The Sheila Variations

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Cocteau’, by Geoffrey Hellman

Posted on April 12, 2013 by sheila

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

This 1949 “Talk of the Town” piece by Geoffrey Hellman features a visit with French “poet, novelist, artist, playwright, actor, critic, scenario writer and motion-picture director” Jean Cocteau, in town for the premiere of The Eagle with Two Heads.

The piece is hilarious. Hellman meets up with Cocteau and a bunch of interpreters at the hotel where Cocteau is staying. Hellman knows a little bit of French, Cocteau knows a bit of English, but better safe than sorry, the hovering protective interpreters (more than one) are there. Hellman will ask a question. Cocteau will respond in French (and Hellman, more or less, understands what he is saying). The interpreters then give completely different interpretations of what was said, not so much opposite, but expanding on what Cocteau said, acting like his press agents. Cocteau will say something about the studio system in Hollywood and how nothing like that exists in France. The interpreters will interpret that as, “He works with his hands.” This goes on forever. It’s very funny. I love that Hellman chose to keep that as part of the “Talk of the Town” piece, because they really are supposed to be little slices-of-life, the more absurd the better. Because life is absurd. And beautiful. Hellman describes each interpreter, and then boils them down in later references, ie: “The Hat” and “The Sweater”

Beautiful.

In the midst of all of this Lost in Translation stuff, we get a great picture of Cocteau the artist, what he thinks about art, his movies, America, France.

Here’s an excerpt.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Cocteau’, by Geoffrey Hellman

With some valuable help from the interpreter, Cocteau went on to tell us that France is like a large village and that he feels like a peasant bringing his films to New York. “America has always given me courage,” he said, in reference to this country’s reception of such past pictures of his as “Blood of a Poet” and “Beauty and the Beast”. “Hollywood needs a laboratory. An experimenter is hampered there today, because it’s closed to risk. But it’s the risk that pays off.” “His films never lose money,” said the Hat. Cocteau made “The Eagle with Two Heads” and “Les Parents Terribles”, another picture (based on a play he wrote in 1938) that he has just finished, for a French company. He has formed his own company for his next film, which will deal with Orpheus and Eurydice. He lives alone in a small house in the country, near Fontainebleau. “All the young creative people in Paris are interested in the cinema,” he told us. “Here I don’t think they are. The cinema is a great art, but in America they have made an industry out of it.” “It is the modern art,” declared the Hat. “It is very young,” said Cocteau. “What is fifty years in the life of a Muse?” This Muse’s name, he said, is Cinema.

The lady in the sweater returned to the room. Cocteau observed that Cinema often keeps him busy from six in the morning till midnight, that forty of his drawings are being shown at the Hugo Gallery here, and that he lately completed a ten-by-twelve-foot sketch for a Gobelin tapestry of the same size. His subject was Judith bearing the head of Holofernes. It will take three years to weave the tapestry and it will go to the Louvre. “I deliberately chose an old-fashioned Beaux -Arts-Pris de Rome theme,” he said, “but my execution was not academic.” “Mr. Cocteau is exceptional,” said the Sweater. The object of her admiration and ours, a delicately featured man of fifty-seven with long, thin fingers, paced about the room as he talked, gesturing with his hands and occasionally coming to rest on a chair, over one arm of which he threw a leg. He wore a brown silk tie with his initials woven on it in cream-colored letters. “Everyone in America seems so youthful,” he said. “They all drink milk, as though they were still their mothers. No Frenchman drinks milk.”

Posted in Books | Tagged essays, France, Jean Cocteau, The Fun of It | Leave a comment

Looking

Posted on April 12, 2013 by sheila

A chilly spring evening, threatening rain. The blue lights were out on the trees. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but twilight was upon us.

My first reaction, upon seeing the blue lights and the building was to stop and snap a pic. But I hesitated for a second. And this entire thought process unfurled in my head, vast, critical, and multi-layered. It all happened in a moment. Proust or Joyce could describe the actual thought process better. But it went something like this: “Wait. Put camera down. Beautiful image. LOOK at the beautiful image for a while. LOOK. I wonder if people now have forgotten how to look? Have I forgotten how to look? Since everything beautiful can be captured immediately … are people more concerned with the capturing of the beauty as opposed to reveling in said beauty? What price are we paying right now? How is this impacting movies, books, the art world, our interactions with one another? Where will it end? Can’t I just stand here and LOOK at the beauty?” This entire worry-wart monologue/lecture took place over a period of about 2 seconds. I felt some dismay, because all around me I saw people take pictures of the beauty – standing still long enough to hold the camera still – and then continuing walking. In general, I don’t believe in judging other people for behavior like that. I do my best to only judge people who commit crimes. If you’re a murderer or a rapist or Idi Amin, I feel completely fine in judging you and calling you by your proper name which is “Asshole” and “Scum of the Earth”. If you’re a man who’s done me wrong personally, then I feel justified in judging you and saying, “How you behaved is why you SUCK.” I’m not gunning for the Saint of the Year award. There are exceptions, and I do slip up, but in general, I don’t think that judging people for what is, essentially, benign behavior, is the way to go. Besides, I was participating in the phenomena as well. As in: OMG BEAUTIFUL SIGHT WHERE IS MY PHONE.

Anyway, I wasn’t in a rush. I had had a rigorous couple of hours, in the care of the medical profession, and I was both stressed out and exhausted (a dangerous combo). So I had my little “Oh woe to us who do not take the time to LOOK” lecture imposed on me by some busybody-inner-voice, and decided to just stand there for a while, looking at the scene. The sky was this weird deep blue. The sun was gone from the sky, and it had been a dramatic cold day of clouds and dampness. I couldn’t tell if there were clouds up there in the sky, but there probably were. The lights around 30 Rock are dramatic and cinematic, making the building look iconic and impressive. The skating rink has been dismantled, now that spring is upon us. There was work going on down there. There was work going on outside the entrance as well.

I worked in 30 Rock for a year. I have really fond associations with the place. I worked on the 17th floor, the SNL floor (due to a glitch in office-assignments: there was zero reason that I should have been placed on that floor! I’d go to the ladies room and be surrounded by the glorious lady performers of SNL, all of us washing our hands, me trying to be cool, them probably thinking, “Who the hell is she and why is she on our floor?”) I would come outside onto that stone area facing the skating rink (where the Christmas tree goes), and be assaulted by the throngs of people, making it hard to walk even a foot in any direction without bumping into someone. There were definitely a ton of cons to working at 30 Rock. The amount of people there on a daily basis, for one. You just had to accept it, get to a Zen place with it. There is never a time there when it is not crowded. On the day the Christmas tree lights go on, they let us all go home at 2 p.m., because otherwise we would have been trapped. It was very interesting working there. It was a good job, a windfall in my lap, I made good friends, worked my ass off, and learned a lot. I almost never go by 30 Rock or Radio City anymore because I just can’t take the crowds. But last night I found myself on 50th Street, and was struck dumb by the beauty of the blue lights and the building and the dark blue sky.

It was around 8 p.m., so the crowds weren’t all that bad, especially because the skating rink is closed. The flags were fluttering a little bit, there was some wind, although nothing like the random gales going on right now as I type this.

As I let myself just stand there, forced myself to stand still, things actually started to look different. But the difference was in me, not the surroundings. People were posing by the blue-light trees, having their pictures taken. People were hurrying by on their phones, talking. They were probably hurrying home to someone who loved them. They were probably coordinating with friends over which wine bar to meet up at. Maybe they stopped on the sidewalk to snap a pic of the beauty because they were late somewhere, and wanted to make sure to savor the image later.

I do that a lot. “I don’t have time right now to enjoy this … but later … later I will savor it.”

And I do. Or I try to.

I’m just doing the best I can. And so is everybody else.

Posted in Personal | Tagged New York | 15 Comments

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘The Celluloid Brassiere’, by Andy Logan

Posted on April 11, 2013 by sheila

Next up on the essays shelf:

How exciting!

The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, opened in Chicago in December of 1944. Williams had already had a production of his first play, Battle of Angels, which had outraged pretty much everyone when it opened in Boston. It was dead in the water upon arrival. Williams was devastated (and kept working on Battle of Angels, it went through many different incarnations), but went back to the drawing-board and completed a play that had been on his mind for years. He had already written it up as a short play, and had worked out a lot of it in short stories and poems. He wanted to write something about his mother, and about his doomed sister. The Glass Menagerie was the result.

It was such a hit in Chicago (mainly due to the hammering-away at the local audience to “go see this show” by two influential local critics) that people started coming to Chicago to see the show. Movie stars would stop off in Chicago on their way to Hollywood, by train. It was an event. And people seemed to know it at the time. Something amazing is going on in Chicago right now. Laurette Taylor, who had been in the business for decades, came out of semi-retirement, to play Amanda Wingfield. It is a performance that influenced a generation. She would be dead in 1946. She certainly went out with a bang.

The show moved to Broadway. It was a continued success. It made Tennessee Williams a star.

The New Yorker‘s Andy Logan gets a chance to speak with Tennessee Williams in April of 1945, in the first flush of that success. Williams had been around for a bit, but he was an entirely new kind of person, seemingly, and people treated him with awe and a little bit of fear. He was openly gay, although I suppose at the time people would use the word queer or fairy. But he never tried to hide who he was (something that closeted men, Montgomery Clift, for example, found disturbing. He was going to ruin it for the rest of them!) He was intimidatingly talented. His play made all others seem pale and unfinished. He had put Laurette Taylor back on the map for all time (although they couldn’t know that in 1945 – they couldn’t know that people would STILL be talking about that performance, even those of us who never got a chance to see it, because it happened decades before we were born). Extraordinary. Who was this guy?

I love this little interview!

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘The Celluloid Brassiere’, by Andy Logan

For a journalist unwilling to interview Tennessee Williams, who wrote the latest hit show, “The Glass Menagerie,” the only alternative is giving up his press card. Fortunately, Williams is an amiable and adaptable young man, unruffled even by such experiences as being asked to pose for three news photographers in a single morning. He told us, as he has told other interviewers, that four years ago he was an usher at the Strand Theatre. It turns out, however, that this was merely an interlude between jobs as a Guild playwright (unsuccessful) and as a Hollywood script writer (unsuccessful). “Battle of Angels” was the name of the Williams play the Guild put on, and, though it starred Miriam Hopkins and was directed by Margaret Webster, it folded up after the tryout in Boston. “I never heard of an audience getting so infuriated,” Williams told us. “They hissed so loud you couldn’t hear the lines, and that made Miriam so mad that she began to scream her lines above the hissing. Then they stamped their feet, and after a while most of them got up and left, banging their seats behind them. That play was, of course, a much better play than this one. The thing is, you can’t mix up sex and religion, as I did in ‘Battle of Angels’, but you can always write safely about mothers.”

The mother Williams wrote about in “The Glass Menagerie” is his own. The play is mainly taken from life. “We moved to St. Louis when I was about thirteen,” the author informed us. “We took an old house that just had windows at the front and back. My sister, who was a year older than I was, had a sad little shadowy room that looked out on an alley, so we painted it white for her, and she collected a lot of little glass animals and put them on the white shelves to brighten things up. It’s something you remember. Especially if you’re a playwright.” A playwright Williams certainly is, the current show being the eighth he has written, not counting his work in Hollywood. He went out there straight from his run as a Strand usher, M-G-M having topped his old salary considerably (life is that way in the arts). They put him right to work on a Lana Turner picture the name of which he cannot remember – “I always thought of it as ‘The Celluloid Brassiere,'” he said – and then, when this project failed to work out, tried to assign him to a Margaret O’Brien script. When he had finished telling M-G-M what he thought of child actors, they barred him from the studio. He sat out the rest of his contract on the beach in Santa Monica, drawing two hundred and fifty dollars a week. That was when he started work on “The Glass Menagerie.” He finished it in Provincetown last summer. When he showed the manuscript to his agent, she said, “Well, let’s get it typed, anyway.”

Posted in Books | Tagged essays, Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams, The Fun of It | Leave a comment

Circumstance (2011); Dir. Maryam Keshavarz

Posted on April 11, 2013 by sheila

Four Iranian teenagers sit in a sound booth, headphones on, making obscene sex noises, doing intermittent shots of liquor to loosen up, and bursting into laughter, ruining the takes. The director is annoyed. They are in the process of dubbing Gus van Sant’s Milk into Farsi. It’s totally absurd. At one point, one of the girls, drunk, starts making what sounds like real orgasm noises, very realistic, and one of the guys looks at her in shock and disgust. “Ladies here don’t make sounds like that.” The girl retorts, “Maybe you just don’t know how to produce them.” Snap!!

Circumstance, written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz, is great when it delves into the underground secret world of Tehran, a world we never get to see in Iranian film, due to censorship issues and the fact that everything portrayed in Circumstance is illegal. Filmed in Beirut, Keshavarz had more freedom than in telling her story in a straightforward manner. It’s no Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel and film about growing up in Tehran post-Revolution. Circumstance lacks the sense of humor and satire that is one of Satrapi’s major gifts. Circumstance is more earnest, and its earnestness gives it a too-heavy hand. But Circumstance has enough of interest to keep me engaged, even as I recognize the overwrought melodramatic and slightly exploitative aspects to Keshavarz’s story.

Atefah (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) are best friends. They are in high school. They come from very different backgrounds. Atefah’s parents (Soheil Parsa and Nasrin Pakkho) are Westernized and wealthy. Atefah’s mother is a doctor. Atefah’s father is a music professor at the University. Both of his children, Atefah and Mehran, are musically inclined. Shireen, on the other hand, lives with her uncle and grandmother (her parents were killed, enemies of the regime). She lives in a traditional household, and her uncle sets her up with “suitors”.

Atefah is bold and aggressive, Shireen is shy and uncertain, but when they are alone together, they are lost in a world of laughter, accord, and fantasy. It’s like they are one person. There are a couple of moments when Atefah’s mother looks at her daughter and her friend, rolling around in the grass laughing, and you can see something hesitant dawn on her face. Atefah and Shireen look like lovers, they act like lovers. And, one weekend away at the seaside, they become lovers.

Passionate friendships between young teenage girls are, obviously, common. There is often an erotic element to such friendships. You’re teenagers, your hormones are insane, and boys can be a frightening and unsafe element. All of this is heightened by the barbaric gender separation in Iran, and the fact that the morality of women is treated as a national concern. So of course in that environment, men are not to be trusted, even men in your own family (this is especially true in Circumstance). The world of women, behind closed doors, provides escape, comfort, understanding, and fun. You can let your hair down. You can be free and spontaneous.

Keshavarz shows that divide (between private space, dominated by women, and public space, dominated by men) in various ways. Shireen and her grandmother mop the floor together in the kitchen, blasting Iranian pop music, and dancing around and laughing, splashing suds at each other. When Shireen’s uncle walks in, everything stops. The women freeze. This is the grandmother’s son, remember. But in Iran, he is top dog, due to his sex.

Atefah’s brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) was a promising musician, but is now a drug addict, living at home. He has to give his father bottles of urine for drug testing. But then he finds comfort and peace at a local mosque. Young Westernized guys finding religion is often a terrible combination. Clutching to the traditional ways is comforting in a world that is too fast-paced, modern, confusing, etc., but often it makes these guys bullies, busybodies, fanatics, and, at worst, murderers (Mohammad Atta and pals). Mehran secretly gets a job with the infamous Morality Police, one of many plot-points in Circumstance that I didn’t buy. He sets up secret cameras through his own home, so he can spy on everyone. A lot of Circumstance involves security camera footage, representing the extension of the Morality Police into all circles of life. Private life is sacred in such countries, because public life is so rigid. Mehran breaks that contract by bringing cameras into his home.

But this is a love story. A love story between two young women in a country where you can be hanged for such a thing. Atefah and Shireen concoct fantasies of moving to Dubai, where “anything is possible”. In their fantasies, they hang out in penthouse suites wearing glittering cocktail dresses, standing on glamorous balconies, lying in a cool white bed, and it all looks a little bit Red Shoe Diaries. (Nothing against Red Shoe Diaries.) Atefah will get a job singing in a nightclub, and Shireen will sit in the audience watching, and they will be able to live, love, and make love to their hearts’ content. I suppose the fantasies show how young the girls are. Nothing about any of it seems real or achievable.

My favorite parts of the film were the parts that showed the vast swirling underground life of Tehran, things I have only heard about. (“They have the best parties in Tehran,” an Iranian friend of mine told me. Looks like.) The girls show up at an apartment in the middle of the day, saying into the intercom, “We’re here for the sewing party.” On their way up the stairwell, they remove their chadors and hijabs, revealing skintight glittering dresses. The “sewing party” is a raucous dance-party in someone’s apartment, with alcohol, drug dealers dispensing pills, and a giant surreal video screen. Shireen is shy. Atefah is not. She hits the dance floor. She does shots. She gives Shireen some ecstasy. Later that night, filmed in erotic slo-mo, the two girls spray graffiti on a crumbling wall, and crash the window of a nearby car to grab the sparkling purse lying on the seat. They kiss for the first time.

Love is equal to societal rebellion. Love is equated with crime. It has to be when nothing is allowed. In a conversation with a friend who spent his childhood in America and who has recently returned to Iran, Atefah tells him, “Everything here is politically subversive.” Circumstance is best when it tries to slice that truth open and show it. Mehran, creeping around his own house, is representative of the male establishment, their weirdness about women. In a society that mistreats its women, everyone suffers. Mehran wants to be kind, he wants to be accepted, but Shireen is creeped out by him. And Atefah has noticed there is a change in her brother. They used to play the piano together, and laugh and joke around. He recoils from her now, as though she is dirty.

Atefah’s father, a kindly man, reminisces about his youth, as a young guy during the Revolution. Of course we all know that what began as a democratic movement whose sole aim was to remove the corrupt Shah, was then co-opted by a lunatic fanatic who flew in from Paris on the first flight to Iran he could get on. Those who had hoped for more democratization were horrified at how things played out over the next year or so. Many of Iran’s best and brightest fled the country, a classic example of the brain-drain phenomenon. There’s a moment at the seaside in Circumstance where Atefah glances over at a family nearby. The men, in swimsuits, come bounding out of the water, and the woman, draped in a sweltering chador, sits there, serving them food. Atefah’s father, about to go take a plunge himself, looks down at his daughter and says, acknowledging the entire situation, “Some day you’ll be able to go in, too.”

I know Circumstance is a sexy lesbian melodrama, but that was the best line in the entire film, and the saddest.

Circumstance shows a Tehran of hidden nightclubs, drug addicts, mayhem, cigarettes, and condoms – all contraband, all illegal. But what are you gonna do? You’re 17, 18. You’re gonna go to the nightclub, smoke some cigarettes, bump and grind, and take your chances. Nobody seems afraid of getting caught, and yet the repercussions, of course, are severe. During one arrest (and there are many throughout the film), Atefah is violently examined to see if she is still a virgin. This is a commonplace for girls in trouble in Iran (there’s a similar scene in The Girl in the Sneakers), and Atefah has parents who are willing to come bail her out. Shireen does not. Atefah’s behavior starts becoming more and more rebellious, and Shireen starts to retreat.

Shireen’s traditional family now treats her like she is a literal whore, and so she must be married off immediately.

You can probably guess who is chosen to be her husband. Let’s turn up the flames of melodrama, yeah!

While Circumstance would have benefited from a bit more subtlety and humor, the story of two young girls who, honestly, should be free to do whatever the hell they want to do as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, is tragic, and revelatory in its way. Circumstance, about Iran but not an Iranian film, not exactly, can get away with being frank, sexual, and obvious. It can say what it means. This is not an endorsement of censorship but sometimes censorship forces film-makers to be inventive, subtle, and ironic in ways that are lost when you can say anything. The extraordinary debut feature of Maryam Shahriar, Daughters of the Sun (review here), filmed in Iran, with non-professional actors mostly, is a harrowing look at the poverty-struck lives of the women who weave the gorgeous rugs that are then sold in boutiques in New York City for thousands and thousands of dollars. One dresses up as a boy, as a survival technique, because the world is brutal to women in ways that are specific and not to be considered. One of the other weavers falls in love with the young boy at the loom, who is really a girl. It’s a breathtaking film, with gorgeous raw imagery, poetic and magnificent, but palpitating with sexual and emotional tension. Does the young girl know that the boy she loves is actually a girl? The film does not say. Of course, in Iran, there is so much that you are not allowed to say.

There is a moment in Daughters of the Sun when the lead character, having been beaten by her employer, is left alone in the weaving hut with the yarn, all hanging to dry, in their magnificent colors. With blood coming out of her battered nose, she comforts herself by plunging her face ecstatically into the yarn. This woman is an artist. Women’s work such as weaving is dismissed and scorned, not just in Iran, but everywhere. But this woman can do unbelievable things with that yarn. In that moment, she is proud, she owns those colors. It’s a powerful and potent image. Erotic, sensuous, feminist, tragic, all at the same time.

There’s a lot to be said about the power of inference. Don’t tell us everything. Don’t show us everything. Hold back on your need to explain. Find a new way. Be inventive with images. Don’t be afraid of symbols and metaphors, but use them wisely and sparingly. Inference is lacking, in general, in much of today’s cinema, which is why films like The Master or The Kid With a Bike were so thrilling last year. Infer, infer, infer.

The plot in Circumstance is such that it does not want to leave us alone. It wants us to get, really get, the horror of these women’s circumstances. But we get it. Trust me, we get it. I got it from the shot on the beach with those asshole men who get to go swimming while the women swelter in veils on the shore. Seriously. That’s all you need to show me.

And so the following dawn, when Atefah and Shireen, having made love for the first time, sneak down to the beach, before anyone is up, to pull off their clothes and go plunging into the water in their underwear …. the scene is an angry fist-pump of victory.

Much to admire here. Much to think about.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Iran, Iranian film, reviews, romantic drama | 8 Comments

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Masterpiece’, by John McCarten

Posted on April 10, 2013 by sheila

Next up on the essays shelf:

The “Talk of the Town” pieces can be about show biz people, businessmen, or just interesting Manhattan locals. There’s got to be some news “hook”: so-and-so came to town today, so-and-so has been staying at the Waldorf all summer, so-and-so is currently on Broadway. And if it isn’t happening in New York, then “Talk of the Town” doesn’t care. They are meant to be short, snappy, gossipy, and yet concise. Omit needless words (to quote a famous “Talk of the Town” author).

I love this collection because the pieces are short, nothing over 2 pages long, and so the diversity of people profiled is fantastic. But even better, it is organized by decade, starting in the 1920s. And so you can basically watch the development of, well, America, through reading these pieces. People who later became household names (i.e.: Orson Welles, and others) are first featured here, doing their little New York thing. I love the historical-snapshot aspect of the pieces. While they are brief, they can contain entire worlds. You know, a piece on the first shipment of alcohol coming to the United States since Prohibition was lifted, contains in its essence the history of the Jazz Age. The pieces have such great feel.

Joel McCarten’s piece is from 1945, so already you can imagine what the hell is going on in the larger world. But, as with all “Talk of the Town” pieces, the author trains his microscope on just one tiny element of the enormous event of World War II.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took that now-iconic photograph of the Marines (and one Navy corpsman) raising the flag following the Battle of Iwo Jima. The photo didn’t have to wait for generations to be recognized as important. The reaction was instantaneous. It was a photo that went round the world (and continues to do so). It’s probably one of the most famous photographs ever taken. Certainly at the top of the list. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography (in the same year it was taken, a first). Joe Rosenthal was signing copies of that photo for the rest of his very long life (he died in 2006).

John McCarten, who wrote this “Talk of the Town” piece on Rosenthal, notes that Joe Rosenthal has stopped off in New York City on his way down to Washington. The A.P. had organized a full schedule of sight-seeing, publicity appearances, and all-around brouhaha for Rosenthal for his brief weekend in New York. McCarten managed to get some time with him, though.

The two men talk. “Masterpiece” is only three paragraphs long, but its essence is vast. I’ll just excerpt a bit of it. This is all well-trod ground for war buffs, photography buffs, WWII buffs … but it’s fun to hear it without decades of retrospect.

And, as always, with the chatty and yet strangely formal very distinctive “Talk of the Town” tone. I love it.

It’s 1945.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Masterpiece’, by John McCarten

Joe – nobody ever calls him Joseph – freely admitted that all the hoopla about the picture had come as a surprise to him. “I wasn’t around when they raised the first flag on Iwo – the little one,” he said. “My shot was taken about three-quarters of an hour later. I went up the mountain with the detail that was sent up with the big flag and the flagpole, along with a Marine Corps movie man and a Marine Corps still man. I took one picture when the staff was halfway up, another when it was all the way up, and then I got a lot of Marines to stand around cheering to make my last one. When they wired from Guam that my flag picture was very good, I thought they meant the last one. All my stuff from Iwo was shipped out in negative, and I never had any idea how the picture looked till I got back from Guam and saw how it developed.” When Joe’s picture was published, a commentator on the Blue Network said that the picture had been carefully posed by Joe. Later, he retracted the canard. “It wouldn’t have been any disgrace at all,” Joe told us, “to figure out a composition like that. But it just do happened I didn’t. Good luck was with me, that’s all – the wind rippling the flag right, the men in fine positions, and the day clear enough to bring everything into sharp focus.”

Joe has been taking pictures in the Pacific since January, 1944, when he got out of the Maritime Service, in which he had served as a photographer. Because of weak vision, he’d been turned down by the Army, Navy, and Marines before the Maritime Service took him in. Since he took his flag-raising picture, his draft board in San Francisco has honored him by stepping him up from a 4-F to a 2A-F. He worked around San Francisco as a photographer for fifteen years before the war, and joined up with the A.P. when it absorbed another news agency he was working for, in 1938. A serious character, Joe gave us a few technical details about his masterwork that we pass along to any camera sharps among our readers. The shot was taken with a Speed Graphic, between f/8 and f/11 at 1/400th of a second, on an Agfa Ansco Superpan Press film pack, against an overcast sky, with camera visibility about five miles. Joe got his composition in line by standing on a sandbag on top of some stones he piled up on the rim of Suribachi’s crater. Joe said that the raising had no perceptible effect on the Marines fighting at the foot of the mountain because they were too exhausted to rejoice. Incidentally, there are six Marines in the picture, although everybody thinks there are four or five.

Posted in Books | Tagged essays, The Fun of It, war, WWII | Leave a comment

Beyond the Hills (2012); Dir. Cristian Mungiu

Posted on April 9, 2013 by sheila

Loosely based on true events (very loosely), Beyond the Hills, the latest from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, tells the story of an isolated windswept snowswept monastery in Romania where an exorcism goes horribly wrong. I suppose any exorcism could already be an indication that things have gone very wrong somewhere, but Beyond the Hills immerses you so completely in the poverty and cold comfort of this particular world that it “checks out” entirely that an exorcism would seem to be a valid response to the situation. That’s part of what is so awful and relentless about Beyond the Hills. There is no deus ex machina in sight. Events march towards their inevitable conclusion. In a later scene that takes place in the nearby town, you see someone talking on a cell phone, and it is jarring. You had forgotten that you were in the modern world at all.

Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) and Alina (Cristina Flutur) grew up in an orphanage. They were best friends from first grade. The friendship probably helped them survive the brutal circumstances of the orphanage which involved poverty and sexual abuse and rape on a systematic level. Leaving the orphanage, however, was a traumatic event. At least in the orphanage you had a roof over your head and occasional meals (provided by the monastery’s garden). Alina was taken in by a foster family, but eventually she got too old for that (both girls are now in their mid-20s). She went to Germany and got a job in a restaurant. Voichita, on the other hand, stayed in Romania, and became a nun, joining the local monastery.

It is impossible to talk about the film without talking about Mungiu’s directorial style, which is a huge part of why it works. This was also true in his 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, another harrowing look at the life and culture of Romania. Mungiu likes to do one shot per scene. People do move in and out of frame, and occasionally (but only very occasionally) there is a change of POV, a cut within a scene. If there is a change in the POV mid-scene, it is always hugely important. You will feel this even if you haven’t noticed the one-shot-per-scene structure. Mungiu’s filmmaking style works on you in subtle and relentless ways, igniting feelings of dread and tension that cannot be pointed to exactly on the screen. There are no “Gotcha!” cuts, no lingering shots highlighting the horror, no quick cuts to artificially spike the audience’s adrenaline. Without any tricks (although, I suppose, one shot per scene is also a “trick”), his films are often nearly unbearable in their sense of inevitability and horror. The screen is sometimes very crowded, with people, with voices. You have to decide what to look at, you have to filter through the chaos of voices to find out what is actually happening onscreen. Scenes go on for so long that it is amazing how it starts to operate: There were specific times during Beyond the Hills when I could feel my eyes actually zoom in, locating (finally) what was important, the essence of a scene. And the camera angle had never changed.

This is challenging filmmaking, for sure, especially if you have a low tolerance for slow-paced uninsistent cinema. Mungiu will not tell where to look, how to feel, and what it means. It’s all up to you. An exaggeration, to be sure, because Mungiu certainly has a point of view, but the film does not hammer that point of view home. There is no score, no incidental music. There is nothing between us and the images. Scenes are long, filled with talk, filled with silences. The camera watches. It is that unvarnished quality, of being in the presence of something raw and unfinished (although the acting is superb, these are clearly not amateurs, and everything Mungiu does with his camera is extremely deliberate), that makes the film such a deeply unsettling experience.

Beyond the Hills, with its long takes and unmoving camera, has the feel of great live theatre. The script is complex and charged, and the emotions are enormous, although the action (as it were) doesn’t really get going until the final third of the film. And once it starts, once the exorcism becomes inevitable (and it is so inevitable as to be practically foreordained), everything changes. The screen becomes frenetic, jagged, chaotic. People run at top speed in and out of frame. You can’t see what is happening clearly. The camera still never moves, and yet you ache to see the periphery, you are impatient to see around corners, because in that way perhaps you can get ahead of events and stop them. This is a classic response to classic tragedy.

Beyond the Hills opens with Voichita, draped in black, greeting Alina (in a track suit) at the train. Their embrace is so emotional and expressive (a lover’s embrace) that Voichita murmurs at one point, “Alina. People are looking.” Alina has returned to Romania from Germany, ostensibly to go back to the orphanage and get her papers (she needs her diploma) and also to pick up some stuff she left at her foster family’s house. But it’s immediately apparent that she is really there to fetch Voichita. Voichita has entered the monastery, an action that is incomprehensible to Alina. Alina does not respect the fact that Voichita chose this life with no coercion. All Alina can see is that she and Voichita have always been together and they must continue to be together. In Alina’s mind, Voichita will leave the monastery at a moment’s notice, come back to Germany with her, and they will get jobs waitressing on a boat. This isn’t a plan or a hope to Alina. It is what is going to happen. She cannot even perceive any other option or alternative.

It is that rigidity which starts to crack open over the abyss of madness already yawning under Alina’s feet. A willow tree doesn’t snap in a hurricane, due to its give and take with the elements. But giant oak trees snap in two. Voichita is a willow, but Alina is an oak. You fear for her. Rightly so.

Voichita is a novitiate in the monastery, which is basically a small farm. They grow potatoes and vegetables and drive them into town periodically, to feed the orphans at the orphanage. I suppose if you come into Beyond the Hills with a strong anti-religious bias, the good things the monastery does cannot outweigh the bad or the creepy. It’s a valid point. But Mungiu’s portrayal of the hardscrabble world in Romania demands a bit more complexity. While nobody has a lot here, the monastery has more than most. The nearby town is clearly poverty-struck and overridden by garbage. The orphanage looks like a hellhole. We’ve all heard the stories about the conditions in Romanian orphanages. It is not at all mysterious that Voichita would flee into the calm quiet life surrounded by fields and hills after growing up in such a putrid violent environment. When the nuns drop off the food at the orphanage, a young woman who is clearly in her late teens, begs to be taken in at the monastery. She is getting too old to stay at the orphanage. There is a lot of competition to join the order. To “stay” at the monastery, you must take religious orders and submit to the rigors of a contemplative monastic life; it’s not a B&B or a halfway house. You get the sense that for some it is a desire to live a life in service to God, but for others it is for the protection and safety the life offers. Life under Communism was no great shakes; Ceaușescu’s regime was brutal and repressive. But the downfall of Communism has laid the country open to a rapacious black-market capitalism and rampant crime and poverty. It’s a big fat mess. Living in religious silence with no electricity and no running water may be a drag but it’s a hell of a lot better than what’s going on in the towns and cities in Romania.

Voichita has gotten permission for Alina to stay with her for a few days until Alina returns to Germany. Truth be told, Voichita is worried about Alina. Something doesn’t seem quite right. The nuns all treat Alina with kindness, although they too perhaps sense that something isn’t quite right with this lanky girl in the track suit sitting at their table. The monastery is run by a bearded priest (Valeriu Andriuta) everyone refers to, cultishly, as “Papa”. He is a believer, for sure, but he doesn’t seem like a crackpot. He confers with the head nun about food deliveries, and car repairs, and getting the church painted. The rules are strict in the monastery, but Alina is allowed to wander around in her track suit. Everyone is concerned that she isn’t a believer, but they are kind to her. They keep their distance and do gossip gently about what her life must be like in Germany (humorously, one of them asks in a whisper, “Do you think she got involved in a cult?”)

Things start to go south. Well, they’ve already gone south before the picture even starts. We are just lucky enough to witness the downfall of Alina, and the series of unfortunate events, some accidental, some deliberate, that put her in harm’s way. As far as Alina is concerned, she is still in a love-relationship with Voichita. Nothing Voichita says can dissuade her from believing that when she goes back to Germany, Voichita will come with. Their conversations are tense and grief-struck. Alina does not like “Papa”, and says to Voichita at one point, “Does he fuck you?”

Alina disturbs the other nuns. She dislikes one in particular, who seems to be friendly with Voichita. Not understanding the code of conduct, not understanding the rules and subtext that underlay the life of the monastery, Alina treats all as an obstacle to her being with her love, her only love. She is aggressive at times.

Alina has a violent breakdown. The nuns and Papa, terrified and concerned, take her to the local hospital where she is strapped to a bed. The doctor clearly perceives that the woman has a mental illness of some kind and prescribes all kinds of medication. He recommends that she go back to the monastery to recuperate, it would be better than lying in the hospital surrounded by sick people.

And it is there that the film takes its final sickening swerve. You know that Alina should not go back. I did not see the nuns or Papa as malevolent creatures. They actually did try to do right at first by the violent disturbed young woman in their midst. This is a medical issue, not a spiritual one, and she should be under a doctor’s care. But once Alina returns (and she is glad to return, as much as she despises Papa and the other nuns, because Voichita is there), the conversation turns more and more towards spiritual matters. Alina is troubled. She needs to go to confession. She needs to really confess, too, she can’t leave anything out. (It is clear that Papa and some of the other nuns discern the nature of Voichita and Alina’s former relationship.) She needs to take God into her heart. There is clearly something demonic working on Alina. It has her in its grip. Voichita is starting to believe that as well. No matter what she says, she cannot make Alina understand that she will not be going back to Germany with her.

An orchestrated campaign of conversion begins. Alina, just happy to be out of the hospital and back with Voichita, does whatever they say. A nun reads aloud all of the possible sins there are (all 456 of them), to see if Alina thinks they apply. Alina obediently checks them off on a pad of paper. She goes to confession. But it’s not “working”. Of course it’s not. She’s in love with Voichita, that’s what’s going on here. It’s not a demon, it’s a broken heart, and a long life of suffering and abuse that has destroyed this fragile precious young woman. But you stay in the monastery, you play by their rules. Alina tries. But not really. One afternoon, she attacks the nun she suspects is in love with Voichita. The nun is terrified, screaming, “There’s something not right in her eyes!”

Papa has private conferences with Voichita, telling her that Alina must go, she is disrupting the entire community. Voichita is devastated. Where will Alina go? She has nowhere to go in this world. Papa reminds Voichita that the monastery is not a hotel, people must submit to their way of life. Voichita begs. Papa relents.

When the decision comes to perform an exorcism on Alina, so much else has happened, so many other solutions tried and discarded, that, awfully, you can kind of see where these people are coming from. This is a terrible statement, and I must qualify it by saying that what happens to Alina is not only unnecessary but barbaric. It is an indictment of the superstition and ignorance that runs rampant in cloistered fanatical religious orders. What I saw was ignorance and carelessness to the point of criminality, but not deliberate or malicious cruelty, which perhaps makes it worse. I don’t know. I felt as helpless as anyone watching events unfold. But I also saw a community living by its own rules, in peace (more or less), content with the life they chose, and truly convinced that the Devil had a hold on this girl. These were not cackling judgmental villains, eager to get their hands on the wicked Alina. They were all devastated by her disturbed state of mind, and hopeful that this would bring her peace and let Christ into her heart. They thought they were helping. There is no excuse for what went down and obviously good intentions mean nothing when crimes are committed. People do a lot of horrible things in the guise of “helping”. But what I am saying is it is the casual and everyday representation of these people as not in any way, shape or form evil, that is the most devastating commentary in the film. Again, I suppose if you have a kneejerk hostile reaction to priests and nuns, all of this may look very different. I obviously do not have a kneejerk hostile reaction (I’ve got tons of awesome nuns in my family, it’s not like this weird foreign thing to me that people would submit to such a life). But either reaction is obviously valid, it depends on where you are coming from. The film can take all of it.

Life in the monastery is not presented in Beyond the Hills as some freaky cult, “Papa” nomenclature notwithstanding. It looks like a religious life, filled with silence, prayer, hard work, and good works. It requires sacrifice and deprivation, and yet it also provides peace and serenity. It’s not for everyone.

But once the wheel is set in motion for the exorcism, nothing can stop it. It is freezing, and there has been a huge snowfall. Alina is restrained (and I worried for the actress when she was thrashing about – it looks completely real) and kept in the chapel for days on end, bound and gagged. Voichita is beside herself. Every time Alina catches her eye through the window, she starts thrashing against her bonds, and it is so piteous to behold, so heartbreaking, that I thought I could not bear it.

Filmed in the dead of winter, you can see people’s breaths in every scene, even in the interior scenes. This isn’t a situation where people are sucking on ice to get the effect, they really are that freezing. Their fingers look like little pale-blue icicles. The light is cold and beautiful, filmed with spectacular simplicity by cinematographer Oleg Mutu, who also shot 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Cinema is all about the accurate capturing of light, and Mutu is a master. The nuns look freezing and pale, the light struggling through the simple panes of glass is pearly and clear, and the snow crunches under everyone’s feet. We become so accustomed to more orchestrated cinema, with more obvious artificial effects, that it is startling to watch Beyond the Hills, in its plain almost-Amish depiction of real activities like shoveling, or cooking, or drawing water from the well. The atmosphere is both beautiful and forbidding.

The final half hour of the film is excruciating. The calm eerily quiet long-take mood of the earlier sections shatters. We still have the long takes, the one shots, but they are now filled with screams and heartbreaking cries, chaotic movement, and panicked gestures. It feels totally out of control.

The acting is magnificent. Every single nun is part of the whole picture, and each one emerges as a fully realized human being, with a backstory, and a history. This isn’t done via monologue or closeups, it is merely done by spending time with these simple women, and watching what they do, listening to their conversation as they prepare meals.

Cristina Flutur, as Alina, gives one of the best performances of 2012. Life has been terrible to this young woman. She is destroyed already, long before the film starts. Her only saving grace was her relationship with Voichita, a place where she could be soft and vulnerable, where she felt safe. Having that denied her is not just a tragedy. It is a banishment. Alina was always going to have problems. She is already broken when she gets off that train in the first scene. Flutur is fearless in showing Alina’s determination, her blind rage, her jealousy, and her terror at being left alone. It is a great performance, a masterpiece of heartbreak and madness.

And Cosmina Stratan, as Voichita, is devastating as the young woman so fearful for her friend’s mind, and desperate to help in any way. She loves her life in the monastery, and it seems to suit her. But she feels loyalty to Alina, and also is frightened at the change in her friend.

In one of the final scenes, crowded with people, I slowly became aware of Voichita in the background, as the conversation was happening in the foreground. My eyes “zoomed in” on Voichita in the background.

I had no idea how long she was standing back there, because so much else had been going on in the long-shot scene with the same camera angle. But once I saw her back there, I couldn’t look away. A lot is happening on her face. She is helpless. She is upset. She is not in tears.

No. She is staring at Papa. And the look on her face turned my blood to ice.

The tragedy here is all Alina’s and I would never suggest otherwise.

But the loss of faith that I saw crack open in Voichita’s face is part of the tragedy of this terrible tale.

I walked out of Beyond the Hills exhausted and wrung dry. I was so glad to escape and I felt guilty about feeling like that. Alina couldn’t escape. Alina haunted me for the rest of the day.

Beyond the Hills is still out in theatres. Don’t miss it. One of the best films of the year.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Cristian Mungiu, drama, reviews, Romania | 4 Comments

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Et Tu, Shadow?’, by A.J. Liebling

Posted on April 8, 2013 by sheila

Next up on the essays shelf:

Orson Welles’ life is epic, in a very American way. There’s a reason Simon Callow felt the need to push his biography of Welles into three volumes (still waiting for that third volume, Simon). There are so many elements, the life had such scope, such highs and lows. It’s a symbolic life, and you can’t say that about too many people. I, however, am particularly fascinated by Welles’ time in New York pre–Citizen Kane. His relationship with John Houseman, the formation of the Mercury Theatre, their radio programs (of which the famous War of the Worlds was only one episode, although it certainly put them all on the map), the famous “Voodoo Macbeth“, the brouhaha surrounding the musical When the Cradle Will Rock (1937) (read about that in the link to John Houseman), and then, of course, Welles’ famous modern-dress production of Julius Caesar in 1937.

Read here for an excerpt from Simon Callow’s biography of Welles, where he discusses the Julius Caesar production. It was insanity. They were barely ready by the time the curtain went up on opening night, and Welles kept tweaking. This was classic Welles. He was never done.

Welles wasn’t even yet 30. I don’t think he was even 25 when all this stuff was going on. It’s insane. He was so inventive. He never stopped to rest on his laurels. He was always busy planning the next thing. He was, in many ways, a trickster, a magician (he loved magic). These weren’t just productions. They were stunts. His Julius Caesar was giant hit for Mercury, and also seemed to tap in to the anxiety about fascism, which, in 1937, was reaching its peak. The cast dressed in black military suits, like Mussolini’s goons, and the setting was abstracted: giant platforms and giant drapes, with pin-spots, and targeted lighting. The few pictures that survive are dramatic and frightening. The “Voodoo Macbeth“, which Welles set in Haiti, and cast with mostly non-professional African-Americans, was a huge hit for him as well, and white audiences traveled into Harlem to see what the fuss was about. It helped make his name. Julius Caesar was a classic hit, and people went crazy about it.

It was 1937. “War of the Worlds” happened in 1938, and then, of course, came Citizen Kane, right on the heels of that stunt-to-end-all-stunts.

So Welles was already famous in 1937. He was famous in a local New York kind of way. That was about to change.

Here, in 1937, A.J. Liebling writes about seeing an ad in the newspaper for “The Shadow”, and being struck by the fact that “Orson Welles” was also the same guy who was playing Brutus on Broadway in his own production of Julius Caesar. It seemed astonishing to Liebling that it could be the same man. He tuned in to “The Shadow” to get a listen to it. He was amazed by Welles’ vocal capability, in the dual-role of “The Shadow/Le Monte Cranston”.

Liebling decided to go check out Julius Caesar, and see what this whole Orson Welles person was all about.

Here is an excerpt.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Et Tu, Shadow?’, by A.J. Liebling

“Did you have to listen to that?” said Mr. Welles. He had just come from the stage and was still in costume, a blue serge business suit. Offstage, he’s still a tall, moon-faced youngster with a baby’s complexion and a mop of brown hair. The only new characteristic we discovered was a sudden giggle. If you read the dramatic pages, you already know that, at the surprising age of twenty-two, he had created history with his productions of “Macbeth” and “Doctor Faustus” even before “Julius Caesar”. Probably you also know the story of how, when sixteen, he left his native Kenosha – “a nasty little Middle Western city,” he calls it – to go to Ireland and paint. Running out of money, he introduced himself at the Gate Theatre as a Guild star on vacation and was immediately presented by the trusting Dubliners with a series of leading roles. He even made guest appearances at the Abbey Theatre. “I don’t want to sound jaded,” he told us, “but this success here, grateful though I am for it, isn’t a patch on my Dublin success.”

Back to New York (after a sojourn in Africa during which he wrote “Everybody’s Shakespeare” – 90,000 copies sold so far), he married and cast about for something to work at. Radio turned out to be his first dish: three months after he was first inside a studio, he had a finger in the production of about twenty big-time programs and some weeks was making as much as $800. Then, last season, he tied up with the WPA and started doing Shakespeare. He now won’t let his name be announced on the air, but can’t prevent the newspaper billing. “Honestly,” we said, “what do you think about the radio?” “I think it’s a lovely medium,” he said. It has been a loving enough medium to buy him a house in Sneden Landing, where he maintains his wife, a chauffeur, a cook, a gardener, a cocker spaniel, and a Lincoln limousine.

The success of “Julius Caesar” came as pretty much of a surprise. Mr. Welles says, “When I took the Mercury on a five-year lease, it was the most presumptuous act in modern theatrical history. I still go into a cold sweat when I think what might have happened.”

Posted in Books | Tagged essays, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, The Fun of It | 4 Comments

Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

Posted on April 5, 2013 by sheila

Mitchell and I were in college and had recently become best friends. We were 19, 20 years old. Theatre majors. For some reason, I can’t remember why, he slept over at my parents’ house, just like we were high school besties. A couple of things stick in my memory from that “sleepover”. My two younger sisters were in high school and grade school, and were sleeping in their room across the hallway from mine. Mitchell and I began laughing so loud and so hard at one point (it is still mythical to us, that laughing fit) that my mother had to call up the stairs to us to quiet down. We were keeping the kids awake. So lame. So hilarious. But the other thing I remember is that sitting beside my dad’s chair was a book of Roger Ebert’s reviews. It had been there for years. I had read it cover to cover. I hadn’t even seen half of the movies, but it didn’t matter. I loved his observations, I looked forward to the day I could see some of these things, and I enjoyed his writing. So Mitchell grabbed it.

He flipped through it, in my upstairs room, both of us lying in bed, and he read out loud from the reviews. We would stop and talk about things. We did this for a couple of hours. It was an early version of these types of conversations, something Mitchell and I still do, for hours on end.

I know we read many reviews, but the one that sticks out was Ebert’s review of Woody Allen’s Another Woman, a movie Mitchell and I both loved. We also were both huge John Cassavetes fans. (Incidentally, it is because of Roger Ebert’s reviews of Cassavetes films that I sought them out, in junior high/high school. Life-changer.) I remember Mitchell reading the following passage about Gena Rowlands’ performance:

There is a temptation to say that Rowlands has never been better than in this movie, but that would not be true. She is an extraordinary actor who is usually this good, and has been this good before, especially in some of the films of her husband, John Cassavetes. What is new here is the whole emotional tone of her character. Great actors and great directors sometimes find a common emotional ground, so that the actor becomes an instrument playing the director’s song.

Cassavetes is a wild, passionate spirit, emotionally disorganized, insecure and tumultuous, and Rowlands has reflected that personality in her characters for him – white-eyed women on the edge of stampede or breakdown.

Allen is introspective, considerate, apologetic, formidably intelligent, and controls people through thought and words rather than through physicality and temper. Rowlands now mirrors that personality, revealing in the process how the Cassavetes performances were indeed “acting” and not some kind of ersatz documentary reality. To see “Another Woman” is to get an insight into how good an actress Rowlands has been all along.

Mitchell stopped reading, and said, “You know, that is so true. If you think about her in Gloria, holding the gun and saying, ‘C’MON. C’MON.’ Or in Woman Under the Influence, with her weird quirks and madness … it’s all totally real what she was doing in Cassavetes’ movies, but then you see her in Another Woman, and you would swear she was born to play that kind of quiet repressed sad woman.”

The couple of paragraphs on Rowlands’ acting and career in the Another Woman review is one of the main reasons I fell in love with Roger Ebert’s writing. While his commentary on directors and the moviemaking nuts-and-bolts were always astute and thought-provoking, he is one of the few critics who really understands acting, and gives it its due. That is a brilliant and insightful analysis of Rowlands’ chameleon quality, her total sponge-like response to whatever director she is working with, and it is details like that that other critics often miss. I’m an acting-nerd. I was interested in movies because of actors, that was my “way in”. And to read someone’s elegant and passionate and knowledgeable analysis of the mysterious art of acting was a huge turn-on.

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My journey is similar to many of those out there who also discovered his writing early. There were the books. And there was the TV show. I would watch Siskel and Ebert every week with my parents. It was a fun family ritual. I got nervous when they disagreed. Sometimes it got heated. But I loved listening to both of them talk.

When the movie/acting bug was born in me, for various reasons, there were Roger Ebert’s books. As I said, my parents owned one of them. Through that book I discovered a series of mysterious names that I knew I would have to investigate. Fellini. Cassavetes. Werner Herzog, who the heck was THAT? I needed to know. I read every word. I was in grade school.

As I moved on from my parents’ house, I missed the Roger Ebert book, so I started buying copies for myself. Those copies have traveled with me over the years. Even now, when all of his reviews are online, I still like to flip through the books. They have followed me from Boston to Philadelphia to Los Angeles to Chicago to New York. I have my favorite reviews. I am sure you do too.

While the movies themselves are always the “stars” of the reviews, what is striking about Ebert is the quality of the writing. It’s just plain good writing. Some of his reviews are actually literature. His review of Stormy Monday is famous, for obvious reasons. (Please go check out Kim Morgan’s emotional tribute, which also references that review.) Reading that review as a young girl, not having even seen the movie, I knew that what I was reading was something fresh, something new. Reading a review like that young is a warning to a burgeoning movie-lover: “You must be able to see at this level. Can you?” It’s a reminder of how deep you must go. How deep you are required to go. Anyone can watch a movie. But can you see it? That Stormy Monday review is BOLD. Bold fearless writing. And evocative of so much emotion, a tone-poem, the words spilling over themselves, launching images in your mind. Even if you haven’t seen the film.

Roger Ebert always said that he didn’t feel it was his job to tell you whether or not YOU would like the movie. It was his job to tell you what HE thought of the movie. That has been hugely influential for me in my own writing, not just about film, but about everything. Some writers will never understand that, because their outlook is stingy and competitive. They are always comparing themselves to others, whatever success they achieve is never enough for them, they are writing to impress, to dominate, a million other reasons. But writing that actually shares who you are is not Amateur Hour. You have to really do it. You can’t fake it. You will be revealed as a faker if you try. I can smell phoniness like that from a writer. But a writer who reveals something about themselves, even if they are writing a book review, a music review, a movie review … it takes that ineffable thing, talent, but it also takes a willingness to be exposed. You must put yourself out there like that. I mean, put your SELF out there. Roger Ebert did.

While I know much more about him now because of his blog-posts and his memoir, I feel like I already knew him, or everything I needed to know, from things like his Stormy Monday review. I could tell what kind of a PERSON he was. You have to know what you are doing to write like that. Roger Ebert was one of the many influential writers out there who pointed the way for me, who shone as an example.

And, as I mentioned, he helped me learn how to see.

I don’t think I can even measure or express how huge a contribution that has been to my life.

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Back in the early 2000s, my old friend Michael Gilio directed/wrote/starred in a movie called Kwik Stop. I wrote about it here and elsewhere. Michael and I go way back, and so to see him achieve what he had been only dreaming about back when I knew him in the mid-90s was thrilling (not even the right word: all of us who love Michael were like, “YAYYYY!” basically.) Kwik Stop did a successful festival circuit, winning some awards. But no distribution deal. Roger Ebert loved the film. Read his review of Kwik Stop here. Ebert ended the review powerfully:

The movie contains genuine surprises, some delightful (like the plan to spring Didi from the home) and others involving loneliness, loss and desperation. I cannot say much more without revealing developments that are unexpected and yet deeply satisfying. Poignancy comes into the movie from an unexpected source. Depths are revealed where we did not think to find them. The ending is like the last paragraph of a short story, redefining everything that went before.

“Kwik Stop,” made on a low budget, has all the money it needs to accomplish everything it wants to do. It has the freedom of serious fiction, which is not chained to a story arc but follows its characters where they insist on going. Gilio, Phillips, Komenich and Anglin create that kind of bemused realism we discover in films that are not about plot but about what these dreamy people are going to do next. On a weekend when $400 million in slick mainstream productions are opening, this is the movie to seek out.

Ebert knows what he is doing. He knows what a review like that can mean to a struggling young indie. He chose Kwik Stop to be part of his Overlooked Film Festival of 2002. The film played at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, with Ebert himself moderating. He interviewed Michael, onstage.

Martin Scorsese released a statement after the news broke, part of which read:

Roger was always supportive, he was always right there for me when I needed it most, when it really counted – at the very beginning, when every word of encouragement was precious; and then again, when I was at the lowest ebb of my career, there he was, just as encouraging, just as warmly supportive.

You can see how meaningful support like that is, from someone who wields so much power, through his TV show as well as his syndicated column. Ebert was a fan. You always could feel that. He was a fan of Scorsese, he was a fan of Herzog. He would watch whatever they did, and even if he didn’t find it completely successful, he would not be dismissive of their lesser attempts. Obviously, he could be downright contemptuous if you made a piece of shit movie that wasted his time and insulted his intelligence. But if you had already proven yourself, if you already got his attention, he would stick with you. He would follow you. (None of this ridiculous stuff I see from some critics: “So and so should just listen to me, and take my suggestions, because I know what’s best for so and so.” Dude, you’re a guy at a keyboard. Nobody asked you, nobody cares. Ebert did not pull that kind of stuff.) If he was disappointed in something, he would say so. But he would not dismiss, and that kind of “encouragement” is meaningful to a giant like Martin Scorsese, and a young new filmmaker like Michael Gilio. It’s not just meaningful. It is everything.

Someone out there is watching. Someone is paying attention carefully. Someone is taking me seriously, even though I am not as successful as I was 5, 10 years ago. It can keep you going. It can, to quote Lorna Moon in Golden Boy, “stiffen the space between [your] shoulder blades.”

So even without the books, the TV show, and everything else, those of us who love Michael will always love Roger Ebert for his championing of Kwik Stop. I still tear up when I think about it.

You love my friends? You support my friends? You have my heart forever.

_________________________________

I will always associate the chaos of the last two months now with Roger Ebert. I have been dealing with some pretty heavy stuff. It started last year, but it has bled into this year, with a brief respite when I went to Memphis. I should have just stayed in Memphis! In the middle of a terrible week, like off-the-HOOK terrible, involving two doctor’s appointments in one week, and lots of outright fear, a couple of things happened on the same day. I had gotten off Facebook because I could not deal with it anymore. I deactivated my account. It helped. Then, one morning, during that off-the-hook week of Suck, I noticed that my blog was slow in its load-time. I wondered why. I checked my Sitemeter. It was apparent that I was being overrun by traffic from what appeared to be a link on Facebook. I am fine with my normal traffic, but there have been a couple of times when big-wigs have linked to me – The Wall Street Journal, Instapundit – and my traffic on this day in February looked like THAT. Enormous spike. It was all going to this piece on Ben Gazzara, who had died in 2012. It wasn’t a timely piece, I had written it when Gazzara died, although the Day of the Facebook Link That Slowed My Site Down in the Middle of the Week Of Suck was the one-year anniversary of Gazzara’s death. I was curious about who the hell was linking to it, but I was no longer on Facebook so I couldn’t check.

5 minutes later, I got an email from my good pal Steven Boone. He said, “Great Gazzara link! Hey, Roger Ebert is looking for you. Can I pass on your information?”

Well, I never thought I would hear the words “Roger Ebert is looking for you.” I didn’t put it together that it was Ebert who had linked to my Gazzara piece, on both Facebook and Twitter. I’m slow like that. Besides, Roger Ebert is looking for me?? Am I in trouble? I emailed Steven back, “Of course, give him my email.” I decided I needed to get back on Facebook to see what was going on.

At the same time, traffic started pouring in from a Twitter link as well, Roger Ebert, with the words: “The only appreciation of Ben Gazarra you’ll need to read. By Sheila O’Malley.”

Light dawned in the cave. Ebert, for whatever reason, had been checking out my site, found the piece on Gazzara, somehow, maybe because he knew it was the anniversary of Gazzara’s death, he was wondering if I had had something to say about it? For whatever reason, Ebert found that piece, and linked to it with the strongest possible words of recommendation on both Facebook and Twitter. For a brief hour or so that morning, my site crashed, because of those links.

I have friends who know him well, who work for him, who write for him. My pal Kim Morgan sat in for him on his TV show with Richard Roeper in 2007. I follow him on Facebook and Twitter, read his blog-posts, read his reviews. But this was the first time he linked to me. I didn’t even know he knew who I was. It was very surreal, since everything surrounding that one day, the rest of my life, was all pretty upsetting, to say the least. I said to cousin Kerry, “The TIMING of this …” She said, “I know!”

Half an hour later, I received an email from Roger Ebert. He cut to the chase. “I would like you to write reviews for me,” was his opening salvo. He broke it all down for me, his plans for his new website, his desire to give new voices a platform. He described it all here in his last blog-post, called “A Leave of Presence”, where he also announced that his cancer had returned. He told me in that first email that I had been recommended to him by a couple of people, and that he loved the Gazzara piece very much. “I would love to discuss you writing for me.”

Naturally, I emailed him back saying, “I am honored to be asked, and of course I would love to write for you.”

He emailed me back, opening with, “This makes me happy.”

His emails were blunt, to the point, and emotional. It took me about a day to get over my shyness in emailing him. He was so open. I would inform him, “Okay, I can get to this-and-this-and-this screening, and get you the reviews by this date, does that sound cool?” He’d fire back an email within hours, but sometimes minutes: “3X Yes!!!” Lots of exclamation points, showing his warmth and generosity.

The thought that all of this was going on while he was on his virtual death-bed is incredibly moving to me, and, again, speaks to his energy, his drive, his work ethic, and his undying enthusiasm. He was pumped at the new direction his site was going. He was pumped about the writers he had working for him. He loved what I was doing. He supported me and encouraged me. Every email I got from him was inclusive and excited. That’s my main impression. He was excited. Having someone excited by what I was doing was one of the most relaxing possible situations for me at that particular moment in time, and is far more important than I can even understand right now. I am still in the crisis, that hasn’t changed. It’s still there. To have this other situation with Roger Ebert flowing alongside the health crisis, the crisis that was frightening and overwhelming, was something I will never forget. He will never know how much it meant to me. I mean, it would have meant a lot to me in normal times as well, but in February 2013? Priceless. It always would have been awesome, but this winter it felt like a miracle. It really did.

We emailed back and forth about EbertFest. He encouraged me to attend. He forwarded invites to screenings to me, seeing if I could make this or that one.

My first review for him was the German thriller Barbara, which had already been released, but Ebert had obviously missed it and wanted it covered on his site. He said he could send me a screener, if I was interested. I said I was very interested, I loved Christian Petzold’s films, and had been sad I had missed it on its brief run in New York in 2012. The screener arrived, and I watched the film. It was around this same time that things started to go off the rails for me in that other situation (I am telling you: both things were happening at the same time). My mother came down to stay with me, to support me as I went to my doctor’s appointments, and help me manage what I needed to manage. It was such an important and special time. My mother is amazing.

I could not “check out” entirely because I had to write the reviews for Ebert. I had to get my shit together. Not a problem. I have never had a problem with writing, even in the worst of times. But for my first review, I had some stage fright. I had to really gather my forces together, which had been so scattered in the months of November, December, January. One early morning, 5 or 6 a.m., I got my notes, sat on the floor with my laptop, and wrote the review of Barbara. Mum was asleep in the other room. I was done with it by the time she woke up. The sun had risen. I read her the review. I said something to my mother like, “I like to start off with something descriptive, usually.” I had to go to work. I sent the review off to Roger, and then jumped in the shower. He had responded by the time I got out. Less than 5 minutes.

He wrote, “What good writing!” Words I will cherish always.

He then observed, “I like drawing us in with descriptions rather than generalizations.”

Mum and I laughed later, how he had completely clocked the very statement I had said to her earlier.

Listen, life can be a cold and lonely thing. The world can be isolating. You can feel all alone sometimes.

Words of not only support – but recognition – can be life-changers. Life boats. Healing vessels. Seriously.

My writing career has been going great. 2012 was the year it cracked. This far pre-dated Ebert, but Ebert reaching out to me seemed yet another element of confirmation. One of those random windfalls that occur when you’re already in the hustling game.

I am going to EbertFest. I had looked forward to meeting him. Knowing now how ill he must have been when he was writing me those emails with exclamation points and warm words like, “This makes me happy” is not just moving. It’s life-affirming. He is an example. I want to be like that when I grow up.

Not just the writing part. The human part.

See, even when I was a child, 9, 10 years old, reading his review of Fitzcarraldo or whatever, and thinking, “Holy mackerel, I have no idea what any of this is about, but I must know” I felt that I wanted to be like him. I wanted to know the things he knew. I wanted to see the way he did.

I would have been a movie fan anyway, I will always want to “talk about the movie”, but Ebert was a torch-bearer. I still go back and read my favorites of his reviews.

And on blue days, I pop in Casablanca to listen to his commentary track, one of the best examples of its kind. I like to sit there, and listen to him talk. It’s both soothing and invigorating.

He falls into silence during the “dueling anthems” scene. How many times has Ebert seen Casablanca? Countless times. But that scene still gets him. That scene still gives him goosebumps. He is almost speechless in the face of its primal power.

He is not “over” it.

Read his writing.

He wasn’t “over” anything.

It is that quality I think I will miss the most.

Thanks Roger. For everything.

Posted in Movies, RIP, writers | 58 Comments

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000); Dir. Béla Tarr

Posted on April 4, 2013 by sheila

Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies is 2 hours and 25 minutes long and has only 39 shots. It is an extraordinary accomplishment, and difficult to describe. There were times, during this or that shot, when I found myself thinking, “How on earth did he pull this off?” The film is both seductive and trying. Despite the fact that there are no cuts within scenes, the sense of dread is on a slow burn here, building and building, through the intensity of the performances, the camera movement (it is rarely static), and the mysterious plot suggesting great violence and devastation. Roger Ebert describes the effect of the 39 shots as “stately”, and that’s very accurate. The “stately” quality of the long shots, with the camera snaking around through rooms, floating from face to face, or zooming in (or out) slowly, is unique. It gives the film a frightening relentless feeling. The camera is not a busybody, cutting in and out, with closeups, long shots, medium shots. Without those techniques, the story starts to feel like a collective nightmare, organic and inevitable. Nobody can wake up.

There’s one scene with a giant crowd walking silently down a street, wielding sticks. The crowd stretches as far as the eye can see. It is night. Nobody speaks. It is a mob we are seeing, and yet they seem rather organized and subdued (that will change). The shot goes on for what feels like a long time, with nothing changing. We are “merely” looking at a huge crowd marching forward.

But slowly, as we settle into the shot, as we submit to it (Tarr’s films require submission, you must meet them on HIS terms, he’s like James Joyce in that respect), different things start to happen. It’s an internal change. As the shot goes on and on and on, and the crowd never seems to end, the sense of danger ratchets up alarmingly. And nothing has changed in the filming of it. There are no closeups of glowering faces or sneering expressions. We are stuck with the same perspective throughout the shot. It is the sticking-with-it that is challenging about Tarr’s films, but it is through the sticking-with-it that you get the rewards. Slowly, as the shot of the crowd continues, you start to realize that the camera is, indeed, moving. It must be on some sort of crane, as well as a dolly, because it is moving backwards, ahead of the crowd, and sometimes the camera is down on face-level with the people and then, almost imperceptibly, the camera will float up high to give us a longer view perspective, and then, it floats back down into the throng for a while, and then it floats back up again. This goes on for five minutes.

As I said, it can be trying, but only if you don’t submit to it. Tarr is a taskmaster.

Béla Tarr is a Hungarian director, and his films are hard to come by. You have to seek them out. Festival favorites, many of them, they rarely find wide releases. He has been working in cinema since the 1970s. He originally wanted to be a philosopher, and this sensibility certainly is evident in his films, which are low on plot, and high on thought and reflection. They are challenging. You must meet them halfway. He started out with documentaries and short films, and rarely used professional actors in the beginning. Social realism was the accepted style of the day. He works with the same people repeatedly. He loves to film in black and white. Tarr was born the year before Hungary’s annus horribilis of 1956, when Soviet troops invaded the country to put down the burgeoning uprising, an event that ignited the world in sympathy and outrage. Despite the Communist iron fist, Hungary was considered a good place to live in the final decades of the Cold War. Budapest was cosmopolitan, artists were allowed freedom (limited, but still), and the standard of living was high (comparatively). Béla Tarr came from a theatrical family (his mother was an actress), and he got some acting jobs as a youth but he never took that seriously as a pursuit. He got jobs with some of the state cultural organizations, and it was under their auspices that he made his first short films. Already, the ties with Russia were loosening. The crackup of the Imperium had begun (it actually had begun the minute it was put in place, but there were years of darkness and isolation in between). The 70s and 80s were heady times for Hungary, the light at the end of the tunnel, and it was then that Tarr first started making his mark. As I said, much of his stuff is hard to come by. He directed a Macbeth that I would love to get my hands on: The entire film only has two shots. Tarr obviously loves to challenge himself in that way. If you set for yourself the task of filming Macbeth knowing ahead of time that you will be doing one long take for the majority of the picture, all kinds of interesting things can then happen, process-wise. (It is reminiscent of the film The Russian Ark, directed by Aleksandr Sokurov, which is a history of Russia up to the Revolution in 1917, filmed at the Hermitage in St. Petersberg, with a cast of thousands – literally – and it’s all one shot.)

I saw Tarr’s latest, The Turin Horse, at the New York Film Festival, and despite some of my issues with it, found much to admire. His cinematography is unparalleled. This is a personal filmmaker, with a unique and individual vision. There are shots in The Turin Horse that have stayed with me. The opening sequence is a masterpiece. There were moments, again, when I thought, “How on earth is Tarr doing this??” His stuff is symphonic, orchestral, filled with foreboding, menace, loss.

I encourage you to seek out his films. Especially if you are interested in the art of moviemaking.

Werckmeister Harmonies tells the story of a small Hungarian town, surrounded by the great plains (on display in a magnificent shot involving railroad tracks and a circling helicopter). The film opens with Janos (Lars Rudolph), a young well-liked man in the town, coercing a bunch of drunks in a bare-bones drinking establishment, to participate in an exhibition of the solar system’s workings. One man is the sun, he has to stand still, doing what amounts to jazz hands, and turn slowly in a circle. One man is the earth, and he has to twirl around the sun, and another man is pulled into the act to be the Moon, and he has to twirl around the earth. Janos is the maestro of this symphony of the celestial spheres.

Later in the film, another townsperson asks Janos, “How’s the cosmos, Janos?” The setting may be grim and poor, but Janos’ natural outlook is up and out.

However. Posters have appeared on telephone poles and lampposts, announcing a circus’ impending arrival. A giant corrugated crate on the back of a truck rolls into town one pitch-black night, its shadow stretching across the houses irrevocably. A harbinger of something dreadful. The light blotted out, no more jazz hands.

The only thing the circus posters proclaim is that you can come see the “world’s largest whale”, and there will be an appearance by someone named “Prince”. Nothing about trapeze artists or acrobats or clowns. Meanwhile, as Janos makes his morning rounds, dropping off newspapers at various locations, stopping to chat, he hears rumblings of unease in the townspeople. A woman at the local restaurant gossips ferociously behind a caged window about the unrest, and how the circus people have been going on violent rampages every night, breaking windows and attacking people. No one is safe. Janos talks to a cleaning woman at his uncle’s house who is afraid to walk home alone. Everyone can feel that something terrible is coming. It may have already arrived, but life, as they know it, is still going on. It is certainly not safe to go to the main square and check out the whale. Nothing good can come of that.

In The Turin Horse there was a similar sense of impending apocalypse, symbolized by the ferocious wind that blows everything away. It is an apocalypse that is felt rather than seen. Werckmeister Harmonies could be seen as a metaphor, for sure, of living under tyranny, of learning early the necessity of keeping your head down and not calling attention to yourself. Of man’s inhumanity to man. Similar to the opening scene in Mikhail Bulgakov’s brilliant Master and Margarita (so full of terror and you cannot quite place why: it is just a friendly meeting in a public park on the surface of it),Werckmeister Harmonies works subconsciously and subtextually. The dread felt by the populace is there in the shadows, it is there in the camera movement (which often comes in so close to a face that you ache for it to pull back so you can see more of the scene), it is there in the music.

Speaking of music.

Janos’ Uncle Gyorgy (Peter Fitz) is a musicologist, obsessed with the theories of Baroque-era theorist/composer/tuner Andreas Werckmeister. Werckmeister, as I understand it, came up with theories of harmony and counterpoint, as well as tips for tuning instruments so that music played would be in tune with the proper harmonies, a revolution at the time of Werckmeister, when tuning was far from a science. Uncle Gyorgy, huddled in a dark room by his piano, feels that the world went wrong after Werckmeister, whose heyday, let’s remember, was in the 17th century. After Werckmeister, the world turned its back on more celestial and natural harmonies, the ones provided by God and the universe. If we could just undo the work of Werckmeister, if we could un-hear him, we could actually be in sync again with the way things ought to be (and to sound). Uncle Gyorgy is so obsessed with Werckmeister that he has kicked his wife out of the house, and is barely paying attention to the catastrophe unfolding in the town.

But perhaps the two are connected. Of course they are connected. Janos spends his life trying to explain and understand the organic movements of the universe, and his uncle spends his life trying to hear the harmonies that existed before everything was straightened out and regularized. What is the world missing? What are we now unable to hear? What have we lost?

False harmonies, false order, will be imposed in such a vacuum. The circus, and the ominous never-seen figure of “Prince”, represents that imposed order. But the circus’ order is actually chaos, a perfect representation of how tyranny operates. Pacify a populace (totalitarian language has a chilling way of taking perfectly peaceful words like “pacify” or “cleanse” and using them to describe violent genocidal events) through terrifying violence. One swift strike and you won’t have any problem for generations to come. Order imposed separates us from God. Werckmeister, “Prince” … same force in our world, violence masquerading as order. Gyorgy’s estranged wife Tunde (a fantastic Hanna Schygulla) appeals to Janos: Gyorgy is the only citizen in the town respected enough to resist Prince and the circus. Aunt Tunde tells Janos that he must get Gyorgy to go out and collect signatures for a petition to keep the town safe from harm. Gyorgy needs to step up, basically, and if he does not do what Tunde asks, then Tunde will move back in with him. “Tell him,” she whispers to Janos, “that I will have supper with him tonight if he does not do what I ask.”

Having to live with his wife again is enough of a threat, apparently, that Gyorgy struggles on his overcoat and heads out with Janos to talk to the citizens and get organized as a resistance. Tarr shoots Janos and Gyorgy walking along the sidewalk, in tight closeup, both faces in the frame, both characters walking briskly, another amazing accomplishment (in a film filled with camera behavior that boggles the mind). You wonder how they timed it, how they got in sync. I do know that it sometimes takes months to get one shot right in a Tarr film. Because the characters are talking, and because they are discussing things like the whale in the town square, and marital issues, and things like that, the scene is engrossing enough on its own. But the filming of it is the stand-out. Werckmeister Harmonies forces you to pay attention to those details.

Meanwhile, a restless crowd gathers on the town square around the corrugated iron shed. Fires burn in the open. Birds fly above and swoop down, as though they too are alarmed. You pay a couple cents and you are allowed into the shed to look at the giant whale. Everyone warns Janos to stay away from the square, stay away from the whale, but Janos must see it. Janos enters the dark shed. The whale, dead, with open staring eyes, lies there motionless. Janos stares into the giant eyeball of the dead whale. To Janos it is not a harbinger of doom, although by that point in Werckmeister Harmonies you may start to feel that Janos’ naivete may be dangerous, as political naivete usually is. I don’t know why the whale is a bad sign. But it is. Or, to say it more plainly: the whale is a blank slate, a vacuum of meaning, and anyone can project anything they want onto it. Janos sees the whale as evidence of God’s magnificence. It is part of that circling perfect cosmos he tried to create in the opening scene. Others refuse to look upon the giant dead thing waiting in the town square. It will bring no good. Others still seem to feel proprietary towards it: it is THEIR whale, what the hell are YOU doing here?

When violence breaks out, after the unseen Prince rallies the forces of chaos, it is horrifying to behold. The mob walking down the street enters a dilapidated hospital, and wreak havoc on the patients. People are beaten and killed. It’s almost balletic, symphonic, the movements of the mob and the camera floating down the hallway, peeking in and out of rooms as horrific events go down. The crowd has turned into a mob (Nobel laureate Elias Canetti broke down the different types of crowds in his fascinating book Crowds and Power: I thought of it often while watching Werckmeister Harmonies.) Power is lying in the streets, waiting to be picked up, as a famous revolutionary once said.

The film’s outlook is bleak. The prospects are not good, people. It’s far too late to wish for simple things like safety and comfort and leisure. Even in the first scene, as Janos manipulates his fellow townsmen into the formation of the solar system, it is too late. The apocalypse has already begun. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

Werckmeister Harmonies, filmed in elegant and sometimes spooky black and white, is pierced with longing for another time, for peace, for harmony, and pierced with terror of what is to come, of annihilation.

Another Nobel laureate, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, wrote a poem that came to mind when I saw the whale, lying in the square, naked and exposed after the violence. Milosz himself experienced tyranny, oppression, and terror. His poetry often had to do with exposing the truth of living under a totalitarian system (in his unforgettable Nobel acceptance speech, Milosz said, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”). Milosz’s poem “So Little” is a pistol shot of truth and, incidentally, it involves a whale.

Listen.

So Little
I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn’t keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don’t know
What in all that was real.

Werckmeister Harmonies, directed by a vital and uncompromising artist, hauls us down into the pit of the “white whale of the world”. We are forever separated from God. And in that chaos, we can’t know “what in all that was real”. It’s a must-see.

Posted in Movies | Tagged Bela Tarr, drama, Hungary, reviews | 5 Comments

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘The Joyces’, by James Thurber

Posted on April 2, 2013 by sheila

Next up on the essays shelf:

From 1935, this “Talk of the Town” piece focuses on Giorgio Joyce, son of James Joyce, who arrived in New York the previous year with his family. Giorgio Joyce is a singer, a bass (unlike his father who was a tenor – James Joyce considered being a singer, actually.) At this point in the James Joyce story, Ulysses had been published for over 10 years (although it had only been allowed into the United States for a year, after a Court of Appeals judge deemed the book to be not obscene). Regardless of Ulysses‘ complicated publishing history, Joyce had been done with the book for 10, 12, years. And since then, he had published nothing. He was working on something else, which would, of course, become Finnegans Wake, finally published in 1939. People knew for years that James Joyce was working on something. Imagine writing Ulysses, and then submitting to silence for 17 years. At one point, Joyce said, of Finnegans Wake, “I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book but it is the only book which I am able to write at present.”

That’s what it means to follow your own star!

I love James Thurber’s piece on Giorgio Joyce because, of course, it’s all about Jimmy. Giorgio is here in New York, he’s singing on the radio occasionally, but all anyone cares about is his father. Including James Thurber.

James and Nora Joyce, and their two children, Lucia and Giorgio

Here is an excerpt.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘The Joyces’, by James Thurber

Giorgio won’t talk about his father’s work, but he told us some interesting things about the author’s way of life, speaking with a slight accent. (He lived in Trieste till he was nine, in Switzerland during the war, and has been in Paris since 1919. He and his father always converse in Italian.) James Joyce’s eyesight, his son says, is much better than it used to be, but he can see only with his left eye, his right being entirely blind. A few years ago he had to write with blue crayon on huge sheets of white paper, but now he uses pen or pencil on any paper that is handy. He can typewrite, using one finger on each hand, but uses a typewriter only for his infrequent correspondence, never for manuscripts. His friends drop in and type his manuscripts – he hates professional secretaries and has never hired one. His friends also read to him, out of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books. When he wants something read to him for relaxation, he usually asks for Ibsen. He has never had a line of Gertrude Stein read to him and seems to have no interest in her work. The two have met, but that’s all. The only thing Joyce reads for himself is his “Work in Progress.” He reads parts of it aloud to his friends, chuckling now and then, going back and rereading sometimes passages he especially likes. He never reads from “Ulysses” or any other of his old works, being bored with them after they are written and published.

Joyce sees very few people. He never goes to literary teas or other parties, but gives three a year himself – at Christmas, New Year’s, and on his birthday, February 2nd. Only his small circle of intimates are invited to these parties. Joyce always sings Irish songs for them, playing his own accompaniment. His voice is tenor and his favorite song is “Molly Brannigan.” (His son, incidentally, doesn’t play the piano.) Joyce gets up around nine, writes a little, but spends most of the morning telephoning. He actually likes talking on the phone, and chins with his friends by the hour. Before lunch he plays and sings, and afterward works until five o’clock. He has been at his new book for years; nobody knows when it will be finished, but Giorgio thinks it’s about half done. After five, Joyce takes a walk, alone. He detests dogs and wouldn’t walk with one. There are no pets at all in his household, which consists of himself, his wife (who was Nora Barnacle), and his other child, Lucia.

Posted in Books, James Joyce | Tagged essays, Ireland, The Fun of It | 5 Comments

The Sheila Variations

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Cocteau’, by Geoffrey Hellman

Looking

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘The Celluloid Brassiere’, by Andy Logan

Circumstance (2011); Dir. Maryam Keshavarz

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Masterpiece’, by John McCarten

Beyond the Hills (2012); Dir. Cristian Mungiu

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Et Tu, Shadow?’, by A.J. Liebling

Roger Ebert, 1942-2013

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000); Dir. Béla Tarr

The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘The Joyces’, by James Thurber

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