The Times Quotidian

Photography and the Dream of Form, Part 1: Batchelor
By Guy Zimmerman

Contrary to popular belief, machines, technology, do not exist to enslave us, or to limit or retard our spiritual growth. Rather, technology exists to liberate us from Cartesian habits of mind so that we can embody hitherto undernourished aspects of our potential for awareness. To see what I mean, examine the photograph to the right on your screen.

The meat in the image is red but probably it’s flowers instead of meat and just a little out of focus such that it appears meat-like. What’s in focus must be water, but since water is transparent you can’t actually see it. The shadow of three fingers and a thumb that interrupt the cool stripe of reflected light is in focus so, yes, probably there is water, and the flowers that look meat-like float just below the surface of the water. Actually, in the lower of the two cool stripes of light you can see the rest of the hand and the arm it is attached to, so definitely the red material is not meat at all, though it still might not be flowers. Whatever it is you can’t turn away because the image is delicious to the eye. There are those rich, blendy colors and the invisible water, and the general sense of stealing a moment from the past and savoring it now because why not?

In another image we’re on a boat looking through a window into a dining room which itself includes three windows framing a view of water far below. Very faint and in the distance, there’s a darker line of land. But actually, we’re high enough above the water so it couldn’t possibly be a boat at all. Probably it’s simply a restaurant on a promontory above a sea or river, the Loire river perhaps, given the title of the photograph: “Val de Loire.” As before, this otherwise unremarkable subject matter is complicated by intervening layers of reflection and transparency, which serve to elevate it toward the sublime. It’s the kind of scene we enter and leave several times a day without noticing the complex yet quiet harmony.

The hull of a caved-in boat, an empty hallway, a drinking glass – the variety of subject matter is as striking as the consistency of the photographer’s concerns. The scenes are busy enough to embody the full chaos of experience while also resolving toward a provisional order. In each case poetic effects are created through optical refraction, reflection and transparency. These are photographs that revel in the continual flux of visual experience, celebrating complexity. And yet despite the weave of surfaces, each image manages to record a unified event of light and moment. They are the product of someone with extraordinary powers of attention, and their aim is to undercut reductive tendencies of mind by seeding doubt, provoking always the question: what is this?

To gain clarity on what the photographer is up to, we can view each of these photographs as embodying five distinct properties or factors. First, each photograph represents a moment of contact between a specific visual field and the light sensitive emulsion in the camera. Next, each image is imbued with a singular, distinctive feeling tone. Third, each photograph represents an act of discernment, meaning that the mechanism of the camera has been constructed (and then deployed by the photographer) to convey a world that makes sense spatially to our eyes. These photographs each embody an act of attention – the photographer has focused his lens on a specific frame chosen out of all the possible frames in that time and place. Finally, each photograph represents an act of intention – to celebrate the beauty of an image and offer it to others. These five qualities – contact, feeling tone, discernment, attention and intention – are referred to in Buddhist arcana as the nama-rupa (name-form) factors. They are five qualities that are present in each moment of consciousness, and what little I know about them I learned from an audio taped lecture by the writer and teacher Stephen Batchelor, who also happens to be the man who took the photographs I now write about.

Batchelor is an iconoclast who has practiced extensively in both Tibetan and Korean Zen. Remaining strongly independent, he is one of the most eloquent proponents of a distinctly agnostic approach to Buddhism that emphasizes secular and pragmatic aspects of practice. In beautifully written books such as Alone with Others, The Awakening of the West, the remarkable gem called Buddhism Without Belief, Living with the Devil and also a translation of Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center, Batchelor “engages in a critical exploration of Buddhism’s role in the modern world.” His work as an artist is fully in this mode, and it’s the trajectory of his career that I appreciate most. Under the influence of a transformative practice we see an articulate sensibility simplifying out into wonder.

It’s the third of the nama-rupa elements, discernment, that I think Batchelor wants most to put pressure on with his photography. His photographs hold us right at the moment where the mind casts its lot with a hard-and-fast interpretation of sense data presented by the visual field. The jaws of the mental apparatus are kept open for a moment. We do not hurtle forward from an interpretation open to revision to a solid belief on which the girders of the self can be firmly planted in its endless campaign for a separate, unchanging and solid existence. The camera, that mechanism of certainty, is here used to undermine confining delusions that constrict our lives, causing us to suffer unnecessarily.

Part of the reason the camera is able to do this kind of thing so effectively is that we understand it to offer an “objective” take on the world. With a painted image the issue is obscured by the more direct engagement with another subjectivity. In photography the question of whether or not we are reading the image correctly comes immediately to the fore. The technology of the camera is doing the “discernment” work our eye-brain typically does, and this allows us to step back from the mechanical tendencies that narrow and limit our own minds. In so doing, Batchelor’s photographs remind us of the gorgeous strangeness of the world we inhabit, and which we are too conditioned in habits of perception to savor appropriately.

Aesthetically, the result of all this is something called beauty. The photographs are moments of presence in which the covert and fleeting harmony of the everyday world moved Batchelor to raise the camera-mechanism and press the button. They are moments of union between the luminous world and a perceiver of that world delivered with mystery intact. The presence is contagious, communicative, the images drawing us closer to our heartbeats and to the ongoing miracle of perception.

I continue to be smitten with the work of Richard Avedon. Left, is his  “Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, American mezzo-soprano, October 1, 2003”. It is an eerie actuality that, to the day, one year later, Richard Avedon would die. Even more disturbing was the untimely death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson on July 3, 2006, at the age of 52. I was shaken, for she truly embodied the music she sang. “So strong, so vibrant and so utterly communicative, they are as if tones were made flesh.”, Mark Swed, Times Staff Writer | September 30, 2003.

Here, from Rilke Songs, a collaboration with her husband, composer Peter Lieberson, for which The Grammy’s posthumously awarded her 2006, Best Classical Vocal Performance, Part two; XXIX.

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Rilke Songs (1997-2001), Composer Peter Lieberson
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano, Peter Serkin, piano

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Part two; XXIX

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face
grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
The sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am

English translation © Stephen Mitchell

Little Black Dresses
by Nancy Cantwell

The Little Black Dress is a Coco Chanel invention. First produced in 1926 Vogue claimed it to be the ” Ford” of fashion, “The frock that all the world will wear.” The long-sleeved black dress, which was initially made for day in wool, and for evening in crepe, satin or velvet, shook up the world of fashion. It became instantly synonymous as an essential chic component of any stylish woman’s wardrobe. One of the early adapters of the LBD was Betty Boop who, in the classic 1932 Minnie the Moocher, sexed it up with sashay and a little black garter. And that is the beauty of the LBD, it’s simplicity and elegance make it the perfect backdrop for accessory, whether it be copious strands of pearls, daring diamond drops or a cultivated Hoochie coochie stroll.

Last Year at Marienbad is filled with LBD’s. In fact the LBD seems to have a character of its own. Alain Resnais styled much of A’s look (played by Delphine Seyrig) after the Louise Brooks’s character Lulu in the 1929 Georg Wilhelm Pabst film Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora). Lulu was lurid and sensationally modern. Seyrig’s look mirrors that sensibility, but Resnais adds a formal, deliberate and poised styling to meet his ends. The hair and maquillage are Gothic, enigmatic and decadent. But behind or below it all is the Chanel Little Black Dress.

There are four distinct LBD’s that A wears and if you follow them closely you can also unwind some of the time shifts that take place throughout Marienbad. Because there is no continuity in time or place, the script girl, Sylvette Baudrot, with whom Resnais continues to work with to this day, had a graph made that resembled an algorithm to track present, past and imaginary time. Costume continuity, while not driven by plot narrative needed to be meticulously recorded as ensemble changes in many scenes were shot months apart. One must remember that Alain Robbe-Grillet has obfuscation built into the screenplay of Marienbad. It is disorienting by design.

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CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY and THE INFORMANT!
By Rita Valencia

And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 19:24
________

When assuring your friend you aren’t lying say:
“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”

One of the common strategies of the contemporary “issue film” is to lull the audience into the comfortable state where it is assured it will not be hearing anything it does not already know. I tried to figure out why Mr. Moore sub-titled his movie “a love story” and my best guess is that he’s referring to this pleasure zone of agreement. His movie is ideological porn, where your righteously progressive opinions are massaged and amplified, and all you need to do is sit there and nod vigorously. In Moore’s Manichean universe there exist the evil rich perpetrators and the innocent poor victims, helpless and wronged–and Moore’s narration in case we don’t get it. He even enlists the aid of Catholic clerics he’s recruited to weigh in on the right side of good and evil (he finds two who condemn capitalism)…a welcome relief from the lurid tales of sex abuse with which OTHER documentaries have regaled us.

There are a number of interesting threads that start, then unravel. Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech a few brief months before his death on the need for a new Bill of Rights which would assure all citizens the right to health care, a decent home, and a good education. There is no follow through to this story. According to Moore’s fast, loose history, the Roosevelt era progressivism of America starts to decline with the advent of Reagan. The efforts to destroy Roosevelt policies started well before Reagan, but Moore evidently had a happy childhood and wasn’t aware of any problems in the late 50’s/early 60’s. His parents could afford vacations, as, he thinks, all working class people did. Yup.

Moore does a sort of historical hopscotch, a chart here, a graph there, Katrina, the foreclosure epidemic, the growing gap between rich and poor, the Great Bailout of 2008, where Moore shows just how there is indeed a sort of Illuminati that control this nation’s economy. (Ohio 9th District Rep. Marcy Kaptur does a star turn as one who balked at the strong arm tactics, heroine of an opposition that was pre-destined to be plowed under.)

It turns out many publicly traded companies buy life insurance policies on their employees, with themselves as beneficiaries. Check www.deadpeasants.biz. “Dead peasants”, a Gogolian concept which has been reinvented by corporate America, is perfectly legal, but ethically appaling. Moore tells the horror story of an ex-Wal-Mart employee who dies of an asthma attack, leaving her family destitute, while Wal-Mart collects a hefty sum in life insurance. This case was particularly shocking because the woman had not worked for a couple of years, and her family was dead broke, but this policy still paid out a hefty sum to Wal-Mart.

A critical mass of this sort of vignette would really make for a fascinating film, but there isn’t. Instead we get the familiar Michael Moore set pieces where he confronts security guards and is escorted from the premises. He rolls out a spool of crime scene tape around a bank building–embarrassing to us but not to him. This not an essay film, it is a screed: too much of the burbling Moore and too little about deregulation, deteriorating public education, lobbyists–and nothing about media consolidation–all essential plot points in any story about Late Capitalism.

Yet another essential plot point in any story of Late Capitalism is the endemic criminality and everyday deceit of our corporate institutions. Millions of people are employed by these megaliths like ADM, Citibank, Dupont, Proctor and Gamble, Xerox–companies that have their moral compass set the polar opposite of the ethics we learn in kindergarten or Sunday School. Compliantly their minions labor along, ignorant for the most part of what the masters of their little universe may be plotting… that is until reality snaps shut and the job disappears, the pension is stolen, the health insurance is withdrawn, fields can only grow corn if anything at all, and the mortgage is in foreclosure.

Steven Soderbergh’s skillful allegory, The Informant!, takes us inside the world of corporate masters, conducting an incisive exploration of the mind of one of non-fiction’s strangest characters, Mark Whitacre, the whistle blower of the 90’s who managed to put execs from Archer Daniels Midland behind bars for price fixing, but himself got busted for massive embezzlement. The man was a pathological liar, to use a psychiatric term completely alien to the spirit of the film. In the world Soderbergh weaves for us, Whitacre is uncannily like us, with his unceasing monkey mind and his facade of normality which lures everyone into the illusion that their lives are real.

The title role is played by Matt Damon, wearing a prosthetic nose and gut, melting entirely into the Whitacre character, a man who himself melted into corporate culture like margarine on Wonder Bread. The Informant is a story told in sideways fashion, incidentally, as an afterthought interspersed between hilarious and random internal monologue. Damon deadpans his absurdist voiceover patter: lines like “I read this thing about mustaches on the flight back from Zurich…What facial hair says about a man’s level of honesty. Some psychological theory ” or, “It’s not really lying when you’re doing it to serve some greater purpose…I think that’s what God would say “… “Porscha or Porsch–I’ve heard it both ways. Three years in Germany–I should know that”.

Before long you realize you have watched the incredible disintegration of a man’s life and, by the way, a corporate cover blown wide open, then sealing itself right back over. Whitacre’s disintegration reveals much about why our culture is degenerating, without ever saying anything. It lays cards on the table and then matter-of-factly wipes them back up again. Bloodlessly, it describes a most horrific horror, one that is easy and pleasant to watch and one that shows why everything happens as it does in the Moore film, but without need for explanation, only the post-Faulknerian patter of a moral imbecile, signifying literally nothing. Marvin Hamlisch’s score is brilliant, and Soderbergh positions the camera as beautifully as he conceals his rage.

Point of View, Photography by Paul Cabanis

Chanel Redressed
Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais France 1961 94 minutes Black and White 2.35:1
by Nancy Cantwell

Much has been said about Last Year at Marienbad and so little of it has to do with the sensational costume designs of Coco Chanel. Has no one noticed just how well paired Chanel and Resnais, were or more to the point, what a dramatic backdrop Marienbad provides for Chanel couture? Chanel was no stranger to the film industry, but it had 22 years since her last employ at costume design and Marienbad. In 1931, as the behest of Samuel Goldwyn, Chanel came to Hollywood twice a year to design for the actresses Goldwyn had on contract with his studio, he would pay her one million dollars per year. She created the costumes for a forgettable Jean Harlow film called Palmy Days and for a Gloria Swanson box office disaster called Tonight or Never. The third film which featured her costumes was called The Greeks Had a Word for It, directed by Lowell Sherman, 1932, which was a huge success starring Ina Claire, Joan Blondell, and Madge Evans.* While these last two films were still in post-production Chanel, disillusioned with Hollywood, returns to Paris to tend her couture business flailing in the midst of The Depression. In 1937 she collaborates with long time friend Jean Cocteau for his plays Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde and Oedipus Rex and continues with theatrical costume designs in early French cinema classics including Port of Shadows, directed by Marcel Carne, 1938, and Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La Règle du jeu, 1939.

With the onset of World War II Coco Chanel closed her shop and had taken up with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a German officer 13 years her junior to ride out the war. There are several accounts of her complicity with the Third Reich, but the one I found the best researched is by weekly columnist for the Times (London) Kate Muir and can be found here. Needless to say she was persona non grata in Paris. But time permitted her return and in 1954 she reopened business as usual. Although not a success in France, sales of what became the quintessential Chanel suit sold extremely well in the US and England.

All this being said, it does seem a bit odd that Resnais, one of the first directors to capture the horrors of the holocaust in his 1955 powerful documentary short Night and Fog, would employ a blatant sympathizer. My speculation runs that, regardless of political affiliation, no one could define the culture of the characters of Last Year at Marienbad with as much exactitude as Coco Chanel. Her sensibilities for perfection in workmanship and design were akin to Resnais’s passion and rigor for the art of film making.

But lets get more to the point of this pairing or trining as it were. For the complicity between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet cannot be undone, theirs is an extraordinary partnership. Here is what Robbe Grillet’s script calls for as to people and place in Marienbad. “This takes place in an enormous hotel, a kind of international palace, huge, baroque, opulent but icy: a univere of statues, motionless servants. Here the anonymous, polite, certainly rich and idle guests observe—seriously though without passion—the strict rules of their games (cards, dominoes…), Their ballroom dances, their empty chatter, or their marksmanship contests. In this sealed, stifling world, men and things alike seem victims of some spell, as in the kind of dreams where one feels guided by some fatal inevitability, where it would be futile to try to change the slightest detail as to run away.” Resnais delivers the mise en scène explicitly, and Chanel conjures through her sartorial discernment just the precise expression of the bored upper class which this film so well portrays.

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Note: *Madsen, Axel. Chanel: A Woman of Her Own (Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1990)