Yan'an

Films this year:

25. Kaoru Ikeya, The Daughter from Yan'an (2002)

Just back from Dalian, China. On the previous day of my departure from Tokyo I watched on DVD this extraordinary documentary. A daughter born of a premarital relationship between two teenage city students "released below" to the rural area because of the cultural revolution... a life inutil from the beginning, unlooked after, unwanted. And behind all this is the shadow of Mao and his over-passionate entourages.

The director Ikeya is of the same age as me. Chapeau, maître. This is a great film.

Tibet/Martinique

Films this year:

23. Ulrike Koch, The Saltmen of Tibet (1997)
24. Euzhan Palcy, Rue Cases-Nègres (1983)

23 is stunning. Quiet and sublime. It depicts a team of salt gatherers who travel far to a salt lake on another plateaur annually as if for a pilgrimage. Their journey and their work on the spot are both out of this world. It reminds me of the actual salt pilgrimage ritual in the American Southwest (of which tribe I can't recall now).

24 I had watched 4 or 5 times over twenty years and yet I was not sure tonight about the sequences of the events at many points; my cinematic memory is eternally deficient! A very well-made story with a clear intention for the community in mind. The final song that people spontaneously begin to sing on the scene (towards the end) of the arrestation of Léopold should be paid more attention. BY ME.

A very educational essay must be written as an analysis of this film (even if the analysis itself may end up a rather tedious one).

The children in Afghanistan

Films this year:

20. Hana Makhmalbaf, Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (2008)
21. Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino (2008)
22. Seiichi Motohashi, Singing With Nami (2006)

In 20, our genius Samira's younger sister Hana proved herself to be a real genius, even surpassing her sis... outstanding. Incredibly well wrought, full of compassion and awareness, and breathtakingly beautiful. And this, a work of an 18 year old? The world is unfathomable. This film is destined to be a classic and every school in the world should try to organize a free screening.

What can I say about 21? It's impeccable, and it's very predictable. A nice urban fairy tale in this age of mass migration and oriented specifically toward... well, needless to say. Can't quite believe some of the best film critics in Japan admire Eastwood to an unimaginable extent! He is always good, always fun to watch, and NEVER BETRAYS YOUR EXPECTATION. This is his problem, and his view of the world is deeply disgusting. Why should he drive the story into the intra-Hmong conflict? Maybe it's not so much of Eastwood's fault, but that of the American movie industry.

22 is a charming documentary film depicting a 85 year-old woman folk singer in Okinawa. Her life being not always very satisfactory, she nonetheless never looses her innate cheerfulness and is determined to live to be 120! The original writer Nobuko Kyo is a Korean-Japanese and I am rather interested in her work. This is our contemporary. This is the story beside which we unkowningly live.

Where does that penguin go?

Films this year:

18. Samira Makhmalbaf, The Blackboard (2000)
19. Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

18 is stunning. Can't quite believe this imagination of a then 20-year old director Samira, Makhmalbaf's eldest daughter. Thematically very tightly woven, with a breathtaking backdrop of the very rocky mountain. AND there is much more behind the film; the vast and ruthless reality of the border situation.

19 I could finally watch; another masterpiece from the master. A solitary penguin heading toward the mountain range and its own death well seems like our own collective destiny. Time to rethink all our ethics with our inescapable end in sight.La vie... sur la terre... quelle tristesse!

In Belarus, in Mongolia, back then, and now?

Films this year:

16. Seiichi Motohashi, Nadya's Village (1997)
17. Peter Brosens, State of Dogs (1998?)

16 is the photographer Seiichi Motohashi's first full-length documentary, following people's life in a small quasi-abandoned village in Belarus. People were evacuated after the accident at Chernobyl, but some of them stayed, including 8-year-old Nadya's family. The film's tranquility and the beauty of the land is awesome. And then when you come to the gate of the village... I've got to go and watch his "Baobab" (now being released) soon.

17 is a surprising masterpiece. A decade ago when it was released in Tokyo I wrote a short essay for the booklet. Reviewing it after such a long time and I blame myself for not remembering the whole film well...even though I've watched it probably four times before. This makes a nice pair of Mongolian films with The Weeping Camel. There are more, too.

Chokora!

Films this year:

14. Shigeru Kobayashi, Chokora! (2008)
15. Byambasuren Davaa & Luigi Falorni, The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)

Two great documentaries. 14 deals with the street children in Kenya with striking cinematography and vivid colours. 15 is almost too well-made. Many scenes must be directed; they are rendered beautifully, yet the feeling of slightly too much intervention, so to speak, remains. Well worth remembering, none the less.

De la traite

Two points to remember from Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau's thin pamphlet Nantes & la traite négrière (2007):

1. La mise-hors (ou capital nécessaire à l'armement d'un négrier) était relativement élevée, de l'ordre du prix d'un petit hôtel particulier parisien à la fin du 18e siècle.

2. Au 18e siècle, la noblesse bretonne était à la fois nombreuse et souvent désargentée. On sait que le père de François-René de Chateaubriand fut un négrier.

And maybe another:

3. Il fallait souvent dix à seize mois afin de boucler la totalité du circuit.

Not the best way to spend a year of one's life.

Veiller ensemble

I've been reading French rapper Abd al Malik's autobiography Qu'Allah bénisse la France (2004) and find it très passionante. A young outlaw, brilliant in his school, turns to embrace Islam. Some details are so interesting:

Chaque samedi soir, nous nous réunissons en outre à cinq ou six pour étudier, puis veiller ensemble. Ces veillées étaient ponctuées de cours sur la jurisprudence islamique, sur la vie du Prophète Muhammad (PSL) et d'autres sur l'islam en général. Nous lisions encore jusqu'à l'aube le Coran et des hadiths, le tout entrecoupé de prières et de discussions religieuses. Ces débats traditionnels (MUDAKARA) consistaient à se placer dans une situation fictive et à déterminer quelle était l'"attitude islamique" à adopter en pareil cas. Je me souviens m'être torturé l'esprit sur des questions aussi "fondamentales" que de savoir s'il était licite de serrer la main d'une femme pour la saluer, ou encore si le fait de regarder un film au cinéma ou à la télévision était compatible avec l'"interdit de la représentation". J'ai tellement été imprégné par cette atmosphère où la distinction du licite et de l'illicite (HALAL et HARAM) devient obsessionnelle qu'aujourd'hui encore, je dois l'avouer, il m'arrive d'être pris à l'improviste par ce genre de questions légalistes.

May be this kind of weekly veillée we should adopt (with our graduate students) to seriously talk about what is to be done... in art (in general). Such will be our seminar this year!

Herzog

Films this year:

12. Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (2005)
13. Werner Herzog, The White Diamond (2004)

Re-watched with some friends two masterpiece documentaries from Herzog. Arresting, heart-breaking, subtle, and beautiful. This is my kind of filmmaker, like no one else in history.

Negrinha

B.D., graphic novel, manga, gekiga, whatever you may call it. This is a genre that's most sophisticated and synthesizing, yet individual and personal (more often than not).

Sometimes I come across an unforgettable work. Today it was Negrinha, written by Jean-Christophe Camus and rendered graphically by Olivier Tallac (Gallimard, 2009).

It's a lovely story of a morena girl (born from a Black mother) in Rio de Janeiro. Camus, himself a comic artist and a child of a Franco-Brazilian marriage, captures the light and atmosphere of the Rio in the 1950s like no one else could.

Some nice lines from Maria, the protagonist, to Joanna, a little white girl with whom she holds a sister-like intimacy:

Joanna, tout ça doit rester entre nous, c'est notre secret, d'accord? S'il est dévoilé, le Christ du Corcovado sera tellement triste que ses bras s'abaisseront.

The charm of Rio returns to me like a wave.

Tractatus, o meu coraçao

Wittgenstein to me is mostly impossible to understand, but he says a lot of interesting things. I only don't want to spend more time with him to grasp what he intends to say. It comes down to the economy of time and your taste, I mean all your intellectual endevour in the humanities. The following are from Tractatus:

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing CAN occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.

2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

These two bits match well with the premises of the concept of affordance.

As if I was writing a letter to a friend

Discussing Hans Erich Nossack, W.G.Sebald writes this:

In an essay of 1961 where Nossack speaks of the influence on his literary work, he writes that after reading Stendhal he was anxious to express himself 'as plainly as possible, without well-crafted adjectives, high-flown images or bluff, more like someone writing a letter in almost everyday jargon'. [...] Nossack experiments with the prosaic genre of the report, the documentary account, the investigation, to make room for the historical contingency that breaks the mould of the culture of the novel.

W.G. Sebald, Campo Santo, Anthea Bell trans., 2005


Viva Stendhal.

And each time I die...

You may think and say whatever you like, but to me Philippe Sollers is one of the writers who can really write. Not a dull page in his œuvre.

This sentence from his Carnet de nuit, back in the 1980s (?):

Il se voyait mourir, chaque fois sous une identité différente.

This is the truth about our relationship with a work of literature.

Image according to Proust

Roger Shuttuck explains what "image" meant for Proust:

Like Locke and Condillac (and later Sartre), Proust saw our image-making faculty as a means both for grasping the world and for detaching ourselves from it, the essentially double process of consciousness. Inevitably "image" spawns a large family of photographic terms: photographie, épreuve (proof), cliché (negative), instantané (still or snapshot).

Roger Shuttuck, Proust's Binoculars (1962)

In a reverse effect, so to speak, photography is essentially ambiguous; it mediates us to the reality of the world, and it profoundly separates us from the world as is.

Bowie was not a vampire (not only, at least)

Nicolas Ungemuth's Bowie (Librio Musique, 1999) clarified many points that I wasn't very sure about in the history of rock. Bowie's "vampirism," for one. He quotes Bowie's own words:

"Dès que je trouvais certaines qualités chez des gens que j'aimais, je me les appropriais. Je fais toujours ça aujourd'hui; tout le temps. C'est comme pour une voiture, on remplace les pièces petit à petit."

And people have accused Bowie of his vampirism. But then Ungemuth goes on to say:

Dans les deux cas, Lou Reed/Iggy, les soi-disant victims du vampire, se sont largement repus du talent de leur prétendu bourreau. Bowie, en fin de compte, a plus joué aux infirmiers qu'aux succubes.

An interesting way to put it!

This books describes well the centrality of Bowie in rock music for more than three decades. I loved Bowie as a highschool student in the 1970s; then lost interest in him in the 80s (definitely by the time of "Let's Dance") and moved on to so-called world music. Which was just and unjust at the same time. But rock by that time was mostly DEAD until a serious ressurrection is brought about by Nirvana in the early 1990s, for example.

I'll go back to Space Oddity and begin listening to the various aspects of Bowie's own histoire vécue!

"Je vis, non j'existe."

I live, not I exist, says Le Clézio. This from the top of France Culture's home page. I think this sentence nicely and profoundly describe Le Clézio's attitude. To say that I exist is way too abstract to be true. I live, in, with, within. I and I live. I have always already been we, with the living and the non-living surrounding me alike. A refreshing pause from a dangerous ego-centrism.

Meet you at the corner?

Here is a joke that I really liked about thirty years ago:

--Qu'est-ce qu'un mur dit au mur d'à côté? demanda-t-il d'un ton criard. C'est une devinette!
Je roulais des yeux pensifs vers le plafond et répétai la question tout haut. Puis je regardai Charles d'un air obtus et lui dis que je donnai ma langue au chat.
--Rendez-vous au coin! m'assena-t-il en hurlant.

J.D. Salinger, Nouvelles (tr. Jean-Baptiste Rossi)

But the problem is, why did I find it so hilarious then?

The NRF at 100

I didn't realize that the NRF has been around for a century this year. It was founded in 1909 by Gide, taken over by Jacques Rivière (whom Philippe Sollers regards very highly), then at his death in 1925 succeeded by Jean Paulhan. I read this article by Philippe Lançon in Libération:

A sa [Rivière's] mort, en 1925, Jean Paulhan, radical prince de l'esquive et de l'ironie, lui donne le ton et l'avant-gardisme qu'elle conservera jusque dans les années 60.

And then:

Jamais l'opacité elliptique de Paulhan, dressant un mur de liège entre lui et chacun au profit de tous, n'a mieux révélé sa nécéssité. Il ne sortirait de l'ambiguïté qu'aux dépens des autres. C'est en manipulant par omission leurs talents immenses, capricieux, égoïstes, haineux, capables du pire pour exister, qu'il permet à la littérature qu'il aime d'entretenir ses vices et ses vertus. (Libération, Jeudi 19 février 2009)

Ah, Paulhan. The politics of literature is rife around him. But then, no editor can be totally innocent. Often tactics are mandatory for making things interesting and keeping them alive.

My friend Naoko Kasama has just completed her translation of Paulhan's collection of very short proses. I am hoping to see it materialize, under a book form, this year.

Films

Films this year:

9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher (2008)
10. Musée haut, musée bas, Jean-Michel Ribes (2008)
11. Al otro lado, Gustavo Loza (2005)

I watched 9 at Gaumont, Montparnasse. It's a masterpiece with a lot of stunning moments and another victory from Fincher. What I particularly liked (just like anyone else, it seems) was an episode of a man who was struck seven times by lightning. This alone proves the director's well-established sense of humor. Tilda Swinton is breathtaking, as always.

10 is so silly one could only watch it in the trans-Eurasia stratosphere with less than regular oxigen level. But I watched it twice, thanks to Air France. Quite nonsensical, and not in the Ubuan or Dalian or even Lewis-Carolian sense. By the way I was surprised to find that Air France doesn't serve Stella Artois anymore! All they have is Heinekken. Tant pis!

Keisuke Dan showed me 11 which was not bad at all. Three parallel stories of children's border crossings that happen in Michoacan, La Habana, and Morocco/Maraga. Often melodramatic, deserted wives too beautiful, characters stereotypical. yet one can't help loving the film. It's got some "it." The best actress of the show award goes to the little girl from Morocco.

I am well behind my video days... Will try to catch up!

Paris Dogs

In Paris and off the Seine, I came across a very nice big dog. Magnificent. I said, "C'est un chien superbe que vous avez. J'adore les grands chiens." And the old man responded in English, "Thank you, it's a Scottish Deer Hound." Oh. I thought it was an Irish Wolf Hound.

Strange but these two breeds are identical to my eyes. The same breed given different names in Ireland and Scotland?

I wonder if they have this kind of dog in Wales, and how they call it. But it's unlikely that they have such enormous dogs; Wales is where corgis are from!