III: Nocturne | Uncomposed: "Long Past Midnight"
Film noir: French for "black film" or "dark film". Marked by themes of fatalism and menace, the genre is predominantly focused on crime drama. Originating in France where directors such as Jean-Luc Godard revolutionized its cinematic techniques, film noir has become a much-loved classic style, helping to usher in a new era in world cinema. Critically, this pointed to a shift in film which incorporated increased skepticism and depression following World War II. Immigrants and other displaced persons became some of this era’s best directors, actors, and producers, which helped to develop film noir’s sense of paranoia and pessimism.
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The first time I ever watched a movie in black & white was on invitation from Isabella. It was a light autumn Tuesday, the leaves were delicately yellow, and the sky showed past-six o'clock colors. A voice is always a voice, even when it’s crackling through a speaker, giving it an underwater quality sounding deeper than reality: “Alphaville is playing at the museum’s theater tonight, do you want to go?”
I am used to seeing loud movies, ones that assault the senses, immersive in the ways they mix color and sound into superfluous movements. I am used to sitting alone in the cool darkness, using cinema as a way to pass the time without talking.
The truth was that she didn’t want to go alone. Isabella’s father had told her about the characters: Lemmy Caution and his careful cataloging of reality, Nat van Braun, the film’s mysterious and alluring femme fatale, and all the careful shots Godard used to create something beautiful. She and I were in love with all things created to be beautiful, but going out to find places where that art existed, where it was allowed to breathe, was something new. We wanted community, and in the same way we have been venturing into the world since we were young I could see how we reached out for each other’s hands to find that warmth.
The film, unbeknownst to me, was in French, but I was the only one who needed subtitles. Isabella had been learning French since sixth grade, and while we sat in the renovated historic theater drinking $9 coffee, she taught me small French phrases, shaping my Spanish-trained mouth to forget the letter “S”. On that night we were surrounded by uncharacteristic luxuries. In the theater, enclosed in swelling music, we could be things that we couldn’t be anywhere else: young, naive, and enjoying art like we would enjoy twirling hair around our little fingers. Flirtatious. Free.
After that night I sought out old movies more and more, finding that I enjoyed their romantic soundtracks and the deepness of their old voices. They are just as rich as modern films, and contain that long lost element of slow, melodic suspense. Not everything is happening at once - the moment is drawn out like a pedal point. Film itself is the intersection of momentums, the real and imagined, the sounding and unsounded, the things we have learned, forgotten, and learned about ourselves again.
A bright white car speeds down the interstellar freeway. It looks just like our freeways, the lights curving on and on, blurring and blazing. One night in November, sitting in the theater, I hear the truest words about love I have ever heard or will ever hear again:
I don't know what to say. They're words I don't know. I wasn't taught them. Help me.
Something about this dark calms me. It’s a contrast, the same way we witness Lemmy commit murder to the tune of light classical music, beautiful women in swimsuits denouncing love and wielding knives. The dark settles my mind, just as the light keeps me alive.
On another night with our knees still pressed together, Vera Lynn sings "We’ll Meet Again" to the tune of 20 atomic bombs detonating. Something in me falters like a spinning top, a jukebox laying down one record and picking up another, resuming the music. Doniel reaches the edge of the ocean, a place he has never been before and doesn’t know what to do with. We have spent the whole film running with him, and before us lies the vast expanse of… what?
The whitecaps are crashing. Miles out, they disappear and become one long blue streak, stretching from the coast down into the depths of what we decide we are. What we want. What defines us.
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So yes, the women are beautiful, but we must remember that they are holding knives. Yes, the murder has been set to pretty music, but it is still murder, and this is the thing that condemns us.
I have struggled with myself in dark places, grappling with my body, my mind so full of sleep it overflows into the room and makes the silence seem even deeper, even more removed. I have slept weeks away. I have put my hands down and made them passive, then picked them up again only to drive them into myself, making wreckage.
Is it not obvious that someone who customarily lives in a state of suffering requires a different sort of religion from a person habitually in a state of well-being?
This pervasive darkness is the reason I write poetry. It’s the reason I met that girl I talk about so much and how I have come to love so many other girls besides her. It’s the reason why I know it’s okay for me to fall in love with these girls at all. And on the nights I regret it, I remember that this darkness has been a mother to me the same way my flesh-and-blood mother has been.
The music and the darkness raised me. They raised things within me. Words and dreams and cities. We spend the first years of our lives coming to terms with the songs that define us. We learn each other’s names, the names of the foods we like, and not just what others call us but what we would like to call ourselves.
Later, these songs characterize ideas like revolution, anger, tenderness, wanting, grief, love, and harmony. We use them to explain not only ourselves, but how we connect to the world around us, how we feel about others, how we find calm and measures of control in knowing who we are.
A60: Do you know what illuminates the night? Caution: Poetry.
I was once asked how I came to know myself as a queer individual. At first I was taken aback. What did that mean? Even as someone who has tried to examine who I am, what having an identity means, I can’t claim to have an idea of how I got here. I don’t think anyone does.
What I ended up saying was that I looked at art. I had always liked girls and women in paintings. Even though most of this art was created by the male gaze, I had never considered that this gaze might belong to men. I watched the way Renaissance women creased in on themselves, their stomachs folding in the middle in ways they never do in adverts. I fell in love with the realness of that image. Romantic poetry settled on top of that idea like a home for a second violin. That idolization of women as natural, beautiful figures gave women a power that they have long been denied in popular culture and history. I created an image around those ideas, and I’ve found that woman in every girl I’ve ever known.
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Back in the theater, the screen fills with the face of a soft-speaking French woman. She asks me what it’s like, my own way of living. I want to tell her that, in the dark, everything is beautiful. That things bloom where you least expect them. Faces and people fill you that have never filled you before. Life is not about willing away darkness, but acknowledging the complements it creates. I want to tell her the moon shines brighter. That the sounds of dissonance are not dissonance at all. I want to tell the girl next to me that -
Even though we spend hours looking away from each other, silent except for the music of our shifting, the misplaced impatience of our bodies filled with impulse, we will leave that room filled with more than love. We will leave with a common experience. From this we grow together like old Spanish trees, talking for hours about the imaginings of false realities and the limitations of our real ones. We walk into darkness and leave with the light.
The aim of this art is to invoke something we know must have existed once and perhaps still does. A love we created, the beginning of something worth remembering, an unplayed chord buried somewhere, not in the abyss, but something deep & close & waiting.
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We leave the house at a quarter to midnight. The movies we like to see only play late at night, and we make time for them in the midst of our already-wrecked sleeping habits. I down a cup of coffee. She steals sips. The rim tastes like vanilla and strawberry chapstick. The lights blur together, the streetlamps large, imminent stars. It’s a familiar way to wander the world: blackness around us, that warm summer air like a cloak, and we can be the darklings. We can be what we want to be. There’s power in that. I know there is.
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We are all determined to speak freely, to know music instinctively as though we have ever had a chance to hear it, turning it over in our mouths like mints, devouring that sweetness whole. Ideas pass from one person to another and linger among us. The world is saturated with it, this light existing side by side with the dark, and this is how we see in color, how we make sense of previously unnameable things.
We are always looking for pieces that will turn us into harmonious wholes. Things that complement our reality, our experience. The sound seems louder in this senseless room in the dark. The objects in the mirror seem closer and are closer and maybe if we believe in them a little bit harder we will be able to reach out and touch them. We may at times be contradictory things, but that does not make existence impossible.
Fuck yourself with your logic.
Some of my favorite moments have been in hidden art theaters and poetry readings, long past midnight or heading towards an even deeper darkness. Color and vibrancy, a face appearing around the cool heat of the moon. Words pouring over one another, seeping into skin. Eyes that glance and shiver and call back.
Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips. Our silences, our words. Light that goes, light that returns. A single smile between us.
I have learned how to love in this room in the dark. I have attempted to qualify my existence with words and pictures and promises. Where qualification is impossible I have created new words, new forms of art. I have found new ways and new people to love. I have changed myself and acknowledged my capacity to do so. I have ceased trying to be one thing, or rather, I have ceased trying to be someone else’s thing.
In quest of knowledge, I watched the night create day while we seemed unchanged. O beloved of all, beloved of one alone, your mouth silently promised to be happy. Away, away, says hate; closer, closer, says love. A caress leads us from our infancy. Increasingly I see the human form as a lover's dialogue. The heart has but one mouth. Everything by chance. All words without thought. Sentiments adrift. Men roam the city. A glance, a word. Because I love you, everything moves. We must advance to live. Aim straight ahead toward those you love. I went toward you, endlessly toward the light.
If you smile, it enfolds me all the better.
The rays of your arms pierce the mist.
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(Uncomposed is a column by Lydia Eileen exploring the music in the moments of daily life where we don’t think to search for it, intersecting to form new meaning and nuanced dialogue. This column, along with two others by the HM team and many more pieces by contributors, is published in Half Mystic‘s Issue III: NOCTURNE. It is available for preorder now.)