Yesterday I finished I Who Have Never Known Men by the Belgian author Jaqueline Harpman and wandered home from the library craving conversation, sound, people. Without giving the plot away, it is at its heart about being a lonely woman, the importance of all humans having the dignity to live beyond basic sustenance- a life with food, shelter and water available but not much else, the horror of a prison but also of an open air prison.
“ I wondered what would make me stop, whether it would be hunger, sleep or boredom- in other words, what prompts decisions when you are utterly alone.”
“I want to go off exploring. I don’t want to end my days here, eating canned food only for it to come out later.”
It is an argument for friends, sex, love, touch, tasty food, art, learning, beauty- and that everything is better when shared with others. I haven’t read a book in a long time that truly made me want to live, and get out into the world available to me, after a year of battling against suicidal thoughts.
I have been reading Virginia Woolf’s essays and criticism too- I think her suicide makes people forget how funny she was. Here she is on Walter Scott’s (who she is more forgiving of than me) pride at having a gas run house.
As Woolf is unfairly associated with gloom, Nabokov is unfairly associated with a sort of nastiness because he could be very opinionated, but he was a great humanist and gentle soul. He was against overly and obvious political art ( I agree) but one of the greatest advocates of simple decency. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is one of my favourite works of his i reread this month for help on a project( I am for all the ones in the shadows of Lolita, I don’t trust people who have only read Lolita and not the joys of Speak, Memory, his short stories or Laughter in the Dark- I think Lolita needs to be read within the context of his other work for its message to be understood ) here is an excerpt which I bookmarked.
“ ‘It has always distressed me,’ writes Sebastian Knight in Lost Property, ‘that people in restaurants never notice the animated mysteries, who bring them their food and check their overcoats and push doors open for them. I once reminded a businessman with whom I had lunched a few weeks before, that the woman who had handed us our hats had cotton wool in her ears. He looked puzzled and said he hadn’t been aware of there having been any woman at all.. A person who fails to notice a taxi-driver’s hare-lip because he is in a hurry to get somewhere is to me a monomaniac. I have often felt as if I were sitting among blind men and madmen, when I thought that I was the only one in the crowd to wonder about the chocolate-girl’s slight, very slight limp.’”
A few weeks ago, I was at my friend Helen’s for a movie. We both wanted to watch Brigadoon, with Gene Kelly, set in the highlands but filmed in a Hollywood studio. We would have paid for it, but there was nowhere to find it, besides a crusty old dvd for sale on eBay, and there was no Russian sight to hazily stream it either. We ended up watching something else, easily accessible on Netflix, disappointed. A few weeks before, we watched the original Whiskey Galore, carefully avoiding the newish one( The era of remaking we are living in gives me a sinister feeling, especially when something so recent as Mean Girls was remade, literature too is in a rut of retellings without any of the freshness of Angela Carter doing it in the 70s with the Bloody Chamber) which took some wrestling to find, and yes we did pay for it. You see a theme here, we like old timey tatty Scotland set films. My favourite film is I Know Where I’m Going! which you sillily can’t rent on YouTube but can watch speckled with many ads. I first saw I Know Where I’m Going! which I first saw at the Filmhouse in 2018, the only indie arthouse cinema in Edinburgh, which closed unexpectedly in 2022. I read this morning that the Filmhouse is reopening and was surprised and thrilled(tbh I was raging when they turned down an offer from the owner of the Prince Charles Cinema to buy it a few years ago) : They would be the type of place to perhaps show Brigadoon. I will be lobbying them certainly.
The internet stinks for watching movies you want to, especially in the UK where the criterion collection streaming site isn’t available. Classics I like will be on Mubi briefly but disappear, replaced by Brazilian films from 2016 I don’t want to see. Netflix and other stream sites actively delete whole swathes of films. For a while the only place I could watch Jules et Jim was dubbed in Turkish, though now its available to rent on Apple TV. I most often watch movies, besides in the theatre, by renting them on YouTube, but it’s not a place to browse films or releases, only search exactly what you are looking for- often if I don’t find it I will do something else. There is an excitement when an old film you love or want to see returns to a cinema. We went to the cinema to see Zone of Interest, which wouldn’t have the same effect seeing it at home- in fact there would be something almost grotesque about seeing it at home, able to pause or turn down the volume when the sound design is a massive part of the experience.
The Filmhouse was a central part of my social life before it closed, I would not only see films there with pals or alone, but drink and read in its bar- it was the decent place to have a drink before going to usher hall or the lyceum. The last film I saw at Filmhouse was The Afterlight, a single 35mm print film of archive footage which would only last as long as the physical film itself did. I wrote a novel, Children of Paradise, inspired by my experience working at another cinema, but when Filmhouse closed as the one in my book did a few months after it was published was an eerie feeling. It’s a good coincidence the Film House is making a comeback, just as a more interesting cinema industry is making a comeback too.
Love that the Filmhouse is reopening. Also love I Who Have Never Known Men!
With you on the struggles of finding movies to watch online - BFI player has been good for me so far but it would be awesome if we had Criterion in the UK
also sending my love, I was in a similar boat re suicidal thoughts last year