Where Have You Been? (32 page)

Gradually, the zaniness and unpredictability of these pictures seem to stabilize themselves in the milieu of the circus, and in a sort of fairground palette of candy colors, pink and light green and a buttery yellow that he favored for a time in the mid-1920s, for instance, in the very striking portrait called
The Romanian
. Beckmann's clowns are both artist and Christ. Formats lengthen to hold vertical spills of figures—like the
Aerial Acrobats
of 1928, or the
Rugby Players
of 1929. Light gradually ceases to matter as an influence or source; shadows disappear as there is little to choose between the burning and the extinguished candles that he includes in many interiors; artificial color—color symbolism too, no doubt—comes to stand in for natural light; there is a sense that many of these paintings were made by neon in the dead of night, which, for all I know, they were. (Beckmann painted in marathon stints, often at night, and he always had several paintings on the go at once, going from one to the other.)

The paintings of the late 1920s—before the onset of lab conditions and the twenty-four-hour clock and the triptychs and the obsessive pictorial code involving fishes and masks and uniforms and handcuffs—paintings that still had to be
seen
before they were painted, paintings that stand in some verifiable relation to a time and a place and a subject, are those Beckmanns I like better than any others.
Bathing Cabin (green)
,
Scheveningen at 5 a.m.
,
The Port of Genoa
,
Portrait of Quappi in Blue
,
The Theatre Box
,
Self-Portrait in Dinner Jacket—
in most instances, the titles already serve to indicate the highly specific nature of the work—are all variously expressive of privilege and glamour. (“Quappi,” by the way, the nickname of Beckmann's second wife, Mathilde von Kaulbach, is derived from the syllable “Kaul,” whose only other occurence is in the word
Kaulquappe
, tadpole. But I don't know if it was particularly his name for her, or if she already went by it.) In some cases, it is the time of day or night, in some the place, in some the subject or prop. There is no longer the prima facie oddity and cramping of the earlier work, nor the depleted range of colors, nor the interiority, nor the sense of having come out of a series. These are all manifestly
external
paintings, bold and full and heavy and separate. They are predominantly blue or green or red or black, but in response to a dress, or the sea, or dawn, or night. Color and form are radicalized and simplified till each painting has an almost autonomous expressive beauty. Water at night isn't ever really the jade green of
Genoa
—worse luck!—and buildings don't have that pale, pink-accented crustacean glow, with sour little yellow sparks coming from the curving railway train at the bottom of the picture as it leaves the curving white-arched station, but what a beguiling hypothesis! These are utterly sophisticated, worldly, commanding and yet still magical paintings.

Quite a few of them were exhibited in the
Degenerate Art
exhibition of 1937 in Munich (when some of the reviewers would have liked the artists to be present, so that they might spit in their faces). On July 19, the day of the opening, Beckmann left Germany, never to return. He and Quappi spent the war years in Amsterdam. Their life together is told with brilliant laconism in the
Journals
: a minimal, but vastly expressive record of work, reading, drinking. In 1947, there was an opening in the United States, as artist in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. Beckmann died in December 1950, on the pavement outside his New York apartment.

His abundant late work can only be understood as the product of the compacting process of exile. Beckmann was deep inside his own phantasmagoria, his obsessive personal imagery, his lexicon of forms, his palette of black, steel, bronze, lemon, jade, cobalt, coral red, sky blue, purple-brown, orange, lilac, and flesh tones. The paintings are airless and lightless, drawing and painting have been driven together, they have a rough, jagged, blackened lucidity like stained glass. Even the seas and mountains look like studio. Dominant, tubular women, winged things, masks and blindfolds, fishes, mutilation, musical instruments, ladders and candles, swords and spears, spiky flowers and leaves like agave and narcissus, playing cards, upside-down or falling creatures populate and overpopulate these paintings. There is a late-classical or neobarbarian feeling of discord to many of the scenes. A pessimistic plenitude, shading into surfeit. It is painting as wisdom, as cultural commentary, not easy to like but too easily dismissed. The pain and caricature and distortion and claustrophobia of the early paintings are less glaringly evident now, but they are all-pervasive. The satirical infantilism of the early twenties has grown up. The big man who drew the little figures has shrunk into the almost unbearably sad
Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket
whose preposterous padded American shoulders hang off him, whose new industrial, electric blue (most disturbing, a color that shows for the first time in Beckmann) turns his face the color of clay, and whose once vauntingly glum mouth is eclipsed by his long, reduced fingers. Even his trademark cigarette looks thinner. On January 26, 1950, he wrote in his journal: “Twice went out
op straat
, painted the first of the blue jackets in the new self-portrait, I fear there'll be many more.” In the event, it saw him off.

 

THE PASSENGER

Dearth of action is the mother of the motion picture.

—Joseph Brodsky

I saw my first Antonioni films in the mid-1960s, when I was eight and nine years old,
L' Eclisse
,
La Notte
,
L' Avventura
, when I was in America, and my father, here on a Harkness, didn't seem to have anything better to do than take me to classic European films at college film clubs. Other attributes of other movies seemed to pale in my memory, grandeur, beauty, drama, mirth (Eisenstein, Fellini, Lang, Keaton) but the etiolated atmosphere of those films—further etiolated, no doubt, in my memory—survived like nothing. The sense of an unhappy couple crawling out of a party at daybreak and crawling unhappily into a bunker on an adjacent golf course (the end of
La Notte
, written with Cesare Pavese) has been with me since then. The “sound” of Antonioni, a little quieter, more composed, and more incident-packed than that of Tarkovsky, likewise. Certain feelings of rain, wind, gloom, and other conditions, also. Some of these films I waited thirty years to see again, mostly in London. (I'm not remotely technically minded, I don't have a television, and I don't really like the idea of seeing films except in cinemas.) I would look up the listings every week, under
L
,
E
,
N
, and
A
. As far as I could see, they weren't played in decades. When I read Pavese's great short novel,
Among Women Only
, I had a sense of having seen the film of that (I had, too:
Le Amiche
). The decorous social gatherings, music, and bleak intimacies of Antonioni further remind me of the German painter Max Beckmann. It seems safe to say that my sense of what a film is—and probably what life is—was substantially formed by these early experiences.

I don't remember when I first saw
The Passenger
, or where. Perhaps in 1974 or 1975, around the time it first came out, with my father again, in Austria? Most Fridays we would walk to a little downtown vitrine and see what the five cinemas (later three) in Klagenfurt were showing, with reviews from the church paper. It was called “going to see what the Catholics had to say.” Perhaps I had already seen
Last Tango in Paris
(which they can't have liked very much) because Maria Schneider meant something to me, and I know I preferred her here, in that very contemporary—seventies!—unisex helmet of hair, to those Louis XIV poodle curls in
Last Tango
. Iggy Pop's great record (and song) of that name was later. 1978 or 1979.
The Passenger
, made—ha, well—mainly in English, newer and in color, seemed to be shown more often than the early Antonioni. I saw it perhaps two or three times later on. Maybe I knew it a little better than those others, which to me became almost mythical. For whatever reason, I had a sense of it as “my” film. It is the only film I can think of that occasionally “happens” to me. Not in the sense that I am pursued by an ex-wife and the operatives of some African state, but that its strange mixtures of inner and outer, boredom and tension, reveries of sound, of indeterminate things happening, are something I encounter fairly frequently.

The Passenger
is either a mystery or a mystification, depending partly on your inclinations. People, it proposes, are by their nature rootless. Rootless and doomed. Locke (Jack Nicholson) is an English TV journalist who grew up in America. His neighbor in a hotel somewhere perhaps in Morocco or Mauritania (remember Polisario?), David Robertson, has no wife or family but “commitments”: a list of girls' names in a diary weeks ahead that cloak commercial transactions. The girl (Schneider) he sees once in London, then in Barcelona; she is an architecture student, presumably she can go anywhere there are buildings: her small bag moves in on the backseat of his car before you can say David Robertson. The settings are old
meubles luisants
(think of Baudelaire's “L'Invitation au voyage,”
luxe, calme et volupté
) interiors of paradores in Spain, some incredibly new-looking roads (the steamrollers barely off them), and tight white towns in North Africa. Flashbacks and simultaneous goings-on in England are sprinkled in, in an often hard to follow way. The story and the feeling and the geography of the whole are very like Paul Bowles.

There is something quite desultory (I think, wonderfully desultory) about the film. The whole thing is a sort of
Nachspiel
, an epilogue. It takes Locke two hours in the film, and maybe a week or two in real time, to reach the condition of his neighbor, whom he finds dead of a sudden heart attack. Probably it was never going anywhere else. It begins with a sudden end, and ends with Locke having shot his bolt—or perhaps someone has shot his fox. Locke has come out on the other side of being a serviceable human being. His wife is carrying on with Steven Berkoff; an adopted daughter is referred to but not, I think, seen. He asks questions—of others, it seems, not to himself—as a journalist. He is probably not far from saying, with Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axël, a hero of decadence (if that's not too much of a contradiction in terms): “Living—let our servants do that for us!” Or he's going the other way, the way of Axël's near contemporary, Arthur Rimbaud, poet turned gunrunner. Curiously, there's very little in it. Stories like this ask us to take a certain amount on trust. We don't know—in
The Sheltering Sky
—what has made America such an intolerable proposition to Port Moresby, but he is in Africa now, and we had better get on with it. It is a little like that with Locke. A few encounters with Africans that are more enigmatic and emblematic than expressive—they make cigarette gestures to him, he gives them cigarettes, they run off somewhere—leave him banging his hand on the rocks and smashing the side of his sanded-up jeep with the shovel he could probably dig himself out with without too much bother. But his story is that of a man past digging. This part of things one could justifiably call self-indulgent—if one were of a censorious cast of mind.

Probably one is supposed to take Locke's decision as one arrived at seriously. A dignified and honorable life choice.
Du musst dein Leben ändern
—or maybe
Du musst dein Leben enden.
He goes next door to borrow soap from his white neighbor, the man he surreptitiously interrogated the day before, over whiskey, and finds him dead on his bed. The fan is whirring, the water in his own room is running, but Robertson's heart is no longer beating. Locke sits with the body, goes through the dead man's effects. Perhaps he is struck by the fact that he wears clean, pressed clothes; perhaps that they're roughly the same size; perhaps that their passport pictures are fairly alike. (It puzzled me when I saw the film first that he works with razor blade and glue on exchanging the passport pictures. Why bother?) The exchange seems to me unprepared for, whimsical, opportunistic. A plane doesn't leave for another three days. What does he do in them; what happens to the body? The film makes a show of being in the hard world—there is a car rental, a false mustache, and a scene around a left-luggage locker, which is about as hard as the world gets in the movies—but really it only pretends. So it is more whimsy. Presumably Locke envies Robertson's condition more than he covets his life. He wants simplification rather than a fresh set of complications. He really isn't Rimbaud, turning in words and images, to do something of greater consequence and carry in the world. But Antonioni has to get Nicholson to the point where anything he does and sees must be interesting. (It is the point, I would say, where Bruno Ganz becomes human in
Wings of Desire
; in a much more general way, the point from which—if you'll excuse the generalization—Chinese poems got written. Someone has died, someone banished or abandoned, at the very least got drunk, and anything subsequent is ennobled, expressive, worthy of recording. “By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, / Too deep to clear them away!” from Pound's version of Li Po.)

That's the donnée. A little elaborate, a little crude, a little superfluous. In a film, if someone proposes themselves to you, and invites you into their life, you go. In fact, it doesn't happen enough. There's really no need for them to become somebody else first. A film about the journalist David Locke, his wife, and their adopted child, in London, is a perfectly respectable proposition. Or again, it could have happened the other way round: if Locke had died, and Robertson had slipped into his unpressed combats and madras plaid shirt, and gone to talk to the next dictator on
his
list. But the way this has permed out, it is Locke who is in a borrowed state, an altered state, a temporary and a terminal state.