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"My film-making is much better suited to being watched by a single viewer.
I take the viewers one by one, unlike Hollywood cinema which aims to
amalgamate the audience."
Stephen Dwoskin
| François Albera : | Stephen Dwoskin |
| Stephen Dwoskin : the poetry of “hinderedness" | |
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| Cathy Day : | I film therefore we are |
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| Michel Barthelemy : | On four films of Stephen Dwoskin |
Stephen Dwoskin
Steve Dwoskin was born in 1939 in Brooklyn, New York City, into a poor
family originally from Odessa. He contracted polio at the age of 7 and
was left disabled. After studying art (under professors de Kooning and
Albers), he attended New York University and the Parsons School of
Design, and was a regular in Greenwich Village with the likes of
Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Frank. He discovered
experimental cinema alongside Maya Deren and was influenced by
the transgressive underground films of Jack Smith and Ron Rice. He
later published the book Film is… on this genre, in a highly personal
and activist style, at a time when the police frequently carried out
Prohibition-style raids on venues where experimental films were shown,
confiscating and destroying prints, and arresting organizers, film-makers
and sometimes audience members. Such films by-passed the usual
commercial channels and norms and were thus considered unacceptable
and branded “pornographic”.
After working as a photographer and graphic designer, Dwoskin worked
as an art director for CBS while at the same time producing his own films
using found footage. The first of these, Asleep, was awarded a prize at
the Venice Biennale. In 1964, he moved to Britain on a scholarship.
He settled there and was the driving force behind an independent cinema
movement (the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative). In the 1970s, he directed
feature films which made him known outside the experimental movement
and attracted support from cultural television stations and institutions
(particularly Germany’s ZDF). After working for a time on subjective
documentaries on artists such as photographer Bill Brandt or the Ballet
Nègre company, his film-making became increasingly introspective as
his mobility diminished.
In this work, the geographical division between New York and London is
matched by a division between a true experimental period (tinkering with
the components of film, framing and voice-overs, timing and repetition),
and a dramatically and narratively more complex period.
But Dwoskin’s entire oeuvre is an attempt to explore the issue of voyeurism
and of the relationship with the Other that Dwoskin’s human camera
attempts to approach or appropriate in spite of his lack of mobility, thereby
adding a whole new tactile dimension to the camera’s way of looking.
Dyn Amo, which records a sleazy striptease stage show in which two
young women are abused by a gigolo in a cruel and haunting
sado-masochistic ritual. The camera casts a relentlessly flawed eye over
the scene, which is so botched, off-centre and fragmented that, beyond
the acting and the make-up, the camera subjects the helplessness of the
actress to its unblinking stare, leaving her stripped bare on more levels
than her mere physical nudity. The scene is so relentless and obstinate
that the “victim’s” gaze is turned back on the viewer, who thus becomes
the sadist. All of his early films (Alone, Trixi, Moment, Times For) subtly
deconstruct the conventional system of the male gaze that would later be
addressed in a gender studies context by so-called “conventional” cinema.
Indeed, it was a discussion of Dwoskin (to whom she was close in London)
that led Laura Mulvey to lay the foundations for this approach in a text that
has since become essential reading in the field of gender studies.
Without turning his back on his earlier experiments with testing the
boundaries, Dwoskin then made fictional films, including a superb
adaptation of Wedekind’s Tod und Teufel, in which voids and slips are
filmed during acts of speech, rather than the characters and their actions.
Drawing inspiration from the writings of Erwin Goffmann, many films
adopted confinement as their premise in order to observe the effects on
those confined, and particularly their self-portrayal and seduction
strategies and their power relationships (Central Bazaar). In some cases,
Dwoskin staged his own cripple’s body (Behindert) or devoted an entire
film to the disruption caused by disability in a standardized society, with
comical results (Outside In).
Dwoskin’s closeness to surrealism (Aragon, Georges Bataille) and its
forerunners (Jarry, Carroll) informed his approach to eroticism in his films
of the 1980s (Shadows from Light on the photography of Bill Brandt,
Further and Particular based on Bataille’s Ma Mère and Jarry’s Dr Faustroll).
After films dealing with fear and pain then remembrance and childhood
using home movie footage of his childhood capers (Trying to Kiss the
Moon), he returned to experimentation using a digital camera and the
computer he could work with from his hospital bed. This personal diary
uses the narrative device of self-verbalization whereby the increasingly
difficult situation of the enunciator (hospitalization, artificial respiration)
can be blended with fantasies or chance encounters with visitors or
care-givers, side-tracks, collages and reminiscences.
François Albera
Paru dans la revue Zeuxis (France) Juin 2004 avec l'aimable autorisation
de l'auteur ©François Albera
(back to the menu)
Stephen Dwoskin : the poetry of “hinderedness"
Dwoskin's films of the 1960s and 1970s are the work of a human camera,
with a prosthetically assisted gaze, which is hindered (behindert) not in
the politically correct sense of the expression ‘physically challenged’ but
actually rooted to the spot on crutches or bed-ridden or stuck in a corner
on a chair (albeit a wheelchair). These films thus touch on the essence of
what a movie camera is: it is static, weighty, awkward, one-eyed,
constricted, insensitive to light. In the earlier films (particularly Asleep,
Alone, Naissant, Soliloquy, Take Me, Moment, Trixi, Jesus Blood, etc.),
the strategy is often one of ‘going for it’ the way one might try to go for
it with a chess move (indeed, see Chinese Checkers), and the standpoint
could be described as minimalist: a restriction designed to have a
maximum effect at the receiving end, a power relationship. The person
being filmed is pushed to the wall, pinned to the bed, hunted down, and
this coercive, haunting setting is expanded or developed by editing,
zooming in and out, repetition and slow motion. The subject thus caught
in the trap of the camera’s gaze breaks down, is pleasured, lets go and
flirts with annihilation. However, in Dyn Amo (and in Me Myself and I as
well) it is clear that although the gaze of the man who films in this way
is a violent one, he still is not in a position of control. At the heart of this
relationship, which appears to be a clinch but is merely a hindered gaze,
there is a space filled with avoidance, failure and faux pas. Then again if,
as a result of a demonstrative decision and positive choice, we consider
Tod und Teufel to be the fulcrum of the period, then these films appear
to shift their focus onto this very ‘failure’, they revolve around their
subjects, scrutinise the interstices or gaps between people, the air,
recording skin, an incipient gesture remembered, the blink of an eye,
the quiver of a nostril, a shiver. Finally, by continually reducing the
weight of the prosthesis, which is now a hand-held accessory, the
caméra-stylo or camera as pen, not the writer's pen with which Astruc
thought he was liberating the cinema, but Marey's ‘style’ that expresses
the slightest reactions of the subject, the animal, and records them on a
roll of graph paper, the camera unleashed dances and caresses its subject.
Then begins an exploration that blurs the distinction between the grain of
the skin and that of the video tape or the digital disc – pores and pixels.
Dwoskin the painter rediscovers the third dimension of matter on his
computer, overlapping the layers of pictures, blending them and
remorsefully delivering a sensual confession.
Back to the first era labelled, for convenience, the era of presentation
because, of course, the three stages described above should really be
considered to be a ‘dominant theme’. These hindrances to all-powerfulness
and all-seeingness that are nevertheless denied by those who talk of the
cinema and call for “ever more” omnipresence, mobility and weightlessness,
a “total” cinema or even a cinema that ceases to exist once it has been
merged with reality, are for others the component parts of the film-maker's
way of looking. Edison, as Sadoul repeatedly said, “heavily secured” the
camera “to the floor of the ‘Black Maria’”, the “cell-cum-vehicle”, thereby
rendering it starchy and stiff. Méliès, of course, would film the Robert
Houdin theatre's stage face-on, “from the point of view of the gentleman
in the orchestra pit”. After him, after them, through editing and cutting,
the camera took off “on a flying carpet”, lifting roofs like Asmodeus,
worming its way into everything and becoming omniscient. Others, such
as Arnheim, turned these very hindrances into the foundations of the
artist's work: since I am restricted by the angle, the flatness of the picture
makes everything look two-dimensional, the lens distorts, the light
simplifies the perception of reality, then art will make up for these
shortcomings, compensating for the handicaps of the hardware by
suggesting what is off-screen, through the composition of the picture
– the erudite arrangement of shadow and light.
It is clear that Dwoskin the disabled film-maker, in his stubborn
determination to hold the camera himself, even though he has to prop
himself up on a pair of crutches that could have come straight out of a
Jacques Callot engraving, and secure a medieval knight's straps and greaves
around his enfeebled legs, might be not only the model of that hindered
camera but also the artist who is prevented from grasping everything and
forced to search the portion of the visible to draw from it a metonymy of
everything, thereby projecting a “built” world. Indeed, semioticians have
postulated that, for “diegetisation” or story-telling to occur, a world must
first be built, the medium must be hidden and a space inhabitable by a
character must be generated. This is the aim of all of the “compensatory”
processes used (from cutting to editing, moving equipment, lighting and
even special effects). However implausible the resulting built world may
be (dinosaurs, Martians, godfathers, gladiators, secret agents), it is
nevertheless a world that humans can inhabit and thus a world that is
possible! Pace the semioticians and their sense of humour, Dwoskin does
the exact opposite: he explores the uninhabitability of the world through
one who is denied all of its comforts and conveniences (including that of
sitting down when invited to do so by a good-natured soul), as well as
through everyone else – whose hostility he will have noticed before anyone
else – and, within that hostility, that rejection, that barrier, he develops
the interstices of survival, the flights of fancy, the attention paid to the
minutest details, the incipient gestures. Dwoskin inhabits this uninhabitable
world, understanding that doing so requires feeling the three-dimensional
nature of the medium, the very matter that makes up the mediation
between him and others, him and that very world, not a world built by
him (the celebrated romantic world of authors), but that world, which
must be confronted in despair, because it is the only world there is, and
because its folds and layers no doubt conceal what is essential for
survival: sensuality, desire, pleasure, amazement, rapture.
François Albera
Texte du livret du coffret 5DVD ©les films du renard/François Albera
(back to the menu)
I film therefore we are
If Stephen Dwoskin’s cinematographic work is both sublime and
uncategorisable, that is because it always goes beyond its component
formal, poetic or narrative subjects. It is impossible not to admire the
sometimes almost unbearable beauty of his films, the virtuosity of his
camerawork, the controlled illumination, the paced precision with which
each scene follows from and interacts with the one before, and the
unique melody of his soundtracks. But the essence lies elsewhere.
The essence is most succinctly expressed by the French word expérience,
which can mean both ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’. It is reflected in
each of his works and each of his works beckons us to discover it.
Indeed, I film therefore I am could be the first term of Dwoskin’s
cinematographic equation. His films, which some have compared to
those of an entomologist, explore their subject with a harsh gaze
unfettered by moral or aesthetic prejudices. This film-maker does not
show what he sees, he exhibits what he discovers, by filming, about
the world, himself and others, and what only the act of film-making
can reveal, namely the fact that cinema is the key to the world.
I film you therefore you are could also be the second term of an attempt
to define Dwoskin’s work. As a film-maker, the point is not so much that
he has always filmed women, and men too, and loved them, sharing with
them the gift of the human expérience (a cinematographic one in this case)
that in his view is the most important. Rather, the point is that he has
always loved those he has filmed, using his camera to establish an
exceptionally intense and intimate relationship with them.
Indeed, Dwoskin’s camera does not pick up anything that existed before it.
The relationship between the camera and its subjects brings into being the
characters and the world it portrays. But the first two terms referred to
above would be hollow were they not complemented by the third term
that confers upon Dwoskin’s oeuvre its real power: I film therefore we are.
Indeed, the viewer is never a third party excluded from this relationship
with the self and with the world. The first two terms of the equation
function because we are watching him watch. Dwoskin’s films bear
witness, and radically so, to our own human condition, our desires, our
pleasures and our pains.
Cathy Day
(back to the menu)
On four films of Stephen Dwoskin
In Pain is, Dwoskin observes that “When you rub your finger on wood,
you feel the wood; if you get a splinter, you feel your finger. That’s how
pain works”. That’s also how Stephen Dwoskin’s films work. They are not
slick films that one can take in at a glance or have fleeting thoughts about,
films to lose oneself in and forget about the world. They are films that
hurt and vivify and delight and soothe, films which, like the splinter that
makes one aware of one’s finger, make us aware of our own way of looking.
Given how he arrived in the world of film, Dwoskin is usually considered
to be an experimental film-maker, which he, like any genuine artist,
evidently is, but this attitude leads to a misunderstanding, and makes his
films difficult to distribute, because his films are immediately assumed
(in a humdrum, unthinking world) to be primarily dominated by
considerations of form rather than substance, and thus not only inaccessible
to, but also uninterested in attracting, a broader audience.
But Dwoskin’s words do not bear this out. As early as 1981, he explained
how “Behindert was intended for a television audience and it was easier
to get my message across by showing myself directly on screen. My aim
is to make films that work both in the cinema and on television”.
Another question: A made-for-TV movie reaches a larger audience than a
commercial movie (let alone a research film). How do you handle this
contradiction? Dwoskin replies: “I don’t find it fascinating. I think a lot
of people can understand my research. I have far more faith in the
audience than the people who produce TV shows”.
This may sound platitudinous, but in an article published in Trafic issue
no. 50 in 2004 and entitled “Reflections: The Self, the World and Others,
and How All These Things Melt Together in Film”, Steve Dwoskin discusses
the values he associates with the profession of film-maker[1].
[Footnote 1: Dwoskin said in 1974: “I do not reflect on the media, I do
my work, I work on people”.]
Although the text as a whole cannot be reproduced here, it is worth citing
a few excerpts of this remarkable, humanist text (assuming that the word
‘humanist’ still means anything), which is more eloquent than any
commentary.
First there is the artist’s demand: “Film is my language and without
language I become silent and in my silence I cease to be. Silence can kill
you, and to remain silent is literally to close down the sense of one’s
humanity (…) I have had to find my voice as a filmmaker, and retain
my own sense of humanity as well as a personal mode of expression.(…)”
The project: “I only do what I know. Nothing else. I do it to make films to
free myself and, of course, to free others, especially the viewer. I also do
it to make films that explore and express the self. To express the self is
to also expose the self, but at the same time to allow a dialogue with
others. It is not only a dialogue, but a process of investigation and
reflection for all, or in Lacanian terms ‘positive transference’. To fulfil this,
filmmaking has to be honest and revealing. It has to bear witness to the
subject and to the self. It has to allow the viewer to be able to engage
with their own selves and their own feelings. Films, my films, have to
open up to the elusive and intimate space in order to permit the viewer
to enter them or reflect upon them (…).”
Form: “My films are made as a process that is reflective (often meditative)
and at the same become reflectors. This forces a type (or style) of
filmmaking that is outside or beyond the barriers of conventional
‘storytelling’ (and beyond even voyeurism). There is no precise label for
this kind of film (though it has often been called ‘personal’).”
Cinema as adventure: “Because of this absence of classification, or this
absence of explanation, the films appear difficult and threatening to some
(certainly to the established conventions), haunting and moving to others.
Clearly, the mirroring effect produced by a ‘personal’ and ‘expressive’ type
of cinema, like my films (and some other people’s work), presents an
image of life in a boundless way (…)”
“One then has to consider that the experience of making (or seeing) a
‘personal’ film (or any borderless film) is like making a trip into an
unfamiliar land – to a place where you’ve never been; like having a love
affair with a person who demands things of you that you have never done
before. It becomes an adventure and a process of revealing one’s selfhood.
It insists that the spectator has to work at viewing (…)”
“This kind of film, my kind of film (…), has to look so far to be able to see
not only the beautiful, but the terrible and apparently repulsive things,
because those things that exist and are in common with all other beings,
have value.”
These quotations speak for themselves and are notable for their rigorous
and dense use of language, which reflects the thinking behind them, and
our hope is that they will make the adventure of these four films (as well
as all the films in this boxed set) a more vivid experience. They also serve
to dispel any suspicion of voyeurism (some have even talked of
scoptophilia) or exhibitionism and thus gratuitousness that has all too
often developed in connection with some of Dwoskin’s films. They also
help to put into perspective such comments as “Although Stephen Dwoskin’s
work is remarkable and worthy, it is nevertheless rather technically flawed”[2]
[Footnote 2: Conclusion of a review of Behindert in Revue du Cinéma
no. 318, June-July 1977].
“A film is like a battleground, love, hate, action, violence and death, in
one word: emotion”. This is, of course, how Samuel Fuller defined the
cinema for Pierrot-Ferdinand.
In Behindert (1974), Outside in (1981), Pain is (1997), Intoxicated by my
illness (2000), Dwoskin’s chosen battlegrounds are paralysis and love,
disease and death, suffering and pleasure, the violence of things and the
sweetness of women, and unlike many senior officers, he doesn’t hesitate
to put himself on the line.
Dwoskin appeared for the first time on-screen in Behindert, explaining
that he did so simply because he was telling his own story. It is a simple
story: a man and a woman (film titles always) meet at a party with
friends, start seeing each other, and live together for a while, then the
woman leaves.
Emotion, again: the scene of the meeting lasts around 15 minutes during
which we see the eyes of Carola, a woman watching, a woman watched
(by the camera, since Steve’s character is nowhere to be seen in this first
part of the film, and he remains the same human camera as in his other
films), a woman put on show and captured at her most intimate. It seems
to us that the questioning expectations, sensual quivers, fevered curiosity
and vague anxiety of first romantic encounters have never been better
portrayed. The film continues in a similarly exultant and wrenching vein.
The film-maker invites us to take a look at things we have never looked
at before, and tells us a love story that struggles to find a way through
the hazards of everyday life – the everyday life of a disabled person,
and those hazards eventually drag the story down. The issue of fiction
versus reality does not have much relevance when it is acknowledged
that reality does not need to be watched to be real.
Incidental note
“Brief shots, staccato editing, “shaky” filming: the awkwardness is
evidently deliberate. In other words, the technique, which is very close
to that of amateur cinema, claims to be avant-garde and is thus an art
effect, a standpoint,” wrote Stanislas Gregeois of Behindert in Télérama
magazine in 1977.
Let us not discuss technical issues further because we do not claim or
have the means to analyse them. But what would be the response if
similar comments were made, for example, in connection with Céline:
“clumsy sentences, shaky syntax, vague wording. (…) In other words,
the technique, which is very close to that of an amateur writer,” etc?
How much harm has been done by comments of this ilk to
Dwoskin’s films, which are just as moving as any by Ford or Chaplin
(ad libitum)? It is precisely because they are “written” the way they
are that Dowskin’s films are so moving. Dowskin’s legs may be
paralysed, but his technical ability and creative energy are not.
With Outside in, Dwoskin delivers us a film that we might be tempted
to call picaresque. “A picaresque novel is an imaginary confession.
The picaro tells the story of his ‘fortunes and adversities’ in the first
person singular (…) The picaro aims to replace the stylised images
of the knight or Arcadian shepherd [‘ordinary’ cinematographic
productions?] with a mocking stylisation of everyday experience from
which he deliberately picks out only that which is most pathetic.”
“In general, this conception of everyday experience cannot be the
subject of literature [or cinema]” [3].
[Footnote 3: Maurice Molho, Romans picaresques espagnols,
Introduction (p. XI), Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Gallimard, 1968. Note
the part played by genuine or simulated physical disability in
picaresque novels.]
Steve (the character) finds himself in strange situations and has to deal
with bizarre characters (or characters who do not become bizarre until
they encounter Steve). Jokes and adventures follow, involving women,
of course, but men as well, especially two drunks who have convinced
themselves that Steve is in need of help.
This is probably a good time to mention Dwoskin’s use of comedy :
Outside in is a film that deals with disability but it is also funny and even
burlesque. Of course, only the disabled can use this mode to stage
themselves as disabled characters.
Bergson [4] states not only that “A deformity that may become comic is
a deformity that a normally built person, could successfully imitate” (p. 18)
but also that “the impression of the comic will be produced […] when we
are shown the soul tantalised by the needs of the body: on the one hand,
the moral personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other,
the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its
machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these
claims of the body, the more striking will be the result” (pages 38-39).
[Foot note 4: All of the quotations from Bergson are taken from Laughter :
an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic]
Stephen Dwoskin thus chooses to show the body of his character Steve
as a potentially comical body and does not hesitate to play on that,
whether conventionally (the ‘apocalyptic’ ending to the film, in which
we see him, grinning and wet, take a toilet bowl with him on his way
down), or more dialectically (the Buster Keaton-esque sequence in which
he meets an editor who absolutely insists that he should sit down on a
swivel chair – to simplify the interview. Steve’s face, like Keaton’s,
remains impassive.) Comedy may also arise from the clash between the
voice-over and the picture (as in the multiple scenes where Steve
attempts to reach a woman on a bed, scenes repeated with infinitesimal
and subtle variations in shots, costumes, angles and lighting). Possibly
or particularly worthy of mention is the scene in which a woman wearing
nothing but underwear dons, equerry-like, Steve’s orthopaedic aids and
experiences how difficult every move then becomes. At this point, we
are in the situation described by Bergson: she is laughing and Steve is
laughing, but what about the viewer? Is he or she laughing? “The
comedian’s cause must necessarily,” says Bergson, “comprise something
slightly detrimental (and specifically detrimental) to life in society, since
society responds with a gesture which looks every bit like a defensive
reaction, a gesture that is slightly frightening” (page 157). Is this what
Stephen Dwoskin meant when he feared that his films might become
threatening to some? Indeed, an alternative title for Outside in could,
without it seems stretching its meaning too far, be My heart laid bare.
In Pain is, one of the last scenes, shot in black and white, is of a clown
show, in which the clown attempts to walk on a tightrope, loses his
balance repeatedly, falls down, gets back up, tries again and eventually
proves to be a marvellous rope dancer. Could this be a metaphor for
Dwoskin as a film-maker? That is what we can and do see.
In Pain is, Dwoskin says that "comedy seems to reflect the structure of
acute pain, in its movement from affliction to disappearance," and adds
"is it the absence of pain in situations that appear painful that makes us
laugh? And laughter is a great reducer of pain."
Dwoskin will never be able to mimic a walking man and although he is
well versed in the ‘mechanical’ laws of comedy, he applies them not to
what is living, as Bergson wished, but to what is real. The result is sublime.
There are echoes here of two lines written by the great, melancholy
Alfred de Musset, who found himself almost alone one night at the Théâtre
Français where “only” Molière was being performed, and who wrote of Molière’s comedy: “This mighty humour, so sad and so profound that laughter leads
to tears” Pain is is a ‘documentary’ produced for a theme evening entitled
“What is pain?” on Franco-German TV station Arte. It is not so much a
documentary as an reflective or even meditative work. The project is
relatively conventional in the sense that it shows a series of talking heads,
but Dwoskin provides the warm, attentive, unassuming voice-over,
conducts the interviews and provides the analysis (he does, after all,
refer to a personal quest, which is bascially the subject of all of his films).
Is it possible to form an image of pain? How is pain perceived and how is
it expressed? “Since pain affects us so profoundly, we seem compelled
to try and make sense of it,” says Dwoskin (on the substance of his work).
The diseases in question are mainly physical, psychological and moral,
but not at the expense of exquisite pain – that strange interface between
suffering and pleasure (another recurrent theme in Dwoskin’s work),
the eroticism of pain or eroticised pain (Dwoskin himself is the subject of
the required experiments), the pain of a sportsman taking off his ballast
or rolling with the punches, the painful ecstasy of religion.
It is a beautiful and dense film because it reflects Dwoskin’s perspective,
because it reflects his fears and his everyday life, and because it provides,
not something to look at, but something to watch and reflect upon. It is
apparently possible to put up with pain (“often to get out of pain you have
to go through pain”). Dwoskin asks a young man “What do you call
your pain? Some philosopher calls it dog or something.” The young man
replies “I’d call it life.” It is the life being fought for (yet another battlefield)
behind the walls of the endless corridors of a hospital Dwoskin visits in
lengthy, feverish or calm tracking shots.
Then there are the repeated shots of trees blowing in the wind. Are they
shot on location for the sake of fresh air? Are they a metaphor for the
human condition (although man is actually more reed-like)? Are they a
homage to Marey the physiologist who used the cinematograph to break
down, inter alia, the movement of a man walking, but also filmed smoke
or falling leaves? Or are they a homage to the cinema, which has made
movement reproducible, along with time and, secondarily, life and life’s end?
Intoxicated by my illness tells us about the end that is nigh, about
boundaries. But it is as if, for example, Rigoletto was telling us about
fatherhood (this year’s hot topic). Of course, fatherhood is the issue in
Rigoletto and Rigoletto is intoxicated by his fatherhood. But it must be
acknowledged that, having said that, we have said nothing about Rigoletto.
Well, Intoxicated is an opera of a film, with a part for baritones and
sopranos and a part for tenors and mezzo sopranos, the struggle between
brothers or sisters, or brothers and sisters, who are enemies, but only
superficially so since they are brothers and sisters.
[paragraph not translated]
The antechamber of death, the corridors of Saint Thomas’ hospital again,
the emergency room resembling a torture chamber with its bizarre
instruments that paradoxically save lives, women in white tending to men
as they suffer, breathe fitfully and die, and a patient with a lengthily
scrutinised mummy-like face and a drainage tube sprouting like a pink
and yellow flower from his neck. The women in white move deftly and
confidently, they know how to soothe and sometimes torment the better
to bring relief. Their rumps (the picture requires the use of this term)
are watched intently by one of those men who are suffering, breathing
fitfully and dying. The man is dreaming or at least daydreaming. He is
Steve. That’s when we find ourselves in Venusberg: the women are in
black, the men are always stretched out naked, in chains, bound or
strung up. The women in black move deftly and confidently, they know
how to soothe and sometimes torment the better to bring relief.
The pace quickens and soon the two worlds mingle, overlap, repel and
attract each other. The women, the ones in white and the ones in black,
become interchangeable. It is no longer possible to tell who is suffering
and who is feeling pleasure. What about death?
We have basically been trying to say only one thing, although it took a
long time to get to this point: Stephen Dwoskin is an infinitely more
important film-maker than Steven Spielberg and it is no less infinitely
regrettable that the distribution of their work is not the reverse of what
it is. But hey, these days everybody seems to think that that’s only normal.
Michel Barthelemy
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