'Could there be any joy more gratifying than that of stretching one's existence, of inhabiting the earth and the heavens at once, of doubling, as it were, one's being?" This question was asked by the 27-year-old Count Xavier de Maistre in 1790, while serving 42 days of house arrest for duelling.
Stuck in his Turin home with only a lugubrious manservant and his dog Rosine for company, De Maistre slipped the bonds of imprisonment by writing a travelogue that is also a defence of inner freedom: A Journey Around My Room. Stylish and ironic, it takes us on a tour of his home, mostly transported by an armchair that inches across the carpet as the narrator rocks it from side to side. We lurch from the mantelpiece to a row of framed prints, from a pink and white bed to a bookshelf.
Underlying its humour is a serious idea of human duality. We have a physical being: our "beast", which can be imprisoned. Our other half, the "soul", cannot. Through daydream and reverie it goes where it likes. If shut in a room, it escapes into an almost infinite space.
Over the last week I found myself thinking of De Maistre in relation to two recent cases. Both are of artists trying to outwit their governments; both do it with Xavieresque wit and grace.
One is Ai Weiwei, who responded to surveillance of his Beijing home and studio by announcing he would himself install four webcams, to transmit his every move while he works, sleeps and lives. His supporters could see that he was OK, while for the government it was a "gift". If they watched his webcams, though, they would be doing it alongside his fans and at his own generous invitation. By opening the scene of his confinement to the world, he was making it an artwork and a means of flight. His "beast" is pinned down, but his soul runs off laughing. It is a measure of how subversive the project was that he was ordered to switch the cameras off.
The same day I read about this, I saw the Iranian director Jafar Panahi's gripping and funny "non-film", This is Not a Film. Panahi lives under house arrest in Tehran, and is banned for 20 years from writing scripts, directing films, giving interviews or travelling. He has therefore made this film that is not a film with the help of Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, a brave colleague with a digicam. We see Panahi drinking tea, talking on the phone, feeding his pet iguana, and acting out scenes from the film he would have made, laying strips of tape on his living room floor to show location layouts.
This is Not a Film plays games with inner and outer worlds, with creativity, and with scale. Even the means of its own escape is a miracle of downsizing: it was smuggled to the Cannes festival on a USB stick inside a cake. Watching it on a London screen, it is mind-boggling to think of its tiny journey, stuffed into the stick like a genie in its lamp. Is this where freedom now lies – in shrinking the human soul into almost invisibly small spaces, so it can flower into a vast wider world?
Like De Maistre's and Ai Weiwei's, Panahi's soul eludes his captors – but his beast justly complains. Reciting the script on his imaginary film set, he yields to momentary despair. A description of a film is not a film, he cries. You need real locations and real actors, who behave unpredictably. He jumps to his DVD player to show old clips: see this actor's face? See the accidents of light in this scene? That can only happen when you really make a film.
The spirit does slip from the oppressor's grasp – but this does not mean that this grasp should ever be tolerated. Our beast and soul are one, and both need their freedom.
