Laughter, Oblivion

I enjoy the work of Czech-born writer Milan Kundera.  I'm not a scholar, just a fan.  Over the years, I've read the two of his books that I own, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, each a couple of times.  Lately, I followed an interest in the Czech composer Janacek, which was sparked by Murakami's 1Q84, to Kundera's book of essays, Testaments Betrayed, and the novel Immortality.  Though one is fiction and one non-fiction, both books offer dramatic narratives and insightful interpretative exposition, delivered by a speaker whose imagination and wisdom are incredibly engaging to me.  There are so many stories and ideas in these books that I love--the story of Max Brod betraying (allegedly, possibly) Franz Kafka's last will which would've had many or all of his works destroyed.  The story of Rubens, a virile but aging man whose sex life is overtaken by his past and eventually reaches a conclusion that resonates like a symphonic adagio.  Near the end of the novel, Immortality, though, I was particularly struck by a passage that expresses the fearsomeness of pervasive laughter in a way that, I think, might help people (me) maintain their (my) bearings in the midst of campaigning and advertising--the onslaught of everyday imagery we (I) now experience.

     "Rubens came upon an old collection of photographs of President John Kennedy: the photos were in color, there were at least fifty of them, and on all of them (all, without exception!) the President was laughing.  Not smiling, laughing!  His mouth was open, his teeth bared.  There was nothing remarkable about it, that's what contemporary photos are like, but the fact that Kennedy laughed in all of them, that not a single one showed him with his lips closed, gave Rubens pause.  A few days later he found himself in Florence.  He stood in front of Michelangelo's David and tried to imagine that marble face laughing like Kennedy.  David, that paradign of male beauty, suddenly looked like an imbecile!  Since then, he had often tried in his imagination to retouch figures in famous paintings to give them a laughing mouth; it was an interesting experiment: the grimace of laughter could ruin every painting!  Imagine Mona Lisa as her barely perceptible smile turns into a laugh that reveals her teeth and gums!
     "Even though he spent so much of his time in galleries, it took Kennedy's photographs to make Rubens realize this simple fact: the great painters and sculptors from classical days to Raphael and perhaps even to Ingres avoided portraying laughter, even smiles....  For classical sculptors as well as for painters of later periods a beautiful face was imaginable only in its immobility.
     "Faces lost their immobility, mouths became open, only when the painter wished to express evil....  the faces of women bent over the body of Jesus the open mouth of the mother in Poussin's Slaughter of the Innocents.  Or the evil of vice: Holbein's Adam and Eve...."
     "Laughter is a convulsion of the face, and a convulsed person does not rule himself, he is ruled by something that is neither will nor reason.  And that is why the classical sculptor did not express laughter.  A human being who does not rule himself (a human being beyond reason, beyond will) cannot be considered beautiful."

A Romantic Education

Werner Herzog:  "My film school would allow young people who want to make films to experience a certain climate of excitement of the mind.  This is what ultimately creates films and nothing else."

Werner Herzog is an amazing artist--he's made so many films of such a wide variety, that I admittedly have barely scratched the surface of his work, and probably have no business writing about him, but....  I have been most interested in Herzog's dramatic documentaries like Grizzly Man and The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner, in which Herzog's pursuit of "ecstatic truth" tests the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.  Herzog seems not just willing to, but actually eager to sacrifice journalistic truth to the more resonant truth of story.  Examples abound, but the one freshest in my mind occurs at the end of Herzog's most recent film, the truly spectacular 3-D masterpiece, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  Herzog ends with a fluourish--tantalizingly beautiful footage of a small, albino alligator swimming in a tank.  The alligator lives in a wildlife refuge that's somewhat near a nuclear power plant that's somewhat near the site of the film's main inquiry, the Chauvet Cave site in southern France, where remarkable, nearly cubist paintings have been found and dated back as far as 32,000 years BP (before present).  These alligators.  Are they real?  Have they really been mutated by radiology?  Why did Herzog include them?  I think he intends to leave us with a resonant image of our own time, one that suggests possibly grim futures that stand in contrast to the worshipful images of nature the Chauvet Cave artist left for our viewing.  For Herzog, it matters less whether the albino alligators are being represented with journalistic truth than that the film's powerful images resonate with the depths and mysteries of time. 

 

Inspired, I finally opened Herzog on Herzog, edited by Paul Cronin (2002: Faber and Faber), which a friend gave me years ago, after I first exclaimed my love for the powerfully ambivalent portrait of Timothy Treadwell that Herzog creates in Grizzly Man.  The book compiles interviews with Herzog.  Herzog's playful ideas on the education of an artist (and of a person) are worth sharing.  I probably don't need to tell you this, but it works best if, as you read, you imagine the words being spoken by Herzog himself in his really charming and mellifluous accent.

Herzog: ... "Actually, for some time now I have given thought to opening a film school.  But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have traveled alone on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about 5,000 kilometres.  While walking, write.  Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks.  I would be able to tell you who had really walked the distance and who had not.  While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom.

...First of all, learn languages.  One also needs to be able to type and to drive a car.  It is like the knights of old who had to be able to ride, wield a sword and play the lute.  At my utopian film academy I would have students do athletic things with real physical contact, like boxing, something that would teach them to be unafraid.  I would have a loft with a lot of space where in one corner there would be a boxing ring.  Students would train every evening from 8 to 10 with a boxing instructor: sparring, somersaults (backwards and forward), juggling, magic, card tricks.  Whether or not you would be a filmmaker by the end I do not know, but at least you would come out as an athlete.  My film school would allow young people who want to make films to experience a certain climate of excitement of the mind.  This is what ultimately creates films and nothing else."