“Europe no longer loves life,” Peter Sloterdijk said somewhere. “The radiance of historical fulfilment is gone, in its place only exhaustion, the entropic qualities of an aging culture,” a reign of “spiritual nakedness.” Is our epoch really “a time of empty angels”?1 What messages does the European today send out to the Europe of tomorrow?
If one were to ask me, as a writer I would, perhaps predictably, immediately think about human beings, of a record of everyday human lives, something akin to a perfect (and perfectly monstrous!) archive for future readers, its files taking account of the smallest details of the lives of regular, anonymous people, like the archive of Danilo Kiš’s The Encyclopedia of the Dead, inspired by a newspaper report on the Mormon archives.
Yet when I try to put myself in Carlos’s position, that of a consumer of dreams, I immediately change tack, and choose the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin as my launch pad for broadcasting messages to the future. It’s cosy, sensual, and wired with oneiric energy.
Yes, the National Museum of Cinema in Turin. Flopping down into a recliner in which you lie more than sit, we place headphones over our ears, direct our eyes high toward the cupola of the Mole Antonelliana — one of Turin’s strangest structures — and watch the inaudible slide of the panoramic glass lift, full of visitors, descending from or ascending to the lookout point at the cupola’s peak. Having ourselves ridden in that same glass cage, we observe others on their gentle vertical slide, up and down. We are no longer participants, but observers.
Lying down, headphones over our ears, we immerse ourselves in a huge canvas as clips from Europe’s neglected film history are beamed before us. We catapult ourselves into the world of images, and swaddled in the imagined future like a mouse in cheese, we observe our recent past. God, look at them alclass="underline" Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Lina Wertmüller, Liliana Cavani, Jean-Luc Godard, Miloš Forman, Sergei Eisenstein, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jiří Menzel, Jeanne Moreau, Simone Signoret, Anna Magnani, Giulietta Masina, and scores of others — where did they all disappear to? And I think, seen from some future perspective, isn’t it the case that cinema — and not literature, music, or visual art — is the most powerful and enthralling legacy of our epoch?
And so we sit and watch the film assembled for museum visitors by Gianni Amelio, a montage of dance scenes from European and American films. With the force of a laser, these dancing images smash loose the deposits of misanthropy that in the accumulated years have clogged my veins. It now seems that I know the content of the message that, if called upon, I would send out into the future, to a museum of tomorrow. My message would consist of images of couples dancing — not of “dancing with the stars”—but the dancing of ordinary people projected into the sky like stars.2 The message would be accompanied by a single caption, Amanda Wingfield’s heartbreaking line from Irving Raper’s 1950 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie: “I’ve always said that dancing is the most civilized form of social intercourse.”
1“The time of empty angels is a syndrome in which everyone wants to be a messenger, yet no one makes the least effort to receive the messages of others; everyone wants to cut through the clatter and be heard, be in the control room, get something into print, but unfortunately they’ve got nothing to say. This syndrome, with its unheard messages, results in media nihilism. Working in tandem, the means of transmitting these forgotten messages only increases.” Interview with Peter Sloterdijk, Zarez, 19 (1999), 12–13; Magazine litteraire, September 1999.)
2Ettore Scola’s silent film Le Bal (1983) features couples as they dance their way through almost the entire twentieth century, proof enough, if one is so inclined, that history (in this case, recent European history) can be easily portrayed from the interior of a dance hall, by gesture, music, and movement.
MANIFESTO
1. A VIDEO CLIP
A Zagreb acquaintance recently sent me a YouTube clip that’s been making the rounds. It’s actually a newsreel chronicling Zagreb’s economic triumphs between 1967 and 1969, and was originally used as propaganda in city councilors’ re-election campaigns. Well into the 70s, newsreels would play in movie theaters before the feature, just like the ads and trailers we get today.
The voiceover and images tell a phenomenal success story. In the given two-year period, the city built new factories, schools, hospital wards, kindergartens, roads, new residential settlements — the graphics, numbers, and statistics are all there to prove it. My Zagreb acquaintance tells me that today, forty years later, the clip has been an online sensation in Croatia. Why? What could be so gripping about an old Yugoslav (socialist) puff piece? Its truthfulness. What?! Yes — it’s the truthfulness of it that gets people. All those factories really were built, and what’s more, some of them became Yugoslavia’s biggest exporters; the schools, residential blocks and neighborhoods, they were built too. In 1972, my parents bought a fourteenth-floor apartment in one such “skyscraper.” Watching the clip, I recognized both my old neighborhood and my future skyscraper. I still remember the joy the amazing fourteenth-floor view out over empty fields provoked in me. From time to time, new clusters of tower blocks rose from the fields, stretching up toward the horizon. All this happened within the space of some fifteen (communist) years.
The Internet is like the ocean — every day it washes new debris upon the shore. The clip in question is just one such piece of detritus. Viewed by anyone able to claim it as part of his or her own mental baggage, it’s bound to prompt a reaction. My Zagreb acquaintance complains that her husband just sits there on YouTube all day, watching the clip over and over, bawling his eyes out. “He’s completely lost his marbles! How can someone cry over a bunch of sepia shots of factory halls?!” she protests. Her husband used to work at the factory. In the “transition” period it went belly-up, and he was forced to take early retirement.
People cry for all kinds of reasons, most often when confronted by their own defeat. “Twenty years they’ve been feeding us crap on TV, in the papers. The media used to be much better quality,” a first person says. “Life itself, the one we had in Yugoslavia, used to be better quality,” a second chimes in. “Why did we march off to war then?” a third asks. “What war? You, old fella, are lost in time. That was twenty years ago,” a fourth responds. “This ongoing idioticization of the people is becoming unbearable. Politicians have fried our brains, and soon they’re gonna toss us in the trash,” a fifth adds. “We’re already in the trash,” a sixth comes back at him. “It’s what we deserve for being such fools!” a seventh concludes. “It’s comforting to know that we’re not the only idiots. Look at the Italians. All the shit they’ve been through, how can anyone still vote for Berlusconi?!” an eighth observes. “Put up and shut up, that’s all that’s left for us,” a ninth summarizes. “Right on, voting is a complete crock anyhow! What’s the point, we’re already dead,” a tenth fires.
“You’re drawing the wrong conclusions. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that we’ve been betrayed by both systems, by communism and capitalism. Personally, I can start bawling for no reason at all, it’s enough for me to watch National Geographic and the tear ducts burst. We’re all depressed, believe me,” another acquaintance tells me. He’s forty-five years old, single, pays his bills on time, is gainfully employed.