Reawakening

This is turning out to be a really grand weekend. Saturday started in grand fashion with the movie binge at Kats's place. We started with Frederico Fellini's 8 ½, and it was a fantastic film. The blurb sells it as the greatest film about film of all time, and the actual product didn't disappoint one bit. I recommend it to anyone who has eyes and ears - this is a film to open the eyes of your eyes and unplug the ears of your ears.

In the film, director Guido is seeking refuge in a stylish health spa, trying to gather his thoughts and ideas for his newest, autobiographical, film. He is followed by his entire production team who is anxious, no, positively desperate, to begin shooting the film, even though Guido himself has no idea how to string the various scenes from his life together into a coherent film. So the film is an engaging and fascinating series of jumps between the haggling and maneouvrings of the production team and actors eager to be on the cast, Guido's own fantasy-like memory sequences that show how he envisions individual scenes without showing how they all fit into the coherent plotline of a movie, and that gray area in between, when he daydreams and sometimes hallucinates wistfully about how he would like the real world to more closely resemble a world in which he is in total creative control and is unopposed and unhindered by the mere effervescence of human interaction, expectation and obligation.

The film is delicately wrought, exquisitely balancing different viewpoints like a brilliant book, and giving the impression of saying something powerful while remaining ambiguous about what it is actually saying. The irritating peripherals of the creative process, as embodied in the pragmatic considerations of his production crew and actors, seem petty, only encumbering his creative vision. One gets the sense that he views his daydreams and stylised recounting of his memories as the core of the enterprise, and pragmatic considerations can burn. But then as the film progresses one gets the creeping sensation that he is merely being vain in making this film, indulging himself in a self-aggrandising spectacle, and inflicting his self-absorbed enterprise on his coworkers and prospective audience. Gradually the importance of the memories too begin to erode, and one is left with the very postmodern feeling that nothing really matters anymore. Guido cannot make his life story fit into a progressive plotline that shows them inexorably shaping him into a successful human being, cannot squeeze meaning out of the clutter of his past.

Another point was that Guido was too proprietary with his memories. Unwilling to throw away any aspect of his life, determined to portray it in all its glorious entirety in the film, Guido is driven to include irrelevant and peripheral events that only serve to disrupt the progressive storyline that he seeks. He is reluctant to cut out any of his old acquaintances from the narrative, leading to a proliferation of anciliary characters and the cluttering up of his story. This, then, is the height of self-indulgence, his essentially egotistical hoarding of disjointed memories. This also makes his prone to dwelling in the past, mulling over what he sees as past successes and refusing to deal with the present consequences of past mistakes and decisions. The film then becomes a type of escapism for him, a symbol of refuge from the present and, even more scarily, the future.

This, of course, adds to his inability to communicate with other people around him, and his inability to engage with the present in general. His production team does not know or understand what he is trying to do with the film. His wife cannot tell when he is telling the truth, and resorts to the conclusion that he must always be treated as a liar. He talks most openly with his Muse, an imaginary actress that serves as a catalyst or sounding board for his ideas, but at the same time further reinforces his handicap in communicating those selfsame ideas in a comprehensible form. It raises the old problem of how an artist is supposed to balance the need for the immediacy of spontaneous experience against the need for detachment in order to create a meaningful portrayal of that spontaneous experience.

Stylistically, the film was beautifully made, with its rich tones in monochrome, its epic-scale sets and exquisitely constructed dream sequences. The people and places are all beautiful in an elegant, prewar setting, and this of course lends itself to the feeling of romantic nostalgia that makes clinging to the past so attractive. The symbolism was richly layered and carefully designed, and it makes you bemoan the notion that movies aren't made like that anymore. Structurally, the film is a feat of idea-engineering that is as awe-inspiring as an architectural masterpiece. The complexities and convolutions of self-reflexive and ironic storytelling is balanced by a captivating and incisive humour that makes this film compelling to watch, that makes its enriching ideas easier to comprehend, that makes its ambiguities and problems attractive to the intellect.

Definitely there is more to this film than what I write here; definitely it warrants another watching. But this kind of writing is also an indulgence in itself, and I have more to write about. Maybe another time, I can take a slower walk through the intricacies of this film.

*

So, after 8 ½ came The Battle for Algiers, reckoned to be the first documentary film ever made. It was significant in its time, I guess, in that it personalised the threat of terrorism, making a faceless threat something human and comprehensible in human terms. The most important aspect, I think, was that it showed the motivations and intentions of both the terrorists and the paratroopers sent to crush them, and both are ennobled by reason. The film, I guess, is a statement against bigotry, a caution to understand your enemy in order not to underestimate his weaknesses or overestimate his scruples. And once evil has a human face it is not so easy to come to unsympathetic sweeping conclusions.

But essentially I think The Battle for Algiers was a war thriller. As is the case with documentary films, it was prone to simplistic ambiguities, fashionably poignant but overused ideas like terrorists not being wholly inhuman, the inexorable escalation of conflict to include innocents, and the waste of war that is inflicted in the name of honour and self-defence by both sides. In its day, the movie was possibly ground-breaking in the portrayal of these ideas, but I think that it's a testament to the genre's success that these tried-and-tested platitudes have come to become the genre's greatest contribution as well as biggest weakness in the discussion of the justice of war.

It si a fashionable idea, isn't it - that both good guys and bad guys can be noble, that audiences can be manipulated into sympathising with people that in real life they would be disgusted by; that audiences can find themselves uncomfortably rooting for the bomber about to blow up a bar filled with teenage revelers. The better films have become adept at playing with these weaknesses and hypocrysies generated by a weak and lazy moral code in the audience. That is not to say that this is a deplorable thing - on the contrary, people should think like this more, I think. But when the films use this device out of habit or obligation, when they make the audience uncomfortable but don't pique them into thinking about the source of their discomfort more deeply, it's like taking a bungee jump - pleasantly scary but assuredly safe. The discomfort becomes ironically a source of comfort for the audience, a superficial and fashionable feeling that lets you soothe your conscience and say that at least you think about the issues, even if you never do anything about it.

*

Also watched The Pillowman that evening. It was the first play in too long - and it was excellent! A very creepy plot, about Katurian, a story-writer whose tales have gruesome and sick twists involving things like children killing parents or strangers maiming children out of a twisted sense of justice. His brother Michael, sort of a retard, takes it upon himself to act out some of the child murders that Katurian wrote, and they get arrested by the police. The play shows their interrogation, and Katurian's search for comprehension behind, first, why the police object to his stories, second, whether Michael did kill those children, and finally, how guilty is himself of his brother's killings.

It was a very, very rich plot, in the same way that Fellini's self-reflexive film had an intricate and complex storyline. The obvious self-reflexivity of the play becomes a central problem, and the audience follows Katurian's reasoning as he tries to extricate the reality from the plotlines of his stories. He wonders how much of their predicament is true; whether the police are framing him, fabricating a story of his guilt; whether his brother can be trusted in his bumbling, well-meaning spirit; whether his writing is essentially fiction or autobiography; whether writers are only responsible for creating the stories, or are also culpable of the thoughts they spawn in their readers. Katurian struggles with the dissolving boundary between reality and fiction, in a very postmodern way, but also very sensitively, with intense emotion, compassion powerfully contradicted by revulsion, guilt vying with a sense of justice for supremacy.

Some of the stories written into the plot by Katurian are also very good in and of themselves. The "Three Gibbet Crossroads" struck me; it goes like this:

A man wakes up from unconsciousness to find he is chained in a gibbet at a crossroads with two other criminals, similarly in gibbets. He knows he is guilty of a crime, but he cannot remember what his crime was. He sees a skeleton in one of the gibbets; a sign declares the man was a rapist. The other gibbet was occupied by an emaciated old man, who was a murderer. The first man calls out to the old man, asking him to read his own sign and tell him what he was guilty of. The old murderer looks at the man's sign, and, disgusted, spits on him.

A group of nuns walk past, and say some prayers over the skeleton. They give some food and water to the murderer. But when they come to the man and read his sign, the life drains out of them and the walk away without a word, stony-faced. Next a highwayman comes along. He examines the skeleton dispassionately. Then he goes to the murderer and breaks open his lock, setting him free. Then he comes over to the man, and reads his sign, and dispassionately draws his pistol, shooting the man through the heart.

The man cries out with his dying breath, "Please, tell me what I've done!" But the highwayman walks away without a backward glance, and the last thing the condemned man hears is the highwayman's derisive laugh.

Then there is the one about the Pillowman:

There was once a Pillowman, made entirely out of pillows. He was a good-natured, kind-hearted sort, but he had a terrible job. He would go around the world, seeking out people whose lives had been so horrible, and they had been so thoroughly broken, that they wanted to commit suicide. He would seek them out, stop them at the verge of death, and take them back in time to their childhoods. There, he would tell them about the terrible lives they would lead, and convince them to kill themselves as children rather than live through the horrible years to come. He would make it look like accidents, and managed to save hundreds from horrible lives.

But there were some who refused to believe that their lives would be terrible. There was a girl who refused to even talk to the Pillowman, because her life had been so happy up to then. The Pillowman left her, tears falling from his eyes. The next day, she began to be systematically and regularly raped by a strange man, and twenty years later committed suicide by gassing herself. The Pillowman visited her again then, and she berated him for not trying hard enough to convince her to commit suicide when she was younger.

Ultimately, the sadness that he had to inflict in his job depressed the Pillowman and wore out his kindly disposition. He resolved to carry out one last mission into the past, and then he would pack it in. He travelled back into his own past and found his younger self. Then, he told his younger self about the terrible job he would have to take up in the future, going around assisting children in committing suicide. The young Pillowman, being equally kind and warmhearted, immediately resolved to spare his older self all this misery, and agreed to kill himself. The Pillowman started to fade away, and in his last moments, gratefully thanked his younger self for taking his own life. But at the last moment, he was buffetted from all sides by the screams of the children he had saved from leading terrible lives, all resurrecting and being forced to live their original lives until they reached their original destinies...

Such twisted, but also disturbingly perceptive and sensitive examinations of the complexities of human life set this play apart from many that I've seen. It is exquisite to see Katurian being tortured by the consequences of his stories, as well as the disturbing origins of his genius. These are sensitively rendered on stage as he faces police torture and the uncomprehending, jolly killings his brother made in the name of his stories. Katurian is also faced with the possible destruction of all his stories at the hands of the authorities, and he decides that he will do all he can to protect the stories, twisted and tortured though they were, as rooted and bathed in blood as they were; and ultimately he even decides to trade his life for the preservation of his stories. Of course this raises the question of whether all fiction is worth preserving at any cost; whether burning literature is a form of sacrilege against the human experience, or whether some products of the imagination are best left in the safe tenebres of ignorance.

And, ultimately, the audience is faced with the last postmodernist question: if Katurian was a story-writer, then how much of the play is reality? Is the ending a self-indulgent figment of his imagination, or a true reflection of the humanity and humaneness that exists even in the most brutal characters? In this play, these self-reflexive questions are far more up-front and central to the plot, but like Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, it is also possible to see the full implications of subjectivity examined in a subjective medium creeping up to ambush the audience's consciousness, and consciences, at the last moment.

In all, it was a good play to watch. If anyone comes across the script, or a production of Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, I highly recommend reading or watching it. It will deeply perturb you. And though it wasn't the best, most moving play I've ever seen (Quills still holds that special place in my heart), it was a good start to a reclamation of the artistic aspect of life.

*

But I think the best part of yesterday was, as always, the people. Setting thoughts and ideas free in a spirited discussion, throwing ideas and notions around, and together appreciating the beauty and power of the craftsmanship in the various forms of art; this was something that we had lost with the end of school and the start of the long wait, and the reclaim it in such grand style, on such a large scale, was in my view a triumph. It is good to be able to think, to feel, and to talk like this again.

After the play, went with Joel to Timbre for a round of drinks and a long, long talk, the kind that dabbles in the philosophies of life, people that are away but eagerly awaited back here, hopes for the future. Here and now, on the brink of a new adventure, and with so many people no longer around, it is good to have Joel around to keep my bearings and shore up my confidence in the worth and beauty of living in this time and place. It is a stand against despair, a philosophical and moral decision not to accept the end of the golden age that school started, a conscious decision to engage with the world and, essentially, to live life. And, though our abilities may be changed, though things will never be the same again, though our thoughts may evolve, there are still some things worth fighting for, some things worth preserving and perpetuating, to be defended against the undiscerning forces of transformation.

And, after all, succeed or fail, the attempt is the important thing.