Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

The end of Hiroshima clearly indicates that the french female protagonist is an embodiment of Veners, her hometown in France, and that the Japanese male protagonist is an embodiment of Hiroshima. In each place a tragedy had occurred at a similar time. In Veners the female had lost her lover 10 years before, holding him in her arms as he bled to death from a bullet wound, leaving her with a deep emotional scar.

The film is mostly set 10 years after the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, news of which reached the female protagonist after her grieving period. The painful effects of the bombing are evident in the male protagonist, but the film also illustrates it's collective social effects, by showing anti-nuclear strikes in Hiroshima and in the significant opening scene, where we are shown the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and found footage is displayed of the aftermath of the bombing. The female's individual plight and suffering is thus paralleled with the collective plight and suffering of the bombing of Hiroshima. Subtle connections between the individual and the collective are here addressed and the film may, on a very important level, be seen as an exploration of such connections.

I admire the way in which, wanting to address the atrocity that occurred in Hiroshima, Alain Resnais did not direct a film about the actual bombing, but directed a film set 10 years after the bombing, detailing the event's emotional effects on individuals. It is also sensitive and intelligent, I think, that the film is primarily from the perspective of the french. Both protagonists speak french and the film is mostly from the perspective of the french female protagonist; it is she who provides the main narrative impulse. The plot is largely about her, with the help of the male protagonist, trying to come to terms with a personal trauma. Resnais is a french director giving his culturally and geographically relative account of the situation in Hiroshima, showing how it is connected to similar situations in other places.

Resnais was certainly occupied with the horrific atrocities of his time. Previous to Hiroshima, he made Night and Fog (1956) and Guernica (1950). Night and Fog is about the Holocaust and Guernica about the 1937 bombing of Spain. Resnais aimed to address and remember such events; he did not want them to be forgotten, repressed, misunderstood or repeated.

In Hiroshima both the female and male protagonists state that they are happy with their partners and yet still have a romantic affair together. This is because they, being embodiments of different places where tragedies have occurred, feel an illimitable magnetism, regardless of whether they are happy in love or not, and this magnetism assumed the form of a romantic affair. They are two countries, two groups of people, two tragedies, two individuals involved in a complex form of deep copulation and connection. Again, this point is demonstrated in the opening scene, where a male and female are shown embracing in extreme close-up shots with only their limbs showing. Such close-up shots also indicate the film's opposition to the style of classical narrative cinema, where long shots are commonly used, reminding one of it's influential position in the history and development of art cinema.

The fact that the protagonists embody larger social groups and geographical areas is significant for it expresses the idea that we have all grown from and invariably express our environments. The film also shows that such environments, and thus our individual selves, are linked to other environments and individuals too. It expresses the idea that we are all, ultimately, neighbours and relatives, and that we should thus stop warring with each other. There is a deep experience of poignancy and profundity with Hiroshima that is derived from such insights. As individuals and societies it's lessons are still desperately relevant today.

Wings of Desire (1987)

Wings of Desire is nothing short of life-affirming. There is something raw and deeply emotional in the way it recognises and values the most basic aspects of everyday life. The film overcomes many of the distractions and concerns of superficial adult life and returns to the initial, essential questions of a child coming to terms with the world.

“When the child was a child it was the time of these questions: Why am I me and why not you? Why am I here and why not there? When did time begin and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream?”

As with many great stories, the film dramatises different realms or levels of existence. The film is about angels, specifically Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), who are watching over Berlin, often in a caring capacity. The angels occupy another realm, which is communicated to us by slowly gliding camerawork (courtesy of cinematographer Henri Alekan), aerial shots of Berlin, an orchestral soundtrack (by Jürgen Knieper) and black and white imagery.

Damiel faces a dilemma. He is an angel but wishes, as we find out early in the film, to “enter the history of the world”, to live and be finite, to sense and love and feel pain. We learn that as angels they live eternally. They can observe every facet of the world and are all-knowing, but are disconnected from the limited, sensual and profane world of manifested life.

In an early scene, the angels Damiel and Cassiel are in a stationary car, calmly recounting their observations of Berlin, as though they had done this many times before.

Cassiel:

“Today, on the Lilienthaler Chaussee, a man walks slowly, and looks over his shoulder into space. At post office 44, someone who wants to put an end it to it today has stuck collectors stamps on his farewell letters, a different one on each, then he spoke English with an American soldier, for the first time since his school days, fluently. In the hills, an old man was reading The Odyssey to a child, and the young listener stopped blinking his eyes.

And what do you have to tell?

Damiel:

“A passer-by, in the rain, folded her umbrella, and was drenched. A school boy described to his teacher how a fern grows out of the earth, and astounded the teacher. A blind woman who groped for her watch, feeling my presence”

During the next lines of this scene we learn of Damiel’s dilemma, as he states:

“Sometimes I’m fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of hovering above, I’d like to feel a weight grow in me, to end the infinity and tie me to earth. I’d like, at each step, each gust of wind, to be able to say “now”, and no longer “forever” and “eternity”.

No, I don’t have to beget a child or plant a tree. But it would be rather nice, coming home after a long day, to feed the cat, to have a fever, to be excited not only by the mind, but, at last, by a meal, by the line of a neck, by an ear. To lie, through one’s teeth! As you’re walking, to feel your bones moving along. To guess, instead of always knowing. Or at last to feel how it is to take your shoes off under a table, to wriggle your toes barefoot”

The realm of manifested life is characterised, prominently, by desire. Desire arguably shapes most of what humans do and think. The desire to love and to be loved. The desire for carnal pleasures. In most Buddhist thought, desire creates suffering and life is defined as suffering. Thus desire is viewed negatively and something to avoid. But desire, for me, is not something to avoid, but something to be apprehended accurately. Desire is multi-faceted and beautiful; pain, love, happiness, longing, connection, suffering. I think this point is expressed in the film too.

Essential to Wings of Desire is romantic love. Part of Damiel’s wish to enter history is his longing for a woman, a trapeze artist named Marion. This longing is expressed in the film, structurally, by the transition from black and white to colour. Black and white represents the eternal angelic realm. When we find Damiel observing Marion, there are moments where the film shifts to colour. The full shift to colour occurs when Damiel emerges into the world of life.

Marion, like Damiel, is also longing. When she finds Damiel in a dream she knows that she belongs with him. Her need for him and his need for her helps the film define human life, which is based on desire (or need) and connection. Marion says to Damiel “You need me. You will need me”.

Marion’s words to Damiel near the end of the film are very telling:

“At last it’s becoming serious. We are now the times. Not only the whole town, but the whole world is taking part in our decision. We are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We’re representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those people dreaming the same dream. I am ready”

After longing and thinking, Marion is ready to take her decision, to be serious, to embrace life. In doing so, she incarnates the world and its capacity to create. Her's and Damiel’s union encapsulates all unions; they are embodying and expressing every act of love, “We are now more than us two”.

A lot more could be said about Wings of Desire, in terms of its historical references, use of music and its connections with other films and styles. Maybe another time!

“Why am I me and why not you? Why am I here and why not there? When did time begin and where does space end? Isn’t life under the sun just a dream?”

David Bowie's Quicksand

Recorded in 1971, Bowie’s song Quicksand represents a desperate striving for knowledge and from it derives a resonant, sophisticated and accurate conception of our place in the world. The song demonstrates Bowie’s eclectic learning at the time. He references Nazi history, Mysticism, Buddhism and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Quicksand brilliantly expresses how humans can drown in their thoughts and lose sight of reality. To me, this is the most significant and common human phenomenon, that can grip people in delusion throughout life, until "death's release". This is what makes the song so emotive and affecting. Using quicksand as a metaphor for this is perfect, because the more you struggle in thought, the deeper you sink. Thus the song also addresses the necessary resignation that one must achieve in light of this, “And I ain’t got the power anymore”. To achieve clarity, the desperate striving must at a certain point cease.

Bowie realises that he is limited by his animal mind “I’m tethered to the logic of homo sapien”, an insight particularly prominent in Nietzsche’s thought. There is a limit to which we can consciously grasp the world, which is why Bowie feels true, full knowledge will come with death, the ultimate transformation, "knowledge comes with death's release". Aldous Huxley explains such human limitation very clearly in The Doors of Perception. As biological entities surviving in the world, we must filter our experience of the universe, we must set limits.

I can see why one would interpret the lines “don’t believe in yourself, don’t deceive with belief, knowledge comes with death’s release” as nihilistic. But, I think, this would be a superficial and simplistic interpretation. These lines are saying that only when we abandon naïve belief will we start to live genuinely, fully and in accordance with reality. They are saying we must humble ourselves to the mystery of the world and realise our own limitations, and only by doing this can we live truthfully. 

The fact that Bowie could perfectly express these deep and mystical insights at the age of 24, with such a beautiful song, is impressive. I knew there was a reason I intuitively loved this song from an early age.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand

"One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalise;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew."" (Edmund Spenser)

Spenser's sonnet is a meditation on the ephemerality of existence and, at the same time, on the eternal endurance of love. He writes "her" name on the strand, hoping to make last his love, but his attempt is washed away. He makes another attempt, the word "again" emphasising the repetitious act, but is thwarted, again. 

One feels that Spenser is trying to come to terms with the passage of time and the eventual erasure of his most cherished feelings and moments. In a resonant way, his attempts at eternalising his love seem vain and represent the struggles we all, most likely, go through during periods in our lives. There is a certain desperation and pain in his repetitious attempts, with the illimitable sea of time his seeming enemy.

But from the sonnet emerges the realisation that, though death can subdue the world, and on one level everything fades, love will fundamentally continue, and will be the force that eternally renews life and it's transformations. In the sonnet there is thus a profound marriage between the transformational nature of existence and the eternal force, that we all embody and experience, that renews such transformation.

"Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew"

I also admire the way that love isn't clearly defined in this sonnet. It points strongly to romantic love, but also indicates a deeper kind of love, as a universal force, thus suggesting an inclusive conception of the word.

Post 77

Different people have different inclinations, predispositions and temperaments. This means our notions of reality, and how we communicate such notions, can vary enormously, even if we share a common tongue and upbringing. To me, this seems a fairly obvious point. But the reason I feel compelled to make it is that, in my experience, few people demonstrate awareness of it. If we are able to bear this insight mind, to understand the manifold ways in which different people express themselves, I believe we will be a lot more patient, humble, tolerant and sensitive. However, true, deep understanding and the genuine embodiment of insight is, I feel, a difficult and rare thing.

Post 76

What is the motivation behind analytical thought? In humans, it seems there is frequently an intense need to understand the world, which presumably means looking at it accurately. Every human feels this need on different levels and in different arenas. But this point begs the question, what is “the world”? And what exactly do we mean by “looking at it accurately”?

Surely, definitions and descriptions of “the world” change with each person. One description might be that the world constitutes all the phenomena of our experience, including ourselves, which includes all internal and external events. We thus can't conceive of a world separate from us, as experiencing entities.

Accuracy is an interesting concept. Perhaps accuracy alludes to objectivity, stripping away as many preconceptions, ideologies and assumptions as possible and comprehending “the thing in itself”, whether it be a psychological state or physical phenomena, as purely as possible. I think of quantum mechanics here, which suggests that, from our conscious human perspective, we’ll never fully grasp “the thing in itself”, for it will hide from us when looked at directly (look up the double slit experiment for more on this).

When people debate, I think they often neglect that individuals have vastly different temperaments and personalities, with vastly different conceptions of how the world works and vastly different ways of communicating such conceptions, none of which are necessarily more “right” or “true”. This is where Carl Jung’s work becomes enlightening, whose book Psychological Types was a systematic attempt to analyse the various personalities that exist in the world, in an "objective" way. Jung introduced the widely used concepts introvert and extravert into modern usage and laid the basis for much personality understanding that has taken place in the 20^th century.

People are often so quick to attack each other in a debate, which is the result of clinging to an ideological position and not genuinely engaging with what the other person has to say, among other things. I think it is so much easier, but ultimately harmful, to hold fast to a position, than it is to be sensitive and humble and to realise our lack of knowledge in the face of complexity and mystery. “I alone don’t know”, says Lao Tzu; this is the hardest position to attain, but also the most beneficial and, for me, admirable and heroic.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, an Opening Passage

The following is the opening passage from The Wreck of the Deutschland, by Hopkins:

“Thou mastering me

God! giver of breath and bread;

World's strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living and dead;

Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh,

And after it almost unmade, what with dread,

Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee”

Hopkins was an artist of unique skill, humour and insight. There is much meaning and talent, for example, contained in this short passage.

By using phrases like “giver of breath and bread”, Hopkins playfully encourages the reader to reflect on the language being used, by using similar sounding but differently meaning words together. Hopkins did this frequently, as did James Joyce and Dylan Thomas later on.

Hopkins evokes a strong sense of dynamism, where there is a brilliant use of verbs such as “sway”, “bound” and “fastened”. Significantly, these verbs are also used alliteratively, again showing awareness of the poem's syntax. In Hopkins there is as much awareness of syntax as there is content.

His insight, in recognising the dual nature of reality, is contained in the line “lord of living and dead”, understanding that to be lord of life, one has to be lord of death. Hopkins, as far as I'm concerned, intuited the world accurately.

Presciently, there is a strong expression of physical embodiment in this passage, “thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh”. In a similar way that God constructs Hopkins the poet, Hopkins constructs his poetry. Hopkins understands that all insight and life, and consequently his poetry, begins with the embodied person, not with some abstract notion of transcendence. Around the same time Friedrich Nietzsche also understood this

Hopkins talks about almost being “unmade”, maybe referring to a period of life where he lost sight of the divine, a period of darkness and stagnation. Hopkins is then “touched afresh” by his maker, his insight returning. “Over again” is another frequent example of dynamism in Hopkins, implying a cyclical motion of reaching an end and returning to a beginning. Hopkins reached the end of his dark period and returned to clarity, again aligned with the universe. So begins his poem.