“To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”
A film by Jenny Triggs, based on the novel of the same name by Samuel Beckett. This film animates body parts, chess pieces and mechnical motifs as life’s conveyor belt threatens to grind to a halt, but never does.
Contact jenny.triggs@blueyonder.co.uk for further information.
Fleurmach highly recommends that you check out Greatmore Studios‘ Showcase 2012, particularly tonight’s live improvisational performance, entitled ‘Unbound’. Don’t miss this once-off collaboration, involving sound by musicians Alex Bozas, Garth Erasmus and Niklas Zimmer, dance by Jacki Job and photography of the performance projected live by Noncedo Gxekwa.
When? Wednesday 28 November (TONIGHT!). Doors open 18h00. Live performance commences 18h30. Where? 47-49 Greatmore St, Woodstock, Cape Town. Map HERE.
The live performance will accompany an extensive exhibition by resident artists, visiting artists and guests, which promises to be really worthwhile. More info HERE.
Greatmore Studios is an artist-run initiative based in Cape Town. It revolves around a pool of permanent artists, an international visiting-artists-in-residency programme and a range of workshops and other activities. This initiative forms part of the Triangle Arts Trust, a United Kingdom-based organisation that facilitates an international network of artist-led workshops and residencies. This association affords artists access to information and opportunities to exchange ideas and skills with other artists around the world.
It’s reassuring to know that there are areas of South Africa, only half an hour from Pretoria, which are not only out of cellphone range but are also, incredibly, not on Google maps either.
My tiny adventure happened on the Lord’s day of the week, which meant I was beyond help, because nothing is open on Sundays in rural areas; obviously, nothing untoward is supposed to happen then.
All that actually happened was that the back tyre on my motorbike went flat.
I was in Tweedespruit, north of Cullinan, visiting a beautiful valley where an elderly German couple reside. Rolf was busy sharpening his fishhooks in anticipation of catching bass when I arrived late in the morning.
He told me how he was trying to get some sort of communication going with the outside world, as there are no landlines and cellphone reception is practically non-existent. Without contact with the outside world, he cannot book clients to come and camp or hike on his pristine property, Frogs. But to establish an internet and phone connection he has to pay R15 000, quite a lot of cash … a bit of a Catch-22 situation.
I went down to the river after drinking some home-made, delicious ginger beer made by his wife, sat by the stream, smoked a small joint, played with a stunning dog that came to join me, swam, and then meditated a tad.
I realised that the city of Joburg had once again filled my being with fear and tension, and prayed the valley would help to release it. A kingfisher came and went; I was drawn to the world of insects; once I noticed one, a large black and yellow bug, I saw many more.
Returning to my trusty steed, I noticed the back wheel was completely flat. This would normally not be a problem, but being in this remote valley, it quickly turned into a challenge of note – how to get back over 100km to Joburg, or how could I get the wheel temporarily repaired?
I returned to Rolf’s home on the bike, and was told that across the road from their tiny farmhouse lived the musician Fredie Nest, who owned a compressor which could fill my flat.
Alas, upon finding his home, the compressor was unable to fill the tyre, as the valve appeared to be truly fucked. But what a place! Ancient, incredible cars and boats stood in rows by a man-made lake, replete with a slowly revolving water wheel.
Fredie’s wife and his servant tried their best to help me, but to no avail. I was told to stand, first in the peach orchard, then next to the lake, to try and obtain cellphone reception, but my phone indicated there was not the slightest sign of contact with the outside world …
They also told me that, even if I did manage to phone someone, there was no way to give them GPS co-ordinates, as there were none for where they lived. I checked this when I got back to the online world, and true as Bob, that area of the map is just a blank: no roads, streams etc.
So I drove to Cullinan, to see if anyone there could help fix the tyre. The bike handled the flat tyre quite well, and though I braced myself for a fall at any moment, I was able to get up to about 60km/h once I hit the tar roads.
In Cullinan I was directed to a disheveled smallholding, but the tyre repair business there had closed, and there was not so much as a puncture repair kit left – just one patch, but no glue to hold it in place.
One of the guys who had gathered around my bike suggested I ride to Rayton, about 10km from Cullinan, and buy a puncture repair spray, which fills your tyre with a foam which is supposed to get you to get to your destination. This I dutifully did, along with a miniature crew of helpful petrol attendants, but the spray just blossomed out of the bottom of the valve onto the garage concrete and did no good at all. All the repair places were closed of course, it being Sunday.
So I rode to Pretoria, where a friend of ours stays, and from there I phoned my insurance company, who sent a roadside assistance crew to get me to Joburg. Retha, who had just got back from India, told me how she and her partner got stuck in Mumbai. Apparently the guy in charge died, and the whole city came to a standstill – even the ATMs closed.
Bal Thackeray had over two million people at his funeral, many of them weeping openly, yet he was a man who publicly proclaimed his admiration of Hitler and who had made statements like “Muslims are spreading like a cancer and should be operated on like a cancer”. I have never understood how fascists arouse such love from the general public. It’s like Zuma, he just can’t do any wrong, no matter how long the list of mistakes he makes gets.
Franswa – a man with a pronounced Malmsbury “brrrray” arrived with his wife and a trailer, and we set off for my home, with her sitting in the back of the tiny, stuttering bakkie, next to the tools and cans of petrol; Retha gave her a cushion to ease the trip.
Along the way Frrrranswa told me of his job – he gets R50 per job, while his boss, who owns the car, makes R300 minus costs – and has to be on standby 24 hours a day. He gets called out to Mamelodi township in the middle of the night. Big guys phone me because they are too lazy to fix a flat, he told me. Anyway, he said, this job is better than sitting at home just drinking beerrrr.
And he often gets tips. But, after sitting for half an hour on the freeway waiting for an accident to be cleared from the road, I was so tired and hungry after five hours of nursing my bike home, and so distracted by the paperwork I had to fill in for being towed, that I forgot to tip him.
I did however find a video by Fredie Nest, called Krummelpap. Check it out on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qwt4c4FnNQ!
and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love
“And when I squinted, the world seemed rose-tinted
And angels appeared to descend
To my surprise, with half-closed eyes
Things looked even better than when they were open…”
From Shakespears Sister (sic) “Goodbye Cruel World” 12″
Label: London Records – lonx 309, London Records – 869 199-1
Format: Vinyl, 12″, Limited Edition, 45 RPM
Country: UK
Released: 1991
From the album Kinshasa Succursale (Crammed Discs, 2011)
Video shot in the streets of Kinshasa.
Electric thumb piano (likembé) played by Konono N°1, the legendary Congolese band whose junkyard sonics and trademark “Congotronics” sound has had a major influence on the electronic and indie rock scenes.
Directors: Spike and Jones
DOP: Nicolas Karakatsanis
Producer: Annemie Decorte (Dr. Film)
Styling: Ann Lauwerys
Mask: Katrien Matthys
Fire in My Belly (1987): David Wojnarowicz
Music: Diamanda Galas
Made by David Wojnarowicz for Rosa von Praunheim’s Silence = Death (1990).
A positive diagnosis for HIV in 1987 didn’t leave you with many options. The pharmaceuticals that have extended life spans for many of those now infected were not then available. Hostility and fear were rampant. It was reasonable to assume not only that you had received a death sentence, but that there was no hope on the horizon for those who, inevitably, would follow in your footsteps: an anguished decision to be tested, an excruciating wait for the results, a terrifying trip to the testing centre, and a life-shattering conversation with a grim-faced nurse or social worker.
Some turned to holistic medicine and yoga. Others to activism. Many just returned to their apartments, curled up in the corner, and waited to die.
But some, like David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37, used art to keep a grip on the world. He was the quintessential East Village figure, a bit of a loner, a bit crazy, ferociously brilliant and anarchic. He was a self-educated dropout who made art on garbage can lids, who painted inside the West Side piers where men met for anonymous sex, who pressed friends into lookout duty while he covered the walls of New York with graffiti. In 1987, his former lover and best friend, Peter Hujar, died of complications from AIDS, and Wojnarowicz learned that he, too, was infected with HIV.
Wojnarowicz, whose video A Fire in My Belly was removed from an exhibition of gay portraiture at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery last week after protests from a right-wing Catholic group and members of Congress, was an artist well before AIDS shattered his existence. But AIDS sharpened his anger, condensed his imagery and fueled his writing, which became at least as important as his visual work in the years before he died. In the video that has now been censored from the prominent and critically lauded exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Wojnarowicz perfectly captured a raw Gothic, rage-filled sensibility that defined a style of outsider art that was moving into the mainstream in the late 1980s.
It may feel excessive now, but like other classic examples of excessive art – Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem, Howl, Krzyzstof Penderecki’s 1960 symphonic work, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, or Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film, Salo – it is an invaluable emotional snapshot. Not simply a cry of anguish or protest, Wojnarowicz’s work captures the contradiction, speed and phantasmagoria of a time when it was reasonable to assume that all the political and social progress gay people had achieved in the 1960s and ’70s was being revoked – against the surreal, Reagan-era backdrop of Morning in America, and a feel-good surge of American nostalgia and triumphalism.
Read more of this 2010 article by Philip Kennicott, from the Washington Post, HERE.
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
Trailer for the new Katinka Heyns film Die Wonderwerker, based on the life of poet, lawyer, naturalist and morphine addict, Eugene Marais.
Released: 7th September 2012 Starring: Cobus Rossouw, Marius Weyers, Sandra Kotze, Dawid Minnaar, Elize Cawood, Anneke Weidemann, Kaz McFadden, Erica Wessels Synopsis:
Eugene Marais was not only a remarkable poet and naturalist, but an extraordinary person whose life was a continuous source of drama and controversy. In 1908, he is a qualified lawyer who has just spent a solitary 2 years living amongst the baboons of the remote Waterberg; studying their habits.
On his way to Nylstroom, in the grip of a Malaria induced fever, he stops on a farm looking for drinking water. Observing his weakness and the seriousness of his illness, Gys van Rooyen and his wife Maria take him into their home to recover.
Maria leads an unfulfilled life and she is lonely. The forty year old Eugene Marais is attractive, charming and mysterious. She, as many women before her, falls in love with him. There are two others resident in the house, the Van Rooyen’s son Adriaan, and a seventeen year old adopted daughter Jane Brayshaw.
Twelve years earlier Marais’ young wife, Aletta, died giving birth to their only child, something he was never able to process. Jane is a striking embodiment of her. Gradually he realizes he is losing his heart to her. And she reciprocates. What further complicates matters is that the young Adriaan is himself smitten with Jane.
Eugene Marais’ secret demon is his morphine addiction. He is a high functioning addict- whose behaviour is only affected when he doesn’t use it. Maria discovers his secret. In an attempt to not only curb his addiction but also to assert control over him, she confiscates his morphine and begins rationing it back to him.
This leads to a love quadrangle, like a time bomb ticking. Inevitably ticking…
“There is no why for my making films. I just liked the twitters of the machine, and since it was an extension of painting for me, I tried it and loved it. In painting I never liked the staid and static, always looked for what would change the source of light and stance, using glitters, glass beads, luminous paint, so the camera was a natural for me to try—but how expensive!” – Marie Menken
16mm, color, sound, 4 min
Original score by Teiji Ito. “A new sound version of this classic. It is a beautiful experience to see her fabulous shooting. The cutting is just as fabulous and is something for all to study; the new score by Teiji Ito is ‘out of this world’ with its many-leveled instrumentation. Marie says ‘These animated observations of tiles and Moorish architecture were made as a thank-you to Kenneth for helping to shoot on another film in Spain.’ Shot in the Alhambra in one day.” – Gryphon Film Group
fleurmach 