The insoluble pancake

In the past few days I have seen five films directed by Aki Kaurismaki, as well as “The Liar”, Mika Kaurismaki’s film school project for which Aki wrote the script. Kaurismaki is one of the “guests of honour” at the Paris Cinema festival, and a complete retrospective of all his films are passing the screens of the Reflet Medicis. As well as this, Kaurismaki and a few actors from his films are in town, and have made appearances before a few of the projections. So I will have a chance to catch up on all the films I missed at the Champo retrospective around 18 months ago.

On Thursday night at the Cinematheque there was a screening of “Juha”, Kaurismaki’s silent movie, and it was accompanied live by the Finnish orchestra who wrote the film’s original music. Kaurismaki, Kati Outinen and Andre Wilms were also there, but unfortunately (and this was to be a recurring feature of other projections) no-one really got very much of an opportunity to say anything.

For Kaurismaki to make a silent film was not such a radical departure of course given that (for certain of his films at least) nobody says very much (apparently for the “Match factory girl” all the dialogues were written on little bits of paper at the last possible minute). But a silent film for sure demands a different style of acting than a film graced with live dialogues; as Kaurismaki commented, once the card appears indicating a person’s emotional state, after that card disappears from the screen the actor has to display that emotion even more forcefully than before.

“Juha” tells the story of a rural couple who live a peaceful simple existence in the depths of the countryside. Their rural idyll is disrupted by the arrival of stranger (Andre Wilms) in a fast red car, who persuades Juha’s wife, Marja (played by Kati Outinen) to run away with him to the city. Needless to say, things end badly for everyone. Tragedy and burlesque. A revolver and an axe.

The live music was not really what I expected; it was kind of rock / jazz fusion, which in the end worked well enough (but then of course live music for a silent movie doesn’t have to be some guy with a piano of course). Mr. Kaurismaki made a few laconic comments before the projection, but wouldn’t be drawn any more than that.

It’s interesting to see so many of Kaurismaki’s films one after the other; the final scene of Juha is almost the same as the opening scene of “Shadows in Paradise”, filmed around ten years earlier — the Helsinki municipal rubbish dump. One notices of course that the same group of actors appears in all the films, more or less. That Kaurismaki cameos quite often (twice as a hotel clerk, once as the driver of a hearse in the delirious “Calamari Union”). Last night, watching his “blockbuster” hit, “The man without a past” I noticed in one of the scenes a portrait of Matti Pellonpaa hanging on the wall – Pellonpaa was one of Finland’s greatest actors, and starred in many of Kaurismaki’s films; he died suddenly in 1995.

Tonight I will go to see the two ‘Leningrad Cowboys” movies, concerning the world’s worst rock band. You know I could have found out about Kaurismaki about ten years earlier if I had been paying more attention, or had been a little more open; in Manchester in 1991 I remember seeing posters for the “Leningrad Cowboys go America” at the Cornerhouse cinema. I was intrigued. But I was perhaps not too open to new experiences back then; I didn’t go to see the film, instead preferring to spend my money to see Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca”. Which I had already seen on television in any case. Ah, youth.

One of my Christmas gifts this year was Catherine Puglisi’s “Caravaggio”. Now I know that Christmas was a long time ago but I just haven’t found time to write about this book before. Puglisi’s book describes in detail each of Caravaggio’s major works, in the order they were painted, whilst at the same time detailing the spectacular and tragic arc of his life. What I appreciated most was that the author’s work is factual; wild speculation and pop-psychology analysis are avoided. This would certainly be something all too easy to do with a character like Caravaggio.

My own encounter with Mr. Caravaggio’s paintings was unexpected. I had been visiting the Naples observatory, in Capodimonte, and I thought, hey I better go and visit the art gallery next door — the museum of Capodimonte. I went there very late in the day, the museum was almost empty, I had the place to myself. I wandered through the empty galleries, not knowing what works of art were there — not knowing that there were three or four paintings of Caravaggio’s. Not even knowing who Caravaggio was. It is always most surprising to see his works displayed with other paintings from that epoch; most other painters were searching an elusive idealised beauty, producing paintings removed from the squalid realities of 17th century life in Italy. So when you see his paintings for the first time you think — these people look like real people! And in fact they were — Caravaggio drew from life. Girls from the street stood in for the Virgin Mary. Surprisingly, looking at enough of his paintings you will see that these models actually reappear in several different works — almost as if he’s a film director who always uses the same actors. Look closely enough you will see that his apostles’ clothes are ripped at the corners. Of course there are the strong chiaroscuro effects, beams of light illuminating chosen sons, tragic figures whose faces are half hidden in shade. It’s easy to see why Caravaggio is Martin Scorcese’s favorite painter.

Caravaggio’s own life was no less shocking — after numerous brushes with the law, he finally ends up killing a man in duel, although perhaps it was an accident?– and he flees Rome, heads south, stopping in city after city for year or two at a time, painting and painting. Caravaggio was probably one of the best-paid artists of his time, and he fled Rome at the height of his fame… although he had become successful and famous, he has always this unstable side. He retreats to Malta, he almost becomes a Chevalier, a knight of the order — but something goes wrong, he’s in prison again, he has to run away once more. He returns to Naples, there are always rich people to protect him, he has connections. Then the final act, the abrupt end: Caravaggio tries to return to Rome, but he is arrested en route. His boat continues on northwards without him, containing the paintings he has made as an act of appeasement for Cardinal Borghese. He tries to folllow on foot, he crosses marshy plains — he catches malaria and dies and is buried in an unmarked grave.

In the boat heading north without Caravaggio is his last painting, drawn for the Cardinal and now hanging in his gallery in Rome. It is “David with the head of Goliath”, representing the well known biblical scene, David holding the head of the slain giant. Except in this case, the giant’s head is that of Caravaggio’s. Caravaggio’s final act of atonement?

Reading Puglisi’s book and looking at all the paintings one after another what impressed me most was Caravaggio’s incredible gift of composition, his ability to place the actors in each scene so as to best tell the story he wanted to tell. It also seems that he worked directly on the canvas, without any preparatory sketches — at least, none has ever been found. Interestingly enough, X-rays of some of his paintings has revealed that he didn’t always find the right solution the first time around; underneath the first layer of paint hidden figures are visible, heads are turned in a slightly different angle.

Strangely enough, Caravaggio had an enormous influence on the painters of his own time, but then he was completely forgotten until the 19th century. Wandering around the Louvre one afternoon I was surprised to stumble into one small room which seemed to be full of Caravaggio paintings I had never seen before. But — these works were not painted by him at all as I realised in a second, looking at the labels — they were painted by his imitators.

Imagine if you can a city already thousands of years old when Giotto drew the Capanile in Florence; a city already turned to dust millennia before the first foundation stones of Chartres or Notre Dame were laid. Before all of western history started, in fact. That city is the city of Babylon. In the Musee du Louvre, for a few more weeks, the history of Babylon is traced from the distant past to the present days, finishing with the discoveries by German explorers at the end of the 19th century.

The Babylonians were compulsive book-keepers, and recorded everything on clay tablets, baked in the harsh desert sun. It’s thanks to this that we know so much about them and their culture. I was a little amazed to discover that even today, among the hundreds of thousand of clay tablets which still exist, quite a few have still to be translated. And of course it is an obvious question to wonder what fraction of the words and text produced today will still be around to be read in 4000 years — we can hardly read a floppy disk made ten years ago.

There was a lot of material about Babylonian civilisation, their codes of law and the city itself. The Ziggurat in Babylon was confused by many people as perhaps having been the tower of Babel, and one room of the exhibition is dedicated to representations of the Tower in western cultures. It seems the image of the tower is perhaps as widespread as that of San Sebastien and his arrows… Bruegel’s tower, I learned, was inspired by a visit to Rome, and in fact bears more than a passing resemblance to the Colosseum.

The second half of the exhibition was concerned with the representation of Babylon in western civilisation. The city, it seems, was all things to all men, depending on the epoch and who was writing the history: either a fabulously opulent city of great wealth and beauty, a place completely corrupt and decadent and worthy of destruction.

I would have liked to have more learned about Babylonian astronomy; they were one of the first if not the first peoples to systematically observe the sky. In one room, a Byzantine russian text was opened to a page showing Babylonian astronomers (in their tower) assiduously observing the sky. But unknown to them, behind them, the hand of god surreptitiously moves the stars in the sky. Indeed!