Life After History

... what a mistake! That last entry —

Film A + Film B = a handhold into consciousness and zeitgeist, evolving spirit in an evolving world

— premature, at best. Unlike writing on paper, or writing on a computer screen, there's NO backspace delete or erase for an entry on a blog. (Question: is that more like life?) Or is there, and I haven't found it yet?
xxxxxxxxWatching YouTube, comparing stagings of one specific scene from an opera, while clerking behind the counter of City Lights Bookstore, with a CD playing of Charlemagne Palestine in the background ————— my friend GBS says, "Computers are such blunt instruments."

In retrospect, I recognize I'd felt this blog was expending fuel without attaining lift off — like what Rilke said about avant garde art (circa 1890? 1920?) "copulating and copulating without ever conceiving" — — and I (not Rilke) hadn't even mentioned a single (1) motion picture title yet. And so when The Divingbell & The Butterfly (2007) pushed a button inside of me a mile wide, and on the heels of just having seen Youth without Youth (2007) I saw a possibility for launch blast-off (— always counted backwards, 8 ... 7 ... 6 ... 5 ... ) — — appearing on the horizon, in suddenly noticing:

how the two films contrasted in my mind as an instance of filmgoing as a higher order of magnitude of what film intrinsically does, I.E.,

Shot A + Shot B = Shot C (in the viewer's mind)

[— unless you're filming the Empire State Building, as Andy Warhol did, 1964, from early evening to 3am the next day — all in one (1) unbroken shot]

But, let's face it ... who cares!
xxxxxxxxTrue, no one (but no one) is reading this, but me myself and I. ("I contain multitudes." — Walt Whitman, 1900.) Yet to so much as breathe the words film and history in the same shot, the same frame, is a sure set-up for channel surfers to zap me out of existence and see what else is playing.
xxxxxxxxxxAttention these days is comparable to looking out the window of a speeding car (such as a shuttlebus driving from the airport), cruising along. Watching the sights to the soundtrack playing in our ears. (Where are we headed?) (Who's our driver?) (Questions, questions!)

"Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" sayeth sage Andy Warhol (1968).
xxxxxxxxxxToday, people remember it as "Everyone will be famous for five minutes."
xxxxxxxxxx — I'm sorry, your fame is up. Next!

The very word history as used today implies the epitome of insignificance. [Synonym for Poof! gone.]
xxxxxxxxxx "Honey, I burnt the toast."
xxxxxxxxxx"Don't worry: it's history."
xxxxxxxxxx History is toast. (Would you like jam on that, Jim? Or how about some dolphin-free tuna?)

To most people, alas, history is not a way of seeing, a process, a verb, but rather some ineffable thing, on a shelf, just out of reach, like some airless pompous pretentious episode of Masterpiece Theatre. Alas. And yet we're all privvy to history. Always.

The danger signs accompanying the seven-letter word history form a veritable maze to navigate around and over and through. Consider: this blog is theoretically as available in Iran as in America, in the Congo as readily as in China. Yet here in America, from where I'm writing, history resembles a medley of clues trying to remind an amnesiac of forgotten identity. (Such historical flashbacks are usually military events, aren't they?*) This is in keeping with Hollywood's general assignment these days of the flashback to refer to (reveal) repressed trauma, rather than happier days. (Uh-oh!, flashback coming on: can't be anything good. Cue up creepy music.
xxxxxxxxxxOur History: bad! Fire: good!)
xxxxxxxxxxOur Our national malady bobs up to the surface of the lake or ocean of consciousness occasionally, in such films as Angel Heart (1987), Memento (2000), Finding Nemo (2003), 50 First Dates (2004), Clean Slate (I forget when), The Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind (2004, but that could be altered to look like 2664), and ribboning through everyday life for a half decade, the Bourne Identity trilogy (2002, 2004, 2o007 — five years, an awfully long time to remain a fully functioning amnesiac, and don't ask me how he pays for all those frequently flyer miles: but, hey, we are all Bourne now).
xxxxxxxxxxIf you're not sure if you might possibly be amnesiac, take this simple test. Without looking down, ask yourself: What color are my socks? Bonus points if you get all two, but it's an extra minus ten if you can get one but not the other. But maybe you didn't dress yourself today. Ask yourself if you've ever opened the refrigerator then wondered what you'd come there for. Similarly, have you ever walked into a room and wondered what you're doing there? Or what are you doing here? I'm a stranger here myself, but these might suggest early signs of amnesia — possibly brought on from watching too many movies! Before you know it, you'll be touching the towel in your bathroom to see if you've taken a shower or not. Write me for details about how you can get a free sample of my new clinically tested antidote.
xxxxxxxxxxNow, what was I saying?
xxxxxxxxxxOh yes, Americans ought to consider celebrating national Amnesia Day. Except no one would remember when it is, what's it for, and what's to be done. So let's party hearty! We're content with, as David Mamet points out, our two uniquely national holidays: SuperBowl and the Oscars. But we're a young nation, with hardly more than two centuries of history under our belt. given time, we might prove contagious to countries with millenia of lore in their veins.
xxxxxxxxxx(Question: What are the antibodies to amnesia? Cultural memory, for example. What else?)
xxxxxxxxxx(Question: How long have humans, per se, inhabited this planet? 60,000 years? How much longer life itself?)

At best, I might attempt to locate film in my own personal history (since "personal" now is "public" too), without boring. After all, since Mel Brooks can fabricate his own History of the World (1982), featuring the Spanish Inquisition as a musical, so too can we. (So too must we?) "It's all personal." — The Godfather (1972).

I remember history: I remember my middle school class being offered Latin or Greek as an elective (at another school), rather than a requirement.
xxxxxxxxI remember the assemblies in the auditorium to watch movies: E.G., the giant mother turtle laying her eggs on the sandy shore, [CLOSE UP: egg! ... egg! ... egg! ... egg! egg! ... ... ... egg!! ... commemorated in the immortal poem Giant Turtle by bard Gregory Corso. Thankfully the Prelinger Archives has preserved thousands of the films from which I and my generation was indoctrinated, to reveal for future generations how deeply the contagion spread.

Time Lines
Would my account be autobiography (films my parents saw, and every film I've seen) or memoir (a selective frame, to illustrate a certain theme) ... ? A celebration but also a debriefing ... ? An elegy or an ode? — A little of each, I suspect. Film is an elastic measuring stick, after all.

Watching old movies, from the 194os, seeing and hearing the initial logos of RKO, MGM, I imagine myself as the babies who remember the theme songs of soap operas their mothers watched while carrying them in their wombs ... remember and experience a feeling a calm, peace, vast pleasure ...

Saying "old movies" to young people, I'm surprised that to them they think I'm referring to films of 10 or 20 years ago. As if history began with them.

Origins
I once had an editor, Abraham Chapman, who posited American history, per se, must properly begin with America's native peoples.
xxxxxxxxxxBoth books are on the same shelf, Charles C Mann's book 1491 (2005) and David McCullough's 1776 (2005). Which first?

Films about devices precededing film — the zoetrope and the kinestoscope, the magic lantern and "still" photography — "film before film" / the roots of film — receive only a passing sigh, at best, since none of them ever showed Gone with the Wind. Clockwork Orange. Blade Runner. English Patient. etc.
xxxxxxxxThe history of cinema usually begins with accounts, instead, of audiences seeing cinema for the first time: a film of a railroad advancing towards the camera. Reportedly, people fell out of their chairs. But I wouldn't know. I wasn't there. Historical sources can be so untrustworthy (if even cited at all).

Had Hollywood ever allowed film to be considered an art, then the studios would have been responsible for film preservation. (Have you ever been watching the only surviving print of a glorious film and witnessed it turning to jelly before your eyes, on the big screen? It's not pretty, kids.)
xxxxxxxHence the recurrent jingle about film's humble origins as amusement, a sideshow at carnivals and amusement pikes. It's a convenient red herring. No mention of film's origins (visual) in Pompeiian fresco, (temporal) symphonic form, (dramatic) ancient Grecian theater. "A whole greater than the sum of its parts ... "

In my own history, I remember my mother and father making ready for going out, and getting me and my sister into the game: Let's all get ready, we're all going out. We're going to see a movie.
xxxxxxxxxxII trundled myself into the backseat of our car. I remember sitting in the dark. Judy Garland, in pigtails, comes to my mind as vividly now as then; even the country dress she was wearing. Then the tornado coming. The whirling blur of panic cascading in all directions at once. Hysteria. What happened then? Did she duck into a cellar? Was the house lifted up in the air and carried off ... to Oz? My memory isn't reliable about the details: I only remember it was meant to be quite scary, rather than rational, and so gritted my teeth, clamped my mind, hard, in my seat. So, ok, I'm supposed to be scared, so now what? Well, she's in this goofy tinsel world and some dame in a glitzy ballerina costume, with a crown and a wand, Glinda, is making like her long-lost fairy godmother, like the odious woman who visited our school once, in a similar get-up, complete with the glittery crown, who told us all about heaven: "yeah, sure!" I remember my reaction to this hokey spectacle (which had many of my peers, females especially, all gooey and goony over this dame), as if my tears were really going to be swept up and kept in little crystal vials on her shelf of Let's Make a Wish, boys & girls.
xxxxxxxxxxIAnyways, just then, just when the adrenalin from the scary tornado scene was supposedly no longer pumping in my young animal veins, this Glinda unleashes the Lemondrop Twins. Awmigawd! I think I screamed, and my parents shusshed me. This was worse than a teacher's fingernail scraping along the blackboard. But then it got even worse with the midgets dressed up in cutesy costumes, and given the creepy name of Munchkin.
xxxxxxxxxxII remember bursting into tears.
xxxxxxxxxxIsobbing and Sobbing! uncontrollably
xxxxxxxxxxIuntil my mother took me by the hand, or maybe just pushed me out into the aisle, with a crumpled dollar bill clutched in my hand, and I spent the rest of the film in the lobby, making an inventory of the every single item under the glass case, from left to right, then right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top ... while the clerk, in her nurse's uniform (only it was red) read her paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye...
xxxxxxxxxxII remember peeking in to the theater at one point, through the tall swinging doors, with black leather and brass studs, having heard some pretty, catchy music, and seeing Judy Garland acting flirty with Bert Lahr inside a floppy cloth lion's costume — and thinking to myself, "This is SO screwy!" and going back to my inventory of Milk Duds, Red Vines, Almond Joy, Almond Roca, ("Brown & Hailey Makes Them Daily") ...
xxxxxxxxxxIEventually, like the early pioneering filmgoers of legend, I too became accustomed to the incredible phenomenon of film ... but that's another story ...

History isn’t dead, it just ain't big box-office anymore.
xxxxxxxxxxI Welcome to life after history.

Today, at the online social network in where I’ve been a member for over a decade, The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) a posting in the Movies conference announces the release from Criterion of the Janus Box, encapsulating 50 years of films from this landmark foreign film distributor. Fine, except it was placed under the Historical Film topic, where it's been discussed thence.
xxxxxxxx[ One obvious element absent from the box : context. When
those films came out, they represented a certain zeitgeist, spirit of
the day; and as such, were in dialogue with both the events of their day and
the other films of the day. (Has any DVD included newsreels for
bonus tracks?)]

Welcome back to Life After History.

When John Coltrane recorded the song Alabama, it was shortly after the bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama, and if you listen to the Smithsonian recording of it, you can hear it juxtaposed with the speech Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave following the shocking tragedy, and can hear for yourself how Trane emulates the cadence of King's sermon. Context.

We do not experience history, except as an artifact, like language.
xxxxxxxxxxWhere is history? Bring it to me. Who can show me history?
xxxxxxxxxxWhat is history but artifacts, their collection and arrangement.
xxxxxxxxxxThis writing, like my life, is the history of what I do inbetween the times I’m watching film.

In lieu of clear, separable, discrete events demarcating history, we often rely, instead, on stories of famous people, biopics. History is Louis Pasteur, pasteurizing milk, discovering radium, and writing "Wake Up Little Suzie" (Or was that The Buddy Holly Story? I get my history mixed up.)


Prehistory was all our civilizations before writing. From 60,000 years or so ago. Up to the time when people didn’t just tie knots on leaves as writing, but committed writing to walls, wax, hides, business transactions, driver’s licenses, etc.
xxxxxxxxxx Then, little over a hundred years ago, film came and pulled the rug out from under old Grandfather Time. Now chrono-logical is no longer necessarily logical. Time now bends like one of Salvador Dali’s soft watches, zigzags like a fly at a picnic, flashes back, cross cuts, freeze frames.

History has never been static, but since the artifact of cinema as reference point it’s in even more of a state of flux.

In dynamic contrast to linear time (1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, like addresses of adjacent houses on a city street or country road), film occurs in a realm of circular time, most easily explained in terms of the carnival, in which everyday routine is halted for a celebration timeless impulses.

Time Lines (continued)
Goethe can remember his early past in terms of albums of heraldry he'd collected as a child.
xxxxxxxxFor us, our memory index is media: films (and tv) plus music, and one or two really memorable newspaper headlines.

Our lives are always in advance of history. No one in 1940 said Let’s make a film noir. The critical historical apparatus gets set up afterwards, after the experience of illumination, like weighing scales and cash register set up alongside the door, a big OPEN sign in the window.

If life is a succession of moments, events — not all are necessarily history. What may be history tomorrow is still only Current Events today, but which ones? Let historians decide, like crows fighting over roadkill.
xxxxxxxxxxShall it be the father’s story? History. The mother’s story? Herstory.

Every Thanksgiving my mother and father would take me and my sister to my father’s brother’s house, in Orange County, where we’d meet with other brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. A fire in the hearth greeted us at the door, and the event proceeded according to schedule, room by room, every year.
xxxxxxxxxxExcept one year, I was reading my fifth-grate history book, and our hostess, white-haired aunt Toni (nickname for Antoinette), from England, came over and asked me what I was so engrossed in. She asked if she could see. I handed the book over.
xxxxxxxxxx She turned the pages, as if perusing a child's fairy tale, then handed it back, her lips pursed in a tight quizzical enigmatic smile, begging me to ask, "Why the smile, Aunt Toni?"
xxxxxxxxxx"Well, it's quite long, isn't it?"
xxxxxxxxxx "Yes, but what do you mean?"
xxxxxxxxxx"Well, when I was a girl, growing up England, and we studied that period of history, we just say we let you go."

History, as what movies we like: contested territory.
xxxxxxxxxx Napolean Buonaparte called history a set of agreed-upon lies.
xxxxxxxxxx History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to wake up, said James Joyce.
xxxxxxxxxx History was a double feature matinee at whose intermission many simply walked out.
xxxxxxxxxx

All films are historical films.
xxxxxxxxA director shouts CUT!!, and time has moved on. Rust never sleeps. (This is strikingly brought home when, after a film's edited, mixed, color-corrected, printed, and distributed, an actor in it might (alas) have died, commemorated with an honorary Academy Award, announced with standing ovation.)
xxxxxxxxxx The question is ... how to photograph people (models, actors) in costume in the present moment as if it were really elsewhere. "Anywhere, so long as it's out of this world." Something else.

______________________
*

The History Channel (www.history.com) provides regular doses of historical promptings, yet initially had so many of its eggs in the World War Two basket that some nicknamed it the Hitler Channel. Nevertheless, it's proven commercially viable, held its own on its network, altho' its highest rated show isn’t history at all, rather reality-tv, documenting truckers traversing ice to lug diamonds and suchlike. The present moment still trumps history. The present moment in which we can experience the birth, evolution, and death of galaxies ... in the tick of an artery ...

Film A + Film B = History

walking in the rain can be so magical. looking at the wavy reflections of lights in the slick blacktop, it’s as if there’s no horizon and i’m moving through outer space. i’m stepping on solid street, but as part of a kaleidoscope of keen neon brightness and ink dark, sharp color and blur, all washed in a sheen or film of glistening. the extra strings of lights some stores wear for yuletide seem all the more cheery for being part of this generalized neo-impressionist light-show.

i’m walking with a few others who take this route as a ritual together, after seeing film previews at a private screening room downtown. i’m all for personal ritual, ‘tho i’m here strictly by accident — or am i?

i was getting a replacement for my lost library card at the mechanic’s institute library. i’m a lifetime member of this, the first educational body in the san francisco bay area. before there was a university of california, a university of san francisco, a san francisco state, city college, etc., a bunch of people got together, after the gold rush boom had gone bust, and formed a communalist venture for exploration of new civic avenues of economic livelihood as well as their mutual self-improvement. the night i’m there happens to be the annual members’ holiday party, and i wander upstairs to take in the sensations. where the speaker’s podium would be, a harpist is rendering all the seasonal favorites. at the other end of the double room, behind the wooden bar, volunteers are selling wine, just behind the healthy line for the capacious free cheese spread. so i set my day-weary bones down at a table, after five hours of errands, and proceed to dine on the take-out left-overs from my chinese lunch. as i do so, my mental apparatus automatically tunes in on the conversation of two gals who’ve since joined my table: one is asking the other, ‘what’s the name of that film about the two sisters, one is a cellist?’ (‘hilary and jackie, [1998]’ my mental librarian notes, and my attention moves back to my mustard greens.)

ten minutes later, as i’m finishing dinner, they’re still talking about movies. i get up and mingle. the same group of distinguished looking matrons and dapper gents has been sitting by the door since I got there, so I pay my respects. after the smiles are passed around, i try breaking the ice with, ‘ read anything good lately? ’

the candid reply: ‘ i come here for the movies.’ everyone concurs. one says she can find titles in the collection she wouldn’t have known about otherwise. heads all nod happily. and they’re all staunch regulars of what they call the friday night screenings.

i’m taken back, in my memory, to something my literary mentor once told me, one afternoon, over 30 years ago, in his sunny russian hill dining room. ‘richard brautigan, the novelist, says that when people get together today they no longer talk about books they’ve read, but rather movies they’ve seen.’ he’d said this, as, for years, he and i and his wife were always talking about films we’d seen. i even bumped into them once at a screening of bergman’s sawdust and tinsel (1953) and joined them. he, a pulitzer-prize winner, yet preferred to talk about films and filmmakers rather than books and authors.

fast-forwarding back to the present, i see now that brautigan’s premise gets an update: not only has print been replaced in the everyday discourse but it’s not just the latest film that’s fair game but any film, since all the films of yesteryear have been reincarnating and lining up in tape and now digital format.

here i’ve given myself extra time this year, after 30 years, to return to reading for pleasure, since my writing life has subsumed so much of my time. this year, i directed amazing movies in my head as i communed with william faulkner’s immense postage-stamp-sized human universe known as yoknatawpha county (say ‘YOK-nuh-pu-TAW-fuh’), mississipi: flags in the dust (1929), the sound and the fury (1929), as i lay dying (1930), sanctuary (1931), light in august (1932) — and finished absalom, absalom! (1936) just two weeks ago, which still feels as if i’d just personally seen and experienced it all.

i excuse myself from the denizens of the doorway and stagger away, off to another side of the room, to greet the arrival of the young man who presents the friday night movies here. he’s with a young gal i recognize from the bookshelves of the neighborhood thrift store, who’s telling him they doesn’t have much time. ‘what’s up!’ i offer, and they ask me if i’m going to see the divingbell and the butterfly (2007). a friend of mine in the book industry had mentioned it last week before going to london on a publishing consultation. i’m not on any list for tonight’s screening but i’m welcome to tag along, and i’m game.

a block and a half away, we’re settling in at the de luxe loge chairs of the screening room, sharing the simple joys of pleasant wit and friendly repartee, when the lights dim, and an old french ballad is crooned over stills of greyish x-rays, with credits cleverly placed in pleasing crooks of elbow, along femur, etc. it’s a slightly bizarre juxtaposition, of romantic sound and clinical sight, and slides me totally into what’s to be discovered next.

it’s not clear at all what’s going on, as the film begins. in fact, the image is so blurry, it’s hard to make out the human forms from a clump of pink roses off on the right of the screen.

i’ll just say as little possible at this point, since anything else would spoil it for you, if you haven’t seen it. (we intend, at a future date, to explore, in and of itself, the phenomenon of film spoilage.) the camera, at the film begins, has taken the place of the narrator, as has seldom been done, and never as successfully as now. what follows is:

a film about saying what it means to be human. no more, no less.

(we intend return to this film, in depth. for now, enough to call it Film A. Period.)

afterwards, we’re walking the rain, talking about the film, and i’m thinking back, instead, to the last film i saw. Film B. whereas i had absolutely no preconcpetions or prior background as to Film A , this one had advance publicity already blowing in its sails, wherein i read the director saying it is a film about consciousness.

how interesting, i mused, that i’d just seen a second film about consciousness, back to back, completely by accident (or was it?).

the first film i didn’t care for, personally, and the second film held me entire, all of a piece. they couldn’t make more of an instructive, fruitful contrast. (we intend, at some future point, to explore Film B, which, for now, is enough to say is called youth without youth (2007). Period.)

by this point, it was just two of us walking in the rain, and now our paths diverged and i was walking uphill alone. and it occurred to me how all my life i’d been seeing films in this way: one film in relation to the previous one.

were i to keep a diary of all the films i’d seen, what would interest me, at this moment, is not so much what i thought of any particular one, but how i learned from
one to the next. in sequence.

[ question : 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. ... ? or other sequences? nonlinear series? etc.]

even when all films are finally digitized and available in an eternal library, 24x7, something new, out now, just released (whether shot on film or digital), will always emerge from who knows where to rearrange the whole sequence.

the sheer existence in the present of something new potentially recontextualizes all films of the past. (the future affects the past, which affects the present.)

were we to believe in evolution as tending towards something better, better than what had come before, better than this, (rather than evolution as merely the eternal survival of the survivors), then surely film furnishes a reflection of that evolving; call it world-spirit, zeitgeist, self-overcoming, awakening, or just consciousness.

winston churchill called history one (damned) thing after another. history, which, like change itself, we cannot see, only its manifestations. (what was life like, back when, much less now?)

film furnishes a window onto history, and any serious, critical examination of 'what is film' must include history, whether the window looks outwards, to events in the world, or inwards, to the life of the mind.

certainly, for me, as a conscious filmgoer, it may be no accident, then, for me to have seen two films back-to-back that, like the intrinsic grammar of film (shot A + shot B) , provided two slides for comparison (film A ... film B). for, unless one is merely a delivery device for popcorn consumption, movies as a narcotic, in a media addiction to the latest fix, film must inevitably, integrally reflect conscious life, what anyone values in their common wealth, that in which one invests one’s attention in life.

as i turned the corner to my street, the analogy of music came to mind, another fourth-dimensional (4d) art form. i was reminded how music exists in between notes: where there's no interval, no music. the ear automatically hears Note A + Note B + Note C as a triad, not as separate notes, because it hears the relation between.

and yet even one single note, or just one film, can include all the others, i realized, watching my footsteps in the rain, heading home, just as a single drop of water contains the same water as the entire ocean. one in all.

and so, on this night, was planted the seed of a phenomenology of film, in a furrow of my brain, sparked by a seemingly chance encounter with a completely unknown film.

laying my pencil down, having written “unknown film” i thought those words a fitting place to end this night, at the doorway to the realm of morpheus, dreams, and more still more of the still as yet unknown




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keywords: mechanic’s institute library, scaphandre et le papillon, the divingbell and the butterfly, youth without youth, william faulkner, richard brautigan, winston churchill, avatamsaka (hua yen, flower garland, kegon)