The Community of Culture

La Soledad, Carlos Saenz de Tejada

When we speak of "culture", we are often referring to a sort of status quo, the condition of education, technology, science, and the arts that we experience in our daily lives. We often refer to "culture" as if it is something without agency, something "out there", without considering our own participation in its formation. It may be for this very reason that we often fail to challenge our own actions, our own way of life, our stock viewpoints -- we see culture as an accumulation of practices and values that may be verbally dispensed and objectively discussed, but which have little interrelation with the manner in which we order our existence. 

Notwithstanding, the word "culture" carries certain connotations. We make judgements about culture because it may contain positive or negative elements. It may be a "culture of death", which is an oxymoron for, according to the frighteningly powerful Google machine, our usage of "culture" derives from

• Middle English (denoting a cultivated piece of land): the noun from French culture or directly from Latin cultura ‘growing, cultivation’; the verb from obsolete French culturer or medieval Latin culturare, both based on Latin colere ‘tend, cultivate’ (see cultivate). In late Middle English the sense was ‘cultivation of the soil’ and from this (early 16th cent.) arose ‘cultivation (of the mind, faculties, or manners)’; sense 1 of the noun dates from the early 19th cent.

Hence, we comment upon practices that are retrogressive for culture, that facilitate the accession of the inhumane, the violent, the brutish, the ignorant. (Recently, Brett McCracken commented upon the attitude in American culture (another oxymoron? not always) of "fame for fame's sake" and the prostitution of art for recognition of the ego (e.g. Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, etc.).)

If we make assertions of value in reference to culture, then we recognize that humanity is responsible for culture, and thence that we are individually responsible, for our part, for the state of culture. We recognize, too, that "culture" is not merely a label for what is, but a concept defined by continual movement toward excellence in all things human (e.g. education, technology, science, the arts).

Matthew Arnold, the 19th century British critic, describes culture as "the pursuit of light and perfection", and explains that "light and perfection consist, not in resting and being, but in growing and becoming, in a perpetual advance in beauty and wisdom" (Culture and Anarchy).

Immediately great names come to mind: Plato, Homer, Virgil, Dante -- the list goes on. The list goes on indeed ... but why do these cultural monoliths stand so solitary against the dark background of history? Why does not a great host of luminous figures swarm around them, equal or greater to the tide of human depravity and squalor?

The modern world is not devoid of cultured minds: Karol Wojtyla, Walker Percy, Arvo Part, Krzysztof Kieslowski. Yet they stand in almost diametric opposition to the crass flashing of famous names in headlines and on the little black boxes of misinformation that constantly invade our homes. Their names are not heard so loudly nor so very often as those which strive harder and harder not to be forgotten like  the finite novelty of autumnal leaves.

Perhaps because they are taproots, hidden and essential. One must dig to find them, and one must get dirty. And one must not leave the soil disturbed.

Why is the community of culture small? The community of culture is the community of the human. The human calls these facets of himself "culture" in order to distinguish them from the spoiling diction of faddism that pervades postmodern society. The human must constantly distinguish himself from that which fades. The human does not fade.

You often hear older people, when they mention the names of actors, films, musicians that no one else knows remarking upon how this particular knowledge dates them, how it is a sign of aging, a movement toward obscurity, disconnection from youth. But the youth are equally old if they speak of what their parents do not know or do not care to know.

The old betray their youth by not caring about Kardashian or whoever's next on the altar of sensationalism. The youth betray their age by caring. To be human is to learn and cling to excellence. That is a perpetual youth, a perpetual becoming, an ever-widening beauty.

And so our culture may be called a "culture of death" in many ways, one being that it clings not to the excellent, which is universal and enduring, but to the ephemeral, which is just that.

If you find yourself lonely in such a milieu, consider this.

Are you infatuated with the esoteric (pride)? Do you wrap yourself in fantasy to deny reality (e.g. the infamous MMORPG, niched obsessions, etc.)? Do you choose to be? Or are you lonely because the way of enculturation is difficult -- the road obscure, the company often silent, the goal something as seemingly unattainable as sainthood?

It is not merely the place of cultural icons to effect culture. It is the way of culture -- the way of the human -- to come out and speak, to stand one's ground among others and assert whatever merited authority one may possess. To share and to accept, certainly, but to be firm in the right.

At the base of the mountain is the battle against physical endangerment, which allows no possibility for culture. The battle against the enemies of culture (e.g. sloth, sentimentalism, political platforming, etc.) ranges in a thicker wood at a higher tier. It is even more essential to the becoming of humanity. Undoubtedly, it is a gift to be here. But it is a curse if we fail our nature and submit to the mediocre strummings, cooings, and ooings of pop folk or the abstract unartistic assertions of obscurantist "postmodern" writers or directors. They wrap the status quo in mysterious trappings and bring despair in the unveiling. Artist's shit (Cf. Duchamp).

There is always a subculture trying to be avant-garde. It is always subculture.

So let your heart be abused. Seek the shifting sifted community of culture that wants to be as best it can. People of culture see the world in its wholeness. They decry and forgive and bring in lost sheep. They acknowledge their own silly sheepishness. But they never stop striving after every ounce of unounceable eternity. They are sometimes artists, sometimes laymen, sometimes clergy, and often on low salaries. But they always try to get the world to listen with the lovingest things. At the same time, they do not reduce truth, beauty, goodness. They do not put pearls forth to be trampled by swine.

Critics called director Eric Rohmer's La Collectioneuse boring. They could not see it.

I therefore encourage you, my friends, not to forget the unity of all things, and how what is separate must be brought together, how the world fights itself but nevertheless tends to communion. To wait is not so bad as to despair and lose oneself to postmodern animalism. Do not fall to easy emotions. Be vigilant. If it were easy it would not be itself. Increase in the virtue of finding loneliness -- beauty awaits the contemplative and forbearing mind. Find and give the lovingest things. You may die cold, quiet, and alone like God.

II. Trois Couleurs: Rouge

Valentine, played by Irene Jacob, is beautiful, vivacious, passionate, assertive. We want to sympathize with her. Her personality is sweetened by a certain scent of innocence that causes us to desire identification with her, to simultaneously fall in love with her.

Indeed, her supreme beauty is central to this part of Kieslowski's trilogy.

A very important moment arrives, however, in the studio where she is photographed as a model. We see her sitting there, artificial wind blowing her wet hair about her face. And at the word from the photographer -- "triste" -- her beauty is transformed by an unutterable sorrow.

Although Valentine has suffered -- her brother a heroin addict, her mother an unforgiven adulteress -- we are given the sense that she has called forth this emotion from outside -- it is borrowed, learned, used for theatrics, but perhaps without completely genuine content.

And in rushes forcefully another theme of the film: external, supernatural movements that intimately interact with the willed movements of the film's characters. An overarching wellspring of meaning and purpose -- a silent smiling whisper in which Valentine, Auguste, and the old judge participate without creating.

We humans can name sorrow, joy, fear, but we cannot know them in their full intensity at any given moment. We can, however, experience little hints of that memory of humanity, what some call the historical memory or collective memory. In my mind, this refers to God, who after all is one of us in a way none of us can be. He is more human than we are, and he is the origin of every sense. Because of this, I think, we have access to feelings that are not our own, access to at least an awareness of the depth of human feeling, desire -- due to our necessary and constant connection with him: complete dependence, our drawing of life from him. We draw everything from him.

Such a beauty illustrated in this film. The old judge reflects upon his life, his decline in sourness and cynicism grown from an experience of betrayal. And who grants him knowledge of this?

As a voyeur, he seeks knowledge to which he has no right. But none of it grants him any insight into his own condition. It is precisely through knowledge gratis that he is able to understand himself, and to love once more.

The beauty and love of the hint. God is a life-hack. I beseech you to give yourself to these films. God love you.

Irene Jacob on Rouge and Kieslowski:

I. Trois Couleurs: Bleu

Krzysztof Kieslowski

For quite a long while, I have been putting off these posts on Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy. Perhaps this is because they are so dear to me that I hesitate to touch them lest their significance be lost in too ponderous and compact a thought.

Regardless, I have made my disclaimer, and so refuse to accept any blame for the comments that follow. They are meant as a guide, or a jump-start, to contemplation of what must be privileged the name of masterworks.

It is held that these films are themed according to the values of the French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité. And while said values are expressed in these films far better and in far purer a manner than was within the capability of those revolutionaries, themes of human sorrow, love, loneliness, regretted revenge, and great joy are also compellingly portrayed in Kieslowski's characters. As Kieslowski himself stated, "The words [liberté, egalité, fraternité] are French because the money is French. If the money had been of a different nationality we would have titled the films differently, or they might have had a different cultural connotation. But the films would probably have been the same." (Wikipedia)

Just as there may be found the themes mentioned above, there may also be found the traditional elements that make a story in film: plot continuity, character development, appropriate setting and costume.

Yes, there is a story in Bleu. It is the potent tragedy of a female musical genius who loses both the husband she made famous and her young, innocent daughter in an automobile accident.

However, just as the capricious human element forces the film to transcend its presumed themes, the dynamics of music and color accentuate those archetypal human compulsions so that the film transcends a particular plot, a particular character -- while yet retaining the indispensable characteristics of particularity. We are conscious, ever, that we are watchers, that even Julie is a watcher, a voyeur, of her own daily life, a tableau of the cosmic fable of which she too is a part -- the giant, the miniscule at times overwhelming each other, but always interpenetrating.

Bleu is a display of this participation. We are meant to understand that the score is composed by Julie herself. And yet the score plays throughout the film, as if pre-existent, ever-present. It is outside and inside. It is also outside and inside of Julie's ownership. There is a man who plays the recorder in the streets of Paris; he plays her music -- or they play a common music. She asks him how he knows it: "I like to play. I make up lots of things."

Moreover, the cosmic purview of the music -- or the great silence to which it gives birth -- enhances the intensity of every particular emotion, every personal encounter, every knock on the door at night. Even Julie seems aware of its rare effect, and appears at once detached and submerged in the flights and plunges of agonized self-isolation, passionate self-destruction. She seems intuitively aware of the spiritual significance of suffering, in a fashion -- at least aware that it is leading onward to something, and this is why she does not complete her attempted suicide.

Onward and onward to the purge of loss, a heart speared and quivering. And strangely finds peace in the knowledge of her husbands affair.

She is not so indebted, not so deeply bound by ties of identity. The relationship between husband and wife is revealed to be less than she had perceived -- and so she is more of the heroic composer of great music than she had created in her husband -- he detached with the lover, he only a face, a name, she the reality.

In the beginning, after her release from the hospital, she seeks out a colleague who keeps the record of her music, and destroys the only known copy, but in a strange foreshadowing, the music continues.

By chance, Julie catches a glimpse of television, where her husband's colleague (Olivier, who is and has been in love with her) is being interviewed concerning his attempt to finish the incomplete composition. (Another copy has been kept -- "one cannot destroy something so beautiful.")

After the interview, photographs are displayed on the screen of her husband (Patrice) and his lover, of whom she had theretofore been ignorant. In this strange moment of ... grace, if you will, both she and her music are freed in some way -- she from a portion of grief, the music from its limbo of spousal ties beyond the grave. The old is not lost, but a new life can begin -- Julie awakens to a frustration with Olivier for presuming to attempt the fulfillment of so great a work of art freighted with such personal memory. She sets out to stop him, but instead hears him out.

She helps him to understand the beauty, the strain. A new thing is formed. What is broken is renewed, and the human story is woven with a new complexity, hence a new beauty.

"I may speak with every tongue that men and angels use; yet, if I lack charity ..."

I simply insist that you hear the soundtrack. You will live ... better. ... I certainly have. The film is part of the ostentatious Criterion Collection, and therefore may be found on hulu. Alternatively,

:)

Enjoy. Tell me about it.

Krzysztof Kieślowski: Polish Filmmaker

Recommended

This post will serve as the introduction to a series on Krzysztof Kieślowski, a Polish filmmaker widely unknown in America, who directed many films of great intuition and artistry from 1989 to 1994. 

A master of the contemplative moments of life, he captured complex emotion with the aid of powerful sound scores by the Polish composer, Zbigniew Preisner, with whom he worked closely on some of his greatest pictures, such as the Trois Couleurs trilogy and La Double Vie de Véronique. 

Noticeable characteristics of his cinematographic style include long shots of characters making their paths through the streets, sequences devoid of dialogue with movement seemingly directed by the almost constant musical accompaniment, and a conscious use of color tones to achieve diverse moods.

Singularly masterful in comparison to most contemporary filmmakers, Kieślowski's ability to convey the human condition as beautiful, mournful, solemn, and sublime dwarfs the standards of Hollywood that attempt to simplify human experience to a few immobile sentiments, reactions, needs. Kieślowski's characters cannot be pinned down. They seem to be the best representations of the fallen human self, free from assumptions and surmise. They have infinite potential, and no trite, quick conclusion is employed to flatten them. They remain real.

We may be blessed with one lonely hermit of the same breed, and of course I mean Terrence Malick, who has also applied the compositions of Preisner -- as well as John Tavener (d. 2013) -- to his work.

Enjoy the trailers. Dive into the human story and the fragrant bath of life. More to come.