Akira Kurosawa: 生きる / 'Ikiru' (1952)

No, Toyo Odagiri is not looking at her cellphone. This is 1952, okay?

I love Akira Kurosawa's films, which hyper-link into many deep things: Japan, the universal human condition, Russian literature, existential philosophy, songs, theatre, visual design and so much more. I also love that Kurosawa's films sometimes meander a bit unexpectedly, like a good novella or novel.

Ikiru (1952) is, indeed, inspired in part by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), and the spirit of Fyodor Dostoevsky is there, too.  

The premise of Ikiru: what happens when a person -- in this case Mr. Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) -- figures out that he (or she) has only six months or a year to live?  

For one thing, Mr. Watanabe wants to spend more time hanging out with Toyo Odagiri (Miki Odagiri aka Santo), who is so full of life and mischief. 

Ikiru also has the feel, at times, of Charles Dickens' 1842 novella, A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas. Though Mr. Watanabe is not such an awful man as Scrooge, he's often just as (almost comically) freaked out when he first glimpses his own mortality. 

Ikiru is a film about nothing less than the meaning and purpose of life. 

As Roger Ebert phrased it on September 29, 1996: "I think this is one of the few movies that might actually be able to inspire someone to lead their life a little differently." (Link to full article here.) No higher praise needed. 

Today's Rune: Flow. 

Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Солярис' / 'Solaris' (1972): Take II

Andrei Tarkovsky's Солярис / Solaris (1972) uses windows, mirrors, water, color and intermittently, black & white film to enhance its existential themes, to great effect. 

"This is my wife." So says Kris Kelvin (played by Lithuanian actor Donatas Banionis) to his colleagues, formally introducing them to Ocean-created Hari / Khari (played by Russian actor Natalya Bondarchuk).

There is a cool driving scene featuring a Japanese cityscape that manifests complexity and pattern recognition in human social relationships. 

The Library on the Solaris space station is a key meeting point; it's also where a gorgeous scene of zero gravity takes place. Solaris explicitly cites Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Miguel de Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, among other cultural touchstones. 

Bruegel, Jagers in de Sneeuw (1565), a copy of which Hari examines with great intensity, looking for clues about human nature. 

Ron Mann's 'Poetry in Motion' (1982)

Ron Mann's Poetry in Motion is a fun documentary sampler of poets, poetry, readings and music. As one might suspect, it's a mixed bag -- I fast forwarded through a couple performances  -- but overall a groovy experience (no joke).

Bukowski opens the ball, drinking, smoking and musing at home: 

Reading the poets has been the dullest of things. Even reading the great novelists . . . I said Tolstoy is supposed to be special? . . . I really try to understand. I mean, and many of the great poets of the past, I've read their stuff, I've read it -- all's I get is a goddamned headache and boredom; I really feel sickness in the pit of my stomach. I say, there's some trick going on here . . . this is not true; this is not real; it's not good.

Bukowski's quips are interwoven throughout the film, providing comic relief.

The performers:

Amiri Baraka (who just died in 2014) with sax and drums
Anne Waldman 
Ted Berrigan (who died in 1983)
Kenward Elmslie
Ed Sanders (also of The Fugs)
Helen Adam (utterly strange and interesting)
Tom Waits (early on)
William S. Burroughs
Christopher Dewdney
Michael Mcclure (who co-wrote "Mercedes Benz" with Janis Joplin and Bob Neuwirth)
Ted Milton
Robert Creeley (died in 2005)
John Cage
Four Horseman (a poem made of noises)
Michael Ondaatje
Jayne Cortez (died in 2012) with  guitar, bass and drums
Diane DiPrima with piano and slides
John Giorno
Ntozake Shange with piano and dancers
Gary Snyder
Allen Ginsberg with Canadian band The Ceedees (guitar, bass and drums)
Jim Carroll (died in 2009)
Miguel Algarin

One of the surprising highlights is Ginsberg singing, off-key, an outraged and joyous punk-like catalog of global injustices that feels completely contemporary. Let's just say that he would not have been too surprised by recent developments.

DVD extras include an interview with the director and Poetry in Motion II (more on the latter soon).

Today's Rune: Protection. 
  

Anna Karenina (2012)

Stumbled across Joe Wright's film version of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (2012), screenplay by Tom Stoppard. Keira Knightley (Anna K) and Jude Law (Count Alexei K) do the job and look good doing it. Director Joe Wright seems to have taken a page out of Orson Welles' book by filming numerous interior shots in an abandoned theatre.

The "enduring appeal" of Anna Karenina probably comes down to a few core things even beyond Tolstoy's original vision: it's romantic, yet a doomed romance. It's about the rules of society, why they're in place and how these rules can be both good and bad. It's about the soaring excitement of desire and the eventual dissolution of all, beyond individual choice. Heady stuff.  

Today's Rune: Joy.   

Louis Malle's 'Les Amants' / 'The Lovers'

Louis Malle's Les Amants / The Lovers (1958) is a wildly subversive gem of a film. Suppressed for supposed indecency and even pornography, it is neither indecent nor pornographic. There's no violence to speak of, and the main character, Jeanne Tournier (Jeanne Moreau), makes her own decisions, her own choices, her own conclusions against the expectations and pressures of the status quo.

I'd go so far as to say that Les Amants is revolutionary in its suggestion of the possibilities of human freedom.

I suppose conservative social and political forces of all stripes would still find its message dangerous.

Generally, The Lovers compares in situation to Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856) and Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina / Анна Каренина (1873-1878). And there are moonlit scenes that remind me of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955). But unlike all three of them, in The Lovers there's neither murder nor suicide involved. Rather, in Malle's film, the big questions are paired down to a relatively small handful of characters within the context of Paris and a rural estate outside of Dijon. And here, everything hinges on the actions and responses of Jeanne -- she is the one who decides how things will go, not the men, and not society, and without violence. It's astonishing, really, because it's so rare to see life depicted this way anywhere -- ever.  I'm still amazed.

Today's Rune: Journey.        

Lady Chatterley

Somehow fittingly, just as there's more than one version of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (ca. 1928), there's more than one version of Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley (2006). Confusing, I know, but John Thomas and Lady Jane, not published (so far as I can tell -- even this is hard to verify completely) until 1972, provides an alternate version which is, via Lady Chatterley et l'homme des bois  [Lady Chatterley and the Man of the Woods] (1977), the basis for Ferran's movie versions.

Okay, so what's the big deal?  This is not far afield from either Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (ca.1857) or Leo Tolstoy's  Anna Karenina / Анна Каренина (ca. 1877), right?  Well, it is and it isn't. For one thing, Lawrence incorporates the industrial slaughter of the Great War of 1914-1918 into Lady Chatterley's arc, which is thus more modern in its setting. 

Lady Chatterley's husband, a mine owner made an invalid by the war, spends part of his time wheeling around in something like a riding lawnmower/wheelchair, complete with combustible engine. Besides that, reading aloud about the Trojan War and acting the aristocrat, he's not able to do much. This leaves emotional and physical space for Lady Chatterley (his wife) to meet up with the gamekeeper from time to time. 

So that's the big deal: a modern twist on an enduring -- and appealing -- trope.













Pascale Ferran (the director) herself notes why she preferred the version she chose to adapt: "[T]he gamekeeper is a much wilder, more sensitive character. He’s a very solitary man, with a complicated relationship to speech. He really should have been a miner, but he didn’t enjoy being around people. He prefers being alone in the woods like a hermit.” 

Ferran, in this same interview with Anne Cammon from which the above is quoted, further observes: The two [main] characters come out deeply transformed, both in themselves and in their vision of the world. They come out freer and braver, and maybe more intelligent . . . At the beginning of the film Constance [i.e. Lady Chatterley] is sort of like a 19th-century woman, and by the end of the film she’s more like a woman from the late 20th-century . . ." 

For the entire interview, please see The Pascale Ferran Interview by Anne Cammon, The Quarterly Conversation:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-pascale-ferran-interview













And oh yeah, the movie(s) is (are) great, just like the book(s)!  Not for everyone, but besides death and taxes, what is?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

Out of the Past

Otis Redding (1941-1967), yet another blockbusting Virgo who came to a tragic end. If you've seen footage of him performing, you've probably glimpsed some of the gusto he put into his singing. He and most of the Bar-Keys (his backing band) died when their small plane crashed into Lake Monona, Wisconsin, on the way to Madison in December, 1967. I swam in that lake at night about twenty years later -- it was an eerie experience.



Above: Jane Greer (1924-2001) playing femme fatale to the hilt in Out of the Past (1947), with Robert Mitchum. One of my film noir favorites, with a great -- and bleak -- ending. Some of Ms. Greer's last performances -- in the 1990s -- can be seen on Twin Peaks.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.

Birthdays: Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu/Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu, William Bligh (Mutiny on the Bounty), Leo Tolstoy (Gregorian calendar), Adelaide Crapsey, Paul Goodman, “Jimmy the Greek” Snyder (b. Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos), Manolis Glezos, Jane Greer, Cliff Robertson, Elvin Jones (b. Pontiac, Michigan), Otis Redding, Michael Keaton (Douglas), Hugh Grant, Michelle Williams.

Midnight in the Garden of Allah

A lot of groovy birthdays today. Hard to beat Goethe and Tolstoy in the writers' department. But Charles Boyer starred with Marlene Dietrich. It's a give and a take. . . . .




That's a lot of silver. Shania Twain meets The Velvet Underground. New Country meets New Amish.



Emma Samms. Looks like sophisticated trouble.


Today's Rune: Strength.

Birthdays: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Boyer, Robertson Davies, Ben Gazzara, Sterling Morrison (The Velvet Underground), Liza Wang, Rita Dove, Emma Samms (Samuelson), Shania Twain (b. Eilleen Regina Edwards, Windsor, Ontario), Jason Priestley, Mary McCartney.

Via new laptop ~~ Ciao!

The Ides of April

I can never say enough good things about both versions of Z -- either Vassilis Vassilikos' 1966 novel or Costa-Gavras' film adaption, released in 1969. The combination of intrigue, assassination, coverup, investigation and crackdown all set within an exciting and clearly articulated social, economic and political milieu permanantly shaped the tone for my worldview. If they're not the greatest such works of all time, they've certainly had the deepest influence on me. What more can you ask from two paired masterworks? I keep two English translation copies of the novel and one copy of the DVD (French with various subtitles, including English) in my small personal library -- because they never fail to buoy my spirits.

From the back cover of the Bantam Books 1969 paperback edition:

Needle-sharp and harsh as a documentary, Z is based on an actual murder -- the political assasination of a celebrated Greek patriot and pacifist -- and the subsequent investigation by a . . . young [government] attorney who followed the trail of responsibility and guilt to the highest levels of a ruthless military regime. Vassilis Vassilikos has dared to expose the story of a political murder and corruption in a novel charged with anger, passion, and mounting suspense.

Quoting the New York Times Book Review: Shattering validity, exciting reading . . . This haunting semi-documentary . . . racing in and among what seems to be half the population of Salonika [Greece], is exhilaratingly wide-ranging and cinematic in the best sense of the word . . . Vassilikos's gifts are dazzling.

Flashed on the screen during Z, the movie:

Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripides; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labor strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoyevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!"



Today's Rune: Partnership.

Birthdays: Leonardo da Vinci, Émile Durkheim, Bessie Smith, Elizabeth Montgomery, Claudia Cardinale, Dave Edmunds.

Andio sas!