| Thursday, May 1, 2008 10:15AM | | | | PEN World Voices/Literary Films | Posted By: Leora Skolkin-Smith
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| Tags: PEN World Voices, Film, Leora Skolkin-Smith, | (The event was an evening of short, literary films. It was held Tuesday, April 29 at 6 pm at the Goethe Institut in New York and referred to as: The Rattapallax/PEN World Voices Literary Film Feast)
“It has always seemed to me a rare privilege this, of being an American,” Gertrude Stein wrote in her sweeping, beguiling epic, written in the 1920’s: “The Making of Americans” , “...a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realise our parents. remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete.” In “The Making of Americans”, Gertrude Stein also brought an odd and singular rhythm to these sentences and the ones that followed them. Later her prose filled with atonal repetitions and circular tangents winding around ideas and characters as much as they deepened and extended their stories.
Last night, seated in the audience at PEN’s film “literary film feast”, in one of the polished white-walled rooms at the Goethe Institut, (one of many rooms in this austere, neo-classic converted townhouse on Fifth Avenue, across from the Met) I watched a series of “Literary Films on DVD”. “The first of its kind,” its DVD authoring producer, Ram Devineni, claimed. For six dollars, this audio/visual literary magazine is available on the web at: http://www. rattapallax.com.
The DVD is a series of films shorts. These shorts are combinations of literary prose and poetry; animation; music; and montages of pop culture imagery. In a version of “The Making of Americans” by Caecilia Tripp, Stein’s unwieldy prose was set to hip-hop music by DJ Spooky and Jean Grae, her words played against blistering imagery of desolate Harlem streets, subway stations, and aimless, non-destinations. It was a montage of image and sounds expressing the exuberant though desperate self-invention borne from squalor and namelessness. Stein’s “The Making of Americans” joined a medley of other equally striking, unusual selections. Among them were: “The Baptism Of Solitude, A Tribute To Paul Bowles” ; “Mirror Talk” based on Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” (“Mirror Talk” used pop culture montages, magazine and tv commercial stereotypes from the 1950’s in animation as its backdrop); Alexie Sherman’s ”49”; “The Old Fools” (by British filmmaker Ruth Lingford based on a poem by Philip Larkin. “The Old Fools” used simple watercolors to tell stories about aging; “With Every Breath”,( “The Old Fools” was a short documentary narrated in poems by the gay Vietnam war veteran, Lamont B. Steptoe); “Tyger” by William Blake,( “Tyger” was a brief film in which the city of San Paulo transforms into a animated zoo); “One Person Lucy” by Dutch filmmaker Taatske Pietterson which showed one character to symbolize the death of many people through a montage of shrieks and muscular facial twists and turns; and many other selections just as poignant and powerful as these.
The shock of filmic images in all these shorts brought a vitality and a refreshed awareness of language and meaning to the already familiar poems and prose. Perhaps it took a new integration--that of cinema, sound and word to allow a return to the original themes of “Americans”. That is, we are people driven to reinvent ourselves in an amorphous, undefined new place, irrespective of previous ethic or national or cultural origins. These short films seem to offer the same fluidity of self and substance, the portraits of solitary struggling “nobodys” who could be universally emotionally experienced and identified with as an American. Nobodies made into “somebodies” in fact from just that process of identification--our collective recognition that the internal and external battles to “become” anything at all was a shared struggle among us.
More personally, I need to add that I think there are those of us Americans who, unlike many of the excellent novels which have recently come out, and have been firmly grounded in a past land of grandparents, simply don’t have an “original ethnic land” left and recognizable enough to draw stories from or to rely on for greater context to their now American lives. My mother had been born in the ancient city of Jerusalem in a Palestine not yet damaged irrevocably by war and terror. Her first language was Hebrew but she knew at least seven European languages as well as English. Later, my mother was required to identify herself only as an "Israeli", despite her more innocent moments as a young Jewish girl in a wildly sensual and exciting early, multicultural Jerusalem. The world of her childhood was presented to me in unusual, variegated impressions and allusions, a cacophony of language sounds, and a series of stories about interrupted, dislocated lives. My mother had been part of a generation of Jewish citizens who arrived in the Ottoman empire’s Palestine at the end of the eighteenth century. My mother was raised then in a multicultural Jerusalem, eventually won in battles by the British Empire to become their colony of Jews,Muslims,Christians and Armenians, undivided. Further back, one my uncles’ has a family who came from Spain as far back as the 1500’s. Businessmen, scholars, and not a few women who baked from scratch homemade breads and casseroles, the vanished world appears to me in dreams, memories, and reflections that I had learned to dismiss as too personal, unworldly, and non-political to have any meaning to the larger global world.
This evening, I had entered the Goethe Institut early. I was remembering a time-- long ago in the 1980’s---when I went here to research, in their 12,000 book library, the elusive little known German women poet Christa Wolf had fictionalized in her novella called: NO PLACE ON EARTH. Karoline Gunderrode was the poetess, and she had suicided, drowning herself in the Rhine. She strove to be a part of Goethe’s exclusive literary circle of 1804 (the time the fictional account is given in Wolf’s novella). But this ambition, ended only in her continued alienation (she never was accepted as a substantial member of this exclusive literari, her work deemed too romantic and self-indulgent.) The body of poems left posthumously by Gunderrode expresses a wounding series of cultural and social effacements and self-effacements-- some often more touching and profound than any I’ve read from the “acclaimed” poets of Goethe’s era. It was haunting and telling, perhaps, to see the film short tonight, “Mirror Talks”, based on Sylvia Plath classic poem “Mirror”. Eerily, the Goethe Institut was also where I had the precious opportunity to meet Christa Wolf, an East German writer well-known in the world as a writer who captured East Germany’s disseminated society after the Berlin Wall was erected. I was sitting next to the film director of my own novel this time, though-- a director, who had recently optioned my first novel.
Before the program started, Michael had asked me:” Which American authors do you read?” I stammered self-consciously, I am so afraid of being accused of being an “elitist” or somesuch adjective which makes people and writers appear as fascistic and precious if they don’t name the standard best 20 novels of the year listed in just about every newspaper, library and bookstore by a democratic majority rule here. I also didn’t want to appear self-pitying, which admitting I had become increasingly estranged, either by advancing age or sensibility, from the American book world at large might do. But Michael was my director and an European himself, so I said: “Well, honestly, I’m lost. I feel closer to work from elsewhere. I don’t get so much of the work done here. I just don’t belong as is usually the case.”
Before my eyes, right after the lights dimmed and the introductions were all given, I found myself undone. All the themes in these short masterpieces picked up the dropped pieces of America’s identitylessness and searching literature I (and maybe others) miss so terribly much, putting them back into our hands to hold again.
As the evening progressed, though, the sensibility of the film-makers and films changed, showing a concern and preoccupation with self and personality but without the sweep of larger questions. Only a light brush was used to express alternate sexuality and done from the point of view of perhaps an eight year boy’s play, idiosyncratic transvestism also a toy, an exploration and presentation more similar to situation tv comedy and HBO Comedy Specials. The film-makers also were reflecting the current American preoccupation with commercial success.
Two different films shared this second act, with a Q and A sessions with the filmmakers after the films were presented. The first, described above was “The Herring Wonder: The Story Of A Writer with a Glass Nose. a Hunger for Herring, and A Dream of Boxing” featured Jonathan Ames, and offered the celebrity Tom Hanks at the microphone introducing the writer as a performer/celebrity/personality himself. The performers in the film donned female and male genitalia, as Halloween-like masks placed over their privates as they boxed. The audience was coerced into considering the relationship between playfulness and offensive ridicule. There was, after some discussion as to the success or failure of the film, an expression of hope from the film-makers that this work be developed and distributed as a “feature film”. The film-makers had tried to market these genital props to prisoners in various “prison programs” as a movie promotion. Questions as to whether Jonathan Ames would box with women were representative of the audience’s peaked and excited but very circumscribed curiosities.
A series of nine poems by Beat poet John Giorno (Giorno was the subject of Andy Warhol’s 1963 film SLEEP) followed. This was set in the poet’s family’s original Italian village.
Still, (and I am repeating myself I know) it was Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mirror” which really typified this exchange of image, sound and word, bringing back to the literary stage in often harrowing ways, all the reasons I loved (and identified with) American writing, those echoes of life and living which made me to want to write, too. All the questions, the ways we experience of effacement and self-effacement, the unique but completely insignificance of our being, how we are only one person in seemingly exclusive circles of “Them” . Of exactly what Stein had written about in “The Making of Americans” and of which Plath screamed out in lyrical pain and rage. So American. I fell back into that innocent and stricken place of engagement and enchantment with words so close to my own bones, a feeling “belonging” once again to some tradition which counted me in. I wanted to leave Plath’s poem as the last sounds and images, for it ran through my head even later, when I came “home”.
“MIRROR
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful ‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”
----Sylvia Plath | | | |
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