Category Archives: Cinema and Television

Cinema and Television

Die Wand

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Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Die Wand.  So, I cooked my rack of lamb, put the beets and greens and mashed potatoes on my plate, and sat down to watch a movie whose description had me in the I’ll watch 10 minutes of it and if I don’t like it, I’ll do something else mode.

1 h0ur and 38 minutes later with dogs lying all around it was clear doing something else would not be necessary.

This movie struck several chords within me.  German.  Strange.  Beautiful.  Integration into the natural world.  Survival.  They played, together, a melody of isolation and yet freedom, a symphony of what it is like to be a human, a woman, a dog alone.  A man.

The Wall of the title, Die Wand in German, reflects an unexplained occurrence at the very beginning of the movie.  A woman, whose name we never learn, has gone into the Alps to a mountain cottage with friends.  They leave soon after arrival to walk back down to the village.  Their dog, Lynx, stays behind.

(the novel from which the film was adapted)

The next morning the friends, an elderly couple, have not returned from the village.  The woman and Lynx set out on the road for a walk.  At a point some distance from the cabin the woman reaches an impenetrable, invisible barrier.  The wall.  Over time she learns it encloses a large area around the cabin, but does isolate her from everyone.  No one comes to find her.

The rest of the movie is the story of her gradual adaptation, often unhappy and despairing, to a solitary life.

At one level this is a movie about the essential barrier we all find between our true selves and the world, and the people, around us.  At another about how women adapt to the world and the violence men bring to their lives.  At another, and the most meaningful to me, about the integration of our humanness with the natural world that is our true home.

No aliens.  No cops.  No serial murderers.  All the stuff that often draws me into a movie.  Just a meditation on life.  Wonderful.

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Photography, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Missing, In the Dark Wood, Lycaon

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Involved with what is, I believe, technically the fifth revision of Missing.  20,000 words went out today, a whole story line about a goddess and her giantess assistance.  It included, too, a favorite part of the book for me, the Wyrm and the Weregild, a group of expert giant dragon hunters.  But this storyline does not intersect directly with the primary story in Missing and it’s now in the pile for Loki’s Children, which now has over 50,000 plus words available from the drafts and revisions up to now of Missing.

Some key names got changed, transitions made more clear.  I got about half way through a quick review.  Probably will finish with that tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back in and start adding some more description, some character development and I may, probably will, change the ending to give it more punch.  Thanks to Stefan for the idea.

Translated another four verses in the story of Lycaon today, too.  These were hard, either the Latin was thick or I was.  Maybe both.  Still.  Done.  That’s my goal per day.

Also worked on ModPo’s final week.  Two very interesting poets today.  Erica Baum is a conceptual poet who combines photography and found language to create intriguing works.  Here are two images we reviewed in class:

 

The first is from a work called Card Catalogues where Baum photographed certain portions of the New York University Library’s old card catalog.  Each photograph is a poem of juxtaposition created by the strange constraint of alphabetically organizing knowledge.  The second is one of several pieces from a work, Dog Ear.  These are all large photographs, Card Catalog is too, and she hangs them in galleries together, though each photograph stands alone.  This is part of the conceptualist idea that ambient language contains all we need as far as poetry.  We only have to work to find it.  But that work can be difficult.

The next poet is Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian who works in English.  Her work is a ten-minute recitation of 47 different translations of the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.  from the Mandelbaum translation

This is a strangely evocative, haunting experience.  You can hear her read it here.

(Frame from a 1911 Italian film version of the Divine Comedy. The director’s name was Giuseppe De Liguoro. from this website.)

Cinema and Television, Humanities, Latin, MOOCS, Poetry

Two Good Movies

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Fall                                                                      Samhain Moon

The wood got split.  The Latin trounced me.  Two essays on pragmatism, one by Richard IMAG1083Rorty and one by Cornel West, put philosophy into the day and the next to last essay in ModPo just went into cyber space.  It’s below, if you’re interested*.  The assignment was a few posts back.

Saw two good movies tonight, too.  Once Were Warriors is a difficult movie to watch since it shows domestic violence in as raw a way as I’ve seen.  About Maori’s living in contemporary New Zealand Warriors has a long tragic arc which only lifts near the end and then to recognize the role of tradition in a tribal people.  Most of it is grim and much of the grimness comes from self-loathing generated by rootlessness, abandonment of the past for a present with no cultural handles.  It’s definitely worth seeing.  The funeral of Grace had me in tears.

Then a longer, unusual Hollywood movie, the Place Beyond the Pines.  This Ryan Gosling/Bradley Cooper movies has a surprise narrative arc as a major character dies halfway through the movie.  This is a movie about consequences, too, like Warriors, but here the past is not so cultural, it’s personal and it skips a generation before it comes to ahead.  I liked the longer plot line, an unusual choice in a mainstream Hollywood movie.  An actual adult movie.  Also worth seeing.

*All That’s Left Is Letters

The title “Why I Am Not A Painter” answers the existential why of the poem’s second line before the poem itself ever starts. O’Hara is not a painter because he writes poetry. For example, here’s one titled “Why I Am Not A Painter.” The poem is his work as the painting hung in the gallery is Goldberg’s. Thus, O’Hara is a poet and Goldberg a painter.

He thinks he would rather be a painter, but he says, “I am not. Well,” This is, I guess, a soft end-stop, a sort of pause here and think construction which suggests a wry answer to the question. He is not well, at least not well enough to be a painter.

The two long stanzas provide an alternative narrative to the usual description of the creative process and in so doing give an insider’s look into the difference between painters and poets.

“Mike Goldberg is starting a painting”, this line in the continuous present, puts us with Goldberg and O’Hara until in the third to last line the painting is finished. What has happened? O’Hara dropped in, had a drink, noticed the painting had the word SARDINES in it. He leaves, comes back, leaves, comes back. Then he returns and it’s finished.

O’Hara asks, “Where’s SARDINES?” In what I read as a plaintive or mock plaintive note, he notes, “All that’s left is just letters,” “It was too much,” the painter says.

In the alternative narrative of a painter painting, we get no description of the painting itself save for the word SARDINE and then its absence in the final work. Even one word was too much.

So, having shown us a painter at work, O’Hara says, “But me?” The poet. What does he do? Well, ironically, he thinks of a color: orange. He writes a line, then a whole page of words, not lines. Like SARDINE this is at the beginning of the creative process. As with Goldberg, O’Hara lets days go by, then he says, “It is even in prose, I am a real poet.” I don’t understand this line except perhaps as irony meaning something like, I’m a real poet so even prose is poetry.

The twist comes at the end and like a magician there is a big reveal. When he names his twelve poems, he calls them ORANGES in spite of having not mentioned orange in any of them.  When he sees Goldberg’s painting in a gallery, it is named SARDINES.

Painter and poet are alike in what they leave out, but different in that with Goldberg “all that’s left is just letters.” O’Hara, on the other hand, has words. That’s the key difference between the two, when their work is done, O’Hara has words and the painter only letters.

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Politics

The Bechdel Test

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Fall                                                                          Samhain Moon

In Modern and Post Modern we read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home.  It’s poignant, well-drawn and has a lot to say about gender and the corrosive personal affects of having to hide one’s sexual preferences behind society’s gender roles.  I’m not surprised to see her in this interesting quote.  Gonna try and test movies from now on myself.  Here’s a link to her website: Dykes to Watch Out For.

“Four independent theaters in Sweden have launched a campaign to install a rating system that classifies films based on their representations of gender. Films will be approved with an “A-rating” if they pass the Bechdel test, named after Alison Bechdel, whose 1985 comic strip inspired its development. The Bechdel test has the minimal criteria that the film contains at least two female characters that talk to each other about something besides men. While this yardstick of measurement may seem easy enough, the amount of films passing the test has proven surprising scant.”

Cinema and Television, Sport

#42

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Lughnasa                                                               Harvest Moon

Saw 42 tonight.  A story about which I knew little, a bit surprising since the Brooklyn Dodgers were my team as a boy.   I can remember listening on my transistor radio to Dodger games as I carried my paper route.  When I saw the dates of his early days in the bigs, 1947 and 1948, though, it became clear to me why I was uninformed.  I was less than a month old when he got called up to Brooklyn.

The back story to his big league days showed what a remarkable man he was and Dodger owner, Branch Rickey, too.  This was a story of personal courage more than one of social change though some change did occur.  It was a heroes journey.

Cinema and Television

Amour

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Lughnasa                                                                        Honey Moon

Kate and I watched Amour last night.  It struck us differently.  I saw two people whose reserve prevented them from opening up to each other, whose Gallic stoicism bordered on emotional neglect.  Georges was dutiful, sometimes loving, always patient and persevering.  Anne had a stubborn fear of medical care and a resignation that set in almost immediately after her first incident.

The dynamic between the two of them left little room for graceful moments.  As I saw it.  Kate saw two people in love who stuck with each other through a horrible and realistically presented slip off a medical precipice.

Perhaps it was the absence of a story line other than the grim decline of Anne, but I don’t believe the unrelenting grayness fading to black represents the whole truth of any such episode.  To be fair there were a couple of moments, when Anne and Georges sang together and when she first got her motorized wheel chair, that had a hint of another mood; but, the bed wetting, the second stroke, the firing of the second nurse, the nasty exchange between Georges and Eva, their daughter, kept piling on and on and on.

I do know this.  It is not the end I want and I will work from this point to see that it doesn’t happen that way.

Cinema and Television

Cinema News

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Lughnasa                                                                  Honey Moon

Criterion on Hulu* is finally streaming the World Cinema Foundation remastered films that they had licensing to and it’s also good because this means in the near future they will be releasing the films on DVD/Blu-ray! Just for context, a lot of these films are extremely important to their individual countries/to the non-western cinema in general.

Cinema and Television, Third Phase

The Quartet

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8/14/2013     Lughnasa                                                                        Honey Moon

As soon Ancientrails goes back online, I plan to create a Third Phase page.  There I will publish titles of books, movies, poems, plays, music that relates in some way to the Third Phase idea as well as continuing thinking about the idea of the Third Phase.

Kate and I watched a powerful movie tonight, soft and comedic, but also tender and challenging for us all in the Third Phase.  The Quartet.  This is a BBC movie about a home for retired musicians, Beechman House, and the lives of those who live there.  Where it challenges us is in its open-hearted support of our life passions, even after our performing days are over.  This lesson, one we often need to learn over and over again, comes at us in so many different ways in this movie.  Dustin Hoffman directed.

Cinema and Television

Elysium

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8/11/2013     Lughnasa                                                            Honey Moon

Continuing in that vein but in a different medium:  Elysium.  A sci-fi movie with a hyper alienated working class inhabiting a desiccated earth while the .1% live a life of luxury in a space station floating high above the earth.  This is not great cinema, but it’s good cinema.  If you can’t make the connections with the immigration debate, the health care debate, the economic justice necessary for a humane society, then you’re not paying attention. It is, in some senses, a little too obvious in its treatment, but these matters of simple justice are so often glossed over that hitting us between the eyes with them is often the only way to make us see.   Marx said revolution was the only sure way to make people see and he was probably right, but Elysium is a step in that direction, if you get empowered to act after seeing it.  I hope you do.

 

Asia, Cinema and Television, Politics, Travel

Human Trafficking

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Summer                                                             Moon of the First Harvests

9 years ago this November I went on a significant trip paid for by money inherited from my father.  It took me to Singapore where my sister, Mary, hosted me and showed me her adopted city.  After Singapore I flew Tiger Airlines to Bangkok where I spent 5 days getting acclimated to Thai culture and the particular culture of Bangkok’s China Town. My hotel there cost $17.00 a night.

(Yaowarat Road.  Bangkok’s China Town)

On the 6th day I took a flight from Bangkok’s old airport on Bangkok Air to Siem Reap, Cambodia.  We landed late at night and the customs area looked like a prison detainee facility in a bad B-movie.  At one box I applied for my visa and at one right next to it, a Cambodian official stamped in it and I was in country.

The taxi scrum had all kinds of vehicles and people, but I happened, quite by accident, on a wonderful driver, Mr. Rit.  He drove me around for the entire time I was in Siem Reap, including several trips out to Angkor, the ancient Khmer region where over 75 different temples built by many different rulers dot the landscape, among them what westerner’s call Angkor Wat, which actually means, Angkor Temple.

(Siem Reap)

Tonight I watched a movie called Trade of Innocents.  It’s a Netflix streaming movie, so it’s easily available.  The focus is human trafficking, based on real events, in the city Siem Reap.  This lovely city, deep in the Cambodian jungle, has what I guess you could say is the misfortune of being the gateway to Angkor.  As such, it has seen a hotel building boom of enormous proportions, making it possible to stay in Siem Reap at almost any price point.  My hotel was $25 a night for a room with teak furniture and a tiled complete bath.  You could pay then $500 a night at Hotel D’Angkor, the old French colonial hotel of ridiculous elegance.

(Bayon Temple.)

All this tourist traffic has apparently made Siem Reap a center for the trade in Cambodian and Vietnamese girls.  The problem gets reinforced by a culturally acceptable practice of sending a daughter into the city brothels to support her family.  This was a side of Siem Reap that was invisible to me.  I saw a small city with contradictions between rich and poor, with beautiful buildings and a friendly people, with local artisans of incredible skill, but I didn’t see the backrooms and back alleys where children, young children, were bartered and rented for an evening.

My friends Paul and Sarah Strickland have made the trafficking of girls a priority issue.  It’s easy to see why.  Girl Rising, the movie Kate and I saw earlier this month, also pleads the case for girls, a vulnerable population everywhere, vulnerable not only to human trafficking but to enforced ignorance, too.  If you have a daughter, or a granddaughter, or if you love a woman who was a daughter once, then these two movies should make you pause a moment.  And wonder how to help.