My Inspiration for June III

This month I’ve been inspired by lots of things; from Czech New Wave, Prague and Egon Schiele to La Belle Epoque, films by Ken Loach and books ‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith and ‘The Incorrigible Optimists Club’ by Jean-Michel Guenassia.

I have quite a few films to recommend: Career Girls (1997) by Mike Leigh starring the always off-beat and interesting Katrin Cartlidge, Kes (1969), Looks and Smiles (1981) and Poor Cow (1967) by Ken Loach, Violette Noziere (1978) with Isabelle Huppert as a pretty prostitute and a cold murderer, Barefoot in the Park (1967) with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, Georgy Girl (1966), and then the Czech ones: Daisies (1966), Valerie and her Week of Wonders (1970), Morgiana (1972) and Alice (1988) – these are the quirky ones I really loved, and The Loves of a Blonde (1965) by Milos Forman is a more kitchen sink drama style.

I also really loved the song ‘Working Class Hero’ by John Lennon, although I prefer the Marianne Faithfull version:

‘Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasents as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be…‘

Source

Source

Egon Schiele – Melancholy of Suburbs and Small Towns

Suburbs and small towns of Middle Europe held a particular charm for Egon Schiele who often yearned to escape the ‘dark and dreadful’ city of Vienna, and venture to provinces and nature around the Czech town of Krumau.

Egon Schiele, Edge of Town (Krumau Town Crescent), 1918

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Schiele’s paintings of Krumau from early 1910s offer a decaying vision of this peaceful town situated in the South Bohemia. Unlike the Impressionists who simply couldn’t resist capturing the moment and the play of sunlight on bridges or cathedrals, Schiele captured his inner turmoil while simultaneously portraying the colourful facades and narrow streets of Krumau. From the pictures I’ve seen, Krumau seems like an interesting town and its beauty reveals itself in many aspects; from the mischievous river Vltava and the illustrious Medieval castle overlooking the town, to cobble streets and classic Central European architecture. However, on Schiele’s paintings, the town holds a different appeal. Look at the painting ‘Edge of Town’; crowded houses and intermingled roofs, radiant colours and simplified brushstrokes – like a kaleidoscop of colours and shapes. Schiele himself was never a disciple of accuracy in portrayal of landscapes. And thank God for that, because the very sight of ‘normal’ veduta makes my skin crawl! In Schiele’s paintings there’s intensity, emotions and chaos.

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Egon Schiele, House with Shingles, 1915

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Town of Krumau first caught Schiele’s attention in May 1910 when he, a month shy from his twentieth birthday, visited the place with two comrades and fellow painters; Anton Peschka and Ervin Osen. The town must have seemed like an interesting place for him because it was the birthplace of his mother, and he must have heard about the beautiful nature that surrounds it. On the whole, he settled there, in a ‘little house with a garden on the Moldau (Vltava) River’*, in May 1911, along with Wally Neuzil, his lover and model.

When painting suburbs and small town scenes, Schiele placed his focus not on details and photographic precision, but rather on the mood of the place. To understand why he liked small towns and suburbs you need to know his opinion of big towns and cities. It wasn’t just Schiele, but his whole generation, the artists and the poets, who deliberately continued in their work the fin de siecle vision of cities as places of decay and loss of humanity. For them, modern life and its reflection – the cities, along with the horrors of the First World War, were seen as the products of ‘materialistic tendencies of our civilisation’.

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Egon Schiele, Summer Landscape, Krumau, 1917

Egon Schiele, Houses with Laundry, Seeburg, 1914

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We could say that Schiele liked small towns because they were stark contrasts to his everyday life in Vienna – a city he experienced as ‘dark and full of shadows’.

He said: “I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…”

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Egon Schiele, House with Drying Laundry, 1917

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Paintings such as ‘House with Shingles’ and ‘House with Drying Laundry’ best evoke Schiele’s love for simplicity and peacefulness of provincial life. In them, he portrayed pell-mell built houses with drab facades, small windows, some broken some not, old roof that’s probably leaking, old chimneys, and then the colourful clothes on the washing line. I just love seeing clothes on washing line! These scenes evoke so many questions: who lived in those houses, how did they live and where are they now? Again we see the typical Egon Schiele colour palette; earthy colours of wood, sand and mud, grays and dark greens. Schiele’s houses are heavy and brown, like they grew from the earth itself, or like they descend into it.

This poem by Russian poet Alexander Blok reminds me of Schiele’s apocalyptic vision of cities:

“The night. The street. Street-lamp. Drugstore.

A meaningless dull light about.

You may live twenty-five years more;

All will still be there. No way out.

 

You die. You start again and all

Will be repeated as before:

The cold rippling of a canal.

The night. The street. Street-lamp. Drugstore.”

(Alexander Blok, written on 10 October 1912, translated by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks*)

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Egon Schiele, Houses on the Moldau, Krumau, 1910

Egon Schiele was born on 12th June 1890, which means I recently celebrated his birthday by fully engulfing myself into his art. Rereading about artists is the best thing ever because there’s always a new aspect of their art that I love. Schiele first lured me with his nudes, then I was crazy about his sunflowers, and now, well, you see that I’m enchanted with his Krumau scenes.

Book Review: The Incorrigible Optimists Club by Jean-Michel Guenassia

A week ago I finished reading an astonishingly brilliant book called ‘The Incorrigible Optimists Club’ by Jean-Michel Guenassia. When I saw it in library, I disdainfully observed the title. I thought ‘optimists club, whatever, I ain’t gonna read that’… Pessimist Club would sound better to me. Still, I was intrigued and, after flipping through the pages, I knew I was holding in my hand a very special book indeed.

Christer Strömholm, La Methode, Paris, 1960

The main character, Michel Marini, tells us about his life, starting from the celebration of his twelfth birthday in October 1959 all to way to July 1964. It has elements of bildungsroman; we witness the development of Michel’s hobbies, his discoveries of books by Camus and Kessel, films, music and first loves, but the book is so much more than that. Michel’s life starts changing after he starts visiting a Parisian bistro, also frequented by Joseph Kessel and Jean-Paul Sartre, and meets people from the other side of the Iron curtain who fled the Communist regime. These brave individuals, mostly Russians, Hungarians, Poles and Germans, are at the heart of ‘the optimists club’ – they are intellectuals who like playing chess and quarrelling, but above all, they are optimists despite their unfortunate material situations. They don’t have much money and they’ll never be fully integrated into French society. Igor, for example, was a doctor in Russia, but in Paris he drives a taxi because his diploma has no value there. Some found this to hard too bear, like Tibor, a Hungarian actor who decided to return to his homeland.

Paris – Johan van der Keuken, 1960s

Marianne Faithfull in Paris, 1965

Why I liked this book? Well, first of all, the plot is layered. You have bits about Michel’s struggles with maths at school and his enthusiasm for photography, then the stories from the other side of the Iron curtain and all sorts of interesting individuals, you have the Algerian war of independence, the beginnings or rock ‘n’ roll and New Wave films such as Godard’s Breathless (1960) with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. These events also show the generation gap between Michel and his comrades, and their parents and grandparents. The former promote individuality and freedom, while the latter stand for tradition and norms. Michel is sort of a misfit. I can imagine him on the streets of Paris during the Student protests of 1968, he seems like a type of person to do that.

Couple in Paris. (Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson), 1969

Secondly, this book captured the spirit of the times I would say. It made me think of all the Godard’s films I’ve seen and the music by Francoise Hardy. Michel could have seen Anna Karina or Brigitte Bardot on the streets of Paris, how cool is that? It also (again) sparked my interest for Cold war and Iron curtain. I also liked the character Sasha, a fellow Russian who escaped, but he is not accepted by the optimists club. I won’t tell you why is that, but all is revealed at the end. I like his life philosophy. When Michel asked him for a cure for sadness, Sasha told him to: eat something tasty like cakes or chocolates, secondly -listen to music, he particularly recommended Shostakovich, and thirdly – watch films, two or three in a row. Sasha also told him that he used to waste his time working and working, but now he lives slowly and enjoys every day of his life as a gift; he reads, takes a nap in the afternoon, listens to concerts on the radio, walks around Paris, chats with people, feeds the kittens in the neighbourhood.

Jeunes femmes sur les Champs-Elysées, Photo Janine Niepce, 1960s

Oh, I have to warn you that it’s a rather long book, about seven hundred pages, but it’s fast-paced and tremendously interesting. The ending was a bit sad. It’s on you to discover that, but it seems like everything is falling apart as Michel slowly and horrifyingly becomes an adult.

Czech Avant-Garde: ‘Daisies’ and ‘Valerie and her Week of Wonders’

Today I’m going to talk a bit about two films I recently watched and still can’t stop thinking about.

“The imaginary is what tends to become real.” (Andre Breton)

Daisies (1966)

Last Wednesday I finally watched these two brilliant films – Daisies or Sedmikrasky (1966) and Valerie and her Week of Wonders (1970). Looking back, it seems I had an afternoon of Czech New Wave, and what a wonderful afternoon it was! The first film I watched, Daisies, directed by Věra Chytilová, is about two girls, Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanová), who, led by the thought that everything is relative and that the world is f*cked up, decide to do everything they want, and that includes behaving improper at restaurants, cutting sheets, dining with wealthy men, eating lots and lots of food, cutting eggs and pickled cucumbers with scissors, having a bath in milk, walking through a corn field, just fooling around really.

Every scene of this film is so aesthetically pleasing; from Marie II’s floral headband and bright orange hair and their pretty 1960s dresses, to their walls half-covered with drawing of flowers and pressed flowers and half with phone numbers and addresses of their ‘sugar daddies’. Just to observe them having fun is a cure for mundaneness of daily life. And Czech language is so soft and pleasant to the ear, especially when Marie I says something like ‘Kam jdeš?’ (Where are you going?) or Marie II proclaiming she likes food very much. Their cheeky behaviour is hilarious. Oh, did I mention it was forbidden by the Communist regime? Forbidden fruit always tastes better.

I’ve read about these two films on a website about weird films. This is what makes this film weird, according to the author of the website:

“Watching the bright colors and bratty joie de vivre of Marie I and II as they slash and burn their way through square society, cutting up phallic symbols and the film stock itself with scissors, it’s hard to believe that Daisies wasn’t produced under the influence of drugs. Made a year before and half a world away from San Francisco’s Summer of Love, this proto-flower power film nonetheless captures the anarchic spirit of Sixties psychedelia; it’s a relic from an alternate universe populated by sexy Czech hippy chicks with serious cases of the munchies. Alternately described as a feminist manifesto, a consumerist satire, and a Dadaist collage, it seems that no one—possibly including the director herself—is quite clear on what Daisies is supposed to be about. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t.” (source)

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“I’m an enemy of stupidity and simple-mindedness in both men and women and I have rid my living space of these traits.” (Vera Chytilová)

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Valerie and her Week of Wonders (original title Valerie a Týden Divu), 1970, directed by Jaromil Jiroš, is different in subject and atmosphere, but what connects it to Daisies is a similar creative and non-commercial approach to film making. Valerie, played by Jaroslava Schallerova, is a thirteen year old girl who lives in a small town with her granny who, by the way, looks really frightening. Actually, Valerie’s surroundings hold a sinister appeal all together; from a pale-faced man referred to as ‘the Weasel’, a lusty priest, mass that resembles an orgy, granny whipping her self and proclaiming her love to the priest. Valerie falls in love and often rescues a boy named Eagle (Orlik, played by Petr Kopriva), who is either her brother or just her neighbour.

You could draw a parallel between ‘Valerie and her Weeks of Wonders’ and Lewis Caroll’s opium-laced classic Alice in Wonderland, but Valerie’s story has a flair of Middle European small towns, with a dash of vampires, Edwardian-revival white lace dresses, barley fields, and lots of mystery. All these weird things start occurring after Valerie becomes a woman, symbolised by a daisy splashed with blood drops. The film is an adaption of Vítězslav Nezval’s novel of the same name. Nezval was a co-founder of the first Czech Surrealist group, and I think the film’s dreamy, surreal atmosphere justifies the story’s origin.

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As I’m writing this, I’m planning to watch two more Czech films – Morgiana (1972) and Alice (Neco z Alenky, 1988), and I hope they’ll be equally weird in a good way! Strange are the paths of one’s imagination; in the beginning of June I was crazy about kitchen sink dramas and wouldn’t watch anything else, and now I totally want to delve even deeper in Surrealism and Czech films. Crazy.

Arthur Rimbaud – Dawn

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861

“I have kissed the summer dawn. Before the palaces, nothing moved. The water lay dead. Battalions of shadows still kept the forest road.

I walked, walking warm and vital breath, While stones watched, and wings rose soundlessly.

My first adventure, in a path already gleaming With a clear pale light, Was a flower who told me its name.

I laughted at the blond Wasserfall That threw its hair across the pines: On the silvered summit, I came upon the goddess.

Then one by one, I lifted her veils. In the long walk, waving my arms.

Across the meadow, where I betrayed her to the cock. In the heart of town she fled among the steeples and domes, And I hunted her, scrambling like a beggar on marble wharves.

Above the road, near a thicket of laurel, I caught her in her gathered veils, And smelled the scent of her immense body. Dawn and the child fell together at the bottom of the wood.

When I awoke, it was noon.” *

Reveries of Fin de Siecle

When boredom strikes the best thing to do is to immerse oneself into a completely different mood, place or time period. It is what I always do, and this time I chose fin de siecle.

Charles Hoffbauer, At the Ball, 1900s

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In the late 19th century, artists on both sides of the Channel began to question the social norms, and used art to display their radical, often perverse, opinions. They attacked capitalism and European imperialism, questioned the Victorian view on sexuality, promoted pure aestheticism, deemed Western society as hypocritical, delved into vampirism or simply longed for death. Creme de la creme of this new wave of literature includes novels such as A Rebours or Against Nature (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde’s notorious The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892) by Thomas Hardy, The Triumph of Death (1894) by Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), and finally, the beautiful, bleak and disturbing Torture Garden (1899) by Octave Mirbeau.

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A scene from the film L’Apollonide or The House of Tolerance (2011); it’s set in a high-class brothel in Paris at the turn of the century

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In visual arts, the decadent, pessimistic and cynical spirit of ‘fin de siecle’ was demonstrated in a more exciting and vibrant manner and painters such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Felicien Rops, Childe Hassam, Edvard Munch, Jean-Louis Forain and many others produced paintings which satirised the state of society, at the same time giving it a certain dose of glamour which continues to fascinate people even today. Welcome to fin de siecle; the age of un-innocence, where darkness and sins lure from every corner, nightclubs offer nothing but loneliness, pessimism is the meal of the day, seedy salon lights conceal the gritty reality…

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1890

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The glamour and vividness of fin de siecle is perhaps best captured in paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – the painter of cabarets, dancers, singers, circuses, and prostitutes. With miraculous ability to capture the moment, incredibly good memory, and proneness for sharp observation that spares nobody, Toulouse-Lautrec, sketched dancers, dandies and common folk at places such as Moulin Rouge; the Studio 54 of La Belle Epoque. Imagine him sitting by the small round table, dressed in a black suit, bowler hat and a pair of spectacles, perhaps in the company of the dancer Jane Avril, drinking absinthe and voraciously sketching. Moulin Rouge, the place where silk dresses rustle, glasses cling, and conversations go on through the night, reminds me of the place Morrissey sang about in the song There is a Light That Never Goes Out:

“Take me out tonight
Where there’s music and there’s people
Who are young and alive…“*

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Jean-Louis Forain (French 1852 –1931), At the Masked Ball, 1885

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I have always wanted to attend a masquerade ball; to be someone else for a night and talk to strangers without having to reveal my true identity, with each mask I could be a different person. Jean-Louis Forain painted a lavishing ‘masked ball scene’ where the lady in a purple-white dress, black opera gloves, a mask and a lace veil stands beside an unmasked gentleman, possibly her love interest for the night. The colour palette for the background, rich wine, sangria and crimson shades, is perfectly suitable for the spirit of the era. The scene itself evokes mystery. What are they talking about? Probably some tittle-tattle with a fin de siecle twist.

The grin on her face and her eyes, barely visible through the mask, suggest she’s gazing at something interesting in the background, while her ‘hunched-back, moustache, hand-in-his-pocket’ companion clutches her arm tightly. Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes is the music for the background of this scene. Roses on her dress remind me of the introduction of The Picture of Dorian Gray: “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. ”

Giovanni Boldini, The Divine in Blue, early 1900s

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Blue blue, electric blue, dynamic brushstrokes, femme fatale – it must be a work of the Italian painter Giovanni Boldini, famous for his turn of the century portraits of aristocratic ladies. This gorgeous, protruding shade of blue, and the lady’s half-hidden gaze make this portrait a perfect representative for the fin the siecle. Boldini’s portraits, along with some female figures in the novels I’ve mentioned above, all show that a new type of woman fascinated artists and society in fin de siecle. A lady who faints and screams like a virgin in Gothic novels simply wasn’t in tune with the times. ‘A New Woman’ stepped on the scene, and Boldini quickly resorted to his brush and a clear white canvas, to capture her charms and seductiveness.

A good example of a fin de siecle goddess is Clara from Torture Garden – a sadistic, intense, hysteric and beautiful redhead who gets pleasure from seeing tortures. She’s a bit extreme, but I like Mirbeau’s description of her gaze because I think Boldini’s ‘Divine in Blue’ has a gaze similarly pierced on the viewers:

“While I was speaking and weeping, Miss Clara was looking fixedly at me. Oh, that look! Never, no, never should I forget the look that adorable woman fixed me with, an extraordinary look in which amazement was mingled with joy, pity and love – yes, love – as well as malice and irony.. And everything.. A look which pierced me through, penetrating into me and overwhelming me body and soul.”

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A scene from the film L’Apollonide or The House of Tolerance (2011); it’s set in a high-class brothel in Paris at the turn of the century

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Another quote from Mirbeau’s Torture Garden, which is just as relevant today:

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

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Childe Hassam, Rainy Night, 1895

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This gorgeous painting by Childe Hassam, Rainy Night, reminds me of a dialogue in Woody Allen’s marvellous film Midnight in Paris (2011), starring Owen Wilson as Gil and Rachel McAdams as Inez:

“Gil: I don’t get here often enough, that’s the problem. Can you picture how drop dead gorgeous this city is in the rain? Imagine this town in the ’20s. Paris in the ’20s, in the rain. The artists and writers!

Inez: Why does every city have to be in the rain? What’s wonderful about getting wet?” (Midnight in Paris, 2011, Woody Allen)

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the title of Hassam’s painting – Rainy Night – now, is there a better moment? I always feel such rapture and manic energy when it rains, and this painting evokes the same feelings. The scene shows people bustling in front of a nightclub, opening their umbrellas, ladies pulling up their skirts so they don’t get wet, while the golden lights and warmth and pleasure awaits them just behind the doors. What a contrast; a nightclub with all its vibrancy is a place were one can forget oneself by dancing or drinking to oblivion, and, on the outside, a dreamy velvety night over the big city. I’d forget the nightclub for a night as beautiful as this.

Hassam, as an Impressionist, tended to capture the moment, and he did it beautifully in this watercolour. He captured both the excitement and the tenderness of the night, the evening lights and gentle shades of blue that endlessly flickers and overflows into alluring yellow-golds and dark midnight blue that exceeds in onyx black.

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Jane Asher in the play ‘Charley’s Aunt’ (2012)

When I started writing this post I was bored beyond pain, but the decadent world of fin de siecle with all its paintings, film costumes, music and books strangely pulled me in. Cure for boredom became my current obsession.