My husband and I saw El Orfanato last weekend at the theater. It was fantastic and totally unexpected - one of the better movies I’ve seen in quite some time. I’ll have to see it again to make full sense of it. It’s one of those that can be understood in any number of ways, and it also might help to have a little better understanding of Jung’s Doppelganger.

I’ve also watched a few movies from my Netflix queue worth mentioning. The first is Little Children which was sort of a suburban Crash, maybe? Except I’m not so sure that any sort of connection was actually ever established although perhaps the Little Children (suburban adults) finally had an inkling of what it means to “grow up”. The suburban at-home-mom’s live according to regimented feeding schedules and discuss the need to schedule sex with their husbands. A sex-offender moves back into the neighborhood who had been arrested for exposing himself to children at the playground. The suburban neighbors are horrified, of course. Yet, in a sense, they are just the same as he is because they have not yet grown up.

There are no sex offenders in our neighborhood as far as I know. But people are often so heavily regimented that it is obvious they’ve lost their creative ability (it’s all about conformity). Or they haven’t fully lost their creative ability but are so repressed that they seek out affairs to feel alive. I hope suburbia isn’t as ugly and disconnected as this film made it out to be, but I have to wonder why it is I found the film so incredibly disturbing. Is it the films fault or does it hit too close to home?

The other Netflix films are both about Gustav Klimt, the artist (Post Impressionism). One was a movie by Raul Ruiz, the other a documentary from The Post Impressionists series. I first watched the movie and was left totally confused. I’m certain it was meant to be artistic - maybe trying to evoke the same experience his art evokes. And perhaps in that sense, it was quite good, although very difficult to follow. I felt that if I knew more about Klimt, I’d probably have a better feel for Ruiz’s movie. So I watched the documentary on him which was helpful, but not a particularly good documentary as far as documentaries go. What I learned is that the movie’s film score is of composers that Klimt admired. Very little is known about Klimt because he lived a sort of hermit existence. What is known about him is gnereally through his art - which makes sense why the movie is so vague in terms of a biography. I’m happy to have learned about Klimt. Although the movie made me want to seek out more information, the documentary did not. (This site on the internet is quite fascinating.)

I have to send Death in Venice back to Netflix. This is another film I really don’t want to let go!

It’s based on Thomas Mann’s novella by the same name. Thomas Mann said the character of Prof. Aschenbach was, in part, based on Gustav Mahler. He had been inspired to write the novella after seeing Mahler break down in tears on a train departing Venice. It was the physical appearance of Aschenbach, not his character, that was based on Mahler. Mahler’s Third and Fifth Symphonies are used in the movie and Gustav von Aschenbach looks very similar to Gustav Mahler in the film. Director Luchino Visconti turns Aschenbach into composer rather than the writer Mann portrayed him as in the novella.

I don’t know who Arthur is, maybe a friend, or maybe the devil’s advocate? There isn’t a lot of dialog in the film, but I did write down the conversation between Gustav von Aschenbach and Alfred on beauty. It seems likely that I’ll want to come back to it after Nausea because it seems to reflect some of Sartre’s thoughts on art….

By aligning himself with Apollo (the god of reason and intellect), Aschenbach has denied Dionysus, the god of unreason and passion (a theme straight out of Nietzsche).

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Alfred: Beauty. You mean your spiritual conception of beauty.

Gustav: But do you deny the ability of the artist to create from the spirit?

Alfred: Yes, Gustav. That is precisely what I deny.

Gustav: So then, according to you, our labor as artists is –

Alfred: Labor, exactly! Do you really believe in beauty as the product of labor?

Gustav: Yes, I do.

Alfred: That’s how beauty is born, in total disregard for your labor or mine. It pre-exists our presumption as artists. Your great error, my dear friend, is to consider life… reality as a limitation.

Gustav: But isn’t that what it is? Reality only distracts and degrades us. You know, sometimes I think that artists are rather like hunters aiming in the dark. They don’t know what their target is, and they don’t know if they’ve hit it. But you can’t expect life to illuminate the target and steady your aim. The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.

Alfred: No, Gustav. No. Beauty belongs to the senses. Only to the senses!

Gustav: You cannot reach the spirit through the senses. You cannot. It’s only be complete domination of the senses that you can ever achieve wisdom, truth and human dignity.

Alfred: Wisdom? Human dignity? What use are they? Genius is a divine gift. No: a divine affliction. A sinful, morbid flash fire of natural gifts.

Gustav: I reject the demonic virtues of art.

Alfred: And you are wrong! Evil is a necessity. It is the food of genius….

Gustav: You know, Alfred, Art is the highest source of education, and the artist has to be exemplary. He must be a model of balance and strength. He cannot be ambiguous.

Alfred: But art is ambiguous. And music, the most ambiguous of all the arts. It is ambiguity made a science. Wait! [Sits down at the piano.] Listen to this chord, or this one. You can interpret them in any way you like. You have before you an entire series of mathematical combinations unforeseen and inexhaustible. A paradise of double meanings in which you, more than anyone else romp and roll about like a calf in clover. [Plays a melody.] Don’t you hear it? Do you recognize it?

….

Alfred: That’s not shame, that’s fear. Shame’s a spiritual distress to which you are immune because you are immune to feeling. You are a man of avoidance, of dislike, the keeper of distances. You are afraid to have direct honest contact with anything! Because of your rigid standards of morality you want your behavior to be as perfect as the music you compose. Every slip is a fall, a catastrophe, resulting in irreparable contamination.

Gustav: I am contaminated!

Alfred: If only you were! To be in debt to one’s own senses for a condition which is irredeemably corrupt and sick. What joy for an artist! Think what a dry and arid ting good health is. Especially if it’s of the soul no less than the body.

Gustav: I have to find my balance somehow.

Alfred: How unfortunate that art is so indifferent to personal morality otherwise you would be supreme, unreachable, inimitable. Tell me, do you know what lies at the bottom of the mainstream? Mediocrity.

Gustav: Stop!

Alfred: It’s yours! It’s all your music!

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Toward the end of the movie, Gustav has a flashback of presenting a composition that angers the audience. He is hissed and booed and retreats to a room where people try to storm him, but his wife pushes them out. Alfred tells him there are people who want to see him, and Gustav asks him to send them away. Alfred says, “Send them away? I will deliver you to them … They will judge you. And they will condemn you.” As Gustav comes back to the present, Alfred’s words continue, “Truth – human dignity – all finished. Now there is no reason why you cannot go to your grave with your music. You have achieved perfect balance. The man and the artist are one: they have touched bottom together.”

At the very end of the movie, upon Gustav’s death, we hear Alfred’s voice again: “Chastity is the gift of purity, not the painful result of old age. And you are old, Gustav – and in all the world there is no impurity so impure as old age.”

I really like the introduction to Nausea by Hayden Carruth which made me do some web surfing and allowed me to read some more of his essays. It seems as though he came to some of the same conclusions Sartre did about art in his later years. At one point, he thought art (his poetry and writing) could help people, but now he realizes it can’t. In Suicides and Jazzers, he writes that artists yearn to be connected through their art, but eventually will discover their defeat.

People say that a society which neglects its arts and artists will be impoverished, but this society is so impoverished already–and from hundreds of quite other causes–that the neglect of art can’t make the situation any worse. Artists know this. They know that if they work simply for themselves, or even for some abstract ideal of Art, they and their work will become attenuated and parched. They yearn to be connected. But they can’t be, and they are defeated, they are in a condition of unending degradation.

But doesn’t this sort of thinking reject the idea of freedom Sartre purports? If you are going to make demands on others (that they be helped by your art, for instance), then you are seeking to limit their freedom. So of course you are going to end up feeling degraded. We are connected. We don’t have to demand connection. To make that demand is to reject the freedom “we have been condemned to”.

Yes, in one sense, we are utterly alone and everything is meaningless, including our attempts to help others and everything we’ve ever held “sacred”. If we can accept this, then we can realize we are never alone and that nothing is ever meaningless. That’s the paradox and I don’t think it requires believing in God or an Absolute to realize it although perhaps it does require a sort of “leap of faith”. But that leap of faith need be nothing more than a willingness to imagine beyond the limits of our current perceptual biases. I don’t mean hoping for anything in specific like wanting the world to conform to what it is we want it to be. But hope in the more general sense - that we can never step into the same river or universe twice because it’s undergoing constant change and there is no way we can possibly imagine where that change may take us. But, if we insist on the reality of our circumstances, we are likely to stay stuck in the same old circumstances.   Our circumstances do not exist in reality because reality is forever in flux.

(What I liked about Carruth’s Introduction on Nausea to follow…)

Sorry about all of the posts today. I have to take a bunch of stuff back to the library so just want to record my thoughts on some of it before I give the items up entirely.

I checked-out a really interesting series called Mystery of the Senses which is hosted by Diane Ackerman who wrote A Natural History of the Senses. There are 5 DVDs, one each on Taste, Smell, Hearing, Touch, and Sight. Each was presented with a mix of sensory experience and research. My daughter got caught up in watching some of them with me and found them fascinating as well.

I think the most interesting episode was on Touch because I hadn’t really stopped to think about how taboo touch is in our culture. Yet how is it we have come to simply consider it a useful tool when we take pleasure in all of the other senses? The film explores how important touch is in the well-being of babies of all species and how difficult it is for cultures that are much more open to touch to move into the ways of modern society where chit chat has taken the place of touch.

I think Smell was my next favorite episoe. They followed the efforts of famous perfumers and people who are studying what makes perfume attractive to us. I’d never really taken perfume all that seriously before but think I have now changed my mind!

This series reacquainted me with my senses! Fun, informative, and fascinating.

Art: 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century

Season 3 was not quite as interesting to me as Seasons 1 & 2 – but still incredibly fascinating. The creativity of some people is astounding.

Art: 21 - Art in the 21st Century (Seasons One & Two)

I finished watching Seasons 1-3 of Art: 21. My daughter has watched almost every single episode with me, too. It’s a very interesting series although we both enjoyed the first two seasons far better than the third.

There were several artists that interested me but two from the first season especially struck me:.

• Sally Mann lives in the south with no electricity and produces her art in old-timey ways. And it is absolutely amazingly beautiful. What I think impressed me most is that she stays so true to herself and also because her kids were so clearly impressed with who she was even though they claimed they had never had a mother.

• John Feodorov’s art keeps coming back to me because everything he does is a presentation of the commodifiation of American spirituality – typically the New Age commidification of Native American spirituality. I think fundamentalism is equally a commodification of spirituality.

Very interesting series. Makes you want to release your creative side.