'Nadja', a follow up.

* Warning: Intellectual stuff! - jump altogether if you are not into psychology and deconstruction.

My friend Daniel Jouanisson, videographer, sent me this photo update on the squares of Paris in 'Nadja'. Judge yourself how little they have changed in almost one century!

Hotel des Grands Hommes

How important were those squares for the  the story of Nadja? Here is another interpretation by Critic David Bate, from Westminster University in 'Photography and Surrealism' .

Deconstruction technique is interesting here because it allows to get to the bottom of the most indifferent image, and extract its true meanings. Remember: no photograph is innocent!

You can always connect it to a context, to a choice and a photographer's point of view. Here we are told about Nadja's madness, so pychanalysis is suitable, and it might even explain the hidden meaning of those sad squares that populate the book.

In his book, Bate relates Surrealism and Sexuality, giving an explanation to the Enigmatic.

Some images draw us, even if we don't know why. Interpretation can provide the explanation. Finding the culprit is like finding a serial killer by Forensic Science. 

Out of necessity the language is specialized. My comments will try to clarify.

David Bate: "The photographs in 'Nadja' echo this structure of loss through their emptiness. As the reader views the photographs in relation to the text, the pictures are dis turbingly empty, 'lacking' in actual events. Looking into these photographic spaces where any decisive momenthas 'disappeared', we wonder what is the other there. 

Just as Nadja loses her image of identification, so the 

reader of Nadja is deprived of a reflected identification 

in the photographs. Most of the photographs, even the 

portraits, have a mute and mournful look, there is a 

'dinginess' in these pictures, rarely noted by commenta- 

tors as such, through which their 'mood' of emptiness 

invades the book. 

Expecting to find photographs of the events in their captions, the reader finds them lacking and it is in this way that an enigma emerges".

In the book the onset of the Enigma is also marked by the impromptu appearance of a fortune teller:

When Nadja told Breton she saw herself as Helene, Breton was reminded that a clairvoyant had predicted days before their meeting that he would get involved with a Helene. Another unlikely coincidence!

Breton and Nadja are approaching the Unconscious zone, which is timeless. They can meet, but they can also differ, having different unconscious goals.

David Bate: "Towards the end of Nadja, Breton says that he wanted some of the photographic images of the places and people to be taken 'at the special angle from which I 

myself had looked at them'. This proved impossible; 

the places 'resisted' this and thus, for Breton, 'as I see 

it, with some exceptions the illustrated parts of Nadja 

are inadequate'

"Breton mythologizes these places, as having some- 

thing in them which resists representation. This only 

makes those places gain in enigma. There is little or no 

attempt to show things as literally from Breton's point- 

of-view in the photographs. In the photograph of Place 

Dauphine, the view is outside, looking in. One would 

have to be a disembodied voyeur to be able to 'see' what 

cannot be seen in these photographs. Whatever Breton 

says himself in the book, the photographs make crucial 

contributions and their presence gives a distinct feeling 

to the book. Can it be that this is what Breton meant 

when he described the photograph as 'permeated with 

an emotive value'?"

                    The uncanny Place Dauphine, where Breton and Nadja were to have dinner.

What is not said is that most of those somber Paris' squares in fact have been the theatre of acts of blood. In Place Dauphine was executed Jaques de Molay, the Master of the Knights Templar. Nadja perceives it and exclaims: "Et les Morts, les morts!" - she can feel the dead, she registers them. She predicts a black window turning red, and a few instants later a window lights up showing bloody red curtains! 

Another of those squares they meet at is where Marie Antoinette was beheaded. Those are not innocent places. They carry the mark of the public execution of a paternal figure.

"'Sadness', says Julia Kristeva,'is the fundamental mood 

of depression.' Certainly the photographs in Nadja are 

not joyous, they resonate with solitude. The ghosts of 

'whom I haunt' appear through their absence; as in the 

solitude of the child at the primal scene, with the parents 

'away' enjoying themselves. In this paradoxical signifying 

structure the signs are empty but never 'empty', they 

still signify. The enigmatic message of emptiness draws 

us back to those feelings and affects in the story of 

Nadja, where madness and sanity are combined in 

the mood of melancholy sadness. This mood is based 

on an identification with the lost object, where the 

depressing and depressed feelings hide an aggression 

against that object." [The Father Figure, she identifies Breton with]

"Nadja is a story in which Breton nevertheless undoes 

himself a little. He is clearly haunted by Nadja's 'madness' 

and the experience of their encounter — even if, as a 

trained psychiatric nurse, he can still say: 'You are not 

an enigma for me.'

"Meanwhile, the eyes of Nadja,repeated insistently
 in Man Ray's montage of them in Nadja,
 place Breton and the reader under her surveillance 
(an image added by the author in 1964)."

"The book ends famously with the seemingly im- 

promptu and rushed conclusion: 'Beauty will be CON- 

VULSIVE or will not be.'The 'beauty' here for Breton is 

the hysteric in convulsion, but in the end, Breton remains 

on this side of the symbolic order, he is the neurotic 

witness to his own unconscious conflicts, while Nadja 

is given to signify the unconscious and can no longer 

bear witness to her own thoughts. 

"Nadja transgresses the symbolic order and pays the price of incarceration. As Simone de Beauvoir wryly notes: 'She is so wonderfully liberated from regard for appearances that she scorns reason and the laws: she winds up in an asylum.'"

"The paths of the sexual question 'Who am I?' are 

different for the man and the woman in 'Nadja'. The 

different trajectories relate to the different relations to a 

paternal image. If beauty is hysteria, it is in the opening 

up of an identification with the other. In patriarchal 

law, as Lacan points out, the question of 'woman' is of 

an 'identification with the paternal object' through the 

Oedipus complex. It is surely this relation that Breton 

explores in Nadja and is perhaps why the photographs he 

chooses are so emptied of such potential identifications, 

except one photograph: of himself. "

To Nadja the acts of blood make the squares terrifying, the very image of parricide, while for Breton,  they are just depressing, reminding him of his literary forebears. 

"The 'whom do I haunt?' posed by Breton at the beginning of the book is revealed as Breton's melancholic 

trawl of the patchwork of paternal literary figures 

(Rousseau, Nerval, Baudelaire etc.) emerging in Nadja

as the 'primordial' signifiers that make up his Paris.  

Breton buries himself in relations to these signifiers as 

he delves into a bit of Nadja's psychosis. His fleeting 

interest in Nadja is as link to that lost literary history"

(From 'Photography and Surrealism' - David Bate)

See how the same image can bring about different responses? A realist interpretation would never have explained them. Surrealism brings to the images the powerful contribution of the unconscious. Internal feeling is as real as the material reality out there.
'Nadja' is very important for the History of Photography, because it introduces the concept of shifting signifiers - there's not a one-to-one correspondance with what the image apparently depicts.
Realism, the earlier paradigm of photography, is therefore inadequate.

Although Breton died in 1966, Surrealism continued to exercise its influence up to the 1970s, notably in the work of women photographers, such as Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman - who mentions explicitly 'Nadja' among her  influences. 
 With her performances and body art photographs Francesca Woodman  showed  how women can reappropriate their own bodies, by turning upside down the male imaginary.

                                             *

And now, just to lighten up, another photo from my friend Jouanisson on American Realism:

No Photo is innocent! We will soon discuss what happened to photography at the era of the internet globalization. When everything went to the dogs with a surfeit of special effects, allowed by the advent of digital. And when millions of digital images pushed aside what had been the little world of the paper image.
Stay tuned!

Aleksandr Rodchenko, the Revolutionary

“The modern city with its multi-storey buildings, plants, factories [...], all this [...] has changed the psychology of the traditional perception to a great extent. It seems as if only a camera is able to illustrate modern life.” (Alexander Rodchenko).

.
We are all dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.

When Rodchenko began his career as a graphic artist under the Russian revolution he was already well known as a cubist painter, but his career skyrocketed with the use of the camera, one of the first Leicas, that he bought in Paris. Happy times when Leicas were still accessible to poor artists! The Leica could then be had for 133 roubles.

(Alexander_Rodchenko Wikipedia)

At a time when photographers were still stuck in the painterly debate between the Picturesque and the Sublime in the depiction of Nature, he famously declared that no picture should even be taken 'from the belly button level' and pointed his lens from plunging angles exclusively to cityscapes and the big demonstrations of the Revolution.

You might object to the ideology, and the rhetoric, but not to his impeccable visuals. It was the first time that proletarians got to see each other - bourgeois and the countryside having being the main subject of Victorianism - and so the tradition of social Reportage began with the march of Russian masses. 

Rodchenko graphical imagination was after the geometry of serial lines, in plunging perspectives, in stark black and whites,  in what came to be known as Constructivism: the city itself appeared as a giant factory. He was not far from F. Lang's 'Metropolis',  but in Germany  too a revolution had taken place, with the Spartacist days of Rosa Luxemburg.

In Russia Aleksandr gravitated in the highly progressive entourage of the poets Majakovsky, Osip and Lilya Brik - LEF, Left for Art,  their review was called - and it helped him keep the revolutionary momentum. He reduced his cubist paintings to monochromes, and then declared that painting was dead, in favor of the camera. There were rumors that Lilya offered her favors to Rodchenko while posing for advertising posters, but free love was usual then between comrades, so nothing shocking.

Rodchenko was a personal friend of Dziga Vertov, the outstanding film maker and inventor of Cinéma Vérité, photography never being far away of the documentary. How many talents fed each other in those early days of the Revolution!

Steel horses
steal the first cubes
jumping from the windows
of fleeting houses.
Swan-necked belfries
bend in electric-wire nooses!
The giraffe-hide sky unlooses
motley carrot-top bangs.
The son
of patternless fields
is dappled like trout.
Concealed by clocktower faces,
a magician
pulls
rails from the muzzle of a tram.

(From street to street - V.V. Majakovky)

A small Leica indeed allowed Rodcenko to record the city and its masses from a birds-eye POV which had never been attempted before.

Painting was to undergo a similar destiny in France and the US, but only 20 years later, with Informal Art and Klein's monochromes. So often revolutions speed up changes in art too.

 Rodchenko was also in touch  with Moholy-Nagy of the Bauhaus. Together they started  industrial art and design. Later however he was accused of having copied the Germans. Small minds!

I had a similar experience in the 1970s when I rediscovered Futurism. By using abstract décors like Balla had done, and by doing away with actors, we introduced installations and performance into theater. A Tabula Rasa took place in 1977-1979, with Teatro di Postavanguardia in Rome. A renaissance that was to last only a few years, before our funds were cut.

Rodchenko had showed that Landscape was just a bourgeois convention. We abolished the scene, and so the spectators became the actors. In Rodchenko pictures the actors were everyday people and thus he also launched Street Shooting, in a far more radical way of what had been  attempted  by Eugène Atget in his documentation of Paris.

Certainly the Leica, replacing the view camera, helped to catch the decisive instant, without the need for Atget's poses. The dynamic lines showed History in Action.

(Girl with a Leica)

Rodchenko also identified diagonal lines as the internal contradiction in respect to the square lines of the frame, thus a metaphor of movement. By destroying static lines he suggested the the breaking down of the image in lesser elements, doing away with the illusion that a picture is an innocent holistic reproduction of Nature. Realism, as an ideology, went out of the the window too. Bodies appeared  estranged from the conventions of the Portrait.

Rodcenko had a heavy price to pay for these innovations: during the purges he was put under trial and accused of 'Formalism': thus to have betrayed the Party and the masses.  It was a terrible accusation, therefore he was threatened to give up all his official jobs.

 So  after shooting for a while the Regime's celebrations he stopped, and began instead to work as a curator of other photographers, who celebrated the achievements of  Socialist Realism and the Five-years Plans of the Regime. 

The same Return to Order was taking place  with the celebratory 'Olympia' in Berlin under Hitler, and in the Fascist regimes, with their notion of a National art opposed to Degenerate Art, cultural hypocrisy being well spread on the surface of the planet.

BTW the plunging, slanted lines of Rodchenko have resurfaced, almost as a trademark, in the Freestyle type of shooting skateboarding in the Social Medias. It is even apparent  in the selfies of Smartphones, all gravity being lost in the Space Age.  

And yet even now  I still have to remind myself not to fall in the old convention, so strongly the tradition of a straight horizon  is entrenched in Landscape. Instead  one must use geometry to advantage, but not necessarily in a Naturalist way.

If you want to understand and learn to deconstruct the main genres of photography, beginning from Portrait and Landscape, those two genres laden with commonplaces, you'd do nothing better than read "Photography, the key concepts" by David Bate, of Westminster University.

To him Landscape is almost invariably an artificial construct built with an aim to order. No picture is an innocent search for beauty. He considers the 1930 as a key period, mentioning a parallel with the American f/64 group. here

On the other hand Old Europe, which is never really so old, did a beautiful Rodchenko retrospective in Summer 2013 in Vienna, at the Westlicht Gallery.

They had some of the best Rodchenko's quotes:

“Photography – the new, fast and real reflection of the world – should make it possible to map the world from all points of view [...]. In order to educate man to a new vision, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations. New objects should be depicted from different sides in order to provide a complete impression of the object.”

.
“We must revolutionize our optical perception. We must remove the veil from our eyes.”

.
“Contradictions of perspective. Contrasts of light. Contrasts of form. Points of view impossible to achieve in drawing and painting. Foreshortenings with a strong distortion of the objects, with a crude handling of matter. Moments altogether new, never seen before… compositions whose boldness outstrips the imagination of painters… Then the creation of those instants which do not exist, contrived by means of photomontage. The negative transmits altogether new stimuli to the sentient mind and eye.”

.
Alexander Rodchenko

The Hieroglyphic Silence

William S. Burroughs  (1914 - 1997) was a writer pioneering non verbal experiments like the cut up, in writing, in movies and in recordings.

I invited him in Rome for a Poetry Festival in 1979, and translated him on stage. Some of his concepts still stay with me, like that of Hieroglyphic Silence, the silent center of perceptual experience.

He relates Hieroglyphic Silence with the birth of the Egyptian Language, which was born in the Western Desert in Prehistoric times, by the way of simple images.
I visited the very places where the first water pictograms were ever drawn,  a stretch of deep desert  near the Egyptian-Libyan-Sudan border.

Processes like double exposure, the Lartigue Effect and chance encounters  I relate with the split between the signifier and the signified which is at work as well in a photo as in a word. The silent core of the Unconscious from where primal experience springs in dreams.

Burroughs knew about the split from the linguist  Korzybski, well before  it became paramount to photography  when Barthes introduced Photograpy to Semiology in his 'Camera Lucida' (1980).

Here are two WSB pieces about Hieroglyphic Silence which I find quite relevant for Experimental Photography.

Pictograms indeed are a very old device by which the Ancient Egyptians began Reportage, mixing it with a fair dose of Magic. This Burroughs had to say in an interview by Conrad Knickerbocker:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4424/the-art-of-fiction-no-36-william-s-burroughs

INTERVIEWER

You seem primarily interested in bypassing the conscious rational apparatus to which most writers direct their efforts.  

BURROUGHS

I don't know about where fiction ordinarily directs itself, but I am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. I've recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I'll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I've written. I'll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or, I'll be walking down the street and I'll suddenly see a scene from my book and I'll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. I'll show you some of those. I've found that when preparing a page, I'll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, I've been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines. I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading, and what I wrote; all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time.  

INTERVIEWER

In Nova Express, you indicate that silence is a desirable state.  

BURROUGHS

The most desirable state. In one sense a special use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words. I've recently spent a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and the Mayan. A whole block of associations—boonf!—like that! Words, at least the way we use them, can stand in the way of what I call nonbody experience. It's time we thought about leaving the body behind.  

Out of body experience were of course related with death and reincarnation, the main social event in Ancient Egypt. Burroughs attempted a description in this section of   The Third Mind, 1977):

http://biblioklept.org/2010/11/07/a-selection-from-hierogylphic-silence-by-william-s-burroughs/

“I am the Egyptian,” he said, looking all flat and silly, and I said: “Really, Bradford, don’t be tiresome.”

All right, let’s put it apple-pie simple with a picture of a wedge of apple pie there, containing fifty-three grams of carbohydrates.(See the L-C diet.)

Well now, if you don’t know the word for apple pie where you happen to be and want it, you can point to it or you can draw it. So, when and why do you need a word for it? When and why do you need to say, I want apple pie, if you just don’t care how fat you get?

You need to say it when it isn’t there to point to and when you don’t have your drawing tools handy\ In short, words become necessary when the object they refer to is not there.

No matter what the spoken language may be, you can read hieroglyphs, a picture of a chair or what have you; makes no difference what you call it, right? You don’t need subvocal speech to register the meaning of hieroglyphs. Learning a hieroglyphic language is excellent practice in the lost art of inner silence. “It would be well, today, if children were taught a good many Chinese ideograms and Egyptian hieroglyphs as a means of enhancing their appreciation of our alphabet.” If you are able to look at what is in front of you in silence, you will be able to write about it from a more perceptive viewpoint.

What keeps you from seeing what is in front of you? Words for what is in front of you, which are not what is there. As Korzybski pointed out: whatever a chair may be, it is not a “chair.” That is,it is not the label “chair.” 

So, now try this: pick up your Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics, by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, and copy out the following phrases:

p. 104; They fall down upon face their in land their own.

p. 173; Stood the prince alone in the presence of the gods.

p. 181; The lock of hair which was in.

p. 79; the wind

p. 202; Giver of winds is its name.

p. 190; coming forth waiting for thee from of  old

p. 200; night that of the destruction of the enemies

p. 208; come thou to us not having thy memories of evil come thou in thy form

p. 103; In the writing of the god himself he writeth for thee the book of breathings with his fingers his own.

p. 195; Shall it be that thou wilt be silent about it.

Now, having memorized the above passage, turn to the hieroglyphs on the following page and read in silence.

(N.B. You might liken this blog to a photomontage where the chunks of text work like pictograms freely associated to the photographs. They might recur in the future in different associations - the same way one walks the same streets but sees different things in new associations - see Psychogeography).

Pasolini the unforgotten

I am always surprised at discovering how a quintessential Roman figure keeps being celebrated in the most unlikely places. The French seem to have a passion for him, but Americans in the know have a place for him too.

This is a recent multilingual exhibition made about him in Paris: The Poetics of Margins. Here is the infographic:

http://www.pasoliniroma.com/#!/fr/map

I could elect him as a saint protector for this blog, together with Francesca Woodman, Both were Romans for a time, who created powerful, unconventional visuals. I might have met both, and instead I am left to weep their early disappearance.

When he was alive I didn't have  much passion for PPP (as he was known). He was part of the literary Clan Moravia which was acting as interdiction on all young writers. Their style was later to be known as 'Neorealismo'.

PPP had risen to fame with the long poem 'Gramsci's ashes'.

It was a lament over Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party founder, buried next to Shelley at the 'Englishmen Cemetery', the non-Catholic one in Testaccio.

"It’s not like May, this impure air

that darkens the foreign garden

already dark, then blinds it with light

with blinding clarity… this sky

of foam, above the pale yellow eaves

that in enormous semicircles veil

the bends of the Tiber, the deep blue

mountains of Latium… Spilling a mortal

peace, estranged from our destinies,

between the ancient walls, autumnal

May. In this the grey of the world,

the end of the decade in which appears

among ruins the profound, ingenuous

effort to restore life over;

the silence, rotten and barren…"


Translated from the Italian by Michelle Cliff, full text

 It was a cumbersome poem, of difficult interpretation, which brought down my young libertarian hopes, by reminding me the bleak defeat that fascism had imposed on the proletarian masses. Gramsci had indeed been killed in prison.

A kinder, more liberated approach to Pasolini's psyche I had through his movies.

'Teorema'  seemed more in the Surrealist Fellini style. An angel arrives in a bourgeois Milan family, and by going to bed with each of its members destroys the bourgeois nexus that kept them together. I still remember the levitation scene of the servant on the roof of a farm, who thus attains saint status in her peasant community.

Pasolini, originally a teacher from poor Friuli, had a direct understanding of the underprivileged classes. In the 1968 uprisings he took sides with the proletarian policemen against the affluent students, which they didn't take kindly. 

His other films, like those inspired by 'Decameron' and 'Fiore della Mille e ulna Notte' he showed the irreverent proletarian sexual  behavior of the origins. As many Italians I didn't like his half manifest homosexuality then, not suspecting that our intolerant attitudes would bring him finally to a violent death.

I also saw him coming out one Summer from a turreted villa in High Latium in an off road with Moravia,  and deduced that he had become rich, while preaching compassion for the poor. At the time he also was touring Africa documenting primitive peasant communities  that he couldn't find anymore in Italy. The mud buildings of Yemen offered him some uncanny surrealist footage.

Yes, he had become part of the intelligentsia of the left, but it is also when he released his two more brutal attacks to the Italian bourgeoisie: 'Salò or the 120 days of Sodom', a fiction about the orgies of the last days of the Fascists,  and  'Petrolio' a novel about the murderous corruption in the Italian oil establishment, which had brought down various governments.

In the end PPP  was savagely beaten and killed by one of his lovers at the Ostia idroscalo (harbor). Many think that various people must  have been involved, and that it was a vengeance against 'Petrolio'.

He came back to my memory very naturally as I was shooting that part of town where the river Tiber runs towards the Sea through the dilapidated Industrial area of Rome. There one still finds wild boys and gipsies sleeping by the river, and I documented the area before it gets gentrified. It's a dead land where many proletarian ghosts of the past come forth.

My wine seller who was a mechanic at Alfa Romeo in the fifties, used to do test runs along the river at full speed. And because of that he had seven fiancées at the same time, if you believe him :)