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Lilith
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Hard as Diamond, Fragile as Glass Hard
as diamond, fragile as glass, the psyche is not about to deliver up
its secrets. It has become one of those passed-around ideas that we are all still struggling to understand. It originated with art historian/philosopher Jean Louis Schefer, and was then popularised by film critic Serge Daney. It’s the idea that – especially during childhood – it is not us who watch films, but rather films that watch us. There are certain movies that, as Daney says, are “already entangled in the snare of our history” (2) – whether or not we have ever actually seen them, or recall doing so. They were in the atmosphere we breathed, from the very first moment that we began breathing. It is an idea to conjure with, to dream with, to speculate with. The kind of idea with which the inventive writer-scholar Bernd Herzogenrath – for whose 60th birthday Festschrift I wrote this text – likes to play. “Those movies that watched us grow up and saw us”, according to Daney, made us “prematurely hostage to our coming biographies”. (3) Our lives were written, pre-destined, not in the stars, but on the screen. Or in the stars on the screen! Cinephiles, naturally, adore this idea. It gives our sometimes uneventful lives a certain fated, melancholic glamour, like in a Víctor Erice film. (4) Yet it also poses a challenge: as Daney once again rightly diagnosed, “It’s one thing to learn to watch movies ‘professionally’ … but it is another to live with those movies” that beheld us in this way. (5) A challenge to learn to live with them, once we have recognised them. Birth is undoubtedly the most dramatic moment of this process. We are born into the world accompanied by certain, key films. One day, if we are lucky – or cursed – we will discover the depths of that truth. The Spanish critic Carlos Losilla has expressed it well in his description of how he experienced the adult discovery of certain films – Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Fritz Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse – the worldwide release of which approximately coincided with his own birth in 1960. I can’t help thinking that when I saw them, I was reverting to a creature in the womb, suspended in amniotic fluid, that I was forever marking my eruption into the world and settling a debt with the images that accompanied me. I am the result of that gestation … My birth, like the birth of my whole generation, is the source of an enigma that I’ll attempt to solve … I’m compelled to clarify those origins that are also my own. (6) Bernd Herzogenrath was born in 1964. My magical cinephile telescope has scoured productions from the entire planet to locate the film with which I believe he was always and forever destined to mesh. It is Robert Rossen’s Lilith, starring Jean Seberg and Warren Beatty. In a Cahiers du cinéma issue of 1966, Jean-André Fieschi called Lilith “the unique film” – special, singular. (7) When interviewed by the same magazine two years later, Jacques Rivette was asked whether he was thinking of Lilith when he made his boldly experimental work L’amour fou – Crazy Love! His answer: “Yes, of course, but Lilith is a film that cuts across so many preoccupations that we all have … I realised I was kind of doing a remake of Lilith … One must never hesitate to plagiarise.” (8) Lilith was imprinting itself on everyone. Like all films, Lilith marks a transition-point in cultural history, a crossroads, an intersection of so many styles and ideas, traditions and portents. It signalled the end, the death throes of the old Hollywood studio system – by a writer-director who had contributed no small part to its classical glories – and, at the same time, gestured fitfully, with difficulty, toward something new. A new cinema. A new vision. A new mind – because Lilith is concerned with, more than anything else, the human mind in a complicated, changing world. It is about madness. But what is madness? In 1964, nobody knew, but everyone had theories about it. Wildly different, clashing theories which, in reality, have never ceased changing and clashing ever since. We are still trying to figure out what madness is. There had been some delicate, empathetic movies, earlier in that decade, about the scars wrought by mental illness, such as Frank Perry’s David and Lisa (1962). Or John Cassavetes’ A Child is Waiting (1963), which offers a clear, unprejudiced look at a mental hospital for children. The popular, Nouvelle vague-tinged Sundays and Cybèle (1962) by Serge Bourguignon squeezed a poignant, pained romance out of the encounter between a troubled veteran from the French Indochina War and a 12-year-old orphan – with social codes of age-appropriateness, and perceptions of impropriety, bringing forth tragedy. In my own filmgoing memory, that film by Bourguignon has meshed with another from the same year, Guy Green’s American production Light in the Piazza, in which a regular Italian fellow (Rossano Brazzi) falls in love with a mentally disabled but seemingly innocent young American tourist (Yvette Mimieux). At the age of 10, I found these two films (on black-and-white TV), Sundays and Cybèle and Light in the Piazza, unbearably moving. But we are here to analyse the cine-mind of Bernd, not mine, aren’t we? Lilith is a confused and confusing film; that is the source of its power. Its view of madness – Rossen was candid about this in the interviews he gave before his premature death at age fifty-seven in 1966 (9) – adopts the radical, anti-psychiatric line that became so prevalent, for a time, in the 1960s and into the ‘70s, via the works of R.D. Laing, David Cooper, Raewyn Connell and many others. (Recall that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, still rather lazily and smugly pedalling this line in the film version of 1975, both originates from and is set in the early 1960s.) To wit: it is not the designated sick person who is mad, but the society that surrounds and has imposed itself on him or her; madness is really an often desperate, last-ditch form of individual survival amidst an insane world (the war in Vietnam, the Mad Men-style disintegration of middle-class, suburban dreams, and so on). In 1974, Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands gave us the ultimate embodiment of this belief in their immortal A Woman Under the Influence. Another, related therapeutic vision is caught in the extraordinary Canadian documentary Warrendale (Allan King, 1967) – where the method of literally “holding” teenage delinquents (i.e., pinning down their arms and legs and completely surrounding their bodies with other helper-bodies) in order to provide them with both relief and release is almost shocking to witness today. In movie melodramas since the early 20th century dawn of cinema, madness or mental illness had been coded as many things: as moral evil, as ‘bad character’, as the result of inner addictions or of external frustrations … and that was still the case by the time of Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972), filmed so brilliantly by Paul Newman – and written as an act of psychic, emotional revenge against a mother who ‘never loved’ her kids. Freudian psychoanalysis and its many offshoots tried to ground the understanding of psychosis within a more rational, scientific system. But it was the remnants of social ideology – of rehabilitation, cure, a return to normality – still lodged in Freudianism that anti-psychiatry rebelled against. In cultural history, anti-psychiatry – and, to a large extent, psychoanalysis itself in all its various methods and schools of thought – was destined to be superseded by another Copernican turn in the treatment of mental illness. This was the swerve into massive medicalisation, justified by a pragmatic neurobiology. Your system is out of balance; take a pill! Non-fiction books including Rachel Aviv’s Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2022) and Alice Carrière’s strange artworld/showbiz memoir Everything/Nothing/Someone (Spiegel & Grau, 2023) testify to the devastating toll that regime changes in the conceptualisation and treatment of mental illness – sometimes a new treatment every decade – have brought down upon unfortunate individuals who, in their debilitated state, become mere puppets of a healthcare system that has no consistency in its methods and no firmness in its core beliefs. Bernd H., in his own work, has adopted and developed a more creative, artistic sense of neuroscience. Not pill prescriptions, but the realm of the neuro-cinematic. I recall the excitement and enthusiasm generated by his research project “Cinapses: Thinking/Film” when it was workshopped at Goethe University in 2014. Lilith, neuro-cinematic and cinaptic to its core, is a weird, disturbing, inappropriate love story. Beatty plays Vincent, who comes to work at a very modern clinic (a little in the style of La Borde, where Félix Guattari worked in France): the patients are free to wander the grounds, follow creative interests, make friends and even form strong relationships. Vincent is drawn to Lilith (Seberg), who possesses, shall we say, an aura to be reckoned with. Brilliant, artistic, tormented, seductive … Rossen constantly associates her character with imagery of spiders and their webs. And, of course, she evokes the Lilith of myth, the “primordial she-demon” (as Wikipedia so politely puts it). An old-fashioned femme fatale, then? Not quite; as Michael Henry suggested in a “Cinema and Madness” dossier in Positif magazine – still upholding the anti-psychiatry gospel as recently as 2009 – “If madness can be related to mythology, it escapes both psychology and morality. It can only be grasped through the detour of metaphor”. (10) A distinctly Jungian perception! So, Vincent, drawn to (and by) Lilith, slowly loses his mind. Their hidden sexual relationship turns increasingly brutal, perverse, murderous. Perhaps he, too, was ‘cracked’, to begin with? The film scatters and scrambles its clues and keys. What’s important is the ambiguous state of fusion between two hearts, bodies, minds, souls. Or, as M. Henry muses, the process of “passing to the other side of the mirror” (11) – in a film where the imagery of glass, in its many forms and states, plays a major role. One of the most remarkable and memorable features of Lilith, for spectators today as much as in 1964, is its display of special visual effects: long, slow, lingering superimpositions and distortions of multiple images, warping, deforming, broken up by the dazzle of lights or the plunging veil of sudden darkness. There is an anticipation, on this level, of a film that B.H. has deeply analysed: David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Another film of splitting, overlapping identities in crisis. But the hand of destiny really reaches to Bernd through Lilith via an extraordinary detail of its technical credits: its cinematographer, Eugen Schüfftan, who was such a crucial and frequent collaborator of Bernd’s beloved Edgar G. Ulmer. (He had already worked with Rossen on the widescreen classic The Hustler in 1961.) (12) In 1964, Schüfftan was, as Seberg delightfully described him, a “marvellous old man” in his 70s (13) – but still tirelessly energetic and inventive in his art and craft. The quasi-avant-garde pictorial experimentation in Lilith surely owes much to Schüfftan’s hand. It
was to be the final screen work of both he and Rossen. NOTES 2. Serge Daney, Postcards from the Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 21. back 3.. Ibid. (my emphasis). back 4. See Cristina Álvarez López, “Films That Watch Us: Cerrar los ojos (Víctor Erice, 2023)”, Laugh Motel: On, With, Around Film, 4 October 2023. back 5. Daney, Postcards, p. 21. back 6. Carlos Losilla, “Suspended Modernity: On the Last Five Films of Fritz Lang”, in Joe McElhaney (ed.), A Companion to Fritz Lang (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 474-475. back 7. Jean-André Fieschi, “Le film unique”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 177 (April 1966), p. 40. back 8. Jacques Rivette (1968) interviewed by Jacques Aumont et al, “Time Overflowing”, Order of the Exile. back 9. See Robert Rossen interviewed by Jean-Louis Noames (aka Louis Skorecki), “Lecons d’un combat”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 177 (April 1966), pp. 26-36. back 10. Henry, “Lilith”, p. 43. back 11. Ibid., p. 45. back 12. Part of my own contribution to a book edited by Bernd on Ulmer (Edgar G. Ulmer: Essays on the King of the Bs, McFarland, 2009) can be accessed in the Tier 3 bonus PDF of my Patreon campaign supporting this website: www.patreon.com/adrianmartin. back 13. Jean Seberg interviewed by Jean-André Fieschi, “Lilith et moi”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 177 (April 1966), p. 44. back © Adrian Martin October 2023 |
