Double Jeopardy: “To Live on The Moon” written and directed by Marcel Dzama

The first time we see Federico García Lorca in To Live on the Moon (For Lorca), Marcel Dzama’s black and white film tribute to the Spanish poet and playwright, he is facing the firing squad that will end his life. The sequence lasts a short 24 seconds, and from that moment on, the film leaves history behind and enters the territory of invention. Before ending 25 minutes later, it will conflate Lorca’s death with that of the Canadian painter Tom Thomson, will introduce a range of odd characters, including a figure based on Trump, will entertain us with half a dozen song-and-dance numbers, and will stage a carnivalesque funeral procession involving 22 participants, including a spotted dog and the image of the dictator originally made by Erwin Blumenfeld in 1937 and updated by Francis Picabia in 1941. Welcome to the narrative filaments of filmdzama.

Dzama’s original plan was to make a film that was an exact copy of a screenplay Lorca had written in 1929, but he discovered that a Catalonian artist had already done that as an independent project. His initial disappointment turned to a recognition that not having his filmscript tied to Lorca’s screenplay provided more freedom. The result was the possibility of making the story “a bit of a mythology.” Dzama was right in his description, but a “bit” was a serious underestimation; his film ends up a whole of a mythology with a bit of history.

He does look carefully at the screenplay and from it picks objects, scenes, or figures and grafts them onto his altered narrative. So a pair of mourning women, three men dressed for dinner, a dead man on a bed of newspapers, a squished frog, a rain of herrings, a moustache painted on a winding sheet, printed signs calling for help and a dominant moon are all in Lorca’s screenplay and find their way into Dzama’s film, but how they are used, and what they mean, bears almost no relationship to their role in Lorca’s Trip to the Moon.

The narrative gets complicated because Dzama conflates two artists who died under radically different circumstances. In addition to Lorca, he was holding onto a second obsession: Tom Thomson, the Canadian painter and founding member of the Group of Seven. Thomson drowned in Canoe Lake in 1917 at the age of 39, and his death became the subject of speculation, a frame of inconclusive references that perfectly suited Dzama’s narrative inclinations. In his film, Thomson neither falls accidentally out of nor commits suicide in the canoe, or is pushed from his canoe by a jealous husband. He is killed by a trio of drunken louts who hit him on the head with a duck decoy and throw his body from a high wall. What follows is a funeral procession that is part Federico Fellini and part William Kentridge. A motley congregation of hybrid human/animals led by a character called the Deadhead Moth Queen dance and play music more Bourbon Street than Via Dolorosa; their version of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” is New Orleans and not New Testament.

The Moth Queen embodies Dzama’s own migratory nature of filmmaking. In 2013 his subject was Marcel Duchamp and the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, the model for Étant donnés. A Dadaist love story called Une danse des bouffons (A jester’s dance), it involved an art rescue where musician and songwriter Kim Gordon saved Duchamp, who was being tortured and forced to recite chess gambits. The film included a trickster figure who continues in the new film as the Deadhead Moth Queen. In A jester’s dance the trickster was slightly ambiguous, but in To Live on the Moon her principal role is to help Lorca take revenge on his fascist executioners.

One of the things that complicated the writing and directing of the film for Dzama was its overlap with a touring exhibition he had agreed to, called “Ghosts of Canoe Lake.” As part of a commission for Performa, the New York performance festival directed by RoseLee Goldberg, Dzama resurrected his 10-year-old idea to make the film based on Lorca’s screenplay. He added songs and dances that would provide the kind of content you would expect to find. The event was staged eight times in six days in a theatre in the Lower East Side.

Working concurrently with film, live performance and an exhibition meant there was room for slippage from one to the other. “I was so obsessed with both these artists that they were bound to play around and interact with one another,” Dzama said. Some of the play is comic, like the pipe-smoking dog that mimics Tom Thomson (who is played by Marcel himself) in My Body Belongs to Canada, But My Soul Belongs to Guadalajara; some are serious, like the celebration of women’s power in I didn’t come from your rib … you came from my vagina (or, The Origin of us all), a drawing that reversed the fifth of Lorca’s screenplay scenes in which letters repeatedly saying “help” were double exposed over a female sexual organ. Others walk a fine line between the two. Frogs appear in the screenplay three times, mostly connected to the mourning women. In the film the Moth Queen steps on a frog, picks it up and squeezes the life, and the innards, out of it. In After the Flood, Before the Fire, a drawing finished before Dzama started filming, frogs are like a plague surrounding Tom Thomson as he drowns. In a scrapbook he kept during the week he was figuring out what the Lorca film was going to be, he made an entry—“Lorca’s on the moon and Thomas is asleep in the sea”—that indicates he is already thinking across art forms.

The film includes his now signature polka-dotted costume, which he copied from Picabia’s 1924 ballet called Relãche. Picabia is Dzama’s favourite artist, but that ranking goes beyond providing an adaptable, multi-tasking figure; he also represents a spirit of fearless invention and disregard for doing what is expected. Dzama’s capacity for combining things that have no logical connection but that operate within a very particular system of reasoning is classically Picabian. The most ridiculous character in To Live on the Moon arrives at the restaurant where the dining table is placed in front of a storage rack for the studio props. A sort-of Trump, he immediately starts making demands, shows a woman in a white polka-dot leotard a rude moving card with a sword swallower, messes with her food and, when she reacts by knocking off his wig, orders her to be punished by being exposed to a hypnotic, light-bulb-powered, brainwashing machine. He has small eyes and an elongated nose, the latter an item that Dzama bought in a costume shop in Paris. The use mixes parody and politics. He was thinking of the “Poor Richard” drawings Philip Guston made in 1971, where Nixon’s chin and nose take the shape of a scrotum and a penis. Dzama’s dick nose figure comes from the same tradition of political satire.

The artist’s sense of detail is remarkable. When Tom Thomson is thrown over the wall, his lifeless body lands on a cushion of newspapers. It is an edition of the Winnipeg Tribune from 1969 and the headlines, stories and pictures on its front page constitute a fabulous fiction. There is a picture of Lorca; a headline reads, “Marcel Duchamp is dead at 81: Enigmatic giant of modern art”; a lower column shows a picture of Picabia’s The Adoration of the Calf; the middle of the page includes a photograph of four men who dug up Tom Thomson’s grave at Canoe Lake to prove he was buried there; there is a story about a visiting French artist under the title “Painter Hits Art Theory”; and, finally, the left-hand column runs an ad for Esso that says, “Trip to the Moon.” Not a word of this copy actually appeared in the Winnipeg Tribune, but in the scrupulously organized world of Marcel Dzama, Winnipeg and its fourth estate is as aware of art as it could possibly be.

A logic does govern the film and the way its characters act. Consider the Moth Queen’s actions in transforming Lorca into the moon. Dzama’s limited budget meant he had to curtail special effects, so the Moth Queen draws a circle on the ground, and shifts the circle into the globe and the globe into the moon. To keep the newborn baby healthy, she produces an amniotic substitute by projectile vomiting some liquid into the glass bowl, a solution that Dzama regards as more practical than metaphoric. The clincher to his logic comes from entomology: “The fact that she’s an insect means that she would have some regurgitation thing to feed babies.” Regurgito ergo sum.

There is an accident in the film when a praying mantis appears. But for the most part, the details are a result of will, not whimsy. When the three men murder Tom, they also deface his bear portrait. Their film action drifts into the exhibition when vandals attacked Tom Thomson’s Northern River in the National Gallery in Ottawa in 2023; Dzama’s response is to mix the real event with the filmy one in two paintings—Unfamiliar drops of paint dripping on closed eyes, where Thomson’s landscape is defaced, and Tom’s bear and tree blues, where the sky above the unhappy bear is a lurid, messed-up magenta.

The second and final time we see Lorca is a reprisal of his execution. We see the poet’s brave resignation and the ragtag fascist firing squad; they go about their business, adding an extra pistol shot to the first enactment, but this time another figure also witnesses the event. The Moth Queen steps out of Thomson’s funeral procession, adjusts a light box and refocuses the scene. Her filmic meta-moment both repeats history and remakes it. Her first act is to deal with the three members of the firing squad, whom she lures by holding a naked rubber bust of a woman up to her own body. When they come close, she touches them and they disappear, each in a puff of smoke. The Moth Queen then pulls a baby (complete with umbilical cord) out of Lorca’s dead body and becomes a magical midwife to Lorca’s spirit.

The film ends where it began, with the moon reciting lines of poetry written by Dzama channelling Lorca’s style. “Good night to the children of glory, good night to our dancing song,” the moon says and then continues her rhapsody (significantly, the lines are spoken by Laura Lorca, the poet’s niece and the director of the Lorca Foundation). “Good night to the flowering skeleton, farewell, to the mother of paradise, farewell to the soldiers of stone. Goodbye from the moon of gold.”

This goodbye echoes her greeting at the beginning of the film, where she tells the “Children of Stardust” why she was chosen to become the moon: “Now I light your way in the violent shadows and lightless light.” The moon has become the poet in an imaginative reincarnation, where Lorca is not living on the moon but as the moon. The film’s message is a simple and innocent one: it tells us that art, and the spirit it annunciates, is unkillable and everlasting.

All the quotes from Marcel Dzama were recorded in a telephone interview with Border Crossings on November 27, 2024. ❚