ODRADEK! - Issue 5: 'Somnolent Writing'
A regular newsletter of The Odd Review
Hello Odradeks,
Happy New Year! appy ew ear! ap y e ar! p y e r! e ! !
For our first post of the new year, we have a contribution from our very own editor, Noah Lee Swann, who has written an engaging piece, ‘Somnolent Writing on Fassbinder’s Landslide Shadows’, a fragment of film criticism written in a state of half-sleep on a film that never existed in the first place. Comparable in a way to the opium-induced half-conscious state described by De Quincey in his Confessions or Coleridge in ‘Kubla Khan’. The origins of the piece are fairly humorous, and so Swann has included a brief introduction, too.
We have also included, at the end of this newsletter, an open call for diary entries, anonymous or authored, for our ‘Diary Machine’, which will be published in our next newsletter. You can find details below.
In other news, we have nearly gone through all our submissions. Thank you to everyone who sent us work. If you haven’t heard from us in the next couple of weeks, please do send us an email.
As always, thank you for reading! please like, comment, subscribe etc. etc. ALL support goes a very long way.
Happy reading!
♡dette ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹
by Noah Lee Swann
Last year, I was working part-time as an invigilator at a gallery in Soho for an exhibition of paintings by the artist Marlene Dumas. The paintings themselves were strange and disquieting, many of them were portraits of stone-like faces, or face-like stones. Day after day I spent hours staring and contemplating them. In fact, as I was sitting in the same unmoved position each day, I felt as though I was becoming a stoney version of myself. The director of the gallery knew I was a writer and asked me if I would like to write a few words about the show that she could send to Marlene Dumas. Naturally, I agreed.
I found it impossible to write anything when I got home and went to bed very late, worrying about it. That night I had the most vivid dream about a film called Landslide Shadows by the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The dream was of intense detail, as you’ll read. On waking up at 4 am, I was convinced not only of the existence of such a film, but somehow, in my half-woken dream state, I was convinced that Landslide Shadows had solved all of the previous night’s writing problems. I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to say and how to say it.
In my delusional sleepiness, I grabbed a notebook and pen and frantically wrote down the dream. I explained the film in great detail and felt, once I had finished, that everything there was to be said about the paintings was explicated through this reading of Landslide Shadows. After two hours of frantic writing, I put down the notebook and fell promptly back into a deep and happy sleep. The next morning, while I set to typing out my notes, the dream-logic began to dissipate in what Yeats called, ‘the prosaic light of day’. In fact, to my now sober mind, the piece of writing had nothing in common with the paintings at all. But the dream being so vivid, I was still convinced of the film, so I googled ‘Landslide Shadows film’, ‘Fassbinder best films’, ‘use of shadows’, in various iterations, I thought maybe I had mistaken the director’s name. Eventually I had to admit there had never been a Landslide Shadows; I had imagined it, along with an entire cast. I had even dreamt up a French critic called Thierry Mirabeau (!!). Even Mirabeau, whose keen critical engagement and philosophical depth I had so heavily relied on in my own piece!
What is written here, is, humorously, with minor changes, a transcription of the somnolent analysis of the entirely imagined film, Landslide Shadows, written at 4 am.
*
Fassbinder’s Landslide Shadows
Fassbinder, or a German film-maker by another name, discovered the importance of shadows, when, one afternoon, while filming, because the sun was at a certain angle, he was unable to keep the cameraman’s lengthy shadow out of shot. Shortly after this frustrating scenario, Fassbinder began experimenting, not with lighting per se, but with shadows: removing shadows completely from scenes, replacing them suddenly, exaggerating them or even growing them like some insistent fungus. His first film experimenting with these techniques was titled simply, Landslide Shadows, a montage of rockfalls and landslides with their shadows changing so dynamically, one critic likened these dark shapes to dancers. Fassbinder went on to incorporate these dynamic shadows into more conventional narratives, achieving commercial successes with films such as Mirror, No Place and Integrity. These were considered the auteurs ‘great’ years, however in an interview with The New Yorker, Fassbinder was reported saying everything in his career after Landslide Shadows was to him an anticlimax. The French literary critic and theorist Thierry Mirabeau wrote the following:
“In the famous scene of Landslide Shadows, Fassbinder juxtaposed two otherwise identical shots of a rockslide, not the event itself but the aftermath of the destruction. The only difference between these two shots is the shadows. In the first, there are almost none, in the second they rise inquisitively, they extend, meet, conjoin, it is an entire erotics of the dark. To be almost perversely interested in shadows is to be interested in aftermath, in how events and their elements lie, how events are experienced, are witnessed, are interpreted and cognised. The effect Fassbinder pioneered is disarming for its simplicity, and seems, on one hand to engage with very little, but on the other hand, it is an enquiry into a phenomenological crisis: how things happen, how things- even inanimate things, continue to happen. As the epilogue concludes: ‘there are shadows because there are hills.’ There is, in Landslide Shadows, an understanding both of the knife-edge of the contemporary moment, but also, considering its subject matter, an understanding of slow time, of the longue durée of geographical time, of tectonic shifts.”
The Odd Review is running a ‘Diary Machine’ experiment to be published in our next newsletter.
The aim is to gather and publish a selection of single, brief diary entries, which record, each in turn, a subjective impression of place and time. Sketched, unrefined, these brief entries can be written during a commute, in a coffee shop, walking down the road, or at home.
We encourage anyone and everyone to produce and submit a diary entry to us by following these instructions (or guidelines - feel free to make the form your own):
Record the date, time, location (eg. London, Hackney), weather and temperature (2°, overcast).
What you hear in the distance (if anything), what you hear around you (eg. humming of the refrigerator).
Describe what you see, be as objective and spare as possible (eg. the street outside. A red London double decker bus. A loud motorbike drives past).
(optional) write your thoughts on one individual, creature, idea or object that grabs your attention.
You can find the original Substack post here: LINK
___________
Example:
Wed 8 Jan 2025. Abraco coffee shop. 13:08. Dalston Kingsland Road. London.
Writing with ridiculous bright yellow nails. It’s bright outside. Bright and cold. The cafe is full w/people on their laptops. Outside, the cold sunlight makes long shadows. It’s a slight golden or yellowed light. Cold but not white. Weak not unoptimistic, sympathetic, even.
“No, I’m in Dalston", says a girl with short blonde hair. She’s on the phone, speaking softly. The man beside her is also on the phone speaking Korean.
“The cafe I wanted to go to didn’t allow laptops — which is fair.”
We are packed in here. Outside a pregnant woman w/glasses, who I will doubtless forget, stands drinking a takeaway coffee .
“I really want to see Nosferatu", says the woman next to me.
I am thinking about diaries. I was re-reading some of my old ones and couldn’t believe how little I remembered. How only the entries themselves are what’s left of the experience. It’s sad. How much we lose + forget. Fills me with hopelessness sometimes thinking like this. — how can we hope to change anything of these ghastly cycles of war and despotism when I won’t even remember this. This — this now — in five years I would have forgotten it all. The light, the girl on the phone, the Korean man, the pregnant woman.
“OK; I’m going to send an invoice + go to the bank,” says the woman with the short hair, before hanging up.I will forget you too.
____________
If you’d prefer to email us your entry you can do so too: odradek.subissions@gmail.com
That is all for now.
Thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed, please think about subscribing or even moving to paid subscription (help us pay our rent). You could also help by simply sharing this with a friend.
Nice idea. It reminds me a bit of the metro poem, an Oulipian invention that involves thinking of what to write between stations, and then writing it down while the train is stopped.
The voice of critic remarking on a imagined piece of work never fails to draw me in and the one here, in the best way possible, reminds of some of the shorter sections in Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the America's. Fantastic