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Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir davantage
My favorite character in Cocteau's Orphée (1949) was never the poet himself or even María Casares' spellbinding Princesse with her face like harsh white marble and her black leather gloves, but Heurtebise, Death's chauffeur, the sympathetic but not sad-sack love-suicide who falls for Eurydice while his mistress is coming through the mirror every night to watch Orphée sleep. I watched the movie with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lesser_celery this afternoon for the first time since September 2009 (when it screened at the Brattle, my first time seeing it on a big screen, and Michael McAfee told me afterward about an upcoming show he thought I'd like) and I still like him. I can recognize the actor now from other roles: the risky lover in Le notti di Cabiria (1957), the superintendant of police in Le samouraï (1967). I don't remember him from Z (1969), but I admit I was distracted by Jean-Louis Trintignant. François Périer was just my age when the film was made. Heurtebise identifies himself as a student. It took John to point out to me that he's not much to look at, especially against the hard bronze Narcissus-planes of Jean Marais: but his frustration with the poet is the audience's, practically dragging Orphée by the hand into the blasted ruins of the underworld to rescue a woman who doesn't deserve to be a casualty of the mutual obsession of Orphée and his Death. (John also confirms that I am not groundlessly slash-goggling Eurydice and Aglaonice. I feel vaguely justified about that.) I think I find the numbers station of the underworld even more poignant now, knowing how many fewer remain in our world. The simplest of special effects in this movie is still my favorite, time running backward with the film—all but Heurtebise, Vergil-guiding Orphée out of death. Into ordinariness. Death and her aide turn away into whatever comes beyond the courts of hell. I noticed the first time around that the opening titles are constellations; the one-word end title, too. Even if I have to map them myself, I like the idea of Casares and Périer in the stars.
My poem "Cuneiform Toast" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It takes its name from the earrings byelisem; its subject is Ereškigal's prime minister, the courier of the Mesopotamian underworld, Namtar. (His mother's name is Mardula'anki, by the way.) The connection is not lost on me. I have never been able to figure out why this archetype, but I'm glad I finally got a tribute to this particular figuration out of my head.
I was turned down tonight by a housing situation I had rather desperately wanted. I wrote this post anyway, because I had been planning on it since I left the house. Then I had to rewrite it, because the internet ate it: the evening has been like that. I suspect I will stop talking about my apartment searches in public; it serves no purpose and feels superstitiously like asking to be hurt (and I can't find that amazing bag B. gave me my Hittite sun disk wrapped in, covered in more stopper-blue eyes than I'd ever seen on plastic before). Comments on this subject not desired. Have a really neat article by Gemma Files on the ways in which media criticism has changed even within her professional lifetime.cucumberseed has asked me to write about monsters and John for something fireproof. I am going to try to sleep, or shower, or something.
lesser_celery this afternoon for the first time since September 2009 (when it screened at the Brattle, my first time seeing it on a big screen, and Michael McAfee told me afterward about an upcoming show he thought I'd like) and I still like him. I can recognize the actor now from other roles: the risky lover in Le notti di Cabiria (1957), the superintendant of police in Le samouraï (1967). I don't remember him from Z (1969), but I admit I was distracted by Jean-Louis Trintignant. François Périer was just my age when the film was made. Heurtebise identifies himself as a student. It took John to point out to me that he's not much to look at, especially against the hard bronze Narcissus-planes of Jean Marais: but his frustration with the poet is the audience's, practically dragging Orphée by the hand into the blasted ruins of the underworld to rescue a woman who doesn't deserve to be a casualty of the mutual obsession of Orphée and his Death. (John also confirms that I am not groundlessly slash-goggling Eurydice and Aglaonice. I feel vaguely justified about that.) I think I find the numbers station of the underworld even more poignant now, knowing how many fewer remain in our world. The simplest of special effects in this movie is still my favorite, time running backward with the film—all but Heurtebise, Vergil-guiding Orphée out of death. Into ordinariness. Death and her aide turn away into whatever comes beyond the courts of hell. I noticed the first time around that the opening titles are constellations; the one-word end title, too. Even if I have to map them myself, I like the idea of Casares and Périer in the stars.My poem "Cuneiform Toast" has been accepted by Mythic Delirium. It takes its name from the earrings by
elisem; its subject is Ereškigal's prime minister, the courier of the Mesopotamian underworld, Namtar. (His mother's name is Mardula'anki, by the way.) The connection is not lost on me. I have never been able to figure out why this archetype, but I'm glad I finally got a tribute to this particular figuration out of my head.I was turned down tonight by a housing situation I had rather desperately wanted. I wrote this post anyway, because I had been planning on it since I left the house. Then I had to rewrite it, because the internet ate it: the evening has been like that. I suspect I will stop talking about my apartment searches in public; it serves no purpose and feels superstitiously like asking to be hurt (and I can't find that amazing bag B. gave me my Hittite sun disk wrapped in, covered in more stopper-blue eyes than I'd ever seen on plastic before). Comments on this subject not desired. Have a really neat article by Gemma Files on the ways in which media criticism has changed even within her professional lifetime.
cucumberseed has asked me to write about monsters and John for something fireproof. I am going to try to sleep, or shower, or something.
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Congratulations on the acceptance! I'm glad that poem's quality has been recognised.
I wish you sleep and success. And shower as well, at least if you'd wish to have one now.
ETA: Thanks for sharing the Gemma Files piece. I'm still digesting it, but there's some very interesting stuff in there.
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Thank you. I think that's four pieces I've sold titled after
You should see Orphée. The Criterion DVD is very fine and does nothing stupid with the subtitles.
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It's much less a retelling of the myth than it takes the myth as a flashpoint about which it elaborates on love and art and liminality and its underworld is one of the best I have ever seen onscreen; I don't know that it is my favorite film of this material, but I've seen it three times now and I love it dearly. I've never heard the opera. Does it use Cocteau as the libretto, or what?
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A little googling shows that Glass did also write an opera based on Cocteau's Orphee, but it uses the screenplay (cut down some) as the libretto and is conventionally staged. Coincidentally, it premiered in Cambridge at ART in 1993. I have not heard it, but if it's on Naxos, I will give it a listen.
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That's the strangest application of the Rocky Horror shadowcast I've ever heard. I may have to see this.
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. . . You know,
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Okay, so, poem?
(I only ever saw about three episodes of Downton Abbey in the second season. What do you like about Carson?)
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Hm. Mostly what I like about Carson is Jim Carter. I'm no Downton fiend - I think my brain just latched onto that character as "butler most recently seen."
But I do think about the notion of "service" a lot: how it's an entire sector of the workforce no longer available (for good and ill) and how such people were the real actors/activators in a household. I keep making notes for extremely boring stories about magic being accomplished by cooks and scrubbers, not the pointy-hatted glitter-wearing wizards upstairs.
If I don't look out, I'll turn myself into the Barbara Pym of spec fic. (ha ha ha ha I should be so talented)
*laugh*
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Huzzah!
(The last one turned out really well.)
I keep making notes for extremely boring stories about magic being accomplished by cooks and scrubbers, not the pointy-hatted glitter-wearing wizards upstairs.
Dude, those would be awesome; write them.
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For what it's worth, I think this has all kinds of potential to be the very opposite thing to boring.
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I had no idea! Excuse me while I find that.
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No! Talk to me about it.
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Fred (Christophe Lambert) is a vague sort of criminal -- shortly before the start of the movie, trophy wife Helena (Isabelle Adjani) invited him to her birthday party after he helped her carry in some groceries, and he subsequently blew up the safe and stole a bunch of blackmail material; but it's never clear if he'd planned this from the start or just robbed the safe on anarchic impulse.
Now he's hiding out in the tunnels under the Paris metro, among a variety of subway workers, pickpockets, homeless people and street vendors. But he's less interested in his current predicament than he is in (a) starting a band (he's unable to sing himself, due to a childhood injury, but he longs to be the manager) and (b) scoring a date with the trophy wife, who comes down into the subway to look for him.
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It has music and the underworld going for it. I will check it out.
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Also Lambert's weird charm. Oh, and there's a a couple of flics nicknamed Batman and Robin.
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Can you explain? What are numbers stations? I am sad for their fewness, not even knowing what they are...
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A phenomenon on shortwave radio of stations whose broadcasts consist most often of strings or groups of numbers (hence the name) recited by human or synthesized voices, although verbal or musical phrases and messages in Morse code are also known to occur. They are not strictly English-language; I don't even believe they're mostly English-language. They've been around since right after World War II. (I've heard claims as far back as World War I, which I find less convincing, but I will admit I have not looked at the data for myself.) The thing about numbers stations is that, as far as I know, no one has ever been able to confirm what they're for, but the widespread belief is that they're used by intelligence services of various countries broadcasting to agents in the field: keys for deciphering a one-time pad. There are entire radio enthusiast cultures that study the transmissions of these stations, trying to crack their codes or pinpoint the signals or just listen in. They are dying out, but they have a fascinating persistence in a post-Cold War era. I learned "The Lincolnshire Poacher" from the singing of John Roberts and Tony Barrand (and later the setting by Benjamin Britten, which is what I sang at the MS benefit concert in October and reprised in December at the synagogue in Newton), but
Orphée in Cocteau's film eavesdrops on transmissions from the underworld, using the radio in the Princesse's car to tune in to the frequency Death and her kind use to communicate among themselves. Their brief, surrealistic phrases (L'oiseau chante avec ses doigts, un seul verre d'eau éclaire le monde—The bird sings with its fingers, a single glass of water lights up the world), repeated and interspersed with groups of numbers, are very much in the style of numbers stations; Cocteau himself identified them with coded broadcasts made by the Resistance during World War II. The movie was probably my first exposure to the phenomenon.
un seul verre d'eau éclaire le monde
Now that I have your explanation, I realize I've heard of the phenomenon of numbers stations before, but not so wonderfully nor so elegiacally as this.
from as far away
as the land of death,
transmissions
as intimate and alien
as grief and loss
gleaned from the air
by all lonely things
and all who mourn
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I didn't even have to make any of it up.
as intimate and alien
as grief and loss
Eight lines; send it to inkscrawl.
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I think it sings. If you are worried, you can make one of Cocteau's lines its title.
It's a good movie for sparking off of—see Adrienne Rich's "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," mentioned above. "Radio Banquo" came out of thinking about Macbeth, but I can't imagine there's not some of Cocteau's autre monde shortwave in there.
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Thanks for the link to the Adrienne Rich poem, too. Wonderful.
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If you write it, I'll read it.
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And yay on acceptance.
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Oh, yes. Have you seen any Cocteau?
And yay on acceptance.
Thank you!
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Yes: it contains many of his feelings and ambiguities about what it means to be an artist (at least at that time in Cocteau's life; he had already explored some of the imagery in Le sang d'un poète in 1930 and would return explicitly to the material with Le testament d'Orphée in 1960), but it's also a beautiful standalone half-retelling, half-reworking of the myth in postwar France with an underworld that calls back to the Occupation and some of the finest, plainest evocations of the supernatural I've seen onscreen. Vampyr last night gave me the same feeling: it does nothing more technically complicated than some double exposures and the carefully lit creation of shadows where you can see very well what shouldn't have cast them, but it's uncannier than all the CGI in the world because something that simple should be the reliable evidence of your eyes. A mirror shivers like a pane of mercury. Two men round a street corner and tumble, windblown, down the wall. A dead woman rises with a falling twist of the body that nothing without marionette strings should be able to perform. It's a magic trick: I know how it's done, and it has all the more power over me.