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The Movies
I never realized quite how much movies mean to me until recently, when I subscribed to Netfilx and started watching the classic movies I really enjoy more frequently.
I went to see Alice in Wonderland with Sylvia this afternoon. (That is to say, "Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3-D"...) I was kind of expecting not to like it, based on a general inbred aversion to commercializing the classics and on a negative review I had read in the NY Times; but it won me over, mostly. Burton really succeeded in completely imagining the world of the movie, with gorgeous photography and animation; the world of Carroll's books was present but Burton was not tied in to imitating it, and there was a reason given in the screenplay for why this was so -- the world of the books was assumed as part of the background of the world of the movie. (I also really enjoyed the use of 3-D in this film, maybe moreso than any other 3-D movie I've been to so far.)
I had a hard time getting fully inside the movie, but I'm blaming my own blinders for that rather than the director's vision -- I set out trying to find fault, and spent too much of my time internally carping about how it was not that way in the book, instead of letting myself go. (And to be sure, the adaptation of the elements of Carroll's plot to a Narnia-style battle between forces of good and evil is heavy-handed, there's no getting around that -- part of the letting myself go that I did intermittently was laughing at the sillyness of this, so that I could get into it.) Sylvia was not doing this kind of nit-picking, and she paid it what seems to me like the ultimate compliment on our way out of the theater, that you could really tell Burton had read the book before he made the movie.
posted afternoon of March 14th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
I watched Land of Silence and Darkness for the second time last night -- the first time I watched it was near the very beginning of my getting into Herzog's œuvre, and I did not get much out of it at all; now it is seeming to me like possibly the greatest of his documentaries, and on a par with Stroszek as an utterly captivating movie.
The first time I saw it I was laboring under some misconceptions, which I believe it would be useful to examine. I had just seen Even Dwarfs Started Small, and then seen the YouTube clip of Vladimir Kokol making lip-noises and playing with his ball, and I went into the movie sort of thinking, This is a crazy Herzog film about crazy people. But that is an exceedingly poor rubrik for understanding Land of Silence and Darkness. The Kokol clip is only meaningful in the context of the film as a whole, and it kind of sucks it is the top hit when you search YouTube for clips from the film -- I think the clip of Straubinger which I posted below is a much better introduction to the movie. Straubinger and the people she visits are not (in general) "crazy people" or deranged, they are deaf and/or blind, and listening to them talk/sign about their experience is enlightening and touching.
(Also possible: when I watched Even Dwarfs Started Small I was listening to Herzog's commentary track, which as I recall consisted essentially of him saying to his interviewer, "heh -- look at these crazy midgets" -- I probably had that in mind going into this movie, and was thinking of Herzog as taking his camera to the zoo/asylum to film the animals/crazy people... I have no idea whether that was his intention, but in any case the movie he made is much more valuable than that suggests. Possibly I should watch Even Dwarfs again and see if there is more to it than I got on my first viewing. A key thing to remember with Land of Silence and Darkness is that Herzog is not the only person making the movie -- the deaf and blind people are not actors, they are people with their own agendas in speaking to Herzog.)
The primary thing I am taking away from last night's viewing of the film -- and I am planning to watch it many more times -- is how the chain of conversation flowed between the different people. When a person is speaking words as he or she signs the words onto the listener's palm, and the listener speaks or mouths the words being signed, the communication that is going on is astounding to watch -- and as a viewer I felt able to get inside that act of communication in a distinctly different way than I do watching what I think of as "normal", spoken conversation. Then in the next scene, a deaf person would be signing to another without speaking/mouthing words, and I would be completely outside their conversation...
La teta asustada, Claudia Llosa's story of the aftereffects in modern Peru of war and insurrection during the 80's, has been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Picture. You can watch the movie streaming (without subtitles) at Megavideo -- my Spanish is not good enough to understand the dialog generally, but I'm finding the imagery very striking.
Lordy, I thought that was the prettiest sweepingest music that I ever heard. I wanted to holler and jump up and down I just couldn't sit still on that log bench when that tune started snaking around the school house. I let out a yell and leapt off that bench and commenced to dance and clog around and everybody was hollering and laughing and every time he touched the bow to them strings hell would break loose in that school house.
Found a treasure trove today; at folkstreams.net is a huge library of documentaries about... well about folkways; but a great number of them, running into what looks like hundreds of hours, are about American folk music. Learn about the Dallas of Blind Lemon Jefferson in Alan Governar's film Deep Ellum Blues. Listen to Peg-Leg Sam Jackson, one of the last medicine show performers, in Tom Davenport's Born for Hard Luck. Alan Lomax travels through the southern Appalachians, filming dulcimer players, banjo pickers, guitarists, fiddlers and more in Appalachian Journey:
The whole thing is great -- even the last 15 minutes or so, which I found a little gratingly kitschy, has some great music in it. Especially wanted to point out the fiddling of Tommy Jarrell about 20 minutes in. Jarrell is a new star in my firmament, a new sound for me to aspire to.
posted evening of February 10th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
From Sundance 2010: In this short doc, T.G. Herrington follows "Mr. Okra" around New Orleans selling vegetables from his truck. Ain't no use in cookin if yo ain't gonna cook wi' fresh food.
(I'm never quite sure how I feel about subtitles for English dialect -- on the one hand they can be really useful, but they can also be distracting and seem patronizing.)
Another image from Heimat is making me wish I could find some stills and clips from this movie online; but no luck. The opening shot of Paul has been all in black-and-white; as he reaches his parents' farm he looks in the window of the barn where his father is working at the forge; its interior is shot in color but you don't notice this at first because it is dark -- the camera pans to the bar of iron that Herr Simon is hammering and its orange glow just fills the screen. And just as quickly pans/shifts back to outside and black-and-white. (The gruff, happy interaction between father and son in the next scene is pretty affecting stuff also.)
I'm finding myself annoyed and puzzled by a bit of subtitling at the beginning of Heimat. Long, beautiful tracking shot without dialog (is this a German thing originally, or is it borrowed from Westerns?*) -- the young man is walking home from war to his village -- and then the view switches to a young woman in the village looking out the window, seeing him come, and says to an older woman, exactly what I'm not completely sure but it sure sounds like, "Ist das niemals Paul?" -- I don't know this idiom but it sure sounds like it would mean something like "Hey, isn't that Paul?" and not, as the subtitlists assure us, "Isn't that Paul Simon?" Why give us this bit of information, that the characters last name is Simon? This is going to be important certainly but there's no reason to cast it in there... And of course it is distracting because of the name being what it is. It seems like very frequently in the first half hour or so, somebody will say "Paul" and it will be subtitled with his family name.
Aargh, never mind, what the characters are saying is of course "der Simons Paul" -- the subtitles were doing the right thing if I would only let them work.
* Well according to Alan Bracchus, the technique has been around as long as the medium of film; but he says "perhaps the first true, universally-accepted ‘long tracking shot’ is Orson Welles’ opening shot in Touch of Evil (1958)." I guess I am associating this technique with German directors because I've watched a lot of German movies lately.
