Letter
to Jean-Pierre
Raymond
Durgnat
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Letter
to Jean-Pierre |
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Film references (in order of appearance): Routine Pleasures (Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1986) Toccata for Toy Trains (Charles & Ray Eames, 1957) Le Grand chemin (Jean-Loup Hubert, 1987) One of Our Aircraft is Missing (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1942) The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948) Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Alain Tanner, 1976) La Bataille du rail (René Clément, 1946)
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When I saw Routine Pleasures (on TV) I really identified with those grey, routine guys whose occupation is a mini-clone of what Marx K. would call their exploitation. And what I reallly (note those three l’s) liked about the film was that its rhythm espouses theirs with a sympathetic camaraderie and little or no cross-cutting between painting and 3D ‘realism’ which the first and alas last thing my Eisenstein might have thought of – or flashy bright cheery Allen Jones cuts, locos/fingertips – do you know that Charles & Ray Eames Toccata For Toy Trains which is the antithesis of your film (even down to celebrating toys-which-aren’t-models whereas your guy’s mind is deadpan reality-replication, even down to timetabling, models-that-only-happen-to-be-toys)? There’s a Cahiers-style piece here on your film being about films as well as trains, both being illusionisms, and why bourgeois realism knows the model/reality difference perfectly well but loves pretending that it doesn’t – in the case of trains because confronting reality with a real train always has something heroic about it, steam against the sky, steel lunging through space, whereas the model has no heroism at all, it’s the apotheosis of infantile-obsessional control, not to say consummate anality about ... motions. Only semi-proletarians like your engine-drivers and sailors who carve ships in bottle and the farmer who in Le Grand Chemin carves an oxcart for the lonely boy are plus bourgeois que le bourgeois because it has nothing to do with spending time on the cross, sorry, pot, being constipated, and everything to do with having time on one’s hands, time to fill in modeling, and what better to model than something important, without other expression or interpretation, or even act of choice of subject. I doubt if in these specific cases, it’s much to do with magic or control over the original of the model: rather making the model is the challenge met by skill, and skill is the magic, or simply the assertion. Your guys continue the making of the trains and landscapes through running the railway. Reliving ritually one’s share of importance. Plus it’s lazy and easy to repeat one’s work through leisure – not ‘poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility’ (Wordsworth) but ‘hobby is work-motion recollected in tranquility’. My dad loved embroidery work becoz it was boring. At which point I can only rejoin your commentary. Farber’s paintings restore the toy dimension, compounded by Recherche des trains perdus and Norman Rockwell through a set of filters: agnostic Judaism, sons-of-the-pioneers, I mean, of the immigrant manual workers, desert-and-Depression forlornitude ... I’d have to watch your film again to talk about it as a film but it’s got great atmosphere ... When the avant-garde (Warhol, Cage etc) prescribe boredom and nothing-happening in art I get highly shirty and intolerant and reach for my revolver, or at any rate cattle-prod, but even I can understand it outside of art. With my brother it was aero-modeling, short ‘Stirling’ MKII, 4 x 1250 hp Bristol Perseus engines, bomb load 8 tons, 99ft wing-span (please don’t trust these technical details), star of the epilogue of Powell-Pressburger, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing. And Powell’s another modeler who often turns his leading men and women into brightly painted toy soldiers, especially in The Red Shoes. I’ll watch your film again after writing this, but one enduring impression is of the disjunction of space, time and spirit, nothing to do with schizo-alienation or the vassalisation by totemisation of the proletariat, but all about mental maps, like that poster of the New Yorker’s View of the world (there’s a Penguin book on mental maps). Film plus painting plus model plus replicated activity. In that film you loathe Jonah Who Will Be 265 In The Year Of The Whale, there’s that engine-driver straight out of a Carné-Prévert-Gabin version of La Bataille du rail, with the picture of his old loco over the mantelpiece, is it over a dead fireplace, like a Magritte? The alienated have art, those who feel they belong have toys-models-hobbies. Only belonging is also forlorn. Your film is like a John Ford film, only it’s not a wagon train, it’s a train. It’s like Protestant rural France, ox-cart France. Your film isn’t a schizo-analysis it’s network-analysis. Same thing, becoz to realize how things are connected is to realize that they’re not all one same thing. Do you ever look at your hand and wonder what it’s feeling? No, neither do I, but it’s an interesting thing to imagine someone doing, isn’t it? Like looking at yourself in the mirror and wondering what you’re thinking. Quite a satisfying activity as you can’t go wrong really. But the guaranteed reassurance has a nice little enigmatic moment in it, like being on a swing at its point of highest rock. I wonder if the problem in that film was finding a climax, a point!, when by nature, a layout, a – as you say – routine, where (presumably) the players don’t timetable a climax-and-resolution, but go evenly through the day, complete with a sort of pre-fatigue anticipation-of-tea-break as they reach a certain point in their program? |
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(December 1988) |
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© Jean-Pierre Gorin 2006. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors of Rouge. |
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