Beat Generation @ Centre Pompidou

Bruce Baillie, Castro Street, 1966

The real joy of this exhibition, and in my mind, the main reason to go, are the rarely screened films. The exhibition includes lots of photographs of Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs, Corso and all sorts of other characters, there’s the original typescript of On the Road laid out down the centre of the first rooms, a handful of Burroughs machines, a sampling of Frank’s The Americans, and other treats. But it’s the opportunity to see, for example, two of Bruce Conner’s never screened films, Looking for Mushrooms (1962) and Crossroads (1976) that make the exhibition exciting. Even films that are available such as Bruce Baillie’s Castro Street are so rarely screened, and it’s a treat to see them in large format. Even if they are shown on DVD, as opposed to projected, they are absorbing viewing. I also loved the anonymous footage of Vietnam War protests in New York City for its examples of early video. The colour is unlike anything we would see today. And films by Christopher MacLean, Burroughs, Bruce Baillie make great viewing.

Beat Generation exhibition view
Kerouac's On the Road laid out in the middle

I also have to admit that even though I loved seeing these films, many of them are not Beat Generation films. Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959), and the collaborations made with Antony Balch for The Cut Ups (1966), and maybe a couple of others can be seen as Beat films-including Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964) and other films, and Harry Smith’s great experiments-- but many of the others screening in Gallery One are not. The late 50s and early 60s was an incredibly furtive moment in American filmmaking, so there were lots of filmmakers and artists making films at the time, experimenting with the medium, doing wild and wacky things. But Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie and Bruce Conner for example are not Beat filmmakers.

 

Kerouac Paraphernalia ... is this really that interesting?

Which leads to what for me was the biggest problem with the exhibition. It uses images of all kinds—photos, films, paintings, graphic art, drawings as documents to exhibit social and cultural and political beliefs. There is no attention to the artistic value of some of these documents. The whole point of the Beat Generation was that they challenged the social and political domain through experimentation in form and aesthetic of their chosen media. Moreover, for the filmmakers such as Smith and Rice, they weren’t just tripping out on drugs and making their experience into films, but their films contain a highly sophisticated philosophy regarding around the use of experimental film (as opposed to other media). The critical ways that these artists manipulated form and aesthetic is completely lost in this exhibition. Similarly, the exquisite use of the camera by Robert Frank in The Americans or even by Burroughs in his never-exhibited photographs is completely lost here. These guys changed art in a way that Duchamp had forty years before them, and because there is no discussion of the aesthetic, there’s no way of knowing the influence and impact they had.

 

Unknown Photographer, Burroughs in the Villa Mouniria Garden, Tangiers. 

I am always irritated by these exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou because of the conventional mainstream vision they offer of a movement such as the Beat Generation. A visitor to this exhibition could well come away with the belief that there were no women, at all, working in this time. From what the exhibition tells us, if women existed in this world, they did so as accessories to the men’s genius. The only relationships that are given significance as having a formative influence on the writers and artists are their gay male lovers. There were in fact a whole host of women who were producing and collaborating and inspiring these works, but they are not shown here.

 

Harry Smith

Lastly, the all-over-the-place nature of the exhibition really dilutes the power of what the Beats were doing. Rather than going for the all out summer exhibition bonanza, I would have liked something that was more sensitive to the relationship between all these different movements, art works, artists, art forms and a much more nuanced placement of the movement vis-à-vis political and historical events. It is true that footage of the Vietnam War, for example, is gorgeous, and yes, it’s going on at the same time as the Beats develop their ideas and work, but more information on their actual engagement with it would have been more satisfying the events as something like background scenery.

Robert Seethaler, A Whole Life, trans. Charlotte Collins, Picador, 2014

The blurb on the back of Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life likens Andreas Egger to John Williams’ Stoner, but he’s completely different. Stoner is an extremely depressing book because the title character is a victim in every sense of the word. Stoner is at the mercy of an academic system that has no care for intellectual values and commitment to his students. He is bullied by the colleague who self-promotes and politics his way to the role of department chair. Stoner marries the wrong woman, and having grown up in a small town in Ohio, he adopts middle-American morality that keeps him tied to her for life. And he doesn’t have the social ability to confront, or better, escape his oppressor. He may not be integrated into the university, but he is in it, a part of that world, and he cannot get away from his circumstances. Stoner is trapped. Andreas Egger in A Whole Life is not.

We all fall in love with Andreas Egger because he is joyous and expresses wonder at the world. Stoner is perhaps a little too close to my own life for comfort, so I find him depressing. By contrast, there’s a part of me wants to be Egger. No matter how brutal and unfair the world into which he is born, Egger has in him a love of life, a habit of looking out into the universe and seeing its magic. Even as he is violently beaten by a step father, or sent to the farthest outpost of a Russian POW camp in an environment that makes the climatic conditions in the Austrian Alps of his hometown seem tropical by comparison, he finds solace and welcomes acceptance of his situation. Likewise, Andreas Egger doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of him. Egger never suffers for the sake of social mores, and he certainly doesn’t adhere to any conventions. Egger is the best worker hired by the company who builds the first cable car on the mountain, he toils in the fields, has calluses and scars all over his hands, his gammy leg is like a piece of wood he carries around with him for a lifetime, he is put in a box by the Russians, but he doesn’t really care what others think of him. The experience that lasts the longest in his mind is one of the shortest in his life: his love for Marie, a young woman who works at the local pub. And through all this, he has very little money, usually one pair of pants and at most a cup and a plate as his worldly possessions. As a young man he buys a plot of land that is so high up the mountain vegetation can’t grow. It is lost not long after he buys it by an avalanche that also kills his beloved Marie and their child. But Egger thinks “things had not gone so badly after all.”

We fall in love with Egger for the expanse of his heart and his mind, even though he leaves the village only twice in his life: once to go to war and the second time on a bus at the end of his life, just for the sake of leaving. The vastness of the universe through Andreas Egger’s eyes is shown in his understanding and harmony with the natural environment. He can bear the ice cold because it is as if he has always been out in the cold, he can toil for hours because he has a sense of self to match, and when he looks to the stars at the end of a day, he thinks that life is filled with infinite possibility. The promise is in the stars.

There are some magical moments in Egger’s life. As is often the case with a character who doesn’t leave his small community, wonder comes to him. A worker loses an arm that he must bury, a man’s body is preserved in ice for forty years, and when the body reappears it is like a freak in a sideshow. The coming of television is exquisitely handled by Seethaler. In the middle of his violent stepfather’s funeral, Egger hears a child’s laughter.

“One of the windows was ajar and flickering brightly. The landlord’s little son was sitting in the room in front of an enormous television set, his face right up against the screen. The reflection of the images danced across his forehead; he was clutching the antenna with one hand and slapping his thighs with the other as he laughed. He was laughing to hard that through the curtain of rain Egger could make out the glistening drops of spittle spraying against the box.”

He thinks about stopping, but quietly decides to continue the procession. When Egger proposes to Marie, he organizes for her name to be written in fire across the mountain that is his home. In one of the most tender and yet tense moments in the book, Egger comes face to face with a Red Army soldier.  The two soldiers, in the snow, no one and nothing else between them, their mutual respect and simultaneous disinterest in each other reveals the triumph of human nature over war. There is no question of what to do with the enemy; they let each other live.

Lastly, given my blog about the joys of spare writing, it’s worth saying that this is a novel of 148 pages that sees the unfolding of an entire lifetime. And it’s a lifetime that is full and rich, complicated by heartbreak and persecution, as much as by love and joy. I read the book in English, so I say with some reservation, that the economy of language is the necessary mirror for Andreas Eger’s reluctance to speak. One of the people he meets on his journey tells Egger that those who talk don’t listen. And it's as though this book asks us to listen, just for a brief time, to its wisdom.

Summer Reading: The Mussel Feast by Brigit Vanderbeke and Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters

I loved The Mussel Feast. I know that Vanderbeke has lifted her writing style and form directly from Thomas Bernhard, but she uses Bernhard’s single paragraph, stream of consciousness, flow of ideas, to quite different but equally provocative effect. The family at the centre of Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast is as trapped by dysfunction and violence as Reger in Old Masters is made instransigent by his neurosis and solitude. And while Reger’s caustic opinions are tightly wrapped within the walls of tradition in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the the family that sits at the table, before a large pot of mussels waiting for a father who will never come home is held hostage by an equally unforgiving institution: marriage in the former Eastern Germany. The young protagonist of The Mussel Feast, though less experienced in the world than Reger, the protagonist of Old Masters, offers penetrating insight into the frightening destruction of a family that cannot break the walls of shame and guilt imposed by years of patriarchal oppression. And she does this, befitting a child, as if in passing. She mentions her thoughts of suicide, her mother’s emotional abuse by a husband who cannot escape the trauma of his own childhood. While Reger sits before an old master painting, his thoughts wander around the world, from politics, to religion, to the weather and every aspect of German philosophy. The child in The Mussel Feast by contrast, sits with her young brother and mother around a table at the centre of which is a pot of mussels. From here, she takes us deeper and deeper into the recesses behind the doors of familial loyalty.

The narrative of The Mussel Feast is like a therapy session, as we the reader become witness to the trauma that has been kept inside, by the violent oppressive father for the lifetime of the young female narrator. We wonder how she, her brother, and most of all, her mother could have survived the father’s manipulation and violence, but of course, we know the impossibility of leaving such situations. We know how the daughter survives, she turns inwards, and leaves the family room if only in her thoughts. It is as though the memories of the father’s abuse become louder as the waiting continues, as the mussels tire and become less edible. Or perhaps it is that the young narrator becomes more confident in relating the events that led to her father’s disappearance from their lives. It comes as a great relief that he doesn’t return at the end of the night, but at the same time, the family is helpless and does not know what to do, how to behave now that the glue that held them together has evaporated. Clearly, The Mussel Feast is also an allegorical tale of patriarchal oppression of a more public kind in the former East Germany.

Vanderbeke sent me back to Bernhard’s Old Masters, a book so immersed in the pleasure of thought and reverie as it happens in a great art museum, that I wanted to live inside the Bordone Room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna together with Reger. Like all of Bernhard’s protagonists, Reger is a solitary man, a social recluse, an intellectual with an acerbic wit and a penetrating insight on the reality of the Viennese, of Austria, of European life. Reger commands a court of two — the guard Irrsigler, and the listener Artzbacher who he has summoned to meet him at 11.30am before Tintoretto’s White Bearded Man in the Bordone Room.

Between them Reger and Artzbacher take us from the lavatories in Vienna through the corruption and oppression of the Catholic Church, to the curse of childhood and the inherent untenability of the family as an institution. In usual Bernhard fashion, Reger is the voice of the author and we see, we laugh, we cannot help but agree with his scathing perspective on art, music, history, and on the pretentions and aspirations of humanity. What makes the book so brilliant is different from Vanderbeke’s. While she captures the most devastating events of a lifetime in a single sentence, for example, the desire of a child to jump from a window, Bernhard can dwell on a topic for pages. He has Reger and Artzbacher muse on the mediocrity of the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, or “that ridiculous Nazi philistine in plus-fours” Martin Heidegger, the incompetence and absurdity of the Art Museum guide, the unseemliness of Viennese lavatories. Bernhard connects the topics of conversation effortlessly, the one flowing into the next in the most seamless of ways, like thinking. The book is one long sentence moving in and out of the voices of the three characters. Until, in the end, it is impossible to distinguish between Reger and Artzbacher’s voice.

Nothing happens in either novel. The silence of waiting holds within it the distinction of these two compelling reads: In The Mussel Feast the waiting is excruciating as the mother and brother, together with the protagonist, anticipate the return of the angry father. But silence is also a place to go where the father cannot reach the young narrator. Silence is a protection against the inevitability of being physically, mentally, emotionally violated. In Old Masters the silence of the Bordone Room before Tintoretto’s painting is a privilege, a joy, a place to dive into. It is the space held open for Reger only by the loyal guard, Irsigler. Silence in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is the magical space created by an opinionated but nevertheless wise old man. In Vanderbeke’s novel, silence is the purveyor of something terrifying. And of course, as we look outwards from each novel, it makes sense that the representation of silence might be their distinguishing hallmark: in 1980s Vienna, silence would have been laced with creative energy, whereas a young girl in a novel written at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall would understandably communicate horrendous familial abuse behind the silence of her screams. 

The Master and Margarita, dir Simon McBurney & Complicité

It was such a treat to see Simon McBurney/Complicité’s production of Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita in Paris last week. The trek out to Bobigny and the not exactly congenial experience of theatre MC93 was quickly forgotten by what was, I thought, a riveting and masterful production.

I was mesmerized for three hours by the vivacity of the production, and especially in its capturing of the complexity of Bulgakov’s narrative. The weaving together of  literary references, German philosophy, the asceticism and oppression of Stalinist 1930s Moscow, Soviet and Russian history, Goethe’s Faust and particularly when Margarita makes a pact with the devil who has come to visit Moscow. And McBurney does not stop there, the centrality of the variety theatre where the devil stages his show revels in the evil and excess that befits Satan, while Biblical Jerusalem is pervaded by the solemnity that befits Pontius Pilate’s trial of Jesus. In a post-World War II world, it would be difficult not to also note the frequent references to the Holocaust in McBurney’s production.  And with it, necessarily, comes to mind the contemporary conflict of Israel and Palestine. While the Jewish pogroms were in full force not long before Bulgakov wrote his book, it's the contemporary resonances that are often most striking.  In other instances, McBurney's production makes the connection between eras for us: the narrative thread about Julius Cesar and his arrest of criminals ricochets through Soviet Russia’s twentieth century of dictatorships and oppressive violent regimes. This is a work of immense reach.

As theatre McBurney and Complicité bring a masterful use of light and sound to the text. The set, the spaces it defined, the changing dimensions of these spaces, the changing perspectives from which the audience looks at the worlds created on stage — at times for the briefest of periods — were all entirely articulated by light and sound. My friend Anne thought that it bore certain resemblances to the Expressionist cinema's use of light. It’s true that Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita engages the confusion between the internal world of the mind and the external historical world, but I am not convinced that the dramatic use of light and sound was expressionist. Rather, if it is to be compared to any of the interwar German art forms, it has to be Erwin Piscator’s political theatre of the 1920s. Piscator begins the conversation that Complicité takes to overwhelming ends with the use of film and video images to extend the narrative space and thematic concerns. For Piscator, the use of film images politicized the individual’s thoughts and actions, carrying them into the public sphere beyond the literal and metaphysical prison walls. Moving images created new spaces and places both real and imaginary in the 1920s. McBurney uses lighting – which includes the video images that saturate the backdrop to open up new spaces, new perspectives, new dreams — as a way of moving between scenes as well as to confound the narrative threads. So, for example, in The Master and Margarita, the video images enable what can only be described as a cinematic edit between the poet’s imagination and the asceticism of everyday bureaucratic life in Stalinist Russia in a split second.

The reviewer in The Guardian bemoaned the coldness of the production, a coldness he identified as deriving from the video images and projection. While I didn't experience this coldness, if the use of the moving images and sounds are seen in the tradition of the great political theatres of Europe in the 1920s, I wonder if it’s a coldness that serves the purpose of provocation? Is it a coldness of the order that would become known as Brechtian distanciation?

Another element of McBurney’s production that I enjoyed was its focus on Moscow, indeed the visual and textual use of Moscow to enable the unpredictable geography of the mind. Moscow is, at the same time, very real: its spatial organization and the fact that, as it is pointed out over and over again in the play, it was the first city with electricity, are also the stage for a wonderful modernist drama. Thus, I would argue that this production has a much stronger grounding in political reality than the German Expressionist films of the 1920s. The very compelling narrative about the poet or writer, who is really a historian, incarcerated for a novel he wrote about Pontius Pilate, in an atheist, communist world opens up to the real politics of centuries, as they pervade the streets and fill the air of a very real city. 

Lastly, it has to be acknowledged that the piece is given its brains by Bulgakov, its complex narrative, its layer upon layer of politics, literature, oppression, dictatorship, history, and imagination. But what McBurney gives the play is an intense visual life that does what all good staged theatre should: it compliments and complements Bulgakov’s literary expertise.