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Crazy Heart: A Film

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhal turn in very nice performances in Crazy Heart, another of so many movies/stories of American lost men on lost roads [Paris, Texas; Don't Come Knocking; Red Lights, based on a Simenon novel; all the Randolf Scott/Bud Boetticher collaborations - The Tall T, Ride Lonesome] featuring wide open western landscapes that appeal to everybody’s shuck the maddening crowd sensibility. In our fantasies, of course, the deserts, the plains, the tumbleweed, the austere table-top hills retain something cozy about them; we can be alone and then come home. In the real lives of marginal men like Bad Blake, the country musician Bridges portrays, there’s nothing very cozy about it at all. Miles and miles of roads, slender paydays, no where to turn but the bottle creates a life not many would chose if they could see the whole package at the beginning.

Bad Blake at 57 looks 77. He’s at the sorry end of a once promising career, driving to whatever gigs his agent can get him, backed by young hopefuls with guitars and drums in barrooms and bowling allies where the audience is all about his age, living the lives of their remembered youths in the nostalgia of his songs. In Santa Fe Jeane (Gylenhall) comes to interview him and (inexplicably) is attracted to him, and he, more explicably, to her. He sourly accepts a big payday to be the warm-up act for his earlier protege, Tommy Sweet who, young and studly, is attracting the crowds and the big dollars. Sweet acknowledges, on stage and personally, his debt to Blake. Coming on the heels of the new affection Blake finds in Janie, we see the possibility of self worth returning and a way of the Blake’s self sought hell. Both Sweet and Blake’s agent keep hammering him for new songs though he claims he’s washed up and they don’t come like they used to. A bad accident, Janie’s devotion, and that of her young son, move Blake back into song writing. An alcohol induced near tragedy with the young boy leads to his separation from Janie and his final turn from alcohol and a modest tale of redemption, not saturated in the Hollywood obvious but real enough…

The music is quite respectable for music-made-for-movies, and the sound track with other familiar country tinged tunes is very nice.

So, does the who package work? Modestly, I’d say.

Somehow the film seems to sag between several of the important scenes. There is a sense of the schematic — that yes, this might happen; yes, I see it — but I don’t feel it. I don’t quite believe. The transition from watching a movie to forgetting we are watching a movie doesn’t happen.

Bridges as a singer is just about perfect. His voice is gravelly and resonant, flirtatious and exhausted. His lyrics and tunes aren’t cliches but are familiar stories from the best of the country-western canon. The make up artists, set designers and most of all Bridges himself give us a visceral, sad portrait of alcoholic ruin; too much of a portrait perhaps. Almost unwatchable. Were we in the room with him we’d turn our heads. We really see a man in the last throes of destruction, from flabby uncared for flesh, to watery eyes, mouth trailing vomit, the bottle being cradled in coma like results.

Gylenhall as Janie is a perky, way cute southwestern woman, who has made some mistakes and is determined to make no more. Her 4 year old, Buddy, is the center of her life. As love blooms she trusts Bad Blake with the child and sets our disaster alarms ringing. And yet, its hard to credit the attraction he creates in her, in the space of time devoted to it. She warms to him in two prickly, short interviews he has granted — the second, with the intention of getting into her pants. Somehow he is not charming enough; he is too unkempt, we don’t quite suspend our disbelief. He is not just the standard older male to the standard younger woman; he is A LOT older – a grandfather….ewww! OK, women are more generous with men’s surface appearances than vice-versa but for a woman who claims to have learned from her earlier mistakes she is pretty quick to forget that Blake’s surface is surely bound to his inner and life-long realities. Something more needed to be done to help us agree to this relationship.

There is somewhat the same problem between Blake and Sweet. The key scene in which Sweet acknowledges his debt to Blake is, as the falling in love scene with Janie, too schematic. It is a well developed sketch for the scene that was needed. They needed a fight in the parking lot gravel or something to help us with the contradictions, tensions, guilt, anger. Oh, and the agent, as an LA not-quite-a-creep was rotely written and rotely acted. Agents get a percentage of their clients earnings. He couldn’t have been getting much from the low-life bars Blake was singing at. There must have been something more generous at work, some belief in the man, some worry for a friend, that might have added to the relationship. We don’t see him at all as Blake finally surfaces to sobriety and modest success at the end of the film.

It was great to see Robert Duvall appear, someway into the film, playing an ex-alchy, still bar-owner, long time pal of Blake’s. Duvall’s appearance in a movie is just about enough to make me pay for admission [if you've never seen Tomorrow, put it on your short list.] But Duvall looked like he was losing a step or two, himself. The longest scene, when he takes Blake out fishing and offers “sage” advice has the same schematic feel as other parts of the film. Yes. Maybe. But not quite. Blake does not follow up on the advice and Duvall sort of disappears.

I’m not with the Rotten Tomatoes reviewers who universally appreciate it. The SF Chronicle’s Little Man just about gets it for me: sitting up in the chair applauding. Though in my case, not long and not hard. It’s a good film in parts; a good film for collectors of on-the-road movies; a good film for country-western genre songs. I wouldn’t wait for it to appear on TV but I might not take a a first date to it, unless already known that wrenching stories, AA redemption and sad songs will be appreciated.

It shouldn’t go without mention that the film is based on a slender novel of the same name by Thomas Cobb. Haven’t read it so no comment, but do if you have.

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Avatar: The Movie

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Avatar, the technically amazing, richly conceived and executed movie, will not be to everyone’s taste.  It is tasty enough, however, to have broken all box office records, streaking to be the fastest movie to gross over $500 million, in only 32 days. Second place goes to The Dark Knight, which took 45 days, followed by Cameron’s Titanic taking 98 days.  The “you-gotta-see it” factor is enormous.  Even those who avoid big American films –including yours truly– are persuaded, and pay the 3-D marked up ticket price.

The visual richness and imaginative detail of Pandora, the moon/planet,  the setting of the entire film, is simply astounding.  The floating-in-space scenes as the humans approach their destination, unforgettable.  The merging of human/actors with humanoid/graphics is seamless, especially when both seem to be appearing in the same sequences – an actor in an attack helicopter alongside an enormous computer graphics gun ship, complete with a mad man in command and troops with guns on the loading dock.

It’s not clear if the biology of the fantasy creatures came from a common point of departure, informed by a fantasy  chemistry and physics of the world being designed.  What is it that would have brought forth six legged creatures, the size of horses and rhinos? What is that would have created gill-like breathing organs, and two sets of eyes?  What allows a force-vortex on the planet, in which mountains float, electronic instruments don’t work, but flying dragon-birds [Ikran and Toruk] can maneuver at alarming speeds and wrenching roll-overs, all the while the riders holding on? Never mind. On the whole, it is enormously entertaining.  The realism of the cliff diving and sure footed racing along enormous tree limbs over caverns of green jungle, all in 3-D, is enough to induce nearly full vertigo for those so tuned.

[Update: Carol Kaesuk Yoon, science writer for the NY Times is wowed by the biology of Avatar, though she doesn't answer my question if there is an underlying organic fantasy out of which the marvelous creatures come.

Update II: Yoon, in an e-mail to me, doesn't plan to write anymore about Avatar but she turned me on to this article about Jodie Holt, Botanist, who worked on the plant conceptions for the film. Interesting. ]

The story and Cameron’s intention in telling it are another matter, though I suspect for many it won’t matter at all. The thumbnail of the plot is that an enormous warrior army, corporate financed, has descended on Pandora, fleeing the world almost destroyed by humans, in search for an element, (“unobtanium” in a too cute coinage) that will enrich them, save them?, all. The invaded people of Pandora are an invented culture of Na’vi humanoids, sometimes looking African, sometimes Amer-Indian despite their wonderful tails, large eyes and marvelous twitchy ears.  In a set-up Cameron intends to stand-in for too much of recent human history, the ancestral home of the Na’vi is smack on top of the main source of the coveted element. The earthlings are going to take it, by persuasion if possible, by overpowering shock and awe if necessary, and as the arch fiend, Colonel Miles Quaritch [Stephen Lang] dearly hopes, soon and with maximum force.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the human center of the drama is a paraplegic ex Marine who is brought to Pandora to replace his dead brother as an avatar guide. Avatars, being living representations of Na’vi controlled by humans who act as their brain and emotions while sealed in capsules. Jake’s task, in his avatar, is to infiltrate the Na’vi people and bring back the intelligence which will enable the corporate mining plan to succeed.  He falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana)  who rescues him from dismemberment by swarming viperwolves, and interprets certain signs to save him from the justified fear and anger of her father, the chief, her mother, the high shaman and her brother, the lead “brave.” All sorts of possibilities present themselves – most of which won’t be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to decades of westerns, cross-cultural romances, good guys among the bad, bad guys among the good, and the newly rising themes of sheltering earth and predatory man.

If anything is new in the standard film myth  it is Cameron’s raising to a literal, if imagined, level the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, and much of the celebration of it by the western world’s techno-spiritual-new ageism. The People, the Na’vi, understand their world as One and connected.  Riders bond with their mounts, whether winged or legged, with a literal interweaving of hair follicles. The mother-tree is connected to all the other trees in the forest. The People, by active, conjoined meditation connect to the Holy tree and under the right circumstances bring the severely wounded back to life, or transfer life-forces between bodies. The visual representation of these ideas is lovely, with pale luminescent strands and fronds, pulsing with life and peacefulness.  The mounts, although “broken” in a contest of wills, as with so many wild-west stories, are then “bonded,” with their riders and team as one. The flash of the dragon-bird wings is one of the most memorable signatures of the movie.

As a motive for telling the story, I am less appreciative. And motive it is. Cameron himself said, on receiving the Gold Globe award January, 2010

“Avatar asks us to see that everything is connected, all human beings to each other, and us to earth. And if you have to go 41/2 light years to another, made-up planet to appreciate this miracle of the world that we have right here, well, you know what, that’s the wonder of cinema right there,”

I would wish Cameron well in his intentions.  The world is out of balance, Koyaanisqati as the Navajo word has it.  Though not a literalist, a connected world makes sense to me; living within the world instead of against it seems as fundamental a truth as there is.  Anthropomorphizing the connections, however, into wriggling other-aware dendrites seems wrongheaded to me, though I appreciate it as a story-telling, myth creating device.

The problem is that what seems most connected, in Cameron’s telling and in the world he wishes to be celebrating, is the violence — vast, omnipresent, destructive and connected generation to generation, across species,  and unstoppable.  Though he wishes to show us a primordial and “natural” world, and the stupidity of its destruction, he himself is really, really really fascinated with destruction. [See: Terminator; Rambo: First Blood;  etc. ) A perverse but reasonable reading might be that if the connectedness of violence were to end, the world itself would collapse, its motivating force gone.

The imagination and technical expertise put into massive gunships, fast attack helicopters, armaments of every kind, from flame throwers to explosives-filled pallets, and especially the human-carrying transformers -- absolute works of depraved genius -- is incredible; beyond belief.  As fabulous as the jungle is, the creatures, the floating mountains, they are obscured by the weapons of destruction imagined for us.  The final battle is a festival of mayhem like few ever seen on the film, loud enough to warrant earplugs, explosive enough to delight the blow-up gene of every boy.  Flames turn the jungle and our irises red, bodies fly through the air. Treason against the bad and loyalty to the good provide emotional satisfaction as weapons are turned on former friends. A final robot-man against man-avatar battle provides the appropriate climax to the thunderous "do-it-now" orgy of weapons and and battle lust.

Interestingly, looking away from the weapons of man-created destruction and back to the primeval jungle itself with all of its creatures, all but a few are fearsome with fang and claw --six legged viperwolves, rampaging rhino like monsters with head plate anvils destroying trees with a swing of the head.  The exotically, butterfly colored dinosaur-bird, Toruk, is a killing machine itself.  The noble savage of the film, although one with their world, are no flower bedecked dancers in the woods, themselves.  They recognize courage in Jake's avatar, they give high value to it in their leaders, and as the climactic battle shows, they are skilled fighters themselves -- something they did not get, we must assume, by sitting at their fathers' knees and being told about days  of old.

Though the story teller's conceit is that the natural world, after a prayer by turncoat Jake Sully to the Na'vi goddess-tree, turns against the despoilers, it is an in-kind turning, maybe "natural" but death dealing just the same.  You won't be surprised to read that Cameron began development in tandem with Avatar another film he now hopes will follow.  The title?  Battle Angel.

As graphical story telling we have an amazing piece of work.  Computer graphics, and performance capture have made major leaps forward.  The technology of movies, and therefore movies themselves are being catapulted into a new era.  As sociology, anthropology and history we have pretty thin gruel.  Most, I assume, will not care.  That's not what they came for.  In fact, many are turning the film and its imaginings into an alternative universe of their own, beginning with full onslaught toy marketing and winding its way into participatory computer games and online communities.  I wouldn't be surprised to find that erotic Na'vi dolls are soon to be available.

I'm of a contrary mind, though. Movies, even those set in 2154, are about today.  They reflect the state of knowledge, hope and desire in the writer, or in this case the director and the team creating the movie.   I'm sorry to see, despite the serious work done to invent a language, to characterize a species, to invent a world and to confront the serious questions of greed, conquest and murder that  the human adventure, even to someone who wishes the good, has been returned to the same old, same old, quest for fame and glory, orgasmic pyrotechnics and utter dependence on, even adoration of,  the implacable will of the last man standing.

It would be unfair to ask James Cameron to conceive of new ways of being as richly as he has the new technical superstructure of wow film making.  It is less unfair to ask him and ourselves to recognize that in the fancy new bottles the same old wine is being served.  He could sit down and watch Terrence Malick's 1998, old fashioned, Thin Red Line to see what war in paradise without all the imaginary apparatus looks like.  It's not nearly as exciting and though there are good guys and bad guys the only cheering we feel like is when the killing stops.

[Update III: Front page of the NY Times on Wednesday Dave Itzkoff writes of the many takes on what Avatar is all about -- including Chinese who see the Na'vi as a parable of those whose dwellings have been razed by governments.  The conservative religious don't like it either, for the infringement on their belief systems by nature-connected pagans....   I stand by my criticism; that his ostensible message of care for the earth is swamped by his love of what his technology does best --blow things up.]

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The Secret Life of Words: A Film

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

In The Secret Life of Words, one of the best films you’ve never heard of, Spanish director Isabel Coixet, guides Tim Robbins and Canadian actor, Sarah Polley, in roles of a life time, to an exploration of human suffering and human redemption quite unlike anything I have ever seen.  Without a frame of bomb blasts, bayonet thrusts or corpse strewn fields The Secret Life of Words brings us one of the truest, most powerful –because most personal– indictments of war ever done on film.  And under nearly impossible circumstances — most of it shot at a hospital bed where Josef (Robbins), his flesh burned, an arm fractured and blinded by seared cataracts, is nursed by a strange, morose, nearly speechless young woman Hannah (Polley) who, when she speaks, is clearly a foreigner and doubly an object of mystery and puzzlement.  To bring the setting even further from the mass chaos of war, this bed is on an oil rig in the Irish sea with only 5 other people aboard, the rest having been evacuated following the disastrous oil fire which injured Josef  and, as we learn,  killed his once best friend.

The film begins so oddly and continues long enough oddly that one, especially watching in a home setting, is tempted to get distracted,  turn to other things, write it off.  It pays back enormously to follow through, let the puzzlement float until the trajectory begins to be seen.  The quirkiness of the beginning, which continues throughout, is the disarming normalcy through which great depths are visited.  Hannah  works in an enormous, loud, plastics plant, not specifically sited, though somewhere in Europe.  She is an outsider, by her accent, her hearing aid assisted deafness — which she keeps off as she desires– her somber, depressive demeanor.  Her non-attentive dress and make up, except for strange amounts of bar soap, one of many object-metaphors in Coixet’s lexicon,  add to her public signing of wishing, completely, to be left alone.

Early in the film she is called in by her manager who says, despite Hannah’s fears, that she is such a perfect worker the company wouldn’t think of firing her.  She must, however, to ease the concerns of her colleagues and the trades-unions, take some time off, so as not to imply that workers need only work.  She clearly doesn’t know what to do or where to go and winds up in a hotel room as plain as her own lodgings — far from the palm trees and beaches suggested by her manager.  Still at a loss as to how to “vacation” she overhears of a need for a burn-trauma nurse and volunteers for the duration of her holiday.  She is trained, she tells the doctor, and has seen terrible things.  She is helicoptered out to the oil rig where she takes over full time care of Josef;  the doctor departs (“Give me a call in case of trouble”) and leaves her with Josef and the 5 other crewmen.

Josef can’t see through his clouded corneas.  He is painfully burned on his face, shoulders and much of his body which we never see below the blankets.  Yet in his pain, barely able to keep up his patter as she changes his bandages and applies compresses to the burns, he is irrepressible.  It’s unclear if he is meant to be a brougish Irishman –Robbins keeps his American accent –yet there is much of the roguish, suggestive bawdiness of an irrepressible story-teller and a man who has not known no from too many women.  To her silence, and our vision of her dour, withdrawn face, he keeps it up, at first a bit to our discomfort.  But he is never mean, never leering; he nudges but does not press.  He has a bantering ease and preternatural cheerfulness in the face of great pain, and as we learn as he begins to reveal his secrets, great sorrow.  Coixet,  having drawn us in finally, and at some risk of loosing us, keeps pulling us into the story, and into the two stories Josef and Hannah are telling.   Josef begins to draw her out, and finally,  telling a great secret makes her laugh at last in its seeming silliness.  Subsequently the secret shared becomes the powerful closing emotional peg of the movie.  Odd little bits of information appear and are left to float, puzzlingly, even irritatingly for some, until the context appears later and the aha! comes.  There is a scene in which the engaging Spanish cook brings and feeds another wonderful dish to Josef.  The two begin verbally tussling over Hannah’s attractions when Simon (Javier Cámara) skewers Josef with “…since when could a single and unattached woman hold your attention?”‘ and Josef orders him out of the room, to the puzzlement of some reviewers. (What is the point of this bad temper? Why is Josef such a jerk? How could she like him?)    Too bad.  It’s another of the tiny, key moments, in which Josef’s partially self-induced pain is set up as a counter to Hannah’s entirely other-induced trauma.  It is excellent work by a thoughtful and talented director.  She is sure handed with other metaphors –of deafness and hearing aid as a response to the enormous cruelties of those she had trusted in, of swimming and fear of sea-monsters, of the importance of oysters…

Hannah remains quiet and withdrawn for a great long while.  We begin to dread a Bergmanesque film with splashes of contemporary silliness, but Josef persists.  He tells her stories of his life and through them, his fears. He keeps prodding her, playfully  –”no fair, I tell you all and you tell me nothing,”– until finally, as we are witnessing, she is drawn out of the enormous shell of mistrust and desperate self-protection and trusts him enough to tell her story.  In one of the most wrenching, compelling monologues I have ever witnessed in a movie, aided by a stunning piece of erotic jujitsu,  almost all of it delivered sitting in a chair beside his bed, Hannah tells of her experience as a young woman of Dubrovnik, Croatia, at the hands of her “own soldiers.”   She, and her best friend, both twenty years old were kidnapped and kept with 16 others in a “rape house,” during the entirely horrific and promptly forgotten, if ever known by many,  Balkan (Yugoslav) Wars.  Her story, delivered with every feature of her face and voice, is as if we are actually sitting near a very dear friend and hearing  for the first time something that happened to her and which though we might have known, we didn’t, and which she has kept from us, unable to allow the memories to surface to be shared with others.   Her voice and presence of re-lived anguish is doubled in power by the dialog  of touch as Josef, still blind,  begins to take in what she is telling him, his blind eyes starting in the disbelief of his own scarred face.  It is an amazing ten minutes of film.

Prior to her revelation, Hannah had called the doctor and told him Josef should be taken off the oil rig; he was not healing fast enough.  And so the helicopter comes. They leave, tightly holding hands until he is put in the ambulance in Ireland, expecting her to stay with him.  She disappears.  We see her return to her factory job and her silent, withdrawn existence.  Josef recovers and leaves the hospital where he is handed Hanna’s backpack, which she had left, stuffed with personal items from his room including unopened letters from the lover we had noticed floating in the background.  The final keys to the story click into place.  The door is fully open.

In the weakest part of the film Josef tracks down a Copenhagen therapist, played by Julie Christie, and tries to get her to reveal Hannah’s location and biography to him.  The scenes with Inge, based on real life Inge Genefke, founder of the The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims,  are too didactic for the tone and the elliptically allowed discoveries of the rest of the film.  She takes Josef through a vast warehouse with shelves of accounts of others raped and brutalized, tortured and murdered in the Balkan  — and presumably other– wars and speaks to him directly what we suppose are  Coixet’s  driving reasons for making the film.  We cannot let these atrocities be forgotten.  We must find, and heal, and through testimony not allow to be repeated such cruelties.  Who can disagree with her?  Yet for me the point was already being powerfully made.  A quiet walk through the memoirs, with Josef picking up and putting down tape, and videos and diaries, with Inge saying their names, their suffering, their origins and mortal state would have continued the understated power of the film set up between the two main characters.  In the closing credits Coixet thanks Peter Berger, the compelling British/French writer,  for “helping her to see.”  Perhaps the urgency of what she has seen, and wants more of us to share, over rode her artistic sense and instead of letting us discover quietly and personally, simply had to shout:  sit up and listen!

Josef goes on to track Hannah down at the factory gate.  He wants to be with her and she with him.  She rejects him.  She cannot go with him, she says because one day, she won’t know when, she will begin to cry and cry and cry until the whole room fills with her tears and they will both drown.   We have already heard of Josef’s terrible fear of water and of drowning and as she begins to walk away again he calls out to her  with his sweet, brave, hopeful — and, still Josef,  quirky, line –  “I can learn to swim.”  It is a powerful moment, and yet understated –as it should be.  Robbins is just simply terrific as a man whose sunny, jocular optimism has been reborn in the certain, real sadness and cruelty of life, both his and hers.   It is a great role to which he does great justice.  Hannah overcomes her muting, well founded, fear and walks to him. They touch, and embrace.  The film comes to a swift close depicting them as married, with children, and yet the tiny, injured, terrified girl within her, whose voice we have head mysteriously throughout the film, still speaking from time to time, as it would in any of us.  There are no permanently happy endings in life, only the eternal possibility of  hope and human connection triumphing over evil, loneliness and despair.

Coixet has succeeded in doing what Tony Judt reminds us in his book Reappraisals: Reflections of the Forgotten Twentieth Century, that Primo Levi, Arthur Koestler,  Manes Sperber and other Holocaust writers came to believe: Language is the only possible answer to human extremism and cruelty.  Without language we have nothing.  We must speak.  We must not forget.

“The importance of language — that we can communicate and that we must communicate, that language is vital to humanity and the deprivation of language is the first step to the destruction of a man– was enforced within the camp (words were replaced by blows — “that was how we knew we were no longer men”); but it can be applied outside. Judt, 57

And Coixet reminds us it is not just the Shoah we must not forget, unique of course in human history, but not as unique was some have come to believe.  By remembering, and knowing, by use of words we begin to heal, to reconnect, make life in hope and life-giving possible for those who are, and are still to come.

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Gardens of Stone: A Film

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

For some, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is the best film made about the Vietnam War:  for some it is one of the greatest war/anti-war films ever made. It was certainly a manic, filmic projection of a manic man-eating war.  Eight years later Coppola made another film about Vietnam, this one quiet, no napalm, no screaming jets, just the daily, non stop burial of those coming back in boxes, to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and the agonizing grief of those who loved them.  Like too many of Coppola’s films, Gardens of Stone, (1987) fell into puzzlement and dismissal and has all but disappeared. It may be worth taking another look at it with another, terribly similar war thrumming in our ears, and the forgetting of the earlier one all but complete.

The story is a simple one. The spit and polish 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment carries dead soldiers and presidents to their graves at Arlington National Cemetery.  The Regiment is the public face of the respect and honor given to the military dead.  The soldiers are drilled and groomed to an almost unbelievable perfection, and Coppola gives them their full due.  As an artist of the technical you can almost see Coppola’s admiration in the repeated shots of precision arms handling, marching, saluting.

Among the soldiers are three, around whom the story is built.  James Caan plays Clell Hazard, a very believable top sergeant.  Lean and tough, he is taunted for being a “pacifist” because he thinks the war in Vietnam is the wrong war against the wrong people, and being fought the wrong way; in other words — get out.  But if it is going to be fought, he believes he should not be with the Old Guard, a “toy soldier,” but should be at Fort Benning training young soldiers to fight and stay alive.  [The reasons that he is not allowed to go is one of the weaker parts of the film.]

His superior and good friend, Sergeant Major “Goody” Nelson, is played by James Earle Jones –the Sergeant Major, with more gold on his sleeve than can be lifted, and a sternness in his presence that is entirely convincing.  For great military tough guy pyrotechnics you could not have cast better. They go after each other, and anyone in sight with hammer and tongs. Yet, their friendship is real and extends back to the Korean war.

Into the Regiment comes a new recruit, Jackie Willow (D.B. Sweeney) who is regularly called “Dildo” in the eternal male teasing that says if you can deal with this, then you’re a man and we can can trust you. He does all right, being the son of another sergeant, retired, who served with Nelson and Hazard in Korea.  The kid is all military, all the time, and wants to go to OCS (Officer Candidate School) and then to Nam — the only place a military man should be. The two sergeants take the newcomer to their hearts and comradeship [another bit of weakness as I remember the military, but needed for the story.] In fact the mechanism for telling the story of the film are a series of letters Willow writes to Hazard after he is shipped to Vietnam, recalling the older man’s warnings, and reflecting on what he has learned in a year there.

Hazard, divorced by a woman who had had it with Army life, makes an awkward approach to Sam (Samantha) Davis, played nicely by Angelica Huston, who to stir the pot quicker is a reporter for the Washington Post (the well known communist rag) and thinks the war is genocide. However improbably, the two fall in love — in some very nice and believable scenes.  Sgt. Major Nelson has a firebrand girlfriend of some years.  Willow, after he makes sergeant, runs across the young woman who has not been answering his letters. He persuades her to re-find her love for him and stand against her father, a Colonel who does not want the shame of his daughter marrying into the enlisted ranks — a piece of the film that rings true to my military bred eyes.

Set in 1968-69 the set up is obvious for knock down, drag out arguments about the war but Coppola has another aim in mind, and one that is obvious as soon as Willow comes on the scene.  By the time he announces his goal of going to Officer Candidate School (OCS) and then to Vietnam there is no other end in sight.  Second Lieutenants in Vietnam had the highest causality rate of any rank. We are going to go with these three couples and enter the work-a-day world of the men as one of them moves through the ranks and comes back to be buried as he buried others.  We share the sorrow and grief, even of those who fight the war, for those they love.  Histrionics are not necessary.  Everybody knows: this is what war brings to families and friends.

Why is the film worth seeing now in 2010?

Soldiers are going again to war, a war which many think the U.S. should not be in, but to which many are glad to go –as this is what soldiers do.  They go with mixed emotions, proud of beings soldiers, determined to meet the test of fear and prove themselves capable; they go bound to their friends.  Yet they go knowing they are leaving behind those they love and that their own futures are more uncertain than most others.  Families are saying good bye again, families with mixed emotions of pride, of dread, perhaps of anger at the decisions that are sending their kids over there.  Some will think their child has no business in another country, killing and in danger of being killed, but will love him as he goes.

Some of these children, these newly weds, these fathers and mothers will come back and be buried with pride and honor by those they left, and with a grief that will go on for years.

Coppola does a good job of showing military life and emotions to those of us unfamiliar with either, and with no polemics he shows us the sorrow and the pity of it all.

The dialog and script are tight and snappy.  The scenes of  military life, on the parade ground or fighting in bars, are real.  We don’t get to know much about the women, especially Angelica Huston’s character who could have been given more background, and more of a struggle between her love for Hazard and her hatred of the war.  Jackie Willow, the eager recruit is a bit too naive and wide-eyed for me, especially as the son of a top Sergeant, but the performance is just a bit distracting, not a major impediment.  The use of actual war footage, helicopters coming in for the dead and wounded, grainy and with realistic radio mil-com between the pilots and units on the ground is well used, cut into the daily lives in Arlington, the first time as a mystery and a warning, the second as a proof and a portent.

Gardens of Stone was built around a novel of the same name, by Nicholas Proffitt, who not only was Newsweek’s Bureau Chief in Saigon in 1971, but had been a member of the Old Guard in the early 60s. As usual, one wants to know how film and novel complement or contradict each other but I’ll leave that for another day.  If you’ve read it, and have an opinion, leave a comment.

The movie itself is available on Netflix, and in the Instant Play offerings as well.

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Salgado: Misery and Art

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

The demons of confusion are always with me at large-scale photo exhibitions of Sebastiao Salgado. They didn’t fail to come by during a recent visit to the David Brower Center Hazel Wolf Gallery. How am I to interpret this image? Am I seeing art, or reportage? Which sector of my brain is lighting up, or better, which interpretive genie in me is to take precedence?

On the one hand this is photographic art, of the highest sort, standing with Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, August Sander, Eugene Smith and many others, technically perfect, imaginatively conceived, splendidly curated. From across the room, the beauty of sun streaming through the branches of enormous banyan trees, whose trunks dominate the vertical space within the frame draws the eye, and then the body. This is amazing, the beauty-struck brain shouts. Or, on another wall, in degrees of white, crescents form in the right foreground, large and bending into a distant left corner, an almost abstract image of advance under great load, perhaps just a play of form and minimalism.

Yet when we approach close enough to see, actually, and to block out other images in the room, the content of these images is horrific: people clustering under the trees, hiding from MIG jet attacks of Somalian forces, the faces we can see gone vacant with worry; a woman leading two terrifically emaciated children, barely walking, across the sands — enormously magnifying the absence of food in the children’s bodies.

The minds of those who wish to see grapple with this great unconformity. Starvation is NOT art! Terror is NOT beauty. These frozen moments of great grief and bare survival should not be displayed before us while we whisper in knowing sadness and sip our wine. And yet, and yet …these events must not be ignored, hidden, not not known. What would be better? Should the images only appear in newspapers? On posters stuck to lamp posts? The famous Gene Smith photo, “Tomoko in the Bath,” appeared initially in Life Magazine, as the centerpiece of a photo essay, intended to bring attention to the deforming and crippling Minimato mercury poisoning disease. Smith and his wife worked for years on behalf of the victims. This seems appropriate, a proper use of a powerful tool, yielded by those with a vision, of art and compassion. Even so, the photo, though withdrawn from circulation at the request of the family, is available as an objet d’art to interested collectors — who, likely, are not using their acquisitions to raise funds for the stricken.

Certainly such images should not appear at all, except perhaps as fantasy warnings of unthinkable futures, or as historical documentation of terrible time, like Mathew Brady’s American Civil War photos. But the world we live in, and which Salgado explores, is a cauldron of the unthinkable and terrible. Images MUST appear, and yet, and yet….

The thought passes: Where would this be hung? Who would hang such an image? In what living room? In what family room?

Not all of the Salgado photos Brower Center are of human misery. Some join our eyes and minds to nature’s drama, large as ice constructions and small as iguana feet. Some of his best known work is of workers, who though desperately poor by all standards, still have in the photos, dignity and even laughter. Some, properly, could be hung in private residences or public spaces to constantly amaze the passing eye. But even as this is true, their sharing the space with the art-of-the-wretched magnifies the problem. In the one series art enhances and magnifies objects of the world, in praise or supplication perhaps, in forms of magic and incantation as art has always done. In the other series, the same powers and purposes of art crash against the non-object, the not to be praised, the not to be wondered at and we are left conflicted, adrift.

It’s as though, we fall into a mental Carrollian warp: this is art no not art yes art no not art. Ah! the composition of this piece! Oh, the bones of the ribs, showing…

It’s no better that much of Salgado’s work appears in over-size, coffee table books –despite the income they might be bringing to groups grappling with the miseries portrayed. It is the same problem, writ somewhat smaller than the large wall hangings. What are we to make of such books on our own, or friends tables, on display with other such books – though of suns, beaches, cliff faces… What are we seeing as we flip the pages? Misery as presentation, as decoration.

Nor are we better off with certain images, flung around the internet, becoming iconic and entering into popular culture — on mugs, t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, such as Munch’s The Scream, the original content, and context completely sucked from it. So, Salgado’s most famous Mali famine photo, of 1985 is in danger of becoming.

Salgado is not waiting for my opinion, or those of others, disturbed, like me. He is doing what he must do — express what he sees and let the world take its own course. I’d a lot rather have him and others like him, sending their misery testaments back into the lands of plenty and the so very near sighted, than not. Yet I can’t help but think that the aesthetisization of the terrible, is itself a creature whose evolution is not a good sign of our collective well-being.

Perhaps you’ll spend a quiet hour at the Wolf Gallery in Berkeley’s Brower Center before the exhibit ends on January 31st, and help me understand how to understand.

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Ai Yi Yi Yiiii!

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Great music, new to my ears, brought by a nice opinion article in the NY times. Los Cenzontles — the Mockingbirds– from San Pablo, California. Do Not Miss hearing them!

The song, “La Luna,” is sung in Spanish by, of all people, Taj Mahal, the African-American blues master. Though not a native speaker, he cradles the words in his gravel voice, and when he sings of the moonlight as “muy sensual,” and of this “baile celestial,” this heavenly dance, he clearly knows what he’s talking about, and so do you.

That’s the strange beauty of “American Horizon,” by a little-known Mexican-American folk-roots group, Los Cenzontles, with guest appearances by Taj Mahal and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. It both honors and upends traditional Mexican music, tapping deep roots as it flowers into something completely new, and distinctly American.

What may be more remarkable is that Los Cenzontles — The Mockingbirds — is not the creation of some music label’s cross-marketing department, but a tiny storefront nonprofit organization for young people in San Pablo, Calif., a heavily immigrant and Hispanic neighborhood outside Oakland.

Several of the tunes are to the left of the Times article.  Or you could go to their website, www.mockingbirds.com and listen till you get up and DANCE! or to their Facebook page.

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The Way

Monday, December 7th, 2009

TaoTeChing Lao Tzu’s (Old Master) Tao Te Ching [Way and Virtue The Ancient Text] is one of the oldest meditations we have on the mysteries of existence and non-existence, light and dark, appearance and reality. Lao Tzu, to whom the text of some 81 verses [slightly different in some editions] is attributed, was likely a man by the name of Li Ehr, a keeper of the Royal Archives in the state of Chou about 516 BCE. He was known in his own time as a formidable intellect, immersed in the shamanistic and in the rationalized and organized systems of the court. He was a seer even Confucius was in awe of.

As the story goes, Confucius, from the state of Lu, came to seek Lao-tzu’s knowledge of the ceremonies and rituals of ancient kings. Li Ehr replied:

The ancients you admire have been in the ground a long time. Their bones have turned to dust. Only their words remain. Those among them who were wise rode in carriages when times were good and slipped quietly away when times were bad. I have heard that the clever merchant hides his wealth so his store looks empty and that the superior person acts dumb so he can avoid calling attention to himself. I advise you to get rid of your excessive pride and ambition. They won’t do you any good. This is all I have to say to you.

Afterwards, Confucius told his disciples: “Today when I met Lao-Tzu, it was like meeting a dragon.”

I have over a dozen translations of the Tao Te Ching, some in Spanish, some over-size gift editions, some miniature pocket editions, most in verse, some in stilted textual analysis.  The touchstone for all has long been the Witter Bynner translation of 1944, still available and still fresh and poetic.  Copper Canyon Press has just released a new edition by Red Pine which may not compete lyrically with Witter Bynner but is a very welcome addition for those of us whose appreciation lies somewhere between the two-verse casual reader and the life-lived-in-the-ideograms academic.

Red Pine is the authorial name of Bill Porter, a Vietnam war resister even as he served in the Army, an independent scholar of Chinese texts, Buddhism and Taoism.   His exhaustive translation and study of the Buddha’s Diamond Sutra [and many who have made commentaries on it] has a place of pride on my book shelf. He has done the same for the Heart Sutra.   His collection and translation of Hanshan’s Cold Mountain is a must read, along with Gary Snyder’s more selected collection.

In the Witter Bynner Verse 4 goes like this:

4

Existence, by nothing bred,
Breeds everything.
Parent of the universe,
It smooths rough edges,
Unties hard knots,
Tempers the sharp sun,
Lays blowing dust,
Its image in the wellspring never fails.
But how was it conceived?–this image
Of no other sire.

and like this in Red Pine

The Tao is so empty
those who use it
never become full again
and so deep
as if it were the ancestor of us all
it dulls our edges
unties our tangles
softens our light
and merges our dust
it’s so clear
as if it were present
I wonder whose child it is
it seems it was here before Ti.

All translation is difficult. Translation of 2500 year old rational mystics is merely impossible. You’ll want several to support you on your own Way. Red Pine and Witter Bynner are two trustworthy guides. With each verse Red Pine offers commentary to help us enlarge the space in which the cryptic words float. If you like, the ideograms are there, carrying with them nuance and echo of already ancient beliefs and ways of being. The introduction has some fascinating ideas about the place of the moon underpinning many of the images of the Tao — not the bright full moon of western romance but the absent, dark moon between old and new.

You can order the Copper Canyon edition directly from them. I got mine at City Lights in San Francisco. You will try your local books store or Powells, or Alibris or ABE on-line before sending another nickel to Amazon….
(more…)

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The Road — Taken

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, translated into film, opened in scattered theaters this week. In the Bay Area only two houses were projecting it. After a brief, sweet opening scene of a loving couple, The Road sweeps on with some of the most thrilling scenes of the aftermath of destruction ever filmed: roaring forest fires, ash laden skies, mountain sides of dead trees, not a bird, beast or insect — until the closing minutes– alive. If, as Paul Goodman once claimed, anti-war films are pornography for pacifists, The Road is surely that for environmentalists — a place to go to enjoy all that they fear.

TheRoad

George Monbiot, the well known environmental dystopian, believes the novel is “the most important environmental book ever written.” (Yep.) I hate to remind George, but anti-war films, much less books, have done precious little to slow the slaughter on seven continents (well, six, since Antarctica is, so far, excluded from the killing fields.) It is also unlikely that The Road will juice the battle to save the planet.

Though neither the film, nor the book, specifies what is, or what brought on, the cataclysm, it looks from the evidence in the movie as though it has nothing to do with human agency. Late in the film the earth heaves, buckles and throws down enormous trees. This, and the smoke filled skies, forests ablaze and freezing weather would indicate a Yellowstone like super volcano, of the mammoth proportions the earth has experienced many times in its existence. The area of the ash cloud, the depth of the ash fall and the toxic gases released could well cause scenes like those of the film (and worse), or of McCarthy’s imagination. Such events however, have nothing to do, with mankind’s dangerous environmental folly and that folly, even in the worst case scenarios — say of Greenland ice sheet melting– is not predicted to cause scenes like the film presents us with. If McCarthy’s concern and the film-maker’s intent was to warn us about human caused environmental collapse, it needs to be re-imagined to something not as totalized but in its own way, locally and viciously picking winners as losers, as wrenching and fearful.

Leaving aside claims of who caused it, what really interests McCarthy is how we respond to it — and in his view, not too well at all. A mother commits suicide rather than living to try to protect her son; roving bands of marauders, starving, are on the look out for flesh, any flesh but young is better; the last two bullets in the doting father’s gun are saved for murder-suicide.

The cannibalism looms large in the telling — and not only that it is happening, but that it happens in the most cruel and bloody ways; that it is not mere necessity that drives it but that the moral order has completely collapsed — somewhat at odds with what is known about cannibalism in human history, where it is (always?) part of a rigid moral order. Eating your enemy, or part of him, is done in highly ritualized ways, not only for nutrition but to prevent his return, or to claim his strength. Not for McCarthy, Penhall (script) and Hillcoat (director.) The scenes seem lifted from teen-popular horror movies.

The Road is worth seeing, with a few dodges behind the hands, for the incredible death-of-nature, death-of-cities scenes and for the very good make-up work. Robert Duval, though still Duval, is a wonder of aging, starving, cataract blindness. Prosthetic teeth give great verisimilitude. The filth and squalor of the road are entirely believable. You will appreciate your shower and warm reading lights when you go home.

The images of starvation are less successful. Many of the faces are gaunt and drawn, but not more so, for example, than in many spaghetti-like westerns. One scene, as Vigo Mortenson strips off his clothes to swim, improbably, through rough seas to a listing freighter, shows his ribs as starving distended, but on the whole the bodies do not match the entire lack of eating we are shown. The two main characters are able to walk with some spring in their steps, months after the cataclysm. People still have their teeth. We, of the 20th century, know what starving and emaciated bodies look like; the film has none of them.

The emotions of love and bonding between father and son, also, don’t entirely work for me. There is something odd about many of the scenes between them, often revealed in the script or their expression of it. It’s as though the director has said, “can you punch it up a bit there?” There is, to my ear, an unnatural rhythm or word-stress in expressions of care and tenderness, perhaps a lack of the urgency and despair that under-gird all the rest of the movie. And, I kept thinking, as the tenderness continued, when was the father going to help the son into the toughness that he needed? When would the lessons begin? This is how you sharpen a stick, son. This is how you defend yourself. These are the places on the body that will disable a man when hit. This is how you kill a gopher should you ever see one, and practice! Practice! Practice! I wondered more than once, how a Native American father, in the wilderness of his world, would be showing his son the means of survival they had at hand. Childhood is a relatively late invention. For millennia ten olds have been considered merely not quite full grown adults, and capable of about the same percentage of work, alertness, toughness as that growth. The ratio of heart to body size in young adolescents is the highest of the entire life-span, and as such they can exceed adult effort in many things. It would seem the necessity of the road would make all this apparent quite fast. Tenderness, yes but strength and cunning as well.

I suppose the book portrays the devastation as unrelentingly total as does the movie, but I found the complete and utter lack of any plant, animal, shell-fish (when they reached the ocean) to be distracting. Even after the great Chicxulub asteroid and the wipe-out of the dinosaurs, much survived. In fact, the dinosaurs-becoming-birds found new opportunities and became a major part of the world we inhabit. They, and the whole storm of mamals all found food, even in years of suppressed sun and wild weather. So, my willing suspension of disbelief, the pact a reader or viewer makes with the author to let the improbable or fantastical become part of the story, kept being interrupted by the thought: how is this possible? There has got to be food of some kind. There have got to be worms, bugs, water plants…. In fact, at one point father and son walked right by upright and waving golden sheaves of grain.

Further, in not one house they entered, with one notable exception, was there any food: no cans, no bags, no bottles, no rotting potatoes. Nor were there any empties, as if the food had all been eaten and the detritus left. It was as if something beyond an explainable disaster had taken place, something in the realm of myth or magic — the authorial voice decreeing, “and then there was nothing.” But watching the very real struggle to survive one engages with the characters: this is what I would do; this is where I would look. And I want to know: What of the bark on the trees? The grass? The shoe leather — all comestibles in histories of actual starvation and struggle.

A movie to find at Netflix to see what an enormously effective apocalypse-bringing-cannibalism film can do is Fires on the Plain, by Kon Ichikawa. In this case the cataclysm is the collapse of the Japanese war machine at the end of WW II and the frantic efforts of remnants of the Japanese army on Leyte Island in the Philippines, to get to the last foothold and onto ships going home, before being captured or killed by the Americans.

fires-on-the-plain-_1
The action centers around one soldier, separated — through deliberate and cruel exile– from his unit who makes his way through the jungle and sere, rocky landscape, starving, cold, shoeless, covered with mud, fearing his own former comrades as much as the Americans. The fact of cannibalism being practiced by others, and his own temptations towards it, and final refusal, slowly grows on us through out the film — and as such, in my opinion, has far more power and effect than the bloody, horror-genre presentation of cannibalism in The Road. Fires on the Plain doesn’t lack for images of horror — piles of bodies, broken shoes pulled from the dead, driving rain, hands chopped off and discarded from the more meaty bodies. But the sensibility throughout is one of defeat and introspection. Ichikawa takes the time to say, and let us absorb — look! This is what we do to each other! These are the results of our own choices and actions.

Further, the human response to the disaster rings truer, in my experience, than that in The Road. People in extremis DO gather together, warily and with fingers on the trigger perhaps but the knowledge is certain: without others I surely will not survive. The pull towards others, though strenuously denied in the myths of go-it-alone America, is as strong as the pull of gravity. The Japanese soldiers know this. The son in The Road knows it as well. Had his father organized those he met on the road instead of driving them away, the hope that appears at film end would have been growing in better prepared ground.

In the book, The Road, perhaps the prophetic warning, or despair at the human will-to-evil holds it own alongside the raw, terrifying physicality of the world McCarthy is so good at depicting. Penhall and Hillcoat, have caught the physical sense of rock-bottom survival and compel us to look, but the prophetic voice, the mysterious sense of watching a future unfold and being able to contemplate it, has gone missing it seems to me. As American film makers they can’t entirely shed the urge to see a good adventure film sharing the stage with the story of bare survival. And to underline the obvious as the film ends and the orphaned boy finds a new family he judges to be among “the good guys,” who don’t eat people, we are treated to the entirely unbelievable promise by the found-mother that “everything is going to be all right.”

We don’t believe it and she shouldn’t have said it. A simple taking of hands would have been all the promise needed. New children looking each other over, walking away from the cameras along the life-source sea and we all get, in Dylan Thomas’ memorable phrase, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” will prevail, eventually…

My Little Man is sitting up and watching intently but not applauding, at least until the credits roll.

Will Kirkland
Dec 2 2003

Reviews: Janet Maslin; Metacritic compilation [the book;] [the movie;]

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Darwin’s Influence on Western Thought

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, last Tuesday, November 24, Scientific American released from its pay archives, a very interesting essay, written in July, 2000, by Ernst Mayr (now deceased) on Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought. The whole essay is worth reading — and will only be available for a month, for free.  Here are a few snips to whet your appetite.

The Darwinian Zeitgeist
A 21st-century person looks at the world quite differently than a citizen of the Victorian era did. This shift had multiple sources, particularly the incredible advances in technology. But what is not at all appreciated is the great extent to which this shift in thinking indeed resulted from Darwin’s ideas.

Remember that in 1850 virtually all leading scientists and philosophers were Christian men. The world they inhabited had been created by God, and as the natural theologians claimed, He had instituted wise laws that brought about the perfect adaptation of all organisms to one another and to their environment. At the same time, the architects of the scientific revolution had constructed a worldview based on physicalism (a reduction to spatiotemporal things or events or their properties), teleology, determinism and other basic principles. Such was the thinking of Western man prior to the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species. The basic principles proposed by Darwin would stand in total conflict with these prevailing ideas.

First, Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations. The theory of evolution by natural selection explains the adaptedness and diversity of the world solely materialistically. It no longer requires God as creator or designer (although one is certainly still free to believe in God even if one accepts evolution). …

Second, Darwinism refutes typology. From the time of the Pythagoreans and Plato, the general concept of the diversity of the world emphasized its invariance and stability. This viewpoint is called typology, or essentialism. The seeming variety, it was said, consisted of a limited number of natural kinds (essences or types), each one forming a class. The members of each class were thought to be identical, constant, and sharply separated from the members of other essences.

Variation, in contrast, is nonessential and accidental. A triangle illustrates essentialism: all triangles have the same fundamental characteristics and are sharply delimited against quadrangles or any other geometric figures. An intermediate between a triangle and a quadrangle is inconceivable. Typological thinking, therefore, is unable to accommodate variation and gives rise to a misleading conception of human races. For the typologist, Caucasians, Africans, Asians or Inuits are types that conspicuously differ from other human ethnic groups. This mode of thinking leads to racism. (Although the ignorant misapplication of evolutionary theory known as “social Darwinism” often gets blamed for justifications of racism, adherence to the disproved essentialism preceding Darwin in fact can lead to a racist viewpoint.)

Darwin completely rejected typological thinking and introduced instead the entirely different concept now called population thinking. …

Third, Darwin’s theory of natural selection made any invocation of teleology unnecessary. From the Greeks onward, there existed a universal belief in the existence of a teleological force in the world that led to ever greater perfection. This “final cause” was one of the causes specified by Aristotle. After Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, had unsuccessfully attempted to describe biological phenomena with the help of a physicalist Newtonian explanation, he then invoked teleological forces. Even after 1859, teleological explanations (orthogenesis) continued to be quite popular in evolutionary biology. The acceptance of the Scala Naturae and the explanations of natural theology were other manifestations of the popularity of teleology. Darwinism swept such considerations away.

(The designation “teleological” actually applied to various different phenomena. Many seemingly end-directed processes in inorganic nature are the simple consequence of natural laws—a stone falls or a heated piece of metal cools because of laws of physics, not some end-directed process. Processes in living organisms owe their apparent goal-directedness to the operation of an inborn genetic or acquired program. Adapted systems, such as the heart or kidneys, may engage in activities that can be considered goal seeking, but the systems themselves were acquired during evolution and are continuously fine-tuned by natural selection. Finally, there was a belief in cosmic teleology, with a purpose and predetermined goal ascribed to everything in nature. Modern science, however, is unable to substantiate the existence of any such cosmic teleology.)

Fourth, Darwin does away with determinism. Laplace notoriously boasted that a complete knowledge of the current world and all its processes would enable him to predict the future to infinity. Darwin, by comparison, accepted the universality of randomness and chance throughout the process of natural selection. (Astronomer and philosopher John Herschel referred to natural selection contemptuously as “the law of the higgledy-piggledy.”) That chance should play an important role in natural processes has been an unpalatable thought for many physicists. Einstein expressed this distaste in his statement, “God does not play dice.” Of course, as previously mentioned, only the first step in natural selection, the production of variation, is a matter of chance. The character of the second step, the actual selection, is to be directional. …

So, do, read it all. Print it out to read on November 24th of every year!  Fine Thanksgiving reading.

And by the way, the whole of The Origin is available at the Gutenberg Project.

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The Burmese Harp: Fires on the Plain: Two Films

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

When Kon Ichikawa’s name is mentioned, ears don’t perk up in recognition. Even if “film maker” is added as a hint, most will shrug, go on to talk about Kurosawa, Eastwood, others…. Too bad, because in the 1950s, in post war Japan, he made two of the most powerful movies on war that have ever been seen. The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires Over the Plain (1959.) Both are now available in the new Criterion series of classic films [many available on Netflix,] with commentary from directors, historians and critics. You’ll want to see them, and together. When seventeen year old children in your presence get glassy eyed from the pleasure of wars imagined, or seen on the screen, buy them tickets to these, and go with. Once seen, not forgotten.

Both films are about the actions of platoon sized elements of the defeated Japanese Army in the last months of World War II. The Burmese Harp takes place in Burma (though most was filmed in forested parts of Japan) as a platoon of soldiers faced with the inexorable advance of Allied (U.E., British, Indian, Chinese) forces –the tide having turned since the Japanese ascendancy in 1942-43 in Burma, and about which the Bridge on the River Kwai is a well known filmic telling — wrestle with fighting to the finish, as had been drilled into them, or surrendering. Surrender was considered an act of cowardice. One soldier swims against the tide of death by suicidal attrition, trying to persuade his comrades to be part of building the new Japan; their deaths now were simply foolish. They condemn him and he slips away, stealing a bathing Buddhist monk’s clothing for disguise and gradually becoming a monk himself, staying behind in Burma to bury the dead, and to carry some of the pain he was witnessed.

Firesontheplainposter Fires On The Plain, takes place in Leyte, Philippines, just months before the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is absolutely the most reality based war film that has ever been made, which is to say, by it’s documentary nature it is explicitly an anti-war film. As Ichikawa says in his remarks, included on the DVD, “war is absolute evil. That is what I wanted to show.”

As in The Burmese Harp, the soldiers are wrestling with surrender or death. It is not fear of imprisonment, torture or death if they surrender; it is that surrendering is an act of cowardice. Japanese soldiers have sworn before their God-King. They have a wrenching decision to make, if it can be made at all. Surrender, as a physical proposition would be the easiest of all choices. And it isn’t the daily battering of big guns, snipers and superior forces advancing, though there is some of that. It is their utter exhaustion, their starvation, their lack of equipment, clothes, medicine and food. The scenes of men listlessly trampling through the mud, stopping to look at shoes on the road to see if they are better than the ones they have, the theft of shoes from men just barely dead, the look of emaciated exhaustion on their faces is unlike anything I have ever seen. I have read stories of the U.S. Civil War, in which freshly dead bodies were ransacked for better clothing and equipment, and similarly in Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, or Moscovian’s resistance to the Nazi seige. Nowhere have I seen it depicted in such a way that my feet hurt, I shivered in the drenching rain. In fact I viscerally felt the tug to get some protein in my belly, regardless of the source.

Ichikawa gathered a determined group to make the film in 1959. The war has ended only 14 years earlier. War Crimes trials had been held, in Japan. Over 5,000 had been tried, 900 executed. The sense of shame and complicity in Japan for the years of imperialism was wide-spread. Nevertheless, to make a film so explicitly pointing at war-time behavior was fraught with controversy. Ichikawa was determined. His own family had been living in Hiroshima the day the first atomic bomb was dropped. He had not been in the city, and didn’t know for weeks what might have become of his family. They survived in a outlying area of the city. Ichikawa saw the devastation up close.

The lead actor Eiji Funakoshi [Tamura] was so determined to act the part of a fleeing, starving soldier he showed up for the first day of shooting, and collapsed at its end. His wife told Ichikawa he had been starving himself for a month to be ready for the part. The filming was postponed for several weeks while he recovered.

The theme of hunger and starvation, already a minor part of most war films, takes on a central role in Fires on the Plain. Hunger for most movie warriors is having to eat C-rations day after day; it’s shown in the happiness of finding fruit or bread at some unexpected point. Never have I seen, not just a mention of hunger-that-leads-to-cannibalism, but a deep and graphic exploration of it, an exploration that does not smugly set down the behavior to aberrant action of one or two, but to the logical and necessary outcome of a war like this: to fight, we much be strong; to be strong we must have meat. Call it monkey meat, call it what you want. Look away if you can’t stand it, but eat, and fight.

The_Burmese_Harp The Burmese Harp is a much less trying film. The cracking of bodies, the starvation, the sheer misery is not the arresting part of the canvas. The decision to surrender or not costs the soldiers less. Though following the soldiers as they retreat across Burma, and seeing them wrestle with their decision, its major interest is how a man makes amends; how a deepening sense of compassion is born, how sacrifice is conceived of and carried out in the name of balancing the weight of war and loss. The growing being-against-the-war is seen in the growing, quiet absorption of what has happened in the eyes of the deserting, becoming-a-monk, soldier. There is a deep sadness but a forward going, a suggestion that had the compassion been more widely held in the beginning the carnage would have not happened. There is resolution.

The order Kichikawa made them is strange to me because with The Burmese Harp, he had looked at war, it seemed, and without going into its ferocity, saw its horror and saw a means of resolution. The quiet trek of the soldier, deserting into monk-hood, and the lush choral music help us out of the despair. It was a kind of “act of contrition.” With Fires On the Plain, it is as if that contrition, or going-forward, exploded. He had not found resolution at all. It was as if he’d been beaten up again by his understanding of what had happened, of what war means. Though “resolved” several years earlier, he screams aloud his pain again. It is almost unbearable to watch, even on a television screen. It was very very difficult to sit through – from the muddy marches of starving men, to the maniacal shooting of a surrendering soldier, by a Philippina guerrilla, unable to rise over her emotions of what the Japanese had done to her country, to the slowly dawning realization that those who were still strong were eating the flesh of the dead. It’s no wonder than when the critics tackled it in 1959 they complained. Bosley Crowther said it was the most “grisly and physically repulsive film” he had ever seen. Pauline Kael, true to form, calls it a “masterpiece.”

I would recommend seeing them in reverse order: Fires on the Plain was made after The Burmese Harp. See it first, with its more haunting, more despairing fullness of war, unbearable for some to watch. Follow with Burmese Harp which was made first.

Both films are based on novels published in Japan, just a few years before, and converted into very strong screen-plays by Ichikawa’s wife, Nato Wada, needless to say an unheard of occupation for a woman in Japan at the time. The books are both available in English translation, and worth reading, though as with many written mothers, quite different than their filmic offspring. Fires on the Plain, originally, Nobi, is written by Shohei Ooka, himself a POW of the American in the Philippines, and author of several WW II memoirs and fictions. The Harp of Burma was written by Michio Takeyama, originally as a children’s fantasy

Ichikawa and Wada, converted it to an adult morality tale about the carnage and ache of war, and what one man is moved to do.

Kon Ichikawa only died recently, January 2008. It’s too bad he isn’t more widely known, and his detestation of war more widely shared. There is nothing of the patriotic, hero petting, flag waving of so many war films — even those which pretend to show it all. Nor are we buried beneath the technological glory of fast loud airplanes, beautiful scarlet explosions, sweaty but determined and ultimately winning men. We are seeing war as so many have seen it, and come home never to talk about again.

These are war films like none you have ever seen, and perhaps the only war-time musical worth citing as one. The choral whistling and catchy tune of Bridge On The River Kwai, the sister film of war in Burma, pales before the rich, resonant singing in the Burmese Harp.

You’ll want your own copy.

I’d like to thank Joyce Cole for recommending The Burmese Harp. I’d not heard of it and was struck many times over. My own synthesizing self brought me to Fires on the Plain, and this this essay. Ichikawa did many other films, of course, though nothing even of this war-genre. He was better known as a maker of comedies and social stories. He always thought of himself as a “cartoonist.” (!) Thanks Joyce.]

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Big Sur in the Autumn on a Birthday

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

The cliffs of the Santa Lucia Range
in years, a mere 5 million old,
made up of parts 100 million
more –beyond all thought;
carried, cooked, cooled and coated
in the incredible oven
that gave us life and breath
and keeps us forever warm.
And this is just the latest serving
at a table set
four thousand million beyond the beyond.

And I dare to stand on an edge
over the waters similarly old
reincarnated, rain-drop to ocean,
more times than Buddha even knows

And think about my years.

The ice plant of summer, green,
each leaf as thick as fingers
reaching for the sun
in autumn turning red
and yellow, translucent
in the angling light.

The stones below
in granite white, and hard,
green serpentine and slippery soft
let sea-waves scrub them
over centuries of centuries
until we can pocket pebbles
and carry home,
mementos of our times
when we ran free

before the wonders
in the days to come
of contemplation, time
and universe.

These cliffs which we can warm
our backs against as sun set
measures other hours gone
have grown and stood their ground
five million years and only lately
have they begun to bow in their old age
as we all do, eroded by
the wind and rain, the softer stuff
that takes us all
in our good end.

So life, our spark in time,
gives eternities
to each of us
then passes on
and we wing with it
ash and flower
in the wind.

Will Kirkland, Oct, 2009
DSCN1675 [Desktop Resolution]

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What I Have Heard About Blue Angels

Friday, October 9th, 2009

All of a sudden
(it was hot, it was blue,
we had finished a meal,
in what would be soon
once a home,)
a sound devoured the sky.

The sky remained blue for a moment,
but was gone from our ears,
young and old, torn open,
all of a sudden,
from outside in.

All of a sudden
the sky turned white
We could not hear.
All that was blue was gone.
The white turned gray.
Sand ate our eyes
in blinding bites.
The gray was gone.
What remained was far
gone from color.

All of a sudden rocks fell
from the sky. As big as heads
they fell. A steel beam fell,
a needle of stone
pierced my eye.

All of a sudden my son
was deaf forever. He would never
hear me say I love you!
all of a sudden forever.

An arm flew by
all of a sudden. I didn’t see the rest
of my wife, forever.
She took another son, too.
We never said goodbye, forever.

I’ve heard, in your country,
people rush up to the roofs
when they hear the sound,
to see. We flee down.
We chew the dirt to go even deeper.
We have already seen.

I have heard they are called
Blue Angels
in your country,
that thousands gather
to watch them fly.

If these are angels
of your heaven
I do not want to see them
forever.

Will Kirkland
October, 2009

In San Francisco, all afternoon
I listen to the music of Rumi
so when the creatures roar over,
making hearts and car alarms scream
I can let the tears go
pretending they come from joy
not fear
of angels and their men.

[I have written in previous years about the Blues. This is the worst weekend of the year in San Francisco, not only for the Angels falling blue to hell, but for the adoration shown, without a thought, the merest thought of what it really means.]

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Rumi: A Poet Like No Other

Friday, October 9th, 2009

What a fortune it is to have friends to send you arrows that lodge in your heart! I got a gift a while back which stayed in its wrapper until just recently, so that arrow had been shot and sort of disappeared into the air. I knew he had shot it. It landed and stayed quiet in repose, not waiting for me at all. When I opened it, suddenly it lept out, and with the full force of its sending, struck my heart!

Poems by Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, in wonderful translations and readings by Coleman Barks, a North Carolinian I have met once or twice, brought together by translation and the adventure of removing the strangeness from strangers. Oh, how wonderful!

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere,
they’re in each other all along.

From Essential Rumi
by Coleman Barks

Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity.
The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death.
Tomorrow, when resurrection comes,
The heart that is not in love will fail the test.

From Thief of Sleep
by Shahram Shiva

Peaceful Rivers

And more of Coleman’s work. You can get audio and video for money you will never think twice about….

And here you can get audio in iTunes and other mp3 formats.

ColemanBarksRumi

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Muddy River: A Town in China

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

The greater the flood of news the faster we are carried along.  We have time to see only the surfaces of events before we are swept beyond them, especially if the events are in countries enormous and far away.

Uighurs attack Hans who attack Uighurs in China. China is making terrifying contributions to CO2 buildup but is working more than many to bring it down.  Tibet has always been a part of China; Tibet has always been its own nation.  And so we know ten thousand things but we know nothing below the surface.  Even if we go there and are toured around and make friends; even if we adopt unwanted Chinese infant girls ; even if we mourn the dead from Tianamen in 1989 or the impoverished poor protesting the fouling of their air, water and soil, we know not much.

vagrants.cgi To get below the surface at all we have to move from the wash of news and enter into history or even better, into fiction.  To know reality we have to enter into fiction.   YiYun Li’s recently published The Vagrants, about life in Muddy River, a fictional town in China in 1979, is a marvelous glass bottomed boat through which we can look into the life of the town and the lives of the people.  In 1979 Mao had died, the Gang of Four had been arrested and the Cultural Revolution was over.  The first possibilities of public, democratic expression were being felt in Beijing and around the country, but the outlines of who was in power and what was the correct line were far from clear. The news traveled slowly,  with travelers and interpretations of what was being said in the press and on the radio and who was saying it.  There was none of the speedy personal communications of the internet, cell-phones and texting which have aided and kept anonymous those who have spoken out recent years. Yet small groups of people breathed a different air and wanted to believe it was there to stay.

The central event of the book is the execution of Gu Shan, a young, female Red Guard “…at first a fanatic believer in Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution and later an adamant nonbeliever and a harsh critic of her generation’s revolutionary zeal.”  Before she is executed for her counterrevolutionary acts she is taken to four public denunciations, the occasion for a public holiday of sorts. School children are walked to the stadium to witness. Perhaps they notice the blood stained rag around her neck through which the vocal cords had been severed — to avoid any embarrassment to the Party officials. Away from the crowds she will be taken to a snowy island for her execution, but not before her kidneys are extracted, en vivo. The official who is to receive them doesn’t want to be tainted with the ghosts of the dead.

Gu Shan’s mother, intent on giving her daughter a proper farewell with a public burning of her clothes, is drawn into a small band of younger people which shares Gu’s urge towards freedom, and means to use her death to celebrate her courage and advance their cause. Her father, a former teacher and intellectual, is appalled both by his daughter’s passion and by the use others want to make of her death. He begins to write long letters to his former wife, a militant communist from whom he separated before having children.

The plot line runs through the richest description imaginable, not only of the hardscrabble town, the one-room shacks with heated brick beds, the cold of the streets, the mud of approaching spring but of the people — from extremely poor, to well-off, public figures, each with their own character traits and opinions. Yiyun Li moves effortlessly between the various stories, all tied together by the death and their relation to it, and tied to each other by their positions in the town and their crossing paths.

Nini is a young adolescent girl, born with a birth defect, the result of her mother being kicked by Gu at the height of her militancy.

“Someone has put a curse on us through you, Nini, and that’s why we never get to have a boy in our family. But today, the one who has done this to us gets to see her final day. The spell is over now, and your father and I will have a son soon.”

Treated as the scullery maid and baby sitter by her parents Nini finds herself drawn to the warmth and kindness of an older boy, Bashi, who is similarly drawn to her and away from the borderline life he is living. In a world of rejection and sadness she manages to persevere, even as Bashi is sent to jail in the closing pages and she heads out of Muddy River with the elderly Huas, the title figures of the story.

“She would take care of the couple, when they were too old to work, with the money in her socks, Nini thought. There was no reason for her to linger in Muddy River, though she knew she would be back in seventeen years, after Bashi had served his sentence for molesting and kidnapping a young child [herself]. She had tried to visit him once, but the guards said only families and relatives were allowed. There was no point in making them understand she was his child bride; there was no point in explaining anything to anyone, the Huas’ included. The only thing to do was to count the days and years to come.”

Kai, a well known radio personality and voice for the status-quo, is another strong female figure in the story.  She, of all of them, changes the most. She walks away from her privileged life, picks up Gu’s cause and suffers a similar fate. Married to a high-ranking family she begins meeting with Jialin, an ailing but fervent rebel trying to rehabilitate Gu’s name. The group manages to have leaflets printed calling for a memorial and petition signing to rehabilitate her name. Stealthily the leaflets are taken door to door. Only the brave appear at the square where a large photograph of the young woman is propped below a statue of Chairman Mao; only the extremely brave, and a few foolish, sign the petition. Kai is one of the party which delivers it to the authorities — leading to disaster for her family, and death in the closing pages for herself.

“Under the policy of giving the harshest punishment to all antigovernment organizations and individuals, three hundred and eleven people who had signed the petition were tried as counterrevolutionaries… Upon reviewing the cases, the provincial officials pointed out that a warning to the masses would not be effective without a death sentence. Kill a chicken to frighten all the mischievous monkeys into silence, one top official urged in writing, and several others chimed in with their consent.”

For all the grimness of the story, both in the behavior of the people and the double execution, The Vagrants is not a labor to read. Li’s graceful sentences and attention to detail, so much of it unknown to us before reading, make us willing spectators of a great canvas, one we want to stand before many times and look again at a particular scene, or notice the description of clothing or food, or twenty minutes in the street.  We read of customs which are not ours but which, embedded in the sympathetically rendered poverty of the lives,   seem not simply exotic but a natural part of what we are seeing.

Li herself has a Tolstoyan sense of history — that life unfolds not at the hands of great men who make events but in those of the millions of people who participate, in millions of different ways.

“[Li] As a writer I am fascinated by small people in community, who are not always in the center of actions, yet who in the end, as onlookers, contribute perhaps as much to history as those who hold key roles. In other words, Hitler did not start his war by himself, nor did Chairman Mao start Cultural Revolution by himself. Those who participate are what I am interested in writing. And Muddy River, as a provincial town, seems a perfect place to investigate the people far from the center of the actions (Beijing, for instance).

[Q:] Yes, I was interested in that choice — showing the action in the provinces rather than in the capital, where events around the Democracy Wall must also have been very dramatic.

[Li] When you choose to write the center of the action — say, the movement in Beijing — it tends to become more political and historical, while my interest always stays with the people — the characters, how they live through certain events; how much their action (or inaction) define not only their own fates but other people’s fates too.”

Mark Pritchard: SF Metro

Li was born and raised in China, and was a teenager at the time of Tiananmen Square — China’s 9/11 she says.  She came to the U.S. to study immunology and found herself caught up in writing, first with short stories and now a fine novel being celebrated around the reading world.  The Vagrants is a grim story but told with unusual dispassion and fine strokes.  It isn’t to be missed.

More about Yiyun Li, here.

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Who Was That Woman?

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Who was that woman
made love to me

in the night

in the empty room
in  the house without sound

so much younger than me
who witnessed the scene?

Who, with the face unknown
the name that rose
from the floor of the sea?

She brought me tea
with a smile I’d seen
–her kimono undone,
I could not receive

too much to grieve
at the thought
of her again

serving me
too young to give.

Will Kirkland
August, 2009

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White Light / Black Rain

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

More than 64 years have gone by since atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, August 6 and 9, 1945. As Steven Okazaki’s 2007 documentary for HBO, White Light / Black Rain, shows, for many, younger Japanese, even in the affected cities, the dates bring up no connection to the horrific events. For others, who were ten and twelve and twenty at the time, the experience of being burned and mutilated, of watching their siblings and parents die, of years of radiation sickness have been with them every moment since the bombs went off.

Okazaki uses many of the black and white images we may have seen over the years, of the unimaginable destruction in both cities, of acres of blasted, seared ground where once there had been tall buildings, trees and streets. He shows some of the gruesome images taken within days of the bombing of the charred corpses, the indistinguishible faces, the separated limbs. But what he really brings are the remembrances of people who survived while their whole familes died. Survivor’s guilt is clear and spoken about. One woman’s sister stepped in front of a speeding train in such despair over the loss of her family. The speaker herself tried to do the same, and stepped out of the way at the last minute. She spoke about the courage to die, and the courage to live.

They spoke about the discrimination they faced in Japan because of their mutilations, or for showing the signs of radiation sickness which many thought to be contagious. And interestingly, none of them spoke with pointed anger at the United States for bringing the bomb. One man had been part of an activist group to make the Japanese government take responsibility for war victims, as the initiator of the war. A woman had been to the United States in the mid 1950s as one of Twenty Hiroshima Maidens brought for plastic surgery. She herself had had 30 operation in a year and a half. She remembered fondly the kindess of the Americans who helped her.

One of the men, after we have heard him talking and seen a relatively undamaged face for much of the film, takes off his shirt, on camera, to reveal such a map of wounds and traumatized flesh we can barely take it in. His ribs are literally showing, the pulse of the heart beating behind them, visible. And then he turns to show his back. He recalls how he cried out for death as the doctors repeatedly had to pull off old bandages and replace them with new. His wife still applies salve all across is back to ease the pain. 64 years later.

What they all spoke about, in common, was that such a horror not be allowed to happen again, that the pain and suffering they had had to carry should be taken as a warning and a plea to never use such weaponry again.

Though they, nor the film maker, didn’t carry a pure pacifist message, it’s hard to see how one could not extend the argument of their lives to those who were burned, maimed and rendered lifeless in the firebombing of Tokyo, done without nuclear weapons, or the Chinese hacked to death, raped, burned and drowned in Nankin at the hands of the Japanese, or those bombed and blackened in Dresden or London, or the savage treatment at the hands of Japanse soldiers in Indonesia, the Philippines, in Korea. From everywhere, survivors could be found to speak of the great sorrow and pain of their lives. Whether the storm of destruction took thirty seconds or three days matters little to them, nor should it to those of us who don’t need to have our eyes blown out to understand the tragedy.

White Light / Black Rain is a non-polemical, wrenching plea for peace, for dismantling the weapons of destruction — the most dangerous ones first.

It’s available at Netflix and other DVD distributors. It will trouble you to watch. Hearing the tears, and yes laughter, of the victims as they remember their losses and show their survival is a trouble that will bring rewards.

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Army of Shadows: A Film

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Army of Shadows — a French film noir about resistance to the Nazi occupation –The Resistance. What could be better? Brave silent men coming out of the shadows to slit Nazi throats, blow up bridges, derail trains. Isn’t that how it happens? Not according to one who was there and lived to make a film about it.

Jean Pierre Melville, if he is known at all in the U.S. is likely known for his gangster films. Even if France he is called the father of the French gangster film. Bob le Flambeur, 1955, Le Samouraï, 1967 and Le Cercle rouge, 1970, are regularly cited as innovative and perfect examples of his distant, observational noir style, his meticulous attention to detail, often in natural –not studio– settings, with plenty of dark shadows, wet streets, resounding footsteps, and grim, matter-of-fact dialogue. His main characters are often small-time crooks and his interest is that they exist and in the details of how a caper is pulled off. Is there agreement or disagreement? Does everything go as planned? How do they dress and how do they speak? Above all: how is loyalty and betrayal played out? He is not much interested in making sentimental or moral points. Life is life.

What aren’t as equally well known are his films of war-time.

He made three, —Le Silence de la mer (The silence of the Sea [1949]), Léon Morin, prêtre (Leon Morin, Priest [1961]) and L’Armée des ombres (The Army of Shadows [1969].) The earlier two are concerned with close relationships of two or three people living in a war time situation. The Army of Shadows is about war and the French resistance itself. It’s interesting both for the anti-heroic viewpoint Melville takes, and that it is the only such film he made as he had been part of the Resistance during his young, formative years.

His original name was Grumbach, from his Hungarian Jewish French emigre family. He took the name Melville from his American writing hero during his years in the Resistance.  The skeleton of the film was taken from a book of the same name written by another resistance fighter Joseph Kessel (who also wrote the novel which became the ground-breaking mainstream erotic movie, Belle du Jour with Catherine Deneuve .)

Filmed in color but almost all in Melville’s preferred blue and brown pallete suggesting the dark, fatalistic cast of Melville’s sensibility, it is the story of 5 resistance fighters in Paris, Marseilles, Lyon and occasionally London. But we see nothing of the successful bridge demolitions or daring clever assaults on the German occupation forces or the Vichy collaborators. Instead, Melville is interested in the tension fraught daily life of those living under cover, with deadly blows against the enemy as their goal but built on the base of chance, choice, personality and fate — where one can never know who is true and who will be false or what the circumstances will demand.

Army of Shadows After beginning with a strutting German parade in front of the Arc de Triomphe, the camera, below the introductory titles, trains on a dark country scene of continuous heavy rain. And so we enter Melville’s world.
(more…)

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Katyn: A Film

Friday, September 11th, 2009

I was just on the cusp of realizing that “foreign” films existed and were a real alternative to what 1950s Hollywood was serving up when Andrzej Wajda’s first films began appearing.   Art houses were far and few between in Falls Church, Virginia. DVDs and streaming video weren’t yet conceptualized.  Tape was something we used for music, if at all.  For movies we went to theaters and we watched what the theater was showing.  War movies ran to The Sands of Iwo Jima [that would be John Wayne], or Run Silent, Run Deep [Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster] .  The heroes were inevitably templates for what was held to be the way American men comported themselves as soldiers –stoic, silent and brave, true to their loved ones and noble to those they rescued –in battles which, despite losses and setback, Americans always won.  If there were deaths the bodies twisted and fell in the middle distances allowing us to stay wrapped in the same safety we were in our own backyard games.  Not known, much less seen, were “A Generation,” [1955] “Kanal,” [1957] or “Ashes and Diamonds,” [1958]  Wajda’s famous war trilogy that announced him to Polish and serious European audiences, war films that had a different take on heroism and the glories of war.

Even as I began to appreciate the Italian neo-realists, French noir and then New Wave, Wajda’s name only floated in that distant sphere of film auteurs with unpronounceable names we must one day see — Russians, Japanese, Poles.  Somehow I never sat in the dark and absorbed his immense, dark vision. Too bad for me.  I’ve been able to begin making up the absence now that technology lets us locate and see films we have long wondered about, have heard or read mentioned of. We can see a short series by a particular director, or follow a theme that interests us, or watch an actor in various roles at various ages. Sitting in a dark room with a big screen in the company of others is still the best way to see a movie, but putting yourself to school in your living room is not a bad second choice.

Katyn is the 85 year old director’s latest film, released in Poland in 2007 and in the U.S in early 2009.  It’s available on DVD already.

katyn_swit_na_stacji_400Katyn for the Poles is a one-word tolling-bell of meaning, as 9/11 is for Americans.  Katyn is a place. It’s a town and a forest near Smolensk in Russia.  It is a massacre of Polish officers, intellectuals, priests and students by the Soviet NKVD.  It is a German propaganda campaign carried out against the Soviets.  It is a Soviet propaganda campaign carried out against the Nazis.  It is the exhumation of bodies, forensic analysis of bullet holes, pieces of cloth, hidden journals. It is the insistence of the truth of the massacre against denial, punishment, imprisonment and torture. It is, the revelation in secret papers between Stalin and Beria, of what was planned, when and who was to carry it out. And it is, finally, Poland the nation becoming Poland a country and able to stand for its own people and the truths they have had torn from their history. All these things are Katyn.
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Mountain Building and Human Existence

Monday, August 31st, 2009

DevilInMountainsThe tallest peaks in the famous Rocky Mountains of Colorado are half the height of most of the those in the Himalayas and are dwarfed by many mountains in the South American Andes. Why is that? And, where do mountains come from? What makes some mountains grow taller and others grow faster? If mountains affect the weather and thus the climate, is it possible that climate and weather could affect the growth of mountains?

I don’t know about you, but such questions have been with me ever since I realized that the mountains I drove through or flew over were not just rocks and dirt that had somehow been there forever. Living in Marin County, California in the eastern shadow of Mt. Tamalpais helps keep such questions alive. The chert beds so clearly visible, folded back and forth in enormous vertical S’s, on the road to the peak just beg as I drive by: exssssplain this! The green serpentine taunts: how did I get here from miles below the ocean floor? In my daily life of making a living and living with family those questions pop up and recede during the length of a Sunday drive. But they swarm out again, bothering and bewitching me when in the company of many mountains, as I was recently in the Peruvian Andes. Along the way I found the perfect book to consult and bring me a little closer to understanding the mysteries.

Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes (2004, Princeton) by Simon Lamb, a British geologist of wide experience in both mountains and in explaining mountains, is a very good book. It will draw in anyone with the stirrings of curiosity of how did these mountains come to be?

It turns out the Andes are young, only 40 million years or so, with many sections of it much younger, rising up as the lower layers skidded up the wedge shaped, and much more solid, Brazilian Shield. The youngest portions of the Canadian-US Rockies by contrast, are 100 to 65 million years old.

Simon’s approach is not pure geology. (more…)

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Inglourious Basterds: A Film

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

You either love Quentin Tarantino’s movies or you think they are disgusting. I fall into the second camp. To lift a line from the best acted role in Inglourious Basterds, If 99.9% don’t die it’s not a Tarantino.

My purpose is to dissuade you from going to see the film, so if that seems improper for a review, stop here. There are plenty of reviewers who think highly of his work and will pitch you with “swaggering fun,” extremely witty,” gleeful violence,” and such. [Actually, only 74% at Rotten Tomatoes don't give it a "splat."]
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