Month: March 2019 (Page 10 of 11)

 

‘Today, Lech J. Majewski lives in Venice, however, he often visits the region of Silesia where he was born and grew up. He works as a lecturer at the Rutger Hauer Filmfactory in Rotterdam. He started his academic education as a student of graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, a branch of the Academy in Kraków. In 1973 he entered the Directing Department at the Film School in Łódź, where he graduated in 1977. Majewski made his debut as a film director in 1978 with Zwiastowanie / Annunciation, the first part of the two-part feature film Zapowiedź ciszy / Harbinger of Silence. The first film that Majewski directed on his own was Rycerz / The Knight (1979). In 1980 the director left for England. In England, in 1982 he staged Homer’s The Odyssey. Soon after, Majewski came into contact with an American producer, Michael Hausman, and moved to Hollywood. In 1985 he directed Lot świerkowej gęsi / The Flight of the Spruce Goose, his American debut. In 2011 he presented The Mill and the Cross at the Sundance Film Festival. The film brings The Procession to Calvary, Pieter Bruegel’s 16th Century painting, to life.

‘Lech Majewski has received numerous film awards, such as the Wielki FeFe Prize awarded at the 9th Fefe Film Festival in Warsaw in recognition of his independent spirit. He won main awards at several film festivals, including the Polish Film Festival Award (Gdynia, 1999) for direction of Wojaczek. The director was also nominated to the Orzeł / Eagle Polish Film Award for his two films: Wojaczek and Angelus.

‘In the early 1990s, Lech Majewski also took up directing theatre and opera productions. He has created street art or performance as well. His theatre production of Czarny Jeździec / The Black Rider in Helbronn, Germany was given cult status and brought him the Kilianpreis award for best direction in the 1994/95 season. He was awarded the Golden Mask for visual effects of the opera production Pokój saren / The Roe’s Room staged at the Silesian Opera in 1993. He has said that he sees his life as a journey through diverse countries, art fields, languages and modes of expression.

‘Lech Majewski’s artistic journey is truly characterised by diversity, however, it distinguishes itself by consistency and loyalty towards the director’s early fascinations. Some visions have been recurring in Majewski’s works in various art forms depending on the genre in which this versatile artist creates at a given moment.

‘As early as in 1977, before his debut as a novelist, Lech Majewski published a well-received poem in Nowy Wyraz, a monthly journal devoted to rising writers. The surreal poetics of this poem, as well as the entire volume entitled Mieszkanie / Apartment, recurred years later in his opera and film by a similar title (Pokój saren / The Roe’s Room, 1997).

‘In his press interviews, Majewski has often referred to events and situations from his childhood or adolescent years that have left him with a distinct impression and years later have provided an inspiration for his artistic projects. The artist’s experiences were exceptional as for the Polish reality. He spent his childhood years in a gloomy, mining and industrial landscape of the Upper Silesia, which, as if in an unreal vision, was interwoven with the extraordinary scenery of Venice, where the future director of Ogród rozkoszy ziemskich / The Garden of Earthly Delights used to spend summer holidays at his uncle’s. Thus, it is not hard to identify the source of suggestive imagery present first in Majewski’s poems and subsequently in his films. In his works, the artist draws a picture of a human being as an integral element of nature, not privileged in any sense. He makes numerous cultural references to works which he had a chance to admire in Venice.

‘Majewski remarked that in Bosch’s In The Garden of Earthly Delights a human being is depicted in a symbiotic relationship with plants and animals. The middle part of the triptych shows an uncanny union of naked figures with the surrounding world.

‘On many occasions, the artist’s fascinations had developed in secret for years before they unexpectedly became the source of inspiration for a film. Such source could be e.g. Rafał Wojaczek’s poem, or a press information about a robbery of the century and a photograph of Ronald Biggs, an escaped prisoner relaxing on the Copacabana beach. It could also be a conversation with a friend from an elementary school who worked hard as a coalminer and dreamed about living a different life. Wojaczek, Więzień z Rio / Prisoner of Rio, or Lot świerkowej gęsi / The Flight of a Spruce Goose have all been inspired by such events.In his art, Majewski derives inspiration from more dramatic events, such as a death of a close person which he experienced and managed to overcome, recalling I realised that we treat death with an increasing superficiality, we push it aside these days when the entertainment is the sole value (interview with Katarzyna Bielas, Gazeta Wyborcza, July 12, 2004).

‘Soon after this significant loss, the director created Wypadek / Accident, an exhibition-performance, in Katowice (1996). Majewski used personal belongings of the deceased in this exhibition: “I mummified them, said the artist in the above-mentioned interview for Gazeta Wyborcza, that is, I bandaged a mobile phone, post card, necklace, high heel shoes, and a coat. I paid a tribute. At the same time, I exhibited all elements that constituted the body of this woman. There were two containers. The first one represented the amount of blood pumped within 24 hours, and the other one the amount of the pumped air. I displayed a body transformed into chemical elements in exactly the same proportions as in her body. There was an exact amount of coal, calcium, iron. Like in Metaphysics and The Garden.”

‘A similar action was performed by the main protagonist of Majewski’s novel Metafizyka / Metaphysics on which he based his film Ogród rozkoszy ziemskich / The Garden of Earthly Delights. However, before the novel and feature film had been created, Majewski filmed the exhibition in Katowice which lasted for 18 days and produced a film about art (Wypadek / Accident). Many viewers, Polish viewers used to keeping the subject of death at a certain distance in particular, found it hard to accept the art form chosen by the artist. For the director however, the installation in Katowice was an important attempt to draw near the mystery.In an interview with Jerzy Wójcik, the director said: “For millennia, a human being has tried to solve the mysteries and ‘describe’ the world, or organise it in line with one’s needs, but it becomes difficult to achieve it because even simplicity holds great mysteries. Each side of a square can be expressed in number 1, while its diagonal is incalculable. We know what a circle is, but we are not able to calculate Pi accurately.”

‘As Jerzy Wójcik put it, Majewski balances between the mystery of metaphor, symbol and the logics of numbers. With time Lech Majewski has continued to pose, in different ways, several fundamental questions regarding the mystery of existence. Thus, he populates his films with protagonists who ask similar questions. Beginning with The Knight, a film set in the Middle Ages, whose main protagonist embarks on a quest for the lost harp, just like many seekers of the Holy Grail; to Silesian naive painters, simple coalminers with their famous leader Teofil Ociepka, associated in an occult community portrayed in Angelus; to the protagonist of The Garden of Earthly Delights who tries to apply rationality and logics.

‘In many of his films, Majewski uses motifs from the tradition of esotericism aimed at penetrating metaphysical mysteries. Such as, in Lot świerkowej gęsi / The Flight of Spruce Goose and Ewangelia według Harry’ego / Gospel According to Harry, the director highlights different aspects of existential quest. His interests lie in an existential pain, which is an integral element of the extreme and reckless attitude of his protagonists, and can be found in such films as Wojaczek or Basquiat – Taniec ze śmiercią / Basquiat, a film about a legendary American graffiti artist (Majewski did not direct the film himself, however, it was based on his screenplay and his concept). Similarly to Wojaczek, the title protagonist of the film, Jean-Michel Basquiat, commits suicide at the peak of his career following his self-destructive instinct.

‘The most important thing both in art and life is mystery. We make all efforts to bring the mystery down to zero, we are afraid of it (…) Whereas I believe that this lack of knowledge is like air for our soul, said Majewski to Grzegorz Wojtowicz and he repeated similar ideas on numerous occasions.

‘Lech J. Majewski managed to find a niche for his artistic cinema in the West, which does not shy away from commercial projects. As the director admitted himself in a conversation with Tadeusz Sobolewski (Kino, no 12/1992), Więzień z Rio / Prisoner of Rio is the sole exception, or rather concession to the popular cinema. And yet, Majewski’s own vision of poetic and metaphysical cinema gains him popularity among the audience. Wojaczek, Angelus, and The Garden of Earthly Delights met with enthusiastic reception.

‘”I am only trying to make films in line with my desires… Some of my films, e.g. Gospel According to Harry, have not found their own audience, while others, like Wojaczek have enjoyed great popularity all over the world.” — Interview by Dagmara Romanowska, Kino, November 5, 2001)

 

___
Stills

 

___
Further

Lech Majewski Personal Website
Lech Majewski @ IMDb
Lech Majewski Website (in Polish)
LM @ MUBI
The Films of Lech Majewski: A Touring Exhibition
‘Lech Majewski: still life with movement’
‘Anaesthetic gardens. On Metaphysics by Lech Majewski’
‘On the Films of Lech Majewski’
‘Painting on Film: An Interview with Lech Majewski’
‘Majewski Is the Surreal McCoy’
‘Lech Majewski: Independent Ethos’
‘Going inside the metaphysics of Bruegel’s art in The Mill and the Cross’

 

___
Extras

Keyframe: Lech Majewski’s Stillness in Motion

A talk with Lech Majewski about The Mill and The Cross

Lech Majewski “Jak zrobiłem swój film”.

Lech Majewski talks to Grolsch Film Works

 

____
Interview

 

You’re showing Bruegel Suite at The Wapping Project onto raw brick walls. It seems at odds with the painterly nature of the film.

I love it here. You could say the walls reflect ‘the hand of time’ made visible; it keeps its own diary. I like that very much. When you look at old unrenovated paintings you can still see this incredible additional texture made by time passing. Nowadays everything is being renovated, so everything looks like plastic. The images projected on The Wapping Project walls retain a sense of time.

When I saw the walls here, I thought, “This is it”. The images I’m projecting are from Bruegel Suite, which I made alongside my film The Mill & the Cross, a film that took four years to ‘build up’. I use that term because each shot required an enormous amount of construction – there were at least 40 layers in any of the images, and up to 147 in some places. Every layer was shot separately against a green screen, then landscape filters were added, then fog filters, then different angles were included. We had to reflect the fact that Bruegel’s paintings were composed of seven contradictory angles in a single landscape, so we were trying to replicate a very magical trick.

And what, other than a visual density, is contained within these layers? They seem to offer multiple perspectives, both literally and in terms of narrative.

Bruegel was reflecting a situation that was absolutely contemporary to his time: issues around Christianity and the death of Christ, particularly in The Procession to Calvary [the painting into which Majewski’s film enters]. But then, I’m an artist in the 21st century, doing the same thing again – making it contemporary. So in a sense these layers reflect a series of endless mirrors, or bridges, between Bruegel and myself. It’s like Bruegel cast a 1,500 year bridge, and I am casting my own 500 year-old bridge – I’m sure there will be many other artists after me doing the same.

For me, these are pillars from which we can build history; it’s real art. Many events that are happening now can’t go anywhere because the bridges immediately collapse.

Which filmmakers would you call ‘pillars’ of cinema, upon whose bridges you have built upon?

There are so many. Tarkovsky, Fellini… they taught me so much. And Antonioni. In fact, he really introduced me to cinema.

One day, when I was much younger, I travelled to Venice as my uncle was a teacher in the Conservatorio there. Venice really opened my eyes to the beauty that human beings can create, as opposed to the koshmar of socialism I was living in, in Poland – a life of forced happiness. In Venice, I was standing before Giorgione’s La Tempesta, and I made the connection to Antonioni’s Blow Up, and the scene in the park.

To return to the bridges analogy, I saw another 500-year-old bridge. I thought, if Giorgione was alive today, he’d be making films like Antonioni. And that was it. In that instant I decided to leave the academy of fine arts where I was studying, and go to film school in Lodz. And from then on, I tried to paint in my films.

And do you have a sense that if Bruegel were alive he’d be making films like you?

But Bruegel was making films. I mean, when you are standing in front of Bruegel in Vienna, looking at the paintings, you are in a Fellini film. I mean, all the facciatas, and all those crazy, corpulent guys.

It’s true that many of his paintings are very cinematic. Procession to Calvary is like a slow pan.

He is a filmmaker. He’s mixing two styles: firstly, an extremely careful composition, which is constructed by an absolutely surreal landscape, mixed with very real costumes and props. But the landscape doesn’t exist. I mean, Flanders is as flat as this table, and yet Bruegel’s Flanders is full of protruding rocks and mountains, hills. The various perspectives don’t really make sense, only in a pictorial way.

Through this technique, he’s capturing a magnificent scene; the people seem to be caught off-guard, red-handed. They are captured in an instant. With other paintings, figures are looking at you and they are intensely aware of being painted, posing; they are draped in front of you. When you see Bruegel characters, they don’t give a damn whether you are looking at them or not. That is a beautiful thing, psychologically, because it draws you a lot closer, and you are instantly intimate with them, rather than being brought into the draped officialdom of posed paintings.

There is a certain sense of time and movement in Bruegel, and in turn in your film. It’s a very slow-moving film – things happen in real time. Does this sense of temporality come from its painterly origins?

Well, my initial idea was to make a feature film of motionless characters… I like stillness, I think stillness happens at the most important moments in life. When you are concentrating, you slow down. When you are horrified, you stop. When you are in love, you slow down and then stop, and you look like an idiot. The crowd passes you by, pushing and punching, but you don’t notice anything. It’s like Gaston Bachelard says: “vertical time”. I like it when time builds upon itself, time that doesn’t stretch like chewing-gum. But, in the end I decided to let the characters move. But even so, at the heart of it, when the central part of the film occurs, everything comes to a standstill.

What do you think the effect of vertical time is upon the viewer?

Well, it depends on the viewer. If you want time chewing-gum, you’ll be bored. If you are coming to see something different, then perhaps you will be satisfied. I have been showing this film all over the world, 47 countries have bought the film for distribution, every country in Europe apart from one. Can you guess which?

Poland?

No, we’re sitting in it. England. It’s strange, it’s spoken in English, it’s got Charlotte Rampling and Michael Yorke. Even Rutger Hauer! Even Andorra bought it.

I’m interested in your relationship to Poland. There is a tendency for artists from Poland to be unable to escape certain interpretations of their work, particularly if there is any violence in it. It’s often interpreted in relation to Poland’s history. How do you negotiate that? Do you see that as a part of the work?

I don’t think Poland is particularly different from other countries. So many countries have suffered. I cannot say that this work is about a history of Polish suffering, because for me the problem lies elsewhere.

The villain of my piece is the 21st century, which has brought with it the absolute devastation of the human figure. It happened in art first, and then one could argue that the armies came afterward and finished the job that the visual world had already started.

Now, we are accustomed to being fooled, we are fed very problematic ideas. I feel very strongly, after spending four years with Bruegel and being a humble observer of his might, that art offers no saviour for us now, no arcadia, no rescue.

Do you see your film as an antidote to this foolishness?

My film is a function of my unease with modern art. Mind you, I was also a perpetrator, and after all, my brainchild was the film Basquiat (1996) [Majewski wrote the screenplay], so I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are contemporary artists who are important, but I’m talking about the vast majority of works in the art market right now, a market that is full of chaotic nonsense. So, instead of the brutality of the past, it’s a kind of white-gloved brutality now.

And finally, casting Rutger Hauer? How do you get past Blade Runner?

Well, now he’s unavoidably Bruegel. He left the blade and hit the canvas.

 

__________________
11 of Lech Majewski’s 14 films

_________
Rycerz (1980)
‘This is a hard film to evaluate because it doesn’t treat itself like film at all. It doesn’t even try to be appealing for the audience. In terms of its figurations and themes, The Knight is equally underplayed–all traces of plot or moral/thematic development seem to simply fizzle out, leaving the film largely unresolved and inconclusive. The boundary between the world of the film and world of the viewer is constantly violated by characters who stare into the camera–sometimes appearing to directly address the audience. Artifice is made intentionally obvious throughout. However, the film left a lasting impression on me. Because the film plays by its own rules, perhaps it is unfair to judge it based on preconceived cinematic notions. I feel like The Knight reiterated tired themes of futility and imprisonment in the search for happiness/meaning in a new (albeit strange) way. Really, I don’t know what to say about it other than it is difficult but ultimately worthwhile.’ — SportexTheLewd

 

_______________
Prisoner of Rio (1988)
‘The fact that Ronnie Biggs co-wrote this fiasco (filmed in English) may explain the portrait of the Great Train Robber as a sharp-witted charmer, his sole real concern in life his son. The story recounts the less-than-legal efforts of cop Berkoff (macho, variable accent) to bring Biggs (Freeman, larger-than-life Londoner) back to Blighty and prison. The intrigue is messily and murkily conceived, involving undercover agents, swarthy thugs, shady fixers, and much predictable ado about Carnival. Majewski renders entire scenes devoid of dramatic point or meaning by the sort of editing that makes you wonder what’s happening, why, and where; the pacing is listless, the camera invariably wrongly placed, the whole stitched with leering shots of skimpily clad revellers and travelogue padding. Risible throughout.’ — Time Out (London)

Excerpt

 

________________
Gospel According to Harry (1994)
‘Starring Viggo Mortensen just moments before he was discovered by Hollywood, Gospel According to Harry is a visionary allegory set in the near future when the Pacific Ocean has dried up and California has become a desert. Against this vast canvas, Majewski tells a marital morality tale of modern discontent. With Jennifer Rubin, Rita Tushingham, and Jack Kehoe.’ — Wexner Center

Excerpt

 

_____________
The Roe’s Room (1997)
‘A fitting introduction to Lech Majewski’s singular vision and multiple talents, THE ROE’S ROOM is the cinematic version of the “autobiographical opera” POKOJ SAREN (itself based upon a book of his poetry) which was later selected as one of the best new operas in the world by the International Theater Institute. In nineteenth century opera, emotions sing. This twentieth century film jarringly recreates these truths inside a decaying Polish apartment complex. Between the four walls of their flat, a mother, father and son grow older by the day. But their “reality” blossoms with the poetics of fantasy: milk spurts from the table, leaves sprout from a cracked shower wall and, in autumn, deer invade their living room to hide in the wheat that has grown through the carpet. THE ROE’S ROOM is a work to be felt as well as heard and seen, soaring with the harmonic beauty of song and the beatific world of dream. Within their apartment, a father, mother and son bear the dulling yoke of an ordinary urban life. His mind and heart borne aloft by the cycle of the seasons and the images and music within him, the son transforms his cloistered existence into a richly poetic emotional utopia. As autumn arrives, cracking flakes of plaster become falling leaves. With spring, a cold hard floor comes alive with meadow grass and love beckons in the form of a beautiful young girl’s outstretched hand.’ — Fandor

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

_______________
Wojaczek (1999)
‘The last days of Rafal Wojaczek, a rebelious poet who died prematurely in his twenties like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jim Morrison. Fueled by his self-destructive life, his poetry made a lasting impression on generations of Poles. He drank and fought and walked through windows. Confronting death on a daily basis, he tried to tame it. Loved by women, he cared for no one, not even himself, living desperado-style only for poetry. Conscious of the need for myth in the mythless reality of communist Poland, he burned his life as an offering.’ — International Film Circuit

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

_______________
Angelus (2000)
‘Thoroughly and rather inscrutably Polish, Angelus makes a fable of Poland’s 20th-century history. In it, caricatures of Hitler and Stalin mix with angels, saints, and a kooky band of sun-worshipping cultists who believe a ray from Saturn will destroy the planet. In a world director Majewski renders in stylized, eccentric tableaus, this eschatology seems fairly reasonable–even if it means a naked, virginal teen boy must be sacrificed to absorb the ray and save the Earth. (Is he a Christ figure? Well, Angelus is fairly well suffused with religious symbolism, so you do the math.) This guileless chosen one narrates the decades-spanning tale, which often suggests a gentler kind of Emir Kustericia-style absurdist nationalism (see Underground) shorn of sex and violence. What lies next for Poland after the horrors of WWII and repression of the communist era? How will the world end? Judged by the movie (if not its prophecies), more with a whimper than a bang.’ — Joan Alice

the entire film

 

________________
The Garden of Earthly Delights (2004)
‘Working from his own novel “Metaphysics,” writer-director Lech Majewski crafts “magic in THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS’ intimate passion plays, which are filled with loving detail” (Village Voice) and creates “a luminous, highly erotic treatise on art, love and death” (Chicago Reader). When London art historian Claudine (Claudine Spiteri) meets engineer Chris (Chris Nightingale), it is love and lust at first sight. But their spiritual and erotic connection is threatened by a devastating and deadly illness. Her remaining days on earth numbered, Claudine chooses to fan the flames of her obsession with Hieronymus Bosch by taking her lover on a trip to Venice, where the artist’s work becomes the background for their physical passion and emotional discovery. Like Dante’s Beatrice, Claudine becomes Chris’ guide into a labyrinth of sensuality, love, death, regret and redemption.’ — Fandor

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

_________________
Glass Lips (2007)
‘Lech Majewski’s Glass Lips (2007) debuted as an instillation piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s original title was Blood of a Poet, paying homage to Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film. Surreal, kaleidoscopic, and predominantly silent, Glass Lips feels like a series of interrelated shorts literally forming a “motion picture.” The homoerotic frescoes of St. Sebastien are re-imaged with a Marian sheen. Mother repeatedly replaces son in martyrdom. Rows of the maternal tree, reduced to an orifice by exploring patriarchal hands. There is also resurrection. Nothing is permanent, possible because the martyr also co-created his passion, painted his pathos, and unraveled the rope which ties him to the cliches and traditions of the doomed poet. Majewski himself composed the impressive score, creating a lush language to supplant impotent words. Glass Lips not only inspires the viewer to labor in his or her voyeurism, but the film also demands some sweat from those who write about it.’ — 366 Weird Movies

Excerpt

 

__________________
The Mill and the Cross (2011)
‘Here is a film before which words fall silent. The Mill & the Cross contains little dialogue, and that simple enough. It enters into the world of a painting, and the man who painted it. If you see no more than the opening shots, you will never forget them. It opens on a famous painting, and within the painting, a few figures move and walk. We will meet some of those people in more detail. The painting is “The Way to Calvary” (1564), by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder. We might easily miss the figure of Christ among the 500 in the vast landscape. Others are going about their everyday lives. That’s a reminder of Bruegel’s famous painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” about which Auden wrote of a passing ship “that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Extraordinary events take place surrounded by ordinary ones. We regard most of the events from one perspective: the front, as looking at the painting. But the camera sometimes enters into the action. There are many closer shots of the peasants, solemnly, sadly regarding the pain they witness. They are as passive as beasts. Others in the same frame may be engaged in indifferent occupations. At the center is the death of Christ, but it, too, is only a detail. Here is a film of great beauty and attention, and watching it is a form of meditation. Sometimes films take a great stride outside the narrow space of narrative tradition and present us with things to think about. Here mostly what I thought was, why must man sometimes be so cruel?’ — Roger Ebert

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

______________
Field of Dogs (2014)
‘Field of Dogs is a film from Lech Majewski, a Polish poet and painter and has been working on film since 1980. His earlier films are not so well known, although he has worked in the fantastic genre a number of times with efforts such as the mediaeval fantasy The Knight (1980), The Roe’s Room (1997) and Angelus (2000) about a cult and their prophecies coming true. Majewski was the writer and what was to have been the original director of Basquiat (1996). More recently, he gained attention with his arthouse and festival hit The Mill and the Cross (2010), which restages a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in elaborate detail. Majewski calls Field of Dogs the third in a triptych of films made from artworks following The Garden of Earthly Delights (2004) and The Mill and the Cross. Though the other two are based on classical works of art, Field of Dogs is based on Dante Aligheri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy (1308-21), which Majewski calls a work of art because it is so visual in nature. The Divine Comedy, one of the classic works of literature, comes in three parts that concern the narrator’s journeys through Hell, Purgatory and finally to Paradise (or Heaven). The section that The Divine Comedy is of course always known for today, except among literary scholars, is Inferno and the image of Hell as a realm of seven circles with punishments meted out to the damned.’ — MORIA

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

_______________
Valley of the Gods (2019)
‘Majewski reteams with Rampling for his latest, Valley of the Gods, an ambitious sci-fi fantasy which uses Navajo folklore to enhance this story of a reclusive trillionaire (Josh Hartnett) who has the ability to alter reality as he’s shadowed by a biographer. In May of 2016, John Malkovich joined a cast which also included Keir Dullea and John Rhys-Davies. We’ve been waiting for quite some time for Majewski to unleash his latest. Filming took place in May of 2016 in Poland, but based on the amount of CGI special effects needed for the five million dollar plus budget, we’re assuming this has been quite the extensive post-production period. While The Mill on the Cross received a premiere at Sundance, his 2014 Field of Dogs received a more demure festival circuit run. With Hartnett and Rampling, we’d expect Valley of Gods to either premiere somewhere in Berlin, or perhaps in an international program in a Spring festival in the US, maybe SXSW.’ — IONCINEMA

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Well then, I definitely will watch it. Thank you, I’m suitably enticed. ** Sypha, I thought I remembered you being a FG fan. I guess my experience, to overly generalise, is that people I’ve met over here that are into that stuff are not more greatly numbered, but their interest has kind of more, I don’t know, depth. That does seem true about musicians and bands from these parts. That’s interesting. That’s an investigative essay someone should write. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I can’t figure out how Kyler’s blog-accessing methodology could possibly work, but I’m very glad it does. Yes, had you been able to access recent comments, Mr. Robinson an I have been tete-a-tete-ing about Hatari. I’m into it. I hope they trounce the competition, and they might just do that a la that hilariously awful Finnish Heavy Metal band some years back who won due to their refreshing incongruity. That name-needing thing is somewhat true for films in France as well. Not for films of that low a budget, but when you get to a million+, … That said, I don’t remember there being any names in Gaspar Noe’s ‘Climax’, which I think cost 3 million. But my friend Patric Chiha’s next film is a million+ project, and he had to cast two ‘names’ — names in France, that is — to get its bankrolling started. Ah, I’m very curious to see ‘An Elephant Sitting Still’. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Hu Bo’s much admired — at least in my circles — new film ‘An Elephant Sitting Still’, so go read his take. Here. My heat restoration got delayed until today. The workers were supposed to be here sat 8 am, and it’s 9:21 am, as I type, so prayers. ** h, Hi! I’ve missed you too. I’m pretty good. Working on stuff. I don’t give out grades, but yours would be a good one. I would be jealous of your snow storm if my apartment hadn’t been without heat or hot water for over two weeks. Take care. ** Kyler, Hi. ‘Black Moon’ is very odd in a good, I think, way. It’s Malle’s weirdo film. You broke your toe! Apparently not not the tiny one which I once read we break hundreds of times in our lives. May it heal pronto. Stay warm. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I remember I used to get excited when I got a new bed, but it’s true the excitement was more subtle. Strokes are super scary. I mean anyone of us could have one any second with no warning and for known reason. In fact, I’m going to stop thinking about strokes right this second. Dying young is a massive injustice. So is dying at all. ** Bill, Hi. He’s worth a multi-sensory gander for sure. As I told Steve, the heat’s return got delayed until today, and I’m counting the minutes until the fuckers with the equipment get here. Enjoy yours. ** Right. Do you know Lech Majewski’s films? They’re terrific. If you don’t, why not change that starting today? See you tomorrow.

Collaborationists Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak’s Death Mort Tod uses fiction, non-fiction, appropriation, cut-ups, and a series of over fifty unsettling illustrations to tour the dark sites of Europe with its millennia of genocides, mass murders, serial killings and suicides. A country-to-country death trip, a necro-travel guide, a Baedeker of bereavement, incorporating myth, folklore, maps, reportage, photographs, recordings, illustrations and poetry. Discover a continent’s thanatic history within a textual and visual reliquary – A European Book of the Dead.

Text by Steve Finbow
Images by Karolina Urbaniak
Foreword by Eugene Thacker
Afterword by Brad Feuerhelm

Softbound with flaps, 210 x 256mm
120 pages, 51 illustrations
Edition limited to 100 copies
ISBN 978-0-9927366-9-9

https://www.infinitylandpress.com/death-mort-tod

 

 

***

From the foreword by Eugene Thacker
There is my death, and there is the death of another. There is the death of the individual, living being, and there is the death of others, of many others, of entire populations, entire peoples, of the embalmed multitudes that form the ramified, forensic architectures of human history. There are living beings, huddled together in temporary assemblages of meaningful organization (the polis), and there are the tombs, the mausoleums, the cemeteries, the archives of the dead that themselves form an entire city, a necropolis. There is my death, a human being. There is the death of the species, the strange event of extinction that leaves not even a final member of the species to bear witness to its own end…

…The innovation of Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak’s Death Mort Tod: A European Book of the Dead is to inhabit the grey, opaque space between death as existential and death as stochastic. Finbow’s texts raise language up and break it down, dramatizing the enigma of being burdened with the capacity for being able to conceptualize death in language, but a language that is itself indelibly scarred by the finitude and mortality of the living body itself – something spectrally mirrored in Urbaniak’s contorted, anatomical reliquaries. The result is a view of death as an impossible life that determines every life. Scaled up as clouds of number and pattern, sunken down in elemental mud. Weightless ash, sunken data.

***

A note – some chapters are cut-ups, mash-ups and bastardizations of ancient, classical, modern and contemporary poems, prose, epics, anthems, songs and outtakes from the literature of the countries concerned; some lines have been translated from their original source, other lines have been re-adapted around preceding and succeeding lines, yet others have been copied and pasted. In other chapters, journalistic and historical resources have been manipulated and used as source material, some are fiction and some are factual-mythical mutations, all of this in an attempt to provide an anti-identitarian focus, to avoid a totalizing version of history and to contrive a literature and continent without finitude.

All photographs, photomontages, collages, drawings and installations were originally produced to illustrate the text without use of any external sources/materials. Clay, sand, ash, animal bones, blood, paint, salt, thread, mud, or human hair can be found among a variety of used materials.

 

EXTRACTS

Moldova – Moarte
The man lies on his side on a bed of straw, blood seeps through a dirty bandage wrapped around his abdomen, drops onto the straw turning it a dark brown. There is a light hanging above the man’s head, a dim light, a light only so because of the murky darkness that surrounds the scene. The man is in his mid-twenties but looks twice his age; he is naked except for a pair of grubby underpants and, of course, the bandage. He is thin, his ribs visible under his skin, his head is shaved and his eyes bulge slightly as if trying to intensify the power of the light bulb. If anyone asked, he would say that he was a farmhand but he has not worked for several years. He moved to the capital Chișinău a year ago to try to find work and spent a few months sleeping rough until he met the Israeli. Painfully, he turns over and reaches for the simple cross he brought from his home near Dubna but it is lost among the broken wheels, the tin buckets, the sodden firewood. Rather than dying from heroin addiction, rather than dying by being shot by a gangster or stabbed by a gypsy, rather than dying of starvation, he had chosen the course that led him to be here in this barn bleeding to death. He had been arrested for vagrancy and the police officer had said that he knew a man who knew a man who knew an Israeli man who could help him with a backhander, bail, some money to live on, some money to go home with. When he had refused the offer, the police officer brought in another man who tied him to a chair, blindfolded him and pinched his fingers and nipples with pliers. After a while, another man came into the room and spoke in a foreign language, the police officer translated: the man would pay him $10,000 for one of his kidneys. He agreed, dreaming of buying a farm near his hometown, of employing his brothers whom he had not seen in years. The next few weeks were a blur. He was given a fake passport, put on a plane to Turkey, placed in a hospital bed, taken down to the operating theatre, anaesthetised. When he came round, he was in intense pain, they did not provide him with painkillers, it was as if he were already dead. After the operation, they treated him like cattle, herding him here and there until, when he could at last walk; they put him on an old bus and sent him back to his own country with $2,000. He was too ill to leave the capital, too sick to return to Dubna with his payment. He had collapsed at a so-called friend’s house after a night of drinking and glue sniffing to celebrate his windfall. His friend and others he had bought drinks for robbed him, he fell unconscious, the stitches ripped, the staples tore, the seven-inch scar opened. They stripped him and wrapped him in a bandage they found in the bathroom, carried him out to the car, drove him out of the city, left him in this place. A fifteen-year-old Israeli girl in Tel Aviv now walks the Promenade with a Moldovan kidney. Blood diamonds they call them.

 

 

Macedonia – смрт
In the reign of Argaeus, king of Macedonia, the Taulantii (Illyrian tribes) under Galaurus made an incursion into Macedonia. He tightened the telephone cord around her neck and watched her eyes bulge, he thought of his dead mother and his auto-suicide of a father, his tramp of a wife whoring herself in Skopje, his two children whose faces had become a blur, his memory pickled with alcohol and hate. Argaeus, whose force was very small, directed the Macedonian young women, as the enemy advanced, to show themselves from Mount Ereboea. This woman was sixty-five years old, the age of his mother when she had died, and he would write about the old bitch’s death in one of the newspapers he worked for – his reports would be the never-ending obituary of his mother. In a numerous body, the women poured down from the mountain, their faces covered by wreaths, brandishing their thyrsi (a wand of giant fennel tipped with a pine cone used in the worship of Dionysus) in place of spears. His other victims were sixty-four and fifty-four years of age, like his mother they were cleaners, they had known her, gossiped with her. Galaurus, intimidated by the numbers of those whom instead of women he supposed to be men, sounded a retreat; whereupon the Taulantii, throwing away their weapons, and whatever else might retard their escape, abandoned themselves to a precipitate flight. He made them all strip, beat them, the sight of their aged and bleeding flesh gave him an erection, they made him do it, they were to blame – he would tell their story as some kind of catharsis, some kind of compulsive writing cure. Argaeus, having thus obtained a victory without the hazard of a battle, erected a temple to Dionysus Pseudanor and ordered the priestesses of the god, who were before called Kladones (spinsters) by the Macedonians, to ever afterwards be distinguished by the title of Mimallones (Amazons). He raped them and ejaculated over their wrinkled bodies just as he had dreamed of doing to his mother, he took their soiled underwear as trophies, placed the items in a drawer with the torn wedding photographs. In a war between the Illyrians and Macedonians, many of the Macedonians were taken prisoner, and others fought timidly in the expectation of being ransomed if they were captured. He tightened the telephone cord and watched the life leach out of the old bitches, he bound them with the same cord he had strangled them with, trussed them, bundled them into nylon bags, drove them into the country, dumped them in the undergrowth. Perdiccas ordered the deputation, which was sent to negotiate the ransom of the prisoners, to declare on their return that the Illyrians had refused to receive a ransom and had decided to put the prisoners to death. The night of his arrest, he waited until the other three inmates were asleep and placed his head in a bucket of water. When all hope of a ransom had been removed in this way, the Macedonians in future fought with more resolution because their only hopes of safety were placed in victory. He drowned himself, committed suicide before his own words found him guilty.

 

 

Malta – Mewt
The room is dark, resembling a cave, yet also like a theatre, a stage set. The walls are of heavy stone, they could be dripping with moisture, they could be enmossed, the dark-green singular flowers like black velvet curtains framing the scene. Left of centre, beyond the stone doorway, is a structure made from rusting metal or rotting wood, it seems to serve little purpose but for decoration, to differentiate the light from the darkness, the active horizontal dynamics of the space. On the right, ropes hang down and pass through a metal ring. Was this the place where he had been tethered? Is this the place where he will soon be tied? This is an arena of punishment, a prison cell, a place of torture and execution. On the right also, a rectangular window – which could be a painting in its own right – is crosshatched with metal bars, through this matrix, two prisoners stare at the illuminated focal point. They are us, the viewer, but they could also be representations of Dismas and Gestas, the penitent and impenitent thieves crucified next to Christ. One stares over the other’s shoulder, witnesses, voyeurs, observing the other five characters, the actors in this drama. In the centre of this quintet, stands the warder; his hair is close-cropped and receding, his beard red and flourishing, he is dressed in a sleeved cape, leather jerkin and pale hose. Iron keys hang from an unseen belt. His right arm is extended down and he is pointing with his index finger. Next to him, an old woman stands head in hands. She is dressed in black, her grey-blonde hair covered loosely with a white headscarf. Why is she covering her ears? Why is she not covering her eyes? She has been identified as Herodias, wife of Herod II, mother of Salome, but is probably a stock figure of the believing Christian. Bending down next to her is not the lustful beast, the seven-veiled dancer enticing the tetrarch Herod Antipas but a lowly servant girl, her russet hair tied back with a butterfly clip, holding a gold charger in the position of the warder’s directing index finger. In the centre, consuming the light within the darkness, a muscular man holds a dagger in his right hand, it rests on the base of his spine, a silver cloth wraps around his waist and sits on his strong thighs. His beard is pointed and his hair tied back. His dirty left foot stands on a red robe and his left hand grips long brown hair. Between the hair and the warder’s left foot is a sword stained with blood. Between the executioner’s legs a man sprawls facedown, hands tied behind his back he lies on a lamb’s fleece, the red robe placed strategically to obscure the evacuation of his bowels as the executioner part severs his head from his body. A frayed rope uncoils from between his legs as if it were an umbilicus that once connected him to life. What will happen next? The muscular man will bring the dagger to the prostrate man’s throat, swiftly finish the decapitation, the warder will lift the head and place it on the gold charger, the servant girl will take it to her mistress. Blood flows from the man’s neck, pools and then forms the name ‘f. Michelang.o.’ Caravaggio.

 

 

Cyprus – θάνατος / Ölüm
‘Want another pint, Binny?’ ‘Yeah, go on then, Geoff.’ ‘Look at the Cube making an arsehole of himself dancing.’ ‘Yeah, he’s never gonna pull.’ ‘Hey, Allan, want a drink?’ ‘Scotch and Coke. And get some fucking tequilas in an’ all, you muppet!’ The three squaddies, members of the British Army’s Royal Green Jackets, are in the Jasmin bar in Ayia Napa, Cyprus. They down their drinks and leave, drunk and ready to fight or fuck. They get into Justin ‘Binny’ Fowler’s Mini Moke and drive to a petrol station. It is 16 September 1994 and Geoff Pernell is determined to get a woman for the night, whatever it takes – not like that bitch on the Falklands – and with Allan Ford, ‘the Cube,’ in agreement, they’re bound to get their wicks dipped tonight. As they pull in to fill the tank of the small jeep, they see a blonde woman get on the back of a motorcycle, the driver is obviously a local, but the woman looks Scandinavian. It is just after midnight. The three soldiers fill the tank, eyeing the woman. They get back in the jeep and drive. A few minutes later, the motorcycle carrying the local man and the blonde woman overtakes the jeep. Pernell accelerates, drives into the motorcycle and knocks the couple into the dust at the side of the road. They are stunned but not hurt. The jeep stops, reverses. The soldiers get out. They stand over the couple, punching and kicking them. The local man makes a run for it and scrabbles into the bushes. The soldiers drag the screaming woman into the jeep and drive off. They turn up a dirt track and stop. They pull the woman out and rip her shirt, exposing her breasts. ‘You fuck her first, Binny,’ the Cube shouts. The blonde woman is crying, snatching at her frayed shirt as the men pull at her jeans. Fowler pulls down his shorts but is unable to get an erection and returns to the jeep. Ford is on his knees trying to fuck the crying woman. After five minutes of this and after five minutes of punching the woman, Pernell replaces the Cube. The woman shouts and screams in a foreign language and the Cube hits her again and again, her half-naked body now a mass of contusions and cuts. After yet another blow, the woman falls sideways, her breathing ragged, The Cube takes a spade from the jeep, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head. Throws it to the ground. The three soldiers look drunkenly at the body, now unrecognisable as a human being. They stare at each other as if they were in the dream of another, the nightmare of their violent history, their beaten girlfriends, their fucked-up pasts. The Cube takes up the spade again, uses it to dig a shallow grave. The three soldiers kick the body into the hole, cover it in the dirt, the dust, the sand of Cyprus. When the woman’s body is discovered a few days later, she is only identifiable by her rings and watch, the violence and thirty-eight-degree heat having rendered her down to mere matter.

 

 

Austria – Tod
My dear neoplasm. This coma may resemble natural sleep, or may be accompanied by so great a reduction of respiration and circulation as to be taken for death. Then, on his father’s death, sudden attack of anxiety with heart-failure, hypochondriacal fears of cancer of the tongue; several months later a second attack, with cyanosis, intermittent pulse, fear of death, etc.; since then weakness, vertigo, agoraphobia, some dyspepsia. A malignant tumour, an epithelioma. It seems as though this death-wish is directed in sons against their father and in daughters against their mother. While he was nursing his father he had seen him with a death’s head. A leukoplakia, a benign tumour, a pre-cancerous lesion of the oral mucosa. His right arm, over the back of the chair, had gone to sleep and had become anaesthetic and paretic; and when he looked at it the fingers turned into little snakes with death’s heads. They report that the most frequent content of the first memories of childhood are on the one hand occasions of fear, shame, physical pain, etc., and on the other hand important events such as illnesses, deaths, fires, births of brothers and sisters, etc. A severe postoperative haemorrhage. The prohibited seizing of the rod (in the dream an unmistakably phallic one), the production of fluid from its blow, the threat of death, in these we find all the principal factors of infantile masturbation united. His father had fallen dead in the street and had been brought home; when his body was undressed it was found that at the moment of death, or post mortem, he had passed a stool. A rigorous oral hygiene, replacing defective dental restorations, fitting gold inlays in certain teeth to help retain and support the obturator, and constructing a vulcanite surgical prosthesis. If there is no mention in the dream of the fact that the dead man is dead, the dreamer is equating himself with him: he is dreaming of his own death. A crater-shaped ulcer on the posterior aspect of the right maxillary tuberosity and a palpable sub-mandibular node. Let us add that a restriction of sexual activity in a community is quite generally accompanied by an increase of anxiety about life and of fear of death which interferes with the individual’s capacity for enjoyment and does away with his readiness to face death for any purpose. Ligated the right external carotid artery and removed the submandbular nodes. In the second he reflected a facial flap and carried out a maxillectomy, sectioning anteriorly through the right canine region and preserving the soft palate posteriorly. The chief subjects of this kind are paternity, length of life, life after death, and memory – in the last of which we are all in the habit of believing, without having the slightest guarantee of its trustworthiness. The maxillectomy cavity was lined with a split skin graft supported by gutta-percha on the surgical obturator which was retained by clasps. Without denying the omnipotence of love we may point out that both these instances were concerned with death. This involved ligation of the vas deferens supposedly to stimulate the secretion of the testicular hormone and hopefully rejuvenate the patient.

 

 

Switzerland – Mort / Tod / Morte
The last document to be signed by the member is the ‘declaration of suicide,’ which states that the member is voluntarily ending his or her own life, that they want to use the services of Death, and that Death has clearly outlined to him or her all the risks involved. This means that Death cannot be held responsible for any problems that might arise during the assisted suicide despite the most careful preparations. Members and those who came with them are then given the opportunity to say farewell. If desired, this can take place at a specific time without the presence of the Death assisted-suicide assistants, who will withdraw themselves for as long as necessary. To live with dignity. If all of the criteria are met and all of the questions have been answered, if the member has been repeatedly informed that he or she is free to return home permanently or temporarily and if the member still expresses a wish to end his or her life, and if the lethal medication is to be administered through the stomach, the medication to prevent vomiting can be given. Thirty minutes later, the member is questioned once again to see whether he or she still want to end life. To die with dignity. If they do, the prescribed dose of NaP (sodium pentobarbital) is dissolved in normal tap water and presented to the member in whatever form is necessary for the planned method of administration. When the medication is being administered, assistance is permitted as long as it does not in any way lead to someone else administering the medication. For instance, holding a glass containing a straw is allowed, but tipping the glass so that the liquid runs into the mouth is not. Careful attention is paid so that the “power/control over the action” always remains with the member and is in no way transferred to either of the Death assisted-suicide assistants or any other person present. Directly after the medication has been swallowed, the member – as described previously – is offered either a sweetened beverage or chocolate to remove the unpleasant taste left in the mouth. To die with dignity. During the entire process, and in particular as soon as the member has lost consciousness, the people who accompanied him or her are given special care. The Death assisted-suicide assistants monitor the process of the dying phase. When they are confident that death has occurred, they confirm by checking the pulse, breathing and pupil reflexes. If these indicators, also known as ‘uncertain signs of death’, are present, the escorts can wait until they are able to confirm the ‘certain signs of death’, in particular livor mortis. To die with dignity. Once they are convinced that death has occurred, they offer their condolences to the people who accompanied the deceased person, then use the emergency telephone number to notify. ‘Dear Death. My name is S**** F*****. I am fifty-seven years old and live in Langres, France. I suffer from severe pain…’ A few pages later, ‘I only wish that my country was humane enough to let a person die. Please consider my letter, I hope to hear a response soon.’ To live with dignity. To die with dignity.

 

 

Luxembourg – Mort / Tod / Doud
In Xanadu did Günter Ewen, a revenge spree killing decree. It is 15 May 1999, the man is in his mid-thirties. With his feathered blond hair and athletic build, he could be a defensive midfielder for Racing FC. He dresses in all black, not to look menacing but to not be seen and to not seem to be not seen. It is cold and approaching dawn, he has been driving through the mist along the borders, Luxembourg and France, France and Germany, Germany and Luxembourg. Borders, town doubles – Dillingen and Dillingen – thinking, ‘What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry?’ He drives until he sees the neon sign, white on blue, stylized buildings – metonyms for civilization, Xanadu. He walks up to the door thinking, ‘Like all doors it is ambiguous, two faced. What is inside it and what is outside it depends upon which side you are on.’ And he is now inside. The music is loud, the lights flash across the dance floor, and he thinks, ‘No, I don’t believe in life after love,’ and takes the gun out and starts shooting randomly into the crowd – but this is not the purist surrealist act, this is revenge. He sees a man fall, blood pulsing in the strobes and then another, the sound of the shots muffled by the dance-pop and while shooting he thinks, ‘So sad that you’re leaving.’ Another three spin and fall in the hail of bullets and he stops shooting and thinks, ‘There’s no turning back.’ He leaves through the same door, no longer ambiguous. He drives to a house where he knows a man lives with his British wife. The man had testified against him, saying he was a thief. This time, doors are immaterial, he breaks in, shoots the man first, shoots the wife second, shoots the young daughter in the face. He leaves, gets back into his car, drives north, drives along the border, drives faster, switching lanes. When he reaches Sierck-les-Bains, a town on the borders of France, Germany and Luxembourg, he loses control of the car and crashes. He can hear helicopters and his own blood pulsing. He runs through the woods, shoots at a nurse out for a morning stroll. Runs along the borders, runs across the borders and back and back and back. He stops a car, a Peugeot, and forces the driver out and onto his knees. He stops at a house, breaks in, shoots another man. He drives into Luxembourg, thinking, ‘The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.’ He drives and drives and then in Strassen, on the edges of Luxembourg City, he finds a hotel, pays for three nights, falls onto the bed, the curtains closed, helicopters in the morning sky, sirens serenading the borders. Sleep comes occasionally, comes fitfully. He dreams of rape and prison, he dreams of the very edge of the world. He wakes and hears the footsteps on the stairs and taking the gun from under the pillow and placing it in his mouth, he thinks, ‘The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.’

 

 

Netherlands – Dood
For I saw that my situation was one of great peril and that I was obliged to seek a remedy with all my might, however uncertain it might be, like a sick man suffering from a fatal malady who, foreseeing certain death unless a remedy is forthcoming, is forced to seek it, however uncertain it be, with all his might, for therein lies all his hope. This corollary can be illustrated by the example of the sick man and the healthy man. The sick man eats what he dislikes through fear of death. The healthy man takes pleasure in his food and thus enjoys a better life than if he were to fear death and directly seek to avoid it. Likewise the judge who condemns a man to death not through hatred or anger but solely through love of public welfare is guided only by reason. Vanitas – still life with skull. A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death. A free man, that is, he who lives solely according to the dictates of reason, is not guided by fear of death, but directly desires the good; that is, to act, to live, to preserve his own being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own advantage. So he thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life. The question may be asked: ‘What if a man could by deception free himself from imminent danger of death? Would not consideration for the preservation of his own being be decisive in persuading him to deceive?’ If we turn our attention to the common belief entertained by men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of the mind, but they confuse it with duration and assign it to imagination or to memory, which they believe to continue after death. Vanitas – still life with skull and globe. When a great disaster or plague had at last reduced them to exhaustion, he succeeded in pacifying them, but their condition was such that they all preferred death to life. What can be more calamitous than that men should be regarded as enemies and put to death, not for any crime or misdeed, but for being of independent mind? That the scaffold, the terror of evildoers, should become the glorious stage where is presented a supreme example of virtuous endurance, to the utter disgrace of the ruling power? Those who are conscious of their own probity do not fear death as criminals do, nor do they beg for mercy, for they are not tormented with remorse for shameful deeds. On the contrary, they think it an honour, not a punishment, to die in a good cause, and a glorious thing to die for freedom. Vanitas – still life with bouquet. What sort of lesson, then, is learnt from the death of such men, whose cause is beyond the understanding of those of sluggish and feeble spirit, is hated by troublemakers, but is dear to the hearts of all good men? The only lesson to be drawn from their death is to emulate them, or at least to revere them. For before my death, fear of death would make me wretched, and after my death I would be nothing, and therefore wretched in being deprived of that divine contemplation? The only lesson to be drawn from their death is to emulate them, or at least to revere them. Vanitas – still life with angel.

 

 

Norway – Død
A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. You can’t really allow yourself to be stopped by any of them as it will lead to your collective death. You will do anything to put out that fire despite the fact that they are trying to stop you. Demonic laughter your cremation, your lungs gasp for air but are filled with blood, a sudden crack as I crushed your skull. I have ordered 50ml, 99% pure liquid nicotine from a Chinese online supplier. 3-4 drops will be injected in hollow point rifle bullets, which will effectively turn it into a lethal chemical weapon. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. I’ll send you to your maker, I’ll send you to your death. The bullet simply lacks the size required to fit a deadly dose. 7.62 ammo would be preferable as it is more than double the size. 9mm bullets are ok for this purpose. Evidence of infinity, procreation of the wicked. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Our choice of difference is what you’ll never know. In the pool of dreams the water darkens for the soul that’s tired of search. I completed the last purification batch of the unpurified picric acid and ended up with several litres of PA liquid that had to be chilled. I then drove to the local town and bought three portions of Chinese takeaway. Beef with noodles and fried rice, yummy! Cries of the (ha-ha!) suffering sound, cries for help to all their dead mums. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. Just learned that when acidifying the sodium picramate solution during DDNP manufacture, H2S and S02 is released, which is potentially deadly. The rain has stopped to drip from the sky, still dripping exists from the veins of a nearly dead boy. This house is infested with beetles. Just now I was about to reach for a chocolate in my goodie bag and a beetle had crawled in, ffs. I immaterialize and slowly drift into the unknown with the cold winds with soul the wintery plains lie untouched. Due to their great feast a year ago, the mosquito population had seemed to triple. Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness. From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic. Be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

 

 

Estonia – Surm
S***** had slept very little the night before, he went to church and fell asleep and did not awake until night. He rubbed his eyes and could not imagine where he was for the church was full of gentlemen. S***** recognised his former master who had been buried three months before. His master asked, ‘S*****, when did you die?’‘Three months after you were buried,’ answered S*****. ‘Oh, indeed,’ said the gentleman, ‘What do you think? Shouldn’t we go home now for a short visit? Won’t you accompany me?’‘I’m ready,’ said S*****. On the way, he found a frozen glove, which he put in his pocket. They came to the mansion and the master went to the stable to torment the horses and thought S***** would help. When the gentleman entered, the horses made no sound, but when S***** came in, they neighed. The master turned and said, ‘Listen, S*****, you can’t be really dead. Give me your hand to feel.’ S***** thrust his hand into the frozen glove and extended it to his master, who said, ‘Yes, you are really dead. Your hand is shockingly cold.’ Then he tormented the horses until they were covered with white foam. At last, the master ceased his spiteful work and said, ‘Let us go into the kitchen and frighten the maids and I will torment the lady. When it is time to depart, I will come for you.’ The lady screamed and sobbed with terror as if she was mad. The maids screamed too but with fun and frolic. After a long time, the master came to the kitchen, and said, ‘Let us make haste for the cocks will soon crow.’ He would have liked to have run away but he was afraid, so he went with his master. On the way his master talked a great deal about how his wife had searched everywhere for the treasure which he had hidden before his death and what she had done to banish the nightly hauntings, but everything was useless. ‘Yes,’ said S*****, ‘it must be a great sorcerer who can lay spectres and discover treasures in the ground. Perhaps she will never meet with one.’‘Ha! ha!’ laughed the gentleman, ‘No great cleverness is needed. If a living person was to stamp three times on my grave with his left heel and say each time, ‘Here shall you lie,’ I couldn’t get out again. But the money which I hid in my lifetime is under the floor of my bedroom, near the stove.’ S***** was delighted to hear this. They came to the churchyard and the gentleman asked S***** to show him his grave. But S***** said, ‘We shall have another opportunity, I’m afraid the cocks are just about to crow.’ The gentleman slipped quickly into his grave, when S***** stamped three times with his left heel on the mound, and said three times, ‘Here shall you lie.’ ‘Oh, you liar and scoundrel!’ cried the dead man from the grave, ‘If I had known that you were still alive, I should have crushed and mangled you. Now I can do nothing more to you.’ Then S***** returned home full of joy and told the lady all that he had seen and heard and done. The lady did not know how to thank him enough. She took him as her husband, and they lived together happily and honourably; and if they could have got on as well with Death as with the nocturnal spectre, they might be living still.

 

 

***

From the afterword by Brad Feuerhelm
How Europeans craft an image of their decline as an entity of ends is beyond simple framing. It exists in the psyche, in the unsolicited desire to cache the ‘phoenix syndrome’ of its impoverished state into a catalogue of possible and triumphant if short reincarnations. Beaten, chained, whipped and scourged, the fluidity of Europe through centuries of shifting empires, gallivanting atrocities and unbridled warfare has created a European that needs to be hammered like the ploughshare of existence into a gleaming sword and then beaten back into a ploughshare ad infinitum. Without defeat, manifest dissection would not be possible. The cycle continues and the image that Europe caters to itself is ultimately that of failure, decline and inevitable collective death and rebirth and death and rebirth and Frankenstein’s monster and zombie preternaturalia. Optimism in the case of Europe is a simple pretext for the slaughter of its many guilty self-appointed prophets blinded by the oblivion of choice. And these images must be celebrated in order to continue with this baseless cycle of self-flagellation, lament and the desire to rise like the aforementioned phoenix only to be crushed by the opposable thumbs of destiny. In Europe, we find a primate fever like none other.

 

***

Steve Finbow at Infinity Land Press & Amphetamine Sulphate reading event. London, September 2018

 

***

About the authors

Steve Finbow
Steve Finbow’s fiction includes Balzac of the Badlands (Future Fiction London, 2009), Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom (Grievous Jones Press, 2011), Nothing Matters (Snubnose Press, 2012) and Down Among the Dead (Fahrenheit 13, 2014). His biography of Allen Ginsberg in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series was published in 2011. His other works include Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia (Zero Books, 2014) and Notes from the Sick Room (Repeater Books, 2017). The Mindshaft will be published by Amphetamine Sulphate in 2019. He lives in Langres, France.
http://indifferentmultiplicities.blogspot.com/

 

Karolina Urbaniak
Karolina Urbaniak is a multimedia artist and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. Urbaniak’s published work includes To Putrefaction (M.Bladh, K.Urbaniak, 2014), Altered Balance – A Tribute to Coil (J.Reed, K.Urbaniak 2014/15), The Void Ratio (S.Levene, K.Urbaniak, 2015), Artaud 1937 Apocalypse (S.Barber, K.Urbaniak, 2018). Her recent multimedia projects include the soundtrack for Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome (J. Reed, M.Bladh, 2017) and the audio/visual installation On The New Revelations of Being (M.Bladh, K.Urbaniak 2018) inspired by the work of Antonin Artaud. She lives and works in London.
https://karolinaurbaniak.com/

 

Eugene Thacker
Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In The Dust of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011) and Infinite Resignation (Repeater Books, 2018).

 

Brad Feuerhelm
Brad Feuerhelm is an artist and the managing editor for American Suburb X. He lives in Slovakia.
http://www.americansuburbx.com/artists/brad-feuerhelm

 

***

To order visit: https://www.infinitylandpress.com/shop

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. This weekend the fine folks at Infinity Land Press have grabbed the blog’s steering wheel in order to introduce us to the newest of their always beautifully designed and fascinating titles. I join them in hoping you’ll spend your local weekend scrolling, gawking, and inputting then potentially clicking where it says ‘order’. Thank you for your kind attention. ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. Aces about the timing. Thank you about the Bookworm. I can imagine how prominent the Jake Bilardi thing was there. I scoured the heck out of that story, as I guess is obvious. Anyway, really nice to see you, and I hope your life is acting golden. ** Natty, Hi, man. That’s a very good reason to come over here, obviously, and I promise to do my small part to make Paris give up a decent portion of its considerable charms and goods. Cool on the dates. Just give me a heads up when you know what piece Paris will occupy. Very great news about your new novel’s progress, not to mention about its incestuous build. I’ll be rabid when it’s out and about. Have a swell weekend. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. You know Storm DeHirsh. I should heave guessed. Thank you! Bon weekend! ** Steve Erickson, Well, I haven’t seen the Morris film, but god knows this is a time when there are great demands on films about politics and its figures to be black or white, and Morris’s work has always and wonderfully been against that kind of gentrified, pre-pointed viewpoint, so I can only imagine that plays into the film’s problems. I haven’t seen ‘The Drowning’. I’ll find it. And I’ll read your new pieces. Everyone, please intersect your weekend with the taking-in of two new non-fictions by Mr. Erickson, one about Angel-Ho’s album DEATH BECOMES HER here, and the other an interview with music video director Shomi Patwary here. BTW, Corey Heiferman had a question yesterday that I think you could probably answer. It is: ‘By the way, do you or anybody else here know of a website that curates online film series based on what’s available streaming for free? Kind of like what you do here when a day is dedicate to somebody who works in film, but only with full films that are available, not excerpts (shorts are more than OK of course). For example, a programmer would write a little essay based on a filmmaker, style, or theme, link to full examples of films (from YouTube, Vimeo, Internet Archive, etc.), and give little capsule descriptions for each film that they link to. The idea would be to make it easy for cinephiles to find stuff to watch outside of official streaming services. I feel like this must exist somewhere already.’ Can you help him out? ** Sypha, Hi. Ah, what a terrific review of ‘Negrophobia’, man! Excellent! Thanks a bunch for sharing it. I always forget to look at goodreads for no known reason. ** Brendan Lott, B! Mellotron! Damn. That does sound incredible. Shit, okay, I will start checking the local gig listings as of the soonest available minute. Thanks, pal, and have a superb one. ** Jeff J, Hi, J. I still have not seen the Welles or the extended ‘ToL’. I must, must make a point of doing that. Kiddiepunk has the latter on DVD, and I just need to borrow a DVD player basically. I did watch the documentary about the making of ‘TOSofW’ when I was in LA, and that was fascinating. Thanks about the Bookworm episode. It was really fun to do. I got the Roussel post stuff, and thank you so much (!), and it’ll launch here on Saturday, the 17th. Gisele’s out of town but gets back this weekend, I think, and I’ll ask her about the PG stuff as soon as I talk to her. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool. That ceramic piece does look good. Man, ceramics are really the hot, trendy contemporary art thing right now. A lot of artists I know are making ceramics. When did that happen, and I wonder why? ** Nick Toti, Well hey there, Nick! Really good to see you! I’m glad the post’s booty was a welcome sight on your end. Very curious about your friend’s film, yes. It does sound really beautiful in your description. Let me know it’s finished and public. Yeah, our film showed in LA. It went extremely well. Thanks for wishing you could have come, and I hope/trust the filmmaking that kept you away was interesting, exciting? What is the project, if it’s interesting to share? ** Corey Heiferman, Great, thank you digging into the film program, and I’m really glad you liked those two. I saw ‘Smithereens’ when it came out. Would be interesting to recheck it. Seems like it would be rather dated now, but maybe not, or maybe in a cool way. Wow, Robert Kramer. That’s someone I haven’t thought about in a long time. I think the only film of his I’ve seen is ‘Route One USA’. Huh. He seems like someone I should do a Day post about. I’ll look into it. Thanks. Let me know how you like those two films of his. Steve Erickson is probably the one to answer your question. I immediately think of MUBI. Great site, and they do that, but there are likely others too. Hold on. Okay, I inserted your question into my note to him above, and watch for his response. And enjoy your weekend both minimally and maximally! ** Okay. Infinity Land Press are your hosts, and please wander about thoughtfully in their post-shaped world, thanks. See you on Monday.