Persona

Quote of the now:

"I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one".

From Persona by Ingmar Bergman.

I talked to somebody today who I had not talked too for a long time. I didn't massively want to, but now I am stuck with him for at least another two weeks.

The little turns that life takes never cease to amaze me. I feel like Golyadkin in Dostoyevsky's The Double. After shutting myself in for so long, life trickles in, like water, and all I can do is react.

Very odd.

Canta la noche

In one of the final scenes of En la ciudad de Sylvia, we see a brief shot of a bored barmaid, who absentmindedly puts a flower in the front of her blouse.This shots lasts about six seconds, but it it is key to understanding the rest of the film. A barmaid with a flower in the front of her blouse echoes one of Manet's most famous paintings, Le Bar aux Folies-Berges.

The theme running throughout Manet's most famous paintings, like Le dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, as well as the previously mentioned Le Bar aux Folies-Berges, is that of voyuerism.In Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, we are looking in on a situation that is pretty suggestive. The woman in the picture returns our gaze. In Olympia, we see a naked young woman, spread out on a divan. The suggestion is that she is a prostitute, and that we are about to be her next client. Le Bar aux Folies-Berges is less sexually suggestive, but still retainst the theme of voyeurism. We see a barmaid, standing behind the bar, with the curious flowers in her blouse.

It is this little detail that ties it to the shot in Le Ciudad de Sylvie and emphasizes the theme of voyeurism in the film (among others).

Why is this important? Many films have a theme of voyeurism.

The director, Jose Luis Guerin, has also professed an interest in Walter Benjamin. (As an aside, it is interesting to note that the main character is also a quintessential Flaneur). Benjamin suggested, as Brecht did, that art should not only try to affect an awareness and possible change of social relations in the audience, but also try and affect the medium itself. Guerin attempts this by focusing on the theme of voyeurism. Some parts of the film are mildly uncomfortable; we see the main character follow a woman through the streets.But we, as the audience, are also gazing at this woman, following her. Earlier in the film, we have gazed upon several other woman, along with the main character, looking for the elusive sylvie.

An interesting article here also discusses some other ideas:

The unnamed hero/stalker’s ambiguous, uncertain search even seems to touch the heart of the woman who has been trying to elude him, and she offers him a fleeting kiss as she gets off the tram. She remains iconic, the one to be pursued. As elegant as Guerín’s new film is(22) – and his films are always thought-provoking – this is no tale of Dante and Beatrice, despite the fact that the protagonist stays in a hotel named “Paradise”. If the artist/protagonist descends into hell – and the bar Les Aviateurs he revisits after his failed attempt to reconnect with “Sylvia” seems close to an inferno of shallow temptations – then he needs to continue his journey upwards, and not just in outward forms.

Youth Against Fascism.

From Violence by Slajov Zizek pp 84 - 85

"Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if the patients wife is sleeping around with other men, the patients jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological condition. In a homololagous way, even if rich jews in the Germany of the early 1930s 'really' exploited German workers, seduced their daughters, dominated the popular press and so on, Nazi anti-Semitism was still emphatically 'untrue', a pathological ideological condition. Why? What made it pathological was the disavowed libidinal investment made into the figure of the Jew. The cause of all social antagonisms was projected into the 'Jew', the object of perverted love-hatred, the spectral figure of mixed fasicnation and disgust".

Sonora

I have been having the strangest feeling recently. Something I can’t quite put my finger on, I can only loosely describe as a feeling of impending doom. Not for me personally, but for humanity generally. I have finished 2666 by Roberto Bolano, and I am going to read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy soon. They are (very) broadly similar, set in the same place, dealing with a vague, systematic anonymous violence, out in the desert on the US/Mexico border (both within the Sonoran desert specifically).

There is something incredibly dark about there as a place. The hundreds of women murdered in Ciudad Juarez. The drug wars between the cartels and the Mexican government. Go further back in history, the frontier, and the massacres of Native Americans, mass scalping. Go further back, the conquistadors and the conquering of Central America, and the Aztecs and human sacrifice. It is almost as if something terrible and malevolent exists in the air and the soil.

I thought about this when I read reviews of The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke, (which recently won the Palm D’Or). It is a film set in a small German village in the years just before WW1. The village becomes plagued by small acts of horrific and inexplicable violence. I have not seen it, but it struck a chord with me, with the idea of violence woven into the very fabric of existence, systematic and anonymous. The film is meant to foreshadow what was to come for Germany. Part of the Roberto Bolano book was set in Germany as well.

It seems to me that the most important artists, the ones who are saying really saying something important, at the very cutting edge, all seem to be saying the same thing. That something terrible is coming, just like in the years before the World Wars in the 20^th century. It is in the air of the world we live in right now, and evident in every action. Things have been set in motion that we as a society/species cannot turn away from.

But, to lighten this up, I will say, that it is amazing that civilization even exists at all. I will quote G.K Chesterton, who said it better than I could, who remarks that detective stories...

“Keep in some sense before the mind that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions ... it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglers and the footpads are merely placid old conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. [The police romance] is based on the fact that morality is the most daring of conspiracies.”

You're, by Sylvia Plath

Posted just because.

You're

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fool's Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Whilst I am here, I will also quote my favourite lines from Prufrock, by TS Eliot:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.’

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.’

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Ingmar Bergman, Summer Nights

A little while ago we had a short burst of summer. Hot days, and sticky nights.

It only lasted for a few days, but each night, as I couldn't sleep, I ended up watching Ingmar Bergman films. The first film I watched was Persona. After that, I watched Wild Strawberries, and then lastly, my favourite, Summer Interlude.

There are more famous Bergman films. The Seventh Seal is probably the most famous, followed the two mentioned above, as well as others like Cries & Whispers. But Summer Interlude is my favourite Bergman film by far.

It is a very simple film, and beautifully shot. A ballerina, played by Maj-Britt Nilsson, remembers a summer thirteen years before, her first love, which ends in tragedy. The film portrays carefree young love, and it portrays how things can stay with you, and shape you. She has built up walls to protect herself, but those walls only serve to keep the ghosts of her past inside. That shutting yourself off from the world is no way to live. I have something to learn there.

It is a small, perfectly formed tale of remembered intimacy, and regret.

It was only the summer before last that I started watching Ingmar Bergman films, and it seems that I only really watch them on long, hot, summer nights. Bergman has a reputation for gloom, but I cant think of a better way to while away a summer.

Gosh.

I didn't even realize I had a blog.