kelp

Excerpt from Requiem for Mohammad Ad-Dura by Mahmoud Darwish

Nestled in his father's arms, a bird
afraid of the hell above him, Mohammad prays:
Father, protect me from flying.
My wing is weak against the wind,
and the light is black.

Mohammad wants to go home,
without a bicycle, without a new shirt.
He wants his school desk and his book
of grammar. Take me home, father, so I can finish
my homework and complete my years slowly,
slowly on the seashore and under the palms.
Nothing further.
Nothing beyond.

Mohammad faces an army, without a stone, without
the shrapnel of stars. He did not see the wall
where he could write: 'My freedom will
not die.' He has, as yet, no freedom,
no horizon for a single Picasso dove.
He is still being born. He is still
being born into the curse of his name.
How often should a boy be born without a childhood or a country?
And where will he dream, when the dream comes to him,
and the earth is a wound and an altar?

translated by Tania Tamari Nasir and Christopher Millis

Drake's Beach

Quote: Elsa Morante

"To tell the truth - as an ancient law teaches - intelligence contaminates mysteries ..."
from Aracoeli

Quote: Michel Haar

"While feigning objectivity, the enterprise of knowing schematizes and creates fictitious coherences."

Quote: Francis Bacon

"(the painter) will only catch the mystery of reality if he doesn't know how to do it."
from Sylvester's Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962 - 1979

Ace Auto

Quote: Edmond Jabes

"The written page is no mirror ... writing means confronting an unknown face."

Quote: John Keats

"That which is creative must create itself."

Edward Hirsch: 'The Demon and the Angel'

Subtitled Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, Edward Hirsch's book about the irruption of an uncanny and wholly 'other' voice or formal directive in the artistic process takes Lorca's notion of duende and Rilke's conception of the angelic as its twin guiding principles, but it makes generous detours through the worlds of literature, visual art, music and dance, surveying examples of ecstatic and irrational experience in the works of artists ranging from Billie Holiday, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Miles Davis, Whitman, Emerson, William Carlos Williams and Martha Graham to Paul Klee, W.B. Yeats, Robert Desnos, Gerard de Nerval, Czeslaw Milosz and Rafael Alberti, William Blake, St. John of the Cross, Ibn Arabi and the Yahwist of the biblical Jacob. It is this vast range of material that comes to dominate the overall impression of the book, and because Hirsch makes vital connections between artists with such agility and ease of recall, the enterprise avoids clogging up in masses of compartmentalized detail, coming to resemble instead a sort of tapestry of interwoven, sparkling threads which deepen and illuminate his single, core idea.

Chapters are short, accessible, easy reads, variations on a theme, expansions and contractions of a foundational study in Lorca's ideas about danger, chthonic power, struggle, fire, death, and ecstasy, and in Rilke's terrifying vision of implacable and awe-inspiring angelic orders. Rilke and Lorca are similarly preoccupied, being differentiated mostly along a vertical axis whereby one's inspiration drops down from a celestial source whereas the other's bursts volcanically from below. But both are seen to be in the business of apprehending something inexplicable and numinous which transfigures the poem (and the poet) in a process of its own devising, a process of compressed associations which takes place on the edge of an abyss in a hitherto unknown dimension of the artist's mind. It is an Orphic dimension, crackling with gnostic implications, with secret and chimerical meanings, and with a supernatural power over conscious intention.

In his reading of Lorca's statements in Deep Song, Hirsch comments that duende rises through the body. It burns through the soles of a dancer's feet, or expands in the torso of a singer. It courses through the blood and breaks through a poet's back like a pair of wings. It smokes through the lungs; it scorches the voice; it magnetizes the words. It is risky and deathward-leaning. His reading is warm, personal, non-academic, motivated by a desire to share what inspires him as a poet and a reader of other poets, a passionate lover of American art, jazz and blues. There is no theory, no jargon. The tone is one of spirited conversation; Hirsch is the sort of dinner guest whose glass you want to fill again.

He doesn't delve too deeply into the psychic rootbed of inspirational experience - there is some mention of depth psychology, but his approach is mainly to illustrate by means of assortment and variety rather than to theorize. In a chapter entitled A Person Must Control his Thoughts in a Dream, he skips from Keats' feverishly motive consciousness to Rimbaud's rational derangement of all the senses, through psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's notion of flow (which hits a deeply unantagonized part of the mind) to Poe's dreaming wakefulness and Louis Aragon's description of Robert Desnos' induced trances by way of Claus Schreiner's book of essays by flamenco enthusiasts - all within the space of three pages. Hence the effect of movement and lightness (not frivolity) in the book as a whole. His reading is so wide (and at the same time so single-pointed) that analysis becomes redundant anyway - his interlocutors do a lot of the work, building up the picture bit by bit. There is a generosity, even a humility in this approach it is pleasing to encounter in a book which could so easily have become overwrought on account of its emotional terrain. I came out of it bristling with quotes and tips for further reading, a personal feeling for the author and a curiosity about his own poetry. All this - and an opportunity to view again one of Robert Motherwell's most beautiful paintings, from his Elegies to the Spanish Republic, on the cover. It is the perfect selection, and it speaks volumes about the author's sensitivity to his subject.

Quote: Tristan Tzara

"Thought takes place in the mouth."

Point Lobos

Pier Paolo Pasolini

"I do not believe in a metaphysical god. I am religious because I have a natural identification between reality and God. Reality is divine. The motivation that unites all of my films is to give back to reality its original sacred significance."
Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini's work is open to a number of different readings, but it is his iconoclastic religious vision that most intrigues me - a sense of the sacred which is rooted in both the physical dimension (the body, the natural-supernatural world) and in the image as primary process. It is a transgressive position, defying both the Right and the Left, the Catholic church and the Marxist-intellectual vanguard of post-war Europe, seizing the irrational heart of the former and planting it in the bloodless, exhausted-because-too-rational discourse of the latter. It also calls into question the humanist background of his early education and mocks the pretensions of the bourgeoisie. Needless to say, his films and essays provoked all but the most independent of thinkers to great shows of disdain during his brief lifetime, but forty years along, now that the terms of the debate have shifted and a new audience has emerged, we can approach the work with fresh eyes, that is, if we are not too encumbered with prepackaged theories.

Watching a film like The Gospel According to St. Matthew, or Teorema, or Oedipus Rex is a blissful experience for the viewer whose first allegiance is to the aesthetic, especially for those who associate the image with a sense of the sacred. And there is a text-based infusion of the poetic as well, with whole sections of gospel lifted intact from the New Testament and used instead of dialogue in the Gospel, or quotations from Barthes, Klossowski, and Nietzsche in Salo; there is also an experimental use of silence in long segments of Porcile and Medea, where cinematic image alone carries the narrative seamlessly from one meaning to the next.

It isn't surprising that such an artist should be drawn to the ancient world of myth as being best able to articulate this sense of the real, the visible, and the physical as holy. As his friend Alberto Moravia pointed out, Pasolini had a Dionysian anthropological view of the world, a view which was able to contain his irrationality, his rejection of the dominant ideology, both capitalist and socialist, his fierce homosexual desire, his passionate love of the land and belief in the natural, 'pre-proletarian' people of southern Italy, where he spent his youth, and of the Third World in general. He was always a Marxist (despite being expelled from the Communist Party for"moral and political unworthiness") but he brought to Marxism a strong critique of its failings and consequently forged a new ideology which conflated the spiritual and the physical and fought for a world in which people and land, the roots of unschooled knowledge, ancient belief and human desire could prevail against the forces of pure reason, mechanization, and mass-consumption. It sounds like a lot, but he manages, with brilliant use of documentary-style footage, to bring a powerful sense of contemporary relevance to what would otherwise be a wildly exotic vision of humanity. It's not his best film (that honor goes to Teorema) but it's never less than beautiful to watch, and the first 10 minutes of the film alone contain a lot of the visual signs -integration of people and land, fertility rites, 'natural' faces of local, non-actors, elaborate costumes and stark symbols - which act as signs for his mythic-realist ideology, an ideology he developed throughout his career and never abandoned, not even with Salo, his most despairing and disillusioned effort. Salo evokes the ideal by virtue of its absence - the 'pleasure palace' of the neo-fascist modernists is Pasolini's full-frontal attack on contemporary culture, which seeks more than anything to exterminate difference, as exemplified by the non-Western, pre-modern paradigm.

That paradigm so saturates the other films of his 'mythic' period that even The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a semi-religious experience - not something you expect from the the work of a committed and outspoken atheist. His beautiful, dark, eroticized Christ is a revolutionary figure, a Palestinian Che to use Jonathon Jones' words (in The Guardian, 2005). Here are a few shots from that film;

Christ (played by economics student Enrique Irazoqui) was inspired by El Greco, and Byzantine art...

In this early scene by the river he looks strange - otherworldly - like a gnome or a river sprite...



Confronting an urbane-looking Satan in the wilderness (the scene was shot on Mount Etna)...



The Pharisees' incredible hats were inspired by Piero della Franscesca ...


Christ's physical beauty is his spiritual beauty. Pasolini adores the male face...

Pasolini's Christ isn't sacred in the metaphysical sense. He is a paragon of male beauty and revolutionary fervor, sacred in the way that reality is sacred, distilled to an essence of reality, a pure drop. It is the sort of thinking that animated ancient Greek religion, the power of the image, of physical perfection, of natural form and heroic action - a non-rational perception of the world, marked by passion, which reconciled dichotemies like life and death, humanity and divinity, and so made miracles possible. It is this irrational aspect of mythical thought that best served Pasolini's ends, because he wanted more than anything to discredit the rational discourse of modern Europe which denied his right to experience himself as an authentically whole being, natural and religious and ideological and free.

.

For Pasolini, nothing worth knowing could be known with the mind alone. The extent to which he dethroned the mind he experienced the sacred, the 'third world' of the body freed from mind's script, the dictatorship of reason. Looking is conceived as a political act - a way of getting out of the mind - and so the purely visual dimension of his films, the ravishingly beautiful dimension, amounts to an ideological statement and a kind of manifesto. There are other, contemporary themes, Marxist allusions, Freudian allegories (especially in the autobiographical Oedipus Rex, or the realm of the unconscious in Porcile), and a host of formal gestures that belong to the film theory discourse, neorealism and its demise, but it is his vision of an undivided (pre-rational) humanity with its abiding reverence for nature's potent magical forms which stands out as his most powerful political statement, perhaps because it is so radically poetic.

Pasolini was a poet before he was a filmmaker, one of Italy's greatest, and it shows in all of his films. The most perfectly realized poetic statement of his (film) career is the unparalleled Teorema, which reconciles his mythic vision with his discarded catholicism, his landscapes of earth, desert, and city, his past and present worlds, his leftist beliefs and his critical attitude toward leftist dogma, his disgust with the spiritual inertia of modern, bourgeois reality and his overriding commitment to the life of physical passion, sex and the body. Nothing is left out, and every theme resonates with the others, so that when we see Paolo undress in the railway station and walk naked into the desert at the end of the film, we see a sort of summation of everything Pasolini has been trying to say thus far. His natural-supernatural man (the nameless 'boy' played by a young and seductive Terence Stamp) has left the old world and entered the new, shattering the identities of every character he comes into contact with, because his 'reality' breaks the static mold of their constructed selves; the contact is shamelessly sexual in every instance, and only the lower-class maid Emilia recognizes the experience as transcendent in the religious sense; the others are driven half-mad with loss after the stranger leaves. It is an extraordinary film, intellectually and theoretically taut, strange, beautiful, painful, and eternally relevant, now more so than ever.

It's impossible to do justice to this prolific, brilliant artist in a single post, but I want to include a poem and some paintings as well, just to give an idea of his versatility and range. I'm not a fan of the portraits, but his landscapes in quicklime and glue or oil and tempera on sackcloth are lovely:

The poetry is soaring, impassioned; it skewers the truths of modern lives with its details, declares the triumph of the low-born, the unsophisticated, and the body. I will sign off with one of his earliest, collected in City Lights' Roman Poems:

.

SEX, CONSOLATION FOR POVERTY

Sex, consolation for poverty!

The whore is queen, her throne a ruin,

her land a piece of shitty field,

her sceptre a purse of red patent leather:

she barks in the night,

dirty and ferocious as an ancient mother:

she defends her possessions and her life.

The pimps swarming around

bloated and beat

with their Brindisi or Slavic moustaches

are leaders, rulers:

in the dark they make their hundred lire deals,

winking in silence, exchanging passwords:

the world, excluded, remains silent

about those who have excluded themselves,

silent carcasses of predators.

.

But from the world's trash

a new world is born,

new laws are born,

where there is no law

a new honor is born

where honor is dishonor ...

A ferocious nobility and power is born

in the piles of hovels

in the open spaces

where one thinks the city ends

and where instead it begins again, hostile,

begins again a thousand times,

with bridges and labyrinths,

foundations and diggings,

behind a surge of skyscrapers

covering whole horizons.

.

In the ease of love

the wretch feels himself a man,

builds up faith in life,

and ends despising all who have a different life.

The sons throw themselves into adventure

secure in a world which fears them and their sex.

Their piety is in being pitiless,

their strength in their lightness,

their hope in having no hope.

Wet Picture - a poem by Jaroslav Siefert

Those beautiful days
when the city resembles a die, a fan and a bird song
or a scallop shell on the sea shore
- goodbye, goodbye, pretty girls,
we met today
and will not ever meet again.

The beautiful Sundays
when the city resembles a football, a card, and an ocarina
or a swinging bell
- in the sunny street
the shadows of passers-by were kissing
and people walked away, total strangers.

Those beautiful evenings
when the city resembles a rose, a chessboard, a violin
or a crying girl
- we played dominoes,
black-dotted dominoes with the thin girls in the bar,
watching their knees,

which were emaciated
like two skulls with the silk crowns of their garters
in the desperate kingdom of love.

Quote: Nietzsche

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."

Nike's pantry

Quote: Mallarme

"If a poem is to be pure, the poet's voice must be stilled and the initiative taken by the words themselves, which will be set in motion as they meet unequally in collision."

Roberto Bolano 'The Savage Detectives'

So much has been written about Roberto Bolano since his books have come out in English translation it seems a bit redundant to add one more review to the mountain available in print and on the internet. And there is such a great review of The Savage Detectives by Benjamin Kunkel in 2007's LRB that there is really nothing further to add, except, if Garcia Marquez, magic realism, and the so-called Boom in Latin American literature left you cold, Bolano could be exactly the writer you have been waiting for, not so much because he repudiates that oeuvre (though he does) but because he represents something entirely unlike both that trend and really any trend in literature, except perhaps the Beats - his sprawling, anarchic, idealistic, almost-formless style, with its flawed, chatty, uncertain characters, its defiantly inconclusive narrative segments and breathless profusion of detail, and its repeated commitment to the idea of a thoroughly lived, embodied poetics, as opposed to the quasi-fascist, stylistically finished literature of the past, is a kind of warcry, an anti-literary statement which is both politically and aesthetically radical. You will wonder what sort of a ride this writer is taking you on, what sort of a fool he thinks you are, until somewhere near the middle of the book you recognize, through the humor, the irony, the misplaced ideals, the vanishing-into-oblivion of people and places and plans, how entirely lifelike these characters and their situations really are, how unlike the perfectly packaged narratives of other writers' characters, and how unusual, how utterly refreshing it feels to encounter this sort of thing in print. You really have to read the book to believe it. It is the sort of upheaval literature needs in order to remain relevant, to thrive and change and live. The Boom is dead! Long live Bolano!

Lars Von Trier's 'Anti-Christ'

Despite some protestations to the contrary (by principal actors Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg), Lars Von Trier's latest film, the controversial Anti-Christ is best viewed as a tale of the supernatural, with Gainsbourg playing a modern variant of the 17th-Century witch, a woman who might struggle with the evil that overwhelms her but who ultimately belongs, whether by misadventure or by nature, to the devil. It is only our insistence that a 'serious' modern film be rooted in something other than discredited superstition that causes us to reject the film as unrealistic or inappropriate. When we compare it to real life, look for psychological parallels, or try to interpret the film's many puzzling and dreamlike symbols, we are bewildered - many critics have been positively outraged - because the film is patently unlike any human experience we are familiar with, yet audiences continue to complain that the movie is unrealistic, over-the-top, shocking, pointless, and absurd. That is, they continue to demand that it conform to modern paradigms. Its first showing at Cannes early this year met with boos and hisses. One reporter actually demanded Von Trier 'justify' himself.

The story follows a married couple in the wake of their infant son's death; Dafoe plays an arrogant, misguided therapist who overrides other doctors' recommendations in taking his grief-stricken wife out of the hospital and off medication, encouraging her instead to face her crisis of grief and fear head-on. He discovers that she is afraid of 'nature' and specifically of the forest around their summer cabin in a place called Eden, and so the couple head out there in pursuit of his version of recovery, a sort of total-immersion therapy. As all readers of old fairy stories know, the descent into the woods is a descent into the hell of our unconscious, an immoral place of darkness and reversal, where everything we have learned not to be comes back to torment us. If we read this through the lens of modern history, the return of the repressed is a return to the sort of superstitious beliefs that prevailed in the 16th and 17th centuries before the Age of Enlightenment and the advance of civilized society, universal education, technological innovation, etc. In Catholic Europe this was a time of massive witch-hunts, show trials, and public execution of women for the crime of sorcery and congress with the devil, a phenomenon which served to shore up the embattled Roman church against reformist onslaughts in the minds of credulous provincial folk. It is no incidental detail that the unhinged and grief-stricken She of Von Trier's film has recently abandoned her thesis on this very episode of European history. We see sinister period engravings of witches' trials and executions pinned to the rafters in the cabin's attic, along with notes for the thesis in handwriting which becomes progressively deranged and illegible; she later admits to a feeling that women are evil and, as the film twists ever deeper, we understand this belief to be connected somehow to her out-of-control sexuality, which concludes with a horrific act of self-mutilation, and to the general malignancy of nature at large, as seen in the lurid, writhing scenes of growth and decay in what is a thoroughly sinister 'conscious' landscape. These are details straight out of the trial literature - testimonies typically included confessions of sexual perversion and boasts of power over nature or accusations of being in league with nature in its malignant, chaotic (ie. unspiritualized) aspect - nature (flesh) as enemy, as the beast. The triad of enigmatic animal familiars, the fox, deer, and crow which appear at intervals throughout the story, and the host of faceless 'sisters' who magically appear in the final scene are further clues to the supernatural essence of this tale.

Von Trier admits to having been sunk in a depression before and after shooting of the film took place, and speaks of its personal, therapeutic content, so it is not out of place to look for psychological keys, but there are no straightforward symbol-object relationships, only a fevered, nightmarish, deeply associative world in which something other than humanity prevails. We might interpret the male therapist as arrogant human rationality and the deteriorating female as everything that falls outside that definition; the relationship between the two could be the state of a human in the throes of a deep depression, struggling to both maintain connection and coherence while at the same time trying to identify the problem and reject what cannot be assimilated. But don't look for an authentic portrayal of grief and its attendant patterns in the human psyche. The film isn't about that. It is a journey to the center of the irrational human heart, where, as the fox says, chaos reigns. Its weird, gorgeous, hallucinatory visuals are entirely appropriate to this realm, as are its scenes of violence, madness and death. The film is stunning in every way, and not least of which, in the absolute fearlessness with which it was produced. This is a balls-out, no-holds-barred production, a fantasy without regard for limit, which is the only way a contemplation of our horrific past and our still-existent if repressed irrational core should be conducted. Don't be fooled by Von Trier's critics. The film is superb.

McClure's Beach

Elsa Morante 'Aracoeli"

Italian writer Elsa Morante's dazzling final novel Aracoeli has received far more than its fair share of uncomprehending critical rejection since its initial publication in 1983. Despite winning the Prix Medicis Etranger in 1985, its reception both at home and abroad has been mixed: critics have complained of its cynicism, fatalism, morbidity, and despair; Morante's only biographer Lily Tuck pronounced the novel almost pointlessly disturbing and shocking and even the introduction to the new edition currently available from Open Face Books questions the author's fatalistic philosophy, acceding that no doubt there are readers who will feel offended by the book's attitude. Offended! Americans are famously optimistic, but must our literature be morally uplifting, must there be always a development from darkness to light for our literary sensibilities to be satisfied? Let's hope not.

Aracoeli is a dark and troubling book, but its lyrical beauty and analytical precision make it compelling. Its thoroughly depressed gay narrator (43 year-old Manuele) embarks on a journey from his native Italy to his mother Aracoeli's birthplace in Andalusia in an attempt to unravel the knot of their tortured relationship. After what is admittedly a somewhat tedious first 100 pages, in which Manuele relates his present state of mind, his sexual failures, his aversion to company etc. (nothing out of the ordinary for a reader of, say, Fernando Pessoa) the book suddenly catches fire in mid-section as memories of childhood begin to flood his mind. From this point on the story is powerfully hypnotic and intense, a relentless exorcism of the demon of a ruined love, a Freudian romance in which one fragile identity is first nurtured and then twisted and crushed. After some blissful years alone with his mother the boy Manuele's world is plunged into darkness as Aracoeli first loses her second child and then succumbs to a sort of sexual mania, an obscure illness which drives her to express her inflamed desires in more and more perverse and flagrant ways. For the child whose identity is still fused to that of a devout, tender, and loving mother, the rapid and incomprehensible changes that take place in their shared locus of existence completely overwhelm his sense of security. Readers become witness to the emergence of what is easily one of the most searing existential crises this side of Dostoievsky, as Morante calmly analyzes the breach with surgical precision. We read of dark symptoms, the unnerving, ulcerated lament of Aracoeli's pleas, of her infected, convulsive movements, her strange cowardice and pathetic regression, her little, revolted moans of bizarre pain; she is variously obscene, befouled, virulent, sterile, perverse, degraded, aching and lacerated, febrile to the point of indecency.

As Manuele is slowly wrenched from his unconscious dream of being and forced to contemplate factors way beyond his understanding, he uses his imagination in fabulous ways, and the story becomes by extension a trenchant look at how and why human beings fantasize, dream, lie, and create, at the possibility that identity itself is humankind's greatest artistic product. Manuele's desperate visions are seen to be as real as anything occurring on the physical plane, perhaps more so, since they are the bedrock of his newly forming, newly warping identity. The effect is fascinating, thrilling. The scene in which he witnesses his mother respond sexually to a stranger on the beach is just flat-out brilliant, combining as it does the minutiae of perceived experience with the slightly hallucinatory qualities of concepts formed under stress. Physics and metaphysics bind together in the development of the narrative as of the child - the book becomes an object lesson in Nietzsche's epiphany that we have art so that we will not perish from the truth. I can't think of any other modern novel that so clearly maps the crossroads of truth and fiction and so directly evokes their mysterious interdependence. If this isn't a subject for great writing, I don't know what is. Morante's obtuse critics are sissies, afraid of the dark. If they must have hope, they might try recognizing it in the brilliance of this singular human voice, a writer capable of illuminating our deepest mysteries and our greatest pain.

MVFF32: 'Precious'

There is a lot of buzz around Lee Daniel's Precious:based on the novel Push by Sapphire, no doubt stoked by Oprah's ringing endorsement ("it split me open") and the presence of pop celebrities Mariah Carey (without makeup everybody) and Lenny Kravitz, but the film is ultimately just another formulaic mainstream product tricked out to look 'different' with its contrived juxtapositions of hard-core domestic violence and schmaltzy teenage glamour-pop musical fantasies. The film is entertaining, and will be a hit with audiences who prefer to contemplate what life should be like, but isn't. There are some good performances, most notably by Mo'Nique as the terrifyingly abusive and ultimately pathetic mother, but they cannot rescue the film from its horribly conventional narrative arc which, given the seriousness of the subject matter, is inappropriate, even exploitative. I haven't read the book, so the problem might begin there, but my sense is that this is an entertainment industry crime.

The story focuses on the character of Clareece "Precious" Jones, a terrifically overweight, illiterate and disenfranchised teenage kid from Harlem, pregnant for the second time with her father's baby, living on welfare with her wretched, foul-mouthed and abusive mother, and newly ejected by the New York Public School system. Things begin to look up for Precious when she enrolls in a special school where, under the compassionate tutelage of the beautiful Ms. Rain (an angel in disguise, an urban myth, or an African American fairy princess) she begins to learn to read and express herself, even talk about college. Her classmates rally around - the schoolgirls' scenes are the funniest in the film - and she finally breaks away from home after the birth of her son, who she is determined to raise herself. She is aided in this transition by her social worker Ms. Weiss (well played by Mariah Carey) and the aforementioned Ms. Rain, who moves bureaucratic mountains to get Precious situated, taking her into her own home in the interim. Precious is finally reunited with her first-born and exits the stage with both children on her way towards a new and hopeful future.

As if! This grotesquely unrealistic but entertaining film will resonate with audiences who need to believe that poverty, illiteracy, morbid obesity, incest, rape, and child abuse do not destroy souls, damage minds, and irrevocably distort people's chances for happiness in this world, that people like Ms. Rain can pluck hapless, emotionally and educationally catatonic children off the streets and 'turn them around', that life isn't so bad, we are all good people inside, and all we need is a bit more love. There are a lot of people who have good reasons for needing to believe in stuff like this, but they aren't the people behind this film, who, on their way to the bank, have swooped in on the poorest members of our society and shoved them blinking onto the runway to Never Never Land, producers and entertainment moguls who will no doubt express for a short while their deep belief in the resilience of humanity while ignoring the ways in which society continues to marginalize its weakest links and grind them down. Ignore the hype about this film, or go for the thrill of Mariah Carey without makeup, but don't think girls like Precious will come through without a sea-change in political and social consciousness. And that means, without us.

MVFF32: 'Fish Tank'

British writer-director Andrea Arnold took the film world by storm with her feature debut Red Road, a singularly realistic if slightly spooky meditation on loss, grief, and the female psyche set in Glasgow's notorious Red Road flats and featuring actors supplied by Lars Von Trier's experimental Advance Party film project. Her second feature, Fish Tank, opening in next week's Mill Valley Film Festival, considers the even more complex territory of dysfunctional family dynamics and the way in which they distort and stifle human, specifically female, development. Set in a bleak and decaying housing project in Essex, the film works sociological territory closer to home for the Dartford-born director, and it shows; the look and feel is grittier, more authentic than any of the social-realist dramas it could be compared to, more powerful by far than anything by Mike Leigh, for example, whose films are descending further and further into a pit of sentimentalized 'ordinary' heroics, and outflanking the much more gloves-off Nil by Mouth which, remarkable though that film was, cannot match the depth and subtlety of Arnold's treatment.

The film spotlights newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia, the sullen adolescent child of a desperately indifferent mother, Joanne, played by Keirston Wareing. Recently expelled from school, alienated from her friends and drifting in and out of the chaotic, abusive home, Mia is rigid with disappointment and pain, locked up behind a wall of disgust occasionally demolished by fits of defiance. For all her despicable qualities, the phenomenally bad mother Joanne is clearly reeling in a sort of hell of her own, a no-exit loop of hyper-sexualized immaturity which conditions the developing predicament of her daughter. This is where Arnold's compassionate understanding of damaged feminine psyche comes into its own. Joanne's retarded, narcissistic sexual identity remains fixed at a level barely above that of her 15 year-old daughter; she is incapable of assuming the responsibilities that come with motherhood, and so leaves both her daughters pathetically exposed to the sort of sexual predation that no doubt infected her own childhood. What we see in the mother-daughter dynamic is a snapshot of one sick, malfunctioning feminine ego at war with itself, dividing at a traumatic point of entry into two armed camps, the rejecting, defiant adolescent whose ignorance leads her to reach for love in the wrong place, and the defeated, slatternly woman whose damaged sexuality condemns her to a life of hopeless, eternal return. If we despise Joanne and root for Mia, we miss the point, for Joanne is Mia on some crucial level. This is how dysfunctional dynamics operate over generations. Other filmmakers have trodden this path, but Arnold does it with exceptional assurance, confidently walking a line between truth and sensation. There are no villains, only victims who enter moral stasis. There are no rapes, no knock-down, drag-out fights, no murders or other catastrophes, though the film is constantly skirting these conventions. The character of Connor, Joanne's boyfriend who encourages the affection of Mia and then betrays it one night on the couch while her mother is passed out upstairs, is sensitively played (by Michael Fassbender) as a gentle, humorous, attractive man whose kindness to the family is like a tank of oxygen come at a critical moment. His sexual advance to Mia proceeds according to the inexorable logic of the family, quietly, inevitably. It is as though the family is one body, expanding and contracting with Joanne's short-lived love affairs. Nobody escapes the scenario, nobody gets to define a self that is distinct from the whole. Hence the fish tank analogy, which I think denotes no escape.


For all that, the film is strangely hopeful, or at the very least, ambiguous. Its rigorous authenticity puts us in mind of what we know, experientially, to be true - that people can and do break negative patterns and escape their conditioned legacies. Mia's courage and sometimes outrageous acts of defiance point to a spirit which might be capable of achieving this. And the film's beautiful photography is a subtle reminder in itself of something slightly to one side of the grim facts, something delicate, displaced, but existent nevertheless. We might call this thing hope, if only because it is beautiful. Shots of wind-ravaged grass, or twilit, empty rooms where Mia dances by herself, of brilliant, light-filled shirts on the washing line, or the crenellated edge of a shell in a stirred wind-chime, all speak to this dimension of possibility. But it has to said that hope is more of a spectre than a real presence, perhaps conjured from a girl's imagination in order that its betrayal be rendered visible. This is the heartbreaking aspect of Mia's trajectory, her will to escape, her innocent, ignorant, absolute need to love and be loved, barely conscious of itself, groping blindly in a shrunken, booby-trapped world. There are metaphors that suggest complete hopelessness - the skewering of the fish on the river bank, the death of the traveller's horse - and then there are scenes of such poignant, breathtaking redemptive force near the end of the film, when Mia seeks revenge and encounters how close she is coming to a point of no return, that clearly reveal the potential in this embattled, confused, and lonely character. The scene where Mia takes Connor's small child into the fields and nearly loses her confounds narrative expectation in every way, cleaving so closely to the truth of its character's desperate state of mind it exposes the viewer's own conventional assumptions about what is about to happen, and what, to the filmmaker's credit, doesn't happen. It is one of cinema's extraordinary moments to be sure. Arnold's flawless decisions about where to take her characters and where not to take them brings her vision right into the center of our own similar lives. We are manipulated by cinema so often we hardly know it is happening until a director like this comes along and appeals to the terrible drama of the ordinary, our ordinary. Because most of us Thank God don't really know much about rapes and murders and such, but we do know the sort of blunt, relentless injuries real life can inflict; the raised temperature of family dysfunction, the blind acts of faith that meet with intransigence, the occasional wild gesture, the undying if inconstant nature of hope, the possibility of growth springing up in unforeseen ways. Fish Tank is about these things, and because it never swerves into conventional territory it stands alone as a masterpiece of originality, the work of what is surely one of the best and most exciting filmmakers working today.

Quote: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

"It is not the sleep of reason that produces monsters but more than anything else rationality, vigilant and unsleeping."
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Driftwood

Kim Addonizio 'what is this thing called love'

Personal truth is not an easy thing to nail down, though most writers are trying to do it, whether by allusion, extension, negation, indirection, or some other means. But it doesn't yield readily to a straightforward gaze, perhaps because under interrogation it tends to break up into multiple truths. When this happens, fractured meanings can disperse quickly in all directions, even evaporate altogether, and if it is not the writer's purpose to simply underscore the instability of all meanings then the work will lose some of the power of its intention. This weakened effect can be more noticeable in poetry, which is generally more volatile than prose, more friable, and therefore more likely to disintegrate under any but the most delicate handling. A poem is so much closer to the edge of whatever it is in us that discriminates between meaning and meaninglessness - it easily exceeds its own limits, spills from a state of coherence into what sounds merely deranged, incomprehensible - at least, to the ordinary reader, certainly to those of us not ordinarily readers at all. But it is to these quotidian souls that Kim Addonizio pitches her work, in the confidence that her personal truths will resonate in their (her/our) experience. She locates herself squarely in the middle of the ordinary, contemporary world. Her gaze is unflinching, clear-eyed, and direct, unforgiving even, and the experiences she is able to articulate do not shatter or divide under the pressure of her attention but remain intact. Each poem articulates a movement towards singularity, not away from it: it gathers and concentrates its meanings into one perfectly translucent gesture, a sort of snapshot of contemporary reality, a polaroid. She aims always, and with astonishing precision, for the naked fact, the simply true. It was the photographer Lisette Model who said the most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated, and her student Diane Arbus who so famously achieved this effect in her work, but Addonizio's best poems are like this too. They are deceptively simple, if deception is a word which can be associated with poems as raw and as honest as this. I found myself dazzled by the subtlety of her ambiguous, unclassifiable tone - it is detached but immediate, unsentimental in the extreme, but delicate, suffused with light. The work telegraphs a kind of profound disillusion, but is not hopeless on account of that. It is rather in the vein of something James Ellroy of all people wrote in his harrowing memoir, something I scrawled once in capital letters in a notebook - disillusionment was enlightenment. There is a sense in these wry, fragile, beautiful poems about sex and booze and cancer and video games and fashion magazines and loneliness and failed relationships, of awakening to something absolute about life. Perhaps it is acceptance, of a fact of life achieved through accepting it, which as anybody knows is quite an achievement, and especially so in language, which is so often deployed in the service of subterfuge. I should illustrate, but it is the pristine wholeness of the poems I want to emphasize, so rather than dissect an assortment I will just quote one in full, one of my favorites obviously, and urge readers to buy the book and test for themselves the truth of these poems against their own experience.


ON KNOCKING OVER MY GLASS WHILE READING SHARON OLDS

The milk spread,
a translucent stain
covering the word milk,

snaking down toward come,
and womb and penis, toward gashes
and swiveled, toward the graceful

grey flower and the infelicitous
errless digit, so that suddenly
the page seemed to be weeping,

the way a statue of the Virgin
in some poor but devout parish
might begin to weep, ichor streaming

from the eyes, the open palms,
so that when the girl kneeling
in the rain of the convent yard

touches the mottled white
folds of the stone robe
her lupus disappears. And I felt

as that girl must have felt,
that the Holy Mother herself
had come to reveal

the true nature of the real,
goddess in the statue,
bread in each word's

black flowering, and I rose
and went to the kitchen -
sacristy of the cupboards

tabernacle of the fridge -
to refill my glass
with her wild and holy blood.

Fava bean

Quote: Nietzsche

"Consciousness is born in relation to a being of which we could be the function."

Quote: Beckett

"There is nothing to express,
nothing with which to express,
nothing from which to express,
no desire to express -
together with the obligation to express."

Quote: Dostoievsky

"Beauty will save the world."

Quote: Picasso

"First I eat the fish, then I paint it"

Quote: Nietzsche

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both"

Quote: Gertrude Stein

"Poetry is the addressing the caressing the possessing and the expressing of nouns"

Quote: Baudelaire

"The study of the beautiful is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is vanquished"

Quote: Eugene Debs

"While there is a lower class, I am in it
While there is a criminal element, I am of it
While there is a soul in prison, I am not free"

Two Quotes: Carl Jung and Gilles Deleuze

"One might almost describe (the work of art) as a living being that uses man only as a nutrient medium, employing his capacities according to its own laws and shaping itself to the fulfilment of its own creative purpose."
Carl Jung, from Aspects of the Feminine

"The body is ... a nutritive medium in which a plurality of forces quarrel"
Gilles Deleuze

The Damned United

There was a time in the not too distant past when television's role as supreme mediator-of-all-reality went unchallenged. Its unprecedented reach and influence lent a magical potency to its creatures - TV was the stage upon which modern personality was created, nurtured, and destroyed. For British screenwriter Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen, The Last King of Scotland) the industry's glamor-days are proving to be a goldmine of material from which his strikingly original studies in human frailty and ambition are developed: Frost/Nixon is a case in point, but TV plays a pivotal role in The Queen as well, as Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth is forced to reckon with a public which has assembled en masse behind the medium itself. Actor Michael Sheen fleshes out the nooks and crannies of the media-savvy personality in both films, playing the iconic TV personality David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Britain's first pop-celebrity PM Tony Blair in The Queen.

Morgan and Sheen's latest collaboration in The Damned United is another spin on this theme of televised celebrity. There isn't a British soul alive today who won't remember, if he/she was around in the seventies, the electrifying presence of Derby County FC manager Brian Clough on the Nine O'Clock News. Clough was without a doubt the most extraordinarily gifted manager and personality the League Division football world had ever seen, and his success at Derby County intersected neatly with his unusual ability to project a media image; it was that ability that led to the sort of fame only a TV audience could generate. The Damned United, which is adapted from the sensational 2006 novel by David Peace and directed by Emmy award-winner Tom Hooper, focuses on the period in which Clough took his languishing team from the bottom of the Second Division to the top of the First in just three seasons, which coup he then reversed with a disastrous spell as manager of rival team Leeds (the damned) United. If you are a football fan, the film will take you straight to heaven, but like Nick Hornby's hilarious Fever Pitch the experience is about much more than plain football. It is a nostalgically-inflected rumination on ambition, rivalry, obsession, partnership and betrayal; a sympathetic, humorous, and complex character study which is precisely tuned to its early-seventies' working-class British scene. The young, flamboyant Clough is perfectly balanced by his much more conventional but equally committed right-hand man Peter Taylor (played by Secrets and Lies star Timothy Spall) and it is their partnership which proves to be the solid foundation beneath his success, though his rivalry with arch-nemesis Leeds United manager Don Revie (played brilliantly by Colm Meaney) is the catalyst - without his determination to upstage Revie, Clough's meteoric trajectory is unimagineable. Not that Clough acknowledges outside influences. His outrageous self-confidence ("They say Rome wasn't built in a day, but I wasn't on that particular job") is blinding, but it is also the essence of the charm that held his public in thrall. When Revie goes on to become England manager Clough abandons Taylor and moves alone into the position at Leeds; it is as if he is driven by some insane daemon to follow Revie and overtake him on his own turf, but ambition of this nature seldom profits, as all great-theatre lovers know. Clough's dramatic failure at Leeds is as steep a descent as any star has ever known, and he is forced, in 44 short days, to make acquaintance with the dark side of his own ambition, to assess its costs on his personal and public life, to endure a public humiliation at the hands of a triumphant Revie, and to pick up the pieces as best he can. What he does with those pieces is a slice of soccer history, but the film includes the details in a satisfying postscript, along with real footage of Clough and Revie, a glimpse of what was for viewers of British television in the seventies two of its most fascinating duelling identities. Because it was as a television persona that Clough catapulted himself into the imagination of his public, just as the fascinated public's overwhelmingly positive response to his success fed his ever-expanding ego and fuelled his ascent. The Damned United captures that giddy whirl and nails it firmly into the center of the gritty, no-frills, working-man's world of northern England, with its whisky-soaked boardrooms, its overflowing ashtrays and beaten up soccer fields, its mud, sweat, and rain. Filmed in glorious location at authentic Saltergate and Elland Road grounds, produced with great attention to period detail, including curious facial-hairstyles, popular paintings from Woolworth's, clips of Jimmy Hill and snippets of the test-card, and gorgeously photographed as well, with a lot of contrasting green and blue interiors (fans will appreciate the symbolism), the film is a winner on every level; beautiful to watch, well-written, funny, dramatic, and true.

It Might Get Loud

With It Might Get Loud Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, The First Year) has made his best documentary film yet, a skilfully edited biographical triptych which brings together the stories, insights, and musical talents of guitar legends Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), The Edge (U2), and Jack White (The White Stripes). The film is a searching and intelligent exploration of the artistic process as it has unfolded for each of these very different personalities. There is no mindless genuflection before their talents, only real analysis of their development in the context of their times, circumstances, and dispositions. Nor is there any of the gratuitous exposure of emotional extremes and/or scandalous episodes we normally encounter with this genre. Psychological revelation remains riveted to the point; every aspect of life, from early influences through periods of self-doubt to moments of sudden illumination remain entirely within the orbit of the artistic goal, which brings a sort of literary unity to the project as a whole. The three meet, discuss influences and approaches, swap anecdotes and jam together, but the real genius of the film is in its careful blend of each man's separate story, told in his own words and shot with great attention to the aesthetic elements that accompany any artistic trajectory. The camera is sensitive to atmosphere, to aspects of longing and nostalgia, to the seductive beauty of the instrument itself. From the opening shot of Jack White constructing a home-made guitar out of a bit of wood, some wire, and a coke bottle on the porch of a Tennessee farmhouse, to the improvised performance of In My Time of Dying towards the end, the film delivers scene after scene of fascinating and sometimes (for music lovers) ecstatic material - Jack composing and performing an original song on camera, or leaving smears of blood on his guitar; The Edge describing artistic revelation in terms of trees, of the importance of jumping off into the unknown; Jimmy being interviewed on British television as a boy interested in biological research, playing air guitar to Link Wray; fantastic clips of Zeppelin, of Top of the Pops in the sixties, of U2 in a sea of thousands. Each is located in his early environment - Jimmy as an art student in 60's London, The Edge as a schoolboy in depressed 70's Dublin, and Jack haunting broken-down rock-averted hip-hop Detroit; each describes his growing addiction to music, the seizing upon new sounds, the development of a personal aesthetic rooted in cultural conditions, and the near fetishizing of the object of the guitar, conceived so differently by all three. It is the sheer range of approach covered by these artists that becomes more and more apparent; Jimmy's attitude is frankly erotic, joyful, totally living at every point; The Edge pursues a more redemptive angle - he speaks of searching and belief, of trying to make sense of a senseless environment; Jack is the embodiment of a sort of seething punk-energy, a defiance, and a refusal: when you become satisfied, he says, you just die. Statements like this one are rendered more definitive by their contrasts, so that we really see the stylistic development of each artist in a kind of relief, distinct, and yet complementary, resonant with a sense of shared passion. It's an illuminating film, elegant and coherent, with as much to say about artistic commitment generally as about its famous subjects in particular. And the music is just - sublime.

Excerpt from a poem by Philip Larkin

"If I were called
To construct a religion
I should make use of water"

from Water

Land's End 2

SFJFF 29: Defamation

Defamation is a brilliant and irreverent documentary film which should receive a lot of critical attention and distribution - but probably won't. Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir's fifth documentary focuses on the politically radioactive issue of anti-semitism and how it is understood today by Jews in Israel, Europe and the US. His seemingly unlimited access to ADL director Abe Foxman alone is worth the price of admission, but his enquiry ranges from New York to Auschwitz to Jerusalem to Moscow, as he interviews controversial heavyweights from both sides of the debate, including veteran Israeli peace-activist Uri Avnery, recently defrocked scholar Norman Finkelstein, anti-AIPAC crusaders Walt and Mearsheimer, Israeli Minister in Charge of Anti-Semitic Affairs Isaac Herzog, and British professor David Hirsch as well as rabbis in Moscow and Kiev, Israeli high school kids on their first trip outside Israel - to Auschwitz, and his grandmother in Jerusalem, whose comical opinions about non-Israeli Jews are the most stereotypically anti-semitic of the entire film. What is so extraordinary about all these interviews is the accomplished way in which Shamir draws his subjects out; with his combination of compassion, friendly irreverence, and a willingness to listen, knowing when to speak and when to shut up, he completely disarms everybody he meets, which for the armed personnel of this issue may prove discomfiting. Even background music, which is the sort of carefree jingle we associate with America's Funniest Videos or March of the Penguins works effortlessly behind the scenes to puncture every doom-laden thought bubble before it can get off the ground, and for this subject, taking in as it does centuries of persecution, the horrors of Auschwitz and Birkenau, sixty years of traumatized recollection and the grim determination to never forget, that is no mean feat. What Shamir manages to do is to insert a grain of yeast into the unleavened bread which is his ethnic legacy - not to belittle his people's suffering, but to question its continuing sinister effects on the Jewish psyche and body politic.

Foxman comes over as something of a buffoon, but he is not demolished, and there is no malice in the portrait; similarly with his various accolites and affiliates, like ADL members Harvey and Suzanne Prince, who are at worst presented as somewhat misguided but well-meaning aunts and uncles. There are revealing interviews with other members on a trip to the Babi Yar memorial site in Russia, who speak of Israel as their insurance policy. Without Israel, one woman opines, there isn't a safe Jew in the world. Such fears seem exaggerated in light of earlier scenes in which Shamir has combed ADL records for evidence of recent anti-semitic acts in the US and come up with nothing more alarming than a handful of complaints about insensitivity to Jewish holidays on the part of employers.

More poignant is the coverage of the high school students on their trip to Auschwitz, youngsters who feel guilty for not having any feelings about the site; who lay stranded in their hotel rooms after dinner because they have been instructed by secret service agents in attendance on the dangers awaiting Jews in the streets of Warsaw - in 2008. In one revealing episode, a teacher wonders if the death industry that is Jewish education in the horrors of its past has gone too far: we perpetuate death, he says, and that's why we will never become a normal people - we live too much in it. At which serendipitous juncture, a guide interrupts the interview to deliver a short reprimand about sitting on a memorial where 20 people died. By the time the children experience their first feelings of shock and horror, we wonder with Shamir what is served by this education in hate and how far the students have been manipulated. One girl spoke of a desire to kill. Perhaps it is a legitimate response - but what purpose does it serve?

The film veers into the political rapids with its coverage of Finkelstein, the de Paul University professor whose career has been derailed by determined opponents. Finkelstein's views run counter to the ADL position and are sharply critical of Israel; his book The Holocaust Industry is a blistering indictment of Israel's cynical misuse of the holocaust to further its own ends which, as the son of holocaust survivors himself, he bitterly condemns. He is thus positioned as Foxman's opposite number, and the terms of the debate are defined. Either charges of anti-semitism are cynically deployed against legitimate criticism of the Israeli state (Finkelstein), or criticism of Israel is a cover for the new anti-semitism (Foxman). Scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who have been accused of anti-semitism since the publication of their book The Israel Lobby, enter the fray at an oblique angle, claiming that the efforts of the lobby in Washington to steer policy decisions are ultimately harmful to Israel, which is becoming an armed camp hysterical with issues of security, as well as harmful to Americans. David Hirsch is the only speaker at the ADL annual conference to mention the occupation of Palestine, the longest illegal occupation in history at 40+ years and counting, for which he is roundly condemned by all present, and compared to a battered woman, and, finally, Uri Avnery weighs in with his view that fears of anti-semitism are bullshit, that American Jews are scared of their own shadows, poking around like Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass, looking for anti-semites behind every tree.

This is pretty bracing stuff, and it is clear where Shamir's sympathies lie - which is to say, they are with his people, but not with those who wish his people to be forever conditioned by the horrors of the past. That he manages to communicate this with humor and compassion is a small miracle. His delightful personality brings with it much needed light and air to dark and forbidding territory, and if there are ears to hear it, his message is one of hope, for normalcy, for a future Jewish identity unconditioned by the legacy of exceptionalism, vigilance, and fear. It will be interesting to see how this film fares in our cutthroat world of media-control and special interests.

SFJFF 29: I am Von Hofler, Variation on Werther

In 1983, Hungarian media artist Peter Forgacs established the Private Photo and Film Archive Foundation in Budapest, from which he has created 15 documentary films in a series called Private Hungary. Each film assembles old photographs and home movie footage and combines them with Forgacs' own video segments and interviews in a loosely woven montage which chronicles a life. I am Von Hofler is the story of Tibor Von Hofler, dilettante, chemist, amateur filmmaker, and spoiled son and heir to the estate of well-known industrialist Jakob Von Hofler. Video interviews with the 103 year-old Tibor and segments of his 9.5mm home-movie footage are curiously combined with bits of a 1975 film about Werther, Goethe's famous sorrowful literary character, who was supposedly modelled on Tibor's great-great grandfather. The whole is accompanied by translated narrative, much of it in the form of letters between family members, lovers, and friends. It is a peculiar, original, and subjective approach to history, which speaks via aural/visual disconnects and surrealistic combinations and overlays to aspects of life and character not usually found in historical documentary. The catalogue blurb mentions scenes of Tibor jauntily playing piano as the mother of his only son is heard pleading for money, of erotic photos combined with stern letters from his mother, and of Tibor and friends enjoying holiday time on a lake while his aunt describes conditions in the ghetto. I would add to this the even more remarkable spectacle of young Werther trying to drown himself in a plastic bag full of water edited together with ancient movie footage of a lady being spanked (hard, with a stick) in the garden, as Tibor's abandoned fiancee (he left her three days before the wedding) heaps scorn upon his head.

There is footage of public events, of private funerals, of the dead bodies of his parents, of his infant son playing in a meadow of tall grass, of swimming and climbing and dancing and eating and taking showers: Von Hofler was, among other things, an assiduous chronicler of his own life long before Forgacs came along. But the picture that floats to the surface of this streaming, impressionistic facade is of a strangely disconnected, selfish, frivolous man who cared little for his family and even less for our opinion. The film is compelling anyway, for its air of nonconformity, its strangeness, and perhaps also for the voyeuristic sense of pleasure we experience when people we don't necessarily admire continue to show us who they are.

SFJFF 29: The Wedding Song

In The Wedding Song Karin Albou casts a lingering, sensual eye on the Sephardic roots she glossed in her first feature, La Petite Jerusalem. Her second film is a story of friendship between two teenaged girls whose families live side by side in Tunis during World War II. Nour is Moslem and Myriam Jewish, but they inhabit a harmonized cultural landscape where Jews and Moslems move through one another's lives with ease, sharing space in the hammam, in the market, at the wells and in the courtyards of their crumbling but still beautiful dwellings. The rituals of domestic life are lovingly filmed and saturated with authentic color and detail; there is a pronounced emphasis on the feminine, including frank exploration of budding sexuality and of ordinary physical intimacy, but the film ultimately fails to deliver much more than a loose collection of stereotypes, as each character proceeds to conform to the simplified cultural paradigms we are already familiar with. Myriam is educated, Nour is illiterate and credulous, her fiance Khaled is a narrow-minded Islamist whose head is filled with unsophisticated bigotries; both girls are fabulously innocent, completely subject to the wills of their parents and (soon enough) their husbands. No doubt there are truths to be found in these conventional forms, but the story which is their logical outcome is too predictable and even sentimental, which is a pity for a film that is in other respects quite bold.

Briefly stated, the story hinges on the fissure that opens in the girls' idealized relationship when the Nazis enter Tunis in 1942 and foment racial hatred there. There are flickers of the complex historical situation which precedes this period, the legacy of French colonial rule in North Africa and the ways in which it impacted Jews and Arabs differently, but such themes are quickly dropped. The seismic world events which are the story's immediate context are so dimly imagined it is as if they are cardboard fixtures at the back of the stage in what feels like the school play. The overall impression is of a culturally sensitive but politically unsophisticated thinker at work, whose sensibilities and talents would be better showcased in less dramatic and - for world history - less critical contexts.

The treatment of Islam is more nuanced, and falls in with Albou's general observations about Moslem-Jewish co-operation; it is Nour's encounter with one of the many pro-Judaic verses in the Qu'ran which prompts her final reconciliation with her friend. But such an ending can really only satisfy the sentimentalists among us. When Albou wakes up to some of life's more intriguing complexities, and does not look to cataclysmic world events to provide her dramatic openings, but trusts in her aesthetics, she could make something really interesting.

Quote: Gaston Bachelard

"To love an image is always to illustrate a love"
from Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, 1942

Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher

Translated by Baudelaire and Mallarme, celebrated by Gaston Bachelard, and interpreted by filmmaker and critic Jean Epstein, Edgar Allan Poe has always been more esteemed, more beloved, in France than in his native land. The SF Film Society's last-minute decision to screen Epstein's La Chute de la Maison Usher alongside Watson and Webber's short American version gave us an inspired lesson in contrasts. Both films are avant-garde interpretations made in 1928, but Watson and Webber's film, with its sharp angles and effects, clashing slices of blacks and whites, multiple exposures, heavily made-up actors and art-deco sets couldn't have been further from the essence of Poe's haunted and dreamlike meditations. Epstein's beautiful film, on the other hand, seemed to offer itself as the medium through which Poe's spirit might speak - and what could be more apropos of its subject than that?

Poe was never very interested in the nuts and bolts of life. His territory was always Death, not the fact of it, but the ongoing experience of it, which influence kept him magnetized to movements of his unconscious, to the ambiguous figures of his imagination, to the symbolic, the dialectic, and, ultimately, to the static, melancholic vision of unity in which his love was forever dissolved. For Poe, such a vision was Beauty itself, Beauty as the sign of Death in the soul of the dreamer, or the artist. Like the anima, she was always feminine, and like the mother who died when he was still a boy, she was forever young, unchanging (despite the various characters in which he reincarnates her soul) and unattainable. Epstein's film conforms to this oneiric sensibility with its haunted, windswept, cavernous interiors, its vast curtains of billowing silk, calligraphic winter trees, pale, dripping wax, wide spirals of dusty stairs, mist, smoke, and water. The filmmaker combines as many as seven of Poe's stories, and his Roderick Usher is compelled to finish an Oval Portrait of his wife Madeline despite her succumbing to a wasting illness that advances with each brushstroke. This Orphic hymn to art's fascination with death is Poe's love letter to his lost mother, developed by Epstein with tailored sensitivity, as he weaves about the dead-undead Madeline a gorgeous visual spell, a gown of diaphanous white tulle which streams from her head and floats behind her coffin on the lake. And just as the film's conjuring effect is uncannily synchronous with Poe's themes, so the silence of this silent film is curiously well suited to its subject, achieving a positive formal status entirely unlike the technological limitation with which we normally associate it. Limitation - like loss - achieves in this film its opposite pole under the influence of artistic compression. Death reaches its far shore and becomes, magically, positively charged, a reversal typical again of Poe himself, that water-gazer.

Roderick's sensitivity to sound extends the application of the silent motif; his ears are tuned to the heartbeat in the coffin in the crypt across the lake; grosser sounds begin to snap his nerves like the strings of the abandoned guitar which break one by one as Madeline stirs. When the suit of armor comes crashing to the floor and the smoke from the enormous hearth replaces the mist of the lake we know we are in a possible-impossible realm of inversion, where fire and water, living and dead are approaching some sort of supernatural betrothal, and the husk of human limitation is cast aside. It sounds so out of all proportion now that I write it, but this exquisite elegy defies reality, giving us not images of Poe's ideas, but perfect correspondences.

Land's End

Joseph Cornell's Dreams

For 20 years Exact Change have been publishing interesting works by surrealists, avant-garde writers and artists, expressionists, cubists, dada poets and others. The covers alone (30 of which are collected on the back page of this summer's issue of Bookforum) are a tantalizing selection of early 20th-century painting, collage, photography and illustration; titles range from Unica Zurn, Denton Welch and Kurt Schwitters to 'first surrealist' Lautreamont, Fernando Pessoa, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud and Gerard de Nerval and include the written works of Pablo Picasso, Leonora Carrington, Georgio de Chirico, Morton Feldman, and John Cage, to name a few. Joseph Cornell's Dreams is the fruit of editor Catherine Corman's extensive reading in Cornell's diaries, currently housed in the Smithsonian Archive. The title is precise - 116 pages of this 145-page volume are directly transcribed dreams, dating from 1944 through 1972; some are just two or three lines long, so it is a quick read. There is very little in the way of editorial interpretation, which is probably a blessing, just a modest guide to themes, and some very interesting appendices detailing the influence of Pascal and Descartes on Cornell's 'philosophy of dreaming'. The dreams themselves are a bit of a mixed bag, though read together they are completely disarming, and if you love Cornell's work you will want to read them. Some are enchanting, and the seeds of his work are plainly visible in all; many feature just one or two arrested or nearly motionless images; there are lots of windows and doors, or rooms or boxes, antiques or old-fashioned objects, books of old photographs, birds, toys and dolls. Here's a selection of some of the best;

5/11/47 - window for icebox + seeing in basement of neighbors house 2 pet cockatoos in cage dimly illuminated (house dark)

9/28/51 - visit to museum where curator showed me a large carved wooden horse the cover of which came off to reveal inside a porcelain set of spice jars ...

9/13/52 - an old-fashioned wagon from which a middle-aged woman in a blue and black printed blouse was in the act of tumbling from the frame of the door into the sea after a pair of scissors ...

10/31/61 - pulling into a station + noting the interior of a large old-fashioned school - large glass case with stuffed birds or animals - old-fashioned desks - no people ... by the shore of a body of water - strangely wonderful (or vice versa) atmosphere - a group of older girls + some baby lambs - something about the girls picking up the baby lambs ...

11/18/62 - cooking custard with skin - dropping it - retrieved by a young man from the floor ... in the dream girls were in their stone uniforms

12/18/65 - dreaming out of windows ...

3/28/68 - elderly, revered woman poet being entertained in her home ... juggling rubber balls

5/14/68 - "CAPRICE" in large black letters on a board in a kind of impromptu open-air booth for checking wraps, etc ...

11/17/68 - river or large body water fishes trapped pointing straight up ...

1/21/71 - 2 old rocks one most curious shape 2 tiny ceramic animals came tumbling out as though the ages had hewn them out a shelter ...

2/29/72 - digging (with hands) into white sands to unearth a bunch of rusty fish-hooks ...

Muni depot b/w 22nd and 23rd

Nuri Bilge Ceylan: 'Three Monkeys'

When Robert Lowell said a poem is an event, not the record of an event, he was referring to a sort of self-sufficiency that can belong to a work in any medium - provided that work really flies, and is not simply an exercise in form. When a film achieves this state, it doesn't need to be 'about' anybody or anything, though it might possess that dimension - it is a phenomenon in its own right. Turkish photographer-turned-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan achieves this sort of phenomenal effect with his latest feature Three Monkeys. The film is a masterpiece, winning for Ceylan Best Director at Cannes in 2008. His earlier films are beautiful to watch, and they scatter before us some lovely and mysterious visual portents of what is to come, but Three Monkeys just transcends expectations altogether. Every element of the film is flawlessly synchronized - sound, light, color, scene, character and narrative all reinforce one another in variation, reprise and counterpoint. There are just four characters, woven together in a tightly braided ring which closes in infinitesimal degrees of action and reaction toward a conclusion which has in retrospect a strong whiff of the inevitable, of having proceeded from its postulates, as literary critic Lawrence Powell would say, in the same way a Shakespearean tragedy proceeds. When aspiring politician Servet is involved in a hit-and-run accident on the eve of the election, he asks his driver Eyup to take the rap in exchange for an unspecified sum. Eyup's wife Hacer and teenaged son Ismail are left exposed and vulnerable by his detention for a nine-month spell in prison, and when Hacer begins a short affair with Eyup's old boss, the characters are realigned according to their fate in a slow, deliberate uncoiling which is quietly devastating to watch. These are people doomed to struggle inside the malignant course which is their destiny, a spiralling shape like the unbroken peel of an orange that not only swerves through acts of adultery, deception and murder, but even hints at a sort of eternal return that extends to people generally. It is a shape that is coaxed out of darkness into light, and its final bend into eternity doesn't arrive until the penultimate scene, in which a twist of the original set-up is inflicted upon a character as peripheral to Eyup's life as Eyup is to Servet.

The faces of these tormented souls are microscopically observed; this is a story told in beads of sweat, in buds of day-old stubble and quickened crows-feet, in narrowed eyes and expressions of suspicion, regret, alarm, surprise, appeal, resignation, nausea and shame ... it is a literary treatment of the suffering human animal, an exercise in observation reminiscent of great Russian novels. For cinematic antecedents, Tarkovsky comes immediately to mind, especially the interiors of Stalker, though Ceylan cites the Japanese Ozu as his favorite director. The film makes use of super-high contrasts bled of color and reinfused with one or two color patches close on the spectrum; a typical scene would have an otherworldly hue altogether, of softened blacks and creams, with a touch of pale blue and perhaps some green in the waves, or of dense shadows with flares of silver which bend and pool up around hard edges. In an interview with The Guardian, Ceylan speaks of his preponderance of reds, but I suppose like a poem the film is open to different readings, because it was the blues and greens and even occasional hints of yellow I noticed and loved. This use of color and light says something important which is nevertheless difficult to articulate. It arouses a response, a recognition which originates just below the rational, as color in paintings does; it references meanings which have to do with our silent experience of life, our felt experience, of sadness, or stasis, or danger. Sometimes light is used in very purposeful ways - there is a remarkable scene in which Ismail's long-dead brother re-emerges from light into form, as if death is a landscape of light so dazzling it renders the dead invisible by over-exposure. But its deployment is more often a matter of suggestion, of oblique understandings which take place on levels of instinct and emotion.

Ceylan uses sound in similar ways, inserting isolated aural signals into deep chasms of intimate silence. The effect of this minimalist approach is to delineate a psychological angle relative to the moment, such as the way in which memories are formed, or the way in which time distorts experience and vice versa. When Hacer is driving home with Servet for the first time, the words he speaks during one part of the journey are superimposed over a scene of the two of them sitting in silence some moments earlier. This slight aural disconnect illustrates in the most understated way imaginable how we can experience one another in the moment and in memory, and how understanding of events can be delayed. Sound effects in this dreamlike narrative are never arbitrary or incidental. They are divided between the intimate (squeaking doors, rustling fabric, running water) and the universal, atmospheric, or extensive (locomotive wheels, wind in grass, rain, thunder) with very little in between, a variation on the extremes of black and white we see in the visual register.

Such contrasts serve again to locate this small knot of characters within a sort of grand neo-mythic frame. They are highlighted, amplified, isolated, picked out against a stark elemental backdrop like figures in a Greek play. The film's final scene makes this explicit, as Eyup stands in tiny silhouetted human form against a gorgeous moving panorama of waves, thunderclouds, light-spokes and rain. There is a static quality to this image which refers back to the filmmaker's origins as photographer, and it is precisely in these origins that I think the film as a whole derives its genetic force, because photographic and visual art contain the qualities of self-sufficiency, of finality, and of the absolute that are distinguishing features of this film. Three Monkeys is definitely an event, an experience both voluptuous (in its surfaces) and austere (in its tone), and because it exercises the microcosmic and macrocosmic imagination simultaneously, we might spend a lifetime tracing its mythic themes in one of its grains of sand.