The quick-paced opening sequence of Fritz Lang’s silent thriller Spione (1928) counterpoints a carefully orchestrated crime spree with the gross incompetence of the law. After a series of assassinations and thefts, an agent rushes into the office of a trim government official. Gasping for breath, the operative tries to tell his superior who is behind the havoc. Just then a single bullet pierces the window and the agent falls dead on the floor. The balding old man slowly raises his hands to his temples: “Almighty God – what power is at play here?”

Cut to the face of Haghi (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) with its calm, reptilian eyes and taut lips. The lips begin to part and a manic, especially hand-painted “ICH!” fills the screen. Leading the double life of a bank director and a criminal mastermind, the wheelchair-bound Haghi has harnessed communications technology to the service of spying and blackmail. Contrary to the governmental desks, which are lucky to be equipped with a lone telephone, Haghi’s is full of gadgetry. A set of phones adorn the desk, and the rest of the space is littered with various dials, switches and wild contraptions.

Besides cutting-edge hardware and henchmen in leather coats, Haghi’s spying empire also relies on the tried-and-true employment of vamps and sex kittens. Blowing cigarette smoke liberally about the room, Sonja Barranikowa (Gerda Maurus) reports that she has her current prey around her little finger. Haghi, his head resting against the back of the chair, closes his eyes, as if enamored by both the knowledge of his increasing clandestine power and the very fragrance of the smoke which carries a faint trace of the young woman.

Sonja’s chance of freeing herself of Haghi’s submission arrives in the form of a secret agent determined to bring down the leader of the criminal network. After discarding his vagabond disguise – complete with a Chaplinesque bowler hat – No. 326 (Willy Fritsch) emerges as the archetypically sophisticated man of intrigue. The exaggerated acting and phrasing which works well enough with the grimacing thugs and high-rolling dandies falls flat with the developing romance between Sonja and her secret agent: “Make me a gift of this evening!” No. 326 coos while kissing Sonja’s hands.

Once Haghi gets wind of the relationship, he turns the cat-and-mouse game between the two espionage factions into a personal battle of wits over the girl. The film is organized in roughly episodic units which see No. 326 getting closer to Haghi one obstacle at a time. Much like in the Dr. Mabuse films or in his 1931 masterwork M, the episodes of Spione give Lang a wonderful opportunity to flaunt his interest in the complex interplay of social (crime syndicates, the police) and technical (architecture, industrial design) structures.

Lang’s direction insists upon a fixation on the physical world through the use of framing and the time allowed for the examination of the selected ephemeral details. The film’s most alluring moments are of close-ups exploring the textures of different objects. Serif-heavy documents with names, dates and the odd notation added by hand rival the bygone designs of stationery and lamp shades in their peculiar force, as do the ornaments of Orthodox Christendom on the walls of Sonja’s apartment. This obsessive attachment to objects is something that makes it impossible to classify Spione as throwaway pulp fiction.

A definite eroticism runs through this kind of visual reverence. The women’s clothing carry an especially high erotic charge: the camera lingers on the particulars of their snug dresses, gloves and hats. In a scene of playful sexual innuendo, Sonja’s enemy is swiftly approaching a door separating the pursuer and his quarry. The lock is located a little lower than the handle, so its position matches that of the man’s groin. The moment the man tries to open the door, Sonja flips the protruding lock and disables him from coming in.

Spione is an urban film, a film of concentration and interiority. Even the few street scenes have a cloistered feel to them, so that the nameless city comes off as one giant interior. The major difference between the inside and outside seems to be whether the walls are covered with floral wallpaper or poster artwork. So it is not unsurprising that the weakest segments of the film take place in the country. A temporary move from chimeric intrigue to uncharacteristically direct action also occurs during the sabotaged train ride and the following highway chase.

The sense of pent-up energy – the frustrations of violence and sex – is best captured when No. 326 and Sonja go out to spend the evening together. The scene begins with an overhead stationary shot of the final moments of a boxing match. Immediately after the knockout, the lights come back up and the orchestra resumes their playing. Dozens of well-dressed couples flock the space surrounding the ring and commence dancing. A swirl of violent motion is replaced by superficially stale romancing, but both energies are strictly regulated within the same geometric structure.

Released as part of Eureka’s “Masters of Cinema” label, the DVD presentation does justice to the film. Although Donald Sosin’s newly composed soundtrack somewhat mars the attentiveness of the eye on the first screening, the score works better on repeat viewings. The disc comes with a booklet containing an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum which offers good background information on Lang’s film. Rosenbaum also draws attention to Spione‘s artistic lineage when he notes that the early Surrealists adored feuilletons such as Fantômas by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. Both influences have their place in the film’s plots and counter-plots executed with fetishistic gleam, making Spione subversive pulp fiction at its most arresting.

An album of remixes, the nine tracks of The Good Son vs. The Only Daughter were made by musicians handpicked by David Sylvian to shake up the subdued sonic architecture of Blemish (2003). Because most of the names of the remixers are not familiar to me, I can only go by what I hear. And what I hear is, by and large, impressive. Most of the new songs make good use of the spareness of the original material, using Sylvian’s lyrical richness and strong delivery as the basis for adventurous reworkings.

When he described Blemish as an “impromptu suite of songs for guitar, electronics and voice”, Sylvian offered his listeners both a caveat and a challenge. Because despite of the appearance of guitarist Derek Bailey on a number of tracks, the overall sound of Blemish is more stripped-down and unpolished than Sylvian’s earlier solo albums such as 1999′s Dead Bees on a Cake. The nearly 14-minute title track opens the album and maps out the emotional territory of the later compositions. Shimmers and quivers of electronic ambience are broken by bursts of anxious words: “And mine is an empty bed / I think she’s forgotten”.

The lyrics tell of betrayals, jealousies and break-ups in the family, but seem to give only bits and pieces of the whole story. On the cusp of transformation, each of the personas is unable to accept the past while at the same time remaining ambivalent about the future, to the point where even favorable change is expressed in wholly negative terms: “There’s a world of disappointment to be lost”. The hesitancy to face up to the reality of the situation (“Place a dummy on the roof / Stitch him a tongue / Give him proof”) ends in failure, as it must: “Like blemishes upon the skin / Truth sets in”.

Even if the remix artists allow Sylvian’s voice to stay prominent and undisrupted, many of them play freely with the lyrical content. When he cuts and reshuffles the words of “Blemish”, Burnt Friedman produces a version that is considerably more affirmative and upbeat than the original. In contrast, he overdoes “Late Night Shopping”, the source album’s most playful track, with the inclusion of a sickly-sweet chorus.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s rearrangement of the vocal parts of “The Heart Knows Better” not only uplifts the mood of the piece, but the new place of emphasis allows for consecutive layers of aural textures to be introduced easily into the mix. “How Little We Need To Be Happy” by Tatsuhiko Asano reveals the pop song well hidden in the caustic original. The remixer hasn’t needed to rethink the lyrics, but instead has built the celebratory orchestration around the voice. The result is a revelation, as if the Blemish version were only a rough draft waiting for Asano’s input.

Yoshihiro Hanno’s “The Good Son” tops the original by placing the rank lyricism within a less tense musical structure, while still leaving much of Bailey’s guitar work intact. In addition to the intro and outro atmospherics, Akira Rabelais applies numerous subtle touches on his rendering of “Blemish”. The two variations of “The Only Daughter”, on the other hand, are solid rather than mesmerizing. In Ryoji Ikeda’s piano-driven piece, the voice and music seem to flutter at a distance from one another, whereas the second variant by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré sets them in the same groove.

The remix of “Fire in the Forest” by Readymade FC, like Friedman’s “Blemish” and Asano’s “How Little We Need To Be Happy”, brings the lightness and hopefulness of the song to the foreground. It is not the case that these qualities are something Sylvian attempts to deliberately obscure; rather, he reserves the sudden brightness until the moment its impact can be greatest. In the image of an immense forest which suffers the loss of single trees, Sylvian has hit upon a fittingly spacious metaphor for emotional unrest:

There’s a fire in the forest
It’s taking down some trees
When things are overwhelming
I let them be

A measure of The Only Daughter‘s success is that the album allows the listener to return to the source with fresh ears. The pulsating electronics and erratic guitar plucks of Blemish become the crackle and crumple of burning leaves. In turn, the energetic overabundance of The Only Daughter sounds like new vegetation pushing itself overground from the ashen soil.

Bouvard and Pécuchet – Gustave Flaubert

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Gustave Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet starts with a chance meeting that has the air of serene machination about it. The encounter between two Parisian copy clerks leads to a remarkable friendship. The first meeting could almost count as a reunion. After all, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, as Hugh Kenner points out in The Stoic Comedians, are really a cliché cleft in two: “Frenchmen are by turns sensual and rational; worldly, lecherous and suave, or else rigorous, logical, prickly; the fat and the thin, the optimist and the pessimist; the Mediterranean and the Roman temperament, respectively.” Care to guess which is which?

The friendship is a perfect symbiosis. Separately, Bouvard and Pécuchet were harmless bookworms. As intellectual companions, they egg each other on to ever more ludicrous levels of self-assurance. If they were to combine their mental resources, how much longer could their brilliance remain a secret to the world? An ideal opportunity to test this thesis drops in their laps in the form of a hefty inheritance. A small country house in the town of Chavignolles as their headquarters, the pair are at last free to satisfy their superhuman yearning for knowledge. “Farcical” doesn’t begin to describe the scope and outcome of their decades-long project.

From the outset it is clear that Bouvard and Pécuchet will fail with clockwork precision. Not only are they themselves liable to make a mess of things, but a hyper-charged Murphy’s Law conspires to flatten even their most innocent plans. They start off by applying their skills around the house. Bouvard picks agronomy, while Pécuchet tries his hand in fruit farming. The template for the whole book is introduced when a volley of disasters and awful decisions force the geniuses to reconsider their commitment to a particular field of study. What’s so special about farming, anyhow? After a stint of gardening, they turn their attention to the art of food preservation. Before they know it, the reserves have gone to pot:

“Their disappointment was complete. The slices of veal looked like boiled shoe soles. A murky liquid had replaced the lobster. The fish stew was beyond recognition. Mushrooms were growing on the soup. And the entire laboratory reeked with an intolerable stench.”

And then the still explodes to pieces, destroying their modest distillery. Pécuchet realizes they perhaps need to get better acquainted with chemistry. Chemistry is followed in quick succession by anatomy and medicine. The human form doesn’t hold their interest for long, and so they capture a stray dog for experimental purposes. Pécuchet dreams up the idea of testing if they can magnetize steel by contact with the poor thing’s spinal cord:

“Bouvard, swallowing his repugnance, held out a plate of needles to Pécuchet, who tried to plant them in the vertebras. They broke, slipped, fell to the floor; he picked up others and shoved them in forcefully, haphazardly. The dog broke free of its bonds, flew through the window like a cannonball, zipped across the courtyard, into the vestibule, and appeared in the kitchen.”

The bleeding dog startles the maid, who doesn’t put off any time to give her employers a piece of her mind: “This is another of your harebrained schemes, no doubt about it! And just look at my kitchen! You’ve probably given him rabies! They throw people in prison who are better than you!” Bouvard and Pécuchet move on to other things.

The thematic threads of Flaubert’s earlier novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony are woven into a new design in Bouvard and Pécuchet. The hermit saint’s day of hallucinations ends with a kind of revelation. In a vision of fluidly mutating forms straight out of Brueghel, St. Anthony finds himself reveling in the riotous fecundity of life. Life is not only complex, but becoming more so. Unlike St. Anthony, Bouvard and Pécuchet never relent in the face of this fact.

With fevered acceleration, the pair race through discipline after discipline, always hoping to master at least one branch of knowledge. Bouvard and Pécuchet share an expert’s eye for exclusion, but they possess none of the skills required to obtain new information about the phenomena under observation. This is something they have in common with most of the authorities whose suspect, tedious and thankfully forgotten titles feed their fire.

In the course of their unwise studies, the two grow from caricatures into indelible characters. For all their pigheadedness, Bouvard and Pécuchet at least put up a resistance against stupefaction and complacency. This is more than can be said of the burghers of Chavignolles, with whom the pair frequently find themselves at odds. Although Bouvard and Pécuchet are hapless in love and out of tune with the society around them, their lives have a Utopian center thanks to their extraordinary friendship and sense of curiosity. It is, plainly, a center that cannot hold. This is the Janus head of satire: Bouvard and Pécuchet is both a comical tirade against stupidity and a bullish reminder of our capacity for insight and clarity.

Mark Polizzotti’s new translation of Flaubert’s final work was published by Dalkey Archive Press in late 2005. Because I have no French, I can’t comment on the quality of the translation, but to say that the text made me smile, chuckle, laugh, frown and stare into space pondering the nature of the Absolute. I can only hope I did everything in an order that roughly corresponds with the 1880 original.