Bernardo Bertolucci 1941-2018: a phantastic guy

Name a filmmaker who maybe, maybe, spent a shade too long in psychoanalysis; Woody Allen’s name might spring to mind. But it was true, by his own admission, of Bernardo Bertolucci, who famously greeted the winning of a barrel-load of Oscars with the quip that Hollywood had become, for him, ‘the big nipple.’ He couldn’t stop himself.

That same year, 1988, John Boorman had done the rounds of Hollywood functions because he, too, was promoting a movie with multiple nominations; and in his diaries Boorman recorded a wonderful exchange with his fellow auteur. He asked Bertolucci quite why he’d done so much time on the analyst’s couch, and the reply was, as I recall: ‘Because I kept on making beautiful movies and nobody went to see them.’

The thing is, you can see Bertolucci making that joke, in all candour, with the delighting, semi-rueful smile that travelled halfway up the side of his face.

But, of course, not nearly so neglected! Bertolucci was, is, will be famous for Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor. The Conformist is widely considered his masterpiece, one of the all-time great movies. Before the Revolution and The Spider’s Stratagem are hugely admired. Much else in his body of work is extraordinary and brilliant. That’s plenty, no?

It’s The Conformist for me, too. It’s about politics, about Italy and fascism; but it’s about cinema, too – helplessly, ravishingly. Bertolucci would own up, candidly, to a case of ‘the disease of cinephilia.’ In this movie, he made plain, you could see Ophuls, Sternberg, Welles. But you saw Godard, too – the father he offended by taking Paramount’s money to distribute the film. You saw Bresson: Bertolucci, who venerated the great man, cast Dominique Sanda fresh from Une Femme Douce because, he quipped, he wanted to steal one of Bresson’s virgins, put her in a beautiful dress and take her to a party.

Bertolucci was always honourable towards his great collaborators, too, as on The Conformist: the visual powerhouses Vittorio Storaro and Nando Scarfiotti, and Franco ‘Kim’ Arcalli, who helped him reconstruct The Conformist in the cutting-room (‘an ex-Partisan, fantastic guy!’ as Bertolucci would describe him to years later.)

Bertolucci’s cinema has given me so many more joys: that apartment in Last Tango in Paris, with its strange Christo-like shroud; the umbilical links in Luna, and the pop-culture joys of Marilyn Monroe in Niagara and Matthew Barry’s café-jukebox dancing; the toast in The Last Emperor to ‘The Lord of Ten Thousand Years!’; The Sheltering Sky’s heartbreaking scene between Malkovich and Winger on the rocky plateau, that film’s heartbreaking score, its exquisite ending with Paul Bowles…

Bertolucci’s ambitions were so grand and romantic, his conception of sex and politics so heady, that you’d be hard-hearted not to see the life-enhancing charm of them, even if he sometimes bit off more than he could chew. If I remember it correct he wanted Novecento to be co-founded by Hollywood and Mosfilm, with US and Soviet actors in the two leads, as a means of engineering a little creative détente. That plan was doomed, a shade too schematic: as is any cinema, in my view, that tries to score points based on theories, that wants to editorialise rather than dramatise. Some of Bertolucci’s movies aren’t as dramatic as they ought to be; but they’re always ravishing.

When I was a research student at the British Film Institute in the mid-1990s I wrote a thesis on Nando Scarfiotti and his work, to which Bertolucci, with great grace, contributed in loving memory of his friend and colleague. I met him on the Tuscan location of Stealing Beauty, where he was commanding matters with the charisma I expected. Darius Khondji was the DP – no mean substitute for Storaro, who wasn't available, as he sometimes hadn't been ever since he was, in Bertolucci’s impish words, ‘unfaithful to him with Coppola’ for Apocalypse Now. 

I will never ever forget that day, that conversation, all I saw on Bertolucci’s show. I have one or two friends who are filmmakers, and I like to address them as ‘maestro,’ jocularly, but in respect, too – because it’s very hard to make a good film. Bertolucci made some great ones, and when I watched him make cinema I was so struck by the easy way in which he was addressed repeatedly by his collaborators as ‘maestro.’ He certainly was.  Buona notte e buona fortuna, maestro.

Robert Aickman at the Freud Museum: Evidence

Above is a nicely shot and edited three-and-a-half minutes marking the event Faber held at the Freud Museum in June 2014 to honour Robert Aickman's centenary. Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson were our distinguished guest speakers and they read and spoke splendidly; and we were also treated to an excellent speech by Jean Richardson, a close personal friend of Aickman's in his latter years, whose acquaintance I was pleased to make in the course of this project. Mr Dyson is at the lectern in the image-capture above; mine is the convict-like profile in the lower-right corner.

Reece and Jean wrote new pieces about Aickman for the new Faber edition of Cold Hand in Mine. A new preface by me also appears in Dark Entries, The Unsettled Dust and The Wine Dark-Sea. Below is a bit of what I have to say therein:

So elegantly and comprehensively does Aickman encompass all the traditional strengths and available complexities of the supernatural story that, at times, it’s hard to see how any subsequent practitioner could stand anywhere but in his shadow. True, there is perhaps a typical Aickman protagonist – usually but not always a man, and one who does not fit so well with others, temperamentally inclined to his own company. But Aickman has a considerable gift for putting us stealthily behind the eyes of said protagonist. Having established such identification, the way in which he then builds up a sense of dread is masterly. His construction of sentences and of narrative is patient and finical. He seems always to proceed from a rather grey-toned realism where detail accumulates without fuss, and the recognisable material world appears wholly foursquare – until you realise that the narrative has been built as a cage, a kind of personal hell, and our protagonist is walking toward death as if in a dream.

This effect is especially pronounced – Aickman, as it were, preordains the final black flourish – in stories such as ‘Never Visit Venice‘ (the title gives the nod) and ‘The Fetch’, whose confessional protagonist rightly judges himself ‘a haunted man’, his pursuer a grim and faceless wraith who emerges from the sea periodically to augur a death in the family. Sometimes, though, to paraphrase John Donne, the Aickman protagonist runs to death just as fast as death can meet him: as in ‘The Stains’, an account of a scholarly widower’s falling in love with – and plunging to his undoing through – a winsome young woman who is, in fact, some kind of dryad.

On this latter score it should be said that, for all Aickman’s seeming astringence, many of his stories possess a powerful erotic charge. There is, again, something dreamlike to how quickly in Aickman an attraction can proceed to a physical expression; and yet he also creates a deep unease whenever skin touches skin – as if desire (and the feminine) are forms of snare, varieties of doom. If such a tendency smacks rather of neurosis, one has to say that this is where a great deal of horror comes from; and Aickman carries off his version of it with great panache, always.

On the flipside of the coin one should also acknowledge Aickman’s refined facility for writing female protagonists, and that the ambiance of such tales – the world they conjure, the character’s relations to people and things in that world – is highly distinctive and noteworthy within his oeuvre. Aickman’s women are generally spared the sort of grisly fates he reserves for his men, and yet still he routinely leaves us to wonder if they are headed to heaven or hell, if not confined to some purgatory. Among his most admired stories in this line are ‘The Inner Room’ and ‘Into the Wood’, works in which the mystery deepens upon the final sentence.

And lest we forget: Aickman can also be very witty, too, even in the midst of mounting horrors, and even if it’s laughter in the dark. English readers in particular tend to chuckle over ‘The Hospice’, the story of a travelling salesman trapped in his worst nightmare of a guesthouse, where the guests are kept in ankle-fetters and the evening meal is served in mountainous indigestible heaps (‘It’s turkey tonight.’) In the aforementioned ‘The Fetch’, when our haunted man finally finds himself caged in his Scottish family home, watching the wraith watching him from a perch outdoors up high on a broken wall – he still has time to reflect that ‘such levitations are said to be not uncommon in the remoter parts of Scotland.’ This is the sound of a refined intellect, amusing both himself and us.

Robert Aickman at the Freud Museum

Robert Aickman, photographed circa 1960

In his famous essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) Freud was careful to let us know that he did not scare easily; that taking fright at strange things belonged, indeed, to the backward childhood of mankind, the natural fear of the body’s death and ‘the old, animistic conception of the universe’, of a world ‘peopled with the spirits of human beings.’ That said, Freud accepted that we all go through this phase and that ‘residues and traces’ of it may remain – old beliefs ‘ready to seize upon any confirmation’ of their survival and endurance. 

Freud paid special attention to the uncanny as evoked by literature because of its special appeal and privilege in terms of making the supernatural plausible to us– which is to say, ‘there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.’ And Freud certainly understood that a great writer of the supernatural could shake us at our cores by the skilful pretence of moving ‘in the world of common reality… he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we would have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late…’

I note all of this in advance of a special event that I am compering tomorrow night, Thursday June 26, at the Freud Museum in Hampstead. The occasion is the centenary of the birth of Robert Aickman, the brilliant English author of ‘strange stories’ whose work I’ve been privileged to publish in Faber Finds and who is now being offered by the main Faber list in glorious-looking new editions. All tickets to the event are already sold, which is a tribute to Aickman’s ardent following but also, I imagine, to the drawing powers of the two gentlemen who will be reading from Aickman’s work and discussing his influence with me: Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson, formerly of Royston Vasey.

If you don’t know Aickman already, I can only say that you will not go wrong for one moment if you sample the oeuvre at any point. (The new edition of his Dark Entries, for instance, includes an introduction by me and an afterword by Ramsey Campbell.) Aickman's work is a wonder, and will always be so. He is an especially fine exemplar of the style Freud identified, as he seems always to proceed from a realism where detail accumulates without fuss, the recognisable material world seems wholly foursquare – until you realise that the narrative has been built as a cage, a kind of personal hell, and the protagonist is proceeding toward death as if in a dream.

Tomorrow night, in the house where Freud used to live, I hope we’ll throw some light into Aickman's shadows - and I hope to report back here, with pictures.

Freud & Jung: The Movie!

On the subject of psychoanalysis - well, I've never been there, you understand, but I'm an admirer both of Freud and of Jung, and I'm quite sure that I’ve learned many profound things from the writings of both that, taken together, are not exactly complementary. As such I have waited keenly for a film of The Talking Cure, Christopher Hampton’s play about the great Austrian, the great Swiss, and Ms Sabina Spielrein. Now that film is nigh, under the title A Dangerous Method, which references a book by John Kerr that was (as far as I know – I’ve not read it) the first to take seriously the importance of Spielrein to the history of psychoanalysis on the grounds that she was first a patient of Jung’s and subsequently a disciple of Freud’s. As I understand it, what Kerr didn’t know when he wrote A Very Dangerous Method was that Spielrein and Jung had been lovers during his treatment of her.
Hence the special drama of this story, for which Hampton was the ideal dramatist – Freud and Jung as mentor-and-protégé pioneers in the fathoming of the unconscious; Jung becoming the errant son who succumbed to sex with a patient, then proceeded to an occult-spiritual philosophy that alienated him yet further from rational, disapproving ‘father’ Freud; and Spielrein as the woman who first occasioned this intellectual dispute, then went on to make a discerning contribution to it.
The richness of all this is obvious. Is it ‘a movie’ though? I’ll be intrigued to see whether Cronenberg follows Hampton’s play in jumping forward and revealing to the audience at the halfway stage what was Spielrein’s eventual fate. It’s also worth noting that Paul Schrader, an equally fine piece of ‘casting’ for this project, tried to write it as a play for the National Theatre in 1982 at the prompting of Peter Hall, but could never quite finish his script. (‘It’s such a great story’, Schrader told Kevin Jackson for the excellent book Schrader on Schrader, ‘that it took me a long time to realize that it just wasn’t working.’)
For Cronenberg Sabina Spielrein is played by Keira Knightley who also gets top billing over Viggo Mortensen (Freud) and Michael Fassbender (Jung). For me as for many viewers, this is a small matter of concern, but presumably for many other viewers it will be why they turn out for this movie. So, we shall see… Here at any rate is the trailer.

Mailer, Freud, Blair/Brown, Philip Collins: Coincidence? I think not

'Coincidence, what do you make of it?' So Tim Madden asks his father Dougy in Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance (a book, you may have guessed, that is rarely far from my thoughts.) In fact, Tim already has a theory on the matter:

'I believe we receive traces of everyone's thoughts... I think when something big and unexpected is about to happen, people come out of their daily static. Their thoughts start pulling toward one another. It's as if an impending event creates a vacuum, and we start to go toward it. Startling coincidences pile up at a crazy rate...'

Freud didn't buy coincidence, no sir, but Jung did. Freud thought there was a causal explanation for dual manifestations that we would otherwise see as uncanny: basically a repetition of old mental habits congealed around buried traumas, familiar repressions, always wearily likely to resurface. But Jung defied his former master, arguing that coincidence, 'syncronicity', pointed toward something meaningful - 'big and unexpected', even.

Now, it is no coincidence whatsoever - in fact, a matter of hard causation - when the scholarly think-tanker Philip Collins (pictured), a former habitue of Tony Blair's Downing Street, writes an op-ed piece in the Times strongly critical of Gordon Brown's goverment, and a rash of media comment on said piece breaks out. The Evening Standard reports said piece as news. The Spectator nods its head fiercely in agreement with Collins. For The Independent Jon Cruddas MP rates the Collins critique as a worrying recurrence of scarlet Blairism, never quite brought under control or inoculated against.

What is the substance of said critique? Collins argues that Brown is a creature of obsessive manouevring and positioning rather than of any fixed and worthwhile principle: in short, that he would never espouse 'equality', say, because it's 'good' or 'right' but because it's 'politically useful', and that he thinks of 'crime' as 'a political event rather than an infringement of liberty.' (So much, then, for all that supposed 'integrity' Brown used to wear as lightly as sainthood.) And as a consequence of this obsessive tendency, in light of recent events, Collins believes that "Labour now finds itself just to the left of sensible on everything."

It's scarcely a coincidence of note, given my recent musings, that I should seize on the sight of Philip Collins leaning heavily for his analogy upon the general incorrectness of Freudian theory, which he does like so:

'The strain of repressing the traumatic past - devalued currency, winter of discontent, public spending run riot, the regulatory regime of 1997 - and the task of displacing the present - “it all started in America” - is exhausting [the Brown government's] capacity to act. The only response is a series of dreams as wish-fulfilment - the Prime Minister will become the international sultan of regulation, the economic news will be good by the end of the year. The truth is that Labour was never going to win on the economy. It was just a daydream, on Freud's definition, in which the hero wins out and achieves his heart's desire...'

An instance of the sadness as Collins sees it is that Labour under Brown has 'bogged itself down in guidelines for rhubarb crumble recipes and instructions for playgrounds to be painted' rather than bolder strokes for improving schools. (He invokes the name of the Department for Children, Schools and Families rather as a sort of Grey Lubyanka.) But of what measures would Collins himself approve, were he nearer to the levers? He thinks Michael Gove’s plans to 'free schools from the control of local authorities' are the right idea, because Labour could and should have done it already. More generally he's on the side of 'plans to improve literacy... transfer power to local authorities...reform of policing', all of which seem to his eye to be written off or forgotten. In brief, the small-c-conservative, liberal, pragmatic New Labour project has been spitefully abandoned, and the excuse of the international banking fiasco is no sort of a fig-leaf.

You can sense Collins' special concern over the notion that Labour has wound up chasing the Tories' lead just like an opposition party. For wasn't Blairism about making Labour the natural party of government? It seemed to me at the time that this was attempted mainly by outflanking the Conservatives, triangulating them in Clintonian fashion by adopting any elements of populist good sense that the Opposition managed to display. Has Cameron now triangulated the Blair Project? Collins seems to think he's seized the opportunity:
"[Cameron] says that he wants to give people the power to instigate referendums on, for example, council tax increases. He wants to change the assumption that local authorities should have to beg Whitehall for permission to act. He wants a referendum on elected mayors in the big cities. An imaginative Labour party should be exploring all these ideas."

Too much in there to quibble with, other than to say I'm not much interested in either of those referenda and I don't know enough about how local government does or doesn't work in the shadow of Whitehall. But I'll look forward to the next column on the subject, and finish instead on this business of coincidence. I happen to know Philip Collins a little bit through a mutual friend, just as his predecessor in the post of Blair's chief speechwriter, Peter Hyman, was once my editor at a student newspaper. Coincidentally I ran into Philip late last year at the same hotel to which we'd taken our respective families for a 'weekend break' (though Philip had his laptop with him, such was the workload...) As for Peter, I routinely see him pushing his kids on the swings at the same municipal park to which I take my little girl.

After 10 years of Blair's premiership I daresay we all felt to some extent that we could ventriloquise him a bit, 'do Blair'. I certainly tried my hand at same in Crusaders. Maybe I felt myself sufficiently qualified for such mimicry on account of having spent some time in the company of a couple of the fellows who best received the traces of Tony's thoughts (a la Mailer)and so could put well-minted words directly into his mouth?

Dreaming is Free, mercifully, as I'm not sure I'd pay for it

'All that we see or seem', wrote Poe, 'Is but a dream within a dream.' Nope, you were wrong there, Edgar. Go easy on that laudanum. The hard-edged contours of our daily life may occasionally get a little blurry before our waking eyes, but rarely ever so warped as the stuff we see and seem while we're asleep. (Funnily enough Poe's poem was turned into a pop song by Propaganda, a band I liked a great deal back in 1985. And while tuning into the first couple reels of John Carpenter's The Fog on ITV4 the other night - something I must have done a million times - I realised I'd forgotten that Carpenter took the line cited above as his film's fancy epigraph.)

While I'm being scholastic, may we then contend that 'A dream is a wish your heart makes / When you're fast asleep?' I ask only because this Hal David tune is strongly featured in Disney's Cinderella, which I must have sat and watched with my daughter about a million times in the last week alone. But no, I have to be a blasted pedant and observe that when Cinders sings about 'a dream' she is referring in fact to what Dr Freud called a 'phantasy': a neurotic daydreaming or, if we are more generous, the imaginative activity that underlies all waking thought and feeling.

All this occurs to me because earlier this week I woke, rather troubled, from a dream in which I met someone I hadn't seen for maybe 15 years, the setting being a place much like that in which we last met, the person physically unchanged by the passage of those 15 years - and yet I in this dream was much the same person I am today, fully aged and weathered by said interim. It certainly wasn't the sort of encounter I would have bothered to daydream about, nor did it much resemble those that I have on a daily basis. Therefore I would venture that however one would best define it, pace Poe and Cinderella, would be the definition of what a dream is.

Thinking about the great enemies of Freud in our time puts me in mind of Vladimir Nabokov, whose writing I used to love. Apparently he explained his disdain to one interviewer like so: 'I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me... I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books.'

There's a bit in Transparent Things which, I think, suggests that Nabokov thought himself much too good for the sort of dreams Freud discussed... That said, I don't think I have 'those' dreams either. And yet, still, I feel 'the Viennese Quack' was onto something.
(That Nabokov's other great professed hate was Dostoyevsky is the decisive reason why I finally stopped reading VN's stuff. Because what could one think but 'Get over yourself, man'?)