Share
Clip description
Maeve (Maeve Dermody) balances on the seesaw at Tom Tiddler’s Ground. Humpty Dumpty’s moment of balance and the egg riddle are invoked, as Beatrice (Anne Louise Lambert) and the Narrator (Gillian Jones) talk about Beatrice’s newly discovered understanding of purgatory. The final moments of Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1953) play out.
Curator’s notes
After leaving the underworld, Beatrice, Maeve and Herman climb a hill to Tom Tiddler’s Ground – Breathing Under Water’s version of Dante’s purgatory – where, to the accompaniment of Elizabeth Drake’s exceptionally beautiful music score, they lay out a picnic and meet up with a group of children. Just prior to the clip Maeve and the children have played a game of Tom Tiddler’s Ground, snatching coins off the grass. Maeve runs to a seesaw and balances at its centre. At the time of filming, Murphy Dermody talked about Tom Tiddler’s Ground as ‘neither up nor down … the notion of being in a fulcrum position … not being in heaven or hell, but in a wonderful poise between the two’ – in a secular sense, life itself lived fully. Charles Dickens, who despised the squandering of human life, named his Christmas Story of 1861 Tom Tiddler’s Ground, and in it expounded the virtues of the positive acceptance of life given, and of commitment to the here and now. In the clip the images of Humpty Dumpty and the egg are also used, symbolising the essential precariousness and fragility of human existence.
Herman, who all along has been more of a Hermes-like companion to Maeve than a Virgil-like guide, throws Maeve into the air. The image is used to illustrate the point of existential equilibrium, but as is the case throughout most of the film, Herman’s role is obscure and Kristoffer Greaves is largely underused. Tom Tiddler’s Ground is the last part of the journey for Herman. Like Dante’s Virgil, he doesn’t accompany Beatrice and Maeve in the final stage of their odyssey.
In the last segment of the clip, the final scene of Roberto Rossellini’s 1953 Viaggio in Italia plays as the Narrator talks about love and arrival, and the need for Beatrice and Maeve to finish their journey and re-enter the world above. In Viaggio in Italia Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) and Alexander (George Sanders), on the brink of divorce, lose each other amongst a religious procession. In his Divine Comedy Dante, at the entrance to heaven, sees Beatrice, his first love, in a procession. Dante and Beatrice (re)unite and Beatrice becomes Dante’s guide in heaven. Katherine and Alexander reunite in the Neapolitan crowd and emotionally reconcile. But for the latter two, we have no idea of how permanent the union will be. What’s important for these 20th century earth-bound creatures is their realisation of the preciousness and brevity of life, and the regeneration of their love (even if momentary) from a decayed relationship. Breathing Under Water’s use of Viaggio in Italia’s particular depiction of love, as symbolising arrival and entrance, has a secondary function. The film, adored by the French New Wave critics, represented a secession from classical cinema (a category into which Rossellini’s earlier neorealist works had fallen). Jacques Rivette, in his famous 1955 Cahiers du Cinéma article, described Viaggio in Italia as ‘opening a breach, and that all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through it’. Many critics since have named it the first modern film. In this way the final segment of the clip brings Beatrice and Maeve to the last stage of their journey and the film back to the core of its concerns – the problem, specific to secular modernity, of finding a space where scientific knowledge and base human emotion (in particular fear) can coexist, each on its own terms.
