erhebung

Based on Actual Events

More stuff that got thrown into “drafts” while I was busy:

This is surely one of the most ambi­tious lists cur­rently on Wiki­pedia. Per­son­ally, I’d be more inter­ested in seeing a list of all the films that begin with a montage of “real life” footage before segueing into the fic­tional world of the film. I watched Dark Blue earlier this week, and in that, the director, Ron Shelton, used the footage of Rodney King being assaulted\beaten\subdued by the Los Angeles Police Depart­ment to open his thriller about cor­rup­tion in the LAPD. There must be hundreds more (I’m fairly sure JFK opens with “real” footage, and of course Stone weaves a great deal of archive material into the body of the film).

Another inter­esting list would be a list of novels directly inspired by actual his­tor­ical events. I was thinking about this while listening to an audiobook of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid because I found myself trying to figure out who was fic­tional and who wasn’t. There are thou­sands of his­tor­ical novels, of course, but I’m thinking spe­cific­ally of novels that build them­selves around recog­nis­able “events” or “points” in history (The Cold Six Thousand, the sequel to American Tabloid, opens just after news breaks that John F. Kennedy has been assas­sin­ated). I can’t find a list that does what I want, though, and I’m not in the frame of mind to make one. But books and films that use his­tor­ical events (or nar­rat­ives) as texture, or as struc­turing elements, are on my mind.

Over the last few weeks I’ve mean mulling a little excess­ively on the question of ver­is­mil­itude and art, and I need to mull some more, form up some thoughts.

I have mulled some more, but not enough. Will return to this in the future.

A Voice File from the Top Deck

A few months ago New Statesman pub­lished an essay by Norman Lebrecht on the future of cri­ti­cism. Here is an excerpt:

[Kenneth] Clark made it possible for a chap in a pub to appre­ciate Francis Bacon, and Reich-​Ranicki for a hausfrau to persuade her neigh­bour in the butcher’s queue that Günter Grass was a more important writer than Hermann Hesse. Kenneth Tynan and Pauline Kael added rep­er­toire tips and quality control to their remit. Their suc­cessors attempt to mediate between a bewildered public and the debate about con­cep­tual art. The role of the critic is in constant evol­u­tion, a work in progress, a creative necessity.

Yet, in 2010, the critic is an endangered species, almost a write-​off. The onslaught of the internet on news­paper eco­nomics has ravaged arts journ­alism. Across the United States, from Miami to Seattle, news­pa­pers have slashed budgets and sacked critics, leaving the New York Times, which is sim­il­arly under siege, wielding an unhealthy near-​hegemony.

In Britain, the Tele­graph and the Times cut review fees to ￡40 and ￡60, a dis­in­centive for all but the utterly des­perate and the aca­dem­ic­ally tenured (who else would write all night for the price of a cheap pair of shoes?). The mech­anism for suc­ces­sion has gone to rust. The average age of clas­sical music reviewers on the nationals is over 55; theatre critics are not much younger. Atrophy is setting in.

After talking for a time about people laid off and dwind­ling coverage of the arts in main­stream media, Lebrecht also recom­mends a couple of inter­esting websites: theartsdesk.com (all and electricsheepmagazine.co.uk. Both are worth a visit. This seems to be the natural tra­jectory for cri­ti­cism to take, although some will ask where the money comes from, how they can remain sus­tain­able. Per­son­ally, I think they’ll all just make a salary selling t-​shirts and taking vol­un­tary dona­tions (I’m half-​joking).

Lebrecht sounds a positive note in his final paragraphs:

How can we rescue cri­ti­cism from the brink of extinc­tion? Some of the best minds in the arts are turning over that question without, at present, much by way of a solution. My feeling is that we have to start from small begin­nings, training a new gen­er­a­tion of critics in the tra­di­tional method and hoping that they will show the resource­ful­ness to achieve con­tinuity. The New Statesman’s search for a young music critic will be widely sup­ported — and not only in this country, as the arts are a global business, but one that, unlike the banks, will never be too big to fail.

The critic of tomorrow will probably tweet a first review in the interval and submit a voice file from the top deck of the homeward-​bound bus. The tempo has quickened and the tech­no­logy has got slicker, but the imper­ative of bearing inde­pendent witness to the arts is unchanged. When the last critic signs off, it will be curtains for civilisation.

Yes. (Although you can argue “tomorrow” is already here.)

An Intensification of Existence

I’ve fallen into an odd love with Kenneth Clarke’s Civil­isa­tion, a series of doc­u­ment­aries Clarke, a his­torian, produced for the BBC in the late sixties. (Inter­est­ingly, it was one of the first major series to be filmed in colour, and it benefits hugely from the innov­a­tion.) After a day of teaching, I find it incred­ibly relaxing to be given an enthu­si­astic and broad-​ranging tour of some or other aspect of Western culture and history (there was a desire to also cover Eastern and pre-​Christian civil­isa­tions, but time con­straints made this impossible). And whether you agree or disagree with Clarke’s opinions (there is much that feels “wrong”, to me, and some of the state­ments that are made seem a little dusty, a little musty; but the show was made 40 years ago, so it’s not really all that sur­prising), it is hard to find fault with his language, his words always well chosen, his sen­tences always elegant, his delivery always crisp and clear and engaging. I’m quite taken by this passage from the second episode of the series:

There have been times in the history of mankind when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radio­active. Well, I don’t put this forward as a sci­entific pro­pos­i­tion, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthink­able under ordinary evol­u­tionary con­di­tions. One such time was about the year 3,000 BC, when quite suddenly civil­isa­tion appeared, not only in Egypt and Meso­pot­amia, but in the Indus Valley. Another was in the late 6th century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece — philo­sophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years — but also in India: a spir­itual enlight­en­ment that has perhaps never been equalled. And aother was around about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world — India, China, Byz­an­tium; but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europe where it was most needed. It was like a Russian spring. In every branch of life — action, philo­sophy, organ­isa­tion, tech­no­logy — there was an extraordinary out­pouring of energy, an intens­i­fic­a­tion of existence.

The whole series can be found on YouTube, which is excel­lent. And here is the video that cor­res­ponds with the passage I quited above.:

Canned Peaches Are Sometimes Enough

I wrote this a few days ago, but forgot to post it:

There is a time for single malt, and a time for rough Swedish vodka; a time for exquis­itely mar­in­ated steak (cooked on a flaming barbecue in a USAF base in South Korea, prefer­ably — but that’s another story), and a time for canned peaches. Films are similar: some are like single malts, others like canned peaches. Tonight I felt like a can of peaches, my brain too weary, too fatigued with nonsense, to appre­ciate anything else, and so I watched The Crazies, a film about a sherrif strug­gling to survive as the town he serves goes insane around him. It was good, in its way, and ended on an pleas­ingly open-​ended note (there might be sequels?). Also, it starred Timothy Olyphant, an actor best known (I would imagine) for playing Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood. There was someone else from Deadwood in it, too, but I’ve for­gotten their name (one of the dope “fiends”).

I feel the same about pho­to­graphy, in a way, right now. Part of it may just be my own personal lack of inspir­a­tion; but a bigger part, I sense, is an unwill­ing­ness to immerse myself in pho­to­graphy of a really high quality. There is an issue with con­sump­tion, not just creation. Music, yes; lit­er­ature, yes; but pho­to­graphy, no. Some­times a fine single malt is great; but some­times you just want to get drunk; and at other times, alcohol just doesn’t appeal at all. With pho­to­graphy, for me, I either want to be com­pletely inebri­ated by what I see, or just not see anything; I’m not in the mood to savour a huge amount of subtlely con­structed, del­ic­ately composed, deeply mean­ingful work. This troubles me, at moments, but not enough to want to do anything to remedy the situ­ation, most probably because I feel very con­tented. So, other obses­sions are to be found. Painting, maybe. Or car­pentry. Or BMX biking. We will see.

Exploring Today (Yesterday)

Wrote this yes­terday, but didn’t get chance to post it here:

Exploring today: found some deli­cious speakers, but decided they were probably too expensive; also found some very cheap in-​the-​ear head­phones, but decided they were probably too cheap; bought some apples and had a bizarre exchange with the apple-​seller; was told by a lady in a DVD store that I was pretty, then told her that she was pretty too (there was blushing); tasted a nice syrupy cake; wandered around and thought about whether or not I needed a digital camera (pretty sure I don’t, but…); met some amusing, lively people at work, one of whom used to study in Xi’an (“I miss the food”, she said); chatted with a wise lady who remembered being given candy by US soldiers when they lib­er­ated Germany (and last night that same lady talked about how once, while living in Paris and missing home, she had listened to Gounoud’s Faust; her descrip­tion of some of the closing scenes — the depic­tion of The Brocken? — has stuck in my mind). More exploring tomorrow.

Do Anything

The most con­sist­ently inter­esting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns pub­lished on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the indi­vidual install­ments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recom­mend taking a look.

Sites of Incarceration

I found Pete Brook’s thought-​provoking Prison Pho­to­graphy blog via con­sumptive (another thought-​provoking blog), and since finding it I’ve spent a lot of time exploring its archives. It’s def­in­itely worth exploring. Brook is using his blog to ask per­tinent questions:

If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/​were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the pho­to­graph as social document, there­fore, what social and polit­ical powers are at play in a photograph’s man­u­fac­ture? And, how is know­ledge, related to those powers, constructed?

It’s implicit, I think, that these are ques­tions we could — should, even — direct at all pho­to­graphy, not just the pho­to­graphy of “sites of incarceration”.

On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read some­thing that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:

[…] I think pho­to­graphers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice pho­to­graphy these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]

I think other people do notice pho­to­graphy, and I think that some will notice the aes­thetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of con­tem­porary pho­to­graphy (and likewise con­tem­porary poetry, con­tem­porary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appre­ci­ation within a quite insular, self-​contained, elitist milieu.

Big Dark Eyes

While on a par­tic­u­larly lengthy ramble through the interweb last night, I stumbled upon an article about Pablo Picasso ori­gin­ally pub­lished in a 1950 edition of Time magazine. Here is a snippet:

Today Picasso’s own face is leathery, seamed and wrinkled, illu­min­ated by big dark eyes which some­times sparkle but more often stare off into the distance. He is old and fat, but still powerful: his chest and belly, brist­ling with white, goatlike hairs, are mahogany-​tanned. At 68, he still dom­in­ates the whole canvas of modern art.

The internet, today, is full of stars.

A portrait of Pablo Picasso by Gjon Mili. (Source)

Kicking His Something Something

A gem from the Time magazine archives:

No one really expected Painter Henri Matisse to bother to answer the attack that British Royal Academy Pres­ident Sir Alfred Munnings had made on his work (TIME, May 9). But last week Matisse did. Sitting up in bed in his suburban apart­ment at Nice to talk to a TIME cor­res­pondent, the 79-​year-​old master gently con­tra­dicted Horse-​Painter Munnings’ views on modern art in general.

“If you want to paint a tree,” gruff Sir Alfred had snorted at a recent R.A. banquet, “for heaven’s sake make it look like a tree!” Matisse’s La Forêt (in London’s Tate Gallery) did not look a bit like trees to Sir Alfred. Argued Matisse, why should it? Such “material truth,” he said, might as well be left to pho­to­graphy. The truth modern painters like himself are after is some­thing else again; it “comes out of the mind of the artist… the sen­ti­ment of an artist moved by the spec­tacle of nature.”

“There are always two kinds of paint­ings,” Matisse went on. “First there is the kind that intro­duces some­thing new. Such paint­ings begin by being worth­less but even­tu­ally they ascend the heights of value. Then there are those which are accepted at the outset because they offer nothing new but simply flatter the public taste. They are later found to be worthless.”

The story of Matisse’s own career clearly made him an example of the first kind of painter. Could he think of an opposite example? “Charity commands me,” said Matisse with a smile, “not to name any artists who do paint­ings of the second sort.”

The original Time article is here. And a little more back­ground:

[Sir Alfred] Munnings was elected pres­ident of the Royal Academy of Art in 1944, a post he held until 1949. His pres­id­ency is most famous for the departing speech he gave in 1949, attacking mod­ernism. The broad­cast was heard by millions of listeners to BBC radio. An evid­ently inebri­ated Munnings claimed that the work of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso had cor­rupted art. He recalled that Winston Churchill had once said to him, “Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his… some­thing some­thing?” to which Munnings said he replied “Yes Sir, I would”.

Won­derful.

Stills #1: Days of Heaven (1978)

This great evil — where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doing this? Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we mighta known? Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you too? Have you passed through this night?

Dialogue from Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line

The first Terrence Malick film I ever saw was The Thin Red Line, the second, the The New World; and after I had seen those I was left wishing for there to be more: more swaying grass, more dithering sunlight, more soulful char­ac­ters, more elegiac dialogue. Malick’s films mes­mer­ised me, and it was jarring to wake from the trance.

Up until a week or so ago, Days of Heaven was a film I had heard about but never seen, a mys­ter­ious entry on Malick’s filmo­graphy that I hadn’t been able to find in the local DVD store. But then I found it, and now I have seen it, and I’m glad I did as it is a beau­tiful and inspired me to find fields to pho­to­graph. The still below, the first in what will be an ongoing series of film stills, is from a scene towards the end of the film. Thinking about these films brings a poem by Ezra Pound to mind:

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Life does not slip so much as ebb and flow in Malick’s films; and the grass does get shaken, does sway, if only a little.

Fields of corn in Days of Heaven.

At the Mouth of an Inaccessible Gorge

While I was wikiwalking last week, I found a place I’d really like to visit:

Saint Catherine’s Mon­as­tery (Greek: Μονὴ τῆς Ἁγίας Αἰκατερίνης) lies on the Sinai Pen­in­sula, at the mouth of an inac­cess­ible gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai in Saint Kath­erine city in Egypt. The mon­as­tery is Greek Orthodox and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to the UNESCO report (60100 ha /​Ref: 954) and website here­under, this mon­as­tery has been called the oldest working Chris­tian mon­as­tery in the world — although the Mon­as­tery of Saint Anthony, situated across the Red Sea in the desert south of Cairo, also holds claim to that title.

[…]

The oldest record of monastic life at Sinai comes from the travel journal written in Latin by a woman named Egeria about 381 – 384. She visited many places around the Holy Land and Mount Sinai, where, according to the Hebrew Bible, Moses received the Ten Com­mand­ments from God.

[…]

The mon­as­tery library pre­serves the second largest col­lec­tion of early codices and manu­scripts in the world, out­numbered only by the Vatican Library. Its strength lies in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, and Syriac texts. The Codex Sinait­icus, now in the British Library, left the mon­as­tery in the 19th century for Russia, in cir­cum­stances that are now disputed.

Dust and sand, time and history: these things have been all been on my mind quite a lot of late.

Sunshine and Cataclysms

Yoann Lemoine (who I found on BOOOOOOOM!, a site I should visit more often) makes images, takes pho­to­graphs, that I would love to put all over my walls. This image seems pulled from some near-​future science fiction tale (is it a utopia trans­forming into a dystopia, or vice versa?), or perhaps from a novel by J. G. Ballard (Cocaine Nights came to mind first, because I vividly recall the sunlight in that book, but Super-​Cannes , with its heat, its concrete, and its glass-​walled offices, is perhaps a better fit):

Many of Lemoine’s pho­to­graphs evoke, for me, the end of the world (or could it be the edge of the world, the fringe: world’s-end?); even the pho­to­graph on her site of the singers — a choir, I think — feels ominous, somehow. She is pho­to­graphing in the present, visu­al­ising the future; and the futures artists visu­alise are always con­di­tioned by how they inter­pret the present. I would like to know more about Lemoine, about her philo­sophy, her hopes, her fears.

This pho­to­graph cer­tainly suggests a journey towards closure, a trip to the edge of some­where, something:

And when I saw this pho­to­graph my first asso­ci­ation, strangely, was On the Beach, (a purely arbit­rary asso­ci­ation, a con­nec­tion of “sand” and “beach”, as I’ve not actually read Shute’s novel):

My second asso­ci­ation was The Quiet Earth, the opening scene of which feature (if my memory is correct) a beach, and waves. A cata­clysm has occurred, and only a few people have survived. There is heat (a very Bal­lar­dian heat, now I think about it) and loneli­ness, the nar­rative tracking a survivor’s explor­a­tion of his newly barren world. Lemoine’s pho­to­graphs do not always depict a barren world, but they do hint at approaching cataclyms.

(On the subject of films about the end of the world, Knowing, the latest film by Alex Proyas, director of the exquisite Dark City, is a mighty thing, and I can’t under­stand why it didn’t receive better reviews when it was first released. Well, I can, in a way, but still: what flaws it may have are greatly out­weighed by its ambition, its ideas. If you get the chance, watch it: it is all that good science fiction films should be, but so fre­quently are not.)