Flowers all the same colour

There are two kinds of photoreceptor in the eye: cones that are sensitive to colour, but are not triggered by low levels of illumination, and rods which are more sensitive to low levels of light but do not process colour. This is what accounts for the black-and-white feel of scenes at night, and the greys before the dawn.

Chekhov, in his story 'The House with the Mezzanine', has one of his characters obseve this: "Луна уже стояла высоко над домом я освещала спящий сад, дорожки; георгины и розы в цветнике перед домом были отчетливо видны и казались все одного цвета." (The moon stood high now over the house and illuminated the sleeping garden, the paths. Dahlias and roses in the flowerbeds in front of the house were clearly visible and all of them seemed the same colour).

The mechanisms of lens and camera will deliver a different picture of the world, unless great care is taken with filters or processing. The opening scene of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (see picture above) conveys almost miraculously the sense of the landscape before dawn, the colour levels are so low that the eye struggles to make out whether there is any colour or not.

Precious knowledge

"There was much that he wanted to learn, but he could not believe that he would learn it as other people learned what they learned. He believed in something called precious knowledge. As a child, he had hoped to find some of that knowledge in some discarded or forgotten book. Later, he came to understand that such knowledge as he was looking for was not readily passed from one person to another." Gerald Murnane, Emerald Blue, p.84

The image above is a still from Tarkovsky's The Mirror - you can tell that it is the boy leafing through the book (the boy in the 'contemporary' time frame of the film) because of the clumsy way in which the pages are turned and the tissue paper over the plates is creased. Later in the film we are led to suspect that this is the book was stolen by his father when he was a boy. The dialogue below is the sister threatening to tell ... "I'll tell them you stole the book."

It's a subtle film, at times difficult with the different time periods and the same actors playing people in different generations, but it is marvellous ... and the ending of the film with that most sublime chorus "Herr, unser Herrscher, dessen Ruhm in allen Landen herrlich ist" from the opening of Bach's great Johannes Passion BWV 245 makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. After just having watched a scene where the central character (the boy from early days who becomes the father in the contemporary time) presumably dies, we see the young mother seemingly watching herself now aged leading her two small children (the boy and his sister) through a field. The different time periods coincide, the decades collapse, which is after all what happens in the mind, and presumably also what happens in the frame of reference of a photon, and maybe even at the moment of death. All time is one.

Des soldats qui jouent comme des enfants

One of Karl Kraus' dicta appears in a different guise in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion. Here is Kraus:

"Kinder spielen Soldaten. Das ist sinnvoll. Warum aber spielen Soldaten Kinder?"

Children play soldiers. That is sensible. But why do soldiers play children?

And here is what Captain de Boeldieu remarks to his fellow prisoners:   

«D’un côté, des enfants qui jouent aux soldats ; de l’autre, des soldats qui jouent comme des enfants.»

Once again, you can see how the subtitles distort things a little; changing the more aphoristic balanced sentence into a more specific observation with it's "in here" & "out there".

Simsion Simplicissimus

Graeme Simsion's recently published first novel, The Rosie Project, is an entertaining first person narrative written from the point of view of a genetics researcher, Don Tillman, who displays several Asperger's-like characteristics. The story gets under way describing his lack of success in finding a partner, which leads him to the idea of the Wife Project, which involves a sixteen-page questionnaire to be completed to filter out unsuitable respondents. Don is an unreliable narrator and this is a source of comedy. Take this small episode of burlesque: Don arrives to give a lecture on Asperger's Syndrome, the convenor has previously been described to him as "blonde with big tits" ... when a woman greets him the internal monologue goes like this "in fact, her breasts were probably no more than one and a half standard deviations from the mean for her body weight ..." and the paragraph is followed by the sentence "I may have spent too long verifying her identity, as she looked at me strangely".

The technique of the defective narrator who doesn't "get it", has a long lineage, and one of the more notable examples has to be in Grimmelshausen's  Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus) from 1668.  For example, in chapter 4, when the soldiers start ransacking and wrecking the boy's home he observes: "Andere schlugen Ofen und Fenster ein, gleichsam als hätten sie einen ewigen Sommer zu verkündigen" ("others broke the stove and windows, as if proclaiming an everlasting summer", or in Mike Mitchell's translation "some smashed the stove and windows, as if they were sure the summer would go on forever").

The story is thought to be in part autobiographical, Grimmelshausen having been abducted by soldiers at the age of 10, and witnessing at first hand many horrors in the Thirty Years War.

In the next chapter the defective narrator manages to convey a striking piece of psychological insight, when he describes how he - as a boy - escaped from the soldiers while they were still torturing the "peasants" which included his father and mother.  "verbarg ich mich in ein dickes Gesträuch, da ich sowohl das Geschrei der getrillten Bauren als das Gesang der Nachtigallen hören konnte, welche Vögelein sie, die Bauren, von welchen man teils auch Vögel zu nennen pflegt, nicht angesehen hatten, mit ihnen Mitleiden zu tragen oder ihres Unglücks halber das liebliche Gesang einzustellen; darumb legte ich mich auch ohn alle Sorg auf ein Ohr und entschlief." (which is rendered helpfully with a little elucidation by Mitchell as "I hid in a thick bush. There I could hear both the cries of the tortured peasants and the song of the nightingales. The birds ignored the peasants and continued their sweet singing, showing no compassion for them or their misfortunes, and therefore neither did I, but curled up in my bush and fell asleep as if I hadn't a care in the world")

Copying your brother

When the central character of Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time (Jeg forbanner tidens elv) is twenty and attending a college he gets a student loan and moves out of his childhood home.

"The first thing I did was to go into town and buy a stereo with some of the money, a TR 200 Tandberg amplifier, a Lenco record player and a couple of 20 watt loudspeakers of a make I can no longer recall, but the sound was superb, and to be honest the whole thing was identical to the stereo my eldest brother had put together and bought with his student loan."

An remarkably similar thing is described by Tolstoy in Youth (Юность) when the central character, Tolstoy himself, passes his university entrance examinations, and is given money and access to a horse and trap (or drozhky) he also decides to copy his older brother, Volodya ... "I remembered that when Volodya entered the University he had bought himself some lithographs of horses byVictor Adam, some tobacco and several pipes, and I felt it essential to do the same." ("Я  вспомнил,  что  Володя  при  вступлении  в  университет  купил  себе литографии лошадей  Виктора Адама,  табаку  и  трубки,  и  мне  показалось необходимым сделать то же самое").

Petterson goes on to say that the older brother also tried to copy the younger brother's intense interest in books; Tolstoy later reveals that the older brother had in fact been copying one of his more worldly friends.

La Règle du jeu

One of the pivotal scenes in Tolstoy's memoir Childhood is first time he is invited to join the grown-ups in the hunt.  The scene of the servants beating the birds and rabbits out of the woods, towards the waiting gentry is perfectly echoed in Jean Renoir's film La Règle du Jeu, which devotes an entire reel to depicting this cruel and pointless upper-class pursuit and the slaughter than ensues. Of course, both Renoir and Tolstoy were depicting the last throes of a doomed social class, that had enjoyed close to a thousand years' dominance since its establishment as a military strategy: when the idea of shock combat spread and the supremacy of making the momentum of knight and horse one, by the use of stirrups, the social order was quickly adapted to support the new military needs: aristocrats were given power and large tracts of land, the quid pro quo being that when the king wanted to go to war, the lord would provide a good number of trained knights: noblesse oblige.

There appear to be several parallels between Renoir's La Règle du jeu and the first volume of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the book Justine.  Obviously the hunt, and its threatening and dangerous atmosphere is a clear link, as too is the story of a rich and powerful husband who suspects a somewhat bored and ill-at-ease wife of being unfaithful with a younger man whom has been accepted into the family circle and household on a friendly social basis.  But it is the smaller details that make me think that Durrell must have seen this film and been strongly impressed by it, and that certain images and ideas lodged in his mind, to later resurface, like drowned bodies.  There is the striking similarity of the use of field glasses in the hunt, which enables the wife to learn first-hand of her husband the Marquis' affair with the somewhat histrionic Geneviève; set this aside Nessim's downward directed telescope which Darley (whose name perhaps is not revealed until later in the quartet?) discovers by chance while looking for some notepaper to write Melissa a letter: when he puts his eye to the glass he sees the little hut by the bathing spot where only an hour before he and Justine, Nessim's wife, had lain together.

Another small detail is that the Marquis collects automatons: singing birds and other forms of musical machines, and a minor scene shows him upset and searching for the small key for one of them. This is echoed by Durrell in the scene where the character Balthazar is most upset at having lost the small ankh-shaped gold key which fits his pocket watch, which used to belong to his father, and has not - up to that point - been allowed to stop running. Darley helps Balthazar retrace his steps, but to no avial. Much later the key turns up in Nessim's possession.

Justine, Balthazar, and the other books of the quartet, made a big impression on me in my mid 20s, but now I have some difficulty with both the tone and the content, and at times it brings to mind Tolstoy's observations, in either Boyhood or Youth, or perhaps both, both about himself and about Dubkov at different times, how these young men tell the most shameless lies in society and everybody knows it. Everybody averts their eyes, or they smile politely, and they feel awkward and embarrassed for them, these silly boys who make up frightful nonsense. Now I get the same feeling at times reading Durrell: when he alludes to some particularly debauched excess I feel like averting my eyes from the page, embarrassed for the bluster and exaggeration of the prose.