Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_010

It pleases me very much to be able to claim on this, the last day of September, that the month has been a stimulating and rewarding one, though most all of them are nowadays. If September was not more rewarding than is customary at this point, it is at least deserving of special distinction on account of its having offered me the opportunity to attend (in a manner of speaking) two film festivals within the context of a drastically transformed landscape. Planet X, Year COVID. Select selections of the Toronto International Film Festival were earlier this month made available for the first time to Canadians far and wide, and I partook of six comically costly streams. One of them, Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, now my favourite of those I dialed in from Toronto, subsequently became announced as a late edition to the Calgary International Film Festival, which commenced Thursday of last week, and I got to see Tamhane’s film a second time Monday night, this time in a theatre, enjoying it approximately a thousandfold. Much more can and perhaps at some point will be written about all this. Of the just-over-fifty films I have watched for the first time or revisited in September, only fourteen have been festival streamers or live festival theatricals (with two more of the latter on the docket for later today). One of the most critical not-festival-related cinematic felicities this month was the arrival of the new Criterion Blu-ray of Claire Denis’ monumental 1999 film Beau travail, finally available for convenient serial revisitation in the form of a 4K transfer presented at 1080p resolution. I have been a huge Claire Denis fan since a little before Beau travail came out, but for whatever reason I did not have the opportunity to experience the theatrical presentation of her most widely-regarded film during its original run near the end of the 20th century. It would certainly have played Ottawa. Perhaps I simply wasn’t in town. At any rate, upon scoping the Blu-ray, it becomes exceedingly apparent how utterly insufficient were the previous transfers of the film I have had occasion to view, that featured on the 2002 New Yorker DVD most especially. I have long prized Denis and her regular cinematographer Agnès Godard as the finest team in the business, and I am gratified to have finally been able to properly appraise the scale of their considerable achievement(s) on Beau travail. Many will be aware that Denis has a bit of a reputation as both a tight-lipped and an intermittently brusque interviewee. I recall not too terribly long ago a Facebook friend having shared a profile on the great director in which she, Denis, disparages critics and film theorists, only to have many responding to the post, some themselves critics and theorists, express, predictably, their ire. Touchy people. Fuck ‘em. Though Denis will regularly talk about the primacy of the human body in her cinema, she will likewise often become annoyed with commentators who discuss the sensual or corporeal nature of her films. Her issue—and I believe it more than merely legitimate—is with the reductive language brought to bear by those who can only manage to espy a bare minimum of the proffered spectrum. And utilitarian language, a bit of a hassle at the best of time, is not ever going to cut it. Otherwise you would get into the blocks of language racket as opposed to the blocks of image-sound one. Note how the great Robert Bresson, master filmmaker and precept man, puts it in an interview with Michel Ciment shortly after the release of what would prove to be Bobby B.’s final film: “I seek not description but vision. A sense of motion comes from building a series of visions and fitting them together. It is not really sayable in words. Increasingly, what I am after—and with L'argent it became almost a working method—is to communicate the impressions I feel. It is the impression of a thing and not the thing itself that matters. The real is something we make for ourselves. Everyone has their own. There is the real and there is our version of it.” Yes, Denis and Agnès Godard have a special capacity to capture the body and its movements, but they do so from the position of a holistic discipline of poiesis fielded by and within resonance. They are in synch with bodies, with minds, with spirits, and with a tradition in and beyond the arts. The work is primarily intuitive (impressions, renderings), and the intelligence is an intelligence of and through the cinema, not an intelligence of finessed discourse and exculpatory explanations. Denis makes great cinema that is unmistakable as anything other than cinema. If she is attracted to the haptic—the feel of a leather jacket, say, or the smell of wet hair—she is likewise attracted to Herman Meville, whose Billy Budd is the key jumping off point for Beau travail, William Faulkner, whose Sanctuary serves the same function in Les salauds (2013), and Clarice Lispector, whose The Hour of the Star I believe is being consciously homaged in the final sequence of Un beau soleil intérieur (2017), a film initially undertaken as a way of reimagining the taxonomies of Roland Barthes’ A Lover's Discourse. The literary enters into the cinema of Claire Denis by way of a perversion assuming the modality of something analogous to biochemical adaptation. When commentators insist on zeroing in on corporeality, sexuality, and sociality to the exclusion of all other considerations, they cut off the very rich poetics and the entire domain of metaphysics, Denis’ cosmicity, even when she is so bold and unambiguous as to set a film (2018’s High Life) in outer fucking space. Take as a not-especially-egregious example the scholar Judith Mayne, author of a 2005 book on the filmmaker, who has provided a video essay for the Criterion release of Beau travail. A key example of Mayne’s tendency toward unsatisfactory reduction can be found in her assessment of the film in question’s bravura opening sequence, a series of fragments or a montage drawing together a plurality of space-times and regimes of semiosis. Pay special attention to the manner in which Mayne addresses a single critical shot which superimposes the journal of Denis Lavant’s character Galoup, source of Beau travail’s intermittent voiceover, and a shot of the undulating sea. Mayne: “The rippling sea water suggests both calm and potential turbulence. Galoup’s writing, from his place of exile in Marseilles, with the water superimposed on it, suggests that his journal is an idealized recollection of the Legionaries as well as an attempt to understand his actions.” While there is doubtlessly something to “calm and potential turbulence,” Mayne's concluding assertion regarding “idealized recollection” and an “attempt to understand […] actions,” is psychologizing hogwash that reflects a film culture no longer interested in or able to take into account metaphysics or poetics. The superimposition immediately hearkens back to the cinema of Jean Epstein, a pioneer for whom both superimposition and the sea assume their respective places of primacy as pertains to a cinematic metaphysics, as in the 1928 Poe adaptation La chute de la maison Usher, where the deceased beloved has been reconstituted into a presiding planetary vitalism, most forcefully manifested by wind and tide, themselves expressive phenomenal manifolds of humbling scale reflecting both Kant’s concept of the sublime and Henri Bergson’s concept of élan vital. The sea is always élan vital within a certain field of French poetics. The great many cutaways to waves rolling into shore or of the horizon line of sea and sky in the films of Jean-Luce Godard, especially those made in collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, should always evoke Bergson and Epstein for us just as they evoke the intersubjective heave of Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Judith Mayne speaks in her video essay of Denis Levant’s “pent up energy and release” or how Michel Subor is “solid and wise” or “quiet and solid,” and she believes she is only talking about bodies and gender, not of the universe and comportment within the universe, not of élan vital, drives that are merely provisionally localized in the body, the blockages and flows. Mayne can express how the explosion of Levant’s Galoup into aleatory dance at the conclusion of the film is presaged moments before by a lingering shot (famous and astonishing) which captures a vein pulsing in Levant’s arm, but it would never for a moment dawn on her that this too is of the same elemental stuff as are the sea and the wind. It is not for nothing that it is Galoup’s notebook that is superimposed over the sea (or vice versa). The notebook and sea situate the instantiation of the creative and/or reflective act, the vital force married inextricably to poiesis. This is the territory of Gaston Bachelard, author both of Water and Dreams and The Poetics of Space. Early in the latter book, Bachelard draws special attention to a formulation from Pierre-Jean Jouve: “Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.” That is what Denis is figuring-forth with her superimposition and it is the work that her cinema has more broadly taken on. For Bachelard, the poetic soul “upsets the plans of the usual psychological explanations,” and rests in what Denis’ superimposition is already proclaiming: “infinite quality of the intimate dimension,” Bachelard later expanding this to qualify that “intimate space and exterior space keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.” Attention is paid to an “astonishing variety of uses” to which Baudelaire puts the word “vast” and how the poet’s reverie “gathers the universe together around and in an object.” The image for Bachelard is a product of the imagination, not a photographic reproduction. The images in Claire Denis’ work with Agnès Godard are photographic reproductions of the imagination’s images in a context where those original images, those of the imagination and its poetics, have to be a product of lived encounters, a dance performed, largely intuitively, by a collaborative unit. This is why these films are more than merely corporeality, sexuality, and sociality. They are more properly a gathering together of the universe around and in themselves. A curious counterpoint can be found in an interesting though not especially strong film I streamed on Friday (care of the Calgary International Film Festival). Lawrence Michael Levine’s new film Black Bear, a good deal more prosaic than the Denis though obviously more than a little enamoured of its inventiveness, is a brokeback film whose two opposed halves are intended to produce a dialogic synthesis via their incorporation within a single field of sense. At first we have a very recognizable indie template, three people squaring off in a remote residence, eminently palatial. These three are large on smart-talk, low on credibility, sharing as such the attributes and the defects of their writer-director. Black Bear pulls an about-face at roughly the halfway point and the palatial residence is now configured within a new self-reflexive regime complete with a corresponding slippage of personages. The eponymous bear will show up in the late going, an agent of something like tenuous metaphysical interlacing, perhaps somewhat similar to the African woman first seen hawking her own rugs in Beau travail, originally situated curiously outside of the governing schematic, who returns later on to minister to the nearly dead Sentain (played by Grégoire Colin). Black Bear is idea-heavy (as in "high concept") and one senses that it has lost much of its promise at each stage of its development, entering into problems on the page, ultimately losing all or most of its moxie in production. It is mostly fatuous. It is pretty clumsy. Its intelligence is about tricks not about the things in the world or the frame that worlds. What is curious here, though, is that Black Bear has ended up back at the page, the final sequence endearing itself to me as such. We end with the film’s star Aubrey Plaza returning to her desk, opening her notebook, and commencing to write what we can only imagine will be the film we have just watched. The closing credits are themselves superimposed over lined notebook pages. The film has gone off the rails and probably never had much of a chance, too full of hot air from nearly to word go, but in returning to the page it returns to the site where it once experienced the intensifying onslaught of its own generative promise. The page is the instantiation of the creative act. The page is the universe. The page, to hijack a precept from Judith Mayne’s Beau travail video essay, is the neutral face of Greta Garbo. It promises. It receives our projections.     

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_009

First and prime-motherfuckin’-airily: it is too stupid for words to outsource your own sense of worth. Strong words, okay. But what, pray tell, backs them up? Good question. Almost sounds like you’re on to me. It might increasingly strike the reader that I open myself to charges of solipsism. This might be a good time to make the case that the enunciative “I” here, gendered merely for expedience, works in a laboratory and observes human phenomena germane to a set field of study, though one that is generously open-ended. Aldous Huxley praised D. H. Lawrence for writing novels with no characters in them. D. H. Lawrence was a lab technician. If I come along with the imposture of a “proper name” with its capacity to provisionally constellate, there are no shortage of such names floating around in Lawrence either…and in the case of both D.H. Lawrence and myself: not all of these phenomena are especially pretty. I wrote a large book of small essays last year. It is called Bottomless Casket: A Year in Books and it is not actually itself a book because it is only a manuscript which I have half-assed shopped about and which, in the year of COVID, I cannot get so much as officially rejected. Is there a person I observe—or some thing or set of things relatively like a person—whose ego is bruised? It’s not nearly that simple. The answer “yes and no” hardly seems to cut it. Let’s note two things, the second already a repetition: 1) the work is a life; 2) it is too stupid for words to outsource your own sense of worth. That being said, something compelled me this past week to send the manuscript to an old friend I have neither seen nor in any way contacted (or been contacted by) in many years. Back in Ottawa at the turn of the century, this friend and I were impossible larger-than-life marauders who, upon reflection, strike even myself as escapees from the asylum of fiction, a challenge to so much as credit as flesh and bone (which those two young people obviously no longer are). He is now a professor out East, married to his second wife, and owner, he tells me in his first of two rapidly-dispatched emails, of a mortgage-free house in the burbs. Okay. I suddenly felt like I needed to send this friend my large more or less abandoned manuscript. Though all of my various deflective statements absolutely tell their truth too, I will confess to having been highly gratified to have received the second email from my old friend half an hour after I had sent my first. He had just boarded a train, he wrote, and, having his tablet along with him, had already made serious headway with my manuscript, which had him “hooked.” He offered me meaningful praise, and his meaningful praise meant. It meant for me and I felt it mean for me. “And, on those many occasions you allude to where it was like you were pretty much out of time, on death's proverbial porchway,” he writes, “you had nothing but time + books. And maybe because, in the long hospital and psych ward and rehabilitation clinic times when one is contained and/or hooked up to a machine (literally and figuratively), a flitting of consciousness here and there permitting that one thing that was the only worthwhile thing to be permissible: read, read, read.” Right. That is right. He continues. “Everything outside is busy, people rushing about, chasing things, deploying small plans, always trying to strategize just an hour ahead of themselves, but there you were, active in mind but not in body. No, I'm not courting old dualism except as a matter of point. Only the fastest minds know how to slow the fuck down.” I am not quite sure how clear it is or will be to readers what my friend means by “the machine,” especially its figurative aspect. (He has been going on about the machine and the machinic since I met him in the 1990s.) The literal meaning is pretty simple. During late stage alcoholism/addiction I spent a lot of time in hospitals hooked up to IV drips and monitors. To explain what it is to become uncoupled from the figurative machine and what that might have to do with a superpower my friend attributes to me—which is indeed a superpower I possess—probably requires more explanation, which I would like to begin providing by backtracking ever so slightly. Bottomless Casket: A Year in Books is comprised of 101 essays I wrote in 2019 corresponding to each of the 101 books I read that year. I knew the fact that I originally shared all of these essays on the social media site Goodreads probably made the whole thing seem dubious in the extreme, such that it became my reckoning that I needed to provide a gangbusters Introduction capable of making with the heavy suasion. So that is what I did. The Introduction incorporates close consideration(s) of the 1948 film Portrait of Jennie, which is approached from a number of angles and made to bounce off the text (my manuscript) and the contexts of the text (which is framed as bound-up in work set on pursuing recovery by idiosyncratic means). The eponymous Jennie, played by the great actress Jennifer Jones, is a revenant, a solid and material being capable of (and available for) direct physical intimacy who just so happens to have died approximately two decades before she enters the story, gallivanting childlike in Central Park in 1940s-anachronistic Puritan regalia. In my Introduction, I address how the revenant figure occupies an abstract line, the third synthesis of time conceptualized in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s 1968 book Difference and Repetition. Now, if the figurative machine, a device of capture making use of the variegated apparatus of daily life in the social field into which one finds oneself haplessly flung, subsists primarily on the first two syntheses of time, those relating to habit and memory, the abstract line is where the indolent supplicant who reads may perhaps have an opportunity to uncouple, making efficacious use of a temporal regime zigzagging parallel, in colloquy with revenants, both teachers of return and agents of the immediately accessible living eternal (the only eternal available to us). In her essay/lecture “Nationalism and the Imagination,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak extrapolates forward from Roman Jakobson’s argument that the experience of “equivalence” is the key mobilizer of the poetic function. Spivak wants to inaugurate an “inventive equivalence” employed in such a way that it might be able to undo the “possessive spell.” It is this “possessive spell” that I believe we could argue is what is produced and reproduced as long as we are coupled to the figurative machine. The imaginative utilization of an abstract line may allow us to decouple in such a way that we are able to take back possession of possession itself. The imagination is not the caster of spells but rather the tool we can use to break them, and that is how the speedy mind slows itself down…precisely in its newly achieved authority over the spells originally imposed from without. As somebody who has suffered from mania and manic psychosis, I have lived the experience of the speed getting on top of me, of its poisonous usurpation of agential governance, triumph of fateful (perhaps fatal) allegro. Much of my fiction has dealt with the spree and I have always responded to literary fiction fixated on spree. Spree is the diabolic interpolation of an alien and annihilating will. When you are in spree it is too late to slow down. You’ve been caught, you have to ride it out. There are two perfect novels on the subject by American writers that immediately come to mind, Stanley Elkin’s The MacGuffin from 1991, a brilliant and hellacious comic novel with no chapter breaks (or even breathing breaks) about the marauding coca leaf-chewing street commissioner Bobbo Druff, and John Hawkes’s Travesty from 1976, a protracted monological nightmare about a logorrhoea that is prelude to a monstrously deferred vehicular murder-suicide. As an alcoholic with a proneness toward manic psychosis, I can relate to Travesty all too well, having for a long while unwittingly fashioned of my life a harrowing hostage situation. Books can put me on and ventriloquize me in a manner altogether Satanic. Punctuation marks seem at times principally to exist as necessary breaks, like those incorporated into the engineering of motor vehicles, preventing the whole enterprise from cartwheeling off into void. A book can slow you down betimes, surely, but my powers of adagio and lento, the contra to allegro, those my friend notes in his praise of my manuscript, are, I should think, more reliably ministered to by the cinema, which will again bring me to Jennifer Jones, a revenant dead since 2009, no matter what character she is playing. What is crucial here and is always crucial is above all the actress. The actress has always been my principal point of identification in the cinema. Dating back to the dawn of film as a domain of legitimate academic study, we owe to the feminist scholar Laura Mulvey and her cohort the implementation of a macrotextual schematic that couples the cinematic apparatus to the male gaze and situates the woman within the context of the bondage of to-be-looked-at-ness. However, my identification with the woman is my identification with the apparatus, and what cannot be nullified here is the potency of her gaze. Think of films where we have a privileged view of an actress gazing directly into the camera. Harriet Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953), Setsuko Hara in various film by Yasujirō Ozu, Alicia Vikander in Wim Wenders’s Submergence (2017). The actress looking directly at the camera is not looking at me, merely at the camera, I am not there for that gaze even as I am, the actress likewise receiving my gaze with no knowledge of my existence, no consciousness of its displaced, individuated presence. It is common to frame these matters in terms of scopophilia, gendered imbalance, but what I experience is a complementarity that immediately provides a space—contingent upon the working of an abstract line—for precisely what Spivak calls “inventive equivalence.” This is already a matter of magic and it compliments the magic that is the breaking of the spell, the uncoupling from the figurative machine, the radical re-territorialization of identification, the slowing the fuck down. 'Tis assuredly the case that my favourite movie stars born in the first decade of the 20th century are Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks, but it has taken me longer than it ought to have to realize that Jennifer Jones, born the same year as my maternal grandfather, stands alone as the finest born in the second. Two of her greatest films, Cluny Brown (1946) and Gone to Earth (1950), are about the achievement of a line-of-flight, a key concept in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on schizoanalysis, categorizing as it does a species of phenomena relating to the forging of connections and the opening of new passages that subvert the impositions of the binary apparatus and as such the figurative machine (the machine that is all those mechanisms with which the social field would set out to figure you). In the long-unpublished interview with Deleuze and Guattari conducted by film scholar Raymond Bellour finally made available in English this past summer (in Letters and Other Texts, the final of three collections of Deleuze minutiae brought to us by Semiotext(e)), the two interviewees repeatedly make the assertion that schizoanaysis believes and wants to communicate a belief in the right to nonsense. While Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud are of course patron saints for this school of advocacy, might not the declarative “squirrels to the nuts!” from Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown serve as its battle cry. However, if you really want the revenant Jennifer Jones, the teacher first of return, secondarily of adagio and lento, you could not conceivably do better than 1943’s The Song of Bernadette, the film that sent her supernova. It ends with dying, but this is a dying that communicates its profound dignity and superhuman forbearance through the face and the gaze by means of an economy of affect. Sister Bernadette, a saint, a worker of miracles, is dying of tuberculosis of the bone, a brutal and agonizing way to go, but you’d never know it, just as the cruel Sister Vauzou, who believes her charge a fraud, does not know it. Upon realizing what Bernadette has withstood so serenely, Sister Vauzou is struck with holy awe, absolutely converted, the viewer’s (certainly this one’s!) conversion already long a done deal. Jennifer Jones is not dying of tuberculosis of the bone during the production of The Song of Bernadette. Still, what her face offers us is precisely the communicable neutralization of the intensities a novel like John Hawkes’s Travesty so effusively performs. 

 

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_008

I would like to proposition you. It is rather more a matter of my offering up something gratis than it is any sort of clumsy and/or dastardly importuning. I am going to trace for you the outline of a flash fiction, flashier than flash. Flash fiction is a whole veritable market these days. Feel free to take it and run with it, perhaps sell it to Tin House, whatever thou wilt. This is the story of two identical twin brothers born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, however many minutes apart, in October of the year 1980, descended from inauspicious Rhinelanders but, because of the enterprising spirit of their scruple-free father, situated to grow up as privileged members of what we would call the upper middle class, quaint as this posited class striation may strike us with regard to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, an obvious backwater. The two identical twin brothers look, of course, very much alike, but from the ages five to fifteen they increasingly come to represent divergent paths, doubtlessly a matter of a core differentiation immanent to their respective natures. We might say that one brother, excelling at maths and sciences, already by fifteen fully grasping some of the more advanced mechanics of commodities speculation et cetera, represents the Apollonian, while the other, into baroque music, Symbolist poetry, and the films of Jean Cocteau, represents the Dionysian. Between the ages ten and fifteen the identical twin brothers grow further and further apart, following their own hearts, though each obviously hoping to follow his heart well away from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, as soon as opportunity should present itself, which is all but certain to happen, the boys happening to both be brilliant, if from the standpoint of opposing orientations. At the age of fifteen something funny happens. The identical twin brothers are so completely spiritually and intellectually opposed to one another that they hardly ever communicate any longer. It were almost as though they have come to occupy two separate worlds altogether, even if this illusion is itself hard to maintain fully in a community where neither feels at home and which neither can stand. One night the boys get to talking, commiserating if you like. It has been a long time since they have felt connected in even a perfunctory way, their being all but physically identical a mere shared (and further alienating) humiliation if anything; this sudden openness, this mutual outpouring, can largely be explained by the fact that the two exasperated boys have decided to get drunk together in the large and empty family home (their parents out doing whatever, wherever). Though they could, again, hardly be more thoroughly unalike, the identical twins, inebriated, make a remarkable discovery: they have each for many years harboured the same exact fantasy, shared with no one, in which they each individually urinate and defecate all over the furniture of their parents’ lavish home and then commit suicide in the most grisly manner imaginable, leaving their horribly abused bodies (individually in each case, but these are identical twins) to be discovered amid the pageantry of malefic destruction they have themselves created as a shrine to the crowning act. The twins are astonished and even giddy to discover they share this fantasy. They go on each to live busy and satisfying lives, elsewhere (or rather two separate elsewheres). What this parable demonstrates is the power of identification as well as that of the unusual manifestation of a profane correspondence. The great scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has spent much of her later career conceptualizing a social sciences pedagogy that might aspire to be adequate to the displacement and scramble of global capitalism. This often has to do with thinking through the problems of institutional instruction in terms of an “inter-literary” homeopathy beset by the double bind of Plato’s pharmakon, i.e. the medicine is also and can at any point become a poison. In her essay “The Burden of English,” Spivak frames her pedagogical pharmakon in terms of the “interpenetration” of the “professional theatre” and the “private sphere,” two domains that I am sure most of us will agree are easier to separate abstract-conceptually than they are practically. The “professional theatre” and the “private sphere” are themselves like identical twins linked by a nebulous unconscious dermis, and whether the negotiation of these overlapping spaces will heal or poison doesn’t ultimately have much if anything to do with the raw content we will unearth there. I believe it was Milan Kundera who averred that literature helps us learn to read our lives, sensitizing us in such a way that we will be better able to discover there motifs analogous to, say, the train stations in Anna Karenina. Of course there is the psychedelic or psychonautic dimension to consider also. Robert Anton Wilson, writing in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati: “Many other scientists have agreed with Carl Jung’s opinion that the number of startling coincidences in ‘the Net’ increases sharply around anybody who becomes involved in depth psychology or in any investigation that extends the perimeter of consciousness.” This becomes relevant here because I took a lot of drugs between the ages of roughly fourteen and twenty-four, the period during which the phenomenon I am interested in getting around to analyzing was most prevalent: a tendency to discover in books and movies the unambiguous implementation of ideas for books and movies that one has already themselves had. As a undergraduate in the late 1990s this happened to me twice with the films of Christopher Nolan. This may be all the more unusual in that I do not especially like nor have I ever really liked the films of Christopher Nolan. (If 2014’s Interstellar, for example, is not the stupidest film I have ever seen, it is quite likely the most agonizingly stupid.) I had the idea for a film very much like Memento in the two years leading up to the release of that film, no knowledge of which I possessed or would have been in a position to possess up to its actual release; it was just in my mind that somebody could or should make a film about a person who wakes up every day with amnesia and has developed a system in order to function adequately or semi-adequately within that basic problematic. Eventually I became aware of Following, Nolan’s debut feature, which appeared to be about stalking people from a safe distance. Another uncanny correspondence. In high school I had imagined a film about a young man who stalks people from a safe distance, also breaking into unoccupied homes to just sort of snoop around, eventually graduating to occupied homes, thereby upping the ante. My idea was to also have the antihero periodically address the camera, a breaking of the fourth wall that I likened less to mockumentary than to the direct addresses of Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller. Part of the concept was to have my stalker pursue his quarry through Calgary’s Plus 15, a network of elevated walkways connecting the buildings in the city’s downtown core, later the setting for Gary Burns’s Waydowntown, which was released the same year as Memento. Though he and I have never discussed the curious correlations I have sketched here, I have recently come to know Gary Burns well and interact with him regularly, his being a co-founder of the Cinematheque on whose board I sit and whose programming I oversee. There is also the matter of the novelist Tom Robbins, whose books continually struck me as fielding ideas I had already had, starting with Jitterbug Perfume, which I read at thirteen (my being able to distinctly recall this because of the memorable correspondence of my identical twin brother Apollo having been in the hospital at the time). Every Tom Robbins novel I subsequently read as a teen repeated the trick. Is it Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that features periodic disquisitions on “pendulum time,” which was, goddammit, my fucking concept? (You know, uh, notwithstanding the publication of the novel in question about two years before I would have been so much as conceived.) The final Tom Robbins novel I ever read, at the age of seventeen or eighteen (so 1997 or 1998), was 1990’s Skinny Legs and All. I remember reading it in my dorm room at Carleton University, so it could only have been during my first year of undergraduate studies. I was bulldozed in my tiny bed by the realization that the lyrics to the song “Plans for Palmyra” by The Primrods, my favourite band from my hometown of Calgary, the track in question having appeared on a spilt 7-inch with Hamilton, Ontario’s Tristan Psionic approximately the year before (1996), had very clearly been entirely cobbled-together higgledy-piggledy from random lines in Skinny Legs. (The Primrods song “Atom Smasher” also happens to occupy a privileged position at the opening of Gary Burns’s debut feature, 1997’s The Suburbanators.) Comfortably relocated to the other end of a vast land, 1997 was the year I first started doing a lot of psilocybin mushrooms. A lot. And regularly. For years. I didn’t only see a vast array of startling connections, I saw the fibrous threads that were the systemic morphological engineering of them. And I had a couple other ideas for movies in the late 90s. One of these was for a genuine mockumentary. It was to be about a young ambassador from a small fictional nation in the former Soviet Bloc, said nation run like a highly corrupt seat-of-the-pants Ma & Pa operation. The young Canadian ambassador is son of the country’s leader, his older brother is performing the same function down in the United States. The Canadian ambassador, an utterly deranged though probably affable and certainly gregarious lunatic, could only be played by myself, or so I believed. He is reading Guy Debord et cetera, employing the film crew documenting his life, and is stockpiling supplies in his friends’ townhouse in preparation for a major transnational terrorist “event.” I had a good pitch for this movie and people enjoyed hearing it. The first thing my extremely wry cousin Glenn asked me after September 11th, 2001, was whether I was still going to make “that movie.” Another idea from this period has been returning to me somewhat regularly of late, and might well be the real impetus for this week’s column. It is based on a thing that actually happened in 2000 or early 2001. A housemate of mine had been acting pretty wild and had at some point gotten into a fight with his father and brother during the course of which somebody attempting to intervene had gotten injured. When his family discovered that my housemate was planning to leave the country (for Afghanistan!), they filled out the paperwork required to have him committed for psychiatric assessment. Asked if it was likely that my friend would resist, if he was possibly going to be violent, his family told the sanctioned authorities something to the effect of “oh, you better believe it.” They sent two tactical units to our place. And dogs. It was the dogs who caught up with my friend. After he broke through one of the tactical units. The dogs got him as he was attempting to climb from a dumpster onto the roof of a convenience store. They didn’t hold him long; turns out he was just an odd fella. Around this time, a little before or a little after, I had flown back to Ottawa from Calgary and my other housemate had picked me up from the airport, after which the two of us went to drink pints at the Royal Oak and discuss the domestic conundrum. We sat around drinking for a long time, discussing our friend and the trouble he might be in—hell, the trouble he might even pose to us—and eventually I said something like, “hey, this is a great idea for a movie, you and I sitting right here, not wanting to go home and confront our friend; it’s a reversal of Waiting for Godot, in which, you know, you are avoiding Godot.” It immediately struck me as an idea Borges would come up with, and a very strong one to boot. This is the idea that has been returning to me lately. Avoiding Godot, or, maybe to make it more vernacular, you could call it Avoiding Gordo. Or call it anything. What is interesting is that I have in the last twenty-four hours been struck by an internal “inter-literary” correspondence. Maybe my friend is me. Maybe the dangerous friend at home is me as the crazed terrorist ambassador. This is the person I—an alcoholic and a drug addict in recovery, let us not forget—need to both confront and avoid. Try working yourself out of those contortions. Three films I watched in August seem to be especially pertinent if we want to conceptualize Avoiding Godot. Two Raúl Ruiz adaptations the great Dr. Trondsen helped me acquire: 1983’s Bérénice (adapted from Racine), 1987’s The Blind Owl (adapted from Sadegh Hedayat’s legendary work of Persian literary modernism). And then there is The Milky Way, Luis Buñuel’s forking path tropology from 1969, which I had gratifying occasion to revisit by way of the recent Blu-ray from Kino Classics.

 

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_007

There I happen to be. I imagine this must be early in the opening Fall term of my first year of undergraduate studies, Carleton University, backend of 1997, shortly before I am to turn eighteen. Even as a grad student at the beginning of the 21st century I would not spend nearly as much time at the library as I would my first year as undergraduate. Later I tended to cultivate my sources like some occult horticulturist, would only visit the library to procure specific things toward specific ends (a pro visiting the garden centre). In my final months as a seventeen-year-old I spent a significant amount of time at the library with little or no itinerary, a passenger of fancy, making my desultory way from book to book, never sitting with any one of them for too terribly long. I had recently become fascinated with the philosopher/theorist Jacques Derrida, having already acquired the Meridian editions of the English translations of both Aporias and Archive Fever at the Carleton bookstore, though naturally no such thing was expected of me. I think I liked Derrida primarily because as a teenager I had already come to intuit that: a) fatuous truth claims presented to me by my elders almost always coincided with the presentation of the fatal weaknesses of those claims; and b) statements (or all lexical business) could be broken down into spare parts and made available for associative prestidigitation / renegade operations / the engendering of Frankenstein monsters. The afternoon in the library where this mediation purports to commence finds me picking up a copy of the Meridian collection of Points..., a book of interviews with Derrida spanning the years 1974 to 1994. I read a page, no more, and am almost immediately assailed with a sense of the impossibility of what I am reading. Now, even by 1974 Derrida is already a man of forty-three or forty-four, I in the autumn of 1997 a mere child of seventeen. The text before me seems impossible because I am not capable of believing that anybody possesses the capacity to speak extemporaneously in the manner recorded. The discourse seems too fine-tuned, finessed in its manifold complexities, and I imagine that it would almost have to be a case of the eminent interviewee having been provided the questions in advance and thus been able to prepare his answers preemptively in longhand. Obviously that would not have been the case. I know that now, myself a man of forty, and the interviews in Points... would present a new intelligibility were I to have the texts at my disposal. It is all about the work. Discipline, repetition, and time. What is the work? For me, the work is already the life, in all its variability and dynamism. It is practically a Christian ideal: love and work are united on the earth and put in service to one’s conception of the divine. I often charcaterize myself as a witness to history. Writing is hardly the totality of the work, reading already comprising the more salient core. Writing is where the work is gathered, organized, and archived. For one’s faculties to develop is a byproduct of the work and the most natural thing in the world. Whether Malcom Gladwell is strictly correct or not about the enterprise requiring 10,000 hours of rigorous toil, it is of course the case that a person can come in time to speak like Derrida as though it were as natural as ordering à la carte. In her recent essay collection Index Cards, the Canadian-born New York-based artworld superstar Moyra Davey, who spent her childhood in the city of Ottawa, where I would subsequently pursue both my undergraduate and graduate studies, demonstrates a formidable grasp of the nature of the work. Davey’s 2008 essay “Notes on Photography & Accident” charts a typically roving trajectory by way of the application of the author’s conversational-associative (non-academic) methodology, leading us circuitously to a consideration of practices in which reading is already writing and part of a self-generative labour of affinity and expansion. Of the precursors Davey visits on her rounds, two are especially important with respect to this specific domain, namely Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Two quotations are stacked, one atop the other. Benjamin (“The Author As Producer”): “For the reader is at all times ready to become a writer…. [C]onsumers into producers, readers or spectators into collaborators.” Barthes ("From Work to Text”): “The Text decants the work from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice.” Shortly thereafter, Davey reflects on the synthesis she has just produced: “Though conceived at very different historical moments, and under very different circumstances, these prescriptions from Benjamin are nonetheless very close in spirit to Barthes’s own manifesto texts that call for collapsing the distinctions between writers and readers, producers and consumers.” Let us pivot. There is another line that can be drawn back to 1997. It relates to the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. First, a number of things have happened relatively recently: 1) In 2016, not long after Kiarostami’s death, I wrote a piece called “Beginning with My Father’s Atlas” for the UK magazine Under the Influence in which I addressed, foremost, the profound influence Iranian cinema exerted over me as a young person; 2) In 2019 I helped oversee, in my capacity as film programmer, the curation of a Kiarostami Masters Series; 3) earlier this month I received my copy of the new Criterion Blu-ray of the director’s Taste of Cherry, revisiting the film for the first time since the 1990s. Taste of Cherry opened during its original run at Ottawa’s ByTowne Cinema shortly after I have presented myself sitting in the library trying to reconcile with Derrida’s extemporaneous speechifying as extemporaneous speechifying. Taste of Cherry had shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes that May with Shôhei Imamura’s The Eel, a film which likewise screened at the ByTowne and which I had at the time deemed to be the superior film. I had adjudged Taste of Cherry a lesser film from a director I regarded very highly. When it came to curating our Kiarostami series last year, a spate of new restorations having become available, it was largely on account of me that we eschewed inclusion of Taste of Cherry. Still, in preparing for the series, I read the second edition, published in 2018, of Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s book on the director, an undertaking that made clear to me that I owed TASTE OF CHERRY another look. Rosenbaum addresses some of the misunderstandings that have clouded the film’s reception, especially as pertain to its infamous coda, a video segment in which the nonprofessional actor we have just witnessed lying down in the grave he himself has dug is suddenly resurrected in the company of Kiarostami and his crew, the production turning its gaze upon itself. The erroneous way of reading the coda is, in Rosenbaum’s estimation, to interpret it as an insistence on the foregrounding of artifice, a reminder that what we are watching is a deception or construction, the drama thereby undercut or muted. Rosenbaum argues that the coda reasserts the axiom implicit in the film’s title by other means. In his search for a stranger willing to conspire in his suicide, Mr. Badii, the protagonist of Taste of Cherry, will ultimately meet a Turkish taxidermist willing to help, though it is this taxidermist who makes the case for life most ardently, asserting that he was once himself dissuaded from committing suicide because of nothing more than the simple enjoyment of a mulberry. Like the taste of cherry (or mulberry), the cinema itself returns in the coda to Kiarostami’s film in order to present itself as a collaborative exultation that can and does announce the preciousness of life, of interbeing, all the bounty immediately at hand. Back in 1997, I was not nearly so errant as Roger Ebert, its not being a matter of my imposing a restrictive misreading. I already understood that Kiarostami is a metaphysician whose cosmic symbology is best exemplified by the zigzag path and the long “philosophical” wide shot, often of a landscape, that poses itself as a question. I understood that Taste of Cherry was no more closed-off allegory than were the two previous Kiarostami films I had seen and consummately adored. If I understood that the coda to Cherry opened itself to me, let me in, and posed itself as a question, my mistake was in attributing the neutrality or my response to a limitation endemic to the film itself. Revisiting Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry last week, it became all too obvious. I bring so much more to an open question. In that final video coda, when we cut to a philosophical wide shot of a group of soldiers sitting at the side of the road, explicitly framed here in their capacity as film extras, the cut coincides with the presentation of an instrumental version of “St. James Infirmary” performed by Louis Armstrong & co. It is something that could not possibly have meant much to me at seventeen. Now, however, I know the Armstrong recording well, instantly recognize it, and am somehow shocked by my apprehension...then, a few breathes later, I am assailed by a potent, nearly overwhelming complex of associations. It does to me precisely what it is supposed to: I am immediately conscious of the gift of life, of having had time for these unconscious networks to systematize themselves, of being afforded the opportunity to do the work, to be a creditable witness to history. It was like when Laura and I went and saw Bill & Ted Face the Music two Saturdays ago. When Bill and Ted’s daughters find themselves in New Orleans, 1922, accosting the game if somewhat flummoxed Louis Armstrong, viewers like Laura and I are in a position to comprehensively enjoy the minutiae of the encounter on account of what we ourselves bring to it, something like the sum of the history of our shared passions. In an interview with Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa, Abbas Kiarostami compares the public viewing of a film to multiple people shopping for different items in a grocery store, based on their own needs: “when you see a film, you should come away with your own personal interpretation, based on who you are. The film should allow that to happen, make room for that interaction.” You bring your work with you. To the cinema. Just as you bring it (and conduct it) everywhere else. I think of myself as exceedingly lucky to have grasped in early childhood that a good deal of the actual work, the heavy lifting, is done by the unconscious. I knew early on that this isn’t magical thinking. You bombard yourself with information, with all manner of stimuli, and you are not obligated to thoroughly comprehend all of it, a good deal of the sorting going on behind the scenes. Looking at the letters that Gilles Deleuze sent to various persons, starting in 1969, early in his collaboration with Félix Guattari—collected as these are in the recent Letters and Other Texts from Semiotext(e)—it is exciting to witness Deleuze grapple with both the recording and the production of the unconscious within the context of a new set of concepts pertaining to the machinic (“the schizo metonymically expresses the machine of industrial society…it treats you like an IBM machine treats its information…”). Consider also one of the epigraphs to Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, extracted from James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry: “…we appropriated about the last one of the ‘jes’ grew’ songs. It was a song which had been sung for years all through the South. The words were unprintable, but the tune was irresistible, and belonged to nobody.” Reed’s epochal Hoodoo frolic imagines Jes Grew as a jazz contagion unto pandemic and pandemonium, originating in something in the vicinity of 1922 New Orleans, the time and place Bill and Ted’s daughters sidle up to Mr. Armstrong. It seems to me that we might call on Jes Grew to perform double duty as additional terminology for the unconscious...as both recorder and producer… an unconscious that collapses “the distinctions between writers and readers, producers and consumers.”

 

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_006

Late enough last night that we are technically talking about this morning: I am directed by the presiding hobgoblins to an article about the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, the crux of the matter here being that wily Summit, celebrated in the article as the second fastest computer in the world, had been tasked, earlier this summer, with getting to the bottom of COVID-19, processing so much data and working out so many permutations in the process that the job took more than a week. Evidently the handlers believe Summit has established with a high probability of accuracy that COVID-19 attacks the human body by setting off bradykinin storms, not unlike “a burglar who slips in your unlocked second-floor window and starts to ransack your house. Once inside, though, they don’t just take your stuff—they also throw open all your doors and windows so their accomplices can rush in and help pillage more efficiently.” Terrific. That’s terrific. My encounter with Summit in the middle of the night, not twelve hours ago as of my writing this, is especially interesting to me on account of what I got up to this past weekend. Saturday night my friend Laura and I went (in our masks) to go see Bill & Ted Face the Music, only the second movie I had seen in a theatre since the slight relaxation of lockdown measures. On Sunday I went by myself to see Christopher Nolan’s Tenet in full flickflackin’ IMAX, then later, from around ten at night until well after four in the morning, binged the entirety of Alex Garland’s Devs, a bit of, er, auteurist television, I suppose you could say, that originally ran on FX beginning this past March, the final three episodes airing during or shortly after the period in which I am fairly certain I had COVID. Bill & Ted Face the Music, Tenet, and Devs are all stopwatch tales of entropy we might classify as contributions to a subgenre labeled Icarus Versus the Quantasaurus. All three films believe—or need to appear to believe—that major events of a cataclysmic nature feel or mean only at the level of close on-the-ground associations and intimacies, a postulate which doubtlessly connects with most people, though, to my mind, indicates the mindset of a pitiful simp. If you asked me to apologize for saying so and I did apologize in compliance with your wishes, you could be certain that the apology was counterfeit. Alex Garland considers himself something of a Cassandra among the Trojans, and you get the sense that he doesn’t believe the vast majority of us have sufficient good sense not to break into prison given half a chance. Of Bill & Ted Face the Music, Tenet, and Devs, it is Garland’s series that is the most nakedly Icarian, its also being the story that hinges most directly on quantum computing or the processing power of incredible machines of computation. A quantifiable universe of contingencies relating to mappable relations and interrelations is reproducible in a laboratory, and not only is the model not compromised by the integration of the near-infinite-possible-worlds model, but ends up having needed that supplementary yardstick in order to properly work. A computer reverse engineers the totality of relations and of possible relations. But how did it do that? It was set out on its path by coders, programmers, a first and then a supplementary algorithm. The quantum computer, in short, has a shady background. Bill & Ted Face the Music is more intellectually honest, more intellectually satisfying, and more purely useful than either Tenet (which I don’t especially want to talk about) or Devs, but in order to establish why that is, I would like to begin by noting a curious development late in Devs. Garland has set his pieces in motion in such a way as to allow him to take an idea from Philip K. Dick, both reverse engineering and forward engineering it to the Garden and to Original Sin, presenting to us the first free human choice as a product of determinations. Last night I finished reading Hélène Cixous’ Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, a Chapter, the Journal, a work of radical autofiction about time travel, ghost interface, and telepathy that makes clear that these phenomena are immediately accessible, cost more or less nothing, and can be put to work for any person alerted (by Los, or a Los) to their existence. You don’t write a book, a secret agent has been writing it for you. The fears that might prevent you from giving birth to the book or any other number of magical beings are not fears that originate with you, but rather free-floating fears, passing through, irreducible to the vessel that provisionally holds them. You as a gaze are the spectation of spectres. Freedom is free to be freedom through you should freedom select you, in the Darwinian sense, to be free. Bill S. Preston Esquire (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves)—last seen, before the arrival of the new film, in the summer of 1991 (two months before the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind)—are ethology before they are incidentally also an ethics. Think of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Might we not imagine that Bill and Ted are something like the Bird of the Air and the Lily of the Field, they the most exalted, though we will concede at the same time that trying to establish who is Bird (not to be confused with Charlie Parker) and who is Lily (Chou-Chou, Gesundheit) is the same kind of absurdist mess as is the basic Bill and Ted Gestalt, the whole business more or less an extrapolation of what we already find in the single-reel silent comedies of Mack Sennett or Hal Roach? Bill and Ted, crucially, maintain a superhuman ease even within a pantomiming of the utterly antic, harried by muddled impossibilities. This is something like an image of what it might be like for us to be available to freedom’s selection. There is, if I recall correctly, a gag in the 2016 Daniel Clowes graphic novel Patience in which the selfish time-travelling prick around whom the tale pivots tells us he is not going to bother us with rigorous considerations of the finer points of time travel, the joke being that we all know that this stuff is so much codswallop. Bill and Ted as time-travellers may originally come from the San Dimas, California of 1988, but they are already fin de siècle French ‘pataphysicians in the Alfred Jarry mode, ratiocinating unstuck and getting sticky with it, becoming fly paper, the joy they capture the easy absurd joy that expresses its joy. Apparently every time Bill and Ted return to Dave Grohl’s mansion they put buckets over their heads in order to blind themselves and randomize their movements and again and again annoy the other Bill and Ted who have arrived at Dave Grohl’s mansion ahead of them. This is freedom that emerges from absolute determinism but liberates nevertheless, and it also happens to be a convincing rejoinder to Kierkegaard’s formulations respective of the “freedom of perversity.” I am forty years old, rapidly approaching forty-one. The day after my forty-first birthday I will (hands clasped in prayer, may the data confirm it) take seven years clean and sober, which is to say I will be celebrating seven years lived in an alternative and magnificent dimension. Bill and Ted just visited me here, their not having visited me since the summer in advance of my turning twelve. They brought their daughters, also named Bill and Ted. In my alternative dimension (Raymond Carver’s World of Gravy), I have just recorded music with two youngsters, my colleagues Jack S. and Matt P. We have consecrated a new musical reality in the form of Falling A Pärt Wagen, a group that plays hillbilly ragas accompanied, thus far, primarily by aleatory sculpted feedback, but able to include any number of players, combining fixed elements and a rangeless capacity to assimilate freer activities. I imagine it is something like the universal transtemporal confederation of virtuosi and adepts who save reality in Bill & Ted Face the Music. We have already recorded the music I intend to comprise the first long-playing vinyl record I will have released in my life. Jack has been effectively ghosting me recently; I haven’t heard back from him since my last message, sent over two weeks ago. I had originally thought it would be fun to drag young Jack through this week’s column, making of him a monkey. The things is, he works basically full time, uses recreational drugs in the agreeable manner of young persons, and has told me he is reading A Thousand Plateaus, which makes me very happy and which I had really ought to let him do at his pace. I am not going to drag Jack through this week’s column. I am very fond of him. That being said, there is only one way I can close this. I have for some time believed that I can reclaim Nietzsche’s ironic megalomania and make it work, believing the modality ultimately failed to work for Nietzsche due to matters strictly hereditary. It is not lost on me that being an ironic megalomaniac is not the same thing as not being an actual (megalo)maniac. Jack S. and Matt P. are spitting images, dead ringers, for Bill and Ted’s daughters. Jack S. and Matt P. were also central members—maybe still are—of a free music group calling itself Turner Fries Jazz Ensemble. Now, I put it to you: how can I possibly fail to feel like Marcel Proust à l’ombre des jeunes frites en fleurs?