small.observations

tentacular:

Such images are never about the animal. They are always excuses to depict buildings in the background. A terrible lubriciousness for architecture, zoologically disavowed.

Except where those animals will not stay still. Defy their depicter. Walk right up to that unmentionable and sniff it. The guilt, but oh, the relief. 

Of course it would be pigs. 

[originally posted May 19th, 2011 2:18am]

digression #3: on looking away: Terry Gilliam’s Damnation of Faust (or, Brazil, the opera)

In English National Opera’s trailer for Terry Gilliam’s production of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, the director says he thinks that his film Brazil ‘would make a great opera’. After having seen Gilliam’s Faust, I wonder whether this production may turn out to have been that opera.

What Faust’s story has in common with Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four (on which Brazil was based, and which it brilliantly improved), is that they are both tragedies of inattention. They share this with the Orpheus legend, which is also a tragedy of inattention, but while Orpheus’ inattention is that of the habitual, of the look backwards which shows a preoccupation with the past, inattention in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brazil and Faust comes in the form of the sideways glance, a look away which betrays a preoccupation with alternative presents and futures: distraction. Berlioz’s bizarre concert-opera, which he called a ‘dramatic legend’, is perfect for this: what is this semi-staged opera, which shifts restlessly from one set piece to another, incorporating hymns, ballads and drinking songs, but a series of picaresque peeks into something else, something different, something new? What Berlioz’s Mephistopheles offers his Faust is a ‘change d’air’: the phrase implies both a change of scene and a fresh tune to play.

Orwell saw the serious potential in this kind of restless evasion of the serious when he made his Winston Smith an employee of the Ministry of Information, engaged in hiding fact behind constantly-updated fiction, and churning out escapist pulp-fantasies for the masses: propaganda consists in getting people to look away. This isn’t the kind of look away from the self which comes from absorption in something outside the self, however, but rather a selfish looking-away from others’ pain to something less distressing. The catastrophe in the tragedy of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a deflection: under torture, Winston wants to divert his tormentors’ attention from himself onto Julia: another way of putting this is that he takes his eyes off her as the object of his care. His moment of carelessness is the exact reverse of Orpheus’s look back.

Brazil got to the heart of this - better than Orwell’s novel - because Gilliam spotted that the focus of the story’s betrayal needs to be, rather than the efforts of various organizations to distract people from unpleasant truths, the shocking eagerness, even desperation, with which people throw themselves on any available distraction. (It’s in this sense, and this sense only, that Channel 4’s Big Brother is aptly named, and performs as an appallingly effective sequel to the work from which its title is drawn.) Orwell, who had worked at the BBC during the war, wanted to indict the manipulation and coercion exercised by wartime and Cold War governments and their agencies; working in 1985, Gilliam could see that, in the post-war West, the role of Big Brother was being fulfilled by big business and not the nanny state, and hinged not so much on The Hidden Persuaders as the all-too-eager persuadees. The state, in Brazil, is sinister in its combination of administrative inefficiency and terrifyingly unwieldy power - the worst sort of official carelessness - but the scenes depicting this are less chilling than the ones which demonstrate how such a situation of negligence is enabled and perpetuated: not, as in Orwell’s imagination, by an underclass made up of pacified proles knowing no better than to consume the trash with which they are supplied by the state, but by an overclass of avid luxury consumers who want to know no more, and care for nothing other, than that the state will ensure the continuation of the supply of goods and services which maintain their lifestyle.  The frightening machine of early 20th-century totalitarianism may have been assembled from the deprivations and desperations of the poor and discontented, but mid-to-late-century capitalism, far from offering liberation of the poor and democracy through consumer choice, transforms choice, and the discontents it continually cultivates under the pretence of soothing away, into an impenetrable camouflage which reinforces and defends what amounts to almost identical machinery. It does this through simply deflecting attention away from the serious malfunctions under the surface and into that sideways glance; even when the browser’s open at an article on extraordinary rendition, there are adverts for American Apparel in the sidebar and Net-A-Porter’s on another tab. Distraction is always also neglect.



The comic horror of such a situation is captured by Gilliam in Brazil with delicious succinctness: the grotesquely escalating cosmetic surgery which runs through the film is a motif which, in acting as a symbol to display his dystopia’s wonky priorities, wickedly contradicts the efforts of such attempts to manipulate shiny surfaces over rotting structures; the scene in a restaurant where the customers, under siege and amidst crumbling plaster, merely complain like fretful children about minor discomforts - a scene which surely owes a great deal to the dinner party scene from Carry on Up the Khyber - is a set piece of fiddling while Rome burns.





On the face of it, Gilliam’s Faust is a reluctant subject of such distractions. In the first scene he is a lone wanderer dragged down from his rocky crag into bucolic May Day festivities, which he rejects and flees; he shrugs his shoulders at the Hungarian soldiers’ military march; later, Mephistopheles takes him to a Bierkeller and cabaret, to which he reacts with disgust. At a musical soirée, he is ill at ease, and only has eyes for Marguerite. But what Gilliam manages to do is to show that this isn’t the only kind of distraction. It’s true that his Faust isn’t a fun-seeking reveller; but then neither is he shown as a dedicated seeker after knowledge, led astray only through the desire to delve into deeper mysteries (in this sense, the production’s Prologue, which has Mephistopheles the showman declaring the subject of his lecture to be the good or evil of the search for knowledge, feels, itself, like a dull textbook we soon throw away for Berlioz’s pretty tunes and ENO’s prettier pictures).

This isn’t Gilliam’s manipulation, but his reaction to Gérard de Nerval’s libretto. Berlioz’s Faust, Gilliam comments here, is ‘not a wonderful man with his eyes to the heavens […] the guy’s a selfish bastard, frankly’.  In fact, the only point at which we see Berlioz’s Faust deep in contemplation of his work is in Scene 4, after the Hungarian March, when he wanders in despair:

Sans regrets j’ai quitté les riantes campagnes
Où m’a suivi l’ennui;
Sans plaisirs je revois nos altières montagnes;
Dans ma vieille cité je reviens avec lui.
Oh! je souffre! et la nuit sans étoiles,
Qui vient d’étendre au loin son silence et ses voiles,

Ajoute encore à mes sombres douleurs.
Ô terre! pour moi seul tu n’as donc pas de fleurs!
Par le monde, où trouver ce qui manque à ma vie?
Je chercherais en vain, tout fuit mon âpre envie!

And even here, Nerval has him as not so much a despairing scholar as a fin-de-siècle victim of ennui, ‘searching’ rather than researching.  Gilliam develops this: singing that the night is ‘without stars’ and the world is ‘devoid of flowers’, his Faust is absolutely correct, but only coincidentally: he is wandering a battlefield in the aftermath of the Great War, gloomily absorbed in scrutinizing and casting aside pages of manuscript. After all, the myopia of declaring that the world is flowerless for me alone (‘pour moi seul’) is no more or less selfish than not noticing that it might have lost its bloom in the largest sense possible, and for many more than me.

This catastrophe has been, in the words of the programme,

a cavalry parade [which] heralds the appearance of the crowned heads of Europe. During an elegant tea party, old alliances are broken and new ones formed as the rulers carve up the map of the world between them. The mounting tension leads to a war in which millions die. Faust attempts to retreat from the chaos of this carnage.

Gilliam’s staging of this is one part Carry On dinner party to two parts James Gillray’s cartoon The Plumb-pudding in Danger: - or, State Epicures taking un Petit Souper (1805).

Hildegard Bechtler’s set and costumes borrow Gillray’s table, chairs, gold braid and plumes for the illustrious guests; Finn Ross’s projections cast them in the light of the map of Europe they covet and gradually obliterate them with film of the trenches they neither see nor foresaw.  This aspect of the staging is what takes Faust’s selfishness beyond a point of characterization and lets self-centred distraction seep into the structure of the whole opera: it develops from the insight that Faust’s personal carelessness of the world beyond himself is a microcosm of this much grander negligence of consequences, and that this grander negligence can be brought down to a personal level of egotism, petulance and pig-headedness. When Nerval has Faust unmoved by military music -

Tout cœur frémit à leur chant de victoire;
Le mien seul reste froid, insensible à la gloire.

- it’s a short step from this to seeing such a ‘cold heart’ as one also ‘insensible’ to suffering; but then again the music, the ‘chant de victoire’ of the soldiers, expresses an identical obliviousness to the pain of the conquered.

Music, in fact, is again and again in Berlioz’s opera presented as a means of distraction. Musically, the opera is a series of divertissements: Berlioz began Faust by writing Marguerite’s ballad of the King of Thulé, with which she consoles herself; the opera opens with the peasants’ May Day song; then comes the Hungarian March; an Easter hymn diverts Faust from his attempted suicide; there are drunken tavern songs and student drinking songs; the original (and traditional) balletic interlude is for Berlioz a ballet of sylphs distracting the dreaming Faust on the orders of Mephistopheles, and tweaked by Gilliam into an evening of Wagnerian theatre; the demonic nonsense-chanting which greets Faustus as he descends into Hell muffles his torment, which can only be described in the next scene, once ‘l’enfer se tut’. After all this, Marguerite’s final apotheosis, heralded as it is by a heavenly choir who exhort her to put her worldly pain behind her, ‘Conserve l’espérance / Et souris au bonheur’, just sounds like another invitation to indulge in divertissement.

Brazil took its very title from a song about wanting to be somewhere else, whose weird jam-yesterday-and-jam-tomorrow tenses look first into the past and then the future in an attempt to evade the present:

Brazil, where hearts were entertaining June
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured “someday soon”
We kissed and clung together
Then, tomorrow was another day
The morning found me miles away
With still a million things to say
Now, when twilight dims the sky above
Recalling thrills of our love
There’s one thing I’m certain of
Return I will to old Brazil

Not just the now but also the here is made uncertain: ‘Then, tomorrow was another day / The morning found me miles away’. It’s the perfect tune to accompany Sam Lowry’s dreams of flying, and, at the happy end of the film, his escape from the nightmare of the city for a pastoral paradise; perfect because it’s the tune he’s humming as the happy ending returns to the torture chamber, and you realize that his evasion is a present but alternative reality, in the face of which his interrogators have to admit a sort of defeat:

MR. HELPMANN: He’s got away from us, Jack.

CUT TO:  INT. INFORMATION RETRIEVAL ROOM - DAY

Sam is sitting in the I.R. chair. He is strapped in. His eyes are open but miles away. His face is wreathed in a benign and very happy smile.

JACK: I’m afraid you’re right, Mr. Helpmann. He’s gone.

A WIDE SHOT of the room shows us Helpmann and Lint turn away and leave. Sam is left alone. He is humming…The CAMERA PULLS BACK AND BACK. The Information Retrieval room with Sam in it floats away into the most beautiful glorious sky ever.

Like Marguerite, Sam is lifted up by the closing music to the ‘hauteurs du ciel’, his suffering assuaged.

In an interview published in the ENO’s programme notes to the performance, Gilliam remarks on this ability of music to tell, even impose, an alternative story, and the way it’s central to Berlioz’s opera:

Because of the way it’s written, the narrative is constantly being held up by really lovely musical pieces. Then I thought: what would happen if there were another narrative, one that everybody knew and which propelled the story in a different way. […] I’m a huge fan of German culture so I thought: why not tell that story from German Romanticism through Expression and Fascism at an artistic design level.

The Damnation of Faust, like Sam Lowry’s life, is indeed ‘held up’ by musical interludes, in more than one sense: the ‘really lovely musical pieces’ not only ‘hold up’ or stop and frustrate the drive of the narrative by halting the main action to open up alternative worlds and stories (Brazil; Thulé; heaven), but, in doing so, ‘hold it up’, supporting it and enabling it to continue, both structurally (these interludes of course constitute the fabric of Faust and Brazil; they are what these productions are made of), and psychologically (they are the consolations which keep Faust on the path to damnation and help Lowry to go on with his life). Moments of beauty are in this way shown as ostensibly decorative embellishments which turn out to be essential scaffolding.  But this leads to another sense in which such instances of loveliness can ‘hold up’ narrative and, as Gilliam suggests, ‘propel the story in a different way’: stopping it by force, as it goes on its way, they are potentially violent arrests which steal valuable attention and significance away from the main story for their alternative realities. Pleasant dreams take a viewer’s mind off dystopian horror; charming sylphs and plaintive ballads divert the operagoer from the prospects of damnation.

It’s been objected that what Gilliam’s production of Berlioz’s opera has done is a version of this: the Faust legend, a story about the search for knowledge, its temptations and its dangers, has its audience’s attention stolen by the well-known story of modern German history, from the late 19th century to the eve of the Second World War. There are undoubtedly moments when this superimposition is indeed an imposition, and the pictures just don’t match the words: to see a Jewish Marguerite dragged away by brownshirts during Kristallnacht while the chorus sings to her mother about the shame of a man being spotted in the house and the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy is nothing short of bizarre.  The ‘artistic design level’ is at such times at cross-purposes with the action, and in being so immediate to the audience - you can’t help but see the huge swastikas and the allusions in set and costumes to George Grosz and Caspar David Friedrich and Otto Dix - they take precedence over the less-well-known story and the more difficult-to-apprehend words. (And as these are most readily understood with the aid of the surtitle screen, you could say that there is a direct competition for our visual attention between the verbal and the pictorial plots.)

But then: what is that pictorial plot, the ‘story […] on an artistic design level’, which leads ‘from German Romanticism through Expression and Fascism’?  Retellings of the Faust legend can feel like the revenge of the aesthetic on the hermeneutic, the creative arts making a meal of the misfortunes of academia by producing a beautiful artefact in which the quest for knowledge is depicted as misguided. Gilliam, however, reminds you that art, too, has a recent history of looking the other way, or rather, of other ways of seeing which, in focussing increasingly on the eye and the ‘I’ of the observer, take liberties with the facts observed. This is the visible journey of what Keats termed the ‘wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’, in which the human mind, faced with the immensity of nature, experiences first a check but then discovers and affirms in itself a power greater than nature by seeing the natural world as merely a reflection of something within itself. The Romantic composer, painter and writer don’t get off scot free here, because their engagement with the world, rather than providing an instructive counter-example to the supposedly arrogant and irrelevant questings of science and philosophy, is seen as equally arrogant in its concern with the self, equally led astray from compassion by absorption in its own thoughts, ideas and ideals, even - perhaps especially - when it seems most outward-looking.

As Bechtler’s sets emphasize, this egotism is what links Faust with Caspar David Friedrich’s glowingly immanent landscapes:

and his cloud-chamber-like cell - as well as the chaos of the Berlin cabaret, to which he first escapes - with the twisted realities of Grosz:

The world doesn’t really look like this, except through the eyes of Friedrich or Grosz; the sets’ journey from one artistic pastiche to another stages an argument between visions and interpretations, which echoes the argument in the Bierkeller between Communists and National Socialists.  Gilliam reproduces Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man on the frontcloth between scenes, at first showing it in its familiar and orderly configuration, then progressively circling the square until one figure hangs upside down, an image echoed by Faust’s own final appearance in Hell, contorted into the shape of a swastika. Do people look like this? Well, if you make them.

Faust’s rejection of the rest of the world occurs when it fails to correspond to his own feelings, and in this production, Mephistopheles captures his soul not with promises of his wildest dreams and heart’s desires, but with a nice piece of theatre which brings our hero back into seeming control of his surroundings and therefore into alignment with his self-image. As Gilliam remarks in the programme interview, Faust ‘has to be a hero, or he has to think of himself in a heroic way’. The two aren’t the same. Wandering the battlefield, deep in his papers and oblivious to the sufferings around him, Faust finds himself offered a surgeon’s white coat, gloves, and an appearance as hero-healer, to the strains of the choir’s ‘Christ vient de resussciter!’. Dr Faustus’s resuscitating scalpel presents him to himself as a saviour while all the time echoing the knives of the European rulers who have just been seen carving up the map to make it fit their desires (and, more distantly, the constantly-in-demand scalpel of Brazil’s kindly cosmetic surgeon). Seeing the world as a reflection of yourself makes it only natural to impose your will on it.

And, like the mirror in the budgie’s cage, it’s a distraction. This isn’t looking; it’s overlooking; Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Mists’ - the visual archetype of the Romantic Wanderer-thinker-hero, and a painting reproduced in the ENO’s programme -  is also, like Faust, ‘not a wonderful man with his eyes to the heavens’, but someone too caught up in his own ideas to glimpse anyone else. As the poster for Brazil reminds you: it’s only a state of mind.