Reel to real

My departure for China is less than a day and a half away. I still don't really know what I'm going to be doing there, but I find I'm cool with that. I've done ok with parachutings into other countries in the past (England, Japan, France, Australia) but I think my lack of panic also marks something else, since those were all countries to which I had affective ties, while I was until recently almost culpably cold to China. No longer, I feel I've become quite the Sinophile!
A big part of that has been the time I've spent with the language, literally adjusting my body to its contours. But another part has been - thanks to Netflix - the extensive diet of Chinese films I've been watching (building on my foundation in animation): films in every genre but romcom, some very good, others not so much; mainland, Hong Kong, exile, diaspora; big box office hits, flops, banned movies; historical and contemporary, supernatural and documentary, art...

“Aftershock 唐山大地震”
“Sacrifice 赵氏孤儿”
“Confucius 孔子”
“Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons 西遊·降魔篇”
“Not One Less 一个都不能少”
“Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles 千里走单骑”
“Uproar in Heaven 阿闹天宫”
“Dreams of Jinsha 梦回金沙城”
“Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”
“Ocean Heaven 海洋天堂”
“Life on a String 边走边唱”
“Farewell my Concubine 霸王别姬”
“Lan Yu 蓝宇”
“City of Life and Death 南京! 南京!”
“Detective Dee & Mystery of the Phantom Flame 狄仁杰之通天帝国”
“Last Train Home 归途列车”
“Everlasting Regret 長恨歌”
“24 City 二十四城记” (source of picture above)

I know, I know - for better and worse, life isn't like the movies. Working that out will be one of my discoveries in China!

Fantasies

I must be on vacation as I saw two tongue-in-cheek series-starting superhero blockbusters today: Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy" (in a cinema, in 3-D no less) and Stephen Chow's "Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons 西遊,降魔篇" (on a computer, and for the second time). I don't know for this sort of movie, but these were lots of fun to watch. Much of the time I knew that some convention of the genre was being cleverly mocked, but not what that convention was. But these films also make fun of themselves, and that I got. Also, I think, how the self-mockery allowed the story to affirm some values it started out treating as laughable - though I'm not sure if this wasn't the way they ultimately pay their dues to their genre. "GOTG" discovers the possibility of friendship and self-sacrifice, a familiar enough storyline to me; it's pretty conventional, too, that one of the characters already had a pure heart to start with though nobody noticed, the literally wooden Groot. "JTTW" redeems platitudes about humans' essential goodness, which start the film as children's fairy tales. But when the hapless hero's "300 Nursery Rhymes" gets torn up by a hot demon huntress enraged by his refusal to requite her love and then patched back together (though she's illiterate) it becomes a sutra and his enlightenment achieved. "We were all born pure, like children"! I'm already overthinking these confections, so let me stop here!

You can't go home again

Just saw Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" - for the second time. I saw it first ten days ago in Los Angeles, the day I dropped off my passport at the Consulate, and now it's come to San Diego too. Like other viewers, my first reactions (along with "a miracle!") was "I need to see this, right away!" How weird and wonderful would it be to go back to see the boy, his parents and sister, and so many others young again - actually younger, not through makeup or computer simulation? It seemed an unprecedented chance. I was also enraptured thinking about how the film must have been made, cast and director winging it, living into the contingency of every collaboration but here in extreme form since it was over 12 years and deals with a child coming into his own (it's not a documentary but the actors bring lots of their lives into it). Open-ended plans, corrections, serendipitous discoveries, new ideas from all sides... the word that came to me to describe the director's ability to let it happen was "generosity."

But I didn't go set the film again right away, even when it opened in San Diego a few days later. Why? There's one scene in the film which is painful to watch - an abusive drunk terrorizing a family - and I found I didn't want to experience it again, it was too raw. But I suspect I was also worried that the magic would be spoiled somehow on re-viewing. I'm a Linklater fan and this has happened before. "Waking Life" is one of those movies that messed with my mind in strange and cool ways, showing things the mind is capable of though we don't usually notice it or let it. I was really experiencing things different way for a while after seeing that film, and tried desperately to hold on to that widened play of consciousness the way you try to cling to the gossamer remains of a dream... but the magic soon ran dry, and I haven't dared see the film again, as the memory of its transport is so strong and precious.

So how was "Boyhood" the second time through? Not at all what I expected. It was, once again, entirely absorbing. Every scene again rang true. The music once again made me misty. The violent drunk was again terrifying. The parents, growing up too in their own troubled ways, were again painfully real. The boy's sequence of haircuts and voices was again more varied, extended and interesting than you'd expect, and the mellow young man who emerges at the end was once again intensely likable, indeed lovable. I thought again: "the students who show up in our first year classes already have whole lives behind them!" But the magic? There was a little less of it. The story seemed more scripted, more normative. I felt Linklater's generosity less keenly, had more questions about what he was up to and whether I approved of it.  

I don't think I was wrong about his generosity the first time, though. I was unable to see the film the same way. Knowing where character Mason (and all the others) end up, I couldn't but listen for cadences and foreshadowings - and found them - in his younger self. He wound up just where I knew he would, which was pleasing but not in the same way as before, when his becoming that person was a mystery and a miracle and a cause for celebration. I saw a "how to" movie where before I saw a movie full of "how" and "what" attending the mystery of "who."

I think this reveals something about more than this film, though part of the film's incredible gift is that it offers us this experience - at least for the fresh viewer. We can't but see the past in unifying retrospect, projecting into it tendencies and inevitabilities that, in the living of it (Linklater referred to this as "the living movie" as it was being made), weren't there, or at least couldn't be seen. Relatedly we see the person we know from the present already there in the past. (This is a much remarked phenomenon, crystallized for me by someone's - wish I could remember who's - observation that in pictures of one's parents as children one still sees adults.) But part of the wonder of people is that they change, especially children, and "Boyhood," at least on first viewing, takes you to the everyday landscapes in which such changes unfold. Linklater's generosity is kin to one of the virtues Sara Ruddick described in Maternal Thinking, the way a parent "fosters growth" in allowing a child to become their own person, an intellectually wondrous mix of patience and appreciation and encouragement and letting go.

So am I glad I saw it again? Yes, though a little chastened: sadder and wiser. I know that I can't watch it for the first time again, and that has become part of its truth. I feel a bit more keenly the disjunction at film's end where Mason's (almost) adult life begins as he heads off to college, and his mother thinks her life is over. Growth when you're part of it is life itself. When you're outside it it's alien, seems to have lost that openness essential to it. The past, once narrated, is closed - at least until something shows you it wasn't so fixed, so determined: learning something new about a past you thought you knew or, perhaps, seeing a film which captures the joyful-sad opacity of life from all vantages...

Memory lane

Some friends were in town this past week on their way to a holiday in Central Europe, their first time. They'll be in Prague and Budapest and Vienna. And Bratislava! I recommended a few things to do in various cities, but then I recalled that they are great James Bond fans and said that they must, of course, go on the Riesenrad in the Prater in Vienna - hadn't their hero been on it? (My reason would be "The Third Man.") Indeed he had, and they couldn't remember much about "The Living Daylights," the 1987 Bond film in question, so I invited them over for dinner and a screening (thanks to Netflix streaming and my projector). 
Who remembered that Bratislava - improbably located over a mountain pass - was even more important to the story than Vienna? It's in Bratislava (actually in a dressed down Vienna Volksoper) that Bond meets his Girl, a cellist. And it's in sledding downhill in the case of that cello (a Stradivarius bought by the arms dealer who is the film's main villain) that they narrowly escape scores of pursuing Soviet soldiers. I'm glad to have seen it for the vintage Bond location switches, but also because I'd forgotten about the piece she played on that cello, Borodin's second string quartet, one of the first things I ever had on cassette.

Monumental waste of time

There's one reason to see the film "The Monuments Men," and that is that our beloved Thomas Hart Benton murals appear in it. They are, as you know, one of my passions, and it's fascinating to me that on their way to the Met they came to be used in a scene of a New York bar in 1943. (The scene at right with Benton's Hallelujah Lassie doesn't even appear in the film.) There is, alas, no other reason to see the film: none.

Lego my ego

I don't usually write negative reviews of things - the Web's overflowing with them - but allow me to recommend that you not see "The Lego Movie." (For everthing that movie should have been but wasn't, go see the sublime "Wreck-It Ralph"!) I should have known better than to go - I know I'm too close to it! - but an alumna told me that it was a brief for Christian socialism and my curiosity was piqued. And then I found myself exhausted late of a Friday afternoon and the deed was done.

The nature of the exhaustion may be pertinent. Fashion Praxis, the series of interdisciplinary conversations on fashion and politics of which I, too, was a part, turned out to be an all-day affair. It began with a prophecy that fashion did not just "exemplify" Hannah Arendt's understanding of the vita activa (The Human Condition was recommended reading for participants), but "completes" it. Specifically, it somehow complements Arendt's understanding of labor (the maintenance of our biological existence) with spectacle, work (the world of made things) with aesthetics, and action (the truly human world of persuasion and human multiplicity) with ethics.

This manifesto came not from one of the fashion theorists or designers but from an enthusiastic professor of international affairs, but it got me thinking. What I, as a relatively unsympathetic outsider, tend to see as a dystopia of waste, elitism and conformity is clearly understood by many within it as a utopia. (Witness the way that the "is fashion a religion?" question once again elicited wide-eyed talk of transcendence, etc.) I understand that Parsons is the design school most committed to bringing critical awareness of the dystopian realities of fashion (sweatshops, anorexia, cultishness) and to releasing its utopian promise (recognition of the value of craft, celebration of the ways that "everyone dresses," communities of use and reuse, etc..)

I wasn't thinking about Parsons while trying to remain interested in the action movie at the center of "The Lego Movie," but in retrospect there's a parallel. The film has been getting plaudits from pundits for successfully selling a 90-minuted infomercial whose point seems to be that big companies like Lego are not to be trusted. The film celebrates everyone's capacity to be a "master builder," to create Lego concoctions nobody has ever dreamt of before - which might, heck, save the world! And there I find myself caught. Even as I note that you can buy new Lego sets to build stuff from this film about not following instructions (hello?!), I am reminded my own utopian attachment to Lego's infinite combinatorial miracle, which - yes, still - I think has shaped (in good ways) how I understand the very stuff of the world.

Maybe I should approach the world of fashion in the same way? In the meantime, there's one moment in "The Lego Movie" which I loved. As the ragtag bunch of lovable rebels are storming the headquarters of nefarious Lord Business, who wants to destroy all creativity, they hear someone approaching. The little yellow people hide. But the improvised robot-pirate-spaceship does even better, recombining its pieces in a blinding flurry to a perfect disguise: a copy machine!

(If only it had actually been the same pieces. Sigh.)

Shanghai is the future

Saw a great movie today, Spike Jonze's "Her." You've probably heard about it - lonely guy falls in love with his artificially intelligent operating system, voluptuously voiced by Scarlett Johanson. It's about that, but about much more, brilliantly written, and sheds light on experiences and relationships we have with virtual technology, social media, and ever more human-like machines. It also does what great science fiction does - shows a possible future which makes such sense you feel it's already arrived. We may look back on it, as we do "Blade Runner" and "The Matrix," as not just prophetic but true.

Among its science fiction futures is a more developed Los Angeles which is full of skyscrapers - and even a functioning subway system. That some of these scenes - like the one above - are shot in China is given way not just by the shapes of the buildings but by the hazy white of the sky. In fact this is Shanghai, the city where, it happens, yours truly will be spending part of next year. Yes: I seem to have succeeded in making a connection in the Middle Kingdom, and it's with the Religious Studies Department at Fudan University in Shanghai. More soon!

Larger than life

Went to see Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" today with my friend L. It was a full house and we arrived only 15 minutes early, so were seated in the third row center. We hope to see it again from a vantage from which you can see the whole screen at once! But, once as accustomed as one can be to the distorting angle, I found I was glad to be so close. Why? Because Daniel Day Lewis' Lincoln is so magnetic a character I actually felt grateful to be close to him! I know, I know - it's just a movie, an actor, a screen (and history, and History). I don't care: I loved him.

That sinking feeling

Another greatest classic - this time in the Lang First Year Café Night series: Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin." Three dozen students sat patiently through it, but when my colleague B tried to lead a discussion about it, nobody said a word. It's too hard to read, a silent,

 

black and white propaganda film about revolution, its hero no individual but a mass coming to consciousness of itself? Perhaps. But maybe it was

something else. When B, near her wits' end, asked if anyone could think of a more recent film which "Potemkin" in some way reminded them of,

someone finally piped up. "Titanic," he said, because in both someone commands someone to "shoot them like dogs." But there may have been a deeper wisdom in the analogy. The main thing this generation knows about the USSR is that - like the Titanic - it wound up going under.

Cinéphile

What a week! A concatenation of Film Forum series let me see two films which have long been honored as best ever - Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) and Jean Renoir's "La Regle du Jeu" (1939) - on the big screen: my first time for the Renoir, for the Welles it's been decades. Both are feasts for the cinephile, but "Kane" now seems a little precious, while "Règle" remains for me a work of devastating perfection.

This is a great painting, Bruegel the Elder's "Kreuztragung Christi" or "Procession to Calvary" in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It's so full of life it seems almost cinematic. But should you hear that someone's actually tried to make it into a movie (perhaps he'll call it "The Mill and the Cross"), don't go see it! It shows only that film can be as mute and static as a painting - a bad painting, not this one.

Before the Sky Tree

Film Forum is showing Samuel Fuller's 1955 film "House of Bamboo," the first American film shot in occupied Japan, and in bright color and gorgeously wide format. I went to see it for the scenery (though the story has its interest, too). Aspects of Japanese mid-century culture I know from black and white films and photographs in exuberant if touristic profusion! The Great Buddha at Kamakura as if time doesn't pass, and the lost Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Imperial Hotel as confirmation that it does. The finale, with winks to the Prater scene in "The Third Man" and the merry-go-round in "Strangers on a Train," takes place on the rotating globe of the amusement park atop a department store at Asakusa. That's the Sumida River above, Sensoji below.

Job movies

Two years ago, there was a Job-inspired movie called "A Serious Man." I'm not sure why I didn't blog about it - I watched it several times, including with my class; it was a more serious engagement with the difficulties of the Job material than you might have expected from the Coen brothers. While a comedy of sorts, it thematizes the temptation to seek a message in misfortune, especially in relation to a God who's supposed to protect good people from evil. Now there's a new Job-inspired movie in town, Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life." I don't want to spoil it for you - you really should see it - but the film's epigraph spells it right out for you, starting with Job 38: 4, 7: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth ... when the morning stars sang together? And then, in one of the first of (too) many voiceovers, this thesis statement: There are two ways through life: the way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow. The universe is vast, but human joys and sorrows, one as surd as the other, have their place in it. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, an older woman glosses Job 1:21, that's the way he is. Like the Job author Malick uses bombast-risking visual poetry to make his case, though there's also a divine feminine at work here the Job author would not recognize. Does it work? Let me know what you think. (Pics here)

Fourfold

Michelangelo Frammartino's film "Le Quattro Volte" - opened this week at Film Forum - is a wonder. Scriptless but not unscripted, few of its main characters are human, but all are somehow deeply if not intimately connected, participating in the mystery of living and dying. Nothing as drab as rural lives "close to nature" is being explored here, nor anything as precious as "the cycles of nature" (herds of urban cinephiles delighting in the spectacle of herds of Calabrian goats!) What I mean: it's also a religious movie. Not at the expense of these other concerns, but involved in them in a deep deep way. I was reminded of Mary Douglas' understanding of Christianity as a composting religion.

Religion and film I

Watched two amazing movies today, each of which resonated with one of the courses whose midpoint we've just reached. (Next week is Spring Break.) This post is about the one I showed in "Aboriginal Australia," the next about a new film which exemplified something we discussed in "Exploring Religious Ethics." Today's film was Warwick Thornton's "Samson & Delilah," the first Aboriginal-made film to win prizes from Australia to Cannes. It's not an easy movie, but powerful. (And great cinema too, especially in its use of music.)

"Sampson & Delilah" balances, or perhaps balances out, the idealized image of a whole Aboriginal world of the film with which the course began, "Ten Canoes" (which is also Aboriginal-made, though the director was Balanda). Thornton's world is very decidedly not whole - he says the film was a wake-up call to Aboriginals to tend to a generation of youth which was getting lost (Sampson, above, is a glue-sniffing addict), and I understand that the sort-of happy end was tacked on so as not to be too depressing.

In the context of our course, it marked a turning point in several ways. From images of the Aboriginal past, whether Aboriginal or scholarly-white, we turn now to the difficult present. And from the Dreaming in putatively timeless rituals we'll turn to contemporary ethnography, art and politics. What about religion? It's still there, complicated by the changes in ritual resulting from dislocations, stolen generations and sedentarization. "Sampson & Delilah" also introduces another important factor in contemporary Aboriginal life: Christianity.

Religion and film 2

The second film was Xavier Beauvois' "Of Gods and Men" ("Des Hommes es des Dieux"), the true story of a community of French Trappists in Algeria who were victims of the violent unrest there in the 1990s - although they knew they are in danger, they chose to stay. It's a beautiful if not always easy film, certainly deserving of its accolades.
I went to see it with my sometimes excitable friend M, who was incensed by A. O. Scott's enthusiastic review in the Times which described this as one of a handful of powerful religion films in recent years - but his highest praise was this: [M]artyrdom is not part of the Cistercian creed, Scott notes; What motivates [Brother] Christian and the others is rather an almost fanatical humanism. Maybe. But the film is suffused (as "Into Great Silence," for instance, is not) by the rhythms of monastic communal life - we spend perhaps half the film with the monks in their daily office - and an explicitly Christian spirituality.

[T]hough [Beauvois'] sympathy for the Trappists is evident, the film does not treat them as saints, or as mouthpieces for any particular theology, Scott also remarks. Rather, "Of Gods and Men” works to balance the two terms of its title and treats the relationship between them as a grave and complex mystery." That's better, a little. Except that saints aren't mouthpieces for theology - which is where this film dovetailed with "Exploring Religious Ethics." Just this morning we discussed a reflection on sainthood by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, focusing on the way he began:

"All it takes to make a man a saint is Grace. Anyone who doubts this knows neither what makes a saint nor a man," Pascal observes in Pensées with his characteristic trenchant style. I start with this observation to point out the dual perspective of these reflections: in the saint the celebration of God (indeed, of his Grace) combines with the celebration of man, with his potential and his limitations, his aspirations and his achievements.

(grace completes nature - it doesn't have to overthrow it!) and culminated in this observation:

In an age of the collapse of collective utopias, in an age of indifference and the lack of appetite for all that is theoretical and ideological, new attention is being paid to the saints, unique figures in whom is found not a theory nor even merely a moral, but a plan of life to be recounted, to be discovered through study, to be loved with devotion, to be put into practice with imitation.

"Of Gods and Men" seems to Scott an apotheosis of humanism precisely because it is true hagiography. The seven Trappists aren't superhuman - each is a fully realized individual - but they are able to show a dazzling human potential because of their life together, and its anchoring in the redemptive suffering of Christ. Their humanity is never left behind or even eclipsed by their heroism. The human is exalted.

I can't resist citing one of my favorite lines from William James (which I'm surprised I haven't yet quoted in this blog):

the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, [are] a genuinely creative social force ... The saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of goodness.... The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world's affairs to be preposterous. And yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.

(Varieties, 1902 edition, 357-58)

The Quarrel

Great film, but nearly unknown, and hard to come by. In order to show it to the "Religion in Dialogue" class I had to buy a copy, since none of our libraries (not to mention Netflix) had it. Read the original story by Chaim Grade, "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner," on which the film is based (there was a stage adaptation along the way, too), and I think the film's much more effective - certainly for a class on dialogue! In the story, secular writer Hersh and super frum rebbe Chaim - friends from childhood who have seen each other only rarely since Chaim left the yeshiva, and as their world was destroyed by Soviets and Nazis - sit side by side in front of the old Hôtel de Ville in Paris; Hersh gives a long speech, then Chaim does, the end. The film, directed by Eli Cohen, is much warmer and in its way more optimistic about alternatives to mutual judgment - perhaps because the world had changed again between 1954, when the story was written, and 1990, when the film appeared. Chaim and Hersh meet in a park in Montréal and walk together, see other walkers, lose their way, get caught in the rain, part ways and come together again, and even dance. The unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, has a visible part.

A saint for secularism!

Hagiography, indeed martyrology, lives! "Agora," the Spanish/Portuguese historical drama directed by Chilean director Alejandro Amenábar, is about the 4th century philosopher Hypatia, who stood up for scepticism, science - we see her nearly scoop Kepler (!) - and liberal tolerance in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, the pathos is that it would have been the right place at the right time - sophisticated, cosmopolitan pagan Alexandria - were it not for the rise of intolerant Christianity. If only everyone had porcelain skin and a toney British accent and knew the axioms of Euclid by heart. Swarthy black-clad middle eastern-looking fanatics (like Cyril of Alexandria and the SA-like Parabolani) outwit Roman-looking romantics and German-looking bishops, but it is the virginal Hypatia - the film's only woman - who must die, and the (already devastated) Great Library of Alexandria with her. It's historically problematic, and as troubling in its racial politics - noble white liberals threatened by dark Taliban-like religious rabble? Puleeze! Did Oriana Fallacci write your screenplay? But it's worth seeing. It's beautiful - a whole world has been lovingly recreated. And it's quirky - from time to time the camera pans up into the sky, sometimes far out into space, for no very clear reason. (The starry-heavensy opening, including the music, evoke the start of "Battlestar Galactica.") And it's always good to learn about other religions and their hagiographies.

A problem named Maria

Just watched the miraculously restored "Metropolis" of Fritz Lang (1927) - miraculous because the 25 minutes cut from the original by American distributors had been thought lost for eighty years, and only recently rediscovered (in Buenos Aires!). The reconstructed film, complete with original soundtrack and titles, is almost unbearably gripping - the graininess of the recovered images (like Maria and the children drowning in the flooded worker's city, above) makes it feel like historical footage! Didn't all this actually happen?
The only other time I've seen the film was in the 1980s when someone put together a techno soundtrack for it. (I remember going to see it with my mother in a movie theater with surround-sound - in Fashion Valley, I think I recall.) Then it was prophetic proto-cyberpunk sci-fi ancestor of "Blade Runner," but the restored print seems very much a critique of its own time, Christianity (I'd forgotten) alive as a human hope if no longer a faith. But it's impossible not also to think about the decades to follow in Germany; socialist revolution indeed averted, but.

Une merveille

A wondrous film, Jessica Hausner's "Lourdes." I won't say more, just: see it if you can.