wodehouse and tretyakov

Two different characters from different worlds: however PGW was not unaware of Russia; in Clicking of Cuthbert he discusses it at length; a place of novels of the utmost misery and where a fellow could expect a brace of bombs coming through the window. PGW and Tretyakov both shared an interest in Futurism. Tretyakov wanted to depict Communism's glowing future, a possible future Utopia. According to Evelyn Waugh Blandings Castle is the original garden (of Eden) from which we are exiled. His characters are still in Eden. Two ideal futures then, equally Utopian and unattainable but with very different biographies. PGW died in a comfortable hospital bed with his final manuscript by his side; Tretyakov threw himself off the landing at Butyrki prison to escape Stalin's torturers; at around this moment Brecht was considering Tretyakov as a possible member of his Society of Productive Writers (the Diderot club). Hito Steyerl's installation In Free Fall starts with a reference to Tretyakov's Biography of an object and goes on to note that he himself became a falling object-in Butyrki prison

Bruno's look

What is in a look? Bruno Schleinstein (who died recently) should know; star of Kasper Hauser and Stroszek, Werner Herzog built part of his cinema on Bruno S' look. The 'look' appears whenever Kinski is on screen; it was a single look in an early German film of Kinski's that lead to the Herzog/Kinski collaboration. Herzog even sees the 'look' in Grizzly Man-in the bear; he is impressed by the ursine gaze that the creature fixes on people seeing only food and nothing else. Bruno S would have been a natural to play Kafka's K; he wrote songs and performed them on the streets of Berlin; one of his songs told of a poor boy who grows up wishing for a little horse which turns up in later life pulling his mother's hearse. One of Thomas Cromwell's  portraits has a penetrating 'look' which Mark Rylance captures in the TV Wolf Hall; interestingly he got it from Brad Pitt in the Jesse James movie.

charles lamb was right about don quixote

The end of Don Quixote is not quite right; he has three options in light of his vanquishment: to carry on regardless as before, to give up the chivalry idea but switch to a pastoral setting (to become a shepherd) or to renounce the whole business and embrace 'normality'. He chooses the latter; an outcome that Dostoevsky considers the saddest imaginable. Certainly the choice he makes is a let down and supports Lamb's idea that Cervantes planned to end the book after Part One adding Part Two before another writer got there first. At the conclusion of the first part his chivalric narrative is working well and as the idea of multiple narratives is now commonplace each of the above three options has equal weight. Dostoevsky's notion of self deception or compounding lies with further lies is off target; Quixote is not a liar; he describes things as he sees them. We need a frame of reference within which to capture his immortality. Consider Munoz' Double Bind; here a lift goes up and down; it is nearly a real lift but not quite; more an alternative or possible lift; one of many possible lifts none of which being in any sense privileged; looking down are mysterious figures a bit like us but not quite. This is a preferred locus for Quixote; he is one of the figures up in the lift looking down on us-forever.

aelita, queen of Mars

Chris Marker in his Immemory multi media DVD asks if Fritz Lang ever watched Aelita, Protazanov's 1920s silent movie featuring costumes by Aleksandra Ekster; it is one of the main forays into films by Dadaism. In it a revolutionary communist society is imagined on Mars. Marker is making a point about European art although he does link the theme of slaves in both Aelita and Metropolis. However it is the costumes rather than the content for which Aelita is remembered. Here are Sophie Taeuber-Arp and her sister photographed wearing Dadaist dresses in the recent Taeuber-Arp expo at the Picasso museum in Malaga.
A more interesting answer to Marker's question for Lang is offered by Malinowska and Tomaszewski's Mother Earth and Sister Moon installation; how did the communist imagination or the imagination of individuals trapped in communism represent the future to themselves? How did cults within the soviet bloc represent the extra mundane? In their installation they develop Ekster's dress designs even further with an enormous installation of a female Russian astronaut's space suit and more yet more striking versions (if that is possible) of Taeuber-Arp's dadaist dresses.

refuges

Here is Jackowski's (http://www.jackowski.co.uk) refuge: a wooden hut made out of planks, protective, human, natural-a place of refuge. At the corner of the room is a mysterious contraption on wheels also made out of planks. Think of the refuge as Heidegger's Todtnauberg, his wooden cabin that he built for himself: his place of retreat and commanding height of his philosophising, his 'house of being' where he could construct 'building dwelling thinking'. In his cabin, Karl Kraus notes, Heidegger dreamed up his 'blood myths' and 'blood driven forces', as a Third Reich 'verbal accomplice of violence'
Marc Bauer in his Panorama Todtnauberg and Nimbus Des Verfehlung drawings and installations (see www.marcbauer.ch) returns to the theme of Heidegger's cabin repeatedly and includes a tiny 50cm replica of the cabin in front of a kitsch Matterhorn accompanied by readings from Jelinek; one drawing reads 'I am in a good mood-my blood is good'. Maybe this is the resonance of the thing-on-wheels in Jackowski's painting: here is Heidegger's wooden refuge and within it a mobile death camp device made out of the same materials. Consider a further (top right) representation in wood of Anselm Kiefer which he calls sternenlager or 'star camp';
the image is of the numbered boxes in his studio cellar containing work in progress; the image also comments, ironically, on efforts to classify stars (which are forever forming and exploding) into little boxes. Two visions in wood: the preferred location for Todtnauberg (50cm) is within one of Kiefer's little numbered boxes.

doorkeepers, assistants, Jackowski/vigilant dreamer, Kraus

two figures/doorkeepers: 1) Kraus' wagenturlaufmacher; this figure exists in Kraus' imagination and is like Nately's whore in Catch 22; in Vienna wherever Kraus goes the doorekeeper jumps out of nowhere to open a carriage door; Kraus even dreams about him-the carriage door handle is for him 'the pledge of his hope and his everything'; and of course the same figure will be in attendance to open the door of Kraus' hearse. The doorkeeper is not a symbol of alienation ie an object of sympathy. Think of him more as a Jackowski image ie a 'vigilant dreamer'. Or 2) like Kafka's doorkeeper in Before the Law; we don't worry about his job prospects; he is another vigilant dreamer.

kafka, fritz lang and melancholy

Melancholy is not a mental state, ie it is not tortured stupidity; it is a condition made up of two parts. In Kafka's work the condition is one of extreme distortion: the distortion of time and space; Orson Welles shows this in his film of The Trial: K can barely fit in the room; Samsa, once metamorphosed, is too big for his room.For a more complete treatment in the cinema of these distortions see Sokurov's Faustus: the characters in the film are constantly struggling to find the space to move past each other-or see any of Svankmajer,s work especially The Flat.  Expressionism represents extreme states of being just as this. In film it is an extremity of gesture eg the M on the clenched claw-like hand at the beginning of Lang's film. Kafka's Trial has many gestures like this; a man presses himself against a woman, gazing up at the ceiling and shrieking; a woman fetches a handbag dragging herself across the whole length of the room. Imagine all this in the graphic setting of M. Imagine further a language of gestures in Kafka: on the one hand there are graphic, extreme situations; on the other there are responses to these situations: responses that befit a gentleman jockey or Red Indian; whereas the woman 'drags herself'' these figures are light and airy almost taking flight like the bucket rider. That is not to say these lighter touches are solutions. They are melancholy gestures. The condition may be inescapable but it calls for an imaginative, airier response.