The two movies that I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks – Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Pina – were both by German directors; Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders respectively. I guess we belong to the same generation as them – oldish men, somewhere along the line between what might be called late middle age and old age – though, maybe, old age is always somewhere ahead, a bit misty, a future to be endlessly pushed into an unreachable future. And both of them digging into tradition, though using cutting edge technology (the latest incarnation of 3D cinema) to make certain sorts of marks, patterns on a screen accompanied by spoken words, a commentary.
The subtitle of Pina is ‘dance, dance; otherwise we are lost’ – Pina Bausch’s words translated, of course, she’s German too. It’s not so long since I even heard of Pina Bausch when (was it autumn of last year?) a friend invited me to join her at the Tanztheater’s performance of Iphigenia auf Tauris at Sadler’s Wells. And, yes it was moving, wonderful as the best dance can be; touching the roots of the artistic impulse. But I discovered her existence only to find that she had died a couple of years previously. Come to think of it, that’s rather like discovering the author David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest only to hear that he had killed himself a couple of years ago.
The tradition of making marks in one form or another – those that at root leave no trace, save for the internal traces, dance, music, the spoken word and those that leave permanent marks, the finger dipped in ochre or the charcoal of a stick from the fire inscribing marks on a cave wall. Fixing something. And we’ve gone on finding ways to fix marks, leaving traces that can be referred to the next day or thirty thousand years later.
Even this blog which some might regard as more throwaway than most things in life – these rambling reflections –but we print out copies for our records imagining some future need – family interest or in heightened moments of excitement, a research project tracing a development or perhaps the opposite of development, a gradual falling away into emptiness or nirvana or God. Look, somebody might be saying in a thousand years, you can see how the threads gradually dissipated, spiralled in endless digressions, until . . .
But let me repeat Pina Bausch’s words: dance, dance; otherwise we are lost.