Trumpet # 7

WHAT SHALL AN ARTIST DO IN A WORLD where art no longer is possible? Ezzie is a trumpet player and his music is in a rot. His band is dispersed; the members gone, each one their own way, after the mysterious death of Ezzie's friend and mentor, Horacio. Ezzie's reaction is to lock himself into his girlfriend Cinder's apartment and separate himself from the surrounding world, completely preoccupied with what goes on in his own head. Cinder feels pressured and wants him discontinue his sombre introspection and start all over again; finally he makes an attempt but his music is already passe. Horacio beckons to him from the other side of the grave and sends him on a long, painful and hallucinatory searchin a decayed city.
Comment:
IN THE INTRODUCTION TO ASK THE DUST John Fante's anti-hero Arturo Bandini exclaims: ''Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I come to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.''
The incredible, often unrequited love for the city, is one of the cornerstones in the modernist project. In that, Trttlllpet #7has an obvious connection to classics like, for example, Berlin, die Symphonic einC?' Grosstadt. Transferred to Los Angeles, the complete list is represented with traffic jams, diners, industries, shop-windows, railroads. Two factors have changed with time, however. First, the fascination for technology and the belief in the future have been replaced by an urban romanticism for ruins which, blackened, approaches the apocalyptic vision. The big city, here L.A., is no longer expanding or being rebuilt, but deteriorating and turning into a slum. Second, the stories and films about ''the modern'' now concern the (post- )modern world itself to a lesser degree and, instead, become testimonies about the (post- )modern attitude to the world.
Adrian Velicescu's and Crocker Coulson's elliptic short story about the unsuccessful trumpet player Ezzie's claustrophobic existence can be viewed as a story about the crisis of the avant-garde and art film, where an almost mechanical rhetoric, based on a strictly codified imagery (the empty industrial sites, the smoke, tile glass, the mirrors), has become the center. The labyrinth is closed and the only possible way out appears to be a metaphysical one, that is, the religious apocalypse, accentuated throughout the film.
This conventionality is making claims on a higher truth, while it mainly places the film within the genre. However, Trttlllpet #7 offers an instant of intimacy which could have ended somewhere else; the encounter with the mermaid at the edge of L.A. River. Her names are as many as her lovers. With her the monochromatic spell is broken and momentarily a fragment of a different, possible art film is visible.
''It sounds like a man's voice'', someone said about the trumpet. It's the human voice, vox humana, which must exist there, ''inscribed in the dust''.
LARS GUSTAF ANDERSSON