kagablog

Maldoror

The film should begin with a meditative, though stiff, film style.

The main character should be without a character, whose face is hidden, whose essence is unknown, eclipsed, shrouded. He is defined by geography and by his banal gestures alone.

A figure of ultimate isolation. This is the story of the desolation of a modern man. Enclosed by an industrial enviroment, he is unable to adjust to the demands of the world. Maldoror turns to the piano, to an eliptical music which he uses to write with.

This film by the way is also about the nature of writing and music, words and imagery. Lautreamont’s style was originated in sound, turned to words which were highly visual. Words must be predominant in the film therefore, they must work as a link between music and image.

Maldoror should speak seldom but when he does he should betray his poetic inside and should speak in repetitive and blunt terms. “Don’t jump around so”, “don’t make such a fuss”, or “ne fais pas de pareils bonds!”

Although highly stylized in his dress, he lives in the worst of starvation. His room, the streets, alleys and bridges he traverses are all poverty-stricken. He leaves his apartment only to go to the piano (to play with one hand and write with the other).

Slowly the mirrorlike imagery of Maldoror’s words take over the film.

The rest of the script, the “other half” which in reality is more than half of the film, is composed by the performance group Zyklus.

The concept is that Zyklus is to compose 6 scenes, which correspond to the six “songs” of which Lautreamont’s book is made of. All of these six scenes should be acted out by the same four members of Zyklus - in each “song” every actor should play another “character”, but the constant return of the same actors should provide a sort of dream-continuity.

The dream-songs should vary in length from anywhere between 30 seconds to twenty minutes.
The dreams should be punctuated by Maldorors’s relation to two elements. The first being his barren mechanical enviroment, and the second being the supremity of the ocean.

Maldoror

Synopsis of film project “Les Chants de Maldoror”

-This film should retain an enigmatic non-identification with its central figure.

- If the film often reflects a simplicity of images in its brightest light, then in its shadows it should conceal a sinister Lacanian discourse. The film should contain references to the one hundred years of influence that the book has caused: Artaud-Crevelian (surrealist); Debordian (situationist)); and Deleuze-Guattarian (anti-Oedipalist).

- It should enter into the argument between nature and style, those two positions which, seemingly, cannot be mixed without catastrophe. But at what point does this disaster begin and why? Is catastrophe a necessary evil of poetry?

- In the background Nietzsche’s observation:
A tremendous quantity of freedom must have
been expelled from the world, or at least from
the visual world, and made as it were latent
under their hammer blows and artists’
violence.
The Geneology of Morals

- The re-analysis of the Oedipus complex, of the “terrible family” (and the infanticide it produces) which is crucial to Lautreamont’s book and which can be re-seen in the light of post-Freudian speculation.

- The so-called “dream” sequences should not be without influence from Artaud’s essay “cinema and reality”.

- It is a project of remembrance. In these days of innovation the past remains un-illuminated in the public scope. This project is an attempt to return to the roots of European ethnocism and to rework this critical source from a contemporary perspective.

- A clear distinction between a public reality and a subjective dream, which slowly takes over, and therefore the material and the spiritual retreat their boundaries and resonate (collapse their positions).

- The dream-songs should be composed of pathological imagery symbolic research and stylistic subversion. (A poetry which not based upon exposing one’s wounds, but which is bent on wounding its public. A brutal poetry.)

- The book was written at the time of attempts to “elevate the public sphere” (the Paris Commune, etc). It should deal with that problematic, of the injection of the private into the public. A central theme indeed should be about the roots of scoialization and the birth of consumerism.

- The book was innovative in the introduction of machinery into the poetic field. It was an important strategy during the industrialization of the period, likewise it is a necessary reflection as we now exit the industrial era.

Acéphale 29/1/94