Councillor Macklin stated that we had to think about the future, what the next steps were.

He stated that we needed experts; we needed to listen, engage and act. We had to look at what we had done and if we had not done things well, we should tackle the reasons behind it. If we were dissatisfied we had to explore the right solutions. We had to work together with people, listen to them and create regeneration. We had to be certain that what we were doing was right, therefore our residents were encouraged to tell us how they wanted us to help them.

Something of a busman’s holiday, this. But I think this might be my favourite astronomy pic ever.

Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance.

How to be the real thing. But which rogue would pay the fee?

“It’s said that in the beginning was the word, but for me the beginning is always an image.”

The FT recites the commonplace observation that curvaceous, minimalist 1960s commercial designs look “space-age”, as if inspired by 1960s SF films, principally 2001: A Space Odyssey:

which might indeed stand comparison with, say, Maurice Calka’s PDG Desk:

The writer, Josh Sims, says there’s a similar “stripped back, wipe-down, germ-free” vision of the future in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. I think he might want to refresh his memory of this film:

But more generally I think he’s missing the point I made rather eloquently in my last post. Isn’t it more likely that, rather than furniture designers looking at film designers, they were all looking at the slightly older generation of modernist sculptors?

Barbara Hepworth, unknown and Icon (1957); Discovery One spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Barbara Hepworth, Oval Sculpture (No. 2) (1943); EVA pod from 2001; Barbara Hepworth, Spring (1966); Death Star from Star Wars (1977).

When I wrote about the pernicious fascination of images and the Islamic suspicion of them and how that might perhaps have influenced some Iranian films, I hadn’t been to see Shirin: a whole film that rests on denying the image. Not to say that there isn’t plenty of eye candy in all that raven hair, shining, almond eyes, chiselled cheekbones etc, not to say that watching emotions ruffle beautifully lit faces of any kind isn’t fascinating, but there’s no forgetting that we’re watching a film that is about not watching a film; if you want to really engage your imagination, the audience of which you are part is in the position of the screened film that the screened audience in the film you are watching is watching. The complications don’t stop there. The film whose place in space you share never existed except in your actualization of that place, behind your eyes and the eyes of other audience members like you, because the women on the screen were, reportedly, actors sitting in Abbas Kiarostami’s living room looking at dots above the camera, and the narrative they are apparently following so avidly was chosen afterwards. It goes to show what a great thing Lev Kuleshov’s editing experiment was. I wonder if Kiarostami was also thinking of Salaam Cinema, made by his intriguing counterpart Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a film made of filmed auditions for a film that turns out to be the film we’re watching, in which the director is shown insisting that his would-be movie stars must be able to cry on demand. Makhmalbaf is already implicated in Kiarostami’s hall of empty mirrors in Close-up, about which it would be wrong to give too much away, except to say that it features an impostor and their impostee both playing themselves.

The comparison with Andy Warhol’s Blow Job

– what’s really going on down there? Does it matter? – and Screen Tests might be obvious, but I’m going to make it anyway: we just love looking at other people, that’s what nearly all paintings and photographs and films are for, and if you take away the frame of context and narrative we expect in a film, we still love it. On that subject, if you ever ever get a chance to see Tim Etchells performing Down Time, do. I wonder how he would now remember what he was thinking.

Imagine someone pays for you to go to the Antarctic and make a documentary. Dramatic, beautiful vistas, as pure as the mathematics of air flow and crystallization, which your viewers won’t have seen for themselves. Extraordinary cold. Cliffs of ice. Danger. Explorers enduring unimaginable hardship in the name of science. Penguins. What a nightmare. Where could you possibly start? How could you avoid all the above clichés without ignoring everything that is recognizably Antarctic?

By force of character. That, at least, seems to be Werner Herzog’s method, except insofar it seems to me that every recent film of his could be subtitled In Search of Another Klaus Kinski. At the beginning of Encounters at the End of the World he tells us he’s not interested in penguins but in the dreams of the people there, and in man’s relationship with other species. He shows us a painting of a chimpanzee on goatback contemplating a ride across Monument Valley. His first interview is with the man who drives the huge bus that runs from the airstrip where he lands to the filthy, shattered landscape of McMurdo Station. He gets to the penguins eventually, by way of an awkward and taciturn penguin expert: a question about penguin insanity leads to a bleakly hilarious contemplation of penguins that inexplicably turn their backs on the sea and march alone directly for the dead heart of the continent.

It helps that Herzog is friends with Henry Kaiser, who is both an avant-garde guitarist and a research diver, who supplies him with footage of diving under ice that almost had me dribbling with wonder – it’s also used to stand in for an alien planet in Herzog’s science fiction confection The Wild Blue Yonder. And his main cameraman, Peter Zeitlinger, manages to get astonishing footage while evidently crawling on elbows and knees through narrow gaps inside hollow ice formations that have condensed around vents leaking hot gases from the highly active volcano Mount Erebus. “It is safe to go inside,” Herzog informs us, “as long as it is not one of those containing poisonous gases.” Zeitlinger doesn’t try, though, to repeat the attempt, shown on archive film, to go down to the magma lake inside Erebus’ crater on ropes.

We do get dreams, and a whole lot of misfits that Herzog presents for us, though not always politely; he doesn’t try to hide either his delight or his annoyance with the personalities he encounters. And along the way we also get the stunning landscapes, etc etc, but by way of saying something far less definite and more profound than you find in any other Antarctic film you’re likely to see, let alone in the countless sci-art projects that have been turned out in recent years by writers and artists on a polar jolly.

Idriss, a teenage goatherd in the Sahara, encounters two French people in a Land Rover. One, a young woman with blond hair and bare legs, takes his picture. She is taken aback to find that Idriss knows enough French to ask for the photo. She promises to send it once she gets back to Paris and has it developed. No photo arrives. But at a wedding party, he has a revelation:

Before the house of Mohammed ben Souhil, the musicians had formed a semicircle lit strongly and capriciously by torches. The music became furious, rose from moment to moment, transmitted an unbearable fever to the immobile bodies of the spectators. The rhythm grew in intensity for a purpose clear to all: to force dance to emerge, to effect the metamorphosis of the whole group of musicians into a single dance. And the birth took place: a black woman, dressed in red veils and silver jewellery, sprang up in the middle of the open space. Zett Zobeida only performed at the high point of the party, for she was its soul and flame. First she ran bent forward in rapid steps at the edge of the circle that was hers, as if to assure herself of her domain. Then she described a suite of figures that became more and more taut. It was clear: she was gathering all the music spread out in her space, she was putting together like an invisible harvest all the dance that was scattered around her. From then on the crowd danced with her, and each person repeated a haunting, enigmatic litany:

The dragonfly quivers on the water

The cricket squeaks on the rock

The dragonfly quivers and sings no speech

The cricket squeaks and says no word

But the wing of the dragonfly is a wordplay

But the wing of the cricket is a script

And this wordplay foils the trick of death

And this script unveils the secret of life.

Zett Zobeida was now moving in very small steps, closely surrounded by the musicians. Soon her feet moved on the spot, for the dance had completely entered her body. And of this body there appeared between the bottom of her bodice and the top of her dress no more than a hand’s width of shining black nudity. In the middle of this veiled statue, only this stomach danced, animated by an autonomous and intensely expressive life. It was the lipless mouth of all this body, the part of all this body that spoke, smiled, grimaced and sang:

The dragonfly words the trick of death

The cricket writes the secret of life.

From then on the dance of Zett Zobeida was the ballet of a hundred pieces of ringing jewellery. Hands of Fatima and crescent moons, gazelle hoofs and mother-of-pearl shells, coral necklaces and an amber bracelet, amulets, stars and pomegranates leading their dance in a great jingling confab. But what held Idriss’ gaze above all was, turning around a leather lace, a drop of gold of admirable lustre and outline. One cannot imagine an object of simpler and more concise perfection. Everything seems contained in this oval, slightly swelling at the base. Everything seems expressed in the silence of this lone bubble that has hit no other piece of jewellery in its slight swings. In contrast to pendants that imitate the sky, the land, the animals of the desert and the fish of the sea, the gilded bubble means nothing but itself. It is the pure sign, the absolute form.

That Zett Zobeida and her drop of gold were the expression of a world without images, the antithesis of and perhaps the antidote to the platinum woman with the camera, was something that Idriss began perhaps that evening to suspect.

The next day, Zett Zobeida and the musicians have vanished before Idriss is awake. But he find the drop of gold in the sand where she was dancing. And he decides that he doesn’t want to get married and stay in his village for the rest of his life. He will go to France and find the woman with the camera and get his photograph. In the first town on the way north to the coast, he finds in the Museum of the Sahara a replica of a typical desert dwelling and recognises the very kitchen implements he had seen his mother using the day before. His journey towards Paris takes him deeper and deeper into the world of images, of mediation. He finds it hard to recognise the person in his passport photo. A half-crazed old woman tries to persuade him to take the place – and name – of her dead son. A blonde French prostitute takes his drop of gold in payment. After many adventures and parables involving kings and queens, painters and weavers, mannequins, film-making and live sex shows, he takes up calligraphy, the Islamic disavowal of the image, the power of the word.

I don’t know what to make of this as a novel – partly because my French isn’t good enough to appreciate it properly – but this idea of the image as the opium of the West, of the Western addiction to images, keeps coming back to me. I’ve always been partial to a bit of eye candy, but I’ve also known that images offer too easily drama, beauty, intrigue; grab the eye and you’ve grabbed the mind, but with what? And the promise of knowledge, of possession that they offer too; the lie of snapping four dimensions into two and pretending there’s no difference; the gambits of mediation that we learn long before our ABC; and so On Photography.

So is it a coincidence that an Islamic culture produces the aesthetically restrained films of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, which seem to take place largely in the head of the viewer? Perhaps I’m growing up.

The novel is called La goutte d’or by Michel Tournier. The title has been translated as The Golden Droplet, and although the drop of gold in question is also referred to in the text as a “gilded bubble” or “balloon”, it seems to have nothing to do with the Gilded Balloon. I guess it’s no coincidence that there’s a district in Paris called Goutte d’Or, named after the white wine vineyards that used to be there, which houses a lot of immigrants from North Africa.