15.1. The great Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has just released a new short entitled October Rumbles, less than five minutes in length, which you can stream for free over at YouTube (through November 12th). Existing as an extension of an exhibition entitled "Third Realm" (curated by Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery), Apichatpong asserts of his short that it seeks to relay a tenuous experience of grounded comfort in the context of pandemic. “I was really longing for physical touch, the act of embracing someone. But after the coming of the rain and seeing all this life around here, I realized I didn’t need any of that. There is enough life here. So I am really content now. That is why I’ve made a number of short films, including this one, all of which involve this rain. My Colombian movie also ends with a long rain. I feel all this connection…and closure maybe.” The film features rain and wind, to be sure, as well as a suspended sheet, liminal, buffeted by the elements, behaving not unlike a sail, made effulgent with invisible force, but also able to become a screen and as such a portal. Extremely truncated running time means one will tend to make a couple strong, immediate associations; the extent to which these stick in the mind may prove testament to the strength of the work. One of my one-hundred-and-three current obsessions is the edition of The Essential Poems of Jim Harrison put out by Copper Canyon Press last year. The opening poem, from 1965, is called "Poem," and it begins "Form is the woods,” followed by a colon. October Rumbles also causes me to reflect for the first time in many years upon my high school drama teacher, a friendly man with a melancholy edge, and how excited he was about the large black scrim at back of stage in the school’s fancy new theatre, opened during my final year of high school. I played Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on that stage, a part supremely suited to my specific species of ungainliness.
15.2. Scott Frank is responsible for some good stuff, and a sufficient number of plaudits from noteworthy sources send me off yesterday to investigate his new limited Netflix series The Queen's Gambit, the opening episode of which, despite its general fidelity to convention and to my considerable surprise, was so astonishingly powerful...I had to take a short break. As I have insisted before, the actress is generally my principle point of identification in cinema; in the opening episode of The Queen's Gambit, what is perhaps most overwhelming for me is an experience of self-recognition. As a child I was able to produce hallucinatory phenomena on the walls and ceiling of my bedroom—generally relating to language and phonemes, intimations of a future vocation—and downers always had a capacity to stimulate me more than uppers, a case of what is sometimes referred to by behaviourists et al. as “paradox reflex.” In these ways and others I am uniquely situated to identify with the chess prodigy orphan Beth Harmon. There is also the matter of the correspondence of parts within an overarching cohesion of design, local particularity as micro-composite, likewise a crucial asset of the compact new Don DeLillo novel I had read in its entirety the previous day. A person I respect had stated online that he did not at all take to the opening episode of The Queen's Gambit. Everything “irked” him. “Directing, writing, performances, approach to period environments. As for coherence, there was way too much.” During my breather following that first episode I posted a reply. “There is not too much coherence in the first episode of The Queen's Gambit. Maybe the wrong kind? From the standpoint of an ‘orientation’? There is certainly no more coherence (the coherence of specifics in relation to the general) than there is, say, in the music Johann Sebastian Bach, which represents, of course, the sublimity of coherence itself.” As for a core theme integrating the series: the natural congenital gift, phenomenal kernel of freak genius, lightning in a bottle, is the unnatural within the natural, the aberrant deviation never without its proper, situated sense, the right example always the example of example itself. They say: “the exception that proves the rule.” What they mean: the rule of the incorporated exception.
15.3. When it first played theatres in late 2011 and early 2012, I had mixed feelings about David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, despite my being an ardent fan of Cronenberg from way back and keen to apprise his angle on the subject matter at hand. I had doubtlessly deemed Christopher Hampton’s screenplay, largely adapted from his own earlier play, the prime culprit, in a manner similar to how just a few years earlier Steven Knight’s script for Eastern Promises had struck me as that film’s mortal weakness. What was absolutely clear to me upon first seeing A Dangerous Method was that Cronenberg’s collaboration with Peter Suschitzky, his regular cinematographer since 1988’s Dead Ringers (an epochal masterpiece), was somehow managing to go further and further, a contraction and purification that nonetheless felt increasingly expansive, searching, bold. Suschitzky and his operator(s) consistently set up some of cinema’s most distinct and remarkable close-ups for Cronenberg. You don’t really see anything quite like it in Suschitzky’s work with other directors. Cronenberg and Suschitzky appear to enjoy shooting close-ups with a 25mm lens, but this does not seem to offer a satisfactory explanation; there has to be a secret ingredient, a patent, a trick which remains concealed. The close-ups Cronenberg and Suschitzky shoot of Sarah Gadon in A Dangerous Method and then again in 2012’s Cosmopolis are especially revelatory. They are liable to leave an indelible mark. My experience of A Dangerous Method when I revisit it late in the first half of October, 2020, is an altogether different experience, though clearly the earlier viewing leaves its apparitions like a film (in the sense of a thin layer) upon the film (in the sense of celluloid). Something immediately leaps out at me in the opening sequence, set in 1904, in and immediately outside the Burghölzli Clinic in Zürich, Switzerland. “Good morning. I’m Doctor Jung, I admitted you yesterday.” Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender), famous clinical psychiatrist turned early adopter of the talking cure, explains the latter newfangled method to Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), institutionalized for hysteria and herself likewise a real historical figure and future analyst of renown. There is no couch as of yet. Sabina sits in a chair, spasming and experiencing autokinetic contortions, another chair situated behind her. Jung explains: “So as to distract you as little as possible I am going to sit there. Behind you. I am going to ask you to try not to turn around and look at me…under any circumstances.” The actor Michael Fassbender enunciates these words in his customary British-accented English, but I am immediately aware of a statement that is properly made in a particular Swiss-German. It is an unusual sensation. Jung’s eerily reasonable paternalistic directive is bound to a historical and institutional staging as it is to a particular sense of Protestant milieu. With respect to A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg has regularly made a point of emphasizing the period’s mania for letter writing, insisting that in the Vienna of the period there were a good many mail deliveries daily, such that if a person sent a letter in the morning they could reasonably expect a reply by late afternoon. Cronenberg has pored over the reams of correspondences written by his film’s referent personages, and if each was written in the German of its particular space-time (one unique German for each unique German correspondent), the filmmaker has had to fall back to reading them in English translation. After Spielrein has made some headway in her recovery, Jung employs her as a hospital helpmeet. A crucial sequence has Jung subjecting his wife Emma (the aforementioned Sarah Gadon) to a word association exercise whilst she is hooked up to a galvanometer, Spielrein in another part of the room analyzing the data as it is produced in real time. Though she has not been told who Emma is, the sequence concludes, the session now terminated, with Spielrein intuiting that the other woman must be Jung’s wife, a fact made evident by the mechanics of its suppression. The galvanometer scene, which contains more cuts and more frequent cuts than any other scene in the film, is all the more fascinating because it involves a three-way interaction mediated by machine, such that the galvanometer and the cinematographic apparatus become a perverse intermachinic assemblage in service to a demonstration of how there is speech speaking beneath what speech is explicitly enunciating. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) do not speak the same German because they do not occupy the same space-time. Yes, Freud is Viennese and Jung is Swiss-German. Freud is, more specifically, a Viennese Jew, Jung a Protestant whose father and a number of whose uncles were pastors. Carl Jung, unlike Freud, is a Wagnerian. As a Viennese Jew, Freud thinks in terms of self-protection. Psychoanalysis needs to make a convincing case for its legitimacy as a serious science, because otherwise it opens itself to paranoid attacks from Anti-Semitics. Jung believes in the primacy of the archetypal-spiritual, a Germanic mythology which history will prove to be in significant respects proto-Nazi. Like Hölderlin, Wagner, and Nietzsche, Jung is plugged into the archaic power of the Black Forest, a collective unconscious, the bedrock of the Germanic archetypal, a subterranean system. His break with Freud requires a new language, an opposing German, operating at yet another tier, hence: a supplemental nomenclature, from “psychoanalysis” to “analytical psychology.” Sabina Spielrein is a Russian Jew and Wagnerian (exception as rule of incorporated exception, example of example), and so for a time an ideal intermediary between Freud and Jung (each of whose Germans she augments). The sexual relationship between Jung and Spielrein is unthinkable in Cronenberg’s film without the music and mythology of Wagner. The very different intimacy shared by Freud and Spielrein is unthinkable without the history of the Jewish people. Wagner is a fundamental antinomy in recent history, the Nazis representing the aberrant turn of the Wagnerian. We see this in Rosmarie Waldrop’s absolutely remarkable The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter, a 1986 novel taking the form of a sisterly deflection, a series of operational unbindings, which happen to persistently retrace the coincidence of rifts driven by the spectre of Wagner into two marriages over two generations, rifts which open up a space for Wagnerian infidelities (and the Jew). The real life Sabina Spielrein was shot dead in 1942 by the SS, along with her two daughters, at Zmievskaya Balka, or "Snake Ravine,” near Rostov-on-Don.
15.4. As chair of the Programming Committee for Calgary Cinematheque, my tenure can theoretically extend as far as six years and no more. My one big ambition has been to mount a Jacques Rivette Masters Series, and the thing has come to be, so, really, I can retire anytime…pretty much, from everything. The attendance numbers haven’t been good, but that’s COVID for you. Who cares? I’m in paradise. This is the final week of the series. Unofficially: Paranoia Week. On Monday we showed Paris nous appartient (1961) and tomorrow we show Le pont du Nord (1981). Last week was the two extant films of the Scènes de la vie parallèle, Duelle and Noroît, both from 1976. Introducing Duelle, I told the audience that the film is among my top ten of all time, the one I will always tend to choose as my favourite Rivette if called upon to choose. This is no longer so. Of the five Rivette films we have screened theatrically thus far, it is Noroît that benefits most extraordinarily from being seen and heard in a theatre. It is currently my favourite film of all time. Period. Both Duelle and Noroît introduce the novelty of incorporating improvised music into the diegesis (the on-set scene-work documented by the camera and location sound equipment). I have seen both films numerous times, and I am totally aware of this, of course, but experiencing Noroît in a theatre was akin to hearing that music for the first time. Rivette is combining Jacobean tragedy with the staging concepts of Artaud and Cocteau, a little bit of Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray thrown in for good measure. His films are above all about a praxis that realizes itself through collaborations with actresses, and here are the musicians in Noroît, engaged in aleatory improv, collaborating directly with the actresses from within the tableau. Marguerite Duras is purported to have once told Rivette that it was in hearing one of his films that she arrived at the ability to see it. Well, slightly gnomic as that may scan, it is precisely what happened to me at our screening. What does improvised music share with the affect of the actress? Be it supernal beings the likes of Bernadette Lafont and Geraldine Chaplin, or be it Keira Knightley, whose wonderful performance in A Dangerous Method was perniciously scorned far and wide? Consider what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze says about the “logic of sensation” and the art of Francis Bacon: “what fascinates him are the invisible forces that model flesh or shake it.” This will have a bearing on things Deleuze offers us respective of affect and faciality in his two books on cinema. Those invisible forces also pass through improvised music (perhaps like a northwesterly). Space is the place, there are other worlds they have not told you of, signals abound, crisscrossing in all directions, and a person can be a transmitter, or a transmitter among transmitters, in the groupuscule context, the intermachinic one. I got to talk to the great avant-garde bassist Barre Phillips at length during the 2019 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville. Barre was there to play a solo concert, a man and a legend eighty-four-years of age. I asked Barre about collaborating with Jacques Rivette on 1980’s Merry-Go-Round. He was surprised and pleased to be asked, this not being something that has happened often, if ever. Barre was happy to share the whole wild tale. After telling it, he paused for a moment, and said with a mixture of mystification and mirth: “Jacques Rivette. Yeah.”
15.5. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner (Turin, 1888): “Only sick music makes money today; our big theatres subsist on Wagner.”
15.6. Jacques Rivette, in discussion with Mary M. Wiles (Café de la Bastille, Paris, June 1999): “That’s how we did Noroît, the film was a disaster, but I have good memories of it because filming it was really crazy, in four weeks, at the ends of the earth in Brittany, you can just imagine…”
15.7. I like the film critic Nick Pinkerton, despite my seldom harbouring anything other than outright contempt for jobbing film critics. Pinkerton is no more than a few months younger than myself and, I believe, from Cleveland, Ohio. He was a kid in a punk scene not unlike the punk scene in which I was a kid. Pinkerton is amusingly sardonic, erudite, keen of mind and enterprise. For a while, back when I was working at The Calgary Drop-In and Rehabilitation Centre, I used to read Pinkerton’s “Bombast” column over at the Film Comment website. This is where I believe you got the best of Pinkerton. Back then. There was no real conformity to house style in that column, and he got to pursue his essayistic fancy wither it led, perhaps like a wisecracking 21st century Robert Musil-type. Dig? 2020, global pandemic, a lot of the jobs have dried up, especially the more traditional ones. Film Comment has folded, Alpha 60 has crashed, precarity reigns. Pinkerton is writing on his own terms. A “Substack” called “Employee Picks.” You can send him five dollars a month to keep the aspidistra flying. That’s what I’m doing. In his lovely and involved piece of October 23, Pinkerton gets into the nitty gritty and the gris gris of the current moment. The COVID moment. Quoth Pinkerton: “This is a moment of utter catastrophe and, as such, a moment of opportunity—the opportunity, as institutions show their asses and existing structures display their frailty, to think of how to work outside of those institutions, or how to create alternative structures that better service everyone, and not just the managerial caste.” I am thinking of this at a crucial moment in the final episode of The Queen's Gambit—which is sort of stupid, totally predictable, and utterly sublime—when a long-distance phone call from New York to Moscow suddenly drops me into an unusual and touching socially-distanced solidarity (less than ten people) that actually makes me cry. Tears. Tears of actuality, the evidence that speaks for itself, no matter how avidly the choked voice may protest their verity. American individualism versus the Soviet Citizen as Continent-Sized Granite Block. You might well expect chess prodigy orphan Beth Harmon, representative of the rule of incorporated exception, to stand for American individualism. I ask you to self-identify here the way I could not help but do. Consider the possibility that there are solid connections already situationally in place for you and concerning which you are not at this moment properly conscious.
15.8. In viewing the very short Apichatpong Weerasethakul film October Rumbles. Right. Able basically to synthesize two key imaginative correlations. Right. Jim Harrison poem “Poem,” scrim in fancy new school theatre. But then the very short film is over and there you remain, seated, imagination still present and accounted for. Always the case with me, always: more correlations incoming. Okay, right. Sheet, scrim, sail. Is there not that audiovisual essay by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López? Concerning the films of Jean Epstein? Yes. Yes there is. Well, what are you waiting for, dial that shit up. Here on Vimeo. “The Thinking Machine 9: The Sea Speaks.” Cue video. Okay, it’s not the exact video I was looking for. Correlates just fine, though. Correlates great. Jean Epstein in Brittany, “you can just imagine…” God said let there be wind and sea. And saw that it cohered. Was good.
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