Bataille’s War

Here is a summary of key events in Bataille’s life and writing during WWII.

Our protagonist: Georges Bataille, born in 1897, author, by the outset of the war, of Story of the Eye (published pseudonymously), The Solar Anus and Sacrifices. His lover, Colette Peignot, known as Laure, died in November 1938. Bataille frequents brothels and strip clubs in this period, and is involved with several women. His secret society, Acéphale, continues to meet; Laure’s tomb becomes another sacred site for Acéphale. He lives in a flat in Saint-Germain-en-Laye which he had taken with Laure. In this period, he also begins ‘The Manual of an Anti-Christian’. Bataille feels he is being deserted by his friends. His great communal experiments have come to nothing; he is alone. In 1938, learns to practice yoga.

1939
The last issue of Acéphale, the review linked to the group, is published anonymously in June under the title ‘Madness, War and Death’, two years after the previous edition. All of its contents were written by Bataille, including his first ‘mystical’ pages: ‘The Practice of Joy before Death’.

Guilty begun 5 September 1939. Bataille is reading Angela of Folingo, the Liber visionum.

The date I start (September 5, 1939) is no coincidence.

Alongside Guilty, Bataille drafts what will become, many years later, The Accursed Share.

On 2 October 1939, he meets Denise Rollin-Le Gentil, who is 32 and married with a young son, Jean. Surya writes, ‘She was beautiful, a beauty that would be described as melancholy if not taciturn. She spoke little or, for long periods not at all’. She joins him at his flat in October; thereafter, Bataille will spend time in her flat at 3 rue de Lille.

1940
Part of Guilty published as ‘Friendship’ in the Belgian journal Mesures.

Bataille meets Maurice Blanchot, who is about to publish Thomas the Obscure and the long essay How is Literature Possible? (Animadab would follow in 1942 and Faux Pas, a collection of articles, in 1943.)

1941
Madame Edwarda written September to October and published in 1941. Begins ‘Le Supplice’, the great central section of Inner Experience, immediately after.

Autumn 1941 sees the commencement of two discussion groups organised by Bataille in Denise Rollin’s flat. They consisted of readings of passages of Inner Experience, which Bataille was writing at the time. The first group includes Queneau and Leiris. Blanchot belonged to both groups. The meetings were, according to several participants, essentially a debate between Bataille and Blanchot. The meetings last until March 1943.

1942
Bataille is diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He contracted it originally as a young man in an army bootcamp. For eight years, however, it has been dormant; eventually (in 1962), it will kill him.

Bataille completes Inner Experience during the summer of the same year. At that time, he is staying with Marcel Moré’s mother at Boussy-le-Chatêau. It is published by Raymond Queneau, an old friend of Bataille’s with whom relations have lately cooled.

He stays in a village called Panilleuse with Denise Rollin.

He writes The Dead Man.

Bataille’s illness leads him to lose his job with the Bibliothèque Nationale.

‘Nietzsche’s Laughter’ published in Exercice du silence, Brussels.

Denise Rollin leaves Paris for Drugeac; Bataille follows her, accompanied by his daughter Laurence, 10, and by his old friend André Masson and his wife Rose. Towards the end of the year, Bataille moves out of the flat he had shared with Laure. He takes a new flat in Paris at 259 rue Saint-Honoré in December (Paris VIII).

Gives the lecture ‘Socratic College’ (note that the date given in the Oeuvres completes is incorrect) which sets out a proposal to organise his discussion readings on a more programmatic basis. This move is rejected by the participants. In Inner Experience, he gives a summary of discussions that arose with Blanchot, presumably in the discussion groups.

There are three principles; experience will:

– only have its principle and end in the absence of salvation, in the renunciation of all hope
– only affirm that experience itself is the authority (but all authority expiates itself)
– only be a contestation of itself and nonknowledge.

This is nicely summarised by Stuart Kendall, one of the editors of The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge:

Their initial proposals were three: they held to the rejection of all hope for salvation, indeed all hope of any kind, the acceptance of experience itself as the only value and authority, and the recognition that experience meant self-expiation.

1943
Inner Experience is published. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness are published in the same year.

In March, moves to 59 rue Saint-Étienne in the village Vézelay with Denise Rollin and her 4-year-old son. His daughter, Laurence, now 13, moves with them. The house is ramshackle; the village austere. Between March and October, Bataille embarks on an affair with the Canadian born, half-Russian and half-English Diane Kotchoubey, an admirer of Inner Experience. She is 23, and has a 3 year old daughter. Diane Kotchoubey and Denise Rollin apparently are joined for a while with Bataille in a ménage-a-trois.

Bataille finishes Guilty in May 1943. In the same month, ‘Nom de Dieu’, a text written by the Surrealists, argues Inner Experience evidences a simple minded idealism.

Blanchot reviews Inner Experience in Journal des débats in May.

Sartre publishes a long, unfavourable review of Inner Experience in Cahiers du Sud. Bataille’s reply is found what will be published in 1945 as On Nietzsche.

Bataille splits up from Rollin after returning with her to Paris. Kotchoubey had already returned to Paris. Bataille finds lodgings with the painter Balthus through Pierre Klossowski, and spends the winter at Balthus’s studio at 3 cour de Rohan. Bataille is at real risk from Kotchoubey’s husband.

1944
He regularly meets, as he is accustomed to do, with friends like Leiris and Queneau. He co-writes a film script, now lost. His co-author leaves the following record of Bataille’s appearance:

A very handsome face, a gentle voice, a very abstract way of moving in space, at once present and absent. When he spoke about the most everyday things, the impression he gave, without being aware of it, was that he was about to impart something of the utmost importance.

He publishes Memorandum, a collage of Nietzsche’s later writings. 

Bataille keeps the diaries that will comprise a large part of On Nietzsche.

In March, Bataille gives the lecture, ‘Discussion on Sin’, based on the ‘Summit and Decline’ section on what would be published as On Nietzsche. Sartre, Klossowski, Blanchot and many others present. Here, Bataille meets Sartre for the first time. The men meet on several occasions thereafter.

In April 1944, he leaves the studio, moving out of Paris to the rue de Coin-Musard in Samois, near Fontainebleau, close to the house Diane Kotchoubey was living in. He visits her by bike. At the time he is often alone and miserable.

Marcel reviews Inner Experience more or less favourably. But he accuses Bataille of complacency and self-satisfaction.

Guilty is published.

Bataille is very ill in this period. He writes Julie. He also begins to write poetry, mostly at Samois. Some bear witness to his love for Diane Kotchoubey. He publishes Alleluia, a collection of poems, apparently reply to the questions she asked him (so Surya).

In October, he leaves Samois for Paris, taking a flat at 16 rue de Condé. He spends winter 1944-1945 there.

1945
In early 1945, Bataille leaves Paris for Vézelay, where he will live for several years with Kotchoubey, who had left her husband. He will remain there until 1949.

On Nietzsche published.

Blanchot commences an apparently largely epistolatory affair with Denise Rollin, which will continue until her death in 1978.

Just after the war, the journal Fontaine publishes extracts from ‘Method of Meditation’ under the title ‘Devant un ciel vide’, ‘Before an Empty Sky’. Alongside this text, Bataille is also writing the fictional texts that will appear first as The Hatred of Poetry and, later, as The Impossible. He befriends Giacometti, Michaux and Merleau-Ponty and begin editing Critique. The Hatred of Poetry appears in 1947.

5 rue Saint-Benoît (I)

I want to write about the community of 5 rue Saint-Benoît, drawing on Laure Adler’s Marguerite Duras, A Life.

Our cast:

Marguerite Duras, 1914-1995. When she meets Antelme, she is a graduate with the Colonial Office, who will write a book supporting French colonialism in 1940.

Dionys Mascolo, 1916-1997, erstwhile philosophy student. He never took the examination, but wanted to be an intellectual. Mascolo finds a position doing odd-jobs for Gallimard, because of his college friend Michel Gallimard. Duras offers him a job with the Paper Allocation Agency. He will read manuscripts with her. From their first meeting, in November 1942, it is love. At this time, he lives with his mother.

Robert Antelme, 1917-90. Said by all to be an extraordinary man. Arrives in Paris in 1936. Studies Law. He meets Duras in the late 1930s, in 1938, I think. They fall in love. He is called up in 1938. They marry in September 1939 (Duras proposed). At the end of 1940, they move into 5 rue Saint-Benoît.

Duras and Antelme’s flat, 1943. They are married, and have become active in the Resistance (the MNPGD group). François Mitterand, the future president, lives for a while in the back bedroom. So, too, does Jacques Benet (an old schoolfriend of Antelme). Dionys Mascolo, Duras’s lover, visits everyday. Antelme has a lover too. Mascolo edits Combat, the Resistance magazine, working with Camus. He meets Edgar Morin at this time. With a few others, they form an irregular force, ready for action. They often meet in Antelme’s sister’s flat – this is Marie-Louise, who will die at Ravensbrück to whom The Human Race will be dedicated. Robert Antelme and then Marie-Louise are captured …

Duras waits for Robert’s return. Mascolo is with her. She is thin, lethargic. She is writing the pages eventually published as La Douleur (The War). Then, in May 1945, Robert is identified at Dachau. Mascolo and Beauchamp, another member of the Resistance, drive there. They bring him back to Paris. He is starving, on the brink of death. In the car, Robert talks and talks. A famous sentence, said to Mascolo: ‘When anyone talks to me of Christian charity, I shall say Dachau’.

They are all there at the flat to meet Robert Antelme. A doctor used to the effects of famine treats Robert, giving him serum first of all, and then introducing him gradually to food. By the end of June, he is recovered.

In 1944, Duras becomes a communist, joining the clandestine French Communist Party. She sells the party’s newspaper on Sunday morning. It is the party, for her, of the poor, of the pure. Every evening she goes out to spread the word, ringing doorbells, talking in cafes. Robert Antelme talks about his experiences. There are few references in the papers in this period to the persecution of the Jews. At the flat, Duras, Antelme and Mascolo speak of the persecution.

After the war, another great period of hospitality. Raymond Queneau and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are frequent visitors. Edgar Morin is always there. Mascolo often sleeps on the couch in the hall. He and Duras make love in hotels; Antelme, too, has a lover; he and Duras sleep in separate rooms. Mascolo, too, has a lover.

Mascolo and Antelme join the Communist Party in 1946. Duras, of course, is already an activist; she becomes secretary of the cell. But she begins to lose her ardency; Robert is expelled in 1950 … but they remain lifelong communists.

Elio Vittorini (whom I’ve yet to read, although Duras, apparently, owes a great deal to him) comes to the flat. Another communist. Antelme, Mascolo and Duras holiday together with Vittorini in Italy. Vittorini attacks what he sees as the slavishness of the French communists. They form the Groupe d’études Marxistes with Merleau-Ponty and David Rousset (I’ll need to find out about him – Duras falls under his influence after her expulsion from the Party). It is a question, for them, of returning to Marx and Engels, and of remaining within the French Communist Party while criticising it – the Italians, here, are an inspiration. The Italian communists take communion on Sundays; they draw upon a spiritual sustenance.

Meanwhile, Antelme is writing The Human Race at the flat. At night, everyone drinks and laughs and sings Edith Piaf songs. Mascolo’s mother moves in. Michel Leiris is a frequent visitor, as is Georges Bataille; Jacques Lacan visits on several occasions. Duras is pregnant by Mascolo … Antelme wants to get out of the way, but they still live together. In 1947, Jean is born; he is always called Outa (Mite). In the same year, The Human Race is brought out by Cité universelle, the publishing house Duras and Mascolo have formed. The book meets with little success.

Morin (from On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race):

A good many deportees’ accounts are heavily rhetorical, written in a stereotyped language[….] The Human Race was the first book – I would even say the only book – that stands firmly at the level of humanity, at the level of naked experience lived and expressed in the simplest, most adequate words there are.

Meanwhile, Vittorini announces his break with the Communist Party; Duras and Antelme will remain in the Party for two more years, after signing up, with Morin and Mascolo, to the Cercle de la commission des intellectuals, a circle of writers within the Party itself. But gradually, they are ostracised by the Party; they are found to be cynical and disrespectful. A bitter blow. Antelme, in particular, is depressed. But he, like Duras, like Mascolo, like Morin, will remain communists.

At rue Saint-Benoît, Italo Calvino and John Dos Passos are entertained as they pass through Paris. Duras’s The Sea Wall, is published in 1950; The Sailor from Gibaltra follows in 1952. Duras has a long affair with Jacques-Laurent Bost, a friend of de Beauvoir and Sartre, whom Duras never liked. Vittorini, Mascolo and others insist she ends the affair. He is bad for her, they think. In this period, Duras spends time with Maurice Blanchot, whose influence, I’m told (I haven’t read it), is strongly marked in The Sailor from Gibraltar. The Little Horses of Tarquinia is published in 1953.

Robert Antelme has already left (but when? And when did Mascolo move in permanently? After his mother died); he is now with Monique. Duras begins to drift from Vittorini.

Adler:

The apartment at 5 rue Saint-Benoît was Marguerite’s universe, filled with her family photos, her bunches of dried flowers, her beautiful shining furniture, her broken stove, her shawls draped over the backs of shabby armchairs, loose parquet, the smell of rose petals. She was a talented DIY enthusiast and she entertained several times a week. Marguerite was considered an intellectual and charming hostess.

Men would turn up alone just to flirt with her. She was careful to kindly their admiration and passion. The small world in which they lived encompassed a tiny area of Paris. A few hundred metres separated rue Saint-Benoît from the offices of Gallimard and the bistro Espérance, where Robert and Dionys often stopped for a drink after work. Head of rights and reproduction for Gallimard, Dionys was one of the six section leaders. Robert Antelme worked for another publishing firm, la Pléaide.

1951-60 Antelme works as a critic for the French radio television network. From 1951-1981, he is a reader for the Encyclopaedia of the Pléiade, directed by Queneau.

Mascolo publishes Le Communisme in 1953.

Duras is becoming a diva. Gallimard must send a messenger to collect her manuscripts. Louis-René des Forêts is the only editor she trusts. Duras wants financial independence from Mascolo.

In 1955, The Square is published. It is staged a year later.

Duras and Mascolo support the Algerians in hteir war of independence against France. Mascolo sets up the Committee of Intellectuals Against the Pursuit of the War in Algeria. André Breton comes to the first meeting. Claude Roy, an old friend of the rue Saint-Benoît community, is there too. The Committee is dissolved and replaced by the Committee of Revolutionary Intellectuals (Blanchot is a member).

There are arguments at rue Saint-Benoît about the Algerian situation. Morin and Roy are hesitant about the Algerian National Liberation Front who shot at the French. The group, which formerly had included Left and Right, begins to dissolve in the face of the attempt of the French and the British to occupy the nationalised Suez Canal and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

In 1957, Antelme’s The Human Race is reissued by Gallimard to great acclaim.

Mascolo and Duras are drifting apart. Mascolo has been having an affair all along; he is a womaniser. They split, but Mascolo will live at rue Saint-Benoît until 1967. Duras takes up with Gérard Jarlot, a journalist and novelist. Duras’s Moderato Cantabile, published in 1958, is dedicated to him (It is published by Minuit, not Gallimard; Alain Robbe-Grillet persuades Duras). Mascolo dislikes Jarlot, who does not visit rue Saint-Benoît often.

Mascolo launches le 14 Juillet, a magazine opposed to Gaullist power, in which he sees the risk of a French-style Francoism.

Adler:

At this time Blanchot was a very regular visitor to rue Saint-Benoît. He got the poet René Char involved in the magazine and wrote (for the second issue) a long political trace entitled ‘The Refusal’ (sic: it was ‘The Essential Perversion’ – Lars). One of the consequences of the magazine was to bring Dionys and Maurice Blanchot closer together.

Here is what Blanchot himself writes, when he remembers Mascolo in ‘For Friendship’:

I don’t think I exchanged many letters with D.M. (if I recall correctly, none at all until the publication of 14 Julliet). I was silently absent. Political responsibility and urgency are what in some sense made me return and look to Dionys with the certainty (or premonition) that he would provide an answer). On receipt of 14 Julliet I heard his call and responded to it with my resolute agreement.

Le 14 Juillet is a magazine unlike the others. Giacometti and Matta contribute works to sell in order to raise cash for its distribution.

Duras takes up journalism, interviewing Bataille in 1957. She no longer distributes her manuscripts to Antelme and Mascolo before she publishes them. She begins a sequence of great works, the books I love, and find frightening. In the early 1960s, she buys a house called Neauphle, a house in the country. She welcomes her friends to stay. She will later buy a flat in Trouville, by the sea.

Meanwhile, the ‘Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la geurre d’Algérie’, the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ is drafted at rue Saint-Benoît. Blanchot writes to Mascolo:

Insubordination, the actual word can appear limiting. We could add to it and say quite bluntly: the right to insubordination and desertion in the Algerian War. But I think insubordination should suffice. Insubordination means the refusal to carry out military duties. And on the basis of this, the principle can be expressed through different behaviour …’ (cited Adler, 233)

Here’s what Blanchot remembers years after:

Unable to tolerate what was intolerable in the events of that time (the Algerian War), I had telephoned D.M., saying: "We have to do something …" – "As it happens, we’re working on something". Inumerable meetings followed, on an almost daily basis, and the preparation of what would become, with the support of all concerned, the "Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la geurre d’Algérie"’.

From the ashes of Le 14 Juillet, a new dream is born: a Revue Internationale, with Italian, French and German editions. A lack of financial backers meant the magazine only came out in one edition, in Italian: Gulliver, as it was called, was published as a supplement to a newspaper.

Jarlot died in 1966. Vittorini died that year, too.

1968. I will write about the Events another day.

The Heteronym

To go by another name – it is tempting, sometimes, to write under another name, relieving oneself of the burdens of an identity that has become onerous. Here, I think of Kierkegaard’s practice of indirect communication. It was necessary, he thought, as an author troubled by what he saw as an excess of reflection and irony in the age in which he lived, to publish many of his books under pseudonyms (the word heteronym is, I think, better, for there are many names, each of who indicates an attitude, a style of existing, a way of living and writing.)

These heteronyms would leave in the works they were supposed to have composed a ‘stinger’ that was supposed to stir the reader into a sense of the fragility and precariousness of their own existence. No doubt it was, for Kierkegaard, a question of communicating a Christian message, of leading his reflective and ironical readers to God, and his work, if we read his later overviews of his own creative endeavour, was intended to systematically expose the weaknesses of various ‘spheres of existence’.

But these books are readable by a non-Christian audience, which is to say, they communicate in a manner that is so indirect that the message never actually gets through. The ‘medium’ interposes itself; the fictional character Johannes the Seducer of the first half of Either/Or troubles the fictional young aesthete, A., who is supposed to have created him. He troubles us, too. But despite this, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, the fictional story A. relates, is, with A.s’ essay ‘Crop Rotation’, the most attractive section this volume. B., Judge Vilhelm, whose fictional letters are gathered in the second half of Either/Or, is simply a windbag. And the Jutland Pastor, who has the ‘Last Word’, the ‘Ultimatum’, which is appended to the end of the second half of Kierkegaard’s book, seems to speak from another era.

What does it matter? The same point was made about Milton, who was able to describe the fires of hell in a much more exciting way than the splendours of heaven. There are always ‘minor’ ways of reading ‘major’ authors – or more precisely, we shouldn’t let the notions of ‘literature’, of the ‘canon’ or ‘culture’ distract us from the works themselves.

No doubt. But there is, perhaps, a deeper way of understanding the meaning of ‘medium’. Before or beyond Kierkegaard’s heteronyms and to the lives to which their names are linked, there is an indirect communication with respect to which it can no longer be a question of taking another name. This is a true heteronym – I am ‘other named’ as my writing reveals in its sonorities and rhythms, in its nuances and musicality, not another meaning, but the ‘other’ of meaning.

A book, and especially a literary book, is always more than a medium through which something might be communicated. It is also the body of words themselves in their resistance to mobilisation, that is, to the sense their author and their readers would discover in them. This is a writing that passes outside every attempt to enclose it, a writing that describes a line along the outside, un-naming me as I write.

Sabi

From its seamless, extended opening shot, it is clear, in this film, that we are in the presence of a great work of art. Nothing is mannered; there is an absolute decisiveness, a necessity, a plausibility; Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is magnificent.

The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s last film; he died, too young, in 1986, the same year as it was released, and of the same cancer that claimed the great actor whom he had wanted to play its protagonist. In the end, the role went to Erland Josephson, who also played Domenico in Nostalghia. If Domenico in that film prophesised the end of time, the apocalypse has arrived in The Sacrifice; nuclear war has broken out, there is no time left.

In his later work, Tarkovsky attempts to purify and simplify his films. To approach time? To approach cinema – or what he calls the cinematic image. What does this mean? The image is authentic when it allows time to live:

The image becomes authentically cinematic (when amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it, even within each separate frame. No ‘dead’ object – table, chair, glass – taken in a frame in isolation from everything else, can be presented as it were outside passing time, as if from the point of view of an absence of time. (68)

Life is a kind of welling up of time, which it is the special vocation of cinema to imprint. This is a lofty vocation. For as Tarkovsky notes, in our world, time itself threatens to disappear. This seems horribly abstract. How should we understand this? Tarkovsky quotes the journalist Ovchinnikov who, on visiting Japan, observed:

It is considered that time per se, helps to make known the essence of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence off old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age, they give the name sabi, which literally means ‘rust’. Sabi, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. Sabi, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.

One might remember the items the camera passes over in Stalker – the patina of age lies upon these apparently derealised objects. Derealised? Perhaps it is only when they are isolated thus, cast out of the networks with which we associate them that these items present themselves as what they are.

This may sound mysterious. But the materiality, the weight or the being of things is often hidden from us. I don’t think about the muddy ground until the wheel of my car is stuck in the mud. Likewise, the tables and chairs I bought cheaply at an out of town store sit unobtrusively in my lounge. The cup and the plate on my table are mass produced and cheaply available; they do not obtrude into my awareness except when they make my flat look untidy. And my flat is a flat like any other; nothing in particular binds me to it; anyone could be living there just as I could be living in any other flat. Things, then, mean little to me. Everything is replacable; and I know that for the Human Resources department where I work, I, too, am replacable. I am a resource like any other, and I am kept on a short-term contract to remind me of my disposability. From a certain perspective, I, too am a thing, with a shelf-life and a monetary value. And is it not true that other people in our modern world are things for me?

For Tarkovsky, the cinema, the cinematic image, by bringing things into view, confronts us with the fact of the heavy materiality of things, their presence and perhaps what one might call their saba, their wisdom, the way in which they evidence the claim of time.

I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema … (63)

In The Sacrifice, Alexander, a retired man of the theatre, lives with his wide, Adelaide, his young son, Gossen, or ‘Little Man’ (this is a poor translation – just use the word lad instead), and daughter Marta in rural Sweden. All is not well – we sense Adelaide is having an affair with Victor, a friend of the family. Alexander is jaded, weary, ironical and detached; he does not believe in God.

They are a wealthy family, with a servant and a large house. Then there is Otto, a mysterious character, collector of extraordinary events, who is also the postman who brings birthday greetings to Alexander at the outset of the film (I think Otto is my favourite character in cinema).

Nuclear war breaks out. Alexander kneels and prays for salvation. He offers everything he owns in exchange for the survival of the world. Otto visits him and tells him of the mysterious foreigner Maria, a witch, a saint, a holy fool whom, he says, Alexander must go to and sleep with. Alexander obeys. When he wakes the next morning, it is the day before the catastrophe. The day of his fiftieth birthday has begun again, it would appear that catastrophe has been averted. But now Alexander has to keep his part of the bargain: when his family (and Victor) go out for a stroll he sets fire to the house; he loses everything. He is taken away in ambulance.

Alexander sacrifices himself – but for what? For all of us. The world is given to us anew.

Is this what Tarkovsky is trying to in cinema when he appeals to the cinematic image, to life, to time? Is this not an attempt to give us the world anew, allowing an audience to receive time from which they have been estranged?

We go to the cinema to receive time, according to Tarkovsky:

I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema … (63)

Is this true? Does the cinematic image allow us to attend to the world in a new sense? In my favourite passage from Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes:

We’ve come to the end of the day: let us say that in the course of that day something important has happened, something significant, the sort of thing that could be the inspiration for a film, that has the makings of a conflict of ideas that could become a picture. But how did this day imprint itself on our memory? As something amorphous, vague, with no skeleton or schema. Like a cloud. And only the central event of that day has become concentrated, like a detailed report, lucid in meaning and clearly defined. Against the background of the rest of the day, that event stands out like a tree in the mist[….] Isolated impressions of the day have set off impulses within us, evoked associations; objects and circumstances have stayed in our memory, but with no sharply defined contours, incomplete, apparent fortuitous. Can these impressions of life be conveyed through film? They undoubtedly can; indeed it is the especial virtue of cinema, as the most realistic of the arts, to be the means of such communication. (23)

The film coalesceces from a kind of uncertainty, which, like the mist in a great Japanese painting, hovers on the edge of our awareness. Thus the wordless shepherd’s cry, the flat green landscape of Gotland, swallows’ song … These remind us, perhaps, of the diffuse, ambient background of our day, which is liable, because it is nothing in particular, to pass into forgetting.

Sven Nykvist, the great Swedish cinematographer, recalls of Tarkovsky, ‘he first and foremost wanted to communicate emotions, moods, atmosphere. By images, not by words. He wanted to impart a soul to objects and nature. Here he actually went further than Bergman ever did’.

The Sacrifice brings us, in its story, to the threshold of the end of the world. Somehow, he is able to make what is to be lost more present to us before. And our own lives? Do we not stand at the threshold in our own way? We go to the cinema for time, Tarkovsky writes – but this means, we go to feel the age of things, to discover the temporality which ensouls our world. It is to bring us sabi that The Sacrifice sacrifices itself.

Still, I wonder whether it is possible to feel the sabi of things. There is little now, it would seem, that hasn’t been sucked into the vortex of the market. How can I recognise the life of things in a film when there is no life in the things around me? Sometimes the world of Tarkovsky’s films seems entirely phantasmic and his book, Sculpting in Time, preposterous. But then, at times, it awakens a strange nostalgia for a life I have never led. It is at these times, perhaps, that time begins to open for me. Is it the power of his films to return to us a sense of permanence and endurance? Or does does it give us a kind of screen-memory for a lack or an absence that is eating our world away? I think I see something frightening in the cinematic image Tarkovsky does not want us to see – the nothingness and non-meaning that threatens to swallow our world.

Hope Against Hope

The length of the shots and the glacial slowness of the film verge on affectation. It is a lugubrious film. But somehow Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (this is how he asks us to spell it) is a film about hope.

At the outset, Gorchakov and Eugenia drive through the dawn mist towards the ancient Chapel of St Catherine. Gorchakov is a Russia writer, in Italy to research the life of a Russian composer. Eugenia is a translator, beautiful and independent.

Her high heels prevent her from kneeling to pray in the Chapel of St Catherine to which she has driven Gorchakov. But the Russian does not enter the church. Eugenia berates him: it was his idea to drive halfway across Italy to see the painting of the Madonna by Piero della Francesca …

Perhaps we are supposed to see Eugenia as modern woman, too proud, too independent. We see her wandering the dark church in her opulent clothes. The Sacristan asks her: ‘have you come to pray for a child, or to be relieved from one?’ Eugenia tells his she is looking, just looking … Tarkovsky is sexist, we think to ourselves. But perhaps something else is happening here.

Eugenia says on first seeing the cathedral: ‘It is an amazing sight, when I saw it first, you know, I simply cried. Just look at the light!’ The film asks us to compare her to the woman at cathedral entrance, chanting ‘Virgin … Mother … Sister … Bride … Sea … Sky … Sun … Moon … Star’. It is incantation. They kneel to pray at the cathedral steps and, kneeling, mount the steps.

What do we see? It is as though the Chapel belongs to an older world, one we cannot re-enter. But it is this world to which the madman Domenico belongs.

We meet him first trying to cross the hot pool dedicated to Saint Catherine of Siena in the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni, where the protagonists are staying. Then we hear he locked himself in the house for seven years with his family, waiting for the end of the world.

He’s mad, Eugenia tells Gorchakov, who replies:

We don’t know what so-called insanity, or madness, is. First, they are inconvenient, they get in everyone’s way … Their behaviour, their wishes lie outside the generally accepted rules… And then, we simply don’t wish to understand them. They are terribly lonely, but I’m sure they are closer to the truth than we are …

Domenico is an Idiot, a Holy Fool. Gorchakov is fascinated by Domenico, this former teacher of mathematics; he demands to be taken to him. He talks to the Fool. Eugenia leaves. Domeinco tells him he intends to save the world. And he tells Gorchakov to cross the hot pool at the Tuscan village Bagno Vignoni holding a lit candle in his hands.

Domenico immolates himself on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoleum, an ancient Roman square, after preaching to onlookers for three days. Aflame, crawling along the ground, he cries, ‘What is this world worth, what is the value of its truth if some unhappy mental patient, as you call us, tells you: “You should be ashamed of yourselves!” While there’s still time!’

And Eugenia? She travels to India with her new companion ‘He’s interested in spiritual matters’ she tells Gorchakov on the phone. Gorchakov carries the candle across the pool as Domenico asks. Twice he fails, but the third time, he succeeds. At the end he stumbles. Commentators tell us he dies, but I’m not sure.

It is a lugubrious film. The key, one might assume, is Tarkovsky’s own nostalgia for Russia. But Russia here means not only Gorchakov’s wife and daughter, but also the unity of a culture in terms of which everything will make sense.

Gorchakov: ‘Poetry can’t be translated… Art in general is untranslatable …’
Eugenina: ‘… but how would we ever have known Tolstoy, Pushkin? How could we even begin to understand Russia, if …’
Gorchakov: ‘But you don’t understand Russia at all’.
Eugenina: ‘And Dante, Petrarch, Macchiavelli? So Russians don’t know Italy!’
Gorchakov: ‘Of course not, how could we?’
Then Gorchakov gestures vaguely towards abolish national borders in order to overcome this difference.

I should add that Gorchakov is sexually drawn to Eugenia. She knows it. She berates him. Perhaps nostalgia also designates a desire for the security of family life.

Nostalgia, then, for what is lost – for Mother Russia, the unity of culture, the security of a wife and child. Nostalgia for the places of men and women, and for human beings who can kneel.

Why is Gorchakov fascinated by Domenico? The latter is indomitable, possessed of his beliefs, uncompromising. He will protest against what the world has become. It is his madness which allows Domenico to dream of transforming his society through his act of self-sacrifice. How futile! Yet he fascinates Gorchakov. Here, too, there is nostalgia, which one can understand from Tarkovsky’s remarks in an interview:

I am convinced that “time” in itself is no objective category, as “time” cannot exist apart from man’s perception of it. Certain scientific discoveries tend to draw the same conclusion. We do not live in the “now.” The “now” is so transient, as close to zero as you can get without it being zero, that we simply have no way of grasping it. The moment in time we call “now” immediately becomes the “past,” and what we call the “future” becomes the “now” and then it immediately becomes “past.” The only way to experience the now is if we let ourselves fall into the abyss which exists between the now and the future. And this is the reason “nostalghia” is not the same as mere sorrow over past time. Nostalghia is a feeling of intense sadness over the period that went missing at a time when we forsook counting on our internal gifts, to properly arrange and utilize them,… and thus neglected to do our duty.

Tarkovsky invokes nostalgia for the future, retrieving its sense, its promise from the deathly repetition of the past. Nostalghia would incite hope in us, a hope against hope, a hope to shore against what hope has become. But this is possible only when we put ourselves in the place of Gorchakov in his fascination with Domenico. Is this possible?

Tarkovsky has hopes for the artwork itself:

An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth. It appears as a revelation, as a momentary, passionate wish to grasp intuitively and at a stroke all the laws of this world – its beauty and ugliness, its compassion and cruelty, its infinity and its limitations. (Sculpting in Time, 27)

Truth? One might think Tarkovsky is nostalgic for the old place of art in a cosmos where human beings could look up to the stars and discover a source of the divine law mirrored in their souls. Musn’t one acknowledge that those stars have fallen, and there is no place for human beings in the cosmos? This is what Nostalghia reveals to me: the old laws have gone. It is no more possible to disappear into the world of the women at the church, of Domenico, than it is to become an animal, dwelling in nature as water does in water. The world, the whole world, can strike us as meaningless, as without sense or direction. But perhaps there is hope here – hope in the face of those who still believe in the great political projects through which freedom will arrive as a result of collective work, of shared labour. A hope implicit in what in a kind of resistance in things themselves, and in the relations between us, any of us, all of us. This is what Gorchakov’s wandering, his inability to complete his tasks or to resolve on any course of action, his sublime weakness suggests to me.

Blindness

‘I’ve seen your film four times in the last week. And I didn’t simply go to see it, but in order to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people…. Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me – it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror. For the first time ever a film has become something real for me, and that’s why I go to see it, I want to get right inside it, so that I can really be alive.’

Tarkovsky recalls the work that went into editing Mirror, in which the structure of the film was altered and the sequence of the episodes changed. It would seem the film would never find its form, that too much was missing. And yet, one day, he writes, ‘the material came to life; the parts started to function reciprocally, as if linked by a bloodstream; and as that last despairing attempt was projected onto the screen, the film was born before our very eyes’ (116).

Somehow, the two hundred shots of Mirror came together. Tarkovsky writes of a ‘time pressure’, in which the scenes have to come together to preserve a consistency of time, in the same manner one joins water pipes of a different diameter. The criterion that guides editing is life, according to Tarkovsky – life as it is ‘constantly moving and changing’, allowing each person to ‘interpret and feel each separate moment in his own way’ (118).

What is essential is that the audience experience a time that is uncoerced by the director; yet, as Tarkovsky writes: ‘There is still an apparent dichotomy: for the directors sense of time always amounts to a kind of coercion of the audience, as does his imposition of his inner world. The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world), and becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own’ and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but, alas, inevitable.’ (120)

I am intrigued about the notion of taste at issue here: the idea that, somehow, the director’s experience of time would resonate with one’s own, to the extent that one is possessed, or, perhaps, dispossessed by the work. Better still – there is the notion that this play of possession and dispossession is at issue in every moment of our lives, and particular when we give ourselves to drifting or to idleness, or when our attention is captured for a moment by something that is mundane and surprising.

What is essential is to cross the bridge from the opening to the work to life. This is not an opposition. Perhaps the bridge leads into the work itself. It is never a question of the representation of the world in the film. The film, sculpted from time, resonates with the rebirth of the world. ‘In a word, the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water. Only in a drop of water!’ (110) A drop of water: an event, banal but world shaking, ordinary but extraordinary insofar, in a moment, it captures us and holds us still. A drop of water – the image is sufficient unto itself, but so too is the event. We live our lives at one time in terms of our desire to complete tasks, to finish projects, but at another – and in the same moment – in the fascination when we are unable, any longer, to be able, to assemble ourselves such that we are capable of anything at all.

‘Everything that torments me, everything I don’t have and that I long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light or warmth, and by which I live, and everything that destroys me it’s all there in your film, I see it as if in a mirror.’ – Everything is in the film. But this is because the film answers to the movement within things as they give themselves to be experienced and as we give ourselves over to them. Everything is there because it attests to a kind of ‘push’ or pressure that inhabits things, that is their movement in time, their constancy, their flowering or their withering which escapes determination. This is what resonates in me as I watch the film; I am claimed not by director’s vision, or even his experience of time, as Tarkovsky suggests, but by time itself.

Mirror is not the film in which one recognises oneself, or recognises one’s childhood. I cannot contemplate Mirror – I am not the spectator; the work does not lay itself before me. Above all, it does not let me see myself. Alexei, the child of the film is fascinating because I am seized by the fascination that seizes him as he gazes into the mirror. It is then that he allows us, too, to gaze at the film as into the mirror in which we can no longer see ourselves. At that moment, we are no longer capable of seeing, of assuming a distance from what we see. We see the film with the blindspot which permits our sight – with the incapacity from which everything we are capable issues and to which it must return.