Eyen

This is Eyen, a short animated clip by Jean-Luc Chansay (2001). It all began with a track, also called Eyen, by a British band called Plaid. Chansay loved it and for that reason began animating its sound. In the process, he used line drawings made by his five-year-old daughter and metal sculptures made by his partner. What came out is a magical sound animation.

Sound painting

Green, by Ken Nordine (album Colors).

2009

tamara is dead;
wrote it down for me they did
from a safe distance

statue arising
haiku ties halting my strike;
movement arrested

Sto te nema

tamari



niko kao ti.

Adventure

"... and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." (Friederich Nietzsche)



This is a sequence from Le Bal, a French/Algerian film by Ettore Scola adapted from a theatre play (1983).
It begins in a dimly lit dance hall. The first to enter are women, one by one. Then the men enter and they settle at the bar. The selection of dancing partners ensues.
Women attract.
Men select.
The former, an art form.
The latter, a lottery.
We are then treated to a series of vignettes in music and dance over a period of fifty years, each vignette ending with a photo still. Finally, each character departs as alone and anonymously as they entered the dance hall.
The entire film takes place in the dance hall. Not a single word of spoken dialogue takes place.
In Europe, such social games between adult strangers are extinct.
Borges was right about tango, though. In Argentina, tango ballrooms remain packed with courageous men, seeking adventure and seeking to dance the tales of their forefathers with a mother, a wife, a daughter, a granddaughter.

Except tango

The dancing sequence is taken from Tango, an acclaimed film by Carlos Saura (1996).
This film is the ultimate tango film.
At the same time, tango is imaginatively used to narrate the story of Argentina and its past.
Everything is subject to change in Argentina, except tango.
At least, this is what is believed in Argentina.
The past, to quote Borges, is indescructible; sooner or later everything returns, and one of the things that comes back is the effort to destroy the past.
In Argentina, collective memory dances.

Tango: a sad thought that is danced

Tango summons a place and a time lost to us. It is a musical narrative of days long gone when tango belonged to compadritos, dark streets and whorehouses. Borges recounts in his History of the Tango (1955) how tango began in brothels as a dance of brave men, outlaws and thugs, who gamble on their lives and make bets with their knives.
You are listening to El Tango by Borges and Piazzolla. The complete poem, in Spanish, can be found here. I could, for the time being, only find the English translation of a part of the poem:

„Where could they be?“ asks the elegy
of those who have disappeared, as if there were
a zone in which Yesterday could be
Today, Still, and Yet.

Where, I repeat, is that underworld
that was created, in dusty dirt alleyways
or in lost villages,
by those who lived with knives and courage?

They are in the music, in the persistent
strumming of the guitar,
that narrates, through a gay milonga,
the innocent festival of courage.

That outburst, the tango, that devilry,
defies the busy years;
made of dust and time, men do not endure
as long as the light tune
that is simply time. The tango creates
a shady, unreal past that in some way is true,
an impossible memory of having died
fighting, on a corner in the slums.

It is this tango of knives and brothels that Borges longed for. This is also the tango imagined in his short story, Man on Pink Corner:
"... milonga ran like grass fire from one end of the room to the other. Francisco Real danced straight-faced, but without any daylight between him and her."