I am researching Film Noir for a project that is coming up this fall. I have started by looking at the work of John Alton. But I am now looking to expand my viewing.
Anyone out there a Noir fan? Ian? Do you have a favorite I should watch. So far this week I have seen The Crooked Way, Bury Me Dead, He Walked By Night and The Big Combo. There are the obvious ones like Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Chinatown and Maltese Falcon that are on my list. I’m looking for a few more.
Thanks.
In Tragedy we cannot imitate several lines of actions carried on at one and the same time; we must confine ourselves to the action on the stage and the part taken by the players. But in Epic poetry, owing to the narrative form, many events simultaneously transacted can be presented; and these, if relevant to the subject, add mass and dignity to the poem.
–Aristotle, The Poetics
One gets the sense reading Ajax that Sophocles was trying to break free from the conventions of the Dramatic Literature of his time through the bifurcation of the story he was telling. Ajax at once falls too neatly into two different sections for a dramatist as skilled as Sophocles to not be doing this intentionally. Further, the work feels like a mirror, or perhaps a parabola, extending infinitely in either direction from the event of the death of Ajax.
The death of Ajax is like a node where all the events from the first half flow to and all the events of the second half derive from. Blanchot does everything Sophocles wishes he could do. Yet in a way Sophocles does attain to this degree of effort. Ajax’s death is marked by the words of farewell a lover might give their beloved. He bids farewell to the sun and the earth, his father and his wife after asking forgiveness and pity from Zeus and the Furies. It is a ceremonial farewell spoken with words held as in religious ceremony, only to end the speech with a mildly ironic turn of phrase, “These are Ajax’ last words on earth: whatever else I say only the Dead will hear.”
Yet if we remember, we are but phantoms, “we’re counterfeits, we mortals, we’re shadows, blown on the wind.” Even in the certain actions of Sophocles we are uncertain, for we are but shadows. The madness of Ajax that brought us to this place of dramatic revelation could be continuing still. All action is become suspect. We know no more than Blanchot’s narrator if the ground we stand upon be true. The uncertainty of life continues to the uncertainty of death. The Hero turned base scoundrel and madman is persecuted by his own mind in life only to find exoneration and vindication in death. His worst enemy in life becomes his savior in death.
Unlike Blanchot’s Madness of Day where the destination is of far less importance than the journey, or Antigone where we watch two unwavering characters act out a battle of will, Ajax takes us on a journey that can only lead to despair and yet we do not. We can not despair. For Ajax was not a hero until vindicated in death. In life his deeds of the utmost bravery were ignored because of the clever words of Odysseus. His vengeful anger at this oversight triggered a madness that reduced him to little more than a common criminal. His suicide was neither noble nor redemptive. It was a cowardly act perpetrated by a man cornered in desperation. At the moment of his death he was no hero. He was the opposite of hero. He was in fact the most miserable character that could possibly be.
The very force of his fall was also cause for his restoration and redemption. His plight so extreme, he could only be raised to the highest of heights allowable to a mortal man. He is the opposite of Blanchot’s narrator, who through his too human suffering can go nowhere but back to where he began. Another aspect of this tension is alluded to by George. It is the play between poetry and prose, between literality and metaphor, madness and clarity that gives power to these works.
Ajax appears to achieve escape velocity from his prescribed fate and arrives in death a Hero. In mirroring his fall from grace, by showing us the opposite action in the second half of the play we are constantly reminded of the fall as we watch the ascent. In this way the two events, that lie upon a temporal spectrum, are compressed into a single experiential moment. Life and death and rebirth exist at one and the same time. We are able to see the Hero walk across the stage only after his mortal self has been taken from our world. Ajax is become immortal as Blanchot’s narrator becomes eternal. All of time and experience are compressed into this single moment, and for that instant, we too are forever.
Maurice Blanchot in his Madness of Day destroys the Aristotilian category of the primacy of Plot, along with most every classical value ascribed to dramatic storytelling. He does within literature what many so-called post-modernists do about literature. He creates text that falls in on itself. Action and character and episode shift in a never ending play of signification. It uses its own mass as a kind of grounding and never finds a level space on which to stand. It ends where it began, nowhere and everywhere.
A man.
Lost to himself.
Insane.
Alone.
This could be Ajax in the postmodern world. There is no set plot or rather there is no linear narrative. The various dramatic episodes flow neatly and smoothly one into the next in a powerfully organic way. Every death is a rebirth. Every reversal of situation reverses again and every recognition becomes once again hidden. The plot, in its own way, is actually quite clear. What is kept from us in any fixed way is place and time and point of view. Blanchot paints for us not a hospital room or a prison cell, but a true landscape of the mind. The transitions between events are at least as compelling as the events themselves. It is the connections and the distortions that are of interest, not the step by step series of locations.
Our speaker confronts the disaster of their own Being and finds himself lost in clouds of thought. Self and purpose obscured by the many shifting currents of the mind. Blanchot’s narrator is the perfect answer to Ajax and his righteous rage. We see this when he says, so simply, “When I die . . . I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it: I experience boundless pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying.”
Blanchot weaves a tapestry that speaks in the space between Ajax’s words. It is a vital stillness that holds us captive. A meditation on the inevitability of Human experience. It is a coming to terms with the madness and absurdity of life. The complete insanity that is the modern condition. One becomes the other.
The text moves imperceptibly slow. It creeps along. Holding your attention fully in the moment and when you step back to see where you are, a surprise awaits you. ‘How ever did we get here,’ one must ask. For place is not a static thing in this world. Time too. The end is in the beginning and we feel ourselves moved along inevitably like an ant upon a mobius strip. We become locked inside this story that is not a story. “A story? No. No stories, never again.”
This kind of text calls for a precision and a stillness that can only be found within the cleanliness of minimalism. That solitary speaker, alone, must not be over exposed. The words are too full, they go mad in the fullness of day. Only in the half light are they safe to be spoken. The memory that falls through our narrator’s hands like water must not get burned out. It is a fragile and delicate thing. Soft. “That was the truth: the light was going mad, the brightness had lost all reason; it assailed me irrationally, without control, without purpose.”
Blanchot’s meditation on mortality and madness must be handled with poetry. Prose is dangerous. Literality deadly.
The text must be allowed to breathe. The still and fragile morning air must be able to contain both the finality of life and the possibility of death. For in this stillness “a vast solitude opened . . . and the entire world disappeared inside it.” The text lives in the madness of day “and outside it there is nothing.”
As of now I maintain two blogs. My blogger that is used for research and storage of articles that might be useful. Or when I am pissed off, politics and the horrible antics of our corrupt and illegal government. And then there is my LiveJournal for theorizing. This is almost exclusively theatre based, it is original creative theoretical writings.
I am curious of the readers of these if it would be useful to merge the two. It seems, based on my own blog reading, that there is a preference for the blogger type blog. I use the two for different purposes and each one is suited to its own purpose quite well. The ‘blog this’ functions of blogger integrates into Firefox quite well and makes it easy to grab bits of articles and post links. LiveJournal allows for comment threads, which I love for conversations as it can keep two divergent trains of thought going simultaneously without getting muddled.
If I do not hear anything back from the readers I will assume the status quo is good enough.
While I am at it I also maintain a portfolio where I have archival pictures of past shows and artist/design statements.
I have a Flickr account for hosting images on line.
I have a My Space account for general social networking and keeping track of friends. Friendster for the same, although few people seem to use it anymore.
I have another portfolio on a british website as well as my NYU Portfolio.
My del.icio.us account is used in fits and starts. Often depending on how much text research I am doing for a show as opposed to visual research.
I have an AIM/iChat account but I will not tell you my user name in a public forum.
I moved to New York five years ago for graduate school from Berkeley, CA. For the last two years I have split my time between New York and Oakland, CA. I am now based permanently in New York, although I seem to travel across the country to design and assist, wherever needed.
I have an amazing girlfriend who will be moving to New York from Oakland this fall around our two year anniversary.
How is that for Web 2.0 meets Bio 2.0?
Have a good day.
Oh, and as always, if you like what you read I can take donations
Writer Warren Ellis created a series called The Global Frequency in which he posits the existence of a global network whose mission is to save the world from destruction. Rather than superheros who fly around in red capes, we find more or less ordinary citizens connected by cellphones and other wireless networks. Each person on ‘The Frequency’ is some kind of specialist in a given field. In the pilot to a now abandoned TV series based on the work, one of the people needed to prevent a major disaster is an olympic gymnast. Not your typical comic book character.
The point is that in a world with the networked potentials that we have today, limiting our activities to traditional notions of role and geography, be they crime fighting or artistic, is looking backwards. The Poor player, while being somewhat self deprecating, makes the important and necessary observation that we need to reorient our vision.
There has been a lot of talk in the last few days regarding Terry Teachout’s recent article. He points out that some of the best theatre being made in the US is occurring in regional theatres. Interestingly enough, this theatre is being made on the same model as The Global Frequency. That is, teams of artists are assembled from across the country, if not internationally, to create works for a localized community. A need is found within a given socio-geographic space, for a particular kind of work. The artists who can best manifest that work are brought together to create. These works in turn, if successful, often go on tour or end up as co-productions with other regional theatres.
This is an amazing feat and something made possible precisely because of modern technologies. The Looking Glass Theater in Chicago is one company that comes to mind when I think of this networked national theatre. I was fortunate enough to board-op their co-production of Metamorphoses with the Berkeley Repertory Theatre a number of years ago before it came to Broadway. As the show toured cast members would leave and new ones would be added in, so there was an interesting mixture of the original ensemble and local actors, one of whom I had worked with at Impact Theatre a year or so before.
There are local theater’s all across the US. This is the New York Off-Off-Broadway scene or the companies I have worked with in California, Impact and ERP among others. The Poor Player tells us of ones in Buffalo, NY. The regional theatre movement of the 1960′s and 1970′s broke the stranglehold on American Theatre that New York had and created a vital new model for producing works in this country. Even as the original intent of these institution evolved to be more national in scope, smaller companies crop up to take on the role of local theatre. But in our connected world it is not enough to simply call for isolationist tribalism. We must look at how to further connection and cross pollination between artists and communities. We must look forward, not just back at the past.
The voice of Duluth might live in Sacramento and the costume designer who understand her lives in Minneapolis. Unless there is a network, a Global Frequency, this artistic team might never find one another. Creating theatre is never so simple an issue as geography or even friendship. These things are important, but in the end it is about finding those people with whom you have a sympathetic artistic relationship and creating works that are vital and powerful. As I said yesterday it is important to look for ways to expand the network.
When I look at the US government I see an entity that is wholly out of touch with the modern world. Where everywhere else technology and ideology are breaking down traditional boundaries, through organizations like the EU and technologies like VOIP and social networking sites, the US Federal government is concerned with Sovereignty. They want to create physical barriers and psychological barriers between US and THEM. They want to reclaim a 19th century idea of the nation state complete with hard power dominance, while everywhere else energy is flowing towards a post-sovereign state influencing events through soft power. There is nothing wrong with history. I find it fascinating to read of events gone by. But it seems silly to me to try and force the energies of change into old fashioned models that do not sit harmoniously with the contemporary world.
But the old models of Self and identity are washing away with time. Be they national or personal, the individual is on the way out. A holistic organic model of self needs be explored. The connections between examined rather than boundaries.
The future is here. We need only reorient our vision and embrace its potential.
One of the first things that intrigued me about light was the color. Watching a sunrise and the resultant building and receding of those myriad pastels of yellow, lavender and blue. Or sunsets and the deep rich orange and purple and green. And while these still hold a lot of power for me and I love a rich orange or a piercing yellow or the infinite depths of blue, I have had a growing appreciation for the many shades of grey.
I am a big fan of William Forsythe and of course saw his company when they came through BAM recently. The set was made up of a grey marley floor, white and plain blond wood walls and a white plastic cyc. Yet these colors hit me as strongly as the dancing. There was a power in the strict simplicity of the setting that would have been lost amid stronger colors. It allowed the movement and the drama to be seen that much more clearly and strongly.
The lighting too held to this minimal palette. For those of you who like numbers the colors ranged from 2300-5600 degrees Kelven. For the rest of us, the lighting was a warm incandescent light to a cool daylight. The small changes in color within this range truly brought out the subtlety in a work that might otherwise be seen in a more blunt fashion. The rigor that went into constructing this tight color palette showed off the rigor of the choreography so well.
I love strong uses of color, the saturated reds and purples of sunset. I love pastels, that thin morning light. But perhaps more than that I love the grey. The overcast shadowless day. There is still morning and midday and afternoon. There is still much variation in the color of the day. But the changes are as shades of grey. Beautifully subtle and imperceptibly strong, these colors effect us more than we often give them credit.
Our lives are colored by this grey light. In a world of unending conflict and strife, there is something to the softness of this grey world that sets the chaos in stark relief. The antics of the capitalist war machine take on a profound absurdity against this wonderfully textured grey backdrop. We see the subtle sifts and currents of our daily lives so much more when the film is developed in black and white and grey.
Why do we care about the Greeks? I often ask myself this when reading through stilted translations whose language is self-consciously old fashioned. These plays were written within a socio-historical context so radically different than ours it becomes almost impossible to try and relate the two. The only real similarities are that we read some of the same authors. I guess we have a similar political system since power is vested only in the hands of wealthy land owning white males. But even there the differences arise as the Greeks were up front about this while we mask it in language of universal suffrage. But I digress.
I am currently in the process of working on two greek texts, Antigone and Ajax. The Antigone is a new translation of the Anhouilh adaptation while the Ajax is an as yet unfinished adaptation of the Greek into Rumanian. These two productions are as different as can be and yet they both pull from some common source, some need to look back.
It always amazes me that these texts hold such strong relevance for a modern audience. But in a way it is not a looking back so much as it is a locating of ones foundation or grounding. For these texts never are the final product, rather they are the jumping off point for an exploration of our contemporary condition. The text becomes contained within a larger experiential context, the production. By using these old texts we immediately find ourselves in the world of metaphor. We know we are talking about the contemporary world, but it is through the veil of history. We are instantly looking at parallels between then and now, us and them. This creates a situation whereby notions of time and identity are at once compressed and expanded. We live and operate beyond the linear qualities of time that daily life presents us with.
One of the reasons I feel that places like New York or Chicago or London or Berlin have such strong artistic and theatrical communities is that daily life is confronted with these very issues. The simple fact of living in a heterogenous cosmopolitan environment lends a vital force to the simple repetition of daily life that one does not get outside of these places. When I worked on Medea this vitality was inherent to the process. Everyone involved was either a full time or part time New Yorker, but all non-native to New York. At the same time everyone except for me was a native of Puerto Rico. We were handling a Greek text translated into English and then adapted and retranslated into Spanish.
The work was performed in a space that had never before seen a performance. But more interestingly, the space was a cross roads. We performed in the open area between the cannon batteries and the kitchen of a 16th Century Spanish fortress. The physical space itself embodied the very psycho-emotional tensions created from these culturally layered situations.
Ajax will be performed in Europe after a workshop production in New York. In this way a further mix of old and new world will come out in the setting and performance. But I find more importantly that this explodes the idea of locality and community. Sure there are communities that are geographically determined, but these are quickly becoming, if not obsolete, at least secondary to the regular functioning of human life. The rise of new and evolving technologies show that we must reconceive the very notion of community. After all, my community is New York. But it is also the San Francisco Bay Area. But it is also the theatre, dance and opera worlds which spans the globe. My community is also the theatre blogosphere which again is not geographically determined but rather determined by thought and ideas. The global underground of rave communities further places me in a community that is bounded by philosophy rather than geography.
To say that theatre must be local because it must be oriented towards community fails to address the very nature of community in the 21st century and risks causing us to stand still at the threshold of possibility. Rather we must take a more expansive stance and see that we live in a world of radical cross-polination. We live in a world that demands of us to look beyond the simple geographical boundaries that have limited human thought for millennia. Theatre allows us to live simultaneously in ancient Greece, 16th century Colonial Spain, contemporary New York and Puerto Rico. But this possibility exists only if we lift ourselves out of the geographical determinism of the past and fully embrace the borderless potential of contemporary existence.
[I]t is only by searching for a new discrimination that we will extend the horizons of the real. Only then could the theatre be useful, for we need a beauty which could convince us: we need desperately to experience the magic in so direct a way that our very notion of what is substantial could be changed.
It is not as though the period of necessary debunking were now over. On the contrary, all through the world in order to save the theatre almost everything of the theatre still has to be swept away. The process has hardly begun, and perhaps can never end. The theatre needs its perpetual revolution. Yet wanton destruction is criminal; it produces violent reaction and still greater confusion. If we demolish a pseudo-holy theatre, we must endeavor not to bamboozle ourselves into thinking that the need for the sacred is old-fashioned and that cosmonauts have proved once and for all that angels do not exist. Also, if we get dissatisfied with the hollowness of so much of the theatre of revolutionaries and propagandists. we must not for this reason assume that the need to talk of people, of power, of money and of the structure of society is a passing fashion. . . .to [capture the audiences attention and compel its belief] we must prove that there will be no trickery, nothing hidden. We must open our empty hands and show that really there is nothing up our sleeves. Only then can we begin.
-Peter Brook, The Empty Space
One of the most compelling aspects of modern culture is that, at least aesthetically, anything is permitted. The ‘rules’ have been so torn down that any artistic avenue one might choose to go down is given the stamp of approval. This kind of freedom though does contain within it its own implicit constraints. Its own rules. It is not so much a matter of achieving perfection as it is transcending form. Precisely because there is so much available to us, we must narrow down our efforts and go beyond the simple forms of previous generations. In the way that the rigor of iambic pentameter allowed Shakespeare to transcend the limitations of language we must do that same thing, but from almost the opposite direction.
The Omega Constant, which argues that the rate of expansion in the Universe is constantly increasing, indicates that on a cosmic scale ideas and possibilities are ever increasing. In this same way, almost like a fractal, the rate of expansion of ideas within our personal sphere of knowledge is increasing. The rate of ideation increases as time goes on. Not simply the number of ideas, but the actual rate at which these ideas manifest increases. One need only take a cursory look at the rate of technological change in the last twenty years to see proof of this. Within this context of an ever expanding novelty from which to draw, it becomes necessary to focus in on a specific subset. We must transform our box of paints into a beautiful canvass rather than allowing them to fall into a thick grey-brown sludge.
There are many ways that one might deal with this information overload. Sadly one of the most common is a kind of stasis. The sheer volume of options available can lead one to balk in the face of decision and end up not making choices, and by force of inertia we fall back on tried and one time successful techniques. This lends itself to a kind of thin idea behind the work. It is recognizable. The play looks like the play, but there is nothing special. There is nothing unique. This is scenery that looks like “scenery.” Lighting that looks like “lighting.” And so forth. The work may be “dramatic” but it is not compelling.
The other too common effect is the kitchen sink problem. As in everything but . . .oh well throw that in there too. This occurs when a kind of preciousness is ascribed to the work that it does not deserve. But more than that, is a subconscious fear that this will be the last work you ever produce. The fear that you will never have another chance causes many to not make choices, to not edit the work. Joshua writes a great piece about how to make that ‘last piece ever’ feeling create a work of strength and beauty. Because there is a way of looking at the edge of the cliff to see possibility rather than death. George’s piece today points to similar ideas.
When Brook says we must be sure to show the audience we have nothing up our sleeves he is not advocating a removal of all stage illusion. A degree of illusion is necessary, however slight, to make theatre work. But the larger point has to do with honesty and authenticity. Approaching a work with an open and authentic willingness to engage is necessary for a true creation of art. We can do less and make wonderful entertainments. And sometimes what is called for is a simple entertainment. But when the call is art, we must drop the pretense and facade and get down to the difficult and arduous work of laying bare the soul. Anything less becomes readily apparent to anyone with a keen eye towards the work.
And sometimes you are the only one carrying the torch. And sometimes that is fine. The issue is not one of judgement and condemnation, but rather of finding ones own place in the larger scheme of things. But as he also says “The theatre needs its perpetual revolution.” Without those creators who are constantly reinventing themselves and the art form, its value quickly falls to naught.
The rough theatre is the theatre of revolution. Not in the sense of putting men with shaggy beards and guns on stage. Rather, it is a kind of ontological and epistemological revolution. Our very way of being in the world must be placed in the sharpest relief to life and possibility. Our fundamental understanding of everything from self to society to cosmos must be put to the test, the fat and waste disposed of such that the lean authentic self can emerge. But this demands of the creators an equal if not greater push towards authenticity. We can not simply sit back and critique. We must get down and get our hands dirty in the task of creating the necessary conditions for the transformation of the human soul. We must use the soul as fuel to transcend the soul. To stand upon our own shoulders as giants and look out over the valley of the Real.
