RAMBLING WITH RIVETTE

So I was doing a word search for “Pynchon+female+flaneurs” y’know, the way you do, and it turned up a movie review on letterboxd.com, by Chuck Williamson discussing Pont de Nord, a 1982 movie directed by Jacques Rivette, which I’d never heard of.  I think it has the least relevant DVD cover I've ever encountered.

Rivette used to be one of my main men: Celine and Julie Go Boating was the movie that drew me in. I never saw the whole twelve hours of his movie Out 1, but I did make it through the 4 hours of the shorter cut Out 1: Specter.  If I’ve cooled slightly on Rivette it may be partly that so few of his films get wide distribution, also frankly there always seemed a bit too much acting going on in his movies; not helped by the fact quite a few of the movies were about people in theater groups.

Anyway, the Williamson review started like this: “Cervantes by way of Thomas Pynchon, Le Pont du Nord is an improvised game of female flâneurs, urban modernity, panoptic surveillance, and apophenia run amok. It recasts Paris as a labyrinthine game board, a liminal space in the throes of renewal whose razed and roughhewn layout houses an intricately patterned maze.”

Intrigued?  Well I was.  I found a few stills online – two women posing around in Paris, one of them instantly recognizable as Bulle Ogier (a Rivette favorite), the other unknown to me: in fact it was Bulle’s daughter Pascale, though they don’t play mother and daughter in the movie. 

A root around on Amazon suggested Pont de Nord was available on DVD in the UK but not in the US, and although I really wanted to see the movie, I thought it was just going to be one those intense passing urges that the internet fosters then erases.  But I thought I’d check on YouTube, maybe find a trailer or some such, and there was the whole thing.  There are, of course, all sorts of reasons to fret about the royalty-free zone that is YouTube, but I am a weak man – I watched it.

It is amazing and wonderful stuff, full of game playing and psychogeography, and really 90 percent of the film has the two female leads Marie (played by Bulle) and Baptiste (played by Pascale) wandering around Paris, usually together; and if you say that the flaneur has to be a solitary figure, well I’d say you’re being a bit harsh.

 With the occasional exception, the Paris seen in the movie is disorientatingly unfamiliar.  The women walk the underpopulated the edgelands of the city, walking through wastelands, past ruins, past things being demolished, along railway lines, up staircases that seem to lead nowhere in particular.   These two singular (and I think you’d have to say rather actressy) women look around them, look for clues, and why deny it, they also look very good.

 They are essentially homeless women, in that Marie has just been released from prison and has nowhere to go, and Baptiste is a sort of street urchin who seems to be suffering from an unspecified mental disorder.  You can’t help noticing that they and their clothes stay remarkably clean despite them having no obvious arrangements for ablutions or laundry, but it’s not really that kind of movie.

There is a sort of thriller plot: you can get away with a lot if you include a thriller plot.  Pierre Clementi is wonderfully, reliably, creepy as the bad criminal boyfriend, and there’s a lot of stuff with a map, actually two maps, of Paris, showing the city as a (thoroughly incomprehensible) game, with different squares representing tomb, prison, pit, auberge, and so on. This inevitably doesn’t add up to as much you’d like, but somehow you never expect it to.

I couldn’t help thinking I’d have been pretty happy if most of the plot and dialogue had been ditched and I could have watched the two women walking around this unfamiliar, transitional Paris, and I’m sure there must be some avant- garde filmmaker out there who’s made a movie much like that.

But what you do get in  Pont de Nord is a sense of danger, the sense that these two women wandering the city are very vulnerable, that no good is likely to come of it, and certainly that the men in the film are unlikely to be any help.  And in the end, things do turn out very badly, though not in the way you’re expecting.   No spoilers from me.

There’s a good deal of discussion in academic circles about the extent to which female flaneurism even exists.  I only follow some of it.  There is an argument, much of it having to do with masculine sexuality and gaze, and the different ways in which men and women relate to the city, which suggests flaneurism in the Beaudelairean sense is a specifically male response to certain crises in 19^th century capitalism.  There is also, naturally, a desire for women to reclaim the territory.

         There’s an interesting 2002 essay by Helen Scalway titled “The Contemporary Flaneuse: Exploring strategies for the drifter in a feminine mode.”  It discusses the difficulties, and “negotiations” demanded of a solitary woman walking in London.  She describes an area close to where I used to live: she describes the horrors of the Westway very accurately.

  She also writes of the area in general, “Aggressively fast boy cyclists on the pavements. - and all the stopped people: unemployed youths, claiming space by their demeanor - probably because they have no space anywhere, really; all the homeless, the beggars, the drugged, drunk, deranged, predatory; other victims of care in the community.”

These things have to be negotiated my male walkers as well, but in a different way no doubt.  Scalway also takes an interesting dig at Iain Sinclair, quoting the opening lines of Lights Out for the Territory, familiar enough to many readers  “The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant sign making.”

Yes, there is something unnecessarily “manly” and macho about that wording, isn’t there?  In part I suspect it’s because Sinclair doesn’t want to come across as some, effete middle-class boulevardier, he wants to show how serious he is, a man on a mission, with a special literary project.  In person he doesn’t come over as macho at all.  But sure, I can’t imagine any woman ever putting it quite that way, and Scalway certainly doesn’t. 

Scalway continues, “I think about the manner of my walking. So then how actually, do I walk? It’s a looking for spaces to slip through and round, weaving and threading a path through which opens and closes, darting, dodging and dancing, two-stepping, giving way, persistently returning.

“My passage is not, cannot be, like that of Iain Sinclair’s narrator who freely uses words such as march, stride, slog, swinging out into the main drag, yomp.  The words that come to my mind to describe my movement through the street imply that it's a much more difficult negotiation.”

         I like that, I like that a lot.

Helen Scalway’s website is here:

http://www.helenscalway.com

PEDESTRIANIZING WITH PYNCHON

Back in the late seventies, Aloes Books was publishing Thomas Pynchon’s early, at that time uncollected, short stories.   They came as separate pamphlets, and the only place in London I knew to buy them was a bookshop called, if memory serves, Agneau Deux.  There I fell into conversation with the guy behind the counter who had it on reasonable, though apparently very hush hush, authority that Pynchon was actually living in London at that time.  There was a small but significant frisson in knowing that I was walking the same streets as the great “recluse.”

Between 1996 and 2003 I lived in New York (more or less – I mean I actually commuted between London for some of it) and obviously I walked the streets, because that’s what I do wherever I am, and it’s what people do in New York whether they want to or not.  And I did know by then that Pynchon was living in New York too.  His novel Mason and Dixon was in the works, and there had apparently been sightings of him in the corridors of his publisher, Henry Holt.  Word was that he looked pretty much like any other sixty year old novelist.  I guess I had become more cynical or realistic, and the frisson of walking the same streets as Pynchon wasn’t quite what it had been 15 or 20 years earlier.

With the newly published Bleeding Edge Pynchon has written his New York novel (a thing many novelists feel the urge to do) and to some extent his 9/11 novel (a thing that many novelists feel very, very uneasy about).

Of course Pynchon walked the streets of New York: and if we doubted it, there’s a pretty low quality picture (seen above) taken in 1998 by James Bone, then of the London Sunday Times, showing Pynchon and his son walking on the Upper West Side.  The authenticity of the picture is slightly contested, but I’m happy enough to believe it’s Pynchon, the first new picture published in over 40 years.  And yes, he looks pretty much like a 60 year old novelist.

Anyway, the book contains this pretty great description of New York pedestrianism:

“Next day, evening rush hour, it’s just starting to rain … sometimes she can’t resist, she needs to be out in the street.  What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle, a reconvergence of what the day scattered … becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow.  Everything changes.  There’s that clean, rained-on smell.  The traffic noise gets liquefied … Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose – they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking.  Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain.”

Gotta say I never saw anybody walking in the rain with their houseplants in New York, but I completely believe it.

Flaneurism is all over Pynchon’s works: it’s pretty much an inevitable part of any detective or “quest” novel.  Still, I do believe that this passage below is the only place in the Pynchon oeuvre (and of course I stand to be corrected) that he uses the word flaneur. One of the characters, Emma Levin, is dating Naftali a former member of Mossad, now working as a security guard for a diamond merchant: (yep Pynchon has kind of gone Jewish for this novel).

         “‘There he is.  My dreamboat.’  Naftali is pretending to lounge against a storefront, a flaneur who can be triggered silently, instantly into the wrath of God.”

         Wouldn’t we all like to that kind of flaneur? 

         Oh, and another thing, if you make it to page 354, there's an appearance by two characters, Promoman and Sandwichgrrl, described as cyberflaneurs.  But really, aren't we all flaneurs in cyberspace

YAY!

Somebody somewhere (actually at the Serpentine Gallery in 

London) has the chance to buy a book about walking by 

Geoff Nicholson.

Photo by Travis Elborough

Rubbing covers with Charles Saachi - ouch.

THE MAHARAJAH OF MELANCHOLY - INDEED!!!

So there's this, the first review of Walking in Ruins, in the new issue of the Spectator

*

Walking in Ruins, by Geoff Nicholson - review

Mark Mason 5 October 2013

Geoff Nicholson is the Maharajah of Melancholy. The quality was there in his novels, it was there in his non-fiction book The Lost Art of Walking, and it’s there in the latter’s successor, Walking in Ruins (Harbour Books, £12.50). He savours the comfort to be gained from accepting decay as an inevitable part of life.

Ruins are his muse. So he spends the book doing exactly what its title suggests. Locations include an abandoned Los Angeles zoo, now inhabited by two homeless men, a Sheffield housing estate whose road layout survives even though its houses don’t, and a desert town that’s been, er, deserted. Nicholson keeps finding shoes there, though never a matching pair.

If you share his mindset, you’ll love the philosophical ruminations that result. Can you, for instance, ruin a ruin? John Ruskin preferred dilapidation to the ‘lie’ that is restoration. It’s only when a graveyard falls into disrepair, argues Nicholson, that it ‘really comes alive’.

We also learn that there’s a town in America called Zzyzx, and that Albert Speer thought buildings should be designed with one eye on how they’d look when falling down. He even did Hitler a drawing of a Nuremberg grandstand with its ‘masonry crumbling, its fallen columns covered in ivy’.

At one point Nicholson finds the left-hand half of a ‘Spontaneous Combustion’ sign. ‘Sponta Combu’, he notes, would be a great name for an Indian fusion dish.

Click here to link to the Spectator website

TURRELL SYNDROME

(photo by Michelle Aldrege)

I’ve said this before so it must surely be true: that walking around art galleries and museums is a highly specialized, and often very odd, and sometimes downright absurd, form of pedestrianism.  If we accept that art has replaced religion for a lot of people, then art galleries become sites of non-specific “spirituality.”  Setting foot in the great Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London, or on the spiral slope of the Guggenheim in New York becomes a kind of secular walking pilgrimage.

This was in my mind even before I went to see the James Turrell retrospective currently on at the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art, but Turrell’s works create an even more specialized set of walking-related issues.  Much of his work requires the spectator to walk around a space and an environment, and sometimes that may be a dark, inchoate, Lynchian place; though admittedly some of Turrell’s other work also involves sitting in one place and zoning out, and one  piece in the current show involves lying flat on your back inside a metal sphere.

I’m pretty sure I first saw his work at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1993, which would have been an exhibition titled Air Mass.  I have very little recollection of it.  I seem to recall walking around on the flat concrete roof that they call the sculpture court, though what I was actually looking at has been erased from my memory.  I know there was nothing like the thing below, which featured in a different Hayward exhibition in 2013 titled Light Show.

Then I saw a number of his “skyspaces:” the first at MoMA PS 1 in Queens, the second in a private home in Brentwood, the third in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield.  In each one, the spectator sits on a bench and looks up at the sky through a hole in the roof. 

You see changes in the light and the color of the sky, and more crucially you start thinking about your own perception of these changes, and about perception itself.  I suppose a person could walk around in these spaces but nobody ever seems to, and I suspect the other people in there would be mightily annoyed if you tried it.  Ditto if you take in your ghetto blaster.

The place in Yorkshire is called The Deer Shelter Skyspace, constructed in a disused 18^th century deer shelter. I suppose I always knew that deer need shelter, like everybody else, but I had no idea that an 18^th landowner would be inclined to build one for them.   The time I was there, it was a windy winter’s day, the sky was gray and you looked up through the aperture and saw birds or leaves or twigs flying across.  There was none of that solid, blue-field, computer screen effect that you get from a California sky, although the pictures on the YSP website show it precisely that way:

A visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park actually can involve a significant amount of walking since it covers 500 acres, with art works scattered throughout.  And when I was there looking at the deer shelter (and I suddenly realize it must have been as long ago as 2005), there was large  Turrell exhibition on there too.  Far and away the most impressive installation was a piece titled Blue Room, a pretty much self-explanatory title.  You stood and walked around in a space that looked exactly like this (that's my pal Steve on the far left):

There is something similar in the LA retrospective, titled Ganzfeld (which actually struck me as slightly over-deterministic title, with its overtones of perceptual psychology, sensory depravation tanks and what not - Blue Room seems to leave the viewer much freer). 

You’re only allowed into the Ganzfeld room as part of a small group, and for limited amounts of time, but the effect really is wonderful.  The room is essentially "featureless," a bit like a cinema, maybe a bit like a certain kind of minimalist architecture, and there’s nothing to “see,” so at first it’s completely and utterly disorienting – you feel like you’re just walking into space, into pure light.   But it’s hard to stand still, you feel compelled to walk around, noticing how the light changes, and how your perception of the space changes, you notice the structure of the room, you pace, you avoid the other people, and of course you can’t help thinking this would be so much better if you were there all by yourself.   Well, I believe Mr. Turrell is still taking commissions if you ask him nicely.  He does after all need the money for his Roden Crater Project.

Back in the 70s Turrell bought an extinct volcano in Arizona, (don’t you wish you could put something like that on your CV)?  The crater is three miles across and is part of Turrell’s 150 square miles ranch.  He’s spent the intervening years converting the volcano into a work of art, what is often described as a “naked eye observatory,” that will eventually have earthworks, tunnels, and sculptural buildings there too.  It sounds as though a lot of walking will be involved.

Obviously people must go there all the time, journalists, filmmakers, the guys who do the earth moving, but it’s not open to the public as yet, and since Turrell is seventy years old, my bet is he’ll die before he “finishes” it.  I imagine he wants it that way.

For now, however, you can walk around a large scale model of the thing (that's it above), in a room at LACMA.  I’m a big fan of all kinds of scale models and dioramas, and if there’s something faintly absurd about walking respectfully around a highly detailed miniaturized version of a lump of the Arizona desert, well, it’s the kind of walking absurdity I absolutely cherish.