Grounding the Symbolic Realms - Peter Galison and Rebecca Belmore

- from Back to the World's weekly links posting "Tea With Chris":

I love Peter Galison and his concrete ways . He wrote a book about how it was probably pretty relevant that Einstein had a crappy job at the patent office where he had to think about how to synchronize clocks for train schedules – a very big problem at that time. It's an obvious idea once you think about – the obviousness a natural sign for a real genius idea. It feels better to think that something as abstract as the theory of relativity could originate from a problem in the world so newly created as "how to coordinate train schedules". One's mundane job feels better too. This New York Times article surveys his incredibly varied works.

Speaking of grounding the symbolic realms, this reminds me of how, reportedly, Buckminster Fuller had a pretty hard timeas a child understanding that the dots on the blackboard represented points in the world - and lines drawn between them represented connections. And how he tried to change the phrase "worldwide" with the more grounded "world around" but didn't have any luck.

Which makes me think of how strangely grounded the artist Rebecca Belmore's repetitive gestures are. Sometimes, when people are trying to be more direct with their art, they occasionally think to take their work off the canvas or pedastal or loom. Sometimes the results of this freedom can, unfortunately, become even more trapped by the medium of the gallery - as it can be a challenge for irregular forms or complicated messages to keep their shape outside this context. But the artist Rebecca Belmore always succeeds to escape both the mediums, the gallery boxes and the confusion.

If you're not familiar with Rebecca Belmore's work, Daniel Baird’s article in Walrus Magazine is a good survey of her work. Even if you haven't seen Belmore's work, it is hard not to be horribly moved by even Baird’s simple descriptions of her most famous performance pieces. The works are made up of ideas and gestures and performance. They performances' power are just as undiminished through video or account (though Daniel Baird is to be credited too here). Rebecca Belmore's repetitive gestures seem to be the gestures that she knows are missing in world - gestures of grieving or acceptance or making things right or simply known. Her gestures became part of the concrete world through sheer force of will, repetition and need. Though unconventional, the work communicates directly to anyone who can look.

At Five in the Afternoon (2003) - written and directed by Samira Makhmalbaf

(I watched Samira Makhmalbaf’s third feature length movie at home recently on my breaking-down television. Samira Makhmalbaf’s first feature, “The Apple”, is one of my favourites. It's set in Iran and is about twin sisters who are physically let out of the locked gate of their home for the first time in their eleven years by a calm and persistent social worker. The girls roam around the neighbourhood together like delighted aliens. The father who had kept them behind the gate is shown simply as a religious man with a blind wife who was doing what he thought was best. “At Five in the Afternoon” also involves two female characters who live with a religious father figure. The father here is also simply doing what he thinks is best. He is an old man and the girls are women. The father, again, wants to protect them, but he is running out of locations - struggling to find a place for them all where “God still lives”. There is no gate – no house and the woman are not prisoners. They live as refugees moving from “ruins” to “ruins” with a horse drawn cart in a devastated Afghanistan. Like “The Apple”, it is an incredibly pleasurable movie.)

Apart from the chores of finding food, water and shelter, the main character Nogreh stands most frequently at a back doorway between a religious meeting place and a city street. She slips her sky blue burqa behind her head like a superhero cape and replaces her modest shoes with well worn high heels and heads off to a school she secretly attends with girls who have less strict fathers than hers. At her school, there are “elections” to see which girl should be “president”. Nogreh has entered the race. She spends a great deal of the movie asking others and herself how change can happen in her country, how a woman like her could become president. She wants to see the speeches that successful presidential candidates in other countries wrote – “the speeches that made people vote for them”. Her questions are searching and practical, she is starting from the beginning.

There is one scene where Nogreh descends down an outdoor staircase with her high heels, her sky blue cape and sun umbrella. Behind her are ruins where her father rests. She stops ten steps above a French soldier standing alone at the bottom of the ruins. Nogreh’s friend, Poet, bikes up and begins to act as translator. The French soldier is told by Poet that Nogreh is Afghanistan’s future president. The French soldier immediately brings his body to attention and salutes Nogreh with sincere respect.

I understand the soldier, I understand that if you are in a foreign country (or even in your own neighborhood), it is often hard to know what is what. It looks like the French solider is both prepared to understand this is a game and prepared to understand that this is true. How could he possibly know for sure? It is hard even for the girl, whose narrative this is, to know what is possible. But he responds with conviction and respect. The soldier and Nogreh have entered into a situation that is either a game or a new beginning - none of us are sure which.

When Shakespeare wrote "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players” in 1599, theatrical stages were in fewer numbers and in more collectively agreed upon locations than presently. Though teasing with “reality”, it was clearly a metaphor.

In 2010, the world is literally very often a stage – the stage part comes in and out of focus in random locations all around the world with the help of tiny video cameras and big, cheap ones. It is now more likely to be true that the sand box we are sitting in or the war zone we are negotiating can literally turn into a stage before you know it.

Shakespeare’s line is still an effective metaphor because though the world is often a stage, it is not always. And though sometimes we are pretending, we are not always. We know both things are possible, at the same time or alternatively, and depending on where one is standing. We can see the metaphor and/or the literal, the play fighting and/or the war, the posturing and/or the effective stabs at action.

There are some great movie makers who are smart about these co-existing perspectives: Agnes Varda, Charlie Kaufman, Ben Stiller with “Tropic Thunder". But Samira Makhmalbaf knows better than anyone how to make art while the world's random and occasionally painfully real theatrical stages coming in and out of focus. She is a genius at saying tangible and concrete things that shift freely between "the stage" and "the reality" - and at knowing how true to life this looks now.

Even woven into the heart of Samira Makhmalbaf's narrative is the hopeful and searching question - could these poetic metaphors of empowerment also be true? Her main character, Nogreh, asks herself: Am I playing or is this real? The answer, of course, is "Yes".

The Headless Woman (2008) - written and directed by Lucrecia Martel

(I rented this at the video store down the street. It was near the cash and the title "The Headless Woman”, a title that ran over a silhouette of a woman’s head with a mass of bleached curls, always caught my eye. One would think that they wouldn’t show a head for the idea of a headless woman. But I am a bit heavy on the side of wanting my metaphors to be literal. And what other visual are they going to show? I ask myself. A toilet? A handbag? I am also always a little more inclined to select a movie if I think the movie is about a group structure or a system rather than an individual character. For instance, if the Dvd cover said “The Headless Women” and had a line drawing of a gold star on it, I probably would have rented it 7 months ago when I first saw it there. And if the image was a photographic image of a woman's whole face, it would have taken me longer.)

The Headless Woman involves groups of people in a community in Argentina. There are people who take care of teeth (upper class), people who take care of pets (upper class), people who take care of plants (lower class) and people who take care of people (lower class). There is much incest between the dentists and the veterinarians. Instead of a narrative about the winners and the losers of incest, here, the incest works to show the intimacy of one group living, thinking and breathing together. We don’t know very much about the people who take care of plants and people, but they are around and are part of this story.

Verónica, a dentist, is the main character. It is her bleached head of curls on the box cover. The only golden head in the movie. Early on, Verónica makes a careless mistake and runs over something while driving her car. It is unclear to us what she has run over. Though shaken and having hit her head, she doesn’t investigate or look back. A thunder storm begins and we continue to follow her for the rest of the movie.

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a novel that is still painfully effective in bringing one through the insanity of a "rational" murder, could have easily been called “The Man with Too Much of His Own Head”. Like many intelligent and impoverished university students, Raskolnikov (the man with too much of his own head) reasons out his own new moral constitution apart from the (often unreasonable) moral constitution of the society he lives in.

It becomes more crazy-making when his ideas are carried through in actions - actions taken within a society that doesn't know anything about his private new moral constitution. For instance, his collective society would have probably said it was ok to kill some young men ( in a war let's say) but it would probably have taken about a hundred years of argument for them to agree collectively that the world would be a better place if Raskolnikov killed the mean lady down the street. It is hard to remain sane while rigorously keeping up your mind's secret moral constitution. It is hard to be the only one around to argue over the validity of these new morals with yourself. Especially when the morals have already translated into actions.

The Headless Woman is the more common, but equally complicated, story of a murderer. Martel’s main character, Verónica, doesn’t need to maintain a rigorous understanding of her own morals because she is fairly trusting of the morals of her community. She barely needs her own head at all - though she starts out with such a seemingly unique one. Unlike Raskolnikov, Verónica becomes more sane after she murders someone. She does not conceal her "mistake" to the dentists and veterinarians. She tells them. They listen, nod, and then, with their collective constitution and societal power, act immediately and discreetly in her favour. The Headless Woman is a machine.

It is not a simple movie. We are given Verónica to empathize with, and empathize we do. We know how easy it is to become a villain like this. We just sometimes forget how horrible this machine can be when it moves along so effortlessly.

The English title Crime and Punishment is supposedly a poor translation of the Russian "transgression over a border". As Crime and Punishment unfolds, Raskolnikov transgresses well past the collective moral boundaries of his society. He stands outside - alone, disturbed and disturbing.

In The Headless Woman, Verónica starts out with uniquely bleached blond hair among a sea of rich brown hair. Near the end, maybe out of a new displeasure of standing alone or out of self-protection (we are not sure), she dies her hair back to the standard rich brown of her community. She moves towards the centre of her society's collective moral constitution.

For the last scene of the movie, we watch Verónica’s brown hair and smiling face attend a dinner party with the dentists and veterinarians at an expensive restaurant. The song “Mammy Blue” plays and we hear no other words. Her brown hair and smiling face nestle in comfortably towards the center of the table- she is as far away from questioning the moral borders of her community as she can possibly be. She is right back in the center, safe and sound - barely indecipherable from anyone else in her community. Hers, and her community's, is a crime of banal and collective evil.

After seeing the movie, the cover image now makes me think of the children's horror story of murder, “Mr. Fox”. The story has stayed with me for years, but in a fragmented way. I had always remembered the main refrain “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold or your head will turn to gold” as a young woman kept opening doors that were not to be opened. I just looked it up and I'm completely wrong. The main refrain is “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, Lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.” In either case, I guess one should be careful about getting too far away from the borders of your society - whatever direction you may be headed.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans - directed by Werner Herzog

(I watched this at my favourite movie house in Toronto, the Royal on College St. It's a big cinema that is always pretty near empty. Sometimes you see the directors standing outside smoking and once I saw the main actor - in the movie I had just watched - sitting at the back with her friends. The conversations before this movie started were hilarious. People explaining to their companions who Werner Herzog was. People explaining to their companions who Nicolas Cage was. It sounded like no one had seen the first Bad Lieutenant movie – the one where Harvey Keitel was acting. I hadn’t either. The movie was out of focus for the first 10 minutes, but then the projectionist fixed it.)

If life is art for you and you are living your life and in your life you want to watch a Hollywood cop movie that’s about America, you go see this movie, cause it’s like you’re dreaming a cop movie about America in public with other people around you. And for you, maybe most of life is art – but sometimes it is more so.

Sometimes the movie comes into focus as a real cop flick complete with a banquet ceremony and a happily pregnant ex-prostitute and then it goes back out again to the place where you’ve been dancing to the beat for a million years in an unconscious stupor.

I like best Werner Herzog's documentaries. They always seem more bizarre than a straight fiction is often capable of being and his strange voice-overs are a big part of this. It's actually kind of generous to suddenly tell the audience, with a dead serious and floating voice, what metaphor we are to go with while we watch a bear coming towards the camera. It’s a hard thing to do because a German-accented voice-over is pretty near some people's definition of pretentious. But when Herzog does it, it is the opposite. It’s accessible. He is not ever being mysterious or windy, he is shooting down metaphors with a pellet gun and saying – wow, look at this one. We are all coming from different places – it’s helpful and interesting to know where the director is coming from and where he is going. Telling the audience straight-up is one way to go about it.

No voice-overs in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans" cause it's not that kind of movie. But a similar need/ instinct to lock down the metaphors comes out. The most beautiful and hilarious one happens immediately after an intense crack-smoking session when there is a shoot-out between a group of 3 men on one side of a room and a group of 4 men (this group including Nicolas Cage) on the other. The 3 men fall to their deaths, the group of 4 remain standing in the silence of the gun-smoke filled room.

Nicolas Cage is the only man without a gun. He suddenly yells “Shoot him again!” One of the other 4 men says “They’re all dead, man.” Cage says, “Shoot that one again - his soul is still dancing!” Because of Cage’s intense drug use and constant hallucinations throughout the movie, we assume that he is literally seeing a soul dancing. We have also witnessed him talking to others, without too much concern for being considered crazy, about things he sees that are clearly not being seen by others. So as he says "his soul is still dancing!" we see a straight double, of one of the men lying and dying on the floor, upright and dancing a crazy jig – then we watch the slow fall as one last bullet goes through his body. We know that what we are seeing is a representation of another man's hallucination and not only a suggestive metaphor. For Herzog, it’s always this kind of heavy and simple poetry – patiently tying anything ethereal to the ground so that it can't get away, and so that we can remember where it came from.

It made me think that the seed of this project was Herzog thinking - I wonder what a soul looks like when it is dying and fighting and dancing all at the same time.

The Name of the Rose (1986) – based on the book by Umberto Eco

(I watched this on video while babysitting my friend Amy Bowles' kid. It was on top of the adult movies and underneath the kids movies. I think the sounds from this movie gave him a nightmare, so I missed a bit in the middle. The movie’s about a lost book of comedy so it is not very funny. I had seen this before when I was younger – maybe on tv.)

This is my favorite thing about this movie:

The oldest monk in the Abbey thinks Aristotle’s book of comedy is too disgusting and dangerous for the world, but he also can’t bring himself to destroy it. So the old monk keeps it hidden in a secret library. The secret library is mostly surrounded by other monks at the Abbey who seem to mostly all have different kinds of physical deformities. I think the old monk’s idea is that it is less dangerous to let those deformed (in body and therefore presumably in spirit) near to this dangerous text because their purity is already compromised in some obvious way. The ones who get killed by the *literally* poisoned book are the youngest and most perfectly formed of the monks. Maybe they are the ones who are most actively kept away from the book and who are not taught how to handle it without killing themselves.

It was hard to not see this structure in my head for a few days after – this dangerous book of comedy surrounded by those deformed in body and spirit, who are in turn surrounded by the scholars circling, trying to get in to see what is at the center of the surprising deaths. I think we are to identify with the logical scholars – the clean and ready-to-go Sean Connery and Christian Slater, but it is hard not to identify completely with the deformed monks (especially the beautiful and ready-to-agree Ron Perlman), or the one female character (the filthy, grunting and seductive peasant girl known as "the girl" - Valentina Vargas), or even just with the book.