1
I’ve been many things to many people: the most beautiful woman in the world, the icy blonde, “the face that launch’d a thousand ships;” a myth, a phantom, a star; the daughter of Zeus; abused, exploited, exposed; a whore, a victim, a virgin; the torch that burns men’s desire, the shining moon; the primal scene of female beauty. Yet no one can say where I come from and no one knows who I am. Despite the tireless efforts of generations of linguists, my name is an enigma still. Did you know that I have the gift of ubiquity, the ability to be in more than one place at once? Here and not here; there and not there; good and bad; possible or impossible. Paris thought that I was his, although I never was — an idle fancy! To Troy I never went; that was a phantom, an image endowed with life … made … out of the breath of heaven. You think you know me but you shouldn’t always believe what you hear or see.

Suppose I was the wife of an ambitious, if somewhat clueless, professor. I refer to him as “my husband,” he calls me “Darling.” We’re like night and day: he speaks English, I speak French. We’re getting along because I haven’t told him that what he sees in me isn’t who I am.  He doesn’t take criticism very well and he can’t stand it when he’s proven wrong. He’s obsessed with finding evidence that Shakespeare was a Spanish Jew, not English at all. I don’t care for his research (I think it is self-involved), but agree to accompany him to the archive. It’s about time he learns to look for the past in the present, to see first and then, maybe, explain. I’m done with playing the part of the perfect wife  — today I want the masquerade to be over. You know the words.

Enough. I come together with my Lord, ship borne,
And now his city must I seek, his harbinger.
But what intent his heart has, that I may not guess.
Is it as wife I come? And come I as a queen?
Or am I here a victim of my prince’s pangs,
And of the evil fates long suffered by the Greeks?
I am conquered; whether captive too I may not know!

Enough, indeed. Neither conquered nor captive I’m coming home! As befits a queen, I expect a formal reception. I ask that you look at me; listen to me, follow me — but don’t search for evidence, and don’t reach for conclusions. Trust me, there’s merit in suspending your sense of orientation (if only for the twenty-two minutes it takes to read this essay). Je me sens si loin, et cependant si près. Et j’aime à me dire: Me voilà, là.

At your service, Madame.

2
He has abandoned the delights of imagination (he calls it fantasy) and the pleasures of the senses. A committed historian he trades in facts. In search for Truth he doesn’t always see what’s right in front of him. (His wife for instance.) When he looks at a woman, he sees a virgin. A secret admirer of Swiss watches (when he was a young boy, he wanted to be a watchmaker) he has read somewhere that time is a mechanical movement with two degrees of complication. He has been taught that it is impossible to be in two places at once.

He is a manufacturer of sense — although these are not the words he would use to describe what he does. He wants to be remembered as the discoverer of Shakespeare’s true identity. “He wants to be immortalized,” says his wife who knows him far better than he knows himself. His supremely ambitious project demands patience and precision. He always knows what time it is. Is that why he lives entirely in the past? Most people when they meet him for the first time find him awkward, out of place, absent-minded. It’s hard to surprise him, he sees what he wants to see. His questions are short and precise: Is this the way into the monastery? Why did you bring me here? Why do you read me Goethe’s Faust now? Did you miss me? (Does he know that some people refer to his life as a tragedy in two parts?)

He is an experienced traveler who does his homework. Always ahead of himself, always looking for something, he’s a tourist in everyone else’s past. An empty cave is an empty cave only until he arrives and fills it with meaning — with the story of Hildebrandt, for instance, the 13th century merchant who was miraculously saved from shipwreck by a shining light on the hill above the cave. And then this: a voided room, a chapel stripped bare. “Look! Nothing, no signs,” the guide proclaims triumphantly. He is shaken momentarily. Voids make him feel uncomfortable. Is that why he spends most of his time in the archive? Is that why the ticking of the clock doesn’t bother him? He prefers things to be fixed, he can’t endure the sight of decay. Frozen time is his preferred element; terra firma his favorite country. He doesn’t trust the sea and he is suspicious of the moon — although he would never admit that, of course not.

Lately he hasn’t slept so well. Lately he’s been doing strange things at night, in his dreams. The other morning he came to in the corridor after a dream that was painful at first and then became pure pleasure. A crack in the wall, a change of light, a faintly familiar voice like a memory from the future. Listen.

Bei euch, ihr Herrn, kann man das Wesen
Gewöhnlich aus dem Namen lesen…
And that’s plainly what we mean when we call you God’s enemies, seducers, liars.
…
Faust: Who are you?

Mephistopheles says: Part of that force which sometimes encourages evil, and sometimes acts for the good.

Faust says: What is this mystery?

Mephisto says: I am the spirit that always denies and rightly so, for everything is worthy of destruction. It would be better if nothing existed. So everything you call sin, destruction, everything, in short, which is considered evil, that is my element.

Faust says: You say you are a part, but I see you standing whole before me.

Mephisto says: I have told you my modest truth. If man, that tiny universe of folly, usually considers himself to be whole, I know I’m part of that part which existed at the beginning of everything, a part of that darkness which gave birth to proud light which now quarrels with the night that mothered it.

An experiment: neither hear nor see nor speak. To change your mind, to ignore the ticking of the clock, to find questions that don’t need answers: Who can tell dusk from dawn? Who can tell beginning from end? Who knows the difference between the past and the future?

He is anxious all of a sudden. But not anxious enough to return to the archive. The sudden urge to go to Paris. If this is an abduction, he surrenders willingly, with pleasure.

3
Magical, mystical, otherworldly — to describe THE CONVENT means to eschew the surgical vocabulary of academic film criticism, to let go of the urge to isolate an idea and explain the meaning behind what is there on the screen. There is no behind. There’s magic — and there’s Catherine Deneuve who, strange to say, seems to be directing THE CONVENT. Commanding the gaze, prompting camera movement, seeing everything, being everywhere at once, combining what we tend to think of as unconnected. Deneuve plays Deneuve plays Hélène plays Helen of Troy. Goddess and diva, idol and star, archetype and stereotype: she incorporates the most powerful afterimages of Western culture’s imaginary. Deneuve’s performance is of a stunning directness — confrontational and susceptive at the same time. ‘Don’t look for hidden motivations,’ she intimates, ‘pay attention to the ongoing moment.’ Sigmund Freud would not enjoy THE CONVENT. Or would he?

Everything in THE CONVENT is apparent. Image, word, and music are what they are: appearances. And yet nothing in THE CONVENT is transparent: no right angles, no progress, no closure. Repetition, perhaps even compulsion. When the lights go on in the movie theatre, the film continues in my head. I can’t imagine Freud wouldn’t be intrigued.

4
Watching THE CONVENT I feel reassured once more that some things will never be resolved: the argument between fact and fantasy, the disagreement between image and word, the controversy between seeing and believing. I like that ongoing struggle. It gives me the freedom to enjoy insignificant questions. What if the past was in the future? What if Helena abducted Paris? What if there was no before to an afterimage? What if there were no insignificant questions?

Don’t expect answers, be prepared for performance. The meaning of THE CONVENT is THE CONVENT. The actors act for the camera. They deliver their lines like priests reciting passages of sacred scripture: diligently, committed, reserved.

THE CONVENT is a celebration of the irreducible obliqueness of the world we live in. A refusal to be anything else but a film. An invitation to experience the untranslatable immediacy of music, images, and — yes, indeed — words. –

Faust says: “Be silent, then, for danger is in words.”

Is this the way into the monastery?

—————————————–

THE CONVENT, written & directed by Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal/France 1994, 95 min., with Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Luís Miguel Cintra, Leonore Silveira.

quotes:

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust 2.

Margaret Atwood, Helen of Troy does Countertop Dancing

“The Convent” (Manoel de Oliveira, 1994) originally appeared on unguided tour on January 8, 2010.
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