The American ride

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The American ride. Stories of a Film Obsessed Man is a volume with stories by Patrick Roth , which was published in March 2013 by Wallstein-Verlag.

overview

A sequence of ten autobiographically grounded individual stories from different work phases is linked to the American journey . The overall picture of the journey places the texts, arranged chronologically according to the age of the narrator, under the paradigm of the quest . The background is Roth's life in America (1975 to 2012), his love for films and finding his own way as a writer. The narrator appears in changing roles: as a film student, actor / extra, young director, film journalist and writer. As such, he looks back on his “American experience”, with the proviso that he can track down the inscribed meaning. In the last three “Stories” entitled Inside America Night , the self-reflective element comes to the fore accordingly.

content

Hebels Hollywood pp. 7-39

The first story covers the years 1975 to 1981 and presents the narrator as a young German looking to gain a foothold in Los Angeles . With nightly car trips on the freeways and boulevards of the "giant city" he tries to cope with his uprooting by listening to the familiar stories of his favorite poets, which he has read on tapes. While listening to Johann Peter Hebel's calendar story Unexpected Reunion , the images rising from the inside are placed on the concrete landscape in front of the windshield. Lever's young miner kisses the bride “in Los Angeles on the Ventura Freeway near Laurel Canyon Exit”, which the young man is currently passing “at 55 miles an hour”. Inside and outside, Germany and America, Hebel and Hollywood are all connected. Through the inner process of projection, what is separate is experienced as united and what is foreign is experienced as at home. A few years later - the first film, a Charles Bukowski story, has not been sold, the young marriage is in pieces - the young man appears in Paris . Following advice from film historian Lotte Eisner , he pays a visit to the Musée Balzac. In an unobserved moment he jumps over the cordon, sits down at the poet's desk. With his head on the tabletop, which is arched by the pressure of Balzac's hand, he suddenly sees the connection between the “valleys”: that of Balzac and his own, Californian San Fernando Valley , which will be the center of his life.

Der Fremde Reiter pp. 41–64

The second story is a classic short story set in 1976 in the milieu of civil war hobbyists, in which the 22-year-old film school graduate ended up. On a meadow south of Culver City , he acts as the Confederate standard bearer in the re-enactment of “Pickett's Charge”, the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War and the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg .

On the eve of the performance, there is a strange supper by the reenactors' campfire, during which original biscuits made from Gettysburg wheat and old wine, believed to have grown on the battlefield, are distributed among the men and consumed. Immediately afterwards an unknown young recruit appeared and asked the group not to re-enact the battle itself, but rather the original re-enactment that veterans from both sides performed on the original scene fifty years later, in 1913. The stranger warns the men not to commemorate battle and death, but the miraculous reconciliation that had occurred spontaneously during this first reenactment: Overpowered by the pain, the mortal enemies had brotherly embraced each other instead of one another according to the "history" to shoot. However, the urgent request of the unknown recruit is refused. The re-enactment the following day ends in disaster. The narrator vividly describes how he and his comrades come under the sharp saber of a "strange rider" who suddenly appeared on the battlefield. The dark figure in the white robe makes the horror of war real again and causes a bloodbath among the reenactors.

Silhouette of the rider pp. 65–83

The third story is a posthumous interview with the famous western director John Ford , who was "blown down" from his cloud especially for this purpose. The interviewer, who introduces himself as “Patrick Roth, writer”, awaits him on a mesa in Monument Valley , the typical landscape of numerous Ford westerns . The following conversation is mainly about the creative process and its requirements. In particular, the difficulties of translating intellectual content into images and scenes, as well as the different talents of the director and the writer, are the subject of the interview: The writer forms a story out of fantasies, thoughts and visions in lonely desk work; With the help of a team, the director translates an intellectual product into the “three-dimensional reality” of the film set . Against this background, Ford appears as a legendary director who could capture a whole world in one film image, but “couldn't write” it.

The interview is based on admiration for the “visual poet” Ford and the conviction that great art enables experience. Creating a space for the viewer to enter is the basic principle of Ford's films in the sense of the interviewer. He owes the “lesson” of the fourth corner of the film image, which must remain dark, and the strict rejection of zoom . The technically produced zooming in or out “destroys” the room, whereas the “calm American tracking shot ” “ writes ” the viewer into the room and into the story.

Lynch for Lunch pp. 87-99

The fourth story is set in 1986 and is about the talented writer Parker, who plays his play about Arthur Rimbaud in a back room theater on Hollywood Boulevard with himself in the lead role and who believes firmly in the power of fate. He sees his dream of a big breakthrough within reach when one evening the name of David Lynch is on the reservation list. Omnipotent fantasies take possession of Parker; he begins to play his role in the style of Lynch's The Elephant Man and fantasizes about future projects with the cult director. However, David Lynch never appears in Parker's mind. Love and admiration turn into hatred and contempt. Years later, Parker is now helping out in a bookstore, and sees his chance for retaliation. David Lynch appears in the store and asks for "Books by David Lynch". Parker gives the man he suspects a lynch suitor a rub-off. But it was the “real” David Lynch and Parker sees himself “bowed” by fate again.

Lost in Your Shadow pp. 101-122

In the fifth story, the narrator appears as a film madman who hurries from screening to screening with a friend on behalf of Universal Studios to check foreign film classics for “remake possibility”. He records his impressions in diary-like notes. The story of his 'encounter' with the great silent film director DW Griffith , which took place in Hollywood's oldest restaurant, opens up deep insights into the everyday life of a “film obsessed” who only sees the world through film glasses and is not surprised if that Long-dead film genius in “Geisterseelenruhe” ate his steak at “Musso and Frank”.

The subterranean closeness of cinema and psyche is also demonstrated by the last entry in the diary, which is about the presentation of a lost scene from Orson Welles The Splendor of the House of Amberson . In the style of a script, the narrator envisions an eerie nocturnal scene in which the protagonist George Minafer, Tim Holt , discovers the skull of his recently deceased mother in the mud of the Amberson property. The episode reads like an essence of the mother-son problem that Welles' film is primed and captured here in a shocking, fictional image.

Real time at the fires pp. 123–169

The sixth, most extensive narrative marks the real center of the American journey and presents the narrator as a film-loving writer who goes through his film notes and diary entries from July 2002 - notes from the time of an impending upheaval that marks the end of a phase of life. Looking back, he noticed his fascination for films that contained "real time" scenes. For example, the episode around the campfire in Richard Brooks Spätwestern 700 miles west or the detailed conversation that Anna Karina has in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie with a philosopher in a Parisian café. The plot stands still in these scenes and gives the viewer the opportunity to experience "real time", i. H. To have a share in the "duration of time": He sits at the "campfire" or at the bistro table and forgets space and time. “If the plot holds: the motionless moves us. Moves the rememberer, moves in him because he now knows, physically - through the duration of the scene - knows that he was really there. "

The peculiar preference for films that allow "real time" moments can be explained by the impending upheaval in the life of the diary writer, the forced departure from familiar Sherman Oaks and the departure for a new city. Against this background, the need for "real time", for something immortal and eternal, is understandable in advance as compensation : The impending upheaval and the chaos associated with it, which consciousness does not yet know about, which is reflected in the instinctive desire for participation, is compensated manifested in a timeless and permanent.

It becomes clear that films or film scenes function in the sense of the narrator in a similar way to dreams: They carry the potential of a mirror with which inner, unconscious processes can be made aware. The condition for this mirror function is that the viewer's feelings are addressed. What applies to the film also applies to one's own writing: it aims to evoke “real-time”, to remove the boundaries between book and reader. If this succeeds, a “space of transformation” is created in which the reader can enter.

Out of the Past pp. 171-181

The seventh story pays homage to the storyteller Edgar Allan Poe and the filming of his "Tales" by Roger Corman . Poe's stories in the translation by Arno Schmidt initiated the fifteen-year-old into the world of the unconscious: Poe, according to the narrator, lets his readers climb into the "abyss", into the abyss from which no ladder can lead back. “Reason and I-mighty will” are in Poe's stories “ropes that suddenly break at some depth.” How horror suddenly breaks into everyday life without leading out of the abyss is the content of the story. While packing his boxes of books for the move from Sherman Oaks to Santa Monica , the narrator is unexpectedly visited by a young Jewish woman named Nethaly, whom he knows from his local pub; she wants to help with packing. After midnight he picks up the storyteller for his EA-Poe edition, thanking her for the story “Shadow. A Parable ”, the story of the“ dark, contourless shadow ”Oinos, who emerges from the“ folds of black imposition ”and joins a small mourning party. A call on Nethaly's cell phone interrupts the reading. At the other end of the line is the mother, who has traveled to see relatives in Poland. Her call comes from Auschwitz - where she lost her orientation in the former concentration camp.

Die Bild-Flamme pp. 185–223

The last three stories, Die Bild-Flamme , Der Voices-Brunnen and The Weddings Tracking Pan , form a thematic unit, which is expressed in the title Inside - America - Night , the last stop of the "American journey". From the present in 2012, we look back to the beginning of the “path of individuation”. The narrator recognizes that the decisive impulses that gave direction to his life came from the “images” - initially from film images, and with increasing age from inner images.

The connection between the external film image and the inner image of the soul is revealed by the story of the first film experience in the summer of 1972. In a Frankfurt art house cinema, the narrator saw DW Griffith 's war drama "America" ​​(1924), a silent film based on the "Bild -Flame ”burned into memory. In the farewell scene of the young soldier standing upright next to his horse, a bright pillar light appeared, wandered from the right to the left edge of the picture through the soldier, who at this moment looks up to the window of his beloved as if ignited from within. What was going on here seemed clear: The soldier going to war, saying goodbye, was "blown through" by the feeling of a force equal to fire at the sight of the beloved woman behind the window.

Years later, when the admired effect cannot be found on any copy of the film, it becomes clear that the “image flame” and the meaning ascribed to it “purest fiction” was an imagination of the moved young man: what seemed “brilliant” was in Reality a technical error. The fascination attached a meaning to the 'image flame' which in fact could not be maintained and yet contained something true: the living reality of inner experience. “At that time, the inside recognized itself in the outside”, it had “poured itself into the scene as if into a suitable shape and thus transformed it for me”. The outer film image had also anticipated something that had already been initiated on the inside and not yet known on the outside. Like Griffith's young soldier, the high school graduate, who had been gripped by his fate, was facing a big farewell: a few years later he was to leave home and set off for America and find the center of his life there.

In the mid-eighties, film images lose their attraction in favor of images in one's own psyche. A “big dream” broke into the young man's life in 1978 and had permanently changed his view of things. Through the systematic observation, recording and interpretation of the dreams that began at that time, it is seen that a “dialogue” is taking place: “The discovery [...] that the type of dreams [...] changed, the more consciously, the more precisely I went into it [...], was my Copernican turn on North Harper Avenue, in West Hollywood at the time. "

A personal dream from January 2012 serves as a concrete example of the "bridge" that has developed over the years between outside and inside, I and the unconscious. It is about the healing of a deep emotional injury and indicates the arrival of a new phase in life. The mental wounding comes from images of the Holocaust that the narrator was confronted with as a child in Germany in the late 1950s. The dream image shows that the rift that emerged back then grew together in silence during the American years.

The Voices Fountain pp. 225–260

As in the image flame, the focus of the voices fountain is the connection between the outer and inner world. The medium of merging is the voice that comes from the unconscious and that “calls” or “calls” the I to the picture. Three aspects of this numinous "inner voice" can be distinguished:

  1. The voice that speaks disembodied or (in dreams) personified. In the creative work it becomes noticeable as an idea, as the “smallest voice” which the narrator characterizes as “living water, like fire”, a kind of “psychic energy” that goes out if it is not picked up immediately.
  2. The voice that you meet outside, in the form of the voice of a singer, poet, actor that you adore. What fascinates on the outside refers to inner potentials and capacities that need to be trained in terms of individuation . According to the narrator, it is a psychological law that we first see what is our own on the outside, in others. He illustrates this connection with his admiration for the actor Henry Fonda . As a schoolboy he repeated Fonda's voice, read the lines from the novel Ritt zum Ox-Bow on record, and admired him as The Young Mr. Lincoln in the film of the same name by John Ford, where Fonda played the role of the young lawyer "Abe Lincoln" Appease mob and bring justice to victory. In 1980, two years before Fonda's death, now based in Los Angeles himself , he went to the cloakroom of a theater on Hollywood Boulevard to pay his respects. Fonda, so the unspoken realization, was the epitome of the longed-for place “America”, to which he set out in 1975, for the young man who was enthusiastic about films.
  3. The third aspect concerns one's own voice, which under certain circumstances becomes a bridge to the unconscious. The narrator describes the experiment of reading Dostoyevsky's novel Schuld und Atonement to oneself in a 16-hour marathon. The result: after about three hours, what has been read is experienced “in person” - ideas and images seem to physically “change”. The reader stands in the pawnbroker's room himself, so to speak. "What has been read aloud moves, remembered, into a region of our brain that was otherwise reserved for 'really experienced', pushes itself into it - our mind hardly distinguishes it any more - finds its place there." The 'method' of, reminiscent of a meditation technique The narrator is based on the tongue, which is constantly moved during hours of reading aloud; insofar as it is directly connected to the vegetative nervous system, "one of the deepest layers in the unconscious", it functions as a bridge.

The representation flows into the image of the voices fountain , a traditional symbol for the unconscious in its numinous aspect. It finds expression z. B. in the story told in the Gospel of John of the Samaritan woman who while drawing water at the well meets Jesus, who says to her: "It is me." ( Jn 4:26  EU )

The wedding tracking shot p. 261–294

The tenth story draws the sum of the American trip in the form of a story. The introductory preface names the principle that connects the individual texts to form an overall narrative: the turn from outside to inside. At a young age, “everything” is projected onto the outside world: onto film images and onto revered role models: poets, directors, actors. In the middle of life, on the other hand, these external images recede in favor of the processes and images within.

To give expression to these inner images of the psyche, to dramatize them with the means learned from film, d. H. to translate it into a narrative is recognized as a real life task. Capturing unconscious content in a picture or in a voice has a “marrying effect” per se: Dressed in an external picture, the unconscious, undifferentiated, can become visible. The I can now relate to that with which it was previously identical.

The biblical story of the copper serpent of Moses ( 4 Mos 21,4-9  EU ) serves as an illustration of this connection, especially its 'healing' effect. When God had sent poisonous snakes to the grumbling people in the desert, he recommended Moses to make a "brazen serpent" to cure the Israelites, to fasten it to a stake and to hold it high above the people. Divine teaching says that anyone who is bitten and looks up at the snake remains alive. The narrator explains: Seeing the affect-causing principle (visualized in the snake) causes healing. "What this image of the brazen serpent of Moses emphasizes is the crucial importance of seeing." Seeing that which the individual invisibly-unconsciously occupies enables objectification and separation. A conscious bridge can now be built to the unconscious content. "And with that there is sense, there is a new relationship, and therefore a new direction."

The final story about the film archivist Kelly, who is a middle-aged woman looking bitter and exhausted, illustrates this connection. It illustrates how psychological content emerges in the narration of personal experiences and is captured in images and voices. What was unconscious becomes conscious in the act of narration, a "marriage" of the inside with the outside takes place. The title-giving motif of the “wedded tracking shot” symbolizes getting closer to the inner, hidden image and at the same time stands for being connected with the stored meaning: However: “The wedded person is - out of our hands. Is not 'feasible', happens, God willing. "

Kelly's story itself is a tracking shot. While she drives through rainy Los Angeles with the narrator in her “camera car”, an old “station wagon” with two installed cameras, to take background shots of the city at night, she tells how she left her father as a six-year-old and a little later from the mother had been given care. In telling her story she discovers that it was the hated father who had been banished from her life who saved her life once. Immediately after the birth, an inexplicable surge of energy led the doctor to reanimate the supposedly stillborn baby. A few hours after the ride with the narrator, Kelly has a dream in which she is driven on rails to a stranger who turns out to be her father as she approaches. She dreams how he takes her hand and how he draws her, the abandoned daughter, to him. His embrace is of that marital power that Kelly is able to heal from her lifelong dissociation.

Design and structure

The American trip tells in ten independently created texts about being fascinated by images and their effects on life. The individual stories are held together by the narrator's voice reporting from the first-person perspective and by a dynamic principle that works in the background of the stories and is visible in the strong subdivision of the volume.

The ten-part narrative volume is divided into three sections according to the ratio 3: 4: 3 and provided with "Slug lines" (the three-part headers customary in scripts) as section headings: Outside - America - Day ; Outside - America - Evening ; Inside - America - night . A double dynamic is indicated: 1.) the spatial movement from the outside inwards, from the periphery to the center, and 2.) the temporal course from day into night. The path laid out in the depths leads from the outside in and from day into night. “Inside” and “night” are synonyms for the unconscious as the actual destination of the journey, which is to be imagined as a tracking shot . It begins in 1975 with a car ride through the hills of Hollywood in daylight ( Hebels Hollywood ) and ends in 2012 with another car ride through the rainy night of Los Angeles ( The wedded tracking shot ).

Between the two trips, the young man who is fascinated by images is individuated from film student to writer. From the end, the sense of the American journey opens up in the knowledge of the underlying “mission”: the outside should be connected with the inside, the day with the night. The inner-psychic world of archetypes should be connected to today's consciousness and made visible to others in story-telling. The aim of the American Voyage lies in the work on unifying the opposites .

reception

The volume of stories received appreciation and praise in the feature sections. Two aspects are recognized in all reviews: 1.) the author's concern to express a higher, transcendent reality that lies behind the everyday and 2.) the power and originality of Roth's narrative language.

The “poetic force” with which existential experiences are brought to mind is classified as remarkable. In every single story, one can understand "how the miraculous can break into everyday life". Instead of factual truth, Roth sees a “transcendent truth”. The ability to discover hidden secrets in seemingly insignificant details, gestures and movements elevate the volume to a " polemic for a different, expanded view of the things that determine our lives."

With its visualizations of film and dream scenes, which allow the reader to penetrate an even deeper layer of meaning, the American journey proves to be a “school of seeing and interpreting”. Roth's “simultaneously sensual and analytical prose” succeeds in preserving the magic and the secret of the images and at the same time communicating their “seductive power”. The search for the superordinate element, which the separated can be, is recognized as the actual red thread: “In principle, these texts always tell of a topic - how something strange can be transformed into one's own, something connecting can be established, if one only understands it to decipher spiritual archetypes that are able to evoke certain experiences - filmic, real or even dreamed. "

It is Roth's own “narrative originality”, his “art” of translating the passion for film into a specific, “image-saturated” language that builds up a “pull” that “stimulates our imagination as well as our mind”. . The meaningfulness of the stories, together with the pleasure in meaning, is characteristic of Roth's “transcendental prose”, which “exudes an incredible trust in the power of image and word. Every sentence speaks of it. You can confide in Patrick Roth, you are at home in this conscious and unconscious narrative stream, which is always closely connected with life and its breaks. "

output

  • Patrick Roth, The American Drive. Stories of a film obsessed person , Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Some of the texts have already appeared in scattered places and have been revised for the new edition. The middle piece “Real Time at the Fires” and the last three texts gathered under the section Inside - America - Night are first publications.
  2. ↑ The last three texts were originally written as Heidelberg Poetics Lectures (2012). See: Patrick Roth, inside video . America. Nacht / Heidelberg Poetics Lecturer 2012
  3. ↑ Patrick Roth, The American Journey. Stories of a film obsessed , Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013, p. 14.
  4. ↑ On the design and interpretation of Ambrose Bierce's short story An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge based on the story: Michaela Kopp-Marx : "The Roman Last Supper or The Problem of Evil in Corpus Christi and The Foreign Rider ", in: dies. (Ed.): The living myth. The letter from Patrick Roth. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010, p. 457ff.
  5. ↑ Patrick Roth: Silhouette of the rider. In: ders .: Die American Fahrt, p. 80.
  6. ↑ Patrick Roth: Real Time at the Fires . In: ders .: The American Journey , p. 138.
  7. ↑ Patrick Roth: Real Time at the Fires . In: ders .: The American Journey , p. 140.
  8. ↑ Patrick Roth: Out of the Past . In: ders .: Die American Fahrt , p. 175.
  9. ↑ Patrick Roth: "Die Bild-Flamme", in: ders .: Die American Fahrt, p. 198.
  10. ↑ Patrick Roth: “Die Bild-Flamme”, in: ders .: Die American Fahrt, pp. 202–203.
  11. ↑ Patrick Roth: The voice fountain . In: ders .: The American Journey , p. 237.
  12. ↑ Patrick Roth: The voice fountain . In: ders .: The American Journey , p. 256.
  13. ↑ Patrick Roth: The wedding tracking shot . In: ders .: The American Journey , p. 268.
  14. ↑ Patrick Roth: The wedding tracking shot . In: ders .: The American Journey , p. 266.
  15. ↑ Patrick Roth: The wedding tracking shot . In: ders .: The American Journey , p. 273.
  16. ↑ The fourth story, Lynch for Lunch , which has a personal narrative situation, is the exception to the rule.
  17. ↑ Uwe Schütte: "Transcendent Truth". In: Wiener Zeitung of June 28, 2013. [1]
  18. ↑ Anja Hirsch: "School of Seeing". In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 24, 2013. [2]
  19. ↑ Thomas Groß: "Stories of a Fascination". In: Mannheimer Morgen from April 6, 2013. [3]
  20. ↑ Ulrich Rüdenauer: "Through the author's windshield". In: Zeit online from May 6, 2013. [4]