92. Category Slippage: Robert Beavers, Ingmar Bergman, Schanelec’s “Musik,” and White’s “Nocturnes for the King of Naples”, reviewed by Master Raro
I suppose it was inevitable. Our ivory tower refuge here at Ebersdorf Tower would eventually be invaded by coarse reality, despite security teams and safe rooms. J. D. Vance’s derogatory attack on “childless cat-ladies” has politicized our leader’s – Louise Ebersdorf’s – aesthetic project, a reversal we would never have imagined possible. Our boss took the remark personally. She is now pro-Kamala Harris for our next President, after years of support for the Republican Party, no matter what, and even after attempts to get a certain former ex-President to appear in one of her lavish screen productions. Like a number of other Republicans running for the MAGA exit, Louise has flipped. Her twenty-one prize felines are housed downstairs under super-security not because there is necessarily any Republican threat to their safety but in a show of protective Pussy Pride that borders on a lioness’ dedication to her young. That would include the safety measures that Ebersdorf employees – Louise’s professional children – enjoy (or suffer). Especially Pippa, Cheryl, Sandy, and myself.
Of course, all of these events impact on our dream company, The Ballet, Lulu’s other pet project and the reason why some of us live and work in-Tower here in Manhattan. Cheryl and I have been rehearsing two new ballets by Sandy which have been put on hold. “Danube”, a satiric pas de deux about club-kids, was judged by Lulu to be too critical and down-beat within today’s politicized culture. She henceforth wants ballets that speak one way or another of “Joy”. (I suppose Sandy and Cheryl will have to become choreographic equivalents of Older Capra or Forever Spielberg.) And now Sandy’s cat-burglar ballet has become too potentially threatening, Lulu’s sensitivity to possible loss of her darlings dialed to the max. (In preparation for that latter dance, I had been reading a fascinating new biography of the real-life cat-burglar of the 1920s, Arthur Barry.) Cheryl had been imagining herself as a combination of Grace Kelly and Kay Francis. I saw myself as Cary Grant and Herbert Marshall. It is possible that Louise has simply lost her sense of humor. Balletomanes sometimes can become rather sanctimonious. And I do think our boss is out of touch with the club scene, such as it is here in a post-Covid New York. So, as in much of the current U.S. arts, cutting satire is out, and the party line is in.
Speaking of dance fashions, what is going on at New York City Ballet? Those “Ballet Unbound” ads and videos are fashionista eyesores. Is Sarah Jessica Parker this company’s Deep-Board CEO? Company profiles have become parodies of themselves: either all-year Fashion Week ballets at NYCB or full evening behemoths after Great Literary and Dramatic Works at American Ballet Theatre. I am not sure either company currently knows what a “ballet” is or has been, much less what it could be. Category slippage has reached a new level of opportunism and evasiveness. Our elderly friend Florian says that the scene is all “Glen Tetley 24/7”. In other words, conceptual mediocrity. Where is the classical dancing? Hiding out in some cultural keep? (Hint-hint!) American companies have extraordinary dancers, so where are the new ballets to show them off in all their schooled glory?
I have been reading far and wide. The post has brought us a lavish new volume from the MIT Press: Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers by Rebekah Rutkoff (Cambridge, Mass., 2024). Beavers is the filmmaker I enjoy the most when it comes to what complex cinematic poetry can convey. His movies are what some audiences would call “avant-garde” but that does not begin to cover their achievement. The examples of his work that I have seen usually deal with his research into European sites and artifacts. His lens travels to the very locations, and there it films images and sounds of extraordinary expressiveness and beauty – and then he assembles the findings into individual statements that describe both the chosen sanctuary, its unique qualities, and his private reaction to its history and resonance, extending evidentiary past into our present and into the future of film form. If that sounds heady, it only begins to describe the lyric ambitions of this extraordinary artist.
Three examples among the films: Ruskin (visuals of water canals and decorative effulgence), Efpsychi (the collaboration of Athens’ urban design and the resident human form), Sotiros (the artistic life equated with healing and self-renewal). Here are three films out of at least two dozen works that show the interactive participation of the director-cinematographer with topographies, topic and tone. The final effect is musical, latticed, intensified. We want the opportunity to see all of this director’s works all of the time.
In author Rutkoff, Double Vision boasts a highly informed and sensitive audience following Beavers in his researches, herself a modern Goethean traveler who outlines autobiographical background and the histories of the places and artifacts documented. Rutkoff demonstrates how Baudelaire’s famous “correspondences” can be found in Beavers’ version of film formalism, an ability to both uncover and correlate. There are so many entryways into these films, so generous are they with sudden intuitions and transparent in their larger aims. Rutkoff covets such strengths of eye and mind and articulates them. She is alert to the inspirations which the young Beavers took from the example of Gregory Markopoulos’ filmmaking. (The American-Greek director was his mentor and partner for many years.) Beavers now oversees the screenings of Markopoulos’ body of work at the Temenos sanctuary in Greece.
The volume is graced with Beavers’ luminous still images from his films and with many telling quotes from his writings and interviews. For example, I was excited to find him indicating in regard to his film Stoas that it includes shots of the waters of the Lousios River in Arcadia where the filmmaker found an example of the “divinity of appearances”. He notes that the Greek god Apollo was the “god of appearances”. As my readers know, I have long seen George Balanchine’s ballet Apollo as a work about the modes through which the Apollonian can be known, how the mythic deity arranged for his participation in our world through startling emergences in time and place. Beavers’ camera tracks the potential for such sudden visions and makes sure they are caught and rendered indelible.
Rutkoff separates various interpretations of the “meanings” of the films – hers and ours -- from the many quotations from Beavers in her text. As a result, we can see where Rutkoff’s voice ends its reports and where Beavers makes his provocative master statements. MoMA recently presented an evening of tribute to Beavers with the premiere of his latest work, Dedication: Bernice Hodges. The filmmaker was in attendance at the screening, and the event also celebrated the publication of the handsome MIT tome. Anthology Film Archives will present eight programs of Beavers' films in a series that runs from September 26-29.
In commercial narrative film-making perhaps no director was (or is) as universally revered as Ingmar Bergman, and a new book from Peter Cowie has appeared -- God and the Devil, Faber, 2023 -- to remind us of the fame and influence which Bergman’s films attained in the late twentieth century. The volume covers the life more than the development of the director’s thought (for example, his study of the writings of Jung), but it has many rewards. Cowie allows us to see how the movies were folded into Bergman’s ongoing work in the theater, where he used many of the same performers found in his films. As a result, for the first time in English the full array of his accomplishment on stage and screen can be grasped in outline.
How I would have liked to have seen certain of his stage productions, for example his version of Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress. To get a sense of what Bergman gave the world you would have to have lived in Sweden and caught both the films and stage productions year after year. Near-comparable figures in world filmmaking would have been Luchino Visconti in Milan along with Jean Cocteau and Patrice Chéreau in France. The new volume also keeps up with Bergman’s busy (and frequently tumultuous) private life. Out of those emotional coils and toils came some of the greatest portraits of women rendered on celluloid. I was interested to discover that Bergman’s first two wives – Else Fisher and Ellen Lundström -- were choreographers. And that he was early and strongly influenced by classical Indian dance. In addition to Cowie’s handy volume, I can recommend Birgetta Steene’s vast reference guide to the director. From a distance, we now begin to have an overview of this theater- and cinema-changing artist.
Sandy and Cheryl and I have continued watching films on the Big Screens of our local N.Y. theaters. The new movie by Angela Schanelec, Musik, is a beautiful conflation of themes from ancient Greek myths, principally the Oedipus narrative combined with the story of Orpheus. It is clearly a descendant of Cocteau’s Orphée. Set in a modern landscape, we watch Jon (Aliocha Schneider) accidentally kill a friend, go to prison, learn there to sing, marry and lose his wife, observe the death of a “great man” (see the choral warning in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex), and end by committing himself to a career as a modern singer-composer. Together with Christian Petzold and Thomas Arslan, Schanelec contributes to what has been termed the second wave of a Berlin School of contemporary commercial filmmaking. Musik’s extraordinary color cinematography is by Ivan Markovic. The original score is by Doug Tielli; I need to hear more of his work. The sound mix is precise in its choices and delicate in its effects.
In Schanelec’s movie the hero’s life is rendered in the small details of brief vignettes which lead to large life-changes: from beloved to murderer, from incarceration to education, from husband to widower, and from father to composer. The implication is that the arts are a kind of sustaining Orphic poultice applied to the Oedipal wounds of our everyday existence. When Jon repeatedly witnesses the fragility of human life and ultimately dedicates himself to the creation of his music, there is even a Dionysian thiasos to celebrate his choice. Cheryl and Sandy and I found Musik to be moving and inspiring. Schanelec has made a short, buoyant cinematic ballet out of monumental Attic materials. Cocteau may have innovated, but there is yet more to say with his approach.
McNally has just published a new edition of the 1978 novel by Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples. (Sandy slipped the volume to me.) White often puts this work, along with his Forgetting Elena and Caracole, in a category of his early “avant-garde” fiction, but it contains his enduring satiric eye and command of language. I suppose you could call the three novels “baroque” in that they take a simple theme and develop it with virtuoso elaboration. All three are wonderfully funny if you get the underlying point of view.
In Nocturnes, we are ostensibly reading the memoirs of an unnamed fellow who once had an affair with “a great man” and who eventually left him (as youngsters will do), and who now at an older age memorializes their relationship and his regrets at the loss of the too-brief union. (I will call the first-person figure here the Young Beloved and the great man the Older Lover.) Not too far into the novel the reader begins to wonder just who this famous, falcon-less “King of Naples” might be – a well-known novelist, perhaps? – and who is this youngster who doesn’t seem to have read his mentor’s old or new works (there are no textual quotes) or to have had much interest in the older man’s backstory. In the narrator’s elegiac memories, the Older Lover is never named and is referred to in tribute with an ambiguous “you” throughout. Something is more than a bit awry in the telling of this classic story of homosexual love and loss.
What the reader may eventually conclude (this one did) is that the Older Lover is indeed writing his latest novel, the one you are reading, and that he is reporting the tale of the breakup from the point of view of the Young Beloved, the invented “I” of the text. In other words, the “you” referred to by a regretful narrator is himself, the older man, and his present fictional project is to imagine the story of the affair of the two from his departed lover’s point of view.
A number of literary effects can be accomplished by so doing. First of all, the regret for the youngster’s departure from the mature man’s life can be both poetically represented and satirically exorcized through an act of creative imagination: here is how He saw Me and here is how I see Him. Working with the biographical information which the Young Beloved has left behind, the novelist will extrapolate the dire home situation from which the boy needed to be rescued by the Older Lover. And the narcissism of a typical eromenos can be used as an excuse for wild (and often hilariously campy) fantasias of guilt and youthful excess. The satire works both ways: the great novelist-erastes even arranges a fictional death for himself, so the terminal parting can take place in anticipatory fantasy, à la Mark Twain’s boy-hero. This great man is not easy on the departed one or on himself in his report, however filtered. He makes clear that the Young Beloved was promptly replaced in his own life with another male muse. The comedy of this critical approach to amatory memorial is rich, but there are wonderful hints of real sorrow and score-settling between the lines. I laughed, especially when the “you” referred to in the text can be applied to both young or old lover simultaneously: such joint application appears to be universal in this caustic view of romance.
White provides helpful clues to his puzzle. The ostensible narrator describes himself as a “spector”, a disguised ghost. The wandering Beloved provides himself with a new friend, Craig, a theatrical designer who evokes a milieu backstage right out of Melville-Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles. The two boys play at identity switches, Craig impersonating the Young Beloved, our narrator miming the stoic Older Lover. (There are charades within charades in this deft, witty work.) In the novel’s intercalated biography of the Beloved, we watch him being rescued by the mature Lover from boarding school and a decadent Spanish scene ruled by the youngster’s biological father. White’s portrait of Euro-trash here is definitive. And I will not soon forget the passage (pages 62-63) where the voices of Lover and Beloved appear to combine or the double vision allowed the reader toward the novel’s climax (see page 119). For those who enjoy the mental gymnastics required by this novel, its aesthetic delights are manifold. In his Nocturnes, White is a one-man avant-garde.
Here at Ebersdorf Tower, of course, we have all been watching the Parisian Olympics. Now that “breakin” has joined synchronized swimming and surf-boarding as competitive events, Paco has proposed “Ballet Athletics” for future Games. (Our savant, Madame Sesostris, is doubtful such decadence can happen.) Inspired by the Olympians and dance coverage in the New York Times, our Belle plans to study sports medicine. “If we cannot all be beautiful, we can at least be healthy!” she declares. After all, the local New York press gives attention to dancers mostly when they are physically injured or in rehab. Belle to the rescue! What classifies as a “sport” anymore? Everything? You know something is very wrong when the digital site of the Times advertises its Arts and Ideas section with a giant martini, McDonalds’ Slurpees, paintings of junk food, and military vests for your next combat mission. As Pippa recently pointed out, the paper’s art section and its digital version are simply out-of-it.
Category slippage can become the fashion when older classifications are suddenly considered to be politically discriminatory. Here is a moment when cultural losses occur in the arts, from ignorance of the healthy multiplicity of creative aims and styles. Thank goodness for Ballet Voice! Think of the way the opera world lost its bel canto repertory until revived in the twentieth century thanks to dedicated artists like Callas. And would we still have the Russian style of ballet we think of as Petipa formalism if Balanchine and Ashton had not conserved and reinvented the mode? Conservation is the first step. Artistic discrimination then provides the tools. How to use them – if we use them – is in our hands.
M.R.
__________________
Commenti