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Sunday, May 24th, 2009
Saramago  has made his entry into animation! Juan Pablo Etcheverry animated "A flor máis grande do mundo" based on Saramago's book A maior flor do mundo, which doesn't seem to be in translation -- I had never heard of it before I saw Saramago's post about the cartoon just now. It is his only children's book, written in the 70's -- oops; not reading closely. The idea is from the 70's but the book was not written until 2000.
posted evening of May 24th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
 Looking at the Film Forum's web site yesterday to see what was playing this summer, I was really excited to see that Agnès Varda's Les Plages d'Agnès will be opening in July. I heard this movie was in post-production last year and have been anticipating it eagerly ever since. It's an autobiographical piece, a look back at Varda's career; should be a lot of fun. If you're going to be in town in early July, give me a holler -- we should make plans to see it.
Varda also has a funny brief interview with Michael Musto in the Voice.
posted evening of May 20th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, April 27th, 2009
(Searching for an image to illustrate this post with; but all the stills from Viridiana that are out there on the web seem to be of the title character, or of the Last Supper scene... Aha! found a picture of Don Jaime.) I met up with Christine this evening to watch Viridiana at the Film Forum; it was really nice to see it again after a couple of years, and yet I find much of what I was thinking about it was in regards to its shortcomings as a story -- this is probably symptomatic of a rebound from being madly in love with it and unable to admit any problems with it... Anyway, I don't really want to write about the shortcomings just now besides to say that the visually brilliant second half of the movie did not seem to me very interesting on a human level, and that the ending was wretched; what I wanted to talk about was how strongly I identified with Don Jaime, and how disconcerting that was. For me the moment that really makes this movie worth it is the moment when Don Jaime suddenly realizes that he has gone too far, overstepped the limits of Viridiana's patience and that she is never going to think of him as a human being any more -- his pathetic pleading with her is all-too real.
posted evening of April 27th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
Viridiana will be playing at the Film Forum tomorrow through next Thursday -- fantastic news! I'm definitely coming in to watch it one of those days, if you would like to meet up for a movie, drop me a line and let me know what days are good.
posted morning of April 23rd, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, April 19th, 2009
At The Song in My Head Today, Holly is thinking about Alan Price's "O Lucky Man!", on the occasion of Price's 67th birthday. A fine song to have in one's head:
posted afternoon of April 19th, 2009: Respond
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I watched Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty last night (and thanks, Dave, for the recommendation!) and found it... mesmerizing? hilarious? yes, and Pythonesque. This is funny because while I've always thought of Monty Python's humor as "surrealistic," I think this is the closest approximation of their style that I've seen in the work of an actual Surrealist. I wonder what vectors of influence are working -- obviously the Pythons were familiar with Buñuel's work, and I expect Buñuel watched their shows, though I don't know what the timeline would look like; The Phantom of Liberty came out in 1974, a year before The Life of Brian and after Flying Circus had been running for a couple of years.* The individual sketches are hilarious, and the transitions between them are kind of brilliantly jarring -- I am going to watch the movie again tonight because I felt like there was a thread linking the sketches that I was not picking up on because the thread was spinning so fast. Take a look at this sketch on Defecation, which is embedded inside a lecture on moral relativism that the professor (the guy with glasses) is giving at the police academy (hence the cut to the mostly empty lecture hall midway through):
I was thinking as I watched this about the Samuel Beckett quote I read recently, to the effect that he writes in French because he feels too fluent in English -- and really liking listening to the French dialogue in the movie, struggling with the help of the subtitles to understand it. It seems to me like listening to or reading a language you don't quite understand, and the process of understanding what is being said, really opens up some interesting new passageways in my brain.
 * I don't know how many seasons they made Flying Circus for -- it premiered in 1969, may well have been finished by 1974.
posted morning of April 19th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, April 4th, 2009
Warning: do not look in this post for a train of thought. Sorry! I've been trying to come up with one for a couple of days but it's not happening yet. So this is just a placeholder, a couple of things I've noticed recently that want tying together. Rosa (with whom I've been corresponding in English and in Spanish, thanks to Conversation Exchange for getting us together) sent me the lyrics to Ana Belén's "España, Camisa Blanca", a beautiful song that has really captured my imagination in the last few days.
I do not understand the metaphor yet -- Rosa explains that the song is about the end of Franco's regime in the late 70's, and that a white shirt is a symbol of hope. Looking around I see (from an article on El problema de España which I have not yet read) that the song's title comes from a poem by Blas de Otero Muñoz -- however I have not been able to find any of his poetry online, don't know the context. In the same article I notice a painting of Goya's, "The 3rd of May, 1808":
-- notice the white shirt which is the most striking detail of this painting. (The soldiers who are about to shoot the man in the white shirt are Napoleon's troops, suppressing civil unrest in Madrid during the occupation.) And now Dave is telling me that this painting features in Buñuel's movie Le fantôme de liberté -- onto my Netflix queue it goes... Hoping I will be able to suss out a thread connecting these items...
posted evening of April 4th, 2009: 1 response
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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
 This weekend Ellen and I watched "Wild Combination: a Portrait of Arthur Russell" and were very taken with it; thanks for the recommendation, Bryan! There was a huge variety of music from Russell's brief career, and it was all brand-new to me. Here is one of my favorite pieces from the film, "Go Bang" by Dinosaur L, produced by Russell:
posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Robyn Hitchcock speaks with Paul Byrne of Movies.ie about making Rachel Getting Married (which sounds like a whole lot of fun) and about Sex, Food, Death, and Insects.
Byrne: During [Sex, Food, Death, and Insects] you said at one point, "At heart I'm a frightened, angry person -- that's why my stuff isn't totally insubstantial, I'm constantly deep down inside in a kind of rage..." And it made me think, well, here you've got people like Gillian Welch and... Jonathan Demme's a fan... you've been playing music for a long time, The Soft Boys and everything, and I was thinking does that make it easier? Because for a lot of artists, to have some kind of recognition, some outlet, you know, eases the soul a bit, I don't know whether, is it still true that you have that rage in you? I guess you only said it last year so maybe it is still true... Hitchcock:
I haven't had enough therapy to get rid of it completely, you know, just enough to find it... Yeah, everybody is at some level of discomfort. Even the people you mention. And some people are in more pain than others, some people know what to do with their discomfort. You know, I mean I could be playing with my hair, I could be, you know, picking on an E♭ or something like that, I could be smoking except it's illegal to smoke now; there's all these manifestations of what to do with your own dis-ease... For me, I turn it into music, and a lot of other people I know; that's how we metabolize. We breathe in life and we breathe out music; it keeps us sane and it seems to be somehow good for the environment, you know, like plants take in CO2 and produce oxygen, we take in the anxiety of life and give out music. And I'm very happy to be able to do that.
posted evening of March 19th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, March 6th, 2009
Au Hasard Balthazar is seeming to me like just exactly the ideal that a movie ought to approach -- i.e. that an item should be called a "movie" or denied membership in this class, according to whether it is similar to this Movie or unlike it. Is seeming like what Bergman would be like if I liked his movies better. There is an excellent trailer you can watch by clicking on the still.
Is making me wonder, also, what kind of literature there is on the subject of composing subtitles for a film. Some information and reflections in this LanguageHat thread from last summer.
posted evening of March 6th, 2009: Respond
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