Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

The incredible lightness of buffalo.

From the first scene, this film is possessed by a lightness, the lightness in the earth. A water-buffalo, sleek, sentient and beautiful in the moony twilight that suffuses the greater part of this film sniffs the air, lows and whinnies, breaks from its hitch, and trots into the Thai jungle alive with the whirr and click of invisible insects. It moons and munches in the undegrowth until its human keeper, a figure at home in but not precisely of this realm of megafauna and dense and sleeping vegetable life, calmly summons it forth. There is no urgency of motivation for this beast's escape, nor in its return to the fold, just an everpresence that compels, an immanence that steadily breathes and animates each and every floating moment. This scene is quietly breathtaking and it sets the tone for the gorgeous, ghostly celebration in slow cinema that is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Folds in time: ghostly presences.

Uncle Boonmee is a kindly widowed farmer of tamarinds and honey, who's seen some time in the Thai military in action against the Communists, and now, suffering from a slowly debilitating kidney disease, has begun to see time in a whole new way. Though Buddhism and the Buddhist way of life inflects this film, it is not so much a case of Boonmee recalling his past lives as a kind of record recited, but rather an expression of the way that lives, of others, of dreams, always already in the past, are recalled by consisting in the presently lived. Boonmee's wife manifests at the dinner table – the shock to his visiting sister-in-law and nephew is only momentary, Boonmee unflappable – saying that she doesn't experience human time anymore. She becomes a part of the palliative cohort Boonmee gathers around himself – family, his mostly illegal immigrant Lao farmhands and personal carer – but of course, she has never left. When he asks her where his spirit should look for her when he dies, she answers "ghosts do not attach themselves to places, they attach themselves to people."

Even more surprising is the appearance of Boonmee's sister-in-law's son, who disappeared years ago. He returns as one of the glowing red-eyed simian forms that haunt the margins of the film, at the edge of the human realm, stepping into the moth-harried lamplight at the dinner table in all his Wookie glory. He relates his obsessesion with taking photographs as a boy, until one day he sees a blurry figure in a snap and sets out to find the animal. It turns out to be a Money Ghosts with whom he runs away with, leaving the human realm for a twilit existence. This story is one of many haunting episodes in the film that don't have an obvious connection to the whole – but this is a relief. Without searching anxiously for a coherent map of this suspended collection of narrative soap-bubbles, you always feel fantastically privy to the firelit clearing at the heart of the movie, at the heart of which is love, compassion, and companionship, a light that extends out into the inhuman world of the jungle and the timeless stones but whose horizon is not visible, or obvious, to human eyes. By what I suspect is a thoroughgoing use of shooting day-for-night, the film, like a dream, moves beyond the visible to the sensuous; primary is feeling, and tone.

Our animal selves in other realms.

In the weightlessness of the film, its buoyancy and oneiric alignment of the human and spirit worlds, is a concern with time, lived time, and the recollection of time, as the title might suggest. The idea that the past, past lives, are all present is one such indication of this concern. I also feel that there is an acute concern with the way cinema can spatialise time, can map the presence of time. There's a curious episode that Boonmee narrates while he (of course locating him temporally like this is a difficult to avoid side-effect of descriptive language) is released from life deep in a cave, whose crystalline formations and strata are geology's diagrams of time, a time beyond any humanly phenomenal dimension. He talks of a dream in which he was (again, undesirable temporal positioning) a time-traveller to a future where the authorities have a beam that seeks out past-people, projecting them onto a wall and in doing so revealing them. This cannot avoid comparison to the cinematic apparatus, if only in that it literally projects events that have unfolded and been inscribed in a past-time. While Boonmee narrates, a series of 'stills' (static shots that have been rephotographed by the film camera, that is) depict a group of military and young men interacting with (guiding by a leash, posing for the camera with) patently ape-suit wearing figures. This depiction could be pinned down to an illustration of Boonmee's dream: a future society, and the ape-figures as the past-people, perhaps a visual echo of the monkey ghosts of the other episode. It also resonates with the film's subtle undercurrent of contemporary S E Asian politics and history: illegal immigration, ideological wars in Indochina, guerilla groups (seriously now): an undercurrent that goes some way to anchoring the film in a narrative stream that is not entirely that of dream or the floating, unengaged world.

At the same time, there is an unbroachable disjuncture between the linguistic device of voiceover narration and the succession of static shots, a juxtaposition that recalls Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962).  The suggestion is that we live a dream, and that images and stories are the way our lives, present and past, are preserved, recalled, lived again (the ghost at the dinner table pores over a photo album at one point); the ineffability of our lives and what lies beyond life, and the ineluctability of our engagement with life by way of stories and images, not to mention the ineluctable transformation or negation of life that is death. 

After Boonmee's death and funeral, this is enacted in an even more direct fashion when sister-in-law, daughter, and the family friend monk drag themselves away for dinner and karaoke from the soap-opera in their hotel room only to react, however mildly, to the sight of doubles of themselves remaining passive in front of the telly. Visually, it is a literal (temporal/spatiovisual) bifurcation that seems to replicate the cyclic, resurgent temporality that subtends dream and experience, that is the substance and lifeblood of this singularly beautiful, meditative piece of celluloid. I sat engrossed in a fold in time for its entire length, knowing this was a singular film well-deserving of its Palme d'Or at Cannes 2010.

Fantastic Planet - Traag Adult Time

Yesss! Thanks D.

Woman in the Dunes (Kobo Abe, 1962)

This isn't my copy, but a cool cover nonetheless. I covet. Mine's the 2006 Penguin with a Corbis stock photo.  I mean it has a figure prostrate (or is it supine) in the dunes, could be a woman, could be a man, the ambiguity is effective. The dunes undulate, the contrast is high, skin like hot burnished metal or grilled silica, great. Figure supine in dunes undulating. Yes, but it's a Corbis stock photo.

I always judge a book by its cover and it looks like this one fits the dark passions that boil in the book. Maybe it's a still from the 1964 Hiroshi Teshigahara film? I've got that lined up to watch.

Again, this book slots nicely into the others that have come across my lap of late. Definite references to Kafka - the protagonist is an entomologist who describes himself and others as insects, and refelcts on the life of insects; he also refers to himself as a mole at one point, cf. Kafka's The Burrow.

A man collecting insects at a remote village enagged in an endless battle against encroaching dunes finds himself trapped, or at least an extended guest, in the titular woman's rotting house at the bottom of a sand pit. A less epic and far more creepy imagination of life at the bottom of the pit of Sarlaac.

Come to mama.

Food and water lowered in on a rope, sand hauled out. Food and water withheld if the Sisyphean task of keeping the hole clear of the rottig house is not worked at. Man plots escape, but what kind of life is he escaping to, if not one analogously absurd? Where some do Sudoku on the Tube, I ponder such questions. 

There's a great sense of desperation in sweat, snot, mucus membranes clotted and caked with sand. Visceral to say the least, there's a peppering of hot, odd Japanese erotica throughout. Suicide is pondered to spite his captors. He tries to catch crows. The sand is figured as a kind of living entity, as the exemplary condition of existence. Atomic, coherent, constantly in flux, dry, wet, all-consuming. It's a great read that delivers always from the fevered insides of the entomologist's subjectivity, not to mention the organs of his rage and desire.

Resonates with Camus' desert obsessions. Cred AJ.

Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand

The Little Island (Richard Williams, 1958)

The Skeleton Dance (Walt Disney, 1929)

Eisenstein called this a "masterpiece of the moving equivalent of music", subsequently theorising his concept of the 'plasmatic' - the metamorphic, protoplasmic possibilities of the image best demonstrated in the graphic animation.

Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Been meaning to get around to Badlands for a while now, hearing many an enraptured account of it. It's certainly good, and fits into the books that have been falling into my lap of late – Kafka, Camus, DeLillo's Omega Point. All deal with existential themes, I suppose. (Then again, I'm increasingly aware of the operations of what Deleuze would call 'the dogmatic image of thought' - put simply, the tendency to get an idea in your head and then see it manifest wherever you look). One might ask What doesn't 'deal' with 'existence'? Huh.

Spacek of the gorgeous almond and alien eyes likens Martin Sheen's character Kit to James Dean in one of her naïvely romantic voiceovers, a description echoed (to Kit's pleasure) by the arresting officer. James Dean being that iconic rebel without a cause that, like Camus, was snuffed from lived existence in a car crash.

Badlands was inspired by the 1957 killing spree of Charles Starkweather and girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, but these particulars of course dissolve in the general: the outlaw as emblematic of the American Western frontier pushing, and the outlawed lovers as an intensification of this mythology, the doomed romantic in doomed romance. As such Badlands takes its cue from 1967's Production Code busting Bonnie & Clyde. It also reminds me of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970), the second in his MGM 'trilogy' (Blow Up, 1966, and The Passenger, 1975 - this latter cowritten by structuralist film critic Peter Wollen). There again we have the antiestablishment figures, growing up absurd, a backdrop of overbearing patriarchal authority and, crucially, the American landscape as both a liberating and crushing  space, regarded as beautiful or awesome but wholly indifferent to our regard.

I love Malick's use of the apparatus of media - private presses, Spacek's murdered father's stereopticon - that seem to underline the dreamlife that Spacek and Sheen's characters lead and Kit's need to establish himself in the pantheon of the outlaw, leaving messages from beyond the coffin he seems resigned to nailing together with each dubiously motivated shooting.

Spacek gets the last gaze though. Holding onto the image of Kit as a James Dean rebel, equally spinning out his public image even as he is chained and bound for the electric chair, her regard remains dreamlike and it is as if it were her gaze, doubled and held in counterpoint with her poetic monologues, that built Kit all along, that it is she and not Kit's violet inscription of himself upon the world that carries their story, cradle to the grave.

The Myth of Sisyphus (Albert Camus, 1942)

Camus, Albert.  The Myth of Sisyphus.
1942.  Trans. Justin O'Brien, 1955. 
Penguin Great Ideas 39.  London: Penguin, 2005.

The second of the lovely Penguin Great Ideas series I've picked up. These pocket-The cover art is by David Pearson and seems to me to be a kind of sized volumes are gorgeously presented. This one's cover is by David Pearson and is a suitably minimalist Malevich/Ad Reinhardt reduction of Sisyphus rock nested in white void threatening to crush the text below. I like.

The first of the Penguin Great Ideas I read was Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin Great Ideas 56), which included not only the titular essay but also essays on Proust and Kafka. The latter is particularly interesting here because in The Myth of Sisyphus Camus holds Kafka up as a representative creator of absurd fiction.

In Benjamin's essay, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death", recounts an early jotting where Kafka writes, 'I have experience... and I am not joking when I say it is a kind of sea-sickness on dry land" (78). A sickness brought on by an encounter with the "fluctuating nature of experience" where "every experience has 'give'; every experience blends with its opposite" surely recalls the attitude of existential philosophy, principally Antoine Roquentin's experience in Sartre's Nausea (La Nausée, 1938).

Like Sartre, Camus' existentialism follows from Heidegger when he states that anxiety is fundamental and that this anxiety (Angst for Heidegger and Kierkegaard) is generated when we situate ourselves in relation to time. Like parasites, "we live on the future",  Heidegger's futural 'thrown' projection of ourselves. Living for tomorrow changes its tone when Camus' man "takes his place in time", fully realising our temporal, that is temporary, location. At this point he

"admits the he stands on a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges he has to travel to its end. He belongs to time and, by the horror that seizes him, he recognises his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him out to reject it. The revolt of the flesh is the absurd" (12).

Again, recalling Roquentin's nauseating experience of the perplexing evanescent-yet-persistent world of objects, Camus talks of the realm "a step lower" from the mundane human condition, where

"strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is 'dense', sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us," that "at the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them" (12-13).

Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent (1989). 

But Camus' approach is breaks with existentialism as formulated, after Heidegger, by Sartre. Where Sartre would stress the vitality of the 'heroic act', that 'to be is to do', Camus' properly termed absurdism rejects that it is essential for humans to create meaning for themselves in a meaningless cosmos without saying that such constructions are impossible. Rather, the pursuit of meaning may have meaning in itself and the solution to our desire for meaning lies not in burying one's head in a solipsistic and autopoetic universe of constructed meaning but the embrace of one's constant becoming (even as one ceases to be). 'Existence precedes essence' is the maxim and, without necessity or essence, the meaning of existence may consist in a simultaneous acceptance and revolt against the Absurd.

Camus turns to Kafka in an Appendix titled "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka", and his opening gambit is to suggest that apprehension of Kafka's works is a Sisyphean task: "The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read" (120). For Camus, Kafka's characters are "inspired automata" that "provide us with a precise image of what we should be if we were deprived of our distractions and utterly consigned to the humiliations of the divine" (127). The divine, after Kierkegaard, is the absurd. That is, as illustrated by Kierkegaard's retelling of the tale of Abraham and Isaac, experience of the divine necessitates a 'leap of faith' into the religious sphere that is tantamount to a surrender to the irrational. Kafka's characters exist in a world where secular and bourgeois mythology has displaced much of the religious, so that Metamorphosis' Gregor Samsa lives by the clockwork of his day-job and familial obligations even after his transformation, worrying that he might be late and what his boss might think about his new form.

At the same time, in figuring the human condition so vividly, Kafka's characters are supremely 'lucid', they represent Kafka's embrace of the God, that is the absurd, that consumes him: "Kafka refuses his god moral nobility, evidence, virtue, coherence, but only the better to fall into his arms." However, Camus refuses Kafka the full credit of an aburd embrace. "The absurd is recognised, accepted, nd man is resigned to it, but from then on we know that it has ceased to be the absurd." This is because Kafka adopts the existential attitude that "is steeped in a vast hope" that the lucid apprehension of an absurd existence, that is a temporally bound existence devoid of inherent meaning, can somehow be transcended.

Kafka's brilliance, then, lies in falling somewhat short of the absurd, for suffering hope and nostalgia. Nevertheless, in Kafka "we are carried to the confines of human thought" for "if nostalgia is the mark of the human, perhaps no one has given such flesh and volume to these phantoms of regret" (133). Camus concludes with reference to Kafka's The Burrow, in which an 'absurdly' rational mole-like creature expends a life mapping and constructing his burrow in defence of an encroaching enemy only identified by a mysterious fluctuating and omnidirectional sound. Camus finds "at the conclusion of the vehement proceedings Kafka institutes against the universe" that "his unbelievable verdict is this hideous and upsetting world in which the very moles dare to hope" (134). The hope expressed at the conclusion of The Burrow is that the encroaching beast has paused, or that it has even failed to register the existence of the mole. This hope is absurd, while falls short of the absurd in its tacit denial of the facticity of death, which figured as the beast is indeed utterly indifferent to the presence of the mole. The contradictory last line of The Burrow states "but all remained unchanged", even as the mole's existence continues to be devoted to an unending cartographic record of its own construction even as the beast, a present absence, flickers in the unmapped space beyond lived existence.

On Getting The Ball Rolling

Titian's Sísifo (1548-1549)

Finally, it's time to blog. I've committed to posting at least something about every film and book I look at, that is, sit in front of and watch or open and read. It is, however, unlikely. I'm inconsistent at the best of times and anyway this first post, perhaps the entire motivation behind this blog, is procrastination, distraction. This alternative to doing other is bound by the same laws of inadequation, I'm sure. In addition, I would like to expand the promised mission to include a reflection, however brief, on every piece of art I see, but this promise, already likely to be broken, most certainly will not be maintained. If this account promises to be a complete record of the aesthetic life, or at least the one aesthetic life feel I can claim to be privy to, it is doomed to infidelity. This is good, because who would want, like Borges' Funes of the perfect memory, to be paralysed in the stammering pursuit of a mirror-life perfect in every detail? Such projects cancel the possibility of living. So. I'll keep you posted. That is all.

Lies.

To begin, to set the clock running, one must act before time. Always posterior, that's a motto, and so the first post is to be about the last book I read, as I suppose all posts from now shall be. Tonight, or rather, tomorrow: it's the excellently placed Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus (1942, English translation by Justin O'Brien, 1955), in which auto-crash-victim Albert takes the story about the guy condemned to push a rock up a mountain, let it fall, rinse and repeat forever and ever, as the springboard for a philosophy that breaks from the existential tradition but manages to wrest nobility from the sublime tragedy of the growing up absurd. Onward, like a rolling stone!

Pulling the plug from worlds unbound to dreams and the absurd. Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965).