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At a turning point in the movie, we are shown a room where a dozen people, all hooked to a machine that lets them share a collective dream, come to sleep a few hours every day.

Those people are us.

They are sleeping in what looks very much like an opium den with wires in lieu of pipes and smoke. We learn they are addicted, no longer capable of dreaming on their own; they chose the reality of the shared dream over whatever their life may be like.

Ever wondered how much time our contemporaries, on average, spend per day hooked to our televisions? They are us. Or rather, they are a projection of how Inception’s director Christopher Nolan sees us: hooked to the machine 3 to 4 hours a day, dreaming a collective dream architected by the people in Hollywood, incapable of dreaming our own dreams any more.

Once you go down this rabbit hole and start seeing the whole film as a film about film (need to go deeper?), there is no turning back. If you start thinking this way, you’ll wonder if there is a reason why all location (but one – Casablanca) where Inception was shot are icons of mass culture: Los Angeles (Hollywood), London (The mighty pinewood studios), Paris (temple of high culture) and Tokyo (Gross National Cool). And isn’t Rupert Murdoch Australian, just like the character of energy mogul Fischer in the film?

I left my first viewing subscribing to one of the most the widespread theories about the story line.

I was wrong. Hint: the spinning top topples twice – in Tokyo and Paris-. And a half. Draw your own conclusions.

But I was also on to something: how the story ends for the characters of the movie actually doesn’t matter. The last shot of the movies shows us a piece of information that may or may not help us decide what is real and what is not. And you know what? The characters are no longer in the room, no longer looking at the artefact. They don’t care. The question is not theirs any more.

The question remains, not for them, but for us. And we’ve been asked the question many times before – we just didn’t notice. Why would an actor look straight at the camera and ask: “what do you believe is real?”. This, happening on the screen, or whatever awaits you when you get up, stretch you legs, rub your eyes and get back to your life?

Inception – the subtle and difficult art of planting an idea in someone’s mind while thy are deep in an altered state – is indeed performed throughout the movie. On us. And the simple fact that we all come out of the theater discussing for hours and days about what happened to Cobb (the main protagonist of the film, played by Leonardo Di Caprio) means that Christopher Nolan and his team have succeeded.

In panic, people try to replace the lost order of the organic process, by artificial forms of order based on control.

– Christopher Alexander, in The Timeless Way of Building

Don’t Panic. Change is on the Way.

One of the children invents a game, dangers, threats, and a set of absurd, almost random rules for their game. He will lead the others to a magical place where all wishes come true, but only if they follow his lead and the convoluted path he will trace for them.

I remember playing such games as a child, and I remember being so engrossed in play that the day would pass in the blink of an eye. To an external observer, however, the game would have felt utterly boring.

Stalker - 1979 Movie Poster

I watched Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 Stalker (Сталкер) – the 2 hours-and-half epic of three middle aged men crossing a field and visiting a house in ruins, making up absurd rules and being afraid of invisible dangers, all the while very seriously bumbling about the meaning of life. I think I almost fell asleep at some point. And yet … it has been a long time since I pondered and blabbered so much about a movie I’d just seen. Stalker has the kind of not-pretty-but beautiful aesthetic I aim for when I point a photographic camera at the world. It is a demanding mess of metaphors and false leads. Full of religious references, pagan, messianic or otherwise, it touches at the ideas of sacrifice, the question of what it means to be good.

At some point the character of the Writer, played by Anatoli Solonitsyn, wonders whether the only decent thing to do with one’s life is to dedicate it to art, because it is the only unselfish action. This line was probably on the crew’s mind as they were shooting amidst the toxic puddles of an abandoned power station that eventually killed Tarkovski, hist wife-cum-assistant-director, and Solonitsyn himself. Beyond its shooting and screening, Stalker remains a story of hope and dedication.

The film is a matter of faith and hope for the viewer, too. If you are like me, you learned about Stalker because so many critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. In the emphatic words of actress Cate Blanchett “Every single frame of the film is burned into my retina.”. But does the opinion of an inspired elite mean the movie will invariably be a pleasant, even life-changing, experience?

Only by letting go can one go past the nagging impression that this might very well be a 163 minutes-long bad joke. But when one does let go, Stalker becomes a trance-like meditation on life, hope and the nature of man; watching it gave me one of the most intellectually stimulating evenings in a decade.

This is not science-fiction for everyone. Enter at your own risks.

“Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe.”

Re-reading this review after watching Where the Wild Things Are makes me appreciate it even more. WtWTA is a honest and beautiful rendition of the joys and pain of being a child growing up. This is the movie children would make if they had a few million dollars and the talent of a Spike Jonze – instead of being usually limited to horrible crayon drawings.

Whether it is suitable for children is besides the point, the good question is whether adults can deal with it. Whether, as an adult, one is ready to open up to deep, old, primal pleasures and hurts. Wanting to be loved, wanting to be the center of attention, hating the awkward silence after a good joke, realising you are the bad guy in the story…

Life as an adult, too, is “all fun and games until someone gets hurt” – but we too often forget.

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

Banksy – Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall

I would love to side with Banksy here. He has a point: art at a bus stop has a mathematically greater chance of touching more people than would a museum (minus perhaps the millions-a-year ilk of the Louvre). The bus stop also shelters a lot of people with a potential to be inspired by art – unlike the jaded artgoer, already taught that art is important and thus seen chin-stroking in front of a Rothko.

Put a Rothko under plexiglas at a bus stop: no-one will even bat an eyelash at it. Not even the aforementioned chin-stroker, who doesn’t necessarily have the right sensitivity to appreciate or recognise the painting. Education and a conviction that art matters is not enough. Neither will the non-artsy bus-goers.

Not convinced? Ask Joshua Bell, thought to be the best violinist of our age, about his little gig in a Washington Metro station: “In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.” Bell was out of his context, a masterpiece without a frame.

This story is getting old now – almost two years old as I write this, but it has been gnawing at a side of my mind on a regular basis. Was it enlightening, or full of self-righteous bias? I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Neither did the authors of the article themselves, concluding (with Kant and with panache) that there wasn’t much to be inferred from their small study on humanity. Bell just was out of context, a masterpiece without a frame.

What reminded me of the Josh Bell story was my reading of an essay by Antoni Tàpies called “Nothing is Paltry”. Tàpies, painter and thinker, thinks that we have lost the ability to look, and that perhaps there is something to be learned in the Japanese mystique around sacred, beautiful arteftacts shown only on special occasions, with a solemn ritual that ensures it is given proper attention. Context matters. The frame matters.

Is the bus stop a proper frame for some art? It probably depends on the art. Just as Rothko would be shunned at the bus stop, Banksy’s provocations would be obscenely out of place in between impressionist paintings (or actually… why not?).

Does all this reflection point, eventually, towards museums as guarantors of “proper” presentation? keeping us, the alien “visitors”, appropriately far from art, close enough for awe, distant enough for veneration.

Museums too often don’t “get it” and stay stuck in their ideological dualism of the curator and visitor. Too often galleries fail to invent any scheme to save us from the drabness of the “four white walls”. And I hate the “four white walls” with as much passion as I embrace attempts to showcase art in smart, enchanting narrative spaces. Museums and galleries have either not enough money, or not enough imagination to reinvent themselves. But if Tàpies is right, if the little study on humanity done by the Washington Post teaches us anything, it is that we are not quite rid of galleries and museums yet.

Contemporary dance, however, has an opacity I never quite felt at ease with. I am not talking about the macho “you’ll never catch me looking at people in tutus hopping on a stage” fright, but more of an intellectual lack of confidence: what if I don’t get it?

And yet when I stumbled upon the presentation of O Vertigo’s La Chambre Blanche, its themes of madness and alienation and its incredible aesthetics made me buy a couple of tickets without much thought.

La Chambre Blanche is a choreographical work in which a confining site brings on states of dismay and frenzy in its captives. In the White Room, the characters are probed in their deepest intimacy and placed in a situation of extreme vulnerability where the body has no choice but to abandon itself to disequilibrium and dizziness.
(– Ginette Laurin, Choreographer)

My fears were apparently unjustified. Obviously I still have no idea what the choreographer and dancers meant with their creation, but they provided me with a canvas on which to apply my own interpretation, my own story. Within the first 10 minutes I was following a story of violence, domestic abuse, miscommunication, and how the characters on stage had no other escape than madness.

“You told me to wait here, and I waited here all that time and you never came back”, one of the character whispers to the outside world. They don’t know they can leave, when their only horizon is to bounce on the walls of the cramped white room, and interact – through love or death – whith whoever happens to be there, too.

I left the theater battered, exhausted, sore in my every muscle as if I’d been the one prancing around for that hour. I left with a head abuzz with thoughts and full of stories. I am not afraid of contemporary dance any more.

Short video of La Chambre Blanche (2008)