If you have 10 minutes … check out Bj\u00f6rk’s video for “Black Lake,” an unbearably sad song about living in the aftermath of a relationship that has died. A while back, last year maybe, I read an interview with Bj\u00f6rk and she talked about the ending of her long-time relationship, and she could not speak of it without welling up with tears. She had to keep stopping the interview. (I can’t remember where I read it.) It was such a touching and honest interview. And, of course, it is somewhat embarrassing to fall so spectacularly apart, in public – you want to hold it together – she keeps apologizing throughout. Reading, I thought of my own experiences with breakups, how completely devastating they can be, especially if you rely on that other person for comfort\/company. It’s exponentially worse if they are engrained into your life, your schedule, the fabric of your day. Because what then? Who are you alone? Do you have any substance? I’ve had only one of those breakups, and once is enough. <\/p>\n
Bj\u00f6rk is an artist, and so she turned it all into art. <\/p>\n
“Black Lake” was part of her MoMA exhibit, apparently, and now it is finally online. I watched it this morning and feel like I breathed only once … twice, maybe? .. during its entirety. <\/p>\n
Filmed in and around a black-lava-rock cave in Iceland (with Bj\u00f6rk in bare feet), it is an expression of sorrow so intense that it’s at Greek-Tragedy-Levels. <\/p>\n
But more than the lyrics of the song, or anything like that, it is her performance<\/i> here that really strikes me. The posture and the gestures. The opening “pose”, with the slight backwards motion. It’s archetypal, that pose. In other words, that shape, and its slight movement, LOOKS like what grief FEELS like. It is tapping into something universal, something that showed up on cave paintings, something we all know. And all of her gestures throughout have that same strange echoey resonance. The gestures are both controlled (she has chosen each gesture specifically), and totally out of control (once she commits to the gesture, she stops controlling it – and lets the gesture take over.) <\/p>\n
For example, at around the 7:30 mark, something starts happening. And once it starts happening, it changes. The gesture goes through an evolution, and so does she. And once she starts committing to the gesture, it changes how she feels, or opens up the depths of the feeling. There starts to be an actual release of something. (This is my thing with “gesture.” You must commit to it on THIS level. A half-hearted gesture is nothing. It doesn’t express anything, and it also doesn’t transform you, the person making the gesture. You might as well not make it at all. As I went on at length in a post a while back: It’s Got to Cost You Something<\/a>.) <\/p>\n These gestures cost<\/em> Bj\u00f6rk. <\/p>\n This is an extraordinary performance. <\/p>\n \n