Ingeborg Holm (film group essay)

　


"You work hard to come up with a really innovative approach to filming something and, then, you discover that it’s already been done in 1913."

Martin Scorsese in conversation with Roger Ebert

"1913 was the final year of the long 19^th century."

Eric Hobsbawm

　

　

Ingeborg Holm is regarded as the first great film directed by Victor Sjoestroem. Made in 1913, the movie was an international hit and signaled the arrival of the Swedish film industry on the world stage. With Mauritz Stiller, Sjoestroem is identified with the first wave of Swedish films, prestigious pictures with wide distribution that culminated in The Phantom Carriage (1922), a movie so impressive and distinctive that it attracted the attention of Hollywood producers and led to Sjoestroem’s (second) emigration to the United States.

Sjoestroem ("Seastrem") was born in 1879 in provincial Sweden. With his family, he emigrated to Brooklyn when he was one year old. His mother died when he was 8 and, apparently, he clashed with his father when he was a teenager. Sjoestroem returned to Sweden, lived in Stockholm with relatives, and worked in theater. Blessed with matinee-idol good looks, Sjoestroem was recruited to film by Mauritz Stiller and appeared in his first movie in 1912. In that era, films were made at a rate of one or two a week and everyone was cross-trained – actors managed lights when they weren’t on stage, screenwriters acted, directors designed sets and costumes. Sjoestroem was thought sufficiently accomplished in the trade to direct Ingeborg Holm in 1913 – this was an important project starring the famous actress Hilda Borgstroem, Sweden’s leading lady both on stage and before the camera. (Sjoestroem was 34 when he made Ingeborg Holm; Hilda Borgstroem was 42. Sjoestroem shot at least two earlier films with her, both made in 1912. Ingeborg Holm is remarkable in a number of ways – one of them is the glimpse it affords of standards of female beauty in 1913. The heroine exemplifies the so-called Gibson Girl, a female archetype created in drawings by Charles Dana Gibson in 1898. The Gibson Girl had pale skin, regular features, and was tall and strong. Gibson portrayed her dominating men; in one of his characteristic cartoons, three Gibson girls are inspecting a tiny man with magnifying glasses. The Gibson girl is curvaceous, even, voluptuous, with ample bosom and large hips – she affects a tiny waist by wearing a tight corset. Her hair is chignon, a "cascade of curls". She is the apolitical sister of the "new woman" familiar to late 19^th century audiences in the sexually liberated and aggressive female characters in Ibsen, Strindberg, and some of Shaw’s plays. The "Gibson Girl" was one of the casualties of World War One – post-war fashions were androgynous and female stars were, often, ethereal waif-like creatures with slender hips and small breasts: Lillian Gish exemplifies the new esthetic that would seize the screens after 1918. Of course, anachronisms will always exist – Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel and Mae West continued the Gibson Girl type through the silent era and, even, into the thirties.)

Ingeborg Holm was an immense success and inspired fierce debate in Sweden about social welfare and the role of the government in providing a "safety net" for the poor. Indeed, some of Sweden’s "poor-house" or welfare laws were the result of legislative action triggered by Ingeborg Holm. Sweden’s modern status as a welfare-state was caused, in part, by the public’s reaction to this film.

Sjoestroem made 44 films in Sweden, most of them lost. Several of these films were major international successes, most notable Terje Vergin ("A Man There Was"), a period picture based on a poem by Victor Hugo made in 1917 and The Outlaw and His Wife (1918). Both of these films were made on location and involve passionate characters who defy convention and suffer tragic consequences. The Outlaw and His Wife, set in 17^th century Iceland but filmed in the Lappland area of Sweden is particularly uncompromising, a grim but compelling tale of doomed lovers – it’s something like a combination between a Western and a particularly cruel drama of marital dysfunction of the sort that Ingmar Bergman, Sjoestroem’s spiritual heir, would perfect. Sjoestroem’s fantasy about Death coming to seize an alcoholic, The Phantom　Carriage (Bergman’s favorite film) impressed Hollywood producers and they lured him to Los Angeles in 1923.

Sjoestroem made a number of estimable films in Hollywood. His first Hollywood outing, He Who Gets Slapped, is a brutal drama involving marital infidelity and abject humiliation – it was a successful, indeed, ideal, vehicle for its star, Lon Chaney. Later, Sjoestroem worked with Lillian Gish in a film adaptation of The Scarlet Letter and, then, again starred her in The Wind (1928). The Wind is a harrowing story of a woman driven mad by the primitive conditions of the American frontier – it is relentlessly harsh account of pioneer life very much unlike other American films of the same era.

Sjoestroem didn’t adapt well to Hollywood’s transition to sound. He was about 50 when he returned to Stockholm. He made several more films in Stockholm – his last directorial effort was Under the Red Robe (1937). Thereafter, he was content with acting both on stage and on screen.

Ingmar Bergman, who revered Sjoestroem, lured him out of retirement to appear as Professor Borg, the elderly, dream-haunted protagonist of Wild Strawberries (1956). Sjoestroem and Bergman clashed repeatedly and the experience of making the film was unpleasant for both of them. Bergman has written a moving account of the difficulties of working with the headstrong old man – he was 78 when Wild Strawberries was made. Bergman had to bribe Sjoestroem with whisky to get him to appear in the final scene in Wild Strawberries – Sjoestroem’s habit was to quit work at 4:30 pm sharp and, then, have several shots of whisky. The late afternoon light on this particular day, however, had a particularly translucent quality that Bergman wanted to capture and so he enticed Sjoestroem into working after he wanted to quit. There was a bitter argument. But when the camera was engaged, Bergman said that the petulant, childishly angry old man became "beatific, transcendent, reflecting a great inner peace and serenity" for the film’s final shots. When the filming ended, Sjoestroem reverted to being an angry old man, but Bergman thought that his film revealed Sjoestroem’s secret essence.

Sjoestroem died in 1960. At his funeral, Ingmar Bergman recalled the final shot in Wild Strawberries:

(His face) showed total tranquility, a soul that has achieved peace and tranquility. Never before, or since, have I experienced a face so noble and enlightened. And yet this was nothing more than a piece of acting in a dirty studio. And it had to be acting. This exceedingly shy human creature would never have shown us bystanders this deeply buried treasure of compassion and purity had it not been involved in a piece of acting of acting, a performance.

Ingeborg Holm is based on a stage play by Nils Krok, first produced in Stockholm in 1906. (Sjoestroem directed the show for the stage). The play differs markedly from the film version – most notably, the motif of the photograph central to the movie does not exist in the stage play. In the film, a photograph of the titular heroine, always presented in the same uniformly lit shot – the picture is presented against a paper background that is not motivated by the story – appears at three points in the narrative. First, the heroine gives the picture to her little son Erik before being separated from him – this shot lasts five seconds. Fifteen years later, Erik looks affectionately at the photograph as he returns home from the sea (ten seconds). Finally, Erik thrusts the photograph before his mother’s face and, therefore, shocks her back into realizing her own identity and that of her son (ten seconds). In all instances, the same shot is used and close analysis reveals that the picture seems to exist in some space outside of the movie – it has the hallmarks of an uncanny talisman that neither ages nor accepts the light (or darkness) in which the picture is viewed: it retains an uniform undying brightness against the paper on which it is displayed. Thus, the photograph seems both a narrative device and a symbol for an identity that can not be effaced by hardship and madness.



Sjoestroem uses the so-called tableau or proscenium method in his mise-en-scene. There is no parallel cutting of the kind pioneered by Griffith in American films of the same date. (As an example: parallel cutting shows a person in peril intercut with images of people coming to rescue the endangered character.) Similarly, Sjoestroem doesn’t dissect his scenes into shots showing various details and differing angles on the action. By 1924, American films made in Hollywood would have used as many as 1100 shots in a ninety minute movie – Sjoestroem’s cutting is much slower and he tends to begin and end sequences in a single shot.

Tableau direction requires that the film-maker exercise remarkable ingenuity to prevent the images from becoming formulaic or tedious. Staging patterns that Sjoestroem perfected include a number of devices. Some shots feature a slow reveal by characters added or subtracted from within the proscenium arch – a slow reveal could also be accomplished by posing actors so that they literally block the view of other figures important as the scene progresses. In some instances, Sjoestroem divides the image into small box-shaped apertures – we look through the window of the proscenium arch and see another window or opening that further narrows of perspective on the part of the image to which we are supposed to attend. In some instances, motion is stylized or characters slow down to emphasize the activity of another figure who acts with naturalistic motion or more quickly than the others. In each shot, Sjoestroem finds some way to guide the eye to seeing what he thought significant in the frame. Action often proceeds on various planes, exploiting early silent camera’s great depth of focus. In a successfully staged film like Ingeborg Holm, the audience is provided complex images that are always moving on one plane (or in one dimension) or another. The viewer’s eyes are active in constructing the space and locating the events that are significant to the narration playing out against that space.

　


Poor Relief in Sweden
In the latter half of the 19^th century, plagues of locusts devastated many counties in the upper Midwest. Farmers lost their crops and were rendered impecunious. Some families starved to death. Others abandoned their ruined fields and fled to the cities. This natural disaster triggered a great debate in the states where it occurred: to what degree should the state government intervene to provide relief to the victims of this calamity? This debate raged with ferocious polemic expressed on both sides. The fact that social welfare was once debated with such vigor should not surprise us – in our own time, we have heard that welfare demoralizes workers, destroys families, and leads to a cycle of poverty. These same issues were fiercely argued in Nebraska, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Minnesota in the wake of the locust infestations. Ultimately, the government was persuaded to take action: army units that had been assigned Indian fighting duties were deputized to provide clothing, blankets, flour, bacon, and beans to indigent farmers. But this outcome was not without controversy.

The Poor Law is a book in the series The English Citizen. Written by T. W. Fowle (of Islip) in 1881, the book provides a specimen of thought on this topic during the Victorian era. "Legal provision for the relief of the poor...would seem, at first sight, artificial and even unnatural for it establishes a state of things in which persons are not obliged to work, unless they choose to provide themselves with the means of subsistence; while those who work for their own living are compelled, whether they like it or not, to maintain those who will not or cannot support themselves." Fowle cites Edmund Burke’s skepticism about social welfare: "To provide for us in our necessities is not within the power government. It would be a vain presumption..." Burke further argued that social welfare was a moral, but not civic, responsibility. In the past, Churches provided for such welfare within their parishes. It would be best, Burke thought, for welfare to be administered as private charity.

Fowle cites J. S. Mill at length and, ultimately, concludes that social welfare administered through the government can be justified on two grounds. A "sentimental" ground is compassion – every one who lives within a land should be supported by that land. The more hard-headed justification is that a poor man is prone to theft and other disorder – he will steal to feed himself and his family. If we wish to maintain the public peace, then, we must provide some kind of social "safety net" for the "worthy poor."

Intrinsic to Fowle’s analysis is the notion of the "worthy poor." In 1836, the Edinburgh Review opined that there was no such thing as the "laboring poor" – someone who was working (or who could work) could always earn a living. The "worthy poor" were widows, orphans, and the "impotent" – that is, people with injuries or afflictions, such as insanity, that debarred them from productive labor. Such persons could be succored either by "out-relief" or "indoors relief." "Out relief" meant the dole – some form of weekly assistance paid as a stipend "Indoors relief" meant the "workhouse" or the "almshouse." Fowle is quick to note that the "relief of the destitute should be administered so that their condition is worse than that of the laboring poor" – in other words, there should be no disincentive to work. Almshouses were planned to be unpleasant and uncomfortable places.

Sweden relied upon Church management of the poor within individual parishes. In the mid-17th century, statutory law regularized these practices and provided for "municipality" management by elected Boards of Commissioners in each political subdivision – households were taxed to support th is function. Changes in the law in 1847 further rationalized Swedish poor law into a national system. In rural areas, the destitute were assisted by a system called rotegang – a rote was a group of six levy-paying households. Poor folk were assigned to rotes and lived, as laborers and servants, in each household in succession. If a rote wished it could by its collective labor carve a cellar (backstuga or "hillside cottage") into a hillside and designate this as the home for the destitute living within its boundaries. In larger cities, almshouses were built to house the poor. If a destitute man or woman or child was capable of labor, that person could be auctioned at a so-called Pauper Auction (or Fattigauktion). In such an auction, citizens would bid on purchasing the services of the pauper, agreeing to pay for that person’s room and board in exchange for a fee offered by the "municipality." Bidding was competitive – the bidder offered to take a pauper as servant in exchange for a stipend paid by the municipality. The low bid won the right to indenture the pauper, an infernal system that led to many abuses. Obviously, if I have secured the "low bid" on a pauper, my incentive is to work the poor creature to death while providing the most minimal rations and housing. The ars Fattigvardforordning of 1847 abolished pauper auctions as applied to children.

Ingeborg Holm shows the protagonist, in effect, selling her children to keep them from living in the almshouse where she finds herself. Under the Reform Act of 1847, incentives were created to provide "foster care" for the children of paupers – these reforms were intended to eliminate the old "Pauper Auction" system, but, in effect, that institution remained viable under the guise of "foster family care." (As the film shows, the foster family is liable to pay room and board for the indigent child for which it cares; the foster family was not liable for medical bills incurred by a pauper’s child and avoided those expenses typically by simply not providing access to medical care in the case of illness.) Ingeborg Holm resulted in the Reform Act of 1918 – this law entirely eliminated the practice of rotegang.

Ingeborg Holm is shown cradling a piece of wood. She regards this wood as her lost baby. (In this respect, she is the precursor to the "log lady," a woman similarly traumatized in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks). It is worth noting that paupers involved in rotegang were obliged to carry at all times a Fattigklubba or Fattigbricka – that is a "pauper’s club" or a "pauper’s brick". This was a wooden tablet specifying the pauper’s status and indicating the physical tasks and labor that the pauper could be called upon to perform for the common good. It’s not clear to me whether the log that Mrs. Holm carries represents this medieval institution not abolished until 1918.

　

　


Samuel Davidson
Samuel Davidson was a German Jew born in Berlin in 1875. At 15, he emigrated to the United States and developed a vaudeville persona exploiting his ethnic background. He worked in Hollywood from 1912 throughout the silent era and made a number of well-received two-reel comedies. Pass the Gravy was produced by the Hal Roach Studios in 1928 and is characteristic of Davidson’s many two-reelers. (Almost all of Davidson’s films are lost.)

Davidson had difficulty navigating the sound era. He died in 1950. His last part was a small role in a Three Stooges comedy produced in 1940.

Nicholas Schenck and Louis B. Mayer were prominent Jewish producers at MGM, the parent studio for Hal Roach. Reportedly, Schenck and Mayer were appalled by Davidson’s comedies and felt that his Yiddish schtick was a disgrace to assimilated Jews. They supposedly pressured Hal Roach to fire Davidson and made it difficult for him to find work between 1930 and his last cameo part in 1940.

The Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute have declared Pass the Gravy to be a "culturally significant film worthy of preservation." Curiously, Davidson’s Hollywood pictures have been collected and lovingly restored by the Munich Film Museum in Munich, Germany.

On Golden Pond

I have spent my life avoiding On Golden Pond, the 1979 play (and, then, movie) written by Ernest Thompson. This hasn't been easy -- the play has been, more or less, ubiquitous during the last 38 years. It was my perception that On Golden Pond was a life-affirming gentle comedy involving an old couple and their children -- something on the order of Steel Magnolias:  a show that makes you feel good about yourself.  I don't deny that there is a place for these kinds of shows and that they comprise a valid genre.  But, purely on the basis of description, I've always thought that this genre is not my cup of tea.  I acknowledge that this perception is pure bias -- after all, I didn't see On Golden Pond until yesterday, Sunday, July 9 when I attended a matinee performance of Thompson's play presented by a community theater group, Summerset Theater.  And, in my view, the show is not half-bad, a situation comedy that is a couple notches above TV sit-coms, a bit like the Bob Newhart show set at the New England resort.  On Golden Pond is reasonably diverting and, in fact, painless. The show is witty and has some good jokes.  The saccharine content, although considerable, is kept within tasteful restraint.  Indeed, the best descriptive term for the show is "tasteful."

As everyone now knows, On Golden Pond involves an old man spending the summer at a lake cabin in Maine.  The old man, Norman Thayer, is obsessed with death, although it's clear that his morbid thoughts are apotropaic -- he talks about death continuously to ward it off.  Thayer has a sweet, patient wife -- she is said to be about ten years younger than the hero.  The two old people seem lonely and Thayer regards his life as finished -- there's nothing waiting for him but death and the protagonist's quietly embittered despair is symbolized by a detached screen-door that the old man doesn't have the energy to repair.  Thayer's wife enjoys her life, has many happy memories of summers on Golden Pond as their lake is called, and she is associated with loons who raise their young on the pond and call out mournfully at all times of the day.  The play is formulaic -- Thompson sets up the situation and demonstrates Norman Thayer's somewhat self-indulgent unhappiness and, then, complicates the story with the oldest plot convention in history:  a stranger comes to town.  In this case, the stranger is a fifteen-year-old boy, the son of a Los Angeles dentist who is romancing the Thayer's 42-year-old daughter.  Daughter and dentist leave for Europe at the end of the third act (and just before intermission); the fifteen-year-old boy stays with the old couple.  After the intermission, we see that the screen door has now been fixed and that old and embittered Norman Thayer is now best friends with the youth.  He has been given a new lease on life.  Daughter returns, without the dentist (a puzzling element in the play), but with a wedding ring -- she has married the dentist in Brussels.  Everything threatens to end happily -- the daughter is married, the youth has found a mentor in the old man, the old man now enjoys his life and, indeed, plans to go to Los Angeles to see his new friend during the winter months.  Then, the hero has a heart attack but it's mild and the nitroglycerin dissolving under his tongue restores him to full health and all is well that ends well. 

Thompson has lavished care on writing parts for Norman and his wife, Ethel.  They are both fully realized characters and believable in an approximate kind of way.  Norman is a bully who taunts people with his sardonic witticisms -- he's a kind of "licensed fool" to use Shakespeare's term, someone who been allowed to make discourteous and mildly cruel remarks for so many years that he isn't even aware that he is hurting people in this way.  Although the character is supposed to be a Professor Emeritus of English, he seems basically illiterate -- he has shelf full of Reader's Digest condensed books, an anathema to any actual literature professor.  (He encourages the boy to read Swiss Family Robinson -- his own reading seems to be Mark Twain.)  Every English professor I've ever known (and I've known several) was proud of his knowledge and a show-off, incessantly citing lines from Shakespeare and poetry.  Norman doesn't act this way -- he contents himself with mumbled asides that are supposed to be funny but that are mostly just nasty.  But this show, I must say, with kin trapped at their isolated estate is not exactly Uncle Vanya; in fact, it's Chekhov-light  -- Norman doesn't ever say anything he can't  take back:  there is none of the hideous infighting that you experience when watching a play by Chekhov or Ibsen or, for that matter, a film by Ingmar Bergman.  Norman's wisecracks are shallow and none of the cuts that he inflicts go very deep at all.  And this is characteristic of the show:  it's all blithe and feather-light.  At the end of Act 2, Norman comes home panicked -- he has lost his way on roads and paths that he has known for fifty years.  There is a moment in which he shows real, stark terror at the prospect of losing his mind.  But his wife consoles him and this topic is forgotten -- Norman isn't suffering from Alzheimer's disease, apparently, merely a temporary lapse of attention and, despite a few feints in the direction of dementia, he remains sharp as a tack.  The part of the daughter is underwritten to the point of vanishing -- what has she done with her life?  What is her job?  She is clearly a liberated woman and has been successfully employed all her adult life, but we don't learn anything substantive about her.  The role of the dentist is also under-written and an absurd caricature to boot:  the dentist is portrayed as fearful of bears and Norman teases him on this account. But, of course, a dentist from Los Angeles has probably gone on expeditions where he shot bears, even large and fierce ones in Alaska -- after all dentists from Eden Prairie have shot much-beloved African lions -- and, certainly, someone from suburban Los Angeles would be no stranger to wild animals:  there are more coyotes and critters of that kind in the Golden State than in southern Maine.  The teenage boy, who should be hideously bored and miserable in this setting, is polite, charming, and, almost immediately, good friends with the old man.  Everything about the show is inconsequential -- Norman's heart attack is just a minor divertimento to spice up the play's otherwise bland last act.  My readers should not construe this review to conclude that I disliked the play -- in fact, I thought the play was well-scripted, cleverly written, and, generally, quite entertaining.  A minor character, a postman, suffers from unrequited love for Thayer's daughter -- he masks his sorrow with a weird cackling laugh and is a genuinely interesting, even, potentially tragic character.  And the show's best scene in which mother and daughter sing a kitschy campfire song from their childhoods is beautiful and genuinely poignant.

The production by the Summerset Theater company was effectively directed by John Deyo and well-acted.  Craig Johnson was charismatic and engaging as Norman Thayer and the company performed well.  I didn't detect any weaknesses in the presentation of the show and there was a good musical soundtrack as well.  The set by Cameron Davis was fussy and spectacularly realistic -- you could live in this cabin as designed and constructed by Mr. Davis and it seemed a nicer abode than my home. 

Baby Driver

Edgar Wright's crime film, Baby Driver (2017) turns out to be nothing special.  This is too bad for a couple reasons.  First, Wright has directed some amusing and witty films, most notably the zombie picture Shaun of the Dead.  Unlike that film, and, indeed, all of Wright's other movies, Baby Driver takes itself much too seriously -- the last half of the film is resolutely humorless, literal-minded, and relentlessly violent.  There's one good joke in the movie but it comes very early:  a grotesquely tattooed bad guy has the letters HAT inked onto his throat; someone asks him "Hat?" and the bad guy replies:  "Well, it used to say HATE but when I started looking for a job I had the E covered up.  Who doesn't like hats?"  This exchange is as close as Baby Driver gets to comedy.  The movie's second deficiency is that the picture doesn't pay off on what it promises in the first reel -- the hero, Baby, is a semi-autistic teenage kid who is a whiz as a "wheel-man" (that is, a getaway driver); he's hyper-kinetic and we see him dance down a city street carrying a tray of coffee, as lithe and athletic and goofy as Donald O'Connor in Singin' in the Rain -- his most routine movements have a balletic beauty.  The movie has a vibrant sound-track and, for a moment, we hope that the picture is going to be a musical -- perhaps, the car chases will make the vehicles dance in time to the film's Top 40 pop tunes and, maybe, the hero will tap-dance through the film like an idiot-savant Fred Astaire.  But, alas, nothing like this happens and the movie devolves into standard issue car chases and over-long, absurdly bloody gun battles.  The picture's uneasy shifts in tone are disorienting -- at first, the film seems like a sardonic and clever movie musical, then, it turns into a nasty film noir complete with bat-shit crazy villains and ranting crime bosses.  Poor innocent Baby doesn't want to drive any more -- he accidentally stole a car containing the criminal mastermind's money and, so, now he has to work as a getaway driver for the villain (Kevin Spacey).  But Baby is a gentle soul and doesn't like violence -- that is, until the idiotic last two reels when he starts gunning people down and using his car as a lethal battering ram.  Blue lives don't much matter in this film -- the cops are crooked and on the payroll of Spacey's criminal mastermind and, so, at the film's climax, whole platoons of them can be blithely murdered in poorly edited and confusingly shot gun battles.  Jon Hamm plays a bad guy who is like the Ever-ready bunny -- he keeps getting shot and mangled in car crashes but, like Frankenstein's monster or the Terminator, continues his crusade to kill the hero.  (He takes a lickin' but keeps on tickin'.)  Jamie Foxx is convincingly menacing as a vicious thug, but his psychopathic violence seems to belong in another picture -- something darker and better than this popcorn genre piece.  There are a few clever twists to the plot but, by and large, it's nihilistic garbage -- a collage of action sequences stitched together from earlier and much better films by Walter Hill and Michael Mann.  (There's a sly homage to Walter Hill -- we hear his voice as the translator for Baby's foster father, an old black man who is a deaf-mute and who speaks by sign language.) A lot of the picture makes only marginal sense, although generally we can decipher who is being killed although, often, the motives for the slaughter are unclear.  Oddly enough the best thing in the movie is a foot-chase -- this is much more exciting because vastly more believable and persuasive than all the  screeching tires and escapes down the wrong side of the freeway in the third-rate car chase sequences.  The foot-race redeems the picture for a few minutes and restores the film's witty and cleverly designed choreography from the film's first reel.  But, alas, the wit ceases when the kid commandeers a car and drives it through another implausible road-race to yet another shoot-out.

On the night that I saw Baby Driver, I caught up with a couple episodes of American Gods, the TV series on STARZ based on the Neil Gaiman novel.  As with Twin Peaks, Fargo, and shows like Veep and Louis C.K., American Gods is vastly superior to almost anything you are likely to see in a movie theater this summer -- it's a truism but worth repeating:  the best things in film right now are happening on your Tv set; shows like Twin Peaks, American Gods, and Fargo are far better written, better acted and more inventive as well as more challenging, and much more powerful than something like Baby Driver.

The Putin Interview

Between February 2015 and the same month in 2017, the American film maker, Oliver  Stone, was granted access to Vladimir Putin.  Stone conducted several interviews with the Russian leader and has edited the highlights of those encounters into a four-hour series.  The shows, first aired on Showtime, are available to subscribers on-demand and they are worth watching. 

The interviews are inadvertently comical in some respects:  Stone is balding in an unsightly way, jowly, disheveled, and dressed like an overweight New Jersey mobster; he has legal pads on which he has scribbled notes for his interviews, a chaotic handwritten outline that seems to have been written in all directions at once.  Stone also seems to have bad hips and knees and walks with a geriatric shuffle.  By contrast, Putin is impeccably groomed, imperturbable, and ridiculously athletic -- he wears his beautifully cut suits like an Italian model.  Even when he dresses casually in deference to the slovenly Stone, Putin still looks like a figure in a fashion magazine.  Stone, who seems to be no patriot, is forever trying to get Putin to make nasty remarks about the United States -- but Putin is diplomatic, producing the peculiar spectacle of the sinister Russian defending American institutions more vigorously than the fat American.  Stone is a poor interviewer -- he doesn't seem to ask follow-up questions and, most of the time, serves up soft-balls for Putin to hit out of the park.  When he does challenge the Russian leader, Putin's imperturbable, eerily inexpressive poker face gets the best of the American.  A good example of missed opportunities is the first episode.  Stone provides a brief curriculum vita of the Russian, posing leading questions to him:  it's an elementary mistake -- everyone likes to talk about their childhood and adolescence, it's the one part of our lives that we all believe we remember with accuracy.  Putin corrects Stone several times with respect to errors in his account and my guess is that the Russian would have been pleased to speak at length about his father's experiences in the war and the poverty in Russian after the conflict -- one of Putin's siblings seems to have starved to death in the great siege of Leningrad.  But Stone is uninterested in these subjects and simply charges forward to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the hope that he can get Putin to say something nasty about Yeltsin, by all accounts a shambling inebriate.  (Putin is too gentlemanly to make any ungracious remarks about any of his predecessors -- he also declines to insult American leaders refusing to speak about Obama and remarking that Hilary Clinton is a "extremely dynamic woman.")  Stone seems ignorant of the fact that if you can get a man or woman to talk unreservedly about their childhood, you will quickly learn their values, how they view the past, and what they wish for the future.  Stone unimaginatively pushes Putin on political issues -- he should be asking the man about his taste in music, the films that he admires, and his first love affair.  In the second episode, Stone presses Putin on Edward Snowden and we are treated to a bizarre sequence in which the American seems to do his utmost to get the Russian leader to confirm some of the paranoid theories exploited in the interviewer's fictional film about Snowden.  (Putin just equivocates.) 

The interviews are shot in a peculiar fidgety way and edited for maximum fragmentation.  Unfortunately, Stone seems to have been concerned about camera failure and, so, he typically uses three angles on all interviews -- there is a fixed camera producing a Sixty Minutes style tableaux, a roving handheld camera, and, then, a third camera often located in a peculiarly remote location.  (In one sequence, Stone sets the camera on a high balcony above an atrium in which a late night interview is conducted -- he shoots straight down on the participants, a sniper's eye view, that is striking but not expressive.)  Stones is fearful that his interviews lack drama and so he cuts them for maximum kinetic effect -- he has the misunderstanding that an interview should be as visually exciting as an MTV music video and the camera is forever pointlessly changing angles:  in the middle of a phrase, we may get a completely different camera angle or an extreme close-up of Putin's lips or a shot of Stone's scribbled notes.  The effect is nerve-wracking at first, although ultimately the viewer gets used to the scrambled imagery.  Curiously enough, Stone's verite techniques have the effect of making it seem that the interviews have been doctored -- sometimes the camera angles are so similar to one another to create a jump-cut effect:  we wonder what phrase or name did Stone just omit from the interview.

But the show has its pleasures and I recommend it.  Putin is the kind of man who has to be the best at everything he tries.  He has taken up skating and plays hockey and it's pretty obvious that he's not a good player.  Stone makes a jocular remark about other players "letting him score" and Putin is so vain he misses the point entirely.  Stone wants Putin to watch Dr. Strangelove and we get a cringe-inducing sequence in which Stone attends to the movie while Putin watches with an air of very remote indifference -- he is obviously not amused.  After the screening, Stone gives the DVD container to Putin but has failed to remove the disk from the machine.  Putin and his aides vanish and, then, a moment come back to retrieve the disk -- "a typical American gift," Putin says deadpan, flashing the empty DVD case.  (One of the amusing aspects of the film is that Putin obviously understands English and will sometimes respond to Stone's convoluted questions without needing translation -- but the fiction is maintained that Putin doesn't really know any English.)  We see Putin's thoroughbred horses and his country home, a dacha that appears to have an entire Eastern Orthodox cathedral tucked away in one wing -- a riot of gold and silver.  Putin casually makes retrograde comments about women and homosexuals but, almost immediately, takes his words back and substitutes expressions that he thinks are more politically correct, sometimes just deepening the hole that he has dug for himself.  (He tells Stone that he "doesn't have bad days" adding:  "I'm not a woman." When Stone teases him about this statement, Putin drifts into a commentary on women's physiology.)  Throughout the two-episodes of the film that I have watched, Putin generally spins his comments around four themes:  (1) the United States political bureaucracy controls the President and not vice-versa; (2) the weakness in the American political system is that the President must be elected every four years, a cycle that results in shortsightedness -- Putin says that he makes plans for 25 and 50 years in the future and claims that he is prescient to that extent; (3) Russia is a free, liberal society on par with the democracies of the West although he, sometimes, allows that Russia was feudal and, then, totalitarian until 1993 and, accordingly, must not be held to standards that would apply in America; and (4) the United States has double-crossed Russia by encircling it on all sides with NATO allies and a ring of nuclear-armed submarines.  Finally, and most importantly, Putin avers that there are only a couple of sovereign nations on Earth -- by this he means countries that can really do what they want independent of other nations:  Russia is one of these countries and, of course, it's adversary (he uses the word "partner"), the United States. 

The film's nervous and agitated style makes the viewer long for Errol Morris' cyclopean and relentless fixed-eye camera (or the humble 16 millimeter tripod fixed camera that Hans-Juergen Syberberg used in his long interviews.)  Putin's face is an impenetrable mask, sculpted it seems by botox and also some sort of nasty plastic surgery -- he has the waxen look of Lenin's mummy.  He's not at all expressive -- at most, a very faint smile glimmers on his lips -- but it's fascinating to hear him speak and wonder what lies beyond his implacable serenity.

Ace in the Hole (film group essay)

　


The journalist is a confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, bargaining for their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Janet Malcolm The Journalist and the Murderer


Billy Wilder has a brain full of razors.
William Holden

　

　

　

Billy Wilder was born Samuel Wilder in Austria in 1906. As a young man, he participated in writing a landmark film in German cinema, Menschen am Sonntag ("People on Sunday"), a picture that presages both neo-realism and the French New Wave – the German term for this kind of Weimar Republic Art was Neue-Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity"). Menschen am Sonntag feels improvised, a genuinely cheerful movie about a group of young people in Berlin and their adventures on a sunny afternoon in Berlin in 1929 – people meet for drinks, stroll in the park, pair-off and there are romantic interludes; it’s all weightless, inconsequential, poignant with youthful yearning and, surprisingly, one of the biggest hits in German films in 1930 when it was released. Menschen am Sonntag involved both Siodmak brothers, Fred Zinneman, and Edgar Ulmer, all Jewish artists who ended up with Wilder in Hollywood a decade or so later.

Alert to the political weather, Wilder left Germany for Paris in the early thirties, directed a film there, and, then, moved to Hollywood. (Wilder’s mother, grandmother, and stepfather all were murdered by the Nazis). He co-wrote Ninotchka (1939, directed Ernst Lubitsch) and established himself as one of the most sophisticated writers in the business, a remarkable achievement when it is considered that English was probably his fourth language after German, Yiddish, and French. (To some extent, Lubitsch is Wilder’s mentor, at least, with respect to his sex comedies – Wilder amplifies the famous "Lubitsch touch", a world-wise mildly risque approach to the war of the sexes perfected by the earlier film maker, also an urban, German-speaking Jew.) Wilder began directing films in the forties and, ultimately, made some of the most well-known and highly praised movies produced during the Studio era. Among his famous films are The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Blvd. (1950), Some like it Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960). For The Apartment, Wilder won Oscars for writing, production, and direction. His best known films are sophisticated comedies like Some Like it Hot and The Apartment as well as The Fortune Cookie and One, Two, Three... But Wilder dabbled in problem pictures like The Lost Weekend, a film about alcoholism, and made an early film noir, Double Indemnity (1944). He wrote anti-Nazi documentaries during the war years, directed war films, and made just about every kind of picture with the notable exception of a Western. (One might argue, although frivolously, I think, that Ace in the Hole is a kind of Western – at least, it features Indians and dramatic desert landscapes.)

After The Apartment, Wilder’s invention seems to have flagged and many of his later films were disappointments. He retired from film making in the late eighties to devote his attention to hobbies – he was an avid art collector and his home in the Santa Monica mountains was a kind of salon for artists. (There are a number of celebrated David Hockney paintings that show Wilder’s house and swimming pool.) He died at 95 in 2002. His gravestone says "He was a writer NOBODY’S PERFECT" – a reference to Joe E. Louis’ famous closing words in Some Like it Hot.

Wilder made Ace in the Hole (sometimes known as The Big Carnival) flush from the success of Sunset Blvd. This was Wilder’s first film made in several years in which his writing partner, Charles Brackett, did not participate in the script. Brackett is generally thought to have exercised a moderating influence on Wilder’s cynicism and exceptionally bitter view of human nature. Accordingly, Ace in the Hole is unremittingly savage and harsh to the point that the film’s first reviewers dismissed it as "grotesque." Some writers suggest that Wilder’s perspective on human folly is so cruel in this film that it offended audiences – there is no doubt that the picture, a very expensive film, bombed at the box office. (The movie cost about 1.4 million dollars – Wilder was paid $250,000 for the script.) Many critics argue that the movie is best understood as film noir. I question this genre assignment as well. However, on one level, this characterization is persuasive – some writers argue that film noir dramatizes the "crack-up of the American dream". Surely, there is no aspect of the American Dream that survives this film unscathed.

Ace in the Hole alludes elliptically to Sunset Blvd, Wilder’s previous film that had garnered three Oscars. In the beginning of Sunset Blvd, the unemployed Hollywood screenwriter played by William Holden must conceal his car from repossession agents. Under pursuit, he parks the car in the driveway of the spooky mansion where Norma Desmond, the silent film star played by Gloria Swanson, lives. This plot contrivance leads to the hero’s encounter with Desmond and triggers the events of the rest of the film. Ace in the Hole begins with the journalist’s car actually being towed – it is as if the repo-men have caught up with the screenwriter in Sunset Blvd and repossessed his car. Thus, incidents involving cars in trouble (either about to be repossessed or malfunctioning) initiate the action in both movies. Similarly, both films feature a hero who is a down-on-his-luck writer. There is a distinct element of cynicism about the writer’s trade, a suggestion that writers are a bit too willing to prostitute themselves. One might detect an element of self-loathing in Wilder’s screenplays consistent with the legend on his gravestone.

Kirk Douglas is central to the film and represents core narrative perspective from which the action is portrayed. As in Sunset Blvd, Ace in the Hole focuses on the hero’s point of view (a more incongruous strategy in Sunset Blvd since the first shot reveals that the narrator is dead). We see the world, more or less, through the eyes of Douglas’ character. In effect, we are asked to identify with a louse, a bad man. With limited exceptions, we only know what the protagonist knows – this is not perceived by the viewer as a restriction on our knowledge, however: what the hero knows is more than sufficient for us to make sense of the film and, in fact, the hero is like a screenwriter – he manipulates the story and pulls the strings on the marionettes. In the law, there is a concept used in estate planning – the notion of the "measuring life". In Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas is the "measuring life" – that is, the film spans the period of time from his grand entrance into Albuquerque in the towed car to the moment when he slams down, face-first, in the film’s last shot: the film begins and ends with him. Indeed, the ominous low angle at the end of the film signals Douglas centrality to the picture – the camera moves in an accommodating way to a position where it can best document his downfall; the camera’s placement, therefore, presages the hero’s demise and serves as a rhetorical device to emphasize how the mighty have fallen.

Godard remarked that every edit represents a moral choice and that it is not so important how a scene begins but decisively significant how it ends. In this regard, Wilder’s last shot has a moral significance particularly because the peculiar low angle immediately draws attention to the image in a way that is different from most of the unassuming and workmanlike images that comprise the rest of the film. The viewer asks him- (or her-)self, why is the camera stationed on the floor? How did they get it down there? What is the point of this arduous positioning? All such questions are answered by the hero’s collapse that brings his face down to the level of the lens. But is this way of answering these questions valid? Certainly, it is determinative in every respect – the actor’s fall closes the film like a door slamming in our face. In another respect, the last shot signifies the working of fate – no one had any real agency in this film: everyone will play out the hand dealt to them and destiny (here imaged as camera placement) will decide the outcome. But, it must be said, this level of control exercised by Wilder over his actor and their story is intensely writerly – the moving finger writes, and what has been written can not be altered, notwithstanding "all your piety and wit."

Wilder’s metier was the Kammerspiel – that is, a small ensemble film, exquisitely scripted that takes place in relatively limited circumstances. Wilder didn’t like shooting on location, preferring the control that exists in a studio production. Ace in the Hole is uncharacteristic for Wilder. With the exception of a few artfully concealed rear-projection shots and the studio footage of the cave where Leo Mimosa is trapped, Wilder shot this picture on location near Gallup, New Mexico. In Sunset Blvd, Wilder bows briefly in the direction of a legendary, but much lesser, director, Cecil B. DeMille. (DeMille has a famous cameo in which he prepares Gloria Swanson for her final shot.) DeMille made big screen epics and Wilder ventures into this territory with Ace in the Hole. The set near Gallup, New Mexico was 3000 feet long with a depth of 650 feet. An adjacent railroad brought extras to the location – Wilder’s budget authorized him to 550 extras, a huge number of people for a film of this kind. When word reached Gallup and the other nearby villages that Hollywood was making a film in the west New Mexico desert, other spectators arrived and were enlisted into appearing as extras – in some scenes shot on weekends, as many as 3000 people were on-hand and the carnival atmosphere depicted in the movie was real. Surprisingly, Wilder manages the spectacle very effectively – the scenes showing the carnival from atop the cliff and the climax when Douglas’ character, the corrupt Tatum, addresses the mob are brilliantly designed and filmed.

Wilder wanted to exploit the motif of the rattlesnake in the film’s opening – instead of the Paramount logo, he asked that the film begin with an image of a coiled rattlesnake striking at the camera. The footage was shot and tested, but found to be too intense – studio memos show that there was a concern that pregnant women in the audience would be so terrified that they would miscarry their children. Kirk Douglas fondly recalled the film as one of his best. Unlike many leading men, Douglas was unafraid to play scoundrels and he relished the part of Tatum. In the scene in which he strangles Mimosa’s treacherous wife, Douglas told the actress to signal to him if he was actually hurting her. When the camera was running, Douglas strangled her so realistically that she was unable to give him the signal and almost passed-out. Tatum’s death was a fait accompli – the production code required that a wicked character such as that played by Douglas receive his just deserts. In fact, the studio production code censors were highly critical that the film did not deliver come-uppance to the corrupt sheriff.

Film makers as diverse as Spike Lee and Guy Maddin have praised Ace in the Hole as an exceptional film. The movie lost money in the United States and was derided by critics as "unrealistic". In fact, it now thought that many of the journalists writing about the movie disliked the picture because, in fact, it was too authentic and cast too many uncomfortable aspersions on their profession. The film was very successful in Europe where it was a big box-office hit, shown there under the name The Big Carnival.

Midway through the film, there is an ecstatic shot that verges on the surrealistic. This is my favorite image from the film: we have just seen Leo Mimosa trapped in the cave. His eyes peer out of the darkness and he seems to pleading for help. The image, then, dissolves into an overhead shot of the carnival outside. One of Leo’s eyes remains visible, however, open and staring out of the ground on which the spectators walk.

　


Floyd Collins

Explorers in the remote recesses of Mammoth Cave, a system of underground passages and chambers now mapped to 650 kilometers, sometimes find rusty cans of Campbell’s Pork and Beans in parts of the cavern never known to have been entered. These artifacts mark the presence of Floyd Collins, the great spelunker, who died in February 1925. The old cans, sometimes accompanied by burnt-out matches, show that Collins reached these inaccessible places, rested there, and ate a meal underground before continuing his explorations.

Floyd Collins was 37 when the accident in Sand Cave killed him. He died searching for another entrance to the Mammoth Cave System closer to the main highway than the show-cave that his family owned, a hole in the hills called Crystal Cave. This grotto was the last cave on the road leading into the mountains and several miles beyond the known and historic entrances to Mammoth Cave. As a consequence, tourists motoring to Mammoth Cave had a chance to stop at Onyx Cave, Colossal Cave, Salt Cave, and Great Onyx Cave before reaching the National Park. Collins’ cave was down the road a few miles from the Park and, therefore, at the end of the route – practically speaking very few tourists ever got as far as Crystal Cave and, for that reason, Floyd went underground, exploring passages in the hopes that he would find another cavern worthy of being shown to tourists closer to Mammoth Cave. And, indeed, a mile or so off the main highway, near Onyx Cave, there was a musty opening into the ground known to locals as Sand Cave. No one had explored Sand Cave and so it was not known where it went. Collins negotiated a deal with the three farmers who owned the cave and its access from the highway – if he found a show cave at the bottom of the crooked sinkhole of Sand Cave, the four men would be partners in developing the property.

Collins entered Sand Cave on January 30, 1925. Under a rocky overhang, a cistern-like pit opened into the limestone. The pit had sheer walls, but they were close together – in the first 100 feet the narrow crack, zigzagged five times, at each bend tightening to an uncomfortable squeeze. The tightest part of the cave was a jagged pothole that corkscrewed down to where there was a dome-shaped room large enough for a man to stand upright. The walls of the spider-hole were rugged and brittle and passage downward caused muck and stones to shower down into the pit. Collins dropped down through the corkscrew into the dome-shaped room, found some more leads descending into the earth from that place, and, then, climbed upward. As he wiggled through the twisting hole, he dislodged rocks and an avalanche of lose gravel pummeled him. One of the stones falling from above smashed into Collins’ left leg and pinned it in the tight passage. As he groped for handholds above his head, Collins dragged down more sand and pebbles until the passageway was clogged with debris – thus, he was caught and held tight in the narrow hole, trapped 55 feet underground and 150 feet from the opening under the rock shelter.

Collins’ partners knew that he was exploring Sand Cave and the next day went to the rock shelter to look for him. They heard him crying out underground and began efforts to rescue him from the cave. From the outset, Sand Cave was a scary place – the little bushel-basket sized cavity under the rock overhang twisted back and forth, a vertical shaft that changed direction every ten feet. The pinchpoints were daunting and rubbed would-be rescuer’s backs and rib cages raw. People who entered the cave recalled that it smelled bad, like death and shit. One of Floyd’s brothers was daring enough to get to point where the spelunker was pinned – Collins’ head and arms and upper torso protruded from a blockage of gravel and rock fallen down into the hole. An electric light was strung down into the cave so that Collins would not be trapped in the dark and so that the bulb could provide him with a little warmth – it was cold in the bottom of Sand Cave.

For a couple days, local people tried to figure out a way to extricate Collins from the place where he was trapped. Nothing worked. Newspapermen came to cover the dramatic attempts to rescue the man pinned in the darkness. One of these journalists was a young man named Skeets (that is "Skeeter" or "Mosquito") Miller. Miller worked for a Louisville paper as a cub-reporter – the rescue in cave country was one of his first assignments.

Miller had the fearlessness of the young and foolish. And he was small – five foot five inches weighing only 117 pounds. He scrambled into the cave, following the electric light cable around the five tight turns to reach Collins. After comforting Collins and bringing him some coffee and food, Miller climbed up out of the cave and posted his first story with the newspaper. Miller’s stories caught the attention of the public and he was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the incident. Each time, Miller descended into the cave, his crawl down to Collins became headline news in itself – for more than a week, Miller reported twice daily on Collins’ spirits, health, and greetings that he sent to people on the surface from his underground tomb. Very few other journalists had the courage (or physical ability) to reach Collins and, so, the story was largely told through Miller’s reports. (Many people claimed that they had ventured down to see Collins but most of those stories were fictitious – about thirty or so feet from the opening, there was a wider place in the fissure called the "turn-around room" – almost all of the journalists other than Skeets Miller reached that place, became fearful and claustrophobic, and, then, abandoned their effort reach the trapped man, often leaving the bottles of water or coffee or tins of food that they were carrying to Collins in the "turn-around room." Most of those people said that had reached Collins, reassured him that help was on the way, and left him provisioned – but, in fact, these accounts were untrue: the majority of the journalists on the scene stopped in the "turnaround room" deposited their booty there and, then, ascended to the surface, not coming within a hundred feet of the dark, tiny hole where Collins was pinned. In the 1970's when the National Park Service let archaeologists into the long-sealed Sand Cave, a treasure trove of intact bottles and cans of food was found abandoned in the "turnaround" room.)



In a video interview shot in 1983, Kirk Douglas smears "Skeets" Miller. Douglas says that the scenario for Ace in the Hole was based on a "real story" and that a corrupt journalist contrived to keep Collins underground until he died. This is both untrue and unfair. Sand Cave was a very nasty place – seasoned war reporters were afraid to go down into the deadly hole. Miller was brave enough to get the story and sufficiently loyal to Collins that he continued to provide him with supplies and company even when it was thought that the whole cave system was in danger of collapse. Miller did nothing to delay Collins’ rescue – there was no easy approach to extracting the spelunker from the cave, although, as noted below, another tiny crawl-space, if it had been explored, might have provided an alternative way to reach the trapped man.

After about a week of unavailing efforts to rescue Collins, the access tunnel down to the pit where the spelunker was slowly dying collapsed. It was determined that the crumbling walls of the passageway were too fragile and no one was allowed to descend into the spider-hole from the surface. The Governor of Kentucky ordered that a lateral tunnel be cut into the rock face slanting down to intersect the vertical shaft where Collins was trapped. Mining engineers and mining crews were deployed to chisel through the stone to reach Collins.

By this time, the fields and roads around the entry to Sand Cave had developed a carnival aspect. Food stands were set up to serve meals and snacks to the tourists flocking to the site and several trains departed from Louisville daily on the L&N Line to bring gawkers to the meadows around the cave. The narrow winding roads leading from the State Highway to Mammoth Cave were blocked by enormous traffic jams. There was wide-spread confusion about the situation in the cave. Photographs simulating Collins’ dilemma showed a man sprawled on the ground in an open cavern among stalactites and stalagmites with a car-sized rock on his leg – the rock pinning Collins to the cave floor was said to weigh 10 or 15 or even 20 tons. In fact, Collins was pinned in an oval hole two-feet in diameter at the bottom of zigzagging shaft – the rock entrapping his leg was the size of a leg of lamb and weighed about 16 pounds.

The lateral tunnel reached Collins on February 17, 1925. Collins was dead and it was estimated that he had perished from hypothermia and general despair about three days before the mining tunnel intersected the shaft a few feet above his head. Efforts to remove the corpse were unsuccessful. It was an eerie place. People said that they heard the sound of old gospel tunes coming from the pit where Collins was buried.

People wrote popular fiddle and blue-grass songs about the death of Floyd Collins and efforts to rescue the trapped man were reported in newspapers around the world. Until the O. J. Simpson murder case, the death of Floyd Collins was ranked as the third most important newspaper story ever reported – first place remains the story of Lucky Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight; the second most important story also involved Lindbergh – the story of the abduction and death of the Lindbergh baby. (Lindbergh himself took aerial photographs of the brouhaha near the entrance to Sand Cave and the huge traffic jams on the country lanes.)

In the early Spring of 1926, Collins’ mother and brothers hired another crew of miners to penetrate the shaft where the dead body was located and, after much effort, the corpse was recovered. A contemporary photograph shows the stark white cadaver, eyes still open lying on a mortuary slab. Collins was embalmed and put in a metal vault. Inside the vault, his corpse was displayed in a coffin with a glass lid. The vault was set next to the entrance of Crystal Cave as a tourist attraction under the sign: Floyd Collins -- World’s Greatest Cave Explorer.

The Collins family lost Crystal Cave by foreclosure in 1927. The new operators moved the vault into the cave itself and, for a small bribe, tour guides were willing to open the tomb and show visitors Collins’ face under the glass lid of his casket. This practice continued until 1989 when the National Park Service acquired Crystal Cave and shut it down. In that year, Collins’ body was buried in the Mammoth Cave Baptist cemetery. (The family was fearful of a reprise of 1929 when vandals broke into Crystal Cave and dragged the corpse out of its casket. The body was found several miles away in a burlap sack on the bank of a river. The thieves had stolen had ripped off Collins’ badly crushed left leg, the limb pinned in the cave by the 16 pound rock and, apparently, kept that as a sourvenir – no doubt there is some curio store or dusty Wunderkammer in some remote hamlet where that twisted, mummified limb can be seen to this day.)

Spelunkers ultimately established that the Flint Ridge Cave System, where Crystal Cave is located, is connected to the Mammoth Cave complex and that, indeed, all of the caverns in the ridge can be characterized as part of Mammoth Cave. Panic makes people unobservant. When the National Park allowed archaeologists to enter Sand Cave in the 1970's, another side passage was discovered, just big enough for a small man or woman to navigate – this passage led to another opening into the tight corkscrew shaft where Collins was pinned. If this passage had been explored, it’s argued that Collins could have been rescued.

Collins’ ghost haunts Mammoth Cave. On several occasions, he has guided lost spelunkers to the surface or helped them find their way through the maze of passageways. In one case, a woman slipped from a rope and harness that she was using to rappel down a shaft. Fortunately, her caving partner was beside her, caught a hold of the rope, and, then, secured it to the wall so that the woman did not fall. Surprisingly, the spelunker found that her partner was not below her at all, but a dozen feet overhead in the same shaft. Someone saved her, but it wasn’t the other cave explorer.

Floyd Collins’ story is irresistably dramatic. It affords the basic premise for Ace in the Hole – an Austrian Jew, then, employed as a part-time actor and taxi-dancer was enthralled, like the rest of the world, by the news reports from far-off Kentucky. This man was Billie Wilder and 25 years later he wrote and directed a movie about this story. In 1996, Adam Guettel composed the musical Floyd Collins – the show is said to be one of the very successful American musicals premiered post-Sondheim and is universally praised. (Guettel is the grandson of the Broadway composer Richard Rodgers.) Around 2009, Billy Bob Thornton bought screen rights to several of the books about Floyd Collins’ death. But a successful script couldn’t be written – the story is too black and disturbing to be entertaining. This probably explains the fact that Guettel’s folk opera on the subject also is only rarely revived. Wilder’s wonderfully accomplished and witty Ace in the Hole, starring Kirk Douglas, lost money at the box-office and was panned by the critics.

Twin Peaks (The Return)

When something is broadcast on TV that is exciting, we tend to claim novelty for the program -- this image or theme or character represents something unprecedented for the medium.  Novelty is a term of praise for innovative TV for two reasons:  first, excellence in any form often involves the presentation of material in a way that allows us to see the subject in a new light; second, TV is a conservative medium, or, at least f is perceived that way by people of my generation -- sit-coms are the paradigm for a medium that sits comfortably ensconced in our living rooms, reliably providing us with well-worn pleasures.  Thus, it will not come as a surprise that I claim that the most recent episode of David Lynch's Twin Peaks (The Return) broadcast on Showtime on June 25, 2017 is something wholly unprecedented, something so new to television that I don't know how it  can be assimilated to our understanding.  If suffices to say that, for this episode, Lynch seems to have abandoned anything like conventional narrative in the interest of providing of showing us visions of a kind no one has ever seen before.  I am agnostic as to how this development will end -- indeed, while  watching the show, I remarked that I didn't see how Lynch could extricate himself from this web of pictures, all of them extraordinarily compelling in their own right, but completely inexplicable.  Readers will have to watch this groundbreaking series and form their own conclusions -- at this juncture, I can only report on what I've seen.

The hero of Twin Peaks is Agent Cooper, a FBI man trapped for 25 years in the evil snares of something called the Black Lodge.  (The Black Lodge is not so much a place as a hallucinatory loop of images from which the FBI man can not free himself.)  An evil version of Cooper has been wandering the earth as a kind of avenging wraith for this last quarter century wreaking havoc of various kinds.  The show seems to depict a congeries of multiple universes in which each place has its own version of Agent Cooper -- there is the evil Cooper of Buckhorn, South Dakota, a benign bumbling Cooper in Las Vegas, and, another, Cooper who seems to be drifting through interstellar space, now and then making appearances on this mortal coil through a weird kind of lens with its aperture in Manhattan.  In any event, the evil Cooper has escaped jail in South Dakota.  He directs his henchman to take a little road, a two-lane blacktop that rapidly devolves into a dirt track in the desert darkness.  The henchman has to urinate and gets out of the car.  Evil Cooper has a gun and steps out of the vehicle to shoot the driver.  But the driver has switched weapons and Evil Cooper's gun is unloaded.  The driver, then, guns Cooper down.  Out of the darkness, a mob of shuffling black figures, something like ghost-tramps, appear -- they are hazy and can scarcely be seen and they do something awful to Cooper's body.  (Whenever Cooper is injured or seriously endangered, Twin Peaks goes into spasms of bizarre imagery.)  Abruptly, the scene shifts to the Road House, a bar with a stage where each episode ends with a dreamy rock and roll song or some kind of techno-drone performance.  In this sequence, lasting about six to eight minutes, we see Trent Reznor's "Nine Inch Nails" perform -- the song is an abrasive roar of noise filmed with Gothic intensity.  Then, a title informs us that we are seeing the desert in New Mexico at the time of the nuclear test at White Sands.  The image shows a huge black and white aerial landscape from which the A-Bomb's mushroom cloud emerges as a tiny blister on the desert floor.  This image of the atomic bomb blast as a tiny disturbance in the center of a vast indifferent landscape is completely different from what we are used to seeing and sets the bizarre tone for the rest of the episode.  The camera slowly advances down on the mushroom cloud, entering it, and, then, apocalyptic flames fill the screen -- we see Brownian motion of stars, clouds of glowing particles, nebulae; all of this imagery is congested with darkness, sometimes, hard to see, and very alarming.  Ultimately, we see a body of light, a kind of waxy cadaver, hovering horizontally against a void and excreting through its mouth a sort of pulpy ectoplasm -- this ectoplasm is full of luminous bubbles,one of which seems to enclose the head of Bob, the villain in the first Twin Peaks' shows a quarter century ago.  Next, the camera glides over a fiercely turbulent ocean, waves roaring against one another in the darkness -- we come to pinnacle with the black sea beating against it, and the camera climbs to reveal a sort concrete bunker perched atop the sheer cliffs.  The camera glides into a vent and we find ourselves in a room where a plump woman dressed in Victorian garb is anxiously awaiting something -- she has an old-style gramophone next to her and the room is very grey and shadowy.  A handsome, elderly giant appears and he looks at her in a bemused way, then, adjusting a kind of bell-shaped dynamo extruding electrodes that sits on the other side of the room.  The giant leaves the chamber and walks through what appears to be an empty and vast old-time movie palace.  (This reveals that the woman has been waiting in the ladies' lounge downstairs from the auditorium.)  The giant goes into the theater, stands next to a screen on which there are projected images of the kind that we have previously seen -- apocalyptic fires and clouds of glowing irradiated dust.  Then, the giant levitates until he is horizontal, floating about 40 feet over the floor.  The plump woman enters the theater and looks upward to see the floating giant.  The screen is still animate with fires and explosions.  The giant's mouth is vomiting forth clouds of glowing golden ectoplasm.  A bubble from that ectoplasm floats down to the woman and she holds it lovingly.  We can see (just barely) the image of the Laura Palmer inside the bubble -- the picture of the girl on the fireplace mantle that was central to the first series of Twin Peaks.  The screen above now shows Earth's globe and the woman pushes the bubble back into the air so that enters the screen and drops onto the Earth, apparently in the American southwest.  We now see the dark floor of the desert on which there is an egg -- a title tells us that it is 1957.  The egg breaks open and a weird creature emerges -- it is a winged beetle with the hind legs of a frog.  The beetle-frog laboriously crawls across the sand.  The scene shifts to a dark image of a convenience store isolated in the desert.  In fast motion, we see blurred images of shadowy figures, the mob of tramps that mutilated Agent Cooper, ghostly dark shadows that twitch across the screen, seemingly besieging the shabby C-store.  Next, we meet a boy and girl, two innocent-looking young people, walking in the moonlit desert. The boy tentatively kisses the girl and they part.  In another part of the desert, the ghost tramps converge on a dark highway -- they stop a car and one of the ghost-tramps, a gaunt-looking scarecrow with fire-blackened skin and a long beard, asks the man and woman in the car "for a light."  The man and woman scream soundlessly.  Cut to a radio station isolated in the desert.  A DJ is playing a love ballad.  We see a tired waitress listening to the ballad in her empty café, a mechanic listening in his garage, the young girl sitting on her bed, beaming about her first kiss, also listening.  One of the ghost tramps goes into the radio station, asks for a light and, then, crushes the head of the woman in the office with his hand.  He, then, goes into the studio, seizes the DJ by the head, and commandeers the broadcast.  The ghost tramp recites something incomprehensible about water and a well and the whites of the eyes of a horse -- he has a gravely voice and he says this over and over again.  The waitress drops dead or faints.  The mechanic, hearing the strange voice, falls over onto the floor.  The girl in her bedroom is similarly affected -- she falls over, apparently comatose or asleep.  Then, the strange beetle-frog flies into her room through an open window, creeps up to her face, and, when she opens her mouth wide, clambers laboriously into the "o" made by her lips.  And this brings us to the end of the episode.  In an early review of David Lynch's Elephant Man, Pauline Kael remarked upon the director's use of blackness -- she observed that Lynch is a master of many forms of black and that his darkness is darker than that of anyone else.  This weird nocturne, wholly inexplicable in any terms but its own, proves this point.  Apparently, this show is a punctuation point -- the program will resume in two weeks.  How I don't know.  But this visionary episode is unlike anything ever broadcast -- a combination of special effects of a kind hitherto unseen, poetic night time imagery, and sheer horror. 

Woman in the Dunes (film group essay)

Woman in the Dunes


Are we shoveling sand in order to live or do we live to shovel sand...
The man in the dunes


Of course this place isn’t as interesting as Tokyo.
The woman in the dunes


　
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 Woman in the Dunes exemplifies International Art House cinema. Exquisitely designed and shot, the film is intentional to the highest degree, a work of art in which every line of dialogue and every carefully composed image works to establish the film maker’s meaning. Like Antonioni’s L’Avventura or the contemporaneous films of Ingmar Bergman, the movie is a well-wrought enigmatic artwork complete unto itself as well as a thoroughgoing rebuke to the Hollywood notion that pictures should be an entertaining mass medium. Woman in the Dunes proposes a scrupulously rigorous esthetic that will not be available to the man in the street. Quick to acknowledge the justice of this rebuke, Hollywood awarded Teshigahara a nomination for Best Director for Woman in the Dunes in 1966.

Teshigahara’s pedigree could not be finer. The director was born in Tokyo in 1927, the son of Ikebana grandmaster Sosho Teshigara. Ikebana is the art of flower-arranging, a practice in Japan much aligned with Zen Buddhism. Teshigahara’s avant-garde credentials are also genetic. His father broke with conventional Ikebana practices to found the vastly influential Sogetsu school of flower-arranging. (Sosho Teshigahara criticized conventional Ikebana too restrictive in its tenets; his Sogetso school, both a form of practice and a literal academy, opened up the art of flower-arranging to allow a greater degree of creative self-expression. Sosho Teshigahara’s books on Ikebana have been translated into languages other than Japan, another innovation since traditional practitioners did not think that non-Japanese could master the art. In Japan, Sosho Teshigahara has the status of a culture-hero akin to Picasso.) When his father died, Hiroshi Teshigahara abandoned film making to become the head of the Sogetsu School and he was active in that institution until his death. Hiroshi Teshigahara also is renowned in Japan for his ceramics, elegant vessels made for his flower arrangements.

Because of other distractions, Teshigahara made fewer films than other similarly situated directors. He began his career with a collaboration with the celebrated novelist Kobo Abe, Pitfall (1962). The director produced three other films based on novels and scripts written by Abe, The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another (1966), and The Man without a Map (1968). The four films made with Abe also feature highly innovative scores by the great Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu. Teshigahara did some work in TV and directed a particularly renowned episode of the jidaigeki ("period drama") show,　Zatoichi – Zatoichi is a blind swordsman who moonlights as a masseur. Teshigahara made a film about American deserters on the lam from the war in Vietnam and living on the edges of Japanese society, Summer Soldier (1972). His esthetic refinement is again demonstrated by his 1988 film Rikyu, a movie about the 17^th century Japanese tea ceremony master, as well as a number of short films about ceramics, flower-arranging, and art. He continued working sporadically in the film and TV industry while serving as the leader of Sogetsu Ikebana school – his last film, a period drama, was released in 1992. In the West, his most admired films have been Woman in the Dunes, said by Roger Ebert to be the greatest film about sand ever made, the grisly plastic-surgery thriller, The Face of Another, and his 1978 documentary about Gaudi, the Barcelona architect, most notably the builder of the Sagrada Familia cathedral. Hiroshi Teshigahara died in 2001.

The International Art House style arose in post-war Europe, principally Sweden and France, as a reaction to the philosophy of existentialism – particularly the writings of Albert Camus. (Camus Myth of Sisyphus is central to Woman in the Dunes.) Post-war existentialism, in turn, derives from the collective trauma experienced by the countries entangled in World War Two. The absurd and meaningless world proposed by the existentialists is undoubtedly a reaction to the horrific events occurring in Europe and Japan between 1939 and 1945. Werner Herzog, who grew up in Bavaria during the last years of the war, and endured, with his family, allied bombing raids said that, as a child, "I saw things that made no sense at all." This was undoubtedly the experience of the founding members of the French "New Wave" as well as the Japanese avant-garde in film in the mid-sixties, a group of directors that included Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, and Teshigahara.

Woman in the Dunes involves a woman living in a crater in the sand desert. Her husband and child have been killed in the collapse of their home. She ekes out a precarious living based on Black Market sale of sand and supplements her income by sex-work. This bleak existence was not fictional for many people living in the ruins of their cities after 1945. Sometimes what appears as Kafkaesque allegory is, in fact, a sober recitation of the facts.

In the United States, the International Art House Cinema began with Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In 1961, Antonioni’s L’Avventura was representative of this genre, an elegantly filmed, sexually suggestive enigma. It seems to me that L’Avventura is a kind of companion pieces of Woman in the Dunes. In the Italian film, a group of wealthy, somewhat debauched Italians visit the Aeolian Islands. On one of the desert islands, one of the young women along for the trip, Anna, vanishes. At first, there is consternation and panic. Several of the characters set out to find the missing woman. But, in the end, her disappearance is never solved and, gradually, the characters forget about her, reverting to their ordinary concerns. In Woman in the Dunes, a man also disappears although we know exactly what happens to him – Woman in the Dunes is, perhaps, L’Avventura from the perspective of the person who vanished. In both films, the narrative arc is from the extraordinary and adventitious toward an accommodation with the mystery and, ultimately, the restoration of something like the routines of ordinary life.

Characteristic of Art House Cinema is the so-called "boundary situation." This is a moment when a person is confronted with an event that forcefully draws that character’s attention to the fact that his life is, or has been, meaningless. In many instances, this event not only forces recognition of the protagonist’s absurd or meaningless existence, but, also, serves as an incentive for the hero (heroine) to change and live more authentically. In The Woman in the Dunes, this "boundary situation" occurs twice. Initially, the protagonist is visualized resting in a boat lying ruined in the dunes. The boat is going nowhere, becalmed in a sea of destructive sand. The hero reclines in the boat and muses about his identity and how we use our identities forged by passports, credit cards, driver’s licenses, and so on, as a bulwark against the meaninglessness of existence. Shortly after this epiphany, the hero finds himself stripped of that official or administratively sanctioned identity and reduced to bare existence in the crater in the dunes. A second "border" situation occurs near the end of the film, when the hero is confronted with an opportunity to escape his absurd and painful labor in the sands, but, like Sisyphus, seems to commit himself to the suffering that now characterizes his life.

　

　

Some additional information:

1. Teshigahara made The Woman in the Dunes for $100,000;
2. The great Russian film maker, Andrei Tarkovsky, ranked Woman in the Dunes as one of the ten best films ever made;
3. The man in the dunes is played by Eji Okada, a Japanese actor who earlier starred in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amou (1959). That film begins with Okada having sex in what appears to be post-nuclear soot and mud – poor Okada is best-known today for his grimy sex scenes;
4. The townspeople are playing "demon-killing drums" – that is Onigoroshi-daiko: this scene shows a kind of exorcism;
5. The film on the Criterion disk is 147 minutes long; this is the director’s original cut. As shown in the United States and at Cannes, Teshigahara voluntarily cut the film to 123 minutes;
6. The angle of repose for sand of the kind shown in the film is 30 degrees. Teshigahara had great difficulties creating the sand pits shown in the film – they had to be specially shored and the shoring, then, disguised;
7. Kobo Abe described the sand as shapeless, but all the more powerful because lacking shape and form;
8. The great Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, is said to have seen Woman in the Dunes over 100 times;
9. One of the few critics dissenting from praise of Woman in the Dunes was Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (It seems he moonlighted as a film critic in the early sixties.) Schlesinger despised the film as "café existentialism" and derided it as faux primitif. Schlesinger felt that the movie preached a acquiescence to totalitarianism and that it was a Communist fable.
10. Woman in the Dunes was shot over a period of four months in the Hamamatsu region at the Nakatajima Sand Dunes – this is an area of drifting white sand .4 kilometers wide and 6 kilometers long. The film was shot without sound because of the difficulties of filming on location and, then, post-dubbed.
11. Teshigahara interpreted the scene in which the sand dwellers demand that the protagonists have sex for their amusement as a positive development. He said: "This means that they have accepted the man into the midst – he is now one of them;"

Integral to the film’s design is the music by Toru Takemitsu. Takemitsu is an important composer, perhaps, the most well-known of all modern Japanese composers. Takemitsu was born in 1930 and conscripted into the armed forces when he was 14 in 1944. Takemitsu survived the war with a deep distrust and abhorrence for Nationalism. In his early compositions, he rigorously omitted any motives or phrases that might be construed as a derivd from Japanese folk music. An unabashed admirer of Olivier Messian, he met the French composer New York in 1975. Messiaen played his Quartet for the End of Time to Takemitsu. (Takemitsu was also a great admirer of J. S. Bach – he is said to have played the St. Matthew Passion through on his piano from beginning to end before starting any new composition – as a sort of "purification.") Takemitsu composed over a 100 film scores, including, notably, the four Abe collaborations with Teshigahara and most of the scores for Kurosawa’s films (including the famous elegy played during the massacre of the retainers in Ran.) Takemitsu’s later music uses Japanese traditional instruments, is influenced by Balinese gamelan, and develops into a tonal style. Takemitsu died in 1996.

　


Giri
Rumspringa is a Swiss-German word that means "running around." Between the ages of 14 and 16, Old Order Amish youth may experiment with life-styles non-conforming to their communities. The Amish baptize adults and, therefore, technically young people experimenting with Rumspringa are not yet full members of the congregation – accordingly, any minor sins committed during this period will be overlooked. The Old Order Amish require that their beliefs be accepted without coercion and with free will. This means that it is sometimes permissible for young people to consort with the non-Amish and learn about their lives before returning to the fold for their baptism and admission to full membership in the faith.

Westerners will not understand the sort of fame and nobility to which Hiroshi Teshigara was born. His father, Sofu Teshigahara, was a "living god", a National Treasure, the founder of the Sogetsu School, one of the principal factors in the renascence of Japanese culture after the end of the American occupation in 1951. Although there were over 300 competing schools of Ikebana prior to 1951, all of them were moribund, mired in the ancient traditions of the art. Like Noh and Kabuki theater, as well as the Tea Ceremony, Ikebana was passed on to its practitioners by the Iemoto system – this is a form of training that involves a long apprenticeship in which the novice is personally instructed by the Master. Iemoto apprentices copy the work of their masters exactly. There is no room for any personal expression or creativity. Sofu Teshigahara changed this paradigm – his pedagogy emphasized creativity and flexibility; the student was taught the ancient rules of the art but encouraged to experiment with deviation from them. As a result Teshigahara’s, Sogetsu School was fantastically successful – at one point, more than 2 million Japanese were studying Ikebana according to Sofu’s precepts.

There was never any doubt that Hiroshi Teshigahara would follow his father into leadership of the Sogetsu School. Although Sofu had relaxed some of the canons of the Iemoto system, nonetheless, Japanese art and traditional crafts remained intensely dynastic – trade secrets were passed from father to son.

Hiroshi’s surviving friends, all of them quite old now, recall that there was a kind of "rumpus room" in the basement of the Sogetsu School. In that room, Hiroshi entertained his friends, gathering around himself the leading young writers and artists of his generation. At that time, Hiroshi indicated that he really didn’t want to follow his father’s lead and become the Sensei of the School – rather, he said that he wished to make his own way. Donald Richie notes that, given his status, Hiroshi could have "been a master potter in his twenties with fifty retainers at his beck and call." Instead, Hiroshi forged creative alliances with the composer Toru Takemitsu and the novelist, Kobo Abe, as well as the architect, Araki Isozaki. Prominent members of the American avant-garde attended Hiroshi’s salon – these included people from the Black Mountain school including Merce Cunningham and John Cage. For a time, Hiroshi painted. He had the sort of genius that adapts easily to any medium that he chose and his canvases were striking. Hiroshi called his salon "The Century Club" – it’s leader was not Hiroshi, but Kobo Abe, someone who impressed everyone with his talent. For a decade, Kobo Abe and Hiroshi were inseparable – their ideas seemed interchangeable: as it was said of Braque and Picasso in the early days of Cubism, they were like two "mountain climbing explorers roped together".

Hiroshi had made short films, a documentary about the artist, Hokusai, and a lavishly beautiful picture about Ikebana. The short subject on Ikebana is revealing. We see Hiroshi’s father, Sofu, arranging flowers, making calligraphy (in one scene he paints kanji with a broom), and devising sculptures. Sofu’s flower arrangements seem to have been influenced by Alexander Calder – some of them look like mobiles. Sofu’s pottery and sculpture, an integral part of his Ikebana, are similar to the work of Henry Moore and Isamo Noguchi – it appears that as time progressed, Sofu gravitated more and more to monumental sculpture, great lattices of steel that are a far cry from his work with flowers. In the film, Hiroshi shows us the Ginkaji garden, an oasis with great pyramids and mounds of raked sand devised to "capture the moonlight" – "an unearthly spectacle," the narrator says. The film also shows the Zen gardens of boulders and raked sand at Ryunji Temple in Kyoto. Accordingly, this 1956 short film is very much alive to the pictorial possibilities of sculpting in sand. (The film also equates some of Sofu’s flower arrangements to neon lights and the sun shining through groves of perfectly aligned bamboo – an image that became very important later in Hiroshi’s life.) The point of Hiroshi’s film is to show that just about anything can be assimilated to the principles of Rikka – that is, the technique used in Ikebana. Rikka requires that each flower arrangement invoke Heaven, Earth, and Man. (At one point, we see Sofu saying that when using a Japanese chrysanthemum as a floating blossom, the flower should never occupy more than 2/3rds of the "water surface because the surface of the water is also key to the arrangement.") Hiroshi demonstrates in Ikebana that the conventional parameters of Japanese flower-arranging can be expanded almost infinitely.

(When I was a child, my mother had a big green book featuring images of Japanese Ikebana. I wonder if that book was not some kind of text book for the expansion of Sogetsu school principles into the United States. When she was young, my mother dabbled in pottery and made statuettes similar to those produced by Henry Moore – she used to tell us that the statue’s "negative space", that is, its hollows were central to its meaning. I know that my mother was very interested in Japanese flower-arranging and, probably, studied the subject at one time. There was really only one room for one artistic type in the family and that was my father and, so, my mother’s endeavors, which were probably more artistically successful, were denigrated. Now that there is no one to suppress her efforts, my mother has taken up painting – she paints clouds.)

As we have seen, Hiroshi made four films with Kobo Abe. Abe had the ideas; Teshigahara had the images. Abe moved on to other things and Sofu Teshigahara died. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s period of rumspringe was over – he stopped making movies and obediently took over the role of director of the Sogetso School. In time, Hiroshi Teshigahara assumed the role of Sensei in the Iemoto system – his mature work in Ikebana involved exuberant use of bamboo. One of his creations is a kind of waterfall entirely comprised of bamboo, about 200 feet tall. (Teshigahara also used bamboo to startling effect in designing the set for the opera Turandot.) Once a great film maker, Teshigahara became a great calligrapher, potter, architect, sculptor, and flower-arranger.

Donald Richie says that Hiroshi Teshigahara always knew that one day he would have to assume the mantle of leadership over the Sogetsu School – this was a fait accompli. Richie notes that "he was dragged kicking and screaming into the directorship position", although, then, amending his words to say: "Well, of course, he neither kicked nor screamed. The most anyone got from him was a tentative, regretful smile."

I think of the nameless hero of The Woman in the Dunes forced to the tedious task of shoveling sand. Shoveling sand is not Ikebana, but flower-arranging, I think, seems to have similarly limited horizons. Teshigahara said the film was about Giri – that is, the Japanese concept of "responsibility", "doing your duty" as defined by the group into which you are born. Teshigahara always knew that his identity required that take over his father’s role. The School was a destiny he couldn’t resist or elude. And, in the end, he seems to have accepted that role: Sisyphus, it is maintained, is content with the rock that he rolls uphill each day – it is his identity.