I begin to think: why am I doing this? It doesn’t matter why I’m doing this. Memories — memories of Wroclaw — begin to fade. I leaf through my notebook (it is the colour of watered-down coffee, with milk in it [unpasteurized]) and realise that my notes are mostly unreadable; written largely with a soft-tipped pencil that I was sharpening inelegantly with a kitchen knife (a very small kitchen knife, the kind you use to chop garlic or salami). Some of the notes were made in biro, I think, but these are only differently illegible, and I wonder if I’m not really a very systematic writer at all; not really very notational, and this makes me think that I am not being very assiduous here, that the things I’m writing — about film — bear little or no relation to the actual films that I saw (or see; have seen). Mostly, I let the films happen before my eyes – in front of me – and then I write about whatever bits of gristle are left on the plate (my mental plate, actually my brain) after the film has ended. Would this make me a very poor academic? Perhaps. Certainly not an intellectual, or not the kind of intellectual that people cite and refer back to and say, hey, this writer knows a lot about films – and is often correct! What I am trying to do is: (a) fasten down my own affective relationship with watching films; (b) to understand formally what films are, what makes films films; (c) to relate films to other bits and pieces of writing and thinking I’ve accumulated and also hold in my mind. I can’t help myself from watching them. I have never felt this way about books or poetry or the plastic arts. Film is really the only truly modern form of art. Everything else is just a steroidal bit of pocket lint — pocket lint from our prehistory — that has remained in our pockets, which we gather in our hands and roll around in our palms and think, huh, this is still here. Film did not exist and then it existed, and it came alive in a field in Palo Alto in 1875, thanks to Muybridge, but not really, because others – it took others – to realise the potential of what Muybridge had rotely created in that field (in summer). It is the only modern artform; a function of modernity — of modernisation. No other form of art will ever exist. It is the first and the last modern art form, like a kind of autochthonous limb that has just grown on our (modern) bodies. All other artforms — those we don’t even know about yet — will just be imitations of film, differently formulated, reorganised, presented. Film is a broken mirror that has locked us into a perpetual tailspin of self-reflection/refraction, and everything we create now will just be a reorganisation of film (of film toward different ends). It might be the only thing we’ve ever actually created. And when we broadcast it — with projectors — the light bounces from the surface of screens and separates, spreading outwards — travelling forever, and (we must assume) will eventually fill the entire visible spectrum of the universe, something like dark matter but (crucially) really its inverse: light matter. Film (between 1875 and now, and years that follow now) must eventually fill every space in the universe, and at that point the map will become the territory, and life will (eventually) not merely reflect art but will become art. Only then will film meet Bazin’s criteria that it is a mere ‘reorganisation’ of reality. Bazin was right, but not in his time — and not in our time. He will become right. Bazin is the only film theorist at the end of time. For now, he is a speculator, a utopian. He was right only insofar as he was writing about the future (by which I mean, the point at which reality coincides entirely with film). Right now he is wrong, but he will become right.
— Toward what? For now, we bathe — we writhe — in the detritus that is looked (down) upon by the angel of history, and this detritus (Benjamin’s, really) is made up of all kinds of films. If you are into films then you continually face down the realization that (hidden, stowed away) there exist tendencies and filmmakers and movements that are entirely alien to you. Your discovery is like a revelation, and it throttles you – really, it fixes its hands around your throat, and attempts to poke out your eyeballs.
— The films of Agnezia Holland felt like this. She was a discovery (of mine) made during Wroclaw, and that’s exactly why I’m writing about her now. What follows is going to be about Provincial Actors (1979), which — for me — embodies one of the most formally and narratively exciting depictions of an ensemble in really any film I care to think about, and because it’s really about filmmaking (albeit set among theatre actors) then it must (necessarily) get more ‘points’, if points were a thing I awarded. I don’t. I’d actually say that Assayas comes close (in Irma Vep, 1996), and — of course — Alexei German. Because they are all very good at filming the tumbling disorder of bodies and the lattices of conversation and tension that cut through (and across) groups of people as they go about their business.
— For Holland, the business (this business) is putting on a play. Assayas was quite literally concerned with filmmaking. German was much more fixated on communal/collective living, and that’s something I’ve written (at length) about before. These bodies are collisions-as-bodies, corporeality at its maximum. Leaning, bending, stooping, rising, a kind of whirlwind that points a different trajectory away from the dominance of the shot-reverse-shot’ism of contemporary arthouse filmmaking (because they interrupt the clarity of the lens, because the camera becomes like a body, a projection of a body). It is polyphonic, in the sense that Bakhtin wrote about polyphony — a “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices”. They signify for themselves within the hubbub/discourse of the text (here, the film). They belong apart from Holland (as director). They do not defer to us (the spectator/viewer). We muscle in toward them, attempting to cling on to glances, motivations. They act without obvious prompts, undeclared prompts and ideas. Krzysztof’s marriage falls apart outside of language, rather it is through gesture, glances, body positions that collide and depart that his relationship with his wife falls apart; fallout from the aggrandising tragedy of his artistic delusions.
— Holland’s filmmaking is concerned — like German — not only with the tensions of collective labour/living, but of the organs of the state that structure and (often) interrogate those efforts. In Provincial Actors, we witness a troupe of actors go about putting on a quite experimental (but also very politically appropriate) play under the direction of a hot-shot from Warsaw. The agonies and anxieties of creativity are definitely under the lens. But there’s also the very obvious spectre of being informed on or being replaced, cut about with all kinds of class tension and creative unfulfillment (and existential dread) that tends to accompany such experiences.
— I am having to shut my left eye slightly while I type, and this is because I have had a few drinks – and I’m listening to Built to Spill’s cover of Cortez the Killer. It’s 12.32am. By the time I finish this it’ll be tomorrow (Thursday), but I don’t know what time of day it’ll be. Not exactly. For some time, this stack has relied on a kind of perpetual motion that has to exist around the other trajectories of my life. I dash words off in an endless google document, one of several. The current working document contains some 37,161 words, but this is only one of the draws in which I keep these words; long before I adapt them for substack (copying and pasting, and then nudging – editing, not comprehensively but loosely).
— Does paranoia exclusively find root within tyranny’s garden? Yes, no, idk. Paranoia also works its way around our creative impulses in seeming utopias. Even here, in this very substack! Not all tyrannies are the same; not all anxieties are equal. Holland really struggled to make her films the way she wanted to make her films in Poland, and there’s a sense that this narrative (at once familiar and unfamiliar [because it belongs to her]) can pre-determine how we handle the interpretive hot potato of a film from the eastern bloc. That’s by the by. The hot-shot theatre director is then a kind of exaggeration and mirror of Holland as the film’s director. He is her and he is not her. The play is her film and it is not her film. They coexist in a kind of tensile balance.
— What do I mean by my paranoia? I often wonder if I should engage more obviously with the froth of film discourse, and then I remind myself that it doesn’t matter – and that there isn’t really film discourse. It’s just what people talk about when they don’t have anything to talk about. I’m just trying to write about films that are interesting, and to do so in an interesting way. Am I running the risk of irrelevance? I can’t say. It’s really possible.
— Holland turned up for the screenings in Wroclaw. I didn’t really get a chance to hang on her words; she spoke in Polish (obvs, I am not expecting her to bend her language to the needs of itinerant intellectuals like R, G and myself, who were all sitting there – but I think that George understood some of the more important bits). It must be strange to be Holland – a filmmaker whose works were needled and suppressed and sanded down by the efforts of censors (facts which led to her departure from Poland). It must be strange and quite satisfying to stand there now before an audience of (mostly young/ish) people and to try and communicate a little of what that experience was like, to not be able to really make the films you want to make. Today, we operate beneath other pressures — what is permissible to make, how you might run the risk not of an institutional censor but the collective censoring of online’s nu-Hays-code.
— Bodies, crowds. Holland is an exceptional director of bodies. The protagonist, Krzysztof, is the star of the troupe. Together, they are putting on Stanislaw Wyspianski’s Liberation. He is drifting apart from his wife. They pout and argue; he meanders this way and that, befriending a fiendish younger stage-hand. He casts his droopy, melancholic eyes all over the shop. Elbows and hips and hair intervene, between lens and subject. The production is beset by problems, not least the obscure decision-making of the (actually quite pleasant) director. Krzysztof believes that this production might be the making of him, that he might escape the rot and minority of his languishing provincial career (but at what cost – relationally?). Earlier, we see him load a shotgun and mount it on a wall, behind a curtain. Mr. Chekhov, your gun! Later, he debates blowing his own head off, but doesn’t. A body tumbles past a window — his elderly upstairs neighbour, he can’t take it anymore (this, this) º — knowing that this situation (1979, rural Poland) is untenable, that it is obliterating. He (Krzysztof) informs on his wife (who reads philosophy books, who has ‘ideas above her station’, as it were). He is not a very likeable figure, but he is our distorted lens — our fixation upon this tumbling drift. His lashing out is erratic, without seeming motive. As much as Krzysztof is a victim of his historical moment, he’s also an instrument of it.
— Tensions flow this way and that. Everybody has accepted the indecency of the play (that it’s just propaganda, that it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on). Krzysztof has delusions, but they’re not really delusions. Who can blame him — the artist — for wanting to elevate every gesture, every scene? They (the others) laugh off his pretensions, but they also rage at his erratic behaviour. He wanders the park at 2am. He glugs milk from a trolley. He turns up late or not at all. In this world, in this moment, there is no space for the tortured artist — a figure sent up as merely ridiculous, but in a very empathetic way. The agony of his personal/intimate struggle has a literal stage. I’ve seen it described as a kind of “poetic realism”; naturalistic yet exaggerated. Turaj says that a moral paralysis infects the play (and the film) — a rallying cry for integrity in the face of art-by-bureaucracy. This is still very relevant! We pity Krzysztof, but we should also lionise him — an artist torn apart by his times, who is not allowed to be bold, and who really sacrifices a lot on the altar of his art. The ridiculousness of his efforts is quite the point.
— Holland puts it this way:
“In Provincial Actors I was less concerned with showing the mechanism of manipulation, and more with presenting human fate, in all its embroilment and entanglement.”
— That is to say, she is not — was not — attempting to interrogate how the instruments of the state, the tensions of collective creative labour, the tensions of marriage (and other institutions) push and pull us toward particular sites of action, but of what these things reveal about the human condition, about our being in the world. Krzysztof — despite his talent — is powerless. The director’s authority runs roughshod over his ideals and ambitions, its clinical avant-gardism stifling the clarity of purpose that Krzysztof is trying to extract from the text of the play. There is a lot of comedy injected into how the script — with all of its ideological ferocity — is adapted, shied away, reduced. The writer and his production colleagues cross out lines, and more times, subtracting and maiming. Krzysztof seeks a certain faithfulness. This cannot come to pass. “You can’t cross these things out – homeland, human fate, freedom”. They are crossed out. Krzysztof crashes against the rocks of obscurity, and is destroyed by abstraction.
— There’s a great party on the opening night. Beginning very formally — a bit stiffly; a sort of ritualized bonhomie of raised glasses and pats on the back — it gradually descends into a kind of sloshy torpor. The room is very white and fills quickly with cigarette smoke. They await the arrival of a big-shot journalist and they toast another theatre director (who has come all the way from Warsaw, I think – really to suss out whether Krzysztof is really a good actor). The room fills with fog, their bodies are deranged — limbs seeming to disengage from bodies, heads hung heavily over tablecloth. Glasses of vodka, cigarette smoke; argument, arousal (but a very soft arousal, sex without eroticism — and without sex). Holland shoots quite intimately, close-up or medium. Her camera is obstructed, as if it is an eye (and you are a participant in the troupe). The spaces behind the stage are very chaotic and messy, and props often fall down or fall apart. There is a quite literal decay at work. “Why get so involved? There’s no truth in it!” Hopes are dashed more than just by crude/blunt ideologies. Krzysztof is his own wrecker. This is what a party at the end of time might be like, a jouissance against (or spitting into the face of, and then wiping away the spit) decline. Krzysztof is railing against defeatism, against nihilism; even while he confronts his own.
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