Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift

in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz

Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the
Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov,
Kubrick, and Ruiz

Laleen Jayamanne

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Gustav Klimt, Hygieia (detail from Medicine), 1900‒1907 (1946)
Collotype, 31.5 × 21.1 cm © Belvedere, Vienna.

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6372 624 5

e-isbn 978 90 4855 282 5
doi 10.5117/9789463726245
nur 670

© L. Jayamanne / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
 Remembering my students,
who have given me so much over so many years
 Table of Contents

Foreword: In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser 9

Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocity 13

1. A Gift Economy: G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929) 23

2. Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov 55

3. Nicole Kidman in Blue Light: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) 111

4. Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006) 127

Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy 153

Bibliography 159

Filmography 165

About the Author 167

Index 169
 Foreword: In Memory of Thomas
Elsaesser

An email from Amsterdam University Press, dated 4 December 2019, in-

formed me that Thomas Elsaesser – whose work has been of fundamental
importance to me as a film scholar since the late 1970s – had endorsed
my book proposal for the series he edits, Film Culture in Transition. Soon
after, I heard that Elsaesser had suddenly died on that very day in Beijing,
where he was on a visiting professorship. This uncanny coincidence, of what
appears to me to be an endorsement by death, immediately reminded me
of my treatment of the death of the Sufi minstrel, his astonishing manner
of dying, and his burial between a rock and a hard place, in Parajanov’s
Ashik Kerib. It is this chapter on two films by Sergei Parajanov that I sent
as a sample of my writing, which I know Elsaesser had read. The following
passage on death now appears in Chapter Two of this book.

There are a great variety of ways of dying on film, some spectacular and
violent, some sensuous, others quiet, soft even, some almost imperceptible,
so much so that I feel that death awaited film to find its full, capacious,
expression in all its magnitude. Its cross-cultural expressions on film are
profoundly creative, diverse. One could not say the same of birth on film
which mostly seems to be reduced to its existential physical coordinates,
screaming or groaning, perhaps a brief silence, shattered by the wail of
the new born.

I now feel that death has cast its shadow over this project. Does death have
a shadow? Death is shadow-like. Elsaesser has shown us how and why
Weimar cinema invested the shadow with vitality, a non-organic life which
displaced the opposition of the organic and the inorganic. Parajanov’s The
Colour of Pomegranates presents us with the Angel of Death, who arrives
as a blindfolded, stumbling, winged soldier, to present the poet Sayat Nova
with a parcel of earth wrapped in a piece of unleavened bread. The usual
solemnity and fear accompanying the arrival of death is undone in these

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick,
and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
doi 10.5117/9789463726245_fw
10  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

scenes of levity, in which two boy angels push and pull the Angel of Death
towards the poet, in an ancient Armenian Apostolic Christian cemetery.
Moreover, in this book, it so happens that the Angel of Death appears to me,
the writer, and offers the chance to see just two clips one last time. I chose the
death of the Sufi minstrel and the nativity presented by Pier Paolo Pasolini
in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. A birth and a death – you can’t get
more basic than that. Raul Ruiz spoke eloquently about the penumbral
qualities of the shadowy film image; his desire to explore these qualities
and the closeness of film (celluloid film with its black space separating each
photogram, leaving us in the dark for a fraction of each second), to death
(oblivion); and how this ontological reality was a spur to invent and play
in the face of death.
Strangely enough, now, as I look back on the films engaged with in this
book, in the wake of Elsaesser’s death, it would appear that they all stage
an encounter with death in the most unusual of ways. In Pabst’s Pandora’s
Box, a film on which Elsaesser wrote a foundational essay, Lulu dies ever so
lightly, nearly imperceptibly, at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Then, there are
the deaths of the Sufi minstrel and that of the poet Sayat Nova in Parajanov’s
films. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick invests the cadaver of the prostitute in
the morgue with a strangely disturbing vitality, altogether absent when
she was alive as the beautiful, naked prostitute, splayed on a chair, in a
drug-induced, nearly comatose state, in Ziegler’s luxurious bathroom and
certainly absent from the perfectly standardized bodies at the orgy. And
finally, Ruiz’s Klimt is seen semi-conscious, dying in a hospital for the entire
duration of the film, which ends with his death and cinematic resurrection.
One of Elsaesser’s earliest essays, in Monograph, ‘Tales of Sound of Fury’,
photocopies of which circulated in the inaugural film studies classes in
Sydney of the mid to late 1970s, gathered together previous scholarship on
the topic and synthesized a conceptual framework for considering film
melodrama as an important mass-cultural generic form with both literary
and theatrical antecedents. Formulated as a way to frame and critically
redeem the work of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s Hollywood films, the essay helped
create the film melodrama boom that we are experiencing now. Not only
could high-end Hollywood and Indian melodrama now be analysed with
sophisticated analytical tools. I was also able to study a significant sample
of critically, thoroughly abject, lowly melodramas in Sri Lankan cinema.
Using the tools provided by Elsaesser, and without embarrassment, I studied
103 of these melodramatic Sri Lankan films (dating from 1947 to 1979) for
my dissertation on that film industry, as a young scholar.
Foreword: In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser 11

Elsaesser’s important book Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical

Imaginary revised some of his early essays on Expressionist cinema and
combined a historiography of the German film industry of the Weimar
period with an analysis of its aesthetics and film criticism. For me, among
the enabling new elements were Elsaesser’s formulation of a camp aesthetic
– and the related importance of a discourse on fashion and design – for an
understanding of the aesthetic durability of some of the Weimar film canon.
His recent formulation of media archaeology, while generating large-scale
empirical and speculative research projects into the new media in the
twenty-first century, is yet again marked by what is singular in Elsaesser’s
philosophical understanding of audiovisual culture. For him, film/cinema
was always the vanishing object, always already in transition, from its
very inception in 1895. And it is this ‘object’ or desire for cinema and an
intellectual devotion to it that orientated his multifaceted, scholarly, and
institution-building work. Film was, forever, Elsaesser’s North Star.
 Introduction: Spirit of the Gift:
Cinematic Reciprocity 1

I have already said this before: cinema is condemned to be poetic. It cannot but
be poetic. One cannot ignore this aspect of its nature. For poetry will be there,
within our reach. If so, then why not use it?2

Each of the four chapters of this book is dedicated to a film or two by a master
film-maker. They span the period from the silent film Pandora’s Box (1929)
by G. W. Pabst, to a late film by Raul Ruiz, Klimt (2006). In between, I explore
two celebrated films by Sergei Parajanov – The Color of Pomegranates (1969)
and Ashik Kerib (1988) – and the critically maligned last film of Stanley
Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The oblique mode of address of each of these
films makes it possible to think of them as poetic. A basic assumption that
governs my film criticism here is the thought that the image is prior to
the narrative and gives rise to it. As Ruiz says, ‘In all narrative films – and
all films are so to an extent – it is the image that determines the type of
narration and not the contrary’. As a result, the image has an aesthetic
richness, a magnetic force irreducible to the narrative line. In these films,
the image may even show something that does not coincide with narrative
meaning. Such moments make the image poetic, mysterious, unforgettable.
It may even pose ‘inexplicable enigmas’, as Ruiz would have it. If only we
yield to them, all of these qualities generate unique cinematic emotions and
thought. Gilles Deleuze supports the view that film, in its very ontology,
is an image in movement, which generates the narrative. For him, too, the
image and its powers are primary.
The kinaesthetic and proprioceptive sensations stimulated by these films
are especially powerful in the silent film Pandora’s Box, because Louise

1 I discuss, in the body of this introduction, the way in which I have borrowed these Māori
ideas of the economy of gift exchange to frame my book.
2 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 22.

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick,
and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
doi 10.5117/9789463726245_intro
14  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Brooks, the star, was primarily a trained modern dancer. Silent cinema
had achieved an astonishing level of aesthetic sophistication, abstraction,
and plasticity of the image within a few short decades by the time it was
made obsolete in 1929 with the arrival of sound. But then there is poetry of
a few nanoseconds in even the most abject, ill-conceived, badly executed,
hard-to-watch genre films of my national cinema of Ceylon (as it once was).
The rhythmic multiplicity of the films analysed are always registered on
the surface; it’s not a hidden dimension, more a matter of not seeing or feeling
what is always already there, but might need to be sensed subliminally
through the imprint left on our body, in our muscles and in our minds. It
may seem hidden only because, to use Henry Corbin’s ideas, our ‘cogni-
tive imagination’ is dormant or has never had a chance to flourish. As I
understand it, sensitivity to rhythm and light are what matters most in being
open to the kinaesthetic register of the ‘imaginal world’ (Mundus Imaginalis)
of film.3 I use Henry Corbin’s twofold ideas of ‘cognitive imagination’ and
‘imaginal world’, derived from a strand of Sufi Islam, to contribute a set of
ideas outside the purview of Anglo-American film theory and aesthetics.
In doing so, I use these two specific Sufi Islamic mystical ideas to explore a
secular cinematic sense of the sacred. I feel I can do this because the films
under discussion enliven our spirit, stimulating thought and feeling. They
encode a spirit of the gift. Corbin’s Iranian Sufi Islamic ideas are locatable
within the Neoplatonic mystical philosophical tradition of the Mediter-
ranean Middle East. The work of Henry Corbin is entirely new to me and
became necessary when working on Parajanov’s Ashik Kerib, which is about
a Sufi minstrel’s journey through Transcaucasia. It is still rather rare to use
concepts from non-European sources for theoretical work on film. While
diversifying our methodological toolkit is a good idea in itself, it is also the
case that, without the precise Sufi ideas elaborated by Corbin (based on
the Iranian Sufi philosopher/mystic Suhrawardi’s theosophy 1154‒1191), my
work on Ashik Kerib would not be satisfactory at all.
The ‘imaginal’ is a neologism invented by Corbin to express a Sufi idea of a
world suspended, as in a mirror, between the purely empirical sense percep-
tion and the purely intellectually abstract domain. The idea is expressed
by drawing on the word ‘imago’ (image), which becomes the neologism
‘imaginal’, similar, Corbin says, to the way ‘original’ is created from ‘origo’.
Between sensible cognition and intellectual cognition, there is, according
to this philosophy, an imaginal world, which is more immaterial than the
purely sensory and less immaterial than the purely intellectually abstract. It

3 Corbin, ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’.

Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocit y 15

would appear to be a paradoxical vision of an immaterial materiality. This is

not imaginary in the sense of being unreal, as in fantasy. Rather it is a non-
spatial topography of a visionary experience, of the subtle body, of dreams,
of symbolic rituals. It is a mode of being suspended in an inter-medial world
accessed in an inter-medial state between waking and sleeping. In this state,
the imagination itself becomes ‘a sensory perception of the supra-sensory’.
The faculty that apprehends and experiences this psycho-cosmic world is
called the ‘cognitive imagination’. Light and its manifestations are funda-
mental ontological principles of this ‘Philosophy of Illumination’ which, it
has been suggested, derives from Zoroastrian metaphysics. According to
Corbin, ‘this philosophical cosmology includes a plurality of universes in
an ascending order, which presupposes a scale of being with many more
degrees than ours’. 4 Parajanov’s singular cosmos-centric vision of cinema
may perhaps be thought of as just such a world.
It seems to me that certain f ilms have the power to activate these
paradoxical states of perception. Such films have the power to constitute
an interiority composed of all the senses in a single ‘synaesthesis’. The
emphatic noetic, active function attributed to the imagination also enables
approaching film as such. Perhaps these very ideas might be repurposed
in a manner that might become serviceable for others in the field as well.
But I rather believe, heeding Bergson, that one must invent for each film
explored a particular set of analytical tools that fit the requirements of the
film itself. This is a strict Bergsonian imperative that I worked with in my
previous book, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani.5 There, I first encountered
a Sufi ethos in Shahani’s film Khayal Gatha, which is based on the classical
Indian musical form. Interestingly, I had not encountered Corbin’s ideas at
the time of writing that book. Now I can see how my approach to that film
might have been somewhat different had I known Corbin’s work. After all,
Khayal is an Urdu word derived from Persian, which means ‘imagination’!
The choice of a theoretical framework or an idea makes a great deal of
difference to one’s mode of perception, conception, and writing on film.
I borrow the dyadic ideas of the ‘spirit’ (Hau), of the ‘gift’ (Taonga), and
of reciprocity derived from Māori cultural practice and metaphysics, as
presented by Māori scholar Tamati Ranapiri in his letters written, in Māori,

4 Ibid. Corbin was a philosopher, theologian and Iranologist and professor of Islamic Studies
at the Sorbonne and in Iran. He edited and translated the work of Suhrawardi. Iran, situated
between India and the Arab world, with its rich pre-Islamic Persian religious thought and
practices, represents a spiritual world formed through a synthesis of syncretic traditions. It is
important to know that Suhrawardi was executed as a heretical thinker.
5 See Jayamanne, ‘Lapidary Dynamism’, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, 95–123.
16  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

to the white ethnologist Elsdon Best, in the first decade of the twentieth
century in New Zealand. It is this correspondence, translated and published
by Best in 1909, which formed an integral part of Marcel Mauss’s famous 1925
anthropological text The Gift.6 Mauss asked the generative anthropological
question, ‘In primitive archaic type societies what is the principle whereby
the gift has to be repaid? What force is there in the thing given which
compels the recipient to make a return?’7 I attempt, with some trepidation,
to navigate, as a student, this deep anthropological archive with the help of
two contemporary visionary Māori scholars of education – namely Georgina
Stewart and Manuka Henare – as my guides.8 Both these scholars, who have
read Ranapiri’s text in Māori, appreciate his educational vision in making
this vital cross-cultural effort to make an aspect of his culture intelligible
to Best. According to Henare, Mauss understood that the Māori concept of
Hau encodes an intangible idea of ‘the spirit [Hau] of the gift [Taonga]’, as
an obligation to reciprocate it. It is the ‘spirit’ in the thing given, as well as
that within the giver, which elicits reciprocity. Henare provides a valuable
discussion of how the emerging disciplines of anthropology and sociology
in the West theorized and debated the concepts of Hau and Taonga as a
purely contractual, secular, materialist exchange, based on Best’s original
mistranslation and misinterpretation. Henare argues that his translation
fails to account for the spiritual and ethical dimension of exchange integral
to Māori sociality. He says that this basic lack of understanding led, in turn,
to Levi Strauss and others’ rationalist, contractual reading of the dynamics
of gift exchange. Importantly, Henare states that, in contrast, Mauss had an
intuitive grasp of the affective, ethical values integral to this remarkable
Māori practice.
It is this affective, ethico-aesthetic dimension of gift exchange that I
borrow for my own transcultural purpose of thinking about the, often
intangible, power of film on us, as “spirit [hau] of the gift”. Georgina Stewart
says that the everyday meaning of the word hau is ‘wind’, which is, again, very
suggestive for my purposes. Air as wind, like film, is an intangible but felt
reality. I perceive film as a gift that calls forth a reciprocal act of reception. It

6 Mauss, The Gift: The Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
7 Ibid., 3.
8 For Māori dialogical, cross-cultural, and intercultural readings of The Gift and the white
anthropological archive generated by this highly influential text from 1925, see Stewart, ‘The
“Hau” of Research: Mauss Meets Kaupapa Māori’. For a further contribution to understanding
this archive from the point of view of Māori philosophical-anthropology and pedagogy, see
Henare, ‘“Kote hau tena o to taonga […]”: The words of Ranapiri on the spirit of gift exchange
and economy’.
Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocit y 17

is a mode of reception that may be animated by the “cognitive imagination”.

Stewart, as a scholar of Māori education, is clearly animated by what she
calls the cross-cultural “Hau of Research” that creates generous intellectual
communities across diverse disciplines and cultures and, in my instance,
between anthropology, philosophy of education, and cinema studies. It
would appear that Ranapiri, in his engagement with Best, was animated by
the Hau of teaching and learning, which is one of my concerns in this book.
Henare says that Hau Taonga exchange takes place within an expansive
understanding of spiritual, environmental, economic, and kinship relations
of the Māori. It follows, then, that the neoliberal command economy that
now governs university education violates our capacity to learn and teach
film, for example, within a capacious and complex understanding of the
processes of learning and teaching.9 I have, in a previous book, crafted the
bio-anthropological idea of ‘mimesis’ as a transcultural cinematographic
concept.10 Film as a non-organic form of life, in its unpredictable aesthetic
density, affective vitality, and cross-cultural reach, incites scholars to invent
concepts and ideas with which to respond to it. The work and indeed labour
of fashioning tools of conceptual analysis may be thought of as acts of
reciprocity essential to a gift economy as explained by Henare.11 I believe
that these crafted tools enhance our capacity to respond to the unknown
and the unforeseeable in film.
As a teacher of film for well over 30 years, I have had a strong feeling that
my own mentor is film and it still remains so. The very sensory surplus of
the image, its poetic mode of address, makes it so. I believe that film trains
us to see in singular ways and conceive as well. So, this book is, among other
things, concerned with modes of learning and teaching and is intended
as a gift in return. This attitude may appear fanciful (a feeble thought of a
septuagenarian scholar, perhaps), given that film is an industrial product of
the scientific and industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. How can a
commodity of mass entertainment, in which every second is calibrated and
monetized (from its inception in 1895), be thought of as encoding a ‘spirit

9 In the field of the philosophy of education, there is a growing robust literature developing
educational theory and practice by engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s mode of philosophizing
and concept creation. I provide just a few examples of this literature. Semetsky, Deleuze, Education
and Becoming; Semestsky, Nomadic Education: Variations on a Theme by Deleuze and Guattari;
Cole, ‘The Power of Emotional Factors in English Teaching’. In the afterword to this book, I
discuss an aspect of my own pedagogic impulse and practice (over a lifetime), stimulated by
specific films.
10 See Jayamanne, Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis.
11 Henare, ‘Maori on Hau’, 56–58.
18  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

of the gift’ (Hau Taonga), as in Māori cultural practice based on indigenous

modes of knowing and doing and ethics of receptivity and generosity? One
can, I think, because the film-makers under consideration (and others) have
burned so much money and energy just to capture, through a collective
labour of love, at least a minute or two of intensity on film and have offered
it to us. The martyrs of cinema are not many (most know how to play the
contractual game of equivalence and the market well – some better than
others), but there are a few exemplary figures, such as Erich Von Stroheim,
Robert Bresson, Chantal Akerman, Sergei Parajanov, Glauber Rocha, Ritwick
Ghatak, and Kumar Shahani… who stand out. They ‘signal to us through
the flames’. To forget their work and their spirit would simply be our loss.
Stanley Kubrick, however, was special. He was a master at playing the
contractual game to buy inordinate amounts of time, which he said was
gold in the business. The stars Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise knew full
well that Kubrick proffered a gift to them, which they reciprocated by giving
him ‘world enough and time’ to work on Eyes Wide Shut. These exchanges
were above and beyond any contractual arrangements. They enabled the
couple to go where angels fear to tread.
In this book, I work with intuition as method, from Henri Bergson’s
theory of duration.12 The threefold steps that constitute Bergson’s method
of intuition has been, for some time, part of my intellectual toolkit through
Gilles Deleuze’s exposition of it. The stating or formulation of a problem,
instead of picking up a ready-made one from the film studies bureaucratic
filing cabinet, is the first step of the method. The next step is to learn to
differentiate between differences of degree from those of kind. This way,
one will not spend a lifetime analysing badly composed composites or badly
stated problems. Finally, I try to think in time – time as duration – rather
than in spatial categories. The imperative is to problematize, differentiate,
and temporalize!
The stars and actors in these films warrant special discussion in terms of
their unique styles of acting. We are able to fully register their tantalizing
ways of moving and being still, their modulation of voice and silence, only
when our ‘cognitive imagination’ is stimulated by these delicate processes.
Otherwise, they are often missed and simply go unregistered, becoming
inconsequential. An awakened ‘cognitive imagination’ creates a field of
awareness, of variations and modulations, of anything whatsoever, in any
space whatsoever. The actors in these films are creatures who animate an

12 See Deleuze, Bergsonism, especially Chapter One, ‘Intuition as Method’. Also see Bergson’s
Matter and Memory, especially Chapter Three, ‘Of the Survival of Images; Memory and Mind’.
Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocit y 19

imaginal world by hovering between a purely sensory register and the purely
intellectually abstract, all in their own singular manner.
Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut
offer most unusual performances at two epochal ends of the history of
cinema: the end of silent cinema in 1929 and the demise of celluloid as the
light-sensitive medium of registration of the image in 1999, respectively.
Sound arrived in 1929, making Pandora’s Box among the last of the silent
films, while the digital revolution was well underway by the time Eyes Wide
Shut was produced. This digital revolution eventually rendered celluloid
obsolete. It is a matter of considerable interest to me that, at the time of
their original reception, both Brooks and Kidman were strongly criticized
for what critics and the general public thought of as ‘very bad acting’. If this
were the case, as critics ferociously maintained, then one would logically
have to also say that both Pabst and Kubrick did a bad job directing each
of their films at the height of their creativity. This was indeed the critical
opinion at the time of their release. Pandora’s Box, however, has by now
been critically redeemed in a way that Eyes Wide Shut has yet to be. In the
mid twentieth century, there had been a re-evaluation of Pandora’s Box and
Brook’s performance, not to mention the celebration and even fetishization of
her youthful image by male critics and curators, starting with Henri Langlois
and Jean-Luc Godard, among a host of others. Despite this belated adulation
and intellectual interest in her, Brooks firmly maintained that she is not an
actress and never wanted to be one; she claims that all she ever wanted was
to dance. Kidman’s performance has not yet received the same retrospective
scholarly attention, though some critics and even audiences have finally
woken up to the fact that Kidman is a brilliant actress with a formidable
filmography and an astonishing range of roles in blockbuster films, art
films, small-scale experimental independent films, and, more recently, on
television as well. Eyes Wide Shut has recently made an interesting return
in popular music.13
John Malkovich’s performance in Klimt also needs to be reconsidered,
as it has been dismissed as bad acting, overly mannered. But critics forget
that mannerism is an aesthetic mode of high artifice available to actors
and should be accepted and judged as such. One might ask how manner-
ism was performed and how it functioned in a film of fantasy, in fact in a
dying man’s reverie. I will discuss and theorize the original work of these
performers in some detail in the following chapters as well as the unique

13 Frank Ocean’s song ‘Love Crimes’ plays Kidman’s voice when she quarrels with her husband
in Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick, 1999. Her voice is heard just underneath Ocean’s vocal.
20  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

mode of androgynous performance that Parajanov and Sofiko Chiaureli

developed in The Color of Pomegranates. This film, about the eighteenth-
century Armenian poet-troubadour Sayat Nova, and Raul Ruiz’s Klimt are
not biopics of the artists, but rather explorations of vital multicultural
epochs of exchange, creativity, and political violence through a focus on the
artists and their unique modes of perception. The cultural zones of contact
of Transcaucasia, with its deep civilizational history, and the Viennese social
world of the declining Austro-Hungarian empire in its last decades, are
perceived through the singular visual and auditory points of view created
by the artists themselves.
The four directors – Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz – offer us hovering
‘imaginal worlds’ on film which are not exhaustible in purely narrative terms.
In their hands, the image and sound catch fire, and matter becomes spirit.
So, this book is an attempt at reciprocation of an abundant gift.

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Rotterdam and Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2008.
Semetsky, Inna, and Duana Masny. ‘The “Untimely” Deleuze: Some Implications
for Educational Policy.’ Policy Futures in Education, 9, no. 4, 2011, pp. 10–16.
Stewart, Georgina. ‘The “Hau” of Research: Mauss Meets Kaupapa Māori.’ Journal
of World Philosophies, 2, no. 1, summer 2017, pp. 1–11.
1. A Gift Economy: G. W. Pabst’s
Pandora’s Box (1929)

Abstract
The first chapter offers a fresh approach to this canonical silent film by fo-
cusing on Louise Brooks’s kinetic performance as Lulu and the tradition of
dance and abstract movements she draws on. The early twentieth-century
feminist political slogan, the ‘New Woman’, is embodied, contested, and
rendered ambiguous in this late Weimar silent f ilm through Brooks’s
technical skills as a modern dancer. Pabst and Brooks as co-creators
draw an intimate link between the dynamism of the silent-film image
and that of Lulu as dancer. I see these as a gift to the rather sedentary
female scholar of cinema.

Keywords: Pabst and abstraction, Louise Brooks’s acting as dance, New

Woman

In primitive archaic type societies what is the principle whereby

the gift has to be repaid? What force is there in the thing given
which compels the recipient to make a return?1

Actor and Prostitute

The etymology of the Greek name ‘Pandora’ (a composite of ‘pan’, meaning

‘all’, and ‘doron’ meaning ‘gift’) resonates with the German film Pandora’s
Box (1929) by G. W. Pabst and starring Louise Brooks as Lulu. As a prostitute
and dancer, Lulu circulates across class barriers as well as those of gender
and ethnicity with the splendour of an abundant, radiant gift. The clichéd
narrative of the film may be summarized simply as the tragic fate of a

1 Mauss, The Gift, 3.

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick,
and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
doi 10.5117/9789463726245_Ch01
24  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

prostitute, Lulu, who unwittingly causes death and destruction among

the men she encounters, and who ends up dying at the hands of Jack the
Ripper. But the images in the film, their lighting, Lulu’s movements as a
dancer, and the clothes and costumes she wears produce a parallel film
which makes this clichéd narrative line waver, producing sensations and
affects that are singular and memorable across nearly a century. This chapter
examines these unique elements and the conflicting images of femininity
they produce.
Although Lulu is a prostitute, a variety performer (a trapeze artist), and a
dancer in a review – in other words, she is engaged in a system of exchange
involving her body – she seems to exceed the terms of those commodified,
quantifiable transactions based on a system of monetary equivalence. She
does not recognize herself as a commodity. The most explicit example
occurs on the gambling ship when Marquis Casti-Piani bargains with the
Egyptian slave trader as to Lulu’s exact worth, her monetary value. Lulu’s
incredulous response to their bargaining – ‘He is acting as if he wants to
buy me!’ – implies that she does not see her relationship with Dr. Schoen
(which entails a financial transaction, that of a high-class ‘kept woman’)
as a form of servitude either. The bargaining of her worth is made urgent
because there is also a legal price on her head, as she has been convicted of
manslaughter for having killed Dr. Schoen, her lover.
Nevertheless, Lulu’s image, its agency, and money are integrally linked
in the film, from the first act to the last. The paradox here is that she hands
out money to the elderly meter man at the beginning of the film and she
refuses money from Jack the Ripper at the end. She acts with agency. In
between these two acts, Lulu as light image circulates like the commodity
of film itself but offers a resistance to its capitalist logic of equivalence.
She exceeds equivalence in her very overabundance. Not only does she
give money to the meter man who reads the electricity meter, she also
offers him alcohol and her radiant smile. Thomas Elsaesser attributes to
the meter man, who appears for only a few minutes at the very beginning
of the film, a key signifying function in the film. In doing this, he brings
into critical focus the nature of exchange in the film as both libidinal and
economic.2 He also highlights how Lulu as a figure of pure externality
eludes capture through the peculiarly acentred point-of-view structure of
the film. Her attention surprises the meter man: he beams with delight at
the unexpected bounty. Similarly, she disarms (quite literally), the penni-
less Jack the Ripper by inviting him to the garret. These transactions are

2 See Elsaesser, ‘Lulu and the Meter Man,’ 259–292.

A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 25

unquantifiable, their register affective. We become participants in a ‘gift

economy’ within the very heart of the commodity form of film and that of
the street prostitute as well. The disarming of Jack the Ripper (who releases
his Expressionist, claw-like grip on the knife), may well be viewed as an
act of reciprocity to Lulu’s gift of a sustained radiant smile. I will return to
the idea of reciprocity implied in the peculiar gift economy of this unusual
film later on and examine the kinaesthetic and proprioceptive force that
compels the recipient (including, in this instance, myself as the female film
analyst) to make a return, and what the nature and value of that exchange
might be, especially for a scholar of cinema. Helen Miller, in her unpublished
article ‘Overcoming Desire: Prostitution and Contract in Pandora’s Box’, a
paper presented at a conference on Gendered Beginnings, mentions that
Louise Brooks as Pandora functions as a gift and that she performs as an
‘automaton’, but neither of these points are supported by film analysis
and as such remain only interesting assertions.3 My approach is based on
detailed film analysis and also on a theoretical articulation of the concept
of the gift derived from Māori anthropology and the performance tradition
of the puppet-automaton linked to Brooks as trained dancer.

Lulu and the ‘New Woman’

Thomas Elsaesser, in his aforementioned landmark essay, has presented

a cogent argument that the ‘Box’ in question ‘is also the cinema-machine,
the machinery of filmic mise-en-abyme’. 4 He expands on this idea through
a detailed analysis of Pabst’s acentred point-of-view structures and ‘the
mise-en-scène of mismatched shots’, especially in the opening scene, the
backstage scene of the theatrical revue, and the remarkable close-ups of
Lulu. In deploying and modifying the syntax of continuity editing, Elsaesser
argues that Pabst created a unique cinematic imaginary that is neither
theatrical nor novelistic. He suggests that it is through these technical
processes that Pabst is able to present the ‘sexuality in the cinema as the
sexuality of the cinema’.5 Further, this defused eroticism of the film image
itself is developed by taking as Pabst’s ‘starting point the crisis in the self

3 Miller, ‘Overcoming Desire,’ unpaginated. Also see Hutchinson, Pandora’s Box, for a useful
empirical account of the f ilm with some interesting historical detail about the production.
However, it does not have a theoretical framework for its film criticism.
4 Elsaesser, ibid., 286.
5 Elsaesser, ibid., 286
26  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

understanding of male and female sexuality that characterized his own

period, the Weimar, of wounded male egos confronting the “New Woman”’.6
I, too, understand the operations of the ‘Box’ in question as the cinematic
apparatus itself, and more specifically as the ‘all-giving’ Pandora. But unlike
Elsaesser, I focus here on the work of light and its relationship to the singular
mode of kinaesthetic performance of Louise Brooks as Lulu. Elsaesser men-
tions the work of light and Brooks’s acting only in passing and instead,
drawing on psychoanalysis, focuses on the systems of looks that structure
the film and cogently argues their inadequacy. By so doing, he is able to
demonstrate how Lulu as image eludes capture by the network of the ‘male
looks’ through ‘a sort of masquerade of excessive visibility’ as image. As he
sees it, the final aim of Pabst’s project is ‘to transform the image of woman
into an imaginary object, so that it can survive any kind of destruction, be
it the ravages of age or sexual murder’.7 While it is possible to view Lulu,
as he does, as a durable, atemporal ‘imaginary object’, I think one could
also approach Brook’s Lulu from another angle entirely by posing some of
the questions that animate this chapter. What more does the atemporal
cinematic persona of Lulu offer to modern women, both then and now,
besides bedazzlement by her iconic beauty? How do Brooks and Lulu, as
modern dancer and fashion plate, offer a kinetic and proprioceptive vitality
that undoes from within the patriarchal stereotypes and imaginary, which
trammel her and restrict her movement?
I think that the absence of a systematic discourse on the work of light
and performance, including costumes, leaves out three of the major cin-
ematic means of transforming the archaic myth of Pandora into a modern
cinematic experience of the creation of the New Woman. Pabst, through
his technical and aesthetic virtuosity, invests the film image with a set of
sophisticated movements, an agency, a volatility and luminosity, which are
also among the remarkable qualities of Brooks as Lulu. Lulu is a creature of
light emitting particles of energy and wave-like movements. Is she, then,
more akin to the electrically and alchemically produced Robot Maria of
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927, ‘the robot Lulu at the interface of sexuality
and technology’, as Elsaesser suggests?8 Perhaps. But my approach is dif-
ferent. To fully understand Brooks’s dynamic, unique performance, one
must situate her in a more ample theatrical lineage – partly archaic, partly
modern – indicated by the following constellation of forms: the puppet,

6 Elsaesser, ibid., 285–289.

7 Elsaesser, ibid., 285.
8 Elsaesser, ibid., 287.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 27

doll, mask, automaton, robot, dancer, fashion model, mannequin. This is

a tradition that produces pure externalized abstract movements, the very
opposite of interiorized, realist, emotional, memory-based acting. I would
suggest that Brooks as dancer draws from this rich externalizing tradition
a highly flexible repertoire of movements (not purely robotic), to create a
contemporary social type – the New Woman.9
The New Woman is a slogan and a modern political idea mobilized by both
first-wave feminism and consumer culture in Weimar Germany (as well as
elsewhere), expressing women’s newly acquired rights to vote, work, and
become savvy consumers fashioning their own stylish image. This movement
of women marks a departure from women’s traditional roles in Germany,
indicated by the terms Kinder (child), Küche (kitchen), and Kirche (church). By
saying that Lulu’s ‘eroticism is constructed on the paradigmatic opposition to all
the traditionally female roles’, Elsaesser overlooks the fact that, though she is not
a maternal figure, she is a prostitute and dancer, two of the oldest professions
and roles available to women in patriarchal traditions.10 The machine Maria’s
avatar as ‘the whore of Babylon’ in Metropolis is exemplary of this tradition of
prostitute as dancer. The vitality and energy that Brooks instils in Lulu as dancer
and prostitute really undoes from within the kinetic and affective attributes
that have accrued to these archaic female stereotypes. Brooks, through her
unique repertoire of flexible movements, vitality, and performance energy,
contributes to imagining the modern social type of the New Woman.
The New Woman is a project in the making, and supple movement,
vitality, kinaesthetic energy, and proprioceptive sensitivity are among her
contemporary attributes. Brooks is not clay in the hands of Pabst, the master
film-maker. Their work was one of collaboration, as Brooks has indicated.
Brooks gives us an image of the New Woman as one who is able to shape
shift and play several stereotypically deadly roles with quick-wittedness
and flare. She seems to enjoy doing so. Her explicit dance moves are neither
titillating nor sexy and as such, are quite unlike the hypersexual dance of
Robot Maria in Metropolis. Lulu’s dance moves are characterized by a pure
kinetic elan. If we only look at the film exclusively through psychoanalytic
concepts of image as fetish and film as primarily a voyeuristic medium,
stimulating a narcissistic experience, we will be unable to sense and internal-
ize within ourselves the kinaesthetic and proprioceptive energy of Brooks’s

9 ‘Puppet Aesthetics.’ This article offers a historical perspective on a constellation of per-

formance forms derived from the figure of the puppet. Their powers of abstraction produce
unforeseeable movements and affects.
10 Elsaesser, op. cit., 287.
28  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

performance, which derives its lean muscular strength from drawing on

the physical performance genealogy I presented above.11
It is by drawing on and creating a repertoire of abstract movements from
this tradition that the film touches us with immediacy and we are impelled
to touch it in return. This, I think, is exactly the process through which
reciprocity might be activated and the experience of the film becomes a
two-way process, a mimetically innervating, unpredictable field of energy.
Understandably, the rather sedentary female intellectual spectator’s perspec-
tive (such as my own) is absent in Elsaesser’s reading of the Lulu persona
and of the film. But Lulu is not exclusively addressed to the intra-diegetic
and extra-diegetic male spectator, as Elsaesser tends to suggest. There is
the smartly dressed professional costume designer Countess Geschwitz in
tuxedo, bow tie, and hat, designing Lulu’s costumes for Alwa’s revue with
enthusiasm and artistry. Though she becomes rather constrained and sad as
the lesbian hopelessly in love with Lulu, she, too, may be viewed as a version
of the New Woman in her sexual orientation, dress style, and engagement in
a creative profession. Dressed in a black satin dress, her tango dance with
Lulu (in white satin), at her wedding, is a unique, iconic, erotic moment of
cinema. The traditionally dressed, utterly poised, and reserved young fiancé
of Dr. Schoen, Charlotte Marie Adelaide Zarmikow, standing backstage at the
theatre, gazes with rapt fascination at Lulu’s back as her elaborate costume
is being fitted. She is barely mentioned in the discussions of this film, except
as Schoen’s fiancé, but her quiet, engaged, and fascinated presence as a
spectator in the backstage of the review is striking.
The first part of the second act of the film focuses on Charlotte and her
father, Dr. Von Zarmikow. Charlotte is seen seated methodically typing (a
modern skill) the envelopes for her wedding invitations. She shows a quiet
independence of mind in telling her father that she will marry Dr. Schoen
despite what people say about him. But we can see that it is a socially advanta-
geous marriage for Dr. Schoen, as Charlotte is very young and her aristocratic
father is the Minister of the Interior. She, too, is a version of the New Woman
in her sense of independence from bourgeois public opinion, her attitude
towards marriage, her skill as a typist, and her quiet dismay at seeing Schoen
in the arms of Lulu. She does not cry or throw a fit like Lulu but simply walks
away from the scene. However, Lulu as New Woman, performing on a quite
different kinetic and affective register, is a gift to all of us (intellectual women,
whatever sexual orientation) who labour over film, because she knowingly

11 Mulvey, in Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinematic Mind’s Eye, argues her case through a psycho-
analytic perspective which she attempts to inflect through the idea of ‘curiosity’.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 29

plays misogynist stereotypes like notes on an invisible keyboard and many

other previously unheard notes. At the end, after the performance, she simply
vanishes like film itself, becoming imperceptible. Rather more like Nosferatu,
who vanishes in a puff of smoke at daybreak! Conversely, however, Lulu as
film image simply vanishes as the light goes out. It is Alwa and Jack the Ripper
who remain in the lower depths of a mournful state of despair and carry the
full tragic load of the tale of Oedipal, patricidal, incest, and sexual impotence.
Henri Langlois put it eloquently and precisely: ‘Lulu is the intelligence
of the cinematographic process, she is the most perfect incarnation of
photogenie’.12 Langlois highlights here (as captured by the words cinemato-
graphic, or ‘inscription with movement’, and photo, or ‘light’) the centrality
of movement and of light in the very ontology of the medium of film and
of Lulu herself. Following Gilles Deleuze, one can say that, materially, film
is a luminous movement-image. In Brooks’s Lulu, we find a singular case
of a hyperkinetic body emitting and reflecting light in a unique manner.
One is inclined to think that Lulu is not quite a ‘character’ in the sense in
which Charlotte and Countess Geschwitz are ‘rounded characters’. One can
imagine an extra-diegetic life for them, whereas Lulu appears as a creature
of film itself, an incarnation of film. Hence, she is an imaginal figure. I will
take up further discussion of Lulu’s performance as a dancer later on and
explore how she is conceived as a cinematic body in motion.
While the male characters are shown to be animated by voyeuristic,
fetishistic, narcissistic, and masochistic impulses, Pandora’s Box as such, in
its ontology, is not limited to the modes of psychoanalytic male pathology
it presents so systematically, almost as textbook case studies. Instead, Lulu,
through her kinaesthetic and proprioceptive prowess, animates a dynamism
of perception in us, enabling us to sense something new in silent cinema
even as it expires with her. She is the modern American dancer as a woman
in unfettered motion. Countess Geschwitz and Charlotte are respective
versions of the educated aristocratic and upper bourgeois New Women.
Lulu, who, we are told, was a ‘street kid’ as a child, has become her own
version of the New Woman as an adult: dancer, fashion icon, and sex worker.

Film and Theatre

Pandora’s Box is structured so that it lightly draws on and enfolds within

itself several theatrical genres and styles of acting. This reflexive formal

12 Elsaesser, op. cit., 259.

30  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

strategy enabled Pabst (who was first a theatre actor and director) to dif-
ferentiate the dynamism of film as such from several prior popular theatrical
forms even as it fondly shows its links to this past and tells the ‘tragic story
of the prostitute, Lulu’. The creative adaptation of the proto-Expressionist
Lulu plays (Earth Spirit, 1895 and Pandora’s Box, 1904), by Frank Wedekind, is
the basis on which Pabst performs this subtle differentiation. Pabst’s link to
theatre is also emphasized by the confident decision to divide the film into
a series of eight discrete ‘Acts’. This division highlights the episodic nature
of the narration, say, for example, from the train to the gambling ship, from
the gambling ship to (most surprisingly) the streets of London. Without the
fetters of realist causality limiting him, Pabst is able to create highly abstract
scenarios such as the backstage scene, the one on the gambling ship, and
the fogbound streets of London. An engagement with European theatrical
history enables Pabst to create a reflexive structure with a temporal depth.
This, however, is not the modernist concern with media specificity. This
cinematic specification is not an end in itself but rather a means of enriching
the affective and cognitive force of the film image and acting, which in
turn kindles the mind. Thought here is to be understood as our powers of
making divergent connections, differentiations of the cinematic image.
Pandora’s Box marks the threshold of the end of silent cinema at the very
height of its aesthetic sophistication. If one were to nominate two durable
icons of silent cinema, Chaplin’s Tramp and Brooks’s Lulu come to mind
immediately, because they animate movement and light in unique ways. They
exist as atemporal cinematic icons not restricted to the original time in which
they appeared. In defying chronological time, they are also able, paradoxically,
to intimate other durations. Brooks as Lulu treads the cinematic instant lightly
as a dazzling, evanescent presence. Chaplin treads time mimetically so that
he is both ‘too soon and too late’.13 While the old pimp Schigolch visits Lulu, he
helps himself to money from a wad of notes in her purse left on the mantelpiece
(again, Lulu is the source of money), and asks her to dance while he plays the
harmonica. She appears to have forgotten the steps, to his annoyance, but
recovers and does a series of spontaneous dance moves, a pastiche of Brooks’s
training at the Denishawn modern dance company and her experience in
theatrical revues and variety. The layered, fluttering light chiffon dress she
wears (rather more costume than dress), enhances the improvised zany
dance wonderfully. Though she has been asked to dance, there is a strong
sense that she dances for herself, evident in her childlike, unselfconscious

13 See Jayamanne, ‘A Slapstick Time,’ in Towards Cinema and its Double, for a theoretical
articulation of multiple temporalities in the work of Chaplin, 171–181.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 31

delight in movement. She is suffused with joy at each instant. This is what
I have called elsewhere a ‘performance of narcissism’, a state of primary
narcissistic plenitude, rather than a ‘narcissistic performance’, which is a
depleted, exhibitionist form of narcissism.14 Reminded of her skill, Shigolsch
says that she deserves to be seen by a large audience and suggests that she
perform in a variety trapeze act with Rodrigo Quast. As a variety performer,
Lulu plans to play in a culturally popular form of theatrical entertainment
for the lower classes. In contrast, her lover, Dr. Schoen, a newspaper magnate,
asks his son Alwa to choreograph his revue to showcase Lulu as the main
attraction so that he can have additional sexual access to her. The revue form
clearly has higher production values than variety and thereby appeals to a
more well-to-do audience. Historically, variety theatre existed as popular
mass entertainment in vaudeville circuits. At its origin in 1895, film was
incorporated into vaudeville shows as the latest new attraction. Film coexisted
with these highly popular theatrical forms of mass entertainment in the
nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. But, as film
developed into ‘legitimate’ narrative cinema with spectacular effects, as a form
of mass entertainment, widening its class base, it soon superseded theatre in
both popularity and profit. Pabst provides a compendium of popular forms
of mass entertainment at the turn of the century, giving us a short history of
the emergence of silent cinema from popular theatre. Like Wedekind in the
late nineteenth century, Pabst, at the end of the era of silent cinema, engages
with popular physical theatre for his own ends.
Jane Goodall, in her book Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin:
Out of the Natural Order, says that Wedekind created the character Lulu after
he spent two years (1892–1894), in the Parisian demi-monde of Montmartre,
among circus performers, acrobats, dancers, strong men, clowns, animal
tamers, trapeze artists, prostitutes, writers, and artists from all over Europe
and North Africa. She discusses a famous virtuoso aerialist by the name of
El Nino who had his London debut in 1866 as the son of the famous aerialist
Farini.15 She goes on to say:

Four years later in Paris, El Nino resurfaced as Mademoiselle Lulu, gaining

an ecstatic reception for a performance of exceptional technical virtuosity
[…] As Shane Peacock observes, there may be a direct association between
this Lulu and the character of that name created by Wedekind.16

14 See Jayamanne, ‘Postcolonial Gothic,’ in Towards Cinema and Its Double, 24–48.
15 Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 197–200.
16 Goodall, ibid., 198.
32  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Though there is a period of more than two decades separating Wedekind’s

stay in Paris and the cross-dressed Lulu’s trapeze act, there, Goodall says
the connection is worth exploring for what it can tell us about changing
perceptions of the performing body and its energies. Wedekind’s interest in
performers who explored the limits of the body was, according to Goodall,
‘bound up with his own experiments to test the boundaries of sexuality’.17
Pabst’s androgynous conception of the cinematic Lulu, with her highly
kinetic performance, pays tribute to and draws from this popular physical
theatrical tradition from within which she is conceived. Similarly, the trapeze
artist Rodrigo Quast and clown-like Schigolch are degraded versions of the
creatures of the theatrical demi-monde Wedekind explored in Paris. Pabst
remembers this milieu and pays tribute to it while recreating with Brooks
their Lulu as an aerialist on solid ground, within the disintegrating social
and familial relations of Weimar Germany.
There are several key scenes in which some of the actors perform as
though they are in a pantomime performance rather than in a film. The
scene is the upper-class wedding reception of Lulu and Dr. Schoen in his
spacious, modern apartment. Lulu has invited her ‘disreputable’ theatrical
friends, Schigolch and Rodrigo Quast, to the wedding. When Dr. Schoen
finds the three of them carousing in his bedroom, the scene turns violent,
he threatens and chases out both Schigolch and Rodrigo Quast with a gun.
The two raise their hands and rush past the upper-class wedding guests in a
state of utter panic. There is something grotesquely comic and terrifying in
this enactment of a chase scene and the social contempt and murderous rage
that initiates it. The difference in class relations, between Dr. Schoen and the
shabbily dressed duo, could not be starker. They are filmed both from the
front and back as the astonished upper-class guests clear the way to make
room and a nearly deranged Schoen pursues them with gun in hand. Here
intersect family melodrama, between husband and wife, and pantomime,
performed for the camera, to highlight a social critique. Schoen, with his
gun held high, converts the light-hearted, playful, childlike carousing in the
bedroom into a highly melodramatic scene. Lulu, Schigolch, and Quast, in
their merriment and enjoyment of each other’s company at the wedding
reception, appear as a comic trio in a burlesque – the beauty, the clown,
and the strong man.
Pabst gives considerable time to showing the servants at the wedding
reception working in the kitchen, serving and drinking, laughing and flirting,
full of warmth and camaraderie in contrast to the polite, staid wedding

17 Goodall, ibid., 199.

A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 33

guests chatting and dancing decorously upstairs. It’s a scene full of the
hustle and bustle of a working kitchen. Lulu enters this space dressed in a
gorgeous white satin bridal dress with train and veil, looking for Schigolch
and Quast, who are comfortably seated in a nook, drinking. Delighted to
see them (as completely at ease downstairs as she is upstairs), Lulu provides
them with ample food and drink. The entire kitchen scene, in its inebriated
high spirits, has the lightness of farce in which bodies of different types
come into very close contact, arousing laughter. Its farcical conviviality
and comic misrule is in sharp contrast with the decorum of the upper-class
people upstairs. The editing brings these two distinct scenes, with different
styles of acting, into opposition.
The killing of Rodrigo Quast, the trapeze artist, by Countess Geschwitz in a
tiny cabin on the gambling ship is pure cloak-and-dagger grotesque theatrical
pantomime; Schigolch hides behind a curtain, having engineered the scenario.
As Rodrigo lunges at the countess, the large lantern affixed to the ceiling
swings violently, creating a visual disturbance to underline the intricate
melodramatic plotting that has brought these two unlikely ‘lovers’ together.
The subsequent high-angled close shot of the murdered Quast is, however,
purely cinematic, with its shadowy lighting and illuminated dead face.
There are aspects of several scenes that belong to pure theatrical bur-
lesque. At the very end of the courtroom scene, after Lulu’s friends set the
false fire alarm to disturb the legal proceedings (so as to give Lulu a chance
to escape imprisonment), a figure drags a supine body across the empty
courtroom floor and another figure in a long coat runs across the space in
a manic twirling motion, while several upturned chairs lie scattered. The
feel of the scene and its visual appearance is rather more like a cabaret hall
where something violent has just occurred. The space of the courtroom has
been transformed into a theatrical one. Pabst’s sense of realism is combined
with a unique ability to speedily transform the mise-en-scène into a higher
degree of abstraction. The courtroom is swiftly subjected to a theatrical
burlesque turn with Lulu’s presence. Brooks’s body is fragmented in the
scene in which she swings from the strong forearm of Quast. Several highly
fragmented shots show her swinging legs and fluttering, diaphanous dress,
rapidly intercut with close-ups of her face and head, creating an overall
sense of her exuberantly childlike delight in motility, a flurry of textured
dynamic movements as though she is doing a trapeze routine.
The famous theatrical backstage scene at Alwa’s review is also comical
and farcical in its multiple movements that interfere with each other and
the little visual running gag of the stage manager’s repeatedly interrupted
attempt to eat his sandwich. It is a popular theatre revue seen from the
34  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

wings and, as such, an oblique cinematic take on theatre in close-up. Here,

Pabst’s editing is at its most dynamic. The camera moves minimally while
the incessant movement of performers and stagehands, materials and objects
in the shot collide and brush against each other, giving an impression of
organized chaos. Space is activated on a vertical and horizontal as well as a
diagonal axis, creating the feeling of an incessantly mobile, tactile surface.
There is continuity of editing, but the movements are not followed, as yet
another set of movements takes their place. The shots are rapidly edited,
suggesting montage and yet the total experience is that of an intensive
surface rich in texture and micro-movements. So continuity and montage
editing are not used in the conventional manner. The camera presents
theatre as only film can. The scene is Pabst’s tribute to a kitsch popular art
form, which he converts into an ornamental space for Lulu, as a resplendent
ornament herself, to stage the private Oedipal drama. On seeing Dr. Schoen
and his fiancé together, Lulu refuses to dance in her presence, throwing
a tantrum, which becomes the main show. In his effort to coax her, they
go into a prop room where Dr. Schoen and Lulu are found locked in an
embrace, seen by his fiancé and son in dazed astonishment. Theatre and its
backstage machinery and materials have been converted into an intimate
chamber play. The transition of mood and tone from farcical pantomime
movements in the wings to the staging of a tragic theatrical melodramatic
tableau is superbly orchestrated.
Only a theatre actor and director such a Pabst would have understood
from within the strange connection and fundamental difference between
theatrical acting and film, theatrical mise-en-scène and film. Schigolch
and Rodrigo Quast, figures from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
popular physical theatre stumble into the high cool of Weimar sophistication.
Lulu’s vital and at first joyful theatrical connection to them creates two
of the most animated dance scenes in the film. In contrast, the very brief
view of Lulu’s dance in the revue is of quite a different order of performance
with its extravagant costume and beautiful yet limited movement from
one pose to another in a rhythmic walking motion. Lulu’s kinetic mobility
is restrained as an ornament for the upper-class audience of the review.
Rodrigo Quast, now employed as an extra, appears in a line-up of soldiers
dressed in comic costume and armour; as he passes Lulu backstage, he
exclaims indignantly, “‘Nonsense! Wouldn’t you rather do a trapeze act
with me!”’ He clearly sees the revue as trivial entertainment with none of
the skill and virtuosity required to do a circus trapeze act in variety. Here,
Pabst has an intimate affinity with Wedekind. I feel that Pabst and Brooks
train us to perceive the kinaesthetic register of performance in a fresh way.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 35

If we take part in this training, our preconceived modes of making sense of

the film may need to be revised. This process is reciprocal in the way that
a gift is said to function.

Realism and Abstraction of Milieux

The scenes in the east end of London – with the street, Salvation Army, pub,
garret, and stairwell – create a strong realist sense of a precise lower-class
milieu of urban poverty. Yet the pervasive fog helps to create an abstract
space at the same time. Only the essential, such as Jack the Ripper, with his
wide-brimmed hat, emerges from the fog. The coexistence or the penetration
of the everyday with cinematic abstraction is especially pointed in the last
act.
It is Christmas. The Salvation Army provides soup to the hungry and
operates within a barter system and a generalized sense of generous gift
exchange in the midst of poverty. The most enchanting exchange of a
gift happens on a large staircase (shot on the diagonal with shadows as
unmistakable Expressionist devices), where Lulu urges Jack the Ripper to
come into her garret (despite both being penniless), with a dazzling series
of smiles in extreme close-up. Here, we see how the realism of the milieu
(the stairwell) is transformed and abstracted through the series of close-ups
into a plane of cinematic erotics, an incarnation of the spirit of the gift.
It is intriguing that the film does not end with the death of Lulu. Instead,
Pabst takes us to the fogbound streets again. The Christmas procession
of the down-and-out, led by the Salvation Army playing its brass band,
a little Christmas tree mounted on a cart drawn by a donkey, and Alwa
following them at the back, with which the film ends, is utterly sombre
and realistic, the tone melancholic as in the genre of street films of the
era. A scene of utter disenchantment and melancholy from the promise
of enchantment and vitality offered at the opening of the film with Lulu
and the meter man.
As Hagopian notes, Jean Renoir expressed this special quality of Pabst’s
image in the following way:

Near the end of Pabst’s life, film-maker Jean Renoir recognized that Pabst’s
deeply personal style was so subtle, so indebted to the prosaic detail of
ordinary life, that it might escape the notice of the auteurists who were
lionizing Renoir. Generously, he wrote: ‘Pabst knows how to create a strange
world, whose elements are borrowed from daily life. Beyond this precious gift,
36  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

he knows how, better than anyone else, to direct actors. His characters emerge
like his own children, created from fragments of his own heart and mind.’18

Impulse and the Bourgeois Male Body

In Lulu’s presence, Schoen is disarmed and surrenders to impulses, which

lead to violence. An example of his volatile behaviour is first seen in Lulu’s
apartment, where he has come to break off his affair with her, when he
unaccountably, absent-mindedly drops a lit cigarette on a side table with a
doily and a cactus plant. The camera lingers on the lit cigarette to silently
make a point about his emotional state. The absent-minded cigarette lighting
is repeated in the prop room of the theatre where Lulu throws a tantrum.
When an agitated Schoen is about to light a cigarette in the ‘No Smoking’
space, Lulu, in the throes of her staged outburst, rationally warns him
against it. Yet again, standing up agitatedly, he topples over a very heavy
large wooden chair he has been sitting on, soon after Lulu has departed
from his study, having arrived there unexpectedly and unwelcomed.
The filming of Schoen’s death is most intriguing, as many analysts have
shown. Having been socially disgraced at his own wedding, he thrusts a
pistol into Lulu’s hand, asking her to kill herself. At her refusal, they struggle
with each other and a wisp of smoke emerges from between their bodies.
Schoen’s body slowly moves away from Lulu and, to her horror, he appears
to be mortally wounded. During his elaborate, Expressionist death scene he
reaches towards Lulu and clasps her face with both hands, slides his hands
down her body, and slowly slumps in front of her, having submitted to his
death. It is the close shots of Schoen’s body, its imposing static bulk, often
seen from the back, occluding Lulu, which conveys the operation of the
impulse, both the willed effort to resist it and then the disastrous unwit-
ting surrender to it, indicated by the Freudian slips of his well-mannered,
controlled, stolid, high bourgeois body.

Lulu’s Childhood

Lulu appears without a sense of the past, though Countess Geschwitz recounts
it to the state prosecutor and his wife in defence of Lulu. She says that Lulu grew
up without a family, on the city streets and in cafés, suggesting a much darker

18 Hagopian, unpaginated.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 37

history of child prostitution, certainly prevalent in the hedonistic, amoral,

decadent ethos of Weimar Berlin where, according to Brooks, ‘collective lust
roared unashamed in the theatre.’. We don’t know for sure what Lulu’s real
relationship to Schigolch is. Lulu refers to him variously as ‘my patron’, ‘my
father,’, while he also seems also to be her pimp. It is evident that Lulu has
no natural history, as Goodall puts it.19 Though Lulu’s death in the garret is
tragic, it is not played as tragedy. Her death is so astonishingly fleeting and
calm, in sharp contrast with Dr. Schoen’s long, drawn-out, agonized agonizing,
theatrical Expressionist theatrical death. The cinematic framing and close-shot
enable us to see only Lulu’s lifeless hand slip down Jack the Ripper’s body,
signalling death. There is no struggle even as he rips into her with a knife.
Once again, the image shows us something beyond or other than the narrative
meaning of the scene. This tension and lack of connection or disjunction makes
us engage with the film in an unusual way. Perception and meaning do not
neatly support and confirm each other in this climactic scene as well. Pabst
leaves the mind perplexed. Why does Lulu vanish so quietly, while Schoen plays
death to the hilt? Schoen and Alwa are creatures of the German Expressionist
imaginary of Oedipal triangles and father-son incestuous struggles. Though
a catalyst, Lulu is not a creature of the psychoanalytic imaginary.

Film and Lulu: A Gift Economy

The Jack the Ripper scene – the final act – is set at Christmas among the poor
and destitute on the streets of London. Lulu’s narrative movement from the
upper-class milieu and the theatrical revue in Germany, to the gambling ship
in France, and then to the streets of impoverished London, marks a sharp
social declivity. Here, the film explicitly elaborates on the multiple economies
of the gift. At first, we see Jack the Ripper emerging from the fog, looking into
the room of a middle-class house where children and adults gather around
a Christmas tree. A Salvation Army woman offers soup to him and tells Jack
the Ripper that they take only so that they can give back in return, implying
a system of exchange as a barter of sorts. According to the Christian legend,
Christmas celebrates the supreme gift of Christ’s incarnation so as to save the
world. As such, it is a gift that cannot be reciprocated. The Christian gift of love
is linked to sacrifice. Similarly, Lulu as film image offers us a special gift of life,
as radiant intense moment, irrespective of social class and market value. In
aligning Lulu’s final sparkling smile with Christmas, and her sacrifice at the

19 Goodall, op. cit., 200.

38  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

hands of the appealing Jack the Ripper, Pabst creates a highly dense, startling,
and somewhat baffling, certainly disturbing, emotional register to end the film.
Pabst shows us several modes of the gift economy in operation, and
through that, he differentiates film as commodity from film as vital force.
Film and Lulu or Lulu as film image itself embodies the spirit of the gift,
which exceeds any reciprocal obligation. She embodies the spirit of the gift
in a unique manner. The reciprocity built into a gift economy is disabled
because Lulu as gift gives all. She gives more than what the exchange
requires; she is, after all, called Pandora. Gift and sacrifice, gift as sacrifice
central to the Christian narrative, is reworked within a market economy,
investing the silent film image itself with a metaphysics of light and the
audience a power to perceive and cherish it on the eve of its obsolescence.
There is a poignancy and fatality to the death of silent cinema and Lulu’s
death. Such a realistic understanding of death as obsolescence is Pabst’s
contribution to the aesthetics and politics of the ‘New Objectivity’ (Neue
Sachlichkeite) of the last period of Weimar cinema.

Lulu’s Democratic Allure and Upper-Class Social Contempt

Lulu flits through the film from one milieu to another, through a highly
stratified social space – from the upper class to the demi-monde and lower
depths – with undiminished ease and vitality. It is as if she belongs every-
where and nowhere, which is, in a sense, what film is! She does not seem to
belong to a particular class, but she comes in contact with several different
social strata. Her allure is like that of film itself, in its historical status as
‘Democracy’s Theatre’ offering a ‘Universal Language’ of intelligibility and
desire. Lulu’s appeal is akin to the appeal of film as an intense light image
that dazzles even as it expires. As a prostitute, she is (like film itself) a
commodity; that is, an object to be bought and sold. But she appears to
evade capture, her identity mercurial. Her clothing and costumes are so
varied – she wears both state-of-the-art fashionable dress and extravagant
theatrical costumes – that they do not precisely identify and contain her.
Their variety contributes to Lulu’s mercurial presence. They amplify her
movements and clothe her with affect, as Brooks understood so well.20

20 Brooks described how wretched she felt when Pabst had her favourite set of clothes despoiled
for her to wear as a streetwalker in London. ‘I went on the set feeling as hopelessly defiled as my
clothes. Working in that outfit, I didn’t care what happened to me.’ Brooks, ‘Pabst and Lulu,’ in
Lulu In Hollywood, 103–104.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 39

In contrast, the men’s clothes and especially their hats and caps (and the
way they are handled and worn), become powerful emblems of class rela-
tions. The hat powerfully creates or delineates and identifies the character
in a swift, economical gesture. There is something of the ceremonial in the
way men embody and handle their hats and caps across class lines. One
thinks of Chaplin here. Schigolch’s shabby gentility, more like a tramp, is
conveyed most effectively through the way he tips his cap (to an unintended
comic effect), say to Dr. Schoen in Lulu’s apartment. When Schoen discovers
Schigolch hiding in a corner of Lulu’s balcony (because of her dog’s bark),
instead of being embarrassed at the disclosure, she introduces one to the
other with an elegantly formal dance-like gesture of her hand saying, ‘He
was my first patron’. Affronted, full of disdain, Schoen storms out of the
apartment, having smoothly collected his hat, gloves, and coat. Moments
such as these are oblique and most tantalizing as they are not played out
as in a realist drama. When Rodrigo Quast, in a tight suit, fails to tip his hat
at being introduced to Lulu, Schigolch nudges him and takes it off for him.
This, despite the fact that Schigloch himself looks like a tramp – unkempt,
shabby, in worn-out shoes and, according to Brooks, smelly as well! While
Lulu attends to the meter man at the opening of the film, the doorbell
rings and he answers it for her. Schigolch, who is at the door, is shot from
behind with his shabby shape in silhouette, a tramp perhaps. A reverse-shot
sequence shows him smiling and tipping his cap at the meter man, who
with his condescending look at a social inferior, prepares to give him a coin.
Meanwhile, Lulu sees that it is Schigolch and moves swiftly to gather him
up and sweep him into her apartment, with a marvellously graceful flowing
movement, shutting the door behind her. The astonished meter man, not
knowing what to make of this socially incongruous, rapidly changing scene,
picks up the two coins from the floor, dropped by Lulu, puts on his workman’s
cap, picks up his logbook, and leaves. In a few introductory moments, Pabst
has given us a small lesson in class relations, social condescension, and the
egalitarian relations and promise of film in an unusual way.
While Lulu moves through several of the theatrical genres of the period,
she is not contained by any of them. She does not belong to the theatre. Lulu
is incarnated by the electric light of the pure film image. The idea of a ‘pure’
film image suggests that the image (as distinct from the plot and narrative),
has a dynamism and vitality or spirit of its own irreducible to a storyline.
The images offer different meanings and aesthetic values on condition
that we sense these differences. One really needs to sense the light values
because their manifestation is so ephemeral and at times non-diegetic.
The capacity to sense the image, its kinetic and proprioceptive impulses,
40  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

stimulates thought. It is a gift offered to the spectator. Pabst and Brooks, in

their collaboration, demonstrate how intimately the eroticism of his film
image is linked to a particular conception of femininity; prostitute, dancer,
and New Woman. In this sense, Pandora’s Box offers a paradoxical cinematic
archetype that is sui generis. She has no progeny despite several attempts by
film-makers, including Godard, to copy her via her famous bobbed hairstyle
and bangs. Her hairstyle alone has little dynamism, an engaging fetish,
without the power of movement and the energy of her body, her costumes,
and mercurial spirit, combined with Pabst’s editing and lighting. This is so
evident in the second film that Brooks and Pabst made together, The Diary
of a Lost Girl. In this film, Brooks still has the same hairstyle but none of
the dynamism of Lulu because she ‘acts’ rather than dances through the
film, whereas in Pandora’s Box, every ordinary movement is inflected with
the rhythmic values of dance. Pabst’s editing in The Diary of a Lost Girl is
also not as fragmented as in Pandora’s Box. Brooks is self-aware when she
says that she is not a real actor, but rather, a dancer. But when she acts as
though she is really dancing, she is unparalleled. Only Pabst in Pandora’s
Box knew how to tap this unique ability, intuitively for the first and only
time. Through her training in early twentieth century American modern
dance, Brooks as Lulu is able to dance her way across Pandora’s Box.

Architectural and Social Strata

The clean, rectilinear Art Deco lines of Lulu’s apartment and windows, with
their striped drapes, is reminiscent of Bauhaus architectural geometric
façades of the late 1920s. But the interior decor is highly individuated with
plants, ornaments, and a divan with cushions and the like.
The high bourgeois modern interior of Dr. Schoen’s apartment is mixed
in style. It is a modern space, with a library of old leather-bound volumes, a
large mural, and heavy wooden furniture. In contrast, the apartment of his
fiancée Charlotte is decorated with ornate furniture from a different era
and draped curtains befitting old money of the ruling class and traditional
social standing.
The London garret shows Alwa, Schigolch, and Lulu together for the
last time. Alwa has become catatonic. Schigolch has regressed; he drinks
alcohol from a bottle and sucks at his pipe dreaming of a plum pudding.
Lulu pragmatically gets ready to walk the streets by combing her hair and
putting on lipstick in flickering lamplight. It is a strange perversion of a
domestic scene.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 41

Two scenes stand out in introducing the public as a central feature of the
film’s social realism. One occurs in the courtroom scene where men and
women occupy the public gallery. They are all well dressed, perhaps middle
class. The other is the pub scene in London and its working-class customers.
During Lulu’s trial, the women in the public gallery vocally express their
sentiments favouring Lulu. During the recess, the people gather outside
the courtroom. Two men and a woman are seen talking in an animated
manner while also eating sandwiches. The detail of the sandwiches attracts
attention, enhancing the everyday quality of the scene. In the ensuing chaos,
when the false fire alarm is struck, a group of tall men form a protective
circle around Lulu and help her escape prison. This anonymous group of
men makes their strong social presence felt. In the pub, we see a convivial
gathering of working-class people drinking and enjoying themselves on
Christmas Eve. Schigolch is there, tucking into a large plum pudding given
to him as a gift by a kindly woman, who looks on. These people stand up
and take off their hats respectfully as the Salvation Army procession, led by
the brass band, passes by at the very end of the film. These two scenes of a
sense of community are in sharp contrast to the scene of frantic gambling
on the ship, by what appears to be upper-class people with a lot of money.
Pabst’s supple shifts from abstract scenes to realist ones are noteworthy,
as is his understanding of class relations.
People actually working are seen in the scenes in Schoen’s kitchen for
the wedding, the men backstage at the review, and the sailors aboard the
gambling ship. That one remembers each of these milieus so vividly, despite
the focus on the dazzling Lulu, says something of Pabst’s capacity to work
with striking details in each of these scenes highlighting class differences
and also the nature of work. The intriguing shot of the young sailor on the
gambling ship, serving a cocktail to Lulu, with another on the tray, standing
and quietly looking at her for a considerable length of time comes to mind.
It is this very sailor who later provides Lulu with his cap and top as disguise
to escape in.

Brooks, Lulu, and Dance

Pabst’s Lulu is not the same as that of Wedekind’s Lulu of Earth Spirit (1895) or
Pandora’s Box (1904). She is not the theatrical incarnation of animal instinct.
We do well to remember what Wedekind said about his Lulu: that she is not a
character. Rather, for him, she embodied an elemental, instinctive force. Pabst
and Brooks converted Wedekind’s Lulu into a cinematic figure incarnated
42  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

with light, movement, and fabric. One could then say that, for Pabst also,
Lulu was not so much a character but rather an incarnation of film, the vital
force of the silent film itself at the very moment of its demise. While she does
appear as the New Woman, it is also the case that the New Woman is not a
character in the traditional sense of a fully rounded realist character. Lulu
is an incarnation of an idea, which is political, aesthetic, and commercial.
Lulu appears to alight just so as to take to flight, as a ballet dancer might.
Brooks was trained as a ballet dancer from a young age and danced profes-
sionally as a young adult with the pioneering Denishawn modern dance
company, alongside Martha Graham. She danced as a chorus girl and as
a lead dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies revues on Broadway. Her dance skills
were evidently both eclectic and extensive. What Brooks really wanted to
do was to have a career as a dancer, but she found herself in film almost by
chance. However, she had no formal training as an actor; she was self-taught.
She expressed her eccentric approach to performing in film in the following
insightful statement: ‘I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance
and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act’.21
She clearly internalized performing as hyperkinetic movement of the
impulsive body in space and micro-movements of gesture and posture.
She was, in this regard, a unique performer in silent cinema, and these
qualities make of her the most contemporary of silent film actors, appealing
to generations across the twentieth and even into the twenty-first century.
Brooks moves her entire body rather than merely gesticulating, as many
silent film actors did. Through motion, she produces emotion. Strangely,
she does not seem to age. As she mentioned, Brooks shared a highly kinetic
expressive power with the figure of Chaplin, the clown. The ballet dancer and
the clown both share a secret affinity in their silently expressive movements
of high artifice, shown so poignantly in Chaplin’s Limelight, in which Claire
Bloom as a ballerina dances to the tune of ‘You Are Always in My Heart’,
while Chaplin, the aged clown, having broken his back, lies dying in the
wings. One defies gravity, while the other succumbs to it through pratfalls.
But both are highly trained and disciplined performers of movement.
Critics have noted that Brooks appeared ‘natural’ on film and that she
appeared not to act but to be. This perceived naturalness and spontaneity is
a result of a rigorous training of her body. In fact, her naturalness is achieved
through a great deal of artifice, an extensive training from childhood. She does
not walk, or sit, or stand like a realist, ‘normal’ actor but rather as a dancer.
For example, when she crosses the full extent of Dr. Schoen’s apartment (on

21 Paris, Louise Brooks, 107.

A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 43

returning there from her trial and conviction), she does not walk so much as
dance, skip across it lightly, twirling. When she sees a pile of magazines, she
selects one and lounges with a precise casual elegance on a divan, looking at
the images of high fashion and swimwear with interest. When she runs a bath,
she strikes a pose with her hands on her hips. She leaps onto the laps of men
(Schigolch and Jack the Ripper), with one clean movement and nestles there
elegantly and yet appears childlike. There are no superfluous movements of
her body, her everyday movements are precise as those of a dancer, which is
what she was. The lines of her movements are pure – abstract even. She does
not gesticulate nor does she produce phatic communicative signs. When she
sees a horizontal bar or arm, she swings from them as she does on Rodrigo
Quast’s strong arm and when she meets Alwa and Countess Geschwitz in
Alwa’s apartment she does the same on a crossbar, much to their and her own
delight. The way she enters this room by opening a large door and turning in
one continuous elegant, light, movement is contrasted with the way in which
Countess Geschwitz, in a smart tuxedo and bow tie, enters through the very
same door in the normal way one would. The two everyday movements are
thereby foregrounded and differentiated in one scene.
This film constantly trains us to perceive its movements, its rhythms,
and its pulses. This special gift proffered us as viewers is not a purely visual
experience. If we are receptive to the film’s sensations, our kinaesthetic
and proprioceptive body may also be recharged. The dancer’s muscular
energy and ours have a chance to achieve mimetic transference. This is the
deepest material sense in which I imagine and understand how reciprocity
operates in Pandora’s Box.

Lulu as Pierrot

A rather large painting of Lulu as an androgynous, sombre Pierrot with

a guitar hangs prominently in her living room, a gesture to Wedekind’s
Earth Spirit in which she appears dressed as the clown Pierrot. Through
her sombre expression, a reflective element is brought into the picture,
which is also suggestive of the fluctuating nature of gender and sexuality
in Weimar culture. Throughout the nineteenth century in Europe, the
traditional clown Pierrot from pantomime became an embodiment of a
male artistic sensibility, sensitivity, and melancholy in a venal commercial
world. Theodore Adorno said that Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle ‘Pierrot
Lunaire’ (‘Pierrot of the Moon’, 1912) expressed ‘the homelessness of our
soul’. Lulu’s androgynous Pierrot appears to be unique until Björk, dressed
44  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

as the clown, sang ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ in 1996! The thick affective life of this
iconic European melancholy clown figure is condensed, I think, into this
painting, creating an androgynous theatrical genealogy for Lulu.22 The
implicit melancholy tone of the bisexual Lulu as Pierrot is picked up and
given full force at the end of the film when we see Jack the Ripper in his
raincoat and hat exit the building (having killed Lulu and having left behind
her dead body), into a London fog, while Alwa, leaning against a wall, sobs.
It is as though (in Thomas Elsaesser’s reading), the man in the raincoat and
hat is leaving the cinema after having seen Pabst’s Lulu!

Lulu in Coco Chanel?

Stars such as Brooks, who were not major box-office figures, were disposable
commodities in the Hollywood industry in which youthful good looks
and talent were plentiful. Pabst knew more than anyone else what was
photogenic about Brooks – her unique movements, energy, clothes, and
hairstyle – which is why he drastically changed them when she is on the
illicit gambling ship, with very little room to move in every sense! Brooks’s
hair is parted in the middle and the two sides lightly curled, immediately
making her blend in with the rest, her appeal significantly diminished.
She dazzles again only when she wears a cap (with her hair tucked in),
borrowed from a male waiter on the ship and a striped top worn by the
sailors. This top is reminiscent of Coco Chanel’s 1917 Breton stripe top
inspired by fishermen and also historically worn by French sailors. While
the police raid the ship, Lulu gets into drag by slipping on this high-fashion
Coco Chanel-like chic urban jumper and cap, caught in an all too brief but
well-lit shot. Lulu peeps stealthily from a cabin, looking like a gorgeous
fashion icon, and escapes in a boat to London with Alwa and Schigolch.
There is, this time round, an outrageous disjunction here between the

22 Brinkman, ‘The Fool as Paradigm,’ 139–167. Brinkman shows how the French adapted and
transformed this clown figure from its seventeenth-century origins in Italian commedia dell’arte
to the clumsy Pierrot and its gradual eighteenth-century transformation as melancholy Pierrot,
to its emergence as a ‘melancholy artist-prototype’ in nineteenth-century Paris. Wedekind
would have been aware of this rich lineage in making Lulu dress up as Pierrot. Also see Youens,
‘Excavating an Allegory’, 95–115. Youens says that ‘Pierrots were endemic everywhere in late
nineteenth / early twentieth century Europe as an archetype of the self-dramatizing artist, who
presents to the world a stylized mask both to symbolize and veil artistic ferment, to distinguish
the creative artist from the human being’ (96). This long history of the evolution of an archetypal
persona is important to Wedekind and also for Pabst in his presentation of Lulu as Pierrot in
the artifice of the painting.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 45

narrative situation (police raid on illegal gambling, murder, and being a

fugitive) and the aesthetics of Lulu as image. The illumination of the shot
of Lulu seems to me to be extra-diegetic in its clarity, rather more like a
fashion plate in Vogue or Die Dame (‘The Lady’)! Brooks’s Lulu in this haute
couture, androgynous, casual outfit becomes the New Woman, who knows
how to get out of a tight spot with aplomb. There is an irresistible sense of
fun in this get-up, in this all too short, light, dangerous instant. But film is
like that: a glittering instant, a sliver of time, a particle of intensity. Oh! If
only we could freeze it! But then it would cease to be an irretrievably passing
instant in all its brilliance, from whence it derives all its power.

Collaboration Between Brooks and Pabst

Brooks and Pabst created their Lulu through a remarkably intuitive collabora-
tion. Brooks has said that she didn’t read the English-language translation of
the script given to her by Pabst. As a result, she says, ‘I didn’t know that Lulu was
a professional dancer trained in Paris (“Gypsy, Oriental, skirt dance”) or that
dancing was her mode of expression (“In my despair I dance the Can-Can”)’.23
According to Brooks, Pabst didn’t discuss her character and motivation with
her as he did with others: ‘But in my case, by some magic, he would saturate
me with one clear emotion and turn me loose, […] this afternoon, in the first
scene, you are going to cry’ and plotted the floor plan of her movement in the
way a choreographer might instruct a dancer. He also took a keen interest in her
costumes and clothing (some of them which were Brooks’s own), as though they
were a supercharged sensory skin that would contribute to the performance,
which of course they did. In contrast, he would spend considerable time
with the other actors – explaining their roles to them, calming them down,
humouring them. He is said to have approached each actor in a manner that
suited the actor rather than in a standardized manner, collectively.
Pabst chose Brooks to play the archetypal German character after seeing
her in a minor Howard Hawks’s film, A Girl in Every Port (1928). Pabst’s search
for Lulu was legendary; it lasted for months. The pre-Hollywood, pre-Blue
Angel Marlene Dietrich was also considered. It is significant that he chose
an American actress rather than a German to play the iconic German role.
It was a controversial choice, upsetting some of the German film-going
public. Pabst is on record as saying that one sexy look from Dietrich would
turn the film into burlesque! On set, Pabst asked Brooks to improvise a little

23 Brooks, ibid., 105.

46  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

dance for the first scene with Schigolch. All he did was give her a fast tempo
for the dance and a small demarcated space. It was then that Pabst realized
that Brooks was in fact a trained dancer. ‘That I was a dancer and Pabst
essentially a choreographer in his direction came as a wonderful surprise
to both of us on the first day of shooting Pandora’s Box’, Brooks recalled.24
What he would have responded to in Brooks’s Hollywood film is her ability
to move freely without being encumbered by the clichés of femininity or
‘sexiness’, a pure kinetic elan of the modern female American dancer in
motion. For example, in one impressive scene in A Girl in Every Port, she
performs with athletic prowess and elegance a dangerous circus act, in
which she climbs a very high ladder in tights and dives down from it into a
pool of water. One can sense proprioceptively this quality of unencumbered
movement in a virtual form even when she settles into a still position, such as
when she is simply sitting or lying down in Pandora’s Box. One could imagine
her playing tennis with great ease, as they did back then for fun. She did
not carry the burden of femininity that had formed and weighed down the
figure of ‘Woman’ as whore or dancer over centuries of theatrical and visual
representation in the Western tradition, including in the silent film era. This
is despite the fact that she played the role of a prostitute in this film. As a
modern dancer who said that she learned to dance from Chaplin and act
from Martha Graham, she possessed the technical skill and amplitude to
demonstrate these stereotypes while not being determined and restricted
by them. According to Richard Leacock, ‘Brooks describes her movements
in the film as simple choreography, and this easily makes sense watching
her move across a room, sit on a sofa, or leap on to a man’s lap’.25 One must
remember, however, that her fluid movements are inextricably linked and
amplif ied by the dynamism of Pabst’s singular style of mise-en-scène,
framing, lighting, camera movement, and editing discussed earlier.
Pabst and Brooks’s Lulu is not the carnal theatrical figure of Wedekind’s
plays. The title Pandora’s Box invokes the mythical woman fabricated by
Hephaestus and given a jar with instructions not to open it. But, true to
other female mythical creatures of a patriarchal imaginary (like Adam’s
Eve, Lot’s wife, and Blue Beard’s fifth wife), she is unable to repress her
sense of curiosity. In opening the jar/box, Pandora lets out into the world
forces of evil and destruction, so the story goes. Curiosity, in this misogynist
myth, is seen as bad behaviour or vice rather than as an intellectual virtue.

24 Brooks, ibid., 101.

25 In her filmed interview with Richard Leacock: Lulu in Berlin (1984), included in Criterion’s
Collection of the film.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 47

The mythical Greek ‘jar’ became ‘box’ sometime in the sixteenth century.
Pabst’s singular achievement is to have given this patriarchal misogynist
myth a unique cinematographic form, delinking it from its fatal moralism.
The fabled (libidinally charged) ‘box’, in Pabst’s conception, becomes the
cinematographic apparatus itself (the black box), and Brooks’s Lulu its most
enchanting, elusive, fantasmatic, and amoral manifestation or projection.
Through film, the world is metamorphosed into images, becoming a
resplendent gift (Pandora), accessible to all and yet freighted with empti-
ness. This is so because film is a play between light and darkness, its image
evanescent, insubstantial. Lulu radiates light, her jet-black hair shines, her
black satin and white silk dresses reflect light, her eyes and teeth twinkle
with stars in the close-ups of her face on the stairs when she invites Jack the
Ripper to come up with her. There is a halo of back lighting illuminating
her outline in the close-up when Alwa holds her in his arms. The source of
the light is not within the image: it appears to be non-diegetic. It’s not any
one’s point of view. It is mysterious. What seems to be the profound black
background of the shot is not spatial but feels rather more like a black void,
actively allied to the mysterious light, as its other. This is so because Lulu’s
face is sculpted with light and shadow as never before. The dazzling halo
also would not be registered as such without the black void itself. Lulu as
the radiant electric light image of silent film could not appear without its
double, the ensuing shadow and darkness.

‘Comes to life so that she may die’

Lulu’s serene death, at the hands of Jack the Ripper, is followed by the extin-
guishing of the flickering lamplight. This scene between Lulu and Jack the
Ripper is bafflingly fascinating as it is performed as a love scene. The narrative
line is tragic, the ‘psychopathic serial killer murders the prostitute’, an instance
of lust morde (‘pleasure killing’). But what actually transpires in this long scene,
moment by moment, is tender and calm, unlike any other scene, except at that
fatal moment when Jack the Ripper grips the shining blade of the knife on the
table and reacts with horror at his own uncontrollable murderous compulsion.
There is no corresponding response from Lulu; there is no perceptible struggle,
just her arm sliding down his back, fingers tensed then falling limp. The instant
of death is marked by the lightest of signs, not unlike the puff of smoke when
Dr. Schoen is shot. But the two deaths are performed in two different genres
or modes. For Dr. Schoen, Pabst chose a long, slow, agonizing Expressionist
theatrical mode of dying (if one were to speed it up, one would be in the Mack
48  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Sennett burlesque mode of dying of the comic villain). In contrast, Pabst has
Lulu die as lightly as she has lived, alight in a cinematic instant. If we sped
up the shot, the moment would be imperceptible.
What appears to be cold amorality in the narrative (as when Lulu returns
from the courtroom to Dr. Schoen’s apartment, where she had killed him,
lights a cigarette, riffs through fashion magazines, has a hot bath, and
makes love to Alwa), when viewed in this light becomes something else.
It’s as though our own moral sense is suspended in becoming enchanted by
Lulu’s movements and capacity to be free of memory and guilt. She moves
from one moment to another, from one scene to another without a sense
of a past, a sense of guilt, a sense of interiority and duration, not unlike a
child. There are moments when Lulu’s movements appear childlike and full
of merriment. Sometimes, her smile is guileless and at others manipulative.
In the absence of an interiority, which would imply memory and guilt, she
flits from one moment to another, she does not exist in duration. This is one
of several ways of thinking about the complex nature of the temporality
of film itself. She incarnates the allure of the ineffable cinematic instant,
which could be the shortest imaginable time, a particle or sliver of light.
This could be the measureless photogenie of film itself.
Our perspective is not Lulu’s, though. We are given the chance (a gift)
to f inely calibrate images including Lulu as movement-image made of
light, which is what makes Pabst a master film-maker. This movement of
calibration is made possible because of the reflexive meta-filmic dimension
of the image that enfolds the unfolding narrative line. This film makes us
hypersensitive to the work of light and movement in producing the film
image. I perceive this aspect of the film as a gift. Count Casti-Piani shows
a set of Lulu’s photographic images in various costumes and poses to an
Egyptian owner of a brothel in the hope of getting a good prize for Lulu. He
is unimpressed by the photographs. So Casti-Piani brings in Lulu to show
her in the flesh and, despite her changed, unflattering hairstyle and dress,
she impresses the Egyptian. Pabst contrasts the two mechanically registered
light images and aligns vitality with the moving cinematic body of Brooks’s
Lulu. Pabst makes us experience the differential between the photographic
and the cinematographic image. The static photographic image of Lulu
taken in court becomes a surveillance image published in a newspaper.
Lulu’s death at the hands of Jack the Ripper as a narrative conclusion is
of course terribly disturbing – tragic in its inevitability. But what is even
more disturbing is the way it is performed. In Wedekind, Lulu cries out
‘No! No! Have Mercy! Police! Police!’ In Alban Berg’s opera, Lulu’s cry of
protest is powerfully expressed through song. But in the film, there is no
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 49

death struggle at all, no protest whatever. It is as though Lulu yields to

it. Why? That’s a question that needs an answer. Pabst doesn’t tell us but
rather leaves us to make sense of it. As a feminist film theorist, one cannot
simply be satisf ied with the answer that it’s an example of lust morde,
which, nevertheless, it appears to be. Narratively, Lulu has reached a dead
end, going from being an upper-class kept woman to a street prostitute
via a detour though theatrical performance. One is reminded of Michael
Powell’s controversial film Peeping Tom, 1960, in which the serial killer
appears as gentle as Jack the Ripper through the choice of the actor and
in the killer’s relationship to a special woman. Though gentle, both the
serial killer in Peeping Tom and Jack the Ripper are propelled by a violent
compulsion which they cannot control. Powell gives his character a backstory
of extreme paternal emotional violence as a child, but there is none for Jack
the Ripper. His presence is announced in a street poster warning the women
of London of the serial killer. He is a generic serial killer, though a known
historical figure in name. Brooks has stated that the only actor she found
appealing on the film set was Gustav Diessl, who played Jack the Ripper.
Certainly, the interaction between them in the garret up to the killing is most
intriguing. It goes through a series of subtle moods, gestures, and postures,
attitudes that are simply and clearly performed. Jack the Ripper looks shy
and reserved while Lulu makes the garret a little less uncomfortable and
jumps onto his lap lightly, as she has done before with Schigolch. They hold
each other gently and smile at each other. Then, she goes through his jacket
pockets, playful like a child, and finds the mistletoe and candle given to
him by the Salvation Army woman. She gets off his lap, lights the candle,
and carefully fixes it onto the table. They then quietly settle into looking at
the candlelight for some time. One feels that this explicit fascination with
the fragile candlelight could go on. The scene is gentle, the pace slow, their
breathing in unison, the moment exquisite. He beckons her onto his lap and
holds the mistletoe over Lulu’s head as she looks up at it, showing her neck
and upturned face. He says that she must let herself be kissed as she is now
under mistletoe. It is at this point of erotic contact that the glinting knife
catches his eyes (a hard-edged glittering abstract steel blade in close-up),
and he is seized by his compulsion to kill. It is the most tender scene in the
whole film. Brooks wrote eloquently about the perverse sexual dynamics
of the final scene in her insightful essay ‘Pabst and Lulu’:

Making love to her in her pure white peignoir, Alwa asks her, ‘Do you love
me Lulu?’ ‘I? Never a soul!’ It is in the worn and filthy garments of the
street-walker that she feels passion for the first time—comes to life so
50  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

that she may die. When she picks up Jack the Ripper on the foggy London
street and he tells her he has no money to pay her, she says, ‘Never mind.
I like you.’ It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has
been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac.26

This passage from Brooks’s essay, with its strong prose voice, appears in
a section of her book discussing the vitality of costumes for her as Lulu.
It is in such a context that Brooks explains (with absolute clarity) Lulu’s
childhood sexuality and trauma with astonishing psychoanalytic acuity.
As far as I know, no scholar or critic has written with Brooks’s degree of
clarity and insight on Lulu’s childhood sexuality and its relationship to her
calm death. One wonders how Brooks was so sure that this was the ‘real’
case history, or backstory, so to speak, of the fictional Lulu. It is of interest
that Brooks thought to give Lulu a backstory at all, given that her mode of
performance was one of pure externality. We know, as Brooks would have,
that child prostitution was prevalent in Weimar Berlin. Brooks has also
written candidly about being molested herself as a girl at the age of nine (in
her hometown of Cherryvale, Kansas), by an older man known to her family.
Barry Price quotes Brooks and comments on her traumatic experience:

‘I was done in by a middle aged man when I was nine,’ she said. And after
her readings in Nabokov: ‘I was loused up by my Lolita experiences,’ Mr
Flowers had defiled her in a time and place where child molestation was
not even mentioned, let alone discussed. ‘[He] must have had a great deal
to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure.’ She told Tynan.
‘For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough – there had to be an
element of domination – and I’m sure that’s all tied up with Mr Flowers.
The pleasure of kissing and being kissed comes from somewhere entirely
different, psychologically as well as physically.’ And most devastating of
all, when she bravely told her mother about Mr Flowers, Myra put the
blame on Louise for ‘leading him on.’27

By placing Brooks’s insightful recounting of her own experience of sexual

violence as a child and its consequences alongside Lulu’s backstory provided
by Brooks (also passionately recounted by Countess Geschwitz in the
courtroom, addressed to the public prosecutor and his wife as defence),
one can better understand the perverse emotional dynamics between Jack

26 Brooks, 104.
27 Paris, Louise Brooks, 533–534.
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 51

the Ripper and Lulu. Pabst wanted Brooks to play the scene lightly, like a
child, innocently. To enhance this mood, he had a piano played between
takes to which Brooks danced the Charleston. By her own account, she
enjoyed playing the scene with Diessl and she also enjoyed his company.
The feelings were mutual, unlike with Fritz Koetner, who played Dr. Schoen.
He, according to Brooks, hated her, never spoke to her, and left her arms
bruised after shaking her violently in the prop room scene.
Pabst was concerned about Brooks’s career and her future. He wanted
her to learn German and become a disciplined actor and work in Germany.
Exasperated by her sense of frivolity and lack of discipline during the filming
(he had to enforce early nights), Pabst famously warned Brooks that if she
did not take care of herself, she would end up just like Lulu. Brooks recounts
this in her old age and agrees in a sense with Pabst’s prediction. So, it would
appear that Brooks embodied both the lustre of the cinematic image and
also its darker side, both on- and off-screen. Brooks’s understanding of her
own career trajectory as an actor (as opposed to a dancer), was also acute.
She admired Pabst’s discipline and direction. She was critical of the way
Hollywood studios treated their actors. But Pabst never knew that Lulu and
Brooks had a shared childhood sexual trauma, too! However, we do know
that, despite it all, Brooks also lived to write some insightful, well-crafted,
politically acute essays on Hollywood and the plight of the contract actor/
star within the studio system and on Pabst’s Berlin and her work with him as
Lulu. But she also told Lotte Eisner, who befriended her, that had she stayed
behind in Germany to pursue a career in acting as Pabst wanted her to, he
would have soon tired of her, and ‘sooner or later the Pabst express would
run her down’.28 These eloquent, ferociously insightful, poetic words about
the limits of her talent as an actor and the precarious work of an actor as
star, should be kept in mind when we yet again swoon (like Langlois and
others), over the luminous undying image of Louise Brooks as Pabst’s Lulu.

Bibliography

Brinkman, Reinhold. ‘The Fool as Paradigm: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the
Modern Artist.’ Schoenberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, edited by
Konrad Boehmer, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 139–167.
Brooks, Louise. Lulu in Hollywood: Louise Brooks. London: Arena Books, 1982.

28 Eisner, Once I had a Beautiful Fatherland, p. 98. Unpublished translation by Brian Rutnam
of a letter sent to Eisner by Brooks.
52  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Eisner, Lotte. Once I had a Beautiful Fatherland. Munich: The Magic Horn Publisher,
1984.
Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Lulu and the Meter Man: Louise Brooks, G. W. Pabst and
Pandora’s Box.’ Weimar Cinema and After; Germany’s Historical Imaginary,
London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 259–292.
Goodall, Jane. Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin; Out of the Natural
Order. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Hagopian, Kevin. New York State Writers Institute, State University of New York.
https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/f ilmnotes/pandora.html.
Accessed 5 December 2019.
Hawks, Howard. A Girl in Every Port (1928). Fox Film Corporation, Hollywood. 78
minutes.
Hutchinson, Pamela. Pandora’s Box. London: BFI, 2018.
Jayamanne, Laleen. Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-cultural Mimesis, Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Leacock, Richard. Lulu in Berlin. Interview with Louise Brooks. New York: Criterion
Collection, 1984.
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies.
Translated by Ian Cunnison, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
Miller, Helen. ‘Overcoming Desire: Prostitution and Contract in Pandora’s Box.’
Central Queensland University, Brisbane. https://www.academia.edu/29113008/
The_Overcoming_of_Desire_Prostitution_and_the_Contract_in_Pandora_s_
Box_1929_. Accessed 5 January 2020.
Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinematic Mind’s Eye. London: BFI, 1996.
Pabst, G.W. Diary of a Lost Girl. Hom-Film GmbH, Germany, 116 minutes, 1929.
Paris, Barry. Louise Brooks. Great Britain: Mandarin, 1990.
‘Puppet Aesthetics.’ https://wepa.unima.org/en/aesthetics-of-the-puppet-european-
romanticism-to-the-avant-garde/. Accessed 1 February 2020.
Youens, Susan. ‘Excavating an Allegory: The Text of Pierrot Lunaire.’ Journal of the
Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 8, no. 2, 1984, pp. 95–115.

Filmography

Pandora’s Box (Die Buechse der Pandora, 1929). 133 minutes. Silent, black and white.
German intertitles with English translation.
Production: Nero Films, Germany
Director: G. W. Pabst
Script: Ladislaus Vajda, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and
Pandora’s Box
A GIF T ECONOMY: G. W. PABST’S PANDORA’S BOX 53

Languages: Intertitles in German with English translation

Cinematography: Gunther Krampf
Art Direction: Andrei Andreiev and Gottlieb Hesch
Costume: Gottlieb Hesch
Editing: Joseph Fleisler
Main Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Goetz, Gustav Diessl,
Kraft-Raschic, Alice Roberts, Daisy D’Ora.

Pandora’s Box, G. W. Pabst. New York: Criterion Collection. DVD 2006.

2. Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov

Abstract
Parajanov is presented here as a director who composes forces of nature.
The four elements – earth, fire, wind, and water, as well as stone and the
nautilus shell with its unimaginable duration – figure prominently in The
Color of Pomegranates. Crafted objects and woven materials play an active
role in his films, while the actors aspire to the state of abstraction of the
puppet. Through these means, Parajanov gives cinema a natural history
and a cosmos-centric power while locating his films within a deep history
of the Transcaucasia. A Sufi concept of the image and its apprehension
are elaborated through a minstrel’s encounter with wedding feasts of the
deaf, the mute, and the blind in Ashik Kerib.

Keywords: Sergei Parajanov and Transcaucasia, Geomorphic and cosmos-

centric cinema, Sufi image, Cognitive imagination, Actors and puppets

They thought up barbaric amusements

I tossed pomegranates up
And they split them with sabres!

The geological, material, and spiritual forces of the porous Transcaucasian

regions of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan nourished the poetic imagina-
tion of the visionary Soviet Union director Sergei Parajanov. Born in 1924 in
Georgia to Armenian parents, Parajanov’s multilingual skills (in Russian,
Georgian, and Armenian), along with his talents and training in music
and singing, dancing and cinematography, enabled him to harness the
many intersecting cultural resources of the Transcaucasia, with its deep
civilizational history. Additionally, the cultural and spiritual practices of the
Armenian Apostolic Church and Eastern Orthodox Christianity as well as
Civilizational Islam (all religions of the Book), coexist in a unique manner in
Parajanov’s two major films, The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova) (1969)
and Ashik Kerib (1988), which are both situated within the multi-ethnic

Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

doi 10.5117/9789463726245_Ch02
56  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

zone of Transcaucasia. Parajanov synthesized this rich variety of elements

to create a singular flexible cinematic idiom. Historically, Transcaucasia
was a contact zone of diverse peoples, languages, and cultures who came
with the caravan trade routes (part of the Silk Road), and the Persian and
Ottoman Turk invasions that introduced Islam to what was hitherto an
ancient Apostolic and Orthodox Christian world. As Peter Brown says,
Armenian culture ‘drew strange vigor from existing side by side with a
continuing epic world or pre-Christian customs and oral tradition’. The
pre-Islamic Persian influence, a legacy of war, was also an important aspect
of the life of the nobility, who were ‘highly Iranized in social structure and
lay culture’.1
James Steffen’s brilliant and award-winning book The Cinema of Sergei
Parajanov, along with the recently restored version of The Color of Pome-
granates (The Criterion Collection), facilitates further work in English
on the film-maker.2 Steffen situates Parajanov within the historical and
political background of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, from Leonid
Brezhnev’s rule through to Glasnost, which began in Georgia under Eduard
Shevardnadze, who authorized Parajanov’s release from prison and his
film The Legend of Surami Fortress (1984) soon after. Steffen provides a
biography of the director, including an account of his relationships with the
Soviet film bureaucracy, Goskino in Moscow, and the regional studios in
Ukraine and Armenia, spanning his entire career. Parajanov’s three prison
terms are discussed in relation to his political and aesthetic convictions,
his theatrical public persona, and his relationship to the Soviet state. Stef-
fen displays (in the words of a reviewer), ‘an extraordinary cross-cultural
stamina’ in researching his book, for which he conducted archival research
in Moscow. The historical detail is remarkable, and the overall intellectual
framework is illuminating. He offers insightful readings of the films and
discusses the director’s many incomplete film projects as well. He helps
us understand Parajanov’s status as a poet of Transcaucasia within the
Soviet Union’s ‘Nationality Policy’. The book provides an intricate history
of the rich transcultural artistic heritage of Transcaucasia and elaborates
on the components from which Parajanov created his unique poetic film
aesthetics. Steffen also locates Parajanov’s mature work within the context
of the modern ‘archaic’ poetic school of film-making centred in Ukraine,
while also highlighting its uniqueness. The following opening lines of the
book capture this well:

1 Brown, ‘Between Two Empires‘, 42.

2 Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 57

Few film directors ever manage to create a single image that is truly unlike
anything you have seen before. In that respect, Sergei Parajanov’s films
seem almost reckless in their generosity […] Watching his films, one is
struck by the presence of ancient peoples, of entire histories contained
in the very objects depicted on the screen, but also by a style of acting
that seems to come from a long-vanished era[.]3

Quoting Parajanov – who declared, ‘My love for old things is not a hobby,
it’s my aesthetic conviction’ – Steffen continues:

But Parajanov did something far more interesting than to simply tell
old stories and show old things in an old way. Under the guise of this
consciously archaic style, he cultivated a sophisticated form of poetic
cinema that extended the experimentations in editing, sound and color
initiated by earlier Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod
Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovzhenko. At the same time, he was conversant
in contemporary European cinema and movements in modern art such
as Surrealism. Ultimately, his great accomplishment was to bring the
cultures of non-Russian republics such as Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia
onto the global cinematic stage through a lively synthesis of regional folk
culture and literary traditions with avant-garde film-making techniques
and sly personal touches. 4

Steffen quotes Jean-Luc Godard, who said, on seeing The Color of Pomegran-
ates, ‘I think you have to live at least fifteen miles away and feel the need
to walk there on foot to see it. If you feel that need and give it that faith,
the film can give you everything you could wish’. Yet Steffen states his own
aim lightly: ‘As the first English-language book about Parajanov’s films, this
study seeks to make the fifteen-mile journey a little less arduous[.] ‘5 This
historical work and the restored version of the film, with the accompanying
research material, made my fifteen-mile journey not only ‘less arduous’ but
a heady adventure as well.
Parajanov’s aesthetically replete, eccentric (to Soviet Socialist Realist
orthodoxy) cinematic idiom derives from several cultural sources – craft
and popular folk traditions, including oral and courtly traditions, as well
as the written religious traditions of the region. As well as this, artisanal

3 Ibid., 4.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 3–4.
58  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

techniques (with their own deep civilizational cultural history) such as

weaving, with all of its essential processes such as carding, spinning, dyeing,
and sewing, are integral to his cinematic practice. Woven material – its
texture, design, colour, weight, cut, drape, and movement – lines and enfolds
his cinematic image, nourishing and amplifying its sensory properties
and affective force. While the canonical triad of Western art history –
architecture, sculpture, and painting – play a prominent substantial role
in these films, music, dance, theatre, and song (all ephemeral temporal arts
of the body) are integral to their dynamism. The traditional and decorative
so-called ‘minor arts’ of making furniture, pottery, musical instruments,
and handcrafted everyday objects are presented as striking still lifes. There
is also an interplay between the written text (whether on paper, in clay,
or chiselled on stone) and the oral sounds we hear, giving language itself
an amplitude and performative power in relation to the visual image that
is quite rare in film. What’s more, these synaesthetically suggestive films
generously invite us to actually perceive how these vital art forms have
arisen from robust yet also very delicate artisanal labour. Synaesthesia
(according to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran), is to be understood
as a mingling of the senses, which are normally kept discrete; their unusual
interplay kindles the mind.6 The vitality of the four primordial elements of
nature (water, wind/air, earth, and fire), and of the aesthetically enlivened
human senses, are shown to be intrinsically linked in a cosmos where
humans and animals coexist habitually as well as ritually, in often strange
and unfamiliar configurations.
This chapter explores the means by which Parajanov creates his poetic
cinematic idiom, privileging a unique activation of all of our senses, through
an analysis of the composition of two films: The Color of Pomegranates and
Ashik Kerib. Moreover, on the basis of this analysis I explore how these films
contribute to film theory and aesthetics and to an understanding of the
making of cultural history as a process of invention. I will do so, in part, by
situating his project in relation to that of the contemporary Indian director
Kumar Shahani, drawing out a certain affinity that I see between their
cinematic projects of the reclamation of cultural tradition. As both these
films are about poet troubadours and their modes of perception it makes
good sense to begin by focusing especially on the sensory, rhythmic aspects
of the composition of images and sounds and the range of formal devices
used. Poetry intensifies perception by undoing customary semantic and
syntactical connections among its components (whether word or object),

6 Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brian, 26.

Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 59

and infusing them with pulses, rhythms, and metres, alongside sensory
formal material that creates new connections and affects.
Steffen deepens our understanding of poetic cinema by introducing
ideas first advanced by the Russian Formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky in
his essay ‘Poetry and Prose in Cinematography’ (1927). Steffen notes that
Shklovsky was especially interested in Parajanov’s cinema and discusses
their collaboration on several unrealized film scripts in the early 1970s.
Shklovsky differentiates poetry from prose in the following way:

They are distinguished one from the other not by rhythm, or rather, not
by rhythm alone, but by the fact that in a poetic film the technical-formal
features predominate over the semantic features. The composition is
resolved by formal techniques rather than by semantic methods. Plotless
film is poetic film.7

Further, Steffen indicates how Shklovsky’s highly influential formalist

concept of ostranenie (or ‘defamiliarization’), formulated in his essay ‘Art as
Device’, can illuminate our understanding of Parajanov’s poetic strategies.8
In the following theorization Shklovsky shows a profound understanding
of the synaesthetic powers of art and poetic cinema:

And so in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us

feel objects, to make stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of
art. […] By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of
art makes perception long and ‘laborious’. The perceptual process in art
has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is
a means of experiencing the process of creativity.9

The kinetic power of cinema is strongly indicated by the formulation, ‘to

return sensation to our limbs.’. The lapidary dynamism of Parajanov’s cinema
may be grasped through the marvellous phrase, ‘to make stone feel stony’.
This idea of perceptual innervation will be developed in the course of my
analysis of his films. Though Shklovsky and Parajanov came from different
generations, Steffen shows us the close affinity between the theorist and the
artist. This in turn is an indication of the astonishing vitality and richness
of intergenerational artistic and intellectual collaboration and tradition

7 Steffen, op. cit., 19.

8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
60  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

in the Soviet Union, despite its totalitarian politics. I will return to this
crucial point later on in this chapter, when I discuss an experimental film
pedagogy (one of the concerns of this book), and the ethics of transmitting
vital ideas and energy across generations.
Parajanov’s poetic images and sounds combine to create a high degree
of abstraction quite unusual in the history of cinema. The unfamiliar
configurations and plasticity of his images and sounds produce sensations
and ‘vitality affects’, which obliquely generate a tissue of interconnected
ideas in the viewer. ‘Vitality affects’ are, according to Daniel Stern, feelings
of sensory liveliness registered by infants below six months in age, prior
to the emergence of meaning.10 In adults this registration might operate at
a subcortical level of intensity stimulated by ‘a-signifying particles’ and a
‘nebula of impulses’ and ‘subtle energies’ of images and sounds.11 These films
do not, however, preclude more analytic cognitive processes, though they are
not privileged over intuitive modes of apprehension. An intuitive approach is
essential because they are not primarily plotted narrative films. Rather, the
focus is on a complex formal poetic temporal elaboration of image and sound.
It’s through these processes that lateral narrative and other connections
slowly and surprisingly emerge, or are made. I am not using ‘intuition’ to
mean instinctual perception as in ‘gut reaction’, which is the common sense
understanding of the term. Rather, I am using ‘intuition’ here as a method,
a mode of thinking formulated by Henri Bergson. He elaborates on what
intuitive thinking as method entails.12 He states that ‘to think intuitively is
to think in duration’ and that such thinking starts by perceiving the reality
of movement and change, rather than that of a static form. His theory of ‘pure
memory’ or ‘duration’ as the preservation of the past and the simultaneous
ceaseless passing of the present demonstrates the flexibility and amplitude
of such movement and change. The awareness of such ceaseless temporal
dynamism, he says, trains our senses and mind to differentiate amidst a
‘heterogeneous multiplicity’ and perceive the emergence of ‘unforeseeable
novelty’. My explorations of this selection of films will be guided by these
dynamic principles. Parajanov’s cinema invites us to differentiate and
calibrate his images and sounds; they sensitize us to these subtle processes.
Henry Corbin’s theorizing of an ‘imaginal world’ and the ‘cognitive func-
tion of the imagination’ in the philosophy of Sufi Islam will also be mobilized

10 Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 51, 55.

11 For an elaboration of this cluster of ideas, derived from Félix Guattari’s schizoanalytic
practice, see my book The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (125–147).
12 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 34–35.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 61

to explore the ontology of Parajanov’s system of images, especially in Ashik

Kerib, because this film is about the journey of a Sufi minstrel. For me,
importantly, the Sufi philosophical vocabulary, which Corbin elaborated and
made accessible, provides a new way of giving voice to often the seemingly
ineffable cinematic experience of Parajanov’s films.13 It is also very rare in
Western film studies and film philosophy to draw ideas from philosophical
traditions outside the Western canon in order to formulate film aesthetics.
While drawing from the cultural commons familiar to those from within
the linguistically diverse regions of Transcaucasia, I feel that these two
films, through the powers of abstraction available to modern poetic cinema,
also invite a foreigner like me – a Sri Lankan Australian film critic and
theorist – to participate in the heady process of the creation of meaning.
That is to say that these films are not neo-traditionalist, nativist films. They
belong to the history of modern cinema. What follows, then, is my attempt
to contribute to a theoretical aesthetic understanding of these enigmatic
and fascinating films about Transcaucasia from within the perspective of
cinema studies.
Kumar Shahani, whose cinematic project of post-colonial reclamation
of diverse Indian traditions and a musical conception of film composition
and editing obliquely resembles Parajanov’s, introduced his film Khayal
Gatha (1988) at the Australian Cinematheque in 2007 by admonishing the
audience to relax into it and not be anxious about what it meant.14 This
advice of letting an unknown, foreign film wash over and seep into one’s
kinaesthetic and proprioceptive body helped me when I first encountered
The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova), which prompted both bafflement
and fascination in me. So I took Shahani’s advice the next time round and
simply relaxed into its metres, rhythms, pulses, and repetitions and felt a
way into the film that was and is hugely enabling. The subsequent historical
research and thinking I did on Parajanov’s cinematic project and context
(so as to ‘teach’ these films) could thereby be assimilated in more intuitive
ways without abrogating analytical rigour. It is certainly true, as Myerhold
demonstrated (thinking about the ‘Bio-Mechanics’ of the actor), that rhythm
penetrates our bodies with an unmediated immediacy and intensity by
activating the nervous system and its kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses,
before cortical conceptual reason ‘digests’ the sensory input according to
habit. ‘Second Nervous System’ is the name Eugenio Barba (commenting on

13 Corbin, ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’.

14 See my book, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, for an account of his f ilms, especially
Khayal Gatha, 95–123.
62  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Myerhold) gave to this delicate but tenacious process of tuning the body of
the actor.15 If and when we allow this process of subconscious (subcortical)
receptivity (‘tuning’) to be activated, the chances are that film will gradually
reveal itself (to us critics, as well), in surprising ways. The temporality of
this revelatory capacity of film is highly variable; it may even happen in
an atemporal dream state or in a flash or nanosecond while simply stroll-
ing along or even doing nothing – perhaps especially when we are doing
nothing! It is this primordial synaesthetic potential of the body (and of
film) that makes it possible to imagine and think that film (while being a
modern mechanical invention of the late nineteenth century), is also an
archaic art form (not unlike Turkish or Balinese Shadow Theatre), much like
dance, which is itself primordial.16 Thus, the poetic cinema of Parajanov,
Dovzhenko, Tarkovsky, Rocha, Pasolini, Ghatak, Shahani, among others,
not only affirm the link between film and modernity but also create one
between film and civilization by engaging the non-cinematic art forms. This
is an important theoretical point, which I will elaborate on later through my
analysis of Parajanov’s two films. We can perhaps understand something
of the cultural evolution of our senses across historical epochs by closely
attending to these imbricated aesthetic processes of different art forms and
their different modes of address. Film by its very nature has the capacity
and the necessary scope to imaginatively incorporate the other art forms
in unforeseen ways.
The Color of Pomegranates is Parajanov’s poetic tribute to Sayat Nova, the
Armenian national poet-troubadour of the eighteenth century; at the same
time, it is also a celebration of Armenian culture within the wider context
of the culturally diffused Transcaucasia. It ‘stages’ (rather than narrates)
the main life events of the poet Sayat Nova (his childhood, youth, courtly
love for the unattainable princess Ana, monastic life, and death), though
it is not in any sense a biopic. Instead of a smooth linear unfolding of a life
story we are offered an emblematic evocation of a life and milieu through
the repetition of vibrant, sensuous visual and auditory motifs and figures
staged (mostly) frontally in static tableaux vivants of a relative opacity. In
the medieval pictorial tradition found in illuminated manuscripts, emblems
combine image and text in a variety of ways. The Soviet authorities censored
the film because it failed to represent a clear account of the poet’s life (i.e.
it was not a biopic), and for its obscurity and supposed inaccessibility. The
title was changed from Sayat Nova to The Color of Pomegranates and some

15 Barba and Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, 112.

16 Sachs, World History of Dance.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 63

of the scenes and inter-titles re-edited for the sake of linearized clarity. The
overabundance of religious images was also criticized. According to Naum
Kleiman, naïve audiences in Russia enjoyed it and it became a cult film,
widely seen, screened, and discussed in cine-clubs. However, the middle
classes and the Soviet film bureaucrats found it incomprehensible!
Several commentators have made the important point that Sayat Nova
the poet also functions as a mediator for Parajanov’s own vision of film as
a poetic medium with great capacity for abstraction, which can blend the
archaic with the modern and communicate across linguistic and cultural
boundaries. In this sense, the eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat
Nova and the modern Soviet film-maker Sergei Parajanov, from Georgia,
inhabit a common continuum across several centuries. Steffen informs
us that Parajanov ‘devoted separate sections to the Armenian, Georgian
and Azerbaijani poems, thereby emphasizing the poet’s status as a mul-
tilingual and multinational figure’.17 He goes on to argue that ‘no other
film-maker has better captured the rich sense of cultural intermingling
and conflict between cultures in that region: the populations of Armenians,
Georgians, Azerbaijanis and Kurds, the religious traditions of Christians,
Muslims and Jews, and the pervasive cultural influences of the Persian,
Turkish, and Russian Empires’.18 This felt sense of a complex filial affinity
to common syncretic aesthetic traditions enables Parajanov to introduce
contemporary concerns close to his own heart and innovate as ‘a poet of
all of Transcaucasia’.19

Figure of the Child

The first caption, ‘The Poet’s Child Hood’, opens the film introducing us
to Sayat Nova as a child called Arutin. The sense of orientation created
by this title is disturbed by the very first image of a child aged about six,
in a large close-up, folded in a kneeling position, but with his head on the
floor, attentively turned, looking directly at us from that strange angle with
wide-open eyes. A roll of thunder adds a sense of drama and movement to
this inaugural still (though not static) image. Already, we have a feeling that
the figure of the child is abstracted from its realist anchoring in the poet’s
biography. This effect is finely orchestrated and prefigured in an astonishing

17 Steffen, op. cit., 122.

18 Ibid., 121.
19 Ibid., 121.
64  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

sequence of images and sound, which form the rhythmic prologue to the
film itself.
The sequence begins with the image of an old manuscript of Sayat Nova’s
Davtar repeatedly intercut with a series of shots, the first of which shows
three pomegranates mysteriously bleeding red juice onto a white cloth, form-
ing an image of an ancient map of Armenia. These images are accompanied
by a repeated refrain: ‘I am the man whose life and soul are torment’, a lament
intoned by a richly textured male voice and accompanied by an ensemble
of duduks, an instrument with a plaintive timbre. An ornate dagger placed
horizontally on a white cloth is again stained with red flowing liquid, now
suggesting a link between the colour of pomegranates and blood. This
use of the fruit, which is itself a national emblem with rich associations,
presages its return as an affectively loaded cultural emblem.20 A male foot
crushes grapes on a stone surface carved with Armenian inscriptions. As
Steffen explains, this composite image has multiple associations. It presents
the work of wine making and stone carving in the monastery, the wine a
reference to the bible and Persian poetry, which informed Sayat Nova’s.
By brilliantly condensing into one sensory image the antiquity of writing,
stone carving, and winemaking in the region, it evokes a deeper historical
time and practices. As Steffen states, ‘recent archeological and linguistic
research’ in Transcaucasia ‘indicates that it is among the earliest known
sites of wine production’, dating as far back as 6000 BCE.21 This historical
resonance evoked by such a condensation indicates one of the ways in which
sensation and thought work in the composite image.
A live fish placed between two loaves of a particular kind of bread is an
image very familiar to Armenians and again also has a biblical resonance.
But when three live fish (neatly placed, parallel to one another) dance
around on the metal plate, the image becomes quite enigmatic unless one
knows or discovers (as one now can on the internet) that this exact design
appears on a Byzantian coin as well. The commonality of this visual motif
gives an inkling of how culture has travelled across epochs and empires
in this porous region. We know that Byzantian art was influenced by an
antique Hellenistic inheritance. The sequence culminates with shots of a
Kamancha – the stringed instrument (or lyre) of the poet – a dried frag-
ment of an arbutus tree on brocade fabric, and a white rose attached to it,
introducing the songs to come. Finally, a large tangle of thorns, arranged
as a still-life sculpture, links the suffering of the poet with that of Christ.

20 Pfeifer, ‘Life History of a Fruit’.

21 Ibid., 137.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 65

This prologue offers glimpses of the region’s deep epochal cultural histories
in highly condensed enigmatic images and signals to us that the film is
not going to be merely a sensory-motor drama of actions and reactions
representing the life of the poet. Instead, the rhythmic flowing sequence of
distilled, condensed, sensuous historical images, shot in close-up, prefigure
the process of abstraction to come where objects in particular configurations
and repetitions become eloquent. The sounds and images animate our
perceptions, stimulating our ‘cognitive imagination’, our own capacity for
differentiating and making new connections. They invite us to turn towards
both history and legend, because Parajanov’s cinema seems to be situated
at their fertile juncture.
The opening close-up of the child cuts to a sequence of stone architectural
details awash with torrential rain, intermittently illuminated by flashes of
lightning. The most startling of these images is one of an entire shelf of large
ancient books drenched by rain. The sound of rain is amplified to suggest
a deluge of biblical proportions. This is the first of several moments in the
film where the sound is amplified, suggesting a new connection to the
image beyond a habitual natural one. The relationship between the durable
texture of stone and the fragile paper of these precious ancient books create
an in-shot montage of sorts, a disjunction, which reaches a peak of intensity
when a large stone slab is placed on a water-drenched pile of books, noisily
squeezing the liquid out. The books and stone are now linked by the water so
that despite the vulnerability of the books to destruction, the film suggests
their tenacious durability. This is especially the case when a host of ancient
manuscripts are laid out methodically to dry by a group of monks, both in
front of and on the roof of the ancient Armenian Sanahin monastery. The
child, who carefully carries one heavy tome up a ladder to the rooftop, sits
to view the miniature paintings, enabling us to see the compositional link
between the illuminated manuscript and the two-dimensional frontal stag-
ing of the film’s mise-en-scène. We hear the rustling of the paper amplified.
We begin to hear the creation of ‘concrete music’. The sound and image are
unlinked and re-linked through amplification, a sonic change adding a new
aesthetic dimension. The wind that blows through the tomes, conveyed in
the amplified flapping sounds of the pages, not only dries them but also
enables the viewer to sense the material force of the texts, their embryonic
vitality (an encoding of a soul and a life), which the priest admonishes the
child poet to actualize by reciting them out loud for the many people who
do not know how to read. Repeatedly, the dwarf monk places the small hand
of the child on a pile of books as he intones his mission, and the child nods
in assent. These images of the poet’s initiation by the dwarf monk in the
66  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

monastery, and that of young monks wearing wet grey habits, carrying piles
of soaked books, are some of the most tactile and conceptually powerful
sequences in the film because of the way they synaesthetically align stone
architecture, writing, painting, paper, and film with water and wind as their
fluid milieu. These images, along with those of the human figures, create
a strong feel for the materiality of objects and bodies, their durability and
fragility, because they are not subordinated to the flow of a narrative but
rather foregrounded.
Sounds of nature and of objects are recorded as ‘raw material’ and
modified according to the methods of ‘concrete music’ (musique concrète)
created by Pierre Schaeffer, to produce a collage sound scored by avant-
garde composer Tigran Mansurian. The disjunction, created by the relative
autonomy of the sonic assemblage from the optical dimension, stirs our
‘cognitive imagination’. The image of the child poet on the roof, rhythmically
swaying against a wall like a pendulum (by hanging on a metal ring attached
to a clanging chain), is not a figure of a child at play, but rather, his serious
expression seems to prefigure his role as a mediator between worlds (of
the written, the seen, and the heard), presaging the celestial child to come.
This lateral enigmatic movement is one that is seen in both Sayat Nova and
Ashik Kerib, becoming a refrain in Parajanov’s cinema.
The son of carpet-weavers, Sayat Nova as a child also introduces us to the
craft milieu of Tbilisi, which stimulated his perceptions like it did Parajanov’s,
who also grew up in that very same multicultural city in Georgia, with its
famous sulphur baths and crafts. Through his father’s work Parajanov came
into intimate contact with antique objects and furniture. The poet’s words,
‘From the colours and aromas of this world my childhood made a poet’s lyre
and offered it to me’, are applicable to both Sayat Nova and Parajanov. This
stanza explicitly states how vision, olfaction, and audition co-penetrate,
activating cross-modal synaesthetic perception. The figure of the child as
poetic mediator appears not only in this segment but also functions in an
abstract manner in several other segments, too. The sensuously abstracted
omnipresence of the child in Sayat Nova’s adult life, as well as in his dream,
implies a specific conception of subjectivity and childhood. It suggests that
the different multiple strata of the poet’s experience coexist simultaneously
in a non-linear duration. Here, Bergson’s concept of duration as a multiple
coexistence of the present with all strata of the past comes to mind. This
suggests that the child’s fresh impulses, perceptions, and affects coexist
simultaneously at all stages of the adult poet’s life, nourishing its vitality.
It is the child who also actualizes the dream vision of the elderly poet,
which includes his dead parents and an entire social milieu. The ubiquity
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 67

of the child’s presence makes him a magical mediator, finally becoming the
celestial child equipped with golden wings, twirling from a rope attached
to a high vaulted dome of the Cathedral, gazing reflectively at his supine
old self, as a poet close to death. The child is an ever-present, integral part
of the poet’s life, the figure of lightness counterbalancing the melancholy
weight of the adult self: ‘I am the man whose life and soul are torment’.
According to Steffen, this is a fragment of a poem written in Azerbaijani
and translated here into Armenian. Likewise, ‘I am wandering, burned and
wounded, I cannot find a shelter’.
In the history of modern film in Europe and Australia (perhaps elsewhere
too), there are several remarkable creative cinematic modes in which the
figure of the child has been configured outside the familiar realist mode of
the ‘natural child’. A new figure of the child emerges with the new image of
Italian Neorealist cinema as theorized by Gilles Deleuze.22 The child here
is marked by a sensory plenitude but a relative motor helplessness, as in
the case of, say, Edmund in Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) or
the toddler in the Po Valley sequence and the young Sicilian boy in Paisan
(Roberto Rossellini, 1945). The neorealist child, with its relative motor
helplessness and sensory alertness, becomes a ‘seer’ rather than an agent of
action, according to Deleuze’s formulation. It is through this child-seer that
we perceive the emergence of the new image of modern cinema (as distinct
from classical cinema), in the debris of ruined Italian and German cities
after the Second World War. This new image is not subjected to the logic
of sensory-motor actions and reactions and it is through the mediation of
the neorealist child that we learn how to perceive this world that lies in
ruins. Then again, in the case of Raul Ruiz, the child (Proust) is a supple
figure who traverses quite different worlds and takes us with him as in
Time Regained (1999). In Baz Lurhmann’s Australia (2010), the little ‘hybrid’
boy Nulla, who is neither black nor white, slips between and connects two
different and separate hierarchized ethnic worlds. What is common to
these different cinematic inventions and deployments of the figure of the
child is his capacity to mediate worlds, as a go-between or a metamorphic
force. In Ruiz’s Klimt, (2006), which like The Color of Pomegranates is not a
biopic of the artist, but a febrile vision of his world of fin-de-siècle Vienna,
we have a rare example of the figure of a little girl as mediator, taking the
dead Klimt by hand to lead him astray! Her enigmatic refrain is ‘I want to
get lost, just like you’. It is important to understand that what the ‘neorealist’
and the ‘post-neorealist’ child offer are not simply a child’s point of view.

22 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1–13.

68  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

These modern cinematic conceptions and configurations of the figure of the

child reveal a point of view on the world through the figure of a child. We
see both the child and what he/she enables us to see, which is not subject
to sensory-motor actions and reactions. Therefore we are able to see more
than the child because our vision is doubled, becomes reflexive though
his/her very presence.
Given the mostly serious expression of the child, two or three scenes of
fleeting levity stand out. While the child stands between his mother and
father in a frontal composition, the latter dips his fingers in the blood of a
cockerel and marks the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead – at which
point he looks at his mother and defiantly smiles and wipes the cross away
while looking at his father. This gesture stands out because it is unique. In
the dream sequence, the child again stands between the parents, who hold
a large flat piece of unleavened bread. He tears a piece from it with a slight
smile and starts munching it heartily, with apparent pleasure. The child
also plays in the draining water in a carpet-washing scene and drags a heavy
carpet impulsively. It would appear that these three scenes highlight the
palpable difference between the everyday naturalistic ‘child at play’ and
the child as ‘seer’, mediator and metamorphic force. The function of the
child as ‘seer’ is that he enables us to perceive a power in the image that
is not subject to sensory-motor actions and reactions. Such an image may
show us something that is too beautiful or too terrible, for which there is
no possible habitual action and reaction. We ourselves are made ‘seers’,
not unlike the neorealist child with his or her sensory plenitude and motor
incapacity. Animated by a new seeing function we are also then able to
make new connections between diverse elements; a thinking with images.

To Craft the Senses Synaesthetically

The interlinked craft processes of carding, dyeing, spinning, weaving

and sewing are an essential part of the world of both poets and poetic
filmmaker growing up in Tbilisi. These skills are presented not so much
as ethnographic representation of a craft milieu but more in a manner
that animates synaesthetic modes of perception and cognition. Ancient
embroidered religious vestments, relics, and objects of great antiquity lent
(as Steffen notes) by the Armenian Church to Parajanov, are used in solemn
ritual contexts, while clothing and costumes play a curiously metamorphic
function. Through a system of artisanal special effects, actors are dressed
and undressed in the presence of the viewer in a most elegantly mysterious
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 69

manner. Costumes seem to have a life of their own, actively dressing the
actors through a manual system of invisible threads attached to the garments
and remotely controlled, with the effect that they move as though by magic.
The actors appear as beautifully mysterious human puppets or marionettes,
with well-articulated joints and precise dance-like micro-movements and
gestures of arms, hands, neck, and legs. Their animated costumes seem to
dress the actors instead of the reverse. While this system is similar to how
the Japanese Bunraku puppets’ costumes are changed on stage, the techni-
cal process and effect are quite different. If one argues, as one must, that
costume is one of the main ways in which the actor’s persona is created and
modulated in film as such, then here the numerous visible transformations,
some glimpsed only subliminally, cause the affective temperature of the
figures to fluctuate. This fluctuation is contingent on the colour, texture,
weight, cut, and movement of the costumes as well as the solemn, ritualized
rhythms of the process of investiture and divestiture.
Three large men, arranged frontally in a row, use poles to lift heavy skeins
of dyed wool out from steaming metal cauldrons. Steffen informs us that
they are the colour of the Armenian flag. The dripping water (amplified),
hits the metal in droplets while the skeins land with a thud on the metal
plates, suggesting the drumming of fingers and then a bang with the entire
hand. This action is repeated many times as the child stands amidst the
steaming cauldrons, observing the multi-sensory process intently. The
process of dyeing under these conditions, with these metal pots and plates,
synaesthetically allows us to both hear and see the rudiments of a drum-
ming sound. Steffen also makes the same connection. The scene concludes
with the child lifting his face and then his eyes to look at us directly. The
quiet still gaze of the child in close-up, looking at us, across the film, is
one of the most enchanting images of this film. It is as though he becomes
our surrogate within the image guiding us to a new mode of perception:
absorbed perception and the very awareness of it. The Paradox of filmic
perception and intensity!
A rug on the wall sways rhythmically (evoking the sideways movement
of weaving) in the room where two women work at large looms, while little
Arutin quietly helps out. A mechanical clicking sound, perhaps linked to
weaving, gives a pulse to the scene. Rhythmic lateral swaying of bodies is
a recurrent motif of Parajanov’s cinema, sometimes evoking comfort (as in
Ashik Kerib), and at other times, with metronomic precision for no apparent
reason, something more like a refrain, as suggested earlier. The twirling
movements of wrist and hand holding little wooden spindles, with which
Princess Ana weaves lace, immediately evoke dance forms familiar across
70  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

regions from India (Kathak), to Spain (Flamenco), through Transcaucasia

(Gypsy). Again, a close shot of many feet adorned with intricately orna-
mented silver anklets, rhythmically scrubbing woven carpets splashed with
water, evoke the rudimentary but unmistakable steps of a dance form yet
to come. The intermittent glimpses of the colourful edges of the workers’
twirling skirts enhance the effect of dance. These synesthetic perceptions
are made possible through a blending of our senses activating cross-modal
connections, here among vision, hearing, touch, and our kinaesthetic sense of
movement. This cross-modal capacity (according to neuroscience) represents
the potential that exists in the human nervous system, which film, with its
multi-sensory channels, is especially good at evoking and orchestrating.23
The Color of Pomegranates is largely composed in this manner, which makes
it almost unique in the history of cinema. There is a certain robust pedagogy
of the image in this film (and in Ashik Kerib), though certainly not the one
that the Soviet authorities had expected when they commissioned this film
on the national poet of Armenia! Parajanov’s cinema trains our senses to
perceive synaesthetically (a replete gift), which in turn enables a mode of
cognition and ideation receptive to ‘a-signifying particles’, ‘subtle energies’
and impulses of the body and its subcortical (unconscious) operations, too.24
Take, for example, another intriguing scene of the child, still in the same
curled up position as in an earlier shot (but wider), and his parents. First the
mother and then the father, very formally, in a dance-like gesture, throw
pieces of cloth and a rug over the child, completely covering him, and hold
the pose while looking at us, inviting us not merely to look on but also to
engage with the scene. We wonder why they as weavers do this odd thing
with the child and realize that we must create our own response. It would
appear then that he is cocooned by the cloth, an essential part of the film’s
mise-en-scène. More than that, it appears that for Parajanov (as for Kumar
Shahani), there is an integral link between light-sensitive celluloid itself
and cloth, which share a common material base in cellulose. This important
connection and its implications will be elaborated on later.
Woven material functions as an active agent creating texture, space and
movement, sensations, and feelings, as in the deliciously parodic scene where

23 Stern, op. cit., 51, 55.

24 Guattari, Chaosmosis. ‘A-signifying particles’ refers to an aspect of the image or sound that is
not figuratively recognizable. It is a formal element at the threshold of perception and cognition.
It originated as part of Guattari’s schema in his schizoanalytic practice. A ‘nebular of impulses’
refers to a form of subcortical receptivity in the body to the uncoded dynamisms of image and
sound. ‘Subtle energy’ emerges from these processes. For an exploration of Guattari’s cluster of
ideas, see Jayamanne, The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani, 51, 134–135, 190–191.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 71

two comic actors replay, like puppets, the formal anguished courtly love
scenes between the poet and the princess, but this time make it a farce. In
a film of extraordinary visual abundance whose tone is nevertheless largely
sombre, tinged with sadness and longing, this scene offers a puppet-like
dance full of comic gestures and parodic, even bawdy, light humour. Sofiko
Chiaureli plays the two comic roles of the pantomime and doubles as the poet
and the princess, creating a remarkable virtuoso androgynous performance
across genres. Pastel shades of cloth form a dynamic backdrop to the action,
and jump cuts (as a ‘magical’ device) produce a feeling of levity. At first,
two ensembles of clothing (male and female) appear upright and animate,
without a body, at which point a ‘male’ body ‘jumps’ into one of the sets of
clothes (as in Georges Méliès), dancing with exaggerated gestures, and objects
parodying the serious and solemn gestures of the poet and the princess. The
routine is repeated with a ‘female’ body. While the poetry being recited is
mostly melancholic and sombre, the fecund, textured images replete with
sensuous abstractions evoke a remarkable range of sensations, feelings,
and meanings. Following Raul Ruiz, one could say that these are ‘purely
cinematographic feelings’, a gift given to us by film. We become part of this
heady process of aesthetic innervation.25

Courtly Love

The poet and the princess cannot inhabit the same frame/space because of
their difference in social standing. As a result, though separated, they engage
in an extended, repetitive courtly ritual, expressing love of exceptional inten-
sity. The poet tunes his lyre in profile while the princess (facing the viewer),
holding spindles, weaves a delicate web of lace with slow, wrist-spinning
gestures evocative of dance. Woven white, red, and black lace in front of her
face, moving laterally, both obscures and reveals her face. Functioning as
repetitive motif, the moving pattern, both empty and full, delicately suggests
the feeling of fullness and emptiness (void) of their forbidden love. The young
poet receives his lyre (kamancha) from his childhood self, who then retreats
behind him. The poet gently caresses its breast-like dome with the tips of his
fingers, showering it with a cascade of pieces of nacre shell, which are also
inlaid into the instrument’s design. The softly cascading shells prefigure the

25 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1 and Poetics of Cinema 2. Both books are based on the idea that film
has the power to create uniquely cinematographic sensations and feelings. The challenge, then,
to the critic is to try to express these ideas in language, which in itself would be a creative act.
72  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

cascade of music to come. The poet and the princess (both played brilliantly
by the actress Sofiko Chiaureli) become a composite androgynous figure in
these scenes of anguished love. Androgyny is an expression of the primary
narcissistic merger of the lover in the beloved found in the Persian miniature
tradition. This merger is further amplified since they wear similar Persian
clothing (tunic and tight pants, more or less unisex, worn even today across
India and Pakistan), with identical blue and black stripes. This most unusual
courtship is pervaded by a sense of melancholy yearning. The minimalist
mise-en-scène of light-filled radiant white spaces highlights the resplend-
ent colours and textures of cloth, lace, and clothing. Here objects become
sculptural. The intermittent breeze creates aleatory movement in the pages
of a book on the floor and in the lace in an otherwise highly composed
mise-en-scène. A puff of powder-blue tulle cascading down from a high
window and some lace fluttering in the breeze mark the disappearance of
the lovers, leaving these lightest of traces, concluding the segment.

Sensuality of Male Monastic Asceticism

Surprisingly, the body at its most sensual is present at the ascetic monastery.
There is something fascinating about the seven young monks who appear to
chisel a wall of rock in unison. They stand, backing us, wearing long loose
grey vestments bellowing furiously in the wind. Their bodies are palpable
beneath the cassocks caught in the wind. Sounds of wind and metal on stone
are amplified. Then these monks disrobe again, doffing their heavy black
outer robes simultaneously (standing in a ritual formation), revealing light
white habits. The repetition of this slow divestiture, both on the ground and
on the roof of a monastery, increases the sensuous feel of their concealed,
chaste bodies. An insistent homoerotic impulse is most in evidence when
the legs and feet of three monks are washed with ritual care. This action
becomes ambiguous as we see the monks being carried by the robed figures,
and becomes clear again only when they are placed in vats to press grapes
rhythmically. Our minds spiral back to the prologue, in which a foot crushes
grapes on a slab of chiselled stone. The bare legs of the monks, the way in
which they are carried, the voluptuousness of the act of crushing the grapes,
the squishing sound, all combine to produce the effect that the action in this
sequence rapidly changes meaning. Here again, we see functional gestures
and the actions of work turned into something erotic and sensual, while also
reminding us of the archaic history of wine production in Georgia around
6,000 BCE, attested by recent archaeological research.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 73

A neatly seated group of monks bite into pomegranates, which have

their skin intact, while the poet stands apart, reading. The orchestrated,
amplified crunching sound of the monks biting in unison into the bitter-
sour-sweet fruit feels like a ritual of displaced eroticism. It is a strange scene,
voluptuous in its long duration. The scene of Sayat Nova seated with cup
in hand, drinking wine (from a small well) to excess in an uncontrollable
surrender to impulse, in a film of restrained, precise gestures, especially
in the monastery, stands out. It certainly separates him from the group.
The poet as monk performs the fundamental Christian rituals of baptism,
marriage, and death with a maximum of sensory awareness, again through
hieratic gestures, rhythms, and use of ritual vestments of great antiquity. We
also see (and ‘feel’) the texture and quilted pattern of the humble coloured
swaddling cloth when a baptized naked infant is placed on it.

Sexuality in the Nunnery

The poet’s sojourn in the convent of nuns creates an unusual tone of sexual
arousal, in a pantomime register that is absent from the high seriousness of
the men’s monastery, where the eroticism is sublimated. The pantomime
performance of sexual yearning by the nuns is parodic in its theatrical
deployment of the embroidered shrouds as props. The high artifice of the
mise-en-scène of seduction and the emphatic theatricalization of rejec-
tion by the poet/monk feature a repetitive set of exaggerated gestures of
pantomime inflected with a sense of levity. Certainly there is a new register
of affect here. Parajanov’s self-portraits of himself wearing handcrafted,
bizarre constructions on his head also suggest a theatrical sensibility, a
willingness to transform oneself in a camp manner. Here the definition of
camp as ‘a recreation of surplus value out of forgotten forms of labour’26
seems especially applicable: witness the transformation of an eclectic array
of found material into objects invested with care and value, and how these
fabrications in turn transform the persona of the artist. It is a kind of self-
dramatization of the artist, which is especially poignant, and humorous,
given the authoritarian state’s control of the artist and his art.
It is here at the nuns’ convent that we see the performance of sewing
as a dance, completing the cycle of carding, spinning, dying, and weaving
as the matrix of a variety of arts. Two nuns are arranged frontally on a
balcony, over which hang two shrouds. They sit sewing with needle and

26 Ross, 170.
74  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

thread, pulled up and outwards in unison, describing an arc. The rhythmic

movement of their arms depicts a fragment of dance. In front of them on
the ground, a nun in white (again played by Sofiko Chiaureli) enacts a series
of stumbling movements representing a woman deranged, in a virtuoso
pantomime. Some of her gestures bear an uncanny resemblance to those of
the bereft Princess Ana, but replayed with exaggerated humour, parodied.
These resemblances and repetitions spiral outwards in the viewer’s mind,
suggesting connections that do not settle. The nun’s displaced eroticism is
directed at a donkey she caresses in a suggestive manner. Again we have
one of those magical moments of the divestiture of clothing, when the
nun, dressed in a black garment, magically changes into white clothes in
the blink of an eye, just as the donkey turns from brown to white and she
throws the shroud over him.

Everyday Life

Through Sayat Nova, Parajanov shows us in tableaux vivants the everyday

life and work of the people, alongside their ritual life linked to the church.
He is explicit and succinct about his approach in the following interview:

We want to show the world in which the ashugh [troubadour Sayat Nova]
lived, the source that nourished his poetry, and for that reason national
architecture, folk art, nature, daily life, and music will play a large role
in the film’s pictorial decisions. We are recounting the epoch, the people,
their passions and thoughts through the conventional, but unusually
precise language of things. Handicrafts, clothing, rugs, ornaments, fabrics,
the furniture in their living quarters – these are the elements. From these
the material look of the epoch arises.27

There seems to be a border or liminal zone where everyday gestures

and ritual gestures converge even momentarily. The poet/monk digs
a grave for the dead Catholicos, Father Lazarus, an Armenian saint. It
is shown as a strenuous activity that goes on for a while. The burial of
the woman in white is performed as an impassioned pantomime with a
chorus of mourners actually chanting in unison (the only time they do)
in a medieval cemetery while the old poet engages with the boy angels
on another plane of action. The mourners chant an enigmatic refrain,

27 Steffen, op. cit., 115.

Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 75

‘the world is a window’. If that is so, what does the world show through
this window, we might ask. It appears that the world of the whole f ilm,
with its magical, even mystical overtones imbuing the everyday, is what
is made perceptible.
A wedding, a christening, and final rites are presented as part of a life
cycle, creating a sense of an everyday milieu in a distilled form. We see a
remarkable scene of harvesting on the roof of a monastery, where four men
rhythmically swing long scythes, cutting wild grass. A couple drive a pair of
bulls in a circle, threshing. Men and women ritually slaughter three rams,
cut up the meat and cook it in large pots. Oil is distilled and grapes crushed
in the monastery. One gets a sense of the rhythms of work, its repetitive
everyday gestures presented sensuously and formally.

The Dream Child and the Celestial Child

The poet’s dream is under the sign of the child with a variety of tones. The
child Arutin, standing between his parents who hold a large piece flat bread,
tears a piece and munches it happily as though he were back at home. Two
complex tableaux are presented within the dream. They gather together
people who have appeared in scenes across the different stages of the poet’s
life, along with a llama and a camel. This aleatory fluidity is made credible
through the perspective of the child’s dream. The celestial child appears to
defy gravity by ‘flying’ high above the dying poet. Childhood and old age
are brought into contact in the one image, just as the child accompanied
the poet right through his life.

Nacre Crosses and the Prehistoric Nautilus Shell

The naked infant (from the baptism scene) recalls an explicit scene of naked
bodies observed by Arutin, the poet as a child. He looks through a window
of a public bathhouse and sees naked male bodies being scrubbed clean
of layers of mud and washed. The levity of this action derives from the
expression of glee on the faces of the young boys on a balcony, who pour
water on to the adult bodies from jugs held high. In contrast, Arutin, with his
usual serious expression, observes in close-up King Irakle, lying on a stone
slab. He turns his head towards him twice, looks at Arutin and then closes
his eyes and turns away. His body is vigorously stretched and limbered at
the joints and efficiently washed by an attendant.
76  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Then the child sees a remarkable image of a woman’s naked torso, with
a nautilus shell (with its lustrous nacre or mother of pearl surface, itself a
compound of organic and inorganic matter) placed on her right breast. The shot
cuts to the child looking attentively and holds the shot for a while, disturbing
the conventional, punctual rhythm of shot/reverse shot. The duration obliges
us to observe the serious expression on the child’s face and see that he is
framed on either side by two streams of water running from the top of the
frame to the bottom. The reverse shot appears now with water and milk
flowing down the woman’s torso. Scattered on either side of her body are a
host of small, gleaming nacre crosses. The explicitly naked or semi-naked
figures are not voluptuous and sensual in the way the fully clothed monks
are elsewhere, for several reasons. While the male bodies are scrubbed and
washed in a functional manner, the naked female torso exists on another
affective plane entirely. The shot/reverse shot schema, rarely used in this
film of frontal tableaux, signals the singularity of this sequence. The child’s
gaze here is chaste but the presence of the nautilus shell and the glistening
nacre crosses also signal a high degree of sensuous abstraction, the grid of
the cross and the spiral of nature brought into alignment on a female breast.
These appear to be two fundamental compositional principles of Parajanov’s
film. The libidinal (though not sexualized) image of the female torso achieves
aesthetic sublimation and conceptual clarity. The owner of this naked torso
is not identified within the diegesis, but Steffen notes that according to the
script it is Princess Ana’s body. In a later scene the poet, dressed in a blue
and black striped tunic, places a nautilus shell on his left breast, echoing
the one on the naked female torso, further amplifying the androgynous
dimension of the semantic field. The motif of the shell appears again when
it is placed on the left breast of Princess Ana, now dressed in red, with white
lace drawn over the shell. In retrospect, all of the images in these three dense
sequences invite us to learn how to differentiate, temporalize, and calibrate
gesture, sound, movement, sensation, perception, and thought. Guided by
these processes – reminiscent of Bergson – one can see that the child who sees
the woman’s naked torso is not presented as a voyeur, and nor are we. None
of the bodies are sexualized, they do not titillate and seduce. The child here
is a ‘seer’ (in the emphatic Deleuzean sense). Parajanov enables us to sense in
these elusive configurations a subtle energy, not subject to the rules of habitual
sensory-motor perceptions, actions, and reactions. Here the juxtaposed crosses
(grids) and the spiral are not used as symbols but rather as the fecund doubled
matrix (womb), awash with the ‘amniotic fluid’ of water and milk, offering
two generative, distinctive modes of perceiving The Color of Pomegranates.
These are two modes of perception and conception, which this film activates.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 77

A film profoundly engaged in the vital cultural patrimony of Armenian

Apostolic Christianity displays the symbol of the cross prominently, carved
on stone or embodied by the poet lying on the floor with his arms spread
out. The child on the roof lies down amongst the fluttering books with
arms spread out in cruciform. The adult poet does the same on the floor of a
monastery while beside him a black cassock is similarly arranged. However,
the cross as a solid, erect object is not visible in any of the monasteries. The
film creates a dynamic relation (rather than a mere juxtaposition) between
the horizontally placed little glistening nacre crosses and the naked female
torso, with the nautilus shell awash with water and milk, in the bathhouse.
It is not possible to decide whether this composite image is secular or sacred,
or perhaps this is not a question even worth asking in this way. Perhaps
the image’s power lies in its very indeterminacy. Certainly, its dynamism
(glistening light, the mix of flowing water and milk) tunes our thinking.
We are wafted into a frequency of the poet’s lyre ornamented with mother
of pearl embedded around its breast-shaped resonator, which the poet
caresses with his fingertips. Sound, vision, and touch entwine in a spiral.
This fecund shot of the prehistoric ‘living fossil’ of the nautilus shell (which
carries within each of its many chambers all the phases of its growth), atop
the right breast of the torso offers an unimaginable temporal scale vastly
exceeding that of homo sapiens and most other organic life forms. The
grid-like, invariably still camera, with its largely frontal address, the little
glistening crosses and the unique organic spiral atop the torso, all considered
together, sensitize us to perceive ‘a-signifying particles’ of the shots, their
‘subtle energies’, and their ‘nebula of impulses’. Subconscious sub-cortical
mental processes, sensations, and feelings on the part of the viewer, can
thereby be actively connected to the more analytical cortical processes of
making sense, in unforeseen ways. Cinematic thinking and writing must
surely be enriched through an attentiveness to these synaesthetic processes.

Digression: Tai Chi

It is well known to learners of a certain form of Tai Chi that the initial linear
form is easier to grasp and remember than the circular one. The linear form
has points of rest and spatial orientation if one is lost. One moves forwards in
a straight line or in reverse. By contrast, the circular form is difficult for the
brain to grasp and remember, as there is no point of orientation, but rather a
continual turning motion that disorients, without a stable point of return. The
central point is only ever provisional as it moves continuously. Such movements
78  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

are dizzying. The whirling Dervishes of Sufi Islam in Turkey overcome this
dizziness by connecting meditatively to a larger (perhaps planetary) force
outside the self. It would appear that these are two separate operations of the
brain and the mind: rectilinear movement on a grid and spiralling thought atop
the concealed, ever-growing chambers of the organic nautilus shell. Perhaps
our minds, encountering The Color of Pomegranates, are given the freedom
to shuttle between these two distinct ways of moving and making sense.

Wind

Wind as a force of nature blows right through The Color of Pomegranates. At

times it flows at a steady measured pace, at others as a light breeze, or else
it roars becoming a gale force. Wind is a harbinger of something. It disturbs
the rock-steady, unmoving gaze of the static camera, the precisely composed
materials of the exquisite tableaux vivants. The wind shakes up the still shots.
The wind is chaos incarnate; it is sound amplified. The wind appears from
nowhere, even in rooms with very high windows on which peacocks perch
luxuriously, their feathers cascading down a white wall. The wind is both
inside and outside. Pages of a single book on the floor of a room covered with
a carpet flap in a gentle breeze while a piece of white lace wafts away from a
lace-maker. A group of shouting women clutching lavash bread are caught in a
gale force wind, their clothes flying while the cypress trees behind them bend
and sway perilously. In the dream sequence, where the child Sayat Nova visits
his parents to mourn their deaths, they and a woman in the background are
seen carding wool by pulling it apart in an absentminded state of repetition.
When a strong wind blows in the scene, the wool flies around wildly, layering
the chaotic image randomly with a soft white texture. The cupola of a church
is carried away by a gale and shattered silently. The two dynamic poles of
Parajanov’s system of shots emerge from these experiences – rock-solid
stability and windy chaos. In between these poles, micro-movements and
affects abound. The chance to synaesthetically engage with these movements
and make sense of them is the gift proffered to us by this most unusual film.

Actors and Puppets

Parajanov is fascinated by the popular traditions of puppetry and panto-

mime of Transcaucasia. Further, he works within the deep traditions of
performance history, where the human actor aspired to the state of grace of
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 79

the puppet. The clown, the doll, the dancer, and – much later – the robot all
belong to this lineage and the desire to escape the limitations of the organic,
all too human body. While imprisoned, Parajanov decorated dolls, creating
hybrid forms and collages. The organic body of the actor seeks the power
of artifice encoded in the puppet’s form and movement. Through rigorous
training techniques the organic body of the actor is able to eliminate all
phatic emissions and communicative gesticulation. The bio-mechanics of
the joints and limbs of the actor-puppet are made supple, ‘well oiled’ through
training, so the body can ‘speak’ with silent eloquence. A high degree of
abstraction and simplification from everyday gesture creates clarity of
line, outline, and movement. The result is a simplification of form, the
creation of pure form: abstraction. The actor, purified in this way, is able to
develop a syntax of exacting precision like that of the puppet. This flexible
syntax of the body has the power to create dance phrases and cadences
with materials and objects, generating synaesthetically replete semantic
fields. Chiaureli in her multiple roles exhibits these qualities admirably. It
is said that Parajanov made a large puppet and filmed it outdoors for his
student film, A Moldovian Fairy Tale, 1952. He developed a unique mode of
film acting by innovating within this theatrical tradition of performance.28
In Ashik Kerib, two dancers perform at the threshold of a small, domed,
open-air structure. One of the dancers is very tall and statuesque while the
other is so short and small that she could well be a child; indeed, she looks
like a raggedy doll puppet, soft, with great flexibility of joints. She does
splits with effortless grace. They stand in front of each other, framed by an
arch in medium shot, and perform a magnificent virtuoso duet dressed in
colourful, layered clothing. It is difficult to know with certainty whether
the dance is a combination of a folk form and a modern choreographed
sequence of moves, or a total fabrication, invented by the choreographer
Parajanov, who was himself trained in dance. This uncertainty is felt right
across the dance-like movements in both films. What might appear to
be an archaic ‘folk’ mode might well be a hybrid mode of performance
with its links to the early twentieth-century Soviet theatrical avant-garde
experiments with the bio-mechanics and kinaesthetic body of the actor as
acrobat. The prodigious inventiveness of Parajanov’s system or repertoire
of movements and gestures in both films is truly astonishing. The puppet/
actor is a singular animating figure in the cinema of Parajanov.29

28 ‘Puppet Aesthetics’.
29 See Heinrich von Kleist’s essay, ‘On the Marionette‘, for a marvellous theoretical account
of the link between the actor and the puppet.
80  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Mask-Face-Close-Up

In The Color of Pomegranates, faces are as expressive as masks are in theatre,

(say, for example, Japanese Noh theatre). There is very little overt expression
on the faces of the actors, their facial muscles barely move. Their mask-like
stillness makes us hypersensitive to the smallest of micro-movements,
the shadow of an impulse often registered in the eyes. The uniform, even
light as in miniature painting does not sculpt faces or objects; there are
no shadows. However, masks, though still and unchanging, do become
expressive depending on the quality of our attention, our capacity to be
drawn to them, and be absorbed by them. It is this quality of our attentive
absorption that makes the perception of the mask a close-up, however
far we may be seated from it in a theatre. Sofiko Chiaureli’s eyes convey
her feelings: they fluctuate subtly, whether in the role of Princess Ana or
the poet. The montage between face, arms, and hands (which the film
invites us to create) speak eloquently. Spatial movements are rare and also
minimal. The movement is intensive. The close-up gathers together all the
micro-movements and creates affects which are sometimes difficult to
name but felt never the less.
The ‘Affection Image’ in Deleuzean film theory is a close-up, one that
makes us sense something but which resists conceptualization.30 This
resistance highlights the singular powers of the cinematic close-up. It
registers micro-movements on a ‘sensitive plate of nerves’. All of our five
senses are gathered on this surface – our face. So the face is the close-up,
the close-up is the face according to this mode of theorization. The close-up
of anything whatsoever (a hand for instance), not just the face, registers
micro-movements and flux, too. We are impelled to conceptualize that
which resists conceptualization. The resistance is a sign of the emergence
of something fragile and new, something unknown. The face as mask (on
film) can acquire the qualities and powers of the close-up. Chiaureli’s face,
both as Sayat Nova the poet and Princess Ana, is in close-up in this sense.
This is part of its magnetism, the enigmatic quality of its affect.

Hands: Relaxed or Prehensile?

Hands also have powers of expressiveness, like the face, when they relax their
prehensile function. The actors who become puppet-like have hands that

30 Deleuze, Cinema 1. See Chapter 6, ‘The Affection-Image; Face and Close-Up‘, 87–101.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 81

speak. These hands make us feel something – rather than nothing – when
viewed in close-up, especially when set against fabric in a contrasting colour.
This is the case with the hands shown in The Color of Pomegranates. These
hands, however, do not function like the precise abstract mudras (gestures)
of Indian dance-theatre (Odissi or Kathakali, for example), which narrate
stories intelligible only to those who know those gestural languages and
traditions. The gestures in The Color of Pomegranates are more elusive,
seemingly idiosyncratic, perhaps a creation of Parajanov’s own. At times,
Princess Ana’s hands, in black gloves, frame and reveal her face or just one
eye, mysteriously; at others, they demonstrate with startling precision and
imagination how an art form such as dance can emerge from craftwork.
We are guided into seeing this metamorphosis when her spindle-carrying
hand relaxes its prehensile hold, freeing it to trace the memory of a twirling
movement in the air – dance.
Hands are most elusive when they draw our attention to them, causing
vision itself to take on a haptic value. The hands texture perception, they
help us differentiate material by imbuing the eye with tactile sensitivity.
Stimulated in this way, the brain and mind are then able to perceive and
calibrate subtle energies of the image. An intriguing prop – an ornamented
metal arm – is introduced. Its fingers are arranged to suggest a hieratic
gesture. It is larger than a human male arm and it covers the mature Sayat
Nova’s face as he lies down. The palm touches his lips. It becomes a pillow.
Its actual function remains unknown. We are free to imagine its virtual
function.
The hand and face areas nestle against each other on the cortical map
of the brain, and can therefore overlap. They occupy a larger cortical space
than does the torso, an indication of the importance of manual dexterity
for survival and cultural development. They can cross-wire and exchange
sensations, making them synaesthetic. V. S. Ramachandran, the cognitive
neuroscientist and clinician with a penchant for speculative reason, draws
out the implications of this anatomical arrangement of the brain.31 He
points out that the face and hand are highly sensitive areas of the body with
many nerve endings (unlike the torso), which equip us with subtle forms of
discrimination and differentiation – each finger is an index of its variety.
The hand released from its prehensile habitual function is invested with

31 Ramachandran and Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain. See note 9 of Chapter 4 for an account
of the role of the fingers in particular, in producing sensation and thought, developed by the
neurobiologist Eric Kendal. Thinking about f ingers and hands in art and f ilm may lead one
astray from the straight and narrow. The resulting meanderings might even stimulate the mind.
82  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

new values. Parajanov’s poetic cinema taps into this potential, enriching
our perception and thought.

The Man with the Peacock

At least one other critic has mentioned that this image is difficult to link
to the rest of the film. I, too, feel that it stands out among the system of
images and their emerging logic and provisional connectivity that we
ourselves can make. It stands out in its difference. Though the figure looks
at us directly, in his clothing and appearance the man with the Peacock
seems to be an outsider, his skin tone darker, clothing strikingly different. A
short embroidered waistcoat reveals his bare chest and arms. He holds the
peacock’s beak in his mouth. He is an opaque and arresting figure with a
defused sensuality. One is left wondering if the script offers any clues as to
his cultural background within the multi-ethnic Transcaucasia. He seems
to be presented as an ‘ethnic other’, especially as he appears alongside the
ritualized Royal Hunting scene, derived from pre-Islamic Persian culture. It
hardly matters if we cannot understand every image and sign in the film, I
tell myself. Like poetry and life, not everything is immediately intelligible.
Elusive configurations activate the mind, agitate it, without being readily
digestible and open to resolution. Art does that.

The Angel of Death and the Boy Angels

Some of the lightest moments of the film are reserved, surprisingly, for the
interaction between the young Angel of Death – who wears a metal blindfold,
military gear, and a set of golden wings – and the two playful winged boy
angels. The humour derives largely from the playful movements of the
boy angels pushing and pulling the blind Angel of Death, who is groping
his way towards the old poet. It looks like they are playing a game, with
no hint of the ‘grim reaper’! The Angel of Death kneels down to pick up a
lump of earth, wraps it up in a piece of unleavened bread, and stumbles
around with proffered hands trying to find the poet. The boy angels lead
him by dragging and pushing him around, taking the parcelled bread and
handing it to the old poet, who smells it. Death as a return to the earth is
announced lightly, it seems. So, what should be a smooth solemn ritual
moment of the annunciation of death turns out instead to be halting, light,
and funny. The Angel of Death, hands out stretched, blunders around the
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 83

scattered ancient gravestones, while the boy angels jump lightly from stone
to stone in a game of their own making. Finally, the naughty boy angels
lead the poet away from the graveyard, pick up his magically disappearing
and appearing kamancha, and run away with it, leaving him alone in an
open desolate expanse.

Christian Funeral Rites

There are three funerals for people of three different social classes in The
Color of Pomegranates. One is a peasant with just two mourners, another is
the Catholicus of the Apostolic Church of Armenia, and finally a Woman
in White is mourned by a chorus of men and women miming an elaborate
ritual of lamentation in an ancient medieval cemetery. Each of these funerals
gives a sense of the communal life of the people in terms of social hierarchy
and the importance of religious ritual in their social life. Parajanov’s own
capacity to invent ritual has been discussed by critics in relation to the
wedding ritual in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965). His invented ritual
had such an aura of ethnographic authenticity that it was subsequently
imitated in actual marriage ceremonies! Similarly, the funeral ritual of
the Catholicus is pure invention in that he surrounds the dead Prelate
with a large flock of white sheep packed into a large chamber cushioning
the sanctified body, which is covered with an embroidered shroud. The
vestments and shroud are authentic, lent to Parajanov by the church officials,
but not the mise-en-scène. The sheep evoke the first Christians gathered in
catacombs as a ‘flock’ protected by the Good Shepherd. In this sense, it is a
rare literal image (a literalization of an idea) in the film, made hyperbolic
and yet persuasive in its very excess. Death is cocooned with wool, soft,
comforting. It is certainly different from having a large number of mourners
packed in there. The sensations and feelings would be quite different. We
would certainly not have given the scene a second thought, as we do now!

***

Christianity and Islam – Ashik Kerib (1988)

The Apostolic Christian rites for the dead described above are in every way
different from those associated with the Sufi minstrel’s death and burial
in Ashik Kerib. This film is Parajanov’s celebration of the Islamic culture
84  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

of Transcaucasia and of Azerbaijan in particular, based on a short story

written by Mikhail Lermontov in 1837. This was itself based on a Turkish
folktale or fairy tale. According to Steffen, ‘the Ashug [Ashik] tradition of
Transcaucasia is noteworthy for the very direct way in which it reflects the
pervasive influence of Islamic – especially Persian – culture upon the region.
The word Ashug derives from the Arabic word Ashiq or “lover”’.32 In these two
films, Parajanov mediates Christian and Islamic cultures of Transcaucasia
with a historical awareness of their commonalities (as religions of the Book)
as well as their specificity, their differences, and conflicts. I find this aspect
of Parajanov’s cinema important, given the long, fraught, often violent
historical relationship between these two civilizational religions in Europe.
It is especially important now, when Western attitudes towards Islam have
become increasingly polarized and Islam itself has been reduced to and
identified (in the popular Western imagination and the media) with the
relatively recent fundamentalist, punitive, puritanical, and again often
violent Wahabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. Parajanov explores the presence of
Sufi Islam in Trancaucasia in Ashik Kerib. The role of the minstrel is played
marvellously by the Kurdish Yuri Mgoyan who had no formal training as
an actor. Parajanov’s spirit is ecumenical and celebratory, his historical
understanding subtle, his cultural vision expansive and imaginative. The
Soviet film bureaucracy would not understand this optic nor its spirit despite
the Soviet State’s policy of encouraging a Pan-Caucasian kinship or com-
monality and national consciousness in the Russian Republics.
Birth and death are two scenes that the cinema does very well, cross-
culturally. One almost feels that death awaited cinema to fully express
itself in all its variety and magnitude! There are many iconic memorable
and spectacular ways of dying on film, but far fewer scenes of birth, unless
we agree that weddings, traditionally at least, are a metonymic precursor to
birth. One fine day, when the Angel of Death arrives and says, ‘This is your
last chance to see your two favourite clips,’ I will choose the death of the
Sufi minstrel in Ashik Kerib and the nativity scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

How a Sufi Minstrel Dies

Kurshud-Bek, an enemy and rival on horseback, steals the Sufi minstrel Ashik
Kerib’s clothes as they cross a river together. Though Ashik Kerib says that

32 Steffen, op. cit., 118.

Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 85

a man riding a horse cannot travel on the same road as a man on foot, he is
nevertheless duped. By trusting his enemy, he loses both his clothes and his
lute, which floats away on the river. Naked, he hides in a ruined building.
A child, seeing him naked and hiding, brings his grandfather along, having
asked him to give the man a set of clothes, which includes his own cloak
and headdress. The section is called, simply and profoundly, ‘Goodness’.
Once Ashik Kerib dresses in the clothes gifted him by the child and his
grandfather, two figures veiled in black guide him to the town to meet the
old and sick Sufi minstrel lying on a bench at the entrance to a mosque. His
lute hangs from the roof above him. When the old minstrel meets the young
minstrel, he reaches for the lute and hands it to Ashik Kerib in a simple
and moving gesture of transmission, the passing of a tradition from the
old to the young. Two men seated there raise their arms to the heavens in
a gesture evoking the Islamic prayer of thanks, marking the sanctity of this
vital moment. The transmissibility of this oral tradition seems dependent
on such magical moments – magical because they are so chance-like and
yet feel like destiny.
The wandering minstrel walks on a path; he is not sedentary, he does
not know what he will encounter, and actually the path does not previously
exist, but is created with each step, the Sufi way, as the film suggests. Ashik
Kerib is on a specific quest to earn money within a thousand days so he
can marry his beloved Magul Megeri, whose father – Ayak-Aga, a wealthy
Turk – has rejected him because he is poor. Despite the temporal urgency
of his quest, he is diverted from it by his encounter with the old Sufi. Ashik
Kerib urges the old minstrel to come with him on a journey, reminding
him that a minstrel cannot die sedentary in bed. From this moment on,
the narrative movement of the film takes on a magical winding path. We
see here the mystical heterodox Sufi way of life, of wandering through the
world creating a direct link with the divine through song and dance. This
devotional tradition of the Sufi is different from that of the centrality of
the priest within the institution of religion and its codes in Christianity
and orthodox Islam or in the case of India, where Hinduism has its own
devotional (Bhakti) tradition and orthodoxy.
The old minstrel can barely walk, his legs buckle under him, but he starts
dancing slowly with his arms held high and spinning like the whirling
Dervishes of these Islamic regions of Azerbaijan and Turkey. The meditative
spinning connects with the energies of the cosmos. All the while, Ashik
Kerib walks ahead, playing his lute. Finally, the old minstrel drops to his
knees and falls flat on the earth, face down. This entire delicate scene is
performed in front of an ancient fourteenth-century stone fortress in Baku.
86  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

A caravan of camels led by men in flowing robes walk across the frame
behind them. Ashik Kerib gathers the dying Sufi in his arms and takes his
body to a scrub. He squeezes the juice of a pomegranate into his mouth and
he appears to take his last drink while the juice pours out of his mouth as
though it were blood. Ashik Kerib digs a grave with a rock and places the
body in it, stands up, tears a piece of his red shirt, and covers the head and
face of dead minstrel with it. He proceeds to ritually place on his body each
of the dolls thrown to them by the men on the caravan as they passed the
dying, dancing minstrel. Little bells attached to the dolls tinkle as they are
shaken ritually and placed on the body. There seems to be an entire code
of ethics of living and dying in these human gestures on the path of the
Sufi and the traders. Finally, he throws himself on the mound of earth and
proceeds to push the soil into the grave with the weight of his entire body.
The amplified wailing on the sound track accompanies these actions. The
poet is mute, as puppets are, like most of the characters in this film. Ave
Maria, among other pieces, accompany this moving ritual. A camel comes
over, kneels down, and places its head on the grave. A ball of thistles blows
in the wind; two white doves flutter.
I have felt impelled to capture almost all the movements of this sequence
as it is unlike anything I have ever seen in any film and also so different
to the Christian rituals we have seen in The Color of Pomegranates. Shot in
Azerbaijan, a Muslim country, with dialogue in Azeri, Parajanov focuses on
Sufism, a heterodox mystical tradition of Islam, and shows its understanding
of both life and death. In its impassioned performance of death, it is perhaps
close to the spirit of his mentor Alexandre Dovzhenko’s Earth. The death of
the old minstrel in this film is quite unforgettable. All of the movements of
dance, music, lamentation, and burial are infused with a sense of rhythm
in tune with nature. The camels and the birds are part of it. Islamic ritual
and Ave Maria coexist. Parajanov has said that he wanted Europeans to
hear that sacred Christian music in the context of Sufi Islam. In mystical
Sufism, there is no priest to mediate one’s relation to the divine or the
sacred: instead, music and dance are an integral part of the connectivity
to the divine.

How a Child is Born

It is a rugged and impoverished Sothern Italian landscape. Mary, Joseph, and

the infant Jesus are in a small stable. We might have seen such a scene in a
Renaissance painting. The Three Kings come slowly down a winding, hilly
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 87

path, bearing their gifts of Frankincense and Myrrh for the newborn. A few
children run around them. The Three Kings are draped in layers and layers
of cloth robes. They seem to walk softly on cloth. Their bodies feel soft and
gentle. Their smiling, kindly faces radiate joy. As they approach Mary and
the infant, she rises quickly, somewhat uncertain, and hands the bundled
infant to one of the Kings, who enfolds him in cloth. The child is held up as
a precious gift and passed tenderly from one King to another. The camera
repeatedly turns to Joseph, who seems puzzled by the events. The African
American Spiritual ‘Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child’ begins while
the camera tenderly picks up the village children’s faces and finally rests on
a boy in a hood with a donkey beside him. The expression on these faces,
their very appearance, is utterly moving in their unadorned beauty. It is a
Nativity scene like no other. It is a voice like no other when we hear Odetta
sing ‘a motherless child… a long way from home…’. The spiritual creates
a marvellous syncretic scene, the montage so unexpected. One feels an
immanent sense of the sacred, a scene enfolded in the softness of cloth. The
next scene is the Massacre of the Innocents, wrapped in swaddling clothes,
snatched from their mothers’ arms. What we see is cloth being violently
pulled, torn and thrown about. We don’t hear any cries, only a jagged piece of
music to match an equally jagged panning movement of the camera catching
the violent action. These are two scenes from Pasolini’s Gospel According
to St. Matthew. I was given a third clip … time accelerates … and then it
dilates, as they say … fast-motion, slow motion and every micro-moment
in between. Between the scenes of death and of birth, time floats.

***

A Turkish warrior on horseback aims an arrow. The reverse shot is of the

face of the Virgin Mary painted on the dome of a ruined cathedral. Her face
falls down. Iconoclasm! Actions and reaction are not enacted. A shot shows
a dagger and smashed up crushed pomegranates. A violent image where
the violence is not enacted, but suggested. The images demonstrate an idea.
When Ashik Kerib is attacked by Turkish soldiers on horseback he calls out,
‘I am your brother, brother!’ And the enemies shout back, ‘You cannot be
my brother. You are my enemy! Flog him! Hack him! In the enemy’s land
everybody is an enemy, only enemies’. A host of little children rescue the
Sufi minstrel from the Turkish invaders on horseback by hiding him in a
church. St. George protects them, an iconic presence amidst the children
and the Sufi trudging through snow. They stand in the snow in a group
and look at us after the danger has passed, holding an image of St George.
88  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

The actor who plays Ashik Kerib is a Kurd and not a Muslim. Sufi Islam
and Christianity come together through the mediation of little children.
‘God is One’ says a caption. ‘Goodness’ could also be its caption, as in the
previous scene of a child and his grandfather clothing the naked minstrel.
This is Parajanov’s ecumenical spirit in action.
In the burial scene, the piece of red cloth torn from his shirt is used by
Ashik Kerib to carefully wrap the dead face and head of the minstrel. The
face, the improvised shroud, and the gesture of covering creates a profound
moment that I cannot quite put into words adequately. But it is for me
one of those cinematic moments of affective intensity, an expression of a
radiant human impulse, a simple gesture in the face of death; a Sufi way of
facing the void, one might say. Here, the cloth is necessary, its use abundant,
unexpected. Here, one’s mind catalogues other ways of treating a dead body.
The open wooden coffins seen in The Color of Pomegranates, Parajanov’s
own body in an open coffin carried down a street with an accompanying
host of mourners, seen in a documentary, a body completely wrapped in
cloth, the cremation on a wooden pyre, leaving a body on a tower for carrion
birds to feed on… All practiced in these vast extended regions where Asia
and Europe came into contact.

***

Pasolini and Parajanov

Pasolini was a director Parajanov loved and felt a deep affinity with. Neither
was religious, but both were fascinated with and knowledgeable about the
rich cultural life produced by religion over centuries. In Parajanov’s case, his
interest was with Orthodox and Apostolic Christianity and Sufi Islam; for
Pasolini it was Catholicism and Paganism. Both worked with the material
culture and expansive spirit of religion with great aesthetic rigour, empathy,
and imagination. Both were interested in archaic periods of human culture
from the perspective of the modern. Both were especially invested in cos-
tume and woven material, their plasticity and their civilizational life. Both
were knowledgeable about the other arts and the craft traditions of these
cultures as well as their literature and music and used these to formulate
and compose their cinematic images. Both studied art history. Importantly,
the curriculum at VGIK (the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography),
where Parajanov studied directing, also included art history and drawing.
The specific training of his hand and eye is perceptible in the way he worked.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 89

Pasolini studied with the eminent art historian Roberto Longhi, who he said
was fundamental to his way of perceiving contemporary reality through a
historical painterly epic framework. For both directors, painting as a spiritual
resource also offered a rich archive for thinking about the organization of
space on a two-dimensional surface, the use of colour and the arrangement
of people and objects, including fabric. Both were interested in dialects and
linguistic diversity, often with adverse political consequences. Both were
public intellectuals whose uncompromising and often provocative views
on politics, sexuality, and cultural politics clashed with institutions of the
state and church. They were flamboyant public figures, dramatizing the
roles of artist and intellectual. Both worked on one particular film each,
with a sense that cinema had no prior history, that they were inventing a
language. This was not a sign of megalomania but rather an unswerving
belief in the singularity of film as a new medium. It was as though they
were discovering it anew. This was the case of Pasolini in his very first film,
Accattone (1961), and Parajanov in his mature work, the now celebrated The
Color of Pomegranates. A young Bernardo Bertolucci, who was apprenticed to
Pasolini on Accattone, expressed the remarkable sentiment that he was see-
ing the birth of cinema in the way Pasolini shot his film, placing the camera
and constructing the mise-en-scène as though it were a mural. Parajanov,
it is said, created the mise-en-scène by actively arranging objects by hand
and adjusting and draping the costumes on the actors. Mise-en-scène for
him was a physical, tactile, kinetic activity, not a set of instructions given to
the art director. Directing was not done seated, calling out ‘Action!’ Rather,
directing was a dramatic activity for him. The dance-like rippling of his
extended arm while choreographing a scene of galloping horses (as seen in
a documentary) indicates that directing, for him, was indeed a hyperkinetic
activity. It is also a sign and expression of his training as a dancer. He felt
the rhythms in his entire body. Each director’s sexuality – homosexuality
in the case of Pasolini and bisexuality and homosexuality in the case of
Parajanov – brought them into direct conflict with the authorities, both
political and religious. Parajanov was imprisoned more than once while
Pasolini received a suspended sentence. Their respective major works,
Pasolini’s Salò 1976 and Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, have at
various points been censored by the state. Both contributed to a cinema of
poetry. Pasolini also wrote an essay on the topic. Victor Shklovsky, who wrote
on prose and poetry, also worked with Parajanov on a script. Both Pasolini
and Parajanov created their own cinematic syntax and idiom. Pasolini was,
indeed, an established poet and writer. Parajanov made art with found
material – collages and sculpture and hybrid objects – while imprisoned
90  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

for four years in a Ukrainian maximum security prison. This work forms
part of the collection at the Parajanov Museum in Armenia, established
posthumously. Though both directors were Europeans, they were interested
in cultural zones outside the European mainstream (Pasolini with Palestine,
Africa, and India; Parajanov with Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Persia, and Turkey).
This attitude and interest, which they pursued with joyful enthusiasm,
sense of curiosity and tenacity, is still very rare among major Western
film-makers. They were true internationalists. Pasolini also mounted a
critique of neocapitalism in post-war Italian life. Parajanov attacked the
Soviet State for its repression of artists and artistic experimentation in the
name of ‘Socialist Realism’. Despite all these affinities between them, their
films are nevertheless unique and quite different form one another. It has
been said that Parajanov felt a sense of immense freedom and of cinematic
possibility on seeing Andre Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962). He referred
to it as ‘a phenomenon, astonishing, unrepeatable and beautiful […] I would
have done nothing if there hadn’t been Ivan’s Childhood’. Thereafter he
dismissed his own work prior to that as ‘rubbish’! He considered Tarkovsky
his mentor, though he was older than Tarkovsky. His tribute to his mentor
was not to repeat him but to invent a new possibility for cinema. It was the
same with his relationship to Pasolini, whose films he admired, and which
gave him the courage to forge his own creative path.

Parajanov and Shahani – Cloth and Celluloid

In this section I would like to elaborate on the perceived affinity between

these two film-makers. As mentioned earlier, Kumar Shahani and Parajanov
have an understanding of the importance of woven material to celluloid
film and an interest in the ornamentation of the image and sound. Cel-
luloid film (coated with emulsion) is a light-sensitive material. Celluloid
and cotton share a common organic component: cellulose. Any kind of
woven material, not just cotton, has the power to line the celluloid image
with texture, enable it both to absorb and reflect light and dress the image
and modulate it. It variegates the qualitative dimension of film. Light,
movement, and colour are important to human perception. Our eyes have
evolved to perceive light, movement, colour, and texture in nature in the
process of evolution and survival. Textile, texture, and text all derive from
the Latin texere meaning ‘to weave’. Film has dressed and enhanced our
senses for a little over a century now. Film (celluloid) image is composed
of light, movement, and colour. These operations, combined with woven
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 91

materials, train us to perceive modulations and self-differentiation within

the film image and between images. They create sensations and feelings,
too, thereby stimulating multisensory thought.
Take, for example, the scene where the villainous Kurshud-Bek takes
Ashik Kerib’s stolen clothes to his mother as proof of his death, aiming to
claim his betrothed. The mother enfolds her son’s clothes like an infant and
the soundtrack amplifies a rhythmic keening. Thereafter, these beloved
clothes, strung up into a limp puppet-like human shape, are lifted up verti-
cally along a high stonewall to reach Magul Megeri, who sits at a top window.
The scale of the shot is remarkable. The stonewall appears monumental in
a mid-long shot while the clothes, invested with a tactile memory of the
‘dead’ son’s body, look small and fragile as they float up the wall linking the
mother and the betrothed. These disembodied clothes are infused with
sorrow. They embody a sense of how woven material is invested with an
immanent sense of the sacred in these films.
These operations of investing value in woven material and their meta-
morphic powers are potentially available to all directors, though few engage
with them in quite the systematic way that Parajanov and Shahani have
done. They each demonstrate a historical, aesthetic, and spiritual interest
in woven material and their link to their respective civilizations. Their
films were made in the era of celluloid in the long twentieth century. They
have an intuitive grasp and a highly sophisticated understanding of the
importance of woven material for film. They find delight in woven mate-
rial. They appreciate the powers of abstraction encoded in the weave and
design. The sensitivity to texture stimulated by woven material in these
films amplifies our powers of differentiation and ability to make lateral
connections. In a previous work I have developed this argument in relation
to the epic cinema of Kumar Shahani. As I mentioned earlier, I find a certain
affinity between Shahani’s work and that of Parajanov and would like to
outline some points of convergence between their cinematic projects and
practice. The fact that one is a European and the other an Indian director
does matter, I think. Ian Christy suggests that The Color of Pomegranates
‘channels the language of Western poetic film rather than anything from
the Soviet canon before 1969’, when it was made.33 This move is a familiar
one, which is repeated by several critics, each choosing examples from the
Western canon they are most familiar with. This is quite understandable.
When we encounter something new, we need a point reference to guide
us. But it is not often that the work of an Asian and a European master of

33 Christy, ‘The Color of Pomegranates: Parajanov Unbound’.

92  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

film are discussed together in any systematic analytical way, as a point

of orientation and theoretical elaboration. Theoretical ideas on cinema,
developed by Asian directors with several aesthetic and philosophical
reference points in both Asia and Europe, rarely figure in cinema studies
or in the cinematic intellectual public sphere of the West. So I am simply
going to widen the terms of reference within which one can discuss these
two Parajanov films. I want to see what would happen by doing so. Might
it produce something beyond a simple analogy?
Parajanov’s and Shahani’s respective oeuvres are situated in a larger
geopolitical historical zone where Transcaucasia, Turkey, Central Asia, Persia,
and the Indian Subcontinent meet in many ways, not only through imperial
wars but through the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road and maybe the
‘wool route’ or the path of the Suf i as well. Etymologically, Sufi means
‘wool’, perhaps referring to the garment the Sufis wore. The trade routes
enabled the exchange of goods, peoples, and ideas and codes of behaviour,
too. As I have demonstrated with the scene depicting the death of the Sufi
minstrel, there is an ethos on the trade routes despite the ever-present
violence encountered en route. The argument I wish to develop here is not
simply to show surface visual similarities between Parajanov and Shahani
(though one could certainly point to some and it may be fun do so), but
rather to demonstrate that their work entails civilizational projects and to
suggest why that might be of some interest now, in the twenty-first century,
where there is an unprecedented accessibility and awareness, and a tolerance
never seen before, of global cinematic cultures. During my research I was
wondering if Azerbaijan and the Transcaucasia are in Europe or Asia, and
found out that it really depends on who draws the maps!

Persian and Mughal Miniature and Film

Shahani derived his ideas for the mise-en-scène of his films Khayal Gatha
and Kasba from Mughal miniature traditions in India, which derive from the
much older Persian miniature traditions. When the Mughal rulers invaded
India they brought with them the rich cultural traditions of Persia – the
language, Islam, and the miniature tradition and Ghazal music, too. Just like
Shahani in his work, Parajanov, as we have seen, drew ideas for The Color
of Pomegranates and Ashik Karib from Armenian and Persian miniature
traditions. Parajanov also stated that he wanted Ashik Karib to look like
a Persian jewellery box. Artefacts such as carpets, fabric, and furniture
in the Persian pictorial traditions were intricately ornamented in vibrant
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 93

colours and designs. The ornamental impulse of nature itself is connected

with the human and animal presence on a two-dimensional pictorial plane,
which tends to confer equal value to all elements of the surface without
necessarily privileging the human. The frontal presentation creates space
as surface without a linear single point perspective, for the most part, and
as a result the eye is not directed to any element automatically. One’s gaze
is free to move around. Objects also have a similar quality in the way they
address the viewer on an equal basis. These two film-makers have drawn
on these elements to create their own unique cinematic idioms. However,
both Khayal Gatha and The Color of Pomegranates for the most part draw
from the stately courtly tradition of Persian miniatures, and also Christian
religious traditions in the case of the latter. In contrast, Shahani’s Kasba and
Ashik Kerib draw from vernacular, more popular regional folk traditions of
miniatures. Shahani drew from the regional Pahari tradition and Parajanov
from popular Sufi Islamic folk traditions of Azerbaijan and Turkey. As a
result, the tone of these two films are lighter and full of humour. In the
case of Parajanov, there is parodic and bawdy pantomime, rather rare in
the stately, courtly, and religious traditions of the other two films. In the
case of India there is a wonderful syncretism between the Islamic Mughal
tradition and popular Hindu iconography and stories of Radha and Krishna
in the regional miniature traditions. However, Shahani’s editing, camera
movements, and modulatory rhythms are based on the ornamental classical
musical tradition of Khayal, which gives its name to the film. Khayal is not
a Sanskrit word but a Persian one, meaning thought, idea, conception, or
imagination. Both Shahani and Parajanov are able to draw structural and
formal elements from common older pictorial traditions, to develop their
unique spatio-temporal configurations. As a result, their films are connected
to a long duration of human cultural production of artefacts, and ideas in
an interrelated geopolitical zone of contact.
Steffen mentions that recently Parajanov’s work has influenced Iranian
film-makers and been copied by music video makers as well. But Parajanov
himself said, ‘I didn’t want to found a school or teach anyone anything.
Whoever tries to imitate me is lost’. He didn’t want followers or pupils
because he thought that imitating him would jettison artists’ own power
to invent with the force of necessity. He said this as a warning because he
thought that imitation would only ever produce surface similarities that
exhaust themselves, as the commodity does, with the logic of its fleeting
surface allure in the marketplace. Perhaps for some, the creation of pleasing
decorative designs is sufficient. Parajanov did not have to play to the market
because his work was state subsidized (as was the whole Soviet film industry)
94  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

and screened only at film festivals and special events. This was exactly
the case with Shahani’s films, funded by the cultural institutions of the
post-independent Nehruvian nationalist state with a modern international-
ist vision. Their permanent home will, undoubtedly, be the art museums
and cinematheques. In 2007, Shahani’s Khayal Gatha was preserved from
destruction by the timely intervention of the Australian Cinematheque of
the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), which now holds rights
to it. Steffen has researched in meticulous detail the difficult production
and distribution history of The Color of Pomegranates, discussing how it was
censored and re-edited according to the dictates of Goskino. In addition, he
has devotedly documented the intricate process of the film’s restoration.
It would certainly be fascinating and instructive to see these four films by
these two directors screened together, perhaps in a museum context, which
is now their natural abode, among the other art and craft forms – their kin
group, one might say. It is remarkable, though, that one is from ‘the East’
and the other from ‘the West’, and that they themselves never met, despite
the fact that they were both present at the Rotterdam Film Festival of 1988.
While Khayal Gatha won the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film
Critics) award, Parajanov’s Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani received
the ‘Twenty Directors of the Future’ award at the festival. It was Parajanov’s
first trip outside the Soviet Union, and sadly he died in 1990.

Ornamentation and its Negation

Orthodox and Apostolic Christianity and Islam, two major religious

traditions of the ‘Book’, have determined the cultural and religious life of
Transcaucasia for centuries. Persian and Byzantine cultures, with their
pre-Islamic ancient imperial civilizational history, have influenced the life
of this zone as a result of invasions. The Byzantine Empire, with its seat of
power in Constantinople, and later the Holy Roman Empire inherited the
decorative traditions from the Greco-Roman and Hellenistic periods. The
Ottoman Empire, established in 1452 with the fall of Constantinople, has also
influenced this region through the introduction of Islam and its decorative
traditions. So several civilizational decorative traditions of ornamentation
have been available to the craftsmen of Transcaucasia, situated on the Silk
Road. Both Sayat Nova in the eighteenth century and Parajanov in the
twentieth engage deeply with these vital decorative craft traditions in their
respective fields. Textiles and carpets, everyday objects and ritual material,
clothing and jewellery, furniture, musical instruments and architecture, are
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 95

all conceived with ornamentation central to their aesthetic forms. It is not

that there is an object to which ornamentation is added as an embellishment;
rather, the decorative impulse itself is integral to the very form. This is not
something secondary added on to a form that is considered more basic
and fundamental. In Western music, for example, ornamentation is an
embellishment added to a prior form to make it more pleasing. However,
in all traditions of classical Indian music – Khayal, Drupad, and Karnataka
music, for example – ornamentation is integral to the form itself, not an
added embellishment. This is also the case in the cinema of Kumar Shahani
and especially so in his film Khayal Gatha, based on this classical Indian
musical form. For Parajanov, too, ornamentation is integral to his aesthetic
practice. Later on, I will discuss what I see as the structural affinity (rather
than surface similarity) between Shahani’s project and that of Parajanov.
Ornamentation is integral to Parajanov’s shot, part of its synaesthetic
vitality. One is reminded of the mysterious emblematic repetitive use of
the motif of the ornamented nautilus shell, whose spiral is ubiquitous in
nature, in vegetal forms as well. He has explicitly spoken of the importance
of the miniature traditions of painting in Persia, Armenia, and Georgia for
his conception of the mise-en-scène of the shot. The traditions of miniature
painting found in illuminated manuscripts of this region, with their two-
dimensional frontal composition, intricate detail, vibrant colour, uniform
light, and decorative motifs of animals, plants, and humans, are important
features Parajanov has creatively internalized in his shot composition.
As a result, the only sequence bereft of ornamentation in The Color of
Pomegranates registers as a shock, a form of violence in the visual field. It
is the resonator jar scene near the end, which includes an unusually large
number of shots. The nudity of the series of shots, with its rare analytic
editing (fragmentation and recombination to create a synthetic space),
appears as a violation of everything the film has brought to life with such
care and sense of joy.

Sayat Nova Sing! Sayat Nova Die!

A mason places and repeatedly adjusts a resonator amphora (jar) on a wall

of resonators in an empty room. He uses what appears to be a cement-like
material to embed the jar in the wall. The process is messy. The wall is stained
and dirty, so are his clothes. The colour of the shot is dull and drab. The jars will
preserve the poet’s voice for posterity. We hear a single voice and then the echo
of a song sung by a chorus. It is as though there is a collective response to the
96  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

poet’s voice. The preservation and transmissibility of this precious oral poetic
tradition should be an occasion for joy. But the room feels airless and terribly
bare, stripped down and desolate, bereft of colour. It jumps out of the system
of ornamented shots that we have been feasting on for seventy or so minutes.
While resonator jars were common in ancient churches to amplify sound, this
space is not hospitable to the spirit. Worse, the mason who appears working
diligently, holding a tool extends his arm and gives two commands, ‘Sayat
Nova Sing! Sayat Nova Die!’ A poet cannot sing to an imperious command,
though a fragile poet, disheartened, might well feel like dying hearing such
a command. Is this claustrophobic scene, from the Color of Pomegranates,
with its visually ugly mise-en-scène, bereft of all ornamentation, Parajanov’s
demonstration of the Soviet State’s control of artists?
Ashik Kerib, a fairy tale, made after Parajanov’s release from four years
in a hard labour prison, has a similar scene but performed in a different
rather playful register and mise-en-scène. A tyrannical ruler, a Pasha, who
imprisons Ashik Kerib the wandering minstrel in chains, commands him
to sing, with the broad exaggerated gestures of a pantomime villain. The
minstrel doesn’t sing: he says he can’t, through gestures and his expression
of silent refusal. Parajanov said, ‘If you are a poet, armor will interfere with
your song; if you see the blind, give them a caress’. The mise-en-scène of
that fairy tale scene of violence is filled with the light and colour of a Royal
Court, presented in broad gestures of a fairy tale pantomime. But in Sayat
Nova the gaping holes in the dirty wall lend the mise-en-scène a sinister
aspect, as though gas rather than sound might come out of them. The shot
makes me feel wretched. After issuing the command the mason, in one
quiet, unemphatic movement, slides his black cap over his face, like a mask,
obliterating it, perhaps a gesture of mourning. The mason is a simple worker
doing his job well, merely a conduit for state violence. Both Sayat Nova and
Parajanov lived and worked in absolutist states. We have been shown both
how the ruler as patron can turn violently against the artist, and the power
of the artist to resist and create life under terrible duress. Sayat Nova, it
would appear, sustained Parajanov just as Parajanov celebrated a vitalist
Sayat Nova, with a transcultural vision, as an artist for posterity. I wonder
if other critics might think as I do about this stark scene.

State Violence – Downcast Eyes

An empty white space separates the scene of the resonator jars from the
final shot of the film. The empty white space, or interval of time, gives us a
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 97

moment of rest to recover from the sensory deprivation and violence we have
just encountered. It is the only such shot in the entire film. The wreathed
Angel of Resurrection, or the poet’s muse (played again by Chiaureli), clad in a
magnificent green and white garment of arabesque motifs, appears one final
time. This time it is a close-up of the face alone, whitened, mask-like as before,
but in profile. Violating a principle of composition and acting established by
the film, the Angel of Resurrection appears now with eyes downcast. In the
miniature tradition, the gaze is usually frontal (as in the religious icons of the
Byzantine tradition) and direct, as was the case in the film until this final
shot. When the poet appeared in profile tuning his kamanch, his eyes were
nevertheless directed straight ahead. In contrast, the downcast eyes appear as
a gesture of sorrow: it stands out. It feels ominous as an ending to a magnificent
modern filmic tribute by one poet to another of equal imagination, vision,
and vitality. Sayat Nova and Parajanov were kindred spirits, as many have
pointed out and as we have witnessed. Despite this clear-sighted ending, sug-
gesting the power of the Soviet State to crush artists and their creativity, what
remains most vivid and indelible are the synaesthetic film images woven with
material and hewn in the rock of Transcaucasia, a zone of profound historical
interconnections between people and cultures. After all, Sayat Nova did write
his poetry in Armenian, Azerbaijani (Turkish), and Georgian, and his name
is Persian for ‘Hunter of Songs’. Similarly, Parajanov mobilized the archaic
and living traditions of Transcaucasia (including its three languages) with
the resources of archaic and modern cinema. The resultant singular modern
syntax and idiom continue to train and amplify our power to think with the
sounds and images that spiral in and out of our minds in unpredictable ways.
I feel, that among other things, the film’s appealing synaesthetic pedagogic
function makes it especially important within the history of global cinema.

Lapidary Dynamism in Film

James Steffen has highlighted the integral link between Sayat Nova’s brilliant
perception of the structure of his own poetry and the structural aesthetic
durability of Parajanov’s own film (and also his own awareness of it), despite
all attempts by the bureaucrats of Soviet cinema to change and modify its
original formal rigour and poetic density and limit its distribution. Steffen
quotes Sayat Nova:

Not everyone can drink of my water, it is of another water.

Not everyone can read my writing, it is of a different script.
98  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Do not think my substance sand: it is a crag of solid rock.

As like a torrent that never dies, do not [try to] wear it down!34

One could say, following this powerful statement, that there is a lapidary
dynamism to Parajanov’s conception of the shot in The Color of Pomegranates,
too, and (as I have argued elsewhere) likewise in the way Shahani’s shots are
composed in Khayal Gatha. How might an essentially evanescent, fragile
medium like film have a rock-steady presence? The structural importance
of ancient stone architecture is one contributing factor, as is woven material
in the very durability of the craft (despite the evident fragility of cloth
itself), and the sense of deep time they evoke. The stability of the emphatic
framing with a static camera and the relative autonomy of the Parajanov
shot from narrative continuity are also contributing factors. A large part of
Khayal Gatha is shot in ancient ruined stone palaces, including the famous
Rupmathi Pavilion in Mandu, overlooking the Narmada River, and Hindu and
Islamic places of worship. A substantial part of The Color of Pomegranates
is set in the ancient stone monasteries, cathedrals, and graveyards of both
Armenia and Georgia. The jaggedly arranged headstones in a famous ancient
cemetery also stand out in this regard. Stone as a material for ‘writing’ and
carving intricate filigree designs figures prominently in the mise-en-scène.
In the case of Parajanov, editing is neither emphatic, as in montage, nor
is it invisible. The real disjunction happens between image and sound,
through amplification. Each shot is like a miniature painting, a seemingly
self-contained unit. The intermittent jump cuts, especially in the parodic
comic pantomime scenes, create a sense of playfulness. For the most part,
though, the editing is ‘loose’, unemphatic, thereby allowing the mind to
move freely among the distilled, at times repetitive images and motifs,
to go back and forth, spiral in and out. And importantly, the spiralling
nautilus shell, with its astonishing, sublime, five-hundred-million-year
prehistory – a living fossil – becomes the perfect emblem for the film itself:
an emblem for how our minds might move when encountering these images.
Through this link with nature and its long pre-human evolutionary history,
Parajanov (and indeed Shahani) help us understand that the ornamentation
so integral to their films is not only pleasing decoration created by humans:
the human impulse to ornament is, rather, already part of our integral
link with nature. Perhaps nature in its infinite variety is the inexhaustible
archive of ornamentation! Shahani’s editing, too, is unemphatic and the
work of ‘editing’ as disjunction or displacement takes place within the

34 Steffen, op. cit., 114.

Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 99

shot, through the movement of light, camera, dialogue, and actors, in tune
with the microtonal modulations of Khayal music. Shahani refers to this
process as modulation through a glissando, a subtle process, rather than
that of in-shot montage. In both films, chronology as a steady continuous
flow directed by time’s arrow is decentred in favour of other non-linear
modes of spatio-temporal organization. Our minds respond to these modes.
And when this happens, the mind also moves in unfamiliar, unpredictable
ways. A cinematic erotics.

A Sufi Ethos in Parajanov and Shahani

While studying film-making in Paris, Shahani was apprenticed to Robert

Bresson on his f ilm The Gentle Woman (1969). Reflecting on Bresson’s
aesthetic, he speaks about combining a certain austerity with an aesthetic
of ornamentation in his own practice, which might be equally applicable
to The Color of Pomegranates and to Khayal Gatha.

There is austerity in Bresson. But there is a possibility in cinema to have

both: austerity and ornamentation. In Bresson, there is mainly austerity
even though he aspires to have spectacle. When I work along those lines,
I want the ornamentation to stand out. The magic of that reality must
appear and we ought to allow that to happen. The notion of ornamentation
that we have in India, the alankar, of how we play with it, that is something
I like to retain in my work. And this is not there either in Rossellini’s
work or Bresson’s, in the work of Catholic film-makers. When they move
towards austerity, they really move towards it[.]35

Earlier on, I discussed the Sufi ethos of Ashik Kerib through the spiritual
initiation of the young minstrel by the old minstrel. We saw how Ashik Kerib
is diverted from his worldly quest for money and directed towards a Sufi path
almost by chance. It is the loss of his worldly possessions (his clothes and lyre)
that eventually leads him to the dying minstrel. My discussion of the old Sufi’s
manner of dying and the young Sufi’s manner of burial explored the immanent
sense of the sacred integral to Sufi spirituality, unmediated by a religious
institution or a priestly caste. Ashik Kerib’s episodic narrative consists of a
variety of events, people, and folk practices that the minstrel encounters on
his Sufi journey, which has a magical component, as it is based on a fairy tale.

35 Shahani, ‘Putting into Question‘.

100  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

In Shahani’s Khayal Gatha, a child is dispatched on a journey from the

king’s palace through the India of legend and history, in order to learn – or,
rather, to learn how to learn. The only advice the little boy as wanderer
receives from the Sufi who garlands and blesses him on his journey is, ‘Stay
close to the river to quench your thirst’, this thirst no water can slake, this
river the river of knowledge. The child becomes an adult in one magical
cut as he wanders through India, encountering many legendary (often
tragic) lovers, attempting to bridge the Hindu–Muslim divide. He walks in
verdant forests and desert landscapes, rides on a camel and also on an Indian
train. He weaves in and out of myth and legend, history and the everyday.
His Sufi quest seems to be a quest for knowledge, though we don’t know
exactly what that knowledge might be, nor the means by which whatever
it might turn out to be can be acquired; nor does he. He and (by extension)
we come to understand that he has first to learn how to learn. Ashik Kerib,
too, is in a similar predicament. The ‘how’ of the process is paramount.
The nameless young man encounters a witch and Princess Rupmathi, who
both pose riddles for him. His response is obtuse, his repeated questions
literal-minded. It would appear that the riddles are traps to ensnare his
senses and mind so as to undo clichés that orient his journey. They impel
the seeker to find out how to listen, to look and perceive intuitively. The Sufi
ethos of the film suggests that intuition is not a vague, so-called ‘feminine’
sentiment or an instinctual process, but that it entails what Henry Corbin
refers to as ‘a precise mode of perception’, and an apprehension he calls
‘cognitive imagination’.

‘Imaginal World’ and ‘Cognitive Imagination’

‘Cognitive imagination’, according to Corbin, reveals an ‘Imaginal World’

(Mundus Imaginalis).36 Here, I am using the concept of the image from the
Iranian Sufi philosophy of Suhrawardi, as explicated and formulated by the
philosopher of Islam Henry Corbin in Mundus Imaginalis: Or, the Imaginary
and the Imaginal. Ashik Kerib’s Sufi journey is one in which he learns how
to learn, to perceive, to hear, to listen to the reality of a ‘supra-sensory’
world – what Corbin designates as an ‘imaginal world’. He coins the word
‘imaginal’ from imago (image), to oppose it to the imaginary understood
as unreal fantasy. He explains that he had to do this because there was no
adequate word in French for a specific concept in Sufi philosophy written

36 Corbin, op. cit.

Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 101

in Persian. The ‘imaginal world’ is one that is ontologically suspended (like

a mirror image) between the physically sensible sensory world, on the one
hand, and the mentally intelligible, purely abstract intellectual world, on the
other. The organ that perceives this intermediate ‘Imaginal World’ (Mundus
Imaginalis) is the ‘cognitive imagination’. The primary noetic function
attributed to the act of imagination individuates the idea, distinguishing it
from purely sensory knowledge of the material world on the one hand, and
purely abstract intellectual knowledge of ideas on the other. Corbin says
that, this suspended, intermedial, ‘supra-sensory’ reality may be accessed
in a psychic state hovering between waking and sleep by using imagination
as an organ of cognition. The structural and experiential similarity between
these processes, and the psychic perception and reception of f ilm, are
remarkable. According to Corbin, in this visionary state, ‘internally, all the
senses constitute a single synaisthesis [sic]’. This formulation by Corbin (the
Sufi mystic and Professor of Islam at the Sorbonne and in Teheran) provides
a metaphysical gloss to my analytic use of the discourse on synaesthesia
(derived from contemporary neuroscience) for understanding how film
stimulates our ‘cognitive imagination’.37

Wedding Feast of the Blind

After the burial of the Sufi minstrel, Ashik Kerib is lying, bare-chested,
resting languorously beside some sheep, when two boy angels astride ponies
blow ceremoniously on conch shells, calling out to him to go on a journey.
He is called to a wedding feast of the blind. He arrives beautifully robed,
playing his lyre, and sits in an open space beside a large caldron over a fire.
The camera lifts up in a crane shot to reveal the wedding guests seated at two
long tables within an adjacent enclosed area. A close shot shows the groom
standing up, dressed in flowing garments with an elaborate headdress. He
lifts a veil from his face to reveal a black band covering his eyes. Central
stones set on ornamented metal discs with radiating lines are prominently
attached to the black band, like artificial eyes. We see the bride also wears
these artificial eyes when she lifts her veil. Hearing the music, the wedding
guests stand up, extending their arms as the blind do, and begin to slowly
grope their way towards the music. Forming an undulating line, they reach
Ashik Kerib and surround him. They listen with rapt attention, proffering
pomegranates in their extended arms, appearing to be unaffected by their

37 Ramachandran and Blakeslee, op. cit.

102  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

evident sensory impairment. They walk through an ancient graveyard led

by the minstrel’s song and the groom carries his bride away.

Wedding Feast of the Deaf and the Mute

Once again, Ashik Kerib lies stretched out in languor; the camera lingers on
his body and face and again the two boy angels call out to him to go on yet
another journey. This time it is a wedding feast of the deaf and the mute. A
smiling man (in close-up) addresses the minstrel in sign language: he touches
his lips and gestures with his hand, then touches his ears with both hands
and gestures similarly again, showing him that he can neither speak nor
hear. The minstrel repeats the gestures in empathy, looking downcast, but
picks up again as he starts playing his music. The wedding guests, seated
at long festive tables, dressed in colourful flowing robes, begin to speak to
each other with exuberant, animated extended arm and hand gestures.
Despite their sensory impairments they appear just as joyous as the blind
were at their wedding feast. We hear background ambient sound, perhaps
distant voices. This entire sequence begins with the camera panning down
a silently cascading waterfall. The wedding guests surround the minstrel
and as he plays, little fish appear, miraculously jumping out from the water.
They sway together with fish in hand. The minstrel plays with a fish with
a glint in his eye. Suddenly the waterfall cascades down with amplified
sound of water with a metal vase at its base. We can hear clearly again (the
silence has re-sensitized us), but there is no sense that hearing and speech
are restored to the wedding guests; yet they are as animated and joyous
as before.
What are these strange feasts, these enigmatic rituals (wedding feasts
of the blind, the deaf, and the mute), one wonders. They are wedding feasts
like no other: feasts where empirical sense perception (vision, hearing, and
speech) is in abeyance, but no loss is registered. Abstract reason cannot do
much with this scene either. Enjoyment, perhaps even ecstasy, is visible when
the guests simply gather around together (with men and women in separate
groups), and listen and move to the music of the minstrel with their eyes
closed. Mughal and Persian miniatures show such scenes of Sufi ecstasy, in
all-male courtly circles, amidst great luxury. Here, meanwhile, it is a folk
milieu of both men and women. It appears that Parajanov has offered us in
these strange nuptials, a delightful glimpse of the topography of an ecstatic
Sufi visionary state, in a decidedly light key, in the vernacular, signalled by
the artificial eyes, the common button sewn prominently on the deaf and
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 103

mute groom’s headdress. It is an ‘imaginal’ supra-sensory world (where the

empirical senses are literally occluded), presented in a way that only cinema
can incarnate, through the immaterial materiality of film itself. ‘Delight’
feels like the exact word to describe the tone of these strange nuptials, the
fairy tale the perfect means for its vernacular (popular ‘folk’) expression,
quite unlike the high seriousness of courtly and religious rituals in The
Color of Pomegranates. And yet, these scenes might well be inventions of
Parajanov himself, rather than being ‘folk’ in origin.

The Sufi Fairy Tale and Violence

Ashik Kerib encounters violence on his journey. In the Pasha’s Court a harem
of six women fire Kalashnikovs into the air, but they seem like toys, their use
playful, the sound amplified. No one is hurt. Ashik Kerib puts on a pasted
beard and moustache stolen from sleeping guards as disguise. A sense of a
child’s play is pervasive. As Parajanov says, ‘The allegories in Ashik Kerib
are on a child’s level. They are not philosophical’. The women of the harem
rescue him and provide him with pleasure. He rests on a carpet with one
of the women and the others cover them up as protection, all performed as
if they were playing like children. There is no sense of moral judgement on
the part of the minstrel, who has for the moment forgotten his betrothed
and his quest for the bride prize.
Another tyrant commands a shackled Ashik Kerib to sing, but he refuses.
The tyrant is flanked by two Africans who hold conch shells. The tyrant
keeps his ears to each conch shell while swaying between them. He appears
to listen to the conch shells. The strange thing is that the tyrant appears to be
played by the same actor as Ashik Kerib, just as the wicked Pasha is played
by the actor who also plays the father of the betrothed. One wonders what
this doubling achieves. Is this an image of the split self? Is it a part of the self,
ordering the other part to self-censor? In the court, a scribe writes decrees
on a soft clay tablet with a stylus. This is an image of an ancient mode of
writing. The tyrant orders the punishment of the poet. The shackled poet’s
hands are tied to ropes attached to horses, then led by mounted guards past
a variety of amazing scenes, some of which are staged in actual locations
but which feel like episodes from a multi-ethnic fairy tale. The people’s
movements are closer to dance. In one scene, a life-size papier-mâché tiger,
animated by two people, instead of enacting violence does a light-hearted
dance, while its head rotates 360 degrees! A doll’s head is severed and a red
cloth is pulled out of it, while Ashik Kerib falls down as though he is to be
104  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

beheaded. The combination of puppets and the human actor produces a

childlike quality of playfulness, though it is performed in an actual location.
Ashik Kerib escapes all this make-believe violence and finds himself at
a mosque with bright blue doors, which he bangs on in desperation only to
find they are locked. He enters a derelict house which is full of daemons,
and escapes that trial, too. Finally, he eats unleavened bread and cries out,
remembering his mother. Soon after, a magical white steed appears from
the sky, mounted by a saint who offers to take him back to his country.
The special effects are simple, like those offered to a child. The camera
gets animated. The saint gives Ashik Kerib some magic dust from the hoof
of his flying horse to cure his mother of her blindness. They fly back to the
city, where an assembly of officials scorn him. When his mother appears,
he begins to play his instrument, which she recognizes. He wipes her eyes
with the magic dust, restoring her vision; she can see light, colour, and her
son, in that order. The lovers Ashik Kerib and Magul Megeri are brought
together in marriage. All of this is performed through dance movements,
staged frontally. The final sequence of images is not of the couple, but rather
a shot of Ashik Kerib holding a white dove, wearing a troubled expression
as he releases the bird. The dove flies and lands on a movie camera with
the caption ‘For the father of the bride!’ An Islamic notion of ‘bridle mysti-
cism’, known to Indians, seems to be evoked here. Is this Parajanov’s way
of wishing for the cinematograph to become free within the Soviet State?
Doves have appeared previously on the grave of the Sufi minstrel. So one
might think that there is a sentiment of freedom expressed in the flight
of the white dove landing on the movie camera. The film is dedicated to
Andre Tarkovsky, who had recently died in exile. The happy ending thus
carries sombre memories. This most childlike of films carries the weight
of tyranny lightly, with playful humour and grace.

Film Strip as Glyph

All the way through the film there are sequences of images showing artefacts
of the region that do not have a direct bearing on plot development or
narrative line. They appear to be folk art. In one such sequence, towards the
end of the film, a series of images drawn on stone are presented. A horse,
a large cow with a bucket under her udder, and then, quite surprisingly, a
sewing machine and a pair of scissors and a funnel! It is then that one sees
sprocket holes painted horizontally on either side of the image, making the
stone image into a filmstrip with frames demarcated by vertical lines. The
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 105

sewing machine is at first shown in a medium shot, so to speak, and next

time round it is shown in close-up, revealing the historical link between
the sewing machine and the apparatus of film. The sewing machine was
a prototype for the creation of the projector and movie camera. Scissors
remind us of editing but also of Eisenstein and his polemics on montage, and
his essay ‘Bella Forgets the Scissors’. All this is a testament to the artisanal
origins of the mechanical production of the cinematic apparatus in the
late nineteenth century. One could say that Parajanov was an artisanal
film-maker, just like Méliès was. Both worked materials with their hands. It
is easy to miss the painted sprocket holes but once the glyph of the filmstrip
has registered, it really makes one feel alive to see it and feel the conceptual
density of Parajanov’s playful shots. No wonder he said that this film made
him happy!

Film Pedagogy – Great Gurus of Soviet Cinema

It is interesting to note that at VGIK, Parajanov’s diploma film Andriesh

(1954) was about a child, and his last film, Ashik Kerib, was a fairy tale for
adults, though his mother read the Lermontov tale to him as a child and
one can imagine children being able to enjoy it. The first retrospective of
his work, held at the 1988 Munich Film Festival, also premiered Ashik Kerib.
Standing on the stage Parajanov declared his love for this film with a touch-
ing, childlike enthusiasm and candour, saying that artists know when they
are close to death and that he was now ready to die! This lightness of spirit
from a man who had spent so much of his precious time in prison, some of
it under very harsh conditions, and who had been prevented from working
for much longer, was a wondrous sight to behold. It was to be his last film.
A few extant fragments of his first film are presented in Ron Halloway’s
Parajanov: A Requiem. The very first shot of Andriesh, a vast expanse of
sky, occupies most of the frame while a tiny strip of earth demarcates a
horizon, against which some animals and a little figure move in silhouette.
A flock of sheep in a long shot and a close-up of a little boy seem to represent
all that is extant here. Parajanov recounts a fascinating anecdote about
the examination of this film. On seeing it, one of Parajanov’s examiners,
Dovzhenko, asked to see it again (an unusual request for student films, he
notes). Another of his examiners, Yurienyev, accused Parajanov of copying
Dovzhenko’s Zvenigora, 1928, while the latter insisted that he had not.
When queried by Dovzhenko, Parajanov confirmed that he had not seen
Zvenigora. This first shot of Parajanov’s Andriesh certainly reminded me of
106  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Earth, 1930. This secret affinity between a great poetic Soviet film-maker
and another in the making shows what a marvellous teacher Dovzhenko
must have been, to see so clearly the embryonic but unique poetic talent
of a young student and encourage him.
Parajanov appreciated the pedagogical methods of his mentor at VGIK,
the director Igor Savchenko: ‘Our mentor Savchenko encouraged us to
draw our thoughts and give them a plastic form. We all had to draw at
the film school. For the entrance exam we were told, “draw whatever you
like”’. This appears to me to be a visionary part of the film curriculum. We
know that both Eisenstein and Parajanov had a gift for drawing, and were
exceptionally accomplished. Apart from that, the formal incorporation of
drawing into the curriculum, as an integral component, indicates that the
teachers understood in a profound way the links between film as an art of
movement and the dynamism of the human nervous system. To be asked
‘to draw… thoughts, to give thought a plastic form’ as a first move, would
give quite a different orientation to the student of film from being asked to
put a thought or impulse immediately into written form. The coordination
between hand, brain, and eye in drawing a line, for example, or scribbling
in a particular way, would stimulate the brain and the mind differently
from writing, with its ready-made, abstract signs. Feelings or sensations
just below a threshold of intelligibility and consciousness would have a
chance to find expression in plastic form rather than in pre-formed abstract
words. ‘Cognitive imagination’ would, I imagine, play a role in this process
of creating an ‘imaginal world’ on film itself.
We know that many major Soviet film-makers, including Kuleshov and
Eisenstein, were inspiring teachers themselves. Eisenstein spent several years
teaching and writing voluminously when he was not allowed to direct films.
A less well-known director, Mikhail Romm, also had a remarkable teaching
practice in the 1950s and 1960s, which is worth mentioning here. His most
celebrated student was Andre Tarkovsky, whom Parajanov thought of as his
real mentor, saying, ‘As my teacher, I consider an absolutely young amazing
director, Tarkovsky’. Romm accepted Tarkovsky into VGIK against the opin-
ion of the rest of the examiners and included him among the four students
in his workshop. It is said that he used his authority to protect this first
generation of film-makers of the ‘Thaw’, who were called to transform Soviet
cinema. Carlos Muguiro offers us a deep insight into the intergenerational
transmission of knowledge at VGIK as the oldest film school of the world:

Some years later Tarkovsky would compare master Romm to a King

who governed without exerting power or imposing his opinion, even
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 107

without teaching the craft, because Romm’s invitation was rather to

journey through one’s own darkness and to identify one’s individual
singularity.38

As the editor and director of the documentary Ordinary Fascism, the com-
pilation film made from the vast Nazi film archive, Romm experimented
with using his own voice in a first-person, subjective response to what
he saw, rather than the usual third-person, objective documentary voice.
Muguiro describes what was referred to as ‘a diagonal pedagogy’ in his
workshops. The articulation of the subjectivity of the director, the expressive
intimacy of a reflective voice, silence, and variation of speech rhythms
became a possibility in Soviet cinema, however interrupted that process
would become. Tarkovsky’s exile can also be seen in light of the powerful
cinematic forces released from these singular daring experiments of free
speech.
According to Carlos Muguiro, ‘Something happened in those classrooms,
between introspective therapy and magical ritual, as staged in Tarkovski’s
film [The Mirror, 1975], which transformed the ‘I CAN TALK’ into a collective
generational need’.39 We see here a profound need to introduce the subjectiv-
ity of the poet within the poetics of film in a totalitarian state. Parajanov
was also a beneficiary of this profound intergenerational ‘transmission of
the secret’ by the masters of Soviet film and film pedagogy. This is also a
radiant gift that Soviet cinema offers to the world in the darkest of times.

Bibliography

Barba, Eugenio, and Nicola Savarese. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The

Secret Art of the Performer. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by
Mabelle L. Andison, New York: Citadel Press, 1974.
Brown, Peter. ‘Between Two Empires,’ review of Armenia! an exhibition at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 22 September 2018–13 January 2019.
New York Review of Books 66, no. 1, 17 January–6 February 2019, pp. 40–43.
Christy, Ian. ‘The Colour of Pomegranates: Parajanov Unbound.’ On Film/Essays,
13 April 2018. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5572-the-color-of-
pomegranates-parajanov-unbound. Accessed 3 January 2020.

38 Muguiro, ‘The Transmission of the Secret’.

39 Ibid.
108  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Corbin, Henri. ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.’ https://
www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginary-
and-the-imaginal/. Accessed 3 November 2019.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul
Baines and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications, 1995.
Guattari, Felix. Chaosophy: Soft Subversion. Translated by Sylvere Lotringer, New
York: Semiotext(e), 1996.
Jayamanne, Laleen. The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2015c.
Kleist, Heinrich von. ‘On the Marionette.’ https://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.
htm. Accessed 3 March 2020.
Muguiro, Carlos. ‘The Transmission of the Secret: Mikhail Romm in the VGIK.’
Comparative Cinema, 2, no. 5, winter 2014, pp. 41–49.
Pfeifer, Moritz. ‘Life History of a Fruit: Symbol and Tradition in Parajanov’s Trilogy.’ East
European Film Bulletin (eefb), no. 58, October 2015, https://eefb.org/retrospectives/
symbol-and-tradition-in-parajanovs-caucasian-trilogy/. Accessed 3 January 2020.
Puppet Aesthetics. https://wepa.unima.org/en/aesthetics-of-the-puppet-european-
romanticism-to-the-avant-garde/. Accessed 1 February 2020.
Ramachandran, V. S., and Sandra Blakeslee. Phantoms in the Brian; Human Nature
and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Fourth Estate, 1999.
Romm, Mikhail. Ordinary Fascism. Mosfilm, Soviet Union, 138 minutes, 1965.
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. London: Routledge. 1989.
Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 1. Translated by Brian Holmes, Paris: Dis Voir, 1995.
Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 2. Translated by Carlos Morreo, Paris: Dis Voir, 2007.
Sachs, Curt. World History of Dance. Translated by Bessie Schoenberg, New York:
Bonanza Books, 1937.
Shahani, Kumar. Khayal Gatha. Bombay Cinematograph, India, 103 minutes, 1988.
Steffen, James. The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2013.
Stern, Daniel. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. London: Karnac, 2005.

Filmography

The Colour of Pomegrantes (Tsvet Granata/ Nran Guyne, 1969). 77 minutes. Colour.
The Armenian release version is in Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian with
English subtitles.
Fabric of Thought: Sergei Para janov 109

Production: Armenfilm, Yerevan, Soviet Union

Director: Sergei Parajanov
Script: Sergei Parajanov
Choreographer: Sergei Parajanov
Cinematography: Suren Shakhbazian
Art Direction: Stepan Andranikian
Editing: Maria Ponomarenko
Sound Designer ‒ Composer: Tigran Mansurian
Main Cast: Sofico Chiaureli, Melkon Alekian, Vilen Galustian, Georgi Gregechkori

The Colour of Pomegrantes, Sergei Parajanov. New York: Criterion Collection. DVD
2018.

Ashik Kerib (1988). 78 minutes. Colour. The soundtrack is in Azerbaijani, Georgian,

and Russian with English subtitles.
Production: Georgia Film Studio, Tbilisi, Soviet Union
Director: Sergei Parajanov and David Abshidze
Script: Gia Badridze, based on the story by Mickhail Lermontov
Choreographer: Sergei Parajanov
Cinematography: Albert Yavurian
Art Direction: Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, Shota Gogolashville, Niko Zandukeli
Sound Design: Gari Kuntsev
Music: Dzhavanshir Kuliev
Songs: Alim Qasimov
Main Cast: Yuri Mgoian, Sof iko Chiaureli, Ramaz Chkhikvadze, Konstantin
Stepanko, Varvara Dvalishivili, Veronika Metonidze

Ashik Kerib, Sergei Parajanov. United Kingdom: Artificial Eye. DVD 2007.
3. Nicole Kidman in Blue Light: Stanley
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Abstract
The strange, inexplicable movement of light and colour of the image is
examined in relationship to Nicole Kidman’s unique form of acting in
this film. Kidman acts in slow motion. The dynamism of colour and Kid-
man’s slowed-down speech acts are explored to show how, together, they
transform the relationship between the heterosexual married fictional
couple Alice and Bill, played by the real-life couple Kidman and Cruise.
Kubrick taps into and draws out Kidman’s metamorphic powers as an actor.
The industrial, technical, and aesthetic context is Kubrick’s experiments
with light and colour on celluloid, at the moment of its obsolescence.

Keywords: Stanley Kubrick, Nicole Kidman, Acting in slow motion, Cel-

luloid cinema, Light and colour

Not too long ago, a fragment of dialogue spoken by Nicole Kidman in Eyes
Wide Shut appeared in a rather unlikely place: Frank Ocean’s song Love Crimes
(2015). We hear it just under his vocals. The dialogue is taken from the scene
in which Kidman’s Alice Harford picks an argument with her husband Dr Bill
Harford, played by Tom Cruise. They are arguing about a ‘love crime’ that has
not actually been committed, but simply imagined. The then real-life husband
and wife couple ‘play-act’ as a married couple in Stanley Kubrick’s final film,
Eyes Wide Shut (1999). By doubling the real couple and a fictional married
couple, Kubrick makes his images simulacral. We cannot truly distinguish
between the real and the fictional couple. They seem to bleed into each other.
They have entered an economy of simulation where the distinction between
the original and the copy becomes blurred, undecidable. We find ourselves
in an inflationary realm of images from which there appears to be no exit.1

1 Tom Cruise has said that the apartment Bill and Alice lived in was modelled after Kubrick and
Christiane’s own New York apartment when they lived in the city. He added that ‘the furniture

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick,
and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
doi 10.5117/9789463726245_Ch03
112  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

When the much-anticipated film, set in contemporary New York (though

based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Novella, set in Vienna in the early
twentieth century), was released soon after Kubrick’s death, its public and
critical reception was less than favourable.2 Some of the criticism was very
harsh and Kidman’s performance was especially targeted. That a piece of
contemporary popular music should quote Eyes Wide Shut in 2015 interested
me at the time and I want now to reconsider the acting in the film, as well as
Kubrick’s innovation in film lighting and colour and their interrelationships,
on the threshold of the obsolescence of celluloid as light sensitive medium.
Contrary to some critical opinions in English, at the time of its release, I
thought that Kidman’s performance was a rare and very special piece of
virtuoso acting – sui generis. I still believe this to be the case. Kidman’s star
is now on the rise and is the highest it has ever been. There was a period,
around the time of this film, when Australians reacted with hostility to
her star persona. But her remarkable body of work has finally made the
general public and critics appreciate her stature as an actor who has often
taken big risks in the range of projects she has chosen. Yet even now when
her body of work is referred to, Eyes Wide Shut and Lars Von Trier’s Dogville
(2003) are rarely, if ever, mentioned, much less discussed. If Eyes Wide Shut
is mentioned at all, it is for gossip to support the familiar cliché about how
weird a director Kubrick was. It is the same with Lars Von Trier, too. One of
the best responses Kidman has given to a question in that vein was that to
work with Kubrick was like being at film school studying with a very clever
professor! What a great way to talk about education and the erotics of film
pedagogy! Thanks very much, Nicole!
As Tim Kreider said, ‘critical disappointment with Eyes Wide Shut was
almost unanimous and the complaint was always the same; “not sexy.”’3

in the house [f ilm set] was furniture from their [the Kubricks’] own home in London’. This
information adds yet another level of density and ‘expressive charge’ to the simulacral nature
of the images. Ebert, ‘Cruise Opens Up About Working with Kubrick’.
2 The film was rereleased in 2016 in New York at Christmas and appears to be gaining a larger
audience, according to Bilger Ebiri. He notes that for a few weeks most of the rep houses in the
city were screening the film as holiday fare. Further, ‘this was a fate no one could have predicted
back in July 1999 when it was released to dismissive reviews and disappointing box office’. See
‘An Oral History of an Orgy: Staging that Scene in Eyes Wide Shut, by Stanley Kubrick’.
3 Kreider, Review of Eyes Wide Shut. James Fenwick argues for the importance of fan discourse
in the reception of all of Kubrick’s films and Eyes Wide Shut in particular, in an essay titled,
‘“Let this be Kubrick’s Final Word. Do You Hear Us Warner Bros?”: Fan Reception to the Death
of Stanley Kubrick and His Final Film, Eyes Wide Shut’. While the initial press reception was
critical, the fan forums discussed the film favourably. Fenwick argues convincingly that over
the last sixteen years or so the unfavourable critical reputation of the film has also been revised.
NICOLE KIDMAN IN BLUE LIGHT: STANLEY KUBRICK’S EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) 113

True, it didn’t show Tom and Nicole making love (as some might have
desired), nor was the orgy as orgiastic as common sense might expect. But
the film’s colour and light left me breathless, wanting more and more. My
encounter with the behaviour of colour (and I primarily insist on the activity
or dynamism of colour rather than its meaning, which seems to me a more
art historical concern), drew me into the film initially. Eyes Wide Shut is
strangely animated with the colours of vegetal or floral paintings done
by Christiane Kubrick (the director’s wife). I say strange because on walls
strewn with these paintings their colours seem to jump out of the frames,
creating an ornamented garden of artifice in the affluent couple’s New York
apartment. Following the unusual movement of colour and light impelled
me to pay close attention to Kidman’s movements and speech patterns,
which also seemed rather strange and unusual. Before this experience, I
didn’t have much interest in her work as an actor, though I was familiar
with some of her earlier work.
Alice Harford (Kidman), the wife of Bill Harford (Cruise), is an out of
work curator whose Soho gallery has gone bust. Her taste in interior decor
is highly decorative, creating a richly layered, textured surface of materials,
light, and colour, the most conspicuous contributors to which are the large
paintings themselves. While her late twentieth-century Central Park West
apartment is expressive of the couple’s taste and class, it also evokes the
intimate domestic interiors of late nineteenth-century Symbolist painters
such as Felix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard, also known
as the Nabis (from the Hebrew for ‘prophet’). The link with Symbolist art
history is also made more mysterious by the briefly conspicuous presence of
a Vincent Van Gogh coffee table book, which Alice and her daughter wrap up
as a Christmas present, and also the paintings of sunflowers on a bedroom
wall. Kubrick is known to have researched paintings extensively as a way to
think about the composition of the film image. The Symbolist painters were
experimenting with colour and surface ornamentation around the same time
that cinema was invented, in 1895. It is evident that the Symbolist aesthetic

He attributes this change to the unique way in which Kubrick’s legacy has been presented
through the donation of his archive to the University of the Arts, London, and the global tour
of the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition, based on his extensive archive. This extraordinary exhibition,
he says, created a narrative that has changed the reception of Eyes Wide Shut. He adds that
‘the Kubrick legacy is not just to prolong the marketability of a dead auteur’, but a search for
ever more knowledge in the quest to decipher his films. I saw this exhibition in Melbourne, at
the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in January 2007. The exhibition documented the
importance Kubrick placed on studying paintings so as to get ideas for the composition of his
film images. His own collection of lenses were also on display.
114  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

and research into synaesthesia developed as a resistance to the mechanization

of perception through the modern mechanical reproductive technology
such as the camera.4 The importance of this historical moment for Kubrick,
after over one hundred years of cinema (and the consequent accelerated
technological mediation of the human sensorium itself), is encapsulated in
the film’s title, Eyes Wide Shut. In modifying and playing with the idiom ‘eyes
wide open’, Kubrick is creating a paradox, a bit of nonsense. How can there
be vision when the eyes are shut? Further, the phrase ‘wide shut’ is also pure
nonsense. Kubrick takes it as a given that human vision is now thoroughly
mediated by technology, that there is no ‘equipment-free’ perception, as Walter
Benjamin once cogently put it. Kubrick turns to the history of painting, an
image mediated by hand-eye coordination, to create a surface that lures the
eye towards a form of perception that is not standardized and commodi-
fied. In trying to do this he appears to be working against the standardized
industrial modes of film production, processing, lighting, and colour. The
expressive use of what Van Gogh called ‘arbitrary’ as opposed to ‘local colour’
is facilitated by the garden of artifice created by Christiane Kubrick’s acrylic
paintings.5 I would go further and say that painting forms an abstract colour
field of intensity, nourishing this film and our perception of it.6
The experimentation with colour and light is made possible by Kubrick’s
refusal to use studio lighting in a film shot almost entirely on a studio
set. Instead of the usual studio key and fill lights, Kubrick used only the
light sources visible within the shot, such as lamps, Christmas tree lights,
and so forth. When these intra-diegetic lights were inadequate he used
Chinese paper ball lamps to softly brighten the scene. This resulted in
the film being underexposed, so to ‘correct’ that Kubrick had the entire
exposed film ‘force-developed by two stops’ in the laboratory through a
special (non-standardized) chemical process. The film’s colour and light is
a result of this unprecedented, laborious, risky, and expensive process. The
cinematographer Larry Smith makes the point unequivocally: ‘There’s no
question that with force-developing you get exaggerated highlights – they

4 Dora, Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology.

5 Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh; Bumpus, Van Gogh’s Flowers.
6 Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. The ‘spirit of the gift’ in this film
is expressed in the way light, colour, movement, and voice work together synaesthetically to
create what may be called, following Raul Ruiz, a ‘secret film’ that generates ‘cinematographic
emotions’. However, ‘the secret film’ is not hidden but perceptible only to an ‘oblique manner of
viewing’ by seeing the dynamic of the image rather than following the narrative line exclusively.
This is what I have attempted to do in my analysis here, as a reciprocal act for the aesthetic
munificence of the film itself.
NICOLE KIDMAN IN BLUE LIGHT: STANLEY KUBRICK’S EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) 115

really blow out’.7 It is not unusual, according to Smith, to underexpose a

small section of a film and then force-develop it to get this effect in order to
create an aesthetic distinction. What was unique in Kubrick’s case was that
the entire film was force-developed, an unprecedented move in the history of
Hollywood cinema. Additionally, Kodak provided Kubrick with the film stock
of his choice, which had just been discontinued.8 It was Kubrick’s stature as
a master film-maker that persuaded his producers, Warner Brothers, Kodak,
and the laboratory in London agree to this delicate and costly experiment
with colour and light. On first viewing Eyes Wide Shut in the theatre at its
original release, I felt from the very first shot that the image had a tantalizing
quality that I couldn’t quite put into words. Similarly, it was reported that
Steven Spielberg had exclaimed at the quality of light when he saw the film
at a private screening with Cruise and Kidman, soon after Kubrick’s death
and just before its public release. It was clear to Spielberg, with his trained
eye, that Kubrick had created a new kind of colour and light by departing
from the standardized norms of the industry. The intensity of colour and the
soft and clear golden light made the audience’s eyes open wide. The acrylic
colour of the paintings on the walls of the Harford apartment seemed to jump
out of the walls. As Smith said, the colour does really ‘blow out’. Also, and
most conspicuously, the light outside the Harford apartment, seen through
the bathroom and the bedroom windows, is a magical, radiant blue. One
could refer to this unusual phenomenon of light as an ‘arbitrary’, rather than
‘local’, use of colour, following Van Gogh’s colour theory. ‘Local’ colour would
be a naturalist use of colour, while ‘arbitrary’ implies an abstract use (with
no corresponding basis in everyday reality), creating a sense of artifice, as
in Van Gogh’s striking portraits.9 I will explore this vital, dynamic aspect
of the film later on and its relationship to Kidman’s unique performance,
which induces an experience of synaesthesia. It is this nexus of light, colour,
and sound as speech and music that emerges as a force that impels me to
reciprocate it, beyond following the narrative line.

At the Dining Table

What Dorothy Parker said many years ago – ‘men seldom make passes at
girls who wear glasses’ – is still more or less true within Hollywood generic

7 Pizzella, ‘A Sword in the Bed’, 12.

8 See Kubrick and Raphael, Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay, 111.
9 Van Gogh, op. cit.
116  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

coding of gender. Why, then, does Alice wear glasses, especially when she is
naked? Does Alice/Kidman play the age-old role of nude model to Kubrick the
artist, or is she simply a naked woman who in wearing glasses creates a slight
difference in her appearance? ‘Nudity is a form of dress’, or a generic category
of art history, while to be naked is an existential state that avoids generic
capture. If so, what might this little ornamented difference be? Something
humorous is going on here between Kubrick and Kidman that develops into
a little joke, the kind he liked to make at the expense of Hollywood codes of
editing for continuity. Alice, wearing her spectacles, is helping her daughter
Helen do her homework at the dining table, which is shot at an angle and
framed in way that is strongly reminiscent of the Nabi paintings of similar
intimate domestic scenes. The picture plane is slightly tilted so that the
surface of the table appears flattened, its depth significantly reduced. At
this point Bill comes home, sees them, goes into the kitchen, and gets a
beer from the fridge; while he is doing this, he begins to hear (in his head),
his wife’s ‘confession’ from the night before of her fatal attraction to a total
stranger, a sailor she saw at a hotel. Alice didn’t act on her feelings but the
intensity of her recounting of the event disturbs Bill. With her voice playing
in his head, he comes over to the dining table and Alice smiles at him. Her
gaze – slightly above her glasses but crucially directed at us/the camera/at
Kubrick (common in early silent film but by the 1920s proscribed with the
formulation of the classical Hollywood codes of continuity editing) – gains
another dimension if one considers a photograph of Kubrick by Christiane,
perhaps his last, taken during the production of Eyes Wide Shut. There,
Kubrick, wearing his glasses (similar to Kidman’s), looks directly at the
camera (his gaze also slightly above his glasses) with the same expression
as Alice; even his eyebrows are quirked, just like hers! So what are they up
to these two – playing little games, having some fun at Tom’s expense? Is
Kubrick making a pass at his bespectacled model or, more interestingly,
are they involved in what Gilles Deleuze called a ‘double becoming’? Does
‘Alice’ permit Kubrick to become a little girl, playful, while Kubrick gives
Nicole Kidman a chance to go slow, to really unwind time and make time
itself play little games?

Through the Looking Glass

The bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen of the Harford apartment are func-
tional everyday domestic spaces but they also undergo, at key moments, a
strange metamorphosis through framing, light, and colour. Kidman’s Alice
NICOLE KIDMAN IN BLUE LIGHT: STANLEY KUBRICK’S EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) 117

occupies these rooms in a manner that engages with these transformative

aesthetic forces. I too will engage with the rich aesthetic materials of sound
and image, as an act of reciprocity.10 Cruise’s Bill, however, is unable to tap
into this energetic field, though he does betray a vague awareness of it. The
first intimation of a shift from the everyday into a register of unusual and
fascinating intensity occurs when Alice and Bill, both naked, kiss each other
in front of a large mirror while Chris Isaak’s ‘Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing’
is heard on the soundtrack. They have just returned from a ball given by
billionaire Victor Ziegler and have undressed, with Alice wearing nothing
but her glasses. At first, the mirror doubles the couple’s image. The camera
then moves into the mirror image of the couple kissing, at which point
Alice turns her head and eyes away from Bill, who is still absorbed in the
kiss. She appears to be looking at herself. This virtual image of the couple
in the mirror is intricately framed to evoke the subtle displacement from
the everyday. While appearing to respond to Bill’s erotic gesture, Alice’s
turning away, the look in her eyes, and the angle all distort her face. There
is a definite sense of a dissonance in her expression as she looks at herself.
The dissonance I see here may be conceptualized as a quiet, silent ‘crack in
the mirror’, separating Bill from Alice. It feels like a hairline fracture, very
nearly imperceptible but most certainly felt. The significance of the shot is
re-emphasized through the use of this very image to advertise the film and
very likely chosen by Kubrick himself, who controlled the publicity of his
films. The DVD and the screenplay also carry this image. The lyrics of the
Chris Isaak song (Baby did a bad bad thing…) function as a commentary on
their situation and its rhythm and lyrics lend the scene a strong, disturbing
erotic charge.

Between Bedroom and Bathroom – Gaseous Blue Light

The disquiet, perceptible in this distorted scene within the mirror, is fully
expressed in the following scene, set in the bedroom, where Alice picks
a fight with Bill. After the ball, the couple get stoned; Bill begins a bit of
foreplay, they chat about the ‘party last night.’ The mood is light at first. Bill
wants to have sex; Alice goes along with it, and mentions how a man hit
on her at the party. Bill is interested and aroused by it, but suddenly Alice,

10 I have not found any article that explores these dimensions of light, colour, movement,
and sound as both music and speech in a systematic way; I consider them a gift nourishing our
powers of perception and thought.
118  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

under the influence, becomes querulous and then very angry at what Bill
says. Remembering their flirtations with strangers at the party, he suggests
that women don’t have sexual fantasies like men do. Alice gets progressively
angrier at Bill’s assumption and begins to talk about ‘last summer’, which
leads to the disclosure of her desire for a total stranger, sometime in the
past. She begins to trip and unravel time – ‘last night […] last summer’ – and
their whole past collapses into the present. It is in this scene in the bedroom,
next to the bathroom, that the unrest perceptible between the couple in
the previous scene is given its fullest cinematic expression. Kidman’s Alice
transforms the everyday of their bedroom and bathroom into a wonderland
and Kubrick creates an intense, ‘arbitrary’, and abstract coloured milieu
within which the metamorphosis occurs.
As the couple start their quarrel, we become aware that the space outside
the bedroom and bathroom windows has mysteriously become a radiant
blue light. As such, the space becomes temporalized and alive. It is in this
scene that Alice and Bill become decisively separated, as prefigured in the
mirror in the previous scene. The divergence between the couple is registered
at first through Alice’s supple movements within the small space of their
bedroom. Bill sits on the bed in a still, static pose, unable to comprehend
what animates Alice. Meanwhile Alice leaves the bed, offended, and stands
framed by the bathroom door. Both the white door frame and the blue
light seen through the bathroom window frame Alice, who is leaning on
the door frame in a strong posture, with her hand outstretched. She is
bathed in a clear golden light, wearing white Calvin Klein-style underwear,
as though in a modern-day portrait but also evoking some of Van Gogh’s
vibrant studies. As Bill becomes frozen on the bed while listening to Alice’s
sexual fantasy, she begins to move supplely on the floor, registering Bill’s
mounting incomprehension of her behaviour. What is wonderful to see here
is the agility of Alice’s movements coupled with her verbal dexterity, while
Bill sits high on the bed, immobile, wordless, with a catatonic stare. Alice’s
impulsive, girlish bursts and peals of laughter (her response to Bill’s assertion
that women don’t have wild sexual fantasies) are quite extraordinary. She
creases up in laughter and each time she looks up at Bill’s baffled face she
bursts into yet another round of laughter, finally ending up on the floor
trying to catch her breath and recover her equilibrium. Then the tone and
mood changes again as Alice sits on the floor quietly and Bill continues to
stare in total bewilderment, seated on their bed, stunned, speechless. Alice
commands the space with great ease and flexibility, seated on the floor
with her back to the radiator, framed by red curtains, even as she begins
to recount in vivid detail the story of her attraction to an anonymous sailor
NICOLE KIDMAN IN BLUE LIGHT: STANLEY KUBRICK’S EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) 119

last summer. The light outside the bathroom window and the bedroom is
a radiant blue, while the inside is bathed in a golden soft glow. As Alice
quietly begins her story of erotic desire, the blue light and the red curtains
that frame her appear to create a purple halo around her head, almost like a
very delicate aura. The three-quarter front angle shot shows her face framed
by the ringlets of her hair. The mood has moved from riotous bursts and
peals of laughter to a very quiet storytelling mode, which also feels like an
introspective form of speech, but is addressed to Bill. It feels like the very first
time Alice has actually put her ‘illicit’ sexual fantasy and experience into
words, imbuing them with the emotional density of ‘inner speech’. The scene
becomes sombre, the mood delicate like the aura around Alice’s head. It is
rare to see such a shift in tone – from ribald to delicate and subtle – within
such a short period of time in a single scene. Alice moves from being girlish
to being a mature woman within minutes. Voice and colour are attuned to
each other. The entire bedroom and bathroom space becomes a gaseous
zone of transformation. In Deleuzian film theory, the non-anthropomorphic
eye of the camera enables at least three kinds of perception: solid, liquid,
and gaseous.11 I contend that Kidman in her sonic performance accedes to
a gaseous perception with the aid of colour. Beyond mere correspondence,
the colour and sound act on each other creating a synaesthetic vibration
that wafts Alice out of the genre of the intimate ‘chamber play’. The way
in which Alice is able to bifurcate time, creating multiple micro-series, a
range of micro-affects, sensations, and emotions, is remarkable. Even the
stately Kubrick camera is animated by Alice’s motility. It moves around to
capture her impulsive convulsions and laughter on the bedroom floor. Bill
wants sex then and there but Alice unravels time, blurring ‘last night,’ ‘last
summer’. From then on, the couple occupy two different dimensions or
series. Bill doggedly goes looking for sex while Alice hangs out at home and
travels in another dimension that Bill can sense exists but does not know
how to activate. While Bill is driven by images, Alice surfs the sonic as if
it were a wave. This bifurcation of time into two series, one audio and the
other visual, is one of the crucial movements of this film.12 In her speech,
especially under the influence of champagne or dope, but even normally,
Alice stretches syllables and vowels to a point where their semantic values
are displaced by musical values. She plays with silence and pauses. The

11 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: Movement Image, 71–86.

12 Deleuze, Cinema 2: Time Image, 275. Time as series is a major concept in Deleuzian film
theory. Time as series provides a more expansive and supple conception of time than linear
time. Time as series has the power to bifurcate and diverge from linear progression.
120  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

consequent unpredictability of what she will say, of how her words might
turn out, creates a tantalizing sense of uncertainty. This is especially so
when she dances at the ball with a total stranger who is hitting on her. She
goes along with him, drunk on champagne, but is actually saying no in a
most seductive manner. In contrast, Bill replays in his mind a black and
white film of his own, imagining Alice copulating with the sailor whom
she was attracted to. Bill goes looking for sex while Alice dreams at home.

The Orgy

In Eyes Wide Shut, the encounter between painting and f ilm is staged
within a self-conscious aesthetic awareness of the simulacral quality of
the cinematic image as commodity. This awareness is structural, that is,
integral to the composition of the film, which is why the film is shot on a
set, a simulated Symbolist New York, and also why Kubrick wanted a mar-
ried couple to play Bill and Alice. As I said earlier, the distinction between
‘Bill and Alice’ and ‘Tom and Nicole’ becomes imperceptible, and the two
couples become a simulacrum of each other. There is a dizzying sense of
being within images with no possible escape, no sense of an outside. In
Eyes Wide Shut we see twelve perfect female nudes and only one naked
woman (Alice). The dozen nudes are interchangeable commodities, both
because they are prostitutes and because they conform to an identical
body type rendered anonymous by being masked in the high-class orgy.
Their speech, gestures, and movements, their breasts, hips, and legs – all
are standardized. The expected eroticism of the bodies is transposed into
the cinematic image itself. The very substance of Kubrick’s film is erotic in
its singularity, its aesthetic richness, especially with regard to light, colour,
and sound; meanwhile, despite their promise of happiness, the perfect nudes
remain disenchanted commodities, plastic bodies, moulded to the desire of
late twentieth-century mediatized beauty. Kidman’s Alice is individuated
as a Symbolist woman, in which idiom the redhead signifies sexual potency.
As such, whether naked or clothed, because of her Symbolist affiliations,
Alice is able to take us elsewhere, even in the shopping mall.
The central sequence, an orgy, takes place in a palatial house whose
interior décor consists of pastiche Islamic arches and decorative motifs.
The score (by the experimental composer Jocelyn Pook) also incorporates
a fragment of South Indian classical vocal music. The complex montage and
modulation of multiple rhythms in this sequence occurs within a context
where the perfect orgiastic bodies are de-eroticized by the mechanized
NICOLE KIDMAN IN BLUE LIGHT: STANLEY KUBRICK’S EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) 121

rhythm of copulation; in contrast, the vocalization intimates a highly flex-

ible rhythm marked by the microtones of the Indian musical tradition.
It is my contention that Kubrick uses decorative motifs from an Islamic
visual aesthetic tradition, as well as a South Indian (Hindu) musical tradi-
tion, as a critique – ‘Is this hell? […] lovers’ is heard sung in Tamil – and
lamentation at the commodification of bodies and the consequent loss of
sensuality. Simultaneously, the aesthetic allows him to open up a multiplicity
of rhythms. By combining two traditions of ornamentation (visual and
sonic) from Indian culture, which both Hindu and Islamic fundamentalists
would prefer to eradicate, and using these traditions not only as critique
but also to intimate that there are other potential temporalities beyond
the chronometric time of the pulsed bodies, Kubrick makes a transna-
tional gesture with the kind of care and precision one expects of him. The
traditional pre-industrial ornamentation he deploys here now returns as
a form of pastiche, made possible by technologies of mass reproduction. It
is evident that Kubrick does use the familiar bag of tricks of postmodern
pastiche – citation, irony, parody – quite liberally in this film: in his use of
popular Western music, in the highly melodramatic hocus-pocus dialogue
at the orgy, and in the construction of the plot; he assumes urbanely that
these examples of postmodern pastiche constitute a contemporary realism
of sorts. But something qualitatively different happens with the South Indian
music, because at that moment we encounter a multiplicity of differential
audiovisual rhythms: those of the mechanistically copulating bodies; Bill’s
slow walk; the floating camera; the microtonal rhythms of the Indian vocal
music and Pook’s electronic score. Through these elements, Kubrick creates
a rasa (aesthetic sentiment) of sadness. This sadness is highly abstract and
precise, a function of the music; it is not achieved through a depiction of
a sad scene. In fact there is one word that modulates that particular rasa
in Sanskrit aesthetics – viraha, which may be translated as a melancholy
yearning associated with erotic loss.13

In the Morgue: Bill’s Sexual Encounter

The scene in the bedroom discussed above terminates when the telephone
rings. Bill is called to the deathbed of an affluent patient. There, the

13 ‘Rasa’ or aesthetic sentiment in classical Indian aesthetics has been codified in the Natyasas-
tra of Bharat, according to which there are nine rasas, one being karuna or pathos/sadness. See
Sankaran, Some Aspects of Literary Criticism in Sanskrit or Theories of Rasa and Dhvani, 18.
122  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

daughter of the deceased man makes sexual advances to Bill in the same
room in which her father’s corpse now lies. Bill gently extricates himself
and goes to the Greenwich Village, where a group of young men accost him,
pushing him and shouting that he is a homosexual. A prostitute invites
Bill to her small apartment, where they engage in flirtation until a phone
call yet again ends the scene. Alerted to the event by a friend’s disclosure,
Bill goes in a cab to a private upper-class orgy in a palatial country house
where he encounters the tightly scripted and choreographed orgy discussed
above. He has been warned to go in costume, wearing a mask and a cape.
A nude, masked model calls out to Bill, attempting to warn him of the
danger he has placed himself in by breaking into this private fantasy world
of the super-rich. Later, in a café, he reads a news item recording the death
of a beauty queen by a heroin overdose and makes the connection with
Mandy, the semiconscious naked prostitute whom he had treated for a drug
overdose in Ziegler’s luxurious bathroom, during the ball he attended with
Alice earlier in the film. Bill goes to the hospital morgue to see her body.
This scene is remarkable for its visual aesthetic richness, manifested by the
appearance of a mysterious purple colour despite the clinical atmosphere of
the morgue. Bill walks into the morgue where Mandy’s corpse is pulled from
a drawer, laid out on a tray, naked. There are three large plastic containers
on a counter – red, yellow, and blue, the primary colours. Apart from this
touch of colour the light is fluorescent, bright, flat, stark, clinical. The
camera is strangely animated in that we view the dead woman’s body from
a very high angle shot. There is no narrative reason at all for this singular
shot. There is tension in the composition of this shot. From that high angle
her hair, arranged in curved strands spreading outwards from her head,
gives the cadaver a sense of vitality entirely lacking in the bodies at the
orgy, as well as proving a macabre contrast with Mandy as she is f irst
encountered in the f ilm, lying in Ziegler’s bathroom after an overdose.
Bill is attracted to the corpse in more than a professional sense. A black
orderly stands at a distance, looking away from him. Bill stands facing the
dead woman’s head and bends haltingly towards her face, as though he
is about to kiss her, but then slowly pulls away. This movement shows his
jet-black overcoat in a close shot and as we register the strange dynamics
of the scene the coat appears to change colour: it briefly emits a mysterious
deep purple hue. This perverse encounter is the closest that Bill comes
to experiencing a disturbing erotic charge. Bill encounters naked bodies
as part of his work as a doctor in his surgery as well as at the party of the
billionaire, Ziegler. An ethical issue was raised in the bathroom where
Bill first encountered Mandy, since Ziegler was anxious to get rid of the
NICOLE KIDMAN IN BLUE LIGHT: STANLEY KUBRICK’S EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) 123

beautiful overdosed woman, splayed naked on a chair. In this earlier scene,

Bill insisted on keeping Mandy there for an hour to ensure that she was
sufficiently recovered to be taken home. It is clear in this scene that Bill
realizes he has drifted into an amoral world of the super-rich, hitherto
unknown to him.
When summoned and reprimanded by Ziegler for having broken into the
orgy, Bill plucks up enough courage to confront him about Mandy’s death.
He demands to know how Mandy ended up in the morgue, suspecting that
she was in fact the masked woman at the ball who issued a warning of the
danger he was in. Ziegler brushes off any suggestion of complicity, declaring
that Mandy died of a drug overdose, shut up in her own apartment. Bill’s
assured senses of normality shattered, he is emotionally ravaged, at his
most vulnerable. Returning home, he goes into the bedroom he shares
with Alice, where she is asleep with Bill’s mask from the ball lying on
his pillow. Bill now knows that Alice knows. Bill sees her laughing in her
dream but waking up troubled, crying. She recounts to him her dream of
copulating with a large number of men and of laughing at him, but he is
unable to tell her where he has been. The couple have been on their own,
aparallel journeys. Yet while Alice’s affective temporal dream journey has
been traumatic, it is also cathartic in that she can verbalize her experience
with a Freudian acuity, while Bill has encountered something terrifying
at the orgy and in the morgue but is unable to process and articulate it in
the way Alice does. Her verbal eloquence, emotional vulnerability, and
sensitivity are remarkable, powerful. Their two series of movements – sonic
and visual – cannot be wholly reconciled. The room is suffused with a
deep purple colour. The bedsheets are also purple and the air itself feels
coloured, seems to resonate. The intermittently appearing purple hue has
now reached an expressive climax in this scene where the couple comes to
a mutual understanding of their erotic emotional complexity. Bill finally
breaks down and says that he will ‘tell everything’. However, we don’t
actually hear him speak or ‘tell it all’ as Alice does because the scene cuts
to the following morning.

Class Relations and the ‘Money-Shot’

Bill’s adventures at night, looking for sex, lead him through a series of encoun-
ters where bodies are explicitly commodified, as prostitutes. These scenes
cut across social strata, from street prostitute to the super-rich, as they do in
Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. The world of the upper classes appears amoral, with
124  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

its own rules and predatory behaviour. We also glimpse child prostitution
when the owner of a costume shop offers his daughter to an astonished Bill,
who is returning the costume he rented to wear to the masked ball. There
is a street prostitute whom Bill meets and interacts with playfully. They
don’t have sex but he pays her nevertheless; he discovers later that she is
HIV-positive. Bill has witnessed the callousness and immorality of Ziegler
when the prostitute he had sex with overdosed in his plush bathroom. He
can barely remember her name, Mandy, even when Bill asks for it so as to be
able to speak to her to prevent her from slipping into a coma. The sense of
the disposability of prostitutes as interchangeable commodities is pervasive.
When Ziegler summons Bill to confront him about his presence at the orgy, he
attempts to bribe him with a case of vintage Scotch, which Bill declines. This
meeting takes place in Ziegler’s library; the setting, featuring a red billiards
table and green lamps, is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s painting The Night Café,
1888, depicting a low class barroom with a green pool table, red walls, and
yellow lamp light. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh referred to this
painting ‘as one of the ugliest pictures I have done’.14 While the painting
is of a desolate, shabby place, Ziegler’s room is a luxurious mixture of red
and green, and he is in full command of the space. Despite this material
difference, the atmosphere in Ziegler’s library is dark and desolate as he
attempts to ‘buy’ Bill’s complicity. Ziegler abandons the niceties of polite
speech and uses a crude and blunt vernacular. Despite the fact that he is
a doctor, we see that Bill’s status here makes him an underling, one who
services the super-rich whenever and wherever they want. The film opens
with Bill looking for his wallet and throughout the film he is seen paying
liberally for services – to the prostitute, to the costume dealer, to the taxi
driver. He actually tears a hundred-dollar bill in half and gives one half
to the taxi driver to ensure he will wait for him to return from the orgy.
Ziegler, despite his immense wealth, makes a point of the high cost of the
top physiotherapist Bill has recommended to him; similarly, Alice, though
well-off, checks the price tag on the large teddy bear that her daughter
wants for Christmas.
While the sexualized bodies are de-eroticized, Kubrick’s film image itself
and its sound have been created at great expense (as discussed above), and
appear singular, sui generis, in the inflationary economy of late twentieth-
century image-making. Thus the much anticipated ‘money-shot’ of Tom and
Nicole copulating is displaced on to the eroticism of the films’s remarkable
audio-visual system.

14 Van Gogh, op. cit.

NICOLE KIDMAN IN BLUE LIGHT: STANLEY KUBRICK’S EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) 125

At The Toyshop

Kubrick ends his film in a toyshop, a place of artifice, unlike Schnitzler’s

Dream Novella, which ends in the conjugal bedroom where a beam of
sunlight streams in and birdsong mingles with the child’s laughter,
enhancing the happy resolution of marital conflicts. I argue that the
film ends in a toyshop for the same reason that the orgy is mechanized,
and for the same reason that the f ilm as a whole is shot on a set (albeit
a Symbolist New York). They are perfectly controlled environments of
late capitalism, where all things and all relations are under the sway of
a standardized exchange of commodities as signs, within an economy
of simulation. In the space in which images and toys are exchanged, a
bespectacled Alice – as if remembering Dorothy Parker’s quip – doesn’t
wait but makes a pass at her husband, yet in an unusual manner, with
a deadpan expression. She uses an inf initive: “There is something very
important we need to do.” “What?” asks Bill. “Fuck,” replies Alice quietly,
thus virtualizing the actual. Throughout the f ilm Alice has conjugated
the vernacular nonsense word ‘fuck’ to replenish her conjugality with a
light (and perhaps also, therefore scary) humour. This is not the Freudian
dirty joke that rouses loud laughter through the exclusion of the other.
There is no self or other to exclude in the infinitive, which has no subject,
a pure virtuality in language. If indeed one smiled broadly at this ending,
as I recall doing the very f irst time I saw it, the absence of the reverse
shot leaves one wondering, was Bill man enough to smile? Or would he
still have that mildly appealing, obtuse look and a posture that suggests
he is quite out of his depth? Either way, in refusing us the grammatical
reverse shot, Kubrick is once again calling the shots, giving Alice (in
the wonderland of the late capitalist toy shop) the power to multiply
micro-series, to toy with time itself.

Bibliography

Bumpus, Judith. Van Gogh’s Flowers. New York: Universe Books, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Dora, Henri. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994.
126  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Ebert, Roger. ‘Cruise Opens Up About Working with Kubrick.’ https://www.

rogerebert.com/interviews/cruise-opens-up-about-working-with-kubrick.
Accessed 3 March 2019.
Ebiri, Bilger. ‘An Oral History of an Orgy: Staging That Scene in Eyes Wide Shut,
Stanley Kubrick’s Divisive Final Film.’ Vulture, 27 June 2019, https://www.
vulture.com/2019/06/eyes-wide-shut-orgy-scene-oral-history.html. Accessed
15 December 2019.
Fenwick, James. ‘“Let This Be Kubrick’s Final Word. Do You Hear Us Warner Bros?”:
Fan Reception to the Death of Stanley Kubrick and His Final Film, Eyes Wide
Shut.’ The Journal of Fandom Studies 6, no. 1, March 2018, pp. 21–32.
Gage, John. Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999.
Kreider, Tim. ‘Review of Eyes Wide Shut.’ Film Quarterly 53, no. 3, spring 2000,
pp. 41–43.
Kubrick, Stanley, and Frederic Raphael. Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay. Victoria:
Penguin Books, 1999.
Pizzella, Stephen. ‘A Sword in the Bed.’ American Cinematographer, 33, 28 Octo-
ber 1999, pp. 12–13.
Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema 1. Translated by Brian Holmes, Paris: Dis Voir, 1995.
Sankaran, A. Some Aspects of Literary Criticism in Sanskrit or Theories of Rasa and
Dhvani. Madras: University of Madras, 1973.
Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. London: Harmondsworth, 1996.

Filmography

Eyes Wide Shut (1999). 153 minutes. Colour.

Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Hollywood
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Script: Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s
Traumnovelle
Cinematography: Larry Smith
Art Direction: Les Tomkins and Roy Walker
Editing: Nigel Galt
Original Music: Jocelyn Pook
Main Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sidney Pollack, Alan Cumming, Rade
Sherbedigia

Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros. DVD 2000.

4. Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl
Ruiz’s Klimt (2006)

Abstract
Raul Ruiz’s film on Klimt and Gustav Klimt’s own work are examined in
terms of a cluster of related ideas; namely allegory, fragmentation, and
ornamentation. Modern allegory, whether cinematic or painterly, is shown to
have powers of fragmenting organic forms. Similarly, modern ornamentation
is elaborated as a power to dematerialize solid forms reaching towards the
infinitesimal in perception. Through these devices of allegorical ornamenta-
tion, the Ruizean cinematic image and sound are imbued with polysemia
and corresponding pathic sates of intensity. The role of the cinematic close-
up in facilitating these processes of fragmentation is also examined. The
multi-ethnic polity of fin-de-siècle Vienna on the brink of its dissolution is
perceived through the aesthetic optic of a delirious Klimt on his deathbed.

Keywords: Raul Ruiz’s Klimt, Cinematic allegory, Ornament and pathology,

Fragment and close-up, Fin-de-siècle Vienna

Who art thou? asked the guardian of the night

From crystal purity I come, was my reply,
And great my thirst, Persephone,
Yet heeding thy decree I take to flight
And turn and turn again, forever right.

I spurn the pallid Cyprus tree,

And take no refreshment at its Sylvan spring,
But hasten on toward the rustling river
Of Mnemosyne, wherein I drink to sweet satiety.

And there dipping my palms between the

Knots and loopings of its mazy stream

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick,
and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
doi 10.5117/9789463726245_Ch04
128  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

I see again, as in a drowning swimmers dream,

All the strange sights I ever saw,
And even stranger sights no man has ever seen.
Klimt

This poem, a pastiche (a sonnet of sorts), written for Raúl Ruiz’s film Klimt,
is heard in voice-over, recited by John Malkovich, in the very last shot of
the film – a coda that shows Klimt holding a glass of water, from which
he drinks as a shower of coloured flower petals rain down on him. His
expression appears to be one of quiet delight at the cascading petals. He
and his voice seem to yield to their softness. It is a posthumous image. All
through the film we have intermittently returned to Klimt’s deathbed in a
hospital, where he lies semi-conscious, uttering just one word: ‘Flowers.’ The
entire film may be viewed in part as the vision of ‘a drowning swimmer’s
dream’, just on the threshold of death. The poem appears to be an ode to
the cinematograph itself. It starts with a piece of dialogue. Persephone,
guardian of the night, asks the stranger, ‘Who art thou?’ and receives the
reply, ‘From crystal purity I come’. The crystalline perception of the lens,
which captures light, thirsts for memory, so as to be incarnated. The white
light of the crystalline lens of the camera encounters the shadowy realm
of Persephone, the guardian of the night, in search of a vision that only the
‘rustling river of Mnemosyne’ (epic memory) might provide. A flowing river
doesn’t rustle, and yet in synaesthetic terms the line does make sense; it
evokes a grove. The river of Mnemosyne is activated by dipping the palms
between ‘the knots and loopings of its mazy stream’. The palms and fingers
(hypersensitive to touch), dipped in the mazy river, activate non-linear
memory through tactile contact. A haptic perception is thus awakened in
us by imbuing the eye with the values and powers of touch. Under these
conditions, the hand may become an instrument not only of feeling but
also of cognition. The crystalline lens activated in this way shows strange
sights ‘no man has ever seen’ because the lensed vision is non-human, an
‘eye’ without an ‘I’ or a human ego. The crystal purity of light encounters
the guardian of the night, Persephone, who decrees that it encounter the
daughter of heaven and earth (of Uranus and Gaia) and the mother of all
the muses, Mnemosyne, thereby conferring both a cosmos-centric and a
civilizational legacy on the Seventh art.
In retrospect, it would appear that Ruiz is not only addressing or apos-
trophizing the cinematograph but also giving us a vision of the camera
itself, as an allegorical instrument, rather than one of representation. For
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 129

Ruiz, film is an allegorizing medium with an intimate, privileged relation-

ship to death. The evanescence of f ilm and its shadowy, insubstantial
temporal images makes it so. Further, Ruiz conceives the film image as
a simulacrum, where the distinction between the original and the copy
becomes unstable and the image acquires non-human powers, like those
of the shadow, for example. The two Lea De Castros (the true and the false)
and the two Klimts (the original and the copy) are playful embodiments
of the contemporary reality of the economy of simulation producing
simulacra. Klimt is the perfect subject for Ruiz in that his major official
paintings were commissioned, conceived, and received as allegorical works.
The works known as the Faculty Paintings (1900–1907) were a set of three
large ceiling panels commissioned by the Art Committee of the Ministry
of Education for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, depicting the
themes of its Faculties: Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. These
works (destroyed during WWII), ‘personif ied’ the three disciplines in
complex, somewhat opaque, and ambiguous allegories that created a
great scandal and were rejected by the university, despite the fact that
the painting Philosophy won a gold medal at the Universal Exposition in
Paris in 1900. Franze Wickhoff, the art historian, delivered a defence of
Philosophy against accusations of ugliness and decadence in a famous
speech to the Philosophic Society of the University of Vienna, with the
title, ‘What is Ugliness?’ Ruiz chose the allegorical painting Medicine to
open his film Klimt.
Ruiz was one of the rare masters of allegorical cinema of the long twen-
tieth century. He said quite emphatically, ‘Allegory for me is much more
than a game or an element of a style.’1 He has also indicated that he sees
the world allegorically, as though it were a museum. It would appear that
for Ruiz, cinema, in its ontology, is an allegorical audiovisual system – an
allegorizing medium. Allegory drains the image of its denotative meaning
and prepares it to be infused with new semantic and aesthetic values, new
connotations.

The connecting aspect of allegory is one of the things that fascinated me

[…] you make an allegory and this allegory touches an element in real life
and makes this element become an allegory of something else, of some
distant object and when this object is touched it becomes an allegory and
so on […] it seems to me that in this moment, especially, most of the arts

1 Raúl Ruiz Forum, Australian Film Institute, Sydney, 1993. Jayamanne, ‘Raoul Ruiz’, 3–6. All
quotations here are taken from a recording of the forum.
130  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

have refused this form of allegory which was such an important element
in the history of culture.2

Simulation and the process of allegorization seem to work hand in hand for
Ruiz. This is why his images do not yield information within a sensory-motor
logic. The density of the Ruizean optic appears to be related to these aesthetic
processes of simulation and allegorization, making certain images opaque,
tantalizing, memorable, difficult to forget, returning one again and again
to certain privileged scenes and relationships. Also, both Klimt and Ruiz
have an intimate relationship to the ornamentation and fragmentation
of image as linked aesthetic processes that render the image mysterious,
rune-like. While Klimt’s work, in part, has been situated within the style
of Art Nouveau ornament, Ruiz did not work within a recognizable and
repeatable style of ornamentation. He appeared to be able to ornament his
image by borrowing from many sources, using what is at hand. I will return
to this key point when discussing the comments Adolph Loos makes to
Klimt on his use of ornament when they encounter each other in the scene
at the famous Café Central of Vienna.
The opening credits are projected onto a part of Klimt’s lost allegorical
painting Medicine. The figure Hygieia, goddess of health (as allegorical
personification), is placed prominently in the centre of the visual field
of the image, in close-up. The camera moves vertically over her brightly
coloured, red and gold ornamented dress, from the base of the painting to
the top, reaching the striking arms, hands, and face of Hygieia holding an
entwined serpent and a bowl, while the image of her face begins to rotate
360 degrees, creating a sense of vertigo. The movement imbues the painting
with a great deal of vitality, as though Hygieia is looking at us, addressing
us, from an ever-shifting point of view. As the camera gradually moves
vertically over a decorative surface, the youthful faces and bodies of men and
women scattered across the image become grotesquely distorted, deformed,
culminating on a close-up of a skull, a perennial allegorical emblem of
death. The allegorical import is clear: life (health) is juxtaposed, or rather
enmeshed with pathology, decay, and death. Medicine’s efficacy, it would
appear, is delimited.
One must remember that the painting was done in the years leading up
to the First World War in a city and a university renowned for their modern
medical research and practice, which established pathology as a separate
area of research, something that interested Klimt. He attended anatomy and

2 Martin, ‘The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz’, p. 61.

ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 131

dissection classes given by Dr. Emile Zuckerkandl, whose journalist wife

Berta was one of Klimt’s patrons. We also know that, through this contact,
Klimt was able to attend lectures on cell biology at the Medical University of
Vienna, a clear indication of his interest in biological dynamisms of molecu-
lar, germinal, and embryonic states. This research, made accessible through
the mediation of the microscope, influenced Klimt’s biomorphic design
practice in Medicine, which engages with the infinitesimal in perception
and sensation. Ornamentation and pathology are linked in this painting.3
Klimt’s modern allegorical vision sees abundant life in relation to its decay.
This conversion of one thing into another, while simultaneously sustaining
both, is part of the allegorical optic’s logic, quite different from the opera-
tions of the formation of metaphor, where there is a complete conversion
of one thing into another. The spiralling, vertiginous, strange movements
of the camera, coupled with the painting itself, emphatically signal the
non-anthropomorphic, temporal powers of the Ruizean cinematic image.4
What might a ‘drowning swimmer’s dream’ look and feel like? It would
be a floating realm of images unmoored from the referential solidity of
representation, arranged in ‘knots and loopings’ of non-linear time itself. In
creating this realm Ruiz also invents for his film an ornamented allegorical
optic, which is nourished by the Klimtian ornament. Both Klimt and Ruiz are
engaged in ornamentation, understood not just as mere surface decoration
or supplement but, rather, as a force with the power to dematerialize solid
forms and thereby renew our perception and thought. Klimt’s ornamentation
works with an idea of the fragment as an aesthetic unit of composition
and perception. One could say the very same of Ruiz’s devotion, across his
oeuvre, to an idea of the ornament as a fragment and a conception of the
fragment itself as potentially containing further fragments, harbouring a
ceaseless capacity to simulate. The cinematograph yields unusual visions,

3 There is a discourse on ornament and pathology and ornament as a fragment in this film,
the implications of which I will take up in relation to the figure of Adolph Loos later on. For
the influence of the Vienna School of Medicine on Klimt’s Modernism see Polina Advolodkina,
‘Klimt, Modernism and Art’s Relationship with Medicine’. She demonstrates how Klimt departed
decisively from the representation of medicine in Western Art History and discusses the influence
of Freud and his theory of the unconscious and dream work on his Medicine.
4 The non-anthropomorphic eye of the camera is an idea of the Indian film-maker Kumar
Shahani. See my book The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani for an elaboration of this idea in
terms of his ‘Epic’ vision. This idea is allied to the notion of a non-anthropocentric eye of the
cinematograph, which has a cosmos-centric capability and power. Among the directors studied
in this book, it is Parajanov who explores this potential in the most imaginative and startling
ways. His fascination with the motif of the nautilus shell and stone, as well as the compositional
use of earth, wind, fire, and water as forces, are testament to this.
132  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

gestures, and movements, which are not at all anthropomorphic. A most

striking pivotal scene that dramatically embodies this allied cluster of
Ruizean ideas of allegory, fragmentation, and ornament is the one where
Klimt is seen standing in front of a large floor-to-ceiling mirror in the Café
Central. As the figure of a state official, the Secretary (who will reappear
repeatedly as an allegorical persona) approaches and calls his name, the
mirror shatters into fragments, shards. The shattering is not ‘motivated’ in
a sensory-motor type logic of actions and reactions. No one has broken the
mirror, rather the mirror itself shatters (as the Secretary calls out to him
and appears in the frame): it has agency, an allegorical agency. We are not
given a clear reason for its shattering. The fragments fall in jagged shapes,
in close-up, forming an ornamented, fractured surface in which we see
reflected a partial view of another of Klimt’s Faculty panels, Philosophy,
and the people at the Secession Exhibition of 1900 in Vienna. Meanwhile,
we also hear them talk about the broken mirror and the bad luck it presages
for the new century. The breaking is rhythmically repeated, highlighting its
artifice and importance. The ‘special effect’ of the shattering is rather more
cognitive than sensory, or perhaps both at once. Its cognitive dissonance is
as sharp as the shards shown in close-up. We are invited to read the scene,
the image in close-up, mark the moment of disjunction, the repetition,
announcing Klimt’s and Ruiz’s virtuosic allegorical powers of abstraction,
fragmentation, and ornamentation. The power of abstraction in this instance
is enabled by the cinematic close-up, which in magnifying details transforms
the object’s very form and function.5
Klimt is not a conventional biopic that recounts the life of the artist in
a chronological progression, though the social milieux of key locations of
Vienna around 1900 are sharply etched. The image often becomes dense,
allegorically mysterious, ornamented. It does not yield information. Rather,
it requires us to activate our ‘cognitive imagination’ as Henri Corbin might
say of a Sufi vision. Alternatively, as Ruiz reminds us in his theoretical text,
Poetics of Cinema, there are several levels of reading available in medieval
rhetoric – for example, literal, allegorical, ethical, anagogical6 – which is ap-
plicable to his images, as well. He suggests that one may create ‘anamorphic
agents’ (with oblique vision), who can play with these four levels of medieval

5 See Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the close-up and its powers of abstraction in Cinema 1: Movement
Image, Chapter 6. Deleuze develops further Eisenstein’s theory of the close-up in relation to his
own concept of the ‘Affection Image’. The close-up in this theory is a transformation of scale
(not simply bringing something close), and thereby imbued with metamorphic powers. In this
way it offers the paradox of the part being larger than the whole.
6 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 82.
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 133

rhetoric and jump from one level to another. The jump, it would appear, is
aesthetically active. There is a pedagogic aspect to the way allegory works in
Ruiz’s cinema. The film lures us to learn how to read it, which might be what
makes Ruiz’s allegory thoroughly contemporary, reflexive. Neither do the
images exhaust themselves by giving digestible information. The sequence
of the shattering mirror also includes a shot of Klimt on his deathbed, so
that one could make sense of it as his nightmare death vision, triggered by
the appearance of the Secretary, suggesting a form of state violence which
is elaborated on as the film progresses.
Besides the highly developed and spectacular allegorical scenes, such as
the above, there are also explicit, at times light-hearted, references to allegory
scattered across the film. At the art gallery, we hear a voice discussing
whether there is a difference between allegory and caricature, to which
Klimt replies, ‘There is none.’ When Klimt and the Minister of the State visit
the bordello with nationally themed rooms, they choose the African salon,
donning gorilla masks. Then we hear the drunken Minister saying, ‘We’ll
cook up some nice allegories!’ Allegory as a construct, a playful artifice, is
suggested here. Then again, when someone refers to a painting of Klimt’s as a
portrait, his brusque rejoinder is, ‘No! It’s not a portrait, it’s an allegory!’ The
intricate Art Nouveau ornamentation of some of his portraits, which obscures
the body with its fragmented, intricate organic forms, is also integrated with
the mineral force of the glistening gold leaf.7 We are shown, in close-up,
how Klimt carefully applies gold leaf to a painting. So it would seem that,
to Klimt, the organic body and face are entwined in a vegetal infinite as
well as being galvanized by the metallic mineral energy. During her visit to
Klimt’s studio, the body of his close friend Midi becomes the surface onto
which Art Nouveau ornament and gold leaf are projected, demonstrating
in a playful way the logic of Klimt’s unique allegorical portraiture. Klimt
himself, holding his cat, is filmed through a glass pane from above at an
oblique angle, playing with surface and perspective. When Midi exits the
studio, deliberately slamming the door despite Klimt’s warning, the gold

7 Stewart, ‘Filming Vienna 1900’, 118–144. This essay includes a detailed discussion of Art
Nouveau ornamentation in Klimt’s work and the vigorous debates on ornamentation more
generally in Vienna at the time. My emphasis, however, is on the link between Ruiz’s own practice
of ornamentation and that of Klimt, and in turn their link to pathic modes of perception. Through
this conjunction Ruiz is able to offer an understanding of ornamentation as something other
than pure surface decoration. Instead, he shows that it has an unconscious affective dimension,
which stimulates the psyche and our capacity to make lateral connections across thresholds
of perception. What we do with these connections depends on the quality of the powers of
attention we can mobilize and the care we might take in the act of writing itself.
134  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

leaf on the table flies into the air in fragments and particles. Instead of the
expected sensory-motor response of annoyance, we see Klimt’s instant
fascination with the golden rain and his attempt to capture a light particle
of energy. Interestingly, apart from a glimpse of the Faculty Paintings, Ruiz
does not show us any of the more famous paintings by Klimt, but rather his
mode of apprehending the world with which Ruiz himself has an affinity.
Ruiz spoke of two interrelated modes in which he responded to his images:
‘fascination’ and ‘detachment.’ Detachment is also a mode of engagement,
with an intense focus leading to understanding, whereas fascination lures
us into the image, rendering it dizzying or even vertiginous.8 Detachment
is not purely rational but, rather, leads to an exploration of processes that
create fascination. Perception of film, for Ruiz, is an energetic activity. It is
a combination of detachment and fascination leading to a sense of vertigo,
even, and to an understanding of this vertiginous process, and finally to
what he calls a ‘breathing in of the film’. I understand this complex process
as the undoing of the coordinates of subject–object relations and of the
primacy of the ego, as well as the opening up of the sensorium to register
rhythms and pulses in the image. As a temporal artist, Ruiz was able to
activate these in his films. It is rare to have a film-maker set out in such
detail the process of spectatorship activated by his own films, an allegori-
cal cinema. This chapter will demonstrate how the Ruizean ornament as
allegorical fragment connects with Klimt’s Art Nouveau ornament so as
to make visible micro-perceptions, or the infinitesimally small, in nature
and in human perception, and in the dynamics of the psyche as well. We
are in Freud’s Vienna, but within a contemporary aesthetic exploration of
the territory of the ‘optical unconscious’ that Klimt opened up for us over
one hundred years ago! Why these strategies matter now is also of interest
here beyond a purely aesthetic formalism. On seeing this film one feels
that reason reaches towards the non-rational in a manner which enhances
its amplitude. The subtitle of the film is A Viennese fantasy in the manner
of Schnitzler. Quite by chance, in this book, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and
Klimt are linked through the figure of Arthur Schnitzler, the Viennese
writer and doctor of medicine (he practised as a neurologist), and friend of
Freud, who inspired both films. As mentioned earlier, Eyes Wide Shut is in
fact based on Schnitzler’s Dream Novella. Schnitzler presented Viennese
social life and its unconscious dimensions from within, with acuity.9 Ruiz,

8 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 36–41.

9 See Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and
Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present. Kandel explores the impact of the Vienna School of
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 135

a foreigner, with Klimt’s mediation, takes us back to a place and a period

of decisive importance in world history, one that resulted in the tragedy of
the First World War in 1914 but also created much of value in the world of
science and medicine, art, music, and philosophy. And it is the conception
of the ornament as fragment shared by both Ruiz and Klimt that enables
crucial connections between that past and our present to be made.
The very first sequence of the film, showing Vienna in 1918, is set in a
clinic, one of the several major sites of urban modernity. Klimt’s friend Egon
Schiele is standing there, looking around with interest, when an attendant
brings a human skeleton mounted on wheels and proceeds to give a strange
mini-lecture to Schiele on its provenance. He is told that the skeleton is not
that of one person (as one might expect), but rather a composite, made of
skeletal remains and fragments of persons from several of the countries that
fought in the First World War. Each of the bones, we are told, belongs to a
different person from a different country in Europe! The skull, relative to the
rest of the skeleton, appears to be too large. But we are assured that it is not
a monster but a hybrid, and appears to be an allegorical emblem made up of
fragments; a grotesque human ‘map’ of a dying Austro-Hungarian empire
and its enemies, cut to the bone!10 ‘The head comes from the Russian front,
1915. The arms are Viennese, 1917. The hips are French. This leg is Rumanian
and that one is Serbian, 1916’. The First World War is thus presented in this
oblique and grotesquely ludic manner. The fragmentation and recombination
of the organic skeleton into a mechanical construct (ornamented, one
might say) is an allegorical conceit, an emblem (a combination of image

Medicine, by mapping out the links between Schnitzler, Freud, Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele,
in terms of the workings of the unconscious. As an eminent Austrian-American neurobiologist,
also trained in psychoanalysis, he has, in this book, focused on the links between art and the
functioning of the nervous system and the brain. He discusses how the hand is registered on
the brain and the mind as a powerful instrument of cognition. He says that the largest number
of neurons are recruited when the f ingers are visibly articulated and exaggerated, as in the
work of Klimt and Schiele, rather than when they are folded into the hand. He is interested in
what the viewer brings to art as well, the psychology of perception. The powers of abstraction
of the finger as digit, and also finger as an indexical sign, are among the many ideas that maybe
generated by thinking of the fingers.
10 Allegory as a process of fragmenting organic forms is made very clear here. See my essay,
‘Life is a Dream: Raul Ruiz was a Surrealist in Sydney – A Capillary Memory of a Cultural Event’
(161–178), in Towards Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis, for a detailed discussion
of allegory as a force of fragmentation. According to Walter Benjamin, in Baroque allegory the
ruin, the corpse, and the ghost are viewed as allegorical emblems. He remarks, ‘In the field of
allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune’. See Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, 176. In Klimt, skulls and skeletons also function as allegorical emblems as they do in
medieval and modern allegory. These are all images of declivity.
136  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

with text), directing us to a mode of apprehending the film, at first literally,

then allegorically and ethically. Egon Schiele to whom this mini lecture is
addressed then responds to the demonstration with, ‘For sure the one thing
where there is no shortage of are corpses’. Here, contemporary history is
presented through an allegorical emblem that could hardly be forgotten
amidst the wounded and the mutilated of the First World War. The ludic
sense and the spirit of the Grand-Guignol is further extended when Schiele,
walking down a corridor on his way to visit the dying Klimt, passes by a
room where a one-legged man is seen copulating with a woman, while
metrically counting, ‘One, two, one two…’ On seeing this, Schiele bursts
into a fit of hysterical giggling while the camera pans down to show the
man’s prosthetic leg flung on the floor next to a large smear of blood. This
scene is linked to the photograph of a man with an amputated leg shown
to us at the beginning of this opening sequence. The image is enlarged with
a magnifying glass and then stamped with a seal by an official. This dense
allegorical opening sequence clearly situates the film in Vienna, 1918, the
year the First World War ended, and evokes the mutilation suffered in and
by Europe during the war through this scene of mechanical copulation, the
discarded prosthetic limb, the smear of blood, the still photograph, and the
hybrid skeleton. Imagine if this scene was represented realistically, with
only the wounded soldiers alone without the grotesquely funny allegorical
component! I doubt a realist representation would be able to create and
connect the cluster of ideas the allegorical construct does. Allegory has
powers of abstraction that realist modes lack. The fragment also has powers
of abstraction as it can be recombined and reconfigured (as in the case of the
skeleton), with other elements of the narrative. This opening sequence ends
at Klimt’s bedside, where he lies unconscious, close to death, with his friend
Schiele beside him. After this deathbed scene the film goes back in time: we
see Klimt working in his studio in Vienna, 1900. The rest of the film follows
in an episodic manner, some scenes delineating the specific social milieu of
Vienna, and others, as though seen from within Klimt’s own optic, refracted
through a dying man’s fantasy vision mediated by the cinematograph as an
allegorical instrument, until we reach Klimt’s death in 1918, returning us
again to the hospital bed and continuing beyond death itself.
Several key social sites of fin-de-siècle Vienna are presented in the film.
The modern institution of the famous Viennese coffee house Café Central,
home to intellectual and artistic cliques, plays a prominent role. As Klimt
enters the space, the perimeter of the café spins like a carousel at a dizzying
pace, while the focal point – Klimt talking with a waiter – remains stable,
introducing us to key personalities representing competing aesthetic schools
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 137

in Vienna. When Adolf Loos sees Klimt at the Café Central, his opening salvo
is a challenge: ‘Ah, Herr Klimt! A modern ornamentalist! A real pathological
case. He never stops switching styles.’11 Klimt’s response is to rub his face with
a piece of cake, smearing it with icing sugar. This slapstick gesture of a ‘cream
pie in the face’ is performed in ‘slow motion’ (slowing the gesture, rather
than the camera, and showing it in close-up), with complete deliberation.
Surprisingly, Loos lends his face to the gesture instead of recoiling from it,
and as a result it becomes readable allegorically while remaining fascinating
even at the literal slapstick level. The piece of cake has a provenance! It is
a piece cut from a large cake made in the shape of a neoclassical building
beside the famous Ringstrasse that goes around the old city of Vienna.
That cake is itself one of many such wedding cakes made in the shape of
the major landmark neoclassical buildings of nineteenth-century Vienna,
which stand in a row and parodically demonstrated to us in a tracking shot.
These nostalgic neoclassical buildings and their ornamentation, and what
they stood for, was what Loos the modernist architect attacked in his lively
polemical essay Ornament and Crime.12 It is also the case that Klimt’s practice
of ornamentation is a modernist practice breaking with those neoclassical
traditions. What starts off as a verbal attack on Klimt and then a physical
counterattack on Loos becomes an allegorical demonstration of the impor-
tance of ornamentation and its intrinsic eroticism for Klimt. Even as Loos
attacks Klimt, he acknowledges the importance of the eroticism of Klimt’s
aesthetic, which he says is an essential attribute of art. Ornament and Crime
frames the two protagonists’ conflicting attitudes to ornamentation. But it
isn’t clear what exactly is pathological for Loos – the will to ornamentation,
the lack of a consistent style, or both. The same could also be said of Ruiz’s

11 Loos, Ornament and Crime. In this allegorically staged encounter between Loos and Klimt,
Ruiz demonstrates the libidinal investment involved in an artist’s passion for ornamentation.
This is most evident in the slowed-down gestures of Klimt cleaning Loos’s face with care, after
having smeared it with the iced cake. Loos yields to what is evidently an assault as though it
were a rather tender gesture. The gestures are performed in such a way that they are not simply
sensory-motor actions and reactions. Rather, the gestures call attention to themselves and in
their very anomaly, invite us to engage with them in an allegorical reading. This is the reflexivity
that seems to be essential to modern practices of allegory.
12 Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. This book provides a detailed history
of urban architecture of this period, including the polemics between the neotraditionalists and
modernists of the Secessionist movement led by Klimt. It also provides an intricate account of
how Vienna became a preeminent European city in medicine, art, art history, music, philosophy,
urban planning, education, women’s rights and much else. Schorske gives an account of the
numerous ways in which anti-Semitism persisted institutionally. All of this is framed within an
analysis of the wider competing political forces active at the time both in the Austro-Hungarian
empire and in Vienna itself.
138  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

own practice. This sequence yet again demonstrates emphatically how Ruiz
constructs his scenes allegorically, in a supple manner, continually shifting
tone, register, perspective, and meaning. As such, Ruiz’s modern allegory
also performs a vital pedagogical, cognitive function in the inflationary
simulacral image-scape of simulation we now inhabit. It trains us to calibrate
images within shifting perspectives and rhythms. As a result, the film is not
only about Klimt and his era but also, crucially, about us, and our time. With
his words, Loos also encapsulates humorously and cogently the psychic,
pathological dimension of the will to ornamentation and fragmentation,
which is quite different from pretty surface decoration, like icing on a cake.
Both Klimt and Ruiz are allied practitioners in that across their entire
oeuvre they follow no single consistent style. Klimt painted in a variety
of styles – academic painting, allegorical work, Art Nouveau ornament
and portraiture, and landscape paintings of trees and flowers. There is no
stylistic consistency either in Ruiz’s prolific corpus.
A group of Jewish patrons of Klimt and his friends (including Szerena
Lederer, who collected his work) are seen in the Café Central seated with
him. One of them wants to start a fight with an opponent but is restrained
by Lederer. Once the State rejects Klimt’s allegorical paintings, he turns to
Jewish industrialists and professionals (whose wives have an exceptional
rapport with him and his work), for patronage. They buy his work and
exhibit and defend it. While the rich Jews appear to be assimilated, the
anti-Semitism of Klimt’s sister and mother indicate the existence of an
undercurrent of racism. Klimt also fathers countless children with his
models, some of whom are Jews of a lower social standing. The Secretary
refers to Klimt as the ‘chosen among the chosen’, referring to his Jewish
patronage. Klimt’s syphilis also indicates how he participated in the ‘normal’
male sexual mores of Vienna where, according to Klimt’s doctor, half the
male population were infected with the disease. The transmission of the
disease among lower class women servicing bourgeois men is made explicit.
Notably, Klimt looks at his bacillus through a microscope in his doctor’s
laboratory and exclaims that it is ‘beautiful’, even as it is killing him and
infecting countless others. When asked, the doctor reassures Klimt that his
children run very little risk of inheriting syphilis. The pattern of the deadly
virus, its natural, infinitesimally small, and ‘ornamental’ molecular detail,
seen magnified under the microscope, is evidently what fascinates Klimt,
linking pathology yet again to ornamentation. It appears to be the case that
nature at its infinitesimal scale is the repository of a will to ornamentation.
This darker and yet seductive aspect of ornament as infinitely tiny fragment
is famously exemplified in Emile Galle’s Pasteur Goblet, 1893 (a crystal cup),
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 139

which was decorated with magnified details of the molecular structure

of the dangerous bacteria discovered by Louis Pasteur.13 Klimt’s doctor
adds a practical note, saying that the bacillus is not only beautiful but also
useful medically, an instance of form and function contained in the one
entity, as in modernist architecture! This fascination with the infinitesimal,
whether in nature or in human psychic forces, beneath the threshold of
conscious awareness, is what links Klimt and Ruiz in a profound way. It is
their deep conception of the ornament as particle of energy and its powers of
fragmentation (or de-composition of solid compositional forms), that creates
an affinity between these two artists across a century.14 Life and death and
the deadly are intermeshed here, as in the allegorical painting of Hygieia.
A recurrent figure, mentioned above, who accosts Klimt as an official
of the Austrian State (‘Secretary to the Consular Services of the Austrian
Embassy, Third Secretary’), is a person no one else in the film sees. He
seems to appear only to Klimt and the viewer. On two occasions, both his
close friend Midi and his doctor indicate that Klimt has been talking to
himself, when we in fact see Klimt talking to the Secretary. What are we

13 Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Here,

Gordon provides a fascinating account of the modernist genealogy of ornamentation in late
nineteenth-century Europe. She also discusses the widening of the repertoire of ornamental
traditions within nineteenth-century Europe, through the restoration of the Alhambra, with
its Islamic design, and the excavations of Pompeii. The other examples are the revival of the
Gothic tradition and also the Universal Exhibition in London, which revived craft practices and
decoration. It is from this event and attendant discussions that the Art Nouveau ornamentation
developed. Eloise Riegl’s collection and exhibition of Islamic carpets and textile designs, shown
at the Vienna Museum of the Decorative Arts, added to these rich traditions.
14 I think Klimt and Ruiz’s fascination with ornamentation as an essential component of
nature and biology at an infinitesimal scale implies that, for them, the aesthetic access to the
dynamism of these materials affects our modes of perception. They create an aesthetic awareness
or sensitivity at a molecular level. The sensations aroused through these processes activate a
visual function that undoes the normal perception of solid forms and their stable functions.
Here then, the putative ‘pathology of ornamentation’ may be understood not as decadence in a
moral sociological sense, but as ‘pathos’, an excess of sensation and feeling at a threshold below
sensory-motor perception. It is rather more akin to sub-cortical processes of awareness, allied
with unconscious operations of the mind, where familiar subject–object relations are set adrift
and solid forms dematerialized, opening the psyche to sense sensory dynamisms and fluctuation
of intensities difficult to capture in language. When Klimt’s contemporaries attacked his Faculty
Paintings for being decadent and ugly, what that implied was that he did not conform to the
tenets of good form, harmony, balance, and clarity of expression required of classical allegories.
His allegorical work was obscure and the European historical grand narrative of progressive
Enlightenment and the triumph of Reason were absent from his personifications of Philosophy,
Medicine, and Jurisprudence. See Simpson, ‘Viennese Art, Ugliness, and the Vienna School of
Art History: The Vicissitudes of Theory and Practice’.
140  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

to make of this figure? Played by Stephen Dillane with nuance, virtuosity,

and humour, he appears to be an allegorical persona, perhaps a figment of
Klimt’s imagination, linked to the social and political conditions of Austrian
life.15 To be more precise, he would appear to be not Klimt’s ‘double’ (id), but
rather his superego, an internalization of the all-powerful Austrian state,
his first patron. On one occasion, we even hear his voice speaking to Klimt
when he is not physically present, at a Jewish patron’s mansion. As such, we
can see that this mysterious figure is really a personification of the intricate
functions and operations of a bureaucratic state apparatus. The curious and
antagonistic relationship Klimt has with this internalized figure enables
Ruiz to track the deep hold on artistic autonomy exercised by the Austrian
state, which was his patron. What the Viennese State considered to be
Klimt’s grotesque and ‘decadent’ work, when shown in Paris at the Universal
Exposition of 1900, was celebrated and given the gold medal. The Secretary,
with his strange sense of humour, says that the French saw Klimt’s painting
as being ‘naughty.’ This allegorical figure of the Secretary seems to shadow
Klimt all the way through the film, even in the most private moments. At
one point, in a darker mood, he even refers to himself as Klimt’s ‘shadow.’
A bust of a black sculpture is visible at certain times when the Secretary
appears, indicating the allegorical nature of the encounter between Klimt
and this mysterious figure. This very same piece of sculpture also appears
in Klimt’s studio. It seems, quite bluntly and quite literally, to code certain
scenes as allegorical. Its sporadic appearances prompt one to scan the
image in a detached manner while also being fascinated by the scene at
the same time. Yet again, the simultaneous interplay between detachment
and fascination makes the allegorical scene readable aesthetically. The
literal reading, as Ruiz reminds us, is only one of several ways of reading
an allegorical configuration.

John Malkovich as a Mannerist Klimt

Mannerism in acting has had bad press and Malkovich’s performance as

Klimt has been criticized for being overly mannered. Malkovich himself
has the reputation of being a mannered actor. However, if one assumes,

15 Ruiz has spoken of the importance for allegorical figures to appear to behave and act in as
‘natural’ a manner as possible. They must not appear simply as abstractions like ‘Every Man’
in, say, medieval allegory. They must appear to belong to the social world of the film however
idiosyncratic they may seem. I believe this to be a singular contribution to acting in film.
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 141

as I do, that mannerism in acting may take many forms, just as codes of
realism or expressionism in acting does, then one can consider Malkovich’s
performance in a more favourable and receptive spirit. The criticism of
the film as being too obscure or downright bad has also been put down
to Malkovich’s performance, as a case of bad acting. The widely different
accents in which English is spoken has likewise been criticized as an instance
of bad acting and bad directing. Alternatively, we could view this diversity as
the reality of the European Union, where English is now the lingua franca.
The film doesn’t attempt to standardize pronunciation. This is an aesthetic
and political decision, making the film very contemporary. It is noteworthy
that Malkovich accepted the role of Klimt precisely because it was not to be
a realist biopic of the artist and also because he enjoyed a rapport with Ruiz,
with whom he had previously worked on Time Regained. The latter film, in
a similar fashion to Klimt, was about Proust but not a biopic, rather a study
of his milieux as seen through a Proustian conception of time and memory.
One of the most immediately striking aspects of Malkovich’s performance
in Klimt is the generally slow speed of his speech. He appears to be acting
in ‘slow motion’, to cite an Eisensteinian idea, which we also see in Nicole
Kidman’s performance in Eyes Wide Shut (discussed in Chapter Three).
Klimt often appears to listen and wait for a beat before he responds. This
is not how sensory-motor-governed dialogue works in the steady, punctual,
‘to and fro’ rhythm familiar in much of cinema. In addition, his intonation
surprises each time as a certain inflection is unexpected. His words don’t
run into each other because they are paced. None of these qualities are
overly emphatic; rather, they make the listener unwind a little in time,
become somewhat relaxed, detached, and attentive in the midst of images
that are at times dizzying in their speed, fragmentation, and allegorical
complexity. While he uses the English vernacular – ‘Shit!’ and ‘Fuck!’ for
example – to swear at critics, theorists, and the state, his everyday speech
with friends and the models is even, quiet, and slow. His exchanges with
Midi have a marvellous tenderness, intimacy, and a lightness of tone that
suggests long-time friendship and shared work, yet maintains the pauses
and pacing. One might even say that he invents a slow, mannerist mode
of acting in the way that, say, Jean-Marie Straub and Daniel Huillet cre-
ated a ‘Brechtian’ mode of acting or Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced a
melodramatic-Brechtian mode of acting, or Louise Brooks’ created acting as
dance, or Nicole Kidman created acting in slow motion in Eyes Wide Shut. All
of these examples point to the rich experimentation in acting presented in
European Art Cinema, over a whole century. In Klimt, the pauses between
words combined with a slow delivery create a sense of a kind of detachment
142  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

because the response is not immediate. The texture of the voice, its register,
pitch, and accent on words is minutely varied according to context. This
aspect of Klimt’s speech appears to be mannered, unique in its artifice,
slightly unpredictable and in this way fascinating. The twofold dynamic of
fascination and detachment in Klimt as embodied by Malkovich (which is
also perceptible in the construction of the images, as I have argued), may
be described as a form of mannerist fragmentation and ornamentation of
speech itself, done with a quiet deliberation.
Klimt’s conversation with his mother and his sister, in the scene at their
lunch table, brings out some of these qualities. Klimt responds to their
pathological hysteria with an engaged detachment. Klimt appears progres-
sive, in comparison to his mother and sister’s overt anti-Semitism. But
the perspective shifts immediately when the mother asks him how many
children he has fathered. Klimt responds urbanely that the models are free,
which is not the case in the highly stratified and almost semi-feudal ethos
of Viennese sexual politics in class relations. Klimt’s mother’s sardonic
response – ‘Free! Evidently!’ – shifts the power dynamic, exposing Klimt’s
casual exploitation of the models. We, in turn, become detached from Klimt
at this moment, but become fascinated by the shift of perspective in the
way the otherwise thoroughly unappealing woman speaks to the truth of
gender and class politics in Vienna. Klimt’s mannerist inflection of speech
enables a subtle shift of perspective within the one scene. He sounds reason-
able and in control, yet is ethically compromised. The various dynamics of
fascination and detachment are in counterpoint. Similarly, Klimt’s facial
expression does not always mirror the emotional temperature of a scene, as
in his numerous interactions with the Secretary. These mannerist devices
stimulate our cognitive imagination and our ethico-aesthetic sensibility,
and have a bearing on our decisions in calibrating images and sounds.

Colonial Relations: ‘Cannibals’ in Paris, 1900

Klimt visits Paris for the Universal Exposition of 1900, where his work
is celebrated. Two novel ‘attractions’ are on display at the Expo: the cin-
ematograph, projecting (among other things) moving horses, and a group of
South American Indigenous people, perhaps Chilean, exhibited in a cage as
‘Cannibals’. A guard, like a fair barker, warns the visitors not to get too close
to the cage or to touch them. Klimt enters the building, dressed formally in
a top hat, and is drawn by the human exhibit as he moves to observe them
closely. A reverse shot from within the cage shows us the visitors looking
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 143

on at this ‘ethnic curiosity’. This sequence is a remarkable one, situating

Europe itself, with its most advanced technology (electricity) alongside
its ‘savage’ colonial history. The men and women in the cage simply look
on, and it would appear that two among them observe Klimt calmly while
he moves closer to the cage, open-mouthed with mounting curiosity and
apparent fascination.

Ethnic Relations: The Chinese in Vienna, Around 1900

Klimt visits one of his models, Mitzi, with whom he has had two children,
in a shabby apartment block. He is there to give money and look at his
newborn daughter. While there he decides, capriciously, not to look at
the baby. It is clear that the model is Jewish as there is a discussion about
educating the children in the Jewish faith, according to her father’s wishes.
She asks Klimt’s permission, which he says is quite unnecessary as he is an
atheist. There is a clear deference in her behaviour towards Klimt in terms
of social class, religion, and perhaps even ethnicity. Interestingly, when her
son Gustav – named after his father – plays with two Chinese boys outside
the apartment block, Mitzi runs down and slaps one of the Chinese boys
and her son for playing together. The conversation that ensues between
Klimt and Mitzi maps the intricacy of inter-racial relations in multinational,
multiethnic and multilingual Austria with regard to the racialized ‘other’.
Mitzi says that she doesn’t want her son playing with the neighbouring
children because she doesn’t know where they are from; Klimt suggests
the obvious: ‘China!’ She then asks, ‘Why are they here, why didn’t they
stay in China?’ Klimt replies that they are not the only people to have left
their country of origin. Through this interaction, the scene clearly resonates
with twenty-first-century Austrian xenophobia, as well as with the memory
of the emancipation of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1867. Of
course, Ruiz himself was an exile in Europe, having fled from Pinochet’s
Chilean regime in the 1970s.
The next scene is among the most intriguing sequences in a film brimming
with them. It continues the inter-ethnic theme on an altogether different
register. Klimt goes down from the apartment to find the two boys who
played with his son crying, whereupon a young Chinese man (who appears
to know him as an artist) comes up to him and invites him to see something
in his apartment. The interior of the apartment is large and shabby, home
to eight people, immigrants. A woman fries something in a wok, which
sizzles (a memorable sound), and several people are lying down in beds. All
144  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

these details make the scene quite memorable in a sociological sense and
a great contrast to the magnificent apartment of Klimt’s Jewish patrons,
the Lederers’, for example. Klimt is taken to a room where he is shown
several ink paintings by a Chinese artist. The young man wakes up the
artist, an older man, and asks him to paint for Klimt, hoping that he might
want to buy some. What unfolds is a delicate scene of the artist painting
an abstract calligraphic design, in black ink, with the lightest touch of the
brush, ink, and water, which has Klimt utterly engaged in following the
foreign, unfamiliar process. As the artist paints we hear Chinese music
and the sound of lapping water. The sequence ends with a child joining
in and the painter holding the hand of the child so that both their hands
now hold the paintbrush. This scene has a lasting impact on Klimt, who
subsequently discusses Chinese art with his friend Schiele in Café Central.
Schiele, looking at some prints, observes that Chinese art has no perspective,
and Klimt responds by saying that he thinks it has several, depending on
the brush strokes. Here one might say that Ruiz is commenting on his own
practice of creating multiple perspectives on scenes, ranging through literal,
allegorical, ethical, and anagogical modes, depending on how one looks. The
two artists each draw delicate pencil lines, adding to each other’s previous
marks producing together an image of two people, perhaps of themselves as
friends. Once again, the sound of lapping water and Chinese music makes
the link between the two scenes and helps us to see the embryonic work
of the artists emerging out of seemingly nothing, with just a brush, some
ink, and a pencil on white paper. In a film full of magnificent, memorable
images, these two delicate images show us the artists at work in a unique
manner. Painting and drawing replenish film and our perception of it.
Those processes make us aware of the fragility and delicacy of the film
image, too, despite being weighed down and bloated by the power of capital.
Klimt is shown to be open to experiences of people outside of Europe, as in
the case of the indigenous people classified as ‘cannibals’ and the Chinese
painter living in the margins of Viennese society. Klimt had an interest in
East Asian art. Perhaps there are also contemporary political lessons to be
found in these scenes, in what several scholars (including Elsaesser) have
referred to as ‘Fortress Europe’. The hostile European response to the arrival
of refugees from the Third and Fourth Worlds (some from former colonies
of Europe) may be viewed in this light by telescoping the optic of these
singular scenes with media images of the fraught contemporary situation
of refugees in Europe.
The rarefied atmosphere of heated philosophical and aesthetic debates
conducted in Café Central, even leading to physical scuffles about art, music,
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 145

philosophy, and the nature of history, is punctured by a tramp-like figure

bringing news of the battlefield of the First World War. While the lights
dim, this figure, carrying a dog in a backpack and holding a newspaper, like
a paper boy, calls out ‘Bad news from the front!’ and then calls to Schiele
repeatedly, in an eerie manner which causes this vulnerable and highly
strung artist to run out barking in fear. While the waiters try to get the boy
out and restore order, this deranged man, seemingly a persona out of some
theatrical pantomime, offers the first tangible sense within the fashionable
‘carousel’ of Café Central itself that there is, in fact, a World War raging in
Europe, started by Austro-Hungary and its allies. Meanwhile, some of the
intelligentsia and artists merely continue their exquisite conversations,
debates, and quarrels, oblivious to the fact that their world is about to be
dramatically extinguished.

Allegory of Film-Making

A rather large part of the film is occupied with Klimt’s infatuation with, first,
the filmed image of the Parisian dancer, Lea de Castro, shot by Méliès. Ruiz’s
conceit is that Georges Méliès has made both a documentary of the World
Exhibition award ceremony, featuring Klimt receiving the gold medal for his
painting Philosophy, and a staged ‘actuality’ of the very same event, using
an actor to stand in for Klimt. The documentary, the staged ‘actuality’, and
Lea de Castro’s seductive oriental dance are projected to an elite audience,
including Klimt, who is mesmerized by the cinematic images. The projector
is as much an object of curiosity as the films being projected because the
cinematic apparatus is still a new technological marvel. After the screening,
Klimt is introduced to Méliès, Lea de Castro, and the actor who plays Klimt
himself. The distinction between the original Klimt and his copy, the actor,
is clear and stable. But the different Leas appear to be multiple. We are told
that there is a true Lea and a false one. Klimt’s infatuation and obsession
with Lea’s film image is used by Ruiz to explore the ontology of the cinematic
image as a simulacrum produced by processes of simulation – that is to say,
an image where the distinction between image and reality or the original
and the copy, the real and the false, become blurred and indistinguishable.
There appear to be not just two but multiple Lea De Castros, all elusive,
and when Méliès ‘magically’ projects a trick effect of a silhouette of her,
a mere colourless shadow, Klimt’s obsession and rapture seems to reach a
peak. The multiplication of the various actual Leas appears to be a trick
staged by a Duke – very much like the prototype of a film director – who
146  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

stages, observes, and comments on Klimt’s behaviour and his appearance

clinically, as Klimt is seduced by a naked Lea in a luxurious room. The Duke
stage-manages the scenes of seduction and controls them while seated
behind a two-way, concealed mirror – thus looking through an optical
instrument as well. The Leas tease and play with Klimt’s heady emotions,
puncturing them with their playfully seductive commentary about his
feelings, an allegorical device. It is not only Klimt but we, the viewers, who
are unable to differentiate between the several Leas within an economy
of simulation of the cinematic image, despite seeing the mechanics of its
production. The Duke’s interest seems to be in creating several ‘erotic scenes’
to trap the susceptible Klimt. It is as though the entirety of his cinema
consists of a soft-core pornographic scenario, manufacturing variation after
variation on the one scene of seduction – to the point of tedium, boredom,
and disenchantment on the part of both the Duke and us as viewers, too.
It is quite rare to see cinematic ‘love scenes’ allegorically dissected in quite
this manner (though Godard has done something similar in say A Married
Woman), with the naked Leas in such magnificent control of movement,
gesture, language, feeling, and laughter. The unusual gender reversal makes
the love scenes playful and humorous for the female characters up to a point,
while Klimt becomes besotted. However, towards the end when a serious
looking Lea appears to perform the set erotic scenes interminably, the
playfulness is drained out of them and a stale air of mechanical repetition
and libidinal exhaustion permeates the scene.

Klimt and the Women of Vienna16

While Klimt’s most famous portraits were of bourgeois and haute bourgeois
women of Vienna, his nude drawings were of naked models from the working
class. Jewish women played a large role in these works. While his portraits
were few in number, he made a very large collection of drawings of the
nude models. Earlier, I discussed Klimt’s mother’s criticism of Klimt on the
sociopolitical aspects of his exploitative interaction with his models and his
fathering numerous children. Here, I want to discuss the physical presence
of the models in Klimt’s studio as a form of labour, and the manner in which
they are presented to us by Ruiz. At first, we see the models swinging from
cloth trapezes hanging from the ceiling. Klimt observes them obliquely
through their reflection in a trough of water, which he stirs with a stick. Then

16 See Lloyd, ‘The Viennese Woman, Community of Strength’, 16–31.

ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 147

he looks at them through a glass pane on which he pours a viscous liquid.

In this way, he dematerializes the materiality of the solid naked bodies,
which is his point of interest in this introductory scene, an indication of
his exploration of disturbance in the visual field. The models themselves
are matter of fact about their work; though naked, they move around and
sit as if they were clothed, confident and at ease with their physicality. In
a scene when Szerena Lederer, his patron, visits Klimt’s studio and sees
all the models gathered in the kitchen naked, she says, ‘They seem quite
terrifyingly naked!’ Klimt responds with, ‘Sometimes.’ This feels like an
important comment despite Klimt’s exploitation of the models sexually.
We can imagine why it might be so. The naked models here contrast with
the naked Leas, who are light-hearted and seductive, play-acting, while the
models’ work does not entail acting or impersonating. They simply appear
as themselves, working, assured, despite their lower-class status, in a highly
stratified society. In both cases, the women, whether actors or models,
whether clothed or naked, occupy space with poise and confidence, while
in the scene with Lea de Castro, Klimt is at his most emotionally vulnerable,
a twist on the sexual politics of much studio film-making.
There is another interesting shot, this time viewed from the perspective of
the naked models in Klimt’s studio. Midi has also joined Klimt, and Szerena
Lederer. As they chat, four naked models are shown in the kitchen, relaxing
from work. Two of the models flick through a magazine and chat while two
others, leaning on a door frame exchange amused glances with each other as
they observe, in long-shot, the upper bourgeois women and Klimt exchanging
pleasantries. Klimt’s guests are unaware of their presence; the models seem
invisible to them. This shot from the models’ point of view, while lightly
handled, shows the class relations between the women in sharp relief. This
scene may be viewed as an example of the shifting perspectives on a scene,
and of Ruiz’s ability to condense in one striking image an aspect of Klimt’s
social world and of his own relationship to women in Vienna around 1900.17
Many art historians have discussed Klimt as a painter of women, especially
in his celebrated portraits of the middle and upper-class women of Vienna
who supported him as patrons after he abandoned state patronage. Szerena
Lederer and Berta Zuckerkandl were Jewish women who conducted famous
salons in their apartments, attended by leading public figures from the

17 Another most striking image of Klimt’s powers of condensation of a milieu is that of two
modernist chairs shot from a high angle, seen at the Secession Exhibition of 1900. Instead of
showing the modernist Secession building, the black and white checked seats of the two chairs
stand in for the white cube and grid.
148  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

world of science, medicine, and the arts. Klimt participated in these salons,
he met Rodin at the Zuckerkandl’s. Berta Zuckerkandl and Emilie Floege,
who Klimt fondly calls Midi, are professional women. The former was a
journalist and a leading intellectual who supported the Vienna Secession
against attacks, and Klimt in particular. Floege was Klimt’s lifelong friend,
companion, and confidant, and a successful business woman. She was a
fashion designer who ran a high-end boutique and shared with Klimt an
interest in exotic textiles, costumes, and jewellery. There are photographs
of Midi and Klimt wearing kaftans she designed. Floege designed clothes
for comfort and elegance, contributing to the dress reform movement in
modernizing women’s dress. Ruiz pays tribute to their unusual modern
friendship by showing Klimt and Floege together in a large number of scenes
in the film. In one scene we see them dressed up in flowing costumes,
playing around like high-spirited children, while a photographer is seen in
the background, ready for a photography session. Yet another such scene
has Klimt and Midi visit the Lederer palatial mansion in the presence of
a curator, who appears to be a Klimt specialist! As Szerena and her portly,
immensely rich husband move to their private gallery for a viewing of their
extensive collection of Klimt paintings, we hear a pompous lecture being
given by the curator in an upper-class English accent. Klimt and Floege,
staying behind in the living room, crack up in laughter, like children, on
hearing the curator’s silly commentary.

The Little Girls in White18

Klimt meets a little girl in white called Sylvia at the Paris Exposition. She
is behind a screen and tells him she is hiding; she asks him to be silent as
we hear a voice calling out to her. And then she says to him, ‘I want to get
lost, just like you.’ A slightly older little girl, also in white, who introduces
herself as Sophia, appears in the penultimate scene in Klimt’s studio, where
a light snow starts falling indoors. It is an explicitly allegorical scene; the
cat on the floor appears to be a dummy. It’s a posthumous image, a formal
scene. Midi, Lea de Castro, and the Secretary appear at the three doors to

18 See Rios, ‘Childhood and Play in the Films of Raúl Ruiz’, 29–48. The figure of the child in
Ruiz’s cinema is not a naturalist child. The child is a figure that enables a movement between
different worlds – a mediator, as in the case of Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates. Usually,
a boy has performed this function in Ruiz’s cinema. Here, this function is performed by two
little girls in white, allegorical figures who instruct Klimt what to do and guide him to move
from one world to another.
ORNAMENTATION AND PATHOLOGY: R AÚL RUIZ’S KLIMT (2006) 149

the room, to bid Klimt adieu. Sophia carries a glass of water and leads Klimt
ceremonially out of the room. In the final scene after Klimt’s death we see a
frontal mirror tableau of the nurse, and Schiele, with Klimt and the little girl
holding the glass superimposed onto the shot. She hands the glass to Klimt,
who drinks from it. The final shot is a close-up of Klimt alone, reciting the
poem in voice-over (discussed at the beginning of this chapter), as petals
cascade down on him. This glass of water, half full, has appeared before,
placed prominently on a hospital table across Klimt’s bed when first we see
him. Its presence is anomalous as Klimt is in a coma. The motif of the glass
of water appears across the film. Klimt pours water into a glass twice, but
instead of using the glass he drinks directly from the bottle. The action is
thereby registered. This is just one striking example of how motifs appear
without explanation and remain anomalous, unexplained, and therefore not
forgotten. Similarly, the presence of the two little girls is mysterious. Sophia
says ‘Poor Klimt! He’s lost,’ and leads him out of the room. They appear to be
allegorical figures who bridge incommensurable worlds. Because the film
operates at an allegorical level and is also a dying man’s vision, one is not
disturbed at not being able to understand these images. Not everything is
explained or explainable within the film’s economy. The image retains a
sense of mystery: it is not jarring but, rather, anomalous, and we accept its
expansiveness as such.
These last two scenes are constructed as explicit allegories. The three
doors leading out from Klimt’s studio mark a threshold. And yet the very
room itself appears as a threshold where the distinction between the inside
and the outside dissolves. The softly falling snow within the room ornaments
the space, creating a veil over our field of vision. Veiled perception interested
Ruiz in his engagement with the arts of Islam, where it has a metaphysical
function.19 The solidity of the space is modified by the texture of the falling
snow. Klimt asks his friend, who has come to bid him goodbye, ‘Midi, what
time is it?’ in the softest of tones, and her reply – ‘Too late, I’m sure’ – does not
refer to clock time but to an existential condition, on death’s threshold. Like
the powdery soft white snow, the many coloured flower petals that rain on
Klimt as he stands reciting the poem to the cinematograph, ornament vision.
This veiling of vision with softly falling snow and petals filters cinematic

19 Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 62–63. See Chapters 4, ‘The Photographic Unconscious’ and
Chapter 5, ‘For a Sharmanic Cinema’, for a cluster of cosmogenic ideas of spirituality developed by
Islamic philosopher-theologians, which Ruiz transposes into his own unique mode of imagining
the film image. Some of these Islamic ideas are expressed in elaborate allegories, which must
have appealed to Ruiz.
150  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

sensations, nuancing them, a singular feature of Ruizean ornamentation

in these two final scenes.
The stream of images wrested from the ‘rustling river of Mnemosyne’
by the ‘crystalline purity’ of the lens, their fecundity, their intricately or-
namented, fragmented composition, refracted through Klimt’s deathbed
delirious vision and Ruiz’s own powers of allegorical invention, make the
exploration of this film a joyful challenge. I feel that this can go on intermi-
nably, because of the seemingly ‘infinite polysemia’ of the images. After all,
we are in Freud’s Vienna with Schnitzler as guide! Here, I have attempted
to respond to just some of the film’s multidimensional perspectives that
appeal to me, though they seem to me to be very near inexhaustible. This
aspect of film is what I have, in this book, called the spirit of the gift.

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Accessed 20 March 2020.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne,
London: Verso, 1998.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement- Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Gordon, Rae Beth. Ornament Fantasy and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French
Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Jayamanne, Laleen. ‘Raoul Ruiz.’ Agenda 30–31, May 1993, pp. 3–6.
Jayamanne, Laleen. ‘Life is a Dream: Raul Ruiz was a Surrealist in Sydney—A
Capillary Memory of a Cultural Event.’ In Towards Cinema and Its Double:
Cross-Cultural Mimesis. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 161–178.
Jayamanne, Laleen. The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2015.
Kandel, Eric R. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art,
Mind, and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present. Random House: New York, 2012.
Lloyd, Jill. ‘The Viennese Woman, Community of Strength.’ Klimt and the Women
of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900‒1918, edited by Tobias G. Natter, Munich, London,
and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2016, pp. 16–31.
Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime, London: Penguin Books, 2019.
Martin, Adrian. ‘The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz.’ Cinema Papers, 93, January 1993,
pp. 61–63.
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Rios, de los, Valeria. ‘Childhood and Play in the Films of Raúl Ruiz.’ Raúl Ruiz’s
Cinema of Inquiry, edited by Ignacio Lopez-Vicuna and Andreea Marinescu.
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Simpson, Kathryn. ‘Viennese Art, Ugliness, and the Vienna School of Art His-
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2017, pp. 118–144.

Filmography

Klimt (2016). 131 minutes. Colour.

Production: Epo Films, Vienna
Director: Raul Ruiz
Script: Raúl Ruiz and Gilbert Adair
Cinematography: Ricardo Aronovich
Art Design: Rudi Czettel, Katharina Wopperman, Birgit Hutter
Editing: Valeria Sarmiento
Sound Direction: Michael Spencer
Music: Jorge Arriagada
Main Cast: John Malkovitch, Veronica Ferres, Stephen Dillane, Saffron Burrows,
Nikolai Kinsky, Aglaia Szyszkovitz, Sandra Ceccarelli

Klimt, Raúl Ruiz. United Kingdom: Soda Pictures. DVD 2007.

 Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy

Directing films, writing about film in a speculative and ludic spirit, and
teaching film-making were all part of a most unusual composite aesthetic
practice for Raul Ruiz. Film, in some rather rare instances (as in Louise
Brooks’s Lulu), has eluded capture by commerce even as it is an essential
part of its life. The directors studied in this book have been animated by a
singular belief in film as a form of life, a non-organic life. As such, financial
profit, while desirable and essential to all but Parajanov, has never been the
primary driving force in these directors’ exploration of the medium’s vitality.
These directors have widened the expressive powers of film and the variety
of forms available to cinema and thereby deepened our understanding of
what is thinkable as film and with film.
Ruiz as pedagogue was the most articulate on this approach to film-
making. Alejandra Rodriguez-Remedi provides a detailed account of Ruiz’s
long practice as a teacher in several continents, from 1969 at the Film Institute
of the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, to the University of
Aberdeen in Scotland between 2007 and 2009.1 Ruiz said that he was able
to work on more commercial, big-budget films on the condition that he had
spent time making films without commercial constraints. He wanted to
have the time to experiment as well as have time for trial and error. Ruiz
used his teaching as a way to experiment with film in collaboration with
his students. Adrian Martin has also provided us with a detailed account
of Ruiz’s unusual pedagogic practice of combining freedom with a certain
rigour, by examining the compilation film (edited by Ruiz’s wife, Valeria
Sarmiento), documenting a workshop he conducted in Chile in 1990.2 The
great Soviet film-makers also had similar unique pedagogical visions (in their
theory and practice), as I have touched on in Chapter Two on the cinema
of Parajanov. Film, for Ruiz especially, was a medium to be explored with a

1 Lopez-Vicuna, ‘Speculative Bricoleur: Pedagogical and Televisual Ruptures’, 56–68.

2 Martin, ‘Do, and Teach: The Workshop Films of Raúl Ruiz’ http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/
do-and-teach-the-workshop-films-of-raul-ruiz. Accessed 5 January 2020.

Jayamanne, L., Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick,
and Ruiz. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
doi 10.5117/9789463726245_after
154  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

curious mind. He shuttled between the experimental workshop exercises

and films and the commercial big-budget modes of film-making with agility
and great conviction.
Here, in conclusion, I briefly touch on Raul Ruiz’s philosophy of film
pedagogy, his poetics, formulated with humour, over a lifetime. This is
because his conception of film pedagogy as a poetic enterprise is something
that I, too, fervently believe in now. I have consciously come to realize this
only rather late in life, looking back at my teaching practice as a septuage-
narian film scholar, I have felt my brain sprout (i.e. multiply connections,
often nerve-wracking) when giving certain lectures, especially the ones on
Chaplin and Klimt. This zone, accessed through one’s cognitive imagination,
is, at times, fraught with danger, though joy is not unknown. It is dangerous
because, in seeking an oblique mode of address as refrain, one has to abandon
the comfort of some of the familiar and habitual and necessary coordinates
and bag of tricks of a ‘well-made’ lecture. One might call this the commerce
of the lecture mode for which one is paid by the university. One is not hired
to deliver poetic lectures, though students might enjoy such a mode if they
can glimpse and sense it, sometimes, sometimes. But, uniquely among
film-makers, Ruiz has formulated an idiosyncratic philosophical vernacular.
He has developed this precarious and joyous work in some detail in and
through his own teaching practice, also glimpsed through his numerous
interviews (largely in Spanish), and implied in his two volumes on the
Poetics of Cinema. He is also one of the rare Western film-makers who has
drawn theoretical ideas for film from a dizzying variety of sources, including
Islamic and Chinese aesthetic and philosophical traditions.

Mimetic Play, or ‘Serio Ludere’

In this intellectual zone of play, the presentation of contextual information,

historical coordinates, and the shape of an idea or concept are all delivered,
but there is another imperative (spurred by Ruiz) to stir the imagination,
the cognitive imaginations of the students and mine, too. This faculty,
often dormant, remains so when analytic reason suppresses the affective
dimension of learning, especially of film. Film is a poetic object (as Ruiz
has shown us), and it is also a non-organic life form (as Deleuze has shown
us), replete with sensory, affective energy, creating cinematic emotions.
Film trains us to learn how to sense the infinitesimal, perceive a-signifying
particles and register a nebular of impulses, the creation of a subtle body.
The requisite noetic function of education is richly lined with these forces
Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy 155

and more. It’s a matter of creating intervals between elements, creating

modulations of voice, playing with silence, showing a clip, and giving it the
time to come to life. The clip then breathes, creating a field of attention or
awareness that values oblique (non-focalized) modes of perception of sound
and image, creating a generous atmosphere and an ethos in the classroom
that resists pedagogy as that bliss-less site of neoliberal calibration and
capture of the modulatory dynamism of the brain and the central nervous
system. I try not to predigest every bit of information (in teaching and in
this book, for instance), but instead to lure the senses – those of the reader,
but my own first and foremost – to be curious, baffled, even, by enigmatic
images and sounds replete with polysemia.
In my view, it would be essential, at this moment in the history of peda-
gogy, to minimize with whatever strategies the sensory overload that the
PowerPoint seems to encourage, even mandate, although, as a tool, it can be
put to another more minimalist, calibrated, sensory, and noetic uses. Here,
I am guided by Jean-Luc Godard’s Dziga Vertov films or the Blackboard
Films, as they were known: British Sounds (1969), Pravda (1969), Wind from
the East (1970), Vladimir and Rosa (1971), and Letter to Jane (1972) come to
mind. His montage created relays between the senses, between sound and
image, and played with the idea of sensory overload. They were explicitly
pedagogical films; they were nothing if not teacherly. From our present
digital technological perspective, those celluloid, analogical, radical films
would perhaps sound and feel like rather relaxed explorations of sound-
image montage, rather than the shocking, annoying and/or exhilarating,
frenetic bombardment they created in the 1960s and 1970s.
I will conclude with two exercises from my own teaching practice, which
aspired to do something more than simply impart centralized information.
When studying Chaplin, for example, even as we convulse in laughter,
it becomes abundantly clear that he trains us to perceive in a mimetic
mode. He becomes our mentor and we have to learn on the run, from his
gestures, rhythmic movements, varied repetitions, and the way he plays
with objects and even people as objects. The idea of mimesis, with its thick
bio-anthropological conceptual and performative history, is provided and
along with that, in this first exercise, I ask students to speak to older relatives
or friends to find out if they remember seeing Chaplin. This leads, in some
cases, to cross-generational stories from far away and long-ago places: Ceylon,
Sarajevo, Hong Kong… I also ask students to observe children, perhaps their
siblings, at play with objects to see how they interact with them, transform
them, with the awareness that the idea of the toy or toying (playing), has
changed fundamentally in the twenty-first century, with the advent of
156  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

electronic devices. I also ask them to show a Chaplin film to children to

see how they react. I told them of a Cuban film about children in a remote
village watching their very first film, Chaplin’s Modern Times, and their
look of wonder and terror at the violent feeding-machine scene.3 For, once
upon a time, Walter Benjamin thought that childhood play was the vital
living repository of mimetic behaviour. Through these practical induce-
ments to widen their awareness and powers of observation to make lateral
connections, the students tended to respond in a lively way and begin to
grasp with an immediacy (in their bodies and through their impulses rather
than through the rational cognition of their brains alone) how, according to
Benjamin, ‘mimesis is a compulsion to become and behave like something
else’ and that children play at being not only school teacher and grocer but
also windmill and train. 4
This second exercise was my own practice. When lecturing on Ruiz’s Klimt,
I gave each student a copy of the poem, the ‘Ode to the Cinematograph’ (as
I called it), recited as a voice-over by Klimt/Malkovich, with which the film
ends. In fact, I began Chapter Four on Klimt with an analysis of this poem. At
first, I became obsessed with it and imagined that it was a less well-known
poem by a minor Romantic poet. Then again, I thought that Ruiz might
have written it with the help of Gilbert Adair, who had translated the script
into English. For some reason, I felt compelled to learn the poem by heart,
which I did with some difficulty, reciting it each morning – something I
hadn’t done since my schooldays. I recited it slowly at different moments
of my lecture. It is only now, writing this, in the depths of my retirement,
that I am asking myself why I did that. The repetition of the poem was
important. It felt right. The points at which it interrupted the lecture were
not predetermined – it was a question of timing and feeling. That it was
learnt by heart was also important; it imparted the requisite tension, as I
could forget some of it at any time and my one rule was not to look at the
text. I realized that it was a wacky thing to do in a lecture, but no one walked
out (after all, it was the very first lecture in my Memory of the World: Key
Films course). I felt that students were attentive, one can sense it even in a
large lecture theatre. I imagine that the repetition might have tempted the
students to pay attention to the poem’s oblique allegorical mode of address,
its synaesthetic resonance in its conception of memory as ‘the rustling river
of Mnemosyne’. And I hope it also made the students in turn make oblique

3 The film is Octavio Cortazar’s Por Primera Vez (‘For the First Time’, ICAIC, Havana, Cuba,
1967).
4 Benjamin, ‘Doctrine of the Similar’, 65‒69.
Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy 157

poetic connections between the sounds and images of the film and their own
thoughts and feelings. It is not usual to end a film with the recitation of a
poem by a character who has just died. I also like to think that the students
were both somewhat baffled and perhaps annoyed, but also impressed
and appreciated that I had gone to the trouble of ‘by-hearting’ the poem
(as we used to say in Ceylon), imbuing it with a certain rhythm, breathing
it in and out as I recited it, instead of reading it at breakneck speed off of
a PowerPoint. Its allegorical images may have made them turn back and

see again as in a drowning swimmers dream,

all the strange sights I ever saw,
and even stranger sights no man has ever seen.

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 Filmography

Pandora’s Box (Die Buechse der Pandora, 1929). 133 minutes. Silent, black and white.
German intertitles with English translation.
Production: Nero Films, Germany
Director: G. W. Pabst
Script: Ladislaus Vajda adapted from Frank Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and
Pandora’s Box
Languages: Intertitles in German with English translation
Cinematography: Gunther Krampf
Art Direction: Andrei Andreiev and Gottlieb Hesch
Costume: Gottlieb Hesch
Editing: Joseph Fleisler
Main Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Goetz, Gustav Diessl,
Kraft-Raschic, Alice Roberts, Daisy D’Ora.

The Colour of Pomegrantes (Tsvet Granata/ Nran Guyne, 1969). 77 minutes. Colour.
The Armenian release version is in Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian with
English subtitles.
Production: Armenfilm, Yerevan, Soviet Union
Director: Sergei Parajanov
Script: Sergei Parajanov
Choreographer: Sergei Parajanov
Cinematography: Suren Shakhbazian
Art Direction: Stepan Andranikian
Editing: Maria Ponomarenko
Sound Designer ‒ Composer: Tigran Mansurian
Main Cast: Sofico Chiaureli, Melkon Alekian, Vilen Galustian, Georgi Gregechkori

Ashik Kerib (1988). 78 minutes. Colour. The soundtrack is in Azerbaijani, Georgian,

and Russian with English subtitles.
Production: Georgia Film Studio, Tbilisi, Soviet Union
Director: Sergei Parajanov and David Abshidze
Script: Gia Badridze, based on the story by Mickhail Lermontov
Choreographer: Sergei Parajanov
Cinematography: Albert Yavurian
Art Direction: Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, Shota Gogolashville, Niko Zandukeli
Sound Design: Gari Kuntsev
Music: Dzhavanshir Kuliev
166  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Songs: Alim Qasimov

Main Cast: Yuri Mgoian, Sof iko Chiaureli, Ramaz Chkhikvadze, Konstantin
Stepanko, Varvara Dvalishivili, Veronika Metonidze

Eyes Wide Shut (1999). 153 minutes. Colour.

Production: Warner Bros. Pictures, Hollywood
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Script: Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s
Traumnovelle
Cinematography: Larry Smith
Art Direction: Les Tomkins and Roy Walker
Editing: Nigel Galt
Original Music: Jocelyn Pook
Main Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sidney Pollack, Alan Cumming, Rade
Sherbedigia

Klimt (2016). 131 minutes. Colour.

Production: Epo Films, Vienna
Director: Raul Ruiz
Script: Raul Ruiz and Gilbert Adair
Cinematography: Ricardo Aronovich
Art Design: Rudi Czettel, Katharina Wopperman, Birgit Hutter
Editing: Valeria Sarmiento
Sound Direction: Michael Spencer
Music: Jorge Arriagada
Main Cast: John Malkovitch, Veronica Ferres, Stephen Dillane, Saffron Burrows,
Nikolai Kinsky, Aglaia Szyszkovitz, Sandra Ceccarelli

***

Hawks, Howard. A Girl in Every Port (1928). Fox Film Corporation, Hollywood. 78
minutes.
Pabst, G. W. Diary of a Lost Girl (1929b). Hom-Film GmbH, Germany, 116 minutes.
German intertitles with English translation.
Romm, Mikhail. Ordinary Fascism (1965). Soviet Union, 138 minutes. The soundtrack
is in Russian. English subtitles.
Shahani, Kumar. Khayal Gatha (1988). Bombay Cinematograph, India. 103 minutes.
The soundtrack is in Urdu and Hindi. English subtitles.
 About the Author

Laleen Jayamanne has taught Cinema Studies in the Department of Art

History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney for over two decades.
Prior to her work at the University of Sydney, she taught for ten or so years
elsewhere in Australia. She works within a Bergsonian and Deleuzean
tradition of film theory and criticism attuned to audiovisual duration, with
an abiding fascination with both good and bad acting in the histories of
cinema. She directed A Song of Ceylon (16mm film, 1986). Her publications
include Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and Cinema for the Moment (as editor,
1995), The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman
of Bangkok (as co-editor, 1997), and Towards Cinema and Its Double: Cross-
Cultural Mimesis (2001). Her most recent book, The Epic Cinema of Kumar
Shahani (2015), is on the avant-garde Indian director.
 Index
a-signifying particles 60, 70, 70 n.24, 77, 154 anti-Semitism 138, 142
abstraction 27 n.9 Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani
and allegory and fragment 136 (Parajani) (1985) 94, 97
and Deleuze 132 n.5 architecture 111–112 n.1, 137, 137 n.12, 139
and Pabst 27, 28, 30, 33, 35-36, 41 and social strata 40–41
and Parajanov 55, 60–61, 63, 65, 66, 71, Eyes Wide Shut 111 n.1, 113, 115, 116–117,
76, 79 119–120
Klimt and Ruiz 132 Armenia 20, 30, 55–57, 62–65, 67, 69, 70, 74,
of finger as digit 134–35 n.9 77, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98
realism and abstraction of milieux 35–36 Armenian Apostolic Christian Church 10,
sensuous 66, 71, 76 55–56, 77, 83, 88, 94
Accattone (Pasolini) (1961) 89 ‘Art as Device’ (Shklovsky) 59
acting 29, 61–62, 88. see also names of actors Art Nouveau 130, 133, 133 n.7, 134, 138, 139, 139
actors and puppets 78–79, 80 n.13, 149
and cognitive imagination 18 artisanal techniques 57–58, 68, 105
androgynous 20 Ashik Kerib (Parajanov) (1988) 14, 23–53,
as dance 14, 19, 23, 25, 27–28, 34, 40, 41–43, 55–56, 58, 99–105. see also Parajanov, Sergei
45–46, 50, 141 actors and puppets 78–79, 88
contrasting styles 32–33 Christianity and Islam – Ashik Kerib 83–84,
doubling real-life fictional characters 111 92–94
dual roles 103 clothes stolen 84–85, 91
experimentation 141 death 10
hands 80–82, 81 n.31, 134–35 n.9 film strip as glyph 104–105
in slow motion 111, 112, 116, 119–120, 141, how a child is born 86–88
141–142 how a Sufi minstrel dies 9–10, 83, 84–86,
mannerism 140–142 88, 92, 99
mask-face-close-up 80 pedagogy of image 70
silent cinema 42 Persian and Mughal miniatures 92–94
simulacral images 111–112 rescued by children from Turks 87–88
styles 18–20 Sufi fairy tale and violence 99, 103–104
theatrical v. film 34 Sufi Islam 61, 99–100
Adair, Gilbert 156 violence 95–97, 96
Adorno, Theodore 43 wedding feast of the blind 101–102
affection image 80, 132 n.5 wedding feast of the deaf and the
agency 24, 26, 132 mute 102–103
Akerman, Chantal 18 Australia (Lurhmann) (2010) 67
allegory 135 n.10, 137 n.11, 139 n.14, 140 n.15, Australian Centre for the Moving
149 n.19 Image 112 n.3
and abstraction 136 Australian Cinematheque 61, 94
Klimt 127, 127–141, 133, 144–146, 148–150 Austrian state 139, 140
as playful artifice 133 Austro-Hungarian Empire 137 n.12, 143, 145
Klimt’s paintings 129–130 Ave Maria (hymn) 86
of film-making 131 Azerbaijan 55, 63, 67, 85, 86, 92–93, 97
poetic of film allegory 156–157
Ruiz 128–130 ’Baby Did a Bad Thing’ (Isaak) 117
v. realism 136 Barba, Eugenio 61–62
Alwa (Pandora’s Box) 28–29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 40, ‘Bella Forgets the Scissors’ (Eisenstein) 105
41, 43–44, 47–48 Benjamin, Walter 114, 135 n.10, 156
Ana, princess (The Color of Pomegranates) 62, Berg, Alban 48–49
71–72, 74, 76, 80–81 Bergson, Henri 15, 18, 60, 66, 76
Andriesh (Parajanov) (1954) 105–106 Bertolucci, Bernardo 89
androgyny 20, 32, 43–44, 45, 71, 72, 76 Best, Elsdon 16–17
Angel of Death 9–10, 82–83 birth 9–10, 84
Angel of Resurrection 97 how a child is born 86–88
Anglo-American film theory 14 Klimt’s children 138, 143, 146
170  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

massacre of the innocents 87 cellulose 90

nativity 10, 86–87 censorship 62, 89, 94
Björk 43–44 Ceylon. see Sri Lanka/Ceylon
Blackboard Films 155 Chanel, Coco 44–45
Bloom, Claire 42 Chaplin, Charlie 30, 30 n.13, 39, 42, 46, 154–156
Bonnard, Pierre 113 Chiaureli, Sofiko 20, 71, 72, 74, 79, 80, 97
boy angels 10, 27, 74–75, 82–83, 101–102 child abuse 51
brain 81–82 child prostitution 37, 50, 124
Brecht, Bertolt 141 childhood. see also figure of the child
Bresson, Robert 18, 90, 99 children, of Klimt 138, 143, 146
Brezhnev, Leonid 56 child’s learning journey 100
bridle mysticism 104 Chile 143
Brinkman, Reinhold 44 n.22 Chinese, ethnic relations, Chinese in
British Sounds (Godard) (1969) 155 Vienna 143–145, 154
Brooks, Louise 141 Christianity 19, 37, 38, 55–56, 63, 73, 88, 93
abused as a child 50–51 and Islam 83–84, 85
acting 26–27 funeral rituals 83, 86
as dance 14, 19, 23, 25, 27–31, 34, 40–43, nativity 10, 86–87
45–46, 51 Christmas 10, 19, 35, 37, 38, 41, 50, 86–87, 113
as puppet automaton 25 Christy, Ian 91
and Pabst 27, 38 n.20, 45–47, 49–50, 51 The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov (Steffen) 56–57,
Lulu 23–25, 30 59, 63–64, 67–69, 76, 84, 93–94, 97–98
agency 24 cinematic allegory. see allegory
and film, a gift economy 37–38 cinematic imaginary 25, 30, 58, 120, 145
and social class 23 cinematic reciprocity. see reciprocity
and the New Woman 25–29 cinematograph 104, 105, 131 n.4, 136
apartment 40 camera lens 128
as character 29, 42 celluloid cinema 10, 19, 70, 90–92, 111, 112
as commodity 24 cellulose 90
as Pierrot 43–44 cinema-machine 25
Brooks, Lulu and dance 34, 40, 41–43, 45 film strip as glyph 104–105
childhood 29, 36–37, 50 ’Ode to the Cinematograph’ (poem) 127–128,
close-ups 25 149, 156
costume and clothing 38, 41, 45 projector 145
death 10, 24–25, 29, 37–38, 47–51 Civilizational Islam 55–56
democratic allure and upper-class social classical cinema 67
contempt 38–40 close-ups 25, 33–34, 35, 36, 47, 63, 69, 81, 97,
Elsaesser’s reading 28 132, 132 n.5
hairstyle 40, 44 and fragmentation 127
in Coco Chanel 44–45 mask-face-close-up 80
light image 24, 29 cognitive imagination 18, 142
money 24 and imaginal world 100–101, 106
New Woman 25–29 Corbin on 14–15, 60–61, 100–101, 132
’Pabst and Lulu’ 49–50 Parajanov 65, 66, 100–101, 106
Pabst’s warning 51 poetic cinema 14–15, 154
Wedekind origins 31–32, 41–42 spirit of the gift 17–18
movement 46 The Color of Pomegranates (Parajanov)
writings 51 (1969) 55–58, 103, 148 n.18. see also
Brown, Peter 56 Parajanov, Sergei
Bunraku puppets’ costumes 69 actors and puppets 78–79
Byzantine culture 64, 94, 97 and Sayat Nova 62–63
andogynous performance 20
Café Central of Vienna 130, 132, 136–138, Angel of Death 9–10, 82–83
144–145 animated costumes 68–69
calligraphy 144 censored 62–63, 89, 94
camp aesthetics 11, 73 Christian funeral rituals 83
‘cannibals’ 142–143 courtly love 71–72
caricature 133 craft processes 55, 68–71
celluloid cinema 10, 19, 70, 90–92, 111, 112 Criterion Collection 46 n.25, 56
Index 171

death 10 Countess Geschwitz 28

duration 99 dress reform movement 148
elements of nature 55 Eyes Wide Shut 118, 122–123
everyday life 74–75 Floege 148
figure of the child 63–68, 148 n.18 Lulu 41, 44–45
funeral rituals 86, 88 male clothing 39
gestures 81 courtly love 71–72
hands, relaxed or prehensile 80–82, 81 n.31 craft processes 66, 68–71
mask-face-close-up 80 Cruise, Tom 18, 111, 111 n.1, 111–112 n.1, 113,
miniature traditions 92–94, 95, 97 115–117, 121–123, 124. see also Eyes Wide Shut
modes of perceiving 76–77 (Kubrick) (1999)
nacre crosses and the pre-historic nautilus
shell 75–77 dance 103, 145
pedagogic function 97 and Brooks 14, 19, 23, 25, 27–28, 34, 40,
pedagogy of image 70, 97–98 41–43, 45–46, 51
production history 94 Ashik Kerib 79
reception 63 forms 69–70
resonator jar scene 95–97 how a Sufi minstrel dies 85–86
scenes 63–64, 64, 65–66, 69 Indian dance-theatre 81
sensuality of male monastic Parajanov 79
asceticism 72–73 sewing as 73–74
sexuality in the nunnery 73–74 Davtar (Sayat Nova) 64
sound 65–66 De Castro, Lea 129, 145–146, 147, 148–149
stone architecture 98 decorative arts 58
Sufi ethos 99–100 defamiliarization 59
Tai Chi digression 77–78 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 17 n.9, 18, 29, 67, 76, 80, 116,
the dream child and the celestial child 75 119, 119 n.12, 132 n.5, 154
the man with the peacock 82 ‘Democracy’s Theatre’ 38
title change from Sayat Nova 62–63 Denishawn modern dance company 30, 42
viewing 61, 77–78 detachment 134, 140–142
wind 78 diagonal pedagogy 107
woven material 55 The Diary of a Lost Girl (Pabst) 40
colour and light 33, 48–9, 123 Diessl, Gustav 49, 51
and Brooks’s performance 26 Dietrich, Marlene 45
and clothing 74 digital revolution 19
camera lens 128 Dillane, Stephen 140
cognitive imagination and light 15 Dogville (Von Trier) (2003) 112
Eyes Wide Shut 111–113, 116–117, 117 n.10 dolls 79, 86
arbitrary v. local colour 114, 115 double becoming 116
between bedroom and bathroom – Dovzhenko, Alexander 57, 62, 86, 105–106
gaseous blue light 117–120 Dream Novella (Schnitzler) 112, 125, 134–135
force-development 114–115 duration 18, 30, 48, 60, 66, 76, 98–99, 119, 119
in the morgue 122 n.12, 121, 131
light sources 114 Dziga Vertov Group 155
commodities 24, 120, 123–124, 125
conceptual analysis 17 Earth (Dovzhenko) (1930) 106
conceptualization. 80 Earth Spirit (Wedekind) (1895) 30, 41, 43
concrete music (musique concrète) 65–66 Eastern Orthodox Christianity 55–56, 86,
continuity editing 25, 34, 98, 116 88, 94
copyright 105–107 editing 25, 34, 65, 80, 87, 105, 116, 120, 155
Corbin, Henry 14–15, 15 n.4, 60–61, 100–101, 132 Parajanov and Shahani 98–99
cosmos-centric cinema vision 16, 56, 58, 128, Eisenstein, Sergei 57, 105, 106, 132 n.5, 141
131 n.4 Eisner, Lotte 51
costume and clothing 38, 38 n.20, 88, 101 elements of nature 58, 131 n.4. see also water;
androgyny in The Color of wind
Pomegranates 72 Elsaesser, Thomas 9–11, 24–29, 44, 144
animated costumes 68–69, 71 The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (Jay-
change of colour 74 amanne) 15, 91, 131 n.4
clothes stolen 84–85, 91 ethnic relations, Chinese in Vienna 143–145
172  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

European Art Cinema 141 FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film

European Union 141 Critics) 94
exchange systems 24, 37 Floege, Emilie (Midi) 133, 139, 141, 147,
Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) (1999) 14, 18, 111–126, 148–149
141. see also Kidman, Nicole; Kubrick, Stanley flower petals 128, 149–150
and Schnitzler 134, 134–135 force developed 114–115
architecture 111 n.1, 113, 115, 116–117, fragmentation 127, 130, 131 n.3, 131–132, 135, 135
119–120 n.10, 136, 139
at the dining table 115–116 Freud, Sigmund 134, 150
at the toyshop 125 funeral rituals 74, 78, 83
bifurcation of time into audio and visual how a Sufi minstrel dies 86, 88, 92, 99
series 119
cinematic image, as commodity 24, 120, 123 Galle, Emile 138–139
class relations and the money-shot 123–124 Gendered Beginnings (conference) 25
colour and light 111–115, 123 The Gentle Woman (Bresson) (1969) 99
and painting 114 George, Saint 87
between bedroom and bathroom – gase- Georgia 55–57, 63, 66, 72, 95, 97, 98
ous blue light 117–120 German Expressionism 37
force-developed 114–115 Germany Year Zero (Rossellini) (1948) 67
in the morgue 122 Geschwitz, Countess (Pandora’s Box) 28, 29,
light sources 114 33, 36–37, 43, 50
light synaesthesia 114 Ghatak, Ritwick 18, 62
critical reception 13, 19, 112, 112 n.2, 112 n.3 Ghazal music 92
death 10 gift economy 17, 23–53, 25, 37–38
doubling real-life/fictional married gift exchange 16, 34, 36
couple 111, 120 The Gift (Mauss) 16, 16 n.8
in the morgue – Bill’s sexual encounter 10, A Girl in Every Port (Hawks) 45–46
121–123 Glasnost 56
Indian musical tradition 120–121 Godard, Jean-Luc 19, 40, 57, 146, 155
Kubrick as director 112 gold leaf 133–134
painting and film 120 Goodall, Jane 31–32, 37
shot on set 114, 120, 125 Goskino (USSR State Committee for Cinema-
simulacral images 111 n.1 tography) 56–57, 94
the orgy 120–121 The Gospel According to St Matthew (Paso-
through the looking glass 116–117 lini) 10, 84, 86–87
title 114 Graham, Martha 42, 46
Grand-Guignol 136
face 33, 69, 71, 76, 80–81, 87–88, 96–97, 101, Guattari, Félix 17 n.9, 60 n.11, 70 n.24
102, 117, 119, 122, 130, 133–137
Faculty Paintings (Klimt) (1900 -1904) 129, 134, Hagopian, Kevin 35–36
139 n.14 Halloway, Ron 105
Jurisprudence 129, 139 n.14 hands 80–82, 128, 134–35 n.9
Medicine 129–131, 131 n.3, 139 n.14 Hau Taonga, spirit of the gift 14, 15–18
Philosophy 129, 132, 139 n.13, 139 n.14, 145 Hawks, Howard 45–46
fascination 134 Henare, Manuka 16–17
and detachment 140–142 Hinduism 85, 93, 98, 100, 121
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 141 Hollywood 10, 44–46, 51, 115–116
feminism 27. see also New Woman homosexuality 28, 89
figure of the child 63–68, 69, 70, 75, 87–88, Huillet, Daniel 141
105–106, 148 n.18
film. see cinema imaginal world 14–15, 18–19, 20, 29, 60–61
Film Culture in Transition (series) 9 and cognitive imagination 100–101, 106
Film Institute of the Pontifical Catholic India 10, 85, 94
University, Santiago, Chile 153 dance-theatre 81
film melodrama 10 musical tradition 15, 61, 95, 120–121
film pedagogy 17 n.9, 61, 92, 105–107, 112 intuition 18, 60, 100
Chaplin exercise 155–156 Iran/Persia 56, 82
mimetic play, or Serio Ledere 153–157 Persian miniature traditions 72, 92–95,
philosophy of education 15–18, 17 n.9 97, 102
poetry exercise 17, 156 Isaak, Chris 117
Index 173

Islam 96, 100, 149 n.19, 154. see also Sufi Islam ethnic relations, Chinese in Vienna, around
and Christianity 83–84, 85 1900 143–145
arts 149 fragmentation 127
Civilizational Islam 55–56 gold leaf 133–134
Wahabi Islam 84 Klimt and his copy 145
Italian Neorealist cinema 67 Klimt and the women of Vienna 146–148
Ivan’s Childhood (Tarkovsky) (1962) 90 Malkovich as Klimt 140–142
motifs 149
Jack the Ripper (Pandora’s Box) 10, 24–25, 29, opening sequence 135–136
35, 37–38, 43, 44, 47–51 ornamentation 127
Japanese Bunraku puppets’ costumes 69 pedagogic exercise 156
Japanese Noh theatre 80 poem 127–128, 149, 156
Jews 138, 140, 143, 144, 146–148 skeleton scene 135–136
jump cuts 71, 98 the little girls in white 148–150
Jurisprudence (Klimt) (painting) 129, 139 n.14 Kodak 115
Koetner, Fritz 51
Kasba (Shahani) (1990) 92–93 Kreider, Tim 112
Khayal Gatha (Shahani) (1988) 15, 61, 92–95, Kubrick, Christiane 111 n.1, 111–112 n.1, 113,
98–100 114, 116
Kidman, Nicole. see also Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick, Stanley 18, 19, 111, 111 n.1, 123–124, 125.
(Kubrick) (1999) see also Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) (1999)
and colour and light 113 and Kidman games 115–116
between bedroom and bathroom – gaseous colour and light 112, 113
blue light 117–120 force-development 114–115
glasses 115–116, 117, 118, 125 light sources 114
in Love Crimes, song 111–112 mirror scene 117
Kubrick games 115–116 postmodern pastiche 121
performance in Eyes Wide Shut 18, 19, Kuleshov, Lev 106
111–113, 115–120, 141
sexual fantasies 117, 118–119, 120, 123 Lang, Fritz 26–27
slow motion acting 111, 116, 119–120, Langlois, Henri 19, 29, 51
141–142 Lazarus, Saint 74
speech patterns 113 Leacock, Richard 46
Symbolist woman 120 Lederer, Szerena 138, 144, 147–148
Kleiman, Naum 63 The Legend of Surami Fortress (Parajanov)
Klimt, Gustav 133 n.7, 134–35 n.9, 137 n.11, 137 (1984) 56
n.12, 139 n.14, 148 n.18 Lermontov, Mikhail 84, 105
abstraction 132 lesbianism 28
allegory 129, 140 Letter to Jane (Godard) (1972) 155
and De Castro 145–146 Levi Strauss, Claude 16
and nude models 147 light. see colour and light
and upper bourgeois women 147 Limelight (Chaplin) (1952) 42
children 138, 143, 146 the little girls in white 148 n.18, 148–150
death 10, 148–149, 150 Longhi, Roberto 89
fragmentation 132 Loos, Adolf 130, 131 n.3, 137 n.11, 137–138
interest in pathology 130–131 Love Crimes (Ocean) (song) 19 n.13, 111–112
The Little Girls in White 148–149 Lulu. see Brooks, Louise
mother and sister 138, 142, 146 Lulu of Earth Spirit (Wedekind) (1895) 41
ornamentation 130, 131, 132 Lurhmann, Baz 67
patrons 131, 138, 140, 144, 147
styles 138 Malkovich, John 128, 156
syphilis 138 mannerist acting 19, 140–142
Klimt (Ruiz) (2006) 13, 20, 67, 153–154. see also man with the peacock 82
Ruiz, Raúl Mansurian, Tigran 66
allegory 127, 133, 136, 145–146 Maori anthropology 14, 15–18, 16 n.8, 25
and pathology 127–151 A Married Woman (Godard) 146
and Schnitzler 134–135 Martin, Adrian 153
colonial relations – cannibals in Paris, masks 80, 96, 97, 122–124, 133
1900 142–143 mask-face-close-up 80
death 10, 128 massacre of the innocents 87
174  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

Mauss, Marcel 16, 16 n.8 Noh theatre 80

Medical University of Vienna 131 nude models 115–116
Medicine (Klimt) (painting) 129–131, 131 n.3, nudes 120
139 n.14 Nulla 67
medieval rhetoric 132–133
Méliès, Georges 71, 105, 145 Ocean, Frank 19 n.13, 111–112
Memory of the World:Key Films course 156 ‘Ode to the Cinematograph’ (poem) 127–128,
metaphor 131 149, 156
Metropolis (Lang) (1927) 26–27 Odetta 87
Mgoyan, Yuri 84 Ordinary Fascism (Romm) (1965) 107
microscopes 131, 138 Ornament and Crime (Loos) 137
Midi. see Floege, Emilie (Midi) ornamentation 133 n.7, 136–138, 137 n.11, 139
Miller, Helen 25 n.13, 139 n.14
mimesis 17, 155–156 and austerity 99
miniature traditions 72, 92–95, 97, 102 and fragmentation 131 n.3, 135, 139
Ministry of Education, Art Committee 129 and its negation 94–95
minor arts 58 and pathology 127–151, 131, 131 n.3, 138
The Mirror (Tarkovsky) (1975) 107 Klimt 127, 130, 131, 132, 133
Mise-en-scène 25, 33–34, 46, 65, 72–73, 92, Parajanov 96
95, 96, 98 Parajanov and Shahani 90, 98–99
Pasolini and Parajanov 89 resonator jar scene 95–97
theatrical v. film 34 Ruiz 130, 132, 149–150
Mitzi, Klimt 143 ostranenie 59
Mnemosyne 127, 128, 149–150, 156 ‘Overcoming Desire’ (Miller) 25
Modern Times (Chaplin) (1936) 155–156
A Moldovian Fairy Tale (Parajanov) (1952) 79 ’Pabst and Lulu’ (Brooks) 38 n.20, 49–50
monastic asceticism 72–73 Pabst, G. W. 10, 19, 23–53, 34–37, 44 n.22. see
montage editing 34, 65, 80, 87, 98–99, 105, also Pandora’s Box (1929) (Pabst)
120, 155 and Brooks 27, 38 n.20, 41–43, 45–47,
Mughal miniature traditions 92–95, 97 49–50, 51
Muguiro, Carlos 106–107 and theatre 29–35, 30, 34
Munich Film Festival (1988) 105 and Wedekind’s Lulu 41–42
music 19, 87, 99 editing 34
and speech 112, 112 n.10 Pahari tradition 93
Chinese 144 painting 113, 114
Indian musical tradition 15, 61, 95, 120–121 and film 120
Parajanov 55, 86, 93 gold leaf 133–134
Sufi minstrel 65–66, 87, 102 Paisan (Rossellini) (1945) 67
wedding of the blind 101 Pandora’s Box (Pabst) (1929) 10, 23–53. see
wedding of the deaf and mute 102 also Brooks, Louise; Pabst, G. W.
Western 95, 121 architectural and social strata 40–41
Myerhold, Vsevolod 61–62 colour and light 48
critical reception 19
Nabi paintings 113, 116 film and theatre 29–35
Nabis 113 gift economy 25
Nabokov, Vladimir 50 meaning 46–47
nacre shells 71, 75–77 narrative 23–24
narcissism 27, 29, 31, 72 opening 25
narrative 13, 20, 23–24, 31, 37, 48–49, 60, 66, poetic cinema 13–14
69, 85, 98, 99, 104, 112 n.3, 115, 136 realism and abstraction 35–36, 41
National Poet of Armenia 62, 70 pantomime 32–34, 43, 44, 71, 73, 74, 78, 93,
nativity 10, 86–87 96, 98
nautilus shells 55, 75–78, 95, 98, 131 n.4 Parajanov Museum, Armenia 90
Nazi film archive 107 Parajanov, Sergei 10, 55–109, 131 n.4, 148 n.18,
neocapitalism 90 153. see also Ashik Kerib (Parajanov) (1988);
neorealist child 67 The Color of Pomegranates (Parajanov)
New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeite) 38 (1969); Transcaucasia
New Woman 23, 25–29, 40, 42, 45 acting styles 20, 78–79
The Night Café (Van Gogh) (1888) 124 and Pasolini 88–90
Index 175

and Sayat Nova 95–96, 96–97 Persephone 127–128

and Shahani 58–59, 61, 90–92, 98–99, Persia. see Iran/Persia
99–100 Philosophic Society of the University of
and Steffen 56–57, 63–64, 67–69, 76, 84, Vienna 129
93–94, 97–98 Philosophy (Klimt) (painting) 129, 132, 139
Angel of Death and the boy angels 82–83 n.13, 139 n.14, 145
Christianity and Islam 83–84 philosophy of education 15–18, 17, 17 n.9
cinematic idiom 55–66, 60, 61, 76, 78, photography 48, 116, 136, 148
82–84 Pierrot 43–44, 44 n.22
cognitive imagination 100–101 ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (Schoenberg) (1912) (song
cosmos-centric cinema vision 15, 106 cycle) 43–44
courtly love 71–72 Pinochet, Augusto 143
death 94, 105 poetic cinema 13, 14–15, 15–20, 58–63, 68–71,
editing 98–99 82, 89, 91, 100–101, 106, 153–157. see also
everyday life 74 names of films
figure of the child 63–68 Poetics of Cinema (Ruiz) 71 n.25, 132, 149 n.19,
film pedagogy 105–107 154
film strip as glyph 104–105 ‘Poetry and Prose in Cinematography’
hands 80–82, 81 n.31 (Shklovsky) (1927) 59
his funeral 88 polysemia 127, 150, 155
how a child is born 86–88 Pook, Jocelyn 120–121
how a Sufi minstrel dies 84–86, 88, 92, 99 Powell, Michael 49
imaginal world 100–101, 106 PowerPoint 155–157
imprisonment 56, 79, 89–90, 96 Pravda (Godard) (1969) 155
lapidary dynamism 97–99 Price, Barry 50
lapidary dynamism in film 97–99, 98 Proust, Marcel 67, 141
man with the peacock 82 psychoanalysis 26, 27, 28 n.11, 29, 37, 50
mask-face-close-up 80 the public 41
miniature traditions 92–94, 97 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 57
movement motif 66, 69, 70, 71 puppets 25, 27, 27 n.9, 69, 71, 78–79, 79 n.29,
nacre crosses and the prehistoric nautilus 80, 88
shell 75–77
ornamentation 94–95, 98–99 Quast, Rodrigo (Pandora’s Box) 31–34, 39, 43
sensuality of male monastic Queensland Gallery of Modern Art
asceticism 72–73 (QAGOMA) 94
sexuality in the nunnery 73–74
tai chi 77–78 racism 143
the dream child and the celestial child 75 Ramachandran, V. S. 58, 81, 81 n.31
the Sufi fairy tale and violence 99, Ranapiri, Tamati 15–17, 16 n.8
103–104 rasas 121, 121 n.13
to craft the senses synaesthetically 68–71 realism 35–36, 39, 67, 136
wedding feast of the blind 101–102 and abstraction of milieux 35–36, 41
wedding feast of the deaf and the realist causality 30
mute 102–103 reciprocity 15–17, 25, 28, 37, 38, 43, 114 n.6, 117
wind 78 refugees 144
Parajanov:A Requiem (Halloway) 105 Renoir, Jean 35–36
Parker, Dorothy 115–116, 125 revue theatre 25, 28, 30, 31, 33–35, 37, 42
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 10, 62, 84, 90–91 rhythm 61
and Parajanov 88–90 Robot Maria 26–27
Gospel According to St Matthew 86–87 Rocha, Glauber 18, 62
nativity 10, 86–87 Rodin, Auguste 148
Pasteur Goblet (Galle) (1893) 138–139 Rodriguez-Remedi, Alejandra 153
Pasteur, Louis 138–139 Romm, Mikhail 106–107
pathology 127, 130–131, 131 n.3, 138 Rossellini, Roberto 67, 99
Peacock, Shane 31 Rotterdam Film Festival (1988) 94
Peeping Tom (Powell) (1960) 49 Ruiz, Raúl 71, 71 n.25, 114 n.6, 127, 132, 137 n.11,
perceptual innervation 59 139 n.14, 140 n.15, 147, 148 n.18, 149 n.19. see
Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin also Klimt (Ruiz) (2006)
(Goodall) 31 abstraction 132
176  POE TIC CINEMA AND THE SPIRIT OF THE GIF T

allegory 128–129, 129–130, 133, 140, 149 ornamentation 98–99

cinematograph 128 Persian and Mughal miniature and
detachment and fascination 134 film 92–95
figure of the child 67 Shevardnadze, Eduard 56
film and death 129 Shklovsky, Viktor 59, 89
film image as simulacrum 129 shot/reverse shot schema 76
fragmentation 130, 132 silent cinema 13–14, 19, 23, 29–31, 38, 42, 46–47,
on film image 10, 13 116. see also Pandora’s Box (1929) (Pabst)
on medieval rhetoric 132–133 Silk Road 56, 92, 94
ornamentation 130, 132, 133 n.7, 136–138, simulacral cinema 111 n.1, 111–112, 111–112 n.1,
149–150 120, 129, 130
philosophy of film pedagogy 154–157 Sirk, Douglas 10
process of spectatorship 134 slow motion acting 111, 112, 116, 119–120,
shattering mirror scene 132–133 141–142
simulation 130, 138 Smith, Larry 114–115
Rupmathi Pavilion, Mandu 98 social class 24, 31–35, 32–33, 37, 49, 63, 71, 113,
Rupmathi, Princess 100 122, 138, 142
and Christian funeral rituals 83
Salvation Army 35–37, 41, 49, 89 and costumes 38, 39
Sanahin Monastery, Armenia 65 architectural and social strata 40–41
Sarmiento, Valeria 153 class relations and the
Savchenko, Igor 84, 106 ‘money-shot’ 123–125
Sayat Nova (Parajanov), `. see The Color of impulse and the bourgeois male body 36
Pomegranates (Parajanov) (1969) Klimt and the women of Vienna 146–148
Sayat Nova, poet 62–63, 72, 95–96 Lulu’s democratic allure and upper-class
and Parajanov 96–97 social contempt 38–40
and princess 68–71 upper-class values 124
Davtar 64 Socialist Realism 41, 57, 90
death 9–10 ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ 87
everyday life 74–75 sound 14, 58, 65–66, 69, 72, 120–121
figure of the child 63–64, 65–66, 66–67 Soviet Union 70, 84, 90, 91, 104. see also
initiation 65–66 Parajanov, Sergei
poetry 97–98 censorship 62–63, 89, 94
Tbilisi craft 66 collaboration and tradition 59–60
Schaeffer, Pierre 66 control of artists 93–94, 96, 97
Schiele, Egon 134–35 n.9, 135–136, 144, 145 film bureaucracy 56, 63
Schigolch (Pandora’s Box) 30–34, 37, 39–41, film pedagogy – great gurus of Soviet
43, 44, 46, 49 cinema 105–107
Schnitzler, Arthur 112, 125, 134–135, 135 n.9, 150 Goskino 56, 57
Schoen, Dr. (Pandora’s Box) 24, 28, 31, 32, 34, Nationality Policy 56
36, 37, 39, 40–43, 47–48, 51 Socialist Realism 57
Schoenberg, Arnold 43–44 spectatorship 134
Secession Exhibition, Vienna, 1900 132, 147 Spielberg, Steven 115
n.17, 148 spirit of the gift 13–21, 114 n.6, 117 n.10, 150. see
Secessionist movement 137 n.12 also poetic cinema
Second Nervous System 61–62 Sri Lanka/Ceylon 10, 14, 61, 155, 157
the Secretary (Klimt) 132, 133, 138, 139–140, Stanley Kubrick Exhibition 112 n.3
142, 148–149 state violence 96, 133
Sennett, Mack 47–48 Steffen, James 56–57, 59, 63–64, 67–69, 76,
sexuality 25–26, 28, 50, 72–74, 89, 120–121, 84, 93–94, 97–98
122, 123, 145–146 Stern, Daniel 60
Shadow Theatre 62 Stewart, Georgina 16–17
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Parajanov) Stewart, Jane 133 n.7
(1965) 83 stone architecture 64, 65, 98
Shahani, Kumar 15, 18, 61, 62, 70, 131 n.4, Straub, Jean-Marie 141
139 n.4 studio lighting 114
and Parajanov 58, 90–92 studio system 51
figure of the child 100 Sufi ethos, Khayal Gatha (Shahani)
on Bresson 99 (1988) 99–100
Index 177

Sufi Islam 14–15, 60–61, 93 state violence 96, 96–97, 133

how a child is born 86–88 the Sufi fairy tale and violence 103–104
how a Sufi minstrel dies 83, 84–86, 88, trade routes 92
92, 99 viraha 120–121
in Parajanov and Shahani 99–100 vitality affects 60
the Sufi fairy tale and violence 103–104 Vladimir and Rosa (Godard) (1971) 155
Suhrawardi 14, 15 n.4, 100 Von Stroheim, Erich 18
super-rich 122–124, 140 Von Trier, Lars 112
Symbolist art 113–114, 120, 125 Von Zarmikow, Dr. (Pandora’s Box) 28–29, 40
synaesthesia 15, 58, 66, 68–71, 77, 78, 97, 101, Vuillard, Edouard 113
114, 115, 128, 156
syphilis 138 Wahabi Islam 84
system of exchange 24 Warner Brothers 115
water
Tai Chi 77–78 Ashik Kerib 102
‘Tales of Sound of Fury’ (Elsaesser) 10 The Color of Pomegranates 58, 65–66, 69,
Tarkovsky, Andre 62, 90, 104 75–77
‘Thaw’ 106–107 Klimt 128, 144, 146, 149
Time Regained (Ruiz) (1999) 67, 141, 149 weaving 58, 69
trade routes 56, 92 wedding cakes 137
Transcaucasia 14, 20, 55–56, 61–64, 70, 78, 82, weddings 28, 32, 36, 41, 75, 83, 84
84, 92, 94, 95, 97 wedding feast of the blind 101–102
Turkey 78, 85, 87–88, 90, 92, 93 wedding feast of the deaf and the
‘Twenty Directors of the Future’ award 94 mute 102–103
Tynan, Kenneth 50 Wedekind, Frank 30–32, 34–35, 41–44, 44
n.22, 46, 48–49
Ukraine 56–57, 90 Weimar cinema 9, 23, 26, 27, 32, 38
Universal Exhibition, London 139 n.13 Weimar Cinema and After (Elsaesser) 11
Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900 129, 139, 140, Weimar Germany 27, 37, 43, 50
142–143, 145, 148 Western art history 58
University of Aberdeen 153 ‘What is Ugliness?’ (Wickhoff) (speech) 129
University of the Arts, London 112 n.3 whirling Dervishes 78, 85
University of Vienna 129, 131 Wickhoff, Franze 129
wind 16, 78–79
Vallotton, Felix 113 Wind from the East (Godard) (1970) 155
Van Gogh, Theo 124 wine making 64, 72–73, 75
Van Gogh, Vincent 113–115, 118, 124 woman in white 74–75, 83
variety theatre 30, 31, 34–35 work 69, 72, 81, 92, 96
veiled perception 149 everyday life 74–75
vertigo 130, 131, 134 World War I 41, 130, 135–136, 145
VGIK (All-Union State Institute of Cinematog- World War II 67, 129
raphy) 88, 105–106 woven material 58, 70–71, 88, 90–91, 98
Vienna 22, 112, 127, 132, 133 n.7, 134–138, 137
n.12, 142, 150 ’You Are Always in My Heart’ (song) 42
ethnic relations Chinese in
Vienna 143–148 Zarmikow, Charlotte Marie Adelaide
Klimt and the women of Vienna 146–148 (Pandora’s Box) 28–29, 40
social sites 136–137 Ziegfeld Follies 42
Vienna School of Medicine 131 n.3, 134–35 n.9 Ziegler, Victor (Eyes Wide Shut) 10, 117,
Vienna Secession 148 122–124
violence 87–88, 103 Zoroastrian metaphysics 15
massacre of the innocents 87 Zuckerkandl, Berta 131, 147–148
Pandora’s Box 36, 49, 51 Zuckerkandl, Emile 131
Parajanov 92, 95–97 Zvenigora (Dovzhenko) (1928) 105–106
play violence 103–104