brechtwork: FOUR THEATRE POEMS

Some fragments that articulate ideas these notes have been trying to get at:

"Whatever you portray you should always portray
  as if it were happening now."

"At the same time express the fact that this instant

 On your stage is often repeated"

"Nor should you let the Now blot out the

 Previously and Afterwards, nor for that matter whatever

 Is even now happening outside the theatre and is similar in kind

 Nor even things that have nothing to do with it at all"

"So you should simply make the instant 

 Stand out, without in the process hiding 

 What you are making it stand out from."

"You should show what is; but also

 In showing what is you should suggest what could be and is not

 And might be helpful."

(Emphasis my own, quotes from 1976 Eyre Methuen edition)

THE LONDON NOBODY KNOWS (1967)

Familiar places found in the images:

Old Montague Street. The buildings on the left are still there among trees. The buildings on the right no longer exist.

Ampthill Square Estate under construction

IRMA VEP (1996) As A Compass

- A carnival and poem about different processes of representation in the moving image, centred in the context of narrative cinema, presented in successive strophes with a structure that becomes more complicated than simply representing representation as a phenomenon of mismatched doubling (as a rhyming poem). A poem in which any line could rhyme with any (number) of the other lines - the number of combinations and ideas this could produce - would this also be achievable on the page (would the page be more suitable)? A film about making films as a good way to begin a map for a journey between different island/ideas of what the moving image could be or do, a route into the post-cinematic archipelago. In the first part of IRMA VEP each process of representation slowly adds another line:

The moving image itself as a representation of visual reality. 

Actors, including people representing themselves as in so many recent comedies, but in contrast to those here the actors are not exaggerating the negative aspects of their personalities, but portraying themselves as quite reasonable, which is oddly confusing. 

Images sampled from other films, including a video of a film from Hong Kong which the camera lingers on for a long time (where do these sampling moments situate the camera being used at the top of the structure as the sampler?).

The genre of the fiction film about making fiction films as in LA NUIT AMERICAINE (1973) and many others (as opposed to the production documentary in something like A.K. (1985), although the fiction idea and an impressionistic film like A.K. throw the whole idea of 'documentary' into confusion).

The culture of remakes.

The careers of actors with a distinctive style (like Jean-Pierre Leaud) as the slow construction of a persona.

The craft of the actor, using disguises, costumes, cosmetics.

The role of a stunt double.

The process of rehearsal, a scene where actors imitate motions first made by filmmakers.

Translation as a difficult attempt to represent in one language ideas expressed in another (the use of multiple languages in this film also makes subtitles effectively inevitable regardless of the audience).

The result of a working process as a representation of the original intention.

Representation in cinema in the political sense, particularly representation of women (in this film there is lots of attention paid to the difficulties this might put women working behind the camera in).

The rushes as a backwards representation of the future film.

Describing a film you've seen as a representation of that film.

Looking in a mirror.

- Each of these ideas is woven together in the montage, but you have to keep your attention up to think about what's happening because the camera dissolves smoothly between the different levels of illusion and it's easy to lose yourself, you are watching the film the characters in the narrative are making and then watching IRMA VEP again in seamless transitions (the mode of capture does not change).

- As the film continues the structure blossoms out from an overlapping constellation of these dualistic forms of representation into a compass pointing out different directions for the moving image, making arguments for each, while using each formal aspect of the cinematic apparatus to do so. Representation as a protracted struggle and practice as well as or rather than an ambiguous mirroring process?

- Within the narrative and dialogue, the fictional production breaks down and the characters begin to argue what the point of their film and cinema in general is; different viewpoints expressed include that cinema is apolitical, is based on desire, is a fantasy, is purely technical, or is repetitive and finished (using representation (the entertaining aspect of narrative) as a vehicle to critique representation, something ambiguous?). One scene features a journalist going on an extended rant in favour of action films, claiming this is what the public wants and that the state has no business funding smaller films. The narrative also attempts to show the production of a film as a protracted negotiation on the social level as well, particularly within the context of gender and labour relations.

- Different ideas of cinema are incorporated into the montage visually, including early silent films, action films and militant cinema from the 1970s that different characters watch on television sets (this  allows the camera to capture the crackling visual effects of video reproduction (one of these video-transferred films even features a sequence based around an old analogue editing table)).

- The soundtrack also experiments with different ideas, switching between using diegetic and non-diegetic music (as in a scene of a moped around Paris). There's a point where the soundtrack cuts entirely, putting extra emphasis on a mesmerising moment when a character in the fictional film performs a leaping stunt, a symbolic gesture of freedom in space - is this sort of performance a way forward? Later another of the characters mirrors this leap in everyday life as a spontaneous rather than scripted moment of liberation, suggesting a relation of cinema to everyday life, but this is rendered ambiguous: the second leap is also scripted.

- There is no clear answer or preference for any of these arguments which is to the film's credit. The ending suggests in 1996 the moving image as cinema was something that could could reproduced and recontextualised more than ever- cinema ends here in the film director's flat, on the DVD player among cats, serial novels and other relics of the 20th century ("Arletty, street thugs and slums" he yells earlier), sending even its most ardent cinematheque devotees to sleep, importantly in the comfort of their own homes, separated from one another. Throughout the narrative the crew members and filmmakers ultimately seem slightly bored with, if not completely sick of, cinema. 

- Yet the ending also points to the possibilities of new technologies, new forms of social/political organisation, and a return to smaller experimental modes of production as routes for the moving image to take. The rave replaces cinema as a more vivid communal experience of sound and light (heightened by drugs and their attendant paranoid episodes), while the analogue scrapes itself out of existence. It would be worth returning to this sort of inquiry in 2023.

Two Films By Vivienne Dick

- Two films by Vivienne Dick who moved from Ireland to New York City in the 1970s. 

GUERILLERE TALKS (1978)

- A record of people constructing their lives the way they want to in the city. Watching this film reinforces the idea that in this time and place a person could do that without so much resistance as usual - is this true? How much danger was shot through everyday life? The film does show that space and time were abundant (see the astonishing still at the top). (is this era accessed through artworks more than accounts?).

- thinking aloud: If a city won't allow people to decide how they would like to live, a film can. You can do what you like in a film, because it's temporary and because it's an image, it isn't exactly real. It's easy to get confused because the image in the film resembles the city near identically. This is also revolutionary, because you can see this convincing illusion of the city (it's more than that), but can also perceive in the same space that which is not everyday and of the rules of the city, but is made possible by the film. These two layers of ideas are transparent and overlaid on one another, become inseparable when experienced, and this combination of the two can produce radical and repeatable new ideas of everyday life. Film is transparent and overlaid on the city, but also contains part of the city (the light), a part which has already disappeared when the camera stops, disappearing further and further after. 

- Thinking again of PORTRAIT OF GA and THE FABELMANS. This revolutionary quality comes in films taken directly, improvised (without (traditional) actors/performers? cf. Rivette's films?), but then an expensive commercial production also often uses real locations; sometimes commercial films can have this quality too; maybe the idea is that the quality is more vivid and condensed in the improvised films, and the expense is not necessary. THE FABELMANS is interesting because it shows someone making a conscious decision to reject an improvised, chance method in favour of a rehearsed, representational one. Why is that choice made? Within that film's narrative the former is just too terrifying and creates too many moral quandaries. An inability to deal with the loss of control and the world as something various. Following this idea...

Still from RAGING BULL

- Also thinking again of the staged home-movie trope in cinema. The super 8 sequence in RAGING BULL is the most striking, and the most striking moment within it, which somewhat resembles the images in GUERILLERE TALKS, is when the faux-amateur camera strays away from the wedding and films the New York buildings - the aspect of the disappearing city. It's very stirring, especially with the romantic music, but it requires so many resources to get there.

- GUERILLERE TALKS consists of a series of durations (each the length of a full super 8 reel) in which different people are given access to the sound/image space of liberation. A series of PORTRAIT(s) OF GA, or a series of landscapes of people. A series of ideas for transforming everyday life in the city.

- Wearing sideburns and playing the Evel Knievel pinball machine while ignoring the camera for the full reel. Filming very openly, drawn to different details, with hands invading the shot without warning.

- As in PORTRAIT OF GA the camera can "think through the littlest objects" and details of interiors, like shoes and telephones. Unlike in Tait's film the sound here is captured as directly as possible; often the microphone is actually visible on screen. 

- People hammering nails into their heads, gesturing silently on a rooftop, or playing guitar in what looks like an old warehouse while people light sparklers. There's an amazing shot that tracks out of a TV set to someone swinging a light fixture through the space before returning to two guitarists who are slashing at their instruments.

- There's also a news report from some enviable waste ground with the reporter wishing for a normal place. Lighting a cigarette while a 45 record plays out. Being photographed by the subject, sometimes there's a chase involved. Opposite of the Warhol screen test films, here people are given the opportunity to speak, perform or hide as much as they like. More like a collaboration between filmmaker and performers than a documentary or attempt to 'capture'/represent people. Sense of respect for the people in the film, who keep opaque what they want to keep opaque.

SHE HAD HER GUN ALL READY (1978)

- As in TAILPIECE this film features titles written on the landscape.

- This goes further than GUERILLERE TALKS, not by expanding narrative or character but by taking the ideas of the first film further into public space, activating different places. The film is full of gestures and people using the city; payphones, diners, subways, and fairgrounds. The chance approach means you get to meet people unexpectedly, like the manager of the fairground stall, or the kid serving drinks.

TAILPIECE (1976)

- The titles in Margaret Tait's films are always important, they are written into the image itself, drawn on bits of wood, made directly into the landscapes. 

- Here Tait writes directly on her house as it is vacated. TAILPIECE is a follow up to her earlier film PLACE OF WORK (1976) which documents the same building while inhabited as a house and studio. Marguerite Duras did something similar with the two linked films INDIA SONG (1975) and SON NOM DE VENISE DANS CALCUTTA DESERT (1976), which both have exactly the same narrated soundtrack, but in the second film the grand house and costumed actors are replaced by images of empty decaying buildings (camera moving through empty corridors in Chantal Akerman's HOTEL MONTEREY (1972)?). Tait's film also takes place as much on the soundtrack as the image. You can hear poems, children's voice and snatches of popular music. The radio station of your life, like in LONE STAR (1975) by Jeff Keen.

- What about the images in this film? They are somehow difficult to deal with. What is this image of newspaper, teacup, chair, glasses, fireplace or cat? A folded newspaper. The image produces an imaginary sensation of touch, the newsprint paper, or the sound of it. Dry surface of the paper, rustle of folding. People used to steam iron them. Headline: '"Phoenix" closes on October 1'. Local headline preserved by the film. Incorporating the word 'Phoenix' into the poem of the film. These images confront the viewer. You can neither hear nor touch them, but you still have this response (cf. the boiled sweets being unwrapped in PORTRAIT OF GA, or the long shots of domestic objects in SELF PORTRAIT IN DECEMBER (1995)). 

- from notebook: Cixous has an idea of "thinking through the littlest object". Where did this note fragment come from? Searching in vain for the original quote.

- Is the strength of Tait's films is the disconnection of sound and image? When making films doing this for the first time feels like a revolution. Suddenly the picture is doing something else entirely, is washing around at the bottom of a bowl full of water, while the sound has become a field. Thinking of films where the image is a placeholder, just an image of production there to allow sound to play (music of Silver Jews where the musical backing sometimes seems like a simple device to extend a duration into existence in order that the text can be said/sung aloud within it). Sound moves outward like the air, cannot be framed as easily as the image - is this true? Cutoff points off a clip of sound. Sound can echo, but so can a picture. In TAILPIECE a child's voice becomes an adult's voice. The adult voice says "A fish swam in the moon". When you move out of a place you live it becomes a between place, an interruption of the conventional (conventional? enforced? everyday?) arrangement of space and time. Moving out of this one soon, it's freezing, you can see your breath in the air and the drains are exploding.

- The song "Funny How Time Slips Away". Always thought Arthur Alexander wrote it, but it was Willie Nelson. Al Green also recorded a version of it. Walking through train stations at rush hour listening to it, looking at commuters faces. A scary idea from watching TAILPIECE of a cut of the same face in an instant from very young to very old.

- Sketches for longer notes on PORTRAIT OF GA (1952) a perfect film and quiet revolution. The gesture / language coup of placing a cigarette into the heather landscape. "Landscape of Ga" rather than portrait. Ga's movement and play is a way and lesson of living. Her dance is... ? Writing to think of an answer.

brechtwork: SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS (1929-31)

- Returning to the original texts as a way to go forward. Avoiding the biography of Brecht and the theoretical commentaries on the texts. This play lists the collaborators as H. Borchardt, E. Burri, E. Hauptmann.

- SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS implicitly posits an idea (will frame it here as such in the hopes of avoiding a totalising theory/reading & a discussion of intentions, especially given multiple authors) that the life of a person cannot be represented, but that ideas, attitudes, philosophies, motions of history, economic flows, and conditions in a structural sense, that create the conditions of that life, of the lives of everyone in a society, can be represented, in part because they are themselves representations of a sort, ideas and theories that attempt to describe phenomena occuring in the world (with a basis in written language, a common basic structure with a play). 

- These representations can be entertaining too, can be songs, though often the text becomes dominated by dry economic language. Yet there are also moments when the language erupts into vivid and striking diversions, often of a horrible nature. This passage illustrates both styles (content warning really gruesome writing here):

"Well, Lennox, now the underbidding's over.
You're finished now and I'll close up and wait
Until the market recovers. I'll clean my yards
And give the knives a thorough oiling and order some
Of those new packing machines that give a fellow
A chance to save a tidy sum in wages. 
There's a new system now - the height of cunning.
On a belt of plaited wire, the hog ascends
To the top floor; that's where the slaughtering starts.
Almost unaided, the hog goes plunging down
From the heights onto the knives. You see? The hog
Slaughters itself. And turns itself into sausage.
For now, falling from floor to floor, deserted
By its skin, which is transformed to leather
Then parting from its bristles, which become
Brushes, at last flinging aside its bones -
Flour comes from them - its own weight forces it 
All the way down into the can. You see?"

(taken from Frank Jones translation in 1976 Methuen edition)

- The characters in this play are hardly characters at all in a conventional sense. Set in the enormous Chicago meat yards in the 1920s the play follows a struggle between the workers and the company owners. The text doesn't particularly bother with filling in details about biographies (so popular in contemporary narratives), few of the characters have names, and when they do that's about all we know of them save for the occasional illustrative anecdote, like Gloomb, the man who loses his hand in a tin can machine. 

- Instead a lot of the dialogue is performed by choruses with labels like "The Workers", "The Meatpackers", "The Stockbreeders", "The Wholesalers", "The Brokers", and so on. The text uses these choruses to enunciate (critical) ideas about the way a market economy functions (this is the basis of the representations in the play of ideas and economics rather than characters). These chorus passages are ironically very confusing and it's as difficult here to follow what the comments are on economic phenomena as it is trying to read about stocks and markets generally. However these passages never become boring because the dialogue and arrangements of characters are musically structured into rhythmic stacks of text that build an atmosphere of increasing panic, which read on the page or aloud form a sort of concrete poetry or sound version of the landscape of the block by block American city (the banks are always the tallest buildings).

- At the same time this play relies on a sort of identification with the main character, Joan, who is a stand in for the reader/audience, being pushed and pulled by the various social forces, ideas and arguments in the play until reaching the ones the text probably wants us to be left with (can only ignore authorial intentions for so long)- in this case the message is to join the organised workers and follow orders (Joan fails to do this and the strike is broken). Hence Joan is the only substantial character, except for the super capitalist "Meat King", Mauler. Our relation to him seems to be: these people will never change, do not ever trust them (despite seeming at times to be having a change of heart Mauler ends up richer than before while exploiting the image of Joan as a sentimental martyr figure to keep control of the yards).

- the idea of some notes like these is to look at different texts and works and to figure out how they work, what ideas and strategies they include, what effects these might have, without necessarily claiming any one method to be better than the other. maybe then the notes could be a resource, a bak of these different strategies that people could rifle through. maybe that critical choice or evaluation becomes necessary later but it feels completely wrong now. maybe a representative style is more useful or morally or ethically better, or maybe a play like this is a way forward. maybe closer examination of these different traditions reveals that they are not nearly as concrete as they seem. "The world is various". examining what is happening in an active sense, a practice of writing for constantly changing contexts? rather than an attempt to produce totalising principles and structures? is this just a complete evasion of taking responsibility? guilt is everywhere. hopefully a reader might find some use in these notes, maybe...

DER MOND IST AUFGEGANGEN (1981)

Some short notes on reading, or was it watching, or was it walking:

- This film by Hanne Darboven, better known as an artist who produced installations and drawings, begins with shots of a carnival. Old caravans make an impression, the thin material they are built from, false wood, and the camera moves but is somehow walking much taller than everyone else - it feels a bit like being in the head of a monster. Oddly suitable as a viewpoint to the environs of a funfair, it's fascinating seeing kids jump up into the frame - one holds up a motorcycle helmet on their arm, a strange gesture.

- Then into a town landscape accompanied by classical music - a blank landscape, cigarette adverts, waste ground, cars, cobbles and houses, sunshine in West Germany. The building site is like the funfair - a handheld camera almost held like a waltz, somewhere uncertain, like trying to capture the feeling of walking in a place, that movement of objects past the body, yet the use of jarring music completely takes that feeling away. 

there is a manner of reading and approaching something new and unfamiliar as though everything in it was made by god, was perfect, and must be read as such immediately - is it a blank approach, without a context? things do not emerge from nowhere or necessarily have their own consistent internal logic - is the idea a need for tools or values or a philosophy to interpret something? but then these have their limits - so an archipelago of different philosophies, different lenses to add and remove and consider next to one another

- Cycling through different lenses of interpretation. Looking at the frame formally/technically in terms of camera height or failure to expose for indoor light or the use of a fluid zoom; thinking of contemporaneous films by Wenders or Fassbinder which often feature diverting background scenery, this film is like walking into that scenery (Darboven also dedicated an installation to Fassbinder); the landscape of West Germany with ample capital, there are snatches of English, a poster showing a map of New York City; a search for a structural rigour that would be consistent with the artists other works,

clinging to something like the 'ABC' sign on one side of the suburban buildings as an arrow pointing to it.

THE FABELMANS (2023)

- A film that is difficult to read without being driven on to the path of the biography of an individual, but becomes interesting when you wander off that path.

- THE FABELMANS is also a series of ideas about the nature of the moving image, which can then be projected back into the film itself. These are somewhat surprising given the position of this film squarely within an American commercial narrative film context.

- The ideas are pushed through a narrative of a child growing up, depicted via the practices of the characters in this narrative in relation to the moving image, and include the moving image as:

1. an irreversible intrusion into the unconscious

2. a space that allows for violent impulses to take place safely and outside of everyday life

3. a space that has nothing to do with the intentions of users

4. a space that reveals in pictures the unconscious drives and desires of its users, usually deeply disturbing them in the process, something that is placed here in the context of the social culture of the USA in the 1950s; the moving image disrupts this culture and dismantles seemingly indestructible everyday structures like the nuclear family or an idea of conventional masculinity

5. a technology that has very little to do with a sentimental idea of cinema with a capital C, or cinema seen as a historical art form (adding this here with no comment on these ideas of cinema - and these ideas are a reading too, ideas read from the film regardless of their value - where is this going...)

Still from PORTRAIT OF GA (1952)

- The relation of these ideas of the moving image are in contrast to the film itself, which is a scripted, intentional piece of fairly conventional narrative cinema. There's a scene of dancing to join to the chain of fragments that has slowly been forming in these notes, where a sudden leap into a freedom of motion is caught in a family super 8 film; we are shown this dance in the headlights in two contexts, as staged super 8 and within the staged montage of the film itself. The characters all seem to agree that this film, based on a moment of chance, has more value than the narrative film the protagonist is also producing, but it's too scary for them, and we end up back in conventional cinema with this film as a looking-back representation of real events. Throughout the narrative control ("Everything happens for a reason") and chance square off against each other, and in the end control wins out in a simple lesson on framing from a mythologised John Ford. In the other direction is a film like Margaret Tait's PORTRAIT OF GA (1952) and Ga's transcendent, genuinely spontaneous dance with the cigarette. 

Norman Rockwell - Saying Grace (1951)

- The image in the film has a treated, sheen effect which along with the decorations gives the whole work the feeling of a Norman Rockwell painting in motion. Other media and film stocks are incorporated into this montage, including sound and footage cut directly from THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH (1952), and staged 8mm films. Always end up crying at this technique regardless of its content, thinking also of the staged family albums and super 8 films from MEAN STREETS, RAGING BULL and GOODFELLAS which shouldn't provoke such sentiment when you think about it, a strange double effect.

Still from GOODFELLAS (1990)

- As the film progresses the camera becomes more erratic, beginning with heavily structured shots and rhythms that recall musicals (especially in the movements of the family group) and an older mise en scene, then shifting into more radical techniques as the 1950s passes and the social conventions of the characters lives are gradually punctured; the cleanliness of the image and montage is punctured too and the camera begins to move more fluidly. This is maybe where cinema with a capital C comes back into the narrative, recalling Nicholas Ray in the scenes of violent racism and intimidation in the high school sequence, and ending with fluid shots with a wide angle lens, pointing toward the developments that would take place in American cinema in the later 1960s: and you end up back at the biography of an individual again!

Still from REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)