Random Notes, Quotations__

在一個很少chat的qq朋友的自我介紹上看到的。

世界上只有两种可以称之为浪漫的情感

一种叫相濡以沫，另一种叫相忘于江湖

和最爱的人相濡以沫

和情深缘浅的人相忘于江湖……

retrieved from Bartleby.com
—————————————————–
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965).

The Waste Land. 1922.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock, 25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 35
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, 45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. 50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. 55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City, 60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. 65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! 70
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! 75
‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’

II. A GAME OF CHESS

THE Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out 80
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion; 85
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended 90
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, 95
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms 105
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. 110

‘My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’

I think we are in rats’ alley 115
Where the dead men lost their bones.

‘What is that noise?’
The wind under the door.
‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’
Nothing again nothing. 120
‘Do
‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
‘Nothing?’
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes. 125
‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent 130
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
‘What shall we ever do?’
The hot water at ten. 135
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself, 140
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, 145
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said. 150
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling. 155
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.) 160
The chemist said it would be alright, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME 165
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. 170
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

III. THE FIRE SERMON

THE river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. 175
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear 185
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse 190
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year. 195
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter 200
They wash their feet in soda water
Et, O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d. 205
Tereu

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants 210
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back 215
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives 220
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, 225
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest. 230
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses, 235
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence; 240
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall 245
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows on final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit…

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover; 250
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, 255
And puts a record on the gramophone.

‘This music crept by me upon the waters’
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, 260
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. 265

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails 270
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach 275
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars 280
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores 285
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia 290
Wallala leialala

‘Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’ 295
‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised “a new start”.
I made no comment. What should I resent?’
‘On Margate Sands. 300
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.’ 305
la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest 310

burning

IV. DEATH BY WATER

PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea 315
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, 320
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying 325
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience 330

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink 335
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit 340
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water 345
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring 350
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock 355
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together 360
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you? 365

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only 370
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London 375
Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings 380
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains 385
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one. 390
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves 395
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
D A 400
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed 405
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
D A 410
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours 415
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
D A
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded 420
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order? 425

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins 430
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

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NOTES

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

Line 20 Cf. Ezekiel 2:7.

23. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:5.

31. V. Tristan und Isolde, i, verses 5–8.

42. Id. iii, verse 24.

46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the ‘crowds of people’, and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.

60. Cf. Baudelaire:
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.

63. Cf. Inferno, iii. 55–7:
si lunga tratta
di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.

64. Cf. Inferno, iv. 25–27:
Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
non avea pianto, ma’ che di sospiri,
che l’aura eterna facevan tremare.

68. A phenomenon which I have often noticed.

74. Cf. the Dirge in Webster’s White Devil.

76. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal.

II. A GAME OF CHESS

77. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II. ii. 190.

92. Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I. 726:
dependent lychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt.

98. Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, iv. 140.

99. V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, vi, Philomela.

100. Cf. Part III, l. 204.

115. Cf. Part III, l. 195.

118. Cf. Webster: ‘Is the wind in that door still?’

126. Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.

138. Cf. the game of chess in Middleton’s Women beware Women.

III. THE FIRE SERMON

176. V. Spenser, Prothalamion.

192. Cf. The Tempest, I. ii.

196. Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress.

197. Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees:
When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear,
A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring
Actaeon to Diana in the spring,
Where all shall see her naked skin…

199. I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.

202. V. Verlaine, Parsifal.

210. The currants were quoted at a price ‘carriage and insurance free to London’; and the Bill of Lading, etc., were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft.

218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest:
…Cum Iunone iocos et ‘maior vestra profecto est
Quam, quae contingit maribus’, dixisse, ‘voluptas.’
Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti
Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota.
Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva
Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu
Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem
Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem
Vidit et ‘est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae’,
Dixit ‘ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet,
Nunc quoque vos feriam!’ percussis anguibus isdem
Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago.
Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa
Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto
Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique
Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte,
At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam
Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto
Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore.

221. This may not appear as exact as Sappho’s lines, but I had in mind the ‘longshore’ or ‘dory’ fisherman, who returns at nightfall.

253. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.

257. V. The Tempest, as above.

264. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren’s interiors. See The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.).

266. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in turn. V. Götterdammerung, III. i: The Rhine-daughters.

279. V. Froude, Elizabeth, vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain:
In the afternoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. (The queen) was alone with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased.

293. Cf. Purgatorio, V. 133:
‘Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma.’

307. V. St. Augustine’s Confessions: ‘to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears’.

308. The complete text of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.

309. From St. Augustine’s Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston’s book), and the present decay of eastern Europe.

357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds in Eastern North America) ‘it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats…. Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.’ Its ‘water-dripping song’ is justly celebrated.

360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.

367–77. Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos:
Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligen Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Bürger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen.

401. ‘Datta, dayadhvam, damyata’ (Give, sympathize, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka–Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen’s Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489.

407. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi:
…they’ll remarry
Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider
Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.

411. Cf. Inferno, xxxiii. 46:
ed io sentii chiavar l’uscio di sotto
all’orribile torre.
Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346:
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it…. In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

424. V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King.

427. V. Purgatorio, xxvi. 148.
‘Ara vos prec per aquella valor
‘que vos guida al som de l’escalina,
’sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.’
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.

428. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III.

429. V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado.

431. V. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy.

433. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The Peace which passeth understanding’ is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word.

Shinya Tsukamoto (冢本晋也)

01. Seven Samurai
02. Ruined Youth
03. Blade Runner
04. Metropolis
05. Taxi Driver
06. Intentions of Murder (Imamura)
07. The Terminator
08. My Neighbour Totoro (Miyazaki)
09. Nikita
10. Les Amants du Pont Neuf

Director: Kurosawa
Actor: Robert De Niro
Actress: Jodie Foster

Terry Gilliam *

01. Citizen Kane
02. 8½
03. Pinocchio
04. The Seventh Seal
05. Seven Samurai
06. Napoleon
07. Birth of a Nation
08. Sherlock Jr.
09. The Exterminating Angel
10. Lawrence of Arabia

转自moviegoers
——————————————————————————
瞧瞧戈达尔的口味

By Jean-Luc Godard

美国电影十佳（～1963）

01. Scarface (Howard Hawks)
02. The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin)
03. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
04. The Searchers (John Ford)
05. Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly-Donen)
06. The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles)
07. Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray)
08. Angel Face (Otto Preminger)
09. To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch)
10. Dishonoured (Josef von Sternberg)

战后法国电影六佳（～1964）

01. Le Plaisir (Ophuls)
02. La Pyramide humaine (Rouch)
03. Le Testament d’Orphee (Cocteau)
04. Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (Renoir)
05. Pickpocket (Bresson)
06. Les Godelureaux (Chabrol)

世界电影年度十佳

1956
01. Mr Arkadin (Orson Welles)
02. Elena et les hommes (Jean Renoir)
03. The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock)
04. Bus Stop (Joshua Logan)
05. Slightly Scarlet (Allan Dwan)
06. The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg)
07. Un Condamne a mort s’est echappe (Robert Bresson)
08. Fear (Roberto Rossellini)
09. Bhowani Junction (George Cukor)
10. My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine)

1957
01. Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray)
02. The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock)
03. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin)
04. Hollywood or Bust (Frank Tashlin)
05. Les Trois font la paire (Sacha Guitry)
06. A King in New York (Charlie Chaplin)
07. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang)
08. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Luis Bunuel)
09. Sawdust and Tinsel (Ingmar Bergman)
10. Saint Joan (Otto Preminger)

1958
01. The Quiet American (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
02. Journey into Autumn (Ingmar Bergman)
03. Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger)
04. Montparnasse 19 (Jacques Becker)
05. Une Vie (Alexandre Astruc)
06. Man of the West (Anthony Mann)
07. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)
08. L’Eau vive (Francois Villiers)
09. White Nights (Luchino Visconti)
10. Le Temps des oeufs durs (Norbert Carbonnaux)

1959
01. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson)
02. Deux Hommes dans Manhattan (Jean-Pierre Melville)
03. Les Rendez-vous du diable (Haroun Tazieff)
04. Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch)
05. La Tete contre les murs (Georges Franju)
06. Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe (Jean Renoir)
07. Hiroshima, mon amour (Alain Resnais)
08. Les Quatres cent coups (Francois Truffaut)
09. Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol)
10. Du cote de la Cote (Agnes Varda)

1960
01. Les Bonnes Femmes (Claude Chabrol)
02. The Savage Innocents (Nicholas Ray)
03. Give a Girl a Break (Stanley Donen)
04. Sansho Dayu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
05. Moonfleet (Fritz Lang)
06. Nazarin (Luis Bunuel)
07. Poem of the Sea (Alexander Dovzhenko)
08. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)
09. Le Testament d’Orphee (Jean Cocteau)
10. Tirez sur le pianiste (Francois Truffaut)

1961
01. Two Rode Together (John Ford)
02. La Pyramide humaine (Jean Rouch)
03. Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (Jean Renoir)
04. Les Godelureaux (Claude Chabrol)
05. Paris Nous Appartient (Jacques Rivette)
06. Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti)
07. Exodus (Otto Preminger)
08. Lola (Jacques Demy)
09. Era Notte a Roma (Roberto Rossellini)
10. The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (Fritz Lang)

1962
01. Hatari! (Howard Hawks)
02. Vanina Vanini (Roberto Rossellini)
03. Through a Glass, Darkly (Ingmar Bergman)
04. Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut)
05. Le Signe du Lion (Eric Rohmer)
06. Vivre sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard)
07. The Flaming Years (Alexander Dovzhenko)
08. Sweet Bird of Youth (Richard Brooks)
09. Une Grosse Tete (Claude de Givray)
10. Ride the High Country [G.B. Guns in the Afternoon] (Sam Peckinpah)

1963
01. Proces de Jeanne d’Arc (Robert Bresson)
02. The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel)
03. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
04. The Chapman Report (George Cukor)
05. Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier)
06. Donovan’s Reef (John Ford)
07. Muriel (Alain Resnais)
08. The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis)
09. Irma la Douce (Billy Wilder)
10. Two Weeks in Another Town (Vincente Minnelli)

1964
01. I Fidanzati (Ermanno Olmi)
02. Gertrud (Carl Dreyer)
03. Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock)
04. Man’s Favourite Sport? (Howard Hawks)
05. The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni)
06. A Distant Trumpet (Raoul Walsh)
07. Love with the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan)
08. Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford)
09. La Ragazza di Bube (Luigi Comencini)
10. L’Amour a la chaine (Claude de Givray)

1965
01. The Enchanted Desna (Alexander Dovzhenko)
02. Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman)
03. Journal d’une femme en blanc (Claude Autant-Lara)
04. Young Cassidy (Ford-Cardiff)
05. Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller)
06. Gun Hawk (Edward Ludwig)
07. Vidas Secas (Nelson Pereira dos Santos)
08. Yoyo (Pierre Etaix)
09. Lilith (Robert Rossen)
10. The Unworthy Old Peter and Pavla (Forman-Allio)

转自 中新网
—————————————————————————————–

伦敦爵士地图10日游

　　2001年11月9日至18日，“伦敦乐迷申请新贷款和与保姆讨价还价的时间到了”。英国人没有丢掉幽默的传统，伦敦爵士音乐节刚开幕，英国最大的民间音乐杂志《Froot》就开了这样一个玩笑。伦敦最流行的城市生活指南《TimeOut》则更耸人听闻：“如果现在的日程表里还没什么让你感兴趣的，那你可能已不在人世。”的确，从伦敦皇家节日音乐厅到伊丽莎白皇后音乐厅，到世界著名的爵士俱乐部，到一大批蓬蓬勃勃的时髦俱乐部，伦敦爵士音乐节让整个城市的音乐地图都活动了起来。
英国Jamaica爵士群星。

　　不仅如此，乐迷比以往任何一次都要有福气，本次音乐节与英国BBC3号电台（以传播古典乐和新作著称）合作，又有强有力的商家和基金会赞助，乐迷可以享受一系列免费演出和活动，还有FM93和bbc.uk.com－radio3的实况转播。音乐鼓动人们用最精妙的方式享受时间，这10天，哪怕没钱或者没空去伦敦，也可以过节了。

打开21世纪的爵士耳朵

　　翻翻我们时代的爵士乐名人册就会发现，一些最响亮的名字和一些炙手可热的天才都聚集在了这个音乐节上：当今最重要的吉它演奏家Bill Frisell，两个最抢眼的萨克斯演奏家Joshua Redman和Denys Baptiste，芝加哥布鲁斯的杰出代表Buddy Guy，还有Annie Whitehead, Andy Sheppard, Juliet Robert, Claude Deppa组成的英国爵士群星—五代同台在皇家节日音乐厅首演，奉献一道融合了斯加、雷鬼乐和古典爵士的烩菜（或色拉？），门票卖得最快的爵士女歌手 Diana Krall这回将与皇家爱乐乐团合作两场演出。

　　这届音乐节的世界性则体现在一大串国际明星身上：葡萄牙的Maria Joao，苏格兰萨克斯风大师Tommy Smith，日本钢琴家Satoko Fujii和美国钢琴家Fred Hersch，小号演奏家和作曲家Byron Wallen，印度鼓手Trilok Gurtu等等，还有Martin Speake组织的一场国际合作，包括有瑞典钢琴家Bobo Stenson, Mick Hutton负责贝司以及杰出的美国鼓手Paul Motian……

　　伦敦爵士音乐节想用它惯有的热情和不俗精神，打开那些聆听21世纪爵士的耳朵。40年前，Thelonious Monk，爵士精神的化身，曾被问到爵士乐将向何处去，他心不在焉地答：地狱。40年后，这个问题仍将继续问下去，特别是在伦敦爵士音乐节期间，因为它的 “粗放”政策让大批生活在爵士边缘的艺术家也来到了伦敦。在这张名单上，列有Salif Keita, 狂热的非洲歌手；Bugge Wesseltoft和Mark De Clive-Lowe， “氛围techno爵士”艺人；DJ Pogo；Courtney Pine，hip-pop与灵魂爵士明星；Kimmo Pohjonen，芬兰的Jimi Hendrix……。在最边缘处，还可以找到后波普重要人物David Murray，贝司大师Christian McBride，Joey Calderazzo, Martin Taylor, Andy Sheppard, Alan Skidmore, Gilad Atzmon，还有—John Surman。

英国的Jan Garbarek

　　John Surman56岁，现在正是他事业的黄金时代。这位萨克斯风即兴演奏家，跨流派的融合者与作曲家，在某种程度上正好诠释了伦敦爵士音乐节的精神。

　　Surman成为国际明星，是因为使用一种特殊音质的低音萨克斯生动地演绎了John Coltrane的观念。他从20几岁开始思考独奏艺术，那些偏离主流的想法在今天会是ECM厂牌典型的素材，所以Surman有时被称为英国的Jan Garbarek。早在爵士之前，他的音乐积累来自教堂音乐和VaughanWilliams 与Elgar的田园牧歌，多年以后，这些影响才慢慢浮出水面。在音乐节开幕之夜，他与贝司演奏家Chris Laurence，一位在古典音乐和爵士乐间来去自如的艺术家，还有一个弦乐四重奏合作。

　　“爵士往何处去？”Surman思忖道：“我和Jack DeJohnette搞过二重奏，我们试着叫它 ‘自由方向的音乐’。爵士现在变得很专业化，可能我们现在听到的东西，正是回到它生之初的那个大熔炉了。”Surman相信即便在这样一个捉摸不定的音乐时代，还是有一种东西叫作“爵士的声音”，一种关于自发性、音调、措辞、韵律变化的 “化学过程”，一种无论加进多少元素都可以指认的身份。正是这种灵活性允许爵士去包容萨克斯诗人，就像Ben Webster演奏歌谣时没有强烈的节奏，就像会有Stan Getz和Ornette Coleman这样对抒情方式有特殊视角的艺人，如同Cecil Taylor的即兴诗作。

　　他说“即兴创作者是磁石，他们吸引或是排斥你，但总是在你离题的时候把你打倒。如果我独自和那个弦乐四重奏乐团合作，我会用与他们相反的方式演奏。这都是有趣的即兴创作方式，这也是严格地区分爵士或非爵士没有意义的原因。在我一生中，没有什么让我相信只有某一种音乐是最重要的。我总是被音乐感动，从吉普赛人的小提琴到马赛受难曲，都会让我战栗。音乐节的意义，也是在这里。”

惟一的五星演出

　　音乐节期间，英国《卫报》特僻专栏，还实行了五星评分制，五星的标准是“不可错过”。这十几天里，两个叫John的评论员都异常吝啬地使用了这个标准，多数出现在专栏的演出都获得三星或四星，而 “Paul Motian三重奏 2000”大概是惟一的例外。

　　Paul Motian三重奏2000是：Motian， 鼓； Chris Potter， 萨克斯： Marc Johnson， 贝司。

　　John Fordham的评论如下：

　　这场音乐节，肯定会有更酷、更“噪音”、更折衷的演出，也肯定会有更醒目、一把就抓住观众注意力的乐队，但是，不会有哪场演出像Paul Motian的三重奏乐队那样，配合得如此天衣无缝，有如此持久、美妙、高超的萨克斯独奏。这是一种精致而复杂的室内爵士乐，大胆的即兴，精巧而不断翻新的乐音，很容易让人着迷甚至忘记身在何处。

　　Motian，一位先后与Keith Jarrett和Bill Evans合作过的鼓手，有着鲜明的个人标志，喜欢用空间与碎片的形式来暗示节奏；Johnson是他的长期伙伴，拥有一把机智又细致的贝司；而Chris Potter则最近才脱颖而出，已进入最优秀的即兴萨克斯风演奏家之列。

　　周六晚间的演出中，有Motian全套华美的鼓艺，有整个乐队令人赞叹的合作，但不得不说，这仍是Potter的晚上。虽然他还没有Michael Brecker那样出名，但毕竟，他奉献了整整一个半小时精妙的独奏，渐入佳境，令人叹为观止。

Pizza Express的爵士乐调查

　　PizzaExpress旗下的连锁比萨餐馆常年有爵士乐演出，为了伦敦爵士音乐节，他们举办了一场爵士乐迷问卷调查活动。调查的结果都不出乎老乐迷的意料，弥漫着浓浓的怀旧情绪：

　　爵士乐“第一夫人”Ella Fitzgerald获最佳爵士艺术家第一名， Louis Amstrong 紧跟其后。

　　最佳男艺人：Louis Amstrong， Miles Davis，Duke Ellington，Charlie Parker， John Coltrane，Harry Connick Junior

　　最佳女艺人：Ella Fitzgerald， Billie Holiday， Sarah Vaughan， Cleo Laine

　　最佳单曲：“Take Five”(Dave Brubeck)，“Summertime”(George Gershwin)

　　最动人歌曲：“Summertime”， “Fever”(Peggy Lee)，“My Baby Just Cares For Me”(Nina Simone)

　　另有结果显示，超过1/3的人认为爵士乐在英国只是乐迷的事，尽管有1/5的人认为爵士还是很酷，很跟得上潮流的。看来，爵士乐在英国的公众形象颇有问题，为此，PizzaExpress决定致力于改善爵士形象，包括继续在餐厅举行定期的免费演出，和赞助伦敦爵士音乐节。另外也可以发现，公众心目中的爵士地图和音乐节所展示的爵士地图，原来如此地不同。

　　编译/Lain

Here are quotations from two masters: Orson Welles–talented filmmaker; John Cage–pioneer musician

Orson Welles:

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

John Cage:

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

黑色電影為一九四○年代美國逐漸發展出的電影風格，由於形象與主題的黑暗，而被法國影評家如此命名。

柯柏(Sharon Y. Cobb)在〈寫作新黑色電影〉(“Writing the New Noir Film”)一文中，條列了這類(genre)影片的十三項要素：

1.
情節圍繞著背叛；

2.
內容與犯罪有關，「象徵了我們潛意識的恐懼、最黑暗的想法和最惡劣的夢魘」；

3.
片中的善惡混淆，呈現出「道德上的模稜兩可」(moral am-bivalence)；

4.
主角是身陷絕境的反英雄 (antihero)，於內、外在的混沌世界中奮力求生；

5.
當主角為罪犯時，故事由他的敘事觀點說出，引發觀者的認同，「彷彿他們代表我們自己可怕、黑暗的一面」；

6.
黑色主角在最終很少自我救贖；

7.
黑色主角感受到生理與心理的孤絕；

8.
片中經常有一類似致命女子(femme fatale)的角色；

9.
主角沉溺於與致命女子的關係；

10.
致命女子會欺矇、背叛主角，結果產生暴力；

11.
片中甚少小孩 (因小孩代表樂觀、希望) ；

12.
這些故事的張力除了來自預期的暴力之外，便是來自情節的扭折與逆轉；

13. 此類寫作風格應結合「黑色形象意象」(noirish images)，展現「黑色質素」(a Noir texture)，而重要的方法便是善選場所，以塑造氛圍。

《浮云》

【原 片 名】Floating Clouds
【中 文 名】浮云
【出品年代】1955
【首映日期】1955年1月15日
【IMDB链接】http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048757/
【IMDB评分】7.9/10 (74 votes)
【国　　家】日本
【类　　别】剧情/爱情
【导　　演】成濑已喜男 (Mikio Naruse)
【主　　演】高峰秀子 (Hideko Takamine)……. Yukiko Koda
森雅之 (Masayuki Mori (I))…… Kengo Tomioka
冈田茉莉子 (Mariko Okada)…… Sei Mukai
山形勋 (Isao Yamagata)…… Sugio Iba
中北千枝子 (Chieko Nakakita)…… Kuniko Tomioka

【文件格式】XviD + MP3
【文件大小】1CD 49*15MB
【视频尺寸】448x336
【影片长度】123 Mins
【对白语言】日语
【字幕语言】外挂中文

【内容简介】

成濑已喜男执导的《浮云》，根据日本著名女性小说家林芙美子的同名小说改编。编剧水木洋子是战后女性题材电影的著名编剧，演员阵容强大，高峰秀子、森雅
之、冈田茉莉子都是日本电影史上享有盛誉的明星。特别应该指出的是成濑已喜男与小津安二郎是同时代的电影人，作为描写女性命运的作家，在欧美影坛成濑比小
津享有更高的声誉，甚至可以说成濑的作品是日本女性教材电影的圣典。在这部作品中痛斥了男人的无常与女人对“情”的真挚与悲哀。影片描写的男女情感的冲撞
与牵连十分动人，观众常在电影结束后仍对片中情感回味无穷。故事描写二战期间农技师富冈被派往邻国管理森林资源，遇到在家遭表兄强暴后逃到此地工作的打字
员雪子，一见钟情。但富冈已有妻室家山，他向雪子保证回东京后一定立即离婚。可是雪子发现他并未离婚，只好另租间破房住下。但俩人仍然藕断丝连，雪子怀了
孕。富冈去温泉开辟事业，又和旅馆老板的妻子发生了关系，事情败露，走投无路的富冈又来找雪子，雪子再次原谅了他。这时，富冈的妻子去世，当富冈被派往尾
久岛工作时，终于名正言顺地携雪子同行，但为时已晚，途中雪子病故，富冈抚尸痛哭。影片精彩之处在于导演对女性的日常生活惟妙惟肖的描写真实而细腻。。
———————————————————————————————
Extract frm

Krause, Linda(Author). Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age.
New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Rutgers University Press, 2003. p 91.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/auckland/Doc?id=10075363&ppg=101

The cinema of Japanese director Naruse Mikio offers a rich example of
vernacular modernism in the context of a rapidly modernizing postwar
Tokyo. Sometimes referred to as Japan’s “Number Four” director, following
Ozu Yasujiro, Kurosawa Akira, and Mizoguchi Kenji, Naruse’s work has nevertheless
been largely neglected by both Japanese and non-Japanese critics
alike. This may be because his films blur the distinction between art cinema
and popular cinema and also, perhaps, because his films can almost all be
described as women’s films. Most of his eighty-nine films are set in the small,
simple homes of the urban middle and working classes. Domestic architecture
and the life of the street are the settings for his stories of young women,
housewives, single mothers, and aging geishas struggling to survive in a
world of economic and social hardships.
Naruse, Women, and Japanese Modernity
Naruse Mikio’s style changed greatly over the thirty-seven years of his career,
but I would describe his films generally as melodramas, taken in the largest
sense of that term. Only occasionally do they rise to the levels of hysterical
excess that we tend to associate with the Hollywood melodrama. But in
Naruse’s films the strong currents of emotional intensity are expressed in
the silences between people, in quick exchanges of looks, and in the framing
of bodies in space. In the 1950s his films were often shown as the B-pictures
on double bills, following Kurosawa’s headline features. 3 Whereas Kurosawa
developed the heroic persona of the postwar male subject, in Naruse we find
the inscription of a fairly well-defined female subjectivity in Japanese
modernity.
Certainly, the director, his scriptwriters, actors, and audiences would
have been familiar with the Hollywood women’s films of the 1930s and 1940s.
During the Occupation Japanese screens were flooded with Hollywood films in the interests of promoting American democracy. Naruse may have been
neglected by film critics because of his chosen subject matter— women’s
dramas— but also because his invisible editing eschews the formal aesthetics
so vital to the critical discourse on Japanese cinema. The confusing affinity
of Western modernism and traditional Japanese aesthetics has tended to
efface the discourse of Japanese modernity as the emergence of an urban
image-culture.
A similar story is told in the historical appropriation of traditional Japanese
architecture by Western architects, who have largely overlooked the role
that Western architecture has played in the construction of modern Japanese
urban space. 4 The term Japanese modernity refers to the emergence of an
industrial consumer culture in Japan that might have been accelerated by
the opening to the West in the middle of the nineteenth century but that
cannot be reduced to a process of “Westernization.” Masao Miyoshi has
pointed out that modernity is a disynchronous process, occurring in different
cultures and social formations at different times. 5 Enrique Dussel has
argued, “Modernity is not a phenomenon of Europe as an independent system,
but of Europe as centre.” 6 The influence of Japanese arts on Western
modernism is a good example of how modernity is coincident with the
establishment of Europe as the center of a world system. The limits of
modernity are therefore coincident with the decentralization of the world
system in a (potentially) globalizing cultural economy that is more selfconscious
about its exteriorizing and othering effect on the non-European
center.
Film studies scholarship has tended to miss the important point that in
the Japanese context “modernity” involved the emergence of the bourgeois
individual and the coextensive adoption of realist modes of representation.
In literature this meant the development of the I-novel, or shishosetsu, in the
early twentieth century. Whereas debates and discussions of this literary
genre were intense throughout the 1920s and 1930s, there were few parallel
intellectual debates, as far as I can tell, concerning the cinema. Questions of
gender and women’s literature, which began to proliferate in the 1920s,
tended to be ghettoized and cut off from the main arena of debate over the
constitution of the Japanese subject, a situation that persists in Japanese
studies. My interest in Naruse’s films is precisely in the way that they enable
us to trace the articulation of female subjectivity over a period of turbulent
cultural transformation.

For the purposes of this essay I will concentrate on the 1950s, when
Naruse made his most popular films and worked at refining a mature style
that has admitted him into the international canons of art cinema. Although
neither the industry nor the critical establishment used the term “women’s
film,” almost all of Naruse’s eighty-nine films feature female protagonists
played by some of the most popular actresses in Japan. Starting in 1951 he
adapted six films from the writing of Hayashi Fumiko, a popular woman
writer who published serialized stories in women’s magazines. In the films,
as in Hayashi’s stories, female characters find new roles for themselves in a
changing society, demonstrating a stubborn perseverance; but there are just
as many women who find ways of resigning themselves to their poorly drawn
lot in life.
Naruse’s work of this period is full of war widows trying to reconstruct
their lives. With the democratic reforms of the postwar period came recognition
of women’s rights and a nascent women’s movement, along with economic
development that created more room for women in the workforce. But
as Sandra Buckley points out, “a discourse of motherhood and the family was
quick to surface through the 1950s in opposition to the emerging women’s
labour movement.” 7
Given the deep ideological conflicts of postwar Japan, the “home drama”
became an important site for directors such as Kinoshita to reestablish the
values of domestic harmony and national identity around the stable figure of
the sacrificing mother. The home drama is a subspecies of the shoshimineiga
and encompasses Ozu’s increasing interest in the upper middle class in
the 1950s. Tadao Sato defines the home drama as centering on a family. 8
Japanese film genres tend to be named for their semantic content, so there
is a great deal of overlap among such genres as wife films, mother films,
husband-and-wife films, salaryman films, home dramas, and shoshimineiga.
In light of the lack of clear distinctions among genres, and the shared
roles of family and domestic architecture in all of them, they can all be
heuristically grouped together under the umbrella of the home drama, which
specifies the important conjunction between architecture and family in this
cinema.
Moreover, this larger category of the home drama has specific effects of
gender. The term okasan, which refers to both mother and wife, derives from
Chinese characters referring to the inner chambers of the home. 9 The maternal
role is a cornerstone of the Emperor System in its implicit link to the ily System, 10 a structure heavily reinforced in the imperialist home-front
propaganda of the fifteen-year war. As Masao Miyoshi has pointed out, many
Japanese perceived democratic reforms such as women’s rights as punishment
for losing the war, and the ideology of male supremacy remained for
many a cornerstone of the mythological “Japanese race”. 1 1 Yet in Naruse’s
cinema we can see how the generic form of the home drama begins to show
cracks and fissures in the postwar period, as he introduces strong and stubborn
female characters into the form.

Trackback from pkblog.org
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a recent interview of godard about his present life and thoughts and his latest film “notre musique”, which was shown at the hk international film festival.

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‘Cinema is over’

Jean-Luc Godard hardly ever talks to the press, and when he does it’s as likely to be about football as film. In a rare interview, Geoffrey Macnab discovers that the original enfant terrible of the French new wave has lost none of his fire

Friday April 29, 2005
The Guardian

It is a balmy afternoon and Jean-Luc Godard is sitting by a French swimming pool, smoking a cigar and talking football. His new film, Notre Musique, has just received its world premiere. Midway through it, there is a reference to the famous match at Wembley in November 1953 when Hungary (the “Magnificent Magyars”) defeated Billy Wright’s England 6-3. Reflecting on the match, Godard, a devoted football fan as a youngster, begins to tick off the names of the Hungarian players one by one. “Apart from the goalkeeper, I remember them all,” he says. There was Puskas (”the galloping major”), the right-half Bozsik (”the deputy”), Sandor (”the mad winger”), Kocsis (”the golden head”). Stanley Matthews, he adds, is the only English player who sticks in his mind.

Godard describes first watching the Hungarian team, which revolutionised world football, as being “a discovery, like modern painting.” Most of the Hungarian players, he points out, were from Honved, the “club of the army”. The country was under Soviet occupation. None the less, Puskas (an army officer) and his colleagues approached the game in a freewheeling, marvellously uninhibited style that contrasted with the regimentation of day-to-day life behind the Iron Curtain. The only team that has come close to Puskas’s Hungary, Godard adds, was Ajax of Amsterdam during the Cruyff era. “Everybody played in attack and defence - it was like free jazz.”

Godard turned 74 in December. In the twilight of his career, he remains as playful, provocative and perverse as ever. Somehow, it’s no surprise that he is as eager to discuss Puskas and Stanley Matthews as to reflect on his new film. He is nothing if not contrary, and has an unerring ability to wrongfoot critics and audiences alike. At a press conference for Notre Musique, Godard fazed journalists by inviting a spokesperson for the French actors and technicians’ union to take to the platform. He then sat silently as the union’s gripes against the French government were detailed at length.

Humorous, lyrical and baffling by turns, Notre Musique is typical late Godard: part essay, part poetic meditation. The film, divided into three parts, begins with a rapid-fire montage sequence of stock shots from documentaries and Hollywood war movies. Lasting for around seven minutes, this section is called Hell. Godard uses a quote from the 18th-century philosopher Baron de Montesquieu to contextualise the images: “After the great flood, men came out of the earth and started exterminating each other.” Alongside the battle scenes, there are shots of penguins and monkeys. “I found some pictures of American GIs in the river and I thought they made a nice follow-up to the monkeys,” he explains cheerfully.

Next comes Purgatory, in which Godard returns to Sarajevo, a city also featured in an earlier film, Forever Mozart (1996). He wanders through the city, encountering journalists and academics, and discussing politics and history. We hear asides about how history is written by the victors. There are actors playing fictional characters and real people (Godard among them) playing themselves. There are near-identical images of Palestinians and Israelis on the same sea shore, but the context of these pictures is utterly different. One is of victory, the other of defeat. We hear a quote from Malraux: “Humane people don’t start revolutions, they open libraries”. We also see the bridge at Mostar, whose destruction in 1993 marked a low point of the Bosnian war. The bridge has now been reconstructed, amid much talk of hope triumphing over barbarism.

“I had the feeling that Sarajevo was the perfect place to shoot the film I wanted to shoot. It is the perfect illustration of purgatory,” says Godard. The final part portrays heaven, albeit in heavily ironic fashion. Paradise is a leafy place in the woods, guarded by US marines.

Godard may be a famous name, but he seems resigned to the fact that his films are not now widely seen and rarely make much impact at the box-office. His reputation is such that his regular producers, Ruth Waldburger and Alain Sarde, can raise money for his new projects easily enough, but his recent career isn’t exactly a commercial beanfeast. To illustrate the point, he tells a story of how he recently flew from Montr?al to New York. When he arrived, the customs officer asked him: “Mr Godard: what are you coming here for? Business or pleasure?” Godard indicated the former. The officer asked what business he was in. “Unsuccessful movies,” Godard replied.

There is something paradoxical about his attitude toward cinema. He now seems despairing of the medium’s ability to reinvent itself or to have any kind of social impact. “It’s over,” he sighs. “There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed.”

Yet he continues to study film and experiment as energetically as ever. He is brutally dismissive of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and of the spate of other recent films attacking globalisation, warmongering and US cultural imperialism. “They say they are attacking Bush, but they are not doing it in movie terms, but in words.” He calls Moore (in his idiosyncratic English) “just a Hollywood reporter man”, and compares him unfavourably with the great cin?ma v?rit? documentary-maker Frederick Wiseman. He even suggests that Moore’s work may actually have helped Bush. “It’s not enough to be against Adolf Hitler. If you make a disastrous movie, you’re not against Adolf Hitler.” (Whether he has actually seen Fahrenheit 9/11 is not in any way apparent.)

Nor is Godard especially flattering about the legions of admirers who make reference to him in their own movies or even name their companies after him. Quentin Tarantino, for example, calls his production company A Band Apart, in deference to Godard’s 1964 classic, Bande ? Part. “He says he admires me, but that’s not true,” Godard muses, then makes a cryptic remark about the torture and humiliation of prisoners by US guards in Iraq. “What is never said about Tarantino is that those prisons we are shown pictures of, where the torture is taking place, are called “reservoir dogs”. I think the name is very appropriate.”

Back in the 1950s, when he was writing for Cahiers du Cin?ma magazine, Godard was among the most provocative critics of his day. “The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray,” he wrote. Another of his gems: “You can describe Hiroshima Mon Amour as Faulkner plus Stravinsky.” Every film student knows quotes such as “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” and “The cinema is truth 24 times a second.”

He remains adept at coining polished one-liners, but now they tend to have a melancholic undertone. Ask him whether he still takes pleasure in Nicholas Ray’s films and he admits he doesn’t watch them any more. “It’s not possible to see the films. You can only see them on DVD, which I don’t like very much, because the screen is too small.”

He sounds equally disenchanted with film festivals. “In the beginning I believed in Cannes, but now it’s just for publicity. People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.”

Living in Switzerland, he rarely sees movies, unless he is preparing a documentary like Histoire du Cin?ma. He claims he spends his spare time watching sport and reading old Jack London novels. He doesn’t keep in touch with many of the old colleagues with whom he worked in the Nouvelle Vague era. “It’s like with any family. You see your relatives and then you don’t. All of a sudden, they disappear and you don’t know what has become of them. Ten years ago, I felt nostalgic about that period, but not any more.”

No, he hasn’t seen Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which re-creates the heady days in Paris in 1968 and features its own homage to his film, Band ? Part. Isn’t he curious about a film so close to his own experiences? “It’s a past life,” is all he says. He likewise parries questions about future projects, joking that all he now has in mind is “to try to play some tennis and see my analyst”.

Despite Godard’s reputation as an aloof, Prospero-like figure, he is a surprisingly gracious interviewee. Not that Godard relishes journalists or authors poring over his private life. Even Colin McCabe’s enthusiastic biography, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70, meets with his disapproval. “I was not glad he did it. I asked him not to, but I can’t prevent someone from writing,” Godard says. “He knows nothing about me. Maybe he knows some of my movies … I was grateful to him for a time because he helped me do a few things, but that’s all. It’s not because you are friends at the time that you have the moral authorisation of entering the private life of another person.”

Godard’s treatment of his own collaborators hasn’t always been chivalrous. One thinks of Truffaut’s famous letter in which he suggested that if Godard ever made an autobiographical film, the appropriate title might be Once a Shit, Always a Shit. Then, there was Letter to Jane, the 1972 documentary he and Jean-Pierre Gorin made about Jane Fonda. A 52-minute deconstruction of a photo of Fonda in Hanoi, this was a cruel and mocking piece of agit-prop. “It was not a very good movie,” Godard acknowledges, but adds that it was “an attempt to analyse the political work of Jane Fonda”, not an attack on Fonda personally.

The director describes his new film as an optimistic one, with an underlying message that “reconciliation is possible” - but there is no disguising the his dismay about the state of his chosen profession. In one of the most poignant scenes in Notre Musique, we hear a voice asking him if small digital cameras can save cinema. There is a close-up of Godard’s face: he scowls and says nothing at all. The inference is clear: the battle is already lost. As our meeting ends, I put the question to him again. There is still no answer.