The insoluble pancake

Before I left for the Germany I was at the cinema — I went to see Antonioni’s The Passenger (the English title is much better than the Italian or French one, if you ask me). The film, apparently, has not been in cinemas for a decade or so, and was re-released last year. It was on at one of my favourite cinemas, Le Champo, so I went along. For the very last projection. The one at 21.45, at the dead end of the day. And just like the other films of his that I’d seen, I feel a need to record here what I have seen.

The film is in English, and in colour. Mr. Jack Nicholson plays a reporter travelling through the remote wastes of Africa in search of important people, leaders of the resistance. That one great interview which could explain everything. But he finds nothing. His targets are elusive, they disappear. The sands shift and he is lost thousands of miles from where he should be. Antonioni, of course, pulls the camera back, we see the dunes and desert wastes, and hear the harsh breath of wind across the sands, see Nicholson’s desparation in the midst of this void.

Somehow — we are never sure how — he find his way back to his hotel, a small village, a few stone walls lost in the sand. He calls on his neighbour, a man he’d spoken to for a few minutes and finds — the man is dead. And he notices something, looking at his passport — he resembles the dead man, just a little. Enough to pass for him in this land far from white man. Surely this man’s life is simpler than his? He decides that he is the dead man, that the dead man is him. He lifts the dead man’s appointment book and sees the journeys he will have to make.

This idea is the core of Antonioni’s film. Does it really matter who you are, actually? From very early in the film it becomes clear that the answer is no, really it does not. Nicholson’s new identity is just as marked as his old one. That the film can only have one possible ending is very clear.

Every frame of the film is as carefully framed as a painting. Nicholson crosses ocean waters in a cable car, is suspended alone above the blue waters, unsupported. The film proceeds at slow, glacial pace but this does not matter as there is so much to look at, the buildings and people, the long shots full of space and distance. Nicholson arrives at each destination marked in the appointment book to find one empty square after another. No-one arrives. He waits for Godot. But others know who he is now. At the end, for the last frames of the film, a long unbroken shot carefully takes in many details over the course of almost ten minutes. It is a perfectly choreographed termination to Mr. Nicholson’s doomed trajectory. A great film, as great as any of the other Antonionis I have seen.

Ringberg castle — do you know it? “Schloss Ringberg” to those who speak German. A castle in the forests of Bavaria. I’ve just spent five days there, from the Sunday before last, to Friday morning. An easy journey to make, a one hour flight from Paris CDG to Munich, then a one-hour bus journey. Heading south, to the mountains. The alps. Forests and trees. A flat level plain, then suddenly steep hills, mountains. The castle gate, the heavy wooden door: we had arrived. I say we: I was there for a meeting, there were perhaps forty of us lodged in the castle for the week. A strange and incomplete place. Incomplete seems to be the best word I can think of to describe it. Of course, now, it is completed, but not to the original design. Not what the makers had intended. The architect and the archduke, hopelessly separate from each other who could only be together whilst they worked on this project which would never be finished.

Over the course of the five days I was there, I filled in the details of the construction of the castle, how it got to be the way it was. My understanding deepened. But I was surprised, constantly, by at least one or two ghosts peering over my shoulder, by figures appearing two steps ahead of me, by a long look that I wasn’t expecting in place where there was no one. Crossing the castle garden at midnight, past the swimming pool empty of water for decades, I would be be surprised by a sudden shadow in the bushes — then I would realise, again, for the tenth time, that it was a nothing more than a silent static statute which had unnerved me. Opening the door of the tower where I was sleeping I would be greeted by the architect, peering back at me from his canvas, one of the many self portraits he had painted which were hung throughout the castle.

The paintings, yes, I knew I would have to talk about the paintings. An early period, a late period. The early period carries heavy echoes of all that happened here in Paris, that play of light and colour seen for the first time in canvases at the start of the century. After that, it is man and nature, together. Heavy-handed obtuse attempts to convey the elemental nature of the world, spring, virility, the seasons, life. A great theme. But in this man’s hands it becomes a figure in lederhosen happily pole-vaulting over a half-sleeping cow. Or a man in the forest with dog at his heel, surrounded by abundant forest life, hands clasped in prayer, radiant light streaming from him to the animals around him.

On the castle’s main staircase hangs the central work, the dead heart of the castle. An enormous tableau which had been hidden for years, but now is visible to all. Two men stand side by side on hilltop. They are looking towards their castle, which either has not yet been built or is finished, completed. It is the archduke and his architect. Behind them far below are the blue waters of the Tergensee, the tiny houses of the village. A dog sits attentively at the Archduke’s feet. There is a tense air in the space between the two figures. An attraction, but too many lines to be completed, paths to be found which do not exist. In the painting, the colours, shades, gradation of light and dark are horribly off, terribly wrong, incorrect. It is enough, really, indicate that these figures exist, and not to make them real.

The Archduke would never live in his castle, preferring the luxury of a hotel in Munich; and the architect would die alone there, in 1947, the depths of winter I suppose, his project unfinished. Do I really need a castle like this, the Archduke asked himself at the end, a man like myself, with no family, no retinue? A deal is made, eventually, the castle is given to the Max Planck society, and money is found for its upkeep, refurbishement. Scholars now arrive from remote corners of the globe to discuss pressing issues concerning the distant Universe. Or any field of human endeavour. But when I think of that place now I think of that canvas hanging over the castle’s staircase, of these two figures, the Archduke and his architect. Lines not drawn to their point of completion.

More time has passed – but I’ve not been completely idle. Here, in a spirit of shameless self-promotion, are two articles I’ve written in the last month:

My article in ‘Spiked’

– This one was inspired by things I’d heard during my stay in Hawaii during the summer.

My article for the ‘Battle of Ideas’ conference

– And this one was actually written during my two weeks in Waikiki, mostly from the terrace of my hotel room. Usually after a hard day’s working on data reductions….

In my next entry, normal service will be resumed.

While I was in Honolulu of course I went to the bookshop. No hanging around beaches and surfing all day for me! I picked up a load of light beach lit — Hanna Arendt, Samuel Beckett and Czelaw Milosz. Appropriate enough, actually, Milosz has written enough poems about beauty of beaches and nature….and really whether or not one would be better off staying inside and thinking some more. Amongst the Milosz books I bought I was very happy to find “Second space”, which is the last book of poems he wrote before his death in 2004. There are many fine poems within, a particularly wonderful one is “Apprentice” which milosz writes about his relative, Oscar Milosz. It contains the following heart-stopping lines, written about the death and burial of Josef Brodsky in Venice:

“So Venice sets sail like a great ship of death,
On its deck a swarming crowd of people changed into ghosts.
I said my farewell at San Michele by Joseph’s grave and Ezra Pound’s.
The city was ready, of course, to receive the crowds of the unborn
For whom we will be just an enigmatic legend.”

And mr Milosz, you great and good man, you would be already gone from us before your poem reached the shores of the English language….and me, I spent the next few days driving around Kauai with my copy of “Second Space” lodged in the windscreen of my rental car. Every so often, when I stopped a particularly remote location, I would open the book at those lines and read them, just to make sure that they were still there.