Melancholia - film

It's painful to watch but interesting to think about. He creates a terrifying dystopia where no-one is really connected to each other any more, nobody properly understands each other and everybody's trapped in their own little world. 

The setting is the party after a wedding. The parents of the bride hate each other, the groom seems to have no friends or relatives, the bride has difficult relationships with both parents, the father is completely narcissistic, the mother is authoritarian and hates all conventions and disrupts the party, there seem to be many acquaintances around but no friends, her boss is her husband's best man and gives a speech where he does not mention him but announces her promotion, he has a minion trailing around her through the evening in case she comes out with an advertising tagline, her brother in law keeps reminding her about how much money he spent on the wedding and how many holes there are in the golf course, she promises to keep forever a photo her husband gives her but forgets a few minutes later, clearly showing they have not established a proper relationship... and so on. 
People converge but they never establish a bond that's sufficiently strong to be mutually nourishing, only to just about be mutually supportive at a given mutually advantegeous juncture, which is an entirely different thing. The two sisters try to mend their bond and create an intimacy in the second half of the film, but it's too little too late.

A very nice metaphor for that is the sticks that support each other to create a teepee effect under which they hide at the end of the world. It's a pathetic haphazard structure under any circumstances and (although the protagonists themselves intend it to be symbolic) is completely useless to confront the oncoming cataclysm. This final scene, where they hold hands under the teepee very nicely underlines their vulnerability, and that everything at the end of the day is about no more or less than human relations and theirs are as inept as the three sticks leaning against each other.

So the heroine is depressed, her sister is half-depressed and everyone has got issues to different degrees. They live in this suffocating, bad taste universe of wealth, in a dreadful castle that is all varnished and the most unpoetic place you could imagine (despite the lovely setting), where everything is perfectly manicured and there's no compromise with nature and where they are separated by the status their wealth gives them from any cut and thrust of life there may be out there. 

So in these kind of conditions, no wonder the end of the world will come along soon, even if it seems at times to be a false alarm. It works well as a social satire showing the dynamics that engender spiritual destruction. I'm not sure what else it could be about apart from that.

St. Pete

I always reserve the harshest words for those I'm close to. This is the best way I can think of to excuse my mainly critical words when writing about St Pete. If you've already detected from the last sentence that I could be inclined to slipping into a city-as-person metaphor, you won't be disappointed.


St Pete is so damn big and spread out, it goes on and on, with far too many empty buildings in it's centre so that its heart beats very slowly, almost inaudibly. In fact there is no centre. In Moscow, everyone knows where the centre is, and everything radiates from there. In St Pete, in the place where the centre should be, there's just water.


This absence of a centre makes people even more aware of where the real one is: for such a big proud city, it's painfully out of reach 670km south. Hence the city's strange swampy lethargy is redoubled by this lack of focus.


There are certain people you can meet who are alluring in their ability to be sometimes very charming and at others terribly indifferent. You grapple to find their heart: some solid yet tender area which, if reached, might give you a measure of the person and something worth gripping on to. But with some people it's just like St Petersburg, as you get closer to where you hope to find the heart, you find instead a kind of dark watery current that pushes along silently and can't possibly be seized.

How do you uproot entrenched oligarchies?

View across eastern Libya

 © David Degner

The problem the crowds are trying to solve in the Middle East with their repeated demonstrations is alot greater than installing democracy through a system of fair elections. It's the far trickier business of peacefully uprooting a political and economic structure that serves the vested interests of a tiny minority of people. If it were  a plant, the dictator is just its flowery head. It can be lopped off, though soon another very similar flower will bloom after a short spell as a demure bud. Having to dig around and uproot the whole thing, leaving a big messy hole in the ground is a completely different matter.

To extend this handy horitcultural metaphor, democracy even in developed counties seems to be not that much more than a process where through some clever grafting, you get a pleasing seasonal variation in the colour of the flower, while the plant itself largely remains the same. If they do find in the Middle East a way to remove the entire plant peacefully, fill the hole, and level out the terrain for a real fresh start then it would certainly be a great example for the entire world. I can think of few places where achieving this periodically without bloodshed would not be a good thing. It's a pity democracy as it is practiced currently cannot solve this issue, though maybe some kind of democratic process could. I wonder what that process might look like.

Discomfort with photos

I've had to cultivate a detachment from photos and other "things" in general to stop me from going crazy.

Only reality is worth investing emotion into.

"Never let anything 'artistic' stand in your way" has sort of become a motto for me, stolen from Bruce Chatwin (who got it from Noel Coward).

Some photos are far more engaging than others, but in the end each seems to offer just a quick emotional hit that rapidly fades.

Meanwhile, irrespective of its aritstic qualities, each one is asking for far more trust than it should be getting.

What bothers me is photography's uneasy, unsettled relationship with reality, how photographers often pose as witnesses when they're really manipulators - both on the field and in how they present things afterwards.

There would be a much more guarded response to images were this element of manipulation not all too easily ignored, because it interferes with the enjoyment of an image.

Meanwhile a photo still carries a segment (or burden) of objective truth that is unnerving and makes photography unlike any other art.

The photo's silence, moreover, gives the image a deceptively stern, grave quality, as if it offered a clear view "beyond the noise".

Each picture sucks you in, makes demands on your emotions. A little vacuum that can leave you drained if you're not careful.

Published pictures have so much authority that they seem to have the final word on the way something should be viewed.. (I think that's what many photographers secretly love about photographs  -  the authority of the published image.)

Once published, images can seem like the assertion of an unassailable objective wholeness.

Writing is made of components, words, and can be broken down or rewired. Pictures, meanwhile, cannot be - they supposedly just convey the captive instant. "Don't shoot the messenger!" each one squeaks when confronted.
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If Sharia law were imposed tomorrow and all images were banned, would a wonderful freedom from a degrading tyranny of archetypes and stereotypes not emerge?

To my mind anything of any importance that exists is outside the realms of the visible. The visible is only (and not always to the same degree) a manifestation or effect of what is important and invisible.

Photography helps place far too much emphasis on the visible symptoms, as if they functioned in lockstep with the invisible causes, which is rarely the case.

When, as a culture, photography makes us become fixated with the symptoms as if they were an accurate evocation of the causes and we start to think that what has no visible symptom has less importance than what does, we reach a point where we no longer understand the world so well.

Nice observations from Nicolas Bouvier

Le monde est constamment poliphonique, alors que nous en avons, par carence ou par paresse, qu'une lecture monodique. il y a des moments... ou tout d'un coup on percoit toutes ces harmoniques. C'est a dire qu'on entend toutes les voix de la partition au lieu d'en entendre qu'une, comme a l'accoutumee, parce qu'on vit dans un temps lineaire, qu'on a un passe, un avenir, on fait des projets, ce qui distrait de l'instant present

... le haiku est, philosophiquement, l'oppose et l'antidote du projet....

Au Japon et en Asie jaune, les gens ne surveillent pas leur visage comme nous le faisons chez nous. Peut etre a cause du bouddhisme, ils n'attachent pas tellement d'importance a leur personne. De telle sorte que lorsque vous les photogrqphiez ils vous donnent leur existence, leur "instant d'existence" avec beaucoup de candeur et sans du tout prejuger de son contenu. Tandis qu'en occident, le visage est l'enseigne, le menu ou la carte du restaurant. C'est a dire qu'on concentre dans la tete jusqu'a la congestionner, tout un projet social. La personne, le citoyen,le seducteur ou la sedctrice, l'ariste maudit ou pathtique que l'on souhaiterait etre. Le visage est a la fois le cahier des pretentions et des reclamations, et la concentration de ce projet cree un cesure dans le corps, qu'on laisse muet silencieux, dont on ne s'occupe pas, qu'on laisse aller n'importe comment. Le personnage est davantage d'un jet.... Si vous voulez il y a une meilleure repartition de l'etre, telle que la camera peut le fixer.