The insoluble pancake

This evening I went down to the “Champo”, one of the cinemas on the Rue des Ecoles to see Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse”. I had been at the Accatone only a few weeks previously to see his previous film, “La Notte”.

This is one thing I like very much about this city — the cinemas. There are around 300 cinema screens in the centre of Paris, I’ve heard. It may well be the world centre of cinema. You can see almost anything at any time. I’ve watched Angelopolous’ “Eternity and a day” at 11AM on a Sunday morning, or Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” at 7pm on a Saturday night. It is not a question of “Where can I see film X” but rather “Which cinema do I want see film X in?” And then there are the particularities of the cinemas. At the “Accatone”, it seems, they only have around 20 or so films (I exaggerate of course) which are continuously shown in rotation. At any time of any day there certainly showing a film from Pasolini or Fassbinder or Fellini. Probably right now whilst you are reading this.

But back to Mr. Antonioni. “L’Eclisse” is the last of the three films in the series which began with “L’Avventura” (which I have yet to see), and is followed by “La Notte”. Mr. Antonioni’s cities are strange places. Like in “La Nottte” large segments of film are shot in depopulated, empty spaces, full of long empty boulevards, streets open to the horizon. In “La Notte” all the open spaces are like this, filmed in post-war Milan, where it seems people don’t relate to people but to buildings. In “L’Eclisse” we at least return to the centre of the city; many scenes take place in the stock market, brilliantly filmed chaotic scenes especially on the one bad day when the markets take a turn for the worse and a zillion lire are wiped off the share prices.

Monica Vitti wanders aimless though all of this, and responds to most questions with ‘no lo so’ (I don’t know). Unable to decide where to go or who to be with, or maybe it is better be with a book than a man? (At one point she says it all the same to her). As in “La Notte” there are many scenes of elegantly dressed people wandering through scenes of unimaginable desolation and solitude, devoid of any other living forms. Antonioni always likes to go for the long shot, to show us the great space around each person.

Whew! After all that I left the cinema to discover I was the Last Man Alive. Walking down the Rue St. Jacques towards my apartment I saw that Paris was empty! It was a Saturday evening at 9pm but I saw no-one in the restaurants I walked past, no cars on the street, the only people I met seemed to be tourists and strangely enough even the tour buses I saw were empty! I soon realised all of this is because it is a long holiday weekend and all the Parisians have left the city, gone south or north. I thought of Mme. Vitti stumbling through EUR-Roma as I crossed the rue Soufflot and looked at all the empty chairs in the brasseries. The buildings here in Paris may not be as in Rome, but the human condition, alas, remains the same.

I’ve been listening a lot the last few days to Mr. David Sylvian’s latest album, ‘snow borne sorrow’, and one of my favourite songs goes by the name of “The banality of evil”. This phrase was first used, I think, to describe what men like Adolf Eichmann did, and it appears in the title of a book from Hannah Arendt (apparently she never uses the phrase herself in the text of the book).

Many years ago I saw the film The Specialist which tells the story of the trial of Mr. Eichmann. Eichmann was one of the organisers-in-chief of the Nazi party, and ensured that all goods reached their destination with the minimum of distribution — no matter if those goods were Jews on the way to extermination camps. It was just a matter of organisation, no? Men can be evil without being malevolent, that was the revelation. It was just an every-day, ordinary kind of evil, which could come about because Eichmann and his colleagues were locked into in an enormous process which had effectively separated them from all moral responsibility.

The text of Sylvian’s song is for sure inspired by these stories, he sings ‘I’ve got me a badge a bright shiny badge/[..]I’ve got me a club an exclusive club’ and then towards the end of the song he tells us that ‘your skin is dirty and your gods…don’t look like gods’. Of course the sub-text in all of the songs on the album is Sylvian’s separation from his wife of 13 years, so every surface has more than one interior, and every song can be read in more than one way.

Students of Irish literature may perhaps realise where the name of this blog and it’s URL comes from. Everything is connected to everything else, of course, and in way which we often don’t fully understand. Policeman Fox’s (and you know who I mean) ceiling contained an exact map of the entire village, laid out in a intricate web of hairline cracks in his bedroom ceiling. Imagine Fox’s ceiling, if he lived here in Paris! Or imagine such a ceiling if it showed instead interpersonal relationships. Who knows who knows who.

But that particular one might not be too complicated. I read somewhere the other day that the mammalian cortex only can really handle social groupings of around 100 people or so. Beyond that, I suppose, it is the grey fog at the edge of the village, where you can’t see any further. But that can make for some strange effects living a large city like I do. One would like to say that one is always open to chance, to random events, to unexpected things that might happen. That is after all one of the reasons why one might want to live in such a place. But then again, taking the metro or walking down a crowded street can sometimes have an overwhelming effect. Look at all those people whose lives will never intersect with mine! Well, you don’t know that for sure, but you imagine it. How many times did you cross someone in the street who might have had a profound effect on your life (and I’m not just talking girls here don’t get me wrong!) if only you had talked to them? Ach! But I don’t want to go and live on a mountain somewhere (yes, I did try that once, actually). I just need to find a really good ceiling somewhere. From now on, the next time I enter an apartment I’ve never visited before, the first thing I will do is to turn my eyes upwards….

I went to see the Bonnard exhibition the other day at the newly-reopened museum of modern art in paris. It was interesting. i didn’t know so much about bonnard, and after reading John Banville’s The Sea I was curious to see what mr. Bonnard’s paintings were actually like. (i should mention, of course, that I’ve been reading mr. banville’s books for at least fifteen years now, well before his well-deserved win of the booker prize).

But Bonnard! While european cities burned, while millions were killed, he spent his time in his normandy house, painting and re-painting his wife in the bath. oblivious to the passage of time, to passing fads in art and culture, intent only on perfectly preserving that one instant, a woman’s body in water. Sometime in this century or the last, and always at the same age.