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Tarkovsky,
or the burning house
by Petr Král As part of a
homage by the French magazine Positif to Marlene
Dietrich, Petr Král contributed a page - somewhere
between an essay, a short story and a reverie - called "The
Visitor". Like many of Král's writings, it is about
the strange, historic coincidence between a dream - one in
which Dietrich appeared at his birthday party, but
incognito, behind a curtain - and a real-life incident. A
friend rings Král from Germany only weeks after this
dream, and asks him to go to a hôtel
particulier in order to deliver flowers to the real Ms.
Dietrich. Král is not to present himself as an
ordinary fan; he must name the acquaintance who has sent
him, and insist that the star accept the offering. The
writer, of course, gets no further than the receptionist. A
call is put through to Dietrich's room - her name is spoken,
the message is conveyed, the flowers are taken and
Král is sent on his way. But he preserves the
delicious memory of a moment: what seemed to be the dead
silence on the other end of the hotel's telephone
line. [1]
Petr Král, "La visiteuse", Positif 380
(October 1992): 78. My translation, with thanks to Helen
Garner and Bill Routt. As a young adult
in the fateful year of 1968, Král moved from Prague
to Paris. His prolific output in the thirty three years
since has covered poetry, essays, periods of regular film
criticism for Positif magazine, and a remarkable
two-volume work on the burlesque comedies of the silent era,
Le burlesque ou morale de la tarte à la creme
(Stock, 1984) and Les burlesques: parade des
somnambules (Stock, 1986). Král brings to all his
writing a clipped, understated form of poetic observation.
He is a master of the detail, the fragment. To those
unfamiliar with his work, it may seem, at first blush,
broadly phenomonological and subjective in its approach,
with its profusion of recounted dreams, sensations,
memories, and reveries. Consider this self-contained
fragment: [2]
Ian Breakwell and Paul Hammond (eds), Seeing in the dark:
a compendium of cinemagoing (London: Serpent's Tail,
1990), 10-11. It is too easy -
as sometimes happens - to write off such an approach as
merely 'impressionistic'. On the contrary, the strength and
value of Král's contribution to film studies - as the
accompanying essay on Andrei Tarkovsky richly shows - is its
effortless demonstration of the generative ways in which
close, material, aesthetic analysis can be married to the
diffuse tradition of essayistic and poetic belles
lettres. Sadly, very
little of Král's work exists in English translation.
What has appeared seems mainly due to the efforts of the
surrealist specialist Paul Hammond, to whom Král
dedicated his brilliant 1980 essay "De l'image au regard:
les peintres de l'imaginaire et ses cinéastes" ("From
image to look: the painters and filmmakers of the
imaginary"). [3]
An early piece from Positif on Larry Semon (one of
the first manifestations of his research into burlesque and
slapstick) is anthologised in Hammond's invaluable The
shadow and its shadow. [4]
Another short extract from a translated book that I have not
been able to trace, Private Screening (London:
Frisson, 1985) - devoted to a lifetime's experiences of
film-watching in various times, places and situations - is
included in Hammond's and Ian Breakwell's Seeing in the
dark. [5]
In the latter-day American surrealist publication
Surrealism and its popular accomplices, Král
joined in the game of "Time-travellers' potlatch", conjuring
a list of gifts he would offer various historic figures from
American popular culture on the occasion of their first,
imaginary meeting: [3]
Král, "De l'image au regard: les peintres de
l'imaginaire et ses cinéastes", Positif 353/4
(July/August 1990): 68-77. (This essay is dated 'February
1980'.) [4]
Král, "Larry Semon's message", in Hammond (ed),
The shadow and its shadow: surrealist writings on
cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1978),
109-114. [5]
Král, "Double death", in Breakwell and Hammond (eds),
46-7. For Harpo
Marx: A small potted tree with a possum permanently
suspended from one branch. For Buster
Keaton: A raft with a landsdcape-painter's
easel. For Larry
Semon: An anthill. For Fred
Astaire: A silk dressing-gown, with an ostrich egg in
one pocket. For Lauren
Bacall: A tie cut from the flag of
England. For Cab
Calloway: A bulldog with golden fangs. For
Thelonius Monk: A complete edition, in Turkish, of
Brehm's World of animals For Bessie
Smith: A canopied bed (red). [6] [6]
Král et al, "Time-traveler's potlatch", in Franklin
Rosemont (ed), Surrealism and its popular accomplices
(San Francisco: CityLight Books, 1980), 113. An indirect way
for deprived English-language readers to gain some sense of
Král's very particular culture is to consult the
translated work of his Positif colleague, Robert
Benayoun (deceased 1996), such as his books on Buster Keaton
and Woody Allen. [7]
The two men shared an association with the surrealist
movement, a broad appreciation of the poetic arts, a mode of
writing as freely lyrical as it is immediately
comprehensible, and a particular passion for film comedy
(from Keaton to Monty Python). In print, they enjoyed a
comradely relation comparable to that of Gilles Deleuze and
Michel Foucault. Král described Benayoun's 1980 book
Les frères Marx (the Marx Brothers) as one
that "makes me really jealous - which says it all"; Benayoun
returned the compliment in his review of Les
burlesques, praising the "poet's regard" which
transforms the analysis of comedy into "an aristocratic
activity". [8] [7]
Robert Benayoun, The look of Buster Keaton (London:
Pavilion, 1984); The films of Woody Allen (New York:
Harmony Books, 1986). [8]
Král, "Les livres", Positif 238 (January
1981): 77-8; Benayoun, "Notes de lecture", Positif
314 (April 1987): 78-9. In that review,
Benayoun happily describes Král as "a surrealist with
intimate knowledge of composite images, portmanteau words
and visual 'exquisite corpses'" (79). Král's
association with the surrealist movement began in his
homeland. According to José Pierre, an official
historian of the movement, surrealism "never awakened deeper
and more lasting echoes than in Czechoslovokia".
[9]
Much of Král's writing on film in Positif
during the late '60s and '70s has a surrealist flavour.
Take, for instance, this typically ecstatic passage on the
"lucid delirium" of the cartoons of Tex Avery: [9]
José Pierre, A dictionary of surrealism
(London: Eyre Methuen, 1980), 43. [10]
Quoted in Rosemont (ed), Surrealism and its popular
accomplices, 54. The original essay, "Tex Avery ou le
delire lucide", appears in a 1976 issue of
Positif. Král's
surrealism mixes familiar tropes - the appeal to the
irrational, the subversive, the perverse - with a side of
the surrealist sensibility which is less well recognised
today: a sense of grace, lyricism, and a giddy, infantile
joy. L'amour fou, after all, has its lighter, more
vital aspect. Closely related to the more or less directly
surrealist subjects and readings that Král explored
in this period was an immersion in Positif's general
'pop culture' sensibility (a love of musicals, animation,
film noir, sword-and-sandal spectaculars) long before such a
taste became fashionable and/or academic. Like Jacques
Brunius, a surrealist of an earlier generation, Král
also cultivated an interest in the moments where films go
'off the rails', voluntarily or involuntarily - creating
phantasmogoric experiences with little relation to a
controlling auteur. Roger Cardinal has said of Král's
Le burlesque: [11]
Roger Cardinal, "Pausing over peripheral detail",
Framework 30/1 (1986): 124. It is worth
noting, however, that with all the prolific Positif
writers who were at one time or other certified surrealists
- especially Král, Benayoun and Gérard Legrand
- it is by no means the case that all their film criticism
should be classified or understood under the surrealist
rubric. All these critics had an equally strong classical
side - which was anathema to the Cahiers du
cinéma crowd - expressed in an appreciation of
solid aesthetic structures, well constructed dramas, and
films with a historical-political conscience.
[12]
Král's list for Positif of his favourite films
of the '80s captures well his diverse taste, mixing Victor
Erice and Jacques Doillon with Chen Kaige and Stephen
Frears; Heimat (Germany 1984) with The
Draughtsman's Contract (Britain 1982); and an
unclassifiable documentary by Joris Ivens and Marceline
Loridan, Une histoire de vent (A tale of the
wind France 1988), with an emblem of the '60s-style
modernism he has so often championed, Michelangelo
Antonioni's Identification of a Woman (Italy/France
1982). [13]
Král's broadest orientation, ultimately, might well
be a 'cinema of poetry', which he has explored in filmmakers
including John Boorman, Dusan Makavejev and, supremely,
Andrei Tarkovsky. [12]
For an example of Král's more classical criticism,
see "Le film comme labyrinth: Orson Welles et quelques
autres", Positif 256 (June 1982): 29-33. [13]
For Král on modernism, see "La parole
décalée", in Jacques Aumont (ed), L'image
et la parole (Paris: Cinémathèque
Française, 1999), 293-303. In "De l'image au regard",
Král (like some of his Positif comrades)
sharply separates his preferred modernists from "avant garde
films, the American underground or the New German Cinema
(from Fassbinder to Straub) (...) whose programmatic
modernism seems to me to empty them of any purchase on
contemporary reality" (77). Král began
to move away from surrealism in the early '80s. Cardinal
observes this shift taking place in Le
burlesque: In a 1998
interview, Král looked back on this evolution. He
refers in this discussion to what has become, since the
'80s, the principal topic of his poetry: his 'strolling'
through the cities of the world. [14]
For a succint discussion of the surrealist definition of
'image', see Pierre, 138. [15]
Emmanuel Laugier (interviewer), "Detours par l'antichambre
de Petr Král", Le matricule des anges 23
(June/July 1998). My translation. In one sense,
Král's essay on Tarkovsky remains true to a crucial
aspect of the surrealist legacy: it explores the
marvellous-in-the-everyday, not as a flash or a black hole,
but an omnipresent texture. For Král, the weight of
the world, with its "irreplaceable magic of undiluted
reality", is laid bare in Tarkovsky. But its mystery remains
to be teased out in the experiences recreated by
Král's writing: those "unforseen encounters" rendered
visible in the "luminous blows of a thousand brilliant
inventions".
2395 words
Behind
the dark curtain of the dream as behind the black hole in
the receptionist's telephone conversation, I imagine
Marlene dressed in a black robe, the very opposite of the
white suits she loved to wear in films. Whether in a robe
or a suit, it's true, a certain masculine aspect is
inherent in her somewhat austere charm - the very same
quality she seemed to transmit to our mothers when,
without going so far as the suit, they followed her
example and wore costumes with padded shoulders. Our
mothers - upon whom the shadow of war and occupation (the
penumbra from which they oversaw our first steps) also
forever bestowed a sombre, widow's dignity...
[1]
We were
watching [Louis] Feuillade's Judex
[France 1916]. Insulated both against the cold
and the ordinary activities of the town we abandoned
ourselves delightedly, there amidst countless panelled
enclosures in this little cinema in the sticks, to the
all-consuming comfort of another era. Suddenly on the
screen there appears a clock set in the centre of the
kind of sumptuous salon that epoch, and Feuillade, alone
had a taste for; it shows 4.40 pm. One of us
automatically consults his watch: 4.40 to the second. For
an instant our present, across the ruins of several
decades, has rejoined that of an afternoon in the 1910s.
[2]
For
Groucho Marx: A whole ham enveloped in a bouquet of
flowers.
Impelling
the absurd to the point of delirium, nonsense to the
point of the surrealist Marvelous, and the gag to the
point of nightmare; superbly rejecting every rational
pretext, assaulting screen and spectator as with so many
luminous blows of a thousand brilliant inventions;
elevating the cream- pie fight to a cosmic level;
discovering a powerful libido in the gentlest animals;
and finally, returning the corrosive power of the gag
against itself: Tex Avery's work makes the work of others
appear fatally conformist or, at best, as simple preludes
to these magnificent orgies. [10]
Král's
conclusion is that cinema must always betray authorial
intention, since its vocabulary is inherently the
concrete substance of the world, that which escapes men's
labelling: every time a director fancies he is speaking
to us, reality is always there, signalling to us over his
shoulder. [11]
...
Král adopts a surrealist strategy by isolating
gags from their admittedly unimportant narrative context
and treating them as so many independent poetic episodes.
Repeatedly he finds himself pointing to the theme of the
protagonist's violent relationship to the concrete world
- the world of ladders and motorcars, of grand pianos and
faucets, of top hats and umbrellas. What is interesting
is to see how the pressure of this material takes
Král in a direction such that he ultimately
abandons the premise of a surrealist criticism devoted to
lyrical vignettes and susceptible to an oneiric, more or
less irrational yet always human-oriented reading.
Instead he finds himself giving way before the frenzied
pressure of the objects in these movies, seeing slapstick
as dominated by the "weight and texture of things", a
hymn to "the irreplaceable magic of undiluted reality",
rather than to a metamorphic surreality. (123)
In a
certain way, my attraction to surrealism came from the
fact that it forced me to face my own obsessions. And,
paradoxically, the sensibility I discovered within myself
was hardly surrealist. I was already drawn to the
mundanity of reality, everyday details. (...) Surrealism
uses an a priori formula in order to declare the
presence of mystery. Now, for me, what is proper to the
unveiling of mystery is the 'unforeseen encounter'. (...)
I believe, too, that my withdrawal from surrealism came
more profoundly from the fact that my walks, my journeys
through cities, had the consequence of separating me from
the surrealist practice of the image - which is a sort of
spasm, the sudden appearance of the incredible.
[14]
It was while walking that the intimate texture of reality
hit me. (...) Working with the things all around you
takes you somewhere - even if it's simply the street
where you live - whereas the surrealist image is a sudden
'hole' that leaves you exactly where you began.
[15]
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