The Sublime

In search of something unnamable with no idea where to find it

I was watching Vampyros Lesbos the other day, which is, shall we say, very much less than a perfect movie. It is not even, by any reasonable standard for what makes a movie good, a good movie. It is a bad movie, and upon further reflection I’m not even sure if we should call it a movie at all, since it is constructed so sloppily. You could say that instead of a movie it is really just some scenes. There are some scenes, they don’t fit together that well, and then it is over.

The film was directed by Jess Franco, a person well-known to schlock horror and B-movie aficionados. From the early 1960s into the early 2000s, Jess made about three movies a year, which is no mean feat, except that when you watch many of these films it becomes clear that it may indeed have been a mean feat. To say that Jess churned them out would be something of an understatement. What I find personally fascinating about Vampyros Lesbos and this is true of all the films of Jess Franco that I’ve been able to get my hands on, is that it is nearly impossible to watch them in one sitting. Twenty minutes of a Jess Franco film is actually something closer to four hours in felt-time. The movies are, to put it succinctly, boring.

And yet, in many Jess Franco films there are what I want to call moments of being. That phrase is of course stolen from Virginia Woolf. Now, it is probably the case that Virginia Woolf would not have applied her beloved concept to scenes from Vampyros Lesbos. I understand that. Nonetheless, I persist. A moment of being is when one is alive but only more so. Alive as usual, alive in the way that being alive is like it is every single day, but somehow the aliveness of being alive slips into a concentration, a focus, a sense that it is really and truly real that this moment is really here and being experienced. You are yourself, but you are also not yourself. Fully penetrated and fully porous to everything around you and somehow still completely, ineluctably what-you-are.

Jess Franco managed, in his terrible and often exceedingly offensive films, to record these moments anyway. Or to allow for the right mood and stance by which moments of being may present themselves. And the great paradox of his career is that the scenes he tried hardest to make interesting, the erotic tableaux, the dungeon scenarios, the vampire seductions, are precisely the scenes that fall flattest. He was a person in search of something unnamable with no idea where to find it.

Consider the opening credits of Vampyros Lesbos. A large commercial vessel sits in the water of an industrial port somewhere along the coast of Turkey, perhaps the port of Istanbul. It is early morning, or late evening. Funky music plays, drums and sweeping electric organ and the indecipherable noises of what could be a garbled radio transmission. We just see the boat in the water with a light mist over the whole scene and a sort of blood orange sun hovering in the misty sky like something you’d expect on a canvas by J. M. W. Turner. Jess Franco does capture something in that moment, a mood, a certain mystery and foreboding and longing that is almost perfect. The feeling is soon dashed completely by the ridiculous sexy-vampire-lesbian scene that comes next. But for a brief moment, Jess was onto something.

My favorite scene in Vampyros Lesbos involves Soledad Miranda, a stunningly beautiful young woman who appeared in a number of Franco films and who died not long after this one was made, in a car accident, which gives everything a particular ache. In the scene, her vampire character and the film’s protagonist decide, inexplicably, to go swimming. The camera films them from afar as they run toward a rather shabby inlet somewhere along the Turkish coast, stripping off their clothes and frolicking in the tepid and what seems to be knee-deep water. The greatest moment is the shot of Soledad Miranda running. Vampires, it should be noted, are not generally filmed running. That’s because people tend to look goofy when they run, and vampires are supposed to be anything but goofy. But that’s what Soledad Miranda does, she runs goofily, with the awkward and halting gait of undeniable vulnerability. Not cool, not sexy, not alluring, nothing but a young person trying to be what she thinks she’s supposed to be in that scene and failing completely. There is something achingly tender about it. The mask slips and the person is just there. Sublime.

When (Pseudo)Longinus wrote ‘On The Sublime’, a treatise from somewhere in the first few centuries of the Common Era, he was also chasing something. He was trying to teach us what makes writing great. This is, as projects go, both admirable and completely insane. And Longinus was not a good writer himself. The whole treatise is written in a haughty, scoldy manner that is pretty much the signature fault of second-rate literature from late antiquity. As a work of instruction and codification it is an almost total failure. And yet this boring and sometimes inane treatise managed to survive the various travails of history, probably in one single fragmentary copy, and because of this one fragment wandering forlorn through the maze of centuries, it happened finally to be rediscovered in the Renaissance and became, through no great accomplishment of Longinus himself, a kind of timeless thing.

The best part, the genuinely miraculous part, is what Longinus preserved without meaning to. In the middle of his droning on about characteristics of sublime literature, he quotes a poem by Sappho. This poem is a mini time bomb that goes off time and time again whenever someone new discovers it. We have no other copy. It would have been lost forever. We only know it exists because Longinus stuck it into his boring treatise as an example, and now this extraordinary fragment of human feeling, one of the most thrilling bits of literature ever committed to papyrus, has survived in the vessel of one of the least thrilling.

The sublime, it turns out, doesn’t go where you try to send it. It goes where it wants. It hangs out with Longinus and with Jess Franco and with every other misfit and loser you can imagine and does so in complete indifference to our categories and rankings, and as I consider this fact more and more and reflect upon this reality more and more I become further convinced that this fact is, in itself, what is most sublime about the sublime.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. The Fate of The Animals, and The Grand Valley. He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.

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