i just finished watching one of my favourite films of all time, humoresque. there are films i love that i watch so many times that when i pick up the dvd box and can hear it and see it in my head from beginning to end, and then there are films like this one that hit me so hard, as much as i love them i can only bare to watch once in a while when i’m in a very certain mood. what an astonishing film this is though. its probably one of the best studies i’ve seen of the character of the artist/and/or musician ever, its also a brilliant breakdown of an affair, of the older woman younger man dynamic and for a film shot in the forties is right on point with the issues of fame and artisitic criticism.
i don’t even know what drove me to watch it tonight, other than i knew i had to stay in and i knew it was teh kind of film to keep me grounded and thinking in such a way i couldn’t just float out of the flat after for a drink (she says typing wiht a volumninous glass of rose’ by the mouse…) this theme of involvement with artists is suprisingly a new one for me. see i never really dated many artists before, creatives etc. but now in berlin my life is a dense tapestry of performers of all descriptions. singers, performance artists, musicians, performance poets, actors and actresses, comics. its rarely a day that goes by when i’m out and i’m not with someone who performs in some way
and we’re a funny lot. really. we crave attention to sometimes superhuman proportions, we’re as vulnerable as we’re brash and outgoing. and fueled by our vices of choice, destruction is often just out of reach. i cheated a bit when i went wrote my why you should never date a kunstler piece. i cheated in that i hadn’t dated all those artists. ok an affair and a relationship with two conceptual artists (not at the same time, that woudl have been insanity) and i’ve defo had too many affairs with poets, but the musician section was mostly abstracted from the experiences friends of mine have had. and oddly that felt the most true
humoresque like many brilliant films of the forties, is rife with cracking dialogue, but the line that stuck out and made me laugh out loud in my living room was “a french philosopher once cited three thousand ways to commit suicide, but he left one out, falling in love with an artist” how terribly true. the line is said as the joan crawford character walks out drunkenly from a bar. excited to pass a note to her lover with news that will change their relationship, she goes to his rehearsal. and when he comes ot a pause and reads her urgent note, he crumples it up and asks the conductor to go back to the beginning of the concerto. he doesn’t even look up to see her in the auditorium. its brutal. and she tells him later she doesn’t want to be second to his music. and thats the problem. one falls in love with the artist partly because of the art, and the passion for the art, and not long after one becomes jealous of that very thing. i’ve even been guilty of the same. and yet, now that it comes to me i have this joke i often make with my friends
given the choice of meeting someone tomorrow who i loved and loved me, or a personal assistant who would work for free. i’d take the P.a. no doubt. no question. and its a joke kinda. but the frightening thing is , i also know its true. i used ot be the girl who’s relationship was my life, and it made me very happy, and i’d given up on my career really progressing anyway. i find myself in reverse now.
and why do i think about all these matters? because i’ve been commisioned to write a piece authored by my doppelganger. and as i try to connect with that old self, before the madness of performing, before a kunstlername and alterego utterly eclipsed me and the life before, i’m left thinking, how could anyone really handle me now seriously as a partner, and for that matter, how coudl i seriously entertain the matter of involving anyone else…
