A dream: beneath any narrative you might write, there is the counter-narrative of writing. Beneath and behind the narrative, but also touching it at each moment of its development, the narrative against narrative, that lets the story hover out over 70,000 fathoms and voids its episodes from within.
How can it itself be brought closer to the surface, as a drowned body to the surface of the ice? How can it be made to pass close to the ice but beneath it, moving away from you but there?
Dream of a narrative so faintly written that another narrative can pass beneath its surface like a body under ice. A narrative so faint, so broken, that the other narration is also there and speaks in its own voice, far and distant. Its own voice but that is also yours, the unfamiliar sound that comes from you when, like the narrator of Tarkovsky’s Mirror (just before the starting credits) you are able to say, ‘I can speak now’.
‘I can speak’ – but can you? For it is not what you can say that matters, but also what says itself by means of that saying. And I think of Tarkovsky’s film again, the newsreel clips, the Chinese at the Russian border waving the little red book; the girl in an evacuation who turns to the camera; the troops in Crimea, still cheerful, crossing the mud.
What says itself by means of film? By means of it, but holding itself into its own means, its own capacity? Even as it cannot own itself, or that it is what disowns itself from you as a filmmaker in your finished (unfinishable) work of art?
Imagine this instead: the artwork that cannot resort even to newsreels, or continuity shots that Ozu loved. That presents the bareness of the narration, of a narrative voice that says nothing. The breaks in Bergman’s Persona, perhaps.
Is it possible to say even Tarkovsky was afraid of abandonment, that he sought to fill the void from which speech comes and to which it returns with historical footage; that even when his camera pans across abandoned items in the water during Stalker (the same items as were on Stalker’s nightstand earlier in the film; the same, but sea-changed, become image …) his cinema is still an attempt to avoid what abandons itself in narrative. And isn’t Bergman’s Persona, despite its breaks, still too ‘psychological’, still a descendant of Strindberg’s theatre (his chamber pieces in particular)?
And now, idly as usual, I think of Bacon’s attempt to strip his paintings of any narrative. Ah, but that is the good fortune of the painter, whose work needs much less time to unfold, that unfolds across space (crude analogy) and not through time; that is not obliged to narrate. That can be, in some sense. That stands on its two feet.
What would a film be that told despite narration, across it? Images, now, that are set loose from any particular story? Think of Duras’s remaking of India Song … what was its name? But wasn’t it too boring? Didn’t it fail to carry you along, even though you saw only the briefest excerpt.
Idle thoughts. Perhaps we must all be like Tarkovsky and Bergman, who stumble upon the ‘break’ – that other narration. Perhaps it can be spoken of ‘despite’, in negligence, happenstance, and according to those contingencies where something else speaks by way of what unfolds.
Think of Tarkovsky again. Tarkovsky, editing Mirror over and again, looking for – what? It fell together, after long effort, all at once, and there it was: broken narratives, though interconnected. Broken, though, and just enough to let something else shine through.
Shine? I imagine instead the body under ice, the drowned one Tarkovsky also was as he made his film. As though the whole film was seachanged like the items from Stalker’s nightstand. The whole film – and perhaps, too, if we can read it autobiographically – Tarkovsky’s life, his whole life as it had been offered as a sacrifice. A sacrifice, as it had been made to speak of that other who drowned beneath him, under ice …
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