Category Archives: life

Philippe Noiret (1930 – 2006)

Noiret in good company, I believe the lady on the left is Jeanne Moreau.
Photo credit unidentified, sourced here.

As you reach middle age, actors, singers and other artist whose work you’ve followed start to die. Most recently it was Philippe Noiret’s turn. His peephole closed last Thursday. Noiret debuted on the screen in 1956 in La Pointe Courte by Agnès Varda, but was not cast again until 1960 in Zazie dans le métro. After that, he became a regular on the French screen, without being cast in major roles untill the late 1960s. Noiret first came to my attention in 1984, in the French film Les Ripoux (English title: My New Partner). A story about a veteran cop who sees his habits disrupted by his new partner. (co-written by real internal police officer Simon Michaël) My first unconscious exposure to Noiret must have been the famous 1969 heist movie Topaz which our father encouraged us to see in the early seventies. I recently saw him perform in the 1969 art-agit film Mr. Freedom by William Klein and Zazie (his performance was superb).

He shone in such films as Coup de Torchon, the 1981 French film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1964 novel Pop. 1280, directed by Bertrand Tavernier; in the legendary La Grande Bouffe (1973) by Italian director Marco Ferreri; and perhaps most of all in one of my all time favourite films: Life and Nothing But (1989), again directed by Bertrand Tavernier where Noiret turns in an unforgettable performance as a French Army Officer given the thankless task of uncovering the identity of all the dead of the post World War One battlefields (and falls in love with the character of Catherine Deneuve in the process).

He also starred in two feelgood films of the late eighties and early nineties: Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (of minor interest because of its the famous ‘kissing scenes‘ montage near the end of the film) and the sentimental comedy Il Postino (the story of real-life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda ).

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks

Furthering my post on national stereotypes I present you a joke related to the subject:

“Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian and it is all organised by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it is all organised by the Italians”. [Nov 2006]

The Pianist (2002) – Roman Polanski

I saw Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist today. The story about a Jewish piano player and his time in the Warsaw Ghetto. I have never seen a bad film by Polanski, in my view he is one of the greatest post-war cineasts and this film is no exception. While I recently said that there can be no fictional narrative of Auschwitz (thinking of the faux realism of Schindler’s List black and white footage) this film sort of changed my mind. I thought that it was very realistic in its portrayal of the atrocities committed by the Germans and the gradual build-up of the dehuminazation of the Jews. The film is also a testament to the value of art and music, a bit contrary to Adorno’s famous statement that “there can be no art after Auschwitz.”

Searching for polanski+pianist+schindler+black and white+spielberg+verisimilitude brings up two good reviews, the first by Clive James and one by kamera.co.uk.

Trivia: I cried when the wheel-chaired bound man was thrown of the balcony and the men were shot and driven over by the Germans. I laughed when one of the brothers told the story of the surgeon who was brought to the ghetto to operate on someone, and was subsequently shot along with the anaesthetized patient.

In search of monomaniacs

Monomania: The Flight From Everyday Life In Literature And Art (2005) – Marina Van Zuylen
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

First sentence: “The early twentieth-century physician, philosopher, and psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859-1947) could be renamed the great poet of obsessive disorders…” (more)

Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idée fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore the therapeutic attributes of obsession. She introduces us to artists and collectors, voyeurs and scholars, hypochondriacs and melancholics, whose lives are run by debilitating compulsions that may become powerful weapons against the tyranny of everyday life.

In van Zuylen’s view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the idée fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies—Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them—embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion. — from the publisher

Monomania word sample from Jahsonic.com:

The She Devils remains Pierre Louys’ most intense, claustrophobic work; a study of sexual obsession and monomania unsurpassed in its depictions of carnal excess, unbridled lust and limitless perversity. –Kathleen Murphy on Pierre Louÿs (1870 – 1925)

It’s this very monomania that gives [Sade’s] works their coldly granitic fascination, page after page of mechanized sexual debasement hewn out like so many identical slabs of stone, and it’s also why he can disturb the most open-minded reader. — Bruce Reid on Quills (2000) – Philip Kaufman

Poe’s tales, of course, fall into several classes; [the] third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. –Lovecraft via Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927)

From Art and Popular Culture:

In psychiatry, monomania (from Greek monos, one, and mania, mania) is a type of paranoia in which the patient has only one idea or type of ideas. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas. The originally French term was prominent in the 19th century and has come into disuse.

In colloquial terms, the term monomania is often attached to subcultures that to the general public appear esoteric. However, the differences between monomania and passion can be very subtle and difficult to recognize.

The term was first attested in the English language in 1823, probably on model of earlier French monomanie. [2]

See also: everyday life – escapism – addiction – obsession – creativity

The weekend

Friday evening the weekend started at the Scheld’apen, from where I went to Petrol to see Simon Vinkenoog (see the poem, a poem makes a visit to a poet and says “from now on you have to wear a mask”) performing backed by Spinvis.

Saturday went for some psychogeographical biking with my friend, and later that evening to dinner to my brother’s new digs. Finished the evening/night at Bartillia and Fake Bar where Factor 44 was holding a group exhibition and a party afterwards.

Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Belgium
Sunday: Gorge(l), a show at the KMSKA themed around the sense of oppression and relief in art, curated by Sofie Van Loo. Most impressed by the work of Merlin Spie and dancer/performar Erna Omarsdo’ttir.

Feeling like blah-feme:

I am lonely.

There I said it. —blah-feme

Jack Palance (1919 – 2006)

Jack Palance (Vladimir Palanuik/Walter Jack Palance), one of my favorite actors, died today at the age of 87. All Jess Franco watchers will immediately recall his off the wall meanderings as Brother Antonin in Justine (1968), a role Franco said Palance played while under the influence. Given his lack of respect for his own European career, he fiercely denied his numerous Spaghetti western appearances when confronted about them in his later years, he was a steadfast professional. The Oscar and Emmy award winning actor was one of the great screen “heavies” in George Stevens’ SHANE, among others. He recently auctioned off his movie memorabilia. Offscreen he was a landscape painter, who inscribed his canvases with poetry. Palance claimed he never watched the films he appeared in. — I’M IN A JESS FRANCO STATE OF MIND

Palance came to the attention of many arthouse fans in 1988 with the film Bagdad Cafe in which he shines as an artist who wants to capture on canvas the beauty he perceives in the rotund Sägebrecht.

Danger

A 7 minute youtube video on bike messengers by a certain Lucas Brunelle, with a soundtrack by Broken Social Scene, Bandwitch…. via Dogmat and pas au-delà

Boredom (1924) – Siegfried Kracauer

The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (1995) – Siegfried Kracauer
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The Mass Ornament is a collection of essays by Siegfried Kracauer first anthologized in 1995. It features a 1924 essay entitled Boredom. Kracauer is most famous for his film criticism book From Caligari to Hitler.

“People today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored.”

“Boredom becomes the the only proper occupation, since it provides a kind of guarantee that one is, so to speak, still in control of one’s existence… [O]ne flirts with ideas that even become quite respectable in the process, and one considers various projects that, for no reason, pretend to be serious. Eventually one becomes content to do nothing more than be with oneself, without knowing what one actually should be doing… And in ecstasy you name what you have always lacked: the great passion.”

Purse lip square jaw writes:

Kracauer writes about boredom as a way of resisting constant distraction or, in other words, defying Debord’s spectacle and Lefebvre’s colonisation of everyday life by the commodity. But [Ben] Highmore suggests that Kracauer also shares an affinity with 1970s punk: “to declare yourself bored is not a mark of failure but the necessary precondition for the possibility of generating the authentically new (rather than the old dressed up as the new).” —http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/2005/02/in-favour-of-boredom.php [Oct 2006]

Conjugal Love (1947) – Alberto Moravia

Conjugal Love (1947) – Alberto Moravia
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

I just finished this short novel by Moravia, my second of his books, the first being The Voyeur, by which I had been impressed. It is to be re-published in English in 2007 and described thus:

Book Description
“A story of love, obsession, and betrayal from “the most important Italian creative writer [of the twentieth] century.”—The Times [London]

When Silvio, a rich Italian dilettante, and his beautiful wife agree to move to the country and forgo sex so that he will have the energy to write a successful novel, something is bound to go wrong: Silvio’s literary ambitions are far too big for his second-rate talent, and his wife Leda is a passionate woman. Antonio, the local barber who comes every morning to shave Silvio, sparks off this dangerously combustible situation when Leda accuses him of trying to molest her. Silvio obstinately refuses to dismiss him, and the quarrel and its shattering consequences put the couple’s love to the test.

Alberto Moravia earned his international reputation with frank, finely-observed stories of love and sex at all levels of society. In this new English translation of Conjugal Love, he explores an imperiled relationship with his customary unadorned style, psychological penetration, and narrative art.

Just as in The Voyeur the main theme of Conjugal Love is a wife unfaithful to her husband. In both cases the husband is the narrator. I identify the narrator with Moravia himself. In real life, Moravia’s wife was unfaithful to him with Klaus Kinski (Kinski Uncut: The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski). Instead of disliking or becoming angry at the unfaithfullness, the narrator gets a perverse pleasure from it reminiscent of candaulism.

Moravia is famous for another novel which bears the name Boredom. Now as you know boredom is a prerogative of the very rich. Poor people don’t have time to be bored, they have to work. In real life, Moravia was born into a wealthy family.

See also: adultery – marriage – Alberto Moravia – 1947 – 1900s literature – Italian literature

Her stupid questions …

“Her stupid questions, which once had seemed to me the happiest proof of her love; her voice, which had once been capable of exciting me physically; her touch which had ravished me, all had only one effect and influence over me now—to enervate me. She became jealous, or behaved as if she were; there was scene after scene. I realized that I should have been devastated, but all I could feel was torture. Then she would kiss my hand, beg for forgiveness, we would rest side by side, and I was consumed by boredom. I ate oranges and was annoyed by the thought that I would have to get up in the middle of the night and go home. And as I held her in my arms, I was thinking of any other woman, longing for any other woman, a prostitute for all I cared, if only I could have kissed other lips, heard other sighs…”

If Schnitzler was a master of the playboy type, he was even more famous for his depiction of the woman with whom the playboy was so often involved, das susses Madel, “the sweet girl.” She is socially inferior and sexually accessible; he can buy her company with modest gifts. Each of the parties in this relationship is subject to a characteristic illusion: the young man pretends that there may be a future for their affair; the young woman tries to pretend that she is content with its impermanence. The break, when it comes, is likely to be awkward for the young man, painful for the young woman. Far from being the femme fatale of the fin-de-siècle aesthetic imagination, she is fragile and vulnerable. –via http://media.ucsc.edu/classes/thompson/schnitzler.html [Oct 2006]