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‘Today would be the hundredth birthday of the cinema’s exemplary modernist, Michelangelo Antonioni, who, from the very beginning of his career, understood form to be the crucial content of his era—and made films that, themselves, had an advanced form of his own design. His fundamental subject is the bourgeoisie and the way that new methods of communication—mainly the mass media, but also the abstractions of high-tech industry, architecture, music, politics, and even fashion—have a feedback effect on the educated, white-collar thinkers who create them. These new ideas have as strong an effect on their creators and implementors as on the world around them, and knocks them off the course of their own lives.

‘Antonioni is also one of the cinema’s great pictorialists—his images reflect, with a cold enticement, the abstractions that fascinated him. That’s why the word most commonly used to describe his view of the modern world—“alienation”—is, rather, a common mistake. Certainly, many of his characters find themselves out of touch with their own desires, their own physicality, and seem distanced from themselves, in search of an anchor of immediate experience and spontaneous emotion. But he wasn’t nostalgic about the premodern; he understood that technology and advanced design arose in response to authentic needs, and that there is at least as much of a problem with the long-established ways that cry out for sophisticated technical improvements.

‘Let’s be specific. There has been a lot of talk lately about the death of the cinema, and one clip puts it in its place. It’s an excerpt from Wim Wenders’s 1982 film Room 666, featuring a remarkably prophetic and sanguine interview of sorts with Antonioni, when he was a young man of seventy who looked with confidence to the electronic future of the cinema. The premise of the film is that, at the Cannes Film Festival, Wenders posed one question to each of his interview subjects, film directors all—“Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”—and left them alone in a hotel room, in front of a camera, to address it. (By chance, the clip begins with the tail end of Steven Spielberg’s segment, in which he incidentally reveals the same stunted and repressed approach to inner life that dulls his films.)

‘But Antonioni would have none of Wenders’s hand-wringing. He responded by considering “the influence of television”—and adding that, if it seems like a problem, it’s “only because we belong to a different generation.” He talks about “new technologies”—videotape, which, he says, “will probably replace film”—as may other technologies “like lasers, who knows, or others that are yet to be invented,” which will solve the problem “of being able to entertain ever-growing audiences.” He recognizes that many people are attached to film, but that this attachment will eventually vanish. “We should think of the entertainment needs of future viewers. I am not that pessimistic. Actually, I am quite … I’ve always tried to adapt myself to the means of expression characteristic of a certain time.” He mentions that he had already made a film on tape and was continuing to work in video (“I’m sure that the range of artistic possiblities ofered by video will make us feel differently about ourselves”). He understood that with the “big screen” at home, together with “high-definition magnetic tape, we will have cinema in our homes. We will no longer need to go to the cinema.” He knows that the change will be a big one—but “We will have but one option: we will have to adapt.” And he concludes, “My feeling is that it won’t be all that hard to transform us into new men more suited to our new technologies.”

‘He cites his 1964 film Red Desert as the place where he addressed that theme most directly. I agree; it’s his greatest film. It was forward-looking then, and remains so. Antonioni, born on this date in 1912, is younger at his posthumous centenary than are many active filmmakers today.’ — The New Yorker

 

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Further

Michelangelo Antonioni Overview @ Senses of Cinema
MA @ IMDb
French Antonioni Website
MA’s films @ The Criterion Collection
‘Michelangelo Antonioni: stately cinematic master or pretentious bore?’
‘Michelangelo Antonioni: centenary of a forgotten giant’
L’exposition Michelangelo Antonioni @ La Cinémathèque Francais
‘The Mysteries of Michelangelo Antonioni’
MA’s films @ Strictly Film School
‘Where to begin with Michelangelo Antonioni’
‘Michelangelo Antonioni | Ontological Architecture’
MA interviewed by Roger Ebert
MA’s films @ mubi
‘Rethinking Michelangelo Antonioni’s modernism’
‘La vraie vie de Michelangelo Antonioni’
‘Michelangelo Antonioni on the Utility of Mystery’
‘Art/Form: Antonioni at the Cinémathèque Française’
‘Michelangelo Antonioni—a flawed legacy’
‘Antonioni’s Dome’
‘Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert’
‘The Colors and the Spinozist Bodies of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura’
‘Michelangelo Antonioni / Film as Sculpture’
‘Michelangelo Antonioni and the “Reality” of the Modern’
‘The languorous, achingly hip films of Michelangelo Antonioni.’
‘He was a man you could never quite reach’

 

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Additional

Michelangelo Antonioni en 5 minutes

Michelangelo.Antonioni.The.Eye.That.Changed.Cinema-2001

Michelangelo Antonioni receiving an Honorary Oscar

 

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My Dinners with Federico and Michelangelo
by Charlotte Chandler

 

Somehow Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, the two greatest film directors to emerge in Italy after World War II, sparked a rivalry in the public’s imagination that didn’t really exist for either of them. Cinema buffs still sometimes ask, “Are you a Fellini person or an Antonioni person?,” much as they would ask you to make that other necessary creative choice: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?

I was a friend of both of these remarkable artists and their wives for many years. I wrote a book about one of them—I, Fellini (1995)—and I hope to write a book about the other, who died in 2007. The truth is they led parallel lives. They began their careers as journalists, and both were skilled artists. Young Antonioni sketched architecture; young Fellini drew cartoons. Both were encouraged by Roberto Rossellini, the genius of Italian neo-realist cinema, who was a mentor at the start of their careers. Though they never became close friends, the two men were very respectful of each other’s work. Fellini’s 1952 film The White Sheik was based on a story by Antonioni, and when Fellini was filming And the Ship Sails On, in 1982, Antonioni visited him on the Cinecittà set. Both directors created masterpieces in black-and-white as well as in color. Fellini, whose fame caught on earlier, made, among other major works, La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Fellini Satyricon (1969), and Amarcord (1973). Antonioni’s finest works include L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962), Red Desert (1964), Blow-Up (1966), and The Passenger (1975). Their films were only rarely in competition, most memorably at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, when L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita contended for best picture. La Dolce Vita won.

“Fellini and Michelangelo were two sides of the same coin,” Enrica, the widow of Antonioni, told me. “People said they were opposites, but they were twins, though they never knew it. My Mickey was seen as a director who wanted to do highbrow films for the few, but he really wanted to make films everyone would love to see, just like Fellini.”

Antonioni once told me, “I believe Federico was more concerned with the outer life of the people in his films. I am concerned with their inner lives—why they do what they do.”

Fellini told me, “I feel my inheritance as a film director is from art, and Michelangelo’s is from literature. My films, like my life, are summed up in circus, spaghetti, sex, and cinema.”

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Interview

 

Nowadays is not only us critics who enthusiastically support your work, as it was at the times of L’avventura and La notte. A large part of the public has also shown its enthusiasm for your work since Blow-Up was released. How do you explain this change?

Michelangelo Antonioni: Today, the public has matured and accepts certain themes and/or language without difficulty. As for myself, I would say that, instinctively, I might have found a way to make my films more – how can I say­ Americans would say exciting, more interesting, but that is not the right word. More precisely, I might have found a way to be less reserved in showing emotions and feelings. Perhaps I have been able to deal with a topic more deeply and even more skillfully. I do not really know. A film – I will never grow tired of repeating it – does not need to be “understood.” It is enough if the viewer “feels” it. To see a film must be an overall personal, intuitive experience, like when one reads a poem. Who would dream of being able to thoroughly explain a poem? Take The Passenger, for instance (I am sorry to keep returning to this film, but this is the film that everyone wants to talk about), or its last sequence, that long uninterrupted take. There is no need for the audience to understand it from a technical point of view; it is enough if they are sensitive to that slow flowing of things through the window, while the camera slowly moves onward.

In The Passenger, however, technique is very important, even if this is not unusual in your films.

MA: It seems to me that there is something unusual here. In general, I have never made camera movements that were not justified by the movements of the characters. Here, instead, the camera moves on its own, as if it had the same interest for objects, landscape, and people that the protagonist, the reporter, has. Why this? It seems to me almost arrogant to answer. I work very instinctively, and the meanings of certain techniques become clear to me only later on. For example, in reviewing The Passenger I ask myself: Why did I film that scene in this way? It will seem strange, but I always find an answer that I have never previously thought of. The presence of a car in a pan, apparently coming from nowhere, might have been suggested to me by the fact that a character without a past of his own, but with the past of someone who is now dead, was riding in that same car.

And I took another liberty – that of approaching every sequence with always a new attitude. If you think of it, it is possible to say that there is no technical unity in the film. Every sequence was fIlmed differently from the others because the content was different. At the end, however, all of these differences seem to me to find a unity of their own. This is, after all, my attitude toward the story I’m telling.

The Passenger was released this year. Apart from the television documentary on China in 1972, your last film was Zabriskie Point in 1970. Why such a long break?

MA: Because in the meantime I prepared two films. One, Tecnicamente dolce [Technically Sweet], took almost two years. The script was ready, I even went location-scouting in Sardinia and in the jungle. Then Carlo Ponti, who inherited the project from other producers, eventually decided against it. He was probably scared that I would never leave the jungle or that I would start painting it.

The other film was inspired by a story by Calvino, The Night Driver. At first it was called The Spiral, and then The Color of Jealousy. It was an obsessive story of a jealous man who every night would leave his own city by car and go to his lover’s town. In order to have a better control of the color I filmed it with a video camera rather than with a regular camera. This time I was the one who was having serious problems with the script. I could not find the right approach, and I gave up. But in the meantime, another year had gone by.

You have stated that your next film will have an Italian subject because you realized that by making films outside of Italy you began to feel uprooted. Can a frame, a language, give you roots?

MA: We are all rooted in a language, in a culture, in an historical environment. In traveling to other countries I have assimilated parts of their culture, while at the same time losing a part of my own. It is somewhat like those writers who spend alternatively six months in the United States and six months in Europe. At a certain moment they no longer know what to write about. That is what I mean when I say that I need to find my roots. I would now like to tell the story of people born and raised in Italy. It may happen that at the last moment this country, which already makes us shiver if we look at it closely, unexpectedly will push me away and make me change my mind. I know, it is not a very original criticism, but it might be original to attempt to love this country even if you despise a part of it. And when I say “a part,” I mean a large group of people, those we see in the streets, in the public places. Sometimes I think I belong to another race.

And your films?

MA: I could answer by saying that my films are what they are because I am who I am. Some say that I am a typical elitist director. The truth is that when I come in contact with art I have a freer, less engaged attitude than most people think. Personal interests are what always move me. All of the characters in my films are fictional, but at the same time they are also real, because reality has suggested them to me. What I need is to hear a line or to see a gesture, a face, an expression, an event, a story. This grows inside of me, it becomes a sequence, the sequence becomes a series of sequences, and then I have a complete story. I’m not too sure how this happens. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I always have to make a film for someone. Not the public, but a specific person – a friend, a woman. It has always been this way, even when I used to play tennis as a young man. If I had a public, I played better. Once, in Bologna, at the final match of a tournament, practically no one was there. I lost the first two sets. Then more people came and I won the next three.

There is something else I would like to add. I wish my films were released more discreetly than the promotion requires. The publicity spots and the billboards loudly boast of how good the fIlm is, and urge the public to go and see it and to admire it. The beauty of a film, when it is there, should instead surface almost by chance, without arrogance, since the purpose of the film is different from what advertising would make it to be.

Does autobiography play a role in your films?

MA: There is only one way to be autobiographical: out in the open, without restraint. That is, one should not regard as private what one writes or puts in a film. One needs a certain amount of shamelessness to do this, and I do not have it. My way of being autobiographical is different, it changes depending on what people I see, what I do, what kind of light I’ve found on my way to work. All these things can influence the way I film or make a sequence. So if certain characters reveal something of myself, I would say that it is natural, and that it would be unnatural if it were not so.

What about tomorrow?

MA: Cinema as it is now is beginning to tire me out. There are too many technical limitations. It is ridiculous to still have to use a regular camera, not very different from what was used thirty years ago, or to still have to go to such great lengths to transform reality to conform to our desires. We cannot completely dominate color or use it as painters do. That is why I have thought of video cameras, and I am still thinking about using them for my next film. Only with magnetic tape is it possible to avoid the com­promises that the
development and print laboratories impose on you. On the tape the color can be electrically corrected. It is true that there are many other technical complications, but the advantages are enormous.

You asked me: “What about tomorrow?” Tomorrow could already be today if it were not for the industrial structure of cinema that opposes it. It would be the end of film, of film development and print laboratories, of regular cameras, and of at least a third of the commercial cinema establishment. Do you think that it would be easy to destroy all of this? Among all of the arts, cinema is the one that is most solidly grounded in life, and one would have to begin to change even life. Since, the way it is now, it’s not very well organized.

 

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16 of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 17 films

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Story of a Love Affair (1950)
‘After a series of striking documentary short subjects, Michelangelo Antonioni made his first feature, Cronaca di un Amore (Story of a Love Affair), a loose, neutral treatment of a seemingly standard noir subject. Cronaca is much like Robert Bresson’s early Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne—you can detect the future abstract style of the director underneath the conventional material. With these two films, a new type of reflective cinema was born, dedicated equally to the interior lives of actor “models” and the obscure surfaces of the photographed world.’ — Slant

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The Vanquished (1953)
‘There’s no gainsaying Antonioni’s sense that there’s little going on in the story to repay attention to the action—but this may be why the director achieved so much with its filming. The characters play second fiddle to the environment in the Italian episode of I Vinti; the actors seem to shrink beside the awesomely looming, coldly oppressive images of modern buildings going up quickly in grandiose modern urbanistic projects. Looking down upon the city through a huge window high up in the revellers’ glossy glass-and-metal apartment building, filming the alluringly pure yet chilling shapes of modern streetlights on a bare new highway, Antonioni foreshadows his great films of the sixties—and the French and English episodes of I Vinti, with their more pointedly worked-out stories, hardly do so. The constraints that circumstances placed on Antonioni’s story-telling pushed him, perhaps unintentionally and maybe even unawares, into a freer, stranger, more probing and more inventive way with the camera. He said of his early films: “I chose to examine the inner side of my characters instead of their life in society, the effects inside them of what was happening outside. Consequently, while filming, I would follow them as much as I could, without ever letting the camera leave them. This is how the long takes of Story of a Love Affair  and The Vanquished came about”.’ — The New Yorker

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The Lady Without Camelias (1953)
‘The third feature film by cinema master Michelangelo Antonioni, La signora senza camelie [The Lady Without Camelias], expanded the expressive palette of contemporary Italian movies, demonstrating that a personal vision could take an explicitly poetic tack; that “seriousness = neo-realism” was perhaps already turning into something of a truism; and that Antonioni would answer to no-one but himself. A riveting ‘behind-the-scenes’ show-business drama, La signora senza camelie explores themes that would haunt its director from L’avventura through La notte and The Passenger — an individual’s tenuous hold on her identity, and the dangers inherent to performance… in life and on-screen.’ — Eureka Video

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Le Amiche (1955)
‘A woman friend of mine once insightfully remarked that men show much more compassion and empathy for other men than women do for other women. She claimed that the congenial smiles among a group of women may often belie far less generous feelings. This challenging subject territory – how women see themselves and how they see each other – is what Michelangelo Antonioni explores in his fourth feature film, Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955). Although the film is not so well known today and appeared before Antonioni came to international prominence, Le Amiche features many of the themes and cinematic techniques that characterized Antonioni’s great works that came later. In fact it displays some of Antonioni’s innovative storytelling methods on a narrative canvas that was more complex than that of his later works. Here Antonioni traces the evolving and mutually influencing relationships among a group of young women friends who are all trying to answer the same question for themselves: what do they really want out of life?’ — Film Sufi

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The Cry (1957)
‘So much attention has been paid to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s films from the 1960s that his earlier Neo-Realist efforts have been overlooked – as if they represented the work of nothing more than a talented tyro. But even though Antonioni was not as consciously “experimental” in his early films as he was in those of his Alienation Trilogy (L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse), and in later classics such as Blow-Up and The Passenger, his Neo-Realist films were both well written and visually accomplished, playing upon the viewers’ emotions and providing them with believable characters and situations. That Michelangelo Antonioni’s film career started out in documentaries should come as no surprise to those familiar with his earlier output. One of the best of the early Antonioni efforts is Il Grido / The Cry (1957), which he also co-wrote along with Elio Bartolini and Ennio de Concini. The nearly two-hour-long black-and-white drama has much in common with Federico Fellini’s 1954 classic La Strada, save that Antonioni’s film is a bit more believable and less patently heart-tugging. Also worth noting, Il Grido prefigures many of the themes that would recur in the director’s later work – e.g., alienation, apathy, anomy – in addition to possessing a political edge lacking in those later films.’ — algft.com

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L’Avventura (1960)
‘A group of rich Italians is on a cruise off the coast of Sicily when one of their number—a moody, unhappy young woman—disappears. Murder, kidnapping, accident, suicide? Her boyfriend and her close friend search for her, but the search turns into a new love story, and the mystery is never resolved. With this simple, elusive tale, director Michelangelo Antonioni launched himself to the forefront of the emerging European art cinema. At the time of L’avventura’s premiere at Cannes, in May 1960, he was forty-six and had directed five previous features, all of them interesting but none of them able to massively capture the public’s attention. The premiere was a disaster, with catcalls erupting throughout the auditorium. But the critics loved it, and so—when it went into international release—did wider audiences. With L’avventura, Antonioni’s career was made, and the film is now an acknowledged classic. Forty years ago, the film struck audiences mainly with its freshness, and it can still have that effect today. It surprises with its insights: characters do unexpected things in unexpected places, but in a way that provokes recognition—yes, that does happen, though it doesn’t conform to the way we think things ought to happen.’ — Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

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La notte (1961)
‘With understated shifts in perspective, Antonioni captures a world that is subtly yet deeply out of joint. (In L’eclisse and Red Desert, the visual dislocation would be more radical, and the emotional one irreparable.) One sequence in La notte shows Giovanni and Lidia entering his publisher’s office for his book party. As he passes behind a rack of his books and pauses for a mortal instant, his name appears repeatedly in front of him like a caption that’s empty of meaning, an incantation of nonsense sounds that are somehow him and that he’s there to somehow impersonate—an anti-verbal opacity that lends its meaninglessness to the little bricks of words that lie beneath these tags and that also reduces to inanity the suited and dressed, coiffed and elegant, witty and eloquent intellectuals who are there to celebrate him and his opaque creation. The world of La notte isn’t an absurd or meaningless one; it’s one that hides its profoundest meaning in plain sight, that owes its almost incalculable profundity to the immediacy of its visual patterns and abstractions, and that Antonioni both damns and redeems in the same gesture, the same moment, by means of his own art.’ — Richard Brody

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L’Eclisse (1962)
‘Michelangelo Antonioni’s mysterious and disquieting 1962 film L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) is a twilight zone of anxiety and alienation in which the director displays his ability to slow time down a stop and allow his characters to wander in an eerily untenanted landscape. He had a knack of making Rome look as empty as the middle of the night – in the middle of the day. Did his film intuit the emptiness of growing postwar prosperity, or just have its own strange vision of the aftermath of nuclear attack? The film really is visionary: it has a gift for unearthly images to compare with Fellini: the crashed car resurrected from the water with the hand of its dead joyrider visible is unforgettable. But it also discloses an enigmatic void in its own strange, hectic little love story: almost as if extraterrestrial forces are preparing this ground for some uncanny incursion.’ — The Guardian

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Red Desert (1964)
‘Coming after the trilogy of L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L’eclisse (1962), which confirmed his reputation internationally as one of the world’s leading avant-garde directors, Red Desert is the most ambitious of all of Antonioni’s attempts to ground the condition of our modern existence in a theory of alienation. The alienation in question is very complex, and it is part of the film’s difficulty, but also its achieve­ment and seriousness, that the feelings evinced in its dramatization are so fundamentally contradictory and intractable. For on the one hand, Antonioni would say, the world being created by the advance of tech­nology is undoubtedly beautiful: we see it in the fantastic sculptural shapes thrown up by science and industry—the girders and pipings and pylons that are part of a vast new network of global communications, seemingly reaching to the stars (an early sequence in the movie takes us to a deserted rural building site where the University of Bologna is constructing a massive new radio telescope). On the other hand—and here the pounding soundtrack of the film’s opening ten minutes makes its own inescapable comment—this new world is very close to hell. A wasteland is a wasteland, after all, and if a “new beauty” has been born (how power­fully the film shows that it indeed has been), the phenom­enon is shot through with poison.’ — Mark Le Fanu

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Blow Up (1966)
‘Made in Great Britain in 1966, the flat-out great Blow Up (in the U.K., Blow-Up) was Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English-language effort. “Inspired” by Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar’s 1959 short story Las babas del diablo (literally, “The Devil’s Drool”), Blow-Up was nominated for two Academy Awards – Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, and Edward Bond) – in addition to winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the National Society of Film Critics’ Best Film Award. Having first seen the two Hollywood films most influenced by Blow-Up, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Brian De Palma’s Blowout (1981), I did not know quite what to expect since the former is an excellent film – arguably, Coppola’s best – and the latter is a solid Hollywood thriller. Blow-Up, for its part, is not only a great work of art but a great work of philosophy as well, one as impressive as Antonioni’s Italian masterpiece, La Notte (1961).’ — altfg.com

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Zabriskie Point (1970)
‘Zabriskie Point was to be Michelangelo Antonioni’s greatest triumph, a crowning achievement in an already seminal body of work and a bold affirmation of his commercial ascendance in America. It was to be the Italian-born director’s state-of-the-epoch address, a provocative document of the political injustice, civil warfare, and extreme moral and cultural polarities defining the end of the 1960s. The eagerly awaited successor to Antonioni’s stunning 1966 success, Blow-Up, a stylish mystery and an enigmatic study of naïveté and ennui in swinging, pop-art London, Zabriskie Point was to be nothing less than Antonioni’s portrait of the United States — and by extension, Western society — at war with itself. And it was to be a film made with the kind of financial largess, technical facilities, and corporate indulgence that only a major, old-school Hollywood studio like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in its infinite blockbuster fantasies, could sanction. But just about everything that could go wrong with the project did go wrong, and Antonioni’s great dream would prove to be his worst nightmare. Released in March 1970 after nearly two arduous years in production — a period that included long, exhausting shoots on location in the California desert, pitched battles between Antonioni and M-G-M executives, and a protracted, frustrating search for the perfect musical score — Zabriskie Point was one of the most extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history. The arithmetic alone was astonishing. Reeling from severe management trauma yet eager to capitalize on the booming counterculture youth market, M-G-M — which went through three presidents during the production of Zabriskie Point — poured $7 million into the film, an extravagant figure for that time and nearly five times what Antonioni spent to make Blow-Up. But where Blow-Up (the first release in Antonioni’s three-picture deal with M-G-M) had taken in more than $20 million at the box office, Zabriskie Point made less than a tenth of that — a mere $900,000 — in its humiliatingly brief theatrical run.’ — phinnweb.org

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The Passenger (1975)
‘After the relatively modest results from Zabriskie Point (1970), even Michelangelo Antonioni’s loyal fans may have wondered if his powers of artistic expression were in permanent decline. But with his next feature fiction film production, The Passenger (1975), the writer-director turned away from the political and returned to the philosophical existential themes that had driven such earlier artistic successes, as L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962), Red Desert (1964), and Blow-Up (1966). And on this occasion he was supported by having perhaps the two most magnetic and compelling screen personages of the time, Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. The result was one of Antonioni’s greatest works. Actually, The Passenger initially does seem to have a political theme, since it concerns a television reporter’s investigation of revolutionary turbulence in North Africa. But it eventually reveals itself to be an examination of existential dissatisfaction with contemporary personal and social narratives in our modernist world. So the film very much situates itself within the thematic contexts of Antonioni’s earlier successes.’ — Film Sufi

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The Mystery of Oberwald (1980)
‘The easiest way to explain The Mystery of Oberwald is that it is intended to make up for this deficiency in Antonioni’s work when taken as a whole. Oberwald forms a tidy contrast with most of Antonioni’s output—shot on video where his major works are shot on film; tightly paced where Blow-Up and The Passenger are quiet and slow; primarily confined to interiors where most of his films, going all the way back to L’Avventura, indulge a fascination with landscapes and the insignificance of the individuals within them. But the video’s look in its opening moments—grainy shots of a castle interior as thunder and lightning boom theatrically outside and actors gad about in Victorian garb—evokes these stories not so much as the late ‘60s, early ‘70s TV show Dark Shadows. Indeed, Oberwald immediately seems to share much of television’s humble and undiluted desire to entertain. Like Dark Shadows and its ilk, Oberwald is so modest in its means and its aspirations that ten minutes in, you realize that your expectations are going to be dashed. Even though Oberwald is the video creation of one of cinema’s most legendary directors, it isn’t a wild, abstract experiment of the Nam June Paik variety, but a straightforward dramatization of an age-old story.’ — Pop Matters

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Identification of a Woman (1982)
‘Antonioni didn’t always produce demanding High Masterpieces. And a perfect example is Identification of a Woman, his foolishly underrated 1982 film about men and women, love and cinema. When it first came out, the responses were furiously divergent—it won a prize at Cannes, got creamed by the New York Times—but three decades on, it’s easier to assess its place in Antonioni’s career. Made when he was nearing seventy, this is one of those autumnal movies—think Rio Bravo or An Autumn Afternoon—in which an aging director allows himself to be more relaxed and genial than in his most finely tuned work. Far from serving up a major statement about the human condition—something Antonioni was never shy about doing—Identification of a Woman comes tinged with modesty and irony. His first feature set in Italy since 1964’s Red Desert, it finds him taking a provisional measure of how the modern world has been shifting around him.’ — John Powers

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w/ Wim Wenders Beyond the Clouds (1995)
‘Clouds are magical when you’re young – remember staring up at the sky with your imagination running wild, seeing the endless possibilities of their shapes? But somewhere along the way, we often lose that sense of creativity. For example, watch Beyond the Clouds – the work of an old man who had long forgotten how to look up. The credits list two directors, Antonioni and Wim Wenders, but it’s well and truly the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, the man responsible for the acclaimed L’Avventura and Blowup. At the age of 83 and not long after suffering partial paralysis following a stroke, Antonioni started work on his final film armed with a collection of his own short stories, a half-formed screenplay, a cast full of people he owed favours to, a doting wife to literally call the shots, and with German filmmaker Wim Wenders as insurance. The result is a mishmash. It’s a swan song that recycles his visual and theoretical motifs – some of it works, most of it doesn’t, but all of it is decidedly Antonioni.’ — SCMP

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The Dangerous Thread of Things (2004)
‘Eros is a composite film consisting of three short films, two by admirers of Michelangelo Antonioni and the last by Antonioni himself. The first two films in the package, by Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai and the U.S.’s Steven Soderbergh, are both excellent. As is typical of this sort of composite work, the best is saved for last, and it is to that amazing film that I wish to direct your attention. Written by Antonioni and longtime collaborator Tonino Guerra, it is called The Dangerous Thread of Things (“Il filo pericoloso delle cose”), and it is based on a short story in Antonioni’s 1983 collection, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber River. It is from this book that Antonioni drew episodes for his film Beyond the Clouds (Al di là delle nuvole, 1995). Antonioni made The Dangerous Thread of Things when he was 92 years old. He directed it from a wheelchair, to which a stroke has confined him. One never knows, of course, but it probably will prove to be his last film. It’s a brilliant piece of work.’ — Dennis Grunes

Trailer

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, the meeting was civil-ish, so love stepped up. As for what the meeting results in, we’ll see, and love might need to be called back at some point. Did love serve your purpose so you could hit the hay? Love feeding me a four foot long loaf of olive bread like a Dom Top, G. ** politekid, Oh, whoa, whoa! Howdy, buddy. I like that dream, even though the only time I saw Massive Attack live I was kind of disappointed. Me, I’m good. I’m just a 24/7 workhorse finishing Zac’s and my new film, and there’s literally almost nothing else happening over here or rather in and around me. No, ‘Zone of Interest’, not yet, but, again, literally everyone is telling me I need to see it. I think I’m going to need the English subtitles, so I’ll have to find the UK or American brand of it online. But I will. Maybe even today. Okay, your turn. What are you up to? What your’s and yours’ latest. Tell me, pal. So excellent to get to see you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Dude, that’s so exciting. Man oh man, I’m delegating a whole big wad of my natural optimism in your guys’ direction. ** Justin, Hi, J. I have come to the conclusion that the two extant, hyped movies I actually need to and will watch are ‘All of Us Strangers’ and ‘Zone of Interest’. Maybe a double bill if my favorite illegal site houses both. Haunting is the goal for sure. That’s Zac’s and my goal with our stuff: not over the top satisfying but very lingering. Thanks! Good weekend on your end of everything? ** Misanthrope, I do remember that origin story now that you mention it. Anyway, you could have done worse You could have picked Nincompoop. Hm, maybe that’s what I should call my impending Instagram account. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Originally we were supposed to be sound mixing all day today, but the mixer wants a day to get some future mileage for us to go over with our fine toothed combs, so we’re off until Monday. We’re doing the final mix/design on 15 or so minutes of the film a day, and I think we’re okay. Our deadline is March 5th ‘cos the film has to be submitted to Cannes on the 6th for some reason. Hope you got the relaxation. Awful about that scammer. How can people be so fucking amoral. I’ll find that ‘Jomon’ remix, sounds fun. Me, I’m hoping to go look at some art today which I haven’t been able to do for what least seems like months and also talk with Zac about the next film. I have an idea about it that I’m hoping he’ll be into. ** Darby (is probably going to spontaneously combust into flames ) 🔥, I hope you don’t mind me saying that I hope you don’t combust. That would be most inconvenient. Your mother is such a big problem, I’m so sorry. She’s the one who needs the mental health upgrade. I had a differently horrible, control freak, extremely nosey mother, and I ended up fine, and you seem as tough and determined as I was, so I know you’ll be more than okay, but that doesn’t make the present tense any less obnoxious to deal with. I’m so sorry, my friend. Stay way positive and motivated. I swear to god, my having those qualities saved my life, really. Oh, a movie suggestion. Well, I should pick something from today’s post, I guess. Okay, ‘Blow Up’. That’s my coax. ** Mark, Fun galore there. I can’t wait until I have a fucking hour or even more to have fun galore again. I am having fun, but not galore. Great weekend of this and that to you. ** Guy, Swinging a sword plus reading, writing, and teaching poetry sounds pretty heavenly. So no worries about you. What are you writing and what poetry are you teaching, if you don’t mind sharing a wee bit? My favorite pizza is deep dish Chicago style pizza, but they don’t have that here in Paris, so I tend to go for Four Cheese. You a Margarita guy? I like the big M too, of course. Yeah, I just never figured out the flirting thing. I think it’s because I like to pretend I’m invisible in social situations. That doesn’t lend itself to ‘come on’s. I’m good with rest, thanks. Any weekend ecstasy re: you? xo. ** Bill, I watched the whole vid/piece last night, and I loved it. Super up my alley, Kudos again and more fully. ** Uday, Hi. Intellectually deficient, yep. The current day’s rampant, across the board anti-intellectualism is really, really depressing. The diaries are fun and juicy as I can recall. Have the loveliest weekend somehow. ** Jeff Coleman, Hi, Jeff. It’s great to see you! Glad you dug. I hope you’re doing really well. ** Right. So this weekend I’ve gone back into the blog’s distant past again in order to revive and expand an old Antonioni Day that was languishing in nowheresville. Hope it serves a purpose. See you on Monday.

 

‘Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) is part of a celebrated generation of mid-20th-century Polish writers, one that includes the doomed magic-realist short story writer Bruno Schulz, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, author of the great and sexily titled novel Insatiability. All these writers knew, admired and supported one another.

‘Schulz, for instance, once gave a lecture on Gombrowicz in which he underscored that his friend’s fiction “did not follow the smooth path of intellectual speculation but the path of pathology, of his own pathology.” In recalling that talk, Gombrowicz added: “This was true.”

‘Certainly, Pornografia, first published in Polish in 1960, seems as sick, as pathologically creepy a novel as one is ever likely to read. In some ways, it resembles a rather more polymorphously perverse version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses or one of those disturbing fictions by European intellectuals that blend the philosophical with the erotic: Think of Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye or Pierre Klossowski’s Roberte Ce Soir. Gombrowicz himself once dryly described Pornografia as “a noble, a classical novel. . . . The novel of two middle-aged men and a couple of adolescents; a sensually metaphysical novel.”

‘Set in Poland during World War II, the book focuses on a visit by two Warsaw intellectuals to a country estate, where a pair of young people catch their eye. Henia is engaged to an upright young lawyer; Karol is a handsome 16-year-old farmhand. The narrator, who is named Witold, and his extremist friend Fryderyk soon decide that these two “children” belong together, even though they reveal absolutely no particular interest in each other. But what does that matter?

‘Fryderyk soon begins to act like a theater director, manipulating the people around him, designing ambiguous encounters and sexually charged scenes. When, early on, he points out that Karol’s dirty workpants are dragging in the mud, the boy starts to bend over to adjust the cuffs. “No, wait,” says Fryderyk. “Let her roll them up.” After a brief silence, the obedient Henia, who is the daughter of the household, stoops down and does as she has been told.

‘Fryderyk, it is clear, possesses a sometimes painfully acute awareness of social dynamics, always sensing the dark impulses and desires lurking within the most upright-seeming people. Commenting on his almost parodistically Nietzschean character, Gombrowicz asserted that Fryderyk ultimately aims “to reach different ‘realities,’ unforeseen charms and beauties, by selecting people, by forming new combinations between the young and the old — a sort of Christopher Columbus who isn’t searching for America, but for a new reality, a new poetry.”

‘In the novel, however, Witold repeatedly questions Fryderyk’s sanity, even though he, too, is soon caught up in an unsettling drama. The four of them, he concludes, make up “some strange erotic combination, an eerie yet sensual quartet.”

‘Throughout his work, and especially in his most famous book, Ferdydurke (1937), Gombrowicz espouses a cult of youth. Man, he insists, wants to be young, and in “Ferdydurke” he shows what happens to an adult who is changed into a schoolboy. That novel is, to some degree, often bizarrely comic. Not so, the distressing Pornografia, though he insists that this much later book is simply “a particularly irritating case of the Ferdydurkean world: the Younger creating the Older.”

‘Certainly, the novel’s two vampiristic debauchees desperately need their connection with childlike Henia and Karol — who, it turns out, aren’t quite as innocent as they seem. Karol admits that he would like to sleep with Henia’s mother; Henia confesses that marriage will keep her from giving in to certain of her sexual inclinations. Following such revelations, Witold proclaims that he is virtually “bathing in their eroticism.” The tacitly homosexual relationship of Witold and Fryderyk further intensifies the book’s perfervid kinkiness.

‘Gombrowicz’s French publisher once summed up the author’s personality as “irritating” but added that that quality was transmuted into work that was perennially “perturbing.” Certainly, most readers will find Pornografia perturbing, or worse: repulsive, confusing, ugly. As Milosz once said of Gombrowicz: “He had no reverence whatsoever for literature. He derided it as a snobbish ritual, and if he practiced it, he attempted to get rid of all its accepted rules.”

‘Perhaps not quite all of them. Gombrowicz did believe that “the primary task of creative literature is to rejuvenate our problems.” That seems absolutely right. Whether you like his work or not, you can still understand why Milan Kundera called him “one of the great novelists of our century.” Pornografia — which follows Danuta Borchardt’s earlier and now standard translations of Ferdydurke and Cosmos — compels its reader to recognize the complexities of human psychology and the darkness at the heart of sexual desire.’ — Michael Dirda

 

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Gallery

 

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Further

Witold Gombrowicz Official Website
The Witold Gombrowicz Home Page
Witold Gombrowicz Museum
‘The World of Witold Gombrowicz’
‘Witold Gombrowicz, and to Hell with Culture’
Witold Gombrowicz Archive
‘Gombrowicz’s Unknown Journal’
‘What You Didn’t Know About Gombrowicz…’
Witold Gombrowicz @ goodreads
‘Imp of the Perverse’
‘Art of Self-Defense’
‘Witold Gombrowicz or The Sadness of Form’
‘BACACAY BY WITOLD GOMBROWICZ’
‘The Untranslatable Literature of Witold Gombrowicz’
‘consciousness & masturbation: a note on witold gombrowicz’s onanomaniacal novel cosmos’
‘Reading Witold Gombrowicz’
Witold Gombrowicz @ The Paris Review
‘Wrapped Up in the Mystery of Cosmos’
‘The Plotlessness Thickens
‘Witold Gombrowicz confronts (Polish) provincialism’
‘ORIGINS OF A ‘PRE-INTERNET BLOG”

 

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Extras

Witold Gombrowicz – 1 – Vence, 1969

Witold Gombrowicz – 2 – Vence, 1969

Witold Gombrowicz – 3 – Vence, 1969

Witold Gombrowicz – Forma Upupiona

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969): Une vie une oeuvre

 

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Manuscripts

 

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Interview
by Paul Beers

 

Monsieur Gombrowicz, one could say that in your last novel Kosmos you have, as it were, penetrated to the ground that also determines your other work, but now in a more general, philosophical way – that your battle with Form is here reveals all nakedness?

‘I don’t really know, my main theme of course dominates all my work, but it is true that Kosmos is a bit more philosophical than my other books. So that main theme is: man as creator of Form.’

Your main theme, yes. But you also talk about themes that gradually change over the course of your existence. So the main theme has varied in a certain way.

‘Yes, one could say this very briefly and very generally. Ferdydurke : man created by other man; Pornography : the adult created by the youth; Kosmos : man created by and himself creator of the Form.’

Could we say that in Kosmos man is formed by things instead of by people?

‘No, in Kosmos people are also central, in all my work people are at the center. Because the emphasis is not on things, but on associating and connecting in the human mind. My art, the art, is the passion and the need to understand things.’

Aren’t you, especially in your Diary, not just as much a philosopher as an artist?

‘No, no, I want to be an artist first and foremost. It was only after I had written Ferdydurke that I became aware of the implications, and it was only because people did not understand that book and my other work that I was forced to explain myself. But I want to be read as an artist, I hate overly philosophical explanations of my work, I want people to read the story, the history and be carried away by it. That’s how I would like to see criticism written, not philosophical extracts, not an impossible representation of the flow of the story, but a creative showdown with the author. The critic must try to convey the electricity, the attractiveness of the book. But unfortunately, I know so few of them and people get the impression that I am a thinker.’

You are making it very difficult for your critics with these demands. To convey your style as well as your ideas, they should be a second Gombrowicz.

“Hmm.”

To return to your being a thinker, your Diary clearly contains more than explanations of your own work and personal notes. You discuss in detail writers from such different directions as Catholicism, communism and existentialism, where, in the midst of all the rejection, a great loyalty stands out.

‘As for loyalty, it is the other side of disinterest. Because I am not committed to any of these -isms, I can view them all the more objectively. So I am not a philosopher, but I have acquired great intellectual rigor.’

Did you also study philosophy during your years in Paris?

‘There were no Parisian years, although I sometimes went to Paris for a longer period of time during my law studies in Warsaw, but because I didn’t do anything there my father put an end to it.’

Would you like to tell me something about the past?

‘As usual, I came from a Catholic family of which I, born in 1904, was the youngest, besides a now deceased sister and two older brothers. I still have contact with them, in writing, because I have never been to Poland again. So after high school I studied law in Warsaw and I only completed my studies because of financial support from home. I never did anything with it and I don’t remember anything about it. Falling away from faith did not come as a shock to me at all, at least internally, it happened naturally. Already at the age of sixteen or seventeen I was working on Kant, his Prolegomena on the Critique of Pure Reason , and with books about him, because the Critiques themselves were still too difficult at the time. Then Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.’

I wanted to ask you about that. In your Diary you are sharply critical of Nietzsche. But isn’t it true that if one were to name a philosopher who at least thinks in your direction, more a thinker of life than a philosopher of the spirit, then one would think of Nietzsche first?

‘Yes, Nietzsche is also very important, and for me was more important than Kierkegaard, but in that passage the point for me was that Nietzsche wanted to unite ‘young’ and ‘wise’, while for me youth equals the lower, the immature, the inferior.’

You talk about existentialism in more detail in your Diary , have you studied its major works?

‘Yes, Sartre’s L’être et le néant and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, Jaspers less so. But never as a philosophy student, always as a layman. Philosophy is important for the intellectual rigor I mentioned, and it helps us order the world.’

Despite this, you don’t write your novels with a specific plan in mind.

‘Oh no, in all my work I am guided by natural impulses that drive me in a certain direction, sans préméditation . And by ‘natural’ I mean: attractive, fascinating, unexpected, I don’t know in advance how the story will develop. In Kosmos, for example, there is first the sparrow hanging, then the mouths, the arrow on the ceiling that points to another hanging, thus creating the theme of hanging, which in turn seeks a connection with the mouths, but I don’t know how. Thus the book creates itself as the gradual formation of a reality of references.’

Couldn’t one say that in your work you attempt to catch and portray life itself, its wildness and unformedness, in the act, especially since your working method also follows the capriciousness of life, unexpectedly and without premeditation?

‘No, certainly not, because that would mean capitulating to chaos. And writing is a means of organization.’

I wanted to come back to Kosmos . Although the emphasis is on the associations, the connections between things, the things themselves play a major role in this book. Because this is also the case in the nouveau roman , I wanted to ask you whether you see parallels.

‘The only coincidental parallel is perhaps that emphasis on things. But otherwise the nouveau roman is of a horrible intellectualism. Of course, one should not generalize, there is more to be said about Robbe-Grillet in particular, but in general this is true. They seek the object, which for me is an absolutely false thing, because one can only start from oneself, that is to say from the subject. That bottle there is for me, not me for the bottle. And the worst thing is: they make literature boring, the French nouveau roman is boring and unreadable. Kosmos also wants to order the world, but in a lyrical, passionate way, the nouveau roman is cerebral, intellectual, dead.’

These are more common accusations against French culture. How do you feel about France?

‘Very ambivalent. I don’t like France very much, it’s too intellectual, too cultural for me. But I know the language, I have most of my contacts there, my Polish publisher Kultura is in Paris, I know my French translators, whose work I can correct myself. But I don’t like the country. I briefly visited Italy and I immediately liked it much better. Much more the South. I like the South, not the North. Argentina, that is a good country, I enjoyed it the most there, the lightness, the looseness. But now it doesn’t matter anymore, I’m old now.’

I had another question about your Paris-Berlin Diary. You are giving, I thought, a true account of your return to and your first year in Europe. But I noticed that several times you almost unnoticed leave the territory of credibility and describe a bizarre fantasy, as we know it from your work. For example, that sailor who swallows the end of a rope and is hoisted up the mast by the coils of his esophagus, or taking off your trousers during dinner with the French writers.

‘No, no, that is indeed a fantasy, the one about that dinner, of course! Also in my diaries I don’t stick strictly to reality, more, but not completely. And that sailor with that line ties in with an earlier story of mine, ‘Occurrences on the Schooner Banbury ‘, in which a similar episode occurs and in which I describe a boat trip to Argentina at a time, 1932, when I have not yet heard anything about my later Argentinian fate could know. So that was a prediction, a kind of clairvoyance, and because this was quite preoccupied with me at that moment, that story comes back to me: the simultaneity, the flow of time.’

Then your stage work. You know that Yvonne and Het Huwelijk will be played in the coming season in the Netherlands . It took a long time for your plays to be performed in Europe.

‘Yes, Yvonne dates from 1935 and has remained unplayed for almost thirty years. The Marriage , from 1945, was first performed in Paris in 1963, directed by Lavelli, and with great success. Since then, Yvonne has also played in France. Germany now follows suit, and last year there was a performance of The Wedding in Stockholm, directed by Sjöberg, which is said to have been the biggest theatrical event of the season. My theater was certainly ahead of its time. In all these years I have gone unnoticed as a playwright. But now I am suddenly a serious name in discussions about modern theatre, while a man like Lavelli has become a director of international significance thanks to his success.’

Have you seen performances of your own plays?

‘No, I was in Berlin for the performance of The Marriage in Paris, and vice versa. By the way, I’m not a theater fan at all, I prefer films, I’m a theater writer who doesn’t like theater.’

Finally, I would like to ask you whether you could come to the Netherlands on the occasion of the appearance of Kosmos and the performance of The Marriage.

‘No, that’s out of the question, my health absolutely doesn’t allow that.’

 

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Book

Witold Gombrowicz Pornografia
Grove Atlantic

‘An outlandish stylist, a provocative philosopher on youth and sexuality, and one of the indisputable totems of twentieth-century world literature, Witold Gombrowicz wrote Pornografia after leaving his native Poland for Argentina in 1939 and then watching from afar as the German invasion destroyed his country. Translated for the first time into English from the original Polish by award-winning translator Danuta Borchardt, Pornografia is one of Gombrowicz’s highest regarded works—a richly imagined tale of violence and carnality set in wartime Poland.
—-‘In the midst of the German occupation, two aging intellectuals travel to a farm in the countryside, looking for a respite from the hellish scene in Warsaw. They quickly grow bored of their bucolic surroundings—that is, until they are hypnotized by a pair of country youths who have grown up alongside each other: the betrothed daughter of the farm’s owner, and a young farmhand who has just returned from a stint in the Polish resistance. The older men are determined to orchestrate a tryst between the two teenagers, but they are soon distracted by a string of violent developments: the cold-blooded murder of the young girl’s future mother-in-law and, even more disturbing, an order that comes down from the leadership of the underground movement for the men at the farm to assassinate a rogue resistance captain who has sought refuge there. The erotic games are put on hold—until the two dissolute intellectuals find a way to involve their pawns in the murderous plot.’ — Grove Atlantic

 

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Excerpt

I’ll tell you about yet another adventure of mine, probably one of the most disastrous. At the time—the year was 1943—I was living in what was once Poland and what was once Warsaw, at the rock-bottom of an accomplished fact. Silence. The thinned-out bunch of companions and friends from the former cafés—the Zodiac, the Ziemiańska, the Ipsu—would gather in an apartment on Krucza Street and there, drinking, we tried hard to go on as artists, writers, and thinkers … picking up our old, earlier conversations and disputes about art. … Hey, hey, hey, to this day I see us sitting or lying around in thick cigarette smoke, this one somewhat skeleton-like, that one scarred, and all shouting, screaming. So this one was shouting: God, another: art, a third: the nation, a fourth: the proletariat, and so we debated furiously, and it went on and on—God, art, nation, proletariat—but one day a middle-aged guy turned up, dark and lean, with an aquiline nose and, observing all due formality, he introduced himself to everyone individually. After which he hardly spoke.

He scrupulously thanked us for the glass of vodka we offered him—and no less scrupulously he said: “I would also like to ask you for a match …” Whereupon he waited for the match, and he waited … and, when given it, he proceeded to light his cigarette. In the meantime the discussion raged—God, proletariat, nation, art—while the stench was peeking into our nostrils. Someone asked: “Fryderyk, sir, what winds have blown you here?”—to which he instantly gave an exhaustive reply: “I learned from Madame Ewa that Piętak frequently comes here, therefore I dropped in, since I have four rabbit pelts and the sole of a shoe.” And, to show that these were not empty words, he displayed the pelts, which had been wrapped in paper.

He was served tea, which he drank, but a piece of sugar remained on his little plate—so he reached for it to bring it to his mouth—but perhaps deeming this action not sufficiently justified, he withdrew his hand—yet withdrawing his hand was something even less justified—so he reached for the sugar again and ate it—but he probably ate it not so much for pleasure as merely for the sake of behaving properly … towards the sugar or towards us? … and wishing to erase this impression he coughed and, to justify the cough, he pulled out his handkerchief, but by now he didn’t dare wipe his nose—so he just moved his leg. Moving his leg presented him, it seemed, with new complications, so he fell silent and sat stock-still. This singular behavior (because he did nothing but “behave”, he incessantly “behaved”) aroused my curiosity even then, on first meeting him, and in the ensuing months I became close to this man, who actually turned out to be someone not lacking refinement, he was someone with experience in the realm of art as well (at one time he was involved in the theater). I don’t know … I don’t know … suffice it to say that we both became involved in a little business that provided us with a livelihood. Well, yes, but this did not last long, because one day I received a letter, a letter from a person known as Hipolit, Hipolit S., a landowner from the Sandomierz region, suggesting that we visit him—Hipolit also mentioned that he would like to discuss some of his Warsaw affairs in which we could be helpful to him. “Supposedly it’s peaceful here, nothing of note, but there are marauding bands, sometimes they attack, there’s a loosening of conduct, you know. Come, both of you, we’ll feel safer.”

Travel there? The two of us? I was beset by misgivings, difficult to express, about the two of us traveling … because to take him there with me, to the countryside, so that he could continue his game, well … And his body, that body so … “peculiar”? … To travel with him and ignore his untiring “silently-shouting impropriety”? … To burden myself with someone so “compromised and, as a result, so compromising”? … To expose myself to the ridicule of this stubbornly conducted “dialogue” … with … with whom actually? … And his “knowledge,” this knowledge of his about … ? And his cunning? And his ruses? Indeed, I didn’t relish the idea, but on the other hand he was so isolated from us in that eternal game of his … so separate from our collective drama, so disconnected from the discussion “nation, God, proletariat, art” … that I found it restful, it gave me some relief. … At the same time he was so irreproachable, and calm, and circumspect! Let’s go then, so much more pleasant for the two of us to go together! The outcome was that—we forced ourselves into a train compartment and bore our way into its crowded interior … until the train finally moved, grinding.

Three o’clock in the afternoon. Foggy. A hag’s torso splitting Fryderyk in half, a child’s leg riding onto his chin … and so he traveled … but he traveled, as always, correctly and with perfect manners. He was silent. I too was silent, the journey jerked us and threw us about, yet everything was as if set solid … but through a bit of the window I saw bluish-gray, sleeping fields that we rode into with a swaying rumble. … It was the same flat expanse I’ve seen so many times before, embraced by the horizon, the checkered land, a few trees flying by, a little house, outbuildings receding behind it … the same things as ever, things anticipated … Yet not the same! And not the same, just because the same! And unknown, and unintelligible, indeed, unfathomable, ungraspable! The child screamed, the hag sneezed …

The sour smell … The long-familiar, eternal wretchedness of a train ride, a stretch of sagging power lines, of a ditch, the sudden incursion of a tree into the window, a utility pole, a shed, the swift backward dash of everything, slipping away … while there, far, on the horizon a chimney or a hill … appeared and persisted for a long time, stubbornly, like a prevailing anxiety, a dominant anxiety … until, with a slow turning, it all fell into nothing. I had Fryderyk right in front of me, two other heads separating us, his head was close, close by, and I could see it—he was silent and riding on—while the presence of alien, brazen bodies, crawling and pressing on us, only deepened my tête-à-tête with him … without a word … so much so that, by the living God, I would have preferred not to be traveling with him, oh, that the idea of traveling together had never come to pass! Because, stuck in his corporality, he was one more body among other bodies, nothing more … but at the same time here he was … and somehow here he was, distinctly and unremittingly. … This was not to be dismissed—not to be discarded, disposed of, erased. Here he was in this crush and here he was. … And his ride, his onward rush in space, was beyond comparison with their ride—his was a much more significant ride, even sinister perhaps. …

From time to time he smiled at me and said something—probably just to make it bearable for me to be with him and make his presence less oppressive. I realized that pulling him out of the city, casting him onto these out-of-Warsaw spaces, was a risky undertaking … because, against the background of these expanses, his singular inner quality would necessarily resound more powerfully … and he himself knew it, since I had never seen him more subdued, insignificant. At a certain moment the dusk, the substance that consumes form, began gradually to erase him, and he became indistinct in the speeding and shaking train that was riding into the night, inducing nonexistence. Yet this did not weaken his presence, which became merely less accessible to the eye: he lurked behind the veil of nonseeing, still the same. Suddenly lights came on and pulled him back into the open, exposing his chin, the corners of his tightly drawn mouth, his ears. … He, nonetheless, did not twitch, he stood with his eyes fixed on a string that was swaying, and he just was! The train stopped again, somewhere behind me the shuffling of feet, the crowd reeling, something must be happening—and he just was and was! We begin moving, it’s night outside, the locomotive flares out sparks, the compartments’ journey becomes nocturnal—why on earth have I brought him with me? Why have I burdened myself with his company, which, instead of unburdening me, burdened me? The journey lasted many listless hours, interspersed with stops, until finally it became a journey for journey’s sake, somnolent, stubborn, and so we rode until we reached Ćmielowo and, with our suitcases, we found ourselves on a footpath running along the train track, the train’s disappearing string of cars in the clangor dying away. Then silence, a mysterious breeze, and stars. A cricket.

I, extricated from many hours of motion, of crowding, was suddenly set down on this little footpath—next to me Fryderyk, his coat on his arm, totally silent and standing—Where were we? What was this? I knew this area, the breeze was not foreign to me—but where were we? There, diagonally across, was the familiar building of the Ćmielowo train station and a few lamps shining, yet … where, on what planet, had we landed? Fryderyk stood next to me and just stood. We began to move toward the station, he behind me, and here are a carriage, horses, a coachman—the familiar carriage and the coachman’s familiar raising of his cap, why then am I watching it all so stubbornly? … I climb up, Fryderyk after me, we ride, a sandy road by the light of a dark sky, the blackness of a tree or of a bush floats in from the sides, we drive into the village of Brzustowa, the boards glow with whitewash, a dog is barking … mysterious … in front of me the coachman’s back … mysterious … and next to me this man who is silently, affably accompanying me. The invisible ground at times rocked our vehicle, at times shook it, while caverns of darkness, the thickening murkiness among the trees, obstructed our vision. I talked to the coachman just to hear my own voice:

“Well, how’s it going? Is it peaceful over your way?”

And I heard him say:

“It’s peaceful for the moment. There are gangs in the forests. … But nothing special lately. …”

The face invisible, the voice the same—yet not the same. In front of me only his back—and I was about to lean forward to look into the eyes of his back, but I stopped short … because Fryderyk … was indeed here, next to me. And he was immensely silent. With him next to me, I preferred not to look anyone in the face … because I suddenly realized that this something sitting next to me is radical in its silence, radical to the point of frenzy! Yes, he was an extremist! Reckless in the extreme! No, this was not an ordinary being but something more rapacious, strained by an extremity about which thus far I had no idea! So I preferred not to look in the face—of anyone, not even the coachman’s, whose back weighed me down like a mountain, while the invisible earth rocked the carriage, shook it, and the surrounding darkness, sparkling with stars, sucked out all vision. The remainder of the journey passed without a word. We finally rolled into an avenue, the horses moved more briskly—then the gate, the caretaker, and the dogs—the locked house and the heavy grating of its unlocking—Hipolit with a lamp …

“Well, thank God you’re here!”

Was it he or not? The bloated redness of his cheeks, bursting, struck me and repelled me. … He seemed to be generally bursting with edema, which made everything in him expand enormously and grow in all directions, the awful blubber of his body was like a volcano disgorging flesh … in knee boots, he stretched out his apocalyptic paws, and his eyes peeped from his body as if through a porthole. Yet he wanted to be close to me, he hugged me. He whispered bashfully:

“I’m all bloated … devil only knows … I’ve grown fat. From what? Probably from everything.”

And looking at his thick fingers he repeated with boundless anguish, more softly, to himself:

“I’ve grown fat. From what? Probably from everything.”

Then he bellowed:

“And this is my wife!”

Then he muttered for his own benefit:

“And this is my wife.”

Then he screamed:

“And this is my Henia, Hennie, Hennie-girl!”

Then he repeated, to himself, barely audibly:

“And this is Henia, Hennie, Hennie-girl!”

He turned to us, hospitably, his manner refined: “How good of you to come, but please, Witold, introduce me to your friend …” He stopped, closed his eyes, and kept repeating … his lips moved. Fryderyk, courteous in the extreme, kissed the hand of the hostess, whose melancholy was embellished with a faraway smile, whose litheness fluttered lightly … and the whirl of connecting, introducing us into the house, sitting, conversing, drew us in—after that journey without end—the light of the lamp induced a dreamy mood. Supper, served by a butler. We were overcome with sleep. Vodka. Struggling against sleep, we tried to listen, to grasp, there was talk of aggravation by the Underground Army on the one hand, by the Germans on the other, by gangs, by the administration, by the Polish police, and seizures—talk of rampant fears and rapes … to which the shutters, secured with additional iron bars, bore witness, as did the blockading of side doors … the locking and bunging up with iron. “They burned down Sieniechów, they broke the legs of the overseer of the farm laborers in Rudniki, I had people here who were displaced from the Poznań region, what’s worse, we know nothing of what’s happening in Ostrowiec, in Bodzechów with its factory settlements, everybody’s just waiting, ears to the ground, for the time being it’s quiet, but everything will come crashing down when the front comes closer … Crashing down! Well, sir, there will be carnage, an eruption, ugly business! It will be an ugly business!” he bellowed and then muttered to himself, absorbed in thought:

“An ugly business.”

And he bellowed:

“The worst of it is there’s no place to run!”

And he whispered:

“The worst of it is there’s no place to run!”

But here’s the lamp. Supper. Sleepiness. Hipolit’s enormousness besmeared with a thick sauce of sleep, the lady of the house is here as well, dissolving in her remoteness, and Fryderyk, and moths hitting the lamp, moths inside the lamp, moths around the lamp, and the stairs winding upward, a candle, I fall onto my bed, I’m falling asleep. The following day there’s a triangle of sunlight on the wall. Someone’s voice outside the window. I rose from my bed and opened the shutters. Morning.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Steve Erickson, Yikes. Yeah, that’s why whenever I have a health issue when visiting the US I wait until I’m back here to get it looked at. I’ll seek out that Joe D’Amato film, thanks. Sounds quite doable. ** Charalampos, My total pleasure on the successful Pollard rec. Anytime. Interesting about Samson deBrier. I guess I never cottoned to the names of the ‘Pleasure Dome’ performers, even thogh it’s my favorite Anger. I do not look forward one little bit to being on Instagram, but the future is always full of surprises. Happy b’day to your mom a little late. Love from thus far not rainy for once Paris. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Awesome! I’m gonna find those magic sand videos as soon as I get a decent film work bteak because that sounds like a very lustrous viewing experience. Ha ha, yeah, love may have to find you an instrumental track. Interesting. Today I give love the workmanlike task of making a big Zoom business meeting about the film today not turn into an ugly shitshow, and it definitely may need love to prevent that, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Trash’ is a blast. Whatcha gonna put in that mug? Or does it being empty increase the luck? ** Jack Skelley, Jack of All Trades. Cool, I’ll read that article. I’m in my usual rush to get to work, but later is in the offing. I’m going to do my utmost to just stop into Instagram long enough to post something and then vamoose. We’ll see. Yours, Freddie Kruger. ** Misanthrope, Dude, keep that up and you may have to change your screen name. Just saying. ** Mark, Hi. I, in fact, have that very zine sitting on my desk, not, oh, even 6 inches from my very nose. If that post hadn’t been from many years ago, I would’ve scanned it to use the shebang. Everyone, If you need more Holly Woodlawn, and trust me, you do, plus her compadre Joe Dallesandro, you are hereby highly encouraged to pick up Mark’s crazy great zine about the vaunted duo, which you can find and order right here. ** Justin, Cool that you understand my ‘Salo’ trepidation. I do think that: that the novel itself is just the drug that makes the novel possible. I wish more writers thought about their work that way. How’s ‘All of Us Strangers’? I hear a lot of good about it, but I’m trepidatious re: it, I don’t know why. I guess because of all the hype. When’s the last time hype attached itself to something actually great, I wonder? ** Guy, Hi! Well, Japanese sword class definitely counts as exciting. Wow. And your instructor’s visual attributes don’t hurt either. Wild, cool. Oh, I’m an absolutely terrible flirter. I have no idea how to flirt. Never have. I don’t even know how to be flirted with successfully. I understand that relaxing and exuding confidence works pretty well? Good luck. Anyway, that’s such an interesting thing you’re doing. Hm, I’m so locked down with finishing the film every day that almost nothing else is going on. And that’s exciting. But tedious. So, it’s a kind of complicated excitement. My favorite pizza restaurant, which I had thought went out of business, just magically reopened, so I’m excited to eat a pizza there. That’s a pretty lowkey excitement thing, but it’ll do for now. What are you doing when you’re not swinging a sword around? ** Darby 🔥🔥, Yeah, no dung beetle today. I am going to try to make that post, but it’s a labor intensive once, so I think it’ll have to wait at least a couple of weeks because my post-making time is severely hampered by the film stuff for now. Oh, shit, really, you may have to move out? That’s stressful. What happened? Where did you go if you had to move? I have an annoying back too. Lifelong. I grew too fast when I was around 11 years old, and my spine didn’t develop properly. It’s not a huge deal, and it doesn’t look weird or anything, but my back is always annoying me. Me, I’m really just going to be working on the film and not much for the next couple of weeks. I might eat some okay food. A lentil burger sounds so good. I’m gonna find one. I hope today goes okay and much better for you, my pal. ** Uday, Cool, happy to help fill in the blank. The writer C Carr, who wrote the Wojnarowicz bio, has a big bio of Candy Darling coming out soon that I’m excited about. Oh shit, about the racism imposition. I’m so sorry. People can so fucking idiotic sometimes. It’s just fear, but you know that. Have the best day you can. ** Right. Perhaps you know or do not know today’s spotlit novel by the great, misanthropic novelist Witold Gombrowicz, whose diaries are also scabrous fun. Anyway, that’s what I’ve put before you today. See you tomorrow.