Three Faces

 You’re future is all used up. Why don’t you go home?
- Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

When Orson Welles directed his old friend Marlene Dietrich in a small but absolutely crucial character turn in 1958’s Touch of Evil, she was fifty-seven and he was forty-three, wearing extra padding to add to his not insubstantial girth and very obviously not in the best of shape (my goodness did that man love to eat and drink). If you watch the complicated display of discrete emotions on Dietrich’s famously close-up-friendly face, you see for sure that the actress is having the same feelings as her character and that somebody—well, Mr. Welles, her old friend and current director—gets to sit and take it while with hurt in her eyes Marlene berates him for getting stupid and fat gobbling up candy bars. Sometimes we can only be mute with stupefaction when we encounter somebody who once seemed as low as low gets but who over a couple more decades would seem somehow to have reached lower depths yet. Marlene adopts the sombre and clearly pitying disgust from her own nature and reflexes. It’s real emotion and had to be by design, at least if you take design’s word for it. I wonder if Welles considered the possibility that Dietrich might break into tears and/or flee the set.   

La truite (Joseph Losey, 1982)

If there is a magic and metaphysics to the art and technology of cinema it very much pivots in large part on the human face and on close-ups, which have long drawn us like moths to porch light, a ubiquitous part of the basic grammar of narrative cinema since the early 20th century. For French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two absolutely mandatory books on the cinema, the face rendered cinematographic is a kind of psychedelic Renaissance because it requires new landscapes in and languages for looking, as well as new topologies or landscapes with respect to the human face from the standpoint of audition or mediated network interaction. “When it looks at you,” observes Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, “Isabelle Huppert’s face destroys its own contradiction, which it had incarnated until that moment. Positive and negative in one. The film no longer needs to be developed.” This social interplay malarkey is largely electronic activity down to the sub-molecular level and all kinds of machines are activating and decommissioning us all day long, every day, remedial parasites the cost of doing business on the grid. Sometimes a lovely friend who hasn’t seen you for a good spell will upon catching sight of you ‘click on’ like an old-timey automaton. Nothing is more adorable. Certain gazes turned on you at just the right moment can make you nearly evacuate your bowels. (For intense spontaneous diarrhea brought on by moral terror, all are advised to consult Michael Tolkin’s brilliant and real fuckin ugly 1993 novel Among the Dead.) 

Jane B. par Agnès V. (Agnès Varda, 1988)

Reaching middle age, I was struck I recall by a pretty famous David Bowie quote in which the debonaire genius attempts to console us with the fact that as we grow older we become more who we were always meant to be. I thought that this certainly appeared to be true of the mercurial Mr. Bowie…and also definitely for sure Jane Birkin, who I adore most of all for her work as an actress and public personality. I had for some while been modelling my ideal rapidly forthcoming middle age after Birkin, having taken solace in and vital creative support from pictures she appeared in from about 1985 to about 1995, especially the stuff with Jacques Rivets, Jean-Luc Godard, and Agnès Varda. What is it this middle aged person has going on that a middle aged person ought to have going on? Well, Jane is no longer likely to be tricked out of being herself or themself or what-have-you, she cannot see the limits of her knowing as anything other than luxuriance and possibility, endlessly re-vitalizing. Steadfastly vulnerable, operationally agnostic. The maturity and resilience demonstrated by Jane Birkin in Jacques Rivette’s artist/model picture La belle noiseuse as her painter husband Michel Piccoli begins to get more and more inextricably bound up with Emmanuelle Béart’s model, who happens to be the most fantastically proportioned woman in at least Europe and not wearing clothes often, shows forbearance and strength like that I hope to myself some day earn, may I so happen to slay the right dragons and in the right sequence. Birkin’s Liz is the only character in Rivette’s film who sees that she needs to grow and adapt and who thereafter sets about getting to work on doing that. Birkin’s conflicted and complex gender identity led to her becoming an early advocate for queer youth and included among the special features on the Kino Lorber Blu-ray for Je t’aime moi non plus, a wonderful film from ’76 directed by her husband Serge Gainsbourg, is an interview with Jane and her co-star, Warhol company stud Joe Dallesandro, in which the lead actress, visibly emotional, says she believes that the most important thing she ever did on camera is the scene in that film where she says she really feels like a boy. Not knowing much about how other folks feel nor taking any questions at this time, I can confess that I always found Jane Birkin’s intergendered, non-binary, exploratory/playful relationship with the transience of self and the flexibility of sexuality to be noble and encouraging. That’s why I became a disciple in the first place. Also, I knew in the early years I had to be a boy and I ran with it, even though I knew I was a boy and a girl, the impetus of puberty kicking in with its hormonal signals and 24/7 meltdown. But you know what? I’m both agnostic and queer: I don’t have enough information about sexuality yet!