Voice-Over
for the Documentary
Scenes from the Films of Konkowsky as
Recalled by the Executor of His Estate
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Nice
neighborhood. Konkowsky died in it.
Strandvägen,
in the film director’s Stockholm suburb of North Djurgården, was not a
tree-lined street, but a house-lined forest. Nothing is more natural in a forest than a forest fire, and
last year’s Great Fire of Stockholm got its start only a few doors away.
I
say “doors,” but here no doors remain:
no doors, no ceilings, no walls.
Even windows melted away like sheets of ice. There are only brick stairs to nowhere, birdbaths, and
chimneys that rise like exclamation points from the sentence fragments beneath
them.
It
was a fire that swung from the trees like a great ape. It was a fire that alighted on seven
thousand rooftops. It was a fire
that cost the life of a sixty-two-year-old film director who stood
five-foot-three in his boots and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds without
them.
Konkowsky
had always labored under the weight of a paranoia that his films would be
altered. The release of the
colorized Battleship Potemkin was, for him, the last straw, and he
boarded an SAS red-eye flight to Los Angeles to stage a protest at the
premiere. Beneath the shafts of
searchlights dueling in the smog-milky night air,
before
the winking orientalia of Mann’s Chinese Theatre, beside the tongue of red
carpet licking up celebrities from limousines arriving at the curb of Hollywood
Boulevard, the squat, bearded, wild-eyed, un-plastic-surgered director planted
one boot in Hedy Lamarr’s right footprint and his other in Myrna Loy’s
left. There Konkowsky tore his
contract with Svenskfilmindustri into very small pieces and announced to a
flabbergasted press corps that he would never work again.
When
several of its most influential directors threatened to follow suit, the Swedish
film organization relented: if
Konkowsky paid to double the insurance on his films and to construct a modern
storage facility, Svenskfilmindustri would turn over to his custody every
negative and every print of each of his films. So it was that the Fichet Lock Company came to North
Djurgården and installed in the basement of Konkowsky’s home a bank vault with
nine-inch-thick insulated walls and a 2½-ton door — a fortress guaranteed
steadfast to the improbable level of twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
But
Konkowsky hadn’t reckoned on anything like the Great Fire of Stockholm — and
temperatures that reached two thousand degrees. When the director perished, his films — Music, Death,
Malmö, Infra-Red; all his films, all copies of them — perished with him.
There
is a skeleton in Konkowsky’s closet, and it is Konkowsky. Or was Konkowsky. Or was presumably
Konkowsky. We know only that the
ashes found in Konkowsky’s basement vault are the remains of an adult male Homo
sapiens who died with a garden shovel in his hands.
"
Konkowsky
was not the first artist whose work went up in flames — Gogol burned his
unpublished volume two of Dead Souls; Kafka instructed his executor to
burn all his novel manuscripts — but Konkowsky was the first to go up in flames
along with his work. Rare
indeed is the successful artist who controls every extant edition of his work;
rare indeed the man who has the power to wipe out every trace of his existence.
No
art, no art critic: so if the
critic finds his subject in ashes, he must try to rebuild the ashes back into
his subject. He must try to
regenerate a phoenix from the ashes of a chicken.
What
a film critic does for a living is write in the dark. During years of Konkowsky’s screenings I filled hundreds of
pages — but nothing I wrote brings me any closer to reconstructing these
movies. I never tried to replicate
Konkowsky’s work on paper: why,
when the films themselves existed in the flesh? Film retains all it sees and all it hears. Film — like paper, like videotape, like
wet concrete, like silicon chips, like brain tissue — is a medium of memory.
Film
is memory. Memorizing a memory is
a redundancy. Besides, even if I
had copied down a shot-by-shot synopsis of any film by Konkowsky, I could no
more transform that synopsis into the film itself than I could transform a
telephone directory of a city into the city itself. Data, facts, details are never enough. Feed a trillion facts into a
computer: it cannot fabricate a
single cockroach.
And
so I find myself at a loss. Film
is memory; what does one remember of a film? Worse, what can one possibly remember of Konkowsky’s films,
which made no sense unless one made them make sense? Still, as a student of Konkowsky’s — at first his only
student, his John the Baptist — later, as perhaps his foremost critic, and
finally now as the executor of Konkowsky’s estate, I must try.
"
Watching
Konkowsky’s images I feel I am getting somewhere, but whether it is up or down
I cannot tell. The images that
face me on the screen are like passengers on the other escalator — the one
going down if I am going up, up if I am going down. Though I see each image only for an instant, I know it will
continue to exist, to live once it is out of my sight, just as it existed
before I saw it, just as I lived and will continue to live outside the moment
when the image and I found ourselves face to face.
Konkowsky
has not created or even captured the image but intercepted it; and just as he
cannot control the life of the image, he cannot select the moment when it
chooses to pass before his lens.
Each of Konkowsky’s images appears almost casually — not necessarily at
a pivotal or even a definitive juncture in its existence.
Sometimes
you want to immerse yourself in an image, to bathe in it, to drown in it, to
inhale it deeply into your lungs and hold your breath, to eat of it until you
are stuffed, to lie down and roll in it, to grab hold of it and draw it loosely
round you, to pull it tightly over your head, to mask yourself in it and pass
among the living, to cloak yourself in it and pass among the dead, and to dream
it and to live in it. Konkowsky’s
images, like the people on the other escalator, don’t hold still long enough
for any of that. What color was
his hair — gone! Her coat? Gone! How old?
Gone! Male? Female? Student?
Soldier? Priest? Gone, all gone, quite gone, each gone
back into a separate life, toward a meal, a job, a home, each toward its own
private mystery. You haven’t
enough left over in your memory, even now, to sketch out a decent likeness of
any of them.
Instead
you’ll get a composite: Y’s
forehead with Q’s hair, R’s mustache on N’s lip — and perhaps your own eyes
because you’re so used to looking at them that you’ve come to think all eyes
resemble your own. You are
recombining, collaging, reanimating, sewing it all together. You are forcing jigsaw pieces into
spaces that do not fit, because you lack — can never have — the original
solution to the puzzle. You are
re-acting, re-shooting, re-editing, re-releasing the film. You are making a new movie.
Konkowsky
knew you would, knew you couldn’t help but, wanted you to, counted on it. He knew that an image of a thing is not
the thing itself — not an object made up of specific elements with
numbered places on the periodic table, an object with a specific set of
properties, a specific mass and volume — no, an image of a thing is not the
thing itself but the distillation of a thing, a single variation of a thing of
which an infinity of variations are possible.
A
flock of pigeons flying through a city on a sunny day remains a flock of
pigeons, and each pigeon remains a pigeon, wherever the flock flies. Yet the shadow of the flock — the
image of the flock — changes shape, texture, color, even speed and
direction when it flies over a sidewalk and a street and takes on the colors
and corrugations of concrete and asphalt, when it flies past an apartment
building and leaps up onto a vertical screen of red brick, when it flies over
trees and is atomized onto a thousand translucent green leaves.
Konkowsky’s
idea was to hand over images — “empty images,” he called them — and let us
invest them with meaning, charge them with emotion, link them together, not
only reading their story but writing it for ourselves. Konkowsky gave up his empty images as
trustingly, as guilelessly, as willessly as a child gives up his empty hand to
his father at a street corner.
"
An
“empty” image:
In
a famous museum, a young woman approaches a painting by Rembrandt. Staring intently, she comes very near
the portrait, produces a small metal case, and applies her lipstick.
It
is easy to assume that she is using the glass over the painting as a mirror,
that she does not even see the face behind it, seeing instead her own face in
its reflection.
But
perhaps it is not this way at all.
Perhaps she wishes to color the lips of the man in the painting, and
since she cannot apply lipstick directly to the canvas — there are laws, there
are guards — she positions herself where the reflection of her own lips matches
the man’s lips. Perhaps she paints
her lips only to paint his lips.
His
lips are quite different from hers, however, and to paint them precisely, she
must miss the outlines of her own.
It may be that this woman, this woman whom we suppose so selfish that
she can look into a painting and see only herself, is in fact so selfless that
she looks into her own reflection and sees only the portrait behind it; so
selfless that to bring color into his faded lips she mis-paints her own, slips
the boundaries; so selfless that she makes herself over into a madwoman or a
clown only so that, whenever she will look into a mirror, she will see his
lips, expertly and exactly delineated, and not her own. Perhaps she is in love.
And
if in love, in love not with a man her own age or even old enough to be her
father, but with a man three hundred and fifty years older than she is. There are other obstacles in the way of
their relationship. She speaks
Russian; he speaks Middle Dutch.
She can, whenever she chooses, stroll along Nevsky Prospekt or the bank
of the Fontanka River; he is bounded on all sides by a wooden frame. She is talkative and energetic; he
never changes his expression. She
is three-dimensional; he is two-dimensional. She has a youthful body full of hormones and hungers and
electricity; he has only a head.
And
yet she comes here every day — yes,
she does it every day — to apply her
lipstick to his lips, to commit not an act of vanity but an act of restoration,
to wear his mouth on hers as if in a kiss.
"
Konkowsky
believed that an image is emptied of its meaning each time it is interpreted,
that as an image lives out its life, it becomes emptier and emptier, until it
is only what one makes of it, until it is an empty image.
The
image is a seashell and the interpreter a hermit crab. While he inhabits the image, there is
room for only one interpretation, for him alone, and he jealously protects the
image, his image, from other interpreters. When he dies, or is evicted by a more forceful
interpretation, or turns his interpretive interest elsewhere — it is all the
same to the image — another interpreter moves in; and each successive occupant
puts his name on the mailbox, paints his colors on the wainscoting, hangs his
curtains in the window, runs his banner up the flagpole.
"
The
fate of Rembrandt’s Night Watch is the fate of all images.
The
master labored over this enormous canvas for two years. Indignities were heaped on it almost
from the beginning. In 1715 a
third of the painting was shorn away.
Generation upon generation of protective varnish was slathered onto
it. The Night Watch
embarked upon a night that would not be marked in hours but in centuries.
In
1946 a thorough cleaning revealed that these “watchmen” were actually soldiers
getting ready for battle. The
painting known for three hundred years as The Night Watch was not a
night scene at all — it took place in broad daylight. So its name was changed to The Company of Frans Banning
Cocq Preparing to March Out.
And fifty years later, everyone still calls it The Night Watch
"
Konkowsky
was a painter, not a critic; a creator, not an interpreter; a pigeon, not a
zoologist. He sharpened the
distinction at a press conference during the making of The Making of the
Illusion of Gravity. Amidst
the freak blizzard that swept Los Angeles two Christmases ago, Konkowsky held his
press conference as he filmed his film — outdoors.
In
a Russian black fur hat that outlandishly exaggerates the huge head perched
neckless on that stocky torso, Konkowsky seats himself behind a table and the
customary growth of microphones.
It is twilight. The
tabletop is covered with snow. So
are the tops of the microphones, as if they’ve gone gray waiting for Konkowsky.
“OK,”
he says, clapping his hands, “Zoom zoom!”
(His English vocabulary consisted almost wholly of film jargon.)
“Mr.
Konkowsky,” says a critic in the second row, “you must have many commitments
elsewhere. Why did you drop them
all to come here?”
Konkowsky
stretches his arms upward and tilts back that great head, large
clumped-together snowflakes nestling in the black fur of his hat, in his
unpruned salt-and-pepper Rasputin’s beard, lingering there, individual flakes
landing on the ruddy exposed patches of his cheeks, melting so instantly and
leaving traces so infinitesimal they seem simply to disappear.
“The
snow!” says the critic from Cahiers du Cinema. “The snow!” she says, the ember of her cigarette sketching
circumflex accents in the air.
“Unlike rain, unlike heat, unlike fog, unlike tears, unlike art, snow transforms
reality — yes, blankets reality with a new layer of reality, a new layer that
not only changes the color of all things, the texture of all things, even the
temperature of all things, but unifies them under one color, one texture, one
temperature — and then, as completely, as drastically as it came across our eyes
— a veil, a curtain, a hand of God wiping it all clean, subtracting everything
from everything, offering our senses a preview of death or the prelude to life
— as totally as it came over reality, it is gone, it returns to us our world
and returns us to our world, the world we knew or thought we knew, the world
from which the world was subtracted only to be added back once again — and
this, then, all this, is what you find in snow?”
Yosei
Mura, Konkowsky’s cinematographer and alter ego, bends near the director, and
Konkowsky listens to the translation, his beetling eyebrows beetling. Long before Mura can possibly be
finished, Konkowsky, laughing, waves him away. He pushes snow into a peak in front of him with his fat
little hands, and puts a pinch into his mouth, like a man taking snuff. His jubilant, watery eyes come bugging
out, and he says, “Look! You can
eat it, and it’s cold.”
"
So
he filmed the snow, and warm air melted the snow, and fire melted the memory of
snow. Konkowsky died in the custom-made
Fichet vault in the basement of his home — with a garden shovel in his
hands. In reconstructing
Konkowsky’s final scene we begin with the shovel.
We
begin with the shovel, for a film of snow is not snow, and the shadow of a
flock of birds is not a flock of birds, and a painting of a man is not a man,
and the ashes of a man and a shovel are not the man and his shovel. Each is an image of the thing.
An
image is a thing riven from that which it has been and that which it will be,
cropped and cut and sized and framed off from that which surrounds it in the
physical world; a thing first filtered through the artist’s senses, then sifted
and sorted and strained by the artist’s mind and soul, then squeezed down by
the artist’s hand into or onto a medium, in which form the image reaches the
viewer: and now, all that the
artist did to distill the thing into an image — the sifting, sorting,
straining; the cutting, cropping, sizing, framing; the rivening and rendering —
all this is done or redone or undone by the viewer, out of the artist’s control
and out of his awareness: until
finally the image stands reconstituted, regenerated, re-created, not as the
thing it was before it became an image, but as a newborn thing that only now
takes the first breath of its life.
The
archaeologist finds a broken plate and sets an imaginary table with it; he
places the table in a house, the house on a street, the street in a village,
the village in a kingdom, the kingdom under a king, the king in history: the archaeologist finds a broken plate
and builds up an entire civilization around it. Yet all he has in his hand is a piece of crockery encrusted
with dirt.
Who
is the artist: the ceramist who
made his civilization into a plate, or the archaeologist who made the plate
into a civilization? Both,
Konkowsky would have said, but the archaeologist is the greater.
Who
is the artist: the filmmaker or
the film-viewer? Konkowsky
believed a film is more than a murder to be solved, an equation with one right answer
and infinity-minus-one wrong answers; he believed that most films infantilize
the viewer, so he made films that venerated the viewer instead.
Now
we, the viewers of Konkowsky’s films and the viewers of what he left us of
himself — we who file past the empty coffin — must repay the trust Konkowsky
placed in us. He gives himself to
us as ash and char, gives himself to us as an image: we rebuild the image into the thing. In reconstructing Konkowsky, we begin
by reconstructing Konkowsky’s last scene; and in reconstructing Konkowsky’s
last scene, we begin with the shovel.
"
As
the Great Fire of Stockholm starts to spread — fire outstripped by scent of
fire, scent of fire outstripped by word of fire — we place the slightly
dwarflike figure of the director in his rose garden, turning soil up against
the exterior wall of the vault in which his doubly-insured and irreplaceable
films lie preserved, turning it violently, turning soil and seedling, petal and
twig, stem and thorn.
Konkowsky
shovels until droplets of sweat fly from his whiskers, until the teeth of the
fire crash through the houses on Strandvägen. As the flames leap his barrier of dirt and roses, Konkowsky
dashes down into the vault.
Throwing the shovel aside, he grabs an armful of film reels — but no,
his home is melting, raining down around him; he must retreat back into the
vault, must crawl beneath the heat and smoke, and limp-crawling now, his films
still crooked in one arm, he swings the enormous door shut behind him; yet even
here the hot air pushes in, in on his face, in and in, pressing and
pressing, until a final mad and heat-maddened inspiration seizes him: laughing that laugh of his that knows
no language and no limit, Konkowsky heaves open the vault door so the flames
may enjoy access to his life’s work:
yes, picking up the garden spade, and, the sweat pouring from his beard,
shoveling cans of film into the fire like some maniacal engineer on a train to
Hell.
"
For
film is a train, its windows fleeting by, each an image filled with color,
framed off from the next; and a train is a film, the strip of colored landscape
seen from behind one of those train windows, the world hemmed in, squared off,
encapsulated in an arbitrary border, which is to say the world transformed into
a film of the world. Angle,
reverse angle: either way you look
at it, a film is a train and a train is a film.
The
frames in a film are railroad ties, the tines of a zipper, stitches sewn in
injured flesh; and the images in a film are cars on a rainy highway, flagstones
on a garden path, lilies floating downstream, their upturned faces reflecting
moonlight and the water reflecting nothing, zero, black: black as the night cut by a
searchlight, a searchlight announcing, for example, the premiere of a film; a
searchlight which cuts the sky and cuts a film from the sky, from the smog,
from the pigeons; a searchlight which, shined down instead on the street, cuts
a film from the city, from asphalt and concrete, brick and mortar, flesh and
cloth, and the people lining up to see a film become actors in another film of
whose existence they remain oblivious.
For
film is a train and a train is a film.
Run a length of movie film through your hands, long and long and narrow
like the path of a human life: a
train is a film, the frames of a film, the colors in the frames of a film, the
empty images in the frames of a film by Konkowsky, a train braking on the edge
of town, a train pulling into a station, the film flapping in the projector, a
train stopping, a film ending, a man dying.
So
now Konkowsky’s films do not exist.
Do not exist, at least, as long colored strips of cellulose acetate
rolled up in disc-shaped aluminum cans.
But
though a train may break down, wear out, derail, explode, may meet a thousand
fates, nothing can destroy the memory of the places it has been; though a book
may be burned, nothing can burn its contents out of the mind of the reader; and
though a film may rot, may mold, may crack into a hundred pieces, may
disintegrate into a million particles of dust, may incinerate into a trillion
atoms, its images, once created, once communicated, can never be effaced. For just a train is where it takes you,
just as a book is what is in it, so a film is whatever the viewer uses it to
create.
I
have taken the long way to say that Konkowsky’s films still exist. To say that Konkowsky’s films were not
destroyed in the Great Fire of Stockholm.
I see him, shovel in hand, cans of film in shovel, shovel in fire, sweat
dripping from beard, laughing that laugh of his that knew no language, no
limit, no stopping, no end, laughing because he knew that the only thing going
up in smoke was a sixty-two-year-old film director who stood five-foot-three in
his boots and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds without them.
"
Konkowsky
was a spinner, spinning threads from the colors of all he saw; and he was a
weaver, looming the threads into a bolt of fabric thirty-five millimeters wide
and as long as his life; and he wrapped his fabric around him and around him
until it was a shawl, a veil, a jacket, a straitjacket, a coat-of-many-colors,
a mummy’s bandage; a bandage that at first protected his skin, then stuck to
his skin, could not be removed from his skin, could not be distinguished from
his skin, a bandage that grew into his flesh as his flesh grew into the
bandage, until warp and woof were cell and cell; and when finally this bandage,
this bandage wrapped so tightly, engrafted so deeply, when finally this bandage
of film was peeled away and borne aloft by fire, Konkowsky had become the
bandage and nothing of him remained inside the bandage: ascending on an updraft, Konkowsky
reached down, took hold the last scrap of bandage, of fabric, of film, and
pulled the last scrap up after him.