Blue in the Face

I haven’t posted anything on here for a little while and I feel guilty about it. The absence of my posting is a signal to me of my inability to delve and resolve. I have been writing, but posting seems to require reaching somewhere, some concrete thing.

I end up trying to write about my Self. I find some relief in laying things down on paper in front of me. It is my way of compensating for some shortcoming, an inability to grasp a feeling and a thought and run with it; a feeling of discontinuity and calcification. Where thoughts alone are just a rubber mallet bouncing off a boulder, writing can provide a chisel to cut into and discern my insides. So here I am, chisel in hand, writing about my Self.

A friend of mine once told me about a performance artist that would stand in a gallery and sing her best; which was badly. I don’t remember the name of the artist, a quick search just throws Marina Abramović at me, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t her. Anyway, this artist sung, not all that well, intentionally because she reckoned that in that performance, in her vulnerability, was a meaningful transcendent connection with the audience. Not due to the emotive sways of a song pulling on our heartstrings, but instead the imperfect everyday wobbles of a voice straining to sing a simple note, eyes darting around for assurance, knees wobbling with nerves. In there, in the vulnerability, the imperfection, the audience can feel something real, a connection where precision and brilliance might create a rarefied distance.

When I’m writing, formulating some thing to put out into the world, I do aim to perfect the thing, chip away at it until it resembles some form that I can recognise, that I think others may recognise and think is complete. But what is this completeness? Often when working towards it, writing or making the films, I feel I am searching for integrity and trust. I wish for you, reader, to trust me, and I want you to feel gratified, rewarded for the reading.

However, in truth that is a facade and a folly. In fact any definite sense of completeness, trust, or integrity crafted in the writing, and garnered in the reading is probably unfounded. The truth is the opposite. I cannot explain, write, or depict my Self or the thoughts I wish to. They are floundering and incomplete misadventures. And as for trust, it’s usually grounded on simplification, or my generating some semblance of order and completeness. In truth I feel stuff, and reckon with my thoughts, but the words here are a just a story of coherence.

Deleuze wrote about the folding of concepts, that language may take an idea, a feeling, and like an oragami crane from a flat piece of paper, fold it into something comprehensible. He talked about literary criticism, translation and secondary works. That though they may be wholly derived from an original work, they themselves are depictions, foldings as it were, of the very same original thing, and so serve to shed light on that same original thing, the root of which is not neatly contained to words or language. Translation is a folding of the source material, though it may mystify some parts, it may bring to light others. Critical writing provides insights you hadn’t discerned before. In-between a book, its screen adaptation, its translation, and criticism is the one original thing; an impetus. All these works attempt to illuminate it but each can only reveal a particular aspect. The concept or feeling from which the work originates – the paper that is folded – is complex and incommunicable in its entirety, so we must fold it up in language, time and time again, so eventually we might see what is behind the curtain, and sense where it began.

All this is to say, though I wish I could reveal something of myself when writing, I can never wholly do that. I am just reflecting some shadow of it, my writing is just one facade, incomplete. I fail all day every day to know my Self. There is always a new fold to depict, some angle yet unseen. And the same applies to when I write.

Yet, insufficient as it is, I keep folding the paper, and just like the so-so singer, I put it out into the world and hold it up to you. Here’s me singing imperfectly so that I might show some incomplete thing to you.

More paper cranes will be coming into you inbox soon but for now I need to sew the top button back onto my favourite jacket.

Josh x

Fallen Leaves by Aki Kaurismäki begins in a supermarket. Meat is piled onto a conveyor belt, scanned, and bought. Shelves are stocked, older food reduced or trashed. Some gorging/disgorging loop recurs here. And Ansa, played by Alma Pöysti, works away within it, judging and condemning out of date cheeses.

Sitting down to watch a film two parts of me co-exist. The child anxious to be occupied, and the man pre-occupied and wanting to switch off. Many films I enjoy are successful because they resolve these parts of me. Enthralling the child, and permitting my executive mind a waking rest.

Ansa heads home. She and her coworker don matching coats, implying that the uniformity of the shop we are exiting from extends into the outside world. Ansa is on a bus and then she arrives at home. It is bare, whilst referencing a mid-century aesthetic, and yet a radio plays with news of the Ukraine War from 2022. I knew then that the world of this film is intended to be a stage, not some attempt at a hyper-real contemporary space that we are so often presented with in TV and Film. Here, in these opposing timestamps, is an intentional reminder that this film and the world in which these characters exist is an invention.

I am a Cinderella, and the cinema – Curzon Hoxton – is the ball, I arrive and wait to see if my Prince Charming will appear and whisk me away. Recently Dune, Anatomy of a Fall and Past Lives did just that, and I didn’t properly return to myself, and my thoughts, until the credits rolled. Though I usually feel relief whilst watching, sometimes, after this “whisking away”, I am left with a slight ick as the film ends. Netflix documentaries are a prime culprit. They wrap you up in a cosy high-ish production value, chuck story at you and before you know it you’ve given your time to a film or mini-series that was without integrity, produced with little to no regard for the people within it, and left you feeling confused about what the point was; if you’ve watched The Tiger King you know what I mean. These icks come in other flavours too: unaware male gaze, a moment of bigotry in a script used only to add drama, a seeming lack of reflection on what tropes this film might be playing into.

In this case Aki Kaurismäki, the glass slipper does fit. But rather than picking me up and whisking me away, he was asking me to put a little effort in myself. And so we meet Holappa, played by Jussi Vatanen. His job is to sandblast what look like rusted train wheels. Dressed in a tattered, and no longer protective, protective suit, he takes gulps from a bottle of alcohol before he works and afterwards he smokes under a sign that says not to. Not long after that Holappa and Ansa meet in a bar, and share a look.

The “ick” isn’t the only way a film can disappoint me. Nodding along with a character’s impassioned speech, or leaning in my chair as the car goes round the corner, usually I am fully engrossed in what I’m watching, but not always. If the film is straight up shit, or just pretty shit, or if I feel betrayed in some way by the filmmaker I’ll come crashing back to my seat. This isn’t always a bad thing though. Other films purposefully do this, reminding the watcher that you are in fact watching an invention. Examples of this are Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog and The Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley where both directors talk explicitly about their own partiality within the invention of the film itself. In fact, most of my favourite films do this, because not only is the “child” part of my mind occupied , but the other part, the adult, the bit that knows these shadows on the wall are not real, is also being addressed and asked to enter into the film too.

So Ansa and Holappa weave through this world, tripping and falling together. But all the while I’m not quite in it with them, the world they’re in is over-designed, not so far off a Wes Anderson; though unlike Wes Anderson the design isn’t the point. Here the design serves to negate itself, to point to it’s designed-ness, so too does the dialogue, the references to other films and the sound; a wilhelm scream shouts “I am artifice”. And amongst that I am now eagerly watching for what is real here! Not the war, nor the trials the characters go through, nor the characters themselves; they have something invented/symbolic about them too. The themes of the film: a system which presses down on humans, creating copies of itself, ad infintum, until the whole world is a factory for similarity and discontent, though deserving a review of their own, become secondary to me*. As if they are leaves falling away from a tree all the artifice and structure we are so familiar with in film becomes secondary, until all I can see are the small things. A wink, a kiss. I read the words of a song, watch and listen to its performance, a music video within the film, a mise en abyme.

I came back to myself in the cinema – Picture House Crouch End the second time round – as the credits rolled I was left with a little more wonder than when the film had started. Small moments, that exist outside of everything else, can be the very heart of things. Next time I share a wink, a kiss or take a moment to think on the bus on the way home, hopefully I’ll remember these are remarkable moments. As I said, I watched this film without any knowledge of Aki Kaurismäki‘s previous work, which would have surely added layers to my understanding and what I took away from it, but if all a film does is remind us to treasure something new in life, I say go see it.

Josh x

*If you’re interested in a good review, including those themes, you can read one from the BFI here.