three colours blue (w&d kieslowski, w. krzysztof piesiewicz)

I don’t know how many times I have seen this film, and it’s worth noting that the print was very poor quality, but last night it connected with me in that way that happens when a work of art feels so direct that it’s as though it is speaking to you personally.

The film was moving (emocionante - Spanish has a word which better captures the sensation), both emotionally and intellectually. As regular readers will know, this is not something that happens all that often. In part because of my incipient Englishness, which makes me wary of triggered emotional reactions, in part because my instincts are probably on the whole intellectual rather than emotional (if that division has any kind of validity). I am also wary of what might be called ‘Great Artist Syndrome’, which is the disease which means people go weak at the knees when in the presence of a supposedly great artist, losing all critical faculties.

So I have tried to analyse why this particular film, which tells the story of a young woman’s recovery from the tragedy of losing her child and her husband in a car crash, was so affecting.

Juliet Binoche in a Portobello Cafe

Given the premise, opening the film from an emotionally charged standpoint as we witness the actual crash, the director was steering the viewer into highly emotive territory. Binoche’s performance is, thereafter, the triumph of reason over emotion. Where we are guided to react to moments of emotional distress with our own outpouring of matching distress, Binoche’s character, Julie, (her name so similar to the protagonist’s) reacts with unfettered intellectual rigour. There’s an early scene where the old housekeeper weeps, saying she is weeping the tears that Julie will not. In classical narrative terms, the script would be steering the character towards a moment of catharsis, when the emotion would finally be expunged and Julie would weep those tears which she refuses to or cannot at the start. This doesn’t happen. Kieslowski/ Binoche/ the Script never offer the character this cathartic moment. The more the script held off from permitting the character this moment, the more emotionally charged the film became. I remember once spotting Binoche in a Portobello Cafe, looking utterly and completely herself. This might sound like a stupid thing to say, but I think it reflects the way she as an actress succeeds in fusing outer and inner appearance on screen: we never for a moment question a performance which is a sublime example of screen acting, in spite of the fact she the script refuses to let her do what we expect or anticipate a dramatic character to do in this situation. She at once defies us and convinces us, a balancing act that never wavers

The Act of Killing the Act of Kindness

The director Joshua Oppenheimer made a very powerful film called The Act of Killing, which is a slightly leftfield way of introducing the idea that Blue could have been retitled An Act of Kindness. In modern narrative models, the protagonist is supposed to be decisive, to take action. So often, the action of action leads towards violence, even cruelty. This is because violent acts are considered dramatically more engaging, from Homer and Beowulf until the present day. Julie is a character who is hiding. She is in retreat from the world. When asked by an estate agent she’s going to rent a flat from what she does, she says “Nothing”. Instead of going out and fighting against fate and anyone who backs fate up, she retreats. Hiding, in our world. is usually associated with cowardliness. (In others it is associated with saintliness.) But we never feel Julie is a coward, in part because of the ferocious strength Binoche’s performance manifests. Instead, she is someone who is resisting conventional models of grief. This culminates in an action which is one of both forgiveness and inordinate kindness. In dramatic terms it is a small action, one which requires no physical exertion, one which doesn’t demonstrably alter her own well-being. It is at once the most innocuous of dramatic twists and the most radical and it is in its small way reflective of a director who appears to be turning his back on thousands of years of narrative (and social) conformity.

The Lost Dream of Europe

Julie’s husband is a composer who has a commission to write a symphony to celebrate European Unification. He dies with the symphony unfinished. Julie and her lover, Olivier, eventually complete it. If there is anything that signifies Julie’s final recuperation from the tragedy it is that she comes to accept the legacy of her husband’s music (which she collaborated in the writing of) and agrees to help in the completion of the score. There is in this narrative angle an intimation that Julie’s process of healing runs parallel to a European process of healing, which for Kieslowski and his generation goes back to the wars of the twentieth century and subsequent ideological conflict. The progressive, pacifist element of the European project is celebrated in Julie and her husband and her lover’s shared project, and the film’s music itself. It goes without saying that there is, from an English-British perspective, something heartbreaking about witnessing this, (from our point of view), lost dream of European Union. It only serves to consolidate the known fact that what has happened to our nation has been a triumph of the philistines, and those bellicose instincts which Kieslowski’s film so roundly and subtly subverts.

The Bravery of a director who Empowers Sound above Image

Finally, in a note that is connected to the above, there is the issue of the music itself and the way the director prioritises it within his structural use of the elements at his disposal as a filmmaker. The music is employed in an entirely intrusive manner. It rears up at moments, out of context, like another character stamping on stage. Kieslowski worked with Zbigniew Preisner, the composer, on numerous occasions. He clearly had complete faith in Preisner to construct a music which would not only possess a dramatic potency which would counterpoint Julie’s passivity, but would also be, in so many ways, the star of the show. Music has a transcendent power which the word and its cinematic sister, the image, can never quite match. It communicates with the listener in a visceral manner, uncluttered by the noise of ideas and the rationality. The use of music is where Kieslowski front ends the emotional charge of his film, in so doing defying the audience, like his protagonist, to resist its power. And we cannot. The music overwhelms us. 

the parable of the sower (octavia butler)

I read Butler’s book not realising, in my ignorance, its original publication date. Perhaps this is of less relevance that I am making it out to be, but the fact that the  novel was written in the mid-nineties marks Butler out as an uncannily prophetic voice. Had this been a novel published this year, one might have accused her of jumping on a bandwagon, but given the publication date it would be fair to say that in fact, Parable of the Sower is the bandwagon. It predates that other influential US dystopian novel, The Road, and subsequently apocalypse has become more and more fashionable. I came to the novel via Amitav Ghosh, who recommended it as one of the very few pioneering climate change texts. 

As an aside it would be fascinating to trace the history of apocalyptic literature. Apocalypse lends itself to cinema, and there have been plenty of Apocalyptic movies, from Stalker to The Omega Man via Will Smith’s I Am Legend. Images of devastation give good cinema. In literature, so rooted in the mores of its culture, it’s perhaps less common. Ghosh talks about the marginalisation of SF as a literary genre, which is the more natural home for an apocalyptic literature, a genre he argues is essential if we are to begin to address the dominant issue of the day, which is climate change.

Butler was there ahead of her time. The book’s heroine, Lauren Oya Olamina, lives on the edge of a Los Angeles which has been brought to the brink of societal collapse, in large part due to the scarcity of water. As her world becomes more and more feral, she is forced to flee, setting out on the road and gathering a bunch of followers to her slightly trippy vision of humanity’s future, encapsulated in her poetic writings. The novel is dynamic, fast-moving, and, in its way, terrifying. Survival is everything in the apocalyptic world and values such as empathy have to be carefully rationed, like water, if you want to live. 

The vision of Los Angeles being overrun by drug-crazed gangs made me question the writing at first. It made me thinking of the writings of Mariana Enriquez, whose stories broach the issue of an inner city which has been hollowed out by the use of crack derivatives (‘pasta base’ in Rioplatense terms). Where I live now, the Ciudad Vieja, there are most nights pasta base users squatting in the porch in front of my house. They are the shadowy figures of bourgeois nightmares, theoretically the emerging zombies who end up overrunning LA in Butler’s novel. Only, the social balance doesn’t quite work that way. In practice, they keep themselves to themselves, huddle in the corner of the barrio they have appropriated, and, as Enriquez describes, are not threatening. All of which made me question Butler’s Yankee perspective. However, the fact the novel is 25 years old gives it another dimension. Perhaps what is happening in our ‘third world’ barrios is just the start of something that terminates as Butler describes it. One hopes that her deeply pessimistic vision does not come to pass, but events seem ever more determined to prove this hope wrong. 

the lives of michel foucault [david lacey]

part 1

Last year, an Argentine play, helmed by a distinguished director, called something like “Searching for Foucault”, arrived on tour in Montevideo. It was about a teacher having a nervous breakdown. There was disappointingly little about Foucault himself. It was clear that the play was using his name to give itself a certain caché. Apart from the fact I had wanted to see more of this director’s work, it felt as though I had gone to see it under false pretences. Still, the title demonstrates the curious allure of the philosopher’s name. More than any other late twentieth century intellect, the myth of Foucault has grown from the days when I first studied him, a year after his death, at York university. If the last thirty years have been the age of any given figure, we might well look on back on them as the Foucault years. 

Macey’s book traces Foucault’s life from birth to untimely death. As well as detailing the story of his life, it also tackles the story of his intellectual development, not an easy task for such an intellectual magpie. Suffice to say that Macey is rigorous and comprehensive in his detailing of Foucault’s work, which is the most important element of his life. However, as regards the secondary issue of describing the person, Foucault remains as enigmatic a figure upon the conclusion of the book as he was at the start. He’s a bundle of contradictions. Sage-like but quick-tempered. An espouser of political causes of all kinds who was criticised for not being political enough. An ascetic soul who was also a hedonist who frequented the bathhouses of San Francisco. A would-be outsider who was very much an insider in the highfalutin circles of French academia. Perhaps these contradictions are fundamental to the construction of a mind that taught the world to think in terms of matrices rather than absolutes. 

Nevertheless, even Macey’s book seems to cling to the notion of an absolute truth that underpins thought. The final pages relate a coded secret account of Foucault’s past (written by a possible ex-lover) as though this might indeed be the key to understanding him. (One that made me think of Hanecke’s Caché.) One imagines Foucault himself would not have warmed to this theory/ conceit. Or perhaps this was a way for the biographer to acknowledge that whilst his book discloses a great deal of information about Foucault, the philosopher, it also leaves many a stone unturned. 

+++

part 2

Additional note written whilst reading this book:

“On reading Foucault’s biography:

When I first read Foucault, in 1986/7, it felt as though one had discovered a writer who could map out the shape of the world. Not just the world as I knew it to be then, but also the world which was to come. In so many ways this proved to be correct. Foucault was the prophet of identity, of post-truth (for better and for worse). The iconoclast of the post war systems he and my parents grew up with. However, this is not the thought. The thought is thus: the world requires a successor. For the first time since those days, one is conscious of the fact that Foucault’s view (pendulum) is no longer sufficient. In the ensuing decades three things have occurred which have yet to find a mind capable of synthesising them. These elements are the digitalisation of the world (internet; personal computers; robotics etc); climate change; accelerated globalisation. The latter has always existed as a concept, but has been hyper-extenuated by the rise of aviation and the digital shrinking of the world. The other two factors were no more than flecks on the distant horizon back in 1987. There may be writers/philosophers who address any of these issues with imagination and insight. But I have yet to come across anyone who has in any way synthesised these elements of the present, permitting the reader to peer into a future and begin to comprehend the shape and needs of advancement/ survival within this future. The global warming of information. The rising simulacrum tide.”

the mexican dream [j. m. g. le clezio]

The subtitle of this book appears somewhat convoluted upon first reading. It's: "Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilisations.' Is this merely a poorly translated phrase, or is it just a piece of literary whimsy? The answer is neither, and by the time the reader reaches the end of this book, its meaning is clear.

Le Clezio's objective is to explore the fate and legacy (or lack of one) of those civilisations of the New World which the Old World cut off just as they were coming into their prime. Far from being a collection of savages, the Aztec and Mayan worlds were sophisticated urban societies, with their own notions of religion; philosophy and physics. In comparison, the barbarians were the Spanish, who melted down golden artefacts and destroyed their beautiful cities. The book documents this tragic meeting of two worlds, introducing the reader to a host of other forgotten cultures who lived on the edges of the Mexican world, including the Chichimeca; the Tarahumara; the Totonac and further North the tribes of North America. The author observes the connections between these doomed worlds, in the way they viewed nature, their span upon the earth, and their gods.

His reading of authors such as Sahagun and De Las Casas, as well as those few Mayan and Aztec texts which survived, allows him to establish a clear portrait of what was an evolving world view, contextualising the famous blood lust of the Aztecs, as well as divining the secret of their innate expectation of destruction, a prophesy which came to be fulfilled. At the same time, he stresses that these societies were still in the process of developing philosophies, philosophies which might, had they been allowed to flower, have evolved to rival or complement the complexity of Buddhism, or materialism. However, as observed, this never happened. The evolving thought processes were interrupted. This world where gods walked with men, and life was not part of a linear vision of time, but a circular one, was all but extinguished over the course of a single generation. And the loss to mankind as a whole, the author suggests, was greater than we shall ever be able to realise.