Posted on: June 29, 2009
Last Year at Marienbad. Directed by Alain Resnais. 1961
Gothic, surrealist, stately, slow .… haunting and bee-zarrr, Last Year in Marienbad is a classic French film that will mystify and intrigue, or drive you right up a wall. And those walls are sumptuous.
The film is set perhaps in what was once called Czechoslovakia. We don’t really know, because we’re never really sure if we’re in the present, in the past, in an invented past or present. Resnais does give verbal, musical and visual clues that shift the time, but as the film progresses, we trust those clues less and less. Is it all in the mind of X, the narrator? Is he actually talking to A, the woman he claims he met in the spa town Marienbad last year? Does her lover or her…
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Posted on: June 23, 2009
Ari Folman, director. David Polonsky, art director. 2008
Waltz With Bashir is a stunning, profoundly moving animated documentary about war, memory loss, vengeance and guilt. It is based on true stories and memories gathered by the director, focusing on his own time as a soldier during the Lebanon War. It is his personal journey to recover hidden memories, to uncover exactly what he did, where he was, and what his role might have been in Beirut, cerca 1982.
I had no idea, going into the film, that an animated feature could be so powerful. Its slow pace at times proved deceptive, and the final shift into live action, archival footage from the time of the Sabra-Shatila massacres crushes the viewer.
What is most important about this film is that it puts the lie to the…
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Posted on: June 22, 2009
Only Four Colors Left
Clumsy painting of the Self must turn
Into itself and away from vague
Proclamations and generalities
Concerning what it means to live and die
But who would know what we
What I face going into the landscape
Again and again?
Like bitter birds waiting for the scraps
And arthritic hands in the park
Who knows how the snow stops
Coming and coming pushing cars off the road
Or mixing polarities with gray
gray air?
Mine is the issue of the landscape
Not the pattern
It is the slant and the break and the wisdom
Of hills becoming mountains becoming
Slopes
Valleys
Gorges
Sneaking near fault lines
Spraying the open mind with replicas
As contours of itself
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Posted on: June 18, 2009
The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel. 1565
John Abel’s comments about Mark Twain’s non-fiction work got me to thinkin’. A dangerous thing, for sure. I thought about the miles Twain must have travelled, first up and down the Mississippi, then, when famous, around the world. And I thought about Tess, Hardy’s Tess, and how she might have traveled within Wessex some 15 to 25 miles in one direction or another, probably never going much beyond a radius of 25 miles or so.
.… Through beautiful meadows and across ancient hills, to her destiny, but her destiny was not too far from the place she was born. Hardy creates a big world for her, with extensive inner horizons, but she walked almost everywhere she went, rarely was granted even so…
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Posted on: June 16, 2009
Cover, 1922
Another year past, and we’re here again. June 16th. Bloomsday. The day to celebrate James Joyce’s book about a day in the life in 1904 that was kinda important to him.
It points back in time to Homer, back in time to various modes of English, back in time to that day in 1904, and ahead in time for thousands of scholars who have labored to understand it and its myriad sources.
Ulysses was meant to be read aloud, so we can chew on each word. It was meant to be heard, so we can sing with each paragraph. Listen to each sentence, carefully, so we can dance inside our ears. May your celebration be cerebral, merry, filled with joy and song, and may it involve a little…
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Posted on: June 14, 2009
Jacket for The Great Gatsby. Cerca 1925
Personally, I have no horse in this race. But I am interested in discussions regarding the best of the best. Not that any of them are definitive, or even particularly enlightening. They do, however, seem to spark interesting dialogue.
A friend of mine sent along an online article about a panel discussion on the topic of Great American Novel. The Cultural Center of Cape Cod recently had a battle of the books, with five English teachers guiding the debate, and some one hundred people in the audience.
Some excerpts from the article:
“Moby Dick” had the home court advantage according to Rick Porteus, who teaches at Dennis Yarmouth High School. “Two months ago the Massachusetts state legislature voted ‘Moby…
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