Edouard Manet’s “Portrait of Stephane Mallarme” (1876)

Manet’s painting didn’t offer a comfortable seat to Mallarme’s inspiration. His posture is rather restless – he is not sitting/not lying, and his reclining/non-reclining body is in un-decided position (is he falling back or getting up?). He is here, in front of us, but not really here. Where is he? It could be possible to say that his gaze is rooted in reality much more than his body is if reality (where his gaze is rooted) was the physical world but not the trembling pre-verbal ghosts of his intuitive thinking/concentrations/sensations.* Mallarme’s attention is rooted in reality not suitable for roots, where human intellectual effort can only be a guest, not master.

While looking at the painting we get the impression that the poet is in the process of falling down, but, somehow, harmoniously, without heaviness. His relying on his right elbow is not solid. Is he in a process of putting his weight on the right hand, or is he changing posture from relying on his right hand to the left one? It is as if his body cannot decide how to locate itself in space (because it cannot choose between its weight and its weightlessness. And can Mallarme’s very feeling of pre-verbal reality of his intuitions prop itself up with his hand of the writer?

Physical nature for Mallarme-the poet, according to Manet’s painting, is… a wall paper. But it is not an insult to the physical world and the beauty of creation. It is simply that nature as a cradle of everything alive is not Mallarme’s cup of tea. What for nature-worshippers is the brightest and wisest world, for an intellectually spiritual poet is just the physical capsule, shell of the noumenal glory of both, animated and not-animated reality, a kind of genetic code of the very existence. Too much attachment to the beauty of the physical world is the cousin of the technical science and predatory hunt after the natural resources (that destroys nature in the very moment it attends it). Mallarme is too alien, much more than Manet as a painter, to nature as a womb – his environment is a limitless world (that nevertheless is available to human reason and empathy, congruent with human cognition and is in tune with our emotional vivacity), it is not only what is created but what is in the process of being created/co-created by the world and the human spiritual effort. We have to forgive Manet’s Mallarme for seeing nature as a design of the wall-paper – there are not many people like him among us.

A similarity and difference between poet and painter, between Manet and Mallarme is of the same nature as similarity and difference between Manet and other impressionist painters. Impressionists are not realists (they prefer to have a deal with the spirituality of human perception rather than with physical and social world as it is), but Manet while also cultivating visual perception, is interested in semantics, in understanding of the reality in its psychological and social aspects. The similarity and difference between Manet and Mallarme then is that the spiritual painter cultivates two types of analysis – more subjective (perception) and more objective (social and psychological understanding of the world) while the spiritual poet is, as if, impressionist of the very thinking (he is concentrated on the analysis of subjective aspects of the verbal understanding). In this sense Mallarme is simultaneously Manet and other impressionists.

Mallarme for Manet is the verbal “impressionist” The both as creators of culture complete one another. In Mallarme Manet meets the impressionist of the verbal discourse, of the argument without arguing, the impressionist-philosopher, creator of intuitive/subjective meanings not only as meanings but also as a style, as formulations in the process of being formulated (opened to their future). It seems that Mallarme for Manet is a creator in verbal form what Manet as a painter-philosopher is doing himself with visuality.

Is behind Mallarme on the painting a pillow or an angelic wings? Why not to specify what it exactly is? Because Mallarme’s angelic status is not literal, it is a connotation, a metaphor; it is an “as if” reality (we are not having a deal here with a fundamentalist sort of realistic art – propaganda or advertisement). Secular spirituality is metaphoric. The discourse of secular spirituality is not dogmatic knowledge produced by belief – it is gentle meaning, the one produced gently, without commands and orders, hypnotic suggestions or rhetorical seduction. It is hypothetical, modest and full of humility and for this reason – full of reality. It needs verification. It is just a suggestion. It’s asking for verification. That’s why it is able to produce, step by step, the real – sublimated (and at the same time full of sublime ambition), knowledge of reality.

What is Manet’s Mallarme looking at? – At his intuition in a process of projecting itself into the world? His concentration is not greedy and vulgar, not that of a soldier or a businessman. His gaze is not that of a hunter. It is not even the gaze of a fisherman. It is neither a gaze of an admirer, nor a consumer or destroyer of nature. It is close to the gaze of an amateur astronomer amazed by what he has managed to see in the sky.

Is Mallarme’s cigar his pen? Is trail of its smoke the ink/paint of the poet, the first phase of poetic incarnation of his inspirations, before the white piece of paper?

In comparison with Mallarme’s photographs, Manet’s Mallarme is less strong, more fragile, less physical than the “actual” Mallarme. In real life a poet must be physically and mentally stronger in order to be able to be gentler than others. But it is exactly in real life that it’s absolutely necessary to emphasize the fragility aspect of the poet’s strength, exactly as Manet does.

Mallarme standing in front of his portrait by Manet

In our world today, the very concept of gentle power is in a process of being lost together with serious culture (with its metaphoric and symbolic discourses). Mass culture transforms everything into beer drinking (with chips and jokes) activity and imposes an atmosphere of primitive self-assertion that is perceived as democracy. In American reality of 21st century, with the marginalization of poets, philosophers and intellectual artists, gentle power (authority of truth and subtle beauty) also becomes marginalized. The vulgar power of the financial speculators, conservative (hateful) politicians and belligerent emotions of jingoistic (jungle-istic) crowds is rooting itself deeper in the world. In this universe we have to restore our sensitivity to the gentle power of culture, and on this path the legacy of Manet and Mallarme is of a great help.

*It could be possible to say that his gaze is rooted in reality much more than his body is if reality (where his gaze is rooted) was itself rooted in the physical world but not, as it is in reality, in the trembling pre-verbal ghosts of his intuitive thinking/concentrations/sensations.

Fernando Botero, “Reclining Priest”, 1977

The priest’s fatness and his bodily closeness to the soil immediately engulf the viewers’ attention. His heavy shoes and massive feet belong to a person whose soul has no wings – they belong to a heavy physical world inert and resisting to change. Is the priest plump because he eats too much? – We have a deal with art (“Boterismo” style), not with illustration in a book on health. Botero is more interesting than that. He makes his figures (not only clergy) “voluminous” because, it seems, this is for him the metaphor of materialism – orientation on emotional stability, on solidity of existence that reflects people’s loyalty to social hierarchy of power (the church hierarchy is a part of). In their social position and moral concept priests like Botero’s are not just conservative; their conservatism reflects the authoritarian and dogmatic nature of the traditional social authorities. The lying (on the ground) position of the priest and the exaggerated massiveness of his shoes, like his corpulence, emphasize the anti-spirituality (materialism) of his orientation in life that is connected with intolerance towards progressive changes in conditions of life and any attempts by some to follow Christ (not merely to worship his authority).

Fernando Botero, “Stroll in the Hills”, 1977

The “strolling” priest is moving nowhere. He is not walking; he is, indeed, strolling in life. But even this is too much of a movement for him – he is rather standing like a plant. He doesn’t have active (creative) goals. He is as stationary as stationery. He is the stationery for the church hierarchs and the ruling bureaucracy. His mission is just to be present – whether it is to lie on the ground or to stand still amidst life: to be as passive as a tack or a piece of cardboard. This priest is cross-eyed not so much physiologically but psychologically. He doesn’t have any goal in front of him (nothing to look at) and instead he is identical with himself as a part of a respectable hierarchy. His task is not to see the world around but exactly not to see it – he understands his service to the Church as not being interested in the world (the “fallen reality” doesn’t deserve to be registered by the human attention). To be attentive to the world with human beings as they’re is perceived by creatures like this as sinful occupation. “God is more important than man, church is more important than human life”. This priest is really a monist in his dedication. There is no rain – the priest’s umbrella, according to the logical chain of Botero’s images, is his defense against disturbing his inertia spiritual messages present in Christ’s teaching.

Fernando Botero, “Stroll in the Forest”

Americans who have grown up on animation cartoons can easily imagine a mushroom strolling along the lake, with parasol and a decorative bustle-tail. But can the bank of a lake be as straight as it is so unrealistically made in Botero’s painting? Step by step we come to grasp Botero’s idea – this is not really a lake or a river what reflects the mushroom-bishop. It is the abyss. It is Botero’s parody on the skies understood according to religious dogma as reflecting the pious among us in the eternity. The feeling of being pious and capable of surviving our death is a self-aggrandizing experience of an incredible psychological power. It is similar with the feeling of being chosen, as if having reserved the eternity as a reward for belonging to the church hierarchy. What is perceived by those who dream to be reflected by what is above life as the heavenly abode of eternity is in reality located under and not over them. It is a reflection down, not up. Is it hell then? Do the crowns of the trees look a bit like clouds (there is a cloudy quality to them)? What is perceived by pop-religious consciousness as the sublime human desire to join God in His abode is, according to Botero, nothing more than the desire to join the might of a predatory forest of an anti-spiritual life.

Thank God, not all Catholic priests are like those represented by Botero. Here are some photos of those who for trying to incarnate the words of Christ in life were murdered by the right-wing activists who themselves go to the church not to learn how to bring Christ’s word into a reality but to find and stabilize a place for themselves in the social hierarchy of power.

Priest Ignacio Ellacuria was a philosopher, theologian and Rector of the University of Central America in San Salvador, El Salvador.

Priest Segundo Montes was a scholar, philosopher, educator, sociologist.

Appreciate the difference between the autistic faces of Botero’s “mentally retarded” priests and these intelligent, intellectually alert and spiritual faces of people who preached and taught moral response to poverty through addressing the source of its existence – the sins of pride and greed (read more about Liberation Theology).

The only meaningful way of relating to the stories of Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz’ novel “Fatelessness”, Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” or Herta Muller’s novels and short stories from totalitarian Romania is to read them as testimonies of a total collapse of human conduct and responsibility: a collapse of such a nature and on such a scale that it transcends any attempt to explain them exclusively in terms of historical, political or psychological concepts; a collapse that is like a contagion, and like a contagion penetrates our self-knowledge at all levels… There are no unblemished witnesses, as it is perfectly possible to be a victim yet not wholly blameless. And there is no language… through which pure, unsullied experience could find expression.
Steve Sem-Sandberg, “Even nameless horrors must be named”

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Mother (about the daughter) – She was seen in the woods with Monblat’s son.

Father – So what? He is rich. His father made a bundle during the occupation. The kid joined the Resistance at the last moment. Now he‘s a businessman, like his father. That why she likes him. Am I right? It’s sad but it’s true. The only thing that counts in life is money. Your mother agrees! If you (to the daughter) marry him, she’ll forgive you.

Mother – Marriage? He is just playing around!

Father – A smart girl can gain a lot by being a rich man’s mistress.

Mother – Even if she’s pregnant?

Father – That should be avoided. Kids are expensive and cause trouble. You (to the daughter) have time. You want to go to Paris, be an actress. Do it. You flanked out of school, but you’re pretty. Anyway, actors don’t need a diploma. Your mother is right. Stay out of woods. Do it in a room.

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Leopold (to his wife) – We got into beer in 1933, went to war in 1939 and got bombed in 1944 just so that I could become a poet!

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Archambaud – I feel dirty deep down in my gut. I have been a part of so much slime and crime.

Watrin – By staying silent. And so have I. We are hypocrites, like most people. The times demand it. Do you know a lot of brave people, heroes, friends? But men are still wonderful. If a man lives to see a single daisy it’s all worth it. And there are woods, elephants…

From the dialogues in “Uranus”

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The characters in “Uranus” represent variations of condition of the human soul in circumstances when humane life is impossible. On this poster, from left to right, we see in the background: an engineer Archambaud (a sympathizer, during occupation, with Nazi ideology), a teacher of poetry Watrin (a man “not of this world”), his son who has returned after the end of WW2 from a German camp for French POWs, communist railway worker Rochard (a scoundrel, motivated by hate), Gaigneux (a “pragmatic” communist), Jourdan (a militant communist), Archambaud’s daughter (intelligent girl trying to be a decent human being), Mme Archambaud, Maxime Loin (Petain loyalist), Monblat (a “multibillionaire”), Leopold’s wife, policemen, right wing fanatics; and in the foreground – a jingoistic boy with a toy-machine gun, jingoistic girls with French flags, and Leopold (the pub-owner and drunkard – personification of the human soul lost and trapped in impossible circumstances).

This shot represents Dr. Archambaud, a senior engineer at the local plant, as a person who saw something terrifying, something that is unbearable for the human eyes to see, what wasn’t meant for the human soul to witness. What can that be? – The war that recently ended with the German capitulation? – The bombing of his town by the allies that killed so many innocent people? – Human cruelty towards other people? Yes, but he saw more than that. What he discovered is that in order to “survive” people will do everything, that they can “swallow” their fellow humans without any or with only minor torments of conscience. It is this knowledge that is reflected in Archambaud’s gaze we observe in this still. Is he looking at us, the viewers of the film? Is he looking only at his contemporaries or at us in the beginning of 21st century?

Reaction of Watrin, teacher of literature at the elementary school, on seeing the corruption and corrosion of the human soul (moved by ideological idolatry and human desire to survive and be saved by any price), is even more radical than in Archambaud. While Archambaud still keeps the ability to look at the world (with a terrible price of hypocrisy and cynicism to balance the unbearable reality: hypocrisy is a sign of split between positive self-image and the objective truth of how we really are – of our immoral behavior), Watrin completely lost the ability to see the truth. He looks through the factual world – at the sun and the moon, at the good potentials of our human nature, at the very innocence of human sinfulness, at embarrassing but redeeming coexistence of human naiveté and human criminality. If Archambaud becomes psychologically fragmented (loses human wholeness), becomes “post-modernistically” schizoid, Watrin is maniacally, absurdly, saintly, insanely positive and “optimistic” in spite of everything

Archambaud helps Watrin to put on an optimistic bowtie for the event of celebrating the return of the French POWs released by Germans after the end of war. Amongst the returning soldiers is Watrin’s son who doesn’t know yet that his mother is killed during one of the bombing raids on the city by the allied forces.

The absurdity of cheap (completely imaginary) joy that war ended (when narcissism of self-assertion and egoistic joy of individual survival prevail over compassion and the ability to assess what’s happened) is emphasized in this shot by the clownish attire of Watrin and mixture between the Communist, French and festive flags. A psychologically defensive need of the French masses to vengefully cheer the defeat of Germans, who earlier prevailed over them, makes people turn away from questioning and analyzing what happened with the world and them.

Jourdan is a French communist dogmatic and militant fanatic presiding over the post-war hunt after Collaborationists and Petain loyalists. This small, thinly framed and personally timid creature who still needs his old mother’s emotional encouragement and who in his letters to her often confesses about his political ordeals, has an inflamed socio-political passions. He prepares himself for the ultimate battle for the “communist’ heaven against the “capitalist” evils. This personage is Berri’s parody on numerous “positive” heroes (meant as role models for the viewers) of Soviet propaganda movies. With his irrationally obsessive political “activism” Jourdan is responsible for many mistakes in judgment and for many innocent victims wrongly accused of collaboration with Germans. Jourdan is an explosive mixture of political idolatry and a fundamentalist inability to differentiate between logic of the ideas and logic of the social reality.

Here we see Jourdan in between two portraits of his mother, behind him on the wall and in front of him on the desk, in an epistolary contact with her. His political fanaticism cannot be separated from his psychological infantilism, from being emotionally completely inside the imaginary (covered up by his blind belief in communist doctrine). His deductive thinking (neglecting complications and ambiguities of reality) is completely “geometrical”. His psychology is very close to the American “theoreticians” of economic “shock therapy” and “austerity measures” who apply combinations of concepts to reality without taking into consideration their real price in terms of the human deprivations as a result of implementation of their “theories”. For Jourdan victory of communism is beyond human cost, like for today’s Wall Street schemers and today’s corporate entrepreneurs their perfumed profits.

Gaignaux is a “communist pragmatic”, a moderate/rational political believer, the type that in Soviet Union was completely destroyed during Stalin’s purges of late 30s – early 50s. Following Marcel Ayme (the author of the novel the film is based on) Berri provides Gaignaux with four characteristics meant to emphasize his ordinary humanness and not being fanatic and dogmatic. It is his love for children, his amorous need (both features are absent in the dogmatic/fanatic politicians for whom their children are an extension of themselves and love is reduced to sexual victories), absence of vengeful feelings, and loyalty not to a political doctrine as such but to an existential stance of political fight.

Gaigneux is not a sexually promiscuous type. He like almost everybody reacts on beauty and purity. He is not a particularly humane person, he is also a political functionary, but he is without a psychotic streak of people like Jourdan.

Instead of using the return of the peace for trying to understand better what’s happening with people living under inhumane conditions, the world after the war occupies itself with new rounds of political propaganda and pop-entertainment, and, of course, with feverish money- and career-making. Pay attention to the co-existence of Christian symbols and entertaining movie-ads (psychologically, cousins – both exploit the human proneness to prefer imaginary bliss on the swings of identification to facts, analysis and truth) in Archambauds’ bedroom.

Why Archambaud’s wife couldn’t resist “emotionally helping” Maxime Loin, a conservative political activist under Vichy government, when her husband moved by humane impulse let him to hide in their place? She herself refers to Christianity as a religion of forgiveness. But more detailed impressions from her personality tell us another, less noble story. Maxime Loin is doomed. Earlier or later he has to surrender not to endanger even more people who helped him. Like Gaigneux he is in love with Archambaud’s beautiful and intelligent daughter. Maxime Loin knows he will be executed by the Communists; he trembles with fear and dreams of what will never happen in his destiny. He is an ideal person to be used as an existential stimulation (on somebody’s despair it’s possible to harvest passion that is the last flash of life, last outburst of vitality). Mme Archambaud feels predatorily triumphant around Loin (like a female spider eating her mate).

Monblat is a crushing power from behind his desk (that is the 1945 equivalent, for example, of the office of Goldman Sachs’ CEO today). Pay attention to several phallic symbols around him including the angelic figurine keeping the light – financial power is means of wealth but its goal is to reach the godly might dressed in angelic kindness.

Monblat is a successful business dealer under any system of power. He made money under Nazis; he will make more under French Communists. Politicians and administrators always love wealthy people (they need money) and this gives Monblats of the world incredible advantage. For them money/profit is priceless. Money, like god, is beyond human frame of reference.

Rochard represents in the film a type of communist who is ready to try anything immoral not for the sake of success of his political belief but for the sake of being ahead and above others. He is ready to intrigue, to lie, do anything just to win. Stalin’s KGB guard in the late 30s was made of Rochard dough. Bush-Rumsfelds and Rove-Cheneys belong to the same category. Rochard is tragically a universal type of lout under the mantilla of political righteousness.

Rochard deserves to be treated like Leopold treats him (after he lied that he saw Maxime Loin hiding in Leopold’s pub), even though Leopold is wrong to treat him like this.

Claude Berri is rehearsing a scene with Gerard Depardieu.

Leopold is worried because of Rochard’s open menaces to report him to the Communist authorities for the crime he didn’t commit.

When a person is innocent of a crime he is accused of he is worried even more than when he knows that he is actually guilty – the guilt is not primarily a matter of legality, the Law, prosecutors, judges and Jury. The guilt/innocence is, first of all, connected with the truth of our identity. This truth is what makes us what we are; it is our personality, our very essence. To be accused wrongly drives us insane exactly because it’s crumbling our personality, distorting and violating it, making us, as if, not-existing.

Leopold escapes into poetry – so unbearable is for him the world that insinuates his identity. Yes, he wasn’t rebellious against German rule, but so the majority of French. Yes, he had his small business. But Rochard just to revenge him for being successful represents him as a pro-Nazi.

In magnificent constellation of personages in “Uranus”, Leopold plays a similar role as the double of Shingen in Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha” (1980). Instead of being one of the characters Leopold personifies the very condition of the crumbling soul in all of them. Gerard Depardieu acts the agonizing death of the human soul in those who survived the WW2 – exactly what so frightened Archambaud and what made Watrin turn away from the reality. With each war we become more and more inclined to start the next one.

The death of Leopold signifies the death of the soul of the modern man who in order to survive has lost with his humanness his humanity. The scene of Leopold’s death is one of the most impressively acted scenes in the history of intellectual cinema.

Claude Berri with his youngest son, the film actor – look at Berri’s gaze, it’s not like Archhambaud’s and not like Watrin’s. It is a gaze of a person who has taken to himself all the burden of truth about the condition of human soul that he is trying to describe in his films to make a difference. And his son respects and loves him for this incredible courage.

This is a commercial poster of “Uranus” with reduced quantity of characters. Pay attention to how the right wing insignia in the upper right corner of the poster is symmetrically contrasted with left wing banners.

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In the very beginning of the film we see a man’s big fat rear pulling itself up from the prostrated body of a beautiful girl with a gaze of compassionate distance. The faceless, flabby guy is pulling up his pants as if after using toilet. The connotation here is that the survivalism under extreme conditions is destructive for the human psyche (only calculating mind is left from it), and then only body can be a channel for human self-expression and self-realization. Fat guy steps away from the place of sinful embrace. He is a billionaire Monblat’s son, and the girl with him is the daughter of the engineer Archambaud. Both fathers during the occupation sympathized with Nazi ideology and Monblat did more than that – he collaborated with the right wing pro-Nazi French government and had business relationships directly with German entrepreneurs. But what is the significance of the fact that Berri starts the film with a sexual intercourse in the forest on the outskirts of the town? Is he making a point about animalization of love – its reduction into sex as a result of war and pauperization? Or is he trying to say about the necessity to hide whatever it is – love or sex, from other people because of fear of enraged gossip among neighbors polarized by ideologically enhanced mutual hate? Or the point here is that love that people are unlearning (because of over-occupation with “hate, fight and survival”) hides not only from gazes of others, but hides from itself behind/under sex? Is war achieved “sexual revolution” – freedom of sexual self-assertion by the price of destroying the very ability for (disinterestedly) loving?

“Uranus” classifies the types of people whose souls were either completely or in a substantial degree destroyed by the “tough times” they were moving through. The analogy with Kon Ichikawa’s “Fires on the Plain” (1959) may be helpful here. Watching this film about the predicament of Japanese soldiers at the end of WW2 we cannot avoid noticing a similarity with today’s American life – comparison of times of actual war with so called peaceful life in US. Like Ichikawa emphasizes the intensity of a naked fight for survival amongst the Japanese soldiers trapped in the Philippines in 1945, like Berri underlines the condition of brutalization and atrophy of the soul in the French population in the same historical period, the both directors on the level of semantic (deep) structure address the desperate fight for survival in general (including fight for financial “survival” according to the norms of American life in 21st century). Brutal behavior of the American right wing corporations taking away from their fellow Americans the right to work and sending American jobs to other countries, recent administrative and political attacks on American education, pensions for elderly and help to an enlarging segment of the poor – create similar psychological effects on American life today as what is described by Ichikawa and Berri.

Berri provides a detailed criticism of both – collaborationists and communists because he sees the same moral degradation in both mutually antagonistic camps. The film is about immorality of the both sides involved into a hateful fight for an unconditional victory of their side in the fight.

For people who joined hate (regardless of which side they are on – extreme right or extreme left) to morally survive the war is no brainer. These people are always on the moral side of the universe in their own eyes, even when (and especially when) they behave immorally. That’s what pop-morality is – the person takes refuge in the alibi provided by the political system which guarantees that our sins and crimes, as soon as we are committed to official jingoistic ideology, are no longer considered sins and crimes and by the very magic of the political/ideological belief are transformed into heroic deeds. That’s what “Uranus” is all about – it shows how severe conditions of life and tricky cultural clichés neutralize our moral consciousness and then we become “tolerant” of our behavioral immorality in the name of our political/ideological fetish, be it belief in the Communist future, in superiority of the Third Reich or in “American democracy”. Feeling of hate to whoever it is then is a proto-immorality, a psychological trigger of immoral behavior.

In one of the most important scenes of the film (when after the end of war the city celebrates the return of French POWs from German camp) we see violence unleashed by the French right-wing nationalists celebrating final triumph over the “krauts” and their contempt for the French POWs who “surrendered to the enemy” – we feel that lessons of war are not understood once again, that war is interpreted not in term of its tragic results for everyone, but in the spirit of the primitive right wing hate and competitiveness for the place of winner over loser. Barbaric emotions which have led to war in the first place are unleashed again, after the war is over.

According to the film, six basic motivations determine human behavior during “hard times” – trying to succeed in survival and salvation by any price (everybody), money/profit/power idolatry (Monblat), political ideology idolatry (Jourdan, Gaigneux, Rochard, Maxime Loin), intolerance: sharpening teeth for revenge (Rochard), common sense (Archambaud, Watrin), compassion (critically problematized by Berri) complicated by egoistic psychological motivations (Archambaud, Watrin).

“Uranus” is an impossible (admirable) cinematographic poem about the (terrifying) deadening of human soul.

One of the most linguistically original among the Russian poets, Tsvetaeva has an exceptional ability to realize her visceral vision of the reality through new lexical combinations and semantic clashes and juxtapositions.

The world migration started in the darkness:
It’s trees stroll along night earth,
It’s bunches of grapes ferment with golden wine,
It’s stars wander from home to home,
It’s rivers start to flow backward!
And I want on your chest – to sleep.

Jan. 14, 1917

Erotic process as a spiritual experience starts for Tsvetaeva with the “world migration” felt simultaneously in and outside the soul of her lyrical heroine. Trees start to move along the earth, the stars to wander “from home to home”. The whole being of a person is awakened within sleep like “bunches of grapes ferment with golden wine”. Mutation of nature – a radical change in the direction of the rivers is a prerequisite for the appearance of the desire to sleep on the chest of the beloved.

What Tsvetaeva is telling us here is that eroticism as a spiritual process takes mystical preparation and concentration (that without this erotic yoga, love is only a fear of loneliness and need in symbiotic response – a psychological defense, and sexuality – a predatory vanity).

The chest of the beloved for Tsvetaeva’s heroine is a “magic flesh” she feels herself “on” regardless of the position of bodies in love.

To O. Mandelstam

From where such tenderness?
And what to do with it, the sly teen,
a vagabond singer,
with eyelashes – there are no longer ones.

Feb 18, 1916

The first stance underlines the incompatibility between emotion of tenderness and assessment of the “attractive qualities” of the loved one. For Tsvetaeva’s lyric heroine it is not Eros that triggers erotic response but a combination of Agape and Amour. From the very first words of the poem, Tsvetaeva “dares” to take the reader directly to the bed of love.

The second stance introduces the most “revolutionary” lines in the Russian poetry (in the genre of meditation on erotic experience). Rhythms of cosmic life (“Stars rose and faded”) coincide with human bodily love (“Eyes rose and faded/Near my very eyes”). The readers are invited to try to understand exactly what Tsvetaeva means when the eyes of the beloved (during love making) rise and fade.

The third stance as if awakens doubt of the first stance – Tsvetaeva’s heroine is in love even more because her beloved’s lips “are not dark enough” and his songs to her are not the most perfect ones.

The last stance defines the impossibility to resolve love of tenderness in a diachronic world of time (it’s congruent only with a synchronic universe). The beams of the eyelashes of Tsvetaeva’s beloved point to nowhere except the eternity of memory, art and wisdom.

To kiss the forehead – wipe away worries.
I kiss you on your forehead.
To kiss the eyes – take away sleeplessness.
I kiss you on your eyes.
To kiss the lips – quench thirst.
I kiss you on your lips.
To kiss the forehead – wipe away memory.
I kiss you on your forehead.

June 5, 1917

The forehead is not the most erotically arousing part of the human body. Still, in Tsvetaeva’s poem the forehead is invoked two times, ahead of eyes and lips – Tsvetaeva’s spiritual eroticism cathects the forehead more than the eyes (outside poetry usually the focus of “romantic” adoration) and lips (usually the rainbow entrance into the dark cave of the flesh). Tsvetaeva’s understanding is that refined (effective) sexuality is impossible without the participation of the mental factor and that without the “forehead’s” involvement sex becomes of the size of human genitals or conventional social rituals.

Kissing on the eyes and kissing on the forehead (healing the beloved through wiping away worries and memory) are oriented on elimination of the hindrance for love (removal of the need to observe, to visually and/or situationally control), while kissing the lips is the only “positive” reference to the role of erotic togetherness, but not in the conventional sense as triggering of the “unconditional” reflex of sexual arousal, but rather as an eroticized Agape’s reaction on the human emotional need to be attended. Tsvetaeva saves the “lips” from the intruding intensity of yearning for sexual release – from penetrating impatience.

Tsvetaeva’s emphasis on “worries” and “memory” as radical obstacles for love is important – a too overwhelming present and past, both are hostile to love’s self-realization and to life’s ability to promote it. The result is the destruction of emotional sensitivity – transformation of tremble into trouble, Eros into Icarus, and sex into socks.

*Literal translation by V.E.

The matter here is who is in charge of the government. In Soviet Russia (SRussia) to be in command meant to give orders and punish those who don’t follow. But in US today the situation is more complicated and at the same time more basic – here to be in charge of the government means to own the politicians: to have the power to provide (or not) the money that are desperately needed for politicians’ survival (for sustaining their ability to keep their job, careers, future). The professional politicians are fed by the donations of the financial elite without which they will not be elected/re-elected because they will not have the money to advertize themselves to the electorate and denigrate their opponents. Wealthy people’s money is a survival kit for the politicians “elected” by simpletons who think that election is the main step in the politicians’ political career while in reality it is a preliminary, almost a tentative step to the grand money-future of the American politicians.

In SRussia the “Commander-in-Chief” of the Soviet government was the Communist Party, but today for many Americans it‘s more and more obvious that their “democratically elected” government is just an obedient clerk of the corporate elite. Still, is it correct to compare the Soviet Communist Party (the cult of utopian political doctrine) with American big business, “pragmatic people occupied with personal profit” amidst real life, even although they may be not the most generous people in the world? How business elite can be considered similar with ideological elite? – By applying the operational criterion of how much power it has over the political decision-making, and secondly, by considering the common psychology of the power-keepers (their tendency to manipulate the reality to keep and enhance their dominant position).

Like the leaders of the Soviet Communist Party lived on taxpayers’ money, American business/financial elite is grazing in the same meadow (by enjoying massive subsidies and finding endless loopholes not to pay taxes). If so, why the poor Russians and poor, near poor and at risk of becoming poor Americans agreed/agree to admire their elites, to make sacrifices for the sake of the masters of their countries, and be ready to sacrifice their lives defending in wars those who rule over them? Is it only the question of the power of the financial and ideological elite encircled by the army, police and secret agents? Or is it also the magic power (seductive influence) of ideology over human imagination – in SRussia the ideology of Communism and in US today the ideology of money/profit as the ultimate value of human life? Like SRussians were dreaming about Communist prosperity and loved Communist idea (of brotherhood, equality and prosperity in the future Communist society), Americans not only enjoy cheap/fake prosperity of mass-culture society but their common dream of becoming wealthy (the American dream of being rich feeds the ideology of money like SRussians were dreaming of collective happiness with militant jingoistic loyalty that, as they believed, will take them there).

As simplemindedly trusting Soviet propaganda Russians believed in Communism like virginal souls, mass Americans today are not less naïve believers in glory/glamour of money-profit. Ultimately, the both ideologies promise unconditional prosperity, well being, and consumer paradise. Even today, after “disappointment” with the extremist behavior of corporatists and financiers who learned how to become even subtler crooks and more sophisticated robbers, Americans are still susceptible to the right wing propaganda claiming that “democratic government’s regulations” are the reason for all bad things. Pop-Americans are full of irrational hope that by magic combination of financial manipulation tricks – ultimate prosperity will eventually come down on them from the sky that will release an unlimited amount of money like manna. People are believers by their human nature (for so many centuries they were trained by their leader-bosses that one day their religious and later political ideological beliefs will reward them with a paradisiacal prosperity). In SRussia credulity in relation to Communist propaganda made dreams of SRussians false and their proclivity to believe wasted. In US identification of the meaning of human life with material achievements, consumerist/possessive pride and professional career has led to a social climate that nurtured Wall Street speculators, corporate greed and absurd militarist adventures.

Only democracy corresponds to the possibility of reaching a rational level of understanding of a humane meaning of material prosperity and moral sensibility. But today American democracy is endangered by the invasion of oilnivorous (eating petroleum to have more controlium over human life, nature and the world) corporate giants-tyrannosauruses and by moneyvorous Wall Street banksters, these equivalents of the ruthless rule of Soviet Communist party.

Fundamentalist perception of oral or written narratives (tautological, without any sense of connotation, like an automatic action) and authoritarian/totalitarian communication – ATC, which corresponds to it – is a way to transform narratives into a toy, and listening, reading or watching them into a child’s game, into a make-belief. Religious fundamentalism as a tautological perception of stories and ATC communication are the equivalent, in the area of religious beliefs and practices, of what mass-cultural perception and communication is in the secular area. In mass culture we observe the same fundamentalist tautological perception and the same type of communication that we see in fundamentalist religious perception of reality. What is perceived is identical or near identical to what is communicated – no connotation or interpretation intervene between the communicator and the receiver, no mental space mediates between what is communicated and what is perceived.

What for people who try to please God is religious fundamentalism and for the ones who try to please a commanding officer a commanding communication (CC), for mass-cultural consumer and the entertaining communication (EC) are images and goods he/she consumes/appropriates. Semantic tautology is the psychological mechanism in all three cases. And with it to people comes a fundamentalist pleasure of having precious privilege not to be occupied with connotations, to be free from the necessity to deploy interpretation with its relativity and insecurity.

It is the absence of connotation what transforms communication into a toy – into a consumed object, into pure energy of appropriation/consumption with resulting very rewarding pleasure. ATC (including commercial communication: the one between producer/seller and consumer) is a communicational aspect of the same phenomenon psychological aspect of which is tautological fundamentalism.

It is helpful to represent the instrumental form of ATC (for example, military order from higher to lower ranks) as a transitional form between religious fundamentalism (transforming religion into a toy of pop-belief) and mass-cultural entertainment. Like religious dogmas in fundamentalist perception are taken as commands – without any connotation, words and phrases of military commands and entertainment’s super-stars are taken with a passive imitation, through symbiotic identification. Religious and political dogmas, military commands and super-stars’ self-expressions are oriented on direct and immediate identifications on the part of those at the receiving end. This kind of non-critical identification is the psychological essence of the relationship between a human being and a toy. Like religious fundamentalist appropriates/consumes/identifies with the religious maxims, images and authorities, like a soldier appropriates his colonel’s order and his general’s commending and encouraging gaze, like a sport- or pop-music fan emotionally swallows/appropriates the star’s face and voice – in the same way a child makes its toy not only part of his body, but an object of his internal world.

But the age of technologically advanced toys has brought about a new epoch of a more profound fundamentalization of human communication and tautologization of human thinking about the world. High-tech toys come to children with the aura of independence from existential frame of reference; they are a goal in itself, their own world, other (better) planet. These toys are the new version of narratives (where connotation is destroyed not only subjectively, on the level of perception – through a fundamentalist [tautology oriented] psychological reaction, but objectively, through the elimination [in the toy] the existential reference, reference to the common good of the society). Communication between a high-tech toy, like, for example, video-game, and a human being, corresponds to a fundamentalist psychological code, when there is no room for otherness/dissimilarity between the sender and receiver – the more the receiver becomes identical with the game the more effective he/she becomes as a player.

While in religious fundamentalism identification with the dogma and religious authorities will always keep an inequality in the existential space, while in the army identification with the commander-in-chief will always keep inequality in real life situations, while in mass-cultural communicational relations between the star and fan and entertaining idea or image and their consumer the difference between the idol and its worshipper is blurred – the identification between video-game player and the video-game takes place inside a completely artificial communicative space. Such space doesn’t need the reality at all. In this feature of high-tech toys lies their destructive power. Now it is not only fundamentalism of toy as a narrative the problem. It is toy’s complete freedom from the existential system of coordinate, its complete independence from human life. And it means that the psyche of those who play with these toys is already not an existential psyche capable of balancing its imaginative needs by the awareness of its existential limits (the fragility of human body, identification with otherness of other people which makes us capable of developing empathy and compassion, and ability to take into consideration the vulnerability of individual and planetary life).

But now toy-me or me-toy becomes the king – not king of earthly proportions, but king beyond and above life. We are less and less interested in life and more and more are playing with super-toys – new weapon systems, incredible profits, and high-tech science. As soon as they are not regulated by life (but directed by our super-human ambitions), they are in a unique position of destroying life because they are not part of it. Our human part cannot control our toy-obsessions because the more we play with real weapons and “unreal” (super-human) profits we are weaker and weaker in our ability to improve our understanding of life and make it more refined and humane.

“Communication” between high-tech toy like the video-game and human being follows the archaic fundamentalist code when there is no semantic difference between the sender and receiver – when receiver blindly follows/identifies with message – acts according to prescription/command incarnated into the rules of the game.

…The blonde girl on the beach… The girl’s long hair…caresses his head, tying him to his vision, allowing him no escape from his memory. David Loshak, “Munch”, PRC, 2001, p. 62

Edvard Munch, “Separation” (1896)

The nature of personal love contradicts the nature of human life. While love is all about coming together and becoming one, life is about separation. We lose the maternal womb, after this – symbiosis with mother and later with our own body, and finally – symbiosis with life. Life is a chain of our attempts to survive our separation from love. Torments of love are our very transition from love to life.

To be able to survive the loss of love, the protagonist of “Separation” – a “romantic” with pale face and somber mimics, unconsciously helps himself by transforming in his imagination the lost love into the “part of landscape” – into the nature he then can solemnly transcend through his noble suffering. The world in Munch’s painting splits into past and present and simultaneously into external and internal world (nature and human consciousness).

The tree on the left of the painting marks the border between the past/nature where the protagonist as if disposes his broken love (mixture of a melancholic pale purple with the earthy brown under the black clouds), and the present consisting of the expressive and symbolic world of a sublimated (self-reflective) suffering. The lost object of our love that we unconsciously impersonalize, is then, as if, transformed into a “natural phantom” – we pantheize it to make it easier for us to survive its loss.

Separation in “Separation” is without hope and without future. The painting is a representation of past and present of human experience of separation from love, and of art as its symbolization. The past and the external world are painterly “incarnated” in the background of the painting, the present and the internal world – in the middle-ground, and the future – in painting’s absent foreground (in the very canvass). The present extends itself into painting instead prolonging itself into future.

The girl’s hair is a continuation of the landscape (the earth). And the landscape is a continuation of her dress-body (of the sunlight mixed with sand). Her face is generic – as if erased by the male protagonist’s pain. She is earth and air, and the curves of her figure are that of the water. But he is transformed into fire. If she is three of the four elements, what is left of him is just one, and even this one is self-consuming. His blood of grief is that of the fire of self-annihilation (the impossibility of losing love). The girl’s impersonalization and “dehumanization in “Separation” (her psychological destruction) is a prerequisite for the appearing of the very artistic form. According to the logic of Munch’s images, the pain of losing love leads to the transformation of reality into intelligence (reality of love into intelligence of life). The joy of loving is beautifully wasteful, while pain of separating from love is the accumulation of this beauty of love into artistic form. Intelligence inserts itself between love and life if the person is able to sustain the pain of love-loss.

Can the necessity to pantheize woman who “abandoned” our male protagonist be a sign that she was never much of a personality for him, that her image in his mind was not too individualized by him, that it always was close to be as generic as it is in this painting? The tendency to “generalize” the woman we love, to perceive her as a part of our own personality tells about the absence of interest on our part to perceive her as an independent human being, free from our projections. It tells about the narcissistic (self-occupied) nature of our love. While a narcissist with a superficial (shallow) character will not suffer too much about amorous loss, the narcissist with a profound personality is in the danger of not surviving separation (with the object of his love he loses too much of his self).

But what is the nature of this double-headed creature right in front of the main protagonist who has as if, stopped before his unknown future while being occupied with what has already become his past? “The lovelorn man appears about to move forward, into the future, but his path is blocked by the crimson plant, possibly intended as a mandrake, with its love and death symbolism.” (David Loshak, ibid… p. 62) This morbid two-headed plant represents, it seems, the destiny of the two beloved whose tormenting separation from each other is the topic of the painting. It is (like they are) in the process of being ripped apart. This surrealist image, ahead of its time, is made even stronger by its contrast with the rest of the painting.

In his “Separation” Munch (in order to express the complicated nature of human emotional predicament) uses three styles – Art-Nouveau representation of the lost love-object, realistic/symbolic style of expressing the hero’s suffering, and surrealistic representation of the amorous couple in the process of being ripped apart.

Munch’s creative intuition is so rich that when he is concentrating on separation and suffering (quite widespread topics) his painting opens an additional semantic/formal perspectives (like split – under the influence of trauma of losing love – of human experience on past/nature and present/inner world, representation of amorous separation as a morbid plant ripped off, or pantheization of the lost love object – its impersonalization and dehumanization, etc).

Edvard Munch in 1907

Edvard Munch in 1938

Emil Nolde, “Sonnenblumen” (“Sunflowers”), 1930

Who on earth could see the sunflower’s stigma/stybus (the heart or the head) of bright blue color? Usually it is either browning orange or when seeds ripe, black. But Nolde’s intuition has a surprise for us – it perceives the face of the sunflower’s head encircled by yellow petals as aggressively dense and bright dark-blue. Why? Simultaneously, the discernable patches of the blue in the painting represent the sky as reduced to the background of the sunflowers, not like usual the top of the world patronizing plants and humans. Nolde’s sunflowers are given here in a close-up, as the center of the world, while the sky has lost density of its blue – became pale as if it is dried up of its blue juiciness. May be, the sunflowers have drank the blueness of the sky transforming heaven into a pale echo of their two bright sad eyes?

What two bright sad eyes? May be, it’s possible also to see in Nolde’s painting the red lips – sunflowers’ twisted mouth. But we should not follow American mass culture’s childish route of animated cartoon that sterilizes everything by making it a reflection of simplified plots. We have to forget about the sad eyes, twisted mouth, and nose of the flowers (the face of the bouquet) and return to them not as slaves of our perception. We have to take flowers in all their otherness. We have to let this otherness resonate with our being without using perceptional projections-clichés. Nolde himself leads us by making the centers (the faces) of the sunflowers unrealistically blue and simultaneously by making the patches of the sky very pale as if the sky has lost its density to the intensified blue of the sunflowers’ faces/hearts.

It looks like Nolde in this painting is interested not so much in sunflowers as heliotropic plant but in them as a kind of sky-flowers which through assimilating sky’s blueness and making it even denser – make sky incarnated on earth, make it more of a sky when it becomes part of an earthly flowering – earthly life.

By looking at the two lower sunflowers we see that not only their faces but their necks are also dark blue as if they are growing not from the soil but from the sky, as if they are rooted not in the earth but in the sky. It is as if flowers were alchemically accumulating the energy and the meaning of the sky, not that of the earth and sun. Does it mean that according to Nolde’s intuition, the essence of the sky is itself earthy, from the earth, not in the sky?

Does it mean that earth is the painter of the sky compressing sky’s essence by metaphorizing it (representing it by the means of the earth – incarnation and life)? Earthly life paints the sky with brush of flowers. Then we don’t see the painting – but only the brushes carrying the paint of the sky. So, where is the painting? – It’s the very feeling in Nolde as a demiurgic creator (and in us, viewers of his painting, who through identifying with him identify with creative energies of earthly life adding vitality to the monumental sky), who can participate in the mystery of creation.

Nolde’s sunflowers (especially the upper right one and the one beneath it) enrich our world with their blood-purple coloration. Blood added to the sky (of the flowers) is already not only signifies life of earthly flora but the warm life of fauna. Incarnation of the sky-spirit into the fleshy life of the earth is completed by the effort of a painter as an alchemical creator of the transformation of the spirit into life and sense.

Impressionistic version of Nolde’s painting “Sonnenblumen”

This version of Emil Nolde’s painting doesn’t inspire us like the first version did to make interpretation. Painterly speaking this painting is no less of a virtuoso work. It is full of air and trembling of the living which “infect” us through the magic channel of aesthetic perception. But it is completely “phenomenal”. It doesn’t directly incarnate the essence. In it the essence died in the process of being incarnated, it is transformed into a non-graspable connotation that can be attended only by feeling. This painting doesn’t enrich the alchemical practice of creation while the first one as an intellectual art creates between noumen and phenomenon an additional category of an essential phenomenon – an art between spirit and life: an existential art of earthly meaning, of sky inside the earth, of heaven inside life.

The pedagogy of self-respect

This poster of “Chinese Roulette” symbolically refers to the psychological situation (and spiritual ordeal) of the film’s heroine Angela, the intellectually precocious adolescent daughter of a wealthy and very intelligent couple. Here we see Angela on her way out of the gilded castle of her parents’ love and her family’s prosperity. The point of the film is that for exuberant existence amidst parental care and support you have to pay a very high price: you have to correspond to their perfectionist expectations and demands. For Angela it’s too difficult to achieve, so, she decides to question the unconscious megalomania of her parents’ dream about what their child should be. As the poster of the film suggests, the way to freedom is not easy – too many doors you have to go through on your way out of the place, where even the floor, as if, glues to your feet not to let you step out of un-freedom (blind obedience, the inability to question and analyze parental and social authority).

Angela’s parents are exemplary in terms of love for their child, their distinguished social status and personal charm. Angela’s well deserved love for them is beyond doubt, but amidst their dedication to her, she feels something particular in their love for her – some kind of a shade, and this triggers her inquisitive curiosity that step by step, the older she becomes, transforms into a kind of research about her parents’ psychological particularities. Angela is a child of exceptional intelligence, and what she was able to understand about her parents became (with Fassbinder’s help) of a universal importance. Angela is lucky to have a governess (a distant relative) who understands her predicament and tries to help her to confront the truth about her parents and herself. This shot depicts an important moment in Angela’s life when she feels she must act to spiritually save her future. The composition of this shot points to her closeness to her governess whose style of helping is not giving direct advices but creating a kind of emotional music in Angela’s life in order to support her belief in her human value.

Angela’s dolls are as if horrified and even dead children. These dolls are multiple versions of how Angela feels herself in life since she discovered that her parents cannot accept the fact that she is physically not perfect. Their suffering (that they hide from her behind their compassionate and spoiling love) is not only that they as all the parents want her daughter to be in perfect health and condition, but that their child’s inherent physical “defect” as if reflects their hidden “moral” imperfection. For Gerhard and Ariane it is almost unconscious torment that they never in any way expressed to their daughter, but Angela feels that it is always there, inside them. It is, indeed, their complex, and it makes Angela depressed and self-reproachful for not being able to make her parents happy. Of course, Angela’s physical crippleness is for Fassbinder a pure symbol, a signifier. For some parents it is that their child doesn’t believe in god, for some his/her “unnatural” or “sinful” sexual orientation, for others if their children are unsuccessful as a money-makers or social success achievers, etc. – all this signified by Angela’s invalidity.

The film starts with Ariane, Angela’s mother (Margit Carstensen with her philosophically sharp acting style), feeling melancholically contemplative in front of the window into a “public opinion”. Ariane’s suffering because of her daughter’s condition is inseparable from her compassion and care about her child, from her guilt for not being able to give birth to a perfect child. Fassbinder’s point here is the opposite of the philistine logic: that Angela’s future social success will compensate for her physical handicap and that it will be a great victory of the human spirit over the error of nature. He emphasizes the inhumane logic of the very feeling that a person with “defect” deserves compassion and needs to “overcome inferiority” through some “heroic effort”. His point is not the necessity “to achieve” success” in spite of the “defect”, but how not to feel inferior if you are not like everybody else.

By a compassionate and simultaneously expressing repentance gesture of the mother who is as if asking for her daughter’s forgiveness, Fassbinder and Carstensen iconoclastically challenge the psychological point of Christian ethics (compassion hides a condescending posture and, therefore, unintentionally legitimizes inequality that is based on perfectionism of the “successful” people with disrespect for the “poor” or “deviants” who are being judged as distant from the “ideal” by the reason of being unable to yearn for perfection that stimulates the achievers to achieve).

Why Gerhard and his mistress when they meet at the airport are obsessively laughing? – Because they both feel emptiness in the exact place in their souls where their love for each other could be. It is like a similar laughter between Hans, the hero of “The Merchant of Four Seasons” and his military buddy when they meet again after serving together in foreign legion – while in “Merchant…” their laughter points to something problematic in their “unconditional” friendship, a similar laughter in CR refers to the fact that Gerhard and Mlle Cartis “fall in love” by other reasons than love.

Why is the lover of Angela’s mother crying? – Because Angela’s “intrigue” destroyed his illusion, that relation between him, a Gerhard’s secretary, and Angela’s mother is a “real love”. Truth hurts everybody, not only the one who delivers it but also those who hide behind “bad faith” (behind love as a cover up). Angela’s point is that her mother started to have an affair with the secretary of her husband not because of love but because of Angela’s imperfection! The nasty connotation here is that the other, younger man could be more capable to be a progenitor of the perfect baby.

As a non-conformist (free-thinking) child, Angela doesn’t want to “prove” anything – she just wants the recognition of her right to be who she is.

Angela’s mentor tries to show Angela how to dance with her crutches to awaken in her the joy of life, the feeling of being not worse than anybody else.

We see Angela’s father with his French mistress, affair with whom is irrationally connected with his daughter’s illness. Pay attention to Mlle Cartis’ surrealistic reflection (entangled with other optical effects) referring to the second (less obvious) reason for Gerhard’s falling in love with her (beside Anna Karina’s intelligent charm).

For years Gerhard unconsciously burdened his mistress with expectation of relieving him from his consciousness of having a sick child. Angela’s face signifying her father’s need to compensate himself with a rewarding affair for his narcissistic wound, can be seen reflected near the bottom of the shot – out-of-focus (it belongs to the unconscious of Gerhard and Irene’s relationship and it only broke out to the surface because of Angela’s unexpected “psychotherapeutic session” ). But you can notice an almost triumphant expression on Irene’s face, her gaze surrealistically multiplied as if underlying her victory. It is as if Irene intuitively has always known that Gerhard’s proclaimed “great love” for her is not without other reasons but because of good taste she pretended she believed in it to be (and to make him) happy. But now, after the lesson all three of them got from the child, she looks at her lover as if making point about lack of courage in his intimacy and faint-heartedness of his desire.

Angela’s mother feels the need to be “cheered up” by her young lover after their affair was exposed by her “demonstratively disrespectful” daughter.

Ariane feels guilty in front of her boyfriend because of Angela’s rebellious behavior and is afraid of losing him.

Why is it so difficult for Angela’s parents to swallow that their secret affair is made “public”? – Beside the obvious: that most parents don’t like to be outsmarted by their children who are capable of discovering what parents prefer to hide, Angela with one strike managed to destroy two personal myths as hypocritical – of Gerhard-Ariane’s impeccable love and of their affairs as genuine and unique. Soon during the game of Chinese roulette she will openly debunk her parents as perfectionist narcissists with racist overtones and super-human pretensions.

It looks that contrary to his “rival” Kolbe, Gerhard was able to realize his male prowess in spite of the psychological blows inflicted on him by his daughter. The dominant males can even be reinforced in their status by the unexpected destabilizing surprises.

As it is always the case with “intellectual” film directors (who dare and are capable of going farther than clichés allow, the composition of this shot communicates a lot about the characters’ social and psychological situation. On the left we see a decorative chess set with shiningly glorious pieces. The dark object lying under the chessboard is a loaded gun that will be finally used. The two queenly ladies towering over the chessboard (the wife and the mistress) are two chess queens. But we have only one king. It is Gerhard standing on the right while looking at them. Ariane’s lover stands near the mirror in contemplation of his defeat – Gerhard is hierarchically stronger male, especially after being exposed as having two women, while his young secretary in spite of his good look as if has lost his mistress (the boss’ wife). Behind Gerhard we see a part of Gabriel’s body (he is the house keeper’s son who as if stands next in line) – he is extremely envious of the master’s wealth and success. But he is reduced not only to his body, but to a part of a human body – he doesn’t have any chance to become as successful as Gerhard.

Through the composition of this shot and his craft of visual connotation and symbolism Fassbinder analyzes not only personal rivalry between Ariane and Irene (mistress of Ariane’s husband), but them as personifications of the competing socio-historical trends. Margit Carstensen‘s (Ariane) face is beautiful and also very strong – but in the hands of Irene (a professional hairdresser and owner of a beauty salon in Paris) it loses all its power, it became just a pretty face (we see this transformation in the right mirror). In the central, the largest part of the 3-part mirror we see Irene remaking Ariane. The impression is that Irene (with her body towering over) dominates but not personally. Ariane in the film personified megalomania (signified by her suffering for not being able to produce a perfect child) while Irene represents – conformism (her agreement to have an affair with Gerhard without flame). Then Angela signifies spiritual alternative to both these positions (her orientation on truth by the price of losing emotional complacency).

Irene Cartis understands how painfully her lover and his wife are entangled in their family situation, that they by their mutual mental pain (connected with their daughter’s condition) belong together. She is grateful for Angela’s psychodrama.

The difference between Angela and Gabriel, as Fassbinder suggests by their names, is that Angela represents a new kind of “angelic” creature – oriented on existential truth, while Gabriel is conformingly oriented on heavenly hierarchy of earthly success – he exists only if he is appreciated by those on the top. Angela is becoming a human being while Gabriel is doomed to stay dehumanized and impersonalized.

Gabriel’s plebeian orientation on the rich and influential people is expressed in his tendency to eavesdrop to “big people’s” chats. It’s not that he wants to find out something – he just wants to absorb their glamour, to be elevated by being close to them, his gods. In this (like in the previous) shot we don’t see Angela’s upper part of body – Fassbinder equalizes Angela’s crippleness with Gabriel’s whole being.

Kast is Gabriel’s mother and Gerhard and Ariane’s house keeper. As this shot suggests, her existence is a combination of unreality – she lives in a world of appearances: (reflected nature, interior, possessions which are not hers). Her reflection in the mirror is more solid than she herself. She as if tries to grasp what she is by looking at her own reflection in the mirror. Many people are like this – just an incarnation of customs, norms and expectations.

Angela is going to achieve her task – to make her parents to become conscious why their souls need compensation in the form of new sexual partners. According to this shot, it is the most important moment in Angela’s life, only what’s happening to her is important here (will she able to insist on truth?) Other personages are out of focus. Whatever will happened, it is Angela’s responsibility.

Angela contemplates on her “super-human”: existentially spiritual task.

A tough moment during the game of Chinese Roulette (third from the left is Angela’s helper Traunitz) – adults are either like extras (father and his mistress) or are in a supportive role (governess), but it is Angela who move the plot and the meaning of the film.
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Fassbinder starts the film with a magnificent, imposing, self-reflecting, omnipresent and self-aggrandizing music of Gustav Mahler which is in counterpointed manner juxtaposed with Ariane Christ (Margit Carstensen) melancholically dreaming with a cigarette in front of a window. We see how her gaze full of love is turning to her pretty and intelligently looking daughter. When music subsides we understand that her daughter is crippled. Up to this moment we are in the kingdom of the noble archetypes – beauty, perfection, compassion, love. But music stops, and Fassbinder pushes us into the everyday reality of human life: business, bustle, vanity, passion, suspicions, lies. The contrast here is not between spirituality and ordinary life, but between fallen spirituality of self-aggrandizement and the need for it in fallen human beings who react on frustration of loosing glory with pleasurable earthly compensations (like consumerism, searching for money-power, finding scapegoats – those who, we think, are guilty for our problems, or secret sexual affairs stabilizing or destroying marriage, etc.).

Fassbinder takes the basic motif of “Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (an important Hollywood film based on Edward Albee’s play – 1966) about perfectionism (the perfect progeny-complex) of the main character Martha (Elisabeth Taylor) whose obsession with the perfect marriage that must be verified by a perfect progeny, creates a delirious dream of having an impeccable (angelic) son. In “Chinese Roulette” the point is a deep seated (semi-unconscious) psychological trauma of parents having a crippled daughter – the fact that shatters their being in spite of their genuine love for their child, and makes them behave in an irrational manner.

The demanding posture toward children often expresses the hidden megalomaniacal psychological constellation in the parents. It is as if children didn’t have the right to be free – to follow their own inclinations and must be viewed by the parents as vessels for projection of parental (and societal) expectations. Isn’t this a form of child abuse – a dismissal of the need of child to develop its own potentials and proclivities regardless of parental narcissistic projections? For many Soviet Communists their children had to be exemplary carriers of so called “moral code of the builder of Communism” and self-sacrificial fighters for Communist idea. For the dedicated Nazis their children should be model carriers of Nazi ideology and racial values. For American worshippers of money and social success their children have to learn “business”, have “clients” when they are ten-twelve-years-old and become millionaires in their twenties. For Christian believers their children have to be the personification of Christian belief and ideology of their brand of Church affiliation. In too many cases this position leads to child abuse (including corporeal punishment) as a result of parental frustration about “under-achieving” offspring, or child neglect because parents suffer about their child’s low value in the eyes of public opinion. Endless emotional conflicts between parents and their children can be connected with parents’ frustrated expectation about their child’s lack of social success and admiration.

The heroes of Fassbinder’s film are not like all these categories of people – they are emotionally refined and intellectually sophisticated. They don’t have any conscious expectations from their child to be the wunderkind. But when Angela became sick with no life-threatening condition, even these refined and educated people couldn’t resist taking this fact as an act of primordial self-judgment. They got a secret life as a reaction to their, mainly unconscious, grief. This “secret life” in no way intervenes with their marriage or love for their child, and if Angela could be just identical with her condition the problem couldn’t even be noticed. But this girl has an extra-ordinary intellectual sensitivity that made her try to read her parents’ internal world, to research their behavior only finally to discover their secret. She is emotionally helped by her governess Traunitz (Macha Merril), an exceptional person whose sensibility and pedagogy are incompatible with the values dominant in today’s society.

Gerhard and Ariane’s secret became a focus of Fassbinder’s (reinforcing Angela’s) investigation of the exemplary couple’s personal sensibilities. Angela challenges her parents’ axiom of perfectionism acting beneath their mind – with all the rebelliousness of a young passion. Angela wants to blast not only her parents’ megalomania, but their hypocrisy and cowardice – right in front of them to make them conscious about their complexes, conformism and weaknesses. She creates with their parents a tough psychodrama only to find that their unconscious megalomania (activated by their psychological trauma that was created by Angela’s physical handicap) is made them psychologically entrenched. It is as if love for their child frustrated by their disappointment in her, returned to them in form of extra-narcissistic energy. In the end of the film their pain of failure as procreators (multiplied because of their mutual identification), became a pseudo-psychotic construction of their super-human suffering.

Angela’s parents could not discover the possibility of loving the child as she is – Angela’s psychodrama is failed (they love her only consciously – only her potential of perfection, while meaninglessly reproaching themselves unconsciously). It is this self-reproach and vain suffering connected with it that Fassbinder challenges in “Chinese Roulette”. Many parents in different historical periods and various nations have this megalomaniacal projection to their children instead of loving them with all their difference from their “creators” and the norms of obligatory perfection.

By giving the surname Christ to Angela’s father, Fassbinder deconstructs the pop-Christian sensibility and parodies pop-Christian “suffering” about the “fallen” condition of the world (suffering that becomes a cover-up for hating the human body, alive matter and this world in general). Religious perfectionism is like wealth/money-perfectionism – it is a model of maniacal obsession with god of wealth and any ideological “truth”. In this sense Angela is a fighter with our inability to discover the ultimate beauty of being a living human being (without antagonism to life in the flesh). Angela’s crippleness is a metaphor of being human, and her cruel lesson to her parents is a punishment for their possessiveness and consumerism as a facet of a perfect life. Angela is a child who victoriously survives the ordeal of Hermann-Hermann [from Fassbinder’s “Despair”,] who while searching for the truth of his existence deliriously “found” himself in other person to avoid the truth about his own life. Angela (with the help of her tutor) is able to define herself where Hermann-Hermann covers up the truth by the illusion of creating a totalitarian psychological trick of a common identity to mask his failure as a human being.

In “Chinese Roulette” Fassbinder examine how people react on truth. Only Irene Cartis is able to “join the truth” in spite of the fact that this exposed her as a participant in existential lie. Ariane and Gerhard became even more entrenched in their trauma, while Kolbe (mother’s lover and Gerhard’s secretary) is left mute in his conformism. Do the film characters’ reactions on truth sociologically predict/model the reaction of the film audiences on “Chinese Roulette”? Fassbinder’s classification of the five female and six male characters of the film creates a sociological matrix for analysis of the population in Western societies.

Ken Russell on the set of “Women in Love” with Glenda Jackson who plays the leading role

The question put by Russell’s work is not only the priority of life or art for his personality (aestheticism or existentialism of his creative dedications). It’s a question of who he is – a narcissist armed with a cinematic medium or a human being singing a hymn to creation by analyzing the mysteries of life. In times when a film-director is forced by economic pressures beyond his control to become a “filmmaker”, Russell balances his extravagant cinematic style (creating and simultaneously subverting his success) with his dedication to thinking about human existential problems (that usually is not noticed by the viewers of his films and is covered with the elegant silence by the critics).

At least three topics are characteristic of Ken Russell’s creative curiosity – human sexuality with its mysterious twists and tricky enigmas, human aggression as the dark flower of human nature nurtured by human history, and religious fundamentalism with its paradoxical psychological primitivism when belief in good creates evil.

Russell deals with these themes in many of his films, but the main “textbook” on the intriguing nature of human sexuality is his “Women in Love” (1969), like “Lair of the White Worm” (1988) is the main visual “text” of his psychology of human aggressiveness, and like “The Devils” (1971) is his main elaboration of the psychology of religious fanaticism.

Russell’s directorial style is based on the disruption of plot as a timid, step-by-step narrative. Radicalism of his worldview demands an extremely symbolic cinematic language. Formal excesses of his many films hide but also promote the existential radicalism of his political positions.

Ken Russell understood that sexuality is not only sexual phenomenon but represents the yearnings of the human soul. “Women in Love” makes a paradigmatic case for a democratic position on sexual liberation. Russell depicts love between men not as an alternative or an addition but as a completion of love between the sexes. This love, according to Russell, contradicts the fiesta of megalomania and scapegoating characteristic of machoistic posture of competition, rivalry, rigid identity, hate and wars.

In “Lair of the White Worm” Russell emphasizes the morbid psychological transformation of our soul when we give ourselves to hate and to desire to manipulate or exterminate other people. In “The Devils” Russell analyzes the psychology of religious fanaticism when belief in god provides a megalomaniacal support for intolerance of and hate for human flesh and nature and creates a spiritual alibi for crimes against life.

In “Salome’s Last Dance” (1988) Russell traces the psychological configurations of the position of control and manipulation inside personal love (quite widespread anthropological phenomenon). The desire for power over another human being can insidiously impregnate the very desire for love and waits for the right moment to sting through the decorative laces of eroticism. The director uses historical analogies to create a portrait of possessive and sadistic love between two persons.

“Women in Love” by Ken Russell
Is Gerald a domineering lover or is he, psychologically a child with desperate need to dominate?

Gerald is sexually “nursed” by Gudrun (“Women in Love”)

Rupert and Gerald – wrestling with amorous connotation (“Women in Love”)

Doesn’t Russell’s “white warm” remind us of, not really a snake but a helminthes (not so much of a parasitic warm inside human intestines but of the basement of human soul where energies of greed and predatoriness are crystallized)?

Ken Russell’s “The Devils”

”Salome’s Last Dance” by Ken Russell
Princess Salome dominates the setting according to universal logic of social hierarchy.