"Darkness Rumbling": Kozintsev's Karòl Lier and the Visual Acoustics of Nothing

Through gloom and shadow look we

On beyond the years!

The soul would have no rainbow

Had the eyes no tears.

John Vance Cheney1

Reflecting on how King Lear's "stormiest part"2 (229) could be filmically realized, Grigori Kozintsev intriguingly alludes to the "visual acoustic" (229) aesthetic upon which Le Corbusier erected Notre-Dame-du-Haut, his Ronchamp chapel.3 That Kozintsev appropriates this crucial Corbusian concept to make Lear resonate within the space of tragedy like Ronchamp chapel does within its Vosges setting becomes however more evident from his "visual acoustic" comment about Lear's "thoughts and feelings [having to] sound like an arrow in the mist" (142). Admittedly, Kozintsev owes this poetic simile to Alexander Blok,4 but he just as dearly echoes what Christopher Pearson calls Le Corbusier's "lyrical account" (179) of how the Parthenon subsumes the Acropolis plane through its "arrows bursting away like rays"5 (179). Far from remolding Lear in terms of Peter Brook's "delocalized space"6 (26), Kozintsev envisions him as a Corbusian landscaped figure whose radiating influence modulates his ambience to his tragic resonance. Hence John Collick's astute remark that "[in] Koro/Ler, as in Noh, the diegetic space barely exists in a concrete physical form" (145), for it functions essentially as Kozintsev"s Corbusian analogy to what Shakespeare's Lear describes as "this tempest in my mind"7 (3.4.12). Collick's Noh reference is in fact deadly accurate, since what Kozintsev's landscape radiates, while "contractfing] or conflat(ing]" (145), to use Collick's verbs, in resonance with his Corbusian Lear is the "light emptiness" (3) Kozintsev sees characterizing Soami's Kyoto garden. What Kozintsev's Lear shares with Soami's garden is "the rhythm" (3) of its stones and gravel from which emanates its Nohlike musical evanescence-for Kozintsev attunes Lear to a parallel immateriality often through Dmitri Shostakovich's "tragic forte passages" (51). Keyed at a phantom pitch, Kozintsev's landscaped Lear resonates beyond the storm scenes to engulf other parts of the film as a hollow echo of what Shakespeare's Fool labels "Lear's shadow" (1.4.222). By intermeshing Corbusian and Noh influences, Kozintsev transforms what Lawrence Danson terms "the nothings of King Lear" (131) into the visual acoustics of an insubstantial Shakespearean realm.

Consider, for instance, the battlements sequence where Kozintsev's Lear, blaring Cordelia's banishment, unleashes his fiery essence by radiating it through his turreted belching beacons. Just like his Shakespearean counterpart whose "wheel of fire" (4.7.47) impels him "Every hour / [to] flash [...] into one gross crime or other" (1.3.4-5), Kozintsev's Lear instinctively bursts into elemental turbulence by appropriating the "walking fire" (3.4.111) aspect that Shakespeare's Fool attributes to the Bedlam Edgar. Significantly, what Kozintsev's Lear earlier unmasks when he removes what Kenneth S. Rothwell righdy identifies as "a Noh-like mask" (A History 189) is a seething affinity with his heardi. Kozintsev instandy underlines Lear's scorching nature not only by having him conduct the heated division of his kingdom sitting near his crackling hearth but, as Douglas Radcliff-Umstead points out, by "catching] Lear's face in a shot taken through the flames of [the] high fireplace" (268). Equally ominous is Kozintsev's suggestion that Lear's smoky self trails from the battlements to disperse into what Jack J. Jorgens describes as "a clouding sky" (239). Inspired by Gordon Craig's Lear sketches, with their "confusion of perspectives [and] threat of emptiness" (228), Kozintsev smolders Lear into a celestial incarnation of what Shakespeare's Fool tells his literary equivalent: "I am a fool, thou / art nothing" (1.4.184-85). What Kozintsev skyscapes then is Lear's Corbusian warping of his country into the "empty geometry" (174) of his psyche-a nebulous terrain that Rothwell evocatively charts as "the imaginary realm of Gog and Magog, which, if nothing can be about something, is pretty much what King Lear's about" ("In Search" 145). Once Kozintsev's Lear unmaps his kingdom, Nothingness threatens. Again, Rothwell timely hears this threat in Lear's racking of his map: "[he] shakes it and rattles it so fiercely that it rumbles like distant thunder" ("In Search" 140). Rothwell's simile sharply clinches Kozintsev's prolepsis of Lear's impending tempest that Shostakovich's orchestral crescendo equally heralds by propelling Lear's stormy scaling of the battlements. As Erik James Heine observes: "it grows from a single cello line at a dynamic of pianissimo to a full orchestra at fortissimo" (277). Significantly, Shostakovich's "Approaching Catastrophe" movement, with its mounting musical eruption, abruptly ends with what Heine calls "a tam-tam attack" (277). Since the tam-tam frequently figures, as Heine emphasizes, in "funeral ceremonies" (278), its conclusive cadence accrues the foreboding effect of tolling what Shakespeare's Kent later terms Lear's "promised end" (5.3.26). Pitched by the death-gong's final note to Kozintsev's reworking of Gloucester's "extreme verge" (4.6.26), Lear likewise annihilates himself by scaling analogous heights of emptiness. For what Lear's Corbusian edge fatally resounds is the immaterial might of thunderclouds.