Seeing Further E-Book

Esther Kinsky

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 249

Beschreibung

While travelling through the Great Alföld, the vast plain in south-eastern Hungary, Esther Kinsky stops in a small town near the Romanian border. Like many other things, the cinema, 'mozi' in Hungarian, has long since closed. Entranced by the decaying mozi, she soon embarks on the colossal task of reviving it, compelled by the irresistible magic of the cinema, a site rooted in ritual that is steadily disappearing. Beautifully translated by Caroline Schmidt, Seeing Further is a powerfully eloquent declaration of love to the cinema and the collective experience of watching by Esther Kinsky, one of Germany's most important contemporary writers.

Leseprobe

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Praise for Rombo  

‘Esther Kinsky has more eyes than most; in her novel Romboshe evokes the entire life of an Italian village before, during, and after the two devastating earthquakes of 1976, but each plant and animal central to the village is also a character, and the most important character of all is the landscape itself. The book becomes as much about the futures as the past, for our natural disasters are increasingly man-made, and we need more than ever this reminder of universal impermanence and the marks of memory we leave in its wake.’

— Mary Ruefle, author of Madness,Rack,andHoney

‘A tragic travelogue to the underworld-turned-world that recasts a newly lost Italian past with a climate-wise chorus straight out of the most harrowing Greek drama.’

— Joshua Cohen, author of TheNetanyahus

‘In Esther Kinsky’s new novel, language becomes the highest form of compassion and solidarity – not only with us human beings, but with the whole world, organic, non-organic, speaking out with many mouths and living voices. A miracle of a book; should be shining when it gets dark.’

— Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory

‘Esther Kinsky has created a literary oeuvre of impressive stylistic brilliance, thematic diversity and stubborn originality…. It is always clear that for her the only landscape worth describing is the one in which she is currently situated. Far from “eco-dreaming”, without sorrow or critique, Kinsky’s novels and poems position humanity in relation to the ruins it has produced and what still remains of nature.’

— 2022 Kleist Prize jury 4

Praise for Grove  

‘What makes Groveso noteworthy is the keening, perfectly weighted clarity of Esther Kinsky’s prose; Caroline Schmidt’s elegantly considered translation is meticulous but never overstated.’

— Lucy Scholes, FinancialTimes

‘This is a sublime book, born of profound, empathetic understanding.’

— Declan O’Driscoll, IrishTimes

Praise for River  

‘Riveris an unusual and stealthy sort of book in that it’s the opposite of what it appears to be – which is a rather apt dissimulation, as it turns out. Yes, it rifles through both the rich and rank materials of the world, turning over its trinkets and its tat, in a manner that is initially quite familiar – however, this curious inventory demonstrates an eye for the grotesque and does not hold the world aloft, or in place. Here, details blur boundaries rather than reaffirming them, positing a worldview that is haunted and uncanny. Shifting through unremarkable terrain we encounter the departed, the exiled, the underneath, the other side. We are on firm ground, always; yet whether that ground is here or there, now or then, is, increasingly, a distinction that is difficult and perhaps irrelevant to make. Sea or sky, boy or girl, east or west, king or vagrant, silt or gold; by turns grubby, theatrical, and exquisite, we are closer to the realm of Bakhtin’s carnival than we are to the well-trod paths of psychogeography. Kinsky’s Riverdoes indeed force us to stop in our tracks and take in the opposite side.’

— Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

‘Our narrator is an ambulant consciousness open to stimulus, like a video recorder left running. She’s not searching 5for anything. She’s just there, enduring in the company of rust, moss, dirt, cracks, puddles, half-dead grass, rubbish, wire, random bricks, concrete without purpose, the blackened ground from past bonfires, holes, fragments of fabric, plastic toys, weeds, saplings and dead animals…. [River’s] main subject is the sense of materiality, and its complement, light, that accompanies the narrator from her childhood on the Rhine through sojourns in other riparians homes-from-home, on the St Lawrence in Canada, on the Vistula in Poland…. The form of Rivermirrors its content; its consciousness flows with a sense that, like water to the sea, it will one day lose itself. It is appropriately, seamlessly translated by Iain Galbraith.’

— Lesley Chamberlain, TimesLiterarySupplement

‘Rich in atmosphere, River meanders like its liquid locales … Iain Galbraith, who has also translated Sebald, gives River, and all its “lumber of cumbersome jetsam”, a special English poetry of grunge and grime.’

—Economist

‘A magnificent novel.’

—New Yorker

‘Esther Kinsky’s unnamed narrator observes and remembers, piling up beautiful, silt-like layers of description and memory until it becomes difficult to know which is which…. This is a book to relish for its precise descriptions of landscape and weather, for its interest in the detritus of other people’s lives that we routinely overlook, and for its international reach as well as its localized intensities, all wonderfully evoked in Iain Galbraith’s translation.’

— Jonathan Gibbs, Guardian

‘A minor-key masterpiece. Iain Galbraith’s English translation is note-perfect.’

— Jacob Silkstone, Asymptote 6

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SEEING FURTHER

ESTHER KINSKY

Translated by CAROLINE SCHMIDT

Contents

Title PageEpigraphI. PRELUDEII.III. INTERLUDEIV.V. EPILOGUEAcknowledgementsAppendixAbout the AuthorsCopyright

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‘There is something important in people, something that’s dying – the senses, a universal thing. We can’t agree on politics, but maybe we can agree on senses. We are dying of sadness. The whole world is dying of sadness. We are the enemy.’

— John Cassavetes 10

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I. PRELUDE

I spy, I spy with my little eye

Years ago, I was sitting on a bench by a fjord in Norway, far up north. The landscape was dramatic: craggy mountains, dark water, every so often rippled by a gust of wind. Spring had arrived early, bringing the snow to melt under a pale sun. In the unexpected light of that Sunday afternoon a number of people from the nearby university town had set out on foot for a short excursion. They passed by on the path behind the bench, remnant snow crunching beneath their soles, conversing in calm tones, some with muffled laughter; there was something ceremonious about this procession of walkers and, for a moment, without turning around, I imagined I sat with my back to a film by Carl Theodor Dreyer.

A woman joined me on the bench. She appeared as un-Norwegian as I felt myself to be. She was short and plump and, in my memory, she was swinging her legs. For a while we both looked at the dark fjord and then in English she asked where I was from. She herself had fled the war in her native Yugoslavia a few years earlier, and after a prolonged search found a position at the university in the nearby town. She told me about the war and the region from which she came, the flatlands of northern Serbia, a town not far from the Hungarian border. She described the river, the large cornfields and the composition of the cities and villages, where all the roads were laid out as if drawn with a ruler, running ramrod straight from south to north or east to west, and, because the region was very flat, in many places you could see from one end of a street to the other and even farther, to the horizon. As the Norwegian spring day reached its end and 12her teeth began to chatter from the cold, she expanded on the flatness and vastness of her southern, dusty native district, which in light of our surroundings seemed virtually unimaginable and downright fabulous, and lastly she mentioned that there, in this landscape which had once been part of Hungary and in spirit was still aligned with the Hungarian capital, even though a border now separated it from former Yugoslavia, they said you only needed to climb on a pumpkin to be able to see all the way to Budapest. Imagine that, she said, shivering, just imagine it: You climbed on a pumpkin and up there you could see further, on and on and on.

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II.

‘It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.’

— John Berger, WaysofSeeing

Where to direct the gaze?

There are two aspects of seeing: whatyou see and howyou see it. This investigation into seeingfurtherwill involve only the question how. It pertains to the place that the viewer takes. It concerns point of view and remove from the things and images, from the action, proximity and distance, vastness. Vastness is more than physical; it is the scope of possibilities you allow. This applies to looking at a landscape, a terrain, at people, at art. In the past century no location was as important for the howof seeing, for contemplating the place that a viewer assigns themself or takes, as the cinema – as a venue, as a space. This space, whose relevance and significance did not even withstand a century, has been closing ever further in recent decades. The view out of the dark into a vastness created by film grows narrower as this venue for seeing disappears. The collective experience facilitated by this space is disappearing along with it, as is the more-or-less emphatic joy of taking part in these experiential possibilities, and this loss, whether mourned or not, deserves to be described and merits consideration. The cinema was the stage of a century. Today people differ in their relationship to this venue. Why the cinema? After all, films are available in other formats; the black box of the auditorium is considered a necessary venue for seeing by only few, and some even brush off the cinematic experience as an elitist pastime. As if the only thing that mattered any more was the what. And no longer the how.14

Despite being relegated to the fringes of the action, the cinema still retains some mythic quality as a venue for seeing. The more the privatization of all experience eats away at our lives, the more fabulous appears a venue where seeing was a collective experience, where wit, terror, dismay and relief found a communal expression without encroaching on the anonymity afforded by the dark room. Even those who never visit the cinema any more will still remember particulars of the experience, of the place; the act of entering into the dark in order to then look out of it; the unspoken, abided by rule of seeing: ‘All eyes in the same direction.’ In the direction mastered by the projectionist, invisible to the audience.

Seeing is a proficiency you acquire. A competence you slowly become aware of. Should you desire. In the beginning there is always the framed view. From the inside to the outside, from a window, whose cutout determines the world for the person looking out. Then comes a discovery: the discrepancy between the way things look from the window and the way they look when you are outside, surrounded by an unframed world, your eye itself now part of the world. A child’s view from the window into a winter morning of hoarfrost and fog remains engraved in the mind as a promise and a mystery; from the garden path or the roadside that same overgrown, rimy terrain rouses confusion, becomes branded in the mind as a memory of the world’s strangeness, which needs sizing up. A winter morning as the first film: a montage from various angles and perspectives. Visiting each window in the house on a quest to watch the outside transform into a series of cutouts which the contemplating eye alone can read and fill with narrative, whereas outside those same things, relinquished from their frames, become landmarks which the 15eye’s corresponding self uses to determine their place in that outside. Out there you stood in the world and looked around as far as you could see, the eye always searching for a place to rest, whereas inside, standing by the window, you gazed at a framed fragment which could be ascribed or denied an absolute significance.

Later: binoculars. A new frame, a new, magical metamorphosis via manipulated distances. A fetched piece of yonder, transformed by the frame into a foreign land, into a fiction entirely liberated from its surroundings: the other side of the river, accessed in life outdoors only by crossing a bridge found farther upstream, became available as a result of the binoculars and the view was made obtainable, offering itself up to be filled with ideas entirely unrelated to the vague, blurry contours recognizable to the naked eye, embedded in the familiar gradation of fields, trolley embankment, waterside trees and a notion of the river. Seeing became an adventure, each look through the binoculars was a journey of discovery.

From binoculars to the camera viewfinder. As a child I received a small Russian camera with an inscription in Cyrillic letters. The camera was black and silver, girdled by a brown leather case that snapped onto it, with a protruding part, which could be folded down, covering the lens. The world was reflected on the surface of the lens, distorted to the point of unrecognition, and thanks to a mysterious technical correlation when I looked through the square viewfinder I saw what the eye of the lens saw. Suddenly the world could be divided into pieces, into fragments that became separate entities if you stared long enough through the viewfinder, and even more so later, once the fragments were spread out on the table as 16photographs and all memory of what had once surrounded these images receded into the shadows. What had been all around could then be reported, related, invented in words; it was excluded from the image. That was a revelation to me. The act of seeing, much more how to look than whatto see, had become a decision.

One spring they destroyed the wild terrain across the street, which had always been the first thing I saw out my window every morning. Abandoned land, as they called it, orphanedland; the missing owners’ heirs never turned up, the wilderness became land to build on, and in the morning my gaze now fell upon a construction site, piles of soil and trucks, later the skeleton of a multi-storey house, an apartment building. An act of violence was committed against the view; there was no further, there was no yonder any more, no mystery, and in winter no forms enchanted by hoarfrost. Families moved in, children who went to my school, and one day I stood on one of those balconies visible from my window, and looked down at my own house, at my own window. From the perspective of this newly built balcony, the spot from which I examined my world now appeared distressingly strange and distant; the window looked so small I couldn’t believe it capable of the relevance it held for my seeing, for my preoccupation with the cutout of the world that it delineated. For the first time a question began to stir in me, unarticulated yet, about the relationship between seeing and being seen, about the mysterious connection between looking and being looked at. But I also saw past my house, out to the terrain leading to the river, which I was otherwise familiar with only from a different window found on the backside of my house, framed as if cut out from a larger whole. I saw the strips of field, the railroad embankment, 17the pikes of the poplar trees that lined both sides of the river, the factory behind the damp alluvial meadows with the ‘migrant-worker shanties’; I saw further, all the way to the range of hills, bluish-green and out of focus beyond the river, and down to the river bend country shimmering in whitish light, where the landscape flattened and dissolved into everything possible. This panorama of vague things, of vastness, of eventualities and all the stories the river bend might have opened up into, remained for me a promise that oddly belonged to the cinema – as if this were the place where the worlds that I peered into from the darkness of the auditorium grew.

. . .

The cinema was not an everyday experience in my childhood. I grew up in a suburb, without a television, in fact, yet not close enough to a cinema for regular weekend visits. From time to time a theatre on wheels came along, set up a projector in a gymnasium, and there was a programme. Charlie Chaplin or, less frequently, Buster Keaton, with his absurdity pushing into chaos, as well as nature documentaries and animated films. Because of my nearsightedness I had to sit in one of the front rows, and for weeks I lost sleep over Bambi, those rolling eyes and the animals’ distorted proportions. The cinema was better with ‘real movies’, for instance NilsHolgerssonsunderbararesa, even if the end was always difficult to bear. Not because of the story itself, but simply because the film had to end, because you couldn’t go on watching, because the view out the window of the screen into another world had to close. Later my father occasionally took my siblings and me along to a cinema near a train station, where a main feature and an opening short and 18the weekly newsreel ran in an endless loop. You could join the sparse audience at any point, search for a seat in the dim glow of the usher’s flashlight, and stay there. A cinema ticket meant you could spend the whole day, as some people liked to do on cold or wet days, and after the loop ran for the second time they were even tired enough to sleep. Many people smoked cigarettes; I remember plumes rising before the image and floating in the air. Most of the visitors clearly came to pass the waiting time at the train station; they carried small suitcases or valises, and once a man who sat in our row forgot his when he left the cinema hall in haste, rushing to catch his train or get to some appointment. I remember the musty smell of the cinema and the heavy, raw felt curtain through which you entered, the lower edges tipped in leather or synthetic leather dragging across the linoleum floor, and the usher, who had a curly head of hair and a tired face, who always tried to find us an empty row.

My father was a reticent man, and our trips to this cinema almost always transpired unannounced; later, if he had things to do, sometimes he would leave us alone there, and we wouldn’t move an inch. He never said a word about the films we saw, but at times I thought they might be messages, from the screen to him, or from him to us. In one film, for instance, a train crossed a tremendous prairie, heading towards pale, tall mountains in the distant background, approaching a village where, as the viewer already knew, several people were longingly awaiting its arrival at the station. I was sure it was a certain train in a region that our father had already told us about a few times – a scene from his childhood, for which the flatness of the landscape played a large role, since the trains were already recognizable on the horizon hours before they arrived. I never mentioned this connection, 19but I also didn’t believe my father when he later explained to us that this scene was simulated with a toy train, since it wouldn’t have been possible to film it otherwise, from so high up and with a view across such a tremendous landscape. If anything, an angel could do it, my brother said, an angel with wings. We all laughed at him for that. The idea of an angel with a movie camera.

These trips to the cinema under my father’s supervision eventually came to an end, and a few years passed before the endless-loop cinema played a role in my life again. It was the rediscovery of a hot summer; I was a teenager, a child no longer, and one afternoon during break I was out roaming the streets alone, not knowing what to do with myself, when I suddenly stood in front of the cinema and it all came back. The programme had changed. There were no longer newsreels and no longer second-and third-rate facile films, arbitrarily selected for a tired audience to pass time with or perhaps even drift asleep to under the soporific influence of their predictability. Now they screened films whose titles sounded like something, which had distinction, a preceding ring. They weren’t the latest films and there was still an occasional intermission, only now instead of newsreels there were advertisement breaks or short films, but the endless-loop concept remained unchanged. Something I had previously simply accepted – that you could enter at any time and stay seated for as long as you liked – now acted as a spell, which appeared to make room for the possibility of luck.

Under this spell the cinema was transformed from a refuge for shelter-seeking travellers on layovers into the preferred spot of a different crowd who sought to reach or come down from various states of intoxication, who came to enjoy and occasionally also sleep off a smoke-induced 20weightlessness. There were probably also quiet cinema lovers among them, visitors who simply sat in their seats and watched for as long as they could, and the scattered chroniclers, who in the weak glow of the emergency lights or standing next to the cracked foyer curtain would now and then scribble something into a notebook. All in all, things proceeded less noisily than before, although there were occasionally viewers who laughed to themselves, as if caught in a comical dream that had nothing to do with the film. I saw quite a few films in this cinema and for many of them I can still remember today the spot where I entered the auditorium and saw the first image on the screen. The last film I watched there was DeathinVenice– nothing novel any more, but for me it remained distinctive, since a few years earlier, when I was still a child, in the milky light of northern Italy I stood on the sidelines among other curious spectators and watched the filming of a few scenes. The incongruence between my personal experience as a witness to a tiny, random phase in the metamorphosis of a vision into a film and the visible reality of that film on screen brought me to think about the cinema again and again. It was not only the films that were important, but also the place itself. What unfurled on the projection screen was invariably bound to this space, to the dark with a view into a world, which despite being cropped always appeared larger than your own, determined by other boundaries. Yet for all its vastness, it was still bound to this physical place and determined by its features, all of which played a role: the way you entered the foyer through a brown swinging door, traded a coin for an entrance ticket made of rough paper, and dove through a bristly curtain into the dark room; the smell of it; the moderately tiered seating rows with strangers’ skulls in silhouette, their hair variously coifed and styled. 21Film wasn’t a mere sequence of projected images – film was cinema, and it became reality when the gaze met the screen, and the seeing happened surrounded by other viewers. An experience unimaginable without the presence of other participants, whose identities literally remained in the dark although they were also silent confidants, accomplices in seeing. And something took hold of me in there, in this separate venue with invariably poor ventilation, something that pointed the way and connected dots on the pale map of my minor experiences such that an image emerged. A moving image with blurred edges, which I never lost sight of.

A film on celluloid or ‘cellulose acetate’, the material later developed for greater durability, is a peculiar creature. A compact, vulnerable testimony to joint efforts, to interventions and encroachments, to circumstances resulting from countless imponderable circumstances, which at every showing technology and manual expertise help to unfurl into a world capable of filling the dark watching room in front of the screen so fully that reality outside the cinema, which proceeds according to the bidding of no recognizable entity, fades into the background for the length of time required by the strips of celluloid to travel at a fixed speed before a powerful light source, guided by several reels and spindles. In its density and absoluteness, for its viewers a film in the cinema is always a disruption in the course of the world. Countless people used to share the experience of this disruption without ever referring to it as such. It was a cultural fluency with its own small rituals, insiders, servants, artisans and henchmen, and then it began to crumble without relent. You could name the reasons why, but that wouldn’t really help to understand the process. Of course the cinema isn’t dead as long 22as there are still films whose ideal form, intended by all parties involved, is realized only when screened there. What isdead, however, is the compulsory communality of the cinematic experience that everyone agreed to, even if it is still preserved, beautiful and undecayed like Snow White, in some people’s thoughts and memories, nourishing the fantasy of its reawakening. A dream in a glass coffin, set aside on some peripheral terrain. Even the seven dwarves are sitting at home by their screens, leaving the pallbearing to random romantics, undaunted volunteers, momentary hopefuls.

The cinema used to have presence, it had weight in almost everyone’s life, not as an exceptional experience, but as a commonplace in a less privatized world that first the television invaded bit by bit, and later the permanent accessibility of private screens caused to fully unravel. In my old Russian and Polish language textbooks, the cinema played an even larger role than the factories, universities and outpatient clinics that also came up in many exercises. There was hardly a dialogue or a lesson in which the cinema was not visited, exited, missed or espoused under various grammatical pretences. Lands of promise, where the cinema determined life, spread out before my mind’s eye. In my Polish textbook it was above all Cinema Wisła, which in the sketchy illustrations accompanying the exercises had a classical-seeming, nearly temple-like façade with small figures standing in front in little groups, the women wearing skirts that recalled the fashions of the fifties, the men in suits, and all of them carrying briefcases, to suggest that everyone had rushed directly from university, the outpatient clinic, or the factory to catch a film – because back then, when the cinema was still a part of life, it didn’t matter if you 23were in Italy, France, Poland or the Federal Republic of Germany: the workers also carried briefcases, in which they stashed their snacks. Above or below the drawings there would be a dialogue, for instance: Do you already have plans for tonight? – Yes, I’m going to Cinema Wisła with Antek. – Oh, I’ll come along! Or: Do you want to take a walk in Łazienki Park after the lecture? – No, I’m going to Cinema Wisła.

I took my first trip to Warsaw one September; the light was mild and grey-blue, the air scratched my throat and smelled of smoke, an odour that long remained characteristic of Eastern Europe. In the morning I walked over to the window in the apartment on Mickiewicza, in the Żoliborz district. The room was on the rear side of the apartment building, where there was a balcony full of potted geraniums, now gangly in autumn, a send-off to the dark time of year, and the first thing I saw past the flowers was the façade of Cinema Wisła. The lettering above the entrance looked exactly as it had in the textbook illustrations, reflecting the autumnal sunlight by day, and after nightfall the letters had a familiar glow, promising the fulfilment of expectations. My encounter with this cinema caught me off guard, and it remained as a backdrop of sorts in those weeks, when all of Warsaw appeared like a film. In the evenings when I walked past the cinema I noted that people without briefcases also went there, the men did not wear suits and the women were not in mid-calf-length skirts. I didn’t see a film there myself, something kept me from doing so; maybe I was afraid if I climbed the steps the façade might reveal itself to be a cheap backdrop, and behind the entrance doors allotment gardens would open up, where weak fires smouldered and the last apples still hung from the trees, or a sea of 24rubble might spread out, with broken papier-mâché columns at first indistinguishable from real fragments of rubble weighing tons. But even without visiting the cinema I learned that Łazienki Park is located a fair distance from Cinema Wisła, at the opposite end of the city. Wisła is the Polish name for the Vistula River, which courses through Warsaw, grey-blue and murky from sand, and to my knowledge for a long time it remained the only river with a cinema named after it.

Where do they go in today’s foreign-language textbooks? Are there still places of promise like Cinema Wisła, where the familiar – the cinema, purely and simply – mixes with the foreign, the unknown – the outpatient clinic, the factory, a river with a sonorous name – luring you into another language, which in turn opens up another world?

On my travels in Eastern Europe I looked for the cinema every new place I went. Practically every village had one, or had, after all, had one until the early nineties; the death of the cinema was learned from the West, where film became a private matter, where cinemas wasted away and eventually perished, while the few surviving films were distributed as luxury goods. The cinema as a classless place had died. The buildings of former cinemas were easy to recognize, their splendid traces still visible, along with, at times, a certain pride in their achievement, even if the cinema had not been in operation for some time. Market, cinema, cemetery: these were the three points of orientation in the places where I went. Eat, see, die. Or: See, eat, die. Those were the possible variations. Fewer and fewer cinemas were active but they were all still recognizable, closed and barricaded, but not yet repurposed or razed, occasionally painted with slogans 25