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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Category Archives: surrealism

DESCENDING TO HADÈS part 2: THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL AS FILM AND AS OPERA

13 Saturday May 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, disaster movies, opera and film, surrealism

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Alcoriza, Bunuel, Calanda, Exterminating Angel, Figueroa, Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, Thomas Ades, Tom Cairns

We are familiar with disaster movies, and have been for some time – not just Titanic in 1997 but also the 1953 version. Then there’s the British take on the same disaster, A Night to Remember (1958), the latter title displaying British understatement. American overstatement, titanic you could call it, favoured concepts such as a group stranded on the top floor of a skyscraper in The Towering Inferno (1974). The genre is embedded enough to earn its own spoof title, Airplane! (1980), which exploited its comic possibilities and was wildly successful.

Where did the idea for Buñuel’s disaster movie come from? It had been suggested to him as a young man in the 1920s that Géricault’s narrative painting of 1819 ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ would make a terrific film. It was only in the 1950s that he and his regular scriptwriter at the time, Luis Alcoriza, picked up the idea and wrote a short story, ‘The Castaways of Providence Street’, from which Buñuel later worked up a screenplay. Six years earlier in Mexico he had made La Mort en ce Jardin / Evil Eden about a group of disparate and desperate people stranded in the jungle in a situation like the castaways in Géricault’s painting. The short story gave him an opportunity to tackle the subject again and to inject a darkly comic element. That comedy was partly contributed by the Catholic religion, the mocking of which motivated Buñuel throughout his career. He used the idea here to invert Christian ideas in a sort of ‘transvaluation’. The disaster takes place on the Calle de la Providencia,

2017-05-12 17.42.12

and the victims find themselves damned by Providence rather than saved. Secondly they are imprisoned in a room by a ‘miracle’ (they discover they lack the will to leave even though there are no physical obstacles to their doing so), an event Hume defined as something “beyond custom and experience”: they then find themselves taken by this miracle not to heaven but to hell, which by Act 3 is Hell Cubed.

2017-05-12 17.44.37

Buñuel’s film is satirical, subversive, made for revolutionaries. Although there are plenty of surrealist touches – a disembodied hand, the feet of a dead bird, the amour fou  between Eduardo and Beatriz –

2017-05-12 17.43.27      2017-05-12 17.43.50

it owes just as much to the theatre of the absurd, the godfather of which is surely Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, less terrifyingly comic than comically terrifying. Another key feature of the film is the fluidity of its treatment of time, not to mention the ‘joke’ about physical space, an echo of the fantastical disruption of space and time that marked Buñuel’s first film, made with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou.

Finally, it has no film score, hard to imagine as that is when we are burdened so much by music-saturated television. So, that makes it right for reinventing as an opera? Thomas Adès thought so, although there were other reasons such as the story’s dramatic premise and its claustrophobic atmosphere. In the production in the Royal Opera house, the surrealist touches become a bit contrived – film is so much better at these things –

2017-05-12 17.44.22

but the hysteria inherent in the situation is wonderfully heightened. The film’s visual patina of light and black, created by Gabriel Figueroa’s camera, beautifully crafted as it is,

2017-05-12 17.45.01

the ultimate barbarism: Nobile’s cello is destroyed for fuel

cannot match the musical flourishes of Adès’ score. The film can be criticised too for the difficulty of distinguishing the individual characters who in a way all look the same, the men in their dinner jackets, the women in their evening gowns. Adès and his librettist, Tom Cairns, do something clever here by using what they call the ‘encantada’ (as in ‘enchanted to meet you’) sequence to introduce the twelve characters (down from seventeen) to the audience.

What really distinguishes the opera from the film, however, is its tragic quality. These people are not so much condemned to hell by their bourgeois, ruling-class origins as by the condition of being human. And the opera is to be appreciated not so much by would-be revolutionaries as by people who are a mirror to those on stage: after all the characters are gathered for dinner after a night at the opera listening to ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’. The effect was so powerful that as we left the building it crossed my mind that we would lack the will to exit it, even with all the doors unlocked. Are we meant to like the people in the story? I think the people in the film not, but the people in the opera yes, or at least perhaps – they are our tragic selves.

*

This is Adès’ third opera. His first one, ‘Powder Her Face’ (1995), was also tawdry, and makes full use of the modest musical resources of a 15-piece ensemble. Here such forces are of the fullest and lessons from his symphonic work, such as ‘Asyla’, ‘Polaris’ and ‘Tevot’, make the score sometimes searing, sometimes blasting. Acts 1 and 2 were performed without an interval, and separated by a musical interlude marked by pounding drums, an idea taken from the Good Friday tradition of communal drumming (for 24 hours!) in Calanda, the remote town in Spain where Buñuel was bought up. (That it made a powerful impact on him is witnessed by Buñuel giving it a chapter in his autobiography, ‘My Last Breath’, and in the fact that his son Juan-Luis made a documentary about it in 1960, which can be watched on YouTube – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jbu6qqdxj8&t=2s)

Act 1 of the opera puts us in the vice, and Act 2 turn the screws on us. Act 3, I felt, was less successful. This may be due to the curse of the interval but the question Act 3 poses without quite answering is how it will all end. In disaster movies, the people are saved (with the good ending happily and the bad unhappily), but would this happen here? The film has an elegant solution which seems to arrive seamlessly and ends with a twist, the most comic moment in the whole story.

In the opera I got confused. In the film the offer of suicide by the host, Edmundo Nobile (noble by name and by nature), is treated in an off-hand away and superseded by Leticia’s eloquent and clever solution.

2017-05-12 17.45.46

Nobile gets the gun with which to shoot himself

In the opera it is a big moment that teeters on the idea of Christian atonement: one man’s death can save others. But then this premise is choked off by Leticia’s big aria, an unmotivated Ladino song, sung in her shrill manner (Ades’ intention, not the singer’s poor technique), that fits very oddly into the whole.

Of course, I have only heard the opera once, and the ending might make much more sense after it has been heard half a dozen times. What will they say in 30 years’ time, and 100 years’ time, and 500 years’ time? I have no idea but I do foresee a long life for this piece, as well as for the film.

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DESCENDING TO HADES part 1: BUÑUEL’S ‘EXTERMINATING ANGEL’ AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, LONDON

05 Friday May 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, God, opera and film, surrealism

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Ades, Bunuel, Exterminating Angel, Royal Opera House, Tom Cairns

It is the late 1960s: Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel is on at the cinema, and I am drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Half a century on, I am drawn from Norwich, like a lone iron filing to a far-off magnet, to the Royal Opera House in London on the 3rd  May to see the new opera ‘The Exterminating Angel’ by Thomas Adès (or Hades in certain imaginations), with a libretto by Tom Cairns drawn from the script Luis Buñuel wrote for the film.

I am preparing some treasure-able words on a comparison between the opera and the film for my next blog piece. Suffice it to write now a Trip-Advisorish comment on going to the ROH in Covent Garden.

Oh, splendiferous temple to grand opera and high art. You cannot enter the building without a palpable sense of entering a sanctum of civilisation at its most civilised. Its elegant luxury, and the emanations of power, financial and cultural, that it exudes make me gasp in admiration.

But then, what is this? We paid £72 for our two seats, admittedly not at all a bad price by London standards for a theatre seat, but we were seated on the Left Balcony, which means that by the design of the building – extraordinary when it was first built and even more extraordinary now – you only see two thirds of the stage. We’ve encountered this problem before but never until now have we been so short-changed. The stage design is brilliant in every way, except that a lot happens at the side of the stage and is therefore out of sight to spectators in the left-side balcony. To rub it in, the ROH has ditzy little wall lights all way round which no doubt were le dernier cri when it was built but when you lean over the balcony to see better (thus blocking the view of the person behind you) these pesky objects get in the way. Banish them, I say. Replace them with flat lights from John Lewis.

The photo was taken before the performance began when the sheep that feature in the opera (yes, sheep) were paraded on stage. You can see what I mean about the lights.

ROH 2 - May 2017.jpg

The real story however is the opera, which is a drama about a group of wealthy socialites at a dinner party held after an evening at the opera (‘Lucia di Lammermoor’) that all goes wrong, the dinner party from Hades you might say. When it finished and we were seeking to leave, I had a curious feeling: will we in fact be able to? But that is for the next post . . . coming soon, I hope.

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Antonioni’s Metaphysical Cinema

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Antonioni, Italy, metaphysical film, surrealism, Uncategorized

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Antonioni, Camus, De Chirico, Donato Totaro, Ferrara, Morandi

In Antonioni’s La Notte, Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) is in his study, aimless as usual, much as he drifts throughout the film. When he bends over his desk, a painting is visible on the wall behind him, not just any old painting but one by Morandi.

notte-6

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) is famous for his obsessive painting of grouped bottle and vases, an idea which preoccupied him all his life. He lived in Bologna, down the road (well, 50 kilometres) from Ferrara, where Antonioni was born and brought up. When Antonioni left home it was to go to study Economy and Commerce at Bologna University. There he began to develop his interest in art and theatre which led him to the cinema and Rome.

Did he encounter Morandi’s pictures during his time in Bologna? And in doing so, did he connect them with the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico, whose brief sojourn in Ferrara from 1915 to 1918 led to a number of his key paintings? If there is a metaphysical school of painting, De Chirico and Morandi are its most notable figures. But what connects them? De Chirico’s troubled reality is populated by architecturally strong but unadorned buildings: arcades and porticoes, such as Bologna is thronged with, especially attracted him, and in some of the Ferrara paintings the brute majesty of the Castello Estense. These townscapes are depicted with strong if colliding perspectives, and by their unexpected juxtapositions, they produce a surrealism before Surrealism. In the streets and piazzas figures are silently frozen in time. Morandi’s bottles and vases are in the ‘still life’ genre but stillness is an absent quality. He paints them so that they jostle with each other as if they were not always comfortable in each other’s presence. I have always thought of them as people, or at any rate objects with distinct characters of their own.

What connects the two painters? De Chirico turns the urban scene into a still life; Morandi takes stillness and sets it quivering. So, in that respect they contradict each other. On the other hand the atmosphere of the paintings in both feels melancholic, and often unsettled, even troubled. The ordinary aspect of things and of places is replaced with something spectral in De Chirico’s case, and in Morandi’s with something disconcerting. Both take everyday reality and make of it something strange, and it is in this I believe that they earn the title of ‘metaphysical realists’.

*

Film criticism has for some time now made the connection between Antonioni’s visual style and Metaphysical Painting, and I am especially grateful to Donato Totaro for alerting me to the echoes of De Chirico in Antonioni’s films.

While Antonioni’s film-making mindset was forged by the neo-realist films being made around him, and the intellectual atmosphere in which they were created, from the beginning his feature films looked for a different appearance of the world than the purely realist one. When filming interiors, he was very attentive to objects as adding a specific tone to a scene, and when he was filming places, or rather spaces, he wanted – and found – a new photographic language to depict people within them. There are echoes here of the exploration of perspective by Italian Renaissance painters whereby people were placed into a grid of lines. Antonioni sees the world if not geometrically then as planes and shapes to which his figures must conform themselves, rather than the other way around.

Can we speak of Antonioni as an exponent of metaphysical cinema because he was drawn to the metaphysical painting of De Chirico and Morandi? This feels insufficient. Nor is he ‘metaphysical’ in the sense of Bresson, Tarkovsky or Kieślowski, to take three important names who all look beyond realism for a spiritual realm. (See my essay ‘Kieślowski before Kieślowski’ at: http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk/kieslowski-before-kieslowski.) However, Antonioni’s metaphysical cinema is close to the concept of ‘metaphysical rebellion’ that Camus proposes is the proper position for artists of all kinds, as articulated in his book L’Homme Révolté / The Rebel, published in 1951. This rebellion is a “necessary blasphemy against the created order” which disputes “the end of man and of creation”. In Antonioni this did not produce revolutionary rage as it did in some, but it did produce a deep melancholy about human relations and human purposes. This attitude allowed him to distil something essential about the twentieth century.

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Ferrara made me (1): Antonioni

12 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Antonioni, cinema and culture, Italy, surrealism, travel

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Antonioni, Bassani, Castello Estense, Corso Rossetti, Cronaca di un amore, De Chirico, Ferrara

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature film of 1950, Una Cronaca di un amore (‘Story of a love affair’, but better in Italian), the private investigator commissioned by the husband of Paola Molon to find out more about her and her past, spends time in her home town of Ferrara. He goes to the liceo, Ferrara’s notable school,

cronaca-4

he goes to the tennis club to talk to the caretaker,

cronaca-4a

he is seen strolling along Corso Ercole I

cronaca-5a

then round the corner,

cronaca-5c

and the camera follows him to look up Corso Rossetti.

cronaca-7

This last shot is cinematic dead time because it tells us nothing about the story. On the other hand it tells us a great deal about its mood, and foreshadows the end, that this love story will lead to a fruitless, unconsummated, unredeemed end.

Antonioni was born (1918) and brought up in Ferrara, a city of long streets, high walls and the formidable Castello Estense, moat and all, at its centre.

castello-2     dscn8083

He went to the Liceo Ludovico Ariosto (on its old site, in Via Borgo dei Leoni);

old Liceo Ginnasio

he frequented the tennis club in Via Saffi (made famous in Giorgio Bassani’s novel, ‘The Garden of the Finzi Continis’);

Club Marfisa

he also must have liked to stroll up the Corso Ercole

Corso Ercole I

to the crossroads with Corso Rossetti, past the Palazzo dei Diamanti and the Palazzo Prosperi-Sacrati (below).

Pal. Prosperi Sacrati

Another important Ferrarese denizen in his mind must have been Giorgio De Chirico, who while not a native was invalided there from 1915 to 1918, and painted some notable pictures there. ‘Le Muse Inquietanti’ [s.v. Wikipedia] of 1918, for example, features the Castello Estense. His imagination made something quite new out of empty streets, shadowed porticos, statues in the piazza, and lone figures. The bleak absence of the ordinary living human must have informed Antonioni’s own imagining of cities, explored in several of his films, and most famously in the final sequence of L’Eclisse (1961).

The shot of Corso Rossetti in the winter light of an evening is powerfully imagined. This image

cronaca-6

is crucially different from the one above, since it shows a person stepping, like a figure from a De Chirico painting, into the building on the right, defined as much by his shadow as by his figure.

cronaca-6a

Intriguingly, it echoes the comments of English visitors found in the Blue Guide to the Romagna, which I was using on my visit. Hester Piozzi wrote in 1789: “My pen was just upon the point of praising its cleanliness . . . till I reflected there was nobody to dirty it.” In 1826, William Hazlitt wrote in his ‘Notes of a journey through France and Italy’: “You enjoy the most perfect solitude, that of a city which was once filled with ‘the busy hum of men’”; in his ‘Pictures from Italy’ of 1846, Charles Dickens described old Ferrara as “more solitary, more depopulated, more deserted than any city of the solemn brotherhood”.

It’s not like that now. Here is the Corso Rossetti from a position close to the one above. (If you took the photo from the middle of the road you risk being run over.)

Pal. dei Diamanti     Corso Rossetti

The extensive pedestrianisation of Ferrara, preserving cobbles where possible, and the high prevalence of bicycles preserve the poetry of the city but in parts that poetry has been put paid to by the ubiquity of the car whether driven or parked, and the fact that cobbles have given way to asphalt. The city seems to be economically prosperous and there are coachloads of tourists, indeed I was one myself, which drains the poetry of solitude away. I wonder if Antonioni ever regretted this.

Next post: ‘Ferrara made me (2): Giorgio Bassani’

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WONDER RING/GNIR REDNOW: AN INTRIGUE

01 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in avant garde, Brakhage, surrealism

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Atget, By Night with torch and spear, Centuries of June, Joseph Cornell, Michael Pigott, P Adams Sitney, Rudy Burckhardt, Stan Brakhage, The Wonder Ring Gnir Rednow, Tower House, Wanderlust

A mild version of Cornell-mania has hit London with the ‘Wanderlust’ exhibition at the Royal Academy (due to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in October), showing a number of his collages and boxes, some familiar, some less familiar. It is welcome to see these gathered together, and the occasion is made more welcome by the inclusion of some of his films. Triply welcome is an evening of his films at BFI Southbank on 3 September. Showing in the exhibition itself were firstly, Thimble Theater, a collage of trifles from the 1930s completed but not re-edited by Larry Jordan in the 1970s so that the collage remains as Cornell prepared it. Second was Angel, a collaboration with Rudy Burckhardt from 1957, that counterpoints an angel in a cemetery, frozen in stone, with fluidities and liquidities that barely register: shimmering water, waving flowers and trees, ending with a back view of the angel against clouds moving slowly across a blue sky. Best of all is a leaf resting on the water floating with a fastidious slowness into the angel’s dark shadow.

The third film is Gnir Rednow, his version of The Wonder Ring of 1955. The story is this: Brakhage was in New York in the mid-50s and Cornell gave him some Kodachrome asking him to use it to make a record of the 3rd Avenue Elevated railway, an overground track which was due to be replaced. The result was the 5½ minutes of The Wonder Ring, Brakhage’s second colour film and the one in which his preoccupation with light came to the fore signalling a major new direction in this work. P. Adams Sitney elaborates on its inception (in his ‘Visionary Film’, chapter 6 ‘The Lyrical Film’): “Joseph Cornell . . . wanted someone to film the 3rd Avenue El before its destruction. Parker Tyler gave him Brakhage’s telephone number. When Cornell called, according to Brakhage’s account, the young film-maker had to admit he had never been on the El. That ended the conversation and, he thought, his election to make the film. But the next day he received in the mail two tokens for the El. Cornell supplied the materials, and Brakhage made Wonder Ring.” I do not believe there is any particular record of what Cornell thought of the finished film, but I cannot help feeling it was not quite what he wanted – but that he was content with what had resulted. The only comment we do have, a very oblique one, is that he did his own version as Gnir Rednow (dated to 1960), the clue to which is in the end title: “The end is the beginning”, i.e. The Wonder Ring is run backward and upside down. Was this in mild mockery of Brakhage’s effort? Not necessarily at all, and anyway it now seems that Gnir Rednow users mostly out-takes from Brakhage’s footage. Some shots are surely the same in each: he uses from The Wonder Ring the bulbs on the roof of the carriage and the light-flooded roof or the elevated station stop:

WR 7    WR 1

only he inverts them. There is a precedent too, since his found film of ca 1942, By Night with Torch and Spear, has a sequence in a foundry which is upside down and running backwards, so he clearly was drawn to this idea for its own sake.

Some shots in The Wonder Ring he will have particularly valued: the door to the ticket office, the coloured glass, both of which Brakhage’s camera caught (did Cornell instruct him to include these?).

WR 2    WR 3a

These have period charm, that bland phrase hiding the aesthetic burden Cornell placed in such details: “we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone” (to use the words of the song), and the preservation of such details in an artwork makes them even more precious than they were before.

As an example of difference between the two films, Gnir Rednow includes a clear shot of a series of billboards in the station, ephemeral advertisements which, as they recede in time, take on an added lustre of pastness. In The Wonder Ring, Brakhage has the billboards but they are filmed through the distorting glass of the window so that as the train moves, the image ripples – and Brakhage is interested more in the ripple, the way the image is shown rather than what is shown.

WR 8

This points to a fundamental difference between Brakhage and Cornell. Brakhage was anxious in his aesthetics to make the distinction between still images and moving images, between photography and film, and to discourage the notion that you could switch easily from one to the other. The difference is ontological, a difference in essences. Did Cornell on the other hand want Brakhage just to make a documentary record in the manner that the French photographer Eugène Atget recorded the streets of Paris and their shop windows about a century ago, that gentle surrealism which Cornell preferred to the erotic or subversive version of (for example) Max Ernst?

And yet it is hard to see Cornell objecting to what he got. He seems to have been intensely interested in New York modernism, and must surely have responded favourably to The Wonder Ring’s evanescent window lights which so felicitously illustrate frames and sprockets passing through the projector gate.

WR 15

In hindsight we can see that The Wonder Ring points to the materiality of film that was going to obsess film modernists in the 1960s and 70s, a development that Cornell could not have predicted but one that he would have surely accepted as valuable in its own right.

© Tim Cawkwell 2015

Three afterthoughts:

1              In his book ‘Wits End’ (1989) about film-makers he had known, Brakhage does not have a chapter on Cornell, although he does refer to the mutual friendship with Cornell that he and Ken Jacobs shared.

2              In 2013 Bloomsbury published ‘Joseph Cornell versus Cinema’ by Michael Pigott, a welcome essay on Cornell’s film work which turns out to have been more extensive than originally appeared. But it is unfortunate that the book contains no filmography.

3              Cornell and Brakhage also collaborated on Tower House – Centuries of June. Again, Sitney is helpful in ‘Visionary Film’: “The same year [as Wonder Ring] Cornell asked Brakhage to photograph a film for him of an old house that he liked which was about to be torn down. The film he made was called Tower House until Cornell edited it and renamed it with the phrase of Emily Dickinson’s, Centuries of June.” Big question: which was made first? If Wonder Ring was first, the commissioning of Tower House underlines Cornell’s faith in the film-maker.

4              It was back in 1973 (in ‘Artforum’ for January of that year) that Paul Arthur first drew attention to the way The Wonder Ring manages to replicate the way the film strip could be put in the foreground: “This constitutes a wonderfully ironic reversal of the persistence of vision phenomenon in that the windows assume the basic shape of successive film frames though which the figures of passengers standing on the opposite platform remain motionless.”

 

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