Dive! Dive! Dive! Sub movies

Film4 seems to have its submarine-movie jones on at the moment, so I thought I'd dig up and rework an old piece on the genre I did for Little White Lies' Marie Antoinette issue (Oct/Nov 2006).

'Dive! Dive! Dive!' Is there any more evocative word in cinema, especially when repeated three times? We all know what comes next: periscope down, the sonar's ping, red light reminiscent of a photographer's dark room. The submariner's life is one of numbers, too: distance to target, torpedo tube one, distance from the ocean surface, ever-rising pressure levels.

If you think about it, depth charges and silent routine have been imprinted on our minds through only a handful of films. One of the best is The Enemy Below, starring Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens - all the regulation words and images are present and correct.

There's the man who cracks amid it all - who can't take it any more - he even tries to climb up the conning tower and open the hatch when they're under water. He's talked down by captain Jurgens: 'It is part of our work to die; we are not going to die. Do you believe me? Do - you - believe - me?' He does.

There's a great shot just before this point in the movie: the crews are absolutely still in the middle of the Atlantic waiting for the tiny noise that gives the other away. One US soldier is shown playing noughts and crosses while another is fishing over the side of the boat. Audaciously, the camera travels all the way down his line to focus on the sub, paralysed on the seabed. Here, the German crew is playing chess.

Incidentally, it's no coincidence sci-fi movies share much with submarine movies - that slim metal tube floats precariously in an alien environment. In the same way a U-boat's hull might give way - fatally - at any moment, so, 'The engines cannae take it, Cap'n.'

Geoff Dyer, whose Zona, about Tarkovsky's Stalker, is out now in paperback, itemises the distinctive tropes of the submarine movies in his memorable 1998 e-novel Paris Trance ('e', in those days, for ecstasy). Characters Luke and Alex pore through the pages of listings mag Pariscope for the best way to experience the city of (flickering) light, only to discover they're surrounded by Cassavetes films.

So these movie buffs escape instead in a love of submarine films. Their list of themes fills a page of the book (p33 in the Abacus paperback edition, if you happen to have one to hand), and they come to one vital conclusion: 'Essentially you're a Second World War man?' 'Through and through.' No Crimson Tide or The Hunt for Red October for them.

Made in 1957, The Enemy Below exemplifies what makes this genre so special: it's not the rakish fashions, the thrill of the chase or the heightened sense of claustrophobia - no, it's because these films consistently humanise the enemy. Like no other, the WWII sub flick is as interested in the other side as the heroes we're ostensibly backing. Could this be because the two sides are at different levels? This literally isn't a level playing field.

As captain Jack Hawkins tells his deputy after a gruelling chase in The Cruel Sea (1953) : 'Number One, this is quite a moment: we've never seen the enemy before... They don't look very different from us.'

Director Wolfgang Peterson extended the form for his groundbreaking 1981 TV series, Das Boot. Here we see the war entirely from the point of view of the German crew; as in The Enemy Below, a young Nazi ideologue onboard is humoured like a wilful child: wrongheaded, but what can you do? Here again is the captain portrayed as mythical seer, a man whose experience and guile will see his men home alive.

This is the best bit: the Second World War submarine film is visceral Battleships, a bloody mind game played out, usually by two mutually admiring leaders. As Jurgen Prochnow's captain declares at a crucial moment in Das Boot: 'Jetzt wird es psychologisch, meine Herren' - 'This is where it gets psychological, gentlemen.'

Submarine movies Operation Petticoat and The Bedford Incident screen on Film4 in the UK this afternoon from 1.20pm. Painting 'Torpedo... Los!' by Roy Lichtenstein can be seen in Tate Modern's retrospective of the US pop artist, which runs until 27 May.

SHHhH

In his introduction to Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Robert Chandler makes the point that individual chapters in the book read like short stories (specifically Chekhov). They are beautiful vignettes, often ending on triumphant sentences, such as: 'The Gestapo limousine sped down the autumn autobahn.'

It's a line Laurent Binet could be said to riff on in HHhH - much as the book's cover draws on Gerhard Richter's portraiture - when he dreams of writing the phrase: 'A black Mercedes slid along the road like a snake.' Mercedes cars recur in the young French writer's book about World War II's Operation Anthropoid and its target, Reinhard Heydrich, known as the Hangman, the Butcher of Prague or - by his own men - the Blond Beast.

I'd be loath to drag Geoff Dyer into yet another post if such work as The Missing of the Somme weren't an obvious touchstone for this 'personal' portrait. Dyer's non-fiction is the writing of the book he would have written if he hadn't written about writing that book instead. Or, as he puts it in Out of Sheer Rage, his book about writing a book about DH Lawrence: 'There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research, and then, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do they sit down and write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject to begin writing about it I lose interest in it immediately.'

There are episodes that preempt Binet: Dyer finds he can't work without his copy of Lawrence's Complete Poems, 'crammed with notes and annotations', which he has left in Paris. Having regained it thanks to a friend, Dyer then leaves the 'talismanic' book in Rome. Unable to work in Greece he could blame his 'inability to get started on having left my copy of The Complete Poems in Rome', except: 'At the last possible moment, with the taxi rumbling downstairs, I had dashed back up, retrieved my copy...'

Binet recounts how he regrets not having snapped up, for 250 euros, a book called Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher (Living with a War Criminal) written by Heydrich's wife, Lina, after the war : 'I've reached the point in the story where I have to recount Heydrich's first meeting with his wife. Here more than for any other section, that extremely rare and costly tome would undoubtedly have been a great help.' Later he tells us, parenthetically, however: 'I admit it, I ended up buying the book.'

'Actually I don't know...'; 'I've been talking rubbish...' HHhH is strewn with such caveats. 'I said before that one of the characters in Chaplin's Great Dictator was based on Heydrich, but it's not true.'

Nevertheless Binet and Dyer are meticulous in their research, even if the former seems to garner much of his inspiration from films, notably Hitler's Madman (directed by Douglas Sirk and starring John Carradine) and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! (1943). There's more recent fare, too, including Conspiracy ('only five euros [on DVD] - postage and handling included'), Downfall, The Pianist, The Counterfeiters, Black Book and Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent - 'Heydrich in a Rohmer film! I still can't get over it.'

Binet's girlfriend, Natacha, teases that he may be turning into a fascist, as if he were the obsessive narrator at the centre of Roberto Bolano's war-gaming novel The Third Reich. Binet wields his real-life characters deftly but if I have one quibble about HHhH, it's in the editing: at times the construction means the reader is missing certain important facts, while at others the detail is repetitive.

Miroslav Tichy and the ongoing impulse

There's a section towards the end of Jonathan Dee's 2010 novel The Privileges that reads like a bad Paul Auster extract (and there's enough of that about). A character, Jonas, goes on the hunt for outsider art: 'The rule of thumb seemed to be that the further a particular artist's own mind had pushed him toward society's border, the more you could charge for his work. It was revolting and thrilling at the same time.'

With the help of an expert, Jonas tries to separate the real deal from fraudsters: '...outsider art is overrun by thieves and hacks and opportunists and corrupters... The difference here is that the artists themselves can't be corrupted by it.' He's advised a good test is to meet the artist and, in this case, the artist turns out to be a true wacko, someone with a 'total absence of self-consciousness'.

It's a definition that could apply to Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy, who died last year aged 85. A student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague he suffered first when the communists came to power in 1948 and then, in 1957, when he had a mental breakdown.

He moved back to his hometown, Kyjov, and began taking pictures using homemade cameras. I'll leave it to a biography for the Wilkinson gallery, which hosted an exhibition of his work soon after his death, to take up the story: 'He mainly photographed the local women; the curvaceous contours of a body in motion, captured moments of sartorial revelation, smooth calves truncating from underneath full skirts... He worked with a homemade camera that he fashioned from used materials, such as shoeboxes, rubber bands and tin cans, complete with makeshift telephoto lenses, polished with toothpaste and ashes.'

'He honoured women in bikinis' according to the gallery or, as writer Geoff Dyer has it: 'he spent the 1960s and '70s perving around Kyjov.' The local swimming pool was a favourite haunt - from the outside of the mesh fence - or, if not that, a line of bras hanging to dry would do.

There's something of Victorian artist Edward Linley Sambourne here, who would hang around in Kensington taking pictures of schoolgirls using a camera that took pictures at a right angle to the direction in which it was pointed. Dyer links Tichy's pictures with an unrequited summer of longing in Paris, images that are no doubt conjured again in these hot days. The oddest part of Tichy's pictures is that there's something nostalgic about his unguarded moments, of unlikely hairstyles and retro costumes.

Like the artist in Dee's book, Tichy was apparently oblivious to his own work: he used a homemade enlarger to print his images, sometimes scribbling in the detail. Then he might use them as beer mats or drop them onto the floor, where they were nibbled by rats.

Haruki Murakami and 1Q84, part two - cuts

I'm rather jealous of the stylish US edition of Haruki Murakami's new work, 1Q84, not least because all three Japanese books are published in one, 900-page volume. In order to speed the novel's release in English, Murakami's regular translators Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel split the work between them. Rubin took on the first two books while Gabriel tackled the last, although some particularly pernickety reviewers have complained about variances of tone between the sections.

Timing is important to Murakami: in his critical biography, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2002), Rubin explains how Murakami asked him to begin translating book one of what is probably the Japanese author's chef d'oeuvre, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, while it was being serialised. 'Of course, as a scholar, it would have made sense for me to have waited to see how the book turned out...' Rubin concedes.

Like 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was originally published in Japan in three parts: the first two books were released simultaneously in April 1994 with book three following almost a year later in August 1995, a time lag roughly replicated by the third part of Murakami's latest. Where the books differ is that a decision was made to edit Wind-Up Bird - that task was given to the book's translator, Rubin.

'The cuts occur primarily at the end of book two and the beginning of book three,' Rubin writes. But his work went beyond that: 'I did a lot of rearranging at the beginning of book three because I found several chronological inconsistencies which were not deliberately placed there by the author... To further complicate the textual picture, Murakami contributed many minor cuts that have since been incorporated into the Japanese paperback edition of the novel (mostly in book one).'

According to Rubin: 'There are many versions of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: the serialised version of book one; the published hardback editions of books one, two and three; my unpublished complete translation of that edition (with likely inconsistencies since I may have missed something in revising the version based on the serialised chapters); the American version; the British version from Harvill; and finally the paperback (bunkoben) version in Japanese, which incorporates some - but not all - of the cuts recommended for the American translation and possibly others decided upon afterwards.'

The decision to abridge the work in the first place was justified by Murakami's US editor, Gary Fisketjon, on publisher Knopf's website in 1997: 'My reaction was that it couldn't be published successfully at such length, which indeed would do harm to Haruki's cause in this country.' In nearly 15 years, things have moved on enough for 1Q84 to be published unexpurgated but it seems unlikely we will see a special edition of Rubin's complete version.

In his introduction to collection A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (2008) - more of which in my next post - the translator writes: 'I have occasionally suggested to Knopf that the time might be ripe for an uncut edition, but they have shown no interest in the idea.' I wonder, too, if we'll see Portrait in Jazz, which Murakami's Russian translator Ivan Sergeevich Logatchov describes as a 'masterpiece' and sounds like it might be a counterpiece to Geoff Dyer's brilliant jazz book But Beautiful (1991).

Deserted villages

On one of the hottest days Turkey had experienced in 60 years, I visited one of the country's literally deserted places. Kaya Köyü is reached via the Mediterranean resort town of Fethiye and is described in my Rough Guide book as 'the largest late-medieval ghost town in Asia Minor'.

In 1923, following three years of war, Kaya Köyü's Greek Christian residents were exiled and the village has been uninhabited ever since. The Muslims who were supposed to replace them apparently found the land far inferior to what they were used to and refused to move in.

The roofs of the village's 400 homes have long caved in, exposing the interiors to the elements. Kaya Köyü's three churches are in a similar state: the Panayia Pyrgiotissa basilica dates from 1888 and is notable for its mosaic floor, as well as a charnel house full of human bones (the departing Greeks are said to have taken the skulls with them).

While other villages have been turned into holiday homes and short-let accommodation - this is a particularly beautiful part of the coast, boasting one of the world's most stunning beaches nearby - Kaya Köyü has been left untouched. There was hardly anyone else in sight and, with the sun beating down, it made a particularly desolate scene.

In France, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane has been left as a monument ever since 10 June 1944 when the SS killed more than 640 residents and refugees either as a form of reprisal or warning. The men were separated into five groups and killed with machine-gun fire, while women and children were corralled in the church, which was set ablaze.

In 1994, Geoff Dyer visited the site for an article in Esquire, collected in Anglo-English Attitudes (1999). 'The sign at the gate admonishes SOUVIENS-TOI: REMEMBER. Beyond the gate you see the ruined walls of a few houses,' he writes. 'Propped against one of these, a large sign admonishes SILENCE... One kind of time stopped here on an afternoon in 1944 but a different, slower kind - that sculpts hills and silts rivers - has taken over.'

You can create deserted villages, too, as Anselm Kiefer did in Barjac, southern France, where, for more than 15 years, he established a studio and outdoor exhibition space for his work, a sort of city of art. Director Sophie Fiennes captured the climax of his project, before the German artist struck camp and moved to Paris. The title of her 2010 film came from the Book of Isaiah, echoing Dyer: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow.

Related: WG Sebald and why we memorialise sites

Geoff Dyer and Michael Ackerman

I'm very excited to be starting Geoff Dyer's new collection of essays, Working the Room (Canongate), not least because it solves a question that's been bugging me for a time. I tend to judge books by their covers, and have been known to buy multiple copies of the same work simply because I'm taken by the alternate jackets. I have duplicates of a couple of books by Dyer - this is a coincidence; I don't do it that often - but have always regretted not picking up a US imprint of his novel Paris Trance for its striking cover image (detail, pictured; it had a terrible jacket in its initial UK versions), nor could I remember the name of the photographer.

One of the shortest pieces in Working the Room reveals the name of the man behind this blurry, sexy shot: Michael Ackerman. It also features another similar picture (Untitled) of a naked person bent over, hand gripped in front of face, perhaps scooping up water, or giving a blow job for all you can see. It blew me away in much the way Dyer reacted when he first encountered Ackerman's work: 'The pictures were subtly erotic, incredibly intimate and, as can happen when you are exposed to certain works of art, I felt as if something in me had been waiting for them. It was like falling in love.' The series he saw was called Paris, France, 1999, which almost lent him the title for a book, presumably.

Though the author doesn't mention Ackerman in his survey of American photography, The Ongoing Moment, the photographer does feature in Dyer's last novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. In the novel's second half - Death… - the unnamed narrator finds Ackerman's book of photos of Varanasi, End Time City, in the hotel where he is staying: 'They were like pictures of the inside of the photographer's head while he was here, or later, while he was remembering it, or while he was asleep, sweat-drenched and dreaming about it.'

This is the kind of brilliant insight you'll find in Dyer's essays; his journalism always contains one line that turns perceived thinking on its head and is worth the price of admission. (In a review included in the latest book, he breaks down the title of Ian McEwan's Atonement into its constituent parts: 'at-one-ment'. I don't share Dyer's admiration for that novel's stylised nature, but I hesitate when I read his assessment: 'McEwan… seems to be retrospectively inserting his name in the pantheon of British novelists of the '30s and '40s.')

There are many reasons why I love Dyer's writing - not least because he writes so well: he's fluent, captivating, endearing (is this what they call man love?) - but I also share many of his fascinations. He namechecks many of my favourites: Jacques Henri Lartigue, Rodin, James Salter, Denis Johnson, John Cheever, WG Sebald… There's a beautiful photo by Miroslav Tichy (Untitled, again), who I hadn't heard of before but about whom I immediately want to read and find out more: I trust Dyer's judgement.

Typically modestly, he writes in the introduction: 'I see I keep coming back to Rebecca West or John Cheever or DH Lawrence when I'm writing about other people: they constitute the core of my personal canon, the writers I can't do without. The fact that Robert Frank keeps coming up as a point of comparison when I'm talking about other photographers might be a symptom of the author's inadequate frame of reference; or perhaps it shows that there is no getting away from him (I meant Frank but perhaps the same is true of the author).' Which is pretty much how I feel about Dyer, and why I keep coming back to him - here, and here, and here. Well, you get the picture.

Paris syndrome

Right, this should be the last post inspired by Paris for a time. While I was there, I got to thinking about Paris syndrome, the sickness that affects mainly Japanese visitors to the French capital. Officials at the Japanese embassy say they have to help up to 20 tourists a year when their experience of a dream destination is destroyed by elevated expectations, the language barrier, cultural clashes, crime or plain rudeness.

This is not to be confused with Stendhal syndrome, whose symptoms of fainting, rapid heartbeat and so on are much the same, but is provoked by a particular sensitivity to overwhelming beauty - perhaps much like Henry Miller, 'wandering and wandering' along the Seine, below, though most usually inspired by art. Also named Florence syndrome, the 19th century writer Henri-Marie Beyle (Stendhal) was overcome in the city: on the porch of Santa Croce he was 'seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.'

The full-on breakdown abroad is a common outcome in the work of writer Geoff Dyer, whether on the beach in Mexico (Out of Sheer Rage), in Detroit (Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It) or at a pilgrimage site in India (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi). I feel a sense of liberation somewhere no one knows me, surrounded by another language, but perhaps for some people this can prove too much.

My own relationship with Paris is different: I've been going there since childhood and, while the city hasn't changed that much, I wonder about myself reflected against it: the different, or maybe-not-so-different, mes that have visited, and stood in the same places (pictured, a bar I first visited more than half a lifetime ago). Those moments don't come in the full-time bustle of London, in the same way parents, because they are all the time with their children, don't see them growing up.

Get your texts out

Sampling, of course, has had its place in pop music for some time. In art or literature it's usually couched in the form of homage, but a few of my favourite authors seem to have taken to dropping in quotes, and more, in their books as a form of literary parlour game. Though Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance was described by Tim Pears as 'A Tender is the Night for the ecstasy age' on its cover, Dyer took instead to dropping lines from Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises) by Ernest Hemingway among his pages. 'It was amazing champagne' (p120), 'He took a big gulp of coffee...' (p218) are among the book's handful of what Dyer refers to, typically engagingly - and in his engaged manner - as 'samples'.

Arthur Phillips notes of his latest, The Song is You: 'beginning with its title (Kern-Hammersmith), this book incorporates in its text several song names'. He namechecks such estimable - and notaby UK-centric - sources as the Beloved, the Blow Monkeys, David Bowie, of course, Leonard Cohen, the Dream Warriors, EMF, Haircut 100, the Pet Shop Boys, Swing Out Sister and They Might Be Giants in his book of pop voyeurism.

And now The Escape, by Adam Thirlwell, 'contains quotations, some of them slightly adapted, from works by WH Auden, Mel Brooks, Alfred Hitchcock, Groucho Marx, Marcel Ophuls, Saïan Super Crew, Tupac Shakur' [my editing, again, of his much longer list]. Considering its form, verging on pastiche of the elderly lothario's antics in a generic mittel-Europa spa, there's also Saul Bellow, Bohumil Hrabal, Ladislav Klíma as well as Mann, Nabakov and Tanizaki.

Most appropriate of all, though, is probably the quote from Milan Kundera on The Escape's cover - and perhaps most important to the potential buyer of this very readable work. Credit, also, the book's designer, who seems to have spent some time matching the breasts of the cover's model with the description of the novel's gamine central character, Zinka: 'Her nipples were long, and almost black, with stained pools of areolae.'

Dyer straits

It reads like a quote from the cover of one of his books: Geoff Dyer is the type of writer whose work you want to press onto loved ones or, better still, lovers. My best mate apparently gauges his friends by their response to John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany (LOTS OF UPPER CASE TEXT); you don't expect people to have read Dyer but you want to pass his books on, as a reflection of you, and so much the better if people like him.

Another friend recently received a signed copy of Dyer's latest, Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi, from her new boyfriend. I urged his books onto a girlfriend; I may have hoped that they would come back to me, in a sense, if our book collections were joined, as we were, but things didn't turn out that way.

As someone who has written on photography (The Ongoing Moment), war memorials (The Missing Of The Somme) and jazz and photography (But Beautiful), it's been a while since Dyer has produced what is nominally a novel. You'll have gathered that Dyer is not someone who sticks to one genre; he skips from one the subject to the next, usually finishing a book as he grasps its topic.

In his fiction, you can replace "subject" with "place": The Colour Of Memory, The Search and Paris Trance are all steeped in their setting, as is this latest. The punning of the title continues through its first half, which features a skinny art critic called Jeff who travels to Venice to cover the Biennale. The city defies original description, so Geoff describes the art, the art world (perhaps in a little too much detail) and the sex Jeff has there. Dyer's familiar foibles are here: U-boats (Paris Trance, I think), being pissed on (Paris Trance, again, I think) and women's anuses (erm, Paris Trance?).

As well as a great critique of Tom Hanks' movies, Dyer also offers a form of raison d'etre for his own unique voice: "People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened… It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories, case histories; what happened – what actually happened and what you thought happened – would be enough."

The book's second half, also familiarly, is essentially travelogue: an unnamed first person narrator travels to Varanasi in India, which has been namechecked as a possible destination in the first part. There are other connections as well as the watery settings (both starting with V) notwithstanding; both Jeff and this narrator are described as looking like monkeys when they eat bananas.

Breakdown is another familiar motif for Dyer, whether in Detroit (Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It) or on the beach in Mexico (Out Of Sheer Rage, his excellent DH Lawrence book). As in the latter, "I's" collapse here is brought on by drugs but it's probably the most consummate of Dyer's finales; it is, as a cover blurb might have it, a triumph.