"A Walk"

No one cares how much effort was involved. But I'm here to report that creating moving images hasn't gotten any easier or less time consuming now that we're firmly into the digital age. It might happen on a more accelerated schedule, but the total hours haven't really changed much from the dark ages of film.

Time to kick this shit out the door. This one followed the opposite of the schedule utilized for the previous production.

Russian Ark

That would be the Hermitage, one of the largest and oldest museums in the world, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, the collection consists of nearly three million items. This astounding and revolutionary film is the first to employ no edits, as the camera - piloted by Steadicam operator extraordinaire Tilman Büttner - travels two kilometers through the complex of the museum and the Winter Palace, traversing 300 years of Russian history, observing a cast of hundreds along with thousands of extras. The point is, that this incredible institution is an ark of culture floating on a sea of turmoil and constant change.

Astounding because Mr Büttner carried 77 pounds of Steadicam and camera for about 90 minutes and traversed some 30 rooms that needed to be lit. Revolutionary because it is an entire film in a single take, but the narrative takes place over such a broad period of time. Despite these aspects, and the impressive size of the production in general, non Russians are not likely to be engaged on anything other than a visual level. Snippets of dialogue with historical characters are heard throughout, but engagement does not occur. The camera is too anxious to continue on its tour of this remarkable location.

Alexander Sokurov - dir.

Tilman Büttner - dp/Steadicam; is Steadicam op for Béla Tarr's last film The Turin Horse

primarily a Russian/German co-production

the return - Vozvrashchenie

A Russian film from 2003 that Mike Johnston recommended some time ago, The Return has been on the queue since that initial recommendation. But there it sat amongst hundreds of other titles that have been saved on a whim for whatever reason, but the whim or recommendation forgotten. Thankfully Mike mentioned it again recently as something worthy of watching.

While there is a minor photographic element in the story of two brothers and their returned father who takes them on a motoring trip to go fishing, it's really only a passing glance. It is the photography exhibited throughout the film that is most impressive. The compositions evoke Antonioni and the material Tarkovsky. Vast tracts of water, two imposing towers, the mysterious return of a long missing father, his unknown mission, his severe but loving nature. It's all rather Biblical, but impossible to ignore.

The film won a Golden Lion in Venice in 2003 - the same award that Last Year at Marienbad won in 1961.

Interesting trivia: the film was shot - in Russia - on Kodak rawstock in the early 2000's.

Andrei Zvyagintsev - director

Vladimir Garin - Andrey

Vanya Dobronravov - Ivan

Konstantin Lavronenko - father

Update on Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 11:00PM by KMW

And then there is the tragedy surrounding one of the actors.

"The Forgotten Space"

"The Forgotten Space"

Random confluences have come together to suggest the intriguing prospects of a film that was made in 2010 by photographer Allan Sekula and writer/theorist Noël Burch (whose book Theory of Film Practice is a wonderful work of abstraction) called The Forgotten Space. In fact I first read about it here, only a week ago when it opened in New York. There are interviews with the directors at the web site, but the one with Sekula is particularly informative about some of his recent work in Los Angeles - completely outside the dominant film making tradition centered there.

The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete.

A range of materials is used: descriptive documentary, interviews, archive stills and footage, clips from old movies. The result is an essayistic, visual documentary about one of the most important processes that affects us today. The Forgotten Space is based on Sekula’s Fish Story, seeking to understand and describe the contemporary maritime world in relation to the complex symbolic legacy of the sea.

Unfortunately, it appears unlikely those of us outside cities will get an opportunity to view the film. Netflik knows nothing about it. But you can watch the trailer on Vimeo. This is the kind of non linear work that I pine to see. Not necessarily simple to watch, but memorable nonetheless.

l'enfant

The fictional film work of the Dardenne brothers is a direct trajectory of their years of documentaries. Inheritors of the neo-realist stylings, they have become critically acclaimed at Cannes and other international festivals. Their new film, The Kid With A Bike, recently played the current New York Film Festival. Utilizing the sparest of production designs, no music, and mostly hand-held camera work that accompanies the protagonists wherever they go, their stories of morally compromised youth acutely observed in their quiet desperation are compelling and authentic.

L'enfant especially presents us with children playing, killing time, refusing to join a society that doesn't want to make room for them, but reluctantly assuming adult responsibilities of raising their own children. They sleep in abandoned garages or riverfront warehouses, and traverse a landscape of no mans land terrain between the places the privileged classes inhabit. Dardenne characters struggle to find their way in less than ideal circumstances, pushed by economic realities over which they have no real influence.

pierrot le fou

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1965.

w/ Jean-Pierre Belmondo & Anna Karina

A fractured mixture swatted back and forth - much like the tennis ball in the opening shots of the film - between art and pop, comprehension and abstraction, and subtlety and cliche, Pierrot is Godard's tenth feature. Apparently it was largely improvised during the two months of shooting, with the dramatically confusing later sections on the Mediterranean filmed first. With this in mind, it becomes understandable how the early sections of the film become a necessary clarification for where the characters and the film must head in order to end up with what they had already filmed.

The film begins with the narrator, presumably Ferdinand as played by Belmondo, reading from a book about Diego Velazquez to his daughter while sitting in a bathtub smoking.

Past the age of 50, Velasquez stopped painting definite things. He hovered around objects with the air, with twilight, catching in his shadows and airy backgrounds, the palpitations of color which formed the invisible core of his silent symphony. Henceforth he captured only those mysterious interpenetrations of shape and tone that form a constant, secret progression, neither betrayed nor interrupted by any jolt or jar. Space reigns supreme. It is as if an aerial wave, sliding over the surfaces, soaked up their visible emanations, defined and modeled them, then spread them about like a perfume, an echo of themselves, a scattering of impalpable dust.

The world he lived in was one of sadness, a degenerate king, sickly infants, idiots, dwarfs, cripples, a handful of clownish freaks dressed up as princes, whose function it was to laugh at themselves and to amuse a cast that lived outside the law, in the meshes of etiquette, plots and lies, bound by the confessional and remorse, with the Inquisition and silence at the door.

A spirit of nostalgia pervades his work, yet he avoids what is ugly, sad, or cruelly morbid about those oppressed children. Velasquez is the painter of evening, of open spaces and of silence, even when he painted in broad daylight or in a closed room, even with the din of battle or of the hunt in his ears. As they seldom went out during the day, when everything was drowned in torrid sunshine, the Spanish painters communed with the evening.

While Ferdinand appears to be reading from a published book, the text more probably belongs to Godard, with his claims that the 17th century painter abandoned his typical court scene paintings in later life and “...captured only those mysterious interpenetrations of shape and tone that form a constant, secret progression...” What is most probable is that Godard had edited his film, found it wanting, and decided that his final attempt to solidify the pieces would be to add this description to and about a film that he wished to make but had eluded him.

It's difficult to watch this post modernist “classic” with the eyes and sensibilities of a “modernist,” trained as we are to expect the elements of the MAVM to distract our attention from the artifice of the presentation in front of us. Godard as well as anyone within commercial cinema knew the conventions that were expected of someone in his position, wielding as much money as he certainly did for this feature. Which creates a tension that propels us forward, into what the characters say is either an adventure or a romance. What else does Hollywood know in its continual insistence that “the story” is the only use to which film should be put? Godard progresses onward using a variety of the conventions of commercial cinema, but regularly drops the mask of artifice in order to remind us that we are watching a movie. At the end, after a literally explosive conclusion that is a mixture of comedy and cliché as well, a pair of whispered voices are heard over a pan to the right over the vastness of the ocean.

She: It's ours again.

He: What?

She: Eternity.

He: No that's just the sea. And the sun.

It's neither an adventure nor a romance, there's nothing omniscient or religious in the experience. But in it's way it is. It's only a movie. But it's a Jean-Luc Godard movie.

KOYAANISQATSI

Conceived and directed by Godfrey Reggio, I remember seeing this remarkable film at the New York Film Festival in 1983. Two more films, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi, complete the trilogy. These are words from the Hopi language, with Koyaanisqatsi being translated by Reggio as meaning "life out of balance." In his commentary - as a separate piece on the dvd - the director explains that his unique combination of image and music is a way to examine the modern world, the world of technology. He feels we are no longer living in a natural state, but are now living "above" the earth, isolated from our historical connection by the layer of technology that encompasses the globe.

The film's role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the
experience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then propaganda and advertising is the form. So in the sense of art, the meaning of KOYAANISQATSI is whatever you wish to make of it.

On the surface level of mechanics, the film consists largely of time lapse images created by the cinematographer Ron Fricke. By now we have seen these images repeatedly - the accelerated traffic flows in New York and Los Angeles; production lines in a Twinkie factory, a hot dog factory, an automobile factory - but there are others of the earth and individuals in the mass of humanity that are perhaps more striking for their inclusion in a vision of machine technology.

This powerful combination of images and music, the latter by Philip Glass, is like few others: there is no linear story, there is no narration, there is no actual subject. It is an experience waiting for a viewer.

a modest discovery

There's no way around it: the first has definitely influenced the second, seeing as it came about 10 years earlier. Not surprising that the Coens know about contemporary Art photography.

JEFF WALL "An Eviction" 1988 click 'er for bigger

JOEL & ETHAN COEN "The Big Lebowski" 1998 click 'er for bigger

Found while absently running a test DVD to check that software had been reinstalled on an older laptop. It's a good example of what $$$millions can do for a photograph. I'm sure even Wall can't compete with the Coens' budgets.

all over the place

It may not be obvious while it's happening, but after the fact we can always make some justification for our behavior. In this case it's merely what cinematic experiences have been consummed of late. That is, maybe there's more of a connection than random happenstance, or the quioxotic passion of the moment.

Upon Joe Reifer's advice, over the course of a couple of sittings I've watched Errol Morris' Pet Cemetary, his first film for which he and DP Ned Burgess generated some rather striking compositions.

Also not to be missed as a stream from Netflix is Richard Linklater's first film, Slacker, a 24 hour tour through the back streets of Austin, Texas, surely a film that is a dérive if ever there was one. Only Luis Bunuel's Le Fantome de la Liberte has a similar non structured flow. Linklater's collection of misfits and polemecists don't necessarily engage anything but the mind, but they do entertain.

"we've been on the moon since the 50's"

"you should stop traumatizing women"

"I can't watch it on slo mo"

On disc came an "imaginative biography" of Diane Arbus, Fur, from the period when she left her successful photographer husband and began to photograph her own subjects. The film isn't much about her photography, as few American films ever have anything whatsoever to do with the thing that occupies most of our waking hours: work. Not exactly a Hollywood film, since it was filmed in studios in Jersey City, N.J., but since it's got Nicole Kidman playing Arbus, and Robert Downey Jr. as her new friend upstairs, it's not far from that dominant aesthetic. The compositions - by DP Bill Pope (he did all the Matrix films), and production designer Amy Danger - are gorgeous, as one would expect from a big budget production. It's full of ideas obvious and not so obvious, and probably deserves better attention than it received.

(Sorry, no screen shots.)

Also streamed from Netflix was Le fils, by the Belgian brothers Luc and Jeanne-Pierre Dardenne. Interestingly enough, their production company is called Dérive (see above) Films. The brothers Dardenne are much awarded flim makers who work in the area of Belgium where they grew up, having gone on to their minimalist ficitional films that feel much like a documentary. The characters barely speak, but the camera follows them constantly in its long take examinations of their lives of labor and work. The technique is as much a contributor to the perception of the film as the writing and acting, with elements of the Dogme 95 movement exerting their influence. Image quality in the Netflix stream is not particularly high, the original apparently being Super 16mm. It is the fluidity and intensity of the framing that reveals the authenticity of the material.

What's the connection amongst these varied viewings? Mostly, I think it's my infinite curiosity about the methodology that film makers use to present the lives of others in a fictional or documentarian manner.

Zizek

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Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek is the subject of the hagiographic documentary Zizek! This is not the place to learn or understand what this provocative gadfly really believes, other than snippets of his contrarian personality. The film plays mostly like a comedy as it follows the hyperactive Zizek from a lecture in Buenos Aires to his hometown of Ljubljana to New York for more lecturing and adulation. He claims to be a "card carrying Lacanian," which someone more knowledgeable than I could explain. But as near as I can tell that translates as someone who has combined the teachings of Freud and Lacan with a Marxist perspective to derive a psychoanalytic critique of capitalism and modern life.

While this documentary may not be the place to understand Zizek, a quick perusal of the Wikipedia article will yield much jargon and opaque language:

It can be argued however that Žižek's most original aspect comes from its insistence that a Lacanian model of the barred or split subject, because of its stipulation that individuals' deepest motives are unconscious, can be used to demonstrate that ideology has less become irrelevant today than revealed its deeper truth...

To him, the Real names points within the ontological fabric knitted by the hegemonic systems of representation and reproduction that nevertheless resist full inscription into its terms, and which may as such attempt to generate sites of active political resistance...

The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the "mirror stage". Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, "identification" is an important aspect of the imaginary. The relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification is a locus of "alienation", which is another feature of the imaginary, and is fundamentally narcissistic. The imaginary, a realm of surface appearances which are deceptive, is structured by the symbolic order. It also involves a linguistic dimension: whereas the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the "signified" and "signification" belong to the imaginary. Thus language has both symbolic and imaginary aspects. Based on the specular image, the imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship to the body (the image of the body).

Probably the better place to get a sense of what Zizek is about is to read him here, where he contributes regularly, and somewhat more clearly. It is his critique of capitalism and the consumer society that makes him someone important to read.

Why am I writing about a philosopher in a photography blog? To show off some intellectual acumen? To process some of the ideas? To give myself a theoretical underpinning? The opacity and specialized language are a serious hindrance, which lead me to feel even stronger that my unexamined modus operandi are all I am capable of. Let me take my pictures. Don't ask me to examine my motives.

But from time to time, I will...

Michaelangelo & Me

Antonioni, that is. L'Avventura begins with this image of Anna departing through an archway.

It ends with this image of Claudia and Sandro in a moment of reconciliation in front of Mt. Etna.

Anyone who enjoys black & white images should watch this film, one of the greatest ever made.

Apparently Antonioni at some point called this 1960 film a mystery in reverse: it more or less starts with a solution, and broadens into a mystery. But if one pays attention, it's pretty obvious that the question of Anna's disappearance is of little interest after several days. Early on she has gotten herself out of a relationship that gave her no satisfaction, her disappearance the solution to her dilemma. The continuing mystery is about her friend Claudia, who becomes involved with her fiance Sandro, a man who has conveniently lowered his sights to become a consultant. He wishes he could go back to doing architectural design work, but he's too comfortable being an estimator to bother.

Monica Vitti's portrayal of Claudia's quest reveals a character of incredible strength, intelligence, compassion, and subtlety.

Every image in the film is constructed with the care of a master photographer. That the camera moves around the locations is an added bonus that still photographs aren't afforded.

The currently available DVD from Janus Films is a pretty decent transfer. There was one scratch in the print that I noticed, but generally it's quite clean.

"bubble"

 

Another experiment from Steven Soderbergh, a man who will seemingly try anything. My initial reaction to this low budget feature shot on HD video for a reported $1.6 million was that it is Soderburg's entry in the Dogme 95 category: a non professional cast, no lighting other than what is available on location, no music other than some driving acoustic guitar, direction, camera, and editing by the same individual: Soderbergh.

The film doesn't strictly adhere to the Dogme 95 rules, but it's obviously an attempt to create a work of immediacy that doesn't rely on the artifice of the huge Hollywood machine that Soderbergh wields remarkably well.

Set in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the story revolves around a woman Martha whose life is spent caring for her ailing father and working at the local doll factory. Her "best friend" is a young man who also works at the factory. There are multiple scenes of them working and eating lunch in the break room. Bubble is one of the few American fictional films ever to truly give an accurate depiction of what factory work is like, the crushing repetition, the poverty of emotion and expectation, to be relieved only by the consumption of globs of greasy fast food washed down with 32 oz. soft drinks.

Small in all ways, Bubble has only a modicum of surface emotion revealed by the non professional actors playing themselves. But the scarcity of expectation creates a blank slate on which to project the undercurrents of jealousy, betrayal, and ultimately murder.

far from the last word

Dating from 1963, directed by Chris Marker, it is one of the more influential pieces of cinema in the latter half of the 20th century. Why it's taken so long to see it again, I'm not quite sure. It's been on the queue for months, and finally made it to the top. Possibly one of those pieces of work that you know is supposed to be fabulous, but is so out of currency that it becomes something like a chore to watch it again?

The credits actually list Marker as the creator of this photo-roman, rather than as le directeur. According to the included interview with Marker's friend Jean-Pierre Gorin, they were a form of popular entertainment in post-war Italy and France. It's not clear whether La Jetee was the first of its kind, to be put on film rather than paper, but certainly through the usage of montage and sound, it achieves a remarkable sense of movement and story telling. A film about time travel from a post apocalyptic Paris, this collection of still images put on film has a remarkably gentle tone to it. The connection between the male prisoner/time traveler and the woman he meets regularly in the past is not a typical film romance, but a meeting of individuals giving freely.  Marker is primarily interested in memory and time, both particularly well suited to investigation through images and their manipulation. Adding density to the story, he makes reference to Hitchcock's Vertigo, another film concerned primarily with images about memory, time, and image.

Although it's been since 1975 that I last saw this 25 minute classic, and nothing in particular was remembered about it other than it's structure and look, the power of the single moving image - set amidst all the other stills - in which the woman blinks her eyes has never been forgotten. This lone shot - using the artificiality of motion pictures which is after all nothing but a succession of still photographs which our minds put together as movement due to the persistence of vision - shatters the simplicity of the remainder of the film, moving it to a level of abstraction and obvious greatness.

Update on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 07:31PM by KMW

After another viewing of La Jetee before sending the disc back to Netflix Roanoke, I was struck by the music. Knowing now that Vertigo had a large influence on Marker, it's obvious to hear the similarities as well as see some of the visual references. According to this article on the composer Trevor Duncan, the score for La Jetee is "library" music. Who then made the selections, and were they in order to sound eerily similar to Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo? Only Marker knows for sure...

more late night viewing

UZAK - Distant

A 2002 Turkish production, Uzak is set in a thoroughly modernized Istanbul of wintry emotions and lowered expectations. The downsized factory worker Yusuf begins the film with his trek across a snowy landscape from a small river town and ends it by staring at his future from the balcony of his cousin Mahmut's apartment in Istanbul, a city of equally frozen prospects. The idealism of youth is soon overcome by the realities of even the most simplistic existence. During a small gathering of photographer friends, Mahmut is accused by another photographer of abandoning the ideals of his youth, when Mahmut claimed he would make films like those of Tarkovsky. Mahmut says that "...photography  is finished... photography is dead."

Shortly after this gathering, Mahmut and Yusuf are in Mahmut's apartment watching a video of Tarkovsky's Stalker, during one of the long takes of the early train ride into The Zone.

 The unsophisticated Yusuf bails on the film and goes to bed. Mahmut continues to watch, but as soon as his cousin has closed his door, removes the Tarkovsky tape and begins to watch some unknown porn.

The primary question posed to the viewer is: why has this self made small town success abandoned his art and become a commercial hack who photographs static ceramic tile for a tile manufacturer? Is photography really dead? Or is it dead only for the director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a  photographer himself?  Or only to  Mahmut, who has lost the idealism of his youth? Most likely the latter, for Mahmut's challenger Arif  asks which he Mahmut prefers, "Photogtraphy or women?" There seems to be no real answer from Mahmut directly - his use of porn and prostitutes is clear enough an answer -  but Arif answers for him, "I prefer photography."

Meanwhile, his unemployed cousin Yusuf wanders around a snow filled Istanbul in search of a dream job that doesn't exist, refusing to tell the truth about his prospects to either his host or himself. Eventually he disappears without any announcement or traces, other than some cheap cigarettes Mahmut finds between the wall and the couch.

Earlier Mahmut had railed against Yusuf for smoking such "shit" that was commonly consumed by the sailors Yusuf wanted to join. Yusuf's idealism crushed also, we're left with the image of his cousin, the sophisticate and equally as dissolute photographer, watching the harbor with boats busily steaming past as he smokes the last of Yusuf's ordinary cigarettes.

The distant of the title rather explicitly refers to the separation the characters feel from each other, from their environment, from themselves. Not a particularly cheery or unique view, but one well rendered nonetheless.

more Tarkovsky

I'm not sure what the fascination with Tarkovsky is about. He's obtuse and totally non-commercial. You might even have to think about something to understand what is going on in his films. Continuing my fascination, the past week has been spent watching on several different occasions The Sacrifice. This was Tarkovsky's final film prior to his death from cancer in 1986. It was a co-production of the Swedish Film Institute and Film Four, photographed by Sven Nykvist, and stars Erland Josephson.

This is the third viewing for me. It's finally beginning to come into focus. The opening sequence, after the titles, is a single nine minute tracking shot with a mention of Nietzsche, the "rotation" of the cycle of life, hope, despair, death, another life's performance, no chance for an Absolute Truth. During this shot, and then slightly later, there is the not so distant sound of an explosion, or is it thunder. For the characters on screen, the sound  barely registers. It is only later that they find out that war has broken out, and that their country probably faces annihilation.

Alexander, a journalist, actor, critic, and lapsed man of religious faith, collapses and prays to his God for the first time in years to save his family, and humanity. He wants to make a bargain that he will give up everything he has if God will stop the war and put everything back the way it was the day previous.

By the end, when time has been turned back on itself, and the day of his birthday begins once again, Alexander goes mad at the possibility that he must uphold his end of the bargain. But we are left wondering if Maria the "witch", a pre Christian animus of power has been the cause of the reversal of destruction, or the God of organized religion has spared us one more time.

Rather than these two incompatibles, the final image returns us to the opening location, the track beside the sea, with the spindley tree once again center frame. Only this time, Little Man has decided to take his father at his word and initiate a "system" that will change the world. He drags two buckets of water towards the tree, determined to start a daily watering ritual, much as the monk in Alexander's first story of the film did.

The Kino International DVD copy of the film is rather standard quality, hardly a signal to demonstrate the superior capabilities of the HD format. But as per usual, the sound can be dramatic, such as when jets fly closely over the house and it becomes obvious that the world is at war once again. At least the film is available to watch the mastery of Tarkovsky as captured by Nykvist - in the comfort of our own screening rooms.

Any other Tarkovsky fans out there with something to add?

the museum is dead - long live the museum

 

 
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 With the arrival of BIG SCREEN teevee and full 5.1 home theater audio to the folks on the E'ville ranch, the space formerly known as The Museum is radically transformed into The Room. The furniture is rearranged so that the new gear is aligned along the interior stair wall. It's true that it sits opposite the three unit window, and prior to purchase I was concerned that glare from these windows would be a problem on the proposed plasma screen. Salesmen that they are, the guys at Stereotypes said "We've never had a problem." When it comes to glare on the screen, that is. All their plasmas in the shop are in windowless rooms. As it turns out, during the day glare is quite apparent, but not so bad that the screen becomes unuseable. Who is doing any serious viewing during the day anyway?

I think the teevee picture, as seen on one of these excellent plasma screens, has finally reached the quality of being able to compare the experience to watching film in a cinema. With this setup, I expect to be able to do some serious viewing. The 50 inch screen is actually big enough to read credits and even subtitles.

What's been seen so far, after a week? We're still getting used to the reality, but have sampled a variety of sources. The BluRay disc that came in the box with the player, Spiderman 3, is yet another lameo effects laden picture. For something really different, I tried out some Bad Cinema: XXX with Vin Diesel. This too was viewed in BD, and is not as high budget as Spidey, so the signal's not quite as good. I think I've been seeing this movie since Connery was doing Bond and Dean Martin did Matt Helms. With the attitude Diesel has at the beginning of the picture, why should he care at the end whether the entire population of Prague is poisoned?

Trying out a current release on standard DVD, the picture was still a phenomenally great cinematic experience. We watched Namesake, and travelled back and forth between the U. S. and India in Mira Nair's film about immigrants who never feel at home anywhere. There is much allusion to the Ukranian writer Nikolai Gogol (one of the main characters is named after Gogol by his father, and hence the title of the film), who I've never read. Probably time to pick up a book and do some fiction reading for a change.

With so much cinema to watch on a great system, who has time for books? 

my continuing examination of world cinema

After my recent recollections on favorite films from my distant past, it seemed appropriate to relive another cinema experience from my yout. Last night I watched the film Solaris, by the great Russian film maker Andrei Tarkovsky. By all western standards of storytelling, this film at something like 2 hrs. 45 min. is nerve wrackingly frustrating. While some called it Russia's answer to 2001, it's beyond low tech - it's no tech. Tarkovsky was not that kind of film maker. Nor was he the slightest interested in the conventions of the sci-fi genre. While the story is an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel, Tarkovsky does his best to frustrate the expectations of anyone looking solely for a story to entertain. Where Hollywood would pump up the action and streamline the story (we'll have to save comments on Soderbergh's version for a later date - it's farther down the queue) so as to quicken the pulse, Tarkovsky's pace is exactly the opposite. He is in no hurry to tell a story, but many of his trademarks are evident: the beauty of the natural world, the alienation of the man-made city, the dominance of water in the visuals, and the complex and fluid dance of the camera with the actors.

As frustrating as the experience may be for even those with an open mind (I won't deny nodding off several times, but always felt as if I hadn't missed anything), it's one I'm ready and fully prepared to subject myself to again. There is something ultimately hypnotic about Tarkovsky's visuals, if not always his ideas about faith and the alienated human. The slow zoom into gently waving underwater grasses, repeated in Stalker, is an image to fall into. Unfortunately, Tarkovsky's films may be more intellectually challenging to write about, and rewatch in the mind's eye, than they are to actually sit through.