Screening today at 20h00 at Bolo’bolo, the new anarchist infoshop and vegan café at 76 Lower Main Road, Observatory, Cape Town.
An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of ground-breaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his other half and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centred around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their “Pandrogyne” project. Watch the trailer HERE.
Here’s a full synopsis:
Genesis P-Orridge has been one of the most innovative and influential figures in music and fine art for the last 30 years. A link between the pre- and post-punk eras, he is the founder of the legendary groups COUM Transmissions (1969-1976), Throbbing Gristle (1975-1981), and Psychic TV (1981 to present), all of which merged performance art with rock music. Celebrated by critics and art historians as a progenitor of “industrial music”, his innovations have transformed the character of rock and electronic music while his prodigious efforts to expand the boundaries of live performance have radically altered the way people experience sound in a concert setting.
But that’s just the preamble to the story. Defying artistic boundaries, Genesis has re-defined his art as a challenge to the limits of biology. In 2000, Genesis began a series of surgeries in order to more closely resemble his love, Lady Jaye (née Jacqueline Breyer), who remained his other half and artistic partner for nearly 15 years. It was the ultimate act of devotion, and Genesis’s most risky, ambitious, and subversive performance to date: he became a she in a triumphant act of artistic self-expression. Genesis called this project “Creating the Pandrogyne”. Influenced, like so much of Genesis work, by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs Cut Ups , it was an attempt to deconstruct two individual identities through the creation of an indivisible third.
This is a love story, and a portrait of two lives that illustrate the transformative powers of both love and art. Marie Losier brings to us the most intimate details of Genesis’s extraordinary, uncanny world. In warm and intimate images captured handheld, Losier crafts a labyrinthine mise-en-scene of interviews, home movies, and performance footage. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye documents a truly new brand of Romantic consciousness, one in defiance of the daily dehumanization of the body by the pervasive presence of advertising and pornography, conveying beauty, dignity and devotion from a perspective never before seen on film.
This play is on for two more nights at the Intimate Theatre on UCT’s Hiddingh Campus. I went last night. It is an absolute tour de force – insightful, brutal, awkward, compassionate, hilarious. If you are in Cape Town, GO, GO, GO!
Scrape is the story of an everyday woman suffering from an unusual condition.
After falling and scraping herself, Beth discovers that not only does skin heal, it can sometimes do so with a vengeance.
This one-person show, performed by Amy Louise Wilson, is presented by writer Genna Gardini and director Gary Hartley. It features sound design by musician and performance artist SIYA IS YOUR ANARCHIST and set design by 2011 ABSA L’Atelier and Sasol New Signatures finalist Francois Knoetze.
Scrape is presented by the new theatre company Horses’ Heads Productions. The production will preview at the Intimate Theatre from 19 – 24 March 2013 and go on to feature as part of The Cape Town Edge programme at this year’s National Arts Festival. Scrape will then return to the Mother City for a run at The Alexander Bar in August 2013.
Scrape, 19 – 24 March 2013, 20:00
The Intimate Theatre on UCT’s Hiddingh Campus
R50 general/ R40 students
To book tickets, contact 0827765490 or horsesheadsproductions@gmail.com
Director:
Gary Hartley is a theatre-maker, performer and television producer based in Cape Town. In 2007 he graduated from Rhodes University with a distinction in Drama. His production, WinterSweet, made in collaboration with The Runaway Buni Collective and writer Genna Gardini, won a Standard Bank Ovation Encore prize at the 2012 National Arts Festival. He currently works as a writer and producer at Greenwall Productions and has produced for shows such as The Showbiz Report, The Close Up and Screentime with Nicky Greenwall.
Playwright:
Genna Gardini is a writer based in Cape Town. Her play WinterSweet was produced in collaboration with Gary Hartley and The Runaway Buni Collective for the 2012 National Arts Festival and won a Standard Bank Encore Ovation Award. She has curated The Readings Upstairs, a monthly series of play readings held upstairs at the Alexander Bar, since 2012. Her work as a poet has been published widely both locally and internationally. Gardini has presented papers at the 2012 AFTA Annual International Conference and GIPCA Directors and Directing: Playwrights Symposium. She also works as a freelance arts writer for various publications, including the Cape Times and Art South Africa magazine. She is currently completing her MA Theatre-making (Playwriting) at UCT.
Performer:
Amy Louise Wilson is an actress living in Cape Town. She has studied Acting and Contemporary Performance at Rhodes University; Processes of Performance and Shakespeare Studies at the University of Leeds and Theatre and Performance at the University of Cape Town. Recent performances include The Petticoat Chronicle (dir. Lynne Maree), Voiced (under Clare Stopford) and 2012’s Standard Bank Encore Ovation Award winning Wintersweet (dir. Robert Haxton). She will be presenting her paper ‘Performance, Persona and Identity in the work of Die Antwoord’ at the New Directions in South African Theatre Today: Circulation, Evolutions, Adaptations symposium in France later this year.
Set Designer:
Francois Knoetze is an artist based in Cape Town. Having recently completed his Honours in Fine Art at Rhodes University, he is currently pursuing his MFA at Michaelis. His work is multidisciplinary, incorporating performance, assemblage sculpture and film. In 2011 he was a finalist in both the Absa L’Atelier and Sasol New Signatures competitions. Last year he was named one of Art South Africa magazine’s Bright Young Things. He has been involved in numerous theatre productions as set designer and puppet-maker, including works by the UBOM! Eastern Cape Theatre Company.
Sound designer:
Writer, journalist, musician and filmmaker SIYA IS YOUR ANARCHIST has written for publications like the Sunday World, The Event and The Callsheet. He has performed at the National Arts Festival and written several plays. He has also worked for TV shows such as Rhythm City (E-TV), Font (SABC 3), Breaking New Ground (SABC 2). He directed an SABC2 documentary on Aids activist Zackie Achmat called His Husband in 2011 and has exhibited multi-media installations for Goodman Gallery Cape Town and GIPCA Live Art Festival. He now works for Entertainment Africa as a features writer and is combining writing, music, art and media for the release of his upcoming musical EP.
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone, even, who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
Archival interview with David Cronenberg from Bombsite (1986)
Bette Gordon (BG) Are your nightmares like your movies? Do you actually see your movie images in your dreams?
David Cronenberg (DC) Rarely. My images come out of the process of making film. I do really think that movies work on the level of dream logic. However realistic or narrative they might like to think they are, they are dreamlike.
BG You, as a director, have an incredible ability to tap into the unconscious.
DC I was once on a talk show with a psychiatrist who worked at the Clark Institute with criminals. He had seen my film, Videodrome and said to me, “I’m almost afraid to be sitting here next to you.” He was totally mystified as to how I could empathize with those states of mind and he obviously, could not. It is mostly intuitive with me. One of the reasons I make a movie is that I’m then in a position where I have to analyze and I enjoy that process.
BG In They Came from Within there was a line of dialogue—”Man thinks too much, he’s lost touch with the body, with instincts. Too much brain and not enough guts.” Do you think the mind is stronger than the body?
DC No. I think the quote is particular to that film. What interests me is the mind/body schism.
BG What do you mean by mind/body schism?
DC I think the mind grows out of the body. I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t see the mind or the spirit or the soul continuing after our body dies. The mind and body are completely dependent and interrelated. The mind is somehow organic and physical. It’s only our perception and our culture that keeps them separate.
BG What about the mind creating its own monsters in a sense, that the monster comes from within the mind. Like in Dead Ringers for example, or in Videodrome where it’s the mind that is completely in charge of the body.
DC In as much as the mind is ever in charge of anything. I don’t think it is always in control.
BG Or in Scanners where through mind control, you can . . .
DC Affect the body. But you see, I think everybody does that. I don’t think it’s just Western culture, other cultures even accentuate it more by saying the body’s nothing; it’s only temporary and the mind and the spirit are eternal. I think that’s very destructive. It’s not true. All philosophical, metaphysical and religious forces should be concentrating on trying to form a perception and reality for ourselves that integrates the two. And that would include coming to terms with death as a physical event rather than trying to evade it.
BG So how would you come to terms with death?
DC There’s a Japanese religion that thinks of all of life as a preparation for death, which to the Western mind seems like a very morbid approach to life. But if you think of death as a true end of something, of a process, it makes perfect sense. There we get into the old idea of Western culture being death denying, but I actually think Eastern culture is too. Because they try to trivialize death as being not important.
BG So it falls somewhere between the two as being very important and not important at all.
DC One of the main subjects of all of my films is exactly that. In Dead Ringers you get a body split into two (the twins) with basically, one mind. Just doing that is like an experiment in a lab—which all my movies really are. I set out to see how they work, to illuminate something for myself by doing these experiments.
Videodrome – with James Woods and Debbie Harry
BG There is something about the medical profession in all of your films.
DC Scientists and doctors to me, are at the leading edge of what all human beings do all of the time; which is to change, everything. We’ve never been satisfied with what we’re given. We don’t accept the earth as a given. We change our body chemistry, our physiology, our biology, our biochemistry. We clear the forest, we build our own environment, we climate control it . . . And, the interface between that impulse and the human body often is doctors, biologists, and biochemists.
BG Were you a biochemist?
DC I did go into biochemistry at the University of Toronto. But when I came face to face with what science required, I realized that my temperament was much more suited to some form of art; writing or whatever. I didn’t think of film at the time. I found I would prefer to invent my own science rather than spend two years with rats in a lab getting results.
BG There’s an ambivalence for the medical/science profession in all of your films. You don’t really have villains in the film, nobody’s quite evil . . .
DC That’s right. It is ambivalence. Because I think that they’re heroic even when they’re crazed. I think that being crazed and obsessed is part of being heroic. You don’t get one without the other. Ambition is something else. It’s not ambition in the material sense. My characters are obsessed with discovery and that does excite me and I do identify with that. A good creative scientist is as good as a good creative artist. No question in my mind.
BG What is your notion of the hero? You said your characters are heroic even when they are crazed.
DC Yes, maybe even especially because they’re crazed. I’m obviously drawn to people as main characters who are not embedded so completely in their culture that they can’t see any . . . a visionary’s process . . . people who are jarred into being outside. Continue reading →
This is again radio Yerevan with… our news (claps)
Oh, I’m sorry, you should turn on the machine
This is radio Yerevan, (laughs)
my name is Hans Ivanovich (laughs) Hagen and this is…
The news (laughs) Continue reading →
Since Valentine’s Day everyone has been talking about the murder of Reeva Steenkamp, although rarely in those terms. We know that her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, shot her four times and killed her while she was behind a locked door in their bathroom in a gated estate. We know that he has a history of domestic violence, a penchant for shooting things. We know absolutely everything about his extensive sporting achievements. The main thing, however, that we know about Steenkamp is that she was a model, and that she was really hot.
Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
Here life has death for neighbour,
And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.
No growth of moor or coppice,
No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
Green grapes of Proserpine,
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes,
Save this whereout she crushes
For dead men deadly wine.
Pale, without name or number,
In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
Comes out of darkness morn.
Though one were strong as seven,
He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
In the end it is not well.
Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love’s who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.
She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.
There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.
We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
Time stoops to no man’s lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
Herk Harvey’s low-budget yet influential 1962 cult horror film that relied more heavily on its organ-based score by Gene Moore than it did on special effects for its spookiness… to chilling effect!
It’s New Year’s Day, away for the weekend with a smallish group of friends… people on different continents, in one place in my mind. We leftovers – avatars of Stella, Michelle, Marco and me, I think it might be – wander back through in the early morning to the communal lapa sort of place where all the dancing had been, the remains of last night’s party trodden into the ground, our affect similarly flattened. The day is wrapped in a quiet mist blanket, grey and clammy. All the couples are still in bed.
“OK, we need music.”
I pick my way over to the old boombox, there on a table surrounded by empty cups, the dregs of stale liquor… Scratching around blearily, I find a Nina Simone tape. (CASSETTE TAPES? WTF, dreambrain?) Anyway, I want to put on “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” for we souls with nowhere to be curled into.
I slide the wonky cassette into the player, reach out to press play, and my finger can’t. The buttons are melted, changed into some unearthly goo. Not sticky, not hot, not cold, just melted, uncooperative and soft in an alien, irreparable way. This weird flux will crust over, re-harden as the day wears on into a single mass of equally unbiddable plastic.
Someone must have been using a lighter to illuminate what they were doing during last night’s revelry, I suppose. What a bright idea it must have seemed in that moment, but now we can’t hear the one song that I was hoping might make us feel sort of OK about living through another year alone on Earth.
The marionette scene from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991).Watch the full film HERE.
“The director’s international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to each other, the two women share a mysterious and emotional bond that transcends language and geography, which Kieslowski details in gorgeous reflections, colours, and movements. Aided by Slawomir Idziak’s shimmering cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting, operatic score, Kieslowski creates one of cinema’s most purely metaphysical works. The Double Life of Veronique is an unforgettable symphony of feeling.
“Krzysztof Kieslowski focuses on identity using actress Irene Jacobs in the dual role of French music teacher Veronique and Polish soprano Weronika – both born on the same day. Metaphysically they are aware of each other’s counterpart – this harkens back to the director’s penchant for fate, chance and circumstance,and we envision a possible meeting of the intertwined souls… Our unspoken desire for a mirrored being – who can non-verbally share our most intimate loves and joys – is the ultimate expression of personal support… Overall, an ambiguous and enigmatic offering, this is a film that clings to you for years after viewing. A true masterpiece of cinema.”
~ Gary W. Tooze
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is a short experimental film directed by wife and husband team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film’s narrative is circular, and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper-like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, this surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality.
“This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience.”
— Maya Deren on Meshes of the Afternoon, from DVD release Maya Deren: Experimental Films 1943–58.
The film was originally silent – the soundtrack, by Deren’s third husband, Teiji Ito, was only added in 1959.
A year or so ago, some colleagues of mine did a campaign for a film called Night Drive, which was a slashy, schlocky horror that centred on the body-parts-for-muthi trade. The campaign handed out a couple hundred pamphlets, in the style of those ridiculous pamphlets that offer penis enlargement, bad luck cure, womb cleaning etc that we see littered around town every day. The pamphlets offered money for body parts, and linked to a website that detailed the “doctor’s” cash-for-organs trade in more detail. The people who received the pamphlets went ape-shit, calls were made to the national media, everyone was pranked and much outrage ensued. The campaign was slammed by the Department of Health for trivialising a “Serious Problem”, and was pulled, effective immediately, complete with apology from the ad agency in question, and a promise to conduct an “internal disciplinary procedure”.
Pamphlet collected in Durban by Rosemary Lombard, 2009
My question is, what exactly is being done about this serious problem? Why do people get up in arms about a cash-for-body-parts hoax, but think its OK (and hilarious) for there to be pamphlets offering safe abortions, womb cleaning, AIDS cures and a whole manner of sexual health treatment that is not only bogus, but seriously harmful to those who pursue it. What effort is being made by the Department of Health to shut down these “doctors”? Most disturbing is the discriminatory gender ideas at the root of these so called treatments. Muthi to “make lover have sex with you”, and treatment for women for, among other things “cleaner vaginas, more willingness to have sex.”
These charlatan muthi men make a mockery of traditional healing, and the pamphlets and posters not only mislead the poor, vulnerable and uneducated, but reinforce negative stereotypes about traditional healing and the communities that take advantage of them. Is any work being done to address this “Serious Problem”, or do people only care so long as the content of said media panders to savage stereotypes of murderous muthi men lurking in the shadows to chop your heart out?
Pamphlet collected in Durban by Rosemary Lombard, 2009
Anis Fuleihan (April 2, 1900 – October 11, 1970) was a Cypriot-born American composer, conductor and pianist. Fuleihan’s music generally avoided serial structures, and was heavily influenced by Middle Eastern folk music. One of his works is a concerto for theremin, premiered by the New York Philharmonic under Leopold Stokowski in 1945; the soloist was Clara Rockmore.
But supposing God became a man – suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person – then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can only do it if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of God’s intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and God cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.
Cape Town’s Good Film Society presents this Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece, on at the Labia Theatre at 20h15 tonight.
Recently voted in Sight and Sound’s definitive poll as the greatest film ever made (the only film to surpass Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in many a decade), come to this Sunday’s one-off screening and decide for yourself if it’s worthy of the accolade!
Vertigo is the spellbinding tale of an ex-policeman with a fear of heights, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), who is hired by an old friend to investigate his wife (Kim Novak). But it’s no ordinary case – the woman is suspected of being possessed by the malignant spirit of a suicide victim. As the mystery leads to a spiral into paranoia and obsession, Scottie is forced to encounter the most painful truth: He has fallen in love with a woman who may not exist. Stylistically breathtaking, intellectually complex and profound, the film is a startlingly experimental exploration of desire, a psychological spider-web woven with unusual compassion by the master of nightmares. With this touchstone of psychological thrillers – his most personal masterpiece – Hitchcock defined not only a genre, but an entire era of filmmaking and art. Continue reading →
In Alice, a little girl follows a white rabbit into a world where nothing is quite what it seems. Where Czech surrealist Švankmajer’s Alice differs from other adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is that it explores the book’s darker side as well, thereby remaining faithful to the tone of uneasy confusion that pervades the original story. A live-action Alice (Kristyna Kohoutova) inhabits a Wonderland that teems with threatening stop-motion characters. Švankmajer’s visual canniness and piercing psychological insight permeate the film with a menacing dream-logic. Curiouser and curiouser.
This poetic, surrealistic and disturbing Swedish film – sometimes called a “black comedy” – written and directed by Roy Andersson, received a number of awards, including the Swedish Film Critics Award and the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It makes use of many quotations from the work of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. It’s like a multiple pile-up where Vallejo is crashed into by Beckett, tail-ended by Bergman… and Monty Python can’t slow down or swerve enough to avoid sandwiching them all together.
Reviewed by Anton Bitel:
“Everything has its day,” says the CEO Lennart (Bengt CW Carlsson), concealed (but for his bare feet) beneath a sunbed, to his flustered sub-manager Pelle (Torbjörn Fahlström) in the opening scene of Roy Andersson’s Songs From The Second Floor. “This is a new day and age, Pelle – you have to realise that.” Faced with the imminent collapse of his business empire and the mass unemployment that will inevitably result, this invisible mogul has already decided to take the money and run, contemplating a better life (or should that be afterlife?) abroad for himself in the future once he has put the past behind him. With blithe disregard for those that he is abandoning, he asks, “What’s the point of staying where there is only misery?” – and yet Andersson’s film offers a dystopian vision of the new millennium, where misery, pain, guilt and despair are the universal condition, where escape is impossible, and where, no matter how much anyone tries to turn their back on the past, somehow it always returns.
If everything has its day, the Songs From The Second Floor was certainly a long time in coming. Andersson first discovered the avant-garde Peruvian poet César Vallejo (19892-1938) back in 1965, and first read his poem Stumble Between Two Stars while working on his second feature Gilliap (1975). In the early Eighties he began preparations for a documentary feature based around the poem, before concluding that the material would be better served by the medium of fiction. So he established an independent film studio in 1981, and devoted the next 15 years of work (in short films and commercials) to inventing and honing an aesthetic style that would make his unique vision for this third feature possible. Production proper began in 1996, and lasted four long years – but the results were well worth the wait, and would indeed win the Swedish writer/director a slew of international awards.
The film is told in a series of stylised, hyperreal tableaux, unfolding in indifferent wideshot before an unmoving camera whose very distance helps convert all the tragedy of human experience on display into a very singular brand of dark comedy. Hence the mannered grey makeup worn by the performers – for while this may reflect their status as spiritual zombies lost to their own moral damnation, it is also the familiar mask of clowns, and all these characters are both the living dead and comic chumps. So it is that when, in one sequence, a stage magician (Lucio Vucina) accidentally saws into the belly of his hapless volunteer (Per Jörnelius), eliciting immediate cries of pain, we share the fictive audience’s initial instinct to laugh, even as we are horrified.
Some of the film’s episodes are self-contained vignettes, while others feature an ensemble of recurring characters in the orbit of Kalle (Lars Nordh). Having just torched his own furniture business, this corpulent, middle-aged salesman must deal with sceptical insurance adjusters and find a new outlet (viz. crucifixes) for his flagging spirit of entrepreneurship, even as a strong sense of guilt, both personal and collective, keeps creeping up on him.
Meanwhile Kalle’s eldest son, the poet Thomas (Peter Roth), suffers in silence in a mental institution, leaving his sensitive younger brother Stefan (Stefan Larsson) to pick up the pieces and hear the depressed confessions of passengers in his taxi cab. In the background of all this grief and anxiety, Andersson reveals a grimly absurd vista of societal breakdown, where acts of racist violence go unchecked, traffic jams go on forever, suited flagellants mortify themselves in the street, the dead walk among the (almost) living, panicking financiers resort to crystal balls, and a virgin is publicly sacrificed in a last-ditch effort to fend off not just economic ruin but the end of days.
“Beloved be the ones who sit down,” reads on-screen text near the beginning of Songs From The Second Floor, cited from Vallejo’s Stumble Between Two Stars – and it will recur, along with other lines from the poem, several times within the film itself. At first there might seem little room for poetry in Andersson’s nightmarish picture of a venal, gloomy and bleakly prosaic metropolis whose only poet, Thomas, whether driven mad by his work or by the world, has been reduced to inarticulate muteness.
And yet, like the ghosts of the dead that continue to haunt Kalle’s heavy conscience, or like the buried Nazi past of the superannuated general (Nils-Åke Olsson) that resurfaces in a torrent of Tourette’s-style outbursts (à la Dr Strangelove), poetry just keeps coming back. Even in a setting as banal as a commuter train, Andersson’s drab characters are apt to burst into choral song (magisterially scored by none other than ABBA’s Benny Andersson).
Much of the film’s poetic humanism derives from the word ‘beloved’ that forms a refrain in Vallejo’s poem. For while Andersson may offer up a monstrous parade of vices and vulnerabilities, he invites us to love his gallery of rogues precisely for the flaws that make them – and all of us – so human. A key, repeating image in the film is of different characters perched on the end of their beds, making each and every one of them “the ones who sit down” – but it is a phrase that rather pointedly describes any viewer as well, ensconced in cinema or on sofa. After all, Andersson’s story of frailty and folly is our story too – and at the end of the extraordinary 10-minute single take that closes Songs From The Second Floor, the look that Kalle gives straight to camera implicates us all in the film’s haunting return of the repressed.
Put simply, the everyday apocalypse envisaged in Songs From The Second Floor is a wonder to behold, an idiosyncratic humanist allegory without parallel in cinema – unless, of course, you include Andersson’s equally astonishing follow-up You, The Living (2007), with which it forms the first two parts of a projected trilogy on the “inadequacy of man”.
Directed and written by: Roy Andersson
Director of Photography: István Borbás, Jesper Klevenås
Music: Benny Andersson
“There is a feeling I’ve had ever since childhood: that there exist many different “worlds” and I was born in the wrong one, a world I don’t quite fit into. I’ve felt this strong feeling of wrongness all through my life. There is no space for me in this world. Every time I believe I’ve finally found my place, someone comes to me and says “Go away! You’re not supposed to be here.” ~ Jun Togawa – more of this interview HERE.
Mushi No Onna (“Pupa-woman”)– translation from the internet…
In the forest, in the white moonlight, I dig in the ground and find many cicada chrysalises.
Ahh… Ahh…
They are my shape that has changed completely, thinking too much about you.
I am a woman who is an insect that sips sap in the forest, in the frozen moonlight.
When you finally notice me, I have already become an insect with a light brown belly
The mysterious grasses are parasitic on me, and a stem of sorrow grows up from my light brown back.
___
There is a very pretty video for the slow version of “Mushi no Onna“, but Sony Music has restricted its viewability on Youtube to Japan… ANNOYING! I have managed to find it, though (w00t) and you should watch it HERE. I can’t get it to embed properly, unfortunately.
The following is an intense live version of the more commonly available “punk” version of the song, which riffs on Pachelbel’s Canon:
Another translation:
Moonlight in the white forest
In all of the trees
Cicadas emerge from their chrysalises
Ah ah, ah ah
And so, as thoughts of you run through my head,
my body reaches the final stage of transformation
Moonlight in the frozen forest
Sipping sap, I am an insect woman
When you notice me
amber has filled me up
The girl who changed into an insect,
a parasite in the strange grass,
growing stems of sadness from her amber back
![The Garden of Earthly Delights [detail].Date 1480-1510](https://fleurmach.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/hieronymus_bosch_garden_of_earthly_delights_tryptich_centre_panel_-_detail_9.jpg)
Since Valentine’s Day everyone has been talking about the murder of Reeva Steenkamp, although rarely in those terms. We know that her boyfriend, Oscar Pistorius, shot her four times and killed her while she was behind a locked door in their bathroom in a gated estate. We know that he has a history of domestic violence, a penchant for shooting things. We know absolutely everything about his extensive sporting achievements. The main thing, however, that we know about Steenkamp is that she was a model, and that she was really hot. 
fleurmach 