Here now are Hydra Magazine’s top ten films of 2011:

10. The Tree of Life — dir. Terrence Malick (USA)

9. Nostalgia for the Light – dir. Patricio Guzmán (Chile/Germany/France)

The thirst for cosmic presence, cosmic relevance, is one that does not leave us even when we are at our most ordinary and vulnerable. The Tree of Life’s analeptic urgency demanded something of an escape into cosmic refraction, but where it seemed to stumble upon the insurmountable obstacles of New Age aesthetics, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (its title borrowed from a book by astronomer-poet Michel Cassé) succeeds in restricting its intellectual and emotional interests to symmetries of a less ornamental nature. The Atacama Desert in Chile is the driest desert on earth; for reason of its dryness and clarity of air, it is the site of two different (and seemingly unrelated) activities: its high altitude provides the ideal atmosphere for the research of two major astronomical observatories, from which distant galaxies are glimpsed and studied; but the desert’s vastness was also, tragically, the preferred dumping site for the assassinated political victims of the murderous Pinochet regime. The search for distant stars and planets instantly absorbs into itself the (self-same) search for the murdered victims of a grievous (and terribly recent) political past. If the stars and planets are the effects of a million years gazing back at us, then our own contemporary present is nothing less than a fleeting illusion, the momentary trace of astral states depleted long ago. An archaeology of memory, of the past that cannot, must not, be abandoned, hence, assumes a magnitude equal to that of the pain and voracious desire to know, which drives mothers, scientists, sisters, and astronomers to locate their celestial origins in the mineral sleep “of what is past, or passing, or to come.” The mournful search for the bones of the dead, beneath a moisture-less sedimentation occasionally sprinkled by the salt of fallen, minuscule teardrops, finds resonance in the daily, patient work of lonesome astronomers. Thus, “the calcium which we carry in our bones, the bones which the dead offer up to the living as consolation, is the same calcium that the farthest stars are made of, the same dust that has fallen over eons on the crust of the Atacama, and which has shaped constellations out of the remains of prehistoric man.”

8. Meek’s Cutoff — dir. Kelly Reichardt (USA)

Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff unravels with very little exposition; dialogue is muttered almost inaudibly, as if we were accidentally stumbling upon the middle of someone else’s conversation. Natural sounds blend in with human voices, sounds that describe the economy and daily chores of living permanently on the road: wind passing through blankets on a makeshift clothesline, spoons tapping and scraping on metal plates, the crackle of someone lighting a pipe or stoking a campside fire, the murmur of a devout woman reciting Bible verse, her husband splashing water in his face in the light of early morning. Events occur strictly on the plane of the immediate present, irregardless of the overtly historical character of the costume and proceedings — we are somewhere near to, but also very far from, the Oregon Trail, and we, along with a small group of emigrants traveling on a harsh wagon road known to posterity as the Meek Cutoff, are lost in the blank unfolding of the present, bewildered by the vast openness of the road and humbled by our incapacity to perceive anything more significant than the sight of the mute sun rising, and setting early, on a monotonous and water-starved landscape. Reichardt makes no effort at romanticizing or mythologizing the pastness of the past, and for this reason Meek’s Cutoff circumvents the fictitious retro-feel nostalgia that too many latter-day westerns fall into. Meek’s Cutoff is as urgently contemporary (and as urgently local) as Reichardt’s previous film, Wendy and Lucy (2008), was: the Oregon depicted in both films constitutes a being-lost-in-the-present which is timeless and indelible. Meek’s Cutoff is undoubtedly Reichardt’s greatest achievement yet, and as an exercise in the western genre, it offers the wide-screen spaciousness and cinematographic richness that all orthodox westerns are known for. But what makes Meek’s Cutoff truly original is its rigorous use of atmosphere: its sonic absorption of environmental pressures and aleatory forces produces passages which hint at but never fully reach a kind of hermetic enlightenment.

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7. The Kid with a Bike — dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Belgium/France)

6. The Mill and the Cross — dir. Lech Majewski (Poland/Sweden)

Brueghel’s famous sense of motility — multitudinous, boundless and scattered — is brought to rapturous life by Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, one of the finest films on art to have been produced in recent memory. One is reminded of Peter Greenaway’s oeuvre, particularly Nightwatching (2007), a dramatic recreation of the historical forces that worked for and against the completion of Rembrandt’s “The Nightwatch” (1642); but Majewski’s work avoids Greenaway’s theatricality and licentious asides by immersing itself within the pictorial fabric of Brueghel’s dizzyingly meticulous canvas. Much like in Auden’s poem on Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” the historical/mythical subject has been replenished by its delimitation: its off-screen, minor placement allows for the plurality of life to flower around its small puncture-point. Icarus, much like Christ — titular subjects of their respective paintings — are no longer the overbearing, overdetermined despots of subject-object relations; rather, they serve as Archimedean vanishing points from which, and through which, the sentient world is allowed to breathe, to move, to come to vivid life. Majewski’s wisdom in following Bruegel’s example, situating his film in the pictorial depths that Bruegel walked through and discoursed upon, provides us with the felicitous occasion of watching the (cinematic) frame vanish and blend into the pictorial surface.

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5. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia — dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)

There is a hilarious scene in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant (2002) when Mahmut, a middle-aged, successful photographer, treats his cousin Yusuf, a laborer from the countryside temporarily staying with him, to a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Yusuf, ostensibly bored by the pensive film, excuses himself and retires to his room for the night; the more worldly Mahmut, now left alone, decides to eject Tarkovsky’s masterwork and slyly pops in a porn film (clearly part of the nightly routine for a bachelor used to living alone in an Istanbul apartment), all the while anxiously glancing over to Yusuf’s bedroom door in the fear that it should open and interrupt his secret pleasure. The comedy, of course, arrives when Yusuf does open the door and Mahmut quickly changes the channel — Yusuf, now interested in the television program, hovers over Mahmut, who pretends to channel surf randomly. The scene holds a lot of meaning within the thematic context of Distant, but I find it also curiously resonant in the leaps which Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s artistic career has taken. The disjunction, or should we say the distance, that divides the greatness of a film like Tarkovsky’s Stalker (or any of the immortal Russian’s films for that matter) from the lowness of the common porn film is about as immeasurable as Dante’s Paradiso was from the Inferno (Lars von Trier, another Tarkovsky acolyte, has frequently tried to bridge the two levels, the spiritual and the base, in several of his films). Ceylan’s humorous appropriation of Tarkovsky performed two functions: it brilliantly conveyed the vast gulf which separates the impenetrable formalism of great and timeless art from the contingencies and trivial demands of modern life (particularly, in Ceylan’s estimation, the kind of life lived in Istanbul or any other cosmopolitan city sunk into the disaffections of postmodernity); but the scene also projected, perhaps subconsciously, Ceylan’s evident aspirations to commit himself to an art worthy of Tarkovksy, a cinema, moreover, made profoundly difficult by the insuperable ordinaryness of situations.

4. Mysteries of Lisbon — dir. Raúl Ruiz (Portugal/France)

3. A Separation — dir. Asghar Farhadi (Iran)

2. Poetry — dir. Lee Chang-dong (South Korea)

1. The Turin Horse — dir. Bela Tarr (Hungary)

2011 was a fertile year for festival films, especially for well-established and world-renowned auteurs, a few of whom happened to produce some of their most vital work. Some interesting parallels arose: ruminations on the origin(s) of life contrasted with visions of an apocalyptic nature. The end of the world turned out to be an occasion to reflect back on its beginning. Other films were almost wholly involved in the different valences of the surface, either as an apparition of speed and tactility, or as an asylum from the immanent and consternating depths of the past. As usual, there are a number of films that won’t appear on our list simply because they were unavailable or were not released in time. But we are confident that we have selected among the very best; in fact, there were so many films that we loved, we had to expand the list to 20 entries (from last year’s 10). So, without further ado, here is the first part of Hydra Magazine’s Top 20 Best Films of 2011 (for Part Two, click here):

Reduced to its fundamental parts (a preternaturally sadistic prince abuses and terrorizes his subjects at his every whim, so a group of 13 samurai are secretly gathered in a conspiracy to kill/stop him at any cost), the plot goes no farther than “good guys go after the bad guy” — but this is precisely the reason why 13 Assassins works so well: it wastes no time to get to the meat of the action, of which the centerpiece is the 40+ minute final battle scene in which the 13 samurai take on an army of 130 soldiers. Part of the pleasure of the film is in discovering how the 13 manage to level their odds: where Seven Samurai quite famously developed engaging storylines by involving the villagers in the operation of the makeshift battle fortress they construct alongside their samurai protectors, Miike and his screenwriters, perhaps sensing their inability to recreate such a highly inimitable plot structure, choose to forgo too much exposition and dive right into the visual surprise of trick-shot battle tactics (but this is probably more due to the inherent design of Kaneo Ikegami’s original screenplay). A young boy’s fever dream undoubtedly, but one whose execution puts to shame the current stock of action and superhero films that are being made with three times the budget in Hollywood now (that said, there was probably no better pure summer action film than this one in 2011).

19. The Strange Case of Angelica – dir. Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal)
Manoel de Oliveira, as has been abundantly remarked upon, is still making films at the tender age of 103. Not only has he managed to continue working steadily since directing his first film in 1927, he has been producing films at a rapid pace. The Strange Case of Angelica, following quickly on the heels of its companion piece, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (2009), only confirms the suspicion that Oliveira won’t be quitting anytime soon. Angelica is filled with a literary allusiveness that saturates its many frames and interiors. Beginning with a quotation from Antero de Quental and propelled by the verse of José Régio, the film covers a wide expanse of literary-historical landscape: it feels both antique and contemporary at the same time, like a 19th century short story furnished with the techno-aesthetic novelties of the early 20th. Angelica centers itself around the reanimating wonders of photographic art, but its fable concerns itself with the encroachment of the cinematic on a chimerical world divided into a series of rooms, frames, and landscapes. Interiors in Oliveira’s film seem to denote an artificiality made resplendent only through controlled light and photography, balanced on the other hand by the naturalistic landscapes of plein air scenery (most notably in several passages when the photographer, a young man named Issac [played by Ricardo Trepa], shoots pictures of day laborers singing and working on a hillside farm). If some feel that the film’s peculiar pacing carries an artificial dryness bordering on the unreal and the corny, I would answer that its strangeness relies precisely on this dryness and artificiality which Oliveira meticulously builds up frame by frame — Angelica‘s atmosphere of muted washed-out colors, anachronistic knick-knacks, and old portraiture only makes necessary the odd Méliès-style special effects that suddenly, but tastefully, lift the two dream lovers into the ether of early cinema.

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In contrast, the Claire section is impressively subtle and affective. Gainsbourg does an excellent job bringing real pathos to her performance. Though we are meant to be critical of Claire, who wants only to sit on the terrace with a nice glass of wine and what’s left of her family—(and they will have a little Beethoven playing in the background as they go!)—her sincerity, as empty as it is, is itself moving. As is the care she takes in selecting the perfect piece of chocolate for Justine, the person least likely to care, and the arrangement of the flowers by her bedside, and her futile attempts to take her young son somewhere, anywhere, as the world ends. She loads him into the golf cart and drives—fast—towards what? It doesn’t matter, but she needs to feel as if there’s a point to the driving. As she scurries around like an insect about to drown in a deluge, Justine looks on with digust. Now it is Justine who is the villain, not the planet careening through space to destroy our own. And through this, the ending offers a splinter of comfort. Justine, the ultimate nihilist, nevertheless offers something that is the closest thing to a revaluation of ritual that we will get out of von Trier. We will go on building our magic caves.

– Anelise Chen

Before the violent turning point, the anonymous “driver” or “kid” played brilliantly by Ryan Gosling suffers through at least half an hour of emotional awakening, stirred from the solipsistic confines of his shiny, enclosed vehicle, to the outwards overflowing of love for his too cute neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and his growing affection for her young son. I’ve already followed this propulsive narrative in terms of the stunningly beautiful synth-pop soundtrack, which sonically provokes  the cosmic expansion of the driver’s emotional sphere from an enclosed world of solipsism, but something is left to be said of director Nicolas Winding Refn’s play with themes of the human and machine, mechanical labor and violence, love and war. After all, the driver is a mechanic by day, a stunt devil during the fringes of his workday, and an amazingly expert get-away driver mercenary in the dark hours of the neon-lit night. His dawning love interest doesn’t so much pull him away from mechanical labor as transform his nuanced precision into even more incredible feats, expressed in what could count as heroic or even superhuman acts of violence, on the level of wars waged in epic romance, against those who threaten what’s gathered into his emotional sphere or resonance. But back to the soundtrack, you can now listen to two hours worth of Johnny Jewel’s unused tunes for an “imaginary film.”

The pre-cinematic origin of Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) holds residence at an unlikely (and resistant) site of historiography: the mental breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche. Whether the facts of Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin are as true as one anecdotal legend claims, the narrative details are compelling enough to stand forth as fiction: “In Turin, on January 3rd, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the door of number six, Via Carlo Alberto, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his mail.” The mundaneness of the incidentals, in which Nietzsche assumes the role of an ordinary man who ponders two equally banal choices (to take a leisure walk, or to pick up the mail? or why not both?), augments the pull of the inevitable catastrophe. “Not far from him, or indeed very far removed from him, a cabman is having trouble with his stubborn horse.” The cabman begins to whip the horse viciously because it refuses to budge and convey its load, and Nietzsche, overwhelmed by the sudden violence and pathos of the event, rushes to the horse’s aid, throws himself on its neck, and prevents the cabman from flogging it any further. Nietzsche, perhaps feeling underneath his arms and face the rippling skin and pulsing heart of the animal, breaks down in convulsive tears and, as a crowd collects around him, submerging him further beneath the heat of an encounter which has escalated beyond the point of comprehension, he collapses unconscious. The rest, as they say, is history: carried back to his apartment, the philosopher wakes up, but he can no longer function as he had; that is, he can no longer make autonomous decisions about taking either leisure strolls or visits to the post office, or anything else for that matter. He lives out the rest of his years in a state of profound philosophical silence, “only broken on occasion by a lengthy and unpunctuated scream.”

Bela Tarr

As scripted by Tarr and his regular screenwriter, the great Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the unfounded but no less evocative event of “the flogging of the Turin horse” signals the terminus of Nietzsche’s life as a philosopher, though not the end of his life as an all-too-human man (he still would live on for another eleven years under the care of his mother and, later, his sister Elisabeth). Tarr’s film uses Nietzsche’s dramatic exit from public life as the point of departure: of what happened to Nietzsche, reduced to the state of being a “gentle and demented” man, we presumably know enough. But to Tarr and Krasznahorkai a greater historical lacuna emerges: “Of the horse…we know nothing.” The nearly five minute tracking shot that opens The Turin Horse immediately answers the query in a stridently phenomenological manner: the horse materializes right before us, and we see it has finally recovered from the Nietzsche episode and moved onward. The speckled horse pulls its driver with grim but determined velocity through a cold skeletal landscape that promises no end in sight. Moving Sisyphus-like toward a destination that lies somewhere beyond the screen (a liminal place that might be located somewhere at the far end of the world), its heavy but forceful movement seems to occur in a vacuum, a progress that is abjured by the eskhaton of nonprogress, Zeno’s impossibility of movement. The horse moves because it is forced to, but inwardly, we may say, the horse does not move; its muscular nature is still and timorous perhaps, and though solidly built, it resigns itself to a deathlike trance made stark by its inability to abdicate the cruel task assigned to its strained legs, its aching back impelled by the whips and grunts of a stubborn but hardworn and similarly bestial man. Man and animal are one in their movement forward.

All throughout this eternalized march, Mihaly Vig’s solemn funereal music envelops us (as it will continue to envelop us throughout the film, as a doom-ridden leitmotif), and we are transported by the fluid camera that swivels around the horse and keeps pace with its advance (as if it were tied to the magnetic pole of the horse’s moving sphere), and we are transported by the horse itself on a darkening passage into the closed world of Tarr’s film. It goes without saying that the first shot of The Turin Horse (much like the first shot of many of Tarr’s films) constructs the whole architectural valency of the film in miniature, only this time in an inverse relation: the action-event of the horse’s trudge through an eternalized landscape turns out to be the positive topside of what gradually develops into an entropic negativizing of the scenario. The film moves, as one critic has astutely pointed out, from the “pure movement of cinema” to “the absolute stasis of photography.” (One is tempted to add: from the animism of the cinema to the spectral entombment of the photograph.)

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v32n4lCG0OA

 

The march of the horse from the historiographical site of Nietzsche’s departure from world history (or should we call it rather his dramatic entrance?) to the ahistoric realm of Tarr’s picture, in which the horse-driver and his daughter dwell in their own phenomenological vacuum, constitutes a suspension of dramatic impulse within the slow freeze of the film’s gaze. The horse, which we just witnessed trudging determinedly toward us, refuses during the next “six days” of the film’s arc (each chapter is divided into separate days) to pull the cart-wagon again. Just as it had done in a parallel universe one innocuous day on a cobblestone street in Torino, the horse respectfully declines the apparatus of its vocation; it prefers not to perform its job, we may say, because it senses an ending on its way to arriving, a metaphysical “dead brick wall” past which it cannot imagine moving. The horse’s refusal is the first decisive act of the film, or rather, the hinge on which the film shifts from the ostentatious mobility of the tracking shot to the reciprocally stringent anchoring of the film in the inertia of domestic life. The horse’s sad refusal ties us down to its stable life and, concomitantly, to the rustic cottage inhabited by the horse-driver and his daughter. The story shifts from “Of the horse…we know nothing” to “Of the carter, and of his life at home, we also know nothing.” But these two focal points soon become merged: man and animal are also at one in their habitation.

After nearly twenty minutes of non-dialogue, we learn to the full what kind of meager, bone-dry existence the carter and his daughter endure. We perceive that the carter relies on his horse as the primary means of eking out a paltry economic subsistence, and that he relies on his daughter, in lieu of the absence of a wife or partner, to dress and feed him since he is lame in his right arm. The daughter, on her end, seems to enjoy no private life other than the absent-minded pleasure of staring out her window for extended periods of time; that is, when she is not stoking the fire, pulling water from the well, dressing and undressing her father, feeding the horse, cleaning the stable, and boiling potatoes for what seems to be their only meal of the day. Father and daughter rise early and, when darkness comes, they go to bed early — not to sleep, but to bide the reprieve that structures their waking hours. They do not speak much to each other, and their lack of words posits a life emptied of reflection or introspection, indeed of personal history and historical insight. The rituals that formulate their existence, and which are dictated by the objects and material conditions that restrict them to the bare essentials, are ultimately what define their severely curbed form-of-life, a life simultaneously bounded by the interiority of the austere cottage they call a home and by the ascetic cinematic space in which Tarr gives them limited range to dwell, sleep, and eat in.

But I must digress a little. The term “bare life” has specific significance, and it owes its recent conceptual resurgence to the work of Giorgio Agamben. In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben explains that since the Ancient Greeks had no term that could equate to our contemporary usage of the all-inclusive word life, they “used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1). For Aristotle, zoe was excluded from consideration in the life of human beings: people were fundamentally thinkers whose form of thought, and not the mere fact of their living, defined their existence. But in the nebulous zone that sprouted between zoe (bare life) and bios (political existence), as human civilization grew more and more complex, a modern incarnation of man as containing both bare life and, in Michel Foucault’s words, harboring “the additional capacity for political existence,” became feasible. Political man was gradually recontextualized as a “human animal” who was still subject to the sovereign power of the polis or state apparatus as its resident or citizen, but who remained eternally suspect on account of his potential regression to the bare life of animals, vegetables, and things.

The proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life… Man cannot, at any price, be said to coincide with the mere life in him, no more than with any other of his conditions and qualities, not even with the uniqueness of his bodily person. However sacred man is (or that life in him that is identically present in earthly life, death, and afterlife), there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men. What, then, distinguishes it essentially from the life of animals and plants? And even if these could be sacred, they could not be so by virtue only of being alive, of being in life. It might be well worth while to track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Perhaps, indeed probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost to cosmological impenetrability.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPpJoTmIeuc

But bare life, mere sentience, is only one part of the puzzle of inclusion/exclusion in the architecture of The Turin Horse. The severity of the fading world winnows down their actions to the level of what Benjamin calls “mythical violence”: the violence which does not necessarily destroy laws or destroys life but which founds an order of things that must be patiently and habitually built up, again and again, day after day; a violence that is also a kind of law-making and law-keeping, the law of ritualized actions; the minor laws of domestic space and the major laws of boundaries and boundary-setting. (With this in mind, we can begin to understand the carter’s hostility toward or distrust of foreigners and strangers who visit his abode, those who trespass over the boundaries he set up or who force him into reactive thinking: “It is rubbish.”)

For a film that is so devoid of dramatic event and cataclysm, it is also one which problematizes the effects of critical appraisal despite its clarity of execution and the exhausting repetitiveness of its rituals. Tarr’s aesthetics of maximalized minimalism produces a disorientation involving its repetitions. The soundtrack, but also the framing of the scenes and the daily actions of the duo, are replayed over and over again, each day no different from the last except for the rare intrusions of other characters or the deprivation that comes with the reduction of their resources, of their water supply, of their hunger, of even the light that comes with each new day, and which disrupts the regularity of their domestic actions and behavior. The inclusiveness of these ceremonies of domesticity reciprocates the exclusiveness of each individual movement in the bare life of these apolitical people.

Just as Tarr and his crew had memorably performed in Satantango (1994), we revisit some of the same set-pieces but from different perspectives and angles (except that in The Turin Horse, each set-piece constitutes another day in chronological order, whereas in Satantango the scenes comprise a single chronological event re-seen from different points of view). The event of eating the boiled potatoes with their bare hands (and which scene signals more than this one the grounding of the carter and his daughter in the residuals of bare life?) is played numerous times, each time from a different perspective, i.e. from the daughter’s point of view, and then from the father’s point of view, and then from the side showing both of them looking upon each other, and so forth. Just as he accomplished in Satantango, Tarr submits us to a cinema of physical endurance, at once below cinema, but also qualitatively beyond its spectacle; a cinema in which we are bodily committed not as spectators but as participants in the rituals that constitute the very surface of the image. It is possible to consider the belaboring of each ritual to carry the purpose of causing us to suffer with them the ennui of each passing day, in which the same actions are performed ad infinitum (or until they or we perish); but I am more drawn to believe that each ritualistic repetition, because it is seen from a different perspective or angle, reconstitutes the event as a qualitatively different phenomenon quite distinct from the last; not only are the multiple repetitions of the potato eating different in kind, but they are also different in potentiality.

But what do these repetitions mean in relation to the aesthetic intentions of The Turin Horse? Its simplicity pushed to the point of absurdity foams at the mouth in Zarathustrean complexity. Its major inclusion, or should I say, its chief visibility, is that of the bare life of the carter (who I shall now call, archetypally, the patriarch) and that of the bare life of the daughter. Removed from political existence, indeed only barely clinging to the faintest lineaments of domesticity and civilization, they appear to be inhabiting a corner of the world at the margins of an apocalyptic event, in which human language, the foundation of political existence as such, is aborted and dispersed, quite literally, to the sound and bluster of the wind. These two people are only barely removed from animal existence, not in any pejorative sense, but in a way that is at once political (i.e. material) and metaphysical. It is to this extent that, quoting Agamben, “there is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (8). So that the major exclusion, or rather, the film’s key invisibility, happens to be that of the political autonomy which has been denied to them. This is not simply to say that The Turin Horse is not a political film, but that its politics is compounded with the gestures and limitations of material disappearance; it is a film about the end of history and the consumption of a world order, perhaps even of the end of the world as we know it, not in a bang, but in a whisper. In short, it is a film about Nietzsche and about the ponderous silence in which he became submerged.

To return to our beginning: of the horse we know nothing, but the film makes it a point to put the horse and its dependents front and center; their exclusion from history automatically becomes the major inclusion in the film. Reciprocally, of Nietzsche we pretend to know enough; but it is his dramatic inclusion in the history of human civilization which Tarr/Kraznahorkai invert into an overwhelming invisibility in the film. A dialectic of presence/absence ensues. Nietzsche’s very absence in the film becomes an overbearing presence; he is the eraser in the book of history, and it is his thought process which slowly deadens the light, one would say, and makes impossible the virtuous powers of political sovereignty in a world gone abysmally absurd.

But this is only one way of looking at it. Another way is to reconsider the cumulative effect of the repetitions in the film. A few reviewers have already alluded to the Beckettian overtones that the repetitions play out. Two of the best reviews of the film (by Robert Koehler, the other by Andrew Schenker) utilize the classic ending line of Beckett’s The Unnameable as a pithy summation of the attitude conveyed in The Turin Horse: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — but a study of the literary work of Kraznahorkai would suffice on its own to explain how Tarr hit upon these existential tonalities without having to read Beckett. In any case, Beckett (and Kraznahorkai), both in their stylistics of prose and in their fundamental attitude, paint the gateway through which the film sets up Nietzschean games of absence/presence. I perceive instead something of a recreation of the concept of the eternal return, one of the most misunderstood and misquoted tropes of Nietzsche’s thought (see The Gay Science). Gilles Deleuze provides a supple explanation:

We misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we understand it as “return of the same.” It is not being that returns but rather returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and of the being which is affirmed in the becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation. (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 45)

Elsewhere, Deleuze rejects the term “mechanism” for describing what shape the eternal return takes form. “Why is mechanism such a bad interpretation of the eternal return? Because it does not necessarily or directly imply the eternal return. Because it only entails the false consequence of a final state.” The term mechanism resonates, I think, in Tarr’s film: it is precisely the kind of word one would use not only in describing its mechanical repetitions, but also in general consideration of what cinema does as an artform (the cinema is, in a superficial sense, the result of a variety of mechanisms at work). Yet this temptation to restrict or malign its repetitions as the result of a mechanism compounds the genius of the film for me: in spite of the logical resonance, I find myself unable to compare Tarr’s cinema of repetitions, such as they appear in The Turin Horse, to a mechanical process of “passing through the same set of differences again.”

The activation of the body in being laid bare by Tarr’s film defies or circumvents mere mechanical rotation or repetition; one is gradually weaned off the idea of “spectacle” and the body becomes the central event of the film’s “eternal return.” (“We must eat,” the patriarch says, because the body, ground degree zero for all versions of political existence, zoe or bios, is what ultimately matters.) The body in its full erosion represents, and quickly absorbs, the germ of the screen: we are also attempting to return to ordinary life, but its mundane ceremonies have been permanently affected, have undergone transmutation. After watching The Turin Horse, we cannot so simply “return” to life again; our conception of life has been transformed, its entrails slashed open. In the sense that Deleuze admonishes the description of the eternal return as a mechanical process, we are also encouraged to refuse labeling Tarr’s repetitions as mechanisms of the cinema. We are subliminally entering a zone of synthetic possibilities; we are placed beyond the cinema, in a curious state of exception, yet very much a part of the cinema, insofar as our body is heavily weighted with the experience of its totalizing, self-effacing image.

Describing “the abyss and the apotheosis” of Nietzsche’s final year of coherence before his mental breakdown, Pierre Klossowski writes, “Now he saw the world beyond language: was it the sphere of absolute muteness, or on the contrary the sphere of absolute language?” (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 251). This is the question which The Turin Horse asks not only of what Nietzsche glimpsed that fateful day in Torino, but also of what the patriarch and his daughter witnessed shortly before the end of the world arrived at their doorstep. The film’s shift from the sphere of absolute cinema to the sphere of total photography works as a correlative to the Nietzschean shift, but it also summons an inversion of its own mechanics: an entropic shift from an ending to a beginning. In the beginning, that is to say, at the multiple originary sites of cinema, there were already present the mechanisms of its destruction, a state of “sacredness” (in the Agamben sense) which plays out as an affirmation intent upon going mad, going bare, “becoming animal.” This is because what is repeated is affirmed, is active, is perpetually on its way to actualizing a truer, fundamentally different non-identity:

Only action and affirmation return: becoming has being and only becoming has being. That which is opposed to becoming, the same or the identical, strictly speaking, is not… We can thus see how the eternal return is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation. It is the moment or the eternity of becoming which eliminates all that resist it. It releases, indeed it creates, the purely active and pure affirmation. (Nietzsche and Philosophy, x)

In some ways, Tarr’s stated decision to not make any more films after The Turin Horse signifies a noble resumption of the Nietzschean concept of affirmation. The film’s last gasp is no true gasp, it recedes rather into unostentacious silence, and the images of the two archetypes, Patriarch and Daughter, become a pure affirmation that performs a double act: the will to nothingness, transmuted to the will to power, consummates itself, that is, negates its own negation; while the will to power, fulfilling the desire of a nihilism that wishes to vanquish itself, allows it to become pure nihilism, a nothingness, that allows the body, our bodies, to return to life, to make their recurrence in the world which lies beyond cinema.

This mirror image is most likely not the Earth as we know and understand it–it is not, for example, an Earth in intimate collusion with the sensuous limitations of our bodies, nor is it an Earth defined by our ample ignorance of its largeness, making it more terrifying in its localized concentrations–rather, the Earth of Google Maps is a Zone in which human desire and its waste product creep up along the blueprinted, line-traced passageways like an ineradicable weed, a gnarly and phantasmagoric apparition, the human face blotted out as a way of preserving the integrity of the machine that recreates not the visage but les yeux sans visage.

For Orpheus, and equally for the 9-eyed camera of Google Street View, the Gaze is All, while the face, the body, and what political or symbolic value of identification can be attributed to these detached limbs and voiceless creatures of accident, dissolve in the withering sight of the mobile Panopticon. Jon Rafman’s curatorial project, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, collects the most striking screen captures he finds on Google Street View (or through scouring other blogs devoted to the service) and exhibits them as a way of reinforcing the human presence that is always on the cusp of disintegration, threatened as it is by the randomized framing of the autonomous panoramic camera.

Rafman manages to rediscover the Orphic gaze in Google’s aesthetics of informativity, and it is this gesture of arduous selection (a selection made precious by the extent of effort involved in picking his subjects out of countless mundane specimens) that restores something of the human sight to the Panopticon’s alienating lens. The restoration, however, is not totalizing, and while the human trace receives a name and a scent of the familiar, the senses remain divided: human sight, left on its own, can sometimes begin to take on the contours of the machine, and a type of hallucinatory disorientation can sometimes seep in the images.

My friend (and fellow Hydra writer) Edgar Garcia once surprised me when he stated how much he disliked Ralph Waldo Emerson. This conversation was over text message, and he stealth-attacked me with this unforeseen indictment of one of America’s great prophets, friend to all humanity, the Sage of Concord. What he disliked so much about Emerson was the “erosive quality, the constant undermining” that seemed to “require the reader to move forward and backward in order to get what’s going on.”

It was true: Emerson’s peculiar style, which moved and swayed in giant steps and seemed to say something forcefully, lyrically, without saying anything in particular, drove the reader into some kind of rapture that necessitated the comprehension of great hermetic truths about life, about nature, about humanity, on just about everything ever said and made and experienced. Instead, “what the reader is fed in this novel redesign of the reading experience is washy Vedas. Its dreams of freedom and independence are cheaply purchased. Cheap tea for the American soul market.” Watching Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, I’m finally starting to understand what Edgar meant by the “washy Vedas” that lay concealed in the subterfuge of Emerson’s lyrical style. If Terrence Malick, the sage of Waco, Texas, is the new Emerson, then his Tree of Life introduces an updated, 21st century Transcendentalism that uses cinematic hyperbole and a barrage of ultra-scenic visuals that irk and distract rather than enlighten

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shortly after watching The Tree of Life, I re-read Emerson’s seminal book-length essay Nature (1836) on a hunch, and something like a mystical apple fell and struck me on the head: Malick’s Tree has its roots firmly placed in Emerson’s Nature. The return of Transcendentalism! It had never gone away apparently, and it was sprouting from the transparent, all-seeing eyeball of a revered but media-shy American film director who’s only made five films up to now, his latest earning the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. A film of tremendous promise that had been hyped up for years since Malick finished principal shooting in 2008 (and spent almost three years editing it into several versions that changed in length over time), the wait-time spent for the completion and release of Tree of Life was a considerable improvement over the 20 years that divided his second film, Days of Heaven (1978), from his third, The Thin Red Line (1998). The smallness of Malick’s oeuvre seems to be due to his artistic commitment to one-up himself with each successive work. Badlands (1973), still considered by some to be his finest work, is a bona fide American classic. It gave definitive roles to Martin Sheen (impossibly cool and handsome) and to Sissy Spacek (simultaneously wise and naive), shortly before they would become established actors of the 1970s American film renaissance. Badlands proved to be a blessing and a curse for Malick: it was a film so spherically airtight, so instantly memorable and iconic, that its debut set a high standard for Malick the director; he had to reinvent himself at the very moment he was discovered by the industry.

Terrence Malick

Days of Heaven followed five years later, and it was the first attempt on the part of Malick to experiment with a different way of shooting and editing that seemed to grace or skirt straight narrative instead of directly involving itself in its parameters. The repetitive use of voice-over (a Malick hallmark) was used in Days of Heaven as a kind of tangential punctuation for scenes that seemed to always be in medias res, often in the middle or at the end of conversations in which words were barely heard or muttered, but in which landscape, American landscape, was the thing itself, the narrative captured in still life. Badlands was already a miniature study of 1950s Americana filtered through the eyes of two fugitive lovers, and Days of Heaven served the same purpose, only this time setting the period even farther back (circa 1916), and expanding the color palette, dilating the largeness of sky and terrain, which in turn diluted (and sometimes enhanced) the molecular intimacy of the characters who only happened to stumble into his camera sight.

The progression from the tight narrative and character development of Badlands to the looser, more contemplative style of Days of Heaven was the first step in creating the signature Malick style, in which the linear conventions of strong narrative are replaced or derailed by staccato rhythms of natural history scenes and American dreamscape. Malick was not so much interested in the stories he had to tell as he was in the geography that was traveled by the characters, the historicity that situated and authenticated them, and the search for a new land that drove them perpetually forward.

And I have said it elsewhere: Malick’s oeuvre is almost exclusively concerned with geography, American geography, and his image-ideas serve as historiographies of an American-oriented epistemology. An American epistemology is necessarily a geographical one: the endless search for the “New World,” whatever it was, if it existed at all. Badlands and Days of Heaven were enough to cement Malick’s reputation for good, to such an extent that there was quite a clamor raised for his late reemergence with The Thin Red Line. I do not want to spend much time analysing Malick’s war film, so I’ll only state that it was a significantly longer film (170 minutes) and even more elliptical in style than Days of Heaven had been — a continuation, but also a step forward, of the Malickian technique. Days of Heaven, even at 95 minutes, seems to feel epic, and its brevity belies the desire to show more landscape, to explore more geographical and historical strata, to perhaps develop the back story and the characters more (and its strange way of being edited, as if in a hurry to include all the shots and scenes that were filmed, points to the possibility of a different film, longer and slower, if Malick had to time to put it together).

The Thin Red Line, to some extent, liberated Malick from the constraints of producing a film within the 90 minute mark, and this newfound freedom was no doubt indebted to the 20 years that had served to increase his fame within the network of a new Hollywood generation that readily worshiped him. Everyone who was anyone at the time signed up to be in his film: the ensemble cast was so large that the initial edit of the film (running at 5 hours) took 7 months to get through, just to include all the star performances in the film. The same Malickian tropes appeared again: nature-worship, fraternitas, elliptical asides and voice-overs, geographical cognition, the search for and the destruction of Paradise. (So that all of his films play like variations on Paradise Lost — and The Tree of Life could possibly be Malick’s Paradise Regained.)

Whatever the merits of The Thin Red Line, Malick’s fame escalated high enough to secure a larger budget and expenditures, to dream bigger and shoot longer, to dare to top himself again and again. When The New World was released in 2005, some of the hype that tended to surround a Malick production had been depressurized (the wait time was no longer 20 years but 7), but the film received its due share of awards and praise. Even after watching The Tree of Life, I still consider The New World to be the culmination of Malickian technique or, at least, the most successful incarnation of his mass-aggregate style of shooting and editing. The New World epitomized the sort of dreamer’s naivete that characterizes all of Malick’s work with a grace and tenderness that was, indeed, sumptuous and myth-making, because it was so purposefully neo-romantic, so determinedly optimistic, and even sometimes delirious and foolish (as all love stories ought to be).

The New World was always about Pocahontas (just as Hart Crane had envisioned her), and it freely expressed itself in the permanent American idiom: the plural, the ecstatic, the Whitmanesque. As usual, different cuts of the film came to exist: a limited release version (150 minutes), the wide-release version (135 minutes), and an extended cut version (172 minutes), all of which were harvested from well over a million feet of film shot — Malick shot large, but he also shot long and hard. This is an important fact because, judging from the vertiginous plurality of shots and scenes that make up The Tree of Life, I would not be surprised if Malick and his team of filmmakers surpassed the exorbitant amount of film stock that was used up in the discovery of The New World.

Scene from "The New World" (2005)

Scene from "The Tree of Life" (2011)

The extraordinary thing about The Tree of Life is, firstly, its sheer scale. Nothing less than the Origin of Life itself is directly tackled, and this extra-large evolutionary scheme is anchored by the core story of a young family’s parallel evolution in 1950s Texas. The second extraordinary thing is the ease and velocity with which the film migrates through a succession of macrocosmic phenomena that envelop and comment upon microcosmic occurrences.

It is a film divided into 4 sections: the 1st works as a kind of prelude in which large scale astral events (let us group these massive events under the more generic term “the Macrocosmic View”) intertwine with the events surrounding a man’s recollection of his life growing up in Waco, Texas and his subsequent present-tense life working and living in what looks like modern day Chicago (we can call this other half, “the Microcosmic View”). A death in the family, received by letter and telephone call, disrupts the tight-knit peace of the family: we see them endure their suffering, as the camera gazes on their gestures and faces (there are a lot of close-ups that swoop in or rise up to the expressive faces of the characters, which often stand in for actual dialogue). We gradually discover that Sean Penn plays the grown up version of the oldest boy of the family, and we see him too inwardly suffer within the air-conditioned nightmare of his existence (or so we are led to believe by the dismal grays and silvers and blues of his sleek, well-cushioned [i.e. "empty"] lifestyle as a wealthy architect trapped in a nature-less modernity).

The 2nd section shifts into the Macrocosmic View: we start with a “Let there be Light” moment, and then we progress to starbursts, to cataclysmic eruptions, massive volcanoes, tectonic plate shifts, and so forth. Eventually we have water, eventually we have microorganisms, amoeba, fish, tadpoles, etc., until we arrive at the awaited moment: dinosaurs! Yes, the film contains dinosaurs, and it is no wonder: Malick takes his natural history very seriously, and having the American backing and resources to reproduce life-like prehistoric creatures (and even an American tradition of loving and supporting this kind of hyperrealism), why not? If Kubrick could have the Dawn of Man littered with bone-flinging apes, then why not go farther back and show every possible step in the evolution of life?

Yet by the time the dinosaurs make their stage entrance, the film has already lapsed into a semi-ridiculous, pseudo-Kubrickian mood. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the obvious model for many of the grandiose shots that Malick and his team indulge in (Malick even hired Douglas Trumbull — special effects supervisor for 2001 – to handle some of the special effects work), but Tree of Life never succeeds in achieving the strange and anomalous balance that Kubrick (in my estimation, still a far more accomplished, versatile director) had managed to construct in 2001. The antiseptic coldness and aloofness with which Kubrick envisioned impossibly large, astronomical events happening outside of time (and indeed outside of human perception) seems now more sincere, paradoxically enough, than Malick’s picturesque, New Age-y meditation on astronomical and molecular life processes.

Perhaps nothing exhibits this note of falseness in Malick’s vision of extra-human/pre-human phenomena more than the dinosaur episode, not ridiculous, as I said, because of the mere fact that dinosaurs appear (for certainly, depicting the ontological blossoming of the Cosmos cannot be considered any less outrageous than showing terrestrial lifeforms which really did exist a long, long time ago); rather, the dinosaur episode (albeit brief) is ridiculous because the saurians appear so ludicrously anthropomorphized that one has to question the whole reasoning behind the beginning-of-time setup.

A dinosaur (a “parasaurolophus” according to the author(s) of the Wikipedia article on Tree of Life) lies wounded by a shallow stream. Another critter (a “troodon” — as if it really mattered what a CGI-rendered creature happened to be) comes out and contemplates eating the wounded reptile, which seems to be condemned to die anyway: as a way of showing that the dinosaur “thinks,” it experimentally steps on the head of the wounded creature, repeats this process again, a little harder, a little lighter (I can hear a few gasps of alarm from the audience), and then, miraculously, decides not to eat it (now I hear “Ahhhs” and sighs of relief). An altruistic dinosaur! Who would have known?

The film happily skips along to show other pre-human formations and terrestrial events, but my attention has already been permanently damaged by the dinosaur’s altruism: what was the purpose of that, really? That “life loves life”? That we are all… One? That if a dinosaur can love its fellow brother, certainly we can, and we should, too? The message was irreducibly kitschy (a fresh dosage of hardcore existential alienation would have been welcome by this point), and as I looked up at other impossibly beautiful shots of cave formations, church spires, majestic trees, etc., I realized that Malick’s pan-historical travelogue mode had gone too far this time — he had run out of actual ideas, or he had grown bored with plain old narrative.

The mainly fatuous 2nd section of Tree of Life is nothing more, nothing less, than a miniature copy of the BBC and Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth series, an invariably impressive mosaic of natural phenomena, but Malick’s work seems to carry a kind of National Geographic aesthetic that tries to compensate for a dearth of actual emotion, actual thought, with the pull of wonder-baiting cinematography. Seen from this angle, the personal investment for the viewer is small because one has only to watch, to gawk in awe, to stare passively at a stream of pretty pictures, in place of reading and interpreting difficult, ponderous subtexts or deciphering the layered depths of more complex (i.e. less tourist-ready) images. The Attractive immediately becomes the True.

Malick seems convinced that staggering beauty is always enough — and that a surplus of it can overwhelm all the other faculties of intellectual engagement. Watching parts of Tree of Life is comparable to reading a pop-up children’s book on a pre-school level: the text is either absent or reduced to the barest minimum and the illustrations are maximized to ultimate, panoramic effect. Yes, pictures tell stories (picture theory is, after all, the primordial root of all cinema), but Malick leaves no room for doubt or speculation in his images: his sweeping camera movements, the compulsive rush of events that are always lunging forward, work as unquestionable assertions, injunctions even, “to believe.” Believe! Yes, but believe in what?

This sophisticated form of cinematic legerdemain simulates the gospel message of American Transcendentalism, a universalist credence made persuasive by the hypnotic but indeterminate fulcrum of Emersonian aesthetics: the will to believe, left on its own, and supplemented merely by a pseudo-pantheism that lacked the certainty of conviction or the repository of a well-defined doctrine. It is a kind of beauty-cult faith that circumvents definite, Kierkegaardian faith: as empty of meaning as it is large of target, it signals everything and beckons nothing in particular. Emerson had no “dogma” to adhere to or speak of (to the Concord Sage’s credit, he never pretended to subscribe to any religious doctrine but that of a  philosophical syncretism that based itself largely on self-reliance and private revelation), but he did place a tremendous semantic value on Nature — with a capital N — and it is this Emersonian spirit of nature-worship which has been consistently echoed throughout all of Malick’s work, so that we find him frequently

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed in blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

And if there is any gospel message to be gleaned from the surfeit of images that constitute Tree of Life, it is that last sentence from Emerson: “I am part or particle of God.” If we never received the memo, Malick makes sure that the incessant voice-overs (all of them irritatingly whispered and “poetical”) remind us of it. “Brother… sister…” becomes a kind of biblical invocation for Sean Penn to walk aimlessly around in a canyon (he is in Nature this time, outside of the sterility of the Office), or for Brad Pitt (who plays the father, Mr O’Brien) to mug a little and stand perplexed, or for Jessica Chastain (who plays Mrs. O’Brien, the uber-motherly 50s housewife who almost never says anything above a few words) to hover around magically and flash a smile at her children: “Mother, father… you wrestle in me.” (Or something like that.)

But I am only meagerly, maybe unfairly, bringing Emerson into the picture: indeed, Emersonian thought is not so simple or clear-cut as the stock of sometimes fascinating, sometimes generic, images Malick brings into his picture frame. Emerson invoked Neoplatonism and the Upanishads, he sought Nature not in natural scenery strictly but in the apperception of the human soul channeling nature or re-creating it — he found it nestled and functioning within “the infinitude of the private man.” Malick sees it quite the same, I’m sure, but it is a Nature so washed out by breathless whispering and beauty, beauty, beauty, that it does end up looking and feeling a bit like a “washy Vedas.”

All is not lost however: the 3rd section of the film, which should be considered the movie proper, is fortunately the longest part, and it is the section when Malick actually begins “doing cinema” (in the same manner that a philosopher finishes setting up the prolegomena to the problem at hand and begins “doing philosophy”). Malick shifts to “the Microcosmic View” and gives us a detailed portrait of a boy’s youth in 1950s Texas, from the moment of birth up to his early adolescence, and one wonders how many of the events that transpire during this section occurred to Malick personally. I would guess not too many: while many of the scenes are lovingly crafted and superbly paced (the sound design is impeccable here), they still retain a residue of generic standardization: we watch a photogenic anglo-saxon family grow up together through thick and thin, just as we would imagine them in compressed form, in Coca-Cola advertisements or on black-and-white television shows of the period (but with more doses of realism to temper the emphatic loveliness of everyone).

All of the actors are attractive and fresh-faced enough to star in commercials, the sons as much as the parents, and their growing pains, when attempting to simulate real friction and real family problems, embody the sheen of harmlessness that typify idealized family dramas. There is nothing overtly ugly or crooked in anything that happens in Tree of Life. The father is a disciplinarian who makes his sons fear and love him; but he is also something of a failed dreamer who makes us empathize with him; the oldest son grows to hate the father once he nears puberty, he wants to replace him, he is confused about life because fear and desire, sex and pain, begin to grow in him, etc. The mother is softer, kinder, more intuitive and empathetic, she teaches the boys how to love and be free, how to be kind to one another, etc. And the second oldest boy, who plays the guitar and has a “sensitive side,” takes after his mother, while the older boy adopts the more masculine behavior of his father.

In short, many of the literary and media-informed tropes that have gone into the historical representation of the everyday white American family are here exploited to great emotional effect. This family is not my family, but I’m so familiar with the themes, with the domestic arguments, with the quite universal forms of emotion that are exploited here, that I cannot help but understand and sympathize with their troubles or relate to Malick’s boyhood memories. Some of it is endearing, undoubtedly, but its montage of attractions has no real hold on singularity, on that indefinable eccentricity that makes each family fundamentally different from others, so that the O’Briens turn out resembling more of a blueprint for the quintessential American family than an actual collective of complicated individuals. (But maybe this was the universalist goal Malick had in mind: he wanted to build and reproduce the family archetype, “the family of families,” the family experience in itself.)

However meticulously wrought this 3rd section is, much of the hard work that went into its execution (majestically lensed all the way through by Emmanuel Lubezki) is instantly subverted by the lackluster, almost laughable, 4th section, the coda of the family’s evolution, in which (I presume) Sean Penn somehow escapes his waking dream-dilemma of wandering around canyons and through open door frames (surreal!), and finds himself on a beach with everyone he knew in life, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, himself as a younger boy, his brothers. 8 ½ it absolutely is not, but the attempt to tie everything together after all that transpired, remains a partial failure of empty accretion — we are reminded of the washy Vedas again (literally this time, since the principal characters get wet while they walk around the beach or run through the lapping waves), but not before a final montage sequence of randomized scenery (micro and macro mixed in), seemingly in the attempt to fit in every shot which the editors could not find a place for in the opening section. Two of the final shots are, inexplicably, of a carnivalesque Eyes Wide Shut-style mask floating in the water (an art film!) and another of a modern-day bridge at sunset (the Golden Gate Bridge?), surreptitious moments which inspired a colleague of mine to quip outside the movie theater, “It would make a great screen saver.” I can’t think of a better summation.

Does Malick succeed in creating a new cinematic idiom with The Tree of Life? Yes and no. Yes, he has crafted a film that has pushed the Malickian technique to its breaking point, and the film’s true core (the 3rd or “main” section) is an undeniable spectacle of consummate, indeed transcendental, filmmaking — capturing emotions and intimacies as only a transparent all-seeing eyeball can.

The universality of Emerson assumes the universality of everyone else, of the American Experience specifically, but also of me and you and everyone we know (in the world of cinema anyway). It is the prayer for “all things”: an ornate rhetoric that disarms our skepticism and subdues our thought in aromas and sensations — we are pushed along, pulled here and there, because there is never any one place to stop at and think for a minute, because everything has got to be accounted for, no matter how fast or haphazard. But this love of speed and texture also collapses into structural disorder. The Tree of Life loses traction and a lot of internal coherence when it tries to augment and move forward, when it could be taking pauses, reducing its vocabulary and effusiveness, and sharpening its focus. This is the “erosive quality, the constant undermining” that diminishes (for me) the revolutionary aims of the film.

But I suppose it is in Malick’s nature to do more and more, to one-up himself, to constantly move forward at greater and more intricate velocities, leading one to wonder how on earth Malick could top himself after something so all-encompassing as The Tree of Life. Evidently, it would simply have to be even more of itself: a 6 hour version is reportedly being prepared already. A friend asked me what makes this film especially American, and I would answer that it would be this more-of-more-ness, this contagious audacity to film as much of everything (both the representable and unrepresentable, the objective and the inter-subjective) as is financially and technologically possible: the quantification of human experience in a nutshell. The optimistic belief that a million feet of film (2 million, 3 million?) could register the sum total of a boy’s life in Texas. A similar question would be: what makes Transcendentalism an American ideology? It could be answered something like this: the belief that one can transcend the perceptual limitations of history, of time and place, provided one invents one’s own medium for narrating it. A kind of metaphysical entrepreneurship. We produce our own history, or we bring the universal down to our size, if we can create a private, self-willed language for its mediation. Or as Emerson would say (and Malick approve of):

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face-to-face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? . . . The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Faces in the crowd; in the metro, faces. Faces on the bus; through the bus window, faces. Outside, faces. Inside, portraits. Of the General & the Dictator, of the Emperor & his beloved Carlota, of the poet-king of Texcoco and the Tlatoani, of the Neo-Marxists & the Republicans, of the Zapotecs & the Zapatistas, of the shoe-shiners and the narcotraficantes, of the trafficking cars and the bones of the indigent beneath the blind wheels of the cars. Of a striking worker, assassinated, his face streaked with blood and his eyes in pools on the ground. Such are the fates of beastly loves. The public women and the sculptors of addictions, the drunkards, the tequileros de primera, the gamblers, the pickpockets, the stock-holders, the politicos, the assassins, the priests, the telecommunication titans, the federales, the mestizos and mystics, the carnivores and criollos, the quick-tongued chilangos and the sagging pelados – these, their beastly loves, in a city of palaces. In the Museum of Anthropology the faces of ancient patriarchs, young hustlers, of miniature women and capacious grandmothers, of smiling children and the serious-faced children of men, these countless specimens of innumerable facial types fanning out in a color spectrum, change gradually into skulls. The skulls all look the same, regardless of the face that once was there. For when the face vanishes, the inescapable fact of the flesh remains, bone-white, ineradicable. Beyond the gate, digitized skulls whisper into your ear, bienvenido a México.

Within the flesh-wound of the sky a word for every season, a logos for all the cities of the world. A word designed in the heart of the pregnant sky for the poinsettia and the night panther impartially: this secret word no one knows, not the eagle or the snake (if they could speak our tongue), neither man nor the kings of men (if such regaled hominids still exist in our posterior age). No one willingly befriends the Eternal. But there are few. In Chapultepec Park, los voladores de Papantla spin in slow circles toward the ground from the heights of clouds while the flayed one, Xipe Totec, observes. Four Totonac men descend and form a spinning pyramid, while a fifth stays posted at the apex and plays the flute. It is the music rain makes in a drought season — the music that is unclenched from the throats of birds parched from thirst — and the falling men embody the supreme desire to drink and harness the rain: they are feathers wafting in the air, but they are also falling raindrops.  At the end of the dance, a foreign exchange student from UNAM goes up to one of the voladores and hands him a political pamphlet discussing the costly activities of a pan-american post-industrial military complex and the cultural desiccation of the indigenous; the student asks the volador if he feels he has been ‘dispossessed of his natural rights,’ to which the cloud-man placidly responds: ‘Dispossessed? Of what? I belong to the sky, my home is in the clouds, where many mansions abide; my father was a volador, and so am I, and my brothers and I descended long ago from the great heights.’ In the obscure heart of the city, dispersed among the 16 delegations and throughout the hundred colonias, one can hear among the speakers of castellano the syncopated patter of ancestral dialects: nahuatl, zapoteco, mixteco, otomi, mazahua. The voladores, if anything, continue to ascend and descend in the hope that their idiom — physiological, but also musical — never dries out.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGd5owGow1E&feature=related

Mexico-Tenochtitlan in those days, when coyotes fasted and sang of flowers, had nearly half a million people in its vicinity; this was more than Sevilla, at that time the largest city in Spain with just 45,000 inhabitants. Despite the voluminous tribes that resided there, Mexico-Tenochtitlan was renowned for its cleanliness; one could walk barefoot through the clean-swept streets, tread upon the white-washed patios and polished steps of the temples, and suffer nary an inconvenience or blister. It is said that the tlatoani employed nearly a thousand men to sweep the streets daily. Waters flowed freely through that isle city, following Nezahualcoyotl’s dictum: ‘A city must have the heart of a river breathing through it — water holds the origin of life’ – he built the albarrada, and it parted the brackish from the fresh, an engineering marvel. A century later the city had thrived on the swamp, the island grew larger, the lake of Texcoco was drained by Neza’s genius to maximum effect – the loftier citizens of that city drank mountain spring waters and bathed twice a day when they wanted. Moctezuma Ilhuicamina was in the liberty to bathe four times a day.  At night the smooth-stone roads that led out and into the city were lit with resinous, aromatic pine torches to guide the laborers home, the priests to the temples, and the Tlatoani to his luxuries.

A city cannot escape itself; once it is founded, it is found for all time: it repeats its themes, it recalls its past lives, it announces the imminence of its own destruction. “Instantaneity: Mexico’s response to temporal flux” (Carlos Fuentes). The Valley of Anáhuac was already el Distrito Federal when the tribe of Tenoch sighted the eagle feasting on the snake. Aztlán is always being rediscovered. Across from the Catedral Metropolitano an archaeologist unearths the head of Huitzilopochtli; to the right hides the countenance of Tlaloc. El Templo Mayor stands contemporaneous with the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. La Virgen, dressed in the raiment of Tonantzin, compounds 500 years in a single appearance. Dahlias continue to grow in splendor on the hill of Tepeyac, and the pilgrims, despite the constant change in their attire throughout the decades, continue their pilgrimage on the bone of their knees.

I see her face in Magdalena Contreras. Take the orange tram to the Paseo de la Reforma: el Zócalo, filled with tourists, vendors, and soldiers. The blurred faces of children running, and green balloons, white balloons. A solitary red balloon waltzes and rises slowly to disappear in the smog-stuffed sky. Maybe she is here. Someone, I am certain of this, is watching me from the 55th floor of the Torre Mayor. A taxi ride down the Empress’s Avenue. We merge with the Insurgents. At a distance I can see the massive blue microchip of the World Trade Center. The resplendent figure of Diana, a body like a machine rather than a virgin’s – her sensational breasts her wide thick hips her taut bow her dripping arrow aimed at me – in the center of gaping glass monoliths. I believe I am in love, yet there is no face to confirm it, only a memory, a residue, a broken trail that I reinvent through a confusion of places. In the Plaza de Toros the bulls are seasonally sacrificed to the gods buried underground. In the Central de Abastos a woman wanders through the markets, in between the menacing parked vehicles, in search of a child whose name she has momentarily forgotten in her panic. A gold ribbon drops out of her hand onto the dry salt-littered ground; trampled upon by a hundred feet, a thousand feet, a million feet.

What is left after a city has ground itself under, when the monuments to great men no longer bear the inscriptions of their names and their faces have eroded into skulls? Nothing but the wilted flower petals of fame. Nothing but the unheard songs of the nocturnal axolotl. The Palace of Fine Arts sinks daily under the mass of its marble, the sheer weight of its European inflection too much to sustain. The City of Mexico sinks lower and lower with the generations. If beauty exists, then we are thankful that its fearsome power fades with the turning of the seasons and the forgetting of illustrious names. Six dead boys, boys who were men before they were adults, died protecting the Castle of Chapultepec from the Yanquis; in place of their names, the white columns of their spines rise up and form a gateway to the Castle, a gateway through which the remembrance of death is enough to permit passage into the corridors of an assassinated monarch and a failed usurpation.

In Article 50, Section 28, of the 1824 Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States, it declares that it is the especial duty of the Congress of the Union ‘to establish a suitable place of residence for the supreme powers of the federation and therein enact the legislative power of the state.’ As a result there followed the institution of the Federal District of Mexico within the greater City of Mexico, and through a rapid inward process the Federal District came to absorb the City and transform it into the official seat of the Powers of the Union. In a word, the City of Mexico ceased to exist. The Federal District took as its center the Plaza de la Constitución, with a radius of 8,380 metres, per instruction of the first President of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria. Thirty years later, on the heels of the Mexican American War, burgeoning internal movements within the social and political spheres would incite new reforms and designations in the re-structuring of the Federal District, and it was General Santa Anna’s voice that rang out in Congress in support of the extension of the Federal District (in land and in law) to prefectures that were traditionally outside the earlier versions of the city:

La de Tlanepantla al norte

La de Tacubaya al occidente y

La de Tlalpan al sur –

But the City of Mexico proper would thrive regardless of its assimilation of the outlying communities; its antiquity would survive the modern implementation of constitutional legislation and the perpetual demarcations of its originary properties. If the instruments of representational government would absorb the municipalities that lay outside the city, with the autonomous municipalities reciprocally absorbing the centralized power of the Seat of the Union, the city would continue to grow despite the reforms and divisions that crippled its older integrity – if it was a District for the Federation, it was also a City independent and composed of a diverse people and of movements invisible, indeed impervious, to the invasions by foreign interests and to the splicing of its fundamental identity throughout the modern era. If it is the Distrito Federal, it is also la Ciudad de México; if it was the site for the New Spain, it persisted in the marrow of its bone to be Tenochtitlan, only now disguised in the vestiture of the Modern, its inhabitants the inheritors of a technology of the New; that is, of a mixtec-nology that would alchemize the Ancient with the Modern, the Mesoamerican gods with Catholic monotheism, the Templo Mayor with the Torre Mayor, the chinampas in Xochimilco with the neo-Champs Elysees, the Paseo de la Reforma.

In the City of Mexico there can be found in a single area the neo-classical buildings of Paris, the baroque avenidas of Spain, the stone-cut indigenous faces of the warring cuauhpipiltin. To the south lies the arboreal mountain of the Ajusco; to the north the grassy hills of the Chiquihuite and the Three Fathers; to the west the Naked Lord of Cornstalks, el Nevado de Toluca, snoozes under a cap of snow; to the east the colossal and majestic lovers, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, rest in a bed of landscapes, the one awake and ponderous, the other asleep on her back, her lifeless body depressed to the side, asleep in death. Grief took the white soft lady’s warmth away, never to wake again, while the warrior, returned from the Oaxacan battlefields, rages at the sight of her body stripped of life: one day he shall burn to ashes those close enough to gaze on her denuded majesty; his head smokes with anger, the dagger of bitterness still rooted in his beating heart.

On the invisible lake of Texcoco the waving reproducible image of a brown eagle descends on the featherless serpent, lands on the nopal, and decimates the history of a city. It had sighted all that could be seen on that land, in one fell swoop: the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan by the Mexica, the wandering tribe of Huitzilopochtli; the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, brought to fruition by Itzcoatl and the ingenious Nezahualcoyotl; the imperial achievements made by Ahuitzotl in the expansion of the empire; the melancholy surmises of Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, in conversation with his priests; the three year war for Tenochtitlan, and the Conquest to last 300 years hence; the Victory of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the coming of the Angel of Independence; the entrance of a Hapsburg into the city gates; three years after, the restoration of the Republic upon the entrance of a Zapotec into the City of Mexico; the assassination of Maximilian I; the countless reforms by Juarez, and the re-establishment of the Republic; the thirty-year Porfiriato that would return Mexico to the French Intervention it had just overthrown, and regress the national achievements of the Zapotec liberator; the Revolution that would destroy everything that existed before it and build up a storm that would last decades after the first wave; the establishment of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, and the 70 years of a perfected dictatorship under the umbrella of a revolutionary cause that continues to thrive in the hearts of partisans; and the positivist urbanizing spirit of the times that would bring skyscrapers, the 1968 Olympics, the Tlatelolco Massacre, the 1970 World Cup, and NAFTA to the neo-classical post-modern streets of Mexico – extending blood and expanding borders and exploding the free market, at the helm of a mystic nation  – from a moment’s perch on the cactus – in the solitary eye of the eagle: if Mexico City continues to sink with the florid seasons, the urban congestion, and the heavy traffic into the soft soil of the evaporated lake, then Tenochtitlan will surely rise from its ruins, a phoenix from the ashes of Aztlán; so had Chimalpahin prophesied:

En cuanto tiempo dure el mundo,

nunca se perderá la gloria de México-Tenochtitlan.

Cine Foundation International is a humanitarian cinema organization, a non-profit film company and a human rights NGO devoted to tracking and assisting those who are oppressed and/or missing from the normative rhetoric of cinema. CFI was launched on December 10, 2010 (Human Rights Day) with a single objective in mind: “To empower open consciousness through cinema.” Founded by Tobias Morgan, Jesse Richards, and Blue Un Sok Kim (who is also a fellow Hydra contributor), CFI takes vital interest in the protection and preservation of human rights through the promotion of an open cinema society that empowers minority and third-world cultures through the technologic voice of the cinema. According to their website, “CFI’s actions include the creation and reclamation of temporary spaces for film projection, arts regeneration and emergency broadcast; humanitarian actions aimed to increase agency for people who are typically voiceless within a culture, community or location; ad campaigns raising awareness of social or political injustice, and film, reportage and broadcast actions to aid in conflict resolution.” 

Among those who are unjustly missing from a free and open cinema discourse are Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. Panahi, a major figure in the Iranian New Wave movement and director of The Mirror (1997), The Circle (2000) and Crimson Gold (2003), was sentenced on December 10, 2010 to six years in prison and given a twenty-year ban from making, writing, or producing films of any kind. Panahi was convicted for “colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic,” dubious charges which fail to account for the immense cultural service Panahi has given his country by increasing cultural awareness of the human issues that define and particularize life in modern-day Iran. Mohammad Rasoulof, Panahi’s compatriot and director of Iron Island (2005) and The White Meadows (2009), also received a 6-year prison sentence for the same charges.

Mohammad Rasoulof

CFI’s Advisory Board lists Vincent Moon, the independent filmmaker responsible for the Take-Away Shows published on La Blogotheque (which featured in a Hydra article), and Bill Mousoulis, founder of the Senses of Cinema website, as members. The Board of Directors includes Fred Kelemen, Lav Diaz, and Bela Tarr, whose latest film, The Turin Horse, won the Silver Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival just last Monday (February 21). In a gesture of solidarity, the Berlinale held an empty seat in honor of Jafar Panahi, who was symbolically named to the jury. Just as fitting was the announcement that Asghar Farhadi’s Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (Nader and Simin, a Separation) won the Golden Bear for best film at the festival. Farhadi’s film is the first from Iran to win the top prize at the Berlinale. Receiving the award, the director expressed goodwill for his compatriot: “I really think his problem will be solved and I would like him to stand here next year.”

Visit Cine International Foundation’s website to read statements issued by Bela Tarr, Fred Kelemen, Lav Diaz, J.P. Carpio, and others in support of Panahi, Rasoulof and the right to free discourse in cinema. To access the White Meadows Video App, click here. You can also visit CFI’s alternate wiki-site, whitemeadows.org, to read about its latest initiative, The Ortolan Project, a “massive global alt-Documentary” enterprise which “will comprise 9 feature length films (mostly shot on 16mm), 40-50 short-form film, digital video and other transmedia works and over 300 broadcasts and audio-visual documents including live feeds, news reportage, photography exhibitions, audio files and eyewitness testaments,” some of which will be submitted through the White Meadows application.

Andre Bazin

Bazin’s essay dates from the period in the late 40s/early 50s when cinema was going through a kind of midlife crisis (in which the technology which had given it birth also managed to accelerate its potential obsolescence). No longer in its “classical period,” cinema found itself under threat by television and the beginning of commercial media saturation, forcing it to find recourse in the development of cheap and fast genres (teen-age romances, horror flicks, drive-thru sized pictures), when it was not pillaging literature for convenient, ready-made scenarios that could be efficiently translated to the screen. Post-World War cinema could no longer feign aesthetic innocence or rely on the scenarios of “pure cinema” to sate the industrial demand for more pictures.

Unsurprisingly, novels reciprocated the love and writers began to think more “cinematically.” Bazin cites the established examples of James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Albert Camus, and Raymond Queneau for demonstration, and if we were to update his essay to our 21st century, the examples will have multiplied a hundredfold: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, and Junot Díaz are just a few of the names which crop up when novels evince “cinematic” qualities. The elliptic, collapsible form of cinema, with its expediencies of montage and soundtrack, provided literature with an economy of language capable of capturing image-heavy narratives in a terse and fluid expressionism. Paragraphs became sculpted images that presupposed the eternal present-tense of cinema.

Of the ancient Maximus “nothing more is known, than that he was by birth a Tyrian; that he lived under the Antonines and Commodus; that he for some time resided in Rome, but probably, for the most part in Greece; that he cultivated philosophy, and principally that of Plato.” Of Charles Olson, who cultivated “Projective Verse” and dubbed himself a Maximus in the genealogy of homo maximus, much the same could be repeated: that he was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1910; that he came of intellectual age under the four terms of FDR; that he early on resided in Worcester, but spent his boyhood summers, and probably, the most formative passages of his life, in Gloucester, the seaside Massachusetts city — site of “Tyrian Businesses” — that’d become his coronation place. Olson was privy to its entanglements and halibut, its salt airs and gull cries, and he set out to form the province in his image. But he encountered another poet, who had published in and of Gloucester shortly before him, and who presented Olson with a counter-image to his own: Vincent Ferrini.

Charles Olson

Ferrini — who’d become Gloucester’s first Poet Laureate only after Olson, his friend and master, had passed away — wasn’t born in Gloucester either, he was born in Saugus in 1913, the son of Italian immigrants from the Rome and Abruzzo provinces; Ferrini’s Massachusetts was also Sacco and Vanzetti’s Massachusetts. Olson’s papa was of Swedish stock, a letter carrier who taught his son the value of knowing one’s streets by heart, by walking them, imprinting their cartography into the soles of your step. Ferrini’s old man was a hard-drinking, aria-singing, atheist shoemaker, who indirectly taught his son the art of appropriating images from brick yards and trash heaps, from the rich refuse of everydayness and proximity. The story of Olson and Ferrini can be read as the story of magnitude meeting locality. The largeness of Olson — all 6-foot, 8-inches of him, the kingliness, the mythos, the spaciousness — contrasted with Ferrini’s sleekness, his sensuality, his qualities of tight and small composition. Their story climaxes with a self-appointed king leaving his homeland, like Alexander, to wrestle with the histories of other nations, other landscapes, so as to return and know his own place thoroughly; and it ends with a humble but prolific frame-maker who inherited a throne late from having stayed local (and loyal) all his life.

Vincent Ferrini

Ferrini moved to Gloucester in 1948 after a fan of his poetry, a painter living there, had invited him over for a visit. Back in Lynn, Massachusetts, Ferrini, self-taught and public-library-educated, had initially fashioned himself a proletarian poet baptized in “the Church of Politics” and Communism; whose first book No Smoke had earned some considerable fame for him. His first five books of poetry (published before Olson had managed to put out his first one) established Ferrini as a voice of political unrest and the working class. Settled in Gloucester, however, Ferrini began to find a different rhythm, inwardly motivated by his daily contact with the Atlantic spray and the fishcutters and “the triumph of the Soothsaying Waters”; this new relationship compelled the inveterately anti-doctrinaire Ferrini to quit what appeared to him as the falsified dogma of Communism, whose “roots… are in Russia, and… have an alien smell.” Nor was that break enough: Ferrini eventually quit his 9-year stint at a GE factory in Lynn (to which he commuted from Gloucester), and later took up a new vocation as a self-employed maker of picture frames, with a married domestic life withal. Ferrini’s life wasn’t truly changed however (and in some respects his craft wouldn’t have sharpened) if he had never encountered Charles Olson. Besides publishing plays, Ferrini continued to write and publish poems, one of which showed up in a local poem mag, Imagi. Olson Maximus, self-crowned Poet King of Gloucester (but at this time fairly unknown to his subjects), happened to read that poem, which set his hairs on end. The piece was good, not only good, but it said enough of Gloucester as any woman-born man could speak of it, who was born there, ate there, and slept there. Olson paid Ferrini a visit; he had his intel, he knew the streets and addresses of that sea town by heart, and he found Ferrini easy. The latter explains:

A man’s whole lifetime is affected by another person, who enters the stream of his days and years and stays in these waters. That’s how Charles Olson visited me, stayed, and keeps flowing, as in life so in death… We were living on Liberty Street near St. Ann Church when coming home one night from the General Electric Company where I had been working for the last nine years, Peg told me about a Poet who had almost broken his head getting through, and I could not fathom who it might have been and I was curious and sorry to have missed him. He came back the next night, a Giant! to pay a ‘fan call’ to another poet because he was smitten by a poem I had written and which had appeared in IMAGI. I was pleased by the size of the man and the compliment.

The largeness of Olson was the immediate thing one learned of him. Olson’s largeness, his magnitude, was felt in speaking with him, in seeing him, and if lacking that, in reading him. Ferrini sought out what Olson had mentioned of his that was available: Call Me Ishmael. “He told me about this book he had written, Call Me Ishmael, which I found in Cairnie’s bookshop. It was the second time I felt the girth of the man, the first was HIMSELF… Charles being by nature big, just took up and spread himself all over the pages as he did in his kitchen, his sleepingroom, and the house of any guest he was with.”

Olson returned the favor: “Then he dug me up. He ransacked my background and the early writings, he scoured Lynn, like the Archaeologist he is. Everything was stored for its uses in that mindbin of his. He never forgot anything and his memory was sleepless… He read all my earlier works in the Library and the first book, No Smoke…” A correspondence was thereafter struck up; the two began as friends, and the first Maximus poems, framed as “Letters”, originated in this friendship:

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

jewels & miracles, I, Maximus

a metal hot from boiling water, tell you

what is a lance, who obeys the figures

of the present dance

This “metal hot from boiling water” that was Olson’s harpoon struck Ferrini deeply and irrevocably, in the way an old god’s torso tells the poet that “you must change your life“; something had to be reformed, reshaped, readjusted in Ferrini, something proximate to the movement (an arrowhead too fast to catch) and to the form (a space too vast to contain) that Olson pondered and played with, almost physiologically, in his projective girth. “How had he affected me as a working poet? By the way he used his harpoon, ACCURACY.” Most accurate when one has archived the radial immensities of space, of pure irresistible forwardness, in which all targets are hit because all targets are every compass point swollen to a cosmic fineness. One has only to study the constellations to know what their shapes are capable of, to make them lunge out of their shells; so also a city’s range, its depths and distances, to know what eternity should mean in the present case, on a map of spatial geometries, real centripetal forms; on one side the city and its hard, true-to-life projections, and on the other end the ocean (and lush oblivion). Gloucester was all this, for the two adoptees, a land at once splendidly physical, historical, walkable, the first phrase in a magnetic backward clause stretching out to the West and even further, toward the Pacific; but also a purview (the lighthouse!) of the farsighted mystic potentialities mariners and Ahabs know firsthand, sometimes tragically but always by their own lights. A division in space (land & land’s end) which could be called uniquely American. Olson:  ”I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYxpSjkyAg&feature=related

But their friendship turned combative quick, and Olson, often a man keen and to-the-point, who feared no one since all feared his whale-sized intellect, wrote “Letter 5,” addressed to Ferrini, in which he excoriated the latter for staying too local, too small-minded, too peevishly concerned with the politics of favor. Gloucester was either too small a place for two poets, or Olson too large a man to accommodate another. Robin Blaser relates how he once hinted to Olson he would look into Gloucester’s history as one of America’s first fishing towns, but was quickly turned off the scent by the other: “‘Oh don’t do that! This is my place. You go do it for yours.’” But Gloucester also happened to be Ferrini’s place, and Olson was resolute to test this other man’s will & erudition, disappointed as he was with Ferrini’s lack of vision for his own circumference:

(I am not named Maximus

for no cause

Gloucester, circa 1915

But Ferrini was fortunately of an empathetic and resilient class, who took slights only slightly, and respected the “Maximus” in Olson as much as he venerated the “Polis” in Gloucester. “Letter 5″ was a harsh jolt to his pride, but Ferrini responded as only a man of some humility — as one who knows his limits — can: with an outpouring of love. Ferrini’s “response” was titled In the Arriving, a 32-page “love poem” that contains some of his very best work, a different strain from the “working class” poet of the 40s who wrote on smokestacks and union bosses and shoe-workers. This was a Ferrini who suddenly, like a man washed in a clear spring whose eyes are cleansed of smog-motes, starts seeing the recumbent forms etched on the x and y axes of the city; a new Ferrini, formally speaking, born from contact with a man considerably larger than himself, whose “maps followed him everywhere like budding poets wanting that water of his nourishment.” Rather than compete with a poet qualitatively different than himself, Ferrini foresaw that THE POEM was not what was at stake but perception itself; the Gloucester which Maximus had erected was just as much Ferrini’s as Olson’s property, because “There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of” (Letter 6). Ferrini had only to reposition his stance, adjust his lens, refocus the principles of his craft:

I say this

so it sticks in the mind’s craw

each

in his own

weight

& specific

value

on his individual terms

to be hammered

out on the

anvil

of

experience

into his usable metal

thus

created

from his

ore

so each one

counts

(…)

love does not

judge

he

is

too busy

making

anew

(…)

As the keel of a

boat is submerged in water

so are we in death.

(…)