1. Small Manifesto
I want to write by positing ideas as possibilities, rather than attempts to be authoritative*. Writing as an experiment, and ideas functioning as lenses of coloured glass that you could look through or remove as you like. A text that exists in relation to its subject like a drawing to a landscape, as something that is visibly an inadequate representational form, a model - writing transparent to the subject, which is above, not beneath it. This writing may end up having nothing to do with the original landscape at all, and then you and I might find ourselves walking somewhere else, and perhaps, hopefully, find new ideas there.
At the same time, the place we came from will still be clear and visible to us, but our relation to it will no longer be clear - then writing asks how did we get here, how did we forget, should we go back again? What is it that actually joins an idea to an idea? Suddenly, a flash, a fizzing cut in the head, pictures behind your closed eyes coming together, overlapping in impossible space, something illustrated back outside by someone putting two pieces of coloured card side by side and finding the effect pleasing, or a moment of chance when everything around you, seen, heard and felt in a place and time suddenly coheres - in a way that you didn't expect, or were you silently preparing yourself not to expect it all along? Anyway, maybe this ambiguous join should be where writing begins from, or takes place, or be what writing seeks to clarify.
* What is it in texts that produces the effect of authoritative-ness, or if you are writing, the fear of seeming to seek it, or accidentally producing it? Is it text itself wearing a disguise, woven over a very long time, a disguise of seeming very clever, or a very beautifully published book, likely unread, in a very nice house? Or is it the requirement that a theory exceed its predecessors, that an idea must argue? Isn't it completely dangerous to try and argue against argument, isn't that to dive headfirst into madness? Or is it to dive headfirst into fiction?
I want to write modestly (I'm not sure I'm succeeding!). Maybe all writing should confess to being fiction, to its own transparency - but then fear and danger wander into the room again. Maybe we can get them to go away again with a transparent writing: we admit from the first that we might be wrong, in fact we probably are, our drawing is a drawing, but we might find somewhere new in the process, we might produce a possible world. The contemporary authoritarians who deal in outright misinformation will never do this, will never admit this, and will do the opposite: in that model the drawing is not a drawing and is a place where we will be forced to live and probably die.
Could ideas and their dialogue take place side by side, in space rather than in the linearity of time, where one idea succeeds and bests another, like a wrestling match - time here produces a hierarchy. Doesn't history show us that we have thrown away an unfathomable treasure chest of ideas that we should have at the very least preserved, let alone listened to?
2. Invisible Pictures & Sonic Pictures (An Idea)
Beginning with some notes from a yellow notebook written a year and a half ago,
I would like to posit an idea about the recorded music of the Duke Ellington orchestras, thinking of this work as a visual, but not conventionally visible, experience.
The rhythms in this music:
Do you hear rhythm, or is the relation to it when reproduced by a recording something else? In a simple way, when I dance, it seems to be something I feel in my body, down to the toes, not just in my ears or emanating from somewhere in the room. In a very different way, when I listen, I can hear the sounds that work within a rhythm, but I also have an experience of the rhythm as something that sits underneath the sounds, structuring them, a silent motor in the music, perhaps the motor of the musicians actual limbs, or hearts, or brains, playing the instruments. I'm not sure if this experience is something I can hear - here I am thinking, beginning with what is audible and ending somewhere else. Simultaneous to hearing the sounds, I can think of this silent experience as something visual, like a chart.
In "Black and Tan Fantasy" by the Washingtonians the rhythm of the bass and banjo goes boom-scrape, boom-scrape, boom-scrape.
In this silent part of listening, the rhythms of an Ellington orchestra take on a visual form. The boom-scrape is a dot-dash, with the dash being a kind of zig-zag like a staircase. A drum punctuates this rhythm too, a big blot sometimes crashing in. This visual chart looks like a reel, a simple cartoon, with each figure appearing on the screen and sliding left, westwards.
3. City Lights (Walking To Duke Ellington)
This is a fairly static experience of having a listen, but what about walking around the city and listening to the Ellington orchestras through headphones, a context that didn't exist at the time of the writing and recording of the music.
Suddenly, in this new context, the silent space of rhythm is not a picture in the head, but is visible all around you: the rhythms structuring the music of the Ellington orchestras visually resemble the rhythms of the city in motion. Just as music can have a pictorial structure, a picture can have a sonic structure.
In a simple, illustrative way, boom-scrape / dot-dash suddenly becomes somebody's shoes stepping along the pavement, bass drum / big blot becomes a bus driving through a puddle, splashing everyone at the stop.
(It's remarkable how often music through headphones will line up exactly with what you are seeing - once I was on a ferry and the light at the end of the harbour, the pier, the breakwater, blinked perfectly in time to the music as we sailed out into the evening sea)
In a more complicated way, a constantly shifting picture of everyday life is produced - and this picture, by being produced in sound, then filtered back through a visual space produced by chance, has none of the normal restrictions placed on a (visible!) picture, even a moving picture.
This combined picture is a reciprocal multi-media space. The polyrhythmic clash of visible and audible rhythms will be different each time, truly improvised and subject to chance - while the audible (the recording) will remain fixed, it will be transformed each time by the aleatoric visible (the landscape of the city or elsewhere), while the liquid nature of the visible will be structured by the audible.
4. The Construction Sites Of King's Cross (Looking With Duke Ellington)
A soloist in an Ellington recording descends a scale and I descend a staircase, by chance my shoes and the notes of the solo work to the same rhythm.
In these recordings the orchestra converts the rhythms of daily life into sounds. Just as there is rhythm like a map silently propelling and organising music, there is a space of rhythm beneath daily life. Ellington and his collaborators seem to be aware of this space and able to hear it, to take ideas from it, and use these in their own compositions.
There are big and small rhythms, fast and slow rhythms, there are the crowds of commuters pressing in and out of King's Cross and there are all the individual footsteps and silent cadences of thoughts within the crowd, there are the huge structures being built over the King's Cross landscape, slowly rising, adding new floors, one by one windows that fly precariously through the air, within the slow visual rhythm of the façade being constructed there are the movements of the individual workers, the rhythms of shouts, clanking machinery, the sparks cascading from tools.
5. Possible Cities / Collaborative Cities (Playing To Duke Ellington)
The approach of the Ellington orchestras was radical, working, consciously or not, by combining ideas from different media. With the basic material of the rhythm of the city, they composed like cinema-makers, cutting rhythms together into montages, using different transformations: overlaying, dissolving, combining, collecting, connecting and collaging these patterns of rhythm. In music it is possible to transform the material in ways a filmmaker cannot.
The Ellington orchestras composed with the city as material, but by transforming the rhythms of the city into different sounds and arrangements, they transformed the city, producing radical, possible cities.
These possible cities were produced collaboratively, by the different orchestras Ellington formed. Together they built cities as places of freedom. The compositions of Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and other band members, made out of the city, were a map and a blueprint the orchestra could use to construct these possible places through playing together, harmonising and especially improvising. Improvising on the rhythms of the movement of the city, a soloist could move through a possible city in a possible way, a liberated way, could dance across the skyline, on tiptoes.
Despite his own dukedom, in Ellington's orchestras there were many composers, and in the recordings too he takes a quieter role, equal among the band members, while big personalities like Ben Webster or Johnny Hodges could run wild with the blueprints, sometimes altering them permanently, and become characters with their own stories in the possible cities of the music.
A collaborative structure of working together functions in co-operation with a collaborative materialism in the music itself.
Furthermore, entirely different artists outside the orchestras could, and did, use the body of work produced by the Ellington orchestras themselves, sometimes travelling in radical new directions. In a work like Thelonious Monk's LP Plays Duke Ellington for instance the material is transformed through Monk's own ideas. This was a new way for composers to be able to perform and relate to one another's works.
6. City Sounds (Dancing To Duke Ellington)
Stepping out of the railway station and walking down to the Euston Road you can hear many overlapping sounds. Sounds working at different speeds, rhythms, pitches and timbres fade in and out of the space, while others drone and hum, or oscillate, like the constant waves of traffic. A piece of music might recreate this structure by using lots of different overlapping metres and tempos at the same time. The advent of the arrangement of music digitally, using timelines, makes this much simpler.
Or, you could use the same underlying structure, which is chance. Ellington and John Cage are not usually put into the same history, but their approaches are connected. While the Ellington orchestras took elements from the city and transformed them, Cage used the same principles as the city in progress to compose, chance principles.
Cage:
“I couldn’t be happier than I am in this apartment, with the sounds from Sixth Avenue constantly surprising me, never once repeating themselves,”
"If you listen to Beethoven or Mozart you see they are always the same. If you listen to traffic you see it's always different." (Amusingly as soon as Cage has finished this sentence a perfectly timed, extremely loud car horn sounds in the background, as though God or a motorist was agreeing)
The original music of the Ellington orchestras, and by extension almost all jazz, in its live, chance form, is no longer accessible. We only have the recordings, with the improvisations by the original band members in those recordings only able to repeat themselves, perfectly, each time. On the other hand, there is the lasting democracy of the chance for any band to play those compositions and for new individuals to improvise with them again.
Cage's music, for better or worse, reduced the element of individual performers, meaning the music we might hear at a performance today seems to function in almost the same way as it did at the first performance, except with wildly different results - the element of chance is perfectly preserved (is it odd to think that it could be anything else?).
"I make a music for which I am not so much the composer as the listener too."
Ellington and Cage were not representational artists - they used and transformed structures like rhythm and chance. They were transformational artists. The Ellington orchestras were the precedent for avant-garde practices later in the century.
Representation is attempting to take something out of the world, whether you are content with the world or not. Transformation is producing possibilities from the structures of the world, and connecting these back into the world you are rightly discontented with. This is possible if you construct possibilities with the structures of the world. The underlying unity of the material allows the altered material to be connected back and used in the world.
Watching a video of Yvonne Rainer's famous dance Trio A (1966). While lots of the movements seem to come from dance, some of the smaller, quieter movements suggest the movements of people in the city, walking or riding trains or working, hauling, constructing. Sometimes the dance resembles the dallying, distracted patterns children make walking down the street. The silence and simplicity of the piece isolates these gestures and allows them to be connected together and transformed in different ways, into something extremely complicated, yet quiet and serene.
Something similar happens in a very different way in the dances by Pina Bausch and collaborators in Chantal Akerman's film One Day Pina Asked (1983), particularly when the dancers produce short pieces in which everyday gestures are isolated and repeated very quickly.
In Trisha Brown's Roof Piece (1971) the transformed gestures of dance are connected back into the city and the world at large, taking place in and transforming public space.
Imagine the Ellington orchestra playing in the middle of a street. Maybe this collision of the city with a possibility of itself and its gestures transformed creatively, would look like this:
David Hammons - Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983)
7. From The Roof To The Record Player (Listening Back At Duke Ellington)
If the Ellington orchestras were constructing possible cities with each performance, the recordings we have are not just preserved performances, they are preserved possibilities and possible cities.
We could use these possibilities from the past as ways to access or imagine the cities of the past, the New York of the 1920s.
Or, we could imagine these possible cities visually, maybe they would resemble the images of cities in films from the period, the constructed cities standing in for cities in the films of Chaplin, or the enormous set constructed for Sunrise (1927).
City Lights (1931)
Cities like the city painted into the background of Frank Sinatra's album In The Wee Small Hours (1955).
These images register as the big city without using real cities, by taking and re-arranging the visual material of cities for specific ends - for establishing the context of the metropolis, or for atmosphere. They can function as a visual illustration of the transformational processes used in the music of the Ellington orchestras.
Recording was a means not only to preserve, but to distribute the cities the Ellington orchestras created together, allowing these cities to be accessed and used by others, especially others far from the places the bands would perform. Liberation became reproducible and distributable.
This process becomes the basis for the Alan Plater scripted television series The Beiderbecke Affair (1985), where Trevor Chaplin the woodwork teacher escapes into other worlds through the headphones in his Leeds flat.
8. From The Record Player To The Street (Writing To Duke Ellington)
From my notebook:
Or this process takes place when I walk through King's Cross and the cities of Ellington simultaneously as though they were printed on transparent sheets of plastic. There is a revolution in this combined city, but it is a revolution only I can access in this private way.
Looking at the street again. What are these rhythms and gestures that take place in everyday life?
Looking out of the window of the train at the commuters waiting on the platform. What would a section cut from the concourse sound like?
The city itself is unconsciously composing and we are both the subjects and the performers, we walk, step, dance, construct, within its structures. Who decides the structures?
Within these planned and policed structures people write their own music out of everyday life, finding gaps of space within which to construct different forms of freedom. There is always a possible city and a gap to find. Music itself is a gap without the same limits as physical city space. Sometimes the possible spaces of music cross into the physical spaces of the city, as dances and carnivals.
Then there are moments where the music of the city alone will do, strange moments where everything seems to line up and work together - all sorts of unexpected music and unexpected rhythm becomes possible in the unexpected connections of a moment of chance, a pencil turns and a cathedral turns with it, the stars appear over the Euston Road and the headlights of the traffic are like stars too. People meet by chance on a street corner and become friends. We are just looking for good places to listen in the endlessly changing concert of the city.
I stop my pen as the train pulls in - this way of thinking, structured but also chance-based, makes writing and writing music simpler. This way of writing, in public space, makes the search for something possible possible.
9. Cutting To Duke Ellington
Returning to the colliding pictorial and musical rhythms of the experience of walking around and looking at the city while listening to headphones, what possibilities for working with the moving image does this open up?
The polyrhythmic nature of this experience is exciting and various. Perhaps this is why when a series of moving images is cut to the rhythm of a piece of music, the effect can be quite unsatisfying.
D.A. Pennebaker's film Daybreak Express (1953) uses an Ellington recording as a soundtrack and features both cuts and moments that fit the recording and cuts that do not. While the effect is fun and exciting, the film has the closed off feeling of a novelty compared to The Wonder Ring (1955) by Stan Brakhage, which is shot in the same location but is completely silent. This film is full of space and air, the pictures have their own qualities that are allowed to unfold slowly, you can walk around in this film, it feels like being there. Yet it's also much more difficult to watch. Presumably in its original setting it would have been accompanied by the steady rhythm of a projector.
From Daybreak Express (1953). In this shot in particular you wish you could just sit and watch the sun flicker through the silhouetted train without the picture being whisked away.
By cutting the rhythm of the pictures to the rhythm of music you are simply repeating the same thing twice, while losing both the rhythms that the pictures already have, and the productive space produced by the collision of the two.
Everything seems to open up in moving image production, and the form becomes immediately more satisfying, as soon as you disconnect the soundtrack from the image. Disconnecting the rhythm of how things sound and the rhythm of how things look and move allows a filmmaker to compose in two media at once, and produce a third by the combination of the two. This process could be taken further given the other possibilities that could be combined into a moving image work, dance, gesture, text, colour and so on.
Making the audible visible and the visible audible might produce something possible, produce new motion.
The collaborative works of John Cage and Merce Cunningham manage to achieve this through non-cinematic means, by combining completely independent works in music and dance that share nothing other than that they take place in the same space and begin and end at the same time. When asked why these works were performed together, Cage told one attendee:
This extract from Spare Time (1939), a GPO film directed by Humphrey Jennings, also features independent musical and pictorial rhythms. Simple images that isolate different rhythms and gestures are featured alongside the sound of a marching band, who we also see on screen as a bookend. The cuts are not dictated by the music of the band but seem to be based on preserving the durations of each gesture. This passage suggests there is the possibility of using sound-image polyrhythms to produce further meanings. This film concerns the leisure activities of industrial mill workers, and the fact that the rhythm of the marching band and the rhythm of each of the leisure activities we see - gardening, drawing in chalk on the street - are independent of one another reinforces their independence, liberty and self-directed pace as activities.
10. Ellington Lights (Looking Back At Duke Ellington)
There are a number of instances of Ellington engaging with the moving image in his own lifetime.
Film & Video
The internet is awash with fragments of moving images of the Ellington orchestras.
In Jam Session (1942), which some unverified research online suggests may have been a short film distributed for a kind of visual jukebox, Ellington and members of the famous Blanton-Webster era orchestra mime along to "C Jam Blues" together in a kind of underground cafe set. Some of the band members are introduced one by one, including drummer Sonny Greer who starts the film disguised as a waiter.
Despite its clearly fabricated setting, this film has a certain quality as an image of the Ellington band. The idea of having each member of the band join one by one captures some of the spontaneity of the music, especially as the musicians appear to be wearing street clothes for a winter day, enormous overcoats and hats.
More than this though the film is a great image of the band as a band playing together, something the elaborations of the music can obscure. That Ray Nance is playing a violin connects the image to older groups of musicians, to folk music. This group of musicians, who carry their instruments in cases and can play while walking around or sitting at a table with a cup of coffee, could presumably set up and play together anywhere. The cheap set ends up reinforcing this idea, it looks as though this group are hiding out somewhere.
There's something quite liberating about this film. Here collaborative music seems so simple, you wonder why there aren't more groups of musicians, if playing music together can be something simple and fun like this. The poor quality of the video upload is of an already worn print, full of vertical lines dancing along to the music.
Some of the same musicians appear in a performance of "Take The 'A' Train" from the film Reveille With Beverly (1943), a musical that featured guest performances by many notable musicians. This time Ellington and the band perform in a train carriage, with Betty Roche singing and dancing up the aisle.
At least a decade ago I saw a fragment of film of Duke Ellington - at least I think it was him - talking to camera about rhythm. In my memory it's a grainy old film, pre-war, Ellington is in his prime, dressed to the nines and talking casually to the audience with incredible charm. He explained something along the lines of "It's simply impolite to click your fingers on the beat".
Dance
In 1970 Ellington specifically composed music for dance, for a ballet produced in collaboration with the choreographer Alvin Ailey entitled
The River.
According to the Ailey company's website, this was "Duke Ellington's first symphonic score for dance". This music, which was made in collaboration with composer Ron Collier, seems to be some of Ellington's least known work but the closing section in particular is wonderful.
Ellington's improvisational approach was not blunted by the commission. From the LA Philharmonic site:
Intriguingly this site also mentions that Ailey had previously collaborated with Ellington on a large scale multimedia stage show entitled My People which was held on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. I haven't been able to find any documentation of this performance online.
Ailey went on to choreograph other dances to Ellington music including Night Creature (1974) and Pas de Duke (1976).
Dance Lost & Found
Are there any moving images, buried somewhere in the world, of the lost dancers to the music of the Ellington orchestras? The dancers at the Cotton Club, or the spontaneous dancers who responded to the lost spontaneity of so many lost solos.
On the internet again I can find
a short fragment of footage, provenance unidentified, of Ellington and band playing on a stage behind a large mirrored floor. Five tap dancers enter and begin to tap dance to the music. These five dancers stand in a compact line directly behind one another, dancing identical steps. The effect looks a little like those multi-exposure time lapse photographs that show the motion of a dancer or an animal, creating a trail of ghosts. The four dancers whose faces remain partially obscured might function as an image of the lost dancers to the music of the Ellington orchestras. They are especially ethereal when they are reflected in the wide mirrored floor that the dance never seems to reach, never crosses into.
The lack of information attached to this fragment gives it a haunting quality, the way the curtain opens and closes, the lack of language, the idleness of some of the band members in the background. It's like a photograph of the band has come to life. A curtain opening on to a strange part of the ragged archive of the internet, potentially welcoming in a slightly unsettling way, a silent dance that will repeat endlessly, the same solo, the same insistent banjo rhythm. The band are in the background. Where is this space? What is that strange mirrored floor? A fragment of sound and image that is a little like the fictional spaces in Ralph Ellison's novels, spaces that seem to construct ideas out into objects and atmospheres, thinking about and through them spatially.
In the neglected Cotton Club (1984), the search for the lost dancers takes place in a representational way, attempting to recreate the setting of the Cotton Club, particularly the dancers, through the form of a commercial film. Admirably the production uses this as an opportunity to spotlight the work of contemporary performers, most prominently Gregory and Maurice Hines.
Perhaps the most famous lost dancer is the woman at the centre of the famous story of a supposedly out-of-vogue Ellington band's performance at the Newport jazz festival in 1956.
I can have the rare experience of a myth with this story, not knowing where I ever heard it but being able to recount it, with inconsistencies new and old, from memory. The big band era is over and the lacklustre crowd think they've heard it all before until relatively unknown tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves uses his solo in a bridging section of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" to take off on an unprecedented long solo that grows wilder and wilder, prompting increasingly crazed encouragement from the other band members. At some point in this performance a woman in the crowd gets up and begins to dance wildly to the music, prompting the rest of the crowd to work themselves into a frenzy, leading to a near riot. This single performance prompts a reversal of Ellington's ailing fortunes and everyone lives happily ever after.
Much of this myth is documented. "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue", and Gonsalves' long solo can be heard on the (wonderful) album Ellington At Newport (1956), more recent versions of which have restored the recording quality of the solo. The dancer in the crowd has also been identified as Elaine Anderson, who even appears to have been photographed at the event.
By drifting through the various versions and accounts of this story available online (all the more unreliable as a result), you can see that there are still variations in the story. How much trouble were Ellington and co. really in before this concert? Sometimes you read that various members of the band went missing before the show, leading to the musicians being pulled from the stage after two pieces and forced to wait for three hours before returning. Sometimes you read that the concert was already turning into something of a comeback before the performance of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue".
More interesting is that nobody can quite agree on the different details. Sometimes Anderson gets up in one of the boxes, signifying wealth, the music turning even the squarest crazy, while sometimes she dances in the aisles or with a friend. Sometimes she actually leaps up on to the stage and dances with the band.
This story retains some mystery, and continues to function as a myth, because everyone involved, as well as subsequent tellers of the story, all agree that something happened at this concert, but what started it isn't clear. Was it the solo, the dancer, the Duke himself? What is it that gives this story an enormous appeal? If it is being exaggerated, why? To what ends are these exaggerations for?
When things seem at their bleakest there is still, just about, the element of chance at play. Nothing so far can change that anything might happen. For no clear reason a dancer begins to dance, a musician is suddenly inspired, unrelated activities begin spontaneously and begin to work together simultaneously, everything begins to revive again. We can use all the fragments of lost music and lost dancers to start to make our own music, our own dances, our own images.
11. Fragments: Sketches and Routes
Diversion Bridge No.1 (Distribution Diversion)
1. the era of popular art - limited channels of distribution with greater audiences accessing each one: radio, cinema, television
2. within this structure these channels could be used to distribute authoritarian propaganda, and control information in general (the 1930s)
3. now we work with (for?) multiple digital structures with more channels than can be comprehended - the optimistic idea is that this is a democratic process which cancels out the dangers of the structure of (2.)
4. instead these malfunctioning archives still lead to disinformation, propaganda and hijacking through the creation of complete chaos, the overloading of narratives, and a solution is difficult to imagine because the kind of co-operation and organisation (in actual, chance based space and time) that would be required to counter this problem is increasingly impossible in the hyper-individualistic culture this hyper-distributing structure enforces. the machine which can distribute everything to everyone doesn't makes it difficult to distribute anything to anyone
5. the new structure is still a structure within which technology and the market are unregulated and combined, which inevitably leads back into the same problems - fascism, authoritarianism
6. there has to be a conviviality, an appreciation of contexts, of space and time, an analysis of how we are using things, what for, and what sort of world we want to create with them
7. what did jazz do in the era of popular art? jazz liberated people, jazz opened up spaces for the creation of new communities, new ways of life, for integration, co-operation and a greater liberty to express sexuality. could this happen again?
"The event that will light the way for immigration in North America is the talking picture. The silent film brings nothing but entertainment - a pie in the face, a fop being dragged by a bear out of a department store - all events being governed by fate and timing, not language and argument. The tramp never changes the opinion of the policeman. The truncheon swings, the tramp scuttles through a corner window and disturbs the fat lady's ablutions. These comedies are nightmares. The audience emits horrified laughter as Chaplin, blindfolded, rollerskates near the edge of the unbalconied mezzanine. No one shouts to warn him. He cannot talk or listen. North America is still without language, gestures and work and bloodlines are the only currency."
- from In the Skin of a Lion (1987) by Michael Ondaatje
Diversion Bridge No. 2 (Gesture Diversion)
1. the dances of silent cinema actors - dances made up of gestures, city gestures, just as the music of ellington is constructed of city gestures
2. early jazz - silent cinema - the great american songbook - work from this period (between the wars?) has a quality that is difficult to describe but impossible to avoid. words like 'iconic', 'timeless' or 'classic' seem completely redundant. yet there is something there - this work is just there, natural, you can write about it, in particularly you can adapt it, make collages with it. recent myths. what produces this quality?
3. america before the war. popular art made within and for the industrial american city at its peak, the remnants of which, like the older parts of the manhattan skyline, also have this quality. histories of struggles during this period make this a difficult thing to revere. after the war the works that seem to have the same quality come from countries excluded from industrial overdevelopment, places like kingston or rio de janeiro
4. artists lived and worked in this (communal? chance based?) environment, maybe through exposure they found ways to condense the rhythms of the city down to their simplest forms. this took place within (an exploitative?) a mode of production that was itself industrial, the recording industry, hollywood, tin pan alley. does this produce a quality that goes beyond the work of an individual?
5. is this the quality, that these works become the form of democracy, the people, liberty, at least as ideals? the cinema of nazi germany is always a spectre in this period.
6. ellington and brecht as modern bawdy, or chaplin. chaplin is able to take extremely broad social situations without generalising in an insulting way, and producing comic gestures within these. these gestures take each scenario and turn it on its head in the simplest possible way, for instance in the scene from City Lights in the expensive restaurant where he takes a napkin and tucks it into the waistband of his trousers rather than his collar
7. what dates chaplin's cinema more than anything else is that you can tell the cadences and pacing have been designed (brilliantly) for a far more raucous cinema crowd than those that exist now - an illustration of this takes place in the chaplin screening sequence in Au Revoir Les Enfants. when viewing chaplin alone, through a computer screen particularly, the films hardly work at all other than as objects of contemplation and study. popular work of the 20th century in our own time becomes a private experience - the scene at the end of Irma Vep where the film director falls asleep watching video copies of Les Vampires. the complete transformation of context transforms our readings. yet the original contexts remain partially visible, especially in the memories of older people.
Diversion Bridge No. 3 (Realism and Representation Diversion)
1. works of art that are: representations of the world that are conscious of their own function and limitation as representation. they operate in the undefined space between illusion and abstraction: how would you define this space?
2. we are narrowly free and our activity is finding gaps for liberation: but what happens in these gaps?
3. brecht, eisenstein, ellington, chaplin, and so on, seem to work in this way. after the war chaplin's tramp and the kid become de sica's bicycle thieves. representation has changed. from then until now realism becomes increasingly habitual, representations of the world become less conscious of their functions and limits (this is a broad and bad sketch). see recent european cinema's infatuation with a cinema of rural struggles utilising non actors, particularly children
4. in chaplin the tramp becomes a figure for the inequality of the world but is allowed to win, is given that possibility
5. ellington and chaplin produce transferable cities, sets of gestures a viewer could use in any city
6. chaplin-cinema as anti-individualist experience - yet even within his own career the cadences of cinema had clearly moved away from being designed for the bawdy crowd, decades even before private reproduction of film was possible. therefore the fabled end of cinema, which is variously brought about by television, video reproduction, and so on, is something of a red herring. it happened long before. this feeling of the end is part of a wider drift towards total individualism in the west?
7. the space of rhythm is a space within which everything is connected but simultaneously is dictated by chance.
