Katla

 Katla is a Netflix limited series, comprised of eight episodes that are about 43 minutes long each.  Produced in Iceland with a cast of dour Scandinavian players, Katla is errant nonsense, although so handsomely produced a viewer is tempted to remain on duty until the last frame.  The series is the creation of Baltasar Kormakur, an Iceland-based director, who has directed a number of suspense-thrillers with high-profile American stars. The movie's locations are so spectacular and the film's nightmarish scenario so compelling, at least, initially that the viewer is willing to overlook lapses in logic and the derivative nature of much of the action -- however, by the show's final episode, things have pretty much collapsed completely and Katla lapses into full-scale idiocy.  

A volcano is erupting at the center of a mountain glacier.  This volcano, Katla, has darkened the landscape all around it with a deep shroud of grey ash.  A small coastal village, Vik, located on a spectacular stretch of beach -- there are shadowy knife-edged sea-stacks standing in the surging surf -- has been entirely blanketed in ash and almost all of its people have fled to Rekyavik.  The film is punctuated with shots of the volcano, a billowing column of ash lit with lightning, looming over the jagged, charred-looking glacier and the village.  The film is  essentially monochrome, all exteriors drowned in dull grey ash.  Of course, Iceland has remarkable landscapes and some of them are on view in the film -- there are tidal estuaries with vast pebble plains all braided with streams flowing from the glacier, weird-looking glacial badlands with hoodoos coated in ash, ferocious-looking seascapes and an upland meadow, also charred grey, with a enormous waterfall spilling down off the glacier.  The town is isolated, surrounded by miles of barren ash-covered steppe.  Both the location and the plot recall American science-fiction from the fifties in which isolated desert towns are beset by alien invaders or giant insects -- there is the same sense that Katla's people are living in a ghost-town and cut off from civilization.  In Katla, you need a government-issued permit to visit Vik and this rule is administered by a brusque (if sleepy) cop at the ferry-crossing.  

The die-hards in the village are an inn-keeper, a middle-aged woman who is former flower-child and the local cop, Gisli, who also is a religious fanatic.  Gisli's wife, Magnea, is dying of something like ALS and is immobile, breathing through a ventilator plugged into her throat.  Gisli's son, Kjarten, a dairy farmer, is married to a young woman named Grima.  (Their marriage is failing.)  Grima is mourning her sister, Asa, a woman who was wild, promiscuous, and probably alcoholic -- Asa has simply vanished.  Grima and the missing Asa are the daughters of Thor, an eccentric cat-loving mechanic.  Thor's wife,  Grima's mother, committed suicide many years earlier she she caught Thor in bed with a Swedish girl who was working at the local hotel.  The Swedish girl was called Gunhild.  Gunhild now lives in Uppsala with her mentally challenged and physically disabled son Bjorn (who is Thor's natural son).  The various isolates living in Vik are like characters from a movie by Ingmar Bergman -- they all have serious "issues" as one might say and lead tormented lives knee-deep in the ash that rains down from the volcano.  Up on the glacier, there's a volcanologist named Dirra, also in mourning -- his 9 year old son was killed in a car accident in Rekjavik -- and he's divorced from his ex-wife, Rakel.  The nine-year-old boy, Mikael, was peculiar , to put it mildly -- he tried to burn down his school in Rekyavik because the other kids teased him.  

All of these miserable people find their lives complicated immensely when the glacier starts spawning Doppelgaengers called "Changelings" in the show.  Apparently, there is local lore than when Katla is erupting, something that occurs every couple hundred years, changelings appear on the glacier.  These changelings replicate human beings that have died (in most cases) but seem to be soul-less and, possibly, malevolent.  The replicants are entirely covered in black mud and ash, naked, and they look a bit like the bog bodies dragged out of Scandinavian swamps, weird, eerie-looking apparitions.  But once the changelings are cleaned-up, they look exactly like the person that they replicate and seem to have all the memories possessed by that person.  This element of the plot is equal parts Stephen King (Pet Semetery) and Tarkovsky's Solaris.  The Pet Semetery elements arise from the repeated resurrections of cats, crows, and dead sheep and cows.  In Solaris, the sea-planet, which was a giant alien brain, replicated persons dear to the lonely cosmonauts, creating apparently flesh-and-blood replicants of those loved by the space-explorers.  As it turns out, you don't need to be dead to be replicated in the furnace of Katla under the glacier.  (There is another obvious predicate to this plot, the Icelandic writer, Halldor Laxness' spooky novel, Under the Glacier.)  First, the dead girl, Asa reappears, black with ash and shivering with hypothermia.  Then, Thor's old girlfriend, Gunhild pops up (even though the real Gunhild is living in Sweden); Mikael, the dead nine-year old returns as does a second Grima, the girl unhappily married to Kjarten, Gisli's son.  For a good measure, Magnea in a much younger, sexier version comes out of the glacier.  Several of these changelings are sexually active.  Grima's double promptly sleeps with Kjarten, cheering him up considerably, and, also, sets to work redecorating the couple's rather dreary cottage -- she finds paint in the cellar and cheerfully begins remodeling the place.  The young Magnea, has sex with Gisli who is encouraged to murder the old Magnea who is no fun anymore because she is paralyzed.  Mikael commits a couple murders with a box-cutter knife.  The replicant Gunhild starts a love affair with Thor and gets pregnant (or is replicated as pregnant).  Meanwhile Bjorn, Gunhild's mentally and physically challenged son, somehow makes his way to Vik to confront his mother about getting pregnant with (of all persons) a fetal replicant Bjorn.  Some of this is pretty confusing, but Kormakur, to his credit, keeps things reasonably clear -- you can generally tell if you're dealing with a changeling or the authentic person.  Kormakur seems to be relentlessly humorless -- the images are all grey with sepulchral dust, the soundtrack is full of dirges and scary-sounding heavenly choirs.  Although many of the situations are pretty funny, Kormakur treats them without any comedy whatsoever -- so we see Grima competing for the affections of her husband with the officious, scheming changeling Grima.  Gunhild is mad about her boyfriend Thor being monopolized by a replicant Gunhild who seems younger and more frisky.  At one point, Grima and the replicant Asa find the corpse of Asa under some floorboards at the glacier-volcanology lab.  Shown pictures depicting her own dead face, replicant Asa says blandly:  "Don't recognize her.  Nope, never seen her at all."

This is all sort of spooky in a lugubrious way.  (It would be better played for comedy.)   But everything collapses in the last couple episodes.  I won't give away the film's plot twists in its final hour.  Suffice it to say that Kormakur has to get rid of all of the replicants.  By this point, the plot, like the volcano-charred glacier, is fissured with gaping holes and incongruities.  Dirra, the volcanologist, descends into the glacial "conduit" as it is called for the gas and steam jetting out of the volcano and discovers (these scenes are very spectacular) that there is a meteorite buried under the glacier that somehow possesses the capacity of knowing what human's want and duplicating replicants to serve these purposes.  We see the meteorite, looking like anthracite, replicating itself.  At this point, Kormakur's show has lapsed into the sort of imagery prevalent in fifties Sci-Fi films set in the Mojave Desert and it's all ludicrous -- people stare in horror at little pebbles that seem to split and divide and re-divide while characters mutter variants on "it came from Outer Space" and the like.  (These scenes ignore a previous bravura sequence in which replicant Asa and the real Grima swim in a verdigris-colored hot spring that seems to be a kind of well of souls with other replicants dimly visible in the steamy water.)   Kormakur's single-minded plotting to destroy all the replicants seems wrong-headed -- in fact, the replicants, despite being inhuman, are better people than their prototypes.  They don't deserve the dismal fates meted out to them and the real humans aren't particularly sympathetic and become less so when murdering the changelings.  (The show gets so dimwitted in its final episode that there's even a homage to the movie Thelma and Louise.)  After an ostensibly happy ending, we see the volcano belching and, in the last shot, a whole crowd of replicants are dimly descried approaching over the burning plain.  (By my count, one of the replicants is unaccounted-for at the end of the show -- maybe, she will be the commander of the new changeling army.)  Everything's set up for a sequel.  I did my duty watching this entire series and I admit that I enjoyed some of it -- whether I will enroll for a reboot of the show remains to be seen. 

Family Romance, LLC.

Werner Herzog's feature films have often been experimental.  I don't mean that Herzog's film technique is advanced or avant garde -- indeed, to the contrary, his feature (fiction) films are shot conservatively, even prosaically, using raw editing, images that are less than perfect in tone and color; his camera is often obviously hand-held and the effect is that of watching a documentary produced on low budget in which the audience must tolerate primitive film-making in exchange for the privilege of seeing images that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.  (By contrast, Herzog's recent documentaries have been well-financed and are lavishly produced.)  The experimental character of Herzog's features relates to their idiosyncratic subject matter, topics that can be expressed as a series of "thought-experiments" -- what would happen if a child raised in a cellar without language were to encounter the world? (Kaspar Hauser);  can a movie be made in which all actors are hypnotized? (Heart of Glass); if a mentally ill man from Berlin found himself in Wisconsin, how would things turn out?  (Stroszek) Could a movie be made in which the entire cast are midgets or dwarves?  (Even Dwarves Started Small) and so on.  Herzog's Family Romance, LLC. (2019) is a thought experiment of this kind:  What would happen if people could hire actors to simulate participants in family relationships, even family members?  What would happen if I could rent a wife for special occasions -- no sex involved, but just a woman paid to play the perfect spouse when I am required to attend a funeral or wedding?  This is a forbidden experiment in some ways, one too fraught with all sorts of dangers, but, apparently, underway in a very real sense in Japan, the place where it is always tomorrow.  

Family Romance, LLC is a Tokyo business that rents out actors to play the roles of family members who have  gone missing or are otherwise incapacitated.  The owner of the business, Mr. Ishii, is a handsome young man with Matinee idol features -- he looks like various Asian movie stars and exudes a sense of familiarity; he's like a suave Tokyo Cary Grant, but younger.  As the film begins, we see Ishii meeting a sullen-looking 12 year old girl -- she's wearing a hoodie with black horns representing, I think, a Studio Ghibli-animated character.  Ishii claims to be the girl's father who has not been present in her life.  At first, the girl is suspicious and withdrawn, but, later, she warms to "father" and begins to confide secrets in him and ask for his advice.  Ishii also assumes an actual paternal role and provides parenting advice to the girl's attractive mother, apparently a well-heeled divorcee who lives in a very nice suburban house.  Herzog's film has only a vestigial plot and the movie seems an excuse to string together a series of vignettes about modern Japan, episodes that would seem irritatingly disconnected but for the director's brilliant eye and penetrating exposition of Tokyo's post-human milieu.  We see Ishii involved in all sorts of encounters.  He's hired to represent the father of the bride at a wedding -- the real father is an alcoholic (his wife claims he's epileptic) and can't attend the ceremony without the risk of dire consequences.  Ishii explores a Robot Hotel equipped with colorful robotic fish, segmented koi that swim in a large aquarium under saturating lights that modulate through the spectrum.  (The sequence is similar to the jellyfish that we see in Herzog's films about Little Dieter, the German-American pilot who was captured by the Vietnamese and escaped from a horrifying prison camp through Laos.)  The humanoid robots are firmly astraddle the "uncanny valley"-- they are so human-looking as to be frightening.  Ishii prices funerals and caskets -- perhaps, he will have to stage a fake funeral.  With the teenage girl -- she's called Mahiro -- he goes to a Hedgehog cafe, where patrons play with hedge-hogs (filmed in huge close-ups).  Along the way, we see Japanese street performers, some of whom apparently work for Ishii; when Ishii has a street performer take his picture with Mahiro, the man grimaces in a weird way and, then, performs an intricate pantomime.  Kids in a park simulate samurai battles and, then, commit fake hara kiri.  Herzog seems hell-bent to incorporate as much stereotypical information about Japan in the film as possible:  there's origami, cherry blossom viewing, the Bullet Train and the Tokyo Tv tower, an oracle contacts a dead man and speaks for him, Mahiro's mother goes to the tsunami-damaged north part of Japan where she sits among rocks on the seashore, using an old-style rotary telephone to speak to the spirits of those lost in catastrophe (although when Ishii asks the woman who she was calling, she says it was someone living and not dead -- by this point, the mother has fallen in love with the gracious and kind Ishii and, probably, is reaching out to him over the spirit-telephone.)  One woman has won 20 million yen (180,000 dollars) in a lottery and yearns for the sensation of winning again -- she's a plain middle-aged woman who seems to be one of life's perennial losers.  Ishii stages another "win" for her, something like the images that show people who have won the Publisher's Clearing House lottery.  (The woman has a perplexed, bitter-sweet smile on  her face -- she seems to recognize that the fake lottery is inevitably less satisfying than the real one and that this effort to recreate past happiness has been unsuccessful.  Another young woman hires Ishii to trail her through the Ginza entertainment district with a crew of fake paparazzi, thereby, imitating a starlet on the prowl with her horde of admirers.  Of course, some of the passers-by are fooled and they take pictures themselves of the girl vamping as she struts down the street.  After a half-dozen encounters with Mahiro (and sometimes a little half-Black girl who she has befriended, Airi), it's apparent that the adolescent loves Ishii and that he plays in irreplaceable role in her life.  Ishii is alarmed.  He says:  "At Family Romance, we are not allowed to love or be loved."  But it's too late, the child loves him and so does Mahiro's mother.  The older woman asks Ishii to move in with them and play the part of Mahiro's father permanently.  Seated seductively on her bed, the mother says:  "You can use this bedroom and everything in it."  Ishii is baffled and doesn't know what to do.  He suggests that they will have to stage a funeral -- this is why we have seen him with the mortician pricing caskets. Ishii doesn't know how to get out of the dilemma, nor does Herzog -- Herzog is honest enough, I think, to acknowledge that there is no way out of the moral and ethical dilemma that Family Romance, LLC. has created.  Ishii begins to wonder whether his own family is merely acting; have they also been rented? he wonders.  We see him go to what seems to be his home.  But he remains outside, as if afraid to enter --  he toys with his house key  A child approaches a door-window glazed and partially opaque, putting her little hands on the glass.  And so the film ends.

The movie is very gripping and its odd episodic structure seems somehow liberating.  Herzog is not known for his warmth, but this picture is extremely sentimental and, even, romantic.  All of the characters are caught in a perpetual cycle of performance, acting that Herzog suggests characterizes modernity.  People are fungible -- they can be substituted for one another, but this doesn't mean that the emotions aren't real.  It's obvious that Ishii is in love with the little girl and her mother as well, but doesn't know how to express this emotion -- particularly within the boundaries of Family Romance's business model.  Herzog's film making seems to lack any kind of craft, but, in fact, the film is carefully designed.  An attentive viewer should take note of Herzog's use of hot pink in the scenes with Mahiro.  In one shot, Herzog pays an extremely perverse, even funny homage to Ozu.  The lottery winner is summoned to the door of her home.  We see a long corridor with side-rooms, a typical Ozu shot of an interior intricate with a geometry of rectangles and squares.  But Ozu films these scenes from tatami level, that is, from the vantage of a person seated on a floor-mat.  Herzog puts his camera up close to the ceiling and shoots down the hallway exactly as Ozu would design the shot, but making the image odd by using a high, as opposed to, low camera angle.  The editing is intentionally crude -- there are many documentary-style jump-cuts.  Some of the shots are over-exposed and the camera-work (done by Herzog guerilla-style with a hidden camera) is primitive.  These technical deficits are offset by radiant drone shots, some of them shooting vertically down on city streets or Yoyogi Park, a huge public space where much of the action takes place.  Since the film is about Japan, Herzog, of course, includes spectacular samurai battles fought by teenage boys in the park, the combatants whirling and lunging to samizen music.  Much of the film has a documentary style -- and, in fact, Herzog blurs the borders between documentary and feature fiction film:  Mr. Ishii is, in fact, the CEO of Family Romance, LLC, a real business in Tokyo and, of course, exotic places like the Robot Hotel and the Hedgehog Cafe really exist.  The film is excellent and, I think, very personal to Herzog (although he attributes the idea to a student in his Rogue Film School, someone named Roc Motin,  a young film-maker whom Herzog lavishly praises.)  Herzog has always admitted that he fabricates parts of his documentaries, just as aspects of his feature films are documentary in nature.  The notion of truthfulness in film making has been central to Herzog, articulated most rhapsodically in his so-called Minnesota Declaration, delivered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1999; in that declaration, Herzog declared that film aims at a Higher Truth and that this Higher Truth isn't accessible unless "ecstatic" -- "ecstatic"  truth involves falsehoods.  In Family Romance, LLC, Herzog seems to be coming to terms with the notion of what it means to invent and fabricate, particularly in the realm of intimate family relationships.  The film is almost a parody of Herzog's style -- he seems to find as many bizarre and kitschy aspects of Japanese life as possible -- but it's an important picture if you are, as I am, a life-long admirer of the director's work.  

(As usual, Herzog, who is a great showman, is the best advocate for his work.  MUBI shows this film with an introduction by Herzog, addressing the main issues in the film.  There is a blurry ZOOM Q & A, with the MUBI curator, after the picture that is illuminating as well.  Herzog pontificates as to the importance of reading and, of course, walking -- he reprises several familiar tales.  But he also explains how some of the shots were made in the movie, including an extremely alarming image of a bullet train moving at an incomprehensibly high speed -- taking this kind of picture is forbidden and Herzog and his tiny crew had to flee when security guards chased them, each "departing in a different direction," he drily says.  The MUBI curator has good questions that challenge Herzog who often does these sorts of interviews on auto-pilot, just repeating his greatest hits, anecdotes that he has narrated many times before.  The curator asks Herzog what he would hire Family Romance, LLC to do for him.  Herzog becomes nostalgic and says that he lives in LA where no one speaks his Bavarian dialect -- he would hire someone who knows "how to handle a soccer ball" and would kick the ball around, he says, and swear in Bavarian.)  

     

A Sunday in the Country

1,

A Riddle: like some literary works, Bertrand Tavernier’s A Sunday in the Country is equipped with an epigraph.  Before the movie’s first image, we hear a female voice pose a question: “When will you stop asking so much of life, Irene?”  Later, we learn that the voice belongs to Irene’s mother and the question is spoken in a brief flashback representing a memory experienced by the young woman.  Tavernier gives prominence to this snippet of dialogue because it is thematic.  Humans are desiring beings, forever yearning for ideal future happiness while, sometimes, ignoring the pleasures and satisfactions of the moment.  What does it require for people to be happy?  A Sunday in the Country depicts an idyllic world: it is 1912 and Europe, at least, is peaceful, free from the nightmares that would ensue later in the century.  The old painter’s estate is a locus amoenus – a place where all pleasures seem concentrated.  There’s no sickness, no Spanish flu, and no poverty nor privation.  The weather is uniquely glorious – June, it seems, in France or, perhaps, September.  The home is filled with beautiful objects and paintings.  Everyone is healthy and vigorous – at least, for now.  And, yet, in this ideal setting among handsome and pampered people, something is amiss.  To some degree, Tavernier’s film is about the riddle of human happiness: why do we ask too much of life?

2.

Bertrand Tavernier was one of the most intelligent of all film-makers.  He died on March 25. 2021, a month before his 80th birthday. Tavernier was born in Lyon, France in 1941.  His earliest memories were recollections of World War Two.  Tavernier’s father, Rene, was the editor of Positif, a journal that featured writers such as Louis Aragon.  Rene Tavernier was threatened by the Vichy regime, particularly when he published a translation of several chapters of Hemingway’s anti-Fascist novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Nonetheless, Rene Tavernier didn’t join the maquis – the Resistance.  Later, some accused Rene Tavernier and figures in the French film industry who produced movies during the Occupation for being collaborators with the Germans.  (This allegation is generally considered unfair, although it has occasionally achieved some traction with French intellectuals.  Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche were essentially blacklisted in French cinema on the basis of the accusation that they did not sufficiently resist the Germans.  Tavernier risked opprobrium by hiring Bost and Aurenche to write his first film, The Clockmaker.  A Sunday in the Country is an adaptation by a novel by Bost.)

Tavernier was a film brat who skipped school to watch movies.  He worked as an assistant for Jean-Pierre Melville.  When Tavernier expressed admiration for Fritz Lang’s Hollywood picture, Moonfleet, Melville was enraged (or pretended to be so), accused Tavernier of disloyalty and forbade anyone in the cast and crew of the film being shot to speak with him for three days.  Humiliated, Melville tried to quit.  Melville wouldn’t allow him to resign, reconciled with the young man, and hired him to do promotional work for the film – it was Los Doulos (The Wolves, a very tough gangster picture).   Tavernier worked in PR for a decade, promoting French New Wave films by Truffaut, Godard, and Agnes Varda – he also promoted American films in France, including late works by Howard Hawks and John Ford.  During this time period, Tavernier met many important film makers.  He had a famous falling-out with the notoriously prickly Stanlely Kubrick.  “You are a genius when it comes to directing,” Tavernier said, “but an imbecile in every other respect.  So, I quit.”  

Tavernier directed his first film, The Clockmaker in 1973.  Thereafter, he made three dozen or so pictures.  The most notable films made by Tavernier are Death Watch (1980) with Charlotte Rampling and Harvey Keitel, a prescient science fiction film that predicts Reality TV, Coup du Torchon, (1981) an adaptation of a Jim Thompson noir novel  translated from the American Deep South to French Equatorial Africa, and The Passion of Beatrice (1982).    After directing Sunday in the Country in 1984, Tavernier made ‘Round Midnight, about an American jazz musician in France – the picture stars jazz man, Dexter Gordon, and is probably the director’s most critically acclaimed.  (It’s inexplicably not available on DVD).  L623 is a cop movie about a police officer working undercover to bust drug dealers. Capitaine Conan is a brutal war film set during the WW I in Bulgaria – it’s about guerilla warfare.  Safe Conduct (2002) wrestles with the career of Jean Aurenche during World War Two and was a cause celebre in France, igniting an enormous controversy about the Resistance during the Vichy regime.  In the Electric Mist (2006) is a crime film set in the United States starring Tommy Lee Jones – it was well-reviewed in Europe but never released (except in edited direct-to-disk) form in this country.

All of Tavernier’s films are different in form, style, and subject matter.  One of his last movies, for instance, The Princess of Montpensier is an adaptation The Princess of Cleves, Madame de La Fayette’‘s 17th century novel.  Tavernier has also made notable documentaries including a film about immigrants to France and an excellent survey of French films made during the fifties and sixties, My Journey through French Cinema (2016) a great source of information on movies not widely released or known in this country.

Tavernier died just before completing his revision of a magisterial encyclopedia of American films.  (He was also a prolific writer.)  It is said that he never made a movie that didn’t interest him passionately.  He chose the subjects of the films that he made and had, more or less, complete autonomy within the French film industry.  There is no Tavernier style of film making – the technique of each movie is adapted to the individual requirements of the picture.  He has no equivalents in American cinema.

3.

Une Partie de Campagne haunts Tavernier’s similarly titled film (in French Un Dimanche a la Campagne).  Jean Renoir’s short masterpiece was shot in July 1936 but left incomplete because of terrible, rainy weather.  (Near the film ends, there is a majestic shot of rain dimpling the surface of a river.)  After World War Two, Renoir pieced the footage together to make the 40 minute feature that we know today.  (The movie wasn’t released until 1947 in France and 1950 in the United States.)  In Renoir’s Day in the Country, a bourgeois family picnics near a café along a river somewhere in the country near Paris.  We see a somewhat comical married couple, a bit overweight and in their forties, with their beautiful young daughter (played by the sublimely beautiful Sylvie Battaille).  The daughter’s rather dull fiancé has come along for the ride.  After lunch, the men get a little drunk and take a nap.  Two young men, apparently boaters, seduce the women while husband and fiancee are slumbering on the bank of the river.  A thunderstorm ensues and the seducers retreat to the café while the family departs for Paris in their horse-drawn wagon.  Years later, the young woman, now married, returns to the river with her husband.  Again, he falls asleep and, while walking along the stream, she encounters that man to whom she made love years earlier.  They say a few words and, then, the young woman’s husband awakes and the brief encounter ends with the boater hiding in the brush.

Renoir’s film, an action-packed blockbuster (almost a Michael Bay production) compared to Tavernier’s Sunday in the Country, casts an long shadow on the later movie.  Indeed, Tavernier refers to the movie in the scene in which Irene and her father dance at the gazebo near the river.  Several of the young men wear the striped shirts of 19th century boats-man in that sequence.  (Tavernier also references August Renoir’s famous painting of the boating party “Luncheon of the Boating Party.”)   One of Tavernier’s favorite French directors was Jacques Becker.  Becker (along with the Italian film maker Luchino Visconti) worked with Jean Renoir on A Day in the Country.  Both films share a tone of restrained, ennobled melancholy.  Most importantly, both movies reference the great era of Impressionist painting that flourished in France between 1860 and the turn of the 20th century.  In fact, many of the compositions in Jean Renoir’s Day in the Country are modeled off famous paintings by Renoir pere.  Similarly, Tavernier remarks that the country home where his film was made was adjacent to an estate where Manet painted.  

Impressionism is notable for its sunny exuberance and its optical celebration of the sensuous pleasures of life: bright Impressionist paintings feature beautiful women, flowers, gorgeous scenery and landscapes, picnics on the grass in a bright, sun-dappled world without shadow in which people pursue happiness with unmitigated zest.  These idyllic qualities characterize Tavernier’s film.  But in both Renoir and Tavernier’s films, a secret sorrow lurks beneath the glittering beauty – time passes and our joy is fleeting.  

Some critics, both French and American claim that A Sunday in the Country is a hommage to French Impressionism.  This assertion outraged the normally mild-mannered Tavernier.  Impressionism blurs the field of vision and flattens perspective to a tapestry-like frieze of color. Impressionist art is superficial, although in the way that described by Oscar Wilde: "It's only shallow people that don't judge by appearances.  The true mystery of the world is that is visible, not invisible."  Tavernier instructed his Director of Photography, Bruno de Keyzer, to devise a film palette that approximated the very first use of color in French films, Lumiere’s Autoscope process.  Keyzer achieved the desired texture for the movie by omitting the bleaching bath when the film-stock was developed.  Without bleaching, the film’s whites are very bright and, correspondingly, its dark or shadowy elements are very black.  (The process resulted in reds sometimes deepening into black – therefore, the red wine that the characters drink had to be diluted to a pink color or it would have appeared that the people in the film were pouring some kind of black brew into their mouths).  Without bleaching, colors were hard to control and Tavernier used different kinds of gels and filters on the camera lense to achieve the tints that he desired.  Lumiere’s Autoscope, as simulated by Tavernier’s developing process, has very deep focus and results in a precisionist imagery in which forms seem to be outlined by dark shadow.  Deep focus and clearly delineated form is the exact opposite of the techniques used by the great Impressionist painters.

However, to be fair to the critics, the style of Tavernier’s film may be inimical to Impressionism but, certainly, the content of the movie partakes in the pictorial language intrinsic to painting by French masters such as Caillebotte, Renoir, and Monet – all mentioned in the film.  The movie’s vocabulary of sun-drenched landscapes, flowering gardens, dejeuner sur l’herbe (picnics on the grass), beautiful young women, little girls in sunbonnets and the like all refer to pictorial elements that we associate with Impressionism – in fact, Tavernier installs in his film the little arched bridge over a stream edged with flowering plants that we know from Monet’s garden in Giverny.

4.

As we learn in the film, Ladmiral is an academic painter.  He admits that he never had the courage to follow the lead of the great Impressionists.  They labored, for part of their careers in maligned obscurity. Ladmiral has been decorated for his painting – that is, has achieved great public fame.  Further, Ladmiral notes that if he had imitated Cezanne or Renoir, he would have only exchanged one formula for another.  (He seems to acknowledge that the spark of genius is missing from his work – he has never been an innovator and it is, perhaps, too late now to change his style as he says.  In fact, he tells Irene that changing his style would have wounded his wife who was accustomed to the academic and classical way in which he painted – this seems a specious self-justification to me.)  Consistent with Ladmiral’s conservative approach to painting, Tavernier imitates the ancient films of Lumiere and shoots the movie in a way that approximates his protagonist’s precisely detailed and academic paintings.  The movie is shot the way that Ladmiral paints.  

Louis Ducreux plays Ladmiral.  Tavernier says that a highly intelligent actor is required to perform the role of a highly intelligent character – intelligence, Tavernier, avers can’t really be simulated.  Ducreux was a famous French man of the theater, both an actor and renowned director.  (He was also highly musical, composed the tunes for Max Ophuls’ films, and directed opera.)  Tavernier met Ducreux on a fine arts committee on which both men were serving – the director represented films; Ducreux was appointed as a representative of the classical theater.  Tavernier suspected the old man was senile because he never participated in the committee’s discussions.  When he invited Ducreux to lunch, he discovered that the old actor was feigning senility to avoid committee assignments that he thought would be onerous.  Ducreux was also a talented painter.  The little canvas that Irene discovers when scavenging for clothing in the attic (she runs a vintage clothing store in Paris) was painted by Ducreux.  

Although a brilliant actor, Ducreux had been in only one previous film, shot during the fifties.  He didn’t understand the process of making movies and never could find his mark.  Instead of moving to where he was supposed to go, Tavernier’s camera has to follow him.  Ducreux was so naive about filmmaking (although I suspect this was also feigned) that he would sometimes repeat a line that he had botched in the middle of a complicated moving camera-shot – “just edit it out,” he would tell Tavernier, without knowing, purportedly, that this was impossible.  In several scenes, other actors reach out to physical restrain Ducreux who is about to wander off-camera.  In an early scene, Ducreux is about to step into bright light that would obliterate the image – Edouard reaches out and seeming to caress the old man, actually keeps him from ruining the shot.  In the dance-hall scene, Sabina Azema, playing Irene, also subtly directs Ducreux to keep him from moving out of the frame.  

5.

Miracle: French summers can be very rainy.  As we have seen, Renoir’s A Day in the Country was vexed by bad weather to the point of exhausting its makers and rendering the film (which turned out to be a great masterpiece anyway) apparently incomplete.  By contrast, Tavernier reports that the weather was miraculously accommodating for the five week of shoot of A Sunday in the Country.  The tone of the film required that light levels be scrupulously matched between scenes – the film takes place over the course of a single day with light modulating from early morning to the brightness of midday and, then, dusk at night.  The weather cooperated and Tavernier was able to make the movie without encountering any difficulty.  Tavernier points to another weirdly miraculous event on the set.  When Mirielle somehow gets trapped in the tree, Tavernier recalls that a strong wind suddenly arose.  The child was frightened by the wind and began to cry in real distress.  The little girl playing Mirielle was not particularly expressive and Tavernier was having difficulty eliciting any realistic fear from her while shooting the scene in which she is rescued by her father (who himself almost falls out of the tree).  The sudden gust of wind, coming from nowhere, frightened the little girl into acting according to Tavernier’s direction.  (In his commentary on the movie, Tavernier suggests that the poodle, Caviar, was probably a better, more seasoned film actor than either the child playing Mirielle or Louis Ducreux.)

5.

Oedipal conflict is intrinsic to the relationship between the staid Edouard (called Gonzague by the old man) and his father.  Gonzague wished to become a painter like Ladmiral, but, perhaps, his father’s influence was too overwhelming.  Instead, he has become a bourgeois businessman of some kind, a staid and dignified figure far more conservative that his father.  The dutiful son and the old roue Ladmiral have nothing in common and, perhaps, don’t like one another that much.  (Remember that it’s possible to love intensely those that you don’t necessarily like.)   Edouard/ Gonzague has done everything that he can to win his father’s admiration – but his best is never enough.  The beautiful and vivacious Irene will always be the old man’s favorite.  He dotes upon her when he is dismissive of his son.  In a startling voice-over, Edouard seems to “stumble like a rejected lover” when he contemplates how much his father prefers the company of Irene to him – “all sorrow are alike,” we are told, the narration boldly equated disappointment in romantic love to Edouard’s grief that he can never quite please his narcissistic, self-absorbed father.  

Tavernier’s relationship to the great directors in French film has a similar character.  Tavernier is a generation younger that the film makers whose pictures were the glory of the French Nouvelle Vague (the “New Wave”).  Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, and Rivette were all fifteen years or so older than Tavernier.  Tavernier stands in relationship to the famous French New Wave directors as son to father.  The French New Wave rejected (in large part) the so-called “cinema of quality” that was the legacy of the generation preceding them.  Tavernier doesn’t reject the French New Wave, but he struggles to avoid its influence, making his own way that is independent from the themes of the film makers in the generation preceding him.  Thus, we see the primordial pattern of sons departing from the path established by their fathers.  Tavernier’s masters were directors like Jacques Becker and Jean Pierre Melville, men who made tough little movies in the hard-bitten early fifties.  He follows the example of those film makers and doesn’t work in the style of Truffaut and Godard.  (As further evidence for this point, Sunday in the Country is adapted from a novel by Pierre Bost.  Bost was most famous as screenwriter who crafted scripts for some of the most famous French films embodying the “cinema of quality” or “papa’s cinema” as Truffaut called these movies derisively in his 1954 Cahiers du Cinema essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”.)  Generational conflict is intrinsic to Tavernier’s film: we see the alliance between a grandfather and his grandchildren – as the joke goes grandfathers and grandchildren “share a common enemy.”

Sons must struggle to overcome the influence of their fathers.  This project is irrelevant to daughters.  Notice how Irene is capable of criticizing her father’s work without reservation. Although Edouard has not followed his father’s path (even to the extent of somehow evading the name his father gave him), he doesn’t dare to criticize Ladmiral’s painting – indeed, he seems to stand in awe of the old man’s work.  Irene blithely rearranges her father’s still life in the corner of the atelier.  And, at the end of the film, the old man puts aside the incomplete painting over which he was puttering and sets a new canvas on his easel.  We are led to believe that under the influence of his daughter’s scorn, the old man will attempt something new, something better – perhaps, as the final shot implies, a painting that is made “after nature”, something full of fresh air and old sorrow.  

6.

Gabriel Faure is the composer of the rapturous music on the soundtrack.  Faure’s music embodies the aesthetic of the Belle Epoque, the period in which film is set.  Tavernier chose this orchestral music because of its undertone of melancholy.  Much of the movie seems to mourn the absence of something – we shouldn’t expect too much from life: existence, after all, is characterized by what is missing. Ladmiral’s dead wife, whom we see in several short sequences, is an absence that haunts the film.  Irene’s unseen and absent lover controls her actions.  And Irene, although a manic bundle of furious action, is melancholy herself – she predicts Mirielle’s death before the little girl is fifteen.  (Presumably, we imagine that Mirielle will be perish in the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918; this leads to the gloomy surmise that the two high-spirited and combative boys will likely die in World War One.)  Most notably, Ladmiral’s atelier features a large canvas that seems to lament Irene’s absence – we see her portrait all in white prominently displayed in the house; there she is present.  But in the studio, Ladmiral has painted her absence – a shroud-like veil and a mandolin that suggest that someone has recently left the room.  Tavernier interprets Faure’s music as yearning for happiness that is never quite achieved.  In any event, the music is perfect for the film.  Elements of the movie refer obliquely to Proust, particularly scenes (for instance, picnic flashback) that show us a lost paradise.  Faure’s music appears in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, albeit ascribed to the fictional composer Vinteuil.

7.

Crane shots adorn several scenes in the film.  Tavernier had the use of a crane for only one (or, perhaps, two) days but he seems to have made the most of that piece of equipment.  The film’s camera style is interrogative – that is, the camera executes complex maneuvers as if it is searching for something.  This technique materializes the film’s concept of art as a search for something, either meaning or an embodied idea or a new technique.  Most sequences are long, featuring fluid camera movements.  On occasion, Tavernier violates the 360 degree rule, “crossing the axis” as it is said.  Notable examples occur when Irene enters to disrupt the film’s placid and static tone as the character’s recline for their post-prandial snooze.  At the end of the film, there is a 360 degree shot/reverse shot of Ladmiral standing on the train platform.  At first, we see him next to the train as it advances forward toward the camera, but, exquisitely adapting to the crepuscular mood, there is a cut to the train departing – the departure of the train into the dusk signifies the end of things, although the film will show us a little, hopeful epilogue.  A slightly later shot that shows Ladmiral walking along a large field-stone wall, a rampart that encloses and confines the old man, and, further, signifies the protagonist’s isolation and the implacable nature of his fate.  

8.

Beginning and Ending: the film’s opening shot, mirrored by the scene at the movie’s end, shows a tree across the lawn.  The tree’s leaves are prematurely autumnal – the rest of the woods remain verdantly green.  In context, we discover that the subtle light illumining the tree is dawn – it is sunrise.  The image has a magical quality.  It is like some of the pictures that we find in Tarkovsky’s films – a dimly lit interior that opens onto a landscape suffused with light.  As in Tarkovsky, the exterior world appears as if we behold the landscape from within the complex, obstructed space of Plato’s cave.  The outside enters our space only tentatively – mostly, we remain locked within our own imaginations.  Notably, the opening scene shows us three versions of the real: there is the landscape itself replete with golden shadows, the clear, if dark, version of the landscape reflected in the windows of the open door on one side of the aperture, and, then, the blurred, illegible forms that we see mirrored in the windows on the opposite side of the frame.  The window reminds us, if we are so inclined, that we are really beholding this world through the frame of a picture – there is actually nothing “real” before our eyes; the entire vista is “virtual.”  But the three versions of the landscape that the picture presents suggest something about art: we have a precisionist photographic representation of the thing, the thing as viewed through a dimly lit mirror (“as if through a glass darkly”), and, at last, the thing abstracted into a blur of faintly lit green and yellow forms.  If we wish, we can imagine this tripartite image as showing us how art is made, or providing us with different paradigms for art: realism, the picture as a mirror for the world, and, at last, the blurred and abstract forms of impressionism.  

The framed view from the Ladmiral’s window at the end of the movie corresponds to the blank canvas that the old man sets on his easel in the film’s coda.  (Tavernier remarks that this sequence is his invention – he shot the last scenes on a single afternoon after filming the script version of the ending, a sequence that he says was “very bad”.)  The white canvas reminds us of the fade-to-white in the picnic flashback.  A fade-to-white here signifies that the presence of the past, our remembrance of things past, has become bright, even, blinding and threatens to overwhelm what is now and here.  The blank canvas that Ladmiral views with restrained happiness is another absence of the kind that structures the film and may have several meanings.  Perhaps, Ladmiral has no future – the canvas is blank because there is nothing ahead of him.  But, more likely, the blank slate represents a new beginning for the old man, a new way to paint that he will explore on the morrow.  (This ending reminds me of Goya’s last cartoon, an image of an old man, bearded like God, hobbling forward supported by two canes under the words Aun Aprendo – “I am still learning.”)

The image of the blank canvas is followed the eerie and luminous shot of the darkened chamber (the camera’s interior on which pictures are exposed) opening onto the autumnal tree.  Viewed in chronological sequence, the picture of the tree could be thought of as representing twilight, the last fading rays of the sun.  But the image is clearly identical to what we saw at the start of the film and, so, probably, should be read as another dawn.  (Is it the end of the day or its beginning? A rising sun or one that is setting?  These questions are pertinent to the viewer.)  Tavernier advances the camera toward the window, tracking or dollying forward.  Yet at the same time, he uses a zoom lens to withdraw from scene.  Thus, we are given a visual metaphor for time – the picture shows us simultaneously an advance into the future and a pulling back and away into the past.  This is a mixed message, a jumble of past, present and future, that represents the scheme and content of Tavernier’s picture.        

Transit

 Transit (2018 Christian Petzold) is a maddening film.  Although it is well-made and timely, the way that the characters behave makes you want to slap them silly.   Furthermore, the picture's narrative is mostly very predictable -- you can see most plot twists coming well before they are revealed.  The movie has a satisfyingly spooky ending -- this is genuinely surprising, but in a way that is a bit unfair.  The film's sudden swerve into the supernatural isn't motivated by the narration -- the ghost that appears arbitrarily at the end of picture seems to violate the rather scrupulous, if abstract, realism that characterizes the rest of the movie.  A film is effective to the extent that it grips a viewer's imagination.  Petzold's Transit certainly is compelling, but not in a pleasant way.  It's tense and frightening but works on the audience in a way that is really the opposite of entertainment.  The sense that the film is a carefully engineered exercise in audience frustration is particularly disheartening because, in many ways, the movie is a variation on one of the most entertaining of all Hollywood films, Casablanca.  Both films involve a similar situation -- refugees from German fascism holed-up in an ostensibly neutral third-country, scheming to escape their hide-out as the noose slowly tightens around them.  Both films imvolve reference to concentration camps and "cleansing" (that is, reinigung -- the extermination of Jews).  Oddly enough both movies have as a central focal point a tavern or saloon catering to increasingly impoverished and frightened exiles from Nazism -- Rick's Cafe run by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and a rather less impressive bar in Marseilles in Transit.  In fact, there's a voice-over narrative in Transit that is very puzzling for most of the film -- who is speaking and how does this narrator know the story that he is recounting?  As it turns out, the doomed hero of Transit, Georg, a Jewish TV and radio repairman, has told his tale to the bartender at the Marseilles tavern.  The narrator, accordingly, is the barkeep who now fills us in on the details of Georg's adventures. Of course, I was rooting for poor Georg to escape the dragnet closing on him.  But he's a passive hero, not particularly resourceful, and, in the end, he turns out to be almost as much of a phantom as the ghost that makes a cameo appearance in the film's last five minutes.  

Transit is based on a renowned novel by the German writer, Anna Seghers.  One of her books, The Seventh Crucifix written in 1939 was made into an anti-Nazi picture in Hollywood in the forties during the War and Transit is obviously rooted in World War II. (Seghers wrote the book in 1944 -- it is semi-autobiographical, documenting the author's own escape to Mexico through Marseilles four years earlier.)  Petzold elects to tell the story in the present.  In other words, although the action happens in the 1940's, the cars and streets and clothing are all contemporary.  However, it's an odd version of 2018, one in which no one has a cell-phone, in which communication is by snail-mail and not computer emails, a peculiarly bookish world in which an important writer still has sufficient prestige to manipulate the levers of power even in the nightmarish bureaucratic milieu of customs and border enforcement. Presumably, the film was intended as some kind of rebuke to Trump's border policy -- it's always a bit dubious when Germans lecture American audiences about human rights abuses in the context of World War Two.   (This impression, that the film addresses American immigration policy is probably paranoia -- most likely, the immigration references in the movie relate to African and Syrian refugees flooding into Europe at the time the movie was made.  However, "if the shoe fits....") The title of the film is obscure to me -- although, ultimately, I interpreted "transit" to refer to something like an exit visa.  Seghers' book seems to have something to do with Walter Benjamin's hopeless attempt to escape Nazi authorities and his suicide when he erroneously thought that he was about to be captured.  

The film's plot is complicated, but not in an interesting way.  There are too many characters, often, a result from adopting a complex novel into a 90 minute film.  The gist of things is that Georg is hiding in Paris as the Nazi's approach.  He is persuaded to carry a letter to a writer named Weigel.  The letter is from Weigel's wife, Marie.  Weigel has committed gory suicide in his hotel room.  The Resistance spirits Georg away in a railroad storage car headed for Marseilles.  There's a wounded refugee in the car also fleeing, but he's lost a leg, it seems, and is very sick -- sepsis is killing him.  Georg reaches Marseilles and escapes authorities who pursue him.  The injured man has died, something that the audience figures out long before Georg, since apparently the dead refugee has ripened enough to create a stench in the storage container.  Georg delivers a message to the dead man's wife, an Algerian, I think, who, for some reason, is deaf and dumb.  (Usually characters are deaf and dumb for a narrative reason but I couldn't quite figure out the plot motivation for this detail.)  Georg becomes close to the dead man's little boy, Driss.  He has now assumed the identity of the suicide victim, Weigel.  At the Mexican Embassy and, then, the American embassy, Georg pretending to be Weigel gets a "transit" and entry visa for himself to flee to Mexico.  It's not obvious why two consulates are involved.  Both of them treat Georg- Weigel in a rude and cruel way and seem to have contempt for his plight.  Georg keeps encountering an attractive young woman.  We quickly figure out that this is Marie, the wife of the suicide victim.  It takes the dimwitted Georg quite a while to ascertain this fact -- I suppose he's not aware, as we are, that he's in a movie and that the movie is a knock-off of Casablanca, hence, there will be all sorts of anguished romance in the picture.  When Driss gets sick, Georg finds another exile, a pediatrician who helps the little boy who has become ill.  (The pediatrician is living with Marie Weigel, who like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca seems to be a bit casual about her sexual liaisons.  Although it's posited that Marie is fatally in love with Weigel, she doesn't seem to have much problem having sex with the pediatrician and, then, with Georg.)  There are lots of recriminations about people betraying one another -- the basic plot premise is that some will escape, but others will have to remain in the occupied country and, ultimately, be captured by the Nazis to perish horribly in a concentration camp.  One question arises twice:  who forgets the other more quickly? -- the one who successfully flees abandoning the other or the one left behind?  Different answers to this question are suggested.  As a result of these recriminations, characters have the tendency to get to the harbor, but, then, either refuse to board the ships leaving for safety or, for other inexplicable reasons, be denied access to these means of escape.  I presume that this motif of deferred escape and frustrated waiting is integral to the experience of being a refugee.  Ultimately, Georg secures a exit visa (transit) and other papers to allow Marie to escape with him.  Marie is delirious with joy expecting that Weigel will meet her "at the railing" on the ship -- it's wholly unclear to me why she believes this.  (Does she think that Weigel has been hiding in some other part of the town, afraid to meet her?)  In any event, at the last moment, Georg gives his passport to the noble, if conflicted, pediatrician allowing him to escape with Marie.  (The pediatrician thinks that Georg is just a venal coyote and human smuggler since the hero demands all of his cash before giving him the requisite papers -- why? I never figured this out either).  The pediatrician and Marie get on the boat and sail out of the harbor.  Georg is picked up by a sad woman who has been tending to two dogs for a couple of Americans while waiting for her papers to clear.  She doesn't get her transit and visa and commits suicide after having a final meal with Georg.  (All of this is completely predictable to the audience -- Petzold telegraphs all his effects well in advance of events actually occurring.)  Of course, the Kafkaesque situation is fatal.  No one gets out alive.  In the last shot, Georg seems to greet the ghost that has suddenly been conscripted into the film to provide a suitably eerie ending.  

None of this is really convincing.   If the viewer is alert to the nuances of the European art-film, much of the picture is predictable, a condition that evinces a failure of the imagination at worst, or sloppiness at best.  In one scene, a music conductor explains that he has 'transit' to Caracas and, giddily, looks forward to his future in that place.  He is naively hopeful and, so, the viewer knows that this poor bastard is a goner -- he won't survive through the reel (if movies now had reels.)  

Souls Grown Deep (MIA exhibition)

After more than a year, I ventured a visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a place that has played a vital role in my imagination since I was small child.  The museum is hard to reach from the south.  All exits on the freeway leading into neighborhoods west of I-35 are closed north of 46th Street.  (The easiest way to get to the MIA northbound on 35 has always been to exit at Lake Street and zigzag north to 24th Street and 3rd Avenue where the complex is located.  With exits at 36th and Lake closed, there is no way to access the museum from the freeway, meaning that the visitor approaching from the south has to drive into downtown Minneapolis and find a way across the east-west freeways to drive back to the museum.)  In the Covid hiatus, the MIA, a place notably more conservative than its sister institution the Walker Art Center, has become significantly more "woke".  Each gallery now displays a painting or object made by a Black artist or woman -- it appears to me that many of these works, which are interesting, have been resurrected from the MIA's vaults.  I didn't observe any masterpieces from these works that have been dusted-off and installed -- but masterpieces are few and far between and, certainly, these canvases are as good as what they have replaced.  (I didn't notice any major omissions from the permanent collection although my survey of the galleries was haphazard and there were large parts of the museum that I didn't enter.)  MIA's"wokeness" is evident in some of the explanatory labels for the artworks.  For instance, I noticed no fewer than three labels in a couple of galleries of classical Chinese art remarking that imperial courtesans in the Emperor's court were marginalized and, generally, got a raw deal.  I suppose that being an imperial  concubine was mostly dull work, with sexual encounters very rare, probably unsatisfactory and, even, frightening -- the Emperor had hundreds of  women available to him.  On the other hand, I would guess that being confined in the Emperor's palace was a good deal better than alternatives available to these women.  In any event, there is a smug aspect to these explanatory labels -- presumably, the label-writers think that we know so much more today that we can regard the imperial concubines, for instance, as cautionary examples, handmaidens, the victim's of institutional sexism.  But, of course, these concepts are modern constructs and really have little relevance to what the pictures show.  And, in any event, some of the Chinese wall-hangings make disturbing points about sexual politics in a way that is more self-aware and poignant than the rather tendentious labels.  In particular, there is a wall-hanging, almost life-size, showing a woman in the royal court who seems to be middle-aged and, apparently, no longer of interest to her lover who has replaced her with a younger woman -- the image has a particularly haunting quality.  Clearly, the painter found the woman's plight to be sufficiently interesting and poetic to pause from his commission to portray the Court beauties to show this particular, sad-looking lady.  I don't recall previously seeing the series of images of court women now gracing the walls of the Chinese art galleries to the east of the entrance atrium. Several of those pictures were a revelation to me.

Souls Grown Deep is a small exhibit of art by self-taught African-American artists, mostly from the South.  This little show is located in the gallery on the ground floor, also to the east of the entrance desks and information kiosks.  (This little gallery has often been used to display small special exhibitions or new acquisitions to the museum collection.)  The objects in Souls Grown Deep are all very interesting, raw-looking paintings smeared on wood with thick layers of impasto and, in many cases, idiosyncratic subject matter.  Some of the objects are crudely carved wood or collages of scrap timber.  "The Old Rugged Cross" is an assembly of rough pieces of fencing banged together -- it commemorates a church bombing during the Civil Rights crusade.  A man named Jesse Aaron has cut a log into a jagged-looking shark and affixed a pale plastic doll on the sea-creature's back -- it looks like a sinister, predatory mermaid.  There are monstrous creatures in bas relief on panels of wood -- these monsters seem to have been molded from wood putty and, then, painted.  A noteworthy example is a horrible-looking "Spider Lady" with fat splayed limbs extending away from her torso (made by Eldren Byron).  Prophet Royal Robertson is represented by three large panels -- one shows "Fire Dragon fighting Giant Electric Eel", a nice piece of draftsmanship, brightly colored, that seems to depict a scene from a Godzilla movie; another of Robertson's works is screed against his ex-wife, whom he calls a "Nasty Gal", buxom cartoon women winking at the viewer from within mesh cages of letters -- it's extremely misogynistic, funny and scary at the same time.  A man named Arthur Dial has created a large mural of "Eve and Adam" with two pillowy naked figures (suitably equipped with large fig leaves) separated by a jaunty-looking snake made from a painted garden hose.  There are several devotional images of Jesus with black skin that are effectively painted.  The works have an Art Brut aspect -- they are vigorous, engaging, and a little menacing.  (Far more sedate are two large quilts done by Black women -- these are both variants of a so-called "Housetop" pattern, constructed as a series of boxes joined together by the central spine of a ridge-line; these works are abstract and rather soothing with harmonious colors.)  An African-American curator supplies an annoying commentary on a TV screen -- you would like to tune her out but this isn't possible.  Far more interesting are the labels for the paintings and other works which show us pictures of the artists -- with the exception of the quilts, the artists are all fierce-looking old Black men who uniformly ascribe their inspiration to Jesus working through the Holy Spirit.  The portraits of these men and their statements, all highly religious, falsify most of the what the curator is saying in the TV message.  She suggests that the art works are somehow healing -- I experienced them as raw, provocative, and disturbing in some respects.  

Casque d'Or

 Casque d'Or (1951) is an unusual film noir set in the Belle Epoque.  Although there are some gritty back-alleys in the movie, much of the action takes place along verdant riverbanks, outdoor dance halls of the kind that Renoir painted, and picturesque country farmhouses.  Instead of neon reflected in puddles of water on urban mean streets, we see flowery vistas that could be the subjects of Impressionistic paintings.  Nonetheless, the crucial elements of film noir are present in Casque d'Or:  we have an ex-con trying to go straight, a blonde femme fatale who seems to be a prostitute, and a grim sense that destiny is against these characters and will doom  them -- the film famously ends with the hero going to the guillotine, a notable sequence shot in the blurred, uneasy grey of early morning. Although some of the scenes are airy and bright, and everyone dresses in elaborate costumes, (this is a film in which there is a credit to Marie Rose de Bigot for corsets), a premonition of doom hovers over the narrative.  Although a box-office flop when premiered in Paris, the movie was an international sensation and has grown in critical renown with each passing year.  For decades, the movie's director, Jacques Becker (pronounced Bey-KAR), was underestimated, thought to be a mere imitator of Jean Renoir with whom he worked in the 1930's.  After a 2016 revival of his works in New York City, some critics went so far as to consider the disciple greater than his master, proclaiming that Becker was the real talent behind the string of masterpieces made by Renoir before World War Two.  This is an over-statement and, in fact, Renoir's form of poetic realism is quite distinct from Becker's more clinical approach to his material.  However, there are interesting overlaps and Becker, for instance, relies upon Margaret Renoir (Jean's girlfriend -- she took his last name) as his editor.  

Casque d' Or was initially misunderstood as a crime movie.  In fact, it's an underworld love story.  An ex-con named Manda encounters a beautiful blonde girl, Marie (Simone Signoret) at a river-side dance-hall in Joinville.  The girl is the moll of an abusive gangster named Roland.  Marie and Manda fall in love at first sight.  Roland is jealous and there's a brawl at the plein-aire dance-hall and the thug gets knocked-out.  It turns out that Roland is part of a nattily dressed gang of mobsters who work for a bigger, meaner version of Roland, a sadistic crook named Felix Leca.  Leca has aspirations toward Marie who is the most glamorous of the various impressively coutured courtesans bar-girls hanging around with the criminals.  Leca sets an assignation with Marie at a hoodlum bar called The Angel Gabriel.  Manda, who is working as a carpenter, is betrothed to his boss' scrawny and sharp-featured daughter.  When Marie finds out about the other woman, she slaps Manda's face and stalks angrily away.  (There is lots and lots of face-slapping in this film -- in Becker's films, slaps in the face are what trills are in late Beethoven; the gesture obviously has a some kind of extra-narrative significance to the director and seems to be fetishized.)  Manda, who loves Marie, plans to break-up with the daughter of the cabinet-maker, and comes to the Angel Gabriel to look for her.  Three men, accordingly, are vying for Marie's favor -- the film is named after her tightly coiled blonde hair, her casque (or helmet) of gold.  The evil Felix Leca incites a knife-fight between Roland and Manda.  After a brutal struggle with much eye-gouging, Manda stabs Roland to death.  Callously, Leca offers Manda a job in his mob -- "there's a vacancy," Leca says.  The next day, Manda leaves his job as a cabinet-maker, ending his relationship (whatever it was) with his boss' daughter.  He goes on the lam, receiving a message to go down to the river-side in Joinville.  Marie appears in a row boat and they make love.  Then, the couple hide-out in a farmhouse nearby, supervised by a cynical old lady.  Leca plots to rape Marie.  The gangster has a corrupt cop in his pocket and pins the death of Roland on Manda's prison-buddy, Raymond.  When Manda learns that his chum, Raymond, is facing charges for a killing that he committed, Manda sneaks out of Marie's bed and goes to the corrupt cops to confess to stabbing Roland.  Raymond has been caught in possession of Roland's pocket-watch and switchblade and so he isn't released but, instead, held as an accomplice.  Marie decides to have sex with Leca to get Manda  out of the jam.  She goes to Leca's place where he rapes her.  But Leca isn't a reliable guy.  He doesn't lean on his corrupt police chief buddy to get Manda out of stir.  Instead, he's more than happy to possess Marie himself and let Manda rot in jail.  "You're a louse," Marie tells him angrily, earning (you guessed it) a slap in the face.  She takes matters into her own hands and aids Manda and Raymond in escaping from a paddy-wagon that is transporting them to prison.  (Marie's beauty is posited to be so great that her mere appearance creates a distraction so that the prisoners can overcome their guards.  As one of the guards chases the two fleeing men, Marie throws herself in his way and literally tackles him.)  Raymond is shot and dies.  Manda discovers that the mob boss, Leca, has raped Marie and framed Raymond, presumably to entice Marie to approach him and offer herself as assistance to Manda.  This doesn't sit well with Manda.  He hunts down Leca and shoots him in the police station in front of the crooked cops. Manda is condemned to death for this shooting (it would seem to me that the killing of Roland which has triggered the whole mess would be excused as self-defense).  In the film's famous finale, Marie rents a dismal room overlooking the prison yard where Manda will be executed; she watches her lover as he is guillotined and, on this grim note, the film ends.  

The plot is nothing much, a standard film noir narrative involving a good-time girl and an ex-convict trying to go straight.  The gangsters are a little pathetic --they steal from one another (triggering another bout of face-slapping) and Leca, although vicious, isn't really intimidating.  Simone Signoret is like a French version of Marilyn Monroe, vehemently blonde but not child-like, rather somewhat cold and calculating -- she's the focal point of the film, the object of desire that everyone wants to possess.  In the final scenes, she watches the death of her lover dry-eyed with a kind of feverish intensity -- the squalid execution is something that she must witness.  In the film's opening scene, we see the mobsters with their girls rowing in four boats down the Seine.  The men are rowing the boats except for the one carrying Marie and Roland -- Roland is a bully and we think that Marie is rowing the boat because Roland is lazy and has forced her to do so.  But, in fact, Marie is rowing the boat as a representation of the fact that she is an independent woman, the mistress, as it were, of her own fate.  Later, we see her row the same boat to the landing place where Manda is waiting for her -- he's asleep on the river bank and she teases him into waking; then, Becker gives an ecstatic close-up of her face ringed in golden hair backlit against the radiant sky.  But Becker's particular directorial touch is epitomized in the scenes before Marie wakes Manda on the river-bank.  We see Marie very carefully tying up the boat, not in any particular haste, but looping the rope three times around a stake on the bank and, then, putting the end of the tether in a crack in the stake.  Then, the camera follows her as she carefully sets the oars inside the boat.  The essence of Becker's film making lies in his patient observation of small, seemingly inconsequential details.  Even though Marie is hastening to an encounter with her lover that will be decisive in her life, Becker shows her taking extreme pains to make sure the rowboat is properly beached and tethered -- this is not a woman who makes mistakes:  everything she does is carefully calculated.  The genius of the film resides in these sorts of details.  When Manda first dances with Marie, he keeps one arm hangings stiffly at his side -- as if he's hesitant to put his arms around her.  (This is compared with other dancers who tightly hug their partners or put their hands boldly on their asses.) An old woman cuts bread for the lovers, handing them the slices and, then, scooping up the crumbs which she crams in her mouth.  A gangster raises his hand instinctively to protect his face when Leca, who is slap-happy, threatens him.  When Marie and Manda watch a wedding in a church, a glimpse of a respectability that they will never enjoy, Becker's camera slides along the wedding party to show the bride and groom:  it's an older man with a smug look on his face and a young woman who seems totally terrified.  When Manda leaves the cabinet-maker's shop, the boss, who has a bad limp (probably a war injury) says that he doesn't want him to leave on account of his daughter.  Then, he offers Manda money which he hasn't earned to tide him over on his trip into the country.  Manda, at first, refuses the money but, then, is pressed to accept it.  As he walks away, the two men exchange forlorn goodbyes -- suddenly, a minor character, the cabinet-maker, who has maybe four lines in the film, has become the still center of Becker/s attention.  There are innumerable felicities of this kind -- the implacable Manda chases Leca into the police station where the hoodlum jumps through a window into a small closed courtyard.  Manda jumps into the courtyard too having seized a cop's gun.  Leca tries pathetically to hide behind a little concrete pier before Manda shoots him to death.  The whole thing is staged with a sense of eerie determinism -- these things have to happen.  Becker's Paris looks like a small village -- I think the action is supposed to be taking place in the suburbs which have a rural flavor.  The scene where Manda is forced into the knife fight at the Angel Gabriel is complicated by a group of aristocrats who are slumming in the gangster-haunted tavern.  The women, elegantly dressed as if they are coming from the opera, swagger as they enter the bar.  The men are more circumspect and timid.  One of the gangsters dances with one of the high-society women -- the gentlemen are only too accommodating to encourage her to dance:  they don't want any trouble.  Later, they are obviously embarrassed after the homicide occurs and they are questioned about what they have witnessed.  

For me, the film is impressive and fascinating, but the plot is uninteresting despite Becker's ornamentation of the story's bare bones with poignant or closely observed vignettes.  The movie doesn't generate for me any intense sense of involvement -- there's something faintly schematic about the narrative and the final scenes, which have been widely imitated, don't have the force that they apparently possessed in 1951.  Nonetheless, the film is on-par with most of Renoir's lesser-known pictures -- that is, excellent but, perhaps, not a masterpiece.  

Bleak Street (Le Calle de la Amargua)

Arturo Ripstein's 2015 Le Calle de la Amargua ("The Street of Bitterness") is nothing less than astonishing.  Ripstein is an excellent Mexican director and has been active making movies since 1961 -- as a teenager he worked on Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel and made his first Western when he was only 21.  I have seen only a few of his films, all of which were extremely interesting and brilliantly directed.  It seems a shame that he is not well-known in the United States -- so far as I know retrospectives of his movies are unknown in this country and his pictures seem to have been rarely, if ever, released here theatrically.  You can watch Le Calle de la Amargua on a Kino Lorbeer DVD and, if you've never heard of this director, the film will be a revelation to you.

Shot in supernaturally beautiful black and white, Bleak Street (as it is called in English) takes place in the old historic center of Mexico City.  In Ripstein's vision, the City center is a labyrinth of dismal, moldering alleys, full of medieval-looking alcoves and niches.  People live in tenements with stairwells caged in spectacular, ornamental cast-iron balustrades and balconies -- the elaborate decorative iron-work casts webs of glorious-looking shadows when lit from behind and Ripstein sprays all of these lower depths with blinding rays of light that stab through the otherwise supernal darkness.  Pools of water glint and blaze with reflected light.   People live in holes with ancient exposed masonry that look like wet caverns.  A wrestling ring is a glacial pier of white light at the center of a dark and gloomy arena -- through an entryway bathed in alabaster light figures move to and fro.  Ripstein uses long takes to explore these spectacular environs, dollying and craning the camera through the chiaroscuro.  In many respects, the film resembles German expressionist cinema or Orson Welles' more elaborate mise-en-scene (for instance in films such as Touch of Evil).  There's a strong element of silent movies in the way that the characters emote, the outlandish plot, and the way some scenes simply dissolve into whirls of pale smoke -- the film features long interstitial black-outs, each extended one-take sequence ending in a fade to black and, then, light restored to show us another astonishing vista of poverty and misery.  The film's extraordinary physical beauty elevates the fantastically sordid narrative into the realm of the archetypal -- at the end of the movie, the picture has advanced into the real of the tragic, like something from Greek mythology.  

Two elderly whores, Dora and Arlita, work the mean streets of Mexico City.  (They are called "senior sex workers".)  The women are cynical, humorous, and very lonely.  They haven't promoted themselves into pimping (like their former colleague Margara who seems to be about their age and is surrounded by a protective coterie of male homosexuals).  Rather Dora and Arlita are the lowest form of streetwalker -- Arlita has to beg Margara for a particular corner to ply her trade and they turn tricks in auto garages and toilets to make a living.  Dora has a boyfriend, a nasty old street-conjuror named Max.  She also has a daughter who is about 15 who despises her -- she and her daughter quarrel about a cell-phone.  Dora's daughter hates her mother's profession, but is on the road to becoming a whore herself.  Arlita lives in a sort of wet catacomb with an elderly woman who is immobile and apparently reeks of piss.  Arlita abuses the old woman but also love her and, even, gets out of her bed to cuddle her on a mattress lying on the floor.  The old woman is demented and, when Arlita doesn't want to see her face, she  simply wraps rags around her jaw and head and ties them tight.  Arlita has a crew of street kids who help her push the old woman in her tattered rags and reclining on a cart onto a street corner where she begs.  The old woman is able to sing a little (she hums a tune) but she can't talk.  Two mini-Luchadores, that is, midget-wrestlers, live with their wives and seem to be lower middle-class.  (Their wives are full-sized women and each of the wrestlers has a child -- the little kids are always crying because they are afraid of the masks that the Luchadores wear throughout the movie.)  The dwarf-wrestlers are so-called "shadows" -- that is, they are miniature versions of normal size professional wrestlers:  thus, there is Muerte (Death) and little Muerta, both of whom enter the ring with sinister-looking scythes; the other mini-Luchadore is little AK47 who enters the ring with big AK47, also both of them carrying imitation automatic weapons.  The two mini-Luchadores are identical twins.  They are manipulated by their wicked mother who forces them to pay her tribute from their wrestling earnings.  This woman is like a figure from mythology -- the fearsome mother whose love destroys her children whom she regards as special gifts from god.  Needless to say, the brothers aren't happily married -- when they are introduced in the film, each of them is fighting with his wife and each slaps his spouse.  The wives resent their mother-in-law's manipulative conduct that divides them from their husbands.  The little wrestlers are highly belligerent, perpetually angry about being regarded as "mascots" as they are called in the film, and when someone says they are "diminished" (referring to their size) brawls result.  

Ripstein's film inexorably draws these alarming characters into a tragic relationship.  The mini-Luchadores have decided to splurge on an orgy with the whores.  The two women recall their "salad days' in which they had a lot of fun "dropping" johns and stealing their money.  "Dropping" refers to putting so-called "eye-drops" in their victim's booze, knocking them out, and, then, absconding with their money.  Arlita and Dora plan to "drop" the mini-Luchadores and steal their earnings from a big bout scheduled for the Arena Coliseo.  After the fight, the whores meet the dwarf wrestlers and they go to an anteroom of Hell called the Hotel Laredo.  (This place has an ice-white interior with floors made of translucent, illuminated tiles -- the sign advertises "Agua Caliente";  for some reason, it's huge with a palatial entryway that leads to a tiny booth where the two owners appear as if confined within a TV screen -- it's an image worthy of David Lynch.)  The whores dose the midgets with the drops, but forget to adjust the amount of the knock-out serum for the size of their victims.  We see the poor midgets dead in bed, more or less arm in arm with their little masks still in place.  The law quickly descends on the scene and the hapless midgets, who were derided in life, become a cause celebre -- the media calls them valilant "Lilliputian gladiators."  The pharmacist who supplied the eye-drops is fingered and she identifies the prostitutes.  (The nasty pimp Margara is beat-up by the cops who aren't hesitant to use strong-arm tactics -- after she's roughed-up, we see her homosexual lieutenant tenderly comforting her.)  Dora and Arlita plan to flee together although Arlita, who has been in prison before, commends incarceration as a "roof over your head, food, a blanket" -- the comforts of life as she sees it.  Arlita uses the remaining drops to poison the old woman for whom she cares -- "you wouldn't leave a dog here alone," she says.  The old woman hums herself to sleep.  We see a shot of Dora's daughter raging in the alleyway:  "What will happen to me?" she cries out.  Dora is now alone.  Her boyfriend, Max who is a transvestite homosexual, steals her better evening gowns, well-suited for whoring, and absconds.  Dora and Arlita descend the elaborately steps in the tenement, plotting their escape, but they are apprehended on the first landing.  As they are put in separate squad cars, Arlita faces the camera and says:  "It was fate.  All things pass."

The film somehow makes squalor magical.  The miserable fable is ennobled by the way that it is acted and filmed.  The mother of mini-Luchadores rages and claws at her husband's face in grief.  At the funeral of her two sons, she places a rosary in each of their tiny caskets in which the boys are buried in their masks.  (Other masked wrestlers are in attendance).  There is something weirdly demonic about all of the characters.  A lurid sense of doom hovers over every shot in the film.  The acting is superb and the aging whores, who are not glamorized in any way, are both poignant and repellent.  Everyone in the movie seeks to assuage a sort of fundamental grief at being alive and human -- even the nasty Margara has someone who cares for her.  But betrayal is the rule of the streets and, in the end, everyone is left alone. The film's camerawork is spectacular.  In one scene, the camera glides into a cafe where two detectives working on the case are discussing the matter.  The cafe is a velvet light-trap full of dark shadow and bright glaring light.  The camera sweeps by the cops and, then, explores above the bar where there is a TV showing coverage of the death of the mini-Luchadores.  Then, the camera gracefully rotates to show us the pale figure of the pharmacy clerk advancing slowly into the cafe like an apparition signifying the doom of Dora and Arlita.  Apparently, the film is based on true events that occurred in Mexico City.  In 2009, two sex workers accidentally poisoned La Parkita and Espectrito Jr. (two mini-Luchadores) in a hotel in Cuahtemoc, blue collar neighborhood in Mexico City.  Riptstein's film features a version of the song "Mexico" by Luis Mariano that is stunning in its own way. The song comes from Mariano's musical Le Chanteur de Mexico (1956) and is sung in French.  

The Woman with the Five Elephants

Vadim Jedreyko's 2009 documentary The Woman with Five Elephants reminds us that many excellent films exist out in the great wide world unknown to us (or, at least, unknown to me).  The world is rapidly filling up with images.  Soon there will be more images in creation that trees on the globe. It's impossible to know about even a tiny percentage of the films that now flood the world.  Somehow I missed Jedreyko's film or it missed me.  

Svetlana Geier is the titular five-elephant woman.  The five elephants are Dostoevsky's five big novels, each about a thousand pages in length.  Frau Geier lays claim to the elephants because she has translated them from Russian into German.  Jedreyko's documentary is about language, the craft of translation, memory and the horrors of the 20th century.  Svetlana Geier's biography encompasses several of Europe's great historical tragedies -- but these enormities are also paralleled by private suffering:  in the course of the film, Geier's son, Johannes, a High School shop teacher (it's called "Handicrafts" in the movie) dies as a result of freak accident.  Geier, who was 86 when the film was made, is rendered literally speechless with grief.  Although she is afloat in an ocean of words in both German and Russian, her son's death, more or less, strikes her dumb.  Indeed, at the heart of the film, there lies a concept that certain things are inexpressible:  when Geier's much beloved father is returned to his family, a gaunt specter flattened to flesh and bones by torture in the Soviet gulag, he tells his fifteen-year old daughter about what he endured in prison on the condition that she ask him no questions.  More than seventy years later, Svetlana says that she has absolutely no memory of what he recounted to her -- she understands that the horror is within her someplace, but, perhaps, mercifully she can't bring it into her conscious mind.  Time also erodes and conceals.  In the course of the film, Svetlana returns to the Ukraine, where she was born and lived as a girl.  But the landmarks are all changed.  She can't find her family home and the dacha where she cared for her father until he died, a year after release from the Gulag, has also gone missing.  She finds her father's grave in a cemetery but it is covered in snow.  When her great-granddaughter offers to clear some of the snow from the marker, the old woman tells her not to bother.  But she does ask the girl to pick up a fallen branch so that it can be placed on her mother's grave, apparently back in Freiburg, Germany where she lives.  

The documentary begins by showing us Frau Geier at work.  She is stooped over, but when she gazes at the camera, we can see that her eyes are bright and penetrating, even flashing with a little malice.  (A strength of the film is that we never warm to the old woman -- she's not grandmotherly, but rather prickly, arrogant, and demanding.  Her high intelligence is also on display and she's more than a little bit of a show-off -- she taught college students for 40 years, embarking on her career as a professional translator only in her sixties and she has a dramatic, professorial and authoritative way of speaking.)   In her old age, Geier is dependant upon the assistance of neighbors.  One woman comes every morning with an old Olympic typewriter and takes dictation from her after the two eat several muffins for breakfast.  Then, later an old man appears, a retired musician:  he reads Geier's recently translated pages aloud to her and criticizes the prose.  Geier bickers with both of her helpers, quarreling with them vehemently on the minutiae of spelling,  punctuation, and word choice.  The film shows her preparing food for her wounded son -- he is confined to some kind of nursing home and she brings him meals every evening.  (She says that she learned to prepare food for sick and injured people when her father was dying -- "first, the rehearsal," she says, "then, the main performance.")  We see a family gathering in which she supervises the preparation of vast amounts of some sort of filled pastry -- Frau Geier seems to have dozens of industrious granddaughters and great-granddaughters, many of them quite beautiful with pale skin and high Slavic cheekbones.  We learn that Geier's father was a prosperous sugar beet farmer in the Ukraine.  The family was well-to-do and owned a country house or dacha.  Her father was a faithful member of the Communist party until he was purged in 1938, tortured for 18 months and, then, released as a staggering cadaver to his family.  With something like perverse pride, Geier says that he was one of a thousand who survived murder inflicted on seven or eight million.  Her family was ruined and her mother had to work cleaning houses in Kiev while Svetlana nursed her father until his death.  In 1939, the Germans rolled into Kiev and were greeted by many of the people as liberators.  Certainly, this was the view of Svetlana and her mother who hated Stalin and his minions.  The Germans turned out to be murderous as well.  Svetlana recalls a Jewish girlfriend marched from her apartment with her family and led in a long procession to Babi Yar ravine where she was shot with 30,000 others.  Nonetheless. Svetlana perceived the Germans as the better of two evils.  Her mother sent her to school to learn German as her "dowry" -- the gift of language that would save their lives.  Svetlana was a good student and recognized as a prodigy by the German officer whose home her mother was cleaning.  The officer, Count Kerssenbrock, proved to be Svetlana's benefactor and  procured for her (and her mother) passports to Germany.  Geier is asked if she wasn't complicit with the Nazi murder of the Jews and, particularly, whether Kerssenbrock was an accomplice.  She says:  "the only thing to do was go down to the headquarters with a gun.  He didn't do that."  After some close calls, Svetlana and her mother reach Freiburg where she marries, has a family and becomes a college teacher.  Svetlana's begins translating Dostoevsky in in the early 1990's.  Her practice is to study the text until it enters into her.  Translating, she says, must be done with the "nose up in the air" -- that is, not with the nose buried in the text.  She suggests that you  have to look away from the text in order to properly translate, otherwise, she says you are like a "caterpillar crawling from left to right" on the page.  She equates Dostoevsky's novels to finely woven and embroidered linen, an art that "no man understands".  Her idea that each thread is woven into a tight pattern that has to be imagined and designed before the fabric is made.  "Text" and "textile" she says are related words for a reason -- a properly made text is like a lovingly woven fabric -- the film shows us Svetlana luxuriating in beautiful white linens that were made by her mother.  

The bulk of the film involves Svetlana's trip to Kiev by train, undertaken when she is 86 with a great-granddaughter.  In Kiev, a place she has not seen such 1943, she is a guest speaker in several seminars -- presenting her theories of translation to a largely female group of college students (it appears that translation is women's work in Ukraine) and, then, talking to a class of high school kids.  She asks the high school kids to write their names on a sheet of paper so that she can show this to her ailing son -- he was hit in the head by shrapnel from a circular saw that blew apart during a "handicrafts" class that he was teaching.  Everything has changed in the Ukraine.  Svetlana recognizes one street where there are museums and recalls seeing a painting by Oleg Graber of snow -- "there was not a single stroke of white on the canvas," she recalls with wonder.  It's snowy and cold.  At one point, Svetlana's great-granddaughter almost slips on ice accumulated under the eaves of an old house.  If you're from Minnesota, this very short image is frightening -- probably, people from warmer climates won't even recognize the peril.  Returning to Freiburg, Svetlana's paralyzed son dies of his injuries.  She says he is laid in his casket "like a baby laid in a cradle."  The film ends with her bickering with the old man who reads her translated texts aloud to her:  they quarrel over the proper collective noun for a group of  horses (some are steeds for riding and others drag coaches and so the question of what the group should be called is problematic).  In the film's last shots, Svetlana and the old man argue about whether the punctuation in a sentence should be a period or semi-colon.  

There are many remarkable discussions of literature and language itself in the film. Svetlana says that German and Russian are incompatible -- in Russian when you own something, it owns you; that is, the thing you own turns you into its subject.  She describes poetically the different sounds that German and Russian words produce and their emotional meaning.  She quotes a beetle humming in Pushkin and notes that the words exactly imitate the sound of the insect.  She recites Goethe's famous little poem that begins "Ueber alle Gipfeln / ist Ruh"-- quoting the last line, she says that the German word "auch" is like a breath breathed out into the immensity of the silent universe.  Cutting an onion, she remarks that the "onion has no center" and that existence is justified only by what it leads us to.  Every mystical experience is an inducement to kindness and peace, she says.  Language, at least poetry and novels, is the opposite of war and violence, Svetlana tells us.  "Sehnsucht" ("yearning") is the most fabulous word, she says.  Stacking up her translations from Dostoevsky (they make a pile a yard high), she tells us proudly that "One doesn't translate these things with impunity" -- that is, Man uebersetzt nicht ungestraft.   "Ungestraft" means literally "unpunished" and, although I think "impunity" is close to this meaning, it's not exact.  I think the translation should be simply "without being punished' or "unpunished."  

(Svetlana Geier died in 2011).