of inescapable fallenness. Carrying her work with her, she rejects the city’s present materiality, seeking only the narrative she constructs from her own exhaustive research: what the city meant when it was built and when it fell, and what it can mean when the rubble is finally cleared and only the ideal is left. public miracles Finally, the most martyred of all these saints, The Green Figure , has no methodology of his own but is borne along through the city’s spaces and buildings under the hallucinatory force of the mass of meanings that have accumulated there. Seemingly longing for self-realisation, the restless city nearly devours him during a series of animated visions. The Green Figure absorbs the whole of time and collective memory as successive blows to his body, yet his one effort to exert his will over the mass of metonymic clutter that overwhelms him becomes just one more failure, one more closed door of possibility.
In the film’s final moments, the city implodes under the weight of its own history, but also under the weight of interpretation forced upon that history by the characters. The climax of the film, both a disastrous culmination and a restarting of the knotted, cyclical narrative, represents a critical failure of any one character or faction to impose narrative on the mass of evidence left in the city’s collapsing shell. ‘The foundations have become unstable’, warned The Digger in the beginning of the film, and it is precisely the saints’ fixation on foundations, on the lost moment of original intent, that leaves them with neither legacy nor an enduring institution. The failure of utopia, of planning in the interest of an imagined future citizenry, has left them bereft. More than that, their bootless attempts to resurrect what never lived – not the way it was meant to – cancels the city’s ability to resurrect itself, not as something new, but simply as functional space. The truth of the place, then, is that there is none. The will of the characters to arrange the city’s original aspirations, brief glory,
stills from the film, copyright Greg Mahoney, used with permission
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