Parasite

Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man.

The underdog has retreated underground

The gradual tension

Water rising and flooding everything, washing everything and everyone away

Like anger suddenly unleashed.

Destructive and relentless.

A sense of place, the use of space as character:

The apartment

Stairways and trapdoors

The cellar.

The exploration of the dark recesses of the mind

The descent into Madness, the vaults of the human psyche.

People going up and down the stairs

Missing each other or bumping into each other.

Lines sketching different courses of action of actions

Frames within frames.

Patterns emerge, colors clash, emotions collide.

The intrusion of the supernatural

The stone: the parasite?

Or is the parasite the rich man who lives off the back of the poor?

The pervasive sense of threat

The smell you cannot wash off: the place where you belong and where you are brought back too relentlessly and cruelly.

The poor who are constantly thrown back into their reality

The poor who are seen and treated as garbage.

The uncanny child’s gaze and gift of intuition

His ability to decipher the invisible present

His own trauma

The former maid: “I have forgotten something in the cellar”….

Something, someone.

Living on the edge, living on the border.

The political dissident that has to hide.

All those who have to go into hiding.

Resentment and bitterness

And the sudden eruption of violence.

The gesture of contempt that triggers the rage

People and things turn around

And the current balance is thrown off-balance.

The party turns bloody

The tomahawk that was supposed to be used for fun is now used for real!

The dogs feed off the meat on the spike that has been used as a weapon.

The laughter at the end: as a result of the trauma/the concussion?

Laughing in the face of terror and horror?

The Fool’s laughter? Erasmus and In Praise of Folly?

The revenge of the helpless against the powerful?

The open-ended finale: “I have a plan”

The sense of a warning issued somewhere, sometime.

JOKER

The grotesque behind the farcical mask.

The freak turned wise expresses the ills of society:

Erasmus and his In Praise of Folly, again?

The Fool denounces the hypocrisy of the Court

While negotiating urban violence and other emotional jungles.

And his own existential fall and mental collapse.

The De Niro character is on the other side of the fence of law and order,

Yet the Travis of Taxi Driver is conjured up:

His gaze and dreams

And the theme of vigilante violence.

The play with the guns, rehearsing an act of violence,

And performing it relentlessly, without a break.

The image of urban warfare,

And collective madness as an expression of fear and anger.

The subway scene and the overall sense of danger and threat,

NYC as the new Frontier.

Nothing can protect you: the shooting of Wayne and his wife in a dark alley.

The gradual sense of being ostracized and estranged.

A growing sense of resentment and bitterness as a result of being treated unfairly.

The slow descent into something that cannot be named.

The scene at the gate: who is behind bars?

The real intention behind the farce.

Keeping a happy face through it all: HAPPY!

When the buffoon confesses his crime, he is not taken seriously.

To the psychiatrist he issues a warning: “You do not listen”…

Another bloody act to make his point.

What does it take for people to hear the punch line?

Marie Lienard-Yeterian

Un récit suspendu, étiré, sur plusieurs générations. Celles de ses spectateurs. Celles de ses acteurs. Ce qu’on pourrait voir comme un mythe. Une histoire qu’on a suivi autant qu’elle a suivi l’histoire de la second moitié du XXième siècle, un compagnon de route pour un temps d’abondance, d’apaisement et d’espoir.

Il est donc question d’espoir, encore, toujours, et de temps. Et de comment voyage l’espoir à travers le temps. Il est question d’un récit, dont on a suivi les méandres pour remonter à ses sources, puisqu’il y avait un début, un avant, et dont on attendait l’aboutissement, puisqu’il devait y avoir une fin.

Comment conclure? Que faire d’un tel monument, si cher au cœur de celles et ceux dont il a accompagné les rêves? Que faire de ce fantôme qui refuse de mourir mais dont les artifices sont devenus bien trop évidents, bien trop visibles? Que faire de ces marionnettes et de ces maquettes immenses, abandonnées dans une galaxie lointaine? Quel temps peut bien digérer ce paradoxe d’un monde désuet et pourtant nécessaire?

Parler d’espoir ; on a en toujours parlé. Toujours compter sur un coup de chance, sur une faille impossible, dans les situations les plus désespérées. Trouver la fracture, monter un plan, le voir échouer, improviser, espérer et triompher. Ce sont les valeurs simples que Star Wars tisse à travers trois trilogies et quarante-deux années. C’est l’héritage et le message que nous transmet ce long récit, au moment de se conclure.

The Rise of Skywalker sera, pour toute la génération de la première et de la seconde trilogie, le dernier Star Wars. C’est la chambre des jouets sur laquelle on jette un dernier regard avant de refermer la porte. Comment conclure, sans basculer dans le clin d’œil mélancolique ou la répétition? Comment boucler la boucle? En la faisant boucler, dans l’idéal d’un temps qui a subitement perdu sa linéarité, qui s’est arrêté pour faire des trois trilogies un cycle noué par une cohérence nouvelle.

Et Star Wars de devenir ce qu’il était déjà devenu: l’histoire d’un temps suspendu, où les morts ne meurent plus, où les générations se confrontent, où les ennemis perdurent, où l’histoire bégaie, mais où l’espoir perdure à l’infini.

Un dernier regard, pour se dire que tout a toujours été là, et restera là où cela doit être. Maintenant c’est passé. Le temps est réconcilié, il peut repartir, laissant derrière lui ses héros et ses batailles. En nous transmettant l’espoir.

Je referme la porte, et je descends à pas silencieux le grand escalier qui grince.

STAR WARS, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER : SHAKESPEARE REDUX

Two heroes:

One reclaiming his family, and going home after all.

One rejecting her ancestors, and finding a new home after all.

Ghosts and apparitions.

The intrusion of the supernatural instead of just the magic of science fiction.

The space opera takes a Shakespearean turn:

The visit of a Hamlet-like father claiming the son back, away from the dark side;

The mother conjuring up Ben out of Kylo Ren.

The ingredients of tragedy:

Conflicts and dilemmas, hesitations and choices, murders and sacrifices.

Human passions at war with themselves

Courage and fear, forgiveness and resentment, anger and peace.

A departure from the technological and robotic galore.

An episode clearly refocusing on what makes the human story an epic one: Journeys undertaken to articulate an identity for yourself even if it means rejecting your original bloodline,

Or to uphold your name (some viewers might remember John Proctor in The Crucible)

Or to claim one.

Against all odds, and expectations,

Reverse the course of destiny,

And turn flaws into strengths.  

The blood family and the family you create through loyalty and fighting for the common good.

Betrayals and intrigues conjuring up Macbeths and other Richards or Iagos of the Dark Side.

With the occasional lightness of Twelfth nights and porter scenes comic relief.

Shouts and murmurs, whispers and screams.

Hands that kill, or give life.

Rey and Kylo Ren: twins of some sort after all—a dyad in the Force.

Romeo and Juliet-like, fighting on the same side, after all,

Delivering a better world for others.

Together.

Death held at bay by Love,

An ultimate sacrifice and gift.

A life redeemed, after all.

The urgency of ethical imperatives clearly situated against the backdrop of our overall moral bankruptcy.

Enter natural elements and climatic protagonists:

Glaciers, lush forests or raging seas.

Tempests to come, and be feared.

Tiny humans strut and fret about the stage in the face of an adversity greater than what they can imagine—with or without the stars, other players that have their exits and entrances.

The proper scale of our humanity in the galaxy,

Brief candles that can be put out indeed.

And the proper measure of our greatness too: mercy, compassion and Love,

And their sound and fury

Signifying something.

Marie Lienard-Yeterian

C’est à la limite où disparaissent les arbres. Quand on s’est suffisamment élevé sur les sentiers rocailleux, sous le soleil, à l’ombre des sapins, chênes, aulnes ou autre espèce, selon le lieu, selon le climat. Un peu de vent qui agite les cimes au-dessus du regard, et après un certain temps, au détour d’un virage, derrière une roche, soudain, comme par surprise, on perce, et l’immensité se fait.

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THE SHORT STORY : A DOUBLE BILL/ REGARDS CROISÉS SUR LA NOUVELLE

Two collections of short stories :
Teasing generic conventions,
Conjuring the artistic worlds of painting and cinema into their narrative imagination.

Deux recueils de nouvelles :
Jouer avec les conventions du genre,
Convoquer l’univers de la peinture et du cinéma dans leur imaginaire narratif.

TRAJECTORY
By Richard Russo (2017)

Four short stories, four thresholds ushering uncanny guests into the house of fiction.
Four cardinal points directing us to unchartered narrative continents, Following the lead suggested in the title.

A range of characters faced with different dilemmas and crises—decisions to be made in spite of fear, resentment, or just the weight of life:
To face up to a student who plagiarizes.
To decide to accept oneself and the other, and rejoice in the feeling that the current winter will not be the last.
To reject, or accept, a brother in the midst of emotional turmoils, and existential queries.
To launch into script writing, and undertake the journey—physical and mental— between Los Angeles and New York.

Circumstances to address.
Possibilities to articulate.
Designs to sketch.
Films on the move.

The narration conjures poetic and novelistic tricks, and proposes forays—or trajectories—into alternative storytelling modalities, and unexpected modes of the imagination.

A choreography of bold yet determined gestures on the stage of narrative conventions.

And a polyphony of sort.

OMBRES ET MURMURES : QUAND LA SCÈNE DEVIENT UN MONDE
De Thomas Thérèse (2018)

Une série de courtes nouvelles en prose à vocation poétique— autant d’anachorèses créatrices, de « retirements » (à l’instar du personnage dans Le Maitre de Santiago) dans un contexte saturé d’images.

Comme les peintures de David Hockney : regarder le moment, et faire prendre conscience au lecteur de l’activité de regarder.

Une invitation double : voir et re-voir.

Une dimension méta-fictionnelle réitérée par les textes consacrés au cinéma, où l’activité du spectateur est également donnée à voir.

Compléments et déclinaisons de certains thèmes à travers la récurrence des sections en alternance avec des sections uniques.

Digressions filmiques qui proposent d’autres « visions » et constituent autant de « suppléments » de l’acte de voir, à travers le détour par un autre art.

L’acte de voir et ses limites, interpellations à poursuivre pour découvrir dans l’avènement du texte suivant un prochain point de vue. Pointillisme à la Seurat.

Le retour de certains titres—comme l’on peut parler du retour des personnages pour les romans balzaciens et faulknériens, par exemple—rythme cette invitation.

La ponctuation et la mise en page ébauchent autant de convocations à voir la page comme espace de mise en regard—espace de jeu avec les images et les mots. Et avec notre curiosité.

Telle la couverture et son blanc à remplir, écrire, ou peindre. A habiter.

Marie Liénard-Yeterian

TAKING A WALK THROUGH DIFFERENT LANDSCAPES
DAY 7

From Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God:
“The deep orange-gold of the sun is pure nostalgia. An antique radiance already sheds itself upon this beautiful life we share. I grow heavy, rooted in my lawn chair. Everything I say and everything my parents say, the drift of friends, the tang of lemonade, the wine on their tongues, the cries of sleepy birds and the squirrels launching themselves…all of this is terminal. There will never be another August on earth, not like this one”

Blessed gifts of time:

Flow, change and mortality
An active physical and mental engagement with the world
A readiness to respond to circumstance
The awe and wonder of the child’s gaze indeed.

Walking in the rain, singing.
A glistening sidewalk. Rain dropping wetness and discomfort. An empty space. Walking and singing, non plussed by the storm, enjoying a newly-gained sense of freedom and the cleared-up space. Feeling of joy, like a child at play in the newly discovered snow. Seeing the place as familiar and yet experiencing it for the first time. Its texture, its surface, its urban beauty. Without the crowd, moveable or not. But with the feast.

Many years later, on the Brittany coast
Beautiful sunset. Generous nature.
The sky, the sea. A giant tea party in red.
Scuttling of the clouds. Scudding across the distance.
Scribbling on the beach. Tiny birds scurrying the surface of the sand. Calling out
To retrieve what was written and has been lost
To the tide coming in, to the occasional longer wave, to human erasure.
Every second bringing change
Experiential and empirical.
The urgency of time.

Drinking the instant like water.
Clinging to every moment:

Existe et meurs avant de mourir

« Lorsque les dieux faisaient l’homme, ils étaient de corvée et besognaient: considérable était leur besogne, leur corvée lourde, infini leur labeur. Car les grands Anunnaku aux Igigu, imposaient une corvée septuple! Leur père à tous, Anu, était leur roi; Enlil-le preux, leur souverain; Ninurta, leur préfet, et Ennugi, leur contremaître. Tombés d’accord, les grands-dieux avaient tiré au sort leurs lots: Anu était monté au ciel; Enlil aviat pris la terre pour domaine, et le verrou qui barricade la mer avait été remis à Enki-le-prince. »

Poème D’Atrahasis, ou Poème du Supersage, vraisemblablement XVIIIème siècle avant J.C., trad Jean Bottéro in Lorsque les dieux faisaient l’homme, mythologie mésopotamienne, J. Bottéro, S.N. Kramer, Gallimard

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TAKING A WALK THROUGH DIFFERENT LANDSCAPES
DAY 5

Andrew Motion reviewing Andy Goldsworthy’s works in a piece titled “The Pencil of Nature” (The New York Review of Books Feb. 8, 2018, p. 17-18):

“They are also works that impressively extend the expression of themes that have obsessed Goldsworthy from the beginning of his career. At the same time they let us hear the silence produced by the deadlocked confrontation of equally weighed and weighed opposites, they allow the earth to have its say. Not just by giving close attention small and insignificant-seeming things such as thorns and leaves and nettles and petals, but by embracing the fact of their own transience while also reminding us that everything in nature involves a past and future, as well as the present in which we regard it”.

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VOYAGE A TRAVERS LES PAYSAGES
JOUR 4

« In the new order, there was not so much space left for the Guugu Yimithirr. The farmers resented their burning of grass and chasing the cattle away from the waterholes, so the police were employed to remove the natives form the settler’s land. The Aborigenes reacted with a certain degree of antagonism, and this in turn provoked the settlers to a policy of extermination. Less than a year after Cooktown was founded, the Cooktown Herald explaines in an editorial that ‘when savages are pitted against civlisation, they must go to the wall; it is absolutely necessity for such a state of things, it is absolutely necessary, in order that the onward march of civilisation may not be arrested by the antagonism of the aborigenes’. The threats were not empty, for the ideology was carried out through a policy of ‘dispersion’, shich meant shooting aboriginal camps out of existence. »

Guy Deutscher, Through The Language Glass

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TAKING A WALK THROUGH DIFFERENT LANDSCAPES
DAY 3

For H.P. Lovecraft, the weird conveys « a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim. »

Uncanny whirls and winds
Snatching our lives with the roofs over our heads.
Estranging sounds and screams
Piercing the comfort of our sleep.
Trees collapsing and branches breaking
Cluttering the space of our dreams and horizons.
Uninvited guests to the table of our feasts.
Black wings beating ceaselessly on our thresholds
Weirdness paired up with the sublime
Awe-inspiring vistas
Turned into predatory shapes.
Rim of the universe
And other unfathomable borders.
Frontiers to be imagined.