Midsummer night's steam

1) "I believe that our culture is turning to steam."

The great Alan Moore in the trailer for the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore, one of the highlights of the "Transcendental Cinema" programme of the Equinox Festival, London, June. There's zero chance we'll be anywhere near Camden in June but if we were then we might pop in for that, the Craig Baldwin one about Scientology we mentioned some time ago, maybe even the ("hopelessly muddled" -- Variety) Paola Igliori film about Harry Smith. And the talk by Erik Davis and much of the music. Otherwise, more would-be shamans and part-time gurus that you can shake a talking stick at.

2) There's been the usual internet interest (eg here) in one image released from Peter Jackson's Lovely Bones of young Atonement star Saoirse Ronan in what is assumed by some to be the film's Heaven. This kind of advance leakage -- a picture here, a picture there -- has been a successful Jackson strategy ever since Christopher Lee got spiked on a wheel and Lord of the Rings nuts tried to work out what possible scene it could be depicting. But in terms of afterlife imagery, we're more interested in Niki Caro's vision of Heaven and Hell in her Vintner's Luck, which is also due this year and about which we've heard much less. I'm re-reading the Elizabeth Knox novel at the moment. Here's what Caro will have to show us:

In the far south there is a volcano whose blue sulphurous lake is a back way into Heaven. It is a journey that takes more than human hardihood. As far as I know it is seldom used. I went through that lake ... Where I gained access, Heaven was like the volcano -- not terrible to an angel -- but with winds full of ice like powdered glass.

And

[In Hell] I found a place behind a ridge in the mountains, where the air was thin and cool -- that is, only as hot as this hilltop at noon in midsummer. Then I built the ridge up, stole tools from the masons, the angels who built that dark, thick-walled citadel that is the only other bearable place in Hell. Where all the books are kept. I carried molten glass, poured and sculpted it, till I had a wall that rose between my slope and the prairies of fire, a wall of black glass, translucent for half its height, thinner towards the top. You must imagine my garden in light that arrives through imperfections, distorted, like sunshine through smoke.
Next I made soil. I carried it from earth and I made it. I grew lichen, little creeping plants. I carried soil then water. Carried water every other day for a thousand years.

3) "Of course, history has been its own reward. Once the fuss died down, it was easier to see that Heaven’s Gate was an astonishing thing. Yes, it is too long — the opening Harvard scene might go altogether, allowing the film to start as James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) arrives in Wyoming. But over the years, the film’s reputation has steadily improved, and I heard Steven say on a few occasions that he reckoned he might live to see the word 'masterpiece' descending on it like one of Wyoming’s great sunsets. Alas, not quite, but nearly."

-- David Thomson reconsiders Heaven's Gate, and eulogises Steven Bach, in the LA Weekly.

4) In something I read, maybe one of those Geoff Dyer books, a character talks of wanting to write down the first lines of movies and then run them all through a computer. I got to two before I forgot to keep doing it. The first line in Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light comes a full seven or eight minutes in, after the time-lapse sunrise and the silent family prayer and it's not a line but a word: "Amen." The first line in Psycho is from Sam Loomis, the married man that Marion Crane is sleeping with, who has that dialogue about how she didn't even touch her lunch. Which seems like the most banal way possible to open one of cinema's greatest horror movies until you realise that it chimes with Norman Bates telling Marion that "You eat like a bird", just before he ...

JG Ballard, 1930-2009

"I think my work is superficially dystopian, in some respects, but I’m trying to, as you say, affirm a more positive worldview. I lived through more than two-thirds of the last century, which was one of the grimmest epochs in human history — a time of unparalleled human violence and cruelty. Most of my writing was about the 20th century, and anyone writing about the 20th century writes in a dystopian mode without making any effort at all — it just comes with the box of paintbrushes.

"You know, to be a human being is quite a role to play. Each of us wakes up in the morning and we inhabit a very dangerous creature capable of brilliance in many ways, but capable also of huge self-destructive episodes. And we live with this dangerous creature every minute we’re awake. Something like The Atrocity Exhibition sums up my fiction: the attempt by a rather wounded character — in this case, a psychiatrist having a nervous breakdown; there are similar figures throughout the rest of my fiction — to make something positive out of the chaos that surrounds him, to create some sort of positive mythology that can sustain one’s confidence in the world."

JG Ballard interviewed by Simon Sellars, 2006.

Herzogian

I've been getting into the writing of Geoff Dyer lately, the tough-to-categorise British author that we've just called "the thinking man's hedonist" in a Your Weekend interview (not online). Like Sebald, who he admires as a predecessor, Dyer's stuff occupies a zone between what we conventionally understand as fiction and what we conventionally understand as non-fiction, as in the very title of his new novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (why Jeff and not Geoff?, etc). But this is Sebald as a restless, 21st century itinerant, a guy you might meet at a ravers' hostel in Thailand, quoting Nietzsche.

After reading Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, I went back to an earlier book: 2003's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. This is the heart of his restlessness: funny and erudite travel essays on New Orleans, Rome, Detroit, Libya, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Amsterdam, Florida and, finally, the enlightening deserts of Nevada (he develops a Burning Man obsession). As a not very disciplined collector of film references in non-film writing, these essays were rich pickings too. Dyer is a hardcore fan of Tarkovsky's Stalker, which he also writes about here, and the final essay adapts Stalker's open-ended "Zone" as that place of chemical, spiritual or communal bliss a raver might get to; but the Zone also appears in his writing on Libya and Detroit.

The others:

An eroticised moment in Rome, mindful that Dyer once wrote a book about not writing a book about DH Lawrence: "Her hair was shadow dark and I was watching her eat a fig. I was eating one too. I was acutely conscious, obviously, of the Lawrence poem and the scene in the film of Women in Love where Alan Bates, who plays Birkin, quotes the poem. The experience came dripping in quotation marks."

Also in Rome: "One night I went with Nick to an open-air screening of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves. Neither of us had seen this masterpiece of neo-realism before, and it came as a major disappointment to both of us.

"'If it was meant to be so realistic, why didn't he just lock up his bike?' said Nick in the Calisto afterwards."

Meeting a woman at a resort in Ko Pha-Ngan, Thailand: "We both loved Voyager with Sam Shepard and Julie Delpy, a film regarded with derision by the few people who have seen it."

His use of Stalker and Women in Love are good illustrations of our use of film as memory, the ways we now order and measure and relate our experiences. Which Dyer fully understands -- see that "quotation marks" line -- and it's something that he does less self-consciously than, say, Douglas Coupland in Generation X. But the best examples of that tendency might be these:

In Indonesia: "We toiled up an Aguirre path to one side of the waterfall, in deep shadow flecked by gold light, scrambling upward, clinging to the roots of trees."

In Cambodia, where a boat is stuck in mud: " ... and the sunburned Germans Fitzcarraldoing succeeded in moving it, our old boat, first an inch and then several feet."

With these two, you have to know what he's talking about to know what he's talking about. He doesn't italicise these Herzog references, and they might be the most seamless references to life imitating film clips I've seen: all these backpackers, slackers and sunburned Germans are would-be Herzogs, looking for the most dangerous and difficult places, the peak experiences and some zone beyond materialism. But there's another thing: like Sebald and like Dyer, Herzog blurs that line between fact and fiction. In Aguirre, his extras really did trek up that mountain path; in Fitzcarraldo, they really did drag a boat over a hill. Real world events happen and are documented in the service of fiction. And his documentaries incorporate non-fiction elements. The start of something I wrote about Herzog in 2005:

Near the end of Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God – his first film with the unhinged force of nature that was actor Klaus Kinski – a demoralised, renegade band of Spanish conquistadors are drifting on a raft on the Amazon, their mission abandoned. They are silent and weak with starvation. They are hallucinating, or the natural world has gone as crazy and sick as they have. One crewman rouses himself from his stupor: “I see a ship with sails … in a tall tree … and from the stern hangs a canoe.” Unlikely, says a fellow crewman: “The ship is in your imagination. We all have the fever. It’s only a mirage.” As he keeps talking, Herzog’s camera turns around, from the raft back to the dense forest, and shows us the image of a ship, with sails, sitting high in the trees. The hallucination –if it is that – is shared by Aguirre (Kinski), the most deranged of all: “That ship is real. We’ll sail it to the Atlantic.”

At this point in the film anything is possible, but there’s still something breathtaking about seeing that ship in the trees. “We actually built a boat, partially in the treetop, which was 120ft high,” Herzog says on the commentary track of the Aguirre DVD. “It was heavy and huge.” All for a sequence that lasts about 30 seconds. And, as he says in the interview book Herzog on Herzog, “Who knows, it might actually still be up there.”

Religulous instruction

[Bill] Maher and [Larry] Charles get laughs by using brief clips from sanctimonious religious movies, but they don't quote from Dreyer's Day of Wrath, Bergman's Seventh Seal or Tarkovsky's Andrei Roublev.

Philip French in the Observer reviews Religulous, which aims to do for organised religion what Supersize Me did for fast food. Day of Wrath pictured.