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Songs from the second floor

‘Beloved be the unknown man and his wife. My fellow man with sleeves, neck and eyes! Beloved be the one who sleeps on his back. The one who wears a torn shoe in the rain.

Beloved be the bald man without a hat. The one who catches a finger in a door.

Beloved be the one who sweats out of pain or out of shame. The one who pays with what he does not have…

Beloved be the ones who sit down.’

-César Vallejo1

‘–Sit down?! –What’s with that? –Beloved be the one who sits down?! –Why should you love him, eh? –Look at that brother of yours. –He sits were he sits. –Sit down, sit down… –He sits where he sits! –Who’s going to come along and love him, then? –Can no one help him?’ Words of a father who failed as a man and as father. Unlike the paternal personas in Benigni’s Life is Beautiful and Wilkomirski’s Fragments2 he didn’t manage to protect his son from the eschatological void, he didn’t manage to create the form of a lie that would explicate the rules of a game of despair. Thus the son became a poet, ‘writing poetry till he went nuts’- into the speechlessness of madness3. In the Songs of the second floor the game of despair is lost by default. What fails to appear in front of the court of life is reason, any reason. At the hands of this court the child can only repeat the Verdict it has created for personal use- ‘I was born a day / when God was sick’4. The son, the child in man, shall forever remain in his ‘cloister of silence’.5

Songs from the second floor is an open wound. As painful as sensitive. Still, a

mature wound. For twenty-five years Roy Andersson did not direct a full-length film. The success of the Swedish Love Story of 1970 and the bankruptcy of Giliap in 1975 were followed over these years by hundreds of commercials. Yet two utterances heralded the coming of the anti-masterpiece, the masterpiece of Songs. A short film was commissioned in 1987 by the Swedish state; it was meant as school propaganda, elucidation, about AIDS. The film that appeared under the name Something has Happened did not satisfy its official patrons: too dark, too elusive. In 1991 another short film, World of glory was created again as a response to an invitation. The Gothenburg Film Festival project 90 Minutes of the 90's appointed Andersson as its first voice. The film won both the Canal Plus Award and the prestigious Press Prize at the 1992 Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival. The further decision of the Festival to include the film in its list of the best ten short films of all time was the affirmative

1 Songs from the second floor are dedicated to the Peruvian poet. ‘Beloved be the ones who sit down.’ is the prayer that opens the film- a leitmotif; as such an explication of humanity. 2 Zizek Slavoj, The art of the ridiculous sublime, p.30-31 3A trans-formation of this speechlessness, as the absence and negation of language in the indecipherable fragmentation of the mad parole, obtains a splendid voice in Foucault’s, History of Madness- particularly the reply to Derrida in the appendix of the second edition of 1972. 4 Vallejo César, A selection of his poetry, Verdict , from Los heraldos negros (1919), p.17 5 Ibid., Verdict, p.17

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sign of an extraordinary birth. World of Glory, a micrograph of the Songs, is a complete work; as such a final work. This is why it was possible for it to happen again, to unfurl into the poeticity of the Songs, this is why this was necessary. There is here a parallel between the act of creation and the act of its reception. For that we re-read Barthes and read him contra Barthes.

‘Re-reading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us “throw away” the story once it had been consumed (“devoured”), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book […] Re-reading is here suggested at the outset for it alone saves the text [us] from repetition (those who fail to re-read are obliged to read the same story everywhere)’6 Contra since for us the author is still alive. The undying author has to re-read himself, his own layers of creation, equally through and through layers of another, he has to re-read himself but exactly not as a layered author, and this means a decision rather than blindness, to re-create what he has already created in order not to create the same. This is the relation of World of Glory to the Songs. This relation shall appear again and again, but it cannot be exhausted here. Still to break down the constellation of the two films is the loss of meaning severed stars have to suffer, reduced to signs of themselves, a sign of failure. We appreciate them then in their separate unity, by bringing their atmospheres into communion. In that we may indeed be doing an injustice to the remaining oeuvre of Andersson by excluding it from this double image. After the Songs Andersson directed last year another film, called You, the Living. Still, if it is possible at all to detach the work from the oeuvre, if there is more than one work for the author, outside the singular Gesamtausgabe, this essay is dedicated to the Songs. Necessarily then to the World of Glory for even if no mention of it was made, talking about the Songs would be talking about it. In completing our excursion in the past of the Songs three observations shall pave our way. First, the significance of the advertising experience behind the possibility of the late work of Andersson. Advertisement was a powerful school for him. Vice versa his commercials bear the quality of a true creator. It is however, not the education in technique, nor the evolvement of his themes, not even the common farcical nature as such that is of interest here. We stay on the side of the creator and interrogate the alienation that made the Songs possible: only because Andersson went through it as one, were the Songs born, born completely, that is as a complete work. For Andersson is not a critic of modernity. The importance of the millennial element in him could not be more distant from all the worried voices. His work is beyond the rebellious, for it is a work of the resolution of anguish within itself. The topos of the social- society, economy, religion is for him only the expression of what man, equally the civilized and the a-civilized cannot but experience; this experience is staged within history- the history of a metaphysic experience.

Second, the nature of the two short films that preceded the Songs as responses. Both films were initiated as answers to specific requests. This is again and necessarily linked to out first remark. Andersson is an Old Master of the commissioned work. This anti-phonetic element, the answering, replying, responding, characteristic of the tragic chorus implies a necessity, more free than the singular freedom of the pure I. The Songs emerge exactly as an anti-phonesis to nothing7. Nothing, another –the most

6 Barthes Roland, S/Z, pp.15-16 7 Nothing should not be written with a capital n –at best not even in the beginning of a sentence, if the periodical structure can still be exclusively valid in a discourse in nothing, at all- despite its capital

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primordial- name of the resolution of anguish within itself, essentially different from no-thingness, non-presence, nihilism, roots the millennial nature of the work into historicity.

Third, the significance of maturity in-corporated, em-bodied in this response. Songs from the second floor were completed in 2000 after four years of work. A decade had passed since the beginnings of the World of Glory. Maturity then does not mean the well-meditated answer, the meticulous realization. We may call it organic, but isn’t logic the ultimate Organon? And if pregnancy is our metaphor –a metaphor we already used– don’t we relapse into Romanticism –we are indeed romantics–? Maturity is here precisely the tropos -manner or nature and turning towards- of the work unto nothing. It is the culmination of a history, thus closing the circle of the millennial triptych. For millennial cannot be what happens on the eve of the turn. As tropos, turning towards is the preparation and the very turning as culmination of this preparation.

We now turn to the question of the work as such; a question in concrete; a last interlude before touching again the amazing flesh we were promised in the opening of the text. We still need to justify ourselves, we need ask: Why do we watch the Songs from the second floor? Moreover, since we not only watch, but write we feel obliged to ask: What is the textual importance of this single film at the hands of the history of culture?

Our inductive observations come already forward with an answer. This film is a reflection –the visual metaphor here necessarily pertains to an art whose medium is the image, even if its nature is time– of the history of nothing on the present time. It is as such the most faithful cultural testimony, equally preserving its faith in the future of history, as reconciliation with non-presence, failure, the failure of culture. We insist. And give the same answer more concretely. The film is a hauntology. The word bequeathed by Derrida is the summary of a face of western history that is more than a face. As summary it brings together the pleiad of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Benjamin, Schmitt and Heidegger. Authors haunted by a ghost of Legion8, by a legion of ghosts, story-tellers and thinkers of a history crowded with apparitions. Not only bear the Songs the trait of this history, as heirs taken by surprise by the evangelic news. They are haunted themselves. Three identifiable and an army of anonymous ghosts tarry in it. We give our answer a final time, in all its possible concreteness: we cite Derrida’s citation of Shakespeare: “How goes the world?”, asks the Poet- the Painter answers: “It, wears, sir, as it grows”- the Poet is unsatisfied “Ay, that’s well known; But what particular rarity, what strange, which manifold record not matches?”9 The Songs are a masterpiece for they are themselves concrete: the attempt towards concreteness much appreciated by Andersson himself10 -preserving all relations, also a lesson from commerce- is precisely what makes this work historical, (geschichtlich). It is millennial exactly because upon touching nothing, it represents its event-ness, in the event of our world. The Songs sing our experience.

We should perhaps now approach this experience, the very body of its event-

ness. It is surely too great a task to reconstruct here a whole work. It is also futile. importance. The reasons for that have to remain here obscure. This is only a note to bring awareness to this very weird word neither pronominal nor substantive-onomatic. 8 See Luke, 8:30, Mark 5:9 9 Derrida Jacques, Specters of Marx, p.50 [my italics] 10 See the collection Cinema 16, where the comments of the director accompany the World of Glory.

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Among the mosaic of scenes that arrange the Songs –equally the World of Glory– we begin by pulling anew the thread of the paternal-filial relation. This relation, essentially spectral in itself, is the main topos of our constellation. The father of the Songs is fat and old- he belongs to the society of suits –we shall return to the significance of the suit in Andersson. He is the reversed figure of the son, the slim state-agent of the World of Glory. The son there- son of a dead father who has thought everything so well, particularly the family grave- manages to live on; almost. The father here does not. Both are haunted. The father of the Songs has two sons. The older, Tomas, the poet, is in the asylum. He has ceased talking; he exited language. Stefan, the younger has taken over the taxi Tomas was too sensitive to drive. He is the one who recites Vallejo’s words. This poem belongs equally to both. Indeed to all three, Vallejo and the brothers. Unlike the fathers mentioned earlier that succeed in their paternal task of presenting and legating the world, unlike Bergman’s paternal figures –for example in the Wild Strawberries or even more powerfully in Saraband and despite the analogies drawn between the two directors– who only succeed at the cost of a very sinister perversion of their heirs, unlike also the absent or absencing-sacrificial paternal apparitions of Tarkovsky, that bequeath a poem-world, this father has nothing to present. As a matter of fact he is a burnt man. This is how we meet him and this is his nature. But it is not his fault for he hasn’t failed as an individual. He failed as a man, he failed because man has failed.

He is burnt from the fire he set his furniture enterprise on. We meet him in the tube, among the underground crowd. A smoked face, an obliterated stare. The music opens a universal theme, a chorus sings- the people join the distant voices and Kalle, the father, wipes a tear. He does not hear the reconciling song, for it is spectral. It does not take place. Yet he has heard it. For in his utter isolation, in the isolation permeating the work, he is haunted by a common ghost, the ghost of the polis, the people, a singing ghost. The name of its song is indeed Silent Song.

As the music culminates and fades it mingles with blowing horns. Their distant noise is to be heard throughout. A terrible, utterly motionless traffic jam has bounded all. As all attempt to abandon the sinking city, none does. No one knows why. Still, everyone knows he has to leave. For, ‘what’s the point of staying where there is only misery?’

Why is there only misery? The question haunts us. The stock-market is in a free fall. No reasons again; no reason. But this is not enough. It doesn’t account for the motionlessness, for the failed trick of the magician, for the poor man’s fingers caught at the wagon door, for the moving building, for the grand sacrificial scene- for its futility.

Something has gone horribly wrong. Lasse, after 30 years of service, after 14 years without a day of absence, has to be fired. The scene takes place in a corridor with twelve doors, twelve clerks behind them, glimpsing, overhearing- the looming fate lingers for all, but they shall do nothing- neither for themselves nor for Lasse, who drags grasped from Pelle’s, the director’s leg- as soon as the scene ends, they shut their doors (in the World of Glory one of the brothers looks at his watch, impatient to return to work, while the other confesses, in the presence of his brother’s co-employers: ‘I suppose, he is my only friend, so to speak’). Kalle, the father, burnt his merchandise as we already know. He owes money. In his attempt to sale crucifixes he will fail again, as will his supplier, Uffe, who thought this was a good idea for the millennium, who was stupid enough to believe he could ‘make money on a crucified loser’. Not even confession can incite a sign of compassion, for the priests are in equal despair; priesthood is haunted.

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No reason. In this eclipse only a regress into mythical mythology seems rational. The wise men of the polis have decided. A young maiden will be thrown off the cliffs. The army, the clergy, the reverent wise men are all there. Attending, hoping, silencing. The girl is cast off and general mourning ruptures. Their guilt shall not to be forgiven; their sacrifice will not appease a god who has never existed.

Just, the young girl will join the legion of specters. She appears again in the junkyard, where Kalle has gone to get rid of the unsuccessful crucifixes, leading the dead who have found no peace. This is closure.

We still need to know who this army of specters is. Surely they are the dead of the polis. Those who died in injustice. All. But who? The World of Glory opens with a minimalist genocide. Naked people are loaded into a grey truck. One girl, another, screams. The doors of the track are sealed, the engine turns on and the exhaust is turned into the coach. The screams are covered by the motion of the track as it circles until they stop. The crowd in suits is watching. Among them is the son and brother, the slim state-agent. In the final scene of the film the screams return. His woman asks him to sleep- he has to work tomorrow. But the screams are loud. The two films share the same dead. In the Songs, more apparitions appear. The young man who didn’t have the chance to tell his sister how much he loved her before the Nazis hanged them. The old friend of Kelle, whom Kelle owed money, whom he still owes, but he is happy not to have to pay it back, less happy upon his return. They follow the maiden in the final march.

Sweden is held responsible for no genocide. No financial crisis brought her on

the verge of collapse. Andersson seems extravagant, picturesque, irrelevant- obsolete. He may be included as a latecomer in the Neue Sachlichkeit along Beckmann and Dix (in this pacifying act we do them injustice no less), so that we can go on. We can, but the specters will follow. Even sociology noticed in the seventies the Swedish crisis in the persistent suicides. To say then that Andersson has felt the relation that brings together the Holocaust and Capitalism is too little. The Holocaust will still remain distant. For in a metaphor, in this play of similarity and difference, one of the sides has always something sedative.

Liberal democracies tenaciously broadcast Nazi films. The Holocaust is generously financed again and again (this time as a spectacle). Not even the audience will abandon this banality. A grand scale exorcism, a sacrifice; a mirror.

We cannot dwell on the significance of the sacrificial mirroring now. But this mirroring has also been the task of art: ‘Even if people believed in the truth of the pictures, they were in fact seeing their own mirrors’, writes Belting11. Even abstraction cannot escape participation in this mirroring: ‘the sense of tragic is always with me when I paint’ says Rothko12, while Kandinsky writes in his Reminiscences ‘The very word composition ‘affected me like a prayer’13.

There is still a meaning left to be narrated. It is the most painful of all for it is not the plastic arts, the image, that failed in the pretension of an avant-garde desire, but history itself- meaning has failed, showing itself as meaningless. This history which Belting does not historize, does not narrate, is the theme of the Songs.

The Songs are thus a mirroring of a sacrificial mirroring. As such a mirroring of a malfunction: nothing good will come out of it, not even the restoration of 11 Belting Hans, The invincible masterpiece, p.148-149. See also Baudelaire’s citation, beginning ‘Leonardo, a mirror, sombre and profound…’ 12 Schama Simon, Power of Art: Rothko, these words are attributed to Rothko, presented as original. 13 Belting Hans, The invincible masterpiece, p.300

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prosperity. Adorno in his famous affirmation seems to agree: ‘the function of art is its lack of function’14. If the Songs present the failure of the most essential sacrifice, no function belongs to them either, for in this double mirroring no image will be born, the specters will not leave. But this is the most reactive inversion.

If reality fails, art fails. The distancing which art as pure form desires is only the source of another legion of deaths. The Songs are real. Their function is the function of reality- none, perhaps. A discourse on function is here irrelevant.

In the Lacanian/Zizekian dream-language we say: this is a dream you cannot awake from and escape, since it is real; upon waking, the same inescapability will confront you. No distance is conceded between the two states, because there is only one state, a state of emergency: constant, human. One already has the impression no light can ever enter the Songs. But a wasteland of infinite lament is what the Songs cannot be. There is a deeply farcical element, which brings it in the company of Beckett and has provided further support to the aforementioned parallel with the New Objectivity. We know however already that this is more than satire. If the essence of the clown is the right to failure15 the farcical obtains here its fullest meaning. The society of suits, is a society of clowns. The suit, at once total urban uniform and circus costume, unveils and masks. As mask it masks the self from its self. The people are prevented from seeing their failure, more, their right to fail, by hiding away their bodies, hiding them into success. They cannot know they are clowns, thus they are not. Still in unveiling, the suit presents the stiffness that constitutes laughter in Bergson16. Ignorance, another form of stiffness, is especially funny. But only when things go wrong. Only after things have gone so terribly wrong will society accept the clown. But this cannot exactly happen in the work. This society of clowns is funny for us. For itself it is only desperate. And only after the sacrifice has failed, in the bar of the Grand Hotel, will the grotesque play with despair evident in repetition (vomiting, collapsing, asking) suggest, but still only suggest, the abandonment of the self. These clowns will have to suffer, haunted in failure, until they welcome it. This is a film which comes after a long tradition. Haunted indeed yet because of that alive. This tradition is clearly not singular. Apart from the already identified figures, a dark vein runs into it. Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kane, Bernard-Marie Koltés, Heiner Müller is another pleiad, a generation –or almost two– in absolute darkness. This play, though in no direct relation to any of them, comes after them. As heir, it tries to inhabit its lunar inheritance. This attempt, whose tropos is the farcical, roots its maturity, its historicity.

Those who thought the songs have no light are deaf. They belong in the film, for they have not heard the double song of the Songs (this is one reason for the plural, another appearing if one counts in the Silent Song, a final, since infinite specters have infinite songs). What is this double song? In the film there are actually –here the word has its scholastic meaning– no songs. The operatic element in the Silent Song consists in a bare aaah, while the other song, the song from the second floor (are we really on the second floor?), has no lyrics. It is rather a choral, a piece of music, consisting in the naked tune of a flute. Its two variations (one could say the happy and the sad) open and close –respectively– the film. But the song also takes place in the film. After the quarrel between Stefan, the son, and his wife -closure of a day of sorrow- we see 14 Belting Hans, The end of the history of art?, p.15 15 A conclusion of extensive experimentation of my dear friend Ilias Kounelas. 16 See Bergson Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

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him –four scenes have intervened- behind her. He holds the flute and covers its holes, she blows. For a few seconds the most wonderful tune is born; at dusk, behind a table with a gentle white tablecloth, two humble candles on it, mankind has been saved. The song dissolves quickly into the sound of blowing horns of the next scene, the way the Silent Song before it did– an interior scene, since the collapsing polis is everywhere, walls unable keep her out. Yet the brief song was happy, it was erotic. An eroticism without desire, ecumenical, forgiving, a tender waking into life, life.

The second song consists only in words, it has no music. The poem of Vallejo is however only music. Its repeated verse is as universal and erotic as the song. ‘Beloved be the ones who sit down.’ The father cannot accept this, since it offers no exit from the nightmare. But in turn, when his anger has settled and despair returns, he will repeat the irritating words; ‘Beloved be the ones who sit down.’

[… ‘Every revenant seems here to come from and return to the earth, to come from it as from a buried clandestinity (humus and mold, tomb and subterranean prison), to return to it as to the lowest, toward the humble, humid, humiliated’17 –earth is where we conciliate at last with specters, humiliated and human; on earth, where the two worlds divide, where they meet;]

The son is right: ‘It’s not true that no one cares about poetry. They just pretend they don’t. Right now… they’re just pretending. That’s how it is. I know.’ They know that in all exorcistic attempts, they have only not thought to sit down. Everyone sits down, yet no one does. This is a poem for everyone. As its tune, it is naked. The double song becomes single, words and music find at last a tropos of reconciliation. This Song, the happy and the sad, is what we have long hoped for: the resolution of anguish within itself. It is the possibility of light, where light has failed, a song of nothing after nihilism.

–Georgios Tsagdis 24.02.2008

17 Derrida Jacques, Specters of Marx, pp. 116-117

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Appendix of images (in order of filmic time)

New Objectivity: Lasse at home.

Lasse dragging. 30 years of service.

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The failed magician.

Kalle, the burnt man and the silent song.

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Phone call during traffic jam.

Stefan, scavenger, rats.

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Kalle and Uffe, the crucifixion retailer. A crucified endlessly swinging.

Kalle, the new merchandise and the spectres: the old friend, the hanged boy.

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Meeting. The building (outside the window) is moving.

Song from the second floor.

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The sacrifice.

The Grand Hotel.

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Abandonment rush. All leaving the land.

Tomas and Stefan, the two brothers. The asylum.

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Kalle and the dead.

Closure

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corpus

-Andersson Roy, World of glory, 1991 (short film) -Andersson Roy, Songs from the second floor, 2001 (feature film) -Barthes Roland, S/Z, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990 -Belting Hans, The end of the history of art?, The University of Chicago Press, 1987 -Belting Hans, The invincible masterpiece, Reaktion Books, London, 1998 -Bergson Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Dover Publications, 2005 -Derrida Jacques, Specters of Marx, Routledge Classics, London, 2006 -Foucault Michel, History of Madness, Routledge, 2006 -Heidegger Martin, The saying of Anaximander in Off the beaten track, (Cambridge University Press, 2002) -Schama Simon, Power of Art: Rothko, 08.12.2006, BBC 2 (documentary) -Schmitt Karl, Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel, Klett-Cotta, 1993 (made available in Howard Caygill’s translation, Hamlet or Hecuba: the Eruption of time in the Play) -Vallejo César, A selection of his poetry, Francis Cairns, Liverpool, 1987 -Zizek Slavoj, The pervert’s guide to the cinema, 03-05.07.2006, More 4 (documentary) -Zizek Slavoj, The art of the ridiculous sublime, On David Lynch’s Lost Highway, The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, Seattle, 2002