SO WHAT EXACTLY IS IT WHICH MAKES A HERO SO SUPER?

“I swear by the spirit of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.”

One of my more recent musings has been upon what actually defines a ‘superhero’. Before coming up with my own thoughts, I first consider some more typical suggestions. The list below is drawn partly from Wikipedia’s list of ‘common traits’ and partly from a private mailing group to which I belong. I have tried to pare things down from what was common to what might seem essential, the quicker to get to the nub of it.

A moral code
It is as tempting to say “yes” here as it is difficult to say it without sarcasm. Recent research has shown that heroes in general tend to have something resembling this. The guy who uses his super-vision to peer in the back of the girls’ changing rooms is often considered more of a super-heel. (Unless of course he doesn’t get caught.)

A secret identity
This one sounds straightforward. After all, everybody knows who Clerk Kent or Bruce Wayne are, and their role in their respective stories. The glasses are as central as that big S. And of course it’s from here we get the idea the superhero has to wear a mask, otherwise his secret identity wouldn’t be very secret any more. (Except with Superman, where it was Clerk Kent who wore a mask cunningly disguised as those glasses.) It’s certainly true that threats to this secret identity are a common source of tension in superhero stories. (Spider-man was particularly susceptible to it.)

But in fact not all superheroes have secret identities. The Fantastic Four don’t. Captain America started with one in his wartime days, but when he got fast-forwarded to the present he left poor Steve Rogers behind. (I sometimes wondered what he did in Avengers mansion, the nights the others were out living their civilian lives.) And with The Spirit, Denny Colt was supposed to be dead, not living some other life away from crimefighting.

A Costume/ codename/ motif
From my mailing group Martin Skidmore was keen to point out: “this has to include a superhero codename, not like ‘my real name is Bill Smith but I will pretend to be... Jeff Williams!’”

Wikipedia elaborates this point into: “An underlying motif or theme that affects the hero's name, costume, personal effects, and other aspects of his or her character (e.g., Batman resembles a large bat.)”

Once uncoupled from the secret identity, this does, I admit, come to feel important. There is a huge element of ‘clothes maketh man’ about the superhero. The Fantastic Four started without their costumes, but when they got them it felt like a sign of things kicking into gear. Even the Spirit’s piddling little domino mask feels important, even if (as said earlier) he had no real secret identity for it to protect. His artist Will Eisner later admitted disliking the thing, but could never bring himself to dispense with it. This is true of even more peripheral and even less identity-concealing accessories, such as Luke Cage’s ever-present tiara. (You were probably not supposed to think of it as a tiara.)

But if those costumes and codenames are important, are they actually essential? Recent dramas such as the film Unbreakable or TV series Heroes have dispensed with them. Of course, this argument is double-edged, you’re supposed to see that act as audacious. Yet it’s an audacious thing to do to superheroes. Superhero characters they remain. It’s like the way a King is signified by a Crown. The Crown doesn’t make him the King, in a way that would work if anybody else tried sporting it.

An Origin
A film about a guy who works as an insurance clerk doesn’t need an origin, where we flashback to him taking the job just for a while as he looks into college courses. But of course a superhero needs some explanation for how he got here. We think of the origin as an explanation for how he got his super powers, but it’s notable how it also commonly throws in how he got his codename, accessories and motifs. And its also notable how non-super-heroes need an origin to explain how they got those things. This is true even when they’re not particularly otherworldly. For example, the Indiana Jones films give us an explanation of how he first picked up his hat and bullwhip.

However, do we really need an origin? Batman didn’t get one for the first six months. (Which, when it finally arrived, lasted a whole two pages.) Unlike the Fantastic Fours’ costumes, I can imagine him continuing without one. Perhaps a superhero could be a perpetual man of mystery, in stories told through the eyes of secondary characters. Or perhaps he could perpetuate a civilian identity without any explanation of his origin. I’m not denying the origin makes the character more enduring, perhaps even better. I’m simply saying a superhero without an origin is conceivable. Like the secret identity, the origin is desirable but not necessary.

To these elements I would add one other, which I’m surprised nobody else has listed...

A spirit of independence
Like the private eye, the superhero is an independent operator, a sole trader against crime. It’s surprisingly common to have a superhero thought of as criminal within his own story, such as Spider-Man. Of course some superheroes do work for the authorities. But for this to work properly the relationship must be distant and frequently problematic (where not actually explosive), as in the recent Hellboy films. Superheroes can at times act with other superheroes (The Avengers), and perhaps even accomplish this without arguing all the time (The Justice League). But with penpushers and bureaucrats? They’d rather choke in their cowls!

The underlying point is that the superhero’s activities must be a calling first and a job second, if at all. Secret service operatives like James Bond inhabit another kind of story.

For this reason superheroes often have an alternative source of wealth (Batman and Iron Man being but two of many millionaires.) Spider-man’s problems with earning a living were, at the time, a major twist in the genre.

Superpowers
This one sounds like such a no-brainer, we must surely have arrived at our clincher. Superheroes = superpowers, comprendez? There’s a preponderance of stories where they lose those powers (Kryptonite being invented for this sole purpose), but these paradoxically underline their importance – by showing the size of the gap if they’re removed.

But what about the heroes whose powers were never intrinsic? Who gained them from a magic object (Green Lantern), technology (Iron Man) or even never really had them to start with? Batman for example has nothing actually super about him, and should more rightly be classed alongside Zorro, The Lone Ranger or The Green Hornet. (A type I’m going to go on to call the ‘emblematic hero.’) We know this, and yet it feels as meaningful to say he isn’t a superhero as to say a tomato’s not a vegetable. Our brains reject the information as pedantry, something of no real significance.

Probably the main dividing point, as much as there is one, is the origin. Batman “trains his body to physical perfection until he is able to perform amazing athletic feats.” Okay, we got that? ”Train his body.” No getting bitten by a power ring or handed a hammer by some cosmic rays. But how does that simple-sounding distinction work out in the wash?

If you’ve read this pulpy sort of stuff you’ll probably be familiar with passages such as this: “To escape the fiery pit, the hero had to leap...leap!...leap further than even he had before, further perhaps than had any man. He steadied himself... and leapt for all he was worth!” (NB If you haven’t read this sort of stuff, the hero generally tends to make it.) The inherent hyperbole of pulp, the heat that powers the pot-boiler are always pushing and prodding at the limits of human endurance, and with it eroding the distinction between the possible and the plain unlikely. Start with a hero who can run for the bus okay, and pretty soon he’ll be doing marathons on one leg.

”I swear to devote my life to the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty and injustice in all their forms.”

It's for these reasons and more I think we need to accept there's a fuzzy line
between the superhero and the emblematic hero. The boundary between the two is not the one between North and South Korea, rigidly delineated and abundantly policed. It’s more akin to the border between North and South Ireland, a vaguely conceived concept buried beneath a criss-cross of tracks, where you’d have trouble offering up your identifying passport if you wanted to.

My theory is that the superhero is at most a subset of the emblematic hero, and that it’s the distinction between the emblematic hero and the rest that’s the significant thing. My theory is that this distinguishing feature of the emblematic hero is that he becomes a symbol for a general struggle (against crime, oppression, nasty stuff etc.) rather than goes on some singular mission or holds a private grudge.

Just as ‘super’ literally means ‘more than’, managing to collect one enemy doesn’t allow you to join the emblematic club. Tales of revenge and private vendettas are out. Perhaps the classic example of the character who isn’t emblematic but might look it from a distance is The Bride in Kill Bill. She has a code-name and enhanced powers, and even a (kind-of) costume. But she is solely motivated by revenge, not to do general good. Once she’s offed her tick-box list of antagonists, her story’s done.

“To avenge the helpless, to punish cruel politicians, to aid the oppressed.”

The epitome of the emblematic hero is therefore the Vow. This doesn’t have to be explicit, but it has to underlie everything else. Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes, for all their surface similarities, aren’t emblematic by this token - because they never made such a Vow. Nor does it have to be as general as ‘crime’, ‘injustice’ or ‘misdeeds’. The Scarlet Pimpernel wars against the guillotining French, and Zorro the Spanish presence in California. But this was still a general enemy, no solitary mischief-maker like Moriaty. A story can start with vengeance, such as the Lone Ranger running down the bandits who killed his buddies, but must quickly expand out. Spider-Man’s origin takes this at its most explicit, by demonstrating acts of personal revenge to be insufficient.

After the Vow, everything else falls into place. Paradoxically, this is often achieved through the cutting of immediate ties to society. This happens most spectacularly in Superman, where he loses his whole home planet. But Batman, the Phantom and the Lone Ranger are among many who lose their friends and family. There’s a common motif where the pre-hero is believed dead, for example in the Lone Ranger or the Spirit (who even locates his base in a cemetery). The Phantom is ‘the ghost who walks.’ The mask and costume therefore don’t just disguise the old identity but replace it – depersonalise the figure, make it into a symbol. Hence the current usage of motifs and symbols – Zorro’s Z, Superman’s S, Batman’s bat.

”My only desire is to see that the oppressed are assisted, and that the evil pay for their crimes.”

It’s perhaps for this reason that emblematic heroes don’t really exist before the Twentieth Century, and achieve a kind of critical mass around the Thirties. The original Scarlet Pimpernel play, by Baroness Orczy, was first performed in 1903. The first Zorro pulp novel, by Johnston McCulley, appeared in 1919. But after that we get The Lone Ranger (radio series, 1933), Doc Savage (pulp magazine, 1933), the Green Hornet (radio series, 1936) and The Phantom (newspaper strip, 1936). (Where Superman, the first superhero, inserts himself into this chain of cause-and-effect, is debatable. His first comic-book appearance was in 1938, but Jerry Seigal had conceived of him as far back as 1932. But the separate origins of social production seem more credible than mere copyism, so perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much.)

Perhaps this is because, along with everything else, urbanism and the rise of the mass society make crime start to feel anonymous. If somebody vandalizes something of yours you become less likely to wonder who might have something against you, and more likely to put it down to that darn riff-raff you read about in the paper. But what depersonalises crime also pushes it further beyond your control. If it’s most likely your neighbour who broke your window, you always can try (in some form) having it out with them. If it’s committed by purely anonymous forces, you can never be reconciled to them because they were never really against you in the first place. Furthermore, what renders crime anonymous can easily also make it appear endemic. What is unknown is by definition unquantified, so can easily lead into fears of a sinister unknown multitude. It’s widely documented how people commonly have a fear of crime wildly out of proportion to any crime statistics.

“Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I...”... oh you get the idea!

This is why, as Andrew Rilstone has pointed out, it changes everything when the recent crop of superhero blockbuster films make the hero’s nemesis ever-present. (Now done by Batman, Daredevil, twice in Spider-Man and counting.)

“In the comic, Daredevil's father is killed by a relatively anonymous gangster, which motivates him to pursue vigilante justice for the rest of his life. In the movie, the anonymous gangster turns out to have been the guy who grows up to become Kingpin of Crime, giving a personal twist to the final minutes of the movie.”

...which, of course, is switching things back – turning Batman into the Bride. It’s as if we’ve hit some kind of event horizon in mass society, where we can’t actually face the sheer anonymity of it anymore and need to take refuge in the pretence that everything has become personalised all over again. (I’m also of the impression that superhero comics have become much more obsessed with personal revenge, perhaps in a bid to make things more ‘gritty’. But as I rarely if ever read them nowadays I will concur if told better.) It’s similar to the way in which Thirties art commonly simplified and boiled down form into general geometric shapes, in a way that looks foreign to us today. The emblematic hero is fact becoming a casualty of our ‘me’ society, which finds its heroes journeys more often in winning reality TV shows. Perhaps today’s Spider-Man would simply have stayed a celebrity wrestler.

”And a lean silent figure slowly fades into the gathering darkness, aware at last that in this world, with great power there must also come great responsibility.”

WE COME TO BURY HIGH CULTURE, NOT TO PRAISE IT

This is the text of a piece I read out at the recent Alternative Press Fair in London. It’s something of an ‘oldie’, I wrote it to celebrate the launch of my first ever small press comic Scrawl!,and it went into the Caption newsletter in November 1992.(This is an edited and slightly amended version. But the first line is still an outright lie.)

For those who do not know, Scrawl! Is the product of two years of solid and relentless effort. Leaflets were handed out at comics, small press and alternative events, with a humourous, graphic and above all inept style encouraging people to participate. (This was usually achieved in the bar while others pursued fruitless dry-throated discussions as to how many angels could balance on the arm of a long-arm stapler.) Much to my own surprise, contributions of wit and brilliance flooded into my HQ.

People who played ranged from semi-pros to people who had never drawn a comic strip before in their life and just fancied the idea. As requested, all were in the form of a monologue or duologue.

The aims of Scrawl! were two-fold: a) to reclaim art from the Artists, eliminate Art as a bourgeois concept and destroy the money-commodity system; and b) to have a good laugh.

Luckily these aims proved to be highly compatible (indeed almost interchangeable). Let’s face it, we live in a lifeless society where creativity is fetishised as static museum-pieces to gape at, and where ‘I can do that!’ becomes a cry not of inspiration but criticism. Capitalism of course transforms everything into a commodity, but Art has the dubious and vacuous honour of being prized for its very uselessness! The moneyed classes need some way to show off their ‘taste’ (ie wealth) by how many ‘aesthetic’ (ie useless and expensive) objects they can adorn their homes with. As George Grosz so wisely said, “there is art so the rich have something to hang in front of their wall safes.”

Of course this has the added effect of manacling something empowering and ultimately uncontrollable – human creativity. Making or doing something yourself is bags more exciting than passively consuming, but the loaded concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture lead people to regard their own efforts as worthless.

Comics are a very good example of this. It’s noticeable how ‘adult comics’ had to lose almost all of comics’ intrinsic good qualities. Instead of the life and vigour of the line drawing, murky painting was in. Instead of easy and accessible language, long captions full of literary references became the rage. Instead of a cheap and affordable product, fancy paper provided a ‘quality’ product.

Scrawl! emerged from a contempt for the mainstream comics world, which has always prized slick and fancy rendering over content – but was now completely vanishing up its own arsehole. With an accessible style and the method of monologue or direct address to the audience, its aim was to cut the crap and defuse comics down to their basic form.

Once you actually reach it, it’s remarkable how – of all the arts – the comics form is so accessible. Unlike music, you don’t need to form chords to make noise into sound, you just draw a stick figure onto paper and everyone recognizes it. Unlike performance, theatre or ranting poetry you don’t have to stand up in front of a crowd worrying about making a tit of yourself. You just sit in your own room drawing, and rejecting anything you don’t like. Unlike literature there are no impeding high culture notions of ‘proper writing’ – you can WHOK!, ERK! and KER-SPLAT! to your heart’s content and be speaking a common tongue. You don’t even have to draw if you don’t want to, just cut panels out of existing comics or magazines and scrawl in your own scathing comments.

It’s also remarkable how easily the form lends itself to laughter, particularly of the pretension-pricking variety. Scratch someone into a box with a word balloon sticking our their mouth and see how long they keep their lofty dignity. For this reason, the scurrilous political cartoon has a long and glorious (and above all effective) history.

In short Scrawl! comes because we want to bury high culture not to praise it, because we want to destroy the comics industry and wrest our form back off it, because it seems a good excuse for a party; - and the marker pen, the nicked photocopy paper, the unfair and insulting caricature, the uneven panel border, and the word balloon stuffed with cheap and nasty humour are our weapons in this war.

Home creativity is killing the comics industry – and it’s fun too!

THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a film on the Baader Meinhoffs (aka Red Army Faction) proved controversial in its native Germany. Ignes Ponto, widow of one of their victims, even returned her Federal Cross in outrage over what she saw as a glamourisation of their brutality. But of course you hear that its based upon a book by a mainstream journalist (Stefan Aust’s ‘The Baader Meinhof Group’) and imagine the reverse, a smear campaign against anyone who ever questioned an orthodoxy. In fact it neither whitewashes nor pillories the group’s often-murderous acts, so much as lays them bare. But, lacking anything very insightful or imaginative to say on the subject, its attention falls almost by default to the photogenic business of shootouts and bombings. After all, mainstream cinema will happily glamourise poverty, so how is it likely to cope with an gunfight? In short, it sidesteps radical chic to end up in heist-movie cliché.

Even when much of the furniture is placed scrupulously in place, it fails to perform its function and just sits there inertly on the screen. The RAF were the sharp end of a wave of radicalism unleashed when the police attacked an anti-Shah demonstration in ’67, and murdered Benno Onhnesorg. But as played here the scene is so hackneyed and overblown you get little sense of verisimilitude – you simply feel like you’re watching a scene from a film. Not a particularly good film.

“The filmmakers can also hardly be blamed for the fact that quite a few of Germany's most wanted were ridiculously good looking in real life,” claims Channel 4’s reviewer Ali Catterall, “and they've cast accordingly.” But it’s instructive to examine the exception to this rule. Martina Gedeck’s is actually made up to be more dowdy than Ulrike Meinhof in real life, in order to provide her with a ‘journey’ that threads together the first section.

Though lipservice is paid to Vietnam and all the usual suspects, the makers’ main thesis is that the gang were really a generation gap writ large. As a middle-aged radical, Meinhof therefore starts the film stuck upon a fence from where she must decide which way to jump. (A metaphor given a somewhat gormless literalisation.) In an early conversation with Gudrun Ensslin, she states she couldn’t take to a life underground as it would mean leaving her kids behind. Ensslin states flatly she never sees hers. In a later scene, a pram is but a disguise for a gun. The ‘radicals’ must abandon their children to be the children –Germany’s children, middle class youths groomed for good careers, now in revolt against her.

As Catterall later puts it: “Substitute those guns for guitars and this could almost be the biopic of a rock band, from early hits to mid-period mismanagement and fatal fall-outs over direction and differences.” There’s a point in the Stammheim trials, where they all take turns to call the Judge an “asshole”, which can’t fail to remind you of the Pistols on the Grundy show. Only without the politics.

Of course, the film is correct to suggest they are encouraged into their infantilisation by their times. Their parents’ generation were what every adolescent years for – a bunch of Nazis to rebel against. Many Nazis had escaped punishment and continued to hold prominent positions, at a time when a law explicitly excluded leftists from official employment. When echoed through the shrill RAF mindset, these genuine criticisms turned into the rhetoric that post-war Germany was still a Nazi state. Ensslin was forever saying things like “This is the Auschwitz generation, they aim to kill us all!”

But if the film’s line is correct, that doesn’t make it adequate. It merely rehashes what has by now become an orthodox view. ‘The Baader Meinhof Simple” may have been a more fitting film name. Jillian Becker’s book on the RAF, tellingly titled Hitler’s Children had even been published in 1977! Even if the RAF leadership themselves were merely proffering adolescence as ideology what of their widespread support among the young? (Frequently reflected in contemporary opinion polls.) Or the fact that, as soon as they were caught, another ‘generation’ arose after them? And how did they relate to the wider youth movements?

But for all their tubthumping and hissy fits perhaps the most absurd figure in the film isn’t a RAF member at all but a Police Chief – Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz.) Herold isn’t so much a character as a white flag flown to appease those who might otherwise take the Ignes Ponto view. A chest-thumping liberal, he is forever reminding his knuckle-dragging staff of things like “the horrors of the Third World” which have led to the protest movement. Let us suppose, just for the sake of conjecture, that he was the walking cliché as portrayed here – so what? Did his men take up his theme, jump in their squad cars and duff up the IMF? Perhaps they even put a collection box for the Third World by the till in the police canteen. Herold, in fact, achieves precisely nothing, even within the distorted world of this film. We are supposed to look at him and respect the way mainstream society could embrace self-critique. Whereas his presence actually proves quite the opposite.

However, unlike most of the gang’s actions, the film’s not a dead loss. It has one quite distinct, if presumably unintended, advantage. If its is quite ludicrous most of the time, then so were the people it has been made about. If it’s not sure whether the RAF were a revolutionary militia or just defiant posers, neither were they. There are several points where it is genuinely and quite deliberately funny. For example, there’s the scene where they have their car stolen. As Baader rages, the others have to remind him they’d stolen it themselves in the first place. (There you’re reminded of Student Grant from Viz Comics.) Yet it’s often hard to tell such times from when it’s merely being kitsch, such as the innumerable scenes where they shout sloganistically at each other inside their hovelly hideouts, or go for long speeding drives like in some shitty juvenile delinquent movie. Unlike Ignes Ponto, you find yourself wishing they had merely gone all-out for the absurdist black comedy angle – The Comic Strip Presents The Anti-Imperialist Movement At Home In Deutschland, Ja?

As mentioned earlier, much of the big units of the furniture in this story are in place. However, this does not mean it’s accurate – in fact even my passing knowledge of the subject found major flaws. (Disclaimer: Having never read Aust’s book, I have no way of knowing whether these mistakes are theirs or his.) The RAF are perpetually called ‘anarchists’ whereas they were really subscribed to Leninist anit-imperialism filtered through a gang mentality. Meanwhile, student leader Rudi Dutschke does get called an communist where he was really an anarchist! (Though he later drifted towards liberalism.) When the Stammheim inmates die, the surviving members call it murder. Brigitte Monhaupf then defiantly proclaims it suicide, as a story better fitting the RAF’s own mythology. (“They were not victims” etc.) We’re supposed to chill at her propogandist shiftings. Except, as Robert Gerald Livingstone has said in the New York Times: “It remains an article of faith on the left that their keepers killed the prisoners.” The notion that it was group suicide has always belonged with the authorities.

But worst of all is when we’re shown the ‘second generation’ plotting the kidnapping of Schleyer. It is never mentioned why he was chosen – he was an ex-SS member who had gone entirely unpunished after the War. Are the makers worried that, should we be given this dangerous piece of evidence, we’d leave the cinema to buy ourselves AK47s or something?

Even though it gives itself the liberty to play with the facts, the film still manages to lack dramatic structure. The later ‘second generation’ section in particular is incoherent and hard to follow, with characters hanging around as if waiting to see what the script wants from them. Meinhof is given us as the linking thread, but with her death this thread which snaps well before the film’s end. At times this incoherence seems to be played up; for example, we’re given rapid crosscutting or voiceovers which swap so fast they virtually overlap. But there is never anything so sophisticated as the presenting of multiple points of view, there is merely incoherence masquerading as statement. We’re watching neither decent docu nor well-crafted drama. In a particularly risible line, Baader proclaims “it’s more fun with a gun.” But he’s proved wrong. The film allows itself to play with the guns, then still fumbles with them.

Had I made a film on this subject, I would have thrown the audience straight into a situation of carnage – say the kidnapping of Schleyer or the murder of Jurgen Poto. I’d then have snapped back to the idealism of the mid-Sixties to show the same people initially acting quite sympathetically, to demonstrate how such social movements soured into terrorist gangs. And, if we are to have a parallel story for the Police, perhaps a young officer caught up in the anti-Shah demonstrations who vows to change things from the inside. If we need a Herold, he should at least feel a genuine frustration. The ‘second generation’ section would need to go one way or the other – either providing us with a new Meinhof or deliberately keeping them shadowy. And while, as we’ve seen, the RAF’s fascist fixations were present, this film sorely lacks any sense of the international context. The astonishing feature of this era was the global spread of radical movements.

While this film is often entertaining (in the sense of laughable), it’s tragedy is that a good film on this subject still lies waiting to be made. The Spectacular Times’ slogan “terrorism is always counter-revolutionary” is of course accurate, but it is also necessary to understand how such mistakes came to be made. The nearest we have is Reinhard Hauff’s Stammheim, a narrower but more successful reconstruction of the trials from their transcripts. Other decent films on similar subjects are Good Morning Night (on the Italian Red Brigade) or the documentary The Weather Underground (on the American group.)

CINECITY 4: THE QUAY BROTHERS – QUITE DEFINITELY THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Yes, I am not exactly being timely here, finishing my posts on a festival which actually ended two weeks ago. However, I am due extra nerd points for posting this on Christmas Day!

One of the most exciting things for me about this years’ Cine-City festival was the programme dedicated to the Quay Brothers, whose work I’d only ever caught snatches of before. Here we had three showings of shorts, one full-length film (Institute Benjamenta), a Q&A session plus an exhibition! Though Americans living in London, the Brothers are celebrated for their films and animations in the fantastical East European style of Svankmayer and Borowczyk. (NB All direct quotes below are from the programme notes or this interview –a site which looks worth bookmarking in it’s own right.)

They comment “we want to make a world that is seen through a dirty pane of glass. You can’t exactly get at it because it is elusive.” What’s crucial to their work is the distance between a puzzle and a mystery. With a puzzle, the pleasure lies in the working out – the cutting through the convolutions to arrive at a solution. With a mystery the pleasure lies in the precise opposite, embracing the inscrutability, tasting the strangenes. To clear away that pane of glass would be a violation, not a clarification. However, giving the game away on these compelling films is not our biggest worry here! What follows is instead a few hasty scrawls upon that dirty pane.

As with Svankmayer, what’s vital to their aesthetic is the fetishification of everyday objects. Screws, combs, pencil tips, all the little things which lie almost beneath our vision are suddenly rendered animate. This gives rise, to drop a Freudian term, to the all-important sense of the unheimliche, or strange familiarity. As they put it, “what we’re trying to do is release the strangeness.” We peer into this other-world, but it is not grandiloquent and distant - for sheer freakishness is unengaging. We peer into it with the vertiginous sense that we could topple into it at any time. (As much as I will venture any ‘explanation’ for anything here, I’ll suggest the primary puppet in Street of Crocodiles somehow represents the man who starts the machine up.)

Perhaps paradoxically, this sense is enhanced by the Brothers’ refusal to play up the dramatic illusion. Street Of Crocodiles starts with an old man looking into a peep-show, effectively reminding us of our status as audience. Similarly the Optical Boxes in the exhibition often contain viewing slots, or distorting lenses which enlarge the insides once looked through. In the catalogue they speak of the importance of seeing their work on a large screen, where puppets are no longer smaller than us but suddenly blown up to giant-size.

This “extraordinary power of the camera to ‘make strange’ “ is central to their fetishism, but of course they are merely magnifying something cinema does already. Hitchcock, for example, is full off innocuous objects fixated upon by the camera and plot. Even a film as apparantly at variance to the Quays as Bicycle Thieves does this. At one point we see the bicycle large upon the kitchen table, attended to by the son. Later we see it ridden off stolen, growing tinier and tinier against a teeming Rome.

Unfortunately, some of their later shorts abandon animation for pixellation, rusty screws for computerisation. The Comb, for example, loses some of this object-fetishism by creating an all-too-obviously virtual world. It was vital that their animations looked unreal but hand-crafted, with even the credits often hand-written or even carved. Alas, in their Q&A the Brothers explained that this change was not a creative choice but a financial necessity, a response to the more difficult funding situation we now live in. Perhaps their more live-action films such as Benjamenta provide the best hope for them now.

The Brothers also spoke of the importance of music to their work, sometimes even commissioning scores first and working their animation around them. “We much prefer to obey musical laws because they’re not logical,” they explained. You can’t print logic on music, it’s outside of that.” Without having read Schulz’s Street Of Crocodiles, I assume their animation is ‘based’ upon the book the way a musical piece would – elaborating on themes and moods, with scant interest in reproducing the string of events. After watching it I found sequences and images were set to loop in my memory, just as if they were snatches of music.

It’s notable that even when their work isn’t specifically based upon novels or operas, their references tend to be to other artists – composers, authors, even other animators. After all their whole approach stems from accidentally coming across an exhibition of Polish film posters while still students. This can often be a bad sign, creating work which (even when not merely imitative) is is nothing but referential – at it’s worst even post-modern. But perhaps the Quays bend this hermetic quality to work for them. Their references become like their peep-shows and cabinets, creating spaces of strangeness to fall into and get lost. The clusters of allusions almost knot, adding to their works’ sense of ponderousness and claustrophobia.

However, I did at times experience a niggling doubt – that the Quays could pull off this style superbly, but not themselves inhabit it with anything. Are they reliant on outside sources for their substance? Or are they even a superior cousin to those award-winning rock videos, the ones which recycle the tropes of art cinema but never any more? (The Quays made rock videos, for His Name Is Alive, but not in a dumbed-down fashion and anyway that alone should not be considered damning proof.) The question is difficult to answer because you’re not looking for anything discernable in terms of content, more an idiosyncratic spirit. However, it’s most likely to reveal itself in their full-length films, where style alone won’t maintain interest over the duration. I suspect if I could see more of their films, or even these films again, this doubt would either grow or be dispelled.

Watching the films, you can’t but wonder how they are able to realize these works of strange familiarity. Perhaps part of the answer is the fact that they’re identical twins. Their working methods are clearly as interchangeable as their conversation, casually using phrases like “we were reading” or even “our left hand.” The interview transcript I linked to above merely quotes them together, and they even sign their correspondence with a single ‘Q’. They emphasised both their intuitive methods of working (storyboarding to satisfy the backers, then throwing the boards away) and the pitfalls of working with an ensemble to which everything must be explained. (“You just have to sense it, you don't have to think it too much.”)

Perhaps as identical twins they developed a kind of conjoined psyche – sharing their perceptions from the very beginning, in a way siblings born even a short distance apart never would. It’s scarcely innovative to see something child-like in their enclosed worlds of object-fetishism; to children, all objects are infused with character and life. It’s even possible to argue that it’s the very development of communicative skills which banishes such perceptions; as soon as you able to speak of it, you lose your sense of what was so sublime. But for these twins the unspoken remained preserved and, not through words but the manipulation of space and objects, they have effected a means to transmit it to the rest of us. (Disclaimer: As an only child, I am the very opposite of the Quays in this respect.)

CINE CITY 3: ANDRZEJ WAJDA

I must admit to having a fair bit of catching up to do with legendary Polish director Andrzej Wajda, having only seen the early (if widely considered seminal) Ashes And Diamonds and A Generation. (No, I wasn’t starting with the A’s.) So when Brighton’s Cine-City Festival announced this year would include of two of his films, I was suitably attentive.

However, though keen to see his most recent film Katyn, I was in some ways wary. Directors often try to achieve the summation of their career near its end, and this had many of the signs. Aged 82, Wajda is putting on the screen the Soviet wartime massacre which not only set the tone for their subsequent occupation but also claimed the life of his own father. (As the Guardian commented: “In many ways, Katyn is the film that Wajda has been building up to throughout his career.”)

Does this sound bad? Perhaps counterintuitively, it can be. Such portentousness can crush the life from a film, leaving something sumptuous but stately – perhaps even stodgy. (Kurosawa is a classic example, compare Yojimbo to Kagemusha.) And despite their wartime settings, his early Films had a contemporary Fifties feel. The young lead Zbigniew Cybulski agonized so pensively over how he fitted into society, all the time sporting a pair of sunglasses (the era’s symbol for alienated cool), that he earnt the nickname “the Polish James Dean.”

SPOILERS IN NEXT PARAGRAPH!

In some ways Katyn takes this heritage head-on, introducing a headstrong and impulsive young nephew. He’s not exactly Cybulski reborn, in fact he’s quite precisely committed where Cybulski was conflicted. But the film first follows and indulges his swingheeled romanticism, seeing the world from his elevated rooftop perspective, only to swat him.

SPOILERS END!

However, it would be more accurate to say that Wajda’s concerns have now shifted to the adult generation. His characters are less concerned with where to place their idealism, and more burdened with balancing their consciences against the encumbering business of survival. At one point the authorities smash a tombstone for bearing the wrong date. (Suggesting it was carried out during the Soviet, not the Nazi, occupation.)

But the film is not the celluloid equivalent of that tombstone, proclaiming something which no reasonable person now rejects. Instead his focus is not so much the moment of the massacre as it’s aftermath, not those who died from it but those who have to live with it. As he himself said: “While Stalin’s crime deprived my father of life, my mother was touched by the lies and the hoping in vain for the return of her husband.” Living with such knowledge becomes a microcosm of Soviet occupation, where the unbearable must daily be borne. No easy solutions are offered for this, and the collaborators are given their say as much as the rebels. This gives the film a tension which prevents it from falling into heritage status.

Of course, all of this could not be further from the Hollywood treatment of political events as a backdrop to a ‘personal journey’, like a yuppie backpacking through Nepal to “find himself.” Wajda’s famous deep field photography comes in here. Characters never look like lead actors, posing potogenically in front of some neatly arranged backdrop. They always seem to spring from and inhabit the space around them.

MORE SPOILERS COMING!

Only in the final scene, shifting back in time, do we see the actual massacre. The horror here is that it’s shot neither through the eyes or the victims nor the perpetrators – instead it merely follows their hands. As corpses are repeatedly piled onto slides to enhance disposal, the killers work in a detached a way as workers in a slaughterhouse. Such behaviour has become normalised.

SPOILERS END!

But if Katyn is the summation of Wajda’s career, Man of Iron is the departure. Made at great speed during the first wave of Solidarity strikes in 1981, it trades in much of Wajda’s reflectiveness and becomes much more of a bulletin. Often shot on location and incorporating real news footage, it has an almost Sixties cinema verite style. Like such films as Medium Cool, the process of film-making is often foregrounded. The film starts with a woman making a passionate and poetic speech about freedom, who then stops to ask the radio engineer for another take. It’s protagonist, Winkel, is a journalist ordered to perform a hatchet job on the strike leaders. Wajda commented afterwards “we were learning to understand this new reality and to show it on the screen at the same time, which was not easy.” (Notably, while Western films of this style seek to dispel the chimera of ‘journalistic objectivity’, here the question never even comes up. Winkel must choose one side or the other, no third options.)

However the film also has a reflective half – with the frequent flashbacks, which set the current strike (and the main characters’ behaviour) into context. Here Wajda’s patented style comes back – muted colours, deep field photography and poetic composition. (These refer back to an earlier film, Man Of Marble, which was presumably shot in that style.)

Functionally, this is effective – the two distinct styles never leaving us in doubt which era we are in. But the two tones can at times jar. You naturally indulge Wajda’s more poetic instincts when they take on a poetic form, less so when they are inserted into a news report. One example would be Winkel’s symbolic pilgrimage towards the worker-occupied Shipyard. (Which he is only able to enter at the very end of the film.) We seem supposed to infer that this swapping sides has cured him of the alcoholism which has plagued him up until then. There is also a subplot, involving a striker’s father, which drops a smart expectation-denying twist, but then one which simply seems to get forgotten. More pettily but still notably, whilst Katyn has a score by Pendereski, the music here is mostly Eighties synth stuff!


However, Wajda is keen as ever to keep matters nuanced. The provisional nature of the worker’s victory is stressed, and even Winkel’s side-swapping is not altogether welcomed. This cautious optimism was validated, when the authorities later imposed martial law. Wajda later commented he’d earlier asked the military to borrow their tanks as props for the film – but been denied. A year later, those tanks were on the streets for real...

CINE-CITY 2: SQUARING THE CIRCLE

Tom Stoppard’s account of the birth of Poland’s free trade union Solidarity was, according to the Cine-City site, “broadcast in the ‘golden age’ of Channel 4...never released on DVD and its last transmission 20 years ago”. Indeed, the film has almost fallen through the cracks of history - with the most perfunctory IMDB page and no Wikipedia entry at all. And yet, as Mike Hodges mentioned in his Q&A after the showing, about the last thing it could be accused of is being a period piece.

The film makes no attempt approximate Polish accents (Lech Walesa speaks Scouse throughout), or even pretend it’s not being shot in a studio. Mike Hodges revealed this Brechtian style was originally budgetary, but he soon came to see the aesthetic advantages of it. By the end he insisted beach scenes be mocked up in the studio, which ironically it would have been cheaper to just film on an actual beach.

Of course such effects tend to universalise the story, no bad thing when a British press was insistent free unions were great for Poland yet somehow all wrong for Britain. Yet it’s interesting to note that Brecht himself strayed most from his patented ‘distancing effect’ when recounting contemporary events, notably in Senora Carrar’s Rifles and Private Lives of The Master Race. When your story’s so close to the headlines, wouldn’t a verite effect have worked better?

In fact, Hodges’ choice has specific advantages. There’s a point where a party dignitary gives a TV speech in a cosy-looking Library. Transmission over, he slides his chair back with promptly knocks over the ‘bookcases’ – mocked-up studio flats. If everything in the film is a facade then so is the Polish regime, in their pretence either to hold independence within the Soviet block or to have the workers’ interests at heart. Hodges also revealed that the only non-studio shot was of a rising helicopter, used to suppress a strike. This is also fitting, for the subsequent repression was no doubt real enough.

It also induces an appropriately hermetic effect. The dignitaries and bureaucrats live in a rarified world where they are constantly discussing real-world events in the abstract, talking steel production while never visiting a steelyard.

The film’s also quite courageously willing to present Solidarity warts and all; arguing amongst themselves, making tactical errors. Walesa comments near the end that they started marching together, but the road they were on forked and then forked again. Though this might have risked criticism, with several Solidarity members imprisoned when it was transmitted, it makes for a stronger, more interesting and more nuanced film.

Throughout the film is dense with information and ideas, without ever falling into polemicism. Some scenes are played more than once, in varying permutations of what might have happened. The narrator is himself frequently interrupted by passing Poles, challenging his assumptions.

Despite such courage and these many strengths, it perhaps has two weaknesses. First, we have the role of narrator itself. As Hodges admitted, this role was intended to be played by Stoppard himself, but an American presence was forced upon him by the backers. (Though he praised Richard Crenna’s actual performance.) It’s not a problem that the authorial voice takes on an American accent; as mentioned, the Narrator is continually perceived by locals as a clueless outsider who needs correcting. But had we seen the scriptwriter having his own script corrected, as Stoppard intended, the effect would have been stronger. Also, at a point in the film American bankers appear. This is the first time ‘natural’ accents have been used, for the ‘Poles’ have all been English. This jarring is presumably deliberate, to emphasise the bankers as outsiders. Yet the accent already given the Narrator dilutes this effect.

Also, though the work is clearly well-researched and Stoppard doubtless has a keen brain, his politics are somewhat liberal. (He’s described himself as “a timid libertarian”.) This shows through mostly over Walesa. It’s as though, just by placing characters to Walesa’s ‘left’, he is immediately made a ‘moderate’ and is therefore correct in all he says. This takes us to strange places. The Wikipedia article on Solidarity mentions how their “example was in various ways repeated by opposition groups throughout the Eastern Bloc, eventually leading to the Eastern Bloc's effectual dismantling.” Yet at one point, Walesa rules out links emerging in other Eastern Bloc countries, because as Poles they should concern themselves with Polish affairs. As in other places, the film seems to side with this petty-nationalism rather blithely. Similarly, his personality cult and its effect on collective decision-making is repeatedly brought up, but never particularly closely examined. It might even be possible to argue this film enhanced such a cult, by making him so central a character. (Though of course Stoppard couldn’t have known at this point of Walesa’s later career as a rather free-market-oriented Polish President.)

But for all such criticisms, this was a bold and intelligent piece of film-making that honoured rather than trivialised the seriousness of its subject. Hodges quite casually remarked that it would be impossible to make such a film for British TV today. (The decline of Channel Four was also noted by the Quay Brothers in their own Q&A session, though more of that anon.) ‘Squaring the Circle’ refers to a mathematically impossible act. Yet for a few short years such a thing was possible. Switch on Channel Four now, and you will see with which substance they have replaced their Golden Age. Alas, that was one kind of freedom that didn’t need helicopters or troops to be brought down. Look out for this when it’s shown again. Only another twenty years to wait...

CINE-CITY 2008 PART 1: BICYCLE THIEVES

NB If you’re worried about plot spoilers for a 1948 film, they follow! And yes there is more to spoil than ‘someone’s bike gets nicked.’

The Cine-City Festival is back in Brighton for another year, and (among other delights) has given me the chance to finally see De Sica’s acclaimed drama Bicycle Thieves. As it turns out, this film is just as good as everyone has always said it is!

Of course, as a totem of Italian post-war neo-realism, it’s also a magnet for brickbats. It’s been criticised by some for not being ‘realist’ at all, with accusations that it’s even “manipulative.” But these are arguments against some absurd caricature of neo-realism rather than the style itself. (Though it doesn’t help that the genres defenders, such as Bazin, often made almost as foolish claims.) It’s abundantly clear that De Sica isn’t concerned with finding something ‘real’ and pointing a camera at it. ‘Realism’ is an artistic genre, and hence a form of artifice, as much as any other. To turn his sense of cinema into a criticism is the height of ludicrousness. A measure of the film’s success is that, even when you know it’s based upon a novel (by Luigi Bartolini) you find it almost impossible to imagine it as such – so pure is the sense of cinema it exudes. Similarly it’s sometimes claimed that the storyline is not as casual and free-flowing as it looks but actually conforms to a narrative structure. Again, this is not a criticism but a compliment with an identity crisis.

De Sica’s talent is not to dispel cinema’s devices but know which ones to keep in. Cross-cutting, for example, is rarely used here – the focus is almost all upon our protagonist Ricci. When he pawns his own bedclothes we see the pile of linen in the brokers, testament to how many have come to the same step. But we see the size of this pile via a reaction shot - through his eyes. Similarly, we learn almost nothing of the actual thief – where he’s put the bicycle, his relationship to the old man. We don’t even know if his fit is fake or not. We only know of him what Ricci does. Cross-cutting is minimised not because it’s not ‘real’ but because it would mitigate against seeing this world through Ricci’s eyes. The weaving camera shots give us the feeling the film is being shot in long takes in real time, even though this isn’t actually the case.

The Forties Rome we see feels almost like another planet, not only the palpable poverty but also the astonishing labour-intensiveness of life –fleets and flurries of workers continually pass us by, such as the army of street-sweepers that descend upon the morning. It adds weight to my hypothesis that, as a modernist art form, cinema has some inimical connection to the urban environment. (Alas, the Cine-City festival has now almost given up honouring its name as a festival of city films.)

It’s perhaps interesting to note that, upon release, the film was often criticised from the left. (Though the scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini was a Communist Party member, De Sica was not.) “As a form of social criticism,” claims Aristides Gazetas, “[it] never attempts to examine the root causes behind the poverty, nor criticize the ‘system’ that creates the injustices and inequalities.” Tomasulo even insists that "at best, the film is reformist; at worst, it legitimizes the ideology of bourgeois liberalism." De Sica was accused of propounding nothing but empty humanism, eight reels of weepy sympathy rather than an ounce of constructive suggestion.

To this charge, that the film’s chief deficiency lay in offering no ‘solutions’, it’s tempting to reply facetiously. Perhaps Ricci should have caught his thief, then united with him against a system which exploits us all. They could then have refused to put up their Rita Hayworth posters until the capitalist edifice crumbled around them. However, this criticism does illuminate what the film is doing to a greater extent than those who simply complain it’s not ‘really real’.

It’s true that, while Ricci faces problems which are typical of his time, he is still individualised. He is different from the types which inhabit Eisenstein films, who often feel as if they’ve stepped down from the geometric forms of Soviet propaganda posters. And this emphasis on him as a man, like you and me, is vital. Compare the plot to an outwardly similar story, Will Eisner’s acclaimed newspaper strip Ten Minutes, published the following year. (A semi-accurate summary of it is here.) Like Ricci, Freddy is hard pressed by life and in a moment of weakness resorts to crime. Both acts are presented as out of character, and neither ends well.

But Eisner emphasises this moment, closing in on the point where Freddy finally gives in to his weaknesses. He’s like a bridge which breaks the first time a heavy truck passes over it. The truck may have precipitated the break, but the problem was a structural flaw in the bridge. De Sica and Zavattini, conversely, contextualise the moment. Because we have inhabited Ricci’s reality up to this point, we understand his temptations. The very causes of his hesitation cause us a sense of dread, as it is all too credible to us that he’ll try to steal the bike. As Zavattini said, “that man is bearing what I myself should bear in the same circumstances.” To use Tomasulo’s terminology, it is Eisner’s work which “legitimises the ideology of bourgeois liberalism” (an abstract ‘morality’ devoid of context), De Sico and Zavattini have other fish to fry.

The whole of the film expands from the agony of that moment, including Ricci’s subsequent capture. (Which by then feels fated.) We are invited to consider what we would have done in the same situation. Any ‘solutions’ then offered would not only by necessity feel pat, but would crush the poignancy of this moment. As it stands the film is not closed and didactic, but open and troubling. It’s emphasis is not on the possibility or otherwise of living any other way, but the impossibility of the way we live now. As Zavattini said: “It is not the concern of an artist to propound solutions. It is enough to make an audience feel the need, the urgency, for them.”

It’s also arguable that the film is making a concrete point, albeit a harsher but more worldly one – that to survive in this world a poor man needs to be part of a gang. The fleets of uniformed workers come in here. Workplaces in Italy then were normally associated not only with a union but a political grouping, all who worked there were expected to join the grouping to enhance collective strength. A smart worker whose political inclinations lay elsewhere would learn to shut his mouth.

We first see Ricci sitting apart from his peers, having to be called over to hear about the job he’s won. Later he catches the titular bicycle thief but is unable to confront him when the lad’s neighbourhood comes together to defend him. Even his final desperate attempt to steal a bicycle himself come to naught from, unlike the original thief, having no accomplice to throw pursuers off the scent. (Admittedly he does at one point raise a posse in search of the stolen bicycle, who even seem to represent Leftism as much as anything does here. But this withers away.) Ricci suffers, what Bosley Crowther called “the isolation and loneliness of the little man in this complex social world”. He is a man with only his own determination, which he finds to be not enough. Perhaps such savage honesty is more productive than abstract calls for class unity.

More Cine-City reports to follow...

"TOLD BUT THESE FEW WORDS": JOHN WESLEY HARDING (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

Bob Dylan, 1967

Despite being another reprint from Ye Olde Print Days, this is also part of an occasional series where I eulogize some of my favourite albums. (Or, for younger readers, CDs.) Content may therefore be more celebratory and less analytical than usual. Despite this being the first entry labelled as such, I really started the series here without knowing it.

I‘m currently in the habit of borrowing my flatmate’s CDs to take into work. Thing is, I can only ever fit one in my jacket pocket. Marooned for a day with a single CD, I’ve learnt the wisdom of choosing wisely. But this is an album I’ve always liked which I haven’t heard in a while, so I should be okay.

As it turns out, listening to it again serves to confirm my view that the highpoint of Dylan’s career is either this or Basement Tapes. (Though admittedly you do have to mentally edit out the lesser Band tracks from Basement Tapes.) This was a realization that came over me slowly. I spent many angry teenage years playing the electrified hallucinogenic grotesquery of Highway 61 Revisited as loud as the volume dial would let me, until my Dad would rush in and accuse me of damaging my hearing. Admittedly, the more subdued sound on display here doesn’t generate that instantaneous antagonistic reaction in Dads, but that just obscures its true worth.

I wonder if the switch had a strange disconcerting effect on the rock audience, who had assumed Dylan was now their mascot after plugging in and turning off his original folk followers. The songs from those albums have been the subject of many a rocked-up cover, from Hendrix’s almost instantaneous cover of Watchtower to Patti Smith’s more recent Wicked Messenger - like they wanted to drown out and extinguish the unamped originals.

Though Highway 61 may have marked a step away from the literalism of the original protest songs, this era makes for even more of a sideways leap – into the allusive land of parable. Much of the appeal lies in the way the songs take place inside some mythic past, what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America”. After the frenetic modernity of Highway 61, John Wesley follows more leisurely trails. Telephones that don’t ring become telegraphs and steamboat whistles, passports become messengers and horsebacked strangers, cars become churches and Napoleon in Rags transforms into St. Augustine.

Alongside the old, weird West we also have the old, weird Victorian England and no shortage of the old, weird Bible either. John Wesley Harding, Tom Paine and St. Augustine all inhabit the same imaginary neighbourhood. Befitting Dylan’s new quietism, all this is assumed rather than paraded, there’s no “long-time-ago-in-galaxy-far-away” style bookends.

(Though of course Dylan’s just foregrounding tendencies he had earlier. Back in ’65 he was already enthusing how folk music was “just based on myth and the Bible and plague and famine and nothing but mystery. Roses growing right up out of people’s hearts and seven years of this and eight years of that and it’s all something that nobody can really touch”.)

The music’s similarly unassuming, a pick-up band of Nashville session men just clock in and do their job. His voice itself is almost unrecognizable from the nasally whine set to wind up Dads, instead it’s deep, gruff and gospelly. He sings distrustingly of the Wicked Messenger “whose mind it multiplied the smallest matter”.

His language is effective through being unassuming, a line like “all across the telegraph his name it did resound” resounds more for its apparent lack of effort. Such simple, direct language is more redolent of folksong than the bogus “these” and “yees” that make most such attempts sound like a bad issue of the Mighty Thor. Writing is about building up a picture gradually through accumulating small and seemingly innocuous words, not painting broad and grandiose flourishes that just flake off in the memory.

But what really makes the album linger in the mind is its beguiling quality. Underneath the simple surface lie pithy parables you never quite get to the bottom of; “nothing was revealed” as he deadpans at the end of Frankie Lee. I was surprised to see so many of these allusion-stuffed songs clocking in on the CD display at under the three-minute mark. Dylan apparently complained at the time that simple was harder to write, but the extra effort was worth it.

There’s a distinction between the gospelly first-person songs which mostly inhabit the second side, which seem to feed from Basement Tapes, and the symbolist character encounters which open and eventually dominate the album. The two final tracks stand out by being as simple and direct as they appear. After the “too much confusion” of all the cryptic allusions, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight is a song about being your baby tonight. These songs offer the “way out of here” longed for on Watchtower, a redemptive coda to send us home happy and satisfied. But ahead lay Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait where, extended to album length they wouldn’t maintain interest. Dylan dipped and, while he rose again eventually, he’d never recapture what he manages so effortlessly here.

Postscript: When first writing this piece I seem to have somehow overlooked Blonde On Blonde entirely. Not sure why, as between them those four albums are surely Dylan’s most essential.

LOOK MA, I'M ON THE RADIO!

Well Resonance FM anyway...

PLEASE SIR, THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK

Alas, a surfeit of stuff has stopped me blogging anything new for a while – and may well stay that way into the near future. Some of that stuff is fun stuff. Most isn’t.

So superlative gigs by Acid Mothers Temple, Lightning Bolt, The Hanson Brothers and Jackie-O Mothefucker shall pass unrecorded here.

As will the equally superlative films Gomorrah and Hunger and the not-bad-at-all Linhade Passe.

When all these wrongs right themselves again, offerings currently stalled in the works will appear. Including (but not limited to) the much-promised screeds on Quatermass and Doctor Who. If you’re absolutely desperate to read something I wrote lately and have an abiding interest in the Marxist theory of light bulbs (I kid not), try here then scroll down. Quite a long way down...

...further...

...further...

...there.