Souls for Sale

Souls for Sale is a 1923 Hollywood film.  It's engaging throughout in a peculiarly noncomital and weightless manner.  Ukiyo-e is the Japanese name for the pleasure-districts in cities -- the so-called "floating world".  In these places, everything is for sale and ephemeral pleasures of all kinds are on offer.  The point is that these pleasures represent gratification for its own sake -- they are not designed to make you better (or worse for that matter); the "floating world" advertises itself as a kind of frivolous dream.  Romance, in the Shakespearian manner, is similar:  the world as depicted in "romance" is not free from pain and even varieties of tragedy, but suffering is treated with the same lightness of touch that we might expect from comedy -- in the end, the world presents certain archetypal patterns and these adventures, whether unpleasant or pleasant, are ultimately inconsequential in light of the persistence of the archetypes.  Souls for Sale in its own modest way is like a Shakespearian romance -- there is fear, danger, death, pleasure, and love:  but all of these elements are ultimately without gravity, ephemeral moments within the floating world.  In Souls for Sale, Hollywood with its studio dream-factories is the ultimate expression of the pleasure palaces and travails that comprise a "floating world" -- terrible things happen but these things are all fictional.  The film concludes with an overtly Shakespearian title:  the actors are merely shadows doing their best and "working as hard as they can" to entertain an audience that they have never met:  the paradox of their labors is that they can never know if they were successful until their efforts are finished and screened -- and, even, then, they will not really know the audience response for they will have moved on to other exploits. These concluding colophon reads like the last speech in The Tempest.

A young woman has married a cad.  She is the daughter of a righteous preacher-man who has condemned Los Angeles, the home of the movies as Los Diablos.  Presumably, the mesalliance is the result of her wanting to escape the strictures of her smalltown family life.  The young woman's name, curiously enough, is Remember Stedman. Names are expressive in this picture -- the evil husband is called Scudder.   

When her husband implores her to come to bed -- they are riding a train -- she flees instead, escaping at a water-stop into the barren desert.  It seems as if she is staggering across Death Valley.  The landscape is implacably barren and hostile.  Swooning with thirst and fatigue, she collapses on a sand dune only to be rescued by a handsome sheik on a camel.  "Mem" as she  is called has wandered onto a location where a desert romance is being filmed:  a title says "The Usual Princes on the Usual Camels appeared with the Usual Captives."  After recovering, Mem makes her way to Hollywood.  She works as an extra in some films and, gradually, becomes successful in the movie industry.  Her husband, Scudder, is arrested at the Los Angeles train station for murdering another woman, an earlier wife, and stealing her money.  He escapes through the train terminal, finds another lonely matron to seduce, and, ultimately, kills her for her cash.  With that bankroll, he flees abroad and is exercising his wiles on an Egyptian princess when he sees a film in Cairo in which Mem has a supporting role.  His schemes go awry -- the Egyptian princess is a confidence woman herself and outsmarts the cad.  He returns to LA, hoping to find Mem.  Apparently, Scudder actually loves her, although his love is destructive. 

Mem has now achieved humble stardom.  Two distinguished men are competing for her affections, Tom Holber, the actor who played the sheik, and Claymore, Holber's director.  After various adventures, Claymore casts Mem and Holber in a big tent circus spectacular.  On the last night of shooting, a typhoon blows in from the sea and lightning strikes the generator setting afire the big top tent.  Mem's husband, who has been lurking around the set, recognizes that Mem loves Claymore and so he tries to kill the director.  (For this purpose, he tools around in a wind-machine on wheels.)  There's a fight and the wind-machine breaks free, threatening to run down Mem.  Scudder, realizing that he really loves the actress, sacrifices his life to save the young woman -- he backs into the propellers of the wind machine and is killed.  The massive fire burns itself out.  Claymore, who has ordered his cameramen to film the whole catastrophe, shoots a final scene in the charred debris and embers.  This is a love scene between the leading man, Holber, and Mem.  Holber who realizes that Mem really loves Claymore embraces his leading lady and gives a bittersweet kiss, yielding to his rival.  Claymore calls "cut" and, then, takes Mem in his arms.  A title tells us that the actors have done their best, "working hard" to make the picture and that they hope the audience enjoys it. 

Souls for Sale is full of incidents, grotesque figures, and strangely poetic shots.  The picture is intricate with several subplots. The scenes in the desert have a fearsome beauty -- in one image, we see Mem collapsing at a cross marking a barren grave atop a desolate ridge.  A major star is famous for being a "vamp" but she is, in fact, warm-hearted.  A man with a grotesque face like a cartoon caricature loves her, but knows he will never be able to win her affections.  This man plays clowns and fools in the various films we see being made.  At the climax, he rescues the vamp from the burning circus tent -- she has suffered a burn to one side of her face and proclaims that her career is now over.  The clown looks on baffled -- perhaps, her misfortune will be his fortune:  maybe her affection for him will now progress into love.  (The vamp is mourning another lover, an actor who perished in a spectacular flaming plane crash while filming another movie -- the picture cuts back to that crash, a pillar of fire hanging in the night sky, from time to time.)  When Scudder kills the plain matron that he has seduced and whose money he plans to take, the scene is harrowing -- the woman is pathetic and Scudder's violence looks real and frightening.  But the film propels itself forward quickly moving on to new territory.  Mem's first screen test is similarly harrowing -- she can't keep herself from making ludicrous faces and it's obvious that she has little or no talent with respect to acting  The test is wholly cringe-worthy..  The film's photography features vertical space -- we see Mem in a circus tent astride a big white horse, the camera's deep focus picks out trapeze artists high above her.  When Mem's parents come to visit, she is high over them in a sort of loft in the studio.  At one point, she almost loses her balance and seems about to fall a hundred feet to the floor of the studio.  Mem gets her first big break when a 300 pound light plummets down from overhead and horribly crushes (and I assume burns) the actress playing the lading role -- Mem is promoted to the part because "the show must go on."  (This is the same callous attitude that animates the climax -- as the tent burns down, director demands that his camera crew take cover but still film the catastrophe.  And he demands that the injured Mem kiss his rival, the movie star Tom Holber as the rain and sooty embers continue to pour down out of the turbulent sky.  Scudder escapes the Keystone cops at the train terminal by diving off a balcony and, then, running through the station, this whole sequence shot from a steep overhead angle.  In fact, the camera is even peers down almost vertically on a procession of knights and regal ladies riding on horseback into the studio -- the name of the movie is Chivalry and it's this picture on which Mem seems to get her lucky break.  The image of the flaming plane plummeting out of the sky seems symbolic for being a star -- you may be beloved, but in the end will flame-out.  The picture's view of the audience and fans is sardonic -- in many ways, the film seems aligned with bitter satiric vision of Nathaniel West in Day of the Locust.  People who are off-screen are viewed as homely grotesques -- one man chattering gaily to Scudder seems to have little or no chin or lower jaw.  The projectionist who shows Mem's screen test looks like one of the Katzenjammer kids.  Grotesque old men grimace for a casting director.  When Mem's straitlaced parents wander into the studio, the casting director dismisses them -- he doesn't need more grotesques of their sort.  Women hoping for a break in the movie industry throw themselves at the unattractive casting director -- "I will keep  your picture with the 'Beautifuls'," he says, exhausted.  But in Hollywood, all the women are beautiful.  The film's acting is stilted and, in fact, intentionally old-fashioned -- the movie wants to proclaim itself as an artifice.  The final conflagration is spectacular -- huge friezes of leaping orange flames (the scenes are tinted), animal cages on wheels dragged here and there, mobs of people running this way and that; the trapeze artists lunge toward one another, miss their grip and fall horribly into the middle of the big top center arena while flaming debris pitches down pelting the panicked extras.  It's all dizzying, hard to grasp, and obviously unnatural -- nothing is at stake:  after all, it's just a movie. 

Souls for Sale was thought lost for many years.  It was rediscovered around 2006 and restored for Turner Classic Movies -- some of the film is in bad shape and remains somewhat murky.  There's a gorgeous wide-screen score written for the film's re-release on TCM.  We see von Stroheim leaning into the shot, directing Greed and there's Charlie Chaplin smoking cigarette after cigarette on the set of Woman of Paris.  I don't know who directed Souls for Sale -- the name is not one that I recognize.

Graciela Iturbide at MIA

Graciela Iturbide is a black-and-white photographer born in 1945 and primarily known for photographs made in her native Mexico (although she has worked in East LA and other places as well.)  Iturbide's photographs, printed in uniform size (all proportioned like a magazine on its side) are arrayed around the walls of two galleries.  The pictures are interesting,although with a few exceptions not particularly memorable -- Mexico and its indigenous people are so intrinsically fascinating and photogenic that its hard to not get good pictures of them.  Iturbide is ethnographic in her emphasis -- she lives for a number of weeks with the people that she photographs and, so, her rapport with her subjects is obvious from the images.  The Indians that appear in her pictures confront the camera proudly and seem happy to have their portraits taken.  Some of the subject matter is hair-raising -- a group of pictures documenting La Matanza, a goat-slaughter ritual among one group of Indians are conspicuously gory and Iturbide treats some of the images a bit like Weegee:  we seem to be seeing images of bloody crime-scenes.  (There is one alarming picture of a little girl, scarcely more than a toddler, who seems gripped with blood-lust as she stares as the carcass of a recently slaughtered and bloody goat.)  Iturbide's pictures raise question about the "ethnographic gaze" and, I wonder, if the pictures would be as well-received if they had been made by a male Caucasian researcher:  in other words, there is something dispassionate, clinical and, even, "essentialist" about many of the picture.  We are looking at what seem to be imagined as archetypes or representatives of the cultures that are portrayed -- these Zapotec, Mixtec, Seri of the Sonoran desert, and Juchitan (a subgroup of Mixtec people) Indians of coastal Oaxaca.  The Juchitan in particular are proclaimed to be Indians that live in matriarchal societies that are strongly female-influenced and that ostracize men from the market (for instance) although certain types of flamboyant transvestites are, apparently, allowed participation.  (It should be noted that the Juchitan women themselves reject this characterization of their society.)  The pictures are well-worth seeing and all of them are interesting, although I note again my slight skepticism as to whether this is due to the art of the photographer or the intrinsically fascinating quality of the subject matter.  Two of the pictures are justly famous:  One of them, Mujer Angel, shows an eerie-looking black clad woman, arms outstretched like great dark wings, running down from a ridge into what seems to be completely barren desert -- the woman is carrying a big boombox, an element that adds to the surreal quality of the picture.  The picture seems staged but is impressive nevertheless -- I think it was featured on the cover of a Rage Against the Machine album.  Another picture is whimsical:  it shows a statuesque and floridly handsome woman wearing a turban of living iguanas -- I think it's called "Our Lady of the Iguanas." 

One pleasure of returning to the MIA is to see new hangings and new acquisitions.  Some of the period rooms have been equipped with multi-media installations -- a New England seaside room now has windows with crude, but effective, animations of silhouette crabs, seagulls, and ships.  (I think the animations, which look a little like Kara Walker but without the violence and sodomy, are supposed to comment on the slave trade.)  Another room is set up with lighting to simulate the candles that once illumined the place, then, transitioning to the bright light of day.  A surreal painting by Peter Blume (Winter, 1964) is new to me:  it's a large work with a conspicuously jagged boulder sitting in the middle of snow decked with birds and some strange-looking vegetation.  An inconspicuous painting by the Chicago-based Ivan Lorraine Albright shows nothing more than a potato, but its big, blemished, hefty potato and the damn thing seems to watch you with a sullen gaze -- it moves when you move.  This room is full of lots of showy stuff but the potato painting, about eight inches by eight inches is the canvas that has the real presence and profundity in the room.  (It's called "The Lonely Potato").  In a little show called "Growing the Collection", there is a large and impressive collage by an outsider artist named Felipe Jesus Consalves (1891-1960) -- the picture is fantastically complex and very beautiful.  Two smaller and sinister-looking canvases by Henry Ray Clark, a prisoner doing hard-time in some southern penitentiary, are also very spooky, beautiful, and compelling:  strange personages with beaks and rooster combs glare out of elaborate labyrinths of paint.  In one of the rooms full of late Victorian furniture, a large canvas writhing with life-sized figures has been hung.  This is a painting called "Cleopatra" made by the Swedish artist Julius Kronberg.  It's over-the-top:  a nude marmoreal Cleopatra seizing an emerald-green viper while her dark-skinned and similarly half nude maids are slaughtered around her -- its like a vulgarization of Delacroix's already insistently vulgar "The Death of Sardanapalus".  The picture is twelve feet tall, swooning with sphinxes and all sorts of Egyptian kitsch and its quite the thing to see -- this loan from "Anonymous"is more spectacle than art, but well-worth examining.  (When I was there, a curator was unctuously discussing the painting with a couple of obviously wealthy donors -- one of them confined to a wheelchair.  The curator said that the picture's peculiar obelisk or monolithic shape was due to the fact that it had been commissioned to flank a similarly sized window in a Swedish castle.)  In the prints gallery, there are a number of very pretty colored woodcuts by the French artist La Pierre --  the elegant images confirm the influence of Japanese engravings on French art during the Impressionist period.  All in all, plenty of new things to see and admire at the old Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Phoenix

Phoenix, a German neo-noir released in 2014 is Christian Petzold's sixth film with his muse, actress Nina Hoss.  She's excellent and the film is mildly compelling, but, unfortunately, it's only okay.  Criterion has given this movie its full attention -- the picture looks fantastic, the subtitles are well-translated and instantly legible, and there's a variety of accompanying material on the disc.  But, unless I am missing something, the film is not a masterpiece, but, simply, a rather depressing, if eloquent, melodrama.  Movie-making is so degraded these days by superhero movies and gory horror films that any picture made for adults is likely to seem extraordinary.  Phoenix is certainly a movie for grown-ups with grown-up concerns and a nuanced view of history -- once, these sorts of movies were commonplace:  you can see three of them a day on Turner Classic Movies.  Regrettably, they are now rare and, I think, this leads to a sober, intelligent, but, ultimately, disappointing movie like Phoenix in being overvalued.

Despite its lurid subject matter, everything in Petzold's film is, more or less, tasteful and understated.  An enigmatic woman (she's apparently a Jewish lawyer) drives across a border with another woman who's face is swathed in bloody bandages.  This is Nelly Lenz geboren Wolf, a former Jewish cabaret singer and the sole survivor of a wealthy family that once owned much property in  Berlin.  Lenz has somehow survived Auschwitz, albeit with part of her face shot away.  She has plastic surgery and emerges looking different than she did before her imprisonment in the Camp.  The Jewish lawyer, Lena, urges her to leave Germany with her and travel to Tel Aviv or Haifa -- she has even picked out an apartment for Nelly in what the film calls "Palestine."  Although its not directly stated, there is a strong implication that Lena is in love with Nelly.  Rejecting Lena's pleas, Nelly seeks her Gentile husband, the thuggish Johnny Lenz.  Johnny concealed Nelly successfully until 1944, but rumor has it that he was interrogated and betrayed Nelly with the result that she was shipped to the death camp.  Fallen on hard times, Johnny is bussing tables at a squalid cabaret, Phoenix, in Berlin's American sector.  Nelly finds him there, but he doesn't recognize the emaciated woman with the mutilated face.  She stalks him and, ultimately, Johnny enlists her in a scheme to secure the restoration of Nelly's property seized by the Nazis -- as her surviving husband, he should be entitled to her estate and town home in Berlin.  Remarkably, Johnny chooses Nelly as his accomplice, because he thinks she looks a little like his wife, whom he believes to be dead.  Johnny grooms Nelly to act like the old Nelly, a carefree, elegantly stylish cabaret singer.  Of course, in a very real sense, the old Nelly is dead -- she was destroyed in the Holocaust.  He coaches her on how to walk and talk like Nelly and, even, trains her to write in Nelly's script, something not too difficult because, of course, the fake Nelly is, indeed, the real Nelly, albeit altered by her horrific wartime experiences.  Lena, who we see using a magnifying glass, to study corpses in a mass grave -- she is trying to figure out who has survived the Holocaust -- succumbs to mourning and kills herself.  Johnny has Nelly dress in a red gown and wear her old Parisian shoes to meet the rest of the family at the train station.  Nelly protests that no one returns from the death camps wearing an elegant dress and designer shoes -- "They won't ask about that," Johnny says, accurately predicting the rest of his Gentile family's willingness to simply ignore the past.  The meeting at the train station occurs.  It is just as Johnny predicted.  But Nelly has discovered that two days before she was arrested, Johnny secured a divorce from her.  Apparently, he informed on her.  During the celebratory dinner with Johnny's rather reptilian family, Nelly literally finds her voice:  she sings Kurt Weill's cabaret song "Speak low" (famous for its version by Marlene Dietrich) and Johnny sees the camp tattoo for the first time on her wrist --presumably, he knows, as she sings, that this is, in fact, the real Nelly.  At its climax, the film becomes predictably evasive -- this sort of evasion is known as an "open-ended ending", but is no less evasive for that terminology.  The whole movie has built slowly, and obsessively even, to this moment of revelation -- but Petzold doesn't know how to end the thing and so he just lets Nelly walk away, out of focus as she departs into a bright day. 

The film is maddening because its flaws (in typical Teutonic fashion) can also be argued to be virtues.  For instance, many literal-minded critics argue that there's no possible way that Johnny can't recognize that Nelly, after plastic surgery, is his wife.  But the movie skirts the problem:  Johnny selects Nelly for his Vertigo-like scheme for precisely the reason that she does, in fact, look like his supposedly dead wife -- and has her mannerisms as well.  Similarly, Johnny's blindness, emphasized by a blind street musician who tells Nelly how to find him, is symbolic in a particularly bald and obvious way.  The post-War Germans are willfully blind to what they have done.  Like the audience, they are willing to suspend their disbelief -- of course, they are willing to believe that concentration camp survivors return from the East wearing designer skirts and Parisian shoes.  It's like Shakespeare -- tropes of blindness and misidentification have both literal, as well as symbolic meaning.  Similarly, the evasive ending is probably necessary just because there is no real closure to a story like this -- any conventional ending would be inadequate to the powerful issues raised by the film. (More troubling to me was the mismatch between Nelly and Johnny -- why would a wealthy, well-educated and sophisticated Jewish heiress be married to a common lout like Johnny?  This is never explained and seems profoundly implausible to me.)

Petzold says that he wanted the film to rely upon the Expressionistic cinema in Germany in the late twenties.  This is a misrepresentation fostered by the "anxiety of influence" -- Petzold may or may not believe that his movie is based remotely on the style in Caligari, but, in fact, the film's true influences are far more immediate and obvious:  the picture looks like Fassbinder from beginning to end:  unfortunately, for Petzold the film lacks Fassbinder's wild mise-en-scene and his delirious use of mirrors in confined spaces -- it's like Fassbinder denatured and domesticated.  Fassbinder derived his voluptuous baroque style from Douglas Sirk and, in fact, the movie also looks much like Sirk's technicolor pictures, particularly Written on the Wind in its use of lurid reds and other deeply saturated colors.  The subject matter is similar to issues raised by Fassbinder in so-called BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy particularly in the motif of the missing person returning from the East  as in, for instance, The Marriage of Maria Braun.  Nina Hoss gives a bold and courageous performance -- in her acting, we do, in fact, see traces of the Expressionistic cinema:  throughout much of the movie, she staggers around like a revenant, a zombie, one of the living dead.  Closely considered, the plot doesn't make sense.  If Johnny is divorced from Nelly what right does he have to her property anyhow?-- accordingly, the very plot twist that establishes that Johnny has betrayed Nelly, also should render the whole narrative moot:  he has no legal basis to participate in her property due to the divorce decree.  Ultimately, I question the film's entire enterprise -- the picture is essentially a garish, trashy melodrama, a less obsessive and swoony version of Hitchcock's Vertigo.  But Vertigo didn't rely for its plot points on the Holocaust and I have a very slight sense of queasiness at using the mass murder of the Jews (which Petzold in his commentary piously calls "The Shoah") as a basis for a tawdry crime melodrama. 

Petzold notes that he shot the film in lustrous Cinemascope just before the Arri laboratory in Germany closed down.  This is probably one of the last, if not the last, film made on actual celluloid in Germany. 

A Ghost Story

David Lowery's 2017 film, A Ghost Story, is a minimalist exercise in sleek, hihilistic post-modern style.  The film is shallow, but knows that it is shallow and, therefore, excuses its shallowness by putting post-modern quotes around it.  The hyper-intelligent and aware film makers probably wouldn't disagree with this characterization.  However, one could substitute for "shallow" the word "trite" -- I presume this would be anathema to them.  At heart, the movie has one trick, but it's a good one:  what if the spirits of the dead, in fact, manifested as elegant figures in white sheets with black elliptical eyes cut in the fabric that are wholly inexpressive -- indeed, nothing more than deep and dark shadows?  This is where the distinction between "shallow" and "trite" arises.  Certainly, it is self-consciously "shallow" to conceive of a ghost as a spook parading around like a 7 year-old under a sheet -- however,it is also precociously clever, maybe even brilliant, to devise a movie around this concept.  Casey Affleck, the leading man, is a famous Hollywood heart-throb -- so, the mischievous film maker says:  "Let's cover him up in a sheet that shows not one inch of his skin and have him traipse around in the movie in that get-up."  It's a sort of Dadaist joke and, in fact, the marmoreal ghost gliding about in his elegant drapery of white cloth, catching on its edges the ambient textures and colors of light, is an extremely beautiful apparition.  But where do we go from here?

A young couple lives in a unprepossessing house that seems to be out on the pampas somewhere.  (It turns out that the house was a real place in suburban Dallas.)  The house is rented and the young woman wishes to move somewhere more urban and elegant -- the place is indisputably ramshackle.  But the husband is inexplicably attached to the house (because, as it turns out, his ghost is haunting the place.)  One night that couple hear the piano in the other room sound as if someone has touched the keys.  They get up and look around but there is no one.  The next morning, the young man (he seems to be a musician specializing in spooky tunes) gets himself killed in a pre-dawn crash right outside the home.  At the morgue, he gets up wearing his sheet and walks back home.  Then, he sits around the house moping.  He observes his wife grieving and throws a tantrum when a year later she brings a man  home.  (No one can see him but he can make electric lights flare and can move objects around.)  His wife leaves the home after depositing an enigmatic slip of paper in a crack in the wall which she paints over.  The ghost finds that there is another similarly sheeted specter in an adjacent home:  this poor ghost is waiting for "someone to return" but can't recall who it is.  A Hispanic woman and her three children move into the house.  The ghost is apparently racist or bigoted because he throws a poltergeist fit smashing the family's crockery.  (This seems just mean-spirited.)  The ghost seems to like the next tenants (who are white people) much more -- these apparently are college kids or professors, hipsters of some sort who host a party in the home.  The party climaxes in an 18 minute monologue by one professorial type on an ancient theme:  the vanity of human desire and achievement in the face of an eternity of indifferent time.  After the party, the house is condemned but the ghost still sulks there, scratching at the wall to try to retrieve his wife's note pushed into the crack -- but the sheet of paper eludes him.  A wrecking ball knocks the house down and, later, a skyscraper is built on the site.  The ghost morosely parades around the corridors of the building and, then, looks out over a great neon-bright city built in the area.  Then, the ghost goes back in time.  Pioneers arrive on the empty pampas and try to build a  house, but Indians slaughter them.  The ghost morosely observes a young girl elegantly decomposing in the grass, an arrow stuck in her belly.  Then, the married couple arrive, time looping it seems, the ghost watches them quarrel.  A second ghost appears, presumably, another version of the husband because now the woman is alone -- the accident has happened.  (This leads to an amusing surmise -- if this loop continues, the house will soon be packed full of mournful, silent, inexpressive ghosts).  This second ghost is more vigorous than the first and he manages to get the Rosebud-like note out of the wall.  When he opens it to read the message, suddenly, he deflates and his sheet (in fact, both sheets because there are two ghosts) falls empty to the floor.  (There are aspects of the film that reflect casual reference of the Tibetan Book of the Dead -- in the hospital, the ghost approaches a threshold blazing with different colors of light, but doesn't enter there and wanders off to the house that he has been apparently haunting for all eternity.  The composer had a chorus chanting Bardo Thole at various points in the movie -- the chant can be heard in a couple scenes if you listen closely.)

This plot is filmed with exacting attention to light and color -- we can almost always determine the exact time of day.  There is next to no acting.  The young couple seems selfish and disaffected and scarcely talk to one another while the husband is alive.  The husband's death is absorbed by the young woman in one completely vacant and expressionless close-up in the morgue -- in fact, in a strange way, the be-sheeted ghost is more expressive than the actors.  The film is shallow in many respects:  it's certainly trite to show the widow's grief in terms of her eating an entire pie and, then, vomiting (none too persuasively) -- this is all done in one four or five minute shot that is made in low light and intentionally inexpressive.  The style sometimes resembles Bresson but a moronic version of that film maker's deliberately inexpressive style.  It's as if the extremely laid-back filmmakers were too lazy or hip to script any sort of expressions of grief (or simply didn't know how to do this).  Showing the grieving woman scarfing down a pie certainly seems to me to be a trite expression of grief and a sort of cheat.  And the film makers are obviously blind to the implications of their imagery -- showing an angry spook in a sheet menacing a Hispanic family in the suburbs of Dallas certainly has connotations of which the terminally hip film makers seem to have been wholly unaware.  Isn't the sheet associated with the Ku Klux Klan?   Why does the ghost only attack the Hispanic family?  The long monologue that is supposed to explain the movie is also trite, although well enough scripted and delivered in an interesting way.  And the film's Ku Klux Klan aspect seems also reflected in the gratuitous Indian attack, devised I think by the clueless hyper-white film makers as a way to import a clever and arresting special effects stunt into the movie -- the decomposition of the little girl as the ghost sulks next to her.  There are aspects of the movie that work reasonably well and, in fact, the film has some "bump scares" that are genuinely unsettling.  Some cosmic night skies are attractively shot and the extremely nuanced camerawork is beautiful to behold somewhat in the style of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, but the movie is, more or less, a fraud and a cheat. 

Mindhunter

Mindhunter (Netflix -- season 2) is an excellent example of a Police Procedural.  The Police Procedural is a genre in crime films and fiction focusing close attention on the efforts of a team of law enforcement officers working to solve a crime.  The genre is ideal for television because it lends itself to the sit-com format -- that is, a group of recurring characters interact in an amusing or dramatic way.  In effect, a Police Procedural is a sit-dram -- that is, a situation-drama.  When applied to crime, the form is intrinsically satisfying:  the chaos and lawlessness of crime contrasts effectively with the rational procedures and rules applicable to law enforcement:  this generates a stark contrast between lawlessness and the law (and, also, allows for interesting thematic developments in which the police may be tempted toward lawlessness in order to solve particularly heinous crimes).  The form allows for all sorts of productive conflicts:  good v. evil, means v. ends, personality conflicts and romantic intrigue threatening the police team, conflict between the rigid "by-the-books" boss and his (or her) more intuitive, flexible subordinates, and, of course, also authorizes development of subplots involving the families and associates of the cops.  The form is rich with potential and provides a pleasure always intrinsic to genre art -- that is, the tension between the formula required by the genre and the individual artist's creativity in expanding limits of the genre.  Frames exist to be challenged and a good genre work will acknowledge the fundamental tenets of the form while also working to subvert them.

I didn't watch Mindhunter (1st season) on the basis that I knew nothing about it and, of course, wished to avoid the shame attendant upon devoting many hours to squalid and horrific stories about serial murderers.  These kinds of shows are always a guilty pleasure -- everyone, more or less, has morbid curiosity about serial sex criminals:  these people display the outer limits of human nature and, although freakishness is always fascinating, I'm not sure that it is morally defensible to gawk at freaks or, for that matter, gruesome sexually inflected murder scenes.  But when I discovered that Mindhunter (2nd Season) features work by the directors David Fincher, Andrew Dominik, and Carl Franklin, all major talents in my estimation, these auteurs, as it were, gave me cover to watch the show.  And, I must admit that the show is morbidly fascinating to the point of being addictive. It's all a gruesome tease, but the tease works and the shows are beautifully directed, featuring  showy arias of nihilistic discourse in the scenes in which the protagonists interview various famous serial killers.  The effect is similar to True Detective with elements of David Fincher's film Zodiac thrown into the mix.

The basic premise is a group of FBI agents stationed at Quantico are working to pioneer "profiling" with respect to serial sex murderers.  The group is led by Bill Tench, a straight-up man's man sort of guy with a flat-top haircut and the general demeanor of a 1980 industrial arts instructor.  He is assisted by a cipher, the strangely expressionless and coolly analytical Holden Ford, a young agent who looks eerily like a mannequin and may have mental problems of his own.  In addition, the team includes a beautiful and cerebral professorial type, Wendy Carr.  Carr is a lesbian, something that she keeps to herself since the show is set around 1980.  (In fact, she icily endures homophobic statements made by others on the team -- when a serial killer specializing in torture murders of Gay men is interviewed, Tench jocularly suggests that he "just picks the low-hanging fruit.")  These characters have various love interests who complicate things from time-to-time, although all of them seem committed primarily, and, indeed, obsessively to their work.  The tough boss is Ted Gunn, here a master manipulator who hosts cocktail parties to get the agents to regale other law enforcement about their adventures with serial murderers -- it's sordid, but Tench, at least, seems to like to tell people about the villains (he seems to be telling his buddies hunting stories) and, of course, the morbid interest of the other FBI employees mirrors our interest as an audience.  I haven't seen the first series, a group of shows that I will need to watch at some point.  In the second series, the team becomes involved in working to solve the child murders in Atlanta, Georgia.  Simultaneously, the BTK (Bind-Torture-Kill murderer) is fantasizing about killing people in Kansas.  Individual shows follow a predictable format -- the team members interview some famous serial killer (in this case the Son of Sam and Charley Manson among others -- most of the bad guys I didn't know about since I haven't really devoted much time to studying the subject:  suffice it to say that the prisoners interviewed are all imitating real people who were serial rapists, murderers, and necrophiles.  (The giant genius necrophile Ed Kemper has a re-occurring role in the show -- he plays the Hannibal Lecter character in the program.)  These interviews are always fascinating and give the actors paying the villains a chance to chew-up the scenery -- this is particularly true with respect to the guy playing Charley Manson.  I should note however that police are notoriously bad interviewers -- they have always preferred to just beat the confession out of the criminal -- and the interviews shown in the TV program, presumably based on actual tapes, are exceedingly amateurish and poorly conducted from the perspective of the supposedly sophisticated G-men; simply put, they don't really have any idea how to effectively interview anyone.  Fortunately,the bad guys are self-aggrandizing and loquacious.  Wendy Carr is slumming with a bad-girl girlfriend a bartender -- one senses that the relationship will not end well.  Bill Tench's own seven year old is tangled up with the murder of a toddler in the neighborhood -- he's adopted and the show creates the unsettling implication that the chief FBI man's own son in a nascent serial-killer.  Holden has had a mental breakdown and seems on the edge of collapse -- his icy reserve is quivering over an emotional abyss.

There's  much to admire about this series.  The acting is mostly excellent and the scene-setting is hyper-realistic.  The dialogue is crisply written and the mass killers get spectacular soliloquies.  There are innumerable tiny details that seem just right -- the callous, condescending attitude of the social worker supervising Tench's son and making "unannounced home visits" captures the type perfectly.  The Tench's have to cooperate with the woman who has threatened to take their child away from them, but she is a sadistic as any of the killers on display in the film.  Tench becomes increasingly enraged with Manson and, even, unprofessional -- he can't tolerate Manson's assertion that his followers acted on their own, choosing to commit the murders.  (He can't stand this argument because it places, by analogy, complicity in his own son, who he denies is responsible for the death of the toddler.)  About half of the serial murderers are not criminal masterminds -- in fact, some of them are almost comically stupid.  The casual sexual harassment and gender discrimination of the era is well-documented -- it's subtle but omnipresent to the extent that Wendy Carr almost doesn't seem to notice that she is a not full-member of the team, although she's clearly smarter than both of the men.  The powers-that-be in Atlanta are Black and want to pin the child murders on the KKK if possible, although this is manifest idiocy:  how does a White man infiltrate the ghetto and kidnap Black boys without alarming the neighbors?  Indeed, one of the themes of the film is that the FBI team, notwithstanding their obsessive hard work, really don't have a clue.  They're making things up as they go and the vignettes of the BTK killer show how completely wrong many of their theories and criminal profiles seem to be. The show's design features low-key but intelligible lighting -- everything is pale beige, light blue, light yellow:  even the sun seems vaguely beige, the color of tasteful wall in a tastefully decorated house circa 1980.  The shows are crisply edited and the composition of the shots praise-worthy. The program isn't overly larded with portentous drone shots -- when this is done it serves a purpose.  I have noticed that the show is best enjoyed in one hour sessions -- when you view two shows back-to-back the formulas on which the program operates are too overt, too schematic, and the show's pervasive gloom and morbidity seems almost comical.  The titles establishing where things take place are remarkable -- they fill the whole screen with huge white letters, one line cursive and one line in blaring Bauhaus-style type-face.  It's like something out Samuel Fuller -- I think this kind of type face also appeared in David Byrnes one and only movie True Stories.  The effect of the titles is like some sort of scarcely repressed hysteria.  The soundtrack oozes with faint shrieks and sirens and there are also great versions of songs contemporaneous to the action, everything familiar but slightly disorienting.

A metaphor for the entire series is the opening title sequence.  We see a hand manipulating an old reel-to-reel tape recorder.  Cut into these shots are subliminal flashes of bound and decaying corpses -- you can't quite see the images; they're too short -- but you have a sense of the pale fungal texture of a rotting body, contorted fingers, empty eye-sockets.  Of course, you want to see but can't and the simultaneous exposure and, then, denial of these images is foundational to the whole enterprise.  Something awful has happened and we want to know about it -- but common decency intervenes to conceal the horror from us.  The show has almost no violence:  everyone treats everyone with civility, even the serial killers are, by and large, polite, but bad stuff is always happening where we can't see it.  In one show, a man has been disfigured by being shot in the face -- apparently, he hates the way he looks and, so, when he meets with the G-men in their car, he asks the cops to turn the mirror so he doesn't have to see himself.  The guy is filmed in long-shot hurrying to get into the car's backseat. The interview with the cops is shot with the victim's face in shadow and blurred, focus pulled tightly onto the two cops so that we perceive the interview through their reactions -- this is extremely effective:  you want to see, but you can't and are grateful that you can't.   

Addendum to review -- I've now completed watching all episodes of the Second Season.  Mindhunter remains true to its premise to the bitter end.  (Here "bitter end" is more literal than metaphoric.)  The last four or so episodes focus intensively on the child murders in Atlanta, somewhat to the detriment of the subplot involving Wendy Carr and her barmaid lover.  (In fact, Wendy is scarcely on-screen in several of these episodes and we have the unsettling sense that the director and scenario-writer have simply forgotten about her.)  The Atlanta narrative is particularly dank and unsatisfying -- in some ways, the show's fidelity to its sources and its pervasive despair is depressing, although the show never fails to be surprising and, even, gripping in a low-key way.  There has never been a police procedural so thoroughly skeptical of police procedures and basic competence as to detective work.  Twenty-eight or twenty-nine young men, most of them adolescent boys, are strangled and, then, pitched into waste lots and rivers around Atlanta.  The young men are all African-American and the crimes touch a nerve that is so raw and basic about race-relations that the crimes are essentially insoluble because of deeply entrenched biases.  Simply stated, the Black community wants the police to arrest a White supremacist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, for the crimes.  But Holden Ford won't retreat from his statistical studies that show that serial killers always kill within their own race.  This leads him to "profile" the killer as a Black young man between 21 and 29.  The African-American citizens of Atlanta are rightly suspicious of the FBI and unwilling to accept that the predator is a member of their own community.  Local Black politicians, of course, side with their constituents, further distorting the investigation already under considerable pressure from the public.  Reconciliation is impossible between the different factions and, ultimately, the show dramatizes how race is a "third-rail" -- if you touch it, you are electrocuted and racial tensions cloud and confound all civic issues, including those as fundamental as protecting children against serial murder.  The investigation, arduous and conflicted in all respects, is unsucessful and takes a toll with Tench and Ford.  Ultimately a plausible suspect is apprehended pretty much by accident.  A leak from within the police results in the Press reporting that the cops are collecting "fiber and hair" evidence from the corpses.  This causes the killer to start throwing the bodies in the murky brown and perpetually flooding rivers around Atlanta.  Using brute force, the cops stake-out all the river landings and bridges and ultimately arrest Wayne Williams, an arrogant Black hustler who is recruiting children for an act like the Jackson Five.  Williams, it seems, had committed two of the murders -- but the victims were both adult men.  The police announce that the serial killer's rampage is over and the investigation is quietly scotched.  An advocacy group comprised of the mothers of child victims is not satisfied -- they want to see a White man arrested for the killings of the children.  (And there is some evidence that the killing spree involved several other murderers, at least, one of them a White supremacist.)  Holden  Ford promises the mothers that he will continue the investigation but he can't keep the promise -- he's pulled off the job.  Tench's family problems, which have harried him through the series, increase to the point that his wife leaves him.  He comes home from Atlanta, hailed as a conquering hero, but his house is empty and dark -- his wife has left.  When Wendy's girlfriend tries to placate her ex-husband and conceals their relationship from her son, Wendy lashes out with gratuitous cruelty and ends the affair.  At the conclusion of the show, Tench and Holden Ford are hailed as heroes but a deep and pervasive sense of failure haunts them.  The women whose children have been killed remain wrong-headed, insulting, and intransigent in their view that the FBI has betrayed them -- even the local White judge is skeptical:  when asked for a search warrant, for a wire tap he says:  "I recall the last time the FBI wanted a wire-tap on a Black man" -- referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.   The idea of criminal "profiling" has been irretrievably contaminated by the notion of racial profiling.  No one trusts anyone and the BTK killer in the last scenes dons an inexpressive female mask, coquettishly adjusts his decolletage, and, then, engages in a little auto-erotic asphyxiation and masturbation, using souvenirs of his seven or so torture killings.  We know that no one will catch him for another twenty years.  Ultimately, this show -- without on-screen violence, without any car chases or showy action sequences -- dramatizes the futility of even heroic and self-sacrificing effort in the face of unfathomable evil. 

Diamonds of the Night

Jan Nemec's 1964 Diamonds of the Night is essentially an hour-long student picture, the sort of thing that an earnest young man in an Eastern bloc country (Nemic is analumni of Prague's famous FAMU) directs to show that he has the native skill and technical accomplishment to move onto something bigger, better, and more meaningful.  The film exhibits extraordinary proficiency and it's exciting in a grim, joyless sort of way, but the picture is too resolutely unpleasant and dire to be taken seriously.  I found that watching the movie was an ordeal.

Two boys escape from a train bound to a concentration camp.  They flee through a vast, scary forest like characters in a Grimm Brother fairy tale for a quarter hour before anyone speaks.  Then, they come to an isolated farm-house, either steal or are given some food -- pivotal plot elements are intentionally ambiguous in this movie-- an encounter that triggers a surreal manhunt.  The posse pursuing the boys are all old German Home Guards between 75 and 85 years old, ancient wrecks tottering up the wooded hills with antiquated shotguns in a slow motion pursuit.  Notwithstanding the superannuated nature of the pursuers, the boys are in even worse shape than their elderly pursuers:  wet, starving, hobbled by bad shoes, scarcely able to run themselves.  Ultimately, the elderly search party catches up with them.  The old men feast on roast chicken, sausage, and beer while waiting for the authorities to arrive and take possession of their prisoners.  The authorities either don't show up or they do and the boys are either executed or they are let go -- in the film's final scene, the two boys are still stumbling through the crepuscular forest.  This is the whole story -- the film is only 64 minutes long.  And, even at that length, Nemec pads the material with either flashbacks or hallucinations of some kind -- we see the boys wearing long coats marked in paint "KL" (Konzentration Lager) casually riding streetcars and wandering around the eerily empty streets of Prague.  Whether these scenes, often visually striking, represent a dream of freedom or an earlier memory is unclear.  One of the boy's seems to have a girlfriend in Prague, although she doesn't come to door when he rings the bell -- it may be that they are visiting a brothel in a dim alleyway in the city.  Sequences repeat and the same shots are used half a dozen times -- an uncanny image of pillows piled on a windowsill is repeated at least four or five times:  either it's a dream or an image of the sort of pillowy comfort that the harried boys desire or has something to do with sex.  We just don't know.  The Supplements to the film, excellent as always with Criterion, note that even laconic summaries as to film's plot frequently vary on key points.  For instance, we don't know if the kids are Jews fleeing a train that will take them to their extermination or military deserters -- both possibilities are implied. (The movie is based on a novella by a Jewish Auschwitz survivor and so the wise money is on the former option.)

Fully a third of film's budget, which must have been minuscule, was devoted to the showy opening shot, a bravura tracking image that lasts two minutes and shows the boys fleeing across a clear cut in the forest, the train stopping somewhere behind them, and the sound of machine gun fire.  This shot requires the boys to scramble up a steep hill -- it looks like it's sloped about 45 degrees or more.  (Pictures taken on location show a ski-jump like track system ascending the face of the brambly, clear-cut hillside.  Nemec made four takes with this set-up and says that all of them were ruined in some way.)  The densely saturated black and white image of the boys scrambling up the hill returns at intervals throughout the movie -- it's impressive but only one iteration shows how extremely steep the the hill actually is.  The scene has a dreamlike quality -- it's like the sort of hazards and obstacles one encounters in a nightmare, a landscape that tilts in such as way as to become essentially impassable.  This shot rhymes with the harrowing slow motion pursuit, more conventionally cut, a crowd of old men in hunting caps and suits and ties staggering like zombies up a steep hill as the boys flee in front of them -- this is also exceedingly nightmarish particularly since the camera emphasizes the haggard, elderly, and senile appearance of most of the men:  it's like an allegory of crabbed old age pursuing youth.  Ascent imagery is also distributed through the film in the form of spiral stairs in Prague, a steep sledding hill on which figures that Brueghel might have limned are playing  in the snow, and, finally, an uncanny elevator in an ancient framework of filigree-scaffolding.  The film's surrealism is thoroughgoing and overt - we see ants pouring out of a hole and covering a boy's wrist and hand and later, seeming to swarm out of his eye.  A vast field of scree somehow tempts the boys to ascend and we watch them hobbling upward over unstable shattered rocks.  (Here's where I began to sense that the film was primarily surrealist in affect -- why would people who are hiding with ravaged, blistered feet ascend a nightmarish landscape of this kind? -- it's a purely expressionistic landscape.  Similarly, when the old men in the posse feast, the audience is treated to big close-ups of their toothless jaws masticating chicken bones and gnawing on sausage, the sounds of their chewing mercilessly amplified -- it's deeply unpleasant particularly since the wounded and starving boys are standing in the room, facing a wall.  Just about every scene is shot with an alternative:  when one of the boys enters the farmhouse and sees an austere, forbidding-looking woman, he either murders her or simply begs for bread.  At the end of the movie, the boys are either killed by a firing squad comprised of the nasty-looking old men or survive a mock execution in which the old men actually applaud them.  We see the boys lying dead on the road and, also, escaping through the woods.  James Quandt offers a visual essay pointing out five influences on the film -- they are Bresson, Resnais' Last Night at Marienbad, Bunuel and Dali, Tarkovsky's The Childhood of Ivan etc.  But I thought the film most resembles aspects of Ambrose Bierce's Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, not mentioned by Quandt -- there is a sense that, perhaps, the whole story is imagined, a plot confabulated in a dying brain, and that the boys may have been gunned down even as they jumped from the fatal train.  (The way that the movie is shot closely resembles the great French version of Bierce's story shown on Twilight Zone  in February 1964, made by Robert Enrico, a nearly silent 28 minute movie, also in intense black and white so as to resemble the photographs of Matthew Brady -- the movie won a prize at Cannes in 1962.)

I didn't like the movie but it's impressive enough in a grim way and more interesting to think and write about than to see.  The two actors are non-professionals.  One of them was "shunter" in a railyard near Prague.  After the movie, the boy fancied himself a movie star, got into fights and broke his leg and, then, simply vanished.  The other boy left Czechoslovakia -- he was a photographer and ended up in LA working for Hustler magazine.  Nemec tells us he specialized in close-shots of female genitalia.

Where'd you go, Bernadette?

Where'd you go, Bernadette? is beautifully acted, well-directed movie about a brilliant woman who has lost her way.  Richard Linklater, the movie's auteur, directs the movie in his most nondescript and fluent "invisible" style -- at no point,does the film's style draw attention to the way that it was made.  It has no gorgeous shots (except a few images of icy mountains and icebergs ostensibly in the Antarctic -- the credits reveal that the landscapes were filmed in Greenland), no flashy or fast editing, and much of the picture, curiously enough, was made in Pittsburgh, standing in for the more expensive Seattle where the bulk of the film is set.  The camera set ups are utilitarian and some of the movie, particularly the scenes in the Antarctic, are obviously shot on sets nowhere near the polar circle.  Linklater's unassuming style is on display in a scene that many directors would turn into a showy quasi- action sequence -- Bernadette (Cate Blanchett) has so landscaped her backyard that the steep hill is unstable and, during heavy rain, a massive landslides pours down the slope and knocks down a wall in a suburban house where Bernadette's neighbor and nemesis (played by Katherine Wiig) is hosting a party.  Linklater uses three close-ups showing soil slipping on the hillside -- the shots are close, abstract, and without any landscape or environmental context.  This is intercut with the party.  We see some wet mud flowing under a door, then, two quick shots of the backwall giving way and mud pouring into the party.  Most film makers would milk the sequence for suspense, create a threat of injury, and use some flashy CGI effects to show the torrent of mud and debris pouring down the hill -- Linklater knows that the landslide is wholly extraneous to the actual themes of his film and, therefore, doesn't interrupt the story with anything that would distract us from the main themes in his narrative.  This sort of discipline is rare among filmmakers and contributes to the powerful effect that the movie makes as a whole.  (Linklater has always been more interested in extracting remarkable performances out of his actors than he is in staging action scenes -- in fact, rare among American directors he has no interest in directing fights or combat or action at all.  Some of his films have been openly experimental, for instance A Scanner Darkly and Boyhood -- but the nature of his experimentation is more philosophical than pictorial.  With Steven Soderburgh, he's our best advocate for the "invisible directing" style that characterizes the old masters like Howard Hawks and Budd Boettcher.)

Bernadette Fox is a great architect who was awarded a McArthur Genius grant and, after a calamity involving a house she built in LA, fled that scene and moved with her family to Seattle.  At the film's start, she seems to have no interest in architecture and has become a kind of recluse.  She is given more than adequate grounds for her reclusiveness -- after four miscarriages, her daughter was born with a defective heart and required several neo-natal surgeries in order to survive.  This stress seems to have knocked her out of the professional orbit where she was once well-known and even feted.  No longer creative in architecture, she has channeled her intelligence into tinkering with the decaying mansion where she lives, fighting with the neighbors whom she derides, and hiding from the world.  Most of all, she has focused her energy on her relationship with her daughter which is almost frighteningly close and intense.  Bernadette has agreed to take her daughter on a trip to Antarctica with her remote husband, a Google executive played by Billy Crudup.  But she's terrified of the trip and seeks ways to avoid making the journey.  The film is very clever at showing us Bernadette's reasoning from her perspective -- we don't really sense how crazy she has become until the film is about half-way finished.  After some bizarre behavior, Bernadette's husband hires a perky therapist to work with his troubled wife -- the therapist diagnoses her as suffering from severe anxiety and adjustment disorder.  When the therapist and her husband try to "intervene" and have her hospitalized, Bernadette flees and, in fact, ends up on an adventure by herself in Antarctica.  

In some ways, the film is a bit like a Woody Allen movie -- it features fantastically intelligent and articular characters who harangue one another is a witty and engaging way.  (Cate Blanchett is particularly good in her manic discussion with a former colleague on the things that she despises about Seattle).  In another way, the film resembles Five Easy Pieces even down to the rainy Pacific Northwest setting.  Like the concert pianist played by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, Bernadette has suppressed the most important part of her personality, her creative energy, and this has caused her extreme distress.  Like Nicholson's character, she's rude and outspoken and lashes out at those around her -- she alienates and estranges all of those around her.  But the picture develops along its own organic lines and becomes extremely affecting emotionally. (All of the film's performances are excellent and Wiig in particular gives a very striking and surprising turn to her role that, in most films, would be that of a simple villain).  This is the sort of picture that is designed for female suburban audiences -- it's charmingly aspirational, focuses on creativity which, I think, is an important theme for gifted women who may be relegated to the role of mere mother and wife, and is intensely emotional particularly in the film's depiction of the relationship between the troubled mother and the spunky teenage daughter -- and it is, in fact, heart-warming.  I spent much of the last half of the movie dabbing at my eyes.  The movie doesn't exactly stick with you because it's pleasures are really readily portable -- the pleasures the film offers are so intrinsic to the material and so embedded in the relationships that the movie depicts that they don't really apply to other settings.  Parts of the movie are probably wildly improbable although I didn't register any of that implausibility as condescending to the audience or disturbing in any way.  Linklater is one of our best film-makers and this modest picture is one of his best movies.  (I should note that the advertising campaign for this film which leads the viewer to expect a vulgar SNL-style comedy is totally misleading.  But it's an excellent film and I hope the meretricious ad campaign helps the movie find an audience.)

The Wandering Earth

The Chinese mega-blockbuster The Wandering Earth is said to be the second most popular film in human history.  Probably, when all receipts are collected, the science fiction epic, will be accounted the movie seen on the big screen by the most people in all of the history of cinema.  Based on a notable science fiction novel, a part of The Three Body Problem books by ... (admired by no less than Barack Obama), the picture has a distinguished pedigree.  It's fantastically grandiose but incoherent to such an extent that one suspects that the Netflix streaming version of the epic, perhaps, preserves only about half of the movie.  Whether this is true, I don't know. 

Even severely edited, the film, after its novelty wears off, becomes rapidly tedious.  This is due to the fact that we can't ever tell what is happening or why, confusion aggravated by the fact that, with few exceptions, we don't have much clue as to the characters (or even identities) of the various heroes and heroines expiring spectacularly on-screen.  It's pretty clear that the director can manage a zoom shot that begins with a glint in the eye of a character, passes through buildings and walls and monstrous machines, then, rises over what's left of the frozen earth's atmosphere, climbing into outer space, and, then the intergalactic void, all of this accomplished in a single take that is about 30 seconds long, but has no idea at all how to film a simple conversation between two actors.  I've never seen a film so technically accomplished in its special effects, Bladerunner-style urban environments, and gut-churning anti-gravity scenes, that is so completely botched in all other  respects.  Most of the action comes down to a guy in a space suit hammering on jammed door with a wrench. 

The plot moves with lightning speed.  In the first minutes, we're told that the sun is about to explode and that "monster tsunamis" have wiped out half the population.  The survivors have been forced into underground cities about 5 km below the earth's surface -- these places look like a combination of an urban mall with the streets of neo LA in Blade Runner, all kiosks and brightly lit booths and flickering neon signs.  To escape the blunderbuss of the exploding sun, the earth has been equipped with 1500 giant blue propulsion jets -- these huge jets fire incessantly operating off some kind of nuclear fuel in "reactor cores."  The jets propel the earth across the Solar System and toward a friendly planetary system where human beings plan to take up residence after a 2500 hundred year flight -- nine-hundred years of acceleration, nine-hundred years of cruising, and 700 years to decelerate into a earth-like orbit around a distant sun.  Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry -- the earth which is relying on Jupiter's gravitational field for an additional boost is off-target and, venturing too close to the massive gaseous planet, will be torn apart by its influence.  There's a vestigial backstory about a teenage boy who is mad at his astronaut father -- the boy's father is an astronaut on a huge rotary space station that is shadowing the earth on its voyage for completely inscrutable reasons.  (A sort of explanation is given late in the film.)  The boy skips school and sneaks to the earth's frozen surface -- it's a vast glacier -- and, with his kid sister, gets caught in titanic earthquakes as Jupiter's tidal forces begin to literally pull the earth apart.  Some more heroes surface and the kid with his colleagues drives their giant snow-rover, a big mining truck qua snowplow, down to Sulawesi where they are supposed to replace a failed reactor core.  At Sulawesi, the kid contrives a plan to light Jupiter on fire using a huge jet torch and employ the consequent blast (Jupiter being mostly inflammable hydrogen) to propel the "wandering Earth" back on course.  When the flame from the jet falls short of Jupiter, which is pulling earth's matter into the vortex of its great red eye, the kid's father on the space station bridges the gap by sacrificing himself (and the Helios Project) in a huge self-inflicted explosion that amplifies the jet from the earth and puts the match to Jupiter.  As anticipated by the teenage hero, the massive planet blows up and blasts the Earth back on its 2500 year voyage.  The film ends inexplicably with a sequence just reprising shot for shot an early sequence in which the hero "hot-wires" and steals a massive snow-rover which he doesn't really know how to drive. 

I've left out about an hour of earthquakes and explosions. Jupiter's gravity turns the earth's surface into a turbulent ocean of cracking and lunging ice.  Periodically, the characters shoot through ravines full of deadly snapping rocks, a bit like the navigation of the fissure in the Death Star in the first Star Wars movie.  Sometimes, they go underground into giant shafts where they fall or are endangered by meteorite-like shards of ice and boulders about the size of train locomotives.  Each individual shot or vista is impressive, but, ultimately, they don't add up to anything at all.  In the film's climax, daddy astronaut is working to blow himself up as his enormous Ferris-wheel shaped space station fragments into fiery pieces.  Down on earth, everything is being sucked into the sky by Jupiter's gravitational field.  In some kind of hole, two lads are trying to do something to some kind of machine -- this involves hammering and mighty feats of strength.  Nearby, about 12 heroes are shoving on something as hard as they can -- they are really putting their shoulders up against some sort of obstacle (maybe, it's a door they are trying to keep closed against some enigmatic force).  In any event, a little girl, who has been skewered with iron re-rod, broadcasts a call for help.  All of the snow-rovers are frantically driving home so people can say goodbye to their families before the earth blows up.  But the snow-rover drivers heed the child's call and make about 5000 u-turns on the crumbling glacier, drive back to the Sulawesi jet, and, there, hopping out of their monster snow-plows, run into some vast shaft to help the 12 heroes who are pushing heroically on whatever it is that they pushing heroically against.  There are too many people to put their hands on the surface that, for some reason, has to be pushed and so they push on the backs of others who push on the backs of yet others who push against the backs of the dozen heroes who are pushing on whatever it is they have to push against.  It's completely idiotic.  But whatever has to be pushed gets good and pushed and the earth is saved -- although at the expense of the Helios Project.   The Helios Project is a post-human library of all known DNA designed to seed the universe with people and animals and insects from earth in the event that the Wandering Planet gets destroyed -- this is why the Earth is shadowed by the giant space station.  Of course, the Helios Project is supervised by a HAL-like computer intelligence who is not at all amused when the hero-astronaut (the surly boy-hero's father) decides to blow up the repository of all future generations.  But the hero-astronaut does something to something else to induce a mighty explosion, destroys the Helios project and its uncooperative robot sentinel, and, then, pilots his space station with 300,000 kilotons of nuclear fuel into Jupiter to help his son blow up the colorful Gas Giant.  (Given the level of stupidity in the human characters, I found myself rooting for the computer and the Helios Project.)

There's no acting in this movie.  No dialogue worth repeating or, even, hearing -- the film is hideously dubbed and, probably, best watched with the sound muted.  People posture, declaim defiance or express hope, and, then, they die.  It doesn't matter half the population perished before the movie began and, I think, another third of the survivors were eliminated when they were forbidden to enter the underground cities, freezing to death on the icy surface of the earth that is now nothing more than a huge sepulcher.  In the cosmic scheme of things, life is cheap, although this film is not.

Western

In the arid and mountainous frontier, a group of hardy men are assembled to achieve some objective -- perhaps, it is a cattle drive or mining or defending a cavalry post.  One of the pioneers is laconic and has a mysterious background; he is thought to have killed many men.  Everyone drinks too much and conflicts arise over poker, women, and water rights.  Inevitably, a confrontation ensues between the pioneers and the tribe living in the area.  The mysterious gunman takes action and, then, his combat skills no longer needed, recedes into the frontier darkness.

This is the general premise of the German director Valeska Grisebach's 2017 film, Western.  Shot in the wilds of Bulgaria, the movie features a cast of non-professional actors, mostly selected, it seems, for their rugged good looks.  Grisebach says that she watched many American Westerns when she was growing up in West Germany and she models her film  (she says) on Henry King's The Gunfighter, John Ford's My Darling Clementine, and Anthony Mann's Winchester 73.  Notwithstanding its plot, Western is an austere art-house film, with influences in Antonioni and the Rumanian new wave particularly Corneliu Porumboi and Radu Jude.  Grisebach's cowboys are a group of German construction workers dispatched to a remote part of Bulgaria to build a hydroelectric power station.  The leader of the construction workers is the foreman, Vincent, a man with a malign babyface, recently estranged from his wife.  Vincent clashes with Meinhard, a new addition to the crew and the film's apparent hero.  Meinhard has a weathered face (too many years riding the range) and seems to be a loner.  He is a man of few words, although he has said enough to let it be known that he has seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan (and may have been a member of the French foreign legion).  These claims seem more than a little questionable.  The German construction crew approaches their job with a considerable degree of arrogance -- they blithely plan to re-route an entire river, maul the terrain with huge construction equipment, and flirt  aggressively with local women.  The German cowboys, as it were, even post a large German flag over their encampment.  Only Meinhard has any interest in the local people.  He wanders around in the village a few miles from the encampment and, after being initially rejected (the village shopkeeper won't sell him a cigarette let alone a beer), becomes friends with some of the people in the dusty arid town.  Meinhard's friendship with the villagers creates hostility with Vincent, not helped by Meinhard getting a big crane stuck in the middle of the river near construction site.  Initially, Vincent also creates a bad impression by taking a local woman's hat and playing "keep away" with it as the men and girls swim together.  Communication problems are rife:  the Germans don't know Bulgarian and the Bulgarian's know only smatterings of German.  (This problem seems a bit fabulous -- in my experience, even uneducated Europeans speaking different languages can communicate with pidgin English.  Here no one knows any English at all notwithstanding the fact that men from the impoverished village are said to have immigrated to North America.) .  Grisebach subtitles the Bulgarian (and the German is subtitled for English-speaking audiences) and so we can clinically see how misunderstandings arise and propagate themselves, at times, something excruciating to watch. Meinhard finds a horse grazing near the construction crew's camp which he tames and rides bareback.  He becomes good friends with the horse's owner, Adrian, a man who also owns a local quarry and may have ties with some kind of organized crime.  The German flag is stolen and, during a poker game, Meinhard wins all the money of one of the villages -- the man later comes to him and begs for the money back and he has a point:  Meinhard won the poker game simply because he had more money to gamble away than the poverty-stricken, unemployed local men.  The presence of the Germans destabilizes the rather fragile local economy.  The village, as it happens, shares its water with two other towns, but the Germans need water to mix their concrete.  When Vincent takes the horse to turn on the water to his camp, the animal stumbles on a steep hill, falls and is badly injured.  A quarrel arises over gravel aggregate from Adrian's quarry.  Everything seems tending toward a final showdown of some sort.

Western achieves an interesting balance of double perspectives.  It's like certain optical illusions that  shift shape as you gaze at them -- is this a hag or a young woman haughtily turning away from you?  Is it a rabbit or a duck?  From one perspective, the construction crew seems to be a group of men struggling to tame the wilderness and surrounding by enigmatic hostiles.  But from another vantage, the German construction crew are wild Indians, invading raiders who threaten the stable, traditional life in the small village.  Similarly, for three-fourth of the film, the strong, silent Meinhard seems to be the hero -- the only member of the German crew willing to meet the locals half-way.  But, by the end of the film, Vincent is partying with the Bulgarian villagers and, in fact, engages in a game of keep-away in the river using the German flag earlier stolen by the locals, a scene that rhymes with, and resolves, the conflict arising from the "keep-away" game with the woman's hat.  By contrast, the eerie Meinhard now seems relegated to the shadows.  After having sex with the attractive local translator, who actually likes Vincent it seems, he becomes further alienated and estranged, lurking in the darkness and brandishing a nasty-looking switchblade.  The movie suggests that Meinhard has gone native -- when a group of men beat him up at the end of the movie, the kindly Adrian says:''Don't worry about it.  It's the kind of thing that happens in small villages."  In the film's final shot, we see Meinhard dancing clumsily with the villages.  He is the sort of man who doesn't fit in anywhere -- and, of course, the movie suggests that he is too restless to be happy with any one or in any place.

The film is about two hours long and features some spectacular landscapes of the mountains on the border with Macedonia.  The editing employs many jump-shots that don't really contribute to the film and, in fact, work against its archetypal form.  Details as to local geography and the customs are vividly established and, even, minor characters have a pungency not often displayed in films -- we can almost smell these people.  The oppressive heat and humidity, the river cutting through little limestone gorges, the hillside thickets, and the small, poor village -- all are effectively and memorably presented.  In this part of Bulgaria, the Germans were regarded as "allies" during World War Two and, oddly enough, the locals recall their presence "seventy years ago" with warmth and affection.  (This reminds us that the history of World War II at what we might regard as its periphery -- for instance, the Balkans -- is fantastically complex.)  The film has a number of blind spots that strain credulity -- it seems doubtful that a group of thuggish construction workers would be unleashed on a remote Bulgarian village without better preparation and some kind of liaison with the local authorities.  (And there seem to be no local authorities -- in keeping with the Western theme, there is no real law and order.)  The details of the construction work, which never seems to advance, are unclear -- a bunch of re-rod stands for a concrete pour that never happens (I assume the budget didn't permit anything more than the nominal foundations we see on screen).  Except for a few short sequences, no one seems to work -- everyone just sits around chain-smoking and getting drunk.  (I think the conceit is that without the gravel to make aggregate no progress can be made on the hydro-electric project).  In this part of the world, people are very religious -- Grisebach, as a modern secular German, has a complete blind spot for religion -- we see a church on one occasion but no one seems to go to it other than the sexually compliant lady translator.  Grisebach's non-ending is suggestive but also something of a cop-out.  Real Westerns conclude with some sort of climax that resolves at least some of the issues.  Grisebach simply complicates the situation to a sort narrative saturation and, then, ends the picture without anything approaching a resolution.  Her answer to this criticism would be classically "art house" -- there are no resolutions in real life.  True enough, but her film isn't exactly a model of realism either and, so, an audience has a right to, at least, hope for some kind of denouement. Despite these objections, it's a pretty good film, exciting enough in its own way, and well worth seeing.     

The Counselor

When it was released in 2013, Ridley Scott's The Counselor was, more or less, universally derided.  Despite an all-star cast, the movie was said to be nearly unwatchable with a script by Cormac McCarthy that was so bad as to be risible.  (In fact, the movie was denounced in such terms as to cause re-evaluation of some of McCarthy's more recent novels.)  However, recently the Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro has suggested that The Counselor is better than its reputation and has been severely underestimated.  Accordingly, I thought that I would take an look at the movie.  Del  Toro is highly inconsistent himself and, generally, overrated in my view, but he's an important film maker with a good eye for genre films and his critical views are worth consideration.

In fact, The Counselor is entertaining.  It's not a bad film by any means.  Much of it is ridiculous, but this arises from its rather bizarre aspirations.  McCarthy's script is primitive by any standards, but, certainly, contains a number of soliloquy-like scenes that succinctly present themes present in the novelist's works -- for better or worse, the director (and his actors) treated McCarthy's screenplay with reverence (I recall that a few pages were published in The New Yorker) and what's on-screen is all intentional.  My Blu-Ray of the film is 137 minutes long and appears to capture every word that the novelist wrote -- the theatrical (cut) version was about 120 minutes.  On the film's commentary, everyone raves about McCarthy's script -- in fact, the script is poor, implausible, and very thin.  The characters are all cartoonish and the plot is rudimentary.  The long speeches with which McCarthy indulges himself occur at about 15 minute intervals and add nothing at all to the movie -- indeed, most of what is said in those speeches is either totally extraneous or, in the alternative, serves as an obtuse commentary on action that would be better shown and than described.

A lawyer, called simply "Counselor" (Michael Fassbender) has a beautiful girlfriend (Penelope Cruz) and seems to be prosperous.  The character has no depth -- he is a Luftmensch to use the Yiddish expression.  This attorney seems to have no office, very few, if any, current clients, and no obligations other than enriching himself by transactions with bad guys.  Counselor is completely implausible as a lawyer -- we have no idea about his practice -- and he seems to be an idiot too boot.  He's good in bed, however, as we see in a long and embarrassing sex scene with which the film begins -- it involves what the elderly Cormac McCarthy regards as post-modern pillow-talk (which also makes no sense) and simply compromises the two high-powered actors who have to thrash about in this scene.  Counselor is planning some sort of transaction with Reiner, a smarmy club owner in El Paso, played by Javier Bardem.  Bardem seems to have thought his part was unworkable and he makes fun of  it with his appearance -- he has a kind of frizzy hair that looks like a cartoon character who has suffered a high-voltage shock and he wears pink sunglasses.  (It's a ridiculous get-up and he looks like the old Little Rascals African-American child actor who plays Buckwheat.) Reiner's girlfriend is Cameron Diaz who slinks around in BDSM garments and keeps twin pet cheetahs -- the cheetahs are apparently pretty well trained because they sometimes sit regally in Reiner's night club.  This detail is like something imagined by a precocious 8th-grade boy and is indicative of the general level of most of the script -- the film's morality features bad guys who do garish bad things of the kind that an imaginative 8th-grader would find deplorable.  (Are there really "snuff films" in which teenage girls are beheaded and their twitching torso's ravaged by naked guys in executioner hoods?)  The movie is generally misogynistic (again an element of 8th grade boy morality) in that women use their sexuality to coerce men into doing bad things -- the world would be so much better if these nasty, sexy girls weren't always forcing us to sin.  Counselor goes to Amsterdam where he buys a beautiful diamond for his girlfriend and, later, asks her to marry him.  The Amsterdam scene features an encounter with a Sephardic Jewish diamond cutter played by the great Bruno Ganz -- there's a lot of totally unnecessary dialogue establishing that McCarthy has read Wikipedia about the diamond trade and some bizarre religious commentary about the "man of God" versus the Greek hero and Semitic (Jewish) culture being the last culture of any substance to exist on earth.  At times, the film slips into gloomy apocalyptic ravings -- the sins of the hero, which seem pretty minor to me, are somehow equated to world-wide greed and false values that McCarthy thinks will destroy the world.  (This is flat-out quack nonsense.) For some reason, Reiner who wants Counselor to invest in a new night club tries earnestly to talk him out of the deal -- he seems weirdly concerned about Counselor's naivety and innocence.  Needless to say, the deal is going to be financed with money provided by a Columbian drug cartel that ships its wares around the US in a huge "honey-wagon" filled with barrels of cocaine and human shit.  After Reiner tries to talk the dimwitted Counselor out of the deal, another drug dealer, played flamboyantly by Brad Pitt, also tells him to back out of the transaction.  But Counselor decides to make the play for the big one-time score with predictably dire consequences -- all the main characters suffer spectacular on-screen deaths.  (There are a couple of beheadings, some well-staged shoot-outs, and lots of running around desperately to avoid the assassins sent to murder all of the principals  in the film.  At one point, the hapless Penelope Cruz suggests that she and the hero hide in Boise, Idaho -- this amazes both the audience and Counselor who seems not to know where Boise is located, although he dutifully goes there.)

In the end, just about everyone is killed, the bad guys recover their cocaine, and Cameron Diaz playing the role of the evil, pan-sexual Malinka (she offers to have sex with Penelope Cruz and, in one memorable sequence, copulates with the windshield of a Ferrari) remarks to some character who I couldn't quite identify (a survivor bad guy I guess) that "the slaughter to come you can't even imagine", another of McCarthy's idiotic apocalyptic ravings.

Despite its folly, the movie is very entertaining and its fun to see big Hollywood actors wrestling with material that obviously completely baffles them -- Brad Pitt as the horn-dog drug dealer is pretty funny and Bardem is hilarious throughout the whole movie.  (He seems to relish to stupid lines that he has to read and, when he describes how his girlfriend "fucked" the windshield of his car, with visual to illustrate, his eyes bug out and he acts truly traumatize; he literally cowers as Malinka wipes her vagina all over his windshield, half-covering his bulging eyes, but too obsessed to look away -- it's laugh-out loud funny.  (The episdoe traumatizes Reiner Although not traumatized enough to end his relationship with this evil femme fatale ; in light of recent events, its impossible to see the wicked Malinka as anyone other than the snow-white Malania Trump.)  Just before the climax, Counselor calls the head mafia guy predictably called Jefe, played by the redoubtable Ruben Blades, and gets an earful of gibberish from the crime boss including statements about human destiny at the crossroads, the transcendence and duty of suffering, and the fate of the world.  It's all pretty great if viewed in the proper mood.  A scene in which Cameron Diaz tries to confess her polysexual adventures (she's not Catholic and doesn't know if she was even baptized) to a poor priest is also priceless -- ultimately, the miserable priest has to flee his own confession booth to the dismay of the nice Mexican ladies waiting in line for his services.  The sequence in which Brad Pitt loses all the fingers on one hand and his head to a ridiculous garroting automaton is really funny, particularly the way in which the astonished cops put the actor's head on top of his crotch to carry him away.  It's not a serious movie and once  you figure out that the film's pleasures will all be guilty ones -- it's just a well-made, interestingly acted B neo-film-noir --  the proceedings are, in fact, pretty amusing.  Nothing in the movie is even remotely plausible and, as I watched the film, I wondered about the Euro-trash night-clubs and elaborate restaurants and palatial mansions in El Paso where the movie is set.  Remarkably,it turns out no one went to El Paso to make this movie -- why would a film crew suffer for eight or nine weeks in a backwater of that kind? Amazingly, London is used for El Paso, hence, the utter, overt inaccuracy of the city scenes.  The landscapes look pretty plausible for West Texas.  But those scenes were shot in a National Park in Spain, the same place where spaghetti Westerns were once made.
 

Alec Soth "Sleeping by the Mississippi" and Minnesota Marine Art Museum

"Sleeping by the Mississippi" is an exhibition of about 15 large pictures made by Minneapolis-based photographer, Alec Soth.  Soth uses a large format camera to make his images.  He works effectively in several styles:  many of his picture are full-frontal confrontations with eccentric people -- in this vein, his work looks like Diane Arbus; but Soth also has an excellent eye for landscapes and color-saturated interiors making bright, disturbing pictures that show the influence of William Eggleston.  The landscapes and the interiors, generally garishly decorated, are wonderful, if always seeming a bit derivative.  Those pictures don't raise the moral conundrums implicit in Soth's portrait photographs.  For some reasons these images make me a bit queasy -- I'm not sure to what extent Soth is patronizing or exploiting the subjects of these photographs.  He is a good-looking, youthful-seeming man, undoubtedly born to the modest privileges of White middle or upper class (he attended Sarah Lawrence) and one wonders a bit about the exchange of power on display in these portraits.  Soth gets rich and famous and inspires rapturous reviews and receives funding from State arts organizations as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship; but he finds his subjects poor, disenfranchised and half crazy and he leaves them that way as well.  Two photographs exemplify the uneasy transaction between cameraman and his subjects.  In one picture, we see a very handsome, red-headed girl -- she is startlingly pale and throws her head back like a pre-Raphaelite Madonna or martyr; there is a big soot cross on her forehead.  The caption to the picture tells us that the woman, someone living on the streets in Louisiana, made the cross on her forehead for Ash Wednesday with soot from a cigarette that she had just smoked.  The girl's eyes have a dull, medicated look.  Of course, we don't know what she really looks like -- we don't know what the other images of her taken by Soth show.  He has instead opted for to print a four-foot by four-foot picture in which the woman is posed as a preternaturally light-skinned red-haired saint  shown against a nondescript, glowing void-- in other words, he makes her into something unwordly.  But I wonder if this is exactly fair -- and, if the intent is to show the woman as a sort Dante Gabriel Rossetti saint, then, why tell us that she's not really a believer and has marked herself with soot from her cigarette?.  Did she do this herself?  Why? Or did Soth encourage her make the mark on her forehead?  An aggressive image of a mother and daughter said to be taken in Dubuque, Iowa is similarly troubling.  The two women are reasonably attractive and Soth has posed them with their long, naked legs crossed and touching one another -- even though everyone is decent it remains a highly sexualized photograph.  Much of the image is occupied by the women's bare legs -- they have almost identical and hardened-looking faces under identical canopies of black hair and their little heads appear as an after-thought:  the big legs make them look like the strutting stylized harlots in some of Steinberg's  sketches.  (The picture is also similar to a obscene picture of a mother and daughter in the collection of John Waters illustrated in his book, Art, a Sex Book.)  Again, the picture seems somehow condescending and unduly harsh and confrontational -- the clinical approach to these women seems to dehumanize them and the label which indicates something like the daughter wants to go into "nursing" but the mother "has no dreams left anymore" doesn't really help things.  With these reservations, moral but not  necessarily esthetic, the show is excellent.  Soth has some spooky still lives, a mattress drowned in a slough and a chain gang working the absolutely flat and barren cotton fields near Angola Prison in Louisiana.  One image is particularly both memorable and strangely appalling -- it's a photograph of Charles Lindbergh's cot on the front porch of his parents' home near Little Falls, the old mansion only a stone's throw from the Mississippi River.  (Indeed, I suspect that this strangely indelible picture gives the exhibition and the book from which it is drawn its name).  I saw this cot about 15 years ago when I took a tour of the Lindbergh house and I was also struck by the abject aspect of that little bachelor bed on the house's unheated porch.  Lindbergh's childhood seems to have been unhappy and his parents were miserable in their marriage -- misery that seems to have been inherited by Charley and imported into his own marriage with Anne Morrow Lindbergh.  The impression that I had was that Lindbergh fled the perpetual strife in the home by sleeping on the porch -- maybe, this impression is wrong, but the little cot with its white blankets and sheets, the refuge of the hapless teenage boy who was to become the most famous person in the world, is strangely mournful, dejected, even, pathetic.  Soth has a brilliant eye -- he  has caught the uncanny atmosphere around the bed on the porch and made a picture with real presence which somehow communicates this sense to the viewer.

It costs seven dollars to get into the Minnesota Museum of Marine Art and the admission is a real bargain. From the outside, the gallery looks a bit like a nautical-themed restaurant near an airport or the outskirts of a mall, something like a larger and more elegant Red Lobster.  But, in fact, the interior consists of five large exhibition rooms, well-lit by skylights, and filled with beautiful and interesting things.  Two of the exhibition spaces were occupied by temporary shows -- the Soth photographs and twenty canvases by Dutch artist, Maarten Platje.  Three of the galleries display paintings from the permanent collection.  Ostensibly all of these paintings are thematically related to water -- oceans, lakes, and rivers.  The collector, Bob Kierlin one of the founders of Fastenal, however, seems to have purchased noteworthy works on the basis of their availability and about a quarter of the pictures, although intrinsically interesting, have little or nothing to do with the aquatic theme.  (For instance, there's a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, a bit sketchy and, perhaps, incomplete, that shows a young man and what seems to be a Labrador retriever.  One might interpret the young man as wearing a sailor's suit and, of course, Labradors are bred to swim -- but I don't recall any water being in sight in the picture.  Similarly, the museum owns a reasonably good Millet -- the artist's trademark field workers are stooping to the harvest, but the image is mostly dusty-looking and dry.)  The museum is small, but has a plenty of luminaries on its walls -- Picasso, a bright expressionist landscape by Max Beckmann, all the Impressionists, and, even, a half-scale, but still impressive "Washington crossing the Delaware", kitsch but inspired kitsch.  The recent paintings in the collection are mostly commissions for the museum:  a 2012 canvas of  New York's East River waterfront circa about 1632 done in a limpid style that combines Luminist influence and American primitive folk painting (Tarantillo), a blue and foamy Marteen Platje painting of a mighty 19th century war ship sailing the high seas, and various other commissions that seem to have been made to document the appearance of the rigging and other accoutrements of martial "Tall ships" -- these things are picturesque, particularly in the way that the artists have managed the choppy, turbulent seas, but, otherwise dull, unless you are a specialist in nautical history -- and, apparently, there are enough Master and Commander fans in the world, enough, it seems, to support an entire accredited academy, the American Society of Marine Artists.  Otherwise, the most recent paintings in the collection are a Marsden Hartley landscape that looks like a bleeding wound, a painting of dunes by Georgia O'Keefe, and some snazzy if light-weight, Stewart Davis paintings.  The strength of the collection is its array of 19th century Luminists on display -- there is a gorgeous, sultry-looking canvas by an artist named Alfred Bricher showing a solitary grain elevator perched next to the still and vacant expanse of the Mississippi River at Dubuque and two heroically sized paintings by Martin John Heade, a botanically exact wall-sized canvas called "View from Fern Walk, Florida" showing a jungle that would have delighted Douanier Rousseau and the spectacular pink flamingo-colored "Great Florida Sunset", an explosion of neon color that has to be seen to be believed.  (There are many other fine Luminist works in the collection including paintings by Fitz Henry Lane and Francis Silva).  The Hudson River School is well-represented, particularly in a series of paintings by various artists that show Indian Summer, the trees all gone yellow and brown and a pale golden haze softening all edges and forms.  The museum has a good Constable, a painting by Turner, a typically windy and silver-toned Corot, some vigorously painted horseman by Degas, and a dark and green-shadowed Courbet from 1864 showing a glimmer of limestone cliffs around a spring -- "The Source of the Lison."  Just about every painting displayed as part of the permanent collection is well worth your attention.  Even the duds and misfires have their pleasures:  one painting ("On the Beach, Julius LeBlanc Steward 1880) showing a bourgeois family stiffly enjoying a seaside beach is noteworthy for the almost surrealist hideousness of the people depicted -- the painter was inept and couldn't managing foreshortening with the effect that some of the portraits are like images of pale shrunken heads.  It's an awful painting but also a genuine curiosity.

When I toured the museum, the other traveling show featured about 20 window-sized paintings by Marteen Platje showing "United States Naval battles during the first 20 years of the 19th century."  Plaatje was a sailor with the Royal Netherlands Navy and his pictures are microscopically detailed.  He seems to have researched the precise rigging, caliber of the cannons, the weather conditions at the time of the encounter, and details relating to the location of rocks, shrubs, and trees on the shoreline if the affray took place near land.  The vessels swarm with tiny, realistically depicted figure -- there are explosions and haze of drifting smoke, timbers floating in the foaming seas, little life-boats, flags unfurled and so on.  The fantastic detail lavished on all details is surreal and the pictures can best be described as photo-realist.  Plaatje works fast -- I think all of these impressive canvases were made in 2016 to 2018.  The pictures resemble some sort of conceptual art joke -- they are pretty much devoid of interest, all look more or less alike, and, so, pedantically painted that one suspects that there is some kind deceitful, even, malign program underlying these things.  But this would be to give the painter and his paintings too much credit -- there is apparently a big market for hyper-realistic depictions of old-time sea-battles and I suspect Plaatje had these paintings sold to someone or some several before the pigments were even dry

A bonus of going to the museum on Sunday morning is that you might encounter Mr. Kierlin himself patrolling his galleries.  On both occasions when I was in the museum, he was on hand to interact with visitors and show his favorite pictures to them.