A treat from Mali on Monday, seeing Amadou & Mariam live in the Melkweg. For well over two decades this blind couple of musicians have blended traditional Malian and Western pop music into an irresistibly catchy mix, led by Amadou's terrific guitar and Mariam's soaring vocals.
Live they traded in the bluesy and often wistful undertone of their albums, notably 'Dimanche a Bamako' (2005), for a more danceable sound that was somewhat heavy on the beats. But while they kept most songs brief, a few times they allowed themselves extended jams with some showoff percussion and oldschool guitar soloing. (Back in the '80s Amadou in fact started as a guitarist in Les Ambassadeurs, itself an offshoot from the legendary Super Rail Band, which produced some of Africa's finest guitar players.)
Swiss director Alain Tanner's 'Dans la Ville Blanche' (1983) has a uniquely weightless atmosphere as it floats through Lisbon, the white city, in search of the limits of doing nothing, and "abolishing space and time".
The story is simple and has an improvised feel. A sailor, Paul, jumps ship in Lisbon and explores the city, recording street life on his 8mm camera and savoring his newfound liberty. He writes rambling letters to his girlfriend back home, and has an affair with a woman he meets, Rosa. The hotel where Paul stays, and where Rosa works, features a clock that runs backwards - an apt symbol for the warped and weightless atmosphere that Paul finds himself in.
In the vacuum of his life, Paul wanders around the foreign city whose language he doesn't speak, drinks in seedy bars, gets mugged and with obstinate aimlessness let's his life unravel around him. At one point Paul is compared to an axolotl, and the film quotes (or actually paraphrases) Argentine writer Julio Cortázar from his short story 'Axolotl' to explain this.
What fascinated me was their stillness the first time I saw the axolotl, and I soon thought I understood their secret will: To abolish space and time with an indifferent quietness. They seemed to be spying on something, some remote extinguished realm, a time of an aloof and absolute freedom when the world belonged to the axolotl.
It's this "indifferent quietness", this waiting to see what life has in store for him, even to the point where Paul's identity starts to dissipate in existential questions, that gives 'Dans la Ville Blanche' its unique atmosphere. And a very alien one from our own goal directed, efficiency obsessed age.
'Dans la Ville Blanche' shares many characteristics with that other famous film about Lisbon, Wim Wenders' 'Lisbon Story' (1994). In both films Lisbon is more than just a backdrop and becomes a character, an elusive mystery that the protagonists try to fathom. Both films are also about the attempt to capture that character on film, with lots of time capsule scenes with the camera just winding through its narrow cobbled streets and documenting life in the Alfama and other neighborhoods twenty, thirty years ago.
In 'Dans la Ville Blanche', as the 1983 NY Times review put it, "the city of the title is less a particular place than a series of states of mind". By now those states of mind seem almost as nostalgically lost as the picturesque 8mm city life the film portrays - but this just provides another reason to watch this somewhat forgotten film.
His son Andrei Tarkovsky included this poem in his film 'Stalker', narrated by Arseny himself. More of his poetry featured in 'The Mirror'.
(Mosfilm has released most of Tarkovsky's films online, including 'Stalker', though I really wouldn't recommend trying to watch these cinematic masterpieces on a laptop screen.)
This poem particularly expresses a major theme in 'Stalker', and indeed in many of his films, of man's yearning for some form of metaphysical guidance in a postapocalyptic, disillusioned age of cynical Writers and pragmatic Professors (to name the two iconic characters in the film).
Just a short service announcement: today my website was hacked and down for most of the day until I had a chance to clean up the mess, directory by tedious directory. This was way beyond a bit of spam on the doormat, and more like there was graffiti all over the inside of my house. So apologies if you found the door closed.
If I understand correctly, technically this was an obfuscated Base64 encoded PHP injection hack, though I don't know where exactly they/it broke in. Was this due to my own chmod carelessness? Was PivotX vulnerable somewhere? Or were my FTP or PivotX login somehow sniffed out or brute forced?
In any case there's a kind of perverse pleasure in seeing this described as "definitely one of the most elegant hacks I've seen".
Anyway, things should be okay now, with fresh passwords and everything either restored from backup or manually cleaned. Unless there's a backdoor script installed somewhere that I've missed...
A complaint with many mainstream films these days is that they treat their audience as if they're toddlers, but last year's 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' is an interesting exception for deliberately making its plot too complex to understand on first viewing. That is, unless you've read the film's source, John le Carré's classic 1974 spy novel, and preferably also seen the equally classic BBC television series (1979).
The film itself has been reviewedquiteexhaustively, so I'll resist another description of its gloomy '70s atmosphere of smoky back rooms and drizzly London with its pervasive feel of paranoia and betrayal, or of Gary Oldman's great sphynx-like performance as the sad and world-weary Smiley, whose eyes often remain hidden behind the reflection of his glasses. I'll also resist comparing the film with the BBC series, and Oldman with his formidable predecessor, Alec Guinness.
It is a tatty, nasty, shabby and stiflingly male world of beige and grey, seen through a dreary particulate haze - fag-ash and dandruff. The interiors and government offices are lit with a pallid, headachey glow. Every room looks like a morgue, and the corpses are walking around, filling out chits, wearing ill-fitting suits, having whispered conversations, giving and receiving bollockings and worrying about loyalty.
In two long blog pieces, film critic David Bordwell (who every film student knows as one half of Thompson and Bordwell's book 'Film Art: An Introduction') close-reads the storytelling strategies that 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' ('TTSP') uses to stay ahead of its audience. Highly recommended (but lots of spoilers): 'Tinker Tailor: A guide for the perplexed' and 'Tinker Tailor once more: Tradecraft'.
Put simply, most films go to great length to tell their story redundantly, with vital clues repeated at least once or twice, in dialogue and/or visually, to make sure its audience understands the causal links between what happens, as well as all the characters' motivations. However, as Bordwell notes, 'TTSP' "adheres to common conventions of modern storytelling but then subtracts one or two layers of redundancy."
Obviously, Le Carré's complicated labyrinthine plot had to be condensed and simplified quite a bit to fit into a feature-length film. But this doesn't explain the lack of redundancy and extreme ellipsis.
An interesting example is the introduction of the film's central location, the Circus in London - Le Carré's ironic code name for the British intelligence headquarters - and its key characters.
Another film would have typed out, "MI5 HQ," but we're left to infer that behind this façade the Secret Intelligence Service does its work. So the convention of the exterior establishing shot is respected but made a little less redundant.
Consider as well the introduction of the Circus's decision makers. Another film might have started with Smiley and followed him from his office into the briefing room. Instead, he's introduced as one of several men, then as an out-of-focus figure alongside Control. And even Control could have been more clearly identified. He signs his resignation with what could become an emblem of the film's stingy approach to storytelling.
Bordwell gives a number of other examples, all contributing to this "stingy" storytelling. The effect seems designed in part for the many fans of the book and the series, who would come to the film with extensive knowledge of the plot. Partly this approach also invites repeated viewing, and especially on the small screen where you can watch it nonlinearly. This is not uncommon for modern "clever" films like 'Memento' or 'The Usual Suspects'.
However, 'TTSP' seems to go a step further, by not just making the puzzle complex or subtle, but actively creating gaps and missing hints - like a mosaic that's complete enough to see the pattern but not entirely complete. In that sense 'TTSP' is by now best approached as one large intertextual work encompassing both the book, series and film. To complete the mosaic repeated viewing as well as knowledge of the book and/or series is necessary.
(A small but telling example of a missing piece of the mosiac is the painting that Smiley has on his wall. The film never tells us it is in fact painted by the character who turns out to be the mole.)
Ultimately, the film leaves you a bit mystified, like having witnessed but not quite followed a suspenseful chess match. Particularly, the motives of the various pieces remain inscrutable - even of Smiley himself.
The behavior of these spies is oddly ritualistic, caught up in their own web of deceit and suspicion, which they themselves can never fully see. Smiley's glasses play an important role as a symbol for both seeing and hiding, so that even when Smiley has identified the mole, the motivations for this agent's betrayal remain opaque. It is this disillusionment and frustration about the moral rot which was at the heart of Le Carré's novel that is reflected in the film adaptation's deliberate incompleteness.
Update: To add one more work to the intertextual 'TTSP' constellation, here's the film's screenplay (pdf). Much less mosaic in structure than the final film, it shows the extent to which its construction took place in the editing room.
'Map' by German artist Aram Bartholl was part of this year's Signals: For Real program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which focused on the increasingly blurry line between physical and virtual space.
It's a simple and almost inevitable idea, placing the familiar Google Maps location icon in real spaces. Bartholl has exhibited the large A in different cities around the world, and it now stands at the exact spot in Rotterdam that Google indicates as the location of the film festival (i.e. at the corner of Schouwburgplein, next to the IFFR offices).
Perhaps most interesting is how natural the icon looks in the urban landscape - a sign of our increasing tolerance for hybrid reality? (Or just of Google's ubiquity?)
Bookstores don't provide a remote control for Proust, you can't switch to a soccer match, or a quiz show, win a Cadillac.
We live longer but less precisely and in shorter sentences.
We travel faster, farther, more often, but bring back slides instead of memories. Here I am with some guy. There I guess that's my ex. Here's everyone naked so this must be a beach.
Seven volumes - mercy. Couldn't it be cut or summarized, or better yet put into pictures. There was that series called "The Doll," but my sister-in-law says that's some other P.
And by the way, who was he anyway. They say he wrote in bed for years on end. Page after page at a snail's pace. But we're still going in fifth gear and, knock on wood, never better.
The most cinematically rewarding film seen so far at the International Film Festival Rotterdam is the Tiger nominated 'Sudoeste' ('Southwest'), directed by Eduardo Nunes. Shot in extreme widescreen (cinemascope) and gorgeous black and white, this poetic and magical-realist film from Brazil might be imagined as Andrei Tarkovsky filming a story by Gabriel García Márquez.
A fairytale for grownups, 'Sudoeste' takes place in a sleepy, tropical village on the shores of an inland sea, where salt is the local industry. Its slow-moving story revolves around a young girl, Clarice, who in the course of one day grows into a woman, grows old and dies. She spends time with a family who have lost a daughter, also named Clarice, and there are hints that what we are witnessing is history repeating itself.
Further interpreting the enigmatic and dreamlike narrative, there appears to be a dark and horrific secret at the heart of this film. But this is wisely left implicit - something to be felt rather than spelled out - and draped in the beautifully composed cinematography and sound design. For instance, the scene when the little girl dozes off in the midday heat, with the local band's hypnotic rhythm playing in the background, and wakes up a woman is a stunning piece of filmmaking.
In a Q&A after the screening on Wednesday, Nunes explained how the initial idea for his film was to have two different paces of time coexist in one story. This became Clarice's time and the 'normal' time of the village. "Or actually," he added, "there are three forms of time. The third is the projection time."
Indeed, the film repeatedly draws attention to itself as a sensual object, made of sight and sound as well as vividly evoking the textures and smells of its magical world. In another scene, Clarice is heard in voice-over saying, "Close your eyes. Listen to the sound of rain." As the screen turns dark to let the audience experience the sound of the first drops of a tropical downpour, one of the most memorable moments of this film is made purely of sound.
'Sudoeste' might well win a Tiger Award later this week. If you have a chance, see this widescreen gem in the cinema. As the director commented in a Daily Tiger interview, "It's so difficult to show it on DVD. I joke that when you show it on a laptop you have to use two and put them together to watch the film!"
Update: If you're wondering about the title, 'Southwest', this in-depth review (mind the spoilers) offers an interesting interpretation:
Brazil, as a country, is generally divided into five regions: the North, the Northeast, the Central-West, the Southeast, and the South. So when director Eduardo Nunes names his first feature Southwest, it must be assumed that we are entering a place more of the imagination than of representation.
Update: Unfortunately no Tiger Award for 'Sudoeste'. These are the three winners, including the daring and disturbing 'Klip' from Serbia.
I'd like the reading of this book to leave you with the impression that you've traversed a sensual nightmare.
One of the great masterpieces of modernist literature, Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet' ('Livro do Desassossego') is impossible to read in its entirety. Not because of the book's incomplete state (the manuscript was found posthumously in Pessoa's famous literary trunk, unfinished, on loose leaves stuffed in an envelope), but because its fragmentary and dreamlike nature prevent the reader from ever surveying it as a whole.
This is the kind of reasoning that Pessoa, or rather his heteronym Bernardo Soares, revels in - a labyrinthine introspection reminiscent of Borges, always shifting between metalevels of his argument and delighting in paradoxes, oxymorons and non-sequiturs.
Worked on throughout Pessoa's adult life, the book has no beginning or end, its narrator has no past or future, there is only an eternal mazelike present made of thoughts, scenes, aphorisms, literary theory and metaphysical irony. As in a dream, there is only a very tenuous, haphazard link between one fragment and the next, nor is there any way of turning back - the book is truly nonlinear, almost random, and easy to get lost in.
This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing - just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world's diversity. I don't know if I'm happy this way. Nor do I care.
As with most of Pessoa's work, 'The Book of Disquiet' is ostensibly written by a heteronym. In this case Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon, was described by Pessoa as a semi-heteronym, "because his personality, although my own, doesn't differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it". The book contains a preface by Pessoa describing how he met Soares in a Lisbon restaurant and ended up receiving the manuscript from him, subtitled 'A Factless Autobiography'. In reality, the book wasn't published in Portuguese until 1982, and in English in 1991 - over half a century after Pessoa's death. Needless to say there is no such thing as a definitive edition. (The quotes here are from the translation/edition by Richard Zenith.)
In an Observer review, George Steiner also wondered how to characterize this strange and unique book:
What is this Livro do Desassossego? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valery's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle.
Without aspirations or illusions, living and working in Lisbon's Rua dos Douradores, Bernardo Soares treats life as "fundamentally a mental state" and prefers to live in his dreams - or rather to "interexist" in that half-conscious state where dreams are real and the world is strange. Thus he escapes from the tedium of existence, formulating a philosophy of inaction and of failure - a theme Samuel Beckett would develop further (though without the possibility of dreaming).
Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it's because the poetry or prose we write - devoid of any desire to move anyone's will or to mould anyone's understanding - is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.
A quintessentially modernist work, 'The Book of Disquiet' is a kind of exploded novel - plotless and fragmentary, and with a narrator who realizes his own incoherence. As such it contains fascinating insights into Pessoa's obsession with his literary personas. (Apart from his most famous ones, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, he reportedly used dozens of other alter egos.) Soares writes:
I've created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I. To create, I've destroyed myself. I've so externalized myself on the inside that I don't exist there except externally. I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
Here Soares' melancholy escapism threatens to turn into nihilism, the modernist narrator almost disappearing in his various personas. Usually Soares will solve this by just switching to a different dream level, from where he can watch the stage of his own self like a spectator. On another level, by making himself an unflinchingly self-aware literary character, Soares really has found the perfect escape from his tedious life. With Pessoa, fiction became an endlessly layered and kaleidoscopic concept.
To be sure, with its heady style and plotless philosophizing, 'The Book of Disquiet' is best read in moderation. But this doesn't mean it's all literary abstraction. Pessoa has a wry and self-mocking humor, as when he describes the soul as a dark well full of "subjective snot". And once in a while he'll throw in a perfect aphorism:
Reductio ad absurdum is one of my favourite drinks.
Here's one more excerpt from this infinitely quotable book, a short vignette (fragment 101) showing a hint of moody romanticism in Soares. (Or is "we" just him and his various personalities?)
If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there forever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever paining the curve of the hills... If we could remain that way for beyond for ever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing an action, without our pallid lips sinning another word! Look how it's getting dark!... The positive quietude of everything fills me with rage, with something that's a bitterness in the air I breathe. My soul aches... A slow wisp of smoke rises and dissipates in the distance... A restless tedium makes me think no more of you... All so superfluous! We and the world and the mystery of both.
See also the Site of Disquietude, an interesting experiment to turn 'The Book of Disquiet' into a hypertextual, audiovisual experience.
Cabo de São Vicente is the very south-western tip of Portugal (and Europe), and the cliff of the Promontorium Sacrum, as the Romans called it, was the last land the Portuguese Navigators saw before setting course for the open Atlantic in the 15th century - an amazing leap of faith which they may well have expected to be a one-way journey.
The cape takes its name from Saint Vincent of Saragossa, patron saint of both sailors and of Lisbon. Legend has it that the martyred saint's body was buried on the cape, and his grave was guarded by ravens. His remains were later relocated to Lisbon, again accompanied by ravens. This scene is depicted on Lisbon's coat of arms. (Of course there are other, parallel stories. He is also venerated in Valencia, for instance.)
St. Vincent's memorial day, by the way, is next week: 22 January.
