In the process of writing my dissertation I find myself in a continous oscillation between intellectual ups and downs. A moment of ‘up’ is taking place right now and although there might be a chance I’ll destroy it by my attempt to keep it, I can’t resist to write about it.
It started with a recommendation of the book Over-Sensitivity by Jalal Toufic. It’s about… yes, it’s not always easy to understand what it’s all about, but I’m especially interested in the chapter on what he calls the voice-over-witness. His notion is based on voice-over in film in cases where “voices are non-representational not because they create what they are talking about but because they are themselves a creation – a creation that tells the truth.” The voice-over “is out of nothing” and here Jalal Toufic extracts his theory from Claude Lanzman’s Shoah, the almost 9 hour long film on concentration camps during World War 2, where the narration is driven by the voices of survivors revisiting the places of the camps. The “out of nothing” is the voice that comes from the physical non-presence of the real witnesses, those who died and are buried in the silent land shown in the film, but the out of nothing is nevertheless put into words by the survivors of the extermination camps.
It is a heavy topic. Which might be why I have difficulties understanding Jalal Toufic’s notion of the voice-over-witness. It is for me still an abstract notion even though he does a great job in drawing on a wide range of films. I started to list all the films he mentions throughout the chapter so as to understand the theory through them. So far the list is as follows:
Films:
Ingmar Bergmann:
Persona (have seen)
From the life of the marionettes
Maya Deren:
Ritual in transfigured time
Assia Djebar:
La Nouba des Femmes
Marguerite Duras:
India Songs
The Vice-consul
Son nom de venise dans calcutta desert
Hiroshima mon amour (have seen)
Aurelia Steiner
Le Camion
Ernie Gehr:
Eureka
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi:
People, years, life
Herzog:
Land of Silence and Darkness (have seen)
Heart of Glass
Lessons of Darkness
Every man for himself and god against all
Alfred Hitchcock:
Vertigo
Kiarostami:
Where is the friend’s home?
Akira Kurosawa:
Rashomon
Claude Lanzman:
Shoah (have seen)
Meredith Monk:
Book of Days
Nicholas Ray:
The lusty men
Michael Snow:
Seated Figures
Wim Wenders:
Kings of the road
Vertov
Man with a movie camera
Robert Zemeckis:
Back to the Future I-III (have seen)
Radio:
Artaud:
To have done with the judgment of god
Yes, the list is quite long. And it’s quite embarrassing only to have seen 4-5 of the films.
The one I chose to see tonight was India Song. The image above is from the beginning of the film and yes, it is a bit pretentious to begin with. It is difficult to get into the movie, the first couple of minutes is a still of a sun slowly setting over a dusty, cloudy sea. A voice-over tells the introductory information about Anne-Marie Stretter, the main character of the film. She is dead and what we see is a recalling of one of her last nights. The voice-over is annoyingly innocent and sexy in a boringly normative way. She speaks slowly as the camera points to 3 people walking ever so slowly down a staircase outside a huge house. It’s India in 1937 in the residence of the English ambassador.
So, why was I so excited about the film? It could have been really bad; too rich people too bored to be alive in a colonised country only concerned about love? What about gender, race, postcolonial and heteronormative issues? As you can see, the main character is dressed in a red dress and surrounded by men in suits. Could it be possible to create a more tired cliché?
Most of the film takes place indoor in the same room. The camera is fixed and the characters enter and exit the frame, often with Anne-Marie Stretter dancing with one of the men. The soundtrack is voices and India Song repeated again and again. We hear people talk about the protagonist, Anne-Marie Stretter. These voices come from guests at the ball, which is supposedly taking place in the almost always empty room. Doors are opening as the mirror in the middle of the room double the characters and shows us the back of the room.
The characters on screen have an almost ghostly presence as the other guests of the ball are edited out and invisible. We only hear their gossiping voices. At times the only trace of action is smoke issuing from insence. The highly dramatic story is silent and poetic as a result of the loss of action on screen.
Are the characters on screen haunting the house where Anne-Marie Stretter lived her last days?
I guess the film gets strongness from the characteristics of the form. It is the loss of origin, where the constant rupture between the voice-overs and the characters is complete. The physically present bodies have no voice and the voices no body. It creates a gap between the image and the sound that leaves the viewer/listener with a continuous flow of cracks to fill with thoughts and imagination. Thereby the film doesn’t appeal for already closed readings and as such it can avoid to be a big cliché.
I got into the film. It almost hypnotized me as the images floated by and the voices sucked me into their universe. I was watching the scenery of Anne-Marie Stretter’s life, while it was explained to me in past tense by commentators. Still, at the end of the film, I knew nothing about Anne-Marie Stretters thoughts or inner feelings; nothing is explained by her. At the same time I knew all there is to know, as I had been on a fantastic journey into a universe devoted only to her deathly destiny.
It came out of nothing;
as if voices were a creation;
to tell the truth.
Went to Southbank Centre yesterday night to attend a talk with the German artist Klaus Weber. Apart from the talk being a really interesting walk-through his works the aftermath in front of the Southbank Centre made a spectacle on its own.
Klaus Weber’s latest work The Big Giving, which is a fountain of 7 people in different positions with water streaming from different body parts, has been commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and is placed in front the centre. The fountain is made of leftovers from the making of cement and has in that sense a direct link to the public space it’s placed within. The water splashes from the figures in a quite fascinating way leaving curious spectators and walkers-by wet.
(Above: Another of Klaus Webers public fountains: Fountain Loma Dr / W 6th St, 2002. It was exhibited for one day in L.A. and had two hired police men to guard it. Down under: LSD Fountain. It’s an antique crystal fountain. It makes an incredible sound when the liqiud (professionally prepared potentized LSD) hits the crystal, hear here. )
Parts of the Southbank Centre has recently been refurbished. Yesterday night the small plazas in front of the River Thames and between the two Waterloo bridges were full of people. The centre has now got modern glass facades and lots of café’s and resteaurants. Happy people enjoyed beers, met for dates and cultural adventures, whereas others were on a promenade along the river. The atmosphere signaled the life in a metropolis, the life one expects to happen, when one looks at an architecture model. In fact, the whole setting made me feel like I was a tiny little figure from a white and fancy carboard model. I behaved as they expected people to do – the dream had come true.
Or maybe the dream was about to crack. Klaus Weber has done another work consisting of cultivating the ‘sidewalk’ mushroom (Agaricus bitorquis), which can push its way through asphalt. Undermining every city planners dream of straight lines, asphalt here and nice green plants there, the mushrooms pops up at unpredictable places mastered by the rhizome-like net of roots in the soil. And soon the joy was over, the happy people were all eaten by big mushrooms and the Southbank Centre infiltrated by a hasty growing net of roots.
Filed under: Livet i London / Notes on London
Over the past 18 months the amount of feminist magazines in the UK has gone from 0 to 6. The sudden reaction comes from women in the early 20’s who are sick and tired of women’s magazines and their dictating discourse. And of course the reaction comes from the lack of a magazine addressing women in a serious way. The initiators have for a great part organised and written the issues in a non-profit spirit and sometimes even paid for the launching themselves.
A lot of the magazines have a confronting approach to subjects such as rape, sexist adverts and disparity between between men and women’s salaries and as such they seem to follow the line from the feminist movement in the 70’s.
I’m reading all this with great joy – I am a feminist and in general happy for diversity – in todays version of The Guardian. By the end of the article I turn the page and the smile on my face slowly transforms into a great question mark. I find and article with a slightly different approach to the subject: How to dress while being pregnant in order not to look frumpy? The catch line says: “Looking good when you are pregnant has never seemed more important. So can you keep up appearances while dressing for two?” The title continues down the avenue: “´I still want to be me`”. Two pages after I get to know where to buy a fragranced candle promised to enhance any soiree. It’s only ten pounds and is at the same time hand poured.
I wonder why young women feel the need to make an alternative to this kind of unnecessary information as I simultaneously think of the person who hand poured the candle. Whether it’s a man or a woman it smells of underpayment. Inequality plays a role at many levels when it comes to consumerism. And here women are an important part of the game. Women’s wear is placed closest to the entrance in many stores, because it sells better than men’s wear and childrens wear. Somehow we’re already always in it.
What can be done? Maybe a listening to some of the voices around the world? Take a look at this blog: Laurelin in the Rain and investigate some of the blogs listed to the right. You’ll find voices from Kenya, India, Iraq, Canada and Afghanistan.
And at last, but not least: start rehearsing how to say the f-word… It’s soon going to be fashionable in Denmark as well.
for further cruising:
the f-word
lads mags
charliegrrl
feminist carnival
Filed under: Livet i London / Notes on London
Jeg keder mig! Det var det, der var galt. Torsdag aften, ligger syg på 4. dagen. Har nok kunnet få tiden til at gå; sygebesøg, skype, netsurfing, chatting, mailskrivning, facebook, myspace, linkedin, messenger, net-tv, Adam og Asmaa, Orientering, TV-avisen og Deadline. Ved alt om regnvejr og Roskilde.
Men underholdningsbehovet daler, da sofaen lige så stille tager hånd om mig og blidt lukker mine øjne i. Lyttende til min flatmates madlavning i køkkenet med duften af hakkekød i næsen og fransk electronica i ørerne slår det mig: Der er ikke noget jeg gider at lave! Ikke engang at rejse mig op og hente computeren. Eller at gå på besøg i min flatmates atelier. Eller at researche lidt mere på mit speciale. Eller at skrive noget begavet til min blog. Eller at lave en kop kamillete, som jeg egentlig nok trænger til. Næ, jeg keder mig, er ugidelig og har ikke engang dårlig samvittighed.
Det er egentlig meget rart, tænker jeg, for hvornår har jeg sidst kedet mig? Hvornår har man egentlig tid til at kede sig? Efter 4 dage i sygesengen? Med gråvejr og kulde? På ugens store ferniseringsaften, hvor alle sniksnakker sig glade rundt i den pulserende storby? Til fernis eller på ferie: Indien, Beirut, Nyborg, Oregon, Barcelona, L.A., Østrig eller i sommerhus? Ja, hvornår har man egentlig sidst haft tid til at kede sig? Godt spørgsmål.
Og hvor længe varer det ved, spørger jeg mig selv, alt imens jeg rejser mig for at hente computeren. For man har fået en ide, den skal nedskrives, lige nu, her på bloggen. Bare fordi, det er også længe siden den er blevet opdateret. Der trænger til at ske noget. Kloge mennesker keder sig aldrig, var barndommens lærdom. Den sidder vist naglet fast til rygraden.
TEXT TASKS 