Waterfall

I returned, recently, to one of my favourites: the choreographies of Footlight Parade. When I first watched these, the number that most caught me was 'Shanghai Lil', with its arch stereotypes, opium-den tap and fantastical patriotism. And Jimmy Cagney. This time round it was undoubtedly 'By a Waterfall', with the more classical Busby Berkeley pairing of Dick Powell and the beautiful Ruby Keeler. 'By a Waterfall' is the very epitome of the Berkeley routine, and his most famous image comes at its glorious climax:


I watched the number again and again. There is so much to look at, and it is so strange. Many of us have some idea of what we're going to see when we watch one of his films. And so it comes as little surprise to see massed girls twirling geometrically. But— it should be a surprise. Shouldn't it? Dick Powell opens the scene, as he usually does. His voice does not have right timbre for the material; it is too hard. And he sings with a sort of jolly smugness that we now find uncomfortable to watch, if we do watch. There's a magic melodeee / Mother Nature sings to meee / Beside a waterfall / With you. He completes his part with a knowing nod, almost imperceptible, to Keeler. The nod is an act of perfection: it says, This is the order of things: it is correct. Then he sets his head all snug on her barm, and she starts to sing, before a chorus of bathing demoiselles takes over. Choirs on film had a very distinct sound at that time—it had something to do with recording techniques—a sharp, keening, ghostly coo.

It is at this point that the number becomes really odd. For about ten minutes we watch these slim lovelies—let us pretend they are lovely—cavorting on the side of an artificial cataract, and then in an artificial pool, and then in a stylised Art Deco palace, and then in more pools, of indeterminate size, depth and shape, and finally in the palace again, arranged in that legendary ziggurat, spraying jets of water out on all sides.


The costumes represent, albeit stiffly, a soft and osculatory flow of preraphaelitesque hair from the head to the neck, shoulders, around the breasts, between the legs, against a palette of foamwhite flesh, thinly suited. (Hair as tentacle; how Japanese.) There is a mood of social gaiety and innocent frolics. And this is one of the most bizarre things to us—we who have grown up with a pop culture at once morbidly ironic and hypersexual, paranoid—this conflation of the sweet and jolly with the titillation of (apparent) ladyflesh. It is striking to see a beauty so unencumbered with sexuality.


In this shot Keeler smiles blissfully as she dissolves in the visual noise of the torrent. Keeler, just one of the dozens of seagirls involved in the sequence, is happily fulfilling orders. They all participate in the spectacle, just as when the bugle is blown in 'Shanghai Lil' the sailors all march out to drill their rifles and parade with their flags (and portrait of FDR). This, ladies and gents, is what America is made of. The aesthetic deepens as the natatory movements become mechanical. Here the girls become a human zipper of shapely legs:


And here a rather peristaltic boa-constrictor:


These images are consumptive, digestive. And faces are lost in the patterning; the players might as well be droids. For those who let ethics get in the way of aesthetics, this should be disturbing—a stripping-away of human particulars to create a harmonious whole—a reduction of the human to the functional—and thus an essentially anti-humanist choreography, the opposite of character-centred Astaire routines. For me it's fine. But how far is this from the furniture of faceless nude slavegirls in De Sade's castle? Interlocking limbs and all.


This is what I mean when I insist that that 'By a Waterfall' is extremely strange, and beautiful because strange. It is not just camp or corny; it is irreducibly foreign. Even after the synchronised swimming, it is still strange. Keeler wakes Powell up from his dream by splashing water on his shoes, and the final shot shows us three baby whippoorwills in a nest, chirping one-two-three at the final notes of the music. The camera cuts to the curtain falling and the audience clapping ecstatically, and we remember that this entire fantasie is supposed to have happened onstage before a flock of theatregoers. We look for some acknowledgement of the surrealism—we look because we are accustomed to the ironic wink—but there is none. 'By a Waterfall' is a mesmeric reminder of that enormous gulf that separates our age, wholly subsumed in irony, from that which came before, a past almost lost to us.

Surrealissimo

On Salvador Dali, Hitler, and the limits of political ethics.

In a vacillating era people are shy of anything absolute and autonomous; for this very reason then, we no longer care to tolerate either genuine fun or genuine earnest, either genuine virtue or genuine malice. The character of the times is patched and pieced together like a fool's coat, and worst of all, the fool buttoned in it would like to appear serious.

— The Night Watches of Bonaventura (c. 1805)

In 2002, to coincide with a major exhibition of surrealist art at the Tate Modern, BBC4 commissioned a one-hour film about Salvador Dali's engagement with the Surrealists during the early 1930s. Written by Matthew Broughton, the film is called Surrealissimo, and you can watch it in six parts on YouTube, starting here. It has no more than two real characters—Dali himself, played with camp panache by Ewen Bremner—and his nemesis André Breton, Surrealist ringleader, for whom Stephen Fry was an excellent choice. The other parts are mere clown-figures, an excuse for various cultish British comedians—Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, Mark Gatiss, Matt Lucas, Ben Miller, and even Vic Reeves in a brief turn as Paul Eluard—to play themselves playing Surrealists.



The film centres around a real event that occurred on the evening of February 5, 1934. André Breton, having accused Dali of untoward activities—supporting Hitler, making fun of the Surrealist hero Lenin (in this painting), and generally being a bit of a creep—summoned the Spaniard to a 'trial' in his apartment on the Rue Fontaine, Paris:

Order of the day: Dali having been guilty on several occasions of counter-revolutionary actions involving the glorification of Hitlerian fascism, the undersigned propose. . . that he be excluded from Surrealism as a fascist element and combated by all available means.

Most of the surrealists signed the bill: Ernst, Brauner, Jacques Herold, Georges Hugnet, Meret Oppenheim, Perét and Tanguy. Tristan Tzara, René Crevel and Eluard, who were off sunning themselves on the Riviera, had already refused to sign—Eluard, whose Russian wife Dali had just nabbed. Nice chap! The climax of the film runs as follows:

Breton. Adolf Hitler. Adolf. . . Hitler. The most detestable man on our planet. Would Dali agree with this statement?

Dali. All disaster are beautiful to the Surrealist. Earthquake, rail accident, fire. . .

Breton. Hitler is a mass murderer.

Dali. So was the Marquis de Sade. Both men push back the boundary of taste to a fantastical extreme.

Breton. Dali admires mass murder?

Dali. The Surrealist must create his own logic, then never be consistent with it.

Breton. Dali admires Hitler?

Dali. He is a magnificent icon.

Breton. Breton asked Dali a direct question.

Dali. Yes! Hitler is a Cecil B. DeMille of massacre and death. He is a Surrealist.

Hitler was not yet a mass murderer in 1934, but we won't be pedantic. In a moment of horror, the Spaniard begins to speak in a tone quiet and distant, half awake, his eyes unfocused, while Fry-Breton rests his head in his hands, almost forsaking the whole affair:

I often dream of Hitler. Sometime he's dressed as a woman; sometime he is a woman. Sometime he is a man with six foreskin, twelve balls. I see him as a guardian angel too, standing over a crevice, filled with the dying. I see Hitler is looking at these people, their bones already sticking out. He is a spectacular sight.

Breton is tired and horrified—'Salvador, please. . .'—but Dali is not interested; he plucks a pamphlet from his jacket, rapping Breton in contemptuous accolade—

This is your first manifesto: "Surrealism is thought dictated in absence of all control by reason and outside all moral and aesthetic preoccupation", I know it by heart. Understand? I am the true embodiment of this faith, more than any of you.

Dali is quoting the definition of surrealism in Breton's First Manifesto (1924): 'Dictée de la pensée, en l'absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale'.

*

Quellenforschungen.

Broughton had done his homework; he evidently read at least three chief sources for the event. These sources are Georges Hugnet's 'Petite contribution à la vie secrète de Salvador Dali', from the 1954 Figaro littéraire; Marcel Jean's 1959 History of Surrealist Painting; and the account in Dali's own Unspeakable Confessions—this being his last book, fadged up from conversations with André Parinaud in 1973. The line about Cecil B. DeMille comes from Hugnet (the translation is my own):

Implacably logical, Dali advanced like a steamroller over a piece of meat, whose extra-soft superstructures and con-rods were his head and limbs, agitated by the shocks of absolute conviction. From deduction to deduction, he was drunk with delight in his own logic. He implored the surrealists to be reasonable with themselves, and presented to them a Hitler who became, in his apologia, sort of a genial director of abomination, a Cecil B. DeMille of massacre and killing.

By amusing contrast, Marcel Jean notes that Dali, 'to his eternal credit, succeeded in creating an atmosphere remarkably unconducive to any rational and logical argument'. Hitler's genitals are also from Jean's book:

At the point in his speech where he reached the phrase, 'But, in my view, Hitler has four balls and six foreskins. . .' Breton interrupted him brutally with: 'Do you intend to bore us much longer with this damn nonsense about Hitler?'

And female Hitler is from Dali himself:

Lenin and Hitler turned me on in the highest. In fact, Hitler even more than Lenin. His fat back, especially when I saw him appear in the uniform with Sam Browne belt and shoulder straps that tightly held in his flesh, aroused in me a delicious gustatory thrill originating in the mouth and affording me a Wagnerian ecstasy. I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me. . .

Hugnet, Jean and of course Dali were all eyewitnesses, and they agree on many details. All recall Breton in a green suit; green was apparently his favourite. All remember Dali's multiple sweaters, each stripped off in turn, and accumulating on the floor in a thick heap, upon which he knelt, bare-chested, to declare his allegiance to the Surrealist cause. And all note the presence in Breton's office of Dali's painting Gradiva:


But just as with the Wittgenstein's poker incident, the accounts of Dali's trial also differ. Dali insists that he had a fever, while Hugnet remembers a cold; Jean, the most cynical of the three, thinks Dali was faking the illness for disruptive effect. Moreover, Dali and Hugnet recall the event as a clear triumph for Dali, whereas Jean's Dali was a figure of general mockery. We note with interest a remark from Ian Gibson's impressive biography of the Spaniard:

No strictly contemporary account of the meeting on 5 February has come to light. Later ones, including Dali's, conflict, and in several cases seem to incorporate anecdotal material from previous gatherings.

With the incorporation of 'anecdotal material' we seem to be in the realm of Q and New Testament source-studies. One must ask, likewise, why Dali's account of the incident is found in the 1973 Confessions, but not in the autobiographical Secret Life of 1943. The three synoptic accounts may have been eyewitness, but in the course of decades the memories have been warped by common experience, by the talk and thought that comes to make human history human history, and not merely an enumeration of facts.

*

Breton vs. Dali.

Hugnet writes, 'We were suddenly witnessing the encounter of the two tendencies of Surrealism—of the confrontation of two men, Breton and Dali'. This captures, in a nutshell, our abiding interest in the scene. For the conflict is essentially a meeting of two intransigent ideologies—Breton the communist, bourgeois despite himself, flirting with the irrational and unconscious, even with the violent, but remaining humane and moderate in his beliefs—and Dali the faux-aristocratic jester, an embodiment of irony, full of scorn, his politics utterly subjugated to his aesthetics, and to his sense of humour. (In his Confessions he writes, 'Politics seemed to me a cancer on the body poetic', and 'The defense of my own intimate interests seemed as urgent, proper, and fundamental as that of the proletariat.' Thus also, Conrad versus the modern academy.)

For Hugnet, Breton was outmatched: 'For perhaps the first time, Breton had met a Surrealist who took the system to its limits'. Dali was 'implacably logical', while his adversary was left gasping and fumbling for words. We can understand this–Breton had defined Surrealism as thought in the absence of aesthetic and moral control, a doctrine incompatible with the engagé communism being urged on the group by Louis Aragon. Dali shocked Breton, and Breton liked neither the shock, nor the fact that he could be shocked. For he himself had admitted no boundaries of taste, and yet here were just such boundaries—religion, fascism, and shit. How bourgeois! Had Dali been betrayed by a failure of nerve?

Jean is more cynical—his Dali paints shit and Hitler not from faithfulness to his own unconscious, but merely for notoriety. His Dali is dogmatic in his adherence to the original code of Surrealism—to the 'absence of all control by reason'—a code which was obsolete, even in 1934. But was it obsolete? Breton does not disown the doctrine in his second manifesto of 1930. In that document are two principal notes: the bitter rejection of former companions—Soupault, Desnos, Masson, Artaud, Bataille—and a reiterance of the old revolutionary creed:

[Surrealism] was then, and still is today, a question of testing by any and all means, and of demonstrating at any price, the meretricious nature of the old antinomies hypocritically intended to prevent any unusual ferment on the part of man, were it only by giving him a vague idea of the means at his disposal, by challenging him to escape to some meaningful degree from his universal fetters. . .

One can understand why Surrealism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence.

Similar statements are made in Breton's semi-autobiographical novella, Nadja, published in 1928. As important as political (Communist) revolution was to Breton, it remained subservient to the holistic revolution of the individual spirit, which had always been the central motive of Surrealism. That Breton put Surrealism before Communism was demonstrated by his 1932 expulsion from the Party. So I cannot believe that 'pure psychic automatism' was in any way obsolete in 1934—and in consequence I must believe that Dali's adherence to the doctrine, as a true Surrealist, was impeccable. The genuity of his erotic Hitler fantasies—that is less important. Dali was undoubtedly an épateur; but he was not superficial, and his very real understanding of Breton's intellectual hypocrisy is well attested by this passage in the Confessions:

There was no reason for me to stop telling one and all that to me Hitler embodied the perfect image of the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble of an empire: the gratuitous action par excellence that should indeed have warranted the admiration of the Surrealists, now that for once we had a truly modern hero!

Dali's erotic Hitler had been pure harmless outrage; these words, on the other hand, are actually dangerous, for they demonstrate the proximity of avant-garde ideals, still with us today, to the indiscutable but indisputable aesthetic appeal of totalitarianism. The key phrase in this passage is 'gratuitous action', translating 'acte gratuit'—André Gide's expression for the unmotivated and sublime action, extolled as a liberation from the constraints of engagé collective activity, and even from the prison of rationality itself—

The acte gratuit, which is detached from any ulterior or utilitarian motive, springs from a sense of intentional irresponsibility. . . Whatever its various aspects are, the acte gratuit is the contrary of engagement, in so far as it deliberately rejects responsibility—it is a caprice as Sartre calls it.

In his 1914 novel Les Caves du Vatican, Gide had explored murder as an acte gratuit: his hero Lafcadio pushes a stranger off a train, with no good reason—lacking even 'motiveless malignity'—and proceeds to listen with amusement as Gide himself, in the character of a novelist, Julius de Baraglioul, explains the idea in abstractu: 'I don't want a motive for the crime—all I want is an explanation of the criminal. Yes! I mean to lead him into committing a crime gratuitously—into wanting to commit a crime without any motive at all.' André Breton greatly admired Gide's idea, as witnessed by the most famous passage of the second Surrealist manifesto:

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.

But Breton's heart isn't it; a few sentences later he admits that it is only an allegory for the universal rebellion against all strictures of family, religion and State—an expression of the 'element of human despair', which must be coupled with its contrary, an affirmation of the 'gleam of light that Surrealism seeks to detect deep within us'. Those who try to trap Breton in contradiction are thus dismissed as 'bourgeois'. It is easy to see how, for a Dali, Breton lacks the courage of his radical convictions. If casual murder and the pistol in the crowd, why not the Holocaust? Mussolini and Hitler, as charismatic fascists, posited themselves as men become divine, not bound by the prisons of reason and reasonableness, and thus resembling the ancient monarchs, or the popes—as men whose actions required no common motives. That was the glorious myth of their régimes. And the culmination of their magnetism was in warfare, as recognised by Benjamin at the conclusion of his essay on the Work of Art—fascism makes war and politics aesthetic, whereas communism makes art political (and polemical). Likewise, we can see that Dali makes art of politics, but Breton makes politics of art; the two impulses are irreconcilable.

By 1945, both Mussolini and Hitler seemed like grotesque failures—the former with his risible military aspirations, and the latter with his egomaniacal world-plans, come to nothing. It was left to Dali to imagine their failures as the result of a sublime masochism—how better to aestheticise the political? How better to turn such a catastrophe into a great marvel?

*

Breton was a revolutionary, bourgeois contra bourgeois. Dali, in turn, revolted against revolutionaries. He extolled Meissonier at a time that venerated Picasso and Cézanne; he praised the old Catholic monarchs at a time of socialism and anticlericalism. He claimed to find Hitler erotic, true—but it was Dali, alone among the artists of the early 30s, who understood the gravity of Hitler's threat—he wrote to Breton in 1929 that it was imperative for the Surrealists to take a stand on the matter, which would only become more serious. It was a threat that fascinated him.

Dali was a sell-out, the prototype of Warhol—later he would advertise cigarettes, appear on gameshows, design lollipop logos, collaborate with Disney, and sign blank canvases. But at the same time he exposed faddishness and hypocrisy with a brutal humour. Nietzsche had called for a morality beyond good and evil, the criteria of the resentful oppressed. By 1930 the criteria of resentful intellectuals had become rather authentic and fake. Breton continually calls for 'moral asepsis', for a commitment to ideals. He admits, 'What could those people who are still concerned about the position they occupy in the world expect from the Surrealist experiment?' Salvador Dali was beyond authentic and fake—such was the strength of his irony. 'The only difference between myself and a madman,' he famously wrote, 'is that I am not mad'.

We bourgeois have not transcended our criterion of authenticity, which is why Dali is still routinely castigated for his post-1940 work, as a fraud and a charlatan. But to me—the more he lied, the more he swaggered, the more he punctured those pieties of artistic pseudo-integrity—the more interesting, and the more hilarious, he became. Dali took Surrealism seriously, just as long as it took him to expose its pretentions and dishonesty, rendering it useless. In truth he refused to take anything seriously for long, himself least of all—and that is the mark of a man who understands the threat of anything taken seriously. It is a genuine and incomplacent response to the horror of the modern world—the horror, for instance, of Hitler. It is, as Lear's fool knew, a sign of wisdom.

[Update: Is Dali like Dick Cheney? Update 10/07/08: more arguments with Yusef on this subject in the comment-thread here.]

Infinitas

Memories of a near-silent picture I saw, alone, at the National Film Theatre in October 1997. The film was Marlen Khutsiev's 1991 Infinitas (Beskonechnost); its extreme obscurity makes any second viewing highly unlikely, and so I cling to these fading recollections, more and more precious in the passage of time.

*

It is evening. A man is at home; he contemplates the street from his window, and mutters some remarks on life, on things coming to an end, in the quiet style of which the Russians and the French are so fond. He is old but not elderly, perhaps 50 or thereabouts; he possesses a sort of sturdy vigour. His name is Vladimir. (What name says 'Russia' more?) He decides to walk in the park, and sits on a bench beside a path that emerges from an arbour. Upon the path materialises a young woman, a silhouette in the glow of a dull sunset. She is probably beautiful; certainly muselike. Does Vladimir interact with her, or only observe? There is also a young man, who will recur throughout the film–a man who is, we are told, unless it was only ever in my imagination, Vladimir's younger self. When at last our protagonist returns home, he finds at his door a queue of proletarians clamouring to take objects from his apartment. This does not appear to surprise him, although there is no indication that he had been expecting such an event. He allows them to dismantle his home and carry off his possessions into the grey unreality beyond the frame of the camera. Again, Vladimir leaves. He decides, if I am not mistaken, to return to the town in which he was born.

The film is in colour, but I remember it in black and white, and I remember it as if it were me walking in the park, and me encountering the rabble at my door, although my recollection of the scenes is indistinct and without focus, as if it were only the fact of the memory, and not the memory itself. Or again, it is like that sort of memory which is so old, and so ritualised in one's mind, that one is no longer sure if it is real, or only the echo of a dream.


The film is almost three and a half hours long, with an intermission, and virtually no dialogue. There is a protracted reminiscence, repetitive and monotonous, of the War, of soldiers marching and drilling endlessly, and this part of the film, I believe, was genuinely in black and white, as if composed of old footage. There are trains and platforms—I remember the whistles. And there is an evening scene, a soirée, with a Strauss waltz as accompaniment.

What I remember most vividly, but still without clarity, is the film's conclusion, a long moment of deadpan poetry. Vladimir is, let us say, stranded in a field, huge and dull. A great clamour has passed on, perhaps the War, leaving in its wake a terrible quiet. He sees his younger double, and something about the double's appearance tells us that this is the last time, and indeed, that the film is about to end. The two men walk together, along a train-track, abandoned—they are talking, but we do not hear their conversation, or else we hear a little, and the rest is inferred. Again it is evening, and the sky is luminous, suggesting that ambivalence of the human soul as it comes to rest, wanting nothing, empty of moment. I recall an almost overwhelming sensation of satiety, of a journey without purpose. Soon the two men, Vladimir and himself, stray from the track, and descend into a darkened area, perhaps wooded. They emerge at a stream. The youth immediately dashes across, extending his hand to the protagonist. Come over, he says, you can make it across. Vladimir shakes his head, and indicates that he will cross a little farther up, where the way is easier. So they walk side by side upstream, parted by a few feet only, glancing at each other, still able to converse; the older man gestures continually, nodding and pointing ahead. The youth, for his part, continues to beckon, with a wide nonchalant sweep of the arm. Ahead, up ahead, Vladimir points. The stream is widening in a gradual calculus, almost imperceptibly. The men begin to stride, with added urgency, and the camera follows them from above; its eye does not flinch, but rather is steady, or as I have just put it, deadpan. The measured calm of the camera, divine but without judgement, indicates the ineluctable—the immobility of two men, who are really one man, playing a set part, as if in a dream. The stream continues to widen. Small bushes separate the men, and yet they continue to talk; then thickets, until they can hardly see one another. Their talk is lost in the noise of the waters, for the stream is now a river. We follow the water, from above, leaving Vladimir behind, and his double also, and at last the camera pans upward, showing no longer a river—but now, rather, the sea itself.

*

This scene is doubtless an allegory for modern Russian history. I do not know any Russian history, and I am glad—for if I did, that sequence of river and sea could only have been less beautiful. On the way back home I crossed the Hungerford Bridge—the old iron one (now extinct), narrow with a frail railing, badly painted and unlit, and from which you could see beneath your feet the waters of the Thames, dirty old river, green and viscous—a young couple were canoodling passionally within view of St. Paul's, lit up in the distance, grey and bright in the plum dusk. Nobody at school was interested in silent Russian films.

The rhythm of response

God. Abraham!

Abraham. Here I am. . . The night is filled with thy voice. Here am I. What dost thou demand of me?

God. Thy son. Thy only son.

Abraham. What sayst thou?

God. Take now thy son, thy only son, Isaac, whom thou lovest, and go into the mountains where I shall show thee, and offer him there for a burnt offering.

Abraham. Wouldst thou I do even as the Canaanites, who lay their firstborn on fires before idols? Art thou truly the Lord my God?

God. Thou knowest.

Abraham. No! NO!

Abraham marches up the hillside, cursing and shrieking. He rests on a large rock.

Abraham. Thou wilt not ask this thing of me. . .

This dialogue is from John Huston's 1966 film The Bible, which would be more accurately titled Genesis 1:1-22:19, and which stars George C. Scott as Abraham, alongside such luminaries as Peter O. Toole, Richard Harris and Ava Gardner. You'll notice that this passage, like much of the film, is written (when it is not merely quoting) in a decent pastiche of KJVese; 'even as the Canaanites', especially, has a plausible ring to it. But how unlike the telling of this story in Genesis (22:1-3)—

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah: and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

The prose style of this passage has acquired a particular fame since Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, in which he contrasts it to a paragraph from the Odyssey. The Biblical epic style, he argues, is spare, shadowy, and psychological, where the Greek epic style is descriptive, bright, and essentially superficial. An equally illuminating contrast can now be drawn between the Biblical passage and its cinematic translation.

*

Huston presents his scene as a conflict of forces—in other words, as a drama. This is an obvious point, but it needs nonetheless to be stated, because our notion of narrative as drama is so deeply rooted that it tends towards the status of an unrecognised assumption. When stories from the Bible are retold, they are always told as dramas. But the Bible itself is virtually without drama.

At first, this statement seems flagrantly false. Isn't the entire Old Testament full of drama? From Adam's expulsion and Abel's murder to Job and the moral conflicts of Kings—the scripture narrates one conflict after another. But each scene, examined closely, turns out to be fundamentally undramatic. Take God's rebuke of Cain, for example—instead of a conflict of forces, we read this (Gen. 4:9-10):

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

God does not answer Cain's question, but rather asks another of his own; both are rhetorical, not directed towards one another, but rather revealing inner states. God knows what has happened—for he hears the voice of Abel's blood—before asking Cain where his brother is. There is no meeting of forces, because in reality there is only one force—that of God. Cain is merely a foil, a dummy. Or take another example: the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:17-39). Here, again, Elijah stands in for the divine force; his success over Ahab's minions is so well anticipated that Elijah can nonchalantly flood his altar with water, and taunt the struggling villains:

And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god, either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.

The prophets, like Cain, are a dummy, essentially one character although enumerated at 450. And what about that dramatic tour de force, the grandest and most heartfelt book of the entire Bible, not to mention the most beautiful—the Book of Job? In the Middle Ages the book was called a syllogism; but I find this account completely false. There is nothing reasonable in its resolution; the setup, in which Satan wagers God, has been forgotten by the end, and the arguments of Job's interlocutors have no role in its conclusion. Their claim that Job must have sinned is rebuffed without humility. Job is in this respect a Nietzschean hero, refusing to accept the arguments of a 'holier than thou' ressentiment. Here, perhaps alone in the Bible, there is some semblance of drama, although Job's outpourings are at right-angles to the speeches of his four visitors. God's final discourse offers no justification, and therefore no engagement with Job's plight—it asserts instead that God's majesty renders all human debate impossible. (We note, as with Cain, the introduction of this speech with a rhetorical question, 38:2: 'Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?') In dramatic terms, this is a cop-out; in the terms of the Old Testament, it is utterly sublime.

*

The story of Isaac's sacrifice, especially, is without drama. The narrative reads to us like a clockwork mechanism, with each participant contentedly playing his part in the whole. Abraham offers no resistance to God's command. And one of the insights of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling (1843) is that if Abraham had offered resistance—if, in other words, there had been real drama—then he would not have been a paragon of religious faith. Kierkegaard opens his book with several retellings of the story, introducing into each a dramatic aspect, however slight. In one version, Abraham decides to convince his son that he is a monster, lest Isaac think ill of God; in another, Isaac looks up to see 'that Abraham's left hand was clenched in despair, that a shudder went through his body'. These stories show by contrast that the moral perfection of the real Abraham lies in his unquestioning obedience. This is why George C. Scott can only be a modern hero, conventionally pious, without obtaining the existentialist heights of the Biblical Abraham. It is why the Bible can never be filmed.

It is important to reiterate, however, that the Genesis narrative never states that Abraham is unquestioningly obedient; this is not an aspect played up in the text. The events just happen. Those who know the Bible stories well, but do not know the Bible itself, will be repeatedly impressed by this aspect of the scriptures. It is an aspect impossible to render on the silver screen; this is because cinema, like theatre, has moral drama—the conflict of wills—at its core. George C. Scott cannot merely do as God says, because that would not make any sense to us. He must protest; he must explicitly demonstrate the enormity of his charge. This is a question of rhythm—thesis, antithesis—a rhythm that we need to make meaning of narrative, as a reassurance.

*

If the Bible does not use the dramatic thesis-antithesis rhythm, what sort of narrative rhythm does it use? Perhaps many: but for the purposes of this post I am interested in the rhythm of 'call and response', where the response echoes the call, and makes it manifest. This rhythm is often achieved by perfect (or near-perfect) verbal repetition. It is established at the very beginning—'And God said, Let there be light: and there was light'—and carried to extraordinary lengths in Exodus 25:1-39:31, where God's elaborate designs for the ark and priestly vestments are executed to the letter, his imperative words transposed almost verbatim to a narrative voice, for pages on end:

And they shall make an ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the height thereof. (25:10)

And Bezaleel made the ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it. (37:1)

The same rhythm can be clearly seen in the Isaac-sacrifice passage (Gen. 22:1-3) quoted above: God tells Abraham what to do, and Abraham does it. It can even be seen in miniature within the first verse—God calls out for Abraham, and the patriarch replies, 'Here I am'. As Auerbach acknowledges, the latter's words really mean, I await your command: 'a most touching gesture expressive of obedience and readiness is suggested'.

Whereas the dramatic rhythm is dynamic, the rhythm of response is static. It underlines the relationship between God and man: God speaks, and man (if he is good) does. It also gives the Biblical narrative a timeless or eternal quality: when God and man are in accord, there is no change, because change is seen as deviation from an ideal, as in the archetype of Eden. It is characteristic that Milton uses this same rhythm in a key passage of Paradise Lost. Adam has come to understand his sin, and now repents—he assumes a voice of leadership, and action exactly follows intention. At the end of Book 10 (in the original 12-book edition):

What better can we do, than, to the place
Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall
Before him reverent; and there confess
Humbly our faults, and pardon beg; with tears
Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.

And at the beginning of Book 11:

. . . they, forthwith to the place
Repairing where he judged them, prostrate fell
Before him reverent; and both confessed
Humbly their faults, and pardon begged; with tears
Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.

To make better sense of this I turn to a wonderful little book, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's The Origin of Speech, written during the Second World War but only published in 1964. Nothing in this slim volume is true. . . but sometimes we need a religious man to tell us about language, and not a linguist or a historian. For ERH, modern communication is based excessively on indicative statements, and especially on abstract, 'reflective' statements of universal truth. This he regards as a negative deviation from an earlier and more 'authentic' mode of communication. (The narrative of decline is typical of religious writing.) In authentic discourse, statements of fact can only be understood in the context of other sorts of speech—imperatives, subjunctives, optatives, and questions. An order is given, and ratified by its execution; the execution in turn is ratified by the order which instigated it. As ERH puts it, '"Break" is said because "broken" will be said. And "broken" makes sense because "break" preceded it'. He invokes a curious fact well-worn by linguistic investigators—that in many languages, the imperative is morphologically the simplest form of the verb (for instance fac from fac-ere)—concluding from this that the imperative is also the earliest and most fundamental form of the verb, and therefore the most 'authentic'. In valorising the command-execution relationship, or in other words the rhythm of response, ERH insists on the necessity of a hierarchical separation between speaker and actor, for to remove this hierarchy would be to create a mob—an ochlocracy. Language is inseparably linked to politics and society, the ills of the latter being results of linguistic shortcomings. Anarchy, he argues, is the disease of speaking when one should be listening, as to God.

Can you imagine thinking like that, dear reader? No? Perhaps, then, that is why you are reading a blog about unreligious experiences.

Apocalypto

An intermission from The Unknown Object—the winnowing-fan next time, I promise!—as I thought this was worth writing about. I attended a preview screening of Mel 'I want his intestines on a stick' Gibson's latest offering, Apocalypto; with me was the Mesoamericanist Pretzel Bender and some members of her department. The film, with its goofy Greek title ('I reveal'), is Gibson's take on the culture of the Late Postclassic Mayans in the Yucatán Peninsula, just before the Spanish invaded (presumably set some time between 1510-1520). The dialogue is completely in Yukatek Maya—so I'm told, though it could be in Swahili for all I know.

At the beginning of the film, instead of the title, Mel quotes pop uber-historian Will Durant that 'A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within'. In other words, the Mayans were goners even before Hernández de Córdoba got there in 1517. The subtext, one suspects, is even less subtle: Goddamn, those barbarous heathens needed Christianity! And barbarous they are: Apocalypto is even more graphically brutal than The Passion. Over the course of 2 hours, various characters are stabbed, shot with an arrow through the mouth, phlebotomised, decapitated, raped, sacrificed, mauled by jaguar, slashed, dashed against rocks, poisoned, near-drowned in quicksand, stung by hornets, clubbed, axed and self-mutilated. One of my party, deeply horrified, described it as 'another snuff flick'. I liked it!

Spoiler warning: Plot details follow.

Basic narrative: peaceful village (of savage animal-hunters) is captured and taken to Chichen Itza to be sacrificed à l'Aztec—think cityfuls of extras baying for heads, jabbering drugged priests, lavish costumes and monumental sets—all completely incorrect, as the academic sneerers next to me proudly pointed out—taciturn hero escapes à la Tintin, and spends the rest of the film running from bloodhungry maniacs à la The Naked Prey.

Spoilers end here.

I know nothing about the history, of course, so its accuracy is unknown to me, and in any event irrelevant. My comrades were doubtful; I couldn't find the Yukatek woman to ask her if the language was authentic. It could hardly be denied, however, that it all seems very real—there's a real flair in the small details and facial expressions, and so much texture. The camera never shies away from the visceral, the sadistic Catholic gaze carried over from The Passion—the hero sheathed in mud, or live ants stuffed in an open wound, or the innumerable piercings and other grotesque ornaments on every face. The chief slaver has human jawbones for epaulettes, a cute touch. It is this unflinching quality, so absent from the usual pussy-hearted blockbusters, that transfixes and enthralls.

Apocalypto is an odd mixture: still firmly rooted in the heroes-and-villains gothicism of his early action-flicks, it also aims at High Art, with a Message. That message, however, is anyone's guess. Near the beginning of the film the village bard tells the assembled throng a fable of man's unconquerable greed, which will one day ruin the earth—this obviously describes the cynical greed of the sacrifice-hunters, but also suggests an anti-American comment, or even an anti-Semitic one, given Mel's notorious outbursts. The Jews, naturally, have always been lucre-mad usurers among men. Apparently Gibson has compared the Mayan practice of human sacrifice to 'sending guys off to Iraq for no reason', which is patently idiotic. So the (urban) Mayans are the evil Americans, right?

But wait. Remember Durant—the Mayans, a corrupt society, have set themselves up for a fall. A fall from the conquering Spaniards, that is. The idea is straight out of Flaubert's Salammbo, a novel about the baroque decadence and internal strife of the Carthaginians in the years before Roman conquest. Flaubert's language, itself proto-Decadent, with its thick description and sensuous metaphor, is something akin to the spectacular spectacular of Apocalypto—and his hindsight view of barbarians priming themselves for a fall is very close to Durant's statement. The problem is this: if we wanted to apply Gibson's picture of 1515 to the present day, what does it most closely resemble? Surely, the Americans invading the Middle East, a mess of violent insurgents. Which puts the Americans in the (positive) role of the Spaniards—God's men bringing salvation to the barbarians. This is brought out in the film's conclusion, which I won't spoil. Another historical analogy might be to the corrupt First Temple Jews carried off into Babylonian captivity—the stepped pyramids of Chichen Itza even suggesting the ziggurats of Babylon. But what sort of comment would that make? The whole thing is a mess, if indeed it is trying to make a Statement at all; it certainly sounds like it is.

Anyway, philosophical qualms aside, it's as good a mainstream picture as you're going to see these days, and if you can stomach copious quantities of graphic violence, I recommend it.

Sublimelight

Chaplin's Limelight has got a pretty bad rep, for the same sort of reason, perhaps, as Sylvie and Bruno. Both Chaplin and Carroll produced iconic, cutting-edge works, and then at the end of their careers sludged out something perceived as over-ambitious and mired in sentimentality. The illimitably and inimitably inimical Pauline Kael, for one, slaughtered Chaplin for his narcissism in a review now apocryphally referred to as 'Slimelight'. It's a fair cop: Limelight is preachy, bombastic and pretentious κατ' εξοχήν, but its oddness somehow offsets such a demerit.

The intellectual and emotional core of the film is a two-scene sequence near the beginning: in the first, the heroine Terry adolescently laments the futility of existence, only to be reprimanded by Chaplin's character, Calvero, who insists on 'life, life, life!' In the second, Calvero is dreaming of a music-hall act with Terry as comic foil. These two scenes witness a constant hesitation, the movement towards a grandeur without irony, and then back towards farce and bathos. When asked why she can't go back to dancing, Terry sighs:

The utter futility of everything. I see it even in flowers, hear it in music. All life endless, without meaning.

This, of course, has not the ring of true speech—particularly revealing are the asyndeton of the latter two sentences, and the pronounced metric of the third, 'ăll lĭfe ēndlĕss / wĭthŏut mēanĭng'. This is Schopenhauer-lite. Calvero replies:

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning! Desire is the theme of all life.

I find this a very strange reply; it slides from an old-fashioned, commonsense 'stop bothering with silly ideas like that' response, into a gesture towards serious philosophy. Calvero's absurdist statement that 'life is not a meaning' sounds like Nietzsche-lite, or possibly Wittgenstein-lite, and his assertion that 'desire is the theme of all life' is rather Fourieresque, though one could trace it back to the Romantics. In fact, when he continues, 'It's what makes a rose want to be a rose, and want to grow like that. And a rock want to contain itself, and remain like that,' he is channelling the Aristotelian telos. But while spouting doctrine, he makes silly gestures imitating a rose and a rock—and later a Chinese tree, waving his arms and squinting, which sets Terry squealing with laughter. But it gets better—he continues:

The meaning of anything is merely other words for the same thing. After all, a rose is a rose is a rose.

The first statement is a classic statement of Wittgensteinian or structuralist nihilism—the second is a Gertrude Stein quote famous enough to have its own Wikipedia article! (Calvero adds, 'That's not bad, it should be quoted'.) Chaplin thus gropes for profundity, invoking the irrationale of Romantic poetry over any claim to a transcendent Meaning. Having just done an impression of a tree.

*

The second scene, a dream-sequence, pops a cap in the first scene's ass. Here Calvero relives his glory in music-hall routines: he begins with an asinine song about springtime lovers, and then Terry comes in for a bit of banter. There are some good lines too—Terry objects to a phrase in his sonnet on the worm:

Terry. A worm can't smile.

Calvero. How do you know, did you ever appeal to its sense of humour?

She doesn't like the notion that a worm could be in love; Calvero pulls a face and remarks 'Even a flea can be romantic'. (Fleas seem to be a recurrent feature of the musical interludes—from Calvero's 'flea circus' joke to his later ditty about reincarnation: 'But I don't want to be a tree, sticking in the ground, / I'd sooner be a flea'. Is this significant?) Calvero manages to work a Maeterlinck reference into a spot of cheery wordplay:

Surely you're read The Life of the Bee? The bee's behaviour in the beehive is unbelievable.

And after a host more bathetic two-liners, we get:

Calvero. At this moment I'm beginning to grasp the meaning of life. Oh, what a waste of energy! What is this urge that makes life go on and on and on?

Terry. You're right. What does it all mean? Where are we going?

Calvero. You're going South dear, your hand's in my pocket!

And finally:

Terry. Just think, all life motivated by love. How beautiful!

Calvero. By no means beautiful.

Terry. It certainly is!

Calvero. On the contrary, it's vile, wicked, awful. . . But it's wonderful.

Throughout the scene, grand sentiments are blown apart by cheap ironies, a casual savagery. It reminds me strongly of Beckett, the master of subverted romanticism. The forlorn clown, for whom the world has yielded to the solipsistic mechanics of a private wit—Calvero, whose name means skull: Beckett's everyman. And there is always a disconnect. Earlier on in the film, the maid tells him, 'Your wife won't eat', at which he quips, 'That's a blessing to a poor married man'. It takes her a couple of seconds to laugh, and then only uneasily. During his fantasy routines, the audience laughter is ghostly and stilted. Even during the final stage routine—this time for real—eerily hilarious, with a past-it Buster Keaton on piano—there is no laughter at all until the precise moment that Calvero falls into a drum, at which point it flows in torrents until the close. It is this hollow and artificial humour, puncturing sincerity, and its uncanny isolation, that permits the heavy pathos required by the film as a whole. 'The heart and the mind', Calvero says soberly: 'What an enigma'. But his last lines to the crowd are still Beckett:

This is a wonderful evening. I'd like to continue. But I'm stuck.

The Divided Self: Part III

So far I have not mentioned the unfairer sex.


To accomplish this I leave the Jews and head over to Greece, where the myths are full of triune goddesses. Diana's aspect Hecate, goddess of crossroads and boundaries, had three faces—and see Gawain's post on the three ages of woman here. Three goddesses competed for Paris' apple. There were three Gorgons, three Graeae, three Horae, three Graces, three Furies, and most importantly, three Fates (Latin Parcae, Greek Μοιραι). Something about the Greek woman just seemed to say, Three. Freud, our kabbalistic diviner, discusses these patterns in his well-known essay, 'The Theme of the Three Caskets' (1913). He sees the Moirai (Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos) as the division of a single original goddess into three, by analogy with the Graces and Horae. That original was Atropos, the shearer, literally 'she from whom there is no turning', an emblem of inevitable death:

The earliest Greek mythology only knows one Moira, personifying the inevitable doom (in Homer). The further development of this one Moira into a group of three sisters—goddesses—less often two, probably came about in connection with other divine figures to which the Moirae are clearly related. . .

The self-division of Atropos into three was thus not intrinsic to her rôle, and as Freud notes, she was occasionally made into two instead. Plutarch, incidentally, in his essay 'On the E at Delphi', regards as a profound enigma the existence at that temple of two statues to the Fates, rather than the usual three: 'το δύο Μοίρας ιδύσθαι πανταχού τριών νομιζομένων' (385D). In this, the last leg of our journey, we shall see Atropos in her dual aspect, and in her dream-reversal, as the goddess not only of death, but of love.

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When Offenbach came to write The Tales of Hoffmann (1881), he adapted Hoffmann's story Der Sandmann (1816) for the first act—the very same story later chosen by Freud to epitomise the uncanny. In this act we find the opera's female lead, Stella, reflected as Olympia, the doll or automaton from Hoffmann's story: a material creation under the dominion of a hidden presence, not an active subject, but a passive object. Freud notes the inherent uncanny in the cultural motif of a 'pretend woman', something familiar made strange, although Olympia is not his primary interest. In Offenbach, Stella and Olympia are doubles. Now, in 1951, the Archers, aka. Powell and Pressburger ("No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness") decided to shoot a film of The Tales of Hoffmann, and in the leading role, the double Stella / Olympia, they cast their young ballerina-muse, Moira Shearer—or as we must surely now think of her, Atropos.

Shearer had already served the Archers well in The Red Shoes (1948), dancing the lead in that film's famous ballet rendition of Hans Christian Andersen's story of the name. The ballet's plot is amazingly simple: girl acquires red shoes, which are magical; girl dances through a series of increasingly fantastic landscapes; girl can't get shoes off; girl dies in the throes of a Romantic passion. The red shoes—themselves a sort of self divided—exert their sinister force on the dancer, turning her from an active subject into a passive object, a doll. There's a beautiful shot (below) where she first sees the shoes in a shop window, and becomes herself divided across the glass, a doppelgänger. In this scene the personification of love is first directed on the path towards inevitable death. It is most uncanny.


Surprisingly uncanny, also, is the original fairy tale, which is online here. I don't want to summarise the whole plot here, as it is somewhat more complicated than the ballet. The image above is paralleled by two scenes in the original story: the first, where the heroine Karen's looking-glass tells her pointedly 'Thou art more than nice, thou art beautiful!', and the second, where Karen sees her literary double, the princess:

And this little daughter was a princess, and people streamed to the castle, and Karen was there also, and the little princess stood in her fine white dress, in a window, and let herself be stared at; she had neither a train nor a golden crown, but splendid red morocco shoes.

In the film, the ballet's Mephistophelean director, played to perfection by Anton Walbrook, claims that at the end of Andersen's story the heroine is killed by the dancing shoes, as she is in the ballet; but this is not true. In the end, in fact, she is redeemed from the shoes' evil, and dies of joy at being allowed into communion. The whole narrative is quite morbid, choked from the start with the threat of death—I adduce these passages:

On the very day her mother was buried, Karen received the red shoes, and wore them for the first time. They were certainly not intended for mourning, but she had no others, and with stockingless feet she followed the poor straw coffin in them.

She danced over the churchyard, but the dead did not dance—they had something better to do than to dance.

The shoes carried her over stack and stone; she was torn till she bled; she danced over the heath till she came to a little house. Here, she knew, dwelt the executioner; and she tapped with her fingers at the window, and said, "Come out! Come out! I cannot come in, for I am forced to dance!"

Freud argued that the death-figure of Atropos had been transformed in many contexts into a personification of love: Cordelia, Cinderella, Aphrodite in the Judgement of Paris. This represents unconsious wish-fulfilment, the insurance of the self against death. But here the two figures are blurred: the red shoes as the red lips of sexual passion are pointed up as the road to perdition, although ambiguously, as it is the executioner who strikes off Karen's feet—an image so pregnant with significance—and restores her to spiritual health.

The lady of death and the lady of love are one, so the shaman tells us, opposites conflated in the dreamer's mind. Moira Shearer, the dead doll and the dancerly beauty bound for Romantic oblivion, is a self divided over and over again, according to the fantasy of the male mind—a mind which thirsts for love, and for oblivion, as if those two were one and the same.

Green Pastures

Near ever'thing 'bout The Green Pastures is funny, yes suh, mighty funny. In short, it's a retelling of famous Bible stories with a cast of rural black Southerners from the 1930s. Written by a white New Yorker. How could that go wrong? Leaving aside its marvelously wayward theology, the film gives us, c. 2006, a renewed English vernacular. The language of po' Louisiana Negroes shines not only in the rich and varied music of the speaking voices, but also in the expressions themselves, offbeat but so natural, an echo of an era now all but forgotten. George Reed's Sunday-school teacher explains to his young charges about the emptiness of the Beginning:

There wasn't nobody in New Orleans,
on account there was no New Orleans.

There wasn't nothing on Earth;
on occasion [of the] reason there wasn't no Earth.

This boy Cain was a mean rascal,
on account of 'cause he killed his brother.

We can expand the first and third phrases to 'on account of the fact that', but the second is more peculiar—and a googling turns up no appropriate hits. A troublesome boy in the class is told by Reed, 'Content yourself!', which has since become a favourite with Mrs. Roth and myself. A more subtle exchange occurs between De Lawd and Gabriel after the flood, standing on the Ark and looking out over the ruined Earth:

Lawd (smiling): Well, it's dead.

Gabriel (impassive): So I see.

Lawd (taken aback): Don't seem to set you up much.

As with the Rastafarian vernacular, listening to this speech awakens something older, a harmonic in the body, as if hearing Hendrix play All Along the Watchtower for the first time, or catching Bing Crosby duet with Rosemary Clooney on the familiar Brazil. Here, again, is that creative spirit, the beating anew of words and phrases on the linguistic anvil. I wasn't around in 1930s Louisiana, so I have no idea how accurate this rendition is; but it doesn't matter. Fictitious or genuine, this is a joyous, even a religious, presentation of the English language.

Forgotten men

JESUS LOVES THE LOST, THE LAST AND THE LEAST

Thus, a billboard outside a Baptist church near Woodbridge, VA, demonstrates what can be done with an ablaut. Are we humanists, I wonder, among the lost, the last, or indeed, the least?

Today we leave America, though not for the last time, as we return in August. Fittingly then, the last DVDs we watch before the plane are genuine Americana classics from the 30s, The Green Pastures, and three Busby Berkeley gems of 1933. These latter efforts are entirely forgettable for their plots; we adore only those showstopping choreographies, and Dick Powell's face, so wholesomely lascivious. (Or, as Mrs. Roth suggests, lasciviously wholesome.) Who could fail to enjoy Berkeley's human patterns, like those old abstract-geometric animations set to swing melodies, but enfleshed with the finest blondes of Hollywood, and bursting with that joyful communalism of the New Deal? Pictured below, a syntaxis of stills from the films, each top-down on a troupe of dancers, captured by me, with painstaking jiggery-pokery, for the delight of my readers.


They remind me of cell diagrams, meiosis and mitosis and all that, or Kircher's volcanic earth. Who knew you could have such fun with a top-down camera? Note the soldiers-as-eagle, centre, firing their rifles on all angles.

This is incantatory stuff, sowing happy oblivion in the minds of the Depressed, and in our minds too. One can almost forget the dissociation of his ideals, immersed in such fantasia. Even so, the realities of the time are made now and then quite apparent—Warren William, the director/producer character of Gold Diggers of 1933, tells his cast he wants marching, marching, and a music that's wailing, wailing, the cry of the Forgotten Man of the Depression, the lost, the last and the least. Meanwhile, the oddly Stockard Channingesque Ruby Keeler seems game for anything, with a knowing grin on her face as she taps her heart out, dolled up as pussy-cat, heathen Chinee or girl-next-door. American movies, despite their smatterings of sirens and tit-counts, seem to have lost the sex-appeal so evident in these pieces. Massed baigneuses with bizarre Art Nouveau hairstyles, frolicking by a waterfall? Massed violonistes with neon instruments and gigantic skirts, twirling in geometric unison? Shanghai Lil? Petting in the park—bad girl! It is impossible to resist.

Sometimes we need not subtlety, but spectacle; and these spectacles are so serene, waltzing and lilting, with strings repeating over and over a simple melody, and all pretense of reality quite defenestrated.


I will not be too sad to leave the States. The heat was becoming unbearable, as was the wasteland of strip-malls and construction-work. Glad, too, to be back where I belong, in the city of freemasonry and good beer, with my own Shanghai Lil. I hope, in the coming months, to approach still closer my journeymanship of the guild of humanists—meiosis, mitosis and all that—to join the hallowed ranks of the lost, the last and the least.

Lives of Jesus: films

Pier Paolo Pasolini, dir. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
George Stevens, dir. The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
Franco Zefirelli, dir. Jesus of Nazareth (1977)
Martin Scorsese, dir. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
Mel Gibson, dir. The Passion of the Christ (2004)

Leaving my office this afternoon, in the 100-degree heat, for the last time before we leave for the summer, I heard the campus carillon chime out the tones of Big Ben; soon, dear city, we shall be with you once more. We leave tomorrow, for over two months. Posting will be reduced, but still existent. In fact, I will take the opportunity to write about some of the obscurer reaches of my London book-collection, so watch this space. For now though, a most unreligious topic, surely: Christ biopics. My previous post here on written biographies of Jesus.


Mrs. Roth and I blandly debated the relative merits of this crop. We both favoured Gibson's vision, but she chose Zefirelli for his star, Robert Powell, whereas I preferred Stevens for his film's classical monumentality. It is a relief to say that all five versions were as different as could be expected, a rich hoard of competing interpretations. The first two remain the polar visions. Pasolini uses the Italian countryside, untrained actors, silence, with dialogue largely of teachings, grainy monochrome, a beaten, rustic quality to his cinematography; Stevens uses the canyons and deserts of Utah and Arizona—and this is quite obvious, an incongruous setting for Galilee—mixed Hollywood talent (including Max von Sydow, Telly "Kojak" Savalas, and a hilarious Charles Heston as John the Baptist cum Samson: "I have orders to take you to God!"), silence, with dialogue largely of American BigScreenisms, glorious technicolor, and a statuesque setting for every scene—I marveled at the perfect figural arrangements, like a Raphael, and the slow, framed solemnity of each shot. Stevens' actors, especially Sydow, speak as if they're on Valium; his Jesus seems impressively uninterested in the evangel, which matters little, as the apostles flock anyway to this least charismatic of Saviours. Mrs. Roth intensely disliked the sluggishness and poor acting of this version, but I was entranced.

Robert Powell is really the only thing to recommend Zefirelli's laboriously overliteral mini-series, which insists on spelling out every last detail of Christ's life. James Mason and Laurence Olivier thesp it up in minor roles—Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, ie. the Good Jews. The rest of the film is also pretty halfhearted and mechanical; but Powell, despite a nebulous start, soon ups the smugness factor and hooks you with those limpid eyes of his. He's sufficiently smug that when he's actually crucified, you can't help but smile.

Willem Dafoe, meanwhile, turns fire and brimstone for Scorsese's ludicrous Last Temptation, which at least makes some effort to get into the thick of Roman Israel. Thus we get a frenzied, ascetic Baptist, with initiates thrashing around ecstatically in the water, quite the opposite of the serene pleasantries of Zefirelli's John, or the Herculean athlete offered by Heston. Harvey Keitel, apparently here only to complete his mission of being in every Scorsese flick, offers a Noo Yawk Judas quite at home in a sea of Noo Yawk Judaeans. Mrs. Roth remarked on Scorcese's handling of Lazarus as a horror-movie, the undead hand lurching into the frame for that added 'boo' factor. The post-cross sequence is risible, frankly, and I don't want to dwell on that here.

So much has been written about The Passion that I won't reiterate all the controversies. We find the anti-Semitic accusations laughable (the New Testament, after all, is anti-Semitic); and we both enjoyed the rich language, of which I understood most of the ecclesiasticized Latin and even a few fragments of the Aramaic. The scourging scene is notoriously graphic—at one point the soldier's flail embeds itself in Christ's back, and a yank sends visible pieces of Jesusflesh flying. The film as a whole is undeniably very lovely to watch.

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Each film had something to recommend it; but none was the New Testament. It appears impossible now even to put Christ on film without interpolating the entire history of Christian tradition. As Auerbach made very clear in the first chapter of Mimesis, part of the literary power of the Scriptures (he uses the Old, but for our purposes the New follows a similar path) derives from their taciturnity—and in the unparalleled King James Version, archaic even in 1611, the odd turns of phrase and dislocated expressions give the work a very quiet grandeur, a 'still small voice' (compare the legion earlier and later translations of this phrase, 1 Kings 19:12, to realise the perfect music of this rendition). This is absent from all the films, though least absent from Pasolini's. Gibson's, in particular, is heavy with the carnality and sadistic violence of the Catholic Church—it's a fantastic achievement, the keen articulation of one aesthetic, mais ce n'est pas le guerre. Seeking a faithful interpretation is fruitless with this material; we are content to experience instead the religion of modern man.

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Is it only a matter of time before somebody shoots all four gospels, beginning and ending with John, but the bulk in real-time four-way split screen (à la the awful Timecode)? It needs to be done.

Apocalypse Then?

Well, it turns out that D. W. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation (1915) is pretty dull, at least until the final fifteen minutes. One query struck me, though. As the heroic Ku Klux paladins storm Piedmont, SC to rescue the film's heroine (Lillian Gish), what should the orchestra strike up but Ride of the Valkyries? The Teutonic military-mystical aspect of Wagner's music fits the cinematic theme well. But one wonders if Coppola had this scene in mind when filming his more famous sequence in Apocalypse Now—the reference would certainly reinforce the ambivalence of Coppola's portrayal of Kilgore et al.

Alone in N.Y.C.

Sidney Lumet, dir. The Pawnbroker (1964).
Martin Scorsese, dir. Taxi Driver (1976).

Dos Passos has a lot to answer for; New York has been the great locus of romantic urbanism in literature at least since Manhattan Transfer (1925) and USA (1930-36). In 1940, Piet Mondrian moved to the city and was transfigured, rendering the upbeat grid of downtown Manhattan in vivid primaries. And the camera loves the place, since the twenties soaring adoringly upwards along long magnificent facades, and opening up the perspectives of its glass and steel canyons. But the world of The Pawnbroker and Taxi Driver—dirty uptown Harlem, Mau Mau Land—is another place altogether. There are no vistas here, no glittering verticals; only two men who look out at the city from a cell—pawn shop, taxicab—and see only filth. "One day a real rain is gonna come and wash all the scum off the streets".

Neither Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) nor Travis Bickle (Robert de Niro, of course) belong in NYC. Both are haunted by carnage, but of a fundamentally different nature; the camps and senseless Nazi torture for the Jew, and the purposive guerilla warfare of Vietnam for Bickle. Nazerman reacts to this experience by turning away into an amoral, impassive solipsism, relieved by bouts of anger. But Bickle's fury is a righteous, active one—it quickly becomes his goal to purify the city of its disgusting elements. Each character loses himself in his work; the routine allows him to dissociate himself from his surroundings, preventing the establishment of meaningful relations with those around him. Nazerman, although he openly expresses disgust at the prostitution and objectification of women, is too broken, too stilled and distant, to help those in distress; Bickle, on the other hand, obsesses over such a self-levied imperative. He has to, in order to articulate some meaning in his life. In the end he loses all touch with reality, whereas the Jew, who had almost given up, begins to reconnect. What constitutes a dereliction of duty to our world?

Mabuse

The threat of rain continues to hover, unfulfilled; today came clouds. And there is something in the air, the suggestion of horror. My past continues to shed itself ritualistically in the sloughing of dead skin from my arms, and I pass on campus a junior preacher warning his small crowd about the evils of the Church of Vodka and Burritos, which cares not for men's souls. His mentor stood by approvingly. Meanwhile my nephew looms on the threshold of existence.


Yesterday I labelled our foe as a "compassing Mabuse of words"; the reference was not idle. We have, in fact, been watching Fritz Lang's original Mabuse movies, Der Spieler (1922) and Das Testament (1933). The difference between the two is astonishing: where the first creeps inexorably for four silent hours towards its climax, fleshing out its anti-hero as a concrete übervillain with a line in telepathic hypnosis and a network of accomplices throughout Berlin, the second reduces the insane Mabuse to a cipher, literally as letters scratched in a window-pane, his voice channelled through Baum, the head-doctor of the asylum in which he is incarcerated, exerting a sinister power on all from afar. The first scene of Das Testament breaks noisily from the silence of Das Spieler: all dialogue is subsumed under a roar of machinery. Mabuse's silent spoken mantras in the first film give way in the second to reams and reams of written commands through which he manifests his influence. Baum (whose own name, 'Tree,' is almost an anagram of 'Mabuse') shows us at the beginning that his patient had been writing and writing with his hands on air, until supplied with a paper and pencil; at first his gestures produced meaningless scribbles, but these scribbles slowly congealed into words, and then intelligible sentences, outlining imaginary crimes in meticulous detail. The suggestion is not just Hitler scrawling his Kampf at Landsberg in 1925, as some have observed, but even the birth of language itself, a parodic inversion of that Enlightenment vision of the creation of language to cement social concord. Here words emanate only from the individual, and threaten to destroy society in apocalypse.

The ultimate appeal of Mabuse as criminal mastermind is his nihilism: it is explicitly stated that his goal is not personal wealth or gain, but total destruction of the world. Crime is a total entity for Mabuse, an expression of pure destruction, almost mystical: "When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime." But the spirit of total annihilation is discovered in both films to be self-annihilating, as the villain is defeated each time by personal demons, guilt. Compare Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives (1945) on Raskolnikov:

Crime produces a kind of "oneness with the universe" in leading to a sense of universal persecution whereby all that happens has direct reference to the criminal. There is no "impersonality" in the environment; everything is charged with possibilities. . . A sense of guilt may lead to crime as its representation; and by such translation, a sense of persecution that might otherwise verge upon the hallucinatory can be made thoroughly real and actual.

Everything in Mabuse's world is indeed charged with possibilities, and his persecution does become 'real and actual', effecting his capture at the end of Der Spieler; but here we see also the opposite process, as the real and actual Mabuse becomes hallucinatory in his hypnotic power. If crime for Burke is a sort of mystical communion with the universe, then so is gambling:

Experience itself becomes mystical when some accidental event happens to be "representative" of the individual, as when a sequence of circumstances follows exactly the pattern desired by him. Hence the mysticism of gambling, where it is hoped that one's "pure purpose" in the pursuit of money will be in perfect communion with the inexorable decrees of fate.

Mabuse himself is the ultimate 'gambler' (Spieler), cheating the stockmarket top-hats and swindling aristocrats of their riches over illicit poker rounds in the Berlin underworld. Except he isn't a gambler, and he has no need of hope—as he ensures by hypnosis that his pursuit of money is indeed "in perfect communion" with the decrees of fate. With his stares and mantras he dictates fate (fatum, 'that which is spoken'). Mabuse is therefore less the mystical initiate, and more the demonic God or Ahriman, creating the accidental event as "representative".

Finally, all of this plays into Mabuse's status in the first film as a respected doctor and psychoanalyst. Lang's Expressionist sensibility, as noted in his work on Dr. Caligari (although David Kalat advises caution with the Expressionist label), is of course intrigued by the phenomena of insanity and psychoanalysis, and Mabuse suggests the same scepticism about the 'authoritative discourse' of psychiatry in general that would be expressed later by Foucault et al. A thin line, we see, separates the fatherly psychoanalyst, fascinated by madness, and the raving maniac himself. In one powerful scene, the spectral Mabuse, incarnating himself in Baum, assumes the bulbous, distorted head of the African sculptures adorning Baum's office—the same sculptures called primitive in the popular mind, and linked intimately to the infantile, and to the delirious.

On Dr. Caligari

I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari last night; it is fantastic. This opinion was a foregone conclusion. Just as when my wife reads the latest (and last, in this case) Dorothy Sayers novel, I know that when I see a 1919 psycho-horror movie with Expressionist sensibilities, my reaction will be generally positive. The older fantasies, in the broader sense of the word, are far superior: Metropolis, King Kong, Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or, Intolerance, Modern Times, The Wizard of Oz. The excellent Eraserhead, though much later, is also in the Expressionist tradition. There's a certain darkness in the design, animation, effects, and a certain powerful quiet, that is missing in today's slick CGI extravaganzas; the world is never entirely real, and never attempts to be real, but rather holds itself apart from the viewer as some kind of uncanny otherworld, where the makeup is thick, the sets are stylised, the monsters are jerky, and oftentimes our view is grainy and obscure. The crucifixion scene in Intolerance is just like that—a dim, nebulous morass of tiny figures on a red-tinted pane, the only clue to the scene being a tiny Christ-figure in the upper-left.

I didn't like everything about Caligari. The dialogue-screens, with their jagged shapes and 'Expressionist' typography, seem more 1987 than 1919, and too much of the story-background is given away before the final twist. But the sets and acting are sublime. My father-in-law once remarked, in a discussion of Hoffmann's 'The Forest Warden', that Italy seems to represent mystery and magic to the Germans (personally I suspect it's a Romantic obsession with the cloak-and-dagger intrigue and occult traditions of the High Renaissance)—and the same applies to this film, which is very Hoffmannesque. Macabre and quiet: Arvo Pärt should write a score for it.