I have never set out to imbue my films with literary or philosophical references. Film should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars, but illiterates.
from Herzog on Herzog, but I found it here.
I’ve told this story before: My mother thought that the hardships of World War II brought out the best in the British. She also said, when our father’s company was in trouble, that she’d be quite happy to live on next to nothing if it came to that. She said this often enough to make me wonder if she didn’t hope on some level to be relieved of her comfortable middle-class life.
It makes more sense after reading a review (by Donna Foote in the Washington Post) of Rebecca Solnit’s new book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. I’d thought that disaster jolts us into thinking about what’s important. But Solnit finds a deeper reason for why (in Foote’s words) “the best of human nature emerges and a remarkable spirit of generosity and co-operation takes over” in times of disaster. Why, for example, some people (Foote again) “recall the Great Depression as a time of spiritual and social richness.”
Solnit posits that our ordinary lives, in which we compete against each other and strive to perfect ourselves, lead to boredom, alienation and unhappiness. In her words, our lives are “already a disaster of sorts, from which actual disaster liberates us.” Humans are tribal and communal, and it takes something as devastating as a disaster to free us from “the shackles of conventional belief” and (Foote) “return us temporarily to that state of grace.”
This in turn explains the psychological paradox, noted by Richard Layard in a recent Guardian column, that “people who care about the happiness of others will themselves become happier.”
I hope I can learn all this—and live accordingly--without having to suffer through an actual disaster to bring it home.
--Julian
Not long ago, grousing about the lack of subtlety that characterizes most movies, I wondered if there were any films, other than those by old favorites, that don't beat one over the head to get their messages (snore) across. Then I happened upon a short piece in the New Yorker about a film by Chantal Akerman, Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles. I was intrigued, and even more so when I read Vincent Canby, who, in 1983, wrote:
LIKE its blunt title, Chantal Akerman's ''Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,'' deals in unadorned facts. It's about the looks and sounds of ordinary things and people, which it records with such precise, unsettling clarity that it has the effect of finding threats in mundane objects and doom in commonplace characters.
(Read Canby's whole review here.)
That sounded like just the thing to reinvigorate my interest in film, and that night, to my surprise and delight, when I sat down with a couple of friends for beer and conversation, one of them produced a DVD containing this very film, saying "You want to borrow this?"
I watched it last night, and wasn't disappointed. It is, beyond a doubt, the slowest movie I've ever seen. Akerman, at least this outing, makes Ozu's and Rohmer's work look, by comparison, packed with action and pregnant with plot, but somehow, watching the remarkable Delphine Seyrig, as Jeanne, peel potatoes, shine her son's shoes, wash dishes, and other mundanities, all in real time or very close to it, is absolutely mesmerizing . . . for all three hours and twenty-one minutes of the film's running time. Jeanne, who is on screen, usually alone, for the entire film, also turns tricks to keep her son in bourgeois comfort, but her commercial trysts elicit no more emotion from her than do peeling, shining, and washing; they are just one more thing that fills up her empty days and which Akerman, unburdened by action or plot, makes magically fascinating and dreadful.
This film came out in 1975, nearly forty years ago. Is anything as demanding and fresh being made now?
I await your answers.
The stats are in: 33% of men in Japan pee sitting down at home. That’s up a whopping 10% since 2004. Clearly there’s a bathroom revolution going on.
As a male in Japan who has switched from peeing standing to peeing sitting since 2004, I’m well positioned to comment on this revolution-in-progress. Since my conversion, the bathroom, which I clean weekly, no longer has that clinging urine odor. Indeed, ease of cleaning was a top reason given for sitting by men in the survey. It’s distance and gravity: no matter how carefully a man of average height or more pees onto a porcelain surface or into a pool of water, he can’t help but cause a few minute drops to splash back over the sides of the bowl onto the floor, walls, or mat.
The other reason men gave for sitting was comfort. There is that, I suppose, but for me it’s far outweighed by the hassle of taking pants down/pulling pants up every time you want to pee. Which hassle is in turn outweighed by a fresh-smelling bathroom.
The burgeoning practice drew the comments “outright creepy” and “Japanese men?? Yeah, right” on one English-language news site. The unstated reason for these judgments is, of course, that sitting down is the way women pee. I’ll hazard a reason why this ongoing revolution is possible in Japan but not, say, in the UK or US: because here there’s comparatively less of the macho culture that leads men to feel threatened by implications of effeminacy.
But of all the toxic effects of men proving that they’re men, a foul-smelling bathroom is probably the least noxious.
--Julian
After an iffy summer (lack of sunshine; poor tomato crop), Japan’s Kanto is enjoying a classic fall. The equinox was last Wednesday, and the scarlet higanbana (equinox flower) spider lilies are in bloom in graveyards and along rivers and the banks of the paddies right on schedule. These are days of sunshine and blue skies, more warm than hot, and stripped of summer humidity. The local farmers are using this spell of unusually dry weather to harvest the rice and hang the sheaves to dry. The sight of autumn.
Slim, silver sanma (Pacific saury) are delicious this year, grilled and served with grated daikon radish and soy sauce. Picking the flesh off the bones with chopsticks while sipping warm sake is a mighty pleasure. The taste of autumn.
After dark, the bright trilling of suzumushi (bell crickets) fills the orchard and garden. Play part of the short video, then imagine the ringing multiplied a thousandfold. The sound of autumn.
--Julian
- Acupuncture (for reasons other than the placebo effect) works.
- Chiropractic (for reasons other than the placebo effect) works.
- Vitamin C (for reasons other than the placebo effect) is effective against the common cold.
- God is omnipotent and omniscient.
- The United States was founded as a Christian nation.
- Sugar makes you hyper.
These assertions come from a post over at Spiteful Critic called "6 Things You Believe that are Complete BS." I guess I should be proud that I only believed one of them.
Or perhaps I should be ashamed that I believed even that one.
—David
Julian, commenting on my previous post, in which I quoted the film-maker Werner Herzog describing film as "the art of illiterates," wrote:
Movies the art of illiterates? Well, I suppose the same could be said about music. A more interesting dichotomy is how a story is told in novel and in film. As a friend pointed out to me recently, unlike a novel, good filmmaking can’t tell you what a character is thinking or feeling. In that way, it’s like poetry—calling on the reader/viewer to interpret and imagine. You love poetry, which makes your lack of enthusiasm for movies strange. But perhaps no weirder than my lack of enthusiasm for poetry and love of cinema.
Good points, all.
I suppose what it really comes down to is there are just not enough hours in the day, and that I want to devote the time I have to what I, without reservation, love: books and music. (I'm told that for some people days contain twenty-four hours. Mine seem to have six or eight at best.)
Music, certainly in the case of instrumental music (with the exception of a couple of odd limit cases), tells no story at all, and has no message. That few of us would agree on the story or message of, say, Thelonious Monk's Brilliant Corners even if we thought we had discerned such things, makes it clear that any message, any story, we find in a piece of music is only what we walked in with. Thus, comparing music with film or the novel, it's not that different art-forms tell stories differently. It's that some art-forms—music, some kinds of painting, some kinds of poetry—tell no story, have no message at all. I would call these forms not illiterate, but superliterate.
As I believe that stories are peripheral to art even in forms like the novel that do employ them, and that "the message" is not just peripheral, but often militates against art succeeding, I view dispensing with story and message as a good thing.
(Aside: Where do young people get the idea that the most important thing to do when experiencing a work of art is to attempt to locate a message that the artist has artfully (and apparently for no reason) concealed? And why, when they think they've located it, do they always tell you about it in sentences that take the form: "What Borges / Joyce / Ozu is trying to say is . . . ?")
Film, Julian says, because it can't tell us directly what characters think or feel, forces readers to interpret and imagine. That's certainly true of the best films (also of the best novels), and the best in any art-form are the ones by which the form should be judged. The problem is, however, that placing the best to one side, all too many films, far from leaving it to the reader to put the pieces together, are quite dictatorial with regard to what readers are allowed to imagine. (This one, for example.) I think, in fact, that a character's face screwed up in agony is if anything less subtle than symbols which, deciphered from a page, spell out agony. And don't get me started on film music, or the easy nostalgia that, ever since The Big Chill
Again, though, film, and every other genre, should be judged by its best exemplars, not its worst or even its so-so, but I fear that hammering-the-viewer-over-the-head lack of subtlety is now the norm in film-making. Other than Kore'eda—and he had to struggle to get his last masterpiece released outside of Japan—who now is making movies that don't hammer viewers over the head?
I don't keep up with film much, so that's a sincere, non-rhetorical, question. There probably are film-makers out there doing just that. Please let me know who they are. (Rohmer is, I believe, still working, but wasn't his last film a departure from his usual subtle approach?)
—David
My morning was made by Tim Kreider. In “The Referendum,” his latest contribution to the New York Times Happy Days blog, the single, 40-something author notes how we compare our lives with others in an attempt to justify the choices we took and didn’t take. Two of the great divides are between the single and married, and those with and without children:
Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] ….
Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.]"
His past Happy Days posts deliver just as much fun spliced with grist for reflection. As does his classic alcohol memoir “Time and the Bottle” over on the (now on hiatus) NYT Proof blog.
And because you can never have enough insight into and laughter at our venial humanity, this morning I felt with great happiness--and without in any way wanting to compare the one with the other-- that in Tim Kreider we have another Guy Browning.
--Julian
Herzog is, of course, correct. Perhaps that's why my feelings about the form don't run to unbridled enthusiasm.
—David
At 4PM, uniformed Isuzu employees are outside their factory in Shonandai picking up trash. It reminds me of David’s People’s Republic post two years ago.
It’s a real joy to ride on the riverside cycle path that connects Fujisawa with points north. It’s well paved, and, apart from cyclists, well used by joggers, walkers, dog walkers. I hook up with it in Shonandai and turn south down one side of the broad valley of hot houses and paddies. As the harvest approaches, the ripening rice is protected by nets or scarecrow sentries.
I push down on the pedals and feel the exhilaration of my own speed. Across the river, the raucous shouts of kids at after-school baseball practice. I wish there were cycle paths like this everywhere.
--Julian
"'Actually, Katherine, it's not gibberish.' His eyes brightened again with the thrill of discovery. 'It's ... Latin.'"
—Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
—David
