Behold the bride Justine, her name plucked from a novel by de Sade, her body bedecked in crinoline, lace, satin, and bone stiffeners. Her voluptuous skin pillows at the edges of her wedding garment, which squeezes her bosom tightly and blossoms open below the waist. She is a vision in white as she runs across the neatly cropped lawn, dragging ragged rope chains behind her. A cumbersome sort of froth envelopes her, marks her as special and sets her apart from the herd of onlookers, the wedding guests who watch, each regarding her with his/her own form of desire.

To shun their desire, one after the other, is the project of Lars Von Trier’s “melancholy” bride, played by Kirsten Dunst (Justine), whose face, described brilliantly by cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, is much better than beautiful as it expresses her mercurial moodswings. We find ourselves ensnared in a madness that would be Cassandra-like if Justine were willing or able to express it coherently.

As do all brides worthy of the gown, Justine has a secret. Her clandestine date with doom is something which she is not able to share, although it is, ironically, something all will share in. The astronomical anomaly which is the domain of scientists she has stolen and adopted into her feminine aspect: a planet which is no more than a sparkle of red in the sky has fallen into her mind’s orbit. Hers is the intelligence of the seer, the shaman, the witch or the saint. She has no power that is superhuman, but the sensitivity she possesses has no place in polite conventional society, a world in which she is still trapped. Having not found any alternative universe, she grows morose and pensive. She has only a partial, truncated faith in herself, which is more problematic for her than no faith at all and yet makes her easier for us to deal with (i.e., medicate) than a true yogi, or a believer like Johannes of Dreyer’s Ordet. Justine’s acts of kindness and cruelty may appear random and arbitrary, though she is unfailingly loving to the child in her life, her little nephew.

Dunst’s bride is exasperating to the audience (turned rather cleverly into extended wedding guests). We see the bondage of the bride as privilege. The conventions demanded of her on her special day are our gifts to her. To refuse them, to try to make “her” special day into her special day is an offense. She only displays “rudeness” to the most arrogant of guests, her boss, whose hideous egocentrism demands the harsh treatment with which she blesses him and leaves him to degenerate into speechless, impotent apoplexy.

The opulence of the wedding party is essential to Von Trier’s strategy, as is the Wagnerian grandiosity that underlays the sumptuous images. The magnitude of gifts granted the bride reflects the profundity of her renunciation. Faced with the ire of her family, she protests to her rigid sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg): “…But I smiled, I smiled a lot!” The bride can smile all she wants, but even these guests, obtuse as pigeons, know there is something awry.

Lars Von Trier has avoided the traps of genre conventionality that turn any filmmaker broaching the subject of the end-of-the-world into a bride getting married to a particularly boring groom. He dances with his subject with characteristic delicacy, care and fine poetic instinct, alluding to a host  of great masters whose work informs his:  the elegant planet choreography of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Shakepeare’s lovely suicidal Ophelia, Antonioni’s refractory beauty Giuliana of Red Desert, Resnais/Robbes-Grillet’s scenic mystery of Last Year at Marienbad. His artistic/cultural bloodlines are Ingmar Bergman and  Carl Theodor Dreyer. But his fusion of wedding movie, family drama and apocalypse is a reinvention and a subversion of genre that is uniquely Von Trier and defies labels, much  like Kubrick, Godard, or Fassbinder, who have pretty much invented their own way of “doing” film that can’t be easily categorized as “post modern”, “neo-realist” etc. His work has the quality of good fiction or philosophy leading us into a dark vast forest and leaving us there to contemplate rather than showing us the way back (which always ends up being wrong).

The openness of the result, conceptually, is what will frustrate ordinary audiences and create an attitude of dismissiveness, quibbling and even scorn. But it leaves the rest of us open to speculate. Justine is privy to an apocalyptic vision which is as subtle and elusive as it is inexorable. It drives her into behaviors that have the appearance of rudeness, craziness, or extreme narcissism. “I know things”, she confides to her sister Claire, who has limited patience, as an ordinary woman steeped in the mundane world.

When the planetary disaster is imminent, Claire rounds up her son and tries to escape the estate in a golf cart. “Where are you going Claire?” Justine asks. “The village,” Claire tearfully replies. “This isn’t about the village,” responds Justine darkly.

The experience of the end is shared only by the sisters and the child, Leo. Claire’s husband John (Keifer Sutherland), the bourgeois scientist, has killed himself, more from shame at facing his calculation errors than end-of-world terror. They come together, under no more than a sketch of a shelter created by sticks, a purely architectural form of whimsical surrender, and join hands in love as they merge into Justine’s apocalyptic crescendo. There is no more than this, what we see–what we think we see–and doom.

]]> http://www.timesquotidian.com/2012/01/09/heaven-is-in-your-eyes-2/feed/ 5 http://www.timesquotidian.com/2012/01/02/becoming-planet/ http://www.timesquotidian.com/2012/01/02/becoming-planet/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:03:56 +0000 Nancy Cantwell http://www.timesquotidian.com/?p=17248

Melancholia, by Lars Von Trier, 2011
by Guy Zimmerman

Far away among the stars a planet holds your image in its heart. You met on a summer night. A single glance was all it took. Later, in your dreams, your heart fatally divided, you beamed out a signal of erotic distress, a covert invitation. And now the planet is on its way, a wanderer, dark and brooding – a Hamlet-planet traveling a winding path toward you. The date has been set. Lying back naked on a bed of moss you wait and hope and pine, as luminous as Ophelia. Wagner, of course, loops in the background – the awe-struck Prelude to Tristan and Isolde. Your first and only embrace will be a Germanic dream – the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, a final all-totalizing work of art. You will not survive but nobody else will either…

When I go to the movies these days I find it useful to embrace the notion that we are witnessing the conclusion of an art form. Like the fresco during the late Renaissance, I think to myself, cinema came into being through a confluence of economic, sociological and aesthetic factors that have now shifted such that the “movie” is no longer evolving as a cultural form, but instead branches out into new, emergent forms still waiting to be named. There continue to be movies made, but they are actually re-makes of other movies (or TV shows)…or they are late stylistic distortions, like the “mannerist” painters who brought the High Renaissance to a close. I’m thinking here of Rosso Fiorentino, Tintoretto or Pontormo, the painters who closed out the great arc of the classical fresco that had sprung into life with Giotto two hundred years earlier, and reached its peak with Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian.

Characterized by compositional extravagances and chromatic excesses of one kind or another, the Mannerists explored the outer reaches of the form. The funders of art, meanwhile, moved from the Church to the private elite, and commissions for large altar pieces gave way to portraiture and still lives better served by paintings on canvas. Likewise, I think to myself, to the extent that cinema continues to evolve as a large-screen public projection (as opposed to cable, Netflix, or YouTube), it does so in a mannerist direction. One of the best examples of a “mannerist” auteur would be Lars Von Trier, and Exhibit A might be his recent film Melancholia.

Anchored by Kirsten Dunst’s strong performance in the lead role, the film tracks the final months of human life as a rogue planet, Melancholia, completes a collision course with planet earth. The film opens with a long sprawling disaster of a wedding, Dunst’s Justine ditching the groom at the last moment, newly committed to the planet she has glimpsed eclipsing a star in the tail of Scorpio high above. This abortive wedding is staged by Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsburg) and her billionaire husband John (Keifer Sutherland), and takes place on the grounds of John’s lavish estate. The long second act involves Justine’s return to the estate some months later as the errant planet approaches. She looks on with great sadness as Claire and John reassure their young son that the planet will safely fly-by, a unique event to be savored later in scrap books and stories by the fire. They devise a sad little hoop contraption out of wire that gets placed on the heart like a cartoon valentine to gauge the advance or retreat of Melancholia. The planet looks so delicate in John’s fancy telescope that Claire whispers to her sister “it couldn’t hurt anyone.” Justine smiles mildly, knowing her lover’s true intentions.

Justine councils Claire to embrace the end of terrestrial life, which she views as inherently evil. In her melancholic logic she echoes Conrad’s Kurtz here, or Celine writing from the depths of the Congo about the nefarious fecundity of the jungle. Von Trier expands these downbeat self-assessments to a planetary level, creating in Melancholia a cinematic antonym for the interplanetary subjectivity of James Cameron’s feel-good Avatar. I think also here of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which Tarkovsky (and, later, Soderberg) made into a film. Fresh in our minds will be the decade of socio-political malfeasance we have just lived through, the transparent villainy of our elites having given us all a Boschian sense of human malice. Watching the film we experience the covert self-flattery of apocalyptic plots – all others will be punished, as we, the virtuous elite, observe the apocalypse unfold from a safe remove.

In formal terms, Melancholia is “about” the slow motion montage of its stunning title sequence; the rest is denoument. Here is slow motion that assaults our sense of temporality, the foundation of cinematic art. In Sauve qui peut (la vie) Godard famously turned to slow motion in an attempt to extend the life of cinema by driving it forward into something new. In Melancholia, Von Trier uses the technique to free-fall away from the art form itself; a different way of knowing, non-cinematic, animates the work.

One way to view Melancholia is that the apocalyptic collision it depicts is a goodbye to classical cinematic form – a final and complete Eisensteinian collision. In Melancholia, the cinematic line of flight completes itself in global oblivion, and we shift into a register of collapse, disintegration, the formation of a cloud of earth dust between Venus and Mars, the ember of the earth’s core disappearing with an interplanetary hiss. The film’s subject is itself: the end of things, the dissolution of forms under the threat of extinction. Von Trier’s slow motion puts the issue of time into abeyance – the planetary collision is a foregone conclusion sometime later, a completion that arrives for the species that, consumed by lack, continually says “no” to its own self-completion.

The film depicts a becoming-planet that can only happen in the shadow of calamity, a becoming-planet that, like all becomings, involves an embrace of impermanence – to become a planet is also to become the end of a planet. Every true marriage, says Melancholia, is a marriage of destruction, a move out of the terminal ambivalence of depression, toward a new embrace of mortality, particularity, immanence. The state of melancholy is a doorway to a different mode of being, continuously emergent, a distributed awareness that feels non-human or post-human, a state that opens out, perhaps, into the “immeasurable” of sympathetic joy untainted by self.

Close to a year ago I posted a longer dramatic monologue called Snout. I recall being anxious about deploying creative work in the TQ space, where I had been posting thought pieces on culture, but the experiment seemed interesting to readers, a welcome complication to the line of posts I had made. Djinn, presented below, is a companion piece to Snout and part of a triptych I expect to complete in the next few months. Djinn looks at the reductive power of a name, the trap of a name. The djinn in the piece is a trapped party girl, but also a deity figure – a djinn or genie. The element of nostalgic reflection in Djinn does make it seem like a fitting piece for this time of year, and I think its environmental themes pertain also to life as we are living it here in America on the cusp of 2012. Barbara Eden’s sitcom genie was a fixture of the past in which Djinn is anchored, and one of the many things I admire about Elizabeth Greer’s work here is how she could do justice to the ideas I’m preoccupied with, while also making Djinn into a cosmetics ad gone very wrong. As always I am in debated to Jeffrey Atherton’s visual artistry, brought to life this time by Brad Cooper’s inspired editing.
—Guy Zimmerman

DJINN
Sometimes I think I was born at a very special time
When everything for a brief moment attained this kinda like
Perfect alignment

Do you have that?

Wild
They said that about me
That I was wild

I used to like the clubs yeah
And the sun coming up over Brooklyn to the East
I loved getting lost in the spell of those nights
That soft wild dark because we all can sense
A golden perfect place around the next corner

Do you know what it’s like to be caught in a trap?
Course you do – why am I asking?
Hey now, we’re all in a trap one way or another, my friend
You don’t have anything to worry about
Not from me
The trap releases when you learn to love the trap
Isn’t that how it works?

(titles)

You again – ha ha ha
But really
Look at me blushing
Was that really us?
Did we really do those things?

On the other hand I don’t know you at all
We never met

(then, listening)

Hear that…?

You definitely look familiar
Did I see you at the horseshoe bar?
Did we share a drink together?
Did you shower me with money on some dance floor?
Did I pass you on the street downtown?
Did you feel me in your heart?
Do you feel me there right now?

When I was a girl I used to get these high fevers
My brain would cook and bubble in my skull
I’d have this one hallucination where I’m standing at the edge of a field
In the shadows at the border of this little clearing in the woods
This meadow
And the grass is so wild and green it just throbs with color
Making my eyes ache there under the bright sun
But I have come on a crucial mission
I have been given the knowledge that somewhere in this field of grass
Is the single molecule, and on the molecule the single atom
Where the end of the world is about to begin
And it’s up to me to find that little atom and stop
The world from bursting into flames
Igniting into a storm of nuclear fire
That consumes the planet and everyone on it
All those I love and the millions of strangers too
And all their dogs and cats and all the wild animals too
The mice, the doves on the wing all consumed by fire and heat
Melting, turning to smoke and ash
And at the very last moment I suddenly know
My fever vision suddenly zooms in on this one blade of grass
In the middle of the field and I just fly there
Zero in on that single molecule,
Tunnel in even further to find
That pesky little apocalyptic atom
And I reach out toward it and suddenly of course I wake up
The fever has broken
I’m drenched in sweat, a soft breeze
Blows in through the window
Warm spring air, the sound of birds, my brothers
Throwing a baseball

You know, this air you breath is really delicious
It’s really starting to change me
I can definitely feel it kicking in

You thought I was about to say something about “the edge of chaos”
I wasn’t going to say anything about the edge of chaos
You made bad choices in life
You’re going to have to deal with the consequences
Me, I always hear the roar outside the door
The roar of romance and danger
The ecstatic parade of the divine
Money raining down on the dancing girls
A shower of gold falling from the purse of a god
“Happy New Year” tapped out in white dust
The lines Hoovered off a closet mirror laid out like a table

(Hears something distant. )

You know those magic shows they have in certain old movies?
The magician in the black top hat and the wand
And he has an assistant, a smiling woman
Who gets sawed in half
I always wanted to be that woman sawed in half
That woman in the box that hinges open
Where I’d be in on both sides of the magic trick
Both sides of the illusion, the sleight-of-hand
Half of me in the world of the audience saying oooh and aaah
And the other half in the world of the magician
Leading these suckers by the nose
But the world is not a magic show, is it

Or…mmm…what do you think?

Is the world a magic trick?
Or is it the kind of place where a thing is what it is
And we can rely on that
Where, for example, lip gloss is lip gloss

Simple and direct
And the same goes for me or for you
We are what we are…or…but…

We grow, we change, but something is unchanging too, huh?
Our soul, our essence is what it is…but it changes…?
And isn’t that confusing because things have to be…the way they are…

Or something…right…?

The silk scarf becomes a white dove
And we love it because it’s a total lie that also tells the truth
Things are always shifting into other things
The lie becomes the truth
The truth becomes a lie
Talk about freedom, a high wire act
Floating on air

We give things a name, “wild”
The name never changes
The name is a trap, a jar for the spirit of the thing named
The name that we are given accumulates a story
A history, a little narrative that is a prison
And what you see when you see me
Is a woman learning to forget her own name
A woman intent on being free once more

Venus, web, fly, magic, trap, silent –

What is my name do you think?
Do you even remember it?

In general I’m a mystery
A mystery woman
Some men don’t like that
Some men want to pierce the mystery

They said I was wild
That’s what they said
Me
They don’t say that any more
Is it wild to love the sky, the forests, the seas?
Pricks
Wild
Maybe I’m a just a lover!
Maybe I’m just in love with humanity!

Eh
Life is an ebb and flow
And what if I can see the future
My future, your future
Sure, you want closure
Questions that get answered
You’ve been that way since the pilgrims
You goddamn Americans
Always the same

You won’t stop ‘till you’ve covered the whole goddamn earth
In asphalt and for what?
A waste what a waste
And you won’t stop you won’t ever stop
I’d rather bang every last one of you
Than talk to you
Or know what’s in your mind

Drown me if you have to
Burn me or drown me, do what you want
Just don’t show me the contents of your mind
Ever again
Maybe I’m just pretending to be your captive
Because it turns me on
Master
Do you like it when I call you that?
Master? Listen…!

Can you hear it now?

Sure you can
You can hear it coming, a hot wind
All the way from that meadow long ago

I can do lines now without even doing lines
Every breath is like a line now for me
And God holds the mirror except he’s a goddess
And she approves of me violently
And my sinuses are all stuffed up
It’s from giving you all I have
Over and over and over but I still like you
Would you like a drink?
Would you like some pills or to take a crap?
No? You’re good? Okay.

There are 521 ways to forget
I know because I counted
Trapped away in here all these years
While the rivers baked into streams
I mean someone please pull the plug
Yank the trigger tug the rope
I can’t speak for you but
I’d rather get dragged behind a car
Quite frankly
I’d rather get gutted by a boat hook
In all honesty
Someone give me a hammer
I’ll break open the sky, let all the air rush out

In Central Park at the break of day
I used to go sit by the side of that still lake
In the black water the mutant goldfish
Would slowly emerge
Big bulbous eyes and skin mottled orange and white
As if they had survived the radiation
As will a small percentage of humanity
Transformed into shuffling beasts and monsters
That hobble along the floors of deep smoking valleys
Bellowing to each other
Mating in the rocks and in the ditches
But I could stop all that
And sometimes I think I really did

I was big on recycling
I knew it was just a start
We needed to get to full sustainability
It would be like a dance
We’d be dancing with the planet
We’d restore the jungles and the prairies
Bring all the species back and mid-wife a few new ones as well
Unintended consequences were gonna be our middle name
It would be like a beautiful and terrible dream
We couldn’t ever wake up from
And no more wars because they’re boring and ugly
How to let go
How to sink back into the dark we rose out of
The warm dark of the womb

Fire, fight, engine, flight . . .

Did you forget yet?
Did you forget my name?

Revisiting the World of EASY RIDER

I vividly remember paying not a shred of attention to Easy Rider in 1969. Whatever it was about, it wasn’t Ours, but was pretending to be. The idea of re-presenting the present out from under Us was still too new. It was a given that Hollywood wouldn’t, couldn’t ever “get it”, that the portrayals of sixties youth culture would always fall flat. People from the Hollywood establishment were untrustworthy observers: too old, too embedded in cliché and conventionalism for even the best of intentions to salvage them. This went for movie stars too, even “hip” ones like Dennis Hopper, who was, at  34, trying to play a 20-something in this film. Nobody with the wherewithal to mass market, on 35 mm film, a message or representation, took the notion of questioning consumerist and capitalist values seriously. Perhaps they knew that, as sure as four kids at Kent State, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy,  and Fred Hampton, were dead, the idea of  world peace and a society free from corporate sponsorship was doomed.

Today’s youth culture is a brand that is readily accessible: it exists in a cyber world of signs, tweets and emoticons written in code for all to see in the realms of Facebook and Twitter. Style and language is a uniform code vertically integrated through age, socioeconomic demographics–instantly, globally. In those long ago times before the internet there was a private and unspoken aspect to the communal youth experience that defied facile representation. But Easy Rider went ahead and did it, grossing 60 million dollars worldwide by 1972 off a $400,000 budget. Someone was paying attention, or at least watching in gape-mouthed silence.

There was a deep establishmentarian aversion to looking at the genuinely radical ideas behind some of the social trends of that decade. ‘Free Love’, for example, in its filmic representations and in its reiterations in the 70s, looks like swinging or other forms of narcissistic hedonism. Hedonism and narcissism were symptomatic of a boisterous boom economy, but the ideas that generated free love were based on socialist ideals. The marriage institution was a consumerist exercise in purchasing a biological mate. A utopian ideal of communal loving kindness, and ultimately peace, required that people eschew “ownership” of a sexual partner. These ideas sound laughable today, but I grew up schooled in the view that all the rituals of courtship–rings, gifts of jewelry, formal dating etc. —were bribes and ransom for the procurement of access to, followed by ownership of, my body, and that love (relationships, sexuality) needed to break free from the capitalist consumerist model that underlay it. Free love was meaningful, at least superficially, to women more than men because the concept would presumably free them from an essentially passive and reactive role. But somehow the mass media re-presentation of “free love” became horny male hippies skinny-dipping with hot “chicks.” Easy Rider was cast in that pre-feminist mold.

As I reach back to try to remember why I ignored Easy Rider, I recall an amazing array of culturally trenchant films that had credibility at the time: Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969); Don’t Look Back (D.A. Pennebaker, 1967)  with Bob Dylan at the center spinning poetry and attitude; Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, (1968) with its long long takes of Mick Jagger singing in some kind of sexual ecstasy intercut with protest signs, graffiti, and Black Panthers. Panic in Needle Park (1971)—which, incidentally, starred Al Pacino—was also a favorite: it evoked the smell associated with crash pads, bad drugs and wasted kids. 1969 was the year that Midnight Cowboy came out, one of the darkest, saddest and most soulful films of the decade. A year earlier, the spectacularly creepy and poetic 2001:A Space Odyssey, had captured the paranoia of the coming digital surveillance space age. Warhol/Morissey were in their prime, with a prodigious output of B films that covered urban subculture–a long list that includes Lonesome Cowboys, Flesh, and Trash.

Although Easy Rider may fall short as cultural analysis or filmic poetry it undoubtedly marks the successful branding of a generation. As of 1969, advertisers had not yet figured out the youth market and had largely ignored the counterculture. Life magazine was just beginning to show photo essays about hippies, as some odd wackos living out in the country. Hopper and Fonda were the perfect frontmen for the opening salvo in a campaign to gather the flocks of disaffected youth, or, more importantly, disaffected youth wannabes, for after all, it’s the aspirational character of mass market that drives consumerism. Dennis Hopper grew up in television. Peter Fonda was part of Hollywood royalty. They never become fictional characters. Compare them to Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo and the Jon Voight’s haunted and sweet Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) come off as two fairly well off Hollywood actors who dress up like hippies and ride shiny motorcycles. Peter Fonda’s Wyatt is amiable and narcissistic, tilting his well-sculpted head to capture the light just so on his high cheekbones and patrician profile. He wears the shirt of a dandy and has the whiff of natural privilege and superiority about him. His famous line, “I never wanted to be anybody else” says it all. Why the hell would he want to be anybody else? Hopper’s Billy is the more interesting of the two: a confused, irascible, paranoid, and sometimes unpleasant misfit. After they do a drug deal with Phil Spector–whose genuine unwholesomeness seems downright eerie given recent events–the two set off  to a grand soundtrack of “classic” sixties pothead music, through the glorious landscape of the West. Jack Nicholson plays himself lusciously, with a nod to his character “George”; good fun but ultimately disappointing. His memorable moment is his “They fear you for your freedom” speech, that has all the depth of Jefferson Smith’s climactic rant in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I for one don’t buy the argument that people down South are “fearful of freedom”. They just don’t like Yankees, queers or Hippies: the bias is wired into their brains from long-standing cultural practice. Importantly, cultural practice is subject to influence and change, however glacial.

Landscape is really at the heart of the film. Lovely to look at, vista after stunning vista appears like flapping pages on an Arizona Highways calendar. The magnificence of the American desert is a tacit expression of albeit bland religiosity embedded in Easy Rider. The message goes something like: out here you can see the majesty of the Creator at work. This is sacred land, once tended by indigenous peoples whose dead are buried under the places we buy and sell, get high upon, or otherwise profane by our presence. Notions of property are mundane held up to the pristine and ancient openness of the desert, and  ideas of time are petty, held up to the eternal Presence of the land.

The American roots of this mode of thinking are the Transcendentalists of the 19th century, whose ideas were in turn derived from the English Romantics, from German Idealism…and the Hindu Vedic tradition. Even though there was a small but important hippy subculture that returned to the land who did adopt these values, to look too deeply into those sources in the context of Easy Rider is misleading. The landscape is really more a decorative mood motif than a source of genuine reverence, more a backdrop for dudes on shiny motorcycles than an allusion to transcendence.

The encounters of Wyatt and Billy with the others they meet are  laced with paranoia, conflict and strangeness. With the exception of  George Hanson–the small town ACLU lawyer played by Jack Nicholson–the people of the road never whole-heartedly welcome them, and the trip gets progressively darker, but unfortunately not in a very illuminating way. (It is instructive to note that if you decide to drop acid after a friend has been murdered, don’t do it in a cemetery.) Billy’s line after their journey is (almost) all over is “we blew it”…meaning they had made some unnamed, perhaps unnamable, irreversible mistake. The koan-like remark, left unexplained, promises more than it can ever deliver. Yes, it’s a good idea to leave it unexplained, but it does beg the question, what was their plan…the “it” that they blew? Even in 1969 it was pretty obvious from the start that these guys were too old to be excused for having a hare-brained idea like taking off and retiring to Florida on the proceeds of a drug deal. There was no idealism, no altruism, no cynicism, just an experiment with mindlessness. Yeah, whatever.

Now that I am an old geezerette, and not an 18-year old with a bad attitude, I smile a little at the kindness in Hopper’s portrait of a generation that, at his advanced age of 30-something, he could easily have derided. Alas, the kindness was too soft in the head to shed any light on what was really happening. As political agitprop it falls almost tragically flat. Tragic because it’s crucial to understand what happens when people begin to rise up. Yes, rednecks hated hippies, but rednecks were never the real problem, and the “hippies” knew that. Rednecks weren’t responsible for killing the kids at Kent State or the Black Panthers. That was the National Guard, called out by the State government of Ohio; that was the FBI. It was never the country people who presented much of a challenge to the counterculture, as a matter of fact, the stylings and costuming of Easy Rider were ironically taken from them and then re-adopted in relatively short order by rural America. By the early seventies a whole vein of rock’n'roll had gone southern (Allman Bros, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ry Cooder, etc). Style and costumes became the only lasting legacy of the time.

The sixties was the only decade where three grass roots political movements–anti-war, feminism and civil rights–actually gained traction; but the social movement of the counterculture, the utopian dreams, died, and all that was left us was granola, tie dye and Rolling Stone Magazine (which in the 70’s claimed to have “sold” the 60’s generation to advertisers). The reasons are largely structural, with institutions of media, finance and governance playing major roles. The ignorant redneck with a tumor on his neck (played by an actual resident of a tiny Louisiana town known for its gambling dens and brothels) who shoots Billy and Wyatt may have been a villain once upon a time, but today he’s the victim of a health care system that gives him the choice of losing everything he’s got to pay for his disease, or dying in the same ditch as the killed hippy.

I first saw Sara Driver’s film You Are Not I, which is based on the story by Paul Bowles, over twenty-five years ago now. The film was shot quite beautifully in black and white by Jim Jarmusch and features the actress Suzanne Fletcher (who, as it happens, I work with today in LA). A few months after seeing the film, I made a trip to Tangier to meet Bowles, and packed in my luggage a bulky 16mm print of You Are Not I that Driver asked me to pass along. After Bowles screened it, this print disappeared from sight. It was discovered in 2008 by Francis Poole, head of the Film and Video Collection Department at the University of Delaware Library, on a shelf in a vacant apartment in Tangier where it had spent the intervening decades gathering dust. A new, re-mastered print of the film was just screened in the Master Works section of the New York Film Festival on October 6th. Later this year You Are Not I will be seen again in a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives, alongside Driver’s three other features. The film is such a strong piece of work I still find it surprising that more of Bowles’ stories have not been adapted for the screen.

Set in the vicinity of New York, You are Not I chronicles a possession, the aggressive conquest of one consciousness by another. This dark, shamanistic aspect can be found in many of Bowles’ stories, most of which take place abroad at the edges of the “civilized” world. Through shape-shifting, psychotropic drugs, spirit possession, occult conjuring, and plain old aggression, powerful forces of a primal nature are focused on vulnerable Westerners. Bowles’ characters, often tourists or travelers who have wandered too far off the beaten path, are so used to playing the dominant role they frequently fail to recognize mortal danger as it approaches. They are, in fact, often drawn toward their doom like the proverbial moth to its flame. Perhaps the most complete embodiment of this Bowlesian paradigm is A Distant Episode, in which an American linguist, eager to purchase an exotic trinket, is taken captive by a tribe of desert nomads who train him as a kind of clown-figure, hung with tin cans and chains, prancing and capering, his tongue severed at the roots.

When I first encountered the elegant Bowles’ persona I thought of him as an American version of Michel of Andre Gide’s The Immoralist, or perhaps an American version of Gide himself. Famously, Bowles was close with Isherwood, Capote and Tennessee Williams. He had been mentored by the composer Aaron Copland in Paris, and had spent time with Gertrude Stein. Later, during his long sojourn in Tangier, Bowles offered safe haven to William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and other members of the Beats, becoming an eminence grise to the artistic elite of the Post-War era, that great cultural tumescence of American wealth and possibility. Later still, in the 1990s, Bowles’ profile attained the altitude of celebrity when Bernardo Bertolucci adapted his first novel, The Sheltering Sky into a film starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger.

Today, pondering the strong impact Bowles’ work had on me, I cross to the bookshelf and pull down the volume of his Collected Stories that Bowles himself gave me on that trip to Tangier in the 1980s. Tattered and coffee-stained, its spine buttressed by a strip of black camera tape, the book, remarkably, retains the distinctive scent – is it sandalwood? – that filled Bowles’ small apartment on an upper floor of the Immeuble Itesa hi-rise near the center of Tangier. Travelers who visited Bowles there could hear him hold forth with great urbanity over cups of mint tea, cookies and kif. It was winter when we arrived, and quite cold. In the living room you’d sit on low couches facing the window across the room. In my memory Bowles stands at the hearth rolling a cigarette between his thin fingers while delivering a dry anecdote, the loose tobacco gathering in the palm of his hand. The tobacco goes into the fire with a small burst of blue flame, and then Bowles packs the empty cigarette with kif, lights it up and passes it around.

Edgier somehow than plain marijuana, kif leaves you more alert in ways that explain how Bowles could have used the drug so extensively in his writing process. My companion on the trip, the poet Brandel France (now France de Bravo), had known Bowles as a girl. Her father, Alec France, had spent a year in Tangier working on a dissertation on Bowles’ fiction. We visited Immeuble Itesa several times before heading South to Agadir and Essaouira, and then inland to Ouerzazate and the edge of the Sahara. When Brandel went back to Cairo, where she was living, I stayed on in Tangier and saw Bowles a few more times before returning myself to New York City. Surprisingly, what made the strongest impression on me after all our visits was how alive Bowles’ wife Jane still seemed in his inner life, despite having died a decade earlier. He referred to her casually, as if she might arrive a bit later in the day, and with a palpable tenderness that seems at odds with the way their marriage is often viewed.

I find it instructive now, as the Occupy Wall Street movement announces a sea change in our cultural history, to look back again at Bowles and his work. Against the backdrop of our current dysfunction, the economic inequities and environmental depredations that threaten and confine us, it’s a relief to connect with a perspective in which the moral confusion of the West is a given. And, of course, the stories are beautiful, clear and unflinching in their inclusive scope, gem-like perhaps. Iconicized by his encounter with Bertolucci, Bowles remains for me a deeply human figure. And this humanity is connected most of all to the fidelity I sense he maintained for Jane, as if in observance of a connection between them that continued, below all the structures of identity and beyond the reach of the passage of time.

Aspects of ourselves that we don’t know how to care for give rise to the complex patterns of distraction that we call our personalities. This notion came to me courtesy of Brittany Spears in a small burst of insight that happened also to illuminate the closing moments of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a film that has always haunted me. I was surfing around on Facebook and I happened to catch a clip of some Marines from the 266 Rein Division lip-synching Brittany’s song Hold it Against Me on a supply base “somewhere in Afghanistan.” One of my characteristic distractions is to locate something conservatives (or the military) are doing, and use it to climb up on my tub and start thumping. This is a habit-of-distraction I picked up as a child of the 1960s, and because conservatives have been ascendant ever since, it has served me quite well. I found it interesting to track how this critical impulse of mine reacted to the immediate vitality of the 266 Rein Division dancers.

Watching these homesick kids bust all those familiar music video moves will strike you as adorable or annoyingly vapid depending on your mood. I suspect, however, that the Corps is only too happy about this kind of R&R activity – these frisky youngsters will make many want to sign up and ship out right away. I got into trouble in the comments section on Facebook when I gave voice to some qualms about the context of this little piece of social media – an armed conflict we have no business waging, a conflict defined by staggering high-tech violence and civilian casualties. I also mentioned the fact that these kinds of fun-loving, extra-curricular video antics have been forever tainted by the depravity of Abu Graib. And yet I found myself honestly conflicted. Homesick kids having fun and expressing a kind of erotic joy in a collaborative performance piece; a surreal expression the infantilizing effects of American culture in an era of global capitalism – both statements embody equally valid responses to the video.

I’ve often had a kind of delayed reaction to the films of Stanley Kubrick, who is an anomaly in the pantheon of great American directors. Without question a major artist, Kubrick distilled the psychological and cultural contradictions of our time into a series of intellectually intricate and formally brilliant, multi-million dollar, studio-sponsored art films. From The Killing 1956 through Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, Kubrick’s films explore the kind of double-bind Freud laid out in his late work Civilization and Its Discontents. Man is the creature who must repress his libidinal energies in order to co-exist, but doing so makes life into a pointless charade. Our sublimated energies give rise to technologies that only amplify our disconnection from experience, leaving us as dissatisfied as ever, especially when our repressed violence returns in the form of devastating conflicts. The best we can do, given our situation, the story goes, is to endlessly distract ourselves, and here, at least, technology is our friend.

The visual motifs Kubrick deploys to explore this fertile set of ideas retain a remarkable consistency – the Classical architecture of the chateau in Paths of Glory returns in the statuary of Claire Quilty’s home in Lolita…and in the ornate décor of the eerie after-world that closes 2001…again in the theater fight in which Alex and his droogs wage war against Billy’s rival gang in Clockwork Orange…throughout the 17^th century European settings of Barry Lyndon…the Colonial buildings of Saigon in Full Metal Jacket…and the Boschian mansion where the oddly non-erotic orgy takes place in Eyes Wide Shut. The “Ophuls-ian” tracking shots through the maze of trenches in Paths of Glory repeats in the chase through the labyrinth of The Shining, Nicholson’s Jack Torrance limping after his son in an Oedipal rage that shows up somewhere in every Kubrick film, chin tucked, eyes gazing up in a rictus of primal aggression.

Kubrick’s work is devoid of lyricism and he was uninterested in dramatic narrative, or character as it’s usually understood. Kubrick’s interest was the formal beauty of his films, which often achieve the internal integrity of a work of plastic art. They are art films, truly, and they achieve the object-ness of a painting or a sculpture while playing with the temporal and performative aspects of cinema. I wish Kubrick’s films seemed dated, but I can’t count how many times the lurid characters who shuffled through the corridors of power in the Bush-Cheney regime reminded me of Strangelove’s primitive Generals Buck Turdgison or Jack D. Ripper, or the smug Joker from Full Metal Jacket, or the self-satisfied yuppie doctor played by Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut or even, in rare cases, the noble but deluded Colonel Dax who Kirk Douglas brought to life in Paths of Glory.

If Kubrick is vulnerable to criticism it’s that his work is almost autistic in its chilly formalism – he’s all shell, no mollusk. But if you want to write him off you must at least consider his continued relevance. This relevance was cemented when I saw a report on the infamous meeting in June of wealthy conservatives in the Rocky mountains. Hosted by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire Hardy Boys of the American right, the group gathered at the Ritz-Carlton Resort at Bachelor Gulch, a dead ringer for the Overlook in Kubrick’s masterful 1982 horror film The Shining. The Koch brother’s faux grassroots Tea Party movement strikes me as the sociological embodiment of Jack Torrance, played memorably by Jack Nicholson. In thrall to the ghosts of oligarchies past, and driven crazy by an indolent paranoia, the Tea Party limps after poor Barak Obama through the frozen labyrinth of our political discourse dragging an axe.

There’s one camera move in particular that seemed to unlock The Shining for me. It’s about two-thirds of the way through. Wendy goes looking for Jack and she finds his psychotic “work” all typed up beside his typewriter. As she looks at the one line of prose Jack has repeated for page after page, we cut to a SteadyCam shot that pulls out from behind a pillar. The camera moves forward subjectively for a few steps and then the figure of Jack detaches itself from the field of view. The subjective shot has shifted into something quite eerie and odd – we have become the “Overlook” hotel. And this begins to explain quite a lot. The scene unfolds and Wendy knocks Jack unconscious and drags him into the walk-in freezer. A short while later one of the “ghosts” unlocks the freezer. Again, something has shifted. We, in our ghostly form within the film, have become corporeal, able to do things like open freezers so that the “horror story” can continue towards its climax. What Kubrick is commenting on directly here is the aggressive bloodlust that drives audiences into theaters to see “horror” films. Our concealed sadism wants to be satisfied and Kubrick wants to draw that out and capture it in the act, so to speak, in order to show us what lies beneath this particular form of distraction.

What is it, finally, that we are so intent on avoiding? If my own experience is any guide, beneath our distractions we can usually locate an amorphous unease, an undefined feeling of lack. As I’ve noted before in this column, writers like the historian David Loy view this feeling of lack as a major player in the course of history, appearing as the Original Sin of traditional Christian cultures, the alienation cited by Marxists, and the dukkha or “suffering” described by Buddhists as our fundamental challenge. If I resist the impulse to disengage via my characteristic distractions and instead allow my attention to settle down, I often discover that this feeling takes somatic form in some specific part of my body. If I rest there long enough a shift happens, the sense of lack opening out into a kind of quiet but expansive feeling of joy. What had been a source of visceral fear, a dark ground common to jealousy, hatred, greed – all the contracted states that reach up and seize us in the course of daily life – now becomes a portal to a vibrant immediacy.

I think again of Full Metal Jacket, which examines the process by which a human being is transformed into an agent of destruction. The film is loosely based on the book by Gustave Hasford, but as usual, Kubrick has taken the script in unexpected directions. The first half of the film is devoted to the institutional sadism of Marine Corps training, complete with an Oedipal murder and suicide. In the film’s second half we find ourselves in Vietnam on the eve of the Tet offensive. Mathew Modine’s Joker, who has secured a cushy job with the press office, finds himself on the frontlines with a platoon that is gradually reduced as it battles to regain lost territory from the Vietcong. Like the Marines in the Brittany Spears lip synch, these characters do not come off as deluded in any special way. Kubrick has gone to great lengths to establish their humdrum humanity. They find themselves in Vietnam for a complex of reasons (including the draft), many of them economic, as do the Marines in the Rein Corps video forty years later.

The film closes on an extended sequence in which Joker’s platoon gets pinned down in a warehouse district by sniper fire. As man after man gets picked off, it becomes clear that Kubrick has crafted this sequence to incite our aggression toward the unseen sniper. After losing several soldiers, Joker and a marine named Animal-Mother gain entry to the building and discover that the sniper is, in fact, a Vietnamese girl. Wounded, chased to ground, the girl lies on her back, plaintive, utterly vulnerable. The shot is eerie, intimate, and almost unbearably sad, the two Americans gazing down as the girl writhes in pain, begging for death. Our galloping aggression has suddenly been met by an equally powerful, equally primal compassion, and the resulting dissonance is what completes the “full metal jacket,” our slippage past any possible structure of stable, coherent values, any mental construct that distracts us from the full vulnerability of the immediate moment. Kubrick then cuts to a shot of the surviving marines marching through the night across the rubble that once was a city singing, in unison, the Mickey Mouse Club song. The rubble the Marines march across is the final ruin of Western culture, that elaborate cityscape of intricately justified distractions and evasions keeping dark oceans of lack at bay. The ruins are the work of a freedom long denied and pushed away, as implacable as the blankness of the supply base of the 266 Rein Division. With Kubrick, we have gotten more than we bargained for, those of us who are so accustomed to using our values as the basis for distraction.

Couched in a comfy sci-fi genre, Another Earth takes off to explore, not the regions of outer space, but instead turns inward, to examine the intimate nature of redemption. It questions what are the actual possibilites for the reparation of unyielding guilt—explores the avenues, the processes of atonement. Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), a gifted college student with pure potential, takes one intoxicant too many and becomes distracted by the discovery of an alternate Earth, causing her to crash into an unwitting family who too are on their way to a beautiful future. And there the future ends. Wife, pregnant with the second child, and son die and leaving the husband John Burroughs (William Mapother) comatose only to awake to unspeakable grief.

The film unfolds four years later when Rhoda is released from prison and story follows her as she attempts to reconcile her life. And four years later the alternate Earth looms even larger now, as if one could merely reach out and grasp it in one’s palm. It has been established that indeed it is a mirror image, a one for one swap of human race. Speculation is rampant as the public eagerly dotes on the every talking head whose theories are a constant drone throughout the film. But the real speculation what the film makers have set into motion is how will Rhoda and John resume their lives, how will they choose to go forward faced with unspeakable loss. Unspoken truths is how the the new relationship begins as Rhoda raps on Johns door seeking to apologize and looses heart. Instead she concocts a coupon scheme putting herself in the position of caretaker, cleaning, literally picking up the pieces of his shattered existence.

Another Earth undertakes the difficult task of putting on another’s shoes. Rhoda identifies with those who have gone before, convicts shipped off to explore the new territories of yore. She embraces the unaccounted names of outcast. And while many of us may not be card carrying felons, there are those of us for whom personal trespasses may still have the capacity to evoke crippling remorse. Rhoda’s seeking, wondering how to right the wrong is deeply palpable, contagious. In John, on the other hand, we can taste the bitterness of blame. His anger first turns in on himself and we see him slovenly, indifferent to his being and surrounds. Cahill then begin to offers up tiny disclosures as Rhoda, in her cleaning crusade, excavates the life that was John. The slow mending begins and he is returned, seen once more as the gentle, cultivated professor. But when the truth of this new relationship is revealed to be the root cause of his misery, his fury takes on a deep seeded savagery. Co-writers Mike Cahill and Brit Marling have done an uncanny job communicating more with less. Small budgets leave the way clear for powerful tacit narratives. The small act of washing a sweater carries a magnitude of sin and emotional unraveling when it is realized it contained the last vestige of smell of the loved one. The incremental closeness Rhoda and John gain, each small step towards redemption they attain, the larger the impending doom lurks ahead. A shaman like character, Purdeep (Kumar Pallana), Rhoda’s comrade in janitorial service, plays out in the background with more unspoken wisdoms. While the weakest person of this sub-plot, Pudeep does serve the function of posing the ultimate question of total undoing as he purposefully blinds and deafens himself using bleach as his ultimate cleansing agent (a little heavy handed, no?). While managing not to drink the stuff, he can still speak to Rhoda of ensuing nothingness while she hangs on acknowledging the inevitability of the void.

Catharsis and resolution are neatly wrapped up when Rhoda, seeking reparations gives John her seat on the first shuttle to the new Earth. His is a final attempt to reunite with his family who could be lurking unscathed due to a schism in time that corresponds with the duplicate planet appearance. It is a tidy resolve that works magic for all concerned, that is until it doesn’t. Redemption it seems is not so easily appeased. Rhoda refreshed with a spring-like innocence, purged of self-reproach, merely needs to look up one day and find that she herself is looking back in horror. It’s seems that no two souls can be truly indistinguishable. We may not be alone, but on Another Earth all is not the same.

“We were told to fire 30 rounds each into them. From the hip. As paratroopers. Not as a firing squad, where some of the shooters have real bullets, some blanks, so that no one has to live with the feeling of being an executioner. We fired live…

“After shooting seven rounds into Ceausescu, the gun jammed. I changed magazines and shot a full 30 rounds into Elena. She flew backwards with the force of it all. We started at about a metre range and then walked steadily backwards, still firing, so that we wouldn’t be caught by a ricochet.”

Elena’s blood splattered on his uniform. The back of her skull had fallen away. “She didn’t die easily. She was in spasms,” Mr Cirlan shook his head at the memory. “I had never even killed a chicken before.”

—Dorin-Marian Cirlan, one of the Ceauscescus’ executioners, from a 2009 interview in the London Sunday Times by Roger Boyes

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about the purely sensual, filmic side to this extraordinary documentary is the unfailing beauty of Nicolae Ceausescu’s hair, and the pure pleasure that sparkles on his pretty face as he enjoys his glorious life: the parades, the pageantry, the state visits, the swank vacations. There is no sense of a grim or troubled soul, and his public remarks always seem well-reasoned and intelligent. Hitler, by contrast, always seemed a bit angry or agitated. Nixon was sweaty and anxious. Bush had his edge, with the hangdog look of a dry drunk. Perhaps this could be accounted for by different drugs. We know Hitler was a speed freak. Ceausescu seemed…high on life.

This film, by Andrei Ujica, is constructed entirely of archival footage, documented by state agencies. The destitution of late 20th century Romania is hidden in plain sight, as  staged scenes of supposedly well-stocked markets appear absurdly barren and phony to Western eyes (ironic, considering), and the parade routes of the later years of Ceausescu’s reign are thinly lined with conscripted citizens who made little attempt to disguise their lack of enthusiasm. Formally excluded from this documentary is any direct indictment of Ceausescu. This lies exclusively in the great space that the film opens up by building a framework out of the celebration of the life of a Great Man. The filling of this great space has been carried out by mainstream media critics who are in basic lockstep with the official line, that Ceausescu and his wife were corrupt monsters and deserved to be tried in a kangaroo court and shot dead within the hour of their sentencing on Christmas Day.

That the realities of the revolution in Romania were the result of more complex and sinister forces is not surprising. The General who ordered the execution has claimed that the Soviet KGB was instrumental in Ceausescu’s downfall, having been involved in planning it for a year or more. With the track record the IMF has accumulated over the past twenty or so years of being the world’s most brazen loan shark, one has to look at Ceausescu’s act of going into debt to that organization as a terrible blunder indeed; but given the number of people wanting him out of the way, the disaster that ensued seemed almost scripted. His “maverick” status within the Soviet bloc, along with his staunchly nationalist ideology contributed to Romania’s isolation. At the same time it was the principle of state sovereignty which formed the basis of his philosophy of diplomacy, a philosophy that proved largely successful until the tide turned. He seemed to relish the notion of having skilled statesmanship, creating and keeping alliances with strangers, but as the infrastructure of his own nation decayed there was an air of sham and delusion to his career which became increasingly piquant as his stature declined.

Ujica builds an exquisitely subtle tragic drama without dialogue, interview or narration. His authorship is entirely intelligent and completely invisible. This self-effacement itself has a dark edge: an eloquent a comment on the voicelessness of a population under the hold of a dictator—and perhaps there is something of this carried into the current Romanian political climate, where positive comments about Ceascescu and negative comments about his opponents are illegal. In am atmosphere of silence, scene by scene, the arc of a man’s life unfolds: beginning with a portrait of ambition, loyalty, and sincerity; building into a fantasy of pomp and self-importance, until the bloating and hollowing of the machine of state collapses, and there is nothing left of the man, only slogans, anxiety, and bald lies.

Always, it is the unstated that takes center stage in this tragedy…what we know, or think we know, what we’ve heard, what we wish to be true. Was he a delusional madman, a foolish dupe, or a cruel tyrant? A metanarrative emerges which affords us only signs.  This documentary—which ought to be considered a classic of the form—somehow seems to demand that critics and viewers fill in the spaces it leaves with what is known, or thought to be known, about the history of the time. We feel that such a construction of materials produced with an entirely “positive” viewpoint on the subject must be “corrected.” However, the blanks the filmmaker leaves, intentionally and formally, in no way compel us to fill them in. The compulsion to fill in lies entirely with our own discomfiture at any whiff of real openness—of heart or mind. Begin your story with the downfall of any man or woman—begin by showing her to be a corpse—or a prisoner rendered powerless, and somehow the jeering ceases and fascination begins, that is, unless the audience is addicted to the anger porn peddled by the mainstream broadcast news. The tension that animates this film and gives it its power is the unknown: the mystery at the heart of a subject and in his wife, and the hidden clockwork of a megalomaniac turned tragic antihero in the grasp of a skilled  historiographer.

I met Patrick Halm in 2003 at plays I produced in which our mutual friend Barry Del Sherman performed. Patrick and I spoke a few times before he let me know he made films himself. When I asked if I could see some of his work, he showed me Pulse. I found it intriguing. The imagery is instantly arresting, but what struck me most is the coherence of the piece as a work of art. The challenge with experimental films of this kind often has to do with completion and closure.The sudden contrasts and juxtapositions create the moments of surprise we look for in art, but we also want the full trajectory of a piece to have a revelatory quality of its own, the sense of an organized, cumulative impact. And Pulse had that for me. It formed a single and unsettling thought about perception and mortality, and the relationship between them. This year I looked again at Patrick’s films, and found they had only gained in relevance, as has the Brackage-Frampton tradition they continue and extend. It’s as if the steady flood of conventionally structured visual narratives has created a need for the associative openness these films embrace. The experience of viewing them raised several questions, and Patrick was kind enough to answer them.

Patrick Halm: Guy, I’m glad you asked about the relationship of film to theater and particularly experimental theater. One thing I often remember is that the first film ever shown was of a man sneezing. Then, a little later, the newly invented motion picture camera was turned to look upon a naked woman. Third in line came the theatrical stage.

Guy Zimmerman: The link to theater is interesting. When I see this work now I feel an oddly visceral kind of relief. We’re so continually assaulted by what might called “over-determined” visual narratives that the kind of open space here feels very welcome.

PH: Yes, you asked earlier about the different approaches between making commercial films vs. experimental films. For the record, I do not really like the term experimental. If it has to be categorized it seems to me that Scott MacDonald’s “critical cinema” is a better fit for the genre over all. It is all just film making to me. It’s true that separating out styles and approaches into different venues and stages ultimately does everyone a disservice, but I will get to that later. The main difference in approach, to me, is the role a script plays in the creation of the piece. All filmmakers write and work out their ideas in some form or another. Making a film outside of the charted waters of narrative often involves inventing a new method of organizing themes and concepts. The creative experience is much more upfront, even automatic at times. Filming a rehearsed, blocked-out scene is much different than experiencing even the most mundane activities through the eyepiece of a camera for the first time. Just the act of filming, watching and reacting, at least for me, can be a very intense experience much like playing a musical instrument in an ensemble. Filming pre-planned, blocked out sections of rehearsed scripts is often nothing more than a technical exercise. Still difficult, no doubt, and a practiced craft, but a different experience with a more predictable result.

GZ: Typically, people stress the differences between film and theater, but to you film seems almost to be a subset of theater.

PH: The early films shot of stage plays were meant as “recordings” to preserve the performance. All the major early innovations of editing and camera position were quickly needed to make it less boring and better represent the experience of the theater audience; and that is a crucial point, I think. The medium was being employed to replicate an existing experience — not to create a new experience. The relationship of the subject being photographed to the photographer is always present, and every photo is, to some degree, about that relationship. In commercial, narrative film this is what directors have to negotiate. The good ones make it work. But right away you can see the difference. Also you can see how it would be natural to want to remove or reduce this false relationship or façade, and explore a more direct and personal cinema. In some of my films I have played with this relationship and have more than once explored bumping up alongside the “façade” of scripted film. This has had mixed results. I’ve found that once viewers are given even the slightest wisp of narrative will, on their own, concoct the most incredible storylines to “make sense” of what is, by any definition, completely devoid of narrative.

GZ: What can you tell me about how this kind of “experimental” work relates to “experimental” theater? I was intrigued by your ideas on that.

PH: To a large extent we are talking about non-narrative works. I feel that once the trappings and hangers of narrative structure are removed, the piece itself, both in theater and in film, takes on a much more dimensional, spatial quality. The film or performance becomes an object in the room that must be negotiated. This negotiation goes on in real time, not in the programmed time-space of commercial narrative. When I say “negotiated,” I am suggesting that the viewer has to come to some conclusion on their own about how they want to experience the piece. This, to me, is the classic modern art, “anxious object” experience. At its best, the real-time space is transformed by the work. It’s that bolt of lightning that hits you when discovering a poem that has quietly been in your presence for years, dormant, until that certain moment arrives. The next thing is that, in both cases, the experimental film and theater mediums turn back onto themselves through a kind of self-examination. They both seem to aim at examining the medium itself by celebrating it and criticizing it. Also, in both cases, the abandonment of narrative allows a wider range of exploratory freedom. Curiously, the narrative structure is often one of the elements that gets explored or critiqued by the artist.

GZ:: I want to ask about really great narrative and how artistically crafted stories transcend the limitations of narrative. Whether it’s Fellini or John Ford or Val Lewton or Kurosawa – how do they do that?

PH: Guy, this is a great question. I would also add Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder here. When filmmakers talk about abandoning the narrative, they are talking about breaking down walls. They are talking about a narrative line that jumps tracks. All these filmmakers were in total control of the narrative source and limits in their films. They find and focus the point they want to get across in more places than just the story line. They allow the narrative line to be picked up entirely by the costumes, or the landscape, or a characters pattern of speech, or allowing some of the greatest character actors of all time the space to do what they did so well. OH HOLLYWOOD WHY HAVE YOU ABONDONED THE CHARACTER ACTOR!!! Not every line or page in a script is, or can be, gold. My point is that these filmmakers were not servants to the story line in their script. They drew out the themes they wanted to highlight from a multitude of artistic resources, not just the story line. The narrative served the filmmaker.

GZ: When, speaking about the strategies experimental, non-narrative artists use, you say, “Curiously, the narrative structure is often one of the elements that gets explored or contrasted to.” I often think that’s because of how central narrative is to our way of relating to experience, and how closely it is linked to issues of identity. The self images that shape our behavior are narrative constructions, to be specific. Can you comment?

PH: Yes, film’s linear presentation and form has lent itself very well to the “historical narrative” or “timeline narrative”, as it might be called. I wonder if this narrative link to our collective identity, as you call it, has not been usurped by an identity linked to entertainment or to “being entertained”. To me, the result of watching a film does not have to be entertaining, but most audiences are preconditioned to this, and expect to “be entertained” the second the lights go down. This is, of course, due to film’s early relationship to the theater. I think theater has in many ways moved on. What do you think, Guy?

GZ: I’ve always thought it was cinema that relieved theater of the need to be entertainment first and foremost. Or at least it revised the necessary ratio of art-entertainment in the theatrical equation. The difference between art and entertainment is, in my view, one of intention – the artist wants to wake us up; the entertainer wants to help us fall back asleep. Film and TV are much better at delivering that kind of sleep, the sleep of distraction and palliative emotions. The encounter with art is much more complex, though entertainment can certainly be an important part of the experience.

PH: Yes exactly. I read many types of things; novels, poetry, instruction manuals, blogs, emails, phone bills, computer code, street signs, etc. All of these types of printed material are full of signs and symbols, and complex with layered meaning. I read and take them in for different reasons, not just to be entertained. Not all of what I read was meant to be entertainment, but I might read it for that reason etc. (I take pleasure in reading antiquated instructions for games and operating machinery, for example.) For me, a narrative timeline is a hold-over from our oral tradition of storytelling. It is a useful device, like an outline on cue cards, for remembering the segments of a long story. All we are currently left with is the antiquated device and have lost the sophisticated cultured content. This ties in a bit to your last question about high and low narrative. Where is the film equivalent of “The Wrath of Achilles”? And I do not mean ”film adaptation”. The human device for remembering a sequence can be replaced by the medium itself. The film remembers for you. (Maybe that is a bit too scary for most.) With film, thought can take form and can be archived. I recommend “San Soleil”, by Chris Marker, from 1983 in this context.

GZ: Can you also give me an account of how you stumbled onto this work at the beginning and how you got involved?

PH: I have always approached making my films like objects. I have never thought of them as programs. Although there is a linear order to the images, to me that is nothing more than a delivery mode. For me, the approach is based on the study of art history and modern art. I am also interested in symphonic musical structure. I have never been much interested in making low narrative. It has always seemed over represented and limited in creative scope. There are many great films that fit this approach, but to me it seems the equivalent of creating  all sculpture only in bronze, six feet tall, and of a realistic human form. After a while you just get tired of it. Many years ago, in a single afternoon, I experienced for the first time Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Anticipation of the Night (1958), and Wait (1968). At the time all these films were over twenty years old. I realized I had a lot of study and work to do if I wanted to join the conversation.

GZ: . I’m curious if this, along with technological shifts involving the internet – YouTube, etc – don’t create new opportunities to explore this “lineage. For example, we are having this exchange in the context of Times Quotidian – isn’t this the kind of “space” that might help you cultivate an appreciation for this aesthetic?

PH: I don’t have any conclusions about the internet as a creative environment. It certainly, like television, has potential. But more and more I see it becoming closer to a television experience. What the internet and YouTube, etc. seem to be good at is documenting and enshrining; seemingly into infinity.  Finding a meaningful creative experience on the internet suffers from the same problem the commercial sites have selling soap or vacations – getting lost in a vast sea of meaningless data. Without an outside curatorial force the internet can only take you to where you desire. The very personal mental space that is formed while surfing the internet feels small and very circular to me. The opportunity of the internet I think, is to archive and catalog. The disadvantage of being a drop in the ocean is an advantage of equality. The smallest unknown, unseen act of creative expression can live documented and archived on an equal footing by any robotic search engine after a bit of time. The open space, perhaps, is best created by insisting and corroborating on it’s existence.

GZ: In your view, who are some significant filmmakers in this “experimental” lineage, decade by decade?

PH: Sidney Peterson 40’s, Jerome Hill 50’s -60′, Stan Brackage; Hollis Frampton 60 -70;s, Ernie Gehr 60’s-, Barry Gerson 60’s-, Larry Gottheim 60’s- Jonas Mekas 60’s , Abigail Child 80’s-, to name a few favorites. One thing interesting about the “lineage” is that it is very much a work in progress after the 80’s.  There are still many undiscovered gems out there.  This is in part because most of the work is screened for one night, if shown publicly at all. The result of this is that art critics seldom write about film and video in a way gallery shows or theater productions might enjoy. When a longer-running museum show gets mounted, the critics and the public are so ill-prepared that the show goes largely unnoticed in terms of artistic significance and gets reported more as a curiosity. To even have an opinion about where things are going you would really need to travel and seek out the work. Not a bad way to spend one’s life, if you think about it. So-called non-narrative film and video is the last gasping remnant of the original avant-garde lineage.  Perhaps it’s best that it’s quietly bubbling under the surface waiting for its next moment.

GZ: When you say: “The main difference in approach, to me, is the roll a script plays in the creation of the piece,” I want to ask about documentary film, which is at least supposed to be non-scripted.

PH: Well, many documentaries are scripted, some more so than others. Many documentaries currently set out from the beginning to endorse a point of view. The documentary form has been often used as a way to present an activist point of view in a light that seems unbiased.  A closer example of unscripted documentary would be something like Salesman or Sweetgrass. This dovetails nicely into what I was saying about narrative structure in an earlier conversation. To really document something objectively as possible, the filmmakers has to be willing to follow the subject line or narrative wherever IT wants to go.  Documentary filmmakers with this more objective approach all talk about having hours and hours of shot film for a project, but have been unable to “find the cohesive story line” that they need to complete the film. They just keep shooting. Life does not always produce a story; but that doesn’t mean it’s any less interesting, or that there is no subject. Life often abandons the narrative, and yet remains a real experience worthy of exploration.

Patrick Halm received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School Of Design. His work has been featured in solo and group shows in London, Berlin, Hamburg, Vancouver, and throughout the U.S. Selected film works are distributed through Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. He has been living and making his work in Los Angeles since 1990. He is also an enthusiastic beekeeper.

It was the endtimes of a fatuous delusion—the casting of a dream and the narrowing of a nightmare; the sluicing of whites-only beaches and blacks-only townships, and the opening of arms caches on Transvaal sugarcane farms; it was a time of ANC pub bombs, and meetings of obscure Afrikaner insurgents in restaurant basements to chart the overthrow of F.W. de Klerk, and germ attacks on expensive hotels, It was a time when women wore the Black Sash and police informants wore the Necklace; when mobs who could still hear the echoes of Sharpsville paced the streets of Durban; when the Boer extended cordiality to the black with one hand, and lobbed grenades into the township schoolhouse with the other; when many Soweto children believed that if they touched white skin they would melt; when Piet Rudolph’s sudden and mysterious conciliation sharpened the flint of paranoia for the striking of the swart gevaar; when de Klerk’s elite began to sing the swan song of Apartheid, and when changes in rhetoric permeated even the propaganda of the day, which buoyed from onslaught to amnesty; and the whole mealy myth of separate native culture began to suffocate under the cloven hoof of its own bloated ideological apparatus. Against these contradictory social cleavages—the tearing asunder and the forcing together, documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield arrived in South Africa and shot the first of his two documentaries on the subject of its struggle.

But South Africa writ large we do not see. We do not see bright blue sea and red soil of the Cape, or Alan Paton’s Natal, or the karoo of Thomas Hardy. We see only colorless camps and dorps and uniforms of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging through the eyes of its Leader’s mercurial driver, JP Meyer, the driver’s wife, Anita, and occasionally through the eyes of the Leader himself: Eugène Terre’Blanche[1], former bodyguard to H.F. Verwoerd[2], the architect of Apartheid. This triadic perspective was not intentional, nor was it predictable; it was simply the result of Terre’Blanche’s noisy contempt for journalists who did not allow him to run the show.

The film opens with an AWB rally in Ventersdorp during which a supporter rises from his seat and proceeds to knock the camera to the floor. This was observed by JP, who offered to arrange for an interview with the Leader as an apology. Broomfield and crew arrive several times at AWB headquarters in Ventersdorp only to learn the Leader has just left, seemingly to find among Sycorax, Godot, Michael Rubbo’s Castro, and other literary figures who never actually appear. But the Leader does appear. And when finally the real meeting is imminent, Broomfield and crew deliberately linger in the café across the street from the window of the Leader’s office in full view for ten minutes, drinking tea [3]. When the interview commences, the Leader is so spitting mad at this gesture that he loses his composure, beautifully. Thus the documentary becomes a meta-documentary. It was with this film, in fact, that Broomfield codified his characteristic Les Nouvelles Egotistes filmmaking style, which had been born of necessity in Driving Me Crazy. This style, which Broomfield has been unable to shake, has also served influence to Michael Moore.

Broomfield makes no secret of his contempt for Terre’Blanche either in the film or in print. In an interview with Jason Wood he said, “I wanted to make something that would really puncture his balloon.” Annoying the Leader becomes a sub-thread of the film, which otherwise opens from its simple program of interviewing a thundering extremist into an incredulous ethnography of the lost generation of Afrikaners who all on some level knew the end was nigh. Serving as embodiments of this generation are JP and Anita, who live a life of suburban Euro-normalcy by day and high explosives funneling for Piet Rudolph and others by night. JP is an immanently likeable fellow even as he threatens racial violence—perhaps because you get the idea he doesn’t really mean it. There is something stand-up about his reluctance to stand up. Like many South Africans of the day, JP stood in a corner, his Bible in one hand, his pistol in the other, and toward him he sees the shadows of Communism, black militancy and white acquiescence approaching. “Through JP I really came to understand how fascism and its supporters came about in Nazi Germany,” says Broomfield. “It was people who had a lack of self-identity and a lack of sense of self who went for an extreme ideology at a time when they needed some kind of certainty.”

Though this swollen moment in South African history represents an important turning point, the fashioning of the Afrikaner identity is a complex and still contested issue whose central themes are the Great Trek of the 1830’s and the near mythical Battle of Blood River [4]. The objects of a further century of discrimination by the British, the Afrikaner moment of mastery came again in 1948, the year the National Party came to power and gave birth to Apartheid. Oom Paul’s peoples’ self confidence soared to impossible heights, in their pluck to conflate baaskap with natural law and their eventual quest for a nuclear weapon. Yet by the 1960s they had ventured into what Douglas Brown called “the cul-de-sac of their racial policy” and by the 1990s something had gone terribly wrong: nothing delivers an apologia to Spengler quite like the party scene in which we find the Ventersdorp upper crust dancing effetely to the strains of a bizarre cover band playing phonetically learned Bruce Springsteen songs.

In the years between The Leader and its sequel, His Big White Self, many things came to pass. The coffin of Apartheid was nailed and only the fumes of its corpse still reek in the platteland—this when the smell of gunsmoke from Johannesburg does not cover it up. The AWB, though it never succeeded in fomenting its promised race war, its supporters did commit several acts most desperate: in June 1993 it crashed an armored vehicle through the glass of the Kempton Park World Trade Center where the ANC and National Party were discussing the dissolution of Apartheid. In March 1994 they invaded Bophuthatswana and picked off a number of civilians before being picked off themselves. The Leader served three years in prison for assaulting a black petrol station worker and attempted murder of another man (crimes of which he staunchly has maintained he is innocent). JP and Anita were divorced and living separate lives, the former as an ambulance driver utterly disillusioned with both the black majority government and the AWB, and Anita as a nurse in a desegregated hospital. Broomfield, during the twelve years that separate his two South African documentaries, received numerous death threats from shadowy unknowns using suspiciously Afrikaner schwa-vowels (Broomfield for a time suspected it was JP). In spite of this, he returned to Ventersdorp in 2005 to see what had become of everyone.

He found an older and wearier though no less dramatic and driven Terre’Blanche, to whose home he gains access incognito. The Leader, twelve years and one prison term older, seems transformed from the figure he cut of Ezra Pound’s Mussolini into a post-Fiume Gabriele d’Annunzio. According to a fellow inmate he had gotten along very well in prison, in spite of being one of only three whites. It was reported he had been born again and that he even called on several black friends around town; a man still very much given to rhetoric, yet more subdued and more realistic; more invested in his poetry than in the ongoing AWB tragicomic opera.

It seems nearly ironic then that Terre’Blanche would be hacked to death in his farmhouse bedroom on April 3^rd 2010, the day before Easter, by two black farm workers, allegedly over a wage dispute. Yet his killers left him with his pants pulled down to his knees—an oldtime anti-Boer move made much of in the press. Without him the AWB lurches on, fully defanged and slightly defiant, still maintaining an Afrikaans-language website which sells khaki paramilitary uniforms, bronze busts of the Leader, and a DVD of his funeral. According to the new Leader, Steyn van Ronge, the mission of the movement is now to implement a security plan to keep farmers safe. Indeed, there exists the very real danger of Mugabe-styled land appropriation and ethnic erasure. What will become of the Boers in the 21^st century? No doubt their children will be educated in the way of their folk heroes, exogamy will remain verboten, and all the important elements of cultural durability will remain. Perhaps like the Mennonites of Belize, or the Greeks of the DR Congo, or the German farmers of Kyrgyzstan, they will endure culturally, but fade historically. But as to the famous words of Prime Minister Verwoerd, “We will see to it that we remain in power in this white South Africa”, it seems only fair to rejoin with the words of Stephen Biko, “It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die”. In the end Terre’Blanche did neither.

[2] Evidently not a particularly successful one, as Prime Minister Verwoerd was assassinated on September 6^th, 1966 in the lobby of the House of Assembly of South Africa by a parliamentary messenger named Dimitri Tsafendas; this following a nearly successful attempt six years before at the Union Exposition on the Witwatersrand.

[3] An added taunt, inasmuch as tea is a British institution, and is never taken by Afrikaners.

[4] In 1979 Terre’Blanche and several other AWB supporters tarred and feathered University of South Africa history Professor Floors Van Jaarsveld for daring to suggest there had been no divine intervention at Blood River.