"They need to be reminded of the order of things" : Clash of the Titans

Not quite 3D, no longer really 2D, the new Clash of the Titans multiplex-filler, shot in two dimensions but re-processed into three to cash in on the success of Avatar, survives in an odd kind of not-quite-flatness. The credits come zooming out towards you, but everything else just seems to hang precipitously over the edge of the screen, like a limp phallus poking out of its fly.

As has become standard practice in mainstream action movies lately, the film is composed almost entirely of great, swooping aerial long shots, to show off the locations and the detail of the production design in the manner of the French heritage films of the 1980's. These are juxtaposed with fast-moving close-ups, edited in the style of an ADHD sufferer's stream of consciousness. What this means is that the film contains almost no mid-shots, and it is mid-shots that tell the story.

As in Deleuze's tripartite distinction (with the perception-image usually in long shot and the affection-image characteristically in close-up), the action or impulse-image takes place in medium shot and is the most important element of naturalism. Of course, this is not to say that nothing happens in Clash of the Titans, simply that when it does, it is enormously disorientating due to the lack of mid-shots - or at least it would be if it wasn't for the presence of Io (played by Gemma Atherton, last seen as tracksuit-wearing hostage in The Disappearance of Alice Creed).

The character Io plays no part, either in the original (1981) film, Clash of the Titans, nor in the myth of Perseus upon which it is based. Her function here is largely as a kind of onscreen narrator, informing the otherwise bewildered viewer what the plot is in lengthy expository dialogue during the rare moments of calm between fight scenes. Such characters have become increasingly necessary in recent Hollywood films due to the almost complete inability of contemporary directors to make the most elementary cinematic gesture of telling a story through images.

In mythology, Io is the lover of Zeus who is transformed into a heifer and sent to wander the earth, tormented by a gadfly. None of this plays any part in Clash of the Titans, but it does point towards the second function of this character in the film. One of the major changes made by Louis Letterier's new Clash from both the 1981 film and its classical sources, is that the mother of Perseus, Danaë, raped by Zeus out of vengeance for the hubris of mortals, is no longer the daughter, but the wife of Acrisius. This makes the prophecy sent to Acrisius, that his wife's son will grow up to kill him, the exact double of the prophecy revealed to Laius in the story of Oedipus.

Throughout the new Clash of the Titans, Io is cast in a maternal role, saying to Perseus, "I've watched over you for a long time now. I've always been there." So when, at the end of the film, after Perseus has slain Acrisius and been reunited with Zeus (his 'real' father), his final coupling with Io (despite her onscreen death several sequences earlier), must be seen as the ultimate completion of the film's somewhat contorted Oedipal triangle. The order of things is thus restored and Io, the only character in the film (barring perhaps the gorgon, Medusa) to do anything other than get raped, sacrifice herself or get saved, is safely re-domesticated.

"Like a wind-up toy, you stutter at my feet" : Towards an Aesthetics of Stammering

The Shows of London is a small reading group, based out of the King's College English department and interested primarily in the "entertainment and display cultures of nineteenth century London." Last week saw them mounting a half-day symposium in the King's old anatomy museum under the heading 'Stutter London'. London, it seems, has always stuttered, always been noted for its sounds and its machinic rhythms, and this brief conference set out to explore the stammering, spluttering sounds of the city as circulation and disturbance, synaesthesia and unrest. Can we speak of a radical stuttering whilst simultaneously maintaing due sensitivity to those for whom a stammer is a serious impediment?

Sara Thornton, in a presentation on Dickens's Bleak House, evokes Deleuze's paper, 'He Stuttered' in which the stammer is enlisted in the schizoanalytic opposition of the smooth and the striated, and for which, "Style is to stutter in one's own language." She opposes the smooth, oily discourse of Chadband to the ellipses and aporias of Krook, exploiting the potential for innuendo behind stuttering's pathological designation as a 'struggle behaviour'. Louise Lee, however, notes that Charles Kingsley, author of the Water Babies and Westward Ho!, was crippled by a paralysing fear of new and unfamiliar situations as a result of his speech impediment, suggesting that stuttering is perhaps just as likely to be an agent of conservatism as unrest. Kingsley went to great lengths to try and cure his stammer, frequenting the very same Harley Street specialist as another famous British stutterer, Lewis Carroll.

From my own perspective, the most fruitful of the day's interventions were those that drew the notion of stuttering out of the context of the Victorian novel and into the art forms of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus explored the cinematic genre of the 'city symphony' from Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures to Jean Vigo's A propos de Nice, via Ruttman, Vertov and Joris Ivens. The city symphonies of the late twenties sought to project a kind of isomorphism from the urban rhythms of their chosen city to the rhythms of film and montage. As each of the films under consideration were silent, their status as symphonies must be understood as figurative, synaesthetic (Germaine Dulac dubbed Ivens, "One of the visual musicians of the future," and in general it seems to be one of the ironies of history that film-makers tended to forget the close family relationship between music and film at the very moment the cinema becomes sonorised).

As 'symphonic' cinema, it is striking that such city films offer rare examples, for which they were highly praised by Ezra Pound, of a kind of object-oriented cinema (elements of which are taken up later, in very different ways, by Ozu and Tati). It is clear that the only protagonist of such films is the city itself, in which any human subjects are merely subsumed, participants in a rhythm which is not their own. In Ivens's Regen, set, though not obviously so, in Amsterdam, the city, as Marcus pointed out, "knows it is raining." We see the first raindrops strike the canal before we see a man's upturned palm, testing the air for precipitants.

Though containing as much as four months worth of footage, the narrative time span of such films tended to be compressed, in the edit suite, down to the passage of a day. In this respect, we might see them, as was pointed out by a question from the audience, as heirs to the late nineteenth century fondness for using stage lighting effects to recreate the sensations of dawn and dusk, common to Puccini and French realist opera. In other respects, the musical antecedents of Ruttman and Cavalcanti are not opera composers, but the Zukunftsmusikers around Franz Liszt whose programmatic symphonic poems would be the source of Liszt's break with Wagner in the late 1850's.

Following Laura Marcus's presentation, came Tom Fogg's exploration of the craze for 'stutter edit' and similar sounds in what he insisted on describing with the rather unfortunate American term, IDM. Ever since Karlheinz Stockhausen offered his 'Advice to Clever Children' in which, at the prompting of Radio 3's Dick Witts, he compared the repetitive beats of the Aphex Twin to being, "like someone who is stuttering all the time, and can't get words out of his mouth," electronic beats have stammered with an infectious aphasic arrhythmia. The use of the stutter edit in works by Matmos or Caribou, has a kind of anthropomorphic effect on the computer, claims Fogg, while insisting that, perhaps more than any other instrument, the computer was "always already anthropomorphic."

Fogg's paper restricts its attention to the use of specific stuttering software plug-ins in recent computer-based music, his conclusion that stuttering is then a consequence of spread of home computers and their domestification, is thus largely tautological. But what would a general theory of musical stuttering look like? One that would have to go way beyond the rhizomatic glitch techno of the Mille Plateaux label (and their various imitators, discussed by Fogg), to take in Steve 'Silk' Hurley's 'Jack Your Body', Paul Hardcastle's 'Nineteen', the "uh uh uh" of Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman', the voice phasing of Steve Reich's 'Come Out' and 'It's Gonna Rain', even the repeated staccato quavers tht comprise the colloratura of the Queen of the Night's "Der Hölle Rache" aria in The Magic Flute. Indeed, just think how commonly Italian opera singing (perhaps most obviously in Rossini) is characterised by precisely the repetitions, unnatural prolongations, and curiously placed (from a linguistic point of view) cessations that comprise Wikipedia's definition of stammering. And that is just to speak of the most obvious vocal stutterings, whereas Fogg has already shown the possibility of expanding the term to an anthropomorphic description of instrumental and machine-made sounds.

If any piece of music were to, "Der Hölle Rache", one of the most venomous, but also one of the most beautiful, and certainly one of the most difficult to sing arias in all opera, right at the very top of a soprano's range, sits well with Deleuze's notion of a language "so strained that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer ... then language in its entirety reaches the limit that marks its outside and makes it confront silence." But perhaps Fogg is a little overhasty in dismissing the possibility of a psychoanalysis of sonic stammering. In 'O Superman', in 'Nineteen', even in Matmos's A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, don't we find precisely this re-mergence, this return of the repressed - as in the young Freud of his early Studies on Hysteria (co-authored with Josef Breuer), stuttering as hysterical symptom, "effects and residues of excitations which have acted upon the nervous system as traumas." The stammer marks the horror of the past, a nervousness towards the future, and the block of the unsayable.

All images taken from last summer's 'Stutter' exhibition at the Tate Modern.

"God is opening his doors for a moment, and his orchestra is playing the fifth symphony." (Sibelius, letter to a friend, 1914)

Despite the presence of British composers David Bedford and Andrew Poppy contributing arrangements to Strawberry Switchblade's one and only (eponymous) album, it was apparently producer David Motion who lifted the horn motif from the finale of Sibelius's fifth symphony for the intro to 'Since Yesterday' (unbeknownst to Jill Bryson and Rose McDowell: "It's only afterwards we had to ask, 'Who's Sibelius then?'" Of course, it remains possible that Motion himself didn't know the source and simply took it from the end of The First Class hit 'Beach Baby' from ten years earlier).

It would seem that the theme in question was inspired by the sight, on the 16th of April, 1915, of sixteen swans taking flight ("God, what beauty!" He wrote in his diary, "They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a silver ribbon."). Deleuzians should, no doubt, appreciate that this refrain - whose 'adventure' has taken it from the fifth symphony of the world's most popular composer (in the 1930's), through the power pop of the 1970's, the New Pop of the early 80's, and finally the dance pop of Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the chorus to Sinitta's (1988) hit, 'I Don't Believe in Miracles' - was inspired initially by a (quite literal) line of flight.

The fifth symphony came at something of a turning point in Sibelius's career, following the avant-gardist dissonance of fourth symphony with its heavy reliance on the interval of an augmented fourth, or tritone (known in Bach's time as "the devil in music"). It is perhaps interesting to note that the 'modernist' fourth symphony was composed during a rare period of sobriety in the life of Siblelius, after being hospitalised for alcoholism in 1908. By the time work was afoot on the fifth, Sibelius was merrily off the wagon again and reverted to classical tonality, believing only "madness or chaos" to lie beyond the tentative chromaticism of the fourth.

It was perhaps inevitable that to renege on the modernist deal in such a way, stepping back from the brink just as Schoenberg was boldly stepping over it, would earn Sibelius his detractors. The world's most popular composer he may well have been in the 1930's, but a book Bengt von Torme's 1937 Sibelius: A Close Up) that claimed he was a greater composer than Mahler or Schoenberg would pique the anger of one of dissonance's greatest standard bearers, Theodor Adorno. 

Sibelius, wrote Adorno in a 'marginal note' published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung of 1938, was a mere 'scribbler', "If Sibelius is to be considered a good composer, then we shall have to disregard all of the criteria historically used to evaluate music from Bach to Schoenberg." Sibelius's pastoralism (inevitably, Adorno believed, a symptom of German Blut and Boden propaganda), his acceptance of the Goethe medal from Adolf Hitler in 1935, made him not just a bad composer, but a Nazi composer. But Sibelius, it would seem, was somewhat in the habit of accepting garlands without too much concern over their origin. A fault, to be sure, but perhaps one more personal than political. 

In his diaries of 1943, he explicitly condemned the "stupid prejudices" of Nazism as "utter hogwash" even as he relieved himself, as a "cultural aristocrat", of the necessity of fighting against them - only a year after this same vanity had led him to accept the foundation in Germany of a Sibelius Society (Finland and Germany were, at the time, allies in war against the Soviet Union and the Society was most likely a diplomatic request from the Finnish foreign ministry). If, then, Adorno's political argument against Sibelius is somewhat tendentious, his musicological attack relies, according to semiotician Eero Tarasti, on the "colonialist discourse" of a more or less explicit assumption of German musical superiority.

If Adorno's attacks may have largely banished Sibelius from the corridors of academic musicology, possibly even contributing to the self-doubt that prevented him from completing, or leaving any traces of, his eight symphony, and led to the silence of his later years, they could do little to tarnish his iconic status in his native Finland. Though Tarasti sees the birth of the "Sibelius cult" in Finland as early as the first performance of the Kullervo symphony in 1892, still all his references date significantly from after the publication of the fifth symphony. Completed only very shortly after the declaration of Finnish independence, it was at the very first performance that composer Robert Kajanus claimed, here Sibelius had created a distinctively Finnish style of composition, "The little that had seen the light of day before that was only a feeble offshoot of the German school containing – if I may use the expression – ethnographically inoculated material from Finnish folk music."

Sibelius's fifth symphony remains a curiously contradictory beast: a retreat from the modern whose theme would haunt popular music more than half a century after its composition, appropriated first as a hymn to the soil, and unofficial national anthem, and later, by the BBC, as the music to accompany the first images of the Apollo moon landings. "Is the bird's refrain necessarily territorial," ask Deleuze and Guattari, "or is it not already used for very subtle deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight?" The co-called 'swan' theme from Sibelius's fifth symphony seems to illustrate perfectly this seemingly paradoxical movement of the refrain. As we listen to each of the four incarnations of the melody in order (Sibelius - The First Class - Strawberry Switchblade - Sinitta), we can hear not just the stripping away of the musical context, but the gradual whittling away of its tone colour, the richness of the sound, up until its final reduction to the tinny synth part in the chorus to 'I Don't Believe in Miracles'. Music, "lays hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few notes ... no origin or end in sight . . . " 

Messiaen and Ancient Science Fiction

After that last post, I received the following email:

"But there was one modern composer for whom the natural world never lost its innocence."

No matter how original a composer Messiaen may have been, his attitude to music, as his pupil Pierre Boulez pointed out, was quite apart from the radical modernists in Vienna and elsewhere. He always retained a deep attachment to certain aspects of tradition, of which certain references to nature in his work were a symptom. It may be telling that he largely abandons this imagery during what Boulez calls his 'utopian years', after the encounter with Darmstadt. However, I am not sure if it is this traditionalism that is at work in his use of birdsong. For Messiaen sees birds less as a natural force than as fellow composers. Even more than that, birds are for Messiaen, as Deleuze and Guattari might say, a line of flight, not drawing him down and attaching him to the earth, but soaring up and away from it. His music contains a becoming-animal, in the process of which the birds themselves become something else too. Birds for Messiaen are like the Tuareg for Delia Derbyshire, rockets for Joe Meek: a means of escape from the earth and the ground. In one of the clips above he even describes a certain bird's noises as "slow, distant, lunar sounds. Like he's from another planet." 

At a recent lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Catherine Hezser developed a theory of ancient science fiction. Based on Biblical, rabbinical, and other Graeco-Roman texts concerning people being spoken to by extra-terrestrial visitors and lifted up above the earth, such imaginary voyages, Hezser claimed, are invariably connected with some kind of vision of Utopia. Like Alexander, Messiaen has been lifted to the Heavens by a flock of birds, in order that he may look down upon the earth and see it all as one, synthesizing all of its diverse sounds into his own unique musical language.