Blog Archives
MWF 2010 authors on… listening
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
The film Morvern Callar by Lynne Ramsay is based on a book by Alan Warner (although the film has a completely different tone and aesthetic). The title character is a young woman whose boyfriend has committed suicide as the film opens, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel, which Morvern then submits to publishers under her own name, successfully, as it eventually turns out.
This is the final scene. It may not be apparent that Morvern is actually wearing earphones connected to a Walkman (this is pre-iPod), which provides an implied diegetic source for the soundtrack, even if the version we hear is obviously overdubbed. This theory is subsequently confirmed by the final few seconds of the clip, in which the sound is ‘overheard’ through earphones turned up too loud, although by that point there is no accompanying image, so that the sound only becomes literally diegetic after it has ceased to make sense in diegetic terms.
Clearly there is something else at stake besides narrative logic by the time we get to the black screen.
I remember going to a concert with friends when I was a teenager, when one of our group also insisted on wearing a Walkman, through which he listened to heavy metal, to register his disgust at the sappy Christian folk being performed on stage. This has always struck me as a peculiarly eloquent and perverse gesture, which expresses both the need to belong to a group and the inability to reconcile oneself to that need. I think that this same gesture, whose perversity goes unremarked in the clip, except insofar as its eloquence is amplified by the sound design, means something more in Morvern Callar.
The sequence also works visually of course. It is not merely moving bodies filmed under a strobe. Rather, it is a tour-de-force of choreography and editing, in which a series of jump cuts disguise abrupt focal shifts as well as changes in the lighting.
DEDICATED TO THE ONE I LOVE.
David Bowie. Preferably Hunky Dory, Pin Ups or The Man Who Sold the World.
We talk a great deal in Australia about the ‘right’ to free speech. Much less is said about the right to be heard, to be listened to. Susan Bickford has interesting things to say about this in The dissonance of democracy: listening, conflict and citizenship (Cornell University Press 1996). In my own work (with Joan Eveline) I’ve been exploring the concept of ‘deep listening’, developed among transcultural mental health practitioners (Gabb and McDermott 2007: 5), who describe deep listening as entailing ‘an obligation to contemplate in real time, everything that you hear – to self-reflect as you listen, and then, tellingly, to act on what you’ve registered’. These ideas and references can be pursued in Mainstreaming Politics (Bacchi and Eveline, University of Adelaide Press, 2010), available as a free download at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press.
Angela says…
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… mornings
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
I’m more a day-break person than I am a morning person. My wife is neither a day-break nor a morning person, and so I thought to invent a vibrating wristwatch that woke me and only me during my six years of breakfast radio. I thought to invent it, but unfortunately my complete lack of technical ability and the fact that it had already been invented stopped me making my millions.
I love dawns. For six years, it meant Triple R Breakfasters and time spent waking up with the rest of the city. Now it means sitting on a couch, sipping coffee and watching my ten month old strain through his morning nappy. We both watch The Gruffalo as he does this, and both love the owl.
Mornings start earlier and earlier now that I have children.
‘At this hour of the morning,’ he said, addressing nobody in particular, ‘people who are awake fall into two categories: the still and the already.’
So says a character in Italo Calvino’s story ‘The adventure of a wife’ to the protagonist, who has wandered into a cafe at six a.m. She, like the speaker, falls into the first category, since she is on her way home after being out all night.
In 1994, I was up at six a.m. almost every morning, but for the first part of the year I was a ‘still’ and in the second part I was an ‘already’. Initially I worked on the night shift as a security guard at a cardboard factory. (I think that’s what they made. I didn’t really care, so I never bothered to find out). After that, I worked as a postman, and I started work at 5.45. In both jobs I set a record of sorts: I had the longest hair of any security guard in Glasgow that year; and later I was the slowest postman in the entire city.
I became a connoisseur of tiredness during this period. The first critical distinction to be made on that subject is related to Calvino’s observation, since the tiredness of staying up too late is qualitatively different from the tiredness of getting up too early.
Mornings? Don’t do ’em.
I’m a morning person if you accept that morning is a state of mind, beginning when you decide it should. I think Descartes said something like you shouldn’t let anyone get you out of bed until you’re good and ready if you want to do decent mathematics. In a perfect world, it would be the same with writing, of course. But even on little sleep the morning can be golden for creative work, the brain surprisingly deft, somehow reborn.
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… time
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
Summer tends to do strange things to time, but in Finland the effect is breathtaking. Nights—in that old sense of those dark interludes during which you slept–are a brief, odd joke. At first, I especially found the birdsong around midnight disconcerting, like the sneaky onset of a subtle insanity. But the mind or the body adjusts. And then time seems to have become so generous, childhood-holiday elastic…
‘He flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor.’ (David Bowie.)
1/60 of a second, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 2003
The photograph above is part of a sequence at www.letusburnthegondolas.com. I took it in Piazza San Marco, in Venice. It reminds me of a portrait by Josef Sudek (reproduced below), in which, as Ian Jeffrey explains, ‘the man is accompanied by his shadow … and by his reflection …. [I]t is a portrayal of a subject reduced and simplified almost out of existence’. There’s a paradox at the heart of this quotation, because in Sudek’s photograph the man is reduced by multiplication. Not only that, but his doppelgangers – a broken black shadow and a will o’ the wisp white reflection – are unrecognisable reproductions. By contrast, the doppelgangers of folklore were indistinguishable from their originals: except for the fact that they cast no shadow and left no reflection.
Josef Sudek, Portrait of a Man, 1938
The subject of my photograph is also a waiter (or rather, one of the two subjects is a waiter), but it is difficult to make sense of what is happening without recounting the precise circumstances under which the photograph was taken. So: I am sitting in front of a bar in an overpriced café. A waiter is standing behind the bar. Half of his bisected torso is visible at the extreme right edge of the frame. At frame centre there’s an espresso machine and a rack of upturned coffee cups. There’s a mirror above the cups, in which the reflection of the waiter’s back is visible. All of these elements are out-of-focus.
Behind me, over my right shoulder, is a plate-glass window which opens out onto the street. A reflection of a small part of this window, framed by drapes, is also visible in the mirror above the espresso machine. Because it’s dark outside, a faint image of the waiter’s face bounces back off the plate glass window into the café interior. That image is also visible in the mirror: the reflection of a reflection.
People walking past the café always look in. They can’t help it. It’s a reflex. So, I think, if I preset the focal point of my lens manually ‘inside’ the reflection in the mirror, I can capture someone looking through the glass from outside at the precise moment that their reflection passes the faint outline of the waiter, projected onto the glass from inside.
Because I am left-handed, I hold the viewfinder up to my left eye, and I have to pull it down and away in order to get enough space to flip the lever that advances the film. As I do so, I expel the air I have been holding in to keep the camera steady. So each exposure on a 35mm film represents a single breath and a discrete perception, both of which have a finite duration: in this case, 1/60s.
This particular image, which exists as a hypothesis in my head before I am able to test it experimentally, is doubly singular, because I know that I’ll only get one chance at it. The experiment can’t be repeated, because I’ll have to bring the camera up fast and shove it right in the waiter’s face, with no warning. I’m willing to do this once – I’ll take my chances and apologise afterwards – but I won’t get away with it twice.
The footsteps outside reach a particular pitch when someone is approximately two seconds away from the right location, before they actually appear in the mirror, so I’ll have to start moving the camera up to my eye when I hear that cue, before the image has presented itself to my eye.
Click.
1/60 of a second is – just, barely – long enough to distinguish the sound of the shutter opening from that of it closing, an interval during which I cannot in fact see anything, during which I am conscious of nothing: except duration itself.
What is the resulting photograph ‘about’? It includes three versions of the waiter. In one sense the bisected mannequin in the foreground at frame right is most real. It’s closest to the camera and is undeniably there, physically present. But that version of the waiter is an amorphous blob: half a white tuxedo, half a black tie, a quarter of a grey jawbone, an icon of the idea of the costume of a waiter, ‘reduced and simplified almost out of existence’. The man’s back, visible as a reflection in the mirror above the espresso machine, is further away, but clearer, more recognisable as an actual human being. Still, it’s turned away from us, expressionless by definition.
It’s only in the second-degree reflection bounced back from the plate glass that the man acquires a personality, but this minute, barely visible face floats uneasily next to that of an outsider peering in, whose naked, grainy curiosity is unbound by the blank protocols of service. Together, these two faces make up less than five per cent of the negative. They’re the only parts of the photograph in focus, but they never coincided or connected in reality.
But perhaps the most important thing about this photograph is what it doesn’t show. No-one ever asks the right question, the most puzzling question, the most important question: ‘How did you keep yourself out of the mirror?’
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 