, often silly and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.

Apart, the two former bandmembers obviously suffered from each other’s absence – Lennon no longer countering McCartney’s lapses into kitsch, McCartney unable to rein in Lennon’s tendency towards self-importance – but Lennon’s albums have aged far worse. After two decent albums in 1970-71 – one, Plastic Ono Band, raw and noisy, the other, Imagine, giving the same sentiments the full Spector treatment for entryist purposes – diminishing returns set in. Lennon’s solo albums could be dreadful and political (the patronising, musically sludgy agitprop of 1972’s Some Time in New York City) or dreadful and apolitical (the Elton John-level soft rock of Mind Games from 1973), and it’s hard in either case to imagine many people listening today. Even his life partner’s once-ridiculed music has endured better. By the unplanned end, Double Fantasy, his happy, honest but dull homilies about doing the washing up and changing nappies in the Dakota Building were outclassed by Ono’s snappy, curt and very New York pop-punk answer songs. The best of her records, like the Can-esque trance-rock of 1971’s Fly or the astonishing disco melodrama of ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, are far more interesting than most of what Lennon recorded in the last decade of his life. McCartney’s solo albums from the 70s and 80s, by contrast, though desperately unfashionable until the 1990s, are now accepted as classics.

The rise of McCartney’s reputation at the expense of Lennon’s over the last few decades has something to do with the way popular music has become a less crucial part of youth culture. People still listen to music, it still changes and develops, but it is no longer the main vehicle for social comment or subcultural identity, far less important than social media; perhaps on the same level as clothing. Gone is the idea that pop music could ‘say’ something, that it could be a means of commenting on society, or an integral element of an oppositional counter-culture. McCartney’s solo work now seems unexpectedly prescient, anticipating modern listening habits. McCartney, Ram, Band on the Run or McCartney II all deliver the immediate dopamine hit and the restlessness with genre that you can find on Spotify playlists; they are albums already ‘On Shuffle’. In the last of the several editions of the standard book on the Beatles, Revolution in the Head – Ian McDonald’s unusual fusion of musicology and deep cultural pessimism – the question arises as to whether the vacuity of most Beatles lyrics would render them incomprehensible to future generations. The reverse has happened – nowadays who listens to music for the words?

What has also virtually disappeared from pop music is ‘politics’. The Beatles’ politics were complicated, to be sure. Each of them owed almost everything to the welfare state. Starr’s upbringing was rough, and a spell of childhood illness saw his life saved by the new National Health Service, which sent him to a sanatorium, an unimaginable thing for a working-class child before 1948. McCartney and Harrison grew up in good suburban council houses, and their families – sons and daughters of Irish migrants – were in skilled, stable work during a period of full employment (Lennon’s father, a Liverpool-Irish sailor, was a ne’er do well, but he was raised by his middle-class aunt in a large semi). Lennon and Harrison went to Liverpool College of Art, and McCartney sat in on lectures, later recalling attending a talk on Le Corbusier. 

One could easily make a New Spirit of Capitalism argument about these four working-class boys turned millionaires as proto-Thatcherites; take Harrison’s ‘Taxman’, the most exciting right-wing pop record ever made, for one piece of evidence. In Hunter Davies’s 1968 authorised group biography, written without the benefit of hindsight, everyone (except the notably more guarded McCartney) complains about the Labour governments’ taxation policies, which funded council houses, free tuition at art colleges and free healthcare, and without which three of the Beatles would probably have been queuing up to load timber at the docks and the other would have been dead. In one passage, Starr, after describing the amphitheatre he had built in his Surrey back-garden, objects to funding buses and calls for the privatisation of the railways. And yet, the group were usually identified with the left – ‘up the workers and all that’, as McCartney quips in A Hard Day’s Night – and were public opponents of the war on Vietnam as early as 1966. In the 70s, Lennon explicitly identified with Marxism for a time, with musically unimpressive results – perhaps except for the crunching ‘Power to the People’, which, as they say today, ‘slaps’, and was well used by Bernie Sanders as the theme song for his two presidential campaigns. Lennon later claimed he had only written it to impress Tariq Ali. 

*

The ‘new’ ‘Beatles’ songs have been devoid both of the interesting if generally failed political content of Lennon’s solo work, and the musical invention of McCartney. They are the worst of all worlds, leaden plods saying little more than that Lennon in the late 70s didn’t have much to say anymore. That was likely why he wasn’t saying it publicly, declining to release the songs in his lifetime. Yet, tellingly, ‘Now and Then’ has far outsold an actual new album of actual new songs by the actually living Rolling Stones, who were sixty years ago the Beatles’ nearest competitors. The song is also bundled with ‘new’, remixed editions of two 1970s best-of compilations, the latest in the apparently interminable process by which existing songs are repackaged, remastered and reissued (though one of McCartney’s own claims to radicalism, the famously unheard-since-1967 AMM-inspired improvisational piece ‘Carnival of Light’, recorded by the Beatles for a ‘happening’ at the Camden Roundhouse, remains unreleased, against his repeated wishes, apparently blocked by Lennon and Harrison’s widows). Peter Jackson has promised – perhaps the word should be threatened – to use ‘MAL’ to uncover more ‘new’ ‘Beatles’ songs from Lennon’s discarded tape archive. Some of these could perhaps be created completely anew, without the need for the Dakota home demos hoarded by Ono. Indeed, ‘Now and Then’ already sounds like what the ‘stochastic parrots’ (in computer linguist Emily Bender’s phrase) of contemporary AI technology would create if asked to make a Beatles song – which would of course sound like ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘Let it Be’ rather than, say, ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’. 

Nostalgia can be spun out of the flimsiest of mid-20th-century golden age cultural phenomena – Cliff Richard, whom Lennon and McCartney loathed, is currently on tour – but, unfortunately, the Beatles really were special. It isn’t all a hoax; there has never been anything quite like the sheer speed and promiscuity and drama of those six years of actual Beatles music. They proved that working-class people from ordinary places could create, in the 2.5 minute slots of the lowest of low art, work that is bottomless in its complexity and richness. There are entire worlds in A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour or the White Album, evanescent spaces in which rhythm and blues, Victoriana, cheap chanson, electronic avant-gardism and Indian classical traditions are all mixed up and transfigured in the studio by people who, as the Get Back film revealed, could not even read music. Theirs was a world in which everything was getting better, with new possibilities, new ways of hearing and seeing opening up every minute.

McCartney once explained that ‘Too Many People’, the diss track aimed at Lennon – the opening shot in their public feud – was provoked not by the fact that his former partner’s solo songs were political as such, but by the fact they were hectoring, telling people what to do and what not to do. For McCartney, the Beatles’ songs were political because they were affirmative, outlining in microcosm a new world of love, togetherness, communality, possibility. In his self-justifying 1997 book with Barry Miles, McCartney described this genuinely utopian strain:

I always find it very fortunate that most of our songs were to do with peace and love, and encourage people to do better and have a better life. When you come to do these songs in places like the stadium in Santiago, where all the dissidents were rounded up, I’m very glad to have these songs because they’re such symbols of optimism and hopefulness.

As it becomes harder and harder to believe in this hope, or in the possibility that four working-class people in Britain could ever have been given the opportunity to evoke it so vividly, the elderly and unimaginably rich McCartney has had to create a series of counterfeits, now with the assistance of cybernetic lifeforms. 

Read on: Alan Beckett, ‘Stones’, NLR I/47.

Categories
Uncategorised

Broken Codes

There is an ironic term for a piece of cinema that combines weighty themes with an imposing style: un grand film. Several recent Palme d’Or winners merit the appellation: Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2019), Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2020), Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022). These are works that strive for ‘relevance’, often at the expense of psychological depth or aesthetic subtlety. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall – the latest film to be awarded the prize – adheres to the same criteria. Triet, however, is less interested in mounting a schematic critique of inequality than her confères. Her subject is the cosmopolitan European family, and beyond it, other institutions of bourgeois life.

The film unfolds as follows: Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a German writer, her French husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their visually impaired son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) live near Samuel’s hometown in the Alps. Returning from a walk with his guide dog, Daniel stumbles upon Samuel’s body outside their house. It is unclear whether Daniel has happened upon a murder, suicide or accident. Sandra is charged, and a courtroom drama begins. Evidence is sparse; attention turns to Sandra’s infidelities, Samuel’s jealousies. Her work is highly acclaimed, while he is struggling with his first novel. On the day he died, she was being interviewed in their living room; he was upstairs blasting music to disrupt the meeting. Samuel was additionally paralysed by guilt, blaming himself for the accident that blinded Daniel. Sandra, for her part, regretted leaving their life in London. These resentments erupted in a screaming match the day before Samuel’s death, later found to have been recorded on his phone.

The result is a two-hour-long exercise in haute vulgarisation, in which art-house tropes and trappings are combined with those more familiar from the made-for-TV movie. Triet has said she drew inspiration from the case of Amanda Knox, accused of murdering her roommate Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007 – already the subject of a TV movie as well as a Netflix documentary. The conventions of the whodunnit – a bird’s-eye view of the corpse in the snow, the arrival of police, the painstaking reconstruction of the incident – are mobilized to full effect. In this regard, Anatomy of a Fall is only superficially distinct from the better products of the recent true-crime boom, where viewers are invited to pass judgement on real-life mysteries. Triet, though, has loftier conceptual ambitions. Samuel’s fall metonymizes the fall of the modern male; the court case probes the contemporary status of the family and the law, as well as – more obliquely – the novel and the cinema.

In the film’s diagnosis, these institutions have fallen into a state of disorder. Reconstruction of the truth is conspicuously absent from the trial; questions of legal guilt appear casually relative. The rise of trial-by-media and its pas de deux with the true crime format appear to have produced a qualitative change: the purpose of true crime, after all, is not to uncover what happened, but to relish in the process itself. Triet’s court has a purely mediatic function, presenting wife and husband as sleazy characters rather than legal subjects.

The nuclear family is afflicted by a parallel breakdown. The free-spirited middle class to which the protagonists belong has rejected conventional marital roles, yet this is not depicted as progress: the scrambling of domestic codes has instead resulted in turmoil. Samuel struggles to share his life with a successful woman, Sandra to tolerate her husband’s closer relationship with their son. And while the great bourgeois form, the novel, was once capable – in Hegel’s words – of neutralizing the ‘conflict between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of circumstances’, Sandra’s experimental, interior, achronological novels do no such thing. The prosecution claims to find incriminating details in her work, at one point citing a character who expresses the desire to get rid of their spouse. A nucleus of ‘truth’ is sought in her slippery autofiction but proves stubbornly elusive. The novel is now a world unto itself, and can no longer shed light on our own.

Anatomy of a Fall thus depicts a society that claims to have moved beyond shared codes – generating new and unstable ones in the process. As viewer, we are placed in a position where we are expected to resolve such disorder ­– if only we could ascertain if Sandra did it. But all the while Triet conveys the impossibility of this task. For the authority of the cinema is also under threat, its engulfment by the streaming industry embodied in the film’s very form. At its conclusion, Daniel, like a blind Tiresias, tells the court that he has just remembered a conversation he had with his father some months earlier, in which Samuel seemed to confess that he was preparing to take his own life. This, we are led to assume, is an expedient fiction. Only such an act of symbolic patricide can bring the chaos of rival narratives to an end.

A gentrified television film, though, cannot easily transcend the bounds of its genre. If its true subject is bourgeois polycrisis, the film’s reliance on received ideas means this cannot be dealt with effectively. Ultimately, its depiction of gender relations is a tissue of conservative cliches – the sapphic feminist, the splenetic macho. An egalitarian marriage is apparently unworkable due to some ‘repressed’ male essence. Triet insists on raising social ‘issues’, but the result is still an upmarket family film.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘What’s Your Place?’, NLR 136.

Categories
Uncategorised

In Praise of Tati

1. Each of Tati’s films marks at once (a) a moment in Jacques Tati’s oeuvre, (b) a moment in the history of French cinema and society, and (c) a moment in the history of cinema. Since 1948, the six films he has directed are the ones that have best kept pace with our history. Tati is not only a rare filmmaker, the director of few films (which all happen to be good); he is a living point of reference. We all belong to a period of Tati’s cinema: the author of these lines belongs to the one that extends from Mon Oncle (1958: one year before the New Wave) to Playtime (1967: one year before the events of May ’68). Since the beginning of sound film, only Chaplin has had the same privilege, that sovereignty of being present even when he wasn’t filming and, when he was filming, of being exactly on time, which is to say just a little early. Tati: a witness first and foremost.

2. A demanding witness, then an inconvenient one. Very quickly, Tati rejected the easy way. He doesn’t play on his public image, he doesn’t keep tight control of the characters he created: the postman in Jour de fête disappears and even Hulot winds up scattering himself – fake Hulots roam all over Playtime. Tati runs the ultimate risk for a comic: to lose his audience by taking them too far. But where? However admirable it may be, his artistic conscience would move us far less if it only consisted of aristocratic loftiness or the haughty retreat of a man angry with his era and with cinema. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. If one considers as a group the six films Tati has made since Jour de fête (1948), one notices that they form a line of flight that is the line of flight of all of postwar French cinema. Perhaps because a comic is given less of a right to separate himself from his era than anyone else, even and especially to criticize it, it’s in Tati that one best perceives, from one film to the next, French cinema’s characteristic oscillation between populism and modern art. Who today is able to pick up and imitate the most quotidian gestures (a waiter serving a beverage, a cop moving traffic) and at the same time incorporate these gestures in a construction as abstract as a Mondrian canvas? Tati, obviously, the last of the theorist-mimes. Each of his films is also a marker of ‘how it’s going’ in French cinema. And it’s been this way for thirty years. While Jour de fête bears witness to postwar euphoria and Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle maintain the continued existence of a very French genre (social satire) in the context of a ‘quality’ cinema, Playtime, a great anticipatory film, builds the La Défense business district before La Défense exists, but already says that French cinema can no longer deal with the gigantism of French society, that it’s no longer ‘up to it’. It says that French cinema will deteriorate by opening itself up to internationalization – in other words, the Americanization that already threatened the postman in Jour de fête. Sure enough, Tati’s two subsequent films are no longer entirely French (Trafic is a coproduction, a very European film), or entirely cinema (Parade is a commission from Swedish television).

3. Tati is not only the exemplary and disconsolate witness to the decline of French cinema and the degradation of the trade, he takes cinema in the technological state that he finds it. And curiously, though he has so often been accused of being backward-looking, all he thinks about is innovation. People are starting to realize that Tati didn’t wait for anyone’s permission to reimagine the film soundtrack starting with Jour de fête. It’s less well known that thirty years later, Parade is an extraordinary probe into the world of video. In fact, the major theme of Tati’s films is what we now call ‘the media’. Not in the restrictive sense of the ‘main means of mass communication’, but in the sense McLuhan gave the term: ‘specialized extensions of human mental and psychic faculties’, extensions of all or part of the human body. Jour de fête was already the story of a postman who keeps refining the delivery of the message to the point that he loses it. It’s a child who inherits the message (a mere letter) but who, distracted by a traveling circus, doesn’t pass it on: a beautiful metaphor for the intransitivity of modern art. But at that point, the viewer has understood that the real message is the medium – it’s the postman, Tati. The media is also the premature and accidental setting off of fireworks at the end of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, transforming Hulot into a luminous scarecrow, prefiguring the brilliant culmination of Parade where everyone – meaning anyone at all – becomes the luminous trail of a colour in an electronic landscape. And in Mon Oncle the media was also that surprising decision for the time to resist making spectators laugh at the expense of the programmes on the television set bought by the ‘modern’ couple, but to reduce this television to the abstract, nearly experimental spectacle of the sudden changes in intensity of the pale light irradiating the ridiculous garden. The list is endless, one could mention a hundred other examples. The most important thing is that at every moment and for all and sundry (in a kind of democratization-generalization of comedy that is the big gamble of Tati’s last three films, and probably the acknowledgement that we’ve all become comical), there’s a possible media becoming [devenir-média]. From the doorman in Playtime who becomes the entire door when the window pane is broken to the maid terrified at the idea of going through the electronic beam that opens the garage door behind which her bosses have foolishly locked themselves in (Mon Oncle), there’s the (threatening or comical) possibility that the human body will also become a limit, a threshold (and no longer, as is the case in burlesque comedy, a scatological depth). Modern art if ever there was one.

4. Tati doesn’t condemn the modern world (botch-ups and waste) by proving that the old world (economy and human warmth) is better. Other than in Mon Oncle, his films don’t praise what is old: one can even say, without being too paradoxical, that he’s interested in only one thing, which is how the world is being modernized. And if there’s a logic in his films, from the country roads in Jour de fête to the highways in Trafic, it’s the one that continues to irreversibly lead humans from the country to the city. Tati shows, in a way that’s in keeping with the recent (schizo-analytic) descriptions of capitalism, that the human body’s media-becoming works very well insofar as it doesn’t function. There are no burlesque catastrophes in Tati (the kind one can still see in American films such as Blake Edwards’s The Party) but rather a fatality of success that evokes Keaton. Everything that is undertaken, planned, or scheduled works, and when there’s comedy, it’s precisely in the fact that it works. Watching Playtime, one has a tendency to forget that all the actions one sees undertaken are ultimately relatively successful: Hulot finally meets the man with the Band-Aid on his nose whom he had an appointment with, he fixes the street light, is reconciled with the manufacturer of silent doors, and at the last moment even manages to get an admittedly piddling gift to the young American woman. Similarly, the opening of the royal garden is a success: the vast majority of customers dance, dine, and pay. Nothing really goes wrong in Playtime, though nothing works.

5. Cinema has made us so accustomed to laugh at failure and get off on ridicule that we wind up believing that we’re also laughing against something when we watch Playtime, though that isn’t the case at all. For in Tati there are no pratfalls or punchlines [chute]. Or else it’s the opposite: there’s a punchline but we haven’t seen the gag get set up. This isn’t a crafty and elegant way of making people laugh by playing with ellipses, it’s something far deeper: we’re in a world where the less things work, the more they work, therefore in a world where a punchline wouldn’t have the demystifying, awakening effect it has where failure is still conceivable. The same is true with the other meaning of the French word chute – ‘fall’. We’re dealing with bodies that aren’t made comical by the fact that they can fall. This is the nonhumanist side of Tati’s cinema. The ‘human’ part of comedy has always been to laugh at the one who falls. Laughter is only proper to man (the spectator) if falling is proper to the human body (as a spectacle). Chaplin is the archetype of the one who falls, gets up, and makes someone else fall, the king of the trip. In Tati, people practically never fall because there’s nothing ‘proper to man’ anymore. For me, one of the most beautiful moments in Playtime is when a woman customer, thinking that a waiter has held out a chair for her, goes to sit down without looking back (she’s a snob) and collapses in slow motion. A very funny gag, a beautiful ‘pratfall’ [‘chute’] but what exactly are we laughing at? And what are we laughing at in Parade, during the number when spectators are asked to mount an obdurate mule? Or the one where the clowns are constantly falling over each other as they stumble over a pommel horse? Here, falling is just one body movement among others. As a nonhumanist filmmaker, Tati is quite logically captivated by the human species, that animal which Giraudoux described as standing up ‘to get less rain on himself and to pin more medals on his chest’. The source of comedy for him is that it stands up and that it walks/works [marche], that it can walk/work [marche]. Infinite surprise, inexhaustible spectacle.

Rather than a dialectic of high and low, of what is erected and what collapses (a carnivalesque tradition and a situation that Buñuel illustrated: from the camera at insect level to Simon of the Desert at the top of his column), Tati would introduce another kind of comedy where it’s the fact of standing up that is funny and the fact of being unsteady (Hulot’s gait) that is human.

‘In Praise of Tati’, translated by Nicolas Elliott, appears in Footlights: Critical Notebook 1970-1982, published this month by Semiotext(e). The text was originally published in book form as ‘Éloge de Tati’ in La Rampe: Cahiers critique 1970-1982 published by Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard in 1983. 

Categories
Uncategorised

Insomniac Visions

Philip Guston didn’t sleep well. The first room in Tate Modern’s current retrospective is hung with two late images of insomnia: a painting, Legend (1977) and a print, Painter (1980). They show different stages of the same sickness. Legend has the painter in bed, eyes squeezed shut, surrounded by half-formed clapped-out thoughts. Painter shows him at work, all hope of sleep abandoned, eyes gummed near-shut, face pushed as close to his canvas as it will go. The pairing is inspired. It gives clues to the meaning of figuration in Guston’s paintings – to his entire epistemology.

Legend is a large painting, almost two metres across. It shows that unique feeling for colour, or rather for a particular range of colour – roughly, between salmon pink and cadmium red – that Guston tested throughout his career. The painter’s face is a study in this range, from the delicate pinks of his crumpled forehead, flaccid and puffy like uncooked sausages, to the glistening reds of his temples. Pink suffuses the atmosphere and tints each object: the boot heel, the tin can, the billy-club raised by a disembodied fist. Guston’s pillow is crimped like a thought-bubble in a comic strip, and clearly we are meant to read at least some of the objects surrounding him as thoughts, projections of his sleepless brain. They float in pink space. Some cast no shadows.

Philip Guston, Legend, 1977 MFAH © Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photograph © MFAH; Will Michels

There are objects here, like the tin can, the horseshoe, and the studded shield, that he returned to again and again, that he simply could not stop painting. Obviously he thought they were significant. But the weight of that significance, its clarity and legibility – these are what the painting puts in question. Take the horse’s rear end, poking out from behind the artist’s pillow. This has been linked to one of Guston’s favourite books, Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926), a collection of stories based on the author’s time as a journalist in the Polish-Soviet War. But it is an evasive reference, if indeed it is one. Much more important, within the space of the painting, is the way the downward curve of the horse’s tail is repeated and continued by the stream of brown fluid that pours from the lidless tin can onto an odd studded object (a boot heel?). This does cast a shadow, as do the discarded objects that surround it on the studio floor: an old bottle, brilliant green against the pink atmosphere, glass shards, and useless bits of misshapen wood.

Horse’s rear and boot heel; billy club and broken glass: such detritus is the material of Guston’s painting, as it is the stuff of his insomniac thoughts. For all the talk of his political convictions – which were real, and deeply felt, and drove him back to representational painting from abstraction in the teeth of savage criticism – his great paintings dwell among the sweepings of the studio floor, far from the legible images of waking political discourse. They speak a language of uselessness, anxiety, and helpless alienation. Like all insomniacs, the sleepless painter in Legend is tormented by yesterday’s leftovers: the pointless and circular, the looping thoughts that lead nowhere. These are the building blocks of Guston’s art, as they were for so many other modernists. They are what is left to a painter compelled to ‘bear witness’ (a favourite phrase of his) without much hope of averting the horrors he sees. ‘A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street’, as W.B. Yeats put it, ‘Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, / Old iron, old bones, old rags . . . the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’.

There are many old bottles and broken cans in this exhibition, bones and iron too. There is an apocalyptic Kettle (1978) in the final room. It squats high on a red horizon against a black sky, at once a vision from a nightmare and the very picture of mundanity. This is the promise of Guston’s art: that in paying attention to the broken-down and meaningless – to what is cliché, outworn, comically decrepit – the painter might break through to some new intensity of expression.

Philip Guston, Kettle, 1978. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Daniel W. Dietrich II, 2016, 2016-3-17

Turn again to Painter. The artist, squinting, encrusted with plasters, is shown so close to his work that he has even dispensed with his brush. The two raised fingers he presses to the canvas make the familiar sign of Christ’s benediction. This is a fantasy of painting as creation (rather than production), of the artist as a god, literally in touch with his canvas, rising from his insomniac visions to create new meanings. But it is also self-conscious, doubly mediated, done in a different medium – lithography – with no canvas present. Much of the pleasure in viewing the work comes from the blurring Guston achieves between print and painting, mediacy and immediacy. Surely few artists since Rembrandt have wrought such painterly effects from a print. Look at the flowing, incised greys on the artist’s shirtsleeve, the thick black smudges on his collar, the pooling shadow beneath his canvas. Painter shows Guston, in the year of his death, working at a furious peak. It is a self-portrait as a bandage-swaddled, mummified wreck, but at the same time a master creator, something divine.

Guston was born in 1913, to immigrant Jewish parents, and grew up in Los Angeles, before moving to New York and changing his name in 1936. He showed an early inclination for politics. In 1930 he made Painting for Conspirators, an image of the Ku Klux Klan lynching a Black man with a crucified Christ in the background (present at the Tate only as a small reproduction). He was still signing his paintings ‘Philip Goldstein’ when he made Female Nude with Easel (1935). It is young man’s work, arrogant, mock-heroic, straining for classicism. But it also shows the emergence of certain enduring concerns: the hard cast shadows of dream, the creaking assemblages of objects (boards, nails, staples), the intense reflection on the function and meaning of the painter’s art, and – perhaps above all – that emphasis on the expansive qualities of the colour pink. At this stage it is crisp, delineated: quattrocento pink, wrapping the easel and the painter’s stool in the colours of Della Francesca and Veneziano. The nude, modelled with a solidity drawn from Picasso’s work of the 1920s, is greyscale. She awaits the touch of the artist to give her colour.

Like other American modernists (his school friend Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning among others), Guston found work in the 1930s painting murals. By 1943 he had worked on fifteen of them, mostly for the Works Progress Administration (a New Deal agency set up to fund public works). In 1934 he and two other artists, Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner, were commissioned to paint The Struggle Against Terrorism, a mural in the Universidad de San Nicolás in Morelia, Mexico. A vast synthesis of Diego Rivera, Surrealism and the kind of large-format fresco painting perfected by Piero at Arezzo, it is one of the highlights of the exhibition, displayed through a series of ingenious projections. The mural shows the victims of fascist torture. Their massive bodies hang from ropes or are dumped, Christ-like, in open tombs. But the mood is not all sombre. At top right, sickle-brandishing communists charge into the frame, hurling down klansmen and swastikas. Bombast and dynamism are the painters’ creeds here, the searing critique of fascist violence married to a polemical faith in left-wing triumph.

In Bombardment (1937), which hangs nearby, these forces reach crescendo. Painted, like Picasso’s great masterpiece, in response to the bombing of Guernica, it adopts the format of a Renaissance tondo. Guston drives this into centrifugal motion, setting the blast at the painting’s centre back from the figures who surge forwards in extreme foreshortening. It is a painting that strains against its own physical constraints: against painting’s flatness, its stillness, its muteness. At the same time, Bombardment mobilizes these constraints for emotional effect. Its figures are eternally caught in the blast, both thrown and held; sucked in and pushed out. The leg of the naked, screaming child endlessly disappears into the void of the explosion.

Philip Guston, Bombardment, 1937. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Musa and Tom Mayer, 2011-2-1. © Estate of Philip Guston

Where did this model of engaged art go? How do we get from the young leftist painting communist murals to the tattered insomniac dreaming of horse shit and empty liquor bottles? A broad answer would take in the crushing of American communism, the end of the New Deal, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the waning of the Mexican revolution, World War Two. Mural commissions dried up. Artistic certainties came under pressure. One feels the 1940s for Guston were a period of gradual disintegration. He went on painting his Renaissance-modernist hybrids. But the convictions seem to have ebbed away as the war ground on and the first images began arriving from the death camps. There are no distinct sides in his paintings of this decade; no battle between good and evil. Self-Portrait (1944) shows him hollow-eyed and gaunt, raising a ghostly hand to touch his cheek, as if doubting the capacity of vision to confirm his existence. Gladiators (1940) updates Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari into a duel of dunces with saucepans for helmets. It is an image of senseless violence unified by the tightness of its composition and the balance of its colours. The pink of its central figure’s strange garment (a dress? a tunic?) echoes in the hoods and fists of his adversaries.

In 1945 Guston brought this sense of uncertainty to an astonishing pitch with If This Be Not I, one of several images of street children that hang in room 3. The setting is some New York slum, piled with trash. Night is coming on. The clock on a distant roof looks past ten, though it might be earlier – the clock might have stopped – there is still a faint blue light in the sky. All is blue here, the hard blue of a winter evening, of street light on frozen metal, and of the stripes on the inmate’s uniform worn by the child at bottom left. He lies, stiff like a dead man, lips drawn back from his teeth. The imagery of the Holocaust is unmistakeable. The painting is haunting, perhaps nowhere more so than in its central figure, another child who stares out from beneath a magnificent paper dunce’s hat (done with a few thick dabs of brown, blue and white). His commedia dell’arte mask has slipped. His gaze is adult, as cold as the air.

It is a wonderful painting but it is also strained, lugubrious, cynical to the point of being hectoring. Guston wrote at the time of the need to find ways to ‘allegorize’ the Holocaust and as the forties wore on he abandoned the directness of his earlier work. Abstraction beckoned, although it was not an easy transition. A work like White Painting I (1951) registers the losses involved – of style and subject matter and commitment – as a kind of bleaching and thinning of the painted surface. The palette is stripped back to the greys and browns of analytical cubism. The central forms hover and crackle against their white ground. Everything seems on the verge of coming apart. Guston made it in a single session. It is easy to imagine him wondering whether he had anything else left to put in.

Guston was able to tolerate these gaps and absences, these crises of indecision. He seems to have driven himself towards them, sometimes destroying whole sequences of his paintings, at other times stopping painting altogether for months, even years, at a time. The effort it cost him to assemble an abstract manner is palpable. Dial (1956) bunches colour and form towards the centre. Reds and pinks stand off the surface in thick ridges. The contrast they create with the green forms is so strong it is almost crass. Thumb marks are visible. Meanwhile, towards the edges, the paint thins, the colours grow less harsh: mauve, sky-blue, here and there a hint of grey. Such abstractions are successful because they find ways to accommodate some of Guston’s old preoccupations – the obsession with certain colours, with the way a particular colour (a blue, a pink) can stabilize and link together a picture of extraordinary violence; the sense of an image straining to allegorize something terrible that is just beyond its reach. They always seem on the verge of materializing into a recognizable form. The meaty densities of Dial almost add up to a figure. There are triangles in Passage (1957-8) that recall the klansmen of the 1930s. In The Return (1956-8) these have become eyes, ears, and noses.

Philip Guston, Passage, 1957–1958 MFAH. © Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photograph. © MFAH; Will Michels

There is a massive teleological bias in writing about these paintings, one I am aware of failing to avoid. Guston returned to figuration with his notorious Marlborough Gallery exhibition in 1970. It is difficult to view his abstractions without these later works in mind, as anything other than steps on a path back to the figure, back to the world. The balances they seem to strike – between the disembodied purity of the painted mark and the tendency of that mark, when set alongside others, to coalesce, to take on something of the look and feel of reality – can seem too provisional. Was Guston really serious about abstraction? Did he ever work hard enough to keep out the world? Such questions are to the point. At their best, Guston’s abstractions show the extreme difficulty involved in separating painting from the outside world, in limning it with a fragile autonomy. Others in his generation – Joan Mitchell most spectacularly – never stopped making paintings out of this contradiction. For Guston this wasn’t an option. The Heads he exhibited at the Jewish Museum in 1966 pushed the line between figurative and abstract to breaking point. They used the contrast between a dark central shape and broad, wet, grey brushwork to bring up, again and again, the image of a human head afloat in a sea of static. They are difficult paintings, depressive. They have something of the stunned tenor of If This Be Not I. The eighteen-month period of lethargy and crisis that followed is hardly surprising. It is what happened next that has always come as a shock.

*

There are continuities between the Marlborough paintings and Guston’s earlier work. But at the time they were read as an absolute break: an attack on modernism, a defection to the other side, or something even stranger. Guston’s friend, the composer Morton Feldman, never spoke to him again after he saw them. Even now, walking into room 8 is an overwhelming experience. The curation is intelligent: you walk through a dark corridor and emerge into a riot of massive, cartoonish forms; exuberant colour; pointed Klan hoods. Everything is pushed to extremes. City Limits (1969) is massive, bigger than any of the abstractions. It shows three klansmen driving a stupid cartoon car through a desolate landscape. The whole surface seems built from those smeared, liquid pinks and reds. Even the Klan hoods are more pink than white. But the affect has changed. There is no hint of the quattrocento in Guston’s pinks here, nothing of balance or grace. The blacks and greys blended with his colours make them look grubby, like greasemarks on cheap newsprint.

Philip Guston, Dawn, 1970. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland

These paintings were horrifying in 1970 and still are (witness the show’s near-cancellation back in 2020, on grounds that it might give offence). They pose a chilling equivalence between their elements. Everything – klansmen, buildings, corpses, cars, windows, cigarettes – is rendered in the same cheerily inane cartoon style drawn in part from Guston’s reading of comic strips like Krazy Kat. The tiny paintings on one wall, which Guston lived with, make the point brutally clear. Each shows a personage in his late paintings. The rubbery form of a skyscraper is there in one; a hanging lightbulb in another. A Klan hood appears in the series too, but fungibly, as one element among many. Dawn (1970) shows another carload of klansmen with a tangle of human body parts protruding from the back of their car. Blood drips from one of the feet. The sun in the sky is a jolly orange disk. The birds on the telephone wire might as well be singing.

It is this cartoonishness that people find disturbing. There is a chasm between the moral clarity of Guston’s work of the 1930s, with its bands of communists ever ready to fight off the Klan, and a work like Dawn or The Studio (1969). In the latter, perhaps his most famous image, it is the artist himself who wears the pointed hood, puffing on a cigarette while painting (yet) another klansman by the light of a single bulb. Guston makes the Klan cute. He identifies himself with those he is supposed to despise, and identifies these with the most debased products of American popular culture. The Studio recognizes the enmeshment of racist violence in the very tissue of American life, as much a part of its workings and history as cigarettes, cars and cartoons. More terrifying still, it suggests that there is no position outside this culture for the artist to take up; no separation that would arrive with the force of a moral binary. The horror of the landscape in City Limits, with its blood-red ground and looming skyline, is of a world in which the Klan have lost their identity as an embodiment of evil and become normalized, banal. We are a long way from the ‘us and them’ of World War Two and the Mexican Revolution. ‘We are all hoods’, as Guston put it.

This sense of helpless complicity, with all the paralysis it implies, returns us to the outlook of the insomniac, obsessing over a world he cannot change. Worry, with its circling momentum, disconnected objects and desperate leaps of inference, is often the subject of Guston’s work in the 1970s, his last decade, during which he produced many of his greatest paintings. Painter’s Forms II (1978) shows a mouth and part of a jaw literally vomiting up the objects – the boots, legs, cigarettes and tin cans – that Guston called his ‘visual alphabet’. It is an image of useless compulsion, as bleak and relentless as anything else to come out of this highpoint of the Cold War.

The final room, titled ‘Night Studio’, is the best in the exhibition. It is revelatory: the full range of Guston’s late works dealing with sleep, death and isolation become apparent. Kettle sits on its high red hill. The figure of the artist curls beneath a too-thin blanket, stick limbs shivering against a black void. Hands gesture unintelligibly. Flames gutter out in the dark. By this point the stakes of these images, their conjunctions of meaninglessness and desolation, the stress they place on bearing witness – even when to do so is impossible – are clear. In Couple in Bed (1977) the artist clutches his brushes even as he pushes his face so close to his stroke-stricken wife’s that their features disappear into each other’s. Guston never lost his faith in modernism; he sought the meaning of modern life, its poetry and heroism, among the wreckage. Creation was the other side of destruction. A sleepless night could always produce a painting.

Philip Guston, The Line, 1978. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

The last work in the show, The Line (1978), shows a godlike hand reaching from a cloud. It makes the same divine gesture as the artist in Painter, although here the two fingers grasp a stick of charcoal and draw a line. It is at once an image of defunct cliché, absurdly anachronistic in the age of burgeoning postmodernism (who on earth still believed in the artist as divine?), and a serious statement of the painter’s vocation. Such paintings resonate today because they are able to hold both poles together: to be both anachronistic and contemporary. Ideas do not disappear simply because they have become outmoded. Like fascism or the Klan, returning to haunt capitalist modernity in ever-new configurations, it is when left behind that they can be most dangerous.

Read on: Saul Nelson, ‘Opposed Realities’, NLR 137.

Categories
Uncategorised

Real Life

A pair of novels from Pier Paolo Pasolini, recently reissued by New York Review Books, display the aesthetic and intellectual range of the Italian writer and filmmaker. The first, his debut, Boys Alive, published in 1955, is a fizzing chemical reaction, its postwar hustler vignettes suffused with speed, lust and disaster. The second, his final work in prose, Theorem (1968), is a chilly, enigmatic parable about a visitor who seduces each member of a bourgeois family and thereby transforms or destroys them. (It began as a poem and was later made into a film of the same name.) Between these two approaches we find tradition distilled and then discarded, moving from gritty Italian neo-realism toward the abstraction of the then-ascendant nouveau roman. Pasolini built upon his literary inheritance before utterly razing it such that neither nostalgia nor mythology could gain a footing. Reading the novels back-to-back is like a cold plunge after a scalding bath.

Pasolini was an urban aesthete, conflicted Catholic Marxist, peasant mythologizer and inveterate lech. He was born in Bologna, in 1922, to a Fascist army officer and a schoolteacher. His father’s military postings and sometime imprisonment for gambling debts compelled the family to move frequently. He attended the University of Bologna, writing a thesis on the nineteenth-century poet Giovanni Pascoli. It was there he began to speak openly about his homosexuality. (He was said to have fallen in love with one of the war-ravaged pupils he and his mother taught free of charge.) A series of disasters precipitated his fateful move to Rome. His brother, a partisan, was murdered by rivals in 1945. His father came home from the war in a state of alcoholic paranoia. Then, in 1949, Pasolini was caught with a group of underage boys performing an undisclosed sexual act. The local anti-Communist authorities put him on trial; narrowly avoiding indecency charges, he was nonetheless expelled from the Communist Party and fired from his teaching position. In January, 1950, he and his mother abandoned his father and set out for Rome.

The city was a sea change, a whirl of pleasure, squalor and art. Pasolini’s fall from respectability compelled a reckoning: ‘Like it or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud . . . or even Oscar Wilde.’ He sought the desperate freedom of disrepute and found it in Rome’s poverty-stricken underclass, particularly in the beautiful, violent young men who furnished him with the material for his early poems and fictions. He stayed afloat via odd jobs: teaching, literary journalism, bit parts in movies. He would later work as a screenwriter for Soldati and Fellini, and go on to direct a variety of disruptive, legacy-defining works including Accatone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962) and Medea (1969). He was murdered, in Ostia, in 1975, likely by a right-wing criminal organization.

Boys Alive remains his best-known novel. It is plotless, headlong, horny, vascular and often unbearably sad. It follows Riccetto and his friends – all the boys have diminutives or nicknames: Trouble, Cheese, Woodpecker and so on – over the course of five years as they pillage, cruise, fight, strut, gamble and narrowly avoid incarceration. Pasolini is unerring in his dramatic instincts. He seeks heat, battle, humiliation, thrilling reversals of fortune. The boys are either skint or flush with ill-gotten spoils. Money is forever being lost and found, then spent recklessly on indulgences. Financial windfalls – from lifting scrap metal, robbing friends and enemies, or sex work – are splurged on fashionable shoes or enormous bar tabs. Riccetto believes ‘cash is the source of all pleasure and all happiness in this filthy world’. It is above all a means of style, to be used solely in service of what the boys call ‘real life’.

What is this ‘real life’ they speak of? Everything pleasurable, everything wanton, everything unpredictable, incongruous and free. It is competition, fashion, swimming, sex, food, drink and indolence. ‘God, I like having fun!’ Cacciota says. The words constitute the group’s personal code, a philosophy with which they reimagine the meagreness of their circumstances. To experience boredom is to have failed ‘real life’. It is to be found wanting, to lose one’s nerve, or else to work a day job, to achieve a shabby respectability. To be short of cash is to lack the shrewdness necessary for living. It is a kind of total defeat. If the alternative to ennui is death, the boys will unfailingly choose the latter. (Many boys die in the novel: illnesses; drownings; car crashes; suicides.)

Weather and youth are the novel’s twin forces of aggression. There is no season but summer and one practically squints while reading, assaulted by page after page of heat and glinting metal. Asphalt yards ‘crackle with flame’, the Colosseum stands ‘burning like a furnace’; ‘rank heat’ rises from a river; bodies sweat under ‘the full blaze of the sun’. It’s nearly impossible to imagine Pasolini’s Rome in winter, so complete is his delirious, fiery dream. The sun is his engine. Its presence suffuses the novel, forever offering up a plausible, heat-addled motive for petty crime or a disorienting backdrop for flashy exhibitionism. It drives the boys, sweating, heedless, into their next misadventure.

The novel’s episodic structure – built loosely around criminal activity, family life, the procurement of prostitutes, group swims at the river, and plenty of shooting the shit – eludes a totalizing narrative. Scenes never outstay their welcome. A climax approaches, your heart lurches or breaks, and then you’re whisked to the next calamity a month or a year hence. It is in these pungent transitions that Pasolini betrays his obsession with cinema, in the way he weds his lyricism to setting, his prose like a camera eye, ever ready for the close up or tracking shot. Translator Tim Parks renders a lean, athletic prose that oscillates between beauty and brutality. Its wattage can’t be overstated. All is kinetic possibility, open-ended, chaotic, alive. No resolution, no hope, only action, action, action.

*

In 1968, Pasolini shot his film, Theorem, in Lombardy. Before it hit screens, he’d published a novel of the same name. Despite some equivocation by contemporary critics, he was quick to dispel any suggestion that the novel was mere film treatment. As translator Stuart Hood notes in his introduction, Pasolini said it was ‘as if the book had been painted with one hand while with the other he was working on a fresco – the film.’ The pleasures and challenges of each work are interrelated, a kind of correspondence. To set one against the other is to ignore this complementary formalism, the way each foregrounds the spiritual corruption and erotic ennui of the bourgeoise.

Theorem is a beguiling work of calculated estrangement. Pasolini forecloses any attempt to locate the narrative, geographically or historically. ‘As the reader will already have noticed,’ we are told, ‘this, rather than being a story, is what in the sciences is called “a report”: so it is full of information; therefore, technically, its shape rather being that of “a message”, is that of “a code”.’ Events unfold by way of meticulous description, a kind of poetic data that pins the novel’s subjects like insects beneath glass. What results is an allegory disguised as a memorandum.

The novel immediately establishes an aura of boredom, drift and atrophy. The family of a well-to-do Milanese businessman endures aimless walks, chaste kisses, drowsy reading, and the ringing of midday bells. This soporific mood is shattered when a beautiful, enigmatic young man invites himself to stay at their suburban mansion. Each member of the family – Paolo, the father; Lucia, the mother; Pietro, the son; Odetta, the daughter; Emilia, the maid – is gradually overcome by the youth. He beds them all, one by one, tenderly, as if the family ‘awoke in him merely a kind of loving compassion, precisely of delicate maternal caring’. His magnetism is effortless, his flesh somehow consoling. He remains an inscrutable presence throughout, a figure of almost biblical ambivalence.

His eventual withdrawal destroys the family: ‘The guest . . . seems to have divided them from each other, leaving each one alone with the pain of loss and a no less painful sense of waiting.’ Each fruitlessly seeks some purpose or diversion to staunch the wound of his abandonment: Emilia leaves her post to float surreally above her village; Odetta becomes catatonic and is admitted to a clinic; Lucia cruises for boys half her age; Pietro becomes an artist, pissing on his work in disgust; Paolo strips at a train station and walks the platforms as if in a dream. Between these descriptive chapters there are lengthy prose poems, ostensibly narrated by a member of the family. Their weighty musings (with titles like ‘Identification of Incest with Reality’ and ‘Loss of Existence’) offer bursts of transgressive interiority. These modal shifts continue through to the novel’s conclusion, ending with a reporter’s staccato questioning of the workers outside Paolo’s factory, a strangely detached examination deploying the ‘kind of language used in daily cultural commerce’. (‘Would the transformation of man into a petty-bourgeois be total?’) This alloy of myth, portent, social commentary and dream was as far as Pasolini could take the novel. From this point on, he would focus solely on filmmaking.

What proof the novel takes aim at – what theorem is being explored – tantalizes in its nearness. It remains an ambiguity swirling beneath the frozen crust of the novel’s surface, luring the reader into a strange, almost empirical participation in the presented facts. Everything trembles with restrained volatility as the family is awoken to itself, its hungers, its failings, the abysses of desire that suddenly open amidst so much ease and comfort. Pasolini is at his best here, a poet of ruinous Eros, of the calamities we welcome and fear, each of us ‘a famished animal writhing in silence’.

Read on: Jessica Boyall, ‘Militant Visions’, NLR–Sidecar.