Jason Farago
It comes two hours into “Drive My Car,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning 2021 masterpiece of bereavement and artistic inspiration, when a troupe of actors steps outside the theater to rehearse in the fresh air. It is autumn. Leaves crunch beneath the feet of two actresses as they play one of the tenderest scenes of “Uncle Vanya.” They’d been struggling, up to now, as they recited Chekhov’s lines about sorrow and stagnation: lives not lived, dreams squelched and dreams maintained. But here in the park something clicks. We must live. The show must go on.
It’s never made explicit why this outdoor rehearsal unlocks the core of Chekhov — how this park, for these actors, opens a whole universe of grief and endurance. For a Japanese audience, at least, there was no need.Beginning in 1958, Kikuji Kawada photographed Hiroshima, capturing images of its A-Bomb Dome and objects reflecting the American postwar occupation. The park is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, designed in 1954 by the great modernist architect Kenzo Tange. On Aug. 6, 1945 — 80 years ago this week — a new kind of bomb detonated, almost silently, some 1,900 feet overhead.
The scene from “Drive My Car” came back to me when I stood, in a pouring rain, on the spot where it was filmed. Anyone standing there in 1945 was killed immediately; then came the fires, and the fallout. It started raining in the first days after Aug. 6 as well: viscous black drops, heavy with soot and debris. The survivors drank it desperately in the ruins of Hiroshima. The raindrops were radioactive. A scientific event,” wrote the painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1913, “removed one of the most important obstacles from my path. This was the further division of the atom.
The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world.” At the start of the last century, after Ernest Rutherford, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein began to unravel the mysteries of nuclear physics, a periodic table of artists, authors and philosophers grew fixated on this new science’s cultural repercussions. Suddenly, the permanence of matter (the permanence of history, perhaps) appeared like an industrial relic. Objects that seemed stable actually vibrated with energy. Nuclear physics was confirming a suspicion, one at the core of modern art and literature, that the things we see are less solid than they look.
No comments:
Post a Comment