Uncategorized – Page 2 – Lars Iyer's Blog

It is the connection with Pascal that explains why Rohmer’s work is often linked to Jansenism. Jansenism was a movement in seventeenth-century Catholicism which argued that original sin has so corrupted nature that everything empirical is evil. The only hope for redemption is through the grace that is the gift of the God who is hidden from the world except in the unasked-for moments of the miracle. Within the Jansenist perspective then, each person must persevere to achieve a preparedness to receive the gift of God, although whether or not that particular person has the grace to accept the gift is quite beyond comprehension.

More specifically, it can be proposed that Rohmer’s films explore a Pascalian understanding of grace. They are explorations of how grace is embodied in the empirical social world, and how it transforms moments and appearances into something ‘real’. Rohmer’s films show how important it is for us to cultivate a way of seeing the world that is open to the miracle that irrupts unexpectedly.

Grace is the help that God gives to humans to attend to His call. It is supernatural and cannot be asked for or hurried along by human action or intervention.

What Rohmer explores, through his focus on the world as it is and on men and women in their empirical surroundings, are the mistakes which mean that the moment of the infusion of the ‘heavenly sweetness’ is missed, the delusions through which men and women seek to hurry it along or find it even when it is absent, and, finally, the selfdeceptions and strategies in relation to others through which men and women justify to themselves their free choice to withdraw from grace.

Rohmer’s films are examinations of how men and women freely respond to the irruption of God in the everyday, how they notice it (if they do), and whether and how that irruption implies preservation from temptation in self-understanding and the understanding of others.

What makes Rohmer’s films so questioning – and question provoking – is their refusal to present the miracle that can transform the empirical into the real as a magical moment that appears with thunder and lightning. Instead it is fragile, small and too easily misrecognised (hence the ‘misdirected attachments’ that feature in ‘Rohmer territory’, and hence also the panning shots of landscapes which invite the audience to look out for signs that may appear, or then again may not). Introduction 17 It is to be seen in a chance meeting, the gesture of a hand or the shape of a knee, not a cataclysm. The miracle is an irruption of new possibilities and consequently a moment of new uncertainties, not a sentimental closure. Similarly, Rohmer’s films rarely end with a moment of closure. They tend to end with the intimation of a new beginning.

The moment of irruption – the moment of the miracle – can be recognised only by those who are prepared to see it, and the question that the films explore is whether the characters – and by extension empirically real people ‘like us’ – will be able to persevere in trying to see, will be possessed of a disposition to continue to seek, even if the signs are missed or, indeed, never evident. Rohmer’s films are hopeful because they establish the possibility that even when they feel distant from the miracle of the ‘real’ that will infuse their lives with meaning, men and women can aspire to be open to more than the merely empirical, but this openness requires that attention always be paid to what surrounds and that it never be avoided. Grace comes, if it comes at all, in nature and in the human nature of sociability. In this way, empirical realism creates opportunities for the recognition of the irruption of the transcendentally real, and Rohmer’s films pose questions to their audiences: Is this film going to be a mere diversion or will you devote attention to seeing it? Is this film a distraction or will you be committed to try to see signs of grace? What is your disposition?

There are very few close-ups or focus pulls, and all the time a gap is maintained between the viewer and the viewed. This is a cinema of observation; observation by the film-maker and of the filmmaker’s production by the audience. But the audience is all the time encouraged to engage with the film, because the deep focus and long takes create the space and time in which choices can – and have to – be made about precisely what is going to be observed, and whether it will be remembered.

The ‘territory’ of Rohmer’s films is not just spatial or stylistic, however. It is also thematic. Rohmer’s work concentrates relentlessly on the confusions and self-deceptions of young(ish) educated men and women who have realised that ‘Real life is always unreal, always impossible, in the midst of empirical life’.

This is desire as wanting, or perhaps even as a request that is made to an other, as opposed to desire as eroticism and sexual activity. It is love as petition to the other, a love through which possibilities beyond the empirical might be seen if the characters have the sight and disposition so to see.

‘All I ask of grace is that it open up to me the possibility, however slight, of being touched by it’.

This becomes clear when Rohmer makes comments of the order that ‘not only is there a beauty and an order to the world, but there is also no beauty or order that are not of the world. Otherwise, how could art, a product of human effort, equal nature, a divine creation?’ He went on to state that ‘art is the revelation, in the universe, of the Creator’s hand. True enough, there can be no position more teleological or theological than mine’

According to Guy Bedouelle, writing in the orthodox Catholic journal Communio, Rohmer’s work is ‘a true theo-logia, a word about God’ because it is a step on the path along which cinema will discover its ‘spiritual destiny’. Rohmer’s realism means that his work has openness to ‘Christian reality’, which Bedouelle finds in the Moral Tales. He says that the films in that series emphasise the unplanned and accidental and thereby offer ‘a reflection on the part played in life by chance meetings and roundabout ways in which we are forced to look at ourselves and which give us a deeper understanding of our moral standards’. In this way, the Moral Tales are reflections on the preparedness to receive the accidental encounter that enables us to ‘learn how to give ourselves to God and to others’. The ‘word about God’ that Rohmer’s films express is, therefore, a word about grace and the receptiveness of men and women in the empirical world to the favours that God bestows, regardless of the human asking for them.

The film shows that Christian grace and redemption is ‘in the order of things whose order, in the end, depends on a miracle’ even though the miracle itself is always an unexpected form of appearance. Rossellini thereby points to a way in which Catholicism can be enriched and renewed by film, and Rohmer asks the rather rhetorical question: ‘Is it the task of the cinema to bring into art a notion whose great riches the whole of human genius had not yet known how to uncover: the notion of the miracle?’

For Taubes, Nietzsche’s atheism is not a heroic negativism, a reversal of Pascal’s wager, but a living of the death of God, a living sacrificially, an unlimited power of negation by which the absence of God is a way of life.

It has been said of both Swift and Gogol that they did everything they could to go mad, and in the end they succeeded. Hölderlin did not seek madness, he had to accept it; but, as Bertaux notes, his conception of madness had nothing to do with our notions of mental illness. It was, rather, something that could or should be inhabited. That is why, when he translates Sophocles’ Ajax, he renders the phrase theiai maniai xynaulos, literally ‘dwelling with divine madness’, as sein Haus ist göttliche Wahnsinn, ‘his house is divine madness’.

his versions appear to aim, as has been aptly observed, at achieving a sort of ‘mimesis’, if not downright ‘mimicry’, of the original’s form.10 Following an approach even Cicero considered misguided, Hölderlin not only translates verbum pro verbo, ‘word for word’, but forces the syntax of his German to adhere to the Greek. His pursuit of a ‘literal’ translation is so obsessive that he freely coins neologisms structured to correspond to the original (the Greek siderocharmes, which dictionaries typically translate as ‘bellicose’, is etymologically rendered eisenerfreuten, ‘iron-happy’)

Philosophy is born when certain individuals realize that they can no longer feel part of a people, that a people like the one poets believed they were addressing does not exist, or that it has become something foreign or hostile. Philosophy is, above all, this exile of a human being among other human beings, the predicament of being a stranger in the city in which the philosopher lives and in which he nevertheless continues to dwell, obstinately addressing an absent people. Socrates epitomized this paradox of the philosophical condition: he became such a stranger to his people that they sentenced him to death; but then, by accepting his sentence, he joins the people once again—as the one whom they have irrevocably expelled.

From a certain moment onwards, at the threshold of modernity, even poets become aware they can no longer address their own people—even the poet understands he is speaking to a people that no longer exists or, if it does, it cannot and does not want to listen to him. Hölderlin himself is the point at which these contradictions explode, and the poet is forced to recognize himself as a philosopher or—as he put it in a letter to Christian Ludwig Neuffer—take refuge in the hospital of philosophy. He realizes that what he lacks, or rather his weak point, is a sense of community with his people—what he referred to as the ‘national’— without which he will never be able to excel poetically. Hence the rupture, the break with earlier poetic forms, the paratactic shattering of the hymn, the stereotypical repetitions of his final quatrains; hence Hölderlin’s unconditional acceptance of the diagnosis—madness— his people ascribed to him. And, nevertheless, he continues writing until the very end, stubbornly seeking out a ‘German song’ in the darkness of night.

Hölderlin’s apparent silence regarding comedy is still more difficult to explain. It is as if, despite having understood that tragedy had become impossible, he simply could not see any way beyond tragedy except through madness—but then madness had to assume the character and manner of a comedy, of ‘sublime mockery’. Hence the exaggerated courtesy with which he simultaneously welcomes visitors and keeps them at a distance, deploying titles like ‘Your Majesty’, ‘Your Holiness’, ‘Your Highness’ and ‘Mister Baron, Sir—oui monsieur . . . ’; hence the nonsensical words he enjoys surprising them with: ‘Pallaksh, pallaksh’, ‘Wari wari’; hence the sublime irony with which he tells those who ask him for a poem, ‘Shall I write about Greece, about spring, or about the spirit of the age?’; or the way he abruptly points out to a visitor, ‘You see gracious sir, a comma!’ while reading a page from his own Hyperion.

Precisely as in Schelling’s account, Hölderlin’s apparently extravagant behaviours are referred to as ‘assumed’ mannerisms, not madness.

He is deemed half mad but perhaps sane, furiously mad and yet visionary: assessments of Hölderlin’s condition continue to oscillate between two radically opposite poles.

And yet commentators do not seem to realize that here, with a sort of theological nihilism which perhaps not even Nietzsche could have managed, the death or absence of God is in no way tragic, nor is it a matter of waiting for another divine figure, as Heidegger suggested in his later work. With a profound and paradoxical intuition—whereby the poet, ‘like ancient Tantalus’, is allowed to see more than he can bear—Hölderlin situates humans’ leave-taking from the gods in the poetic and existential form of an idyll or comedy.

True comedy aims to give a ‘a true but poetically grasped and artistically presented copy of so-called ordinary, habitual life’ (des sogennantes gewöhnlichen . . . Lebens). This in turn is immediately defined as that ‘life that stands in a weaker and more distant relation to the whole and for that very reason will be infinitely significant when it is comprehended poetically, but to a high degree insignificant in itself’.

What happens in comedy is that what is most common and insignificant—ordinary, habitual life— becomes ‘infinitely significant’ (unendlich bedeutend) and, although isolated from its vital context, shows itself as a truth of nature. But isn’t this precisely what, in the thirty-six years he spent holed up in his tower, Hölderlin’s life and poetry stubbornly, exemplarily and comically sought to do? And isn’t ‘habitual’ life the self-same inhabiting, ‘dwelling’ life (wohnend, that is, living according to habits) that appears so distant and done in the last idyll written from that tower? Wenn in die Ferne geht der Menschen wohnend Leben . . . ‘When one’s life of dwelling goes off into the distance . . . ’. In any case, if Hegel defines idylls as ‘poems that are half descriptive and half lyrical, having nature and the seasons as their main subject’, then the poems from the tower—that extreme, incomparable poetic legacy of the West—are, technically, idylls.

Agamben, Hoeldelin's Madness

As Henry Rollins says of him: ‘He really is that guy you really hoped you could be, but weren’t. If you’re in band, you really don’t want to care what anyone thinks, but you do. And you really want to be able to crank out an record every nine months, but you can’t. And you’d love to keep surprising people and baffling your critics by every three albums or so turning out your best album, but you don’t’.

On Mark E. Smith

This is Linklater's third film, after "Slacker' (1991) and "Dazed and Confused" (1993). He's onto something. He likes the way ordinary time unfolds for people, as they cross paths, start talking, share their thoughts and uncertain philosophies. His first movie, set in Austin, Texas, followed one character until he met a second, then the second until he met a third, and so on, eavesdropping on one life and conversation after another. The second film was a long night at the end of a high school year, as the students regarded their futures. Now there's "Before Sunrise," about two nice kids, literate, sensitive, tentative, intoxicated by the fact that their lives stretch out before them, filled with mystery and hope, and maybe love.

Review of Linklaker's Before Sunrise

A lot of bands work very hard to make you appreciate their meticulous craft or browbeat you with hooks, but Pavement tossed off brilliantly composed pop songs with a shambling, carefree swagger. They made it sound easy, and maybe it was. The best kind of genius tends to come very naturally to people, like a side effect of just being themselves.

The very best Pavement songs delight in curiosity and imagination, drawing connections between images and ideas as if everything in the world was full of character and significance. This is part of why, for example, a playful joke about the voice of Rush's lead singer in "Stereo" never gets stale. It's in the middle of a song that may as well be a sub-genre unto itself, bouncing about gleefully, utterly fascinated by the all the obscure details of the world. They found the magic in the mundane, and could make small enthusiasms, silly in-jokes, and skewed observations seem profound and glorious.

Stephen Malkmus' lazy, pitch-imperfect California drawlin', Spiral Stairs' shredded almost-guitar-playing, and the album's seemingly unfinished half-songs encapsulated the slacker ethos of the time with the hyperactive, restless energy that only hits after long bouts with boredom. Pavement's stream-of-consciousness lyrics and one-take anthems achieved genius through apathy. And in a time when apathy seemed the only option in life, no one said everything by saying nothing at all like those bored Stocktonites.

Matthew Perpetua

Here Lyotard is icily precise: The university once held the high calling of “the formation and dissemination of a general model of life” in hopes that an educated population would create a better world. But in a world without grand narratives, “universities and the institutions of higher learning are called upon to create skills, and no longer ideals—so many doctors, so many teachers in a given discipline, so many engineers, so many administrators, etc. The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions.”

Many popular defenses of the humanities—that they teach transferable skills, or that most graduates end up gainfully employed—preemptively concede that only instrumental knowledge can hold broader societal value. Yet many scholars are unable to articulate a more robust defense because doing so would require an appeal to grand narratives they themselves no longer believe. Without a shared system of values that gives social meaning to the study of the humanities, there is ultimately little reason for anyone to do so beyond personal enjoyment.

Synth-pop went through two distinct phases. The first was all about dehumanisation chic. That didn't mean the music was emotionless (the standard accusation of the synthphobic rocker), but that the emotions were bleak: isolation, urban anomie, feeling cold and hollow inside, paranoia. In the post-punk underground, that meant Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, both of whom ironically used a fair bit of guitar but treated it heavily with electronic effects. On the pop overground it meant John Foxx and Gary Numan. Gaz also used guitar prominently on his early hits under the name Tubeway Army. The secret of his success was that his music, for all its majestic canopies of glacial synth, rocked. Even when he dropped the guitar along with the name Tubeway Army and went fully electronic on Cars, he kept his flesh-and-blood drummer.

The second phase of synth-pop reacted against the first. Electronic sounds now suggested jaunty optimism and the gregariousness of the dancefloor, they evoked a bright, clean future just round the corner rather than JG Ballard's desolate 70s cityscapes. And the subject matter for songs mostly reverted to traditional pop territory: love and romance, escapism and aspiration. The prime movers behind synth-pop's rehumanisation were appropriately enough the Human League (just check their song titles: Open Your Heart, Love Action, These Are The Things That Dreams Are Made Of).

Simon Reynolds

The hierarchical status of the auteur, bussed in from a luxury hotel, was anathema to Rohmer’s working methods. As his filmmaking developed, he rejected 35mm for 16mm, with the latter’s visible grain making for a less obviously cinematic image. He also moved away from the wider frames associated with large-scale or epic cinema toward a more televisual, square 1:33 frame, with The Green Ray (1986) even premiering on French television before its cinema run. In the words of his biographers, Rohmer considered this televisual framing, with its defiantly non-cinematic look, as opening the film up to the “epiphany of banality.”

Rohmer’s films are characterized by long, locked-off frames and slow tracking shots of people walking through sunny towns, cities and countryside. The films radiate a quiet beauty. The buildings and clothes come in muted pastels, and the sound design is marked by the ambient noises of distant traffic or the wash of the sea.

In the Bazinian tradition, no attention is drawn to the filmmaking apparatus in the process of telling the story; here, style is an apparent absence of style. We sit with the characters, hear their opinions and watch them work out their problems, all the while remaining, from our omnipotent position, one step ahead of their epiphanies. What we get in Rohmer’s calm, sophisticated mise-en-scene is a sensation, a “feel,” or what today might be called a vibe.

[…] the ‘absolutely negative expectant emotion: despair’. This is expectation as eliminated expectation, expectation in its negative form, despair as the flipside of hope.

Analogously, the decisive incentive toward utopia I argue is present in Satantango is built on this permeating sense that something’s missing. The utopia exists, in the words of Adorno, ‘in the determined negation’, it comes into being through the false, cheap and cruel utopia (offered on the one hand by Irimias and, on the other, by the socialist and bureaucratic Hungarian regime). This is the negative dialectics of hope and utopia at work in the novel. One cannot cast a picture of it in a positive manner.

In the midst of hopelessness, there is hope, a hope against hope. There is a dialectic between hunger and hope, a negative dialectics in the words of Adorno

Satantango, then, would be full of despair, but not disillusion. The one who is disillusioned can live quite comfortably with her disillusion, in her disillusion; the one in despair cannot. Disillusion belongs to cynicism, despair to hope.

‘This is perhaps what Béla Tarr wants to say when he assures us that his films are messages of hope. They do not speak of hope. They are his hope’). This is in fact in line with the view of Béla Tarr himself, who insists that he is not a pessimist.

German didn’t trust Soviet archives and newsreels when it came to collecting information, so he sought out alternative documentation of the period. What they found especially useful were photos and films that only captured images of people incidentally, because it showed how people dressed and did their hair and moved and behaved when they didn’t know they were on camera as opposed to how they looked when they were posing or being directed. German would describe that research process, saying “For example, we watched some short films about building water pipes. Of course, the cameraman was showing all those pipes. At the same time, when he moved his camera from one place to another, he’d happen to point the camera at the boys in the street, who were not always very polite, who didn't have very good manners. Or we saw a woman carrying quite a few bags. So we could see the real life.”

An expatriated Tarkovsky declared My Friend Ivan Lapshin the greatest Russian film ever made. German politely demurred, saying he didn’t think his film was “as good as Mirror or Andrei Rublev.”

I think it could be cinema’s answer to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, for being something of a rollercoaster ride through the dark absurdities of the collective Russian unconscious. Who am I to say though? Probably more than anything, it’s like Dante’s Inferno, penetrating and observing the hellish strata beneath the onion dome of Stalinism.

German described a recollection of his father’s, an NKVD officer telling Yuri German in detail about the about the mass murders he had participated in. When Yuri German asked why the officer was telling him, the answer the officer supposedly gave was that “You’re a writer, you should know.” Later the same night the officer went to a sauna and killed himself. Soon after, secret police came to Yuri German asking why the officer had spoken to him right before committing suicide, and they wanted to know what had he said. Apparently Yuri shrugged it off to the police saying that the officer was just drunk. Aleksei German said that that incident had greatly haunted his father. I think for Aleksei German, a writer or filmmaker is someone who has a responsibility to know.

Adam Louis-Klein

“Russia is a nation that never had a renaissance,” German would say in the behind the scenes footage of Hard to Be a God. The sentence stands out because it’s true; the advancements of the European renaissance had to be imported to Russia. It’s enough to make you wonder if the medieval science fiction world of Arkanar is Russia’s true face. That its soul is still in the dark ages. That might explain the problems addressed in German's other films. In the same footage, German singles out the Russian celebration of tyrants as an example of what he's getting at. He relates a conversation that he had with fellow filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, about how there are no statues of Tsar Alexander II, also called Alexander The Liberator who did many great things for Russians, while statues of people who were responsible for the death and misery of so many of their own citizens can be found all over.

German is explicitly weary of the effects of power on people. He'd state (while Karmalita is in earshot) that if he were in the shoes of a man like Stalin, “I’d hang Svetlana just in case she thought of organizing a coup.” It sounds unfathomably cruel, but true, which is why he needs to say it. I think back to The Fall of Otrar, and really Don Rumata’s arc is like seeing Undzhu Khan become Ghengis Khan. What the character of Rumata is, is to make us recognize in ourselves our capacity for atrocity. That's some tough love.

Disharmony reigns in all Bergman’s films, but in The Serpent’s Egg the pessimism is almost cosmic, no longer restricted to one couple, one family. ‘Man is an abyss,’ wrote Georg Büchner, ‘and I turn giddy when I look down into it.’ Bergman sets this quotation at the head of his screenplay for The Serpent’s Egg (Ormens ägg)

As a child, I had heard that the end of the world would come just when no one was thinking about it, and so I spent many nights thinking hard about the end, because I might be the only one.

I have endeavoured on more than one occasion to convey that I take the original meaning of the word apocalypse to be the most relevant: that is, apocalypse is not some end-of-the-world event that threatens us but is yet to come. No, apocalypse is the form of existence right now. Each and every moment is apocalyptic.

By the way, Thomas Bernhard – the saviour of post-War German-language prose literature – may have been pitiless in his works and public statements, that’s true enough, but Bernhard himself cannot be said to have been devoid of compassion. There is a memorable documentary about Bernhard attending a bullfight, on a trip to Spain. The camera is glued to his face throughout, that face is all you see, with the sounds of the audience in the background, and when at the end the death-dealing thrust takes place, you can observe how this face goes to pieces. I looked at this devastated face, and saw it was full of compassion for the bull. Ah, Herr Bernhard, I said to myself, all is well after all.

As in AnimalInside, your book created with the artist Max Neumann, your compassion is for the animal, but also for the creature that we are. You often return to the creaturely – why?
LK It is not that I return to it; I have never left it. The creaturely is there in the inferno of our existence and there it remains. You see, I perceive all of the terrestrial world in its entirety at once – nothing is missing, everything is here simultaneously, there is no time for this thing or that one, because there is no such thing as time if we think of everything at the same time.

Who the hell is interested in what I say here or have said previously? Literature in terms of prose is finished, and it is washed away by exactly the same repulsive forces that had brought it into being. Remember? Literature first showed up in the form of chapbooks displayed in marketplace stalls, as pulp fiction placed upon the tarp laid out by the side of the booth. By now even the best writers are waiting in line, their books in hand, hoping for permission to put them on display. Prose literature? It’s a market! “Come on in!” the vendors say. Only poetry remains – because poetry always survives. Poetry always finds a way to manifest itself. Of course, we are mere mortals. I wonder what will happen when the snail or the rat launch into our funeral dirge and sing of us.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

It usually starts with a personal problem which is also reflective of a social malaise, and then I find an occupational metaphor. Going back to Taxi Driver, the personal problem was young male loneliness. And the metaphor of the taxicab occurred to me. The thing about these occupational metaphors is that you have to break the viewer’s identification. When Taxi Driver came out, taxi driver characters in movies were like your brother-in-law: a funny guy who would talk too much. I looked at him and I said, “No, this is the underground man. This is the heart and soul of Dostoevsky. This is a kid locked in a yellow coffin, floating through the open sewers of the city, who seems in the middle of a crowd to be absolutely alone.” That was a good metaphor. That became the template: to learn about the self by finding a metaphor that’s not at all like you – gigolo, drug dealer, minister, card player, gardener – and using him the same way that Robert Bresson used pickpockets. Pickpocket isn’t really about being a pickpocket.

With Taxi Driver, I went to the European model of the existential hero of Dostoevsky, Camus and Sartre, where you’re just inside that person. You get into his life and it’s interesting enough. But maybe 50 minutes in, it starts to aberrate a little bit. You think, “That’s odd.” And then it aberrates a little more. And by the time you’re an hour and 15 minutes in, he’s no longer a character you would identify with, but you already have. You think, “I’ve gotten to kind of like this guy, I sort of understand him, but now he’s behaving in a way that I don’t condone. What’s going to happen?” That’s the formula.

It has to do with the conundrum of the way I was raised, the inherent conundrum of Calvinism: man is incapable of good, but he must try. You won’t earn your way to heaven, but you have to try anyway. I’ve never really fully understood that combination of free will and predestination. How can you be predestined and have free will at the same time?

I remember that when I first saw Pulp Fiction [1994] at the New York Film Festival, I instantly recognised it. I turned to my wife during the screening and said, “Everything I have done is now outdated.” I realised that the ironic movement had surpassed the existential movement. ‘Existential’ now had quotes around it. It’s a very important film in film history. It would be interesting to see it again and see how well it holds up, now that it has become the subject of endless imitation. The Godfather is also the subject of endless imitation, but it holds up and the imitators don’t.

Paul Schrader, interviewed

The Image Book belongs to that robust genre, the soaring lament of the humiliated Marxist. The fifth section, “La Région Centrale” (also the title of a work by Michael Snow, as Amy Taubin reminds us in her Artforum review), features a line uttered by the strained voice that begins the film: “C’est l’angoisse.”

In Godard’s Maoist period, he filmed fists defacing or punching through the screen; in Goodbye to Language, it merely flexes and ripples. Freed from the rigors of dialectics by the failure of the New Left, Godard now stalks Lear-like over the heath of his own devastated feelings. “There must be a revolution,” he announces at the end of The Image Book—but the militant’s devotion to theory and praxis has lapsed into a wistful wobble between experience and loss. So Godard is thrown back on a desperate messianism. At the film’s end we hear track over track of his hacking, failing, heaving, spluttering, now-ancestral voice, which says, beneath the layers of pain: “Ardent espoir”—ardent hope. The words arc through the mind.

Tobi Haslett

Jen and Itt's relationship is the main story, I suppose, but that would be like saying "Hamlet" is "about" a boy and his mother. While the film unfolds, you are caught in its undulating rhythms, drawn from image to image, given the time to contemplate the juxtaposition, how the film is put together and why. It's so rich that way. Once the screen goes to black, you are left to your own devices in terms of interpretation. There are other recent films in this tradition, "Upstream Color," "Post Tenebras Lux," where meaning is contained IN the images: the films are like entering someone else's dream-logic. Things "make sense" in profound dreams, and the dreamer may feel he is being given a kind of truth unavailable to him in the waking world.

Weerasethakul's other films (most notably "Uncle Boonmee" and "Syndromes and a Century") share some similarities with "Cemetery." The fantastical and surreal are presented with unshowy practicality. It's magical realism mixed with kitchen-sink drama, seasoned by a haunting sense of history as a sentient entity. A "ghost" isn't necessarily a spooky creature moving through walls. A ghost could also calmly sit down at the table and join the conversation. When death is near, the past comes flooding into the present, and sometimes the past bears a message, but how to de-code it? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps what matters is that we are connected to those who came before, that we honor them, and that we try to hear them.

Yet other forces soon impinge on the everyday calm. When Jen comes across two beautiful young women hawking clothes, they casually reveal themselves to be centuries-old dead Laotian goddesses. They mention in passing that an ancient cemetery lies beneath the hospital, with the kings and warriors buried there draining the sleeping soldiers of their energy so they can keep fighting their age-old wars. As Jen, Keng, and Itt grow closer, their thoughts, dreams, and eventually even bodies gradually merge, led by and suffused with all the rippling layers of reality this place contains. This mood of progressive convergence is amplified by the deliberately hazy spatial relationships between each location, as school, lake, park, city, and temple all flow together to form a borderless dreamscape equally unburdened by temporal continuity. The neon lights by the soldiers’ beds soon cast their glow across the entire town; a sumptuous palace of past days is verbally conjured out of an overgrown garden; and, as the sun threatens to break through the clouds, an amoeba slowly inches its way across the image.

On Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour

I quote in the preface one of his newspaper articles about Accattone (1961), in which he writes “…religiosity lies not in the need for personal salvation…not in the fatality that determines the entire story … It is found in [the film’s] very mode of seeing the world, in the technical sacrality of seeing itself.” I mean – these are bewildering statements from someone who was (or wanted to be, mostly…) a fully paid up member of the Communist party!

Nonetheless, let’s say that Pasolini’s strategies in relationship to Catholicism were unique! But again, even that won’t quite do … As usual, there’s nothing new under the sun. I’m a tremendous admirer of The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), an extraordinary attempt to try and remake Jesus Christ as proletarian revolutionary. But of course Rossellini had done the same thing, or tried to with The Flowers of St. Francis (1950). The relationship in that earlier film between the Franciscan text and the cinematic image is spell-binding. All the way through (from the first unforgettable images of the brothers trudging through the rain) Rossellini is saying “What do we think St Francis was, or is? Can we reimagine him as a real historical character?” “What would a Franciscan cinema be like?” I think Pasolini looked hard at The Flowers.

John Cale, the Velvet Underground’s other musical genius, thought his often appalling behaviour was rooted in “fears about [his] sanity” that drove him to “purposefully [try] his darnedest to set people off. That made him feel he was in control, rather than living in a state of uncertainty or paranoia. [He was] perpetually seeking a kind of advantage for himself by bringing out the worst in people.”

On Lou Reed

Russian history, as German has said, is an endless process of degradation, abuse, and humiliation[…] The temperamental flux of Cassavetes, Fellini's carnivals of daily life, Tarkovsky's poeticism, Malick's precarious voice-overs.

It is set in what appears to be a horrendous central European village of the middle ages, as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch, where grotesquely ugly and wretched peasants are condemned to clamber over each other for all eternity, smeared in mud and blood: a world beset with tyranny and factional wars between groups called “Blacks” and “Greys”.

Each shot is a vision of pandemonium: a depthless chiaroscuro composition in which dogs, chickens, owls and hedgehogs appear on virtually equal terms with the bewildered humans, who themselves are semi-bestial. The camera ranges lightly over this panorama of bedlam, and characters both important and unimportant will occasionally peer stunned into the camera lens, like passersby in some documentary.

The most startling lines are those in which people complain about the lack of a Renaissance: “Where’s the art? Where’s the Renaissance?” moans one. In my view, this is the key. Just as in Narnia it is always winter and never Christmas, so in Hard to Be a God it is always the middle ages and never the Renaissance. Cultural and human advances never arrive in this alternative Earth, and what we are seeing is not the middle ages but the present day.

“Hard To Be A God” is a fantastical examination of man’s inhumanity to man, and as replete as it is with persistent visceral disgust, it also pulses with intelligence, a mordant compassion, and yes, incredible wit. Its vision is so monstrously realized that even as it repulses, it makes almost any other film you would care to put next to it seem puny, silly, unnecessary.

German orchestrated his film as a series of long-take sequence shots, every plane of the frame a turmoil of activity, including the extreme foreground, in which objects – Rumata’s flexing gauntlets, fish and poultry, agog onlookers – are frequently thrust towards the viewer in the manner often attributed to chintzy 50s 3D movies. The result is a carnivalesque processional of sodden grotesques, trudging through an endless torrential autumn rain.

Shot in co/ntoured, high-contrast black-and-white, Hard to Be a God isolates faces from the crowd in chains of choreographed vignettes – in a real sense, the mob is the star of the film. To name but a few standouts: there’s the muzhik who breaks from tooting a rude pipe to pantomime humping at the camera, the uncertain POV of which frequently realigns in the space of a single shot from that of Rumata to a third-person perspective. There are the Don’s slaves, enchained by collars which, like almost every piece of forged-and-hand-tooled set dressing here, serves to ground the viewer in the all-consuming reality of this world, showing the mark of the artisan’s practice as well as the wear of years. (The film doesn’t just feel ‘lived-in’ but lived-and-died-in, for unchanging generations. If we take it as a period piece, it is the most immersive instance of its type outside of Rosellini and Hou Hsiao-Hsein, though expressionist where their films are austere.)

Not sure of the source.

This extreme precision also prevailed on the set, where German was known for his special attention to extras. Svetlana Karmalita, his co-writer and widow, explained that the words massovka (extras for the crowd) orstatist (an extra) were forbidden on German’s set. He would say that everyone was an actor, a foreground actor or a background actor, but still an actor (Svetlana Karmalita, interview with the author, 5 September 2014, St Petersburg). Nikulin remembered that ‘to the disarray and vexation’ of main actors in the film–Liudmila Gurchenko and Nikulin himself–the best takes were thrown out on account of extras, ‘because someone in the background had done something wrong’. Because of this particular method, German had the nickname of an outstanding ‘director’s assistant’, since traditionally the director’s assistant takes care of the extras, while the director concentrates on the protagonists […]

[…] another striking specificity of German’s style appeared already in his first feature films: the importance of the ‘diegetic life’ in the background. The director Aleksandr Ivanov noted the camera work in Trial on the Road: ‘I see very elaborate shots, a lot happens in every and each one. It all had to be minutely prepared’. German uses long and complex moving shots, choosing precision in all the details that constitute the profilmic, but not emphatic, as he tends to film all the main events from afar, such as the death of Lazarev in Trial on the Road or Lopatin’s and Nina’s first kiss in Twenty Days without War. German’s camera passes between the people and the buildings, catching glimpses of conversations, glances and emotion

In his next film, My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Moi drug Ivan Lapshin, 1984), the same peculiarities can be found again. Every extra was chosen by German from among photographs of people gathered by his film crew; on set everyone would be dressed in period clothes from head to toe, including underwear, even those whose faces were barely visible in the windows of a passing tram . The shooting period got longer with each new film. When asked about this dilatoriness, Viktor Izvekov, his executive producer on this last Soviet-era film, described his method in the following way: Normally a film director tries to adapt when told that something is impossible. We cannot shoot from this angle? Let’s shoot from another one. We cannot shoot in this courtyard? Let’s shoot in the adjacent courtyard. I don’t know how he behaved on his previous pro-jects, but on Lapshin, he never gave up on anything; he made no concessions. If someone would tell him: ‘We cannot shoot here today’, he would answer: ‘That’s even better, that will leave me time to think it over once again. We will shoot in three days, if necessary’.

his time, no limitations for the duration of shooting were imposed and a low but steady flow of finance was coming in while German shot the film over five years, with some foreign subsidies from France. The film was finished only in1998. This extraordinary tardiness was due both to German’s faltering health and to his conviction that he was entitled to take his time: ‘Before, I was always trying to be quick, but then they would forbid my films and they would be shelved for years. So now, let them wait a bit).

From the moment go I said: let’s try to make a film that would smell; film the medievalera through a keyhole, as if we had lived there ourselves'.The effect on the spectators seemed to be in line with this project, since critics around the world spoke about the physical impressions produced by the film, which almost created the sensation of smelling faeces and blood, and of sensing the over-whelming mud: ‘German is aiming to conjure a nightmarish, inescapably sensual experience, immersing us in an [sic] mud-puddled, amoral world where bodily-fluids flow and hideously intermingle, torture and battle are everyday events’. But this ‘gorgeous-looking feast of barbarous filth’ was at the same time described as terribly, sometimes unbearably hideous and monstrous, but also extremely beautiful in its framing, camerawork and details.

Dmitrii Bykov described the diegetic world of Hard to Be a God as ‘heavyset, dirty and luxurious, rude and refined, sanguinary, authentically medieval’, while Vasilii Stepanov talked about its ‘physio-logical realism’(Stepanov2008). After the screening of the finished film at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2014, critics noted that ‘for each intentionally ugly shot there is one of stunning composition and beauty, despite all the fog, rain and caked muck’. These seemingly paradoxical comments stem certainly from the way in which German used art references and influences. For this film, German once again used the system of ‘inspiration panels’. This is how he described them to Anton Dolin: There were panels with many, many cut-up pieces of classical paintings. Paintings of Earth. A barrel by Brueghel. And near the barrel stands a guy. A palace. A John [sortir]. A sledge. Hats, gloves, boots. Classical paintings and non-classical ones. It was for the last film. There were approximately one hundred [images].

Another aspect that seems to interest German in the paintings selected for the ‘inspiration panels’is frame composition. Hard to Be a God, just as was earlier the case for Khrustalev, My Car!, is made of extremely long and complicated sequence-shots, which are choreographed to the extreme. The camera weaves its way through the castles and courtyards, in the middle of people scurrying about, eating, drinking, snorting and con-spiring.

As we have already seen, German’s logic is to push the vanitas to its logical conclusion, and instead of tasty, perishable food he places on the table already rotten food, as if the seventeenth-century Flemish painter had arranged the objects for a still-life, and then left them out to rot. The same applies to textures in the film: patterns, sceneries, silhouettes or faces may be recognizable, reminding us of paintings from the ‘inspiration panels’, but they are all covered in mud, rotting food, excrement, filth, blood and bowels. Whereas paintings are often an obvious inspiration source, German ‘brings them to life’ not only by setting them in motion, but moreover by making them dirty and displaying their frailty. Whereas in the paintings the tortures, however expressive, are represented as rather ‘clean’, leaving most of the physiological horror to the imagination, German’s film contains a lot of blood and bowels.

Khrustalev, My Car! was composed of long, elaborate sequence-shots, filled with authentic details, but ultimately resembling more a beautiful and monstrous nightmare than a documentary film.

Eugenie Zvonkine, 'The Artistic Process of Aleksei German'

The complaint extended to Nietzsche's writing style. "I can no longer read Nietzsche or take an interest in him. He seems too naïve. It has been a long time since I've ceased to admire him. A diminished idol. He took pleasure in prolixity, in padding, in grandiose diffusion." "We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests" He was too lyrical and his literary taste was second-rate.

Older Cioran was put off by Nietzsche's inexperience, by his megalomania, and by his lack of humor. "Nietzsche was too carried away by a tragic breeze to be capable of that form of skepticism that pre- supposes humor." Cioran believed that Nietzsche's lack of humor was one reason for his success among the young. Nietzsche was too solitary to understand the conflicts that exist between people, or the means by which people were able to coexist in large cities. At first Cioran exempted Nietzsche from his fulminations against modern philosophers, but in his later years he thought Nietzsche was too academic and knew too little of life. Nietzsche didn't understand Greece, and worse, he didn't understand himself. He was "a lamb who dreamt he was a wolf."

In 1986, in reply to a question about Susan Sontag's comparison of Cioran and Nietzsche, Cioran said, "There is, I dare say, a resemblance of temperament between Nietzsche and me: we are both insomniacs. That creates a complicity." The complicity extended to common ideas about suicide and the salutary value of thinking about suicide as a means for surviving sleepless nights. Cioran said that "without the idea of suicide I would certainly have killed myself; Nietzsche wrote: "The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night.”

"Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoyevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being."

Anonymous, Cioran and Nietzsche

Roeg's photography reinforces this notion. He is careful to keep us at a distance from the physical sufferings of his characters. To be sure, they have blisters and parched lips, but he pulls up well short of the usual clichés of suffering in the desert. And his cinematography (and John Barry's otherworldly music) make the desert seem a mystical place, a place for visions. So that the whole film becomes mystical, a dream, and the suicides which frame it set the boundaries of reality.

Roger Ebert On Nick Roeg's Walkabout

I called Go-Kart Mozart a B-side band. It didn’t mean that they were inferior songs; it simply meant that you would take away the pressure of I’ve got to write a hit single, I’ve got to write an album that’s going to get in the top ten. It was that idea of, ‘Hey, listen to that mad song that’s on the B-side.’ But then in 1999, 2000, the bottom fell out of my life. I think I had a mini-breakdown to be honest. I’d worked so hard and my mind had been so focussed on trying to be famous for twenty years, I think I just collapsed, metaphorically, and I couldn’t function anymore. Even though I wanted to get on with the second Go-Kart record, I was trying to do it but I was doing it in a really haphazard way. That one took around four years to come out and then the next one took around seven. Real life caught up with me. Before that I wasn’t rich or anything, but I’d somehow managed to skate through it all and still been able to buy records and clothes or whatever. But I went from that to looking for money on the floor. On a Sunday I would go to a bench on the King’s Road, because rich people were there and they might give me a cigarette. I went from being okay to being absolutely penniless to being homeless. It was the craziest turnaround. And I went a bit mad. I definitely had a mental breakdown of some kind, and it was purely all to do with music, because I couldn’t do what I wanted to do.

Consequently, although I tried, I couldn’t get those albums finished. I wanted to do one in 99, one a year later and one maybe two years later; three albums within a three-year period. And that took until 2012, when Hot Dog Streets came out. My big regret at the moment is that I didn’t finish Go-Kart quickly, because the name doesn’t ring true anymore. It doesn’t sit right in these times. Go-Kart Mozart was purposely not a very good name because it had to be worse than Felt or Denim, because it had to be a B-side project. It wasn’t meant to turn into this huge bloody great long thing that’s gone on forever. I actually want to change it to Mozart Estate now, and that’s why I put Mozart Estate presents Go-Kart Mozart on the new album, because we’re getting ready to change the name. We’ve got a mini-album coming in September, and when that comes it’ll say on the back, this is the last Go-Kart Mozart record, we’re going away for an enforced holiday, when we come back we will then be known as Mozart Estate.

Lawrence, interviewed

Here I am reading my essay, 'The Opposite Direction: Taubes, Bernhard and the Gnostic Imaginary' in The Journal for Discarded Daydreams.

Apocalypticism negates this world in its fullness. It brackets the entire world negatively. […] The world is a totality which keeps itself distinct from the divine, forming an auto-nomy in relation to God. […] As the world does not contain its real source of power but is determined by an opposite pole, God is also held in tension at a distance from it. This relationship of tension is mutual and determines both poles. The world is that which stands in opposition to God [das Gegengöttliche], and God is that which stands in opposition to the world [das Gegenweltliche]. God in this world is alien and unknown. […] He is nonexistent [nicht-seiend] in the world. […] The “non-existent” God is an annihilating God [nichtender Gott] who clasps and destroys the world [die Welt umklammert und vernichtet]. The “nonexistent” God puts the being of the world in question by contesting the entire validity [Gültigkeit] and finality [Endgültigkeit] of what exists.

Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology

Today the ways of death or halfdeath have an almost sure and easy stronghold on us. Here each goes his own way into the same darkness. And the ways of life where we walk together and that no man can build from and for himself alone are not yet built. Nor is it anywhere written that they must or will be built. We know only that the power of the mystery may be as strong or stronger, than the power of death.

Susan Taubes, Letter to Hugo Bergman, September 18, 1950

I confess to you, it is no pleasure to be here at all. The only spirit that I have found here to converse with is
the angel of apocalypse. (He-she sends his-her greetings to you).

Letter written to Gershom Scholem on November 8, 1950

And you my mad one, my mystical one — ? […] All the places are wrong for us because the time is wrong. I think of you in the dark night hours of illuminations. Ah I’m so exiled. The earth is without sex here and dead as a rug.

Letter written to Jacob Taubes, November 24

“After we have tasted death how shall we taste/any other thing?// A great shudder we felt at the instant of unveiling/Our faces peeled off, face to face with the faceless.”

Concluding verses from her poem “Post Apocalypse."

Susan Taubes, Letter to Hugo Bergman, September 18, 1950