Come on, pilgrims, you know I love you!
I've decided this little preamble would be a nice place to discuss where I'm at or what I'm doing--the province of the more conventional blog--before I get into the good stuff. You know, because the only people reading this are actually friends, so why not some intimacy?
Speaking of intimacy, right now, I'm in that uncanny mindset of reading a book that feels like it came out of my own head, Grant Maierhofer's Works, out just recently from 11:11 Press here in the Twin Cities.
That’s a special intimacy that I think only books can have, when you find the right one. When you really feel seen by something, it can be very affecting. People have done plenty of rotten things after reading Catcher in the Rye or the Bible.
Reading a book that feels like it’s about you / you could’ve written it is an altered mindset comparable only to maybe drugs or international travel. It has the advantage of being much cheaper and lasting much longer.
I feel like I should send the guy an ear, at least.
Onto the double feature! The subjects this week share a climactic plot point I don't feel I should divulge, so you'll just have to take my word for it they are related. I've made one of my ham-handed allusions to it already. The films are Pasolini's Teorema and Dumont's L'Humanite.
Teorema is by his own admission, Pasolini's film about the bourgeoisie. The film centers around a well-top-do Italian family, their servant, and their houseguest. You see the banality of their comfortable lives, the unnamed houseguest's visit, in which he beds the entire family, servant included, and the aftermath of his departure. Teorema, or Theorem in English, is a hypnotic movie, deliberately paced, filled with symbolic meaning and political implication.
It stars Jean-Luc Godard's then-wife Anne Wiazemsky, star of his La Chinoise and Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, as the impressionable but devoted daughter. I mention her mainly to mention her Hall of Fame postmarital divulsion that Godard sang the Internationale after having sex, that dirty dog.
The stranger is Terence Stamp, who you may know from Soderbergh's the Limey, or any one of his 21st century character actor roles. He's easily confused with Malcolm McDowall.
The film is structured as several cycles of intercut scenes. First the father, mother, son, daughter, and servant as they were. Lounging on their estate, playing childish games with their friends, going to parties. Then the stranger arrives. Next comes cycles of seduction and then each character tells the stranger how he has made their life worthwhile. He then announces he must be leaving, and we finish with cycles of the family losing their collective shit once they realize they can't have him in their lives anymore.
The son becomes a hack painter, the sister catatonic, the mother a sexual predator, the servant a saint.
The film begins and ends with the father giving his unspecified factory away to the workers. What are the class implications of a factory-owning proletariat? a reporter wants to know. The father strips his clothes off in a modernist train station and then wanders through a volcanic landscape screaming.
The late Sean Bonney, one of my favorite poets, described that scream in his poem "Letter Against the Language":
I was ranting on to a friend a few days ago that I take that scream to contain all that is meaningful in the word "communism" -- or rather, whatever it is that people like us mean when we use that word, which is, as we both know all to well, somewhat different to whatever it is the dictionary of the invisible world likes to pretend it means. You know what I'm saying. A kind of high metallic screech. Unpronounceable. Inaudible.
The whole deal is that bourgeois life is comfortable but not fulfilling, and when you fulfill it actually but then withhold that fulfillment, it casts that empty comfort into stark relief.
L'Humanite, on the other hand, is more of a middle class film. Not to be confused with the press organ of the French communist party, it's the story of a small-town police detective investigating a rape/murder of an 11-year-old girl in the wake of the death of his girlfriend and son. He has lost his ability to feel emotions, which makes him something of an empty shell, but also a weird empathy monster. He can only feel anything through others.
He's moved in with his mother. He's got a proper dad bod. He gloms onto his neighbor, who is dating a brutish bus driver. His supervisor is an impotent blowhard. He works at the community garden. He lays in the mud and stares off into the middle distance. There are startling moments of human intimacy, from unexpected handholding to sweaty rutting. Things progress, or they don't. This is the sort of movie that uses boredom to heighten tension, if you're into that.
I feel weird about recommending it for puritan reasons: two extended, straight-on shots of genitalia, and not 18-year-old genitalia either. These shots are all part of Dumont's project to depict human physicality and therefore sexuality in quite a frank way. That's the rationale, I think, but I'm not quite sure the movie earns it. It is the French, though, they seem to be pretty permissive about that sort of thing.
The film is a showcase for the non-professional performances. The lead looks like Brent Spiner and plays a Phillip Seymour Hoffman-esque world-weariness. This is his first and last film. He won the acting prize at Cannes for this.
Again, at the risk of giving anything away, both films feature, well, transcendental moments. These are moments were characters who are basically innocents cannot contain physically their divinity any longer. And both films feature almost dichotomous examples of what can happen when this divine innocence butts up against harsh reality.
Maybe if you watch both these movies, and we see each other (I said "maybe"!), we can talk a little bit about what I mean by that. Failing that, until next time, this is Alex Kies signing off.