I've had depression for as long as I can remember (even if there were times in my younger life when I didn't realise it) and I have always wanted to write. It's been a constant depression, rather than bipolar, which has been worse at some points, especially during sustained hot weather, than others, but which has always present. In my early thirties, I've had to grudgingly accept that everything I've tried - trying to pull myself out of it, numerous periods in counselling or psychotherapy, anti-depressants - will not dispel it, and the best I can say is that by now I better recognise the symptoms of particular severe bouts, and that I've managed to arranger my life so that there are very few people around me who are not understanding.
(Rightly or wrongly, I feel bound to clarify that I never thought or intended transition to be a panacea for depression - more that it would make it easier to manage. This has proved the case, and I wrote about the relationship between my gender and mental health, which is ultimately a separate issue, here.)
I realised that I wanted to write during the worst depression of my life, during Years 9 and 10 at school, when I would tell anyone who'd listen that life was fundamentally pointless and that nothing could change this. Not many would listen, certainly not for long - it wasn't until I got to sixth form that I read Camus, Sartre, Kafka and others who would help me to articulate these feelings, and the realisation that there were authors who had shared this outlook provided tremendous comfort. Then, I decided that the only way I could find any meaning would be in trying to make material conditions better for people, as far as possible, and that I was best equipped to do this through writing.
So writing became a tactic against negativity, despair and defeat - it was never hard to find inspiration from the cultural or political climate, but nor was it uncommon to feel overwhelmed by it, unsure of what to focus on and pessimistic about whether anyone was even reading, let alone if it was making any difference. This feeling has hardly changed as my platforms have become larger, and nor has the unwillingness to take part in public debate that comes with depression - the sense that I will have nothing to say at any exchange of ideas, in person or through writing becomes insurmountable during its worst spells. Even if I am still capable of producing rather than procrastinating, the depression shapes the subject - I am far less likely to offer a view that might prove contentious or tackle a controversial issue head on if I'm particularly down, even though some of my favourite articles were written during severe bouts.
The formation of my aims in direct relation to depression often led me to prioritise them at the expense of my own wellbeing - I'm thinking particularly of the Guardian blog on transition, when friends warned me that putting so much of my life into the public eye could have strange and damaging consequences, but I felt that I was already deeply unhappy, so how could it make this any worse? In the main, it was cathartic, allowed me to feel I'd achieved my teenage goal and was positive, but in some ways it exacerbated the problem, especially as it brought me into contact with many people who had found that discrimination had shaped their lives in very sad ways. After several years, unable to shake this feeling that short-term successes always faded into long-term failure, I had a mini-breakdown in December 2011 and had to stop writing for a couple of months whilst I sought more counselling and thought about where my work, and its underlying motivation, had taken me.
So I still can't say if writing makes my depression and anxiety better or worse: I can only conclude (in true History graduate style) that it does both, providing an outlet for and alleviating some sadness whilst constantly keeping it at the surface, often facilitating conversations with like-minded people which can be inspiring or despairing. The drive that it gives during better periods means that I can be very productive, which keeps giving me reason to live; at other times, I feel unable to work at all, each day that passes without a word making me more anxious, the cycle rapidly spiralling, disproportionately affected by the most minor failures or rejections, this fixation often preventing me from pursuing any other action that might improve my mental health (such as taking a holiday, or even a walk, or taking time to cook and eat properly).
Even now, for all my familiarity, it can be weeks before I become aware of it, although I find that keeping a journal helps me to monitor my feelings, tracking heightened periods of depression or self-absorption, and means that I don't stop writing entirely. It's not going to go away, so right now, this is the best solution. Speaking about the subject helps, though, and having raised it on Twitter recently, I was heartened by the number of people who felt able to say that they were exploring a similar relationship, which a range of responses - it gives them ideas and experiences, they lose motivation, sometimes they create a lot (and then have to edit heavily) and at others they cannot write a word. All things I can identify with - how about you?
27 January 2013
21 January 2013
Sanja Ivekovic: Unknown Heroine
Yesterday, I went to Calvert 22, near Arnold Circus in Shoreditch, to see one half of Unknown Heroine, the first UK solo exhibition of works by Croatia photographer, filmmaker, video and performance artist Sanja Iveković (1949-). Iveković is understudied and underrated in this country: indeed, I only discovered her recently, when I told a Croatian friend that I was writing on Marina Abramović and she told me that (in her opinion) Iveković was far better.
Then Iveković cropped up in the Tate Modern's Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance exhibition, in a room full of works by the wave of feminist and queer artists from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. The Tate Modern showed her video Make Up - Make Down (1978), in which Iveković ritualistically picks up and puts down make-up, opening and applying it although the viewer never sees her face. Iveković graduated in Zagreb during the Croatia Spring of the early 1970s, when poets and artists demanded improvements in human rights and rejected officially sanctioned art, preferring to engage with video and performance works being created in the US and Europe.
Unknown Heroine is split across two sites - the South London Gallery, which showcases Iveković's exploration of female identity and consumerism, and Calvert 22, which foregrounds her engagement with the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, state surveillance and the gendered division of labour under socialism and capitalism. The link between the two, above all, is the invisibility and erasure of women within historical narratives, before and after the collapse of communism and the break-up of Yugoslavia - the works exhibited at Calvert 22 examined both periods, moving from the concentration camps to 11 September 2011 and beyond whilst remaining faithful to this theme.
Tragedy of a Venus (1975-76) was a series of juxtaposed photos, each showing a scene from a photo essay about Marilyn Monroe's emblematic life on the left and Iveković's less spectacular existence on the right. In Gen XX (1997-2001), there were a number of détourned images from fashion magazines, showing contemporary models, the captions referencing partizan women who died or were tortured after opposing the Nazi occupation.
One of these, Nera Šafarić, was Iveković's mother, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 but survived - in 1949, the year of Iveković's birth, she was declared unable to work by the state and granted social security. Iveković's efforts to find out her mother's prisoner ID at Auschwitz and chart her mother's interminable quest for support from the Yugoslav state made up one of the most powerful installations here, Searching for My Mother's Number (2002), comprised of archival documents, black and white photographs and email correspondence with the Auschwitz museum.
Several of Iveković's shorter video works were exhibited: my favourite was Personal Cuts (1982), in which she wore a stocking over her face, gradually cutting circles out of it. Every time she made an incision, the film would cut to an extract from the state TV documentary The History of Yugoslavia, in which women perform purely ceremonial roles - such as turning out, well-dressed, as the state's male rulers parade victoriously through city streets. The film is here:
My favourite piece here was the documentation of Triangle, a performance devised by Iveković in 1979 and repeated in 2005. The piece needed three people: Iveković; someone stood atop the tall building opposite her apartment; and a policeman on the street as a world leader - Tito in 1979, the visiting George W. Bush in 2005 - drove by. Women were expected to either remain invisible, or enthusiastically support the parade: Iveković did neither, lying on her balcony, smoking, reading, and performing gestures that looked like masturbation. The balcony was visible only to the person on top of the opposite building, with binoculars, but in both cases, the performance ended with the policeman coming to order Iveković to 'remove herself and the objects' from the space they occupied, making a powerful commentary on the paranoid nature of surveillance both under Tito and the paranoid post-9/11 liberal democracy.
There were several longer films, such as an hour-long documentary on women under Yugoslav socialism, but I didn't have time to watch them all. The catalogue, selling at just £7, offered several short essays on Iveković's works, but she is an artist who deserves a larger, fuller retrospective, and I would love to see a company such as LUX issue a DVD selection of her video works. In the meantime, Unknown Heroine runs until 24 February.
Further reading
Dazed Digital interview with Sanja Iveković
Then Iveković cropped up in the Tate Modern's Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance exhibition, in a room full of works by the wave of feminist and queer artists from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. The Tate Modern showed her video Make Up - Make Down (1978), in which Iveković ritualistically picks up and puts down make-up, opening and applying it although the viewer never sees her face. Iveković graduated in Zagreb during the Croatia Spring of the early 1970s, when poets and artists demanded improvements in human rights and rejected officially sanctioned art, preferring to engage with video and performance works being created in the US and Europe.
Unknown Heroine is split across two sites - the South London Gallery, which showcases Iveković's exploration of female identity and consumerism, and Calvert 22, which foregrounds her engagement with the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, state surveillance and the gendered division of labour under socialism and capitalism. The link between the two, above all, is the invisibility and erasure of women within historical narratives, before and after the collapse of communism and the break-up of Yugoslavia - the works exhibited at Calvert 22 examined both periods, moving from the concentration camps to 11 September 2011 and beyond whilst remaining faithful to this theme.
Tragedy of a Venus (1975-76) was a series of juxtaposed photos, each showing a scene from a photo essay about Marilyn Monroe's emblematic life on the left and Iveković's less spectacular existence on the right. In Gen XX (1997-2001), there were a number of détourned images from fashion magazines, showing contemporary models, the captions referencing partizan women who died or were tortured after opposing the Nazi occupation.
One of these, Nera Šafarić, was Iveković's mother, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 but survived - in 1949, the year of Iveković's birth, she was declared unable to work by the state and granted social security. Iveković's efforts to find out her mother's prisoner ID at Auschwitz and chart her mother's interminable quest for support from the Yugoslav state made up one of the most powerful installations here, Searching for My Mother's Number (2002), comprised of archival documents, black and white photographs and email correspondence with the Auschwitz museum.
Several of Iveković's shorter video works were exhibited: my favourite was Personal Cuts (1982), in which she wore a stocking over her face, gradually cutting circles out of it. Every time she made an incision, the film would cut to an extract from the state TV documentary The History of Yugoslavia, in which women perform purely ceremonial roles - such as turning out, well-dressed, as the state's male rulers parade victoriously through city streets. The film is here:
My favourite piece here was the documentation of Triangle, a performance devised by Iveković in 1979 and repeated in 2005. The piece needed three people: Iveković; someone stood atop the tall building opposite her apartment; and a policeman on the street as a world leader - Tito in 1979, the visiting George W. Bush in 2005 - drove by. Women were expected to either remain invisible, or enthusiastically support the parade: Iveković did neither, lying on her balcony, smoking, reading, and performing gestures that looked like masturbation. The balcony was visible only to the person on top of the opposite building, with binoculars, but in both cases, the performance ended with the policeman coming to order Iveković to 'remove herself and the objects' from the space they occupied, making a powerful commentary on the paranoid nature of surveillance both under Tito and the paranoid post-9/11 liberal democracy.
There were several longer films, such as an hour-long documentary on women under Yugoslav socialism, but I didn't have time to watch them all. The catalogue, selling at just £7, offered several short essays on Iveković's works, but she is an artist who deserves a larger, fuller retrospective, and I would love to see a company such as LUX issue a DVD selection of her video works. In the meantime, Unknown Heroine runs until 24 February.
Further reading
Dazed Digital interview with Sanja Iveković
20 January 2013
Anthony Asquith's 'Underground' - the Tube in the Twenties
Last night, I finally managed to see Anthony Asquith's Underground (1928), fully restored with a new soundtrack by Neil Brand and showing at the British Film Institute on the South Bank to mark the 150th anniversary of the opening of the London Underground, more affectionately known as the Tube. (I always loved silent film fanatic Paul Merton's take on this: "Did you know that the first Tube station ever opened was Baker Street in 1863? What was the point of that? Where would you go?")
I'd long wanted to see this film, rarely screened and unavailable on DVD, as I've seen it cited as one of the best British silent movies. British film in general does not have a brilliant reputation, and the silent period in particular has a poor critical stock, as Twenties Britain failed to foster any movement, or even any domestic-based directors that changed the language of film like the German Expressionists, the Russian Formalists or the French Surrealists, or which incorporated Modernist writers or artists. (A Londoner, Charlie Chaplin, did as much as anyone to establish the syntax of screen comedy, but he did it in the US.)
There were, however, a number of interesting and well-made individual British silent films, the best known of which probably remains Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). Even more than Hitchcock's blend of suspense and smog, Underground is firmly of the English capital, offering (amongst other things) a fascinating look at London life between the wars.
The film opens with a shot taken from the front of a Tube train as it enters a station, a huge number of people from all walks of life stood on the platform, then as now. (Trains, and shots taken from trains, were a common trope in early cinema, from the Lumière brothers' infamous L'Arrivée d'un train en gare du Ciotat in 1895 - the myth around this film, and this wider connection between modern transport and the modern art form, are well described by Cinema of Attractions author Tom Gunning.) It looks like we're being set up for the 'cinema of the masses' that the Close-Up group dreamed about, but the film becomes about the affairs of four working people: shop assistant Nell; her colleague Kate; underground porter Bill; and Bert, an electrician at the Powerhouse which supplies the entire Tube network.
The network was smaller before Frank Pick's reforms of 1933 (the Central Line extension to Ongar did not exist, nor yet did the Victoria or Jubilee lines) and looked different, without Harry Beck's famous diagram. (The Underground roundels were introduced in 1908, but aren't prominent here.). The humorous opening scene on the train, with passengers trying to avoid unwanted interactions whilst jostling for seats in this claustrophobic environment, seems far more familiar, with shop assistants talking across the well-to-do lady sat between them, and Bert mocking an overdressed businessman. Then, Asquith makes light slapstick comedy of the wooden escalators (abolished after the King's Cross fire of 1987), which ended with a diagonal so the stairway finished sooner for the right foot than the left, with the inevitable pratfalls for those ignoring the signs.
From here, however, Asquith widens his space to London's buses, parks, pubs and shops and narrows his narrative to the love triangle between Nell, Bill and Bert, moving away from the social mixing of the Tube to a distinctly proletarian world. The melodramatic story takes some time to develop, meandering through boozy fights, melancholic letters towards a brilliant final scene which starts in the powerhouse, where Bert tries to scramble away from those trying to apprehend him for murder.
Crossing the South Bank (which, before the 1951 Festival of Britain, was all factories) and into the creaky lift of an Underground station, it's the point at which Asquith's engagement with German and Soviet cinematography pays off, after the Expressionist-influenced light and shadow of the scenes around Kate's boarding house room and the punches launched at the camera as Bert and Bill face off in the pub. (This conclusion, in both style and content, reminded me of one of my favourite British films, Robert Hamer's post-war drama It Always Rains on Sunday - more on that soon.)
Underground does not approach the same heights at the best European films of the Twenties, but it's an intriguing period piece, intelligently made and enjoyable, even if it does not transcend its obvious stylistic influences. Applause is due to the BFI's restoration team, who used a recently rediscovered French print at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, parts of the BFI's own damaged nitrate print and safety duplicate negative to produce this version, funded by a grant from Simon W. Hessel. Alongside Maurice Elvey's Hindle Wakes (1927), a story of working-class leisure in the industrial North, and Kenneth MacPherson's stridently avant-garde Borderline (1930), Underground is a captivating relic of an under-explored film culture, finally receiving a critical reappraisal.
Further reading
You can read Pamela Hutchinson's take on Underground for The Guardian here, and her wonderful Silent London blog, with its previews, reviews and silent film listings for London, is always worth visiting.
Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review is here.
The British Film Institute's video about Underground's restoration is here. (8m 33s)
My review of Christine Gledhill's book Reframing British Cinema 1918-1928: Between Restraint and Passion is here.
I'd long wanted to see this film, rarely screened and unavailable on DVD, as I've seen it cited as one of the best British silent movies. British film in general does not have a brilliant reputation, and the silent period in particular has a poor critical stock, as Twenties Britain failed to foster any movement, or even any domestic-based directors that changed the language of film like the German Expressionists, the Russian Formalists or the French Surrealists, or which incorporated Modernist writers or artists. (A Londoner, Charlie Chaplin, did as much as anyone to establish the syntax of screen comedy, but he did it in the US.)
There were, however, a number of interesting and well-made individual British silent films, the best known of which probably remains Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). Even more than Hitchcock's blend of suspense and smog, Underground is firmly of the English capital, offering (amongst other things) a fascinating look at London life between the wars.
The film opens with a shot taken from the front of a Tube train as it enters a station, a huge number of people from all walks of life stood on the platform, then as now. (Trains, and shots taken from trains, were a common trope in early cinema, from the Lumière brothers' infamous L'Arrivée d'un train en gare du Ciotat in 1895 - the myth around this film, and this wider connection between modern transport and the modern art form, are well described by Cinema of Attractions author Tom Gunning.) It looks like we're being set up for the 'cinema of the masses' that the Close-Up group dreamed about, but the film becomes about the affairs of four working people: shop assistant Nell; her colleague Kate; underground porter Bill; and Bert, an electrician at the Powerhouse which supplies the entire Tube network.
The network was smaller before Frank Pick's reforms of 1933 (the Central Line extension to Ongar did not exist, nor yet did the Victoria or Jubilee lines) and looked different, without Harry Beck's famous diagram. (The Underground roundels were introduced in 1908, but aren't prominent here.). The humorous opening scene on the train, with passengers trying to avoid unwanted interactions whilst jostling for seats in this claustrophobic environment, seems far more familiar, with shop assistants talking across the well-to-do lady sat between them, and Bert mocking an overdressed businessman. Then, Asquith makes light slapstick comedy of the wooden escalators (abolished after the King's Cross fire of 1987), which ended with a diagonal so the stairway finished sooner for the right foot than the left, with the inevitable pratfalls for those ignoring the signs.
From here, however, Asquith widens his space to London's buses, parks, pubs and shops and narrows his narrative to the love triangle between Nell, Bill and Bert, moving away from the social mixing of the Tube to a distinctly proletarian world. The melodramatic story takes some time to develop, meandering through boozy fights, melancholic letters towards a brilliant final scene which starts in the powerhouse, where Bert tries to scramble away from those trying to apprehend him for murder.
Crossing the South Bank (which, before the 1951 Festival of Britain, was all factories) and into the creaky lift of an Underground station, it's the point at which Asquith's engagement with German and Soviet cinematography pays off, after the Expressionist-influenced light and shadow of the scenes around Kate's boarding house room and the punches launched at the camera as Bert and Bill face off in the pub. (This conclusion, in both style and content, reminded me of one of my favourite British films, Robert Hamer's post-war drama It Always Rains on Sunday - more on that soon.)
Underground does not approach the same heights at the best European films of the Twenties, but it's an intriguing period piece, intelligently made and enjoyable, even if it does not transcend its obvious stylistic influences. Applause is due to the BFI's restoration team, who used a recently rediscovered French print at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, parts of the BFI's own damaged nitrate print and safety duplicate negative to produce this version, funded by a grant from Simon W. Hessel. Alongside Maurice Elvey's Hindle Wakes (1927), a story of working-class leisure in the industrial North, and Kenneth MacPherson's stridently avant-garde Borderline (1930), Underground is a captivating relic of an under-explored film culture, finally receiving a critical reappraisal.
Further reading
You can read Pamela Hutchinson's take on Underground for The Guardian here, and her wonderful Silent London blog, with its previews, reviews and silent film listings for London, is always worth visiting.
Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review is here.
The British Film Institute's video about Underground's restoration is here. (8m 33s)
My review of Christine Gledhill's book Reframing British Cinema 1918-1928: Between Restraint and Passion is here.
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