The insoluble pancake

I’m afraid that once again my eyes are on the intricate web of cracks and fissure lines up there on ceiling– read my first post if you don’t understand. Looking close I see one fissure has a name — it is the name of a song I first heard as a boy in Ireland almost twenty years ago. I think of this time almost as a negative, pre-time; this happened even before my life began. You see, I always considered the instant I left Ireland and traveled east as the actual moment I began to live, the point after which things could happen to me, when life unfroze. But stuff actually happened back then, on the other side of zero?

Of course it did. I see long slices of sunlight on my bedroom wall. It is very early in the morning, perhaps five or six am, and the light comes to my room slowly at first, deep red lines of light, sunlight sliding obliquely through the Venetian blinds, fading in now, becoming brighter, light at the end of another shallow northern night which was never really night. It is summer.

I am listening to a cassette tape. I’m listening to a song from the Blue Nile. It is a recording I plucked from the air, from the radio. Blasts of FM static obscure the song’s opening melody. We are far from the transmitter. The song fades in, a few bars of a repeated melody, the sound of sticks on sticks. The first line I miss, I never hear until ten years have passed and I am living in Durham. You are pretending, Buchanan sings, in his hoarse voice, love is worth waiting for. I wasn’t pretending anything! This was, remember, before pretense and knowledge. Heatwave, heatwave he sings, and I imagine there in my northern room that this day to come would be one of those impossibly warm days where one can neither move nor think, frozen into immobility. Heatwave, heatwave, why is it rolling down on the young and foolish? What did I know of heat? In a decade and half I would live in Bologna where for one summer the mercury never went below thirty, even at night, for two long months. But here in pre-history it is different, everything is implied or imagined, the rising sun becomes the sun, the day begins with its promise of great heat, the song finishes.

Before I can rewind the tape, I am at the other end of the fissure. I am standing in my apartment in Paris about to press the skip button on my mp3 player, to skip back instantaneously, and I skip back, forward– and once again I am in this twenty-first century present, and Mr. Buchanan’s voice fills my living room again, I hear the first line of the song that I’d never heard back then, you live beneath another star,
And too much has happened, or not enough. Do I feel the same, here, listening to this song? I do here, in this instant. I skip back and forward over two decades of event and happening, drawing a line from France to Ireland passing through everywhere else I have lived. Distance and time shrink down to zero, I see the long-gone rays of lost sunlight on the walls of my apartment in Paris, I open my window and feel the warm evening air, a summer’s evening in Paris, and I return again, evening becomes morning, and yes, this is the memory, I realise, this is the memory which has yet to happen.

It’s already a few weeks since I’ve written here, and I realise I never wrote anything about my return to the Champo to see the next film Antonioni made, Il deserto rosso. His first film in colour. It was shot in the Po valley, around Ravenna, not so far from Bologna, not too distant from Ferrara, Antonioni’s home town.

Antonioni films in colour but there are no natural colours in the film — except for a segment near the end which perhaps serves the same function as the blast of colour in Wenders’ Der himmel uber berlin or the suddenly moving figure in Chris Maker’s La Jetee: we immediately realise how impoverished our screen existence has been up to then. Antonioni’s vision of the countryside of Emilia Romagna is of a terrifying blasted landscape where the rivers have been turned to sludge and the skies are filled with flame and steam. The cities that we see consist of monochromatic back streets where no-one lives and no-one could possibly live. And through all of that comes the famous fog of Emilian Romana, a fog which can linger for days thanks to the long low level plains where there is no wind, no air to move or stir things. Every so often, immense ships drift along the canals and waterways, materializing by magic, and they seem, perhaps, to offer in equal proportions the possibility of escape or plague.

Once again, the very beautiful Monica Vitti wanders in the midst of this awful desolation, but this time even less cognisant than before. The ostensible reason is that she was in an ‘accident’ but we know that it was really because of all those microparticles in the air, the heavy metals in the water, the constant noise and smoke. An abortive affair with Mr. Richard Harris provides no respite because of course Mr. Harris is there just to take advantage of her weakened state of mind and subsequent intermittent failures of judgement. And of course she can’t escape on any of the ships that slide terrifyingly close to her bedroom window because, alas, she can’t speak the sailor’s language to ask them for a passage to — wherever.

Watching the film, I could see echoes of two films yet to come — Lynch’s Eraserhead and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, both of which rather cruelly subjected their principal characters to the same overwhelming epic industrial alienation. Like Stalker, Il Deserto Rosso is an ‘inaction movie’ where the most important thing always seems to be what might happen — which does not, of course. But I appreciate very much the certain peculiar atmosphere these films have. Each shot in Antonioni’s film is beautifully framed and after fifty or so minutes of “beautiful” smoke stacks and power plants or close pans of the hypnotic regularity of antennaes of the Medicina radio telescope, one might even believe that this kind of beauty is the only kind of beauty which exists. It’s only when we travel to the distant island (recounted in a story by mme. Vitti) and we see the distant seas, the open sky and the blue waters below do we realise, actually, that this thing we thought beautiful is, in fact, very, very ugly.

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.