Nagina

A wealthy Indian matron has arranged a suitable marriage for her handsome son.  The young man, Rajeev, educated in London, has returned to the family estate after fifteen years abroad.  His mother plans to marry him to the plump and beautiful Vijaya, the daughter of the businessman who has managed the family enterprises (farming and a sugar factory) after the woman was widowed.  (In the palatial mansion, a huge photograph is displayed of the deceased Rajah, resplendent in his turban and with his foot planted on a tiger that he has shot; a swag of flowers garlands the life-size photograph.)  Everything is well-planned and Rajeev seems delighted by Vijaya.  But, then,  strange events ensue and the eligible bachelor marries a snake.  This turns out to have calamitous consequences worked out over the two-hours and 18 minute length of this 1986 movie.  The picture, Nagina, was India's number one box-office hit in 1986 and remains acclaimed as one of the best "snake-fantasy" pictures ever made.  (Yes, Bollywood has a genre that is identified as "snake-fantasy".)  You can watch the picture on Amazon Prime.  Like many celebrated Bollywood movies, it's astonishingly bad -- so terrible that it's often quite funny.  The movie features a commanding performance by the astonishing Svidevi as the snake-wife and Amrish Puri as her nemesis, the Snake-Charmer who is also some sort of holy man -- but these performances aren't tailored to human dimensions; they are grotesquely larger-than-life:  the actors strike poses and move like figures in a silent movie. The special effects are primitive:  the snake-wife, Rajni, is sometimes shown with a cobra superimposed over her face, but there are no attempts to show the woman turning into a serpent -- indeed, the "money-shot" of the beautiful Svidevi becoming a huge scaly venomous snake seems beyond the capabilities (and budget) of the director, Hamesh Malholtra.  The screenplay is over-emphatic and very broad --  it was written by someone with the snaky name of Dr. Achala Nagar (snakes are naag in Hindi).  The plot is slow to develop and the climax involves elements rushed into the picture that don't make any sense.  And the movie is very, very long.   

Senses of Cinema is an Australian on-line journal about movies.  It publishes academic articles, frequently very badly written in impenetrable lit-crit jargon.  But the publication is a mixed-bag and it's a good guide to Asian cinema, a subject in which the Australians take a keen interest.  Volume 101 of the journal features eight or nine articles about Bollywood that make claims for the artistic integrity of some of the products of that industry -- the largest film factory in the world.  Critics writing for Senses of Cinema condemn Western critics for neglecting Bollywood movies -- Indian cinema in Europe and America is limited to Satjayit Ray's arthouse picture and, perhaps, a handful of other similar movies.  The innumerable films made by Bollywood are, by and large, ignored although there are now many of these movies available to anyone who cares to watch them on Netflix and Amazon Prime.  The editorial staff at Senses of Cinema implies that Western racism is the cause for critics neglecting Bollywood pictures; Europeans are contemptuous, it is suggested, of the movies made by a former British colony.  Although there may be some element of truth to this characterization, it is, by and large, unfair.  First, until recently, these movies were very hard to see.  There are only a few theaters that show first-run Indian popular films and, although Indian immigrants may know about these screenings, no one else does.  (There's a theater in a remote suburb of Minneapolis that often shows Hindi films but at strange hours of the day, usually on Sunday mornings -- and these screenings aren't well-advertised.)  Second, Indian films aren't reasonably conserved.  As in Mexico, film classics are treated casually and, often, released on pirated DVDs that are unwatchable -- there's no Indian (or Mexican) equivalent of Criterion or Janus Films protecting these movies which are, apparently, allowed to decay into illegibility.  Third, it's unclear what exactly constitutes Indian film -- the industry produces movies in Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and about a half-dozen other languages.  (Nagina exists in Telugu and Hindi versions.)  The movies are badly dubbed and often have tinny sound -- this is because they have to be shown commercially to people within India who don't speak the language in which the film was made.  But the soundtracks are off-putting.  Even a prestige picture like Nagina sounds like it was recorded over a dictaphone.  But the main reason that Indian popular cinema hasn't been extensively studied is that the movies are all very, very long -- most of the classics made in Bollywood are between three and four hours long.  (By contrast, Ingmar Bergman's movies, for instance, and Ray's as well, are usually about ninety minutes long.)  Therefore, anyone interested in Indian popular cinema must commit to watching a three to four hour film often involving very unfamiliar cultural premises with poorly dubbed sound and erratic subtitles written in a form of English spoken in Mumbai but only tangentially similar to standard English.  These are all formidable obstacles to overcome.  Further, Indian popular films don't curry Western favor -- they have a billion viewers in India and its diaspora and the industry is self-contained:  it doesn't really care what I think about it.  Fortunes are made and lost in the industry every year without anyone outside of India knowing anything about it.  I don't think that any of these factors have much to do with bigotry.  And, then, there's the daunting question:  where to begin? 

I've seen a few Bollywood movies and concede I don't really understand them very well.  Clearly they are based on popular esthetic principles in which I am illiterate.  Some of these movies are very entertaining, but it's hard to claim the mantle of "art" for them.  I watched Nagina because it's relatively short (only two-hours and 18 minutes long) and features the famous Svidevi, one of Bollywood's leading actresses between the late seventies and first decade of the 21stcentury.  Like some of the most iconic screen stars, Svidevi is fantastically beautiful but her beauty is also a bit imperfect, even somewhat odd -- from some angles, she looks a little bit strange, an appropriate effect for a woman who is, in this film, actually a snake.  Svidevi has huge eyes with an asymmetrical aspect; she sometimes seems cock-eyed.  She has a slight double-chin and sometimes looks a little bit squat -- I don't think that she's very tall.  Svidevi doesn't have the lissome, willowy appearance of American and English film actresses -- who are all, more or less, built on the lines of Tilda Swinton but more attractive and with bigger breasts. Svidevi is capable of exuding an aspect of raw sensuality but she is treated as a movie star in Nagina and never portrayed in a way that is undignified.  Even when she is dancing by sliding her rump over the ground like a caterpillar inching forward, she remains, somehow, remote, an aloof goddess.  Her antagonist in the movie, Amrish Puri, playing the snake-charmer has grandiose villainous features and seems to be very tall -- he glares in an impressive manner and is often shot standing in front of cultic swastikas (clearly an intentional effect).  The climactic battle between the snake-wife and the snake-charmer is a tremendous spectacle, but like everything in the movie it goes on way too long.  

The film's plot is simple in outline, but complex in exposition.  Rajeev was a sickly child and had to be raised in London for his health.  (It turns out that he was bit by snake when he was six but revived from the dead by the Snake-Charmer; the snake that bit him was a gem-bestowing snake, whatever this means, and very late in the picture we learn that there is an unseen jewel somewhere that will bestow power to control the world on its possessor -- this seems like a poorly contrived after-thought to motivate the fight to the death between the snake-wife and the snake-charmer).  Returning to his family estate, Rajeev attempts to take his  arranged-marriage fiancee on an outing.  But the horse and buggy in which they are riding is spooked by some snakes haunting an old, decrepit and ruined temple.  The snake-maiden lives in the temple and appears during a song-and-dance number when Rajeev explores the place.  He courts the snake-maiden, who says she is an orphan.  At last, he begs his mother to allow him to marry the snake -- of course, no one knows that Rajni, the snake girl, is really a big cobra.  After his mother's objections, Rajni wins the woman over and the marriage takes place.  Mr. Thukar has been managing the estate for the family in the hopes that his daughter would become Rajeev's wife.  When Rajeev marries the snake, Mr. Thukar becomes an outright villain and tries to kill Rajeev.  He sends thugs to murder Rajeev (as well as Rajni) but snakes intervene and the bad guys get bit.  Finally, Mr. Thukar shoots Rajeev from a distance, although apparently a cobra kills him after he fires the shot.  While Rajeev is recuperating, there is dissension in the snake world and the Snake-Charmer sends a malevolent King Cobra to attack the comatose hero.  This leads to a bloody battle between Rajni as Queen Cobra and the sinister King Cobra -- Rajni wins the fight.  After some more complications, the Snake Charmer with his six flute players (all dressed in saffron yellow) enter the family's mansion and try to destroy Rajni.  Rajni does an astonish snake-dance writhing all over the floor and knocking over the flute-players -- she seems both defiant and, somehow, enthralled by the Snake Charmer's repetitive flute riffs.  (The guy and his assistants are playing what looks like gourds stuck on tubes.)  Rajeev now recovered appears and fights a duel using magical tridents with the Snake Charmer.  A great tempest ensues and we see lightning represented as white bolts in the sky in interpolated shots -- it looks like the lightning shown in Ed Wood movies.  Finally, Rajeev with the help of his snake-wife wins the duel.  The snake-charmer is defeated  Rajeev's mother, who has never been given a name in the movie, is collateral damage and dies.  Rajni vows to never become a snake again.  A title says AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY THERAFTER (sic).

The film's last forty-five minutes are impressive in a grotesque and alienating way.  It's impossible to figure out who is supposed to be the hero of the film.  Rajeev looks like Wayne Newton; he's plump with a spectacular black pompadour.  He seems pretty much clueless throughout the movie although he rises to the occasion in a couple of big fight scenes.  The Snake-Charmer is apparently supposed to be the villain but, in  effect, he's exorcizing the house from the supernatural threat posed by the snake-maiden and, so, his motives seem to be pure (until the end when we learn that he's really just trying to seize the jewel from the deceased gem-bestowing snake.)  The difficult factor for a western audience has to do with the multiple meanings associated with serpents in Indian culture:  sinister and dangerous creatures, snakes are also perceived, somehow, to be benign household guardians and were, in fact, the protectors of Hindu and Buddhist scripture.  So the snake is neither good nor evil.  Apparently, snakes are embodiments of the power of Shiva and devotees to that god sometimes worship serpents.  The snake-wife is, therefore, a monster who is both good and evil.  Indian cinema is very conservative and, at the end of the movie, the snake-wife is perceived to be battling to protect her family -- that is, her husband and her mother-in-law.  The movie is shot in a primitive but effective way.  It has enormous sets with balustraded galleries and huge curving staircases.  Lighting supplies hysterical accents to the action -- it's not unusual for a character to move through four or five brilliantly colored lighting schemes in a single shot.  Every effective shot is repeated at least three times -- sequences go on and on without any regard to proportion.  As is the manner in Indian popular cinema, the movie is also a musical with about six song-and-dance numbers including the tremendous snake-dance at the end of the movie (worth the price of admission) and a love duet that takes place among cascading waterfalls.  People are posed against impressive backgrounds without regard for logical topography.  There are innumerable inserts of people glaring at one another, particularly Svidevi and the Snake-Charmer.  

A final bizarre element in the film deserves mention.   Like Shakespeare, this drama is made for both high- and low-brows.  The movie features a comical servant in a sort of Indian Stepin Fetchit role.  This guy tells incredibly offensive jokes -- he compares his wife to an elephant who is crushing the life out of him.  In one scene, he has hired an urchin to take a family portrait but the little kid can't fit all the fat women into the frame and makes fun of them.  Somehow, the little boy ends up embraced by the fat woman who calls the emaciated urchin a "mosquito" and, then, accuses him attempting to rape her.  She picks up the kid and, like a professional wrestler, hurls him off-screen.  It's comedy of a sort that is truly cringe-worthy and the film exploits these scenes for all they are worth.  Then, when the tone turns darker, the comical subaltern, like Shakespearean fool in King Lear, just vanishes from the picture.  

Revanche

 An internet staple is posting about the ends of movies.  This content is "water-cooler" gossip to use a phrase probably unfamiliar to many younger readers.  The water-cooler was a place in the office where workers would congregate to chat about recent events.  In my lifetime, most events of interest to people were broadcast on TV; we saw them the night before.  Thus, workers were gather around the water-cooler to discuss TV shows that they had just watched or sporting events or, even, popular movies.  Colleagues compared notes and developed a sort of consensus about the merits of the shows that they had seen and, further, would speculate as to the meaning of sequences in the broadcast that were unclear, puzzling, or enigmatic.  Most workplaces today don't have water-coolers -- people drink bottled water grabbed from the fridge -- and the chatter of the collegial office, with various secretaries mingling with bosses and clerks at some central location, is also, alas, a thing of the past.  The proverbial water-cooler is now extinct and, indeed, with it, the idle gossip swirling around it -- and, it may be that the densely populated workplaces that existed even three years ago with their cubicles and wandering supervisors and busy word-processing and copy collation and mail rooms are all things of the past, killed by COVID-19 and, perhaps, never to revive.  But, in lieu, of the water-cooler, there are numerous casually written and jaunty websites where readers can learn the plots of TV shows that they may have missed and follow their favorite celebrities.  Many of these sites even feature detailed, shot by shot analysis of controversial scenes in Tv shows and movie as well as explication of puzzling denouement in Netflix series (such as Ozark and Better Call Saul) -- these postings purport to explain baffling features in programs that consumers have watched.  This is a lengthy predicate for the proposition that I would like to find a internet posting that explains to me Revanche, Goetz Spielmann's 2008 crime picture.  And, I don't need an explanation of the end of the movie -- that seems pretty clear to me.  Rather, I would like someone to explain the show's first shot.

Revanche is an austere, but gripping Austrian film.  The movie is very lucidly shot in long, carefully composed sequences, mostly filmed with an immobile camera.  The picture divides into an opening forty minutes that is gritty, urban, and sordid -- the movie involves an exploited Ukrainian prostitute working in a brothel in Vienna and her hapless, dull-witted boyfriend, a penny-ante Austrian criminal.  The second two-thirds of the film take place in Vienna's Waldviertel -- that is, the sector of agricultural land, partly wooded and decorated by small lakes immediately outside of the big city.  In some respects, the shape of the movie is similar to Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, a film involving crime in a nameless noir city (all neon lights reflected in puddles, glaring police interrogation rooms and wet dank alleys) that sloshes over into similarly a cheerless and snowy mountain town (Leadville, Colorado).  The consequences of the brutish behavior in Vienna infects the rural environs in which the last two-thirds of the movie takes place.  As one would expect from a film set in Vienna and its neighboring woods, the picture is aggressively sexual with lots of naked girls, joyless copulation, and a general undercurrent of erotic anxiety.  In some respects, the movie resembles a mixture of Fassbinder's notion of love as a battlefield in which power dominates libido and Michael Haneke's cruel and dispassionate objectivity -- you are always anticipating that something terrible and unexpected will suddenly occur.  

Alex is in love with Tamara, Ukrainian prostitute who is indentured to a vicious brothel-owner.  (The name of the place is Cinderella).  Tamara owes the boss $30,000, probably for smuggling her out of Ukraine and she's working off her debt in the whorehouse and, also, on the streets.  Alex is a jack-of-all trades in the brothel -- he lugs cases of beer around, sets out towels, and provides muscle when necessary; he's not a knight in shining armor -- we see that he's not above roughing-up a girl who would prefer to sleep late as opposed to servicing the icy middle-aged men who frequent the joint.  The boss proposes that Tamara agree to work as a more elite call-girl and he offers to set her up in an apartment for a higher class of clientele.  Tamara, however, is plotting to escape with Alex who has a pipe-dream about setting up a bar with her in Ibiza.  The boss is a bad guy -- he demands oral sex from Tamara who is about to oblige when he tells her "No, my loss your gain", a weird refrain (I don't know what he's saying in German) that means something like:  "I could force you to do this, but it's really not worth my time and effort.  When Tamara resists the idea of operating out of an apartment (she's living in a hotel run by the boss that is really just a spartan jail -- the front desk workers keep tabs on the girls as they come and go), the brothel-keeper has a customer beat her up -- to "break her."  Alex intervenes and gives the bully a thrashing.  This upsets the boss, but boys will be boys, and Alex has to apologize and shake hands with the guy who was charged with battering his girlfriend. -- the men after all are colleagues and will work things out among them. Alex has figured-out a way to evade hotel security and, with Tamara, the couple escapes to the country.  We have learned that Alex has a grandfather, Mr. Housner, who lives on a farm with some dairy cattle -- Alex' grandmother has just died and the old man is very lonely.  The old man despised Alex whom he correctly regards as a ne'er-do-well -- Alex didn't attend his grandmother's funeral because he was in jail.  

Alex has devised an idiotic plot to rob the small-town bank near where his grandfather lives.  The robbery, of course, is botched and poor Tamara, who is along for the ride, is accidentally shot and dies.  The cop who pulled the trigger, Robert, is an athletic young man with some problems of his own.  His wife has just suffered a miscarriage and he is working nights and neglecting his duties at home.  (Robert's wife, Susi, runs a grocery store and she has despaired of getting pregnant -- she proposes to Robert that they adopt but he says no:  "you don't know who you're getting when you adopt and the kid will turn out to be a bad apple," the rather judgmental policeman tells her.  (Soon enough the joke will be on him.) Susi is also pressured to have a baby by Robert's condescending mother -- when Susi says that the fertility problem is not hers, Robert's mother responds with a non sequitur:  "But he's so athletic."  Somehow, Alex escapes and isn't even suspected for the botched bank robbery -- the identity of poor Tamara is difficult to establish since she may be an illegal immigrant and Alex has kept her passport.  One of the picture's strengths is its convincing portrait of a small town where everyone knows everyone else and their families.  The cops form a "good old boy" club (it has a couple of female members too) and they are always drinking beer, barbecuing, and and target shooting.  All of the cops have pregnant wives or several children.  Susi is a devout Catholic as is Mr. Hausner, Alex's curmudgeonly grandfather.  Susi takes Mr. Hausner to church each Sunday and forms an interest in the bad boy, Alex.  (He's obsessively brooding about Tamara's death and using a hideously dangerous-looking circular saw to cut up an enormous stack of logs -- he's making firewood for grandpa.)  Susi invites Alex to her house -- Robert is working the night-shift.  They have sex, although Susi wonders why Alex is so cold and inhuman:  "Someone must have done something to you," she muses.  Alex has a gun and he learns that Robert shot Tamara in the bank-heist (he was aiming for the tires).  Alex knows that Robert goes running every day, a trail that leads into the woods and to a rather desolate lake -- we hear a loon cackling unseen at the pond.  Alex plans to kill Robert as revenge for the death of Tamara.  And, so, the film moves inexorably toward its climax.  By this time, Susi is pregnant with Alex's child and, mission accomplished, ends the nocturnal relationship with Alex -- she's been having sex with him in the nursery that she and Robert outfitted for the baby that she miscarried.  

(Spoilers follow:)  Revanche is very skillfully acted and its somewhat baroque plot seems plausible within the confines of the movie.  There is a wonderful scene in which Susi transfixes Alex with her gaze and we immediately understand what she is planning to do.  Susi is more than a little spooky -- she's extremely matter-of-fact and laughs oddly at moments when we would expect her to cry.  (She's very believable as a cop's wife -- she's competent, taciturn, and remote.).  Robert is suffering from remorse and post-traumatic stress from the shooting and seems completely miserable and helpless. Alex is unpredictable and a little sadistic -- he loves terrifying Tamara and seems frighteningly impulsive -- there's no reason for Tamara to be at the bank robbery which results in her death. Ultimately, Alex confronts Robert, although the shooting is mentioned obliquely and its not clear that the young cop knows what Alex means with his vague diatribe.  Alex decides to forego revenge and he throws the gun into the lake.  We see the weapon splash in the water and sink and, then, a wild gust of wind makes white the glassy surface of the lake.  It's as if God is somehow commenting on Alex' decision to renounce vengeance -- something that Susi, of course, has pressed upon him.  The scene with the gun sinking into the water rhymes with the very long opening shot -- we see the lake, hear thunder, and the water looks black and menacing.  Suddenly, something splashes into the lake --it's shocking and you half jump out of your seat.  The shot is held for another thirty seconds as the ripples gradually subside.  But there is no violent gust of wind that turns the mirror of the water into a pale frothy sheet.  So what is it that is dropped into the lake in the opening shot?  The two images don't match.  At the end of the film, Alex resigned to working on his grandfather's farm (the old man has died) is seen forking hay to the cows.  We hear thunder.  The thunder connects the last shot with the bleak opening image -- but the puzzle remains as to what is thrown into the water in the first shot; Spielmann, the director, has taken care to shoot the film so that the two shots of something dropped into the pond do not match.  Revanche, of course, means "revenge" -- but it's not clear what revenge is here meant.  Obviously, Alex plots revenge on Robert, but what exactly is Susi doing -- is she taking some kind of revenge on Robert for his infertility and, for the fact, that the local code of machismo requires that she take the blame for their childlessness?  And is Mr. Hausner involved in some sort of revenge on his grandson?  There are many possibilities and the movie's strength is that it doesn't require us to choose between these possibilities.  

This is a splendid movie, very closely observed, and rich with intricate detail.  It's the sort of movie that sticks in your mind, that you re-play and that seems better as imagined than when the movie was underway.   I recommend this film.

The Lighthouse

 I heard this joke in New Hampshire.  It's about Maine.  People in New Hampshire think of folks in their neighboring state as primitive bumpkins with funny-sounding accents.  To get the full effect of this joke, it must be imagined as spoken with drawl of an old-time Maine lobster-man.  Up in Maine, a newcomer to the State is surprised by a visit from his neighbor.  The neighbor says:  "I'm here to invite you to a party."  "What kind of party?" the newcomer asks.  "Well," the Maine old-timer says:  "They'll be drinkin' and, then, dancin'.  Then, there'll be fightin' and, finally, fuckin'."  "Wow," the newcomer says.  "Sounds wild.  Who's invited?"  "Just you," the old Maine fisherman says.  This joke pretty much summarizes the action in Robert Eggers' The Light House, a grumpy and tedious horror film starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe.  Pattinson plays a young man, a refugee from the Canadian lumber camps, who signs up for a four-week gig tending a remote light house somewhere off the north Atlantic coast -- the film was shot, in part, in Nova Scotia.  Pattinson's boss is named Tom Wick, a much older man (a bit like Coleridge's "ancient mariner").  The film is, to all intents and purposes, a two-hander:  the light house master and his assistant are ill-matched and, at first, Wick mercilessly bullies and torments Pattinson's character who is called either Winslow or Thomas Howard (it turns out that this kid has killed a man in the lumber camps and taken his name, Ephraim Winslow).  For the first two-thirds of the movie, Wick persecutes his assistant, demanding that he do pointless and agonizingly hard jobs involving the maintenance of the light house.  Wick may be some kind of sea-god; in one shot, he's naked, holding down the young man and his eyes blaze with light -- he seems to be an embodiment of the light house itself in this image.  Winslow/Thomas, however, is mentally unstable and the constant bullying harassment by Wick doesn't help things.  He's prone to seeing visions, including a dead sailor's head in a lobster pot and sexually voracious mermaids.  The tables turn in the film's last third -- now, Winslow/Thomas savagely beats the old Tom Wick, drags him around on a leash like a dog, and, at last, buries him alive.  By this time, the light house's spartan housing has been drowned by a perpetual storm that lashes the rocky islet and the two men savage each other in knee-deep water into which they also piss and vomit.  The tempest has kept the men from being relieved of their light house duties and they are running low on food -- fortunately, Wick has cached about fifty bottles of booze in the dirt next to the light house and so the two men spend the second half of the movie getting drunk and, then, staying drunk.  While inebriated they dance together and embrace and, even, come close to kissing. Meanwhile outside, enormous waves hammer the light house rocks and a mermaid sprawls on the vicious-looking stone ledges next to the sea.  When Winslow/Thomas has sex with the mermaid, she opens her mouth and screams like a sea-gull.  

The film is grim to the point of being unintentionally funny.  Shot in black and white, everything looks sodden, rain-swept, and cold.  It's a handsome movie, made in the style of David Lynch's early pictures, particularly Eraserhead, dense with different shades of black  The light house throbs and pumps and makes guttural intestinal noises like the apartment building in Blue Velvet -- the sea and the tower sound like they are engaged in some kind of nightmare industry.  Eggers choreographs the action with many slow and lugubrious crane shots -- the camera slowly rises up around the spiral steps in the light house passing through different gradations of pitch-black, grey, and misty whitish gloom.  Strange geared machines chug away in an outbuilding.  There are several cisterns full of dark water that may be sewage.  At one point, Winslow/Thomas has to thrown lye or something into one of these black wells.  The light house master won't let his helper ascend into the brilliant blaze of the mirrored tower-top cell where the fresnel lens of the oil-fired light rotates to cast its beam into the watery chaos around the islet.  This isn't only one area to which the assistant is denied access -- he's also not allowed to open a locked armoire in which the light house keeper stores a journal in which he writes incessantly.  At one point, the master tells the kid that he is recommending that he be docked all of his pay due to "incessant self-abuse" that has kept him from performing his duties.  At the bloody climax of the film, Thomas/Winslow takes the keys from the corpse of Wick (he has to half disinter the man that he earlier buried alive) and breaks into the armoire.  It's not clear what he reads in the journal but his eyes grow wide with horror -- the scene is a variant on the episode in The Shining in which poor Shelley Duval reads her husband's novel which consists of one sentence repeated a million times:  "all work and no play make Jack a dull boy."  This is another comical aspect to the movie -- it recapitulates other more famous horror films but doesn't bother to surpass them.  (For instance, we see Wick chasing Thomas/Winslow with an axe, limping along like the villain in The Shining because one of his legs is -- I kid you not -- a pirate's peg leg.)  at the very end, Winslow/Thomas also climbs up into the top of the beacon, a place to which he has been denied access:  the chamber is filled with light and mirrors and this supernatural radiance blazes on the young man as he howls at the sky.  But nothing is revealed.  

The two characters speak in a strange lingo that is a mixture of pirate gibberish with Shakespearian nonsense.  The actors affect such heavy nor'east accents that most of what they say is impenetrable.  (Sometimes, Pattinson drops the accent and sounds like Teddy Kennedy or the corrupt politician with the Kennedy accent in The Simpsons.) At one point, Wick taunting his assistant says:  "Every scantling of your soul is Winslow no more but is barren sea alone."  Thomas/Winslow gets a similar aria in which denounces Wick.  After his soliloquy, which sounds a bit like something from the blacker parts of Macbeth or King Lear, Wick is impressed -- "ah, you have a quite a way with words, laddy," he grunts.  This elaborate diction is probably very impressive -- Eggers is known for his ability to write grim, poetic sounding effusions (he successfully simulated Puritan diction in his first film The Witch) but it's all for naught if you can't understand what the actors are saying.  In The Light House, there's so much pirate "argh!" in the speech that it's impossible to figure out the dialogue.  As far as I can tell, it probably doesn't make any sense at anyway.  The movie is all mood and no plot -- everything gets increasingly disgusting as the movie proceeds; in the end, the two men, who have become irredeemable drunks, pour some kind of viscous glop into their booze -- is it some sort of oil, even, perhaps the stuff that fuels the light house beacon? In the last scene, hungry sea gulls eviscerate poor Thomas/Winslow who lies paralyzed on the frigid rocks. This is avian revenge for the young man slaughtering a sea gull that has been harassing him.  He's been warned:  Wick has told him that sea fowl are inhabited by the souls of dead mariners.  

I wasn't able to figure out what this movie is supposed to be about.  It has some of the nihilistic and comical features of Beckett's Waiting for Godot with two men alternating between master and slave.  There's an aspect of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the motif about the vengeful sea fowls.  The movie looks like David Lynch and seems derived pictorially from that director's work and the plot involving the delirium-inducing aspects of isolation (cabin fever) alludes to The Shining.  Other aspects of The Shining are on display -- it's not clear what is real and what is hallucination and, as at the Overlook Hotel, there are forbidden rooms in which evil secrets lurk.  It's not clear when the story is supposed to be taking place.  Thomas/Winslow denounces Wick as "not even a good Captain Ahab imitation" -- so he seems to have read Moby Dick and, in fact, talks in that book's garbled Elizabethan diction.  Eggers is a serious film maker and the picture probably is carefully designed and rife with symbolic significance -- but it's too obtuse and morbidly grim to be worth investing any interpretative energy in the thing.  The movie is shot in the old German Expressionist ratio -- it's pillar-boxed which gives the black and white images a strong impression of confinement and claustrophobia and, dare I says, madness. The film's pacing is all messed-up.  There's no slow burn toward the insanity at the end.  In the movie's first ten minutes, Winslow/Ephraim finds a little effigy of a mermaid in the sea-weed stuffed mattress on which he has to sleep -- and from that point to the end, we're off to the races.

California Split

 I saw California Split when it was a new movie, back in 1974.  A lifetime has passed since that screening and the movie is now as remote from 2022 as California Split would have been from Lon Chaney and Mary Philby in The Phantom of the Opera made 48 years before Robert Altman's gambling picture.  Of course, for me, an incalculable gap of time and style exists between California Split and the Lon Chaney movie.  But California Split, a film that now seems an extreme example of neo-realism after the model of the great Italian directors of the forties and fifties, still seems fresh, relevant, and not at all dated.  This is a characteristic of movies that intend a realistic portrayal of life at the time that they were made.  These films don't really age in the way that pop culture and escapist movies age -- genre films tend to show the ravages of time; they are designed to make money off current trends and fashions and, therefore, become quickly dated.  By contrast, an intensely realistic film like California Split, if it was interesting to audiences when it was produced, will remain vibrant as a sort of documentary, that is, a portrayal of a slice of life as it existed in 1974.  Take, for example, the film's soundtrack.  Altman doesn't use any movie-music composed for the picture.  Rather, we hear some contemporary tunes played on radios used by on-screen characters and the Cheech and Chong song "Basketball Jones" heard in the background in one scene dates the action to 1973.  ("Basketball Jones' was a peculiar novelty tune that charted at number one for several weeks in 1973 -- the highly ghetto and falsetto lyrics are sung by Cheech Marin accompanied by an all-star band including Carole King, George Harrison, Billy Preston and Ronnie Spector as part of a "cheerleader" chorus.) Music specially composed for a film as its score tends to date the period to the styles prevalent at the time the movie was made.  By contrast, the tunes we hear in the background of Altman's picture have a documentary character -- this is what people were listening to at the time the movie was produced;they aren't imposed on the action but are part of the action.  A lounge singer named Phyliss Shotwell performs some old Jazz and Blues standards -- these musical interpolations seem to be accompanying music at first, but in the film's last half hour we see the singer actually performing and it's revealed that this music isn't really "incidental" music but is diegetic, that is, music that the characters are ostensibly listening to in the scenea showing them.  (It's hard to keep in mind the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic, that is, incidental music:  diegetic music is part of the narrative, something that can be heard by the characters in the film -- that is, music that they experience on a radio or in a live performance; non-diegetic music is scored and "incidental," that is, a commentary of the what we see on film.)  Altman at the height of his neo-realist style rarely uses incidental or non-diegetic music; typically, the music in his pictures is something that people on-screen are hearing.  Altman seems to have regarded his diegetic use of music as a "fair use" not requiring the purchase of music rights.  This interpretation of the law, shared by the studios apparently, wasn't correct -- people sued and California Split was tied-up in litigation over its music for several decades until, at last, the controversy was settled.  Phyllis Shotwell who provides the sardonic cabaret Blues and Jazz accompaniment is a hard-faced, middle-aged broad who plays piano next to a big wheel of fortune in the climactic sequence.  With her growled parenthetical remarks interposed in the lyrics that she sings and her cynical aplomb, she reminds me of Lou, the pianist at Nye's in old St. Anthony (although I don't recall Lou singing.)  Altman's commitment to realism extends famously to his soundtracks on which there are multiple layers of conversation recorded all at the same time -- it's difficult sometimes to know what we should listen for in the labyrinth of words.  No one declaims and no one speaks theatrically -- everything is recorded as if we were present in the crowded bar or casino and heard what was happening without sounds being filtered for emphasis (although Altman takes care to make sure we hear what is necessary to his rather formless plots).  I recall that California Split, a highly regarded film at the time, was a disappointment to me -- I couldn't figure out what it was about or, even if the movie was about anything at all.  I admired (and still admire) the acting but the picture is, perhaps, so extreme in its commitment to displaying the inchoate, even chaotic, aspects of experience that, it remains, 48 years later somewhat daunting.

The film's narrative is strange, full of false starts and dead ends.  Two men stroll separately into a California casino.  One of them, Charley Waters (Eliot Gould) is a professional gambler, apparently -- although he seems more like some sort of hapless gambling addict.  Charley is a risk-taker, supremely self-confident and recklessly brash.  The other man, Bill Denny (George Segal) is, at first, a casual gambler -- he's playing hooky from a job he despises:  he works for a magazine called California Trails, a publication seemingly modeled on Arizona Highways.  (His boss in an incomprehensibly young looking Jeff Goldblum who appears in one scene as an intensely Semitic publisher -- Altman was like Fellini; he had a good eye for faces and the film is full of people who look vaguely familiar and, later, went on to more visible parts in TV and the movies.)  The plot trajectory involves a rather puzzling role reversal; Bill, who gets into trouble with Charley, becomes a highly focused and, at least, transiently successful gambling professional; Charley who starts out this "buddy" film as the dominant partner ends up a pathetic kibitzer in the movie's last half-hour.  To call the film's narrative a "plot" is generous -- Altman doesn't articulate a conventional narrative and there are lots of gaps in the story that the viewer has to fill in.  Most of his sequences are intentionally off-point and not designed to convey narrative information -- the film's emphasis is on character, not character development.  In this regard, the movie adheres to real life:  when someone does something out of character, we don't get an exposition of the steps leading to that person's unusual conduct -- it just happens and this is how Altman presents things in his movies.  Bill and Charley get into a dispute with an aggressive, greasy hoodlum with whom they are playing cards in a casino.  The hoodlum, with his buddies, beats them up and steals their earnings.  Charley takes Bill to his apartment that he shares with two rather pathetic call-girls. (He seems more of a roommate than a boyfriend.)  In a homo-erotic scene, Charley smears shaving lotion as an analgesic on Bill's bruised ribs and chest -- the call-girls think his solicitude is amusing and suggestive.  Bill is seduced by Charley's insouciance and infectious recklessness.  Like lovers, they meet at racetracks and other gambling venues; Charley generally wins -- it seems he can make a precarious living by gambling.  Bill, who has become addicted to wagering, loses heavily.  Apparently, he's fired from his job and ends up destitute.  He has borrowed money from Sparks, the least fearsome loan shark in film history.  Sparks, who is on crutches, whines to Bill that he has to pay back his debt -- Charley ducks the obligation and Sparks sends an enforcer:  Altman  is barely interested in this aspect of the movie -- the enforcer is just a menacing voice behind a door.  The younger and more innocent of the two hookers (she's a bit like Shelley Duvall in McCabe and Mrs. Miller) cautiously asks Bill to make love to her; he makes a half-hearted effort but can't figure out how to get her out of her clothing and, then, the other call-girl appears interrupting them.  Humiliated, Bill flees the apartment.  The two girls have acquired a couple of johns who are taking them to Hawaii and, as they say in Icelandic sagas, "now, they are out of the story."  This part of the narrative simply dead-ends.  The girls talk a little wistfully about their hopes that the Hawaii trip won't be too miserable and, after that scene, we never see them again -- the point, it seems, is that the girls are gamblers as well, wagering themselves on sexual adventures that may or may not turn out to be lucrative.  (There's a throwaway scene intended as comedy involving a transvestite; this is the one part of the movie that has dated -- the scene comes across as cruel and offputting.)  Bill desperately raises money to invest in a high-stakes game in Reno.  Charley encounters the thug who beat him up earlier and took his money.  He gets into a fight with the man and knocks him down -- after administering a few punitive pay-back kicks, he takes the guy's money and invests it in Bill's venture.  In Reno, Bill focuses intensely on the game, won't drink, and, in fact, wins big. On a streak, he then plays blackjack, roulette and craps.  It seems that he can't lose.  In the end, he makes $88,000 split two-ways.  Bill is exhausted and appalled that his success at gambling doesn't carry any kind of thrill or, even, intense emotion.  As he and Charley are splitting up the money, Bill says:  "I didn't fell anything."  Charley replies that he knows:  "It don't mean a fucking thing," he responds.  Charley plans more gambling adventures but Bill says the he's done with it and won't accompany him.  

Altman stages everything as undramatically as possible.  The big climax is effective but it's not filmed in an emphatic or even expressive manner.  Altman's characteristic technique is show that these places where people are supposedly having fun are deeply sad -- there is a profoundly melancholiac edge to much of Altman's best work.  The boys go to a boxing match and Charley gambles with all the people around him -- he even wins a hat from someone sitting next to  him.  (Charley will wager on anything.)  It's a big scene, shot realistically in what seems like a real, if very low-rent, boxing arena.  But the heart of the scene is a brief shot of one of the boxers -- he's just a Mexican teenager with an infinitely sad look on his face; it's as if he'd rather be anywhere but here in the ring getting his brains knocked out.  A hooker in a bar can't inspire any interest in her -- she's aging and a loud-mouth; she calls everyone faggots.  The gentle call girl keeps her eyes shut during the boxing match -- apparently, the violence is too much for her, although she cheers as lustily as everyone else.  A janitor pauses in his tasks cleaning a casino floor to play a little of his hard-earned money in a slot machine.  The trip to Reno takes place in a wintry landscape -- a bus ride over Donner pass.  Everything is the opposite of glamorous.  The other gamblers are rude fat women, old ladies, and bums of various sorts.  Even the high-roller game is staged without any sense of drama or consequence -- the most loquacious of the players is an old medical doctor who rambles on about gambling in 1926 and a big loss that he experienced then (he's not senile but the next thing to.)  The other gamblers are callow kids, a Chinese guy, and one charismatic figure "Amarillo Slim", apparently a real professional poker player.  (There's an excellent sequence in which Charlie "reads" the poker players in the high-stakes game much to the amusement of a cynical bartender who confirms many of his observations.)  The casinos are ugly and full of ugly people.  In a topless bar two women have an inscrutable conversation -- one of them is naked from the waist down:  this sort of imagery was apparently something that interested Altman --there's a celebrated scene in Short Cuts in which Julianne Moore irons a skirt wearing no pants.  Altman wrings a good deal of pathos out of the climactic gambling orgy in Reno.  Charley's had his nose broken and has two black eyes and a big garish cross of bandage on his nose -- he looks ridiculous.  Bill thinks Charley will ruin his concentration and so won't even give him money from their stake so that he can amuse himself playing the slots.  This reduces Charley to a sort of ghostly figure wandering around in the background as Bill wins again and again.  The rift in their friendship is obvious and painful -- these ending scenes justify the sequence early in the film involving the shaving cream.  The final ten minutes seems to take place at dawn in the Reno casino; there's a big vacuum-cleaner abandoned on the carpet.

Extreme (even excessive) realism of the sort exemplified by California Split may seem ultimately nihilistic.  We see everything and it rings true but it doesn't mean anything (a conclusion announced explicitly at the movie's end) -- this is because the real world doesn't ultimately mean anything either; it just is.  The film's revelation is that all of Charley's gaiety and reckless abandon is also a charade:  "it doesn't mean a fucking thing," Charley says.

 

Forest of Love (Deep Cut)

 The cinema of provocation is a development in film history that begins in the late sixties.  I distinguish these kinds of movies from exploitation pictures, for instance films by Herschel Gordon Lewis (The Gore Gore Girls) or Dwaine Esper (Maniac).  (The movies have always mined the vein of the horrific, violent, sadistic, and pornographic -- one of the very first pictures ever produced was Edison's tiny documentary reporting on the electrocution of an elephant.) In the sixties, auteurs who specialized in scandal first emerged.  Consider, for instance, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch or, more provocatively Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the director's attempt to dramatize his rage at the industry that had spawned (and later spurned) him.  For a time, Brian de Palma served as outrage auteur par excellence -- particularly with his films Body Double and Dressed to Kill.  (As with Peckinpah, Body Double is a mordant blast of outrage aimed at the film industry.)  Later, Quentin Tarantino assumed the role of provocateur within Hollywood-based filmmaking.  In Europe, Lars von Trier took up the mantle of scandal vacated due to Fassbinder's early death.  In Japan, for a time, Takashi Miike was the provocateur par excellence, specializing in torture porn and hyper-violent Yakuza pictures.  Miike's role now seems to be occupied by Siano Sono, a prolific and, seemingly, highly ambitious director, who makes films designed, apparently, to induce controversy (Sono is controversial as well for his apparent penchant for sexually harassing his female actors).  Sono's pictures flirt with profoundly disreputable genres in Japanese films -- he invokes the groper "up-the-skirt" movies involving voyeurism on Tokyo's crowded subways, as well as Japanese cinema's richly varied repertoire of violence and porn:  Forest of Love contains lesbian school girls in cute juvenile costumes, incest, sadism, and "pink" softcore porn.  What sets Sono's movies apart from mere exploitation is the director's frenzied eclecticism and his operatic attack on the sordid subject matter that he favors -- Sono is not content to show one type of perversion; instead he seems determined to cover the water front, loading his movies with something titillating for every depraved taste -- every stone he turns over has a fetish under it.  Furthermore, Sono's technique is ultra-stylized, lurid, and Wagnerian -- his pictures give the impression of being febrile hallucinations with interpolated swooning music videos.  About seventy minutes into Forest of Love, a garish serial killer epic, a young woman goes berserk.  We see her feverishly sawing at her wrist with a piece of broken glass -- the soundtrack obliges us with a rasping sound as the girl's impromptu blade hits bone; she's wearing a Japanese school girl costume and writhing on the floor among heaps of dolls fallen from a shrine to a schoolmate who died ten years earlier after a Lesbian production of Romeo and Juliet.  (We've been treated to shots of the suicidal girl earlier masturbating in front of the picture).  Various apparitions appear including the dead girl dressed as Romeo.  Furthermore, the soundtrack rumbles with a deep bass roar -- it sounds like an earthquake.  Now and then, Sono cuts to gory shots of  dead girls strewn all over an asphalt parking lot.  Earlier we have seen a dance sequence scored to Pachebel's Canon, a tune that the Japanese call "The Cicada song" in which the sapphic schoolgirls flutter around calling themselves "insect women" and asserting that they will shed their adolescent form to become sexually active adults.  When a young woman dressed in bondage gear (she always appears wearing a sort of leather harness) recounts an erotic story to three punks with movie cameras who squat in front of her squeezing their legs together in order to control their raging "boners" -- I'm citing the film which plays these sorts of episodes for raunchy laughs.  The girl in bondage gear says that "scars are memories' and walks with a sort of club-footed limp -- the inside of her thigh is marked with a long scar that one of the kids tries to lick.  And, so it goes.  The film's obsessions with just barely pubescent girls, lush tableaux of nature in full bloom, and squirrely sounding pop tunes creates an effect like David Lynch on crystal methamphetamine.

As it turns out, a little bit of Sono's cinematic bad boy behavior goes a long way.  The so-called "Deep Cut" version of The Forest of Love is a Netflix TV series, comprising seven episodes each about 35 minutes long.  The series was compressed into a feature film, also called The Forest of Love, running about two hours and fifteen minutes; the series version is about 65 minutes longer.  Apparently, the feature film is confusing and baffles most viewers.  Critics who have reviewed the movie version say that it manages to be both muddled and highly repetitive.  Although the TV show is slow to develop, it has a plot that makes some limited sense (if its premises are accepted) but the program also feels stalled-out -- it goes on and on and on and since the subject is mostly torture-porn, all the gratuitous dismembering and mutilating becomes not just irritating but tiresome.  It's not easy to make constant graphic brutality tedious, but, somehow, Sono achieves this effect.  Similarly, the school-girl lesbian stuff, featuring lots of nudity, quickly palls as well.  The guy is a sort of one-trick pony who just keeps repeating himself long after the audience has figured out the point (or the pointlessness) of what he is doing.

The series involves three narrative strands that are haphazardly intercut.  In 1985, a group of perky Japanese school girls perform in a production of Romeo and Juliet.  Since there are no boys at the school, all parts are played by attractive teenage girls.  All the girls seem to be involved  in lesbian sex and the child who plays Romeo is universally desired by the other students.  This subplot involves lots of sex and romantic imagery of girls kissing and declaiming Shakespeare to one another on an picturesque set with a big brooding moon, classical columns and stylized trees. A second subplot is a witless parody of a teenage snuff film -- three kids are stalked by a serial killer and murdered one after another.  The kids find a scary dead body in a clearing in the forest and, then, the murderer wipes them out, taking his time because this plot, like all the series' narrative elements has to be dragged out over seven episodes.  As is typical in this genre film, the kids act in a completely idiotic way, don't flee, and, in fact, venture into the danger that ends up wiping them out.  (This story is supposed to take place in 1993).  In 1995, a group of punks plan to make a movie.  They don't have much of a story to tell until a predator named Joe Murata appears.  Joe Murata is a "singer-songwriter" which in the film's alternative universe gives him a license to beat up and torture everyone he meets.  Murata is posited as a incredibly charismatic -- people literally beg him to physically abuse them.  The joke, which turns pretty sour after a half-dozen bloody murders, is that Murata isn't much of anything -- he's homely, arrogant, a lousy singer, and it's incomprehensible that everyone in the film worships him.  (Clearly, there's some sort of perverse allegory here about Japanese sado-masochism and authority figures -- but it's hard to decipher.)  Murata is a transparently phony con-man:  he claims to be a Harvard graduate and a CIA operative.  In one scene, he makes a call from a toilet and asserts that the peculiar metallic echoes in the sound are the result of talking to his girlfriend from a CIA "submarine."  (When he leaves the toilet, he blithely tells the girl that the "sub has just surfaced.")  There's some funny scenes involving Murata's incredible lies and the abuse he inflicts on everyone -- in one sequence, he raises money from an elderly professor by showing them a movie that he's produced that, he says, has made a lot of money; the movie is James Cameron's Titanic.  The Tokyo punks who proclaim that "cinema is life" decide to make a film about Murata's adventures which involve seducing every woman in sight and, then, torturing them.  His first victim is Moriko -- she played Juliet in the school production.  Moriko claims to be a virgin and Murata enjoys raping her, burning his initials between her breasts with a cigarette, and, then, electrocuting her with two hissing prods that leave deep black burns on her hips and thighs.  Moriko enjoys this action so much that she encourages her girlfriends to also have sex with Murata (he tortures them too).  Ultimately, Murata is having sex with Morito's sister, Ami, and their tight-laced mother.  The plot involving Murata is the main line of action and gradually evolves into a series of murders.  Murata has gathered a sort of thrill-kill cult around him, but the group keeps shrinking as its members murder one another in perverse sex games or on Murata's orders.  Murata tells his film-making crew to drain the blood from the bodies,  hack them up, and, then, run the corpses through a blender to make corpse smoothies.  The gore in the blenders is, then, rolled into little miso balls and pitched into a lake in the mountains near Fuji, presumably to be consumed by the koi.  This is all shown in graphic detail and is mildly amusing, but, also, soon becomes repetitive.  (In his urge to irritate, Sono has the corpses spurting arterial geysers of blood when they are cut up -- what happened to the order to first drain the bodies of their blood?  In any event, I don't think a corpse is likely to spurt blood -- I believe the effluvia would be more of a slow seep.)  When he tires of ultra-violence, Sono cuts back to the story about the lesbian schoolgirls, a plot that he seems to view as a romantic, lush and erotic counterpoint to all the hacking and electrocuting in the Murata story.  But the narrative involving the sexy sapphic schoolgirls also involves lots of self-mutilation, weird sexual acts, and about five suicides.  ("Romeo" is killed in a car crash and the mourning girls in the Shakespeare play drink a sleeping potion and, then, stand on a ledge five stories over the parking lot, dropping off the roof to be smashed to death on the asphalt below.  One of the girls, Taeko, survives although with a badly shattered femur and she becomes a "super slut" who has sex with everyone -- she has the word "Romeo" tattooed on her thigh over the surgical scar resulting from the open reduction of her femur fracture.  This motif rhymes with Joe Murata burning his name into Moriko's chest.)  Moriko, the sole survivor of the mass suicide, has a Gothic home-life -- her father is a brutal professor who is always slapping her around.  (Everyone slaps everyone else around in this movie -- there's a funny scene in which Murata performs with his hapless boy-band; all the musicians have badly bruised faces from being continuously cuffed and pummeled by Murata.  Murata is a singer-songwriter the same way that Nero was a singer-songwriter, amusing himself on  his lyre while Rome burned.) As the show limps forward, all of its characters get tortured and, then, slaughtered.  About half of them get cut up and reduced to meat milk-shakes.  The film-makers, whose crew gets smaller and smaller as they are murdered, claim to be influenced by the Coen brothers and some of the sequences have the visual flair shown by the American moviemakers -- there are parodies, I think, of Miller's Crossing in the staging of some of the shots.  There's also a shout-out to Alex Cox' Sid and Nancy -- that film is portrayed as the modern punk correlate to Romeo and Juliet.  I laughed out loud at one sequence in which Murata, after beating everyone up, regales his bruised posse with sales pitches for futons.  

The three plot-lines intersect but not in an interesting way.  By the third episode, I had figured out how the characters relate to one another and from that point on the film hasn't got any surprises.  It's just gets more and more nasty and gory.  Sono conceals the lack of substance in the film with jokes and gruesome violence -- the film's central conceit is funny but insufficient to support a series of this length:  the supposedly charismatic Murata isn't charismatic at all; everyone treats him as a kind of God, but he's just a ruthless narcissist who spends a lot of time zapping people with his electrical prods and licking girl's faces.  At the end, the movie comes to screeching halt as Moriko reads a lengthy confession in which she admits that she was never the virginal figure that she claimed to be -- Murata seems genuinely puzzled; he apparently thought he was the only egregious liar and con-artist in the group.  By this point, the viewer doesn't care.  Moriko has already killed her parents, disemboweled them and fed the entrails to a blender and, so, where do we go from here?  (Murata has turned Moriko's staid parents into a nightmare version of Sid and Nancy and it's mildly amusing to seem them cavorting around drunkenly to punk music.)

By coincidence, a friend shared with me a video documenting a Japanese genre called Harajuku Kawaii.  Kawaii means "cute' in the somewhat nauseating manner of Japanese anime and fashion -- little girls in pastel frocks with enormous wide eyes and bee-sting lips.  These asexual creatures apparently are ubiquitous on the streets of Tokyo and its fashion malls.  The Harajuku aspect of this style involves a recognition that this cuteness is "terminal" in some respects -- in other words, practitioners of Harajuku Kawaii blend their cute costumes and accessories with references to death, suicide, and self-harm.  Japan has always had suicide rates far exceeding other countries and the samurai phenomenon was, in large part, a death cult so the general impulse behind Harajuku Kawaii isn't completely surprising -- however, the grotesque way that these cute kid-suicides appear is a little disconcerting. (The Forest of Love probably refers to the famous "suicide forest" in the Fujiyama foothills where kids go to kill themselves in the solitude of the dark, labyrinthine woods.)  Clearly, the Romeo and Juliet pastiche in Forest of Love with its not-so-virgin suicides is a lurid expression of Harajuku Kawaii.  Furthermore, Japan produces scores of "Pink" movies each year -- these are erotic films featuring torture and humiliation, a mainstay of the Japanese adult film industry.  Sono seems to be  fusing the Pink film with anime-influenced Harajuku Kawaii -- at least, I think what's at work here.  Like Oshima, Sono seems to think that Japanese people are in thrall to an authority-based irrational death cult.  But Forest of Love doesn't criticize this phenomenon -- it celebrates it.

I watch these films so you don't have to. 

Carmen (Minnesota Opera - 2022)

 If there were such a thing as Opera noir, Georges Bizet's Carmen would be that thing.  This may seem like an odd description for an opera famous for its gaudy, technicolor spectacle -- bullfights, gypsies, Carmen's famous habanara and the show's scintillating melodies.  But the content of the spectacle is pretty grim and the theme of the opera is fate -- no one is going to get out of this thing alive. The show relentlessly portrays the destruction of hapless military officer at the hands of a destructive femme fatale - the sort of character that we would call today a "sociopathic narcissist."  The puzzle posed by Carmen's character is central to the plot -- is she a passionate free-willed member of a marginalized community (a gypsy called "Romani" for the purposes of political correctness), indeed a kind of freedom fighter for the oppressed or is she some sort of promiscuous monster?  The opera holds these ideas in suspension -- it has a great "negative capacity" that keeps these different interpretations in question, never quite settling on one or the other.  (I suspect that viewers will interpret the opera's action largely in terms of their gender -- men will be fearful of Carmen's charisma and ruthlessness; women may well imagine her to be a role-model although, of course, she gets strangled in the end.)  In 1991, I saw Denyce Graves, resplendent in a tight-fitting yellow dress, sing Carmen with the Minnesota Opera; she now directs the show and, according to comments in the playbill, views the heroine as a sort of courageous guerrilla fighter in the war between the sexes (and the war between the dominant culture and the oppressed Romani).  But evidence that Carmen is "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" is replete in the libretto and the show's brutal ending remains as disquieting as ever.  Carmen, who believes in divination by Tarot card, has been shown that she is doomed.  The opera's music features a snaky, semi-oriental-sounding motif, descending by slinky chromatics, which is about as foreboding a tune as anything ever written -- merely by hearing the "Destiny" or "Fate" motif Carmen should know that things aren't going to end well in old Seville.  And, in the last scene, Carmen's friends, such as they are, repeatedly tell her that she should avoid the hapless Don Jose.  So what does she do?  She searches him out, goes with him to a secluded place, and, then, ferociously taunts him into killing her.  It's a spectacular example of amor fati, that is, embracing your fate and cheating destiny by willing things to happen that you know are doomed to occur in any event -- it's no wonder that Nietzsche declared Carmen to be his favorite opera turning his back on Wagner with whom had long been closely associated.  Carmen knows her destiny -- she's fully aware of what must happen to her, but she, nonetheless, actively coerces her doom into reality. 

Of course, Carmen is full of famous melodies.  It's a Singspiel, more like a Broadway musical than a classical through-composed opera.  Characters speak their parts before bursting into song.  The music is splendidly illustrative; unlike a Mozart or Rossini opera in which the music has a life of its own and operates, to some degree, independently of what we see, Bizet's music is a Hollywood soundtrack closely tracking the moods on display in the plot.  We first encounter Carmen, the girl from the cigarette factory, in a fight with a co-worker -- she slashes the girl's face with her knife.  The authorities arrest Carmen and the hapless Don Jose is told to tie her up -- motifs of being bound are central to the plot's themes that contrast freedom with destiny.  Carmen seduces Jose to avoid going to prison.  He ends up in the cell in her stead.  (She binds him, as it were.)  Released from jail, Jose hastens to Carmen.  She's never been much interested in him and immediately commences persecuting the soldier -- as a test of love ("proof of concept" as it were) she orders him to stay with her and not report to his regimental barracks, obviously a disastrous decision for a professional soldier.  Jose deserts, goes into hiding among the Romani, it seems, and gets dragged into a smuggling operation.  The couple don't enjoy any sort of honeymoon.  Carmen tells Jose that "(she) loves him less than before" and they are bickering throughout the criminal enterprise, a group endeavor with the Romani clan, that ends with Carmen and two other girls seducing some border guards to get the contraband back to Seville.  The opera's third act involving the smuggling is visually strange  -- it's generally portrayed as occurring in some misty meadow high in the mountains, somewhere near Gibralter, with black clad smugglers wandering around with big suitcases and valises full of fabric; in this production, the smugglers have totes, old fashioned suitcases, and even 55 gallon drums that litter the stage.  The prelude music to Act Three contain some of the most beautiful and haunting melodies in the repertoire and the scene begins with a ballet.  Carmen and her friends play with a Tarot deck that announces that Carmen and Jose are doomed; she keeps drawing the "death" card.  A handsome matador, Escamilla, has appeared.  He's a cocky prick whose aria equates love with death, also foreshadowing the opera's gloomy ending.  Escamilla fights with Jose (very unconvincingly in this production) and Jose gets the upper-hand, but Carmen intercedes to save her boyfriend -- she's now carrying-on with Escamilla.  In the last Act, Carmen is stalked by Jose.  He demands that she return to him.  In the arena, Escamilla is fighting bulls.  Carmen refuses to be intimidated by Jose who now brandishes a Bible.  She harasses Jose into strangling her. As she is dying, Escamilla is gored by a bull and his corpse is hauled on-stage as Jose is murdering Carmen.  Escamilla and Carmen lie side-by-side and Jose is hauled off to jail and, presumably, death -- the show begins with a pantomime of a priest and two nuns with a corpse; this is apparently supposed to be a flash-forward to Jose's death and establishes the meaning of the "fate" motif in the score.  But wasn't clear to me what we were seeing in this prefatory proleptic scene.

Carmen uses every trick in the book to mercilessly badger Jose.  She's a walking repertoire of taunts that have resulted in women being battered, abused, and murdered throughout recorded history.  Carmen accuses Jose of being a mama's boy; she sarcastically mocks him by repeating his words back to him, actually imitating his voice; she obstructs his professional obligations only to cast him away when he has committed to her to the disastrous detriment of his career -- she turns him into a deserter and criminal; she parades her other admirers before him and forces Jose into fits of jealous rage.  In this version of the opera.  Carmen's excuse for this behavior is that she is a "little Romani girl without the law" and that she is "a bird too free to be caged."  Bizet's music and the libretto based on Prosper Merimee's story treats Carmen's story as a clash between personal freedom and destiny; you can be free as a bird, but this dooms you to an early death.  The Romani are contrasted with the soldiers who are dressed up like black-shirted thugs from the Franco era, sexually harassing any woman in sight, and, generally, strutting around like Derek Chauvin, the cop who murdered George Floyd.  Everyone is gay, beautiful, doomed. 

The opera is staged against a towering backdrop that seems to represent a great impenetrable wall.  An arch, seemingly made from massive stone blocks covered in disfigured plaster, appears on the left side of the stage.  People come and go through the huge entrance gate.  The opera's morbid last scene is played against a blood red wall on which there is displayed an 18 foot tall figure of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven -- a rigidly hieratic doom-goddess with stiff hands and wildly staring eyes.  When the bullfighters enter, picadors with long lances march down the theater aisles.  There is poetic use made of a scrim that softens figures into an impressionistic blur -- this is particularly effective in the ballet prelude to the Third Act.  The big crowd scenes are full of the raunchy tomfoolery that characterizes opera street  scenes:  lots of kids playing pranks, lovers groping one another, and noisy street vendors.  There are effects that are important to Graves' directorial vision of the opera that don't exactly work.  In the First Act, Carmen throws a flower at Jose.  Normally, the actress appears with a big white or red flower, at least fist-sized, in her hair.  Graves imagines Carmen to be like the bulls destroyed in the arena.  So she equips her heroine with two buds, one on each side of her temple -- the horns of a demon or a bull.  But when Carmen has to throw the flower at Jose, it's like she's pitching a piece of popcorn at him.  In the show that I attended, Carmen was played by Zoie Reams, a statuesque African American singer.  She's excellent.  However, Graves creates some confusion by casting an equally statuesque Black singer, Symone Harcum as Micaela.  (Micaela is the virtuous counterpart to Carmen, the good girl that Jose's dying mother wants her son to marry.)  At first, it wasn't clear to me that Carmen and Micaela were two different people -- they look pretty much alike and are both mezzo sopranos.  (I should have paid closer attention to the summary of the plot in the program).  Rafael Moras played Don Jose; he has one thrilling tenor aria in which he hits his high note with a little catch or sob in his voice that signifies that he is completely and authentically in love with Carmen.  From where I sit, to the far left of the stage, I can see the actors assembling behind the backdrops on the right hand side of the stage.  Furthermore, I look down into the orchestra and could see the back row of instrumentalists departing for off-stage so they can play the remote-sounding flourishes that signify the bullfight in the last Act.  Since there's a catfight in the show, the intimacy coordinator doubles as assistant fight director.  

Disfarmer

 A friend mentioned to me that he had recently become aware of a  photographer named Michael Disfarmer.  I had never heard of this photographer and, therefore, was pleased when my friend lent me a book (obtained through the library) about this figure.  I've now studied this volume of photographs by Disfarmer -- although the book is simply entitled Disfarmer on its spine, the volume is captioned "1926 - 1949 The Heber Springs Photographs."  As this subtitle informs us, the pictures were taken in a photography studio in a small town in rural Arkansas by the village's commercial photographer,  Disfarmer seems to have specialized in portraits; he works in an archaic style, apparently producing the pictures on small (playing card size) glass-plate negatives.  Unknown to the larger world during his lifetime, Disfarmer's work was discovered by a former professional photographer who had been employed by a newspaper in Little Rock. The photographer contacted the editors of a journal, Modern Photography, and the pictures, thought to have considerable aesthetic merit, have been published in several selections of Disfarmer's work, including the rather lavish volume that my friend had obtained through the local library system.  In all a total of 4200 glass negative exists, although some number of them are no longer legible due to age and decay.  Disfarmer was discovered as an important, if highly idiosyncratic, talent long after his death in 1959 and accounts as to his character vary -- some regarded him as eccentric and possibly predatory; others thought he was harmless.  Clearly, he was one of "pure products of America" to use the phrase from William Carlos Williams great poem "For Elisa" -- an "isolate", a "virtual hermit" as he is called in the book who seems to have unnerved people who knew him.  Although he was part of a large family living near Heber Springs, Disfarmer disavowed them, claimed that he was raised amidst these people because dropped among them as an infant by a wandering tornado, and, after a few decades, came to be regarded as a man completely apart from others, a strange and unsettling loner who make taking portraits an exercise in silence and intimidation, an ordeal that is figured on the faces of his subjects.  Almost no one smiles; everyone scowls at the camera (and by extension Disfarmer), people stand stiffly in a black void or posed against a white backdrop marked with one or two strips of black tape, a bit like a much more abbreviated version of the black and white grid on which Muybridge posed the naked victims of his photography.  

By the standards of Hollywood or TV advertising, most people are very ugly.  Usually, professional photographers labor to make their subjects look handsome, suave, caricatures, as it were, of TV and movie models.  Disfarmer shows no charitable (or dishonest) impulses in this direction.  His portraits are stark and unflattering, shot in clinical light in which the people are shown like medical specimens.  Some of the figures are attractive in a haunted and spectral sort of way -- many of the people are grotesquely ugly, although as with many unsightly visages, these faces have a haggard and gaunt integrity and, in fact, they grow on  you -- indeed, you feel a faint affection or, at least, sympathy for many of these people.  The great riddle posed by photography is the extent to which the viewer imputes meaning to the picture.  We have no idea what any of these people were like -- therefore, when we conclude that someone is suffering or stoic or, for that matter, stupid or intelligent, we are imposing those values on the portrait.  In fact, the pictures are noteworthy because they seem to be made completely without any judgement on the figures portrayed.  Disfarmer seems to have stripped his own personality from the work -- it is classically still, poised, and indifferent, a God's eye view of the denizens of Heber Springs.  

In the volume of photographs that I perused, about half of the pictures show a single figure posed against a black background (probably about 20% of the pictures use the weird white set with the vertical strips of black tape.)  The rest of the pictures show family groups, brothers and brother-in-laws, sisters and best friends, mothers with their homely miserable-looking babies.  No one is overweight.  Everyone seems on the verge of starvation and some of the faces display the anguish that we see in pictures of dirt farmers taken during the Depression by WPA photographers.  One woman is posed in profile, dressed in a jaunty outfit but she seems to be so skinny as to be skeletal.  Some of the men look like rough characters that you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley -- they glare at the camera in a way that reminds me of Civil War pictures of soldiers or images of gunmen taken in the Old West.  The men have dead eyes and their hands hang down like inert sledge hammers at their sides.  (Probably, these were all hale fellows well-met -- happy-go-luck "good ole boys", but this isn't how Disfarmer photographs them.)  Because most of the people are so slender, their store-bought clothes hang loose on them.  Many of the pictures affect us on the basis of contrast:  a normal-looking brother poses next to a much smaller sibling who has vaguely Asian features and seems deeply distressed; three men pose in a jocular way -- two eerie scarecrows flanking a jovial man who looks like he stepped out of a TV sitcom.  In the group pictures, family resemblance take on the appearance of congenital deformities.  If these people are dressed up in their Sunday Best they must be very poor indeed.  Two pictures will suffice to give a sense for the images in this book.  A little girl who seems to be about three years old sits with a round-faced dour baby dressed in white and wearing a white sailor's cap.  The toddler has disheveled short hair that no one has bothered to comb.  The baby sits between her legs and her right foot is sprawled to the infant's side, a slab of shoe sole that is strangely disturbing and uncommunicative.  It's an ungainly posture that either Disfarmer intentionally created or accidentally shot -- who knows?  The toddlers feet seem too large and inert.  The picture is disturbing because the little girl is clutching the baby for dear life -- it's as if the two children are being threatened with something awful; there's an aspect of uncanny abduction haunting the picture, as if someone is about to snatch the little kids, hurl them into a tornado, and have them deposited among some strange family that is not their own.  The children sit on a black bench, a completely austere piece of furniture to raise them off the floor -- we see this sepulchral black object is several other pictures, including a shot of a four-year old boy (by my estimate) decked out in an elaborate shaggy-looking cowboy suit.  Another picture shows a girl standing on a concrete floor (Disfarmer's studio has a concrete slab floor that looks like what you would find in a garage).  The girl faces the camera full-frontal and she is wearing a white smock that looks a bit like Disfarmer's white backdrop with the black tape --there are some faint wrinkles in the garment and it has two bows one on her shoulder and the other below at her hip on the opposite side of the garment.  (The garment is marmoreal and has a classical lucidity -- it seems like a theorem by Euclid, a bit of pure geometry.)  The girl is pretty with very neatly coiffed hair and she has either a faint smile or a vague look of uncertainty -- it seems that she's experimenting with an expression in the hope that it will please someone; but she can't get beyond looking very tentative.  The picture is disturbing, however, because the little girl's feet are turned sharply to the side -- in other words, the child's knees and shoes don't match the posture of the rest of her body.  I experimented with this pose myself, turning my feet sharply to the side while keeping my torso facing straight ahead -- it's an uncomfortable pose and would be very difficult to sustain.  There is something of the Greek Kore about the picture -- a dead maiden who has appeared against a wholly black void standing on cold concrete that with ruled slabs.  Even the faint archaic smile on the classical Kore is present in this picture.  The image is very beautiful but it has a distinct mortuary aspect.  

The essay that accompanies the pictures compares Disfarmer with Eugene Capa (the war photographer), Diane Arbus, and, of course, August Sander.  The comparisons are mostly inapposite.  Capa took pictures of the D-Day landings among other things and has nothing to do with the insular, ostensibly undramatic pictures that Disfarmer makes.  Arbus was complicit with her freakish subjects -- she doesn't confront them but rather forms an alliance with the people she photographs.  It's hard to imagine Disfarmer forming an alliance with anyone.  Sander, of course, attempted to document every type of human being; he had the encyclopedic ambition of many German artists and his objective was to portray all of society -- we see plump self-satisfied bourgeoisie, confrontational artists, craftsmen, farmers, and, finally, misfits, retarded people and, at last, a homeless man turned slightly to the side, his features blasted by misery, wearing rags against a blurry landscape that seems perpetually enshrouded in rain.  Sander's people are "representative" -- they are usually quite pleased with themselves; his baker, for instance, is a jolly little pug of a man who dares us to make fun of him.  Disfarmer's people don't represent anything but themselves; even when they appear in groups, somehow, they seem to be alone.  The figure in American photography who most resembles Disfarmer is Charles Van Schaick, the small-town photographer whose work is featured in Michael Lesy's haunting Wisconsin Death Trip (1973).  Van Schaick took pictures of people living in Black River Falls, Wisconsin between about 1880 and 1920.  Many of Disfarmer's photographs resemble Van Schaick's work.  Wisconsin Death Trip, once a famous book, though now largely forgotten.  Lesy was a student of sociology and his book was, in fact, submitted as his doctoral thesis.  The book is experimental in character.  Lesy juxtaposes pictures made by Van Schaick with news reports from the several local newspapers.  The reports that Lesy selects all involve madness, murder, and suicide -- people light themselves on fire or die after drinking potato bug poison.  (One man sits down with a bucket of well-water and drinks himself to death using nothing more than pure, cold water.)  Women are raped and commit suicide or die by abortion.  Old widows go mad and run amuck.  Lesy's thesis was that by 1880 small towns in America had become "charnel houses" to use his term -- everyone with good looks or ambition or brains had fled to the big cities. Wisconsin Death Trip has the dank, claustrophobic aspect of a nightmare and the pictures are an illustration of that nightmare -- dead babies, people who seem totally insane, thugs posing under walls covered with stuffed animals (it looks like Norman Bates' parlor in Psycho), gaunt horses with long blonde manes.  All of this stuff is presented with newspaper commentary that is harrowing.  But the book, in the end, I think is a cheat. If you presented these stark photographs with newspaper stories about banquets, christenings, family birthdays, and barn-raisings, I think the pictures would look very different.  There's no cheating in Disfarmer -- the pictures are presented without commentary.  You have to look at them yourself to discover what the image means if it means anything at all.  

(SELCO, the South-Eastern Library network, is loaning out a rare book.  The book that I describe in this essay was printed sumptuously in Japan and released in a First Edition, slip-cased, volume with only 4000 printed.  I presume the book is quite valuable.)

 

Minneapolis Bump

Minneapolis Bump is a 2022 recording by the Southside Aces, a jazz group dedicated to performing traditional (that is ragtime and Dixieland-influenced) music.  Tony Balluff, who plays clarinet with the group, has composed 15 tunes for Minnesota Bump all of them written in a form that invokes jazz compositions by Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Sydney Bechet and other masters of that genre.  The CD is excellent and I recommend in highly.  The tunes are composed for a small ensemble and designed, generally, to state a theme on which the musicians each improvise in turn -- that is, the standard form used in Dixieland jazz.  Sometimes, there is a brief evocative introduction.  In some cases, the entire ensemble returns to restate the theme, although in ornamented form, at the end of the song.  The compositions are short -- the longest sing on Minneapolis Bump is about four minutes and most tunes are between three and 3 1/2 minutes in duration.  The songs are unassuming but have a strong impact and the ensemble is comprised of excellent musicians each of whom display to excellent advantage the qualities of their instruments.  The music seems authentic -- that is, "truthful" if that term has meaning in this context.  It's worth thinking about how this CD fits into a great tradition that is, nonetheless, not much heard in popular culture and, lamentably, exotic and unfamiliar for many listeners.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a famous short story about the problem of anachronism in art.  The story is called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" published in 1939.  In the very short tale (only six pages long), Pierre Menard, an eccentric polymath, decides that he will rewrite Cervantes' Don Quixote.  Menard's ambition is not to revise or "update" or translate Quixote.  Instead, his project is to school himself so completely in Cervantes' culture and sensibility that he can compose the Quixote verbatim, that is word-for-word albeit in the 20th century.  After years of effort, Menard manages to write a single paragraph of the Cervantes' novel.  Although the words are precisely the same as those in Cervantes' original book, of course, they have a completely different meaning -- that is, because the time intervening between 1602 (when Don Quixote was first published)  and 1939 has produced connotations in the language (shadow meanings that are historically dependent) that didn't exist in the earlier work.  I think some of the same implications arise in Mr. Balluff's devoted recreation of musical forms that had their greatest currency in the late 1920's and early 30's.  Here, precision is important.  It would be imprecise to say that Balluf has "revived" Dixieland style -- the music is eternal; it didn't go anywhere and hasn't perished:  Beiderbecke's "I'm coming Virginia" (to use one example) is still with us and remains, like all great art, timeless.  Similarly, it would probably be unfair to say that the tunes of Minnesota Bump are "imitations" or a "pastiche" of the Dixieland style.  "Imitation" or "pastiche" implies a distance between source material and the work that it influences that I don't really detect in this music.  I think it would be better to invoke Menard and say that Mr. Balluf and his colleagues have followed the inner logic of traditional jazz to create these works -- they are a transmutation of an older style into something that sounds similar (as in Menard almost identical to its origin material) but that is, nonetheless, new and different.  You hear bee-bop, for instance, by its absence in these songs.  The melancholy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq infuse the music; you can sense, faintly, the ghostly influence of another famous Minnesota musician, Prince, in some of these tunes.  If this music had been composed in 1929, it might be the same note-by-note with similar jazz made at that time.  But heard in 2022, the tunes have a very different meaning and emotional valence.  This isn't meant to be obscure:  I am making a very simple point.  We don't listen with "innocent ears" -- music made in our time is always of our time whether we like it or not.  After World War Two, the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony means something completely different than what it meant in 1815.  

All of the tunes on the record are noteworthy.  "St. Anthony Strut" stars with some grief-stricken chords but,  then, advances as a four-square Dixieland march tune -- it 's like the Second Line at a New Orleans jazz funeral and has mixes up some of the emotions that you might experience at such an event.  "The Roar" features a kinky-sounding banjo solo that has a discordant effect that wouldn't be possible (or, perhaps, audible) in 1930.  "The Sorrow" commences with a weird sounding foghorn bleat sounded over a tremolo of drum.  The tremulous drum introduces us to a lovely ballad-like melody played with heavy vibrato. This is a wonderful song.  "Zutty Charges In" (these songs have engaging names) is a suitably jaunty melody composed in short distinct units.  "My Inside Voice" sounds, in part, like Prince would have sounded in 1930 -- it's a funk tune with simple, gorgeous theme featuring an eloquent drum solo near the end.  Balluff is a fine composer of catchy melodies:  in "Lullaby on the Avenue,"  the theme is particularly pretty, a rich singing cantabile melody that is adorned by a guitar solo -- the guitar sounds like Chet  Atkins but ends with arpeggios that imitate a harp. ("Lullaby" is part of a trio of songs "on the Avenue" including the cheerful "Frolic on the Avenue" and the very slow, lyrical, and yearning "Dawn on the Avenue" -- I assume the titles reference Hennepin Avenue and the late lamented "E Block" in the chill light of early morning, fast food sacks skittering along the frigid sidewalk only recently abandoned by the pimps and their whores.)  "Lullaby" also invokes effects and sounds that wouldn't be admissible in 1930.  A sinister stalking theme introduces the eponymous tune, "Minneapolis Bump"-- there's a stop-time muted trumpet solo that is particular wonderful, a remarkably fluent clarinet solo played against what sound like minor key vamping figures.  I could annotate each song with my impressions, but I fear that my vocabulary isn't exactly correct and, in any event, the verbal description of music is always, I think self-defeating.  Music describes itself in its performance and, generally, words are superfluous.  

The breezy uptempo"Upstairs at Barts" is the most classically Dixieland number of the CD.  "Yeah you bet" features raunchy gutbucket trombone and starts with a chaotic-sounding blast of nose.  The trombone blares and bleats and sounds like someone blowing his nose -- I mean this as a compliment.  On the Beatles White Album, I recall that there's a song called "Honey Pie" featuring suavely massed saxophones that mimic thirties Hollywood dance music.  "Mordecai Promenade" has a similar ambience with sleek glissando stylings and a sort of Art Deco elegance -- the song shows the group's versatility and range.  "If I had a $1.50" is a tune with vocals:  the singer pleads for his girl to come back to him in doggerel verse ("Rockefeller" is rhymed with "Old Yeller"); the nonchalant vocals remind me a little of Jack Teagarden singing "Ain't Misbehaving" or his duet with Louis Armstrong on "Rocking Chair."  In "Whole Tony", the trumpet is tightly muted simulating the tinny sound of music overheard on an old radio.  The astonishing "G's Goodbye" concludes the CD -- this is an exceptional song, a swing-time waltz that manages to be both elegiac and hymn-like at the same time centered around an extremely eloquent and moving trombone solo.  

The CD is dedicated to luminaries of the Twin Cities jazz scene, Charley DeVore, the Hall Brothers, Bill Evans, Butch Thompson and others.  The personnel on the record are Tony Balluff on clarinet, Dan Eikmeier on trumpet, Eric Johnson playing trombone, Erik Jacobson on tuba, Robert Bell (guitar and banjo) and Dave Michael playing drums. The CD is decorated with the Minneapolis skyline, perhaps as seen from Lake of the Isles.  A mischievous-looking loon with demonic red eye floats on the water.  If you see this CD, buy it,