On having artistic relationships
Since I started my Substack last week barely an hour has gone by without me having some new idea of what I could write about. Rights issues! Film festival Q&As with filmmakers! Classical narration vs. modernist narration! Film watching/writing in a time of crisis! I might write about them all, at some point or another. But right this minute I want to write about having relationships with the artists. I don’t mean private/personal relationships but finding writers or filmmakers or painters or musicians or photographers with which you feel some kind of special connection, so that they become a part of your life, even though you might never have met them or they might be long dead, and you feel compelled to see/read/listen to everything they have made. It’s not only that you like and admire their art, but it’s something else, something more abstract and deeper. That’s why I call it a relationship. Maybe it’s similar to how football fans feel about their favourite team, a love which is often unrelated to their team’s skills or successes on the field. Maybe everybody, at least when you’ve got a certain level of leisure time that makes it possible to engage at all with art, have such relationships. This is a personal topic, esoteric even, I’m slightly embarrassed to write about it because it’s so personal, but it’s very meaningful and important to me.
Next to me when writing this is for example a shelf with books by Haruki Murakami. He’s someone I have that kind of relationship with. I’ve read most of what he’s written, both fiction and non-fiction, and I need the books close to me. Knowing that they’re there, within immediate reach, gives me a sense of joy and comfort. I bought, and read, my first Murakami books in, suitably, Japan. I vividly remember the visit to the bookstore where a young woman who barely spoke any English tried to help me find his books. The first I read was Sputnik Sweetheart, which is also when I had my first weird Murakami moment. I was sitting on the metro in Tokyo, reading the book, as the train came into a station. When I looked up and saw the name of the station I noticed that it was the exact same station that the character in the book had just gotten off at. It was spooky. It made the reading experience much deeper. Later, I read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running while I was a regular runner, and I would come back from a run, take a hot bath, and read a chapter or two in the bathtub. After Dark I would read in bed at night, and would have the satisfaction of looking at the red flickering digits on the clock radio to see that it was 04:20 or something like it, the same hour as it was in the book. I don’t think I’ve had that kind of immersive experience with any other writer.
I won’t mention all those with whom I have, or have had, such a relationship, but I’m going to mention some filmmakers. The biggest and most important filmmaker for me when it comes to this relationship angle is Howard Hawks. For as long as I’ve been into film, Hawks has been like a close friend, even though I was very disappointed with Rio Bravo (1959) the first time I saw it. Now I love it as one should, but it was clear from the very beginning that I had a unique response to Hawks’s films, and his world, and that I wanted to be part of it, and therefore returned to the films on a regular basis. If I could choose a film in which I would like to live it would be Hatari! (1962). And it’s not only the films but the interviews as well. Reading them is not that different from watching the films because it’s the same voice in them, the films are as much Hawks as the interviews are, and they’re equally satisfying.
Another with whom I have such a strong connection is François Truffaut. I wouldn’t necessarily want to live inside a Truffaut film, well, maybe Day for Night (1973), but I want to hang out with him as much as I can, and the way to do it is to watch the films and read the interviews. He died, rather young, a few years before I discovered his films, and I was genuinely sad about this, as it felt like I would’ve had a chance to meet him had he lived to a more average age.
My relationship with Hawks and Truffaut goes back to the beginning of my days as a cineaste, but a third, Henry Hathaway, is a more recent discovery, only some ten years or so ago. Almost immediately after having watched Diplomatic Courier (1952), I knew that I would not be able to let go, and it became a quest to track down every film Hathaway had made, to watch and rewatch, to live in that world. I’ve seen almost all of the films, there are only a couple of his early B-westerns from 1932/1933 I haven’t been able to track down, but someday I might. There isn’t as much in terms of interviews with him as there are with Hawks and Truffaut, but I treasure the ones I’ve got my hands on.
What I’m trying to say here is that it isn’t just the films, but it’s the connection I feel to those three filmmakers, a connection through their films, and interviews with them and books about them, (I also like to listen to the music from the films, a lot of which is available on Spotify) and how this is different from how I feel towards most other filmmakers. Take as an example this scene from Hathaway’s Nevada Smith (1966) between Steve McQueen and Brian Keith. I love it, and one reason I love it so much is because I feel that this is Hathaway showing his relationship with McQueen. Hathaway’s presence in it is strong, and I like that presence. If I were a lost young man, adrift and alone, like McQueen’s character, I would also like to be rescued and straightened out by Keith’s character, i.e. by Hathaway. It’s a comforting feeling.
It doesn’t mean that I think those three are the three greatest filmmakers of all. There are several I rate as high, or, compared with Hathaway, higher, such as Yasujiro Ozu or Anthony Mann or Claire Denis or Satyajit Ray or F.W. Murnau, but without feeling the same kind of personal attachment to them and their work. I don’t have the same feelings for Ingmar Bergman or Hasse Ekman either, despite having a more intimate knowledge about them. I have for one thing read an alarming amount of Bergman’s personal letters, but hanging out with him is not something I’d like to do.
There are also a few filmmakers active today with which I feel this special connection, such as Nicole Holofcener and Michael Mann. This started, like it did with Hawks and Truffaut, in the 1990s. With Holofcener it was when watching Walking and Talking (1996) at home on a VHS-tape, and with Mann it was watching Last of the Mohicans (1992) followed by, and deeply enhanced by, Heat (1995) in the cinema. Another one is Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Two of them have new films coming out. You Hurt My Feelings is the title of Holofcener’s, which seems to be in post-production, as is Mann’s Ferrari. Hou has kept himself busy producing, but he hasn’t directed a film since 2015, the beautiful The Assassin. I hope he will direct again; I miss him.
I don’t understand this phenomenon. Is it some kind of chemistry to use a common cliche? We’ve just clicked, just as it is with many relationships between friends and lovers, although there it’s from both parts and not one-sided? But it’s clear that it’s connected to discoveries I made in the mid-90s. A similar thing happened then with music, such as Nina Persson and The Cardigans, or Oasis. (The odd one out here is Hathaway, whom I discovered much later.) The 90s is also when I began falling in love with girls for real, and not just fleeting temporary crushes like before. It’s also when I moved away from my parents and lived alone for the first time, when I began studying at university, and when I began travelling abroad on my own. I think this is all connected. These were years of tremendous changes in my life, a lot of that on my own, and these filmmakers gave me strength, comfort, and companionship, beyond making great art.