A film and a diary entry loop me back to 1980

[imomus]

When I was interviewing Nairy Baghramian, she mentioned Yvonne Rainer's films as an influence. I wasn't sure who Yvonne Rainer was, but when I got home and researched her I realised she'd made a film I saw in 1980, when I was 20 -- Journeys from Berlin / 1971. Not only can you see the whole film (which is excellent) on UBUWEB if you click that link, but, thanks to my voluminous and pretentious diaries, I can give you my account of the day I saw it. I can take you back to the Edinburgh Film Festival, August 1980.



So picture me aged 20, a virgin. I'm a student of English Literature at Aberdeen University, back in Edinburgh for the summer holidays, just back from a trip to Rome, where I've been staying with my Greek friend's communist parents. I'm a huge fan of Beckett and Kafka, in unhappy love with a girl called Paula, an art student, who's not interested in fucking such a green, self-involved little St Sebastian. (Years later she'll relent, but -- tragically, farcically -- I won't fit.) I'm writing art reviews for Insight, a local (and short-lived) Edinburgh art magazine.

I haven't yet thought of launching a music career, but I'm composing absurdist Eno-esque pop songs with prepared piano up in my old bedroom on Drummond Place. What really surprises me, reading this diary entry 28 years later and seeing the Rainer film again, is how little has changed. Except that now I actually live in Berlin, instead of watching films about it. I found the community I aspired to find back then, I overcame that sense of isolation. I got laid. Now I write for Frieze and The New York Times (about how Punk Rock is dead -- a very 1980 subject!). My first novel -- and the writer of this journal is such a "first novel" guy -- still hasn't come out, but it won't be long now.



Monday August 18th 1980

Nonexistent thing, wretch that I am, here on my back in the dark, nonetheless nothing stops, rather it (nothing) never stops, so here are some of the things that negate it:

Paula, at the Scotsman Steps Art (Students) Exhibition, with a girlfriend, facing in towards the corner at the top, apparently discussing something, carrying away some insecure items from her own display area down below. I stood a few steps above them, her, us. Then abruptly came in. 'You're finally exhibiting here, are you?' 'Oh, hello!' She is a consummately good actress -- could she not have seen me, could she have been genuinely pleased -- or at least not dismayed -- to see me? She asked me if I was reviewing the show for 'Insight' -- 'No, it folded, soon after I left. I don't think it had anything to do with my leaving, though!' I was aware that the 'it' had changed its denotation, also that the joke was old, uninspired, and in danger of conveying the wrong impression of my mood, so instead of easing it home with a smile or some other such harmless pretense (semblance of uncomplicated 'humanity' -- calculation) I looked away desperately after speaking. 'How's university?' she asked. 'It's four months, I can't remember.' She was beginning to follow this up, but I had already asked 'Did you go to Spain?'

This is awful.

That's right, pretend you have feelings.

'Oh well,' she said twice. I left with the consolation of moving down to her drawings & oils. 'They aren't very good,' she said, leaving, smiling.

They weren't very good, except for the signatures, similar to those on letters in my possession. I might buy one to expand my collection.

Galleries. Kafka's 'Amerika' back home. Possessive, clutching destruction of the self. Outside threats are competitors who can be afforded no foothold (especially not the binding, straw to flesh, of dummy self to partner, saviour, killer, woman).



A film, 'Journeys from Berlin / 1971 (Working Title)' -- all human life is contained in it. If only I could have it in writing, yet, no, that was its greatest fault, the words flow incessantly, arrows which were unbearably accurate, unscrupulously demanding: 'You are God, you are our victim, you are omniscient, you are stupid,' they cried as they hissed into our helpless flesh (which is, after all, only that)...

Stonehenge from the air over / under a girl's sensitive diary entries -- her distance from the feelingless slabs, her necessary involvement nonetheless. 'There will be no steerage on spaceflights departing from the earth...' 'Want an axe to break the ice' ('Ashes to ashes') -- here the axe was that of the R.A.F. ('What makes you think anyone's worried about you?' -- Eno, 'R.A.F'). Psychoanalysis, surrealism. 'My brain is lying on the floor beside tramlines that go through the wall to the ashphalt six feet away...' -- but it was a camera track, not a tramline.

The shots of streetscenes through windows, landscapes from trains. How Kafka would have liked them! The scenery always a slap in the face to the ideals of the captions and words on the soundtracks -- not because they were 'real' -- but because they were so ruthlessly realised a dream.

Wonderful city. Narrow steps off Victoria Street, up towards the castle, descended by exotic black Africans in strange, brightly coloured robes, holding tartan-covered musical instruments. Off to a pub.

The buildings, yellow or brown, swelling with pride, suffer the service of harsh lights in the interests of moral enlightenment.



The director of 'Journeys' was there, waiting to be addressed by her audience in the bar. I couldn't bring myself to confront this person who had just widened my appreciation of the possibilities of expression, and my sense of community with anyone at all, vastly. At the door of what I took to be the bar, where everyone but me seemed to be going, an official asked to see a blue card which everyone but me seemed to possess. Such devices of exclusion, even though enigmatic, surprise me less than the simplest inclusion.

The girl who sat beside me during the film. What a wrench when she leaves so hurriedly afterwards. A relief too -- imagine having to speak immediately after receiving this huge innoculation of speculative stimulation. Yet she was my partner, at each shuffle or sigh I tensed adoringly.

We are clenched so intensely together in this cinema that a simple release becomes a violent ejection.

'Espece de monstre, species of monster,' I whisper to myself on the streets.

Comments

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"Nonexistent thing, wretch that I am, here on my back in the dark, nonetheless nothing stops, rather it (nothing) never stops"


CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAWLING IIIIIN MY SKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN

[bugpowered.livejournal.com]

Man, this diary entry reminded me of what Brecht wrote, on his criticism of the work of some young German poets: "people should finish their army service before they are allowed to write poetry".

Well, at minimum, they should get laid.

Ideally, both.

;-)

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Did you type all this out or use OCR?
What did it feel like stepping through it physically word by word.
OCR often can lead to interesting misreads.

We are clenched so intensely together in this cinema that a simple release becomes a violent ejection
Were you thrown out?

I had a similar scene in the Classic, the old dirtymac brigade's Palace, when the school janitor's daughter took me to see Man Who Fell To Earth. As she asked me to watch closely to see Bowie's dick, the armrest between us snapped off in my hands and we had a veritable sofa experience.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

a simple release becomes a violent ejection

That was just my neo-expressionist way of saying "We left". I was a rather over-wrought young man, "too talented to live" (as the reviews would soon be saying of Paul Haig, another Nervousness Romantic).

I saw The Man Who Fell to Earth in the same tiny back room at the Filmhouse where I saw Journeys to Berlin / 1971. But actually I'm old enough to remember when the Filmhouse was on Randolph Crescent. I don't think I ever saw any films there, but I looked in, and it was Paris and New York in there, all rolled into one! In Randolph Cresent, mind!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Ha, yes! Then again, I'd already been institutionally brutalised at boarding school, so probably National Service wouldn't have done much good. I did stop keeping these diaries once I got laid, though, so probably that was the solution. After that I just sang. Well, until blogging came along, anyway.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

emomus?

Momus' middle tape

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

I destroyed my own late teen/early twenties diaries about ten years ago.
They were so overwritten and overwrought, constantly finding the monumental in the ultra-prosaic, flirting with literary styles but essentially knock-kneed, sweaty-palmed, pretentiously romantic/horny.
Reading them back I felt like the older Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape and imagining the possibility of their being found and resultingly having this persona connected with me led to their disposal.
It is curious to look back in cycles like Krapp, what one wrote at that age was really written by someone else..

hot butter - popcorn

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

...and the French Institute is there! Which has a formidable library.

There are other overwrought images associated with your "violent ejection" phrase. I see years of pent-up priapic twitching exploding like multicoloured confetti from your Armstrong's peglegs.

Then again, I am all passages, corridors, balconies and aisles these days.

[pixelmist.livejournal.com]

Nonexistent thing, wretch that I am, here on my back in the dark, nonetheless nothing stops, rather it (nothing) never stops, so here are some of the things that negate it:

I always feel odd when I find my quasi-Rimbaudian scribblings from the undergraduate days. It's a definite journal-genre that is specific to lit. majors, I think. I see it in this, I see it in my students who are declared English majors, and I definitely see it in my old work.

I end up asking myself, "Jesus, how did I ever feel anything that deeply and tragically?!" Maybe it's the first blush at new literature we lose as we become professional writers and thinkers, you know? The emotional response gets undercut; we become like Trajan in Piers Plowman, screaming "Baw for bokes!" even as our rooms get more and more cluttered with 'em. Effete literary woe is replaced with effete literary detachment; we go from Rimbaud to Oscar Wilde.

Why did this entry just make me so wretchedly nostalgic?!

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's definitely specific to lit majors. I wonder what phase, if any, the visual types go through? They always seemed to be more fun loving and easier going, which might explain why lit/writer types are converted more easily to the visual and not so much the other way around.

It's funny, by the age of 25 this angst is basically gone completely ... maybe marking the period when younger girls start looking up to you for some reason, the same kinds of girls who wouldn't give you the time of day when you were the same age. (younger here being like ... 20-22)

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I kept a diary for a few months in middle school, though I stopped because I was paranoid my parents would find and read it. This was in the depths of my prepubescence, and things were changing. Going through puberty, being Mormon, and having a diary certainly wasn't on my agenda, and I had two older sisters as well. Of course, if they found my diary, I would be judged since that's all that Mormonism is. There I found the internet, where I became increasingly more tech savvy, and incidentally, more secretive. The internet was my safe haven, I could discuss my feelings without my parents judging me, and I could be who I truly was.

I go back to that old diary and cringe, because I held so much back. It certainly is painful to look back and remember my sense of isolation in my early prepubescent stage, and I'm glad that I didn't write down very much from those years. I have an immense visual memory, which makes all of my experiences so real when I go back to them. Sad that I was taught in Mormonism to keep a diary for all of my life, perhaps I felt that I shouldn't because I couldn't handle the religion anymore.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Disagree with this specificity - it certainly would not have been applicable to my circumstances.
That said I tend to think those who kept such journals must possess some literary slant.