The insoluble pancake

I’m in Ireland. Nowhere near any city, in the countryside. In my parents house, yes. A “zone of low resolution on Google Earth” as I like to call it. One day before Christmas. Outside, the sky is an overcast grey, and a thin mist hangs on the ground. No sound can be heard; a car passes on the road in front of our house perhaps every hour or so. After Paris, after the enormous crowds at CDG and in Dublin this is somewhat of a surreal experience, but nevertheless one I know extremely well, having spent at least eighteen years of my life here. It is a kind of decompression. One awakes in the morning, takes one’s coffee and then thinks — well, what should I do now? But it is not the right question to ask, because the density of life and event here is completely different from Paris.

These thoughts lead me back the events of two weeks previously, when I was at the “Cinematheque Francaise”. In a few days it will be the twentieth anniversary of the death of Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky died in Paris. In commemoration, the Cinematheque showed all his films over mostly the course of one weekend. On the Sunday at midday there was a special reading of Tarkvosky’s diaries by the French actor Denis Lavant (which was broadcast live on France Culture). I was at Lavant’s reading, as well as two other films of Tarkovsky’s that I had not seen before: “The mirror” and “The Sacrifice”. There were other films of his that I would have loved to see again, but that would mean seeing two Tarkovsky films in one day, and that for me is a bit of an overwhelming experience.

Perhaps I should say a bit about the Cinematheque Francaise before I go any further. It really is a temple of cinema. They have been around for a while, but they have only been in their current location in Bercy for a year or so — it is a expressionist angular structure designed by Frank Gehry for the american cultural centre. That particular venture only lasted a few years before folding (hmm, am I surprised?), and then the cinematheque moved in. What amazes me about the cinematheque is that it is always completely packed. And by a relatively young audience; it isn’t just retired people. Cinema seats are cheap; a subscription for a year, offering unlimited access, is around 10 euros a month; the card that I have gets me in for four euros, around half of what you would pay at the Gaumont or UGC.

The main screen is in an enormous, steeply sloping room with maybe four hundred, five hundred (very comfortable!) seats. I’ve been there to see, for example, the first of Fritz Lang’s “Mabuse” films. Mr. Mabuse, that master of disguise, the first evil genius in cinema. Now this film is a silent film, in black and white. The Cinematheque, being rigorous and pure, of course, interpret this to mean really silent. (For every other place where I’ve seen a “silent” film there was at least some music on the soundtrack). Unless, like in the old days, there was actually someone on the stage in front of the screen with a piano. In all, it was a somewhat surreal experience. Imagine yourself in a packed cinema with a few hundred other souls watching a black and white film in total silence. And there really was total silence. No-one talked; a respectful silence was maintained throughout the projection. The only sound one did hear, from time to time, was that of the occasional snore; Dr. Mabuse’s machinations were just not thrilling enough for them, combined with the soporific effect of the intense heat of the cinema (it’s always super hot in there, there never seems to be enough ventliation). I suppose there are people sleeping in cinemas all the time but one doesn’t realise it, thanks to the obscuring effects of film soundtracks.

That’s enough for today; tomorrow I will write more about the two Tarkovsky films I saw, as well as the reading by Denis Lavant.

Technorati Tags: cinema, tarkovsky

A man hangs suspended in mid-air. His arms are outstretched. He could be a swimmer about to plunge into ocean depths. Except that he is fully clothed, and metres below him is the hard pavement. That he will fall, and fall heavily, on this unforgiving surface seems inevitable, certain, but in this instant this has yet to happen. It is still in the future. Perhaps it may not even happen?

The image is Yves Klein’s “Le Saut dans la Vide”; the man is Klein himself, frozen for an instant above a pavement in the southern suburbs of Paris. We do not know what happens next. A thirty-foot replica of this photograph hangs today from the outside wall of the Centre Pompidou, Beaubourg, in central Paris. It advertises their retrospective of Klein’s work, which will be shown until February of next year. I’ve been there myself to see the show, quite a few times now. I have a “Laissez Passer” for Beaubourg and I’ve been spending a lot of my weekends there. I’ll have to write about the other shows I’ve seen there, at some point.

I didn’t know so much about Klein before I went to see the exhibition, I certainly didn’t know that he died of a sudden heart attack at 34; all pictures of him are pictures of a young man. Before his intersection with the unyielding earth.

Klein invented a colour, “IKB” or” “International Klein Blue”. In exhibition space in Beaubourg there are entire rooms filled with paintings consisting of only this colour. Square canvasses of IKB. But it is a very strange colour. Wikipedia will tell you that it is location in colour space is #002FA7, a simple number, a simple shade of blue on a computer screen. But it is not. It has a luminous, fluorescent quality to it. It avoids one’s direct gaze. The edges of a IKB painting are obscure, it’s contours are difficult to fathom. A component of this colour concentrates the light around entering it, reflects it back as a deep and living blue.

I’d seen the IKB’s before, but never in such quantity. And the rest of the exhibition provided some interesting insights into the rest of Klein’s works, his philosophy based so strongly on the ephemeral and insubstantial. His designs for a city consisting where the buildings have no walls and ceilings. Everything is separated by a thin layer of air blown across the buildings. His endless experiments with flame and fire, the attempt to make a fountain for the Trocadero in Paris consisting of jets of fire and water which intersect and annihilate. Sculptures made from gaslight. His experiments with painting by flame and fire. In one (very funny I have to admit) film one follows the path of gas pipes and tubes — till the end, at once, there is Klein himself holding a canvas before a naked flame. A fireman with a hose stands at the ready, water to cancel fire. Klein even traces the form of women’s bodies against the flames of fire, flesh interposed between canvas and fire.

Just how serious was this man, I wanted to know. I thought of Rothko’s pantings, the colour field artists in America. What relation did they have to Klein’s eternal blue? Was this what Douglas Adams meant when he talked about a ‘superintelligent shade of the colour blue’ (probably not)? Enough to have tried. Enough to have tried. Meanwhile, Klein’s body still hangs suspended above the street, detached from the steel and glass surface of Beaubourg, and the future has yet to happen.

Over the past month, I have made two trips to the “Theatre Bouffes du Nord” with my friends to see two performances of short plays by Mr. Samuel Beckett. You know it is the Beckett centenary now, so there are many performances of his works in Paris. In London, I’ve heard, Harold Pinter is making probably his last ever stage performance in Krapp’s Last Tape.

Beckett of course is in that very small group of people who were successful in a language other than the language of their birth. Nabokov comes to mind. Beckett translated his own books back to English, from French; he said that process improved his style. He wanted to pare things down, to produce words which were simple and unaffected. Passing his words through the hand-wringer of a double translation perhaps was a way to achieve this.

The Theatre Bouffes du Nord is itself an amazing venue. From outside, arriving from metro “porte de la chapelle” (behind the Gare du Nord) one sees, on the other side of the street, what seems to be an ordinary row of Parisian apartments. Tall narrow buildings. Except that at the first floor level one sees the words “Theatre” and of course there is normally a large crowd of people standing outside, waiting. The theatre is completely integrated into the apartments around it. Or rather, the apartment buildings have grown up around the theatre. It was derelict for twenty years before Mr. Peter Brook took over in the early seventies. And did not restore anything! The theatre was left exactly as it had been; the seats were changed, but the rest remained untouched. One imagined that a lot of things had been said and seen and heard inside those walls, ancient tired air, old emotions…

The space inside the theatre is strange, and it is not like any theatre I have been to before. I am reminded a little of the unfinished Cathedrale de Beauvais: the stage is foreshortened, and the building itself is very very high. Each row of balcony reaching up to the domed glass ceiling is encrusted with centuries old intricately carved stucco. The stage is narrow, and there is almost no distance between it and where the audience sits. One is actually sitting on the stage. And behind that, there are tall walls painted a rough sienna brown.

Each performance I saw there lasted one hour and consisted of three short pieces written by Mr. Beckett. The very first was classic Beckett: a man who can’t walk (he is confined to a wheelchair) and a man who can’t see (he has his cane) confront each other. Both need the other in a very fundamental way — to see and move — but neither can stand to be with the other. What to do? They cannot escape. They run away from each other but always return. They are tender and violent. Blasts of absurd vaudevillian Beckettian humour provide relief for what would otherwise be an insupportable situation…

I won’t describe the other five pieces here. Just to mention that I felt that the first evening’s performances I found perhaps more interesting, and certainly easier to follow for me (well okay I admit, one of three pieces was without words – remember all this is in French!). But what was most amazing about the first evening was the lighting. Long rays of light fell on the sienna walls of the theatre. Somehow they seemed to change colour! At one time, they were a deep red, the colour of morning, the dawn. But then there was a clear colour, ochre; the soil of tuscany perhaps a little further away. A midday sun. This all happened before my eyes, but in a way I didn’t fully understand, I couldn’t really comprehend what was happening.

At several times all the lights went out in the theatre, we found ourself in a profound darkness. But not all that profound; from the high domed window, a weak pale glow filtered in from the night-time clouds over Paris, illuminated by the light from a million streetlights. Then a spotlight would come on, and it would illuminate a human face. Behind that, the century-old shape-shifting walls of the theatre. In that darkness, it was quite remarkable how one’s entire universe shrinks right down to that one point of reference, a human face in the void. I listened hard to each word because remember there was the filter of language to be traversed. Time, of course, stretched out in a very curious manner, under this weight of light and concentration. The hour was finished much sooner than one might have thought it would.
Technorati Tags: Paris, Beckett, Theatre

Last night I was at the “Cite de la Musique” to see Steve Reich and Musicians. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Reich for many years now, ever since a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Different Trains. Before I moved to Paris I had never heard any of his music actually performed (too much time spent in remote locations far from anywhere worth being…) But here in Paris his compositions are a regular fixture, and I must have been to at least six or so concerts in the last three years which featured one or two of his works. Last night one had the unique opportunity to hear Steve Reich’s music performed by Steve Reich himself, and his ensemble that have been playing with him for almost forty years I guess…

The “cite” was full to bursting point. I’ve never seen so many people there before. Leaving the metro 5 at the porte de pantin I was amazed to be accosted by people offering to sell me a ticket for the show. This never happened at any other concert I’d been to! Obviously this was a big event. I took my seat with two friends just before the concert began. The lights dimmed, the audience fell silent, and then – all the musicians got up and left. There had been some confusion over who got which set of notes! One of the violinists reappeared and ostentatiously placed a thick set of music on a stand and left again; a few seconds later his colleagues reappeared.

The first piece they played was the extremely moving Daniel Variations, a piece of music written for the journalist Daniel Pearl who was executed by Pakistani militants in 2002. The first time this music has ever been performed in France. Like in Different Trains, Reich scores his music to follow the cadences of speech – this case, words taken from the Book of Daniel; and words spoken by Daniel Pearl on the video of his own execution. The phrase, “My name is Daniel Pearl” is sung a dozen, two dozen times. ” My name is Daniel Pearl”. How could those people have done this thing? Pearl himself was a violinist; and when those words are sung, the string section comes to life, it’s melody shadows the words of Daniel Pearl. “My name is Daniel Pearl (I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California)”. Listening to Reich’s music I really felt it as something vital and living, a statement against the stupidity and pointlessness of the loss of Daniel Pearl’s life. Not all a requiem.

The intermission — and then Music for Eighteen Musicians. For this one, Mr. Reich came out from behind the mixing desk where he’d been stationed before, and took turns at the piano and xylophone. Looking at his musicians one certainly gets the impression that they’ve all been together on this musical journey for a long time. What I found myself thinking was — my gosh! this is the ultimate expression of Steve Reich’s music — by Steve Reich himself! The piece is quite long, and certainly one needs a certain kind of determination to remain concentrated throughout the entire time. For those of you who know Mr. Reich’s music, this one is particularly hypnotic, pulsating, yes, say it — minimalist — but at the same time it is full of all those wonderful contrapuntal structures that a hard-core Bach listener like me likes so much. At one wonderful point in the performance, Mr. Reich and three of his collaborators all play together on the same xylophone! At the same time, I was certain that one guy near the back of the mini-orchestra played the same note for the entire 58 minutes….

At the end of performance, Reich and his musicians were rewarded by rapturous applause. I felt a need to stand up and applaud too. Thanks Mr. Reich and happy seventieth birthday!