18.1. The Loop, Jacques Roubaud’s follow-up to The Great Fire of London, second of the three branches constituting the mathematician-poet’s triptych of experimental Oulipo autofictions—and again consisting of a main body and two sections of “insertions,” these the “interpolations” and “bifurcations” to which the reader is regularly directed by typographic prompts in the main body—conceives of itself, in complement to its predecessor’s configuration of the Project of which it is but one branch as a work in which remembering becomes orderly destruction, as centrally concerned with the Fore-Project, or the prehistory of the Project, its dormancy and slumber, and therefore the phenomenology of its emanation. That so many of the passages early in The Loop—in the first chapter of the main body, the corresponding interpolations, and the first lengthy bifurcation—fixate on the physical space of the childhood home, both rigorously schematized and “webbed with imprecision,” means that it is difficult not to reflect on Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis of the soul, setting out as it does in The Poetics of Space to catalogue the many ways physical spaces come to constellate the imaginations of poets. The Loop approaches these matters from the standpoint of three distinct temporalities (main body, both regimes of insertion). This past Monday, I introduced a Calgary Cinematheque screening of Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Krabi, 2562, a 2019 film that we had originally intended to be the final Contemporary World title of our previous season, though this screening was not to happen on account of COVID and the resultant municipal shutdown. The date in the title of Rivers and Suwichakornpong’s film is not that of a distant futurity, the stuff of science fiction or the speculative, but rather an alternative present date for its production, that of the Thai Buddhist Calendar, from the standpoint of which our screening of the film ultimately occurred the subsequent year, which is to say 2563. If the current year is both 2020 and 2563, this could already be said to represent a layering of coterminous temporalities and the coextention of distinct regimes or space-times. As with Roubaud’s The Loop, Krabi, 2562 presents us with the living spectre of a prehistory, manifest most unmistakably in the presence of caves occupied by actors made-up as primordial humanoids, and it could be suggested that an implicit question is raised regarding something like a Fore-Project, that which precedes recorded history containing within it the kernel of a future anterior tense. Krabi itself is a major tourist centre in Southern Thailand, as such a very particular social space intelligible both as a crossroads generally and as a crossroads for global capital specifically, its spectacle in large part a spectacle of leisure. It is as such a place where more than one calendar might be expected to obtain. The special attention to prehistoric man in the film is in part accounted for by a compulsion to satirize. In an interview with both filmmakers conducted by Jordan Cronk for MUBI, Rivers addresses this: “It was interesting: during our site visit the mayor gave this talk, and I couldn’t understand it—there was no translator. But I kept hearing at certain moments him saying the word ‘Africa.’ And afterwards I asked Anocha, ‘Why did he keep saying ‘Africa’?’ And she tells me that he’s saying that maybe the birthplace of humanity was actually Krabi, not Africa.” The mayor’s showmanship here is of course little more than that, a fatuous “pitch,” a conscious bit of fanciful spectacularization, finding in part a visual equivalence in Krabi, 2562 by way of a commercial being shot on the beach, the director of said commercial being the filmmaker Oliver Laxe, whose most recent feature, Fire Will Come, Calgary Cinematheque did manage to squeeze in last season, and who was seen not too terribly long ago filming his 2016 feature Mimosas on the periphery of the opening section of Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, another film we have had the opportunity to screen. The commercial shoot in Krabi, 2562 involves an actor dressed as a conspicuously well-put-together caveman. Off urinating in the trees, the actor will encounter a "real" prehistoric ancestor. Because we were not able to show Krabi, 2562 early in the year on account of COVID, we ended up showing it not terribly long after MUBI had made Ghost Strata available to Canadian subscribers. Ghost Strata is a short film Rivers shot over the course of a year, partially concurrent with Krabi. As its title suggests, Ghost Strata is, like Krabi, a geology of temporalities belonging to physical spaces, stacked strata, presentation of traces. Shot across the globe over the course of a year, Ghost Strata also in its own right rhymes with the comparative stationary Arboretum Cycle, a series of films Nathaniel Dorsky shot over the course of twelve months at the Strybing Arboretum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and which Kyle Whitehead’s MONOGRAPH screened on 16mm at Contemporary Calgary this past October. If they do indeed rhyme, what is ultimately most salient here is that Ghost Strata and Arboretum Cycle represent completely divergent modalities of doing, thinking, and being a calendrical year in space and time. What more might we say about prehistory and the dormant future anterior? Perhaps we go to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?),” third chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. What is it Deleuze and Guattari say about embryogenesis? Ah, yes, right here: “the embryo does not testify to an absolute form preestablished in a closed milieu; rather, the phylogenesis of populations has at its disposal, in an open milieu, an entire range of relative forms to choose from, none of which is preestablished.” And then at the bottom of the same paragraph: “Geographical areas can only harbor a sort of chaos, or, at best, extrinsic harmonies of an ecological order, temporary equilibriums between populations.”
18.2. How would your average person tend to characterize my particular lunacy? I know I am mostly a pariah, people find me exhausting, et cetera. I have a tendency to prefer it that way. But why? I suppose there are a good number of ways to come at it. In Canada, especially in its arts communities, circumspection will tend to reign. Circumspection is always to one extent or another ashamed. I have known the deep shame of one who is too defective to live, and I have found in irony a way of inhabiting a performative shamelessness that, in sobriety, has become more than merely safe. Shame resents my shamelessness, and as such I often play Dan Ackroyd to the John Candy of my fellows in this national Great Outdoors. There is that to factor in. Still, sticking with the great outdoors, I am also odious from the positivist standpoint, which is to say the stultifying rationalist standpoint of the bark experts who scrupulously miss the trees, not to mention the forest. For me, the bark is already a solar system of mites. Since most everybody is currently apoplectic about harebrained conspiracy theorists and faulty pattern recognition, it is doubtlessly the case that many would find fault in my writing with what they might determine to be apophenia, or the tendency to perceive connections between unrelated things. Well, again, I am a reader of Gaston Bachelard and Gayatri Spivak. The imagination is a builder and what it builds is always real, if not always actual. It is built, you can demonstrate the thing, and you can demonstrate the uses to which the thing can be put. Was it apophenia when I watched Night of the Living Dead (1968) nearly contemporaneous with the global rollout of shutdowns in March, shortly after daylight savings kicked in, delighting in the matter of how, in the opening sequence of that film, Johnny and sister Barbara complain about the previous night’s sleep and losing an hour to daylight savings? So be it. Is it apophenia that causes me to believe that a large part of why Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela (2019) is one of the five greatest films of all time is because we managed to screen it literally the day before shutdowns ended our season prematurely? So be it. Is it apopehenia that causes me to get no end of pleasure out of the inconsequence of Vladimir Nabokov and Yasunari Kawabata having both been born in 1899? Yes. It is surely apopehenia. Ain’t it grand? Apopehenia isn’t just an alternative to positivism, but also to what Jacques Roubaud suggests is the looming threat operative in Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström.” Ergo: “that in leaning over the dark spiral of the staircase, my gaze had sunk into a whirlpool, the endless coils of a whirlpool, in which a proliferation of images was the rule. Impossible for me to separate, to distinguish, to organize. The images thus ‘compressed’ together, endlessly, one on top of the other, demonstrated another condition, another modality of past time, to me. I could hardly refuse it.”
18.3. In furtherance of the consideration of complimentary or not-so-complimentary space-times, I have returned to Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, just released on a Criterion Blu-ray which arrived here in a parcel one day in advance of the street date. This is a truly extraordinary popular movie that has only gown in my estimation in the aftermath of a second viewing. Compare it to David Fincher’s unbelievably bad Mank, which most folks will not be able to see until early December, and The Irishman cannot help but benefit, especially insofar as pertains to the sophisticated transtemproal schematic of Scorsese’s film, first a core business of Steven Zaillian’s screenplay, and then, on a whole additional level, Scorsese and co.’s cinematographic worlding. Many find fault with the infamous digital de-aging tech and its applications, a reservation I have not at any point shared, and I am happy to find Geoffrey O’Brien tackling this with intelligence in his very fine essay included in the booklet accompanying the Criterion release: “The effect is not exactly undetectable, at least at the outset; one is aware of variations in texture and sharpness, disparities between the apparent age of faces and bodies, odd distortions that can create a momentary masklike quality. But those anomalies become part of the film’s language, and what might have been a distraction serves an aesthetic purpose.” This is exactly right, and it begs the question: what aesthetic purpose, especially as pertains to the most glaring of these matters, that of the disparities between face and body? The film relates to or situates aging and death precisely from within a masquerade that cannot ultimately hold, that was always counterfeit, and that ultimately becomes the pathos of the patently pathetic Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro). A masquerade, a mask. Right. A mask only covers a face. If it is clearly a geriatric Robert De Niro shit-kicking a grocer in front of his tween daughter in one notable sequence, the synthetic face therefore anachronistic, this is testament above all to an already faltering masquerade, and it immediately ought to evoke the opening vignette, the masquerade vignette, in Max Ophüls’s Le plaisir (1952), depicting as it does the physical collapse of an old man at a masquerade ball who has sought to relive his youth beyond his capacity to maintain the dissimulation. The masquerade vignette from Le plaisir is also quoted—with almost overwhelming beauty and power—at the very end of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2018 essayistic collage Le livre d'image, the scene from the Ophüls of the tragic old man from Maupassant accompanied by inveterate smoker JLG’s hacking cough. Crucially, the pitiful senescence and imminent death of the elderly Frank Sheeran belong in a sense to the futurity of a framing operation within The Irishman. Old man Sheeran’s narrational voice nominally comes to us from a retirement home in the future, but we begin “inside of” an experience of 1975, an early moment showing us Sheeran tracing in red ink on a map the prospective itinerary of a trip to a wedding in Detroit, though he does not actually know where he is headed, in two crucial ways: 1) doesn’t know the journey is one immediately toward a grievous betrayal; or 2) that this is an altogether more circuitous journey into memory and prophecy wherein the eponymous Irishman will wear various versions of his face on the same body (the younger digitized faces are much more the younger Sheeran than they are younger De Niro). If The Irishman ventures back and forth to and from and between years stretching from the immediate postwar to the dawn of the new millennium, 1975 is a grounding calendrical index. Revisiting the film, something leapt out at me concerning The Irishman’s 1975 that I had not consciously noted on a first viewing. Certainly when I had seen the film during its limited theatrical run, I had taken notice of a series of curious insert shots (almost like Ozu-esque “pillow” shots) of a suburban intersection, incorporated like repeated punctuation in the sequences surrounding the murder of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). On second viewing what was most distinctive about these shots was the prevalence of power lines and the angles of those power lines. In fact, power lines are ubiquitous in the 1975 sections of The Irishman in a way that they are not in the other sections. If we think of the 1975 locus as a grounding narrative narrated from the standpoint of a futurity, and of the film as a whole branching off from there into the past and the future, the power lines serving to indicate a transtemporality that is not only networked, but that is mobilized by the progressive construction of infrastructure, a whole new reading opens up. From here, we can insist that key historical events become themselves inherently infrastructural. The Second World War, the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, NATO’s intervention in the Balkans, the deaths of any number of major and minor players, and with the development of newfangled de-aging tech in some sense figuring into this schematic as well.
18.4. Geoffrey O’Brien writes of Anna Paquin’s almost-completely-silent character Peggy Sheeran in The Irishman that the clear-eyed and disapproving gaze she turns on her father represents “the power of refusal, for which Frank has never had the slightest capacity.” (Think again of Roubaud’s “I could hardly refuse it.”) What Geoffrey O’Brein insists of Peggy Sheeran rhymes with what the philosopher Jacques Rancière has written respective of Vitalina Varela in the Pedro Costa film named for her. “This leading role for a female accuser is what sets Vitalina Varela apart.” Aside from a gaze of sober judgement, Vitalina also has a voice. And a mode, a space-time in opposition to that against which she stands in accusation. “But here it is a well-individualized voice that takes charge of the accusation and asks all these fallen men the brutal question that no well-mannered left-wing filmmaker would dare to ask migrant workers, knowing the answer all too well: they are not the guilty ones, the system is. And it is the system that must be judged. But Vitalina does not know the ‘system.’ She only knows men who have made a promise and who have betrayed that promise; who have betrayed her for the very reason that they are men: beings who can always go away, leave their home, fields, wife and family behind because they are given the privilege of travelling, which is reserved for those who are in charge of preparing the future; beings who, once far away, can still use the solitude of exile, the gruelling labour, the exploitation and the wounds suffered for that famous future as an excuse for justifying this small, miserable and forgetful life these men have cobbled together.” The final shot of Costa’s film immediately evoked for me the cinema of John Ford. A tableau and a woman’s gesture turned toward distances. We are looking at an image produced through digital deception. It involves a home, a domicile, on a frontier, equivalent to so many in the films of John Ford and in American westerns more generally. It is a huge part of why Vitalina Varela, seen on the precipice of global shutdown, felt like a total culmination, the actual end of an epoch. This physical domestic structure is on a frontier. What frontier? If Rancière places Vitalina as a guarantor or possible guarantor of an actual future narcoleptic men have largely abnegated, the homestead at the end of Costa’s film exists at the edge of that future…the after that comes before what comes after…the future anterior proper…
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