FOOTNOTES
Peter Lyssiotis
M A S T ER T H I E F
(2/3 of an image is enough!
then again, 1/3 will do)
Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence …
Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence,
certainly never.
Franz Kafka – The Parables
PREFACE: MY GRANDMOTHER’S VOICE
My grandmother, Angelou, had her own way of speaking and it was that – her speaking – that got me here. She’d silently circle around whatever was happening and then she’d come out with a fable, a maxim, an aphorism that would either put the final full stop to the situation or she would drop it into a context that would at first surprise but would clarify what had just happened. As a young man I was lining up the Big Europeans, looking for the right questions to ask at the coffee shop; there was Kazantzakis, Calvino, Brecht, Camus, Joyce, Hesse, Beckett. She however, was already sitting comfortably with what her 78 years had brought to her. Not only did I end up surrendering to her way, but I also surrendered on behalf of the Big Europeans, and a whole lot of Minor Europeans, as well. Was her way of speaking the result of her being unable to read or write – was it because she always appeared to own the ground she stood on…? I don’t know. But she showed me that clarity was found in fragments rather than extended texts or dogma… it was from parables… stories… that you got insight… after all, the best we get to know, for example, the great religious figures is through those bits and pieces that truly instruct because they are roomy enough; and have a wide enough embrace to call us into the mystery. So when I set out with the idea of making these images… this book, I wasn’t out to harpoon the current white whales of the Art world… I was trying to illustrate her voice… to make my way into that world of suggestion… looking for that incomplete… broken narrative that led straight to the heart of the story. Still, I have to contend with how much of the past I can bring up without the strain of regret. How better to explain myself? … Dixie Dean. Dixie Dean played for Everton Football Club in the 1930’s. So famous and formidable was his header that the story is told of his meeting Elisha Scott, Liverpool’s goal-keeper at a railway station. Dixie nodded a greeting and a wary Elisha instinctively flung himself across the platform, arms out stretched in an effort to stop Dean’s header from ending up in the back of the phantom net.
CHAPTER 1: THE SEEING SHELL
When Ioanna was a little girl there were always dolls around the house – Cabbage Patch dolls, Barbie & Ken dolls and ordinary, run-of-the-mill dolls. These dolls were never treasured like soft toys were. Simeon, Ioanna’s older brother was just starting to follow both Jason in the Friday 13th movies and Michael Myers in the Halloween franchise. Inevitably horror movies and dolls collided and there was some not-so-pretty backyard surgery performed on the dolls. At the same time I’d locked on to the idea of accidental sculptures. I’d take random things that were lying around the house and weren’t being used, or bits and pieces found on my morning walks and try to make Henry Morres from round stones; Giacomettis from twigs; Calders from bits of wire. There must have been a day when Simeon had performed a number of eye surgeries in the carport, because there were dolls’ eyes scattered on the outdoor chairs and table. There was also a sea shell lying about which we’d brought back from a family holiday in Apollo Bay. Irresistibly, an eye found its way into the shell – just as the Surrealists had predicted using Lautreamont as a guide… the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. I was so pleased that I took what I’d made downstairs to my darkroom and photographed it against a black, a grey and then a white back ground… nothing too much; though I did like it set against the white background… but it needed something more. Since nothing much was happening with the sculpture, and since it needed something else I tried making a photomontage from the idea. I went to my picture archive and to the drawers marked eyes and shells and made a succession of images of shells with eyes set in them. Not enough, then; so I started placing these sighted-shells onto backgrounds so their meaning would be enhanced. I put them in oceans, on top of buildings, in rooms, in bodies, skies, in hands and so on – nothing. It seemed that beyond the thing itself there was indeed nothing. I left the montage on my work bench… just the seeing shell on the white paper which always covers my work bench – disappointed, I avoided the dark room for a while. The more I separated myself from the photomontages, the more they occupied me… I began telling myself stories about them: I’m at the beach. It’s night. I see the shell and pick it up, raise it to my ear to hear the ocean’s echo – but instead feel the faint brush of an eyelid against me ear as the shell’s eye opens… when I got back to my workspace a couple of days later and saw the montages lying flat on their white background, William Carlos Williams’ voice told me No ideas but in things. That settled it – the image had to stand on its own – exposed – by its white background. Among the ten odd images, there was one which was absolutely right. That image birthed the rest and told me not to look for more – for additions – but to demand less and to avoid overload.
Line ‘em up! Those ancestral spirits which unclutter the past.
Marianne Moore said it….
Omissions are not accidents.
·
Edward Gorey said it, too
I sit reading Andre Breton and think, Yes, yes, you’re so right. What appeals to me most is an idea expressed by Eluard. He has a line about there being another world, but it’s in this one. And Raymond Queneau said the world is not what it seems – but it isn’t anything else, either… If a book is only what it seems to be about, then some how the author has failed.
·
… and Gorey’s friend, George Balanchine – director of the New York City Ballet was known for his advice to dancers during rehearsals:
Better don’t do.
Seduction and mystery came easily to Isadora Duncan. She distrusted both the still camera and the film camera – which by their nature are committed to completeness; not Isadora, who only allowed herself to be filmed for 4 seconds… the applause which follow the end of her performance lasts twice as long! (If she had lived one more day, she would have been filmed dancing by Ivan Nikolenca who had won her trust.)
·
Nijinsky was never filed dancing, either; so fortunately legend gets free play… in both cases.
·
Inevitably,
I end up in Japan – where the idea of uncertainly or impermanence is embodied in the phrase nono no aware – which manifests itself in poetry, lyrical essays and in the call to be receptive to new or other beginnings – or endings…
·
so over the last little bit I’ve called on my love of Issa and Basho – and the hiaku. In the Zen experience, the disciple is asked to meditate or point the mind at an object; say a bowl of water. Initially the disciple is inclined to reach for metaphors and rise imaginatively from water to lake, sea, clouds, rain. Natural; but Zen masters caution against such a stream of thinking. The disciple is instructed to continue until it’s possible to remain strictly with the object, penetrating more deeply, no longer looking at it, but as it. Only then will the disciple attain the state of muga, so close an identification with the object that the unstable mentalizing self disappears. The best haiku give a very strong sense of the process:
Dew of the bramble,
thorns
sharp white.
(Buson)
·
Wouldn’t Woody Allen be pleased if someone turned his dictum: 80% of success is showing up – on its head and declared: show just 20% of any image and you’ve nailed it?
·
Even Harold Bloom writing about Shakespeare buys into the idea when he says: Increasingly in his work, what he leaves out becomes more important than what he puts in, and so he takes literature to its limits.
·
Elizabeth Bishop wants in as well, because she writes:
The art of losing is not too hard to master though it may look (write it) like disaster.
·
These images know the Grimm boys’ fables off by heart – their favourite is Hans In Luck, in which Hans, having been paid in gold by his master, is persuaded to exchange his gold for a horse, then his horse for a cow, then his cow for a pig and so on, until he finally loses everything, and returns home happy and unencumbered. His luck is his reduction.
·
Nabakov said writing was a process where he would… fondle details. In these images there are only details – all that’s left is to fondle them into a narrative. Are you in?
·
Listen to Keats:
Heard melodies are sweet
But those unheard
are sweeter
·
Let’s drop in on D. H. Lawrence the poet. Lawrence wasn’t all that interested in ur-versions of his poems: the more he threw off set forms and all that other tasteful packaging which came with it, the more he wanted his poems to feel like drafts. He understood that free verse meant perfection, consummation and a polished finish weren’t necessary; the quality of his poems instead, would lie in their still being caught in the process of working things out.
·
and Lawrence the novelist, extends the conversation when he slaps down writers like Thomas Hardy who exercise total control:
If you try to nail anything down … it either kills the novel or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
·
John Ashberry knew something about this when he said: I thought that if I could put it all down that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave out would be another, truer way.
·
Drawing on a probable distant cousin, the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, allows me to put another spin on these images because he believed that life begins with disconnected parts. Arms without shoulders, heads without necks and other solitary organs which bob about on the surface of the Earth until love makes them come together and form whole beings (with no guarantee of functionality).
·
I want to include E. M. Forster in this primarily because he was a friend of Constantine Cavafy; but also because he knew the worth of very little or mothering … he writes in his journal:
I made an entry in my diary Nothing – to remind me it had been something.
·
These bits and pieces are always searching for unexpected levels of poetry (and maybe even humour).
·
Aren’t all of us in need of some mystery? Don’t our lives become incomplete without it?
·
By trying to tie up all the loose ends – trying to show everything, you only manage to disappear from view – by not completing the whole picture – making becomes an adventure, not a lecture.
·
Sometimes I read these images as the relics of a sweeping melancholy …
·
and then there’s to dazzle by absence, a Dutch expression which means that by being absent you are all the more present.
·
Or are these simply images of holes in the air?
·
These images want to siphon the emptiness of Atget, the theatre of Beckett, the desire of Duras… When you drink from such waters you won’t be any happier, but then not a one of them ever promised that.
·
Between the novels of Marguerite Duras and Robert Pringet in our bookcase there are 5 romans by Alain Robbe-Grillet : In The Labyrinth, Ghosts In The Mirror, The Immortal One, The Erasers, La Maison de Rendez-vous – all of them have a nothingness at their core. Sure, all around this hollow centre there are fantastically detailed descriptions of things and surfaces … but the core is empty – Robbe-Grillet knows to leave this space open for his readers imagination (- or is he pissing on our need to make sense of a senseless world?)
·
These images try to withhold the agony of their distillation…
·
they are what I have a memory of, but have forgotten…
·
… bulletin boards of the psyche?
·
Better catch my breath – but not before reaching out to Cervantes who said we should really admire him for what he had not written.
·
I’d like to follow the example of VU magazine’s editor, Luciene Vogel, who married off two autonomous systems of logic: text and image, and by doing so replaced the sentimental coupling of illustration,.. in VU the text explained and the (photographic) image proved.
·
When whiskey is aged in wooden casks, there’s an inevitable loss to evaporation. This loss is called the angel’s share – it’s as if a portion of the spirit is offered up to heaven in thanks for the miracle. Can there be a better reason for these images having lost a good deal of themselves?
·
As haiku are composed of three lines, so too these images are usually composed of three (or four) separate parts. I take Basho as my guide here, who in Narrow Road To The Interior writes this haiku:
Heavy falling mist
Mount Fuji not visible
but still intriguing.
·
CHAPTER 2: SELLING IT
Our letterbox has always brought me stuff which I’ve used in the things I make: flyers, brochures, community notices, letters from members of parliament, packages… I have used parts of these in several books I’ve made (more, more, more; In These Great Times; The View From My Pillow; Sell It, Baby). I was waiting a long time to adopt the way designers isolated a product by photographing it on a simple white background. The starkness and simplicity of this advertising gambit had me – because the design made me focus only on the thing itself. The isolation of the product in this way made it seem heroic – it gave it a chance to shine on its own, having wrestled itself free from the waves of products on the shelves. I took this design element and hopefully obliged it to carry a meaning which it never intended.
·
White is a humble colour…it never presumes to tell you the whole story.
·
Sculptors instinctively would know what’s happening here. Listen to Michelangelo: Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of every sculptor to discover it. I can see it, can’t you? There’s Michelangelo. And there’s a massive block of Carara marble. He picks up his tools, sometimes it’s a hammer and chisel; sometimes it’s a rasp or a riffler… he gets to work on the marble – chipping away – reducing – taking away what doesn’t belong. The white space is my block of marble!
·
A fragment comes out of the whiteness – out of the photographic paper – out from the white page – out of the silence: here is a voice speaking to you from a room you thought was empty.
·
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Eric Satie was pretty much every shade of eccentric. One of his eccentricities was, as he claims in his autobiography that he only ate:
… food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals.
There is so much white in these images, that I sometimes suspect I’m stuck in Satie-Land! Might these images be crumbs caught in the food – traps between Eric’s teeth?
·
The white I use here is not the stuff of mythical longing or heroic renunciation but rather something humble: the whiteness of a whisper.
·
… it makes for another voice… it lets other things be seen.
·
I’m a regular visitor to the white space which happen in the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler & Cy Twombly:
What’s there in those undetermined fields? (Whatever it is, I want it.)
·
I know both Rodchenko’s page layouts for Mayakovski’s Pro Eto and Maholy-Nagy’s design of Malerie Fotographie & Film and I’ve seen how to firstly leave the white space of a page alone and secondly how to make it part of the narrative.
·
Without emptiness nothing can happen – with it however, everything is possible. Don’t all things come out of emptiness? Being full and being empty are integral to each other. Absence and blankness have become signposts of both Modernism and Post-Modernism… these images have read and understood the signs.
·
Is Surrealism’s game of the exquisite corpse being played here… though instead of 3 or 4 participants, the stakes are raised because I am playing on my own.
·
Just as the holes are part of Emmental – probably the best part of that experience – so the gaps or missing pieces in these photomontages are perhaps where the idea beats loudest.
·
Flaubert dreamed of:
un dictionaire des riens – a book of nothing. I try to get there, but don’t have the courage – but then neither did Gustave – though we both dreamt it!
·
How accessible – how appealing do I want to make these images? Do I really want to make more sweets for the eyes? Not really… if the core of these images is not strong, the ocean of white which surrounds them, will quickly betray them… space and absence work here, like indefatigable termites.
·
Memory plays a role here, too because the viewer/reader is launched into a search for what is lost. Memory becomes the place where this search can begin… I recall Augustine’s querry:
When… the memory loses something where are we to look for it except in memory itself.
·
As I was making these images I did have a memory of how I would complete what is missing in each one – but now I’ve forgotten what that was; – start again?
·
CHAPTER 3: MAYBE DUCHAMP WAS RIGHT
The story of the Mona Lisa feeds into this, too. The Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911, and its place on the wall of the Salon Caree in The Louvre, became a destination site for visitors who came in greater numbers than before to gape at an empty space on the wall bearing a ghostly imprint of Mona Lisa’s frame and the four hooks that marked the place where the painting once hung. Was it partly as a consequence of its being missing that it was elevated to its status as an unrivaled masterpiece? Le Figaro reported that the theft left an enormous, horrific, gaping void, which I’d like to think was the reason Franz Kafka joined the crowds and noted in his diary: … the excitement and the knots of people, as if the Mona Lisa has just been stolen. Some people even began to place flowers beneath the spot where the painting had been. (There are those who still think that the painting was never recovered and that the painting hanging there today is a copy).
·
The robbery of the Mona Lisa, apart from setting the scene for my images, probably also had something to do with Malevitch’s Black Square and Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning.
·
(The crowds which flocked to see the absent masterpiece would have been the ideal audience for a contemporary installation artist who would have created an event probably titled something like Missing Ms Lisa.)
·
Then there’s the theory of Japanese aesthetics in which transience is the touchstone of beauty… the theory runs counter to Western art practice because it provides space for the collaboration of the audience; it invites us not to just sit down and contemplate but to become actively involved through an appreciation of impermanence, ageing and incompleteness – and letting those qualities reflect on our own lives. When we enter such a space we can experience a lift in our senses: we feel it.
·
Like most people, these images are never quite satisfied with what they are – they would rather be defined for what they haven’t got.
·
Architects buy into this idea as well – it was after all Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who minted the dictum … less is more. Adolf Loos was on song too, when he declared … lack of detail is a sign of spiritual strength. I’ll take that; and join those who stand in opposition to all the silly add-ons to the Sangrada Familia. Good judges like Antoni Tapies got it right when he said Gaudi’s incomplete cathedral should have been left as it was on the day Gaudi died and that it …should have been enclosed within glass walls and left alone.
·
Sport buys in too – Philip Jackson, Michael Jordan’s coach at the Chicago Bulls was different – at times during a game, when overcome by doubts, he successfully chose to do nothing… He was fond of quoting Satchel Pag’s sometimes I sits and think, and sometimes I just sists.
·
Exercising one’s imagination is both a way of saving yourself and a way of taking stock. Use it here… the idea is to close your eyes and see where you land…
·
CHAPTER 4: PAPA AND THE POWER OF LESS
It isn’t an accident that I met my old friend Ernest Hemingway in this arena. Where to begin? Probably in a bar in a Cuban fishing village where legend has it he wrote this miniature masterpiece:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
·
Hemingway named his guiding principle in writing the Theory of Omission. Listen to him in Death In The Afternoon:
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader knows, if the writer is writing truly enough, he will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eigth of being above water.
And again in an interview with George Plimpton in The Paris Review:
Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. I’ve seen marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school of more than fifty sperm whales in the same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him, so I left them out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.
Working with fragments as I do in making montages, I’ve learnt about the impossibility of knowing the whole story – the whole of you, me, us, them…
·
Raymond Chandler knew something about all this when he wrote in The Blue Dahlia:
Just don’t get too complicated Eddie… when a guy gets too complicated, he’s unhappy. And when he’s unhappy, his luck runs out.
·
… and never count the Russians out – because when we finish reading Anna Karenina we realise that Tolstoy never described what Anna looks like – sure, early on he lets us know she’s beautiful, but that’s it… he’s clever enough to leave it up to us to attach whatever we consider to be beautiful to her – undescribed – a killer move!
·
Classic books and images remind us how hard the work of understanding can be, whereas these abbreviated views here remind us how little we have to know or see before we get to a meaning.
·
System failures, as we know in our World of Big Data are common, but these images happily deny themselves the comfort of a system.
·
And facing Hemingway and Chandler in the opposite corner? The writers William Styron and Henry James who pile words on words on words until reading begins to resemble wading through wet cement…
·
(… but I’m happy to forgive Henry James his style because he eventually sees daylight in his Notebooks when he writes:
… the whole of anything is never told.
·
In one way these are quite risky images – because there’s less content, so their faults are a lot easier to spot.
·
The possibilities these images offer for you to refer to a missing text is what makes them poetic. We are told that, in reading , context is everything, but these images remind us that there is, joy too, in freeing ourselves of context.
·
Margurite Duras said in an interview with Palottadella Torre in Suspended Passion, producing literature:
… was now about discovering the gaps, the blanks I had within me and finding the courage to express them.
(You can see this in what she writes – it also happens in the films she scripted; watch for the silences and how they’re used in Hiroshima Mon Amour and India Song.)
·
CHAPTER 5: IT’S FINISHED. NO IT’S NOT. BUT IT MIGHT BE.
By leaving out the expected rounding off of an image I deny myself any number of expected connections; so very little is ever pinned down – and as a result I’m only doing the minimum of damage to all the other possibilities – which I must confess, I haven’t even thought of.
·
Are these images ruins – pictures that have been knocked about by Time and unkind hands or are they something new – something on the way to being completed?
·
Why are we so obsessed with slowing down disintegration, both of ourselves and the things around us? These images accept disintegration and in fact they’ve been disintegrating all these years I’ve had them hidden away in drawers. (Maybe they’ve even cast-off bits on their own – without me knowing.)
·
I want to think that like an aphorism, these images don’t conclude.
·
Would these images be better if they were just one step more towards being completed?
·
Here is the stuff of possibilities… and possibilities have always had the grace to lead me on to other work.
·
Keith Jarrett, in a solo concert in Lausanne struggled at the piano for an hour, then stepped forward and asked his audience:
Is there a pianist here who would like to carry on?
These images issue the same invitation.
·
As Baudrillard tells us, the perfection of any system leads to its collapse; I’m always here, waiting to sweep up the leftovers and rearrange them the best I can.
·
We should never surrender the bitter-sweet delight of not knowing; if we’re not puzzled by the oriental box in Belle de Jour or the mysterious suitcase and its contents in Kiss Me Deadly or that other suitcase, the one which omits a golden glow in Pulp Fiction, then one of the best parts of us has been abandoned.
·
I can see how whatever I make is never finished: it has simply stopped – hopefully in an interesting place…
·
Bonnard knew something about this because even though he sometimes worked on his canvases for years he was known to whip out a brush and a couple of paint tubes he always carried in his coat packets just to add a final touch to a painting. Once in the Musee du Lumexbourg he asked his friend, Vuillard, to distract a guard, while he quickly retouched a painting of his that had been hanging there for years…
·
Similarly Issa, a renowned poet, was also famous as an eager revisionist and as a result, he left as many as six or seven versions of the same haiku.
·
Can I trust you to make deeper mysteries from what is missing here?
·
Where do these images begin and where do they end? – in the Beginning there was no beginning and in the End there was no ending, I’ve learnt over the journey how to make an image appealing: add a beautiful sky, an exotic interior, a smiling child, a bright, blue ocean, a wild animal… but I want to deny myself such a fix… such a quick exit.
·
In this space, giant moths are forever nibbling away at the perfect mechanical reproduction that photography and the digital world promise.
·
In their heart of hearts these images don’t want to be photographs/photomontages; what they want to be is maquettes for some never-to-be-made pieces of sculpture.
·
What should happen here is the opposite to what happens in Martin Parr’s photo book Common Sense – where there are 158 highly saturated colour photographs all laid out in full bleed – including the book’s endpapers. All the white space has been gobbled up; so when you turn any page you’re immediately swallowed by a full on, colour diptych. No thanks.
·
CHAPTER 6: LIGHTS OUT. ROLL THE FILM!
Film always helps me better understand what I’m making – and there are two scenes in Cool Hand Luke which plays regularly in the cinema in my head. Paul Newman’s character, Luke, takes an awful beating from Dragline the character played by George Kennedy. The men are prisoners in a chain gang where Dragline is the bull goose. Because he’s been getting the wrong vibe from Luke, a boxing match is organized to sort things out. Luke takes such a fearsome beating that the other prisoners turn away or tell him to stay down. But Luke insists on fighting on, swinging wildly, punch-drunk and powerless, until even Dragline gets so tired of the mismatch that he takes Luke, hoists him on his shoulder and carries him to his bunk. This scene is followed by the poker game. The prisoners (among them Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton) sit round a table drinking beers and paying poker. Luke is at one end of the table with his face scarred, looking away from the game, the other prisoners and I suspect beyond the frame of the film! Dragline is on his feet hovering above the game – giving instructions. As the other players fold only Savanah and Luke are left. The men around the table yell, talk and try to figure out the play. Dragline tells a nervous Savannah how to play his hand. Luke stays cool and keeps raising the bet… with a distracted mumble of kick a buck. Finally Savanah with two Kings calls Luke. Silence. Dragline flips over Luke’s cards One, two, three, four, five. Nothing. The men are all taken aback. Luke stares, way, way out… he’s been bluffing. Dragline says almost triumphantly:
He beat you with nothing. Just like today when he kept coming at me with nothing. Luke focuses at last and with a half smile delivers the killer line:
Yeh; well, sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.
(O.K. he isn’t Brando, but at that moment Paul Newman comes so close.)
·
Take another look at A Place In The Sun. Watch Montgomery Clift especially in his love scenes with Liz Taylor; watch for his laconic ability in expressing what an inarticulate character is processing: that intense emotional life that is caught in a web of poetry, eroticism and power. No symbolic gestures. No romantic flourishes. Nothing loud or insistent. Listen to him speaking-softly, saying almost nothing. If your careful; you’ll hear every word he doesn’t say.
·
The artist Lawrence Mynott recounted a story told to him by a friend who worked with Visconti on The Leopard. One day Visconti showed Burt Lancaster a nineteenth-century man’s toilet set: beautiful brushes, bowls, mirror and open razors. After Visconti had shown it to the actor, he put it away in a cabinet:
When will I use it? Asked Lancaster. You won’t, said the director only you and I will know it is there.
·
Bernado Bertolucci tells this story which made me want to become the Robert Bresson of the book world:
Was it 1964 or 1965?… Mauro Bolognini invited me to a dinner in honour of Robert Bresson who had been in Rome for the last few weeks preparing an episode of The Bible, a movie produced by Dino de Laurentis with various directors. Bresson had chosen Noah’s Ark. Before I was introduced, Bolognini told me that Bresson was in a rather bad mood and briefly explained why. That morning, while Bresson was lecturing, Dino de Laurentis had gone to the studio and witnessed huge cages containing wild animals arriving in pairs: two lions, male and female, two giraffes, male and female, two hippos, male and female etc. A few hours later, Dino told Bresson that he was excited to be the only producer on earth able to bring the elevated Maestro down to earth to produce a film with real production values… on ne verra que leur traces sur le sable (One will see only the footprints in the sand) Bresson whispered to Dino. An hour later he was fired.
·
While we’re running with a Christian theme I have to introduce the Bible because it loves to be included in any discussion; and it, too, weighs in on behalf of these images:
Look not to things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:18
·
… so once again – the great religious texts tend to be roomy enough to accommodate a swag of readings, rather than being nailed down to a single ethical truth.
·
Karl Teige wrote the avant-garde manifest to Fotokino Film and coined the phrase obrazove basne or picture poems/wordless poems which incorporate elements of film and photography and photo collages. I stand with Karl… back there – in 1920.
·
It was inevitable that in writing about film, I’d get round to Marlon Brando, again, because he is the master of the unfinished, the incomplete… he’d stop mid-scene and go quiet, then he’d claim the silence… the blankness he’d created. Take another look at the first meeting between Stanley and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire as Brando takes off his t-shirt. Suddenly nothing becomes something – and that something, usually points towards desire.
·
So far film has helped me understand these images through cinema’s minimalists: Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando – I should have included George Raft, Jimmy Dean and Clint Eastwood. I can’t move on without mentioning Gary Cooper. William Wellman, the director, told Cooper:
Never be the aggressor. Always back away from everything until you can’t back any further.
Cooper took the advice to heart – to the point that other directors would look at a scene and worry that Cooper wasn’t showing up, but looking at the rushes they’d see that he’d shown up plenty – like infra red. Charles Laughton, who knew a thing or two about cinema said:
You don’t see it, but the camera does.
So take a closer look at these images – hopefully there’s more than you initially suspected – but still, I’m not willing to let them face off with Coop.
·
Gary Cooper gets me back to Hemingway. There are two film versions of his short story The Killers of which Hemingway said:
That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote.
So both sets of screenwriters had to make up what was left out – what Hemingway didn’t write.
·
There’s no way of avoiding Brando in The Godfather; where he plays Don Corleone as a man of honour – a man with an ocean of reserve; and with another ocean brimful of the things that are not said. He speaks in code: there are hints and gestures, fragments of phrases, stares and deep silences – which in the end amount to a soulfulness that makes me plunge, head-first into it.
·
Sam Goldwyn’s legendary cry of Include me out finds a comfortable resting place here.
·
And what about those films that were never completed… which never happened. Who knows what might have been if the Beatles had been cast in that film based on Joe Orton’s Up Against It; or if Orson Welles had been able to finish any of a dozen projects. If Luchino Visconti’s version of Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time had been produced or if Harold Pinter’s Proust adaptation had been shot? And again, what if Alejandro Jadorowsky had made Dune, as he was slated to… or does his film, the phantom Dune, cast a longer shadow than any finished film could? Not having made any of these films does not smack of failure – rather it unleashes the imagination and gives us license to make them ourselves: choose a cast, a soundtrack, a director and our favourite scriptwriter and cameraman… their mythological charge is always there… forever.
·
CHAPTER 7: A SOUNDTRACK – ECHOES OF WHAT’S BEEN LEFT OUT
Music guides the work I do. I can trace each project back to a particular album or musician – it might be Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison or Scott Walker… or it might be The Neville Brothers, Sam Cooke or Al Green… or more recently it could be Keith Jarrett, John Coltrane or Miles Davis…
·
Sometimes it seems that these images began their story in a mute place – and were only waiting for a sound to point them in their true direction.
·
Miles Davis knew all about these images way before I did when he said:
I always look for what I can leave out.
and again – this time he tells a young musician:
Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.
·
Listen too, to Charlie Parker – listen to how he uses silence in his solos as if they were sounds. (One time Bird said to a group of musicians which included Dizzy Gillespe, Listen to this and proceeded to play a tune without blowing on his sax… he played it just on the pads.)
·
Then there’s John Cage’s 4’33”. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of incompleteness. Where the piano keeps its lid securely closed and what we hear are the sound in the auditorium and around and beyond the piano… he’s there, too, with his mantra: I’ve got nothing to say and I’m saying it.
·
Because I hanker for his approval, I have to include Van Morrison somewhere; and he doesn’t disappoint because in an interview wit Q magazine he says:
Every time Armstrong sang something, it was different. He didn’t believe in the idea of playing a wrong note. To him, it was always perfect. I love that idea … It’s also my approach. Leaving enough space in the music for something new to come in every time.
(Disclaimer – Astral Weeks is very high on my list of desert island discs)
·
In the film Almost Famous, there’s a scene where one of the members of the band says to the young, aspiring critic:
It’s not what you put into it. It’s what you leave out… Yeah, that’s rock n’roll.
·
Chip Taylor wrote The Trogg’s classic Wild Thing. Taylor has said of the song, which Jimi Hendrix was later to take into outer space:
… loved that Larry Page production. Little bits of energy and not doing any
more than that. Letting the silence be the silence… less is more. He understood.
Not bad for a songwriter who was working for $30 a song!
·
Speaking of silence… as a young man, Stanley Crouch a dedicated jazz fan, recalled his first, youthful encounter with Thelonious Monk at the Manhole Club in Los Angeles:
He walked over and pow, I was just standing there. I said Silence is something isn’t it Mr Monk? Monk said – It’s the loudest sound in the world, but most motherfuckers can’t hear it because it’s moving. And Whomp he’s gone.
·
CHAPTER 8: QUEUING UP FOR SOMETHING LESS
I’m not a friend of queues; but I’m caught in one, and Tes may be responsible for drawing me into her wake. Over the last year, she’s been preparing the house and thus, for a simpler life.
·
Tes and millions like her and queued up to read such anti-glutter classics as The Life Changing Magic of Tidying and Decluttering at The Speed of Life
·
… and come out the other end believing that a potential solution to our consumerism and the destructing it has wrecked on the planet is to want less.
·
Could the two of us – independently – and in separate oceans, have caught the same wave?
·
Might be
because we are now filling black recyclable plastic bags with stuff:
it’s goodbye to all those souvenirs from Cyprus
those gifts from Mum
those clothes that look better in the wardrobe than on us
those uncomfortable shoes
those air-port novels
that corduroy jacket with the leather elbows
those scrubbed-to-death pots & pans…
·
Apparently 2 people in their 70s need to rely on less.
·
I understand. The principles are the same – kind of, because what’s happening in these images – and in this writing – is that they’re constantly reducing information and cherry-picking from memory… chasing less.
CHAPTER 9: IN A ROOM FULL OF SILENCE
Our times have seen a shift towards what is staid, conventional – the uncomplicated and glossy – Footnotes isn’t tempted; it takes its cues from the beginning of the twentieth century – when artists were comfortable with irresolution. Line ’em up: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau and further back, William Blake’s The French Revolution – all unfinished (perhaps even unrealizable) – all flirting with failure
keep in mind, its in emptiness that things begin.
·
Herve Le Tellier in The Anomaly has The White House and Head of Psychological Operations sums up his approach to any predicament by saying: I know no problem that can resist the absence of a solution.
·
A book becomes a classic when it won’t let me shut the door on it … it becomes a classic because it’s never finished; and because I’m unfinished, too, I inevitably return to it – searching. Footnotes might just be a classic then, because how could it have finished what it has to say, if the images themselves are unfinished? Endings have to learn to wait …
·
If this all sounds a but like a Manifesto, then OK: because if we go back to the origins of the in the 17th Century, we’ll see that a Manifesto was a piece of evidence, from the Latin manifestare: meaning a piece, rather than a whole… not a long journey away from these images – and text.
·
you see, this is another throw of the dice into an anxious and electric sheet of white light.
