“The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams.”
How strange, when a book and film with no direct connection seem to engage in noisy conversation, clamoring to elucidate one another. There is ecstasy as neutrons fire between texts, as if there was no interlocutor. I’m busily returning the pages of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space the morning after seeing Of Time and the City (the last show of the last night of its weeklong run — at the Landmark Shattuck, which is on a block of downtown Berkeley where nearly half of the storefronts have been shuttered over the last six months — curmudgeonly Terence Davies would appreciate this foregone setting). I confess I was a little disappointed in the film. Part of this was surely due to having already experience that voice during his PFA residency, when he circled his past with the same practiced language (the bit, for instance, about praying until his knees bled). In person, Davies’s insistent glumness was offset by the way his speech would quicken around passion; fondling memories of repose, he would cut back for cheerlessness without losing any of the twinkle in his intonation. One gets this in Of Time and the City, but it’s crusted over with quotation and a hoary rasp. It may be the equivalent of criticizing cake for being sweet, but I found the film overwrought.
This, of course, must be taken in measure, next to the raptures of a weightless chamber drama like The Long Day Closes, surely one of the most complex, unchained meditations of the fragrant childhood comforts found in the cinema and the tiny nooks of a mother’s kitchen. Of Time and the City recovers this intimacy with streaming montages of women washing windows, children playing between rows of apartments, families crowded onto a stoop, etc etc. As with My Winnipeg, the film conjures the synesthesic fabric of memory using the foregrounded, granular sound of trains and running water. “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time,” Davies says, quoting Willem de Kooning, but dreary routine is wound up in the succor of solitude that the filmmaker cannot help but set to lyric — even as he deplores its circumstance. Of Time and the City is an essay film, a film which seems to think, and so it is allowed to leave dangling the contingences of a disinherited past. It doesn’t compare with The Long Day Closes or Distant Voices, Still Lives as a voluptuous inhabitation of memory, but there’s something remarkable in the way Davies manipulates the Humphrey Jennings-ish Liverpool footage to evoke his tentative, treasonous relationship with space: enraptured, curious, sidelong at the same time that it is frail, petrified, secreted, hoping not to draw attention. The archival sequences demonstrate how he remembers seeing (and being); the flat digital images show how he sees now, from whence he remembers. Space and time dissemble one another.
This is where the Bachelard comes in. His phenomenological registry of how certain spaces compel feelings of intimacy and well-being (he memorably writes of the “dignity of admiration”) hinges on daydream, more specifically the memory of daydream. With taxonomical breadth, Bachelard isolates the contours of suspended animation, the kind of space which, “in its countless alveoli…compresses time.” The French author terms his pursuit topoanalysis: “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” Bachelard’s psycho-affective mapping of space resonates with cinema generally but is exquisitely attuned to Davies’s mode of reverie. He might be describing any number of ascending camera movements in Of Time and the City when he writes, “A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality.” Bachelard is unabashed in his topophilia, something which, for Davies, is obviously complicated for having stemmed from abuse and shame. A couple of incantatory passages from the first chapter of The Poetics of Space which help realize Davies’s work:
“And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic…These retreats have the value of a shell.”
And,
“It is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond that history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order to actually live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion.” Of course, some separations are more painful than others. Bachelard goes on, “Poetry gives not so much a nostalgia for youth, which would be vulgar, as a nostalgia for the expressions of youth.”
Much of Bachelard’s book is a good deal more specific than these passages; it holds something for anyone who has ever sought solace in a lamp’s light or entrusted a chest as a protector of keepsakes.
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