I spent last night in Mahagonny, or else downtown Manhattan, or at least in a well-attended screening at the Castro.
That is, Harry Smith’s Mahagonny, which exists in some parallel verse to Brecht/Weill’s, a midden of images so rich in its detail that it seems absurd to me, after only one (and how long till the next?) viewing, to even begin to speak of its wholeness. We are pattern-makers, we humans, and one tries so hard to make patterns here; but the patterns with which Smith wove this string figure are so obfuscated that we pass from trying to follow, to making our own, to merely swimming in the image-bath until the water runs out the drain and we’re left huddled in the cold porcelain.
The currently-available restoration is a single-projector 35mm reduction of the original four-projector 16mm presentation — which means, of course, that the four images take up the same screen real estate as they would have in 1980, but the images are locked in sync with one another and with the soundtrack, which would have been damn difficult if not impossible in most venues. So the mirrored images actually stay mirrored for the duration of each reel — perhaps there would be occasional chance synchronies revealed by a wild 4-track screening (how could there not be?) but more has been gained than lost, I think1 — it is, though, an open question whether some of the timing issues I’ll mention below are Smith’s intention or the results of decisions by the people doing the reduction (does it matter?). God knows how changeovers were handled, but that may have something to do with the periodic blankitude of parts of the screen.
So. We have a cartesian grid, four individual frames, two side-by-side, two top-and-bottom. In the beginning, the x-axis separates dissimilar images and the y-axis marries mirrored images — that is, the screen is divided horizontally into two Rorschach blots (at times, particularly when the images are of tree branches, literally resembling Rorschachs). The first image is a long take of twilight fading over a Manhattan skyline, a tower in the center of the fold (i.e., originally broken by the right-hand frameline in camera), the reddish sky slowly turning to black, figures moving blurrily (it’s under-cranked) in the windows. Eventually, the lower quadrants join in with another image and a few reels pass with full-width mirrored images top and bottom most of the time. After a while (around the 1-hour mark), the top pair is further split into two separate images (while the bottom two remain mirrored); and awhile later we have four independent images. During this period we start to notice repetitions ... a long multi-shot sequence (possibly 10 minutes) from the IV quadrant is repeated verbatim in the II quadrant, other images from the mirrored section are repeated (or drawn from the same shooting sessions), but without their mirrors. Another gradual transition ensues and once again we are looking at paired images, but this time top-to-bottom rather than side-by-side (so, no illusions of continuity — disappearing/appearing blobs at the central frame, etc. — as with the Rorschach); one the left, generally in synch with each other, on the right out of synch by a small amount (3 seconds when I first thought to count; as time goes on they get closer, down to 1/2 second difference at the end). And then it ends. It strikes me now that the three orientations may be tied to the three-act structure of the opera, but if so I didn’t catch it at the time (dammit, when do we get a DVD?).
I’ll be honest. I also have no idea what any of this has to do with the Large Glass. While I can understand Smith’s categorization of the images (Portraits, Nature, Animation, Symbols), I’m sure not seeing the palindrome — possibly because what one might put in those categories is so general and idiosyncratic as to be arbitrary. And the relationship between sound and image is ... loose. Shots, we’re told, are cut to the length of scenes, or songs, or lines, or words; but for the most part shots go on and on, and scenes and songs end and new ones start up with no real change on the screen. Sometimes, an affecting coincidence of mood, and sometimes a synchrony so precise that it can’t be trusted to have been intended (those wild projectors, remember); but hardly ever even a mild perceptible connection of image to lyric or musical phrase. That I could see, anyway.
So this viewer is left with taking the images as images (the sound, well, it’s a record you can play at home) and basking in them. And at that point this Mahagonny is a stream of Puncta. Bam bam bam. The white cat wandering in the background in the second shot in the brick alleyway, the elderly security guard stopped on the crazily-tilted sidewalk to light a cigarette as people swirl around him. The shoeshine boys disrupting the dance, yes — but how about this guy walking straight toward the camera through their disruption? The way the illusion of depth shatters when people walk parallel to the picture plane, each individual defining, with his mirror image, a separate plane (like a collection of plates in a multi-plane magic lantern) which blips out of existence when they merge and vanish at the centerline (matter and antimatter? mutual annihilation in the union of opposites! oh mysterium coniunctionis! or not ...) or oozes into existence as they mitote out from the center2 ... and then snaps back into depth when the lights change (the city directs its own special effects) and the twinned busses start passing into the depths. And what are those books on Ginsburg’s shelf, and haven’t I seen that painting the couple is necking under on the wall of a museum, twenty years later? “We goofed!” says the sign in the shop window. Perhaps.
And, well, the studia as well. The yonicity of the footbridge mirror image in the first reel. The way we realize, after becoming accustomed to the repetition of footage, that no, this one isn’t a repetition, because the camera’s running at a different speed. The pan across a row of liquor bottles, echoed with its 2.5-second delay in the frame below ... but time is transformed into space as our eye draws a vertical axis and measures the difference in distances travelled ... and at the end of the pan one frame waits while its partner catches up (such gentility!) and they pause, out of synch yet synched in their stillness, until the first winks out to the next shot. The video feedback, its shutter-generated rollbar passing upwards in synch with the pulse of the music. And then again, in synch with the line “to Benares” a dancer’s head rolls backward, bringing her face out of the clump of people bunched around the door ... and her visual-reverb sister, rolling her head backward, precisely in synch with the repetition of the line “to Benares,” a rebuke to all the moments of soundimage non-synchrony in the previous 130 minutes. Layer upon layer of chinese fans making arcs in the lower centerfold, introducing the first mirrored dutch angle in the upper centerfold, the camera’s tilts the complement of the handles’ spread.
And the teasing at meaning ... the hands that only gradually reveal themselves conducting the sand painting/collaging ... never onscreen at the beginning, then just a flash that we see and think indulgently is an error ... but then yes, they’re in the frame and jeez, they’re painted a nice bright blue ... and the next time we see them they’re green ... then red (wait, is that the order? Shit, I should have been taking notes (how would I know they would change?), this sequence must mean something, this all must mean something) ... the return of the psychopomp dancer from #12, bounding from the head of one Hindu deity to another’s ... should these collages mean what they do in #12, or are we being played with (always)? And the sandpaintings, there’s a ritual about them too, but whose?
And even the things that would break the spell of other films, like the hamming of Smith’s addled cast, just take us to another level of spell, like walking out of a cinema within a dream. The actors mug floridly, staring directly at the camera ... but then, what they do in their “I’m acting” act often is only what a screen actor of the time of Mahagonny would have done. A guy with a moustache turns from the mob of dancers in the hotel room and flashes Smith a raised middle finger and we’re “out of” Mahagonny, yes, but we’re there with Smith, not here, in the time and place of the enactment of Mahagonny, now little less remote than Mahagonny was from them; and they are themselves, even as they enact Mahagonny, in Mahagonny themselves, as are we. Because Mahagonny was Amerika, and this ragtag collection of poets and hangers-on, themselves caught in the toils of the sin of having no money, were in Amerika, and we are in Amerika. And the sad, careless shot of the flower vendor that ends the film — so weak, I thought at first, the film just peters out — is Mahagonny’s ending, and ours ... sad, weak, torn off, abandoned, cast out. Finished.
