Of Tarkovsky and the uncanniness of history

We are in the midst of a strange time in history. Well, perhaps this isn’t strictly true, at least not in as much as every time in history is a strange time. A sense of history, of history in the making – that is what’s truly strange. What’s changed for, then, what lies behind me write such an entry, is that I am beginning more and more to feel a sense of history in everything I see. A sense of removal from current events and of an outside perspective looking in. Not quite complete, of course. Not enough, that is, that I can see the precise motivations behind every act and tribulation taking place or that I could have the answer to the world’s problems. Even the best history books, no matter with how much hindsight they are written and how well documented their subject matter it, cannot help but try and impose some sort of sensible narrative on past events. Simply put, I get an overwhelming sense of us hurtling blindly through time, tentatively grasping for some sure-footedness and certainty in what the future holds for us and - for those of us fortunate enough to be involved in such matters – trying to steer history and the fate of empires in one direction or another. Maybe it’s reading history books that puts one in this mind-frame of a sense of history. Adam Curtis’s recent 3 part documentary for the BBC is a good example of something that might instil this sense of history, which is also a sense of awe, and of horror. Regardless of how accurate or insightful his presentation actually is, it performs a magical service by injecting a chain of events from the past 60 years with the same distance and sense of history as learning about the Roman Empire or the two World Wars. It takes huge events, events so large that occur on an unfathomable international scale, events so large, complex and all-pervasive we barely even notice them as events, and breaks them down into digestible components, draws lines between them, makes connections and links dots, so that suddenly we believe we can see something that has actually been in the making for at least a few decades. We suddenly believe that we can spot ideological shifts over the past few decades and actually make narrative sense of them. In an uncanny way (uncanny in the Heideggerian sense), it makes me feel as though I’m watching the machinations of human society reduced to a nature documentary about insects, with David Attenborough explaining their behaviour as part of a dance of life that simply must be so, with every insect falling into a predetermined role and having its behaviour dictated from the start. It makes me feel, when I watch mankind, that no-one understands their own debt to history, to the circumstances and context in which they make their decisions, and that it can only ever be so. Things could never have been any other way.
More so, however, what Curtis’s programme does is not merely leave us at a specific point in the past, as though history has stopped there. Slowly, without us realising it, the events which he is trying to analyse gush forth and spill right into the present. Suddenly, we are shaken and jolted out of our everyday existence, only to look around us and understand that we are in the midst of something that’s taking place right now, something that’s been building up throughout time, that has not yet ended, and that will not end for a while. The uncanny invades our everyday existence and our relationship to our own present and future. It is the historian’s role to piece together the past, but it is the philosopher’s role to both take apart and piece together the past, future and present.


Is it the philsopher’s role, though? Perhaps it is the artist’s. Themes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Much like my above ruminations on the nature of history and of nostalgia, Tarkovsky here appears to operate in a similar fashion. We have memories of the past interspersed in the present, flashes of images, all silent, flaring up indeterminately and with no real chronological sense. Even in scenes of conversation, the camera never focuses on a particular speaker but drifts slowly through the house, from detail to detail, as though to suggest that the significance of the memory haunts the totality of one’s environemtn, every object in the room rather than being concentrated in one person. No, not the totality, for that word would suggest a closed circle. Rather, every object and every instance has the potential of entering and making up a memory or a narrative, itself an open and inexhaustible field of signification.
The preoccupation with the meaning of the film is a mistake, as Grigory Yavlinsky notes. The film is so deliberately opaque that even if some of the scenes are in fact based on Tarkovsky’s childhood memories, they do not actually refer to or represent these memories as such. If anything, the structure of the film tells us that even those memories upon which the film is supposedly based are not Tarkovsky’s own, in as much as he has no direct access to his memories or to a coherent sense of the narrative of his own life. The film, in that respect, becomes something else the moment it is put on film. It resists meaning and interpretation so strongly that it can’t help but become one’s own film as soon as one watches it. The powerful emotions it might stir in some are new each time, as it can only provoke feelings of awe and wonderment, of mystery, and of the overwhelming realisation that we are lost and insignificant in the endless gush of history, which never stops changing and exerting its force on us, and which has always already moved on to pastures new while we still try to make sense of what’s just happened.

No matter how many different names Tarkovsky toyed with during the making of the film, the fact that he settled on Mirror is telling. The film itself might act as a mirror to whomever watches it, not in the sense that someone might suddenly be confronted with themselves as they are, but in our inability to ever fully grasp ourselves. This is not the only time a mirror has played a part in Tarkovsky’s films. Solaris, too, sees a planet attempting to communicate with a space station’s inhabitants by entering their subconscious and replicating what it finds. More than an attempt at self-healing, it perhaps depicts the manner in which we are confronted with the inevitable return of themes, dreams and memories that play a role for us throughout our lives and which are ultimately unassailable.

Watching Janie Geiser’s short films makes me think about nostalgia in a new way. Nostalgia is no longer a case of images, sounds, or any other material, pointing to a memory in a suggestive manner, but a suggestion referencing nothing but itself – pure suggesting. Geiser’s film Lost Motion (to which I haven’t been able to find a link online but which you can buy from the wonderful people in The Other Cinema, San Francisco, on the DVD Anxious Animation) felt more nostalgic to me than almost anything I’ve experienced before; it brought to me the kind of feeling of deaf and dumb opaqueness that makes up my most intense nostalgic experiences. I believe now that what has characterised the way in which I have experienced the recollection of past experiences – what must characterise so many people’s experience – is not a the repeating of certain aesthetic or actual experience that can be repeated, but the way in which the world refuses us in these moments of nostalgic recollection, dumbfounds us, repeatedly strikes us with a sense of awe, bewilderment, of something greater and unfathomable – and, subsequently, a sense of fear… I can remember watching films and, perhaps because I was too young to have a sufficient understanding of this world’s signifiers, my mind would create all sorts of suggestions and inferences from images that otherwise made no sense at all. This might still happen to me when I watch a film without concentrating or if I keep falling asleep. Something fills in the blanks, creates narratives and signification for me. This is precisely the feeling I got from Geiser’s film – an inability to follow any tangible narrative, and my mind, already in a dream-like state thanks to the film’s unique form, entering a state whereby it creates the vaguest and most incomprehensible inferences from the images and sounds that it encounters. Perhaps from this sense of fear comes an introversion, a retreat into oneself, the creation of a bubble where everything makes sense, where one feels warm and protected. Maybe it’s whence that feeling of warmth and innocence so often associated with nostalgia comes? Then perhaps nostalgia can be divided into different – at least two – elements or states: the protective reaction, and the droney, unintelligible sensory experience that leads to it?
In this sense, nostalgia is it not possible that nostalgia is not the re-enactment of an old experience per se, but a re-experiencing of this awe in a way that’s different each time.


Here's another film by Janie Geiser, albeit not as powerful as Lost Motion.

Attending the Prelinger Archives screening at the AV festival provided some fascinating insights. The idea, in the film Destination Earth, that quality of life comes from increased production, and that this comes from competition, is echoed in many of the other propaganda films in the archive and can be recognised as one of the foundational tenets of our capitalist age. In the film we are introduced to Mars as an inhabited planet, whose inhabitants are ruled by a hated and self-deluded tyrant named Ogg. Ogg does not believe in competition because, you know, competition breeds free thinking. Instead they work, you know, towards a common goal, thus stifling creativity and a natural urge for discovery. He is also unloved by his people because, as we all know, tyrants don’t come to rule by being admired and desired by people. This goes pretty well with the great democracy/dictatorship dichotomy created and permeated by America and its cultural industries throughout the 20th century, where anyone who isn’t democratic in the capitalist sense (because democracy means freedom, and freedom means infinite choice), is undeniably forcing people into an unnatural and oppressive form of living. Never mind the fact that most despots have been unusually charismatic people who were, for the most part, brought into power with the support of the people. This is not to justify despotism, not at all, nor to say that democracy is bad… but this all depends on what we mean by “democracy”. The point is simply that over the years America has succeeded in appropriating to itself certain terms (such as freedom and choice) and changing their meaning so much they don’t really mean anything anymore, and anything that doesn’t conduct itself, economically and socially, in exactly the same manner (such as socialism), is then seen as standing against all of America’s values, which are America’s and America’s alone.
A similar thing occurs in “King Joe”, where Joe is proclaimed to be the king of all workers simply because he has the power to buy more than any other worker in the world.

Also found this a while ago: Destination Earth used as a video for a Kassem Mosse track. Enjoy.

It's been a long, long time since I last gave writing on the blogosphere any importance or high priority in my life. It used to be the case that I easily wrote over 1,000 words each day while at university. Maybe that wasn't always a healthy thing and maybe I don't necessarily want to go back to that frame of mind, but one thing is for certain, and that is that I was always stimulated, so much sharper, with thought and ideas forever at my fingertips, on the tip of my tongue, I could enter a discussion at almost any moment and feel as though I could take on the subject matter in a critical way, play around with it, press it, squeeze it, take it apart and reassemble it. Now that feeling is gone. The ability to write has left me. Even when I try my hardest to set aside time for writing in my schedule, I have at times spent hours before the computer screen with not a single kernel of a thought passing through my mind.

I can't explain quite why or how, but I know that writing is incredibly important to me, not as an artistic tool (although that mustn't be discounted) but as an integral part of my existence as a human being in this world. Or rather, as a means of working through and figuring out the never-ending puzzle that is existence (without wishing to sound too dramatic or self-indulgent). Writing is what allows me to grab an image of thought as it floats in the ether of my consciousness, smack it down on the table and begin to dissect it... No, this is the wrong verb, the wrong way to look at thinking or writing. What writing allows me to do, is to latch on to that flash of thought and let it blindly take me to places I couldn't have possibly predicted at the start of the journey.
Similarly, I can't quite explain why thought has deserted me. I suspect it has a great deal to do with my relationship with time and work. It used to be the case that I didn't have that much to do other than read for write for my degree, which back then I considered to be my 'work'. Yet the nature of this work was so lacking in urgency, that I happily allowed myself to write in an unfocused, undirected manner whenever I wanted. Writing - writing for its own sake, for the sake of thought - was my top priority at all times, and if I was overcome by the urge to write then it would take precedence over any other urge or obligation, usually to the detriment of my course work. I was obsessed with writing; and writing, thus, became a great experiment. Not a means to understanding the world, but a thing in its own write, to be reflected upon by itself, during its own act. Writing about writing, about the meaning of writing, about the effects of writing, and so on...

And so, I feel I need to make some sort of disclaimer. In view of what writing became for me in the past before I lost it, I feel as though starting up this blog again is a way of trying to get back into writing. With blogging there sometimes comes a fear of being perceived as vain. "Why would anyone want to read my stuff? Will I come across as self important?" and so on and so forth. I am a little older now, and I can happily say that I don't worry about these things so much now, at least not half as much as I might have worried about them in the past. I don't feel the need to justify making my writing public, as I feel it to simply justify itself. I am doing this because I feel that this might somehow spur me into thinking and writing regularly once again. I don't know how to go about it exactly, so expect plenty of posts about my inability to start writing, my inability to think, and other such bilge. The results may indeed be vain at times, boring at others, or, if everything goes to plan, downright megalomaniac. And so what? No-one is free of vanity, and vanity isn't enough to rule anyone, or anything, out.

David Lynch, amazingly, says that he will never go back to using film. He admits that film looks better than digital but insists that the highest importance should be placed on the capturing of ideas, for which a giving in to rhythm is required. Digital cameras, he says, allow the director to, first of all, shoot with a minimum amount of people and therefore allow connections to manifest themselves that would not do so in a busier environment and, secondly, to shoot long takes without interruption and allowing one to mess things up without worrying, to talk to the actors while filming, and therefore capture any ideas that might come up in the moment.

My love, still, for all things smacking of Blanchot, nearly forces me to agree with him. However, just as profoundly I carry a strong mistrust of all allusions to immediacy, particularly from artists. Yet Lynch can’t be dismissed as a mere artistic romantic just as the lovers of film cannot be branded mere nostalgic purists. Lynch recognises the beauty of film, but he is willing to sacrifice it. Has he lost something, though? Is it just a coincidence that Inland Empire is my least favourite Lynch movie? It does feel to me as though Lynch had lost some focus with that film rather than gained it through the uninterrupted technique of shooting in DV. He is too free. He needs restraint if he is to produce something truly great again.

19.6.10

- I had a very interesting walk home last weekend after Road to Rimini; let’s see if I can remember it. I took a pill that didn’t quite get the chance to spend itself in a positive manner, and so, as is often the case in these instances, triggered an unpleasant and somewhat schizophrenic trail of thought in my head, albeit a highly lucid one, which is almost always the case. In fact, I find the lucidity of my thinking when taking pills overwhelming, and perhaps it is this that is partially responsible for what we term a ‘comedown’. Some say, of course, that the drugs are to blame for my experience, but that is a gross over-simplification and misunderstanding of the experience.
It’s very important that we understand, first of all, that it is a mistake to divide this experience into independent factors such as ‘the drug’ and ‘the individual’. What occurs at such an intensification of self-reflective thinking is not made up of separate factors, but is in fact one experience, and whatever factors might be said to be present in the experience operate together and off the back of one another. The pill does not trigger an effect that is in some way contained within the pill and operates on the subject. Rather, the process that can be observed during the experience is one which is always already occuring within the subject as an inextricable part of the very fact of being a subject, or of the process of subject-formation, which is in itself a never ending process, but a continual process of layering, holding together, and breaking up of multitudes. There is always, at the same time as - and as part of – the will to stability, also present an undermining process of disintegration. This process, we understand from Nietzsche, Deleuze, and many other thinkers, must not be seen as a negativity, but as a crucial drive in a healthy psyche. Any identity can only maintain itself as identity, paradoxically, precisely through its capacity for disintegration and reorganisation. Too strong a tipping of the balance in the direction of this drive, however, can be dangerous, and it is perhaps true that only certain souls are fortunate to be strong enough to withstand such trials (although I’m wary of siding with Nietzsche’s opinion that these characters are in some way ‘stronger’ or higher individuals, or rather, some people’s interpretation of Nietzsche to this effect. One must ask ‘stronger for what?’ But we shan’t dwell on this point here). What occurs during the comedown is one experiencing the removal of the defence mechanisms that occult from view the fact of drives balancing off one another, and are exposed to the lie that is our life (this experience is necessary for one to learn the secrets of acting). Walking past a group of lads I heard one of them talking about Jermaine Defoe. Defoe, of course! England had played that evening the opening match of their world cup campaign and got off to a demoralising and disillusioning performance, drawing 1-1 with the U.S. Months and months, nearly two years of the most meticulous preparations, both mental and physical; the expectations of millions and the instilling of self-belief, cultivating an unshakeable faith, a strength, the strength to believe that they are, in fact, world class players capable of the ultimate feat in football – winning the world cup. All of these beliefs explode in one night of doubt. A few minutes where things don’t go their way during the game might trigger a chain reaction of self-doubt: “what if we lose this game? What if we fail to achieve our goals? What if we’re not good enough, not as good as what we’ve led everyone to believe?” And suddenly they find that they can’t answer those questions other than by forcing themselves to believe them, which they no longer can. How will they recover the belief in their stability and unshakeability? How do you do this once you’ve been exposed to the fragility of quotidian efforts for sanity? This is a call of conscience. I believe that most players might experience an instance of anxiety, in a Heideggerian sense, and hear the call of conscience, yet the majority must overcome this precisely by ignoring the call and reassemble their strength again around their identity as per its role within the sport of football. It must be this ability, after all, that makes them champions and others losers. They sacrifice a certain questionning in favour of social achievements, and I don’t intend this as a criticism. There is something awe-inspiringly impressive and strong about this, but it is a strength driven by fear – fear of disintegration – a fear of death. I wish to desire a stronger, truer strength. I wish to know what desiring that strength feels like. I wish to know what that strength is so that I may even begin to desire it. What would this strength be, this strength born from the embracing of death?
I kept walking past towering buildings in the sobering light of dawn that seemed to reflect the gradual awakening of my soul, its attention pointed towards its own frailty. A new Generator Studios building, not even finished yet, the product of Labour investment in this area and of so much waste. What will become of this building now that we have a Conservative government? What will happen to this city? It will be opened up to the folly of its own existence, the façade that Labour had managed to put up here for such a long time, the image of sustainable prosperity.

Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil", 261

“Among the things which a noble human being perhaps finds hardest to understand is vanity: he will be tempted to deny its existence where a different type of human being will thing it palpably evident. For him the problem is to imagine creatures who try to awaken a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do not hold – and thus do not ‘deserve’ either – and yet subsequently come to believe this good opinion themselves. This seems to him in part so tasteless and lacking in self-respect and in part so baroquely irrational that he would prefer to consider vanity exceptional and in most cases where it is spoken of he doubts its existence…. The vain man takes pleasure in every good opinion he hears about himself (quite apart from any point of view of utility and likewise regardless of truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he submits to both, he feels subject to them from that oldest instinct of subjection which breaks out in him. – It is ‘the slave# in the vain man’s blood, a remnant of the craftiness of the slave – and how much ‘slave’ still remains I woman, for example! – which seeks to seduce him to good opinions about himself; it is likewise the slave who immediately afterwards falls down before these opinions as if he himself had not called them forth. – And to say it again: vanity is an atavism.”