Gertrud

Gertrud waves from the door. Her friend waves back. Gertrud steps back into her room and shuts the door. The camera tracks back and holds. The door to Gertrud's room remains shut. She will not see her friend again. She has told him love is everything. Gertrud is brave, but lonely and tragic in her fortitude.

How emotionally present the characters seem, how luminous. Dreyer achieves this by internalising the performances, using prolonged takes and by isolating the action, which is often staged in almost neutral settings.

The door remains shut. Gertrud is somewhere within. A simple wooden stand sits to the left of the door. A fitting prop for this austere tableau. It is simple, even archaic. We stand in a universal realm. The shot of the door is held for some time. Church bells are heard. Dreyer is making sure we understand. This scene depicts an entombment.

A tracking shot from Ozu

A tracking shot in Early Summer (Ozu): we pass down an empty corridor after Setsuko Hara has left it; then we cut to the next shot in which the camera tracks along the empty audience stalls at the play theatre (recalling the aged Uncle who sat here and witnessed a performance:- or, to put it another way: we recall the aged Uncle whose life has almost run its course; who has witnessed the full length of life's performance). This track recalls the Kenko maxim: time does not surprise us from in front, it is ever pressing from behind, hastening us toward death. [One is reminded of the graceful tracking shots in the films of Resnais: e.g. La chant de la Styrene, Last Year at Marienbad, Tout la memoire du Monde,etc. But the tracking shots of Resnais embody a more rhythmic, musical significance rather than the symbolic, existential weight present in the tracking shot in Ozu mentioned above.] There is an symbolic echo, perhaps, of this tracking shot later in the family portrait scene where the camera becomes the inexorable eye of time and history: a strange mute entity who is able only to move forward on rails or remain planted in one place and yet forces the filmmaker into subjection.

Brancusi/Serra

The rule of thirds, the golden section, is really a description of entropy, of the rise, bearing and fall of things within time.  The egg is a Platonic sphere under the condition of gravity.  Even Brancusi did not quite see it in his Newborn. This may be fallacious, but his essential forms do not always strike me as fundamental primes or ideas, but a type of highly refined caricature; a decadent, fin-de-siecle imagining of purity, but not the thing itself.   I was surprised at MOMA looking at all the early masterpieces how much I kept thinking of Art Deco as opposed to early modernism. His sculptures are still highly decorative and representational.

It takes eons to 'wash the sin' from an object: every symbol has a half-life that is longer than the memory of mankind. For a symbol is an archetype, that is, the part of a primal evolutionary instinct that is apprehensible in our consciousness. Meaning ebbs and flows from symbols, as does their usefulness. But every good artist strives to discover and work within and strengthen the current idiom.

Serra has achieved both: his work operates in a contemporary feeling and he has created forms as a result of real, hard-won knowledge. I think Richard Serra has gone further than Brancusi did, although obviously Brancusi pointed the way for a simplification and clarification of what sculptural form actually is. But Serra conducts himself at all times more like an architect, he shows a sculptor must be the same if he is to avoid decorative redundancy. One is always aware, before his works, that he is conscious of gravity, and has attempted to master it. There is this feeling of grandeur and monumentality which arises from the feeling of risk and danger, primal forces being channelled: much the same feeling one has when experiencing a bridge or a vast built structure. Emotion is present in Serra in the same way: one walks through the torqued ellipses, one senses the danger and power of his enormous steel sheets pinned to the wall by massive steel poles.

Two paintings by Magritte

1. Le Plaisir, oil on canvas (1927)

Here is an image of sex, the transgression of forms and moral codes. The shape of the girl's skull reminds one of an Alex Katz painting. It is a mask which infers the hypnotic train of pleasure. Her food are the birds, mere symbols here of the flight and freedom of desire. Pleasure is part of the painting itself. The fluidity of linseed oil, the painting of the girl's chestnut hair. What an artist misses most when they are away from the studio is the simple, tactile process of their art, mixing and brushing on paint; the swish the brush at a particular speed across the canvas, loaded with a particular mixture and volume of paint.

The girl wears a blouse whose collar is fretted lace, a garment a chorister might wear, or a hand-me-down chosen by a parent. The birds too, seem quite Presbyterian. They sit there waiting to be had as if they belonged to the all-too-easy first level of a computer game. The hoopoe in Magritte's painting is green, suggesting sickness or envy (Hoopoes are orange). Or since the painting leans toward brown tones, the green key note balances its dirge effectively. In the Persian poem, The Conference of Birds, by Farid ud-din Attar, the Hoopoe gives reply to assembly of birds who are allegories of human vanity, representing, en masse, the bondage of Selfhood.

In Persian folklore, the Hoopoe is the symbol of virtue; in the Old Testament, considered unclean. "To deter predators when nesting, mothers and chicks have glands which produce a foul smelling liquid. This sticky fluid, which smells like rotten meat, is rubbed on the plumage to keep intruders at bay. The substances can also be squirted with deadly accuracy to deter marauding cats and humans. This is no doubt why the Old Testament declared the birds to be impure, Leviticus advising that they should not be eaten and Deuteronomy that they were not kosher"

The roughness of the tree bark. The tree ridiculously flat like a tapestry design or an Egyptian wall painting. The whole painting seems to owe some of its candidness to Henri Rousseau. This naivety helps to push the picture's eroticism: it is all too casual, it hides its subversion, its sinister intent. The young woman is in ecstasy, but to fuel her pleasure, she must devour: she must play upon the register of feeling. To do any more than this, pleasure must succumb to suffering, or to love.

2. L'Assassin menace, oil on canvas, 1927

The clothes of the dead woman are nowhere to be seen. How much can be read into that white cloth that is draped over the dead woman's neck like the garrotte and the fetish that kept the assassin's hand's clean. The clean white material represents the most intimate zone of this painting; but a perverse intimacy. That the cloth remains draped over the corpse suggests that it has been intrinsic in the act of violation. The fetish itself may still be charged: the blood that has splattered from the mouth of the victim during strangulation has not fallen on the white cloth.

The assassin is a sociopath and cannot resolve the problems he encounters in society through its approved methods. The assassin finds his own outlet which postpones the problem of having to join society by passing through the solution and then abandoning it. The assassin finds it difficult to reciprocate contact and therefore searches desperately and compulsively for something that will be engaging and will offer him the release of stimulation. Disgusted or disinterested by the things he has violated in order to extract an escape from his suffering, the assassin destroys the things that have failed to offer him engagement. The assassin's fidelity to his first victim, which is himself, remains.