More to distract oneself, than anything else, I started to watch the series ‘Ripley’ - Steven Zaillian’s panoramic stylized, artistic adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith masterpiece. Andrew Scott has a tall order before him, walking in Matt Damon’s shoes (Anthony Minghella’s eponymous iconic 1999 adaptation is always the first mental image that comes to mind when referring to the literary work). But the new series is a universe in itself - a chimeric animal, unfolding slowly with the quiet persistence of the character Kaonashi, or ‘No-Face’, from Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away’. (possible spoilers ahead).
I invoke Kaonashi with reason. For those who have not watched it, a quick, inadequate summary of Spirited Away: This is one of Studio Ghibli’s (and Miyazaki’s) most celebrated animated productions - an allegorical tale set in a fantastical universe slipping between realism, myth, magic, folklore, and the supernatural. The narrative has an insidious subtext of themes such as traditional Japanese culture interacting with western consumerism, power, labour, human relationships and the environment. The spirit Kaonashi, based on the Japanese figure of the Noppera-bō (a faceless human-like creature from Japanes folklore and literature) moves noiselessly through the surreal landscape, in a semi-transparent black haze with varying degrees of opacity. He communicates in occasional hoarse grunts and moans, and is the visual personification of “lingering”. Referred to as “No-face” in most Hollywood contexts, he is a lonely silhouette that feeds on emotion - a metaphor for emptiness, perhaps, and pathetic fallacy?
The slow, brooding chiaroscuro of the lingering camera in Zaillian’s Ripley - more stealth than bravado - reminded me of the creature. The narrative, set mostly in Italy of the 1960s is painted in varying swathes of black, white and deafening gray. Each sequence is glazed with marble and stone. Greek gods and otherworldly creatures give character to the epic landscape that is a lonely person skulking at cliff edges, and frothing beaches. The camera is lazy, but insistent, circling with purpose, over cities of steep stairways, stone pathways, Baroque gorgons, and vacant rooms whose curtains curl sideways to reveal open windows with views into an endless teal sea.
As space acquires character, Caravaggio becomes a visual motif that runs through most of the story. Ripley is, among other things, a psychological study of a sociopath, a tale of identity theft, violence, murder, with homoerotic undertones. Carravagio’s art, and explosive, erratic biography become a backdrop for the protagonist’s emotional landscape and his cold, conniving schemes. Biblical paintings, and their stories, emerge, like angry Rorschachs, moody micro-epiphanies of the protagonist’s fluid mind, in light-cut black-and-white.
I cite from Shannon Connellan’s piece on the Caravaggio references in Ripley:
“Here's what London's National Gallery has to say about Caravaggio's...attitude:
According to one of his biographers: ''after a fortnight's work he will swagger about for a month or two with his sword at his side and with a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or argument, with the result that it is most awkward to get along with him''. (The sword was illegal — as with guns today, one had to have licence to carry arms.) Caravaggio was arrested repeatedly for, among other things, slashing the cloak of an adversary, throwing a plate of artichokes at a waiter, scarring a guard, and abusing the police.”
Some startling shots in black-and-white, of his paintings irrupt into the visual plot, embedded in their original environs - an empty, ornate church, say, with no soul there but a lone priest in black habit. These open up a space of liminal engagement, an interstitial tunnel through time and space, creating a resonance that drums softly in the endless expanses of the frames, a long slow echo that outlines some primordial drives of the human condition.
I share a couple of such moment below.
Laggard whales of feeling, affective sweeps that rasp under the surface, miasmas of stewing guilt, steely gestures of insensitivity, expressions devoid of empathy, moments gibbous with sensation, but starved of action: these are the whispers that conjure up character in the haunting frame.
While Highsmith doesn’t refer to Caravaggio in her books, Zaillian redraws the character in this image, and the landscape. It is as if the camera is dipped in the violent ink that Carravagio flayed his canvas with. Frames are ripped with the blood of Chiaruscuoro, and doused in the shadowy aesthetic of tenenbrism (from the Italian tenebroso, meaning darkened and obscured). I felt myself drowning in the mind of the calculating con artist, oscillating between his narcissism and the visceral pathos of the parables (reinterpreted through the lens of his own life, and now Ripley’s).
I was compelled to write. The pen pulling my heart like a needle without an eye. But the mind is a difficult thing - it always springs memory before creation. This is how i remembered a poem I had read about Caravaggio.
Writing into art is a poetic genre that is closest to my heart, and it requires a whole other post; I mean poems that reference, or are inspired, by visual art, even film. Ekphrastic poetry is a subset of this form. But before I share the poem, I share a couple more of Caravaggio’s paintings:
The Supper at Emmaus is a significant Baroque painting, animating in stark relief, the moment “when the resurrected but incognito Jesus reveals himself to two of his disciples… in the town of Emmaus, only to soon vanish from their sight”.
It is a moment of recognition, a kind of startle. A self-portrait of the painter serves as the figure in the top-left. Caravaggio often used his own appearance as a reference for his paintings. One of the most striking examples is his use of his own face for both David and Goliath in the painting David with the Head of Goliath. This is how Zaillan uses this in the film - Ripley visits the Galleria Borghes in Rome, and overhears a tour guide describe the last year of Caravaggio’s life and its relationship with the story the painting depicts:
“During this time, perhaps the last year of his life in 1610, he painted his David with the head of Goliath. In the painting, Caravaggio links the killer and his victim, by portraying David as compassionate, even loving, in the way he gazes at the severed head of Goliath. And he made this bond even stronger, by using himself as model for both. Both are Caravaggio’s face. Young, and old.”
This strange interweaving of character, art, plot and action, is the fertile breeding ground for drama in the series. I find, that it becomes a vivid background for Pamela Harrison’s So, Caravaggio.
The poet wrestles with the unsayable, the filmmaker with the unsaid, but the artist negotiates with what is felt, what has no language, but is glimpsed briefly in sensation. What is concept without words, feeling without utterance, eh?
It is, as Harrison says, “a narrow arc of light”. See how language fills the stanza of the description (light fills a room slowly), murmurring towards the volta, that raw fission of feeling, brought alive, not in effulgence, but an absence of light - ‘the bounding dark’.
I hope you are finding the space to write, to dream, and to resist.
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