Can’t give you anything, but love

I met my first Cassavetes moment six years ago in a script writing class.  It was the long and exhausting scene that comes at the end of A Woman Under the Influence and we watched it alongside another brilliant domestic moment, the scene in Network where William Holden tells his wife he’s in love with Faye Dunaway.  Later, I saw Shadows and Faces and Opening Night.  Then I wrote about The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and now his films are stuck under my skin and almost every tiny thing links back to a Cassavetes moment.  This has ruined countless conversations. Everything will be going along swimmingly, stories, jokes, shared wonder at lovely things, and then a word or an image will remind me of Gena or Seymour, wild laughter and endless glasses of scotch.  After that, I’ll gush uncontrollably while the other person’s attention wanes and they begin to wish they were somewhere else.

The other day Cadillac said, in reference to some kind of rot, ‘well botulism is the same everywhere,’ and immediately I was in the dressing room of The Crazy Horse West and Cosmo Vitelli was telling a sinking joke, ‘they got botulism and died!’ and laughing as though the rest of the room were laughing with him.  I’m always urging people to see Cassavetes’ movies, and then worrying they won’t like them and wondering if we’ll still be friends afterwards.  It’s a problem, because I think I might be becoming the very kind of person that annoys me the most.  The person Jonathan Lethem describes in the first part of his essay, ‘Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes’, the one who says, ‘Well quit saying you love me because if you don’t love that movie you don’t love me because I am that movie, that movie is me.’  Oh, help!

There are lots of reasons why I love Cassavetes so much.  I love his openness and the way his films ask questions and then answer them with more questions.  I love his images, the way he lets the frame become an abstract blur of hair and limbs when the characters come too close to the camera and how he lets the camera be curious, swooping after the characters as their bodies try to somehow express some terrifying primal feeling.  I love that he is so articulate about the inarticulable, that he gathers up all the things we feel but can’t put into words, and makes the film — the lighting, the composition, the camera movement —convey them.  Those myths you hear about him being an amateur director and a kind of idiot savant are bullshit.  I can’t think of another director whose images reflect so precisely the sensation of the character’s world.  There’s not a chance you can pull that off by accident.  Nor can I think of one who had such acuity about blindness — the way we so often fail to listen, fail to know what other people are feeling, fail to understand what it is they want.  Cassavetes loved Nicholas Ray, and I can see a shared commitment to communication in their films.  Just as Ray used the frame as a visual mirror of inner conflict, Cassavetes’ camera enacts the messy emotional binds his people are in so that we can feel how they feel and experience, just a little, what it is to be them.  Look at the lens flare in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.  It marks the frame so frequently and with such deliberate placement — how many times does the flare obscure Cosmo’s face?  — that it has to be telling us something, leading us to some realisation about this doomed man, this creator whose only art is a series of distinctly un-titillating strip shows.

And what about the way his camera bestows such dignity on his characters, even in the most undignified situations.  I’m thinking of Florence in Faces as she urges Chet to kiss her and Margarita in Love Streams, dancing slinkily with her daughter’s lover, two women whose youth has long past but whose desire and longing for love has not.  These scenes could so easily be played for the grotesque, for laughs, they’re scenes that in front of another camera could be unbearably mean.  Watch how respectfully the camera follows Mabel as she careens around the living room at the end of A Woman Under the Influence.  Cassavetes refuses to say, this woman is crazy, she’s nuts!  He doesn’t judge Nick either, when he gives his children beer and hypes Mabel up instead of calming her down.  They’re all just people, and sometimes they act foolish and lose their shit and upset everybody, but isn’t that what living is all about?

I could keep going.  I could describe Meade Roberts stunning performance as Mr Sophistication, the extraordinary dialogue in Love Streams, the beauty of Shadows.  But I’ll stop.  I’m taking Cadillac to see his first Cassavetes film on Wednesday.  I hope he likes it.

 

Blue Valentine

As Public Enemy reminded me last Wednesday night, don’t believe the hype.  I was hoping the hype when I went to see Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance) and I left disappointed.  Blue Valentine is actually a good film, but it isn’t ‘Revolutionary Road for generation y’ (The Vine), it doesn’t have ‘an ingenious temporal structure’ (Slate) and nor is it a confirmed tear-jerker.  Cadillac and I left dry eyed, and I’m not convinced it’s because we’re heartless. (I sooked all the way through Where the Wild Things Are.)  A few references have been made to Cassavetes but I feel like these comparisons miss the mark.  Cassavetes’ relationships are loose-ended and the dynamics between the characters messier.  His peripheral characters are as fleshy as the stars — relationships never happen between just two people.  There is wonder and discovery in a Cassavetes marriage and nothing ever really ends, it just goes on breaking, the pitch rising and falling as everyone struggles along bitter with drink and false laughter. While Cassavetes puzzles over what a marriage might be, Cianfrance knows.  This is it, he seems to be saying, watch it and weep.

Without a mention of Tom Waits’ moody song of the same name, Blue Valentine looks back as the relationship between a just past young and worn out married couple reaches its close.  The film has a dewy pink and blue colour palatte and a gently shifting camera perspective that reflects Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams)’s rocky grounding.  This is a love that is out of whack from the beginning.  The two meet while Cindy is trying to extricate herself from a coupling with a thick-headed jock, who we see giving her a thuggish, condom free banging on a dorm room couch.  He comes inside her and she washes herself out with water.  She’s either naïve or hopeful here, but I would’ve thought a medical student would realise this isn’t a safe method of contraception.  She meets Dean, and Dean is everything a boy in love should be.  Sweet, funny and a mean singer, Dean is also blindly romantic.  He adores Cindy, and when she discovers she’s pregnant they make a trip to the registry office and leave man and wife.  I thought the child was clearly not Dean’s, but Cadillac argues that this is vague.  In any case, Dean is a boy so in love he sacrifices his own life for Cindy and inevitably ends up an angry, frustrated man.  Dean’s arc is true, but there is a false note to Ryan Gosling’s performance.  His Dean seems to be two irreconcilably different people, or maybe it’s just poor styling.  His younger self looks and acts like an extra member of Grizzly Bear (who made the soundtrack) while his older style is an irony free filling-station wife-beater.

It’s Michelle Williams’ performance of Cindy that is the best thing about the film.  I’ve liked Williams since she played the only spunk in Dawson’s Creek, but I’ve never noticed what a tremendously physical actor she is before now.  There is a startling honesty to her movements.  Her shoulders are rigid and slightly slumped, and her hands are busy, making breakfast for Frankie, pushing her hair behind her ears.  She moves with the purpose of someone who can’t stop for fear of collapsing. On an overnight getaway to a lurid couples hotel, she showers herself with a frightening physical panic, wiping her hands over her face over and over as if she wants to wash herself away while Dean tries to engage her in sex.  Later, drunk and flat on the floor with her husband lurching desperately over her, she clenches her fists behind his head so tightly you can feel her nails cutting into her palms.  At the end of the film, she stands by her parents kitchen sink, one hand hanging like a on her hip like an anchor, her face blank and closed.  It’s this that’s affecting about Blue Valentine, the perfectly rendered image of a not yet middle aged woman so completely spent.

Hopscotch

I’m about to give up when I hear Cadillac calling out.  He’s found it.  White glinting marble, the names etched into it so that from a distance they’re hidden.  It’s plain (which is at it should be) and clean and new-looking (which is a surprise).  Under his name is a hole.  A sagging rose, stalk like the crooked ribs of a lost umbrella, juts out.  The hole is stuffed with messages, metro tickets, pebbles and tiny keepsakes.  So many people leave metro tickets for the dead that I begin to wonder if you need one to pass into the afterlife.  On top of this precious trash is a torn page with a hopscotch drawn on it in blue biro.

It’s a gesture to Julio Cortazar’s most famous book — one of the titles on my top five blow-me-away book list.  I still remember how I first read it, in tiny bursts that suited its brief, skittering chapters, on the ferry between Circular Quay and Kurraba Wharf.  It’s slow though, this book, with its lurching population and crowded happenings.  Everything is detailed, each buttonhole, nail and twist of the mouth.  The characters feel one thing and then another and we share every capricious moment.  There are the digressions, the expendable chapters that slip in between the narrative ones — slivers of reportage, jokes, wordplays, letters, the writings of the fictional Morelli, and affairs not covered in the plot.  As the hero Oliveira states, ‘There’s no such thing as a general idea.’

I bought Hopscotch on the back of a single prose poem.  ‘Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch’ was a set piece in my high-school English class, and I ripped it out of the book and stuck it in my diary.  I still think about it often but I’m not sure I’ve ever understood it.  In the collection there were other tales of ordinary things that take on extraordinary meaning — tubes of toothpaste, hairbrushes, hammers.  Under Cortazar’s inky fingers these objects are politicised and used to make sly digs at the drudgery of being a good citizen.  Hopscotch too, is full of these odes to the everyday.  ‘The sun began to hit Oliveira in the face sometime after two in the afternoon.  Besides the heat, it made it very hard for him to straighten out nails by hammering them on a tile on the floor (everybody knows how dangerous it is to straighten out a nail with a hammer, there is a moment when the nail is almost upright, but when you hit it with the hammer again it gives half a turn and pinches the fingers you’re holding it with; there’s a quick perverseness about it all), stubbornly hammering them on a tile (but everybody knows that) stubbornly on a tile (but everybody) stubbornly.’ (page 228) That pesky nail.  Like the thrumming of the hammer, the phrase beats stubbornly.  The frustrating rhythm, the repetition of the word ‘hammer’ and the turned phrase doubling the feeling of trying to straighten the nails.

Hopscotch is full of humour and Cortazar pokes fun at everyone.  The main characters, a group of multicultural bohemians, are drawn lovingly and then gently derided for their intellectual indulgence.   There is a brilliant moment not far into the main narrative, where Oliveira wanders through Paris in the rain.  ‘“Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity,” Oliveira repeated. “But Jesus, I’m going to get soaked,”’ (page 99) To avoid making the puddle in his shoe any worse he slips into a piano concert given by one Berthe Trépat.  The programme is absurd and the old man who introduces the concert describes each work with sycophantic admiration.  ‘The Three Discontinuous Movements by Rose Bob, one of Madame Trépat’s favourite students, had their start in the reaction aroused in the spirit of the composer by the sound of a door being slammed shut, and the thirty-two chords which made up the first movement were the resulting repercussions of that sound on the aesthetic plane;’ (page 101) And on it goes in this bubbling spirited prose, without pause, the musical patter of the language driving the book on.

In Argentina, Cortazar’s writing is everywhere.  He left at 30 and spent the rest of his life in Paris, but he is Argentinian, and that, it seems, is what counts.  The café he frequented in Buenos Aires advertises the fact, and his books are sold at newsstands.  From afar, he spoke out against military dictatorships in Latin America, but I think there is more to why he is so celebrated there.  Perhaps his writing reflects back to the people of Buenos Aires just how they’d like to see themselves.  His characters are intellectual, artistic, cosmopolitan.  They are frequently blind to their own self-indulgent naivety, but this is laughed at gently, and besides, a little misplaced ego is better than becoming a product of the state.  And perhaps he captures a certain mood that is not unlike the tango, passionate and reserved at the same time, the rhythm more like a march than a dance, pulled and stretched at will.

Towards an Elegant Solution

An old review of the Peter Cripps’ exhibition that was on in June. I wrote this for a competition that I didn’t win, so I’m putting it here. Yay! for blogs and their publish buttons.

On entering the main gallery at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) for the first part of Peter Cripps’ retrospective, you are immediately made aware of the space. Large panels of masonite and dulled mirror stretch around the walls and up across the ceiling, forming a curved space inside the rectangular room. The unevenly hung planks draw attention to the height of the ceiling and the narrowness of the gallery. This work, Another History for H.B and R.L (1991) was re-fitted around ACCA’s unusual shape, and it reveals the surprise of a gallery being so long and thin. It’s like an aerated tunnel – standing inside you feel the curve arching over your head, but the gaps let you see into the beyond.

Cripps is a curator as well as an artist and so space, and the interplay between work, gallery and spectator, is vital to his installations. The human scale of Field (1970-2010) and Construction Series (1974-1980) invite the viewer to engage with the works as if in conversation. Field is a collection of spindly wood and brass tripods. Standing the height of a tall person, the legs are crowned with slender brass rods and neat rectangular mirrors. These reflect the viewer’s face cut through with brass. Like dysfunctional surveyors tools, they are sturdy, yet unbalanced, and the tension created between the graceful piping and the heavy wooden legs is unsettling.

Construction Series shares the lightness of the brass and mirrors. Along one wall, makeshift forms made from toilet rolls and cheese boxes poke out of the gallery walls like blind hands. Cripps gives these discarded everyday objects a new life, delighting in their forms and shapes. There’s a playful link here to the cars children make out of empty tissue boxes with toilet rolls for wheels, but Cripps takes away all allusions: the objects are presented in and of themselves. On the opposite side of the room is a line of small mirrors, placed so they tilt toward the ground. By celebrating the discarded and making the useful uncomfortable to use, Cripps questions the relationship between functionality and objecthood.

Two works that explore this exchange directly are State Library of Victoria Commission Proposal (1991) and Display Culture for H and d.M and R.M (2010). The first, a never realized sculpture designed for the lawns of the State Library of Victoria, looks like a wardrobe or three-paneled display case. Drawers tilt open, but they are false ¬– just the shape of a drawer without a cavity. There are glass-fronted shelves but these too are useless, the glass fixing their emptiness. Display Culture is a large wooden structure that looks like a storage system with an arch in the centre. Made of untreated marine ply, it could be found stretching along a wall at one of Melbourne’s bars, filled with knick-knacks, records and wine bottles. Here, it stands opposite a wall of butcher’s paper that has been faintly marked with squares. Cripps admires the work of Sol Lewitt, and these delicate geometric drawings are a lovely homage. The squares line up with the back end of the boxes so that the drawing is a two dimensional reflection of the sculpture – a mirror image made without mirrors. The closed back of the units shows off all the natural irregularities in the wood grain, and the uneven rings, rough fibres and pale reddish colour give this piece a warmth that is absent from the rest of the show.

Towards an Elegant Solution is the first full scale retrospective of Cripps’ career, and the exhibition will be shown in three parts, each running for two weeks. A large collection of essays that explore Cripps’ historical and theoretical context accompanies the show and it’s an illuminating guide to the spare, intellectual work. This is a much quieter show than some of ACCA’s previous retrospectives – the past two years have featured video artists Lyndal Jones and Richard Billingham – but if you are willing to give the works time, to puzzle over them and play with them, they reveal an elegance, which, in true minimalist fashion, is the solution.

An Apology

When I started out on this trip, I thought I’d blog.  I imagined sharing all the exhibitions I’ve seen and having time to think about them intelligently, in words.  But as you can see, I’ve been so busy doing that I haven’t had time to reflect.  I’m sorry.  In apology I offer you this photo I took at the Getty Centre, where I saw an astounding show of photojournalism.

And one of the other Venice, the one with muscle men, skateboards and blinding sun.




I will be back properly soon, I promise.

My Lolita

In the May edition of ‘The Believer’, there is an essay by Namwali Serpell on Lolita.  There is a strange possessiveness we feel about books we love, and when someone else claims them as their own we rile up – after all, Lolita is MY Lolita.  But Serpell writes for ‘The Believer’ and because I love ‘The Believer’ almost as much as I love Lolita, I’m happy to share.  Serpell writes joyful prose and as I read her words, I longed to read Nabakov’s again.

My love affair with Lolita is different to Serpell’s.  I’ve never written an essay on it, and the one time I had the opportunity to do so, in a year twelve English class I demurred, opting instead for The Catcher in the Rye.  I felt then, that to write on Lolita would be ruinous.

Lolita was not the first book by Nabakov I read, and I came to it rather oddly by way ofAda.  In my mid teens I had a lazy practice of choosing what to read by grabbing books at random off the library shelf.  I first stumbled on Vonnegut this way, when my lucky dip landed me with Slapstick.  I didn’t understand a word of it and it left me feeling so hollowed out I’ve never dared read Vonnegut again.  (That’s the danger of reading too widely at fourteen.)  But I liked the unwieldy Ada – it was a fat hardback copy oozing that sour smell of old library books – and so I read more Nabakov, his short stories, and then Lolita.

I bought my first copy in 1996 at the Electric Shadows Bookshop.  It’s a green spined Penguin with a fragment of Balthus’ Girl and Cat on the front.  It cost $14.95.  I still have this copy; the spine is peeling off at the bottom front corner and the cover is torn.  I hate this cover.  I tried to amend the image when my photography class was given a book jacket project.  I attempted to recreate the apple, that moment before Humbert’s first dangerous fulfillment.  ‘She sat down, cool skirt ballooning, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit.’  The results were disappointing.  My friend, pale skinned, moody and a product of too much Smiths, was no nymphet (although she has her own allure) and the light was wrong.  I imagined Ramsdale bathed in a late summer glow, all yellow and warm and drifting slowly into night – instead, my camera stared into the cold winter sunshine of an endless middleclass mid-afternoon. But as Serpell points out, Nabakov never wanted an image of Lolita on the cover – every reader will have their own downy nymphet under their eyelids.

Since that first well-thumbed copy I have acquired others.  I have Serpell’s cover, the second International Vintage edition of 1997, with the knock-kneed legs and blown skirt, and I have the first International Vintage, published in 1989, which sports the same Vanity Fair quote, ‘The only convincing love story of our century’ scrawled in handwritten font around a blurred photo of a girl holding a bicycle, her toes alluringly pointed inward. (Daily, you can witness this vulnerable stance on the pages of The Sartorialist).  I have some other Penguin editions, one with Shelley Lyons glancing over the top of her heart shaped sunglasses under the words, ‘The greatest novel of rapture in modern fiction’, the plain orange re-issue and the silver spined butterfly.  I also have a copy of the original Olympia Press edition, not the first but the fourth printing, made in 1959 in two volumes with that plain cover of the most perfect green.  Damien gave it to me for my 29^th birthday, and it is possibly the best present I have ever received.  Ryan has a copy I covet, a hardcover with a banned book stamp marking its flyleaf.

Nabakov’s prose is always fluid, but in Lolita, it sings.  It rolls and rumbles, and underneath the tragic Humbert’s purple prose there is Nabakov laughing at the sounds of a new and other language.  English was not his native tongue and perhaps it was this, the ear he had for the sounds of a strange language that let him write so freely – punning, rhyming, and twisting words to suit his flow.  Every description hurtles forward, the words tumbling after one another,

And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called ‘sage brush’ appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

It’s a celebration of language – lyrical, humourous and bleak in turns.

Serpell writes of the surprise at discovering the horror in her favourite paragraph (it is the one in chapter 32 that begins like this: ‘I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise…’) only after several re-readings.  Swept up in the beauty of the words, she finds she has somehow missed the disquiet.  For me, the horror is there from the beginning.  It is there in Annabel’s parents, the ‘bald brown Mr Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness)’, in Humbert’s first marriage to the chubby, stubbly Valeria, and in the pudgy girl prostituted by her parents.

Next day, an asthmatic woman, coarsely painted, garrulous, garlicky, with an almost farcical Provencal accent and a black mustache above a purple lip, took me to what was apparently her own domicile, and there, after explosively kissing the bunched tips of her fat fingers to signify the delectable rosebud quality of her merchandise, she theatrically drew aside a curtain to reveal what I judged was that part of the room where a large and unfastidious family usually slept.  It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll.

A bald doll.  As if the preceding description wasn’t stomach turning enough.  John Updike must have admired Nabakov’s visceral descriptions of the flesh, the grotesquery of the body that is both repellant and desirable in all its sticky glory. It is Lolita’s innocence amidst all this grime that makes her so intensely appealing.

Of course, the true horror is that this state of grace can’t last.  With his terrible love, Humbert pulls Lolita into his pain.  ‘You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.’  Every time I reach this line I’m swamped by the same sensation.  It’s like having pulled a billy-kart up to the top of a gravelly hill, and now teetered at the top, you get in and look down.  There is a moment there, reins held, feet tucked away from the wheels, where you could stop, but of course you push off and slide skidding, skin scraping off knees, down the dusty slope.  The horror grows, and for me culminates just before Serpell’s beloved page,

There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on – a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face…that look I cannot exactly describe…an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration – and every limit presupposes something beyond it – hence the neutral illumination.

And Nabakov goes on to remind us, ‘that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child’.  A child so destroyed that her ache falls outside the bounds of language.  I always see here Lolita’s soft face with a painfully old expression, that particular helpless exhaustion of unhappy adults hovering over the face of a child.  A heartbreakingly clear image slipped into a baffling barrage of silky words.  It’s this that Nabakov does so well, and why I love Lolita.

 

Childhood in the Philippine Islands

There is a shot near the beginning of Raya Martin’s Childhood in the Philippine Islands, that blows away most of the lens flare shots I know.  A first, there is a black screen with a strip of white running along the bottom.  Some legs and then feet, clad in loose white trousers can be seen moving in the streak of light, walking away from the camera.  The feet stop, pause, and then two large doors open up, and light pours in like a wave, engulfing the boy’s body and filling the screen with light.  It happens like a heart bursting with joy.  It is surprising how much that movement, the forward rush of light as the doors glide open is moving.  I could feel my pulse quicken with the light.  I didn’t realize at first that these doors were the doors of a church, but when I did, I imagined how ecstatic this light, swelling like the light of heaven, might feel to a religious person.

The film is made up of simple everyday scenes of life in a small village in the Philippines in the late 1900’s.  Made into a short from pieces of his longer film A Short Film about the Indio Nacional, the shots are silent, interspersed with old style intertitles and accompanied by a spare acoustic guitar track.  The soundtrack is not as accomplished as the film itself and I found it grating, but the idea of the music, like a throwback to the scores of the silent cinema, is a good one.  There are some quirky moments; some children stand in the middle of a field looking up at a cloud with their mouths open, waiting for it to rain, and in another, titled ‘Two Beautiful Native Women Arguing About the New Statue’, two devout women mistake an old man for their church’s new statue.  There is a lot of religion about, and Martin seems to be poking sly fun at it – in the last shot of the film, some men throw a vicar into the river.  My knowledge of the Philippines under Portugese rule is none, and I suspect that the finer historical points were lost on me, but the film beautifully captures the look of photographs from the era. Martin drew inspiration from the postcards of the time, explaining to Cinemascope magazine, ‘there was a lot of photography going on at the time, as studies, souvenirs for westerners by westerners.’  This observational point of view is clear in the still, formally framed shots that keep a polite distance from the subjects.  Even the film stock shares the even grey tones of old postcards.

Martin speaks about the way the Philippines has no silent film history of its own, and how his films come to occupy the space where these never made films might have been.  I think this idea of re-imagining the past is a way of discovering the charms of early cinema – an excitement about recording and looking that my generation, born into a world of images, missed.  By setting up a camera and letting the scenes unfold in front of it, Martin reveals the pleasure of contemplation and the joy of capturing a place on film.

Blood, and then more blood

The past two weeks have been ones for wetting my eyes with blood and muck and delving into the violence of two small towns in lands far away.  I finally hired the BBC’s Red Riding Trilogy (2009), which I’ve spent the past few months picking up at in the video shop and then chickening out and choosing something lighter.  I also watched Pedro Costa’s first film, O Sangue (Blood) (1989), which opens with a powerful scene of familial violence that might just be one of the most arresting film openings I’ve ever seen.

O Sangue is a film overwhelmed by images.  Each shot is so perfectly composed that the film sometimes looks like a series of beautiful black and white photographs.  Punctuating the calm realist passages are sequences that seem to be taken out of a silent melodrama.  Exaggerated gestures, violent tears, and wide eyes take over the screen.  Costa emphasizes centre weighted compositions that suit the 4:3 aspect ratio, and he compulsively frames within the frame.  People are boxed inside mirrors, in windows and doorways, between forking tree trunks.  Halfway through there is an overhead shot that looks down on the characters rushing contraband goods out of the storeroom and into a van.  The world is tilted on its side, and when the car drives off the bottom of the screen it feels as though you are sliding off the screen with it.

But my favourite visual moment happens toward the end of the film when Clara (Ines de Medeiros) and Vincente (Pedro Hestnes) wander through a party by the water.  A dead body floats on the river.  As people gather on the escarpment the camera drifts back, the figures become hazy strokes of blackness shrouded in the smoky grey mist.  The scene looks like a slowly moving charcoal drawing, and reminded me of the very first photograph.  The bleary forms have the same amorphous edges as Niépce’s rooftops.  I’ve often thought that Niépce’s heliograph as he named it, looks like how we must see when we are new born – space hazy and unformed as our eyes adjust to the light and we see for the first time unrecognizable shapes, patches of light and dark.

But despite the film’s beauty, I felt alienated by the cinephilia. In the liner notes Adrian Martin refers to the quoting of shots as being more like an outpouring of a collective cinematic unconscious, all the shots seen and stored finding their way into the film like the ‘trace of cinema as something “like the photo of a loved one carried with us”’ (Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque, 148) than of overt quoting, but I felt a bit like I was watching a joke I wasn’t in on.  The film has a sense of its own weightiness, of the significance of cinema and its history, but for me the joy of watching films that leads to the collection of images in the first place was missing.

There is much more overt violence in the Red Riding Trilogy, the disturbing set of BBC films based on David Peace’s crime novels.  Set in Yorkshire, the characters are as rough as the climate.  It’s rugged country, with hulking smokestacks towering over rough grass.  The tiny mining outpost of Fitzwilliam is dwarfed by its industry.  There is a sadness to the land itself, as if the pain of the people who live there is etched into the mud and hillocky plains.  All three films have their own look, while still maintaining a consistency through the wide aspect ratio and the repetition of a few shots.  A long shot of a car driving through the moors between Morley and Fitzwilliam appears near the beginning of each film, the mood of the trilogy captured in the empty landscape.

In the Year of Our Lord – 1974 (Julian Jarrold) was my favourite part.  The shots are composed so that characters are boxed in on the edges of the frame by doorways, windows.  The camera remains distant, the places are shot in long wide shots, and often, while the action takes place in the foreground, another figure appears in the background on the other side of the screen in a symmetrical movement.  The crime under investigation here is brutal, although just how horrible it is isn’t fully revealed until the third film.

In the Year of Our Lord – 1980 is the lightest on the violence.  Directed by James Marsh, who also made the lovely documentary, Man On Wire, the film is built around the serial murders of several young women.  Marsh intersperses the action with montages that are coloured like super 8 home movie reels.  I liked these moments, but they were out of keeping with the rest of the trilogy.

The third instalment, In the Year of Our Lord – 1983 (Arnand Tucker) is awash with too much light – light that obscures the corruption happening in the shadows.  In a scene where the police raise their glasses to the toast, ‘To the North, where we do what we want,’ light reflected off glass creates shimmering blue lines that slice across the screen like bars.  It’s a nice inversion of the traditional noir image of the protagonist caught in the shadows of the venetian blinds.  The resolution of the crimes committed in the first part is confronting and the violence that happens inside the police force is quite unsettling.  It’s darker thematically than visually, but I was left feeling haunted.  You might need to have a few episodes of Parks and Recreation on hand to lighten the mood.

Speaking in Tongues

I hope one day to be able to write essays like the ones in Zadie Smith’s latest offering, Changing My Mind.  Sometimes I like essays by novelists better than their novels – Siri Hustvedt’s non-fiction flows more freely than her fiction and it’s Jeanette Winterson’s book of essays, Art Objects, that I come back to again and again.  Changing My Mind is like this; I enjoy Smith’s novels, but her essays are something more.

The book is broken into five sections – Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, Remembering – and it’s one in ‘Being’ called ‘Speaking in Tongues’ that I look at here.  There is a strange (and usually quite misplaced) affinity we feel for people who share something fundamental with us, and like some of the other notable persons I’m fond of,  Zadie Smith and I come from what she refers to as Dream City.  Smith describes Dream City like this:

It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion.  Naturally, Obama was born there.  So was I.  When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin – well anyone can see you come from Dream City.  In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various.  You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues.

Being both this and that, and at the same time neither this nor that is both a difficult and glorious place to be.  At least, it’s becoming a glorious place, because all of a sudden it’s not odd to have parents from different cultures with different shades of skin.  All of a sudden we mutts are everywhere.  Writing novels, making films, leading nations.  The difference that bothered me as a child because I didn’t want to stand out has become a way of fitting in anywhere.  In Chinese restaurants waiters give me chopsticks and in New York I was spoken to in Spanish, even though I can’t speak a word of Spanish.  I’ve had arguments with strangers over my own nationality.  A man on a train once asked after my racial heritage, and on hearing the answer – my father is Malaysian and my mother Australian – responded, ‘Oh, no!  You aren’t Asian!  I’ve seen Asian women, and they don’t look like you.’  Indeed.  The neither-this-nor-that quality of my appearance has meant I can be anything.

‘Speaking in Tongues’ is mostly about Barack Obama and his border crossing, polyphonic qualities.  Chameleon-like people are often distrusted.  Just think of Woody Allen’s Zelig, who at first fits in by taking on the appearance of the people around him, but is later persecuted for mis-representing himself.  Being a chameleon is different from being an outsider, because an outsider lives by a code that is as clear and straightforward as the codes of those on the inside.  Outsiders have integrity.  Chameleons on the other hand, suggest deceit and dubious morality.  Many-voiced people often turn up as spies, as conmen, as murderers.  This is not what people wish for when they wish for a president, and Obama’s ability to change his voice to suit his audience is one of the main things he was criticized for during the campaign.  That one man could empathise with so many points of view seemed implausible to some.  Smith notes, ‘There was the sense of a double-dealer, of someone who tailors his speech to fit the audience, who is not of the people (because he is able to look at them objectively) but always above them.’  On election day, enough people decided that being multi-voiced wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and he triumphed.

I do not know enough about politics, especially American politics, to comprehend just how big a thing Obama’s coming to power is, but I got a sense of the Americans desperate need for a figurehead they can admire when I was there in August 2009.  Almost a year after the election, people were wearing campaign shirts, Obama paraphernalia was on sale everywhere, and when we went to see The National and Cadillac wore his Mr November t-shirt people smiled and complimented him.  ‘Great t-shirt’, the security guard at the gate said, and there was a general feeling of goodwill toward Obama’s oversized face on Cadillac’s chest.  The feeling of expectation was immense.  It certainly puts a man in a difficult position when faced with the realities of running a deeply disjointed country, but it also shows how deeply Obama’s message of hope and community struck.  His inclusiveness had awakened people who were stultified by a world that kept leaving them out.  ‘Throughout his campaign,’ Smith writes, ‘Obama was careful always to say we.’  A brave move in a culture dominated by ‘I’ and ‘me’.  Obama was bent on creating a sense of community, and ‘had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City too.’  For me, this is Obama’s greatest possibility, that he might, simply by being who he happens to be, change the way Americans see themselves.

While in New York I saw By the People: The Election of Barack Obama at its week long run at the Sunshine Theatre.  The film follows Obama’s young and racially disparate campaign team, as well as Obama and his family as, much to their own surprise, they beat the odds and win the election.  Shot in an intimate way with the camera rambling after its subjects, the film is focused on the people not the policies.  We see Obama sitting down with his speechwriters and creating an idea, we see volunteers making calls in the phone rooms, we see voters lining up for hours in the snow, we see Obama’s family calling him from home.  There is an emphasis on collaboration and everyone involved, is involved.  There is no mistaking the intense personal investment being made here.  When it’s all over and they know they’ve won, one of the field directors, Ronnie Cho breaks into tears.  It’s moving, and the camera manages to watch Ronnie sobbing with exhaustion and joy in a way that is intimate and slightly uncomfortable, but kind and respectful.  Some reviewers panned the film for its naiveity, but it’s a film about a campaign, not a film about politics.  It does say something about politics though, because we see the effort that goes into constructing the idea that either wins voters over or doesn’t.  Smith observes that ‘it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times’, and in a way, they have.  By the People shows those voters dreaming that dream.

Of course, campaigning is all about creating an idea that people can believe in, while running a country is a murky cocktail of diplomacy and decision making in situations where there is no right answer.  But in the story Obama created for his ascension there is something a little different.  By being many voiced, Obama has turned around the idea that a leader ought to be monologic.  He suggests that we can be many things and still be authentic.  This is a difficult idea to sell.  Perhaps because it’s easier, we pride ourselves on portraying a fixed identity.  We take our inconsistencies as accidents, momentary slips of judgement that are not a true part of who we are.  We say to someone who is acting in a way that goes against the role they fulfill in our lives, ‘You’re not being yourself.’  Or, when we do something that in retrospect we feel was a bad idea, ‘I didn’t recognize myself.’  What we really mean is that we aren’t acting in accordance with the guidebook we’ve constructed for ourselves to live by.  We all have terms we choose to define ourselves by.  Someone will say, ‘I’m serious,’ and another, ‘I’m happy.’  Yet we all experience both at one time or another.  Inconsistency is probably the most authentic mode of all.  We are all serious and happy and brave and frightened, and some of us live more comfortably with the multiplicity of it all than others.

We don’t embrace multiplicity in our leaders, but I think the ability to see many sides opens the way for a more compassionate humanity.  If we are all a bit of this and a bit of that, then we must be more similar than we think.  Perhaps I’m simplifying things.  I know we’ll always manage to find some point of difference, some reason why we just can’t get along.  But I feel that despite whatever failings and fumbles Obama is going to have dealing with the practicalities of being the president of a large and rickety country with it’s deeply rooted belief in binary morality, as a symbol, he can’t help but change things for the better.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis, and Me

One of the things I had marked down to do in New York, was to finally see, in the flesh, Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis.  Man, Heroic and Sublime.  This is one of my paintings.  I have read about this painting.  I have written about this painting.  I have pored over prints of this painting, comparing the various shades of glossy art-book orange and trying to imagine what that orange might actually be.  I have wondered about the quality of the paint – are there visible strokes?  Or is it smooth and flat?  I have thought about the purpose of the zips – those five bold slashes that divide the canvas.  I have bored people at parties talking about this painting.  Most of all, I have pondered the affect of this painting.  When faced with it, is the experience really sublime?

Jean-Francois Lyotard, who wrote a lot about Newman’s work when exploring his own understanding of the sublime noted,

What distinguishes the work of Newman from the corpus of the ‘avant-gardes’, and especially from that of American ‘abstract expressionism’ is not the fact that it is obsessed with the question of time – an obsession shared by many painters – but the fact that it gives an unexpected answer to that question: its answer is that time is the picture itself.

Time is the picture itself. What a curious and engaging conclusion.  For Lyotard, time in Newman’s work is immeasurable.  Nothing we see relates to a quantifiable, clock driven version of time.  There is no narrative, no beginning and end.  There is just the painting itself – the colour, the depth, the horizonless expanse.  To stand in front of such a work is to allow the tick-tock workings of daily life to evaporate.  It is to experience a time that is.

Despite his work’s formal characteristics, the rigorous classicism of their composition, Newman was fascinated by the idea of time in painting.  ‘The concern with space bores me.  I insist on my experiences of sensations in time – not the sense of time but the physical sensation of time.’  There are stories of Newman sitting for hours with his paintings, communing with them until they revealed themselves.  He was also hell-bent on painting as a form of communication, rather than statement.  In 1945, in an essay titled ‘The Plasmic Image’, he attempted to outline the basis for a new art, where ‘the shapes and colours act as symbols to [elicit] sympathetic participation on the part of the beholder in the artist’s vision.’  The new painting was also an act of sharing ideas:

Just as mathematics is a language that gives shape to thought, so the new painter feels that abstract art is not something to love for itself, but is a language to be used to project important visual ideas.  In this way, abstract art can become personal, charged with emotion and capable of giving shape to the highest human insight, instead of creating plastic objects, objective shapes which can be contemplated only for themselves because they exist between narrow limits of extension.

For Newman, everything was a dialogue, the act of painting, the act of writing, the act of looking.  He was a generous artist, always striving to provoke a conversation between painting and viewer.  This might be one of the reasons I like him.  There is nothing inward looking about Newman’s paintings – they are like gentle Socratic philosophers, wanting to stop you for a discussion, to ask questions of you and have you ask questions back.  They want to challenge you to think more deeply about all sorts of things.  Life, death, joy, sadness and why you’re rushing so fast to see everything, when you know that if you go too fast you won’t see anything.

Vir Heroicus Sublimis lives at MoMa.  It stretches along a wall beside a passageway that joins two galleries of Twentieth Century art.  People enter the room right beside it.  Many do not look at it; they are headed, armed with their cameras, for the works they recognize.  This suits me.  I am here for Vir Heroicus Sublimis, and I intend to give it the one thing it asks of me: time.

The painting is big, but not quite as big as I had imagined it.  This is poor visualization on my part – the works dimensions, 242.2 x 541.7 cm, are no secret.  It’s just that in the vast reaches of MoMa the canvas is surrounded by white, while in the photos of its first showing, it was part of Newman’s second solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, it covers an entire wall.  Newman conceived of it like this, the painting filling the wall so that the bottom of the canvas was at your feet and the colour spread out around you.  Looking at the work was to be an encounter, ‘It’s no different really,’ he wrote, ‘from meeting another person.’  There is a photo taken at the opening of this show, of Newman, Jackson Pollock and Tony Smith sitting beside Vir Heroicus Sublimis.  They are no more than a foot away from it.  Accompanying the show was a statement: ‘There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance.  The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.’

Vir Heroicus Sublimis is both lively and still.  It is lively, because there is something very much alive about Newman’s paint.  There is the colour, the warmth of the orange and the intensity of the red, and there is the decisiveness of the zips, slicing through the picture like a knife through a peach.  It is still, because as Lyotard observed, to really look at it requires you to stop.  To stop thinking about which room of the gallery you’re going to go to next, if you’ve seen everything on your list and whether it’s time for lunch.  I stopped because I was determined to stop, although around me the gallery was a blur of frenetic shutter release.  And after a few minutes of feeling like I was in everyone’s way, the noise of the gallery faded and the zips leapt and shimmered on the surface of the expanse.  They shifted, they switched places – it was impossible to pin them down.  It was surprising and I wasn’t sure whether to trust it.  Part of me thought I might have willed the sensation of being pulled into the painting, because after reading so much about the sublimity of Newman’s work, not to be moved would feel like being cheated.  But standing in front of this canvas, close enough so that the colour spread to fill my peripheral vision, the painting did have an extraordinary presence.  For Newman, painting and art-making were linked to spirituality, and for him, standing in front of a work of art is like worship.  You enter a place that is still, and in that stillness a movement begins.