Mango Grove

favorite films

2011-03-06T00:45:00.000-07:00

Notes.
Bumped to the top of my blog for easy access.
20 films. Chronological. 1 film per director. I have given my top 5 special pictures. I do plan to expand this list (though when, I do not know).

LIST.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

City Girl (1930)

Under the Roofs of Paris (1930)

Love Me Tonight (1932)

Spring Shower (1932)

Little Man, What Now? (1934)

The Scarlet Empress (1934)

Four Seasons of Children (1939)

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Major Barbara (1941)

Sullivan's Travels (1942)

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

A Bloody Spear on Mount Fuji (1955)

The Seine Meets Paris (1957)

Glass (1958)

F for Fake (1974)

Manhattan (1979)

Cafe Lumiere (2003)

A Gentle Breeze in the Village (2007)

finding meaning in the mundane

2010-12-30T14:41:00.003-07:00

The older I get, the more meaning I find in the mundane aspects of my life.

When I was young, I used to think I was important. I justified my importance with my beliefs and my dreams. I was going to be an incredible scientist who was going to make the next profound leap in human understanding because scientific understanding is the only understanding of the world we humans know, and the more we know the better off we are. Then I was going to be a brilliant artist whose art shook the souls of everyone it reached because we humans need an emotional grasp of our existence and a reason to live, and art is the light which brightens the darkest corners of our hearts.

But now, as I struggle to make this transition into adulthood, I realize how unimportant I am. My existence is small, my actions inconsequential. I no longer have dreams or beliefs. I care little about where life leads me as long as it leads me forward. I expect to be alone for most of it.

More and more, the meaning of my life is defined by the details of day-to-day living: eating well and sleeping soundly; keeping clean and staying warm; remaining emotionally tranquil and intellectually active. This is the sum of my life. To grow up, I must recognize how small this sum is.

Everywhere I turn, I see people who justify the importance of their existence with Philosophy and Science, Love and Art, Religion and Politics, Wealth and Power, Truth and Beauty. A soul is often unable to recognize the smallness of its existence. This is sometimes a painful and depressing thing to witness.

But there is pleasure in the mundane, and I am off to seek it.

old habits

2010-12-03T18:33:00.005-07:00

I have spent the past month pretending to write a nanowrimo, but have in reality done nothing of the sort. I have instead fallen back into old habits, most of them bad (like watching movies), and spend the rest of my time in despair over how hopeless my future surely is. As blogging is an old, bad habit, I shall blog again. But before I get to it, I will divert you with a sketch, a piece of creative writing, which I had promised to share in my last post but on which I never delivered: Philosophers in the Square.

returning

2010-11-09T08:07:00.003-07:00

Just as I have fallen in love with Japan, I am to leave it. I am returning home, but what lies in my future is still unclear. While I would like to update this blog more often, I have decided this month to tackle nanowrimo, so my writing time will be devoted to that idiotic task. (I have a grand total of 500 words 1 week in, so I may accomplish more by abandoning this project than continuing it. But I will stubbornly persist.) I may, if the readers so desire it, begin posting older creative writing projects, projects previously unknown to the world. But internet posterity is a dangerous thing, and I must consider carefully what I am about before I grant it to these works.

Goodbye Japan. Keep being awesome until I have the chance to come back.

Annie

2010-10-26T10:32:00.003-06:00

I last saw Annie when I was in high school. I do not remember when, exactly, but she would have been 7 or 8. Annie is my cousin Marti’s daughter, and, coincidentally, we share the same birthday (and Marti’s is the day after, if I remember correctly; these family coincidences made a vaguely strong impression on me when I was young, and although I rarely saw Marti and her kids, I was aware of them for this reason).

Little Annie had spunk. She was small, energetic, a little shy but very affectionate. I did not have much patience for kids when I was in high school, but after a couple of days of hanging out with Annie I had come to the conclusion that she was alright.

I do not remember how long she stayed, though it can’t have been more than a week. I do not remember much about her visit, why she and her mother were there, or what we did together in that time. But I do remember her energy, her unruly red hair, and my conclusion that this kid was alright.

It was the rare visit from Marti which reminded me of Annie’s existence, but I had otherwise not heard or seen anything of her since then.

About a week after I landed in Japan, I received this email:

Hey Ian! It's Annie :) I just wanted to say that I was told you were in Japan and you know.. I totally love Japan hehehe.

How have you been?

We're good here lol. I'll have to send some pics to you 'cause we all look really different.

How's Japan so far?

Well I'll talk to you later!!

~Annie

The voice is naïve and affectionate, the same as the girl I can barely remember from so many years before. I was amused by the email, and responded with a question I knew the answer to: And what is it about Japan which interests you? Comics, she says. Manga and anime.

Of course. She would be the type. I do not know much about manga, but at about the time I decided to try for Japan, I picked up a minor interest in anime (having hated what little I had been exposed to before then). I have learned a lot about anime and anime/manga culture in these past few months and am beginning to understand its place in a broader Japanese social context. And, having watched my share of anime, I understand the creative influence it exercises on a young soul.

She, I thought, would surely enjoy Japan, more so than me. In those first few weeks, I was overwhelmed by so much that was new; had I been a Japan nerd, or had I been with a friend, I imagine all the stimulation would have been exciting rather than exhausting, and I would have been happy rather than bewildered. I wondered what Annie would feel in my place. I asked her: What should I do while in Tokyo? Shopping! she said. Oh! and see the Hachiko statue.

For those who do not know the Hachiko story:

In 1924, Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor in the agriculture department at the University of Tokyo took in Hachikō as a pet. During his owner's life Hachikō greeted him at the end of the day at the nearby Shibuya Station. The pair continued their daily routine until May 1925, when Professor Ueno did not return. The professor had suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage and died, never returning to the train station where his friend was waiting. Every day for the next nine years Hachikō waited at Shibuya station.

This sentimental story is popular in Japan, especially among children. A statue of Hachiko sits just outside of Shibuya Station, forever waiting for its master.

I visited Hachiko. I did not think back to Hachiko’s story, however, but to Annie. How characteristic of this naïve, affectionate girl! She is a Hachiko herself, and she will undoubtedly stand where I am standing at some point in her life.

On October 18, 2010, Annie was shot and killed by her (ex) boyfriend Gabriel Dye, who then turned the gun on himself. She was shot in the back of her head--she had been trying to run away. She was 16. You can read an article about it here.

My mother sent me an email telling me what had happened. She added an extra “I love you,” imagining, I’m sure, her oldest son meeting the same fate on the other side of the world. After hearing about Annie’s death, stunned and emotional, I sent Annie a final email. No one shall ever read what I wrote.

Today is her funeral. You can read her obituary here.

Goodbye, Annie. I was glad to have your company here in Japan.

why I write so poorly

2010-10-14T10:10:00.006-06:00

Having set myself about the project of publishing to my blog everything I write, I find that contrary to what I had intended I am less eager to write than ever. Most of my thoughts just aren't meant for any head but mine, and it would be an alarming mistake to give those thoughts to the world. I am a man of caution. This bold and reckless project is against my temperament (though whether good or bad for it I have yet to tell).

You are free to dismiss this excuse and replace it with your own, more plausible explanations for my sluggish pace.

But as it stands, I am unable to pick a suitable topic to write on. To resolve this issue, I have decided to make why I am unable to pick a topic the topic of this post. What follows is a rough portrait of your author. Read on and judge fairly.

*For writers struggling to find a topic, one typically advises them to “write what they know.” I believe it is more accurate to say: “Begin from what you know, and proceed to what you don’t.” This has been true for me, at least, especially when writing about film. Writing is a process of discovery and affirmation. I find that my thoughts on a topic are only sorted out having written, and even then there is a lot I do not understand. From this observation, I conclude: I write to understand.

I wrote about film to better understand film. I wrote about philosophy, literature, and politics to better understand those, as well. I write at the present moment to understand why I am unable to write. &c. Therefore--

I write about nothing because I understand everything.

And that is all there is to say on that point.

*I write as a reader. And I read as a writer. In other words, I do neither for the pleasure of the thing.

Before I continue with this point, I should make it clear what sort of reader I am, as many readers do not consider me a reader at all. What I do read: philosophy, drama, poetry, history, criticism, scholarship, travel &c. In fact, it is more precise to say: of the world of literature, I seem to have the patience for every sort of literature written but fiction. (I should add that this category includes: comics, religious works, most journalism, and other dregs of the literary world.) The majority of readers happen to read fiction, and furthermore they do it for the pleasure of the thing. The divide between me and readers, it seems, is unbridgeable. It perplexes me that so many people would waste their time reading fiction and, even more perplexing, writing it. And it justly perplexes these readers that I could call myself a reader and hardly touch a bit of fiction.

But, so that I might make my next point, please consider me a reader.

As a reader, I write under the influence of what I have most recently read. Montaigne one day, Musset the next--emulation is necessary for creation. But emulation (and imitation) will only bring you so far. I am at present reading Laurence Sterne and Cicero; I challenge you to trace even a single phrase back to the ancient statesman (those seeking a chain between me and Sterne will have an easier time of it, but do not let this fact diminish my final point). And now, finally, my point: I have reached a stage in my writing in which I have shed most of my influences but have yet to discover a voice which is fully my own.

*My third point is the most bleak, and likely the most honest point on why I am unable to find topics to write about. I shall approach it directly--

At this moment in my life, I have no direction or ambition. I have a vague notion that I want to live, but I as yet do not know how to go about doing so. Writing, like living, requires ambition, an end towards which you can pitch your soul; and even though you are likely to end up a good distance from where you had aimed, you have at least thrown yourself somewhere.

I write poorly because I live poorly. I do not know what I am doing in this world, how I got here, or where I will be going. My writing is as confused and indefinite as my existence. But I struggle on all the same.

I would like to continue with this portrait, but I have delayed this post long enough. I shall remember to write my writing history someday, when I think my history is worth writing.

But, for now, I need to find a new topic to write on.

an earthquake

2010-09-29T02:09:00.002-06:00

It was a little past dawn. I had been sleeping poorly and was disturbed by thoughts I would rather not share with my sensitive readers. I had been fighting to drift back into sleep, but gave up the attack and decided that I should be using this unexpected morning to accomplish unexpected things. As I lay on the floor, wrapped comfortably in my blanket, to decide which of my unexpected goals I would set about accomplishing first, the floor started to shift one way then the other, and my whole body rocked with it. The sensation was mild, but it carried a deep and quiet power. It lasted a few seconds, no longer.

Though I had suspected the importance of these few seconds, I was too wrapped in blankets and unexpected thoughts to confirm my suspicions. It was only many hours (and many unexpected accomplishments) later that I typed "earthquakes" into google and discovered that I had indeed survived the first earthquake of my life.

I am happy that fate decided I ought to be conscious for this moment. I had been psychologically preparing myself for this moment for many years, you see, and it would have been most unfortunate if I had decided to sleep through it. It is certainly possible that I might have slept on through the event and afterward live out my life unaware of my first earthquake, but fate would not allow it. I do not know by what system fate operates, but I would imagine that in exchange for this important moment I have sacrificed consciousness of many other important moments in my life. It is a startling and curious endeavor to invent all those historic personal events that I have slept or shall be sleeping through.

But I will save what life I have slept through for another post.

Now, as I have burdened myself with the task of publishing everything I write, I ought to continue on with earthquakes. It would be a pleasure to tell you everything worth knowing about earthquakes; I do not, however, know anything about them, and that is perhaps everything worth knowing.

As a general rule, the less a man knows about a subject, the more unreasonable he becomes when discussing it. I hold myself to be an exception to this rule, and have to say that I only become unreasonable about a subject once I have learned it through, front to back and back to front. But when the topic is something as mysterious to me as love, music, or earthquakes, I am the most reasonable fellow alive. It is not so much a challenge to be reasonable about earthquakes, however, as to be reasonable through them. And this is why I spent time preparing myself for my first earthquake.

I was determined not to panic. As you have read above, I remained as calm as possible, calmer indeed than you should expect from people even when the earth is quite still. Yes, you say to me, but you hardly had anything to panic about. True. But had buildings crumbled, had firestorms raged, had people exploded in the streets, I would have kept the same composure, I assure you. (I shall wander into a digression at this point, since the reader can do nothing about it--

Although I am quite relieved that my first earthquake was not the disaster scenario to truly try my composure, I have to admit my disappointment with the literary possibilities of the experience I did have. Had there indeed been firestorms and corpses, this post would be filled with terror and excitement and pathos. Imagine it! My dry style would excellently capture the violent and thrilling details. It would be a chronicle for history, an awe-inspiring account of the 2nd Great Kanto Earthquake. It would win admiration, adulation, awards. It would be treasured. The world would rush to read it. The number of visitors to my blog would double from 2 to 4. Glory I should have!

But my first earthquake was a modest one, and it deserves this modest post.

And this is probably as it should be. There is unreasonable disaster literature enough, and I am not the one to contribute to it.

While on the subject of literature, I will take this opportunity to excerpt a passage from Roughing It about that author’s first earthquake. His first earthquake makes for more interesting literature than mine, and I am happy to assume that you readers would rather read Mark Twain than me:

The “curiosities” of the earthquake were simply endless. Gentlemen and ladies who were sick, or were taking siesta, or had dissipated till a late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public streets in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all. One woman who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it by the ankles as if it were a dressed turkey. Prominent citizens who were supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in their shirt-sleeves, with billiard-cues in their hands. Dozens of men with necks swathed in napkins rushed from barber shops, lathered to the eyes or with one cheek clean-shaved and the other still bearing a hairy stubble. Horses broke from their stable, and a frightened dog rushed up a short attic ladder and out onto a roof, and when his scare over had not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up. A prominent editor flew down-stairs, in the principal hotel, with nothing on but one brief undergarment-–met a chambermaid, and exclaimed:
“Oh, what shall I do! Where shall I go!”
She responded with naive serenity:
“If you have no choice, you might try a clothing store!”

A certain foreign consul’s lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion, and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands’ purses and arrayed themselves similarly. One man, who had suffered considerably and growled accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the next instant the consul’s wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no other apology for clothing than--a bath towel! The sufferer rose superior to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:
“Now that is something like! Get out your towel, my dear!”

The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day would have covered several acres of ground. For some days afterward, groups of eying and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long zigzag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. Four feet of the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned around in such a way as to completely stop the draught. A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of one street and then shut together again with such force as to ridge up the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady, sitting in her rocking and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose and went out of there. One lady who was coming down-stairs was astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight at the same time--the woman insensible from the fright. Her child, born some little time afterward, was club-footed. However--on second thought--if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at his own risk.

The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said:
“However, we will omit the benediction!”--and the next instant there was a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.

After the first shock, an Oakland minister said:
“Keep your seats! There is no better place to die than this”--
and added after the third:
“But outside is good enough!” He then skipped out the back door.

My own first earthquake does not have one hundredth of the literary possibilities. So much for that digression.)

I have nothing more to write concerning my first earthquake, but I would be pleased to answer whatever questions you may have about my experience. I may not be an expert on earthquakes, but I am more of an expert now than I was a week ago. I have even written a blog post on the subject (and you have just read it)--an expert indeed.

a writing note for fall

2010-09-22T02:01:00.004-06:00

September is slipping by and I still seem to be ignoring my blog. Woe for this poor, obscure corner of cyberspace! Can I so cruelly ignore it for any longer?

The desire to write grips me, so write I shall. But note a symptom which afflicts me: I long to write when I have nothing to say, then having set about writing nothing, I discover I no longer desire to write.

I have tried to compensate for this in the past by finding something to write about, or else by writing my nothing through to the end whether I desire to or not. This state of my creativity does not please me, so I shall set about fixing it by writing about everything, or else not writing at all. If I cannot write about everything, I shall at least publish everything I write. If I do not write, I shall publish that as well.

I do not know what this unfortunate decision means for my poor, obscure corner of cyberspace, but I will find out soon.

leaving

2010-08-18T22:39:00.004-06:00

I leave for Japan tomorrow. I have three months to find a job. The inquisitive reader will ask why I have chosen to search for work abroad rather than at home; to answer that, I shall echo Montaigne:

When people ask why I go on my travels I usually reply that I know what I am escaping from but not what I am looking for.

To those of you wondering if I will blog my experience: I do not know.

July 10 favorites update for Aug

2010-08-01T21:16:00.003-06:00

Upon making this post of the films I watched last month, I discovered I saw only 5 movies and felt no desire to list any of them. I apologize to those who come to my blog for those outstanding recommendations and beautiful screencaps.

But the worse news is that these monthly film posts will be no more. As my situation will radically change this month, this blog will change as well. I have not decided how it will change yet. It may become dead space, or I may be energetic enough to blog prolifically. Such changes are in the future, of course, so I cannot give you accurate predictions.

But ahoy! adventures lie ahead. I need to be preparing for them rather than relaxing in this little blog.

lit project update

2010-07-28T20:09:00.003-06:00

I will no longer be writing posts for my lit project (though I will still be reading a lot). This blog will be quiet for the next month at least.

The World as Will and Idea

2010-07-11T17:32:00.002-06:00

For my lit project, I read The World as Will and Idea by Schopenhauer.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first two, S describes his metaphysics, which separates the world into idea and will. For S, the distinction between the subject (the thinking person) and the object (the world the subject experiences), which philosophy has long maintained, is false; the object, says S, presupposes the subject and exists already as an idea which the subject comprehends. This argument becomes clearer as the book progresses.

S then describes the will, which we all have an intuitive understanding of; the will is, according to S, the being-in-itself of all things, humans, plants, and rocks alike. It is the fundamental force behind human actions and the laws of nature. It does not exist within the trappings of space, time, and causality, but rather exists outside these fundamental properties we perceptually experience. And since it exists beyond these trappings, it is unified, and as such the will we experience within ourselves is the same will which drives every other object we encounter.

Thus for S, there is the idea -- which is defined by space, time, and causality, and which we understand through our senses as the objective world -- and the will -- which is the metaphysical inner-nature of all these objects. Describing the world in this fashion, S compares his metaphysics to Plato’s; whereas Plato assigns particular objects (a chair, for instance) to generalized Ideas (that is to say, the particular chair is an expression of an Idea of chair, from which all chairs come to exist), S assigns particular ideas to a grade of the will. Properly speaking, the idea for S is the objectification of the will.

However brief and (undoubtedly) confusing this summary of S’s metaphysics may be, an understanding of S’s metaphysics is necessary before approaching the rest of his philosophy. S heavily reworks Kant, and his separating the world into two aspects is a twist of Kant’s insight into the difference between the phenomenal world (which we have access to) and the being-in-itself (which we do not have access to). The rest of S’s philosophy (which gets the more attention) is built on this.

Science, says S, is the study of the phenomenal idea defined by space, time, and causality; what, then, is the proper study of the will? S’s answer: art. S devotes the third section of his work to this topic and argues that in aesthetic contemplation (and rapture) we leave behind the will and enter into the world of idea. This argument is completed in the final section of the book --

The will, according to S, is forever striving, never satisfied. It is, as such, suffering. Midway through the final section, S gives a detailed exposition of the suffering of the human will (which I thought reminiscent of Lucretius) and lays out the portion of his philosophy which others have inevitably labeled “pessimistic.” S’s vision is bleak, but he is a transcendentalist: the striving of the will can be forgotten, even suppressed; we transcend the will through knowledge of the true nature of the universe (which happens to be S’s metaphysics). In art, we glimpse this truth and briefly forget the will as we contemplate pure objectivity (which art expresses). But this is not full understanding.

In the final section, S outlines his ethics. This is probably the most famous portion of his philosophy. He begins from the illusion people hold that they (as subjects) are separated from the objective world they experience; in this egoism, people recognize only their own wills, and in asserting their wills come to actively deny the wills of others. This person does wrong and borders on wickedness. Once, however, a person recognizes the truth -- that is, that his will is the same will which appears in others, and, consequently, that his suffering is tied to the suffering of other wills -- this person strives to become just by recognizing the equal rights of another’s will. Finally, a person comes to elevate the wills of others above his own and becomes willing to sacrifice his own will for the sake of others. This final person has escaped the sufferings of the will by suppressing his will entirely. For S, this is the ascetic, the saint.

Before reading this, I had heard a lot about Schopenhauer and his pessimism. Having read it, I would not call S a pessimist. He is greatly misrepresented. And though I found his discussions about art and ethics stimulating and fascinating, I think it is his metaphysics which is his important philosophical contribution. One cannot take his aesthetics or ethics without first swallowing his metaphysics. And his metaphysics is transcendental (re: not pessimistic).

S’s writing style is occasionally maddening. His sentences can get unruly. His paragraphs can continue on for pages. And yet he is surprisingly coherent; his clarity is sometimes startling. Though I never fully took to his philosophy, I at least took something from nearly everything he discussed and found my own philosophy becoming that much clearer through his words; I subscribe to none of his assertions yet feel his influence throughout my thoughts. This influence may not survive for long, but for now at least I feel this book has been an important step for my understanding of philosophy (as a subject). I plan to read more philosophy for my lit project in the near future.

June 10 favorites

2010-07-01T07:28:00.003-06:00

Actually, I did not watch anything this month that was truly worthy of this list. Despair! But, in order to fill this list with something, here are films which, had it been better month, would have almost made this list:

Diva Dolorosa (1999)

Like You Know It All (2009)

Souls on the Road (1921)

Death by Hanging (1968)

The Sorrows of Young Werther

2010-06-20T20:53:00.002-06:00

For my lit project, I read Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.

This is my first novel since beginning my lit project. As a matter of personal safety, I picked something short and highly regarded.

The unreasonable emotions displayed here are not to my taste. While I first sympathized with Werther, allowing his youthful feelings to sweep him away, I became annoyed with him before long. By the end, I had no other desire but to slap him and tell him to grow up. This he refused to do; he chose to leave the world instead.

Other points to my distaste: the maternal simplicity and purity of Lotte, Werther's love-object; using peasants and nature to signify romantic innocence; the portrayal of the artistic temperament as emotionally unreasonable; Goethe drawing heavily on real life experience (including the suicide of an acquaintance).

At this point in my life, I am interested in the mundane. The overwhelming emotion of Werther lacks the depth and difficulty of the everyday, and his obstinate refusal to grow out of it annoys me (as I have said).

So! My excursion into novels is a disappointment. Beyond that, nothing to report.

Montaigne

2010-06-19T20:43:00.006-06:00

For my lit project, I read the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

I began reading Montaigne shortly after the start of the new year and have been coming back to him in intermittent bursts throughout these six months. The past few weeks have seen my longest and most intimate association with his work, and now, faced with writing about the Essays, I do not think I will be able to properly separate myself from them in order to fairly assay them. But here I go:

Montaigne's subject is himself. Following Apollo's inscription at Delphi ("Know Thyself") and the lead of history's sages, Montaigne examines his virtues and follies, his habits and experiences, his mind and his body. Montaigne's voice is direct, realistic, and mature. He does not hide his vices or shy from uncomfortable truth. He is temperate and relaxed. He ambles through his thoughts with unassuming ease, detailed yet disorganized, rambling yet apt. He borrows heavily from the Ancients, whole essays structured around lines of poetry, others indebted to the examples of a philosopher. Socrates and Epicurus, the Stoics and Sceptics, Virgil and Juvenal, Plutarch and Cicero, Caesar and Alexander -- an endless run of wisdom which Montaigne examines (sometimes to accept, sometimes to criticize) and applies. He is right to. No wisdom is as rich as Ancient wisdom.

Montaigne began writing his Essays late in life and, finding them worthwhile, dedicated himself to them till his end. He published three books. Reading them beginning to end, as I have, reveals a writer who becomes more comfortable and confident with time. His first essays are short, his topics less personal. His final essays are breathtaking in their aimless length and frankness.

As Montaigne changed over the course of his Essays as a writer, I changed as a reader. This has little to do with Montaigne and more to do with the circumstances of my life, which have altered me, sometimes radically, between bouts of reading. With each change, my appreciation for Montaigne grew. My first approach to Montaigne was as an intellectual; I examined his thoughts and tested his world view, comparing his philosophy with my own. I was disappointed. By the end of his Essays -- by today -- I learned to approach Montaigne as a person, a man like any other. Few of us will fail to recognize aspects of ourselves in this detailed auto-portrait. Montaigne, as is his project, fully displays his humanity; and in so doing he displays our own.

We set our stupidities in dignity when we set them in print.

From the start, I always read Montaigne with a pencil by my side. My book is now filled with faint markings, bracketing off passages and lines which struck me while I was reading. To read them now is an experience of its own. Some passages strike me as dull or bizarre, and I cannot imagine what crossed my mind when I first read them and found them worth highlighting; other passages strike me through the heart, onto which I am moved to inscribe such clear and simple wisdom. It is something when but a sentence is needed to question the virtue and depth of my soul; I have opened my book to find this modest line --

in an age when so many behave wickedly, it is almost praiseworthy merely to be useless.

I shall return to your Essays later in my life, Montaigne. Then will age be my aid.

summer

2010-06-12T15:57:00.002-06:00

Aside from monthly lists and lit project posts, this blog will be mostly quiet throughout the summer. Adjust your blog-reading schedules accordingly.

And don't mind my playing with the new blogger templates.

May 10 favorites

2010-06-01T14:25:00.004-06:00

I rediscovered Japanese film this month and watched little else. I have not been so excited about film for some time. Expect this pace to continue over the summer.

Of what I watched, I liked:

A Hen in the Wind (1948)

Kochiyama Soshun (1936)

5cm per Second (2007)

A Bloody Spear on Mount Fuji (1955)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

Love Exposure (2008)

[note: the inclusion of anime on this list is not an accident.]

Homer (and an update)

2010-05-13T12:09:00.001-06:00

When I began this lit project, I was not sure which direction I would take. I had planned to pursue philosophy and drama, my original literature loves, but a sidestep into Ovid took me down the path of Ancient poetry. It quickly became a minor obsession. Having now read many of the Ancients, two ideas have crystallized in my mind: the cultural meaning of poetry as established by the Ancients; and the influence of Homer on Western Civilization. To culminate my compulsion for Ancient poetry, I read Homer.

This post will be brief. Rather than talking about the Iliad or the Odyssey, I offer a quick note on my relationship with his work:

Homer is a point of reference I share with nearly every literate person in the West. This is true not only of people today, but also of the Ancients. The Homer I read and know is the Homer they read and knew. Time, place, language give us a different understanding and perspective, but Homer still mediates our connection. This connection is culture, and it is overwhelming to think we have preserved culture for over two and a half thousand years.

Awesome.

I had a lot to say about Homer but gutted it all from this post. I am up for having a conversation about him, though, if anyone cares to throw in their own thoughts.

[My Update: I will be taking a break from blogging and my lit project. Two weeks, I think. You can email me in the meanwhile, or if you happen to be interested in what movies I am watching, you can stop by pear hut (my hitherto hidden tumblr).]

Callimachus

2010-05-04T01:18:00.005-06:00

For my lit project, I read the surviving poems of Callimachus.

One hears a lot about Callimachus when learning the Classics. Poet, librarian, critic, Callimachus represents the shift to the post-Heroic Hellenistic era. As a critic, he condemned epic poetry and praised what was brief, highly-crafted, and very literate. These lines from his Hymn to Apollo both express and exemplify this philosophy:

And Envy whispered in Apollo's ear:
"I am charmed by the poet who swells like the sea."
But Apollo put foot to Envy and said:
"The river Euphrates has a powerful current
but the water is muddy and filled with refuse.
The Cult of the Bees brings water to Deo
but their slender libations are unsullied and pure,
the trickling dew from a holy spring's height."

Pure drops from a holy spring (Callimachus's poetry) are preferable to a powerful yet muddy current (epic poetry). This aesthetic preference characterizes the Hellenistic age. Epics and Tragedies are out of fashion; in fashion are Menander, Theocritus, and Aratus. Incidentally ... Epigram 62:

Aratus of Soloi models his verse
On Hesiod's best, and refuses to write
The Ultimate Epic. We praise these terse,
Subtle tokens of long effort at night.

How fortunate I am to have crossed Aratus, this bizarre, little poet. I am beginning to understand his reputation among the Ancients.

The Hellenistic inclination to holy dew reappears with vigor among the Romans. Without Callimachus, no Catallus, Propertius, or Ovid (whose Fasti may be more influenced by Callimachus's lost Aetia than by Propertius). Callimachus's influence is difficult to escape. And yet, as Fortune has it, little of his work survives, and one is at a loss to discover why there is so much noise about him. 6 hymns, 64 epigrams, and some number of fragments survive. These I read. These only of hundreds of estimated books. Time has robbed us of his work.

What, O Zeus, are we to make of Callimachus?

April 10 favorites

2010-05-01T11:43:00.001-06:00

This appears to have been a slow month. These were the movies I watched and liked:

The Trio's Engagements (1937)

What Did the Lady Forget? (1937)

Our Neighbor Miss Yae (1934)

This list gives the impression that all I watched this month were Japanese films from the 1930s (in which women wore stylishly tilted hats). This is not the case, though I certainly wish it were.

Homeric Hymns

2010-04-26T01:09:00.007-06:00

For my lit project, I read the Homeric Hymns.

The Hymns are a collection of 34 poems, each in praise of a particular god. These Hymns are a mysterious bunch. They vary in length, the shortest being only several lines long, the longest almost 600. Nobody really knows who wrote them or when. Some date back to Homer's time (thus their name), others seem to have been written in later antiquity. One Hymn poet identifies himself as a blind singer from Chios; this little detail sparked what may be the biggest rumor about Homer's biography.

All the Hymns follow a similar formula. First they announce which god they are singing about (and include a number of epithets, as all Greeks do in naming their gods). Then they move on to some biographical myth about the god. Then they close, usually as a final entreaty, often as a transition into another song. These endings indicate that the singer of these Hymns used them as a preface for something else. What that ensuing song might have been is, like the Hymns, a mystery.

Without any details about what these Hymns were or who wrote them, all a modern reader can do is enjoy them for what they are. The longer Hymns are moderately entertaining. I rather enjoyed the Hymn to Demeter (2) and the Hymn to Hermes (4). Aside from Classical scholars, the Hymns are largely unread. I do not expect I will convince anybody to read them, but for the sake of your general knowledge I will provide a very standard Hymn which should tell you what every other Hymn is like. Hymn to Artemis (27):

Artemis I sing, of the arrow of gold and the hunting cry,
Chaste virgin pursuing the deer, showering arrows,
Own sister of gold-bladed Apollo, who courses
Over the shadowy hills and wind-swept peaks
Taking delight in the chase, and, bending her golden bow,
Sends forth her arrows of anguish. The peaks of the high mountain tremble,
And the shady woodland screams with the cries of wild creatures;
Earth itself shudders, and the deep sea teeming with fish,
As the brave goddess turns this way and that, slaying the race of wild beasts.
But when the showerer of arrows is sated with searching for game
And her heart is content, she slackens the well-bent bow
And goes to the great house of her dear brother, Phoebus Apollo,
In the rich land of Delphi, and orders the beautiful dance of the Muses and Graces.
There, hanging up her curve-backed bow and her quiver of arrows,
Her figure adorned with elegant raiment, she takes command
And leads in the dances. They all raise their heavenly voices
In hymns of praise to Leto, delicate-ankled,
Telling in song of how she gave birth to children
Foremost in counsel and deeds among the immortals.

Farewell, children of Zeus and of lovely-haired Leto;
I will remember you both and another song too.

[I really must blog about film again. Writing about Ancient lit has to be the most boring thing I could be doing with this blog.]

Ovid's Fasti

2010-04-23T17:51:00.009-06:00

For my lit project, I read Ovid's Fasti.

"Fasti" is Latin for (something like) "chronicle," a marking of time. A fasti is frequently a (Roman) calendar. Ovid's Fasti is an elegiac poem describing various important dates, mostly Roman religious holidays/festivals. Ovid provides mythological explanations for these festivals.

If that sounds boring, it is not. This is Ovid.

It is, however, difficult. In these first few months of my lit project, I have become comfortable with Classical myth; the numerous religious references in these Ancient works pause me no more. But Fasti is an exception. Much of the myth it covers is peculiarly Roman and terribly obscure. And Fasti is written with the assumption that the reader knows the importance of the days it mentions and what the festivals are. I am not an Ancient Roman citizen and do not know anything about these traditions. All to my dismay.

But the obscurity of the myths and festivals did set me thinking. It is too easy to look at Roman culture as a borrowed culture. What would they be without the Greeks? But no, they seem to have had a well established set of myths beyond the Greeks. How far back does this culture date? How independent are these Roman myths? How did they survive? How did Greek and Roman myth so successfully mix? Such questions are impossible to answer this far removed from the Romans.

Another question which fascinates me: how did all these poets know all these stories? I have always wondered this, especially with Ovid (a fountain of references). In most cases, it is easy to imagine the very basic oral tradition that the poets are filling in when they are writing their myths, but this is more difficult with the Romans who borrowed Greek myth and could not have had the same oral tradition. Did Ovid find all his myths in Greek books? How much myth was recorded by Ovid's age? (Too few Ancient texts survive to say.)

Perhaps Ovid made all of his myth up. He frequently offers several explanations and leaves it to the reader to decide which explanation is correct. Ovid does not actually know the reasons for the many traditions he is explaining -- even when he appeals to a god or goddess who answers his questions for him (he uses this amusing device in (almost) every book of the Fasti). But it is hard to doubt Ovid's authority on mythology. He is our standard for Ancient mythology, two thousand years on.

Scholars like to point out that Ovid's Fasti does not fit neatly into any "genre." There is no precedence for this work. No generic tradition. By choosing elegiac meter, Ovid defies the Ancient obsession with the relationship between meter and content; the elegy is usually reserved for small and unambitious subjects (a prayer, or the erotic), but the Fasti is an incredibly ambitious work, as Ovid likes to note (comparing his work to an epic voyage). Other poets would have composed the Fasti in dactylic hexameter (favored meter of the epic). Ovid, choosing the elegy, is self-consciously provocative.

Ovid's ambitious scope allows him to cover many different aspects of mythology and Roman society, further confounding any attempt to categorize his Fasti. But he does have two important influences I am proud to have recognized. The first is Propertius, who wrote etiological poems in Book 4 of his Elegies. Ovid seems to have picked up on this new possibility and turned it into the Fasti (this also explains his choice of elegiac meter). Ovid's second important influence is Aratus, who wrote a poem on the constellations and weather and who I discovered through Ovid's praise (in Amores). Indeed, Ovid makes a special point of the stars and writes about them, their rising and their setting, as often as he can. Some of my favorite sections of the Fasti are mythological explanations of the constellations. I did not expect Aratus to reappear in any form in my reading. I am glad he did.

Scholars also like to point out the political implications of Ovid's work. This is undoubtedly because of Ovid's exile, which must have some political reason. But I do not think that subtle political implications are important to Ovid's work. I wish more scholars would skip this tedious political interpretation.

Only six books of the Fasti survive, corresponding to the months January through June. There is a fierce debate about whether the other six books were written and lost or never written (and so never lost). I shall not throw my divine opinion into this fray. I do wish we did have those six books. It would be a nice feather in my lit project's cap.

Tibullus

2010-04-18T18:50:00.003-06:00

For my lit project, I read the poetry of Tibullus.

After finishing Propertius, I thought it would be a good time to finish up the Roman love Elegy, Tibullus being the only major poet I had not yet read. Two books of his love poems survive, as well as two more books (with no clear demarcation) which are attributed to Tibullus but most likely not his (spurious). Tibullus died young, so little remains.

Tibullus is often described as the simplest of the love poets. He is certainly the most gentle and most sincere. He dreams of an easy country life with his love, as wife, the heart of his humble home. He chooses love over riches, love over war. He is direct about his emotions, and genuinely so. He is quiet. Needy. Tibullus is not coarse or blunt like Catullus; he has none of the flamboyant learning of Ovid; he knows not the style or charm of Propertius--

Tibullus (alas!) is dull.

What a disappointment.

Propertius

2010-04-09T19:41:00.001-06:00

For my lit project, I read the poems of Propertius.

Ovid is my point of entrance; Ovid's Amores consists of three books of love poems written in elegiac meter (couplets alternating hexameter and pentameter). The poems, like and unlike love, are brisk and frivolous and bold and capricious and honest and desperate and sensual and charming and oh! ever so charming. Ovid is blunt yet delicate, mischievous yet discreet, shrewd yet earnest. Every line is smart, every sentiment wicked. Ovid, crafty Ovid, exhausts Lust's emotions, bounds from the thrill of a night's passion to the despair of passion rejected. The Amores introduced me to Ovid and Roman poetry. Hardly a line of it did I not take to heart.

And there is hardly a line which does not owe a great deal to Propertius.

Propertius (Ovid's elder by a few years) wrote four books of elegies. The first three are love poems dedicated (mostly) to his Cynthia. Everything to love in Ovid is here -- the energy, the honesty, the charm. The poetry is as capricious as love can be, as irrepressible. The fourth book turns from love poetry and takes the elegy in other directions, from epistles from wife to soldier-husband (perhaps inspiring Ovid's Heroides) to etiological descriptions of Rome (perhaps inspiring Ovid's Fasti (which I've just begun to read)).

What to say of Propertius? I am too sick at the moment to think clearly and give him a proper assessment. Here are some poems and passages to give you an idea of his work (though the translation I read/am quoting seems to place an emphasis on fitting Propertius' lines into properly metrical English lines, making me worry the translation is in many ways inaccurate). Enjoy.

From I.vii:

Though sometimes she may criticize me, lovers
can profit from my words if they'll but read.
The sad heart lifts a bit when it discovers
others have suffered and survived indeed.
My friend, if Cupid's arrow ever finds you--
I pray the gods may spare you such a fate--
you'll try to praise the silken net that binds you,
but these will be new skills, and learned too late.
Then you may seek my songs, and even learn them,
and sigh with lovesick youths above my dust,
His words were truth.

The following two poems illustrate how quickly Propertius can change tones. From II.xv:

No man more blest! O night, not dark for me,
beloved bed, scene of such dear delight!
To lie and talk there in the lamp's soft flickering,
and then to learn ourselves by touch, not sight--
to have her hold me with her breasts uncovered,
or, slipping on her tunic, balk my hand;
to have her kiss my eyes awake and murmur,
Why must you sleep? and make her sweet demand.
Shifting our arms, moving to new embraces,
we kissed a thousand kisses multiplied;
then, with lamp rekindled, fed our senses
on new delights -- the eye is love's best guide.

&c. II.xvii:

If you must lie about your lovers,
beguiling me, my blood is on your head.
Each night of solitude I sing my sorrows,
lying alone -- and you in what man's bed?
Pity poor Tantalus, waist-deep in water
that shrinks whenever he would quench his thirst;
or Sisyphus who strains to push the boulder
up the long slope, and fails. Pity these cursed,
but pity even more the piteous lover--
lover with whom no wise man would change place.
I, once the king admitted and admired,
for ten days now I have not seen your face.
Bitch! I should find a rock, a cliff, to leap from,
or mix a poisonous drug and drink it down.
I cannot hurl my works at that closed doorway,
nor wander weeping through the moonlit town.

Yet I can't leave her, though I try it often.
Seeing how true I am, may she not soften?

Propertius is more melancholy than Ovid, and genuinely so. II.xxvii:

Men, alive for an hour, would know that hour's ending,
would learn the path by which their doom draws near;
on the unclouded sky they search, like the Phoenicians,
what star to trust in and what star to fear.

Whether we fight the Parthians on foot, or sail to Britain,
death may be waiting us on sea or land.
A man in civil war, caught by opposing armies,
can feel the rock he stood on turn to sand.

Fire comes in the night, swallowing and engulfing;
into the cup what poisons find their way!
Only the man in love is proof against such terrors:
he knows his doom, its source, its kind, its day.

Though he has taken his place at the oar on death's black river,
though he looks at those sails of which no man can tell,
if he hears the voice of his mistress, calling him back from that kingdom--
let heaven thunder, he'll fight his way from hell.

[Not satisfied with this translation, I sought another and found this. I do not like this one much either:

Do you mortals seek to know death’s unfixed
hour and by what path the end may arrive?
On a clear night, do you study Phoenician science, as to
which star may be favorable and which destructive?
Whether we pursue Parthians on foot or Britons by boat,
on sea and on land, the way holds hidden perils.
Our head again tossed into the tumult, we moan,
when Mavors jumbles both camps’ uncertain hands,
and what’s more, the flame and ruin to our homes,
we moan, lest the black cups approach our lips.

Only the lover knows when he will die and from what
cause, and he fears neither Boreas’ blasts nor war.
Though the oarsman already sits in the stygian reeds,
and he sees the gloomy sails of the infernal bark:
if only the whisper of his girlfriend calling would summon him,
he would make the journey back, obedient to no law.

Maybe I should learn Latin.]

Like Ovid, Propertius is sexually blunt, which is often surprising. From III.xv:

No storms henceforth, I beg you, in our loving,
nor any endless wakeful empty nights!
When I had passed beyond my boyhood shyness
and was permitted love and all its rights,
it was Lycinna brought me that first knowledge,
giving a heart that I could not repay.
Now, almost three years since then, I remember
scarcely ten words of all we had to say.
Your love has buried all; no other woman
has made me her captive, to this day.

And yet he still manages to be utterly charming.

Perhaps my favorite line; from II.xv (again):

O let us love until we are each other--

And a fitting epigram for the man; from I.vi:

Well, men have died for love, they say, and gladly.
I shall be one of that immortal band.

Reading Propertius, I almost long for love and all its agony. May Cupid spare me.

[On the subject of love poems, I also read the surviving fragments of Sappho. I have nothing to say about them so won't write a separate post.]

The Trio's Engagements (1937)

2010-04-06T21:54:00.004-06:00

From a technical standpoint, this film is far less interesting than the films of the heavy-hitters of Japanese cinema in the 30s — Ozu and Shimizu and Naruse and Mizoguchi. However, this film feels like it is the most “modern.” Three youngish men are hired at a store (which seems to specialize in fake silk) and each falls in lust with the president’s daughter; each also happens to have a previous engagement set with another girl.

The script might as well have been pulled straight from Hollywood (this is what I mean by “modern”). And it is as delightful as old Hollywood comedy can be (very delightful), though it has none of the sparkle. The central points of comic tension (the conflict between the three men for one hand; the conflict between the previous lovers) are not utilized whatsoever (the film spends a lot of time on exposition, then dissolves with a miraculous anti-climax). The conspicuous elements of modern Western society (the lush store, the jazzy soundtrack, the neon signs, the somewhat-independent working woman) tend to clash with conservative Japanese conventions (particularly marriage and the woman’s role in it; re: the ending). The film also lacks the polish of Hollywood (the lighting, the fluid camera, the magnificent costumes and sets), however hard it may try to compensate for that. It almost works, but mostly doesn’t.

And for that, perhaps, it is all the more charming.

This is the first film I have seen by Yasujiro Shimazu. Mostly forgotten now, he seems to have been a defining influence in Japanese films in the 1930s; the internet assures me that he helped cultivate a lot of young talent and that his early 30s realism paved the way for the canon of Japanese filmmakers that IS remembered (see the canon I listed above). I would love to see more of his films. What survives of this film is choppy and, I imagine, does not do the original product justice. I shall keep my eye open for more.

Hesiod

2010-04-05T23:15:00.005-06:00

For my lit project, I read the Works and Days, Theogony, and The Shield of Heracles by Hesiod.

Like Homer, Hesiod is an early bard continuing what seems to be a much older oral tradition. The Homeric tradition and the Hesiodic tradition are usually considered as separate traditions (perhaps with some intermingling), and so the two together give us two perspectives on Ancient poetry. Homer's epics are narrative poems which take place in the mythological past. The Hesiodic tradition is more varied, and if it is artistically less satisfying, it is historically more fascinating.

The Hesiodic tradition begins with Works and Days which, unlike Homer, is of the present. After a hymn for Zeus (considered spurious by some scholars) and a description of the Five Ages -- which ends in the modern age which, surprise, is the hardest on Man and which requires constant toil (the subject to come in this poem) -- the poem describes various farming techniques (when to sow, when to reap, when to furrow, when to sleep, &c.), stressing the importance of Work, and ends with a description of Days (which days are good for what). There are a few curious myths thrown in between all this stuff about work and days; what caught my eye was the myth of Pandora, which I had not yet stumbled upon in all of my Classical readings (apparently Hesiod is the only Ancient to relate this myth). The Pandora myth itself has been reworked by many modern authors and has been turned into a stunningly poetic allegory; I was shocked to discover how unpoetic the original is. Really, it is just a myth which blames all of the Evils in the world on Woman. It is because of Her that we must toil, because of Her that we must suffer, because of Her that we have no hope. There is not much to the myth, and I am impressed modern interpreters have been able to discover so many nuances.

Theogony is a genealogy of the gods. There are a lot of them. Most of them are personifications (of, say, Hardship, or Zeal, or whatever). Most of them are not mentioned much (at all) outside Theogony. This is my second time through the Theogony, and it is a fascinating, bizarre, and ultimately tiresome read.

The Shield of Heracles is a mini-epic (or else fragment of an epic) of an episode in which Heracles fights Cycnus, the son of Ares. This is the closest the Hesiodic tradition gets to the Homeric tradition. A good deal of this poem is dedicated to describing the bronze shield Hephaestus made for Heracles. It is difficult to imagine any shield could be as elaborate as this description. It is even more difficult to imagine how the Ancients found any pleasure in an elaborate description such as this. (Such a description is not unique in Ancient lit, as anybody who has read Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes can attest.)

Hesiod is usually the loser when he is compared to Homer. (That probably does not need to be said.) Poor Hesiod. His work has survived two-and-a-half thousand years so that I might admire how bizarre it is. He probably deserves better.

Pindar's Odes

2010-04-02T02:59:00.004-06:00

For my lit project, I read Pindar's Odes.

Pindar's Victory Odes celebrate athletes who have triumphed at the Panhellenic Games (4 places hosted such events: Olympia, Delphi, Corinth, and Nemea -- the 4 books of Pindar's Odes are divided according to these four events). The games include boxing and wrestling and chariot driving and spear throwing and race running (both in armor and the nude) and whatever other physical abilities the Ancients prided themselves in.

Pindar is often considered the "poet's poet." This reputation (I discovered) is granted to Pindar less for his content and more for his form, which is compulsively metrical and rigid (with a concentration on the balance of strophe/antistrophe). Even the Pindaric Odes which have been popular through the ages borrow his form rather than his language (the book I read had an appendix which included some of these Pindaric imitations; Cowley's reinterpretation of Pindar into English was most fascinating). I, however, do not feel qualified to say any more about this form and how it operates. Undoubtedly my lack of education in poetry means there are yet secrets in Pindar for me to unearth.

Pindar's method of praise is similar throughout the Odes: compliment the victor, his family (usually father or son, sometimes uncles and brothers and other MEN of the family), his homeland; relate a myth which in some way compares the victor (or his family or homeland) to gods and heroes; tell the victor that though he may never achieve what the gods have (and he should not be so arrogant to try), he has achieved the highest among mortals. Pindar's sobriety is most effective in making the Odes sincere (rather than simple flattery).

Horace (in his Odes) describes Pindar as a river whose forceful torrents flood its banks. This description has persisted, and it is accurate in its own way. Pindar's metrical diligence is counterpoised by his dense and stately language. He flies to heroic heights but is ever sure to scale back to human dignity (defined by chance and change). Pindar's poetry rolls ferociously, insistently; one steps into this river to be swept away, to be drowned.

Pindar proved difficult for me. The first Odes I read were too heroic, too obscure. As one who admires simplicity and clarity (and humor), I felt there was little in Pindar for me. Only in Book II (Pythian Games) did I begin to feel some of Pindar's power. It took patience. I took time to work through his language; I read up on each myth he cites and tried to figure out why it was relevant and what it accomplished; I reread difficult passages and abrupt transitions. And finally something in Pindar's poetry gleamed. I could finally respect Pindar's style, if I could not yet love it (and I may never love it).

While reading the Odes, I thought often about how poetry developed and evolved. All the Ancient poets I have been reading write in specific styles to accomplish specific things. Pindar praised. He wrote Odes to be sung in honor of those who wanted to be honored by poetry. (<-A fine business, I'm sure, for talent like Pindar's.) Some poets taught. Some poets loved. Some poets mourned. The poets wrote our myths. The poets thought our thoughts...

But poetry is different today. It is abstract. It has lost its forms. What poets write today is abstract and formless. Ah! but so is the way of all arts. If poetry is obscure today, it is because new media have taken its place. Our myths were once written in poetry; we write them now with Images. Film is our new poetry. Griffith is our new Homer, Eisenstein our Pindar... (or not). And yet we still have Pindar.

March 10 favorites

2010-04-01T02:05:00.001-06:00

I feel my viewing habits becoming more sluggish, though I watched a lot this past month. Film no longer challenges me; my interest in it is waning.

On that note, this is what I liked this past month:

Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935)

Medicine for Melancholy (2008)

The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005)

I watched two dozen short documentaries this month. I do not know what possessed me. Of them, I liked:

Moment of Joy (1965)

The City (1939)

The Devil's Toy (1966)

A Walk in the Old City of Warsaw (1958)

Idylls of Theocritus

2010-03-25T15:11:00.005-06:00

For my lit project, I read the Idylls of Theocritus.

Theocritus is widely considered the father of pastoral poetry, Virgil his most famous son. Shepherds and goatherds and cowherds sing in contest and blow a syrinx. And lovers pine for love, maidens for men, old men for young boys. Satyrs rape young nymphs. Polyphemus tends his flock. And everything is sweet and honey-dipped in the meadows and groves.

Theocritus is less sober and more naive than Virgil. Theocritus is less of a poetic force to reckon with. The collection of his poems that survive, some of them spurious, is rather eclectic, which might not help his reputation. Not all are bucolic paeans. There are laudations for men and gods and there are mini-epics, which are amusing and curious. Theocritus (like Callimachus) believes in the short poem form, and the mini-epics (a couple hundred lines at most) are abrupt passages seemingly torn from greater epics.

I have little to offer in sustained analysis of Theocritus, but do have a puzzle a quick google search failed to solve: how does one pronounce Theocritus? Does one stress the second syllable, as in Thee-ok-ruh-tus? Or does one stress the third, as in Thee-uh-kri-tus? Quite the puzzle. And, I am afraid, beyond me.

Heroides

2010-03-24T14:00:00.003-06:00

For my lit project, I read the Heroides of Ovid.

The Heroides are a collection of letters (epistles) as written by mythological lovers (heroines, except for the "double Heroides" in which both lovers write a letter). Thus mythology is given some subtle psychology. Entertaining, inventive, fascinating, &c. And yet I was disappointed. The idea thrilled me, the poems themselves did not. (All except Helen to Paris, which I will single out for making Helen a strong, intelligent woman contrary to common mythological portrayal.)

I have so little to say, and so say no more.

Eclogues and Georgics

2010-03-20T23:25:00.004-06:00

For my lit project, I read the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil.

I read Dryden's translation of the two works. With Dryden, one might mistake the poems as English, so easy is the translation. This is both good and bad; good in that it is easy on the native English-speaker's tongue, bad in that one often forgets Virgil for the translator. I do not know how Virgil's Latin reads, but it does not read like this.

This was my second time through the Eclogues, which helped me appreciate it. This was my first time reading the Georgics, though, and I was quite surprised. Lucretius showed me the potential of didactic poems; Virgil has fulfilled that potential (note: Lucretius seems to have influenced Virgil).

Rather than talk about the Georgics, I have decided to reproduce a passage from the end of Book II:

Ye sacred muses! with whose beauty fired,
My soul is ravished, and my brain inspired--
Whose priest I am, whose holy fillets wear--
Would you your poet's first petition hear;
Give me the ways of wandering stars to know,
The depths of heaven above, the earth below;
Teach me the various labours of the moon,
And whence proceed the eclipses of the sun;
Why flowing tides prevail upon the main,
And in what dark recess they shrink again;
What shakes the solid earth; what cause delays
The summer nights, and shortens winter days.
But, if my heavy blood restrain the flight
Of my free soul, aspiring to the height
Of nature, and unclouded fields of light--
My next desire is, void of care and strife,
To lead a soft, secure, inglorious life--
A country cottage near a crystal flood,
A winding valley, and a lofty wood.
Some god conduct me to the sacred shades,
Where Bacchanals are sung by Spartan maids,
Or lift me high to Haemus' hilly crown,
Or in the plains of Tempe lay me down,
Or lead me to some solitary place,
And cover my retreat from human race.

Happy the man, who, studying nature's laws,
Through known effects can trace the secret cause--
His mind possessing in a quiet state,
Fearless of Fortune, and resigned to Fate!
And happy too is he, who decks the bowers
Of sylvans, and adores the rural powers--
Whose mind, unmoved, the bribes of courts can see,
Their glittering baits, and purple slavery--
Nor hopes the people's praise, nor fears their frown,
Nor, when contending kindred tear the crown,
Will set up one, or pull another down.

Without concern he hears, but hears from far,
Of tumults, and descents, and distant war;
Nor with a superstitious fear is awed,
For what befalls at home, or what abroad.
Nor his own peace disturbs with pity for the poor.
Nor envies he the rich their happy store,
He feeds on fruits, which, of their own accord,
The willing ground and laden trees afford.
From his loved home no lucre him can draw;
The senate's mad decrees he never saw;
Nor heard, at brawling bars, corrupted law.

&c. Spring is coming, and I am called to distant meadows.

La marche des machines (1927)

2010-03-15T18:38:00.002-06:00

Since writing my senior paper last year on early montage documentaries, I have come to regard a small and elusive group of filmmakers as a curious rumor. I think of them as the Paris Film Club Crowd. They are a young and enthusiastic lot. They are most prominent in the late 1920s. They make montage films, some of them earnest documents, others abstract explorations. They show these films to fellow film enthusiasts, often at film clubs, often in Paris. Among the circle, one will find Jean Mitry, Jean Vigo, Boris Kaufman, Georges Lacombe, Henri Storck, Jean Lods, Pierre Chenal, and Eugene Deslaw. Many others are associated with this group: Charles Dekeukelaire, Jean Dreville, Jean Painleve, Alberto Cavalcanti, Joris Ivens, Marcel Carne, &c. Some of these names ought to be familiar, others completely unknown. Those names which are known are not known for their early montage abstractions; such is the nature of this era, and I am desperate to penetrate it.

La marche des machines is one the key films to come from this crowd. Deslaw directed. It is only the second Deslaw film I have seen. It is very short and very difficult to judge. I feel that the film has no context, nothing to ground its abstraction; ironic, considering I had known about this film, its context, and its impact for years and have sought it out with determination. I found what I was looking for: a rhythmic film about machines. That is all.

My impression of Deslaw is true for the rest of the group. His films lack rigor, clarity, perhaps worthwhile cinematic ideas, yet his technique is so charmingly light and youthfully poetic that his films are difficult to resist. I say this of La marche des machines, though it is too small a film. I say it of Deslaw's Montparnasse (1929); I say it of Carne's Nogent (1929); I say it of Storck's Images d'Ostende (1929); I say it most of all of Vigo's A propos de Nice (1930). I might dare to say it of all these young cineastes in Paris, but the group remains so obscure. What of Deslaw's La nuit electique? What of Lacombe's La Zone? What of Lods' Le Mile? So much remains hidden, and even I am having trouble bringing it out. What a mess.

I am stuffing this post with names so that a better historian will do the necessary research to bring this group to light. I apologize to all of you who read this expecting an interesting or moderately witty commentary on a film you ought to see. Although I hope that if you are a regular reader of this blog you do not expect that anyway. I am really curious though! Who were these young fellows? What are these lost films like? Why has nobody caught on to this group, the "new wave" of 1930? Why is nobody but me interested in exploring them? I am such a bad pioneer.

Odes of Horace

2010-03-06T13:44:00.006-07:00

For my lit project, I read Horace's Odes.

I do not have much to say. It was only into Book II or so that I began to feel the rhythm of these poems. An obsession with death runs through them, sometimes in a Stoic way, sometimes an Epicurean. I would call the Odes Stoic, though. Live today that you may die tomorrow. Such is his theme.

I had been aware of the problems of translation before this, but only with Horace have I realized how distant these Ancient poets are in translation. Horace exists only in Latin; what I encounter is a shade. I discovered this after reading multiple translations of one poem (I did this for several poems). What I read was not Horace.

Translated by A.E. Housman-- IV.7:

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn, with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams:
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are,
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When though descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

But still beautiful. From here, I am torn about where to take my project: to lesser Ancient poets or to modern philosophy? I feel the Shades may win.

favorite films archive

2010-03-05T18:05:00.008-07:00

monthly viewing favorites.
June 10
May 10
Apr 10
Mar 10
Feb 10
Jan 10
Dec 09
Nov 09
Oct 09

misc.
favorite films (current)
favorite films of the 2000s
Feb 09 50 favorites

Lucretius On the Nature of Things

2010-03-02T17:12:00.001-07:00

For my lit project, I read On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.

Lucretius's project in On the Nature of Things is to banish from the minds of men the fear of gods and death. Lucretius does this by showing that the Nature of Things can be explained by Atomism, atoms being indivisible bodies flying through void. Each book of the poem is devoted to different aspects of nature, and each phenomenon is explained through Atomism/materialism in various ways. A reader, thoroughly absorbed in this work, concludes that since everything can be explained by atoms, gods do not participate in nature (and remain ever-serene, happy, aloof), and since humans are atoms and the atoms dissipate when the body dies, death is nothing to us (no Hades, just nothingness). If Order and Gods cause us pain, then Chaos and Void are our balm.

So say the Epicureans. This is the only major surviving work of Epicureanism (written 200 years after Epicurus). Before reading this, I had already been aware of my affinity with Epicureanism; I was an expert, in fact ... but I need not boast of my wisdom, which should be immediate to everyone. What follows are notes on what was most banal and most bizarre in this work--

Lucretius has a grand time insulting every major philosopher and philosophy before him. The only exceptions are Epicurus, Democritus, and Parmenides (he defies the first and borrows heavily from (while lightly criticizing) the latter two). He quite happily attacks everybody else, sometimes calling them by name, other times describing their ideas without approaching their character. He likes to show why they are wrong and he is right. He loves to call them idiots*. Not even Heraclitus is safe, though I do believe Lucretius is wrong for criticizing Heraclitus for not being "logical."

"Logic" raises a most bizarre trait of Lucretius's scientific method -- he demands logical rigor from philosophy while he asserts that sense perception is the basis for all truth. Presumably this is a counter to Parmenides, who brought logical consistency to the point of utterly denying sense perception; no, say the Epicureans, this is wrong. The senses are everything, and if you see it, it must be true. The Epicureans are thus proto-scientists, but before the age of experimental testing and observation; and so Lucretius, in explaining the Nature of Things, proposes bizarre hypothesis after bizarre hypothesis, offering multiple explanations for one phenomenon insofar as the explanations do not contradict themselves (logically). The sun, for example, is as large as we see it to be, a small blazing disc traveling a vast sky; greater animals are born from lesser animals (Ancient Evolution); earthquakes happen when subterranean mountains fall; &c.

Lucretius's many explanations are sometimes aligned with modern science, sometimes totally absurd. Modern readers ought to be surprised to discover Ancient theories of atoms, evolution, and light, while explanations of magnetism, lightning, and earthquakes will undoubtedly make modern readers smile because of their whimsy and naivete. Lucretius's Ancient earnestness is hard to fault.

The poetry itself has similar highs and lows. The final 250 lines of Book III are the boldest in the book and some of the boldest in Classical Lit. "Hell does exist on earth -- in the life of fools." Lucretius argues that the hellish afterlife humans so fear is present here in life, that life is a loan, and that Wisdom is necessary to banish this fear and suffering. Only a book later, however, at the end of Book IV, Lucretius is arguing a most curious argument against sex (as a cause of pain). There is nothing in the argument I do not agree with, but I cannot help but wonder how Lucretius could fall so far.

Bold, bizarre; few words describe this poem better.

On the Nature of Things lacks Epicurean ethics. This is disappointing. What little survives of Epicurus's writings remains the definitive work on the subject. Though Ancient Natural Science is interesting in its way, Epicurean ethics is what interests me most. It is misunderstood today. People drink expensive wine and eat expensive cheese and gossip and call themselves Epicureans while Epicurus sits in his corner and nibbles bread and sips water. I always hesitate to mention Epicurus to anyone who does not know Ancient philosophy. This has ruined a perfectly awful pun which I have never dared use but have always wanted to: Epicure-Ian.

Read more about Epicurus here: Epicurus.net
I recommend his surviving letters. Lucretius struggles to say in a poem what Epicurus says in a line. Lucretius is fine, though; everyone should read the end of Book III at least.

[*Lucretius is especially insistent about applying this to DG]

February 10 favorites

2010-03-01T00:58:00.003-07:00

I only watched 8 films this month. 8! I do believe that is a record low for me. From this small batch, these were my favorites:

The Swallow and the Titmouse (1920)

Au Bonheur des Dames (1930)

A Page of Madness (1926)

Aratus

2010-02-25T20:56:00.002-07:00

For my lit project, I read the Phenomena and Diosemeia of Aratus.

This was an obscure outing for me, and an interesting one. In Ovid's Amores, Aratus is mentioned as a Great Poet who has achieved Immortality. Aratus was very popular in the Classical world; he is forgotten today. Though I found that intriguing, I was not convinced to read Aratus until I discovered that his most famous poem is about the constellations. Enter the astronomy geek.

Phenomena is a description of the constellations. If you are not out among the stars, the descriptions can be confusing. There are some inaccuracies. The work is dry (this might just be the literal prose translation I read). Many have wondered what here drove the Ancients so wild. I wonder it myself.

But I am an astronomy geek, and the Phenomena gripped my imagination in a number of ways. I have always been fascinated by the idea of a constellation: How are they named? Who named them? Why did they name them? It all seemed so fantastical and arbitrary. What is most fascinating is that these constellations, named in some forgotten past, are still called by the names they were called millennia ago. We see the same Orion Aratus did. We know the same Arcturus. I suppose this is a question of praxis; the stars, once so important for sailors and farmers, were most memorable when related to myth, and we, who have so little use for stars, find the constellations memorable enough and have no practical need for change.

Most curious for me about the Phenomena is the universe-view of the Ancients. Since my childhood, I have always looked up to the stars and imagined them continuing on forever; my father would reinforce this wonder in me and impress me with infinity, telling me to imagine, at all those distant points, a sun like our sun, a system like our system. The Ancients, however, looked to the sky and did not see infinity but a ceiling, a sphere, a thousand lanterns or gods. For the Ancients, the Earth stood still and a dome revolved above it. No infinity, but a collapsed plane. Why, I ask, why have I never seen the universe in this light? Why have I never stopped the earth and collapsed the heavens? There is something wondrous about this naivete, something attractive about this simplicity. I have never considered the Universe in these different ways. And now I must. Perhaps the poetry of candles dotting a vaulted dome will reveal to me the poetry of accretion discs, pulsars, dark matter...

Diosemeia is about predicting the weather. It is mostly worthless*. I did however realize that I am totally blind to my environment when it comes to subtle cues (about the weather). I am sure this applies to most of us. But most of us don't need to watch for wasps to know what kind of weather is about to come -- the internet is a marvelous thing.

[*like DG and his 20th C lit]

One Image

2010-02-24T03:07:00.004-07:00

The other day I watched Au Bonheur des Dames (1930). This is not a post about the film, but rather about a phenomenon I notice often but never bother to describe--

My memories of a film fade in various ways. What was vivid to me while watching the film disappears with time, and as days pass I may remember nothing of a film but its name and my general opinion. Sometimes a perfectly wonderful film finds no traction in my mind and slowly escapes from it entirely. At other times a merely adequate film will latch onto me and stick with me for years because of one outstanding detail -- be it an action, a character, an image...

With this post, I want to pay tribute to that One Image that stays with me. What is it that gives One Image so much potency? What thoughts, emotions, impressions do I compress into One Image that I cannot feel elsewhere in the film? Why should One Image -- only one image -- be the one to reecho through my soul? Why does every other image scatter into shadows? O inscrutable One Image, I pay tribute to your power--

This was the One Image from Au Bonheur des Dames. I knew it as soon as I saw it.

Once seen, forever recognized. Does anybody else experience this One Image? How do films impress themselves in your memory? How does your memory of a film change?

I do not know why I have never asked these questions seriously before; I hope to get some good answers.

The Aeneid of Virgil

2010-02-23T23:55:00.002-07:00

For my lit project, I read The Aeneid.

I did not expect to get in to the Aeneid, but it seemed like a good time to read it (on the heels of Metamorphoses). Indeed, it is an epic all about Valor and Piety, qualities I am unfamiliar with, and a good many words are wasted in prayer or else in sacrificing lambs and sows and oxen, and reading about slaughters and prayers is not very exciting. It is an epic all about war and fate, also unfamiliar, and men are slaughtered as frequently as the bleating sheep; Virgil depicts many lances through groins and rocks against heads. I could not handle the violence of the Iliad; Aeneid too tried my timid mind. And what's up with Juno? She is the worst god ever. I do not understand why Jupiter does not kick her teeth in and pitch her down to Tartarus. I wanted to. So badly.

And yet -- and yet! -- I was so into the Aeneid. I began reading and two nights later finished it. The story progresses with calm intensity. The narrative's weight is always bearing but never overwrought. And I was into it. Surely, the very spirit Epic possessed me as I hunched over this book. I have no rational explanation for my becoming so engrossed.

I think it helped to read this back-to-back with Ovid's epic. Virgil builds his epic with patience, diligence, focus, solemnity. These do not describe Ovid; his cracks and tumbles and wheels energetically along its way. Ovid's epic is swift and dense with action; Virgil's deliberate and dense with emotion. So into it.

My praise to the translation.

Ovid's Metamorphoses

2010-02-17T13:07:00.002-07:00

For my lit project, I read Ovid's Metamorphoses.

DG and I planned to synchronize our reading of Metamorphoses, but he has put his lit project on hold after reading the first part of Don Quixote. He has instead returned to 20th century lit, an addict back to his fix. I will harass him with these posts until he starts his project again. Read Metamorphoses, DG, you coward.

On the Metamorphoses itself, I am not sure what I can say. I have not yet learned how to research classical lit in the way I know I how to research film, so I have no topics to muse on or amusing facts to dispatch. Unexpectedly, Metamorphoses was everything I expected it to be -- a dense course in classical mythology imbued with Ovid's clarity, wit, and charm.

I was most surprised by Pythagoras's long discourse in the final book, a summation of much of ancient philosophy. Surprised because Ovid so persuasively fits his project into a philosophical tradition (mostly a Hericlitean worldview). Philosophy had not been on my mind, but this section alerted me to philosophical ideas scattered throughout the book. Everything is in flux. Panta Rhei. Metamorphoses. &c. But most surprising -- and this is what I love about Ovid -- is that after Pythagoras explains the universe, the soul, and everything, he asserts his entire speech as an argument against eating meat; his philosophy is boiled down to nothing but a rationale for being vegetarian.

And, at the end of this final book, having given the reader a weighty blast of the Everything-is-Flux argument, Ovid writes: "Now I have finished my work, which nothing can ever destroy --" Ovid insists he (his work) is immortal. Ha! Ha! That Ovid! He refuses all consistency. Artists today are not that brave. How unfortunate that we don't have more Ovids!

notes on our trip to San Francisco, part 1

2010-02-14T21:35:00.033-07:00

I traveled from Denver to San Francisco with Drew, Jacob, and Joshua. Our trip began on Sunday, Jan 31 and ended Sunday, Feb 7 (2010). This is my record of the journey. I have edited it for reasons of decency (my edits appear as brackets and strikethroughs). In spite of these edits, I still must declare this record to be morally improper, and I sincerely apologize if you are offended while reading this.

I have separated this account into two parts. This is Part 1. Here is Part 2.

PART 1

Several weeks ago, Drew, Josh, and I were on our way to WaterCourse. I was riding in the back seat of Drew's bad~~ass~~ Land Rover, minding my thoughts, when I heard my name mentioned in the front seat. "Ian," said Drew, "Want to come with us to San Francisco?" He told me the dates and costs and other unimportant details. "Why are you guys going?" I asked. "No reason," they responded. I was in.

A few days before the trip, Drew and Josh were making tasteless jokes of some nature or other while I stood silently to the side. "Man, I think we're corrupting Ian," said Josh. "Just watch," Drew responded, "some day he's going to take all this s[tuff] we say and write it down." That night, I began writing this post.

During the week before the trip, Josh was distressed about getting the rental car. Our vehicles are not road-trip worthy (although we did consider Jake's minivan), and biking there was not an option. Renting a car sounded far too adult for us (having never done it), and all those rumors about being 25 nearly threw us into panic (could Drew, the only 25 year-old, afford it?). But it turns out renting a car is easy; in fact, it is too easy. None of the rumors are true. Insurance presented the only obstacle, but Jake cleared that.

We had originally intended to leave Monday morning, Feb 1. But Jake called me on Sunday afternoon and asked if I was ready to leave that night. I was. He and Drew were on their way to rent the car.

I drove up to Josh+Drew's place. I was not as excited as I should have been, and this worried me. On all counts, this is exactly what a recent college graduate with no known future or ambition should be doing, yet some voice in me whispered doubt and disappointment: Why am I traveling and spending money? Why am I not getting a job? What good will this trip be? = Doubts of a soul that has not been to SF.

Jake and Drew rented a car (a Chevy Malibu). We were about to put 3000 miles on it. As we prepared for this endeavor, Drew laid down for us five Rules:
1. Don't be a [heel].
2. If you (the driver) are tired, pull over/let some one else drive.
3. The front seat Passenger is not allowed to fall asleep.
4. If any one of us has the chance of getting [a girl], he gets priority over everybody else.
5. No talking about ex-girlfriends. (Subsequently, I learned every disgusting detail about their ex-girlfriends during the trip.) (This rule did not apply to me.)
(And finally, since neither Drew nor I drink, rule 6. Stay out of the way of the Js when they get drunk.)

We loaded the car and drove off, full of excitement. Two blocks later, we stopped at Qdoba so that Jake and Drew could eat. We turned back around after Josh remembered that he had forgotten to take out the trash. After that, we stopped at Whole Foods to buy some groceries. Then, then we were on our way. It was just before sunset.

We headed north. Jake drove. Night fell quickly. We do not like Red States but had to pass through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada before we reached California, and our conversation through these states was a never-ending wisecrack at the expense of the people who live there. Truckers and Mormons were our favorite victims. We tiptoed through a Wyoming truck stop and were thankful to find that no burly beasts were waiting for us in the restroom (they were too busy enjoying their late-night meal). This was a lucky escape.

Further down the road we passed an ominous compound. We tried to guess what so cold and remote a building could be. We were confounded until Josh explained: "It's a concentration camp. That's where they keep the gays."

Because it was night, we could not see any of the beautiful Wyoming landscape. We did see two things we liked: the moon-rise; and a wind farm (apparently Wyoming is a hot spot for wind farms). We were in awe passing the wind farm and all had our own comments--
Jake: "It's kind of eerie. They look like monsters."
Drew: "They remind me of the robots in Terminator 3." [???]
Me: "It makes me excited for the future."
Josh: "It makes me want to [masturbate]. Sustainably."

One final note on Wyoming: Jake, who does concrete (when not earning his Poli. Sci. degree), helped work on the highway around Rock Springs a few years ago. He could not contain his excitement as he drove over the part that he worked on. He went on and on about American infrastructure and how it felt to help build it and is crafting this story as a talking point for his political career. It made me realize I have done nothing for my country. Nothing.

A snow storm hit us over the Wyoming-Utah border. We cautiously sped through it. Josh raised a complaint we heard often during the trip: "I can't get service on my phone. Why can't I get 3G coverage? I just want to update my Facebook status! What kind of ~~hellhole~~ place is this?"

The closer we came to Salt Lake City, the more vicious Jake and Josh became in their attacks against Mormonism. Before this, I did not say much; I even contributed to the demonizing by telling the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But here I objected to their attacks (a timid voice in the back seat) and was promptly torn apart, limb from limb.

The snow subsided and, though the city was a bit damp, Salt Lake City was pleasantly cool. We entered SLC so that we might gape at the Temple. It was 2AM following a Sunday. The city was deserted. So much silence. It is impossible to describe this desperate silence. A city without people is a disconcerting thing. I have seen a city deserted like this only once before -- it was Santiago on New Year's morning, and everyone was home with a hangover. Driving through SLC's quiet, wide, clean streets, we wished we had our bicycles. We found our way to the Temple, parked, and wandered around the Square, cameras out. We did this nervously and jumped whenever we heard a car pass, wondering if we were about to be captured, afraid of what cruel devices they had waiting for heathen sinners. Before we sped away from SLC, we stopped by the State Capitol and admired its hill. A final cruise through deserted downtown ended our odd SLC experience, and we were back on the road.

Although we could not see it, we knew it was there: the Great Salt Lake. We squinted out the windows and still saw nothing. Finally, we decided to pull over and get out of the car so that we might see this lake. We could see it; we could also smell it. We jumped back into the car. The internet tells me this is called Lake Stink. I feel privileged to have experienced it.

Further down the road we drove through the Bonneville Salt Flats. The dark masses of mountain in the distance reflected off the damp flats illuminated by the just-past-full moon. A haunting and beautiful image.

Jake switched places with Drew (who drove us all the way in to SF). A long, long stretch of Nevada desert remained between us and Reno, and our only respite from boredom was the sunrise. Sunrise is always magical, even in Nevada.

Reno is a sleazy city. We arrived mid-morning and rode through downtown; dirty casinos sit on dirty streets populated by dirty (homeless?) people. The glitter of the lights/signs appeared all the more fake and sinister. We were looking for a vegetarian restaurant which Josh had heard about. We parked and walked to the address he gave us; we found an apartment building. We loitered, confused. Josh called the number for the restaurant and the apartment building answered. Finally, we went inside and asked where the restaurant was -- 2nd floor, they said. I quietly proclaimed that this was not a good idea. The others, however, decided this was an experience we ought to have. On the 2nd floor, no restaurant was in sight. We split up to look for it, pacing down the crumbling, caving halls. The situation had all the hallmarks of a horror film. Maybe this restaurant was not a vegetarian restaurant but a restaurant which cooked/served vegetarians? A dark and serious possibility. We found the restaurant in a back corner. It was closed. We raced out of the building and decided on a less risky breakfast option: Whole Foods.

Nevada (so I'm told) is in grave financial trouble. We were reminded of its economic woes when we turned into the Whole Foods parking lot -- a stretch of storefront held half a dozen empty spaces. What were we in for with this Whole Foods? What kind of Whole Foods would rise in the midst of dilapidation? We rounded an empty store and discovered an oasis, the Whole Foods of our dreams. Spacious, clean, friendly; water sparkled, berries burst; shepherds piped cheerful melodies. We ate at a patio with fireplace, sofas, chairs. Forget casinos; Whole Foods is Reno's finest attraction.

I slept the distance between Reno and the California border. I woke at the border where an attractive girl asked if we were carrying any fruits or vegetables. The stretch of road just past the CA border is the most beautiful stretch of road we had yet traveled, though I could not help but compare the Sierras to the Rockies (and the Rockies always win). I fell asleep again and woke up somewhere between Sacramento and Oakland. I could not help but notice the color green.

San Francisco appeared in the distance. We approached the Oakland Bay Bridge and prepared our cameras like good tourists. On cue, Jake played Coconut Records' West Coast; I thought it was cheesy (though not in bad taste); everyone else described it as 'epic.' I promise my next entrance into SF will be more to my style.

We were in the heart of the city and were overwhelmed. So much was going on! So many buildings, so many people. It was the first time I had ever been in awe of a city, and whatever doubts I had about the trip before it began disappeared in those first minutes of SF. We turned a corner and faced our first steep SF hill. Drew, imagining no doubt that we were in his Land Rover, ~~recklessly~~ fearlessly drove up it. At the top, at a stop sign, he spun out; the sound reechoed loudly through the buildings, and an old man (whom I had been watching), poor old man, jumped at the sound, both feet off the ground. In the front, Drew and Jake were giddy with this new power; in the back, Josh and I fretted and bit our nails. What was first an accident became a game. Drew spun out on every hill he came to. We could smell the burning rubber. I have never been so stressed out.

Originally our plan had been to stay the first few nights with either of Josh's friends (both girls) who live in San Jose. But we were a day early. So we put ourselves up in a cheap-ish hotel in South San Francisco (en route to San Jose). Our plan was to wash up and get settled before diving back into the city; Drew suggested we double up in the shower to save time, but we rejected that idea. Once clean, we found our way to Herbivore (on Divisadero), a vegan restaurant.

A theme of this trip, which you will observe as these notes progress, is vegetarian restaurants. Josh, a hardcore vegan, invests a great deal of energy into what he eats, much more than the rest of us; he had a lengthy list of restaurants we could eat at, and we happily (aside from the Reno incident) followed him around to his dining choices. He could not get over how many veg. restaurants there were in SF. He loved Herbivore, and we ended up eating there twice.

The waitress recommended we check out Mojo up the street. It is a bicycle cafe. A hip one. Drew and Josh grabbed coffee, and then we all walked to Alamo Square Park where we had a great view of the city. We also saw a great many dogs. Dogs are everywhere in SF. I imagine if you live in a dense city you sacrifice yard space and are forced to walk your dog in the streets/public parks. This is an unpleasant chore, but for whatever reason the people walking the dogs did not seem particularly upset. This mystified me.

We wandered around the neighborhood until sunset. Josh wanted to go to American Apparel to buy a hoody. This is a habit which he has to satisfy every couple of months, and we were happy to oblige. We went to American Apparel but Josh did not buy a hoody. He bought a long-sleeve shirt instead. It was still early but we had been awake for the better part of 30 hours and so decided we should sleep. We went back to the hotel. We slept two to a bed. I had the misfortune of being paired with Josh. In the morning, they discovered me on the floor and asked what happened. I explained: "Josh is the worst bed-hog ever. I had to punch him several times during the night to get him to move over so I had room. Eventually I woke up and found his face a few inches from mine, and that was that. I moved to the floor." They laughed and laughed and teased Josh for chasing me around the bed. Josh became the Bed Chaser. This would take on a new context in a night's time, as you shall see.

We were to meet up with Josh's friend Michelle. He had not seen her for five years (but they kept in touch). We were up early that morning and arrived in San Jose before Michelle had woken up, so we passed time with our favorite past-time: shopping for Joshua. Josh needed pants, and we searched through several stores before finding something Josh was happy with (though he wasn't really happy with them). I was confused why Josh was in such desperate need of pants; but then I got an explanation: Josh only kept one pair of jeans which he wore until they ripped, and the pair he was wearing was about to rip. Without the next pair, tragedy would strike. Jake found that it was wisest to have two pairs of jeans to switch between, while Drew, like Josh, kept only one pair. Surprised, I admitted my wealth: four pairs of jeans to cycle through. "Gee, Ian," said Drew, "Do you have a servant to take care of those for you?" I do not, but I am looking into it.

We met Michelle at her house, though we were still early (and she was still dressing). She took us to her favorite restaurant down in Santa Cruz, Saturn Cafe. It is a Vegetarian American Space Diner. Or something. The food was good, the waitress better. After lunch, we walked through town and cruised the various shops. We browsed Urban Outfitters for Josh. While in a record store, Drew and I watched as a homeless couple (?) screamed at each other across the street. Screaming. Profanity. It began to rain lightly. We split up -- Josh and Michelle went to a bar for beers while Jake and Drew went for coffee. As one who does not drink either, I hung around outside with the rain. Once he had coffee, Jake went back to the bar; Drew and I walked down the street and through a bookstore. We made it back to the bar eventually, too, but thankfully did not have to stay long.

From downtown, we walked to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Because it was February, the boardwalk was deserted. The shops and booths were empty, shuttered. The rides were still. A security guard patrolled the walk, her footsteps echoing through the silent park. The beach was gray and littered with seaweed. Seagulls hovered overhead. Shadows roamed the beach in the distance. The sun began its descent over the pier to our West. We were alone.

Jake, Josh, and Drew were thrilled by this opportunity to commune with the Pacific. They took off their shoes, rolled up their jeans, and cautiously approached the surf. The water looked cold. I did not follow. Michelle asked why, and I explained that I grew up in Hawaii and that the Pacific was no stranger to me. I tried to be real cool about it. But in fact, I just do not like the feel of cold, wet, sandy feet.

They took lots of pictures and the boardwalk was a relaxing, carefree time. We stopped in Neptune's Kingdom (which Josh compared to Casa Bonita ...) where Josh and Drew played a game of air hockey. Josh won. After this game, everybody but me packed into a photo booth and wasted $5 on an awful photo (they all seemed to be picking their noses). We strolled past a trash can full of dead sea gulls on our way to the pier. The sun set in the time it took to walk the length of the pier. Sea lions rested on planks beneath us, and the less mature ones of our group teased them. More pictures. Sea gulls rested on the rails. I saw a pelican. A fine experience. We walked back to the car. Jake and Drew found ice cream on the way.

Michelle's parents invited all of us over for dinner. This was unexpectedly nice. And they were nice. They cooked a satisfying vegetarian dinner for us and were careful to list all their ingredients, lest they put in something we did not approve of. (Josh stopped by Whole Foods on the way to buy his own stuff just in case he did not approve.) Since Michelle is a vegetarian, her parents were well-prepared to meet our demands.

There was one moment when we were uncomfortable in that house, but Drew handled it beautifully. Michelle's parents (her father, at least) are conservatives; Michelle's father's outfit announced this to us the moment we walked in (gold chain necklace and all). The after-dinner conversation came around to business, and he was giving us all very good advice. Before one point of advice, however, he prefaced himself thus: "Now I don't want to sound like I'm getting political, but if you guys voted for Obama ..." At this, Drew whispered, loud enough to be heard but so as not to be taken as an interruption, "We all voted for him." And then Michelle's father laughed. And we laughed. And it was all good and pleasant and merry. Good work, Drew.

We stopped at Michelle's house as we considered what to do that night. Josh and Jake and Michelle wanted to drink. Drew, though no longer a drinker, wanted to go along. I did not want to go along; so they swapped me with Michelle's roommate and hit a bar. No matter. I had my own wild night planned: an evening with Montaigne. I read half a dozen essays and went to bed.

They woke me up when they came home. I was too tired to think anything, but I did see one gossipy detail: when she was ready for bed, Michelle grabbed Josh's hand and led him into her room.

Out in the living room, Jake, Drew, and I woke up early the next morning. They wanted coffee, so I went with them to a Starbucks. Josh's story was all on our mind. Jake, however, had a story of his own. It is not the type of story one shares out of respect to those who lived the story, but the story did generate what might have been the joke of the week: "I wouldn't be offended if you asked me to take my shirt off." I will leave the story to your imagination.

We arrived back at Michelle's and were ready to go, but were not sure what to do. No one was daring enough to knock on that door. We did not want to lose much more time. Drew called Josh's cell phone, but I was the one who answered it (it was, after all, in the living room). What to do? Josh finally, finally, walked on out, and we all did what he hoped we would not do. We looked at him. To release the tension, he raised his hand as a pistol and fired a shot. Drew would later describe this moment as "epic".

Rule #4: CHECK.

As all good tourists, we went to the ~~Power of Suggestion Spot~~ Mystery Spot that morning. The forest was beautiful, the place quiet. Nobody else was there aside from three young strangers, who were part of our tour. After the tour, we were given Mystery Spot stickers. Apparently these stickers are famous. We have not yet decided what to vandalize.

We left the Spot after noon, and we were all hungry. We went to Capitola and, in Capitola, Dharma's. The ordering process was confusing, but eventually they gave me a Teriyaki Burger. It was amazing.

Drew, Jake, and I wanted to spend the day driving up Highway 1, but we did not want to obstruct Josh's romantic conquest. While we were waiting to hear back from Michelle and thus form plans for the day, we went to Capitola Beach and relaxed. Capitola follows the wealthy, suburban California model: Mansions cling to beach-side cliffs. Late-twenty-something wives walk the sandy streets with strollers and oversized dogs and gaily gossip with every other wife they meet (about their sex lives, no doubt). Men spend their lunch hours squeezing into wet suits and surfing February's chilly waves. Tourists stumble from shop to shop drinking bad gourmet coffee and slipping change into their parking meter. Teens roll around on skateboards and curse and hit each other and warily eye police officers and generally have a great time playing hooky. Mother and child sit on the beach and build castles and look for seashells. &c. We sat on a bench and watched them.

Wikipedia relates an amusing anecdote about Capitola:

In the summer of 1961 hundreds of birds attacked the town. Most of the birds were sooty shearwaters - a normally non aggressive species that rarely comes to shore. Alfred Hitchcock was a regular visitor to nearby Santa Cruz and read about this episode. He went on to direct a film - The Birds - based on the idea of hundreds of birds attacking humans.

The day before, Michelle skipped her friend's birthday so that she could hang out with us. So today she was making it up to him and could not hang out with love-struck Joshua. This meant Josh had to tag along with us as we traveled State Route 1 from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. I do not think he was happy about this at first, but the earliest coastal vistas rapidly changed his mood.

My words cannot accurately describe SR1's beauty. It was February and chilly and overcast most of the time and the colors were dull but still vibrant and everything was awesome. Cliffs jut powerfully from the ocean. Sometimes they are level enough to build on (and there, farms and lighthouses stand), other times they slope and climb dramatically, ending in peaks far above our heads or in gentle beaches that yawn below us. We stopped at most beaches and photographed everything we saw. Small, rocky islands sat beyond us just out in the surf, waves bursting at their edges, sea birds resting in the ocean spray. Jake had been waiting for this moment the entire trip; he donned his swim trunks and waddled a few feet into the water. A wave broke before him, and in a moment he was submerged in the Pacific. He jumped back out of the water and ran to shore, whooping in triumph. Drew had gone in the water with Jake but had not been so brave. These two, pasty Colorado boys celebrated their moment and would later think of it as the greatest moment of the entire trip. I will not disagree.

It was late afternoon. We stopped in Half Moon Bay to fuel up, and in the last, brief stretch between HFB and SF, the sun set. However pleasant the day had been, it was not what Josh had hoped for. His mood turned sour for a brief time ... but I will not dwell on the worst in us. Once in SF, we parked in a Chinatown lot and ate at Loving Hut, an international vegan restaurant chain. The restaurant's symbol is a big, golden L with hearts running through it. It's motto: "Be veg. Go green. Save the planet." A vegan neon sign lights its window. Inside, at the door, is a table filled with propaganda/pamphlets about veganism. A hi-def television loops the world's latest vegetarian news between clips of animalsbeingcuteandcuddly; the video is subtitled in a dozen languages. And this vegan message all revolves around the Supreme Master Ching Hai.

If this sounds like a cult, that's because it is. Ching Hai is the self-styled teacher of the "Quan Yin method" (summary: meditate for 2 1/2 hours a day and be Veeegan). This article tells us more about the Master:

When she's not fulfilling her role as the Almighty, Ching Hai paints, makes jewelry, publishes a magazine, produces music videos, and designs a flamboyant clothing line that debuted last year on runways in Paris, New York, and London. Ching Hai's heavenly creations are a far cry from the hair shirts and drab cassocks often associated with religious devotion. She's partial to flowing silks in bubble gum colors, elaborate hats, and custom-made umbrellas. It would take a miracle for most of her disciples to purchase this holy couture; ensembles from the "Celestial Clothing" collection can cost as much as $11,250.

Also in the article, this description:

San Francisco's Mike Treacy was a devoted Ching Hai disciple for years, even traveling to Taiwan in 1990 to live at the Master's compound for six months. He broke away from the movement two years ago and now labels it a moneymaking sham.

"Ching Hai has basically got thousands of slaves and all the power and money she wants," says Treacy, who runs a service transporting the elderly and disabled. "The followers may be smiling and seem happy, but they're still getting ripped off."

Asked what it's like to interact with someone many place on par with Jesus Christ, Treacy is equally blunt: "She rules with an iron fist. She has tantrums; she screams; she yells. Basically, she's an asshole."

and this story:

Just as pieces of the one true cross were a hot commodity among medieval Christians, Supreme Master's followers lust for a token of her. But unlike Jesus and the saints, whose ascetic lifestyles limited the number of possessions that could be marketed as relics, the Supreme Master has entered the religious keepsake business, auctioning everything from her Volvo sedan to her old hankies.

South Bay resident Anna Long owns such a piece of the Supreme Master's past. She learned about Ching Hai when she was working at a San Jose beauty college and suffering through a troubled time with her in-laws. She now runs Oakland's Bode Vegetarian House, which, while not an official Supreme Master eatery, is filled with photos of Ching Hai and literature related to the pint-size deity. Last year, Long outbid a throng of other disciples for a pair of the Master's sweat socks at a retreat in Taiwan. The price? $800.

"The socks are a memory of the Master, so they are priceless," says Long, who admits that she's not sure if the socks were washed before the auction. "When the Master leaves the physical world, at least I will have her socks."

The food was fine. I was happy to get out of there, though. Josh loaded up on propaganda before he left, his mood wholly lifted. The Supreme Master may have another disciple. [Update: Josh denies this.]

We walked over to the City Lights Bookstore of Beat Generation fame. It is the best-stocked independent bookstore I have ever been in. The shelves overflow with world literature and cultural topics. I wandered through the store, overstimulated. I had to buy something. Finding my way to the Classics section, I scanned for several books I wanted: they did not have Ovid's Heroides, nor did they have Humphries' translation of Lucretius, but they did have Mendelbaum's translation of The Aeneid, and although it cost me $10 more than it would have had I ordered it from the internet, I bought it. Drew also bought a book (for Beth), Jack Kerouac's Big Sur. Josh, as overstimulated as I was, decided to leave the store before he blew $100. Jake was the only one not stimulated by the City Lights Bookstore; he was far more interested in the adult bookstores across the street.

From City Lights, we walked SF's red light district; a dozen strip clubs lined both sides of the street. And of course it was here, of all the places we crossed on our journey (like that Wyoming truck stop), that our masculinity was questioned. Two guys sat outside a club; one smirked as we passed by and asked, "Who's playing in the Super Bowl?" "That's the one with the baskets, right?" Drew asked. We walked a few steps before they replied: "Do you guys like red meat?" Actually...

This was the heart of Barbary Coast. In ages past, sailors would stop here to blow their money on cards and prostitutes before they were shanghaied for their next voyage. I knew all this seedy history because I had seen it in the movies, with tough guys like Edward G. Robinson and Clark Gable. But real life history is interesting, too. Here is a story of the famous crimp (=the person who shanghaied sailors (=drugged them and put them on boats)), Shanghai Kelly:

One day – some sources say it was in 1854, others say the mid 1860s or ‘70s – Kelly found himself with an urgent order for nearly 100 crew members and a dearth of sailors at his usually full boardinghouse for him to shanghai. The ever-resourceful Kelly quickly came up with a plan. First he chartered an old paddlewheel steamer, the Goliah. Then he put the word out on the streets that it was his birthday and everyone was invited aboard to celebrate with free food and drink. Ninety men showed up and the Goliah put out to sea amid great merriment of drinking, eating, and song. As soon as all the guests had passed out from the drugged drinks. Kelly sailed to the three ships waiting outside the Golden Gate. The still unconscious “sailors” were handed over to their new captains, who sailed away.

Kelly now saw a slight problem: all of the Barbary Coast knew he had sailed off with a shipload of merrymakers. How would he explain returning with the Goliah empty? He sailed on down the California coast to mull it over.

As the story goes, it was off Point Concepcion that he met his incredible stroke of good fortunate. He came upon the ship Yankee Blade that had run aground and was taking on water. Kelly saved its entire crew and sailed them on up to San Francisco. Hailing him as a hero, no one seemed to notice that his full ship carried not one of his original party guests.

We hurried back to Michelle's that night to satisfy Josh. As it happens, Michelle was out late and we arrived before she did. Michelle's roommate let us in and we were all preparing to go to bed, Josh calling it a night, when Michelle finally made it home. To his surprise (but not ours), Josh did not have to spend the night in the living room with us.

I tell you this next story merely to shock and appall you, and hope that as you continue through these notes you keep this revolting fact in your mind: After Josh's nights of romance, Drew pestered Josh about taking a shower/washing his face. We did not, after all, want to be in close quarters with a fellow who had vadge-beard*. Whenever Drew pestered him, Josh assured us that he had cleaned himself and that we should not worry. This happened Thursday morning. On Saturday night, Josh stepped out of the shower in Vegas and admitted, gleefully, that this was the first shower he had taken since going to bed with Michelle. This caused quite the uproar. It went against every rule of decency. How impolite a friend can be!
[*this is a technical term]
Part 2

notes on our trip to San Francisco, part 2

2010-02-14T21:30:00.022-07:00

This is part two of my account of our trip to San Francisco. Here is Part 1.

PART 2

Thursday was the worst day for me. I woke up dizzy and exhausted. I do not know why. I drifted in and out of semi-consciousness between San Jose and SF. What was going on? We went over some bridge in SF. Drew, Jake, and Josh made a big deal out of it. Gold-somethingorother. I did not care. I just wanted food.

Finally we checked into our hotel, Hotel Bijou. It is a creaky boutique hotel with a San Francisco movie house theme. Pictures of stars line the hallways and every room is named after a movie shot in SF. We got room Lenny. I was not thrilled with this pick, but at least it was not room Mrs. Doubtfire.

Once fully moved into our hotel room, we decided to get food. We walked down Market Street and turned on to Mission. It was a long walk and I just shuffled behind the others, keeping to myself. I saw a lot of homeless people. Eventually, we walked into a restaurant -- a vegan Mexican restaurant ... Oh! How I hate Mexican food! My experience in this restaurant is too horrible to describe. I walked out of it feeling a thousand times worse than I had before. My stomach rebelled. I wanted to go to the hotel and die. It was not to be so. The others pushed on to new sights, and I stumbled to keep up. My eyes were at my feet. I didn't know where we were. Did not care. I thought the world a black and vile place, a cesspool, a torture chamber, a pit of monsters in slime, ~~a hell,~~ a disease peddled to you on a plate of enchiladas. My heart spewed bile over SF's streets.

I looked up every so often to be sure I had not lost the others. At some point I looked up to see a RuPaul poster and a gay pride flag. Oh, that's where we're going, I thought. We wandered around The Castro for awhile. We passed bars, hair salons, mannequins in studded-leather. We stopped at Harvey Milk's plaque. Josh, Drew, and Jake were tremendously entertained. Were this a better day, I might have been entertained, too.

It began to rain. The rain was not hard, driving, foreboding rain, but it would last all day. We hopped on a (heritage) streetcar down Market to Fisherman's Wharf. We cruised Pier 39 and did a generally bad job of staying dry. Josh bought a $100 windbreaker jacket at the Gap, but not even shopping for Josh could cheer me up; I was still cursing lunch.

Josh left us to meet his (other) San Jose friend. Jake, Drew, and I briefly went to a bar near Ghirardelli Square and had an awful time. Afterward we went to the squiggly street and had an awesome time. Jake met up with Josh while Drew and I took the streetcar back to the hotel. The streetcar was exceptionally crowded, uncomfortably so. And still the driver asked people to shove in. Drew and I did not make it to the hotel. Josh called us as soon as we got off the streetcar and asked if we would meet up at Whole Foods for dinner. We said we would. And did. We had been on our feet all day, it was raining, and both Drew and I were feeling ill (Drew had a headache), but we made the walk.

Our hotel, as part of its movie theme, plays a double feature every night (of films based in San Francisco). American Graffiti was the first film playing that night, and Josh and Jake went down to watch it. Drew and I meanwhile nursed our bodies -- he with Lost (on Jake's laptop), I with Montaigne. While I felt better, Drew felt worse. I could hear his head throb. He sent me out for Tylenol and did what he could to relax once I brought it back. His headache would be gone by morning, but he would be stuffed-up for the remainder of the trip. Poor Drew. As for me, I promised myself that I would never eat Mexican food again. I have kept this promise so far.

The beds were really small, so I slept on the floor. We all woke up early and went back to Herbivore to try out their breakfast menu. Since our rental was parked in a garage, we hailed a taxi. It was a tight squeeze. The driver was a nice fellow -- born in Africa, raised in Sweden, making his way in SF with his family. We told him we were from Denver. "Oh, I hate Denver," he replied. We asked him why. He told us his story: "My cousin owned a liquor store in Denver and I was supposed to come out from Sweden to stay with him. He was doing well. But then he was shot and he died." All of us agreed: that was a legit reason to hate Denver.

We arrived at Herbivore a few minutes before it opened. Outside the restaurant sat an abandoned couch, on that couch sat a styrofoam container, and in that styrofoam container sat an enormous, rotting slab of meat. It looked like a pig's thigh. Flies picked at it. We had a view of this hideous thing from the restaurant and watched as everyone who passed by stared at it in shock. One girl took a picture. A homeless man meandered in its direction; we all watched him with anxiety. Drew: "If that guy takes a bite of that thing I'm going to barf." The man saw the meat and stopped. He stooped. He examined it. And then he tore off a chunk and ate it. Actually ate it! We could not believe it. We cursed and shouted in disbelief. Nothing could make this sight believable. He actually ate it! Thankfully, Drew did not barf.

Our waitress at Herbivore that morning was unpleasant, and this put us all in a bad mood. After breakfast, we walked over to Buena Vista Park. The park rises steeply up a hill (and we began at the bottom); the plant life is very thick, very damp, and very green (it was like a rain forest, I thought). The morning sun streamed through the thick leaves, and these occasional shafts of light stood like great, gold pillars there to guide us through the gloom. We climbed to a clearing and discovered a wonderful view of the city. Overall, a very impressive park. Two facts we did not know about the park when hiking through it: it is the oldest 'official' park in San Francisco; because of it's proximity to the Haight and the Castro and its secretive shrubbery, it is a notorious spot for anonymous gay sex. There are parks in every city that can claim this distinction, but generally I am wary of these claims -- I have never actually seen anybody cruising for anonymous sex. Indeed, the only people in the park that morning were old women walking their dogs (and smiling at us). These claims, I conclude, must be overstated.

We walked down to Haight-Ashbury, famous for its counterculture history. I was very disappointed. But what did I expect? As tourists, you can't just see counterculture and take a photo (although I suppose we did that in The Castro). The neighborhood was humble, as it should be. But I was not into the shops; they were either stereotypes of what counterculture shops should be (bong shops, coffee shops with angry sounding names, record stores) or else totally commercial junk that no respectable person would go to (Ben & Jerry's, McDonald's). I looked at the local art house theater's schedule, hoping to see some hardcore art films in its lineup, but the most interesting film on the schedule was M. Hulot's Holiday, which has been rounding the art house circuit recently (and had shown in Denver about a month before). Hardly counterculture.

Drew and Josh played around in Amoeba Music while Jake and I hung out at the edge of Golden Gate Park. My disappointment with the Haight was not so much a disappointment with the neighborhood as with the whole "Summer of Love" legacy; it was an adolescent desire for independence then, a nostalgic sentiment now. But more important things were on my mind -- Golden Gate Park stretched before me. On the other edge sat the Pacific Ocean, and I was going to meet it.

We convened and decided to split up. This was potentially dangerous because, of the group, I was the only one without a cell phone. This made my appetite for going alone all the greater. We planned to reconvene at 5pm. Josh, Jake, and Drew went to Alcatraz. I went on an adventure.

I set out through the park. Like every other San Francisco park I had been to, it was beautiful. I hiked across fields, past waterfalls, around statues, through tennis courts, over homeless people. At times I stuck to the main roads, at others I plunged into woods where there were no roads at all. I saw museums, stadiums, the botanical garden, the Japanese Tea Garden; but I could not take time to stop for such tourist traps (however much I wanted to for the Tea Garden) -- I was on an adventure.

I stopped to rest at Stow Lake and gazed at the peace pagoda. Ducks, lots of ducks, floated around the lake and acted duck-y. Old Asian couples power-walked past me. The lake is a donut -- an island is the donut's center -- and I sat on the outside of the donut and looked in. I saw a bridge and thought about crossing over to the island, but I thirsted to get on with my adventure and could not be sidetracked by things as unimportant as islands and donuts and decided to press on without crossing the lake and this happens to be the only thing about the entire trip that I regret (really regret). I should have crossed over to that island. It would have been an adventure.

The most surprising thing I passed on my journey west was the Bison Paddock. Multi-layer fences surround a sizable slice of meadow, and in this meadow are four, big, brown, bulky bison shapes. I did not think they were real. They were not moving. Besides, how could they be real? But I watched them (it takes a long time to cross that meadow), and eventually one of them moved. And then another. And then another. And I could not believe it. Nor could other people -- a car stopped in the middle of the road to take pictures. A bus tour did, too. The people walking the other direction on the same path as me seemed more savvy; they did not stop to gawk (but they, too, kept their eyes on the bison). I reached the other side of the meadow and read a sign that told me all about the Bison Paddock. Yes, they are real. Yes, they are bison. Yes, you are allowed to gawk.

I turned off the main road and got lost in the west end of the park. I saw a windmill through the trees and aimed for it. The windmill is old fashioned and very cool. On the ground below it grows a flower garden called the Duchess Something Garden or the Queen Something Garden or something Regal like that. The tulips looked pretty, but I did not have time to smell flowers. I could hear the ocean. I was on an adventure.

I had reached the Pacific. It was cool and breezy and overcast, but at least it was not raining as I had feared it would. I crossed over to Ocean Beach. It was not very crowded. Most of the people there were loitering. I stayed on the walk and looked down over the ocean. In the distance to my right were cliffs and an island (Seal Rock, the island is called); in the distance to my left were sand dunes. The water itself was violent and gray. Posted signs warned me that the current was strong and that it had killed people in the past. I knew then that this was a popular surfing spot (although no surfers were out that day).

I walked the beach and tried to relax, but the hike through Golden Gate Park tired me out, and I still had to hike back through it and all the way back to the hotel. Since I had walked most of the way west through the north side of the park, I started on the south side of the park for my tramp east. I stuck to main roads throughout this hike back because my legs were aching and if I collapsed in less traveled woodland and had no cell phone and some homeless fellow happened upon me ... well, I did not want to think about that.

The walk back was equally beautiful, if less adventurous. People were throwing tennis balls across fields, and their dogs would bring the balls back (amazing!). I saw a lot of attractive girls on bikes and was upset that I did not have my bike. But this was no time to think of ~~girls~~ bikes. I was on an adventure.

I reached the Panhandle and felt this to be an important moment even though I had not yet walked half the distance to the hotel. On the bike path in the Panhandle, I discovered an amusing path sign; I did not have a camera but bet that a google search would give me a picture. I was right:

I love you, San Francisco.

After the Panhandle, I was hiking city streets. When I reached the Alamo Square area, I took out my map and considered my choices. To my north, a park tempted me -- it was Pacific Heights, and though it would take me out of my way it promised to be stunning. To my east was Civic Center, which I could not see but which was on the way to the hotel and promised to be spectacular. I (wisely) chose Civic Center.

Civic Center is a dozen public and arts buildings around a plaza. It is very Stately. I collapsed in the plaza and finished the orange juice I had bought at a local store. I could hardly move my legs. I was not sure I would be able to walk again, but of course I could because I am awesome. I wanted to hang around and look through some of these buildings, but I was also exhausted and had to be at the hotel some time in the future (I did not have any way to tell time, so was unsure how late it was). I decided to make one stop, the San Francisco Public Library (main branch). I walked in. I loved the building. It was very modern and complicated and clean. I wandered through the stacks. I became frustrated. "Yes, this is a beautiful building, but it's modern and complicated and I just want to figure out where the philosophy section is but CAN'T because this building is modern and complicated and I'm exhausted and can't spend the rest of my day trying to figure out this library." Thus ran my thoughts. Denver Public Library's main branch is simple to learn and comfortable to hang out in and the San Francisco Public Library's main branch is not. I was very upset.

I walked up Market, exhausted and delirious. I did not know it, but I passed our hotel and walked a couple blocks in the wrong direction; but this proved lucky, as I met Drew, Josh, and Jake in front of the Mac store. They had just returned from Alcatraz and were on their way to the Levi's store to shop for Josh. Although I was tempted to partake in my favorite hobby, I was too exhausted to accept and made my way back to the hotel. I was sidetracked, however, when I discovered that I was right next to Union Square, which we had yet to visit though it was so close to the hotel. I walked up into Union Square and sat down. I could not think straight. My legs bent like wheat in the wind. A thousand people walked by me like so many ants -- I recognized a pattern in their many-tracked movements but could not decipher them. Buildings hung over my head like the boughs of steel and glass trees, rocking gently in the afternoon sun. The squeal of cars resonated throughout the square like the pitch of raptors echoing down canyon walls; car exhaust blew across the Square like a desert breeze. The very stone I sat on shook and rumbled with the city's life. And I was exhausted and delirious.

The hotel was only a few blocks away from Union Square, but I got lost. This happens when you cannot think straight in an unfamiliar city. I lurched a bit through the Tenderloin -- a charming neighborhood -- before I finally circled back to Hotel Bijou. Once in our room, I slept for half an hour before Jacob, Josh, and Drew returned. They showed me their Alcatraz pictures and told me about how great it was while I told them that my adventure was greater (but I did not have pictures to prove it).

That night we met Josh's other San Jose friend, Jessica, and ate at Golden Era, another vegan Chinese restaurant dedicated to the Supreme Master. Jake was visibly fed up with all these restaurants -- not that he wanted a steak, but he prefers meals without the ceremony or hassle (like a salad from Whole Foods). It was Friday night and Jake and Josh were determined to get drunk. They went off to a bar with Jessica while Drew and I went back to the hotel. Drew thought about going with them, but I convinced him that reading his Land Rover Owner International magazine would be more fun than watching the others get drunk.

Back in the hotel, I read Montaigne while Drew watched Lost and spent a long time talking on the phone with Beth. He had been calling her everyday. He would frequently explain her awesomeness to us. Quite often, and quite unprovoked, he would exclaim: "[*expletive of your choice*], I miss that girl!" I am not sure, but I think those two might have something going on.

I fell asleep on the bed rather early. This means that Josh, to my relief, slept on the floor. Jake and Josh did not stay out very long and could not have been very drunk considering how easily they woke up the next morning. Jake, in fact, would be the one to drive us out of SF. We were packed and ready and checked out by 7am. We walked over to the garage where our rental had been parked and asked for the car. They could not find it and we waited in the garage while a worker ran to a lower floor to look for it. What would we do if it was gone? It wasn't though. The car rolled up and we drove out.

We left San Francisco and headed for Las Vegas. Vegas was Jake's special request. Drew, Josh, and I hate the place, but Jake (who loves it) paid for most of this side-trip and made all the arrangements. He planned to get plastered and blow a lot of money on roulette. We were not to get in his way.

It rained for most of our drive, even/especially in the desert. The drive through California was wonderful -- nothing but wind farms and rolling, green hills. Josh moaned about leaving behind Michelle; he had been used or rejected by all the girls he liked in Denver and so lamented leaving behind this new romantic horizon. He called Michelle his "ideal" girl and cursed the distance between Denver and San Jose. I do hope the two get together again.

I slept for a lot of the drive. Once in Vegas, we checked into the Luxor. I had already felt uncomfortable just driving in Vegas, but I was downright terrified walking through the Luxor lobby/atrium/casino. The empty, tasteless glamor of a Vegas casino (of the whole Strip) stinks of desperation. What won't Vegas do to separate me from my dollar? "I feel like I'm about to be robbed," said Drew. I agreed.

After checking in and putting our things in the hotel room (the nicest room we had during the trip), we went to Whole Foods for dinner. How many Whole Foods had we gone to this trip? On our way out, I grabbed the most decadent desert I could find: a cannoli (cannolo?). "Why did you have to grab my favorite?" the girl at checkout asked. "Well, I am looking for a wild night in Vegas." I got it--

I had trouble keeping my hands off my cannoli. But I convinced myself to wait until I was alone. Josh and Jake showered (if you'll remember, Josh's first in days) and prepared for a "night on the town." Jake had it all planned out -- clubs and casinos and girls (he wished) and everything. He had already downed three cans of Pabst.

Jake, Drew, and Josh hit the Strip. I was alone. Bliss at last! Little compares to the decadence of a cannoli! I took a hot shower, sunk into a bed, and read Montaigne. Rain rapped a tranquil rhythm on the window. I was oblivious to the desperate cacophony of the casino beyond the door. I was asleep by 9:30.

At 11:30, Jake body-slammed me. Bewildered, I pushed him off and he rolled onto the floor. "Whoa! How'd I get here?" "Jake's wasted," Josh explained. I only got the story in jumbled bits, but the gist is this: Jake drank seven cans of Pabst; then he ordered a "football" of hard liquor, and before he had finished half of it, he began vomiting; Josh (also drunk) and Drew (not drinking) got him home (but not before he vomited several times in the street/parking garage); Jake didn't even get to gamble. In the hotel room, not far from where I had pushed him off the bed, he passed out under a table.

Jake's enthusiasm and planning had all gone to waste. Originally, he hoped to stay up and party for the entire night, and we would dutifully fetch him at 6am or so and let him pass out in the car while we drove the stretch back home. Instead, he lasted about three hours on the Strip. He did seem to have fun though; and now a new phrase has entered our circle: "That's [messed] up like Jake in Vegas!" If you want more of this story, ask Josh or Drew what happened.

I was the first up the next morning but everybody woke reasonably early (they were, after all, in bed before midnight). Jake had vomited on the floor during the night and had to clean it up. The lobby was quiet when we checked out aside from a few, old, rural Americans with Hawaiian shirts and beer bellies sitting at penny slots. But no Chads or Ashleys around, thank you. We went to Whole Foods for breakfast and began the long drive home to Denver.

Snow blanketed the Utah desert. A light rain met us at the otherwise clear Rockies. We crossed through the Eisenhower tunnel and hit the final leg -- thick snow and white-out conditions! From a green San Francisco to a glowing white Denver ... We had found a new appreciation for this little city, our home.

--------------------------------

For more details and legends about our trip, especially those I am too modest to discuss, look for Joshua, Drew, or Jacob: Josh can usually be found at Whole Foods; Drew can usually be found with Beth; and Jake can usually be found converting Republicans to Democrats. I have tried to be honest yet judicious with my notes; for every line I have written, there was a line I could not write. I still may have written too much. To those offended by this immoral account, I apologize.

-Feb 2010

auteur woes

2010-02-11T17:01:00.001-07:00

A discussion about the auteur concept is going down at girish's place. This is a topic that interests me, so I wanted to jot down some thoughts here.

The frequency with which people throw around the word 'auteur' has always annoyed me, especially when it serves only as a description of quality. Calling James Cameron an auteur, for instance, is just a way to distinguish him as a director of quality, as someone who consistently delivers what the audience asks of him, as an 'artist' with an unpolluted personal vision; it is a simple way to give artistic legitimacy to any director a writer chooses.

'Auteur' is one of the defining concepts of artistic legitimacy in film theory. How do we value a film? What standards of art and beauty do we hold film to? The Cahiers crowd aggressively accorded artistic legitimacy to the auteur (and fought the artistic legitimacy of studio-polish), and young film ~~snobs~~ lovers have readily picked up on this method of artistic valuation ever since.

The rise of the internet+film discussion has given the word a healthy boost. It is an easy way to talk about and judge films, and using the word 'auteur' gives the writer/speaker an air of cultural sophistication and so bolsters the legitimacy of his/her opinion. Its spread and sway is no surprise. It can legitimize any creative producer. If we can call James Cameron an auteur, why not Steve Jobs?

These complaints aside, I personally do find something attractive about the auteur. Rivette, explaining the allure of the auteur, once compared Hawks with Moliere -- this comparison worked for me. Moliere is one of my favorite playwrights, but it is his body of work as a whole which fascinates me more than any individual play; and this is true, too, of certain directors -- Welles, Renoir, Lubitsch -- whose filmographies are more dynamic and exciting than any individual film within them. It is John Ford, however, who exemplifies what curiously compels me to the auteur concept: his characters, themes, and style (everything but his camera) repel me, but watching a Ford film can be a genuinely thrilling experience, and I delight in having another piece of the giant puzzle that is his filmography.

To counter myself: perhaps consuming enough work of an artist/filmmaker will lead one to discover an underlying persona or artistic vision to connect with. John Ford, after all, made a lot of films; if you see enough of them (nearly 50 in my case), you cannot fail to feel his presence, to be drawn to it.

I am not an auteur-driven movie-watcher. I have found the concept of the auteur useful as a critical method -- to discover similar themes and techniques among an artist's work -- but terribly limited. As a matter of artistic valuation, whether a film is the product of an 'auteur' does not matter much to me. There are many other ways to judge this art. I worry that the auteur has limited the judgments of young film lovers. I worry that films are hastily categorized as 'auteur' or 'non-auteur' and judged accordingly (the latter always losing). I worry that the widespread use of the word auteur has turned it from critical tool to meaningless show. I worry that artists too often fret about their artistic vision and strive blindly to be 'original' and 'personal' when that was what they were all along.

Anyway, I am hoping that the few regular readers of this blog could comment with their own thoughts. What has the auteur meant to you? What do you think about how widespread this word is? Do people overvalue the auteur as artistically legitimate (as I think) or not? &c.

January 10 favorites

2010-02-03T00:29:00.001-07:00

Slow month. More slow months to come. Here are my favorite first-time viewings for this month:

An Inn in Tokyo (1935)

5th Ave Girl (1939)

Duelle (1976)

She Had to Say Yes (1933)

The Aviator's Wife (1981)

By the time this is published, I ought to be in San Francisco. Do not panic. I will be back next week.

Euripides

2010-01-27T20:10:00.003-07:00

For my literature project, I read 10 plays by Euripides.

So much of Greek tragedy revolves around fate and prophesy and gods and grief and so many other things I don't believe in; it seemed crafted to repel me. I had hoped that Euripides would be different, especially after hearing the following repeated so many times: "Of all the ancient Greek dramatists, Euripides says the most to modern readers." How careless I was to consider myself a modern reader! (Even Cyclops disappointed me!)

What to say of Euripides? However much I may put him and tragedy down, honesty bids me say that I have enjoyed myself. Greek myth, once so foreign to me, becomes clearer with every play I read. With every play I read, I enjoy myself the more. I am now comfortable with the stories, the themes, the places, the people, the gods. And I desire more. I may read the rest of Euripides's surviving plays soon, and I am tempted to reread Aeschylus and Aristophanes (what emotions will they teach me this time through?).

But I am kind of puzzled about what makes Euripides so "modern." He is more cruel than Sophocles and Aeschylus, I think. His gods and people are less noble. Does cynicism speak to modernity? Do we prefer the flawed and ugly to the ideal? Undoubtedly we do. It speaks the most to our experience. But I -- to separate myself from tragedy -- seek something else. Something more mundane. Something more aloof. Something more--

But who knows what I seek? Perhaps a trip to the oracle will tell me. Excuse me while I make my sacrifices at Delphi...

a tale of the wind (1988)

2010-01-24T23:27:00.012-07:00

Joris Ivens spent a most of his career making leftist documentaries. This did not please Western governments, and he was on bad terms with most of them, including his home, The Netherlands. By the end of his career, however, he wanted to distance himself from politics and release the philosophy-poetry that burned in his heart (and lungs (he was sick)).

In the early 1980s, he began to think about a film to be called The Roof of the World. During this time, The Netherlands decided they ought to repair their relationship with Mr. Ivens -- who, after all, can spurn a man so wise, so traveled, so old? -- and so awarded him the Golden Calf in 1985. This reconciliation opened doors for Ivens, who discovered that people suddenly respected him (and not just young-ish Paris intellectuals).

(A note: one of those young-ish Paris intellectuals, a lovely Juliet Berto, cast him in a film she directed, Havre (1986). What specific impact this had on Ivens, I do not know; nor do I know much about Juliet Berto aside from what I've gathered by her presence in JLG and Rivette films. This girl is one cineaste I must learn more about, as preliminary research turns up very meager results -- I shall follow this up sometime.)

Respect brought Ivens the financial backing necessary to embark on his project, an idea which had solidified over the years and which was now called The Wind.

A Tale of the Wind -- the title this project ultimately adopted -- follows Ivens around China as he attempts to film the wind. He muses about himself, Chinese culture, and life and death (as an 89 year old), among other such trivialities. It is his final film. The capstone of his career. The summation of his spirit. The Joris Ivens film.

However, I would like to point out a name that is usually forgotten in the discussion:

Marceline Loridan, wife to Joris Ivens (30 years his junior). She survived concentration camps as a Jewish teen. In Paris, she became interested in socialism and film (as people in Paris are wont to do). She participated in that cinéma vérité bedrock, Chronicle of a Summer (1960). She met and married Joris Ivens, who, though critical of these vérité and vague filmmakers, became friendly with some of them. The pair traveled and worked together. Loridan was with Ivens until his end.

For The Wind, Ivens originally planned to use two crews; Ivens's crew would film the wind, while Loridan's crew would film Ivens's crew filming the wind. Complications arose. Ivens was sick and, in a particularly serious incident, required on-the-scene surgery (in China, before transported back to France (from what I read)). Loridan filmed it all. (This is represented in the film -- and I believe this is a recreation -- when Ivens collapses in the desert and is rushed to a hospital.) This resulted in a reshaping of the film; in his biography of Ivens, Schoots writes:

with the expansion of Loridan's directorial role came a shift in the concept of The Wind. According to the plan, Ivens was to be a cineaste in search of the wind and Chinese culture and Loridan's crew would simply observe him at work.

Thus the two crews became one. The Wind became Loridan's film.

How strange, then, that her name is forgotten! As much as A Tale of the Wind is about Ivens, it is about Loridan's relationship with Ivens -- her love, respect, and dedication. And yet she is given so little notice; I have uncovered few biographical details about her (here is one bio) (she is not even listed as a director for the film on IMDb (but who takes that site seriously?)). She is a vital contribution to the film, and everybody who approaches A Tale of the Wind ought to keep her in mind.

Anyway, I want to digress into another topic: the Monkey King.

The Monkey King appears throughout the film; he throws banana peels and unplugs microphones and laughs and commits crimes of every sort. Schoots shares a story which intrigued me immediately:

There is a famous story in which the Monkey King sits in the palm of Buddha's [sic] hand boasting about his knowledge and insight. After Buddha asks him to show him how wise he is, the monkey sets out in search of the end of the world and pisses on one of the five pillars he finds there. He returns to Buddha and confidently tells him that he found the end of the world, whereupon Buddha says: 'You pissed on one of my fingers.'

Who is this Monkey King? Apparently he is a very influential character in Chinese mythology. He also seems to be a central character in Journey to the West. I found a summary of this Monkey King online which, thanks to its bad English, is disarmingly charming:

The Monkey King was born out of rock, and hence is extremely strong and durable - in fact he is totally invulnerable. He is immortal, having gorged himself on the life-giving peaches of the Jade Emperor's sacred garden. He is also extremely smart - he learned all the magic tricks in the world from a master Taoist, so that he is now able to transform himself into seventy-two different images such as a tree, a bird, a beast of prey or a bug as small as a mosquito so as to sneak into an enemy's belly to fight him inside or out. He can employ clouds as vehicles allowing him to travel 180,000 miles in a single somersault. He uses a Wishing Staff he got from the Dragon Kings of the Oceans as his favorite weapon - it can expand or shrink at its owner's command (he normally stores it in his earlobe). He can turns clumps of his hair into any object he desires. His fiery eyes can see through most illusions. Being made of stone, he is uncomfortable underwater.

Wikipedia offers a more informative (if less charming) summary (it seems the Monkey King comes to an unfortunate end -- Buddhahood).

At one point in A Tale of the Wind, Ivens himself appears as the Monkey King. Keeping the legends in mind, one imagines Ivens, carved of stone, somersaulting to the ends of the earth to commit unforgivable acts of mischief. One might examine this as a symbolic (and playful) representation of Ivens's career. But I am not that one; I just thought I should point this amusing symbol out.

Ivens is placed among other symbols as well -- the Moon Fairy, a dragon, the drunken poet, the warrior statues, the wind. Is Ivens saying something about himself? About culture? Is Loridan saying something about Ivens? There is a lot of symbolic information to work through when interpreting this film.

Ivens and Loridan finished the film and showed it around. Although it earned respect, one would not dare to call it a "hit." In an interview, Ivens spoke of his next project, though I don't imagine either Loridan or Ivens believed they would make it. This project: a film about fire, the second film in a series about the elements. A part of me still hopes this will be made.

Ivens and this film are still to be discovered and studied. Lately, Ivens seems to have become more popular. A good sign.

a short film about the indio nacional (2006)

2010-01-18T15:24:00.002-07:00

Apparently, Philippines/Filipino cinema is hip these days. The names Lav Diaz and Raya Martin and Brilliante Mendoza keep appearing as I click across the internet. Adrian Martin, commenting on the fickleness of film culture, calls Filipino cinema "hot."

Intent on staying hip, I sought out a Filipino film last month. I had never seen one before, and the only Filipino film name I knew was Lino Brocka. But his films looked boring. I looked around some more and discovered the name Raya Martin. He is young, he is smart, and (it seems) he likes old movies. Furthermore, he is somebody I would hang out with (at coffee shops and cinematheques).

Filipino films are not easy to find here (must be why they are so hip), but eventually (it came to pass that) I saw Raya Martin's A Short Film About the Indio Nacional.

I did not understand it. There is stuff about a bell-ringer and a solar eclipse and a revolutionary; what's it all about? I know nothing of Filipino history, and the whole thing seemed foreign and inaccessible. The style intrigued me -- Martin obviously understands early cinema techniques -- but I felt there was a depth of symbolism and emotion that I could not begin to penetrate.

I read around online. "Indio Nacional" is the (common) people. They lived under Spanish colonial rule until the 20th century (the film is set in the 1890s, the beginning of cinema + the end of Spanish rule). This did not explain what I was watching.

Finally, I found help from blogger Oggs. He writes:

The film is elliptical. It begins with prolonged woe, with the wife's troubles and the husband's suggested sorrowful past, continues with a recounting of history, and ends with a conclusion of a nation's destiny of sadness. Martin is of an age group of Filipinos who have been deprived of history. History is merely learned through schooling, through books whose own sources are questionable results of centuries of colonial rule. Simply put, Martin is of an age where the history learned is the history of the privileged. The heroes of the Philippine Revolution are the illustrados, the wealthy, the learned and the titled. The indios (commoners) are merely pawns, foot soldiers of a revolution that led to the nation's supposed freedom from the clutches of colonialism. But has the nation outgrown its colonial masters when its own history is clouded by foreign historians who have neglected the stories of the common folk? Martin, through the film, has visualized his belief that ours is a nation that is bereft of a national identity. He fashions a film that could have been made by any native Filipino, if handed a video camera while in the midst of the Philippine Revolution. He will not capture the drafting of treaties or the promulgation of constitutions or other grandiose moments in written history. Instead, he will capture are the ordinary, the droll and mundane, non-effects of the War. There will be an abundance of religious articles, simply because that is what he was force-fed with. There will be numerous deaths, because that is the logical repercussion of poverty and slavery. There will be humorous sketches that display the Filipinos' ignorance and deprivation of knowledge.

Having puzzled over the film for a few weeks, I finally realized I was approaching it the wrong way. Why did I see a symbol-heavy historical commentary? The film is nothing more than a reclamation of history for those without it. It is a film made in the 1890s, but which could only be made 100+ years later. That, I have to say, is pretty cool/fascinating.

I have a lot of Filipino cinema to catch up on if I am to be hip. I imagine they are as difficult and novel as this. I hope that I can see another of Raya Martin's films soon. Or, even better, hang out with him and talk about movies and just be all around awesome.

some blog reviews:
Lessons From the School of Inattention
the persistence of vision
Critic After Dark
Lilok Pelikula
Landscape Suicide

cinema and post-representation

2010-01-15T23:18:00.004-07:00

A conversation I had the other day turned my thoughts to post-representation. This post is about post-representation. Actually, these are more like preliminary notes on a subject I want to explore more. There will be little substance to this post and lots of disconnected musing (in other words, worth skipping*).

So, on to representation: most (all?) of film/art theory rests on representation; the image is approached as a representation of something, whether a personal artistic vision (auteurism), a broader cultural aesthetic (national cinema/artistic movements/so on), a symptom of a cultural context (multiculturalism/identity politics/so on), &c. The image itself is a representation of what is photographed (a face or a landscape or whatever happens to be in front of the camera). And so on. Art and symbolism and hermeneutics and it's all representation.

Well and good. What is post-representation? Let me describe how this subject came up: Dusty and I were debating. He said Brakhage's films were pre-linguistic; I said they were post-linguistic. No, Dusty argued, they are before language, they are before thought, they just are! Brakhage himself, I concede, will most likely consider himself pre-linguistical; his writing expresses his wish to achieve the magic of experience before language and all the surprises that the senses were in for. But no! I respond, Brakhage's films are only possible after language and after representation. Without language, how could we yearn for that time before language? Without representational cinema, how could we imagine a non-representational cinema? As you can see, I am obviously right, but we fought bitterly over it nonetheless.

Post-representation is about experience. Language is a representation of consciousness. Words name experiences (which include sensations and emotions and thoughts and probably more stuff). Understanding this gap between language and the inner-experience it represents teaches one to consider the experience rather than the representation. And consciousness is a far more broad, fluctuating, uncertain thing than representation.

Film (and art and pears and sex and everything, actually) is both representational and non-representational. When one consumes an image (in one's mind), one naturally analyzes it as and through representation, building on to it all sorts of meanings and contexts and things. But before that, beyond that, all around that, is the immanent conscious experience of the image -- the sensations one sensed and the feelings one felt. These experiences are what is turned into representation.

Your mind without thought -- that is experiential non-representation.

Now about cinema: the earliest theorists worked, for the most part, to describe what was experiential. Eisenstein, Epstein, Clair; montage, photogenie, cinema-pur -- these are theories about cinematic rhetoric, about which formal qualities create the most thrilling and awesome cinematic experiences. Although theories of representation were appearing in other arts and seeped into film theory, cinema was still young, still innocent. Theories of representation, however, sprouted like weeds with the emergence of semiotics and post-structuralism and psychoanalysis and other things many and absurd. Film (+art) became increasingly self-conscious about its representational qualities. Artists no longer created art -- instead they crafted feminist or Marxist or post-colonial critiques.

We are still in this paradigm today. It has grown up a bit, and has expanded alongside cultural criticism. With cultural criticism and identity politics, however, there has been a peculiar shift back to the experiential. Note this. Cultural criticism focuses on how the interpretation of a film (+art) is shaped by a person's cultural experience. It is still representational insofar as experience represents a cultural/historical context, but cultural criticism is looking once again at the non-representational.

Following my crude history, I ask the question: Will post-representational theories emerge?

I want to answer "yes" to this, considering it sounds like a fine project for a fellow like me, but I am not sure what a post-representational theory would look like. I list some observations below and hope that within them is a base to begin with---

Observations on post-representation

-if the emphasis is on conscious experience, description of this experience will be most important. Descriptions of experience must include descriptions of what is experienced (the film). I, who have always had a distaste for symbolic and representational readings of art, have noticed that in my own writing I strive for the detached and empirical -- jettisoned are the subjective descriptions (as in: "this film is sad") and totalizing overstatements (as in: "this film is a masterpiece" (blech)). One becomes scientific when dissecting one's own soul.

-this in mind, it seems there should be a renewed interest in film form and its various rhetorical effects.

-the representational and non-representational always intermingle. As language is shaped by experience, so too does language shape it. One's representational analysis of a film is just as important as one's non-representational experience of it. Representational film readings will not vanish; on the contrary, they will be important tools for shaping and expanding one's own conscious experience.

-artists, hip to the new post-representational phenomenon, will be freed from self-conscious representational critiques. They will explore new forms of perception. Filmmakers will be less intellectual (but don't have to be) and more physical -- a cinema-of-the-gut.

---------------
*You have now skipped my post. Thank you for stopping by!

no trifling with love

2010-01-12T02:40:00.000-07:00

Before going too far into my lit project, I wanted to get some practice writing about books and I wanted to write about some of my favorite plays. This post is about Alfred de Musset's play No Trifling with Love (1834).

Here are the play's opening lines:

CHORUS. Gently rocked on his prancing mule, Master Blazius advances through the blossoming cornflowers; his clothes are new, his writing-case hangs by his side. Like a chubby baby on a pillow, he rolls about on top of his protuberant belly, and, with his eyes half shut, mumbles a paternoster into his double chin. Welcome, Master Blazius; you come for the vintage time in the semblance of an ancient amphora.

The chorus and stylized language recall the Greek tradition. What is striking (what stroke me) is the expressiveness of the language. These are details and descriptions usually found in serious literature, not in plays. More naturalistic dialogue would fail to capture so expressive a tone. From what I have read, Musset wrote his plays without any intention of having them staged (because of the disaster the production of his earliest play proved to be); and they are, indeed, seemingly unstageable. Though No Trifling with Love is quite stageable (in spite of its frequent scene changes), its high language conveys a stiff attitude of indifference to performance and theatrical convention. I find this a most attractive feature of the play.

The play's opening lines set the tone for what is to follow. Observe how Master Blazius, a man in a position of respectability (as tutor to Perdican), is characterized as slovenly and child-like, as a hypocrite and a drunk. The language is dense, the portrayal brutal. So too the rest of the play swells with vicious satire and cruel wit. One might call this "comedy" but would soon find the description inadequate. The best description I have yet read calls the play a "tragedy of innocence." But this too is inadequate.

The play reverses the time-worn comic conflict -- two young lovers, cousins Perdican and Camille, have both just finished their education and have come of age; they are brought together to their childhood home by the Baron, who intends for them to marry. Rather than the Baron standing in their way, as classic comedy calls for, he has planned for this day his whole life. No, it is not the Baron who keeps the lovers apart but the lovers themselves. It is in particular Camille's education at the convent, where she has adopted the wounds of life of the elder nuns, that prevents her from accepting this marriage proposal. Upset with each other, Perdican and Camille play games of jealousy and revenge, ultimately ending in tragedy.

The lovers destroy themselves. This appeals to me. They understand only too late that happiness was there for them were they but to accept it; but they, humans that they are, did not want it, could not have it. Camille's fear is singled out as the igniting cause, fear that she would end up broken and alone like the nuns in her convent. In the final scene of Act II, Perdican confronts her fears and scolds her for refusing life. The following is from his speech:

Farewell Camille. Return to your convent; and when they tell you one of their hideous stories that have poisoned your nature, give them the answer: All men are liars, fickle, chatterers, hypocrites, proud or cowardly, despicable, sensual; all women faithless, deceitful, vain, inquisitive and depraved. The world is only a bottomless cesspool, where shapeless monsters climb and writhe on mountains of slime. But there is in the world a thing holy and sublime -- the union of two of these beings, imperfect and frightful as they are. One is often deceived in love, often wounded, often unhappy, but one loves, and on the brink of the grave one turns to look back, and says: I have suffered often, sometimes I have been mistaken, but I have loved. It is I who have lived, and not an imitation created by my pride and my sorrow.

Perdican is trying to teach what few humans learn: life hurts (a lot), and is going to hurt... and that's OK. Camille, who has lived life's pain through the stories of her convent's nuns, has chosen, in declining marriage to become a nun, to reject life. Too blinded by the anticipation of pain, she has rejected what it means to live and all the highs and lows that life might bring. For Perdican, pain and ugliness are part of being human; we must accept it. He (with weighty viciousness) rebukes Camille for doing otherwise.

I love this speech. I had, upon first reading the play, absorbed it into my own philosophy. We are human, we are monsters; and I'm fine with that! I have taken a lot more from the play as well, especially Musset's writing style -- one can be tragically expressive yet incisively witty (though his other plays are perhaps better examples; they are less vicious, and I hear it theorized that this is because of his personal romantic life, which looked quite bleak while writing No Trifling with Love).

The play's rich style and tragically youthful philosophy have branded me. I hope I have conveyed something of my admiration with this post. I leave you now with other quotes from the play that have left quite an impression on me, and I hope that if you have not yet read the play, I have convinced you now to do so:

AiSii ... Neither friendship nor love should accept anything but what they can give back.

AiSiv ... Knowledge is a fine thing, lads. These trees and this meadow find a voice to teach the finest knowledge of all -- how to forget what one knows.

AiiSi ... I don't deal in pride; I care for neither its joys nor its pains.

AiiSii ... like Caesar, I would rather be first in the village than second in Rome.

AiiiSVii ... Shall I not find a sensible man here? Upon my word, when you look for one, the solitude becomes appalling.

AiiiSviii ... Why is truth itself a liar?

AiiiSViii ... We must do wrong, for we are of mankind.

Sophocles and Aesop

2010-01-10T14:37:00.004-07:00

As a part of my lit project, I read the surviving plays of Sophocles and Aesop's fables.

Sophocles
Tragedy has something to teach me, but I am not yet sure what that something is.

Ancient Greek Dramatist Scorecard--
Aeschylus ... no
Aristophanes ... yes
Euripides ...
[Menander ... yes]
Sophocles ... no

Let's do this, Euripides.

Aesop
I do not understand why I did not read these as a child instead of Dr. Seuss. These are so much more bizarre. Many similar stories strike on similar morals, undoubtedly leaving a fine impression on young minds. Their matter-of-fact telling is at odds with the whimsical story told. It is adorable.

Favorite fable:

The Ass and the Grasshopper.

An Ass, having heard some Grasshoppers chirping, was highly enchanted; and, desiring to possess the same charms of melody, demanded what sort of food they lived on to give them such beautiful voices. They replied, "The dew." The Ass resolved that he would only live upon dew, and in a short time died of hunger.

literature project

2010-01-05T01:52:00.024-07:00

Some months ago, DG emailed me the following:

I'm thinking of devoting much of my reading next year (i.e. when I can start doing leisure reading again) to classic novels and plays. I want to understand the form that 20th century literature did away with. I don't suppose you'd be interested in joining me for the novels but would you be interested in looking at plays? Wait of course you would. I think some of the stuff I want to read is stuff you like - 18th and 19th century stuff, maybe going all the way back to Shakespeare? Could always go for some more Greek stuff too I suppose... it's time for this to happen. I've done the 20th century - must move backwards...

[Update. DG has decided he does not want to follow through. The following paragraph has been edited to reflect this.]
So this is ~~our~~ my project. We I will read classic literature. I will blog about it here. ~~DG there. We will try to synchronize some of our readings, but will otherwise go our separate ways (and hopefully cover a lot of ground between us).~~ DG is the worst online lit friend ever and I hope something really bad happens to him. Not so bad that it ruins his life but bad enough that he regrets abandoning this project and being an overall jerk. Watch yourself, DG. Trouble lurks in the margins of every 20th C book you read.

All posts I write will be linked below.

Updates:
[lit project write-ups stopped]
J 11 The World as Will and Idea
Je 20 The Sorrows of Young Werther
Je 19 Montaigne
M 13 Homer
M 4 Callimachus
Ap 26 Homeric Hymns
Ap 23 Ovid's Fasti
Ap 18 Tibullus
Ap 9 Propertius
Ap 5 Hesiod
Ap 2 Pindar's Odes
Mr 25 Idylls of Theocritus
Mr 24 Heroides
Mr 20 Eclogues and Georgics
Mr 6 Odes of Horace
Mr 2 Lucretius On the Nature of Things
Fe 25 Aratus
Fe 23 The Aeneid of Virgil
Fe 17 Ovid's Metamorphoses
Ja 27 Euripides
Ja 10 Sophocles and Aesop

December 09 favorites

2010-01-02T03:06:00.000-07:00

These were my favorite first-time viewings during this past month.

Some Photos in the City of Syliva (2007)

Miss Mend (1926)

The Private Life of Don Juan (1934)

Joris Ivens films

(of the 9 Ivens films I watched, these were the 4 I most enjoyed)

Pour le Mistral (1965)

...A Valparaiso (1963)

The Seine Meets Paris (1957)

Philips-Radio (1931)

This is my third month making this list. Had I been making these for the entire year, I could have picked my favorite first-time viewings for the whole year. How cool would that have been? Instead, all I can offer are my five favorite first-time viewings for the past three months:

1. Joris Ivens films (see above)
2. Film Ist. a girl & a gun (2009)
3. Four Seasons of Children (1939)
4. Diatoms (1968)
5. Under the Bridges (1945)

If I can keep these lists up for another year, expect a cooler list at the beginning of 2011.

favorite films of the 2000s

2009-12-31T00:34:00.006-07:00

Film lovers have been making "Best of the Decade" lists for several months now and have been making a lot of noise about it, too. This is my own contribution, but without the noise.

I am still new to this decade's cinema. I only discovered that it appealed to me after watching Cafe Lumiere this past summer, and I have been trying to catch up on this decade ever since. I had hoped that this list-making year-end frenzy would provide a wealth of recommendations for me to study, but alas it is not so. Everybody seems to be recommending Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lord of the Rings. Woe is me.

I have alphabetized my list using English titles. It does not deviate much from standard arthouse decade lists (update: I have weakened my list with anime), but this might change once I have been better educated on the 00s. I have restricted myself to one film per director. There are 15 films.

LIST

5cm Per Second (2007)

Brand Upon the Brain! (2006)

Cafe Lumiere (2003)

Film Ist. a girl & a gun (2009)

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006)

In Praise of Love (2001)

In the City of Sylvia (2007)

Linda Linda Linda (2005)

Love Exposure (2008)

Marie Antoinette (2006)

Medicine for Melancholy (2008)

Nights and Weekends (2008)

Of Time and the City (2008)

Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007)

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Finally, I take this opportunity to note: on every list I have come across, somebody has commented that they were shocked that their favorite film does not appear on the list. I have not commented on these lists and I am unable to name an absolute "favorite" from this decade, but I want to contribute to the trend. So I wish to say that I am shocked -- shocked! -- that I have not seen a girl & a gun on any other list by mine. What a shame.

Updates.
Je 6 Expanded to 15
Mr 5 -Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) +Medicine for Melancholy (2008)

ivens, politics, poetry

2009-12-26T13:35:00.001-07:00

I first discovered Ivens (like most North Americans, I suppose) through The Bridge (1928) and Rain (1929). Mundell has something to say about this at Senses of Cinema:

These early films -- in particular The Bridge, Rain and Philips Radio -- retain a high critical reputation for their cinematic beauty and formal inventiveness. Film historians place them equally among the founding films of documentary and the tail-end of Europe's silent avant-garde. However, in light of what Ivens went on to do, they are also “safe” films for critics to like. They are not politically explicit and do not transcend what is acceptable in terms of manipulation for the camera. This is Ivens before he was “spoilt”.

I find this argument peculiar. I have always known Ivens to be a political filmmaker -- every blurb about the man tells me so -- and I have never known film critics/scholars to shy away from the political. (By "political" I mean "leftist," as the case is for the 20th century.) Perhaps they are safe choices, as likeable as they are, but I think these earlier films are best known (here to young film-lovers) for reasons of availability. The early avant-garde is quite popular, and Rain fits in perfectly with a DVD release. Ivens's other films, his later political ones, have the misfortune of being original, of fitting into no defined cinematic "movement," of crossing the lines between politics and poetry, "realism" and "formalism," short and feature. I do not think people are repelled by this work (who would call it "spoilt"?); they just do not know about it, or do not know that they could know about it (as it is a rather rogue branch of their standard history).

That is my thesis. Now on to my guilt: of all the Ivens films I have watched this month, it is his least political (and most poetic) films which I have most enjoyed; namely The Seine Meets Paris (1957), ...A Valparaiso (1963), and Pour le Mistral (1965). Especially The Seine Meets Paris. I have conversed with myself for days about the endless beauty and charm of that film.

I have withdrawn myself from politics. But the left still holds my sympathies, and I find no fault with the messages in films like Borinage (1933) or The Spanish Earth (1937) or Power and the Land (1940). At least, I certainly wouldn't call them "spoilt." But nothing compels me to them, either. And I feel guilty for this because the messages are so painfully heartfelt and sincere. Watching an important Spanish soldier in battle while Orson Welles (is it really him?? the credits say so, but I cannot believe it) tells us he died in that battle is quite moving. But why am I left so cold? I know what it is to believe in this cause, and I know that I ought to engage with Ivens's politics with equal sincerity.

OK, then. Sincere question: What is the hoped-for end of these political films? It is this question with which I stumble when considering films from the left. Perhaps the final end is "defeat capitalism," but one does not bring down capitalism with a single film screening (at least, I hope political filmmakers are not thinking this -- what a disappointment when capitalism continues as it always has!). A film is part of a larger process, a brick in the building of "class consciousness." But how to build class consciousness and proletariat solidarity with a film? There are generally two schools of thought answering this question: the realists and the formalists. The formalists argue that the masses have to be agitated out of false consciousness, and thus the formalists use all manner of artistic agitation in their art. The first half of the 20th century was a hotbed for this school. Eisenstein and Brecht are two noteworthy examples. The realists argue that reality has to be "redeemed" in art, and that bourgeois art (as consumed by the masses) creates false consciousness and masks the suffering of the proletariat; only by portraying reality as honestly and brutally as possible will the masses wake up to their situation under capitalism. This school finds roots with Lukacs and the beginnings of Marxist literary criticism, but it really takes off in the latter half of the 20th century after Bazin and Italian Neorealism.

I draw the reader's attention to Ivens's place in this narrative: Mundell thinks Ivens poses a challenge to the "realists," who so dominate our thoughts today, while in the beginning of his political career Ivens was criticized by the "formalists," who did not like his realist approach. What a pickle.

Before I can comment any further on Ivens's own artistic ambitions, I must study up on him some more (and I will, I will -- though I never seem to keep such promises). Mundell identifies his poetic films, the ones I find so wonderful, as his "mature" films. This is encouraging. The serenity of this poetry, though informed by politics, accomplishes so much more on an artistic/emotional level than straight politics does. So I think. But, again, I really need to study up on Ivens, now that I have a solid foundation. I am most curious about how he originally got into politics and into the left. It happened some time between Philips Radio and Borinage (presumably before Song of Heroes (1932)). Amusingly, Ivens's shift from poetry to politics can be pinpointed in a moment in New Earth (1933). Let me tell you about it:

New Earth is adapted from Zuiderzee (1930), a film Ivens made earlier about the Dutch who "set about reclaiming land from the vast northern inland sea, building dykes, pumping out water and creating new agricultural land." This was part of a series of films called We Are Building. It was commissioned by the Dutch construction workers' trade union (Algemene Nederlandse Bouwarbeidersbond -- so the internet says). From this Zuiderzee film, Ivens made New Earth with the help of two friends, Van Dongen and Hanns Eisler.

The first twenty minutes of the film document the building of dykes and the harvesting of the new land. This is all done in a very relaxed style. In the last ten minutes, however (and this is the crystallization of the political Ivens), the film abruptly changes into a charged polemic, yelling at the fatcats atop the Depression who are letting grain rot while thousands starve so that they (the fatcats) can keep prices high. Newsreels of the Depression are cut in to this section (many of these images are also cut into Borinage) and are accompanied by a bombastic voice singing these lyrics (written by Eisler):

they are throwing bread into the flames
they are throwing grain into the sea
when will the bag-throwers throw the robbing fatcats down?
you see, that is strange, my boy!
you see, this will be some winter, my boy!

All that is amusing enough (I enjoyed myself), but what is more amusing is what Schoots has to say about the film. Apparently this political finale was Eisler's idea, not Ivens's (although he went with it). Schoots describes their difference of opinion:

The addition of a political finale was not a stylistic improvement. A film that had formed a superb unity had been extended with an extra reel in which both editing and commentary were glaring and obtrusive. Ivens had sacrificed the form to the message. He realized that it lacked cinematic unity, and hoped to compensate this with 'the uniting strength of the ideas'. Later he admitted that 'for an economist my position is primitive; the film is an appeal to justice, humanity, common sense.' Eisler, on the other hand, was wildly enthusiastic and wrote to Brecht that, in comparison to New Earth, Eisenstein's Potemkin was 'a sickly, rightist-reformist, yes, almost petit bourgeois, concoction.'

One can only admire such humility.

For those curious, Brecht also had an opinion about the film:

When New Earth was completed, Eisler, Brecht and Kisch viewed the results in a private showing. The Czech expressed his doubts about the scene with the grain, whereupon Brecht declared: 'Kisch, this is a classic masterpiece, you're talking rubbish!'

That is enough politics. Poetry is what I crave. I must rewatch A Tale of the Wind (1988).

philips radio (1931)

2009-12-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

Most of my viewings this month have been Joris Ivens films. This Ivens kick has been long overdue. I have decided to write about some of these films.

Philips Radio began my Ivens kick. As an abstract "industrial symphony" and early silent-sound hybrid, the film is certainly a safe entry point for me. It is beautiful and pleasant...

I write this mild description of the film because other bloggers have not found it mild, beautiful, and pleasant. This confused me.

For example, this guy writes:

The first Dutch sound film, it was commissioned by the Philips Eindhoven company, branches of which refused to show it. This film is openly ambivalent about the factory whose activity it shows.

Glass bulb blowing exerts its usual fascination; the strenuously puffed cheeks are no worse than afflicts a musician playing certain instruments. The tone is moderate; most of the film seems neutral -- although at length this in itself projects something of the dehumanizing factory monotony of Jean-Luc Godard’s British Sounds (1968) and Pravda (1970)....

Ivens’s film expresses the ambivalence towards the factory that most of us, consciously or unconsciously, feel. Such progress -- at such a human cost.

If this is what Philips Radio expresses, I completely missed it. I saw people at work, all of them quite human. But if this guy's fact about Philips branches refusing to show the picture is true, I really missed something. Perhaps this "pleasant" film is actually critical.

This other guy seems to think so:

At this early stage Ivens already observes social problems. He showed the deadly repetitious action of a boy at a stamping machine where the machine seems to do the thinking and the boy the moving. Hundreds of girls working at the endless conveyer belt - where a girl would be fired if she broke one of the thousands inexpensive bulbs which she handled daily. The glass-blowers rarely live beyond the age of 45 and earn only 10% more than their fellow workers.

Where did these new facts suddenly come from? None of this was in the film I saw. Glass blowers blew and stamping machines stamped and girls did routine routines, yes, but all in a very pleasant way. I saw no injustice or death to speak of. Here are some screenshots of workers; tell me if you see injustice/death:

After reading these strange bloggers, I sought clarity. In Hans Schoots's biography of Ivens, I found it:

The Dutch reviews of Philips Radio were favorable but far from jubilant. A striking number of critics complained that Ivens showed an excessive interest in the machinery and too little interest in the people who worked at it. 'Ivens didn't see any people in the factories,' wrote Het Volk, and even spoke of a 'document inhumain'. The filmmaker himself developed an ambiguous attitude to this piece of work. He sometimes liked considering it a documentary version of Chaplin's Modern Times, but although Ivens also showed man as an appendage of the machine, he lacked Chaplin's critical approach. At other times Ivens simply said that the film gave an impression 'of what a cineaste who is sympathetic to the product sees'. More than anything, his film shows his enormous respect for modern technology, an admiration that was consistent with the aim of the film. During shooting Ivens explained to an NRC journalist: 'The audience has to be fascinated by what it sees, it has to be impressed by the company, so that it goes away thinking: a company with a set-up like this must make a good product.' He had made a company film in pure Neue Sachlichkeit style, something no one could reasonably object to. Although there were apparently some dissenting voices, the management of Philips was generally satisfied and the screening even brought tears to the eyes of old Mr. Philips. A company press release spoke of a 'good modern film', and Philips proudly referred to 'our Ivens film' in letters to the Commission for Film Censorship.

Good. I am right. But what of the places that refused to show the film?

This did not stop the film from being cut for screenings in Rotterdam and Nijmegen. The film was too long to be part of a double feature within a normal program, and as a concession to the theater operators, Philips arranged for it to be shortened. The abstract, experimental ending took the brunt.

I do not know what is wrong with bloggers these days; one is safest not reading them.

As for Philips Radio ... I leave you with images of mechanical abstraction, the beauty that is the film's heart:

the seine meets paris (1957)

2009-12-18T11:47:00.005-07:00

ticket stubs

2009-12-16T22:35:00.001-07:00

This is a follow-up to my previous post.

I have been saving ticket stubs for several years. I remember starting this habit even before getting into film. I did it for no real reason except sentimentality, deciding once I got home that I did not want to throw my ticket stub away. The pile grew for a number of years before, one day, I cleaned my room and either put my original pile into a corner I have not yet rediscovered or else threw it away. According to the pile I have now, this date was some time in the summer of 2007.

But to the point: I had forgotten about my pile when writing my last post. I am looking through it now. On top is THE RED SHOES 12/4/2009 and FILM IST. A GIRL & A GUN 11/18/2009. Digging deeper I find some curious tickets from screenings I can't even remember. Some highlights:

THE 39 STEPS 11/1/2008
MAJOR BARBARA 10/4/2008
MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY 9/16/2008
LA MARSEILLAISE 11/3/2007 (I have seen multiple Renoir in a theater!)
ROOM AT THE TOP 10/6/2007
DEATH OF A CYCLIST 8/26/2007
CRIA CUERVOS 7/29/2007

This is a very strange and scattered history. I am not all that careful about ticket stubs, and frequently tear them (in which case I do not keep them) or lose them or throw them away by accident. And as a film student, I had many theater privileges which need no ticket. Most of my theater history is thus absent from the current record, and it is sort of frightening to think that if I could forget so many screenings that were on the record, what have I missed that is off it?

At the very bottom of my pile, where my current record begins, are two tickets:
BRAND UPON THE BRAIN 7/14/2007
GOLDDIGGERS OF 1933 7/14/2007
I stared at the tickets for a moment before I realized what this meant. "That night was even better than I had remembered." It was a double feature. I listed Brand Upon the Brain! as one of my three best in-theater experiences, and I could not even remember that it was a double feature.

I will pretend this is a comment on how underwhelming my experience with theaters has been.

my best theater experiences

2009-12-15T18:54:00.001-07:00

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to see The Red Shoes (1948) in a theater, on a newly struck 35mm print. The crowd was fussy, and people were walking in and out of the theater throughout the screening. At every reel change, the sound would cut out for a few moments, stopping sentences short and leaving the ghostly image foolishly mouthing words. And, in the quiet moments of the film such as these, the sound from a particularly noisy film playing across the hall would seep into our theater. These distractions were tremendously unpleasant. I had come for the colors and not for the story (which I consider weak P+P), but still, I would not have minded the total imaginative immersion that the distractions made impossible.

All this set my mind on the in-theater viewing experience. Had I ever had a great one? Were such experiences worth anything?

The theater experience is overrated. Most film lovers adore the theater experience, but when I think of the film theater my first thought is of Sullivan's time with the "farmer's wife" ... yes, that awful. I mostly avoid the theater; admittedly, however, this is because the types of films that get screened in theaters are usually the types of films I think are worth avoiding. (My taste is not of the people's.) Some theater experiences have diminished my respect for a film; occasionally I have walked into a screening of a film I once loved in my youth, quite buoyant with anticipation, only to walk out of the screening disappointed and slightly angry. Such is the case with Fight Club (1999) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). (And I regret to say that The Red Shoes has also fallen in my estimation since seeing it on the big screen (but not the colors!).) The worst theater experiences generate within me a blistering, uncontrollable rage; Inland Empire (2006) and There Will Be Blood (2007) fall into this category, both experiences thoroughly horrific because the theater's sound was too loud. This sort of experience can only be described as physical violence (think A Clockwork Orange). In both instances, I walked out of the theater never wanting to watch a film again, and my pain only increased when I learned that my friends, whom I had hoped were as tortured by the film as I was, had loved it and wanted to see it again. What betrayal! Good friends are hard to find.

Let no one tell me that I must experience a film in a theater. Such people are insufferable. I know that many of them are good at heart and simply think, however naively, that the in-theater experience is the best. But there are many others for whom the theater is a test of legitimacy -- they think that you cannot have a legitimate opinion about a film until you have seen it "how it was meant to be seen." There are many tests for legitimacy, and undoubtedly your opinion will never be legitimate in their eyes. Legitimacy snobs should be shipped to Siberia.

For all that, I have had fine viewing experiences in a theater. They were difficult to remember, but, having dug them out from all the bad and indifferent memories, I have decided that I would not trade them for anything. In fact, I want to share them. Here are my three favorite in-theater viewing experiences, listed in chronological order:

#1. Jaws (1975); fall 2005

Although films had my attention at the time, I was not yet a film-lover -- I was a physics major, and one morning, while I was driving to school, I noticed a multiplex theater sign which read: "Giant Screen: JAWS." I suddenly had something to do that night.

I went to the screening alone. (I would bring a friend along to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) a few weeks later.) At the theater I discovered that they screened "classics" like this every Wed. for a few months in the Fall and that, to my delight, the screenings only cost $5. I had never been this "in-the-know" about films before.

I took my seat. The theater filled rather quickly ... not quite full, but still a few hundred people by my estimate. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how big this theater is. And "Giant Screen" is an understatement. One could land an airplane on it.

This was my first time in such an environment. For those who can imagine it, I need not stress how deeply, profoundly awed I was by the experience. There was so much space, so much noise, so much energy, so much life. That night, I was in love with movies.

But this was years ago. I hate the film now. And I am more than embarrassed that I once fell under the spell of such vulgar hullabaloo. But nostalgia wins this time. For a night, I understood what movie magic meant. It gripped me. I laughed and gasped and sweated and all sorts of weird things with hundreds of strangers, and that meant something. It was a defining moment. In just over a year I would be making the leap from physics to film studies. Although I have life left yet to regret this switch, today I can remember the Jaws screening fondly and wonder at my innocence.

#2. Brand Upon the Brain! (2006); summer 07

Before Brand Upon the Brain! played in Denver, I had known of Maddin only through his short The Heart of the World (2000), which I watched once on the internet. ("Watch" is a curious word for what I do with movies on the internet.) Others had recommended Maddin's work to me, as I had grown fond of early cinema by this time and Maddin, it seems, likes early cinema, too. I was cautious, though. For most people, a pastiche of early cinematic techniques usually just means cutting out the sound (and putting in ragtime music) and color. Sometimes the actors dress in something like old-timey clothes (usually badly done). Nobody pays attention to framing, lighting, editing, camera movement, and every other technique that defines early cinema. They just cut the sound and think it clever. Such pastiches are always painful to watch.

Hearing that Maddin's work was a pastiche of early cinema did not encourage me to see his films. What was worse were the comparisons to Lynch and surrealism. "Surrealism," too, is a completely misapplied and misunderstood technique in film. Please, people, study up on early cinema some more.

All these things considered, I braced myself and entered Brand Upon the Brain!

Before Brand Upon the Brain! started, The Heart of the World screened. I did not know this was going to happen. I was excited to see it for real. In the five minutes between the start of The Heart of the World and the end of it, I discovered that everything people said about Maddin was wrong. This is not a surrealist pastiche of silent cinema. This is something completely different, completely new, completely awesome.

And nothing could have better prepared me for Brand Upon the Brain! My heart was flying. It flew through most of the feature. I wish to describe the sort of impact it had on my mind while I was watching it: with most films, I can grasp an image easily; I can understand it spatially and figure out its place in the broader context pretty quickly. When I cannot work out an image immediately, I ask myself questions and play with the image in my mind. Why this shot? Why this time? How does it fit? In Brand Upon the Brain!, I began by trying to apply the same thought-process; many of Maddin's images are complicated -- they are very expressively shot, and their subject is frequently unreal and surprising, and all of this is made the more overwhelming by the rapid-neuro-editing style Maddin has adopted. The film's incredibly complex images pass across the screen like lighting, and one barely glimpses an image before another strike occurs. All my efforts to stop and grasp the image failed. I could not understand, in expressible terms, what the images meant, and somewhere around "Chapter 6" I stopped trying. One doesn't need logic for Maddin. One needs emotions. I let Maddin's pseudo-retro childhood fantasia flow through me. Those are vague words for a vague experience. I cannot describe what I thought or felt once in the grip of this film, but hopefully you trust me when I say that it was thrilling.

Maddin had me thinking in images, not words. There were times when, because the editing is so frantic, I began to feel as though I were catching the individual frames. And not only those frames, but the moments of darkness that cushioned them. That's right, I saw the darkness on the screen that no one sees thanks to the "phi effect." And ever since that night, when in the presence of some banal moment in other films, I have sought that darkness, have looked for that darkness between the images. It never fails to restore my interest in film.

It was a special night. I became a Maddin fan. I learned that for some festival screenings, Brand Upon the Brain! had live sound performers instead of a soundtrack. That sounded cool. Would that have been a better experience? I doubt I would have seen the darkness in such conditions. The performers might have been altogether annoying. No need for envy. I was perfectly happy with my theatrical experience. Best to treasure this memory. Best to remember the darkness.

tangent:

I may complain about the theater experience, but I have been lucky enough to see many wonderful movies on the big screen, including my favorite film (listed first): Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Sherlock Jr. (1924) (and many others from Buster), Rules of the Game (1939), It Happened One Night (1934), The Thin Man (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Lady Eve (1941), Black Narcissus (1947). The list goes on. Comfortable theater experiences. I have also had a good dose of the 60s arthouse experience: I have survived the films of Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Fellini, Godard, &c. in the theater. I do not get to the theater often, but I have accumulated a list of in-theater experiences that impresses even me.

And I am usually alone (or virtually alone -- at a screening of Amarcord (1973) this past summer my two comrades fell asleep!). My aloneness also impresses me. It could be that I regard the theater to be so low because I go there alone ... but then I remember that most of my worst theater experiences have been with a group. Also that I was alone for each of the three screenings in my list.

So I have a brief story to tell which, I hope, explains both my mysteriously impressive in-theater list and my preferential in-theater solitude:

On the first Saturday of every month, Starz Denver Film Center, the theater at (what was once) my school, screens a free classic. Many of these films are taken from the theater's small archive, whose history I have heard pieces of but has yet to be satisfactorily explained. In my fledgling film days, these screenings were a blessing -- I could count on going to the theater at least once a month (and the theater is a luxury for a poor student) and seeing a film which was, at the very least, old, which was all I needed to know I would enjoy myself.

I went to these screenings alone, mostly because it is hard to find people willing to see an old movie, even a free one. One month, however, I convinced some friends to go. Or precisely: one friend, his younger brother, and his younger brother's friend (but I consider all three to be good friends). The film was Went the Day Well? (1942). We loaded ourselves with Japanese candy from a nearby Asian grocers before the film. We were all quite happy.

At these screenings, before the feature, the theater also plays a short film (all films selected and introduced by H. Movshovitz), and since this short film is not noted on the schedule, it is usually a surprise. That night, Listen to Britain (1942) played. I had heard of this short before but did not know much about it. I soon discovered that it is a montage documentary. I also discovered that I absolutely loved it. So much detachment and artistry, yet so much pathos! Such a strong propagandistic message of unity and strength, but so little of it feels like propaganda! My brain filled with thoughts and questions. I did not want the feature to start yet.

But it did. And I enjoyed Went the Day Well? a great deal. I absolutely connect with British WWII propaganda and its understated emphasis on British character. Normal, stubborn people continue to be normal and stubborn, in spite of those humorless Germans. Brits don't lose their heads or get sentimental. Went the Day Well? is all about this sort of thing; ordinary Brits do ordinary things which happen to be extraordinary in wartime. And, with all that, the film does something beautifully audacious, in a very British sort of way: the film takes place after the war has ended, even though the war was still happening. Were I a WWII-era Brit exposed to such films, nothing could have stopped me from enlisting.

But enough about the film. It ended. And I was still thinking about Listen to Britain. My friends and I strolled out of the theater. They had enjoyed the film a great deal. That is good, I thought. I was hoping they would enjoy it. But what I wanted to know was: "What did you guys think about the short film that played before?" They hesitated. Nothing to say, perhaps. Finally somebody responded: "What was the short film? I don't remember it."

#3. Major Barbara (1941); fall 2008

This was another such free monthly screening. I had been attending the screenings only rarely by this time since I had become familiar with most of the films they showed, but were they to play nothing but Major Barbara every month I would attend every screening. I had fallen in love with it earlier that year, quite by accident, after stumbling upon a VHS copy of it in the library. This is what a screen version of Shaw should be, I thought.

Every seat in the theater was filled. This happened sometimes. I remember one night when, after having ticketed out a screening of The Third Man (1949) and still having people line up for it, they decided to show the film simultaneously on another screen, and promptly ran out of tickets for two whole theaters. One screen played a 16mm print, the other the Criterion DVD. My friend and I saw the Criterion screening. But The Third Man is one thing, Major Barbara quite another. A lot of this crowd had come after hearing Howie review it on the radio; I do not know what praise he heaped on the film, but judging by the crowd his review must have been stellar. Major Barbara needs the publicity -- if only more critics would follow this example!

When the film started, I worried that the crowd would have trouble understanding the jokes; Shaw's wit is many-layered, and some of the jokes are difficult to catch when they are delivered by thick, lower-class London accents. But the crowd surprised me. They caught all the jokes I hoped they would, and they laughed at many jokes I had never caught. I was surprised. I had underestimated the crowd.

The greatest joke comes in the third act, when Undershaft rebukes his son. I copy it here from the play (slightly different from the film), but change the final lines to the punchline I remember from the film:

STEPHEN. I hope it is settled that I repudiate the canon business.

UNDERSHAFT. Come, come! don't be so devilishly sulky: it's boyish. Freedom should be generous. Besides, I owe you a fair start in life in exchange for disinheriting you. You can't become prime minister all at once. Haven't you a turn for something? What about literature, art and so forth?

STEPHEN. I have nothing of the artist about me, either in faculty or character, thank Heaven!

UNDERSHAFT. A philosopher, perhaps? Eh?

STEPHEN. I make no such ridiculous pretension.

UNDERSHAFT. Just so. Well, there is the army, the navy, the Church, the Bar. The Bar requires some ability. What about the Bar?

STEPHEN. I have not studied law. And I am afraid I have not the necessary push -- I believe that is the name barristers give to their vulgarity -- for success in pleading.

UNDERSHAFT. Rather a difficult case, Stephen. Hardly anything left but the stage, is there? Well, come! is there anything you know or care for?

STEPHEN. I know the difference between right and wrong.

UNDERSHAFT. You don't say so! What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only the simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you're a genius, a master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too!

STEPHEN. You are pleased to be facetious. I pretend to nothing more than any honorable English gentleman claims as his birthright.

UNDERSHAFT. ...You know nothing, and you think you know everything. That points clearly to a political career.

At this, the audience burst into the loudest, longest applause I have ever heard. This was the election season, you see, and we still had a month left until the vote and were all rather exhausted with politics. The applause/laughter was deafening, intoxicating. I have never heard a more beautifully crafted joke receive more beautifully sincere applause. I did not realize Shaw could still be appreciated. I did not expect it. I will never underestimate the crowd again.

A good crowd is worth so much. A bad crowd ruins the whole experience. I had the best possible crowd for Major Barbara. If only Shaw had been there! It is a night I relive with joy. Truly, I had seen Major Barbara "as it was meant to be seen."

That's it for my theater experiences. A smart reader will notice how dull my "best" experiences have been. I bet there are some wild theater stories out there. I would like to hear them. Please tell them.

November 09 favorites

2009-12-02T02:21:00.000-07:00

Here are my favorite first time viewings from last month (no number, no order):

Berlin Express (1948)

Voici les temps des assassins (1956)

Film Ist. a girl & a gun (2009)

That Hamilton Woman (1941)

July Rain (1966)

Four Seasons of Children (1939)

Prix de Beauté (Miss Europe) (1930)

Because I am about to ~~die~~ graduate and because I am having a number of computer problems (awfully frustrating), I won't be able to update much this month.

prix de beauté (1930) write-up

2009-11-29T14:44:00.010-07:00

Since screenshots are not enough, I have decided to post my thoughts on Prix de beauté (Miss Europe) (1930).

I first heard of Prix de beauté several years ago; I was a burgeoning film snob and watched the Pabst/Brooks films as part of my education. Prix de beauté, the finale to the European Brooks Trilogy, sounded like something I ought to see. No DVD or VHS of the film sat in the library, however, so I decided my education would continue without it.

Soon after that I discovered Rene Clair, and I prodigiously tracked down his films available on home video (and was subsequently delighted by them all). Clair, it turns out, had something to do with Prix de beauté, and so my interest in it suddenly refreshed. But where to find a copy? It was on VHS, I knew, yet there didn't seem to be a public copy available to me nearby. (This, I confess, was before I had become the expert I am today at tracking down copies of obscure films.) I dropped my search, but not my interest.

Years pass until one day, over a month ago, DG tells me how much he enjoyed Pabst's The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927). He asks me why I don't like Pabst -- "No," I assure him, "I like Pabst well enough. But I really should rewatch some of his films." I hadn't watched one for a while, after all. I begin my Pabst rewatches and come to Pandora's Box (1929). This is the first time I have seen the Criterion release of it. On the DVD set is an interview with Louise Brooks, Lulu in Berlin (1984). And in that interview, right at the beginning of it, is a clip from Prix de beauté.

This clip is from the end of the film, and I describe it here in full: Louise Brooks is sitting in a darkened theater, a handsome fellow at her side, a shadow or two behind her. Over her head streams the light from a rear projector; this is the only light in the room, and her face pulses with the alternating light and darkness. She is smiling, laughing. She is watching a film of herself. On the screen her phantom image, elegantly dressed, poses and sings in an elegant room. Here is a shot from the scene:

But all is not well. Some angry fellow (whom I discovered upon watching the movie is her fiance/husband) interrupts this happy screening with a bullet through her heart. Brooks jolts forward in a moment of shock. In an instant, she has recognized death. She falls; the handsome fellow clutches her, the angry fellow experiences his own shock ... and the phantom image sings merrily over her own corpse. [For more images of the scene, see my last post, the last three screenshots.]

The clip ends and the real Louise Brooks, the aged Louise Brooks, begins her interview. But I am not paying attention. Everything about that clip -- the lighting, the editing, the camera, the juxtaposition of film life over real life -- reverberated through my soul. When I learned this clip was from Prix de beauté, I scolded myself for not properly seeking it out. Why had I not seen it? This I had to change.

The film begins pleasantly: three friends are out for a day on the beach. Brooks is the one to watch here. She, in a tight-fitting bathing suit (which is still a leap in modesty from today's beach-wear), innocently warms-up, stretching and bending and smiling and all sorts of attractive things. A group of beach hunks watches on. "What a figure!" Lucienne's (Brooks) fiance, André, who is lounging on the sand, sees this and calls Lucienne over to lecture her. He is jealous. Ever so confident, Lucienne warms him with a smile and a song (the same song her phantom image happens to sing at the end).

This brief conflict is the base for the rest of the story. Lucienne has whimsically entered a beauty contest, hoping for the prize of 'Miss Europe,' and has not told André that she has done so. André, for reasons not sufficiently explained by jealousy, thinks that all such contests should be abolished (and this viewer totally agrees). Naturally, trouble arises when Lucienne wins the title of 'Miss France' and is sent to Spain for the final competition. She doesn't tell André. She leaves without him (but is promised that everything will be explained to her fiance).

After learning about Lucienne's victory, André moodily boards a train for Spain. And Lucienne wins the 'Miss Europe' title. Fame! Attention! Leering men! Lucienne is quickly picked up by a Prince and a Maharajah, but her heart still belongs André. When André arrives, he gives her a dreadful ultimatum: either leave Miss Europe or leave me. She leaves Miss Europe. One wonders if the love she chooses is worth anything anymore. One also wonders why André is so harassed and desperate. Surely if I had a girlfriend (though considering my hermetic, cold personality, I probably never will) who had won a major beauty contest (though she probably never would) and still wanted to marry me (this definitely could not be so) ... well, my story wouldn't end with murder.

Lucienne comes to regret her choice. At one point she looks longingly at a bird in a cage in a great confusion of symbolism. She contacts the Prince again. You know the rest.

Immediately after finishing the film, I tried to research it on the internet. But researching anything to do with cult stars is a risky endeavor on the internet; while in the library, it is easy to discern the academic gold from the idol-driven glitter, but while on the internet, one is not always sure whether a link will bring solid scholarship or cultish worship. One may browse a website for a good half hour before stumbling across a gossip-laden paragraph or fetishistic image and finally realizing: "Oh, it's one of those sites." At that moment, one is drowned in creepiness and quickly closes the browser and tries to forget everything just seen and read. Such was my experience during my first round of internet research.

I still have puzzles worth solving, however, and have none of the research needed to solve them. First, I would like to know just what roles Rene Clair and G.W. Pabst played in the production. Who wrote what? Who directed what? How did Brooks get into this film exactly? My cautious second research attempt yielded no answers; there is such a variety of accounts that it has only expanded my confusion. Some have Clair directing (or, starting the production before leaving it), others have Pabst directing (especially taking over at the end); some have Clair writing, others have Pabst writing. No one, it seems, is all that interested in the credited director, a certain A. Genina. The directing, though, is impressive at times, in a humble sort of way. (This may just be Maté's camera-work, which often dazzles.) I would greatly appreciate the clearing up of this particular puzzle.
[Update: This puzzle has been solved by DG; see his comment below.]

Another puzzle, which is only clouded by internet research, concerns the film's sound. The film is dubbed. Most of the sounds are simplistic and most of the spoken lines are simple. Brooks is obviously mouthing English most of the film except when she is singing her song, at which point sound and mouth startlingly synchronize. Brooks, so the internet tells me, is dubbed by an Edith Piaf. The film runs at a slightly rushed pace, filmed, I suppose, at a non-standard silent frame rate. (To note: I imagine most of these qualities disturb the average viewer. I find them ineffably charming, as only transitional silent-sound films can be.) The puzzle is this: How was the film planned and executed? Was it conceived as a silent film, sound added under producer pressure to make the film highly marketable? Or was it conceived as a sound film, shot the way it was in order to experiment with the new technology and discover its possibilities? I suspect the latter for two reasons: Louise Brooks synchronizes her singing with the lyrics; and the final scene is dominated by those lyrics, using them to reinforce the life of the phantom image over the death of the real thing. (To clarify: the screen test Lucienne does, which she watches in the end, is of her singing, which means the film-in-the-film must have been a sound film, and consequently Prix de beauté had to have been conceived as a sound film for this effect to work.) If I knew anything about film stock, I could interpret this image as either sound or silent stock:

The horizontal bars on the left look like sound. But what do I know? Although I lean toward the conceived-as-sound theory, the puzzle is far from solved. There are still many choices in the film which could be explained either way, and thus explained in very different ways. I ought to do more research (though won't). There is history missing here.

My final puzzle is not really a puzzle but a moment of amusement. At the end of the film, when André is sneaking up to the screening room to shoot Lucienne, he passes this sign:

"EXPLOITATION LOCATION"
I know the French meaning is different from the English. I know I have no reason for grinning and being amused. I know this is total misinterpretation. But the sign, if indeed this is in a film office, is so apt, so honest. I share this puzzle with the hope that no one will solve it for me. Let my amusement live.

So much for puzzles. And so much for Prix de beauté. I've known for years I would enjoy this film; I can finally gloat about enjoying it. Indeed, for those of us with sophisticated taste, this is our greatest secret: we make up our minds about a film before we see it. This lets us craft witty insights and explore subtle details while the vulgar still labor with their thoughts. It is a minor advantage, a worthless skill, and a difficult thing to learn, but one feels good gloating nonetheless.

So much for refinement.

Update: I browsed the library today, looking for clues. I didn't find much. Most people say that the project was begun by Clair and that he left it because of conflict with the producer and/or the very idea of sound in film.

I did, however, discover something about Genina. Concerning the Tenth Venice Biennale International Film Festival of 1942, Marla Stone writes:

Augusto Genina's Bengasi premiered on the film festival's opening night at the San Marco theater in Venice. A full house, according to critics, cheered the film and its director. At the festival's conclusion, the jury awarded it the Mussolini Cup. This 1942 production by Bassoli Films represents an expansion of Genina's war/propaganda films. By 1942, Genina had a reputation as the director of "virile" propaganda films that idealized Fascism at war....

I need no longer puzzle over his obscurity.

I also discovered a review of Prix de beauté I lament not writing myself. In the June 1930 issue of "Close Up" Charles E. Stenhouse writes:

A final French talking-film, Prix de Beauté by A. Genina and with Louise Brooks looking very photogenic as Miss France but not acting as well as when directed by Pabst. Never has one of Pabst's discoveries achieved more than when under his inspiring influence. Greta Garbo! Brigitte Helm! And now Louise Brooks! The big trick in Prix de Beauté is its remarkable ending, which redeems the previous passages whose very mediocrity emphasizes the ending's splendour. An exceptional end and for once not a happy one. Louise, who has won a beauty prize, accepts a talking-film engagement against the will of the man with whom she is living. The evening arrives when she is to attend the private viewing of her film. She is seated in the little projection room watching herself on the screen and hearing herself sing a popular melody. The villain-prince seated beside her is caressing her hand. Semi-darkness broken by the flickering beams of the projector. Her lover arrives, is guided to the door by her talky-voice. In jealousy, he shoots, she falls, but her figure on the screen-within-a-screen continues to move and to sing over her dead body the words of the song.
Ne sois pas jaloux, tais-toi...
Je n'ai qu'un amour, c'est toi!
A trick -- but really one of beauty and irony, and at last a morsel of true sound-film technique. For the rest, there are a lot of grand-scale portions and the dialogue is childish but Louise has developed a talky-laugh which appeals both visually and orally, although as the film has been post-synchronized credit for the oral part may be due to her unknown French "double." What a state of affairs.

prix de beauté (1930)

2009-11-27T10:41:00.004-07:00

denver film festival 2009

2009-11-20T03:15:00.002-07:00

film fest, 09:

I went to a few Denver Film Festival screenings this year; this is the first year I have done so. A couple of years ago, I nearly went to a screening of The Scarlet Empress (1934) (and regret not going), and the year before that I was tempted by a screening of The Big Parade (1925). (They seem to have stopped showing classics, the only exception to that this year being a 50th anniversary screening of The 400 Blows (1959).) But this year -- the first year I have ever respected what today's filmmakers are doing -- I wanted to see (nay, was desperate to see) two films, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (2009) and Film Ist. a girl & a gun (2009). I saw them. But my first festival encounter began a couple of days earlier.

Josh wanted to see a film called Harmony and Me (2009). I hadn't heard of it, but it played Saturday night, a night I always have open. OK, I said. I glanced at the film festival guide's film description. Indie. Comedy. Austin. I get it -- Austin, SXSW, Richard Linklater, slice-of-life, guy-whines-about-girl, Mumblecore. No, I should stop using that label. These guys are maturing in style, maybe even becoming important. But still: indie musician lead, ungrammatical title (from a song lyric), quirk and absurdity ... what else can I call it?

We bought our tickets that cold morning and appeared half an hour before the screening that cold night. We were supposed to form a ticket-holders line. Where do we queue up? we asked. Over there, on the other side of that pillar. We make it to the other side, confused, standing around for some minutes, dazed. Finally, some bold beginners start the line behind the pillar and we appear behind them. We had missed the sign. The line grows quickly (were the others loitering with uncertainty like we were?), and we are in an awkward location (an intersection, other festival goers cutting through us and asking once a minute what our line is for). "This is obviously well organized," a man in our line says mockingly, affectionately. I bet he loves this festival. He is middle-aged, white, well dressed (who isn't but me here?), clearly a fellow of humble authority. Having found security in life, he looks to learn culture, is here to become cultured. There are lots of these people around. "It was either [derogatory generalization of a film] or this," exclaims another. So many choices.

A coordinator comes out and begs us for our patience. We grant it. Later she thanks us, but asks us to wait a little bit longer. We are an exceptionally patient line, so don't mind her request. She appears again, this time for action, and leads us to a side door where our tickets are ripped and we are ushered into the theater and into our seats. We are in the big theater. It doesn't quite fill up.

The audience chats and gossips for those few minutes before the screening begins, but, all too soon, we are interrupted by a coordinator introducing the film. She also introduces the filmmaker, who finishes the introduction. He is hip. Oh no, I think. He is too hip, too dirty. Certainly smart, but not the demanding intellectual I had hoped for. But who is intellectual these days? I put aside my fears and hope that the film is more smart, less hip.

The lights dim, the screen blazes. Short advertisements for Starz play. A short film plays which I would rather forget. Josh asks for his Tofurkey Jerkey, which I retrieve from my bag. ("Jerk me," he says, a most uncomfortable joke in a darkened theater.) After that, Harmony and Me.

Justin Rice is Harmony. I have seen Rice in other movies, but, for whatever reason, can't recall them just now. This film begins after Harmony's last relationship has ended. He spends the rest of the film missing the girl he lost. It is by now a tired theme, but I am OK with that. The film is very choppy; episodic and emotionally unfocused, this film jumps quickly from one unrelated scene to the next, from one joke to the next. The cast is surprisingly big. Among them is Karpovsky whom I recently saw in Beeswax (2009). He is awesome. The film is paced by the jokes. The humor is sincere; it is that wit which is peculiar to the hip. The jokes are frequently uncomfortable. Jokes about love, jokes about death, a joke about sperm -- uncomfortable, crude, but not crudely done. They are honest jokes. Yes, I like this.

The film ends and already I begin to forget it. I try not to, but my memory fails -- no solid core to latch onto. The film's episodic structure works against it. It dissipates in my mind.

The filmmaker appears and answers our questions. Like his humor, he is honest. Oh, as it happens he is working on a film in which a character, tired of being dishonest, tries over the course of the story to become honest. So says the director, whose honesty is suddenly explained. He answers more questions. He tells us his inspiration for this film's character, Harmony, took root after an encounter with Harmony Korine. He tells us about the cover letter he attached to the script he sent to Justin. He tells us he has no explanation for the coma-lapse scene in the film. He tells us this film is kind of autobiographical, and that he shouldn't be telling us this (but, in the spirit of honesty...).

He tells us that snow flies thickly outside. He is telling the truth. The screening ends and we flow back out into the glowing, snowy night. I pull up my hood, tuck down my head, and slide across the wet sidewalk, Harmony and Me already a distant memory.

Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl played Monday evening. I arrived early. No line this time. I loiter in the lobby, gliding alone between the various festival goers and festival volunteers. I hang out near the master schedule and wonder about the various titles I was reading for the first time, concluding that I am lucky not to be sitting through them. I stare at the flat screen television at the other end of the lobby which runs an advertisement for a horror film. (I lost interest before I learned the title.) I browse one of the magazines that are piled in stacks against the walls, admiring the gloss and pictures that fill it. I wait. Finally a volunteer announces that seating for my film is ready. They rip my ticket and I drift downstairs.

This screening is also in the big theater. Since I am alone this time, I am able to take my favorite spot in the second to last row, atop a step which places the row slightly higher than the rest. I take out my notebook and a pencil and relax. Apparently a new 35mm print of The Red Shoes (1948) is playing in a few weeks, so the onscreen ad-slide tells me. Must go to that. Another advertisement replaces it. The theater begins to fill. Will this screening be as busy as Harmony and Me? Busier. The theater fills. A trio of talkative ladies sits behind me. The Red Shoes slide appears again. But then the slides stop, and the programmer for Starz appears and introduces the film. The lights dim. Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl begins.

I have had only two encounters with Manoel de Oliveira before: Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) and I'm Going Home (2001). Naturally, I am not sure what to expect from Eccentricities. I focus. The audience, however, needs more time. The ladies behind me whisper. Others shift in their seats, searching for comfort. Stragglers straggle in and blindly feel about for empty seats. The ladies whisper some more. I try my best to focus.

A train. A man. A stranger. A story. This is familiar. The story is set up quickly: the man, working for his uncle in Lisbon, falls in love with the (blond) girl across the street. Their windows face each other, you see. She fondles a unique and stylish Chinese fan, looking over it flirtatiously. The man is hooked. "A dove of ermine, snow, and gold," he says. He awkwardly pursues her, finally gets an introduction. All this bumbling greatly amuses the audience. He wishes to marry her. "No," his uncle-employer says. Either stay single or leave your position. Classic lover's dilemma. He leaves and searches for the money to support the potential marriage. He is in luck, but he must travel awhile. He does. He returns. Gets swindled out of the money he made. Is forgiven by his uncle. &c.

Something strikes me while I watch this, something which I also felt while watching I'm Going Home: this is not an intellectual film. I know that Oliveira's reputation rests in the hands of the arthouse crowd, but Oliveira's virtues are not those virtues of the challenging and ambitious arthouse directors. No, Eccentricities is disarmingly simple, sincere, naive. This is a glimpse of the innocence that the arthouse has lost. This (or so I feel) is art without the burden of the word, in spite of the burden the film critics may try to place on it.

This innocence is (quite unexpectedly) voiced in the film when a character recites a Fernando Pessoa poem; "Keeper of Sheep," XXXII:

Yesterday afternoon a city man
Was talking at the door of the inn.
He was talking to me too.
He spoke of justice and the struggle to achieve justice
And of the suffering of the workers
And of the ceaseless toil and hungry people
And of the rich, who just turn their backs to it all.

And, looking at me, he saw tears in my eyes
And smiled with satisfaction, thinking I felt
The hatred he did, and the compassion
He said he felt.

(But I was scarcely listening.
What does mankind matter to me
And what they suffer or think they suffer?
Let them be like me -- they won't suffer.
All the world's troubles come from poking our noses in one another's business,
Whether to do good or to do bad.
Our soul, the sky, the earth, are all we need.
To want more is to lose it all and be unhappy.)

What I was thinking about
While the friend of mankind was talking
(And that's what moved me to tears)
Was how the distant tinkle of cowbells
As night came on
Was nothing at all like the sound of bells in a small chapel
Where flowers and brooks would go to Mass
Along with simple souls like mine.

(Thank God I'm not good,
And have the natural egoism of flowers
And of rivers following their course
Intent, without knowing it,
Only on flowering and flowing.
We've only one mission in the World:
That's to exist clearly
And know how to, without thinking about it.)

And the man had fallen silent, watching the sunset.
But what's a man who hates and loves got to do with the sunset?

This intellectual burst sent me into a flurry of thought. So much of it rang true in me. So much of it didn't. In my flurry, I managed to jot down two words in the dark that happen to be the best two-word summary I can give of the poem: "exist clearly." I was unprepared for this message. It stunned me. As the film fades into my memory, as I examine its impact on my mind, it is this, my first encounter with Pessoa, that promises to carve the deepest wound ... the only wound.

The film ends. "OK, what?" one of the ladies behind me says. The rest of the audience quickly joins the buzz. I don't though. I was expecting this. I was waiting for it (one might characterize it as anxious anticipation). It was this that sold me to the picture. Eccentricities has a running time of just over one hour (described by others as a "micro-feature"), and I, who adore short running times and concise narratives, had to see how this film handled it. The audience becomes more noisy, and they seem to be finding many things to say about the film ("It really was beautifully filmed," one of the trio behind me explains); and all the while I sit there quietly, looking at my notebook, hiding an irrational grin. I am thinking about that ending I so anxiously anticipated: "yes," I write, "that was very satisfying."

Film Ist. a girl & a gun played Wednesday night. I arrive early again. Alone again. (Dusty was supposed to have come but canceled earlier that day.) I don't have to loiter for long, though. Seating is ready, and they rip my ticket and send me downstairs.

It's one of the normal theaters this time. I expect experimental films don't make it to the big theater often. That's fine. I seat myself optimally again, near the back, right on the aisle. I take out my notebook and observe the people coming in. There is something in this audience that wasn't in the audience for the previous two screenings: youth. This excites me. Also, although it is still too early to tell, it appears that the seats are filling rather quickly. This crowd for an experimental film? Oh, Dusty makes it to the screening after all. We chat. The theater fills some more. This is a lot more people than I had expected.

The film's programmer appears and we calm down to hear his introduction. I miss the first words he says, but no matter -- he has interrupted himself and is now apologizing for not giving the customary introduction which we have been receiving for other festival screenings. This film deserves much more than a canned introduction. Indeed, it gets something more. The programmer tells us how glad he is to see so many people here tonight, this late, for (of all things) an experimental film. This film is special to him, and he thinks it is wonderful to have an audience for it; he tells us this is the only chance we will have to see the film outside of a museum setting (unlike the other commercial flicks that populate the festival, in which the museum setting will be the most unlikely). "I know some of you are going to walk to out of this theater before the film has finished," he says ("I hope so," whispers Dusty -- and several people do walk out during the screening, but, for such a large audience, not nearly as many as I would have thought); but give this film a chance, he continues. "Let the sounds and images wash over you." I, already a fan of the film's director, need no further convincing, but I hope this programmer's sincere plea has convinced the rest of the audience. I hope they walk out of this theater as enthusiastic about Deutsch's technique as this programmer is. "I will program Deutsch until the day I die." What a fellow! Who is he? I want to thank him personally. Maybe even hug him.

The programmer exits. The theater darkens. As the short advertisements for Starz play, I breathe. The programmer thought this was Deutsch's best entry yet into the Film Ist. series. I was hoping he would say this. But one must not be carried away by one's hopes.

The film begins. "Film Ist." -- footage of Annie Oakley showing off her rifle skills -- "a girl & a gun" with texts from Hesiod, Sappho, and Platon (Plato). A Drama in 5 Acts.

Act I: Genesis. Hesiod first. The screen flashes in bursts of creation. A woman is the Earth. I try to get comfortable with the film's construction, try to remind myself that much of this found footage is almost one hundred years old (some of it older). Act II: Paradeisos. Humans, the Earth's children, frolic naked. I am finally getting into the film's rhythm, its logic. This is the creation myth; film is our creation myth. Act III: Eros. It is Sappho's turn now. I am captivated, and I soon experience my first moment of total devastation:

The film is juxtaposing images of people wearing masks: a woman reads a magazine in her home, a couple dances, a man reads a magazine on a park bench (why the mask?), a fellow looks at a pornographic photograph and tugs at his pants. The dancers again. The man on the bench rises and leaves. Oh, it turns out he's gone to the home of the woman magazine reader. "Hold it," I think ... and my heart plummets. In the early days of pornography, most people wore masks or disguises to hide their identities (as though the rest of their bodies wouldn't give it away). As I remember this fact, I suddenly realize what I am about to witness. The masks take on a new and twisted meaning. The mask-wearing, magazine-reading couple greet each other. They get friendly. A woman on a bed (new footage). The couple undresses. A man, looking desperate/forlorn, walks (new footage). A parrot (new footage). The couple has sex. The desperate man, a knife. The woman on the bed. The couple has sex. The parrot. The desperate man. The couple gets dressed abruptly. The desperate man is at the door. The mask-wearing fellow jumps out of the mask-wearing lady's window. The desperate man opens the door. The woman on the bed. The desperate man seizes her, brings up the knife. She grabs it, her whole hand gripping the blade. Blood runs down her arm. He raises the knife and plunges it downward. The parrot swings above, nonchalantly watching this act humans call murder.

And in this moment, everything comes together. I cannot think, I cannot breathe.

Unlike the previous Film Ist. films (what I have seen and remember of them), a girl & a gun makes extensive use of pornography. The film also constructs mini-narratives, like the one I have just described. Their sum emotional effect is overwhelming. I remember at one point during the screening, when someone from the audience was walking out, I wondered if they were walking out because they really hated the film or because they were so overwhelmed that they had to take a break. I am sure they would laugh long and loud were I foolish enough to ask them.

Act IV: Thanatos. To the pornography and violence, add war. My emotions riot. Act V: Symposion. But this is my favorite Act. In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes tells this myth: there were humans once who were double what we are (eight limbs, two heads, and all that). These humans, trouble to the gods, were split by Zeus, cut into two halves, incomplete, powerless. Thus these two halves now always seek each other, compelled to become whole, and erotic love is the expression of this compulsion, the joining of two human halves being the closest to our original state. I love this absurd, satiric myth. In the film, this myth is related as scientists peer into a microscope and watch cells divide; images of halves attempting to be whole are intercut with this. "This," I think, "is the most brilliant interpretation of that myth I have ever seen." It really is.

Annie Oakley began the picture; the final bandit from The Great Train Robbery ends it. "to be continued...." The credits roll. All the music and film selections are listed. The audience is silent. Dusty breaks out with loud applause. Good man.

Film is our myth. Film is: a girl and a gun, Eros and Thanatos, sex and death.

For each of these festival films, we are given a scorecard, each scorecard listing the numbers 1-5. At the end of the film, we are to mark our rating (1 is the lowest, 5 the highest) and submit them for the "Audience Award." I gave both Harmony and Eccentricities sentimental 4s, glad at least that such films are programmed. But there is nothing sentimental about this rating; I rip the number 5 and exit the theater (chatting with Dusty), eager to sort out my thoughts, eager to tell everyone about my experience.

-Nov. 20, 09

melody of the world (1929)

2009-11-11T17:41:00.007-07:00

What are you doing, Bernard Shaw?

"I beg your pardon, sir."
I suppose so great a wit can commit himself to celluloid however he pleases.

Also, for Josh --

Classy slaughterhouse, 1929 style.

update: G.B. Shaw Eclipse set to come in Feb., with an old favorite, Major Barbara. THANK YOU, CRITERION.

faves from Oct.

2009-11-06T12:06:00.002-07:00

Several people do this, so I thought I would join in (late). No promises about keeping it up month-to-month, though. Favorite first-time film viewings last month (no number, no order):

My Nights are More Beautiful Than Your Days (1989)

Diatoms (1968) + Pigeons in the Square (1982)

The Sun in a Net (1961)

Le pont du nord (1981)

Of Time and the City (2008)

Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007)

Under the Bridges (1945)

under the bridges (1945)

2009-10-27T23:55:00.002-06:00

"Unter den Brücken is actually my favorite film. Anyone who sees it today would not be able to understand that at the time, when there was no future any more and Germany's final collapse was a question of days, it was possible to film such a simple, almost idyllic story.... When I really think about it, what we did arose from the film makers' stubbornness to allow any of the horror which surrounded us to seep into our work." -Helmut Käutner, director

Notes:
Under the Bridges is available on an R2 DVD by FilmMuseum.

I found the Käutner quote in Silberman's German Cinema: Texts in Context, in a note to Ch.6 (about Käutner's Romance in a Minor Key). It comes from an interview Käutner did with a certain Henning Harmssen, though I can't find the text of this interview on the web. Please tell me if you know where to find the full interview (in English).

For more on Käutner, see: Who is Helmut Käutner? review, Film Reference, Film Among the Ruins. For a review of Under the Bridges, see Shooting Down Pictures.

Although there seems to be academic interest in Third Reich films, there isn't much critical interest. The reasons are clear, but perhaps mistaken. We politicize and other Nazi Germany, and it might be difficult to approach these films in any other way; but the skill I witnessed here warrants investigation. What fascinates me most, illustrated by the director's quote above, is the desperate affirmation of life in a time of death -- and this perhaps is what draws me to escapism, that wonderfully dark void beneath the naive charm. With simplicity and beauty, terror; one crosses to death not with tears but with song. Am I alone in this affinity?

le pont du nord (1981)

2009-10-21T21:21:00.003-06:00

There doesn't seem to be much written about Le pont du nord (in English). Most of the reviews state the obvious facts and obsess over the nebulous plot. The most interesting mention of the film is made by Deleuze (interesting, but not very helpful). For such a rich and difficult film, this lack of academic interest is unfortunate, and I am left with the feeling that I missed the film's most vital and interesting points.

Rivette is a tough nut, and I don't have the energy to crack him. But a couple of things really appealed to me about Le pont du nord. First is the theme of play, common in Rivette. The two women, Marie and Baptiste, are drawn into the abstract mystery as players and participate as though it were a game. The game itself is mediated by the map of Paris. See, they're playing:

According to their explanation of it, they are supposed to get through each trap without getting caught in them, and after that they win. Most of the traps are obvious (Prison), but some of them are curiously mundane (the Inn). The traps are located in Paris, according to the map the pair have gotten hold of which divides Paris into a nautilus-like spiral. (The game is called Game of the Goose in English. I have never before heard of it.) This mapping from game to city seems like it might be an important symbolic point. More on this later.

The two women bounce around Paris to complete their goal and get further and further involved in the sinister, completely senseless mystery. Game and reality intertwine. How does play function in reality? Play and sobering life cross at several crucial moments (more so as they near the end), but unlike other narratives which approach this conflict, in which the play and reality eventually clash to the demise of one, here they complement, blend to the point of being indistinguishable. Importantly, the film ends with play; Baptiste gets a lesson in fighting imaginary foes. What is real? What has happened?

The blend of play/life calls into question the experience of film. As people seem to take note of, Le pont du nord is an unpolished production -- one catches glimpses of the camera, mic, and moving corpses. Everything feels relaxed and amateur. Everything, if I may say it, feels like play. This connection is an important one. As viewers at play in cinema, we (usually) ask that reality (in the form of the filmmakers, or references to the world as it exists beyond the narrative) be completely absent from our experience. Does the knowledge that the filmmakers are playing (which is a reference to reality) change the way the viewer plays? (It does, of course, and people have noted this for a long time; I'm just rephrasing the question; playing with my perspective.)

The other important point I seized upon is the use of space. Marie, having just been released from prison, likes "wide open spaces." And, appropriately, the film is nothing but wide open spaces, being shot almost entirely outdoors. Parisian streets dominate the film, dominate the whole experience. Aside from the psychological impact of spending two hours in the streets, however, Rivette is making (I suspect) a deeper comment about Paris.

Several reviewers (including Deleuze) have noted similarities between the film and Don Quixote. Having not read the book (and not being a lit person), the allusion doesn't mean much to me. But yet, somehow, I want to connect Don Quixote's displacement in a changing landscape to Le pont du nord. Present throughout the film are cranes and construction sites, in various stages of construction or demolition. And with the dragon Baptiste battles the environment becomes a full faux-sinister comment on modernity (what?). Rawr:

What does this have to say about Paris of the time? About the social climate? Rivette was definitely saying something; indeed, for all its negativity the NYTimes review provides us with a very important clue:

At the press conference after yesterday's press screening, Mr. Rivette reported that the film was a collaborative effort, made last year in Paris by him, Bulle Ogier and Pascale Ogier (Bulle's daughter), and Suzanne Schiffman without a script. Together, he said, they wanted to make a film about what it was like to live in the France of the then-President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. They were convinced, he said, that President Giscard would be re-elected.

Paris under President Giscard. I certainly don't know anything about this. Is the film critical or optimistic? I wish somebody who knew this stuff would come in and help me out.

Thus the mapping of Paris takes on a new importance. What do those traps signify? The Prison? The Inn? The Bridge? Why is Baptiste so terrified of surveillance? And Marie of enclosed spaces? What are these wide open spaces? The dragon? The stone lions (all male; symbolic of power; which Baptiste seems to find annoying)? How does it all relate to Paris?

Je ne sais pas.

Where are you, scholars? I demand this film be un-puzzled for me.

Links to (mostly blog) reviews:
NYTimes
Fabrice Ziolkowski
Slant
Cinema Talk
Only the Cinema
SFS
The Face Knife
Wonders in the Dark

film as play

2009-10-18T20:08:00.003-06:00

In philosophy, the notion of art as "play" has appeared as early as Plato and Aristotle, and has an important place in Kant's aesthetics. Others have shared this idea. Consider these two quotes from the fifteenth letter in Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man:

1. Man is only serious with the agreeable, the good, the perfect; but with Beauty he plays.
2. Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing.

Not that his are arguments I want to make, but play forms a vital part of Schiller's philosophy. It forms a vital, if small, part of the philosophy of art in general. Why then have I not seen it earnestly applied to film?

Film and play seem a natural fit. Although the rigid commercial production of a film may diminish the chance for play by filmmakers (who has time for play with a deadline and budget?), the spectator at least sits in a theater determined to depart into imagination. At the cinema, we are all at play. We project ourselves into the image, are consumed by it. And, as with all play, we play with film to grow: we experience all sorts of new situations, emotions, ideas.

I have felt remarkably clear-headed in these few days I've thought of film as play. Films become less heavy. They are no longer the monoliths of ideology recent film theory says they are; enculturation is no longer a sinister perpetuation of existing structures, but a curious exploration of worldviews. (This is not to say that those worldviews aren't harmful....) But I think it is the scientist in me that finds this idea most appealing. Play has many legitimate biological functions, and, by thinking of play as a biological product, one can map our genetically prescribed rules to their cultural consequences (like film, or art in general).

According to a few quick google searches, lots of people have been researching the biological, cultural, and social functions of play recently. I hope this interest crosses over to film soon. That it hasn't been important before now is odd, especially considering the rise of interactive media like the internet and video games; video game theory has been heavily influenced by film theory, so why hasn't film theory yet embraced video games? Good question. I think I'll go play Monkey Ball.

Notes:
I read Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man by accident after finding it in a pile of Russian history books. It's not an easy read, and, unless you are interested in Schiller or philosophy, I'm not sure it's worth it. Consider this a mild warning from a mild mind.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good overview of Kant's aesthetics. More film people ought to have philosophy backgrounds (rather than half-learning the philosophies of complicated critical theory, which is what I am being exposed to in class right now).

Here's a thoughtful look at video games and the philosophy of art. This is a subject I need to explore further. The author's reading list looks great; that Homo Ludens book in particular interests me.

Finally, while browsing articles on the subject of art as play on the internet, I came across the Marxist thinker Plekhanov, and the essay Historical Materialism and the Arts. There is something refreshingly honest and naive about his Marxist approach, absent the complicated cultural criticism Marxism has become since the latter half of the 20th century. I am particularly interested in his thoughts on art as imitative and/or antithetic. This link is sort of off-topic and I expect it won't grab many people's attention, but I think it's worth reading.

la bohème (1926)

2009-10-14T11:11:00.003-06:00

Have I never noticed Gish before? I suppose I have (what else but Gish to love in True Heart Susie (1919)?), but all her minute girly gestures struck me hardest here (perhaps because the picture does not have much else going on...). Gish, you intrigue me.

There are things that both draw me to and repulse me from hardcore Woman's Pictures like this. There is something wonderfully compelling about classical, honest tragedy on film, something beautifully perverse about pretending to sacrifice one's life for love. But why is a woman sacrificing for a man, especially one as boring as John Gilbert? Sure he cries and repents at the end, but he's still soaking up her glory, unforgivably forgiven for his earlier jealous thrashing. Not a fellow worth dying for.

And yet... No, Gish dies for vanity. She dies a woman's dream, a martyr for her man, a virgin saint who cares nothing for herself and everything for her love. To project yourself as a martyr -- is there no better way to please your ego? To satisfy your vanity? I suppose this is the ultimate appeal of the Woman's Picture; housewives weep as they imagine their own sacrifices embodied by Gish. Women die for love, men for courage, intellectuals for wisdom. We all die for vanity.

The early Hollywood perception of artists is, in many ways, odd, perhaps mostly naive. There seems to be no reason (save perhaps fidelity to the source material) for this film to be set among artists, except to exploit the cliche that they are poor and starving (which is a major impetus for the characters, after all). Disappointingly, the film only lightly suggests that artists live without much regard for broader social norms (another favorite cliche; see: Design for Living (1933), a much more satisfying bohemian portrait), and, beyond the first 15 minutes, the film seems to avoid references to art altogether. If one is to set a film in the Latin Quarter (even if it is to be a hardcore Woman's Picture), one ought to have some fun with it.

And Edward Everett Horton as an artist? Wrong, wrong, wrong. And so right! (Again, see: Design for Living.)

Back to Gish: what to make of the innocence fetish? She is eagerly fetishized by the camera, but instead of a sexual body (today's norm) it's a virginal face. I had never thought about it before, but this is really off-putting. I would rather ogle legs than innocence, knowing then at least how I feel about the image; but a Gish close-up is an uncomfortable mix of the filthy and pure, the sexual and impotent. She is the virgin whore. Angels are masturbating to her image. This is too much for me. Must the camera linger over her features? Must light caress her shape? Must men always fall at her feet?

And yet... Gish, you intrigue me.

my nights are more beautiful than your days (1989)

2009-10-01T01:20:00.004-06:00

Screen grab stolen from Lauren. Read her short review.

I felt reckless after watching this movie. I wanted to channel their insane passion, their disregard for everything but love. An unfortunate desire for such a dull life. Brushing my teeth more vigorously did nothing but fleck my mirror with toothpaste. There is no room for reckless passion in my life. *sigh* But I suppose there is room for more Zulawksi.

psychological Russian acting

2009-09-10T17:32:00.002-06:00

Yuri Tsivian, on the topic of early Russian cinema, writes [13-18]:

The most paradoxical of the many strange features of Russian cinema in the 1910s is the immobility of its figures. The static Russian mise-en-scene, which to the uninitiated might appear to be a sign of hopeless direction, in actual fact bore all the characteristics of a conscious aesthetic programme.

He goes on to cite several sources concerning this trend. As a general description:

The film story breaks decisively with all the established views on the essence of the cinematographic picture: it repudiates movement.

A Russian critique of an American film:

As far as the whole pace of the action is concerned, neither the director nor the cast have managed to capture that slow tempo that is so common in the Russian feature-film play. The actors are still too fidgety, as the Americans are wont to be; their acting still derives largely from the superficial, from objects and facts rather than from experiences and emotions.

And a manifesto of the Russian style:

In the world of the screen, where everything is counted in terms of metres, the actor's struggle for the freedom to act has led to a battle for long (in terms of metres) scenes or, more accurately, for 'full' scenes, to use Olga Gzovskaya's marvellous expression. A 'full' scene is one in which the actor is given the opportunity to depict in stage terms a specific spiritual experience, no matter how many metres it takes. The 'full' scene involves a complete rejection of the usual hurried tempo of the film drama. Instead of a rapidly changing kaleidoscope of images, it aspire to rivet the attention of the audience on a single image.... This may sound like a paradox for the art of cinema (which derives its name from the Greek work for 'movement') but the involvement of our best actors in cinema will lead to the slowest possible tempo.... Each and every one of our best film actors has his or her own style of mime: Mosjoukine has his steely hypnotised look; Gzovskaya has a gentle, endlessly varying lyrical 'face'; Maximov has his nervous tension and Polonsky his refined grace. But with all of them, given their unusual economy of gesture, their entire acting process is subjugated to a rhythm that rises and falls particularly slowly.... It is true that this kind of portrayal is conventional, but convention is the sign of any true art.

An amusing debate. "Psychological" acting has become normal now (in art cinema -- commercial cinema remains fidgety); which begs an odd (misleading) question. Were the Russians ahead of their time or behind it?

(Also important to note, acting played an important part in the development of montage theories (though this connection is mostly forgotten now). How inter-related are methods of acting and film rhythm? Are today's long-take, interior filmmakers closer to this past than we realize? (Because it amuses me,) I'd like to think they are...)

Menander and the spirit of comedy

2009-08-16T08:26:00.002-06:00

"The sum of all philosophy is this:
Thou art a man -- there breathes no other creature
more liable to sudden rise and fall."
-Menander

I discovered this argument in Farquhar, but I'm sure it exists elsewhere: Aristotle was not a poet, and his philosophy of poetry, which remained standard for the classical art for so long a time, is empty. But this isn't an argument against dated ideals of narrative and form; it is rather a lament that so few philosophers are poets and so few poets philosophers, though both often like to think of themselves as the other. I write this out of admiration for those who have been both, and in particular those comic poets close to my heart who navigate wit and buffoonery with enlightened fire and a sophisticated understanding of the human condition -- whatever that may be. I don't mean the didactic or sentimental writers who show good conquering bad; I don't mean social satires or farces of manner; I mean the immortal comic spirit Absurdity, which recognizes that we are all hopeless, forsaken idiots -- with dignity. We are fools who think ourselves wise; beasts who thinks ourselves beauties; apes who think ourselves gods; mortals who think ourselves eternal. We are not ourselves but our dreams. Comedy expresses this truth (but not with jokes; comedy needs no jokes); this spirit needs compassion, patience, humility, sincerity. There one finds the philosopher of the poet.

You have my admiration, lost Menander. You too, Marivaux. And you, Lubitsch. May your philosophy keep me humble, your comedy keep me a fool.

by the bluest of seas

2009-08-11T20:15:00.002-06:00

Reading through various professional and not-so-professional online writings about By the Bluest of Seas (1936), I still find myself unsure what to say about the film. Something helpful -- Eisenschitz writes:

No lesson taught, no exemplary characters: a loose sequence of events within a tight structure. From Miss Mend onwards, Barnet made his films by setting in motion a variety of characters and events, quite independent of each other, then organizing their intersection. The structure is as rigorously planned as in By the Bluest of Seas, which ends as it began, with all the narrative relationships, the dynamics of scenes and gags, arranged symmetrically. But within this scrupulous equilibrium, everything is constantly displaced. Once the point of a scene or a shot is established, it is immediately side-stepped, as if being shown through the wrong end of a telescope, or at least not developed. The rules of American (and indeed of Soviet pre-war) cinema -- maximum impact and maximum economy, following the shortest line from one point in the story to the next -- were not Barnet's, even if he knew how to make use of them.

I think this description is accurate, although it turns what I saw as utter simplicity into something more formal and dynamic. There are so many bizarre details in By the Bluest of Seas that are just sort of skipped over, lost to the simplicity of the characters and story. For example, Yussuf and Aliosha are arguing in the ship's cabin, a storm kicking up on the seas around them. Water starts spilling in from the deck. A rather large wave of water splashes down between the two and, suddenly, Misha is standing there, the object of their argument. Do they see if she's unharmed? Do they pay any attention to the storm that is putting them in danger? They smile and talk about their relationship, the conflict of the whole film. All the characters are reduced to this simplicity, thinking only of their love and nothing else. All narratives, in some way, simplify their characters and situations, but I could not have expected this. And I'm still not sure how to think about it.

Iosselliani writes:

I fell in love with [Barnet] the first time I saw By the Bluest of Seas. It was in the editing class given by Felonov, an excellent teacher, who told us: ‘There is no logic to this film, none at all, and no measurement, but it is very well filmed.’ (He was used to measuring everything and thought that all films were calculated). ‘It is very well made. I am not teaching you the craft in order to follow this example. I noticed how much you liked it’ (I had badgered him to let me see it again on the editing table) ’so here it is, but don’t take it as an example. Even though it is better made than, say, Ivan the Terrible.’

If there is poetry in this simplicity, I think it is precisely in the film's illogical rhythm and bizarre details. Logical connections absent, poetic connections are really all that remain. As illogical and bizarre as the moment when Misha breaks her necklace-present is, it remains hypnotic and attractive.

Several writers highlight the film's cinematography, but I don't think I can support their arguments. The camera is generally as simple as the story (although the editing is more complex). It seems the film was shot in a color version, but only black&white survives -- could it be the film looked better in color? Considering the location, I imagine so. I'm not sure it's fair to judge the film's camera (whether praise or dismissal) based on the b&w.

Just about every writer says that Barnet is a "lost Soviet master." I can't support this argument either. Although we tend to think of early Soviet cinema as a highly modern, politicized, montage cinema, we forget that such films made up a small portion of total Soviet output; thanks to the film critics, who brought the intellectual Soviet cinema to an international audience and enshrined them in film history, most early Soviet cinema is completely unknown to the world. Barnet may not have fit well into the montage aesthetic (which is what, people argue, keeps him out of the canon); but how well did he fit into the commercial aesthetic? Until we know about the commercial domestic Soviet cinema, we ought to be cautious about approaching Barnet. He seems to me much more in the domestic mode, and By the Bluest of Seas reminded me at times of a couple of other bizarre quasi-musical socialist realist films of the period, Jolly Fellows (1934) and Circus (1936). Where does Barnet fit in? Also, what was the co-director's (Mardanin's) contribution to the film? No one seems to mention him.

Overall, I approach this film with a lot of hesitation. I can't articulate what has made this film enduring nor where it belongs in history.

[Written in response to sidehacker's MoM.]

cafe lumiere

2009-08-05T00:00:00.004-06:00

Although I know I have become more mellow when watching movies, I did not expect such plain evidence: a year ago I would have hated Café Lumière (2003); not only do I have the patience for it today, I find that I (almost) kind of love it.

why My Winnipeg is not satisfying

2009-07-24T21:54:00.004-06:00

This is an open discussion with DG. He mentioned that he was disappointed with My Winnipeg.

I think what I dislike most about My Winnipeg is its narration. There's a strong Maddin poetry to it that, though it works for Maddin, does not work for me. I think the strength of his images and subject is weakened by his poetry. My favorite part, for instance, is the seance-dance recreation, a solid bit of visual delirium without narration. The narration is certainly important in establishing the many strange facts the film presents, but there are many times when I wish Maddin restrained himself and let the images make their own insane arguments.

Another weak point -- and this belongs with the narration, I think -- is Maddin's persistent treatment of his childhood. Though he looks to his past with the same mad method as his previous films (which is what makes them wonderful), here the treatment is in opposition to the odd stories he is unearthing about his city. However wound up his childhood is with his broader subject, they don't compliment each other as well as they ought to. Maddin's typical perversity (especially the Oedipal and homoerotic) adds a lot to the stories, yet distracts from them. I think Maddin could have integrated the two better; although because he has more experience with the personal and perverse, it would make sense that those aspects overwhelm the docu-fantasy.

Above all, what is a disappointing is to see that Maddin's technique does not quite express its full potential. He is nearly alone out here, using personal hyperbole to fantasize fact; few filmmakers are as bold as he, and I worry that no one else will attempt something like this. Maddin's style might have made this an unbelievably satisfying experience for me. But it isn't that satisfying. That's the ultimate disappointment.

DG has a similar interest in exploring his city as Maddin does. DG: What do you find disappointing about My Winnipeg and what would you like to see done differently?

internet broken

2009-07-02T14:48:00.003-06:00

back whenever