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Hyperboloids of Wondrous Light
It starts with the apple. Of course it does: would one saint deny another his martyr's palm? It gleams in the hand like the skull of a seventeenth-century vanitas, already borne toward the lips for the final froth-pricked kiss. Gotcha! The white teeth penetrating the crimson skin belong not to the mathematician writing busily at his desk—a hodgepodge of papers and plugs and soldering, a gold-plated spoon standing in a half-drunk mug of tea—but to the youth in the school blazer seated on its edge, kicking his heels as he crunches another bite. He looks interested when he twists around to read over the older, shabbily sport-jacketed man's shoulder, not overawed. When he pulls the stiff little cream-colored rectangle out from underneath the other's pen, he goes on writing as the youth reads it aloud. It is one of the postcards Alan Turing sent to Robin Gandy in the spring of 1954, his messages from the unseen world: Science is a Differential Equation. Religion is a Boundary Condition. He turns it over in his hands and the other side is reflective, its flash for an eye-wincing instant bounces the camera blind. In the days of John Dee, it would have summoned angels. It may be the short distance ahead by which we can see the plenty that needs to be done.
Derek Jarman's Avalon for Aquila (1994/2024) doesn't run twenty minutes, less than the time required by the color-coded drums of a Turing-designed bombe to chug through the possible combinations of a three-rotor Enigma machine, but then again it isn't trying to decrypt its subject so much as offer its audience their own chance to work it out, or not. In 16 mm blow-up cut with the slow saturated grain of Super 8, Neil Tennant's Alan moves through slant icons of his dead man's words, spoken quietly in two voices neither his own. To take an extreme case, we are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. We don't want to say, 'This machine's quite hard, so it isn't a brain, and so it can't think.' Some of his actions are as banal as any of the tasks he specified an intelligent machine might or might not be able to perform, skipping stones across the glaucous ruck of the waves at Dungeness, repairing a chain-slipped bicycle propped at the back of the Pilot: his bitten fingernails edged in grease are part of his director's insistently tactile, pungent and painterly world. He pulls to a halt from running over the endless gorse-tufted mottle of beach, his dark tumble of hair sweating into his eyes. Others resemble more familiar tableaux, the mathematician in windblown tweeds holding a field-red poppy like a war memorial, a casualty, even as its fellows nod in California-orange splashes about his feet, a shade on the shores of Lethe. The other difficulty would be more fundamental and would become more serious still if he were not writing his life but a work on something he knew nothing about, let us say about family life on Mars. Outside on a wooden bench in the sea-breeze sun, the girl who sits playing chess with daisies for black and fir-cones for white must be Joan Clarke, the braided mass of her hair glinting like copper wire because she is played by Tilda Swinton in the round glasses and plain cardigans of her dazzling war work. Later she will be seen kneeling near the tide-line, rubbing a piece of white perforated paper over the silent slither of the shingle. It's a Zygalski sheet—is the joke that the telltale letters which repeated in the indicator transmitted before the body of the message were called females? A second-order hint of the original imitation game, in which the trick was to confuse the difference, not between machine and human, but woman and man? It crumbles in her hands like lace, she lets it wing out toward the water like a cloud of cabbage whites. Beyond the welter of sciences constantly threatening to overflow his desk, the film indicates nothing of Alan's achievements at Bletchley Park except as we come to realize that the irregular clacks and ratchets which form the only soundtrack beyond the narration and the traces of synths and strings from the Pet Shop Boys can be nothing but the operation of an Enigma machine. Nor does it allude to his arrest and conviction—the other half of the tragedy everyone knows—unless in the scene in which Alan in his undershirt sits confronted with an unnerving mandala of pills. In the process of trying to imitate an adult human mind we are bound to think a good deal about the process which has brought it to the state that it is in. We may notice three components, (a) The initial state of the mind, say at birth, (b) The education to which it has been subjected, (c) Other experience, not to be described as education, to which it has been subjected. Are they the stilboestrol of his court-ordered chemical castration, the prison term he served within his own body for his Tiresias year? Is he medicating, like his director, with the cocktail of drugs that started with AZT and cascaded on through antibiotics, antibacterials, anticonvulsants, antimalarials, antihistamines? Their sickly rainbow clashes with the vivid shore-tones, the healthy, untidy glow of Alan himself. He puts one on his tongue like communion. Always coming and going from the frame like lens flare with cormorant-slicked hair and an Old Shirburnian town tie is Keith Collins' Christopher Morcom, chewing curiously on his heart's alizarin apple as he pokes his way around the queer doings of his long-lost love. He adjusts the telescope through which Alan sights on a gorgeously artificial drape of spotted velvet stars; he regards the brilliantly formed eyes of a peacock fluttering round the sea kale while Alan carefully letters the bow of a boat like a beached rib of driftwood with the hieratic string of one of the reaction–diffusion equations of morphogenesis. That is to say, that if there is any doubt as to how the organism is going to develop it is conceivable that a minute examination of it just after instability has set in might settle the matter, but an examination of it at any earlier time could never do so. He shares his air time with a woman's voice as centrally as his screen time with the bodies of men, since Saint Derek of Dungeness of the Order of Celluloid Knights does not force his homosexual hero to be demurely chaste to a ghost: the handsome young men who strip off for Alan on beds of crackling paper and punched tape are accompanied by Collins' reading of one of the algorithmically generated love letters programmed by Christopher Strachey into the Manchester Mark 1. Darling sweetheart, you are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking. Yours beautifully— If any one of them should be identified as James Atkins or Kjell Carlson or Arnold Murray, their modern jeans and donkey jackets and tattoos do not give it away. At the last it is still Christopher leaning over the desk as the last of the postcards is licked for its dull scarlet stamp, Christopher with his sea-colored eyes whom Alan seems suddenly to see without surprise. He holds out his half-eaten apple; the mirror flares to black between their hands. Joan's hair spirals into the wind as she overturns her chessboard to the garden, scattering seeds. The rotors and keys whir to silence for the credits, the calm of her voice: I am afraid this may be more confusing to you than enlightening. If so I will try again.
It is not difficult to fathom the attraction the story of Alan Turing would have held for Jarman, though he could not have foreseen the apposite irony of its long-posthumous release, another message from the unseen world; unlike his features with their always precarious funding, it could be made almost literally a home movie with two muses and one familiar visitor to Prospect Cottage plus a handful of attractive extras and such usual suspects as Sandy Powell, Christopher Hobbs, and Ken Butler on set. Perhaps its private quality kept it from premiering before the last word of Blue (1993), just as its historical fiction did not lend itself to incorporation into the free-form testament of Glitterbug (1994). A hundred and a dozen years after its subject's birth, three decades on from its maker's death it reaches us like the light of a comet in Delphinus, a late delivery from Ariel. Alan in a tangle of beach roses ticks his fingers against his teeth, his other hand clenched on the blue oil of a mussel shell: a disturbance in the spheres. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimetre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping. When the world runs in retrograde, dream sideways. Always, always, something really new.
~
Derek Jarman (1942–1994) never made a film about Alan Turing (1912–1954). He expressed interest in the idea when interviewed around the release of Wittgenstein (1993), but the last film of his lifetime was Blue (1993) and the last film that could be counted under his name was the posthumously assembled collage of Glitterbug (1994). Had he been funded by Channel Four or the BBC for his choice of twentieth-century queer subjects, I am confident he would have done as much that I can't imagine with a biography of Turing as he did with Wittgenstein, but when near the end of a week of battering nightmares accelerating into zero sleep I have an ordinarily frustrated dream about not being able to get to BFI Southbank to see the first public screening of a rediscovered Jarman short about which I have only been able to read tantalizing, elliptical references in an equally nonexistent collection of his published late diaries, I take the hint. I am pretty sure it was triggered by the combination of the season and the only slightly less unattainable Powell and Pressburger retrospective going on right now at MOMA. The title and the original date came out of the dream and were not open to alteration. I have tried to keep in mind that not everyone who worked on Jarman's movies is dead. Happy hundred and twelfth birthday of Alan Turing! It was probably inevitable one of these years that I should write a ghost review.
Derek Jarman's Avalon for Aquila (1994/2024) doesn't run twenty minutes, less than the time required by the color-coded drums of a Turing-designed bombe to chug through the possible combinations of a three-rotor Enigma machine, but then again it isn't trying to decrypt its subject so much as offer its audience their own chance to work it out, or not. In 16 mm blow-up cut with the slow saturated grain of Super 8, Neil Tennant's Alan moves through slant icons of his dead man's words, spoken quietly in two voices neither his own. To take an extreme case, we are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge. We don't want to say, 'This machine's quite hard, so it isn't a brain, and so it can't think.' Some of his actions are as banal as any of the tasks he specified an intelligent machine might or might not be able to perform, skipping stones across the glaucous ruck of the waves at Dungeness, repairing a chain-slipped bicycle propped at the back of the Pilot: his bitten fingernails edged in grease are part of his director's insistently tactile, pungent and painterly world. He pulls to a halt from running over the endless gorse-tufted mottle of beach, his dark tumble of hair sweating into his eyes. Others resemble more familiar tableaux, the mathematician in windblown tweeds holding a field-red poppy like a war memorial, a casualty, even as its fellows nod in California-orange splashes about his feet, a shade on the shores of Lethe. The other difficulty would be more fundamental and would become more serious still if he were not writing his life but a work on something he knew nothing about, let us say about family life on Mars. Outside on a wooden bench in the sea-breeze sun, the girl who sits playing chess with daisies for black and fir-cones for white must be Joan Clarke, the braided mass of her hair glinting like copper wire because she is played by Tilda Swinton in the round glasses and plain cardigans of her dazzling war work. Later she will be seen kneeling near the tide-line, rubbing a piece of white perforated paper over the silent slither of the shingle. It's a Zygalski sheet—is the joke that the telltale letters which repeated in the indicator transmitted before the body of the message were called females? A second-order hint of the original imitation game, in which the trick was to confuse the difference, not between machine and human, but woman and man? It crumbles in her hands like lace, she lets it wing out toward the water like a cloud of cabbage whites. Beyond the welter of sciences constantly threatening to overflow his desk, the film indicates nothing of Alan's achievements at Bletchley Park except as we come to realize that the irregular clacks and ratchets which form the only soundtrack beyond the narration and the traces of synths and strings from the Pet Shop Boys can be nothing but the operation of an Enigma machine. Nor does it allude to his arrest and conviction—the other half of the tragedy everyone knows—unless in the scene in which Alan in his undershirt sits confronted with an unnerving mandala of pills. In the process of trying to imitate an adult human mind we are bound to think a good deal about the process which has brought it to the state that it is in. We may notice three components, (a) The initial state of the mind, say at birth, (b) The education to which it has been subjected, (c) Other experience, not to be described as education, to which it has been subjected. Are they the stilboestrol of his court-ordered chemical castration, the prison term he served within his own body for his Tiresias year? Is he medicating, like his director, with the cocktail of drugs that started with AZT and cascaded on through antibiotics, antibacterials, anticonvulsants, antimalarials, antihistamines? Their sickly rainbow clashes with the vivid shore-tones, the healthy, untidy glow of Alan himself. He puts one on his tongue like communion. Always coming and going from the frame like lens flare with cormorant-slicked hair and an Old Shirburnian town tie is Keith Collins' Christopher Morcom, chewing curiously on his heart's alizarin apple as he pokes his way around the queer doings of his long-lost love. He adjusts the telescope through which Alan sights on a gorgeously artificial drape of spotted velvet stars; he regards the brilliantly formed eyes of a peacock fluttering round the sea kale while Alan carefully letters the bow of a boat like a beached rib of driftwood with the hieratic string of one of the reaction–diffusion equations of morphogenesis. That is to say, that if there is any doubt as to how the organism is going to develop it is conceivable that a minute examination of it just after instability has set in might settle the matter, but an examination of it at any earlier time could never do so. He shares his air time with a woman's voice as centrally as his screen time with the bodies of men, since Saint Derek of Dungeness of the Order of Celluloid Knights does not force his homosexual hero to be demurely chaste to a ghost: the handsome young men who strip off for Alan on beds of crackling paper and punched tape are accompanied by Collins' reading of one of the algorithmically generated love letters programmed by Christopher Strachey into the Manchester Mark 1. Darling sweetheart, you are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking. Yours beautifully— If any one of them should be identified as James Atkins or Kjell Carlson or Arnold Murray, their modern jeans and donkey jackets and tattoos do not give it away. At the last it is still Christopher leaning over the desk as the last of the postcards is licked for its dull scarlet stamp, Christopher with his sea-colored eyes whom Alan seems suddenly to see without surprise. He holds out his half-eaten apple; the mirror flares to black between their hands. Joan's hair spirals into the wind as she overturns her chessboard to the garden, scattering seeds. The rotors and keys whir to silence for the credits, the calm of her voice: I am afraid this may be more confusing to you than enlightening. If so I will try again.
It is not difficult to fathom the attraction the story of Alan Turing would have held for Jarman, though he could not have foreseen the apposite irony of its long-posthumous release, another message from the unseen world; unlike his features with their always precarious funding, it could be made almost literally a home movie with two muses and one familiar visitor to Prospect Cottage plus a handful of attractive extras and such usual suspects as Sandy Powell, Christopher Hobbs, and Ken Butler on set. Perhaps its private quality kept it from premiering before the last word of Blue (1993), just as its historical fiction did not lend itself to incorporation into the free-form testament of Glitterbug (1994). A hundred and a dozen years after its subject's birth, three decades on from its maker's death it reaches us like the light of a comet in Delphinus, a late delivery from Ariel. Alan in a tangle of beach roses ticks his fingers against his teeth, his other hand clenched on the blue oil of a mussel shell: a disturbance in the spheres. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimetre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping. When the world runs in retrograde, dream sideways. Always, always, something really new.
Derek Jarman (1942–1994) never made a film about Alan Turing (1912–1954). He expressed interest in the idea when interviewed around the release of Wittgenstein (1993), but the last film of his lifetime was Blue (1993) and the last film that could be counted under his name was the posthumously assembled collage of Glitterbug (1994). Had he been funded by Channel Four or the BBC for his choice of twentieth-century queer subjects, I am confident he would have done as much that I can't imagine with a biography of Turing as he did with Wittgenstein, but when near the end of a week of battering nightmares accelerating into zero sleep I have an ordinarily frustrated dream about not being able to get to BFI Southbank to see the first public screening of a rediscovered Jarman short about which I have only been able to read tantalizing, elliptical references in an equally nonexistent collection of his published late diaries, I take the hint. I am pretty sure it was triggered by the combination of the season and the only slightly less unattainable Powell and Pressburger retrospective going on right now at MOMA. The title and the original date came out of the dream and were not open to alteration. I have tried to keep in mind that not everyone who worked on Jarman's movies is dead. Happy hundred and twelfth birthday of Alan Turing! It was probably inevitable one of these years that I should write a ghost review.
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Thank you.