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Steve Fagin: Two Essays |
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1. Rest in Pieces: 45 Minutes From Edith Wharton (2022) All
things considered, it’s possible to imagine that we are moving
toward a reign of the adaptation in which the notion of the unity of
the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will
be destroyed. 45 Minutes From Edith Wharton: that body of American literature named “Wharton” as a site you can visit, a street you can walk or take a train to, a monument. But a monument to what? That’s always the question. Even more so, the question of our collective, trained will to monumentalise such works of culture and their venerable authors. The specific work in question is Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence (published 1920, set in the 1870s). But Steve Fagin does not set out to adapt this novel in any way, shape or form. To address it, yes. To circle it. Surround it. Question it. Stalk it, even. To treat it as a cultural site (across, literally, its many editions) and also, in a virtual-cubistic sense, an imaginary space that one can inhabit and poke around in. To unsettle its foundations, its comfortable drift into history – including media history. Fagin does not represent chosen scenes from the book. For him, across the decades of his artistic practice, it’s never of matter of representation, mimesis, verisimilitude. No re-creation of another, hallowed work; only its re-invention – in pieces. Tableaux, block-scenes, digital chunks. Literature and cinema (or any of cinema’s latter-day video & digital mutations): this relationship should not be for the sake of smoothly conveying the former into the latter, solely for the purpose of extending a work’s market-reach. Why bother with that? Read an old book, see a new film: use your precious time and your brain wisely, there’s no need to duplicate these texts across media, and even less need for any of us to police how faithful (or otherwise) the adaptation turns out to be. As if duplication was ever a possible thing, to begin with. I had a dream while writing this text. Edith Wharton’s initials – EW – became a kind of giant, glowing, flickering, fluorescent neon sign that metamorphosed in its meaning in the moments I gazed at it: EW stopped meaning Edith Wharton and instead signified Entertainment Weekly. Or, as I used to watch it on TV in the 1980s, beamed direct from the USA to Australia: Entertainment This Week. This dream was telling me something! I retain a tele-memory of EW’s 1993 coverage of the release of Martin Scorsese’s version of The Age of Innocence (“that horrible movie”, as Mia Fowler glancingly refers to it in 45 Minutes). Winona Ryder gushed that she needed a special “historical coordinator” for her role as May Welland, to ensure that none of her spontaneous postural gestures, hand movements or facial expressions gave out the “wrong” modern meaning. “It’s like, if I put my hand on my hip as I’d normally do, I’m saying to Newland, ‘Just fuck my brains out, OK?”. Maybe that would have been a good intervention. Fagin wages war against a certain, ghastly practice of modernisation of ‘the classics’. In fact, I well recall, from decades ago, a conversation with him wherein he railed against the likes of The Wooster Group for, at the time, always returning to ‘the classics’ (old and more recent: Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill … ) for their supposedly avant-garde repertoire. But the trend back then is piddling compared to what goes on today: a deluge of supposedly enlightened (aka ‘woke’) modernisation, inserting (often by force, and clumsily) ‘progressive’ elements, perspectives, characters and situations that never existed in the original source. A trend that 45 Minutes from Edith Wharton adroitly punctures in its passing evocation (in monologue) of “an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence as a musical with an ‘upstairs downstairs’ twist … the next Hamilton”. Monologue, reading aloud, recitation, performance: these are some of the varied modes that Fagin deploys. There are also improvised games, fragments of sets, drawings (and erasures) on a chalk board, and a constantly mobile digital space that is somewhere between a drawing-room and a gallery, stuffed with surreal objects and images that poke further holes in the skein of modernised representation … Wharton’s novel stakes out a particular ‘turf’, a plotted territory of physical and social space, defined by strict, fine-grain hierarchies of class, status, privilege, wealth, gender, entitlement, vocation, cultural affiliation, hobby, family ties, and every other imaginable demarcation-line. Fagin’s opening tableau has writer Constance DeJong (sitting amidst the mobile digital room-space already mentioned) reading from Chapter 6 of Wharton’s book. It’s a passage that lays out the dizzying system of some of these hierarchies in the New York world that the author so meticulously reported on and captured. Many filmic adaptations of classic literature are content, indeed deliriously happy, to reproduce these types of anthropological ‘thick descriptions’ of a given social milieu. But the more fanatically these milieux are researched and reproduced on screen, the more specific they become – and the further they proceed into a past rendered as distant and remote. So different, it would seem, to where and what we are now. These historic chronotopes become exotic museum pieces, fetishes of lost time. The past as a foreign country to be mapped and then sold with a tour-guide commentary implicitly or explicitly attached. And with no evident link to the present, except in the hopeful allegory opportunistically and emptily hailed by reviewers and commentators (‘How relevant it is!’). Fagin has a different approach to the space-time of cultural history. I am reminded of the immortal words of German film critic Frieda Grafe, urging us “to become aware of the present in the past, and to see that established practices have been subject to development. A critique of the present is a critique of the past that has allowed the present to come about”. (2) As 45 Minutes from Edith Wharton proceeds on its merry way, we see and hear the “Wharton world” simultaneously splinter apart and expand. It’s a represented world as fixed in the pages of a book or previously adapted to the screen – and thus a type of museum exhibit – but also a world that can be conjured anew, reconfigured, and explored in the present. A process that is encapsulated wonderfully in the intermittent use of a large, shop-front window that is open to the fleeting gazes of passers-by in the present-day, outside world. This new world is arrived at and traversed in various ways, by various means of transport. In one of the scenes involving the lively improvisational byplay between Winsome Brown and Vernice P. Miller – as servants set free from their historical narrative – the news of a subway is imagined with awe. The Puerto Rican performance artist Michele Carlo pounds the pavements as she recounts the extraordinary tale of racial “kill whitey day” at the school she once attended. In another tableau of recounting, we are given a complex insight into the New York Draft Riots of July 1863 – the off-screen space, as it happens, of another epic Scorsese history-recreation, Gangs of New York (2002). A further reading from Wharton’s book (Chapter 3) takes place in a cemetery. Mia Fowler’s running monologues at her laptop take us somewhere else again: into the struggles of black artists to claim their own modernism, to pass on their radical pedagogies, to sovereignly play with the representation and retelling of their own historical experiences. At all times and in all spaces – real or imaginary, stripped-down or surreal, physical or digital – Fagin weaves in striking details, gestures, manoeuvres. Geoffrey Hug’s cinematography is crisp and on the ball, following every movement. The blackboard is on wheels, it gets flipped and hurled around. A performer speaking about historic riots never ceases arranging her magnificent hair throughout her tale. We recognise the same patch of purple lighting on a wall, uniting two different tableaux. A giant birthday-cake prop, which doubles as a stage for the actors, also contains – if you look closely enough – tiny media screens. When
we finally return to Constance DeJong, she is no longer reading aloud
but offering a reflection on reading and writing, fiction and
non-fiction. Writing and art need to be a bit difficult, she muses,
to create a singular idiom, in order to not be so quickly and easily
consumed. As she once wrote, 41 years ago: “Knowledge made to go
down real easy makes you real sick.” The humour in Fagin’s work is, all at once, conceptual and liberating, rewiring your brain in real-time. The inventiveness carries a shock of surprise; its off-centre character is a poke to your sensorium. DeJong again, from ’81: “I’ll just say boo to clear the air for a moment before the demons return”. She immediately added: “It takes a while to even identify them”. Tricky devils! 45
Minutes from Edith Wharton has exactly that effect: it scares up the trouble, it patiently
identifies the demons, and then it blows them away. Before they
return, as they are always poised to do. But, at least, you will be
better armed to deal with them in that future which is “the past
that has allowed the present to come about”. Hell
is full of musical amateurs. I once sketched the dream of a certain kind of cinema: not ‘musicals’ per se – that oft-glorious form which Jean-Luc Godard once rightly called an idealisation of cinema, a lyrical apotheosis of image-sound fusion – but music-driven films, where the ‘numbers’ are not just outbursts in an otherwise conventional storyline, but the whole show, in a sense, from start to end. (4) I don’t mean elaborate ‘concert films’ like Prince’s Sign O’ the Times (1987), or Carlos Saura’s pristine restagings of Spain’s ‘national dance tradition’ spectaculars (such as Flamenco, 1995). Some of Tony Gatlif’s portraits of Romani peoples (especially Latcho Drom, 1993) get closer to my ideal, but even those are a little too keen to erase the specificity of music’s complicated action in the world and extol a universal humanism of the heart’s response. In a more frankly experimental (and cryptic) vein, Carmelo Bene in Italy and Werner Schroeter in Germany have approached, via the twin peaks of opera and pop, this music-driven ideal. Enter – as if in response to my dream – Steve Fagin’s La Cura which, as he jokes, “is the best I can do to make a musical”. It is comprised of episodes – of tableaux. These jewel-like pieces do not add up to a plot. Even when something recurs – like the studio set that stands in for a nightclub, proudly stripped bare under the final credits – or a performer reappears in a different situation, it is not for the purposes of narrative linkage. The connections between tableaux come about in a different way: through an accumulated interweaving, threaded on music. Cuban popular music, delivered in many forms: sung live, performed in archival clips, danced to, explained … Yet even (as we witness) just speaking about it, attempting to describe it, becomes a way to play this music, differently: its rhythm infects performers, specialists, and radio DJs alike as they offer up their stories, their lived histories. Nobody escapes the tendrils of the polyrhythmic beat. But this is not some transcendental, universal escapism. Fagin, in contrast to most musicals, never lets us forget the conditions of trade and barter, the selling and buying, that underlie any act or consumption of culture. From the very opening scene, everything is mixed together, all possible levels of life, culture, and history. A woman (Yeny Silvia Dalmau Brindis) pushes her fruit cart in an open, public area with imposing arches, just by a large body of water, and full-throatedly sings her sales-chant of “Mango, manguito, mangüé …”. The heavy creaking and groaning of the cart’s painted wheels seem to ‘make music’ just as significant as that of the human voice. When she stops, she begins a private ritual, spoken and sung aloud to the world: she offers up three pieces of fruit to the water, and thus to the “blessed Yemayá” and to Orula (two of the santos of the Santería religion), each one in memoriam to a past lover: the first she loved and lost (“But well, one adapts to everything in life”); the second who didn’t last long (“I didn’t like him that much”) although he was good in bed; and the third who has died. Each of these men enjoyed the specific fruit (such as fruta bomba) that is dedicated to them. What does this woman ask of her gods as she wades waist-high, fully dressed, into the water, lifting her removed high heels to the air with arms outstretched? The usual things we implore our deities to give us: health, happiness, prosperity, long life, security. But there is a wider frame of reference evoked here at the outset of La Cura. This sung oration takes in the full gamut from the daily work of selling, to the sweet memory of sex – and more, touching on a history of migration: “From África they came and among us they remained” … And all of it wrapped in the flow of live, sung music. No overdubs, no miming to playback, no post-production reconstruction of this music. The use of direct sound, directly captured, will form an important filigree in Fagin’s mosaic – in one memorable episode, the microphone set up to record a conga drum is entirely, unashamedly visible. Nothing is hidden in this spectacle of life, of the live production of time and space, gesture and event. There is no need for voice-over narration in La Cura – no need for that particular type of clean, clear, pedagogic distance. The songs, the words, the gestures flow. They inescapably trace their own conditions of cultural contradiction, of historicity. It’s the montage, the clash of sequences and of their internal elements, that makes the meaning. Fagin never lets us forget the social world from which this music comes: the changes it has gone through, the platforms it reaches, the cracks it fills. A scene of fractious exchange, along these lines, between a man-woman couple literally takes place on … a seesaw! (This is vintage Fagin humour.) Musical taste – with all its connotations of class, race, gender, status, privilege, or exclusion – is a continuous battleground. End of Scene 1: the camera swings away from the human figure of the woman in the water as the image swiftly fades to black. How the next section begins is a shock: stylised coloured lighting (lurid greens and blues), a nightclub that is clearly staged on a set, highly theatricalised gestures seen in fragmenting close-ups: hands, fingers pointing, drinking glasses moved along the tabletop in scarcely rational ways. The diagram of a certain behaviour in a certain social class. Plus the movements of the drink waiters, to whom I shall later return. The two seated men begin their conversation with Enrique Serpa’s 1938 novel Contraband (5), and swiftly segue into the sad story (taken from that book) of Anita, driven to suicide. The narration of that story passes to two women moving on the dance floor – tales travel like gossip in this movie. And the changing levels, overlaps and transitions of snatches of music and successive passages of voice (the sound elements are handled by Kamilo Kratc) match the velocity of that travel. Now we behold the full visual dispositif of the set: complete with a large screen at the back beaming archival, black & white footage of musicians performing; cut-out, graphical friezes depicting two men at table, and a band; and two dance-floor couples, occupying either side of the abstract space (Fagin loves mirroring effects: later, two guys will discourse right into their own reflection in a wall-size mirror). On the set, there are also spotlit areas in colour, and a shaft of hard, clear light along the floor, leading to the front table. An elegant, shifting geometry of places, roles, possibilities … In this matrix-sequence and, in fact, everywhere in La Cura, there is a cinematic panache that raises the stakes we find in Fagin’s more conceptualist works, such as 45 Minutes from Edith Wharton (2022). Where ‘great literature’ of the Western canon represents to him a type of crippled, over-venerated cultural monument – and is thus translated into blocks of artifice where movement is necessarily curtailed – the music of Cuba is more elusive, more alive, and demands a freer, more mobile treatment. So, the camera (cinematography by Alexander Gonzálex) moves restlessly in the opening scene, framing the woman from the back, from the sides – and here in the club-studio it swoops and turns, on a crane; the editing (sometimes using shots from several simultaneous cameras) suddenly takes us to overhead or close-up angles. And there is also a constant traffic of bodies indoors and outdoors, as in the splendid sequence devoted to a woman and her aunt making a visit a neighbourhood rumba in someone’s home “where there is Guaguancó” – a site of ‘authentic’ Cuban music. (This section is introduced by a clip from Nosotros la música [1964] directed by Rogelio Paris – who died in 2016, and to whom La Cura is dedicated – over which is placed the fragment of a discussion as to whether rumba should evolve.) Authenticity in music – in culture generally – is a hard thing to nail down. Music history is always a complicated two-step between tradition and change. Adaptation, rearrangement, admixture are the hallmarks of that change. But, too easily, this can shade into compromise, betrayal, toning down, whitewashing. The music may enchant us, as a DJ in La Cura remarks, “but is not as you say”. What’s missing? And is there an elusive, authentic musical “essence” that can be preserved? This is precisely what Pancho Amat (playing amazing tunes for us on his tres guitar) argues for in La Cura: “It’s not the same, yet it is”. What is it that needs to be – that can be – preserved? Too heavy a tradition – fixed beyond change – is bad. Even worse, a tradition made static (or made to seem static) invites sickly nostalgia: the way it was (not) in some Golden Age of yore. In an interview about his earlier Cuban project, TropiCola (1997), Steve discusses how one fixed, mythic image of Cuban music – as an emblem of glorious Revolution – was replaced, after the 1990s influx of touristic capital into Cuba, and in step with the release of Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club (1999), with another: the pre-Castro era of music, apparently “free” of politics and full of globally-pleasing charm. (6) “Easy listening”, as radio hosts in the West used to say. Wheel those “forgotten” old guys out on stage, rehabilitate them and their time, and let the good times roll … In that same interview, Steve points to an important index of variation in a 1990s adaptation of the Cuban son tradition: the up-front, “hard edge” presence of percussion, something so easily minimised or softened in a recorded sound mix, “over produced” (and/or automated) to the point of near-erasure. (7) We hear the echo of arguments like this in the scene of La Cura where a man continually passes from one side of a table to the other in order to stage an argument with himself: the patrimonial heritage of Cuban music comes up against “international commercialised salsa”, even to the point of heretically incorporating … Panamanian reggaeton! (A nice tangent here can direct my reader toward Pablo Larraín’s spikey dance mélo from Chile, Ema [2019], in which reggaeton is virulently defended by its adopter-practitioners as “the orgasm you can dance”.) By the same token, truly creative change – evolution – in musical form cannot and should not be resisted. New generations coming up will always overturn the cart, rearrange the cards on the table. At the very least, such change should be experimented with, essayed. That is the point of the story imagining an Artificial Intelligence program, “more advanced than Microsoft”, which could reconfigure, speculatively and hypothetically, the very history of Cuban music – to situate timba at its heart, for example – not as a “hostile takeover” but a “playful reshuffling of the deck”. Fagin is always up for reshuffling the deck, and seeing what happens as a result. His precious Cuban collaborators, including producer Berta Jottar, are up for it, too. Personally, I have little expertise, and less experience, when it comes to Cuba and its culture. So sue me, I like Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), with its own weird soundtrack mixes (in track selection and in the arrangement of each piece) of the old and the new, and its unlikely (for contemporary Hollywood) romanticisation of grass-roots, revolutionary fervor as Batista gets overthrown in 1959. That one would never have slipped through the nets of the Miramax production slate unless disguised (completely illogically) as the market sequel to the hit Dirty Dancing (1987). Like many, I receive the stereotypes from afar. La Cura is made, in part, for people like me, as much as it’s made for Cuban audiences. Doubtless a high number of its references, nuances, and jokes are lost on me. I learn a lot of names and dates and facts along the way, and I jot them down for future reference. But something else comes through, viscerally, in this torrent of words, images, sounds, motions, and songs: a strong, palpable sense of how inextricably tangled up everything is – the sensual joy with the political pain, the individual with the collective, the everyday with the longue durée – and how everything is knotted, unknotted, and reknotted, over and over again, in the music of a time and a place. Every song, every dance, is a drama of connection, disconnection, reconnection. Music is not the accompaniment for, or metaphor of, life: it is this life, beaten out syllable by syllable, step by step, beat by beat. Steve Fagin’s art has always been about building or conjuring surprising bridges: between the eccentric babble of an individual’s private unconscious and the overarching currents of public history; between the crush of all-round oppression and the possibility of a gesture that loosens the chains and creates some room to move. Music is energy. It can be channeled, co-opted, softened … but its seed or core of energy can rarely be snuffed out altogether. Something of its origin will inevitably linger, even its most distorted, commercialised, or cleaned-up forms. Music gives energy – life energy, the cure of the work’s title. Survival energy, a current to revitalise you. This is given indelible expression by Fagin in a motif extending across several performers and performances (because there is frequently a performance-art element in his work): I’ll call it the rag doll motif. In a stunning sequence, an elderly man (Carlos Pérez Peña) – director of a kinesthetic psychiatry clinic for people who have withdrawn from communicating and interacting with others – delivers a monologue in an outdoor setting while sitting next to an ailing patient (Gesliam Suarez ‘Momo’), lost in her intonation of a sad Beny Moré song, her body constantly ‘collapsing’ like a rag doll in intermittent narcoleptic trance. The music of Abelardo Barroso has worked on previous sufferers (we are informed), but not this one. This delirious saga of therapeutic revival reaches fever pitch as we discover that only timba music of the Bamboleo orchestra can get this patient onto her feet, mobile and charged up – the music reaches into her unconscious, her lived, bodily memory, her history, rewiring her. She even gets a change of costume, straight from the good doctor’s suitcase! As spectators, we see it, hear it, and feel it all. Call and response: a call from the world, from time, to the somatic body. This woman metamorphoses, in the course of the scene, from raggedy helplessness into a figure of “chronotopical structural stability”, as Yanay Prats Herrera has put it: the sturdiness of popular music. (8) Now recall the twin drink-waiters from the studio set. Their movements are ultra-strange, alien, as if their limbs are constantly folding in and over themselves. They, too, are rag dolls – but this time trapped in their servile roles, constantly at the beck and call of well-off customers. At one point, these guys can barely stand up any longer – so they support each other in a reckless dance of falling, submissive bodies, mutually propped up by some magic will to keep going. The vibrant, tough, political vision of Steve Fagin is condensed in this interplay of multiple rag dolls across the social and musical space of La Cura.
1. André Bazin, Bazin at Work (Routledge, 1997), p. 49. back 2. Frieda Grafe (1968, trans. Barrie Ellis-Jones), “Theatre, Cinema, Audience: Liebelei and Lola Montès”, in Paul Willemen (ed.), Ophüls (British Film Institute, 1978), p. 54. back 3. Constance DeJong, “In Between the Dark and the Light (Television/Society/Art: A Symposium)”, Artforum (January 1981). back 4. See my long 2000 essay “Musical Mutations”, definitive author’s version available as a subscription bonus to the Patreon supporting my website: www.patreon.com/adrianmartin. back 5. A generous excerpt from Contraband in English translation (by Andrew Feldman) can be consulted here. back 6. “En la calle”. back 7. Ibid. back 8. Yanay Prats Herrera, “La cura que lo cura todo: el cronista lo sabe”. back
© Adrian Martin August 2022 / 18 & 19 November 2024 |
