The streets have always been where the masses bring their voices and grievances. It is a practice as old as Ancient Rome. It is when the city rises and a sense of social war penetrates the air that even art itself cannot help but be transformed. This year marks a half century since the great convulsions of 1968, when art itself became the vehicle of capturing and giving voice to the emerging, clashing ideals of that heroic generation. The tail-end of the sixties featured much of the imagery, cultural shifts and pop evolution that define the decade in the world consciousness. Acid rock was in, fashion was taking leaps so colorful and free that trends were established which have not gone out of style. But an aesthetic not readily discussed in the mainstream is the aesthetic of revolution. [Read more…]
Dangerous Poetics: Baal and the Resurrection of Fassbinder
The poet wanders the world, his soul a caldron of anarchic nihilism. Thus we are introduced to a young Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Volker Schlöndorff’s Baal. Based on a 1918 play by the legendary German playwright Bertolt Brecht, this 16mm work, vivid and wild, has remained largely unseen since it was first broadcast on West German television in 1970. An aghast cultural hierarchy, not least Brecht’s own aged widow, ensured the film would remain locked away until 2014, when a digitally restored version was previewed at the Berlin Film Festival. Now this restored version arrives as one of the latest additions to the Criterion Collection. [Read more…]
The Haunting Of One’s Self: Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1
“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all of possibilities of time.” — Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
One could imagine Borges, who declared that the basic devices of fantastic literature are four-fold—the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double—as personal timekeeper and Virgil-visioned guide to Paul Auster, who for the past half a century has trafficked in existential loops and slipknots, identity crises and vanishing acts. Auster, whether writing fiction or non-fiction, writing in the first person or third person, has always haunted his own writings, sort of as the negative imprint of a splitting point. [Read more…]