The Transcendence of Cinema

Recently, I have been lucky enough to experience two examples of cinematic transcendence, a feeling at once fleeting yet all the same striking, like an effervescent glare. It is a rare occurence when a piece of art - in whatever medium - manages to evoke such a cocktail of emotional responses in the individual that, perhaps for just a few sparse moments, they are elevated to a higher plateau of conscious engagement with the artwork itself.

Perhaps the most iconic of these moments in cinematic terms is the spectacular 'Beyond the Infinite' section of Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'; the otherworldly Ligeti score combined with the lysergic 'head-rush' visuals, perhaps rendering it unsurprising at how popular the film was upon its release with the acid-dropping hippie scene (not to mention every student whose ever held pretensions to stoned intellectualism).

More frequently for me in the past, this sensation has occured with music, predominantly in a live context when my proximity to the composers of great works has served to inflate me with hopeless awe. For instance, watching Roger Waters and Nick Mason (one half of Pink Floyd) play 'Dark Side of the Moon' in full at Hyde Park; U2 playing the euphoric 'Where the streets have no name' in front of 80,000 at Croke Park, Dublin; or watching Robert Plant wail 'Whole Lotta Love' at a distance of only a couple of metres in a small Wolverhampton town hall.

Literary transcendence is, perhaps for reasons of its lesser immediacy, a slightly more elusive phenomena; more of a protracted transcendence rather than one fleeting moment. The moments that immediately spring to mind are my first readings of Ballard’s ‘Crash’, Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ or Doestoyevsky’s ‘Notes from the Underground’. Similarly, through reading various works by Kafka, Borges, Orwell, Burroughs, et al.

This month I experienced this sensation watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 existential science-fiction epic ‘Solaris’ at the Renoir Curzon in Bloomsbury. At close to 3 hours of ponderously slow narrative and moody introspection, the film’s often stunning imagery ends up seeping like osmosis into your psyche. Finishing at gone 11pm, as the lights went up there was a palpable sigh of exhausted relief from the packed audience, not borne out of boredom but from the sheer hypnotic weight of the film leaving everyone fatigued.

Finding myself bleary-eyed back on the platform of Russell Square tube station, the juxtaposition between the world of ‘Solaris’ and the real world around me was both harsh and jolting, in a way echoing the opening section of the film which jumps from ethereal countryside to teeming metropolis. Over the 3 hours my brain had slowed itself to ‘Tarkovsky time’ and as such I found myself struggling with the reengagement process back to the regular tempo of things in the modern city.

More fervently did I experience the power of the transcendent whilst watching Werner Herzog’s masterpiece ‘Aguirre – Wrath of God’ as part of the BFI retrospective on the legendary German visionary’s oeuvre. My first foray with this film was aged 17 or 18, returning home from a drunken night out to find my Dad starting to watch the film on DVD. I sank down on the sofa and for the next 90 minutes allowed the film to permeate through to me as I sat drifting in and out of inebriated consciousness. Thereafter, I could scarcely remember anything about the film, apart from some striking and haunting images that kept recurring at odd moments; resonating like beams of sunlight through a heavy mist of obscurity. I’ve since watched the film several times in a sober state and yet it never fails to keep its distance, I don’t feel familiar with it to any overt degree, still it retains much of its mythical allure and potency.

The film is a searing portrait of the ambitious follies and delusional conquests that have gripped so many in the past as in the present day. It is a film dense with multiple layers regarding politics and the machinations of power, social hierarchy, religious motivations, colonialism, and the ever-present human foibles of avarice and obsession. These are foibles mirrored by the reckless determinism of Herzog himself in completing the film, considering the feverish extremities of the shoot. At times, Herzog’s direction feels like one of his documentaries, the shaky camerawork taking you right up into the faces of the struggling conquistadores and their slaves as they wade through swamps and contend with the tumult of the river.

Re-watching this time around, I was also reminded of the film’s sporadic touches of humour that add yet more disparate tropes to the overall thematic spectrum. The soundtrack by German band Popol Vuh is ethereal and spellbinding, as perfectly married to the visuals as any I’ve experienced before. Klaus Kinski gives perhaps his finest performance as the power-hungry Aguirre, acting more with his deranged facial expressions than anything else, lurching around as though intoxicated, and in the haunting final scene, floating on a primate-infested raft, expounding insane plans for his imaginary empire, amidst the ruins of his El Dorado crusade.

Leaving the BFI, I felt entranced by the mesmeric quality of the viewing, and once again found the re-emergence back into the nocturnal bustle of London almost nauseating. I felt strangely compelled to ape Aguirre’s delusional madness, improvise a raft from some al fresco restaurant tables and set out on a personal mission along the mighty River Thames, in an attempt to somehow invoke my own wrath of God.

Culture - May

Books read:

Oscar Wilde - 'The Importance of Being Earnest' (play)
Will Self - 'Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys' (short stories)
Charles Mackay - 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' (non-fiction)
Charles Dickens - 'Night Walks' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'The Day of Creation'
Gustave Flaubert - 'Madame Bovary'

Charles Mackay’s ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions’ was a weighty, sometimes long-winded, oftentimes fascinating examination of the many follies and delusions that have gripped humankind with such a stranglehold throughout civilisation. It explored such issues as the South-Sea Oil Bubble, witchhunting, the Christian crusades, alchemy, and haunted houses; clinically exposing the rank ignorance, gullibility and fervid imaginations that combined to propagate and maintain such collective insanities.

Throughout my reading, I couldn’t help but notice the striking parallels and depressing recurrences between these and popular delusions that still cling fast to contemporary societies (celebrity obsessions, social media, late capitalism, perhaps?)

I also strongly enjoyed Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’, it being far more than the dry romanticism I had been expecting. The characters were painted with such an alacrity – their effeteness, deviance and connivance coming across in such vivid tones – and the eponymous heroine with her air of desperate desire that would inevitably run her to ruin, that propelled me swiftly through the book.

Films Watched:

'Eyes Wide Shut' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Chernobyl Diaries' (Bradley Parker)
'The Stone Roses: Made of Stone' (Shane Meadows) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)

May was a slow month for new films. I found ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ to be rather more gripping and intriguing than I had been lead to believe by Kubrick purists, although far from being a satisfactory final act in the director’s unrivalled cinematic career.

Shane Meadows’ unabashed ‘love letter’ to the Stone Roses was as fine a tribute as could have been expected, and whilst it occasionally fell short of being the comprehensive documentary of the band’s career that I hoped for in favour of shameless misty-eyed nostalgia, it instead beautifully portrayed the kind of mad adoration instilled in hardcore music fans. Surely, a modern-day delusion worthy of Mackay?!

Albums Played:

Primal Scream - 'More Light'
The Fall - 'Cerebral Caustic'
The Fall - 'The Marshall Suite'
The Fall - 'Country on the Click (The Real New Fall LP)'
The Fall - 'Reformation Post-T.L.C.'
The Fall - 'Imperial Wax Solvent'
The Fall - 'Re-Mit'
The Rolling Stones - 'Undercover'
The Rolling Stones - 'Dirty Work'
The Rolling Stones - 'Steel Wheels'
The Rolling Stones - 'Flashpoint' (live)
The Rolling Stones - 'Voodoo Lounge'
Can - 'Soundtracks'
Savages - 'Silence Yourself'
The National - 'Trouble Will Find Me'

I enjoyed the new Primal Scream album an awful lot; a defiant step in the right direction for them after more recent albums of dreary second-rate Stones emulation. By contrast, The Fall’s 30th album ‘Re-Mit’ was decidedly mediocre to my ears, bereft of any real diversity or creative zeal. Being The Fall though, the album was still a compelling, if ultimately disappointing, listen.

The hotly-tipped female post-punk band Savages released their debut album ‘Silence Yourself’. Although their influences seep from every aural pore, this is a band with an adrenalized grit and raw power that is seldom heard in today’s bands. A very welcome burst of aggression.

Perhaps the musical epigone of Savages, The National’s new album ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ had me continuing to scratch my head at the abiding popularity of this band. After several attempts to engage with their music I find them to be tediously maudlin, tepid and uninspired; I’m continuously left baffled at the precise basis of their appeal.

Gigs Attended:

Damo Suzuki & The Dream Machine Allstars, + Eat Lights Become Lights (at Windmill Brixton)
The Fall (at Clapham Grand, London)

This month I was lucky enough to see Damo Suzuki just round the corner at the wonderfully dingy Windmill Brixton. The frontman of legendary German band Can during their ‘golden era’ of 1970 - 1974, Suzuki now tours through a means of connecting with a network of ‘sound carriers’ – local musicians he enlists for a largely improvised live band. Damo and his band (including members of the also excellent Eat Lights Become Lights), eschewed any breaks, playing almost 90 minutes of scorching hypnotic trance-rock that had myself and the crowd of around 100 captivated throughout.

Can were, of course, majorly influential for The Fall, who I saw for the third time this month. Despite not being as revelatory an experience as my first time at a tiny club in Manchester, the band were tight as they ripped through predominantly new material (which naturally improved in a live setting), with Mark E Smith appearing to be in a mischievously positive mood, despite now being forced to disappear at regular intervals for a sit-down behind the amp stacks. The down-side was the venue’s strict curfew which compelled them offstage at 11pm sharp, meaning we were unlucky in missing out on a customary encore.


Exhibitions:

Andre Kertesz - 'Truth and Distortion' (at the Atlas Gallery) (photography)
'Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective' (at the Tate Modern)
'A Walk Through British Art' (at the Tate Britain)

This month I went to the Tate Modern to see their blockbuster Lichtenstein retrospective. It’s hard to appreciate the true scale of Pop Art’s radicalism and innovation viewing them in 2013. Indeed, I tried my hardest to approach the pieces as though the last 50 years of modern art hadn’t yet happened. The problem is, I found, that Lichtenstein’s deadpan renditions of advertisements and household objects in dot stencil form have become so ubiquitous and universal, long since adopted by the very industry they were designed to ironize, that they fail to strike as anything other than passé. His most famous works from the 1960s on war and romance do still, like the best cartoon art, have a genuine resonance (on a side note, I think that some of Herge’s Tintin cartoons should likewise be exhibited in art galleries, but that’s beside the point).

I was intrigued to see Lichtenstein’s lesser-known works on sunsets and seascapes, mirror surfaces and parodies of other artists’ work like Picasso and Monet (of these I was actually disappointed he didn’t go further in pastiching more well-known artworks – a Benday dot Mona Lisa perhaps?!) In his later career though, it’s clear that he was an artist wrestling with the style and technique that had made his name, akin to listening to the Rolling Stones trying to shape-shift into disco beats and New Wave in the 1980s, desperately clinging to a fading relevance. By stretching his trademark form to attempt nude renderings, abstract expressionism and Chinese landscapes, you get the feeling that he was frustrated by the confines he had set by his own early innovation.

Tearing the City At the Seams #9 - A Hike Through Ballardian Territory – Shepperton to Heathrow

For a split second I was convinced that the powers of fate had colluded to engineer a car crash at the end of J.G. Ballard’s road, thereby definitively validating my solo expedition in tribute to his legacy.

A car teased its snout forward from a T-junction into the path of another snarling vehicle, which managed to halt inches from collision, amidst a crescendo of horn blaring and tyre squawking. Not that I willed an achieved impact between these two cars; I just couldn’t help rejoicing in the almost beautiful sense of poetic justice at play given the purpose of my excursion to Shepperton. This was principally to pay homage to the late J.G. Ballard, who ever since reading his notorious ‘Crash’ (a book exploring the themes of auto-erotic death), has been of the foremost importance in my own creative fermentation.

The plan for my pilgrimage hike was to get the train to Shepperton, the leafy London suburb where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death and where he wrote all his fiction. From there, I would walk the 6 miles north to the Heathrow Hilton, a place Ballard called his ‘spiritual home’ and one of his favourite buildings in the world.

I was aware of the subversive nature of ‘Crash’ before I read it, aged 19, and in so many ways it exploded all my preconceived ideas of what literature should be about, its possibilities, its raison d’etre. Ballard’s own summation of the book that he was ‘trying to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror’, was a succinct one, and after several re-reads over the last few years, it has lost none of its raw power, shockingly transgressive edge and often sublimely imaginative imagery.

I vividly remember putting the book down after reading the first page and experiencing a cocktail of deflation and euphoria. The former, because I knew that here was someone who was mining precisely the same literary pit that I naively had it in mind to, albeit substantially superior. The latter, because I knew I had found a writer whose entire bibliography I would revel in and extract the utmost inspiration and stimulation, and this has been borne out over the last few years of reading my way through his work. Never before had I experienced such a profound connection with a writer, never before had I desired such an urge to reach out and make a connection. Therefore, the selfish disappointment I felt when hearing of his death from cancer just a few weeks later was undeniably palpable.



Arriving at Shepperton station I took a few minutes to stroll up and down the High Street, taking in the ‘small town’ aesthetic; the quaint bakery, the community centre that was trying to muster enthusiasm for some fundraiser or other, the Budgens supermarket. From here I started walking up Old Charlton Road, the sense of anticipation mounting as I neared his former home. I had read, on various fan websites, plans that had been mooted after his death about turning his ramshackle semi-detached house into a museum of some kind, although sadly this came to nothing (despite being an example of the kind of navel-gazing nostalgia he himself had always been opposed to).



I was thrilled to find that it was still the shabbiest property on the entire road; Ballard described himself as living ‘like a refugee’ in his home, allowing the place to gradually deteriorate around him. As I paused to take photographs, I could detect movement of a new occupant within, and felt slightly abashed. However, as much as I believe people obviously have a right to privacy in their own home, I don’t think they can rightfully take umbrage at a prevailing interest due to a former inhabitant; instead they should accept it in good grace and feel a sense of pride that their house holds a certain resonance for some people, or else don’t buy it in the first place.

I followed the road until it merged with a country lane and a thin picturesque river that threaded its way through long grass in an ethereal way that reminded me of Tarkovsky’s close-up shots in ‘Solaris’.



Emerging from the woodland thicket, a concrete walkway circled round in a helix leading up to a walkbridge across the M4 motorway. It was hard not to get carried away with the Ballardian imagery encapsulated by such a sight, my discovery of this Neolithic concrete structure abandoned by an outdated society, fossilised through the ages and left for nature to reclaim.



Walking to the centre of the bridge span was a strangely jarring sensation; the sleepy suburban environs being impaled by this raging river of high-speed transit. I could feel myself starting to occupy the same spiritual headspace as Ballard would have when surveying the scene – the cars racing by in pursuit of their own private destinations, whilst in the distance planes one-by-one approached Heathrow airport, in a stately descent as though an invisible lasso was reeling them in to the ground.



I decided to divert slightly from my course and walk to the famous film studios, that Ballard claimed had a psychological leak effect in terms of their imprint on the unconscious imaginations of the town’s inhabitants who viewed their sedate surroundings with an almost filmic rendering, as though the studio productions of captured fiction had spilled over into their everyday lives. Finding little more than a security fence and some rather shabby backlot barns, looking for all the world as if they were relics of a medium whose scene had long since departed, I turned back to regain my plotted course.



My route took me round the perimeter of the vast Queen Mary reservoir; its steep banks lending Shepperton the impression of being below the natural water line, flowing direct from the pages of Ballard’s early natural disaster novels, particularly of course ‘The Drowned World’. I sat on the benches outside the sailing clubhouse and surveyed the landscape; this colossal man-made aquamarine feature striking such a contrast with the main roads and tightly-clenched residential streets that surround it. Indeed it struck me as almost a surrealist landscape (Ballard often repeated the fact that his own creative influences were less literary figures and more surrealist painters such as Dali, Magritte and Ernst), this marine expanse positioned on a topographically higher level than the surrounding suburbs.



I couldn’t help but wonder how the nearby residents incorporated this reservoir into their psyches, whether their dreams were irrigated by this apocalyptic body of water contained at so proximate a distance, and their sense of personal fallibility in relation to its intrinsic destructive power.

As I continued on my way, following the Clockhouse Lane, the dreary monotony of the surroundings began to seep through. The blandness of the roads, with the occasional smattering of shops and pubs, recalled to mind all the homogeneous landscapes of business parks, airport terminals and shopping malls; Marc Auge's 'non-places', which Ballard infused in his writing.

In terms of his masterwork, many point to the mainstream quasi-autobiography ‘Empire of the Sun’, but personally I would elevate ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ to that prestigious accolade. Aside from his novels, Ballard was an incredible architect of the short story, and indeed it could be argued that these are the true gems unearthed from his imaginative quarry.

Reading these stories from collections such as ‘Myths of the Near Future’ or ‘Vermillion Sands’, one cannot help but rejoice in the sheer prophetic power Ballard seemed able to conjure at will. A story like ‘Billennium’ echoes with a terrifying clarity on the issue of contemporary city overcrowding and space shortage; ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ explores the potentially violent consequences of a life dominated by a pre-empted version of social media; ruminations of the post-Space Age malaise that afflicted the mass collective psyche in ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’; and explorations of a wholesale personal rejection of modern life and its discontents in ‘The Enormous Space’, to hint at just a handful.

As I began my approach to Heathrow, truly a city in and of itself, the roadways thickened and the environs gradually grew colder and evermore artificial. I was reminded of a common experience of mine whilst endlessly hiking around Los Angeles (as well as other US cities), of feeling utterly subservient to the tyranny of the infrastructure. As a pedestrian, your right of way is almost entirely eroded in favour of soul-crushingly extended routes as vehicular transit invariably assumes predominance.



Sitting on a grassy hillock at the Heathrow perimeter, I could stare straight at the gigantic Hilton hotel that stood as my destination, but I was at a loss as to how exactly to reach it on foot, seen as how it was seemingly entangled by teeming roads as a castle is by a defensive moat. It was only by taking a prolonged detour doubling back on myself along an arterial sliproad that I was able to complete the walk. In such inhospitable pedestrian terrain you are almost reprimanded with the logical conclusion of the futility of walking, its alien concept as a mode of traversing these largely automated landscapes. Here on the hinterlands of Heathrow, I felt I was far more immersed in a Ballardian wilderness than in Shepperton; the featureless and bland expanse of carriageways, flyovers and aircraft hangers bound together to exert an equisitely dehumanising impression, without any recourse to geographic or cultural identity.

Trudging along grassy verges of carriageways, and kerb edges of long-stay car parks, you really get a definite sense that merely by the act of walking, you are somehow subverting the well-defined order of things. You can almost taste the bitter ridicule from speeding cars and airport shuttle buses that pass you by in your apparently pointless and lonely endeavour. Here on the airport fringes, the role of the pedestrian has not been factored into the infrastructural matrix, the terrain exists as an annexed zone into which amblers venture entirely at their own volition.



When finally I found my way to the Heathrow Hilton, I was instantly struck by the monolithic vacuity of the structure, the brilliant transluency and anonymity that the building engendered. I sat drinking an over-priced beer on a plush leather seat amongst the mostly lone people, islanded on separate tables as though they were survivors of a shipwreck floating on improvised life rafts.

The imagination conjures up images of space hangers or way-stations for futuristic travellers; the double-ended transparent elevations adding to the impression of some incredible mechanised filtration system. Ballard called this place his ‘spiritual home’ and said in a 2003 interview that:

‘[it’s] a white cathedral, almost a place of worship, the closest to a religious building that you can find in an airport. Sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to.’



The great success of the Hilton is its reflecting and instilling, with bland featureless décor and expansive atrium of open space, the ephemera of presence, the transient nature of all who pass through en route to some extraneous global destination. An environment of ghosts that flitter through without staying long enough to even register the structure on its own terms. It is a building not meant to be noticed, not meant to distract attention, or infringe on mental space in any tangible way.

I felt validated therefore, that my hike should find as its end point a place of functional transience in which only the person who has reached it as a final destination in its own right can objectively decipher its inherent logic. With my walk complete I felt that I had paid apt homage to the great Sage of Shepperton. More importantly, I felt I had achieved, in a psychical sense at least, through feeding vicariously from the imaginative landscape he cultivated, some semblance of that longed-for connection.