Play What You Can’t Say: Scribbled Words From A Desperate Moment of Real-Time Inspiration
“I went home with a waitress, the way I always do…..”
Ohhh, wait….. right song, wrong verse.
“I’m hiding in Honduras, I’m a desperate man, send lawyers guns and money, the shit has hit the fan”
Ahhh, Warren Zevon, how we miss him so. This is a guy who counted Hunter S. Thompson as not just a close and collaborative friend but a fan. Or maybe that should be the other way around. But also a dude who did candy-ass duty as stand-in for Paul Shaffer on the Late Show With David Letterman more than 20 times. To be fair, Letterman’s tribute to Zevon when he passed away was the epitome of authentic humility and homage. And it was pretty clear that Shaffer held Warren in something approaching, if not exceeding, genuine awe. Some things can’t be faked.
I’ve been to Honduras, it’s an amazing place. In the 1980’s when the bullets were flying, a surprisingly modest amount of green-folding dropped into the right cup in Puerto Cortes could see a punch-drunk photographer – sans passport or explanation – sped across the bay to the post-surrealist alternative realities of life in Belize, the single strangest place I’ve ever been.
Cabin fever!! In truth, I’m reporting from the lap of luxury in a swanky 8th floor apartment right on a beach on the Portuguese coast. Being old, white and male, the idea of spending 4 Euros on an umbrella – like asking for directions – hasn’t occurred so rather than venture out beyond dashing distance, I’m running down the mini bar, ducking into a near-by dubious mini-mart for uncertain products of dubious origin and bathing in my own diminishing wisdom as I accumulate some pretty decent pics of increasingly dramatic storm clouds alternately skipping down the coast line and rushing towards the land. Late last night, two massive earth moving machines clanked in and spent three hours digging big trenches on the beach to try and wrangle the tides they knew were coming. The authorities are telling the locals to stay away from the shoreline.
Cabin fever!! Contrails of abandoned responsibilities are beginning to converge on my horizon. Vague rumours that I might be teaching university students on the other side of the world have coagulated into a need to grade a plethora of surprisingly good final assignments. Marking this stuff is usually fairly easy and not that time consuming – but providing comments is like being dragged down the road behind a truck until you give up the inner truth..
Cabin fever!! Some sort of failure of literary confidence has seen LIAF turn to me for a few words to guide wary travellers into the joyously tangled playhouse that is LIAF’s competition programmes. It’s one of my favourite annual responsibilities – a more or less unfettered stump from which to bellow any thoughts I might have on the work we’re screening. I’m not sure how I landed – let alone keep – the gig; I can only assume my good looks have something to do with it.
Cabin fever. In the teeth of common sense, a small crew of workers just turned up and installed a three metre tall, weirdly surreal, strangely watchful, fake reindeer on the forecourt eight storeys below me. Cartoonist Gary Larsen nominated “anatidaephobia” as ‘the irrational fear of being watched by a duck’ but just what the term for being concerned about being watched by a deer is yet to be determined. The bugger seems to be staring straight at me though, even as the wind is whipping it around a bit. It’s hard to put a finger on why – or how – this could be a sign…. but Nag Vladermersky is a festival director with some very unique skills, which I ignore at my peril and this might be his way of sending a message. These sorts of antics are why we kicked him out of Australia but I’m in Europe now and the net is tightening, I need to get this stuff written.
Cabin fever!! On my side is the sensible decision I made early to drag in sufficient quantities of the local Barca Velha vino rouge. Within the bounds of my building I can obtain tiny bread rolls, fairly dry grilled chicken, little coconut cakes and 45 flavours of ice cream with three different cone types to choose from. Clearly, concerns about scurvy can be put to one side for the moment. But each attempt at a breach is met with the same conversation with the same doorman who I think hasn’t been home for days coz he doesn’t believe in umbrellas either. He has a side hustle in assisting people parallel-park for a coin or two. Business is down.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Cabin fever!! Two guys from the hotel just came through and put big duck-tape crosses on my main windows. I asked them how bad it was going to get and they gave me six – SIX – vouchers for the bar! Things are looking up. In theory, it’s time to worry. In practice, there are more surfers down at the beach than I’ve seen all week. If I cared about surfers even just a little more than I do, I’d be worried. I’m not – the mini-bar in 807 is holding up and the main bar down in the foyer seems steeled for the coming crisis.
The idea behind these pieces is that they contain some unique pin-points of wisdom with which to appreciate the programmes. Wisdom might not seem where this has been heading but, my friends, you have not been holed up in 807 for the last three days…. thinking, thinking, thinking.
The bad news is thinking tends to get me nowhere. The good news is I’ve made an artform of wrangling the wisdoms of others. And, finally, we have arrived at the start.
A first-pass research with an AI bot asking where wisdom comes from returns results steeped and dripping in a kind of predictable, puritan misery that isn’t worth pursuing. With the internet’s memory failing me, I turn to my own. These are, after all, desperate times. Top of mind is a diatribe from the great George Carlin who, in times of trouble and with the need for help, intervention and guidance turns to …. Joe Pesci. This doesn’t seem like wisdom on the face of it, it seems sacrilegious or just dumb but, when George ran the numbers he figured his hit-rate with Joe Pesci (probably about 50/50) was more or less what he expected from directing his wishes to God. Plus, George has a feeling that Joe Pesci “is a guy who gets things done”.
My needs – and means – are more humble. In need of wisdom, I turn to WGBO, the greatest jazz station in the world. They never disappoint. I’ve listened to WBGO paddling a kayak across 6km of deep, sharkey water to French Island in Victoria, Australia; on a ferry in the foggy Baltic seas heading to Tallinn through hefty weathery murk and just a week ago on an A380 flying 35,000 feet above what used to be Persia in the black of night.
I come for the music but I stay for the wisdom. And…the…wisdom…abides!
The announcers – some of them accomplished jazz musicians, many of whom are decades behind the WBGO mic – are steeped in their art. And when they talk to people in the community, they talk as a living, breathing member of it. The New York state Governor turns up to an ask-me-anything session once a month. They’re giving a heads-up that the daughter of assassinated senator Robert Kennedy is coming in to talk about her father on the centenary of his birth. There’s a recent podcast about how ‘Hey Arnold’ brought jazz to a young generation. Bill Clinton drops in for a chat every now and then. It’s that kinda’ place!
They broadcast to the whole world but they know every crack in the pavement of Newark where they do their work. This deep connection and authentic connectedness invokes trust and with that comes real stories and a comfort that opens people up. Sometimes this brings forth an incredible personal narrative, compelling in its depth and experience. Other times, tiny little nuggets of concentrated wisdom packaged in a vernacular and a tone that only gives it more colour and impact.
And I just heard one of the latter. Inspiration just turned up! “Jay” Johnson works the mic on his weekend Rhythm & Song programme. This gig probably doesn’t pay as well as his previous one….. he is (real name) Jeh Johnson and Jeh Johnson used to be the US Secretary of Homeland Security. WGBO, man what a place!
Talking to an up-and-coming underground jazz musician, the conversation slowly slid into a quiet, rolling stream-of-conscious flow about where inspiration for composing music comes from. At some point, they agreed, the meaning and feeling in the best music takes over from where words reach their limit.
“Play what you can’t say” – they both said in unison.
This could be the underlying mission statement that sits as the emotional pilot-light for pretty much every film in this programme.
Words can only take us so far and for every time they come up short they can also be the concrete that paves a road heading off in the wrong direction. When words’ limits are reached, a deeper and more vividly viable form of communication has to kick in although it is a more universal language it is one with fixed rules, agreed upon grammar or even the certainty that it will be heard.
Animators and poets can be among the best equipped to take travellers into this landscape after they’ve bogged their car in the muddy field at the end of the road.
Opening the programme, Laura Zürcher’s new film, I’m Not Sure brings an immeasurable visual weight to the invisible space that opens up between words being bandied back and forth between people who won’t and can’t listen to what the other is saying and to a more personal internal interrogation about their relationship with their own body. Zürcher claims an interest in chronicling the absurd – and to be sure, there is an absurdist edge to her artwork here – but in I’m Not Sure she has shone a deceptively sophisticated light onto a splintered collection of inner voices.
The compositional construction of so many relationships is akin to a large bowl filled with a squadron of endlessly bouncing balls; and living within it is like being asked to play a game of offence and defence at the same time without any rules or the capacity to keep score. Little things are huge; things that should be huge pass through you without registering more than the merest of breezes. This quiet, velvet turmoil is superbly captured in The Pool Or Death Of A Goldfish by Daria Kopiec. The linear, the uncertain and the downright uncanny converge and coalesce in a narrative pathway that is impossible to interpret without engaging one’s EQ and suspending at least the leading edge of reality. Some of the signposting couldn’t be clearer, nor starker. But it takes a certain kind of radar to keep track of its suppler twists and turns.
In a lot of ways it’s not that big a gear-shift to Martine Frossard’s Hypersensitive made under the auspices of the National Board of Canada, one of the most dependable wellsprings of great and thoughtful animation. Hypersensitive is a step removed from many of the more definitive narrative films the NFB is so good at producing and it takes us into a highly interpretable world, made up of different layers the central character is navigating for reasons that have as much to do with following instincts and exercising impulses than anything else. It’s a dreamscape navigated for reasons that words fall short of defining, with many of its resonation points reliant on making a connection to a memory or an association quietly smuggled in by the viewer.
A good friend recently related a story of attending a large family picnic in a public park. A model railway was happily chugging away and the adults assumed the kids would love to take a ride. In the three-year-old mind of my friend though, this treat was interpreted as her being transported away from her family and she leapt off the train as it moved along, desperate not to be abandoned. When I was about the same age I remember my mother getting a nasty bee-sting on the very corner of her eye. The next day I was sent off to a relative’s house and the day after that I had a new brother. I was certain – certain – there was a connection. How could there not be? And I stayed weeeellll clear of bees – even honey was a bit sus! Kids make extremely complicated connections – they join dots all the time. They are hardwired to do this, often because they are still short on words and often because they live in worlds in which their thoughts and opinions are deemed more as entertainment than enlightenment.
Pear Garden by German/Iranian animator Shadab Shayegan nails this dynamic down with a consummate, perceptive skill. The story speaks for itself but Shayegan has crafted an observational masterclass here, depicting a world filled with different, equally charged nuclei rushing around each other without ever touching. Many adults (or those of us claiming to be so) will almost instinctively look into this world from window height. But maybe try looking up, channeling the child’s perspective whilst being wary of the navigating between the legs and being dragged around places you might not always want to go.
Is there anything more ethereal than relationships? Words name and try to shape them but their raw ingredients are invisible, fragile and vital. They offer bonds that bring and hold us together; the power to nourish, complete – or destroy – us. Trying to define them has to move beyond the limited scope of mere language and into the realm of imagery, mystical signification and a kind of coding that invokes ideas, memories and feelings that do the heavy lifting. Animation is a GREAT vehicle to peddle down this uncertain path and in Wish You Were Ear we have a grand example. Made by Hungarian animator Mirjana Balogh, it is yet another stunning, imaginative film to emerge from the MOME school in Budapest. Balogh dives deep into the notion of how every relationship takes something and leaves something behind, changing our emotional physiology in the process. Manifesting this most primordial and invisible of experiences into the insanely creative space of the depicted physical realm is the genius kernel of this entire enterprise.
The closing film in the programme sends you out into the night with a spring in your step, a song in your heart and, maybe just maybe, a little bit of quiet reassurance that we’re all pretty complicated little creatures and our various inner contradictions aren’t really a bug, they’re a feature. Julie Cerna’s Stone Of Destiny offers us a complicated little character getting through life as best it can; sometimes getting it right, other times maybe not so much. It’s a character that Cerna has been developing and using for a while and she readily admits to it being an avatar for her own journey through life. Take from this what you will, leave the rest maybe. And keep in mind …. it’s pretty much what we’re all trying to do.
That’s enough words for one day.
Malcolm Turner
International Competition Programme 2: Playing with Emotion: screens at the Garden Cinema Sat 29 Nov and online from the same date (available for 48 hours)
Leave a Reply