‘Alan Burns is one of the most challengingly innovative novelists in contemporary British fiction. Inspired by painters, he strives to create what René Magritte once described as the “magic of unforeseen affinities” by means of a collage, cut-up technique that he attributes to the fiction of William Burroughs. The result is a surreal assemblage of events, images, even syntactical arrangements that challenge the reader’s comfortable assumptions about what a novel is or can be. Burns possesses a thoroughly original voice.

‘Burns was born in London on 29 December 1929 into the middle-class family of Harold and Anne Marks Burns and educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School. When he was thirteen his mother died, and his older brother died two years later; both deaths profoundly affected him both emotionally and artistically. Burns has described the impact of these separations: “The consuming nature of this experience showed itself not only in the disconnected form but also in the content of my ‘work.'” The most obvious treatment of these experiences is in Buster (1972; originally published in New Writers, 1961); however, the theme of death pervades all his novels. From 1949 to 1951, Burns served in the Royal Army Education Corps, stationed at Salisbury Plain. After his discharge he traveled through Europe; he married Carol Lynn in 1954. He was called to the Bar in 1956 and practiced as a London barrister until 1959, when he spent a year as a postgraduate researcher in politics at the London School of Economics. For the next three years Burns was assistant legal manager for Beaverbrook Newspapers, “vetting [appraising] copy for libel and copyright.”

‘While walking down Carey Street on his lunch hour one day he saw, in a jeweler’s window, a photograph of a man and woman kissing, which reminded him of a photo of his mother and father on their honeymoon. Having previously felt stymied in his attempts to write, Burns describes the artistic significance of this moment: “I understood in literary terms, the value of the image because I saw that I didn’t have to grapple, as it were in essay form, with the endless complexities and significances of the love and other feelings that existed between my mother and father, and what they meant to me. I could let it all go by the board, let it take care of itself; I could, in the time-honoured phrase, show, not tell. . . . I could tell this story in a series of photographs, which is to say, a series of images, and let the stories emerge and the ideas emerge from that series of fragments, and that’s how I found myself able to write that first book, Buster.”

‘Although quite different from the novels that follow it, Buster suggests some of the fictional concerns and techniques Burns employs in all his works. Central to his fictions is the technique of fragmentation, and although Buster is more conventional than any of his other novels, it too employs a limited form of fragmentation. Events in the work follow one another rapidly, and the temporal links between incidents are implied more than they are stated. The effect is one of an associative rather than a temporal pattern of organization.

‘In Europe after the Rain the domestic theme reappears, but in a less evident way than in many of Burns’s other works. Although the narrator is the focus of the novel, the reader knows less about his family than that of the nameless girl for whom he searches. Like the children in Burns’s other works, she has been separated from her father (here by the leader of an opposing political faction), and her eventual reunion with him leads not to a new life but to a physical decline. Family is finally an ineffective alternative to the violence and chaos of this world and may perhaps even contribute to the widespread devastation.

‘As in Buster, the images of death in this second novel are compelling and abundant. Burns renders these events with detailed precision, in a thoroughly prosaic tone. The disturbing quality of a passage such as the following stems not only from its graphic nature but, more important, from the matter-of-fact manner in which the narrator relates such carnage: “Disturbed, she gave the cry, went up to the body and touched it, dragged it down as the others crowded round, clamoured for it, each one desperate for it. She wrenched off the leg, jabbed it, thick end first, into her mouth, tried hard to swallow it, could not get it down, the thicker part became less visible, there was nothing but the foot, she twisted off the protruding foot.” Critical reaction to Europe after the Rain was mixed, as it would be toward many of Burns’s later novels.

‘All of Burns’s emphasis on fragmentation, the cut-up method, surreal intrusions, and wild juxtapositions may suggest rather formidable reading. After all, Burns has admitted that he wants “to shock readers into a new awareness” and that he seeks “to work more like a painter than a writer; place images side by side and let them say something uncertain and fluctuating. This work will not be literary and will not lead to discussion or redefinition, but simply exist–like a Magritte painting.” Such remarks may give the impression of an utterly anarchic art, but this is not the case.

‘At the heart of these methods of fictional disorientation is Burns’s resistance to traditional notions of the novel and his rejection of any idea of the genre as being an inflexible monolith of changeless features. “The great attraction of the novel,” he has said, “lies in its search for form. The secret may lie in the word novel itself. If it’s new, then it’s novel.” Thus the novel, in his view, is malleable and accommodating to the mutable nature of a writer’s and audience’s perceptions, and by insisting that it shares in the characteristics of painting, Burns reveals his adamant concern for hard, concrete prose, a prose that is nearly palpable and strongly visual. Scenes and chapters often have an almost independent relationship with their larger narrative, which is nowhere more obvious than in Babel.

‘Burns is also a writer of strong ideological convictions that, while deeply held, never prompt him to lapse into didactic preaching. His political beliefs and his aesthetic proclivities underscore a deeply humanist point of view. “It sounds pathetic–this avant-garde novelist wanting to change the world–but I do, I simply want to leave it a little bit better.” Burns is a champion of individual freedom and consistently attempts to reveal those forces that would stunt or limit expressions of individuality. As he explains, “Like others, I have in a way been writing and rewriting the same basic book, again and again. All that material about the recurrent father figures, and the father-State, and the absent mother, and the young man dead.” Such a characterization might imply simple repetition, yet what this description reveals is the consistency of his vision and his steadfast dedication to opposing the most destructive tendencies of human beings.’ — David W. Madden

 

___
Further

Alan Burns Bio & Info Page
Alan Burns Obituary
Alan Burns @ goodreads
Alan Burns interviews JG Ballard
Europe After the Rain: Alan Burns and the Post-War Avant-Garde
Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition With A Difference
Alan Burns, Ian McEwan, and the Lasting Legacies of Postwar British Experimental Fiction
Identity and Alan Burns
Alan Burns Biography
Buy ‘Europe After the Rain’

 

___
Covers & Interiors

 

____
Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

David Madden: Europe after the Rain works on the reader in strange and unexpected ways. For instance, the reader begins fearing for the girl and sympathizing with her concern over her lost father, only to discover their moral ambiguity. Were you seeking such an ambiguity?

Alan Burns: I don’t seek a quality such as “moral ambiguity” in a character (I doubt that any novelist does). I follow a character and try to find out who she is. That of course is why it is necessary to test a character, compel her to make choices, so that she reveals who she is. (When Anna Karenina decides to leave her husband for her lover, Tolstoy has her go upstairs to her child’s bedroom, see the child asleep (maybe for Anna the last time) and still go through with her flight. Thus Anna, and the reader, are put through hell: we don’t merely know about, we suffer through the experience of her “moral ambiguity.”) Needless to say I’m not making comparisons between the two novels, still less the two authors . . . Another source of “moral” and numerous other ambiguities in my characters generally is my awareness of contradictions within characters and between them. As soon as I become aware of a certain characteristic, I instinctively look for an opportunity to show its opposite. For the brave to show fear, the innocent guile, the timorous courage, and so on. An example of this is early in Celebrations where Williams is given one blue eye and one brown.

DM: Could you discuss your view of the connection between the novel and Max Ernst’s painting of the same name?

AB: Some months after I’d started writing Europe (but before I’d found a title), I chanced upon a reproduction of the painting in a book on Ernst: I instantly recognized the very landscape I was—in my way—”painting.” I knew I had a title—and a book jacket too! Beyond that, however, I can’t say that I studied the painting particularly closely, though I think I always had it somewhere at the back of my mind. It was not until I was writing the last chapter of Revolutions of the Night that I did look intensely at the Ernst painting and made as precise and passionate a word picture of it as I could. Some years after Europe was published, I saw the original at an Ernst retrospective at the Tate in London, and was disappointed to see how small and seeming-not-so-powerful it was. In reproduction it makes the impact of a colossal work of art, not so in the original.

DM: A feature I’ve noticed in this and others of your novels is a slippery quality, even a vagueness about large issues of plot or character motivation (for instance, the reasons for the father’s fall from grace) while details of appearance or descriptions are minutely and exactingly precise. Can you explain the idea or purpose behind this paradoxical method? Might this be explained in part by what you described in the essay in Beyond the Words as the “distanced technique of writing from the unconscious”?

AB: I like that phrase “slippery quality.” Elusive, yes, it’s yet another aspect of my wish to avoid any suggestion of an absolute, purportedly “accurate” statement as to what happened or where we are or what role a particular character plays in the novel. Look again, and—see, it ain’t so—the opposite may as well be true. As soon as the reader is beginning to feel secure in the world I’ve made for him, it “slips,” he slithers; me too. There’s also a strong element of doubt; that’s part of it too. Some absurdist stuff as well, yet I temper that tendency with a genuine, even passionate, humanism. With nuclear bombs around, we must be careful not to get too far gone into the irrational—and when I yap about “instinct,” I’m also aware, of the fascists’ appeal to “gut feelings” and so on . . . so it ain’t easy to get it right.

So, for example, and to get back from vague philosophizing to the novels, while I go for the “slippery,” I’m concerned by your reference to vague character motivation. I’d want the father’s fall from grace to be not arbitrary or author-driven but fully motivated in the traditional sense. In fact, I suggest that his “fall from grace” is largely accounted for by the simple notion that “power corrupts”—see the heavily ironic paragraph that starts, “The father received me in his spacious and magnificent apartment” and later the (probably too bare) statement that the father was “growing senile.” Final word on “slippery”—it’s close to the “precarious” dream.

DM: There are no names for any of the characters and thus pronoun references are sometimes vague. Why are identities so deliberately elusive?

AB: I could not find the “right” names . . . something connected with Kafka’s “Joseph K.” I regret pronoun uncertainties and would want to correct them, but there it is.

DM: Don’t you think, though, that this nameless quality is exactly appropriate for this blasted place; it enhances the shadowy quality and the ambiguity that pervades so much of the book? Was this namelessness deliberate on your part?

AB: I think you put it perfectly, and I now adopt your formulation as my answer to your question (I particularly like “this blasted place”—with Lear nudging in there). “Namelessness” also reminds me of Wilson Harris—see p. 58 of The Imagination. My only quarrel is with your word deliberate, as you know. I feel the word is inappropriate, because it implies a degree of control I deliberately (!) eschew.

DM: Explain the narrator’s presence in this world of military conflict. He has access to both commanders of the warring sides, yet he is seemingly outside the fray (though it appears he destroys the reconstructed bridge at the end of chapter 11). He talks of his job, but what is it? Is he a journalist, or is his “job” or purpose more subtle and perhaps even metaphysical?

AB: The narrator’s uncertain role and status is vital in maintaining the novel’s precariousness and ambiguity. Give him a job, and the novel becomes more reportage—everything would have been watertight, rational, the reader would demand it. But I have made a contract with the reader that allows me the freedom to slip in and out of the rational. That has to be established from the start and iterated and reiterated (implicitly, by conduct) consistently throughout. A key passage reads, “I changed my life. I went among the prisoners taken to the camp for labour purposes. I wanted to make certain, I wanted to get inside, I knew the language, I wanted to learn more, suddenly . . . My work was in that place. . . .” Remember, his work at that point is assassination.

DM: John Hall in the Guardian mentions Burroughs’s cut-up tech-nique as being yours also. Was Europe written as a series of fragments “synthesi[zed and] shuffle[ed] . . . so that they form new associations and build up fresh nuclei of meaning”?

AB: Yes, that quote applies to the writing of Europe and my other novels. I had not read Burroughs then, nor heard of his “cut-up” technique. I did not actually use scissors, but I folded pages, read across columns, and so on, discovering for myself many of the techniques Burroughs and Gysin describe in The Third Mind and elsewhere.

DM: Given Hall’s quote and what I see as numerous echoes of Beckett in your work, have you or do you have affinities with existentialist thinking?

AB: I have only dipped into Being and Nothingness, but Nausea much impressed and maybe influenced me, along with Camus. As for Beckett, I delighted in Murphy, Watt, and a couple others, and Godot, Endgame, and more. However, The Unnameable I call The Unreadable. Like Joyce, Beckett extended the range of the possible. He is somewhere there in my mind when I’m working, but I don’t quite know where.

 

___
Book

Alan Burns Europe after the Rain
John Calder Publications

‘Europe after the Rain takes its title from Max Ernst’s surrealist work, which depicts a vision of rampant destruction – a theme which Burns here takes to its conclusion, showing man not merely trying to come to terms with desolation, but combating human cruelty with that resilience of spirit without which survival would be impossible. The Europe through which the unnamed narrator travels is a devastated world, twisted and misshapen, both geographically and morally, and he is forced to witness terrible sights, to which he brings an interested apathy, without ever succumbing to despair or cynicism.

‘Upon the novel’s first publication, Burns was heralded as presenting a picture of his age and capturing the ‘collective unconscious’ of the twentieth century – in a language that can have few rivals for economy, beauty and rhythm. His austere sentences glow with intelligence, colour and force, and evoke a powerful image for the modern reader of fears every bit as relevant today as on the day when they were written.’ — JCP

 

_____
Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I only really vaguely know Cole Porter’s stuff, but, yes, happy b’day. ** tomk, Hi, Tom! How cool that the post lined up with your novel’s quest. That’s kind of the ultimate blog hope. I don’t know what Kevin’s fave is. If he contacts me again and says, I’ll pass it along. There were only two games I sought that were actually playable for me on my equipment, ‘GPT Adventure’, which was interesting, and ‘Wallpaper’, which was quite, quite good. Take care, pal. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yeah, they’re kind of beyond mere games or something. Like sit down Raves or something almost. Wonderful, that feedback on your piece. Definitely take that to heart and keep going with it. Cool. ** Sypha, Hi. I wondered, yes. That’s a nice Swans era, ‘Greed/Holy Money’. Except for that one unfortunate foray into the major labels — that album with the Mapplethorpe cover, which I thought was kind of a disaster — I like everything up through ‘White Light … ‘. Maybe a bit after. ** Tosh Berman, ‘Kids’ is a siren, for sure. I intend to play it somehow somewhere. I think your theory on Sparks makes utter and absolute sense. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Yeah, I too want to give ‘Kids’ a go. I played ‘Wallpaper’ on my Mac, so I guess there’s a way. I don’t remember it being all that tricky to find, but I don’t remember how I found it. Ah, the innocent days when Jimmy McNichol could be a semi-star for a brief time. ** Ferdinand, Gaming is a commitment. Like TV series. I learn so much from them. Great, thank you so much about the Darkentries Records post! Very excited to get and build and explore it. ** Misanthrope, I saw the pix. They’re wunderbar! And their old Brownie camera washed out look is beautiful. Nice park. All those slides. That one in the snowy mountain looked especially yum. Thanks for going to that trouble, man. ** Steve Erickson, The new Sparks is excellent, maybe the best among their most recent post-‘Lil Beethoven’ albums. Everyone, Mr. Erickson reviews the new Run the Jewels album right about here. Good luck with the single note music piece. Yes, there have been the rare artists who made one note seem symphonic. Wow, Buy Muy Drugs, that’s a flashback. Is the 4-part video up? Wait, I can find out for myself, duh. ** Right. A couple of weeks ago a fine fella, writer, d.l. and so on mentioned Alan Burns in the comments, which occasioned me realising I had never focused on Burns’ really excellent and very undervalued fiction, and today is the day that I rectify that neglect. Explore and enjoy yourselves, please. See you tomorrow.

 

‘A muse to both Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard, Anne Wiazemsky turned from screen acting to become a prize-winning novelist, and in the last year of her life saw herself portrayed on the screen. It’s the kind of career not so surprising in as cinephile a country as France, where the divisions between life, cinema and literature are frequently blurred.

‘Wiazemsky’s childhood was spent in a variety of countries, as her father was a former Russian aristocrat turned diplomat. Her mother was the daughter of Nobel Prize-winning writer Francois Mauriac. Once settled in Paris, the teenage Anne was introduced to Robert Bresson by her schoolfriend Florence Delay – who had been his Joan of Arc. Wiazemsky’s introspective, pensive nature, which could suggest both fragility and strength, led the master to cast her in Au hazard Balthazar (1966), which tells of the often oppressive life of a donkey and its most devoted owner, Marie, a shy country girl. For Bresson, Wiazemsky’s passivity matched entirely his preference for ‘models’ over ‘actors’: “She is Marie because she accepts simply to be herself without bringing intent or psychology to the role.” Marie’s suffering is the more moving for Wiazemsky’s lack of histrionics, and Bresson’s camera frequently frames her with a saintly aura.

‘During filming, Wiazemsky was visited by Jean-Luc Godard, to whom she had written a passionate fan letter. In 1967, he married his “animal-flower”, and cast her in a number of his films, most notably as the Maoist student in La Chinoise (1967). Shooting in their Parisian apartment, Godard played with the dichotomy between hardline political pronouncements and his wife’s physical delicacy. While together they engaged with the revolutionary events of 1968, gradually Wiazemsky took against her husband’s stance, and they lived apart in the 70s until their eventual divorce.

‘If in her films for Godard Wiazemsky seemed to be following the puppet master’s dictates, more interesting roles were offered by Italian directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Marco Ferreri. In Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) she was perfect as the sexually gauche daughter of the bourgeois family turned upside down by the erotic presence of Terence Stamp. Never a career actress, Wiazemsky took ever smaller parts, bowing out in films by Philippe Garrel and André Téchiné.

‘In the 1990s, she turned to literature, and with the encouragement of Jacques Fieschi had her novels published. Canines (1993) won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Controversy came her way with Jeune Fille (2007), which though described as a ‘roman’ (novel) was a flagrantly autobiographical account of the filming of Au hazard Balthazar, during which an infatuated Bresson (almost 50 years her senior) became painfully possessive of the young girl.

‘She followed this with Une annee studieuse (2012) and Un an après (2015), in which she described her passionate life with Godard. When the director of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius, approached her to make his film Redoubtable (2017) from the latter book, she gave her blessing once it was established they both agreed it should be treated as a comedy, and attended the Cannes premiere to prove her commitment. Only in France.’ — David Thompson

 

___
Stills

 

____
Further

Anne Wiazemsky @ IMDb
Anne Wiazemsky: a haunting, humane star who helped France discover itself
Anne Wiazemsky obituary
Mort d’Anne Wiazemsky : sa dernière interview
Radical Presence: Anne Wiazemsky
Anne Wiazemsky: French actress, novelist and inspiration to French new wave directors
La romancière et actrice Anne Wiazemsky est morte
Quand Vogue Paris rend hommage à Anne Wiazemsky, l’amoureuse
Disparition d’Anne Wiazemsky
A Bio-Pic of Jean-Luc Godard and His Second Wife, Anne Wiazemsky, That Betrays Its Source Material
Anne Wiazemsky: The Muse Become Creator
Anne Wiazemsky, French writer, actress and Godard muse, dies at 70
Anne Wiazemsky, 1947–2017
Anne Wiazemsky: the woman who mused back

 

____
Extras

Hommage à Anne Wiazemsky

Dialogues avec Anne Wiazemsky

Anne Wiazemsky évoque le père Deau dans «Un saint homme»

Anne Wiazemsky “Mon amour pour Jean-Luc Godard”

 

____
Prisoner of Bresson
by Dave Kehr

 

Anne Wiazemsky was a 17-year-old nonprofessional when Robert Bresson asked her to play the leading role in ”Au Hasard Balthazar,” the 1966 film that is now widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of that French director.

”When I first met him, I was very much impressed and fell very much under his charm,” Ms. Wiazemsky recalled, speaking in French from her home in Paris. ”Because, even if he was an older man, he was really very, very handsome. He spoke very softly, with a slight stutter, and that made me laugh — the seriousness of his speech, the beauty of this man, and then his little stutter. That made me feel at ease with him right away.”

Ms. Wiazemsky met Bresson through the actress Florence Delay, who (under the name of Florence Carrez) had played the central role in Bresson’s 1962 film ”Trial of Joan of Arc.” Bresson cast Ms. Wiazemsky immediately, and given her ethereal, angelic beauty, it is not difficult to see why he replaced another actress who had already been selected for the role.

”She lost the film because of me,” she said, ”and I still feel a pang of regret for that unknown girl.”

During the filming, ”I lived with him, I ate with him away from the crew,” Ms. Wiazemsky recalled. ”I was his prisoner, but a happy one.” Bresson, who liked to refer to his actors as ”models,” militated against conventionally expressive film acting. He liked his performers to be as neutral and noninterpretive as possible. ”I was already what he was looking for,” she said, ”because I naturally have a very flat voice. He never had to direct my line readings as he had to, a great deal, with the others. And so I did very few takes compared with the other actors, 5 or 6 instead of 50 or 60.

”I was just emerging from adolescence,” Ms. Wiazemsky said, ”and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. It was very reassuring to be in the hands of someone who seemed to know everything. And when I decided to continue as an actress, it was largely because of the pleasure that experience gave me — of being an instrument in someone else’s hands, at the service of someone else’s desire.”

 

______________
13 of Anne Wiazemsky’s 44 roles

______________
Robert Bresson Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
‘In 1965, young French acting aspirant Anne Wiazemsky was asked by celebrated auteur Robert Bresson to star in his forthcoming film, Au Hasard Balthazar, the austere, heart-wrenching tale of a donkey, and Marie, the farm girl who loves him. “At the age of 17 I was chosen,” she would go on to say of the part that launched her to worldwide fame upon the film’s release the following year. During the shoot, Jean-Luc Godard, whose work Wiazemsky much admired, visited the set and the duo fell in love. To Bresson’s presumed dismay – it is well known that he himself proposed to the auburn-haired beauty multiple times during filming – she and Godard were married shortly afterwards, and Wiazemsky would go on to star in a number of the director’s movies, securing her title as the face of French New Wave cinema.’ — AnOther

Trailer

Excerpt

 

________________
Jean-Luc Godard La Chinoise (1967)
‘Godard’s second masterpiece of 1967 – the first being Week End – is a brisk social satire on the nature of petty bourgeois revolutionaries playing terrorists from the comfort of their parent’s suburban apartment building, presented in the form of an infernal parody of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1872). The film is famous for two reasons; firstly for predicting the eventual mood and political atmosphere of the events of the following year – with French university students plotting a course for political action and enforced revolution in a way that is highly reminiscent of the eventual proceedings of May, 1968 – and secondly for Godard’s increasingly confrontational style of film-making; with his continual experiments with Brechtian inspired alienation techniques employed alongside the once radical appropriation of abstract design concepts, pop art and psychedelia.’ — Three Sad Tigers

Trailer

Excerpt

 

______________
Jean-Luc Godard Week End (1967)
‘This scathing late-sixties satire from Jean-Luc Godard is one of cinema’s great anarchic works. Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. Featuring a justly famous sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam, and rich with historical and literary references, Weekend is a surreally funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society reverting to savagery, and— according to the credits—the end of cinema itself.’ — The Criterion Collection

Trailer

Excerpt

 

_______________
Pier Paolo Pasolini Teorema (1968)
‘A mysterious, irresistible stranger (Terence Stamp) drops into the sterile, orderly home of a Milanese industrialist, then proceeds to methodically seduce the patriarch and his entire family in Pasolini’s perverse masterwork, as simple in structure as it is endlessly beguiling in execution. Italian stars Massimo Girotti and Silvana Mangano are heads of the household, but it is the blue-eyed Christ-devil Stamp and his painted-on slacks that reign here, exerting control over father, mother, and daughter Anne Wiazemsky in turn. The dialogue is sparse, but Ennio Morricone’s score speaks volumes.’ — Metrograph

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

_____________
Pier Paolo Pasolini Pigsty (1969)
‘In her second film for Pasolini, one of five features that she appeared in during a busy year, Wiazemsky again plays opposite Jean-Pierre Léaud. The duo feature in a contemporary narrative (intercut with a medieval-set scenario starring Pierre Clémenti as a not-so-fine young cannibal), in which Léaud’s conflicts over his rich German family’s wartime past lead him to forsake trying-to-make-it-work girlfriend Wiazemsky in favor of rutting with pigs.’ — Luce Cinecittà

Trailer

Excerpt

 

_____________
Carmelo Bene Capricci (1969)
‘Articulated around two parallel series of events that constantly interfere with each other, the film demolishes any sequential concatenation. On one side is a painter of ‘poisoned Christs’ and on the other is a poet (Bene) and his partner (Anne Wiazemsky) orchestrating his suicidal tendencies in a self-destructive performance of car crashes (anticipating Ballard’s musings on the carnality of automobiles). Fierce parody of the then fashionable dilemma of art vs. life, Capricci sees and films destruction as the last possibility for creation, savaging all that is emotionally blackmailing and institutional within the frame to expose “the total void of art.” Cradled by an intoxicating choreography of meaningless eloquence, the victims of this crash between instinct and art are the codes of realism and the assertive nature of images.’ — MUBI

the entirety

 

________________
Marco Ferreri Il seme dell’uomo (1969)
‘”The Seed of Man,” which I could only find in Italian without English subtitles (I understand some Italian, but this isn’t a movie where the dialogue is terribly important), is typical of many Ferreri films: Striking in concept, middling in execution. It’s lively enough considering that not much “happens,” and the leads are agreeable, but there are too many scenes of them simply gamboling about, and the bemused, leisurely tenor isn’t close enough to either satire or tragedy for the overall sociopolitical commentary to have any great impact. Still, it’s a quirky movie from an always-interesting (at least in theory if not always practice) filmmaker, and if like me you get a kick out of such late 60s/early 70s projects that no one in their right mind would have funded at any other moment in time, “Seed” is certainly worth a look.’ — ofumalow

Excerpt

 

_____________
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin Tout va bien (1972)
‘”If you use stars, people will give you money.” And so Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin went to work on what would be their first commercial narrative feature since coming together to form the radical Dziga-Vertov-Group filmmaking collective in the aftermath of May ’68. Enter Yves Montand and Jane Fonda as the stars, the latter of whose public support for the militant cause could serve as mutually beneficial for her own revolutionary credentials and for the publicity of Godard and Gorin’s film itself. Tout va bien [Everything’s Going Fine] places Fonda and Montand in the roles of Her and Him, that is, a modern couple representative of the middle-class global bourgeoisie circa 1972. She’s a radio journalist at the French bureau of the American Broadcasting System; he’s an advertisement director who before ’68’s social upheavals served as a Nouvelle Vague screenwriter. Through Fonda’s and Montand’s star-personas, Godard and Gorin investigate ‘how the sausage is made’, both metaphorically (movie financing) and literally (industrial food processing), in the process questioning what it means to be involved or ‘engaged’ socially, politically, and romantically. Taking a cue from the tricolour of the French flag, Godard and Gorin adopt the language of Frank Tashlin to discover whether or not, four years on, May ’68’s revolutionary spirit has not already been perverted into a living pop-art Looney Tunes, with society having finally transformed into a playground of consumption and commodity. With its bravura scenes of a factory cross-sectioned like a dollhouse (a nod to Tashlin-protégé Jerry Lewis’s film The Ladies Man) and an oscillating supermarket tracking-shot (one of many quotations of Godard’s ’60s work such as Weekend, La chinoise, Le mépris, and À bout de souffle), Tout va bien remains a vital film of the 1970s — and for a world gone out-of-control.’ — Arrow Films

Trailer

Excerpt

 

_______________
Alain Tanner Return from Africa (1973)
‘An ode to liberated speech and to the power of words, “those one speaks to others, those one speaks in silence”, Alain Tanner’s third film is inspired by a poet and a poetic text which deeply affected him as a young director.’ — IMDb

Excerpt

 

_____________
Michèle Rosier GEORGE QUI? (1973)
‘Rosier’s extraordinary feature debut is a buried gem of post-New Wave French filmmaking, starring the inimitable Anne Wiazemsky as the scandalizing writer George Sand (1804-1874). Born into nobility as Aurore Dupin, Sand was the most prolific female author of the 19th century, notorious for smoking cigars and flouting laws banning women from dressing as men. While her life is storied (she was close friends with Balzac, Delacroix and Flaubert, as well as one of Frederic Chopin’s lovers; he described her gaze as “like a fiery flood” in his journal), Rosier’s approach mischievously and anachronistically engages the limitations of the staid and stale drawing-room biopic. GEORGE QUI? juxtaposes current-day discussions about Sand’s proto-feminism (as well as her militant opposition to the Paris Communards) with the very real movement for gender equality raging outside the cinemas. Beyond Wiazemsky’s coy leading turn, the film features delectable discussions about sex, love and literature, with a supporting turn from Bulle Ogier as stage actress Marie Dorval, and Gilles Deleuze in a bizarre cameo as pioneering Catholic philosopher Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais – Rosier’s idea.’ — Spectacle Theater

Trailer

 

______________
Philippe Garrel L’Enfant Secret (1979)
‘Garrel completed L’Enfant Secret in 1979 but didn’t exhibit it until 1982, because, according to legend, he couldn’t afford to pay the lab that had processed the film. Despite winning France’s prestigious Prix Jean Vigo (an annual award for movies exhibiting an original vision), the film has seldom been screened and was released on DVD only in Japan (even there it’s been out of print for a while). The rareness of L’Enfant Secret has heightened its reputation as a precious object, a movie so intimate that watching it makes you feel as though you’ve been let in on something private. Nakedly autobiographical, the film plays like a confession; moreover, Garrel elicits such sensitive performances from his actors that they too seem to be baring their souls.’ — Chicago Reader

Excerpt

 

______________
André Téchiné Rendez-vous (1985)
‘Nina, a young provincial and a student actress, discovers the Capital. That of her dreams of love and theater. Guided by her instinct, she travels around alone and follows her chance encounters, whether good or bad. On her way, she first meets Paulot, a simple clerk, with a reassuring face of an honest man. Then Quentin, an actor enters into Nina’s life. He is a run-down actor, eaten up by a drama in his past. The third person she meets is Scrutzler, a rigid and tired director. He will choose Nina to mold her, throw her on the stage and leave her alone to face herself.’ — Unifrance

Trailer

 

_____________
Philippe Garrel She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps (1985)
‘Faceted, fragmented, and oneiric, Philippe Garrel’s She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps is an abstract, yet lucid chronicle of love and loss, death and birth sublimated through textural, self-reflexive impressions, visceral gestures, and metaphoric tableaux.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** h (now j), Hi, h (now j). Yes, I believe it has the Blanchot introduction. My copy is the old one. Well, I hope our almost opened lives are a preview of what you’ll be happily experiencing before too, too long. Great luck with the pieces you’ll be writing. Stay well and busy and hopeful. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. It’s a lovely book. I’m pretty you’ll like it a bunch. I’m glad you fnally got to see the comments. Weird problem, that, or weirdly unfixable. Great news about your book being on track. Let me know the scoop. But that’s great, man! ** David Ehrenstein, Leiris is something else, yes. I would be curious to see a production of ‘The Screens’ some day. Gisele considered doing one way back when she was starting but couldn’t figure out to ace a production, so she did ‘Splendids’ instead. Everyone, FaBlog + today = General Idea. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too. My dreams are bare boned and very uncolorful. ** Jeff J, Hi. You haven’t read it? Oh, it’s great. I read the first volume of ‘Rules of the Game’. Amazing, yeah. I should get back on finishing the trilogy. The Bob Kaufman ‘Collected Poems’ that City Lights put out earlier this year is very good. Yes, I like his work. Maybe not every thing, but he has a real force. More interesting than most of the Beats, in my opinion. Derek’s new novel is insane. Mind-blowing. I love the new Sparks. One of my favorites of their most recent LPs. All I know is that Carax was editing the film a few months ago. I would imagine it’s finished. I thought it might be in the cyber-Cannes line-up, but it isn’t. Yet anyway. ** Tosh Berman, Yes, yes! ** Dominik, Hey, hey, D! Oh, mainly I moved to Amsterdam because I was in love, and my boyfriend was Dutch, and he was in the US for a while, but then he started back at university in Amsterdam, so I moved there to be with him (although our relationship crashed and burned very shortly after I moved there, oops.) Also it was the height of the AIDS crisis, and most of my friends in NYC, where I was living, were sick and/or dying, and I was doing way too much coke, and I was really broke, so all of those things combined made moving to Amsterdam seem like a good idea. Whoa, here’s hoping Anita can move to Amsterdam with you! Crazy! I sure hope that happens. If she’s (apologises if I’m misgendering) in the situation she’s in, I mean, it would make total sense for her, no? Good about the session. And thank you about ‘The Sluts’. My day was okay. It rained a lot, which was nice. My plans for yesterday got delayed to today, so it was empty-ish in an okay way. How was your today? Love that magically goes back in time and transforms the young Walt Disney into a guro fanatic/artist and lets the future play-out anew, Dennis. ** KK, Hi, man. Oh, cool, that you love that book. It’s killer, yeah. Excellent! Your story! I’ll hit it/read it when I’m done here. Everyone, Most excellent scribe and d.l. Kyle ‘KK’ Kirshbom has a new story called ‘Holoceners’ just published on the excellent Hobart site, and please complete your day by zipping over and reading, yes? Easy. Congrats, man! I’ll check my laptop’s game resources, thanks. Gombrowicz’s ‘Cosmos’ is top notch, yeah, I agree. His diaries are really excellent as well. Theaters don’t reopen here until the end of the month or early July. France is being very careful. So I don’t what’s on release. I’m still fishing around in the ‘illegal’ sites. The new Benning was briefly online, either by accident or as a quarantine gift, but it’s gone now. Most lovely day to you as well! ** chris dankland, Whoa, Mr. Dankland! A site for very sore eyes! So great to see you! That does sound like something that would take over your life. So has you been teaching them by Zoom? Or are in-person things still possible there? Thank you! You mean ‘Permanent Green Light’, I think, right? Anyway, thank you so much, that means a lot. We put a lot into that film. We were going to do some kind of ‘PGL’ book that would have the script as part of it, but it never happened. Maybe it still can. I’m glad the Leiris caught your eye. It’s excellent, as is he/his in general. I don’t remember my dreams almost ever, and they’re always nightmares, and they’re always slight variations on the same thing, so, no, no dream journal for me. Well, yeah, if you can find the time and interest to be here more, that would be treasure for me/us/here, but you must do what fuels you always and only. In the meantime, I remain a devoted reader and fan of X-R-A-Y. Take good care, pal! See you soon somewhere or other, I hope. ** Steve Erickson, Ah, well, imagine being in that situation for two months straight. Everyone, Steve has reviewed Abel Ferrara’s newbie ‘Tommaso exactly here. He also tells/reminds us of the following: ‘Many record labels are donating all or some of their profits from Bandcamp tomorrow to organizations fighting for Black civil rights, change to the police in America and bail money for imprisoned protesters. There’s a list here.’ ** Okay. Today the blog focuses on the wonderful French actor Anne Wiazemsky, and I hope it suits. See you tomorrow.