Sehnsucht, A Critical Feeling?

When is it critique and when is it complaint?  What about lamentation?  When is it mourning? When it’s someone close to you who dies, you mourn, they say, but when it’s an “object” you never “had,” that grief stricken pose is melancholia.  The german word, “sehnsucht,'” describes a melancholy yearning expressed in the voice of Ingrid Caven, who herself is a Frankenstein monster of twentieth century artifice; a muse for Fassbinder & Yves Saint Laurent & Jean-Jacques Schuhl, her boyfriend who wrote the “novel” about her that I just read. Ingrid Caven’s voice expresses this feeling that is pleasant and painful all at once, that is sad and beautiful, that is a gesture of the hand that reaches out for something in the distance; it is the beam of the spotlight, filtered with blue/red, that touches the hand; and no one wants anything more, or?

Do I have the capability to offer a true critique?  Or is it that I yearn for possibility only because I know it is impossible; a way to feel desire without the fear that it will be satiated and prove altogether unsatisfying.  I don’t want what I don’t have, because then I will never want anything again; or rather, I will want something else. So sad, isn’t it?  And so, I don’t know if I can critique anything. I cannot analyze the situation in order to find a theory to understand it beyond the expression of the condition of wanting to someday understand.

Imaginary Film Festival I: Pictures of Jubilee, Breaking Glass, Shock Treatment: The Winners of The Film Festival

One Sunday in December 2009.
At Imprenta.