Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz 9789463726245, 9789048552825

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Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz

Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz

Laleen Jayamanne

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Gustav Klimt, Hygieia (detail from Medicine), 1900‒1907 (1946) Collotype, 31.5 × 21.1 cm © Belvedere, Vienna. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 624 5 e-isbn 978 90 4855 282 5 doi 10.5117/9789463726245 nur 670 © L. Jayamanne / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Remembering my students, who have given me so much over so many years



Table of Contents

Foreword: In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser

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Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocity

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1. A Gift Economy: G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929)

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2. Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov

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3. Nicole Kidman in Blue Light: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) 111 4. Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006)

127

Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy

153

Bibliography

159

Filmography

165

About the Author

167

Index

169



Foreword: In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser

An email from Amsterdam University Press, dated 4 December 2019, informed me that Thomas Elsaesser – whose work has been of fundamental importance to me as a film scholar since the late 1970s – had endorsed my book proposal for the series he edits, Film Culture in Transition. Soon after, I heard that Elsaesser had suddenly died on that very day in Beijing, where he was on a visiting professorship. This uncanny coincidence, of what appears to me to be an endorsement by death, immediately reminded me of my treatment of the death of the Sufi minstrel, his astonishing manner of dying, and his burial between a rock and a hard place, in Parajanov’s Ashik Kerib. It is this chapter on two films by Sergei Parajanov that I sent as a sample of my writing, which I know Elsaesser had read. The following passage on death now appears in Chapter Two of this book. There are a great variety of ways of dying on film, some spectacular and violent, some sensuous, others quiet, soft even, some almost imperceptible, so much so that I feel that death awaited film to find its full, capacious, expression in all its magnitude. Its cross-cultural expressions on film are profoundly creative, diverse. One could not say the same of birth on film which mostly seems to be reduced to its existential physical coordinates, screaming or groaning, perhaps a brief silence, shattered by the wail of the new born.

I now feel that death has cast its shadow over this project. Does death have a shadow? Death is shadow-like. Elsaesser has shown us how and why Weimar cinema invested the shadow with vitality, a non-organic life which displaced the opposition of the organic and the inorganic. Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates presents us with the Angel of Death, who arrives as a blindfolded, stumbling, winged soldier, to present the poet Sayat Nova with a parcel of earth wrapped in a piece of unleavened bread. The usual solemnity and fear accompanying the arrival of death is undone in these

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/9789463726245_fw

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scenes of levity, in which two boy angels push and pull the Angel of Death towards the poet, in an ancient Armenian Apostolic Christian cemetery. Moreover, in this book, it so happens that the Angel of Death appears to me, the writer, and offers the chance to see just two clips one last time. I chose the death of the Sufi minstrel and the nativity presented by Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. A birth and a death – you can’t get more basic than that. Raul Ruiz spoke eloquently about the penumbral qualities of the shadowy film image; his desire to explore these qualities and the closeness of film (celluloid film with its black space separating each photogram, leaving us in the dark for a fraction of each second), to death (oblivion); and how this ontological reality was a spur to invent and play in the face of death. Strangely enough, now, as I look back on the films engaged with in this book, in the wake of Elsaesser’s death, it would appear that they all stage an encounter with death in the most unusual of ways. In Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, a film on which Elsaesser wrote a foundational essay, Lulu dies ever so lightly, nearly imperceptibly, at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Then, there are the deaths of the Sufi minstrel and that of the poet Sayat Nova in Parajanov’s films. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick invests the cadaver of the prostitute in the morgue with a strangely disturbing vitality, altogether absent when she was alive as the beautiful, naked prostitute, splayed on a chair, in a drug-induced, nearly comatose state, in Ziegler’s luxurious bathroom and certainly absent from the perfectly standardized bodies at the orgy. And finally, Ruiz’s Klimt is seen semi-conscious, dying in a hospital for the entire duration of the film, which ends with his death and cinematic resurrection. One of Elsaesser’s earliest essays, in Monograph, ‘Tales of Sound of Fury’, photocopies of which circulated in the inaugural film studies classes in Sydney of the mid to late 1970s, gathered together previous scholarship on the topic and synthesized a conceptual framework for considering film melodrama as an important mass-cultural generic form with both literary and theatrical antecedents. Formulated as a way to frame and critically redeem the work of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s Hollywood films, the essay helped create the film melodrama boom that we are experiencing now. Not only could high-end Hollywood and Indian melodrama now be analysed with sophisticated analytical tools. I was also able to study a significant sample of critically, thoroughly abject, lowly melodramas in Sri Lankan cinema. Using the tools provided by Elsaesser, and without embarrassment, I studied 103 of these melodramatic Sri Lankan films (dating from 1947 to 1979) for my dissertation on that film industry, as a young scholar.

Foreword: In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser

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Elsaesser’s important book Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary revised some of his early essays on Expressionist cinema and combined a historiography of the German film industry of the Weimar period with an analysis of its aesthetics and film criticism. For me, among the enabling new elements were Elsaesser’s formulation of a camp aesthetic – and the related importance of a discourse on fashion and design – for an understanding of the aesthetic durability of some of the Weimar film canon. His recent formulation of media archaeology, while generating large-scale empirical and speculative research projects into the new media in the twenty-first century, is yet again marked by what is singular in Elsaesser’s philosophical understanding of audiovisual culture. For him, film/cinema was always the vanishing object, always already in transition, from its very inception in 1895. And it is this ‘object’ or desire for cinema and an intellectual devotion to it that orientated his multifaceted, scholarly, and institution-building work. Film was, forever, Elsaesser’s North Star.



Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocity 1 I have already said this before: cinema is condemned to be poetic. It cannot but be poetic. One cannot ignore this aspect of its nature. For poetry will be there, within our reach. If so, then why not use it?2

Each of the four chapters of this book is dedicated to a film or two by a master film-maker. They span the period from the silent film Pandora’s Box (1929) by G. W. Pabst, to a late film by Raul Ruiz, Klimt (2006). In between, I explore two celebrated films by Sergei Parajanov – The Color of Pomegranates (1969) and Ashik Kerib (1988) – and the critically maligned last film of Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The oblique mode of address of each of these films makes it possible to think of them as poetic. A basic assumption that governs my film criticism here is the thought that the image is prior to the narrative and gives rise to it. As Ruiz says, ‘In all narrative films – and all films are so to an extent – it is the image that determines the type of narration and not the contrary’. As a result, the image has an aesthetic richness, a magnetic force irreducible to the narrative line. In these films, the image may even show something that does not coincide with narrative meaning. Such moments make the image poetic, mysterious, unforgettable. It may even pose ‘inexplicable enigmas’, as Ruiz would have it. If only we yield to them, all of these qualities generate unique cinematic emotions and thought. Gilles Deleuze supports the view that film, in its very ontology, is an image in movement, which generates the narrative. For him, too, the image and its powers are primary. The kinaesthetic and proprioceptive sensations stimulated by these films are especially powerful in the silent film Pandora’s Box, because Louise 1 I discuss, in the body of this introduction, the way in which I have borrowed these Māori ideas of the economy of gift exchange to frame my book. 2 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 22.

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/9789463726245_intro

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Brooks, the star, was primarily a trained modern dancer. Silent cinema had achieved an astonishing level of aesthetic sophistication, abstraction, and plasticity of the image within a few short decades by the time it was made obsolete in 1929 with the arrival of sound. But then there is poetry of a few nanoseconds in even the most abject, ill-conceived, badly executed, hard-to-watch genre films of my national cinema of Ceylon (as it once was). The rhythmic multiplicity of the films analysed are always registered on the surface; it’s not a hidden dimension, more a matter of not seeing or feeling what is always already there, but might need to be sensed subliminally through the imprint left on our body, in our muscles and in our minds. It may seem hidden only because, to use Henry Corbin’s ideas, our ‘cognitive imagination’ is dormant or has never had a chance to flourish. As I understand it, sensitivity to rhythm and light are what matters most in being open to the kinaesthetic register of the ‘imaginal world’ (Mundus Imaginalis) of film.3 I use Henry Corbin’s twofold ideas of ‘cognitive imagination’ and ‘imaginal world’, derived from a strand of Sufi Islam, to contribute a set of ideas outside the purview of Anglo-American film theory and aesthetics. In doing so, I use these two specific Sufi Islamic mystical ideas to explore a secular cinematic sense of the sacred. I feel I can do this because the films under discussion enliven our spirit, stimulating thought and feeling. They encode a spirit of the gift. Corbin’s Iranian Sufi Islamic ideas are locatable within the Neoplatonic mystical philosophical tradition of the Mediterranean Middle East. The work of Henry Corbin is entirely new to me and became necessary when working on Parajanov’s Ashik Kerib, which is about a Sufi minstrel’s journey through Transcaucasia. It is still rather rare to use concepts from non-European sources for theoretical work on film. While diversifying our methodological toolkit is a good idea in itself, it is also the case that, without the precise Sufi ideas elaborated by Corbin (based on the Iranian Sufi philosopher/mystic Suhrawardi’s theosophy 1154‒1191), my work on Ashik Kerib would not be satisfactory at all. The ‘imaginal’ is a neologism invented by Corbin to express a Sufi idea of a world suspended, as in a mirror, between the purely empirical sense perception and the purely intellectually abstract domain. The idea is expressed by drawing on the word ‘imago’ (image), which becomes the neologism ‘imaginal’, similar, Corbin says, to the way ‘original’ is created from ‘origo’. Between sensible cognition and intellectual cognition, there is, according to this philosophy, an imaginal world, which is more immaterial than the purely sensory and less immaterial than the purely intellectually abstract. It 3

Corbin, ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’.

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would appear to be a paradoxical vision of an immaterial materiality. This is not imaginary in the sense of being unreal, as in fantasy. Rather it is a nonspatial topography of a visionary experience, of the subtle body, of dreams, of symbolic rituals. It is a mode of being suspended in an inter-medial world accessed in an inter-medial state between waking and sleeping. In this state, the imagination itself becomes ‘a sensory perception of the supra-sensory’. The faculty that apprehends and experiences this psycho-cosmic world is called the ‘cognitive imagination’. Light and its manifestations are fundamental ontological principles of this ‘Philosophy of Illumination’ which, it has been suggested, derives from Zoroastrian metaphysics. According to Corbin, ‘this philosophical cosmology includes a plurality of universes in an ascending order, which presupposes a scale of being with many more degrees than ours’. 4 Parajanov’s singular cosmos-centric vision of cinema may perhaps be thought of as just such a world. It seems to me that certain f ilms have the power to activate these paradoxical states of perception. Such films have the power to constitute an interiority composed of all the senses in a single ‘synaesthesis’. The emphatic noetic, active function attributed to the imagination also enables approaching film as such. Perhaps these very ideas might be repurposed in a manner that might become serviceable for others in the field as well. But I rather believe, heeding Bergson, that one must invent for each film explored a particular set of analytical tools that fit the requirements of the film itself. This is a strict Bergsonian imperative that I worked with in my previous book, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani.5 There, I first encountered a Sufi ethos in Shahani’s film Khayal Gatha, which is based on the classical Indian musical form. Interestingly, I had not encountered Corbin’s ideas at the time of writing that book. Now I can see how my approach to that film might have been somewhat different had I known Corbin’s work. After all, Khayal is an Urdu word derived from Persian, which means ‘imagination’! The choice of a theoretical framework or an idea makes a great deal of difference to one’s mode of perception, conception, and writing on film. I borrow the dyadic ideas of the ‘spirit’ (Hau), of the ‘gift’ (Taonga), and of reciprocity derived from Māori cultural practice and metaphysics, as presented by Māori scholar Tamati Ranapiri in his letters written, in Māori, 4 Ibid. Corbin was a philosopher, theologian and Iranologist and professor of Islamic Studies at the Sorbonne and in Iran. He edited and translated the work of Suhrawardi. Iran, situated between India and the Arab world, with its rich pre-Islamic Persian religious thought and practices, represents a spiritual world formed through a synthesis of syncretic traditions. It is important to know that Suhrawardi was executed as a heretical thinker. 5 See Jayamanne, ‘Lapidary Dynamism’, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, 95–123.

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to the white ethnologist Elsdon Best, in the first decade of the twentieth century in New Zealand. It is this correspondence, translated and published by Best in 1909, which formed an integral part of Marcel Mauss’s famous 1925 anthropological text The Gift.6 Mauss asked the generative anthropological question, ‘In primitive archaic type societies what is the principle whereby the gift has to be repaid? What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?’7 I attempt, with some trepidation, to navigate, as a student, this deep anthropological archive with the help of two contemporary visionary Māori scholars of education – namely Georgina Stewart and Manuka Henare – as my guides.8 Both these scholars, who have read Ranapiri’s text in Māori, appreciate his educational vision in making this vital cross-cultural effort to make an aspect of his culture intelligible to Best. According to Henare, Mauss understood that the Māori concept of Hau encodes an intangible idea of ‘the spirit [Hau] of the gift [Taonga]’, as an obligation to reciprocate it. It is the ‘spirit’ in the thing given, as well as that within the giver, which elicits reciprocity. Henare provides a valuable discussion of how the emerging disciplines of anthropology and sociology in the West theorized and debated the concepts of Hau and Taonga as a purely contractual, secular, materialist exchange, based on Best’s original mistranslation and misinterpretation. Henare argues that his translation fails to account for the spiritual and ethical dimension of exchange integral to Māori sociality. He says that this basic lack of understanding led, in turn, to Levi Strauss and others’ rationalist, contractual reading of the dynamics of gift exchange. Importantly, Henare states that, in contrast, Mauss had an intuitive grasp of the affective, ethical values integral to this remarkable Māori practice. It is this affective, ethico-aesthetic dimension of gift exchange that I borrow for my own transcultural purpose of thinking about the, often intangible, power of film on us, as “spirit [hau] of the gift”. Georgina Stewart says that the everyday meaning of the word hau is ‘wind’, which is, again, very suggestive for my purposes. Air as wind, like film, is an intangible but felt reality. I perceive film as a gift that calls forth a reciprocal act of reception. It 6 Mauss, The Gift: The Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. 7 Ibid., 3. 8 For Māori dialogical, cross-cultural, and intercultural readings of The Gift and the white anthropological archive generated by this highly influential text from 1925, see Stewart, ‘The “Hau” of Research: Mauss Meets Kaupapa Māori’. For a further contribution to understanding this archive from the point of view of Māori philosophical-anthropology and pedagogy, see Henare, ‘“Kote hau tena o to taonga […]”: The words of Ranapiri on the spirit of gift exchange and economy’.

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is a mode of reception that may be animated by the “cognitive imagination”. Stewart, as a scholar of Māori education, is clearly animated by what she calls the cross-cultural “Hau of Research” that creates generous intellectual communities across diverse disciplines and cultures and, in my instance, between anthropology, philosophy of education, and cinema studies. It would appear that Ranapiri, in his engagement with Best, was animated by the Hau of teaching and learning, which is one of my concerns in this book. Henare says that Hau Taonga exchange takes place within an expansive understanding of spiritual, environmental, economic, and kinship relations of the Māori. It follows, then, that the neoliberal command economy that now governs university education violates our capacity to learn and teach film, for example, within a capacious and complex understanding of the processes of learning and teaching.9 I have, in a previous book, crafted the bio-anthropological idea of ‘mimesis’ as a transcultural cinematographic concept.10 Film as a non-organic form of life, in its unpredictable aesthetic density, affective vitality, and cross-cultural reach, incites scholars to invent concepts and ideas with which to respond to it. The work and indeed labour of fashioning tools of conceptual analysis may be thought of as acts of reciprocity essential to a gift economy as explained by Henare.11 I believe that these crafted tools enhance our capacity to respond to the unknown and the unforeseeable in film. As a teacher of film for well over 30 years, I have had a strong feeling that my own mentor is film and it still remains so. The very sensory surplus of the image, its poetic mode of address, makes it so. I believe that film trains us to see in singular ways and conceive as well. So, this book is, among other things, concerned with modes of learning and teaching and is intended as a gift in return. This attitude may appear fanciful (a feeble thought of a septuagenarian scholar, perhaps), given that film is an industrial product of the scientific and industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. How can a commodity of mass entertainment, in which every second is calibrated and monetized (from its inception in 1895), be thought of as encoding a ‘spirit 9 In the field of the philosophy of education, there is a growing robust literature developing educational theory and practice by engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s mode of philosophizing and concept creation. I provide just a few examples of this literature. Semetsky, Deleuze, Education and Becoming; Semestsky, Nomadic Education: Variations on a Theme by Deleuze and Guattari; Cole, ‘The Power of Emotional Factors in English Teaching’. In the afterword to this book, I discuss an aspect of my own pedagogic impulse and practice (over a lifetime), stimulated by specific films. 10 See Jayamanne, Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis. 11 Henare, ‘Maori on Hau’, 56–58.

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of the gift’ (Hau Taonga), as in Māori cultural practice based on indigenous modes of knowing and doing and ethics of receptivity and generosity? One can, I think, because the film-makers under consideration (and others) have burned so much money and energy just to capture, through a collective labour of love, at least a minute or two of intensity on film and have offered it to us. The martyrs of cinema are not many (most know how to play the contractual game of equivalence and the market well – some better than others), but there are a few exemplary figures, such as Erich Von Stroheim, Robert Bresson, Chantal Akerman, Sergei Parajanov, Glauber Rocha, Ritwick Ghatak, and Kumar Shahani… who stand out. They ‘signal to us through the flames’. To forget their work and their spirit would simply be our loss. Stanley Kubrick, however, was special. He was a master at playing the contractual game to buy inordinate amounts of time, which he said was gold in the business. The stars Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise knew full well that Kubrick proffered a gift to them, which they reciprocated by giving him ‘world enough and time’ to work on Eyes Wide Shut. These exchanges were above and beyond any contractual arrangements. They enabled the couple to go where angels fear to tread. In this book, I work with intuition as method, from Henri Bergson’s theory of duration.12 The threefold steps that constitute Bergson’s method of intuition has been, for some time, part of my intellectual toolkit through Gilles Deleuze’s exposition of it. The stating or formulation of a problem, instead of picking up a ready-made one from the film studies bureaucratic filing cabinet, is the first step of the method. The next step is to learn to differentiate between differences of degree from those of kind. This way, one will not spend a lifetime analysing badly composed composites or badly stated problems. Finally, I try to think in time – time as duration – rather than in spatial categories. The imperative is to problematize, differentiate, and temporalize! The stars and actors in these films warrant special discussion in terms of their unique styles of acting. We are able to fully register their tantalizing ways of moving and being still, their modulation of voice and silence, only when our ‘cognitive imagination’ is stimulated by these delicate processes. Otherwise, they are often missed and simply go unregistered, becoming inconsequential. An awakened ‘cognitive imagination’ creates a field of awareness, of variations and modulations, of anything whatsoever, in any space whatsoever. The actors in these films are creatures who animate an 12 See Deleuze, Bergsonism, especially Chapter One, ‘Intuition as Method’. Also see Bergson’s Matter and Memory, especially Chapter Three, ‘Of the Survival of Images; Memory and Mind’.

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imaginal world by hovering between a purely sensory register and the purely intellectually abstract, all in their own singular manner. Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut offer most unusual performances at two epochal ends of the history of cinema: the end of silent cinema in 1929 and the demise of celluloid as the light-sensitive medium of registration of the image in 1999, respectively. Sound arrived in 1929, making Pandora’s Box among the last of the silent films, while the digital revolution was well underway by the time Eyes Wide Shut was produced. This digital revolution eventually rendered celluloid obsolete. It is a matter of considerable interest to me that, at the time of their original reception, both Brooks and Kidman were strongly criticized for what critics and the general public thought of as ‘very bad acting’. If this were the case, as critics ferociously maintained, then one would logically have to also say that both Pabst and Kubrick did a bad job directing each of their films at the height of their creativity. This was indeed the critical opinion at the time of their release. Pandora’s Box, however, has by now been critically redeemed in a way that Eyes Wide Shut has yet to be. In the mid twentieth century, there had been a re-evaluation of Pandora’s Box and Brook’s performance, not to mention the celebration and even fetishization of her youthful image by male critics and curators, starting with Henri Langlois and Jean-Luc Godard, among a host of others. Despite this belated adulation and intellectual interest in her, Brooks firmly maintained that she is not an actress and never wanted to be one; she claims that all she ever wanted was to dance. Kidman’s performance has not yet received the same retrospective scholarly attention, though some critics and even audiences have finally woken up to the fact that Kidman is a brilliant actress with a formidable filmography and an astonishing range of roles in blockbuster films, art films, small-scale experimental independent films, and, more recently, on television as well. Eyes Wide Shut has recently made an interesting return in popular music.13 John Malkovich’s performance in Klimt also needs to be reconsidered, as it has been dismissed as bad acting, overly mannered. But critics forget that mannerism is an aesthetic mode of high artifice available to actors and should be accepted and judged as such. One might ask how mannerism was performed and how it functioned in a film of fantasy, in fact in a dying man’s reverie. I will discuss and theorize the original work of these performers in some detail in the following chapters as well as the unique 13 Frank Ocean’s song ‘Love Crimes’ plays Kidman’s voice when she quarrels with her husband in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick, 1999. Her voice is heard just underneath Ocean’s vocal.

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mode of androgynous performance that Parajanov and Sofiko Chiaureli developed in The Color of Pomegranates. This film, about the eighteenthcentury Armenian poet-troubadour Sayat Nova, and Raul Ruiz’s Klimt are not biopics of the artists, but rather explorations of vital multicultural epochs of exchange, creativity, and political violence through a focus on the artists and their unique modes of perception. The cultural zones of contact of Transcaucasia, with its deep civilizational history, and the Viennese social world of the declining Austro-Hungarian empire in its last decades, are perceived through the singular visual and auditory points of view created by the artists themselves. The four directors – Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz – offer us hovering ‘imaginal worlds’ on film which are not exhaustible in purely narrative terms. In their hands, the image and sound catch fire, and matter becomes spirit. So, this book is an attempt at reciprocation of an abundant gift.

Bibliography Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1991. Cole, D. R. ‘The Power of Emotional Factors in English Teaching.’ Power and Education 1, no. 1, 2009, pp. 57–70. Corbin, Henri. ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.’ https:// www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginaryand-the-imaginal/. Accessed November 3, 2019. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1988. Henare, Manuka. ‘Maori on Hau: The Ethics of Generosity and Spirituality of Maori Gift Exchange.’ An Introduction to Social Anthropology: Sharing Our Worlds, edited by Joy Hendry, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, pp. 56–58. Henare, Manuka. ‘“Kote hau tena o to taonga…”: The Words of Ranapiri on the Spirit of Gift Exchange and Economy.’ Journal of Polynesian Society 127, no. 4, December 2018, pp. 451–463. Jayamanne, Laleen. Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-cultural Mimesis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Jayamanne, Laleen. The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Ocean, Frank. ‘Love Crimes.’ Nostalgia, Ultra, self-released, 2011.

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Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 2. Translated by Carlos Morreo, Paris: Dis Voir, 2007. Semetsky, Inna. Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006. Semetsky, Inna. Nomadic Education: Variations on a Theme by Deleuze and Guattari, Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2008. Semetsky, Inna, and Duana Masny. ‘The “Untimely” Deleuze: Some Implications for Educational Policy.’ Policy Futures in Education, 9, no. 4, 2011, pp. 10–16. Stewart, Georgina. ‘The “Hau” of Research: Mauss Meets Kaupapa Māori.’ Journal of World Philosophies, 2, no. 1, summer 2017, pp. 1–11.

1.

A Gift Economy: G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) Abstract The first chapter offers a fresh approach to this canonical silent film by focusing on Louise Brooks’s kinetic performance as Lulu and the tradition of dance and abstract movements she draws on. The early twentieth-century feminist political slogan, the ‘New Woman’, is embodied, contested, and rendered ambiguous in this late Weimar silent f ilm through Brooks’s technical skills as a modern dancer. Pabst and Brooks as co-creators draw an intimate link between the dynamism of the silent-film image and that of Lulu as dancer. I see these as a gift to the rather sedentary female scholar of cinema. Keywords: Pabst and abstraction, Louise Brooks’s acting as dance, New Woman

In primitive archaic type societies what is the principle whereby the gift has to be repaid? What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?1

Actor and Prostitute The etymology of the Greek name ‘Pandora’ (a composite of ‘pan’, meaning ‘all’, and ‘doron’ meaning ‘gift’) resonates with the German film Pandora’s Box (1929) by G. W. Pabst and starring Louise Brooks as Lulu. As a prostitute and dancer, Lulu circulates across class barriers as well as those of gender and ethnicity with the splendour of an abundant, radiant gift. The clichéd narrative of the film may be summarized simply as the tragic fate of a 1 Mauss, The Gift, 3.

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prostitute, Lulu, who unwittingly causes death and destruction among the men she encounters, and who ends up dying at the hands of Jack the Ripper. But the images in the film, their lighting, Lulu’s movements as a dancer, and the clothes and costumes she wears produce a parallel film which makes this clichéd narrative line waver, producing sensations and affects that are singular and memorable across nearly a century. This chapter examines these unique elements and the conflicting images of femininity they produce. Although Lulu is a prostitute, a variety performer (a trapeze artist), and a dancer in a review – in other words, she is engaged in a system of exchange involving her body – she seems to exceed the terms of those commodified, quantifiable transactions based on a system of monetary equivalence. She does not recognize herself as a commodity. The most explicit example occurs on the gambling ship when Marquis Casti-Piani bargains with the Egyptian slave trader as to Lulu’s exact worth, her monetary value. Lulu’s incredulous response to their bargaining – ‘He is acting as if he wants to buy me!’ – implies that she does not see her relationship with Dr. Schoen (which entails a financial transaction, that of a high-class ‘kept woman’) as a form of servitude either. The bargaining of her worth is made urgent because there is also a legal price on her head, as she has been convicted of manslaughter for having killed Dr. Schoen, her lover. Nevertheless, Lulu’s image, its agency, and money are integrally linked in the film, from the first act to the last. The paradox here is that she hands out money to the elderly meter man at the beginning of the film and she refuses money from Jack the Ripper at the end. She acts with agency. In between these two acts, Lulu as light image circulates like the commodity of film itself but offers a resistance to its capitalist logic of equivalence. She exceeds equivalence in her very overabundance. Not only does she give money to the meter man who reads the electricity meter, she also offers him alcohol and her radiant smile. Thomas Elsaesser attributes to the meter man, who appears for only a few minutes at the very beginning of the film, a key signifying function in the film. In doing this, he brings into critical focus the nature of exchange in the film as both libidinal and economic.2 He also highlights how Lulu as a figure of pure externality eludes capture through the peculiarly acentred point-of-view structure of the film. Her attention surprises the meter man: he beams with delight at the unexpected bounty. Similarly, she disarms (quite literally), the penniless Jack the Ripper by inviting him to the garret. These transactions are 2

See Elsaesser, ‘Lulu and the Meter Man,’ 259–292.

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unquantifiable, their register affective. We become participants in a ‘gift economy’ within the very heart of the commodity form of film and that of the street prostitute as well. The disarming of Jack the Ripper (who releases his Expressionist, claw-like grip on the knife), may well be viewed as an act of reciprocity to Lulu’s gift of a sustained radiant smile. I will return to the idea of reciprocity implied in the peculiar gift economy of this unusual film later on and examine the kinaesthetic and proprioceptive force that compels the recipient (including, in this instance, myself as the female film analyst) to make a return, and what the nature and value of that exchange might be, especially for a scholar of cinema. Helen Miller, in her unpublished article ‘Overcoming Desire: Prostitution and Contract in Pandora’s Box’, a paper presented at a conference on Gendered Beginnings, mentions that Louise Brooks as Pandora functions as a gift and that she performs as an ‘automaton’, but neither of these points are supported by film analysis and as such remain only interesting assertions.3 My approach is based on detailed film analysis and also on a theoretical articulation of the concept of the gift derived from Māori anthropology and the performance tradition of the puppet-automaton linked to Brooks as trained dancer.

Lulu and the ‘New Woman’ Thomas Elsaesser, in his aforementioned landmark essay, has presented a cogent argument that the ‘Box’ in question ‘is also the cinema-machine, the machinery of filmic mise-en-abyme’. 4 He expands on this idea through a detailed analysis of Pabst’s acentred point-of-view structures and ‘the mise-en-scène of mismatched shots’, especially in the opening scene, the backstage scene of the theatrical revue, and the remarkable close-ups of Lulu. In deploying and modifying the syntax of continuity editing, Elsaesser argues that Pabst created a unique cinematic imaginary that is neither theatrical nor novelistic. He suggests that it is through these technical processes that Pabst is able to present the ‘sexuality in the cinema as the sexuality of the cinema’.5 Further, this defused eroticism of the film image itself is developed by taking as Pabst’s ‘starting point the crisis in the self 3 Miller, ‘Overcoming Desire,’ unpaginated. Also see Hutchinson, Pandora’s Box, for a useful empirical account of the f ilm with some interesting historical detail about the production. However, it does not have a theoretical framework for its film criticism. 4 Elsaesser, ibid., 286. 5 Elsaesser, ibid., 286

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understanding of male and female sexuality that characterized his own period, the Weimar, of wounded male egos confronting the “New Woman”’.6 I, too, understand the operations of the ‘Box’ in question as the cinematic apparatus itself, and more specifically as the ‘all-giving’ Pandora. But unlike Elsaesser, I focus here on the work of light and its relationship to the singular mode of kinaesthetic performance of Louise Brooks as Lulu. Elsaesser mentions the work of light and Brooks’s acting only in passing and instead, drawing on psychoanalysis, focuses on the systems of looks that structure the film and cogently argues their inadequacy. By so doing, he is able to demonstrate how Lulu as image eludes capture by the network of the ‘male looks’ through ‘a sort of masquerade of excessive visibility’ as image. As he sees it, the final aim of Pabst’s project is ‘to transform the image of woman into an imaginary object, so that it can survive any kind of destruction, be it the ravages of age or sexual murder’.7 While it is possible to view Lulu, as he does, as a durable, atemporal ‘imaginary object’, I think one could also approach Brook’s Lulu from another angle entirely by posing some of the questions that animate this chapter. What more does the atemporal cinematic persona of Lulu offer to modern women, both then and now, besides bedazzlement by her iconic beauty? How do Brooks and Lulu, as modern dancer and fashion plate, offer a kinetic and proprioceptive vitality that undoes from within the patriarchal stereotypes and imaginary, which trammel her and restrict her movement? I think that the absence of a systematic discourse on the work of light and performance, including costumes, leaves out three of the major cinematic means of transforming the archaic myth of Pandora into a modern cinematic experience of the creation of the New Woman. Pabst, through his technical and aesthetic virtuosity, invests the film image with a set of sophisticated movements, an agency, a volatility and luminosity, which are also among the remarkable qualities of Brooks as Lulu. Lulu is a creature of light emitting particles of energy and wave-like movements. Is she, then, more akin to the electrically and alchemically produced Robot Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927, ‘the robot Lulu at the interface of sexuality and technology’, as Elsaesser suggests?8 Perhaps. But my approach is different. To fully understand Brooks’s dynamic, unique performance, one must situate her in a more ample theatrical lineage – partly archaic, partly modern – indicated by the following constellation of forms: the puppet, 6 Elsaesser, ibid., 285–289. 7 Elsaesser, ibid., 285. 8 Elsaesser, ibid., 287.

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doll, mask, automaton, robot, dancer, fashion model, mannequin. This is a tradition that produces pure externalized abstract movements, the very opposite of interiorized, realist, emotional, memory-based acting. I would suggest that Brooks as dancer draws from this rich externalizing tradition a highly flexible repertoire of movements (not purely robotic), to create a contemporary social type – the New Woman.9 The New Woman is a slogan and a modern political idea mobilized by both first-wave feminism and consumer culture in Weimar Germany (as well as elsewhere), expressing women’s newly acquired rights to vote, work, and become savvy consumers fashioning their own stylish image. This movement of women marks a departure from women’s traditional roles in Germany, indicated by the terms Kinder (child), Küche (kitchen), and Kirche (church). By saying that Lulu’s ‘eroticism is constructed on the paradigmatic opposition to all the traditionally female roles’, Elsaesser overlooks the fact that, though she is not a maternal figure, she is a prostitute and dancer, two of the oldest professions and roles available to women in patriarchal traditions.10 The machine Maria’s avatar as ‘the whore of Babylon’ in Metropolis is exemplary of this tradition of prostitute as dancer. The vitality and energy that Brooks instils in Lulu as dancer and prostitute really undoes from within the kinetic and affective attributes that have accrued to these archaic female stereotypes. Brooks, through her unique repertoire of flexible movements, vitality, and performance energy, contributes to imagining the modern social type of the New Woman. The New Woman is a project in the making, and supple movement, vitality, kinaesthetic energy, and proprioceptive sensitivity are among her contemporary attributes. Brooks is not clay in the hands of Pabst, the master film-maker. Their work was one of collaboration, as Brooks has indicated. Brooks gives us an image of the New Woman as one who is able to shape shift and play several stereotypically deadly roles with quick-wittedness and flare. She seems to enjoy doing so. Her explicit dance moves are neither titillating nor sexy and as such, are quite unlike the hypersexual dance of Robot Maria in Metropolis. Lulu’s dance moves are characterized by a pure kinetic elan. If we only look at the film exclusively through psychoanalytic concepts of image as fetish and film as primarily a voyeuristic medium, stimulating a narcissistic experience, we will be unable to sense and internalize within ourselves the kinaesthetic and proprioceptive energy of Brooks’s 9 ‘Puppet Aesthetics.’ This article offers a historical perspective on a constellation of performance forms derived from the figure of the puppet. Their powers of abstraction produce unforeseeable movements and affects. 10 Elsaesser, op. cit., 287.

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performance, which derives its lean muscular strength from drawing on the physical performance genealogy I presented above.11 It is by drawing on and creating a repertoire of abstract movements from this tradition that the film touches us with immediacy and we are impelled to touch it in return. This, I think, is exactly the process through which reciprocity might be activated and the experience of the film becomes a two-way process, a mimetically innervating, unpredictable field of energy. Understandably, the rather sedentary female intellectual spectator’s perspective (such as my own) is absent in Elsaesser’s reading of the Lulu persona and of the film. But Lulu is not exclusively addressed to the intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic male spectator, as Elsaesser tends to suggest. There is the smartly dressed professional costume designer Countess Geschwitz in tuxedo, bow tie, and hat, designing Lulu’s costumes for Alwa’s revue with enthusiasm and artistry. Though she becomes rather constrained and sad as the lesbian hopelessly in love with Lulu, she, too, may be viewed as a version of the New Woman in her sexual orientation, dress style, and engagement in a creative profession. Dressed in a black satin dress, her tango dance with Lulu (in white satin), at her wedding, is a unique, iconic, erotic moment of cinema. The traditionally dressed, utterly poised, and reserved young fiancé of Dr. Schoen, Charlotte Marie Adelaide Zarmikow, standing backstage at the theatre, gazes with rapt fascination at Lulu’s back as her elaborate costume is being fitted. She is barely mentioned in the discussions of this film, except as Schoen’s fiancé, but her quiet, engaged, and fascinated presence as a spectator in the backstage of the review is striking. The first part of the second act of the film focuses on Charlotte and her father, Dr. Von Zarmikow. Charlotte is seen seated methodically typing (a modern skill) the envelopes for her wedding invitations. She shows a quiet independence of mind in telling her father that she will marry Dr. Schoen despite what people say about him. But we can see that it is a socially advantageous marriage for Dr. Schoen, as Charlotte is very young and her aristocratic father is the Minister of the Interior. She, too, is a version of the New Woman in her sense of independence from bourgeois public opinion, her attitude towards marriage, her skill as a typist, and her quiet dismay at seeing Schoen in the arms of Lulu. She does not cry or throw a fit like Lulu but simply walks away from the scene. However, Lulu as New Woman, performing on a quite different kinetic and affective register, is a gift to all of us (intellectual women, whatever sexual orientation) who labour over film, because she knowingly 11 Mulvey, in Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinematic Mind’s Eye, argues her case through a psychoanalytic perspective which she attempts to inflect through the idea of ‘curiosity’.

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plays misogynist stereotypes like notes on an invisible keyboard and many other previously unheard notes. At the end, after the performance, she simply vanishes like film itself, becoming imperceptible. Rather more like Nosferatu, who vanishes in a puff of smoke at daybreak! Conversely, however, Lulu as film image simply vanishes as the light goes out. It is Alwa and Jack the Ripper who remain in the lower depths of a mournful state of despair and carry the full tragic load of the tale of Oedipal, patricidal, incest, and sexual impotence. Henri Langlois put it eloquently and precisely: ‘Lulu is the intelligence of the cinematographic process, she is the most perfect incarnation of photogenie’.12 Langlois highlights here (as captured by the words cinematographic, or ‘inscription with movement’, and photo, or ‘light’) the centrality of movement and of light in the very ontology of the medium of film and of Lulu herself. Following Gilles Deleuze, one can say that, materially, film is a luminous movement-image. In Brooks’s Lulu, we find a singular case of a hyperkinetic body emitting and reflecting light in a unique manner. One is inclined to think that Lulu is not quite a ‘character’ in the sense in which Charlotte and Countess Geschwitz are ‘rounded characters’. One can imagine an extra-diegetic life for them, whereas Lulu appears as a creature of film itself, an incarnation of film. Hence, she is an imaginal figure. I will take up further discussion of Lulu’s performance as a dancer later on and explore how she is conceived as a cinematic body in motion. While the male characters are shown to be animated by voyeuristic, fetishistic, narcissistic, and masochistic impulses, Pandora’s Box as such, in its ontology, is not limited to the modes of psychoanalytic male pathology it presents so systematically, almost as textbook case studies. Instead, Lulu, through her kinaesthetic and proprioceptive prowess, animates a dynamism of perception in us, enabling us to sense something new in silent cinema even as it expires with her. She is the modern American dancer as a woman in unfettered motion. Countess Geschwitz and Charlotte are respective versions of the educated aristocratic and upper bourgeois New Women. Lulu, who, we are told, was a ‘street kid’ as a child, has become her own version of the New Woman as an adult: dancer, fashion icon, and sex worker.

Film and Theatre Pandora’s Box is structured so that it lightly draws on and enfolds within itself several theatrical genres and styles of acting. This reflexive formal 12 Elsaesser, op. cit., 259.

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strategy enabled Pabst (who was first a theatre actor and director) to differentiate the dynamism of film as such from several prior popular theatrical forms even as it fondly shows its links to this past and tells the ‘tragic story of the prostitute, Lulu’. The creative adaptation of the proto-Expressionist Lulu plays (Earth Spirit, 1895 and Pandora’s Box, 1904), by Frank Wedekind, is the basis on which Pabst performs this subtle differentiation. Pabst’s link to theatre is also emphasized by the confident decision to divide the film into a series of eight discrete ‘Acts’. This division highlights the episodic nature of the narration, say, for example, from the train to the gambling ship, from the gambling ship to (most surprisingly) the streets of London. Without the fetters of realist causality limiting him, Pabst is able to create highly abstract scenarios such as the backstage scene, the one on the gambling ship, and the fogbound streets of London. An engagement with European theatrical history enables Pabst to create a reflexive structure with a temporal depth. This, however, is not the modernist concern with media specificity. This cinematic specification is not an end in itself but rather a means of enriching the affective and cognitive force of the film image and acting, which in turn kindles the mind. Thought here is to be understood as our powers of making divergent connections, differentiations of the cinematic image. Pandora’s Box marks the threshold of the end of silent cinema at the very height of its aesthetic sophistication. If one were to nominate two durable icons of silent cinema, Chaplin’s Tramp and Brooks’s Lulu come to mind immediately, because they animate movement and light in unique ways. They exist as atemporal cinematic icons not restricted to the original time in which they appeared. In defying chronological time, they are also able, paradoxically, to intimate other durations. Brooks as Lulu treads the cinematic instant lightly as a dazzling, evanescent presence. Chaplin treads time mimetically so that he is both ‘too soon and too late’.13 While the old pimp Schigolch visits Lulu, he helps himself to money from a wad of notes in her purse left on the mantelpiece (again, Lulu is the source of money), and asks her to dance while he plays the harmonica. She appears to have forgotten the steps, to his annoyance, but recovers and does a series of spontaneous dance moves, a pastiche of Brooks’s training at the Denishawn modern dance company and her experience in theatrical revues and variety. The layered, fluttering light chiffon dress she wears (rather more costume than dress), enhances the improvised zany dance wonderfully. Though she has been asked to dance, there is a strong sense that she dances for herself, evident in her childlike, unselfconscious 13 See Jayamanne, ‘A Slapstick Time,’ in Towards Cinema and its Double, for a theoretical articulation of multiple temporalities in the work of Chaplin, 171–181.

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delight in movement. She is suffused with joy at each instant. This is what I have called elsewhere a ‘performance of narcissism’, a state of primary narcissistic plenitude, rather than a ‘narcissistic performance’, which is a depleted, exhibitionist form of narcissism.14 Reminded of her skill, Shigolsch says that she deserves to be seen by a large audience and suggests that she perform in a variety trapeze act with Rodrigo Quast. As a variety performer, Lulu plans to play in a culturally popular form of theatrical entertainment for the lower classes. In contrast, her lover, Dr. Schoen, a newspaper magnate, asks his son Alwa to choreograph his revue to showcase Lulu as the main attraction so that he can have additional sexual access to her. The revue form clearly has higher production values than variety and thereby appeals to a more well-to-do audience. Historically, variety theatre existed as popular mass entertainment in vaudeville circuits. At its origin in 1895, film was incorporated into vaudeville shows as the latest new attraction. Film coexisted with these highly popular theatrical forms of mass entertainment in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. But, as film developed into ‘legitimate’ narrative cinema with spectacular effects, as a form of mass entertainment, widening its class base, it soon superseded theatre in both popularity and profit. Pabst provides a compendium of popular forms of mass entertainment at the turn of the century, giving us a short history of the emergence of silent cinema from popular theatre. Like Wedekind in the late nineteenth century, Pabst, at the end of the era of silent cinema, engages with popular physical theatre for his own ends. Jane Goodall, in her book Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order, says that Wedekind created the character Lulu after he spent two years (1892–1894), in the Parisian demi-monde of Montmartre, among circus performers, acrobats, dancers, strong men, clowns, animal tamers, trapeze artists, prostitutes, writers, and artists from all over Europe and North Africa. She discusses a famous virtuoso aerialist by the name of El Nino who had his London debut in 1866 as the son of the famous aerialist Farini.15 She goes on to say: Four years later in Paris, El Nino resurfaced as Mademoiselle Lulu, gaining an ecstatic reception for a performance of exceptional technical virtuosity […] As Shane Peacock observes, there may be a direct association between this Lulu and the character of that name created by Wedekind.16 14 See Jayamanne, ‘Postcolonial Gothic,’ in Towards Cinema and Its Double, 24–48. 15 Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 197–200. 16 Goodall, ibid., 198.

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Though there is a period of more than two decades separating Wedekind’s stay in Paris and the cross-dressed Lulu’s trapeze act, there, Goodall says the connection is worth exploring for what it can tell us about changing perceptions of the performing body and its energies. Wedekind’s interest in performers who explored the limits of the body was, according to Goodall, ‘bound up with his own experiments to test the boundaries of sexuality’.17 Pabst’s androgynous conception of the cinematic Lulu, with her highly kinetic performance, pays tribute to and draws from this popular physical theatrical tradition from within which she is conceived. Similarly, the trapeze artist Rodrigo Quast and clown-like Schigolch are degraded versions of the creatures of the theatrical demi-monde Wedekind explored in Paris. Pabst remembers this milieu and pays tribute to it while recreating with Brooks their Lulu as an aerialist on solid ground, within the disintegrating social and familial relations of Weimar Germany. There are several key scenes in which some of the actors perform as though they are in a pantomime performance rather than in a film. The scene is the upper-class wedding reception of Lulu and Dr. Schoen in his spacious, modern apartment. Lulu has invited her ‘disreputable’ theatrical friends, Schigolch and Rodrigo Quast, to the wedding. When Dr. Schoen finds the three of them carousing in his bedroom, the scene turns violent, he threatens and chases out both Schigolch and Rodrigo Quast with a gun. The two raise their hands and rush past the upper-class wedding guests in a state of utter panic. There is something grotesquely comic and terrifying in this enactment of a chase scene and the social contempt and murderous rage that initiates it. The difference in class relations, between Dr. Schoen and the shabbily dressed duo, could not be starker. They are filmed both from the front and back as the astonished upper-class guests clear the way to make room and a nearly deranged Schoen pursues them with gun in hand. Here intersect family melodrama, between husband and wife, and pantomime, performed for the camera, to highlight a social critique. Schoen, with his gun held high, converts the light-hearted, playful, childlike carousing in the bedroom into a highly melodramatic scene. Lulu, Schigolch, and Quast, in their merriment and enjoyment of each other’s company at the wedding reception, appear as a comic trio in a burlesque – the beauty, the clown, and the strong man. Pabst gives considerable time to showing the servants at the wedding reception working in the kitchen, serving and drinking, laughing and flirting, full of warmth and camaraderie in contrast to the polite, staid wedding 17 Goodall, ibid., 199.

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guests chatting and dancing decorously upstairs. It’s a scene full of the hustle and bustle of a working kitchen. Lulu enters this space dressed in a gorgeous white satin bridal dress with train and veil, looking for Schigolch and Quast, who are comfortably seated in a nook, drinking. Delighted to see them (as completely at ease downstairs as she is upstairs), Lulu provides them with ample food and drink. The entire kitchen scene, in its inebriated high spirits, has the lightness of farce in which bodies of different types come into very close contact, arousing laughter. Its farcical conviviality and comic misrule is in sharp contrast with the decorum of the upper-class people upstairs. The editing brings these two distinct scenes, with different styles of acting, into opposition. The killing of Rodrigo Quast, the trapeze artist, by Countess Geschwitz in a tiny cabin on the gambling ship is pure cloak-and-dagger grotesque theatrical pantomime; Schigolch hides behind a curtain, having engineered the scenario. As Rodrigo lunges at the countess, the large lantern affixed to the ceiling swings violently, creating a visual disturbance to underline the intricate melodramatic plotting that has brought these two unlikely ‘lovers’ together. The subsequent high-angled close shot of the murdered Quast is, however, purely cinematic, with its shadowy lighting and illuminated dead face. There are aspects of several scenes that belong to pure theatrical burlesque. At the very end of the courtroom scene, after Lulu’s friends set the false fire alarm to disturb the legal proceedings (so as to give Lulu a chance to escape imprisonment), a figure drags a supine body across the empty courtroom floor and another figure in a long coat runs across the space in a manic twirling motion, while several upturned chairs lie scattered. The feel of the scene and its visual appearance is rather more like a cabaret hall where something violent has just occurred. The space of the courtroom has been transformed into a theatrical one. Pabst’s sense of realism is combined with a unique ability to speedily transform the mise-en-scène into a higher degree of abstraction. The courtroom is swiftly subjected to a theatrical burlesque turn with Lulu’s presence. Brooks’s body is fragmented in the scene in which she swings from the strong forearm of Quast. Several highly fragmented shots show her swinging legs and fluttering, diaphanous dress, rapidly intercut with close-ups of her face and head, creating an overall sense of her exuberantly childlike delight in motility, a flurry of textured dynamic movements as though she is doing a trapeze routine. The famous theatrical backstage scene at Alwa’s review is also comical and farcical in its multiple movements that interfere with each other and the little visual running gag of the stage manager’s repeatedly interrupted attempt to eat his sandwich. It is a popular theatre revue seen from the

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wings and, as such, an oblique cinematic take on theatre in close-up. Here, Pabst’s editing is at its most dynamic. The camera moves minimally while the incessant movement of performers and stagehands, materials and objects in the shot collide and brush against each other, giving an impression of organized chaos. Space is activated on a vertical and horizontal as well as a diagonal axis, creating the feeling of an incessantly mobile, tactile surface. There is continuity of editing, but the movements are not followed, as yet another set of movements takes their place. The shots are rapidly edited, suggesting montage and yet the total experience is that of an intensive surface rich in texture and micro-movements. So continuity and montage editing are not used in the conventional manner. The camera presents theatre as only film can. The scene is Pabst’s tribute to a kitsch popular art form, which he converts into an ornamental space for Lulu, as a resplendent ornament herself, to stage the private Oedipal drama. On seeing Dr. Schoen and his fiancé together, Lulu refuses to dance in her presence, throwing a tantrum, which becomes the main show. In his effort to coax her, they go into a prop room where Dr. Schoen and Lulu are found locked in an embrace, seen by his fiancé and son in dazed astonishment. Theatre and its backstage machinery and materials have been converted into an intimate chamber play. The transition of mood and tone from farcical pantomime movements in the wings to the staging of a tragic theatrical melodramatic tableau is superbly orchestrated. Only a theatre actor and director such a Pabst would have understood from within the strange connection and fundamental difference between theatrical acting and film, theatrical mise-en-scène and film. Schigolch and Rodrigo Quast, figures from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular physical theatre stumble into the high cool of Weimar sophistication. Lulu’s vital and at first joyful theatrical connection to them creates two of the most animated dance scenes in the film. In contrast, the very brief view of Lulu’s dance in the revue is of quite a different order of performance with its extravagant costume and beautiful yet limited movement from one pose to another in a rhythmic walking motion. Lulu’s kinetic mobility is restrained as an ornament for the upper-class audience of the review. Rodrigo Quast, now employed as an extra, appears in a line-up of soldiers dressed in comic costume and armour; as he passes Lulu backstage, he exclaims indignantly, “‘Nonsense! Wouldn’t you rather do a trapeze act with me!”’ He clearly sees the revue as trivial entertainment with none of the skill and virtuosity required to do a circus trapeze act in variety. Here, Pabst has an intimate affinity with Wedekind. I feel that Pabst and Brooks train us to perceive the kinaesthetic register of performance in a fresh way.

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If we take part in this training, our preconceived modes of making sense of the film may need to be revised. This process is reciprocal in the way that a gift is said to function.

Realism and Abstraction of Milieux The scenes in the east end of London – with the street, Salvation Army, pub, garret, and stairwell – create a strong realist sense of a precise lower-class milieu of urban poverty. Yet the pervasive fog helps to create an abstract space at the same time. Only the essential, such as Jack the Ripper, with his wide-brimmed hat, emerges from the fog. The coexistence or the penetration of the everyday with cinematic abstraction is especially pointed in the last act. It is Christmas. The Salvation Army provides soup to the hungry and operates within a barter system and a generalized sense of generous gift exchange in the midst of poverty. The most enchanting exchange of a gift happens on a large staircase (shot on the diagonal with shadows as unmistakable Expressionist devices), where Lulu urges Jack the Ripper to come into her garret (despite both being penniless), with a dazzling series of smiles in extreme close-up. Here, we see how the realism of the milieu (the stairwell) is transformed and abstracted through the series of close-ups into a plane of cinematic erotics, an incarnation of the spirit of the gift. It is intriguing that the film does not end with the death of Lulu. Instead, Pabst takes us to the fogbound streets again. The Christmas procession of the down-and-out, led by the Salvation Army playing its brass band, a little Christmas tree mounted on a cart drawn by a donkey, and Alwa following them at the back, with which the film ends, is utterly sombre and realistic, the tone melancholic as in the genre of street films of the era. A scene of utter disenchantment and melancholy from the promise of enchantment and vitality offered at the opening of the film with Lulu and the meter man. As Hagopian notes, Jean Renoir expressed this special quality of Pabst’s image in the following way: Near the end of Pabst’s life, film-maker Jean Renoir recognized that Pabst’s deeply personal style was so subtle, so indebted to the prosaic detail of ordinary life, that it might escape the notice of the auteurists who were lionizing Renoir. Generously, he wrote: ‘Pabst knows how to create a strange world, whose elements are borrowed from daily life. Beyond this precious gift,

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he knows how, better than anyone else, to direct actors. His characters emerge like his own children, created from fragments of his own heart and mind.’18

Impulse and the Bourgeois Male Body In Lulu’s presence, Schoen is disarmed and surrenders to impulses, which lead to violence. An example of his volatile behaviour is first seen in Lulu’s apartment, where he has come to break off his affair with her, when he unaccountably, absent-mindedly drops a lit cigarette on a side table with a doily and a cactus plant. The camera lingers on the lit cigarette to silently make a point about his emotional state. The absent-minded cigarette lighting is repeated in the prop room of the theatre where Lulu throws a tantrum. When an agitated Schoen is about to light a cigarette in the ‘No Smoking’ space, Lulu, in the throes of her staged outburst, rationally warns him against it. Yet again, standing up agitatedly, he topples over a very heavy large wooden chair he has been sitting on, soon after Lulu has departed from his study, having arrived there unexpectedly and unwelcomed. The filming of Schoen’s death is most intriguing, as many analysts have shown. Having been socially disgraced at his own wedding, he thrusts a pistol into Lulu’s hand, asking her to kill herself. At her refusal, they struggle with each other and a wisp of smoke emerges from between their bodies. Schoen’s body slowly moves away from Lulu and, to her horror, he appears to be mortally wounded. During his elaborate, Expressionist death scene he reaches towards Lulu and clasps her face with both hands, slides his hands down her body, and slowly slumps in front of her, having submitted to his death. It is the close shots of Schoen’s body, its imposing static bulk, often seen from the back, occluding Lulu, which conveys the operation of the impulse, both the willed effort to resist it and then the disastrous unwitting surrender to it, indicated by the Freudian slips of his well-mannered, controlled, stolid, high bourgeois body.

Lulu’s Childhood Lulu appears without a sense of the past, though Countess Geschwitz recounts it to the state prosecutor and his wife in defence of Lulu. She says that Lulu grew up without a family, on the city streets and in cafés, suggesting a much darker 18 Hagopian, unpaginated.

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history of child prostitution, certainly prevalent in the hedonistic, amoral, decadent ethos of Weimar Berlin where, according to Brooks, ‘collective lust roared unashamed in the theatre.’. We don’t know for sure what Lulu’s real relationship to Schigolch is. Lulu refers to him variously as ‘my patron’, ‘my father,’, while he also seems also to be her pimp. It is evident that Lulu has no natural history, as Goodall puts it.19 Though Lulu’s death in the garret is tragic, it is not played as tragedy. Her death is so astonishingly fleeting and calm, in sharp contrast with Dr. Schoen’s long, drawn-out, agonized agonizing, theatrical Expressionist theatrical death. The cinematic framing and close-shot enable us to see only Lulu’s lifeless hand slip down Jack the Ripper’s body, signalling death. There is no struggle even as he rips into her with a knife. Once again, the image shows us something beyond or other than the narrative meaning of the scene. This tension and lack of connection or disjunction makes us engage with the film in an unusual way. Perception and meaning do not neatly support and confirm each other in this climactic scene as well. Pabst leaves the mind perplexed. Why does Lulu vanish so quietly, while Schoen plays death to the hilt? Schoen and Alwa are creatures of the German Expressionist imaginary of Oedipal triangles and father-son incestuous struggles. Though a catalyst, Lulu is not a creature of the psychoanalytic imaginary.

Film and Lulu: A Gift Economy The Jack the Ripper scene – the final act – is set at Christmas among the poor and destitute on the streets of London. Lulu’s narrative movement from the upper-class milieu and the theatrical revue in Germany, to the gambling ship in France, and then to the streets of impoverished London, marks a sharp social declivity. Here, the film explicitly elaborates on the multiple economies of the gift. At first, we see Jack the Ripper emerging from the fog, looking into the room of a middle-class house where children and adults gather around a Christmas tree. A Salvation Army woman offers soup to him and tells Jack the Ripper that they take only so that they can give back in return, implying a system of exchange as a barter of sorts. According to the Christian legend, Christmas celebrates the supreme gift of Christ’s incarnation so as to save the world. As such, it is a gift that cannot be reciprocated. The Christian gift of love is linked to sacrifice. Similarly, Lulu as film image offers us a special gift of life, as radiant intense moment, irrespective of social class and market value. In aligning Lulu’s final sparkling smile with Christmas, and her sacrifice at the 19 Goodall, op. cit., 200.

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hands of the appealing Jack the Ripper, Pabst creates a highly dense, startling, and somewhat baffling, certainly disturbing, emotional register to end the film. Pabst shows us several modes of the gift economy in operation, and through that, he differentiates film as commodity from film as vital force. Film and Lulu or Lulu as film image itself embodies the spirit of the gift, which exceeds any reciprocal obligation. She embodies the spirit of the gift in a unique manner. The reciprocity built into a gift economy is disabled because Lulu as gift gives all. She gives more than what the exchange requires; she is, after all, called Pandora. Gift and sacrifice, gift as sacrifice central to the Christian narrative, is reworked within a market economy, investing the silent film image itself with a metaphysics of light and the audience a power to perceive and cherish it on the eve of its obsolescence. There is a poignancy and fatality to the death of silent cinema and Lulu’s death. Such a realistic understanding of death as obsolescence is Pabst’s contribution to the aesthetics and politics of the ‘New Objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeite) of the last period of Weimar cinema.

Lulu’s Democratic Allure and Upper-Class Social Contempt Lulu flits through the film from one milieu to another, through a highly stratified social space – from the upper class to the demi-monde and lower depths – with undiminished ease and vitality. It is as if she belongs everywhere and nowhere, which is, in a sense, what film is! She does not seem to belong to a particular class, but she comes in contact with several different social strata. Her allure is like that of film itself, in its historical status as ‘Democracy’s Theatre’ offering a ‘Universal Language’ of intelligibility and desire. Lulu’s appeal is akin to the appeal of film as an intense light image that dazzles even as it expires. As a prostitute, she is (like film itself) a commodity; that is, an object to be bought and sold. But she appears to evade capture, her identity mercurial. Her clothing and costumes are so varied – she wears both state-of-the-art fashionable dress and extravagant theatrical costumes – that they do not precisely identify and contain her. Their variety contributes to Lulu’s mercurial presence. They amplify her movements and clothe her with affect, as Brooks understood so well.20 20 Brooks described how wretched she felt when Pabst had her favourite set of clothes despoiled for her to wear as a streetwalker in London. ‘I went on the set feeling as hopelessly defiled as my clothes. Working in that outfit, I didn’t care what happened to me.’ Brooks, ‘Pabst and Lulu,’ in Lulu In Hollywood, 103–104.

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In contrast, the men’s clothes and especially their hats and caps (and the way they are handled and worn), become powerful emblems of class relations. The hat powerfully creates or delineates and identifies the character in a swift, economical gesture. There is something of the ceremonial in the way men embody and handle their hats and caps across class lines. One thinks of Chaplin here. Schigolch’s shabby gentility, more like a tramp, is conveyed most effectively through the way he tips his cap (to an unintended comic effect), say to Dr. Schoen in Lulu’s apartment. When Schoen discovers Schigolch hiding in a corner of Lulu’s balcony (because of her dog’s bark), instead of being embarrassed at the disclosure, she introduces one to the other with an elegantly formal dance-like gesture of her hand saying, ‘He was my first patron’. Affronted, full of disdain, Schoen storms out of the apartment, having smoothly collected his hat, gloves, and coat. Moments such as these are oblique and most tantalizing as they are not played out as in a realist drama. When Rodrigo Quast, in a tight suit, fails to tip his hat at being introduced to Lulu, Schigolch nudges him and takes it off for him. This, despite the fact that Schigloch himself looks like a tramp – unkempt, shabby, in worn-out shoes and, according to Brooks, smelly as well! While Lulu attends to the meter man at the opening of the film, the doorbell rings and he answers it for her. Schigolch, who is at the door, is shot from behind with his shabby shape in silhouette, a tramp perhaps. A reverse-shot sequence shows him smiling and tipping his cap at the meter man, who with his condescending look at a social inferior, prepares to give him a coin. Meanwhile, Lulu sees that it is Schigolch and moves swiftly to gather him up and sweep him into her apartment, with a marvellously graceful flowing movement, shutting the door behind her. The astonished meter man, not knowing what to make of this socially incongruous, rapidly changing scene, picks up the two coins from the floor, dropped by Lulu, puts on his workman’s cap, picks up his logbook, and leaves. In a few introductory moments, Pabst has given us a small lesson in class relations, social condescension, and the egalitarian relations and promise of film in an unusual way. While Lulu moves through several of the theatrical genres of the period, she is not contained by any of them. She does not belong to the theatre. Lulu is incarnated by the electric light of the pure film image. The idea of a ‘pure’ film image suggests that the image (as distinct from the plot and narrative), has a dynamism and vitality or spirit of its own irreducible to a storyline. The images offer different meanings and aesthetic values on condition that we sense these differences. One really needs to sense the light values because their manifestation is so ephemeral and at times non-diegetic. The capacity to sense the image, its kinetic and proprioceptive impulses,

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stimulates thought. It is a gift offered to the spectator. Pabst and Brooks, in their collaboration, demonstrate how intimately the eroticism of his film image is linked to a particular conception of femininity; prostitute, dancer, and New Woman. In this sense, Pandora’s Box offers a paradoxical cinematic archetype that is sui generis. She has no progeny despite several attempts by film-makers, including Godard, to copy her via her famous bobbed hairstyle and bangs. Her hairstyle alone has little dynamism, an engaging fetish, without the power of movement and the energy of her body, her costumes, and mercurial spirit, combined with Pabst’s editing and lighting. This is so evident in the second film that Brooks and Pabst made together, The Diary of a Lost Girl. In this film, Brooks still has the same hairstyle but none of the dynamism of Lulu because she ‘acts’ rather than dances through the film, whereas in Pandora’s Box, every ordinary movement is inflected with the rhythmic values of dance. Pabst’s editing in The Diary of a Lost Girl is also not as fragmented as in Pandora’s Box. Brooks is self-aware when she says that she is not a real actor, but rather, a dancer. But when she acts as though she is really dancing, she is unparalleled. Only Pabst in Pandora’s Box knew how to tap this unique ability, intuitively for the first and only time. Through her training in early twentieth century American modern dance, Brooks as Lulu is able to dance her way across Pandora’s Box.

Architectural and Social Strata The clean, rectilinear Art Deco lines of Lulu’s apartment and windows, with their striped drapes, is reminiscent of Bauhaus architectural geometric façades of the late 1920s. But the interior decor is highly individuated with plants, ornaments, and a divan with cushions and the like. The high bourgeois modern interior of Dr. Schoen’s apartment is mixed in style. It is a modern space, with a library of old leather-bound volumes, a large mural, and heavy wooden furniture. In contrast, the apartment of his fiancée Charlotte is decorated with ornate furniture from a different era and draped curtains befitting old money of the ruling class and traditional social standing. The London garret shows Alwa, Schigolch, and Lulu together for the last time. Alwa has become catatonic. Schigolch has regressed; he drinks alcohol from a bottle and sucks at his pipe dreaming of a plum pudding. Lulu pragmatically gets ready to walk the streets by combing her hair and putting on lipstick in flickering lamplight. It is a strange perversion of a domestic scene.

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Two scenes stand out in introducing the public as a central feature of the film’s social realism. One occurs in the courtroom scene where men and women occupy the public gallery. They are all well dressed, perhaps middle class. The other is the pub scene in London and its working-class customers. During Lulu’s trial, the women in the public gallery vocally express their sentiments favouring Lulu. During the recess, the people gather outside the courtroom. Two men and a woman are seen talking in an animated manner while also eating sandwiches. The detail of the sandwiches attracts attention, enhancing the everyday quality of the scene. In the ensuing chaos, when the false fire alarm is struck, a group of tall men form a protective circle around Lulu and help her escape prison. This anonymous group of men makes their strong social presence felt. In the pub, we see a convivial gathering of working-class people drinking and enjoying themselves on Christmas Eve. Schigolch is there, tucking into a large plum pudding given to him as a gift by a kindly woman, who looks on. These people stand up and take off their hats respectfully as the Salvation Army procession, led by the brass band, passes by at the very end of the film. These two scenes of a sense of community are in sharp contrast to the scene of frantic gambling on the ship, by what appears to be upper-class people with a lot of money. Pabst’s supple shifts from abstract scenes to realist ones are noteworthy, as is his understanding of class relations. People actually working are seen in the scenes in Schoen’s kitchen for the wedding, the men backstage at the review, and the sailors aboard the gambling ship. That one remembers each of these milieus so vividly, despite the focus on the dazzling Lulu, says something of Pabst’s capacity to work with striking details in each of these scenes highlighting class differences and also the nature of work. The intriguing shot of the young sailor on the gambling ship, serving a cocktail to Lulu, with another on the tray, standing and quietly looking at her for a considerable length of time comes to mind. It is this very sailor who later provides Lulu with his cap and top as disguise to escape in.

Brooks, Lulu, and Dance Pabst’s Lulu is not the same as that of Wedekind’s Lulu of Earth Spirit (1895) or Pandora’s Box (1904). She is not the theatrical incarnation of animal instinct. We do well to remember what Wedekind said about his Lulu: that she is not a character. Rather, for him, she embodied an elemental, instinctive force. Pabst and Brooks converted Wedekind’s Lulu into a cinematic figure incarnated

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with light, movement, and fabric. One could then say that, for Pabst also, Lulu was not so much a character but rather an incarnation of film, the vital force of the silent film itself at the very moment of its demise. While she does appear as the New Woman, it is also the case that the New Woman is not a character in the traditional sense of a fully rounded realist character. Lulu is an incarnation of an idea, which is political, aesthetic, and commercial. Lulu appears to alight just so as to take to flight, as a ballet dancer might. Brooks was trained as a ballet dancer from a young age and danced professionally as a young adult with the pioneering Denishawn modern dance company, alongside Martha Graham. She danced as a chorus girl and as a lead dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies revues on Broadway. Her dance skills were evidently both eclectic and extensive. What Brooks really wanted to do was to have a career as a dancer, but she found herself in film almost by chance. However, she had no formal training as an actor; she was self-taught. She expressed her eccentric approach to performing in film in the following insightful statement: ‘I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act’.21 She clearly internalized performing as hyperkinetic movement of the impulsive body in space and micro-movements of gesture and posture. She was, in this regard, a unique performer in silent cinema, and these qualities make of her the most contemporary of silent film actors, appealing to generations across the twentieth and even into the twenty-first century. Brooks moves her entire body rather than merely gesticulating, as many silent film actors did. Through motion, she produces emotion. Strangely, she does not seem to age. As she mentioned, Brooks shared a highly kinetic expressive power with the figure of Chaplin, the clown. The ballet dancer and the clown both share a secret affinity in their silently expressive movements of high artifice, shown so poignantly in Chaplin’s Limelight, in which Claire Bloom as a ballerina dances to the tune of ‘You Are Always in My Heart’, while Chaplin, the aged clown, having broken his back, lies dying in the wings. One defies gravity, while the other succumbs to it through pratfalls. But both are highly trained and disciplined performers of movement. Critics have noted that Brooks appeared ‘natural’ on film and that she appeared not to act but to be. This perceived naturalness and spontaneity is a result of a rigorous training of her body. In fact, her naturalness is achieved through a great deal of artifice, an extensive training from childhood. She does not walk, or sit, or stand like a realist, ‘normal’ actor but rather as a dancer. For example, when she crosses the full extent of Dr. Schoen’s apartment (on 21 Paris, Louise Brooks, 107.

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returning there from her trial and conviction), she does not walk so much as dance, skip across it lightly, twirling. When she sees a pile of magazines, she selects one and lounges with a precise casual elegance on a divan, looking at the images of high fashion and swimwear with interest. When she runs a bath, she strikes a pose with her hands on her hips. She leaps onto the laps of men (Schigolch and Jack the Ripper), with one clean movement and nestles there elegantly and yet appears childlike. There are no superfluous movements of her body, her everyday movements are precise as those of a dancer, which is what she was. The lines of her movements are pure – abstract even. She does not gesticulate nor does she produce phatic communicative signs. When she sees a horizontal bar or arm, she swings from them as she does on Rodrigo Quast’s strong arm and when she meets Alwa and Countess Geschwitz in Alwa’s apartment she does the same on a crossbar, much to their and her own delight. The way she enters this room by opening a large door and turning in one continuous elegant, light, movement is contrasted with the way in which Countess Geschwitz, in a smart tuxedo and bow tie, enters through the very same door in the normal way one would. The two everyday movements are thereby foregrounded and differentiated in one scene. This film constantly trains us to perceive its movements, its rhythms, and its pulses. This special gift proffered us as viewers is not a purely visual experience. If we are receptive to the film’s sensations, our kinaesthetic and proprioceptive body may also be recharged. The dancer’s muscular energy and ours have a chance to achieve mimetic transference. This is the deepest material sense in which I imagine and understand how reciprocity operates in Pandora’s Box.

Lulu as Pierrot A rather large painting of Lulu as an androgynous, sombre Pierrot with a guitar hangs prominently in her living room, a gesture to Wedekind’s Earth Spirit in which she appears dressed as the clown Pierrot. Through her sombre expression, a reflective element is brought into the picture, which is also suggestive of the fluctuating nature of gender and sexuality in Weimar culture. Throughout the nineteenth century in Europe, the traditional clown Pierrot from pantomime became an embodiment of a male artistic sensibility, sensitivity, and melancholy in a venal commercial world. Theodore Adorno said that Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (‘Pierrot of the Moon’, 1912) expressed ‘the homelessness of our soul’. Lulu’s androgynous Pierrot appears to be unique until Björk, dressed

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as the clown, sang ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ in 1996! The thick affective life of this iconic European melancholy clown figure is condensed, I think, into this painting, creating an androgynous theatrical genealogy for Lulu.22 The implicit melancholy tone of the bisexual Lulu as Pierrot is picked up and given full force at the end of the film when we see Jack the Ripper in his raincoat and hat exit the building (having killed Lulu and having left behind her dead body), into a London fog, while Alwa, leaning against a wall, sobs. It is as though (in Thomas Elsaesser’s reading), the man in the raincoat and hat is leaving the cinema after having seen Pabst’s Lulu!

Lulu in Coco Chanel? Stars such as Brooks, who were not major box-office figures, were disposable commodities in the Hollywood industry in which youthful good looks and talent were plentiful. Pabst knew more than anyone else what was photogenic about Brooks – her unique movements, energy, clothes, and hairstyle – which is why he drastically changed them when she is on the illicit gambling ship, with very little room to move in every sense! Brooks’s hair is parted in the middle and the two sides lightly curled, immediately making her blend in with the rest, her appeal significantly diminished. She dazzles again only when she wears a cap (with her hair tucked in), borrowed from a male waiter on the ship and a striped top worn by the sailors. This top is reminiscent of Coco Chanel’s 1917 Breton stripe top inspired by fishermen and also historically worn by French sailors. While the police raid the ship, Lulu gets into drag by slipping on this high-fashion Coco Chanel-like chic urban jumper and cap, caught in an all too brief but well-lit shot. Lulu peeps stealthily from a cabin, looking like a gorgeous fashion icon, and escapes in a boat to London with Alwa and Schigolch. There is, this time round, an outrageous disjunction here between the 22 Brinkman, ‘The Fool as Paradigm,’ 139–167. Brinkman shows how the French adapted and transformed this clown figure from its seventeenth-century origins in Italian commedia dell’arte to the clumsy Pierrot and its gradual eighteenth-century transformation as melancholy Pierrot, to its emergence as a ‘melancholy artist-prototype’ in nineteenth-century Paris. Wedekind would have been aware of this rich lineage in making Lulu dress up as Pierrot. Also see Youens, ‘Excavating an Allegory’, 95–115. Youens says that ‘Pierrots were endemic everywhere in late nineteenth / early twentieth century Europe as an archetype of the self-dramatizing artist, who presents to the world a stylized mask both to symbolize and veil artistic ferment, to distinguish the creative artist from the human being’ (96). This long history of the evolution of an archetypal persona is important to Wedekind and also for Pabst in his presentation of Lulu as Pierrot in the artifice of the painting.

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narrative situation (police raid on illegal gambling, murder, and being a fugitive) and the aesthetics of Lulu as image. The illumination of the shot of Lulu seems to me to be extra-diegetic in its clarity, rather more like a fashion plate in Vogue or Die Dame (‘The Lady’)! Brooks’s Lulu in this haute couture, androgynous, casual outfit becomes the New Woman, who knows how to get out of a tight spot with aplomb. There is an irresistible sense of fun in this get-up, in this all too short, light, dangerous instant. But film is like that: a glittering instant, a sliver of time, a particle of intensity. Oh! If only we could freeze it! But then it would cease to be an irretrievably passing instant in all its brilliance, from whence it derives all its power.

Collaboration Between Brooks and Pabst Brooks and Pabst created their Lulu through a remarkably intuitive collaboration. Brooks has said that she didn’t read the English-language translation of the script given to her by Pabst. As a result, she says, ‘I didn’t know that Lulu was a professional dancer trained in Paris (“Gypsy, Oriental, skirt dance”) or that dancing was her mode of expression (“In my despair I dance the Can-Can”)’.23 According to Brooks, Pabst didn’t discuss her character and motivation with her as he did with others: ‘But in my case, by some magic, he would saturate me with one clear emotion and turn me loose, […] this afternoon, in the first scene, you are going to cry’ and plotted the floor plan of her movement in the way a choreographer might instruct a dancer. He also took a keen interest in her costumes and clothing (some of them which were Brooks’s own), as though they were a supercharged sensory skin that would contribute to the performance, which of course they did. In contrast, he would spend considerable time with the other actors – explaining their roles to them, calming them down, humouring them. He is said to have approached each actor in a manner that suited the actor rather than in a standardized manner, collectively. Pabst chose Brooks to play the archetypal German character after seeing her in a minor Howard Hawks’s film, A Girl in Every Port (1928). Pabst’s search for Lulu was legendary; it lasted for months. The pre-Hollywood, pre-Blue Angel Marlene Dietrich was also considered. It is significant that he chose an American actress rather than a German to play the iconic German role. It was a controversial choice, upsetting some of the German film-going public. Pabst is on record as saying that one sexy look from Dietrich would turn the film into burlesque! On set, Pabst asked Brooks to improvise a little 23 Brooks, ibid., 105.

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dance for the first scene with Schigolch. All he did was give her a fast tempo for the dance and a small demarcated space. It was then that Pabst realized that Brooks was in fact a trained dancer. ‘That I was a dancer and Pabst essentially a choreographer in his direction came as a wonderful surprise to both of us on the first day of shooting Pandora’s Box’, Brooks recalled.24 What he would have responded to in Brooks’s Hollywood film is her ability to move freely without being encumbered by the clichés of femininity or ‘sexiness’, a pure kinetic elan of the modern female American dancer in motion. For example, in one impressive scene in A Girl in Every Port, she performs with athletic prowess and elegance a dangerous circus act, in which she climbs a very high ladder in tights and dives down from it into a pool of water. One can sense proprioceptively this quality of unencumbered movement in a virtual form even when she settles into a still position, such as when she is simply sitting or lying down in Pandora’s Box. One could imagine her playing tennis with great ease, as they did back then for fun. She did not carry the burden of femininity that had formed and weighed down the figure of ‘Woman’ as whore or dancer over centuries of theatrical and visual representation in the Western tradition, including in the silent film era. This is despite the fact that she played the role of a prostitute in this film. As a modern dancer who said that she learned to dance from Chaplin and act from Martha Graham, she possessed the technical skill and amplitude to demonstrate these stereotypes while not being determined and restricted by them. According to Richard Leacock, ‘Brooks describes her movements in the film as simple choreography, and this easily makes sense watching her move across a room, sit on a sofa, or leap on to a man’s lap’.25 One must remember, however, that her fluid movements are inextricably linked and amplif ied by the dynamism of Pabst’s singular style of mise-en-scène, framing, lighting, camera movement, and editing discussed earlier. Pabst and Brooks’s Lulu is not the carnal theatrical figure of Wedekind’s plays. The title Pandora’s Box invokes the mythical woman fabricated by Hephaestus and given a jar with instructions not to open it. But, true to other female mythical creatures of a patriarchal imaginary (like Adam’s Eve, Lot’s wife, and Blue Beard’s fifth wife), she is unable to repress her sense of curiosity. In opening the jar/box, Pandora lets out into the world forces of evil and destruction, so the story goes. Curiosity, in this misogynist myth, is seen as bad behaviour or vice rather than as an intellectual virtue. 24 Brooks, ibid., 101. 25 In her filmed interview with Richard Leacock: Lulu in Berlin (1984), included in Criterion’s Collection of the film.

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The mythical Greek ‘jar’ became ‘box’ sometime in the sixteenth century. Pabst’s singular achievement is to have given this patriarchal misogynist myth a unique cinematographic form, delinking it from its fatal moralism. The fabled (libidinally charged) ‘box’, in Pabst’s conception, becomes the cinematographic apparatus itself (the black box), and Brooks’s Lulu its most enchanting, elusive, fantasmatic, and amoral manifestation or projection. Through film, the world is metamorphosed into images, becoming a resplendent gift (Pandora), accessible to all and yet freighted with emptiness. This is so because film is a play between light and darkness, its image evanescent, insubstantial. Lulu radiates light, her jet-black hair shines, her black satin and white silk dresses reflect light, her eyes and teeth twinkle with stars in the close-ups of her face on the stairs when she invites Jack the Ripper to come up with her. There is a halo of back lighting illuminating her outline in the close-up when Alwa holds her in his arms. The source of the light is not within the image: it appears to be non-diegetic. It’s not any one’s point of view. It is mysterious. What seems to be the profound black background of the shot is not spatial but feels rather more like a black void, actively allied to the mysterious light, as its other. This is so because Lulu’s face is sculpted with light and shadow as never before. The dazzling halo also would not be registered as such without the black void itself. Lulu as the radiant electric light image of silent film could not appear without its double, the ensuing shadow and darkness.

‘Comes to life so that she may die’ Lulu’s serene death, at the hands of Jack the Ripper, is followed by the extinguishing of the flickering lamplight. This scene between Lulu and Jack the Ripper is bafflingly fascinating as it is performed as a love scene. The narrative line is tragic, the ‘psychopathic serial killer murders the prostitute’, an instance of lust morde (‘pleasure killing’). But what actually transpires in this long scene, moment by moment, is tender and calm, unlike any other scene, except at that fatal moment when Jack the Ripper grips the shining blade of the knife on the table and reacts with horror at his own uncontrollable murderous compulsion. There is no corresponding response from Lulu; there is no perceptible struggle, just her arm sliding down his back, fingers tensed then falling limp. The instant of death is marked by the lightest of signs, not unlike the puff of smoke when Dr. Schoen is shot. But the two deaths are performed in two different genres or modes. For Dr. Schoen, Pabst chose a long, slow, agonizing Expressionist theatrical mode of dying (if one were to speed it up, one would be in the Mack

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Sennett burlesque mode of dying of the comic villain). In contrast, Pabst has Lulu die as lightly as she has lived, alight in a cinematic instant. If we sped up the shot, the moment would be imperceptible. What appears to be cold amorality in the narrative (as when Lulu returns from the courtroom to Dr. Schoen’s apartment, where she had killed him, lights a cigarette, riffs through fashion magazines, has a hot bath, and makes love to Alwa), when viewed in this light becomes something else. It’s as though our own moral sense is suspended in becoming enchanted by Lulu’s movements and capacity to be free of memory and guilt. She moves from one moment to another, from one scene to another without a sense of a past, a sense of guilt, a sense of interiority and duration, not unlike a child. There are moments when Lulu’s movements appear childlike and full of merriment. Sometimes, her smile is guileless and at others manipulative. In the absence of an interiority, which would imply memory and guilt, she flits from one moment to another, she does not exist in duration. This is one of several ways of thinking about the complex nature of the temporality of film itself. She incarnates the allure of the ineffable cinematic instant, which could be the shortest imaginable time, a particle or sliver of light. This could be the measureless photogenie of film itself. Our perspective is not Lulu’s, though. We are given the chance (a gift) to f inely calibrate images including Lulu as movement-image made of light, which is what makes Pabst a master film-maker. This movement of calibration is made possible because of the reflexive meta-filmic dimension of the image that enfolds the unfolding narrative line. This film makes us hypersensitive to the work of light and movement in producing the film image. I perceive this aspect of the film as a gift. Count Casti-Piani shows a set of Lulu’s photographic images in various costumes and poses to an Egyptian owner of a brothel in the hope of getting a good prize for Lulu. He is unimpressed by the photographs. So Casti-Piani brings in Lulu to show her in the flesh and, despite her changed, unflattering hairstyle and dress, she impresses the Egyptian. Pabst contrasts the two mechanically registered light images and aligns vitality with the moving cinematic body of Brooks’s Lulu. Pabst makes us experience the differential between the photographic and the cinematographic image. The static photographic image of Lulu taken in court becomes a surveillance image published in a newspaper. Lulu’s death at the hands of Jack the Ripper as a narrative conclusion is of course terribly disturbing – tragic in its inevitability. But what is even more disturbing is the way it is performed. In Wedekind, Lulu cries out ‘No! No! Have Mercy! Police! Police!’ In Alban Berg’s opera, Lulu’s cry of protest is powerfully expressed through song. But in the film, there is no

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death struggle at all, no protest whatever. It is as though Lulu yields to it. Why? That’s a question that needs an answer. Pabst doesn’t tell us but rather leaves us to make sense of it. As a feminist film theorist, one cannot simply be satisf ied with the answer that it’s an example of lust morde, which, nevertheless, it appears to be. Narratively, Lulu has reached a dead end, going from being an upper-class kept woman to a street prostitute via a detour though theatrical performance. One is reminded of Michael Powell’s controversial film Peeping Tom, 1960, in which the serial killer appears as gentle as Jack the Ripper through the choice of the actor and in the killer’s relationship to a special woman. Though gentle, both the serial killer in Peeping Tom and Jack the Ripper are propelled by a violent compulsion which they cannot control. Powell gives his character a backstory of extreme paternal emotional violence as a child, but there is none for Jack the Ripper. His presence is announced in a street poster warning the women of London of the serial killer. He is a generic serial killer, though a known historical figure in name. Brooks has stated that the only actor she found appealing on the film set was Gustav Diessl, who played Jack the Ripper. Certainly, the interaction between them in the garret up to the killing is most intriguing. It goes through a series of subtle moods, gestures, and postures, attitudes that are simply and clearly performed. Jack the Ripper looks shy and reserved while Lulu makes the garret a little less uncomfortable and jumps onto his lap lightly, as she has done before with Schigolch. They hold each other gently and smile at each other. Then, she goes through his jacket pockets, playful like a child, and finds the mistletoe and candle given to him by the Salvation Army woman. She gets off his lap, lights the candle, and carefully fixes it onto the table. They then quietly settle into looking at the candlelight for some time. One feels that this explicit fascination with the fragile candlelight could go on. The scene is gentle, the pace slow, their breathing in unison, the moment exquisite. He beckons her onto his lap and holds the mistletoe over Lulu’s head as she looks up at it, showing her neck and upturned face. He says that she must let herself be kissed as she is now under mistletoe. It is at this point of erotic contact that the glinting knife catches his eyes (a hard-edged glittering abstract steel blade in close-up), and he is seized by his compulsion to kill. It is the most tender scene in the whole film. Brooks wrote eloquently about the perverse sexual dynamics of the final scene in her insightful essay ‘Pabst and Lulu’: Making love to her in her pure white peignoir, Alwa asks her, ‘Do you love me Lulu?’ ‘I? Never a soul!’ It is in the worn and filthy garments of the street-walker that she feels passion for the first time—comes to life so

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that she may die. When she picks up Jack the Ripper on the foggy London street and he tells her he has no money to pay her, she says, ‘Never mind. I like you.’ It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac.26

This passage from Brooks’s essay, with its strong prose voice, appears in a section of her book discussing the vitality of costumes for her as Lulu. It is in such a context that Brooks explains (with absolute clarity) Lulu’s childhood sexuality and trauma with astonishing psychoanalytic acuity. As far as I know, no scholar or critic has written with Brooks’s degree of clarity and insight on Lulu’s childhood sexuality and its relationship to her calm death. One wonders how Brooks was so sure that this was the ‘real’ case history, or backstory, so to speak, of the fictional Lulu. It is of interest that Brooks thought to give Lulu a backstory at all, given that her mode of performance was one of pure externality. We know, as Brooks would have, that child prostitution was prevalent in Weimar Berlin. Brooks has also written candidly about being molested herself as a girl at the age of nine (in her hometown of Cherryvale, Kansas), by an older man known to her family. Barry Price quotes Brooks and comments on her traumatic experience: ‘I was done in by a middle aged man when I was nine,’ she said. And after her readings in Nabokov: ‘I was loused up by my Lolita experiences,’ Mr Flowers had defiled her in a time and place where child molestation was not even mentioned, let alone discussed. ‘[He] must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure.’ She told Tynan. ‘For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough – there had to be an element of domination – and I’m sure that’s all tied up with Mr Flowers. The pleasure of kissing and being kissed comes from somewhere entirely different, psychologically as well as physically.’ And most devastating of all, when she bravely told her mother about Mr Flowers, Myra put the blame on Louise for ‘leading him on.’27

By placing Brooks’s insightful recounting of her own experience of sexual violence as a child and its consequences alongside Lulu’s backstory provided by Brooks (also passionately recounted by Countess Geschwitz in the courtroom, addressed to the public prosecutor and his wife as defence), one can better understand the perverse emotional dynamics between Jack 26 Brooks, 104. 27 Paris, Louise Brooks, 533–534.

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the Ripper and Lulu. Pabst wanted Brooks to play the scene lightly, like a child, innocently. To enhance this mood, he had a piano played between takes to which Brooks danced the Charleston. By her own account, she enjoyed playing the scene with Diessl and she also enjoyed his company. The feelings were mutual, unlike with Fritz Koetner, who played Dr. Schoen. He, according to Brooks, hated her, never spoke to her, and left her arms bruised after shaking her violently in the prop room scene. Pabst was concerned about Brooks’s career and her future. He wanted her to learn German and become a disciplined actor and work in Germany. Exasperated by her sense of frivolity and lack of discipline during the filming (he had to enforce early nights), Pabst famously warned Brooks that if she did not take care of herself, she would end up just like Lulu. Brooks recounts this in her old age and agrees in a sense with Pabst’s prediction. So, it would appear that Brooks embodied both the lustre of the cinematic image and also its darker side, both on- and off-screen. Brooks’s understanding of her own career trajectory as an actor (as opposed to a dancer), was also acute. She admired Pabst’s discipline and direction. She was critical of the way Hollywood studios treated their actors. But Pabst never knew that Lulu and Brooks had a shared childhood sexual trauma, too! However, we do know that, despite it all, Brooks also lived to write some insightful, well-crafted, politically acute essays on Hollywood and the plight of the contract actor/ star within the studio system and on Pabst’s Berlin and her work with him as Lulu. But she also told Lotte Eisner, who befriended her, that had she stayed behind in Germany to pursue a career in acting as Pabst wanted her to, he would have soon tired of her, and ‘sooner or later the Pabst express would run her down’.28 These eloquent, ferociously insightful, poetic words about the limits of her talent as an actor and the precarious work of an actor as star, should be kept in mind when we yet again swoon (like Langlois and others), over the luminous undying image of Louise Brooks as Pabst’s Lulu.

Bibliography Brinkman, Reinhold. ‘The Fool as Paradigm: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the Modern Artist.’ Schoenberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, edited by Konrad Boehmer, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 139–167. Brooks, Louise. Lulu in Hollywood: Louise Brooks. London: Arena Books, 1982. 28 Eisner, Once I had a Beautiful Fatherland, p. 98. Unpublished translation by Brian Rutnam of a letter sent to Eisner by Brooks.

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Eisner, Lotte. Once I had a Beautiful Fatherland. Munich: The Magic Horn Publisher, 1984. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Lulu and the Meter Man: Louise Brooks, G. W. Pabst and Pandora’s Box.’ Weimar Cinema and After; Germany’s Historical Imaginary, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 259–292. Goodall, Jane. Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin; Out of the Natural Order. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Hagopian, Kevin. New York State Writers Institute, State University of New York. https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/f ilmnotes/pandora.html. Accessed 5 December 2019. Hawks, Howard. A Girl in Every Port (1928). Fox Film Corporation, Hollywood. 78 minutes. Hutchinson, Pamela. Pandora’s Box. London: BFI, 2018. Jayamanne, Laleen. Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-cultural Mimesis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Leacock, Richard. Lulu in Berlin. Interview with Louise Brooks. New York: Criterion Collection, 1984. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Miller, Helen. ‘Overcoming Desire: Prostitution and Contract in Pandora’s Box.’ Central Queensland University, Brisbane. https://www.academia.edu/29113008/ The_Overcoming_of_Desire_Prostitution_and_the_Contract_in_Pandora_s_ Box_1929_. Accessed 5 January 2020. Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinematic Mind’s Eye. London: BFI, 1996. Pabst, G.W. Diary of a Lost Girl. Hom-Film GmbH, Germany, 116 minutes, 1929. Paris, Barry. Louise Brooks. Great Britain: Mandarin, 1990. ‘Puppet Aesthetics.’ https://wepa.unima.org/en/aesthetics-of-the-puppet-europeanromanticism-to-the-avant-garde/. Accessed 1 February 2020. Youens, Susan. ‘Excavating an Allegory: The Text of Pierrot Lunaire.’ Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 8, no. 2, 1984, pp. 95–115.

Filmography Pandora’s Box (Die Buechse der Pandora, 1929). 133 minutes. Silent, black and white. German intertitles with English translation. Production: Nero Films, Germany Director: G. W. Pabst Script: Ladislaus Vajda, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box

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Languages: Intertitles in German with English translation Cinematography: Gunther Krampf Art Direction: Andrei Andreiev and Gottlieb Hesch Costume: Gottlieb Hesch Editing: Joseph Fleisler Main Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Goetz, Gustav Diessl, Kraft-Raschic, Alice Roberts, Daisy D’Ora. Pandora’s Box, G. W. Pabst. New York: Criterion Collection. DVD 2006.

2.

Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov Abstract Parajanov is presented here as a director who composes forces of nature. The four elements – earth, fire, wind, and water, as well as stone and the nautilus shell with its unimaginable duration – figure prominently in The Color of Pomegranates. Crafted objects and woven materials play an active role in his films, while the actors aspire to the state of abstraction of the puppet. Through these means, Parajanov gives cinema a natural history and a cosmos-centric power while locating his films within a deep history of the Transcaucasia. A Sufi concept of the image and its apprehension are elaborated through a minstrel’s encounter with wedding feasts of the deaf, the mute, and the blind in Ashik Kerib. Keywords: Sergei Parajanov and Transcaucasia, Geomorphic and cosmoscentric cinema, Sufi image, Cognitive imagination, Actors and puppets

They thought up barbaric amusements I tossed pomegranates up And they split them with sabres!

The geological, material, and spiritual forces of the porous Transcaucasian regions of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan nourished the poetic imagination of the visionary Soviet Union director Sergei Parajanov. Born in 1924 in Georgia to Armenian parents, Parajanov’s multilingual skills (in Russian, Georgian, and Armenian), along with his talents and training in music and singing, dancing and cinematography, enabled him to harness the many intersecting cultural resources of the Transcaucasia, with its deep civilizational history. Additionally, the cultural and spiritual practices of the Armenian Apostolic Church and Eastern Orthodox Christianity as well as Civilizational Islam (all religions of the Book), coexist in a unique manner in Parajanov’s two major films, The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova) (1969) and Ashik Kerib (1988), which are both situated within the multi-ethnic

Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/9789463726245_Ch02

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zone of Transcaucasia. Parajanov synthesized this rich variety of elements to create a singular flexible cinematic idiom. Historically, Transcaucasia was a contact zone of diverse peoples, languages, and cultures who came with the caravan trade routes (part of the Silk Road), and the Persian and Ottoman Turk invasions that introduced Islam to what was hitherto an ancient Apostolic and Orthodox Christian world. As Peter Brown says, Armenian culture ‘drew strange vigor from existing side by side with a continuing epic world or pre-Christian customs and oral tradition’. The pre-Islamic Persian influence, a legacy of war, was also an important aspect of the life of the nobility, who were ‘highly Iranized in social structure and lay culture’.1 James Steffen’s brilliant and award-winning book The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, along with the recently restored version of The Color of Pomegranates (The Criterion Collection), facilitates further work in English on the film-maker.2 Steffen situates Parajanov within the historical and political background of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, from Leonid Brezhnev’s rule through to Glasnost, which began in Georgia under Eduard Shevardnadze, who authorized Parajanov’s release from prison and his film The Legend of Surami Fortress (1984) soon after. Steffen provides a biography of the director, including an account of his relationships with the Soviet film bureaucracy, Goskino in Moscow, and the regional studios in Ukraine and Armenia, spanning his entire career. Parajanov’s three prison terms are discussed in relation to his political and aesthetic convictions, his theatrical public persona, and his relationship to the Soviet state. Steffen displays (in the words of a reviewer), ‘an extraordinary cross-cultural stamina’ in researching his book, for which he conducted archival research in Moscow. The historical detail is remarkable, and the overall intellectual framework is illuminating. He offers insightful readings of the films and discusses the director’s many incomplete film projects as well. He helps us understand Parajanov’s status as a poet of Transcaucasia within the Soviet Union’s ‘Nationality Policy’. The book provides an intricate history of the rich transcultural artistic heritage of Transcaucasia and elaborates on the components from which Parajanov created his unique poetic film aesthetics. Steffen also locates Parajanov’s mature work within the context of the modern ‘archaic’ poetic school of film-making centred in Ukraine, while also highlighting its uniqueness. The following opening lines of the book capture this well: 1 Brown, ‘Between Two Empires‘, 42. 2 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov.

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Few film directors ever manage to create a single image that is truly unlike anything you have seen before. In that respect, Sergei Parajanov’s films seem almost reckless in their generosity […] Watching his films, one is struck by the presence of ancient peoples, of entire histories contained in the very objects depicted on the screen, but also by a style of acting that seems to come from a long-vanished era[.]3

Quoting Parajanov – who declared, ‘My love for old things is not a hobby, it’s my aesthetic conviction’ – Steffen continues: But Parajanov did something far more interesting than to simply tell old stories and show old things in an old way. Under the guise of this consciously archaic style, he cultivated a sophisticated form of poetic cinema that extended the experimentations in editing, sound and color initiated by earlier Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovzhenko. At the same time, he was conversant in contemporary European cinema and movements in modern art such as Surrealism. Ultimately, his great accomplishment was to bring the cultures of non-Russian republics such as Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia onto the global cinematic stage through a lively synthesis of regional folk culture and literary traditions with avant-garde film-making techniques and sly personal touches. 4

Steffen quotes Jean-Luc Godard, who said, on seeing The Color of Pomegranates, ‘I think you have to live at least fifteen miles away and feel the need to walk there on foot to see it. If you feel that need and give it that faith, the film can give you everything you could wish’. Yet Steffen states his own aim lightly: ‘As the first English-language book about Parajanov’s films, this study seeks to make the fifteen-mile journey a little less arduous[.] ‘5 This historical work and the restored version of the film, with the accompanying research material, made my fifteen-mile journey not only ‘less arduous’ but a heady adventure as well. Parajanov’s aesthetically replete, eccentric (to Soviet Socialist Realist orthodoxy) cinematic idiom derives from several cultural sources – craft and popular folk traditions, including oral and courtly traditions, as well as the written religious traditions of the region. As well as this, artisanal 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 3–4.

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techniques (with their own deep civilizational cultural history) such as weaving, with all of its essential processes such as carding, spinning, dyeing, and sewing, are integral to his cinematic practice. Woven material – its texture, design, colour, weight, cut, drape, and movement – lines and enfolds his cinematic image, nourishing and amplifying its sensory properties and affective force. While the canonical triad of Western art history – architecture, sculpture, and painting – play a prominent substantial role in these films, music, dance, theatre, and song (all ephemeral temporal arts of the body) are integral to their dynamism. The traditional and decorative so-called ‘minor arts’ of making furniture, pottery, musical instruments, and handcrafted everyday objects are presented as striking still lifes. There is also an interplay between the written text (whether on paper, in clay, or chiselled on stone) and the oral sounds we hear, giving language itself an amplitude and performative power in relation to the visual image that is quite rare in film. What’s more, these synaesthetically suggestive films generously invite us to actually perceive how these vital art forms have arisen from robust yet also very delicate artisanal labour. Synaesthesia (according to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran), is to be understood as a mingling of the senses, which are normally kept discrete; their unusual interplay kindles the mind.6 The vitality of the four primordial elements of nature (water, wind/air, earth, and fire), and of the aesthetically enlivened human senses, are shown to be intrinsically linked in a cosmos where humans and animals coexist habitually as well as ritually, in often strange and unfamiliar configurations. This chapter explores the means by which Parajanov creates his poetic cinematic idiom, privileging a unique activation of all of our senses, through an analysis of the composition of two films: The Color of Pomegranates and Ashik Kerib. Moreover, on the basis of this analysis I explore how these films contribute to film theory and aesthetics and to an understanding of the making of cultural history as a process of invention. I will do so, in part, by situating his project in relation to that of the contemporary Indian director Kumar Shahani, drawing out a certain affinity that I see between their cinematic projects of the reclamation of cultural tradition. As both these films are about poet troubadours and their modes of perception it makes good sense to begin by focusing especially on the sensory, rhythmic aspects of the composition of images and sounds and the range of formal devices used. Poetry intensifies perception by undoing customary semantic and syntactical connections among its components (whether word or object), 6 Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brian, 26.

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and infusing them with pulses, rhythms, and metres, alongside sensory formal material that creates new connections and affects. Steffen deepens our understanding of poetic cinema by introducing ideas first advanced by the Russian Formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky in his essay ‘Poetry and Prose in Cinematography’ (1927). Steffen notes that Shklovsky was especially interested in Parajanov’s cinema and discusses their collaboration on several unrealized film scripts in the early 1970s. Shklovsky differentiates poetry from prose in the following way: They are distinguished one from the other not by rhythm, or rather, not by rhythm alone, but by the fact that in a poetic film the technical-formal features predominate over the semantic features. The composition is resolved by formal techniques rather than by semantic methods. Plotless film is poetic film.7

Further, Steffen indicates how Shklovsky’s highly influential formalist concept of ostranenie (or ‘defamiliarization’), formulated in his essay ‘Art as Device’, can illuminate our understanding of Parajanov’s poetic strategies.8 In the following theorization Shklovsky shows a profound understanding of the synaesthetic powers of art and poetic cinema: And so in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. […] By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious’. The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity.9

The kinetic power of cinema is strongly indicated by the formulation, ‘to return sensation to our limbs.’. The lapidary dynamism of Parajanov’s cinema may be grasped through the marvellous phrase, ‘to make stone feel stony’. This idea of perceptual innervation will be developed in the course of my analysis of his films. Though Shklovsky and Parajanov came from different generations, Steffen shows us the close affinity between the theorist and the artist. This in turn is an indication of the astonishing vitality and richness of intergenerational artistic and intellectual collaboration and tradition 7 Steffen, op. cit., 19. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.

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in the Soviet Union, despite its totalitarian politics. I will return to this crucial point later on in this chapter, when I discuss an experimental film pedagogy (one of the concerns of this book), and the ethics of transmitting vital ideas and energy across generations. Parajanov’s poetic images and sounds combine to create a high degree of abstraction quite unusual in the history of cinema. The unfamiliar configurations and plasticity of his images and sounds produce sensations and ‘vitality affects’, which obliquely generate a tissue of interconnected ideas in the viewer. ‘Vitality affects’ are, according to Daniel Stern, feelings of sensory liveliness registered by infants below six months in age, prior to the emergence of meaning.10 In adults this registration might operate at a subcortical level of intensity stimulated by ‘a-signifying particles’ and a ‘nebula of impulses’ and ‘subtle energies’ of images and sounds.11 These films do not, however, preclude more analytic cognitive processes, though they are not privileged over intuitive modes of apprehension. An intuitive approach is essential because they are not primarily plotted narrative films. Rather, the focus is on a complex formal poetic temporal elaboration of image and sound. It’s through these processes that lateral narrative and other connections slowly and surprisingly emerge, or are made. I am not using ‘intuition’ to mean instinctual perception as in ‘gut reaction’, which is the common sense understanding of the term. Rather, I am using ‘intuition’ here as a method, a mode of thinking formulated by Henri Bergson. He elaborates on what intuitive thinking as method entails.12 He states that ‘to think intuitively is to think in duration’ and that such thinking starts by perceiving the reality of movement and change, rather than that of a static form. His theory of ‘pure memory’ or ‘duration’ as the preservation of the past and the simultaneous ceaseless passing of the present demonstrates the flexibility and amplitude of such movement and change. The awareness of such ceaseless temporal dynamism, he says, trains our senses and mind to differentiate amidst a ‘heterogeneous multiplicity’ and perceive the emergence of ‘unforeseeable novelty’. My explorations of this selection of films will be guided by these dynamic principles. Parajanov’s cinema invites us to differentiate and calibrate his images and sounds; they sensitize us to these subtle processes. Henry Corbin’s theorizing of an ‘imaginal world’ and the ‘cognitive function of the imagination’ in the philosophy of Sufi Islam will also be mobilized 10 Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 51, 55. 11 For an elaboration of this cluster of ideas, derived from Félix Guattari’s schizoanalytic practice, see my book The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (125–147). 12 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 34–35.

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to explore the ontology of Parajanov’s system of images, especially in Ashik Kerib, because this film is about the journey of a Sufi minstrel. For me, importantly, the Sufi philosophical vocabulary, which Corbin elaborated and made accessible, provides a new way of giving voice to often the seemingly ineffable cinematic experience of Parajanov’s films.13 It is also very rare in Western film studies and film philosophy to draw ideas from philosophical traditions outside the Western canon in order to formulate film aesthetics. While drawing from the cultural commons familiar to those from within the linguistically diverse regions of Transcaucasia, I feel that these two films, through the powers of abstraction available to modern poetic cinema, also invite a foreigner like me – a Sri Lankan Australian film critic and theorist – to participate in the heady process of the creation of meaning. That is to say that these films are not neo-traditionalist, nativist films. They belong to the history of modern cinema. What follows, then, is my attempt to contribute to a theoretical aesthetic understanding of these enigmatic and fascinating films about Transcaucasia from within the perspective of cinema studies. Kumar Shahani, whose cinematic project of post-colonial reclamation of diverse Indian traditions and a musical conception of film composition and editing obliquely resembles Parajanov’s, introduced his film Khayal Gatha (1988) at the Australian Cinematheque in 2007 by admonishing the audience to relax into it and not be anxious about what it meant.14 This advice of letting an unknown, foreign film wash over and seep into one’s kinaesthetic and proprioceptive body helped me when I first encountered The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova), which prompted both bafflement and fascination in me. So I took Shahani’s advice the next time round and simply relaxed into its metres, rhythms, pulses, and repetitions and felt a way into the film that was and is hugely enabling. The subsequent historical research and thinking I did on Parajanov’s cinematic project and context (so as to ‘teach’ these films) could thereby be assimilated in more intuitive ways without abrogating analytical rigour. It is certainly true, as Myerhold demonstrated (thinking about the ‘Bio-Mechanics’ of the actor), that rhythm penetrates our bodies with an unmediated immediacy and intensity by activating the nervous system and its kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses, before cortical conceptual reason ‘digests’ the sensory input according to habit. ‘Second Nervous System’ is the name Eugenio Barba (commenting on 13 Corbin, ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’. 14 See my book, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, for an account of his f ilms, especially Khayal Gatha, 95–123.

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Myerhold) gave to this delicate but tenacious process of tuning the body of the actor.15 If and when we allow this process of subconscious (subcortical) receptivity (‘tuning’) to be activated, the chances are that film will gradually reveal itself (to us critics, as well), in surprising ways. The temporality of this revelatory capacity of film is highly variable; it may even happen in an atemporal dream state or in a flash or nanosecond while simply strolling along or even doing nothing – perhaps especially when we are doing nothing! It is this primordial synaesthetic potential of the body (and of film) that makes it possible to imagine and think that film (while being a modern mechanical invention of the late nineteenth century), is also an archaic art form (not unlike Turkish or Balinese Shadow Theatre), much like dance, which is itself primordial.16 Thus, the poetic cinema of Parajanov, Dovzhenko, Tarkovsky, Rocha, Pasolini, Ghatak, Shahani, among others, not only affirm the link between film and modernity but also create one between film and civilization by engaging the non-cinematic art forms. This is an important theoretical point, which I will elaborate on later through my analysis of Parajanov’s two films. We can perhaps understand something of the cultural evolution of our senses across historical epochs by closely attending to these imbricated aesthetic processes of different art forms and their different modes of address. Film by its very nature has the capacity and the necessary scope to imaginatively incorporate the other art forms in unforeseen ways. The Color of Pomegranates is Parajanov’s poetic tribute to Sayat Nova, the Armenian national poet-troubadour of the eighteenth century; at the same time, it is also a celebration of Armenian culture within the wider context of the culturally diffused Transcaucasia. It ‘stages’ (rather than narrates) the main life events of the poet Sayat Nova (his childhood, youth, courtly love for the unattainable princess Ana, monastic life, and death), though it is not in any sense a biopic. Instead of a smooth linear unfolding of a life story we are offered an emblematic evocation of a life and milieu through the repetition of vibrant, sensuous visual and auditory motifs and figures staged (mostly) frontally in static tableaux vivants of a relative opacity. In the medieval pictorial tradition found in illuminated manuscripts, emblems combine image and text in a variety of ways. The Soviet authorities censored the film because it failed to represent a clear account of the poet’s life (i.e. it was not a biopic), and for its obscurity and supposed inaccessibility. The title was changed from Sayat Nova to The Color of Pomegranates and some 15 Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 112. 16 Sachs, World History of Dance.

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of the scenes and inter-titles re-edited for the sake of linearized clarity. The overabundance of religious images was also criticized. According to Naum Kleiman, naïve audiences in Russia enjoyed it and it became a cult film, widely seen, screened, and discussed in cine-clubs. However, the middle classes and the Soviet film bureaucrats found it incomprehensible! Several commentators have made the important point that Sayat Nova the poet also functions as a mediator for Parajanov’s own vision of film as a poetic medium with great capacity for abstraction, which can blend the archaic with the modern and communicate across linguistic and cultural boundaries. In this sense, the eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova and the modern Soviet film-maker Sergei Parajanov, from Georgia, inhabit a common continuum across several centuries. Steffen informs us that Parajanov ‘devoted separate sections to the Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani poems, thereby emphasizing the poet’s status as a multilingual and multinational figure’.17 He goes on to argue that ‘no other film-maker has better captured the rich sense of cultural intermingling and conflict between cultures in that region: the populations of Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis and Kurds, the religious traditions of Christians, Muslims and Jews, and the pervasive cultural influences of the Persian, Turkish, and Russian Empires’.18 This felt sense of a complex filial affinity to common syncretic aesthetic traditions enables Parajanov to introduce contemporary concerns close to his own heart and innovate as ‘a poet of all of Transcaucasia’.19

Figure of the Child The first caption, ‘The Poet’s Child Hood’, opens the film introducing us to Sayat Nova as a child called Arutin. The sense of orientation created by this title is disturbed by the very first image of a child aged about six, in a large close-up, folded in a kneeling position, but with his head on the floor, attentively turned, looking directly at us from that strange angle with wide-open eyes. A roll of thunder adds a sense of drama and movement to this inaugural still (though not static) image. Already, we have a feeling that the figure of the child is abstracted from its realist anchoring in the poet’s biography. This effect is finely orchestrated and prefigured in an astonishing 17 Steffen, op. cit., 122. 18 Ibid., 121. 19 Ibid., 121.

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sequence of images and sound, which form the rhythmic prologue to the film itself. The sequence begins with the image of an old manuscript of Sayat Nova’s Davtar repeatedly intercut with a series of shots, the first of which shows three pomegranates mysteriously bleeding red juice onto a white cloth, forming an image of an ancient map of Armenia. These images are accompanied by a repeated refrain: ‘I am the man whose life and soul are torment’, a lament intoned by a richly textured male voice and accompanied by an ensemble of duduks, an instrument with a plaintive timbre. An ornate dagger placed horizontally on a white cloth is again stained with red flowing liquid, now suggesting a link between the colour of pomegranates and blood. This use of the fruit, which is itself a national emblem with rich associations, presages its return as an affectively loaded cultural emblem.20 A male foot crushes grapes on a stone surface carved with Armenian inscriptions. As Steffen explains, this composite image has multiple associations. It presents the work of wine making and stone carving in the monastery, the wine a reference to the bible and Persian poetry, which informed Sayat Nova’s. By brilliantly condensing into one sensory image the antiquity of writing, stone carving, and winemaking in the region, it evokes a deeper historical time and practices. As Steffen states, ‘recent archeological and linguistic research’ in Transcaucasia ‘indicates that it is among the earliest known sites of wine production’, dating as far back as 6000 BCE.21 This historical resonance evoked by such a condensation indicates one of the ways in which sensation and thought work in the composite image. A live fish placed between two loaves of a particular kind of bread is an image very familiar to Armenians and again also has a biblical resonance. But when three live fish (neatly placed, parallel to one another) dance around on the metal plate, the image becomes quite enigmatic unless one knows or discovers (as one now can on the internet) that this exact design appears on a Byzantian coin as well. The commonality of this visual motif gives an inkling of how culture has travelled across epochs and empires in this porous region. We know that Byzantian art was influenced by an antique Hellenistic inheritance. The sequence culminates with shots of a Kamancha – the stringed instrument (or lyre) of the poet – a dried fragment of an arbutus tree on brocade fabric, and a white rose attached to it, introducing the songs to come. Finally, a large tangle of thorns, arranged as a still-life sculpture, links the suffering of the poet with that of Christ. 20 Pfeifer, ‘Life History of a Fruit’. 21 Ibid., 137.

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This prologue offers glimpses of the region’s deep epochal cultural histories in highly condensed enigmatic images and signals to us that the film is not going to be merely a sensory-motor drama of actions and reactions representing the life of the poet. Instead, the rhythmic flowing sequence of distilled, condensed, sensuous historical images, shot in close-up, prefigure the process of abstraction to come where objects in particular configurations and repetitions become eloquent. The sounds and images animate our perceptions, stimulating our ‘cognitive imagination’, our own capacity for differentiating and making new connections. They invite us to turn towards both history and legend, because Parajanov’s cinema seems to be situated at their fertile juncture. The opening close-up of the child cuts to a sequence of stone architectural details awash with torrential rain, intermittently illuminated by flashes of lightning. The most startling of these images is one of an entire shelf of large ancient books drenched by rain. The sound of rain is amplified to suggest a deluge of biblical proportions. This is the first of several moments in the film where the sound is amplified, suggesting a new connection to the image beyond a habitual natural one. The relationship between the durable texture of stone and the fragile paper of these precious ancient books create an in-shot montage of sorts, a disjunction, which reaches a peak of intensity when a large stone slab is placed on a water-drenched pile of books, noisily squeezing the liquid out. The books and stone are now linked by the water so that despite the vulnerability of the books to destruction, the film suggests their tenacious durability. This is especially the case when a host of ancient manuscripts are laid out methodically to dry by a group of monks, both in front of and on the roof of the ancient Armenian Sanahin monastery. The child, who carefully carries one heavy tome up a ladder to the rooftop, sits to view the miniature paintings, enabling us to see the compositional link between the illuminated manuscript and the two-dimensional frontal staging of the film’s mise-en-scène. We hear the rustling of the paper amplified. We begin to hear the creation of ‘concrete music’. The sound and image are unlinked and re-linked through amplification, a sonic change adding a new aesthetic dimension. The wind that blows through the tomes, conveyed in the amplified flapping sounds of the pages, not only dries them but also enables the viewer to sense the material force of the texts, their embryonic vitality (an encoding of a soul and a life), which the priest admonishes the child poet to actualize by reciting them out loud for the many people who do not know how to read. Repeatedly, the dwarf monk places the small hand of the child on a pile of books as he intones his mission, and the child nods in assent. These images of the poet’s initiation by the dwarf monk in the

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monastery, and that of young monks wearing wet grey habits, carrying piles of soaked books, are some of the most tactile and conceptually powerful sequences in the film because of the way they synaesthetically align stone architecture, writing, painting, paper, and film with water and wind as their fluid milieu. These images, along with those of the human figures, create a strong feel for the materiality of objects and bodies, their durability and fragility, because they are not subordinated to the flow of a narrative but rather foregrounded. Sounds of nature and of objects are recorded as ‘raw material’ and modified according to the methods of ‘concrete music’ (musique concrète) created by Pierre Schaeffer, to produce a collage sound scored by avantgarde composer Tigran Mansurian. The disjunction, created by the relative autonomy of the sonic assemblage from the optical dimension, stirs our ‘cognitive imagination’. The image of the child poet on the roof, rhythmically swaying against a wall like a pendulum (by hanging on a metal ring attached to a clanging chain), is not a figure of a child at play, but rather, his serious expression seems to prefigure his role as a mediator between worlds (of the written, the seen, and the heard), presaging the celestial child to come. This lateral enigmatic movement is one that is seen in both Sayat Nova and Ashik Kerib, becoming a refrain in Parajanov’s cinema. The son of carpet-weavers, Sayat Nova as a child also introduces us to the craft milieu of Tbilisi, which stimulated his perceptions like it did Parajanov’s, who also grew up in that very same multicultural city in Georgia, with its famous sulphur baths and crafts. Through his father’s work Parajanov came into intimate contact with antique objects and furniture. The poet’s words, ‘From the colours and aromas of this world my childhood made a poet’s lyre and offered it to me’, are applicable to both Sayat Nova and Parajanov. This stanza explicitly states how vision, olfaction, and audition co-penetrate, activating cross-modal synaesthetic perception. The figure of the child as poetic mediator appears not only in this segment but also functions in an abstract manner in several other segments, too. The sensuously abstracted omnipresence of the child in Sayat Nova’s adult life, as well as in his dream, implies a specific conception of subjectivity and childhood. It suggests that the different multiple strata of the poet’s experience coexist simultaneously in a non-linear duration. Here, Bergson’s concept of duration as a multiple coexistence of the present with all strata of the past comes to mind. This suggests that the child’s fresh impulses, perceptions, and affects coexist simultaneously at all stages of the adult poet’s life, nourishing its vitality. It is the child who also actualizes the dream vision of the elderly poet, which includes his dead parents and an entire social milieu. The ubiquity

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of the child’s presence makes him a magical mediator, finally becoming the celestial child equipped with golden wings, twirling from a rope attached to a high vaulted dome of the Cathedral, gazing reflectively at his supine old self, as a poet close to death. The child is an ever-present, integral part of the poet’s life, the figure of lightness counterbalancing the melancholy weight of the adult self: ‘I am the man whose life and soul are torment’. According to Steffen, this is a fragment of a poem written in Azerbaijani and translated here into Armenian. Likewise, ‘I am wandering, burned and wounded, I cannot find a shelter’. In the history of modern film in Europe and Australia (perhaps elsewhere too), there are several remarkable creative cinematic modes in which the figure of the child has been configured outside the familiar realist mode of the ‘natural child’. A new figure of the child emerges with the new image of Italian Neorealist cinema as theorized by Gilles Deleuze.22 The child here is marked by a sensory plenitude but a relative motor helplessness, as in the case of, say, Edmund in Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) or the toddler in the Po Valley sequence and the young Sicilian boy in Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1945). The neorealist child, with its relative motor helplessness and sensory alertness, becomes a ‘seer’ rather than an agent of action, according to Deleuze’s formulation. It is through this child-seer that we perceive the emergence of the new image of modern cinema (as distinct from classical cinema), in the debris of ruined Italian and German cities after the Second World War. This new image is not subjected to the logic of sensory-motor actions and reactions and it is through the mediation of the neorealist child that we learn how to perceive this world that lies in ruins. Then again, in the case of Raul Ruiz, the child (Proust) is a supple figure who traverses quite different worlds and takes us with him as in Time Regained (1999). In Baz Lurhmann’s Australia (2010), the little ‘hybrid’ boy Nulla, who is neither black nor white, slips between and connects two different and separate hierarchized ethnic worlds. What is common to these different cinematic inventions and deployments of the figure of the child is his capacity to mediate worlds, as a go-between or a metamorphic force. In Ruiz’s Klimt, (2006), which like The Color of Pomegranates is not a biopic of the artist, but a febrile vision of his world of fin-de-siècle Vienna, we have a rare example of the figure of a little girl as mediator, taking the dead Klimt by hand to lead him astray! Her enigmatic refrain is ‘I want to get lost, just like you’. It is important to understand that what the ‘neorealist’ and the ‘post-neorealist’ child offer are not simply a child’s point of view. 22 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1–13.

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These modern cinematic conceptions and configurations of the figure of the child reveal a point of view on the world through the figure of a child. We see both the child and what he/she enables us to see, which is not subject to sensory-motor actions and reactions. Therefore we are able to see more than the child because our vision is doubled, becomes reflexive though his/her very presence. Given the mostly serious expression of the child, two or three scenes of fleeting levity stand out. While the child stands between his mother and father in a frontal composition, the latter dips his fingers in the blood of a cockerel and marks the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead – at which point he looks at his mother and defiantly smiles and wipes the cross away while looking at his father. This gesture stands out because it is unique. In the dream sequence, the child again stands between the parents, who hold a large flat piece of unleavened bread. He tears a piece from it with a slight smile and starts munching it heartily, with apparent pleasure. The child also plays in the draining water in a carpet-washing scene and drags a heavy carpet impulsively. It would appear that these three scenes highlight the palpable difference between the everyday naturalistic ‘child at play’ and the child as ‘seer’, mediator and metamorphic force. The function of the child as ‘seer’ is that he enables us to perceive a power in the image that is not subject to sensory-motor actions and reactions. Such an image may show us something that is too beautiful or too terrible, for which there is no possible habitual action and reaction. We ourselves are made ‘seers’, not unlike the neorealist child with his or her sensory plenitude and motor incapacity. Animated by a new seeing function we are also then able to make new connections between diverse elements; a thinking with images.

To Craft the Senses Synaesthetically The interlinked craft processes of carding, dyeing, spinning, weaving and sewing are an essential part of the world of both poets and poetic filmmaker growing up in Tbilisi. These skills are presented not so much as ethnographic representation of a craft milieu but more in a manner that animates synaesthetic modes of perception and cognition. Ancient embroidered religious vestments, relics, and objects of great antiquity lent (as Steffen notes) by the Armenian Church to Parajanov, are used in solemn ritual contexts, while clothing and costumes play a curiously metamorphic function. Through a system of artisanal special effects, actors are dressed and undressed in the presence of the viewer in a most elegantly mysterious

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manner. Costumes seem to have a life of their own, actively dressing the actors through a manual system of invisible threads attached to the garments and remotely controlled, with the effect that they move as though by magic. The actors appear as beautifully mysterious human puppets or marionettes, with well-articulated joints and precise dance-like micro-movements and gestures of arms, hands, neck, and legs. Their animated costumes seem to dress the actors instead of the reverse. While this system is similar to how the Japanese Bunraku puppets’ costumes are changed on stage, the technical process and effect are quite different. If one argues, as one must, that costume is one of the main ways in which the actor’s persona is created and modulated in film as such, then here the numerous visible transformations, some glimpsed only subliminally, cause the affective temperature of the figures to fluctuate. This fluctuation is contingent on the colour, texture, weight, cut, and movement of the costumes as well as the solemn, ritualized rhythms of the process of investiture and divestiture. Three large men, arranged frontally in a row, use poles to lift heavy skeins of dyed wool out from steaming metal cauldrons. Steffen informs us that they are the colour of the Armenian flag. The dripping water (amplified), hits the metal in droplets while the skeins land with a thud on the metal plates, suggesting the drumming of fingers and then a bang with the entire hand. This action is repeated many times as the child stands amidst the steaming cauldrons, observing the multi-sensory process intently. The process of dyeing under these conditions, with these metal pots and plates, synaesthetically allows us to both hear and see the rudiments of a drumming sound. Steffen also makes the same connection. The scene concludes with the child lifting his face and then his eyes to look at us directly. The quiet still gaze of the child in close-up, looking at us, across the film, is one of the most enchanting images of this film. It is as though he becomes our surrogate within the image guiding us to a new mode of perception: absorbed perception and the very awareness of it. The Paradox of filmic perception and intensity! A rug on the wall sways rhythmically (evoking the sideways movement of weaving) in the room where two women work at large looms, while little Arutin quietly helps out. A mechanical clicking sound, perhaps linked to weaving, gives a pulse to the scene. Rhythmic lateral swaying of bodies is a recurrent motif of Parajanov’s cinema, sometimes evoking comfort (as in Ashik Kerib), and at other times, with metronomic precision for no apparent reason, something more like a refrain, as suggested earlier. The twirling movements of wrist and hand holding little wooden spindles, with which Princess Ana weaves lace, immediately evoke dance forms familiar across

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regions from India (Kathak), to Spain (Flamenco), through Transcaucasia (Gypsy). Again, a close shot of many feet adorned with intricately ornamented silver anklets, rhythmically scrubbing woven carpets splashed with water, evoke the rudimentary but unmistakable steps of a dance form yet to come. The intermittent glimpses of the colourful edges of the workers’ twirling skirts enhance the effect of dance. These synesthetic perceptions are made possible through a blending of our senses activating cross-modal connections, here among vision, hearing, touch, and our kinaesthetic sense of movement. This cross-modal capacity (according to neuroscience) represents the potential that exists in the human nervous system, which film, with its multi-sensory channels, is especially good at evoking and orchestrating.23 The Color of Pomegranates is largely composed in this manner, which makes it almost unique in the history of cinema. There is a certain robust pedagogy of the image in this film (and in Ashik Kerib), though certainly not the one that the Soviet authorities had expected when they commissioned this film on the national poet of Armenia! Parajanov’s cinema trains our senses to perceive synaesthetically (a replete gift), which in turn enables a mode of cognition and ideation receptive to ‘a-signifying particles’, ‘subtle energies’ and impulses of the body and its subcortical (unconscious) operations, too.24 Take, for example, another intriguing scene of the child, still in the same curled up position as in an earlier shot (but wider), and his parents. First the mother and then the father, very formally, in a dance-like gesture, throw pieces of cloth and a rug over the child, completely covering him, and hold the pose while looking at us, inviting us not merely to look on but also to engage with the scene. We wonder why they as weavers do this odd thing with the child and realize that we must create our own response. It would appear then that he is cocooned by the cloth, an essential part of the film’s mise-en-scène. More than that, it appears that for Parajanov (as for Kumar Shahani), there is an integral link between light-sensitive celluloid itself and cloth, which share a common material base in cellulose. This important connection and its implications will be elaborated on later. Woven material functions as an active agent creating texture, space and movement, sensations, and feelings, as in the deliciously parodic scene where 23 Stern, op. cit., 51, 55. 24 Guattari, Chaosmosis. ‘A-signifying particles’ refers to an aspect of the image or sound that is not figuratively recognizable. It is a formal element at the threshold of perception and cognition. It originated as part of Guattari’s schema in his schizoanalytic practice. A ‘nebular of impulses’ refers to a form of subcortical receptivity in the body to the uncoded dynamisms of image and sound. ‘Subtle energy’ emerges from these processes. For an exploration of Guattari’s cluster of ideas, see Jayamanne, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, 51, 134–135, 190–191.

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two comic actors replay, like puppets, the formal anguished courtly love scenes between the poet and the princess, but this time make it a farce. In a film of extraordinary visual abundance whose tone is nevertheless largely sombre, tinged with sadness and longing, this scene offers a puppet-like dance full of comic gestures and parodic, even bawdy, light humour. Sofiko Chiaureli plays the two comic roles of the pantomime and doubles as the poet and the princess, creating a remarkable virtuoso androgynous performance across genres. Pastel shades of cloth form a dynamic backdrop to the action, and jump cuts (as a ‘magical’ device) produce a feeling of levity. At first, two ensembles of clothing (male and female) appear upright and animate, without a body, at which point a ‘male’ body ‘jumps’ into one of the sets of clothes (as in Georges Méliès), dancing with exaggerated gestures, and objects parodying the serious and solemn gestures of the poet and the princess. The routine is repeated with a ‘female’ body. While the poetry being recited is mostly melancholic and sombre, the fecund, textured images replete with sensuous abstractions evoke a remarkable range of sensations, feelings, and meanings. Following Raul Ruiz, one could say that these are ‘purely cinematographic feelings’, a gift given to us by film. We become part of this heady process of aesthetic innervation.25

Courtly Love The poet and the princess cannot inhabit the same frame/space because of their difference in social standing. As a result, though separated, they engage in an extended, repetitive courtly ritual, expressing love of exceptional intensity. The poet tunes his lyre in profile while the princess (facing the viewer), holding spindles, weaves a delicate web of lace with slow, wrist-spinning gestures evocative of dance. Woven white, red, and black lace in front of her face, moving laterally, both obscures and reveals her face. Functioning as repetitive motif, the moving pattern, both empty and full, delicately suggests the feeling of fullness and emptiness (void) of their forbidden love. The young poet receives his lyre (kamancha) from his childhood self, who then retreats behind him. The poet gently caresses its breast-like dome with the tips of his fingers, showering it with a cascade of pieces of nacre shell, which are also inlaid into the instrument’s design. The softly cascading shells prefigure the 25 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1 and Poetics of Cinema 2. Both books are based on the idea that film has the power to create uniquely cinematographic sensations and feelings. The challenge, then, to the critic is to try to express these ideas in language, which in itself would be a creative act.

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cascade of music to come. The poet and the princess (both played brilliantly by the actress Sofiko Chiaureli) become a composite androgynous figure in these scenes of anguished love. Androgyny is an expression of the primary narcissistic merger of the lover in the beloved found in the Persian miniature tradition. This merger is further amplified since they wear similar Persian clothing (tunic and tight pants, more or less unisex, worn even today across India and Pakistan), with identical blue and black stripes. This most unusual courtship is pervaded by a sense of melancholy yearning. The minimalist mise-en-scène of light-filled radiant white spaces highlights the resplendent colours and textures of cloth, lace, and clothing. Here objects become sculptural. The intermittent breeze creates aleatory movement in the pages of a book on the floor and in the lace in an otherwise highly composed mise-en-scène. A puff of powder-blue tulle cascading down from a high window and some lace fluttering in the breeze mark the disappearance of the lovers, leaving these lightest of traces, concluding the segment.

Sensuality of Male Monastic Asceticism Surprisingly, the body at its most sensual is present at the ascetic monastery. There is something fascinating about the seven young monks who appear to chisel a wall of rock in unison. They stand, backing us, wearing long loose grey vestments bellowing furiously in the wind. Their bodies are palpable beneath the cassocks caught in the wind. Sounds of wind and metal on stone are amplified. Then these monks disrobe again, doffing their heavy black outer robes simultaneously (standing in a ritual formation), revealing light white habits. The repetition of this slow divestiture, both on the ground and on the roof of a monastery, increases the sensuous feel of their concealed, chaste bodies. An insistent homoerotic impulse is most in evidence when the legs and feet of three monks are washed with ritual care. This action becomes ambiguous as we see the monks being carried by the robed figures, and becomes clear again only when they are placed in vats to press grapes rhythmically. Our minds spiral back to the prologue, in which a foot crushes grapes on a slab of chiselled stone. The bare legs of the monks, the way in which they are carried, the voluptuousness of the act of crushing the grapes, the squishing sound, all combine to produce the effect that the action in this sequence rapidly changes meaning. Here again, we see functional gestures and the actions of work turned into something erotic and sensual, while also reminding us of the archaic history of wine production in Georgia around 6,000 BCE, attested by recent archaeological research.

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A neatly seated group of monks bite into pomegranates, which have their skin intact, while the poet stands apart, reading. The orchestrated, amplified crunching sound of the monks biting in unison into the bittersour-sweet fruit feels like a ritual of displaced eroticism. It is a strange scene, voluptuous in its long duration. The scene of Sayat Nova seated with cup in hand, drinking wine (from a small well) to excess in an uncontrollable surrender to impulse, in a film of restrained, precise gestures, especially in the monastery, stands out. It certainly separates him from the group. The poet as monk performs the fundamental Christian rituals of baptism, marriage, and death with a maximum of sensory awareness, again through hieratic gestures, rhythms, and use of ritual vestments of great antiquity. We also see (and ‘feel’) the texture and quilted pattern of the humble coloured swaddling cloth when a baptized naked infant is placed on it.

Sexuality in the Nunnery The poet’s sojourn in the convent of nuns creates an unusual tone of sexual arousal, in a pantomime register that is absent from the high seriousness of the men’s monastery, where the eroticism is sublimated. The pantomime performance of sexual yearning by the nuns is parodic in its theatrical deployment of the embroidered shrouds as props. The high artifice of the mise-en-scène of seduction and the emphatic theatricalization of rejection by the poet/monk feature a repetitive set of exaggerated gestures of pantomime inflected with a sense of levity. Certainly there is a new register of affect here. Parajanov’s self-portraits of himself wearing handcrafted, bizarre constructions on his head also suggest a theatrical sensibility, a willingness to transform oneself in a camp manner. Here the definition of camp as ‘a recreation of surplus value out of forgotten forms of labour’26 seems especially applicable: witness the transformation of an eclectic array of found material into objects invested with care and value, and how these fabrications in turn transform the persona of the artist. It is a kind of selfdramatization of the artist, which is especially poignant, and humorous, given the authoritarian state’s control of the artist and his art. It is here at the nuns’ convent that we see the performance of sewing as a dance, completing the cycle of carding, spinning, dying, and weaving as the matrix of a variety of arts. Two nuns are arranged frontally on a balcony, over which hang two shrouds. They sit sewing with needle and 26 Ross, 170.

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thread, pulled up and outwards in unison, describing an arc. The rhythmic movement of their arms depicts a fragment of dance. In front of them on the ground, a nun in white (again played by Sofiko Chiaureli) enacts a series of stumbling movements representing a woman deranged, in a virtuoso pantomime. Some of her gestures bear an uncanny resemblance to those of the bereft Princess Ana, but replayed with exaggerated humour, parodied. These resemblances and repetitions spiral outwards in the viewer’s mind, suggesting connections that do not settle. The nun’s displaced eroticism is directed at a donkey she caresses in a suggestive manner. Again we have one of those magical moments of the divestiture of clothing, when the nun, dressed in a black garment, magically changes into white clothes in the blink of an eye, just as the donkey turns from brown to white and she throws the shroud over him.

Everyday Life Through Sayat Nova, Parajanov shows us in tableaux vivants the everyday life and work of the people, alongside their ritual life linked to the church. He is explicit and succinct about his approach in the following interview: We want to show the world in which the ashugh [troubadour Sayat Nova] lived, the source that nourished his poetry, and for that reason national architecture, folk art, nature, daily life, and music will play a large role in the film’s pictorial decisions. We are recounting the epoch, the people, their passions and thoughts through the conventional, but unusually precise language of things. Handicrafts, clothing, rugs, ornaments, fabrics, the furniture in their living quarters – these are the elements. From these the material look of the epoch arises.27

There seems to be a border or liminal zone where everyday gestures and ritual gestures converge even momentarily. The poet/monk digs a grave for the dead Catholicos, Father Lazarus, an Armenian saint. It is shown as a strenuous activity that goes on for a while. The burial of the woman in white is performed as an impassioned pantomime with a chorus of mourners actually chanting in unison (the only time they do) in a medieval cemetery while the old poet engages with the boy angels on another plane of action. The mourners chant an enigmatic refrain, 27 Steffen, op. cit., 115.

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‘the world is a window’. If that is so, what does the world show through this window, we might ask. It appears that the world of the whole f ilm, with its magical, even mystical overtones imbuing the everyday, is what is made perceptible. A wedding, a christening, and final rites are presented as part of a life cycle, creating a sense of an everyday milieu in a distilled form. We see a remarkable scene of harvesting on the roof of a monastery, where four men rhythmically swing long scythes, cutting wild grass. A couple drive a pair of bulls in a circle, threshing. Men and women ritually slaughter three rams, cut up the meat and cook it in large pots. Oil is distilled and grapes crushed in the monastery. One gets a sense of the rhythms of work, its repetitive everyday gestures presented sensuously and formally.

The Dream Child and the Celestial Child The poet’s dream is under the sign of the child with a variety of tones. The child Arutin, standing between his parents who hold a large piece flat bread, tears a piece and munches it happily as though he were back at home. Two complex tableaux are presented within the dream. They gather together people who have appeared in scenes across the different stages of the poet’s life, along with a llama and a camel. This aleatory fluidity is made credible through the perspective of the child’s dream. The celestial child appears to defy gravity by ‘flying’ high above the dying poet. Childhood and old age are brought into contact in the one image, just as the child accompanied the poet right through his life.

Nacre Crosses and the Prehistoric Nautilus Shell The naked infant (from the baptism scene) recalls an explicit scene of naked bodies observed by Arutin, the poet as a child. He looks through a window of a public bathhouse and sees naked male bodies being scrubbed clean of layers of mud and washed. The levity of this action derives from the expression of glee on the faces of the young boys on a balcony, who pour water on to the adult bodies from jugs held high. In contrast, Arutin, with his usual serious expression, observes in close-up King Irakle, lying on a stone slab. He turns his head towards him twice, looks at Arutin and then closes his eyes and turns away. His body is vigorously stretched and limbered at the joints and efficiently washed by an attendant.

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Then the child sees a remarkable image of a woman’s naked torso, with a nautilus shell (with its lustrous nacre or mother of pearl surface, itself a compound of organic and inorganic matter) placed on her right breast. The shot cuts to the child looking attentively and holds the shot for a while, disturbing the conventional, punctual rhythm of shot/reverse shot. The duration obliges us to observe the serious expression on the child’s face and see that he is framed on either side by two streams of water running from the top of the frame to the bottom. The reverse shot appears now with water and milk flowing down the woman’s torso. Scattered on either side of her body are a host of small, gleaming nacre crosses. The explicitly naked or semi-naked figures are not voluptuous and sensual in the way the fully clothed monks are elsewhere, for several reasons. While the male bodies are scrubbed and washed in a functional manner, the naked female torso exists on another affective plane entirely. The shot/reverse shot schema, rarely used in this film of frontal tableaux, signals the singularity of this sequence. The child’s gaze here is chaste but the presence of the nautilus shell and the glistening nacre crosses also signal a high degree of sensuous abstraction, the grid of the cross and the spiral of nature brought into alignment on a female breast. These appear to be two fundamental compositional principles of Parajanov’s film. The libidinal (though not sexualized) image of the female torso achieves aesthetic sublimation and conceptual clarity. The owner of this naked torso is not identified within the diegesis, but Steffen notes that according to the script it is Princess Ana’s body. In a later scene the poet, dressed in a blue and black striped tunic, places a nautilus shell on his left breast, echoing the one on the naked female torso, further amplifying the androgynous dimension of the semantic field. The motif of the shell appears again when it is placed on the left breast of Princess Ana, now dressed in red, with white lace drawn over the shell. In retrospect, all of the images in these three dense sequences invite us to learn how to differentiate, temporalize, and calibrate gesture, sound, movement, sensation, perception, and thought. Guided by these processes – reminiscent of Bergson – one can see that the child who sees the woman’s naked torso is not presented as a voyeur, and nor are we. None of the bodies are sexualized, they do not titillate and seduce. The child here is a ‘seer’ (in the emphatic Deleuzean sense). Parajanov enables us to sense in these elusive configurations a subtle energy, not subject to the rules of habitual sensory-motor perceptions, actions, and reactions. Here the juxtaposed crosses (grids) and the spiral are not used as symbols but rather as the fecund doubled matrix (womb), awash with the ‘amniotic fluid’ of water and milk, offering two generative, distinctive modes of perceiving The Color of Pomegranates. These are two modes of perception and conception, which this film activates.

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A film profoundly engaged in the vital cultural patrimony of Armenian Apostolic Christianity displays the symbol of the cross prominently, carved on stone or embodied by the poet lying on the floor with his arms spread out. The child on the roof lies down amongst the fluttering books with arms spread out in cruciform. The adult poet does the same on the floor of a monastery while beside him a black cassock is similarly arranged. However, the cross as a solid, erect object is not visible in any of the monasteries. The film creates a dynamic relation (rather than a mere juxtaposition) between the horizontally placed little glistening nacre crosses and the naked female torso, with the nautilus shell awash with water and milk, in the bathhouse. It is not possible to decide whether this composite image is secular or sacred, or perhaps this is not a question even worth asking in this way. Perhaps the image’s power lies in its very indeterminacy. Certainly, its dynamism (glistening light, the mix of flowing water and milk) tunes our thinking. We are wafted into a frequency of the poet’s lyre ornamented with mother of pearl embedded around its breast-shaped resonator, which the poet caresses with his fingertips. Sound, vision, and touch entwine in a spiral. This fecund shot of the prehistoric ‘living fossil’ of the nautilus shell (which carries within each of its many chambers all the phases of its growth), atop the right breast of the torso offers an unimaginable temporal scale vastly exceeding that of homo sapiens and most other organic life forms. The grid-like, invariably still camera, with its largely frontal address, the little glistening crosses and the unique organic spiral atop the torso, all considered together, sensitize us to perceive ‘a-signifying particles’ of the shots, their ‘subtle energies’, and their ‘nebula of impulses’. Subconscious sub-cortical mental processes, sensations, and feelings on the part of the viewer, can thereby be actively connected to the more analytical cortical processes of making sense, in unforeseen ways. Cinematic thinking and writing must surely be enriched through an attentiveness to these synaesthetic processes.

Digression: Tai Chi It is well known to learners of a certain form of Tai Chi that the initial linear form is easier to grasp and remember than the circular one. The linear form has points of rest and spatial orientation if one is lost. One moves forwards in a straight line or in reverse. By contrast, the circular form is difficult for the brain to grasp and remember, as there is no point of orientation, but rather a continual turning motion that disorients, without a stable point of return. The central point is only ever provisional as it moves continuously. Such movements

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are dizzying. The whirling Dervishes of Sufi Islam in Turkey overcome this dizziness by connecting meditatively to a larger (perhaps planetary) force outside the self. It would appear that these are two separate operations of the brain and the mind: rectilinear movement on a grid and spiralling thought atop the concealed, ever-growing chambers of the organic nautilus shell. Perhaps our minds, encountering The Color of Pomegranates, are given the freedom to shuttle between these two distinct ways of moving and making sense.

Wind Wind as a force of nature blows right through The Color of Pomegranates. At times it flows at a steady measured pace, at others as a light breeze, or else it roars becoming a gale force. Wind is a harbinger of something. It disturbs the rock-steady, unmoving gaze of the static camera, the precisely composed materials of the exquisite tableaux vivants. The wind shakes up the still shots. The wind is chaos incarnate; it is sound amplified. The wind appears from nowhere, even in rooms with very high windows on which peacocks perch luxuriously, their feathers cascading down a white wall. The wind is both inside and outside. Pages of a single book on the floor of a room covered with a carpet flap in a gentle breeze while a piece of white lace wafts away from a lace-maker. A group of shouting women clutching lavash bread are caught in a gale force wind, their clothes flying while the cypress trees behind them bend and sway perilously. In the dream sequence, where the child Sayat Nova visits his parents to mourn their deaths, they and a woman in the background are seen carding wool by pulling it apart in an absentminded state of repetition. When a strong wind blows in the scene, the wool flies around wildly, layering the chaotic image randomly with a soft white texture. The cupola of a church is carried away by a gale and shattered silently. The two dynamic poles of Parajanov’s system of shots emerge from these experiences – rock-solid stability and windy chaos. In between these poles, micro-movements and affects abound. The chance to synaesthetically engage with these movements and make sense of them is the gift proffered to us by this most unusual film.

Actors and Puppets Parajanov is fascinated by the popular traditions of puppetry and pantomime of Transcaucasia. Further, he works within the deep traditions of performance history, where the human actor aspired to the state of grace of

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the puppet. The clown, the doll, the dancer, and – much later – the robot all belong to this lineage and the desire to escape the limitations of the organic, all too human body. While imprisoned, Parajanov decorated dolls, creating hybrid forms and collages. The organic body of the actor seeks the power of artifice encoded in the puppet’s form and movement. Through rigorous training techniques the organic body of the actor is able to eliminate all phatic emissions and communicative gesticulation. The bio-mechanics of the joints and limbs of the actor-puppet are made supple, ‘well oiled’ through training, so the body can ‘speak’ with silent eloquence. A high degree of abstraction and simplification from everyday gesture creates clarity of line, outline, and movement. The result is a simplification of form, the creation of pure form: abstraction. The actor, purified in this way, is able to develop a syntax of exacting precision like that of the puppet. This flexible syntax of the body has the power to create dance phrases and cadences with materials and objects, generating synaesthetically replete semantic fields. Chiaureli in her multiple roles exhibits these qualities admirably. It is said that Parajanov made a large puppet and filmed it outdoors for his student film, A Moldovian Fairy Tale, 1952. He developed a unique mode of film acting by innovating within this theatrical tradition of performance.28 In Ashik Kerib, two dancers perform at the threshold of a small, domed, open-air structure. One of the dancers is very tall and statuesque while the other is so short and small that she could well be a child; indeed, she looks like a raggedy doll puppet, soft, with great flexibility of joints. She does splits with effortless grace. They stand in front of each other, framed by an arch in medium shot, and perform a magnificent virtuoso duet dressed in colourful, layered clothing. It is difficult to know with certainty whether the dance is a combination of a folk form and a modern choreographed sequence of moves, or a total fabrication, invented by the choreographer Parajanov, who was himself trained in dance. This uncertainty is felt right across the dance-like movements in both films. What might appear to be an archaic ‘folk’ mode might well be a hybrid mode of performance with its links to the early twentieth-century Soviet theatrical avant-garde experiments with the bio-mechanics and kinaesthetic body of the actor as acrobat. The prodigious inventiveness of Parajanov’s system or repertoire of movements and gestures in both films is truly astonishing. The puppet/ actor is a singular animating figure in the cinema of Parajanov.29 28 ‘Puppet Aesthetics’. 29 See Heinrich von Kleist’s essay, ‘On the Marionette‘, for a marvellous theoretical account of the link between the actor and the puppet.

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Mask-Face-Close-Up In The Color of Pomegranates, faces are as expressive as masks are in theatre, (say, for example, Japanese Noh theatre). There is very little overt expression on the faces of the actors, their facial muscles barely move. Their mask-like stillness makes us hypersensitive to the smallest of micro-movements, the shadow of an impulse often registered in the eyes. The uniform, even light as in miniature painting does not sculpt faces or objects; there are no shadows. However, masks, though still and unchanging, do become expressive depending on the quality of our attention, our capacity to be drawn to them, and be absorbed by them. It is this quality of our attentive absorption that makes the perception of the mask a close-up, however far we may be seated from it in a theatre. Sofiko Chiaureli’s eyes convey her feelings: they fluctuate subtly, whether in the role of Princess Ana or the poet. The montage between face, arms, and hands (which the film invites us to create) speak eloquently. Spatial movements are rare and also minimal. The movement is intensive. The close-up gathers together all the micro-movements and creates affects which are sometimes difficult to name but felt never the less. The ‘Affection Image’ in Deleuzean film theory is a close-up, one that makes us sense something but which resists conceptualization.30 This resistance highlights the singular powers of the cinematic close-up. It registers micro-movements on a ‘sensitive plate of nerves’. All of our five senses are gathered on this surface – our face. So the face is the close-up, the close-up is the face according to this mode of theorization. The close-up of anything whatsoever (a hand for instance), not just the face, registers micro-movements and flux, too. We are impelled to conceptualize that which resists conceptualization. The resistance is a sign of the emergence of something fragile and new, something unknown. The face as mask (on film) can acquire the qualities and powers of the close-up. Chiaureli’s face, both as Sayat Nova the poet and Princess Ana, is in close-up in this sense. This is part of its magnetism, the enigmatic quality of its affect.

Hands: Relaxed or Prehensile? Hands also have powers of expressiveness, like the face, when they relax their prehensile function. The actors who become puppet-like have hands that 30 Deleuze, Cinema 1. See Chapter 6, ‘The Affection-Image; Face and Close-Up‘, 87–101.

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speak. These hands make us feel something – rather than nothing – when viewed in close-up, especially when set against fabric in a contrasting colour. This is the case with the hands shown in The Color of Pomegranates. These hands, however, do not function like the precise abstract mudras (gestures) of Indian dance-theatre (Odissi or Kathakali, for example), which narrate stories intelligible only to those who know those gestural languages and traditions. The gestures in The Color of Pomegranates are more elusive, seemingly idiosyncratic, perhaps a creation of Parajanov’s own. At times, Princess Ana’s hands, in black gloves, frame and reveal her face or just one eye, mysteriously; at others, they demonstrate with startling precision and imagination how an art form such as dance can emerge from craftwork. We are guided into seeing this metamorphosis when her spindle-carrying hand relaxes its prehensile hold, freeing it to trace the memory of a twirling movement in the air – dance. Hands are most elusive when they draw our attention to them, causing vision itself to take on a haptic value. The hands texture perception, they help us differentiate material by imbuing the eye with tactile sensitivity. Stimulated in this way, the brain and mind are then able to perceive and calibrate subtle energies of the image. An intriguing prop – an ornamented metal arm – is introduced. Its fingers are arranged to suggest a hieratic gesture. It is larger than a human male arm and it covers the mature Sayat Nova’s face as he lies down. The palm touches his lips. It becomes a pillow. Its actual function remains unknown. We are free to imagine its virtual function. The hand and face areas nestle against each other on the cortical map of the brain, and can therefore overlap. They occupy a larger cortical space than does the torso, an indication of the importance of manual dexterity for survival and cultural development. They can cross-wire and exchange sensations, making them synaesthetic. V. S. Ramachandran, the cognitive neuroscientist and clinician with a penchant for speculative reason, draws out the implications of this anatomical arrangement of the brain.31 He points out that the face and hand are highly sensitive areas of the body with many nerve endings (unlike the torso), which equip us with subtle forms of discrimination and differentiation – each finger is an index of its variety. The hand released from its prehensile habitual function is invested with 31 Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain. See note 9 of Chapter 4 for an account of the role of the fingers in particular, in producing sensation and thought, developed by the neurobiologist Eric Kendal. Thinking about f ingers and hands in art and f ilm may lead one astray from the straight and narrow. The resulting meanderings might even stimulate the mind.

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new values. Parajanov’s poetic cinema taps into this potential, enriching our perception and thought.

The Man with the Peacock At least one other critic has mentioned that this image is difficult to link to the rest of the film. I, too, feel that it stands out among the system of images and their emerging logic and provisional connectivity that we ourselves can make. It stands out in its difference. Though the figure looks at us directly, in his clothing and appearance the man with the Peacock seems to be an outsider, his skin tone darker, clothing strikingly different. A short embroidered waistcoat reveals his bare chest and arms. He holds the peacock’s beak in his mouth. He is an opaque and arresting figure with a defused sensuality. One is left wondering if the script offers any clues as to his cultural background within the multi-ethnic Transcaucasia. He seems to be presented as an ‘ethnic other’, especially as he appears alongside the ritualized Royal Hunting scene, derived from pre-Islamic Persian culture. It hardly matters if we cannot understand every image and sign in the film, I tell myself. Like poetry and life, not everything is immediately intelligible. Elusive configurations activate the mind, agitate it, without being readily digestible and open to resolution. Art does that.

The Angel of Death and the Boy Angels Some of the lightest moments of the film are reserved, surprisingly, for the interaction between the young Angel of Death – who wears a metal blindfold, military gear, and a set of golden wings – and the two playful winged boy angels. The humour derives largely from the playful movements of the boy angels pushing and pulling the blind Angel of Death, who is groping his way towards the old poet. It looks like they are playing a game, with no hint of the ‘grim reaper’! The Angel of Death kneels down to pick up a lump of earth, wraps it up in a piece of unleavened bread, and stumbles around with proffered hands trying to find the poet. The boy angels lead him by dragging and pushing him around, taking the parcelled bread and handing it to the old poet, who smells it. Death as a return to the earth is announced lightly, it seems. So, what should be a smooth solemn ritual moment of the annunciation of death turns out instead to be halting, light, and funny. The Angel of Death, hands out stretched, blunders around the

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scattered ancient gravestones, while the boy angels jump lightly from stone to stone in a game of their own making. Finally, the naughty boy angels lead the poet away from the graveyard, pick up his magically disappearing and appearing kamancha, and run away with it, leaving him alone in an open desolate expanse.

Christian Funeral Rites There are three funerals for people of three different social classes in The Color of Pomegranates. One is a peasant with just two mourners, another is the Catholicus of the Apostolic Church of Armenia, and finally a Woman in White is mourned by a chorus of men and women miming an elaborate ritual of lamentation in an ancient medieval cemetery. Each of these funerals gives a sense of the communal life of the people in terms of social hierarchy and the importance of religious ritual in their social life. Parajanov’s own capacity to invent ritual has been discussed by critics in relation to the wedding ritual in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965). His invented ritual had such an aura of ethnographic authenticity that it was subsequently imitated in actual marriage ceremonies! Similarly, the funeral ritual of the Catholicus is pure invention in that he surrounds the dead Prelate with a large flock of white sheep packed into a large chamber cushioning the sanctified body, which is covered with an embroidered shroud. The vestments and shroud are authentic, lent to Parajanov by the church officials, but not the mise-en-scène. The sheep evoke the first Christians gathered in catacombs as a ‘flock’ protected by the Good Shepherd. In this sense, it is a rare literal image (a literalization of an idea) in the film, made hyperbolic and yet persuasive in its very excess. Death is cocooned with wool, soft, comforting. It is certainly different from having a large number of mourners packed in there. The sensations and feelings would be quite different. We would certainly not have given the scene a second thought, as we do now! ***

Christianity and Islam – Ashik Kerib (1988) The Apostolic Christian rites for the dead described above are in every way different from those associated with the Sufi minstrel’s death and burial in Ashik Kerib. This film is Parajanov’s celebration of the Islamic culture

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of Transcaucasia and of Azerbaijan in particular, based on a short story written by Mikhail Lermontov in 1837. This was itself based on a Turkish folktale or fairy tale. According to Steffen, ‘the Ashug [Ashik] tradition of Transcaucasia is noteworthy for the very direct way in which it reflects the pervasive influence of Islamic – especially Persian – culture upon the region. The word Ashug derives from the Arabic word Ashiq or “lover”’.32 In these two films, Parajanov mediates Christian and Islamic cultures of Transcaucasia with a historical awareness of their commonalities (as religions of the Book) as well as their specificity, their differences, and conflicts. I find this aspect of Parajanov’s cinema important, given the long, fraught, often violent historical relationship between these two civilizational religions in Europe. It is especially important now, when Western attitudes towards Islam have become increasingly polarized and Islam itself has been reduced to and identified (in the popular Western imagination and the media) with the relatively recent fundamentalist, punitive, puritanical, and again often violent Wahabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. Parajanov explores the presence of Sufi Islam in Trancaucasia in Ashik Kerib. The role of the minstrel is played marvellously by the Kurdish Yuri Mgoyan who had no formal training as an actor. Parajanov’s spirit is ecumenical and celebratory, his historical understanding subtle, his cultural vision expansive and imaginative. The Soviet film bureaucracy would not understand this optic nor its spirit despite the Soviet State’s policy of encouraging a Pan-Caucasian kinship or commonality and national consciousness in the Russian Republics. Birth and death are two scenes that the cinema does very well, crossculturally. One almost feels that death awaited cinema to fully express itself in all its variety and magnitude! There are many iconic memorable and spectacular ways of dying on film, but far fewer scenes of birth, unless we agree that weddings, traditionally at least, are a metonymic precursor to birth. One fine day, when the Angel of Death arrives and says, ‘This is your last chance to see your two favourite clips,’ I will choose the death of the Sufi minstrel in Ashik Kerib and the nativity scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

How a Sufi Minstrel Dies Kurshud-Bek, an enemy and rival on horseback, steals the Sufi minstrel Ashik Kerib’s clothes as they cross a river together. Though Ashik Kerib says that 32 Steffen, op. cit., 118.

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a man riding a horse cannot travel on the same road as a man on foot, he is nevertheless duped. By trusting his enemy, he loses both his clothes and his lute, which floats away on the river. Naked, he hides in a ruined building. A child, seeing him naked and hiding, brings his grandfather along, having asked him to give the man a set of clothes, which includes his own cloak and headdress. The section is called, simply and profoundly, ‘Goodness’. Once Ashik Kerib dresses in the clothes gifted him by the child and his grandfather, two figures veiled in black guide him to the town to meet the old and sick Sufi minstrel lying on a bench at the entrance to a mosque. His lute hangs from the roof above him. When the old minstrel meets the young minstrel, he reaches for the lute and hands it to Ashik Kerib in a simple and moving gesture of transmission, the passing of a tradition from the old to the young. Two men seated there raise their arms to the heavens in a gesture evoking the Islamic prayer of thanks, marking the sanctity of this vital moment. The transmissibility of this oral tradition seems dependent on such magical moments – magical because they are so chance-like and yet feel like destiny. The wandering minstrel walks on a path; he is not sedentary, he does not know what he will encounter, and actually the path does not previously exist, but is created with each step, the Sufi way, as the film suggests. Ashik Kerib is on a specific quest to earn money within a thousand days so he can marry his beloved Magul Megeri, whose father – Ayak-Aga, a wealthy Turk – has rejected him because he is poor. Despite the temporal urgency of his quest, he is diverted from it by his encounter with the old Sufi. Ashik Kerib urges the old minstrel to come with him on a journey, reminding him that a minstrel cannot die sedentary in bed. From this moment on, the narrative movement of the film takes on a magical winding path. We see here the mystical heterodox Sufi way of life, of wandering through the world creating a direct link with the divine through song and dance. This devotional tradition of the Sufi is different from that of the centrality of the priest within the institution of religion and its codes in Christianity and orthodox Islam or in the case of India, where Hinduism has its own devotional (Bhakti) tradition and orthodoxy. The old minstrel can barely walk, his legs buckle under him, but he starts dancing slowly with his arms held high and spinning like the whirling Dervishes of these Islamic regions of Azerbaijan and Turkey. The meditative spinning connects with the energies of the cosmos. All the while, Ashik Kerib walks ahead, playing his lute. Finally, the old minstrel drops to his knees and falls flat on the earth, face down. This entire delicate scene is performed in front of an ancient fourteenth-century stone fortress in Baku.

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A caravan of camels led by men in flowing robes walk across the frame behind them. Ashik Kerib gathers the dying Sufi in his arms and takes his body to a scrub. He squeezes the juice of a pomegranate into his mouth and he appears to take his last drink while the juice pours out of his mouth as though it were blood. Ashik Kerib digs a grave with a rock and places the body in it, stands up, tears a piece of his red shirt, and covers the head and face of dead minstrel with it. He proceeds to ritually place on his body each of the dolls thrown to them by the men on the caravan as they passed the dying, dancing minstrel. Little bells attached to the dolls tinkle as they are shaken ritually and placed on the body. There seems to be an entire code of ethics of living and dying in these human gestures on the path of the Sufi and the traders. Finally, he throws himself on the mound of earth and proceeds to push the soil into the grave with the weight of his entire body. The amplified wailing on the sound track accompanies these actions. The poet is mute, as puppets are, like most of the characters in this film. Ave Maria, among other pieces, accompany this moving ritual. A camel comes over, kneels down, and places its head on the grave. A ball of thistles blows in the wind; two white doves flutter. I have felt impelled to capture almost all the movements of this sequence as it is unlike anything I have ever seen in any film and also so different to the Christian rituals we have seen in The Color of Pomegranates. Shot in Azerbaijan, a Muslim country, with dialogue in Azeri, Parajanov focuses on Sufism, a heterodox mystical tradition of Islam, and shows its understanding of both life and death. In its impassioned performance of death, it is perhaps close to the spirit of his mentor Alexandre Dovzhenko’s Earth. The death of the old minstrel in this film is quite unforgettable. All of the movements of dance, music, lamentation, and burial are infused with a sense of rhythm in tune with nature. The camels and the birds are part of it. Islamic ritual and Ave Maria coexist. Parajanov has said that he wanted Europeans to hear that sacred Christian music in the context of Sufi Islam. In mystical Sufism, there is no priest to mediate one’s relation to the divine or the sacred: instead, music and dance are an integral part of the connectivity to the divine.

How a Child is Born It is a rugged and impoverished Sothern Italian landscape. Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus are in a small stable. We might have seen such a scene in a Renaissance painting. The Three Kings come slowly down a winding, hilly

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path, bearing their gifts of Frankincense and Myrrh for the newborn. A few children run around them. The Three Kings are draped in layers and layers of cloth robes. They seem to walk softly on cloth. Their bodies feel soft and gentle. Their smiling, kindly faces radiate joy. As they approach Mary and the infant, she rises quickly, somewhat uncertain, and hands the bundled infant to one of the Kings, who enfolds him in cloth. The child is held up as a precious gift and passed tenderly from one King to another. The camera repeatedly turns to Joseph, who seems puzzled by the events. The African American Spiritual ‘Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child’ begins while the camera tenderly picks up the village children’s faces and finally rests on a boy in a hood with a donkey beside him. The expression on these faces, their very appearance, is utterly moving in their unadorned beauty. It is a Nativity scene like no other. It is a voice like no other when we hear Odetta sing ‘a motherless child… a long way from home…’. The spiritual creates a marvellous syncretic scene, the montage so unexpected. One feels an immanent sense of the sacred, a scene enfolded in the softness of cloth. The next scene is the Massacre of the Innocents, wrapped in swaddling clothes, snatched from their mothers’ arms. What we see is cloth being violently pulled, torn and thrown about. We don’t hear any cries, only a jagged piece of music to match an equally jagged panning movement of the camera catching the violent action. These are two scenes from Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew. I was given a third clip … time accelerates … and then it dilates, as they say … fast-motion, slow motion and every micro-moment in between. Between the scenes of death and of birth, time floats. *** A Turkish warrior on horseback aims an arrow. The reverse shot is of the face of the Virgin Mary painted on the dome of a ruined cathedral. Her face falls down. Iconoclasm! Actions and reaction are not enacted. A shot shows a dagger and smashed up crushed pomegranates. A violent image where the violence is not enacted, but suggested. The images demonstrate an idea. When Ashik Kerib is attacked by Turkish soldiers on horseback he calls out, ‘I am your brother, brother!’ And the enemies shout back, ‘You cannot be my brother. You are my enemy! Flog him! Hack him! In the enemy’s land everybody is an enemy, only enemies’. A host of little children rescue the Sufi minstrel from the Turkish invaders on horseback by hiding him in a church. St. George protects them, an iconic presence amidst the children and the Sufi trudging through snow. They stand in the snow in a group and look at us after the danger has passed, holding an image of St George.

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The actor who plays Ashik Kerib is a Kurd and not a Muslim. Sufi Islam and Christianity come together through the mediation of little children. ‘God is One’ says a caption. ‘Goodness’ could also be its caption, as in the previous scene of a child and his grandfather clothing the naked minstrel. This is Parajanov’s ecumenical spirit in action. In the burial scene, the piece of red cloth torn from his shirt is used by Ashik Kerib to carefully wrap the dead face and head of the minstrel. The face, the improvised shroud, and the gesture of covering creates a profound moment that I cannot quite put into words adequately. But it is for me one of those cinematic moments of affective intensity, an expression of a radiant human impulse, a simple gesture in the face of death; a Sufi way of facing the void, one might say. Here, the cloth is necessary, its use abundant, unexpected. Here, one’s mind catalogues other ways of treating a dead body. The open wooden coffins seen in The Color of Pomegranates, Parajanov’s own body in an open coffin carried down a street with an accompanying host of mourners, seen in a documentary, a body completely wrapped in cloth, the cremation on a wooden pyre, leaving a body on a tower for carrion birds to feed on… All practiced in these vast extended regions where Asia and Europe came into contact. ***

Pasolini and Parajanov Pasolini was a director Parajanov loved and felt a deep affinity with. Neither was religious, but both were fascinated with and knowledgeable about the rich cultural life produced by religion over centuries. In Parajanov’s case, his interest was with Orthodox and Apostolic Christianity and Sufi Islam; for Pasolini it was Catholicism and Paganism. Both worked with the material culture and expansive spirit of religion with great aesthetic rigour, empathy, and imagination. Both were interested in archaic periods of human culture from the perspective of the modern. Both were especially invested in costume and woven material, their plasticity and their civilizational life. Both were knowledgeable about the other arts and the craft traditions of these cultures as well as their literature and music and used these to formulate and compose their cinematic images. Both studied art history. Importantly, the curriculum at VGIK (the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography), where Parajanov studied directing, also included art history and drawing. The specific training of his hand and eye is perceptible in the way he worked.

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Pasolini studied with the eminent art historian Roberto Longhi, who he said was fundamental to his way of perceiving contemporary reality through a historical painterly epic framework. For both directors, painting as a spiritual resource also offered a rich archive for thinking about the organization of space on a two-dimensional surface, the use of colour and the arrangement of people and objects, including fabric. Both were interested in dialects and linguistic diversity, often with adverse political consequences. Both were public intellectuals whose uncompromising and often provocative views on politics, sexuality, and cultural politics clashed with institutions of the state and church. They were flamboyant public figures, dramatizing the roles of artist and intellectual. Both worked on one particular film each, with a sense that cinema had no prior history, that they were inventing a language. This was not a sign of megalomania but rather an unswerving belief in the singularity of film as a new medium. It was as though they were discovering it anew. This was the case of Pasolini in his very first film, Accattone (1961), and Parajanov in his mature work, the now celebrated The Color of Pomegranates. A young Bernardo Bertolucci, who was apprenticed to Pasolini on Accattone, expressed the remarkable sentiment that he was seeing the birth of cinema in the way Pasolini shot his film, placing the camera and constructing the mise-en-scène as though it were a mural. Parajanov, it is said, created the mise-en-scène by actively arranging objects by hand and adjusting and draping the costumes on the actors. Mise-en-scène for him was a physical, tactile, kinetic activity, not a set of instructions given to the art director. Directing was not done seated, calling out ‘Action!’ Rather, directing was a dramatic activity for him. The dance-like rippling of his extended arm while choreographing a scene of galloping horses (as seen in a documentary) indicates that directing, for him, was indeed a hyperkinetic activity. It is also a sign and expression of his training as a dancer. He felt the rhythms in his entire body. Each director’s sexuality – homosexuality in the case of Pasolini and bisexuality and homosexuality in the case of Parajanov – brought them into direct conflict with the authorities, both political and religious. Parajanov was imprisoned more than once while Pasolini received a suspended sentence. Their respective major works, Pasolini’s Salò 1976 and Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, have at various points been censored by the state. Both contributed to a cinema of poetry. Pasolini also wrote an essay on the topic. Victor Shklovsky, who wrote on prose and poetry, also worked with Parajanov on a script. Both Pasolini and Parajanov created their own cinematic syntax and idiom. Pasolini was, indeed, an established poet and writer. Parajanov made art with found material – collages and sculpture and hybrid objects – while imprisoned

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for four years in a Ukrainian maximum security prison. This work forms part of the collection at the Parajanov Museum in Armenia, established posthumously. Though both directors were Europeans, they were interested in cultural zones outside the European mainstream (Pasolini with Palestine, Africa, and India; Parajanov with Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Persia, and Turkey). This attitude and interest, which they pursued with joyful enthusiasm, sense of curiosity and tenacity, is still very rare among major Western film-makers. They were true internationalists. Pasolini also mounted a critique of neocapitalism in post-war Italian life. Parajanov attacked the Soviet State for its repression of artists and artistic experimentation in the name of ‘Socialist Realism’. Despite all these affinities between them, their films are nevertheless unique and quite different form one another. It has been said that Parajanov felt a sense of immense freedom and of cinematic possibility on seeing Andre Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962). He referred to it as ‘a phenomenon, astonishing, unrepeatable and beautiful […] I would have done nothing if there hadn’t been Ivan’s Childhood’. Thereafter he dismissed his own work prior to that as ‘rubbish’! He considered Tarkovsky his mentor, though he was older than Tarkovsky. His tribute to his mentor was not to repeat him but to invent a new possibility for cinema. It was the same with his relationship to Pasolini, whose films he admired, and which gave him the courage to forge his own creative path.

Parajanov and Shahani – Cloth and Celluloid In this section I would like to elaborate on the perceived affinity between these two film-makers. As mentioned earlier, Kumar Shahani and Parajanov have an understanding of the importance of woven material to celluloid film and an interest in the ornamentation of the image and sound. Celluloid film (coated with emulsion) is a light-sensitive material. Celluloid and cotton share a common organic component: cellulose. Any kind of woven material, not just cotton, has the power to line the celluloid image with texture, enable it both to absorb and reflect light and dress the image and modulate it. It variegates the qualitative dimension of film. Light, movement, and colour are important to human perception. Our eyes have evolved to perceive light, movement, colour, and texture in nature in the process of evolution and survival. Textile, texture, and text all derive from the Latin texere meaning ‘to weave’. Film has dressed and enhanced our senses for a little over a century now. Film (celluloid) image is composed of light, movement, and colour. These operations, combined with woven

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materials, train us to perceive modulations and self-differentiation within the film image and between images. They create sensations and feelings, too, thereby stimulating multisensory thought. Take, for example, the scene where the villainous Kurshud-Bek takes Ashik Kerib’s stolen clothes to his mother as proof of his death, aiming to claim his betrothed. The mother enfolds her son’s clothes like an infant and the soundtrack amplifies a rhythmic keening. Thereafter, these beloved clothes, strung up into a limp puppet-like human shape, are lifted up vertically along a high stonewall to reach Magul Megeri, who sits at a top window. The scale of the shot is remarkable. The stonewall appears monumental in a mid-long shot while the clothes, invested with a tactile memory of the ‘dead’ son’s body, look small and fragile as they float up the wall linking the mother and the betrothed. These disembodied clothes are infused with sorrow. They embody a sense of how woven material is invested with an immanent sense of the sacred in these films. These operations of investing value in woven material and their metamorphic powers are potentially available to all directors, though few engage with them in quite the systematic way that Parajanov and Shahani have done. They each demonstrate a historical, aesthetic, and spiritual interest in woven material and their link to their respective civilizations. Their films were made in the era of celluloid in the long twentieth century. They have an intuitive grasp and a highly sophisticated understanding of the importance of woven material for film. They find delight in woven material. They appreciate the powers of abstraction encoded in the weave and design. The sensitivity to texture stimulated by woven material in these films amplifies our powers of differentiation and ability to make lateral connections. In a previous work I have developed this argument in relation to the epic cinema of Kumar Shahani. As I mentioned earlier, I find a certain affinity between Shahani’s work and that of Parajanov and would like to outline some points of convergence between their cinematic projects and practice. The fact that one is a European and the other an Indian director does matter, I think. Ian Christy suggests that The Color of Pomegranates ‘channels the language of Western poetic film rather than anything from the Soviet canon before 1969’, when it was made.33 This move is a familiar one, which is repeated by several critics, each choosing examples from the Western canon they are most familiar with. This is quite understandable. When we encounter something new, we need a point reference to guide us. But it is not often that the work of an Asian and a European master of 33 Christy, ‘The Color of Pomegranates: Parajanov Unbound’.

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film are discussed together in any systematic analytical way, as a point of orientation and theoretical elaboration. Theoretical ideas on cinema, developed by Asian directors with several aesthetic and philosophical reference points in both Asia and Europe, rarely figure in cinema studies or in the cinematic intellectual public sphere of the West. So I am simply going to widen the terms of reference within which one can discuss these two Parajanov films. I want to see what would happen by doing so. Might it produce something beyond a simple analogy? Parajanov’s and Shahani’s respective oeuvres are situated in a larger geopolitical historical zone where Transcaucasia, Turkey, Central Asia, Persia, and the Indian Subcontinent meet in many ways, not only through imperial wars but through the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road and maybe the ‘wool route’ or the path of the Suf i as well. Etymologically, Sufi means ‘wool’, perhaps referring to the garment the Sufis wore. The trade routes enabled the exchange of goods, peoples, and ideas and codes of behaviour, too. As I have demonstrated with the scene depicting the death of the Sufi minstrel, there is an ethos on the trade routes despite the ever-present violence encountered en route. The argument I wish to develop here is not simply to show surface visual similarities between Parajanov and Shahani (though one could certainly point to some and it may be fun do so), but rather to demonstrate that their work entails civilizational projects and to suggest why that might be of some interest now, in the twenty-first century, where there is an unprecedented accessibility and awareness, and a tolerance never seen before, of global cinematic cultures. During my research I was wondering if Azerbaijan and the Transcaucasia are in Europe or Asia, and found out that it really depends on who draws the maps!

Persian and Mughal Miniature and Film Shahani derived his ideas for the mise-en-scène of his films Khayal Gatha and Kasba from Mughal miniature traditions in India, which derive from the much older Persian miniature traditions. When the Mughal rulers invaded India they brought with them the rich cultural traditions of Persia – the language, Islam, and the miniature tradition and Ghazal music, too. Just like Shahani in his work, Parajanov, as we have seen, drew ideas for The Color of Pomegranates and Ashik Karib from Armenian and Persian miniature traditions. Parajanov also stated that he wanted Ashik Karib to look like a Persian jewellery box. Artefacts such as carpets, fabric, and furniture in the Persian pictorial traditions were intricately ornamented in vibrant

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colours and designs. The ornamental impulse of nature itself is connected with the human and animal presence on a two-dimensional pictorial plane, which tends to confer equal value to all elements of the surface without necessarily privileging the human. The frontal presentation creates space as surface without a linear single point perspective, for the most part, and as a result the eye is not directed to any element automatically. One’s gaze is free to move around. Objects also have a similar quality in the way they address the viewer on an equal basis. These two film-makers have drawn on these elements to create their own unique cinematic idioms. However, both Khayal Gatha and The Color of Pomegranates for the most part draw from the stately courtly tradition of Persian miniatures, and also Christian religious traditions in the case of the latter. In contrast, Shahani’s Kasba and Ashik Kerib draw from vernacular, more popular regional folk traditions of miniatures. Shahani drew from the regional Pahari tradition and Parajanov from popular Sufi Islamic folk traditions of Azerbaijan and Turkey. As a result, the tone of these two films are lighter and full of humour. In the case of Parajanov, there is parodic and bawdy pantomime, rather rare in the stately, courtly, and religious traditions of the other two films. In the case of India there is a wonderful syncretism between the Islamic Mughal tradition and popular Hindu iconography and stories of Radha and Krishna in the regional miniature traditions. However, Shahani’s editing, camera movements, and modulatory rhythms are based on the ornamental classical musical tradition of Khayal, which gives its name to the film. Khayal is not a Sanskrit word but a Persian one, meaning thought, idea, conception, or imagination. Both Shahani and Parajanov are able to draw structural and formal elements from common older pictorial traditions, to develop their unique spatio-temporal configurations. As a result, their films are connected to a long duration of human cultural production of artefacts, and ideas in an interrelated geopolitical zone of contact. Steffen mentions that recently Parajanov’s work has influenced Iranian film-makers and been copied by music video makers as well. But Parajanov himself said, ‘I didn’t want to found a school or teach anyone anything. Whoever tries to imitate me is lost’. He didn’t want followers or pupils because he thought that imitating him would jettison artists’ own power to invent with the force of necessity. He said this as a warning because he thought that imitation would only ever produce surface similarities that exhaust themselves, as the commodity does, with the logic of its fleeting surface allure in the marketplace. Perhaps for some, the creation of pleasing decorative designs is sufficient. Parajanov did not have to play to the market because his work was state subsidized (as was the whole Soviet film industry)

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and screened only at film festivals and special events. This was exactly the case with Shahani’s films, funded by the cultural institutions of the post-independent Nehruvian nationalist state with a modern internationalist vision. Their permanent home will, undoubtedly, be the art museums and cinematheques. In 2007, Shahani’s Khayal Gatha was preserved from destruction by the timely intervention of the Australian Cinematheque of the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), which now holds rights to it. Steffen has researched in meticulous detail the difficult production and distribution history of The Color of Pomegranates, discussing how it was censored and re-edited according to the dictates of Goskino. In addition, he has devotedly documented the intricate process of the film’s restoration. It would certainly be fascinating and instructive to see these four films by these two directors screened together, perhaps in a museum context, which is now their natural abode, among the other art and craft forms – their kin group, one might say. It is remarkable, though, that one is from ‘the East’ and the other from ‘the West’, and that they themselves never met, despite the fact that they were both present at the Rotterdam Film Festival of 1988. While Khayal Gatha won the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) award, Parajanov’s Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani received the ‘Twenty Directors of the Future’ award at the festival. It was Parajanov’s first trip outside the Soviet Union, and sadly he died in 1990.

Ornamentation and its Negation Orthodox and Apostolic Christianity and Islam, two major religious traditions of the ‘Book’, have determined the cultural and religious life of Transcaucasia for centuries. Persian and Byzantine cultures, with their pre-Islamic ancient imperial civilizational history, have influenced the life of this zone as a result of invasions. The Byzantine Empire, with its seat of power in Constantinople, and later the Holy Roman Empire inherited the decorative traditions from the Greco-Roman and Hellenistic periods. The Ottoman Empire, established in 1452 with the fall of Constantinople, has also influenced this region through the introduction of Islam and its decorative traditions. So several civilizational decorative traditions of ornamentation have been available to the craftsmen of Transcaucasia, situated on the Silk Road. Both Sayat Nova in the eighteenth century and Parajanov in the twentieth engage deeply with these vital decorative craft traditions in their respective fields. Textiles and carpets, everyday objects and ritual material, clothing and jewellery, furniture, musical instruments and architecture, are

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all conceived with ornamentation central to their aesthetic forms. It is not that there is an object to which ornamentation is added as an embellishment; rather, the decorative impulse itself is integral to the very form. This is not something secondary added on to a form that is considered more basic and fundamental. In Western music, for example, ornamentation is an embellishment added to a prior form to make it more pleasing. However, in all traditions of classical Indian music – Khayal, Drupad, and Karnataka music, for example – ornamentation is integral to the form itself, not an added embellishment. This is also the case in the cinema of Kumar Shahani and especially so in his film Khayal Gatha, based on this classical Indian musical form. For Parajanov, too, ornamentation is integral to his aesthetic practice. Later on, I will discuss what I see as the structural affinity (rather than surface similarity) between Shahani’s project and that of Parajanov. Ornamentation is integral to Parajanov’s shot, part of its synaesthetic vitality. One is reminded of the mysterious emblematic repetitive use of the motif of the ornamented nautilus shell, whose spiral is ubiquitous in nature, in vegetal forms as well. He has explicitly spoken of the importance of the miniature traditions of painting in Persia, Armenia, and Georgia for his conception of the mise-en-scène of the shot. The traditions of miniature painting found in illuminated manuscripts of this region, with their twodimensional frontal composition, intricate detail, vibrant colour, uniform light, and decorative motifs of animals, plants, and humans, are important features Parajanov has creatively internalized in his shot composition. As a result, the only sequence bereft of ornamentation in The Color of Pomegranates registers as a shock, a form of violence in the visual field. It is the resonator jar scene near the end, which includes an unusually large number of shots. The nudity of the series of shots, with its rare analytic editing (fragmentation and recombination to create a synthetic space), appears as a violation of everything the film has brought to life with such care and sense of joy.

Sayat Nova Sing! Sayat Nova Die! A mason places and repeatedly adjusts a resonator amphora (jar) on a wall of resonators in an empty room. He uses what appears to be a cement-like material to embed the jar in the wall. The process is messy. The wall is stained and dirty, so are his clothes. The colour of the shot is dull and drab. The jars will preserve the poet’s voice for posterity. We hear a single voice and then the echo of a song sung by a chorus. It is as though there is a collective response to the

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poet’s voice. The preservation and transmissibility of this precious oral poetic tradition should be an occasion for joy. But the room feels airless and terribly bare, stripped down and desolate, bereft of colour. It jumps out of the system of ornamented shots that we have been feasting on for seventy or so minutes. While resonator jars were common in ancient churches to amplify sound, this space is not hospitable to the spirit. Worse, the mason who appears working diligently, holding a tool extends his arm and gives two commands, ‘Sayat Nova Sing! Sayat Nova Die!’ A poet cannot sing to an imperious command, though a fragile poet, disheartened, might well feel like dying hearing such a command. Is this claustrophobic scene, from the Color of Pomegranates, with its visually ugly mise-en-scène, bereft of all ornamentation, Parajanov’s demonstration of the Soviet State’s control of artists? Ashik Kerib, a fairy tale, made after Parajanov’s release from four years in a hard labour prison, has a similar scene but performed in a different rather playful register and mise-en-scène. A tyrannical ruler, a Pasha, who imprisons Ashik Kerib the wandering minstrel in chains, commands him to sing, with the broad exaggerated gestures of a pantomime villain. The minstrel doesn’t sing: he says he can’t, through gestures and his expression of silent refusal. Parajanov said, ‘If you are a poet, armor will interfere with your song; if you see the blind, give them a caress’. The mise-en-scène of that fairy tale scene of violence is filled with the light and colour of a Royal Court, presented in broad gestures of a fairy tale pantomime. But in Sayat Nova the gaping holes in the dirty wall lend the mise-en-scène a sinister aspect, as though gas rather than sound might come out of them. The shot makes me feel wretched. After issuing the command the mason, in one quiet, unemphatic movement, slides his black cap over his face, like a mask, obliterating it, perhaps a gesture of mourning. The mason is a simple worker doing his job well, merely a conduit for state violence. Both Sayat Nova and Parajanov lived and worked in absolutist states. We have been shown both how the ruler as patron can turn violently against the artist, and the power of the artist to resist and create life under terrible duress. Sayat Nova, it would appear, sustained Parajanov just as Parajanov celebrated a vitalist Sayat Nova, with a transcultural vision, as an artist for posterity. I wonder if other critics might think as I do about this stark scene.

State Violence – Downcast Eyes An empty white space separates the scene of the resonator jars from the final shot of the film. The empty white space, or interval of time, gives us a

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moment of rest to recover from the sensory deprivation and violence we have just encountered. It is the only such shot in the entire film. The wreathed Angel of Resurrection, or the poet’s muse (played again by Chiaureli), clad in a magnificent green and white garment of arabesque motifs, appears one final time. This time it is a close-up of the face alone, whitened, mask-like as before, but in profile. Violating a principle of composition and acting established by the film, the Angel of Resurrection appears now with eyes downcast. In the miniature tradition, the gaze is usually frontal (as in the religious icons of the Byzantine tradition) and direct, as was the case in the film until this final shot. When the poet appeared in profile tuning his kamanch, his eyes were nevertheless directed straight ahead. In contrast, the downcast eyes appear as a gesture of sorrow: it stands out. It feels ominous as an ending to a magnificent modern filmic tribute by one poet to another of equal imagination, vision, and vitality. Sayat Nova and Parajanov were kindred spirits, as many have pointed out and as we have witnessed. Despite this clear-sighted ending, suggesting the power of the Soviet State to crush artists and their creativity, what remains most vivid and indelible are the synaesthetic film images woven with material and hewn in the rock of Transcaucasia, a zone of profound historical interconnections between people and cultures. After all, Sayat Nova did write his poetry in Armenian, Azerbaijani (Turkish), and Georgian, and his name is Persian for ‘Hunter of Songs’. Similarly, Parajanov mobilized the archaic and living traditions of Transcaucasia (including its three languages) with the resources of archaic and modern cinema. The resultant singular modern syntax and idiom continue to train and amplify our power to think with the sounds and images that spiral in and out of our minds in unpredictable ways. I feel, that among other things, the film’s appealing synaesthetic pedagogic function makes it especially important within the history of global cinema.

Lapidary Dynamism in Film James Steffen has highlighted the integral link between Sayat Nova’s brilliant perception of the structure of his own poetry and the structural aesthetic durability of Parajanov’s own film (and also his own awareness of it), despite all attempts by the bureaucrats of Soviet cinema to change and modify its original formal rigour and poetic density and limit its distribution. Steffen quotes Sayat Nova: Not everyone can drink of my water, it is of another water. Not everyone can read my writing, it is of a different script.

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Do not think my substance sand: it is a crag of solid rock. As like a torrent that never dies, do not [try to] wear it down!34

One could say, following this powerful statement, that there is a lapidary dynamism to Parajanov’s conception of the shot in The Color of Pomegranates, too, and (as I have argued elsewhere) likewise in the way Shahani’s shots are composed in Khayal Gatha. How might an essentially evanescent, fragile medium like film have a rock-steady presence? The structural importance of ancient stone architecture is one contributing factor, as is woven material in the very durability of the craft (despite the evident fragility of cloth itself), and the sense of deep time they evoke. The stability of the emphatic framing with a static camera and the relative autonomy of the Parajanov shot from narrative continuity are also contributing factors. A large part of Khayal Gatha is shot in ancient ruined stone palaces, including the famous Rupmathi Pavilion in Mandu, overlooking the Narmada River, and Hindu and Islamic places of worship. A substantial part of The Color of Pomegranates is set in the ancient stone monasteries, cathedrals, and graveyards of both Armenia and Georgia. The jaggedly arranged headstones in a famous ancient cemetery also stand out in this regard. Stone as a material for ‘writing’ and carving intricate filigree designs figures prominently in the mise-en-scène. In the case of Parajanov, editing is neither emphatic, as in montage, nor is it invisible. The real disjunction happens between image and sound, through amplification. Each shot is like a miniature painting, a seemingly self-contained unit. The intermittent jump cuts, especially in the parodic comic pantomime scenes, create a sense of playfulness. For the most part, though, the editing is ‘loose’, unemphatic, thereby allowing the mind to move freely among the distilled, at times repetitive images and motifs, to go back and forth, spiral in and out. And importantly, the spiralling nautilus shell, with its astonishing, sublime, five-hundred-million-year prehistory – a living fossil – becomes the perfect emblem for the film itself: an emblem for how our minds might move when encountering these images. Through this link with nature and its long pre-human evolutionary history, Parajanov (and indeed Shahani) help us understand that the ornamentation so integral to their films is not only pleasing decoration created by humans: the human impulse to ornament is, rather, already part of our integral link with nature. Perhaps nature in its infinite variety is the inexhaustible archive of ornamentation! Shahani’s editing, too, is unemphatic and the work of ‘editing’ as disjunction or displacement takes place within the 34 Steffen, op. cit., 114.

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shot, through the movement of light, camera, dialogue, and actors, in tune with the microtonal modulations of Khayal music. Shahani refers to this process as modulation through a glissando, a subtle process, rather than that of in-shot montage. In both films, chronology as a steady continuous flow directed by time’s arrow is decentred in favour of other non-linear modes of spatio-temporal organization. Our minds respond to these modes. And when this happens, the mind also moves in unfamiliar, unpredictable ways. A cinematic erotics.

A Sufi Ethos in Parajanov and Shahani While studying film-making in Paris, Shahani was apprenticed to Robert Bresson on his f ilm The Gentle Woman (1969). Reflecting on Bresson’s aesthetic, he speaks about combining a certain austerity with an aesthetic of ornamentation in his own practice, which might be equally applicable to The Color of Pomegranates and to Khayal Gatha. There is austerity in Bresson. But there is a possibility in cinema to have both: austerity and ornamentation. In Bresson, there is mainly austerity even though he aspires to have spectacle. When I work along those lines, I want the ornamentation to stand out. The magic of that reality must appear and we ought to allow that to happen. The notion of ornamentation that we have in India, the alankar, of how we play with it, that is something I like to retain in my work. And this is not there either in Rossellini’s work or Bresson’s, in the work of Catholic film-makers. When they move towards austerity, they really move towards it[.]35

Earlier on, I discussed the Sufi ethos of Ashik Kerib through the spiritual initiation of the young minstrel by the old minstrel. We saw how Ashik Kerib is diverted from his worldly quest for money and directed towards a Sufi path almost by chance. It is the loss of his worldly possessions (his clothes and lyre) that eventually leads him to the dying minstrel. My discussion of the old Sufi’s manner of dying and the young Sufi’s manner of burial explored the immanent sense of the sacred integral to Sufi spirituality, unmediated by a religious institution or a priestly caste. Ashik Kerib’s episodic narrative consists of a variety of events, people, and folk practices that the minstrel encounters on his Sufi journey, which has a magical component, as it is based on a fairy tale. 35 Shahani, ‘Putting into Question‘.

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In Shahani’s Khayal Gatha, a child is dispatched on a journey from the king’s palace through the India of legend and history, in order to learn – or, rather, to learn how to learn. The only advice the little boy as wanderer receives from the Sufi who garlands and blesses him on his journey is, ‘Stay close to the river to quench your thirst’, this thirst no water can slake, this river the river of knowledge. The child becomes an adult in one magical cut as he wanders through India, encountering many legendary (often tragic) lovers, attempting to bridge the Hindu–Muslim divide. He walks in verdant forests and desert landscapes, rides on a camel and also on an Indian train. He weaves in and out of myth and legend, history and the everyday. His Sufi quest seems to be a quest for knowledge, though we don’t know exactly what that knowledge might be, nor the means by which whatever it might turn out to be can be acquired; nor does he. He and (by extension) we come to understand that he has first to learn how to learn. Ashik Kerib, too, is in a similar predicament. The ‘how’ of the process is paramount. The nameless young man encounters a witch and Princess Rupmathi, who both pose riddles for him. His response is obtuse, his repeated questions literal-minded. It would appear that the riddles are traps to ensnare his senses and mind so as to undo clichés that orient his journey. They impel the seeker to find out how to listen, to look and perceive intuitively. The Sufi ethos of the film suggests that intuition is not a vague, so-called ‘feminine’ sentiment or an instinctual process, but that it entails what Henry Corbin refers to as ‘a precise mode of perception’, and an apprehension he calls ‘cognitive imagination’.

‘Imaginal World’ and ‘Cognitive Imagination’ ‘Cognitive imagination’, according to Corbin, reveals an ‘Imaginal World’ (Mundus Imaginalis).36 Here, I am using the concept of the image from the Iranian Sufi philosophy of Suhrawardi, as explicated and formulated by the philosopher of Islam Henry Corbin in Mundus Imaginalis: Or, the Imaginary and the Imaginal. Ashik Kerib’s Sufi journey is one in which he learns how to learn, to perceive, to hear, to listen to the reality of a ‘supra-sensory’ world – what Corbin designates as an ‘imaginal world’. He coins the word ‘imaginal’ from imago (image), to oppose it to the imaginary understood as unreal fantasy. He explains that he had to do this because there was no adequate word in French for a specific concept in Sufi philosophy written 36 Corbin, op. cit.

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in Persian. The ‘imaginal world’ is one that is ontologically suspended (like a mirror image) between the physically sensible sensory world, on the one hand, and the mentally intelligible, purely abstract intellectual world, on the other. The organ that perceives this intermediate ‘Imaginal World’ (Mundus Imaginalis) is the ‘cognitive imagination’. The primary noetic function attributed to the act of imagination individuates the idea, distinguishing it from purely sensory knowledge of the material world on the one hand, and purely abstract intellectual knowledge of ideas on the other. Corbin says that, this suspended, intermedial, ‘supra-sensory’ reality may be accessed in a psychic state hovering between waking and sleep by using imagination as an organ of cognition. The structural and experiential similarity between these processes, and the psychic perception and reception of f ilm, are remarkable. According to Corbin, in this visionary state, ‘internally, all the senses constitute a single synaisthesis [sic]’. This formulation by Corbin (the Sufi mystic and Professor of Islam at the Sorbonne and in Teheran) provides a metaphysical gloss to my analytic use of the discourse on synaesthesia (derived from contemporary neuroscience) for understanding how film stimulates our ‘cognitive imagination’.37

Wedding Feast of the Blind After the burial of the Sufi minstrel, Ashik Kerib is lying, bare-chested, resting languorously beside some sheep, when two boy angels astride ponies blow ceremoniously on conch shells, calling out to him to go on a journey. He is called to a wedding feast of the blind. He arrives beautifully robed, playing his lyre, and sits in an open space beside a large caldron over a fire. The camera lifts up in a crane shot to reveal the wedding guests seated at two long tables within an adjacent enclosed area. A close shot shows the groom standing up, dressed in flowing garments with an elaborate headdress. He lifts a veil from his face to reveal a black band covering his eyes. Central stones set on ornamented metal discs with radiating lines are prominently attached to the black band, like artificial eyes. We see the bride also wears these artificial eyes when she lifts her veil. Hearing the music, the wedding guests stand up, extending their arms as the blind do, and begin to slowly grope their way towards the music. Forming an undulating line, they reach Ashik Kerib and surround him. They listen with rapt attention, proffering pomegranates in their extended arms, appearing to be unaffected by their 37 Ramachandran and Blakeslee, op. cit.

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evident sensory impairment. They walk through an ancient graveyard led by the minstrel’s song and the groom carries his bride away.

Wedding Feast of the Deaf and the Mute Once again, Ashik Kerib lies stretched out in languor; the camera lingers on his body and face and again the two boy angels call out to him to go on yet another journey. This time it is a wedding feast of the deaf and the mute. A smiling man (in close-up) addresses the minstrel in sign language: he touches his lips and gestures with his hand, then touches his ears with both hands and gestures similarly again, showing him that he can neither speak nor hear. The minstrel repeats the gestures in empathy, looking downcast, but picks up again as he starts playing his music. The wedding guests, seated at long festive tables, dressed in colourful flowing robes, begin to speak to each other with exuberant, animated extended arm and hand gestures. Despite their sensory impairments they appear just as joyous as the blind were at their wedding feast. We hear background ambient sound, perhaps distant voices. This entire sequence begins with the camera panning down a silently cascading waterfall. The wedding guests surround the minstrel and as he plays, little fish appear, miraculously jumping out from the water. They sway together with fish in hand. The minstrel plays with a fish with a glint in his eye. Suddenly the waterfall cascades down with amplified sound of water with a metal vase at its base. We can hear clearly again (the silence has re-sensitized us), but there is no sense that hearing and speech are restored to the wedding guests; yet they are as animated and joyous as before. What are these strange feasts, these enigmatic rituals (wedding feasts of the blind, the deaf, and the mute), one wonders. They are wedding feasts like no other: feasts where empirical sense perception (vision, hearing, and speech) is in abeyance, but no loss is registered. Abstract reason cannot do much with this scene either. Enjoyment, perhaps even ecstasy, is visible when the guests simply gather around together (with men and women in separate groups), and listen and move to the music of the minstrel with their eyes closed. Mughal and Persian miniatures show such scenes of Sufi ecstasy, in all-male courtly circles, amidst great luxury. Here, meanwhile, it is a folk milieu of both men and women. It appears that Parajanov has offered us in these strange nuptials, a delightful glimpse of the topography of an ecstatic Sufi visionary state, in a decidedly light key, in the vernacular, signalled by the artificial eyes, the common button sewn prominently on the deaf and

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mute groom’s headdress. It is an ‘imaginal’ supra-sensory world (where the empirical senses are literally occluded), presented in a way that only cinema can incarnate, through the immaterial materiality of film itself. ‘Delight’ feels like the exact word to describe the tone of these strange nuptials, the fairy tale the perfect means for its vernacular (popular ‘folk’) expression, quite unlike the high seriousness of courtly and religious rituals in The Color of Pomegranates. And yet, these scenes might well be inventions of Parajanov himself, rather than being ‘folk’ in origin.

The Sufi Fairy Tale and Violence Ashik Kerib encounters violence on his journey. In the Pasha’s Court a harem of six women fire Kalashnikovs into the air, but they seem like toys, their use playful, the sound amplified. No one is hurt. Ashik Kerib puts on a pasted beard and moustache stolen from sleeping guards as disguise. A sense of a child’s play is pervasive. As Parajanov says, ‘The allegories in Ashik Kerib are on a child’s level. They are not philosophical’. The women of the harem rescue him and provide him with pleasure. He rests on a carpet with one of the women and the others cover them up as protection, all performed as if they were playing like children. There is no sense of moral judgement on the part of the minstrel, who has for the moment forgotten his betrothed and his quest for the bride prize. Another tyrant commands a shackled Ashik Kerib to sing, but he refuses. The tyrant is flanked by two Africans who hold conch shells. The tyrant keeps his ears to each conch shell while swaying between them. He appears to listen to the conch shells. The strange thing is that the tyrant appears to be played by the same actor as Ashik Kerib, just as the wicked Pasha is played by the actor who also plays the father of the betrothed. One wonders what this doubling achieves. Is this an image of the split self? Is it a part of the self, ordering the other part to self-censor? In the court, a scribe writes decrees on a soft clay tablet with a stylus. This is an image of an ancient mode of writing. The tyrant orders the punishment of the poet. The shackled poet’s hands are tied to ropes attached to horses, then led by mounted guards past a variety of amazing scenes, some of which are staged in actual locations but which feel like episodes from a multi-ethnic fairy tale. The people’s movements are closer to dance. In one scene, a life-size papier-mâché tiger, animated by two people, instead of enacting violence does a light-hearted dance, while its head rotates 360 degrees! A doll’s head is severed and a red cloth is pulled out of it, while Ashik Kerib falls down as though he is to be

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beheaded. The combination of puppets and the human actor produces a childlike quality of playfulness, though it is performed in an actual location. Ashik Kerib escapes all this make-believe violence and finds himself at a mosque with bright blue doors, which he bangs on in desperation only to find they are locked. He enters a derelict house which is full of daemons, and escapes that trial, too. Finally, he eats unleavened bread and cries out, remembering his mother. Soon after, a magical white steed appears from the sky, mounted by a saint who offers to take him back to his country. The special effects are simple, like those offered to a child. The camera gets animated. The saint gives Ashik Kerib some magic dust from the hoof of his flying horse to cure his mother of her blindness. They fly back to the city, where an assembly of officials scorn him. When his mother appears, he begins to play his instrument, which she recognizes. He wipes her eyes with the magic dust, restoring her vision; she can see light, colour, and her son, in that order. The lovers Ashik Kerib and Magul Megeri are brought together in marriage. All of this is performed through dance movements, staged frontally. The final sequence of images is not of the couple, but rather a shot of Ashik Kerib holding a white dove, wearing a troubled expression as he releases the bird. The dove flies and lands on a movie camera with the caption ‘For the father of the bride!’ An Islamic notion of ‘bridle mysticism’, known to Indians, seems to be evoked here. Is this Parajanov’s way of wishing for the cinematograph to become free within the Soviet State? Doves have appeared previously on the grave of the Sufi minstrel. So one might think that there is a sentiment of freedom expressed in the flight of the white dove landing on the movie camera. The film is dedicated to Andre Tarkovsky, who had recently died in exile. The happy ending thus carries sombre memories. This most childlike of films carries the weight of tyranny lightly, with playful humour and grace.

Film Strip as Glyph All the way through the film there are sequences of images showing artefacts of the region that do not have a direct bearing on plot development or narrative line. They appear to be folk art. In one such sequence, towards the end of the film, a series of images drawn on stone are presented. A horse, a large cow with a bucket under her udder, and then, quite surprisingly, a sewing machine and a pair of scissors and a funnel! It is then that one sees sprocket holes painted horizontally on either side of the image, making the stone image into a filmstrip with frames demarcated by vertical lines. The

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sewing machine is at first shown in a medium shot, so to speak, and next time round it is shown in close-up, revealing the historical link between the sewing machine and the apparatus of film. The sewing machine was a prototype for the creation of the projector and movie camera. Scissors remind us of editing but also of Eisenstein and his polemics on montage, and his essay ‘Bella Forgets the Scissors’. All this is a testament to the artisanal origins of the mechanical production of the cinematic apparatus in the late nineteenth century. One could say that Parajanov was an artisanal film-maker, just like Méliès was. Both worked materials with their hands. It is easy to miss the painted sprocket holes but once the glyph of the filmstrip has registered, it really makes one feel alive to see it and feel the conceptual density of Parajanov’s playful shots. No wonder he said that this film made him happy!

Film Pedagogy – Great Gurus of Soviet Cinema It is interesting to note that at VGIK, Parajanov’s diploma film Andriesh (1954) was about a child, and his last film, Ashik Kerib, was a fairy tale for adults, though his mother read the Lermontov tale to him as a child and one can imagine children being able to enjoy it. The first retrospective of his work, held at the 1988 Munich Film Festival, also premiered Ashik Kerib. Standing on the stage Parajanov declared his love for this film with a touching, childlike enthusiasm and candour, saying that artists know when they are close to death and that he was now ready to die! This lightness of spirit from a man who had spent so much of his precious time in prison, some of it under very harsh conditions, and who had been prevented from working for much longer, was a wondrous sight to behold. It was to be his last film. A few extant fragments of his first film are presented in Ron Halloway’s Parajanov: A Requiem. The very first shot of Andriesh, a vast expanse of sky, occupies most of the frame while a tiny strip of earth demarcates a horizon, against which some animals and a little figure move in silhouette. A flock of sheep in a long shot and a close-up of a little boy seem to represent all that is extant here. Parajanov recounts a fascinating anecdote about the examination of this film. On seeing it, one of Parajanov’s examiners, Dovzhenko, asked to see it again (an unusual request for student films, he notes). Another of his examiners, Yurienyev, accused Parajanov of copying Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora, 1928, while the latter insisted that he had not. When queried by Dovzhenko, Parajanov confirmed that he had not seen Zvenigora. This first shot of Parajanov’s Andriesh certainly reminded me of

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Earth, 1930. This secret affinity between a great poetic Soviet film-maker and another in the making shows what a marvellous teacher Dovzhenko must have been, to see so clearly the embryonic but unique poetic talent of a young student and encourage him. Parajanov appreciated the pedagogical methods of his mentor at VGIK, the director Igor Savchenko: ‘Our mentor Savchenko encouraged us to draw our thoughts and give them a plastic form. We all had to draw at the film school. For the entrance exam we were told, “draw whatever you like”’. This appears to me to be a visionary part of the film curriculum. We know that both Eisenstein and Parajanov had a gift for drawing, and were exceptionally accomplished. Apart from that, the formal incorporation of drawing into the curriculum, as an integral component, indicates that the teachers understood in a profound way the links between film as an art of movement and the dynamism of the human nervous system. To be asked ‘to draw… thoughts, to give thought a plastic form’ as a first move, would give quite a different orientation to the student of film from being asked to put a thought or impulse immediately into written form. The coordination between hand, brain, and eye in drawing a line, for example, or scribbling in a particular way, would stimulate the brain and the mind differently from writing, with its ready-made, abstract signs. Feelings or sensations just below a threshold of intelligibility and consciousness would have a chance to find expression in plastic form rather than in pre-formed abstract words. ‘Cognitive imagination’ would, I imagine, play a role in this process of creating an ‘imaginal world’ on film itself. We know that many major Soviet film-makers, including Kuleshov and Eisenstein, were inspiring teachers themselves. Eisenstein spent several years teaching and writing voluminously when he was not allowed to direct films. A less well-known director, Mikhail Romm, also had a remarkable teaching practice in the 1950s and 1960s, which is worth mentioning here. His most celebrated student was Andre Tarkovsky, whom Parajanov thought of as his real mentor, saying, ‘As my teacher, I consider an absolutely young amazing director, Tarkovsky’. Romm accepted Tarkovsky into VGIK against the opinion of the rest of the examiners and included him among the four students in his workshop. It is said that he used his authority to protect this first generation of film-makers of the ‘Thaw’, who were called to transform Soviet cinema. Carlos Muguiro offers us a deep insight into the intergenerational transmission of knowledge at VGIK as the oldest film school of the world: Some years later Tarkovsky would compare master Romm to a King who governed without exerting power or imposing his opinion, even

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without teaching the craft, because Romm’s invitation was rather to journey through one’s own darkness and to identify one’s individual singularity.38

As the editor and director of the documentary Ordinary Fascism, the compilation film made from the vast Nazi film archive, Romm experimented with using his own voice in a first-person, subjective response to what he saw, rather than the usual third-person, objective documentary voice. Muguiro describes what was referred to as ‘a diagonal pedagogy’ in his workshops. The articulation of the subjectivity of the director, the expressive intimacy of a reflective voice, silence, and variation of speech rhythms became a possibility in Soviet cinema, however interrupted that process would become. Tarkovsky’s exile can also be seen in light of the powerful cinematic forces released from these singular daring experiments of free speech. According to Carlos Muguiro, ‘Something happened in those classrooms, between introspective therapy and magical ritual, as staged in Tarkovski’s film [The Mirror, 1975], which transformed the ‘I CAN TALK’ into a collective generational need’.39 We see here a profound need to introduce the subjectivity of the poet within the poetics of film in a totalitarian state. Parajanov was also a beneficiary of this profound intergenerational ‘transmission of the secret’ by the masters of Soviet film and film pedagogy. This is also a radiant gift that Soviet cinema offers to the world in the darkest of times.

Bibliography Barba, Eugenio, and Nicola Savarese. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison, New York: Citadel Press, 1974. Brown, Peter. ‘Between Two Empires,’ review of Armenia! an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 22 September 2018–13 January 2019. New York Review of Books 66, no. 1, 17 January–6 February 2019, pp. 40–43. Christy, Ian. ‘The Colour of Pomegranates: Parajanov Unbound.’ On Film/Essays, 13 April 2018. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5572-the-color-ofpomegranates-parajanov-unbound. Accessed 3 January 2020. 38 Muguiro, ‘The Transmission of the Secret’. 39 Ibid.

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Corbin, Henri. ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.’ https:// www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginaryand-the-imaginal/. Accessed 3 November 2019. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Baines and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Guattari, Felix. Chaosophy: Soft Subversion. Translated by Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. Jayamanne, Laleen. The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015c. Kleist, Heinrich von. ‘On the Marionette.’ https://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist. htm. Accessed 3 March 2020. Muguiro, Carlos. ‘The Transmission of the Secret: Mikhail Romm in the VGIK.’ Comparative Cinema, 2, no. 5, winter 2014, pp. 41–49. Pfeifer, Moritz. ‘Life History of a Fruit: Symbol and Tradition in Parajanov’s Trilogy.’ East European Film Bulletin (eefb), no. 58, October 2015, https://eefb.org/retrospectives/ symbol-and-tradition-in-parajanovs-caucasian-trilogy/. Accessed 3 January 2020. Puppet Aesthetics. https://wepa.unima.org/en/aesthetics-of-the-puppet-europeanromanticism-to-the-avant-garde/. Accessed 1 February 2020. Ramachandran, V. S., and Sandra Blakeslee. Phantoms in the Brian; Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Fourth Estate, 1999. Romm, Mikhail. Ordinary Fascism. Mosfilm, Soviet Union, 138 minutes, 1965. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. 1989. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 1. Translated by Brian Holmes, Paris: Dis Voir, 1995. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 2. Translated by Carlos Morreo, Paris: Dis Voir, 2007. Sachs, Curt. World History of Dance. Translated by Bessie Schoenberg, New York: Bonanza Books, 1937. Shahani, Kumar. Khayal Gatha. Bombay Cinematograph, India, 103 minutes, 1988. Steffen, James. The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2013. Stern, Daniel. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. London: Karnac, 2005.

Filmography The Colour of Pomegrantes (Tsvet Granata/ Nran Guyne, 1969). 77 minutes. Colour. The Armenian release version is in Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian with English subtitles.

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Production: Armenfilm, Yerevan, Soviet Union Director: Sergei Parajanov Script: Sergei Parajanov Choreographer: Sergei Parajanov Cinematography: Suren Shakhbazian Art Direction: Stepan Andranikian Editing: Maria Ponomarenko Sound Designer ‒ Composer: Tigran Mansurian Main Cast: Sofico Chiaureli, Melkon Alekian, Vilen Galustian, Georgi Gregechkori The Colour of Pomegrantes, Sergei Parajanov. New York: Criterion Collection. DVD 2018. Ashik Kerib (1988). 78 minutes. Colour. The soundtrack is in Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Russian with English subtitles. Production: Georgia Film Studio, Tbilisi, Soviet Union Director: Sergei Parajanov and David Abshidze Script: Gia Badridze, based on the story by Mickhail Lermontov Choreographer: Sergei Parajanov Cinematography: Albert Yavurian Art Direction: Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, Shota Gogolashville, Niko Zandukeli Sound Design: Gari Kuntsev Music: Dzhavanshir Kuliev Songs: Alim Qasimov Main Cast: Yuri Mgoian, Sof iko Chiaureli, Ramaz Chkhikvadze, Konstantin Stepanko, Varvara Dvalishivili, Veronika Metonidze Ashik Kerib, Sergei Parajanov. United Kingdom: Artificial Eye. DVD 2007.

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Nicole Kidman in Blue Light: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Abstract The strange, inexplicable movement of light and colour of the image is examined in relationship to Nicole Kidman’s unique form of acting in this film. Kidman acts in slow motion. The dynamism of colour and Kidman’s slowed-down speech acts are explored to show how, together, they transform the relationship between the heterosexual married fictional couple Alice and Bill, played by the real-life couple Kidman and Cruise. Kubrick taps into and draws out Kidman’s metamorphic powers as an actor. The industrial, technical, and aesthetic context is Kubrick’s experiments with light and colour on celluloid, at the moment of its obsolescence. Keywords: Stanley Kubrick, Nicole Kidman, Acting in slow motion, Celluloid cinema, Light and colour

Not too long ago, a fragment of dialogue spoken by Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut appeared in a rather unlikely place: Frank Ocean’s song Love Crimes (2015). We hear it just under his vocals. The dialogue is taken from the scene in which Kidman’s Alice Harford picks an argument with her husband Dr Bill Harford, played by Tom Cruise. They are arguing about a ‘love crime’ that has not actually been committed, but simply imagined. The then real-life husband and wife couple ‘play-act’ as a married couple in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). By doubling the real couple and a fictional married couple, Kubrick makes his images simulacral. We cannot truly distinguish between the real and the fictional couple. They seem to bleed into each other. They have entered an economy of simulation where the distinction between the original and the copy becomes blurred, undecidable. We find ourselves in an inflationary realm of images from which there appears to be no exit.1 1 Tom Cruise has said that the apartment Bill and Alice lived in was modelled after Kubrick and Christiane’s own New York apartment when they lived in the city. He added that ‘the furniture

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/9789463726245_Ch03

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When the much-anticipated film, set in contemporary New York (though based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Novella, set in Vienna in the early twentieth century), was released soon after Kubrick’s death, its public and critical reception was less than favourable.2 Some of the criticism was very harsh and Kidman’s performance was especially targeted. That a piece of contemporary popular music should quote Eyes Wide Shut in 2015 interested me at the time and I want now to reconsider the acting in the film, as well as Kubrick’s innovation in film lighting and colour and their interrelationships, on the threshold of the obsolescence of celluloid as light sensitive medium. Contrary to some critical opinions in English, at the time of its release, I thought that Kidman’s performance was a rare and very special piece of virtuoso acting – sui generis. I still believe this to be the case. Kidman’s star is now on the rise and is the highest it has ever been. There was a period, around the time of this film, when Australians reacted with hostility to her star persona. But her remarkable body of work has finally made the general public and critics appreciate her stature as an actor who has often taken big risks in the range of projects she has chosen. Yet even now when her body of work is referred to, Eyes Wide Shut and Lars Von Trier’s Dogville (2003) are rarely, if ever, mentioned, much less discussed. If Eyes Wide Shut is mentioned at all, it is for gossip to support the familiar cliché about how weird a director Kubrick was. It is the same with Lars Von Trier, too. One of the best responses Kidman has given to a question in that vein was that to work with Kubrick was like being at film school studying with a very clever professor! What a great way to talk about education and the erotics of film pedagogy! Thanks very much, Nicole! As Tim Kreider said, ‘critical disappointment with Eyes Wide Shut was almost unanimous and the complaint was always the same; “not sexy.”’3 in the house [f ilm set] was furniture from their [the Kubricks’] own home in London’. This information adds yet another level of density and ‘expressive charge’ to the simulacral nature of the images. Ebert, ‘Cruise Opens Up About Working with Kubrick’. 2 The film was rereleased in 2016 in New York at Christmas and appears to be gaining a larger audience, according to Bilger Ebiri. He notes that for a few weeks most of the rep houses in the city were screening the film as holiday fare. Further, ‘this was a fate no one could have predicted back in July 1999 when it was released to dismissive reviews and disappointing box office’. See ‘An Oral History of an Orgy: Staging that Scene in Eyes Wide Shut, by Stanley Kubrick’. 3 Kreider, Review of Eyes Wide Shut. James Fenwick argues for the importance of fan discourse in the reception of all of Kubrick’s films and Eyes Wide Shut in particular, in an essay titled, ‘“Let this be Kubrick’s Final Word. Do You Hear Us Warner Bros?”: Fan Reception to the Death of Stanley Kubrick and His Final Film, Eyes Wide Shut’. While the initial press reception was critical, the fan forums discussed the film favourably. Fenwick argues convincingly that over the last sixteen years or so the unfavourable critical reputation of the film has also been revised.

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True, it didn’t show Tom and Nicole making love (as some might have desired), nor was the orgy as orgiastic as common sense might expect. But the film’s colour and light left me breathless, wanting more and more. My encounter with the behaviour of colour (and I primarily insist on the activity or dynamism of colour rather than its meaning, which seems to me a more art historical concern), drew me into the film initially. Eyes Wide Shut is strangely animated with the colours of vegetal or floral paintings done by Christiane Kubrick (the director’s wife). I say strange because on walls strewn with these paintings their colours seem to jump out of the frames, creating an ornamented garden of artifice in the affluent couple’s New York apartment. Following the unusual movement of colour and light impelled me to pay close attention to Kidman’s movements and speech patterns, which also seemed rather strange and unusual. Before this experience, I didn’t have much interest in her work as an actor, though I was familiar with some of her earlier work. Alice Harford (Kidman), the wife of Bill Harford (Cruise), is an out of work curator whose Soho gallery has gone bust. Her taste in interior decor is highly decorative, creating a richly layered, textured surface of materials, light, and colour, the most conspicuous contributors to which are the large paintings themselves. While her late twentieth-century Central Park West apartment is expressive of the couple’s taste and class, it also evokes the intimate domestic interiors of late nineteenth-century Symbolist painters such as Felix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, also known as the Nabis (from the Hebrew for ‘prophet’). The link with Symbolist art history is also made more mysterious by the briefly conspicuous presence of a Vincent Van Gogh coffee table book, which Alice and her daughter wrap up as a Christmas present, and also the paintings of sunflowers on a bedroom wall. Kubrick is known to have researched paintings extensively as a way to think about the composition of the film image. The Symbolist painters were experimenting with colour and surface ornamentation around the same time that cinema was invented, in 1895. It is evident that the Symbolist aesthetic He attributes this change to the unique way in which Kubrick’s legacy has been presented through the donation of his archive to the University of the Arts, London, and the global tour of the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition, based on his extensive archive. This extraordinary exhibition, he says, created a narrative that has changed the reception of Eyes Wide Shut. He adds that ‘the Kubrick legacy is not just to prolong the marketability of a dead auteur’, but a search for ever more knowledge in the quest to decipher his films. I saw this exhibition in Melbourne, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in January 2007. The exhibition documented the importance Kubrick placed on studying paintings so as to get ideas for the composition of his film images. His own collection of lenses were also on display.

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and research into synaesthesia developed as a resistance to the mechanization of perception through the modern mechanical reproductive technology such as the camera.4 The importance of this historical moment for Kubrick, after over one hundred years of cinema (and the consequent accelerated technological mediation of the human sensorium itself), is encapsulated in the film’s title, Eyes Wide Shut. In modifying and playing with the idiom ‘eyes wide open’, Kubrick is creating a paradox, a bit of nonsense. How can there be vision when the eyes are shut? Further, the phrase ‘wide shut’ is also pure nonsense. Kubrick takes it as a given that human vision is now thoroughly mediated by technology, that there is no ‘equipment-free’ perception, as Walter Benjamin once cogently put it. Kubrick turns to the history of painting, an image mediated by hand-eye coordination, to create a surface that lures the eye towards a form of perception that is not standardized and commodified. In trying to do this he appears to be working against the standardized industrial modes of film production, processing, lighting, and colour. The expressive use of what Van Gogh called ‘arbitrary’ as opposed to ‘local colour’ is facilitated by the garden of artifice created by Christiane Kubrick’s acrylic paintings.5 I would go further and say that painting forms an abstract colour field of intensity, nourishing this film and our perception of it.6 The experimentation with colour and light is made possible by Kubrick’s refusal to use studio lighting in a film shot almost entirely on a studio set. Instead of the usual studio key and fill lights, Kubrick used only the light sources visible within the shot, such as lamps, Christmas tree lights, and so forth. When these intra-diegetic lights were inadequate he used Chinese paper ball lamps to softly brighten the scene. This resulted in the film being underexposed, so to ‘correct’ that Kubrick had the entire exposed film ‘force-developed by two stops’ in the laboratory through a special (non-standardized) chemical process. The film’s colour and light is a result of this unprecedented, laborious, risky, and expensive process. The cinematographer Larry Smith makes the point unequivocally: ‘There’s no question that with force-developing you get exaggerated highlights – they 4 Dora, Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology. 5 Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh; Bumpus, Van Gogh’s Flowers. 6 Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. The ‘spirit of the gift’ in this film is expressed in the way light, colour, movement, and voice work together synaesthetically to create what may be called, following Raul Ruiz, a ‘secret film’ that generates ‘cinematographic emotions’. However, ‘the secret film’ is not hidden but perceptible only to an ‘oblique manner of viewing’ by seeing the dynamic of the image rather than following the narrative line exclusively. This is what I have attempted to do in my analysis here, as a reciprocal act for the aesthetic munificence of the film itself.

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really blow out’.7 It is not unusual, according to Smith, to underexpose a small section of a film and then force-develop it to get this effect in order to create an aesthetic distinction. What was unique in Kubrick’s case was that the entire film was force-developed, an unprecedented move in the history of Hollywood cinema. Additionally, Kodak provided Kubrick with the film stock of his choice, which had just been discontinued.8 It was Kubrick’s stature as a master film-maker that persuaded his producers, Warner Brothers, Kodak, and the laboratory in London agree to this delicate and costly experiment with colour and light. On first viewing Eyes Wide Shut in the theatre at its original release, I felt from the very first shot that the image had a tantalizing quality that I couldn’t quite put into words. Similarly, it was reported that Steven Spielberg had exclaimed at the quality of light when he saw the film at a private screening with Cruise and Kidman, soon after Kubrick’s death and just before its public release. It was clear to Spielberg, with his trained eye, that Kubrick had created a new kind of colour and light by departing from the standardized norms of the industry. The intensity of colour and the soft and clear golden light made the audience’s eyes open wide. The acrylic colour of the paintings on the walls of the Harford apartment seemed to jump out of the walls. As Smith said, the colour does really ‘blow out’. Also, and most conspicuously, the light outside the Harford apartment, seen through the bathroom and the bedroom windows, is a magical, radiant blue. One could refer to this unusual phenomenon of light as an ‘arbitrary’, rather than ‘local’, use of colour, following Van Gogh’s colour theory. ‘Local’ colour would be a naturalist use of colour, while ‘arbitrary’ implies an abstract use (with no corresponding basis in everyday reality), creating a sense of artifice, as in Van Gogh’s striking portraits.9 I will explore this vital, dynamic aspect of the film later on and its relationship to Kidman’s unique performance, which induces an experience of synaesthesia. It is this nexus of light, colour, and sound as speech and music that emerges as a force that impels me to reciprocate it, beyond following the narrative line.

At the Dining Table What Dorothy Parker said many years ago – ‘men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses’ – is still more or less true within Hollywood generic 7 8 9

Pizzella, ‘A Sword in the Bed’, 12. See Kubrick and Raphael, Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay, 111. Van Gogh, op. cit.

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coding of gender. Why, then, does Alice wear glasses, especially when she is naked? Does Alice/Kidman play the age-old role of nude model to Kubrick the artist, or is she simply a naked woman who in wearing glasses creates a slight difference in her appearance? ‘Nudity is a form of dress’, or a generic category of art history, while to be naked is an existential state that avoids generic capture. If so, what might this little ornamented difference be? Something humorous is going on here between Kubrick and Kidman that develops into a little joke, the kind he liked to make at the expense of Hollywood codes of editing for continuity. Alice, wearing her spectacles, is helping her daughter Helen do her homework at the dining table, which is shot at an angle and framed in way that is strongly reminiscent of the Nabi paintings of similar intimate domestic scenes. The picture plane is slightly tilted so that the surface of the table appears flattened, its depth significantly reduced. At this point Bill comes home, sees them, goes into the kitchen, and gets a beer from the fridge; while he is doing this, he begins to hear (in his head), his wife’s ‘confession’ from the night before of her fatal attraction to a total stranger, a sailor she saw at a hotel. Alice didn’t act on her feelings but the intensity of her recounting of the event disturbs Bill. With her voice playing in his head, he comes over to the dining table and Alice smiles at him. Her gaze – slightly above her glasses but crucially directed at us/the camera/at Kubrick (common in early silent film but by the 1920s proscribed with the formulation of the classical Hollywood codes of continuity editing) – gains another dimension if one considers a photograph of Kubrick by Christiane, perhaps his last, taken during the production of Eyes Wide Shut. There, Kubrick, wearing his glasses (similar to Kidman’s), looks directly at the camera (his gaze also slightly above his glasses) with the same expression as Alice; even his eyebrows are quirked, just like hers! So what are they up to these two – playing little games, having some fun at Tom’s expense? Is Kubrick making a pass at his bespectacled model or, more interestingly, are they involved in what Gilles Deleuze called a ‘double becoming’? Does ‘Alice’ permit Kubrick to become a little girl, playful, while Kubrick gives Nicole Kidman a chance to go slow, to really unwind time and make time itself play little games?

Through the Looking Glass The bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen of the Harford apartment are functional everyday domestic spaces but they also undergo, at key moments, a strange metamorphosis through framing, light, and colour. Kidman’s Alice

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occupies these rooms in a manner that engages with these transformative aesthetic forces. I too will engage with the rich aesthetic materials of sound and image, as an act of reciprocity.10 Cruise’s Bill, however, is unable to tap into this energetic field, though he does betray a vague awareness of it. The first intimation of a shift from the everyday into a register of unusual and fascinating intensity occurs when Alice and Bill, both naked, kiss each other in front of a large mirror while Chris Isaak’s ‘Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing’ is heard on the soundtrack. They have just returned from a ball given by billionaire Victor Ziegler and have undressed, with Alice wearing nothing but her glasses. At first, the mirror doubles the couple’s image. The camera then moves into the mirror image of the couple kissing, at which point Alice turns her head and eyes away from Bill, who is still absorbed in the kiss. She appears to be looking at herself. This virtual image of the couple in the mirror is intricately framed to evoke the subtle displacement from the everyday. While appearing to respond to Bill’s erotic gesture, Alice’s turning away, the look in her eyes, and the angle all distort her face. There is a definite sense of a dissonance in her expression as she looks at herself. The dissonance I see here may be conceptualized as a quiet, silent ‘crack in the mirror’, separating Bill from Alice. It feels like a hairline fracture, very nearly imperceptible but most certainly felt. The significance of the shot is re-emphasized through the use of this very image to advertise the film and very likely chosen by Kubrick himself, who controlled the publicity of his films. The DVD and the screenplay also carry this image. The lyrics of the Chris Isaak song (Baby did a bad bad thing…) function as a commentary on their situation and its rhythm and lyrics lend the scene a strong, disturbing erotic charge.

Between Bedroom and Bathroom – Gaseous Blue Light The disquiet, perceptible in this distorted scene within the mirror, is fully expressed in the following scene, set in the bedroom, where Alice picks a fight with Bill. After the ball, the couple get stoned; Bill begins a bit of foreplay, they chat about the ‘party last night.’ The mood is light at first. Bill wants to have sex; Alice goes along with it, and mentions how a man hit on her at the party. Bill is interested and aroused by it, but suddenly Alice, 10 I have not found any article that explores these dimensions of light, colour, movement, and sound as both music and speech in a systematic way; I consider them a gift nourishing our powers of perception and thought.

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under the influence, becomes querulous and then very angry at what Bill says. Remembering their flirtations with strangers at the party, he suggests that women don’t have sexual fantasies like men do. Alice gets progressively angrier at Bill’s assumption and begins to talk about ‘last summer’, which leads to the disclosure of her desire for a total stranger, sometime in the past. She begins to trip and unravel time – ‘last night […] last summer’ – and their whole past collapses into the present. It is in this scene in the bedroom, next to the bathroom, that the unrest perceptible between the couple in the previous scene is given its fullest cinematic expression. Kidman’s Alice transforms the everyday of their bedroom and bathroom into a wonderland and Kubrick creates an intense, ‘arbitrary’, and abstract coloured milieu within which the metamorphosis occurs. As the couple start their quarrel, we become aware that the space outside the bedroom and bathroom windows has mysteriously become a radiant blue light. As such, the space becomes temporalized and alive. It is in this scene that Alice and Bill become decisively separated, as prefigured in the mirror in the previous scene. The divergence between the couple is registered at first through Alice’s supple movements within the small space of their bedroom. Bill sits on the bed in a still, static pose, unable to comprehend what animates Alice. Meanwhile Alice leaves the bed, offended, and stands framed by the bathroom door. Both the white door frame and the blue light seen through the bathroom window frame Alice, who is leaning on the door frame in a strong posture, with her hand outstretched. She is bathed in a clear golden light, wearing white Calvin Klein-style underwear, as though in a modern-day portrait but also evoking some of Van Gogh’s vibrant studies. As Bill becomes frozen on the bed while listening to Alice’s sexual fantasy, she begins to move supplely on the floor, registering Bill’s mounting incomprehension of her behaviour. What is wonderful to see here is the agility of Alice’s movements coupled with her verbal dexterity, while Bill sits high on the bed, immobile, wordless, with a catatonic stare. Alice’s impulsive, girlish bursts and peals of laughter (her response to Bill’s assertion that women don’t have wild sexual fantasies) are quite extraordinary. She creases up in laughter and each time she looks up at Bill’s baffled face she bursts into yet another round of laughter, finally ending up on the floor trying to catch her breath and recover her equilibrium. Then the tone and mood changes again as Alice sits on the floor quietly and Bill continues to stare in total bewilderment, seated on their bed, stunned, speechless. Alice commands the space with great ease and flexibility, seated on the floor with her back to the radiator, framed by red curtains, even as she begins to recount in vivid detail the story of her attraction to an anonymous sailor

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last summer. The light outside the bathroom window and the bedroom is a radiant blue, while the inside is bathed in a golden soft glow. As Alice quietly begins her story of erotic desire, the blue light and the red curtains that frame her appear to create a purple halo around her head, almost like a very delicate aura. The three-quarter front angle shot shows her face framed by the ringlets of her hair. The mood has moved from riotous bursts and peals of laughter to a very quiet storytelling mode, which also feels like an introspective form of speech, but is addressed to Bill. It feels like the very first time Alice has actually put her ‘illicit’ sexual fantasy and experience into words, imbuing them with the emotional density of ‘inner speech’. The scene becomes sombre, the mood delicate like the aura around Alice’s head. It is rare to see such a shift in tone – from ribald to delicate and subtle – within such a short period of time in a single scene. Alice moves from being girlish to being a mature woman within minutes. Voice and colour are attuned to each other. The entire bedroom and bathroom space becomes a gaseous zone of transformation. In Deleuzian film theory, the non-anthropomorphic eye of the camera enables at least three kinds of perception: solid, liquid, and gaseous.11 I contend that Kidman in her sonic performance accedes to a gaseous perception with the aid of colour. Beyond mere correspondence, the colour and sound act on each other creating a synaesthetic vibration that wafts Alice out of the genre of the intimate ‘chamber play’. The way in which Alice is able to bifurcate time, creating multiple micro-series, a range of micro-affects, sensations, and emotions, is remarkable. Even the stately Kubrick camera is animated by Alice’s motility. It moves around to capture her impulsive convulsions and laughter on the bedroom floor. Bill wants sex then and there but Alice unravels time, blurring ‘last night,’ ‘last summer’. From then on, the couple occupy two different dimensions or series. Bill doggedly goes looking for sex while Alice hangs out at home and travels in another dimension that Bill can sense exists but does not know how to activate. While Bill is driven by images, Alice surfs the sonic as if it were a wave. This bifurcation of time into two series, one audio and the other visual, is one of the crucial movements of this film.12 In her speech, especially under the influence of champagne or dope, but even normally, Alice stretches syllables and vowels to a point where their semantic values are displaced by musical values. She plays with silence and pauses. The 11 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: Movement Image, 71–86. 12 Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time Image, 275. Time as series is a major concept in Deleuzian film theory. Time as series provides a more expansive and supple conception of time than linear time. Time as series has the power to bifurcate and diverge from linear progression.

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consequent unpredictability of what she will say, of how her words might turn out, creates a tantalizing sense of uncertainty. This is especially so when she dances at the ball with a total stranger who is hitting on her. She goes along with him, drunk on champagne, but is actually saying no in a most seductive manner. In contrast, Bill replays in his mind a black and white film of his own, imagining Alice copulating with the sailor whom she was attracted to. Bill goes looking for sex while Alice dreams at home.

The Orgy In Eyes Wide Shut, the encounter between painting and f ilm is staged within a self-conscious aesthetic awareness of the simulacral quality of the cinematic image as commodity. This awareness is structural, that is, integral to the composition of the film, which is why the film is shot on a set, a simulated Symbolist New York, and also why Kubrick wanted a married couple to play Bill and Alice. As I said earlier, the distinction between ‘Bill and Alice’ and ‘Tom and Nicole’ becomes imperceptible, and the two couples become a simulacrum of each other. There is a dizzying sense of being within images with no possible escape, no sense of an outside. In Eyes Wide Shut we see twelve perfect female nudes and only one naked woman (Alice). The dozen nudes are interchangeable commodities, both because they are prostitutes and because they conform to an identical body type rendered anonymous by being masked in the high-class orgy. Their speech, gestures, and movements, their breasts, hips, and legs – all are standardized. The expected eroticism of the bodies is transposed into the cinematic image itself. The very substance of Kubrick’s film is erotic in its singularity, its aesthetic richness, especially with regard to light, colour, and sound; meanwhile, despite their promise of happiness, the perfect nudes remain disenchanted commodities, plastic bodies, moulded to the desire of late twentieth-century mediatized beauty. Kidman’s Alice is individuated as a Symbolist woman, in which idiom the redhead signifies sexual potency. As such, whether naked or clothed, because of her Symbolist affiliations, Alice is able to take us elsewhere, even in the shopping mall. The central sequence, an orgy, takes place in a palatial house whose interior décor consists of pastiche Islamic arches and decorative motifs. The score (by the experimental composer Jocelyn Pook) also incorporates a fragment of South Indian classical vocal music. The complex montage and modulation of multiple rhythms in this sequence occurs within a context where the perfect orgiastic bodies are de-eroticized by the mechanized

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rhythm of copulation; in contrast, the vocalization intimates a highly flexible rhythm marked by the microtones of the Indian musical tradition. It is my contention that Kubrick uses decorative motifs from an Islamic visual aesthetic tradition, as well as a South Indian (Hindu) musical tradition, as a critique – ‘Is this hell? […] lovers’ is heard sung in Tamil – and lamentation at the commodification of bodies and the consequent loss of sensuality. Simultaneously, the aesthetic allows him to open up a multiplicity of rhythms. By combining two traditions of ornamentation (visual and sonic) from Indian culture, which both Hindu and Islamic fundamentalists would prefer to eradicate, and using these traditions not only as critique but also to intimate that there are other potential temporalities beyond the chronometric time of the pulsed bodies, Kubrick makes a transnational gesture with the kind of care and precision one expects of him. The traditional pre-industrial ornamentation he deploys here now returns as a form of pastiche, made possible by technologies of mass reproduction. It is evident that Kubrick does use the familiar bag of tricks of postmodern pastiche – citation, irony, parody – quite liberally in this film: in his use of popular Western music, in the highly melodramatic hocus-pocus dialogue at the orgy, and in the construction of the plot; he assumes urbanely that these examples of postmodern pastiche constitute a contemporary realism of sorts. But something qualitatively different happens with the South Indian music, because at that moment we encounter a multiplicity of differential audiovisual rhythms: those of the mechanistically copulating bodies; Bill’s slow walk; the floating camera; the microtonal rhythms of the Indian vocal music and Pook’s electronic score. Through these elements, Kubrick creates a rasa (aesthetic sentiment) of sadness. This sadness is highly abstract and precise, a function of the music; it is not achieved through a depiction of a sad scene. In fact there is one word that modulates that particular rasa in Sanskrit aesthetics – viraha, which may be translated as a melancholy yearning associated with erotic loss.13

In the Morgue: Bill’s Sexual Encounter The scene in the bedroom discussed above terminates when the telephone rings. Bill is called to the deathbed of an affluent patient. There, the 13 ‘Rasa’ or aesthetic sentiment in classical Indian aesthetics has been codified in the Natyasastra of Bharat, according to which there are nine rasas, one being karuna or pathos/sadness. See Sankaran, Some Aspects of Literary Criticism in Sanskrit or Theories of Rasa and Dhvani, 18.

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daughter of the deceased man makes sexual advances to Bill in the same room in which her father’s corpse now lies. Bill gently extricates himself and goes to the Greenwich Village, where a group of young men accost him, pushing him and shouting that he is a homosexual. A prostitute invites Bill to her small apartment, where they engage in flirtation until a phone call yet again ends the scene. Alerted to the event by a friend’s disclosure, Bill goes in a cab to a private upper-class orgy in a palatial country house where he encounters the tightly scripted and choreographed orgy discussed above. He has been warned to go in costume, wearing a mask and a cape. A nude, masked model calls out to Bill, attempting to warn him of the danger he has placed himself in by breaking into this private fantasy world of the super-rich. Later, in a café, he reads a news item recording the death of a beauty queen by a heroin overdose and makes the connection with Mandy, the semiconscious naked prostitute whom he had treated for a drug overdose in Ziegler’s luxurious bathroom, during the ball he attended with Alice earlier in the film. Bill goes to the hospital morgue to see her body. This scene is remarkable for its visual aesthetic richness, manifested by the appearance of a mysterious purple colour despite the clinical atmosphere of the morgue. Bill walks into the morgue where Mandy’s corpse is pulled from a drawer, laid out on a tray, naked. There are three large plastic containers on a counter – red, yellow, and blue, the primary colours. Apart from this touch of colour the light is fluorescent, bright, flat, stark, clinical. The camera is strangely animated in that we view the dead woman’s body from a very high angle shot. There is no narrative reason at all for this singular shot. There is tension in the composition of this shot. From that high angle her hair, arranged in curved strands spreading outwards from her head, gives the cadaver a sense of vitality entirely lacking in the bodies at the orgy, as well as proving a macabre contrast with Mandy as she is f irst encountered in the f ilm, lying in Ziegler’s bathroom after an overdose. Bill is attracted to the corpse in more than a professional sense. A black orderly stands at a distance, looking away from him. Bill stands facing the dead woman’s head and bends haltingly towards her face, as though he is about to kiss her, but then slowly pulls away. This movement shows his jet-black overcoat in a close shot and as we register the strange dynamics of the scene the coat appears to change colour: it briefly emits a mysterious deep purple hue. This perverse encounter is the closest that Bill comes to experiencing a disturbing erotic charge. Bill encounters naked bodies as part of his work as a doctor in his surgery as well as at the party of the billionaire, Ziegler. An ethical issue was raised in the bathroom where Bill first encountered Mandy, since Ziegler was anxious to get rid of the

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beautiful overdosed woman, splayed naked on a chair. In this earlier scene, Bill insisted on keeping Mandy there for an hour to ensure that she was sufficiently recovered to be taken home. It is clear in this scene that Bill realizes he has drifted into an amoral world of the super-rich, hitherto unknown to him. When summoned and reprimanded by Ziegler for having broken into the orgy, Bill plucks up enough courage to confront him about Mandy’s death. He demands to know how Mandy ended up in the morgue, suspecting that she was in fact the masked woman at the ball who issued a warning of the danger he was in. Ziegler brushes off any suggestion of complicity, declaring that Mandy died of a drug overdose, shut up in her own apartment. Bill’s assured senses of normality shattered, he is emotionally ravaged, at his most vulnerable. Returning home, he goes into the bedroom he shares with Alice, where she is asleep with Bill’s mask from the ball lying on his pillow. Bill now knows that Alice knows. Bill sees her laughing in her dream but waking up troubled, crying. She recounts to him her dream of copulating with a large number of men and of laughing at him, but he is unable to tell her where he has been. The couple have been on their own, aparallel journeys. Yet while Alice’s affective temporal dream journey has been traumatic, it is also cathartic in that she can verbalize her experience with a Freudian acuity, while Bill has encountered something terrifying at the orgy and in the morgue but is unable to process and articulate it in the way Alice does. Her verbal eloquence, emotional vulnerability, and sensitivity are remarkable, powerful. Their two series of movements – sonic and visual – cannot be wholly reconciled. The room is suffused with a deep purple colour. The bedsheets are also purple and the air itself feels coloured, seems to resonate. The intermittently appearing purple hue has now reached an expressive climax in this scene where the couple comes to a mutual understanding of their erotic emotional complexity. Bill finally breaks down and says that he will ‘tell everything’. However, we don’t actually hear him speak or ‘tell it all’ as Alice does because the scene cuts to the following morning.

Class Relations and the ‘Money-Shot’ Bill’s adventures at night, looking for sex, lead him through a series of encounters where bodies are explicitly commodified, as prostitutes. These scenes cut across social strata, from street prostitute to the super-rich, as they do in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. The world of the upper classes appears amoral, with

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its own rules and predatory behaviour. We also glimpse child prostitution when the owner of a costume shop offers his daughter to an astonished Bill, who is returning the costume he rented to wear to the masked ball. There is a street prostitute whom Bill meets and interacts with playfully. They don’t have sex but he pays her nevertheless; he discovers later that she is HIV-positive. Bill has witnessed the callousness and immorality of Ziegler when the prostitute he had sex with overdosed in his plush bathroom. He can barely remember her name, Mandy, even when Bill asks for it so as to be able to speak to her to prevent her from slipping into a coma. The sense of the disposability of prostitutes as interchangeable commodities is pervasive. When Ziegler summons Bill to confront him about his presence at the orgy, he attempts to bribe him with a case of vintage Scotch, which Bill declines. This meeting takes place in Ziegler’s library; the setting, featuring a red billiards table and green lamps, is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s painting The Night Café, 1888, depicting a low class barroom with a green pool table, red walls, and yellow lamp light. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh referred to this painting ‘as one of the ugliest pictures I have done’.14 While the painting is of a desolate, shabby place, Ziegler’s room is a luxurious mixture of red and green, and he is in full command of the space. Despite this material difference, the atmosphere in Ziegler’s library is dark and desolate as he attempts to ‘buy’ Bill’s complicity. Ziegler abandons the niceties of polite speech and uses a crude and blunt vernacular. Despite the fact that he is a doctor, we see that Bill’s status here makes him an underling, one who services the super-rich whenever and wherever they want. The film opens with Bill looking for his wallet and throughout the film he is seen paying liberally for services – to the prostitute, to the costume dealer, to the taxi driver. He actually tears a hundred-dollar bill in half and gives one half to the taxi driver to ensure he will wait for him to return from the orgy. Ziegler, despite his immense wealth, makes a point of the high cost of the top physiotherapist Bill has recommended to him; similarly, Alice, though well-off, checks the price tag on the large teddy bear that her daughter wants for Christmas. While the sexualized bodies are de-eroticized, Kubrick’s film image itself and its sound have been created at great expense (as discussed above), and appear singular, sui generis, in the inflationary economy of late twentiethcentury image-making. Thus the much anticipated ‘money-shot’ of Tom and Nicole copulating is displaced on to the eroticism of the films’s remarkable audio-visual system. 14 Van Gogh, op. cit.

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At The Toyshop Kubrick ends his film in a toyshop, a place of artifice, unlike Schnitzler’s Dream Novella, which ends in the conjugal bedroom where a beam of sunlight streams in and birdsong mingles with the child’s laughter, enhancing the happy resolution of marital conflicts. I argue that the film ends in a toyshop for the same reason that the orgy is mechanized, and for the same reason that the f ilm as a whole is shot on a set (albeit a Symbolist New York). They are perfectly controlled environments of late capitalism, where all things and all relations are under the sway of a standardized exchange of commodities as signs, within an economy of simulation. In the space in which images and toys are exchanged, a bespectacled Alice – as if remembering Dorothy Parker’s quip – doesn’t wait but makes a pass at her husband, yet in an unusual manner, with a deadpan expression. She uses an inf initive: “There is something very important we need to do.” “What?” asks Bill. “Fuck,” replies Alice quietly, thus virtualizing the actual. Throughout the f ilm Alice has conjugated the vernacular nonsense word ‘fuck’ to replenish her conjugality with a light (and perhaps also, therefore scary) humour. This is not the Freudian dirty joke that rouses loud laughter through the exclusion of the other. There is no self or other to exclude in the infinitive, which has no subject, a pure virtuality in language. If indeed one smiled broadly at this ending, as I recall doing the very f irst time I saw it, the absence of the reverse shot leaves one wondering, was Bill man enough to smile? Or would he still have that mildly appealing, obtuse look and a posture that suggests he is quite out of his depth? Either way, in refusing us the grammatical reverse shot, Kubrick is once again calling the shots, giving Alice (in the wonderland of the late capitalist toy shop) the power to multiply micro-series, to toy with time itself.

Bibliography Bumpus, Judith. Van Gogh’s Flowers. New York: Universe Books, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Dora, Henri. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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Ebert, Roger. ‘Cruise Opens Up About Working with Kubrick.’ https://www. rogerebert.com/interviews/cruise-opens-up-about-working-with-kubrick. Accessed 3 March 2019. Ebiri, Bilger. ‘An Oral History of an Orgy: Staging That Scene in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s Divisive Final Film.’ Vulture, 27 June 2019, https://www. vulture.com/2019/06/eyes-wide-shut-orgy-scene-oral-history.html. Accessed 15 December 2019. Fenwick, James. ‘“Let This Be Kubrick’s Final Word. Do You Hear Us Warner Bros?”: Fan Reception to the Death of Stanley Kubrick and His Final Film, Eyes Wide Shut.’ The Journal of Fandom Studies 6, no. 1, March 2018, pp. 21–32. Gage, John. Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Kreider, Tim. ‘Review of Eyes Wide Shut.’ Film Quarterly 53, no. 3, spring 2000, pp. 41–43. Kubrick, Stanley, and Frederic Raphael. Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay. Victoria: Penguin Books, 1999. Pizzella, Stephen. ‘A Sword in the Bed.’ American Cinematographer, 33, 28 October 1999, pp. 12–13. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 1. Translated by Brian Holmes, Paris: Dis Voir, 1995. Sankaran, A. Some Aspects of Literary Criticism in Sanskrit or Theories of Rasa and Dhvani. Madras: University of Madras, 1973. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. London: Harmondsworth, 1996.

Filmography Eyes Wide Shut (1999). 153 minutes. Colour. Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Hollywood Director: Stanley Kubrick Script: Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle Cinematography: Larry Smith Art Direction: Les Tomkins and Roy Walker Editing: Nigel Galt Original Music: Jocelyn Pook Main Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sidney Pollack, Alan Cumming, Rade Sherbedigia Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros. DVD 2000.

4. Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006) Abstract Raul Ruiz’s film on Klimt and Gustav Klimt’s own work are examined in terms of a cluster of related ideas; namely allegory, fragmentation, and ornamentation. Modern allegory, whether cinematic or painterly, is shown to have powers of fragmenting organic forms. Similarly, modern ornamentation is elaborated as a power to dematerialize solid forms reaching towards the infinitesimal in perception. Through these devices of allegorical ornamentation, the Ruizean cinematic image and sound are imbued with polysemia and corresponding pathic sates of intensity. The role of the cinematic closeup in facilitating these processes of fragmentation is also examined. The multi-ethnic polity of fin-de-siècle Vienna on the brink of its dissolution is perceived through the aesthetic optic of a delirious Klimt on his deathbed. Keywords: Raul Ruiz’s Klimt, Cinematic allegory, Ornament and pathology, Fragment and close-up, Fin-de-siècle Vienna

Who art thou? asked the guardian of the night From crystal purity I come, was my reply, And great my thirst, Persephone, Yet heeding thy decree I take to flight And turn and turn again, forever right. I spurn the pallid Cyprus tree, And take no refreshment at its Sylvan spring, But hasten on toward the rustling river Of Mnemosyne, wherein I drink to sweet satiety. And there dipping my palms between the Knots and loopings of its mazy stream

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/9789463726245_Ch04

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I see again, as in a drowning swimmers dream, All the strange sights I ever saw, And even stranger sights no man has ever seen. Klimt

This poem, a pastiche (a sonnet of sorts), written for Raúl Ruiz’s film Klimt, is heard in voice-over, recited by John Malkovich, in the very last shot of the film – a coda that shows Klimt holding a glass of water, from which he drinks as a shower of coloured flower petals rain down on him. His expression appears to be one of quiet delight at the cascading petals. He and his voice seem to yield to their softness. It is a posthumous image. All through the film we have intermittently returned to Klimt’s deathbed in a hospital, where he lies semi-conscious, uttering just one word: ‘Flowers.’ The entire film may be viewed in part as the vision of ‘a drowning swimmer’s dream’, just on the threshold of death. The poem appears to be an ode to the cinematograph itself. It starts with a piece of dialogue. Persephone, guardian of the night, asks the stranger, ‘Who art thou?’ and receives the reply, ‘From crystal purity I come’. The crystalline perception of the lens, which captures light, thirsts for memory, so as to be incarnated. The white light of the crystalline lens of the camera encounters the shadowy realm of Persephone, the guardian of the night, in search of a vision that only the ‘rustling river of Mnemosyne’ (epic memory) might provide. A flowing river doesn’t rustle, and yet in synaesthetic terms the line does make sense; it evokes a grove. The river of Mnemosyne is activated by dipping the palms between ‘the knots and loopings of its mazy stream’. The palms and fingers (hypersensitive to touch), dipped in the mazy river, activate non-linear memory through tactile contact. A haptic perception is thus awakened in us by imbuing the eye with the values and powers of touch. Under these conditions, the hand may become an instrument not only of feeling but also of cognition. The crystalline lens activated in this way shows strange sights ‘no man has ever seen’ because the lensed vision is non-human, an ‘eye’ without an ‘I’ or a human ego. The crystal purity of light encounters the guardian of the night, Persephone, who decrees that it encounter the daughter of heaven and earth (of Uranus and Gaia) and the mother of all the muses, Mnemosyne, thereby conferring both a cosmos-centric and a civilizational legacy on the Seventh art. In retrospect, it would appear that Ruiz is not only addressing or apostrophizing the cinematograph but also giving us a vision of the camera itself, as an allegorical instrument, rather than one of representation. For

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Ruiz, film is an allegorizing medium with an intimate, privileged relationship to death. The evanescence of f ilm and its shadowy, insubstantial temporal images makes it so. Further, Ruiz conceives the film image as a simulacrum, where the distinction between the original and the copy becomes unstable and the image acquires non-human powers, like those of the shadow, for example. The two Lea De Castros (the true and the false) and the two Klimts (the original and the copy) are playful embodiments of the contemporary reality of the economy of simulation producing simulacra. Klimt is the perfect subject for Ruiz in that his major official paintings were commissioned, conceived, and received as allegorical works. The works known as the Faculty Paintings (1900–1907) were a set of three large ceiling panels commissioned by the Art Committee of the Ministry of Education for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, depicting the themes of its Faculties: Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. These works (destroyed during WWII), ‘personif ied’ the three disciplines in complex, somewhat opaque, and ambiguous allegories that created a great scandal and were rejected by the university, despite the fact that the painting Philosophy won a gold medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900. Franze Wickhoff, the art historian, delivered a defence of Philosophy against accusations of ugliness and decadence in a famous speech to the Philosophic Society of the University of Vienna, with the title, ‘What is Ugliness?’ Ruiz chose the allegorical painting Medicine to open his film Klimt. Ruiz was one of the rare masters of allegorical cinema of the long twentieth century. He said quite emphatically, ‘Allegory for me is much more than a game or an element of a style.’1 He has also indicated that he sees the world allegorically, as though it were a museum. It would appear that for Ruiz, cinema, in its ontology, is an allegorical audiovisual system – an allegorizing medium. Allegory drains the image of its denotative meaning and prepares it to be infused with new semantic and aesthetic values, new connotations. The connecting aspect of allegory is one of the things that fascinated me […] you make an allegory and this allegory touches an element in real life and makes this element become an allegory of something else, of some distant object and when this object is touched it becomes an allegory and so on […] it seems to me that in this moment, especially, most of the arts 1 Raúl Ruiz Forum, Australian Film Institute, Sydney, 1993. Jayamanne, ‘Raoul Ruiz’, 3–6. All quotations here are taken from a recording of the forum.

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have refused this form of allegory which was such an important element in the history of culture.2

Simulation and the process of allegorization seem to work hand in hand for Ruiz. This is why his images do not yield information within a sensory-motor logic. The density of the Ruizean optic appears to be related to these aesthetic processes of simulation and allegorization, making certain images opaque, tantalizing, memorable, difficult to forget, returning one again and again to certain privileged scenes and relationships. Also, both Klimt and Ruiz have an intimate relationship to the ornamentation and fragmentation of image as linked aesthetic processes that render the image mysterious, rune-like. While Klimt’s work, in part, has been situated within the style of Art Nouveau ornament, Ruiz did not work within a recognizable and repeatable style of ornamentation. He appeared to be able to ornament his image by borrowing from many sources, using what is at hand. I will return to this key point when discussing the comments Adolph Loos makes to Klimt on his use of ornament when they encounter each other in the scene at the famous Café Central of Vienna. The opening credits are projected onto a part of Klimt’s lost allegorical painting Medicine. The figure Hygieia, goddess of health (as allegorical personification), is placed prominently in the centre of the visual field of the image, in close-up. The camera moves vertically over her brightly coloured, red and gold ornamented dress, from the base of the painting to the top, reaching the striking arms, hands, and face of Hygieia holding an entwined serpent and a bowl, while the image of her face begins to rotate 360 degrees, creating a sense of vertigo. The movement imbues the painting with a great deal of vitality, as though Hygieia is looking at us, addressing us, from an ever-shifting point of view. As the camera gradually moves vertically over a decorative surface, the youthful faces and bodies of men and women scattered across the image become grotesquely distorted, deformed, culminating on a close-up of a skull, a perennial allegorical emblem of death. The allegorical import is clear: life (health) is juxtaposed, or rather enmeshed with pathology, decay, and death. Medicine’s efficacy, it would appear, is delimited. One must remember that the painting was done in the years leading up to the First World War in a city and a university renowned for their modern medical research and practice, which established pathology as a separate area of research, something that interested Klimt. He attended anatomy and 2

Martin, ‘The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz’, p. 61.

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dissection classes given by Dr. Emile Zuckerkandl, whose journalist wife Berta was one of Klimt’s patrons. We also know that, through this contact, Klimt was able to attend lectures on cell biology at the Medical University of Vienna, a clear indication of his interest in biological dynamisms of molecular, germinal, and embryonic states. This research, made accessible through the mediation of the microscope, influenced Klimt’s biomorphic design practice in Medicine, which engages with the infinitesimal in perception and sensation. Ornamentation and pathology are linked in this painting.3 Klimt’s modern allegorical vision sees abundant life in relation to its decay. This conversion of one thing into another, while simultaneously sustaining both, is part of the allegorical optic’s logic, quite different from the operations of the formation of metaphor, where there is a complete conversion of one thing into another. The spiralling, vertiginous, strange movements of the camera, coupled with the painting itself, emphatically signal the non-anthropomorphic, temporal powers of the Ruizean cinematic image.4 What might a ‘drowning swimmer’s dream’ look and feel like? It would be a floating realm of images unmoored from the referential solidity of representation, arranged in ‘knots and loopings’ of non-linear time itself. In creating this realm Ruiz also invents for his film an ornamented allegorical optic, which is nourished by the Klimtian ornament. Both Klimt and Ruiz are engaged in ornamentation, understood not just as mere surface decoration or supplement but, rather, as a force with the power to dematerialize solid forms and thereby renew our perception and thought. Klimt’s ornamentation works with an idea of the fragment as an aesthetic unit of composition and perception. One could say the very same of Ruiz’s devotion, across his oeuvre, to an idea of the ornament as a fragment and a conception of the fragment itself as potentially containing further fragments, harbouring a ceaseless capacity to simulate. The cinematograph yields unusual visions, 3 There is a discourse on ornament and pathology and ornament as a fragment in this film, the implications of which I will take up in relation to the figure of Adolph Loos later on. For the influence of the Vienna School of Medicine on Klimt’s Modernism see Polina Advolodkina, ‘Klimt, Modernism and Art’s Relationship with Medicine’. She demonstrates how Klimt departed decisively from the representation of medicine in Western Art History and discusses the influence of Freud and his theory of the unconscious and dream work on his Medicine. 4 The non-anthropomorphic eye of the camera is an idea of the Indian film-maker Kumar Shahani. See my book The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani for an elaboration of this idea in terms of his ‘Epic’ vision. This idea is allied to the notion of a non-anthropocentric eye of the cinematograph, which has a cosmos-centric capability and power. Among the directors studied in this book, it is Parajanov who explores this potential in the most imaginative and startling ways. His fascination with the motif of the nautilus shell and stone, as well as the compositional use of earth, wind, fire, and water as forces, are testament to this.

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gestures, and movements, which are not at all anthropomorphic. A most striking pivotal scene that dramatically embodies this allied cluster of Ruizean ideas of allegory, fragmentation, and ornament is the one where Klimt is seen standing in front of a large floor-to-ceiling mirror in the Café Central. As the figure of a state official, the Secretary (who will reappear repeatedly as an allegorical persona) approaches and calls his name, the mirror shatters into fragments, shards. The shattering is not ‘motivated’ in a sensory-motor type logic of actions and reactions. No one has broken the mirror, rather the mirror itself shatters (as the Secretary calls out to him and appears in the frame): it has agency, an allegorical agency. We are not given a clear reason for its shattering. The fragments fall in jagged shapes, in close-up, forming an ornamented, fractured surface in which we see reflected a partial view of another of Klimt’s Faculty panels, Philosophy, and the people at the Secession Exhibition of 1900 in Vienna. Meanwhile, we also hear them talk about the broken mirror and the bad luck it presages for the new century. The breaking is rhythmically repeated, highlighting its artifice and importance. The ‘special effect’ of the shattering is rather more cognitive than sensory, or perhaps both at once. Its cognitive dissonance is as sharp as the shards shown in close-up. We are invited to read the scene, the image in close-up, mark the moment of disjunction, the repetition, announcing Klimt’s and Ruiz’s virtuosic allegorical powers of abstraction, fragmentation, and ornamentation. The power of abstraction in this instance is enabled by the cinematic close-up, which in magnifying details transforms the object’s very form and function.5 Klimt is not a conventional biopic that recounts the life of the artist in a chronological progression, though the social milieux of key locations of Vienna around 1900 are sharply etched. The image often becomes dense, allegorically mysterious, ornamented. It does not yield information. Rather, it requires us to activate our ‘cognitive imagination’ as Henri Corbin might say of a Sufi vision. Alternatively, as Ruiz reminds us in his theoretical text, Poetics of Cinema, there are several levels of reading available in medieval rhetoric – for example, literal, allegorical, ethical, anagogical6 – which is applicable to his images, as well. He suggests that one may create ‘anamorphic agents’ (with oblique vision), who can play with these four levels of medieval 5 See Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the close-up and its powers of abstraction in Cinema 1: Movement Image, Chapter 6. Deleuze develops further Eisenstein’s theory of the close-up in relation to his own concept of the ‘Affection Image’. The close-up in this theory is a transformation of scale (not simply bringing something close), and thereby imbued with metamorphic powers. In this way it offers the paradox of the part being larger than the whole. 6 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 82.

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rhetoric and jump from one level to another. The jump, it would appear, is aesthetically active. There is a pedagogic aspect to the way allegory works in Ruiz’s cinema. The film lures us to learn how to read it, which might be what makes Ruiz’s allegory thoroughly contemporary, reflexive. Neither do the images exhaust themselves by giving digestible information. The sequence of the shattering mirror also includes a shot of Klimt on his deathbed, so that one could make sense of it as his nightmare death vision, triggered by the appearance of the Secretary, suggesting a form of state violence which is elaborated on as the film progresses. Besides the highly developed and spectacular allegorical scenes, such as the above, there are also explicit, at times light-hearted, references to allegory scattered across the film. At the art gallery, we hear a voice discussing whether there is a difference between allegory and caricature, to which Klimt replies, ‘There is none.’ When Klimt and the Minister of the State visit the bordello with nationally themed rooms, they choose the African salon, donning gorilla masks. Then we hear the drunken Minister saying, ‘We’ll cook up some nice allegories!’ Allegory as a construct, a playful artifice, is suggested here. Then again, when someone refers to a painting of Klimt’s as a portrait, his brusque rejoinder is, ‘No! It’s not a portrait, it’s an allegory!’ The intricate Art Nouveau ornamentation of some of his portraits, which obscures the body with its fragmented, intricate organic forms, is also integrated with the mineral force of the glistening gold leaf.7 We are shown, in close-up, how Klimt carefully applies gold leaf to a painting. So it would seem that, to Klimt, the organic body and face are entwined in a vegetal infinite as well as being galvanized by the metallic mineral energy. During her visit to Klimt’s studio, the body of his close friend Midi becomes the surface onto which Art Nouveau ornament and gold leaf are projected, demonstrating in a playful way the logic of Klimt’s unique allegorical portraiture. Klimt himself, holding his cat, is filmed through a glass pane from above at an oblique angle, playing with surface and perspective. When Midi exits the studio, deliberately slamming the door despite Klimt’s warning, the gold 7 Stewart, ‘Filming Vienna 1900’, 118–144. This essay includes a detailed discussion of Art Nouveau ornamentation in Klimt’s work and the vigorous debates on ornamentation more generally in Vienna at the time. My emphasis, however, is on the link between Ruiz’s own practice of ornamentation and that of Klimt, and in turn their link to pathic modes of perception. Through this conjunction Ruiz is able to offer an understanding of ornamentation as something other than pure surface decoration. Instead, he shows that it has an unconscious affective dimension, which stimulates the psyche and our capacity to make lateral connections across thresholds of perception. What we do with these connections depends on the quality of the powers of attention we can mobilize and the care we might take in the act of writing itself.

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leaf on the table flies into the air in fragments and particles. Instead of the expected sensory-motor response of annoyance, we see Klimt’s instant fascination with the golden rain and his attempt to capture a light particle of energy. Interestingly, apart from a glimpse of the Faculty Paintings, Ruiz does not show us any of the more famous paintings by Klimt, but rather his mode of apprehending the world with which Ruiz himself has an affinity. Ruiz spoke of two interrelated modes in which he responded to his images: ‘fascination’ and ‘detachment.’ Detachment is also a mode of engagement, with an intense focus leading to understanding, whereas fascination lures us into the image, rendering it dizzying or even vertiginous.8 Detachment is not purely rational but, rather, leads to an exploration of processes that create fascination. Perception of film, for Ruiz, is an energetic activity. It is a combination of detachment and fascination leading to a sense of vertigo, even, and to an understanding of this vertiginous process, and finally to what he calls a ‘breathing in of the film’. I understand this complex process as the undoing of the coordinates of subject–object relations and of the primacy of the ego, as well as the opening up of the sensorium to register rhythms and pulses in the image. As a temporal artist, Ruiz was able to activate these in his films. It is rare to have a film-maker set out in such detail the process of spectatorship activated by his own films, an allegorical cinema. This chapter will demonstrate how the Ruizean ornament as allegorical fragment connects with Klimt’s Art Nouveau ornament so as to make visible micro-perceptions, or the infinitesimally small, in nature and in human perception, and in the dynamics of the psyche as well. We are in Freud’s Vienna, but within a contemporary aesthetic exploration of the territory of the ‘optical unconscious’ that Klimt opened up for us over one hundred years ago! Why these strategies matter now is also of interest here beyond a purely aesthetic formalism. On seeing this film one feels that reason reaches towards the non-rational in a manner which enhances its amplitude. The subtitle of the film is A Viennese fantasy in the manner of Schnitzler. Quite by chance, in this book, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Klimt are linked through the figure of Arthur Schnitzler, the Viennese writer and doctor of medicine (he practised as a neurologist), and friend of Freud, who inspired both films. As mentioned earlier, Eyes Wide Shut is in fact based on Schnitzler’s Dream Novella. Schnitzler presented Viennese social life and its unconscious dimensions from within, with acuity.9 Ruiz, 8 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 36–41. 9 See Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present. Kandel explores the impact of the Vienna School of

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a foreigner, with Klimt’s mediation, takes us back to a place and a period of decisive importance in world history, one that resulted in the tragedy of the First World War in 1914 but also created much of value in the world of science and medicine, art, music, and philosophy. And it is the conception of the ornament as fragment shared by both Ruiz and Klimt that enables crucial connections between that past and our present to be made. The very first sequence of the film, showing Vienna in 1918, is set in a clinic, one of the several major sites of urban modernity. Klimt’s friend Egon Schiele is standing there, looking around with interest, when an attendant brings a human skeleton mounted on wheels and proceeds to give a strange mini-lecture to Schiele on its provenance. He is told that the skeleton is not that of one person (as one might expect), but rather a composite, made of skeletal remains and fragments of persons from several of the countries that fought in the First World War. Each of the bones, we are told, belongs to a different person from a different country in Europe! The skull, relative to the rest of the skeleton, appears to be too large. But we are assured that it is not a monster but a hybrid, and appears to be an allegorical emblem made up of fragments; a grotesque human ‘map’ of a dying Austro-Hungarian empire and its enemies, cut to the bone!10 ‘The head comes from the Russian front, 1915. The arms are Viennese, 1917. The hips are French. This leg is Rumanian and that one is Serbian, 1916’. The First World War is thus presented in this oblique and grotesquely ludic manner. The fragmentation and recombination of the organic skeleton into a mechanical construct (ornamented, one might say) is an allegorical conceit, an emblem (a combination of image Medicine, by mapping out the links between Schnitzler, Freud, Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele, in terms of the workings of the unconscious. As an eminent Austrian-American neurobiologist, also trained in psychoanalysis, he has, in this book, focused on the links between art and the functioning of the nervous system and the brain. He discusses how the hand is registered on the brain and the mind as a powerful instrument of cognition. He says that the largest number of neurons are recruited when the f ingers are visibly articulated and exaggerated, as in the work of Klimt and Schiele, rather than when they are folded into the hand. He is interested in what the viewer brings to art as well, the psychology of perception. The powers of abstraction of the finger as digit, and also finger as an indexical sign, are among the many ideas that maybe generated by thinking of the fingers. 10 Allegory as a process of fragmenting organic forms is made very clear here. See my essay, ‘Life is a Dream: Raul Ruiz was a Surrealist in Sydney – A Capillary Memory of a Cultural Event’ (161–178), in Towards Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis, for a detailed discussion of allegory as a force of fragmentation. According to Walter Benjamin, in Baroque allegory the ruin, the corpse, and the ghost are viewed as allegorical emblems. He remarks, ‘In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune’. See Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 176. In Klimt, skulls and skeletons also function as allegorical emblems as they do in medieval and modern allegory. These are all images of declivity.

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with text), directing us to a mode of apprehending the film, at first literally, then allegorically and ethically. Egon Schiele to whom this mini lecture is addressed then responds to the demonstration with, ‘For sure the one thing where there is no shortage of are corpses’. Here, contemporary history is presented through an allegorical emblem that could hardly be forgotten amidst the wounded and the mutilated of the First World War. The ludic sense and the spirit of the Grand-Guignol is further extended when Schiele, walking down a corridor on his way to visit the dying Klimt, passes by a room where a one-legged man is seen copulating with a woman, while metrically counting, ‘One, two, one two…’ On seeing this, Schiele bursts into a fit of hysterical giggling while the camera pans down to show the man’s prosthetic leg flung on the floor next to a large smear of blood. This scene is linked to the photograph of a man with an amputated leg shown to us at the beginning of this opening sequence. The image is enlarged with a magnifying glass and then stamped with a seal by an official. This dense allegorical opening sequence clearly situates the film in Vienna, 1918, the year the First World War ended, and evokes the mutilation suffered in and by Europe during the war through this scene of mechanical copulation, the discarded prosthetic limb, the smear of blood, the still photograph, and the hybrid skeleton. Imagine if this scene was represented realistically, with only the wounded soldiers alone without the grotesquely funny allegorical component! I doubt a realist representation would be able to create and connect the cluster of ideas the allegorical construct does. Allegory has powers of abstraction that realist modes lack. The fragment also has powers of abstraction as it can be recombined and reconfigured (as in the case of the skeleton), with other elements of the narrative. This opening sequence ends at Klimt’s bedside, where he lies unconscious, close to death, with his friend Schiele beside him. After this deathbed scene the film goes back in time: we see Klimt working in his studio in Vienna, 1900. The rest of the film follows in an episodic manner, some scenes delineating the specific social milieu of Vienna, and others, as though seen from within Klimt’s own optic, refracted through a dying man’s fantasy vision mediated by the cinematograph as an allegorical instrument, until we reach Klimt’s death in 1918, returning us again to the hospital bed and continuing beyond death itself. Several key social sites of fin-de-siècle Vienna are presented in the film. The modern institution of the famous Viennese coffee house Café Central, home to intellectual and artistic cliques, plays a prominent role. As Klimt enters the space, the perimeter of the café spins like a carousel at a dizzying pace, while the focal point – Klimt talking with a waiter – remains stable, introducing us to key personalities representing competing aesthetic schools

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in Vienna. When Adolf Loos sees Klimt at the Café Central, his opening salvo is a challenge: ‘Ah, Herr Klimt! A modern ornamentalist! A real pathological case. He never stops switching styles.’11 Klimt’s response is to rub his face with a piece of cake, smearing it with icing sugar. This slapstick gesture of a ‘cream pie in the face’ is performed in ‘slow motion’ (slowing the gesture, rather than the camera, and showing it in close-up), with complete deliberation. Surprisingly, Loos lends his face to the gesture instead of recoiling from it, and as a result it becomes readable allegorically while remaining fascinating even at the literal slapstick level. The piece of cake has a provenance! It is a piece cut from a large cake made in the shape of a neoclassical building beside the famous Ringstrasse that goes around the old city of Vienna. That cake is itself one of many such wedding cakes made in the shape of the major landmark neoclassical buildings of nineteenth-century Vienna, which stand in a row and parodically demonstrated to us in a tracking shot. These nostalgic neoclassical buildings and their ornamentation, and what they stood for, was what Loos the modernist architect attacked in his lively polemical essay Ornament and Crime.12 It is also the case that Klimt’s practice of ornamentation is a modernist practice breaking with those neoclassical traditions. What starts off as a verbal attack on Klimt and then a physical counterattack on Loos becomes an allegorical demonstration of the importance of ornamentation and its intrinsic eroticism for Klimt. Even as Loos attacks Klimt, he acknowledges the importance of the eroticism of Klimt’s aesthetic, which he says is an essential attribute of art. Ornament and Crime frames the two protagonists’ conflicting attitudes to ornamentation. But it isn’t clear what exactly is pathological for Loos – the will to ornamentation, the lack of a consistent style, or both. The same could also be said of Ruiz’s 11 Loos, Ornament and Crime. In this allegorically staged encounter between Loos and Klimt, Ruiz demonstrates the libidinal investment involved in an artist’s passion for ornamentation. This is most evident in the slowed-down gestures of Klimt cleaning Loos’s face with care, after having smeared it with the iced cake. Loos yields to what is evidently an assault as though it were a rather tender gesture. The gestures are performed in such a way that they are not simply sensory-motor actions and reactions. Rather, the gestures call attention to themselves and in their very anomaly, invite us to engage with them in an allegorical reading. This is the reflexivity that seems to be essential to modern practices of allegory. 12 Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. This book provides a detailed history of urban architecture of this period, including the polemics between the neotraditionalists and modernists of the Secessionist movement led by Klimt. It also provides an intricate account of how Vienna became a preeminent European city in medicine, art, art history, music, philosophy, urban planning, education, women’s rights and much else. Schorske gives an account of the numerous ways in which anti-Semitism persisted institutionally. All of this is framed within an analysis of the wider competing political forces active at the time both in the Austro-Hungarian empire and in Vienna itself.

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own practice. This sequence yet again demonstrates emphatically how Ruiz constructs his scenes allegorically, in a supple manner, continually shifting tone, register, perspective, and meaning. As such, Ruiz’s modern allegory also performs a vital pedagogical, cognitive function in the inflationary simulacral image-scape of simulation we now inhabit. It trains us to calibrate images within shifting perspectives and rhythms. As a result, the film is not only about Klimt and his era but also, crucially, about us, and our time. With his words, Loos also encapsulates humorously and cogently the psychic, pathological dimension of the will to ornamentation and fragmentation, which is quite different from pretty surface decoration, like icing on a cake. Both Klimt and Ruiz are allied practitioners in that across their entire oeuvre they follow no single consistent style. Klimt painted in a variety of styles – academic painting, allegorical work, Art Nouveau ornament and portraiture, and landscape paintings of trees and flowers. There is no stylistic consistency either in Ruiz’s prolific corpus. A group of Jewish patrons of Klimt and his friends (including Szerena Lederer, who collected his work) are seen in the Café Central seated with him. One of them wants to start a fight with an opponent but is restrained by Lederer. Once the State rejects Klimt’s allegorical paintings, he turns to Jewish industrialists and professionals (whose wives have an exceptional rapport with him and his work), for patronage. They buy his work and exhibit and defend it. While the rich Jews appear to be assimilated, the anti-Semitism of Klimt’s sister and mother indicate the existence of an undercurrent of racism. Klimt also fathers countless children with his models, some of whom are Jews of a lower social standing. The Secretary refers to Klimt as the ‘chosen among the chosen’, referring to his Jewish patronage. Klimt’s syphilis also indicates how he participated in the ‘normal’ male sexual mores of Vienna where, according to Klimt’s doctor, half the male population were infected with the disease. The transmission of the disease among lower class women servicing bourgeois men is made explicit. Notably, Klimt looks at his bacillus through a microscope in his doctor’s laboratory and exclaims that it is ‘beautiful’, even as it is killing him and infecting countless others. When asked, the doctor reassures Klimt that his children run very little risk of inheriting syphilis. The pattern of the deadly virus, its natural, infinitesimally small, and ‘ornamental’ molecular detail, seen magnified under the microscope, is evidently what fascinates Klimt, linking pathology yet again to ornamentation. It appears to be the case that nature at its infinitesimal scale is the repository of a will to ornamentation. This darker and yet seductive aspect of ornament as infinitely tiny fragment is famously exemplified in Emile Galle’s Pasteur Goblet, 1893 (a crystal cup),

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which was decorated with magnified details of the molecular structure of the dangerous bacteria discovered by Louis Pasteur.13 Klimt’s doctor adds a practical note, saying that the bacillus is not only beautiful but also useful medically, an instance of form and function contained in the one entity, as in modernist architecture! This fascination with the infinitesimal, whether in nature or in human psychic forces, beneath the threshold of conscious awareness, is what links Klimt and Ruiz in a profound way. It is their deep conception of the ornament as particle of energy and its powers of fragmentation (or de-composition of solid compositional forms), that creates an affinity between these two artists across a century.14 Life and death and the deadly are intermeshed here, as in the allegorical painting of Hygieia. A recurrent figure, mentioned above, who accosts Klimt as an official of the Austrian State (‘Secretary to the Consular Services of the Austrian Embassy, Third Secretary’), is a person no one else in the film sees. He seems to appear only to Klimt and the viewer. On two occasions, both his close friend Midi and his doctor indicate that Klimt has been talking to himself, when we in fact see Klimt talking to the Secretary. What are we 13 Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Here, Gordon provides a fascinating account of the modernist genealogy of ornamentation in late nineteenth-century Europe. She also discusses the widening of the repertoire of ornamental traditions within nineteenth-century Europe, through the restoration of the Alhambra, with its Islamic design, and the excavations of Pompeii. The other examples are the revival of the Gothic tradition and also the Universal Exhibition in London, which revived craft practices and decoration. It is from this event and attendant discussions that the Art Nouveau ornamentation developed. Eloise Riegl’s collection and exhibition of Islamic carpets and textile designs, shown at the Vienna Museum of the Decorative Arts, added to these rich traditions. 14 I think Klimt and Ruiz’s fascination with ornamentation as an essential component of nature and biology at an infinitesimal scale implies that, for them, the aesthetic access to the dynamism of these materials affects our modes of perception. They create an aesthetic awareness or sensitivity at a molecular level. The sensations aroused through these processes activate a visual function that undoes the normal perception of solid forms and their stable functions. Here then, the putative ‘pathology of ornamentation’ may be understood not as decadence in a moral sociological sense, but as ‘pathos’, an excess of sensation and feeling at a threshold below sensory-motor perception. It is rather more akin to sub-cortical processes of awareness, allied with unconscious operations of the mind, where familiar subject–object relations are set adrift and solid forms dematerialized, opening the psyche to sense sensory dynamisms and fluctuation of intensities difficult to capture in language. When Klimt’s contemporaries attacked his Faculty Paintings for being decadent and ugly, what that implied was that he did not conform to the tenets of good form, harmony, balance, and clarity of expression required of classical allegories. His allegorical work was obscure and the European historical grand narrative of progressive Enlightenment and the triumph of Reason were absent from his personifications of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. See Simpson, ‘Viennese Art, Ugliness, and the Vienna School of Art History: The Vicissitudes of Theory and Practice’.

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to make of this figure? Played by Stephen Dillane with nuance, virtuosity, and humour, he appears to be an allegorical persona, perhaps a figment of Klimt’s imagination, linked to the social and political conditions of Austrian life.15 To be more precise, he would appear to be not Klimt’s ‘double’ (id), but rather his superego, an internalization of the all-powerful Austrian state, his first patron. On one occasion, we even hear his voice speaking to Klimt when he is not physically present, at a Jewish patron’s mansion. As such, we can see that this mysterious figure is really a personification of the intricate functions and operations of a bureaucratic state apparatus. The curious and antagonistic relationship Klimt has with this internalized figure enables Ruiz to track the deep hold on artistic autonomy exercised by the Austrian state, which was his patron. What the Viennese State considered to be Klimt’s grotesque and ‘decadent’ work, when shown in Paris at the Universal Exposition of 1900, was celebrated and given the gold medal. The Secretary, with his strange sense of humour, says that the French saw Klimt’s painting as being ‘naughty.’ This allegorical figure of the Secretary seems to shadow Klimt all the way through the film, even in the most private moments. At one point, in a darker mood, he even refers to himself as Klimt’s ‘shadow.’ A bust of a black sculpture is visible at certain times when the Secretary appears, indicating the allegorical nature of the encounter between Klimt and this mysterious figure. This very same piece of sculpture also appears in Klimt’s studio. It seems, quite bluntly and quite literally, to code certain scenes as allegorical. Its sporadic appearances prompt one to scan the image in a detached manner while also being fascinated by the scene at the same time. Yet again, the simultaneous interplay between detachment and fascination makes the allegorical scene readable aesthetically. The literal reading, as Ruiz reminds us, is only one of several ways of reading an allegorical configuration.

John Malkovich as a Mannerist Klimt Mannerism in acting has had bad press and Malkovich’s performance as Klimt has been criticized for being overly mannered. Malkovich himself has the reputation of being a mannered actor. However, if one assumes, 15 Ruiz has spoken of the importance for allegorical figures to appear to behave and act in as ‘natural’ a manner as possible. They must not appear simply as abstractions like ‘Every Man’ in, say, medieval allegory. They must appear to belong to the social world of the film however idiosyncratic they may seem. I believe this to be a singular contribution to acting in film.

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as I do, that mannerism in acting may take many forms, just as codes of realism or expressionism in acting does, then one can consider Malkovich’s performance in a more favourable and receptive spirit. The criticism of the film as being too obscure or downright bad has also been put down to Malkovich’s performance, as a case of bad acting. The widely different accents in which English is spoken has likewise been criticized as an instance of bad acting and bad directing. Alternatively, we could view this diversity as the reality of the European Union, where English is now the lingua franca. The film doesn’t attempt to standardize pronunciation. This is an aesthetic and political decision, making the film very contemporary. It is noteworthy that Malkovich accepted the role of Klimt precisely because it was not to be a realist biopic of the artist and also because he enjoyed a rapport with Ruiz, with whom he had previously worked on Time Regained. The latter film, in a similar fashion to Klimt, was about Proust but not a biopic, rather a study of his milieux as seen through a Proustian conception of time and memory. One of the most immediately striking aspects of Malkovich’s performance in Klimt is the generally slow speed of his speech. He appears to be acting in ‘slow motion’, to cite an Eisensteinian idea, which we also see in Nicole Kidman’s performance in Eyes Wide Shut (discussed in Chapter Three). Klimt often appears to listen and wait for a beat before he responds. This is not how sensory-motor-governed dialogue works in the steady, punctual, ‘to and fro’ rhythm familiar in much of cinema. In addition, his intonation surprises each time as a certain inflection is unexpected. His words don’t run into each other because they are paced. None of these qualities are overly emphatic; rather, they make the listener unwind a little in time, become somewhat relaxed, detached, and attentive in the midst of images that are at times dizzying in their speed, fragmentation, and allegorical complexity. While he uses the English vernacular – ‘Shit!’ and ‘Fuck!’ for example – to swear at critics, theorists, and the state, his everyday speech with friends and the models is even, quiet, and slow. His exchanges with Midi have a marvellous tenderness, intimacy, and a lightness of tone that suggests long-time friendship and shared work, yet maintains the pauses and pacing. One might even say that he invents a slow, mannerist mode of acting in the way that, say, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniel Huillet created a ‘Brechtian’ mode of acting or Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced a melodramatic-Brechtian mode of acting, or Louise Brooks’ created acting as dance, or Nicole Kidman created acting in slow motion in Eyes Wide Shut. All of these examples point to the rich experimentation in acting presented in European Art Cinema, over a whole century. In Klimt, the pauses between words combined with a slow delivery create a sense of a kind of detachment

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because the response is not immediate. The texture of the voice, its register, pitch, and accent on words is minutely varied according to context. This aspect of Klimt’s speech appears to be mannered, unique in its artifice, slightly unpredictable and in this way fascinating. The twofold dynamic of fascination and detachment in Klimt as embodied by Malkovich (which is also perceptible in the construction of the images, as I have argued), may be described as a form of mannerist fragmentation and ornamentation of speech itself, done with a quiet deliberation. Klimt’s conversation with his mother and his sister, in the scene at their lunch table, brings out some of these qualities. Klimt responds to their pathological hysteria with an engaged detachment. Klimt appears progressive, in comparison to his mother and sister’s overt anti-Semitism. But the perspective shifts immediately when the mother asks him how many children he has fathered. Klimt responds urbanely that the models are free, which is not the case in the highly stratified and almost semi-feudal ethos of Viennese sexual politics in class relations. Klimt’s mother’s sardonic response – ‘Free! Evidently!’ – shifts the power dynamic, exposing Klimt’s casual exploitation of the models. We, in turn, become detached from Klimt at this moment, but become fascinated by the shift of perspective in the way the otherwise thoroughly unappealing woman speaks to the truth of gender and class politics in Vienna. Klimt’s mannerist inflection of speech enables a subtle shift of perspective within the one scene. He sounds reasonable and in control, yet is ethically compromised. The various dynamics of fascination and detachment are in counterpoint. Similarly, Klimt’s facial expression does not always mirror the emotional temperature of a scene, as in his numerous interactions with the Secretary. These mannerist devices stimulate our cognitive imagination and our ethico-aesthetic sensibility, and have a bearing on our decisions in calibrating images and sounds.

Colonial Relations: ‘Cannibals’ in Paris, 1900 Klimt visits Paris for the Universal Exposition of 1900, where his work is celebrated. Two novel ‘attractions’ are on display at the Expo: the cinematograph, projecting (among other things) moving horses, and a group of South American Indigenous people, perhaps Chilean, exhibited in a cage as ‘Cannibals’. A guard, like a fair barker, warns the visitors not to get too close to the cage or to touch them. Klimt enters the building, dressed formally in a top hat, and is drawn by the human exhibit as he moves to observe them closely. A reverse shot from within the cage shows us the visitors looking

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on at this ‘ethnic curiosity’. This sequence is a remarkable one, situating Europe itself, with its most advanced technology (electricity) alongside its ‘savage’ colonial history. The men and women in the cage simply look on, and it would appear that two among them observe Klimt calmly while he moves closer to the cage, open-mouthed with mounting curiosity and apparent fascination.

Ethnic Relations: The Chinese in Vienna, Around 1900 Klimt visits one of his models, Mitzi, with whom he has had two children, in a shabby apartment block. He is there to give money and look at his newborn daughter. While there he decides, capriciously, not to look at the baby. It is clear that the model is Jewish as there is a discussion about educating the children in the Jewish faith, according to her father’s wishes. She asks Klimt’s permission, which he says is quite unnecessary as he is an atheist. There is a clear deference in her behaviour towards Klimt in terms of social class, religion, and perhaps even ethnicity. Interestingly, when her son Gustav – named after his father – plays with two Chinese boys outside the apartment block, Mitzi runs down and slaps one of the Chinese boys and her son for playing together. The conversation that ensues between Klimt and Mitzi maps the intricacy of inter-racial relations in multinational, multiethnic and multilingual Austria with regard to the racialized ‘other’. Mitzi says that she doesn’t want her son playing with the neighbouring children because she doesn’t know where they are from; Klimt suggests the obvious: ‘China!’ She then asks, ‘Why are they here, why didn’t they stay in China?’ Klimt replies that they are not the only people to have left their country of origin. Through this interaction, the scene clearly resonates with twenty-first-century Austrian xenophobia, as well as with the memory of the emancipation of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1867. Of course, Ruiz himself was an exile in Europe, having fled from Pinochet’s Chilean regime in the 1970s. The next scene is among the most intriguing sequences in a film brimming with them. It continues the inter-ethnic theme on an altogether different register. Klimt goes down from the apartment to find the two boys who played with his son crying, whereupon a young Chinese man (who appears to know him as an artist) comes up to him and invites him to see something in his apartment. The interior of the apartment is large and shabby, home to eight people, immigrants. A woman fries something in a wok, which sizzles (a memorable sound), and several people are lying down in beds. All

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these details make the scene quite memorable in a sociological sense and a great contrast to the magnificent apartment of Klimt’s Jewish patrons, the Lederers’, for example. Klimt is taken to a room where he is shown several ink paintings by a Chinese artist. The young man wakes up the artist, an older man, and asks him to paint for Klimt, hoping that he might want to buy some. What unfolds is a delicate scene of the artist painting an abstract calligraphic design, in black ink, with the lightest touch of the brush, ink, and water, which has Klimt utterly engaged in following the foreign, unfamiliar process. As the artist paints we hear Chinese music and the sound of lapping water. The sequence ends with a child joining in and the painter holding the hand of the child so that both their hands now hold the paintbrush. This scene has a lasting impact on Klimt, who subsequently discusses Chinese art with his friend Schiele in Café Central. Schiele, looking at some prints, observes that Chinese art has no perspective, and Klimt responds by saying that he thinks it has several, depending on the brush strokes. Here one might say that Ruiz is commenting on his own practice of creating multiple perspectives on scenes, ranging through literal, allegorical, ethical, and anagogical modes, depending on how one looks. The two artists each draw delicate pencil lines, adding to each other’s previous marks producing together an image of two people, perhaps of themselves as friends. Once again, the sound of lapping water and Chinese music makes the link between the two scenes and helps us to see the embryonic work of the artists emerging out of seemingly nothing, with just a brush, some ink, and a pencil on white paper. In a film full of magnificent, memorable images, these two delicate images show us the artists at work in a unique manner. Painting and drawing replenish film and our perception of it. Those processes make us aware of the fragility and delicacy of the film image, too, despite being weighed down and bloated by the power of capital. Klimt is shown to be open to experiences of people outside of Europe, as in the case of the indigenous people classified as ‘cannibals’ and the Chinese painter living in the margins of Viennese society. Klimt had an interest in East Asian art. Perhaps there are also contemporary political lessons to be found in these scenes, in what several scholars (including Elsaesser) have referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’. The hostile European response to the arrival of refugees from the Third and Fourth Worlds (some from former colonies of Europe) may be viewed in this light by telescoping the optic of these singular scenes with media images of the fraught contemporary situation of refugees in Europe. The rarefied atmosphere of heated philosophical and aesthetic debates conducted in Café Central, even leading to physical scuffles about art, music,

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philosophy, and the nature of history, is punctured by a tramp-like figure bringing news of the battlefield of the First World War. While the lights dim, this figure, carrying a dog in a backpack and holding a newspaper, like a paper boy, calls out ‘Bad news from the front!’ and then calls to Schiele repeatedly, in an eerie manner which causes this vulnerable and highly strung artist to run out barking in fear. While the waiters try to get the boy out and restore order, this deranged man, seemingly a persona out of some theatrical pantomime, offers the first tangible sense within the fashionable ‘carousel’ of Café Central itself that there is, in fact, a World War raging in Europe, started by Austro-Hungary and its allies. Meanwhile, some of the intelligentsia and artists merely continue their exquisite conversations, debates, and quarrels, oblivious to the fact that their world is about to be dramatically extinguished.

Allegory of Film-Making A rather large part of the film is occupied with Klimt’s infatuation with, first, the filmed image of the Parisian dancer, Lea de Castro, shot by Méliès. Ruiz’s conceit is that Georges Méliès has made both a documentary of the World Exhibition award ceremony, featuring Klimt receiving the gold medal for his painting Philosophy, and a staged ‘actuality’ of the very same event, using an actor to stand in for Klimt. The documentary, the staged ‘actuality’, and Lea de Castro’s seductive oriental dance are projected to an elite audience, including Klimt, who is mesmerized by the cinematic images. The projector is as much an object of curiosity as the films being projected because the cinematic apparatus is still a new technological marvel. After the screening, Klimt is introduced to Méliès, Lea de Castro, and the actor who plays Klimt himself. The distinction between the original Klimt and his copy, the actor, is clear and stable. But the different Leas appear to be multiple. We are told that there is a true Lea and a false one. Klimt’s infatuation and obsession with Lea’s film image is used by Ruiz to explore the ontology of the cinematic image as a simulacrum produced by processes of simulation – that is to say, an image where the distinction between image and reality or the original and the copy, the real and the false, become blurred and indistinguishable. There appear to be not just two but multiple Lea De Castros, all elusive, and when Méliès ‘magically’ projects a trick effect of a silhouette of her, a mere colourless shadow, Klimt’s obsession and rapture seems to reach a peak. The multiplication of the various actual Leas appears to be a trick staged by a Duke – very much like the prototype of a film director – who

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stages, observes, and comments on Klimt’s behaviour and his appearance clinically, as Klimt is seduced by a naked Lea in a luxurious room. The Duke stage-manages the scenes of seduction and controls them while seated behind a two-way, concealed mirror – thus looking through an optical instrument as well. The Leas tease and play with Klimt’s heady emotions, puncturing them with their playfully seductive commentary about his feelings, an allegorical device. It is not only Klimt but we, the viewers, who are unable to differentiate between the several Leas within an economy of simulation of the cinematic image, despite seeing the mechanics of its production. The Duke’s interest seems to be in creating several ‘erotic scenes’ to trap the susceptible Klimt. It is as though the entirety of his cinema consists of a soft-core pornographic scenario, manufacturing variation after variation on the one scene of seduction – to the point of tedium, boredom, and disenchantment on the part of both the Duke and us as viewers, too. It is quite rare to see cinematic ‘love scenes’ allegorically dissected in quite this manner (though Godard has done something similar in say A Married Woman), with the naked Leas in such magnificent control of movement, gesture, language, feeling, and laughter. The unusual gender reversal makes the love scenes playful and humorous for the female characters up to a point, while Klimt becomes besotted. However, towards the end when a serious looking Lea appears to perform the set erotic scenes interminably, the playfulness is drained out of them and a stale air of mechanical repetition and libidinal exhaustion permeates the scene.

Klimt and the Women of Vienna16 While Klimt’s most famous portraits were of bourgeois and haute bourgeois women of Vienna, his nude drawings were of naked models from the working class. Jewish women played a large role in these works. While his portraits were few in number, he made a very large collection of drawings of the nude models. Earlier, I discussed Klimt’s mother’s criticism of Klimt on the sociopolitical aspects of his exploitative interaction with his models and his fathering numerous children. Here, I want to discuss the physical presence of the models in Klimt’s studio as a form of labour, and the manner in which they are presented to us by Ruiz. At first, we see the models swinging from cloth trapezes hanging from the ceiling. Klimt observes them obliquely through their reflection in a trough of water, which he stirs with a stick. Then 16 See Lloyd, ‘The Viennese Woman, Community of Strength’, 16–31.

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he looks at them through a glass pane on which he pours a viscous liquid. In this way, he dematerializes the materiality of the solid naked bodies, which is his point of interest in this introductory scene, an indication of his exploration of disturbance in the visual field. The models themselves are matter of fact about their work; though naked, they move around and sit as if they were clothed, confident and at ease with their physicality. In a scene when Szerena Lederer, his patron, visits Klimt’s studio and sees all the models gathered in the kitchen naked, she says, ‘They seem quite terrifyingly naked!’ Klimt responds with, ‘Sometimes.’ This feels like an important comment despite Klimt’s exploitation of the models sexually. We can imagine why it might be so. The naked models here contrast with the naked Leas, who are light-hearted and seductive, play-acting, while the models’ work does not entail acting or impersonating. They simply appear as themselves, working, assured, despite their lower-class status, in a highly stratified society. In both cases, the women, whether actors or models, whether clothed or naked, occupy space with poise and confidence, while in the scene with Lea de Castro, Klimt is at his most emotionally vulnerable, a twist on the sexual politics of much studio film-making. There is another interesting shot, this time viewed from the perspective of the naked models in Klimt’s studio. Midi has also joined Klimt, and Szerena Lederer. As they chat, four naked models are shown in the kitchen, relaxing from work. Two of the models flick through a magazine and chat while two others, leaning on a door frame exchange amused glances with each other as they observe, in long-shot, the upper bourgeois women and Klimt exchanging pleasantries. Klimt’s guests are unaware of their presence; the models seem invisible to them. This shot from the models’ point of view, while lightly handled, shows the class relations between the women in sharp relief. This scene may be viewed as an example of the shifting perspectives on a scene, and of Ruiz’s ability to condense in one striking image an aspect of Klimt’s social world and of his own relationship to women in Vienna around 1900.17 Many art historians have discussed Klimt as a painter of women, especially in his celebrated portraits of the middle and upper-class women of Vienna who supported him as patrons after he abandoned state patronage. Szerena Lederer and Berta Zuckerkandl were Jewish women who conducted famous salons in their apartments, attended by leading public figures from the 17 Another most striking image of Klimt’s powers of condensation of a milieu is that of two modernist chairs shot from a high angle, seen at the Secession Exhibition of 1900. Instead of showing the modernist Secession building, the black and white checked seats of the two chairs stand in for the white cube and grid.

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world of science, medicine, and the arts. Klimt participated in these salons, he met Rodin at the Zuckerkandl’s. Berta Zuckerkandl and Emilie Floege, who Klimt fondly calls Midi, are professional women. The former was a journalist and a leading intellectual who supported the Vienna Secession against attacks, and Klimt in particular. Floege was Klimt’s lifelong friend, companion, and confidant, and a successful business woman. She was a fashion designer who ran a high-end boutique and shared with Klimt an interest in exotic textiles, costumes, and jewellery. There are photographs of Midi and Klimt wearing kaftans she designed. Floege designed clothes for comfort and elegance, contributing to the dress reform movement in modernizing women’s dress. Ruiz pays tribute to their unusual modern friendship by showing Klimt and Floege together in a large number of scenes in the film. In one scene we see them dressed up in flowing costumes, playing around like high-spirited children, while a photographer is seen in the background, ready for a photography session. Yet another such scene has Klimt and Midi visit the Lederer palatial mansion in the presence of a curator, who appears to be a Klimt specialist! As Szerena and her portly, immensely rich husband move to their private gallery for a viewing of their extensive collection of Klimt paintings, we hear a pompous lecture being given by the curator in an upper-class English accent. Klimt and Floege, staying behind in the living room, crack up in laughter, like children, on hearing the curator’s silly commentary.

The Little Girls in White18 Klimt meets a little girl in white called Sylvia at the Paris Exposition. She is behind a screen and tells him she is hiding; she asks him to be silent as we hear a voice calling out to her. And then she says to him, ‘I want to get lost, just like you.’ A slightly older little girl, also in white, who introduces herself as Sophia, appears in the penultimate scene in Klimt’s studio, where a light snow starts falling indoors. It is an explicitly allegorical scene; the cat on the floor appears to be a dummy. It’s a posthumous image, a formal scene. Midi, Lea de Castro, and the Secretary appear at the three doors to 18 See Rios, ‘Childhood and Play in the Films of Raúl Ruiz’, 29–48. The figure of the child in Ruiz’s cinema is not a naturalist child. The child is a figure that enables a movement between different worlds – a mediator, as in the case of Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates. Usually, a boy has performed this function in Ruiz’s cinema. Here, this function is performed by two little girls in white, allegorical figures who instruct Klimt what to do and guide him to move from one world to another.

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the room, to bid Klimt adieu. Sophia carries a glass of water and leads Klimt ceremonially out of the room. In the final scene after Klimt’s death we see a frontal mirror tableau of the nurse, and Schiele, with Klimt and the little girl holding the glass superimposed onto the shot. She hands the glass to Klimt, who drinks from it. The final shot is a close-up of Klimt alone, reciting the poem in voice-over (discussed at the beginning of this chapter), as petals cascade down on him. This glass of water, half full, has appeared before, placed prominently on a hospital table across Klimt’s bed when first we see him. Its presence is anomalous as Klimt is in a coma. The motif of the glass of water appears across the film. Klimt pours water into a glass twice, but instead of using the glass he drinks directly from the bottle. The action is thereby registered. This is just one striking example of how motifs appear without explanation and remain anomalous, unexplained, and therefore not forgotten. Similarly, the presence of the two little girls is mysterious. Sophia says ‘Poor Klimt! He’s lost,’ and leads him out of the room. They appear to be allegorical figures who bridge incommensurable worlds. Because the film operates at an allegorical level and is also a dying man’s vision, one is not disturbed at not being able to understand these images. Not everything is explained or explainable within the film’s economy. The image retains a sense of mystery: it is not jarring but, rather, anomalous, and we accept its expansiveness as such. These last two scenes are constructed as explicit allegories. The three doors leading out from Klimt’s studio mark a threshold. And yet the very room itself appears as a threshold where the distinction between the inside and the outside dissolves. The softly falling snow within the room ornaments the space, creating a veil over our field of vision. Veiled perception interested Ruiz in his engagement with the arts of Islam, where it has a metaphysical function.19 The solidity of the space is modified by the texture of the falling snow. Klimt asks his friend, who has come to bid him goodbye, ‘Midi, what time is it?’ in the softest of tones, and her reply – ‘Too late, I’m sure’ – does not refer to clock time but to an existential condition, on death’s threshold. Like the powdery soft white snow, the many coloured flower petals that rain on Klimt as he stands reciting the poem to the cinematograph, ornament vision. This veiling of vision with softly falling snow and petals filters cinematic 19 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 62–63. See Chapters 4, ‘The Photographic Unconscious’ and Chapter 5, ‘For a Sharmanic Cinema’, for a cluster of cosmogenic ideas of spirituality developed by Islamic philosopher-theologians, which Ruiz transposes into his own unique mode of imagining the film image. Some of these Islamic ideas are expressed in elaborate allegories, which must have appealed to Ruiz.

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sensations, nuancing them, a singular feature of Ruizean ornamentation in these two final scenes. The stream of images wrested from the ‘rustling river of Mnemosyne’ by the ‘crystalline purity’ of the lens, their fecundity, their intricately ornamented, fragmented composition, refracted through Klimt’s deathbed delirious vision and Ruiz’s own powers of allegorical invention, make the exploration of this film a joyful challenge. I feel that this can go on interminably, because of the seemingly ‘infinite polysemia’ of the images. After all, we are in Freud’s Vienna with Schnitzler as guide! Here, I have attempted to respond to just some of the film’s multidimensional perspectives that appeal to me, though they seem to me to be very near inexhaustible. This aspect of film is what I have, in this book, called the spirit of the gift.

Bibliography Advolodkina, Polina. ‘Klimt, Modernism and Art’s Relationship with Medicine.’ In-House: Agora for Medical Residents and Fellows, 25 April 2017. Unpaginated. https://in-housestaff.org/klimt-modernism-arts-relationship-medicine-739. Accessed 20 March 2020. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne, London: Verso, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement- Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Gordon, Rae Beth. Ornament Fantasy and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Jayamanne, Laleen. ‘Raoul Ruiz.’ Agenda 30–31, May 1993, pp. 3–6. Jayamanne, Laleen. ‘Life is a Dream: Raul Ruiz was a Surrealist in Sydney—A Capillary Memory of a Cultural Event.’ In Towards Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 161–178. Jayamanne, Laleen. The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Kandel, Eric R. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present. Random House: New York, 2012. Lloyd, Jill. ‘The Viennese Woman, Community of Strength.’ Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900‒1918, edited by Tobias G. Natter, Munich, London, and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2016, pp. 16–31. Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime, London: Penguin Books, 2019. Martin, Adrian. ‘The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz.’ Cinema Papers, 93, January 1993, pp. 61–63.

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Rios, de los, Valeria. ‘Childhood and Play in the Films of Raúl Ruiz.’ Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry, edited by Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna and Andreea Marinescu. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2017, pp. 29–48. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 1. Translated by Brian Holmes, Paris: Dis Voir, 1995. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 2. Translated by Carlos Morreo, Paris: Dis Voir, 2007. Schorske, Carl E. Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992. Simpson, Kathryn. ‘Viennese Art, Ugliness, and the Vienna School of Art History: The Vicissitudes of Theory and Practice.’ Journal of Art Historiography, 3, December 2010, pp. 1–13. Stewart, Jane. ‘Filming Vienna 1900; The Poetics of Cinema and the Politics of Ornament in Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt.’ Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry, edited by Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna and Andreea Marinescu, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017, pp. 118–144.

Filmography Klimt (2016). 131 minutes. Colour. Production: Epo Films, Vienna Director: Raul Ruiz Script: Raúl Ruiz and Gilbert Adair Cinematography: Ricardo Aronovich Art Design: Rudi Czettel, Katharina Wopperman, Birgit Hutter Editing: Valeria Sarmiento Sound Direction: Michael Spencer Music: Jorge Arriagada Main Cast: John Malkovitch, Veronica Ferres, Stephen Dillane, Saffron Burrows, Nikolai Kinsky, Aglaia Szyszkovitz, Sandra Ceccarelli Klimt, Raúl Ruiz. United Kingdom: Soda Pictures. DVD 2007.



Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy

Directing films, writing about film in a speculative and ludic spirit, and teaching film-making were all part of a most unusual composite aesthetic practice for Raul Ruiz. Film, in some rather rare instances (as in Louise Brooks’s Lulu), has eluded capture by commerce even as it is an essential part of its life. The directors studied in this book have been animated by a singular belief in film as a form of life, a non-organic life. As such, financial profit, while desirable and essential to all but Parajanov, has never been the primary driving force in these directors’ exploration of the medium’s vitality. These directors have widened the expressive powers of film and the variety of forms available to cinema and thereby deepened our understanding of what is thinkable as film and with film. Ruiz as pedagogue was the most articulate on this approach to filmmaking. Alejandra Rodriguez-Remedi provides a detailed account of Ruiz’s long practice as a teacher in several continents, from 1969 at the Film Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, to the University of Aberdeen in Scotland between 2007 and 2009.1 Ruiz said that he was able to work on more commercial, big-budget films on the condition that he had spent time making films without commercial constraints. He wanted to have the time to experiment as well as have time for trial and error. Ruiz used his teaching as a way to experiment with film in collaboration with his students. Adrian Martin has also provided us with a detailed account of Ruiz’s unusual pedagogic practice of combining freedom with a certain rigour, by examining the compilation film (edited by Ruiz’s wife, Valeria Sarmiento), documenting a workshop he conducted in Chile in 1990.2 The great Soviet film-makers also had similar unique pedagogical visions (in their theory and practice), as I have touched on in Chapter Two on the cinema of Parajanov. Film, for Ruiz especially, was a medium to be explored with a 1 Lopez-Vicuna, ‘Speculative Bricoleur: Pedagogical and Televisual Ruptures’, 56–68. 2 Martin, ‘Do, and Teach: The Workshop Films of Raúl Ruiz’ http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/ do-and-teach-the-workshop-films-of-raul-ruiz. Accessed 5 January 2020.

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/9789463726245_after

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curious mind. He shuttled between the experimental workshop exercises and films and the commercial big-budget modes of film-making with agility and great conviction. Here, in conclusion, I briefly touch on Raul Ruiz’s philosophy of film pedagogy, his poetics, formulated with humour, over a lifetime. This is because his conception of film pedagogy as a poetic enterprise is something that I, too, fervently believe in now. I have consciously come to realize this only rather late in life, looking back at my teaching practice as a septuagenarian film scholar, I have felt my brain sprout (i.e. multiply connections, often nerve-wracking) when giving certain lectures, especially the ones on Chaplin and Klimt. This zone, accessed through one’s cognitive imagination, is, at times, fraught with danger, though joy is not unknown. It is dangerous because, in seeking an oblique mode of address as refrain, one has to abandon the comfort of some of the familiar and habitual and necessary coordinates and bag of tricks of a ‘well-made’ lecture. One might call this the commerce of the lecture mode for which one is paid by the university. One is not hired to deliver poetic lectures, though students might enjoy such a mode if they can glimpse and sense it, sometimes, sometimes. But, uniquely among film-makers, Ruiz has formulated an idiosyncratic philosophical vernacular. He has developed this precarious and joyous work in some detail in and through his own teaching practice, also glimpsed through his numerous interviews (largely in Spanish), and implied in his two volumes on the Poetics of Cinema. He is also one of the rare Western film-makers who has drawn theoretical ideas for film from a dizzying variety of sources, including Islamic and Chinese aesthetic and philosophical traditions.

Mimetic Play, or ‘Serio Ludere’ In this intellectual zone of play, the presentation of contextual information, historical coordinates, and the shape of an idea or concept are all delivered, but there is another imperative (spurred by Ruiz) to stir the imagination, the cognitive imaginations of the students and mine, too. This faculty, often dormant, remains so when analytic reason suppresses the affective dimension of learning, especially of film. Film is a poetic object (as Ruiz has shown us), and it is also a non-organic life form (as Deleuze has shown us), replete with sensory, affective energy, creating cinematic emotions. Film trains us to learn how to sense the infinitesimal, perceive a-signifying particles and register a nebular of impulses, the creation of a subtle body. The requisite noetic function of education is richly lined with these forces

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and more. It’s a matter of creating intervals between elements, creating modulations of voice, playing with silence, showing a clip, and giving it the time to come to life. The clip then breathes, creating a field of attention or awareness that values oblique (non-focalized) modes of perception of sound and image, creating a generous atmosphere and an ethos in the classroom that resists pedagogy as that bliss-less site of neoliberal calibration and capture of the modulatory dynamism of the brain and the central nervous system. I try not to predigest every bit of information (in teaching and in this book, for instance), but instead to lure the senses – those of the reader, but my own first and foremost – to be curious, baffled, even, by enigmatic images and sounds replete with polysemia. In my view, it would be essential, at this moment in the history of pedagogy, to minimize with whatever strategies the sensory overload that the PowerPoint seems to encourage, even mandate, although, as a tool, it can be put to another more minimalist, calibrated, sensory, and noetic uses. Here, I am guided by Jean-Luc Godard’s Dziga Vertov films or the Blackboard Films, as they were known: British Sounds (1969), Pravda (1969), Wind from the East (1970), Vladimir and Rosa (1971), and Letter to Jane (1972) come to mind. His montage created relays between the senses, between sound and image, and played with the idea of sensory overload. They were explicitly pedagogical films; they were nothing if not teacherly. From our present digital technological perspective, those celluloid, analogical, radical films would perhaps sound and feel like rather relaxed explorations of soundimage montage, rather than the shocking, annoying and/or exhilarating, frenetic bombardment they created in the 1960s and 1970s. I will conclude with two exercises from my own teaching practice, which aspired to do something more than simply impart centralized information. When studying Chaplin, for example, even as we convulse in laughter, it becomes abundantly clear that he trains us to perceive in a mimetic mode. He becomes our mentor and we have to learn on the run, from his gestures, rhythmic movements, varied repetitions, and the way he plays with objects and even people as objects. The idea of mimesis, with its thick bio-anthropological conceptual and performative history, is provided and along with that, in this first exercise, I ask students to speak to older relatives or friends to find out if they remember seeing Chaplin. This leads, in some cases, to cross-generational stories from far away and long-ago places: Ceylon, Sarajevo, Hong Kong… I also ask students to observe children, perhaps their siblings, at play with objects to see how they interact with them, transform them, with the awareness that the idea of the toy or toying (playing), has changed fundamentally in the twenty-first century, with the advent of

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electronic devices. I also ask them to show a Chaplin film to children to see how they react. I told them of a Cuban film about children in a remote village watching their very first film, Chaplin’s Modern Times, and their look of wonder and terror at the violent feeding-machine scene.3 For, once upon a time, Walter Benjamin thought that childhood play was the vital living repository of mimetic behaviour. Through these practical inducements to widen their awareness and powers of observation to make lateral connections, the students tended to respond in a lively way and begin to grasp with an immediacy (in their bodies and through their impulses rather than through the rational cognition of their brains alone) how, according to Benjamin, ‘mimesis is a compulsion to become and behave like something else’ and that children play at being not only school teacher and grocer but also windmill and train. 4 This second exercise was my own practice. When lecturing on Ruiz’s Klimt, I gave each student a copy of the poem, the ‘Ode to the Cinematograph’ (as I called it), recited as a voice-over by Klimt/Malkovich, with which the film ends. In fact, I began Chapter Four on Klimt with an analysis of this poem. At first, I became obsessed with it and imagined that it was a less well-known poem by a minor Romantic poet. Then again, I thought that Ruiz might have written it with the help of Gilbert Adair, who had translated the script into English. For some reason, I felt compelled to learn the poem by heart, which I did with some difficulty, reciting it each morning – something I hadn’t done since my schooldays. I recited it slowly at different moments of my lecture. It is only now, writing this, in the depths of my retirement, that I am asking myself why I did that. The repetition of the poem was important. It felt right. The points at which it interrupted the lecture were not predetermined – it was a question of timing and feeling. That it was learnt by heart was also important; it imparted the requisite tension, as I could forget some of it at any time and my one rule was not to look at the text. I realized that it was a wacky thing to do in a lecture, but no one walked out (after all, it was the very first lecture in my Memory of the World: Key Films course). I felt that students were attentive, one can sense it even in a large lecture theatre. I imagine that the repetition might have tempted the students to pay attention to the poem’s oblique allegorical mode of address, its synaesthetic resonance in its conception of memory as ‘the rustling river of Mnemosyne’. And I hope it also made the students in turn make oblique 3 The film is Octavio Cortazar’s Por Primera Vez (‘For the First Time’, ICAIC, Havana, Cuba, 1967). 4 Benjamin, ‘Doctrine of the Similar’, 65‒69.

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poetic connections between the sounds and images of the film and their own thoughts and feelings. It is not usual to end a film with the recitation of a poem by a character who has just died. I also like to think that the students were both somewhat baffled and perhaps annoyed, but also impressed and appreciated that I had gone to the trouble of ‘by-hearting’ the poem (as we used to say in Ceylon), imbuing it with a certain rhythm, breathing it in and out as I recited it, instead of reading it at breakneck speed off of a PowerPoint. Its allegorical images may have made them turn back and see again as in a drowning swimmers dream, all the strange sights I ever saw, and even stranger sights no man has ever seen.

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Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Dora, Henri. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Ebert, Roger. ‘Cruise Opens Up About Working with Kubrick.’ https://www. rogerebert.com/interviews/cruise-opens-up-about-working-with-kubrick. Accessed 3 March 2019. Ebiri, Bilger. ‘An Oral History of an Orgy: Staging That Scene in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick’s Divisive Final Film.’ Vulture, 27 June 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/ eyes-wide-shut-orgy-scene-oral-history.html. Accessed 15 December 2019. Eisner, Lotte. Once I had a Beautiful Fatherland. Munich: The Magic Horn Publisher, 1984. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Lulu and the Metre Man: Louise Brooks, G. W. Pabst and Pandora’s Box.’ Weimar Cinema and After; Germany’s Historical Imaginary, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 259–292. Fenwick, James. ‘“Let This Be Kubrick’s Final Word. Do You Hear Us Warner Bros?”: Fan Reception to the Death of Stanley Kubrick and His Final Film, Eyes Wide Shut.’ The Journal of Fandom Studies 6, no. 1, March 2018, pp. 21–32. Gage, John. Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Goodall, Jane. Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin; Out of the Natural Order. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Gordon, Rae Beth. Ornament Fantasy and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Baines and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Guattari, Felix. Chaosophy: Soft Subversion. Translated by Sylvere Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. Hagopian, Kevin. New York State Writers Institute, State University of New York. https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/f ilmnotes/pandora.html. Accessed 5 December 2019. Hawks, Howard. A Girl in Every Port (1928). Fox Film Corporation, Hollywood. 78 minutes. Henare, Manuka. ‘Maori on Hau: The Ethics of Generosity and Spirituality of Maori Gift Exchange.’ An Introduction to Social Anthropology: Sharing Our Worlds, edited by Joy Hendry, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, pp. 56–58. Henare, Manuka. ‘“Kote hau tena o to taonga…”: The Words of Ranapiri on the Spirit of Gift Exchange and Economy.’ Journal of Polynesian Society 127, no. 4, December 2018, pp. 451–463.

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Hutchinson, Pamela. Pandora’s Box. London: BFI, 2018. Jayamanne, Laleen. ‘Raoul Ruiz.’ Agenda 30–31, May 1993, pp. 3–6. Jayamanne, Laleen. Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-cultural Mimesis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Jayamanne, Laleen. The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Kandel, Eric R. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present. Random House: New York, 2012. Kleist, Heinrich von. ‘On the Marionette.’ https://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist. htm. Accessed 3 March 2020. Kreider, Tim. ‘Review of Eyes Wide Shut.’ Film Quarterly 53, no. 3, spring 2000, pp. 41–43. Kubrick, Stanley, and Frederic Raphael. Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay. Victoria: Penguin Books, 1999. Leacock, Richard. Lulu in Berlin. Interview with Louise Brooks. New York: Criterion Collection, 1984. Lloyd, Jill. ‘The Viennese Woman, Community of Strength.’ Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900‒1918, edited by Tobias G. Natter, Munich, London, and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2016, pp. 16–31. Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime, London: Penguin Books, 2019. Lopez-Vicuna, Ignacio. ‘Speculative Bricoleur: Pedagogical and Televisual Ruptures.’ Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry, edited by Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna and Andreea Marinescu, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017, pp. 56–68. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Martin, Adrian. ‘The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz.’ Cinema Papers, 93, January 1993, pp. 61–63. Martin, Adrian. ‘Do, and Teach: The Workshop Films of Raúl Ruiz.’ http://mubi. com/notebook/posts/do-and-teach-the-workshop-films-of-raul-ruiz. Accessed 5 January 2020. Miller, Helen. ‘Overcoming Desire: Prostitution and Contract in Pandora’s Box.’ Central Queensland University. https://www.academia.edu/29113008/The_Overcoming_of_Desire_Prostitution_and_the_Contract_in_Pandora_s_Box_1929_. Accessed 5 January 2020. Muguiro, Carlos. ‘The Transmission of the Secret: Mikhail Romm in the VGIK.’ Comparative Cinema, 2, no. 5, winter 2014, pp. 41–49. Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinematic Mind’s Eye. London: BFI, 1996. Ocean, Frank. ‘Love Crimes.’ Nostalgia, Ultra, self-released, 2011. Pabst, G.W. Diary of a Lost Girl. Hom-Film GmbH, Germany, 116 minutes, 1929. Paris, Barry. Louise Brooks. London: Mandarin, 1990.

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Pfeifer, Moritz. ‘Life History of a Fruit: Symbol and Tradition in Parajanov’s Trilogy.’ East European Film Bulletin (eefb), no. 58, October 2015, https://eefb.org/ retrospectives/symbol-and-tradition-in-parajanovs-caucasian-trilogy/. Accessed 3 January 2020. Pizzella, Stephen. ‘A Sword in the Bed.’ American Cinematographer, 33, 28 October 1999, pp. 12–13. Puppet Aesthetics. https://wepa.unima.org/en/aesthetics-of-the-puppet-europeanromanticism-to-the-avant-garde/. Accessed 1 February 2020. Ramachandran, V. S., and Sandra Blakeslee. Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Fourth Estate, 1999. Rios, de los, Valeria. ‘Childhood and Play in the Films of Raúl Ruiz.’ Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry, edited by Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna and Andreea Marinescu. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2017, pp. 29–48. Rodriguez-Remedi, Alejandra. ‘Speculative Bricoleur: Pedagogical and Televisual Ruptures.’ Raúl Ruiz’s Cinema of Inquiry, edited by Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna and Andreea Marinescu, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017, pp. 69–94. Romm, Mikhail. Ordinary Fascism. Mosfilm, Soviet Union, 138 minutes, 1965. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. 1989. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 1. Translated by Brian Holmes, Paris: Dis Voir, 1995. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 2. Translated by Carlos Morreo, Paris: Dis Voir, 2007. Sachs, Curt. World History of Dance. Translated by Bessie Schoenberg, New York: Bonanza Books, 1937. Sankaran, A. Some Aspects of Literary Criticism in Sanskrit or Theories of Rasa and Dhvani. Madras: University of Madras, 1973. Schorske, Carl E. Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992. Semetsky, Inna. Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2006. Semetsky, Inna. Nomadic Education: Variations on a Theme by Deleuze and Guattari, Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2008. Semetsky, Inna, and Duana Masny. ‘The “Untimely” Deleuze: Some Implications for Educational Policy.’ Policy Futures in Education, 9, no. 4, 2011, pp. 10–16. Shahani, Kumar. Khayal Gatha. Bombay Cinematograph, India, 103 minutes, 1988. Shahani, Kumar. ‘Putting into Question.’ Unpublished talk delivered at the Canberra College of the Arts, Australia, March 2003. Simpson, Kathryn. ‘Viennese Art, Ugliness, and the Vienna School of Art History: The Vicissitudes of Theory and Practice.’ Journal of Art Historiography, 3, December 2010, pp. 1–13.

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Filmography Pandora’s Box (Die Buechse der Pandora, 1929). 133 minutes. Silent, black and white. German intertitles with English translation. Production: Nero Films, Germany Director: G. W. Pabst Script: Ladislaus Vajda adapted from Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box Languages: Intertitles in German with English translation Cinematography: Gunther Krampf Art Direction: Andrei Andreiev and Gottlieb Hesch Costume: Gottlieb Hesch Editing: Joseph Fleisler Main Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Goetz, Gustav Diessl, Kraft-Raschic, Alice Roberts, Daisy D’Ora. The Colour of Pomegrantes (Tsvet Granata/ Nran Guyne, 1969). 77 minutes. Colour. The Armenian release version is in Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian with English subtitles. Production: Armenfilm, Yerevan, Soviet Union Director: Sergei Parajanov Script: Sergei Parajanov Choreographer: Sergei Parajanov Cinematography: Suren Shakhbazian Art Direction: Stepan Andranikian Editing: Maria Ponomarenko Sound Designer ‒ Composer: Tigran Mansurian Main Cast: Sofico Chiaureli, Melkon Alekian, Vilen Galustian, Georgi Gregechkori Ashik Kerib (1988). 78 minutes. Colour. The soundtrack is in Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Russian with English subtitles. Production: Georgia Film Studio, Tbilisi, Soviet Union Director: Sergei Parajanov and David Abshidze Script: Gia Badridze, based on the story by Mickhail Lermontov Choreographer: Sergei Parajanov Cinematography: Albert Yavurian Art Direction: Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, Shota Gogolashville, Niko Zandukeli Sound Design: Gari Kuntsev Music: Dzhavanshir Kuliev

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Songs: Alim Qasimov Main Cast: Yuri Mgoian, Sof iko Chiaureli, Ramaz Chkhikvadze, Konstantin Stepanko, Varvara Dvalishivili, Veronika Metonidze Eyes Wide Shut (1999). 153 minutes. Colour. Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Hollywood Director: Stanley Kubrick Script: Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle Cinematography: Larry Smith Art Direction: Les Tomkins and Roy Walker Editing: Nigel Galt Original Music: Jocelyn Pook Main Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sidney Pollack, Alan Cumming, Rade Sherbedigia Klimt (2016). 131 minutes. Colour. Production: Epo Films, Vienna Director: Raul Ruiz Script: Raul Ruiz and Gilbert Adair Cinematography: Ricardo Aronovich Art Design: Rudi Czettel, Katharina Wopperman, Birgit Hutter Editing: Valeria Sarmiento Sound Direction: Michael Spencer Music: Jorge Arriagada Main Cast: John Malkovitch, Veronica Ferres, Stephen Dillane, Saffron Burrows, Nikolai Kinsky, Aglaia Szyszkovitz, Sandra Ceccarelli

*** Hawks, Howard. A Girl in Every Port (1928). Fox Film Corporation, Hollywood. 78 minutes. Pabst, G. W. Diary of a Lost Girl (1929b). Hom-Film GmbH, Germany, 116 minutes. German intertitles with English translation. Romm, Mikhail. Ordinary Fascism (1965). Soviet Union, 138 minutes. The soundtrack is in Russian. English subtitles. Shahani, Kumar. Khayal Gatha (1988). Bombay Cinematograph, India. 103 minutes. The soundtrack is in Urdu and Hindi. English subtitles.



About the Author

Laleen Jayamanne has taught Cinema Studies in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney for over two decades. Prior to her work at the University of Sydney, she taught for ten or so years elsewhere in Australia. She works within a Bergsonian and Deleuzean tradition of film theory and criticism attuned to audiovisual duration, with an abiding fascination with both good and bad acting in the histories of cinema. She directed A Song of Ceylon (16mm film, 1986). Her publications include Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment (as editor, 1995), The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (as co-editor, 1997), and Towards Cinema and Its Double: CrossCultural Mimesis (2001). Her most recent book, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (2015), is on the avant-garde Indian director.

Index a-signifying particles 60, 70, 70 n.24, 77, 154 abstraction 27 n.9 and allegory and fragment 136 and Deleuze 132 n.5 and Pabst 27, 28, 30, 33, 35-36, 41 and Parajanov 55, 60–61, 63, 65, 66, 71, 76, 79 Klimt and Ruiz 132 of finger as digit 134–35 n.9 realism and abstraction of milieux 35–36 sensuous 66, 71, 76 Accattone (Pasolini) (1961) 89 acting 29, 61–62, 88. see also names of actors actors and puppets 78–79, 80 and cognitive imagination 18 androgynous 20 as dance 14, 19, 23, 25, 27–28, 34, 40, 41–43, 45–46, 50, 141 contrasting styles 32–33 doubling real-life fictional characters 111 dual roles 103 experimentation 141 hands 80–82, 81 n.31, 134–35 n.9 in slow motion 111, 112, 116, 119–120, 141, 141–142 mannerism 140–142 mask-face-close-up 80 silent cinema 42 simulacral images 111–112 styles 18–20 theatrical v. film 34 Adair, Gilbert 156 Adorno, Theodore 43 affection image 80, 132 n.5 agency 24, 26, 132 Akerman, Chantal 18 allegory 135 n.10, 137 n.11, 139 n.14, 140 n.15, 149 n.19 and abstraction 136 Klimt 127, 127–141, 133, 144–146, 148–150 as playful artifice 133 Klimt’s paintings 129–130 of film-making 131 poetic of film allegory 156–157 Ruiz 128–130 v. realism 136 Alwa (Pandora’s Box) 28–29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 43–44, 47–48 Ana, princess (The Color of Pomegranates) 62, 71–72, 74, 76, 80–81 Andriesh (Parajanov) (1954) 105–106 androgyny 20, 32, 43–44, 45, 71, 72, 76 Angel of Death 9–10, 82–83 Angel of Resurrection 97 Anglo-American film theory 14

anti-Semitism 138, 142 Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani (Parajani) (1985) 94, 97 architecture 111–112 n.1, 137, 137 n.12, 139 and social strata 40–41 Eyes Wide Shut 111 n.1, 113, 115, 116–117, 119–120 Armenia 20, 30, 55–57, 62–65, 67, 69, 70, 74, 77, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98 Armenian Apostolic Christian Church 10, 55–56, 77, 83, 88, 94 ‘Art as Device’ (Shklovsky) 59 Art Nouveau 130, 133, 133 n.7, 134, 138, 139, 139 n.13, 149 artisanal techniques 57–58, 68, 105 Ashik Kerib (Parajanov) (1988) 14, 23–53, 55–56, 58, 99–105. see also Parajanov, Sergei actors and puppets 78–79, 88 Christianity and Islam – Ashik Kerib 83–84, 92–94 clothes stolen 84–85, 91 death 10 film strip as glyph 104–105 how a child is born 86–88 how a Sufi minstrel dies 9–10, 83, 84–86, 88, 92, 99 pedagogy of image 70 Persian and Mughal miniatures 92–94 rescued by children from Turks 87–88 Sufi fairy tale and violence 99, 103–104 Sufi Islam 61, 99–100 violence 95–97, 96 wedding feast of the blind 101–102 wedding feast of the deaf and the mute 102–103 Australia (Lurhmann) (2010) 67 Australian Centre for the Moving Image 112 n.3 Australian Cinematheque 61, 94 Austrian state 139, 140 Austro-Hungarian Empire 137 n.12, 143, 145 Ave Maria (hymn) 86 Azerbaijan 55, 63, 67, 85, 86, 92–93, 97 ’Baby Did a Bad Thing’ (Isaak) 117 Barba, Eugenio 61–62 ‘Bella Forgets the Scissors’ (Eisenstein) 105 Benjamin, Walter 114, 135 n.10, 156 Berg, Alban 48–49 Bergson, Henri 15, 18, 60, 66, 76 Bertolucci, Bernardo 89 Best, Elsdon 16–17 birth 9–10, 84 how a child is born 86–88 Klimt’s children 138, 143, 146

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massacre of the innocents 87 nativity 10, 86–87 Björk 43–44 Blackboard Films 155 Bloom, Claire 42 Bonnard, Pierre 113 boy angels 10, 27, 74–75, 82–83, 101–102 brain 81–82 Brecht, Bertolt 141 Bresson, Robert 18, 90, 99 Brezhnev, Leonid 56 bridle mysticism 104 Brinkman, Reinhold 44 n.22 British Sounds (Godard) (1969) 155 Brooks, Louise 141 abused as a child 50–51 acting 26–27 as dance 14, 19, 23, 25, 27–31, 34, 40–43, 45–46, 51 as puppet automaton 25 and Pabst 27, 38 n.20, 45–47, 49–50, 51 Lulu 23–25, 30 agency 24 and film, a gift economy 37–38 and social class 23 and the New Woman 25–29 apartment 40 as character 29, 42 as commodity 24 as Pierrot 43–44 Brooks, Lulu and dance 34, 40, 41–43, 45 childhood 29, 36–37, 50 close-ups 25 costume and clothing 38, 41, 45 death 10, 24–25, 29, 37–38, 47–51 democratic allure and upper-class social contempt 38–40 Elsaesser’s reading 28 hairstyle 40, 44 in Coco Chanel 44–45 light image 24, 29 money 24 New Woman 25–29 ’Pabst and Lulu’ 49–50 Pabst’s warning 51 Wedekind origins 31–32, 41–42 movement 46 writings 51 Brown, Peter 56 Bunraku puppets’ costumes 69 Byzantine culture 64, 94, 97

cellulose 90 censorship 62, 89, 94 Ceylon. see Sri Lanka/Ceylon Chanel, Coco 44–45 Chaplin, Charlie 30, 30 n.13, 39, 42, 46, 154–156 Chiaureli, Sofiko 20, 71, 72, 74, 79, 80, 97 child abuse 51 child prostitution 37, 50, 124 childhood. see also figure of the child children, of Klimt 138, 143, 146 child’s learning journey 100 Chile 143 Chinese, ethnic relations, Chinese in Vienna 143–145, 154 Christianity 19, 37, 38, 55–56, 63, 73, 88, 93 and Islam 83–84, 85 funeral rituals 83, 86 nativity 10, 86–87 Christmas 10, 19, 35, 37, 38, 41, 50, 86–87, 113 Christy, Ian 91 The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (Steffen) 56–57, 59, 63–64, 67–69, 76, 84, 93–94, 97–98 cinematic allegory. see allegory cinematic imaginary 25, 30, 58, 120, 145 cinematic reciprocity. see reciprocity cinematograph 104, 105, 131 n.4, 136 camera lens 128 celluloid cinema 10, 19, 70, 90–92, 111, 112 cellulose 90 cinema-machine 25 film strip as glyph 104–105 ’Ode to the Cinematograph’ (poem) 127–128, 149, 156 projector 145 Civilizational Islam 55–56 classical cinema 67 close-ups 25, 33–34, 35, 36, 47, 63, 69, 81, 97, 132, 132 n.5 and fragmentation 127 mask-face-close-up 80 cognitive imagination 18, 142 and imaginal world 100–101, 106 Corbin on 14–15, 60–61, 100–101, 132 Parajanov 65, 66, 100–101, 106 poetic cinema 14–15, 154 spirit of the gift 17–18 The Color of Pomegranates (Parajanov) (1969) 55–58, 103, 148 n.18. see also Parajanov, Sergei actors and puppets 78–79 and Sayat Nova 62–63 andogynous performance 20 Angel of Death 9–10, 82–83 animated costumes 68–69 censored 62–63, 89, 94 Christian funeral rituals 83 courtly love 71–72 craft processes 55, 68–71 Criterion Collection 46 n.25, 56

Café Central of Vienna 130, 132, 136–138, 144–145 calligraphy 144 camp aesthetics 11, 73 ‘cannibals’ 142–143 caricature 133 celluloid cinema 10, 19, 70, 90–92, 111, 112

Index

death 10 duration 99 elements of nature 55 everyday life 74–75 figure of the child 63–68, 148 n.18 funeral rituals 86, 88 gestures 81 hands, relaxed or prehensile 80–82, 81 n.31 mask-face-close-up 80 miniature traditions 92–94, 95, 97 modes of perceiving 76–77 nacre crosses and the pre-historic nautilus shell 75–77 pedagogic function 97 pedagogy of image 70, 97–98 production history 94 reception 63 resonator jar scene 95–97 scenes 63–64, 64, 65–66, 69 sensuality of male monastic asceticism 72–73 sexuality in the nunnery 73–74 sound 65–66 stone architecture 98 Sufi ethos 99–100 Tai Chi digression 77–78 the dream child and the celestial child 75 the man with the peacock 82 title change from Sayat Nova 62–63 viewing 61, 77–78 wind 78 woven material 55 colour and light 33, 48–9, 123 and Brooks’s performance 26 and clothing 74 camera lens 128 cognitive imagination and light 15 Eyes Wide Shut 111–113, 116–117, 117 n.10 arbitrary v. local colour 114, 115 between bedroom and bathroom – gaseous blue light 117–120 force-development 114–115 in the morgue 122 light sources 114 commodities 24, 120, 123–124, 125 conceptual analysis 17 conceptualization. 80 concrete music (musique concrète) 65–66 continuity editing 25, 34, 98, 116 copyright 105–107 Corbin, Henry 14–15, 15 n.4, 60–61, 100–101, 132 cosmos-centric cinema vision 16, 56, 58, 128, 131 n.4 costume and clothing 38, 38 n.20, 88, 101 androgyny in The Color of Pomegranates 72 animated costumes 68–69, 71 change of colour 74 clothes stolen 84–85, 91

171 Countess Geschwitz 28 dress reform movement 148 Eyes Wide Shut 118, 122–123 Floege 148 Lulu 41, 44–45 male clothing 39 courtly love 71–72 craft processes 66, 68–71 Cruise, Tom 18, 111, 111 n.1, 111–112 n.1, 113, 115–117, 121–123, 124. see also Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) (1999) dance 103, 145 and Brooks 14, 19, 23, 25, 27–28, 34, 40, 41–43, 45–46, 51 Ashik Kerib 79 forms 69–70 how a Sufi minstrel dies 85–86 Indian dance-theatre 81 Parajanov 79 sewing as 73–74 Davtar (Sayat Nova) 64 De Castro, Lea 129, 145–146, 147, 148–149 decorative arts 58 defamiliarization 59 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 17 n.9, 18, 29, 67, 76, 80, 116, 119, 119 n.12, 132 n.5, 154 ‘Democracy’s Theatre’ 38 Denishawn modern dance company 30, 42 detachment 134, 140–142 diagonal pedagogy 107 The Diary of a Lost Girl (Pabst) 40 Diessl, Gustav 49, 51 Dietrich, Marlene 45 digital revolution 19 Dillane, Stephen 140 Dogville (Von Trier) (2003) 112 dolls 79, 86 double becoming 116 Dovzhenko, Alexander 57, 62, 86, 105–106 Dream Novella (Schnitzler) 112, 125, 134–135 duration 18, 30, 48, 60, 66, 76, 98–99, 119, 119 n.12, 121, 131 Dziga Vertov Group 155 Earth (Dovzhenko) (1930) 106 Earth Spirit (Wedekind) (1895) 30, 41, 43 Eastern Orthodox Christianity 55–56, 86, 88, 94 editing 25, 34, 65, 80, 87, 105, 116, 120, 155 Parajanov and Shahani 98–99 Eisenstein, Sergei 57, 105, 106, 132 n.5, 141 Eisner, Lotte 51 elements of nature 58, 131 n.4. see also water; wind Elsaesser, Thomas 9–11, 24–29, 44, 144 The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (Jayamanne) 15, 91, 131 n.4 ethnic relations, Chinese in Vienna 143–145

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European Art Cinema 141 European Union 141 exchange systems 24, 37 Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) (1999) 14, 18, 111–126, 141. see also Kidman, Nicole; Kubrick, Stanley and Schnitzler 134, 134–135 architecture 111 n.1, 113, 115, 116–117, 119–120 at the dining table 115–116 at the toyshop 125 bifurcation of time into audio and visual series 119 cinematic image, as commodity 24, 120, 123 class relations and the money-shot 123–124 colour and light 111–115, 123 and painting 114 between bedroom and bathroom – gaseous blue light 117–120 force-developed 114–115 in the morgue 122 light sources 114 light synaesthesia 114 critical reception 13, 19, 112, 112 n.2, 112 n.3 death 10 doubling real-life/fictional married couple 111, 120 in the morgue – Bill’s sexual encounter 10, 121–123 Indian musical tradition 120–121 Kubrick as director 112 painting and film 120 shot on set 114, 120, 125 simulacral images 111 n.1 the orgy 120–121 through the looking glass 116–117 title 114

FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) 94 Floege, Emilie (Midi) 133, 139, 141, 147, 148–149 flower petals 128, 149–150 force developed 114–115 fragmentation 127, 130, 131 n.3, 131–132, 135, 135 n.10, 136, 139 Freud, Sigmund 134, 150 funeral rituals 74, 78, 83 how a Sufi minstrel dies 86, 88, 92, 99

face 33, 69, 71, 76, 80–81, 87–88, 96–97, 101, 102, 117, 119, 122, 130, 133–137 Faculty Paintings (Klimt) (1900 -1904) 129, 134, 139 n.14 Jurisprudence 129, 139 n.14 Medicine 129–131, 131 n.3, 139 n.14 Philosophy 129, 132, 139 n.13, 139 n.14, 145 fascination 134 and detachment 140–142 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 141 feminism 27. see also New Woman figure of the child 63–68, 69, 70, 75, 87–88, 105–106, 148 n.18 film. see cinema Film Culture in Transition (series) 9 Film Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University, Santiago, Chile 153 film melodrama 10 film pedagogy 17 n.9, 61, 92, 105–107, 112 Chaplin exercise 155–156 mimetic play, or Serio Ledere 153–157 philosophy of education 15–18, 17 n.9 poetry exercise 17, 156

Galle, Emile 138–139 Gendered Beginnings (conference) 25 The Gentle Woman (Bresson) (1969) 99 George, Saint 87 Georgia 55–57, 63, 66, 72, 95, 97, 98 German Expressionism 37 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini) (1948) 67 Geschwitz, Countess (Pandora’s Box) 28, 29, 33, 36–37, 43, 50 Ghatak, Ritwick 18, 62 Ghazal music 92 gift economy 17, 23–53, 25, 37–38 gift exchange 16, 34, 36 The Gift (Mauss) 16, 16 n.8 A Girl in Every Port (Hawks) 45–46 Glasnost 56 Godard, Jean-Luc 19, 40, 57, 146, 155 gold leaf 133–134 Goodall, Jane 31–32, 37 Goskino (USSR State Committee for Cinematography) 56–57, 94 The Gospel According to St Matthew (Pasolini) 10, 84, 86–87 Graham, Martha 42, 46 Grand-Guignol 136 Guattari, Félix 17 n.9, 60 n.11, 70 n.24 Hagopian, Kevin 35–36 Halloway, Ron 105 hands 80–82, 128, 134–35 n.9 Hau Taonga, spirit of the gift 14, 15–18 Hawks, Howard 45–46 Henare, Manuka 16–17 Hinduism 85, 93, 98, 100, 121 Hollywood 10, 44–46, 51, 115–116 homosexuality 28, 89 Huillet, Daniel 141 imaginal world 14–15, 18–19, 20, 29, 60–61 and cognitive imagination 100–101, 106 India 10, 85, 94 dance-theatre 81 musical tradition 15, 61, 95, 120–121 intuition 18, 60, 100 Iran/Persia 56, 82 Persian miniature traditions 72, 92–95, 97, 102 Isaak, Chris 117

173

Index

Islam 96, 100, 149 n.19, 154. see also Sufi Islam and Christianity 83–84, 85 arts 149 Civilizational Islam 55–56 Wahabi Islam 84 Italian Neorealist cinema 67 Ivan’s Childhood (Tarkovsky) (1962) 90 Jack the Ripper (Pandora’s Box) 10, 24–25, 29, 35, 37–38, 43, 44, 47–51 Japanese Bunraku puppets’ costumes 69 Japanese Noh theatre 80 Jews 138, 140, 143, 144, 146–148 jump cuts 71, 98 Jurisprudence (Klimt) (painting) 129, 139 n.14 Kasba (Shahani) (1990) 92–93 Khayal Gatha (Shahani) (1988) 15, 61, 92–95, 98–100 Kidman, Nicole. see also Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) (1999) and colour and light 113 between bedroom and bathroom – gaseous blue light 117–120 glasses 115–116, 117, 118, 125 in Love Crimes, song 111–112 Kubrick games 115–116 performance in Eyes Wide Shut 18, 19, 111–113, 115–120, 141 sexual fantasies 117, 118–119, 120, 123 slow motion acting 111, 116, 119–120, 141–142 speech patterns 113 Symbolist woman 120 Kleiman, Naum 63 Klimt, Gustav 133 n.7, 134–35 n.9, 137 n.11, 137 n.12, 139 n.14, 148 n.18 abstraction 132 allegory 129, 140 and De Castro 145–146 and nude models 147 and upper bourgeois women 147 children 138, 143, 146 death 10, 148–149, 150 fragmentation 132 interest in pathology 130–131 The Little Girls in White 148–149 mother and sister 138, 142, 146 ornamentation 130, 131, 132 patrons 131, 138, 140, 144, 147 styles 138 syphilis 138 Klimt (Ruiz) (2006) 13, 20, 67, 153–154. see also Ruiz, Raúl allegory 127, 133, 136, 145–146 and pathology 127–151 and Schnitzler 134–135 colonial relations – cannibals in Paris, 1900 142–143 death 10, 128

ethnic relations, Chinese in Vienna, around 1900 143–145 fragmentation 127 gold leaf 133–134 Klimt and his copy 145 Klimt and the women of Vienna 146–148 Malkovich as Klimt 140–142 motifs 149 opening sequence 135–136 ornamentation 127 pedagogic exercise 156 poem 127–128, 149, 156 skeleton scene 135–136 the little girls in white 148–150 Kodak 115 Koetner, Fritz 51 Kreider, Tim 112 Kubrick, Christiane 111 n.1, 111–112 n.1, 113, 114, 116 Kubrick, Stanley 18, 19, 111, 111 n.1, 123–124, 125. see also Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) (1999) and Kidman games 115–116 colour and light 112, 113 force-development 114–115 light sources 114 mirror scene 117 postmodern pastiche 121 Kuleshov, Lev 106 Lang, Fritz 26–27 Langlois, Henri 19, 29, 51 Lazarus, Saint 74 Leacock, Richard 46 Lederer, Szerena 138, 144, 147–148 The Legend of Surami Fortress (Parajanov) (1984) 56 Lermontov, Mikhail 84, 105 lesbianism 28 Letter to Jane (Godard) (1972) 155 Levi Strauss, Claude 16 light. see colour and light Limelight (Chaplin) (1952) 42 the little girls in white 148 n.18, 148–150 Longhi, Roberto 89 Loos, Adolf 130, 131 n.3, 137 n.11, 137–138 Love Crimes (Ocean) (song) 19 n.13, 111–112 Lulu. see Brooks, Louise Lulu of Earth Spirit (Wedekind) (1895) 41 Lurhmann, Baz 67 Malkovich, John 128, 156 mannerist acting 19, 140–142 man with the peacock 82 Mansurian, Tigran 66 Maori anthropology 14, 15–18, 16 n.8, 25 A Married Woman (Godard) 146 Martin, Adrian 153 masks 80, 96, 97, 122–124, 133 mask-face-close-up 80 massacre of the innocents 87

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Mauss, Marcel 16, 16 n.8 Medical University of Vienna 131 Medicine (Klimt) (painting) 129–131, 131 n.3, 139 n.14 medieval rhetoric 132–133 Méliès, Georges 71, 105, 145 Memory of the World:Key Films course 156 metaphor 131 Metropolis (Lang) (1927) 26–27 Mgoyan, Yuri 84 microscopes 131, 138 Midi. see Floege, Emilie (Midi) Miller, Helen 25 mimesis 17, 155–156 miniature traditions 72, 92–95, 97, 102 Ministry of Education, Art Committee 129 minor arts 58 The Mirror (Tarkovsky) (1975) 107 Mise-en-scène 25, 33–34, 46, 65, 72–73, 92, 95, 96, 98 Pasolini and Parajanov 89 theatrical v. film 34 Mitzi, Klimt 143 Mnemosyne 127, 128, 149–150, 156 Modern Times (Chaplin) (1936) 155–156 A Moldovian Fairy Tale (Parajanov) (1952) 79 monastic asceticism 72–73 montage editing 34, 65, 80, 87, 98–99, 105, 120, 155 Mughal miniature traditions 92–95, 97 Muguiro, Carlos 106–107 Munich Film Festival (1988) 105 music 19, 87, 99 and speech 112, 112 n.10 Chinese 144 Indian musical tradition 15, 61, 95, 120–121 Parajanov 55, 86, 93 Sufi minstrel 65–66, 87, 102 wedding of the blind 101 wedding of the deaf and mute 102 Western 95, 121 Myerhold, Vsevolod 61–62

Noh theatre 80 nude models 115–116 nudes 120 Nulla 67

Nabi paintings 113, 116 Nabis 113 Nabokov, Vladimir 50 nacre shells 71, 75–77 narcissism 27, 29, 31, 72 narrative 13, 20, 23–24, 31, 37, 48–49, 60, 66, 69, 85, 98, 99, 104, 112 n.3, 115, 136 National Poet of Armenia 62, 70 nativity 10, 86–87 nautilus shells 55, 75–78, 95, 98, 131 n.4 Nazi film archive 107 neocapitalism 90 neorealist child 67 New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeite) 38 New Woman 23, 25–29, 40, 42, 45 The Night Café (Van Gogh) (1888) 124

Ocean, Frank 19 n.13, 111–112 ‘Ode to the Cinematograph’ (poem) 127–128, 149, 156 Odetta 87 Ordinary Fascism (Romm) (1965) 107 Ornament and Crime (Loos) 137 ornamentation 133 n.7, 136–138, 137 n.11, 139 n.13, 139 n.14 and austerity 99 and fragmentation 131 n.3, 135, 139 and its negation 94–95 and pathology 127–151, 131, 131 n.3, 138 Klimt 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 Parajanov 96 Parajanov and Shahani 90, 98–99 resonator jar scene 95–97 Ruiz 130, 132, 149–150 ostranenie 59 ‘Overcoming Desire’ (Miller) 25 ’Pabst and Lulu’ (Brooks) 38 n.20, 49–50 Pabst, G. W. 10, 19, 23–53, 34–37, 44 n.22. see also Pandora’s Box (1929) (Pabst) and Brooks 27, 38 n.20, 41–43, 45–47, 49–50, 51 and theatre 29–35, 30, 34 and Wedekind’s Lulu 41–42 editing 34 Pahari tradition 93 painting 113, 114 and film 120 gold leaf 133–134 Paisan (Rossellini) (1945) 67 Pandora’s Box (Pabst) (1929) 10, 23–53. see also Brooks, Louise; Pabst, G. W. architectural and social strata 40–41 colour and light 48 critical reception 19 film and theatre 29–35 gift economy 25 meaning 46–47 narrative 23–24 opening 25 poetic cinema 13–14 realism and abstraction 35–36, 41 pantomime 32–34, 43, 44, 71, 73, 74, 78, 93, 96, 98 Parajanov Museum, Armenia 90 Parajanov, Sergei 10, 55–109, 131 n.4, 148 n.18, 153. see also Ashik Kerib (Parajanov) (1988); The Color of Pomegranates (Parajanov) (1969); Transcaucasia acting styles 20, 78–79 and Pasolini 88–90

Index

and Sayat Nova 95–96, 96–97 and Shahani 58–59, 61, 90–92, 98–99, 99–100 and Steffen 56–57, 63–64, 67–69, 76, 84, 93–94, 97–98 Angel of Death and the boy angels 82–83 Christianity and Islam 83–84 cinematic idiom 55–66, 60, 61, 76, 78, 82–84 cognitive imagination 100–101 cosmos-centric cinema vision 15, 106 courtly love 71–72 death 94, 105 editing 98–99 everyday life 74 figure of the child 63–68 film pedagogy 105–107 film strip as glyph 104–105 hands 80–82, 81 n.31 his funeral 88 how a child is born 86–88 how a Sufi minstrel dies 84–86, 88, 92, 99 imaginal world 100–101, 106 imprisonment 56, 79, 89–90, 96 lapidary dynamism 97–99 lapidary dynamism in film 97–99, 98 man with the peacock 82 mask-face-close-up 80 miniature traditions 92–94, 97 movement motif 66, 69, 70, 71 nacre crosses and the prehistoric nautilus shell 75–77 ornamentation 94–95, 98–99 sensuality of male monastic asceticism 72–73 sexuality in the nunnery 73–74 tai chi 77–78 the dream child and the celestial child 75 the Sufi fairy tale and violence 99, 103–104 to craft the senses synaesthetically 68–71 wedding feast of the blind 101–102 wedding feast of the deaf and the mute 102–103 wind 78 Parajanov:A Requiem (Halloway) 105 Parker, Dorothy 115–116, 125 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 10, 62, 84, 90–91 and Parajanov 88–90 Gospel According to St Matthew 86–87 nativity 10, 86–87 Pasteur Goblet (Galle) (1893) 138–139 Pasteur, Louis 138–139 pathology 127, 130–131, 131 n.3, 138 Peacock, Shane 31 Peeping Tom (Powell) (1960) 49 perceptual innervation 59 Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (Goodall) 31

175 Persephone 127–128 Persia. see Iran/Persia Philosophic Society of the University of Vienna 129 Philosophy (Klimt) (painting) 129, 132, 139 n.13, 139 n.14, 145 philosophy of education 15–18, 17, 17 n.9 photography 48, 116, 136, 148 Pierrot 43–44, 44 n.22 ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (Schoenberg) (1912) (song cycle) 43–44 Pinochet, Augusto 143 poetic cinema 13, 14–15, 15–20, 58–63, 68–71, 82, 89, 91, 100–101, 106, 153–157. see also names of films Poetics of Cinema (Ruiz) 71 n.25, 132, 149 n.19, 154 ‘Poetry and Prose in Cinematography’ (Shklovsky) (1927) 59 polysemia 127, 150, 155 Pook, Jocelyn 120–121 Powell, Michael 49 PowerPoint 155–157 Pravda (Godard) (1969) 155 Price, Barry 50 Proust, Marcel 67, 141 psychoanalysis 26, 27, 28 n.11, 29, 37, 50 the public 41 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 57 puppets 25, 27, 27 n.9, 69, 71, 78–79, 79 n.29, 80, 88 Quast, Rodrigo (Pandora’s Box) 31–34, 39, 43 Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) 94 racism 143 Ramachandran, V. S. 58, 81, 81 n.31 Ranapiri, Tamati 15–17, 16 n.8 rasas 121, 121 n.13 realism 35–36, 39, 67, 136 and abstraction of milieux 35–36, 41 realist causality 30 reciprocity 15–17, 25, 28, 37, 38, 43, 114 n.6, 117 refugees 144 Renoir, Jean 35–36 revue theatre 25, 28, 30, 31, 33–35, 37, 42 rhythm 61 Robot Maria 26–27 Rocha, Glauber 18, 62 Rodin, Auguste 148 Rodriguez-Remedi, Alejandra 153 Romm, Mikhail 106–107 Rossellini, Roberto 67, 99 Rotterdam Film Festival (1988) 94 Ruiz, Raúl 71, 71 n.25, 114 n.6, 127, 132, 137 n.11, 139 n.14, 140 n.15, 147, 148 n.18, 149 n.19. see also Klimt (Ruiz) (2006) abstraction 132

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POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

allegory 128–129, 129–130, 133, 140, 149 cinematograph 128 detachment and fascination 134 figure of the child 67 film and death 129 film image as simulacrum 129 fragmentation 130, 132 on film image 10, 13 on medieval rhetoric 132–133 ornamentation 130, 132, 133 n.7, 136–138, 149–150 philosophy of film pedagogy 154–157 process of spectatorship 134 shattering mirror scene 132–133 simulation 130, 138 Rupmathi Pavilion, Mandu 98 Rupmathi, Princess 100

ornamentation 98–99 Persian and Mughal miniature and film 92–95 Shevardnadze, Eduard 56 Shklovsky, Viktor 59, 89 shot/reverse shot schema 76 silent cinema 13–14, 19, 23, 29–31, 38, 42, 46–47, 116. see also Pandora’s Box (1929) (Pabst) Silk Road 56, 92, 94 simulacral cinema 111 n.1, 111–112, 111–112 n.1, 120, 129, 130 Sirk, Douglas 10 slow motion acting 111, 112, 116, 119–120, 141–142 Smith, Larry 114–115 social class 24, 31–35, 32–33, 37, 49, 63, 71, 113, 122, 138, 142 and Christian funeral rituals 83 and costumes 38, 39 architectural and social strata 40–41 class relations and the ‘money-shot’ 123–125 impulse and the bourgeois male body 36 Klimt and the women of Vienna 146–148 Lulu’s democratic allure and upper-class social contempt 38–40 upper-class values 124 Socialist Realism 41, 57, 90 ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ 87 sound 14, 58, 65–66, 69, 72, 120–121 Soviet Union 70, 84, 90, 91, 104. see also Parajanov, Sergei censorship 62–63, 89, 94 collaboration and tradition 59–60 control of artists 93–94, 96, 97 film bureaucracy 56, 63 film pedagogy – great gurus of Soviet cinema 105–107 Goskino 56, 57 Nationality Policy 56 Socialist Realism 57 spectatorship 134 Spielberg, Steven 115 spirit of the gift 13–21, 114 n.6, 117 n.10, 150. see also poetic cinema Sri Lanka/Ceylon 10, 14, 61, 155, 157 Stanley Kubrick Exhibition 112 n.3 state violence 96, 133 Steffen, James 56–57, 59, 63–64, 67–69, 76, 84, 93–94, 97–98 Stern, Daniel 60 Stewart, Georgina 16–17 Stewart, Jane 133 n.7 stone architecture 64, 65, 98 Straub, Jean-Marie 141 studio lighting 114 studio system 51 Sufi ethos, Khayal Gatha (Shahani) (1988) 99–100

Salvation Army 35–37, 41, 49, 89 Sanahin Monastery, Armenia 65 Sarmiento, Valeria 153 Savchenko, Igor 84, 106 Sayat Nova (Parajanov), `. see The Color of Pomegranates (Parajanov) (1969) Sayat Nova, poet 62–63, 72, 95–96 and Parajanov 96–97 and princess 68–71 Davtar 64 death 9–10 everyday life 74–75 figure of the child 63–64, 65–66, 66–67 initiation 65–66 poetry 97–98 Tbilisi craft 66 Schaeffer, Pierre 66 Schiele, Egon 134–35 n.9, 135–136, 144, 145 Schigolch (Pandora’s Box) 30–34, 37, 39–41, 43, 44, 46, 49 Schnitzler, Arthur 112, 125, 134–135, 135 n.9, 150 Schoen, Dr. (Pandora’s Box) 24, 28, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40–43, 47–48, 51 Schoenberg, Arnold 43–44 Secession Exhibition, Vienna, 1900 132, 147 n.17, 148 Secessionist movement 137 n.12 Second Nervous System 61–62 the Secretary (Klimt) 132, 133, 138, 139–140, 142, 148–149 Sennett, Mack 47–48 sexuality 25–26, 28, 50, 72–74, 89, 120–121, 122, 123, 145–146 Shadow Theatre 62 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Parajanov) (1965) 83 Shahani, Kumar 15, 18, 61, 62, 70, 131 n.4, 139 n.4 and Parajanov 58, 90–92 figure of the child 100 on Bresson 99

177

Index

Sufi Islam 14–15, 60–61, 93 how a child is born 86–88 how a Sufi minstrel dies 83, 84–86, 88, 92, 99 in Parajanov and Shahani 99–100 the Sufi fairy tale and violence 103–104 Suhrawardi 14, 15 n.4, 100 super-rich 122–124, 140 Symbolist art 113–114, 120, 125 synaesthesia 15, 58, 66, 68–71, 77, 78, 97, 101, 114, 115, 128, 156 syphilis 138 system of exchange 24 Tai Chi 77–78 ‘Tales of Sound of Fury’ (Elsaesser) 10 Tarkovsky, Andre 62, 90, 104 ‘Thaw’ 106–107 Time Regained (Ruiz) (1999) 67, 141, 149 trade routes 56, 92 Transcaucasia 14, 20, 55–56, 61–64, 70, 78, 82, 84, 92, 94, 95, 97 Turkey 78, 85, 87–88, 90, 92, 93 ‘Twenty Directors of the Future’ award 94 Tynan, Kenneth 50 Ukraine 56–57, 90 Universal Exhibition, London 139 n.13 Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900 129, 139, 140, 142–143, 145, 148 University of Aberdeen 153 University of the Arts, London 112 n.3 University of Vienna 129, 131 Vallotton, Felix 113 Van Gogh, Theo 124 Van Gogh, Vincent 113–115, 118, 124 variety theatre 30, 31, 34–35 veiled perception 149 vertigo 130, 131, 134 VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography) 88, 105–106 Vienna 22, 112, 127, 132, 133 n.7, 134–138, 137 n.12, 142, 150 ethnic relations Chinese in Vienna 143–148 Klimt and the women of Vienna 146–148 social sites 136–137 Vienna School of Medicine 131 n.3, 134–35 n.9 Vienna Secession 148 violence 87–88, 103 massacre of the innocents 87 Pandora’s Box 36, 49, 51 Parajanov 92, 95–97 play violence 103–104

state violence 96, 96–97, 133 the Sufi fairy tale and violence 103–104 trade routes 92 viraha 120–121 vitality affects 60 Vladimir and Rosa (Godard) (1971) 155 Von Stroheim, Erich 18 Von Trier, Lars 112 Von Zarmikow, Dr. (Pandora’s Box) 28–29, 40 Vuillard, Edouard 113 Wahabi Islam 84 Warner Brothers 115 water Ashik Kerib 102 The Color of Pomegranates 58, 65–66, 69, 75–77 Klimt 128, 144, 146, 149 weaving 58, 69 wedding cakes 137 weddings 28, 32, 36, 41, 75, 83, 84 wedding feast of the blind 101–102 wedding feast of the deaf and the mute 102–103 Wedekind, Frank 30–32, 34–35, 41–44, 44 n.22, 46, 48–49 Weimar cinema 9, 23, 26, 27, 32, 38 Weimar Cinema and After (Elsaesser) 11 Weimar Germany 27, 37, 43, 50 Western art history 58 ‘What is Ugliness?’ (Wickhoff) (speech) 129 whirling Dervishes 78, 85 Wickhoff, Franze 129 wind 16, 78–79 Wind from the East (Godard) (1970) 155 wine making 64, 72–73, 75 woman in white 74–75, 83 work 69, 72, 81, 92, 96 everyday life 74–75 World War I 41, 130, 135–136, 145 World War II 67, 129 woven material 58, 70–71, 88, 90–91, 98 ’You Are Always in My Heart’ (song) 42 Zarmikow, Charlotte Marie Adelaide (Pandora’s Box) 28–29, 40 Ziegfeld Follies 42 Ziegler, Victor (Eyes Wide Shut) 10, 117, 122–124 Zoroastrian metaphysics 15 Zuckerkandl, Berta 131, 147–148 Zuckerkandl, Emile 131 Zvenigora (Dovzhenko) (1928) 105–106