The Clock

I had the great fortune of being in Lisbon when a local art museum was showing Christian Marclay's "The Clock"   The film, which lasts 24 hours, is a collage of film excerpts built around the notion of showing time telling devices in narrative films, with the additional stipulation that the clock times in the film must correspond to the actual time in the venue where the film is being shown.   (This is one movie you don't have to check your watch in.)  I saw from about 12:15 to 2:15 PM.   (I had previously seen a later part in New York at a gallery.  When I first watched the film, I was often concentrating on finding the clock in the scene.   Sometimes they are really in the background.   But, in fact, there are many excerpts from films where you don't actually see clocks; for example, Marclay includes the famous scene from "The Third Man" where Harry Lime talks about the Swiss and their cuckoo clocks.   Often, people are just looking at their watches, or obviously waiting or thinking about time.   So the movie is about time, or how it is represented in films?
But it is just as much about editing; Marclay makes constant quick cuts in the classic Hollywood style, but with the difference, for example, that a phone ringing in one film is answered in a different film.  And he also edits by riffing on non time related themes, as well; there were segments connected by the theme of rain in the part I saw.   And some excerpts recur at different times in the film, often without any specific time attached to them.   And the segment I saw included quintessential time tension scene, the classic misanthropic Hitchcock scene (spoiler alert!) when a little kid is unknowingly carrying a bomb on a bus at which blows up at 1:45 PM, killing the kid.

Even more striking, though, is the audio editing, which is often asynchronous with the visual editing. Thus the music or sounds from one film excerpt continue when the visual excerpt has changed, and often for a significant amount of time.   And sometimes excerpts from two different films are layered. In addition to film dialogue and scores, there of course many sound effects of ticking clocks and sound that mimic them.  In fact, I think the audio track in itself would make for a fascinating composition on its own  (though not for 24 hours, thank you).  

I doubt that this film will ever be viewable outside of gallery and museum spaces, though I would certainly love to have it watchable on a DVD.   Who knows what goes on in the 3 AM parts of the film?  It would also be wonderful to try to analyze in a more precise fashion exactly how the continuity and structure work in the film.

Perhaps the film will eventually show up in Vancouver some time this century....

Seville

I was in need of a haircut, so off we went to Seville.   A larger and more cosmopolitan city than either Granada or Cordoba, Seville has as its main attractions the Real Alcazar, the Royal Palace built after the defeat of the Moors (here, as in Cordoba, it happened earlier than in Granada) and the Cathedral of Seville.   The Real Alcazar, although built by Christians, maintains many of the stylistic characteristics of the Moorish architecture.   Again, I was overwhelmed by an excess of ornamentation.   In fact, I don't really understand how anyone could live with it, but they did.
When we moved to the newer sections of the palace, and saw some very large tapestries, Vera said she was relieved to finally see something with a narrative.   Though, for me, I would happily indulge myself in the surfeit of colors and patterns of the older sections.

Some pictures;

A ceiling:

A floor:

Another ceiling:

A door:

In the newer section, newer kinds of ceramics:

Tapestries, narrative:

The cathedral in Seville was begun in the 1400's.  Unlike Cordoba, the existing mosque was destroyed.   It is Late Gothic in style, and has now officially claimed the title for the largest church in the world.  The interior space is indeed awesome, in the traditional sense.   The various additions over the years are excessively decorative, and indeed make you think that Martin Luther did have a good point.   But Spain is nothing if not Catholic.

This part is really over the top..

A modest looking organ;

The Mezquita

We saw the famous Mezquita in Cordoba.   It was begun as a mosque in the 9th century, and with the Christian conquest of Cordoba in 1236, it was gradually converted into a cathedral.   It is a enormously beautiful building, but also quite a strange experience, because the Christian conversion left parts of the mosque intact, but the Church essentially built a large cathedral right in the middle of the mosque, seamlessly blending the two together in a way that is disconcerting.   It reminds me of many other churches I have seen (like St. Mark's in Venice), where stylistic elements from different eras are blended together, but in this case the blend of mosque and cathedral is particularly strange.   In addition, because the conversion process was gradual, starting in 1236 and lasting hundreds of years, you have parts of the church which were done by Christians, but using the same Moorish traditions.

Pictures:
The original mosque part, built in the 9th century:

Ceiling detail:

The cathedral in the middle:

The Alhambra!

We went to the Alhambra in Granada, and it was a thrilling experience.   The best part was the Nasrid Palace, a rambling series of exquisitely designed and decorated rooms dating from the 13th and 14th centuries.   The sheer inventiveness of the constantly varied patterns is overwhelming, and the notion of decorating the walls with such an excess of ornamentation is hard to comprehend.

I'll let the images speak for themselves:

Alhambra from a distance, with the Sierra Nevada in the background:

Interiors:

Details:

Debussy, Radeau, Preljocaj in Paris

We have been to three very different evening events.   The first was the Paris Opera production of Debussy's "Pelleas et Mellisande", in a production by Robert Wilson.   "Pelleas" has always been one of my favorite operas, and always something of an enigma for me.  Every time I hear it, I come away with a different idea of the opera. Our previous experience with Simon Rattle conducting the Metropolitan Opera orchestra was sublime; his sense of pacing and forward propulsion really made the opera come to life.   In this performance, all the performers and conducting were excellent.  I was very aware of how the opera moves musically, from one motive to another without any sense of forward harmonic rhythm.   The climatic moments in the last two acts were Wagnerian in their very brief intensity, but not in their length.
The production, by Robert Wilson, featured his trademark lighting and minimalist, stylized movements.   It didn't really work at all; I don't think "Pelleas" benefits from such a minimal style.  For example, in the scene where Melisande's hair is hanging out the window, and Pelleas reaches some sort of sexual ecstasy with her hair, Wilson has them 20 feet apart, on pedestals, which of course makes no sense.  You can of course justify such an approach easily, but really, "Pelleas" needs all the help it can get stage-wise to make it work dramatically.   And the poor singers who had to hold their hands and arms in very stylized ways for the whole opera, and not doing it in a very convincing way.   And the blue light virtually never changes.

These might look really cool as still images, but the actual movements were awkward and somewhat ridiculous.

We also went with our friends Michael and Pam to something called "le radeau" at a small theatre up in Belleville.   What it is is a kind of very French variety show, with a sequence of various acts, comedians, trained dogs, acrobats of sort, chansons, magic acts, etc.   The whole thing had a wonderful casual feeling about it, and some of the acts were really entertaining.  We had a great time.



Thanks to the recommendation of our friend Santa in Vancouver, we saw the Preljocaj Ballet in a piece called "Empty Words".  It was one of the best dance shows I have seen in years.   To begin with, the score is a recording that was made in Milan in the 1970's of John Cage reading a realization of his "Empty Words", which is a scheme for applying chance procedures to a text of Thoreau's.   What you get is 1 hour and 45 min. of Cage singing and mumbling syllables.  But what is interesting is that the performance caused a riot, as the 3,000 Italians present began shouting, making noise, and eventually mobbing the stage, while Cage continues as if nothing was happening.  All of this is on the recording.   This makes for a fascinating juxtaposition with the dance, which consists of four dancers who are onstage continually for the duration, and moving in constantly changing, intricate patterns involving all four dancers.  I have seldom been so impressed with such continuously inventive choreography; I was never bored.  And the dancers were truly extraordinary in the way they moved together.  I can't really fathom how they do it.   (Water bottles emerged twice as part of the choreography.)    The piece owes quite a bit to the Cage-Cunningham aesthetic.   It was interesting that the two young professional dancers with us (Maya T. and a friend) could not relate to the piece at all.   What does it all mean?  I don't really know, but I loved it.
A few web photos showing some of the few posed moments in the piece: