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.
No comments:
Post a Comment