PASSAGES

Mining for melancholy is a trait more beloved of some cultures than others.  Film endings are like cultural litmus paper.  They give a kind of reading of the acidity levels.  Americans are extremely alkaline, needing things to be happily resolved.  The Hollywood formula has so often neutered ideas imported from elsewhere, so they became saccharine and safe.  At the other extreme is the acidic Russian ending, where everything must be left in a state of tragic suspense, or calamity.  The Russians like their wounds kept open, resisting the slide into the numbing niceness, and alternative endings were added to films to accomodate this. 

I was thinking of this when recently recalling a film from my memory banks, Montenegro, made by director Dusan Makavejev, from the former Yugoslavia, in 1981.  The film is set in Sweden, tracing the story of a housewife who rebels against her taedium vitae, her weariness with life's tedium.  An affair (with Montenegro) and a murder later, she seems to be back on the road to 'normality' - an American Ending is offered as the apparent denouement.  She cooks a huge meal for her family, and it seems to have ended Happily.  And, for most people going to this film, it did.  Most audiences walked off with the American Ending in their heads, perhaps feeling somewhat unsatisfied ... but those who stayed on past the credits, as I dutifully did as usherette, were rewarded with the Swedish Ending.  A further few frames appear after the credits ... one announcing "the soup was poisoned" (or words to that effect) ... and the final one "this is based on a true story."

The arcade is one of those neither/nor spaces, a space of threshold, of liminality.  Neither buidling nor not-building, the arcade hovers as an interstitial no-man's land, between things.  A kind of twlight domain.  Beloved of the flaneurs, it became the emblem for Walter Benjamin's never completed project, the Passagenwerk.  The arcades of Paris resisted both time and place.   They endured amidst the change all around, and persisted as what Benjamin thought of as fairy grottos.  And spatially they resisted the inexorable drive of modernity, to maximise space, to commodify every square inch.

In Italy too, the arcades represent some of the most delicious spaces.  Lingering between being in a building or being in the expanse beyond, the arcades proffer a kind of 'prospect-refuge' experience, to use Jay Appleton's term.  A memory of being in Bologna returns, it was a sombre time ... the end of November, early December.  One thinks of Flaubert's November - where the books title symbolises the poignancy of the season, of an autumnal gloominess ... a seasonal twilight, "not dark yet, but getting there," where the arcades present themselves as the twilight of built form...


(from my sketchbook c.1992)

An image I carried in my mind on my Grand Tour in the early 1990s, was of Christchurch painter Doris Lusk's Arcades series.  The fabric awnings suffused with a patina of age, and of agelessness, capturing the light amidst that diaphonous space of the arcade.


Doris Lusk (1976) Arcade Awning, Saint Mark's Square, Venice (7)

"The landscape, admirable as a picture, rarely makes a comfortable bed ."
Fernando Pessoa,  The Book of Disquiet, p 200