History Lesson(s)

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And yet, that's how everything was done. At the appropriate time, when investigations on account of embezzled money were threatening, one always repeated the threat of the foul air from below, mumbled something about revolution, made a vague gesture in the direction of the suburbs. The police understood then, and became more tactful. An incidental mention of the hungry masses (in terse military prose), and the Senate hailed again. One was naturally against this stinking tide oneself; one wiped off with disgust the dirt that had splashed on one's toga. One knew that they would use their 'liberation' to set their crippled bastards on the Vestal Virgins' laps, to grow radishes instead of chrysanthemums in the glasshouses, to seal the holes in their barracks with priceless Greek canvases, to shit on grammar — always excused by a couple of literati on account of their neglected education. One knew, all that; one had Greek culture. One knew, but one had to make politics. One made politics until in the end one had got the deluge into the curia, or at least its foam; by no means the hungry peasants, only their tormentors, the usurers. By no means the bankrupt artisans, only the mortgage-holders. No, the gentleman didn't forget 'misery', the great Democrat remembered the 'despair of the pauperised'. What else could he have blackmailed the pauperisers with? The Senate was too small. It had to be enlarged. The privileged robbers were too few; they had to be supplemented by unprivileged robbers. Under the threatening eye of the dictator, those to whom their police had brought the stolen goods shook hands with those who had fetched them for themselves. What of the leprosy one had promised to keep down, to exclude, to decimate, for so many sealed envelopes? Now was it not somewhat decimated when it streamed into the curia? Was it not only a small part of all the leprosy? It was surely only that part of the leprosy that could jingle with money. A very small part. But strong. And loud. One must shout if one wants to bargain. Look at his Senate: a market hall.

--The writer Vastius Alder speaks in The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar, a novel fragment by Bertolt Brecht, written between 1937-39. Translated in the scenario for Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet's History Lessons (1972) published in Screen 17.1, 1976, p.70-71. Intended as an addendum to my brief contribution to this, while it's on my mind...

An aside, or: O somma luce

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Where are you? Dazzled, drunken my soul grows faint
And dark with so much gladness; for even now
I listened while, too rich in golden
Sounds, the enrapturing youth, the sun-god

Intoned his evening hymn on a heavenly lyre;
All round the hills and forests re-echoed it,
Though far from here — to pious nations
Who still revere him — by now he's journeyed.

--ode by Friedrich Hölderlin, 1797-99, Selected Poems & Fragments (Penguin, 1998), p.17.

O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,
knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself,
and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!
That circling which, thus conceived,
appeared in you as light's reflection,
once my eyes had gazed on it a while, seemed,
within itself and in its very color,
to be painted with our likeness,
so that my sight was all absorbed in it.
Like the geometer who fully applies himself
to square the circle and, for all his thought,
cannot discover the principle he lacks,
such was I at that strange new sight.
I tried to see how the image fit the circle
and how it found its where in it.
But my wings had not sufficed for that
had not my mind been struck by a bolt
of lightning that granted what I asked.
Here my exalted vision lost its power.
But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving
with an even motion, were turning with
the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.

--Dante, Paradiso XXXIII, 124-145.

No comment #3

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Studies in Verticality #4

West Highgate Cemetery, earlier today

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There are better reasons for going here than to look at the grave of Karl Marx. This is the creepiest place in London; no Dickensian stretch of the river can match this calculated exercise in stucco horror, now itself decomposing. The entrance is well downhill in Swain's Lane, and at first the landscape is ordinary. But as you wind up the hill it becomes more and more overgrown, choked in winter by dead fronds with an unnerving resemblance to Spanish moss. The landscape looks less and less like London, more and more like Louisiana. Then, with a shock like a bloodcurdling scream, the Egyptian entrance shows up. Beyond it, the Catacombs, a sunken rotunda lined with stucco-faced vaults, gently deliquescent, crumbling away. Inside them, coffins on ledges. A familiar name like Carl Rosa on one of the vaults seems to accentuate the terror. Nothing seems real but death at its greyest and clammiest. The cemetery closes well before dark, and a good job too.

--Ian Nairn, Nairn's London (Penguin, 1966), p. 212.

An aside, or: utopia

Fox Hill, Upper Norwood - Camille Pissarro, 1870, oil on canvas

England, like France, is rotten to the core. She knows only one art, the art of throwing sand in your eyes.

--Camille Pissarro, 1883; quoted in Patrick Keiller's Norwood, 1983.

When Apollinaire arrives in London in 1901, his description of the South London suburbs, seen from the train, is of 'wounds bleeding in the fog...'

--Patrick Keiller, in conversation with John House, 2005.

Nocturne in Grey & Gold: Chelsea Snow - J. A. M. Whistler, 1876, oil on canvas

No comment #2

Vent d'est - Dziga Vertov Group, 1970

Everything or nothing #2

Histoire(s) du cinéma 4A: Contrôle de l'univers - JLG, 1998, video

Jean-Luc Godard was interviewed by Christian Jungen for NZZ on Sunday last week. The original interview is here, and what follows is an edited translation very kindly provided by Frederik Lang. The byline to the interview reads: 'Next week in Hollywood, Jean-Luc Godard will be honored with an Honorary Oscar for his lifetime achievement. He thinks it’s pointless that one insinuates he is an anti-Semite.' Many thanks to Frederik and Andy Rector, to whom this should be credited, for their work and assistance.

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NZZ on Sunday: Monsieur Godard, next Saturday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will award you an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. What does this mean to you?

Jean-Luc Godard: Nothing. If the Academy likes to do it, let them do it. But I think it’s strange. I asked myself: Which of my films have they seen? Do they actually know my films? The award is called The Governor’s Award. Does this mean that Schwarzenegger gives me the award?

I beg your pardon? The most important film award means nothing to you?

No, it really doesn’t. Maybe it is a late acknowledgement that I – like Lafayette in the American War of Independence, in the uprising against the English – supported the beginning of a revolution.

Which revolution?

In the 1950s, when I was a critic with Cahiers du Cinéma, we loved independent films. We discovered that directors like Hitchcock, Welles and Hawks fought for artistic independence within the big studio machinery. After the war, we praised this – back then, a sacrilege for French film criticism. They sniffed at directors like Hitchcock and said: He’s just making commercial films. But for that alone, the Academy could have given the award to someone else.

Now you are being modest. You and your colleagues developed the auteur theory that today structures the canon as works of directors.

The phrase la politique des auteurs was made up by journalists. When François Truffaut wrote his first articles, he only said: The auteur of a film is not the screenplay writer — it is not the one who gets the story on paper who is important, but the one who stages it.

In 1980, you revoked the auteur theory with a mea culpa. Why?

I suffered severely from the consequences, that they talked more about the author and not his works. That’s why I didn’t go to Cannes for the world premiere of my latest work Film socialisme: they would have only talked about me. But it was already like this during the Nouvelle Vague: we were no more than ten critics who spoke of films and not directors. By the way, this was a mistake: with Truffaut and Jacques Rivette, we only talked about cinema and not about ourselves. We didn’t know one another.

[…] Later on, you fell out with François Truffaut. What was the reason?

Over time I realized that he made exactly the kind of films that we attacked: screenplay-films! Truffaut’s works were not shaped by the camera but by the pen. The camera imitated what his pen had written.

[...] Back to the Oscar: Why don’t you attend the award ceremony?

I don’t have a visa for the US and I don’t want to apply for one. And I don’t want to fly for that long.

Once again, there is a debate in Jewish newspapers about whether or not you are an anti-Semite. Does this hurt you?

That’s nonsense! What does ‘anti-Semite’ mean? All peoples of the Mediterranean were Semites. So anti-Semite means anti-Mediterranean. The expression was only applied to Jews after the Holocaust and WWII. It is inexact and means nothing.

You once said you were a ‘Jew of cinema’. What does this mean?

I want to be together with everyone else, but stay lonely. I wanted to express this contradiction.

The Jews have inhabited your intellectual universe since the late sixties. Is there a certain reason for this?

When the Holocaust happened, I was 15 years old. My parents kept it a secret from me, despite belonging to the Red Cross. I only found out about it much later. Even today I still feel guilty, because I was an ignoramus between the age of 15 and 25. I am sorry I couldn’t stand up for them. Today, in my own thoughts, I would like to have a critical look at them. I am generally interested in the ‘other’. It’s the same thing with blacks. First, they were colonised, and later everyone acted as if they were just as we are. Of course, a black person can wear glasses and a watch, but this doesn’t make us the same.

In Film socialisme it is said that although Hollywood was founded by Jews, everyone is looking in the same direction. Do Jews stand for diversity?

For commerce. The big studios were founded by Jews from central Europe, especially from Germany. Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors, nor lawyers or professors. That’s why they concentrated on something new: cinema. The Jews also came to an arrangement with the mafia quite quickly. But if you say this, immediately you are accused of being an anti-Semite, even though this is not true. People don’t see the images — one should have a closer look at the people who founded Las Vegas.

[...] You deconstruct texts and images, and are regarded as 'the Picasso of cinema'.

I don’t like the comparison, he painted too many plates.

Where do you see yourself in the history of cinema?

Next door.

Le Gai savoir - JLG, 1969, 35mm

Distance(s) #20

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