FROM RUSSIA

French and Russian Master Paintings from Moscow and St Petersberg 1870-1925
Royal Academy 26th Jan-18th April (...yep, another exhibition I manage to review just as it closes!)

i) Modernism At Home and Abroad

That two-word title, the very thing which initially seemed doubtful about this exhibition, turns out to be it’s main source of strength. This isn’t Russian art but art “from Russia”; the disgorged collections of four museums from Moscow and St Petersberg. The poster boy for the show is not a Russian painting at all, but Matisse’s Dance II! The place where a bunch of paintings happened to get stuck after the Bolshevik takeover, doesn’t that sound like a somewhat arbitrary rationale for a show? An exhibition isn’t an illustrated essay, but neither is it pretty wallpaper. Shouldn’t it have some meaning and shape?

Admittedly it means omissions, some of which even an amateur like myself can spot. (Can you really have a Russian art show from this era without Mayakovsky or Rodchenko?) But, however arrived at, the chance to compare the Paris-based with the Russian artists throws both into relief, and even gives you something of a sense of what it must have been to be a Modernist artist in Russia at this time.

For one thing it impresses upon you how, in a world before colour photography, it was important where paintings ended up. It’s commonly agreed that the place to be for Modernism at this time was Paris. Those bohemians may well have been going hungry in their Notre Dame garrets, but culturally they couldn’t have been more sated! And this sense may have been more emphasised for the Russians than other foreign visitors. Modernism often quite consciously manifestoed itself as art for the modern condition. But unlike progressive France, its cities decorated with gleaming metal towers, Russia was quite definitely tailgating the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It’s Modernists weren’t reacting to something, they were trying to create it.

Of course even in the early Twenties Paris wasn’t off limits to Russian artists; despite the distance many went to study (or even live) there. But the pictures you saw there from thereon lived only in your memory, they weren’t on instant access as they would be today. When you read that, for example, Udaltsova created a copy of a Cubist Picasso for study, you get a sudden sense of time and place. When the artists’ group Jack of Diamonds organized exhibitions of French art, it’s reminiscent of the way before video budding directors formed film societies - the only way to see many movies then was to show them.

But the main sense you get as you walk these rooms comes from counting the limited number of French works,- then seeing their motifs being endlessly taken up, copied and referenced by the Russians. (For example Mashkov’s skittish mash-up of Cezanne’s Girl at the Piano). Perhaps it was like being a musician in late Fifties Liverpool; no-one plays R&B on the radio, shop rarely stock it, you can only pick the records up through random encounters with sailors. The music which does come you way you then inevitably fetishise.

… which inevitably works to your advantage. Sometimes the place to be is where everyone else is. But if what you want to do is something different, the crowd isn’t really the place. Even when, like Udaltsova, you try to copy something foreign you inevitably end up changing it. And if the picture you’re copying is essentially incomplete, as you can only access a limited number of the works, this effect is enhanced. Russian modernism was seeded by these paintings from France, but what came to birth was new hybrids and variants such as Neo-Primitivism and Cubo-Futurism.

ii) Modernist Folk

But of course the creative explosion in Russian art in this period can’t be reduced to distance alone. There’s a paradox afoot where the artists here saw themselves as a Modernist outpost in a sea of semi-feudalism, yet at the same time drew from a domestic wellspring of inspiration. Of course this paradox is in some ways inherent to Modernism, simultaneously looking forward while venerating the primitive. Yet ironically Modernism’s access to the primitive mostly came from the treasures of colonialism, the tribal masks of Picasso coming from France’s African colonies. Russia’s treasures, conversely, were domestic.

As Ann Dumas puts it in the catalogue “Russian artists were becoming increasingly conscious of their national artistic heritage. The cheap, popular woodcut prints (lubki), toys, painted trays, fairground hoardings and shop signs of Russian folk art, as well as icons, became new invigorating sources of inspiration.” This was perhaps a consequence of Russia’s unique status in Europe, it’s vast size and still-near-feudal relations in the countryside. (Perhaps a similar argument could be made for Mexico.)

There even seem to have been attempts to break out of the urbanity of Moscow and St Petersberg into the Russian heartlands. As early as 1870 the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions (soon known more catchily at the Wanderers) were literally trying just that. I don’t know if they made it as far as the Kamchatka peninsula, but the idea’s a cool one. (Later Mayaokovsky was taking muralled-up trains around the country as mobile art exhibitions, but that doesn’t get a mention here.)

If these folk roots gave Russian Modernism much of its vibrancy, perhaps it also weighted its approach to a classic Modernist dilemma. Though Modernism was in general left-leaning, it was often pitched upon the conflict between the individualist and the collective. Perhaps Expressionism, with its emphasis upon capturing the subjectivity of experience, was Modernism at its most individualist. But most works on show here suggest Russian art was inclining towards the collective.

Perhaps the political context also comes in here. From Repin’s celebratory 17 October 1905 onwards, we’re reminded how it was not France but Russia which was politically cutting edge. From 1917 Russia suddenly felt a new country (in both senses), and an uneasy state tolerance of radical arts was perhaps misread as encouragement. (All of which is of course slid over by this exhibition.)

iii) Join the Dance

Ironically, perhaps the main exemplifier of this on show is the French poster boy itself - Matisse’s Dance II. It’s true that the picture owes much of its impact to its colour sense, as limited as it is vivid. In his later years Matisse worked only through tearing and shaping coloured card, and the roots of that style are visible here. However, the limitations of only seeing this work through its colour scheme are shown later in the exhibition, by one Russian work which is nothing but an inferior copy. Kuzma Pretrov-Vodkin’s The Playing Boys (painted two years later in 1911) duplicates it like a covers band copying the same chords – but getting nothing of the sense.

In a fitting phrase the exhibition describes the “radical simplifications” of Matisse’s figurework. The figures don’t just hold hands so much as form a circle, as if the composition has caught them at some midpoint in shedding their individual shape. Only one of them seems to have a face left, and that is the most basic cartoon arrangement of features. The circle itself is not geometic but loose, flowing and ululating. The figures combine with the colour scheme in a very simple image, yet you feel if you added or took anything away the whole thing would come crashing down. It’s a Bacchic paen to the loss of self, and the invitation to us is to join in and step inside… (Tellingly it was nearly destroyed for its “decadence”, not when painted but during the Stalinist era.)

iv) Let No Painting Be Our Master

There’s a stock point in these exhibition reviews where I complain about the focus on painting. This is something akin to my complaining when superhero films contain plot holes or prices go up at Christmas. It’s doubly disappointing when so much Russian art was moving away from painting; into posters, photomontage, film and theatre design or Constructivist works, to see a show subheaded “master paintings”. There seem to have been two broad approaches. Diaghilev of Ballets Russes, an important svengali in visual arts, staged “productions in which music, choreography and design were fused.” This is akin to Susan Sontag’s theory of Syaenthesis, where all works of art would come together into one. Meanwhile Tatlin’s Constructivism sought not to fuse the arts with each other but press them into the service of design and engineering, to “take control of the forms encountered in everyday life.”

(Albeit with mixed success.Tatlin’s Corner Counter-Relief makes much of using ‘proletarian’ materials such as rope and wire. But it just reminds you of trustafarians appropriating ‘workers” clothes, such as dungarees and cloth caps when they want to look rebellious. Tatlin went on to reject painting as inherently ‘bourgeois’, but ironically his paintings outshine this effort.)

Of course, while all this is sometimes alluded to, we can’t expect any more from the stuffy Victorian Academy…

…actually, they do a few things. A room is given over to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (what everyone calls the ‘Tatlin Tower’.) The labels even make a sly comment about it being planned as taller than the Eiffel Tower, suggesting something of a pissing contest. But they mostly attempt to fill in the gaps with blow-up photos - of contemporary exhibitions, film or theatre designs and costumes etc. These aren’t adequate but do achieve a surprising amount in bringing the work to life, in one case changing your response to it almost entirely.

Malevich’s infamous Suprematist tryptich comes in here, the infamously geometric black square, circle and cross. The crowds did not seem to be gathering overly around these works, at least not on the day I attended. But when you see a picture of him stretched on his deathbed, the Black Square above his head in an almost all-white room, you suddenly get the sense of a man looking past this world to stare into the infinite. You would need a heart of stone not to be moved.



v) Please Patronise Us!

Another couple of photos show some of these paintings not on the walls of exhibitions but adorning the houses of their wealthy patrons, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. These collectors shouldn’t be parodied as mere pretentious flaunters of wealth. They seem to have been keen followers of Modernism, supporting important artists (including Matisse) from early in their careers, plus they often exhibited their purchases publicly. And this was all at a time when Modernism was genuinely shocking. (It’s darkly amusing that their reward for supporting the radical arts for so many years was to have their collections “nationalised” by the Bolsheviks, as the catalogue delicately puts it.)

However it’s worth reminding ourselves how Modernist art relied upon a Medieval means of subsistence; for example both collectors employed artists to decorate panels in their mansions as well as sell them paintings. (This was perhaps part of the impetus away from painting, towards more ‘democratic’ forms such as poster design.) And it is frustrating to realise you are only hearing the sunny-side-up stories. For example, Shchukin commissioned Matisse’s Dance II to decorate his home, but got cold feet when confronted with its bawdy nature. Of course he got over this. But if he hadn’t and the work was never finished, would we ever know of it?

Nevertheless it’s a boon that the show even touches on such normally overlooked subjects, rather than presenting artists as inhabiting some higher realm than such worldly stuff. This was given an extra, unintentional fillip when descendants of the original purchasers threatened legal action to get their property back. A law had to hastily drafted to allow the exhibition to go ahead. Modernist art may point at another world. But it’s nailed to a wall in this one.

Needless to say, if I could ever visit Paris in this period I would be there in a flash. After all, it’s commonly agreed that the place to be for Modernism at this time was Paris. Well, people don’t know nothing. There’s a degree to which the rush to Paris just gained it’s own momentum – artists went to Paris because artists went to Paris. But perhaps Modernism in Russia was more like Modernism in Germany, except more so. Art was neither inspired by social events, nor sought to influence them with its rhetoric. Society seemed to be morphing before your eyes, and artists came to feel their work was fusing with social events – they saw themselves as quite literally making another world. You come out of this exhibition with an exhilarating sense not just of experimentalism but possibility. Yet of course much of that sense comes from the cut-off date of 1925. You could perhaps play a black joke and add on an extra room for radical art in the Stalinist era, then leave the space empty…

THIS YEAR'S WEB & MINI COMIX HAUL

Getting my haul of comics home from this year’s UK Web & Mini Comix Thing, I discovered that unbeknownst to myself I had purchased only comics about seasons or comics about ghosts. I’ll post about both in turn, with a break for ice cream in the middle…

Part One: Seasons

I found Jeremy Dennis in archetypical pose, sitting behind her stall hand-sewing gold leaves into the cover of her latest offering Scattered Leaves.(Guess which season! Go on, guess!) I’ve been reading Jeremy’s comics since the dawning days of the early Nineties Oxford fanzine Stomping Scene, so I’ve been in prime position to watch how her work’s changed. She started out with quite soapy stories, most notably the studenty bed-hopping antics of Three in a Bed. But what seems to have precipitated a big change in her work was when she started drawing her on-line Weekly Strip, which then gets serialised into comics such as this one.

Jeremy told me at the Thing she often thinks up these while walking to work in the morning (in fact one strip features her doing just that), and many of them seem to take place in that hazy interchange between sleep and wakefulness. To my mind it’s like a novelist taking to poetry, with the ever-present nine panel grid working as her meter. Some strips start off with reality before departing on some strange tangent. (For example seeing a fat pigeon in her garden triggers a flubby-winged flight of fantasy.) Some are out and out strange and surreal. But even the ones taking place in the ‘real’ world never just serve up dry facts but take on a numinous aura of subjectivity. The on-line Weekly Strip may work as a galvanizing device for production, but I prefer my comics in print – and anyway I think you glean a better sense of things by reading a bunch of these.

As the stitched cover might suggest, Jeremy tends more to comics-as-art-objects than high runs. To get yourself a copy, try contacting her via the web link given above.

Before you accuse me of being seasonally obsessive, it was at Will Kirkby’s own suggestion that I picked up his Fireflies and Seasons, with its distinctly autumnal feel. One of my complaints about the Web & Mini crowd is that everyone seems so influenced by manga yet seem to suffer from such limited perspective of it. Thankfully Kirkby seems more influenced by the animistic, fable-like world of Miyazaki than by endless parades of giant robots. His style is exquisite and his sense of page design strong. My one criticism… I get the fact he’s not telling fast-paced adventure stories and his characters are no doubt supposed to look inscrutable, but could they have at least some variety in expression? You can order from Will via PayPal.

Garden Funnies describes itself as “the world’s leading horticultural sequential art anthology” and (unusually for small press publications) aims at an all-ages audience. Since fruit and veg bloom in the Autumn, I contend it fits neatly into my seasonal theme! It has some great artists (especially Richard Tingley and Alex Potts) but it’s the neatness of the package that really sells it. The pocket size suits the tone and that green spot colour really puts you in mind of things horticultural! One of the singular features of comics, after all, is the way that the design and the packaging doesn’t really separate itself from the contents in the way it would for a book or CD – they all morph together into one seamless gestalt thing! You can buy Garden Funnies online from the Samu shop, and - for anyone keen to put their produce on show - they’re also after submissions.

Behind a gloriously Wintry screenprinted cover, Hey Monkey Riot: Winter collects a full season’s worth of Edd’s daily updated online strip. (There was also an Autumn one I didn’t pick up.) It’s charmingly palatable stuff, but I would make two criticisms.

Firstly, the restrictions of a three-to-four panel format can be harder to write than longer pieces. In particular it seems to impose a kind of gag structure, two to three panels of set-up then the pay-off. Yet as Eddie Campbell (the pioneer who introduced me to autobio comics) lamented in an old Alec strip: “When you tell and retell a story you tend to streamline it, give it a dramatic shape, leave out nice little touches”. Sometimes I feel like Edd is chopping his strips into comic-book patterns rather than following life’s rhythms and undulations, surely the point of a diary strip. (I may be being unduly unfair to Edd here, reading his comic so soon after Jeremy’s, which I felt did very much the opposite.)

But if I prefer Edd’s longer comics such as Hey Monkey Riot 3 I also have another reason. Edd’s perhaps one of the few people drawing autobio comics who actually does interesting stuff! There’s less of Edd’s political activism in Winter, in fact he even describes himself as a “possibly lapsed anarchist” in the blurb! Hey Monkey Riot 3 was more interesting in detailing the trials, tribulations and (mostly) misadventures of his attending the recent anti-G8 protests in Germany. It was reminiscent of Isy’s Morgenmuffel zine, an angle on activism which is celebratory rather than polemical, yet also unafraid to point out absurdities.

You can order Edd’s comics online from the link above. He only produced fifty copies of Autumn and Winter, though, so maybe you should get moving!

From Edd’s Winter comic to Sean’s comic Ed… do try to keep up! Sean Azzopardi’s Ed 4 was the one comic actually set in Summer, perhaps a result of Sean’s deep devotion to sitting in gardens. Sean’s a great artist, and Ed an iconic-looking character, but after four issues it may be time he took Ed to pastures new. Perhaps the emphasis on Ed as an artist, battling to find motivation or follow his muse, makes things too self-referential. Again, you can by this from the online shop.

This year’s Web & Mini happened slap-bang in the middle of Easter weekend. Of course, long before Easter came to be about chocolate bunnies who died for you, it was a festival for the start of Spring. And of course setting a date for such a thing is just asking for trouble. After an absurdly mild Winter, the cold came back. It was that biting cold, the sort that seeps straight through you without bothering with ostentatious signs like snow flurries. It even hailed on me when I ventured out for sarnies and drinks, though I was more annoyed by the fact it stopped again as soon as I got back to the venue. On the train home, the rails and railway bank gleamed white against the night, as if the world had slipped into negative. By Wednesday I was back to eating my lunch sitting out in the park. When I woke up this morning, a full week after the shift to Summer time, the snow was already deep.

Comics happen in a proverbial, idealised world, never more clearly than when they set a Season. If a comic’s set in Winter, expect to see the characters sport scarves and wooly hats from one cover to the next. Autumn will always be depicted by perpetual falling leaves, as if those trees are inexhaustible. But the real world is fickle and unpredictable, where the seasons are no more set than people’s moods…

Part Two: Ghosts

Ghosts by John Allison (of Scary Go Round fame) is admittedly a slight story, nor will it win any prizes for innovation or originality. (How many comics have we had which starred two sassy-yet-ditzy gals by now?) But where it comes alive is through its charm. The tale’s described as “very mildly bone-chilling”, the ghost doesn’t even attempt to be scary but just merrily plays the trumpet all hours of the day and (more often) night. At one point we even see a beautific smile break across his face, like he just wants to be friends with the living. Were it not for the sharp and self-reflective dialogue, it would read like a children’s story. (I mean that as a compliment!)

Ultimately I came of think of the ghost as the spirit of creativity - recklessly waking the girls up with its wild and wacky notions, interrupting the cool ennui of their pop-tart-munching existence. So it’s not surprising the solution isn’t to exorcise it but find a direction for its energies… I can’t say more without heading into spoiler country!

From Girl Spy, the only other SGR comic I’ve read, I’d reckoned Allison’s art only worked in colour – it was the cheery colour sense which had really carried the artwork. So I was interested to see Ghosts was done in spot colour, yet working so well I immediately bought it. Party it worked through only being in spot colour, all shades of blue without a hint of black. (Upon my quizzing Allison admitted pinching this idea from Top Shelf comics – but a good idea is worth pinching!) But it worked mostly because Allison had abandoned the drawing tablet for the old-fashioned line, and proven himself a superb linesmith. The drawn line gives the characters such a buoyancy and life you don’t miss the full colour. On his website, Allison mentions he’s now reverted to lines on paper full time. Ghosts is available from SGR’s online shop.

I’ve picked up a handful of issues of Hope For the Future over the years and enjoyed them. It’s admittedly very post-Buffy in set-up (flippant-tongued teens encounter the supernatural), but it’s generally handled with enough wit and skill to get away with it. Here for example one gang member is told to dress up for a Nineties rock night; only when he turns up in his flannel shirt does he find they’re actually travelling back ten years in time.

The earlier issues I’d picked up had been drawn by scripter Simon Perrins himself, in a cartoony but rounded and semi-realistic style. Issue 7, however, is drawn by Andrew Livesy in a more stylized fashion – an assortment of angular lines, almost reminiscent of Dylan Horrocks. Despite the slightly jarring feature of the cover being in the original style, the new look lends itself to the story quite quickly and you follow the characters even though they’re now depicted so differently. This is partly because of the reader’s ability to accept the ‘reality’ of quite stylized work, but perhaps mostly because Livesy’s work is so strong. The full-page reality-bending montage panels are particularly effective. Checking the website I note the comic’s actually up to issue 10, suggesting it was Livesy’s art which caught my eye.

Being someone who has to work in at least one complaint, I’ll mention the fact that some panels are far too wordy. To avoid covering up too much artwork they instead shrink down the text, but this just makes it hard to read! This may be something to do with Perrins surrendering the art chores, as earlier issues didn’t suffer from this. Anyway the flaw is frustrating partly through its pointlessness, Perrins is a sharp writer with no need to hide behind verbosity.

Hope For the Future is yet another title to have it’s own online shop malarkey.

Knuckles the Malevolent Nun is a collection by Cornelius Stone and (mostly) Roger Langridge. It’s material from the can, so that kind of makes it a ghost, doesn’t it? Its superlative stuff, with the only criticism that I could possibly make is that Langridge’s more recent stuff is even better, so this now doesn’t look quite as good! If you need a starting point,check out Fred the Clown and check his progress back to Knuckles. Knuckles is ceaselessly inventive in a crazy, Goonish way but there can be something almost too frenetic about it, like the ideas were coming out so fast they were bashing into each other. With Fred it’s like Langridge became the master of his ever-powerful imagination…

Guess what? You can buy this online! Whatever did I ever go out in that freezing hailstorm for?

Douglas Noble describes his new issue of Strip For Me, A Man of Certain Talents, thusly: “It’s a puzzle about identity, set in a world without names. Where no answers are supplied and the questions are left unsaid.” I expect ghosts come into it somewhere… Like most of his comics I couldn’t really tell you what this is actually about, in fact I often find the more I think about them the more elusive they become. It’s the sort of thing where you’re better off savouring the mystery than trying to come up with a ‘solution’. Two quick comments about Noble’s work! First, there’s much more skilful artists in the world but Noble’s a skilful creator who can use his relatively limited chops highly evocatively. For example, he captures movement poorly but devises stories where that seeming limitation just doesn’t matter. And second I find his stuff always works better in issue-length stories, like here, rather than in shorter snippets. Inevitable webshop link here.

While I didn’t manage one new comic for the Thing, Paul O’Connell of The Sound of Drowning has to go and upstage me with two – without even turning up himself! Love is War was a cool strip in an even cooler package, but what really grabbed me was the mini She’s Leaving Home with art by Lawrence Elwick. I’d previously only seen a few examples of Elwick’s work at a comics show in a local Brighton gallery, but judging by this comic he’s got great things ahead of him! The art reminds me, not so much in linework as in storytelling, of some of Glibert Hernandez’s stuff- the combination of cartooniness and childlike perspectives, yet with an undercurrent of menace. And as someone who’s frequently been asked “what, you make up words for the balloons?” I always love it when someone scripts a silent comic!

Like most comics from The Sound of Drowning stable, apparently these comics come in limited editions. They aren’t on the inevitable online shop yet, but keep an eye out…

This is probably quite a random selection based on my meanderings throughout the day, on brief excursions from behind my own stall. I definitely saw other things I meant to pick up, but somehow the fates conspired…

Thankfully there seems to be a tumult of similar-flavoured events coming up guaranteed to empty your pockets of change and clutter your bedroom! ScissorsPaperStone (12th April) is an artist’s book fair, but I know Sound of Drowning at least will have a table there – and, as said several times above, there’s only the thinnest of lines between the two things. I’ll be staffing tables at both the London Zine Symposium (April 27th) and the Artists Books Fair in Brighton (24th May), so if you’re passing say hello. Then the ever-reliable Caption convention will be back on 9th and 10th August. Of course the year is yet young, so we may even see more…

“WHEN THE ICEBURG HIT…”: An Appreciation of Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator)

“Not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name,
Lord I can’t go back this a-way”
-The Kingston Trio

i) “Who could know if I’m a traitor?”
It was the penultimate track Everything is Free that first drew me to this CD by country artist Gillian Welch. At first my fascination confused me; I didn’t find myself at all in sympathy with Welch’s theme, that its become harder and harder for artists to make a living these days. (“They figured it out, that we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.”) While I certainly wouldn’t claim to match Welch for creativity, I’ve never been paid much for any artistic endeavor I’ve ever pursued and reached the ‘gonna do it anyway’ point without thinking about it too much. Everything is free? I don’t see the downside. “I can get a straight job.” Yeah, join the bloody club girl!

Finally it struck me it wasn’t Welch’s subject that grabbed me so much as her tone. In a genre stuffed with tearjerking laments to dead dogs, Welch had cut through to country’s real heart – the point world-weary resignation becomes almost a Zen state. (“Try to make a little change, down at the bar.”) The song ends with her defiantly figuring it out, “I’m gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.” There was a shoulder-shrugging toughness in the face of hard times that had no place for sympathy nor time for sentimentality. Just like blues, country started as a poor people’s music. And poor people can’t, quite literally, afford such indulgences.

Listening further I realised that, though such a tone pervaded the album, the types of songs were very different - and it was really only one type which interested me. A more accurate (if less catchy) title for this screed might be ‘a critical appreciation of somewhere between half and two-thirds of this CD’. It’s not just that they’re recorded in different styles or have different tempos, it’s that they come from different worlds. For example, Red Clay Halo is a character song, sung in the first person and standing or falling on the sense of reality it conveys. We’re asked to visualise the red clay dust on the guy’s boots, a detail picked out to convey authenticity. The other songs are symbolist and multifaceted. The red in My First Lover recurs through different objects capturing the singer’s attention, indeed the objects are only there to illustrate the colour which floats through the song standing for something in its own right – an opposition to “that white wedding gown.”

If Red Clay Halo was a picture, it would seek to convince you that you were looking through a frame into real space. If many of the other songs were pictures they’d be strange Symbolist/Cubist arrangements, where symbols and objects floated in splendid isolation with no concern for normal rules of time, space or motion. Red Clay Halo has musical and vocal lines as straight and direct as the character, while the lines from the more metaphysical songs are twisted and interwoven. In fact you stop listening to them as separate lines, and focus instead on the inter-relationship between them.

Lyrically, pretty much the same thing happens. The line “saw a wheel within a wheel, heard a call within a call” sums things neatly up. Lines and phrases recur during and even between songs, sometimes with shifting words. (Listen out for “sails in rags with the staggers and the jags” for example, and no, I’ve no idea what ‘staggers’ or ‘jaggs’ are either!) The songs virtually finish each others’ sentences, in fact at one point they do that quite literally. (Ruination Day is Part Two of April the 14th and picks up the same line, even though the songs are in different styles and rhythms.) At the same time there’s as many paradoxes and contradictions, where every line seems to be stalked at some point by its own opposite. Every barb becomes double-edged, and ambiguities interbreed with other ambiguities… I like to imagine I’ll be diving to the bottom of this well, and coming back up with lungs still full of air and the magic wishing coins. I’ll probably just muddy the surface for the sake of some small change, but I’m willing to try anyway.

The CD often sounds the way a dream sequence in a film feels, where the edges of the frame washes out, apparently simple phrases taking on a numinous significance and everything happening with stately slowness. It also reminds me of a bright winters day, where everything’s lit with an almost forensic clarity but with an absence of warmth that creates an eerie sense of unreality. (There’s even some un-country references to winter, as we’ll see.)

Welch’s particular sub-genre is sometimes referred to as ‘neo-traditionalist country’. (Though Wikipedia attempts to lumber her with the horrific splice term ‘alternative neo-traditionalist country’!) It’s unlike alt.country, which works more like a punk’s spirit came to inhabit a country musician’s body. Neo-traditionalism tries to conjure up an alternative reality where Nashville never happened, and we never left the simpler unadorned sounds of Hank Williams and the Carter Family. (Welch’s previous album was tellingly titled Revival.)

Songs are littered with references to old country artists (such as Johnny Cash) or quotes from old songs. (For example the “they were one, they were two, they were three, they were four..” section is from The Kingston Trio’s 500 Miles.) This self-conscious referencing of past mythology is something I often find annoying in rock music, when served up by U2 and others. But rock music is supposed to be the soundtrack of modernity and innovation. Country, conversely, has the look back in its very marrow. It’s music that’s always had at least one eye on the past.

However, country may just have different pitfalls which are equally deep. You can easily end up like a folk purist; in trying to reconstruct a dead tradition you assemble a perfect fossil of what was once a living animal. But Welch’s triumph is not to shy from but to accentuate the perils and failings of this approach, at times seeming to insist on its impossibility the same time as she pursues it.

Welch takes such concerns head on in the near-title opening track Revelator, where she describes herself variously as “a pretender’, “a traitor” and finally “Queen of fakes and imitators”. However the full line is “who could know if I’m a traitor?, Time’s the revelator”. Or, in other words, the rest of the CD will reveal all. But for now only time knows, and time ain’t telling.

ii) “I wished that I played in a rock ‘n’ roll band”
The next song, My First Lover is ostensibly the story of Welch leaving her first boyfriend. However, it’s notable that she doesn’t leave him for anyone or anything else – the refrained line is “and she’s free.” Moreover, a combination of the elusive colour red and the Steve Miller song Quicksilver Girl inspires her decision, suggesting she didn’t merely swap one man for another but give up such human concerns for a life dedicated to music.

This implicit idea is taken up more clearly on the later April the 14th, picking up on the red metaphor with red skies and her visit to the “redeye zone”. A kind of cousin to Everything is Free, it details her inspiration to become a musician coming from watching a loser band (“sick and stoned and strangely dressed”) playing in a dive bar. When the song starts Welch is merely visiting the bar. But by the time it ends she’s shifted to clearing up like she works there. The song fits into a long tradition of songs where artistic talent is bestowed like a curse, falling unasked and leaving the victim to wander forever barred from leading a normal life. The song conveys this combination of curse and calling quite brilliantly.

But the event is also bookended with bizarre references to icebergs, shootings and Okies, themes taken up further in ‘part two’ Ruination Day. This starts to make more sense once you realise that April 14th was the day Lincoln was shot, the Titanic sunk and the ‘Black Sunday’ when a giant dust storm sparked a massive migration of farmers from Oklahoma. However this doesn’t mean that it’s a commemorative song, or that Welch is asking us to wear a poppy for some specific historical incident. The somewhat surreal image of Okies fleeing icebergs should be something of a clue that these events are being treated as images, to mix up and juxtapose, not mere chronological lists. The Titanic sections focus on how “far from home” its survivors were, like victims of a Biblical flood.

By unifying into one day every bad thing that befell the Earth, Welch has created a metaphor for the Fall - after which we are all lost in the water, miles from home. By including the Okies she carries the suggestion that this also meant the end of the golden days of country, where the music became rootless, dislocated, inauthentic. But by folding her own fall into musicianship into the moment, she creates a choice paradox - by picking up a guitar she was forced to join with a tradition she might forever be cut off from, yet her only chance is to play her way out.

Such themes are reminiscent of Dylan’s late 60s albums The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding. Turning back on the hallucinogenic grotesquerie of his earlier years, Dylan resolves to “try to tell it like it is with no need of pranks.” Similarly Welch looks fondly back upon the time where Elvis just “put on a shirt his mother made and went on the air”. But Dylan’s once disdainful sneer has transformed into a yearning cry, which puts the emphasis all on the “trying to.” Sometimes the hardest thing you can do is just sing something simple. Welch sums it up with the line “think I’ll move back down to Memphis, and thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue.” Welch wants in her heart to sing Elvis’ direct sentiments, but marooned in the modern world, her tongue can only speak in allusion and metaphor. In both cases the words contain balances and nuances, both within and across songs, which rely upon repeated careful listenings. But this, the very subject of my praise, is also presented by the singer as an encumbrance, a kind of curse.

iii) “Step into the light, poor Lazarus”
The final track, I Dream a Highway (audaciously long for a country track at fourteen minutes) is in some ways a counterweight, the ‘answer’ song to such questions. Though the parade of symbols follows no narrative, there is a kind of temporal chronology at work – from the “moon in the mirror”, through “twilight” to “blind and blistered by the morning white” of the day she finally walks out into. The album’s called Time, but what kind of time are we talking about? Revelator was unable to guess the future. In My First Lover not just the future but even the present were absent, the point where the action moves offstage. April the 14th suggested life was locked inside a cyclic, recurring crisis. I Dream a Highway is linear, as linear as the highway that forms its central image.

The song’s mood also counters much of what has gone before. The first verse is “John he’s kicking out the footlights, the Grand Ole Oprey got a brand new band”. Typically double-edged, it refers to the time a drunken Johnny Cash smashed up the Grand Ole Oprey stage. Yet the song slows down the moment of destruction, bathes it in a tranquil glow. Against April the 14th and Ruination Day, the overriding tone is one of redemption, of a life lived to the full. (“Drank whiskey with my water, sugar in my tea.”)

But of course a highway can be traveled two ways, back (“back to you love”) and forward (“step into the light”.) And alongside the highway is the image of the “winding ribbon”, with no obvious up or down. The paradoxes that haunt earlier songs are here in spades, a getaway car that’s merely “an empty wagon full of rattling bones”.

And what of the “you” the highway is taking us back to? There’s repeated references to a Lazarus-like dead love, in some ways a mirror to the left lover in My First Lover. However, despite Welch’s penchant for such mirroring, to bring back the hazily half-remembered figure here doesn’t really fit. Some lines seem more to refer to Welch’s personal and musical partner, David Rawlings, for example:

Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds?
Now you be Emmylou and I’ll be Gram
I send a letter, don’t know who I am

Such identity confusion seems reflective of their previously-mentioned habit of playing and singing in such an intertwined way you can’t really tell who’s doing what. But Rawlings is clearly neither dead nor reborn.

As noted earlier, the song refers to Johnny Cash, and an earlier track to the death of Elvis, “all alone in a long decline.” Elvis is even coloured in the same silver and gold as the highway and ribbon. All of these may be part, but only part, of the big picture - for it feels as though Welch is singing about something far greater than any single individual.

Despite the references to Hollywood the song takes place in rain and snow, and asks “who will sustain us through the winter?” But just as Welch manages to bring back Lazarus, it is he who sustains her. Lazarus is the whole of country music, yet simultaneously more than that. David Monaghon described Dylan as “calling on modern man to see the spiritual virtues that are to be found by looking in the past.” Lazarus is these, Lazarus is everything that has been expunged and drained from country music; a heart which once beat openly but is now buried under a shroud of WalMarts and multiplexes. Like an Arthurian King, the world is in winter without him. But memory maintains our connection. While we are capable of dreaming a highway back to him, he’s in sense revivable. Can Welch pull of the task she’s set herself, and make music worthy of the grand tradition? And can country’s heart be revived and rewoken? Ultimately, it’s the same question.

The album opens with “darling remember” and closes with “I dream a highway back to you”. But both songs are equally about the future. Welch contends the only way to look forward is to trust the past with your back. She doesn’t skimp on the knives and poisons that populate the past, instead she learns to live with them. Don’t deny the past’s mistakes or wish they could somehow be annulled but accept that they happened, and live today accordingly.

“What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last years lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow.”

World-weary resignation finally reached that Zen state.

THE TRILOGY OF THE DEAD (PLUS ONE) - PART 2

PLOT SPOILERS continue in this second part, taking us from Dawn to Land.

'DAY OF THE DEAD' (1985)

'Day' most obviously returns to the set-up of 'Night', where a group of besieged humans fall not only to the dumbass army of zombies surrounding them but to their own inability to get along. The main conflict at first seems to be enlightened scientists versus small-minded military, that staple of genre fiction. Our hero’s even a scientist - Sarah. (With the CoolBlackGuy reduced to her pilot sidekick, John.) The military want to take on the zombies in naked battle, which as the film makes abundantly clear is absurd – they’re outnumbered many thousands to one. They’re reliant on instinct as much as the zombies they want to fight.

But while through Sarah the scientists initially appear more sympathetic, the more we learn of the blood-spattered chief scientist and his grotesque Dr. Moreau-like experiments the less clear this seems. Pursuit of abstract knowledge has disengaged him from the world and with it all humility, morality and ultimately sense of survival. Against a devotion to brawn, he has only an equal but opposite devotion to brain. Neither are what’s needed. Day originally intended the scientists to live in an electrified compound and the military in a bunker. Apart from providing corollaries for their respective ideologies, this neatly echoes the house vs. basement argument of the first film.

To get 'Day', you have to pinch the tag-line from 'Dawn' - “When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” (No-one from there will miss it much, it only gets alluded to briefly anyway.) The supernaturalism of Night returns, in a film set during Halloween. But while Night uses the supernatural merely to extinguish the rational, Day goes on to fully embrace it.

In Dawn’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Hell, CoolBlackGuy Peter mentions voodoo customs and that his ancestry is Jamaican. (Most black Americans are African in origin.) This time he’s called John, comes with a fully-fledged “yah-man” Carribbean accent, a fondness for wacky baccy and everything bar a rasta hat. Crucially he lives in a caravan outside the main bunker, with his Irish (equally non-Anglo Saxon) co-pilot. In what is probably the film’s skeleton key he offers us:

“You want to put some kind of explanation on all this? Here’s one as good as any other. We’re being punished by the Creator. He visited a curse on us. Maybe He didn’t want to see us blow ourselves up, put a big hole in the sky. Maybe He just wanted to show us He’s still the Boss Man. Maybe He figure, we getting’ too big for our britches, tryin’ to figure His shit out.”

True, this account never gets proven in any formal sort of way. But all the explanations from previous films (the meteorite in Night, the gas in The Crazies) have been standard McGuffins tossed in casually either to silence our questions or to taunt and confuse us further. This one sticks, largely because it suggests our very searching for the Rosebud of a ‘rational explanation’ is part of what’s getting God so pissed off in the first place.

While in 'Dawn' it’s the characters with failings who don’t survive, here it’s much more explicitly the bad who get punished – from Sartre to Brecht to some combination of Dante and Bosch. Almost all the soldiers cross themselves before they die and the (probably over) extended scenes of them being torn apart and devoured are reminiscent of the folk-demons of the underworld who would rip apart their victims.

The film opens with a calendar showing October 31st and closes with another showing November 1st. (Meaning a lot of action gets compressed into one day, but never mind that.) The calendar itself stands for human audacity, us intent on imposing our will on the movements of the natural world. But there’s also a supernatural resonance to the dates. 31st is Halloween or the Celtic Samhain, where “the barriers between the worlds [would] fade and the forces of chaos invade the realms of order, the material world conjoining with the world of the dead.” November 1st is All Saint’s Day, the day when such barriers have been closed again.

John keeps saying they should escape their duties and flit off to an island, and in the final scene they do. In 'Dawn' some characters are looking for “the island”. Asked what island they respond blankly – “any island”. Of course they’re all going to die. 'Daw'n was about nomadism, staying settled means stepping into a trap. This island might be no less a state of mind, but it represents something other than folly. This island represents salvation, its white beaches the heaven the good guys have reserved for them.

'LAND OF THE DEAD' (2005)

Night is followed by dawn, in turn by day and then by…land? This trivial detail, unfortunately, is telling.

'Land' pushes even further into the zombie-ridden future than 'Day', with humanity pressed back into gated compounds. As 'Day' was the de facto sequel to 'Night', this is to 'Daw'n. Except this time the humans are divided along class lines, the super-rich inhabiting consumerist paradise Fiddler’s Green while the humbler humans camp in the outskirts - and must brave the zombie realms to forage for them.

The main failing of the film lies right there. The original trilogy is very much set in our world turned only half a notch towards horror. Pushing everything into the future makes everything bigger and more transparent, but works as a process of removal which blunts the social satire element. What’s more this post-apocalypse world is actually pretty clichéd Max Max stuff to boot, and would have looked out-dated in the Eighties (when it was first mooted). It’s got the borrowed Humphrey Bogart elements from all those films, the hero (Riley) who tries to avoid involvement in the rebel underground but finds himself getting pulled in etc etc. (It was originally called Dead Reckoning, the name of the tank-like device in the film everyone wants to possess, which was the title of an old Bogart flick.)

Worse, it even gets distracted from it’s own simple premise. Romero had for may years talked about making a movie about contemporary LA, with the zombies standing in for the homeless. The ‘exclusive’ Fiddler’s Green is meant to pre-exist the zombie apocalypse. (We see flickery ads for it.) But on top of this get grafted lots of September 11th and Iraq War parallels. For example, it’s made an office-block-like tower rather than the walled gardens you’d expect, all so missiles can be pointed at it and the World Trade Centre parallels emphasised. It’s as if 'Dawn' had been continually sidetracked by a subplot about Watergate. (After seeing the film I read Romero admitting “sometime after the invasion of Iraq we… tried to put more emphasis on the new-normal post-9/11 era”.)

Another noticeable plot device is that the trouble-causing Cholo rebels not at the class imbalance but because as a Latino he’s not admitted even when he’s amassed the necessary cash. Caste not class is intended to be the object of our outrage here.

It would be tempting to say that in this film the zombies get the best lines. They definitely are given the best scenes. In the film’s greatest conceit the CoolBlackGuy of the earlier films is now made a zombie, nicknamed Big Daddy. His outrage at the frequent human forays into his territory, and consequent ‘murders’ of his undead mates, somehow instills in him the rudiments of intelligence and he leads an undead assault on Fiddler’s Green. Like in the early scenes of 'Animal Farm', you’re left to root for the underpriveliged zombies getting their own back! It’s perhaps significant that Land is the only film to start with a zombie scene, then move onto the human characters. The world is now theirs, it’s just that we’re obstinately refusing to concede it to them.

There’s some good scenes where he gets distracted by the petrol pump or can’t figure why the now-unplugged road-drill isn’t working. We could have done with more of those, suggesting his nascent intelligence is actually quite nebulous and can easily be derailed. Unfortunately the film takes it all the other way. He becomes a deus est machina figure of vengeance, remorselessly going after the evil head of Fiddler’s Green (Dennis Hopper) despite the fact he’s got no reason to even know who the guy is. As the ‘good’ zombie Big Daddy is only allowed to kill the villain. This selective morality is even more emphasised by the ending when, having killed anyone who’s (like) bad, the zombies en masse then decide to leave. A surviving human explains that maybe they weren’t so bad after all. Just peckish?

Romero’s as good as ever at capturing moments. There’s a classic one right at the beginning, with a zombie jazz band ‘playing’ a desultory parody of a New Orleans funeral march. Unfortunately he’s as bad as ever at capturing characters and in this more conventional film that starts to matter. Despite the Bogart comparisons Riley has none of his sense of moral ambiguity, he’s just plain bland in his goodness. Unlike the heroes of earlier films he won’t shoot his buddies when they get zombie-bit. (Needless to say, instead of the ramifications of this getting explored, someone less good just happens along and does it.)

Ultimately, the film only fitfully feels like part of the same universe as the others. There’s the pop-up shocks the others eschewed, but are a generic horror staple. (The zombies aren’t supposed to be smart enough to hide, but they manage it well enough.) It feels not only conventional but not a particularly good conventional film, or even a not particularly good conventional film from the eighties which has only just got released. Romero’s original ideas only occasionally turning up to surprise us into remembering who’s film we’re watching. Fourth films in trilogies. Never smart.

THE TRILOGY OF THE DEAD (PLUS ONE) - PART 1

With the release of Diary of the Dead, what better time to post this examination of George Romero’s famous four zombie movies, from the old print days of Lucid Frenzy. (Part two to follow)

PLOT SPOILERS? – Plot spoilers are here and start even within this plot spoiler warning! Read no further to avoid! Otherwise you will… the dead return to life and attack the living! Oh bugger, just slipped out!

'THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD' (1969)



Someone makes a good point in the 'American Nightmare' documentary which accompanied the UK re-showing of this cult classic. Watching a Hitchcock horror was like putting yourself in the hands of a master craftsman, whose special skill was tingling your spine but only just enough, who you trusted to push you up to the edge but never take you over. Watching this film, or one of the others from the late Sixties crop, was like falling into the grip of the psychos and monsters who filled them – who seemed to have no sense of where to stop or what the rules or limits were. Suddenly, anything could happen.

For example, this film’s heavily indebted to Hitchcock’s 'The Birds'. But while 'The Bird's slowly built up character and situation before the first feathered assault, here the first zombie lurches itself at us after about five minutes (in broad daylight yet!), in the middle of what seems like the first character introductions. One is killed straight out, the other turned near-catatonic and stays like that for the duration.

Most ink has been spilt about Ben, the tough black survivor, and his similarities to Malcolm X et al. He’s certainly the central character. But the film’s core is Barbara, this traumatised victim. For the first quarter of the film we follow her as she stumbles, stupefied and uncomprehending. Even when we stop seeing events literally through her eyes, we still see them metaphorically. Talk of a meteor causing the dead to walk is included, but only to taunt us. This isn’t a world where a mystery is poised only to be neatly solved and dissolved by some “rational explanation”. This is a visceral and arbitrary world we’re thrust into, which defies sense and responds only to force. We’re in… quite literally… a nightmare.

At times it’s hard to tell this wilful defiance of explanation from the zombie mythos not being formed. Perhaps tellingly, they’re not even called zombies but “ghouls” or “things”. The zombies are stumbling, stupefied ids, primordially afraid of fire. The clothes or, in one case, shower-cap of their former lives hang off them, an insult to our humanity.

The film is given a low-key, docu-drama feel. It’s like the news reports of riots and assassinations that filled the telly at the (late Sixties) time, given only the slightest twist to be re-labelled drama. There’s a key moment when the surviving humans find a working TV, and hopefully switch it on for info. But they find only a jumbled and chaotic scene, a meteorite which may or may not be causing the outbreak, which gives them no help whatsoever. The media, the voice you turn to for guidance and reassurance, is just giving you more of what’s happening outside the window.

The film is itself built like a zombie, eschewing surprises and fairground-ride shocks. Watching it is like being slowly pounded by a blunt instrument. It’s as if we could turn the cameras round we’d find the director and crew were all undead. The plot lumbers forward rather than advances, towards an inevitable resolution with few twists or turns. Events along the way are jumbled and left deliberately incoherent, characters only briefly sketched in.

But for all the faux-docu feel, this film has a sense of style that was less followed by its sequels. It often feels like a latter-day expressionist film, composed of strong light-and-dark contracts and deep-field photography with objects shoved into the foreground. It could be argued the awareness of construction that comes with expressionism holds the film back from where its sequels go. But actually it’s appropriate. Expressionism was from the beginning about portraying inner, psychological states, eschewing the notion of an objective reality. As Bergman put it, “no form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions.” The menacing shadows and angles of expressionism have become Barbara’s fear-filled world.

There’s immense similarities to Peter Watkin’s faux-documentary agit-prop piece 'Punishment Park' (1970), not just in the use of docu styles and ticks to unnerve and unsettle, but in the near-pathological need to mercilessly trample over any remaining shreds of Sixties optimism. (Watkins spoke of 'Punishment Par'k as a “fusion of two seemingly contrasting elements: realism and expressionism.”)

More to the point, it’s this mixture which ultimately makes the film. You, the film connoisseur, becomes confused watching it. Is it an art movie, avant garde in its refusal of conventional story structures? Or is it a crude exploitation flick, shedding unnecessary baggage because it can’t wait to serve up the meat? The usual handles to tell that sort of thing are taken away, our smarts are assaulted and rendered useless. The style of the film ultimately becomes as unsettling as the content.

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979)

'Dawn' rests upon a kind of temporal sleight of hand, where the events seem to immediately succeed what’s happened in 'Nigh't. (We even fly over the zombie-hunting rednecks, while the TV studio scenes echo the TV-watching scenes of 'Night'.) But everything that happens is contemporary-set for ten years later, most especially the shopping mall. ('Dawn’s almost official subtitle is “the one in the shopping mall.”)

It’s a more conventional film than 'Night', with story development, cross-cutting devices, and if not a happy ending a less absolutely downbeat one. It’s given a classic tryptich structure. The downbeat opener establishing the zombie threat, this time in the big city, is most similar to 'Night'. Human society seems to be hopelessly hurtling towards hell in a handbasket. Then we get an almost idyllic middle section where our heroes believe themselves to be locked safely inside the shopping mall, surrounded by every consumer durable they could ever desire and looking down on the locked-out zombies. The final section you can probably guess…

If 'Night' is Romero’s version of Sartre’s 'No Way Out '(where the humans fail because they can’t get along), 'Dawn' is Brecht’s 'Mother Courage'. The humans fail individually through personal weaknesses, either greed (Flyboy) or conceit (the trooper). Despite the nihilistic surface, 'Dawn' is actually a morality play – while the characters who exemplify these follies die for them, the others live.

By this point, we’re all used to the Mall setting. But at the time, taking zombies out of the standard shadows and into the garish neon lights must have seemed audacious. Gone are the menacing expressionist angles of its predecessor. (Or more accurately confined to one scene, where Flyboy’s followed down the Mall’s back corridors by the shadow of a single zombie, which may be the most expressionist moment in Romero’s career.)

'Nigh't has the celebrated climactic redneck scene where the zombies just become an absurd stumbling shooting gallery, but the film’s characters all fear them. Dawn is unafraid to play up their lumbering comic nature even within the film, there’s even a scene of the brutes getting custard pied! But even as we laugh we know the inevitable result. When the trooper gets bitten there’s no feigned surprise or attempt at a twist, he slowly, painfully becomes a zombie and is blown away by his buddy. Unlike 'Night', Romero plays us more than one note this time. But he’s just as keen as Brecht to tell us where all this is headed…

Unlike the supernatural ‘ghouls’ the zombies are here ‘things’, the superstitious element gone for an anti-consumerist satire. The zombies have to be given some human residue, or they wouldn’t be trying to get back in the Mall. With the extra ‘space’ to it’s mid-section, Dawn finally spells out some of it’s zombie mythos via radio voice-overs and the like. As Wikipedia put it, “…the movie standardised the practice of eating human flesh in zombies, and… the zombie outbreak being a contagious virus spread through being bitten by an infected being.” (Rules which seem to contradict somewhat. Once you’re bitten by a zombie you tend to get eaten, in which case how do you ever manage to come back to life? Maybe we’re better off not asking…)

Fran is poised between Barbara’s scream queen and 'Day’s post-Ripley survivalist Sarah. I’d guess that her whole character comes from Romero being unsure what to do with her, but he uses this ambiguity to good effect. At first she’s constantly having to be rescued by the menfolk and exhibiting women’s intuition (only she can see the Mall’s a trap). She’s even revealed to be pregnant, as if to underline her girly vulnerability. But by the end she’s transformed, shootin’, flyin’ and fully taking care of herself.

The anti-consumerist satire survives the screechy fate of other such Seventies movies, partly through Romero’s endless eye for detail. When the humans need to learn to shoot, the line up storefront mannequins to fire at. While the anti-consumerism’s little more sophisticated than Stairway to Heaven, and character development negligible, the film survives by being stitched together from such iconic moments. Romero would quite likely have been useless in any other medium. But with this eye he can make a film compelling even when telling you exactly what’s going to be happening.

‘FROM BARBARY TO HERE’: THE DARK ACHIEVEMENT OF JOHN CALE'S PARIS 1919

“The road from Barbary to here
She sold then stole right back
The vanity, insanity
Her hungry heart forgave
The fading bride’s dull beauty grows
Just begging to be seen
Beneath the magic lights that reach
From Barbary to here”

Julian Cope once called Love’s Forever Changes a “dark achievement” and, while I don’t know if anyone ever specifically asked him, I expect Arthur Lee himself would concur. It’s a classic album of course, but a “dark achievement”? I see Forever Changes as more of a game played with the listener, a dance of psychedelic-coloured veils, a box of disguises, a series of feints never settling long enough to give itself away. It’s got a vein of darkness running through it, true, but it’s a vein of dark chocolate. Forever Changes is like one of those truly irresistible cakes that put something tangy in the mix in order to make the sweets taste sweeter. It’s exquisitely beautiful, but it’s a beautiful confection.

Now John Cale’s Paris 1919, that’s a dark achievement.

The location of the Velvet Undergound’s songs couldn’t have been any more American, with even the gaps between the tracks virtually oozing the Lower East Side. But with this album Cale took things back to his European origins. There’s more placenames adorning the lyric sheet than you’ll find on the average map, and in a sense it is a map – of a Europe, in Sylvia Plath’s phrase, “scraped flat by the roller of wars, wars, wars”.

Paul Weller sang of “civilization built on slaughter”. Part of the genius of Cale’s conceit here is to specifically expose European civilization to its bloody roots. After all, none but the terminally stupid could miss this point if we were just talking about America. Its’ de rigeur in Euro-snob circles to dismiss America for cultural crassness and for booted imperialism, like the two always belong together. But juxtaposing the beauty of Euro-classicism with the brutality of its roots is something of a masterstroke. The very phrase ‘Paris 1919’ immediately conjures up visions of elegance, but is simultaneously reminiscent of the carve-up treaty that followed the First World War and led almost directly to the second. Cale’s cold yet melodic voice, the audial equivalent of cut glass, perfectly captures this combination. Cale himself described the album as “the nicest way of saying something nasty”. The point about the line “from Barbary to here” is that the line is a short one.

In some ways it reminds me of Kubrick’s near-contemperaneous Barry Lyndon (1975), where the sumptuous classical soundtrack and pompous annunciation of the characters vie with the brutish events. This was a full four years before Brit-punk upped and challenged the predominance of American accents in popular music, and the effect then must have been more striking. The Welshman even appropriates a parodic, strangulated Englishness - particularly in Graham Greene and the title track. (Ironically, the album was entirely recorded in LA with members of Little Feat!)

However, that’s not to say it merely juxtaposes form against content, the ornate arrangements concealing the nasty content, still less follows the polemic of Weller’s anti-Western rallying. (Maybe, just maybe, the more-for-laughs track Graham Greene matches that description.) It’s actually doing something much more existential. When you first listen, you’re seduced by the sweetness of the music. Then the dark achievement of the words start to stain. But soon the two become inextricable.

It’s like taking a tour around the ancient hearts of the cities of Europe. You know the architectural splendour of each exquisite building to be built with the wealth of war and plunder, like scented flowers growing out of shit. Admiring them is like admiring the finest markings on the most predatory spider. You’re unable to resist being seduced by their beauty but neither can you forget they’re the signs of a killing machine. The very same thing simultaneously attracts you and repels. Paris 1919 ultimately implicates you in a terminally paradoxical world where the sweet can never be separated from the savage.

“We burned and we looted
And frightened ourselves
Before we learnt mothers
Could haunt us with words”

There’s a debate about whether the character on the train in Half Past France is a German solider headed for war or Cale himself headed for a gig. People like to pin that sort of thing down, don’t they? Of course, on an album populated by ghosts, it’s both – but that point alone won’t get you to the heart of the matter. Like many songs it’s about capturing a moment, and asking who is supposed to be experiencing that moment is at best secondary.

Journeys on trains or ships can offer moments of encapsulated serenity, an escape into limbo, between the volatile world you just left and will soon be re-joining. As soon as we arrive there’s going to be some unspecified kind of battle, but the train moves at it’s own speed and for now there’s nothing to do but luxuriate in the emptiness of the moment, “looking out from here at half past France”. The song’s refrain is particularly serene.

In fact, for such a dark album it has several such serene moments, certainly more than you’d find on the later Music For a New Society. For example, check out:

“If the sacheting of gentlemen
Gives you grievance now and then
What’s needed are some memories of planning lakes
Those planning lakes will surely calm you down”

As Matthew Spektor puts it in the liner notes, “I still don’t know what ‘planing lakes’ are but calm me down they do”. (The alternate drone version on the expanded CD is perhaps still more serene, but fits less with the orchestration and thematic unity of the rest of the album.) However, serenity is notably achieved the Wordsworth way, by removing yourself from human interaction, by swapping sacheting gentlemen for planning lakes. The humanism of, say, Tom Waits couldn’t be more absent from Cale’s world. As he sings elsewhere “people always bored me anyway”.

In case it’s not obvious, all of this is to describe the mood which suffuses the album. It’s not like some equation where each line sung and each note played draw proceedings schematically towards some intended, calculated answer. I’ve not the faintest idea what, for example, “the cows that agriculture won’t allow” means any more than I did the “planning lakes’. But I don’t suppose Cale did either and I don’t imagine it matters much. When a song has lines in it like “then Martha said…” the worst thing you can do is start wondering who Martha might be, or start looking various Marthas up on the internet. You’re not getting into the song, you’re actually moving away from it. As much as a song can be said to have a ‘sense’, you get to it by succumbing yourself to it, then seeing what’s left after its washed over you.

As with any album there’s a few exceptions to this thematic rule. The title track’s orthodoxly surreal, pitting male clerical rationalism against an unspecified female apparition. The glorious opening line, “she makes me so unsure of myself”, even makes it sound like a kind of topsy turvy love song, with the Churchman as a befuddled suitor striving to “claim” his otherly love. The la-la-la chorus comes to sound like a child’s defensive incantation, a kind of “ghost, ghost, go away, come again some other day”. The “efficient” clock, by which we “get to know the date and tell the time of day”, is ironically turned into the place she “casually appears” from, like a cousin to Dali’s floppy watches.

At the song’s end the general theme reasserts, with allusions to the French Revolution…an event usually thought to have been over by 1919. Truth to tell, it makes a better title for the album than the track. The song sounds so thoroughly English, for one thing. But Cale had carelessly already used up the natural title, Ghost Story, on his first album.

There’s precisely one rock’n’roll track on the album, the glitter-beat Macbeth, and it’s hard not to see it’s stomping as a mis-step. It’s not bad exactly, though the vocal in particular seems oddly flat and subdued. It just doesn’t fit in with the company. It’s as if Elvis had turned up at a Versailles ball… actually, it’s as if Alvin Stardust had turned up at a Versailles ball and said he was Elvis.

Despite this minor blemish the album turned out to be a high-watermark in Cale’s career, marking the end of an informal anti-rockist trilogy with Church of Anthrax (1971) and The Academy in Peril (1972). I also associate this period with his work on the two best Nico albums, Marble Index (1969) and Desertshore (1971), albums that always remind me more of Cale than Nico. They breathe of that defiance of convention and brief sense of possibility that briefly fluttered in the early Seventies, but eventually led back to the bar-room. With the next album, Fear (1974) Cale himself was back to writing gutsy rock’n’roll music to chop up chickens to. Psychotic and often deranged rock’n’roll, true, but something more nebulous and precious had been lost. Only once, on the much later Music For a New Society (1981), would he ever return to such exulted themes. This gives the ghost-heavy, elegiac nature of Paris 1919 an extra poignancy.

“I can’t bring back
I can’t think back
It’s fading again
The tin boys and young girls
All fading away…”

WINGS OF DESIRE

There’s only two kinds of really great films. There’s the stimulating films like Persona or Chien Andalou, fascinatingly inscrutable parables which you could watch endlessly and still want to see again. Then there’s the nourishing films like La Regle Du Jou or To Kill a Mockingbird, which feel so richly humane and heartwarming you cannot help but feel touched by, meals which you couldn’t bear to think you’d never see again. Yet Wings of Desire is somehow both. It’s survived being turned into both a Hollywood classic and a car advert to remain essential viewing.

“For me the film is like music or a landscape. It clears a space in my mind, and in that space I can consider questions.” – Roger Erbert

It’s not a film that’s going to appeal if you hold to the common idea that film is something linear, or a novel which is just acted out in front of you. Like many of my favourite films it’s immersive nor discursive, it’s more like a piece of music which engulfs you and takes you over with its mood.

Set in divided Eighties Berlin, the film might appear a timepiece. Carl Jung once said of the Berlin wall, “the world is now dissociated like a neurotic”. But this is far from a historical record of life in a divided city. For one thing it casually jumps around time, turning a corner it finds itself in a bombed-out wartime Berlin. But more importantly it uses the divided city as a metaphor for a divided humanity, everyone walled inside their private self.

“They no longer sit in a circle, but rather sit apart. And one doesn’t know anything about the other.”

A key image in the film is the library - each inside his own cubicle thinking his private thoughts. The angels however can pass between the solid barriers and eavesdrop on each of these thoughts. (One of which is the old poet’s given above.) Unseen the angels converse only with each other, sharing such observations.

“When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions. Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream?”

However, it boggles my mind how few people actually seem to understand the role of the angels. Many seem to assume they inhabit a state of ‘pure spirit’, above mere humanity to which we should aspire. The references to childhood which open the film (quoted above) are often taken to be a reference to humanity’s unadvanced state. But these notions can be answered with a simple point. This is not a story of a human who became divine, but an angel who became human.

It may be illustrative to compare the angels to the Tralfamadorians, the aliens in Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five. Like the Tralfamdorians, the angels have amazing perceptive powers such as the ability to see through time. But while the Tralfamadorians have reached a state of Zen-like superiority the angels are outsiders, trapped inside their powers. They’re aware the humans live much more limited lives, and see all their failings, but still look to them longingly.

The quote about childhood seems to me a more accurate description of the angels’ state than the humans. The angels are unattached, floating, groundless, without a specific place or purpose in the world. They watch the world attentively, even lovingly, but never quite comprehendingly. Their habit of listing their observations, like they can’t quite see the joins between things, is very childlike.

Damiel, our key angel, becomes human partly out of love for a human girl. (Though also to get the feeling of newspaper ink upon his fingers.) When he succeeds he recites to her an almost exact reversal of the ‘when a child’ speech – essentially “we are here, it’s now, it’s life, let’s live it.” Childhood, free from cares and commitments, is simultaneously free from involvement in the world. It’s a nice place to visit, but you don’t want to settle down there. When Peter Falk reveals he too was once an angel it’s suggestive that perhaps we all were once. (“Oh yeah! There’s lots of us.”) In this way the film is a rites of passage between childhood and adultness.

Simultaneously the angels are artists. They watch life from outside, taking notes. Much of the content of the film is from things Wenders observed in exactly this way, and decided to add. (For example Peter Falk’s sketching of people.) The human Damiel falls for, his route into the human world, is a trapeze artist. Associatedly, the angels are the cinema viewer. Rober Erbert has written of how the “camera seems liberated from gravity; it floats over the city, or glides down the aisle of an airplane. It does not intrude; it observes”. In this way the camera is another airplane. Their world is black and white while the ‘real’ one is in colour. In The Wizard of Oz, filmed in a black-and-white era, it was the fantasy world which burst into colour. These days even newspapers are in colour and black-and-white has become an ‘artistic’ frame.

“I want no longer to hover above, I want to feel a weight within me, abolishing limitlessness and binding me to earth.” – Damiel

All these views are valid and complementary, and in no way vie with one another. However, it’s simultaneously true that the film is ultimately about alienation. Damiel escapes the role of a mere observer of life by embracing humanity. But let us not forget the city where the film is set. The film is not some glib New Agey parable about “following your bliss”. In many ways the humans are as alienated as the angels, locked in their subjectivity, writing epic poems they hope will make everyone else understand, never finishing them. As Richard Raskin has said; “Damiel’s quest is not a denial of the spirit but a wish to live a life in which spirit and body are united.” The trapeze artist aims in her art to achieve weightlessness as surely as Damiel longs to feel weight, and that is the magnet which attracts them. The humans and the angels have the two halves of something which must be put together – empathy for others combined with a will to live.

When Damiel first becomes human, Peter Falk exultingly tells him what he has to look forward to. “When your hands are cold, you rub them together, you see, that’s good, that feels good! There’s so many good things!” Like the graffiti on the Wall, the film often manages to find colour in the bleakest-seeming places. Some films manage to make you see cinema in an entirely new way. This film reminds you of things in the world outside the cinema, things you’d always known but had forgotten to notice. It reminds me of the final line in the Glenn Dakin comic strip, Mr. Night Disappears, “to boldly go where everyone has gone before.”

You know, I even kind of like the sequel…

CLOVERFIELD

PLOT SPOILERS occur here (if not of the size of the beast that besets Manhattan about twenty minutes in… oh bugger, that’s a spoiler in itself!)

What was the old TV show where contestants had to perform one thing “in the style of” something else? King Kong in the style of Wagner and the like? Cloverfield feels like it’s been made on just such a dare, performing Godzilla in the style of Blair Witch Project, using jerky hand-held camera as faux found footage. In case you’ve been vacationing on the moon here’s the set-up - a bunch of Manhattanite yuppies just happen to be filming their party when a Godzilla-like hits New York and they keep filming during the resultant carnage.

Where it’s different to Blair Witch is in theme. Blair Witch was a much more personal and intimate story. It focused on the fraying state of mind of college-aged youths who, despite their talismans of maturity (camcorders and maps, though inexplicably not mobile phones), have their feelings of adulthood progressively stripped away. The film charts their reduction to fearful children. In this way Blair Witch was personal and psychological, while Cloverfield is concerned with the social.

The odd-sounding title was actually just a placeholder, a cover to hide any genuine info leaking out until the makers chose to release it. But the placeholder name gained currency on the net, so came to be left in. In many ways the monster, an unnamed Godzilla-like, feels like a placeholder too. We’re deliberately withheld a decent view of it until the very end, and any info on its origins or motivations are kept firmly at the level of speculation. (For those that really want to know that sort of thing, there’s some ‘viral’ marketing on the internet to clue you in. But that merely confirms the speculation of one of the characters, and doesn’t really have much to do with the film’s theme anyway.) The point is that we quite literally only see the monster from the characters’ perspective, who would know nothing of such privileged information. The film drops us into the chaos, hysteria and uncertainty that get thrown up, and doesn’t deign to offer us such reassuring pegs.

And those characters? Well they’re pretty much placeholders too. In Rolling Stone, Pete Travers described them as “walking MySpace profiles”. (A term that becomes all the more ironic when you learn the makers even gave these characters MySpace profiles as part of their marketing.) Though Travers uses the phrase as an insult, this actually works surprisingly well. After all this ain’t an attempt at Checkovian realism. The characters are supposed to be everymen with nothing special or unique about them - except for the single fact that chance put them in disaster’s path. When, for example, Rob has to tell his mother on the phone about his brother’s death, we know nothing of the particularities of their relationship. Instead we’re asked to consider how we’d cope with such a situation. (In fact a weakness of the film is that it doesn’t go down that path enough. The opening ‘party’ scene dwells on ‘characters’ who don’t – to put it mildly - reward our attention. It’s true we need some normality before disaster strikes, but the scene lasts too long and we end up checking our watches for the monster’s unsurprising arrival.)

Travers goes on to insist “Clovefield’s virtues are all mechanical”, and he’s certainy right it’s a film very much concerned with formal innovation. Back in the days of matte paintings and stop-motion, inserting special effects into the frame used to be dependent on locking the camera down. The sudden lack of camera movement often came to be a clue a ‘special effect’ was just about to occur. We’re used to faux-docu footage and we’re used to big scary monsters, to the point where both long since became clichés. What we’re not used to is seeing both put together. (Even Blair Witch showed nothing scarier on screen than some strangely assembled twigs.)

However, Travers is surely wrong to suggest this reduces the film to the ‘mechanical’. Early films used to show something like trains steaming into the camera, a formal device which still had an impact upon the audiences of the day. Similarly Cloverfield works best when it restricts itself to a conviction in it’s own central device, but find abundant amounts of courage in it. The combination of verité footage and giant monsters is less a nifty novel means to tell us the story than the very thing the film comes to be about.

It works like a trained musician restricting himself to three chords, but finding lots of sub-varieties within them. The ‘plot’ is often perfunctory and predictable. (Will our heroes obey army orders to evacuate Manhattan, or will they brave adversity to rescue their missing friend Beth? Go on, you’ll never guess!) But the wrings the film can pull from its device are many and varied, making it more a haiku device than a gimmick. Unlike Blair Witch it is filmed in near real time, enhancing our sense of being trapped in the moment. It smartly allows for quiet and uneventful moments, rather than reducing everything to a shrill headlong rush. It even finds a way to incorporate a flashback structure. (The videotape being used is filming over an earlier romantic moment between Rob and Beth, which the film keeps cutting back to.)

This sense of immediacy also feels like a welcome change when you hear producer JJ Abrams and writer Drew Goddard previously worked on such fodder as Lost. Lost seemed entirely predicated on the idea that we’d search the frame for ‘clues’, then swap them with our mates (or more often total strangers) on internet message boards. I am heartily sick of this reduction of films and TV shows to honorary computer games, and glad to see two of its worst proponents doing something quite the opposite here. (Disclaimer: there are ‘clues’ hidden here but they have nothing to do with following the front-story. I missed every single one of them while watching the film, and didn’t feel like I was losing out on anything.) It’s also rare to see a Hollywood film that does stick to a single idea, they normally suffer from the death of a thousand chefs where each one has squeezed in his own half-baked notion.

Every review I read of Cloverfield mentioned the September 11th connections at some point or other. Some call these crass, others cathartic, others just find it a marker-point where S11 became do-able in the cinema. And yet New York has been destroyed on film many times, both before and after that auspicious date. Godzilla himself was invited to trample Manhattan back in 1998 while the Big Apple was destroyed in both 2004 (The Day After Tomorrow) and 2005 (War of the Worlds) – you’d probably be hard-pressed to find a year when the city didn’t buy it. (And that’s ignoring the glut of such gung-ho-flavoured direct references such as 2006’s World Trade Center.) Clearly what’s triggering those associations is the faux-docu filming. Unlike many previous disasters S11 is imprinted in our memories through the types of filming we associate with small, intimate events such as weddings or parties - bringing home the notion that that was the day terror was brought home.

Admittedly, the makers do everything they can to reinforce this picture. Beth, for example, has to be rescued from a set of twin towers – one leaning precariously on the other. But the biggest memory-jogger of all is the sequence used in the trailer (and doubtless the film’s central image) – when a huge object hurled down a Manhattan avenue is revealed to be the head of the Statue of Liberty. It’s hardly possible to see such an image without being reminded of one thing – They Hate Our Freedoms. Yet the film’s monster is revealed to be brutish rather than sentient, even running round on all fours. It’s not at war with capitalist democracy, its just banging into buildings which happen to be in its way. It’s a powerful image, but also misleading and ultimately something of a cheat.

Reeves complains the film has “no politics” and thereby no meaning. Certainly what politics it displays seem confused. The military are very much movie-military. In one cringeworthy scene a major allows the gang to defy evacuation orders and continue searching for their missing friend - on camera even. In any real martial law situation, let alone such an extreme one, Rob’s remark “you’ll just have to shoot me” would lead to one response only – “I’ve already thought of that!” (Surely the faux-footage motif obligates the film to have some concessions towards believability.) But then at the end we discover the videotape we’ve been watching is being held by the military, obviously covering up their inability to cope with the crisis.

But again, these criticisms partly come from misunderstanding the very nature of the film. As Alan Vega said of his New York punk band Suicide “people were coming in off the street hoping they’d be escaping, and all we were doing was shoving the street back in their face again”. Cloverfield was marketed on the notion that many of us would pay good money to have bad memories shoved back in our faces again, and it seemed to be working at least on the night I saw it. In this it reminded me in many ways of the ‘re-imagined’ version of Battlestar Galactica. Galactica is a much wider work, taking in not only S11 but Vietnam, the Civil Rights turmoil… virtually every dark moment in modern American history. It’s opening episode, for example, is often said to be reminiscent of S11 but works as a much closer fit to Pearl harbour.

But the psychology is the same - using fiction as a piece of dispelling magic to take everything out there that’s fucked up and stick it all in one place. The bad stuff in the world is thereby made to feel containable by the very fact that you created a container for it. The advantage of having a Book of Everything That’s Fucked Up is that you can then shut the book anytime you want. Cloverfield is therefore no more interested in the military’s tactical response to the monster than it was the monster in the first place. It’s only question is – what if all this happened to you?

Of course Cloverfield’s immediate success, finding a dramatic device that fits our zeitgeist, may turn out to be its long-term failure. While it would be meaningless to speculate how this film might look in the future, where it leads now feels a much more closed question – it doesn’t. Like most Hollywood films, we’re given a coda that leaves the door open for a sequel. But what kind of a sequel could that be? Abrams has pointed to the many scenes where other bystanders wave camcorders and cameraphones, and suggested a follow-up could be made by following any of those people. But as we’ve seen, the whole point about these characters is their very non-specificness, that they were just chosen randomly from out of a crowd. Once you’ve had one everyman, the last thing you need is another one. Of course we could follow the military high command or delve into the monster’s origins, or one of many other plot points the movie leaves open. But that would by necessity create quite a different kind of film to the one here. Sequel proofness isn’t always a bad sign, I can’t imagine a sequel to Solaris or Weekend for example. But here it adds to the feeling that this film is primarily staking out a piece of territory to sit on, not invite further development. It found a style that hadn’t (until recently couldn’t) been used before, and it found that style summed up a very zeitgeisty moment. At the time, many suggested Blair Witch Project might throw open whole new ways of making movies. But all it really led to was a sequel almost everyone found pedestrian. Cheap camcorders were a great way to make that movie, not necessarily any other.

That observation may turn out to be ten times as true of Cloverfield. At a time when films seem to be getting longer, it’s a mere 85 minutes. But (particularly with that opening party scene) it would probably have been more effective had it been even shorter. It’s noticeable that the trailer, rather than acting as a teaser for the movie, effectively presents it in microcosm. It gives us the ‘normal’ opening, then throws the Statue of Liberty’s head down Manhattan. Some have argued we shouldn’t be given a full view of the monster, even at the late stage it appears. But it’s arguable all we should have ever seen was the trailer, with the monster left forever offscreen and unknown.