John & Belle Have A Blog: Oh, sweet ursinality of lifelessness

Well, I can't just keep staring at those election returns. It's not healthy.

As per above, here's my Amazon bargain DVD pick of the week: The Golem. Yes, the print isn't good and the music is doubtful. (If that's the original soundtrack I'll eat my peaked and feathered cap. Alpha Video is cheap and reliably unreliable.) But a bargain, especially since no better edition is available. I've watched it three times. Parts of it are just plain bad, mind you - technically and dramatically. The dashing Knight Florian has terrible teeth and the monster's hairdo is too close for comfort to Shirley Temple sausage curls.

If you see what I mean.

But some elements of the film are just stunning, and even the stuff that doesn't work is historically fascinating (if you are inclined to be fascinated by stages in the development of speculative fiction on the silver screen.) It's like a lot of other silent German cinema from the same era that way. Like Caligari and Metropolis (if you ask me) The Golem careens between sublime and silly, artistic genius and inadequate technique. The mildly expressionistic sets for the Prague ghetto are particularly well done. Everything at mud-daubed angles and all the pointy hats.

Paul Wegener as the Golem gives a truly memorable performance. He was also the director.

Here's a page with some basic info. I got interested in it a couple months back for purposes of my film and philosophy module - the gothic roots of SF, golem as robot, rabbi as mad scientist. It's a strange, late-romantic bloom.

Before the roof fell in on all of us, Matthew Yglesias was recommending relaxation with a different fine work of Prague golem fiction, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It is, indeed, a great read. (See my previous post.)

Oh, but I saved the best for last. Matt Cheney points to a wonderful Bruno Shulz site, whose proprietor is evidently in the process of making new translations of the stories freely available. I'll quote from the father's lecture on the subject of mannequins, from The Cinnamon Shops (AKA The Street of Crocodiles):

- DEMIURGOS - said my father - did not possess a monopoly on creation - creation is the privilege of all souls. Matter is prone to infinite fecundity, an inexhaustibly vital power and, at the same time, the beguiling strength of the temptation which entices us to fashioning. In the depth of matter indistict smiles are shaped and tensions are constrained - congealing attempts at figurations. All matter ripples out of infinite possibility, which passes through it in sickly shudders. Awaiting the invigorating breath of the soul, it overflows endlessly into itself, entices us with a thousand sweet encirclements and a softness which it dreams up out of itself in its blind reveries.
Devoid of its own initiative, voluptuously pliant, malleable in the feminine fashion, and compliant in the face of all impulses it constitutes outlaw terrain - open to every kind of sharlatanism and dilettantism, the domain of all abuses and dubious demiurgic manipulations. Matter is the most passive and defenceless essence in the cosmos. All may knead and shape it; it is submissive to all. All arrangements of matter are impermanent and loose, liable to retardation and dissolution. There is nothing evil in the reduction of life to other and new forms. Murder is not a sin. Many a time it is a necessary infringement in the face of stubborn and ossified forms of being which have ceased to be remarkable. In the interests of an exciting and valuable experiment, it might even constitute a service. Here is a point of departure for a new apologia of sadism.

My father was inexhaustible in his glorification of that astonishing element - such was matter. - There is no dead matter - he taught - lifelessness is merely a semblance behind which unknown forms of life are concealed. The range of those forms is infinite, their shades and nuances inexhaustible. Demiurgos was in possession of valuable and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to these, he called into being a multitude of genuses, renewing themselves with their own strength. It is not known whether these recipes will be reconstructed at any time. But it is unnecessary, for, even should those classical methods of creation prove to be inaccessible once and for all, certain illegal methods remain, a whole host of heretical and illicit methods.

And:

We are not intent - he said - on long winded creations, on long-term beings. Our creatures will not be the heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be fleeting and concise, their characters without far-reaching plans. Often for a single gesture, for a single word, we shall rise to the challenge of their appointment to life for that single moment. We openly admit: we will not place any emphasis on either the permanence or solidity of the workmanship; our handiwork will be, as it were, provisional, made for a single occasion. If they are to be people, for example, then we shall give them only one side of a face, one hand and one leg - namely the one they shall require in their role. It would be pedantry to worry about their other leg, not coming into play. From the rear they might simply be patched with canvas, or whitewashed. We shall state our ambition by this proud motto: for every gesture another actor. In the service of every word, every action, we shall call into life another character. Such is our fancy that there will be a world in accordance with our taste. Demiurgos was extremely fond of refined, excellent and complicated materials; we give precedence to shoddiness. We are simply enraptured by it; cheapness transports us, the scrappiness and shoddiness of the material. Do you understand,' my father asked, 'the profound meaning of that weakness, that passion for tissue paper in bright colours, for papier mâché, for lacquered colour, for straw and sawdust? It is - he said with a woeful smile - our love for matter as such, for its downiness and porousness, for its singular, mystical consistency. Demiurgos, that great master and artist, will render it invisible, commanding it to vanish beneath the pretence of life. We, to the contrary, love its raspingness, its unruliness and its ragdoll ungainliness. We like to see beneath every gesture, beneath every movement, its ponderous exertion, its inertia, its sweet ursinality.

In short, the bearable lightness of being cavalier about clay.