The war against forgetting: Salvador Allende

Patricio Guzmán has devoted much of his career to navigating the foggy history of his native Chile, particularly those few jubilant and turbulent years marked by the unprecedented non-violent ascension of its democratically elected socialist government and that long trail of dark years marked by terror, torture, order and oppression, by ostensible prosperity and cooperation with imperialist foreign powers, that followed. There’s this notion that Chile’s elder populace (those who didn’t, like Guzmán, go into exile), thinned out along its peculiar narrow stem of diverse topography, have constructed their national fog by way of a collective willful amnesia surrounding those aforementioned years. This amnesiac fog is invoked in the very title of Guzmán’s film Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997). I wonder if the process inherent in journeying through this fog, unable to apprehend a view of what’s ahead or behind, hasn’t contributed to that special wandering, uncharted feeling that accompanies some of Guzmán’s finest, most personal films.

This feeling is certainly among the most compelling elements of Guzmán’s Nostalgia For the Light (2010), a masterpiece essay film that traverses the Atacama Desert in search of distant stars and bones of the disappeared. Yet this feeling can even be found in the more conventional documentary Salvador Allende (2004), now available on DVD from Icarus. After repeatedly encircling the Allende enigma, most famously in the three-part, Chris Marker-produced The Battle of Chile (1975-79), Guzmán took this project as an opportunity to take direct aim at Chile’s controversial fallen president, about whom there remains a conspicuous paucity of commentary. Yet there’s nothing especially direct about Salvador Allende. It finds its path as it proceeds.

Guzmán narrates Salvador Allende, emphasizing the first-person approach, while his soft voice can also frequently be heard off-camera posing questions. Guzmán was in his early 30s when Allende came into power (and passed 15 doubtlessly despairing days of detainment in the National Stadium following the coup) and is able to cull a healthy portion of Salvador Allende from his own archive of footage, shot between Allende’s 1970 inauguration and 1973, the year of that other September 11, when US-backed military forces ousted Allende’s government (a day Guzmán hauntingly evokes with repeated images of flames consuming the Palacio de la Moneda following the aerial bombing). Early in the film, Guzmán explains that he wants to get to know the Allende beneath the icon. He travels to Allende’s native Valparaiso, where the city’s former mayor persuasively insists that Allende (who received support from Cuba, but not from the USSR) was neither Marxist nor Leninist but libertarian, having received his first political education from an anarchist Italian shoemaker. But as the film goes along this effort to focus on Allende the man quietly dissipates, replaced by a more straightforward chronicle of Allende’s pre-presidential political career, conveying his charisma and popularity, highlighted by memorable images such as the one of gleeful rural children chasing his departing campaign train.

Later in Salvador Allende Guzmán details Allende’s difficult presidency, his agrarian reforms and nationalization of the mining industry, the hostilities directed at his policies, and his outspoken contempt for US interference and multinational corporations. A notable, revealing interview with former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry confirms Nixon’s explicit commands to get rid of Allende by any means necessary. Yet, appropriately for a film about a politician devoted to workers and the poor, Guzmán finds many of his strongest sequences by giving the floor to ordinary Chileans. He documents a lively debate between several former UP militants about whether or not Allende should have defended the government and properly armed the militia. This debate also pries open the thorny question of Allende’s suicide, undertaken just as the army was about to take him prisoner, an event which only compounds the mystery of his life. One could argue that Salvador Allende falls short of its ostensible goal in that Allende is virtually as enigmatic a figure by the film’s end as he was at its start. But the fortitude of this enigma is also, it seems to me, the film’s point. Allende, though revered by Guzmán as he is by millions around the world, is a truly singular, enduringly contentious figure—so singular that very few have made significant attempts to tell his story. The value of Guzmán’s film is that even in its limitations it makes an enormous contribution to a conversation about Allende that needs to be maintained. In Guzmán’s films the personal inevitably merges with the political, and the articulated memories of the filmmaker and his subjects continue to wage a non-violent war against the perils of forgetting.

On the mercilessly relentless marvels of Koji Yamamura's animated shorts, now on DVD

It’s deep winter, and the old doctor’s horse lies dead in the snow. His assistant goes door to door asking neighbours to lend out their horse so that the doctor can make the ten-mile journey to call on a sick child, but it’s only when the doctor decides on a whim to investigate the contents of his own forgotten pig stall that he finds transportation. Led by a mischievous stable hand, two enormous black horses with ivory marbles for eyes squeeze out of the cramped stall like newborns spilling from a womb. You never know what you’ll find on your own property, the assistant, soon to become the stable hand’s potential rape victim, exclaims, and the doctor is on his way to an apparently healthy patient that politely requests that he be allowed to die and a mass of villagers that seem to be conspiring against the doctor for reasons unknown. They take off all his clothes and stuff him into bed with the peculiar boy now in his care.

The titular 20-minute animated film that constitutes the centerpiece of Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor & Other Fantastic Films by Koji Yamamura is an extremely faithful, which is to say oddly literal, adaptation. It diligently realizes each and every event relayed in Kafka’s seven-page story through colour-deprived images of figures whose limbs and heads balloon randomly as they move about and a first-person narration read by not one but two voices, evoking demonic possession. The doctor’s facial expression and body language do little to enhance our understanding of the character however. Yamamura seems content to illustrate Kafka’s strange tale in a distinctively dreamlike, compelling style and leave it at that, which seems perplexing when you compare ‘A Country Doctor’ (2007) to the bulk of the 13 films in Zeitgeist’s collection, which are nothing if not restlessly imaginative, so much so that watching just a few in a row can prove a tiresome experience.

The multiple award-winning, Oscar-nominated ‘Mt. Head’ (2002) is probably the most well known of the films here. It tells the story of an old miser who eats so many cherry pits that a cherry tree sprouts from his head and becomes a beloved gathering place for families and weekend warriors. It’s a clever, enjoyable, slightly spooky piece, though like most of the more recent films seems less characteristic of Yamamura’s work as a whole. The early ‘Aquatic’ (1987) finds a young Narcissus studying his reflection in a river until his reflection reveals a bizarre sea creature to be staring back. The water’s surface and the sky above become interchangeable. Amorphous life forms constantly come into being. The result is an essentially formless mediation in fluidity and visual depth that just sort of grooves along until it doesn’t anymore. In the more urban-themed ‘Perspektivenbox’ (1989) the parade of imagery seems to finally end for no other reason than it eventually gets dark outside.

In ‘Your Choice!’ (1999), made in collaboration with students in the US and Japan, a barber with a half-moon head seeks a light bulb. In ‘Bavel’s Book’ (1996) two kids find a book at a bus stop that transports them to another realm. In ‘Child’s Metaphysics’ (2007) a boy sneezes, blowing out his candle nose, while a literal birdbrain hovers trapped within a skull cage. The author of these works is clearly some kind of a genius. No ten seconds of screen-time in any of Yamamura’s films are anything less than inventive—the only problem is that so little of it adds up to very much, so sometimes ten seconds feels like enough. So in a sense, you might say that A Country Doctor & Other Fantastic Films, or at least the earlier works that constitute the bulk of the collection, makes ideal viewing for people with extreme short-term memory loss. There’s always something new!

Amacord: Send in il buffone

The title of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) derives from the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect spoken in the Northern Italian village where the writer/director was raised. It supposedly means “I remember,” though if this is true it’s probably safe to assume that the Romagnolian memory is more heavily imbued with fantasy than the average. Episodic, bawdy, cyclical, and at every point flamboyantly exaggerated, Amarcord, newly available on Blu-ray from Criterion, is a group portrait of Italian village life during the rise of fascism, a threat that seems to have no significant effect on humble provincial matters. It’s less a narrative than a vast mural that gradually reveals itself over the course of a couple of hours. Chronologically, a year has passed by the film’s end, but you can somehow imagine all of the preceding events simply repeating themselves once the last fade-to-black closes.

Caricatures of all types inhabit Fellini’s village, as do the deformed and the purely symbolic. The men are mostly salacious while the women are fantastically voluptuous, a collective homage to the corset. Some resemble drag queens, others are the closest thing to living embodiments of Robert Crumb drawings that this world will furnish. Families talking to each other in such blustery tones you worry the elder, heavier members could go into cardiac arrest at any moment. There’s a crazy uncle who pees his pants, carries rocks in his pockets, and climbs a tree in the middle of nowhere so as to declare his melancholy horniness to a nearly unpopulated landscape. There’s a teenage boy nearly smothered by massive breasts, each of them larger than his head. There’s a dwarf nun. And of course there’s sweet, red-haired Gradisca (Magali Noël), an object of desire that just wants to be loved, and an ideal frame upon which to display Danilo Donati’s costume designs, Gradisca’s favoured outfit being a dress and beret combo of a scarlet that hums on the screen as though radioactive, a sort of sex-force, not clothing but some kind of form-fitting energy field designed to ceaselessly prompt in viewers the urge to see its wearer naked.

So Fellini’s memory/imagination has rendered the world of his childhood a series of broad comic sketches. At times you get to feeling like you’re watching Benny Hill with millionaire production design. I confess my patience with the more cartoonish aspect of Fellini’s work, especially in the later films, those modeled on the circus and likely the source of all that’s most tiresome in the films of Terry Gilliam, has its limits. But the rewards of Fellini’s obsession with scale arrive in the inspired heights of artifice, the unabashedly fake and fragile-looking images, and the dream-like extremes of atmospheric conditions. Weather regularly turns his village into a fabulous theme park. The fog sequence is extraordinarily beautiful, as are those colossal mounds of snow that transform the village centre into a labyrinth. And because behaviour is typically so larger than life the rare moments when a character delivers a line with a straight face are that much more striking. Despite (or because of) all the fart jokes and pee jokes, nothing in Amarcord made me laugh as hard as a scene where an older patron leaves the village cinema and, when asked what she thought of the movie, looks directly at the camera and says without any inflection: “It was beautiful. I had a good cry.”

Rock Crystal: Lost in the glittering winter darkness, and happily so

“In most places, midnight as the very hour of his birth is solemnized by ritual of great splendor, to which the bells ring out their heartsome invitation through the still darkness of the wintry air; then with their lanterns, along dim familiar paths, from snow-clad mountains, past forest-boughs encrusted with rime, through crackling orchards, folk flock to the church from which solemn strains are pouring—the church rising from the heart of the village, enshrouded in ice-laden trees, its stately windows aglow.”

Adalbert Stifter

I realize now that, as a child, whatever magic surrounded Christmas for me seemed drawn exclusively from the past: old movies and old storybooks; my grandmother’s anecdotes of her own childhood Christmases; paintings, photographs, or other such images culled from or invoking of antiquity. I’ve just read Adalbert Stifter’s novella Rock Crystal (New York Review of Books Classics, $14.95), quoted above. It was written in, I believe, 1853. I was immediately entranced and even moved by the book’s delicate evocation of a time of year that as an adult I’ve come largely to dread—I’m irreligious, have no children, dislike frantic shopping and hate most Christmas music—and this relationship between Christmas’ former allure and such elements as the darkness of long nights unadulterated by streetlamps and luminous skyscrapers, genuine quietude, ancient rites and activities, and the serenity of an era that predates modern consumerism, now seems very obvious to me. I didn’t want to be transported to a mall; I wanted to be transported back to several decades before my birth. I’ve always had a special attachment to Ingmar Bergman films—maybe I just wanted to share my holidays with Fanny and Alexander.

The story of Rock Crystal is easy enough to summarize: two children travel from their tiny Alpine village to a slightly larger Alpine village to visit their grandmother on Christmas Eve; on the way back they’re lost in a snowstorm and forced to pass the night outdoors. The problem with offering such a synopsis is that this little drama constitutes only about half of Rock Crystal’s page-count. The first third or so, in which Stifter’s trickling prose runs through descriptions of the villages of Gschiad and Millsdorf, their inhabitants and customs, their relationship to the world beyond and most especially to the natural splendour surrounding them, initially seems to promise no drama at all. It seems rather like a work of wondrous, affectionate anthropology, until we gradually realize that everything Stifter details foreshadows the children’s journey: the hubris of their shoemaker father, the gifts provided by their grandmother, the discovery of the remains of a baker in the woods. Stifter draws his narrative from an exacting sense of place, an approach that, along with Rock Crystal’s setting, may have had a considerable influence on Visitation, a wonderful recent novel by the contemporary German author Jenny Erpenbeck.

W.G. Sebald

I don’t know how I first came to hear about Stifter, who was born in Bohemia in 1805, and died in Austria in 1868. Everything I’ve read refers to him as unknown or forgotten, but my finally getting around to reading Stifter this past week was prompted by W.G. Sebald, that specialist of the forgotten, who cited Stifter as an influence and, indeed, whose ornate sentences not only owe something to Stifter’s, but whose particular obsession with history possessed an unmistakable precedent in Rock Crystal, whose descriptions are so rapturous that it’s as though posterity depends on sheer urgency and devotion. (Incidentally, Stifter’s description of how the residents of Gschaid “are obliged to keep their dead with them over the winter till they can bring them to the valley for burial after the snow has melted” reads almost exactly like the description of dealing with the dead in Sebald’s own Alpine village offered in Sebald’s 1998 Writers & Company interview with Eleanor Wachtel.) In the writings of both Stifter and Sebald, memory is a living force, the past inextricable from the now, and the dead remain somehow present. Reading their work inevitably comes with an air of melancholy, but it also comes with deep consolation, perhaps most of all during these longest nights of the year.

TIFF '10: Into the past

I’m not really sure if dreams can be either forgotten or remembered, or if the best we can do is extrapolate on some lone fragment caught in the mind’s net as we ascend from the depths of sleep. Mere shadows. Such extrapolation lies at the heart of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which had its world premiere last night at the 35th Toronto International Film Festival. The power went out in the entire building twice during the screening, causing the movie to suddenly vanish before our goggled eyes and only after some minutes pick up again. I don’t know that these technology-defying interruptions hurled any of us back into the Stone Age exactly, but it did somehow feel part of the show, bringing the fleeting nature of our viewing experience into relief by weighing it against Herzog’s haunting, at times unspeakably moving images of 30,000 year old cave paintings. It also gave Herzog an added opportunity to work his customary showmanship, standing up during one of the pauses to assure us all that this was the first time the deluxe, ultra-modern Bell Lightbox, which opened only the day previous, had ever projected in 3D! He was also quite proud of the fact that the movie had apparently been finished only 15 hours previous.


The 3D is actually fairly subtle in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and I wonder if the movie wouldn’t be just as stunning without it, but it’s nevertheless the finest use of the technology I’ve seen, partly because the depth of field is already fairly limited once we’re moving through the narrow cavities. Though in many ways it picks up from where Encounters at the End of the World left off, using images of landscapes most of us never see as a way to contemplate time on an overwhelmingly vast scale, the movie feels somewhat closer to straight documentary for Herzog, perhaps because of his humbling reverence for what it is he’s been able to see and capture. He was given a very limited number of hours to work in the Chauvet Cave, which holds what are by a long shot the world’s oldest painted images, and which the French government rightfully offers few people access to. The space was such that he and his crew had to assemble their own custom-designed 3D cameras, sometimes improvising them right there on the spot. There are paintings that overlap each other that were made 5,000 years apart. There are images of bison with eight legs and rhino with multiple horns, which for Herzog resemble a kind of proto-cinema in their suggestion of movement. Not unusually for Herzog, the movie takes a decidedly meandering path, yet there’s nothing in its path that you’d want to rush. Ernst Reijseger’s gorgeous, silver-smoke music lulls us into a spell of looking, dreaming, forgotten who were are. Herzog interviews a scientist and former circus juggler who confessed that after his first experiences in the Chauvet Cave he had dreams every night of lions, both real and painted. They were so overwhelming he had to take a break from his work. Perhaps if enough of us see this landmark work we’ll all be having the same dreams, whether we remember them or not.

Blood on the dancefloor: Tony Manero on DVD

We can interrogate and, to some degree, illuminate the most tenebrous horrors of the past through making up stories, but what sort of stories should we devise? Which are best equipped to stir us out of despondency and actively engage us? The greater the horror, the more urgently and rigorously this question needs to be addressed. When the young filmmaker Pablo Larraín interviewed his fellow Chileans about living through the institutionalized terror of the Pinochet years, he found most of their memories to be foggy and imprecise. “What I got from this research was not any particular idea of what happened in terms of facts, but a tone, an atmosphere,” Larraín explains, “a combination of fear, sadness, and strangeness, because they didn’t know what was going to happen the next day.” Larraín’s response to these interviews was not to somberly chronicle the plight of victims of the Pinochet years, but rather to scour the era’s atmosphere and dread in search of a unique sort of character, one that might cloud the conventional frontiers diving victim from oppressor. His response was Tony Manero.

It’s Santiago, 1978, and 52-year-old Raúl is devoting all his energies to preparing for a local televised celebrity impersonation contest. It seems Raúl wants not simply to evoke but to literally transform himself into Tony Manero, John Travolta’s ambitious, disco dancing sensation from Bay Ridge, the hero of John Badham’s 1977 hit movie Saturday Night Fever. We see Raúl in a rundown cinema watching the film, studying Travolta’s moves and parroting his dialogue—but does Raúl ever stay to the end? Does Raúl even realize that Tony Manero never actually becomes a big star? Or is Raúl hoping to correct Saturday Night Fever’s downbeat ending by miraculously transcending his own marginalized existence of despair, poverty, confinement, communal living, dysfunctional sex, and routine applications of jet black hair dye to cover up the accumulating grey? Raúl will do anything to fulfill his dream of usurping reality with his distorted reading of an imported fantasy. His desire initially seems akin to that of so many go-for-it movie protagonists. You wonder at first if Tony Manero will be a comedy of self-discovery and triumph over adversity, its protagonist yet another addition to the movies’ ongoing collection of lovably obsessive, nerdy, underdog dreamers. But any such suspicions are dashed once we see Raúl help an old lady home after being mugged, only to get her alone in her little apartment and calmly bash her head in so as to steal her colour TV. Colour TVs were apparently tough to come by in Pinochet’s Chile.

Would Raúl have been a sociopath had he not lived under a murderous dictatorship? Are there certain kinds of monsters that are only awakened by the right circumstances, prompted by social conditions that seem to offer tacit permission to act out otherwise repressed atrocities? It’s a question that lingers in some of the novels of the posthumously celebrated Chilean-born author Roberto Bolaño, and Larraín, in his documentary-like follow-up to the very different, far more baroque, and not very successful debut Fuga, implies this question too, without offering any answers that might oversimplify his bizarre, grotesque and utterly absorbing story. Larraín instead focuses on imbuing Tony Manero with numerous details that heighten the film’s sense of place, its tension, and its black humour. Raúl’s incestuous housemates rehearse in their ramshackle performance space and perform their almost endearingly lame song and dance show for paltry audiences of locals happy for whatever sort of diversion to fill their hours before curfew arrives. Some of these housemates meet with secret insurgent groups, though Raúl himself isn’t to be distracted from his mastery of Manero embodiment, getting the right number of buttons on his white pants or the right high-density glass cubes to build an illuminated dance floor, just like that of Saturday Night Fever’s 2001 Odyssey nightclub, and replace the crappy wooden plank floor he memorably rips up in a wild fit when something in one of the group’s disco routines goes wrong. The success of that scene, like so many others, including an especially messy one you’ve just got to see to believe, rests firmly on the interpretative talents of lead actor Alfredo Castro, who plays Raúl with such complete, deadpan immersion it’s positively chilling. Castro’s work alone is reason to see this film.

Kino’s disc of Tony Manero is pretty much devoid of extras, and while that’s regrettable given that some minimal historical context at the very least might help certain viewers to appreciate its layers of critique and genuine audacity, it is finally a work that can stand alone and leave you reeling. Tony Manero barely screened in North American cinemas, but everyone with whom I watched it during its appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival, including a few Chilean friends, still haven’t forgotten the experience. Here’s hoping it continues to intrigue and appall viewers on DVD.

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.

Waxing La Moustache

General Emiliano Zapata and his fateful moustache

Have you ever encountered a book that seems created especially for you? I don’t mean a book that’s simply very good—the book I’m thinking about doesn’t need to be the best thing you’ve ever read. Rather, I’m talking about something that radiates déjà vu upon contact, something seemingly plucked from your subconscious.

I think it would be fair to say I’ve always been somewhat obsessed with moustaches. I won’t attempt to analyze it unduly. I do not habitually wear a moustache. I find it difficult to grow a very convincing one. But they interest me. Perhaps as the embodiment of male vanity and affectation, perhaps as the insignia of some occult brotherly union that transcends age, culture, and fashion. I certainly underwent that life-altering experience so many of us experience as small children, that fateful day when your normally moustache-emblazoned father suddenly emerges from a steam-filled washroom with his upper lip freshly stripped of hair. He stands before you and your family, perhaps sheepishly awaiting validation, and you find yourself frozen, prickled by the whiskers of the uncanny, wondering who is this strange, pale-faced man masquerading as your father? It’s a trauma we shrug off and laugh about, yet never quite get over.

Did Emmanuel Carrère endure the moustacheless father experience? Did he fear the moustacheless impostor? Does he himself wear a moustache, or, as they’re sometimes referred to in 19th century literature, moustaches? I have no idea. (I’ve seen a few images of him on the internet, all of them sans moustache.) Curiously, we have the same birthday, along with John Cassavetes, whom I’ve also never seen with a moustache. In any case, despite the fact that he’s made films, written a book about Philip K. Dick (of course!), and another about Werner Herzog (talk about memorable moustaches!), I’d never heard of Carrère until just weeks ago, when I was digging through a box of abandoned books on the street near my house and discovered a copy of Carrère’s 1986 novel La Moustache. I recalled having heard of a film of the same name coming out a few years ago, and thinking I should really watch that. Turns out it was adapted and directed by Carrère himself from his own novel. I understand it costars Emmanuelle Devos, who I find terribly appealing. But I still haven’t watched it yet. I’m just not ready.

Werner Herzog once wore a lovely moustache

John Cassavettes, to my knowledge, did not wear a moustache

“What would you say if I shaved off my moustache?” La Moustache begins with our hero asking his beloved spouse Agnes this innocuous question. He’s in the bath, contentedly enacting his long-practiced grooming ritual. “It was the only time he had left for meditation, self-knowledge, and the spiritual world…” Our hero has worn a moustache his entire adult life. He’s been married five years. He’s an average, middle-class French guy—this is the mid-1980s, so moustaches have not yet entered their current, unfortunate phase of being identified with kitsch, considered the exclusive facial décor of cops, cowboys, gay guys, or Mexicans—so his whimsical suggestion is loaded with consequence. He’s going to look different. Perhaps people will laugh at him. But what the hell?

He shaves it off while Agnes runs an errand. She returns, and he’s cheerfully prepared himself for whatever response his naked lip garners. He doesn’t expect no response. Agnes seems completely oblivious. Is she toying with him? They go to visit their best friends. They too seem not to notice. Did Agnes clandestinely warn them in advance? This conspiracy of silence continues, following our hero all the way home, all the way to bed. He confronts Agnes, but even after the mounting tension doesn’t expect what she has to tell him: that he never had a moustache. At this early stage, La Moustache has already descended into nightmare, one that reverses the childhood scenario described earlier, one akin to tales of metamorphosis from Kafka or Gogol or, more recently, Kobo Abe, whose novels include one about a guy who finds cauliflower growing on his legs. One no less unnerving for its absurdity.

He quickly found the smaller bag they used for the bathroom waste can, picked out cotton swabs, two Tampaxes, an old tube of toothpaste, another one for skin lotion, and some used razor blades. And there it was, his hair. Lots of it, but scattered all over, not exactly as he’d hoped. He’d imagined a nice compact tuft, something like a moustache, holding together all by itself. He gathered as much of it as possible and collected it in the palm of his hand. When he’d amassed a little mound, less than he thought he shaved off, he went back upstairs. He entered the room without a sound, his cupped hand outstretched. Sitting down on the bed next to Agnes, who was apparently asleep, he switched on the night-table lamp. She moaned softly. Then, since he was shaking her shoulders, she blinked open her eyes and grimaced when she saw his open palm thrust in her face.
“And this,” he said harshly, “what do you call this?”

Our hero cradles the remains of his moustache as through it were intact, independent, soul-bearing, his proof that something now lost, dissembled, waiting to merge with nature, once existed, this formerly integral piece of him that no one recalls. (This scene has its echo in the film The Man Who Wasn’t There, when Billy Bob Thornton’s barber reverently resolves to take the day’s mass of cut hair and bury it behind the shop, as though it constituted a dearly departed.) I don’t want to spoil too much of where La Moustache goes, but there is the suggestion that there’s something inherently hazardous to one’s identity in grooming, in clipping away at our extremities, which, once vanquished from body, may vanish from memory too. And if a moustache could just disappear as though it never existed, what might follow? “One should always hold on to everything, never overlook the slightest bit of evidence,” our hero muses, recalling an animist tribe in Java who once collected their fingernail clippings, excrement, and hair, “everything that was a part of them and that would allow them to enter the gates of paradise in one whole and unmutilated piece.”

Emmanuel Carrère

Of course, the real warning in La Moustache might be against growing a moustache at all. Perhaps when I next see my father I should ask not who he might become without his moustache, but whether the moustache hides another, unknown person altogether.

The eternal return: Last Year at Marienbad

For all its ostensible chilly formalism, for all its legendary difficulty, in the slowly shifting dynamic of suggestion, resistance and surrender that underlies every moment of Last Year at Marienbad (1961) there are things that, to my mind, can’t help but worm their way into the most tenebrous corners of the psyche. Memory, to paraphrase a character in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, is a language we all (mistakenly) believe we speak. But its malleability, its essential formlessness holds the key to our deepest fears and desires. The seduction at the heart of Marienbad is that of having someone recount to you all that you can’t recall about some moment that’s either dissolved into the fog of your past or, your strongly suspect, never happened. The seducer wants you to believe in that romance you never had, telling it to you over and over until this miracle happens and you begin to complete the memory yourself. And if you can be persuaded of the verity of this memory—of not only the romance but also the possibility of its revival—you may still have the chance at freedom you thought lost.

The promise of Marienbad is right there in a narrative as utterly simple as its realization is labyrinthine, a variation on a thousand other movies—in short, a love triangle. At a vast luxury country resort populated by well-heeled guests, X (Italian heartthrob Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince A (Delphine Seyrig, virtually unknown at the time) that they met in this same place the year previous, fell in love, and planned to run away together. Away from prying eyes and oppressive décor; from M (Sacha Pitoëff), A’s pale, vaguely vampiric husband, who always wins at the impenetrable table games he plays with the other guests; from “this edifice of a bygone era, this sprawling, sumptuous, baroque, gloomy hotel where one endless corridor follows another,” a place where people seem to always be returning out of sheer habit, where statues seem to move when no one looks, and people often resemble statues, a place where even shadows reveal discrepancies and whose boundaries are never breached at any point in the movie. As the camera continually surveys the place, adrift like a listless ghost, you start to wonder if the only “true” memories are to be found within its moldings, chandeliers and sculpted doorways.

Director Alain Resnais and novelist-turned-screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet never let on. Robe-Grillet was inspired by Adolfo Bioy Casares’ fantastical masterwork The Invention of Morel, and his script shares the late Argentine author’s design of a narrative logic that remains partially hidden from the audience while providing a solid foundation for all that transpires. Sacha Vierny’s weightless camerawork and Jacques Saulnier’s production design—the hotel’s interiors were all constructed—convey an absolute elegance that would imbue countless perfume adverts and inspire Stanley Kubrick’s wandering through the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (80). In the flamboyantly elliptical editing patterns of Resnais and editors Henri Colpi and Jasmine Chasney, the film’s baffling yet most explicit expression of its interplay of memory and fantasy, we find the blueprint for the most mesmerizing sequences in Wong Kar-Wai. In Seyrig’s marvelous performance, aided by a dizzying array of costume changes furnished by Coco Chanel, bewitching make-up and sweep of bangs that seem to invite her being swept off her feet, we’re given a beguiling balance of cool opacity and near-palpable anxiety. She’s in danger. She proves just how many expressions one face can give to uncertainty and unease, while still every bit the embodiment of useless glamour and the elusive promise of sex. She’d soon play the central role in Resnais’ still more intricate investigation into the same core themes—plus a bracing political subtext—in Muriel (63), and moodily inhabit another similarly memory-haunted house in Marguerite Duras’ India Song (75).

Watching Criterion’s well-endowed and gorgeous new director-approved DVD edition—also available in Blu-ray—I fell under the spell of Marienbad all over again. Which is to say I got totally lost in the thing, its details, repetitions, infinite mirrors and strange echoes, the shattered glass and collapsing marble rail, the sexual assault that reads as clown show. And even after having just seen it again I question my memory of it, small moments that may have happened, or maybe just alluded to, maybe only suggested in some subtle way. Maybe I just invented them, as we sometimes do with movies that consume us. I’ll happily re-watch it and try to confirm whether this or that memory is true, though I suspect I’ll just get lost all over again. Either way, these memories are worth holding onto, even if they lead me astray.

Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro's variations on a theme always amabile, rarely animato

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s most widely admired novels, such as The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans or his most recent, Never Let Me Go, memory’s vice grips conspire with some essential inward tendencies within his narrators to gradually reveal intricate discrepancies between the personal story being relayed and the larger story of the world surrounding. Unreliable narrators constitute a well-mined trope in fiction, but Ishiguro has raised it to a highly particular, melancholy art though crisp, concise language, inventive narratives, a sly manipulation of genres as varied as science-fiction and mystery, and, most especially, an unusual willingness to immerse himself so fully into the minds of his protagonists. I’ve pretty much adored everything he’s written, and greatly admired its daring variation, so I guess I’ve set the bar pretty high.

Still, with Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Knopf, $29.95), Ishiguro’s first story cycle, I began to wonder if the one literary boundary Ishiguro’s genius can’t quite traverse is the one that separates the needs of long-from from the short. The stories in Nocturnes are each perfectly absorbing and worth the relatively brief investment required, but taken either as separate components or as a whole—which is presumably the author’s intention—they never quite ascend to Ishiguro’s established heights of emotional complexity. As with all Ishiguro’s work, these stories—of vagabond third wheels trying to interpret the cryptic tensions that exist between couples; of musicians who never quite make it as big as they’d hoped; of lives in stasis contrasted with lives in upheaval—observe the precariousness of nostalgia and the pitfalls of poor communication with knowingness. The problem might simply be that few of these characters truly come to life so as to make that knowingness resonate deeply.

In ‘Crooner,’ Jan, a cheerful young Polish guitarist living in Venice, plays for tourists on the piazza circuit, one of whom being Tony Gardner, a 60ish, once-famous American vocalist. He asks Jan to play backup during a moonlight serenade for Garnder’s wife Lindy. They discuss strategies for injecting specificity of feeling into one’s performances, cultivating those unuttered mental images that imbue one’s playing with texture. What Jan has in his mind—memories of his mother taking consolation in Gardner’s records during bleak days in Communist Poland—differs greatly with what Gardner has in mind—memories of a marriage that for his wife has essentially been a career move. Jan says of his playing: “I tried to make it sound like America, sad roadside bars, big long highways, and I guess I was thinking of my mother, the way I’d come into the room and see her on the sofa gazing at her record sleeve…” Each is lost in private, disparate reveries, but if Jan’s reverie is slightly clichéd, I can’t say I ever bought into Gardner’s story at all. Like a number of the larger-than-life Americans found in Nocturnes, he feels like a conceit.

Lindy Garder however is more developed, particularly since she’s able to return later in ‘Nocturne,’ the fourth story, which—get this—finds Steve, a struggling Los Angeles saxophonist, agreeing to allow the rich man who stole his wife from him to pay for Steve’s plastic surgery, a dubious effort to help forward the unhandsome session player’s lagging career. Steve winds up spending his post-surgery rest period in the posh hotel where he meets the slightly older, rather convincingly batty Lindy, who’s just gone under the knife for the third or fourth time. There are several moments in Nocturnes where Ishiguro, who mastered a Kafkaesque comic vernacular in his underrated The Unconsoled, strains for laughs. But once Steve and Lindy meet, the both of them traipsing around the hotel in the middle of the night with their heads wrapped in bandages, at one point trying to retrieve a stolen trophy from the bowels of a roast turkey, I have to hand it to Ish: this stuff is pretty hilarious. And it cries out for a younger Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, say, to do the movie version.

But in ‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’ similar hi-jinx are thwarted by an uncertain tone or too much repetition. Middle-aged university pals reunite. They’re so comfortable with each other that they can insult each other and, despite protests to the contrary, insist they know what the other is thinking to increasingly absurd degrees. Basically, they don’t listen to each other. This not listening goes on for a while. Again, Ishiguro holds things together. He never betrays the basic traits with which he’s endowed his protagonist—though he does, rather improbably, have him imitate a dog. But what he has endowed his protagonist and his narrative with here is pretty limited, even for a short story. The more serious ‘Malvern Hills’ is similarly founded in a solid premise—young English guitarist meets long-married Swiss tourists so oblivious to each other they don’t seem to exist on the same planet—that doesn’t arrive at a very satisfying resolution.

Which leaves us with ‘Cellists,’ the collection’s final and in some ways strongest tale, partially because while being written in Ishiguro’s customary first-person, the narrator is telling the stories of other people who remain sufficiently enigmatic as to make us wonder about what really transpired between them and where their paths led them in the shadow years after the story finishes. It concerns Tibor, another talented young musician from another Eastern European country—Ishiguro’s quite sensitive to the distinctive experiences of Eastern Europeans who fall under the spell of Western music—whose taken under the wing of Eloise, another American musical celebrity—or at least that what Eloise advertises herself as. Eloise is a fascinating question mark, existing on this strange frontier where it’s hard to distinguish between what passes as lived-in wisdom and as pure fantasy. Her true nature is fundamentally unknown to us, yet what we do know about her are details so carefully arranged that we leave the story wanting to know more without feeling we’ve been ripped off.

When darkness fails: On horror, The Strangers, terrific first acts, lousy endings, and using unlikable stars to your advantage

For all my problems with the movie—which you can read about here—I have to give Eden Lake some credit. It did manage to kinda stick to my ribs after I rented it a couple of weeks ago. It whetted my appetite for more new horror, and I found myself deciding to give writer/director Bryan Bertino’s debut The Strangers a whirl, despite my having this lingering memory of glancing at reviews from the time of its theatrical release last year that deemed it ridiculous. Well, ridiculous it certainly is, with far more creeping-up-behind-you moments than any movie can probably sustain, a few of those turgid scenes where the actors have nothing to do but flip out, cover their faces and say oh my god a dozen times, and risibly inconsistent antagonists, a zombie-like trio who wear these stupid masks for no apparent reason, who rarely talk, and when they do they sound like morons, and who seem to suffer from some serious short term memory loss, given how often they lose track of the whereabouts of our vulnerable, desperate heroes, a young couple trapped in a cottage in the woods. Still, I find myself in this position of, on one hand, wanting to completely write-off the movie for ultimately proving itself to be so dramatically soppy and, on the other, pondering the intricacies of its highly intriguing first act. I didn’t realize just how similar the set-ups were in Eden Lake and The Strangers when I rented the latter, but let me tell you, while Eden Lake is arguably the more effective chiller of the two, The Strangers has certain elements that if reapplied could still make for a very interesting movie.


Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman), like the protagonists of Eden Lake, venture into the woods for a romantic getaway during which the male of the couple plans to propose marriage. Unlike the unfolding of Eden Lake however, the proposal in The Strangers occurs before the couple arrive at their isolated locale. In fact, we only confirm the proposal’s occurrence in what is basically a flashback within a flashback, in a sequence of narrative fragments that serves to disarm the viewer quite effectively. And unlike the couple in Eden Lake, who seemed unambiguously in love with each other and ripe for tying the knot, essentially just tragic victims of circumstance, Kristen and James begin the story with the devastating realization that they’re not in agreement as to what they want from their relationship. Kristen, we discover, has turned James down, and in the same way that we can read the apocalyptic events of The Birds as being some sort of manifestation of Melanie Daniels’ perusal of Mitch Brenner, of the female protagonist’s sexual unconscious overwhelming that of the male’s, so can we read the horrific events that arise in The Strangers as being some similar manifestation of Kristen’s assertion of her desire to remain unwed and independent, of the intense discord it inflicts upon an event intended to be a celebratory confirmation of love and devotion.


I have to confess that I really don’t find Speedman a very appealing presence in movies. I won’t get into the quality of his acting abilities here, but, for the sake of my next point, let me just announce my entirely subjective distaste for the guy as a movie star. The point being that Speedman, for precisely the same reasons that he bugs me, is, for me at least, pretty much perfectly cast in The Strangers. James, having been freshly rejected, comes off as a truly oppressive boyfriend, one who grows only more oppressive with every ostensibly gentlemanly act he performs, such as his insistence that Kristen take the engagement ring he bought for her regardless of her refusal of marriage. He can’t take it back, he says, so she might as well have it. So gratingly paternal is James with Kristen that even when he’s about to leave the cottage to run an errand, he lights a fire for Kristen, as though she were incapable of doing it herself. The extent of his oppressiveness can be found even in the film’s setting itself: it’s his family’s cottage they’re going to spend the night in, full of his memories, placing him into an even greater position of power, power now essentially resigned to gloating resentment and annoying self pity. (And, to return to the movie’s dumbness, this old family cottage that seems to be uninhabited most of the time somehow has this amazing collection of contemporary music from the likes of Joanna Newsom, Gillian Welch, and Billy Bragg and Wilco, and not just on vinyl, but on 45!) No wonder Kristen doesn’t quite feel comfortable marrying this guy. He’s suffocating.


So a stranger turns up at the door, asking for somebody named Tamara. James leaves on his errand and while he’s gone the stranger returns and starts to torment Kristen, even penetrating the house without Kristen’s witnessing it, only to go back outside and knock on the door again. Go figure. James returns, the strangers multiply and get noisier and more insistent and there’s a predictable but nonetheless satisfying twist in how the first real act of violence plays out. So far so good, but it’s all downhill from there. So be it. But what about that first act? Is it me or is there something to it? It seems to be a prime example of the peculiar condition of the horror genre: while things are still ambiguous and the basic elements still falling into place, a horror movie can hold so much promise that that promise itself can, for some of us, actually make the movie worth watching. Even if the ending stinks. I’m imagining a film festival somewhere that only shows the first half-hour of horror movies. Afterwards audience members gather and discuss various endings that would often be superior to the actual endings. Who knows? Could be a hit.