Colin Pantall's blog: le caillou bleu

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Monday, 24 November 2014

Grief, Gish and Three Days in Tharoul

I saw the 1927 silent classic, The Wind at the weekend. It was showing as part of the Bath Film Festival and came with a wonderful live accompaniment by Lola Perrin. It was tremendously intense, the piano carrying us through the screen into the faces of the characters; the troubed Letty, the heartbroken Lige and the predatory Wirt. There was such momentum in the playing that it made it a real journey into the desperate heart of Letty who was played by Lillian Gish.

In Bath, we don't often get the chance to see silent classics on the big screen (maybe the Bath Film Festival is the only time), so this was a real treat, especially with the fantastic score. What was also noticeable was how strong the female character was. Or maybe strong isn't the right word. She had a personality, let's put it that way.

The film essentially tells the story of Letty's departure from Virginia to forge a new life, to find love and fulfilment in the windswept badlands of the prairies. But instead of love, she comes up against hardship, jealousy and cruelty, with the maddening howl of the prairie wind the only accompaniment.

So Letty is going mad with the wind and she's going mad in her love life. The man she thinks she loves, Wirt, proves to be a scoundrel who is married. She is hearbroken and disappointed. When she is forced out of the home she is living in, she marries another man, Lige, out of desperation. Lige is truly in love with her. But she is not in love with him, as he finds out on their wedding night. When his love is unquenched, he is disappointed but honourable. He pledges that he will save her,that her happiness is his only wish.

And so he goes off to earn her ticket home. Letty is left to her own devices, and feels herself going mad with the howl of the wind. She is alone, but then the rapacious Wirt finds and violates her. In the morning she kills him and buries her body in the shifting sands of the prairies.

I won't give away the ending. At the Bath Film Festival, the projector broke just before the climax. But instead of seeing the Hollywood ending, Lola Perrin the pianist explained told us the ending that Lillan Gish had campaigned for - the one that belonged to the original novel, the ending where Letty walks out of the house into the howling wind, ending her life on her own terms, beholden to no man, able to be herself at last to confront her own mortality.

It was the right ending, the one that doesn't pull any punches, in which the woman determines her own destiny. Sadly, Gish was over-ruled by some Hollywood no-nothings and we got a different ending. Still great but Letty comes over as very much less independent.

http://www.annedegelas.com/files/gimgs/57_page-tricot---20.jpg

Funnily enough, I saw another film about a woman lost in a wilderness at the weekend. Yes, it's Gravity. But here, the protagonist Ryan is a lily-livered soul who owes her life to Matt (played by George Clooney). Oh, what a sad apology of a character Ryan is. Her personality revolves around the MacGuffin of her dead daughter (continuing in the Bambi tradition: a dead male would have been too heartbreaking) and she is limited in all kinds of ways, including the spiritual. There is even a line where she moans that she can't pray, because she was never taught to pray, as if God had anything to do with it. This is from my wife's scathing review:

Gravity is an inherently conservative, conventional Hollywood film dressed up as cutting edge. Personally, I feel insulted by that. It's like being promised Beef Wellington, then being given a sausage roll instead. The effects may be spectacular, but character and story-wise it feels like we've gone back in time. Ryan is no Ripley: she is a rather dull heroine who never seems to move beyond an emotional monotone: fear and lack of confidence. She is a vehicle for the plot, a body in a spacesuit. Personally, I didn't really care whether she made it or not.

So there we have it: female characterisation 1927 v female characterisation 2013. Lillian Gish monsters Sandra Bullock and George Clooney should just be embarrassed the dimensions he's plunging too.

So I was wondering about women in photobooks and it brought me back to Anne de Gelas. Rob Hornstra does a thing on photobooks, the madness of the end-of-year lists (I love them!) and how to get on them. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek but alot of it looks like good advice to me. I'm not sure it's entirely meant to be.

picture by Nausicaa Giulia Bianchi

One of the things he talks about is the most neglected photobook.

Anne de Gelas's L'Amoureuse is my most neglected photobook. It's a story of grief where the message is never diluted, where the determination of a grief-stricken destiny is the absolute core of the boom. Very often, photography is used to dilute a message.People remove the story in the name of mystery, ethics or a skewed sense of balance. l'Amoureuse doesn't do this. It has the courage of its convictions.

The basic message sets the tone:

'There is a never a right way to tell a child about the death of his father.'

This is from the book:

T., my lover and father of my son, died on April 5, 2010 of a brain stroke. He fell beside us on a beach at the North Sea. The violence of his death put me in front of a big void…a silence that echoed in my head only equal to the brightness of the blue sky which no planes crossed because of the ashes of a volcano in anger, my anger.

To face that loss, I plunged myself into the work that I had started more than 10 years ago consisting in writing a personal diary, now focussing on telling about my suffering but also about that surplus energy that burst within me.

And this is from my original review.

It's a story about family, childhood and being a woman who is suddenly plunged into a morass of solitude. How does that feel for you, for your family, for your future. What are the little things that will be missed, the little things that make a father and lover irreplaceable in a family's life.

It is also about physical and emotional love, and what it means to have that ripped away from you. What it means as a woman. There's a confrontation with both the immediacy of that loneliness, but also the wider void that threatens.

L'Amoureuse doesn't have a happy ending, because there's no happy ending to be had, but there is a resolution in the sense that life shifts, love changes and new beings are born out of tragedy.

So it's a book with a real character with a real life and all-too real problems. But then I wonder. It might not be that the book is neglected. I don't think it is. It's simply the fact that it is only in French and it's not that neglected in French-speaking land. I wonder how it would be 'neglected' if it were in English as well.

Maybe I should ask, why don't you do an English version.

The book was published by Fabrice Wagner at Le Caillou Bleu. He makes beautiful, thoughtful books. Every year he also runs a programme called Three days in Tharoul.

He invites people over to make a book. As in one book. The book is made and it stays in the house where it is made. A library accumulates. Slowly. It's slow photography.

Last year he invited Pino Musi, Remi Coignet and others. This year it's Paul Gaffney, Pierre Liebaert and myself. I have no idea what is going to happen but I'm sure it will be lovely.

So there will be a break from the blog for a week or so. And I'll be sure to ask Fabrice about an English version of L'Amoreuse.

Wednesday, 6 November 2013

Anne de Gelas: A book that made me cry

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all pictures by Anne De Gelas

L'Amoureuse by Anne De Gelas and published by Le Caillou Bleu is a book about loss. It's moving and heartfelt but also has a determination and hardness about it; the determination to confront unexpected and tragic loss, to be angry about it, to hate it, to accept it, to build it into one's life story and be able to move on to a place where the pain and anger is tinged with affection and love.

http://www.annedegelas.com/files/gimgs/56_ces-mots-nexistent-pas.png

This is the basic story (rough translation from text above):

There is a never a right way to tell a child about the death of his father.

http://www.annedegelas.com/files/gimgs/43_autoportrait-devant-main-bouge.png

T., my lover and father of my son, died on April 5, 2010 of a brain stroke. He fell beside us on a beach at the North Sea. The violence of his death put me in front of a big void…a silence that echoed in my head only equal to the brightness of the blue sky which no planes crossed because of the ashes of a volcano in anger, my anger.

To face that loss, I plunged myself into the work that I had started more than 10 years ago consisting in writing a personal diary, now focussing on telling about my suffering but also about that surplus energy that burst within me.

Most of it was in French which I'm not terribly good at reading French, but the message still comes across. It's a story about family, childhood and being a woman who is suddenly plunged into a morass of solitude. How does that feel for you, for your family, for your future. What are the little things that will be missed, the little things that make a father and lover irreplaceable in a family's life.

It is also about physical and emotional love, and what it means to have that ripped away from you. What it means as a woman. There's a confrontation with both the immediacy of that loneliness, but also the wider void that threatens.

L'Amoureuse doesn't have a happy ending, because there's no happy ending to be had, but there is a resolution in the sense that life shifts, love changes and new beings are born out of tragedy. It's body focussed and seems almost therapeutic in feel - so has a touch of Jo Spence about it, but mixed with the nostalgia and joyfulness of Bertien van Manen's lovely Easter and Oak Trees; a book that reveals new layers with each viewing.

On the cover is a extended poem of De Gelas's last day at the beach with her son Max and her partner T. This brought tears to my eyes. It made me cry. I cry for films and songs and fiction, but photobooks?

The poem's called An (almost) perfect day - 4th April 2010.

This is how the poem ends...

I take your face between my hands,
I still feel your lips on mine
That sweet, mutual movemnet of union
you say 'I'm cold'
I answer 'go straight home and get a coat'
I turn round to pick up my spade
out of the corner of my eye I see
your dark shape falling
I turn you over in the soft sand
they said 'diagnosis of the vital signs is very bad'
I spent the night telling you I loved you
kissing you
crying
looking at you and smiling
still happy to be at your side
impossible to comprehend death
ever

Monday, 28 October 2013

Mothers, Death and Macquenoise

The French TV series, The Returned is about people who had died, who had been mourned and were gone - suddenly returning to life. It was quiet and still and filled with expressive faces and hidden truths and simmering resentments. Amidst all the stillness there was envy, lust and rage. Much of that rage came from a pair of brothers who lived with their mother in a secluded farmhouse on the southern edge of the French Alps; a home from which both brothers would hunt and kill from. Sometimes it would be animals they would kill, sometimes people.

Macquenoise by Pierre Liebaert reminds me of the Returned. It's a series of pictures focussing on the life of a mother and son living in an isolated town on the French/Belgian border. There's hunting and killing and expressive faces peeking out from behind trees or sleeping in raggedy armchairs. The sensation of viewing the pictures is of remoteness and isolation, of a basic existence tempered by ever-present reminders of the participants' own mortality. The pictures are printed on newsprint - which is stitched down one side and merges with the accompanying gatefold sleeve which wraps around it. This is just beautiful, with a graphically printed image of a dead rabbit (that also appears in the newspaper) staring out of you in red, black and white colours.

Monday, 28 November 2011

More small publishers

Above pictures from À PROPOS DE GISÈLE by Estelle Hanania and JSBJ's very cool blue zines. Buy for 15 euros at JSBJ.

OK, so here are a few links of some more small publishers suggested by lots of people - thank you so much for your ideas. So many, so many, some are more affordable than others.

Have a flick through the links below and see what is on offer - there is some fabulous stuff out there.

More self-publishing, but here is a taster of The Photobook Show in Brighton next week.

Also on self-publishing, here is ABC., the Artists' Boooks Cooperative.

This is where you find things such as Mariken Wessels: Queen Ann. P.S. Belly cut off
which is where the above picture is from. Here's Joerg Colberg's review of the book

And here is Jeffrey Ladd's review.

Jeffrey runs Errata Editions which reprints old classics - part of the historical rediscovery of the photobook that the Parr/Badger Histories crystallised. More histories of Dutch/Mexican/Spanish/German photobooks are in the works as we speak and Parr is doing a 3rd Photobook History volume which has to be good news.

For more on Japanese photography and photobooks, see Microcord, Japan Exposures and the Ivan Vartanian book on Japanese Photobooks of the 60s and 70s. Also note that The Photographers Gallery will be having show of 150 Japanese photobooks from the last year. It's in May 2012. It's a kind of bookshow/exhibition. Get your white gloves out. No kidding.

For many, many more small publishers go to last year's Amsterdam Art Book Fair.

One Year of Books blog

Où est passée la journée d'hier

Takiura Hideo

Meier Und Muller

Oodee Books

Fotoevidence