UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 10

After a fairly nondescript couple of days (hence they have not been described in these pages) of hammering away at the script and malingering around our Bourges digs recovering from Monday night's accident, Thursday begins with a little light leg treatment before we join Robin-Tyrek in the Bandits-Mages van for a trip to the shops.

Niemczyk changes my dressing.

We try to upcycle and recycle as much as possible at Universal Ear Studios, partly out of the belief that it makes little sense to ransack the planet in the name of modulating the soul, but mostly out of adherence to the quasi-mythical cineaste and TVaste Francis Dove's aesthetic school of 'clunkyism'. Of course, we need some things to stick these old bits of junk (and cardboard) together, so we start at Brico Dépôt for masking tape and paint brushes. On the way out, we are shocked to see La Dépôt stocks a range of doors that are both named and styled after the fourteen members of arch-villain Being's girl gang in one of the many unfound UNIVERSAL EAR spin-off series. It's surely a work we should look at in closer detail in the near future.

Who would you cast in each of these roles?

Honing Robin-Tyrek's cardboard-sensing capabilities.

Outside, however, the sky mocks our efforts with row upon row of perfect cartoon clouds and a pink castle that's clearly been made with the cardboard from a giant toilet roll. It is surely time for a classic French 2-hour dejeuner.

We lunch on gourmet fast-food burgers and dreadful coffee amongst the concrete gardens of Bourge's inhuman industrial suburb (which we should actually make a point of boycotting since it's killing the city). Robin-Tyrek fills in some gaps in my knowledge of the local history, particularly the subcategories of fire and pastry, and suggests that the 'ass' of the cathedral that was pointed out to us the other day is just one of many profane flourishes to be found around the building, reasoning that the cathedral took so long to build that the workers just got bored and started freestyling. Now that's what I call heritage!

Next we make the journey to an Emmaüs du Cher outlet packed with dusty, half-broken, once-beautiful things-de-house, from tasteless oversized and completely desirable furnitures to stinking books and haunted ornaments. The counter-intuitive, hand-crafted, and in many cases vernacular nature of these objects is a testament in miniature to a time before the helicopters came to drop Brico Dépôt-sized architectural onesies packed with affordable, car boot-friendly goods across the west's under-exploited sub-suburbs. As we prepare to leap into a project that can't help but highlight the absurdity of the things we label and treat as heritage objects and locations, it sort of makes one want to scrape the filth off those wretched, beautiful former possessions of wretched, beautiful former people and reanimate the DNA in a corrugated-iron warehouse theme park of the bad taste and good times of the city's countless golden ages.

I can't wait for this band to come on.

Dove, Francis

An entry in the Glossary project

When, on the advice of his soon-to-be collaborator Harley Byrne, the TV director Francis Dove had his wife permanently committed to an amnesiacs’ hospice, it was Dove who was left with the memories. In his attempts to monumentalise them, he chipped, sanded and warped these memories into the clunky, quite explicitly falsified stage sets of his own personal history; watched helplessly as the scenes that he replayed again and again in his mind became smooth-edged mythologies, lore without nuance.

Dove’s work began to take on the same clunky, mechanical nature: in over-defining the respective elements of his screen works, he was being sarcastic about certainty. This approach found an appropriate outlet in his cinematic serialisation of Byrne’s music-hunting memoirs, UNIVERSAL EAR. As with the compression and digital archiving of music, Dove sought to reduce, simplify and vacuum-pack the various physical and sonic aspects that the EAR scripts detailed. Yet these elements, although coldly configured in mutual isolation, were selected for their tactile, flawed, organic nature. It is this disparity between the cleanness of their juxtaposition and the imperfection of their individual states that Dove used to humanise the scientific, to devalue the authority of human logic and to dismiss - or ridicule - any definitive reading of the text.

Dove stated that his simplified caricatures of Byrne’s real-life experiences were the most complete picture that it was ethical to provide, however far that may have wandered from any ideal of naturalism: that the real movie did not occur on the screen, but in the eyes, ears and brains of the audience, where it would crystallize as a new memory before crumbling away into the recesses of the mind.

See also: Undepth In Real People And Those Who Believe They're Real

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry

Implicit, The

An entry in the Glossary project

In its redestructivish sense, the Implicit is the inverse of Visual Matter or, to put it another way, the essence that fills the holes in the mise-en-scene.

Nanneman stated that although the Implicit was intangible and existed only as an unambiguous natural force that would come into being between any two or more of his components once activated, there would still be a small fee applicable for its use. Hanni took to referring to this fee as a "subtext tax", although Nanneman discouraged her use of this term as it just confused things. The Implicit was an aesthetic side-effect which, whilst unavoidable, could hardly be considered vital to any movie, while the subtext was an essential structural tool which Nanneman suggested had been, since the birth of cinema, "screenwriting’s dark little secret".

For Francis Dove, Nanneman's idea of the Implicit was too weighted and specific. The gaps between screen presences were "less, even, than essence". While visual matter could be used to contextualise (not define) the nothingness that it framed, that was not the same as making this nothingness something itself. From this perspective, Dove's use of ostentatiously artificial sets, props and performances as a moving architecture of absence can be considered an acknowledgement of the futility of artistic pursuit against the dumb mystery of the universe. His contemporaries alternately labelled Dove’s work as "clunkyist" or "nothingist" depending on the part of the screen to which they were referring: he might more accurately have been described as a nothingist wrapped up in a clunkyist (as a filmmaker) or vice versa (in his day-to-day life).

Dove’s creative partner Harley Byrne, who had enormous respect for Nanneman as a thinker (but not as a man), countered that "just because the unknowable isn’t defined, doesn’t mean we’re unsure what it is," though it is possible that Dove wasn’t listening.

Previous Entry - Glossary Index - Next Entry