Ligeti in November

As Ligeti’s Horn Trio ends, its principal motif seems to erase itself in front of our ears, disappearing into the void by a process of subtraction: one by one, each player lifts each finger off keys, strings, horn valves, the ensuing silence extended as if daring and denying the applause to come. This principal motif, an inverted version of the ‘farewell’ theme from Beethoven’s sonata Les Adieux, opens the entire work in relatively straightforward form; in the second movement, it’s given a tripping ‘Bulgarian’ rhythmic surge, rendered ostinato; and in this final movement, too, it serves as a passacaglia, a simple three-note figure, constantly descending, getting up, and rising again as the piano gets louder and louder, the horn gets lower and lower and the violin higher and higher. The descending figure with its conventional associations with falling tears; the ascending high pitch with its association with intense emotion, the scream or sob, rendered into structural elements, pulling apart. And then, as it all grand to a halt, instead of the ostinato, the incessant repetition in which no gap is permitted, we have silence: instead of reiteration, the impossibility of adequate iteration at all. Given that the majority of Ligeti’s family died in the Shoah, pianist Tamara Stefanovich suggested while introducing the piece, these subtracted notes assume the weight of the unsayable or unsaid. Ligeti himself likened it to “the photograph of a landscape which in the meantime has dissipated into nothingness”.

In that silence, sounds of the practice rooms elsewhere in the building filtering in, the inevitable sirens, the clunk of goods or people being transported, a bus or train. So too in the many pianissimo passages, silence and near-silences of Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments and 12 Microludes that we’d heard earlier on the programme Stefanovich curated for a free November concert at the Royal Academy of Music: silence that can’t be silence but can’t be eloquent either, perpetually interrupted, prologue to making sense of making an end, or making a beginning, that making and unmaking shakes assurance in the histories that tradition enshrines and erases. In the case of Ligeti’s trio, that tradition is late Beethoven, is Brahms, their works of farewell—Brahms’ own Horn Trio his elegy for his mother; Beethoven’s Adieux bidding farewell in the midst of wars, whether to a whole assembly or city or to an individual, its ambiguously poised programme. Both those works themselves play variants on the horn’s blaring forested aura: “as soon as he pronounced the word horn”, Ligeti remarked, “somewhere inside my head I heard the sound of a horn as if coming from a distant forest in a fairy tale, just as in a poem by Eichendorff”. And so it’s wanderlust and escape, nostalgia and regret—but too it’s Bruckner’s solemn hymns blaring out and besmirched in Bayreuthian Babylon, rendered window-dressing for an ideology of mass extermination.

 
In 1968, Ligeti identified the emergence of horns within the dense orchestral texture of Lontano (Distance) as providing a historical perspective: late Romanticism, the tutti of Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, the coda to the slow movement of Bruckner’s Eighth itself a kind of recall of Schubert; the horns heard from long ago, already signifiers of the distant and the past. Hunting calls and farewells, last posts and ghosts. In the Trio, Ligeti bends that horn around, alters its timbre, emphasizing the quarter tones enabled by the horn’s natural tuning: those tones that, within the context of the western classical pitch system, come to sound precisely ‘off-pitch’, ‘unnatural’, and whose swooning, stomping quality are essentially to the woozy, unnerving character of the music as a whole. This ‘mistuned music’: the rhythms by concert standard off-kilter, the tones off-pitch. The music ‘non-atonal’, but neither conventionally tonal, as Kurtag’s Microludes too examine and dismantle each note of the chromatic scale in miniatures and gaps, off pitch-pitches, switches, open brackets, ellipses—for the whole is the false and in the shattered looking glass, down through the rabbit hole, history’s abyss. Earlier, we’d also heard Bartok’s Second String Quartet, its extended pauses and melodic fragments continuously passed around each of the quartet’s instruments. Watching each instrument pick up and drop those fragments, the way it’s always the cello that initiates from the depths or the first violin from the heights, there’s a social dimension going on: a kind of second-guessing, a quicksilver negotiation. Likewise, in the Ligeti trio, the melodic fragments of the work—the Beethoven theme, the individual components of each movement—are at once echoed and distorted, sounding as the cracked remnants which each player mirrors, as Stefanovic put it, as if in shattered glass. Each work comes to seem a comment on the next: perpetual dialogue, perpetual reflection, tradition’s accretion and destruction, links on the chain lurchingly dragging in the vast ship on which are laden history’s broken monuments. Messages, remembrances, cracks, silences. All that can’t be said.

***

“To hold on to time, to suspend its disappearance, to confine it in the present moment, this is my primary goal in composition”.

Ligeti began the Horn Trio the year that his mother, the sole other family member beside himself to survive the camps, had died, and, as well as the Beethovenian ‘Adieux / Lebewohl’ theme, the work makes use of the ‘lamento motif’ or ‘lament-ostinato’ present in his early and throughout his late work. Ligeti first experimented with this motif in a student piece from the early 1950s, where it began as an adapted Frescobaldi ricercare” “a chromatic theme which functions as the melodic fundamental of the whole piece. I did the same thing in the last movement of my Horn trio”. Elsewhere he links it to “the melodic type of Romanian laments, the bocet”, and in turn to the “Baroque lament-bass”. The lament-motif might suggest the Berliozian idee fixe, the Wagnerian leitmotif: that fixity of character that guides through narrative, the hammering of fate, inevitably, obsession. Yet its character is almost diametrically opposed, operating by coincidences or cracked mirrors, echoes and over-layerings. These are other kinds of history, a halting, incremental, incorrect history that obsessively stutters its way into being, the same basic core varied and vanished, transmuted through bagatelles, etudes, concerti; as nucleus, ghost, coded shadow, “the riddle of this non-manifest musical language”.

 
“The lamento motif consists of three phrases, the second and third longer than the one preceding them. The phrases descend in stepwise motion most often in whole tone or semitone movement, but occasionally with ascending leaps”. The lament gives a rhythm to the entire work, its talea, constantly repeating. Probably the most prominent use of the motif occurs in Ligeti’s Automne à Varsovie from the first book of piano Etudes that appeared five years after the Horn Trio. The title doesn’t refer to the Warsaw ghetto or the other historical sufferings of that city but to a festival of contemporary music. It continually transforms the lament motif in overlapping figures, descending gradually down the keyboard. In the end it has to stop: it’s reached the final note, the edge beyond which it has nowhere else to go.

* * *

As Amy Bauer notes in her work on Ligeti and Lament, Ligeti linked Les Adieux to the process that would reach its apogee in integral serialism: “the sign of the totally static”. And for Bauer, as the lament, in its inter-textual dialogue with Beethoven and Montiverdi, with folk song, with conventional representations of grief, so “the repetitive strains of both passacaglia and lament retain an aloof, object-like quality, which suggests that emotions that concern the kernel of our being can be approached only as an impersonal play with the object”. Ligeti’s earlier tendency to ‘clocks’ and ‘clouds’—regular, ticking, rhythmic figures, “recalcitrant machinery, unmanageable automata”, taken to its excess in the ‘Poeme Symphonique’ for massed metronomes, on the one hand, and dense, clustered, textural explorations on the other, those for which he remains best known: Atmospheres, Apparitions, Lontano, distance and space, that which evades fixed form or capture.

In the Etudes, the next major work to be written following the Horn Trio, Ligeti, as he put it, tried to write as if there were several musicians playing at once, several tempi at once, like machines, Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano playing impossibly what the human performer could not; automation, pushing the dream of super-human virtuosity to its mechanical limit. The concert piano, index of freedom from labour, of bourgeois leisure, the concert hall or the salon or the living room, becomes itself a kind of factory, its dozens of hammers repeatedly striking, the performers’ fingers and hands multi-tasking, doubled, extending. Ligeti, himself a forced labourer during the second world war, deserting and walking to freedom, links that walk to his desire as a composer for freedom from labelling, but the Etudes also suggest how dreams of freedom and conditions of labour constantly bend in on themselves. I think of the five thousand fingers of Dr Seuss’ Dr T, under whose mendacious tutelage a child imagines piano lessons as a kind of factory torture predicated on child labour. Yet Ligeti’s Etudes are also the joy of complexity, over-extension, polyrhythmic complexity as teeming social life. As he put it to Benoît Delbecq: “This need to feel the resistance of the keys under the pulp of fingers”; “speak[ing] metaphorically about music, using the image of a body that has an organic way to develop”; “just like free jazz, indeed”.

* * *

Though Stefanovich mentioned the Shoah from the stage, she didn’t mention Ligeti’s use of Central African drum musics, the Black Atlantic lineages in the jazz the Trio’s fast second movement evokes. But these histories intersect. The African colonies where the techniques that characterises the Shoah were first practiced, honed; the first concentration camps, mass exterminations, drawing and re-drawing of borders and boundaries like a tightening garrotte. Holocausts the legacy of whiteness, in whatever continent. These roots are hidden in plain sight: the concealment of mass extermination, the refusal to make the links. But music pursues connection by other means, partly by intention, partly by chance, and there are other kinds of both serendipitous echo and cross-cultural influences spread on the trade routes of Atlantic from West Africa to Latin America to North America and back again to Europe. Ligeti told Delbecq:

I discovered African music quite late. In 1985, when I wrote the Etudes, I already had a good knowledge of those traditions. But, in 1982, for the Horn Trio, I used the same kind of ostinato: Even then I knew all this in a non-perfect way, through the folkloric or commercial musics from Brazil, Cuba or Puerto Rico. Samba, especially, I liked a lot, without knowing Africa at all. [...] The varied rhythmic figures are fast and short, and inside them, hidden rhythms and melodies appear by chance. I discovered this intuitively: it was not at all based on a precise knowledge of African or Latin American music.

Instead, Ligeti imagined an encounter between Latin American and Balkan music, or, “a very quick polymetric dance inspired by the various folk music of non-existing peoples, as if Hungary, Romania, and the entire Balkan region were situated somewhere between African and the Caribbean”. Or again, Ligeti remarks: “I was fascinated by a music that didn’t have an initial melody, but in developing would create subterranean melodies: hidden, interior, always ambiguous. They appear, disappear, return.”

 
Music, with its oscillation between precise, mathematical structures and the amorphous—between clocks and clouds—is here poised between geographies imaginary and real: and I think too of how Ligeti retunes and retones the French horn, with its connotations of Alpine forests, its Bayreuthian blares, as part of a complex grappling with tradition; and of how the horn re-emerges, played by Julius Watkins, on Pharoah Sanders’ Karma alongside Leon Thomas’ yodelling, inspired by field recordings of the Mbuti and Ba-Benzele pygymies of the central African forests; or in the work of Brother Ahh, who recorded Sound Awareness with Max Roach and the M’Boom percussion ensemble after seven years of study in Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania.

 
So the music spreads, partly through experimentation and determined study and party, as Ishmael Reed has it, like a virus, a resistant, coded, underground thing that rises to supersede the dominant cultural matrix: those African influences that come through Latin America, through North America. Or again, what Ligeti calls the ‘gypsy music’ of Central Europe—the travellers without nation who also in brutally suffered lebensraum’s expanded homeland. Writing about his experience of the Shoah, Ligeti remarked:

I was born in 1923 in Transylvania as a Rumanian citizen. As a child, though, I didn’t speak Rumanian, nor were my parents Transylvanians... My mother tongue is Hungarian, but I'm not really a true Hungarian, as I’m a Jew. Yet I’m not a member of a Jewish congregation, therefore I’m an assimilated Jew. I’m not completely assimilated, however, because I’m not baptized. Today, as an adult, I live in Austria and Germany and have been an Austrian citizen for a long time. But I’m not a real Austrian either, only an immigrant, and my German will always have a Hungarian accent.

From out of Europe—within it but never at home in it—this music unhomed that remakes the world in its crossed routes, its Atlantic surges, its serendipitous echoes and cultural echoes, solidarities, alliances: that constructs a home in sound of joyous rhythmic complexity, all the notes that squeeze through the tempered scale; and that, at the same time, constructs a home in symmetrically matched lament.

* * *

On the way home, the clouds muted, grey against black; all the clocks in the station glowing red. And Ligeti’s last echoes, “as if it were filtering through atmospheric crystallisation”, on the edge of hearing but refusing to totally fade away; like the half-dying, half-rising light of the tunnel half-light on all day, all night.

 
(Ligeti’s Horn Trio was performed by Preston Yeo (violin), Zoë Tweed (horn), and Tamara Stefanovich (piano) at the Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, November 10th 2021. Also on the programme were selections from Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments, performed by Clara Orif (soprano) and Małgorzata Zwierzchowska (violin), the 12 Microludes for String Quartet, performed by Michelle Dierx, Sydney Mariano (violin) Rachel Spence (viola) Simon Guemy (cello), and Beka Bartok’s String Quartet No.2, performed by Bridget O’Donnell, David López Ibáñez (violin), Julia Doukakis (viola) and Ben Michaels (cello)).

“What would have been a film”: 'Le Camion' (1977, dir. Marguerite Duras)

All of Duras’ films are in some senses about the impossibility of making films; about trying to make the impossible film; about taking apart a medium felt to be at once incompatible with and an ideal medium for a particular approach to writing, narrating and speaking. As she writes/speaks in the late book/film ‘Writing’ (1993): 

One should be able to make a certain film. A film of insistence, flashbacks, new beginnings. and then abandon it. And also film that abandonment. But not one will do it, we already know this […] Because this would be the film of the mad, unattainable idea, a film about the literature of living death.

As ever, Duras insists on separating and simplifying the strands that go into the normative idea of a film: scenario, plot, dialogue, narrative, characterisation, the creation of temporal and spatial continuity through editing, the self-contained world. In each of her films, this is accomplished in different ways; a different recombination of elements, building blocks rearranged with the overall structure that is the film: a combination of moving pictures, sound and dialogue which lasts for a set period of time, bracketed by opening and closing credits. In India Song (1975), the entirely non-diegetic soundtrack severs one link on which the sound film—and to an extent, the silent film—rests: that between the visible movement of lips and uttering of speech and its sounding (or the intertitles that accomplished the same function at an anticipatory delay in the silent era). This cut between the seen and the sounded, one in which the sense of re-enactment, dramatization and the like is retained through the silent tableaux of actors who recreate some of the social situations described on the soundtrack in glacial, frozen poses, is heightened in India Song's 'sequel', Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976), in which the same soundtrack instead unfolds over landscapes entirely devoid of actors, of people. Images, though, are central in both films: in L’Homme Atlantique (1978), images themselves almost disappear, an almost entirely blank screen over which we hear Durasian speech removing, not only the connection between the sounded and the visual, but the visual element per se.

Le Camion is somewhere between these two extremes, the relationship between film and narrative severed—or alternatively reinforced. Duras reads a script to Gerard Depardieu in her house. The script describes the scenario for an imaginary film in which a woman hitches a ride on a truck by the sea and launches into a monologue—with occasional interdictions, responses, questions from the (male) driver—sometimes closing her eyes and launching into song, observing the landscape (apparently inaccurately), hinting at stories, providing vague hints of a family connection (the birth of her daughter’s child), a love affair, her disillusionment with the present state of Marxist politics, the complicity of the proletariat’s official representatives with those of the power structure they ostensibly seek to overthrow, leaving only the possibility of ‘ruin’ ("Let the world go to its ruin, that's the only form of politics"). Duras describes this scenario in the conditional tense—this is what she would have said if we had made this film—yet this description is itself scripted, everything under a tight control belying the vagueness, the dissolution, the aimlessness imparted by dialogue and scenario. Depardieu’s questions seem, too, to be scripted, his and Duras’ eyes fleeting downwards to the pages of script they hold even when the dialogue appears spontaneous. They are not playing the female passenger and the male driver, but of course they cannot not be read as analogues. As in ‘Le Navire Night’ (1979), in which the focus on settings, costumes, the process of make-up, are disconnected from any dramatized acting of the scenarios described, film becomes a record of narration rather than an embodiment of what’s narrated; but as one critic points out, perhaps this makes ‘Le Camion’ more truly a ‘narrative film’ than any conventional film narrative.

The film cuts between Duras and Depardieu, filmed in one setting in the day, in another at dusk; between shots, filmed from a moving vehicle, of the landscape—factories, lorry parks, the edges of towns constituting neither the urban built environment nor the rural; spaces of transport and passage—and shots of the titular blue lorry travelling through it, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations intermittently coming and going as if on the truck’s radio. Beethoven’s grand cycle of 33 pieces departs from a melody by publisher-composer Anton Diabelli, who’d commissioned the leading European composers to write variations on his waltz theme, both as an exercise in vanity and a charitable enterprise for families affected by the Napoleonic wars. In these variations, the original theme, characterised by the simplicity of its repeated musical sequences, its ‘melodic neutrality’ (Hans von Bulow’s phrase), is taken apart from its smallest elements outwards and turned into a display of virtuosity, complexity, variant texture and mood, in a process often read as a kind of satire or parody on the drab and thin material it extends to other realms. Alfred Brendel: “The theme has ceased to reign over its unruly offspring. Rather, the variations decide what the theme may have to offer them. Instead of being confirmed, adorned and glorified, it is improved, parodied, ridiculed, disclaimed, transfigured, mourned, stamped out and finally uplifted.” Writing on Ivor Levit’s recent recording of the piece, a critic describes this principle of variation as “identifying with the particular musical situation and at the same time maintaining his distance from it”. The piece itself is not mentioned in the film, unlike the now (semi-)famous waltz by Carlos D'Alessio that haunts ‘India Song’, or the less well-known pan-flute melody that equally haunts ‘Baxter, Vera Baxter’—both sounds which could well be said to imagine diegetically from what we see onscreen, even in the radically discontinuous non-diegesis of the ‘India Song’ soundtrack, recorded before shooting, to emerge from the traces of a social milieu in which sound spills over and signifies classed anxieties, doubts, desires, proximities. D'Alessio's pieces are characterised precisely by their simplicity, their incessant repetition: these are not extend 'works', but 'pieces', morceaux, fragments entire in themselves, the opposite of grand structures. Here, the Diabelli Variations' grandeur, its variations on a theme, the parodic play between distance and identification built into its structure and the circumstances of its composition, are subject to further 'variation', heard only in fragments--sometimes alone on the soundtrack, sometimes as an undertone beneath voiceover--fitting Le Camion’s own distances between what’s described, what’s seen, what’s spoken and unspoken. In a film that--as we'll see--is in large part to do with political despondency, Beethoven may be invoked for his association with the revolutionary hopes associated with art—as he is in Fredric Rzeswki’s ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated’, written two years before Duras’ film, and using the model of the Diabelli Variations to spin a bravura fantasy on the Chilean revolutionary song, on the political movement/s of peoples and nations, of the possibility of, first Eurocentric, then ‘Third World’ universalism. In Duras, though, perhaps what wins out is parody—the distance between technique and melodic core, between idea and execution, between the cohesiveness of the large-scale concert work based on a single theme and the elliptical nature of the fragmentary variation form. Or perhaps to do so would be to over-read detail, in a film at once so sparse and, in its ambiguity, seemingly freighted with an easily-missed significance in every aspect. 

Duras notes in her script that the film could be shot in various different locales—all of them outside the metropolitan centre, through-spaces, neglected spaces, a ‘land of migrants’. As such, they destabilise notions of national belonging, of the power relations read into landscape, while suggesting the fate of the economic periphery, that which is to the side of dominant narratives, albeit in a manner far removed from the conventional representational framings of social realism, cinema verité, and the like. When we see these landscapes, we might think, if not of cinema verité, of the social critique imparted through landscape film in Masao Adachi’s theory of ‘fukeiron’, in which “all the landscapes one faces in one’s daily life, even those such as the beautiful sites shown on a postcard, are essentially related to the figure of a ruling power”; of his 1969 film A.K.A. Serial Killer in particular. At this point in the 1970s, Adachi’s work, or at least his theories, would presumably have been known to Duras through left-wing and filmmaking circles, but overshadowed and supplanted by Adachi’s own disappearance from filmmaking and exile in Lebanon as part of the Japanese Red Army. Perhaps more likely, we think of James Benning; not yet occupying his position as a prime filmmaker of landscape, Benning’s and Bette Gordon’s United States of America had nonetheless been released two years before Le Camion, with its single moving camera shot as two protagonists—a man and a woman—driving across the States; or Barbara Loden’s Wanda, in which driving, and the female-passenger, male-driver relationship, becomes index of power and passivity. Later, the wanderings of Varda’s Vagabond amplify the sense of being outside social structures, on the edge of towns, between urban and rural, with the road as conduit for a journey without destination. In all these films, the relations between gendered power dynamics, transport, travel and landscape are inscribed into the very (narrative) texture of the film. In A.K.A. Serial Killer, Adachi’s misogynist serial killer, his repression and hatred emerging from the social structures we see, not as a kin of disembodied ideology, but inscribed into the very physical structures in which he lives and moods: structures which the film hopes it can re-train us to read, train us to re-read, not as neutral backdrop but as an open book of domination and violence. Loden’s, meanwhile, is an exploration of safety-in-domination, passivity-in-violence, the role of the accomplice, the subjugated, the drifting.

At the same time, Duras’ insistent return to the static, interior scene of reading—the scenes with Depardieu occupy at least as much screen time as the footage of and from the lorry—prevents these resonances of the ‘road movie’ – as quintessentially American or pseudo-American import (think Wim Wenders). Here is none of the fetishization of vehicles, the potentials of travel or escape found in the road movie as latter day cowboy movie, nor as obvious a diagnostic of gendered power and domination as found in Adachi or Loden. The film feels at once specific and non-specific: in one shot, the camera sweeps round the cabin of the parked lorry—described in the script as both prison and safe house—with a combination of clinical precision and vagueness. The camera seems too big to move comfortably around the space, we see few details that indicate that someone has actually been inside. It feels too antiseptic, too uninhabited, too clean. In Duras’ script, the room in which the reading takes place—curtains shut in day, with a light on inside to create a ‘dark room’; or curtains open to the night, with the film light outside visible in the reflection—becomes analogous to the lorry’s cabin and again in turn to a photographic dark room; all three keeping out a kind of unbearable or sinister light from outside--a door suddenly opened on a darkroom, destroying the image developing within--which nonetheless constitutes its very conditions of possibility. 

I feel as though you and I, too, are threatened by the same light that they are frightened of; the fear that all of a sudden the lorry’s cab, this darkroom, may be flooded by a stream of light, you see…The fear of a catastrophe: political intelligence.

Is this fear the fear of political intelligence, or is this fear political intelligence in itself? What might this catastrophe be, insulated but constantly on the move? Is this even all an extended metaphor for the ‘fellow traveller’?

For the film's 'exterior' shots--which, as that dialogue might indicate, are always poised delicately between exterior and interior--we view the lorry from the outside, seen from a distance, the shots too brief and spatially ambiguous to give much sense of where the vehicle's come from or where it's going. Alternatively, in the ‘landscape’ shots filmed from within it, the lorry becomes merely a floating conduit, its apparently directionless motion emblematised in a scene in which it drives around a roundabout twice for seemingly no reason. As the lorry passes various built structures, the woman remarks that people used to live on these sites—you’re lying replies the driver—I’m lying, she admits. But of course people do live here; this is not a ruined landscape, an ‘end of the world’ (as she describes the sea). To be sure, aside from a brief shot of children by the roadside in the roundabout ‘scene’, these roads and roadsides are devoid of people, the dwellings they pass crumbling or half-built, spaces of potential or aftermath, spaces of passage rather than certainty. The driver doesn’t know what packages he’s delivering or where he’s delivering to; the woman doesn’t know where she’s going—perhaps back to the sea from where she came—the journey doesn’t seem to stop or end. But people do live here, here in the Yvelines region; immigrant families, like those families who are the focus of Duras’ later novel ‘Summer Rain’; those who are not ‘integrated’ into the fabric of the dominant order, those to whom the ‘social contract’ is barely extended or not at all. These, no doubt, are the people we see at the side of the world—those who inhabit spaces which, to those who pass through them, are liminal, transitory, excluded from any rhetoric of ‘dwelling’ or ‘belonging’. 

If the passenger’s disillusion with Marxism appears close to the familiar left melancholy born out of—or bearing—cynicism and despair from the comfortably sad, sadly comfortable vantage of its own beautiful rooms and antique furniture, perhaps its disillusion with (one presumes) an official Communist Party line might derive from the historical failure of that line to encompass the experience of those marginalised, those by the roadside, those not justified, glorified, given their historical place as subject-objects of history within the ranks of and by the name of ‘proletariat’. This view, in which race, nationality and gender are divisive modes of subsidiary otherness detracting from the predominant struggle, refuses that which Duras names in ‘Writing’ as “coexistence with humans, with colonised populations, with the fabulous mass of strangers in the world, of people along, of universal solitude”; as “planetary death, proletarian death”. For Duras in ‘Writing’, the smallest detail—in this case, the slow death of a fly which she happens to witness—connects to the crises of war and death, “these mountains of war on earth”—or, as the woman suddenly cries out in Le Camion (in what’s also a kind of ironic self-reference to Duras’ most famous cinematic contribution, the screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour), “Hiroshima!” The PCF son-in-law's reluctance to name his non-Jewish son 'Abraham' for fear of inciting a pogrom; Stalinist anti-Semitism; the scriptural Abraham’s own nomadic wandering, poised between an abandonment of social context and myths of nation-building and identity-formation; the sea as the figure of departure and arrival, in betweenness, mist, coasts, borders, the switches and ambiguities of power.

“Is it a film?” asks Depardieu at the very beginning of this film, reading from a script he was seeing for the first time. “It would have been a film”, replies Duras, reading from the script she’s written. And then: “Yes, it’s a film”. Perhaps we might draw that film that "would have been a film"—yet which, in its rehearsal, retelling, conjectural description, is a film—into the orbit of Duras' conception of revolution, of a non-derailed, non-betrayed communism that refuses compromises with the established order, those compromises Duras describes as a bargain between capitalism and socialism, resulting “the infinite delay of any free revolution”: 1956—“the clowns on the tanks, entering Prague”—1968—a time of promise returned again to compromise and defeat; the Party as patriarchal structure (the male driver accusing the unattached, middle-aged, unfixed woman, who can’t be interpellated in terms of sexuality, desire or attachment to the familial structure, of being, first, a reactionary, and then a ‘madwoman’ escaped from a psychiatric hospital); yet a certain turn towards a pragmatic politics (in Duras’ continued endorsement of Mitterand, based in part on their shared past in the Resistance) which might well be accused of exactly the same compromises—those between socialism and capitalism—with which Duras (rightly) accuses Stalinism. The passenger, in her apparent lack of attachment to existing systems of social conscription, is not an ideal, utopian figure—the impossible fulfilment of that which exists as contradiction, the material affects of power, class struggle, patriarchy, silencing, the nothingness of sound and fury, in the realm of the impossible film. Her—and the film’s--'aimless', 'banal' mobility (Duras’ own terms) are not escape, but a kind of fugitive moving within entrapment, encampment, an endless negotiation of power, of the frames—filmed, written, spoken, gendered, politicised—within which one can speak.

“Several explanations would have been possible”.

‘Heroic Purgatory’ (1970, dir. Yoshishige Yoshida)

 

Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1969-1973 trilogy of radicalism--recently packaged for the English language market as a DVD boxset entitled ‘Love and Anarchism’, half-borrowing its title from Lina Wertmuller’s rather different tale of the resistance to Italian Fascism, ‘Love and Anarchism’--is at once of the key points of 1960s political cinema and a body of work that--for its dizzying formal experimentation, for its non-European cultural placement, and for the lack of widely-available, suitably subtitled copies--has received relatively little Anglophone critical attention. Of the three films in the trilogy, Heroic Purgatory has suffered most of all, in large part due to its great density. At least an hour shorter than its predecessor, Eros Plus Massacre, it also extends that film’s tendency to narrative compression and ellipses to a far greater extent, and a first viewing may render elements virtually incomprehensible. As Yoshida puts it in a brief retrospective introduction, whereas Eros Plus Massacre used the past to think about the present, Heroic Purgatory uses the future to think about the present. Imagining its characters at four points in time--the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s--its complex play with narrative structure that shares the making-strange of urban locations of, say, Alphaville or La Jetee, and, to a certain extent, a concern with technological development, but is hardly a ‘science-fiction’ film. 

 

In ‘Eros Plus Massacre’, Yoshida adopted the framework of the ‘historical film’ in order to cast doubt on that very form: to question the use of the past as fixed in aspic, the contingent nature of reconstruction and the multi-perspectival nature of narration, and the use of a radical past, both as inspiration for, and as something not fully understood by, a present day generation of radicals. Eiko and Wada, the disenchanted students of the film’s contemporary sections, appear to have few ties to actual political activism--in that sense echoing, in the historical scenes, Osugi Sakae’s increasing inability to criticise the State or advocate revolution due to the repressive nature of the imperial state, focusing instead on accomplishing the revolution in the sphere of ‘private’ sexual experimentation. But whereas Osugi, Noe Ito and others are constrained in their ‘public’ activism by State repression, and in the sphere of sexuality by both the State and conservative public morality and opinion (perhaps gossip can destroy a political figure as much as, or in tandem with, violence), Eiko and Wada’s inability to accomplish meaningful action lies, in part, in the opening up of the State--the importation of American-style democracy, with Japan no longer an imperial power but a colonised, or de facto colonised, one, the lifting of sexual restrictions--and of their seeming lack of awareness (or disinterest in joining) existent political movements opposed to current governments. 

 

Heroic Purgatory offers a more in-depth exploration of contemporaneous political movements that go beyond the lifestyle revolt played out with such desultory frustration by Eiko and Wada. At the same time, its exploration of sexuality, revolt and violence lacks the former film’s basis in a specific historical event. Because familiar from existent accounts, the retelling of aspects of Osugi and Ito’s lives offers a certain legibility--or at least, a way in--that ‘Purgatory’ deliberately blocks. Basing the film on a fictional incident set during the opposition to the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco, rather than the explicitly historical re-enactments of ‘Eros Plus Massacre’, removes the framework of referential specificity that grounds Eros in a manner suitable to this film’s greater emphasis on performance, fantasy and the closed dynamics of small, radical groups: the paradox by which those most minded towards the radical transformation of an entire society become inward-turning cells losing contact with the broader climate of that society. ‘Eros' takes as its principal object of examination the heterosexual, monogamous couple, and by extension the family unit: in 'Purgatory', the couple are only one among several other social formations to be explored. 

The film opens as Nanako (Mariko Okada) witnesses what appears to be the attempted suicide of a young woman, Ayu (Kazumi Tsutsui), who then follows her to the apartment she shares with her husband, engineer Rikiya (Kaizo Kamoda), the three becoming a kind of strange family unit of ‘adopted’ children, absent parents and power triangulations. (It’s never made clear in Ayu in fact exists or is a kind of mutual projection of the childless couple). Ayu, who, at least initially, speaks only rarely, claims to be ‘lost’ and disowns the ‘father’ who comes to the couple’s flat to claim her, and who may or may not be either a police spy, a member of the revolutionary cell in which Rikiya was formerly involved, or a genuine father who has lost both his wife and daughter. As the film unfolds, Rikiya recalls his past within that cell during the signing of the 1952 San Francisco treaty--a de facto ceding of colonial power to the occupying American forces, beyond the period of ostensible occupation--as a planned attempt to either kidnap or assassinate an ambassador collapses due to the possible intervention of a spy within the group. This moment is played out again and again, shifting in time and location from 1952 to 1960 (the signing of another treaty of compromise), 1970 (when the film was made) and 1980, ten years in the future: actors play multiple roles, as the original members of the 1952 cell appear to take up roles in ‘official society’ and their successors among the new waves of radical movements turn against them.

 

Performance is stressed at virtually every turn: in the earlier segments, Ayu’s presence, real or imaginary, reveals families as role plays, removed from their basis in biological parenthood and filiation, while a characteristic move in the film’s final third will see a character remove a wig to reveal their ‘true identity’ (though most of the time their faces are recognisable from the other roles they play). Social roles repeat themselves, over and above the arc of individual motivation, desire or intention, not only within the broader society which, as in ‘Eros’, is encountered more through the discourse of those who resist it than through the appearance of crowds, public places, or the state apparatus, but through the smaller units that try to oppose the Engelsian trinity of the family, private property and the State. Paranoia, suspicion, and the ritual-casting out of outsiders, or spies, are both responses to real conditions, real infiltration, and real defeat, and manifestations of the failure to fully conceive of alternative social arrangements free of hierarchy, cruelty, sexual exploitation and violence. Notably, the wave of late 1960s and early 1970s Japanese New Wave films allying formal and political radicalism--Wakamatsu or Adachi more so than Yoshida--depict this resistance, not by presenting a utopian grouping, a valorised alternative to the more subtle modes of conformism that, in the post-war era, are fostered in the guise of liberation, but through the warping of revolt through violence, sex and fantasy: the actions of ultra-leftist terrorist groups, the misogynist murders of serial killers, kidnappers and sadistic criminals. As the title suggests, part of the problem may be the paradigm of heroism. Refusing to sign Rikiya’s death warrant for betraying the group, Nanako is asked what constitutes the cardinal virtue of a true revolutionary. ‘Love’, she replies. ‘Wrong! It’s heroism’. The constant failure to live up to such an ideal sees the group view heroism, paradoxically, as manifested through an iconoclasm so relentless it must destroy those closest to it for failing to live up to ideals.

 

Yoshida takes the furthest limits of ‘Eros plus Massacre’s experimentation as its operating principle. Spatially, both films are characterised by carefully askew, non-symmetrical framing, with public, exterior, space rendered as a bleached-out, ghostly horizon, always in the distance, glimpsed as if in perpetual mist or blinding sunlight, and domestic, interior space as an endless series of corridors or bedrooms, of secret spaces, characterised, in Eros, by sliding screens, and in Purgatory by modern walls,as characters endlessly circle the space and each other, shot round corners or in mirrors (Yoshida’s dizzying use of the mise-en-abime possibilities that mirrors afford out Fassbinders Fassbinder (see: ‘Chinese Roulette’), rendering domesticity (the couple, the family or substitute family) a claustrophobic nightmare. 

In terms of temporality, there’s the overlap between different time frames, with characters transcending spatio-temporal restrictions to (literally) wander between them, and the replaying of the ‘same’ moment in different ways. Whereas the multiple versions of a single scene occur only at Eros’s climax (the attempted murder of Osugi as the denouement of the love quadrangle), here, this variant structure replay across numerous incidents throughout: the entry of a stranger into the couple’s flat; an encounter between Rikiya and Ayu in front of a blank wall, which appears to have been either secretly filmed or performed as a kind of voyeuristic sex show, replays with various combinations of viewers and protagonists; the central incident of the dissolution of a revolutionary cell, and the subsequent internal trial of a spy (or perhaps multiple spies), perhaps leading to the spy’s execution; the future visit of an ambassador, surrounded by journalists. All this contributes to the dazzling complexity of the film’s structure, determined to resist the conventional representational hierarchies of narrative clarity. As such, it has much in common with the ‘puzzle film’ structure, the studied enigmas, concentric circles, stories within stories, frames within frames, that yield much of the perplexing pleasures of more famous exemplars, from ‘Out 1’ to ‘Inland Empire’, sharing with them the central conceit by which the verifiable existence of a particular event becomes more and more unstable (the actual slaughter of group members taken as the grounds for the show trial is never shown, for example). While Yoshida was early on influenced by Sartreian existentialism, the puzzle structure serves less as a philosophical reflection on the nature of reality--though it is in part that--but a predominantly political interrogation which suggests that any considerations of the nation of being, memory, individuality, alienation, violence and desire must be viewed as social questions: to abstract them at this historical moment would be meaningless. This applies equally to realist modes of leftist filmmaking which fail to trouble their own representative strategies. Yoshida’s methodology suggests that film is uniquely placed to interrogate both the propaganda of consumer democracy and patriotic hierarchy and the counter-propaganda of revolutionary violence, particularly that of the new generation of ultra-left militants. After all, terrorism of whatever ideological stripe is primarily representational in its strategies, for all the actual violence it involves and for all the secrecy and non-visibility of its organisation, whether the spectacular hijacking of a plane or the kidnapping of an ambassador or a prime minister.

 

For Yoshida, in these films, film’s role seems to be to cast a critical eye on the mechanisms of site, representation, and narration--that is, virtually all the paradigms of existent cinematic vocabulary--along with the failures of anarchist, ultra-leftist and official Communist responses to normative society. To present any sort of functioning alternative would be to simply fall into the traps that perpetuate the present state of things. But in that sense, film provides no more favourable alternative than the political activism it represents. Whereas Masao Adachi progressed from making films concerning radical actions to joining the PLO, for Yoshida, the representation/action binary is not an either/or. Both in terms of its own, self-reflexive mechanisms--an endless selection of carefully-framed shots that split and hierarchize the visual anarchy that Yoshida, in his critical writing, suggested was the eye’s natural mechanism (and recall Stan Brakhage’s attempt to capture something of that ‘innocence of the eye’)--and the narrative impasse it depicts--an endless compulsion to repeat, as trauma begets trauma, violence begets violence--Yoshida’s film occupies what its title appropriately designates as  ’purgatory’--a space between earth, heaven and hell, a space of uncertainty and temporal suspension. ‘Eros plus Massacre’ appeared to suggest a disenchantment with the medium of film itself--following a kind of shadow play with a projection room, the film’s director figure commits suicide using a roll of celluloid--and ‘Heroic Purgatory’ once more features a filmmaker surrogate--this time, as a member of the modern, ultra-leftist urban guerrilla group who wields a cine-camera interchangeably with a machine gun. Through his method, Yoshida seems at once to suggest that it’s only through a radically reinvented grammar of film that true critical perspective can be gained; on the other, film itself, with its representational mediation, is trapped inside those very frames on which it seeks to cast light. Yoshida’s characteristic over-exposed black and white thus casts a literal light on proceedings which succeeds only in erasing outline, shadow and shape. Yoshida’s equally characteristic off-centre framings (the very first shot provides an example) often set the camera ‘too high’ or ‘too low’, so that we see only the tops of character’s heads, or in which their minituarised figures are overshadowed the built spaces through which they move. In virtually every frame of the film, such framing stresses the limited, partial nature of any one perspective, the slicing up of reality into segments that never tell more than part of the truth. Or, as one critic puts it, “every shot is an idea”.

 

The film ends at the train station at which much of the action has taken place, as Nanako and her ‘daughter’ board an empty train, only to exit once more and walk back along the platform in front of a prominently-placed sign which reads ‘dead end’. If Walter Benjamin viewed revolutions as pulling the emergency brake on the disastrously destructive myth of historical ‘progress’, here, there’s no more track for the train to run on. The characters admit as much. ‘It’s over. Nothing left’. ‘There’s still things to do.’ ‘Depart to a distant place?’ ‘I will get rid of what I thought my God was’. As the two women walk towards the camera (back to the city, back to society), the camera focuses on the ‘Dead End’ sign, previously only a blurred smudge of white in the background, before blurring it out once more. It’s a perfect in-joke: the traditional signing off of a film, the boundary re-established between life and cinema, the mechanism of narrative closure that rounds off in a neat summary, with the English language signage reflecting the enforced dominance of American culture and its representational strategies. This moment, in its repeating of the mother/’daughter’ pairing, echoes the Valerie Solanas-style fantasies Ayu earlier expounds to Nanako, fantasizing ways of capturing and excuting ‘daddies’ everywhere, it seems as a means of revenge for the abuse that either she or her mother may or may not have suffered from a father figure at an earlier point (and suggested in the armed cell’s condemnation of a female member, who at one point they threaten with sexual violence to extort a confession’ a violence doubled by the criminal gang who surround a lone female figure, played by the same actors as the 1970s guerrilla group). As such, it echoes the thwarted possibility ‘Eros plus Massacre’ found in Ito’s feminist politics--and with the expected casting of Okada, the continuity is further implied.  In the juxtaposition between the historical re-telling of Osugi’s and Ito’s doomed relationship and the adrift experimentation of contemporaneous students, ‘Eros’ suggested that the overt repression of imperial Japan found in the historical segments of ‘Eros’ has now been replaced by the impasse of a ‘democratic’ society, the radical implications of feminism and free love overlooked in a superficial play with transgression, sex and violence. But while ‘Heroic Purgatory’ replaces those students’ petty acts of pyromania with a more focused attempt to change society through underground political action, the same mistakes repeat: the hierarchy, repetition of trauma and, in particular, the patriarchal violence and sadism--which at once condemns sexuality as counter-revolutionary, a distraction (as in the revolutionary-filmmaker’s speech to a female comrade), and sublimates it into an often gendered cruelty, doomed to endless replay myths of heroism in a purgatorial ante-chamber that appears to repeat the binaries of repressive tolerance and flawed resistance every decade: whether in the incidents of 1952 (the San Francisco Treaty), 1960 (ANPO), 1970 (the film’s present) and 1980 (where Cold War problems are assumed to have been ‘solved’ in what is appears to be a pessimistic interpretation of the triumph of the U.S.A. and the Fukayama-esque ‘end of history’). Technology and technocracy are key too: a university student in engineering when involved in the guerrilla activities of 1952, Rikiya paradoxically then went to the United States for further study, reportedly working on the development of the atomic bomb (given the genocidal ‘lab’ of Hiroshima and Nagaski, a doubled historical irony) before returning to Japan to work on a project which appears to involve the construction of an alternative space through laser beams. Meanwhile, the guerrillas progress from debates in clandestine rooms to waving around the symbols of the new, ultra left, Red Army Faktion militancy, brandishing machine guns (or cine-cameras) at every opportunity. As an indicator of progress, technology’s capacity for human transformation becomes subordination to the same mechanisms of patriarchal and national violence, now extended worldwide.

 

The inability to break a cycle of various kinds of repetition, even in the most radical, vanguard, progressive or advanced of movements--whether official technocracies or revolutionary organisations--is the film’s purgatorial territory. On the other, for Yoshida, those same moments and movements repeat the mistakes of previous generations, collapsing from both internal--and, more importantly for the purposes of the film--internal pressures. In a later interview, Yoshida sketches out his interest in the issue of revolutionary struggle, as manifested in the Japanese left from 1952 through to the present of the film, 1969/70, and the taking of power as a kind of perpetual process--”a power struggle inevitably gives rise to other power struggles”. “How to overcome the political problem of power? it’s almost impossible”, he argues, turning Marx’s famous axiom about the replaying of events, first as tragedy, then as farce, and applying it to the Japanese armed struggle. Yet the film’s title--underplayed in the current translation, but apparently invoking Beethoven’s  third symphony, the ‘Eroica’--suggests a more optimistic take than Yoshida’s present-day opinion that, in such situations, one has to laugh to keep from crying, that the revolutionary movements depicted are nothing more than a ‘scam’ or ‘farce’. Initially dedicating the symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, as the representative of the enlightened progress, the continuation of the emancipatory spirit that motivated the French Revolution, Beethoven angrily removed the dedication when Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France. Yet the tears in the page from Beethoven’s scratching out of the original ‘Buonaparte’ subtitle are still existent on the score’s original manuscript, and those tears serve as a useful figure for Yoshida’s film. For all its visual ‘excesses’, this is a film of absence, of narrative ellipses: the un-filled gaps, the endlessly-circling staircases, corridors, subways, and train tracks, taking on or taking off wigs, picking up or putting down the gun. Yet such absences, such repetitions, such deficiencies in action or rhetoric attest, do not only attest to the betrayal and defeat of hopes for revolutionary transformation, the co-option, internal and external violence that play out both in the taking of power and the struggle against it. It’s perfectly possible to view the as presenting a jaded perspective of liberal cynicism. Yet such a view more easily, more comfortably, more cynically fits into narratives of power, defeat and resistance than the film itself offers. Struggles for power may repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce: yet this also means that resistance never ends. Viewed half a century on, Yoshida’s projections of the present into both past and future suggest that, for all the moments of suppression, the defeat of a particular movement or moment, whether in 1952, 1960, 1970, 1980, 2020, the revolution has never ceased to be fought, and will continue to be fought.