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?

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_005

An HBO “true crime” limited series equally about the serial rapist and murderer who would come to be known as the Golden State Killer as it is amateur investigator Michelle McNamara, a woman we can now count among the higher profile casualties of America’s opioid crisis, I'll Be Gone in the Dark enjoys the curious felicity of having aired its final episode nineteen days before Joseph James DeAngelo, now seventy-four years of age, identified and arrested during the shooting of the series, was sentenced to eleven consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. To help ground this event squarely in and of its moment, still images from the DeAngelo trial have regularly depicted the former police officer and outrageously sinister malefactor with the requisite face shields and masks, all in accordance with ubiquitous COVID-19 protocols. I was myself not all that familiar with the Golden State Killer and only knew about Michelle McNamara in an altogether perfunctory sort of a way, but I did manage to find myself binging I'll Be Gone in the Dark earlier this month, shortly after it became available in bulk on a service to which I subscribe, a fact which doubtlessly owes much to a fascination I harbour for a certain obsessive libidinal dimension as pertains to these things (and which cannot help but find me identifying equally with both the Golden State Killer and Michelle McNamara, their effectively becoming distorted doubles of one another). The HBO series—which shares its name with Michelle McNamara’s highly successful book—reaches an early and utterly chilling high point at the beginning of its second episode. A pre-credit sequence is soundtracked by synthetic rapid heartbeats accompanying the tapes of an August, 1979 hypnosis session in which Lori, a victim of the serial offender then known as EAR (or the East Area Rapist), begins recounting her attack over a measured visual montage of sleepy, nocturnal suburbia. The first words we hear from the hypnotized Lori, “TV room,” though they may seem innocuous, immediately had the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. Her auditor presses Lori along. The young woman recounts hearing her dog bark, looking onto the back porch, et cetera. There is a man in the backyard (or on the porch). Asked how she would describe the man’s face, Lori draws out an elongated, terrified, ineluctably childlike “mean,” and it is enough to freeze the marrow in your bones. Cut to opening credit sequence. Watching this, I had an immediate and unmistakable sense of finding myself deep in David Lynch country, a matter that I believe has to do with more than merely a certain species of the picket fence American unheimlich. On two other occasions in my compressed viewing of I'll Be Gone in the Dark, the impression was to return in full force. Hypnosis once again figures in the second instance. A police officer who actually saw him describes the suspect—again, while under hypnosis—as a man with a baby’s face, then goes on to recount how a bullet fired by the man with the baby’s face enters the flashlight that he, the officer in question, is pointing at said suspect, the tableau this paints in the mind of the viewer a shuddering mindfuck. Later in the series, Michelle McNamara discusses the personal connection she felt to Janelle Cruz, last known victim of the Golden State Killer, murdered in May of 1986. Over home movie footage of Janelle, the teenager cavorting with friends and so forth, McNamara discusses how Janelle’s hairstyle and general affect remind her of girls she, Michelle McNamara, grew up with in idyllic suburban Illinois. The Janelle footage reminds me more than a little of the home movies of Laura Palmer and Donna Hayward in Twin Peaks, a series that would originally go on the air in April of 1990. Janelle Cruz would have been about two years older than Michelle McNamara (who was born April 14, 1970). Lara Flynn Boyle, the actresses who played Donna on Twin Peaks, was less than a month older than Michelle McNamara, whereas Sheryl Lee, the actress who played Laura, was closer in age to Janelle Cruz (Sheryl Lee was born April 22, 1967). I turned eleven in 1990, and though older kids I thought cool were already into it (a particular babysitter comes to mind), I would not become hooked on Twin Peaks until the second season, the show already beginning to enter into its infamous, premature decline. The capsule review of Blue Velvet in the Time Out Film Guide hooked me, and I quickly procured the VHS tape, wearing it out with repeated viewings as an adolescent. I went to a midnight screening of Eraserhead with my friend Patrick when I was about fifteen, the two of us hanging out downtown for hours in advance of this unprecedentedly exciting event. In high school, the 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me became outsized in its personal importance for me, a fact that doubtlessly has much to do with my having both gone to school with and as Laura Palmer (or various versions of her), as well as having already come to tenuously apprehend the extent to which my own experience of chameleonic fluidity, within and beyond the codified field of sense of gender, was intimately enmeshed with addiction and self-destruction. Fire Walk with Me and Inland Empire remain my favourite David Lynch films to this day, the special status of the latter owing to elements I have tended to call Rabelaisian, the provisional autonomy afforded Lynch by cheap video tech having allowed him to push his form beyond anything betraying any remaining debt to precedents or the suggestion of a reproducible/co-optable model. It also happens to be his most potent encapsulation of both the horrors and ecstasies of psychospiritual dissipation. Inland Empire is, like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive immediately before it, a film that becomes sundered and/or bisected by virtue of passage through a portal. The two earlier films are not nearly as satisfactory to me, and I am not nearly as much a fan of Mulholland Drive as so many other commentators appear to be. Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are triumphs of structure, extensive as such of formal considerations—constellated as they would seem to be around coterminous whirlpools and centrifugal pull—but they also betray Lynch’s main problems, which are always problems of worlding (and the aesthetics of worlding), the implication being that we are bearing witness to a somewhat embarrassing overgrown boyscout’s notions (or projections) of bad people, the underworld, and, above all else, sex. The first and longer section of Mulholland Drive, originally imagined as the beginning of an episodic television series, has a lot of worlding problems, and the execution is itself consistently uneven to an extent I continue to believe a liability. That being said, there is the curious matter of one way in which this portion of the film, with all of its worlding problems, directly connects to my world. I hint at it regularly. Since I started growing my hair long again a number of years ago, I have occasionally had a tendency, when having had my long hair trimmed, to refer to the resultant hairdo as my “Betty from Deep River, Ontario.” Betty from Deep River is, of course, the character Naomi Watts plays in Mulholland Drive before the film passes through its portal, thereafter becoming a more wholly truthful downer in which Watts now plays the jilted Diane Selwyn. In dialogue with the amnesiac played by Laura Harring, Betty states near the beginning of the first section of Mulholland Drive that “I just came here from Deep River, Ontario, and now I’m in this…dream place. Well, you can imagine how I feel.” In the late 1990s and the early years of the 21st century, until I effectively completed grad school in 2003, I very regularly drove through Deep River commuting at the beginning and end of the academic year between Ottawa, where I was studying as both undergrad and grad student, and my hometown of Calgary. (I would occasionally drive through the northern United States, though it was seldom that I opted for that route on account of my habitually being in possession of a large quantity of cannabis as well as more or less permanently high on the stuff.) You can do the drive between Calgary and Ottawa (or vice versa) in three days if you go all out and sleep in hotels or motels. The ground covered is over three thousand kilometres in length (or over two thousand miles). Deep River is about two hours west of Ottawa on the Trans-Canada #17 highway, and because of the way the highway behaves at the town in question (current population less than five thousand), I always thought of the place as a kind of nexus or interstitial space, perhaps even a kind of portal, commemorating the termination of the first or commencement of the final leg of the drive. It may not quite read that way when you look at Deep River on a map. I am not quite sure I understand why that is. Though I do not believe I have passed though Deep River since 2003, leaving Ottawa by car for the final time, it seems to me that one had to make a hard left just after that gas station, right where the highway meets Deep River Road, in order to keep with the 17.

 

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_004

The edition of Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris brought out by the redoubtable New York Review Books this past May is a curious beast from an editorial standpoint, translation and editorial responsibilities both taken on by Stephen Twilley, who has found himself working from two broadly variant editions in different languages—Italian and French, the two languages in which the original manuscripts were originally composed without much in the way of rhyme or reason—without access to the original manuscripts or support from the Malaparte estate. The title of the book is misleading in any language, because the so-called ‘diaries’ are typical of their author’s modus operandi, featuring he, Curzio Malaparte himself, as the somewhat outlandish protagonist, but clearly not in a context where “facts” are considered sacrosanct. Before and during the Second World War, Malaparte had published numerous works of fiction which secured his international renown and which featured himself as the star, all of them famous for prodigious invention and the difficult-to-credit conduct of the author’s literary avatar. The Paris “diaries,” spanning the years 1947 and 1948, demand to be read as a continuation of the earlier practice, and we cannot assess them adequately without being attentive to their clearly being posterity-minded and calculated. In 1947, arriving in what was once his favourite city, Malaparte is immediately more than a little displeased with the manner in which he is received. He detects in François Mauriac’s reception “a hint of animosity, of repulsion, of dislike.” Others will consistently present as similarly cool or even outright hostile, the exceedingly chic Albert Camus among them. When a woman in the street is kind to him, even vaguely affectionate, he finds it amusing, as it indicates that she is simply too unworldly to have divined from his accent that he is Italian. Writing about a discussion, shortly after his arrival in Paris, with Italian Ambassador Quaroni, Malaparte, already sensing a general and pervasive atmosphere of passive-aggressive rebuke, vents some of his frustration to the diplomat: “it’s even quite amusing to see how much the French consider me a collaborator. At times I have the desire to respond forcefully, to ask what certain people’s Resistance really consisted of.” It is all pretty funny. Can Malaparte actually be credulous in wondering why he is considered a collaborator? Though he would fall in and out of favour, the man was at times a major Italian fascist of record. His tendency is to point to his own Resistance bonafides by enumerating to interlocutors the frequency with which he managed to get arrested as well as the time he spent both in prison and under isolated house arrest. Readers of Malaparte’s Kaputt (’44) are aware of the frequency with which the author likes to present himself insulting powerful people in the most recklessly bold manner imaginable. Hardly emblematic of some sort of commitment to direct action or political Resistance, it appear to testify far more to caprice and a curious spirit of corrosive perversity. Still, in communicating his grievance to Quaroni, Malaparte does at least in part have a point. Any given one of the eminent and cultured gentlemen who have scorned him: of what indeed did these men’s actual so-called Resistances materially consist? During the years covered in Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville is in the process of hustling-up the modest funds he requires to adapt independently to the screen Jean Marcel Bruller's 1941 novel Le silence de la mer. Both Melville and Bruller fought in the Resistance, and the original novel had originally been published cloak and dagger, distributed through clandestine channels. The film would be released in 1949 and (along with revolutionizing production models and film form) is widely considered the first crucial film of the French Resistance. What exactly does the film show and/or tell us? Shot in Bruller’s actual residence, Le silence de la mer features principally a cast of three. A relatively cosmopolitan German officer with a somewhat ghoulish aspect, played by stock company Nazi Howard Vernon, becomes billeted by decree in the home of an uncle and niece played by Jean-Marie Robain and Nicole Stéphane respectively. Though the gregarious and pitifully romantic (which is to say deluded) German officer regales the two occupants of his temporary domicile with repeated monologues over an extended period of time, his hosts, without having consulted one another on the matter, abstain from speaking to him. In a perfunctory sense, the uncle and niece “resist” by being rude and uncooperative, which is in this context suddenly amusing, considering that Malaparte, who would like us to believe him to be more a resister than a collaborator, has little more to point to in his defense other than his own habit of being fantastically rude to highly-placed personages. The reason the Melville film works so well is because of the extraordinary potency of the representational mode, and because of the expressive potency of the form of silence captured in the representation. There is also something to be said for merely waiting the Nazis out. Like Napoleon, Hitler and his minions would ultimately fall on the sword of their own crazed extraterritorial ambition, effectively doing themselves in. Something nearly equivalent, if in micro, happens to Howard Vernon’s officer in Melville’s film. The silence of his hosts insists itself, ultimately serving as an unspoken interrogation that he himself internalizes and then forcefully mobilizes, the upshot being that, having seen the errors of his ways and the rank insidiousness of his countrymen, he ends up requesting mobilization to the front (an unambiguously suicidal act). Telling the niece of his grim decision, and preparing to take his leave, she half-whispers the only word she will ever speak to him, a tender and powerfully underscored “Adieu.” This only serves to intensify the expressive potency of the cinematographic mode that sets the stage for this crucial moment. Let us consider how this powerful cinematographic instance parallels a passage from Malaparte in praise of the actress Véra Korène, performing Racine at the Théâtre-Français: “the only one, surrounded by the poor, embarrassed, insecure, and fearful Paris public of 1947, to bear the message of French tenderness, which is the only still valid message of France’s greatness.” The silence of the sea is the silence that swallows up the Nazis, it is the interrogatory silence directed toward the German interloper, but it is also crucially the silence of the solidarity that precipitates and maintains this iteration of Resistance, the uncle and niece never having had to coordinate their actions by way of speech. If this is Resistance that actually resits in a material and efficacious fashion, it can only be said to do so with any certainly whatever if we confine matters to the representational mode. Indeed, the film was fiercely attacked in many quarters, inciting debates about the legitimacy of what it would appear to argue. Given over to the public, speech again enters the picture, fractious sectarianism dominates, much of it incredibly rude, and division once again reigns. How do you show that you have meaningfully resisted? Usually you have to die or be marked by institutionalized torture (as with the tattoos of concentration camp survivors). It is not for nothing that Jean Marcel Brulle dedicated the original novel Le silence de la mer to Saint-Pol-Roux, “the assassinated poet,” who died in 1941. An Alsatian Jew born with the surname Grumbach, Jean-Pierre Melville—who appropriated his Resistance nom de guerre from the great 19th century American novelist, and was famous for wearing Stetson hats, driving big American cars, and lionizing Hollywood directors like John Huston and William Wyler—lost his brother, who died either as a casualty of operational exigencies or (probably more likely) because he happened to be transporting money to Charles de Gaulle. Though it will not be staged for a few years, in 1949, Samuel Beckett, an expatriated Irishman, who did long-distance errands for the Resistance, has completed his play Waiting for Godot, a masterpiece in part inspired by the tedious and demoralizing work he had done for a noble cause. That work, like dying itself, tends to be quotidian and none too pretty. It is often totally anonymous by design. Martyrs and epochal heroes only happen at the level of representations and the public business of myth (endlessly contested and subject of arguments). A curiosity: there is a nearly throwaway voiceover line of the uncle’s in the film version of Le silence de la mer, the elderly man recalling the “rage” he felt at being “absurd” in the carrying out of his little-r resistance, as though momentarily recessed into the world of Beckett. I’m not convinced that we can do any better than the 17th century poet George Herbert who tells us that “Living well is the best revenge,” the caveat to this axiomatic being that you need to have already cultivated the sapience required to meaningfully rise to its challenge. 

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_003

Most folks are, I would imagine, at least cursorily familiar with D. W. Griffith and his infamous 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Griffith is of tremendous importance above all because he is popularly believed to have been the first director to consolidate into his films all the miscellaneous elements we tend to consider crucial to modern cinema, especially the various stratagems grouped under the designation “continuity editing” and the expressive use of the closeup (especially with respect to his actresses). Anybody who knows about Birth of a Nation probably knows that it is a racist travesty that celebrates the Ku Klux Klan, sympathetically representing both lynchers and lynchings themselves. If you have not seen the film it is probable that you are not prepared for how unspeakably, shockingly vile it actually is. Many audiences and/or individual viewers at the time of the film’s initial release felt that way, even if Birth of a Nation was a massive, highly profitable event on a national scale. We tend to call the United Sates, like most modern nations, polarized, which I believe is the incorrect word; it is divided, complicatedly and in any number of often contradictory ways, always has been, and Griffith both capitalized on and suffered for it, producing a violently divisive cinematographic epic. The fact was not lost on the man himself, and we can surmise that he had certain misgivings. More an exploiter of market potential than any kind of ideologue, Griffith is widely considered to have conceived of his 1919 film Broken Blossoms as in large part a corrective measure, telling as that film does the sympathetic story of a Chinese immigrant in London who is the target of racist white neanderthals. Broken Blossoms features Griffith’s favourite movie star, Lillian Gish, as a young waif, herself the victim of abuse, who befriends the Chinese immigrant portrayed by Richard Barthelmess in what was then commonly called “yellow face.” Let us leave aside the many ways in which Griffith’s efforts to mitigate more than credible charges concerning his racism are themselves appallingly racist. Let’s focus on Lillian Gish, the waif, twenty-six years of age at the time of the film’s release, but still suspended within the amber of her screen persona, which, like that of her contemporary, the Canadian-born Mary Pickford (just over a year Lillian’s senior), was a persona dependent on a vertiginous suspension between girlhood and womanhood. You could make a case that this is in fact exactly what a waif is. I always assume the idea is that young men are supposed to want to marry Lillian Gish as means, essentially, to the affording of an opportunity to play dolly with her, her being perceived (strategically) to be made of porcelain; part of the nobility of the whole deal is supposed to be that you save her from sexual violence in order to consign her to a gentler form of bondage ratified by Church and State. Griffith was himself both obsessive and possessive when it came to Lillian Gish. I think we can consider that a pertinent addendum. Part of the reason Gish and Pickford are made to exist suspended between girlhood and womanhood is simply because the concept of the teenager does not yet exist. Fundamentally a construction precipitated by the underhanded machinations of the advertising industry, the teenager of the postwar era, ideal citizen of the 1950s, is a particular and historically unique form of disposable income. We already see it happening in the curious and pretty terrific 1947 film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, starring over-forty Cary Grant opposite teenaged Shirley Temple, but of course it is Nicholas Ray’s immortal CinemaScope/Technicolor extravaganza Rebel Without a Cause that truly consecrates the ascension of the American teen. One cannot escape making mention of the fact that Mr. Ray is generally believed to have engaged in sexual relations (and gotten high) with all three of his young principles, namely James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood. Between Lillian Gish and the kids of Rebel Without a Cause, we have the story of the gifted star of stage and screen Marion Davies who I recently watched in the wonderful Blondie of the Follies (’32) and who was forced (probably not without a good deal of her own complicity) to throw away her career in order to play mistress and house pet at Xanadu to media magnate William Randolph Hearst. In the Epilogue to Blondie of the Follies we are provided the token happy ending, though we may have cause to worry that the recently maimed Blondie, already self-medicating and a born party animal to boot, in all likelihood has a life of alcoholic abjection and woeful dissipation ahead of her. Ah, but worry not, William Randolph Hearst to the rescue! This is a man around whom all are expected to remain compliantly teetotal lest they wish to excite his famous wrath. It has been averred—by no less than Gore Vidal in one notable instance—that the detail about Welles’s Citizen Kane that most vexed Hearst relates to the matter of “rosebud” having purportedly been the man’s term of endearment for Davies’ genitalia. Both Marion Davies and Rebel’s Natalie Wood are fixtures in lurid stories of Hollywood death connected to yachts of varying proportion. In the case of Natalie Wood the death was sadly her own, and there are many still inclined to place the suspicion on her husband, the movie star Robert Wagner, certain also that witness Christopher Walken has not told us all he knows. Marion Davies is connected to the death of Thomas Ince, the dubious scuttlebutt having long been that the insupportably sloshed Ince may have made passes at her and subsequently been made to answer for it. You may wish to check out Peter Bogdanovich’s 2001 picture The Cat's Meow in which Kirsten Dunst plays Davies, Edward Herrmann plays Hearst, and Cary Elwes plays Ince. Though I must confess to not having myself seen the Bogdanovich, let me just add, on a personal note, that as an approximately ten-year-old boy on a road trip to California with my family in what would have to have been 1989 or 1990, I was more consummately taken with both Redwood Forest and William Randolph Hearst’s Xanadu than I was with Disneyland.

 

 

 

 

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_002

1878 marks the appearance of the heavily modified second edition of Edward John Trelawny’s book of recollections concerning his brief relationship with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and the entourage or entourages both eminent men enjoyed on the Eurpoean Continent—and indeed beyond—during the living of their truncated and sexily cavalier lives. Trelawny was famously full of shit, a self-mythologizer and near-parody of the Romantic stud; he doesn’t treat Byron all that fairly quite possibly because the author of Don Juan had once been widely quoted (by numerous individuals with credible claims to having been present for the auspicious occasion) to the effect that Trelawny couldn’t tell the truth any more than he could spell or wash his hands. Twelawny is himself a celebrity in 1878 and also a man not far short of ninety years. As self-mythologizer, he is intent on securing his legacy. Can we call it setting the record “straight” and manage to keep the expression on our faces likewise? The 1858 first edition had been called Recollections of Shelley and Byron, this 1878 presum’d snow-job reimagined as Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. The addition of “and the author” is one thing, but the transmutation of “recollections” into “records” is exceedingly funny…and terribly telling. Early in the book—I cannot testify to whether or not this vignette appears in the first edition—Brawny Trelawny segues into a consideration of the would-be Shelley biographer Jefferson Hogg (1792-1862), a man who happens to both entirely abjure poetry and, according to our resident confabulator, provide the sole halfway credible written characterization of the only-posthumously-revered Shelley to have preceded his (Trelawny’s) own. Why does Shelley’s old pal Jefferson Hogg hate poetry? Well, the fucker is a barrister. We will discover very quickly, doubtlessly to our immense gratification, that this barrister is all the same not a barrister without a sense of humour, though it is of course decidedly the sense of humour of a British snob. Trelawny quotes Hogg talking smack: “Those who asked me to write it did not want a likeness of the poet as he was, but as they thought he should be; there are literary men who undertake such jobs; Tom Moore and others, who compile Lives and will say anything that is desired; they would introduce their man as a heathen deity, with a flourish of trumpets, a big drum, and mad poets dancing, the muses singing, and the poet in a triumphal car, covered with spangles, and crowned with tinsel.” Now, let me ask you: what does reading this passage immediately evoke for you? Are you like me? What immediately enters into my mind—marauding, ravening—are the films Ken Russell would make a century later and pithy dismissive reviews of same in the English press. Of course, I had to reluctantly oversee a Ken Russell Masters Series a couple years ago, and ’tis mighty likely you did not. Offer whatever thanksgiving you deem applicative.        

Open University for the Trans-Armies Database & Future Classics: cinetagmatics_001

On January 4th, 1903, Topsy the elephant, who had become a nuisance from the standpoint of the top brass at Luna Park, was put to death, poisoned and then electrocuted—call it precautionary overkill—before an audience of curious onlookers. In that audience, famously, was a film crew from Edison Studios, Thomas Edison’s burgeoning film company. We all know Thomas Edison for the proprietary zeal with which he pursued his business interests, popular mythology positing him as the Roman goon, for example, in counterpoint to a Christ-like Nikola Tesla. Edison would very much like you to believe he invented the motion picture camera. It isn’t an especially simple matter. Auguste and Louis Lumière over in France would not have been in a position to steal any of his ideas, but they too were inventing the movie camera in the 1890s. Edison had the newfangled New World Malarkey Complex behind him. And boffo legal counsel. We might err on the side of reserve and muse that the moving picture camera might well have been invented in two places at once, the separate parties wholly unaware of each other’s doings, like calculus was purported to have been “discovered” both by Newton and Leibniz independently. No need for rancour and litigation, though, one wouldn’t imagine. Edison and the Lumières invented two different kinds of cinema. It is commonplace to oppose the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, the magician who went to the moon, suggesting that this dualism gives us the future trajectory of cinema, the Lumières, with their workaday Impressionist tableaus, presaging documentary but also naturalism or realism as well as plain old down-home sentimentalism, Méliès foreseeing a nightmare cinema of attractions, your Star Wars and Avengers hellscape. What of Edison? And what of poor Topsy? In his book The Original Accident, French philosopher Paul Virilio avers that the invention of the Titanic is the invention of its sinking, just as the invention of the railroad is the invention of derailment. This is not at all what Topsy was about (nine years before the Titanic went down). What we have here is something closer to what in his epochal One-Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse called “technological rationalism.” As plain as the nose in front of your face: the electricity and the cameras did exactly what they were supposed to do, Edison immediately submitting the film to the Library of Congress. This too marks the dawn of a critical cinematographic tradition. Is not the peerless American genius John Ford carrying the torch when he oversees the filming of the battle at Midway in 1942, embedded, less surly than he would ever be again, with the United States Navy? If we think of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the events of 9.11 we are again in similar territory, though here it is clearly a matter of original accident rearing once again its infernal visage. But what are we to make of the stock footage of mushroom clouds with which our reeling civilization is so ostentatiously glutted?