En attendant Godot

Waiting is literally a pregnant activity. It is what expectant mothers do of course, but it’s something that bears fruits that are not always the anticipated end of the act itself. Common situations in which people wait are airports (where flights are frequently delayed), auto repair shops (where cars are rarely if ever ready when they’re supposed to be) and most dramatically the waiting rooms of offices where patients are often waiting for results. Those being tried for crimes have to wait for the verdict of the jury and you’ve undoubtedly seen these dramatic moments when the judge reads a guilty or innocent verdict based on a jury’s deliberations on TV. In the most dramatic instances life itself is at stake. But in everyday life, which is filled with moments which have little to do with criminal matters, the end result of waiting can be rather prosaic. Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot and lots of people mistakenly think the play is about God or answers. But Beckett wrote Godot in French and the French title, En attendant Godot, “while waiting for Godot,” throws a light on what the playwright was getting at. The play is not about waiting for anything to happen, as the theater critic Richard Gilman liked to point out. It’s about what one does while one is waiting. So the next time you find yourself waiting for a hamburger, on one of those long lines a Shake Shack, don't even entertain the notion that there is an end in sight. Once you get your food, you're simply going to scarf it down. What’s more important is what happens, the interactions, the perceptions, the conversations you might have, before you satiate your appetite.

Gravity

Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is a neo-realist epic masking as science fiction. Seeing it makes one think of Michelangelo Antonioni and the artist Giorgio di Chirico who was the inspiration for Antonioni’s work. Antonioni was one of the only other directors who could have made a movie about outer space which wasn’t science fiction (Red Desert was probably the closest he came). Gravity is literally about space and has some of the qualities of a documentary. The story, hinging as it does on the effect of space debris, is not very far flung. In addition, in most science fiction movies you usually have a big plot and lots of backstory. But this is literally about the effect space has on its two main characters Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) a research scientist and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), an astronaut. The movie is also reminiscent of Waiting For Godot to the extent that the two move in tandem like Beckett’s two characters Vladimir and Estragon, as they seek to survive. In Gravity they are literally held together by a chord. Then the little plot there is unfolds and Bullock is left on her own to seek a kind of salvation and literally rebirth. “Life in space is impossible,” is the mantra of the movie, but Gravity is also remarkably anchored in the probable. Gravity is also reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, only the psychological confinement is created not by a craft but paradoxically by space itself.

Boredom

Boredom is an unfairly maligned emotion. Inspiration, which shares some qualities of the sugar high, is what most artists claim they seek while enthrallment is what makes most readers buy books or theater tickets —either enthrallment  (Fifty Shades of Grey) or edification (How to Win Friends and Influence People). Boredom is certainly not what the potential lover seeks of his beloved. However caveat emptor, passion is like madness, a form of idealization that’s nature’s way of facilitating biological urges amidst the shoals of consciousness. Similarly, catharsis which produces enchantment and enthrallment can be delusory and manipulative, Aristotle’s Poetics notwithstanding. Boredom is less tolerated today then it was in the era of Edith Wharton and Henry James or even later in the high modernism or post-modernism of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Both the way in which James reticulated prose captured states of being and the way in which Cunningham and Cage sought to redefine the forms they employed required some degree of work on the part of their audience and the result in the case of Cage, in particular, could be intentionally boring. Today, life is moving so fast, there is no time for boredom. Posts come and go on Facebook like the women in T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “talking of Michelangelo.” How prescient Eliot was about esthetics evolving into creative gossip! But count to a hundred or maybe a thousand before you lose patience with people or artworks. When Waiting For Godot had its US premiere in Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse back in l956, with Bert Lahr as Estragon, the audience was hardly enchanted. Now Beckett’s play is part of the canon, but is it boring to watch? And what about Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, in which not very much happens, or Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin which went on for 12 hours?

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

L’Avventura is a mystery about a missing woman, but the supernumeries in what could have been a police procedural, in other hands, move to center stage under Antonioni’s direction. Similarly Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011 and whose title can’t help but reference another fairytale, Serge Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, starts off with caravan of two cars and a jeep with a rotating light, carrying amongst others, a prosecutor, a police commissar and a doctor, who are attempting to locate a corpse in the darkness. The caravan takes on an emblematic significance as it cruises through the breathtaking landscape of winding roads and fields of grass whose beauty and barren immensity are the occasion for window-like set pieces that would qualify as melodrama if they didn’t so perfectly earn the emotion they create. A hogtied corpse is eventually located by a wonderful pair of characters called simply the "diggers." Cemal, the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) sits next to one of the accused men who have been brought along to lead the police to the crime scene. Chekhov was a doctor (he once said “medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress") and Cemal is the Chekhov of the movie, offering not only an autopsy of victim, but a diagnosis of the spiritual illness of his colleagues. For instance, throughout the movie Nusret, the prosecutor (Taner Birsel) repeats the same story to Cemal, about a woman who forecasted her own death.  The seeming non-sequitur begins to make sense as we begin to see that the prosecutor aided by his bonding with Cemal, reveals he is talking about his own wife who killed herself, after giving birth to their child, as an act of vengeance for her husband’s infidelity. The prosecutor’s face is disfigured with dark blotches and then in the autopsy sequence as blood shoots up creating blotches on Cemal’s face, a metaphoric blood-tie between the two men is affirmed. During the course of the night and early morning the caravan stops in a town where they are entertained by the local mukhtar, who has an angelic daughter. The daughter transfixes the miserable party while her father makes a pitch for a state of the art morgue. Most of the young people in the town have left and they need their parents’ bodies preserved until they can fly back from places like Germany. Waiting for Godot is the English title of Beckett’s play, but in the French, in which it was originally written, the title was En attendant Godot or “while waiting for Godot.” Like Godot, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is about the life that goes on and the questions that are asked while men and women wait for the answers to both the great and small questions of human existence. Do not miss this masterpiece.

Paris Journal X: Rue Saint-Denis

The women on the Rue Saint-Denis, their faces hardened and lined as they linger in shadowy doorways, look like protestors against an injustice—in this case the obsolescence of their own profession. In Madame Rosa (1977), Moshé Mizrahi romanticized the condition of the aging prostitute, played by Simone Signoret, but the characters waiting along this destitute section of Paris, with its burned out massage parlors and X-rated sex shops, exist in a condition of waiting that precisely echoes Beckett’s En Attendant Godot. Waiting for Godot, or while waiting for Godot, which is a more apt translation of the original French, is a good description of the despair to be found on the Rue Saint-Denis. Susan Sontag directed a production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993, and one of the boarded up storefronts on the Rue Saint-Denis would actually be a perfect place for the Living Theater to stage their version of the play, with audience participation. It is only a short walk from the Rue Saint-Denis to one of Paris’s great cultural institutions, the Beaubourg, but conceptually the two worlds are light years apart, proving that in our quantum universe, in which particles can occupy disparate positions at the same time, contiguity is not a guarantee of continuity. Prostitution may be alive and well in the high priced precincts occupied by expensive call girls and politicians, but the Parisian streetwalker, one of the most venerated practitioners of the world’s oldest profession, has begun her death rattle.