The Club Anhedonism

Anhedonia was famously the original title for Annie Hall, but it was thrown out because the word was deemed too esoteric for audiences (“Woody Allen Fights Anhedonia," NYT, 4/20/77). It's  strange since anhedonia's really an easy word to parse out with “an” being the not and “hedonia” referring to pleasure. Putting the two syllables together you get the inability to experience pleasure. Narcissism and anhedonia share some qualities, in that they can both be defensive postures which eschew the dependence on the outside world. Anhedonics may feel powerful to the extent that they don’t need or desire anyone or anything. Anhedonia frees you from vulnerability. It’s a perverse version of the Buddhist mantra “desire is but the beginning of suffering.” Those who go to silent retreats in Zen monasteries choose abstinence while the anhedonic ostensibly has psychological problems which make it difficult for him or her to enjoy the senses. In this regard anhedonia is a sister or brother ailment to depression, since its function, which is to some extent protective, has, at the same time, unpleasant consequences. But if Woody Allen wanted to call Annie Hall, a mild essay on cosmopolitan/melting pot neurosis, Anhedonia, what would be alternative titles for say the films in Bergman’s famous trilogy Winter Light, Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence. Pleasure is not only compromised, but absent in these filmic essays on the absence of God. There's a club Hedonism II in Negril, where anything goes. But where would the club Anhedonism be situated? On The Gulag Archipelego?

I Think, Therefore I Am. Sam-I-Am

“Aujourd’hui, Maman est morte. Ou peut-etre hier, je ne sais pas...” is the first line of The Stranger. The Albert Camus classic replaced the Gideon bible for defiant baby boomers. But these lines “The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we stayed in the house. All that cold, cold wet day,” from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat were to be found in the nurseries of these self-same baby boomers, along with other volumes like Green Eggs and Ham. “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am,” is one of the lines from that cherished volume. Dr. Seuss of course was noted for his imaginative children’s books. After all, a cat in the hat is what emerges from an otherwise boring afternoon. But his settings definitely set the stage for the existential crises faced by the generation that read them. The streets that Camus’ anti-hero Meursault walks are hot rather than cold, but they partake of the same dread that Dr. Seuss is dealing with on the cold, cold day described in The Cat in the Hat. Notice Dr. Seuss aka Theodor Seuss Geisel uses cold twice. It’s not just a cold day. It’s a cold, cold day, in which man is separated from God, the kind of day you find in the Bergman trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence. And doesn’t Seuss’s “I am Sam. Sam I am,” sound curiously like Descartes’s famed cogito ergo sum. It even rhymes. Sam I am. I think therefore I am.  

L’avventura at Film Forum

A newly restored print of L’avventura is playing at Film Forum and there are problems with it. To begin with, you can barely read the subtitles. But "let’s go to the video tape" as Warner Wolf used to say and revisit some of the themes of this seminal work. In a key sequence at the beginning of the film Anna (Lea Massari), the girl who iconically disappears, tells Sandro, her lover, “When someone is there facing you, that’s all you get.” She’s in despair when they are apart for a month at a time, but she prefers separation’s imaginative possibilities. It’s the territory of Kierkegaard’s Diary of the Seducer and Sartre’s La Nausee with a touch of Bovaryism thrown in. But then Antonioni turns off the current. There’s nothing like an unexplained disappearance to pull the rug out from under mankind. In fact, the Ur disappearing act is the absence of God. Here we have the Southern hemispheric version of Bergman’s The Silence. As Sandro (Gabrielle Ferzetti), Claudia (Monica Vitti) and the others on their boat search the island, Antonioni begins his exploration of distance and scale. The theme of painting runs through the movie. There’s an early cut between Anna and Sandro and a group of American tourists discussing painting, then in a later scene where Claudia is being stalked by men in a piazza she runs into a paint store and asks for a can of blue and there’s the wonderful scene where Sandro intentionally lets his pendant knock over the ink well of a young artist attempting to capture the ornate arch of a church. Antonioni famously said to Rothko, “your paintings are like my films. They are about nothing...with precision,’ The early scene with the figures crawling across the rock strewn island and then the classic urban scenes culminating in the de Chirico like image of Claudia running frantically down the hotel hallway in search of Sandro, who has fallen into the arms of an American prostitute named Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Poliolo), are all the visualization of the notion of closing the gap, the exists between men and more specifically between man and the enormity of things. It’s not love or even really lust, but some primal fear that brings the figures in Antonioni’s landscape together. When Sandro is caught in flagrante by Claudia, Gloria asks for “un piccolo ricordo,” a small souvenir or memory. Sandro throws some money between her legs as he chases Claudia to the film’s famous climactic or anti-climactic scene. But the lovely words linger with you. Yes, Gloria is a whore, but even she wants to be remembered.