For my writings from 23/4/2008-5/4/2010. It will not be updated again.
Cheers.
Wednesday 9 February 2011
Monday 5 April 2010
501 Great Writers - 1-25
Via an online acquaintance, I came across this recently-released book on the all-time great writers. It's in the same series as 501 Films To See Before You Die, which was a useful resource for me (with contributions from Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of my favourite film critics), even if it seems a bit lightweight now. So, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. In any case, the aforementioned acquaintance is providing me with the list, bit by bit. The authors are listed in chronological order, wisely side-stepping any number of impossible problems presented by ranking by order of quality - Ovid or Nabokov? Shakespeare or Homer? Etc.
Without further ado, here are the first 25 names:
Homer
Sappho
Aeschylus
Pindar
Sophocles
Euripides
Aristophanes
Plato
Gaius Valerius Catullus
Virgil
Horace
Ovid
Apuleius
St. Augustine
Chrétien de Troyes
Dante Aligheri
Francesco Petrarch
Hafiz
Giovanni Boccaccio
Geoffrey Chaucer
Francois Villon
Niccolo Machiavelli
Erasmus
Ludovico Ariosto
Francois Rabelais
I must stress I don't have the book itself, so I can't comment on the rationale provided by the editor, one Julian Patrick, a Canadian literary theorist and lecturer in Comparative Literature. Nevertheless, at this early stage, it's looking like a project that cannot be defended or salvaged. It is almost unfeasibly bad, even taking into account the facts that one, classical educations are rare these days, and two, Westerners tend to be very insular about the canon.
Let me be clear: this is dreadful work from any supposed scholar. The compiler of this list is asserting two indefensible falsehoods: that there were only 25 great writers until 1494 (when Rabelais was probably born) and that only 13 of these were classicists (in the Roman/Greek sense). In reality, it is generally accepted that the classical period was the high point of literature. Trying to come up with a list of the names of unquestionably great writers the author has omitted was exhausting, and at this point pretty much all I can do.
The first thing that leapt out at me was the inclusion of names like Plato and Machiavelli, which obviously means that the list is not limited to poetry and fiction but open to philosophers and essayists. Plato's inclusion is a given, of course - no list of this sort could possibly do without him. However, leaving out Aristotle is borderline criminal. Whilst it's true we only have perhaps a third of Aristotle's works, and that consists mainly of lecture notes by his pupils, this problem has not prevented the author from including Sappho, of whose work we have but fragments, and it hardly needs saying that Aristotle's are ideas that fundamentally (re)shaped physics, biology, ethics, logic, rhetoric, politics and, most importantly here, poetry and theatre. It wouldn't be a stretch to call him the most important thinker and writer who ever lived.
The greatest of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus, is also left out. Hesiod, Archilocus, Alcman, Plutarch (!), Petronius, Plautus, Suetonius, Seneca, Livy, Cicero (!), Juvenal, Apollonios of Rhodes, Lucretius, Theocritus, Ennius (no less a figure than the father of Latinate poetry!), Callimachus, Lucan, Sextus Propertius and Tibullus are all conspicuous. The great historians are royally shafted - I understand that Herodotus is not everyone's cup of tea, but excluding Thucydides is staggeringly ignorant and baffling.
Moving outside of a Western context, and the foolishness of choosing only Plato, St Augustine and Machiavelli is laid bare. There is absolutely zero representation of Eastern thought or writing. No Ibn al-Nafis, arguably the founder of science fiction. No Averroes (Spanish, of course, but a huge contributor to Islamic philosophy), the founder of modern secular thought and great translator of Aristotle. No Avicenna. No Algazel. No Ibn Tufail. Omar Khayyám, hugely famous and popular even in the West, has not been included, so there's no hope for Rudaki, who is to Modern Persian what Shakespeare is to Modern English; Ferdowsi, the writer of Shahnameh, the great Persian epic; Nezāmi, the innovator of romanticism, realism and populism in the style of the Persian epic; his probable countryman Nesimi, similarly revered in Azerbaijan; Ali-Shir Nava'i, the national poet of the Uzbeks; Amir Khusrow; or Saadi. Kālidāsa, almost unanimously regarded as the greatest writer in Sanskrit, the author of not one but two great epics and at least one play that could be counted among the greatest of all time, is similarly without trace. Amazingly Hafiz does make it in, scant consolation for anyone who has dared to read outside of their own culture.
Travelling further East (obviously a mistake at this stage), Confucious, of all people, is missing! Laozi, apparently the second best selling poet of all time and the founder of a major religion, isn't there, nor is Zhuangzi. Luo Guanzhong, a writer of roughly equal standing as Kālidāsa, has not been mentioned.
I'm sure you more than get the picture. I know being given the task of Professor Patrick is unenviable (although honestly, I would gladly have put together twice as good a list for half the fee), but even with the numerical limitations, this is not even a representative sample of world literature over this period. I wish I could, as I did with the film equivalent, excuse it as a valuable resource for beginners. But all this book does is encourage the illiteracy and intellectual mediocrity that has blighted post-War generations, not to mention being a sad indictment on the unwillingness of departments of supposed higher education to engage with anything outside of their comfort zone.
Perhaps the list will improve as we move forward. But it's the classical period that is the foundation stone of an education in literature. Getting it wrong is the equivalent of not being able to do arithmetic in mathematics - not an impassable obstacle, but one that makes success very unlikely indeed.
Without further ado, here are the first 25 names:
Homer
Sappho
Aeschylus
Pindar
Sophocles
Euripides
Aristophanes
Plato
Gaius Valerius Catullus
Virgil
Horace
Ovid
Apuleius
St. Augustine
Chrétien de Troyes
Dante Aligheri
Francesco Petrarch
Hafiz
Giovanni Boccaccio
Geoffrey Chaucer
Francois Villon
Niccolo Machiavelli
Erasmus
Ludovico Ariosto
Francois Rabelais
I must stress I don't have the book itself, so I can't comment on the rationale provided by the editor, one Julian Patrick, a Canadian literary theorist and lecturer in Comparative Literature. Nevertheless, at this early stage, it's looking like a project that cannot be defended or salvaged. It is almost unfeasibly bad, even taking into account the facts that one, classical educations are rare these days, and two, Westerners tend to be very insular about the canon.
Let me be clear: this is dreadful work from any supposed scholar. The compiler of this list is asserting two indefensible falsehoods: that there were only 25 great writers until 1494 (when Rabelais was probably born) and that only 13 of these were classicists (in the Roman/Greek sense). In reality, it is generally accepted that the classical period was the high point of literature. Trying to come up with a list of the names of unquestionably great writers the author has omitted was exhausting, and at this point pretty much all I can do.
The first thing that leapt out at me was the inclusion of names like Plato and Machiavelli, which obviously means that the list is not limited to poetry and fiction but open to philosophers and essayists. Plato's inclusion is a given, of course - no list of this sort could possibly do without him. However, leaving out Aristotle is borderline criminal. Whilst it's true we only have perhaps a third of Aristotle's works, and that consists mainly of lecture notes by his pupils, this problem has not prevented the author from including Sappho, of whose work we have but fragments, and it hardly needs saying that Aristotle's are ideas that fundamentally (re)shaped physics, biology, ethics, logic, rhetoric, politics and, most importantly here, poetry and theatre. It wouldn't be a stretch to call him the most important thinker and writer who ever lived.
The greatest of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus, is also left out. Hesiod, Archilocus, Alcman, Plutarch (!), Petronius, Plautus, Suetonius, Seneca, Livy, Cicero (!), Juvenal, Apollonios of Rhodes, Lucretius, Theocritus, Ennius (no less a figure than the father of Latinate poetry!), Callimachus, Lucan, Sextus Propertius and Tibullus are all conspicuous. The great historians are royally shafted - I understand that Herodotus is not everyone's cup of tea, but excluding Thucydides is staggeringly ignorant and baffling.
Moving outside of a Western context, and the foolishness of choosing only Plato, St Augustine and Machiavelli is laid bare. There is absolutely zero representation of Eastern thought or writing. No Ibn al-Nafis, arguably the founder of science fiction. No Averroes (Spanish, of course, but a huge contributor to Islamic philosophy), the founder of modern secular thought and great translator of Aristotle. No Avicenna. No Algazel. No Ibn Tufail. Omar Khayyám, hugely famous and popular even in the West, has not been included, so there's no hope for Rudaki, who is to Modern Persian what Shakespeare is to Modern English; Ferdowsi, the writer of Shahnameh, the great Persian epic; Nezāmi, the innovator of romanticism, realism and populism in the style of the Persian epic; his probable countryman Nesimi, similarly revered in Azerbaijan; Ali-Shir Nava'i, the national poet of the Uzbeks; Amir Khusrow; or Saadi. Kālidāsa, almost unanimously regarded as the greatest writer in Sanskrit, the author of not one but two great epics and at least one play that could be counted among the greatest of all time, is similarly without trace. Amazingly Hafiz does make it in, scant consolation for anyone who has dared to read outside of their own culture.
Travelling further East (obviously a mistake at this stage), Confucious, of all people, is missing! Laozi, apparently the second best selling poet of all time and the founder of a major religion, isn't there, nor is Zhuangzi. Luo Guanzhong, a writer of roughly equal standing as Kālidāsa, has not been mentioned.
I'm sure you more than get the picture. I know being given the task of Professor Patrick is unenviable (although honestly, I would gladly have put together twice as good a list for half the fee), but even with the numerical limitations, this is not even a representative sample of world literature over this period. I wish I could, as I did with the film equivalent, excuse it as a valuable resource for beginners. But all this book does is encourage the illiteracy and intellectual mediocrity that has blighted post-War generations, not to mention being a sad indictment on the unwillingness of departments of supposed higher education to engage with anything outside of their comfort zone.
Perhaps the list will improve as we move forward. But it's the classical period that is the foundation stone of an education in literature. Getting it wrong is the equivalent of not being able to do arithmetic in mathematics - not an impassable obstacle, but one that makes success very unlikely indeed.
Tuesday 16 June 2009
Schwarzenegger and Us
When asked to name my five favourite Arnie films recently, I gave this list:
1. The Long Goodbye
2. The Terminator
3. Predator
4. The Running Man
5. Total Recall
Okay, maybe I was being clever and obtuse with the number one pick. Remove it, and the humorously satirical Last Action Hero squeezes in at number five, and Terminator and Predator take up the top spots, largely on the strength of the villains that outgrew Schwarzenegger himself. But the truth is, I regard all of these films as solid at the very least. Total Recall, for instance, possesses a pleasingly grotesque aesthetic you don't expect from an Arnie film. During the conversation, later films such as The 6th Day and End of Days were also discussed, neither of which are without merit (the latter, for instance, is one of the only times Arnie has ever seemed completely out of his element, and Gabriel Byrne also turns in an entertaining performance). It occurred to me that Arnie has perhaps been hard done to by both myself and others who regard him as a poor man's John Wayne.
Also discussed were the much-loved Terminator 2 and True Lies. Terminator 2 was my favourite film by far as a child, and True Lies a favourite during my formative years. Now, however, I am less enthusiastic about both. T2 is still a white-knuckle ride, thanks to the still ominous prescence of Robert Patrick's T-1000, but the film as a whole is little more than a cheesy, overblown remake of its predecessor (at least as much as Terminator 3 is a cheesy, overblown remake of Terminator 2 in turn). There's also an annoying tendency of James Cameron's to act like a teenager who has only just discovered the extra features on his new camera, and we are forced to sit though what at times resembles his special effects reel. For all its bad reviews, Terminator Salvation at least looks like it's trying something new, rather than rehashing the cyborg slasher storyline and retaining the "bigger is better" philosophy of the previous two outings.
True Lies is rather more objectionable. It is, admittedly, a funny film, and the main complaint I have with it structurally is in the way it goes on for far too long: the escape from the terrorist camp feels like an ending come none too soon, but then we have a chase sequence that seems to last an eternity and an extra half hour battle between Arnie and Art Malick over a stealth jet. But something more disturbing lies at its heart. Not simply that it's a borderline-racist western supremacy power fantasy, and strangely devoid of irony in this area considering it is a comedy, but also that it is unrepentantly sexist. The women are either scheming femme fatales or painfully clueless dummy housewives. It's difficult to imagine Jamie Lee Curtis' character being able to keep up at a Stepford book club, so her transition into secret agent is dutifully insulting, degrading and embarrassing. Even by the director's own admission (a potential sequel was abandonded in 2002) this film looks even more like a relic in a post-9/11 world, and all involved should be asking themselves just what the fuck they were thinking in the first place.
Now that the latest in the Terminator franchise is out, and Arnie's term as Governator (a complete failure for anyone expecting anything like Arnie's good friend Jesse Ventura's foray into politics) is coming to an end, could we expect further instalments in the career of the Austrain Oak? If so, we want more ridiculous sci-fi and less sequels and political thrillers. Or, if that can't be managed, cameos in hard-boiled detective films.
1. The Long Goodbye
2. The Terminator
3. Predator
4. The Running Man
5. Total Recall
Okay, maybe I was being clever and obtuse with the number one pick. Remove it, and the humorously satirical Last Action Hero squeezes in at number five, and Terminator and Predator take up the top spots, largely on the strength of the villains that outgrew Schwarzenegger himself. But the truth is, I regard all of these films as solid at the very least. Total Recall, for instance, possesses a pleasingly grotesque aesthetic you don't expect from an Arnie film. During the conversation, later films such as The 6th Day and End of Days were also discussed, neither of which are without merit (the latter, for instance, is one of the only times Arnie has ever seemed completely out of his element, and Gabriel Byrne also turns in an entertaining performance). It occurred to me that Arnie has perhaps been hard done to by both myself and others who regard him as a poor man's John Wayne.
Also discussed were the much-loved Terminator 2 and True Lies. Terminator 2 was my favourite film by far as a child, and True Lies a favourite during my formative years. Now, however, I am less enthusiastic about both. T2 is still a white-knuckle ride, thanks to the still ominous prescence of Robert Patrick's T-1000, but the film as a whole is little more than a cheesy, overblown remake of its predecessor (at least as much as Terminator 3 is a cheesy, overblown remake of Terminator 2 in turn). There's also an annoying tendency of James Cameron's to act like a teenager who has only just discovered the extra features on his new camera, and we are forced to sit though what at times resembles his special effects reel. For all its bad reviews, Terminator Salvation at least looks like it's trying something new, rather than rehashing the cyborg slasher storyline and retaining the "bigger is better" philosophy of the previous two outings.
True Lies is rather more objectionable. It is, admittedly, a funny film, and the main complaint I have with it structurally is in the way it goes on for far too long: the escape from the terrorist camp feels like an ending come none too soon, but then we have a chase sequence that seems to last an eternity and an extra half hour battle between Arnie and Art Malick over a stealth jet. But something more disturbing lies at its heart. Not simply that it's a borderline-racist western supremacy power fantasy, and strangely devoid of irony in this area considering it is a comedy, but also that it is unrepentantly sexist. The women are either scheming femme fatales or painfully clueless dummy housewives. It's difficult to imagine Jamie Lee Curtis' character being able to keep up at a Stepford book club, so her transition into secret agent is dutifully insulting, degrading and embarrassing. Even by the director's own admission (a potential sequel was abandonded in 2002) this film looks even more like a relic in a post-9/11 world, and all involved should be asking themselves just what the fuck they were thinking in the first place.
Now that the latest in the Terminator franchise is out, and Arnie's term as Governator (a complete failure for anyone expecting anything like Arnie's good friend Jesse Ventura's foray into politics) is coming to an end, could we expect further instalments in the career of the Austrain Oak? If so, we want more ridiculous sci-fi and less sequels and political thrillers. Or, if that can't be managed, cameos in hard-boiled detective films.
Hell, Germans, Libertines and Shakespeare
It feels like I've spent most of my time watching films lately, which obviously isn't a bad thing when you're a fan of films. I went to the cinema last week to see Drag Me To Hell, a review of which can be found on Paul's blog. It was certainly enjoyable enough, and we managed to make it through the rain in time to catch the England game in the AJ.
Since then I've watched two Fassbinders I haven't seen before. Mother Kusters' Trip To Heaven (1975) is a TV movie about a widow who unwillingly participates in distortions of her late husband's memory. Pulled between communists and anarchists, both of whom wish to make her a symbol in their cause, and systematically abandonded or ignored by her family, Brigitte Mira's character is put through the director's usual cruel ringer until the endings. Strangely, Fassbinder wrote two finales to this tragicomic tale, one astonishingly more violent and nasty than the one he settled upon. I much prefer the latter, where she manages to move on and maybe find love, to the original, where she dies of an anarchist's bullet wound in the arms of her feckless son. The real star of this is Ingird Caven, who is delightful as the worn, ambitious singer and daughter of the protagonist, who uses her father's death to cynically advance her lovelife and career. Her sparring with sister-in-law Irm Hermann is fantastic, too.
Substantially superior and more complete was Fear of Fear, a completely forgotten item from the same year (I don't think it even has its own Wikipedia page). This tells the story of Margot, a severly depressed housewife. Margot's battle with her anxiety following giving birth to her second child goes through the appropriate cycle: Leonard Cohen albums, valium, affairs, alcohol, until the conclusion. This allows Fassbinder to make his commentary upon the value and lack of understanding of these addictions, but the real villain here is the oppressive society of the Economic Miracle that shuns or judges Margot, from the dismissive doctors to the vile inlaws. "We're the normal ones!" screeches Irm Hermann, reprising her role from Mother Kusters'. The implication is unavoidable: Margot, whose world literally disintegrates around her, is the sane one, whilst the respectable in-laws, who chastise Margot for almost everything she does, are the repressed psychotic majority. In this sense, Fassbinder predicts both the medicated society and the religious democratic tyranny of numbers-make-right.
A word must be said for Margit Carstensen, who plays, or rather becomes, Margot. Her acting is comprised of quietly confused facials, which are equal parts brilliantly expressive and controlled. She allows Fassbinder to place ambiguity into his close-ups, such as the final shot of her where it is almost impossible to know for sure her reaction to her neighbour's death. We are left with the disturbing possibility she is happy about it, or is at least gratefully accepting of his self-sacrifice to the demons that haunted them both so that she might live. Or did he merely represent the last traces of her psychosis? The wobbly camera effect, that acted as avatar for her bouts of anxiety, accompanies the credits and works in tandem to split our interpretations. There's such control and economy with Fassbinder that his style is the perfect environment for this story to take hold.
Then The Libertine (2005) was on television the other night. I hadn't seen it since it was first out at the cinema, and having formally studied Wilmot since then was eager to see it again. I was disappointed: it's not as good as I remembered. Not that there's anything seriously wrong with it. It tells a solid story and doesn't shy away from the grotesque and bawdy elements of Rochester's life. Depp gives one of his better performances, though it is still not free from his compulsive false-eccentricity, and John Malkovich is solid as Charles II. There's even a very good piece of shooting in the first theatre scene. But for most part the camera doesn't know where to put itself, too often forcing us into unwarranted intimacy with the characters. There are also some truly outlandish elements, even for the source material. The script seems determined to equate Rochester with a modern rock star, which is not so much unwarranted as it is predictable and cliche, and we are all meant to be aghast at this story of unfulfilled potential without giving us any reason to consider the real Rochester's talent. Admittedly, it would have been difficult to dramatically convey a poem as lengthy as, say, A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, but surely a poet as good as Rochester deserves better than to be remembered as a bit of a lad and a good acting coach.
I also finally managed to see Chimes At Midnight from start to finish and uninterrupted. On paper, it sounds like it should be the greatest film ever: script by Shakespeare, editing and direction by Orson Welles, cast that includes such talent as John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford and Welles himself. There's a temptation to say the general high regard for this film is more influenced by its potential and rarity than by its quality, that those who praise it do so in the knowledge few are likely to call them on it. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This is not quite so much the Holy Grail of Welles' canon (that would be the existing shards of his Don Quixote), nor is it another great but interferred-with show of potential like the Magnificent Ambersons. It is a realised vision, a complete and wonderful film, a culmination both of Welles' unparalleled cinematic skill and his admiration for Shakespeare.
Yes, there are a few problems with the sound, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with a half-hearted restoration. What really struck me about this film was how much Welles, ever the magician, had done with just a little money, cardboard and glue. We are transported to a medieval England of thatched wooden buildings and stone castles, thanks largely to the film's utterly fantastic lighting. Comforting, harrowing and portentious, the shadows themselves are a character. The technical pinnacle of this film comes in the famous Battle of Shrewsbury sequence, a seminal moment in film fight scenes.
The script is fantastic, too. Adapted from Welles' travesty of a play, Five Kings, it seamlessly blends dialogue from five (at my count) Shakespeare plays: the Henriad and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It gives us a sentimental version of Falstaff, more funny and playful than damagingly apathetic and cowardly, but he is none the worse for it. Welles puts in what might be his best performance, giving Falstaff a nuanced depth that is so often missing in other portrayals of the clownish character. In truth there isn't a performance in the film that isn't more than adequate, but this is about Welles, and about Falstaff as his avatar, and they are to be applauded. We learn more about Welles from this film, the way he speaks another man's words, than we do from a thousand biographies or interviews.
Since then I've watched two Fassbinders I haven't seen before. Mother Kusters' Trip To Heaven (1975) is a TV movie about a widow who unwillingly participates in distortions of her late husband's memory. Pulled between communists and anarchists, both of whom wish to make her a symbol in their cause, and systematically abandonded or ignored by her family, Brigitte Mira's character is put through the director's usual cruel ringer until the endings. Strangely, Fassbinder wrote two finales to this tragicomic tale, one astonishingly more violent and nasty than the one he settled upon. I much prefer the latter, where she manages to move on and maybe find love, to the original, where she dies of an anarchist's bullet wound in the arms of her feckless son. The real star of this is Ingird Caven, who is delightful as the worn, ambitious singer and daughter of the protagonist, who uses her father's death to cynically advance her lovelife and career. Her sparring with sister-in-law Irm Hermann is fantastic, too.
Substantially superior and more complete was Fear of Fear, a completely forgotten item from the same year (I don't think it even has its own Wikipedia page). This tells the story of Margot, a severly depressed housewife. Margot's battle with her anxiety following giving birth to her second child goes through the appropriate cycle: Leonard Cohen albums, valium, affairs, alcohol, until the conclusion. This allows Fassbinder to make his commentary upon the value and lack of understanding of these addictions, but the real villain here is the oppressive society of the Economic Miracle that shuns or judges Margot, from the dismissive doctors to the vile inlaws. "We're the normal ones!" screeches Irm Hermann, reprising her role from Mother Kusters'. The implication is unavoidable: Margot, whose world literally disintegrates around her, is the sane one, whilst the respectable in-laws, who chastise Margot for almost everything she does, are the repressed psychotic majority. In this sense, Fassbinder predicts both the medicated society and the religious democratic tyranny of numbers-make-right.
A word must be said for Margit Carstensen, who plays, or rather becomes, Margot. Her acting is comprised of quietly confused facials, which are equal parts brilliantly expressive and controlled. She allows Fassbinder to place ambiguity into his close-ups, such as the final shot of her where it is almost impossible to know for sure her reaction to her neighbour's death. We are left with the disturbing possibility she is happy about it, or is at least gratefully accepting of his self-sacrifice to the demons that haunted them both so that she might live. Or did he merely represent the last traces of her psychosis? The wobbly camera effect, that acted as avatar for her bouts of anxiety, accompanies the credits and works in tandem to split our interpretations. There's such control and economy with Fassbinder that his style is the perfect environment for this story to take hold.
Then The Libertine (2005) was on television the other night. I hadn't seen it since it was first out at the cinema, and having formally studied Wilmot since then was eager to see it again. I was disappointed: it's not as good as I remembered. Not that there's anything seriously wrong with it. It tells a solid story and doesn't shy away from the grotesque and bawdy elements of Rochester's life. Depp gives one of his better performances, though it is still not free from his compulsive false-eccentricity, and John Malkovich is solid as Charles II. There's even a very good piece of shooting in the first theatre scene. But for most part the camera doesn't know where to put itself, too often forcing us into unwarranted intimacy with the characters. There are also some truly outlandish elements, even for the source material. The script seems determined to equate Rochester with a modern rock star, which is not so much unwarranted as it is predictable and cliche, and we are all meant to be aghast at this story of unfulfilled potential without giving us any reason to consider the real Rochester's talent. Admittedly, it would have been difficult to dramatically convey a poem as lengthy as, say, A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, but surely a poet as good as Rochester deserves better than to be remembered as a bit of a lad and a good acting coach.
I also finally managed to see Chimes At Midnight from start to finish and uninterrupted. On paper, it sounds like it should be the greatest film ever: script by Shakespeare, editing and direction by Orson Welles, cast that includes such talent as John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford and Welles himself. There's a temptation to say the general high regard for this film is more influenced by its potential and rarity than by its quality, that those who praise it do so in the knowledge few are likely to call them on it. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This is not quite so much the Holy Grail of Welles' canon (that would be the existing shards of his Don Quixote), nor is it another great but interferred-with show of potential like the Magnificent Ambersons. It is a realised vision, a complete and wonderful film, a culmination both of Welles' unparalleled cinematic skill and his admiration for Shakespeare.
Yes, there are a few problems with the sound, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with a half-hearted restoration. What really struck me about this film was how much Welles, ever the magician, had done with just a little money, cardboard and glue. We are transported to a medieval England of thatched wooden buildings and stone castles, thanks largely to the film's utterly fantastic lighting. Comforting, harrowing and portentious, the shadows themselves are a character. The technical pinnacle of this film comes in the famous Battle of Shrewsbury sequence, a seminal moment in film fight scenes.
The script is fantastic, too. Adapted from Welles' travesty of a play, Five Kings, it seamlessly blends dialogue from five (at my count) Shakespeare plays: the Henriad and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It gives us a sentimental version of Falstaff, more funny and playful than damagingly apathetic and cowardly, but he is none the worse for it. Welles puts in what might be his best performance, giving Falstaff a nuanced depth that is so often missing in other portrayals of the clownish character. In truth there isn't a performance in the film that isn't more than adequate, but this is about Welles, and about Falstaff as his avatar, and they are to be applauded. We learn more about Welles from this film, the way he speaks another man's words, than we do from a thousand biographies or interviews.
Tuesday 9 June 2009
The Night of the Bastard
The results of the European elections were released Saturday night, and it’s difficult to imagine a worse evening/early morning for anyone left of centre without bringing Tequila and large prostitutes into it.
The socialists were comprehensively hammered all across the continent, whilst neoliberal, Euroskeptic and other centre-right parties did well at a time of global economic crisis. (Which, as I remarked to a friend, is like hearing Gary Glitter in the next room whilst you’re already being forcibly fucked in the arse.) As we speak, Silvio Berlusconi is rubbing his salty folds of flesh together in greedy anticipation of another stolen few years as de facto pimp of Italian politics, whilst the likes of Zapatero are licking their wounds. In the UK, David Cameron gloated smugly over a Conservative Wales, comparing himself to David Lloyd George; the vile Dan Hannan recited a Dr Seuss-like ditty before joining Nigel Farange, who looks like a cross between Peewee Herman and a diseased cock, for a spot of mutual masturbation. Finally, and at a glance most disturbingly, Britain elected not one, but two fascists to the European Parliament for the first time ever, only a day removed from the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
We had all anticipated weeks in advance that the British National Party would do well at these elections. I myself had stated it might be a blessing in disguise, that they would go the way of other smaller parties in the past and collapse under their newfound weight and exposure. We all knew that, no matter how well they did here, a first past the post set-up would stop them from ever advancing. But it did nothing to lessen the blow when it finally arrived. When it was announced that Andrew Brons, an outspoken ex-Colin Jordan brownshirt, had gained a seat in Yorkshire and Humber, those of us who had stayed up to watch were nearly speechless. Anger, vitriolic and disbelieving, flooded the Facebook home page. But even that was only a warm up for what happened next: Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, won a North West seat.
A region hung its collective head in shame. The grinning, bloated face of Griffin, like a deliriously spastic Danny DeVito from Batman Returns, seemed to be tattooed on the inside of our eyelids. How could they have triumphed here, and in York, of all places? The answer was clear: low turnouts and electorate apathy had gifted this bumbling far-right Red Triangle Gang seats in an election where they had actually done worse in the popular vote than last time. But the response was impassioned and bewildered: I, for one, in a storm of mentally retarded e-fury, cut all ties to the North West on my Facebook and blog. Never again, I told myself, would I be proud of living in Liverpool, never again would I reminisce about the days when walking viruses like Kelvin MacKenzie would refer to us as a Socialist Republic for our romantic refusal to bend a lip to Thatcherism’s demented labia.
Awake and relatively sober now, we should all be able to take a step back from this and realise the fascist gains, here and in places like Hungary, are an embarrassment and nothing more. That noise you hear is your keys in the washing machine, not jackboots marching up and down outside.
What is far more worrying is Labour dying, a directionless and naive Conservative Party benefitting (although not experiencing the huge swing Cameron promised: realistically, it was a disappointing night for them, too), the worryingly more-mainstream-than-the-BNP UKIP making massive gains and the Lib Dems completely failing. With Vince Cable on their side, and lacking the baggage of the Tories and Labour, this should have been their moment. Instead, they dropped to fourth. Nick Clegg should stand down before the UK has no left-leaning liberal voice left.
What should we learn from this? We do have an enemy. But it’s not the immigrants, like the Daily Mail wants us to believe, or the Commie Jewish Bankers, like the Völkischer Beobachter told us, or the ‘Islamofascists,’ as anyone on the right seems to be screaming, or the Scientologists. It’s not even the BNP: they are a symptom, not the disease itself. The disease is the whole system, and our reaction to it. When liberalism was young, there was a time when our leaders feared us. Now, they only fear us not turning up to the polls. Anyone who doesn’t want this to happen again needs to make their voices a little louder whichever way they can.
For my part, I’m forming the Justice League party tomorrow. The good news is there are still a few places available: I need a Catwoman and an Aquaman before noon.
There are positives to take from this. The Pirate Party, who refuses to treat culture as a commodity, gained a seat. 50% more people voted Green this time around. And Labour took a kicking, perhaps the only centre-right party to do so off the top of my head (though who knows what their orientation is these days?) even if it was to the benefit of the Eton Alliance. But we need to face up to the fact that those who did well are those who are largely responsible for the current economic crisis, and it’s because of our willingness to let corrupt politicians off the hook instead of voting against them. And by the time a real election runs around, those of us who don’t want Dan Hannan to be stuttering the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar to a captivated House of Commons or more demented aspects of British life getting on to so much as a stage in a strip club with a grin on their face need to suck it up before the event rather than eating it afterwards.
The socialists were comprehensively hammered all across the continent, whilst neoliberal, Euroskeptic and other centre-right parties did well at a time of global economic crisis. (Which, as I remarked to a friend, is like hearing Gary Glitter in the next room whilst you’re already being forcibly fucked in the arse.) As we speak, Silvio Berlusconi is rubbing his salty folds of flesh together in greedy anticipation of another stolen few years as de facto pimp of Italian politics, whilst the likes of Zapatero are licking their wounds. In the UK, David Cameron gloated smugly over a Conservative Wales, comparing himself to David Lloyd George; the vile Dan Hannan recited a Dr Seuss-like ditty before joining Nigel Farange, who looks like a cross between Peewee Herman and a diseased cock, for a spot of mutual masturbation. Finally, and at a glance most disturbingly, Britain elected not one, but two fascists to the European Parliament for the first time ever, only a day removed from the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
We had all anticipated weeks in advance that the British National Party would do well at these elections. I myself had stated it might be a blessing in disguise, that they would go the way of other smaller parties in the past and collapse under their newfound weight and exposure. We all knew that, no matter how well they did here, a first past the post set-up would stop them from ever advancing. But it did nothing to lessen the blow when it finally arrived. When it was announced that Andrew Brons, an outspoken ex-Colin Jordan brownshirt, had gained a seat in Yorkshire and Humber, those of us who had stayed up to watch were nearly speechless. Anger, vitriolic and disbelieving, flooded the Facebook home page. But even that was only a warm up for what happened next: Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, won a North West seat.
A region hung its collective head in shame. The grinning, bloated face of Griffin, like a deliriously spastic Danny DeVito from Batman Returns, seemed to be tattooed on the inside of our eyelids. How could they have triumphed here, and in York, of all places? The answer was clear: low turnouts and electorate apathy had gifted this bumbling far-right Red Triangle Gang seats in an election where they had actually done worse in the popular vote than last time. But the response was impassioned and bewildered: I, for one, in a storm of mentally retarded e-fury, cut all ties to the North West on my Facebook and blog. Never again, I told myself, would I be proud of living in Liverpool, never again would I reminisce about the days when walking viruses like Kelvin MacKenzie would refer to us as a Socialist Republic for our romantic refusal to bend a lip to Thatcherism’s demented labia.
Awake and relatively sober now, we should all be able to take a step back from this and realise the fascist gains, here and in places like Hungary, are an embarrassment and nothing more. That noise you hear is your keys in the washing machine, not jackboots marching up and down outside.
What is far more worrying is Labour dying, a directionless and naive Conservative Party benefitting (although not experiencing the huge swing Cameron promised: realistically, it was a disappointing night for them, too), the worryingly more-mainstream-than-the-BNP UKIP making massive gains and the Lib Dems completely failing. With Vince Cable on their side, and lacking the baggage of the Tories and Labour, this should have been their moment. Instead, they dropped to fourth. Nick Clegg should stand down before the UK has no left-leaning liberal voice left.
What should we learn from this? We do have an enemy. But it’s not the immigrants, like the Daily Mail wants us to believe, or the Commie Jewish Bankers, like the Völkischer Beobachter told us, or the ‘Islamofascists,’ as anyone on the right seems to be screaming, or the Scientologists. It’s not even the BNP: they are a symptom, not the disease itself. The disease is the whole system, and our reaction to it. When liberalism was young, there was a time when our leaders feared us. Now, they only fear us not turning up to the polls. Anyone who doesn’t want this to happen again needs to make their voices a little louder whichever way they can.
For my part, I’m forming the Justice League party tomorrow. The good news is there are still a few places available: I need a Catwoman and an Aquaman before noon.
There are positives to take from this. The Pirate Party, who refuses to treat culture as a commodity, gained a seat. 50% more people voted Green this time around. And Labour took a kicking, perhaps the only centre-right party to do so off the top of my head (though who knows what their orientation is these days?) even if it was to the benefit of the Eton Alliance. But we need to face up to the fact that those who did well are those who are largely responsible for the current economic crisis, and it’s because of our willingness to let corrupt politicians off the hook instead of voting against them. And by the time a real election runs around, those of us who don’t want Dan Hannan to be stuttering the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar to a captivated House of Commons or more demented aspects of British life getting on to so much as a stage in a strip club with a grin on their face need to suck it up before the event rather than eating it afterwards.
Saturday 6 June 2009
The Meaning of Cameron
Tomorrow the results of the European elections will be laid bare, and it is almost a foregone conclusion that the Conservative Party will be able to claim another landslide victory as they have done in the local elections. Within the next 12 months, and, depending on the reaction from what remains of the Labour government, possibly within a few weeks, we will have a new Prime Minister: David Cameron, the Gingerbread Man.
Those casual observers in the States might be tempted to draw comparisons with their own recent election. The Gingerbread Man is, after all, a fresher, younger face taking over from a tired, failed and collapsing party.
Others might be tempted to take the other route and equate the Gingerbread Man with George W. Bush's victory in 2001; not for the controversy surrounding the vote counting, but both men's claims to be "compassionate conservatives," not to mention their succession representing a rightwards political shift. Even moreso than that, both Bush and the Gingerbread Man rose because of the capital granted to them by their political aristocracy. Bush, of course, was son of former president George H. W. Bush and grandson of Wall Street executive Prescott Bush, whilst the Gingerbread Man comes from more privileged stock still, the son of a stockbroker, the grandson of Sir William Mount, 2nd Baronet and direct descendant of King William IV. His wife, Samantha, is a descendant of King Charles II, and together the couple have a personal fortune of around £30 million. To call them the aristocracy is a regression of their royal lineage.
However, the Gingerbread Man is not a Bush, for many reasons. There is a long-standing tradition of keeping religion and politics apart in the United Kingdom, perhaps, ironically, because of the lack of official separation of church and state. The last incumbent of the highest office in the land, Tony Blair, famously affirmed this desire for secularism within the Commons and within the Cabinet when he said, "We don't do religion." The Gingerbread Man's vanity has caused him to remark in the past that he is the "heir to Blair," suggesting that a Christian Coalition-style reorientation of politics around faith is massively unlikely and that the Anglo-American tradition will continue, with conservatism remaining a brand of liberalism rather than a concealed far-right assault upon it.
He is also not a Barack Obama. The US president, in one of his more insightful moments, noted the Gingerbread Man was "a lightweight," and is in opposition to his hawkish foreign policy record and Euroskepticism. Obama arguably rose to the top in spite of his relatively unconventional background, whereas in stark contrast the Gingerbread Man has slithered to prominence as leader of the opposition via an old boy's network and has since honoured his connections by promoting his Etonian chums to high positions within the party.
In short, while Obama represents something new, the Gingerbread Man is a return to the days of political hierarchy reflecting the imbalanced order of its society: rich, white males governing. The Tory party has done everything in its power to convince people of the opposite. The patently fake concern for the environment, the "understanding" hand it intends to raise against yobs, the outwards rejection of Thatcherism, the pathetic usage of popular indie bands' music at its conferences - none of it can hold up under the most light of inspections.
The key to understanding the Gingerbread Man, perhaps, is to look at what he sees as the cause of the "broken society" he intends to fix, which is inevitably "the family." Any politician announcing his attention to protect "the family" or "family values" should, in this day and age, be immediately suspected of both homophobia and sexism, but the implication is so rarely picked up on. In the Gingerbread Man's case, it is at the very least pure patronising, a vomitive attempt to appeal to a plastic and hypocritical upper-middle class who will stay with their partners no matter what "for the sake of the children" and actively enforce the stigma that makes life so needlessly difficult for single parents socially and professionally all down the class scale. A more obvious transgression against those lower down the scale was to be found in his utterly juvenile tirade against the poor and the unhealthy, declaring it was their own fault and speaking out against "moral neutrality." Conscious of sounding like a pre-Marxian aristocratic apologist in a post-Marxian age, he hastened to add, “Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices people make.” A few months later, returning to his "family" gimmicking, he added race into the mix, saying too many black fathers were shirking their responsibilities and calling for a "responsibility revolution."
How has this chubby bore been allowed to remain uncatchable? Criticisms have barely stayed in the media for days, satire has been in relatively short supply. The Tories have backed all of Labour's most awful policies - the Iraq War, tuition fees, and so forth, and lacked the economic skill, philosophy and influence to have prevented the current crisis had they been in power. Whilst it is true much of the Conservatives' having managed to escape the public bludgeoning Labour have been subjected to over the expenses scandal is a result of Britain's ignorance, a conflating of "parliament" and "government" that allows the opposition to slip by whilst the party in power bears the brunt, there is more to it. More than anything, what the Gingerbread Man represents is the death of New Labour, contributing actively as it did to the global irresponsibility that finds us where we are now, and perhaps the death of the Labour Party altogether; a nostalgia for the good old days; and working-class apathy. The upper-classes have received their last punch on the nose in the form of Alistair Darling's latest tax increase, and have rallied, whilst those below them, having had no real representation since 1994, have been stamped into the mud and are unwilling to go and vote to counter this resurgence of the nervous overlords shivering in their castles.
The whole country seems unconsciously aware of Giambattista Vico's historical model and is attempting to regress back from the chaotic precipice into the safe, comfortable aristocratic age that proceeded it. This collective urge to return to the womb seems as darkly, comically Jungian as it is ultimately flawed and doomed to failure. Even though the Gingerbread Man's crimes, his racism and his social elitism, his plastic personality politics, his laughable and almost unbelievably egotistical "Cameron Direct" programme, his passive support of the Botha regime, his complete lack of policies, his hypocrisy over drugs, have all failed to catch up with him so far, eventually he will walk into the fox's mouth and dissolve into the cruel river of public and media disapproval. But whilst the Gingerbread Man's vileness seems to know no bounds, for now, he looks likely to stay a few steps ahead of his detractors in this distracted time, for no reason other than there being no enemies to measure him by.
Those casual observers in the States might be tempted to draw comparisons with their own recent election. The Gingerbread Man is, after all, a fresher, younger face taking over from a tired, failed and collapsing party.
Others might be tempted to take the other route and equate the Gingerbread Man with George W. Bush's victory in 2001; not for the controversy surrounding the vote counting, but both men's claims to be "compassionate conservatives," not to mention their succession representing a rightwards political shift. Even moreso than that, both Bush and the Gingerbread Man rose because of the capital granted to them by their political aristocracy. Bush, of course, was son of former president George H. W. Bush and grandson of Wall Street executive Prescott Bush, whilst the Gingerbread Man comes from more privileged stock still, the son of a stockbroker, the grandson of Sir William Mount, 2nd Baronet and direct descendant of King William IV. His wife, Samantha, is a descendant of King Charles II, and together the couple have a personal fortune of around £30 million. To call them the aristocracy is a regression of their royal lineage.
However, the Gingerbread Man is not a Bush, for many reasons. There is a long-standing tradition of keeping religion and politics apart in the United Kingdom, perhaps, ironically, because of the lack of official separation of church and state. The last incumbent of the highest office in the land, Tony Blair, famously affirmed this desire for secularism within the Commons and within the Cabinet when he said, "We don't do religion." The Gingerbread Man's vanity has caused him to remark in the past that he is the "heir to Blair," suggesting that a Christian Coalition-style reorientation of politics around faith is massively unlikely and that the Anglo-American tradition will continue, with conservatism remaining a brand of liberalism rather than a concealed far-right assault upon it.
He is also not a Barack Obama. The US president, in one of his more insightful moments, noted the Gingerbread Man was "a lightweight," and is in opposition to his hawkish foreign policy record and Euroskepticism. Obama arguably rose to the top in spite of his relatively unconventional background, whereas in stark contrast the Gingerbread Man has slithered to prominence as leader of the opposition via an old boy's network and has since honoured his connections by promoting his Etonian chums to high positions within the party.
In short, while Obama represents something new, the Gingerbread Man is a return to the days of political hierarchy reflecting the imbalanced order of its society: rich, white males governing. The Tory party has done everything in its power to convince people of the opposite. The patently fake concern for the environment, the "understanding" hand it intends to raise against yobs, the outwards rejection of Thatcherism, the pathetic usage of popular indie bands' music at its conferences - none of it can hold up under the most light of inspections.
The key to understanding the Gingerbread Man, perhaps, is to look at what he sees as the cause of the "broken society" he intends to fix, which is inevitably "the family." Any politician announcing his attention to protect "the family" or "family values" should, in this day and age, be immediately suspected of both homophobia and sexism, but the implication is so rarely picked up on. In the Gingerbread Man's case, it is at the very least pure patronising, a vomitive attempt to appeal to a plastic and hypocritical upper-middle class who will stay with their partners no matter what "for the sake of the children" and actively enforce the stigma that makes life so needlessly difficult for single parents socially and professionally all down the class scale. A more obvious transgression against those lower down the scale was to be found in his utterly juvenile tirade against the poor and the unhealthy, declaring it was their own fault and speaking out against "moral neutrality." Conscious of sounding like a pre-Marxian aristocratic apologist in a post-Marxian age, he hastened to add, “Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices people make.” A few months later, returning to his "family" gimmicking, he added race into the mix, saying too many black fathers were shirking their responsibilities and calling for a "responsibility revolution."
How has this chubby bore been allowed to remain uncatchable? Criticisms have barely stayed in the media for days, satire has been in relatively short supply. The Tories have backed all of Labour's most awful policies - the Iraq War, tuition fees, and so forth, and lacked the economic skill, philosophy and influence to have prevented the current crisis had they been in power. Whilst it is true much of the Conservatives' having managed to escape the public bludgeoning Labour have been subjected to over the expenses scandal is a result of Britain's ignorance, a conflating of "parliament" and "government" that allows the opposition to slip by whilst the party in power bears the brunt, there is more to it. More than anything, what the Gingerbread Man represents is the death of New Labour, contributing actively as it did to the global irresponsibility that finds us where we are now, and perhaps the death of the Labour Party altogether; a nostalgia for the good old days; and working-class apathy. The upper-classes have received their last punch on the nose in the form of Alistair Darling's latest tax increase, and have rallied, whilst those below them, having had no real representation since 1994, have been stamped into the mud and are unwilling to go and vote to counter this resurgence of the nervous overlords shivering in their castles.
The whole country seems unconsciously aware of Giambattista Vico's historical model and is attempting to regress back from the chaotic precipice into the safe, comfortable aristocratic age that proceeded it. This collective urge to return to the womb seems as darkly, comically Jungian as it is ultimately flawed and doomed to failure. Even though the Gingerbread Man's crimes, his racism and his social elitism, his plastic personality politics, his laughable and almost unbelievably egotistical "Cameron Direct" programme, his passive support of the Botha regime, his complete lack of policies, his hypocrisy over drugs, have all failed to catch up with him so far, eventually he will walk into the fox's mouth and dissolve into the cruel river of public and media disapproval. But whilst the Gingerbread Man's vileness seems to know no bounds, for now, he looks likely to stay a few steps ahead of his detractors in this distracted time, for no reason other than there being no enemies to measure him by.
Monday 20 April 2009
Roadside Ponderings
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) is often hailed as a moving and frightening film, a thinking man's sci-fi to rival 2001. The comparisons with Kubrick's film are more deserved here than those often attributed to Tarkovsky's other venture into science fiction, Solyaris (1972), which I have always considered an interesting but ultimately self-parodying film (laborious shots combined with a pseudo-philosophical script), but again somewhat unusual. Whereas Space Odyssey certainly shares a technical competency and spirtual evolution angle with Stalker, that's where the similarities end. Kubrick's film is cold and impassive, even in moments of glory, underlining the director's understanding of tone and mood. Stalker, at its most pessimistic, is rich in human mystery and pondering on the theme of transcendence.
Truthfully there are literally tens of shots in the film that suggest the director's genius, some of them, true to form, lasting for minutes on end. Our early shepherding into and out of the doorway into the bedroom, the continuous take on Monkey's progress down a slope as it is slowly revealed she is being carried rather than walking, the iconoclastic drift over images of the gods of our modern collective consciousness. (Jesus in prayer, money, a gun.) Perhaps the best example of the artist/magician duality is the final scene that at least deserves to be famous, in which Monkey moves a glass across a table with her mind. Or does she? Is she merely observing it's being progressed by the vibrations of a passing train? Our willingness to believe the unbelieveable, though, is a testament not to Tarkovsky's skill with a camera, but his understanding of psychology.
This scene follows what has been as much a psychoanalytical journey as a theological one. It is impossible not to pick up on the clumsy Id, Ego and Superego dynamic provided by the three (male) leads, but the Wittgensteinian undertones are far more subtle. The Zone, where our three heroes journey, is a metaphor for the functional world, a world of prepositions and language traps, where markers must be lain down to navigate in chaos. Just as we require illogical spatial recognitions to stay sane - Home, School, Work, Local Shop, Abroad, etc. - so does Stalker throw nuts to mark their progress before they've made it. Space is relative in this linguistic realm, and Stalker, who tries to impose his own rules on it, must thus lose the most at the pilgrimage's conclusion, in which it is revealed the Holy Grail of the story is a somewhere between a placebo and a subconscious manipulation of the universe (one theory posits that Monkey is born out of Porcupine's wish for his brother's return and is hence a reincarnation via subatomic reasoning). What is interesting is that it is Professor, ostensibly the broken, castrated Superego, who attempts to destroy Room in the Zone, where wishes are meant to be granted. His rejection of the oxymoronic scientific supernatural represents the ultimate failure of the Symbolic Circuit in Leary's model, and perhaps the culmination of a cinematic thesis extension of Lacan's Symbolic order.
Watching Tarkovsky's Stalker uncovers the potential of cinema as a medium. We are never sure whether we are watching an artist or a magician; the truth is, the director is both, often simultaneously. Immediately we are struck by the aesthetics: the lighting is perfection, the control and patience of the shots chosen unmatched; furthermore, Tarkovsky is one of the cinema's great portraiters as well as a commendable landscape photographer. I fell in love with Alexander Kaidanovsky's head about twenty minutes in and the sympathy I felt for his character never left me.
Truthfully there are literally tens of shots in the film that suggest the director's genius, some of them, true to form, lasting for minutes on end. Our early shepherding into and out of the doorway into the bedroom, the continuous take on Monkey's progress down a slope as it is slowly revealed she is being carried rather than walking, the iconoclastic drift over images of the gods of our modern collective consciousness. (Jesus in prayer, money, a gun.) Perhaps the best example of the artist/magician duality is the final scene that at least deserves to be famous, in which Monkey moves a glass across a table with her mind. Or does she? Is she merely observing it's being progressed by the vibrations of a passing train? Our willingness to believe the unbelieveable, though, is a testament not to Tarkovsky's skill with a camera, but his understanding of psychology.This scene follows what has been as much a psychoanalytical journey as a theological one. It is impossible not to pick up on the clumsy Id, Ego and Superego dynamic provided by the three (male) leads, but the Wittgensteinian undertones are far more subtle. The Zone, where our three heroes journey, is a metaphor for the functional world, a world of prepositions and language traps, where markers must be lain down to navigate in chaos. Just as we require illogical spatial recognitions to stay sane - Home, School, Work, Local Shop, Abroad, etc. - so does Stalker throw nuts to mark their progress before they've made it. Space is relative in this linguistic realm, and Stalker, who tries to impose his own rules on it, must thus lose the most at the pilgrimage's conclusion, in which it is revealed the Holy Grail of the story is a somewhere between a placebo and a subconscious manipulation of the universe (one theory posits that Monkey is born out of Porcupine's wish for his brother's return and is hence a reincarnation via subatomic reasoning). What is interesting is that it is Professor, ostensibly the broken, castrated Superego, who attempts to destroy Room in the Zone, where wishes are meant to be granted. His rejection of the oxymoronic scientific supernatural represents the ultimate failure of the Symbolic Circuit in Leary's model, and perhaps the culmination of a cinematic thesis extension of Lacan's Symbolic order.More mythological is the introduction of a black dog that follows the trio. Undoubtedly Anubis, it consumes whilst Stalker talks of hearts, attaches itself to Stalker in his own words, and whines at Monkey's Osiric annointment by Beethoven. In other scenes it lingers, a curious reminder that in the Zone, just as in life, death (and judgement?) is around every corner. Whilst not quite Tarkovsky's masterpiece (that is undoubtedly Zerkalo (1975)), Stalker is a fascinating film whichever way you look at it and a worthy addition to his oeuvre.
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