Ludwig, eager to get his hands on Dick

As you’ve doubtless realised, today is the 200th birthday of Richard Wagner. Last year in a survey of movies about Wagner’s royal patron, Bavarian King Ludwig II, I mentioned the first biopic of the German composer, which was in fact the first biopic of anyone. It was made by director Carl Froelich to mark Wagner’s centenary in 1913. Wagner himself had died 30 years previously but his widow Cosima was very much alive and the Bavarian monarchy still, technically, in place, with Ludwig’s brother Otto its deranged, titular head.

It appears that there is a case for regarding Froelich’s creation as the very first feature film, with a then unprecedented run time of 80 minutes. However due to Cosima’s vehement opposition to the project it was accompanied not by a Wagner score but – in a truly impressive piece of method acting – a pastiche of the composer’s music written by the actor who plays him, Giuseppe Becce. Tonight the film is being presented in Baden-Baden with an orchestral arrangement of Becce’s para-Wagnerian accompaniment (to be broadcast on Arte if you happen to be in Germany or France).

Meanwhile, here is the silent original of Richard Wagner (and apologies for the puerile title…I’m going to sit in a corner and read this high-minded work of Wagnerian scholarship as penance):

An elderly lady sits in her apartment among her bric-à-brac, reminiscing about different places she has lived. She chats with her housekeeper, and later a neighbour drops in.

A cosy enough domestic scene, but not one that would have necessarily caught the eye of posterity were it not for the fact that said lady is novelist Colette, the apartment her renowned Palais-Royal eyrie, its knickknacks her equally famous collection of glass paperweights, and the houses she describes the stations of a compelling life, familiar to readers from lyrical descriptions in her books.

This comes from a film made in 1950 by French filmmaker Yannick Bellon, who we encountered yesterday. Colette is first seen taking breakfast and – in a nimble meta touch scripted by the novelist herself – announcing her refusal to appear in the film in which she presently appears. She nonetheless goes on to describe her previous residences, beginning with her first childhood home, set amid the kind of bucolic idyll of which Colette was an unsurpassed chronicler. As Colette’s mind wanders back to these homes, so too does the camera.

Oh, and the neighbour? That’s her friend and fellow Palais-Royal resident Jean Cocteau. He banters affectionately with Colette, calling her “a fountain of ink” as he marvels at her ability to produce work while offering the impression of utter indolence.

Anyway, you can see all this for yourself, below.

Enjoy!

Yesterday’s gallery was by way of introduction to Remembrance of Things to Come, a 2003 film study of Denise Bellon’s life and career which I caught recently. It was made by Bellon’s filmmaker daughter Yannick, along with Chris Marker (who died last year). Like Marker’s La Jetée (1962), this film makes an impressive virtue of necessity. Where four decades earlier Marker simply lacked the means to shoot moving film and used stills instead, here the stills – that is, Denise Bellon’s photographs – are actually the subject, and aside from a few fleeting pieces of footage, it is these images which tell the story.

It is a story from “when post-war was becoming pre-war”, when the avant-garde was torn between brittle utopias and brutal reality. Bellon was there to immortalise them at work and play, with portraits of the Surrealists in their pre-war heyday and their depleted post-war gatherings. But there is so much besides. Bellon’s lens consumed the Outsider architecture of the Facteur Cheval, anatomical models, the mutilated faces of war veterans, Parisian street scenes, silent siren Musidora, a Lumière brother, the Paris Exposition of 1937, the tribes of sub-Saharan Africa, the city-dwellers of the Maghreb, Finnish military manoeuvres, French civilians surrendering scrap metal for the war effort, oxen being herded through the streets of Lyon, Yannick and her sister (actor Loleh Bellon) in advertising images.

The same voracious lens captured things of which we might otherwise be ignorant. Henri Langlois’s mythical bathtub, for instance, where he stored French film masterpieces before founding the Cinemathèque. Or the Loyalists’ little-known attempt to re-take Spain in 1944.

Remembrance of Things to Come is an important document of an undervalued 20th century photographer, and well worth seeking out. The trailer is below (and if you understand French or Spanish you can see the whole thing here, narrated in the former and subtitled in the latter.)

Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.

Further reading
The Chelsea

Further reading
James and the Giant Artichoke
Places: Quinta da Regaleira

Just after I posted about Valeska Gert on Friday, I found out that a new book about her was being published. Not only that, it was to be launched that very night, in Berlin. Most of exciting of all, for someone who has always wondered why Valeska Gert isn’t better known in the Anglosphere, it was a bilingual German-English edition.

The launch was in a Kreuzberg gallery, where an exhibition of images of Valeska Gert was also on display. They were stills from video footage shot in 1969 by Ernst Mitzka who was there to talk about his encounter with Gert. A precocious example of video technology (early adopter Andy Warhol, for example, wouldn’t get hold of a video camera until the following year), the footage provides a hugely valuable impression of Gert’s performance. This recording is included as a DVD included with the book, along with another disc which collects film and TV appearances.

The book itself (issued by Berlin publishers Hybriden in a limited edition of just 100) is a thing of beauty, evidently crafted with love and insight. Dressed in scarlet – a colour favoured by its subject – Bewegte Fragmente/Fragments in Motion builds on the 2010 exhibition curated by editors Wolfgang Müller and An Paenhuysen at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof gallery. That show sought to bring Valeska Gert in out of the cold of obscurity and into – if not living rooms the world over – at least the art world. The book further solidifies the case for viewing Gert as an outrider of conceptual art rather than just an idiosyncratic leftover of the Weimar era. Among the texts are an unpublished interview with Gert dating from 1977 as well as a radio piece wherein she discusses her theories of dance. Her words are complemented by essays examining her utterly forward-thinking approach to art, performance and life.

If – long shot approaching – you happen to find yourself in Portland, Oregon on Thursday, have I got a tip for you.

The “first-ever” Harry Smith Seance will seek to channel the spirit of the great American polymath although not – so far as I can judge – through the ouija board or other such paranormality, but rather through presentation of his astonishing experimental films and discussion of his entire confounding oeuvre.

Among the speakers is Rani Singh, who was Smith’s assistant until his death in 1991. She also wrote and directed the 2007 documentary The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, edited a volume of interviews with Smith and co-edited Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular. In addition she is director of the Harry Smith Archives (and given Smith’s mania for collecting the most disparate items in vast quantities imagine what a trip that would be). The archives were recently acquired by the Getty Research Institute.

The “seance” is preceded by “Harry Smith in the Pacific Northwest” a panel discussion which explores Smith’s early influences in Portland (where he was born in 1923) and the surrounding region. Finally on May 19 there’s a “Harry Smith Free For All” which will explore further aspects of Smithery and will include an “indoor air show” celebrating Smith’s collection of paper airplanes.

If you’re entirely new to Harry Smith and can’t make it to Portland, have a look at this quick introduction or read this highly informative longer study. And for a quick flavour of the man, watch this short, animated recollection from one of his friends:

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DC

The development of Walter Benjamin‘s Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (“Berlin Childhood around 1900″) was book-ended by the author’s suicide attempts in 1932 and 1940, the latter successful.

Benjamin began the work in Paris, shortly after leaving his beloved Berlin. It soon became apparent that he would never see the city of his birth again, and in his distress he conceived the book as “immunisation against homesickness”, as he put it. Although nowhere near as influential as his works of cultural theory such as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and dwarfed in scale by the huge, unfinished Arcades Project, this posthumously published collection of childhood vignettes was nonetheless a highly important undertaking for Benjamin. He revised it repeatedly throughout his years of exile. Where the Arcades Project saw Benjamin excavating the Parisian foundations of the modern consumerist society and presenting a faceless, floating cast of flaneurs, prostitutes and rag-pickers, here it was his own past through which he wandered. Nonetheless Berliner Kindheit um 1900 is a work with autobiographical features rather than an actual autobiography.

The extract below is entitled “Tiergarten”, a name given to both a large central Berlin park and the district which abuts it, where Benjamin was born and raised. To the child Walter the landscaped park is an ur-forest, its serene neighbouring canal a mythic river. The child sees things and, like God, names them for the first time so that they become the elements of his own creation myth, with early reminiscences threaded through with inherited memories of antiquity, civilization’s infancy.

Tiergarten was an area girded by privilege but far from insipidly bourgeois; it was an enlightened colony whose handsome villas housed writers, artists, actors, salonnières and – as we saw yesterday – art dealers. This was the “Old West”, so named to distinguish it from the newer, flashier area of western Berlin centred on Kurfürstendamm. It was a world already disappearing as Benjamin set down his recollections. As part of his plans to transform Berlin into Germania, Albert Speer had earmarked it as an ambassadorial district (which it has become once more). Families, many of them Jewish, were forced from their homes, their compensation derisory or non-existent. Numerous buildings were razed.

During the Second World War, Tiergarten’s proximity to Berlin’s government district meant it was subject to particularly heavy aerial bombing. The resulting devastation was near-total and only a handful of buildings survived; whole streets visible on pre-war maps are no longer to be found, and an entire milieu is no more. The traumatised landscape offered fewer traces of its former inhabitants than the long-dead civilizations to which Benjamin alludes and which Tiergarten’s caryatids quoted. All of this makes Berliner Kindheit um 1900 especially valuable.

Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. No, not the first, for there was one earlier that has outlasted the others. The way into this labyrinth, which was not without its Ariadne, led over the Bendler Bridge, whose gentle arch became my first hillside. Not far from its foot lay the goal: Friedrich Wilhelm and Queen Luise. On their round pedestals they towered up from the flowerbeds, as though transfixed by the magic curves that a stream was describing in the sand before them. But it was not so much the rulers as their pedestals to which I turned, since what took place upon these stone foundations, though unclear in context, was nearer in space. That there was something special about this maze I could always deduce from the broad and banal esplanade, which gave no hint of the fact that here, just a few steps from the corso of cabs and carriages, sleeps the strangest part of the park.

I got a sign of this quite early on. Here, in fact, or not far away, must have lain the couch of that Ariadne in whose proximity I first experienced what only later I had a word for: love. Unfortunately, the “Fräulein” intervenes at its earliest budding to overspread her icy shadow. And so this park, which, unlike every other, seemed open to children, was for me, as a rule, distorted by difficulties and impracticalities. How rarely I distinguished the fish in its pond. How much was promised by the name “Court Hunters’ Lane,” and how little it held. How often I searched in vain among the bushes, which somewhere hid a kiosk built in the style of my toy blocks, with turrets coloured red, white and blue. How hopelessly, each spring, I lost my heart to Prince Louis Ferdinand, at whose feet the earliest crocuses and daffodils bloomed. A watercourse, which separated me from them, made them as untouchable as though they were covered by a bell jar. Thus, coldly, the princely had to rest upon the beautiful; and I understood why Luise von Landau, who belonged to my circle of schoolfriends until she died, had to dwell on the Lützowufer, opposite the little wilderness which nourished its flowers with the waters of the canal.

Later, I discovered other corners, and I heard of still more. But no girl, no experience, no book could tell me anything new about these things. And so, thirty years later, when an expert guide, a Berlin peasant, joined forces with me to return to the city after an extended, shared absence from its borders, his trail cut furrows through this garden, in which he sowed the seeds of silence. He led the way along the paths, and each, for him, became precipitous. They led onward, if not to the Mothers of all being, then certainly to those of this garden. In the asphalt over which he passed, his steps awakened an echo. The gas lamp, shining across our path of pavement, cast an ambiguous light on this ground. The short flights of steps, the pillared porticoes, the friezes and architraves of the Tiergarten villas – for the first time we took them at their word. But above all, there were the stairwells, which, with their stained-glass windows, were the same as in the old days, though much had changed on the inside, where people lived. I still know the verses that filled the intervals between my heartbeats when, after school, I paused while climbing the stairs. They glimmered toward me from the coloured pane where a woman, floating ethereally like the Sistine Madonna, a crown in her hands, stepped forth from the niche. Slipping my thumbs beneath the shoulder of my satchel, I would study the lines: “Work is the burgher’s ornament,/Blessedness the reward of toil.” The house door below swung shut with a sigh, like a ghost sinking back into the grave. Outside it was raining, perhaps. One of the stained-glass windows was opened, and I went on climbing the stairs in time with the patter of raindrops.

Among the caryatids and atlantes, the putti and pomonas, which in those days looked on me, I stood closest to those dust-shrouded specimens of the race of threshold dwellers – those who guard the entrance to life, or to a house. For they are versed in waiting. Hence, it was all the same to them whether they waited for a stranger, for the return of the ancient gods, or for the child that, thirty years ago, slipped past them with his schoolboy’s satchel.  Under their tutelage, the Old West district became the West of antiquity – source of the west winds that aid the mariners who sail their craft, freighted with the apples of the Hesperides, slowly up the Landwehr Canal, to dock by the Hercules Bridge. And once again, as in my childhood, the Hydra and the Nemean Lion had their place in the wilderness that surrounds the Great Star.