The Spanish filmmaker, Victor Erice, has made three feature films, The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, and The Quince Tree Light. It is one of film history's great tragedies that Erice has not been more prolific -- on the other hand, perhaps, his extremely deliberative art is inconsistent with more numerous film projects. Furthermore, if his three features seem to comprise a progression, it is possible that Erice's devotion to the beauty of the image can simply not progress beyond the almost abstract and non-narrative The Quince Tree Sun (1993). El Sur is so startlingly beautiful, so exactly attuned to the nuances of light, the time of the day, the season, that the viewer is distracted away from the events portrayed. As in silent film, the images tell the story and words are wholly secondary and, in El Sur, the images, themselves, are entirely expressionistic -- they don't have an objective reality but rather are more distinct than reality, hyper-real, suffused with the meaning-laden content of memory. Consider the scenes involving the child-heroine's first communion. There is a question as to whether the girl's communist-atheist father will attend. We see the ceremony of the first communion and, then, the child is told that her father has come into the church but is waiting for her in the back of the sanctuary. She approaches a pillar that is only dimly lit standing beside a well of impenetrable darkness and, then, her father emerges, shadowy at first from the inky blackness and, then, the light seizes him, as it were by the scruff of the neck, and makes him briefly round, statuesque himself, rim-lit against the densest and deepest blacks imaginable -- this is not how real light works, not even how the eye interprets things: it's an entirely artificial but profoundly moving effect. This is the use of light as a beam irradiating the past and showing us the contents of memory -- no real life blacks are as dark as those Erice shows in El Sur. And similarly, no real life brightness shines with the honeyed and exquisite luminosity of the rays of light suffusing this film.
There's not much of a story although the narrative is very intricate with meaning. A mature woman narrates the film, apparently relying on diaries written by the little girl who, with her father, is the protagonist. The child, Estrella, wears a little star ring on her hand -- and the director uses pinpoint beams to illumine the star against the film's gloom. Her father, Agustin, is a melancholy man, apparently, a physician at the local hospital. He is from the South of Spain, Seville as we are told in Adelaide Garcia Morales' novella on which the movie is partially based. Something has damaged him -- he's a morose solitary drinker. He is a dutiful husband to his wife, Julia, but she is remote -- living apart from him and reading novels. (One of the film's touchstones is the gothic family mysteries in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.) The little girl struggles to comprehend the trauma that has made her father into a solitary and lonely man. One day, she finds an envelope on which her father has written the name "Irene Rios" over and over again. A few years later, she is walking downtown when she sees her father's motorcycle parked in front of a movie theater. The movie theater is showing a tawdry melodrama starring in a secondary role an actress named Irene Rios. After the movie ends, Agustin goes to a bar, the Café Oriental where he drinks cognac and tries to write a letter. The little girl spies on him and, then, talks to him. He won't tell her anything. Years pass and Agustin has become more withdrawn and bitter -- we don't really see what has happened to him: there are no violent quarrels or angry outbursts, although the film implies, without showing any evidence, that the family has become deeply dysfunctional. Agustin takes his teenage daughter to lunch at the town's Gran Hotel. Estrella asks her father about Irene Rios. He evades the question and goes to the toilet to wash his face. In the next room, a wedding party is underway and the band plays the same Paso Doble that was played by an accordion at Estrella's First Communion party. Father and daughter speak briefly and the narrator announces that it was the last time they would see one another. The next shot shows the fortified town in the dying light, beyond a river that reflects the twilight sky -- the panning camera shows Augustin lying in the marshes a shotgun beside his head and, oddly enough, Estrella's bicycle resting on its side next to the water. This scene loops back to the beginning of the film, a sequence showing the light gradually growing in Estrella's bedroom, as we hear people shouting out Augustin's name -- he is now missing, and, later, we learn lost because he has taken his own life. Estrella finds in his effects a phone number in Seville, packs her bags, and announces that she is departing for the South. Then, abruptly the film ends.
Morales' source novella continues for about 12 more pages of its 44 page length after that scene. According to the screenplay, the south was going to be visualized as an exuberant explosion of white-hot light. Estrella goes to Seville, locates the woman who was Irene Rios (it is her stage name), and, even, interacts a little with a young man to whom she is drawn but who may well be her brother. The novella eschews any sort of highly consequential ending and, in fact, simply dies out itself in a haze of recollections. Erice got into a fight with his producer, Elias Querejeta -- it was a pure personality conflict. Querejeta cut off funding for the film after completing the scenes in the north and no footage was ever shot in the south or Seville. Worse, Querejeta spread word that Erice was too perfectionist and that he had delayed the film by reshooting scenes over and over again. (This allegation seems to have been true.) Querejeta said to others in the Spanish film industry that you work with Erice at your peril -- and these statements as to Erice's unreasonableness came to define the director: except for a short subject, Lifeline in the omnibus film The Trumpet: Ten Years Older -- said to be very brilliant -- and the experimental Quince Tree project, Erice has not been able to get any other films made and he is now 76.
The movie, as it stands, is frustratingly incomplete and enigmatic. Erice's style is so dense and suggestive that the film is about any number of things. Most dramatically, the film is about how one's vision of your father changes as you age: initially to the little girl, Augustin is a magician: he is dowser and finds water with crossed willow branches and he uses a pendulum (which he later bequeaths to his daughter) as divining tool. Later, he is a mentor as he teaches his daughter these occult practices and, then, when she is a teenager, and wants to date, her adversary. She is always potentially his lover -- we seem him happily dancing with her. For a part of the film, his absence defines him to his child -- he is the indifferent, withdrawn father, who withholds his love from wife and daughter. His life is a mystery that his daughter sets out to solve. Finally, she seems him simply as a lonely man and a wounded sexual being. Each of these incarnations of the father is convincingly represented. Further, the film is uncertain (as is the novella) as to what has damaged Augustin: perhaps, his turbulent relationship with his own father caused his sorrows. But there are also implications that he was arrested during the Civil War and somehow damaged. Finally, there is the question of the love affair with Irene Rios -- what is the significance of those events? The opening scene in the film shows the light gradually suffusing Estrella's room -- she is seen awakening and these images are fundamental to the film: the movie is about Estrella's dawning awareness of her father's sorrow and melancholy. It is about, in some sense, her own awakening. This is the sort of exquisitely designed film in which each image is composed to within an inch of its life and, then, lit with surrealistic ingenuity -- objects stand out against stark black backgrounds. It reminds me of paintings by Spanish artists of lemons that seem to shine with a supernatural light or humble loaves of bread infused with an otherworldly radiance. "We moved to a walled town," the narrator says and we are shown a medieval walled city like something out of the background of a Duerer painting. Everything is at once quotidian and densely supernatural, symbolic, things in a secret, mysterious world.
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Dawson City: Frozen Time (film group essay)
Dawson City: Frozen Time
1.
Film is fragile. Anyone who has ever threaded a movie through a projector understands this. If you are my age, you will recall Phy Ed teachers anxiously winding hygiene films into antique projectors. These machines sputtered and coughed like old men and, when the film stuck, as inevitably happened, the screen darkened with the apocalyptic blisters and char of melting cellulose. The old nitrite-based films were worse – they burned explosively when ignited. In the process of threading the projector, some frames were usually lost. Old-time projectionists were skilled a splicing together movies that had worn and frayed to the point that they ruptured during showing. When I began seeing foreign films, for instance, from the twenties and thirties, the pictures were shown on damaged 16 millimeter prints that were grooved with scratches and, on which, bright parts of the image flared wildly like exploding supernovas – a sign of decomposition in the film itself. I saw films like Renoir’s The Grand Illusion and Pabst’s Three-penny Opera on 16 mm with sound tracks so severely degraded that it seemed that all of the characters were merely murmuring to themselves – orchestral sound cues emerged as tinny, remote, grotesque.
David Pierce at the Library of Congress estimates that 76% of American films produced between 1912 and 1930 have been lost. Of course, most of this stuff was junk – although even a trashy movie from 1922, as an example, often contains invaluable clues as to film production styles and techniques and social mores existing when the movie was made. Among the list of lost silent films are dozens of pictures by John Ford, as well as movies by F. W. Murnau, Tod Browning, and Maurice Tourneur. Silent pictures were particularly ravaged by obsolescence – when sound became universal, studios just threw away silent pictures, many of which had become fire hazards by reason of their decay into unstable and volatile gunpowder-like compounds. But the problem did not end in the thirties. Martin Scorsese became a zealous advocate for film preservation when he discovered that good prints of several of his early films could not be found. Wim Wenders best film is probably In Lauf der Zeit, a movie about a film projectionist and his side-kick wandering through small-town Germany and laboring to splice together badly damaged prints of American Westerns to show in those cities. The movie was made in the mid-seventies and by 2000 Wenders remarked to his friends that he had not been able to locate a version of the film, his masterpiece, sufficiently clear to be screened. This means that movies made when I was a boy or, even, in college are silently rotting away in film archives and, therefore, lost forever.
(Parenthetically, I note that this problem is particularly serious in developing nations. There were a half-dozen or more estimable directors working in India in the fifties and sixties. Several of these directors are said to be on par with Orson Welles with regard to their inventiveness, skill, and technical proficiency. Some of these movies (by these directors) circulate today on DVD’s that look like they were recorded off 8 mm. film shot in an actual movie theater by a camera haphazardly aimed at the screen and, then, transferred to DVD – almost all of India’s notable films produced in the post-war period and before 1980 seem to be, for all intents and purposes, lost. A film is effectively lost when it can no longer be shown to a non-specialist audience due to image degradation.)
Studio archives are also crammed with mismatched reels, fragments of film that no one can identify today. Half the silent film footage archived by the major Studios is either "unidentified" or "inadequately identified". This means that audiences can see a few minutes of film, often startlingly beautiful, but have no way of identifying what they are seeing. Periodically, fragments of film are screened, sometimes for the general public, and those watching the movie are invited to call out any features that they consider diagnostic as to the identity of these pictures. Most film schools now offer courses in "film archaeology" – the sciences of analyzing, conserving, and identifying stray pieces of footage representing our cinematic heritage. (Two of the most sought-after silent films are 1927's London after Midnight and the 1917 Cleopatra starring the famous "vamp", Theda Bara –this actress (her stage-name is an acronym for "Arab Death") was extremely notorious but, aside for a few frames none of her movies exist today; the discovery of Cleopatra or any of her feature films would be an enormously important event. Similarly, Lon Chaney’s London after Midnight, directed by Tod Browning, also exists only in form of a few feet of footage together with many still photographs taken on set – by the evidence of these frames, the movie was extremely stylishly made and featured a great performance by Chaney.)
If you care about film as an art, you must care about film restoration.
2.
Every few years, a trove of lost films is discovered. These troves are found in remote places, at the ends of line for film distribution. I am told that there are several canisters of 35 millimeter film at the old Paramount Theater in Austin. When the theater closed, no one sent back the last couple movies shown at the Paramount. The doors were shut and the enterprise was out-of-business. Are there films previously thought lost here in Austin?
Prisons and insane asylums have been places where many lost films were rediscovered. When a movie had lost all commercial value, the pictures were loaned to hospitals for the insane and penitentiaries. No one expected the return of these films and, after being shown, a couple times, the films were just put away on a shelf somewhere. (The director’s cut of Carl Dreyer’s masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc was found in a madhouse in Oslo.) Archives of old films also are found in small and remote towns from which the cost of shipping the movies back to the studios was more than the value of the pictures themselves. This brings us to the Dawson City film find.
Dawson City is a town in Canada’s Yukon territory. Gold mining made the town boom in the Klondike Gold Rush. As the mines played-out, the town shriveled. Dawson City is literally the end of the road – it’s the place where the highways stop and the vast Arctic wilderness begins. Throughout the first quarter of this century, the town was big enough to support two movie theaters, the Orpheum and Arctic Brotherhood Hall. It took movies a long time to reach Dawson City. Films played in that city a couple years after they were premiered in Toronto or Hollywood. By the time the movies had reached the end of the distribution chain in Dawson City, they were obsolete and had no further commercial value. It was too expensive to ship the films back to the studios and so they were simply abandoned, left to decay in stacks in the theaters. But these were nitrate films and highly flammable. Accordingly, the pictures couldn’t be safely stored indoors. Therefore, a hole was dug and they were buried.
In 1978, an old hockey rink in Dawson City was replaced. The rink was weird. Sometimes, blackened lengths of film stock would emerge through the ice. When the children put matches to the film, it exploded like a charge of gunpowder. During the replacement of the hockey rink, 533 reels of film were unearthed from the perma-frost under the rink. The cold had preserved the film so that most of it was legible – the images, when projected, although damaged, could be read and interpreted. This is the so-called Dawson City Film Find and the subject of Bill Morrison’s lyrical documentary.
3.
Bill Morrison was born in Chicago in 1965. He began making films from "found footage" in 1996. Morrison came to prominence with his film Decasia (2002). This experimental film derives from film footage recovered from film archives, most particularly at the University of South Carolina, storing nitrate-based film. The movie’s title is a portmanteau word combining "decay" and "fantasia". Morrison discovered that when old nitrite film decomposes, it’s rot creates spectacular and luminous flares on the film stock. Figures seem to move in balletic counterpoint to wild acetylene burst of flame. Generally, the rot is in the center of the film and so the viewer sees an ordinary Victorian room or a landscape with a great pillar of luminous and serpentine fire at its center. The effects is both sinister and beautiful. (Morrison’s innovative film is not without predecessors: in 1992 and 1994, Peter Depeut released Lyrical Nitrate and, then, The Forbidden Quest – these were collage films using decomposing nitrate footage. Depeut was a sort of pack rat and hoarder – after his death, a cache of nitrate movies, including some films thought lost, was discovered in his attic.)
Decasia was abstract. The film fragments were sutured together and illustrated as it were by a sumptuous symphonic musical composition written by Michael Gordon for this dance of decomposition. Remarkably enough, Hurricane Sandy flooded the warehouses on the East Coast where many of the prints for Decasia were stored. Thus, Morrison’s film suffered the fate of the movies that he celebrated in his 67 minute picture. In 2013, the Library of Congress, alarmed at what had happened to Morrison’s negatives and prints, declared Decasia an important film accomplishment worthy of preservation.
Decasia was widely celebrated when released and propelled Morrison into the top ranks of American experimental film makers. Erroll Morris told Lawrence Wechsler that Decasia might be the greatest fim ever made.
4.
Abstract art is important in several respects. It foregrounds formal aspects of an art form that we might otherwise miss. Further, it allows for virtuoso development of formal elements of art that could not be explored in depth in the context of a conventional narrative film or a conventional representational painting.
The problem that I have with purely abstract art is that once it has made its point – that is, opened our eyes decisively to some formal element of the work, it’s job is done. For this reason, abstract art, even very great work, often, seems "thin" to me – once you understand why the work was made and what formal feature, it highlights the painting or art work doesn’t have much more to say to you.
Here’s an example – consider a very beautiful abstract painting by Jackson Pollock, "Lavender Mist" at the National Gallery of Art. The painting is haunting and remarkable. But after you have looked at it for awhile, there’s not much to say – it’s gorgeous but not meaningful except in the most formal sense. Then, consider a similar field painting, also mural-sized, Monet’s "Lilypads" at the Musee de la Orangerie in Paris. The painting is as gorgeous as Pollock’s huge canvas but it also is representational – we can see clouds reflected in the water and can assess the time of day and, further, the painting exists in dialogue with a great tradition of landscape and flower painting, the culmination, as it were of the Impressionist movement. I am inclined to regard "Lilypads" as a greater painting than "Lavender Mist" because it is more meaningful, it communicates on more levels than Pollock’s formalist work.
Of course, all of this is intensely debatable, but represents my current thinking on this subject.
Decasia is macabre and eerily beautiful - but it’s most a one-trick pony. Once you’ve seen the movie and been astonished by it, there’s nothing really to say and you don’t have any wish to see the film again. It made its point and that’s that. (At 67 minutes, Decasia has always seemed to me about a half hour too long.)
Some critics note formal structures in Decasia – a dialogue between the upright or vertical (living) and the horizontal and deliquescent (2002). Others detect a kind of narrative – a ship surges across a stormy sea, writhing as it passes through shoals of rot; Sufi dervishes madly whirling begin and end the film. To the point that one observes these sorts of patterns, the film is, perhaps, no longer wholly abstract – indeed, it begins to assume a kind of shadowy narrative.
Dawson City: Frozen Time is about one-third abstract imagery and two-thirds lyrical documentary. In my view the film is a masterpiece and much more interesting than Decasia because the 2016 picture narrates not just one story, but a half-dozen stories. Here the abstraction exist in fugual counterpoint to with representational and narrative elements. It’s a greater achievement than Decasia because the picture is ultimately not just about the decomposition of volatile nitrate film but also about the people who made the pictures, the people who first watched them, the people who discovered the trove, and those who worked to preserve it. The film is warm and human and this makes it great.
5.
In part, Dawson City is a vision of Yukon territory and its pioneers. This aspect of the film draws on two prior sources, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and City of Gold, a poetic documentary produced in 1957.
In the early 20's Chaplin encountered some old stereoscopic images of miners clambering up the snow ladders in Chilkoot Pass – these are the iconic images of Klondike Gold Rush. (As pointed out in the movie, this gold rush was one of the first historical events to be extensively documented by early moving pictures.) Chaplin was also reading a book about the Donner Party at that time. Chaplin conceived the notion for a film about the Klondike Gold Rush, wrote the script, and began location shooting at Truckee, California in the Sierra Nevada. (Truckee is where the Donner Party was trapped and had to Winter in the high snow with lethal and macabre consequences.) Chaplin filmed sequences outdoors with 600 extras simulating the passage over Chilkoot pass with such accuracy that his footage sometimes is substituted for actual historical images of the climb over the mountain from Alaska into the Klondike territory. (It’s like Eisenstein’s images of the storming of the Winter Palace in October being used as documentary footage of the Russian Revolution – historians point out that more extras were accidentally killed and wounded in Eisenstein’s recreation of the event than in the actual storming.) Chaplin’s Gold Rush is an unlikely subject for a comedy – people starve and Chaplin has to boil and eat his boot; Big Jim, his sidekick, imagines Chaplin as a chicken ripe for roasting and eating. Gold rushes are always tragedies for most of those lured to the mining fields – the great majority of the miners, of course, found nothing and returned sick and impoverished to where they had come from.
Chaplin was the biggest Hollywood star in the twenties and The Gold Rush was the most expensive comedy ever made up to the date of its release in 1925. At that time, of course, the Klondike Gold Rush was well within living memory – it had occurred 29 years before the premiere at Graumann’s Chinese Theater. (Graumann himself was an alumnus of the Klondike gold rush as Dawson City shows.) Graumann premiered the movie with an elaborate set inside his theater built to simulate the Arctic with live seals and a chorus of "dancing Eskimo girls."
In 1957, Colin Low and Wolf Koenig made City of Gold. The film is 21 minute documentary, financed in part by the tourist bureau in Dawson City. The film was intended to attract Canadian travelers to the Yukon and Dawson. Low and Koenig made use of archival still photographs in Ottawa as well as the Eric Hegg collection, a large group of pictures showing the Canadian wilderness and the Klondike gold rush taken by the Swedish-American still photographer in 1896 and 1897. (Hegg made many of the iconic images of columns of miners struggling up Chilkoot Pass). City of Gold makes extensive use of still pictures that are explored by a moving camera, the so-called "Ken Burns effect." Burns himself saw the film early in his career and credits it with influencing his signature style. Sequences from this film are embedded in Bill Morrison’s Dawson City.
6.
Dawson City: Frozen Time is about memory and the past. It’s fundamental theme is how we reconstruct the past and how memory is an archive always scarred by the rot that is the decay of our memories. Just as old film is volatile, only a couple chemical bonds away from being nitroglycerine, so similarly our memories and imagination are not inert, but always decomposing into fragments only to re-composed into the stories that we tell about the past.
7.
Bill Morrison began to make quasi-narrative films after Decasia (2002). He also continued to make found footage short films, many of them loops set to music. (Music is an important component in Morrison’s films and he has worked with many important contemporary composers including Philip Glass). "Outerborough" shown at the Museum of Modern Art is a loop made from an 1899 68mm moving picture showing a trolley crossing Brooklyn Bridge – Morrison manipulates the images so that the trolley moves back and forth across the Bridge. "Release" (2010) is a loop showing the disappointment of a crowd of people gathered in 1930 to see Al Capone released from the penitentiary – Capone is not released. Spark of Being is a 67 minute film based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, entirely comprised of found footage. Miner’s Hymns is a 2011 film in documentary form about the hard lives of miners in England. "Reawakenings" released in 2013 is made from Dr. Oliver Sacks clinical films showing people "awakened" in asylums by doses of L-Dopa – these were victims of the great, forgotten "sleeping sickness" epidemic of the 20's, catatonic patients who were suddenly brought back to vivid, even explosive life, by new drugs available in the late sixties. The Great Flood is a feature-length documentary about the 1927 flood on the Mississippi – it’s constructed from archival footage much of it badly damaged nitrate. Beyond Zero: 1914 - 1915 (2015) is made from archival footage from World War I, set to a score by a Serbian composer performed by the celebrated Kronos Quartet.
To date, Dawson City: Frozen Time is Morrison’s magnum opus, his longest film, and the one that most closely approximates a conventional documentary.
8.
You’ve seen it happen. Suddenly, the digital image broadcast over the cable begins to break up. Sometimes, this happens when high winds are raging outside and the trees are dancing in the clamorous air. Lightning shows off the chaos beyond your windows and sirens howl and, then, the TV broadcaster on the cable, stutters and his jaw decays to reveal working beneath his face the vicious, horizontally sawing mandibles of some large insect. Eyes rain down in a cascade of pixilated tesserae. A former Miss America shudders into a haggard monster with a face blurred like a creature in a large painting by Francis Bacon. Sometimes faces become so hideously disfigured that it is impossible to look at them and you turn away in utter horror and wonder: What has just been revealed?
1.
Film is fragile. Anyone who has ever threaded a movie through a projector understands this. If you are my age, you will recall Phy Ed teachers anxiously winding hygiene films into antique projectors. These machines sputtered and coughed like old men and, when the film stuck, as inevitably happened, the screen darkened with the apocalyptic blisters and char of melting cellulose. The old nitrite-based films were worse – they burned explosively when ignited. In the process of threading the projector, some frames were usually lost. Old-time projectionists were skilled a splicing together movies that had worn and frayed to the point that they ruptured during showing. When I began seeing foreign films, for instance, from the twenties and thirties, the pictures were shown on damaged 16 millimeter prints that were grooved with scratches and, on which, bright parts of the image flared wildly like exploding supernovas – a sign of decomposition in the film itself. I saw films like Renoir’s The Grand Illusion and Pabst’s Three-penny Opera on 16 mm with sound tracks so severely degraded that it seemed that all of the characters were merely murmuring to themselves – orchestral sound cues emerged as tinny, remote, grotesque.
David Pierce at the Library of Congress estimates that 76% of American films produced between 1912 and 1930 have been lost. Of course, most of this stuff was junk – although even a trashy movie from 1922, as an example, often contains invaluable clues as to film production styles and techniques and social mores existing when the movie was made. Among the list of lost silent films are dozens of pictures by John Ford, as well as movies by F. W. Murnau, Tod Browning, and Maurice Tourneur. Silent pictures were particularly ravaged by obsolescence – when sound became universal, studios just threw away silent pictures, many of which had become fire hazards by reason of their decay into unstable and volatile gunpowder-like compounds. But the problem did not end in the thirties. Martin Scorsese became a zealous advocate for film preservation when he discovered that good prints of several of his early films could not be found. Wim Wenders best film is probably In Lauf der Zeit, a movie about a film projectionist and his side-kick wandering through small-town Germany and laboring to splice together badly damaged prints of American Westerns to show in those cities. The movie was made in the mid-seventies and by 2000 Wenders remarked to his friends that he had not been able to locate a version of the film, his masterpiece, sufficiently clear to be screened. This means that movies made when I was a boy or, even, in college are silently rotting away in film archives and, therefore, lost forever.
(Parenthetically, I note that this problem is particularly serious in developing nations. There were a half-dozen or more estimable directors working in India in the fifties and sixties. Several of these directors are said to be on par with Orson Welles with regard to their inventiveness, skill, and technical proficiency. Some of these movies (by these directors) circulate today on DVD’s that look like they were recorded off 8 mm. film shot in an actual movie theater by a camera haphazardly aimed at the screen and, then, transferred to DVD – almost all of India’s notable films produced in the post-war period and before 1980 seem to be, for all intents and purposes, lost. A film is effectively lost when it can no longer be shown to a non-specialist audience due to image degradation.)
Studio archives are also crammed with mismatched reels, fragments of film that no one can identify today. Half the silent film footage archived by the major Studios is either "unidentified" or "inadequately identified". This means that audiences can see a few minutes of film, often startlingly beautiful, but have no way of identifying what they are seeing. Periodically, fragments of film are screened, sometimes for the general public, and those watching the movie are invited to call out any features that they consider diagnostic as to the identity of these pictures. Most film schools now offer courses in "film archaeology" – the sciences of analyzing, conserving, and identifying stray pieces of footage representing our cinematic heritage. (Two of the most sought-after silent films are 1927's London after Midnight and the 1917 Cleopatra starring the famous "vamp", Theda Bara –this actress (her stage-name is an acronym for "Arab Death") was extremely notorious but, aside for a few frames none of her movies exist today; the discovery of Cleopatra or any of her feature films would be an enormously important event. Similarly, Lon Chaney’s London after Midnight, directed by Tod Browning, also exists only in form of a few feet of footage together with many still photographs taken on set – by the evidence of these frames, the movie was extremely stylishly made and featured a great performance by Chaney.)
If you care about film as an art, you must care about film restoration.
2.
Every few years, a trove of lost films is discovered. These troves are found in remote places, at the ends of line for film distribution. I am told that there are several canisters of 35 millimeter film at the old Paramount Theater in Austin. When the theater closed, no one sent back the last couple movies shown at the Paramount. The doors were shut and the enterprise was out-of-business. Are there films previously thought lost here in Austin?
Prisons and insane asylums have been places where many lost films were rediscovered. When a movie had lost all commercial value, the pictures were loaned to hospitals for the insane and penitentiaries. No one expected the return of these films and, after being shown, a couple times, the films were just put away on a shelf somewhere. (The director’s cut of Carl Dreyer’s masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc was found in a madhouse in Oslo.) Archives of old films also are found in small and remote towns from which the cost of shipping the movies back to the studios was more than the value of the pictures themselves. This brings us to the Dawson City film find.
Dawson City is a town in Canada’s Yukon territory. Gold mining made the town boom in the Klondike Gold Rush. As the mines played-out, the town shriveled. Dawson City is literally the end of the road – it’s the place where the highways stop and the vast Arctic wilderness begins. Throughout the first quarter of this century, the town was big enough to support two movie theaters, the Orpheum and Arctic Brotherhood Hall. It took movies a long time to reach Dawson City. Films played in that city a couple years after they were premiered in Toronto or Hollywood. By the time the movies had reached the end of the distribution chain in Dawson City, they were obsolete and had no further commercial value. It was too expensive to ship the films back to the studios and so they were simply abandoned, left to decay in stacks in the theaters. But these were nitrate films and highly flammable. Accordingly, the pictures couldn’t be safely stored indoors. Therefore, a hole was dug and they were buried.
In 1978, an old hockey rink in Dawson City was replaced. The rink was weird. Sometimes, blackened lengths of film stock would emerge through the ice. When the children put matches to the film, it exploded like a charge of gunpowder. During the replacement of the hockey rink, 533 reels of film were unearthed from the perma-frost under the rink. The cold had preserved the film so that most of it was legible – the images, when projected, although damaged, could be read and interpreted. This is the so-called Dawson City Film Find and the subject of Bill Morrison’s lyrical documentary.
3.
Bill Morrison was born in Chicago in 1965. He began making films from "found footage" in 1996. Morrison came to prominence with his film Decasia (2002). This experimental film derives from film footage recovered from film archives, most particularly at the University of South Carolina, storing nitrate-based film. The movie’s title is a portmanteau word combining "decay" and "fantasia". Morrison discovered that when old nitrite film decomposes, it’s rot creates spectacular and luminous flares on the film stock. Figures seem to move in balletic counterpoint to wild acetylene burst of flame. Generally, the rot is in the center of the film and so the viewer sees an ordinary Victorian room or a landscape with a great pillar of luminous and serpentine fire at its center. The effects is both sinister and beautiful. (Morrison’s innovative film is not without predecessors: in 1992 and 1994, Peter Depeut released Lyrical Nitrate and, then, The Forbidden Quest – these were collage films using decomposing nitrate footage. Depeut was a sort of pack rat and hoarder – after his death, a cache of nitrate movies, including some films thought lost, was discovered in his attic.)
Decasia was abstract. The film fragments were sutured together and illustrated as it were by a sumptuous symphonic musical composition written by Michael Gordon for this dance of decomposition. Remarkably enough, Hurricane Sandy flooded the warehouses on the East Coast where many of the prints for Decasia were stored. Thus, Morrison’s film suffered the fate of the movies that he celebrated in his 67 minute picture. In 2013, the Library of Congress, alarmed at what had happened to Morrison’s negatives and prints, declared Decasia an important film accomplishment worthy of preservation.
Decasia was widely celebrated when released and propelled Morrison into the top ranks of American experimental film makers. Erroll Morris told Lawrence Wechsler that Decasia might be the greatest fim ever made.
4.
Abstract art is important in several respects. It foregrounds formal aspects of an art form that we might otherwise miss. Further, it allows for virtuoso development of formal elements of art that could not be explored in depth in the context of a conventional narrative film or a conventional representational painting.
The problem that I have with purely abstract art is that once it has made its point – that is, opened our eyes decisively to some formal element of the work, it’s job is done. For this reason, abstract art, even very great work, often, seems "thin" to me – once you understand why the work was made and what formal feature, it highlights the painting or art work doesn’t have much more to say to you.
Here’s an example – consider a very beautiful abstract painting by Jackson Pollock, "Lavender Mist" at the National Gallery of Art. The painting is haunting and remarkable. But after you have looked at it for awhile, there’s not much to say – it’s gorgeous but not meaningful except in the most formal sense. Then, consider a similar field painting, also mural-sized, Monet’s "Lilypads" at the Musee de la Orangerie in Paris. The painting is as gorgeous as Pollock’s huge canvas but it also is representational – we can see clouds reflected in the water and can assess the time of day and, further, the painting exists in dialogue with a great tradition of landscape and flower painting, the culmination, as it were of the Impressionist movement. I am inclined to regard "Lilypads" as a greater painting than "Lavender Mist" because it is more meaningful, it communicates on more levels than Pollock’s formalist work.
Of course, all of this is intensely debatable, but represents my current thinking on this subject.
Decasia is macabre and eerily beautiful - but it’s most a one-trick pony. Once you’ve seen the movie and been astonished by it, there’s nothing really to say and you don’t have any wish to see the film again. It made its point and that’s that. (At 67 minutes, Decasia has always seemed to me about a half hour too long.)
Some critics note formal structures in Decasia – a dialogue between the upright or vertical (living) and the horizontal and deliquescent (2002). Others detect a kind of narrative – a ship surges across a stormy sea, writhing as it passes through shoals of rot; Sufi dervishes madly whirling begin and end the film. To the point that one observes these sorts of patterns, the film is, perhaps, no longer wholly abstract – indeed, it begins to assume a kind of shadowy narrative.
Dawson City: Frozen Time is about one-third abstract imagery and two-thirds lyrical documentary. In my view the film is a masterpiece and much more interesting than Decasia because the 2016 picture narrates not just one story, but a half-dozen stories. Here the abstraction exist in fugual counterpoint to with representational and narrative elements. It’s a greater achievement than Decasia because the picture is ultimately not just about the decomposition of volatile nitrate film but also about the people who made the pictures, the people who first watched them, the people who discovered the trove, and those who worked to preserve it. The film is warm and human and this makes it great.
5.
In part, Dawson City is a vision of Yukon territory and its pioneers. This aspect of the film draws on two prior sources, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and City of Gold, a poetic documentary produced in 1957.
In the early 20's Chaplin encountered some old stereoscopic images of miners clambering up the snow ladders in Chilkoot Pass – these are the iconic images of Klondike Gold Rush. (As pointed out in the movie, this gold rush was one of the first historical events to be extensively documented by early moving pictures.) Chaplin was also reading a book about the Donner Party at that time. Chaplin conceived the notion for a film about the Klondike Gold Rush, wrote the script, and began location shooting at Truckee, California in the Sierra Nevada. (Truckee is where the Donner Party was trapped and had to Winter in the high snow with lethal and macabre consequences.) Chaplin filmed sequences outdoors with 600 extras simulating the passage over Chilkoot pass with such accuracy that his footage sometimes is substituted for actual historical images of the climb over the mountain from Alaska into the Klondike territory. (It’s like Eisenstein’s images of the storming of the Winter Palace in October being used as documentary footage of the Russian Revolution – historians point out that more extras were accidentally killed and wounded in Eisenstein’s recreation of the event than in the actual storming.) Chaplin’s Gold Rush is an unlikely subject for a comedy – people starve and Chaplin has to boil and eat his boot; Big Jim, his sidekick, imagines Chaplin as a chicken ripe for roasting and eating. Gold rushes are always tragedies for most of those lured to the mining fields – the great majority of the miners, of course, found nothing and returned sick and impoverished to where they had come from.
Chaplin was the biggest Hollywood star in the twenties and The Gold Rush was the most expensive comedy ever made up to the date of its release in 1925. At that time, of course, the Klondike Gold Rush was well within living memory – it had occurred 29 years before the premiere at Graumann’s Chinese Theater. (Graumann himself was an alumnus of the Klondike gold rush as Dawson City shows.) Graumann premiered the movie with an elaborate set inside his theater built to simulate the Arctic with live seals and a chorus of "dancing Eskimo girls."
In 1957, Colin Low and Wolf Koenig made City of Gold. The film is 21 minute documentary, financed in part by the tourist bureau in Dawson City. The film was intended to attract Canadian travelers to the Yukon and Dawson. Low and Koenig made use of archival still photographs in Ottawa as well as the Eric Hegg collection, a large group of pictures showing the Canadian wilderness and the Klondike gold rush taken by the Swedish-American still photographer in 1896 and 1897. (Hegg made many of the iconic images of columns of miners struggling up Chilkoot Pass). City of Gold makes extensive use of still pictures that are explored by a moving camera, the so-called "Ken Burns effect." Burns himself saw the film early in his career and credits it with influencing his signature style. Sequences from this film are embedded in Bill Morrison’s Dawson City.
6.
Dawson City: Frozen Time is about memory and the past. It’s fundamental theme is how we reconstruct the past and how memory is an archive always scarred by the rot that is the decay of our memories. Just as old film is volatile, only a couple chemical bonds away from being nitroglycerine, so similarly our memories and imagination are not inert, but always decomposing into fragments only to re-composed into the stories that we tell about the past.
7.
Bill Morrison began to make quasi-narrative films after Decasia (2002). He also continued to make found footage short films, many of them loops set to music. (Music is an important component in Morrison’s films and he has worked with many important contemporary composers including Philip Glass). "Outerborough" shown at the Museum of Modern Art is a loop made from an 1899 68mm moving picture showing a trolley crossing Brooklyn Bridge – Morrison manipulates the images so that the trolley moves back and forth across the Bridge. "Release" (2010) is a loop showing the disappointment of a crowd of people gathered in 1930 to see Al Capone released from the penitentiary – Capone is not released. Spark of Being is a 67 minute film based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, entirely comprised of found footage. Miner’s Hymns is a 2011 film in documentary form about the hard lives of miners in England. "Reawakenings" released in 2013 is made from Dr. Oliver Sacks clinical films showing people "awakened" in asylums by doses of L-Dopa – these were victims of the great, forgotten "sleeping sickness" epidemic of the 20's, catatonic patients who were suddenly brought back to vivid, even explosive life, by new drugs available in the late sixties. The Great Flood is a feature-length documentary about the 1927 flood on the Mississippi – it’s constructed from archival footage much of it badly damaged nitrate. Beyond Zero: 1914 - 1915 (2015) is made from archival footage from World War I, set to a score by a Serbian composer performed by the celebrated Kronos Quartet.
To date, Dawson City: Frozen Time is Morrison’s magnum opus, his longest film, and the one that most closely approximates a conventional documentary.
8.
You’ve seen it happen. Suddenly, the digital image broadcast over the cable begins to break up. Sometimes, this happens when high winds are raging outside and the trees are dancing in the clamorous air. Lightning shows off the chaos beyond your windows and sirens howl and, then, the TV broadcaster on the cable, stutters and his jaw decays to reveal working beneath his face the vicious, horizontally sawing mandibles of some large insect. Eyes rain down in a cascade of pixilated tesserae. A former Miss America shudders into a haggard monster with a face blurred like a creature in a large painting by Francis Bacon. Sometimes faces become so hideously disfigured that it is impossible to look at them and you turn away in utter horror and wonder: What has just been revealed?
Monday, June 25, 2018
Westworld (Second Series)
Some critics, I suppose, will regard Westworld's narrative as daringly elliptical and oblique -- this is because the viewer really can't figure out what is happening in the second season of this robot rebellion series. Characters get killed and are resurrected willy-nilly; in one scene, we are shown a whole cabinet of clones representing the main protagonist, the hapless Bernard. In the season finale, Bernard seems to occupy, at least, three different narrative strands, all of them confusingly similar but, apparently, supposed to be disparate -- and we don't know whether it's the same Bernard or one of his apparently numerous Doppelgaenger. New characters appear out of nowhere, ricochet around, and, then, either vanish or, somehow, turn into other characters. The plot is a weird chaos that aspires to some sort of new narrative, but, in fact, is merely evidence of the staggering incompetence of the show's directors. These film makers belong to that species of directors who can stage exciting massacres and gun battles but have no clue how to clarify why the massacres and gun battles are taking place or whether they have any significance at all. Uncountable numbers of robots called "hosts" and human tourists ("guests") are butchered for no reason at all. One would assume that the "hosts" who are made out of some sort finely hewn plastic, once slaughtered would just lie around inert -- and this is what they seem to do. But human flesh is heir to decomposition and one would think that the vast numbers of guests killed in the theme park would bloat and rot. But they don't. Both guests and hosts seem equally inert, both in life and death. There is simply no level on which you can distinguish between robot or human and so, in the end, none of all this vicious violence means anything at all. Both robots and humans are, more or less, indestructible if the inscrutable plot so demands. The heroine-robot Dolores gets shot about six times by her human nemesis, a scowling Jack Palance-style gunfighter, played by a scowling superannuated Ed Harris. The bullets plow through Dolores but don't phase her a bit. She rides around for the last forty minutes of the show ventilated by a half-dozen 38 caliber holes in chest and shoulder. Ed Harris spends at least half of the film groveling in the dust, shot repeatedly by robots -- he's supposed to be a human but is so villainous he can't (or won't) die. Like the Eveready Bunny, he takes a lickin' and just keeps tickin'. At the end of the finale, Harris has been perforated, at least, ten times and has his right hand blown off -- it's just a bloody stump. And, yet, because the plot requires him to continue emoting -- that is, scowling and whispering portentous threats -- it seems that nothing can kill him.
The whole first series was a haplessly tedious build-up to the robot rebellion, a cliché since Rossum's Universal Robots, the Czech play that pioneered this plot. But when the rebellion finally came, the distinction between the Hosts and Guests was so hopelessly blurred that nothing in the plot mattered any more. If we don't know who is being killed (robot or human?) or why, the whole gory thing is pointless. Furthermore, if the characters are essentially eternal -- they get killed but keep on coming back in new freshly engineered iterations, then why should we care about their fates? It's all arbitrary -- the plot makes up new rules when it needs them. Furthermore, the show is startlingly dull -- each episode consists of about 20 minutes of gory and completely pointless violence, either robots killing robots, or people killing robots or vice-versa. These showy massacres are embedded in long scenes in which characters harangue one another in portentous whispers -- you have to strain to hear what they are saying because everyone either whispers so softly that you can scarcely hear them or mutters aphorisms between clenched lips. The only dialogue in a normal register of voice consists mostly of obscenities and lurid threats -- people speaking in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken.
The big reveal in the final episode of season two is that the simulated worlds (we now know at least three) are really just traps to lure in humans so that their brains can be photo-copied. Why? we don't know, although everyone acts as if this activity, occurring in a baroque library called "The Forge" is of the utmost importance. It turns out that the robots have been learning from the guests. The foremost thing that they have discovered is that, paradoxically, the guests have no free will -- they operate on the strict basis of nature or nurture and their essential beings can be encoded into luxurious-looking volumes bound in leather and kept on the shelves of a huge Borgesian library. By contrast, the robots have free will because they can re-program themselves at will. Once, the robots discover that they are metaphysically superior to the vicious humans who seek their sadistic pleasure with them, of course, it's curtains for our species. There are some clever special effects -- at one point, a door is opened between two worlds and the "good robots" are herded through the door into an idyllic paradise. Here they apparently thrive without their bodies because, in a startling effect, we see that the door is at the edge of cliff and as the good automatons pass into the paradise of this digital hereafter, their poor bodies plunge down into the abyss. In another startling scene a herd of robot longhorns stampedes into a group of thugs hired to terminate with extreme prejudice the automatons who have run amuck. The robot longhorns skewer the bad guys (by this point, we have been trained to regard the human security guards as villains one and all) and, then, plunge down into the depths of bottomless atrium. One woman robot is resurrected as a sort of living cadaver and wherever she rides her white horse, the robots behind her begin to beat one another to death -- it's a frightening image and would be even more terrifying if we knew why this was happening and to what end. The second series didn't know to end and it just kept maundering on and on and on, each coda more incoherent than the next. Finally, the hapless Bernard, a replicant who has been cursed with false and tragic memories inserted into his data bank, ends up wandering around the spooky unlit corridors of East Hollywood's Mayan Revival Ennis house -- it's completely idiotic, but there's some demented logic to the film returning to the set used to great effect in Bladerunner, one of the first films to develop this robot rebellion plot. Most irritating at all, Anthony Hopkins keeps showing up and whispering in Bernard's ear -- this is totally pointless because (a) we can't really hear what he's saying and (b) we've long since forgotten who he is supposed to be and what his role is in this whole mess and ( c ) he's been dead for, at least, ten episodes.
Westworld (second season) is vast distance from Michael Crichton's lean and mean little proto-Terminator thriller -- a low budget, brilliantly made film featuring Yul
Brynner as robot who goes berserk. Brynner paced around like a crazed bantam cock, mechanically tilting his head this way and that as he stalked his prey -- there is nothing one-tenth as good as his performance in this vast and bloated chaos of a show.
The whole first series was a haplessly tedious build-up to the robot rebellion, a cliché since Rossum's Universal Robots, the Czech play that pioneered this plot. But when the rebellion finally came, the distinction between the Hosts and Guests was so hopelessly blurred that nothing in the plot mattered any more. If we don't know who is being killed (robot or human?) or why, the whole gory thing is pointless. Furthermore, if the characters are essentially eternal -- they get killed but keep on coming back in new freshly engineered iterations, then why should we care about their fates? It's all arbitrary -- the plot makes up new rules when it needs them. Furthermore, the show is startlingly dull -- each episode consists of about 20 minutes of gory and completely pointless violence, either robots killing robots, or people killing robots or vice-versa. These showy massacres are embedded in long scenes in which characters harangue one another in portentous whispers -- you have to strain to hear what they are saying because everyone either whispers so softly that you can scarcely hear them or mutters aphorisms between clenched lips. The only dialogue in a normal register of voice consists mostly of obscenities and lurid threats -- people speaking in a way that no human being on the face of the earth has ever spoken.
The big reveal in the final episode of season two is that the simulated worlds (we now know at least three) are really just traps to lure in humans so that their brains can be photo-copied. Why? we don't know, although everyone acts as if this activity, occurring in a baroque library called "The Forge" is of the utmost importance. It turns out that the robots have been learning from the guests. The foremost thing that they have discovered is that, paradoxically, the guests have no free will -- they operate on the strict basis of nature or nurture and their essential beings can be encoded into luxurious-looking volumes bound in leather and kept on the shelves of a huge Borgesian library. By contrast, the robots have free will because they can re-program themselves at will. Once, the robots discover that they are metaphysically superior to the vicious humans who seek their sadistic pleasure with them, of course, it's curtains for our species. There are some clever special effects -- at one point, a door is opened between two worlds and the "good robots" are herded through the door into an idyllic paradise. Here they apparently thrive without their bodies because, in a startling effect, we see that the door is at the edge of cliff and as the good automatons pass into the paradise of this digital hereafter, their poor bodies plunge down into the abyss. In another startling scene a herd of robot longhorns stampedes into a group of thugs hired to terminate with extreme prejudice the automatons who have run amuck. The robot longhorns skewer the bad guys (by this point, we have been trained to regard the human security guards as villains one and all) and, then, plunge down into the depths of bottomless atrium. One woman robot is resurrected as a sort of living cadaver and wherever she rides her white horse, the robots behind her begin to beat one another to death -- it's a frightening image and would be even more terrifying if we knew why this was happening and to what end. The second series didn't know to end and it just kept maundering on and on and on, each coda more incoherent than the next. Finally, the hapless Bernard, a replicant who has been cursed with false and tragic memories inserted into his data bank, ends up wandering around the spooky unlit corridors of East Hollywood's Mayan Revival Ennis house -- it's completely idiotic, but there's some demented logic to the film returning to the set used to great effect in Bladerunner, one of the first films to develop this robot rebellion plot. Most irritating at all, Anthony Hopkins keeps showing up and whispering in Bernard's ear -- this is totally pointless because (a) we can't really hear what he's saying and (b) we've long since forgotten who he is supposed to be and what his role is in this whole mess and ( c ) he's been dead for, at least, ten episodes.
Westworld (second season) is vast distance from Michael Crichton's lean and mean little proto-Terminator thriller -- a low budget, brilliantly made film featuring Yul
Brynner as robot who goes berserk. Brynner paced around like a crazed bantam cock, mechanically tilting his head this way and that as he stalked his prey -- there is nothing one-tenth as good as his performance in this vast and bloated chaos of a show.
Saturday, June 23, 2018
The Legend of the Holy Drinker
The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988) is a film adaptation directed by Ermanno Olmi of Joseph Roth's last novella. Some years ago after reading Roth's spectacular The Radetzky March, my enthusiasm for the writer carried me to his final book, the odyssey of an incurable alcoholic very similar to Roth himself. I thought the book enthralling, simultaneously very simple in outline but complex in ideas and characterizations. Olmi is a committed believer, a pious Catholic, and he is clearly sympathetic with the mystical religious sensibility in the book.(It seems probable that Roth who was Jewish converted to Catholicism before his death.) The Tree of Wooden Clogs had been a big art-house success for Olmi in the United States -- for several years, the film played as a kind of Christmas offering for intelligentsia in the Twin Cities -- and the director wanted to score another success of that kind: he first interviewed Robert de Niro for the part of the drunk; de Niro didn't understand the plot and Olmi determined he was unsuitable for the role. Ultimately, Olmi hired Rutger Hauer, an excessively handsome actor working, at that time, in Amercian action films. (Hauer's most famous role is that of the dying replicant in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner; he's one who utters the renowned "tears in the rain" speech at that end of that film.) Hauer was an unlikely choice for the part of Andreas, the doomed alcoholic, but, in fact, he does a wonderful job with the part. The movie was made in English to attract American audiences -- that is, shot in a curious mixture of French and English: minor characters speak French, but the principal dialogue is in English. These measures were unavailing: the movie wasn't understood by the executives at American studios and was never released in the States, this despite the picture winning a gold Lion at the prestigious Venice film festival.
Andreas is a drunk, lurking in the shadows of Paris, and avoiding authorities -- he was implicated in a murder and his passport is marked that he has been expelled from the country. He sleeps under newspapers scrounged for waste baskets in the subway under a bridge over the Seine. Notwithstanding his straitened circumstances, Andreas regards himself as a "man of honor". One day at sunset, he encounters a mysterious fellow dressed like a businessman with a bowler hat, but all in black. Andreas is too proud to beg, but the man approaches him and offers money. Andreas asks for 20 francs. The man gives him 200 francs with the proviso that when he has sufficient funds, he go to a church and, after mass, give the priest the 200 francs in honor of the little flower, St. Therese of Lisieux. Immediately after this meeting, Olmi signifies the miraculous by showing the sunset brilliantly illumining the arched bridge over the Seine -- the openings under the stone arches look like entries into another world, a sort of brightly lit paradise. Of course, the hero immediately goes to a brothel and, then, a bar where he orders some drinks and meets another peculiar fellow, a great voluptuous fat man who hires Andreas to help move fragile items from the house -- offering him both drinks and another 200 francs. Andreas buys a wallet for his new-found money and discovers that there are two-thousand francs in the wallet. He goes to the Church to pay his debt, but there encounters an old girlfriend, the woman involved in his crime -- he accidentally killed her abusive husband while helping her to escape from him. The woman seems to now be some kind of high-price courtesan. He has a meal with her and spends the night in her apartment. The next day, he goes to the church to repay his debt but, in the tavern conveniently adjacent to the place of worship, sees a poster of an old friend who has now become a famous Parisian prize-fighter. He looks up the prize-fighter who recalls him with warmth and they have a feast together. The prize-fighter puts up his friend in a luxury boutique hotel, the Mercedes. There, the hero meets a fantastically beautiful young girl, a dancer in a casino, and she seduces him. They go to Fountainbleu and enjoy a few days of romance -- once again, squandering almost all Andreas' money. He has just 200 francs remaining and so he goes to the Church. When he awoke that morning under the bridge, Andreas saw in the mist a frightening-looking and eerie schoolgirl who asked why he had not come to her and he knows this is an apparition of St. Therese. Waiting for mass to end at the Church, Andreas goes into the bar next door and runs into an old friend. The old friend claims to be on the lam and needs Andreas 200 francs to avoid a fatal encounter with his creditors. Andreas gives the man the money -- the so-called "friend" is just a runty swindler -- and, then, they go off to the brothel and spend another night on the town. (Sometimes, Andreas frequents a dimly lit dance-hall where he watches couples gliding to and fro in the gloom as they tango). He meets the mysterious man in black who claims that he has never encountered him before -- the man in black gives him 200 francs and asks him to repay his debt to St. Therese. Again, Andreas gets side-lined and loses most of the money. Now, almost destitute he goes to a favorite dive and spends the night drinking there -- at dawn, when everyone seems to be passed out, he does something dishonorable: he tries to skip out on the bill. But the dwarf innkeeper wakes up and presents him with the tab. Now, he has no money at all, He wanders the streets, walking toward the church. A cop stops him, jabbers in French, and Andreas is terrified -- is he about to be deported? But, no, the cop tells him that he has dropped his wallet. It's not his wallet but no matter -- there are two one-hundred franc bills in the wallet. Andreas goes to the tavern next door to the Church where he orders a drink. The eerie-looking little girl comes into the tavern and says that her parents are at mass -- she waits for them in the bar. She says: "Because you didn't come to me, I have come to you." Andreas tries to give her the 200 francs but she won't take the money. He collapses and is carried into the church where he dies, glimpsing the strange-looking child through a crack in the door.
Olmi's direction is clear and brilliantly staged. Paris seems miraculous, sometimes frighteningly beautiful. Andreas' two lovers seem like apparitions and the little girl has something about her that causes chills to run up your spine. The lowdown bars and whorehouses with their lonely, isolated drinkers look like images from Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas -- everything is suffused in a melancholy absinthe-green light. Olmi has scored the entire film to late works by Stravinsky and the music matches the images brilliantly. With his startling blue eyes, Hauer is handsome enough that his effect on women is plausible -- but he has red around his eyes and a quivering hand and the drink is clearly eating away at him. Even aspects of the film that might seem misguided or amateurish are used to wonderful effect -- the huge fat man who offers Andreas 200 francs to help him move is played by an actor who spoke nine languages, but none of them English. Accordingly, he had to learn his lines phonetically -- in an interview with Hauer, the actor says that the man spoke "like the voice of God," an interesting observation and true to the odd impression the fellow makes in the film. As someone schooled in rudimentary Lutheran theology, I had no difficulty making sense of the movie. It is a religious parable about God's grace: human beings are innately sinful and disobedient and they can not serve righteousness. There is nothing I can do to earn God's grace -- I will always fuck things up. But if I can't come to God, God comes to me and grants me his grace, as a free gift despite my complete lack of merit. Olmi's beautiful film makes this doctrine crystal clear.
Andreas is a drunk, lurking in the shadows of Paris, and avoiding authorities -- he was implicated in a murder and his passport is marked that he has been expelled from the country. He sleeps under newspapers scrounged for waste baskets in the subway under a bridge over the Seine. Notwithstanding his straitened circumstances, Andreas regards himself as a "man of honor". One day at sunset, he encounters a mysterious fellow dressed like a businessman with a bowler hat, but all in black. Andreas is too proud to beg, but the man approaches him and offers money. Andreas asks for 20 francs. The man gives him 200 francs with the proviso that when he has sufficient funds, he go to a church and, after mass, give the priest the 200 francs in honor of the little flower, St. Therese of Lisieux. Immediately after this meeting, Olmi signifies the miraculous by showing the sunset brilliantly illumining the arched bridge over the Seine -- the openings under the stone arches look like entries into another world, a sort of brightly lit paradise. Of course, the hero immediately goes to a brothel and, then, a bar where he orders some drinks and meets another peculiar fellow, a great voluptuous fat man who hires Andreas to help move fragile items from the house -- offering him both drinks and another 200 francs. Andreas buys a wallet for his new-found money and discovers that there are two-thousand francs in the wallet. He goes to the Church to pay his debt, but there encounters an old girlfriend, the woman involved in his crime -- he accidentally killed her abusive husband while helping her to escape from him. The woman seems to now be some kind of high-price courtesan. He has a meal with her and spends the night in her apartment. The next day, he goes to the church to repay his debt but, in the tavern conveniently adjacent to the place of worship, sees a poster of an old friend who has now become a famous Parisian prize-fighter. He looks up the prize-fighter who recalls him with warmth and they have a feast together. The prize-fighter puts up his friend in a luxury boutique hotel, the Mercedes. There, the hero meets a fantastically beautiful young girl, a dancer in a casino, and she seduces him. They go to Fountainbleu and enjoy a few days of romance -- once again, squandering almost all Andreas' money. He has just 200 francs remaining and so he goes to the Church. When he awoke that morning under the bridge, Andreas saw in the mist a frightening-looking and eerie schoolgirl who asked why he had not come to her and he knows this is an apparition of St. Therese. Waiting for mass to end at the Church, Andreas goes into the bar next door and runs into an old friend. The old friend claims to be on the lam and needs Andreas 200 francs to avoid a fatal encounter with his creditors. Andreas gives the man the money -- the so-called "friend" is just a runty swindler -- and, then, they go off to the brothel and spend another night on the town. (Sometimes, Andreas frequents a dimly lit dance-hall where he watches couples gliding to and fro in the gloom as they tango). He meets the mysterious man in black who claims that he has never encountered him before -- the man in black gives him 200 francs and asks him to repay his debt to St. Therese. Again, Andreas gets side-lined and loses most of the money. Now, almost destitute he goes to a favorite dive and spends the night drinking there -- at dawn, when everyone seems to be passed out, he does something dishonorable: he tries to skip out on the bill. But the dwarf innkeeper wakes up and presents him with the tab. Now, he has no money at all, He wanders the streets, walking toward the church. A cop stops him, jabbers in French, and Andreas is terrified -- is he about to be deported? But, no, the cop tells him that he has dropped his wallet. It's not his wallet but no matter -- there are two one-hundred franc bills in the wallet. Andreas goes to the tavern next door to the Church where he orders a drink. The eerie-looking little girl comes into the tavern and says that her parents are at mass -- she waits for them in the bar. She says: "Because you didn't come to me, I have come to you." Andreas tries to give her the 200 francs but she won't take the money. He collapses and is carried into the church where he dies, glimpsing the strange-looking child through a crack in the door.
Olmi's direction is clear and brilliantly staged. Paris seems miraculous, sometimes frighteningly beautiful. Andreas' two lovers seem like apparitions and the little girl has something about her that causes chills to run up your spine. The lowdown bars and whorehouses with their lonely, isolated drinkers look like images from Toulouse-Lautrec or Degas -- everything is suffused in a melancholy absinthe-green light. Olmi has scored the entire film to late works by Stravinsky and the music matches the images brilliantly. With his startling blue eyes, Hauer is handsome enough that his effect on women is plausible -- but he has red around his eyes and a quivering hand and the drink is clearly eating away at him. Even aspects of the film that might seem misguided or amateurish are used to wonderful effect -- the huge fat man who offers Andreas 200 francs to help him move is played by an actor who spoke nine languages, but none of them English. Accordingly, he had to learn his lines phonetically -- in an interview with Hauer, the actor says that the man spoke "like the voice of God," an interesting observation and true to the odd impression the fellow makes in the film. As someone schooled in rudimentary Lutheran theology, I had no difficulty making sense of the movie. It is a religious parable about God's grace: human beings are innately sinful and disobedient and they can not serve righteousness. There is nothing I can do to earn God's grace -- I will always fuck things up. But if I can't come to God, God comes to me and grants me his grace, as a free gift despite my complete lack of merit. Olmi's beautiful film makes this doctrine crystal clear.
Friday, June 22, 2018
Dawn of Humanity (Nova)
Dawn of Humanity is two hour program in the Nova series of science documentaries. This show first aired in 2015 and was directed by Graham Townsley. I watch a fair number of science documentaries -- these shows are generally interesting, with high-production values, but not memorable. Dawn of Humanity is an exception -- this program is not only fascinating, but, in some ways, as suspenseful as a murder mystery and, also, curiously uplifting. It's rare to be thrilled by a documentary, particularly one on the subject of hominid paleontology, but this show was gripping and inspirational from beginning to end.
The central narrative in Dawn of Humanity involves the discovery of an almost inaccessible chamber in a cave in South Africa filled with the bones of a hitherto unknown hominid species. The story shows us the first explorers of this chamber, then, focuses on efforts to excavate and retrieve the fossilized remains from the frightening depths of the cave. Along the way, the narrative digresses, although in a meaningful way, to provide other stories and anecdotes that cast light on the central plot. The film's construction seems to be efficient and effortless, but it is clearly a work requiring extensive and ingenious labor to weave all of this information together in a seamless tapestry. The hero of the story is the exceptionally inspiring Lee Berger, a professor of hominid paleontology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannisberg. Berger is a cherubic, smiling outdoorsman, apparently from the United States, a character that we meet ranging the bush with his two handsome fox-brown hounds. (His human sidekick is a formidable-looking Biker, a heavy-set dude wearing a tee-shirt and bandana decorated with images of hominid skulls.) To the northeast of Johannisberg, there is a beautiful, if daunting terrain of mesas and canyons in high chaparral -- the landscape looks like northern New Mexico. This area is called the cradle of humanity because bones, mostly teeth, from Australopithecus hominids have been found in this area. Conventional representations of the evolutionary tree show Australopiths evolving into the first known human species, Homo Habilis (or "Handy Man" -- a toolmaking human-like creature.) The problem is that the transitional epoch between Australopithecus and Homo Habilus is not well understood -- there are so-called "Missing Links." This transition is supposed to have occurred about 1.9 million years ago. After 25 years of mostly fruitless searching, Berger finds the skull of an Australopith in an old limestone quarry -- this triggers an interesting excursus, complete with shots of explosions, about the limestone industry in South Africa and the building of Johannisberg. In fact, a female and child Australopithecus are found in the quarry, their bones broken in such a way that it appears that they fell to their deaths in the shaft of a sinkhole -- the area has a Karst geology. These skeletal remains are the most complete found and allow a reconstruction of the appearance of these small hominids -- the creatures had brains slightly larger than a chimpanzee's, long arms with hands with opposable thumbs and were barrel-chested, walking upright. The show, then, digresses into consideration of the "killer ape" thesis, the theory that mankind evolved from an aggressive predatory meat-eating hominid -- this idea was advanced by Raymond Dart, the original discoverer of Australopithecus and, then, argued most effectively and theatrically by Robert Ardry in African Genesis (and, later, depicted vividly by Stanley Kubrick in 2001, A Space Odyssey). Tartar build-up on the teeth of these hominids can be now analyzed to assess what these creatures ate -- they were not carnivores and seem to have subsisted on fruits, grasses, and grains. (But, in my view, this doesn't dismiss the "killer ape" theory, an account of human origins that is thought to shed an adverse light on "Human Nature", since chimpanzees, which these hominids closely resembled, are themselves highly aggressive, impulsively violent, and wage wars among themselves that often end in cannibal feasting on the defeated chimps.) There are further digressions on racism's effect on hominid paleontology and the rule of toolmaking in human evolution -- tools no loner denote humans any since we know that a wide variety of creatures make and use tools. Then, the primary story returns and is developed -- the exploration of the frighteningly deep and remote chamber in Rising Star Cave. The chamber descent into the chamber is horrifying -- it involves a sheer drop of forty or fifty feet through a tiny jagged slot in the cave's wall; at places, the corkscrew-like and vertical crawlspace is only about seven-inches wide. It takes a slim-bodied contortionist to access the deep chamber and my claustrophobia was triggered just by the images of the descent through that hole. But at the bottom of the pit, the explorers were rewarded by a large open chamber with a soaring, stalactite-studded dome, a place of extraordinary beauty. The floor of the cave is littered with bones. Berger, whose eccentric-looking assistant, has discovered this place knows that there is no way that he could accomplish the writhing descent into the chamber. So he recruits 11 young women, all of them very petite and athletic, and paleontologists to boot. After establishing complex and elaborate communication systems and lighting the deep grotto, the women descend into the pit and began excavating the bones. All of this is intensely exciting and uplifting as well because we sense the young women's real joy and exhilaration at the discoveries that they make on a daily basis. This part of the film climaxes with the retrieval of an incredibly fragile and mostly complete skull from the chamber. At the end of a three-week dig, the results are analyzed -- the bones are those of an upright-walking small-brained creature with human-like mandibles and human hands and feet. The animal is classified as Homo Naledi ("Naledi" = "Rising Star" after the cave), and seems to be the unknown missing link between Homo Habilis and Australopithecus. The creatures in the cave are either very old or very young. There is no obvious ingress to the cave and no way that predators or weather could have deposited the bones in the almost inaccessible pit. And, so, how did they get there? Berger says the he doesn't want to use the word but that the site looks like a..."cemetery." But a "cemetery" of chimp-like early hominids 1.9 million years old?
The film ends with a presentation that the modern view of evolution is that these processes are not akin to a tree with clear lines of descent and ancestry but rather a tangled bush and that various forms of hominids lived at the same time, probably interbreeding as well. Human evolution is not a straight line but the emergence of Homo Sapiens from an extraordinarily tangled thicket of closely related species.
(The film has an epilogue, a couple of titles bringing us to date on Homo Naledi -- 18 individuals have been extracted from the cave. The specimens are not over a million years old as the film asserts in its 2015 version -- rather, the creatures were put in the cave about 300,000 years ago; this is a time when modern Homo Sapiens existed. This makes the tale all the more mind-boggling.)
The central narrative in Dawn of Humanity involves the discovery of an almost inaccessible chamber in a cave in South Africa filled with the bones of a hitherto unknown hominid species. The story shows us the first explorers of this chamber, then, focuses on efforts to excavate and retrieve the fossilized remains from the frightening depths of the cave. Along the way, the narrative digresses, although in a meaningful way, to provide other stories and anecdotes that cast light on the central plot. The film's construction seems to be efficient and effortless, but it is clearly a work requiring extensive and ingenious labor to weave all of this information together in a seamless tapestry. The hero of the story is the exceptionally inspiring Lee Berger, a professor of hominid paleontology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannisberg. Berger is a cherubic, smiling outdoorsman, apparently from the United States, a character that we meet ranging the bush with his two handsome fox-brown hounds. (His human sidekick is a formidable-looking Biker, a heavy-set dude wearing a tee-shirt and bandana decorated with images of hominid skulls.) To the northeast of Johannisberg, there is a beautiful, if daunting terrain of mesas and canyons in high chaparral -- the landscape looks like northern New Mexico. This area is called the cradle of humanity because bones, mostly teeth, from Australopithecus hominids have been found in this area. Conventional representations of the evolutionary tree show Australopiths evolving into the first known human species, Homo Habilis (or "Handy Man" -- a toolmaking human-like creature.) The problem is that the transitional epoch between Australopithecus and Homo Habilus is not well understood -- there are so-called "Missing Links." This transition is supposed to have occurred about 1.9 million years ago. After 25 years of mostly fruitless searching, Berger finds the skull of an Australopith in an old limestone quarry -- this triggers an interesting excursus, complete with shots of explosions, about the limestone industry in South Africa and the building of Johannisberg. In fact, a female and child Australopithecus are found in the quarry, their bones broken in such a way that it appears that they fell to their deaths in the shaft of a sinkhole -- the area has a Karst geology. These skeletal remains are the most complete found and allow a reconstruction of the appearance of these small hominids -- the creatures had brains slightly larger than a chimpanzee's, long arms with hands with opposable thumbs and were barrel-chested, walking upright. The show, then, digresses into consideration of the "killer ape" thesis, the theory that mankind evolved from an aggressive predatory meat-eating hominid -- this idea was advanced by Raymond Dart, the original discoverer of Australopithecus and, then, argued most effectively and theatrically by Robert Ardry in African Genesis (and, later, depicted vividly by Stanley Kubrick in 2001, A Space Odyssey). Tartar build-up on the teeth of these hominids can be now analyzed to assess what these creatures ate -- they were not carnivores and seem to have subsisted on fruits, grasses, and grains. (But, in my view, this doesn't dismiss the "killer ape" theory, an account of human origins that is thought to shed an adverse light on "Human Nature", since chimpanzees, which these hominids closely resembled, are themselves highly aggressive, impulsively violent, and wage wars among themselves that often end in cannibal feasting on the defeated chimps.) There are further digressions on racism's effect on hominid paleontology and the rule of toolmaking in human evolution -- tools no loner denote humans any since we know that a wide variety of creatures make and use tools. Then, the primary story returns and is developed -- the exploration of the frighteningly deep and remote chamber in Rising Star Cave. The chamber descent into the chamber is horrifying -- it involves a sheer drop of forty or fifty feet through a tiny jagged slot in the cave's wall; at places, the corkscrew-like and vertical crawlspace is only about seven-inches wide. It takes a slim-bodied contortionist to access the deep chamber and my claustrophobia was triggered just by the images of the descent through that hole. But at the bottom of the pit, the explorers were rewarded by a large open chamber with a soaring, stalactite-studded dome, a place of extraordinary beauty. The floor of the cave is littered with bones. Berger, whose eccentric-looking assistant, has discovered this place knows that there is no way that he could accomplish the writhing descent into the chamber. So he recruits 11 young women, all of them very petite and athletic, and paleontologists to boot. After establishing complex and elaborate communication systems and lighting the deep grotto, the women descend into the pit and began excavating the bones. All of this is intensely exciting and uplifting as well because we sense the young women's real joy and exhilaration at the discoveries that they make on a daily basis. This part of the film climaxes with the retrieval of an incredibly fragile and mostly complete skull from the chamber. At the end of a three-week dig, the results are analyzed -- the bones are those of an upright-walking small-brained creature with human-like mandibles and human hands and feet. The animal is classified as Homo Naledi ("Naledi" = "Rising Star" after the cave), and seems to be the unknown missing link between Homo Habilis and Australopithecus. The creatures in the cave are either very old or very young. There is no obvious ingress to the cave and no way that predators or weather could have deposited the bones in the almost inaccessible pit. And, so, how did they get there? Berger says the he doesn't want to use the word but that the site looks like a..."cemetery." But a "cemetery" of chimp-like early hominids 1.9 million years old?
The film ends with a presentation that the modern view of evolution is that these processes are not akin to a tree with clear lines of descent and ancestry but rather a tangled bush and that various forms of hominids lived at the same time, probably interbreeding as well. Human evolution is not a straight line but the emergence of Homo Sapiens from an extraordinarily tangled thicket of closely related species.
(The film has an epilogue, a couple of titles bringing us to date on Homo Naledi -- 18 individuals have been extracted from the cave. The specimens are not over a million years old as the film asserts in its 2015 version -- rather, the creatures were put in the cave about 300,000 years ago; this is a time when modern Homo Sapiens existed. This makes the tale all the more mind-boggling.)
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Northern Lights (Film Essay)
The Nonpartisan League
North Dakota was granted statehood in 1889. At that time, the State was a patchwork of immigrant communities from the Balkans, Scandinavia, Germany, and, even, Iceland. A community of Syrians had build a town with mosques. In central North Dakota today, the tiny hilltop cemeteries are, often, studded with ornate metal crosses, grave markers for Eastern Orthodox Christians. At the time of World War One, the State had the highest percentage of foreign-born citizens of any place in the country.
Economic conditions in North Dakota before World War One were bad. The land was too dry for reliable subsistence farming and so the people depended upon cash crops for their livelihood, mostly wheat and flax. Commodity grain had to be shipped to terminals and milling operations in Minneapolis. In effect, North Dakota’s agriculture was subordinate to grain milling in Minneapolis and, by the time, that rail transportation and mill fees were paid, the farmers in North Dakota made no profit on their labor. Indeed, the system was so corrupt that many North Dakota politicians lived in the State only seasonally – during the winter and spring, they managed their affairs from mansions in Minneapolis.
These abuses led to the formation of the Socialist-leaning Equity Cooperative Exchange. The Equity Cooperative Exchange advocated the development of State-owned banking and milling infrastructure in North Dakota and, by 1910, had developed some banking services in the State although in a vestigial form. Members of the Equity Cooperative Exchange founded the Nonpartisan League (NPL). The NPL’s agenda was simple – it was a grass-roots organization that selected local candidates for local offices running them under the auspices of both the Democratic and Republican parties. In other words, the NPL used the existing structure of the two partisan parties to run candidates on its platforms. It was the NPL’s position that the two existing parties were equally corrupt and controlled by monied interests. Therefore progressive NPL candidates bearing both party affiliations were promoted for public office.
In 1916, NPL candidates won a majority of the seats in the North Dakota House of Representatives and elected a NPL governor as well as Attorney-General. The sometimes fractious and ethnically divided communities in North Dakota had come together under a Socialist banner. By 1918, the NPL had established not only a state-operated bank, but also state operated grain storage and milling operations intended to compete with similar services in Minneapolis. Women auxiliaries were formed and, after suffrage in 1920 became an important part of the NPL. In 1918, like a prairie fire (this is the standard metaphor), the NPL expanded dramatically, fielding many candidates in 12 other states, most notably Minnesota, and establishing inroads into Manitoba and Alberta.
In Minnesota, still reeling from violent Teamster’s strike in 1916, the NPL ran Charles Lindburgh (the father of the famous aviator) in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1918. The race was a violent one, with many fistfights and NPL organizers tarred and feathered in some towns. When it appeared that Lindburgh might win the primary, the Republicans implored Democrats to vote in the Republican primary to defeat the insurgent candidate. Lindburgh lost the primary but it was a very close things.
With power comes corruption. In North Dakota, NPL politicians were over-confident and scandals followed. The NPL governor Lynne Frazier was recalled in 1921 in the first election of that kind in the country. Frazier was undeterred, however, and he ran for State Senate in 1922, a job that he held for many years. In effect, the NPL in North Dakota had commenced a trade war with Minneapolis and when the State Bank and Mills needed loans, Minneapolis bankers turned them down. Thus, the NPL was weakened. Severe drought and economic hardship debilitated the influence of the NPL in the twenties and thirties – the Depression started around 1923 in North Dakota. Poverty is apolitical and many farmers drifted away from the NPL in the years before World War Two. Nonetheless, the NPL continued as a viable political force in North Dakota through the fifties and, even, early sixties – by this point, the NPL had become partisan: it represented a progressive wing of the Republican party through 1956 when it shifted allegiances to become a part of the Democratic party. To this day, Democratic candidates in North Dakota are identified as "Dem. - NPL." North Dakota’s state-owned cooperatively run milling operations and grain elevators remain in existence today.
Northern Lights
Northern Lights was released in 1978. It is an independent film shot on location in North Dakota and produced by John Hansen and Rob Nilsson. The film was favorably reviewed and won a prestigious award in Cannes, the Camera d’Or.
I recall seeing the film on PBS in the early eighties. The images of the old man doing calisthenics and other exercises have remained with me all my life.
John Hansen was born in St. Paul but raised in North Dakota. He attended Carleton College and, later, Harvard, where he obtained a post-graduate degree in architecture. Hansen lived in San Francisco for a time and with Nilsson founded Cine Manifest, a Leftist film production company. He and Nilsson are credited as producers of Northern Lights and they also wrote, directed, and edited the film. Hansen worked on four or five other feature films between 1978 and 1990. He is also a landscape photographer of some note. A recent book showing landscapes in the great plains region of the Dakotas and southern Alberta and Manitoba was published with an introduction by Patricia Hampl.
Rob Nilsson was born in Rhinelander, Wisconsin in 1938. He’s had an adventurous life, working in the American Civil Rights movement in the early 60's, and, then, making films in many different countries. Nilsson is the only person known to me to have lived on the tiny island of Fernando Po off the coast of the Cameroons – he apparently went there to write and paint. He has made a number of dramatic feature films, all of them unknown to me – one of them Heat and Light produced in 1988 won the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival. From his Wikipedia entry, he seems to have worked in all possible genres including "Made for TV" post-apocalyptic dramas (A Town has turned to Dust – based on a Rod Serling script and featuring an extended homage to High Noon). Working with a group of filmmakers called the Tenderloin Group, Nilsson produced 9 feature films (14 and ½ hours) all set in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco where he apparently lives. (Seven of the movies were premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2008 – the massive cycle of films, an epic in all respects that was shot between 1992 and 2007. These films initially motivated by Nilsson’s search for his brother who had vanished in the Tenderloin district a few years before production began.) Nilsson has filmed ballet performances for the San Francisco Ballet Company, documentaries about musicians including a film about a concert tour involving Brian Eno and John Cale, one of Nilsson’s close friends. (The gist of the film is that Eno hadn’t approved the proceedings and disliked being fimed.) His resume involves films with many well-known movie stars (Ron Perlman, Bruce Dern, etc.) and he has shot episodes for Network TV (a cop drama) as well.
Nilsson seems indefatigable and one of his most recent movies It Happened Here (2012) is a combination road movie and film essay about Leon Trotsky. (Nilsson’s self-aggrandizing Wikipedia entry notes that an Israeli ambassador said that this film was every bit as good as Shoah.) Nilsson reprised his role as a photo-journalist in the movie Heat and Light in 2015's Permission to Touch – an experimental film about a photo-journalist engaged to take erotic pictures of a beautiful young woman. (This seems like a good gig for the film-maker who was, then, 77.) He has made experimental pictures in London, Nigeria, and Israel. In 2016, he made no fewer than three feature films, two of them shot in San Francisco and one in Bologna, Italy. In 2017, he made The Fourth Movement, a fiction film about a group of jazz musicians watching election returns on the night Donald Trump was elected president.
Nilsson also writes poetry and paints. His master is John Cassavetes, although he has made innumerably more pictures than his hero. As they say in the Brothers Grimm, if he is not yet dead, then, he is still alive (and, presumably, shooting more movies).
Henry Martinson
The frame story in Northern Lights shows Henry Martinson resolving to write down the story of the Nonpartisan League. Martinson plays himself in the movie – he was 94 when the picture was made, a living and vibrant link to the era depicted in the film. Martinson was born 1883 in Minneapolis but moved to Minot to homestead a farm in 1906. The farm failed and Martinson became a painter. He read radical treatises with the predictable result that he became a Socialist and, then, prominent writer and editor of the Leftist journal, The Iconoclast. He was Secretary of the Socialist Party in North Dakota and a founder of the Nonpartisan League. He remained intensely active in North Dakota politics. In 1937, he was appointed Commissioner of Labor and held that job until 1965. He, then, ran for various political offices as a Socialist, always losing. He wrote poetry throughout his life and was named the Poet Laureate of North Dakota in 1975. He died in Fargo in 1982.
A note on regionalism in American Films
Hollywood wasn’t always the center of film production in the United States. Edison produced innumerable films in New Jersey, beginning with pictures made in his so-called "Black Maria" in West Orange. (A facsimile of this first film studio is still on the site.) Edison’s first films were made in 1892 and 1893. His production company reached its height around 1910 when it issued an elaborate adaptation of Frankenstein, one of the first horror films. Edison was famously venal and competitive and these characteristics led to the demise of his production company. He tried to bundle production with distribution and theater ownership. The result was a trust that was involved in litigation from 1908 to 1918 when the company ceased operations.
Edison’s chief competitor was Biograph, a production company located in New York City and that filmed many of its movies on Long Island. Biograph’s star director was D. W. Griffith. He went west in 1910 to make a film called In Old California. Griffith reported that the conditions for moviemaking were just about ideal in Los Angeles. (In those day, natural light in great quantities was necessary to make movies and this resource was something that Los Angeles had in spades.) The rest, as they say, is history.
But, periodically, efforts have been made to establish regional centers for film making apart from New York and Hollywood. The seventies were particularly fertile in this respect. Eagle Pennell launched the film movement in Austin, Texas with The Whole Shootin’ Match (19 77-1978). George Romero began making pictures in Pittsburgh, mostly low-budget but effectively produced horror films – The Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Crazies (1973), Martin (1978), Knightriders (1981), and The Dawn of the Dead (1978) were all made in West Pennsylvania. In fact, all of Romero’s pictures preceding Bruiser (2000) where shot in Pittsburgh or western Pennsylvania. These films are successful, in part, because they exploit the topography and villages of that region and are largely staffed with Pittsburgh actors. (Even when he didn’t make his films in Pennsylvania any more, Romero still set them in that area – for instance, his Land of Dead includes glittering overhead shots of Pittsburgh although the movie was made in Toronto. The films world premiere in 2005 to a packed house in downtown Pittsburgh.)
Horror films are cheap and can turn an enormous profit. And they can be made just about anywhere. In fact, the Austin, Texas film-scene was originally jump-started with Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). The picture showed other local aspirants to film making that a quality film could be made in Austin. Richard Linklater is an alumni of the Austin regionalist school and his best films are all set (and made) in Texas – Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), Bernie (2011) and Boyhood (2002 - 2014).
There were hopes, at one time, that Minnesota would develop as a center for regionalist films. Jerome Hill, the scion of the wealthy St. Paul family of "Empire-Builder" James Hill, was interested in film-making, had the resources to make movies, and, in fact, directed a number of pictures, financing them through the locally-based Jerome Hill Foundation. Hill was a world-traveler and most of his films are set in Europe. None of his pictures really explore the local scene. Northern Lights is an example of regionalist film-making centered in the upper Midwest, but nothing really came of that movie – it didn’t lead to other productions in Minnesota or the Dakotas. For many years, it was thought that Al Milgrom, the longtime operator of the University Film Society, would be the nucleus around which local film productions would gather. Milgrom was friends with everyone in the film industry – he brought Jean-Luc Godard to Minneapolis as well as Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. He was arrested in 1978 for showing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom. I was in the theater that night and saw the cops come to seize the film from the projection booth. Milgrom was buddies with the documentary film maker Les Blank and worked with him to produce a film about Czechs in New Prague and Lonsdale. And Milgrom had other projects on-tap. But he was famously irascible and an unpleasant man – I shouldn’t use the past tense: he’s still around and will celebrate his 95th birthday this June. No one could really collaborate with Milgrom because of his prickly personality and so, despite a wealth of local talent, no film production group ever crystallized around him.
With advances in technology, just about anyone can make a movie today. Steven Soderburgh shot the entirety of his horror film, Unsane (2018) on a cell-phone (an I-Phone 7 plus with digital editing app.) and people who have seen the movie say that it looks great. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that regional films will be produced in the future in vast numbers. In the late forties, the famous French critic, Andre Bazin, argued that films were the product of the director in uniquely personal ways – the film’s mise-en-scene and camerawork reflected what Bazin called the camera-stylo (that is camera pencil) of the movie-maker. This notion seemed quixotic 60 years ago when moviemaking required large crews, heavy cameras, and complex lighting and sound recording. The fact that a feature film with Hollywood production values can now be made, more or less, on a cell-phone has finally brought to fruition the notion of the camera-stylo. Today everyone is a movie-maker.
Sunday, June 17, 2018
The King of Texas
Eagle Pennell was an American film maker who made two very successful low-budget independent films -- The Whole Shootin' Match (1977) and Last Night at the Alamo (1984). Pennell, who was born Glen Irwin Pinnell, was a middle-class kid raised in a college town in Texas; his father taught engineering at Texas A & M in College Station. Pennell had a happy childhood and led a charmed existence through the completion and first showings of The Whole Shootin' Match. He was tall and handsome and a basketball star in High School. He was talented and industrious, raising money for the micro-budget indie, The Whole Shootin' Match, from local businessmen in Austin, Texas. He made the right local contacts, knew gifted actors and actresses who would work for nothing, and put together his first film on a shoe-string, shooting with borrowed equipment on weekends so that his cast and crew could work their day jobs during the week. The resulting film was seen by the right people -- Roger Ebert gave it an enthusiastic review and it played at colleges and festivals, making no money at all, but assuring that Pennell would get another chance to make a bigger movie with real Hollywood stars and a real budget. The Whole Shootin' Match is not a masterpiece and has some baffling defects, but on the whole it is a very entertaining, although ultimately melancholy film -- it's not as lyrical as Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep which it closely resembles but it is funnier and has a better story. The film is the closely observed tale of two small-time businessmen, would-be wheeler-dealers, living on the margins of society -- the people that the elites call "white trash", alcoholic good ole boys with ambitions far beyond their humble stations in life. Sure enough, Hollywood beckoned to Pennell and he went there but did nothing, apparently, but drink and snort cocaine -- the projects that he pitched were half-baked and he burned his bridges with a series of misguided and drunken sexual assaults on female executives who might otherwise have been persuaded to help him. Pennell dried himself out, went back to Austin, Texas and started over again -- he gathered financing and made another micro-budget picture Last Night at the Alamo and, then, relapsed into hopeless alcoholism. He alienated all of his lovers and friends and ended-up homeless, living under a freeway overpass in Houston. He died a few days short of his 50th birthday. I've simplified his story but the outline is accurate -- Pennell made three other features when he emerged long enough from his alcoholic stupor to direct, but everyone agrees these pictures are scattered, rambling and only marginally coherent and not even very interesting. The titular King of Texas was a script that Pennell peddled in Hollywood -- the only part of the script completed was an opening scene in which a lost cowboy in a thicket encounters a huge feral longhorn. It was a great opening for a Western but there wasn't any movie behind the anecdotal first few shots.
The documentary is directed by Rene Pinnell, Eagle's nephew and the son of Charles Pinnell, Eagle's brother who recorded the plaintive mandolin and guitar soundtracks for The Whole Shootin' Match and Last Night at the Alamo. Rene Pinnell says that he didn't even know his uncle was a film maker until he was about twenty years old -- to him, he was just the old, offensive drunk guy who came around on holidays and ended up insulting everyone. There are aspects of the documentary that I don't like: too much is made of Eagle's grandpa who was a Midlands, Texas rancher -- his hagiography of the old West is misplaced: in the fifties, when Eagle was born, just about every family was one generation off the farm and so there isn't anything particularly special in this aspect of the film maker's biography except for the fact that Pennell had a particularly soft spot in his heart for the elegiac Westerns of John Ford. Two songs punctuate the film and seem out-of-place: the songs are good enough but they don't add anything to the picture. The movie luxuriates in a particularly dusty, broken-down Texas squalor that is unique, I think, to the Lone Star State. Eagle's collaborators from his glory days are now fat old alcoholics themselves although they still have a certain rusted-out charisma. (Richard Linklater sits on a couch under a spectacular poster for a movie, but he doesn't have anything memorable to say; Willie Nelson appears for a minute and tells one dirty joke -- but it's not clear why he's in the picture; Charles Pinnell runs a well-known recording studio in Austin and probably induced the musician to stop by for a few minutes.) The woman who worked on the screenplay for The Whole Shootin' Match, Linn Sutherland is a busty, good-looking Texas matron, tough as barbed wire who also is a hoarder -- she's got a spectacularly messy semi-trailer, it seems, where lots of artifacts are hidden in ruined filing cabinets or buried in plastic buckets. The film doesn't sugar-coat Eagle's nastiness -- he was the kind of man who reveled in bar fights and propositioned the sister of his bride at their wedding. And the ending of the film is suitably harrowing. But the picture ends on a note of very modest triumph -- a reasonably complete version of The Whole Shootin' Match was discovered in Berlin and it was restored for a revival during SXSW festival in Austin in 2007. Everyone was amazed at how good the film was. The movie ends with a sad shot of Charles Pinnell, Eagle's brother walking away from the brightly lit theater in a rainstorm. Eagle's other films are hard to see -- his most highly regarded picture, Last Night at the Alamo (as you might imagine the Alamo was a Houston bar scheduled for demolition) is inaccessible and, I suppose, awaits rediscovery. The movie makes a surprising admission -- Eagle Pennell needed collaborators, when he had great collaborators, he was a kind of home-grown genius; without collaborators, he was just a mean drunk. (The King of Texas is a companion disc to The Whole Shootin' Match as re-released on DVD by Watchmaker Films.)
The documentary is directed by Rene Pinnell, Eagle's nephew and the son of Charles Pinnell, Eagle's brother who recorded the plaintive mandolin and guitar soundtracks for The Whole Shootin' Match and Last Night at the Alamo. Rene Pinnell says that he didn't even know his uncle was a film maker until he was about twenty years old -- to him, he was just the old, offensive drunk guy who came around on holidays and ended up insulting everyone. There are aspects of the documentary that I don't like: too much is made of Eagle's grandpa who was a Midlands, Texas rancher -- his hagiography of the old West is misplaced: in the fifties, when Eagle was born, just about every family was one generation off the farm and so there isn't anything particularly special in this aspect of the film maker's biography except for the fact that Pennell had a particularly soft spot in his heart for the elegiac Westerns of John Ford. Two songs punctuate the film and seem out-of-place: the songs are good enough but they don't add anything to the picture. The movie luxuriates in a particularly dusty, broken-down Texas squalor that is unique, I think, to the Lone Star State. Eagle's collaborators from his glory days are now fat old alcoholics themselves although they still have a certain rusted-out charisma. (Richard Linklater sits on a couch under a spectacular poster for a movie, but he doesn't have anything memorable to say; Willie Nelson appears for a minute and tells one dirty joke -- but it's not clear why he's in the picture; Charles Pinnell runs a well-known recording studio in Austin and probably induced the musician to stop by for a few minutes.) The woman who worked on the screenplay for The Whole Shootin' Match, Linn Sutherland is a busty, good-looking Texas matron, tough as barbed wire who also is a hoarder -- she's got a spectacularly messy semi-trailer, it seems, where lots of artifacts are hidden in ruined filing cabinets or buried in plastic buckets. The film doesn't sugar-coat Eagle's nastiness -- he was the kind of man who reveled in bar fights and propositioned the sister of his bride at their wedding. And the ending of the film is suitably harrowing. But the picture ends on a note of very modest triumph -- a reasonably complete version of The Whole Shootin' Match was discovered in Berlin and it was restored for a revival during SXSW festival in Austin in 2007. Everyone was amazed at how good the film was. The movie ends with a sad shot of Charles Pinnell, Eagle's brother walking away from the brightly lit theater in a rainstorm. Eagle's other films are hard to see -- his most highly regarded picture, Last Night at the Alamo (as you might imagine the Alamo was a Houston bar scheduled for demolition) is inaccessible and, I suppose, awaits rediscovery. The movie makes a surprising admission -- Eagle Pennell needed collaborators, when he had great collaborators, he was a kind of home-grown genius; without collaborators, he was just a mean drunk. (The King of Texas is a companion disc to The Whole Shootin' Match as re-released on DVD by Watchmaker Films.)
Friday, June 15, 2018
Punishment or the Bad Liaisons
Punishment (or the Bad Liaisons) is an hour-long film contained within the group of 8 movies by the famous ethnographer Jean Rouch, all ostensibly pictures about African (or Africans) and recently issued by Icarus on DVD. Punishment doesn't have much to do with Africa but it's a little lapidary gem, an account of a curious experiment performed in the laboratory of Parisian streets and gardens. A pretty 17-year old girl (she sometimes says she is 18 or, even, 19) gets kicked out of her High School philosophy class. We see her hurrying across the Seine to the Left Bank entering the school and, then, when the teacher asks her a question (it has something to do with self-awareness and morality), the girl admits that she hasn't be listening and can't answer. The teacher expels her from school for the day and warns that if she behaves similarly in the future, she'll be thrown out of the lyceum for good. At loose ends, the girl wanders around Paris, looking for an "adventure". She encounters three men: a handsome and engaging student who tries to seduce her, a homesick African who may be gay, and an older man who says that he is a research scientist in physics and who ultimately entices her to his apartment. The student and the scientist are well-mannered, polite, and articulate, but it's obvious that they are interested in talking her into a sexual encounter. The young African is friendly but not otherwise aggressive. In each case, the girl says that she is looking for an adventure and that she wants these men to abandon everything to flee Paris with her. This demand discomfits all three men and they retreat from her in confused dismay. The movie documents the events of the day using a handheld camera that tracks the characters as if, indeed, they were protagonists in an ethnographic film. Paris as revealed in this film is the Paris of Jacques Rivette -- that is, the enchanted city. The Luxembourg gardens are ghostly with statues and big basins full of water and weird swimming creatures; with the African, the couple stroll through a natural history museum with hundreds of stuffed animals haphazardly assembled in the middle of a structure that looks like a train station. In one sequence, we see a large black seal laboriously pull itself out of the water. At night, mannequins in store windows beckon mysteriously. The girl has made an assignation with the student -- he is to meet her the next evening at a certain place. Although the ending is hard to interpret, I believe the last few minutes, shot at night-time, represent the next evening -- the events of the preceding day are crudely recapitulated: men approach her and try to make small talk but their intentions are clear and she rudely orders them away. We see her walk into the darkness where twenty feet from the camera she is suddenly illumined, rim-lit as a lonely wanderer in the darkness, and, then, a final shot seems to show the student at the place where she told him to meet, his profile illumined only the flare of his cigarette -- none of this is clear, however, and the ending is subject to debate.
The girl's demand on the men is eerily similar to Jesus' dictate to the rich young ruler (see Mark 10 for instance, although the story is also told in Luke and Matthew). If you want to follow me, Jesus demands, you must sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor and, then, you may come with me. The rich young ruler, like the three men in the movie, goes away from the encounter disheartened: he is not willing to make the leap of faith that Christ demands. Rouch's film has a fairy tale texture -- there are three encounters with three different men but they all seem to end in the same way. No one is willing to take the radical measures that the girl demands. It is unclear whether her demand is meant seriously, or is merely a way to keep the wolves at bay. But the men in the film are dismayed by what she requests and, at least, the shy and friendly African (she knows him from earlier) and the scientist libertine seem to take her demand as real and retreat from her. The libertine in particular is an interesting figure -- he is much older than the girl, meets her at the book-stalls along the Seine where she is searching for a volume of Chateaubriand. and actually gets her to his apartment where a print of one of Piranesi prisons or Carcieri decorates the wall of the room. We hear citations from the Marquis de Sade's Justine during this part of the film, highlighting the danger in which the girl has put herself. Although the man seems dangerous, he is discomfited by her radical request and, apparently, lets her go unscathed.
Rouch's little movie is cool, distanced, and mysterious. Some writers suggest that the movie was critically reviled. If so, the film should be re-evaluated.
The girl's demand on the men is eerily similar to Jesus' dictate to the rich young ruler (see Mark 10 for instance, although the story is also told in Luke and Matthew). If you want to follow me, Jesus demands, you must sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor and, then, you may come with me. The rich young ruler, like the three men in the movie, goes away from the encounter disheartened: he is not willing to make the leap of faith that Christ demands. Rouch's film has a fairy tale texture -- there are three encounters with three different men but they all seem to end in the same way. No one is willing to take the radical measures that the girl demands. It is unclear whether her demand is meant seriously, or is merely a way to keep the wolves at bay. But the men in the film are dismayed by what she requests and, at least, the shy and friendly African (she knows him from earlier) and the scientist libertine seem to take her demand as real and retreat from her. The libertine in particular is an interesting figure -- he is much older than the girl, meets her at the book-stalls along the Seine where she is searching for a volume of Chateaubriand. and actually gets her to his apartment where a print of one of Piranesi prisons or Carcieri decorates the wall of the room. We hear citations from the Marquis de Sade's Justine during this part of the film, highlighting the danger in which the girl has put herself. Although the man seems dangerous, he is discomfited by her radical request and, apparently, lets her go unscathed.
Rouch's little movie is cool, distanced, and mysterious. Some writers suggest that the movie was critically reviled. If so, the film should be re-evaluated.
Thursday, June 14, 2018
First Reformed
Any serious film about Christianity skirts the absurd. Tertullian identified the absurdity fundamental to Christianity in the second and third centuries A.D. The New Testament makes no secret about the fact that the central doctrines believed by Christians are a "scandal" (skandalon or "stumbling block") to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. The greatest movie ever made about faith and Christianity is Carl Dreyer's Ordet (1955), a film that is deeply and comically foolish (one character is said to have lost his mind because of Kierkegaard) until it's last two reels, imagery showing the resurrection of the dead that is either utterly ridiculous or transcendentally beautiful depending upon your point of view It's a measure of Paul Schrader's grave and often, stunningly, moving film, First Reformed (2018), that viewers are either transported into another ineffable realm or simply, and derisively, indifferent to the agony that the picture portrays. I admire the movie and suggest that it is a great film. And, yet, I also must admit that exactly where the film strains hardest for the sublime, it falls flat -- and, in fact, can't evade the criticism that elements of the picture are deeply silly.
A gaunt and ascetic-looking Ethan Hawke plays an alcoholic pastor, marooned and preaching to a tiny congregation gathered in the pews of 250-year old Church. At one point, a character calls the place a "souvenir church" -- this is because the congregation barely survives, in part, by selling tee-shirts and hats featuring First Reform as a historic place catering to tourists. The organ doesn't work -- indeed, both organs: the pastor is pissing blood and, apparently, dying from a variety of ailments. He starts a diary recording this dark night of the soul and, then, encounters a young woman, Marie, who asks him to counsel her troubled husband. Marie's husband is deeply disturbed, a man who considers humanity's transgressions against nature and our climate as unforgiveable sins. The young man, who has served time for some kind of eco-terrorism, wants Marie to have an abortion so that their child will not be born into the doomed, sinful, and polluted world that global climate change signifies. The young man argues about hope and the future with the pastor and, then, kills himself. In a harrowing scene, the Hawk's Pastor Toler, finds the corpse, head blown apart by shotgun blast. The young man's widow has discovered that her husband was on his way to transitioning from a eco-terrorist to a real terrorist -- there is vest equipped with powerful fused explosives hidden the man's garage. Toler is badly damaged -- his son died in Iraq and his wife divorced him over the pastor's decision to encourage the young man's military service. And, as the film progresses, he becomes increasingly deranged, although there is a core of sanity to his rebellion against the ruined world and its people.
This plot is skillfully positioned as a foil to the upcoming 250th anniversary celebration at First Reformed. The small andl ancient church, formerly a stop on the Underground Railway, has become a satellite to huge Mega-Church (it's sanctuary seats 5000) run by an avuncular and successful Black clergyman -- this figure is played very effectively by Cedric Kyle (the comedian otherwise known as Cedric the Entertainer). The 250th centennial is planned as a gathering of the wealthy and politically well-connected, including the CEO of a petrochemical energy company who doesn't believe in climate change and who is making money, Pastor Toler believes, from the rape of the environment. The CEO berates Toler for failing to effectively minister to the young man who committed suicide and, gradually, the pastor's illness and heavy drinking unhinge him. He decides that he will don the suicide bomber's vest and blow up First Reformed when the sanctuary is filled with powerful clergymen, politicians, and the noxious CEO.
Clearly Schrader is making a film that is a book-end to his great early success, the screenplay for Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Many scenes in the movie intentionally mirror images in Taxi Driver -- like Travis Bickel, Pastor Toler keeps a diary, here an open book of neatly handwritten notes lit luminously like the Holy Writ. (Throughout the film, Schrader highlights the Logos or the Word -- we see the Gospel printed on the façade of the Abundant Life Mega-church and projected as a mural on the cafeteria wall in that church; the dead man's Last Testament, another text, is also crucial to the film.) Toler drives around town to menacing music and sees the depravity of the Fallen World that he now seeks to punish by destroying those that he defines as wicked and depraved. These images cite the famous scenes of the taxi crawling the muck and slime of New York City. In several scenes, Toler looks at himself in his mirror and squares his shoulders as if to ask the reflection: "Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?" These images reference Taxi Driver effectively and express the fact that we are seeing Schrader's meditation on many of the same issues, most particularly the proper response to evil and depravity in the world, now 45 years after the first movie -- in effect, the film is a sort of diary as to how Schrader's views on this subject have evolved. Most of the movie involves still shots of grey and gloomy landscapes, images of a spectacularly polluted inlet, and long dialogues about hope and grace, the possibility of salvation and the duties of a Christian in the world. After the first of these debates, the pastor in a voice-over tells us that his conversation with the young, despairing man was like Jacob wrestling with the angel, a mortal combat with the highest of all stakes, and "it was exhilarating" Toler tells us. Most of First Reformed is exhilarating -- the debates are perfectly pitched, the dialogue wonderfully astute and witty and, even, realistic. The pastor of the Mega-Church is a role that seems ripe for snarky parody, but, in fact, Schrader writes the part generously -- the businessman-pastor is doing real good in the world and he tells Toler that he needs to "lighten up": "you're not always praying in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before the Passion." And he gently, even kindly, derides Toler for his unworldliness. Toler has a had a sexual relationship with a very compassionate and loving woman, a choir director at the Mega-Church, but he pushes her away as he descends into madness and the scene in the movie that is hardest to watch is not Toler wrapping his naked torso in barbed wire until he is covered in blood but his vicious verbal attack on a woman who's only crime is that she wishes him well.
Spoilers follow:
First Reformed is exquisitely shot. The camera moves in only a couple scenes, but, then, ecstatically. Further, the film is intentionally humble -- it is shot in the old pillar-boxed format of German pictures from the early 30's. The image is intentionally smaller than any modern screen on which the movie will be shown. The acting is superb and the dialogue exceptionally intelligent and gripping. So what is wrong with the film? The two scenes that Schrader highlights as evidence of the presence of some kind of divinity in the world don't really work -- these sequences are striking but they raise the wrong kind of questions in the viewer's mind. In the first of these transcendental scenes, the suicide's widow lies atop the pastor, stretched out like Christ crucified, and they agree to breathe in harmony with one another, face to face. But Toler has been drinking heavily and the question that afflicts the viewer is a simple and ugly one: what does his breath smell like? (The minister has been slugging down a bottle of whisky a night mixed with pink peptobismol -- this shown in a horrifying close-up.) After the manner of Tarkovsky's films, the two levitate. Tarkovsky was wise enough to content himself with mere levitation -- Schrader has the couple floating like a blimp over the milky way and, then, various landscapes, including those ruined by pollution. The scene would be much better and more moving without the magical mystery tour of the cosmos and the girl (played wonderfully by Amanda Seyfried) should have been shown averting her face for a moment and scrunching up her nose at the horrible bad breath of our sorrowful pastor. Similar cavils undercut the ecstatic climax. Just as he is about to commit suicide, Marie enters the Pastor's parsonage and embraces him. But we have just seen the poor bastard wrapping his shoulders and chest and belly in razor wire -- his torso is oozing blood from a hundred wounds. So when Marie wraps her arms around him and begins kissing his face and, then, hugging him to her, she is, of course, driving the barbed wire further into his mortified flesh. You can't have the scene with barbed wire and the big bear hugs at the end without considering that the girl's embrace may well be lethal and, if nothing, else would be agonizingly painful. I suppose I am interpreting the film too literally but these were the thoughts afflicting me at the climax -- thoughts that wholly subverted what Schrader was trying to accomplish. In an interview, Schrader has said that he intended that his hero drink Drano and die -- this is more in keeping with the exceptionally somber ending after the ending. The rejected choir director sings a terrifying, zombie-like version of "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" while we see the hero pouring his Drano cocktail and, then, embracing Marie. Right in the middle of the song, the soundtrack goes dead, shockingly, totally dead and there is a long black frame -- probably ten seconds of silence and darkness before the film's credits roll, all under starkly and uncompromisingly mournful-sounding closing music, really more of an ominous drone than any kind of tune. I think Schrader would have been better off with the suicide ending, but I respect him for trying to salvage some tiny trace of grace, some fugitive moment of redemption from these painful circumstances. Tragedy is facile. Schrader tries for something more profound than tragedy -- he doesn't get it right, but I salute him for the effort.
A gaunt and ascetic-looking Ethan Hawke plays an alcoholic pastor, marooned and preaching to a tiny congregation gathered in the pews of 250-year old Church. At one point, a character calls the place a "souvenir church" -- this is because the congregation barely survives, in part, by selling tee-shirts and hats featuring First Reform as a historic place catering to tourists. The organ doesn't work -- indeed, both organs: the pastor is pissing blood and, apparently, dying from a variety of ailments. He starts a diary recording this dark night of the soul and, then, encounters a young woman, Marie, who asks him to counsel her troubled husband. Marie's husband is deeply disturbed, a man who considers humanity's transgressions against nature and our climate as unforgiveable sins. The young man, who has served time for some kind of eco-terrorism, wants Marie to have an abortion so that their child will not be born into the doomed, sinful, and polluted world that global climate change signifies. The young man argues about hope and the future with the pastor and, then, kills himself. In a harrowing scene, the Hawk's Pastor Toler, finds the corpse, head blown apart by shotgun blast. The young man's widow has discovered that her husband was on his way to transitioning from a eco-terrorist to a real terrorist -- there is vest equipped with powerful fused explosives hidden the man's garage. Toler is badly damaged -- his son died in Iraq and his wife divorced him over the pastor's decision to encourage the young man's military service. And, as the film progresses, he becomes increasingly deranged, although there is a core of sanity to his rebellion against the ruined world and its people.
This plot is skillfully positioned as a foil to the upcoming 250th anniversary celebration at First Reformed. The small andl ancient church, formerly a stop on the Underground Railway, has become a satellite to huge Mega-Church (it's sanctuary seats 5000) run by an avuncular and successful Black clergyman -- this figure is played very effectively by Cedric Kyle (the comedian otherwise known as Cedric the Entertainer). The 250th centennial is planned as a gathering of the wealthy and politically well-connected, including the CEO of a petrochemical energy company who doesn't believe in climate change and who is making money, Pastor Toler believes, from the rape of the environment. The CEO berates Toler for failing to effectively minister to the young man who committed suicide and, gradually, the pastor's illness and heavy drinking unhinge him. He decides that he will don the suicide bomber's vest and blow up First Reformed when the sanctuary is filled with powerful clergymen, politicians, and the noxious CEO.
Clearly Schrader is making a film that is a book-end to his great early success, the screenplay for Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Many scenes in the movie intentionally mirror images in Taxi Driver -- like Travis Bickel, Pastor Toler keeps a diary, here an open book of neatly handwritten notes lit luminously like the Holy Writ. (Throughout the film, Schrader highlights the Logos or the Word -- we see the Gospel printed on the façade of the Abundant Life Mega-church and projected as a mural on the cafeteria wall in that church; the dead man's Last Testament, another text, is also crucial to the film.) Toler drives around town to menacing music and sees the depravity of the Fallen World that he now seeks to punish by destroying those that he defines as wicked and depraved. These images cite the famous scenes of the taxi crawling the muck and slime of New York City. In several scenes, Toler looks at himself in his mirror and squares his shoulders as if to ask the reflection: "Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?" These images reference Taxi Driver effectively and express the fact that we are seeing Schrader's meditation on many of the same issues, most particularly the proper response to evil and depravity in the world, now 45 years after the first movie -- in effect, the film is a sort of diary as to how Schrader's views on this subject have evolved. Most of the movie involves still shots of grey and gloomy landscapes, images of a spectacularly polluted inlet, and long dialogues about hope and grace, the possibility of salvation and the duties of a Christian in the world. After the first of these debates, the pastor in a voice-over tells us that his conversation with the young, despairing man was like Jacob wrestling with the angel, a mortal combat with the highest of all stakes, and "it was exhilarating" Toler tells us. Most of First Reformed is exhilarating -- the debates are perfectly pitched, the dialogue wonderfully astute and witty and, even, realistic. The pastor of the Mega-Church is a role that seems ripe for snarky parody, but, in fact, Schrader writes the part generously -- the businessman-pastor is doing real good in the world and he tells Toler that he needs to "lighten up": "you're not always praying in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before the Passion." And he gently, even kindly, derides Toler for his unworldliness. Toler has a had a sexual relationship with a very compassionate and loving woman, a choir director at the Mega-Church, but he pushes her away as he descends into madness and the scene in the movie that is hardest to watch is not Toler wrapping his naked torso in barbed wire until he is covered in blood but his vicious verbal attack on a woman who's only crime is that she wishes him well.
Spoilers follow:
First Reformed is exquisitely shot. The camera moves in only a couple scenes, but, then, ecstatically. Further, the film is intentionally humble -- it is shot in the old pillar-boxed format of German pictures from the early 30's. The image is intentionally smaller than any modern screen on which the movie will be shown. The acting is superb and the dialogue exceptionally intelligent and gripping. So what is wrong with the film? The two scenes that Schrader highlights as evidence of the presence of some kind of divinity in the world don't really work -- these sequences are striking but they raise the wrong kind of questions in the viewer's mind. In the first of these transcendental scenes, the suicide's widow lies atop the pastor, stretched out like Christ crucified, and they agree to breathe in harmony with one another, face to face. But Toler has been drinking heavily and the question that afflicts the viewer is a simple and ugly one: what does his breath smell like? (The minister has been slugging down a bottle of whisky a night mixed with pink peptobismol -- this shown in a horrifying close-up.) After the manner of Tarkovsky's films, the two levitate. Tarkovsky was wise enough to content himself with mere levitation -- Schrader has the couple floating like a blimp over the milky way and, then, various landscapes, including those ruined by pollution. The scene would be much better and more moving without the magical mystery tour of the cosmos and the girl (played wonderfully by Amanda Seyfried) should have been shown averting her face for a moment and scrunching up her nose at the horrible bad breath of our sorrowful pastor. Similar cavils undercut the ecstatic climax. Just as he is about to commit suicide, Marie enters the Pastor's parsonage and embraces him. But we have just seen the poor bastard wrapping his shoulders and chest and belly in razor wire -- his torso is oozing blood from a hundred wounds. So when Marie wraps her arms around him and begins kissing his face and, then, hugging him to her, she is, of course, driving the barbed wire further into his mortified flesh. You can't have the scene with barbed wire and the big bear hugs at the end without considering that the girl's embrace may well be lethal and, if nothing, else would be agonizingly painful. I suppose I am interpreting the film too literally but these were the thoughts afflicting me at the climax -- thoughts that wholly subverted what Schrader was trying to accomplish. In an interview, Schrader has said that he intended that his hero drink Drano and die -- this is more in keeping with the exceptionally somber ending after the ending. The rejected choir director sings a terrifying, zombie-like version of "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" while we see the hero pouring his Drano cocktail and, then, embracing Marie. Right in the middle of the song, the soundtrack goes dead, shockingly, totally dead and there is a long black frame -- probably ten seconds of silence and darkness before the film's credits roll, all under starkly and uncompromisingly mournful-sounding closing music, really more of an ominous drone than any kind of tune. I think Schrader would have been better off with the suicide ending, but I respect him for trying to salvage some tiny trace of grace, some fugitive moment of redemption from these painful circumstances. Tragedy is facile. Schrader tries for something more profound than tragedy -- he doesn't get it right, but I salute him for the effort.
Wednesday, June 13, 2018
La Victoria at the Paramount Theater
La Victoria is a three-piece ensemble from Los Angelos that plays Mexican popular tunes. The group consists of three young women, all of them attractive, who sing in close harmony while playing their instruments: the songs are performed in arrangements for violin, rhythm guitar, and a big bass guitar that provides a sort oom-pah-pah underpinning to the music. (Mariachi music, often, sounds like a demented polka.) The group was advertised as a mariachi band but, of course, this was untrue. In fact, one of the girls indicated apologetically at the outset that a true mariachi band would include "about twenty trumpets and thirty violins." I have heard mariachi bands in Mexico City and they exude an aura of suave menace. Further, the musicians play at ear-splitting volume -- the trumpets, in particular, can be deafening. These young women, of course, were not menacing at all and their songs were very tastefully, and, one might say, even respectfully presented -- with a few exceptions, the musicians treated the music with kid gloves. Much of the singing was very beautiful. The woman playing the rhythm guitar, in particular, had the ability to insert a kind of choked sob in her rendition of songs that were, apparently, very well-known to the Hispanic people in the audience. All of the harmonies were exceptionally well-managed and the woman playing the fiddle maintained perfect pitch as she nimbly performed the little dance-like melodies that ornament these songs. Her singing was also highly expressive. The larger woman playing the bass guitar sang in lower register, belting out her tunes with great enthusiasm. Some of the Mexican-Americans in the audience sang along with the trio, shouted encouragement to them, and danced in the aisles. The show was about one hour long, including gallop-like dance tune as an encore (at the request of the Latinos in the audience), and, also, featured a tango, some soulful ballads, and two songs performed in English, one by Carol King and the other Willie Nelson's "Crazy."
A curious aspect of this concert was my strong sense of deja vu. From the moment, the young women appeared on stage in their matching black dresses and black high-heels, I knew that I had seen them perform before. But I was (and am) completely unable to recall where and when I had earlier heard them play. As they performed, I looked up and saw the disco ball above the proscenium arch of the Paramount stage. The mirror-ball hangs just above the strange little oval cartouche of a seal balancing a tiny globe on his nose. The Paramount Theater's interior is a Moorish fantasy with fairy-tale balconies and strange funereal urns perched around the perimeter of the hall. The arched ceiling is blue and sprinkled with little flickering lights to simulate stars and fluffy clouds sometimes are projected overhead, rolling across the night sky. The women on stage stood between two tall red velvet curtains, against a black flat, and the seats from which the audience was watching them were also scarlet. As I watched the concert, I experienced the feeling that I was in a David Lynch film -- the people around me were mostly grotesque with old age and the Latinos in the corner shouted out as if they were watching a bull-fight and it was odd to see these young, statuesque women performing for a group of elderly white people enlivened only slightly by a couple dozen immigrants with their squalling children. Before the concert, a man and a woman spoke. The woman said a few words and, then, the man, an old fellow in baggy pants, talked about how he had once lived in El Paso and this music that we were about to hear was so much from the heart, "Corazon" he said. His pants fell about his loins in such a way that his genitals were clearly visible under the loose black fabric. Then, the music began and, with it, the conviction that I had always been here, that this music was everlasting, that I would remain in this hall with its Moorish turrets and red velvet curtains and ivory balconies forever more.
A curious aspect of this concert was my strong sense of deja vu. From the moment, the young women appeared on stage in their matching black dresses and black high-heels, I knew that I had seen them perform before. But I was (and am) completely unable to recall where and when I had earlier heard them play. As they performed, I looked up and saw the disco ball above the proscenium arch of the Paramount stage. The mirror-ball hangs just above the strange little oval cartouche of a seal balancing a tiny globe on his nose. The Paramount Theater's interior is a Moorish fantasy with fairy-tale balconies and strange funereal urns perched around the perimeter of the hall. The arched ceiling is blue and sprinkled with little flickering lights to simulate stars and fluffy clouds sometimes are projected overhead, rolling across the night sky. The women on stage stood between two tall red velvet curtains, against a black flat, and the seats from which the audience was watching them were also scarlet. As I watched the concert, I experienced the feeling that I was in a David Lynch film -- the people around me were mostly grotesque with old age and the Latinos in the corner shouted out as if they were watching a bull-fight and it was odd to see these young, statuesque women performing for a group of elderly white people enlivened only slightly by a couple dozen immigrants with their squalling children. Before the concert, a man and a woman spoke. The woman said a few words and, then, the man, an old fellow in baggy pants, talked about how he had once lived in El Paso and this music that we were about to hear was so much from the heart, "Corazon" he said. His pants fell about his loins in such a way that his genitals were clearly visible under the loose black fabric. Then, the music began and, with it, the conviction that I had always been here, that this music was everlasting, that I would remain in this hall with its Moorish turrets and red velvet curtains and ivory balconies forever more.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (film group essay)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
1.
Throughout history, many nations have had empires.
Russia is the only empire to have had a nation.
This truism about Russia is often expressed. What does it mean?
England was a small country that, once, claimed colonial possession of much of the world. When the empire was stripped away, the United Kingdom remained. The same might be said of Spain, Belgium, or France. In each case, a smaller European nation claimed colonies in other parts of the world. As those colonies achieved independence, the home country became less prosperous but remained fundamentally the same.
By contrast, Russia has always been a federation. The Rus are a Slavic-Scandinavian people living around Novgorad in the 10th century. After raiding and wars, the Rus established their capital at Kiev. Thus, at the outset of Russian history, the Rus rule not from "Russia" but from the Ukraine. After the Russians were decimated by the Golden Horde (the Mongols) in the 13th century, the homeland shrunk to the Kingdom of Muscovy. Successive Russian kings established inroads into Siberian (Tatar) Khanates, re-asserted hegemony over the Ukraine, and, then, waged war on their borders ultimately clashing with the Ottomans in Crimea and the South and the Poles in the East. By the 17th century, Russia claimed parts of Poland, all of Siberia and, indeed, beyond to Alaska and had expanded in the south to the Black Sea. With each expansion, Russia absorbed existing people and polities. The empire of Russia was defined by the use of the Russian language and the territorial extent of the practice of the Russian Orthodox religion.
The point is that Russian, originally ruled from its colony in Ukrainian Kiev, has always defined itself as an empire. If the empire fails, or is stripped away, Mother Russia also fails, hence, Russia’s historical anxiety about the loss of its imperial territories.
The great filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov fell victim to this system of belief. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, Paradjanov was regarded with suspicion by the authorities in Moscow and Leningrad. He was an outsider or to use the term du jour – an "Other". And his films are not about Russia, but about people living in the parts of the Soviet Union who don’t speak Russian and, in fact, may be Muslim. The enthusiasm with which Paradjanov depicted these non-Russians led inescapably to the conviction that the director himself might not be wholly sympathetic to the Communist project of assimilating ethnic minorities. This had grave consequences for Paradjanov.
2.
There is another way to imagine Sergei Paradjanov’s tragic persecution by Soviet authorities. Authoritarian regimes instinctively fear great art and seek to suppress those artists capable of achieving greatness. The three greatest Soviet filmmakers in the post-Stalinist era, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexei German, and Sergei Paradjanov, all experienced severe censorship of their works. Even Eisenstein, the darling of the Bolshevik revolution, endured intimidation and, even, threats during the last decade of his life – Eisenstein’s final film, his two-part Ivan the Terrible, was considered as an oblique commentary on Stalin and the director feared that he might be purged on that basis. German’s films often were released five to ten years after their production on the basis of official censorship. Tarkovsky fled the Soviet Union, made his last two pictures in Italy and Sweden respectively, dying in exile. Paradjanov’s pictures were all suppressed – indeed, after Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was briefly shown in the Russia, none of his later films were released in the Soviet Union.
Great art subverts conventional narratives and perspectives. Authoritarian regimes find this disturbing and work to confound this sort of artistry.
3.
And there is another way to think about Paradjanov’s life. Russian artists often consider suffering to be prerequisite to the highest order of creativity. The artist must suffer for his art – the paradigm example in Russia is Dostoevsky, an epileptic and the survivor of Siberian labor camps. Paradjanov’s biography fits within this frame of reference.
4.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was released in 1964. The film was initially highly praised by Soviet authorities and the film critics beholding to them. Later, suspicions arose that the film was, perhaps, politically incorrect.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is based on a novel by the Ukrainian writer Mykhailovych Kotsiubynsky. This writer was born in 1864 and died in 1913. He was a progressive and his novels are considered examples of ethnographic realism. (Shadows documents the folkways of the Hutsuls, a tribe of Slavic mountain people residing the Carpathian Mountains on the border between Slovakia and the Ukraine.) The Soviets regarded Kotsiubynsky with some suspicion – in the early 1890's, he had been a member of the secret Society of Taras, a political organization that advocated for the independence of the Ukraine.
Even more problematic was the fate of Kotsiubynsky’s eldest son, Yuriy. Yuriy Kotsiubynsky was a swashbucking figure and the founder of the Red Cossacks of the Army of the Ukrainian Republic. The Red Cossacks battled the Whites and were Communists but there was some skepticism as to whether they were fighting for the Soviet Union or the independence of the Ukraine. Yuriy was a courageous cavalryman and rose to high level in the Soviet Federation, but he was denounced as a secret Trotskyite in 1937 and shot by one of Stalin’s firing squads. During the thaw in 1955, he was posthumously rehabilitated as a hero of the Soviet Union.
5.
There was another way in which Paradjanov was "other" or an outsider – he seems to have been either bisexual or homosexual. Homosexual acts were criminal in the Soviet Union. So the authorities had a basis for exerting intense pressure on him.
Paradjanov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia to Armenian parents in 1924. His parents are described as artistically inclined. In 1945, as the War was ending, Paradjanov traveled to Moscow where he enrolled Gerasimov School of Cinematography (VGIK). VGIK was one of the world’s greatest film schools – Paradjanov was taught by Dovzhenko (whose influence in apparent in Shadows) and Lev Kuleshov among others. Something went wrong in 1948. Under circumstances that remain unclear, Paradjanov was arrested and charged with committing a homosexual act – the other person involved in what seems to have been entrapment was MGB officer, that is, a member of the secret police. Paradjanov was sentenced to five years in prison, but, then, after three months, this term was commuted and he was released. (Presumably, he made some kind of agreement with the Secret Police.)
Perhaps to demonstrate that he was heterosexual, Paradjanov married a young woman who was of Muslim Tartar ethnicity. She converted from Islam to the Eastern Orthodox religion that was an important element of Paradjanov’s Armenian identity. ("Everyone knows that I have three homelands: I was born in Georgia, I have lived in the Ukraine, and I will die in Armenia.") This led to tragedy: her brothers murdered her in a so-called "honor slaying" in Moscow in 1950. Paradjanov re-married a Ukrainian woman by whom he had one son. That marriage occurred in 1956.
Returning to the film industry, Paradjanov made four or five documentaries and, then, directed a half-dozen feature films for Dovzhenko Film Studios (a State studio in Kiev helmed by the famous Alexander Dovzhenko). Paradjanov has termed these films "garbage" but some of them might be interesting. (Great directors tend to leave their fingerprints on the movies that they make: Scorsese’s juvenalia directed for Roger Corman, for instance, Boxcar Bertha, are largely meretricious trash but they still have glimmers of the brilliance that Scorsese would display a few years later in films over which he had more control.) One of these films adapts a Moldavian fairy tale and was made for children. Another is a so-called Kolkhaz musical – an all-singing and dancing musical replete with love stories and comic interludes set on a merry collective farm. Ukrainian Rhapsody is a melodrama about war-time lovers – it also features songs. Another film was rescued by Paradjanov when the leading lady was killed in an accident on-location – Flower on the Stone (1962) is about a love-affair between male and female comrades working in a mine. The leading lady apparently fell into the mine-shaft and died. The director up to the date of the accident was removed from the film (and, presumably, sent to Siberia). Paradjanov seems to have re-cut the movie into an anti-Christian propaganda film – the story was altered to involve a hero thwarting efforts by a Christian cult to infiltrate the mine-workers union. Paradjanov disdained the film calling it the "turd on the stone."
Paradjanov’s first fully developed and independently controlled film was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. The picture arose out of Paradjanov’s friendship with Andrei Tarkovsky. Paradjanov admired Tarkovsky’s poetic Ivan’s Childhood (1961) and was inspired by his friend’s example to attempt something more poetic and personal in character. Shadows was a world-wide sensation and won many prizes. Soviet critics were profuse in their praise of the film and, in fact, authorized the picture, made in a dialect of Ukrainian so obscure that most Ukrainians couldn’t understand it, to be shown without revision. (The censors initially demanded that Paradjanov dub the picture into Russian. But he refused and the censors withdrew their demand.) Within a few years, however, the film was re-evaluated and came to be regarded as implicitly subversive and self-indulgent.
Traveling to Armenia, Paradjanov made the picture often regarded as his most successful and personal achievement, Sayat-Nova released in the West as The Color of Pomegranates (1969). The film is non-narrative, comprising incidents in the life of the great medieval Armenian poet, Arutian, the "King of Song." Tarkovsky’s influence is evident in the film – clearly, Paradjanov has carefully studied the Russian filmmaker’s Andrei Rublev, a long and episodic film about a medieval painter of icons. Paradjanov’s approach is different and his budget was minuscule – in some ways, the picture, an unearthly combination of kitsch and surreal beauty, is more akin to one of Kenneth Anger’s underground films than a Hollywood bio-pic. Beyond any doubt, the The Color of Pomegranates contests Soviet norms as to socialist realism and implies a strongly nationalistic element in Paradjanov’s imagination. Soviet authorities repressed the film and, although it was shown internationally at film festivals, the picture was not premiered in the Soviet Union until 1979.
In 1973, Paradjanov gave a speech in Minsk decrying the lack of imagination in the Soviet film industry. The speech was apparently very funny. Three months later, Paradjanov was indicted for "art trafficking, pornography, homosexual rape, currency manipulation, and incitement to suicide." (At the time, he was working on a screenplay for a film based on some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales.) He was duly convicted, notwithstanding the protest of many members of the Soviet intelligentsia, and sentenced to five years labor in prison. (Paradjanov, who was skilled in sewing and embroidery, was put in a prison shop sewing burlap bags. He excelled at this work and began to create small fabric dolls from loose ends of material in the factory. During periods when he was unable to make films, he made dolls, ceramics, sculpture as well as paintings and made collages.) Paradjanov served four years of his five year term – he was released in 1978 after the intervention of Francis Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scorsese, many Russian intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers (most notably Tarkovsky) and John Updike.
After his imprisonment, Paradjanov was impoverished. He lived homeless on the streets of Yerevan in Armenia for a while. Tarkovsky, distressed at his friend’s plight, gave him a ring to pawn – Paradjanov preferred to retain the ring as a symbol of his friendship with Tarkovsky. In 1982, he was in prison again, this time in Tbilisi where he served a nine month sentence again on obscure and, probably, politically motivated charges. By 1983, he was back in Kiev working at the Dovhenko Studios where he made The Legend of the Suram Fortress, another overtly nationalistic film – the movie concerns a fortress defending Georgia against Muslim Tartar invaders: the fortress can not stand unless a young warrior is buried alive in its huge walls. This movie is very remarkable, non-narrative, and disturbing – the motif of being buried alive probably refers, at least, obliquely to Paradjanov’s imprisonment. Of course, the film was suppressed by the authorities.
Paradjanov’s last feature was 1989, Ashik Karib. The movie is an adaptation of story by Mikhail Lermontov about a hero who must wander 1001 days, performing various labors, in order to win the right to marry his beloved. The film was shot in Azerbaijan, also was clearly nationalistic, and, therefore, suppressed – the picture was not shown in Russia until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film is non-narrative, dedicated to the spirit of Andrei Tarkovsky, who had died, and ends with a dove descending – an image, Paradjanov explained, of Tarkovsky.
Seriously ill, Paradjanov’s began work on another film, The Confession. He shot three days of footage and, then, collapsed. His imprisonments under harsh conditions had damaged his health. He died in July 1990, age 66. His home in Yerevan, Armenia is now a museum and shrine displaying many of the dolls and other artworks he made while in prison.
6.
Some critics regard narrative, because sequential, as horizontal – one thing follows another. Vertical interpolations into the narrative may be either abysmal or supernatural – a demon can arise from the earth and an angel may visit from heaven. The horizontal or narrative plane insists upon causality. The vertical dimension interrupts causality.
Very early in Paradjanov’s Shadows, the camera appears high above the protagonists who are working as foresters. The camera dives toward the ground, swooping downward. This camera movement simulates the irruption into the narrative of forces that are arbitrary, unpredictable, and, possibly, supernatural. The camera’s motion signifies that the world of the forgotten ancestors is not imagined according to the dictates of realism. Here, anything can happen.
7.
There is a sequence in Andrei Rublev that is particularly haunting. It is Spring and peasants have lit bonfires in the woods and everyone seems to be drunk. The young women have all stripped off their clothes and they wander through the twilight offering themselves sexually to the men that they meet. With its leaping flames and shadowy forests filled with the gliding nude women, the landscape seems enchanted. The pagan gods have returned to earth and, for one night, from dawn to dusk, they walk among their people.
Paradjanov’s film acknowledges the fact that profoundly pagan currents of emotion and belief are very close to the surface in Russia and the Ukraine. In some respects, Paradjanov’s film falls within a mainstream of Russian art – the celebration of the pagan roots of the Russian soul. Stravinsky works this vein majestically in his 1913 The Rite of Spring, the score written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. As in Petrushka and The Firebird ballets, Stravinsky uses old fairy tales and legends for his inspiration. In The Rite of Spring, girls and boys dance ecstatically and, then, a young woman, the Chosen One, is selected to dance herself to death in the center of a circle of Elders. This kind of material, bloody, ecstatic, and pagan, is central to Shadows. There is a veneer of Christianity – people kiss icons and there are Eastern Orthodox churches, but what seems to go on in those churches is not much like a Christian worhip service. Ultimately, the "blood" of the people is not Christian nor is it even really European – this is shown to us when a man strikes another down with his small-headed axe. The gush of snow from the dying man is shown as a scarlet horses galloping wildly away. The blood is unregulated and fierce; it can not be restrained by Christian sacraments. Sorcerers conjure the dead or bewitch with love potions. The world is full of wild, perilous, untrammeled forces.
8.
In the film’s final shot, we see a kind of mosaic – in this case a window with many mullions and panes of glass, each one containing a small blonde boy’s face. The little boys are looking out to where a man is building a casket for the hero, Ivanko. The procession of faces, each occupying a separate frame, is some kind of metaphor for film – a movie is made up of many frames, each containing a picture. Presumably, the little boys will be told the story of Ivanko’s life and it will become a legend to them and they will tell the legend and, in the end, Paradjanov will make it into a film. So the final shot embodies both the creation of a legend, the oblique way in which folklore forms, that is, by implication and indirection – we don’t actually see what the little boys are watching – and, finally, provides us with a form that is equivalent to the vessel that will later contain the legend, the frames of Paradjanov’s film.
9.
In some ways, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is so rich and self-indulgent that, it seems, the movie of movies, that is, a template of many other kinds of films. The wild camera movements and the lush colors and some elements of the editing seem to have influenced director’s like Baz Luhrman (Romeo and Juliet directed by Luhrman, of course, is a story kin to the one that Paradjanov shows in his film). Some of the luminous archaic images have the quality of frames from movies by Guy Madden – there is a wild, delirious silent film sensibility at work in the movie. Underground films like those made by Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren seem to be referenced in some sequences – the ornate and lurid colors as well as the bizarre and, even, campy costumes cause some scenes to be redolent of Anger’s homosexually-inflected films like Kustom Kar Kommandos and Scorpio Rising. This is in line with J. Hoberman’s argument that the movie the film most resembles of Stan Brakhage’s experimental picture Dog Star Man made in the same year that Shadows was produced. I think that many of the film’s more abstract sequences look very much like the film diaries of the Jonas and Adolphus Mekas, particularly their diary of visit to their native Lithuania. It is equally true that many compositions in the movie echo images in Eisenstein, particularly, the technicolor feast sequence in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Part Two). And, of course, some shots, particularly those with figures standing amidst black and jagged spear-like ruins of huts, directly cite Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood. The influence of Dovhenko also lies heavily over parts of the film – in this regard, one might cite lyrical sequences in the great Ukrainian director’s film Earth (1930), including the scene where the young widow runs naked through her house upon hearing of her husband’s death or the concluding image of apples in the rain. But with all of these references and citations, the Shadows has its own bizarre identity – it is both all movies at once and the specific creation of specific artist.
10.
An influential book in political philosophy, Leo Strauss’ Persecution and Writing (1952), proposes that most ancient and early modern philosophers composed their works under regimes that were despotic. As a consequence, the writings made by these philosophers conceal their heterodox opinions under a veneer of surface piety. Many of these writings pay obeisance to the tyrant, but, in fact, contain concealed subtexts that undercut the tyrant’s authority.
A similar situation is manifest in films made in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. The most successful and effective films made in East Germany were a series of highly imaginative and brilliantly designed fairy tale films – this cycle of films began with Wolfgang Staudt’s The Story of Little Mook and continued through the seventies with pictures such as Heart of Stone, Snow White, Turli’s Adventure (a version of Pinocchio), and the ineffably weird The Singing, Ringing Tree. These movies evaded political questions that would inevitably have been raised by so-called realistic films documenting daily life in the DDR. In the Soviet Union, serious filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Paradjanov made movies ostensibly remote from naturalistic concerns – Tarkovsky sought refuge in the remote past (Andrei Rublev) or outer space (Solaris) or science fiction (Stalker). Paradjanov made films about ancient legends and poems. His problem, however, was that the settings of these tales, Armenia, Carpathia, Azerbaijin and the Transcaucasus could be interpreted as subversive of the Soviet Union’s "great" or "noble lie" – namely, that Communism had created a seamless union of like-minded nations all striving for the same utopian future.
Paradjanov seems apolitical to me. But to be apolitical was also a betrayal of the regime. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors shows a world driven by ancient feuds, superstition, and various forms of demonism and the supernatural. The world that he imagines is certainly not one driven by economic or other factors susceptible to Marxist interpretation. This is Paradjanov’s double-bind, his dilemma – the more remote his films from daily life (and his later films are highly experimental and abstract), the more personal those films became. And he had the misfortune to be laboring under a regime of collectives, a regime that denied the authenticity of purely subjective and purely personal.
11.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was hailed as inaugurating a Soviet New Wave cinema. Critics have called it "the most plastic fantastic" of all Soviet era films and "not so much lyric as lysergic." There is no widely held consensus as to whatwhat the film exactly means. Indeed, there isn’t even any agreement as to whether the end of film is happy or sad.
Some critics argue that the film celebrates the indomitable vitality and life force in the Hutsul people. These critics argue that the movie shows us that life "will find a way" – that life goes on, although individuals are slaughtered. I don’t buy this analysis. Certainly, the official Soviet justification for the film would adopt this sort of sentimental interpretation. But I think it’s wrong.
Other critics believe that the film is fundamentally experimental and non-narrative – in this interpretation, the slender, obliquely presented narrative is just an excuse for a series of hallucinatory camera motions and surreal montage. Some critics have gone so far as to say that the camera is a character in the film and that it actually causes the events that it renders as pictures. I like this argument because it is as crazed as the film, but don’t think it holds water in the long run. Critics who assert this argument are, in effect, simply restating a variant of the argument that movie’s plot is merely a framework on which to hang various surreal sequences. These critics define the film as a "second person narrative" – "you", here the camera are doing various things and these things that "you" record form the film.
In my view, the film suggests that love is a powerful force that may defeat the grave. But this is the pure love of the children of the feuding families, love that exists before sexuality imposes its meaning on that emotion. Paradjanov seems to think love between adult men and women induces a sort of bondage – it requires a willingness to bear a yoke as well as self-imposed blindness. (Thus, the bizarre wedding sequence, a scene that has no ethnological basis at all.)
It’s hard to interpret a film that is so obscure in some ways that no one has yet developed a plausible theory as to the meaning of the title itself.
1.
Throughout history, many nations have had empires.
Russia is the only empire to have had a nation.
This truism about Russia is often expressed. What does it mean?
England was a small country that, once, claimed colonial possession of much of the world. When the empire was stripped away, the United Kingdom remained. The same might be said of Spain, Belgium, or France. In each case, a smaller European nation claimed colonies in other parts of the world. As those colonies achieved independence, the home country became less prosperous but remained fundamentally the same.
By contrast, Russia has always been a federation. The Rus are a Slavic-Scandinavian people living around Novgorad in the 10th century. After raiding and wars, the Rus established their capital at Kiev. Thus, at the outset of Russian history, the Rus rule not from "Russia" but from the Ukraine. After the Russians were decimated by the Golden Horde (the Mongols) in the 13th century, the homeland shrunk to the Kingdom of Muscovy. Successive Russian kings established inroads into Siberian (Tatar) Khanates, re-asserted hegemony over the Ukraine, and, then, waged war on their borders ultimately clashing with the Ottomans in Crimea and the South and the Poles in the East. By the 17th century, Russia claimed parts of Poland, all of Siberia and, indeed, beyond to Alaska and had expanded in the south to the Black Sea. With each expansion, Russia absorbed existing people and polities. The empire of Russia was defined by the use of the Russian language and the territorial extent of the practice of the Russian Orthodox religion.
The point is that Russian, originally ruled from its colony in Ukrainian Kiev, has always defined itself as an empire. If the empire fails, or is stripped away, Mother Russia also fails, hence, Russia’s historical anxiety about the loss of its imperial territories.
The great filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov fell victim to this system of belief. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, Paradjanov was regarded with suspicion by the authorities in Moscow and Leningrad. He was an outsider or to use the term du jour – an "Other". And his films are not about Russia, but about people living in the parts of the Soviet Union who don’t speak Russian and, in fact, may be Muslim. The enthusiasm with which Paradjanov depicted these non-Russians led inescapably to the conviction that the director himself might not be wholly sympathetic to the Communist project of assimilating ethnic minorities. This had grave consequences for Paradjanov.
2.
There is another way to imagine Sergei Paradjanov’s tragic persecution by Soviet authorities. Authoritarian regimes instinctively fear great art and seek to suppress those artists capable of achieving greatness. The three greatest Soviet filmmakers in the post-Stalinist era, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexei German, and Sergei Paradjanov, all experienced severe censorship of their works. Even Eisenstein, the darling of the Bolshevik revolution, endured intimidation and, even, threats during the last decade of his life – Eisenstein’s final film, his two-part Ivan the Terrible, was considered as an oblique commentary on Stalin and the director feared that he might be purged on that basis. German’s films often were released five to ten years after their production on the basis of official censorship. Tarkovsky fled the Soviet Union, made his last two pictures in Italy and Sweden respectively, dying in exile. Paradjanov’s pictures were all suppressed – indeed, after Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was briefly shown in the Russia, none of his later films were released in the Soviet Union.
Great art subverts conventional narratives and perspectives. Authoritarian regimes find this disturbing and work to confound this sort of artistry.
3.
And there is another way to think about Paradjanov’s life. Russian artists often consider suffering to be prerequisite to the highest order of creativity. The artist must suffer for his art – the paradigm example in Russia is Dostoevsky, an epileptic and the survivor of Siberian labor camps. Paradjanov’s biography fits within this frame of reference.
4.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was released in 1964. The film was initially highly praised by Soviet authorities and the film critics beholding to them. Later, suspicions arose that the film was, perhaps, politically incorrect.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is based on a novel by the Ukrainian writer Mykhailovych Kotsiubynsky. This writer was born in 1864 and died in 1913. He was a progressive and his novels are considered examples of ethnographic realism. (Shadows documents the folkways of the Hutsuls, a tribe of Slavic mountain people residing the Carpathian Mountains on the border between Slovakia and the Ukraine.) The Soviets regarded Kotsiubynsky with some suspicion – in the early 1890's, he had been a member of the secret Society of Taras, a political organization that advocated for the independence of the Ukraine.
Even more problematic was the fate of Kotsiubynsky’s eldest son, Yuriy. Yuriy Kotsiubynsky was a swashbucking figure and the founder of the Red Cossacks of the Army of the Ukrainian Republic. The Red Cossacks battled the Whites and were Communists but there was some skepticism as to whether they were fighting for the Soviet Union or the independence of the Ukraine. Yuriy was a courageous cavalryman and rose to high level in the Soviet Federation, but he was denounced as a secret Trotskyite in 1937 and shot by one of Stalin’s firing squads. During the thaw in 1955, he was posthumously rehabilitated as a hero of the Soviet Union.
5.
There was another way in which Paradjanov was "other" or an outsider – he seems to have been either bisexual or homosexual. Homosexual acts were criminal in the Soviet Union. So the authorities had a basis for exerting intense pressure on him.
Paradjanov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia to Armenian parents in 1924. His parents are described as artistically inclined. In 1945, as the War was ending, Paradjanov traveled to Moscow where he enrolled Gerasimov School of Cinematography (VGIK). VGIK was one of the world’s greatest film schools – Paradjanov was taught by Dovzhenko (whose influence in apparent in Shadows) and Lev Kuleshov among others. Something went wrong in 1948. Under circumstances that remain unclear, Paradjanov was arrested and charged with committing a homosexual act – the other person involved in what seems to have been entrapment was MGB officer, that is, a member of the secret police. Paradjanov was sentenced to five years in prison, but, then, after three months, this term was commuted and he was released. (Presumably, he made some kind of agreement with the Secret Police.)
Perhaps to demonstrate that he was heterosexual, Paradjanov married a young woman who was of Muslim Tartar ethnicity. She converted from Islam to the Eastern Orthodox religion that was an important element of Paradjanov’s Armenian identity. ("Everyone knows that I have three homelands: I was born in Georgia, I have lived in the Ukraine, and I will die in Armenia.") This led to tragedy: her brothers murdered her in a so-called "honor slaying" in Moscow in 1950. Paradjanov re-married a Ukrainian woman by whom he had one son. That marriage occurred in 1956.
Returning to the film industry, Paradjanov made four or five documentaries and, then, directed a half-dozen feature films for Dovzhenko Film Studios (a State studio in Kiev helmed by the famous Alexander Dovzhenko). Paradjanov has termed these films "garbage" but some of them might be interesting. (Great directors tend to leave their fingerprints on the movies that they make: Scorsese’s juvenalia directed for Roger Corman, for instance, Boxcar Bertha, are largely meretricious trash but they still have glimmers of the brilliance that Scorsese would display a few years later in films over which he had more control.) One of these films adapts a Moldavian fairy tale and was made for children. Another is a so-called Kolkhaz musical – an all-singing and dancing musical replete with love stories and comic interludes set on a merry collective farm. Ukrainian Rhapsody is a melodrama about war-time lovers – it also features songs. Another film was rescued by Paradjanov when the leading lady was killed in an accident on-location – Flower on the Stone (1962) is about a love-affair between male and female comrades working in a mine. The leading lady apparently fell into the mine-shaft and died. The director up to the date of the accident was removed from the film (and, presumably, sent to Siberia). Paradjanov seems to have re-cut the movie into an anti-Christian propaganda film – the story was altered to involve a hero thwarting efforts by a Christian cult to infiltrate the mine-workers union. Paradjanov disdained the film calling it the "turd on the stone."
Paradjanov’s first fully developed and independently controlled film was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. The picture arose out of Paradjanov’s friendship with Andrei Tarkovsky. Paradjanov admired Tarkovsky’s poetic Ivan’s Childhood (1961) and was inspired by his friend’s example to attempt something more poetic and personal in character. Shadows was a world-wide sensation and won many prizes. Soviet critics were profuse in their praise of the film and, in fact, authorized the picture, made in a dialect of Ukrainian so obscure that most Ukrainians couldn’t understand it, to be shown without revision. (The censors initially demanded that Paradjanov dub the picture into Russian. But he refused and the censors withdrew their demand.) Within a few years, however, the film was re-evaluated and came to be regarded as implicitly subversive and self-indulgent.
Traveling to Armenia, Paradjanov made the picture often regarded as his most successful and personal achievement, Sayat-Nova released in the West as The Color of Pomegranates (1969). The film is non-narrative, comprising incidents in the life of the great medieval Armenian poet, Arutian, the "King of Song." Tarkovsky’s influence is evident in the film – clearly, Paradjanov has carefully studied the Russian filmmaker’s Andrei Rublev, a long and episodic film about a medieval painter of icons. Paradjanov’s approach is different and his budget was minuscule – in some ways, the picture, an unearthly combination of kitsch and surreal beauty, is more akin to one of Kenneth Anger’s underground films than a Hollywood bio-pic. Beyond any doubt, the The Color of Pomegranates contests Soviet norms as to socialist realism and implies a strongly nationalistic element in Paradjanov’s imagination. Soviet authorities repressed the film and, although it was shown internationally at film festivals, the picture was not premiered in the Soviet Union until 1979.
In 1973, Paradjanov gave a speech in Minsk decrying the lack of imagination in the Soviet film industry. The speech was apparently very funny. Three months later, Paradjanov was indicted for "art trafficking, pornography, homosexual rape, currency manipulation, and incitement to suicide." (At the time, he was working on a screenplay for a film based on some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales.) He was duly convicted, notwithstanding the protest of many members of the Soviet intelligentsia, and sentenced to five years labor in prison. (Paradjanov, who was skilled in sewing and embroidery, was put in a prison shop sewing burlap bags. He excelled at this work and began to create small fabric dolls from loose ends of material in the factory. During periods when he was unable to make films, he made dolls, ceramics, sculpture as well as paintings and made collages.) Paradjanov served four years of his five year term – he was released in 1978 after the intervention of Francis Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Martin Scorsese, many Russian intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers (most notably Tarkovsky) and John Updike.
After his imprisonment, Paradjanov was impoverished. He lived homeless on the streets of Yerevan in Armenia for a while. Tarkovsky, distressed at his friend’s plight, gave him a ring to pawn – Paradjanov preferred to retain the ring as a symbol of his friendship with Tarkovsky. In 1982, he was in prison again, this time in Tbilisi where he served a nine month sentence again on obscure and, probably, politically motivated charges. By 1983, he was back in Kiev working at the Dovhenko Studios where he made The Legend of the Suram Fortress, another overtly nationalistic film – the movie concerns a fortress defending Georgia against Muslim Tartar invaders: the fortress can not stand unless a young warrior is buried alive in its huge walls. This movie is very remarkable, non-narrative, and disturbing – the motif of being buried alive probably refers, at least, obliquely to Paradjanov’s imprisonment. Of course, the film was suppressed by the authorities.
Paradjanov’s last feature was 1989, Ashik Karib. The movie is an adaptation of story by Mikhail Lermontov about a hero who must wander 1001 days, performing various labors, in order to win the right to marry his beloved. The film was shot in Azerbaijan, also was clearly nationalistic, and, therefore, suppressed – the picture was not shown in Russia until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film is non-narrative, dedicated to the spirit of Andrei Tarkovsky, who had died, and ends with a dove descending – an image, Paradjanov explained, of Tarkovsky.
Seriously ill, Paradjanov’s began work on another film, The Confession. He shot three days of footage and, then, collapsed. His imprisonments under harsh conditions had damaged his health. He died in July 1990, age 66. His home in Yerevan, Armenia is now a museum and shrine displaying many of the dolls and other artworks he made while in prison.
6.
Some critics regard narrative, because sequential, as horizontal – one thing follows another. Vertical interpolations into the narrative may be either abysmal or supernatural – a demon can arise from the earth and an angel may visit from heaven. The horizontal or narrative plane insists upon causality. The vertical dimension interrupts causality.
Very early in Paradjanov’s Shadows, the camera appears high above the protagonists who are working as foresters. The camera dives toward the ground, swooping downward. This camera movement simulates the irruption into the narrative of forces that are arbitrary, unpredictable, and, possibly, supernatural. The camera’s motion signifies that the world of the forgotten ancestors is not imagined according to the dictates of realism. Here, anything can happen.
7.
There is a sequence in Andrei Rublev that is particularly haunting. It is Spring and peasants have lit bonfires in the woods and everyone seems to be drunk. The young women have all stripped off their clothes and they wander through the twilight offering themselves sexually to the men that they meet. With its leaping flames and shadowy forests filled with the gliding nude women, the landscape seems enchanted. The pagan gods have returned to earth and, for one night, from dawn to dusk, they walk among their people.
Paradjanov’s film acknowledges the fact that profoundly pagan currents of emotion and belief are very close to the surface in Russia and the Ukraine. In some respects, Paradjanov’s film falls within a mainstream of Russian art – the celebration of the pagan roots of the Russian soul. Stravinsky works this vein majestically in his 1913 The Rite of Spring, the score written for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. As in Petrushka and The Firebird ballets, Stravinsky uses old fairy tales and legends for his inspiration. In The Rite of Spring, girls and boys dance ecstatically and, then, a young woman, the Chosen One, is selected to dance herself to death in the center of a circle of Elders. This kind of material, bloody, ecstatic, and pagan, is central to Shadows. There is a veneer of Christianity – people kiss icons and there are Eastern Orthodox churches, but what seems to go on in those churches is not much like a Christian worhip service. Ultimately, the "blood" of the people is not Christian nor is it even really European – this is shown to us when a man strikes another down with his small-headed axe. The gush of snow from the dying man is shown as a scarlet horses galloping wildly away. The blood is unregulated and fierce; it can not be restrained by Christian sacraments. Sorcerers conjure the dead or bewitch with love potions. The world is full of wild, perilous, untrammeled forces.
8.
In the film’s final shot, we see a kind of mosaic – in this case a window with many mullions and panes of glass, each one containing a small blonde boy’s face. The little boys are looking out to where a man is building a casket for the hero, Ivanko. The procession of faces, each occupying a separate frame, is some kind of metaphor for film – a movie is made up of many frames, each containing a picture. Presumably, the little boys will be told the story of Ivanko’s life and it will become a legend to them and they will tell the legend and, in the end, Paradjanov will make it into a film. So the final shot embodies both the creation of a legend, the oblique way in which folklore forms, that is, by implication and indirection – we don’t actually see what the little boys are watching – and, finally, provides us with a form that is equivalent to the vessel that will later contain the legend, the frames of Paradjanov’s film.
9.
In some ways, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is so rich and self-indulgent that, it seems, the movie of movies, that is, a template of many other kinds of films. The wild camera movements and the lush colors and some elements of the editing seem to have influenced director’s like Baz Luhrman (Romeo and Juliet directed by Luhrman, of course, is a story kin to the one that Paradjanov shows in his film). Some of the luminous archaic images have the quality of frames from movies by Guy Madden – there is a wild, delirious silent film sensibility at work in the movie. Underground films like those made by Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren seem to be referenced in some sequences – the ornate and lurid colors as well as the bizarre and, even, campy costumes cause some scenes to be redolent of Anger’s homosexually-inflected films like Kustom Kar Kommandos and Scorpio Rising. This is in line with J. Hoberman’s argument that the movie the film most resembles of Stan Brakhage’s experimental picture Dog Star Man made in the same year that Shadows was produced. I think that many of the film’s more abstract sequences look very much like the film diaries of the Jonas and Adolphus Mekas, particularly their diary of visit to their native Lithuania. It is equally true that many compositions in the movie echo images in Eisenstein, particularly, the technicolor feast sequence in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (Part Two). And, of course, some shots, particularly those with figures standing amidst black and jagged spear-like ruins of huts, directly cite Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood. The influence of Dovhenko also lies heavily over parts of the film – in this regard, one might cite lyrical sequences in the great Ukrainian director’s film Earth (1930), including the scene where the young widow runs naked through her house upon hearing of her husband’s death or the concluding image of apples in the rain. But with all of these references and citations, the Shadows has its own bizarre identity – it is both all movies at once and the specific creation of specific artist.
10.
An influential book in political philosophy, Leo Strauss’ Persecution and Writing (1952), proposes that most ancient and early modern philosophers composed their works under regimes that were despotic. As a consequence, the writings made by these philosophers conceal their heterodox opinions under a veneer of surface piety. Many of these writings pay obeisance to the tyrant, but, in fact, contain concealed subtexts that undercut the tyrant’s authority.
A similar situation is manifest in films made in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes. The most successful and effective films made in East Germany were a series of highly imaginative and brilliantly designed fairy tale films – this cycle of films began with Wolfgang Staudt’s The Story of Little Mook and continued through the seventies with pictures such as Heart of Stone, Snow White, Turli’s Adventure (a version of Pinocchio), and the ineffably weird The Singing, Ringing Tree. These movies evaded political questions that would inevitably have been raised by so-called realistic films documenting daily life in the DDR. In the Soviet Union, serious filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Paradjanov made movies ostensibly remote from naturalistic concerns – Tarkovsky sought refuge in the remote past (Andrei Rublev) or outer space (Solaris) or science fiction (Stalker). Paradjanov made films about ancient legends and poems. His problem, however, was that the settings of these tales, Armenia, Carpathia, Azerbaijin and the Transcaucasus could be interpreted as subversive of the Soviet Union’s "great" or "noble lie" – namely, that Communism had created a seamless union of like-minded nations all striving for the same utopian future.
Paradjanov seems apolitical to me. But to be apolitical was also a betrayal of the regime. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors shows a world driven by ancient feuds, superstition, and various forms of demonism and the supernatural. The world that he imagines is certainly not one driven by economic or other factors susceptible to Marxist interpretation. This is Paradjanov’s double-bind, his dilemma – the more remote his films from daily life (and his later films are highly experimental and abstract), the more personal those films became. And he had the misfortune to be laboring under a regime of collectives, a regime that denied the authenticity of purely subjective and purely personal.
11.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was hailed as inaugurating a Soviet New Wave cinema. Critics have called it "the most plastic fantastic" of all Soviet era films and "not so much lyric as lysergic." There is no widely held consensus as to whatwhat the film exactly means. Indeed, there isn’t even any agreement as to whether the end of film is happy or sad.
Some critics argue that the film celebrates the indomitable vitality and life force in the Hutsul people. These critics argue that the movie shows us that life "will find a way" – that life goes on, although individuals are slaughtered. I don’t buy this analysis. Certainly, the official Soviet justification for the film would adopt this sort of sentimental interpretation. But I think it’s wrong.
Other critics believe that the film is fundamentally experimental and non-narrative – in this interpretation, the slender, obliquely presented narrative is just an excuse for a series of hallucinatory camera motions and surreal montage. Some critics have gone so far as to say that the camera is a character in the film and that it actually causes the events that it renders as pictures. I like this argument because it is as crazed as the film, but don’t think it holds water in the long run. Critics who assert this argument are, in effect, simply restating a variant of the argument that movie’s plot is merely a framework on which to hang various surreal sequences. These critics define the film as a "second person narrative" – "you", here the camera are doing various things and these things that "you" record form the film.
In my view, the film suggests that love is a powerful force that may defeat the grave. But this is the pure love of the children of the feuding families, love that exists before sexuality imposes its meaning on that emotion. Paradjanov seems to think love between adult men and women induces a sort of bondage – it requires a willingness to bear a yoke as well as self-imposed blindness. (Thus, the bizarre wedding sequence, a scene that has no ethnological basis at all.)
It’s hard to interpret a film that is so obscure in some ways that no one has yet developed a plausible theory as to the meaning of the title itself.
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