Our Daily Drowning (Fragments on Elias Canetti, Krzysztof Zanussi, and the Question of Meaning) — Christina Tudor-Sideri

On May 13, 1994, holding my mother’s hand, I walked into the office of a cardiologist, from where I emerged a new person. No. There was another I. A double. Perhaps the first double. I was whole, but she was not. She was incomplete, deficient, lacking; nothing like the I that had until then lived in the world. A reflection from another realm. I emerged holding a small piece of paper; yellow, as if already worn-out by the passage of time, as if I were returning from a past that I had no memory of ever living, and on this paper, a diagnosis, simplified for the mind of a little girl: a hole in the heart. That is how it was explained to my then seven-year-old self. How it would have always come to be referred to—by myself, my double, my parents, my lovers. As time passed, folding itself in pleats and years, through the fleshiness of new words, new experiences, through myriad selves, in hours colored by longing, on nights governed by worrying undertones, anywhere and at all times, always this overwhelming presence—not the condition itself, not the illness, but the repetition of what we called it, while its scientific name became something no one ever remembered. Even when the heart healed, when nothing remained of this defect but its memory and whatever metaphysical worth I had assigned to it throughout the years. Even then—a hole in the heart. The day before, I had fainted in the swimming pool. To lose consciousness in water. I am perhaps meant to write here something beautiful or consequential about such an act or about the condition that caused it, but this is not a text on illness, in fact, the only reason this memory and not another takes on the role of an opening paragraph is because that was the day when I first asked myself what it meant to be human. To outline the silhouette of one’s insides. To be whole. To be seen. To be diagnosed. To embrace oneself. To live and make sense of living. To breathe. Under and above water. In the world. To breathe anywhere, really, for without breath, there is no I, there is no double and no further multiplication, there is no meaning. That was the day when I first thought about loss of air, loss of self—loss of something personal, visceral, something from within, as opposed to losing a loved one or a cherished part of the world, or an object one holds dear, or even hours of one’s life, because yes, there had been moments, before, when I thought, for instance, as all children do, about losing time: when sleeping, when eating, when doing anything other than what was desired, anything other than what pleased and satisfied. In the cardiologist’s office, I thought of loss, of disintegration, of monuments—of the body as a monument to the soul—of humans as grains of sand through the fingers of some divine being. Of dreams that end. I thought about the presence and absence of someone. Where do we go when we are no longer here? As I was being educated on what my new life would entail, on new ways of living, as I was being walked through the chambers of my defective heart, fragments of myth and folklore filled my mind; recollections, figures, dancing; dwellings along the banks of the river, fires, silhouettes in the center of the forest, unveiling themselves to my imagination, taking residence as if to fill the hole in my heart. Fragments of myth as perception—though, of course, that is not how I thought of them at the time—fragments as the only knowledge in my possession, their knotting as a game I was playing with myself, with my double, perhaps with doubles to come. Knowledge of the human, of quests and searches, of crossing thresholds, of healing waters and balms that could do anything, even return a heart to its wholeness. Fragments driven by desire—the desire to hurl them at the abyss. That is what I saw in those moments: a dance, a game, a quest; spatial and temporal, absent and present—and what I thought life would be from then on: flow and the desire to collect. A search, a gathering of fragments; not to have, but to offer to the void when the hour would come and the chasm would be so wide and so deep that no reality would ever be able to fill it. 

When face to face with one’s years, time becomes an overture for the events of the self. It becomes a paradox pushed to conclusion, a diversion of the mind. In the November of one’s soul, time is the fulcrum upon which all questions depend. The clock rings hollow. The self as experience becomes nothing but an inconclusive tale, and one no longer knows that this is not a flaw. Time is no longer time: the all-encompassing, but rather, time: the foreteller. Fleetingness that lingers solely to act as the voice of the oracle. Ephemerality in that one instance. In the instance of the fall. Corporeal, metaphorical, no matter. When one collapses into emptiness but there is no inner sense, and there is no underneath, nothing for the body to land on, and so the fall becomes eternal. The body itself becomes a trace. And if the trace is the mark of that which has never been present, the transfiguration, the transformation, too, becomes eternal. An homage to movement, albeit movement that makes one uncertain, uncomfortable; the drive between the conscious and the unconscious, a sort of Sartrean conceptualization, what it means to be a self that passes through time, a self through which time passes. To cross a threshold, to aim for a continuum. In the end, a sheer accident. How to put into words the accidental? To speak of meaning at a time when the word itself is brimming with misinterpretation, when its repetition and analysis have made it something one rolls one’s eyes at, when its echo in the mind and in the world is more that of a motivational nature—under the firm grasp of toxic optimism, meaning cannot be anything other than bountiful. It cannot be dark, empty, absent, futile in search and in discovery. To assert that meaning is nonexistent, that meaning is obscure, to say anything other than what might give one strength to carry on to greener pastures is cause for disappointment. There are perhaps other words, other concepts, other terms, something closer to a philosophical interpretation of life, of death, of experience; words and concepts and terms that might undo the oppressions installed by misuse. Yet speculating about the limits of textual interpretation does nothing but feed misconception. When meaning is uncertain, one turns to other realms. Poetry, for instance. And so I think of the poems of Marcel Proust, of his portraits of musicians and painters, and from them, I gather a few words, fragments to make a whole, an image in the mind: timeless minutes, timeless hours, unrelenting wind. I think of poetry, and meaning becomes image. Film. Instance as image. Anchored in film. The intimate experience of seeing, of capturing what has already been captured, by other eyes, other minds, other realms. Time comes to a halt and everything there is acts as signifier and form and descriptor for an emptiness that offers nothing but the illusion of what is not yet here. There is no plenitude in the sign. No sign carries enough on its own as to be full. There is nothing to be retrieved from the outside. And yet, the illusion remains: the years passed and the years forthcoming. The illusion of how we read them. Like books, like open palms, like river tributaries on maps. The emptiness of a search for meaning. The repetition: of a word, of a task, of an endeavor. The weight of human pain. The weight of pointlessness. The forever that one never experiences. The school of language. Always the search. Like the pre-Socratics, to seek the secret of water and fire. The trace. Every time, returning, a trace, not as itself, but as something slightly altered. Something new yet haunting. A ghost in the skin of newness. 

Writing in the dark one summer, with films playing in the background, as I often do, I lifted my eyes and gazed at the screen when my writing hand was interrupted by a voice asking in Polish: What is illumination? I had seen this particular film by Krzysztof Zanussi more than once, enough that I was familiar with a few words that could serve as identifiers when I wanted to know, to be present without abandoning the page. What is illumination? Upon hearing it, my mind turned to my seven-year-old self, to her double and her interrogations. I immediately slipped back into her ways, her manners of thinking, her theories, and her dreams. What makes one human? More questions rolled and the page, the screen, the walls, all surfaces were all of sudden canvases for these words. I was revisited by those fragments of myth, of folklore, by Elias Canetti, a writer who had been a faithful companion during many childhood nights, whose autobiographical volumes spoke of wolves and the Danube and forests like my own. He, too, asked questions; questions that stayed with me. How do immortals measure time? Questions that I had adopted as my own, at times without knowing. The unbreakable, how do they do it? Questions that became my very emotions. The topography of my quests and searches. The unshaken, what are they made of? No matter how guttural their texture, how corporeal their presence, they remained nonetheless ethereal elements, imaginary entities floating through the air as if to ground one in something—in the idea of the catastrophe, perhaps, as Walter Benjamin wrote; but are Beings not always grounded in the catastrophe? Whether through semiotics or semantics or even metaphysics, is meaning not this: the relationship between a thing and another? If one of those things is the Being, is the other not the Catastrophe? Death? As all these questions, along with their misrepresentations, with their responsibility and symbolism, were unspooling before me, I thought of what resides at the confluence of text and film, and, naturally, at the confluence of Canetti and Zanussi. Their works inhabit that universe where two things can be similar and utterly distinctive at the same time, that paradoxical universe that burrows into our innards, while at the same time we ourselves burrow into it and emerge changed, emerge holding the hand of a double, of another self. People, texts, concepts, disciplines. Whether phenomenology, hermeneutics, linguistics, cinematography, literature; whether the trees outside or the scar on one’s forearm or nothing at all—pure absence—there is in this universe an overabundance of how to provide the Being with a glimpse into the self. Whether through Cixous or Derrida or Nancy or Husserl, whether through Bachmann or Proust or Joyce or Woolf, whether through Lucretius or Wittgenstein, Tarkovsky or Bergman; whether by ways of the sea or the sky or the handful of soil one throws upon the grave of a beloved; through metaphysical slips of the tongue or the shyness of skin in winter, the nature of Being reveals itself: being minded, being body, being grief, being in the world, being toward another, being in itself. 

“There were stories about the extraordinary years when the Danube froze over,” writes Canetti in The Tongue Set Free, “about sleigh rides all the way across the ice to Rumania; about starving wolves at the heels of the sleigh horses.” Outside of my childhood home, a small river passed through as it was making its way to the Danube. “Wolves were the first wild animals I heard about,” he continues. Wolves were the first wild animals I heard about. I could have written that. This was the Canetti of my formative years. A storyteller. Later in the book, he repeats it, “the wolves on the frozen Danube.” A repetition that warms me whenever I come across it. I used to read it aloud in Romanian, lupii de pe Dunărea înghețată, and the familiarity made it seem as there was but one world, but one metaphor; one world for all of us, one tale, for all of us—the tale of the Danube wolves. 

Krzysztof Zanussi’s Illumination is the kind of film that one might rush to call philosophical even before having a proper sense of what it lays at one’s feet, the kind of film that one might desire to analyze and break into fragments and chapters and pull from there its merits, for there are many. Yet anything can be philosophical, there is in each and every act and product and gesture of life a certain something that makes it so, which is why I do not want to write about it from a theoretical perspective. Instead, I shall follow in Canetti’s footsteps. In a 1951 entry, he speaks in his notebooks about wanting to write of the activities of humans—gestures: “the outstretched hand of a seller returning money, a mouth in profile that opens as to pronounce a few words, my own steps when crossing the threshold of a door, the coat of a stranger, a soup spoon that lingers halfway up on a table, a seat not quite occupied.” He wants to write the story of the gesture. “Something like the philosophy of that gesture,” he says. “In none of these stories would I explain anything.” Looking through old notes on Illumination, I think of the story of this film from the perspective of the viewer. Of one viewer. An audience of one; a remarkable rendering of life. The enlightenment of the mind, I wrote. Seeing the truth just as our eyes see the physical world. To see without having to reason. To see the story of life, of someone’s life, as a gesture of being—to see thought itself. That is what one is waiting for, that is what one is hoping to find when one goes in search of meaning and truth, an object in the physical world. “I would like to know certain things,” says the protagonist, Franciszek Retman, just as the film begins. Franek. He is being measured and interviewed and tested for admission to university. The tests reveal a tendency toward reflection. Franek is played by Stanisław Latałło, a cinematographer who had never acted before. Zanussi chose him, though had a difficult time convincing him to accept the role, which is something that he himself mentions, something that everyone mentions when speaking of Latałło. “I like this incarnation of myself,” said the director, while at the same time saying how different they were. A paradox. A paradox of voice and expression and flesh that one both recognizes and doesn’t in another. “This film is a projection of my life.”

A film about one’s first steps into adulthood, about life as it comes and as one lives it, rather than in retrospect; a film about choice, big and small; about situations and thoughts and bodies that must march on, as bodies are expected to do. It follows Franek from his admission to university, studying physics, to his work on a PhD thesis, yet this is not what Zanussi gives the viewer, even though the angle of academic life is present throughout, even though there are debates, for instance, about whether a modern physicist may decide on the fate of the world; debates on pure poetry as opposed to pure science. “None of us working in physics pay much attention to the world,” says a fellow scientist. And yet, this is precisely what Zanussi gives us: life. It could have been anyone. It is him. Franek. Latałło. Zanussi himself, as another. He lives, he loves, he questions. From time to time, the film is interwoven with documentary material; we are also shown photographs, diagrams, scientific details, art. A statue by Josef Limburg, Die Reue. I don’t recognize the name nor the statue itself but I know what the title means: The Repentance. I marvel at it every time I see the film, but I never try to find more information about it nor about its creator, nothing other than what Zanussi provides. An image of a photograph. Perhaps a post card. There is silence, and there is music—the music of Wojciech Kilar. In 1991, Zanussi would make a biographical film about him. From behind autumn leaves, we see Franek having his palm read. The woman says, “You go to sleep but there are various thoughts in your heart.” This echoes the presentation from the beginning of the film, when philosopher Władysław Tatarkiewicz carries us through a brief account of illumination from medieval times; from Augustine to the present-day viewer. In order to understand illumination, one must have a pure heart. Heart over thought. Heart overflowing with thought. A consensus is born, albeit illusory, a trace through philosophy and science and palmistry—illumination requires the heart. Franek’s life goes on. Life, as one lives it, in the here-and-now. Relations, parties, falling in love, experimenting, laughter, first heartbreak, rain. Her image through the rain behind a window. The mountains, music, Kilar. In my notes, a reoccurring thought: mountains, music, Kilar. Later, I would note the same about his other films. As Franek plans a climbing trip, I myself remember looking through my parents’ photographs and seeing much of the same: school, work, the mountains. The same coats, the same whiteness. Snow from the past. Snow from everywhere. On film, in photographs, in memories. Sunbathing on rocks. Franek. My mother, in a worn-out black and white image. A post card. “We don’t know anything; we don’t know what is going on.” He does not want to choose. He does not know. A conversation about his studies, which nevertheless seems to mirror his general attitude towards life: he does not know; he must know. An illustration of the palm as Franek is looking at his hand and fingers under a microscope. He reads himself. He searches—the heart line, the life line, the phalange of will. What we see is everything. Zanussi gives us in those few seconds while his protagonist gazes at his own palm—he gives the audience everything, in fragments, followed by a lecture on space and time.

“While we can move in space (…) the course of time in our consciousness is as if automatic. The course of time in our mind may be compared to a moving illumination: the present and the past, which exists in our memory, are illuminated, while the future is in darkness. Maybe there are such people who can see in the darkness unclear outlines of what will happen tomorrow. Contemporary science does not rule out that the future exists in the present.” The film cuts to an image of the palm reader.

Life carries on. He meets another woman. A child. They marry. He listens to his child’s heartbeat on a monitor. He is happy. To his palm, that of his child is added. More questions; more conflicts. In need of money, he undergoes some medical experimentation. He becomes the subject, the patient. They will measure the bioelectrical activity of his brain. He falls asleep. The audience finds out what sleep spindles are. “This chart signals falling into deep sleep.” I recognize the Polish for deep sleep. I look up and see the slightly blue waves on the screen. Variations. Dreaming. Paradoxical sleep. He does not know how to explain what he was dreaming of; “It’s no good telling, it won’t be the same,” he says, yet we see it. We see the dream. It is akin to a sequence from a Wojciech Has film. Fog, dizzying music, spinning, running, the color red, ruins. A child. A man following the mother and the child with an ax, through the courtyard, through the corridors. I think of the corridors in The Hourglass Sanatorium. Franek gets paid to sleep. To dream. This part of the film serves as introduction into a longer struggle sequence, that is, into a sequence of his life when the questions are no longer theoretical, the pain is no longer pain to come. A spider is injected with human spinal fluid. Under the influence of the fluid, the web woven is deformed. I pause there. I look at the screen. Normal spider web; deformed spider web. I gaze at the two, intermittently, for what feels like hours. They mention the name of a scientist: Peter Witt. I never return to him, either, other than through what Zanussi offers, that is, only when I rewatch the film. The experiments are difficult to take in. The eyes swivel inwards. They are difficult for both the audience and Franek. He begins to see. To question beyond the hypothetical, the speculative, beyond the abstract and the immaterial. He fleshes out his mind. He asks one of the doctors, “Is there some criterion, a boundary? How long is man still a man?” “I can’t cope,” he says. The audience cannot cope, either. It’s the life that one hides away, the life one chooses to forget. “As long as biological processes continue to take place in the body,” the doctor responds. In the face of all this, the mind-body problem appears shallow, insubstantial; cruel, even. “If there is some unity,” Franek resumes, “why do we intervene so brutally in the material basis of the soul?” The body, as the material basis of the soul. One can feel it. It becomes immobilizing. One can feel the interventions being conducted. Brutal, less brutal, one can feel them and can also feel the urge to answer the questions asked of the subject. All of a sudden, the queasiness of having someone rummage through one’s brain. How are you feeling? Is there something bothering you? How about now? Do you feel quite well? You answer alongside the subject. A human being. You ask yourself, again, what does it mean to be human? Sometimes you look away. You might even skip these scenes. Other times, you can’t avert your gaze, you can’t steady your hands. What are you feeling now? Nothing. Piano music carries you away. We see Franek waiting by the side of someone’s bed. A patient. A tumor removal surgery. They were friends; they spoke of physics, and beauty, and mathematics. He carried his books. Franek wipes the sweat off his face. He dies. They wrap him in a white sheet and tape a piece of paper to his chest. Franek watches as they take him away; while his mother smokes a cigarette on the hospital hallway. He gazes at the now empty bed, at the tray with medical instruments, around the room. The camera lingers on the objects. Is it his gaze or ours? Franek attends the autopsy. This man, who not long ago spoke to him about reality and beauty and asked to have his books returned to the library, about physics and the ways of the world—he is now a disembodied organ, tissue inside a jar; tissue from which a piece is about to be excised. The diseased piece. The tumor. “This dark round fragment,” says the doctor. A fragment. Pressing on healthy tissue, causing epilepsy. A dark round fragment. A part of the body. Of the material basis of the soul. A demarcation. “Do you see it well?” “I do.” He does not want to look through the microscope. 

At a convent, where he went to seek not answers, but new ways of seeing, a monk says to Franek, “no man will sacrifice his life for complete emptiness.” He understands, and so does the audience. Wherever we go, however far, however alone, we go to find something. “Mystic experience is connected with the limbic system in the brain,” the audience is informed as colorful illustrations of the brain alternate with sequences of monks in prayer. He returns. We see people smoking, eating, living. We see Franek lingering along the banks of the river, going home, embracing his wife, reapplying to university. Life carries on. He gazes. He studies. He loves. He crumbles ice in his hands. Life carries on. He lives it. 

Whenever I watch Illumination now, I think of Elias Canetti. That is how it will remain forever tangled in my mind. Zanussi, the cinematic conscience of the world. Canetti, the opponent of death. The storytellers. I give to them my search for meaning, I shroud myself in their words and imagery. I bathe at the confluence of their rivers. I think of time and its shadow. I think of the will to be and the effort to do just so; of becoming, of the self—the constructed self, the theorized self, the selves to come. “Old age is the death of others and nothing else,” writes Canetti in his fragments against death. I think of drowning. Of dissociation and displacement and recognition. In a short film from 1973, Hipoteza, Zanussi tells the story of a professor who, while strolling along a bridge, sees a woman drowning in the river below. Hypothesis. Choices. My mind wanders to another Krzysztof. Kieślowski. Good friend and colleague of Zanussi. I think of Blind Choice and the universe of paths and choices expands beyond the fictional. It expands and weighs on me as if it were a blanket of concrete placed from above on my body—my body, that only wanted to warm itself. Zanussi’s short film is a mere memory now, having seen it once, very early in life, at a time when I was neither thinking these thoughts nor living this life. Nevertheless, its essence remains. Drowning. Salvation. Choices. Its absence weaves itself with it. It becomes a cinematic wonder, like many others. An elusive yet everlasting chapter in the life of the mind. 

A conversation with the other. I tell her how she is living. There is much to be said. Many realms to depict. I tell her that she is becoming stone. That only her voice will remain. Her echo. From the deepest of intimacies, there is much to be revealed. To be reflected back to her. One might perhaps think to follow the opposite path, to plead with amnesia, to trail other workings of the imagination, to go in search of compensatory dreams, to be rewarded rather than troubled, to produce and engage with extra-textual features that have a different bearing on interpretation, yet I know, and she knows, that even then, there would be no forgetting outside of its theoretical framework; no forgetting other than the forgetting one invokes and reveals through text. Between beauty and its reflection, the never-answered question of what its meaning is, of why it even matters. What the meaning of everything is. Why anything matters. To empty oneself, to isolate oneself from one’s influences, a kind of kenosis as attempt—at anything, at something else. At curtailing oneself, says the rational mind. It is in such times that language carries very little. It is now that I—that she plays with metonymies and morphemes and whatever else lies at hand. My engagement remains tentative. Even so, even when language matters not, the consequences of abandoning it are grave and everlasting. When she is becoming stone. One needs at least a measure of language, at least something inward, a gesture—Canetti’s gesture of the human—a sigh, anything that can form a conversation, in whatever shape, through whatever medium. A conversation with the self or with another, with the world or with the abyss. Void as belief. What counts now as meaning, what counts as the strive for sense, whether personal or collective, involves precisely this emptying of language. She opens book after book, she traces with her fingers the life of words, its curves and its bounds, still searching for something descriptive, something she can steal from there, from the page; something sublime, emotional, filling. Do you see it well? I do. She has no life left in her, she utters, yet goes on searching. Possessing the emptiness, the vacuum, the space that she confronts and antagonizes—this maddening void of meaning, of passion, of what to carry and what to give to another, the human condition takes on new dimensions. Why a universal meaning? she wonders. Why not a phenomenological approach, why not say: whatever meaning exists, one cannot grasp nor control it? Death speaks to her as if its voice were her inner voice. She carries death. You. I. We carry death. Any and all conversations are about death. Against death. An echo that strives to escape, to emerge, to become the outer voice of this moment—an effort in presentism—of nostalgia, even though she has only a fading idea of what it would entail; to be nostalgic, to feel on her skin the common trait that makes one such—but then, she also lacks the knowledge of its absence, of how to compulsively uproot this nostalgia, and melancholia, and the meaning of all meanings; a meaning that she is keen on capturing in order to offer it to the Other. She utters words to herself: love, time, collapse. She makes with them a poem, and from this poem, a life raft. She does not drown. She drowns every day. Do you feel quite well? She has read enough, she has lived enough; she has positioned herself in all kinds of contrasts, exposed to all kinds of gazes. The interrogation bites its own tail. She thinks of the world as something devastatingly misunderstood, of the relation between speech and language, of life and coming into being, of fissures and interruptions and places where one can rest and breathe and formulate new questions; of this space, of this time she inhabits. She thinks of herself, of arrival, of you, and the moment itself takes on the shape of a thought. What else can it be? What else to call belonging? An error, since truth itself might be a kind of error. What to call belonging—how to name it without naming being? How to name being without having a sense of self? A dark disintegration appears. As text. As theory. As the smallest linguistic part of a word. As the material basis of the soul. Still, text. Pure text, washed away by the sea. Private language; between the self and the Other. Between a body and another. Between the veil and what it obscures. Between structure and syntax. Composition. She does not see the water. She does not see the waves; she does not hear their roar. They, too, are text. They are the minimal materials of what is needed to exist, to observe, to resound in one’s ears and in the ears of everyone else. Waves, as simple as that. Wave upon wave, frame upon frame, phrase upon phrase—the literature of the self. They are also the promise that the world has made to her, a promise whose fulfilment no longer interests her, rather, she would very much like to go on gazing at it as waves at her feet. As text. As consciousness. She was promised a conscience. A context. She is shattered. The illusion remains. Do you see it well? The dark round fragment. Even when there are two of us, even when there is an I and its double, carrying a conversation, the need for more, for something external, even predetermined—if not in content, then at least in existence—is as wounding as the blades of time. 

February 15, 1942. “Today I have decided to write down my thoughts against death as they come to me, without any coherence…” Elias Canetti’s lifelong project, a book against death. One that he never finished, though having carried it for so long, having carried it even from before he knew he was doing so, is perhaps the only accomplishment that should matter. For he knew, and we know, there can be no book against death other than a failed book. No conquest other than that of having chronicled, having witnessed, having cared. In a conversation with Theodor Adorno, on death and surviving, Canetti says: “I believe that this experience is masked by convention, by the things that one is supposed to feel when another person dies.” Death is masked by convention. Not just the rituals surrounding it, not just how we look at it, but death itself. In a similar framework, Krzysztof Zanussi spoke of the presence of death in his films: “I rank death as a very important criterion of our life values. I think about it a lot, and I feel that the society that hasn’t established a realistic attitude toward death is, in a way, culturally condemned. There is no inner strength, and that’s frightening, because such civilizations don’t survive very long.” A realistic attitude toward death. “There must be something bigger in our life than death,” he continues. “Death has to be treated in a way that the ultimate values would be bigger and stronger than death itself. So, I confront death…” In Zanussi’s films, we are always given a glimpse into the clash between the human and that which society imposes, which is also overabundant in Canetti’s writing. The clash between the human and the already-established. Against power. Against death. And while Canetti has made it his life’s work to find a manner in which to annihilate death—not the death of one, but the death of all—Zanussi strives to show how one’s attitude toward death changes, how it separates itself from that of society as a whole when faced with its physical presence, and yet they both speak of and try to disentangle the workings of a society that has made too many mistakes and has taken too many wrong turns when it comes to death, to honoring and remembering its dead. Susan Sontag calls Canetti someone “who has felt in a profound way the responsibility of words,” and while that is indeed easily deductible from his work, there is in Canetti also a responsibility of memory, a responsibility that would go beyond the realm of words, if, for him, there were other means of portraying it. One reads Canetti and knows that he would have found a way, if language would not have been at hand. Same as Andrei Tarkovsky, same as the Romanian phenomenologist Alexandru Dragomir, who wrote: “without memory, without history, there would be no graves,” Canetti understood that there is more to storytelling than passing along one’s personal anecdotes, that there is more to remembering and preserving than an act in praise of the individual past—that, indeed, without it, there would be no past, that is, no past to guide the present, no past to reflect the future. We take from Canetti this responsibility of words and memory—when he speaks of himself, when he speaks of others, when he speaks of death—and we make with it a model for a different way of living; we read Canetti and we understand that his struggle against death was not the struggle of one individual with mortality, but rather the lifelong battle of someone who knew how to look at the world; someone who did not fear to speak of its weaknesses. Someone who found words, and knew what to make of them. “Narrate,” he writes. “Narrate until no one dies.” And yet—

“My little boy, think, not many children get letters from the highest of all mountains.” In a crevice in the Lhotse glacier, lies buried the body of Stanisław Latałło. Franek. He fell in love with the mountains while filming Illumination. “It will take him hundreds of years to float down,” says Jerzy Surdel, film director and member of the Himalayan expedition to Mount Lhotse, which Latałło was part of as a cameraman. At twenty-nine, in December of 1974, a year after his memorable role as one of Zanussi’s incarnations, he died in the mountains. As I watch the documentary made by his son, Marcin Latałło, I can’t help but think of the interweaving of life and film. Of how the mountains are present in most of Zanussi’s work—the mountains, the Himalayas; climbing accidents. The documentary begins with the sound of rain. The sound of rain and a Dear Father letter. “Dear Father, I remember you looking at the sky and saying: it’s going to rain.” Fragments of my own childhood fill the room as Marcin’s voice echoes words from the past. Looking at the sky. We were all looking at the sky, all the time. A trace—from the grief and memory of a stranger, Marcin, into my own grief and memory; from their sky and their rain into ours. The same sky. The same rain. Sometimes I think it a relief to carry that sky merely in memory. In Marcin’s documentary, people speak of Stanisław Latałło as if to rationalize this twist that fate has taken, this mirroring of film and life; they speak of how akin his thoughts and preoccupations were to those of Franek. The documentary is also where Krzysztof Zanussi calls him his incarnation. Scenes from Illumination remind us of Latałło as Franek. “Should I be a walking corpse? I want to live the way I want to.” Agnieszka Holland compares him to Arthur Rimbaud. “They both had the same type of personality, looking for an ideal.” At the airport, before departing for the expedition, Latałło said to his girlfriend that he was considering reciting Kordian’s Mont Blanc monologue when he reached the top of the mountain. I read Juliusz Słowacki’s play some years ago.  A critique of romantic heroes, and an essential work in Polish literature, it tells the story of young Kordian, who, after heartbreak and a suicide attempt, embarks on a journey through Europe in search of new ideas and new ways of living, yet with each place he visits, his bitterness and disappointment deepen. Struggling with loneliness and alienation, Kordian experiences a spiritual transformation when reaching the top of Mont Blanc. I remember the monologue. I pause the documentary and search for it. “Here I’ll unfurl the black wings of my thoughts / Over all the world…” “I’ll be the first to die if heaven falls.” The first to die if heaven falls. I had never before Kordian thought of this; I had never thought of the first person to die in case everyone were to die. There are so many books and films and whatnot about the last person on earth, about surviving on one’s own when everyone else is gone. A world of one’s own. But no, Kordian thought: I’ll be the first to die if heaven falls. Latałło wanted to honor that. In a way, heaven did fall; there was a storm, something ultimate, as those who accompanied him in the expedition speak of it: he wanted something ultimate—and he was the first to die. “One never knows what will be most valuable,” writes Canetti. For Latałło, in the airport, at the moment of departure, it was Kordian. 

During the past few years, I have become dependent on rituals. I no longer resemble myself, I say, when I think of this, when I try to make sense of why it takes so much and why does it need to be so repetitive, when I strive to possess the meaning of this, even if I am not able to render it into words—a meaning to have knowledge of, to know that something is there, something that makes sense, a desideratum. Unable to rid myself of my aversion toward what I equate with monotony, sameness, repetition not as splendor but lack thereof, I have taken to calling them necessary conditions of being. It is perhaps a question of deceiving oneself, life. It is many things. A dispossession. Inevitability. Nature. Corporeal existence. Hauntology. Perception, however faint. Meaning. Of course, life is meaning. Meaning is life. Meaning is desire. Meaning is body. Plato’s khôra and Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. To occur in the space of the search, within a given language, within a given time, within the body; to become oneself part of what is meaningful. To become words in the mouth of another. To resemble oneself. Meaning is the near-far city. It is threshold and intimacy and the accretion of time. Meaning is the return to oneself, or rather, the will for a return. “It is time to once again talk to oneself,” writes Canetti on the last page of the Spanish translation of his fragments against death. There, on that page, he also speaks of Dante, of being given Dante for children, in English, at seven. “At ninety,” he writes, “Dante is vital.” At seven, I was given a blue piano. It was as small as a notebook. It had pink and silvery flowers in one corner, and played the most beautiful music. At least, that is how I imagined it, for I never learned myself, and so, my piano had a secret life in dreams, where it played the most beautiful music. Later, learning to read, reading Cioran, reading about Bach in his texts, I imagined my blue piano playing Bach. I think of my blue piano and repetition no longer bothers me. It is no longer for my eyes, for my thoughts, for my now-mended heart. I think of my blue piano, and I remember: it was around the same time that the street we lived on was named Danube Street. 

“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world,” writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception. Nothing. Used in the sense of the reader’s imagination. Used as the author intended. Nothing, used as everything. Nothing, meant to undo repressions, to untangle webs, to unfurl thought. There is in this discourse about what the outside does to the inside, about how we are what is imprinted on us, about how we, too, leave our mark, how we, too, become an outside for someone’s inside, a rather mechanical line of thought, a position like a limiting, as if it were something that we were meant to think without questioning, the a priori no one recognizes as such. And so, when Merleau-Ponty says, “I am from the start outside myself and open to the world,” all this vanishes, or perhaps it gains new valences—it becomes organic, natural. It makes sense. It speaks, as language should. Not beings in the world, but beings belonging to the world. 

Krzysztof Zanussi’s feature debut was The Structure of Crystal, in 1969, a film about companionship, about different views of the world and understanding another under the paradox of wanting to have the other live a life similar to one’s own. It opens with two people, a couple, waiting for someone in a rural setting. A beautiful secluded village setting. Anna and Jan. Snow fills the screen. From time to time, the voices and steps of children returning from school break the silence. It’s cold. They pace around to stay warm. Someone drives toward them in a comically small car. Marek. He and Jan used to study physics together. Now, Jan is in charge of a meteorological station in the middle of nowhere, while Marek went on to build himself a prolific academic career. Different from his later films, though many of his themes and motifs are present, The Structure of Crystal is first and foremost a visual wonder—the countryside, the cinematography, motion of all kinds, the meteorological instruments at the mercy of the wind—yet it is not through imagery that one grows fond of it, but rather because of its depiction of human attachment. Marek has come to persuade Jan to follow his path, to return to Warsaw and the study of physics. Throughout the film, he makes various attempts at convincing Jan that his chosen way of living is not only wrong, but inconceivable for someone of his age. He understands needing a vacation, “catching one’s breath,” but “one has to do something.” Bemoaning, he repeats it often. One has to do something. “Has it ever occurred to you that catching your breath might be the right way to live?” replies Jan, calmly. They talk, they go for walks in the snow, they have dinner, they run around and play and marvel at the simplicity of life, they discuss physics. The theoretical debates about equations sometimes fade into silence and music. Silence becomes necessary. Music, equally so. The viewer must know that they are connected by something else. And so we see them, we go on seeing them, but the science fades, only the gesture of speaking remains. The passage is not visual, we are not taken from one frame to another, rather, it is aural, the scene stays the same, the two friends remain in focus, but the sound changes. A conversation fades into silence, silence fades into music, and then again into conversation. For Zanussi, this will become a methodology. Words. Silence. Music. Words. The meteorological and otherwise instruments presented from time to time are characters in their own right, even if, occasionally, they are on the screen for only a few seconds. An anemometer. It measures wind speed and wind pressure. Jan is shown clearing the snow from its vanes. Ánemos. For some reason, the gesture and the anemometer itself make me think of language. I gaze at it, at the instrument, at the word depicting it on the screen, and I see an incarnation of language. A signature. The ghost of something. Perhaps of the wind. A question of interpretation. That too is meaning. Only that is meaning. I see an alternative to the word in the word itself. Equal to the task; I see it able to measure the speed of the wind. I see it manifesting, restoring, offering precious information. I see it, this illusory instrument, this ghost, this word, this paradoxical incarnation, I see it as a sort of cataphasis, as the truth of something unknown. Wind from other realms. Another kind of double. Then, a hygrograph—the continual recording of air humidity. A sense of being not alive, but written, created, passes through me—as viewer, as breather of air, as human who does not know. Being ink, being clay, being repentance. A horisontarium. A most beautiful thing. There are questions. What is entropy? Anna asks Jan. Have you noticed the evolution of the concept of infinity? Jan asks Marek. The viewer works backwards in the mind, a process, a craft, that of thinking alongside the film, foretelling what the next seconds will bring. What does language want from its vessel? A monologue on infinity follows, one that serves as forecast also for Zanussi’s films to come. 

“For the Greeks—Aristotle, Plato—for them infinity was something imperfect. Something worse than finity. Well, it did change somewhat in the Middle Ages. These matters were revised. Do you remember what Thomas thought about it? Just a moment, I’ll show you…” He reaches for a book; they are on the floor in front of the bookcase, smoking. It cuts to music. “The idea of infinity doesn’t have a qualification which means it is neither perfect nor imperfect. Actually, it ceased to be the subject of fascination. I know that we use it daily in mathematics, but it was for this reason that it is nothing but a concept in calculations. It is not an idea. Have you thought about it?” “No,” answers Marek, putting away the books that Jan had opened on his lap. 

A visit to the local cemetery offers the audience yet another insight into Jan, into how he lives and who he is. It is important that we know, without being told. We see it. His characterization happens not by way of self-depiction, not through some narrative voice outside of the frame, but through gestures and images. He is someone who brushes away the snow from a gravestone. He does it with a withered plant that he had plucked from the frozen ground. “Who is buried here,” asks Marek. “I don’t know.” “Why do you do it, then?” “Just so.” Marek, on the other hand, enjoys to speak of himself; he speaks of his accomplishments, he speaks of how one should be at their age, he describes and portrays and tries to make sense of how the world must be through these delineations of the self, even if, paradoxically, he is also the one who, later, will say that one needs another in order to have a real sense of self. There is no knowledge of self without knowledge of how others see one, he will conclude. As their voices fade, the frame cuts to the stone, which reads: “I was who you are, I am who you will be, remember me for someone to remember you.” Zanussi’s rendering of time and memory is the same in The Structure of Crystal as in his later films; time itself is a character. The missing yet all-too-present question that does not require an answer. It does not even require to be acknowledged. The scenes of life carry on unraveling, Marek insists in his attempts of convincing Jan to return to city living, to physics and a life away from the futility of meteorological routine. He finds out from Anna that Jan was in a climbing accident. The birth of a motif. The mountains. The accident. A motif which regrettably came to life through Stanisław Latałło’s death in the Himalayas. That Zanussi’s films follow a hidden narrative, whether intentional or not, is no surprise to anyone who has seen more than one, yet I myself was never tempted to dig for more, to provide an accounting; to know whether something in his personal life was responsible for this or that invisible thread. And with The Structure of Crystal, one does not even need it, since there is no need to hunt for the behind-the-scenes, no need to wonder whether there are biographies or memories or if there is hidden meaning in the interviews Zanussi gave, in how he speaks of his work, of life, of death. One becomes part of the film itself, part of the calm rural backdrop; one hears the dogs barking and the children laughing and sees other people from behind windows, something that will remain a staple in Zanussi’s work for years to come, the face behind the glass. There is music and there is fire and there are walks through the snow, and yes, conversations about infinity and instruments that sometimes measure nothing, and perhaps a life that has nothing in common with that of the audience, though, as someone who grew up in such a landscape, it is impossible not to relive it, not to smell the wood and the apples set out to dry, not to feel the crunch of the snow under one’s feet, not to smile at the sight of the sleeping grandfather startled by the sound of classical music. What The Structure of Crystal does is tell us that there are many ways of living, there are many points of view. The two friends no longer see life through the same eyes. Maybe they never did. Marek does not understand Jan. Jan, on the other hand, knows that such an understanding is not necessary for their friendship. They carry on, they care for one another, they play games, they make Chekhov jokes, they make plans to see each other again. From time to time, one of them looks at the camera as if straight at the audience. Again, not a singular event in the director’s universe. A gaze breaking the cinematic wall, piercing the veil of understanding—every time, no matter the film, it is so brief that perhaps one does not register it until after multiple viewings. Someone looks at you, makes you part of their world. Yet, you were already there. No matter the film, with Zanussi, one is always already in the frame. 

There are no channels for communication with the dead. A thought that, when it comes, I brush aside, as I don’t know, I have never known, whether it is true. Rather, I was never able to say to myself whether such a communication needs to be double-sided, whether the dead need to have a voice, or is it enough for us to speak to them, to speak for them? Is it enough to substitute what once was conversation with monologue? How does one address the dead without addressing the self? Which echoes must linger in order to make absent any ruinous thoughts of being-for-oneself and emphasize those of a pilgrimage by way of language to the world of the dead? Do we not speak with our bodies? When we lean on something? When we touch a photograph? When we trace over the letters of an envelope? Is this not communication with the dead? Canetti would tell us to remember everyone. I, too, have written many times, and I am writing it again, we must remember everyone, the forgotten. Zanussi also said it. He said it with snow-covered gravestones. With music, with silence, with images of the Himalayas. If we pay enough attention, we will see that everything speaks it; there is this spectral murmur and it comes from the heart, it comes from the heart overflowing with thought, a murmur that says: remember. The responsibility of memory. How is it that we fail so often to find outlets for memory? So much of the day-to-day has become substitution. And one is grateful. Grateful that there is something. Always in terror of the void of nonbeing, of nonmeaning, of not having, not tasting, not feeling. In terror of “the paralysis between death and death,” as Canetti writes, “no word uninhabited in the middle.” “The gravest of paralyses, hope without hope.” To be haunted by loss to the degree that one replaces anything, everything, with whatever versions guarantee an existence free of uneasiness. And yet to speak of this in a broad-spectrum, to speak as if being haunted were the same for everyone, as if loss were experienced the same for everyone, is a paralysis in itself. Perhaps a paralysis of the mind, a paralysis of one’s capacity to understand the world, a paralysis of knowing that there is no such thing as the world without one and another and an outside—it is, ultimately, a failure at filling the place of loss. Whether substitution or lack or conventional representations, whatever it is that one turns to when refusing to see, to understand, when refusing to let time and memory and lived experience deposit their ruins within one’s body and mind, however one chooses to weave a veil, the result is the same, the wrong kind of paralysis, the wrong kind of availability. It can arrive, this unresponsiveness Canetti speaks of, when in the middle of a sentence, when in the middle of an experience, when in the middle of a river; this drowning, this instant like the ghost of perception. It arrives and says, there is the world. Behold, there is the world, outside of one’s grasp. Between death and death. Until no one dies again. That is why Canetti’s fragments against death will forever remain as he has left them, why no whole can be anything other than a gathering of fragments, not because he did not finish writing, not because he did not gather them together himself, but because there will always be death—a sentence I have written far too many times—and his lifelong project is, in the end, not one meant to abolish death, but rather meant to chronicle every aspect of it; it is a testimony, it is history and memory and attempt, however limited by biology, through the faculties of the mind and of the body and of that which makes one eternal, an attempt at brushing the snow from the gravestone of the forgotten. Why? Just so. 

In 1980, Zanussi made The Constant Factor, a film that once again brings the audience face to face with life and death and what lies interlocked in between. It is the story of Witold, a young man played by Tadeusz Bradecki; Witold, who lives and encounters loss, and tries to make sense of a world that all of a sudden is no longer home but prison. Same as Franek, at the beginning of the film, he is being measured, tested. We are once again carried from music to silence and back to music. Once again, we see mountains. “I quit. I want to live,” says Witold as he is training on the mountain. He wants to live. We find out that his father was thirty-six when he fell to his death in a climbing accident. Witold shivers with cold, just like his father. He did not know this about him. He does not know about life, about the past, about the future. He is, same as Franek, at the beginning of adulthood. He will travel. All over the world. One day, he will go to university. He is happy now, in the beginning. While in India for work, he witnesses a burial ritual. His first encounter with death beyond what he was always told about the accident of his father. Beyond stories of the past. He takes photographs. Body. Corpse. Ash. He cannot bear it. Before returning home, he sells the camera and the photographs along with it. When his mother asks, there are no photographs to show her. No photographs of India. No photographs of death. The frame cuts to an image of his father. “What do you think of his death?” he asks his mother. “He tripped over a stone? Was it fate? “Yes,” she answers. “Grandfather’s, also fate?” Fate, the constant factor. Same as Illumination, the film follows Witold through the first steps into adulthood, through the dishonesty and exploitation of individuals and of society, while not knowing—not knowing how to bribe the doctor when his mother falls ill, not knowing how to make sense of workplace corruption; not yet knowing. “Be observant,” the nurse tells him when she explains how to give money to the doctor. He does not know. He finds himself having to navigate a system he has lived in but never thought of; his thoughts were about fate, about traveling the world, about being happy. Work, an apartment, university. He does it as if he were trying to find his way in the dark. One might be tempted to think that, for the audience, there are two ways of viewing: of those who know, and of those who marvel. Yet through Zanussi’s mastery and Bradecki’s interpretation, there is no need for such a distinction. Yes, we know and agree on Zanussi’s films: they are social commentaries. But that is not all that they are, and one does not need to be acquainted with the society that is being commented on in order to see how life unravels, to feel empathy, to feel everything. Death comes to all, in all societies, under all conditions, in all instances of life. When his mother wants to leave the hospital, while discussing her chances with the doctor, he is given a cold response: “There is always hope, but the chances are slim.” It surprises him, that someone can just say it. The theoretical part of life is over. Climbing becomes a metaphor for descending. The higher he dreams of being, the lower he tumbles into the pitfall of life. He turns to healers. “One touch.” That is all she needs, one touch. Same as in Illumination, we find ourselves thrown in the middle of the search, asking and answering the question; in this case, the question asked of those who are meant to know, for Witold does not. “Even the church is afraid to invoke death,” he says, when the priest informs him of having changed the name of an anointment ritual for the dying. They are now called the sick. Even the church is afraid. He is becoming observant. While his mother is at home, laying in the sickbed by the window, with books and light from the outside world, Witold visits the nurse in the hospital. He cries. She puts her hands on his head. He sees her touch as an escape. A permission, even, to think of something else, to feel something else. He remains burdened. He closes his eyes as she gently touches his lips and puts her arms around him. One can see in those few seconds, in the tremor of his eyelids, how renunciation merges with the comfort of being held. Of being seen and held by another. “It was her wish,” he explains to the curious crowd around him, in the small apartment, as the rituals following his mother’s death are ongoing. What we receive is fragmentary. And yet—the sound of the hammer on the coffin’s nails. No matter how many times I hear it, no matter how familiar it might be, how I recognize its echo in life, from life, it is still unbearable. It is unbearable and it floods one with everything: guilt, heartbreak, empathy, terror, silence. Guilt is linguistic, I think, as I try to find ways that this particular emotion might manifest itself without being put into words. I’m sure there are, but I cannot think of any. A strange temporality envelops the room. The sound of the hammer, and the worm in the soil of the grave. Unbearable. In the cemetery, Witold struggles to light the candle that is meant to provide guidance for his mother’s final journey. “I no longer know what is good or bad.” He thought he knew; I say to myself. Somehow, in the early years of life, that is when we think we know. We are like an immense, no, like an endless blackboard that contains all knowledge, which is being erased little by little, phrase by phrase, word by word, by life itself, by experience that superimposes itself on the theoretical and makes one say, “I no longer know…” There are moments throughout the film that paint a picture of who Witold is, same as in The Structure of Crystal, even if he himself does not know it, even if he does not say it himself. From the tenderness toward his mother, to his refusal to close his eyes in the face of corruption, to small things such as a genuine smile while throwing pennies from above for others to find. At home, in his room, and we see this early on, he has devised a way of “catching fortune in the act.” A dart game, through which he calculates chances, probabilities. As Witold goes through life, in the dark, as he faces the unimaginable and still carries on, dreaming, wanting, training, calculating, however erratically, however lost, the audience is treated to the same remarkable portrayal of life in the here-and-now as in all of Zanussi’s films. “There is no mystery in what one can calculate,” Witold thinks. And yet, life carries on, and it does so on its own terms. Questions. Do you really think that the world will get better if it gains one more righteous man? “Yes.” We answer alongside the protagonist. Yes. 

Where does one go in search of meaning? Once it has been decided, once there is no more innocence, no turning back, once the question has been asked, where does one go? Philosophy? Art? Literature? Everything is literature. Everything is philosophy. Everything is art. In his 1976 Munich address, Canetti says: “literature may be what it may be, but there is one thing it is not, any more than the human beings still clutching it: literature is not dead.” Literature is not dead, and perhaps this is what one must make of it, when asking oneself why this and not something else, when reading, experiencing, devising games and ways of catching fortune in the act; ways of knowing and seeing and having, above all, something that the other does not, having meaning at one’s beck and call. In the formation of these thoughts—thoughts on what we read, on what we see, on what we ourselves bring into the world; on time and memory and language, there is something that one cannot disregard, no matter how tempting: that life in the here-and-now is not life in retrospect nor life in the whats-to-come, that to name is to enclose, that to overcome is sometimes to abandon. That is, no matter the words, no matter the language, the medium, the text or the film, there is too much of everything, and perhaps the way, if there were to be a way, is not to feel overwhelmed, but to take it all in. The most beautiful kind of excess. “If we are in a balloon over an abyss, let us at least value the balloon. If night is all around, then what light we have is precious,” writes Lionel Trilling. “If there is no life to be seen in the great emptiness, our companions are to be cherished; so are we ourselves.” I would add, what night we have is precious as well, and not merely as something to emphasize light. What abyss we have is precious. The emptiness. One reads through the works of Elias Canetti—from whom I would have offered more, so much more—and finds in them traces of this emptiness; it is life itself, life that empties and fills, life against death, life against power, life on the frozen Danube, life in every single line, in aphorisms and in the mind; life before one’s eyes and at the edge of the abyss, and no singular meaning is more worthy. There is beauty in not knowing, same as there is in striving to find out; wherever we go, we go in search of something, though sometimes, perhaps mistakenly, it is the definition of that something that we stubbornly wish to shed light on.

My mother kept the yellow piece of paper on which I was given my first diagnosis, though I myself have looked at it only a couple of times since. It remains an obscure presence inside of a cardboard box. Time has left its mark on it. In a certain light, it blends with the photographs that keep it company. A passport photo. What I feel about it is something unavailable even to myself. It is a story, sometimes a limit, essential and not at all. My heart is no longer the place of darkness. I think of Canetti, of the gap between knowing and unknowing, of the numerous responses to the question of meaning; I think of how perhaps there was never any answer. I think, and I comfort myself with his words. “One never knows what will be most valuable.”

***

REFERENCES: 

Elias Canetti, El libro contra la muerte. Translated into Spanish by Juan José del Solar and Adan Kovacsics. Publisher: Debolsillo, 2019. 

Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Publisher:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

Elias Canetti, The Memoirs of Elias Canetti. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel and Ralph Manheim [The Play of the Eyes]. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 

David Darby ed., Critical Essays on Elias Canetti. Publisher: G. K. Hall & Co., 2000. 

Marcin Latałło, A Trace, 1996. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Publisher: Routledge, 2002.

Juliusz Słowacki, Kordian. Translated by Gerard T. Kapolka. Publisher: The Green Lantern Press, 2011. 

Lionel Trilling, A Gathering of Fugitives. Publisher: Secker & Warburg, 1957. 

Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein ed., The Cineaste interviews: on the art and politics of the cinema. Publisher: Lake View Press, 1983.

Krzysztof Zanussi, Illumination, 1973. The Constant Factor, 1980. The Structure of Crystal, 1969. Streaming on MUBI.

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novel Disembodied, and the collection If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Her second novel, Schism Blue, is forthcoming in 2024. Her translations include works by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Ilarie Voronca, and Mihail Sebastian.