#David Constantine

[apoemaday]

The Wasps

by David Constantine

The apples on the tree are full of wasps. Red apples, racing like hearts. The summer pushes Her tongue into the winter's throat.

But at six today, like rain, the first drops, The wasps came battering softly at the black glass. They want the light, the cold is at their backs.

That morning last year when the lamp had been left on The strange room terrified the heart in me, I could not place myself, didn't know my own

Insect scribble: then saw the whole soft Pelt of wasps, its underbelly, the long black pane Yellow with visitants, it seethed, the glass sounded.

I bless my life: that so much wants in.

[peaceofheartt]

'as our bloods separate', by david constantine

[denimbex1986]

'All of Us Strangers may have missed out on awards earlier in the year (no Bafta wins, no Oscar nominations) but it has won the prize that matters: the Guardian’s best film of 2024. It is the second time that director Andrew Haigh has received this accolade – 45 Years, his searing study of a marriage plunged into crisis, was the Guardian’s choice as best film for 2015.

On the face of it, the two films are sharply contrasting expressions of Haigh’s craft. 45 Years is resolutely realist in its portrait of a retired couple living in Norfolk, investing its middle-class milieu with an understated arthouse aesthetic. All of Us Strangers, meanwhile, returns to the gay themes that marked Haigh’s breakthrough Weekend, but in a shift from his past work operates in an unstable, dreamlike atmosphere that ultimately calls into question whether anything we are watching is supposed to be real.

But the two films share a powerful theme in common: the past’s hold over the present and the unnerving realisation that while we can never revisit our past, it has ways of finding us, sometimes shocking us into a new sense of ourselves.

Working in both cases from source material by other writers, Haigh alights on two brilliant conceits to explore this idea in each film.

In 45 Years, adapted from a short story by David Constantine, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) learns that the body of his old girlfriend Katya has been found more than 50 years after she fell into a crevasse in the Alps. This discovery disinters memories and passions that have lain deep inside Geoff, while his wife, Kate (Charlotte Rampling), scrambles to prevent the disintegration of a long and apparently happy marriage.

We never find out if Geoff makes the journey to see Katya, and we never see the body – but it looms large in our minds. As in Greek tragedy, the horrors of death are kept off stage, all the more to set our thoughts racing. In its ice-preserved youthfulness, Katya’s imagined body somehow rebukes the old age into which Geoff and Kate have sunk.

Kate is twice confronted with the image of the young Katya: in a photograph Geoff shows her (there is a resemblance between the two women) and then, in an unforgettable, Hitchcockian scene, through the primitive magic of a slideshow, which reveals Katya was pregnant.

Haigh finds an equally unsettling way to dramatise the collision between the past and the present in All of Us Strangers (which was inspired by a novel by Japanese author Taichi Yamada). Adam (Andrew Scott) has a series of encounters with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) as they were when he last knew them, before they died in a car crash when he was 11. They have not aged in appearance and behave as if it is still 1987, yet recognise that Adam has got older – perhaps a little older than they are. They are unchanged artefacts from the past, just like Katya in 45 Years, unattached to the present and yet acting upon it.

Readings of All of Us Strangers vary, but it seems that these eerie meetings in Adam’s old childhood home may be visions from his subconscious as he wrestles with the devastating effects of losing his parents so young – as well, perhaps, as scenes from the script we see him starting. Haigh presents us with two intriguing thought experiments: what if you could meet people from your past and have the conversations you were never able to have? And what if you could talk to your parents now as they were when they were bringing you up, meeting as equals? These scenes are so carefully scripted and impeccably acted that what is inherently unreal feels intensely authentic.

In both films, the intrusion of ghosts from the past is highly disruptive. Kate and Geoff go through with their 45th wedding anniversary party, but we are left wondering if their marriage can survive. For Kate, the revelations about Katya have cast her life with Geoff into a disturbing new light, as if it were all built on a false premise. Kate seems to intuit that Geoff loved Katya more than her, and that this old relationship has shaped their marriage without her being aware of it.

Meanwhile, Adam’s meetings with his parents seem to have been part of a reckoning with long suppressed trauma on multiple fronts. In parallel with his home visits, he has embarked on a doomed relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), which we come to interpret as another fantasy in which he plays out his apparently unfulfilled desire for a loving relationship with another man.

Both films threaten to bear out Oscar Wilde’s line that “one’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead”. Adam’s story is suffused with the sadness of bereavement and lost opportunities, but it could be regarded as more optimistic than Kate and Geoff’s in 45 Years. Adam seems to have undergone a kind of cathartic process, and – assuming he is still alive at the end of the film (as Scott says he is) – he has found, in the world he has conjured up in his mind, a potential path to happiness in the future. Kate and Geoff have much less time ahead of them to find an authentic way to live, whether together or – as seems more likely – apart.

But whatever future awaits his characters, Haigh seems to be reminding us that the past will always cast its shadow over us, whoever we are. You don’t have to have lost your parents in a car crash to mourn the passing of your childhood world; you don’t have to be haunted by a decades-old tragedy to be troubled by the way your life has turned out. Haigh’s innovative exploration of our vexed relationship with the past gives both these remarkable films their deep melancholy power.'

[stuff-diary]

45 Years

Movies watched in 2024

45 Years (2015, UK)

Director & Writer: Andrew Haigh (based on a short story by David Constantine)

Mini-review:

45 Years is yet another gem from Andrew Haigh. It's quiet and low-key, but surprisingly intense. In a way, it almost moves like a psychological thriller, slowly giving you the pieces so that you can form a mental picture of what's going on. There's this sense of foreboding and tension that builds along the way, keeping you hooked from beginning to the end. But the main reason why it works so well is the stunning performances by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay; their work is so nuanced and real. Anyway, with this movie, Haigh keeps climbing my favorite directors list.

[prayersforpigeons]

friedrich hölderlin (tr. david constantine)

[bones-ivy-breath]

Text ID:

Image One:

Poetry can repair no loss but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by a continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered.

Image Two:

What can art show us? It can make us feel less alone. It can describe a feeling. It can lift up stories we haven't heard before, told from the point of view of people we haven't heard from before. It can be revenge or merely vengeful. It can entertain, stupefy, propagandize, and perhaps even illuminate with startling clarity. But for any of this to happen, art needs to have a place for the reader to witness the stakes of what's happening. That space seems to be rapidly diminishing.

Image Three:

You like this painting too? / Yes... / It makes me want to live.

Image Four:

Sometimes I say to myself: Your fate is unique, think the others fortunate—none has been tormented as you have. Then I read some poet of the ancient times and it is as though I were looking into my own heart.

what art does for us

john berger and our faces, my heart, as brief as photos \ larissa pham the limits of the viral book review \ frantz (2016) dir. françois ozon \ johann wolfgang von goethe the sorrows of young werther (tr. david constantine)

kofi

[ukdamo]

Watching for Dolphins

David Constantine

In the summer months on every crossing to Piraeus One noticed that certain passengers soon rose From seats in the packed saloon and with serious Looks and no acknowledgement of a common purpose Passed forward through the small door into the bows To watch for dolphins. One saw them lose

Every other wish. Even the lovers Turned their desires on the sea, and a fat man Hung with equipment to photograph the occasion Stared like a saint, through sad bi-focals; others, Hopeless themselves, looked to the children for they Would see dolphins if anyone would. Day after day

Or on their last opportunity all gazed Undecided whether a flat calm were favourable Or a sea the sun and the wind between them raised To a likeness of dolphins. Were gulls a sign, that fell Screeching from the sky or over an unremarkable place Sat in a silent school? Every face

After its character implored the sea. All, unaccustomed, wanted epiphany, Praying the sky would clang and the abused Aegean Reverberate with cymbal, gong and drum. We could not imagine more prayer, and had they then On the waves, on the climax of our longing come

Smiling, snub-nosed, domed like satyrs, oh We should have laughed and lifted the children up Stranger to stranger, pointing how with a leap They left their element, three or four times, centred On grace, and heavily and warm re-entered, Looping the keel. We should have felt them go

Further and further into the deep parts. But soon We were among the great tankers, under their chains In black water. We had not seen the dolphins But woke, blinking. Eyes cast down With no admission of disappointment the company Dispersed and prepared to land in the city.

[dailydccomics]

Swamp Thing and John Constantine by David Mack

[thegoldenageofnza]

waiting at the bus stop, or something

read some of matt fraction's work cause hes writing batman next, now im 2/2 for getting interested in destructive blonde disasters

[hellblazeit]

JOHN CONSTANTINE ART I LOVE

↳  the books of magic (1990), issue #2 illustrator: scott hampton

[peaceofheartt]

orpheus, by david constantine

[bobbole]

John Constantine - art by David Palumbo

[vertigoartgore]

1995's The Horrorist Vol.1 #2 cover by David Lloyd (V for Vendetta).

[graveyardgremlins]

I just finished writing the most inspired thing I have ever written in my entire life and it's for a danny phantom × dc crossover fic based on the vibes from hellblazer (the pacing, the absurd bullshit etc) with a dad!john constantine-centric plot... I don't know how to process this...

random paragraphs from this absolutely insane fic:

It starts on the tip of your toes and it works its way towards your solar plexus. This feeling. You’re standing at the edge of the cliff, you realize. The wind is howling and wiping around your body, the waves crash against it with needless violence, hand-like water reaches towards you as you inch closer towards it. You look towards the dark water, where rock and nothing melt into each other and you can feel that fear burning in your lungs as the Atlantic tries to eat you whole. You remember sitting by the telly at night when you were young. Your father laid passed out on the couch and Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcok playing. The movie had come out not long after they had learned how to broadcast colour and, while you had had colour TV for a while, Judy’s terribly green dress had made an impression on you. There was something about Kim Novak in that scene… Standing in the lab you feel the urge to scream. Your hands shake and your eyes start to water and you’ve never felt so much anger, so much… Your chin trembles and you bite your lip, you dig your nails into your arms and you blink to scare away the tears. Your entire body is on fire. You are so angry, so frustrated, so tired. So much so that there is no space for it in your chest, no space for it in this room, no space for it in this house. Your knees start to go weak and you bend over, curling into yourself.

[leftoversludge]

no, cause the thing that's so funny to me about hellblazer is that i can't stop thinking of it as a demonic noir detective au fan fiction of famous english musician STING bc that's who his character is based on

[peaceofheartt]

'for years now', by david constantine