* (restored)

 

‘Malina illustrates more elaborately and graphically than the short stories of The Thirtieth Year (1961) and even those of Three Paths to the Lake (published in German as Simultan in 1972) Ingeborg Bachmann’s concept of a “utopia of language.” She developed this notion in five important lectures given at the University of Frankfurt in 1959-60. In her fifth lecture, she notably observes that literature “cannot itself say what it is.” Then, appealing implicitly to the Heideggerean analysis of the anonymous “one” (the German word man), she adds that literature “presents itself as a thousand-fold, many-thousand-year-old affront to ‘bad language’ (schlechte Sprache),” by which she means badly made, mediocre, ordinary, daily language. In her view, “life possesses only this schlechte Sprache,” against which writers must oppose a “utopia of language,” even when the language they forge ultimately depends closely on the present and its mediocre speech. Even though the failure to achieve this ideal is inevitable, literature should “be praised for its desperate march toward this Language . . . [which] offers humanity a reason to hope.”

‘Having written her doctoral dissertation on Heidegger’s existential philosophy, Bachmann was also fully cognizant of his idea of a genuine writer’s or poet’s getting unterwegs zur Sprache (“on the way to Language”). And it is as a description of how a writer “heads toward Lan-guage” that Malina, as a meta-novel, must also be read.

‘Yet herein lies another paradox. This principal, most significant activity of the narrator’s life cannot be observed; the novel can only attempt to help us see what cannot be seen. In her acceptance speech for the Anton-Wildgans-Preis, received in 1972, Bachmann pointedly commented: “I exist only when I am writing. I am nothing when I am not writing. I am fully a stranger to myself, when I am not writing. Yet when I am writing, you cannot see me. No one can see me. You can watch a director directing, a singer singing, an actor acting, but no one can see what writing is.” In this sense, the narrator and perhaps also Malina are “nothing,” “no one,” in the novel. At best, they are apparitions or strangers. They exist authentically only in what is unstated, in what cannot be told. Bachmann leaves us with the redoubtable task of grasping their essence “behind the novel,” as vital sources that can be intuited yet not named.

‘Heading toward language thereby implies pushing words to their limits, nearing them to the ineffable; analogously, of driving the self to its frontiers and perhaps beyond. And in this regard, the ominous pronouncements (“the boundaries of my language mean the boundaries of my world”; “of that which one cannot speak, one must remain silent”) of another salient Viennese personality likewise underlie the very conception and narrative processes of Malina. In her essay on Wittgenstein, Bachmann notably praises the philosopher’s “despairing pains with the inexpressible (das Unaussprechliche), [pains] which charge the Tractatus with tension.” This same tantalizing tension characterizes Malina from beginning to end.

‘Bachmann’s deep struggle with the German language was, appropriately enough, waged while she was in voluntary exile from her native Austria. Her poem “Exile” bears witness to both her status as a “woman without a country” (even as the narrator’s passport, in Malina, has the addresses crossed out three times) and to her taking shelter, though a polyglot, in her unique possession: “the German language / this cloud about me / that I keep as a house / drive through all languages.” Much of her career was spent in Rome, a city in which she had to live in order to write about Vienna and its Hungary Lane. She once flatly quipped: “I feel better in Vienna because I live in Rome.”

‘This Roman retreat enabled Bachmann to compose the preeminent modern Viennese novel. The city is obliquely present even in the almost unbearably long second chapter—otherwise set “Everywhere and Nowhere”—because it is entitled “The Third Man,” in homage to Carol Reed’s 1949 film. In Malina, distant parallels with the film are drawn often. In The Third Man, an American writer seeks to track down his friend Harry Lime (whom Orson Welles memorably played) in postwar Vienna. He eventually learns that his friend has become a black-market dealer in penicillin. Rather similarly, Ivan’s profession is never clear. “He pursues his neatly ordered affairs in a building on the Kärtnerring,” writes Bachmann, “an Institute for Extremely Urgent Affairs, since it deals with money.” The film is, moreover, accompanied by Anton Karas’s haunting zither melody, even as music plays an essential role throughout Malina (and especially in the third section, where the author adds Italian musical terms to illustrate how the dialogues should be read). Like the death at the end of The Third Man, Malina abruptly concludes in a murder. Yet is this murder a real or a psychological one?

‘In contrast to the timeless “today” and the explicit Viennese setting of the first and third sections, in the second part of Malina “Time no longer exists at all.” “It could have been yesterday,” the narrator explains, “it could have been long ago, it could be again, it could continually be, some things will have never been. There is no measure for this Time, which interlocks other times, and there is no measure for the non-times in which things play that were never in Time.” This non-time is that of dreaming, when “the basic elements of the world are still there, but more gruesomely assembled than anyone has ever seen.” The narrator recounts chilling nightmares involving her father, Nazism, death camps, electric-shock therapy, and much more. At one point, she shouts: “A book about Hell!” This dire avowal surely designates, alas not the intensely desired Exult, Be Jubilant, but rather the book that “I” must ultimately come to terms with and write. The dark book, which cannot promise facile redemption but which tries to align “true sentences.” In other words, Malina—which Ingeborg Bachmann did write.’ — John Taylor, Context #13

 

____
Further

Ingeborg Bachmann @ The Institute of Modern Languages
‘Reading Ingeborg Bachmann’
Ingeborg Bachmann Website
The Ingeborg Bachmann Forum
‘EXSULSATE JUBILATE: READING “MALINA”‘
‘”Le Temps du coeur. Correspondance”, d’Ingeborg Bachmann et Paul Celan : lettres d’amour en Poésie’
‘Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann’
‘Theirs was an unlikely friendship’
‘Expressing the Dark’
‘LA TRENTIÈME ANNÉE (EXTRAIT), PAR INGEBORG BACHANT’
‘Ingeborg Bachmann and the Mad Men’
‘The Use and Abuse of Feminist Criticism: Ingeborg Bachmann’
‘INGEBORG BACHMANN & PAUL CELAN: HEART’S TIME, A CORRESPONDENCE’
Cafe Ingeborg Bachmann
‘”If We Had the Word”: Ingeborg Bachmann, Views and Reviews
‘THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE’, Marjorie Perloff on Ingeborg Bachmann
‘Gender, the Cold War, and Ingeborg Bachmann’
‘DARKNESS SPOKEN’
Buy ‘Malina’

 

___
Extras

Eine Folge RÜCKBLENDE – DIE SCHRIFTSTELLERIN INGEBORG BACHMANN

Ingeborg Bachmann reads ‘(A Paean) To the Sun’ (1961)

Ingeborg Bachmann reads ‘Her Gun’ (1961)

Ingeborg Bachmann ‘Mein Vogel’ (1961)

‘Portrait von Ingeborg – Ähnlichkeiten mit Ingeborg Bachmann’

 

____________
Werner Schroeter Malina (1991)
‘Malina is a 1991 German-Austrian drama film directed by Werner Schroeder and starring Isabelle Huppert. The screenplay was adapted by Elfriede Jelinek from Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 novel Malina. Like Bachmann’s novel, the film is an incredibly complex drama on the nature of insanity and to watch it, especially in the beginning, is quite a labour. A woman believes that she is a writer and all her men are fruits of her ill consciousness or personages of her unwritten book or alter egos of her split imagination. And episode after episode her consciousness keeps deteriorating more and more but the end breaks everything once again so all that was happening comes up in absolutely different light and changes its meaning. Malina is an anagram of ‘animal’ and it isn’t accidental but symbolic to the entire surrealistic content of the film. Malina is utterly unique, having many layers of narration and visualization.’ — collaged

Lengthy excerpt

Interview with Elfriede Jelinek (on Ingeborg Bachmann)

 

___
Poems

 

The Drugs, The Words

Said it,
and the toad leapt
onto the table,
blew the match out
and the lightning
struck under the table,
lifted the glass,
and the drop
spilled into the sea,
meaning tears,
none of them dried,
which means a sea,
something quite other,
though there’s only one,
suffering not being
the worst thing
to popes, to ideas,
to states, but rather
a torture for the sane.

The sick know
that a color, a breath of air,
a hard step, indeed a
whimper of grass in the world
turns the heart inside
the body, causing them to hope
for peace the more they sense
war, as the war goes on.
They love
the white uniforms
of the nurses.
They hope that
from the white
something good will come.
They are not
white at all.

 

Enigma

Nothing more will come.

Spring will no longer flourish.

Millennial calendars forecast it already.

And also summer and more, sweet words

such as “summer-like”–

nothing more will come.

You mustn’t cry,

says the music.

Otherwise

no one

says

anything.

 

The Bridges

Wind tightens the ribbon drawn across bridges.

The sky grinds on the crossbeams
with its darkest blue.
On this side and that our shadows
pass each other in the light.

Pont Mirabeau … Waterloo Bridge …
How can the names stand
to carry the nameless?

Stirred by the lost
that faith could not carry,
the river’s drumbeat awakens.

Lonely are all bridges,
and fame is as dangerous for them
as it is for us, yet we presume
to feel the tread of stars
upon our shoulders.
Still, over the slope of transience
no dream arches us.

It’s better to follow the riverbanks,
crossing from one to another,
and all day keep an eye out
for the official to cut the ribbon.
For when he does, he’ll seize the sun’s scissors
within the fog, and if the sun blinds him,
he’ll be swallowed by fog when he falls.

 

No Delicacies

Should I
dress up a metaphor
with an almond blossom?
Crucify syntax
on a trick of light?
Who will beat their brains
over such superfluities –

 

________
Interview with Françoise Rétif
Bachmann biographer & translator

 

Ingeborg Bachmann seems to have had critical recognition and even a certain social notoriety in the years 50-73, the date of her death. Is she still popular and still read in the Germanic world?

Ingeborg Bachmann’s popularity is immense throughout the world and still relevant today. She was praised very young, in German-speaking countries, in 1953, with the Groupe 47 prize and at the time of the publication of her first collection of poems, Le Temps en sussis. It was therefore as a poet that she became famous, although she had previously published prose texts. In August 1954, the German weekly Der Spiegel made its front page with a photo of her by Herbert List. A remarkable photo which captured the great sensuality as well as the enigmatic gaze of the young poet. This popularity was confirmed by the publication of the second collection, three years later. However, after 1956, she no longer published collections of poems, but only prose, The Thirtieth Year, a collection of short stories, in 1961, the novel Malina, in 1971, two years before her death, and finally the second collection short stories, Simultan (translated into French under the title of Three Paths to the Lake), in 1972. It is undoubtedly this chronological order which explains why we often hear or read that after 1956 Ingeborg Bachmann did not wrote more poems. It’s absolutely false. She continued to write poems, just as she had written prose before the resounding publication of her lyrical collections. However, these later poems were only published one by one or in small groups, in magazines, or posthumously. Because Ingeborg Bachmann died young, at 47, of an accident, and she left behind a considerable body of work, largely fragmentary. A bit like Kafka…

German-speaking critics, enthusiastic about her poetry, received the prose work rather poorly. It was only after her death that tribute was paid to her, emphasizing in particular his historical and political dimension – a dimension which initially displeased in Germany, in the Germany of the 1960s, at that time more devoted to reconstruction rather than denazification. Moreover, one of the explanations for the author’s desire to publish more prose than poetry from the 1960s undoubtedly lies in the fact that this historical dimension – although already present in a large number of poems, in particularly those of the first collection — had escaped criticism.

It is perhaps in France that Ingeborg Bachmann is least known. Italy considers her a national writer, like us Paul Celan. Why this failing recognition in France? The reasons are multiple, complex and partly irrational. Bachmann tried several times to settle in Paris, but never felt welcomed there, never at home. After the Second World War, France welcomed refugees, like Paul Celan, or persecuted Jews, more willingly than the children of executioners… Because Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann, was raised and educated in a National Socialist family (her father had joined Hitler’s party very early on, from 1932) and in an ultranationalist region, Carinthia, particularly receptive to racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic theories, to everything advocated by the National Socialist party – undoubtedly one of the most radically fascist regions in Austria. The teachers, a body which included Matthias Bachmann, the father, being the most ardent defenders and propagators of this thought.

War and philosophy play a critical role in her work, but her love life also has an impact on what she writes, right?

We have suspected since at least the publication of the novel Malina that sexual trauma had ravaged the life of the child or young girl. The letters to Hans Weigel document the after-effects of this trauma and show how it continues to haunt the young woman’s life – how much, therefore, at a very young age, she is already affected in her physical and psychological health. When Weigel went to the United States for a few months in 1948, she wrote to him very often and confided in him a lot, without restriction or restraint, as she would never do again in her life. Scientists previously believed that Ingeborg Bachmann’s illness, the crises that affected her, the ailments that led her to have to visit psychologists, psychiatrists and hospitals in the early sixties were due to the break with her Swiss lover, the famous novelist and playwright Max Frisch. My study proves that the problems did not appear suddenly after the breakup with the writer. And that the young woman living in Vienna between 1947 and 1953 was already seeking to understand the illness that tormented her and suffered from not being able to explain it. Because the trauma haunts the psyche all the more because it is unspeakable, because it escapes the subject’s memory. Sexual violence indeed generates a traumatic memory. This traumatic memory is at the center of Bachmann’s life and his work. To put it another way, the work is placed under the sign of the problematic unveiling of an unspeakable truth.

However, we should not believe that the trauma suffered and its after-effects are only treated at the individual, biographical level. What is remarkable is that, on the contrary, Bachmann gives it a historical and political dimension. It becomes emblematic of the “fascism” which governs human and social relations, emblematic of the abusive power of one or more people over others, in all the forms it can take, in the different institutions that the Father embodies. in the novel Malina: political, religious, cultural power, and of course also at the family, private level. The second chapter of the novel published two years before his death, if it is inspired by biographical dreams, already mentioned in youthful letters to Hans Weigel, gives them a political and historical dimension which goes far beyond the psychological and personal dimension elsewhere. also present. The ego, mistreated, tortured, raped, locked in a gas chamber, appears as the personification of the victim, of all the victims of the different forms of totalitarian power that the Father represents in his various disguises. Dreams and personal life take on a socio-historical, ethical and universal dimension.

 

___
Book

Ingeborg Bachmann Malina
Portico Paperbacks

‘First published in Austria in 1971, this work gained quick acceptance into the canon of modern Austrian and women’s literature. It concerns a triangle consisting of the narrator (an unnamed woman writer in Vienna), her lover (Ivan), and her alter-ego and male roommate (Malina) and culminates in her murder. Experimental in form and lyrical in style, this sometimes difficult novel explores the limits of language and the enigma of time–major themes in Austrian literature at least since the turn of the century. The role of gender in identity and personality is also considered. Malina was originally conceived as the “overture” to a trilogy entitled Ways of Dying, which remained incomplete at the time of the author’s death in 1973.’ — Library Journal

 

______
Excerpts

1 Hello. Hello?

2 I, who else then

3 Yes, of course, excuse

4 How am I? And you?

5 I don’t know. Tonight?

6 I hear you so poorly

7 Poorly? What? You can then

8 I can’t hear you well, can you

9 What? Is something?

10 No, nothing, you can even later

11 Of course, I’d better call you later

12 I, I should actually with friends

13 Yes, if you can’t, then

14 That’s not what I said, only if you can’t

15 In any case we’ll talk on the phone later

16 Yes, but around six o’clock, because

17 But even that is too late for me

18 Yes, for me too actually, but

19 Maybe today doesn’t make any sense

20 Did someone come in?

21 No, only now Frau Jellinek is

22 I see, you’re not alone any more

23 But later please, definitely please!

*

It was on the Glan bridge. It was not the Sea promenade.

It was not on the Glan bridge, not on the Sea promenade, it was also not on the Atlantic in the night. I only travelled through this night, drunk, toward the worst night.

*

While we talk I can never allow myself to think that in an hour we will be lying on the bed or toward evening or very late at night, because otherwise the walls could suddenly be glass, the roof could suddenly be removed. Extreme self-control lets me accept Ivan’s sitting opposite me at first, silently smoking and talking. Not one word, not one gesture of mine betrays what is now possible and what will continue to be possible. One moment it’s Ivan and myself. Another moment: we. Then right away: you and I. Two beings devoid of all intentions toward each other, who do not want coexistence… I propagate myself with words and also propagate Ivan. I beget a new lineage, my union with Ivan brings that which is willed by God into the world. Firebirds Azurite Immersible flames Drops of jade.

*

A-North in the county jail was the suicide watch ward. The lights never went off. I was up there for the duration of my 10 ½ months because I had never been locked up before and had a history of depression and anxiety—the State didn’t want me to die on their watch; they wanted to beef up their resumes by sentencing me to Life Without Parole.

There was a rumor that if you attempted suicide, you got to go to the state hospital in Kalamazoo where the inmate could smoke and have his own space while being evaluated. It was a seductive dream, one that apparently got the best of a little motor-mouthed meth cook whose name I don’t remember, but who reminded me of a troll.

One afternoon he strung himself up on the bars with a bed-sheet. But he was facing outward, toward the hall. I had never tried to hang myself, but I didn’t think he was doing it right. If he was facing out, didn’t that put the pressure on the back of his neck? The deputies cut him down and he was back in the cell an hour or so later. No state hospital, no cigarettes. I said something smart-alecky about his attempt, something like, “Maybe if you hadn’t done it backwards, they would have believed you, you fucking idiot.” I knew I was looking at life and had little compassion for someone who was going to do 3-5 at maximum. He said, “Alright, let’s go,” so I jumped off my top bunk, raised my fists (I had taken boxing at the Y for a year or so) and began jabbing him between the eyes with quick lefts. I contend that I would have whipped him good, except he grabbed a hold of me and switched the fight to a wrestling match mixed with punching.

I had a black eye for awhile. My kids saw my black eye when they next visited and they worried. I promised them I would never get into another fight. And I haven’t. Which is almost certainly for the best because it hurts to get hit and you have to go around explaining to everyone why your face is all marked up. The talking you have to do is not worth the trouble. It’s not worth anything.

*

It seems to me then, that his quietness is due to the fact that I am for him too unimportant and familiar a person, as if he had ruled me out, a waste, a superfluous incarnation, as if I were only made out of his rib and always dispensable to him, but also an unavoidable dark history, which his history wants to accompany and complement, but which he delimits and separates from his own clear history.

*

My father wears the blood-stained white butcher’s apron in front of a slaughterhouse at dawn, he wears the red executioner’s cloak and climbs the steps, he wears silver and black with black boots in front of an electric barbed-wire fence, in front of a loading ramp, in a watch tower, he wears his costume for the riding whips, for the shoulder rifles, for the shot-in-the-neck pistols, in the worst night the costumes are worn, blood-stained and horrible.

And?

My father, who does not have the voice of my father, asks from afar:

And?

And I say over a long distance, because we come ever farther apart and farther apart and farther:

I know who you are.

I have understood everything.

*

Steps, Malina’s incessant steps, quieter steps, the most quiet steps. A standing still. No alarm, no sirens. No on comes to help. Not the ambulance and not the police. It is a very old wall, a very strong wall, from which no one can fall, which no one can break open, from which nothing can be heard again.

It was murder.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, we’re finally finishing the film. We’re in the studio working on the color and sound from 9 am to 7 pm every day except Sunday and will be for at least two weeks. It’s pretty intense, but exciting. This very respected French film producer saw a cut of the film and loved it and has come onboard as co-Executive Producer, and he’s the one who’s helping us finish, and that’s been a complete lifesaver since useless Fuckhead is now pushed off to the side to some degree. Anyway, the French producer wants to show the film to distributors in early March, so that’s our deadline to get it as complete as possible by then. On the ghost, basically we’re giving up for moment and just letting the ghost pass-throughs look pretty basic because nothing tech-y really works. Yes, we have quick lunch breaks, basically to pop out to grab sandwiches and bring them back to the studio because we’re in too much of a rush to take time away. And Krispy Kreme is just a little too far of a walk, sadly. I know, about those great videos. Sadly I think the wild kids who made them grow up and get embarrassed of them, which is the opposite of how they should feel. Happy b’day to your grandma! And I guess I’ll let love wish you a Happy Valentines Day since I guess today is love’s big annual day, G. ** Charalampos, Hi. Oh, Gérard Blain, right. I’m blanking on the filmmaker with the Robbe-Grillet actresses. I haven’t found anything by Vecchiali that I can use to build a post around. But I will try again. I like pop, I just don’t like Lady Gaga’s brand of it. Except for ‘Poker Face’. I do like that one song. Overdrive is definitely the mode du jour, and thank you. Vibes with considerable eye strain to you. ** Misanthrope, I figured that you, and to some degree I, were going to occasion a rare Sypha visit to defend his goddess, and sure enough! Weird: the vanishing mailbox. I wake up at 6 am every day, bright and spunky and ready to go. Well, actually not until coffee is added. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. Jeez, man, you have just been beset lately. Holy fuck, what’s going on over there. I ‘pray’ that the troublesome mechanics have been fixed by now. You’re seriously due a glorious windfall. ** Barkley, Hi, Barkley! Always a true pleasure. Thank you for letting me know I’m not missing anything. I kind of figured. Mushrooms are so nice. I think I would do them again given the right circumstances. But, yes, total stability, or, well, since that’s impossible, mostly, is kind of a must-have for LSD in-putting, I think. What it does or can do is pretty major. More like brain surgery than a local anaesthetic. Luck with the new doable job! France is trundling along in its winter garb. Although it’s not much of a winter really. Obviously I hope you get to see GbV. They just won’t come over here. Pollard says he hated being in Europe when they did once, so it’s a no-go. It’s very sad. Thank you, thank you for that AC stream! That sounds super fun. I’ll use it to wake up again after my endless hours working on the film today. I did not know airtime.world, and that looks incredible. Bookmarked. Wow, thank you so much!!! You have the best week yourself! Lovely to get to talk with you! ** Steve Erickson, Me too, obviously, about Moullet’s writings. Hard to describe the color grading look we’re after. It’s being pretty intuitive. Big goal is to not use saturation and filters and all that smothering stuff that’s in 99% of films. The grader we’re working with described the look we want as ‘charismatic but soft’, but I’m not sure what that means. Sad your snowstorm was an instant-melt, or, well, wait, congrats, actually. ** Sypha, Hi, James. I knew that would lure you in here. Thank you on behalf of whatever fans of hers might be viewing this for defending her even though I don’t know that she defending exactly? Anyway, you’re a good fan. ** Justin, Aw, thanks, pal. Happy Valentines Day to you. You gonna eat anything especially red and sugary today. I’ll try. ** Uday, Yes, Moullet is in serious need of Criterion Collection boxset or something. When I was in school we were given the choice of learning French, Spanish, or Latin. I chose Spanish because I lived in LA, and that was the sensible choice. but, oh, I wish I’d learned French way back when my brain was fresh and probably even more absorbent. Epistolary formatted as non-epistolary sounds exciting. Makes me want to try that. Maybe try to remember that names are just words and that characters are just configurations of the prose? That helps me. Shame is evil, I think. But he does very annoying. Fell? Ouch. I did that a few weeks ago, and I’m okay now, so your future is bright. Bugs … it’s winter here, so there aren’t a ton of bugs around, and Paris is much less inhabited by insects than LA is, but there’s a nice little spider in my bathroom that I check in on once in a while. You? ** Darby🚀🪂, Great about your great. Yesterday was extremely work-filled and exhausting, but it will seem great in the future. Three boxes, whoop. I like grits. Grits and biscuits, yum. Writing-wise, I want to see of I can finish a collection of short, kind of weird, experimental, fiction things that I’ve been working on fitfully. I’ll start writing Zac’s and my next film as soon as we figure out what we want it to be about. I don’t have any ideas for a new novel, but I’m hoping one will burst through. Thank you for asking, my friend. ** Michael Morland, Hello, Michael! Thank you for gracing this blog’s interior. My obvious pleasure about Mr. Kinkel. He’s unsurprisingly a big fave of mine too. That does sound trying, all that browning and shlop hammering. I can’t even imagine. Big up to you. Come back anytime that here comes onto you sufficiently. ** Pork Scratching, Oh, gosh, you’re too kind. It takes one to know one. ** Right. Someone recently asked me if I would restore the blog’s spotlight on Ingeborg Bachmann’s incredible novel ‘Malina’, and today’s the day. If you don’t know that novel, maybe it’s time? See you tomorrow.

 

‘Many of you, perhaps most, have never heard of Luc Moullet. So much the better. Not all news gets into newspapers, and not all movies get into theaters. The sculptor Paul Thek once proposed an interesting solution to the newspaper problem to me: Get rid of all of them, except for one edition of one daily paper (any would do), and pass this precious object from hand to hand for the next hundred years –- then the news might mean something.

‘Living, as we do, in a time and culture where cinema is becoming an increasingly occupied and colonized country — a state of affairs in which a few privileged marshmallows get saturation bookings all over creation while a host of challenging alternative choices languish in obscurity –- the need for legends has seldom been quite so pressing. Such are the established channels nowadays that even avant-garde films come to the viewer, if at all, in a form that is almost invariably pre-selected and pre-defined, with all the price tags and catalogue descriptions neatly in place. Given the need for legends that might gnaw at the superstructures of these official edifices, the adventurous filmgoer has few places to turn. Even in specialized magazines, one is most often prone to find duplications of the choices available elsewhere; and unless one lives in a megalopolis, the mere existence of most interesting films today is bound to seem almost fanciful and irrelevant.

‘Within this impossible setup, one is obliged to construct a pantheon largely out of rumor and hearsay: at one big state university, stories still circulate about the one time that a few students got to see half an hour of Rivette’s 252-minute Out 1: Spectre.

‘Needing an emblem, agent provocateur, and exemplary scapegoat for a legendary cinema that by all rights should be infinite and expanding, I nominate the figure of Luc Moullet, patron saint of the avant-garde B film. Whether or not anyone chooses to second the motion is beside the point. …

‘“Our Jarry,” Rivette calls him. And when I asked Straub in Edinburgh two years ago which contemporary filmmakers he admired, he cited Mizoguchi, Ford, Renoir, Lang, Godard … and then Luc Moullet: “I am willing to defend him until next year — things can change — even against all those who accuse him of being a fascist, which he is not. He’s the most important filmmaker of the French post-Godard generation…especially for Les contrebandières more than for the other two.” …

‘Manny Farber — whose termite category could have been invented for LM — asked me a couple of months ago how formal analysis could account for the tenderness Straub displays towards the young waiter in Not Reconciled; I asked in turn how a proper formal analysis could avoid it. It would seem, from the available evidence, that LM has shown a comparable tenderness towards everyone he’s ever filmed, and yes, Virginia, this is “work on the signifier”. It’s the signified of commercial cinema that gets short-changed in The Smugglers — not its production of meaning, which is indicated in virtually every shot. This makes some people angry because they want to forget they’re at the movies. LM starts with the assumption that you want to be there.

‘Nevertheless, at one time or another, LM’s films have defeated distributors, exhibitors, spectators, even projectors. At Filmex in Los Angeles last March, people who arrived to see Anatomie d’un rapport — not very many — were essentially informed that the 16 mm projector refused to contend with the film, and those who wanted to see it had to come back the following day. When I returned, along with an even smaller group of people, the projector grudgingly complied this time, but not without a couple of spiteful breakdowns. Every time I’ve seen Les contrebandières, the projector has obstinately refused to keep all of the image in focus at the same time; the gate usually seems to shudder and flinch at the very prospect.

‘Maybe cameras rebel against LM’s cinema too; consider the awfulness of that still I cited from Les contrebandières. I wonder if the breakdown in representation implied by it may, after all, be a fair indication of what his films are all about: not a breakdown of the people and things represented, but of the sort of guff that money and idealism dress them up with. All I know is that the longer I look at that still, the more it inspires me. Like the best of LM’s cinema, it is priceless — language that isn’t theft, because it takes nothing from anyone, but offers, rather, a gift that anyone can have. If anyone will let us have it.’ — Jonathan Rosenbaum

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Luc Moullet @ IMDb
Luc Mouleet @ New Wave Film
‘LUC MOULLET CINÉASTE CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON COMIQUE’
‘Filmmaker, Film Critic, Enfant Terrible. Luc Moullet offers his thoughts on cinema past and present.’
Luc Moullet @ Senses of Cinema
‘Luc Moullet and Parpaillon’s Pataphysical Theatre’
‘Luc Moullet : “J’aime la manière dont mon frère, assez primitif de nature, découpe son steak”’
Interview with Luc Moullet by John Hughes and Bill Krohn
Luc Moullet @ France Culture
‘Luc Moullet tracks the Origins of a Meal’
Video: Tracks: Luc Moullet – Poulidor du cinéma français’
‘Est-ce que ta grand mère fait du vélo?’
‘Seven Comedies: The Films of Luc Moullet’
Luc Moullet interviewed @ VICE (France)
‘Luc Moullet’s 10 favorite films 1957-1968’
‘L’HISTOIRE DU CINÉMA D’ANIMATION VU PAR LUC MOULLET’
‘Portrait(s) de Luc Moullet’

 

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Rockefeller’s Melancholy
Luc Moullet on Michelangelo Antonioni

 

Drifting is the fundamental subject of Antonioni’s films. They are about beings who don’t know where they are going, who constantly contradict themselves, and are guided by their momentary impulses. We don’t understand what they feel or why they act as they do.

Psychological cinema could be defined in this way: it is psychological when you don’t understand the motivation of emotions and behaviors. If you understand, it means it’s easy, immediately, at a very superficial level… The filmmaker must therefore let it be supposed that there are a pile of mysterious, secret, deep, and unlimited motivations, as much in the characters as in the filmmaker (who maybe doesn’t exist). You can ramble on at your leisure about them (cf. the bottle of spilled ink in L’avventura, the tennis game in Blow Up). It’s a way of bluffing the viewer, particularly noticeable throughout L’avventura and La notte, which is very National Enquirer (or Us Weekly, or Star, or People), dignified by an Edward Hopper emulator.

Drifting reveals two facets, one that is positive, one that is negative. First, the positive: it directs the film towards an unusual and surprising elsewhere. It’s the road movie (Zabriskie Point, The Passenger, L’avventura). The beginning of that last film is centered on the couple of Léa Massari/Ferzetti, and then on the disappearance of Massari who will be looked for in vain, very slowly and boringly, by the new—rather disappointing—couple of Ferzetti/Monica Vitti, and then on a semi-documentary and off-topic (but is there even a topic?) stroll through Sicily that, after an hour and a half of yawns, gives us the best (or the least bad) part of the film: the piercing gazes of the men on Monica Vitta alone in a small village square, the flirtation with the maid on the train, the prostitute’s press conference, Vitti imitating the bellboy, suddenly singing and dancing, passages that I am maybe overestimating because they happen after 100 very monotonous minutes. This kind of drifting film – a backpacker’s, a wanderer’s cinema – will come back later in Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes) and Wenders’ Kings of the Road, with the frequent submission to chance – natural and organized—that is equally present in Blow Up. This path will also be found in The Passenger, Identification of a Woman, and L’eclisse, objects in that film definitively replacing the protagonists in a revolutionary ending that happily gives a new twist to a film until then filled with drunks and common places (especially about the stock exchange).

The other facet is more negative. Since drifting is a way of fighting against boredom, it leads to a new form of boredom, inevitably found as soon as the center of the film is lost. Films about boredom are inevitably annoying. An inherent problem in filmmakers’ activities, one that is a vicious circle, is that, in order to make films, you have to be rich or, if not, you have to very quickly become rich. So, filmmakers only know the problems of the well-off, cutting them off from the reality of the masses and diminishing the reach of their oeuvre. But, after all, Rockefeller’s melancholy is a human reality to which it is only normal to bring attention. It’s something. It brings us back to an ancestral conception of art, one that was fundamental until around 1850. It is the expression of noble souls, men of noble births, excluding the mediocre spiritual life of the proletariat. Going back to it (Il grido) seems like a displacement of very artificial problems.

And when one is rich, one has everything—money, work (if one still needs to work in order to live), and love. What more can one hope for? From this comes the boredom, depression, and melancholy that one looks to fill in by looking at other things, left and right. A cinema that is foreign to me, that aggravates me—me, who, like the majority of people, had to fight for decades to reach a summit similar to the one that Antonioni’s characters want to forget. Maybe the height of happiness is to realise one’s ambitions as late as possible, or never, in order to avoid the agony of an earthly beyond.

(cont.)

 

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Extras

LUC MOULLET: The cinema according to Luc

Essai d’ouverture: Luc Moullet

Luc Moullet, enfin cinématonné?

Questions de cinéma Luc Moullet

Le Cinéma selon Luc Moullet (1979) by Gérard Courant

 

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Interview
from mubi

 

You mentioned in your introduction at Cannes that Land of Madness was initially suggested to you by Edgar Ulmer.

LUC MOULLET: Ulmer wanted to produce films by young people, and when I saw him he asked me to write something, but Ulmer had great difficulties getting his own movies produced, so this ended up not being made.

Was it originally a documentary?

MOULLET: No, it was a fiction. It was too long and too expensive. Ulmer spoke a lot without really having the power to supervise this film made by young people. I took a little part of it—10% or 5%, all about madness, this little part—and came back to the documentary way of filming, which was easier and more interesting in this case. And less costly. That gave me the idea of the title.

Did you know other directors from that era? I know you interviewed many, and Fuller you worked with.

MOULLET: Yes of course, because I was writing text for Cahiers du cinéma, and I was just beginning so I couldn’t write about great, great directors; Truffaut and Rivette spoke about them, wrote about them, so I had to concentrate on other directors who were a little forgotten or not yet known, such as Ulmer and Fuller.

And now they are associated with the New Wave and Cahiers.

MOULLET: I remember when Truffaut came to New York there was a question, “who are the best American directors?” And he said Edgar Ulmer and Samuel Fuller! Which in ’59 was rather provocative since the critic who asked the question may not have known Ulmer and saw very little of Fuller. At the time, people said Kazan, or Stevens, or Zinnemann.

That’s our cinema of quality. Now not very many people of our generation watch those films any more. They are underappreciated, almost, because of their reputation for being overblown. I was very startled to see this area of France on film. The landscapes here look like many of the landscapes I see in your movies, and it occurs to me that A Girl is a Gun could have been shot in your backyard. It was interesting to see the land that exists in your fiction films take such a vivid place in your documentary.

MOULLET: There are certain landscapes for fantasies like a western film and for a true story for murder and madness, which we can see here.

There’s something really romantic about your films, which I like. They have a reputation for being austere in a way, because they deliver facts, but there’s something really romantic about the landscapes.

MOULLET: It certainly is a romantic landscape, and these are ugly stories in a romantic landscape—it’s an interesting contradiction. You could say the same about Wuthering Heights, a very beautiful landscape and a certain kind of madness. I think it might be the same as in West Virginia!

Do you look for inspiration in films that you love?

MOULLET: Yes, of course. I wrote many films about American movies, I made a book about Vidor’s The Fountainhead, and there are some influences, some borrowings from The Fountainhead in A Girl is a Gun, from Hitchcock in Brigitte and Brigitte. In Brigitte and Brigitte there’s a girl who has some difficulties finding a secret dictionary in her closet during an exam, and this was made after the end of Strangers on a Train, looking for his lighter—things like that. There’s a borrowing from The Whispering Chorus by DeMille in Le prestige de la mort; it’s a bit of a similar story. There are many things I borrow from American cinema, always in a different context because Brigitte and Brigitte is a comedy and Strangers on a Train is a suspense film. It’s always better to take things from other genres because then nobody sees them…unless I speak to you about them! There are some borrowings from Moonfleet in my short, The Milky Way.

You wrote a book in 1995 called Politique des acteurs—Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Cary Grant, James Stewart, which unfortunately, like much of your criticism, has not yet been translated into English. Could you talk a little bit about why you wrote the book, and what you say in it?

MOULLET: Actors are very important to good authorship, especially in the comical field (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Raymond Griffith, Linder, Tati, Fields, Marx Brothers). Who remembers the official directors of their films, Clyde Bruckman, James Horne, Donald Crisp? I chose to write a book about actors because Truffaut always told me it was the most difficult thing to do, to write about actors. I liked this challenge. Before, almost nobody wrote seriously about actors.

Speaking of material unavailable in English, it is quite dismaying to see your work receive so little attention in the United States in terms of distribution. For someone unable to see most of your films, what have you been up to since the early 1970s?

MOULLET: I can tell you that I worked in many of the usual genres, comedy, western, erotic film, murder film, sociologic documentary, copying (or try to copy) the career of Hawks.

How do you see your filmmaking changing over this period?

MOULLET: I don’t know what difference one can find between a film I made in 1960 and a film I directed in 2006. Maybe there are less puns.

In the U.S. the French New Wave is almost exclusively associated with a very small group of Cahiers du cinéma critic-filmmakers—Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol. Again, due mostly to issues of distribution, access, and translation, we have seen little from other contemporaneous filmmakers and Cahiers writers such as yourself, Jacques Donoil-Valcroze, and Fereydoun Hoveyda.

MOULLET: My films have less success than those of Godard and Truffaut because I do not have their genius. I was a follower to them, a groupie, a fan. And all those who came after the Big Five of the New Wave had great difficulties during their—I mean Hanoun, Pollet, me, Eustache, Vecchiali, Straub, Rozier, Garrel. The audience had enough with the Big Five. We came too late, some months after, but it was too late.

To my knowledge, unlike many of your Cahiers critic-filmmaker colleagues you still remain active as a critic. How do you see your criticism changing since your earlier days? Do you see a difference between the way you worked as a critic-filmmaker during the first years of your career as a moviemaker and now?

MOULLET: To write an article about a film and to do a documentary, that’s the same work—we show a reality that does exist, a film, a factory, a town. I took the same pleasure in writing the book about Vidor’s The Fountainhead and in shooting a film about Des Moiners, The Belly of America. What difference between my film criticism of 1956 and that of today? Difficult to say. I saw more films during those years. I am less interested in giving a shock to my audience. My analysis is more precise—I presume—and I am more fair with the films. Now I try to find the truth while writing my texts, and I no more try to impose a truth, a message before writing an article. The first years in criticism, we often to tried to impose aggressive judgments. After, all that is over.

 

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16 of Luc Moullet’s 39 films

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Brigitte et Brigitte (1966)
‘Brigitte et Brigitte is a 1966 French feature-length film written and directed by Cahiers du cinéma film critic Luc Moullet. Two girls meet accidentally at the station as they come from their oppositely remote small villages. It seems they have patterned themselves against the same model as they are identical in every respect that they can be. They become roommates and go to collage, eventually studying film because it is easy. What follows are episodes, all reflective in some way on the nature of film, either explicitly or as a matter of how life is patterned by film. Eric Rohmer plays a role. What sets this apart from other new wave projects of the era is that it sits in its deep selfreference without taking itself seriously. As it happens, the identities of these girls drift apart in terms of appearance, manner, values and place in film. Its no less consequential than others of its ilk, but seems more fun in being consciously trivial. One episode, for instance has our girls doing a survey of the three best filmmakers. One Frenchman answers: Welles, Hitchcock and Jerry Lewis. Another querent gives the same answer for who are the three worst filmmakers. The joke is that he is a ten year old boy. Worse, pulls out a list with ALL filmmakers ranked in order and he tells precisely that those three are numbers 281, 282, and 283! Moullet’s debut film, Brigitte et Brigitte was praised upon release by one-time colleague Jean-Luc Godard as being a “revolutionary film.”‘ — collaged

Excerpt

 

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Les Contrebandières (1968)
‘In his follow-up to his debut feature Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), Luc Moullet further distanced himself from his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries by cocking a snook at anyone who sees revolution as an effective driver for social and political change. Moullet’s cynical view that nothing ever changes ran contrary to the thinking of other New Wave directors who, in common with a vast swathe of bourgeois intellectuals, saw revolution as not only necessary but inevitable. Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967) and Moullet’s Les Contrebandières (1968) are both wildly anarchic but their premises are diametrically opposed. Like Godard, Moullet evokes the thirst for rebellion that was rife in France in 1967/8, but his conclusion is that all that revolution achieves is to move people from one miserable, unsatisfying groove to another miserable, unsatisfying groove. Moulet’s minority view proved to be the most realistic. Ten years on from the events of May ’68, you’d be hard pressed to notice any significant change in France.’ — French Film Site

Excerpt

 

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A Girl is a Gun (1971)
‘Jean-Pierre Léaud and Rachel Kesterber star in the greatest French western ever made. Never released in France but distributed in South America in an English-language version dubbed by Moullet himself, Billy’s dark tale of lust and revenge swings wildly between a slapstick insanity and a delirious experimentation that are kith and kin with Wellman’s Yellow Sky, Vidor’s Duel in the Sun, Godard’s Week-end, and Garrel’s La cicatrice interieure. In rewriting an old saw (cinema and a girl is a gun, indeed), Moullet tackles favorite themes—time, landscape, exhaustion—with relish.’ — Harvard Film Archive

Excerpt

 

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Anatomie d’un rapport (1975)
‘”For me,” Luc Moullet wrote, “there isn’t intelligence and stupidity, but intelligence-stupidity.” A Cahiers critic who championed Samuel Fuller as an “intelligent primitive,” Moullet turned to directing well after his comrades (Godard, Truffaut, et al.), and has been playing catch-up ever since. With one exception, the movies in International House’s “5 Comic Films” showcase are emphatically unserious, teetering concatenations of moth-eaten gags splintered with Dadaist verve. Moullet has said his “main aim is to make people laugh,” but he lacks the killer instinct of a natural comedian. Even though his features typically run less than 90 minutes, they’re never rushed; for all their frenetic dislocations, they’re somehow restful. Fond of barren landscapes, blackout gags and Sisyphean slopes, Moullet is, like the Parisian rebels of May 1968, “Marxiste, tendence Groucho,” a slapstick anarchist who expresses his hostility to the modern world by refusing to take it seriously. The series’ most atypical entry is Anatomy of a Relationship (1975), co-directed with Moullet’s wife Antonietta Pizzorno. With Moullet as himself and Christine Hébert as an obvious Pizzorno stand-in, Anatomy dissects in painful detail the sexual dysfunction in its makers’ marriage.’ — Arsenevich

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Ma premiere brasse (1981)
‘Luc Moullet turns the camera on himself as he attempts to overcome his fear of large bodies of water and learn to swim.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

the entire film

 

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Les Havres (1983)
‘Watching Moullets “Les Havres” is a lot like flipping through photographer Robert Doisneaus book “La banlieu en couleur”. Doisneau is no Cartier-Bresson: he doesn’t show explicit beauty, but makes pictures of places that look messy. Nevertheless there is plenty of stuff in those messy places that is worthwile. Just like in “Les Havres”: for example a bus stop that is called “Socrate”.’ — Karel

the entire film

 

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Barres (1984)
‘Funny little short film about fare dodging in Paris with a touch of magical realism, a testament to human ingenuity and imagination used to get out of paying those couple of Francs. “My main aim is to make people laugh. For me, that’s very easy: lost between the rustic peasant world whose rituals I have forgotten and the chic Parisian world into which I have never really assimilated, I am a character who is out of place; everybody finds me comical. I only need to show up for people to laugh. So it’s not because I’ve got any great skills: I take full advantage of my situation. And this comedy factor goes beyond my personal self, stretching into whatever I care to imagine.”‘ — Luc Moullet



the entire film

 

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La comédie du travail (1987)
‘From the very beginning, film comedy focused on the world of work. From exploitation to unemployment, from adaptation to resistance, directors multiplied their points of view on survival in the modern world, especially from Chaplin on. With a humor superceding certain conventions and steering towards an eminently political dimension, Moullet follows three characters in order to build one of the blackest satires about the conflict arising from our everyday relation with work. Nobody but Luc Moullet, former witty critic of the Cahiers du Cinema, would have dared to make such a film on unemployment.’ — IMDb

Excerpt

 

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Essai d’ouverture (1988)
‘Twenty-one attempts to open a bottle…. Luc Moullet systematically confronts the recalcitrant caps of Coca-Cola bottles, moving towards increasingly unusual opening methods. Oulipo in the greatest way possible. You have a bottle full of soda, it’s hot and you want a sip of that liquid. And then something goes wrong. Things going wrong are the perfect recipe for comedy. This “Essai d’ouverture” is the living proof. Hurray for failure!’ — MUBI

the entire film

 

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Les sièges de l’Alcazar (1989)
‘Guy, film critic of the Cahiers du Cinéma and terminal cinephile, plans to write about the Vittorio Cottafavi retrospective at the Alcazar, his local cinema. One day he notices that Jeanne, film critic of Postif, the rival magazine, seems to be following him. He is intrigued– is she interested in him, or planning to poach his praise for Cottafavi in her own article? The greatest film about pathetic cinephilia ever made.’ — Letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Parpaillon ou à la recherche de l’homme à la pompe Ursus d’après Alfred Jarry (1993)
‘To understand Moullet’s contribution in Parpaillon, it is perhaps not pointless to ask a question at the outset that is finally quite difficult to answer: what is a gag? Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie suggest a practical definition: ‘More narrative and often more abstract than a sketch, the gag is short in form and relatively autonomous, and in itself does not necessarily belong to film (there are theatrical, and even musical or pictorial gags). In its most general form, it is characterised by the incongruous and surprising resolution of a situation that may or may not be realistic in its premises … The gag, in most cases, is less inclined to mobilise cinematic language than body language.’ The gags created by Moullet in Parpaillon seem in perfect agreement with this definition. The fragmentary nature of the film, resulting more from a narrative aesthetic than an ‘aesthetic of attractions’ – to borrow an expression devised to explain the specificity of early cinema – favours self-sufficiency in the situations being shown, emphasising their intrinsic value as gags. Similarly, all the situations in Parpaillon, however realistic most of them might be at the outset, are pushed to their most incongruous extrapolations.’ — Rouge

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Toujours plus (1994)
‘Aujourd’hui les supermarchés se construisent sur l’emplacement des cinémas ou des églises. Évolution normale puisque le consumérisme est la religion du XXème siècle ; les supermarchés sont les cathédrales du futur.’ — Cinematheque Grenoble

the entire film

 

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Foix (1994)
‘Showing the many idiosyncrasies of a small town (a school you can only enter by using the hospital entry, a culture center which is also used as a busstop), Moullet shows the different, rich layers of the so-called “ordinary” life.’ — MUBI

the entire film

 

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Le prestige de la mort (2006)
‘Whilst seeking out locations in the South of France for his next film, director Luc Moullet comes across a male corpse. He immediately decides to use this to his advantage. By swapping his passport with that of the dead man, Moullet hopes that the world will believe he is dead, thereby ensuring a renewed interest in his work. Unfortunately, the scheme backfires, since the dead man was someone rather important. The film stars Luc Moullet, Antonietta Pizzorno, Claire Bouanich, Iliana Lolitch and Gilles Guillain. It has also been released under the title: Death’s Glamour.‘ — French Film Site

the entire film

 

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La Terre de la folie (2010)
‘Originating from the southern Alps, Luc Moullet has been struck by the abnormally high incidence of mental disorder in the area. Accounts of murder, suicide and self-immolation are plentiful. In this documentary, Moullet examines the causes and consequences of these extreme psychiatric phenomena and arrives at some disturbing conclusions. The film stars Luc Moullet, Antonietta Pizzorno and Jacques Zimmer. It has also been released under the title: Land of Madness.’ — French Film Site

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

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Assemblée Générale (2014)
‘The annual general assembly of the co-owners : quarrels about nothing, the collapse of the management agency, that turns becomes absurd.’ — Letterboxd

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I think it could easily argued that Lady Gaga has a done a shit ton since her halftime gig. But who cares, really? I obviously never listen to any stars who play at that level anyway. Enjoy any free time you have this week. I have zero, so I’ll be rooting yours on. ** _Black_Acrylic, Kinkel has always been the most interesting to me of the school shooters. So much there, or at least so much available. Ah, it’s an arrogant move. Nice. I guess that’s where the extra thrill comes from. What a strange thing to think. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, the gym show window thing is really strange. But it must alluring to gym users since it’s so de rigeur. Maybe some sex club should try doing that. Krispy Kreme isn’t too far from the studio where I’m working this week. Maybe I can talk Zac and our technician into a sugary lunch break. Probably not. I feel for your love of yesterday. There were some really cool, now defunct old posts that relied on bizarre personal youtube videos that kids and weirdos put up that are now dead imbeds, which put those poor posts in my blog’s eternal graveyard. Love making the four hours we spent yesterday trying to create an effective visual effect for when the ghost in our film passes magically through walls result very quickly in success this morning, G. ** Justin, Hi I have to watch ‘American Fiction’ in the next few days because it’s assigned viewing for a Zoom thing this weekend, and I don’t know how I’m going to find the couple of hours to do that. I should try that Capote show, yeah, I’m curious, but it’ll be a couple weeks til I can. Good to hear it’s worth the look. Thanks, pal. ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom! Great to see you! Yeah, I mean, his confession birthed a whole novel of mine. Okay, about ‘Zone of Interest’. I know I should see it. It just hasn’t quite given me the necessary boner yet. Wow, you sound really good and productive in a most interesting fashion. Nice, man. Right, it’s Valentines Day tomorrow. I haven’t seen a peep of related merch or candies here. Weird. I think I’ll skip it. I think I’ve always skipped it actually, except when I was in elementary school, and they made you give every kid in your class a Valentine. That’s where kids would secretly reveal their true feeling for each other, like ‘I like you’, or ‘You’re horrible’ and things like that. Maybe it should become a law that everyone has to give everyone they know a Valentine on Valentines Day. That might be interesting. I’m in the process of finishing the film, all day every day for the next two weeks. It’s really good, but I’m already pretty burnt. Hugs back! ** Darby🐍, Snake! I’ll check out that person’s take on Kinkel when I get a chance, thanks. Oh, you know Puff. Wild. I’m all in on the car = freedom = life itself idea. But, like I said, I’ve been driving since I was pimply. Oh, gosh, amazing luck if you go that kill-the-conservatorship route. Wow. Sure, I’ve been to tons of aquariums. I like them. The Paris one is actually pretty good. ** oliver jude, Well, ixnay on the Mardi Gras finale then for sure. Yes, Steven Hall is a wonderful poet. I actually don’t know if he still writes poetry. I was going to publish a book of his poems through Little Caesar, but then the financial plug got pulled, killing the press dead in its tracks. Steven is the leader of a band that performs and records Arthur Russell’s music. They’re called Arthur’s Landing. Here’s their bandcamp. I hope that helps. ** Uday, Me too, on the growing up and later disenchantment. No, I was very not sporty. Because I’m tall, I wasn’t bad at volleyball and running track when I was forced to do them in high school. I hope you can sort out a way to de-annoy that guy. Shame is super ugly, but I guess it works? I think the problem is less the lack of knowledge than people’s mental laziness, not just when it comes to the mind but when it comes to anything that’s even remotely complex. Well, I don’t know form you’re writing in, but the easiest trick to creating distance is to write in the third person rather than the first. The third person has distance built into it, and then you can modulate that distance much more easily than trying to upfront or backpedal perspective with first person. But what style/form are you working in? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Thanks. We need to get a first pass of the whole film done today. We only have the color grader until Friday, and there an immense amount detailing and subtle things we need to do. I think it’ll get done. She’s very swift and good. These days those problems are acknowledged, but with attached hopes and prayers only for the most part. Your friend’s film sounds most exciting. The Maddin and Baldwin comparisons are very riveting. ** Okay. Today is being given over to the very cool and most attention worthy French director Luc Moullet. Have a scan or a feast or something. See you tomorrow.