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2046

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perfume

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ART? PERFUME COMMERCIAL?

Just saw 2046.

The film is the most succinct compendium of Wong Kar Wei's
themes to date. It covers most of the bases, with many of the same actors.
It seems to be pretty much the same film as In The Mood For Love, just
somewhat less oblique and thematically clearer and from such clarity comes
the big question.... Is this what it's all about?

Because 2046 is beautifully photographed, staged and designed. Wong's eye
for a wallpaper pattern, the gloss of lipstick glinting Faye Wong's
bee-stings laser accurate. His use of Latin American meringue, samba and
tango in an Asian milieu, unexcelled. His ability to record Tony Leung
musing in breathy voiceover, one of a kind. But at what point does it all
stop being art and start becoming high-class perfume commercial? When the
ideas run out, the copy wanes and you start shooting hundreds of rolls of
film of beautiful actresses pretending to be red-wigged robots walking up
and down long corridors voguing to camera. That's when. I waited for a
heavily accented French voice to whisper 'Shanghai, pour L'Homme', the film
to stop and a giant Philippe Starck perfume bottle to dissolve into sight.
Maybe that's a bit harsh, but there's nothing here that Wong hasn't done
before, written before, shot before that's just been given an extra
slathering of self-importance - all the Asian A-List are there: Tony Leung,
Gong Li, Faye Wang, Maggie Cheung, that chick from Flying Daggers - slowed
down and preserved in aspic. There's also the stench over overindulgence on
the production side. Suddenly the credits are freighted with French
associate and executive producers - perhaps they think he's the next Jerry
Lewis - rather than just the HK gangsters who financed his best work. And
for a film that barely features a wide shot, let alone an exterior, the
presence of Macau, Hong Kong and Shanghai crews suggests mountains of
discarded footage.

I'm not a big fan of the new slow style Wong's rediscovered. More stylized
and precious than it ever was in Days of Being Wild or Ashes of Time it only
mires the film in his unshackled fetishistic proclivities... Endless shots
of distressed plaster, lipstick and Tony Leung's spiv moustache. Moreover,
when the camera was going beserk it provided a hard counterpoint to the
mannered prose and imagery of his signature dialogue/monolgue. Now that Wong
has decided his images are 'important' - or important enough to fix on,
really close, for a very long time, whilst people repeat things they've
already said in this film or one or more preceding films, then the dialogue
doesn't seem so lyrical, the ideas not so mysterious. And it's not helped by
the fact that his writing is off it's game this time round: nothing
adventurous, dangerous or charming. In fact it started to come close to a
Zucker Brothers Parody of a Wong Kar Wei film - much like the way Wes
Anderson's Life Aquatic seemed an overfunded parody of his work and themes -
and when that's the case, it's time to change your game, or resuscitate your
ideas from the source.

It is certainly not time to make a film with Nicole Kidman.

Where do the words come from? What do they say?

My mother while expecting me
It seems inquired what I would be.
Phoebus said ‘boy’, Mars ‘girl’; their fight
Juno topped off, ‘hermaphrodite’.
How would I die? She said, ‘run through’’,
Mars ‘hanged’, ‘drowned’ Phoebus; all came true.
I climbed a streamside tree; my sword
And I let slip, myself I gored,
Limb-caught, stream-foundered, met my loss,
Girl-boy, by Water, Sword, and Cross.

MATTHEW OF VENDOME? 12th Century

Why does this strange poem haunt me? What is it about those words, so simple and strange, that seem to echo from some place both far away in time, and always present. It sounds to me a both poem, prophecy and riddle. hinting at an arcane knowledge at the very tips of any conscious thought.

Jung referred to it in one of his compendiums. See whether his words explain the mystery, fail to grasp it or simply sound somewhat obvious, in a psycho analytic sense, of course...


000517 The paradoxa. 3. The enigma of Bologna. In: Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 14. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1970. 702 p. (p. 56-88).

An epitaph found in Bologna and known as the Aelia-LaeliaCrispis Inscription is cited, and it is demonstrated that both the epitaph, which was in reality a joke, and the numberless interpretations of it reveal the workings of the collective unconscious. A review of the interpretations is provided with special attention given to those of Barnaud, Maier, Malvasius, Senior, Richard White, Veranius and Schwartz. The interpretations of Barnaud and Maier are based on alchemical concepts of prima materia, lapis, dismemberment, panacea and coniunctio. The interpretation of Malvasius reveals anima projections and feminine archetypes: the oak, a feminine numes, is seen to be the source of the fountain, a vessel, mother, and the source of life. Attention is drawn to similar images in modem dreams. The motif of the oak tree is examined in the fight of the Cadmos myth with its symbols of loss of anima in the realm of the unconscious, incest relationship, transition to exogamy, the battle of split off complex and the moral problem of opposites. This same myth is given an alchemic interpretation: Cadmos is Mercurius in his masculine form (Sol) in search of his feminine counterpart (Luna); in order to destroy the chaos he must kill the serpent to allow the coniunctio or harmony of elements to occur. The spoils of the battle are offered to the oak tree, representative of the unconscious, the source of life and harmony. Both the enigma and the commentaries are seen as perfect paradigms of the method of alchemy in general. Analogies are found in medieval literature in Vita Merlin, the epigram of the Hermaphrodite attributed to Mathieu de Vendome and in the Niobe epigram. Richard White’s definition of the soul as the selfress of all mankind is interpreted as a possible reference to the collective unconscious; attention is given as well to his discovery of the androgynous nature of the human soul. Comment is made on the Veranius’ interpretation as a forerunner of Freud’s sexual theory of the unconscious. Schwartz’s interpretation, in which the monument is understood as the church, is considered significant in that the symbol of the church expresses and substitutes for all the secrets of the souls which humanistic philosophers projected into the Aelia inscription. The study of both the inscription and its interpretation leads to the conclusion that the collective unconscious, through archetypes, provides a priori conditioning for the assignment of meaning. 2 references.

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R.I.P...

..... rage in peace.

INFINITE SUBSTANCE

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Stillness in the dark. Street lights haloing in the grey dark. A house deafening in its presence. In the city at night, one has intimations of eternity…


I wish to record here an experience I had some nights ago, a trifling matter too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an adventure, too irrational and sentimental to be called a thought. I am speaking of a scene and its word, a word I had said before but not lived with total involvement until that night. I shall describe it now, with the incidents of time and place that happened to reveal it. This is how I remember it: I had spent the afternoon in Barracas, a place I rarely visited, a place whose distance from the scene of my later wanderings lent a strange aura to that day. As I had nothing to do that night and the weather was fair, I went out after dinner to walk and remember. I had no wish to have a set destination; I followed a random course, as much as possible; I accepted, with no conscious anticipation other than avoiding the avenues or wide streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. A kind of familiar gravitation, however, drew me toward places whose name I shall always remember, for they arouse in me a certain reverence. I am not speaking of the specific surroundings of my childhood, my own neighbourhood, but of its still mysterious borders, which I have possessed in words but little in reality, a zone that is familiar and mythological at the same time. The opposite of the known – its reverse side – are those streets to me, almost as completely hidden as the buried foundation of our house or our invisible skeleton. My walk brought me to a corner, I breathed the night, in peaceful respite from thought. The vision before me, in no way complicated, in any case seemed simplified by my fatigue. It was so typical that it seemed unreal. It was a street of low houses, and although the first impression was poverty, the second was undoubtedly joyous. The street was both very poor and very lovely. No house stood out on the street; a fig tree cast a shadow over a corner wall; the street doors – higher than the lines extending along the walls – seemed made of the same infinite substance as the night…

I stood looking at that simple scene, I thought, no doubt aloud: «This is the same as it was thrity years ago…» I guessed at the date: a recent time in other countries, but already remote in this changing part of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for him a small, birdsize affection; but most probably the only noise in this vertiginous silence was the equally timeless sound of the crickets. The easy thought I am somewhere in the 1800s ceased to be a few careless words and became profoundly real. I felt dead, I felt I was an abstract perceiver of the world, struck by an undefined fear imbued with science, or the supreme clarity of metaphysics. No, I did not believe I had traversed the presumed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I possessed the reticent or absent meaning of the inconcievable word eternity. Only later was I able to define these imaginings.

Now I shall transribe it thus: that pure representation of homogeneous facts – calm night, limpid wall, rural scent of honeysuckle, elemental clay – is not merely identical to the scene on that corner so many years ago; it is, without similarities or repititions, the same. If we can intuit that sameness, time is a delusion: the impartiality and inseparability of one moment of time's apparent yesterday and another of time's apparent today are enough to make it disintergrate.

It is evident that the number of these human moments is not infinite. The basic elemental moments are even more impersonal – physical suffering and physical pleasure, the approach of sleep, listening to a single piece of music, moments of great intensity or great dejection. I have reached, in advance, the following conclusion: life is too impoverished not to be also immortal. But we do not even possess the certainty of our poverty, inasmuch as time, easily denied by the senses, is not so easily denied by the intellect, from whose essence the concept of succession seems inseparable. So then, let my glimpse of an idea remain as an emotional anecdote; let the real moment of ecstacy and the possible insinuation of eternity which that night lavished on me, remain confined to this sheet of paper, openly unresolved.

Jorge Luis Borges, 'Feeling in Death'

One can never predict when such a moment will strike. Like déjà vu or the half-wakedness just after a powerful dream – it hits us and we understand that for a moment we have crossed worlds are temporarily in another space and then… We return.

THE START...

Welcome to the octoplex. It has begun.