Maya Deren: Incomplete Control

MAYA DEREN

FILM AND CULTURE

John Belton, Editor

FILM AND CULTURE

A series of Columbia University Press

Edited by John Belton

For the list of titles in this series, see Series List.

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53847-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keller, Sarah.

Maya Deren : incomplete control / Sarah Keller.

      pages cm. — (Film and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16220-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-16221-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53847-3 (ebook)

  1. Deren, Maya—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PN1998.3.D47K46 2014

791.4302'33092—dc23

2014021782

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

COVER ART: From Experimental Portraiture, c. 1942 (courtesy Boston University Howard Gotlieb Special Collections), and from the cover for Voices of Haiti record (courtesy Boston University Special Collections).

COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Portions of chapter 1, Done and Undone, were published as "Frustrated Climaxes: On Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle" in Cinema Journal 52.3 (Spring 2013): 75–98. Copyright © 2013 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

Figures 1.4, 1.5b, 1.6, 2.6, 3.2, and 4.4 are frame captures from the DVD of Martina Kudláček, In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Zeitgeist Films, 2004). Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.5, and 4.1 are frame captures from the DVD Maya Deren: Experimental Films (Mystic Fire Video, 2007). Figure 3.3 is a frame capture from the DVD of Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Mystic Fire Video, 2007).

The place you begin doesn’t determine the place you end […]

—LOUISE GLÜCK, NEST

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Unfinished Business

ONE    Done and Undone

Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle

TWO    Toward Completion and Control

At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time

THREE    Haiti

FOUR    Full Circle

Conclusion

In Completing a Thought

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This project has taken shape with all the earmarks of the same tensions in Maya Deren’s work that it describes. As John McPhee has written, People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? […] What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.* Producer Lorne Michaels has been reported as saying that an episode of Saturday Night Live was finished not because it was ready but because it was Saturday. Keeping these things in mind, I close off the labor put toward this book and recognize the enormous debts of gratitude I owe to so many people and institutions that helped it come to be—such as it is—finished.

Thanks are due to Colby College, especially Dean of Faculty Lori Kletzer, whose office was unstintingly generous in its support of this work. Thank you to the Humanities Center Research Grants, the English Department, and the Cinema Studies Program for the resources to complete this project. Thanks to the Columbia University Seminars Aaron Warner Publication Funds for support with image rights and reproduction. I am especially mindful of all the financial support that has benefited this project considering how much Deren struggled to find such support.

I benefited from a great deal of help from people at several institutions. J. C. Johnson and the staff at the Maya Deren Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University were invaluable to my research. Robert Haller, John Klacsmann, and Erik Piil and their colleagues at Anthology Film Archives assisted me with the materials there. I’m grateful to them and to the archivists at Columbia University Library Special Collections, who helped me with the Amos Vogel Papers. I profited from thoughtful colleagues at Colby College who offered encouragement for my work in innumerable ways. Special thanks are due to Patricia Burdick in Colby College Library Special Collections for help with journals contemporary with Deren’s work.

Warm thanks to John Belton and Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press, who are not just helpful, insightful, and generally extraordinary editors, but people I like to sit down and talk with as often as possible. I am also deeply grateful to Roy E. Thomas, who expertly and efficiently copy-edited the manuscript, and to Kathryn Schell, who shepherded the project from beginning to end with great patience.

I was fortunate to have insightful early readers both at Cinema Journal, which published an earlier version of chapter 1, and at Columbia University Press. Their thoughtful comments helped me to focus my argument.

The people who served as interlocutors to me for various stages of this project are many. Several of them offered insights or asked questions that helped me to develop ideas. These kind individuals include Robert Bird, Audrey Brunetaux, Noam Elcott, Allyson Field, Oliver Gaycken, Anton Kaes, Emily Kugler, Kerill O’Neill, Maple Razsa, Ira Sadoff, Jacqueline Stewart, Dan Streible, Winifred Tate, Julie Turnock, Malcolm Turvey, Jennifer Wild, Steve Wurtzler, and Joshua Yumibe.

Special thanks to Ken Eisenstein, Rebecca Meyers, and Oliver for also allowing me productive time in their welcoming aerie in Cambridge. I thank Louisa Bennion for her assistance with interviews and for introducing me to Judy Reemtsma, who so generously opened her glorious home to my family while in New York for the summers of research and writing.

In addition to talking with me about this project, a few extraordinary people have taken significant time away from their own pursuits to offer careful, thorough readings of drafts at various stages of the process. If there is any advice I did not take from these generous and brilliant friends, it is to this book’s detriment: Leah Culligan Flack, Tom Gunning, Katharina Loew, Caitlin McGrath, Daniel Morgan, Ariel Rogers, Theresa Scandiffio, and Lisa Zaher.

Special thanks are also due to Martina Kudláček, Miriam Arsham, and Barbara Hammer for incisive, useful conversations about Deren. I am also grateful to Nancy Allison, who generously offered access to and information about the work and papers of Jean Erdman.

Thank you at last to my dearest friends and extended family—three Roberts, Donna, Eve, Jane, Tom, Moira, and Karen, whom I miss all the time—who helped in many practical ways and whose support and care have sustained me for so long.

And most of all, my love and thanks to my Jonathan, Greta, and Henry, whose constant encouragement have made this work, and everything else, both easier and infinitely more worth the doing.

*John McPhee, Structure, The New Yorker, Jan. 14, 2013, 55.

Introduction

Unfinished Business

On October 23, 1961, Maya Deren’s car was parked illegally, and she was issued a ticket. Deren’s car was often parked illegally; her archives contain a sheaf of emerald green violations from 1960–61, neatly bound together. However her liability for the tickets might have been determined prior to late October of 1961, Deren could not be held responsible for this particular ticket: she had died in a Manhattan hospital ten days earlier, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage. In the days that passed between suffering collapse and her death on October 13, Deren lay in a coma. While in that state, lingering between life and death, was she aware of both sides of consciousness? Did she worry about her car parked illegally? What other unfinished business might have troubled her?

At just 44 years of age, Deren died much too early. A formidable filmmaker in her own right, she was also a tireless proponent for opening avenues of distribution and funding that would benefit aspiring experimental filmmakers, among them Stan Brakhage and Shirley Clarke. She possessed a precociously bright intellect, which she had turned toward plans for an array of creative projects, many of which she did not complete but which have settled instead into boxes containing the diverse materials of her archive. Looking through these boxes has occasioned several questions related to her legacy, perhaps none more so than the usual question asked of a gifted, inspired artist who comes to an end too soon: what if she had lived longer? Would she have finished, for instance, the major project having to do with Haitian Voudoun rituals that took up so much of her energy and time for some fourteen years? Of what other work did her death deprive us?

Further: would she have been able to advocate for other aspiring artists through the Creative Film Foundation, artists whose work we will never know? Was she poised to contribute something to other emerging branches of the fields of photography, music, anthropology, or any of the other disciplines in whose pots Deren had her thumb? The potential losses are vast in Deren’s case, in that she was possessed of a restless, copious energy for cross-disciplinary engagement, heeded a strong call toward mentorship, and had a penchant for coming up with ideas for new work. Teiji Ito, her third husband and musical collaborator, recollected that Deren often said, quoting her father, that The most important thing in this world is an idea.¹

At a minimum, her early death put an end to the specific labor she had already invested in a range of projects, cutting short a promising creative trajectory. Of these projects, the work she planned and spent over a dozen years working on in Haiti is only the most remarkable case of her unfinished, interrupted labor. Several other films, plans for films, and fragments from completed films were also left behind in an open-ended, unresolved state and now comprise the bulk of her voluminous archives.

But the whole of Deren’s work—even long before her tragic end, even indeed from the very beginning—was always already marked by incompletion. She liked to refer to the poet Paul Valéry’s statement that a poem is never finished, only abandoned, so much that during one period she advertised her film screenings as 3 Abandoned Films, with Valéry’s quotation on the program notes. Unfinished, contingent, or liminal states appealed to Deren, and her aesthetic exploited these conditions wherever possible. Not benighted by failure, she in fact depended on an aesthetic of open-endedness. Even her long-unfinished projects, rather than representing failure (a persistent lament plaguing appreciations of Deren’s work), further indicate an aesthetic that respects a rejection of closure and completion.

This aesthetic explicitly draws on energy produced in excess of a finished product. In her writings and films, Deren prompts reflection on interaction between and among sets of binaries: life/death, conscious/unconscious, visible/invisible, and so forth. Rather than resolving the tensions between opposites to discover truth, or synthesizing or creating a collision between them to generate a third term (thus rejecting the strictly dialectical forms that precede her efforts), Deren fixates on the space between them and strives to maintain a tension plateau that will extend the life and rub of binary pairs for as long as possible, without resolution, without closure.² Through this strategy, she articulates a vision of how cinema specifically relates to the realities it encounters, records, and/or transforms—so that her films consciously cleave and rejoin locations to create effects of proximity and relationship for her subjects. They bind widows and brides, movement and stasis, and interior and exterior as variations on a whole, selfsame state of being. Eschewing permanent conclusions and fixed relations, Deren’s work embraces incompletion as a way to keep things open to possibilities. A great deal of her work accordingly remained in process. This is not to say that she never finished anything; often, her work very simply revises, revisits, or otherwise reopens what had appeared to have come to a point of closure, if it ever reached that point in the first place. Completing something for Deren is not necessarily the end—in fact, as her film Witch’s Cradle makes plain (through a visual motif that shows the phrase written in a circle that endlessly repeats the words): the end is the beginning is the end is the… (and so on).

Unfinished, unclaimed, or fragments of full works pose the intriguing problem of where and how to include them—whether as a generalized whole or on a case-by-case basis—in cinema theory and history.³ In the case of an accomplished filmmaker whose complete works amount to a scant 70-some minutes but whose incomplete projects more than triple that amount, the question of what to do with unfinished work proves of utmost importance. For Deren, what at first seems to be the problem of incompletion plaguing her work in fact points to the polestar of an aesthetic overall. As her remarks about the form of her 1949 film Meditation on Violence demonstrate, for instance, she consciously drew on the principle of incompletion to structure her works—in that film, with movements that alternate "in accord with the negative-positive principle from Confucius. Accordingly, the movements open and close. Moreover, they round back on themselves and are never completed in terms of extension. […] The essential principle is balance in constant flux."⁴ The openness that comes from such incompletion lies at the heart of her approach to cinema.

Furthermore, Deren foregrounds the fragmentary qualities undergirding cinematic production, indicating the power of creative cutting and drawing on but transcending the solidity of the world in front of the camera to generate wholly new images specific to cinema. She often keeps the possibilities inherent in such an approach open for as long as possible before (at least temporarily) closing them off. Circularity, recursion, repetition, and open-endedness: these features are at the center of Deren’s thinking about filmmaking, and they shape her understanding of both film practice and film aesthetics. We could say that she privileges the open over the closed or the process over the product, but even more so, it is in the tension between the two that the energy of her films is generated. Deren repeatedly strives to keep key oppositions—especially openness and closure, but also accident and assertion of control, circularity and linearity, absence and presence, reality and imagination, etc.—in motion.

One of the pivotal films in Deren’s filmography, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), made just before her first trip to Haiti, demonstrates the significance of these tensions and how they play out on several levels toward productive ends. As we will see in chapter 2, this film was significantly reimagined and changed during the process of its making, aspects of which haunt its current structure and symbols. Deren kept multiple options available to it open for as long as possible. But what I want to emphasize here is the way this film’s internal dynamics also depend on maintaining tensions—articulating them but not allowing them to come into closure—to actuate its meanings. In the first place, like many experimental films, Ritual initiates aspects of traditional narrative devices, but uses them without loyalty to their causal logics; in Ritual’s case, this push-pull between potential closure and resolute openness parallels the film’s themes.

Ritual begins with a scene in two adjoining rooms that eventually accumulate three women: Deren comes into view at first moving between two doorways set side by side with a dark wall between them. As she crosses, she disappears behind this dark space before reemerging, pacing in the light of each doorway. She sits in one of these lighted doorways and begins to wind wool with an unseen partner (apparently hidden behind the wall between doors). After a moment, Deren is joined by dancer Rita Christiani, who enters from the adjoining room (in the foreground of the shot). As Christiani approaches, the camera cuts to a closer view of Deren, who continues to talk and spin when she looks up into the camera, suggesting that we are seeing her from Christiani’s perspective. The camera begins to engage a shot/reverse shot pattern from Deren to Christiani, who beckons to Deren. Another match on action uses Christiani’s arm reaching out (but in longer shot) as she turns and moves toward the empty second doorway. Her entrance into the interior room signals the second part of this first sequence.

When Christiani enters, the camera frames her movement in a subjective shot of The Lady in the Lake variety: her hand is before her and she follows it into the room (we are seeing just what she would see).⁵ Surprisingly, she finds Deren there quite alone. After a moment, Christiani picks up the partly wound ball of wool that rests on a chair, sits, and starts to spin and listen while Deren (again in a reverse shot) talks vivaciously. Distracted by something behind her, Christiani turns to look, and sees that a woman (played by Anaïs Nin, grand dame of the bohemian Greenwich Village literary scene) has appeared at the same doorway from which Christiani came. As they come to the end of the skein, Deren is shown in slow motion, letting go of the yarn and leaning back. In the next shot, Christiani discovers she is alone. Nin motions with her head, and Christiani follows her through the threshold back into the other room, where a party takes place.

Deren called this sequence The Entrance and the Winding of the Wool. In at least one version of the preparatory writing she made for the film, this opening scene does not exist; instead the film begins with the party that in the finished version follows directly after this sequence. Its addition puts emphasis on the individual undergoing the socializing rituals of the film, rather than on the rituals themselves. The scene suggests a narrative thread: Christiani, curious, approaches the room to join Deren and Deren’s fellow spinner of thread. That goal is thwarted by the absence of that supposed partner, so the film changes tack and resets the possibilities: Christiani becomes the partner herself and attempts to play the role she (and we) wrongly assumed was being played by another, until she discovers she too has no partner and the film’s direction shifts again, and so forth.

Meanwhile, taking the place of the resolutions being denied the audience because of the narrative breaks, this short but complex sequence depicts a set of relational transactions that prompt a tangle of associations among binaries that combine to generate all the key concerns of the film. Deren propels an oscillation between interior and exterior (in terms of both the two rooms and the subjective vs. objective shots of the sequence), visibility and invisibility, appearance and disappearance, dark and light, movement and stasis (at one point Deren freezes her activity so that Christiani may take her place winding the yarn). Not resolving the tensions generated by their oscillation, Deren chooses instead to initiate through them an oblique but explicit commentary on subject/object relations. For instance, the shot/reverse shot pattern reinforces the separateness of Deren and Christiani, but immediately following Deren’s disappearance Christiani begins to play one half of their double role (they become wholly interchangeable, effected through matches on action, similarities in gestures and roles, and costuming). In her notes to the film, Deren explains: The shift from one to the other throughout the film always takes place gently, imperceptibly. There must never be any doubt that it is the same person.⁶ Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Deren was in the process of researching Haitian ritual as she made this film, individual versus collective interests also find thematic articulation here, effected not through narrative means but through disruption of narrative expectations in favor of ideas held in tension without proceeding toward resolution.

Sitting as it does at the crux between the first part of Deren’s career and her shift into investigations with documentary and ritual when she first goes to Haiti in 1947, Ritual in Transfigured Time represents a moment of great volatility in Deren’s aesthetic development. The years 1946–47 are typically identified in studies of her work as the moment failure comes to dominate her efforts. Read in this way, what she accomplishes after this point is necessarily lesser work, or doesn’t come into being because she lacked resources or got stymied in some important way. I argue that this assumption not only does great injustice to the work itself but also that it prevents us from understanding major features of Deren’s interests that run throughout her career. The work of this period, and indeed of Deren’s entire career trajectory, examines issues and ideas with rigorous intentionality coupled with an openness to possibilities: it is work guided by choice and faith in an often very long process. It draws on the vitality of incompleteness.

Deren’s example is particularly acute, but these dynamics are by no means unique to her. The history of cinema is strewn with the detritus of unfinished, abandoned, rejected, or otherwise laid-aside work. There is also all the finished work to which film historians have no access, either because those works are lost forever to the flames or because they are locked away in archives in a fragile state waiting to be preserved, or because any records outlining considerations for identifying definitive works are elusive, nonexistent, overlooked, or inconclusive. (Paula Amad’s work on the Albert Kahn archives is a particularly rich example of how such work opens fascinating ways to address the study of cinema history’s related discourses.)⁷ Moreover, the collective nature of most cinematic endeavors leads to an excess of creative energy being winnowed down into a single product. In some cases—John Huston’s documentary Let There Be Light, for instance—the ratio of the amount of footage taken so exceeds the final product (by some accounts, about seventy hours to one finished hour) that it begs consideration of what is not in the finished film.⁸ Indeed, all of this raises important questions: What does cinema studies do to account for lost work or the details of the process, as well as the runoff, the excess, the clips on the cutting-room floor, the performance of an actor or the color palate of a designer that changed a director’s vision, the contributions (potential or actual) of creative personnel? This book places value in that which was not included in a final product, or which never even prompted a final product; it finds interest inhering in promises either not yet fulfilled or redirected for other things; and it recuperates and repositions work accomplished by an important filmmaker who may have managed to complete only a handful of films but whose creative range extends further than that. It attempts to recuperate the work that is not usually considered when one considers Deren’s accomplishments, and places it within a broader theoretical and methodological investigation.

Theories of absence suggest a model for the one I wish to adopt for understanding Deren’s work. Patrick Fuery, for example, rejects the persistent notion that centers and presences are to be desired, and remarks on the weight we grant to a metaphysics of presence—that privileging of the centre over its margins and the marginalized.⁹ Elsewhere, through the notion of desire, he links the hegemony of presence with its opposite: one must look to discourses surrounding an absence or a longing (which presupposes an absence) to provide a structure for understanding either state.¹⁰ Fuery designates the central paradox of theories of absence as pointing to a structure (absence signifying something rather than nothing) that refuses to be filled in. Similarly, Deren’s films strike out against the edges of the frame, and her films generate connections through which what is seen and what is unseen might traffic. She gives precedence to things accomplished through suggestion or association, rather than through causal links. For example, her forays into metaphysics, both as a student of literature and more pointedly in her writing about Haiti, explore making representable that which is apparently not present but is actually simply invisible, privileging a fragmented, incomplete state.

Such strategies suggest another of Deren’s prevailing documentary and creative preoccupations: how to access inaccessible states of being; how to gesture toward the unknowable and thereby render it even minutely comprehensible; or, simply, how to visualize invisible realms. Poetry, a touch-point for her aesthetic throughout her career, often draws upon these principles in formal terms: rather than shine a light on the ineffable thing directly, a certain slant of light is bound better to illuminate elusive ideas, feelings, or states of mind.¹¹ The modernist poetry Deren worked on for her master’s thesis (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, et al.) and the art scene of which she was a part similarly traffic in fragmentation, suspended states, and faith in non-resolution. The work that comes out of her Haitian experience draws on energies related to the incomplete, missing, or desired but absent object that she labored to represent. Over her career, she asserts the need to make room where resonances might accrue toward meaning, not where meanings might come to a predetermined or forced closure.

It is daunting to write a book about incompletion. The trajectory of this book has often felt freighted with the worry that it would come to the same end as so many of Deren’s well-laid plans or the works proposed by several stout hearts who similarly intended to grapple with her materials, only to end up coming at last (or should I say so far?) to the same, incomplete, and open-ended end as those materials. As much as Deren’s work was inspired by incompletion, it in its own turn inspires incompletion, which is not generally a state to be desired in the world of scholarship. The Legend of Maya Deren, an utterly invaluable resource for all studies of Maya Deren’s work, has been in the making for thirty-five(!) years and is only about half done as originally conceived. Another volume has been imminent for close to a decade, and it has been beset by complications that have indelibly shaped the outcome (if indeed there will be an outcome). ¹² Robert Steele, the Boston University professor who is responsible for bringing Maya Deren’s copious, fascinating papers intact to the archives at the Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Research Center, spent years similarly compiling and, through interviews, adding to Deren’s materials, at one point envisioning a nine-part, multivolume book detailing her life, writings, and interests. That project, representing years of effort, never found a publisher and now shares space in the Deren archive in the shape of more than thirty folders in box 18. Martina Kudláček spent years researching, advocating for, and adding to the Deren archives starting with her work making her film In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2002). For myself, in a way not at all unique to the state of authorship, I suspect that this book will never quite feel complete: it is ever haunted by all the parts that didn’t fit (I sympathize with the above writers/editors/artists and their urge to include everything) and the shadow of directions it might have gone. Yet knowing how way leads on to way, it is unlikely that those now-lost possibilities will ever find fulfillment in the manner originally considered.

On the other hand, it has also been liberating, even exhilarating, to focus on incompletion. This book champions the idea of irresolution and its fickle, changeable, frustrating, transgressive, unfixed, exciting energies. It values roads not taken, recognizes the benefits of keeping options open, and attempts to bring certain materials—many of them languishing, untouched for long stretches of time in archives, stray texts, or people’s memories—out of the realm of the nearly lost and into the light. Every art form grapples with these kinds of questions, but cinema carries additional freight so far as questions of its purview pertain to the binary of completion/incompletion. For instance, editing depends on incomplete fragments, put together to build meanings that far outstrip the product of its components. In Deren’s experimental milieu, those meanings are multidirectional and built in the same way that poetry juxtaposes its pieces, amasses them toward conglomeration, or allows them to reverberate outward toward exophoric referents. Might there be a roomier, portmanteau approach that would allow elaboration of issues related to completion and incompletion?

Deren’s work is a good place to start for such an approach. The central questions that drive this project concern how we should address unfinished creative work, particularly in the case of a gifted artist’s whole oeuvre, with that oeuvre understood to encompass more than the films for which she is known. In the tendency for an author-centric context within cinema studies (at the very least as an organizational strategy for dealing with film texts: a strategy which inheres as well in many of the humanistic disciplines that abut cinema studies), the apparent cohesion of the artist’s work in relation to the figure of the artist him- or herself matters a good deal. The finished, definitive text matters, too, and in cases where its definitiveness comes into question, we tend to turn to clues provided by the author—in her other works, in her writings, in the traces of process and intention she left behind—to find answers. For me, the question is: Aside from their role in upholding the cult of the author, how might we reconsider the value of remnants, fragments extant or lost, plans abandoned, works never screened, options that were once available to the definitive text but now dog it with what if?, labor that went into the artwork but apparently never emerged as part of its final form? ¹³

Orson Welles, whose work Deren admired,¹⁴ could easily serve as a similarly comprehensive case study for incompletion as an artistic strategy, especially in terms of the effects of incompletion on an approach to authorship specific to cinema studies. It may help briefly to note his more readily familiar career to show what issues arise when considering more popular work, the status of which as a set of finished products cannot in fact claim to be wholly untroubled. The director of that stalwart on the lists of the greatest films ever made, Citizen Kane, has enjoyed a position in the pantheon of film directors via one of the originating texts of auteur studies in this country, Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968. There, Sarris places Welles among the greatest and most signatory of directors, one whose films unmistakably assert his authorial presence:

The Wellesian persona looms large in Wellesian cinema. Apart from The Magnificent Ambersons, in which his presence was exclusively vocal narration, every Welles film is designed around the massive presence of the artist as autobiographer. Call him Hearst or Falstaff, Macbeth or Othello, Quinlan or Arkadin, he is always at least partly himself, ironic, bombastic, pathetic, and, above all, presumptuous. ¹⁵

Designing ambitious