Author: DC (Page 3 of 1114)

 

‘Peter Whitehead could justifiably claim to be one of Britain’s most distinctive and provocative film-makers. His film about the Rolling Stones, Charlie Is My Darling (1966), was a pioneering portrait of the group amid the whirlwind of fan mania, its on-the-road intimacy a precursor of Donn Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan film Don’t Look Back and a blueprint for countless future music documentaries.

‘In Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), Whitehead created what for many critics was the definitive document of swinging London in its period as a white-hot crucible of music, fashion and film. The many short music films Whitehead made in the 1960s foreshadowed the era of the video promo clip that blossomed in the MTV era of the 80s.

‘But by the time he made The Fall (1969), arguably his masterpiece, the intellectually restless Whitehead had moved beyond being merely an onlooker recording events with his camera and was pursuing his own inner journey through a period of violent social and political change.

‘His most intensely creative period began in 1965, when he filmed the International Poetry Incarnation – a gathering of beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti – at the Royal Albert Hall in London, to make the 33-minute documentary Wholly Communion.

‘Word of this reached the Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who invited Whitehead to film the Stones’ trip to Belfast and Dublin in September that year. The resulting Charlie Is My Darling had its first public screening at the 1966 Mannheim film festival, where it was considered for the gold medal (which was won instead by Wholly Communion). However, a clash with Oldham about the film’s portrayal of the Stones meant that it never went on general release.

‘Whitehead did further work with the Stones, including the promo film for the single Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow? (1966) and the audacious clip for We Love You (1967). The latter was shot the day before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards appealed against their drug convictions, and starred the two Stones and Marianne Faithfull in a remake of Oscar Wilde’s indecency trial. “My ambitions are very high – none higher – to be a genius in and with the cinema,” Whitehead wrote in a letter to Oldham.

‘Though he was a classical music enthusiast with little interest in pop, Whitehead understood its potency. He shot films with the Small Faces, the Beach Boys, Eric Burdon, Jimi Hendrix, Nico, the Beach Boys and Pink Floyd, and in 1970 he made a memorable concert film of Led Zeppelin at the Albert Hall.

‘While Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London made Whitehead the toast of the 60s in-crowd, the film also included critical remarks about the vapidity of the London milieu from Jagger, Michael Caine and David Hockney. Whitehead himself, a vehement opponent of US imperialism and the Vietnam war, had a theory that the invention of “swinging London” was “a CIA manoeuvre designed to make British counterculture appear inconsequential and impotent”, as he wrote in 2002.

‘Thus he was enthusiastic about Peter Brook’s invitation to film his experimental Royal Shakespeare Company play US, designed to challenge British apathy about the escalating Vietnam conflict. When the resulting film, Benefit of the Doubt, was screened alongside Tonite … at the New York film festival in September 1967, Whitehead was invited to make a film about the New York “scene”.

‘He was eager to oblige, but the project, eventually released as The Fall (1969), ballooned into a panorama of politics, violent protest and an anguished examination of the role of the documentary film-maker, as Whitehead became a participant in the 1968 student occupation of New York’s Columbia University. His filming schedule was bookended by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. He wrote that when he got back to London, “I had a nervous breakdown. Didn’t speak for three months.”

‘The traumas of making The Fall prompted Whitehead to move away from film-making. Though he made Daddy (1973), a sexual psychodrama about the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, and Fire in the Water (1977), a vehicle for his then partner Nathalie Delon, his attention now centred on breeding falcons. A student of ancient Egyptian mythology, he was obsessed with the story of Isis and Osiris giving birth to Horus the falcon.’ — The Guardian

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Peter Whitehead Official Site
Peter Whitehead @ IMDb
Whitehead, Peter (1937- 2019)
Notes from Underground
‘The Films of Peter Whitehead’, by Robert Chilcott
Peter Whitehead – Réalisateur de ‘Pop Concerto’
Peter Whitehead et Niki de Saint Phalle : Daddy
DVD: Peter Whitehead and the Sixties
Peter Whitehead @ datacide
The Word and the Image: The Films of Peter Whitehead
Peter Whitehead, il filmmaker della lotta e del rock
Peter Whitehead @ The Sticking Place
From pop concerto to falconry – a beginner’s guide to Peter Whitehead’s world
PETER WHITEHEAD: REVOLUTION, REVELATION – PINK FLOYD LONDON 1966-1967
Peter Whitehead Was There
‘I’ve never been interested in the real world’

 

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Extras

In the Beginning was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead

The Move in a rare early interview by Peter Whitehead

Peter Whitehead Piece

 

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Interview
from Electric Sheep

 

CLF: What can you tell us about the film you’re now working on, Terrorism Considered as one of the Fine Arts?

PW: My new film can be considered The Fall‘s sequel since it enacts the end of representation. The protagonist is Michael Schlieman, a MI6 spy working in the terrorism section of the British intelligence. He disappeared and will publish his ‘confessions’ on the internet, revealing the truth about secret operations carried out by various governments. There is a parallel between the sinking of the French Greenpeace boat, the Rainbow Warrior, and the terrorist state murder of a Greenpeace photographer. Schlieman is now part of an eco-terrorist group… the central element of the film is the killing of an ideal victim. I want to investigate the CIA’s influence on English culture, which is based on misinformation. This new film is influenced by Thomas De Quincey’s novels, Confessions of an Opium Eater and Murder Considered as a Fine Art, and I’d say that it is about fear and control, or better still, about the fear that the state spreads in order to control. After having destroyed the Third World now we are also destroying this planet; Gaia is now, rightly so, revolting.

CLF: Can cinema participate in social struggles, or does it merely register/ document?

PW: Yes, partly it can but it’s just a little part. I think that avant-garde art always has to be directly and belligerently dangerous, destructive, but not towards itself, rather, towards the collective inertia. The true aim of art should be to cultivate acts of war… it’s not enough to paint words on walls, these walls need to be torn down.

CLF: Can you tell us more about the magazine you co-founded, Afterimage?

PW: I founded that magazine with Field and Sainsbury in 1970, we were mainly influenced by Cahiers and its political commitment and wanted to bring across the channel some avant-garde cinema such as Godard’s British Sounds (Peter Whitehead was the first one to translate Godard’s films into English) which remains little seen to these days. We were the first to publish the Manifesto of Third Cinema by Solanas and Getino in Europe besides reviewing Guney, Fassbinder and Herzog among others.

CLF: While watching the early Rolling Stones performances in Charlie is My Darling I felt that back then they were using a language that many found dangerous and hyper-kinetic. What attracted you most to that band?

PW: You got the point, the media back then was focusing on the style of the band while for me it was a matter of form or language, as you said. They were adopting the musical culture of the Afro-Americans, an oppressed minority, therefore that music was carrying a strong political message in itself. Jagger himself said, ‘music is one of the things that can change society, don’t let white kids listen to black music if you want them to remain how they are’.

CLF: I’ve just watched your first film The Perception of Life, and in spite of being poles apart from the rest of your production I thought that it somehow represented your cinema quite well. What do you think of that film?

PW: I have to admit that back then I didn’t like the film but, later on I got interested by the fact that it was all shot through a microscope, in other words I was not using the camera, I was using a microscope, and many sequences are shot through the oldest machines used by scientists. We were looking for what these scientists were seeing through those lenses. Perception shows how theories are determined by what is visible. You’re right, in a sense all my films are linked to the idea of using the camera as a microscope. I think that in all my films I enter a situation and I try to analyse it from the inside.

 

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14 of Peter Whitehead’s 21 films

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Wholly Communion (1966)
‘Now celebrated as the quintessential document of the event that marked the arrival of the counterculture in England, Wholly Communion was actually captured under highly restricted conditions – and was almost never completed. The First International Poetry Incarnation, an evening of American and British Beat poetry, took place on 11th June 1965; the film’s birth was as spontaneous as the event itself. Peter Whitehead had attended an intimate reading by Allen Ginsberg, at which was suggested the apparently foolhardy idea of booking the Albert Hall for Ginsberg and his contemporaries to gather and perform their poems. Yet after a few days’ organisation, 7,000 people of various hitherto unconnected subcultures arrived, with many turned away as tickets sold out.

‘Wholly Communion is perhaps the most distinctive British example of a documentary movement that attempted to capture reality while interrogating it: ‘direct cinema’. Whitehead’s camera draws attention to itself and the filmmaker’s presence by filming Gregory Corso’s reading from between two other poets talking during the performance. This technique emphasises the filmmaker’s subjectivity while also identifying the camera (and therefore the viewer) with the perspective of the audience present at the event.

‘Whitehead shows as much interest in the audience as he does in the poets. Exotic spectators such as the girl who dances with a flower to the cadence of Ginsberg’s oratory appear just as significant as the central performances. The sense of disintegration between audience and performance is most palpable when Whitehead’s camera searches the auditorium to train in on a poet in the audience who, in a state of intoxication, interrupts Harry Fainlight’s reading by crying out the words “Love! Love!”‘ — bfi

the entire film

 

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The Rolling Stones: Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow? (1966)
‘Peter Whitehead’s promotional film for the single was one of the first music videos.’ — Wikipedia

 

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Charlie is my Darling (1966)
‘Whitehead catches the band while its feet are still touching the ground and while its members are still facing both the homey pleasures and the mounting terrors of a relatively un-insulated life, while their joy in making music and in having a limber jaunt together is still fresh and their success is still a lightly gilded serendipity. Whitehead, filming in black and white with agile, handheld cameras, gets some crucial things right. He wants to hear the Stones speak, and he keeps them aware of the camera, eliciting the unique mixture of the unguarded and the self-dramatizing that is the hallmark of cinema verité. The film captures some fine moments of performance, some revealing moments of offhanded intimacy, and others of purposeful reflection—and, over-all, it presents an astonishingly clear sense of the grandeur and decadence of Stones-ism.’ — The New Yorker

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Jeanetta Cochrane (1967)
‘More consciously experimental than Whitehead’s other works, this film draws on a variety of sources, including sequences of London shot while Whitehead was at the Slade School of Art, glimpses of the singer and model Nico, and footage of the psychedelic underground nightclub UFO. There is also on-screen text, a voice critiquing it, and music from Pink Floyd, at this point still fronted by Syd Barrett–Whitehead’s old painting friend from Cambridge. The track here, “Interstellar Overdrive”, was recorded by Whitehead before the band signed to EMI and is much more exciting and beat-driven than the version they would later record for the label. There is no explicit link between the content of the film and the Cochrane Theatre, which is is named after, but the theatre was used as a venue for the Spontaneous Festival of Underground Films in 1966.’ — letterboxd

Watch an excerpt here

 

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The Rolling Stones: We Love You (1967)
‘The promotional film for the single was directed by Peter Whitehead. It included footage from recording sessions along with segments that re-enacted the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, with Jagger, Richards and Marianne Faithfull respectively portraying Wilde, Marquess of Queensberry, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Footage also appears of Brian Jones, apparently high on drugs with his eyes drooping and unfocused. The producer of Top of the Pops refused to show the film on that programme. A BBC spokesman stated the producer did not think it was suitable for the type of audience who watches Top of the Pops. He went on to say there was not a ban on it by the BBC, it was simply this producer’s decision.’ — Wikipedia

 

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Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967)
‘Peter Whitehead’s disjointed Swinging London documentary, subtitled “A Pop Concerto,” comprises a number of different “movements,” each depicting a different theme underscored by music: A early version of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” plays behind some arty nightclub scenes, while Chris Farlowe’s rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time” accompanies a young woman’s description of London nightlife and the vacuousness of her own existence. In another segment, the Marquess of Kensington (Robert Wace) croons the nostalgic “Changing of the Guard” to shots of Buckingham Palace’s changing of the guard, and recording act Vashti are seen at work in the studio. Sandwiched between are clips of Mick Jagger (discussing revolution), Andrew Loog Oldham (discussing his future) – and Julie Christie, Michael Caine, Lee Marvin, and novelist Edna O’Brien (each discussing sex). The best part is footage of the riot that interrupted the Stones’ 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert.’ — collaged

Excerpt

Excerpt (Eric Burdon & The Animals ‘When I was young’)

Excerpt

the entire film

 

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w/ Denis Cannan The Benefit of the Doubt (1967)
‘Based on a play by Peter Brook, entitled U.S., is a critical look at the devastation and inhumanity of war. Whitehead adds to the original footage gathered from television news about the Vietnam conflict, a conflict that bled in all its fullness and divided the world into peace and imperialists.’ — film affinity

the entire film

 

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Pink Floyd London ’66-’67 (1967)
‘Shot by movie maestro Peter Whitehead, this film features rare full length performances from the classic late 60’s Pink Floyd line-up at Sound Techniques London & material from the legendary ‘14 hour Technicolor Dream’ extravaganza in April ’67 at Alexandra Palace.’ — letterboxd

the entire film

 

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The Rolling Stones: 2000 Light Years From Home (1967)
‘The clip, filmed and produced in 1967, has now been restored in 4K resolution and released digitally for the first time. The “promotional film,” as it was known back then, was directed by the late Peter Whitehead and shot on 35 MM film. The performance clip opens with closeups of the band members bathed in various colors, with Mick Jagger’s face painted, something he would do again for the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” video, which was filmed the following year. The track, written by Mick and Keith Richards, was the B-side to the single “She’s A Rainbow.” It is believed Mick wrote the lyrics in prison during an incarceration from a drug bust.’ — kslx

 

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Pink Floyd: Recording Interstellar Overdrive and Nick’s Boogie (1967)
‘The recording of “Interstellar Overdrive'” and “Nick’s Boogie'” was originally filmed for Whitehead’s film Tonite Lets All Make Love in London but weren’t used in the film’ — PF

 

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The Small Faces & P.P. Arnold: (If You Think You’re) Groovy (1967)
‘The Small Faces, along with Immediate” artist P.P. Arnold and film director Peter Whitehead traveled to Camber Sands to film an Immediate Records promotion film. The 16mm colour film was later used for the promos of The Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park” and they gave “Groovy” to P.P. Arnold. The Small Faces play on this track, basically making it a Small Faces’ record with P.P. Arnold guesting on vocals.’ — bbc

 

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The Fall (1969)
‘Between October 1967 and June 1968 he filmed in and around New York. Whitehead concentrated on some of the central figures of the civil-rights movement and counter-culture like Stokely Carmichael, Robert Lowell, Paul Auster, Arthur Miller and Robert Rauschenberg. He even managed to get behind the barricades of the radical students from Columbia University while police units insist on trying to break up the occupation of the campus. John Patterson (Vienna Festival Catalogue): ‘Whitehead was his own one-man film unit and was fond of asynchronous images and sounds, allowing new meanings and feelings to arise from the creative use of incongruity. The exemplar of his approach was the dizzyingly impressionistic essay-movie The Fall. Like many a 60s Englishman in America – Hockney, Boorman, Schlesinger, Peter Watkins – he came to the U.S. equipped with freshly-peeled eyeballs and saw a turbulent, vibrant, violent nation in ways Americans themselves often did not. The Fall is unlike any other record of the period – a time a lot like now, full of anti-war and civil-rights demonstrations and profound national self-examination – perhaps because its very obscurity has kept it fresh.’ — EH/iffr

Watch the trailer here

 

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w/ Niki De Saint Phalle Daddy (1973)
‘Daddy, filmed in cooperation with movie director Peter Whitehead, discovers the connection between a father and little girl. Like the majority of Niki De Saint Phalle’s films, the flick combines autobiography with imagination, mixing erotic scenes of incest with a reverse of energy as the female character humors the daddy figure. Saint Phalle narrates the film, offering an almost psycho-analytical explanation of its content and explains the different inexplicable.’ — Letterboxd

Watch the film here

 

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Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts (2009)
‘My film is largely based on the recent novel of the same title. It is the first novel of a trilogy entitled “The Nohzone Trilogy”. The second novel is entitled “Nature’s Child” and the third “Girl on the Train”. The central element of the film is the killing of an “ideal victim”. I want to investigate the CIA’s influence on English culture, which is based on misinformation. This new film is influenced by Thomas De Quincey’s novels, “Confessions of an Opium Eater” and “Murder Considered as a Fine Art”, and I would say that it is about fear and control, or better still, about the fear that the state spreads in order to control. After having destroyed the Third World now we are also destroying this planet. Gaia is now, rightly so, revolting.’ — Peter Whitehead

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Awesome, I hope your friend enjoyed it, obviously. Thanks again for pointing her there in any case. Interesting about that doc. I don’t have Netflix, but I’ll see if I can find it somewhere else. I’ve seen video of that Jeremy Deller piece, of course. ** Charalampos, The film Gregg asked me to be in was ‘The Living End’. I haven’t seen ‘Kaboom’. Hey back from you know where. ** Bill, Odd and intriguing it most certainly is. Kind of shocking that so many hadn’t seen ‘MOPI’. Or maybe shocking that I would have expected them too? You’ve seen the film made up of outtakes of ‘MOPI’? There’s some wonderful stuff in there, if you haven’t. It was put together by James Franco, but don’t let that stop you. ** Carsten, I think maybe things are such that an energetic film that doesn’t depend on CGI and color grading and has an inkling of a decent ideology seems pretty tasty. I liked ‘Sinners’. I thought it was solid and well done. We remain non-stormy as usual. ** Laura, I’m still poring, and it is fun among loftier things. Gosh, thank you about ‘Period’. It was a very complicated and difficult novel to write on many levels. Maybe not as much on a technical level as ‘The Marbled Swarm’, but second at least. And, obviously, there was a lot of emotion to wade through and try to regulate with ‘Period’. You can get ‘The Golden Fruits’ for free from Anna’s Archive. The Vista was closed for years but reopened a few years ago, now owned and somewhat directed by Tarantino. The only problem with LA is the parking situation can be so difficult. Well, and the traffic. But I’m a calm driver. I’m beset with horror and a terrible helplessness re: Minneapolis and ICE and a million other US endangering crap situations over here in Paris too, yes. I have an allergy to fabrics and dyes, and have to wear organic clothes which very much prevents me from being into clothes as a thing The night was pretty grayed-out from what I could see of it. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! I obviously so agree. You good? You really, really good? xo. ** kenley, Yay on the editing. It went well, I trust? Fuck knows where that Ira Cohen thing is. I guess he must have an estate or archive or something? My all-time favorite gallery was called Feature in NYC. It’s defunct now, but there’s a book about it. In Paris, I go to a lot of galleries, and they’re all pretty hit and miss. I do really like a small gallery called Art/Concept. Among the bigger ones, Marian Goodman Gallery usually has good shows. Do you have galleries where you are, or any you like? ** Måns BT, Måns! Yes, we’re set! How about that? Yay, we’ll get to meet and hang and have fun. Oh, interesting, about Ellis. I think I remember his thing about the blog murder. On the Q&A, trust your instincts. It’d be totally good and more for us if it’s just us three talking, for sure. You made a short film! Excellent! I’ll go find kollektivtarbt on Instagram and follow you. Wait, I just did. I hope you had a good sleep, whatever that would entail. ** Steeqhen, I wasn’t into Jedward’s music, surely needless to say, but I was interested by their brand’s construction. I’ve heard of ‘Bulk’, but that’s all. Hm, maybe I’ll investigate further. Strange but totally understandable. It’s very hard being an empath in this world today. ** Steve, I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure he’s into Houellbecq. Luck with the jury duty escaping. Just remember if all else fails, ‘anarchist’. ** HaRpEr //, With the Alt Right guy writers I’m familiar with, it really seems like repressed transphobia in particular exploding outwards. Having had the ‘outlaw writer’ tag on myself forever, it’s a yawn, but it could be worse. Haha, nice ending, very ‘DiV’ indeed. ** Uday, I think Gregg’s interest in putting me in a movie is long since dead. Not a problem for me. Wow, cool that you’ve already started the Sarraute. You would get the blog’s Gold Star of the Day if I gave them out. Sounds like first week jitters, but pray tell after you guys settle in. ** Right. Today the blog concentrates on the work of the groovy Brit filmmaker and music video pioneer Peter Whitehead if you’re interested in seeing what he’s about. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Sarraute’s fourth novel takes us back to the no plot, unnamed characters of her earlier novels. In this novel, there is not even a central narrator. Various people talk. The plot, such as it is, concerns a novel called, of course, Les Fruits d’or (The Golden Fruits). We know little about this book, as regards its author and contents, except that it is a novel by someone called Bréhier. What we do know is how it is received and this changing reception over a period of time. Sarraute takes a group of unnamed people, who comment on the novel. Not only does she satirise their attitudes, they have different views of what the work is, so that we are unable to determine what it really is about. At one point eighteen different people, who are not named and impossible to identify, give their differing views on the novel but their views tend to the vague – it’s funny, it’s a great work of fiction – without actually why it is great or, indeed, what it is about. Of course, there is little basis for their views, except to show how smart they are. When the novel becomes popular, these same critics turn on the author who clearly stole his ideas and that his work is certainly not ground-breaking. And then it is forgotten. Despite the disembodied voices it works well both as a satire on critics as well as a fascinating approach with a book as the hero.’ — The Modern Novel

‘When Nathalie Sarraute published her first novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown, in 1948, Sartre, in an Introduction, placed her with such authors of “entirely negative works” as Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, and the Gide of Les Faux-Monnayeurs, and called the whole genre “anti-novel.” In the Fifties, the anti-novel became the New Novel and Sarraute its originator. All these classifications are somewhat artificial and, if applied to Mme. Sarraute, difficult to account for. She has herself pointed out her ancestors, Dostoevsky (especially the Notes from Underground) and Kafka in whom she sees Dostoevsky’s legitimate heir. But this much is true: She wrote at least her first pair of novels, the Portrait and Martereau (1953), against the assumptions of the classical novel of the nineteenth century, where author and reader move in a common world of well-known entities and where easily identifiable characters can be understood through the qualities and possessions bestowed upon them. “Since then,” she writes in her book of essays, The Age of Suspicion, “[this character] has lost everything; his ancestors, his carefully built house, filled from cellar to garret with a variety of objects, down to the tiniest gewgaw, his sources of income and his estates, his clothes, his body, his face…his personality and, frequently, even his name.” Man as such is or has become unknown so that it matters little to the novelist whom he chooses as his “hero” and less into what kind of surrounding he puts him. And since “the character occupied the place of honor between reader and novelist,” since he was “the object of their common devotion,” this arbitrariness of choice indicates a serious break-down in communication.

‘In order to recover some of this lost common ground, Nathalie Sarraute very ingeniously took the nineteenth-century novel, supposedly the common cultural heritage of author and reader, as her point of departure and began by choosing her “characters” from this richly populated world. She fished them right out of Balzac and Stendhal, stripped them of all those secondary qualities—customs, morals, possessions—by which they could be dated, and retained only those bare essentials by which we remember them: avarice—the stingy father living with his homely, penny-pinching spinster daughter, the plot turning about her numerous illnesses, fancied or real, as in Portrait; hatred and boredom—the closely-knit family unit which still survives in France, the “dark entirely closed world” of mother, father, daughter, and nephew in Martereau, where the plot turns about the “stranger” who swindles the father out of the money he had wanted to save from the income tax collector; even the hero of the later work, The Planetarium, personified ambition (the plot is a familiar one describing his ruthless “rise in social space”).

‘Sarraute has cracked open the “smooth and hard” surface of these traditional characters (“nothing but well-made dolls”) in order to discover the endless vibrations of moods and sentiments which, though hardly perceptible in the macrocosm of the outward world, are like the tremors of a never-ending series of earthquakes in the microcosm of the self. This inner life—what she calls “the psychological”—is no less hidden from “the surface world” of appearances than the physiological life process that goes on in the inner organs beneath the skin of bodily appearance. Neither shows itself of its own accord. And just as the physiological process announces itself naturally only through the symptoms of a disease (the tiny pimple, to use her own image, which is the sign of the plague), but needs a special instrument—the surgical knife or X rays—to become visible, so these psychological movements cause the outbreak of symptoms only in case of great disaster and need the novelist’s magnifying lenses of suspicion to be explored. To choose the intimacy of family life, this “semidarkness” behind closed curtains with its Strindbergian overtones, as a laboratory for this kind of psychological vivi-section, instead of the couch, was a sheer stroke of genius, for here “the fluctuating frontier that [ordinarily] separates conversation from sub-conversation” breaks down most frequently so that the inner life of the self can explode onto the surface in what is commonly called “scenes.” No doubt these scenes are the only distraction in the infinite boredom of a world entirely bent upon itself, and yet they also constitute the life-beat of a hell in which we are condemned to going “eternally round and round,” where all appearances are penetrated but no firm ground is ever reached. Behind the lies and the pretenses, there is nothing but the vibrations of an ever-present irritation—a “chaos in which a thousand possibilities clash,” a morass where every step makes you sink deeper into perdition.’ — Hannah Arendt

 

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Further

Nathalie Sarraute @ Wikipedia
Novel and Reality: A Lecture by Nathalie Sarraute
‘The Golden Fruits’ @ goodreads
Books: Mayhem & Manners
Being Beside One’s Self
Drawing on the Work of Nathalie Sarraute
Sarraute, Nathalie (Vol. 4)
The relationship between Artistic Time and Space in Natalie Sarraute’s “Golden Fruits”
A Conversation With Nathalie Sarraute
LES FRUITS D’OR EST UN ROMAN EMBLÉMATIQUE ET FASCINANT
‘The Golden Fruits’ @ Internet Archive
‘The Golden Fruits’ @ Anna’s Archive

 

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Extras

Nathalie Sarraute “The text is always between life and death”

Nathalie Sarraute et le Nouveau roman en 1969

Un siècle d’écrivains N.SARRAUTE

 

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Interview
from Exquisite Corpse

 

Do you see any sort of difference between women’s writing and that of men?

No, I don’t see any. I don’t feel that Emily Brontë is a woman’s writing, among women who truly wrote well. I don’t see the difference. One says first of all, “That’s what it is to be a woman,” and then after one decides that is feminine. Henry James was always working in the minute details, in his lacework; or Proust, much more still than most women. I think that if women like Emily Brontë wanted to keep a pseudonym, they were entirely right. One cannot find a manner of writing upon which it would be possible to stick the label of feminine or masculine; it’s writing pure and simple, an admirable writing, that’s all. There are subjects in writing that are very feminine, which are lived, the women who write on feminine subjects like maternity, that’s completely different.

Let’s talk about cigarettes. Have you always been a smoker?

Alas! I shouldn’t smoke, but I don’t smoke a lot. Six or seven cigarettes a day. That’s still too much. I have a very bad habit. So, in order not to smoke, I’ve taken to holding the cigarette in my mouth while I work. I don’t light it. That gives me the same effect. Because I forget. I feel something and I forget if it’s lit. Since I smoke very weak cigarettes, and I don’t swallow the smoke, I have just as much the impression of smoking even if it’s not for real.

As if it enters into the game, in effect.

That’s right. It’s a gesture, something one feels.

Could we speak about the conception of some of your books? The Golden Fruits (1963), for example, did that come out of an experience with the literary world?

Not at all. I take no part in the literary world, I’ve never gone to the literary cocktail parties. It has to do with an inner experience. It has to do with a kind of terrorism around a work of art that is lauded to the skies and which we cannot approach. Where there is a sort of curtain of stipulated opinions that separates you from that work. Either we adore it or else we detest it, it’s impossible to approach it; above all in the Parisian milieu, even without going to the cocktail parties, even in the press, there reigns a kind of terrorism of general adulation, and you don’t have the right to approach it and have a contrary opinion. And then it falls; at that moment you no longer have the right to say that it’s good. That’s what I wanted to show, this life of a work of art. And this work of art, what is it? I’d have to approach it, but that’s impossible. And then all that we find there, all that we look for in a book, and which has nothing to do with its literary value.

There is often a multitude of voices in that book.

It’s like that in most of my books that come later. There are all these voices, without our needing to take an interest in the characters that speak them. It doesn’t much matter.

Have there been processes that repeat themselves, either in the conception or in the elaboration of the novels?

Each time it didn’t interest me to continue doing the same thing. So, I would try to extend my domain to areas that were always at the same level of these interior movements, to go into regions where I hadn’t yet gone.

Have you ever been surprised by the fate of one of your books?

No. I was more pessimistic at the start. I really thought that it would not be at all understood.

You’ve said that the nouveau roman movement helped you as a means to get read. But did the idea of belonging to a movement, so-called, constrain you as well?

No. And none of those who belonged, who were classed in this movement, have written things that resemble each other, whatever it may be. They’ve remained completely different from each other, and have continued each one in his own path.

Your essays were among the first to speak of concerns common to the group. Have you ever felt any sort of responsibility to this movement?

Not at all. I had reflected upon these questions about the novel before the others, because the others were twenty years younger than me. I haven’t changed my way of thinking since my first books, I haven’t budged. I could repeat exactly the same things I said when I wrote The Age of Suspicion. It is a deep conviction that the forms of the novel must change, that it’s necessary there be a continual transformation of the forms, in all the arts—in painting, in music, in poetry, and in the novel. That we cannot return to the forms of the nineteenth century and set another society in them, it doesn’t matter which. So, that interested Alain Robbe-Grillet; he’s the one who did a lot to launch the nouveau roman. He was working at Les Editions de Minuit, he wanted to republish Tropisms, which had been out of print. It came out at the same time as Jealousy, and at that moment in Le Monde a critic had written, “That is what we can call the nouveau roman,” though he detested it. It was a name that suited Robbe-Grillet quite well. He said, “That’s magnificent, it’s what we needed.” He wanted to launch a movement. Me, I’m incapable of launching a movement; I’ve always been very solitary.

Were there ever any meetings of the group?

Never. Nor discussions. It had nothing in common with the surrealists, where there was a group, a leader, André Breton, nothing of the kind. We never saw each other.

How did he find all the writers to bring them together as a movement?

It was Les Editions de Minuit. Robbe-Grillet found Michel Butor, who had written Passage de Milan, which they published. He found Claude Simon. Robert Pinget as well. Robbe-Grillet and Jérôme Lindon, who is the director of Les Editions de Minuit, they worked together. Like that they formed a sort of group.

Have there been other experimental literary movements that have interested you?

No, I passed them by entirely. The surrealist movement, for example, that might have interested me, but it didn’t at all.

What about the Oulipo movement in the 1960s, which included Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino?

I liked what Queneau was doing a lot. My first book, Tropisms, appeared in the same collection as his book, The Bark Tree, with the publisher Robert Denoël. I quite liked The Bark Tree.

In Between Life and Death (1968), your novel on literary creation, you say that no work is useless, that sooner or later it must give fruit, that it suffices to pick it up again later at the right moment. Have you had that experience, of reworking a text you’d written?

No. I meant that every effort we make always serves for something, all the same. There are certain texts that were projected for Tropisms that I brought out later in Portrait of a Man Unknown.

Which of your books do you prefer?

That’s very difficult to say. I don’t reread them. And sometimes I tell myself, “But it seems to me I’ve already done something like that,” and I can’t recall where.

Has one of the books satisfied you more than the others?

It’s all very difficult. There are always doubts, in regard to what I wanted to do.

Even the doubts, have they played a constructive role sometimes?

I don’t know. I think it’s very painful, and that it’s better not to have any. I envy those who don’t have any, I envy them a lot. They are happy people.

 

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Book

Nathalie Sarraute The Golden Fruits
Braziller

‘A novel about a new novel and its rites of initiation into the self-hallowed circles of the French literati. Recently published, The Golden Fruits must qualify for the waves of adulation, blind devotion and occasional heretical dissent that constitute the book-worship of a self-styled literary in-group. Not that the novel is the protagonist struggling to assert its worth in this high-spun story–it hasn’t the chance, as the literary vultures make it their own symbolic property, coveting the office of leading critic, whose judgment has only to be well-received by the group to be considered right and “”brilliant””. As the idol of the moment, the book rises and falls in the fluid esteem of its believers as, and all “”humble nostalgics”” must be crushed, perhaps just another novel, another faulty imitation of things past. The social struggle to be the one who really understands the “”imponderables, iridescences, and irisations”” in the novel becomes a satiric comment on literary values. In the end only one loner stands by the fallen God, claiming a resurrection in time and faddism. Mme. Sarraute, member of the French avant-garde, has created a brilliant contrapuntal exercise in conversation, judgment, and social uncertainty– and perhaps a slice at “”Littrachure”” itself. She has now to stand for the same critical nonsense she has so well exposed.’ — Kirkus Reviews

 

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** jay. Hi, jay. Thanks. I really liked seeing how many degrees by which a representation of someone can be inaccurate. I’m good, you too, I trust. ** _Black_Acrylic, Worth a trip to Vegas, for sure. ** Bernard Welt, ‘Z’ is quite powerful. I’d forgotten how brutal it is. I haven’t seen ‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ yet. Its theater time here was a blip, so I’m waiting for a stream that works over here. I’m not envious, strangely enough. The only thing I remember about ‘Caligula’ is the spa/baths scene. The baths scene in ‘Satyricon’ its pretty great too. ** Carsten, The anti-fascism in ‘Z’ makes the anti-fascism in ‘OBAA’ seem quite non-overt. We seem to be inured against storms here in mid-country Paris. I can’t remember us ever having one that qualifies as a storm. Growing up in LA with earthquakes and fires and so on, it’s interesting to live in a city that seems immune to natural calamities, other than the Seine overflowing maybe once every couple of decades. Guest-post will be most welcome whenever your time permits. ** Måns BT, Hi, Måns! Yes, indeed. I’ve been up to this and that and, as usual, lots of organizing ‘RT’ screenings, which will continue to swamp my days for another few months. I’m actually going to write to the Zita people today and try to get them to confirm that March date. We might be able to host a screening in Copenhagen if it’s around that time, so I hope I can get a confirmation. No, I don’t know Elis Monteverde Burrau. I’ll look for anything by him in English. I just looked him up, and I guess he’s an actor too? Sure, great if he wanted to be part of the Q&A. Thanks so much, pal. What are you up to these days? xo. ** Steve, Jedward were more -10s era. I think they had some pop hits. Here they are performing at Eurovision in 2011. It’s worth the look. I think they should’ve won haha. I’ve read about ‘The Blue Elephant’. Ok, I’ll pursue, thanks. ** darbz (⊙ _ ⊙ ), I’ve certainly been known to misconstrue. Misconstruing makes life interesting? Oh, ok, gotcha about your mom and the rich people. There’s this artist Sophie Calle who pretended to be a maid and took photos of rich people’s private stuff and exhibited them and got pretty famous. I’m not sure how she got away with it. Urgh, about the court date. There’s a cool video art piece by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto where the great artist Mike Kelley plays the ‘Kappa’. Here’s a piece of it. Never seen a statue of myself, no. Too bad there’s not a transgressive writers wax museum. ** Hugo, Hey, Hugo. Wow, thanks for watching ‘PGL’. It is funny. We wanted the humor to be kind of hidden in the general dark, sincere tone so people would have to find it. But if you read the script, it reads almost like a comedy. Anyway, thank you kindly, sir. Well, I’d certainly be interested to read that graphic novel if that’s any incentive. That does seem like a really good idea. All the best to you too! ** HaRpEr //, Fingers very crossed (about the TV possibility among other things). The definitive MJ depiction definitely has yet to be realised. Knausgaard is kind of Hemingway type, it’s true. There’s this writer I know who has recently gone to the dark Alt Right side who did this post on social media the other day where he was raving about that new Knausgaard novel and concluded with the statement ‘Could it be that the time of the straight white heterosexual writer has finally arrived?’ Like, whoa, as opposed to how it’s been in the past 15 centuries? ** Steeqhen, I had a short period of being kind of fascinated by Jedward. They were so insanely eager to please. Well, I’m glad you’re not stressed about going to work. Maybe the job structure and preoccupation will dispel the demons? ** Nicholas., Hey, big N! How’s it? My birthday passed with barely a mark left, which is how I like it. But thank you. When’s yours? Take care, buddy. ** Uday, I think it’s safe to say that will be EJ’s only appearance on this blog unless some guest-poster sneaks him in. Actually, I’ve seen every Gregg Araki film except for the last couple. He wanted me to play a role in one of his films, but I was too shy. And not just in movies for sure. ** Okay. I’ve been wanting to throw a spotlight on the book above for years because it’s one of my favorite novels and my favorite by the great Sarraute. But there was nothing online about it, and it was too o.o.p./pricey to afford. But I checked again the other day, and it’s now downloadable from Anna’s Archive and Internet Archive, so you could get it if you want, and I can/could finally turn on my spotlight. See you tomorrow.