Closed circuit: You Are Here

A lecturer (R.D. Reid) stands before a projected image of rolling waves. He should like to instruct us in serenity and solitude. He warns us against the perils of allowing our eyes to follow the red dot darting across the screen, emanating from his laser pointer. The threat of the red dot isn’t specified, but the lecturer’s warning, stated at the very start of You Are Here, Toronto video artist Daniel Cockburn’s feature debut, serves as a reminder that there may still be something dangerous about taking instruction, submitting to direction, or simply watching a movie.

Such deliberately vague portent clings to every new realm of activity introduced in You Are Here: the discovery made by a bunch of people named Alan (not a typo) of a door where there should not be a door; the control centre where dispatchers give directions to individuals walking the city streets, emissaries whose trajectories are without apparent purpose save the avoidance of convergence; the prisoner (Anand Rajaram) who has pages of Chinese script shoved under the door and must then consult a voluminous text entitled What To Do If They Shove Chinese Writing Under The Door; the abandoned things appropriated by a self-appointed archivist (Tracy Wright), each containing recorded information, in varying formats, that may or may not add up to anything yet compel her to provide them with a home.

Each realm of activity, or thought experiment, constitutes a plastic component of You Are Here’s ornate circuitry—which is itself the film’s protagonist. At times this circuitry hints at a critique of technology’s promise to track and organize every last item in the world for posterity; at others it alludes to forms of interconnectivity that can only be understood once the individual (ie: one of those emissaries told not to interact with the other emissaries) rebels agains the dominant hegemony. Which is to say that You Are Here is playful, enigmatic and very cerebral. If the larger meaning strikes you as elusive, then you’ve just about got the point.

Press materials and clippings about the film keep invoking Jorge Luis Borges (though, given the film’s interest in found things and urban geography, I think Paul Auster is a more apt literary allusion) and Charlie Kaufman (though, given the film’s preoccupation with interlocking structures, I think Christopher Nolan is a more apt cinematic allusion), but such comparisons should come with one major caveat: each of these artists are storytellers (yes, Borges included), as engaged with narrative and character, with form and meaning, as they are with metaphor. You Are Here is fun, smart, inventive, and enjoyably puzzling—to be sure, I recommend it—it’s also pretty cold, and satisfies itself above all through the realization and careful arrangement of its concepts.

You Are Here is now playing at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox. It opens at Edmonton's Metro Cinema next Monday.

Citizen on patrol: A conversation with Jonathan Lethem about work, groups, genre, the movies, and the enduring power of Dick

A subterranean monster-tiger wreaks destruction upon New York below a chocolate-scented cloud that emits ear-piercing drones heard only by select citizens. Somewhere within the city’s labyrinthine clusters of living space, mystically glowing vases attract stupendous bids on eBay. The socio-geographical canvas of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (Vintage, $17.95) is teeming with the fantastic and the hilariously banal. The novel chronicles the friendship of Chase Insteadman and Perkus Tooth, the former a grown-up child star now semi-famous for being the fiancé of Janice Trumbull, an astronaut trapped indefinitely in the International Space Station, the latter a dandyish, borderline recluse, and cult-legend arts critic with a fondness for burgers, weed, and Marlon Brando. The pleasures of Lethem’s latest are derived from its relentless invention, sense of place, masterful banter, micro-hierarchies, deliciously absurd dinners with pajama-clad millionaires, and luxurious descriptions of characters that are only intermittently realistic yet nearly always suffused with truth and insight. I spoke with Lethem last November in Toronto, lost my record of our conversation, then found it again, just in time for Chronic City’s trade paperback release.


JB: Several critics have noted the unusual blend of density of incident and paucity of classical narrative structure in Chronic City. Were you conscious of nurturing this sort of busy looseness?

Jonathan Lethem: That’s a great term for it. I think of this book as having an extremely somber, morbid background, almost like a giant Hieronymus Bosch mural of New York City in the 21st century, specifically of Manhattan between 9/11 and the financial collapse. In the foreground, it’s really an antic tangle of characters and their day-to-day hanging out. It’s behaviour. It’s not a plot in a classical sense. It’s almost more like a season of Seinfeld. One stupid day spent with this bunch of people after the next. Their self-absorption is thematically linked to the things that are wrong with the city I’m writing about.

JB: It has a fluidity that’s dictated by the ensemble. In a sense it reminds me of certain Robert Altman films.

JL: That’s good! I like that too. That makes sense.


JB: In your last book of stories, as well as in You Don’t Love Me Yet and Chronic City, I’ve been enjoying your sensitivity to social hierarchies and group dynamics, how different personalities negotiate their place in a rock band, a dinner party or some impromptu assembly of previously compartmentalized friends.

JL: I’m very interested in people forming groups, both useful and useless ones. I’m interested in the structures we arrange for ourselves, what we can take from them and how they can become hiding places or worlds unto themselves.

JB: It occurred to me that for all the more identifiably science-fiction genre work you’ve written, Chronic City seems the most directly indebted to Philip K. Dick. I was recently reading A Maze of Death and Ubik and it occurred to me that Dick’s work is also often deeply concerned with group dynamics.

JL: Absolutely. Chronic City definitely marks a return for me. Having re-read so many of Dick’s books to put together those Library of America volumes, I renewed what is a very permanent influence, a very permanent engagement for me. I got down to the root level with it again and thought, I can use this stuff, I can make more of this again. Because I’d become a very different writer from when I first set out and was very consciously influenced by Dick. I can transmute these materials in a new way because of things I’ve since learned to do and the way I’ve learned to write about New York City. So I was very aware of bringing him into this one.

JB: Has being a father changed your writing?

JL: Probably. It’s been very good on a mechanical level. It meant that I found an office outside of my house and work on a computer with no internet. So instead of indulging myself in sort of always writing and never writing, working throughout the day in this very princely way, now I go and I’m a worker. I get my job done for a few hours and then I go on to other responsibilities. I like the result of that. The deeper, thematic effects of fatherhood will likely emerge only very slowly. I’m not a journalist on ay level. I’m very slow to reflect parts of my life in my work. It took me 20 years to write about my childhood in Brooklyn.


JB: Do you always find a place for some version of yourself in your books?

JL: I feel I’m everywhere. Even before I was writing in any way autobiographically, I could see that I was turning aspects of myself into various characters. If they live at all it’s because I’ve smuggled something of myself into them. It sounds very solipsistic. The book itself is a virtual hall of mirrors. But it’s also my enthusiasms, my responses, my friends, characters from other people’s books, all of these things.

JB: I suppose writing about art is a way of giving your characters life. I’m thinking of Fortress of Solitude and the sheer number of artists or art enthusiasts in that book.

JL: In that book especially art is a mediating way to dwell on the world. The graffiti artists, the musicians, the science-fiction convention, all of these are different ways that people try to thrive in a difficult universe through the avenue of culture. Even criticism, even Dylan Edbus’ writing about music, is an attempt to build some kind of meaningful place for himself.

JB: Chronic City starts in the offices of the Criterion Collection and features numerous digressions into film culture. You’re obviously a film nut. Have you never entertained the notion of writing for the screen, or even directing?

JL: When I was a kid I wanted to be a director very much, but to do that would be rival commitment to the one I’ve made to writing fiction. I don’t think screenwriting is where the action is. If I cared to make film I’d have to direct it. So I’ve just decided to just enjoy this adjacent relationship where I write books that are very responsive to film and in turn tend to attract filmmakers and get me into all sorts of interesting, sticky bystander situations. That’s just enough to give me the fun of dabbling in that world without the totally intimidating prospect of actually originating something myself. I watch filmmakers. My wife is a filmmaker. It’s not an art to be a dabbler or dilettante in. It’s enormous.

JB: Are there things you’d like to convey without words?

JL: I do think about that. I was a painter for a long time, and even in a very wordy book like Chronic City I’m interested in issues of inexpressibility, conundrums that defy language. But I’m pretty well situated where I am. I get to do a lot of what I want to do.


JB: To speak more generally of the culture-obsessive quality of your books, do you ever think about how this aspect of your work will speak to future generations? I’ve often recommended Fortress of Solitude, but I’ve recommended it most often to people who share some of my own interests in the art, films and music referred to in the text. Do you envision a day when new editions of Fortress of Solitude will require copious footnotes?

JL: God bless that possibility. That would be cool if it rated those footnotes. People always want me to be concerned about this issue, and I sometimes try to be, but when you read Dickens you’re in Dickens’ London, with every immensity of detail, the street names, the commercial jingles that were in the air, the snippets of folk culture dialect and jokes. When you encounter Saul Bellow you’re immersed in his mid-century Chicago, and for better or worse you just have to embrace it. And you do because it’s all emotionally charged for him. I just try to meet that standard. I try to make everything matter on the terms of the book. I try not to let anything be too indulgent and extraneous. If you’re going to write about culture you have to accept that you have one.

JB: Do you read as much as you used to?

JL: Never as much as I did. When I was a teenager and through my 20s I was an insanely voracious reader. I miss that, but I could never reproduce those conditions. Forget having a family, once I really got my habit of writing going, that occupies too much of the same mental space, and even physical space, the sitting still, using your eyes. So I couldn’t read the way I used to, but I try to read a lot.

JB: Do you still have relevatory experiences reading?

JL: Yes. Again, they couldn’t come as rapidly as when one week I was discovering Kafka and the next I was discovering Stanislaw Lem and the next Shirley Jackson. I was moving through worlds so rapidly. There are fewer earth-shattering experiences, but when it happens the earth still shatters. Reading Roberto Bolaño the last couple of years did that for me.

JB: Do you read while deep into work?

JL: Yeah, I always do. There’s nothing that I’m trying to protect from influence. It’s great if I get excited about something while working. It reminds me of what it’s for.

JB: I was recently speaking with Paul Auster and was struck by his claim to not read anything, at least not fiction, while he’s working.

JL: He gets more novels written than I do, so perhaps there’s something to be said for that. [Laughs]

Vibration analysis: The Shaking Woman

“At one time or another all of us go to pieces,” writes Siri Hustvedt, “and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” I first heard of Hustvedt though her husband, the writer Paul Auster, and first encountered her writing through Mysteries of the Rectangle, her collection of astute, insightful, and engagingly personal essays on various works of visual art, before digging into her novels, starting with her debut, The Blindfold, which among other things fictionalizes her experiences with chronic debilitating migraines. Her new book, The Shaking Woman, or a History of My Nerves (Henry Holt, $28), is a relatively slim memoir and a seeming departure from her body of work. Yet The Shaking Woman is in many regards a synthesis of nearly every major theme she’s ever dealt with. It’s a nonfiction, existential detective story with faint promise of any neat resolution, concerning the search for a missing diagnosis. It explores lingering mysteries of behaviour and perception, of the body and the mind—if you’ll excuse the dualism—while attempting to uncover established facts with a discipline and fervor rare in writers of fiction. It’s at times scary, always fascinating, and a pleasure to read.

The Shaking Woman was prompted by an experience Hustvedt had in 2006, two years after the death of her father. She was giving a speech in his memory at the university where he taught when her body began to violently convulse. She was already in her 50s by this point and had no history of seizures. As her limbs began to shake and flail, she noticed that her ability to speak wasn’t impaired in the slightest. She gripped the edges of the podium and went ahead and gave the speech while from the neck down her body went nuts. The shaking woman returned three more times, once while giving another public presentation, once while appearing on a low-key Norwegian television programme, and once while hiking in the Pyrenees. The attacks are obviously triggered by something more than stage fright, a particular memory, or repressed mourning. Four years have passed and Hustvedt still doesn’t know where this shaking woman came from.

“I can’t really see where the illness ends and I begin,” writes Hustvedt, addressing how neurological or psychiatric illness is identified with self in a way that corporeal illness isn’t. A large part of this book is devoted to trying to come to terms with what feels like an experience with a separate Other, despite the fact that this Other comes from within. Hustvedt provides readers with a brief history of hysteria, a condition and/or a term that’s been used and abused, discarded or renamed, yet whose real significance remains ambiguous. She consults a number of doctors, both real and imagined, including psychiatrists, a group who, despite her obvious interest in psychology, she’d previously avoided. “I have the vague sense that there are hidden recesses of my personality that I am reluctant to penetrate,” she writes. “Maybe that’s the part of me that shook.”

Hustvedt at one point describes the shaking woman as “a speechless alien who appears only during my speeches… an untamed other self, a Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll, a kind of double.” She interrogates the shaking woman, and tries to befriend her. She emphasizes the essentiality of language to reflexive self-awareness, of putting together words so as to find meaning through making a story of one’s life. Of course, she questions that, too. “Am I looking for a narrative,” she asks, “a confabulation, to interpret a debility that is no more and no less than synaptic wiring and firing?” Yet she accumulates ample evidence of the scientific and therapeutic value of storytelling, quoting physician Rita Charon, who describes how “narrative knowledge, by looking closely at individual human beings grappling with the conditions of life, attempts to illuminate the universals of the human condition by revealing the particular.”


While hurling herself into what seems a very personal search it’s interesting, and endearing, to observe how Hustvedt is continually fascinated by other people, among them Neil, the boy who can remember things exclusively through the act of writing, only to forget the information written as soon as he sets down his pen; Bertha Pappenheim, Breuer’s famous hysterical patient who lived with a “double consciousness,” one basically normal, one who was always observing the other from the outside; S., the man from whom everything was involuntarily associated with images, even numbers and individual words, so that reading a single sentence overwhelmed him with myriad detailed and competing pictures; or the psychiatric patients to whom she teaches writing. Hustvedt also looks to fictional people for help in her investigation, such as Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, unable to accept death, Dostoyevsky’s epileptic Prince Myshkin, or Borges’ Funes the Memorious, who can’t forget a thing.

Hustvedt is a truly voracious reader, as fascinated by psychology, philosophy and science as she is by art, poetry, and fiction. At times her points of reference are so esoteric, so indicative of deeply obsessive research, as to be nearly comical. I had to laugh out loud when she pulled a quote from Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Yet this all-inclusive devouring of literature provides Hustvedt with a healthy skepticism, a view of various phenomena so broad and alert to contradiction as to keep her from latching too readily onto any one theory, however fashionable. It allows her to be as judicious as she is promiscuous, so that every time she seems in danger of losing the thread, of digressing far off from her personal detective story, she always manages to loop back to the essence of her search and feed it with more insight and precision. “The search for the shaking woman takes me round and round because in the end it is also a search for perspectives that may illuminate who and what she is.” And, inevitably, what Hustvedt comes to accept is that the shaking woman is her, or one part of her, an individual like any other, unfixed, unimaginably intricate, and alive.

2000s: the decade in books

For the moment at least, most of us still read books that take up physical space. Scanning our libraries to recall a decade’s reading requires movement. We walk from shelf to shelf in search of that terrific title that nearly slipped our minds. I’ve always sensed a kinship between walking, writing, and reading, the steps taken from one word to the next, the meditative spell we’re placed under, the small choices that lead us farther from home, or deeper into story. I’m going to write about my most treasured books of the century’s first decade as I find them, slip them off the shelf, flip through the pages, and remember.


Austerlitz
The late W.G. Sebald was very much the walker/writer, crafting unclassifiable books we’ll call novels for ease. He meets a man in Antwerp, an architectural historian concerned “with the shape and the self-contained nature of discreet things.” Their friendship develops over decades of accidental encounters. Slowly we learn Austerlitz’s story. He was an infant refugee on a kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. He was raised by a Calvinist preacher in Wales. Slowly Sebald unravels one of the most singular of Holocaust narratives, an immensely engrossing tale of memories recovered. And Sebald’s prose moves not ponderously but one step at a time, stopping to take note of faces and places, objects, voices, hidden spaces, the palimpsest and residue of history. As you read him you sense that the book could go anywhere, yet in the end it only goes where it was meant to all along.


Here is Where We Meet
Did John Berger ever run into Sebald on one of his walks? It could still happen. In the first chapter of Here is Where We Meet Berger encounters his mother while wandering through Lisbon—he recognizes her by her walk. She’s been dead for 15 years. Now in his 80s, Berger remains one of literature’s great nomads. Moving from city to city, meeting or remembering people from his past, this is his most visionary writing of the last decade. To read him is to feel as though you're touching something, smelling something. He gives us back the sensual world like few writers can.


The Body Artist
“You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.” Don DeLillo ended the 20th century with a mammoth masterwork. He started the 21st with this compact, fragmentary novella. I for one think it's been vastly under-appreciated. The first part describes a domestic morning with startling clarity, a couple, moving in the same space, sometimes listening to each other, sometimes blinded by routine. Someone dies. Soon after a ghostly visitor appears. The titular protagonist interprets the whole experience into something essentially wordless, yet her performance is hauntingly described through DeLillo’s prose.


Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson’s the patron saint of fuck-ups. He renders lyrical the depths of human folly. This sprawling epic about Americans embroiled in grotesque misadventures at home and abroad is a blackly comic history of Vietnam, among other things. A CIA operative whose uncle is some goofy 20th century Colonel Kurtz; the Houston brothers, familiar from Johnson’s Angels; a Canadian aid worker and Seventh Day Adventist: these are our sherpas along the mountain. Misunderstandings, dubious ambitions, and fraught friendships forged with Southeast Asians line an unruly tale both hilarious and appalling.


2666
What to make of the posthumous English-language celebrity of Roberto Bolaño, so eerily in keeping with the morbid enigmas buried in his stories? The Savage Detectives would have been enough to cement his reputation, but then we got this. He wanted this last work divided into five novellas, so as to accumulate more royalties for his children after his death. This request was thankfully denied—I hope his kids are eating well. The colossal power of 2666 lies partly in its sustained tonal focus, which tethers together the stories of adventurous young European scholars, an American journalist, an elusive German novelist, a lonely single father, and a number of disparate Mexicans linked to the murder of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa, Bolaño’s fictionalized Ciudad Juarez, into a global geometry of trauma, longing, and obsession. It’s one of the most exhausting and harrowing books I’ve ever read. At times I felt nausea. I can’t wait to read it again.


Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell’s eloquently structured Russian doll novel cradles within it science fiction, a Grishamesque corporate thriller, and letters, spanning the 19th century to the post-apocalyptic future. Tales within tales, each one read by a character in the next, build upon one another until they pass through the mirror in the book’s centre. The individual narratives are mostly simple to describe, but the book as a whole defies synopsis. Sorry.


The Ongoing Moment
Geoff Dyer’s best work since his truly sublime jazz chronicle But Beautiful is a paragon of associational rigour. (Mostly) American photography is his vast subject, though it's wonderful when he makes room for Hiroshi Sugimoto, say. A disciple of Berger, whom he wrote about when very young, Dyer’s guided from image to image by impulses founded in history, biography, art criticism, conjecture, and the labyrinth of magnetic details in the photos themselves that catch his magpie eye.


Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami is always fun, always extravagantly imaginative, always sequestering his heroes in some sort of wilderness—that’s usually when the weirdness starts. A teenage runaway and an aging simpleton share a destiny. Guidance is gleaned from cats and rocks. There’s a murder mystery enveloping this coming of age novel, among the most ambitious in Murakami’s oeuvre.


The Fortress of Solitude, Then We Came to the End
They came from Brooklyn, but only the first, Jonathan Lethem’s quasi-fantastical, pop culture-addled, semi-autobiographical epic, is a remembrance of Brooklyn past, a story of interracial friendship founded in music, graffiti, art, comics, and broken families. Oh yeah, and a super-powered ring. Joshua Ferris’ insightful, very funny novel, a terrific debut, written in first-person collective, is actually set in a Chicago advertising agency. It’s about work, but it’s also about fleeting forms of togetherness.


Miracles of Life
J.G. Ballard is the third author in this little library walk to have died sometime in our new century’s first decade. (Oddly enough he had a special kinship with Jean Baudrillard, who also died, back in 2007, and whom I’m still getting around to reading someday. And speaking of kinships, that David Cronenberg chose to adapt Ballard’s Crash for the screen surely marks one of the most uncannily apt collaborations between two complimentary sensibilities in the history of art.) Whether through science-fiction or merely something like it, Ballard did so much to make us look differently at our minds and bodies, at our memories and our social strategies, at our technologies as extensions of ourselves, at our cities and buildings and boundaries, at our fantasies, perhaps most of all. But his final book was a memoir, and while he published a number of excellent novels in the 2000s, all of them variations on the same, deeply compelling narrative, this memoir somehow seems to me the greater accomplishment. (Is this the case as well with David Thomson? I treasure his writing on film more than almost any other critic, and The Whole Equation is now among my favourite books about Hollywood ever. But Try to Tell the Story, in which he recalls his postwar London childhood and his father's double life, awakens his readers to something altogether different in his prose, something to do with his ability to connect with the sense of loss and wild ambition he writes about with regards to Orson Welles, for example.) From Miracles of Life, I remember especially how he wrote about the corpses he would dissect in medical school as palimpsests of experience, how he wrote about Saskatchewan, where he spent some time in his youth, how he wrote about coping with the loss of his wife and the mother of his children, whom he had to raise on his own while trying to maintain a career as a writer. It’s so strange when writers die. They only existed for most of us on the page, and on the page they live still. Somehow I can still hear Ballard’s voice.


Invisible
Paul Auster—another Brooklynite!—has been on fire as of late—seven novels in ten years. He works diligently on stories that tumble into other stories, testaments to the fact that every one of us is a storyteller. Invisible may be the best of his recent work—in any case it’s the latest. (He’s but one of a number of novelists who churned out one solid book after another in the 2000s. I think of so many good ones from César Aira, Cormac McCarthy, Horacio Castellanos Moya, José Saramago… But I’m trying to draw this to a close here.) A man recalls a turning point in his youth, when he met a Satanic scholar and his lovely, younger wife, who endow the youth with knowledge of eros and death. This story, the first part of the book, is sent to an old friend, a professional writer, who then assumes the authorship of what we’re reading, and delves into still more perverse secrets in the first man’s past. Both of these men, the authors of the first and second parts, have much in common with Auster, but these commonalities highlight the trickster in Auster above all. Divided into four parts, Invisible shifts from place to place, from author to author, from first to second to third person, and then to the form of a diary. Some of these shifts seem designed as coping mechanisms; some imply crucial discrepancies. These discrepancies prompt the question: when does the past become fiction? Is it not happening every moment? And is storytelling not the most durable balm against our histories being swallowed into the fog?

Let there be lightning: Jennifer Baichwal discusses Act of God

The cloud looks lonely and monstrous, cradling some dying sun inside it. Though it’s only the first of many such ominous masses of droplets to loom throughout the film it’s the one that lingers in my mind. It seems to hold an unusually potent charge of destruction and wonder, but it rests there in the sky, suspended static, all threat. Act of God by contrast could be described as all question, an essay on chance and meaning that uses stories of being struck by lightning as a platform for meditation, without concern for hard results.

Paul Auster

Featured among the film’s subjects is novelist Paul Auster, modern literature’s custodian of chance, and musician Fred Frith, for whom improvisation forms the bedrock of his practice. Act of God ends not with a summation of theoretical points but rather a sort of duet between these two, with Auster describing an incident from his childhood where the kid next to him was fatally struck. The interplay between narration, guitar and percussion is buoyed by the filmmakers’ reining in of atmosphere, their evocation of the electrical brooding that precedes a great storm.

Fred Frith

There’s also James O’Reilly, whose monologue about death by lightning inspired the film. There’s Dannion Brinkley, the Las Vegas Lazarus whose near-death experience spurred a career as caregiver and New Age guru. There’s Alex Hermant, who remains off-camera while his lightning museum in Marcenat, France is on curious display. There are trips to Cuba and Mexico, where reverence for lightning assumes religious properties. There’s also a trip to a lab where we get to peek inside the electrical currents flowing through Frith’s brain while he develops one of his spontaneous creations.

Jennifer Baichwal

Jennifer Baichwal’s previous films Let It Come Down, The True Meaning of Pictures and Manufactured Landscapes profiled author Paul Bowles and photographers Shelby Lee Adams and Edward Burtinsky respectively. In each case the subject served less as material for straight biography than as a launch pad for a discussion of larger themes extrapolated from their lives and work. Act of God breaks from Baichwal’s established model by using a chorus rather than a single subject to address its theme. The result—sculpted in part by Baichwal’s husband and cinematographer Nick de Pencier, not to mention editor Roland Schlimme—works quite well more often than not, and the coda is exquisite. I spoke with Baichwal during the film’s premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto last spring. Appropriately, her responses to my questions rarely leaned toward conclusions.

JB: Act of God proceeds along these two distinct parallel thematic trajectories. It addresses a phenomenon that directly effects only a very small number of people, yet at it also invokes ontological questions that effect everyone. Which aspect sparked the film?

JBa: My background is in philosophy and theology, so I think about these sorts of questions a lot. How much meaning can you ascribe to events before becoming deterministic? How little meaning can you ascribe before becoming nihilistic? I read James O’Reilly’s monologue Act of God, about being struck as a young man and this existential crisis that happened as a result. His description of the moment of the strike and his immediate response to it were so interesting. On one level there’s this physical event, something that can be explained by weather and science and probability, et cetera. On another it’s the perfect metaphor for this struggle between meaning and chance. So what sparked the film was really both things simultaneously. I mentioned to Michael Ondaatje that I was thinking of doing this and he suggested I talk to Paul Auster. As well, Nick has always been fascinated by lightning.

JB: Funny that someone whose medium is photography would be so fascinated by something so difficult to photograph.

JBa: Almost impossible. It’s so fleeting. But Nick taught himself to be an electrician when he was young and knows a thing or two about electricity. We wanted to shoot our own images of lightning. If you look at the existing archive, most of it’s very unsatisfying. It’s generally only about the event itself. It gives no contextual information whatsoever.

JB: Your films thus far has been to some extent profiles of artists. I wonder if Act of God somehow also emerged from a desire to understand generative acts or creativity, accidents that bring flashes of insight or inspiration.

JBa: It’s no accident, I guess, that two people in the film are writers, and one’s a musician. I always turn to art when examining questions of the human condition. Even though Auster and O’Reilly resist ascribing meaning to what happens to them they can’t help but frame it in narrative, which you could argue is another way of doing just that. If the film’s thesis is that narrative is the most basic way we can create meaning, then the parallel of that was Frith’s improvisation, which struck me almost as an existential state of being between meaning and randomness. The fact that he embodies an electrical current somehow; to be able to see what that internal electrical storm in his brain looks like; to hear Frith’s brother explain how the brain learns by being confronted by the unexpected; to hear Auster describe his essay ‘Why Write?’ as an ars poetica but without theory, just stories—these are the essential things the film tries to address.

Plugging into Fred Frith's brain

JB: By creating these narratives we’re also attempting to free ourselves of the burden of these experiences on our consciousness.

JBa: It’s true. Why does that process allow us to be free of these experiences? Is it just because it stands in for making sense where sense can’t really be made? We tell stories about these things and it’s a way or ordering, of creating coherence.

JB: Did you ever consider a more didactic approach? Bringing in some sort of authority on meteorology, say?

JBa: I did wonder at one point if we might bring in someone to talk more about the science. The funny thing is that whenever you see TV shows about lightning, for example, the emphasis is always on demystifying it, where I really kind of wanted to do exactly the opposite. I wanted it to remain a mysterious force that precipitates all of these questions. I’m never really interested in making things didactic because I feel like if these questions we’re asking were very easy to answer then the subject wouldn’t be a very interesting thing to spend five years of your life working on. I don’t think it would be interesting for a viewer to spend 80 or 90 minutes on. Making a film like this is about opening up a space to think about something that’s not easily dismissible.

JB: There’s a significant gamble making a film like this because while it is a sort of essay film you’re entirely dependent on the quality of material you get from your subjects. How do you get them to align their statements reasonably closely to the thread of your film?

JBa: Finding the right stories is part of the process. When we went to France, for example, we didn’t know that Alex Hermant was going to say that he didn’t want to be on camera. We went a long way to interview him—the guy wasn’t in Paris, he was in the mountains. We went there with the kids and my mother, who was there to take care of them. So when Hermant laid this on us, Nick and I just looked at each other and thought, Well, this must be the essential thing about this person. This is the key to him. Let’s use it. Your relationship with our subjects is the most important element in any documentary. Unless there’s some exchange of vulnerability, some sense of authenticity, it’s not going to work. Finding a place where you can communicate can sometimes take days. Sometimes it can happen immediately. With Paul Bowles it took 30 hours to reach that place. With James O’Reilly, just the act of taking him back to this place where he hadn’t been for 30 years, watching him walking around trying to find the site for two days, watching him perform this spontaneous recreation, it seemed to find us all together in that place we needed to be. Because we didn’t set up that recreation. I could never set that up. I just don’t do that. I feel like I can always tell the directed act in a documentary. The person walking away thoughtfully, or whatever. You can always tell when it’s something they’ve been told to do.

JB: That’s something that Herzog seems to have mastered though, the created/spontaneous act. Of course he also made numerous fictional films before he was able to do that. But I was thinking that you do have one very Herzogian character in your film, this Dannion Brinkley. Were you ever concerned about the authenticity of his testimony?

JBa: There’s something completely bizarre and coincidental about him living in Las Vegas, the city of odds. When I asked him why he lived there he said it was the most spiritual place on earth. [Laughs] I don’t quite agree with that. But I absolutely believe that Dannion’s transformation is real. I’m sure there’ll be people who feel what he’s saying is untrue. But in some ways it’s not important whether you believe him or not. I wanted his story to be told the way he wanted to tell it.

Baichwal and Nick de Pencier at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival

JB: Given that Act of God is so much about the search for meaning, I wonder if you feel like your own beliefs have made their way into the film, even if only through some unconscious process.

JBa: It’s impossible for me not to be in every frame in some way. It’s not like these stories are somehow being directly transmitted and there’s no author behind it all. There’s no question that we—Nick, our editor Roland, myself—had an enormous impact on how those stories were told. Yet despite the fact that I would disagree strenuously that objectivity is ever possible in documentary, I do think truth is possible. We tried to shape things to retain as much fidelity to how people tell their own stories as possible with the tools at our disposal. It’s the way the whole is framed that’s very much informed by my own personal questions about these things. And also my lack of an answer. I don’t mind living in that uncertain place.

Hot Docs 2009: strange weather, slow death, violent crime, and private confessions

To say there was something electric in the air this year as North America’s largest documentary film festival commenced eleven days ago would be more than a mere platitude. Springtime is typically fraught with electrical storms in Southern Ontario, but the charge felt during the first night of Hot Docs 2009 was generated most prominently by the new film from Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, whose Manufactured Landscapes made such a deep impression both at home and internationally after premiering at Toronto’s other major festival back in 2006.

Act of God uses stories of being struck by lightning as a foundation for meditations on our urge to invest meaning in the most seemingly random events. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that the film feels a little random or rootless itself, but while frustrating desires for a more unified thesis and deliberately ignoring any exploration of the science, it delivers some enlightening profiles and, best of all, a duet of sorts between novelist Paul Auster, who eloquently recalls his experience of witnessing another child’s death by lightning during summer camp, and guitarist Fred Frith, who improvises a magnificent performance meant to invoke the primal drama of a tempest billowing over the landscape.

The equation of death and nature was also central to Swiss filmmaker Peter Liechti’s The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy, where heavily associational images accompany the story of a man who ventured into the wilderness to commit suicide by starvation. The voice-over reading of the man’s journal—the English version comes courtesy of Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler—alternately chronicles bodily collapse in increasingly disturbing detail, offers hints of the life he left behind, and muses on the bizarre choice of method, fasting in solitude ostensibly being the best way to witness the process of one’s own death. Based on a novel inspired by the real event, yet visually realized through a bank of images that feature no actors or recreations, The Sound of Insects playfully haunts the frontiers of documentary and fiction. It’s chilling, funny, hypnotic, and totally draining.

Private confessions are similarly the driving force behind Canadian filmmaker Alison Rose’s Love at the Twilight Motel, which features interviews with various clients of a pay-by-the-hour Miami love nest, many of whom are disarmingly lucid and affecting. The repellent yet admirably frank adulterer and closet junky who wants to protect his wife’s innocence; the Cuban massage therapist who feels it’s his duty to service sexually dissatisfied married women; the prostitute and exotic dancer desperate to reclaim custody of her children: each of Rose’s subjects is able to testify at length and with dignity intact in one of the Twilight’s anonymous rooms. Yet the film leaves you with questions regarding Rose’s intentions. What was she after? Who did she think she was going to fool by only showing portions of her subject’s faces as a method of disguise?

Love at the Twilight Motel is compelling, but a vaguely similar tack is used more rigorously and satisfyingly in Canadian filmmaker Alan Zweig’s A Hard Name, which features Zweig’s more transparently interactive interviews with several middle-aged ex-convicts, many of them with violent pasts. While talking to a former crackhead, a guy who grew up sleeping in abandoned buildings in Detroit, a guy who extended his prison sentence by 20 years just for the sake of stabbing Clifford Olsen 21 times with a pair of scissors, Zweig stays off-screen but remains very present, prompting the more tight-lipped, cracking jokes to ease tension, gathering advice on prison life, and gradually revealing that every last one of his subjects suffered sexual abuse as children. A guy named Art tells a particularly harrowing confession about feeling less capable of dealing with life outside than in. My heart went out to him. Before the screening I attended Zweig declared his hope that after this film his subjects would simply “be welcomed back into the family of man and just disappear into the crowd.” Of course, this didn’t keep Zweig from bringing a number of them up on stage afterwards. Sadly, Art was not among them.

The most sensational tale of going from brutal youth to violent adulthood and prison however would easily be that of Tyson, James Toback’s gripping profile of the eponymous former heavyweight champion. Even if you remember each of its key events (ear biting, et al.) as they unfolded, when you put it all together like this Mike Tyson’s biography is truly incredible, alternately inspiring and disgusting, a living essay on some deeply precarious notions of American race and sex. And Tyson ultimately emerges as a sort of poem about human contradictions, with constantly overlapping interviews in which Tyson gives glaringly incompatible testimonies on things like his rape conviction. Toback never interjects and seems totally uninterested in guiding us toward any conclusion. This movie is too ablaze with fascination for its subject and desire to provoke its audience to settle for anything as simple as closure.

American history X: Ronald Wright and Paul Auster review the story in progress

A nation is a living thing, and as a living thing—not to mention a thing of tremendous potential for both prosperity and peril—it requires ongoing examination. Definitions of nations are useful, yet they are not fixed, and as the US rapidly builds toward a new opportunity to re-define itself following a tumultuous period simultaneously characterized by unprecedented power and influence and unprecedented international disdain, it’s as good a time as ever to take the long view.

With What is America?: A Short History of the New World Order (Knopf, $29.95), essayist Ronald Wright, author of Time Among the Maya, Stolen Continents and A Short History of Progress, does just that, surveying the trends in defining American life from the arrival of the first Europeans and the gradual crushing of the old Americans by the new. The national character as described in this new book’s pages—one that is forever “losing its innocence” thanks to an unusually strong penchant for historical amnesia—is not very much flattered to say the least, but Wright’s aim is not to pat anyone on the back but rather to flush out the essential, long-circulating venom that plagues the heart of what, like it or not, is our world’s best hope. (Okay, them and, maybe, the European Union, but that would surely call for another book.)

What is America? is, as Wright admits, an eccentric book. As concise in volume as it is expansive in chronology, it spends precious little ink reiterating certain historical events, however enormous in implication, that have been exhaustively dealt with elsewhere. Thus slavery and the Civil War, to name two sweeping examples, are duly accounted for in the book’s thesis but left largely undiscussed in favour of more iconoclastic takes on other, still more unruly histories, such as that of the centuries-in-the-making extermination of Native Americans. Wright emphasizes the fact that it was not simply that white settlers usurped their territory and decimated their rank but that this territory was already being occupied by organized, sophisticated, agrarian peoples—not ranging savages standing in the path of civilization. He does this to make clear just how much the New World was founded upon not just the raw terrain but the time-tested developments of the Old: “The Pilgrims thanked their God for saving them in a ‘wilderness,’ but the feast speaks for itself: turkey, corn, beans, pumpkin, cranberries, potatoes and the rest came from thousands of New World civilization. It was the heathen, not the Lord, who saved them.”

Wright aligns the spin doctoring and self-deceit that facilitated the extermination of the Indians with like contemporary practices, aligning the rhetoric of Andrew Jackson with Ronald Reagan, or that of William McKinley, who needed to consult directly with God in order to allow him to justify invading the Philippines, with George W. Bush. Wright also gives a gracious nod to the work that fellow contemporary writers for laying the groundwork for some of his thesis, such as Jon Krakauer, who’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a history of violence in Mormonism, is cited in Wright’s exploration of the continuous role of fundamentalist religious thinking, not to mention paranoia, in the development of America’s march toward self-realization.

Yet while its list of dishonorable patriots is impressive, part of What is America? is also given over to paying tribute to the countless voices of intelligent dissent that are equally intrinsic to American identity. Besides Krakauer, Wright also draws upon the barbed lamentations of such luminaries as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Gore Vidal, Davy Crockett, Henry David Thoreau and Alexis de Tocqueville. And were he to take a gander at some of the other titles sharing the new releases section with What is America?, perhaps Wright would go on to include Paul Auster in his list, since Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $26), Auster’s latest novel, is also in a sense a work of American historical revisionism and Auster’s most clearly politically charged work since 1992’s Leviathan.

“I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.” These are the first words of Man in the Dark, which reads as the testimony of a 72-year-old retired book critic named August Brill. The wilderness he writes about is figurative, a vast landscape of relentless shadows, while the literal space he inhabits for the whole of the novel is but the single darkened room where he lies, his leg shattered by an accident, his mind roiling with persistent ghosts, those of his wife, deceased, his son-in-law, separated from his daughter, and his grandson-in-law, killed horrifically on foreign soil. Brill makes up stories to ward off misery, and the one he’s working on as Man in the Dark begins concerns an America embroiled in a new Civil War, one ignited by the corrupt presidential election of 2000.

Stories within stories are the gleaming mulch of Auster’s garden of ideas that deliberately slip away when sifted for singular meanings, but one of the things that I think ennobles Man in the Dark in particular is how boldly it exudes a faith in the redemptive power of storytelling, and how it locates the storytelling capacity in not just writers but in every one of us. The novel lights upon a dizzying catalogue of hot-button issues, from the war in Iraq to the erosion of civil liberties, yet it is the confluence of Brill’s imaginings with the stories he’ll later share with his grieving granddaughter about their family’s past that provides Auster with the meatier political statement, one founded in this crazy notion that a democracy really is meant to empower the individual, and that the access to individual dreams, to the inner lives of others, is the gift that novels give to readers to sustain them through troubled times.

Man on Wire: Trespassing as sublime art

On the overcast morning of August 7, 1974, New Yorkers lucky enough to have been passing below the twin towers of the World Trade Center bore witness to a genuinely singular event. Philippe Petit had ascended into the clouds for a walk, or rather a dance. The calendars of he and his accomplices were marked on that day with the word “coup.” Disguised, carrying much equipment, and having to constantly evade security, they’d snuck up to the rooftops the night before, strung their wire between the towers, and as the day began Petit, with a focus that's just unfathomable to me, inhabited the largely intangible performance space they’d created for about 45 minutes, dazzling onlookers, merrily taunting police.

They were all arrested, of course, charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. But the trespassing strikes me as essential to the nature of the feat. It needed to be unsanctioned, unexpected, a sort of vision nurtured clandestinely. Petit was sent in for psychiatric evaluation, but no mental illness could be established. The reporters asked Petit why he did it, and obviously there could be no satisfactory answer. In ‘On the High Wire,’ his essay on Petit, Paul Auster writes: “The desire is at once far-fetched and perfectly natural, and the appeal of it, finally, is its utter uselessness. No art, it seems to me, so clearly emphasizes the deep aesthetic impulse inside us all.” Indeed, the purity of the act is somehow its most potent element.

The event, the most grandiose and publicized in a life of similar feats, is the subject of James Marsh’s extraordinary Man on Wire. Marsh’s documentary—and caper movie of sorts—isn’t a point-by-point biographical profile of Petit. (March also has the grace to never make overt something best felt, the fact that recalling this event gives us back the WTC, not as a site of trauma and terror, but one of awe and inspiration.) Rather, Marsh focuses each moment of Man on Wire exclusively on the event’s painstaking preparations—which necessarily include Petit’s previous wire-walks across the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral and those of Sydney Harbour Bridge—and its immediate aftermath. And Marsh had the good fortune to have chosen a subject that was well documented: Petit and his friends shot a lot of terrific footage of their work-in-progress and of the coup itself.

Perhaps even more importantly, Marsh was fortunate to have a superb storyteller in Petit himself, still elfin, animated, a strawberry-maned Petit Prince, still deeply charismatic, not to mention his cohorts, including his articulate, passionate technical mastermind Jean-Louis Blondeau, and Petit’s girlfriend at the time Annie Allix. As Allix, with great sincerity, explains how upon meeting Petit, “it was quite clear that I had to follow his [destiny],” Marsh nicely juxtaposes her spoken testimony with images of her actually shadowing Petit on the wire, a moving evocation of a young woman surrendering completely to love.

Still, for those of us who’ve never witnessed anything like it, the build-up to the event, which roughly consumes the first two-thirds of Man on Wire, though exciting, can feel sort of abstract. It’s only when we begin to see the actual images, and even more so when we see and hear the intensely emotional testimonies regarding that day, that we are all helplessly caught up in the sublimity of the act, which bypasses audacity and becomes something that penetrates a universal desire to live more rigorously. And it also becomes clear in the film’s final section that Petit’s seemingly weightless passage over Lower Manhattan, the fulfillment of an elaborate, un-repeatable dream, was also a passage into another life altogether, a moment in which, inevitably, everything changed for everyone involved. This moment unfolds as something beautiful, overwhelming, and, in all those trailing-off sentences, something very painful. We should all be so lucky as to feel something like it sometime in our lives.