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HELLO MY NAME IS ANNA KAVAN is a 15 minute 3-D animated film. It is based on the writings of british novelist Anna Kavan. Kavan herself becomes a character in the piece as she tells a story about her integration into B.F. Skinner's nightmare Utopia, Walden Two. As she narrates a tale of isolation and imprisonment (recurring themes in Kavan's fiction), memories from her life before her entrance into the community begin to surface, including a memory of a sadistic chauffeur which refers to another recurring theme in Kavan's fiction; cars and speed.
This piece in in production.
HELLO MY NAME IS ANNA KAVAN
(Setting: an Operant Conditioning Chamber. There is a red heat lamp warming it)
I was never a child, but if I had been one, I would say that it is a shame that we ever have to be young, and it is a shame that we have to grow old. We should be born as statues and die as statues, looking wonderful, always. When we die, we would still stand, posed. Eons later, the earth would be a giant sculpture park, a cemetery and a living crowd at the same time.
The problem with human beings is velocity. We cannot help crashing into each other. If we were thinking trees, well then...
The thinking trees.
Incredibly stupid animals live in the thinking trees.
These stupid animals; they are born and die and fight and fall in love.
It has become impossible for these thinking trees to think their sublime thoughts with these stupid chattering animals jumping all over them.
'If they would only go away,' think the thinking trees. 'If they would just go away.'
It's freezing in here.
(During this story the red heat lamp has been dimming. She begins to shiver. She presses the lever. She shakes her long platinum blonde hair in the warm breeze)
Ahhh.
(The heat lamp clicks off)
Pity. That was very pleasant.
I showed up in the town.
I was hungry, and I had been walking all day.
The snow was falling.
The town, as I first perceived it, was composed of a series of communal buildings, all attached by covered walkways.
Three women came towards me. They were wearing heavy grey coats.
One of them had her head tilted sideways, a wary smile on her face. A wisp of blonde hair escaped from her hood and she brushed it aside with a clumsy gloved hand.
She welcomed me in to the town's central pavilion. It was warm, and silent, and a large group of people of all ages sat and ate. I sat and ate. Nobody talked to me. Nobody seemed to notice me. But I have always had this effect on people, or lack of, as the case may be.
Musicians were performing in an adjoining room, and this seemed to make conversation unnecessary.
I asked someone about the thinking trees. Were they near? I was trying to find them.
Nobody seemed to know what I was talking about.
When dinner was over, people took their trays and washed them, dried them and stacked them back in the same place where they came from. By the time everybody left the dining hall, it was as clean as it was when we entered it.
I was shown to a small and comfortable room. I was given a towel. I was told where the showers and toilet were. I was neither wished good night, nor were my expressions of thanks acknowledged. I fell in to bed and slept. The snow was so icy and the wind so strong that it sounded like pebbles against my window.
The next day I was taken to a room where alarm clocks were being assembled. I was shown to a workstation and told how to put together the housing of the clock. It was simple work, not at all unpleasant, and after four hours, when I thought it was time for a lunch break, I was told that I was done for the day.
Days passed. Gradually, I began simple conversations with the people of the town. These conversations were always brief, always terminated by the other person, and I was made to feel that the termination of the conversation was a result of my misdirection. I felt as if I was being subtly trained to keep to a certain course, using my need for human companionship as reinforcement.
As I learned to engage in conversation with the townspeople, my own absurdities began to crowd my mind, particularly my need to visit the thinking trees. I thought with shame of that first dinner; my questions, my need to please and be liked, my need to demonstrate my appreciation in effusive ways.
Brrrrr. It gets so cold in here.
(During this story the red heat lamp has been dimming. She begins to shiver. She presses the lever. She shakes her platinum hair in the warm breeze)
Ahhh.
(The heat lamp clicks off)
We do not need each other. We do not need our memories and we do not need to know anything about our futures. We need velocity. We need to travel at great speeds in giant cars: big, black, shiny cars.
My driver's eyes have that distance in them that only comes from looking at the surface of the earth as it is continually sucked under the wheels of a car. His hands, gloved, have the assurance of all living things that do not move. His hands have a silent intelligence. His hands are thinking.
My driver has perfect teeth and a leather cap. My driver has a dimple in his chin. My driver has the impassive expression of the front of a car.
Strapped down beside him, I am at his mercy.
He turns to me sometimes and looks at me, for too long, too long to look away from the road at this great velocity. I squirm in my seat, and he smiles at me with his perfect teeth and his pale pink lips. My eyes become all pupil, my skin becomes white and bloodless as we fly towards the back of another car. He holds a second more, smiling at me. I cannot speak, I am so afraid. I cannot admonish my driver. That would be impossible; he is the driver. Just as a crash is imminent, he slows down, looks back at the road, and drives on, carefully, regulated, smooth.
The soothing noises of the great car calm my nerves. The blinker, the acceleration…
Brrrrr. So cold. So very very cold.
(During this story the red heat lamp has been dimming. She begins to shiver. She presses the lever. She shakes her platinum blonde hair in the warm breeze)
Ahhh.
(The heat lamp clicks off)
The town.
My work continued to be enjoyable.
I received tokens for my work. Since my meals and room were provided for me, I was able to use the tokens to purchase some new clothing. My own clothing seemed eccentric in comparison to the attractive and practical clothing worn by the people of the town. I put on my new clothing and, as I walked across the town on my way to dinner, I realized that I now looked like the other members of the town. I also realized that I was receiving more smiles and nods from strangers as I passed by, and the invisibility that had been causing me a great deal of torment was diminishing.
It was as if the people of the town were a giant lens, through which I was gradually coming in to focus.
The people of the town never asked about my past or my hopes for the future. I found that I too was losing contact with my past and future, simply by not speaking about them. And my days were so busy, with my work, and my chores, and my new friendships and social activities, that my waking hours were no longer spent analyzing my past and agonizing over my future.
The people of the town would not talk about each other and they would not talk about themselves. The people of the town would only talk about the town, how to make the town better, how to educate the children more effectively, how to bring more money into the town by manufacturing things other then alarm clocks.
And I got interested solely in these things as well. And my days drifted in to one another. I fell asleep the minute I lay down in bed. I woke up with the sun. My days were so regulated that I no longer wore my wristwatch and never glanced at the few clocks that were hung in the communal rooms of the town.
I was learning how to please the town. And I was welcome there. There was no discussion of my leaving or of my having run out the course of my welcome. My anxieties in these areas were greeted with blank looks of incomprehension.
Meanwhile, the snow piled up outside the windows. Higher and higher it piled. The snow muffled all outside noises. It seemed to muffle even my curiosity of the world outside the town. In here we were warm and dry and fed. What was out there? Perhaps nothing was out there anymore.
I imagined the thinking trees, frozen inside an icy crust, the patterns of their thoughts becoming slower and more abstract until they stopped altogether.
Brrrr.
(During this story the red heat lamp has been dimming. She begins to shiver. She presses the lever. She shakes her platinum blonde hair in the warm breeze)
Ahhh.
(The heat lamp clicks off)
Hmmm. Pity.
I had been looking at the crumbling ruins of the old castle for many weeks. It was perched on the top of a steep hill. An overgrown path led up to it.
Every day I would wake up with the intention of walking up to the ruins and having a look around, but every day, somehow, I avoided it.
The castle was one of the attractions of the area where I was spending my holiday, but visiting it became a responsibility, a chore, something I began to dread.
'You haven't seen the castle?' The other guests at the small inn that I was staying at would ask me, astonished. I felt that they were forming a negative opinion about me due a perceived lack of curiosity and laziness on my part. So to save face, I began to lie. I told them that I had been to the castle. I told them that it was really quite something. I described the sun on the old stones, the dark coolness of the interior, the battlements. I based my observations on my experiences of other similar attractions.
Finally, breakfast at the small hotel became intolerable. All that was spoken of was the castle and my lies created more and more anxiety for me each morning. So I headed up the hill to the castle. Just as I expected, it was a hot and uncomfortable walk. The drone of insects and the lack of breeze made me want to turn back many times.
And of course it was a complete bore, just another ruined hulk of defensive stones.
A young man cleared his throat to get my attention. He was wearing a worn out black suit. 'Would you like a tour of the castle?' He asked. 'No, Not really.' I replied. 'I'd much rather be at the beach, and I only came up here because the other guests at the hotel would not stop talking about the attractions up here. You must give an excellent tour. They talk about nothing but this castle.'
The young man looked a bit confused. 'I haven't seen anyone up here in two weeks.' He said. 'And I'm the only guide up here. I've been waiting here for two weeks, hoping that a group of tourists would come up.'
I was completely perplexed. So the other guests at my hotel had not been to the castle either? Was I the only person to come up here? I allowed the tour guide to show me about the grounds and explain the dull history of the great family that occupied the castle, until it was used for ammunitions storage during the war and was accidentally exploded from within. I tipped him generously and I returned to the hotel.
The other guests were having tea. They all stopped chatting the minute I entered, and I self-consciously helped myself to some tea and sat down. 'Been for a walk?' Someone asked. 'Yes, I answered, I've been up to the castle.' 'My, you are an enthusiast.' Someone else said. Looks were exchanged and tiny smiles were repressed. I placed my teacup down on an end table. I got up, left the room, went upstairs, packed my bags and called a taxi. As I left for the train station I thought I could hear laughter from the tea- room, I thought I heard my name. I'll never go back there again.
Brrrr.
(During this story the red heat lamp has been dimming. She begins to shiver. She presses the lever. She shakes her hair in the warm breeze)
Ahhh.
(The heat lamp clicks off)
I had become accustomed to walking the covered walkways every afternoon for a bit of exercise. Since the snow had made leaving the confines of the town impossible, this helped combat my physical restlessness.
I walked towards a door that I expected to be at the end of one of the seemingly endless series of communal rooms, that led to another walk way, that led to yet another communal room. The door was not there. Just wall. I asked a woman who was sitting in the dim light entering through the snow-clogged window what happened to the door. 'What door?' She answered. 'There has never been a door here.' 'But I always walk this way,' I stated. 'There has always been a door here.' 'Perhaps you are in the wrong room.' She said. 'There are so many of these rooms, and so many of them look the same.' I tried to accept her version of my predicament. But if she was correct, then I was going a bit mad.
'Perhaps it's time for me to leave the town,' I thought. 'Perhaps it's too confining.' But I was stuck, due to the relentless snow, at least until the spring. But shouldn't spring be here already? How many months have I been here? Surely it's time for winter to be over, for the snow to stop.
I contented myself with walking in another direction. I absorbed myself yet again in the life of the town and I thought no more about it.
Then again, it happened. I took one of my usual walks and came upon a wall where there should have been a door. I knew that this time I was correct. I tried to make a mental map of the town. I couldn't do it. The isolation of the town and the winding zigzags of its architecture made me incapable of applying normal spatial logic to it.
I began to enquire more and more to the people of the town about its layout, and about the possibility that the town was undergoing some structural changes. But the more I enquired, the more the people of the town seemed to shun me. My former isolation, loneliness and invisibility loomed largely over me. I had come to rely so heavily on the companionship of the people of the town that I couldn't bear for it to be taken away.
So I became quiet. I worked and slept and ate and chatted. I took my walks. But more and more often I was finding walls where doors were supposed to be. The town, it seemed, was getting smaller and smaller. But nobody seemed to notice.
Then one morning I woke up. The door to my room was gone.
Brrrr.
(During this story the red heat lamp has been dimming. She begins to shiver. She presses the lever. She shakes her hair in the warm breeze)
Ahhh.
(The heat lamp clicks off)
