Showing posts with label documentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label documentary. Show all posts
Simply raising a hand, closing an eyelid... Patience (After Sebald)
Patience (After Sebald) has a soundtrack by The Caretaker, whose 2011 album An Empty Bliss Beyond This World was inspired by a study on Alzheimer's disease and featured foggily looping, layered samples from old 78s. Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn, upon which the documentary is based, has a similar preoccupation with memory, time, and the fog of narrative experience. As Sebald walks around East Anglia, two pervading atmospheres engulf and are engulfed in turn; the comminuted and the combusting. Comminuted substances - ash, spume, dust, vapour, mist - the world's particles and fragments, are the extending metaphors of this part-memoir-history-fiction. Here, as with the London fog in Dickens' Bleak House, the loss of the visible is accompanied by a certain loss of understanding, an estrangement of sense. Sebald reminds us, structurally as well as literally, that it is precisely sense that we seek, often post-hoc, in the uncharted gathering that is recovering: a netted comprehension that ties one thing to another, us to ourselves and to others. Something solid to fall upon. And yet behind the rapidity and rabidity of industrialisation is modernity's central religion of combustion, "the hidden principle behind every artefact we create." That which burns, consumes. Burning is both holy and ungodly, occupying a fine atmospheric line between creation and destruction. Heat, light, machines. The reduction of substance to a near nothingness. Ashes and dust. Man's destruction of man is suspended through this book like a fog, which - true to form - never offers itself as distinct or comprehensible, but leaves us with the sense that our Promethean gift may be ultimately Pyrrhic.
From The Rings of Saturn; an English Pilgrimage:
... [Browne] remarks in a passage of the "Pseudodoxia Epidemica" that I can no longer find that in Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the fields, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost forever.
Singly, in groups and in straggling lines, people tottered across the country, and the merest breath of air might suffice to topple them and leave them lying by the wayside forever. Simply raising a hand, closing an eyelid, or exhaling one's last breath might take, it sometimes seemed, half a century. And as time dissolved, so too did all other relations. Parents exchanged children because they could not bear to watch the dying torment of their own. Towns and villages were surrounded by deserts of dust, over which trembling mirages of river valleys and forested lakes often appeared. Sometimes at first light, when the rustling of leaves dry on the branch penetrated their shallow sleep, people imagined, for a fraction of a second in which wishful thinking was stronger than what they knew to be the case, that it had started to rain. Though the capital and its environs were spared the worst consequences of the drought, when the ill tidings arrived from the south, the Dowager Empress had a daily blood sacrifice offered in her temple to the god of silk, at the hour when the evening star rose, lest the silkworms want for fresh green leaves. Of all living creatures, these curious insects alone aroused a strong affection in her.
Manufactured Landscapes
Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary film about the work of photographer Ed Burtynksy.
The opening shot is amazing. Watch it full screen, here.
And why not? A face is a face... Rilke, Sokurov, Nietzsche, Noh
Alexander Sokurov - Hubert Robert; A Fortunate Life (1996)
Slowly, quietly. The smallness of silence pierces the world of noise, of largesse. The bold and fast, whose hurried movements expand and fill the air, leaving no gap, no hollow, no reprieve - are suddenly, quietly pierced. The pure surface of noise is not a sheet, nor a blanket. It does not cover, for it does not leave a hollow, an underneath. It permeates; it is atmosphere. It is in the air, it amplifies itself through vapour, through clouds. It is not broken by the moving interstices of human bodies, but uses them as second skins, stirring over their surfaces and through their bones. Pierced by the quiet, we are stilled. It is only now that we enter. There is not something behind the surface of noise, no special essence. We are terrified, it is infinite. We are in ekstasis, standing outside ourselves. Noise holds and holds in; surrounds, comforts. And yet in silence we are home.
16.03.12
Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.
For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are so many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It's good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.
Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.
But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.
The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, to violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from the Diary of Malte Laurids Brigge
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