The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose is a fabulous book and film about monks, books, murders and the multiplicity of signs and meanings. I just re-read the book over this last week (finally found a nice early hardcover edition that was cheap ...) Of course, purists will argue that the film doesn't manage to get down complex themes involving the language, production, ownership, authority, history, and philosophy of language. But, it still holds a special palce in my heart. Here are a few of my favorite images from the film.

I like this shot because it floods the screen with light and still manages to bisect the lower half of the frame with the gaping blankness of the stairwell. I think it captures that transition into the esoteric world of scholarship very nicely.





Another great shot, blurred around the edges because it's supposed to be seen through a primitive pair of specs that William of Baskerville owns. I suppose it would be a strange world where donkeys preach to bishops, but then again, perhaps the self-contained hyper-rationalism of late-industrial capitalism can only be countered by fantasies such as these.



Another shot of an illuminated manuscript. They actually got monks who restore books to paint these pages for the film. Apparently this page went missing after they started the shoot (one of film's producers liked it and just TOOK it without realizing that its importance to the scene). It then took several months for the page to be re-produced and the rest of the scene had to be re-shot on the eve of wrapping up the production (The producer was very embarrassed when it all came out ...)


"Adso, do you realize that we are in one of the greatest libraries in all of Christendom?"

I identify a lot with this attainment of the secret library because I've spent the last two years sneaking around Columbia's library (yes, I don't go there but they've got lots of great stuff ...).


The obligatory "burn-the-heretic" scene. That's Ron Perlman as Salvatore, the former heretic who speaks all languagees but none. I'll admit that there was a time (quite long ago) when I was so into the film (which I had managed to record off Channel 5 ...) that I could sing the strange chant that Salvatore sings at this moment. Eeeks.



Finally, William gets his hands on the Book! When I first saw the film on TV, I was so entranced by it that I went out to get the book from the NLB. I was supposed to have been studying for a Sec 3 Lit exam (on Macbeth, actually). I ended up doing really badly on that exam. It did steel my resolve, however, to conquer "O" level Lit (even if it meant memorizing the entire play, since that seemed to be the only thing that Lit teachers gave credit for back then). Ah well.

Three Chords and the (Lacanian) Truth

Here's the side B of my fledgling Crit-Rock oevure. Other yet-to-be recorded, sung or even written titles include : "Dare We Da da da ...", "The Loose and What Tarries ..." and "Full Cold in Power". Anyway -- this one is supposed to be funny ... (just so that the foolishness has a name ...)

Encountering the Real
I take comfort the thought that
Language seems to save
Through the simple signifiers:
"I, me and myself"
The objects that relate me to you.

Identify is found
In the sliding oppositions
Floating all around
A universe of signification:
Like "I, me and myself"
The objects that relate me to you.

"But isn't it all rather arbitrary
So what happens to "I think therefore I am"
Do not be dismayed
A sign will show the way...
As long as signifiers have free-plaaaaaaaay!

Structure so profound
We're immune to its consequences
Throwing terms around
As if binaries were natural
Like "I, me and myself"
The objects that relate me to you.

Another What If ...

Inspired by a link, here's another attempt at writing a song. It struck me that the language of critical theory might provide a rich and allusive language for music. What if someone wrote songs that dealt with the matter of crit theory. Anyways -- here's the A-side of my latest efforts. I'll record the B-side tomorrow (having recklessly dashed off two obscure sets of lyrics today). I haven't figured out a name for it -- so suggestions would be nice.

Here

Them Lyrics:

I wept to see your Body
Riddled all throughout
With blinded eyes and broken teeth
your lips that couldn't shout
Muscles all unravelled
Disintegrating time
Desire freely flowing
Decoding the sublime

I leapt in fear to see your heart
Pulse without a beat:
Illusion of the inside
Sacred in defeat
The violence of the symbol
Waiting to be torn
Desire freely flowing
Decoded and forlorn.

I understood you badly
Accusing with the Real:
That absence already always
Draws you onward still
The mirror image you yourself
Will never recognize:
Desire freely flowing
In spite of all the lies.

I laughed to see the prayers
Offered up to form,
Measured in a language
Foreign and still-born
Prison-house of memory
Hoping to restore
Desire freely flowing
Somehow making pure

I thought I wrote you poems
Whose words would demonstrate
The poverty of presence
The hollowness of fate:
But I will never understand
I'm too afraid to know
Desire freely flowing
Where I must never go.

I dreamt I felt your Body
Pressing against mine
With falling hair and shoulders bare
A moment without time
And tracing just beneath your breath
In whispers that would save
Desire freely flowing
Stronger than the grave

Strangely beautiful

Two books that I've read (rather quickly and thus not very deeply) in the past week:

Foucault's Pendulum. Umberto Eco. This is the kind of reader resistant novel I'll admit to liking. Full of strange esoteric references and sparkling with unimaginable linguistic contortions, Eco manages an amazing blend of showy erudition and touching poignancy. Much like Pynchon's stuff, it's books like these that remind me why I do what I do.

The Namesake. Jhumpa Lahiri. This came in the mail yesterday (second-hand book buying is one of the best reasons of living here) and after some late night reading and a final burst this morning, I'm left tingling by the uncanny emotional resonance that tied me to the novel. It's not the immediately spottable New York references that struck a chord (those were fun, but on the level of spotting places from movie sets or on TV that you just wandered past the day before .... ). It was the strange journey that its protagonist takes to a place thousands of miles away, in order to be someone else; a journey which now so many take, that left the sense that our myths no longer map the epic, tragic and comic journeys home of Odysseus, Oedipus and Frodo; neither do they follow the aimless wanderings of Don Quixote or Dean Moriarty. Instead, they trace the unsettling attempts to find the self on distant shores. Amazingly well written, and though it goes flat in the middle (with cliched descriptions of yuppies in New York ... eeks ... ), it ends powerful.

There appears to be a film for the novel in production. But the trailer already seems to miss the point about the vexed nature of "home"!

What d'ya know ...

It occurred to me today as I finished watching yet another film, that the latest string of movies that I've been occupied with all deal with some aspect of prostitution. I guess if you want to be a avant garde in your material you need to pick a subject that lies outside the Establishment. Of course, Hollywood, Julia Richards and Richard Gere changed all that with "Pretty Woman" ...

The Films

1. My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie) This Godard was probably the best of the lot with a very pretty Anna Karina forced into prostitution. The film treats prostitution in a matter of fact manner, with Karina always looking immaculate, pretty and ready for the next customer, who are invaribly balding middle-aged men. Of course, the film's really about existential angst and all that. And it ends very tragically, right after she has a conversation about life and love with a philosopher.

2. Mama Roma. A Parsolini film, it's about an aging prostitute who tries for a better life off the streets, selling veggies in a cart in Rome (The Colloseum is always in the background ...) But she's got a teenage son on whom she places all her hopes. These invariably come crashing down because of his irresponsible behavior.

3. Medea. Another Parsolini film but not quite about prostitution per se, though Medea DOES kill her brother and offers the Golden Fleece to Jason in exchange for herself! I can see why the Soviet film-maker Parajanov claims that Parsolini was a huge influence. There are some similarities in the strange 2-D painterly shots in this film and the endless "Color of Pomegranates". To make a comparison to another film -- very much in the spirit of Fellini's "Satyricon", though the shots are never stuffed with so much detail and excess.

4. The Grim Reaper (La Commare Secca). This was a film that Bernardo Bertolucci directed when he was 21! The idea was Parsolini's but Parsolini had moved on to other obsessions (Mama Roma) and suggested that Bertolucci shoot this. It's very much like Rashmon. A prostitute has been murdered and vcarious suspects are called in, each with their own tale to tell about that fateful night. The strange thing with this film, however, is that there is a clear HE did it at the end, which makes the rest of the film, well, irrelevant.

Two other films that are most definitely not about Prostitution:

1. The Little Soldier (Le Petit Soldat). A Godard film about a French deserter (the Algerian war) who ends up getting involved in a right wing terrorist plot. Long meditation about torture, highly relevant for today.

2. Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen). Another Bergman film. With a young Liv Ulman and Max von Sydow. It traces an artist's descent into madness where the desires of the past cannot be forgotten. There are moments where I think Bergman deliberately mimics Dreyer's "Passion of Joan of Arc", where the sound drops off and there are just these portraits composed only with austere light and shadow.

(De)constructive Criticism?

"Instead of a diatribe mr brown should offer constructive criticism and alternatives."

just one sentence from a Letter from K BHAVANI
Press Secretary to the Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts

It strikes me as interesting that perhaps the most commonly espoused Establishment retort to any critique or criticism is encapsulated in the single line quoted above. Having listened to numerous civil servants and local politicians justify the status quo with the exact same phrase, as if it were a limit of all rational discourse that cannot be transgressed; having been challenged on more than one occassion by family, friends, and indeed, students with the same phrase, I wonder about the powerful illusion that all we need is a kind of "critique" that will "edify"; some manner of technology, language or gesture that is so extensively domesticates itself in the very act of pointing out the spaces, gaps, fears, terrors and contradictions inherent in a post-industrial capitalistic nation that it immediately erases the possibility that the structure could all come tumbling down: the fantasy of "constructive criticism".

In the first place, isn't there a tremendous paradox in the notion that words can construct even as it takes apart, that they can magically unveil, rip and pull while adding to the edifice? It seems to me, then, that the only criticism that will ever be "constructive" is that which merely re-capitulates what is always already there, what always already has been expected and erected by the collective fantasy and is just waiting for that big climactic moment when "Viola! ..." But what constitutes this desire for criticism to be constructive, that allows this elusive dream that we can take apart and build all in a single rhetorical moment to persist in these MOST rationale and practical technocrats? Why the belief that only commentary that replicates and adds to the positivistic logic of the status quo can be made about civil structures and institutions? What are the fantasies and fears that these criteria distort, normalize and then assert as the most commonsensical and rational of public pronouncements?

The flawed assumptions underlying the notion of "constructive criticism" pull in several directions, which the phrase, whenever it is drawn out of any flabbergasted Establishment Figure's bag of rhetorical tricks, tries to brusquely sweep aside. First, is the telelogical belief that a nation progresses in a type of linear history, where every element, every word, thought or deed must pull together towards that pre-determined goal, that vanishing paradisical point variously called the "first-world" or the "Swiss-standard of living". A point vanishing over every horizon that can only be measured in retrospective graphs and charts of economic development and fiscal growth; the central absence that overcodes all desire in Singapore. Every force that bucks the trend or slips out from this narrative of economic and material progress is thus conveniently labelled "disruptive", or "non-constructive". Second is the paranoia that such "aimless" critique will infect the hardworking, "we-can-solve-every-problem-that-history-throws-at-us" (poetically summed up in "we can achieve, we can achieve") spirit that the powers-that-be pride themselves in possessing. Third, it is a calculated ploy to lure critique into playing the game that the establishment wins each and every time: the game of "my-ideas-are-better-than-yours". Any suggestion that is offered can be met with a "we've thought about that and it won't work because ...", "we'll look into that (but still retain the power to decide )" or "hmmm, that's actually good idea, we'll give you a job, co-opt you and your ideas ..." Of course, who decides what actually constitutes "constructive criticism" and whether there is ever a standard that is rigorously applied in evaluating HOW "constructive" the criticism actually is, is never really dealt with properly.

My response, whenever I am faced with the demand to provide "constructive criticism" or "alternatives" is to immediately question the notion of "constructive" critique and to suspect the demand of trying to colonize and exploit my train of thought. Why should thought be subjugated to the assumptions already mentioned? Why should thought be a tool to that particular political agenda? And it's hard to do consistently because people immediately think that you're just trying to be difficult or playing with words. Yet, how can one otherwise prevent an excursion into the tyrannical belief that my ideas are good enough for everyone else, good enough to dictate a way of being and mode of feeling, if I do not begin here?

In short, why SHOULD criticism be constructive?

The plea for "constructive criticism", begins with the naive hope that a society can shy away from the dark elements of its history, politics and social desire by looking away, towards some hoped for shape or outline of social progress (also summed up in "we've come so far together, our common destineee ...). The notion of "constructive criticism" is an ideological construct meant to bolster the fantasy that "at least we're headed somewhere"; the captivating master signifier meant to appease, not matter how vaguely, no matter how desperately, the Establishment's own fears that it is failing at it's own game of policing, directing and controlling desire that gets caught up and distracted by the infinite pulses of the Real. It is cut from the same glass that consitutes the mirror in which the Establishment deliberately misrecognizes satire, the very mirror that enables the status quo to take itself -- it's perfections and blemishes -- far too seriously.

Saraband

After about 30 years since "Scenes from a Marriage", Ingmar Bergman made "Saraband" , a TV movie then re-edited for the big screen. It loosely follows the "after-lives" of the protagonists, re-casting a very old Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson, who played the original couple, struggling with old age and the emotional hang-ups of their children and grandchildren. The film was stunning. Typically Bergman in its use of close-ups and intense personal exchanges (there are never more than two characters in each scene ...) the film deals with the accumulated effects of experience and the emotional baggage acquired after years of living. I guess Bergman's sense of his own mortality comes across very strongly, as does his sense that the accretions of living never fully prepare one for death or loss. Anyway, one of the most evocative scenes has Erland Josephson alone in his book lined study. It took me a while to figure out a way around my Mac's refusal to allow screen captures but here it is:

White Pride

So I queued for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park the other day.
One queues from about 10 am to when the tickets are issued at 1 pm. They're free tickets and there's no telling whether one will get a ticket -- it all depends on how many tickets the people ahead of you need.
Anyway, there was a massive display of what Edna and I call "White Pride". The white yuppy-tai tai-young mother ahead of us in the queue was really irritating. Apart from talking loudly to her many friends on her cell and endlessly proclaiming how clever and cute her baby was, she tried to get her friends who came later into the queue. There are strict rules about the queue (as these tickets are highly sought after). You have to be there to get a ticket. You can't have a friend get there and camp out alone until 1230, then have five other people join you just as the tickets are issued (the 'rules' are repeated ad nauseum by the staff at the Public Theatre, and they do it every 10 meters down the line!) But this White Young Mother (who was picnicking there with her child and a friend) was scheming throughout on her cell phone (loudly -- so I can't be accused of eavesdropping) on how to beat the system. So when her first friend came later, that friends hovered and hovered then, viola, she merged "seamlessly" into the line.
Of course, this irritated me. Not because I wouldn't get a ticket but because there were people at the end of the line who had come much earlier and might be cheated out of a ticket. So after about an hour, when it was clear that they had broken the 'rules' (there was no sign that the friend was going to leave), I did the right thing and went to rat on them. I was pretty amazed that I did it cause I'm the last person to take action in moments such as these (I usually huddle down into a book and act blur). But when White People try to stamp their sense of entitlement on everything -- yes, even free events that are meant to open out the Arts to the less privileged-- that's sort of the final straw. So when I came back with the security people, Ms. White Pride glibly lied -- "Oh no, she's just here to baby sit ..." Yeah right. So security person didn't want to create a scene and just reminded friend to leave the line when 1 pm came. And later, another friend joined them and they ended up in a huddle deciding whether or not to try to go ahead with their plan of cutting into the queue. They probably figured that they've got a crazy chinese guy right next to them who's most willing to cry foul and so her friends left to go to the back of the queue.
Anyway, Ms. White Pride still got her way. When she got to the top of the line where the tickets were being given out, she acted all cutsey and cloyed and toyed with ticket people with the argument that "O, my baby's a PERSON, yes she is, oh she waited in line, she's a Person ..." and got tickets by using her child. Marx would have a lot to say about the parent-child relation and the way it has been corrupted by the commerical impulse of exchange that has become the very soul of the capitalist psyche (Yes, through her loud talking we -- meaning everyone within 20 meters, learnt that her husbands a lawyer and that she lives on a trendy street on the Upper West Side). Of course, child did not turn up for the play and Ms. White Pride didn't even stay for the entire thing.
By the way -- the play was "Macbeth".

Just a List

So the film watchin' rolls on with the following:

1. Dazed and Confused. I actually didn't spot Ben Affleck playing the High School Jerk until very late in the film.
2. A Woman is a Woman. A Godard film filled with much homage to American musicals.
3. The Riflemen. A strange Godard film that is supposed to comment on the folly of war. An extended sequence where soldiers returning from war take out postcards of things, places and people, slamming them down on the table, one after another, which just kept going on and on, really forces one to try to work in an interpretation.
4. The Virgin Spring. An early (and pretty conventionally plot driven) Bergman film. His 'other' medieval film, dwarfed by "The Seventh Seal".
5. The Color of Pomegranates. This was the strangest film that I've watched in a long while (and this includes some weird Peter Greenaway stuff). It was made by an Armenian Soviet film maker in the late 60s. It's amazingly slow and many of the shots are meant to replicate the interior life of an Armenian poet / troubadour. The shots are composed like still frames in a photo, with gestures and symbolic objects carrying the weight of the action. It's thus devoid of almost any traceable narrative or dialogue. Dreamlike in its juxtiposition of images and use of recurring images, it also mimics the iconography of Byzantine Church art. (I think ... like Byzantine Mosaics?)
6. The Thin Blue Line. This was a documentary by the same person that did "The Fog of War", Errol Morris. It's about the wrong conviction and sentencing to death row of Randall Adams, for a cop killing in 1977. After the film was made (and shown, in 1989), the case was actually re-opened and Adams got out. Talk about the power of the movies. In probably the best moment of the film, the actual killer just about confesses that he was the one that did it (we see him interviewed earlier but only hear his voice on tape during this confession, the final sequence of the film, making it even more powerful, because he has already been executed on another murder charge), but being 16 and scared, he quickly formulated a story that the cops eventually went for, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
7. And let's not forget the Zadie Smith novel that I ploughed through over the weekend. After about 200 pages of "On Beauty" and being really irritated by the flaccid, sensationalistic story-telling and unimaginative, cliched writing, I forced myself through this one, just so that I didn't feel as if I cheated in forming an opinion. There are smart ways of referencing literary traditions and great books and while "On Beauty" tries to do this, it just rips off without really doing anything clever or profound in the referencing. Just acknowledging that one is stealing (and thus turning it into an 'the-inspiration-for-this-book-was' note) doesn't absolve from the sin of doing it poorly. And I usually don't have anything bad to say about anything.

Still ...

Despite beginning intensive French classes, I've managed to keep up with educating and occupying myself with more movies. It's a funny thing, these brief comments about film are really just a counter to remind myself what I've been viewing. It must also harken back to the advice that my English tutor in JC gave about film watching -- always write about whatever you watch -- that way your parents won't get on your case for 'wasting' your time at the movies. Of course, that was before DVD ...

Anyway -- the list, as far as I can remember:

1. More Felini: I went and looked up some of his earlier work. "La Strada" (The Road) is supposed to be the last film that Fellini did before breaking out of very conventional story telling. Apparently its succcess at the box-office allowed him more control and freedom over the kinds of experiments that he wanted to do in his films. It's shot in austere black and white with post WW2 Italy, its dusty country roads and scattered villages providing the backdrop of the film. It follows the fortunes of a travelling 'strongman' (ie he's a gypsy entertaining small village crowds to make ends meet) and his companion, a young girl who is 'sold' to him by her poor mother. It's tragic and pretty conventional though there's a tinge of sadness in every scene, even in the comic burlesque and Chaplin-like clowning that the young girl brings to the film. Another Fellini film: La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) is apparently the film that made popular the term "paparazzi". As this suggests, the film deals with the glamorous and decadent life of actors and celebraties and their numerous escapes into hedonistic abondonment. Most of the film tracks the late night activities of these individuals, all tied together by a writer, Marcello. Definitely highly stylized, with great control of light and dark spaces. It's almost a more coherent (and semiotically familiar) version of Fellini's later work, "Satyricon".

2. We just can't shake out the Merchant Ivory. Three films that deal with British / post-British India. "Heat and Dust", which was supposed to be the film that launched Greta Scacchi's career. White women falling in love with Indian men and screwing everything up. Pretty much in tune with the next film "A Passage to India", which paid more attention to inner struggles and the clash between cultures (though it isn't a Merchant-Ivory film but one by David Lean). Of course, I'm pretty biased about what a good film version of this book should look like cause I studied it pretty intensely for the A levels. It placed a lot of emphasis on the first portion of the book and really squeezes the working out of important implications to a rushed last half-hour. Still, this probably explains why I'd make a terrible script writer. Last on this part of the list, "Shakespeare Wallah", an old Merchant-Ivory production (60s?) that traces the fortunes of a company of Shakespearean actors that tour India after 1947, their dwindling audiences (over taken by Bollywood, of course) and a return, to England. Of course, the daughter (young English girl who has lived all her life in India) of the company's director, falls for a rich, young Indian ... Profoundly moving though, and some excellent snippet stagings of several Shakespeare plays (in a very 18th/19th C 'affected' manner).

3. I've also started watching the Black Adder comedies. The first series, which re-writes the history of pre-Tudor England has been the most enjoyable so far. The second series, which deals with Elizabethan England has its moments (and mad queen!) but there seems to have been an attempt to make adjustments to the series so that it caters for a different audience. The dialogue is just silly at points, instead of a clever and allusive re-working of historical (and dramatic via Shakespeare) givens.

4. And let's not forget the book. I also managed to sneak in "Arthur and George" by Julian Barnes. I fall into these moods where I realize that I haven't read any contemporary fiction in a while so I got this (a nice brand new hardback for seven bucks including postage ...) because I really like Julian Barnes. I must so it was very engaging and had some interesting tense shifts. But it definitely pales in comparison to "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" and "Metroland", because it tries to hard to depend on a mystery plot, when the materials at hand can't sustain a dramatic revelation. Anyway, that's probably a reaction to feeling a little let down by how it winds to a close. The earlier bits that track class and racial tensions in early 20th C England, were very nice. And the strange use of the SIMPLE present tense, and how that often shifted unnoticeably into a more conventional past tense of recounted events and reported speech, immensely disorientating and disturbing: it was as it the 'facts' were slipping out of one's hands, all the time.