Dormitorium

Yesterday I went to see Dormitorium | The Film Décors Of The Quay Brothers at the Swedenborg House - wonderful stuff. John Coulthart has written about it and included photographs on his site (he also has previous articles on the Quay Brothers). I took these shots of a mysterious landscape used in their film The Comb (1990). On the BFI site Michael Brooke called this 'one of the most inexplicably compelling of all the Quays' creations.'  

The most deliberately dreamlike of the Quay Brothers' films, The Comb is bookended by (and intercut with) a black-and-white live-action sequence of a woman asleep in bed, the implication being that these disconcerting, dislocating impressions of fairytale landscapes populated by decrepit puppets and an endless series of ladders (shot in colour) are taking place in the darker recesses of her mind. However, this is the only aspect of the film that's in any way easy to grasp, the rest setting out to wrong-foot the viewer at every turn, and the result wilfully defies verbal analysis. ...  Distortions visible in the background décor imply the existence of hidden images. At times it appears to be a discarded theatrical set, an impression given further credence by a camera pull-back to reveal what appear to be stage flats and a proscenium arch - though it could just as easily be a forest. 

In the film you never see the 'landscape' as it is presented in this case, so that undulating shape is rather surprising. The grain of wood is transformed into pools, shadows and bands of cloud. The painted trees here look like details in old German topographical prints or copper plate paintings, or Hercules Segers' 'mysterious landscapes'. I have mentioned on this blog before the Quay Brothers' cover design for Cosmicomics which appears to be a grisaille version of The Comb's wooden sculpture (see below). The literary source for The Comb is a fragment by Robert Walser, but I'm not aware of a precise text that might provide a literary equivalent for this landscape. Writing in Sight & Sound (1992), Jonathan Romney said 'the film is set to his work, rather than derived from it—so much so that the extracts from his texts, balefully whispered and muttered in several languages simply become part of the soundtrack, along with various drips, owl hoots, and strident orchestrations of string and wood by the Brothers' regular collaborator Leszek Jankowski.'

Undercity

I have started the audiobook of Underland.  I listen to it underground, during my tube journeys to work, where claustrophobia comes from the crush of people rather than the confined space of the tunnels.  It is the first of Robert Macfarlane's books I have listened to and so far the reading is excellent and clear, although there is a point on my daily journey between Highbury and Kings Cross where the scream of the train is so loud that I have to reverse back a little way in order to move forward again.  The fifth chapter, 'Invisible Cities', is particularly resonant to anyone listening on the Underground, as it describes a weekend spent with urban explorers in the world beneath Paris.  At one point Rob is compelled to crawl through a crumbling tunnel which begins to rumble and shake with the passage of a train heading overhead to Montparnasse station.  It wasn't difficult to predict, as I did here a few years ago when Underland was a work in progress, that there would be some 'arduous activity' of this kind in the book.  But there are also rich seams of cultural history, like the pages devoted to Walter Benjamin (including his arduous final walk and memorial.)  And there's Italo Calvino of course: his 'Invisible City' of Eusapia had a copy of itself underground, a dead place that over time became more and more like the 'real city' above.  

Cities are increasingly vertical - it has been estimated that the infrastructure supporting urban life spans from 10,000m below sea level to 35,000 km above it.  But one day they will be gone. Then

'it is the invisible cities - the undercities - that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock.  The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence.  Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids - these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.'

Listening to this, I imagined our tube train preserved intact within the fossil record, along with other machines and artifacts that have been abandoned or buried underground.  In an earlier chapter, Rob is told that potash mining machines are simply left when they come to the end of their lifespan.  In their caves they will gradually be covered in translucent halite, burial shrouds of salt.  Another striking Ballardian image occurs in 'Invisible Cities', when Rob remembers a trip he made to a slate mine with the writer and urban explorer Bradley Garrett.  There, in a great flooded chamber, a shaft of sunlight illuminates an avalanche of abandoned vehicles. The oldest cars were the furthest down - at its base, 'a blue Cortina estate was poised as perfectly as a glacial erratic atop the moraine, with a moss-green Triumph Herald both its pivot and its point of repose.'   

Guardian readers may recall a 2013 article Rob wrote about urban exploration, describing his first excursion with Bradley Garrett.  Some of this material reappears in Underland and encountering it again made me wonder about the tube journey I was taking - who else might have passed through those tunnels during the night?  Towards the end of his 'place-hacking' day in London, Rob was worried he might miss his half-midnight train from King's Cross.

'"We'll get you there," replied Garrett. "In fact, if you want we'll walk you north up the tunnels, and pop you out of a manhole just by the station." I liked the thought of taking the tube rather than the Tube back to King's Cross. But I pitied whoever sat next to me on the way home.

The Road to San Giovanni

In Liguria recently I took on our walks my much-read copy of Italo Calvino's Our Ancestors, which contains his short novel The Baron in the Trees.  In the book's introduction Calvino says that its tales 'breathe the air of the Mediterranean which I had breathed throughout my life ... So the Ligurian landscape, where trees have almost disappeared today, in the Baron is transformed into a kind of apotheosis of vegetation.'  He imagined a world of abundant fruit trees and olive groves of 'silvery grey, a cloud anchored halfway up the hillsides.'  Above these were the oaks, and then the pines and  the chestnuts.  'The woods climbed the mountain, and you could not see their bounds.'  Choosing to live out his life in these trees, the Baron would come to know a world of 'narrow curved bridges in the emptiness, of knots or peel or scores roughening the trunks, of lights varying their green according to the veils of thicker or scarcer leaves, trembling at the first quiver of the air on the shoots or moving like sails with the bend of the tree in the wind.'  

These steep wooded hills sloping down to the sea were important to Calvino from the outset, as he explained in a 1964 preface to his first novel, The Path to the Spiders' Nest (1946).  They had not really featured in literature before, except in the poems of Eugenio Montale (the subject of an earlier post on this blog).  Like the other neo-realists, Calvino was striving for authenticity, working with his own 'lexis and landscape', although his was a version of Liguria that omitted the tourist coastline centred on San Remo.

'I began with the alleyways of the Old Town, went up along the hillside streams, avoiding the geometric fields of carnations: I preferred the terraced strips planted with vines and olives surrounded by crumbling, dry-stone walls.  I advanced along the mule-tracks rising above the fallow fields up to where the pinewoods began , then the chestnut trees: that was how I moved from the sea - always seen from above, like a thin strip between two green curtains - up to the winding valleys of the Ligurian Pre-Alps'

Seen from the aeroplane: Calvino's Liguria

All the walks we made began by the shore and took us, like Calvino's descriptions, up through the trees towards the mountains.  In his autobiographical sketch, 'The Road to San Giovanni', Calvino recalls another of these climbs, from the family home to the experimental farm his father ran in the hills above San Remo.  The carnation fields Calvino would avoid mentioning in his novel a few years later were bypassed by his father too, 'as if, despite working professionally in the floriculture business himself, he felt secretly remorseful about it. ...  What he wanted to achieve was a relationship with nature, one of struggle and dominion: to get his hands on nature, to change it, to mould it, while still feeling it alive and whole beneath.'  His son, reluctantly accompanying him on these walks, 'could recognize not a single plant or bird'.  Living in the midst of nature, he wanted to be elsewhere.  'My father is talking about the way olive trees blossom.  I'm not listening.  I look at the sea and think I'll be down on the beach in an hour.'  It was later, in writing, that he would come to explore this landscape and it was through literature that he sought a different kind of connection to nature, where 'everything would become true and tangible and possessible and perfect, everything in a world that was already lost.'

Collection of Sand

Collection of Sand joins our collection of Calvinos

I don't know why it has taken twenty-nine years for Italo Calvino's Collezione di sabbia to appear in English but now it can be enjoyed here in Martin McLaughlin's new translation.  In his introduction, McLaughlin notes Calvino's fondness for mineral imagery: the 'stone' of his earlier collection of essays on politics and literature, Una pietra sopra, has become fragmented into granules of sand in this subsequent volume - short articles on art works and unusual books that captured Calvino's interest, along with travel sketches written after visits to Japan, Mexico and Iran.  Several essays describe different forms of stone, from the raked gravel gardens of Kyoto to the sculpted rocks of Persepolis.  One even mentions George Sand, who aside from her novels painted what she called 'dendrites', landscapes whose textures resemble 'those stones which exhibit a faint pattern of branching, multicoloured veins.'  Calvino finds rock sculpted to imitate natural forms (the overgrown temples of Mexico, the frieze of Trajan column) and writes about trees themselves, painted and real.  McLoughlin highlights this 'luxuriant arboreal theme', perhaps unsurprising in a book from the author of The Baron in the Trees.

George Sand, Landscape, painted using her dendrite technique

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This book's title essay was written after Calvino had been to see an exhibition in Paris devoted to the art of collecting.  Among the bizarre collections there was a set of jars containing nothing but sand, each a sample from a different location, carefully labelled.  Calvino describes becoming absorbed in their minute differences, although at first he 'takes in only the samples that stand out most, the rust coloured sand from a dry river-bed in Morocco, the carboniferous black and white grains from the Aran Islands...'  Reading this reminded me of helping my children make sculptures in these grey Aran Island sands, earlier this year.  However, Calvino wonders whether it is possible for containers of sand to retain traces of lived experience: the sight of an indigo sea, the heat of the wadi, the sensations of the beach.  Were these jars nothing more than a sad 'cemetery of landscapes reduced to a desert'?  And yet perhaps they provided a means of allowing the collector to remove herself from 'the confused wind of being, and to have at last for herself the sandy substance of all things, to touch the flinty structure of existence.'

 '...the carboniferous black and white grains' 

(Trá Leitreach, August 2013) 

Calvino's short sequence of essays on Japan were particularly interesting for me and I only wish there were enough for a whole book, along the lines of Barthes' Empire of Signs.  They touch on the emptiness of old wooden temples, the solitude of pachinko parlours and the way the white sand of Kyoto's Silver Pavilion seems to retain the light of the moon.  In 'The Obverse of the Sublime', Calvino has a 'haiku moment', watching a flock of birds landing on a single bare tree, isolated among the red, yellow and rust colours of autumn.  But the Japanese poet accompanying him seems unconvinced: 'a sure sign that haikus are composed in a different way.  Or that it makes no sense to expect a landscape to dictate poems to you, because a poem is made of ideas and words and syllables, whereas a landscape is composed of leaves and colours and light.'

Sand garden at Ginkaku-Ji, the Temple of the Silver Pavilion

Source: Wikimedia Commons

'The Thousand Gardens' describes the experience of walking a path through the garden of the imperial villa at Katsura, where each footstep is designed to reveal a new landscape.  These conveniently placed stones are 'a device for multiplying the garden, but also for removing it from the vertigo of the infinite.'  The path takes Calvino to a tea house where there are only mats on the floor and a few carefully placed objects: 'it is by limiting the the number of things around us that one prepares oneself for accepting the idea of a world that is infinitely larger than ours.'  He concludes with a story about the great tea master Sen-no Rikyu, who deliberately obscured a view of the sea with hedges so that the visitor could only see it when they bent down to take water from a pond.

'Rikyu's idea was probably this: bending down over the pond and seeing his own image shrunk in that narrow stretch of water, the man would consider his own smallness; then as soon as he raised his face to drink from his hand he would be dazzled by the immensity of the sea and would become aware that he was part of an infinite universe.  But these are things that are ruined if you try to explain them too much.  To the person who asked him about why he had built the hedge, Rikyu would simply quote the lines of the poet Sogi: 'Here, just some water, / There amidst the trees / The sea!''

Without Colours

The exterior panels of Northern Renaissance altarpieces were sometimes painted in what my computer would call 'grayscale' but what art historians refer to as 'grisaille' (a term invented in the seventeenth century to describe stained glass in different shades of grey).  As Susie Nash points out in her book Northern Renaissance Art, these grey panels would also have provided a 'suitably less materially-rich image for Lent and ordinary feast days, and a more durable protective covering, easier to repaint and with no colours to fade.'  Typically these would show Biblical figures as if they were statues and would contrast dramatically when opened with the 'real' figures painted inside.  No wooden altarpiece could have supported the weight of actual stone sculpture and so painting 'made possible the impossible, and painters developed and complicated the idea further by representing sculpture that would have been near-impossible to carve, or in which there is ambiguity about whether what is represented is a sculpted or living form.'  Once artists had developed this practice of painting disconcertingly life-like stone figures, it was not too great a step to replace their sculptural niche with a natural setting - a grisaille landscape.

Jan Gossaert, Saint Jerome Penitent, ca. 1510

The panels above showing Saint Jerome in the wilderness have clearly left the idea of painted sculpture behind - but for the grisaille they are fairly traditional depiction of the story (showing two earlier episodes in the saint's life in the background).  In other media, frescoes and illuminated manuscripts were also being produced at this time in monochrome or with deliberately reduced palettes, emphasising form over colour.  But looking at this painting on a grisaille winter's day last week, in the National Gallery's new exhibition Jan Gossaert's Renaissance, I was still struck by the scene's uncanny resemblance to a world turned to stone. Perhaps it is because Saint Jerome himself is holding a rock, as he kneels in the rocky landscape with a great stone city in the background, whilst on the other panel, the statue-like figure of Christ is set on a petrified tree beneath an ash-coloured sky.    

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights outer wings, c1490-1510

Possibly the best known grisaille outer panels from this period are those of Hieronymus Bosch and those for The Garden of Earthly Delights show the earth as it was on the third day of creation.  This is a world before colour, where land is only just emerging from the misty sea under dark rain clouds, and newly formed trees are seen alongside other stranger growths, half-vegetable, half-mineral.   Italo Calvino's story 'Without Colours', in Cosmicomics, describes the the beauty of the grey earth before an atmosphere has formed to filter the light of the sun.  Here 'trees of smoke-colored lava stretched out twisted branches from which hung thin leaves of slate.  Butterflies of ash flying over clay meadows hovered above opaque crystal daises...' Calvino's hero Qfwfq, who yearns for contrast, colour and sound, falls in love with the beautiful Ayl, 'a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded'.  When the world begins to change Ayl takes fright at the disruption to her beloved neutral landscape and they are parted.  As Qfwfq looks sadly out on the 'canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial...'  He realises Ayl could never have been happy here among 'those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever.' 

The Brothers Quay, cover for Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, 

 a photographic collage grisaille landscape.