Manafonistas

on life, music etc beyond mainstream

2017 15 Jul

The weight of a hummingbird

von: Martina Weber Filed under: Blog | TB | 1 Comment

When exactly does it start? I can hear children´s voices and a melancholy instrumental theme music, but the picture seems to be part of the announcement, not part of the film itself. Then: pure black screen for three seconds. This is longer than usual, longer than expected before a film. Is it the first scene? Or is it the last?

A motel room, at morning, it´s bright outside. The woman is nearly naked, still sleeping. The man is sitting next to her, on her bedside, in a way he seems to be absent. Before I can even think about their relationship the scene is cut up. It´s not really like lovers look like the morning after.

 

[Sound of leaf blower]

 

And this happened in the 1950s in the Beat Hotel in Paris and had an enormous impact on literature, music and this film I´m not really talking about: Brian Gysin wanted to do some drawings and he began to mask the hotel´s table with an old newspaper. So he cut through the newspaper and when he looked at the newspaper he realigned the pages off type and he could see the words made a kind of sense, which almost seemed telepathic.

 

[Hissing light bulb]

 

„Als Paradigma für einen Film mit rhizomatischer Erzählstruktur kann 21 Grams (2003) gelten. Die drei ineinander verflochtenen Handlungsstränge entwickeln sich in nicht-linearer Weise. Teils wird in der Zeit zurückgesprungen, teils vorwärts; auch wreden bereits erzählte Ereignisse erneut aufgegriffen, was teilweise mit einem Wechsel des narrativen Focus verbunden ist. Die Erzählsegmente scheinen von einer umfassenden Erzählung losgelöst. Deren lockere Verknüpfung hingegen erweckt den Anschein, dass sie nicht gänzlich losgelöst, sondern Teil eines Gesamtgefüges sind. Dieses lässt sich in seiner regellosen Vernetzung einzig unter dem Begriff des Rhizoms fassen.“

(Anthrin Steinke: Aspekte postmodernen Erzählens im amerikanischen Film der Gegenwart, S. 69, Fußnote 288)

 

As far as „21 grams“ is concerned, after 30 minutes first connections between the fragments appear.

 

 “I wanted to explore the emotional order of the events, not the chronical order of the facts.”

(González Iñárritus, filmmaker “21 grams”)

 

“Ganz anders das Rhizom. Es ist Karte und nicht Kopie. (…) Die Karte reproduziert nicht ein in sich geschlossenes Unbewusstes, sondern konstruiert es.”

(Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Rhizom, Merve Verlag, 1976, S. 21)

 

Am 11. März 1907 berichtete die New York Times von dem Arzt Duncan MacDougall  aus Haverhill, Massachusetts, der in einem wissenschaftlichen Experiment das Gewicht der Seele auf 21 Gramm bestimmte. MacDougall hatte ein Bett an einem Gestell aufgehängt und daran eine Präzisionswaage befestigt. Die erste Versuchsperson zeigte im Moment des Todes einen Gewichtsverlust von 21 Gramm.

I won´t load up a picture I took from the film and put it at the end of this post. Indeed I take less and less pictures and I took only one picture and I pressed the remote control´s still-button to take it. It´s an empty outdoor swimming pool with building-waste, parts of which covered by a black plastic sheet. There´s a car´s wheel, too. Maybe you can find those pools nearby lonely motels.

21 grams, it´s the weight of a hummingbird. The weight of a stack of five nickels.

This entry was posted on Samstag, 15. Juli 2017 and is filed under "Blog". You can follow any responses to this entry with RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 Comment

  1. Michael Engelbrecht:

     
    HUMMINGBIRD (Wilco / Jeff Tweedy)
     
    His goal in life was to be an echo
    Riding alone, town after town, toll after toll
    A fixed bayonet through the great southwest to forget her

    She appears in his dreams
    But in his car and in his arms
    A dream can mean anything
    A cheap sunset on a television set can upset her
    But he never could

    Remember to remember me
    Standing still in your past
    Floating fast like a hummingbird

    His goal in life was to be an echo
    The type of sound that floats around and then back down
    Like a feather
    But in the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans
    No one could hear him
    Or anything

    So he slept on a mountain
    In a sleeping bag underneath the stars
    He would lie awake and count them
    And the gray fountain spray of the great Milky Way
    Would never let him
    Die alone

    Remember to remember me
    Standing still in your past
    Floating fast like a hummingbird

    Remember to remember me
    Standing still in your past
    Floating fast like a hummingbird

    A hummingbird
    A hummingbird
     


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