TemporaryOne-1's reviews
This page compiles all reviews TemporaryOne-1 has written, sharing their detailed thoughts about movies, TV shows, and more.
22 reviews
In the beginning there was a tree, an autumn tree. It had lost its leaves. But there was fruit on it left for the birds.
Snow fell already. Strange clouds appeared, as if it were summer, not autumn. The sky was dark and deep. Thunder could be heard. There was movement over the water. There were birds. Birds who flew for no other reason than beauty alone. Then the clouds changed. The sky became flat. The light shone upon G-d's command.
I was afraid of falling. Someone left me. I started to feel better. I breathed deeply. Then movement started. I realized it was winter. I was cold. I could almost touch the road. So smooth and transparent. Houses appeared, like an abandoned village under a cold sun. Windows, roofs. And the people? It must be noon, but where are the people? Grey buildings, like prisons. Then came the fog. (confusion).
I found myself on a clearing.
The world created out of darkness and winter and fear, child born, movement, then abandoned, G-dless, fatherless, nationless, but grateful for the freedom of free will. Fragile berry fruit tree, its branches, stiffened and frozen into place like burnt nerves (Plath), a wintry tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with "fruit on it left for the birds". The fruit of this tree teaching the cycle of life and nourishment and struggle and survival and death and rebirth and beauty.
Spectacular scenery of leaden winter clouds in heavens in the darkest dark of the night overlooking black wintry landscapes. Lunar ambiance and lunar silence and lunar seclusion. Voyager the satellite of history, trying to understand his inborn orbit to a G-d, to a father, to a nation, to a life that cut him off and abandoned him at birth.
A wall of snow soundlessly wheeling and reeling in a steady downriver current like a river current frothing forward in a storm, an apt metaphor for the many nations and peoples that drifted without a base after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and an apt metaphor for the transitory nature of existence. A wall of snow drift reeling forward like one gigantic moving mass of migratory disintegration.
Sokurov, our narrator, our voyager, noctivagant. Going back in time to the place of his birth and voyaging through his past and the past of his country and the past of history itself. Travelling across across frontiers of nations and borders, traveling through monastic, nautical, museologic spaces. Dark strokes of Classical music and the distantiated echoes of ambient sound, haunting musical haiku conveying Sokurov's existential turmoil.
Voyager, guided by a monk enters a monastery in Valdai (Old Russia), a journey to find G-d, to understand G-d, to understand Jesus' sacrifice, to study the spirit of a man in the throes of death and an empire in the throes of death and a history in the throes of death, Voyager like Abraham of the Bible, Abram heeding G-d's call of Lech Lecha, and, after passing G-d's tests of faith and accepting G-d's promises to multiply his seed, evolving into Abraham, officially setting up the shop of Judaism which later forged Christianity, but Voyager is beginning at the end of that, faithless and spiritually decayed and identityless. Sokurov asking the monk, why did Christ pray that his Father not send him to his sacrificial cross? Why did Christ, want to avoid crucifixion? If he so loathed being crucified, then how can I accept his sacrifice? Why did I speak about this? His monk keeps silent, G-d fails to answer, the Christ (in Sokurov's view) nothing more than a mere mortal on an equal plane with all of humanity in his resistance to death, the implication being Why is Humankind invested in Christ's sacrifice if He was unwilling to make it, a Baptism occurring in the background ends, a soldier on a pew jars the moment, war invoked and Voyager perhaps remembering himself as a soldier, a fleeting flashback of soldiers crosses the screen, Voyager coalesces back into uninhabited nocturnal landscapes and his own interiorized private world of exilic and religious and spiritual alienation and despair.
Voyager is eternity's hostage and prisoner of time, he's exilic and unhomed and displaced theologically, nationalistically, culturally, and historically.
Voyager not knowing what location he's leaving and where he's going, destabilized location, Guideless, he doesn't know where he came from or where he's going to, he doesn't know who he was or who he will become, he doesn't know where G-d is or where his father is or where his nation is or who or what will guide him, the ship, perhaps Noah's Arc, carrying him beyond the flood of threatening-but-indifferent waves that fill every corner of the earth, transporting him away from his barren abandoned provincial rural Eastern locality and relocating him Westward in cosmopolitan Germany (the trajectory from East to West invoking a reversal of Germany's wartime West-East invasion of Russia), a Germany blanketed beneath a continual falling powdery wall of migratory disintegrating downriver streams of snow.
Voyager whispering, the canvas remains warm, the body remains warm yet must it still die, the spirit remains warm yet must the spirit also die? All the paintings except Van Gogh's include rivers and most appear to also include boats, the boats the body and the water the soul and the spirit and the boats on the water representing the journey into the great unknown, towards death. The camera also passes over two empty frames, spiritless man, coincidence or prophetic.
Last painting, the camera literally enters Bruegel's Tower of Babel, a glorious surface exploration of a crumbling arcesque Ur-text Torah-text, covenant between humanity and G-d shattered, humankind scattered and abandoned, hammering in the theme of humanity's disconnect with its Creator (G-d, father, Nation) and humanity's destructive impulses and apocalypse, the screen turns black.
Snow fell already. Strange clouds appeared, as if it were summer, not autumn. The sky was dark and deep. Thunder could be heard. There was movement over the water. There were birds. Birds who flew for no other reason than beauty alone. Then the clouds changed. The sky became flat. The light shone upon G-d's command.
I was afraid of falling. Someone left me. I started to feel better. I breathed deeply. Then movement started. I realized it was winter. I was cold. I could almost touch the road. So smooth and transparent. Houses appeared, like an abandoned village under a cold sun. Windows, roofs. And the people? It must be noon, but where are the people? Grey buildings, like prisons. Then came the fog. (confusion).
I found myself on a clearing.
The world created out of darkness and winter and fear, child born, movement, then abandoned, G-dless, fatherless, nationless, but grateful for the freedom of free will. Fragile berry fruit tree, its branches, stiffened and frozen into place like burnt nerves (Plath), a wintry tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with "fruit on it left for the birds". The fruit of this tree teaching the cycle of life and nourishment and struggle and survival and death and rebirth and beauty.
Spectacular scenery of leaden winter clouds in heavens in the darkest dark of the night overlooking black wintry landscapes. Lunar ambiance and lunar silence and lunar seclusion. Voyager the satellite of history, trying to understand his inborn orbit to a G-d, to a father, to a nation, to a life that cut him off and abandoned him at birth.
A wall of snow soundlessly wheeling and reeling in a steady downriver current like a river current frothing forward in a storm, an apt metaphor for the many nations and peoples that drifted without a base after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and an apt metaphor for the transitory nature of existence. A wall of snow drift reeling forward like one gigantic moving mass of migratory disintegration.
Sokurov, our narrator, our voyager, noctivagant. Going back in time to the place of his birth and voyaging through his past and the past of his country and the past of history itself. Travelling across across frontiers of nations and borders, traveling through monastic, nautical, museologic spaces. Dark strokes of Classical music and the distantiated echoes of ambient sound, haunting musical haiku conveying Sokurov's existential turmoil.
Voyager, guided by a monk enters a monastery in Valdai (Old Russia), a journey to find G-d, to understand G-d, to understand Jesus' sacrifice, to study the spirit of a man in the throes of death and an empire in the throes of death and a history in the throes of death, Voyager like Abraham of the Bible, Abram heeding G-d's call of Lech Lecha, and, after passing G-d's tests of faith and accepting G-d's promises to multiply his seed, evolving into Abraham, officially setting up the shop of Judaism which later forged Christianity, but Voyager is beginning at the end of that, faithless and spiritually decayed and identityless. Sokurov asking the monk, why did Christ pray that his Father not send him to his sacrificial cross? Why did Christ, want to avoid crucifixion? If he so loathed being crucified, then how can I accept his sacrifice? Why did I speak about this? His monk keeps silent, G-d fails to answer, the Christ (in Sokurov's view) nothing more than a mere mortal on an equal plane with all of humanity in his resistance to death, the implication being Why is Humankind invested in Christ's sacrifice if He was unwilling to make it, a Baptism occurring in the background ends, a soldier on a pew jars the moment, war invoked and Voyager perhaps remembering himself as a soldier, a fleeting flashback of soldiers crosses the screen, Voyager coalesces back into uninhabited nocturnal landscapes and his own interiorized private world of exilic and religious and spiritual alienation and despair.
Voyager is eternity's hostage and prisoner of time, he's exilic and unhomed and displaced theologically, nationalistically, culturally, and historically.
Voyager not knowing what location he's leaving and where he's going, destabilized location, Guideless, he doesn't know where he came from or where he's going to, he doesn't know who he was or who he will become, he doesn't know where G-d is or where his father is or where his nation is or who or what will guide him, the ship, perhaps Noah's Arc, carrying him beyond the flood of threatening-but-indifferent waves that fill every corner of the earth, transporting him away from his barren abandoned provincial rural Eastern locality and relocating him Westward in cosmopolitan Germany (the trajectory from East to West invoking a reversal of Germany's wartime West-East invasion of Russia), a Germany blanketed beneath a continual falling powdery wall of migratory disintegrating downriver streams of snow.
Voyager whispering, the canvas remains warm, the body remains warm yet must it still die, the spirit remains warm yet must the spirit also die? All the paintings except Van Gogh's include rivers and most appear to also include boats, the boats the body and the water the soul and the spirit and the boats on the water representing the journey into the great unknown, towards death. The camera also passes over two empty frames, spiritless man, coincidence or prophetic.
Last painting, the camera literally enters Bruegel's Tower of Babel, a glorious surface exploration of a crumbling arcesque Ur-text Torah-text, covenant between humanity and G-d shattered, humankind scattered and abandoned, hammering in the theme of humanity's disconnect with its Creator (G-d, father, Nation) and humanity's destructive impulses and apocalypse, the screen turns black.
This is a five and a half hour documentary and the below doesn't remotely come close to expressing all my thoughts reactions to it, but wow what another hypnotic piece of art by Sokurov.
A painting. Or a real landscape. Desolving into the vespertine hour. Translunary veneer. Snow blanketing the Russian earth. It might be Isaak Levitan's "Eternal Rest" filling up the screen. It might be a real Russian landscape. Tremulous Sokuvoran micro-undulations confuse the eye. Floating landscape. Delicate elegiac piano-sequined chauntacoustics of Mozart, Beethoven, Messiaen, three embattled lives, drift up from the snowy underworld, melancholic sounds, invocations of angels, evocations of demons. Susurrating narration punctuates sublimity of music and fantasy snows cape. Darkness deepens. Candles burn but briefly, stars outshine themselves. A figure transepts across the landscape. Disappears amidst trees. A flame. A glittering spangle of birds. This is a real place after all. A shift from dawn to dusk and the body and face of a soldier mistily emerges.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of unplumbed profundity in a martian-like sun-bleached spallated paleaceous rock-blasted scoured flayed ruddied ochred rufescent gizzard lifeless trackless Afghanistan-Tajikistan border-landscape alongside silent sunbleared Slavic Russian (and Central Asian) soldiers maundering through the torrid chaff-dusted waste-blasted land.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of dizzying vertical navigation giving way to melancholic horizontal quiescence.
The agony of sunlight the ontology of waiting the agony of restlessness the pointlessness of war the fantasia of night.
Nations and Men enslaved by sciamachic war. Invisible enemies. Alien world where soldiers do not belong.
Soldiers motionless and muted and scattered. A book of Russian fairy tales opened to "The Tale Of The One-Eyed Devil".
Atavistic bare-boned daily routine. A collapsed empire uncreating its own sons. Skin and bone and boots and guns. Uncreating and unlearned and inhumane.
From the first segment:
She died without knowing it -- out like a candle
She was completely unaware of her surroundings
I pressed her hand and she started to talk, neither seeing nor hearing me, not conscious of anything
Exactly five hours went by in the same way until, at twenty-one minutes past eleven in the evening, she (Mozart's mother) passed away
Substitute the soldiers for Mozart's mother. Out like a candle, they neither see nor hear, they're not conscious of anything, they undergo a spiritual death, their voices snuffed out, the spirit of a collapsed empire snuffed out.
The Steppe. Nothing but steppe all round. Minefields. Cake. A New Year.
A bird. Looks like a baby bird. So tiny and delicate. Curious. Eager. Watchful. Takes flight. It's wingspan expansive, a much bigger bird than it seemed to be.
A gun battle with the invisible enemy. About an hour long. Nothing violent appears on screen but you can feel the fear of eminent battle and you can almost taste the metallic heat of the shrapnel mingled with dust and sweat.
Day turns to night, soldiers' limp bodies and sleeping faces seamlessly merging and disappearing into the crumbled landscape. Passing from the body into the earth, in the morning, passing from the earth into the body.
Leaden storm-clouds. A new musical palette. A ship horn. Ship horns and dissonant strings conjuring up icy churning waters. Icy churning waters juxtaposed against crumbled martian landscape. Clouds move to the menacing music of Takemitsu and Wagner. Roseate and ochre tints fade out. Landscape devoid of colour. Men devoid of colour. Men falling into a state of desuetude.
Humanity falling into a state of desuetude thanks to the Military-Industrial Complex.
A painting. Or a real landscape. Desolving into the vespertine hour. Translunary veneer. Snow blanketing the Russian earth. It might be Isaak Levitan's "Eternal Rest" filling up the screen. It might be a real Russian landscape. Tremulous Sokuvoran micro-undulations confuse the eye. Floating landscape. Delicate elegiac piano-sequined chauntacoustics of Mozart, Beethoven, Messiaen, three embattled lives, drift up from the snowy underworld, melancholic sounds, invocations of angels, evocations of demons. Susurrating narration punctuates sublimity of music and fantasy snows cape. Darkness deepens. Candles burn but briefly, stars outshine themselves. A figure transepts across the landscape. Disappears amidst trees. A flame. A glittering spangle of birds. This is a real place after all. A shift from dawn to dusk and the body and face of a soldier mistily emerges.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of unplumbed profundity in a martian-like sun-bleached spallated paleaceous rock-blasted scoured flayed ruddied ochred rufescent gizzard lifeless trackless Afghanistan-Tajikistan border-landscape alongside silent sunbleared Slavic Russian (and Central Asian) soldiers maundering through the torrid chaff-dusted waste-blasted land.
Five and a half hypnotic hours of dizzying vertical navigation giving way to melancholic horizontal quiescence.
The agony of sunlight the ontology of waiting the agony of restlessness the pointlessness of war the fantasia of night.
Nations and Men enslaved by sciamachic war. Invisible enemies. Alien world where soldiers do not belong.
Soldiers motionless and muted and scattered. A book of Russian fairy tales opened to "The Tale Of The One-Eyed Devil".
Atavistic bare-boned daily routine. A collapsed empire uncreating its own sons. Skin and bone and boots and guns. Uncreating and unlearned and inhumane.
From the first segment:
She died without knowing it -- out like a candle
She was completely unaware of her surroundings
I pressed her hand and she started to talk, neither seeing nor hearing me, not conscious of anything
Exactly five hours went by in the same way until, at twenty-one minutes past eleven in the evening, she (Mozart's mother) passed away
Substitute the soldiers for Mozart's mother. Out like a candle, they neither see nor hear, they're not conscious of anything, they undergo a spiritual death, their voices snuffed out, the spirit of a collapsed empire snuffed out.
The Steppe. Nothing but steppe all round. Minefields. Cake. A New Year.
A bird. Looks like a baby bird. So tiny and delicate. Curious. Eager. Watchful. Takes flight. It's wingspan expansive, a much bigger bird than it seemed to be.
A gun battle with the invisible enemy. About an hour long. Nothing violent appears on screen but you can feel the fear of eminent battle and you can almost taste the metallic heat of the shrapnel mingled with dust and sweat.
Day turns to night, soldiers' limp bodies and sleeping faces seamlessly merging and disappearing into the crumbled landscape. Passing from the body into the earth, in the morning, passing from the earth into the body.
Leaden storm-clouds. A new musical palette. A ship horn. Ship horns and dissonant strings conjuring up icy churning waters. Icy churning waters juxtaposed against crumbled martian landscape. Clouds move to the menacing music of Takemitsu and Wagner. Roseate and ochre tints fade out. Landscape devoid of colour. Men devoid of colour. Men falling into a state of desuetude.
Humanity falling into a state of desuetude thanks to the Military-Industrial Complex.
Oral history and storytelling enables the past, present, future, and mythical realms to exist simultaneously alongside light-cultivator Ningiuq, providing her the lessons and strength and wisdom she needs to carry her grandson Maniq through each and every moment of their existence
Faces are topological atlases mapping tundra
Infinitely boundless trackless isolated snowsplendant glacially-suncupped sastrugied panoramas magnify climatic extremity and timelessness and cosmic uncertainty
The Sun's caravel of light disconcernedly aureates their earth, our earth, in titian gold
A watery womb of emerald sunlight shimmers under the water, winking endlessly back onto itself
The point of a needle needles out of the fabric of existence an entire population of Inuit (except for Ningiuq and Maniq), a devastating history reduced to an exclamation point, its intensity viscerally experienced in sweeping panoramas of empty snowscapes
A woman lights the quilliq and a woman keeps the fire burning and another woman hundreds of years later turned on a camera light and keeps the fire burning
A raven flew over a beach. Suddenly a bowhead whale surfaced and swallowed it whole. Inside the whale it was very dark. Like a cave. In the distance the raven saw the flickering light of an oil lamp.
A girl was trying desperately to keep the light from dying.
The raven heard the girl's voice: "You must be faithful to me. Promise never to touch this light."
The raven promised, "I'll never touch it."
But when the girl returned to her work the raven forgot his promise and touched the lamp, and when the light went out, the girl fell over, dead. The raven realized his terrible mistake. The girl had taken possession of the raven's soul and when the light went out, so did the raven's heart.
I just had a dream. It was a beautiful dream. Of little children. I was pregnant. One was a human being, the other looked like a bear club. I loved them both. But I loved one more than the other, I don't know why. I took a harpoon and pierced the cub on its back. It died right away. The human child shrank until it vanished. And went back into my womb. I understand my dream. I really wanted to bear a child myself, but I adopted one. It felt like he was my own. I love him very much.
I have heard that they haven't always been ptarmigans. There was an old woman and her grandson who were all alone, maybe like us. When the grandson went to bed he asked his grandmother to tell a story. "Grandmother, please tell me a story." "I don't have any stories, get comfortable and go to sleep." But the child insisted and started to cry, "Grandmother tell me a story."
Finally, the grandmother started to tell: "Story, Story....Bay lemmings....having no fur....arms folded in.... start falling....feels ticklish."
The grandson was so startled, he shouted "teeook!" and flew off.
He turned into a snow bunting and flew away right out the air hole.
The grandmother looked all around and said, "Grandson, where did you go?" Again and again, "Where are you?"
Then she cried so much, and she wiped her eyes so much, that her eyes turned red, but she couldn't find him. Finally, she put her needles in her boots.
Then she took her oil lamp wick and hung it around her neck. That's the collar filled with seeds around the ptarmigan's neck.
And then she went, "Ap-ap-ap-ap-ap!" And flew off to join her grandson. He was so startled he turned into a snow bunting.
She went flying right out after him. Too bad! But it must have been all right as long as they were together again. That the end of that story.
We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die
We have eyes and intuition
A DNA code and a name
Some tend to logic, some superstition
We have an aura and a frame
Why must we die
We are human, we are angel
We have feet and wish for wings
We are carbon, we are ether
We are saints, we are kings
Why must we die
Why must we die
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
We never found our Eldorado
Where we were born
We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die
Why must we die
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
We never found our Eldorado
Where we were born
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
Faces are topological atlases mapping tundra
Infinitely boundless trackless isolated snowsplendant glacially-suncupped sastrugied panoramas magnify climatic extremity and timelessness and cosmic uncertainty
The Sun's caravel of light disconcernedly aureates their earth, our earth, in titian gold
A watery womb of emerald sunlight shimmers under the water, winking endlessly back onto itself
The point of a needle needles out of the fabric of existence an entire population of Inuit (except for Ningiuq and Maniq), a devastating history reduced to an exclamation point, its intensity viscerally experienced in sweeping panoramas of empty snowscapes
A woman lights the quilliq and a woman keeps the fire burning and another woman hundreds of years later turned on a camera light and keeps the fire burning
A raven flew over a beach. Suddenly a bowhead whale surfaced and swallowed it whole. Inside the whale it was very dark. Like a cave. In the distance the raven saw the flickering light of an oil lamp.
A girl was trying desperately to keep the light from dying.
The raven heard the girl's voice: "You must be faithful to me. Promise never to touch this light."
The raven promised, "I'll never touch it."
But when the girl returned to her work the raven forgot his promise and touched the lamp, and when the light went out, the girl fell over, dead. The raven realized his terrible mistake. The girl had taken possession of the raven's soul and when the light went out, so did the raven's heart.
I just had a dream. It was a beautiful dream. Of little children. I was pregnant. One was a human being, the other looked like a bear club. I loved them both. But I loved one more than the other, I don't know why. I took a harpoon and pierced the cub on its back. It died right away. The human child shrank until it vanished. And went back into my womb. I understand my dream. I really wanted to bear a child myself, but I adopted one. It felt like he was my own. I love him very much.
I have heard that they haven't always been ptarmigans. There was an old woman and her grandson who were all alone, maybe like us. When the grandson went to bed he asked his grandmother to tell a story. "Grandmother, please tell me a story." "I don't have any stories, get comfortable and go to sleep." But the child insisted and started to cry, "Grandmother tell me a story."
Finally, the grandmother started to tell: "Story, Story....Bay lemmings....having no fur....arms folded in.... start falling....feels ticklish."
The grandson was so startled, he shouted "teeook!" and flew off.
He turned into a snow bunting and flew away right out the air hole.
The grandmother looked all around and said, "Grandson, where did you go?" Again and again, "Where are you?"
Then she cried so much, and she wiped her eyes so much, that her eyes turned red, but she couldn't find him. Finally, she put her needles in her boots.
Then she took her oil lamp wick and hung it around her neck. That's the collar filled with seeds around the ptarmigan's neck.
And then she went, "Ap-ap-ap-ap-ap!" And flew off to join her grandson. He was so startled he turned into a snow bunting.
She went flying right out after him. Too bad! But it must have been all right as long as they were together again. That the end of that story.
We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die
We have eyes and intuition
A DNA code and a name
Some tend to logic, some superstition
We have an aura and a frame
Why must we die
We are human, we are angel
We have feet and wish for wings
We are carbon, we are ether
We are saints, we are kings
Why must we die
Why must we die
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
We never found our Eldorado
Where we were born
We are meat, we are spirit
We have blood and we have grace
We have a will and we have muscle
A soul and a face
Why must we die
Why must we die
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
We never found our Eldorado
Where we were born
We are men of constant sorrow
We'll have trouble all our days
Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is quoted late in the film Some of the main cruxes of the novella are - everything has a deep schematic foundation that mirrors everything else - stages of life, stages of love, stages of enlightenment, stages of urban growth and decline, all the stages reflect cosmological schemata - the mirroring is metaphorical, the mirroring and metaphors are infinite in detail and variation, and memory like the sea shape shifts everything (especially time and thought and space) into something rich and strange - there are civilizations beneath civilizations beneath civilizations, layers beneath layers beneath layers, there are invisibles that define and condition and preserve the visible, there are invisibles for the visuals without which the visuals fail - memory is language - memory and all the schemata and all the mirroring and metaphors all spring from one source, a concrete experience, a cosmological epigram, a multi-layered condensed dream The way the Raul Ruiz's camera eye gliding connects everything (landscapes interiors people concepts) resonates with the layered structure of Marco Polo's descriptions The film also borrows from Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the visual framing of most of the scenes is straight out of Renaissance Dutch paintings, perfect because in Dutch painting, mirrors and lenses and camera obscura were heavily used to help create paintings, and were also painted into the paintings for symbolic purposes, mirrors and mirroring play a large role in Dutch paintings and in the film Ancestry, generations, survival, dreams, monuments, mirrors, sociometry, prophet dreams of Indian tribes Pyramids, sandscape, phase of moon, images engraved in mountains, mirages Hands in the black cloven earth, artifact of a wine cup, Eva, Adam, hand print, listening, thinking triangulation of the arrangement of scenery/people - vanishing point, infinite regression, child at the apex, religious symbolism, pictoral depth simulating temporal depth Standing like Charon over the river Lethe with his stick/oar, a silvery scepter lit by distant red fire glow set against a deep inpenetratable black backdrop (chiaroscuro), each tap of the stick a nudging of the bottom of the riverbed to propel the boat forwards or backwards, to propel the chain of thoughts forward and backwards, man pondering and exploring old relics that are novel to him - similar to Jan Van Eyck painting's showcasing people entranced with technological novelties and scientific discoveries Excavation of vanishing language Reincarnation, hunger, war, rain, summer, eclipse of the sun and moon, stars, sea, earth, mother, fatal conflicts between two tribes, death, river stones, light of the moon, sea of whales, woman, fire-water, sun, deaf, artillery fire, walking with no sense of direction, thirst, endless, G-d of the mountain, raw meat, evenings alone, strong emotion at sunset, sheep, explanation of the meaning of life, violin, thirty glasses of fire-water in the morning Digging but not finding anything But then an animal skeleton in the palm of a hand, a celestial panorama at sundown, a pearly white roaring ocean, right into a scene with character examining plants, ceramics, stones, windows, camera gliding across windows and doorways Adam and Eve buried all our mirrors, lashed then cried 60 root words responsible for 300,000 Yaghan words, biblically speaking, Adam and Eve responsible for generating billions times billions times billions of people Metaphors, double and triple metaphors, generations built everything up, no factories nor airports and now exploitation, I heard a baby cry then Adam and Eve laughed, Now I understand everything, Double, triple metaphors are no coincidence, they mean the intuition of 2 and 3 as spoken, they are incapable of more modern thought because conception of the singular eludes them, they are convinced that 1 is an even number, so regression is infinite (cosmological epigram...) Books, dancing, shadow, rippling water, they bury the mirrors again, crying sounds like the crying of whales Whaling/wailing Every word or saying tacitly contains others, tacit metaphors speak between spoken metaphors, silence means more said Every heartbeat has a name Every day they construct a different language, a Gothic Cathedral dreamed up at night, forgotten by morning, proof that too much culture leads to barbarism and hinders development Illusion, the Indians' language is non-existent, they are recessives, not pure Indians, nothing they do or say has meaning, the whole world deceives me I shall not return Be careful what you say because somebody will believe it and your metaphoric images will become a religion and religion is the opinion of the people Recitative (Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities) Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan's mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them. Marco, meanwhile, continued reporting his journey, but the emperor was no longer listening. Kublai interrupted him: "From now on I shall describe the cities and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a city of stairs, exposed to the sirocco, on a half-moon bay. Now I shall list some of the wonders it contains....." Movements like a swimming whale, conducting the ocean, conducting the sun, conducting the invisible Draped like a Roman Emperer, Where do I come from, where is my fatherland, I was searching, but you found a new world for me People of the world, loneliness...unbearable, your visit moves my soul, soul...moves A final judgment of the people will reveal I have returned, I forget everything when I step foot in the house Wailing, Whaling, walking backwards - regression, you have traveled widely, I am afraid, I am leaving Visitor versus inhabitant, home and unhomed, communication and incommunicability, language as symbol, language as process, borders and borderlessness, impression of landscape/city/space more important than structure
A voyage across continents and time and space happens The body takes, the body transfigures itself, the body rejects Two sides of a new heart struggle to beat as one in an old man who owes many debts, while two hemispheres continually peopled with billions of inhabitants struggle to beat as one after billions of years of continental break-ups and ice ages and mass extinctions and mass migrations and devastating wars and the rise and fall of sweeping civilizations, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of unpaid debts that will one day be wiped out in one single blow if the core of the the son, I mean sun, burn out.
An infant smiles at his father, a father searches for an abandoned son, a son has his heart torn out.
Trebor troubadours cross countries and oceans, from the Alps of Switzerland to the Polynesian paradise of Tahiti, in the hope of obtaining a new heart and finding his abandoned son and escaping his conscious.
He swims and cycles and walks and sails and flies, in hot pursuit of a heart, in hot pursuit of a son who may or may not exist, in hot flight from past guilt, in hot tangles of dreams that may or may not be figments of his overheated brain.
His internal experience of his failing heart and new heart and guilty conscience and colonized environment transforms his familiar world into the unfamiliar, and psychological vertigo rises up and chases him into the shifting quicksands of his mind; what he remembers is real, what he remembers is not real; still chained to the Alps, he tumbles through limitless space, and the spatial disorientation is transformed by Denis into an exhilarating, whirling, fluid, cinematographic extravaganza of sensorial movement, with Trebor's potential for balance and self-reconciliation unattainable as the ghosts of his conscience peck away at his heart.
He's a stranger in strange land with a stranger living within him and a stranger shadowing him in the daytime and a stranger shadowing him in the evening, wild dogs in front of him and wild dogs behind him, a cross to the left and an empty grave to the right and a coffin in the middle, his soul yearning for a rejuvenation and a resurrection and ascension that are elusive mirages glimpsed in his dreams that burn out his heart.
He is unhomed but not homeless, his shadowed past eclipses him and he's forced to take measure of his own dwelling within a mental/psychological state of statelessness, alienation, disorientation, unhomedness, existential terror, etc.
He is not only suffering from a deathly paralysis of the heart, he's suffering from a cultural and psychological paralysis, which drives him to restructure his life around a formal structure he once abandoned, drives him to achieve a balance of space and place and culture and memory, but his overabundance of cultural memory and guilt and hallucination creates emotional vertigo, derailing him every step of the way.
His existence is rooted in a beloved son he has 100% faith in yet never met, an abandoned son he thinks is perfect and seeks to unite with in order to cleanse his soul, an idolized, cryptic, insubstantial son represented by a false son who fails to fill the void.
A Dionysian crown and an alpha and an omega and another son crucified and a demon scratching from beneath the clouded ice trickle-trope his journey and wrack his heart.
Trebor is an old man with a besieged body and a besieged conscience and besieged dreams, there are besieged borders (Russian crossed into the Alps with legal documentation) and besieged cultures (Franco-Swiss, Tahiti-French/Polynesia, France-South Korea) and a besieged Christ (won't explain that in this message, but the traditional symbols are in the film from beginning to end).
A heart is implanted but the guilt is unleashed, the mythical son is not found and the son real son is sacrificed.
L'Intrus is a spectacular, sensorial, kinesthetic experience, non-linear motion and reflux, transalpining and transmarining, transplanting and transplaning, transmigrating and transubstantiating, just wow, I've watched this three times and each time I was left breathless by just the vertiginous sensorial experience.
An infant smiles at his father, a father searches for an abandoned son, a son has his heart torn out.
Trebor troubadours cross countries and oceans, from the Alps of Switzerland to the Polynesian paradise of Tahiti, in the hope of obtaining a new heart and finding his abandoned son and escaping his conscious.
He swims and cycles and walks and sails and flies, in hot pursuit of a heart, in hot pursuit of a son who may or may not exist, in hot flight from past guilt, in hot tangles of dreams that may or may not be figments of his overheated brain.
His internal experience of his failing heart and new heart and guilty conscience and colonized environment transforms his familiar world into the unfamiliar, and psychological vertigo rises up and chases him into the shifting quicksands of his mind; what he remembers is real, what he remembers is not real; still chained to the Alps, he tumbles through limitless space, and the spatial disorientation is transformed by Denis into an exhilarating, whirling, fluid, cinematographic extravaganza of sensorial movement, with Trebor's potential for balance and self-reconciliation unattainable as the ghosts of his conscience peck away at his heart.
He's a stranger in strange land with a stranger living within him and a stranger shadowing him in the daytime and a stranger shadowing him in the evening, wild dogs in front of him and wild dogs behind him, a cross to the left and an empty grave to the right and a coffin in the middle, his soul yearning for a rejuvenation and a resurrection and ascension that are elusive mirages glimpsed in his dreams that burn out his heart.
He is unhomed but not homeless, his shadowed past eclipses him and he's forced to take measure of his own dwelling within a mental/psychological state of statelessness, alienation, disorientation, unhomedness, existential terror, etc.
He is not only suffering from a deathly paralysis of the heart, he's suffering from a cultural and psychological paralysis, which drives him to restructure his life around a formal structure he once abandoned, drives him to achieve a balance of space and place and culture and memory, but his overabundance of cultural memory and guilt and hallucination creates emotional vertigo, derailing him every step of the way.
His existence is rooted in a beloved son he has 100% faith in yet never met, an abandoned son he thinks is perfect and seeks to unite with in order to cleanse his soul, an idolized, cryptic, insubstantial son represented by a false son who fails to fill the void.
A Dionysian crown and an alpha and an omega and another son crucified and a demon scratching from beneath the clouded ice trickle-trope his journey and wrack his heart.
Trebor is an old man with a besieged body and a besieged conscience and besieged dreams, there are besieged borders (Russian crossed into the Alps with legal documentation) and besieged cultures (Franco-Swiss, Tahiti-French/Polynesia, France-South Korea) and a besieged Christ (won't explain that in this message, but the traditional symbols are in the film from beginning to end).
A heart is implanted but the guilt is unleashed, the mythical son is not found and the son real son is sacrificed.
L'Intrus is a spectacular, sensorial, kinesthetic experience, non-linear motion and reflux, transalpining and transmarining, transplanting and transplaning, transmigrating and transubstantiating, just wow, I've watched this three times and each time I was left breathless by just the vertiginous sensorial experience.
Bathe and lull in waves of floral fragrances and delicious languid sounds and a pageantry of colour The eyes smell and taste wreaths of golden honeysuckle, deep musk of roses, wild thyme, delicate buds of majoram, powdery lavender, savory buttercups, pale milky primroses, freshly sun-baked daisies, burgundy grape bouquets of irises, garlands of lilac, smooth creamy violets, drowsy poppies, sweet cider mandrakes, rosemary pine, licorice fennel, apple chamomile, nectarine columbine, peppermint peonies.......
The mind stretches out languidly to hear and cusp and faun over exquisite musical decorations - wood-wind bird flutterings, fauning drozelets of golden timpani sun lighting deeply shaded areas, harps glittering in amazement at such an endless profusion riotous colour, flutes and oboes joyantly frolicking through vivid idyllic floral intensity, a hint of a glockenspiel lurking at a cat, a tingle of triangle flitting like a butterfly from petal to petal to petal The body lays down in the warm lush summer greenery, breathing deeply of the broad clarinet pulses of snowdrops and periwinkles and and marigolds and crocuses, inhaling sweet tinctures of trumpets strands of daffodils, dozing off in a rhapsody of strings, shaded by streaming bassoon breezes, with violin trills of dragonflies and butterflies and bees and frogs fluttering to-and-fro through the dream, all underscored and carried along by a placid calm gazing woodwind theme that sometimes pronouncedly descends like glares of sunlight heating up one patchy shade to the next as the morning revolves to late afternoon, awakening the body to woodwind arabesques of prismatically festooned overhanging foliage The ears see bees sinking into the inner sanctum of blooms, a thousand calyxes arching and spreading wide to facilitate the bees' furious vibrations, sonically expressed in sustained trilling tremolos of violas and violins, climaxing in ecstatic shivers of the anthers and calyxes felt throughout the entire human body, the orchestra lurching itself up, hesitating, gathering, then honeycombing itself glorious full timeless climax, timeless and breathlessly holding its chords, musically exhausting and recapitulating and re-exhausting itself, a glockenspiel adding extra strokes of colour Flowers sway like censors in the summer light, pollinating the day with intensifying scents, heavenly opiates intensifying the redolent dreamlike hours, the music of the universe Embroidered flute notes flare excited petals that arch towards the sunlight, sailing golden horn notes lustily trustle a waltz through tangled walls of foliage, golden tingles of triangle excitedly kiss intricate lace works of flora with diamond glitters of adoration, pink and orange and yellow and violet flame A river somewhere violas a continuous earthpusle melody slowly upstream, layered harps lap with the rhythm of the water, violins arpeggio up the scale out of the watery stream and fling their their joyous pitch to the sky The ears look for a river because a river theme is in the melody, but alas, Larry Jordan's garden does not have a river, so he instead gifts us with a few intimate treble clefs of a curious black cat and silent female gardener A solo flute windily murmurers through the thick dark clusters of flowers now impenetrable by light, the garden is musically quiet and a garden scene of infinite flowers impossible to stand anywhere without treading on flowers gives way to single flowers set against blackened sunlight, colours and scents and sounds no more yielding, but a midsummer dream
The mind stretches out languidly to hear and cusp and faun over exquisite musical decorations - wood-wind bird flutterings, fauning drozelets of golden timpani sun lighting deeply shaded areas, harps glittering in amazement at such an endless profusion riotous colour, flutes and oboes joyantly frolicking through vivid idyllic floral intensity, a hint of a glockenspiel lurking at a cat, a tingle of triangle flitting like a butterfly from petal to petal to petal The body lays down in the warm lush summer greenery, breathing deeply of the broad clarinet pulses of snowdrops and periwinkles and and marigolds and crocuses, inhaling sweet tinctures of trumpets strands of daffodils, dozing off in a rhapsody of strings, shaded by streaming bassoon breezes, with violin trills of dragonflies and butterflies and bees and frogs fluttering to-and-fro through the dream, all underscored and carried along by a placid calm gazing woodwind theme that sometimes pronouncedly descends like glares of sunlight heating up one patchy shade to the next as the morning revolves to late afternoon, awakening the body to woodwind arabesques of prismatically festooned overhanging foliage The ears see bees sinking into the inner sanctum of blooms, a thousand calyxes arching and spreading wide to facilitate the bees' furious vibrations, sonically expressed in sustained trilling tremolos of violas and violins, climaxing in ecstatic shivers of the anthers and calyxes felt throughout the entire human body, the orchestra lurching itself up, hesitating, gathering, then honeycombing itself glorious full timeless climax, timeless and breathlessly holding its chords, musically exhausting and recapitulating and re-exhausting itself, a glockenspiel adding extra strokes of colour Flowers sway like censors in the summer light, pollinating the day with intensifying scents, heavenly opiates intensifying the redolent dreamlike hours, the music of the universe Embroidered flute notes flare excited petals that arch towards the sunlight, sailing golden horn notes lustily trustle a waltz through tangled walls of foliage, golden tingles of triangle excitedly kiss intricate lace works of flora with diamond glitters of adoration, pink and orange and yellow and violet flame A river somewhere violas a continuous earthpusle melody slowly upstream, layered harps lap with the rhythm of the water, violins arpeggio up the scale out of the watery stream and fling their their joyous pitch to the sky The ears look for a river because a river theme is in the melody, but alas, Larry Jordan's garden does not have a river, so he instead gifts us with a few intimate treble clefs of a curious black cat and silent female gardener A solo flute windily murmurers through the thick dark clusters of flowers now impenetrable by light, the garden is musically quiet and a garden scene of infinite flowers impossible to stand anywhere without treading on flowers gives way to single flowers set against blackened sunlight, colours and scents and sounds no more yielding, but a midsummer dream
The locations were the locations in the letters the narrator read The present-day locations were the locations of yesterday impoverished villages the narrator listed, villages destroyed by poverty a hundred years after the French Revolution of 1789 (lessons not learned) The very first shot was of the multiple revolutions through the Place de la Bastille (hint hint....) The purposeful camera movements were expertly executed to elide the present into the past, to carry viewers on a counterclockwise revolution into the history of revolution and on a clockwise revolution into the unknown future, an ebb and flow structure, the expertise camera work winding back the hands of time These landscapes were the seeds of revolution where revolution was sown The steady panoramic pans of natural landscapes in France framed in human abandonment and Thracianesque decay were contemplative pans meant to recall how the landscapes were once run riot with innumerable people and the hustle-bustle of life and the cries of hunger and upheaval and revolution, and how now in the present the locations are seemingly abandoned, decayed, returning to their natural state, emptied, nothing changed, the landscape itself reclaiming everything that once stood on it The clockwise revolution through the town that began with an empty field (once seeded and sown, the birth of fruit; the field like a womb, seeded and sown, birth of children) then passed by empty abandoned farm buildings hundreds of years old (once the scene of life and energy, children and marriages, play and work, time and tide, etc) and ended with the old cemetery was extremely evocative, hundreds of years of days and nights and tides and time and work and play and death encapsulated in the directors' highly expertise clockwork camera circuit spanning a mere breath of air The camera captured the sound of the wind as it was bending the grass and the trees, a universal metaphor: the poor and the starving were wind who for brief periods of time bent the grass and trees The revolt and revolution continue in the present-day French country as the camera captures clouds breaking up and flocks of birds bursting out of trees, raucous moments briefly overthrowing the landscape requiem, expertise camera work perfectly capturing the spontaneity of clouds and birds The text recited from the book during Part B/Egypt (diptych-structured film) was of 100% interest, it was a passage about an Egyptian peasant revolt and the ensuing Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which nicely enveloped together the first part of the film (Part A: French revolts and revolutions)
One key to understanding this movie is to understand the parallel between 1) the inspired spirit of early Americans with their desire to build a whole new world from the ground up with their own two hands, and their absolute foundational belief in personal responsibility and individual freedom and willingness to die for their freedoms (Atticus' mother alludes to all this when she's reading aloud the details of the rent wars, and the *Catskills historical marker at the end of the film re-enforces all this) and 2) the current dispirited spirit of a generation of people who consider the system failed and ultimately opt to walk out of civil society (into the "cold lands" - an existence outside of society, disenfranchised, marginalised....but the same "cold lands" where people once upon a time built an entire nation from the ground up) and live a life of pure individual freedom and off-the-grid like Atticus's mother, like Carter, like all the country-crossing flea market/swap meet vendors.
This film is all about the scattering of this long-fractured spirit, and whether or not there's any hope of a wind strong enough to catch these scatterings and glue them together to rebuild this fractured America.
Carter (Peter Scanavino) was nude because he was naturalistic and uninhibited, he represented the early Americana nude male in a natural landscape Carter appears to have lived off the grid in woodland wilderness for a very long time, possibly a decade or more, people who live like that, especially people born into off-the-grid regions within the Catskills, are living a life of abject poverty with no electricity, sleeping nude and swimming nude are natural, as is outdoor bathing ( Plenty of young people love swimming nude, and plenty of people sleep in the nude, but the film goes beyond that ) Catskills (filming location) = Hudson River School of art = plethora of paintings depicting nude males in natural landscapes (looking at you, Thomas Eakins) Carter laid down in a choreographed manner, modelling his chiselled physique, almost like he stepped out of an Eakins painting Carter at the cliff with the rolling water with the other young men was straight out of "Kindred Spirits" by Asher Brown Durand, young kindred spirits on a cliff spiriting amidst an impenetrable green wilderness backdrop of boundless woodlands and forested mountains Atticus' mother was raising Atticus to mature into that same early Americana naturalist, uninhibited, complete-individual-freedom-and-release frame of mind-and-spirit Carter's nature carted Atticus further towards maturing into that frame of mind-and-spirit
This film is all about the scattering of this long-fractured spirit, and whether or not there's any hope of a wind strong enough to catch these scatterings and glue them together to rebuild this fractured America.
Carter (Peter Scanavino) was nude because he was naturalistic and uninhibited, he represented the early Americana nude male in a natural landscape Carter appears to have lived off the grid in woodland wilderness for a very long time, possibly a decade or more, people who live like that, especially people born into off-the-grid regions within the Catskills, are living a life of abject poverty with no electricity, sleeping nude and swimming nude are natural, as is outdoor bathing ( Plenty of young people love swimming nude, and plenty of people sleep in the nude, but the film goes beyond that ) Catskills (filming location) = Hudson River School of art = plethora of paintings depicting nude males in natural landscapes (looking at you, Thomas Eakins) Carter laid down in a choreographed manner, modelling his chiselled physique, almost like he stepped out of an Eakins painting Carter at the cliff with the rolling water with the other young men was straight out of "Kindred Spirits" by Asher Brown Durand, young kindred spirits on a cliff spiriting amidst an impenetrable green wilderness backdrop of boundless woodlands and forested mountains Atticus' mother was raising Atticus to mature into that same early Americana naturalist, uninhibited, complete-individual-freedom-and-release frame of mind-and-spirit Carter's nature carted Atticus further towards maturing into that frame of mind-and-spirit
U R Sunhi and Haewon are mega-political-metaphorical films about the general state and fate of Korea Sunhi and Haewon = Korea, Korea on the cusp, Korea yanked around, Korea caught in its past, Korea yearning for more, Korea cheated, Korea bringing joy, Korea bringing pain, Korea trying to please everybody, Korea f-qq-d over by everybody, a Korea divided, a Korea trying to unify, etc, the daughters of Korea the future, the sons of Korea trapped, the beguiling nature of diplomatic relations between Korea and her various partners, etc I believe people had a hard time with Haewon because of its seemingly sloppy technical direction combined with the seemingly repetitive plot motif (student / teacher relationship) that the director is fixated on But Haewon is not sloppy at all, the film is free, it's purposely free from all cinematic constraints and tricks, no script, no cues, nothing rehearsed, a state of complete freedom....
This film is completely underrated.
It's a film similar to Will Keenan and Patrick Hasson's Waiting, as well as Adrien Brody's Restaurant and the classic film Breaking Away, which are all about young adults who are stuck and know they're stuck, with little or no chance of breaking free.
Death By Pizza (Delivered) is about an intelligent, free-thinking, artistic young adult (Will, played by David Strictland) who is stuck and waiting, bitter at the world's hypocrisy and bitter at his own lack of direction and desire. Will meets his nemesis, Reed (Ron Eldard), another intelligent young adult who's so bitter, he's chosen the path of crime. Both end up helping each other to free themselves of their bitterness, which enables them to get unstuck.
For these young adults, getting unstuck, or, breaking free, can mean both forging ahead into life, and plunging downward into death.
Will's life is filled with the trademarks of a young "stuck" adult: a soul-sucking, sweaty, under-paying job, crude customers, an ex-girlfriend who left him because he was unmotivated, a partial college education with no degree, a house filled with self-made art, and of course the new friend whose ung-dly choices help him to save himself.
It's a film similar to Will Keenan and Patrick Hasson's Waiting, as well as Adrien Brody's Restaurant and the classic film Breaking Away, which are all about young adults who are stuck and know they're stuck, with little or no chance of breaking free.
Death By Pizza (Delivered) is about an intelligent, free-thinking, artistic young adult (Will, played by David Strictland) who is stuck and waiting, bitter at the world's hypocrisy and bitter at his own lack of direction and desire. Will meets his nemesis, Reed (Ron Eldard), another intelligent young adult who's so bitter, he's chosen the path of crime. Both end up helping each other to free themselves of their bitterness, which enables them to get unstuck.
For these young adults, getting unstuck, or, breaking free, can mean both forging ahead into life, and plunging downward into death.
Will's life is filled with the trademarks of a young "stuck" adult: a soul-sucking, sweaty, under-paying job, crude customers, an ex-girlfriend who left him because he was unmotivated, a partial college education with no degree, a house filled with self-made art, and of course the new friend whose ung-dly choices help him to save himself.
Andrzej Wajda's film tells a story of Marta, a middle-aged woman married to a small town doctor. Marta searches for happiness in the arms of a much younger man, Bogus. Their relationship is as innocent and fresh as the smell of the sweet rush that grows in the river where Marta and Bogus swam on their first date. But, just when everything seems to be going well for them, Bogus drowns, entangled in the roots of sweet rush he was trying to pick for Marta.
Wajda's film follows a two-pronged approach. On the one hand we see the actor reconstructing the last months of her husband's life in a simple but extremely touching way and, on the other, we follow the struggles of her fictitious character, who cannot get over the death of the man with whom she was so happy. Both of them have to cope with painful experiences - the actor with the death of her husband, and her character with the additional loss of her two sons who died in the Warsaw Uprising during the Second World War. Thus, the two women, Krystyna and Marta, eventually merge to become one and the same person.
Sweet Rush/Sweet Flag/Calamus, not only refers to a Greek Myth that parallels the film, but refers to a real fragrant weed that when rubbed, wafts a calming fragrant odour that drowses the senses, can lull you into a drifting, soothing, dream state of reverie, even an hallucinatory state, sharpens mental senses and clarity, is a alleviating purifier, an internal cleanser of the physical body, nourishes the entire body, relieves stress, is a restorative, etc, and when rubbed to harshly, when the reeds are crushed, the reed dies, and when you inhale or consume too much of the reed in any form, it can supposedly cause deadly cancer.
Our life is a sweet rush that vigorously flourishes along the rivers of this earth, our lives are the blood of our ancestors, rub us gently and our fragrance, our transient, ghostly reflection, wafts and murmurs and ripples through the clear waters of time, sweetly carrying forth the memories of our pasts and presents and futures, cross-pollinating our consciousness and subconsciousness, carrying us down into the deepest depths and lifting us up to the sweetest heights, but rub the rush too harshly, we are crushed, and death, and death.
Marta dives into the sweet rush of youth that may or may not be reality, it may be her waking fantasy hallucination which she rubbed into reality as a defense mechanism to deter herself from pondering her innate feeling that her husband's death was imminent. The romance is either the recasting of a past romance she had when she was a youth, or a romance she wishes she had with consummated with a young beau, or a romance she wishes she had with her husband but could ave had because he was much older than her. This waking fantasy, this sweet rush transports her through a halcyon summer setting where youth and beauty are truth and immortality, everything is the here and the now and the light, and death holds no domination. The man she breathes into life has a girlfriend, her as a young girl, her travelling far beyond the man's grasp, sailing beyond the sweet rush of an unfilled romance, and unfilled youth, already generating regrets, heading towards a war and marriage and children, who are untimely struck down by death.
Lulled into a waking dream-state reverie by the blending fragrance of the rushes and the cadence of her memories, she almost loses her complete grasp of reality; she engrafts into life the mystic undulating aureate reeds of her memory and breathes the honey of it down as her reality; the shadow of herself as a young women glides forth half-seen beyond her peripheral, the sheer gold perfection of amour eludes her, passion dimly discovered, the golden young man the embodiment of elusive memories, elusive dreams, elusive thoughts that stream through her soul sweetly when transiently glittering, but drown her when she breaks the surface, reality terrifying her, the dream shaken off, crushing the sweet rush, the golden young man, the memory, close to her heart
Marta the middle-aged woman picks up where Marta the youth rushes off and misses the sweetness of the time, crushing a young man's spirit. The closer middle-aged Marta comes to a sexual communion with the man, the closer to the surface the reality of her husband's imminent death she nears, and the moment Bogus (Bogus? A Bogus man? A fictitious relationship, a fictitious memory of something she never experienced, the sweet rush of youth, the sweet rush of a life stripped of that which made it sweet - her children and husband? Why must the lover be....Bogus?) penetrates the depths of her subconscious, purification begins, and the rushes crush her fantasies and quench her desires, the overdose of the sweet fragrance restores her to reality, and she walks away from the film set into the harsh reality that she not only can no longer experience the fragrant height of life with her husband Edward Klosinski, the film's cinematographer, but never had the chance to experience a sweet, sensual youthful romance with him because they were already well past their prime when they met and married. Shivering and wet, rain and a steel gray bridge, traffic and city buildings, a dying body, a dying life, hauling the nets when a shoal of immortality swims by. (Arseni Tarkovsky)
I don't believe in omens or fear Forebodings. I flee from neither slander Nor from poison. Death does not exist. Everyone's immortal. Everything is too. No point in fearing death at seventeen, Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light; Neither death, nor darkness, exists. We're all already on the seashore; I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets When a shoal of immortality swims by.
Wajda's film follows a two-pronged approach. On the one hand we see the actor reconstructing the last months of her husband's life in a simple but extremely touching way and, on the other, we follow the struggles of her fictitious character, who cannot get over the death of the man with whom she was so happy. Both of them have to cope with painful experiences - the actor with the death of her husband, and her character with the additional loss of her two sons who died in the Warsaw Uprising during the Second World War. Thus, the two women, Krystyna and Marta, eventually merge to become one and the same person.
Sweet Rush/Sweet Flag/Calamus, not only refers to a Greek Myth that parallels the film, but refers to a real fragrant weed that when rubbed, wafts a calming fragrant odour that drowses the senses, can lull you into a drifting, soothing, dream state of reverie, even an hallucinatory state, sharpens mental senses and clarity, is a alleviating purifier, an internal cleanser of the physical body, nourishes the entire body, relieves stress, is a restorative, etc, and when rubbed to harshly, when the reeds are crushed, the reed dies, and when you inhale or consume too much of the reed in any form, it can supposedly cause deadly cancer.
Our life is a sweet rush that vigorously flourishes along the rivers of this earth, our lives are the blood of our ancestors, rub us gently and our fragrance, our transient, ghostly reflection, wafts and murmurs and ripples through the clear waters of time, sweetly carrying forth the memories of our pasts and presents and futures, cross-pollinating our consciousness and subconsciousness, carrying us down into the deepest depths and lifting us up to the sweetest heights, but rub the rush too harshly, we are crushed, and death, and death.
Marta dives into the sweet rush of youth that may or may not be reality, it may be her waking fantasy hallucination which she rubbed into reality as a defense mechanism to deter herself from pondering her innate feeling that her husband's death was imminent. The romance is either the recasting of a past romance she had when she was a youth, or a romance she wishes she had with consummated with a young beau, or a romance she wishes she had with her husband but could ave had because he was much older than her. This waking fantasy, this sweet rush transports her through a halcyon summer setting where youth and beauty are truth and immortality, everything is the here and the now and the light, and death holds no domination. The man she breathes into life has a girlfriend, her as a young girl, her travelling far beyond the man's grasp, sailing beyond the sweet rush of an unfilled romance, and unfilled youth, already generating regrets, heading towards a war and marriage and children, who are untimely struck down by death.
Lulled into a waking dream-state reverie by the blending fragrance of the rushes and the cadence of her memories, she almost loses her complete grasp of reality; she engrafts into life the mystic undulating aureate reeds of her memory and breathes the honey of it down as her reality; the shadow of herself as a young women glides forth half-seen beyond her peripheral, the sheer gold perfection of amour eludes her, passion dimly discovered, the golden young man the embodiment of elusive memories, elusive dreams, elusive thoughts that stream through her soul sweetly when transiently glittering, but drown her when she breaks the surface, reality terrifying her, the dream shaken off, crushing the sweet rush, the golden young man, the memory, close to her heart
Marta the middle-aged woman picks up where Marta the youth rushes off and misses the sweetness of the time, crushing a young man's spirit. The closer middle-aged Marta comes to a sexual communion with the man, the closer to the surface the reality of her husband's imminent death she nears, and the moment Bogus (Bogus? A Bogus man? A fictitious relationship, a fictitious memory of something she never experienced, the sweet rush of youth, the sweet rush of a life stripped of that which made it sweet - her children and husband? Why must the lover be....Bogus?) penetrates the depths of her subconscious, purification begins, and the rushes crush her fantasies and quench her desires, the overdose of the sweet fragrance restores her to reality, and she walks away from the film set into the harsh reality that she not only can no longer experience the fragrant height of life with her husband Edward Klosinski, the film's cinematographer, but never had the chance to experience a sweet, sensual youthful romance with him because they were already well past their prime when they met and married. Shivering and wet, rain and a steel gray bridge, traffic and city buildings, a dying body, a dying life, hauling the nets when a shoal of immortality swims by. (Arseni Tarkovsky)
I don't believe in omens or fear Forebodings. I flee from neither slander Nor from poison. Death does not exist. Everyone's immortal. Everything is too. No point in fearing death at seventeen, Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light; Neither death, nor darkness, exists. We're all already on the seashore; I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets When a shoal of immortality swims by.
All creation exists as an allegory of the soul: the microcosm and macrocosm form a (mystical) metonymy in which biblical events are interpreted and reformulated as phases in the development of the soul, and its relation to the phenomenal world. Kosmos (2010) by Reha Erdem is such an allegory, a parable of cosmic biblical proportion.
The film opens with inhuman howling winds whirling round and round over a white wintry snows-cape, and on its rounds the wind returns (Eccles 1.6), snowing the whole world over, shifting to night, with its hoary silver-gray sky menacing a vacant snows-cape, shifting to day again, a pure argent white snows-cape undisturbed and unperturbed by a background speck of movement, a lone feral-like man running breathlessly, at full speed towards white nothingness, wailing at whatever he's left behind - a vast boundless vacant snows-cape of white nothingness. But then the run ends at the snowed-over cliff, and he takes in the view, right out of an impressionistic painting: the outline of a snow-swept medieval town sculptured by the blizzard and hewed right out of the rocks of the valley, domes and spires of trees and serpentine roads completing the vista. The wind echoes, the sound of emptiness reverberates across all the corners of the earth, synclastically returning to this medieval town, hallowed out of the stones of the earth.
The man, among rocks, a whirling wine dark river tessellating impartially alongside him as he takes a knotted mess of money out his shoe. Catacoustical, tintinnabulation sounds of nature and mechanical melt into each other: fermenting water and crunching snow and echoing rocks spectral intersecting with distant sounds of machinery and battle. A young girl, howling a wail, and the man, abandoning his wealth to the rocks, runs responds to the call: he runs into the ferocious slate ice waves to save a child drifting unconscious in the water. Breathing the child back into life, he then collapses, his winded breathing the sound of a wounded animal.
Cross-cut of the moon: representing the cyclical movement of day and night, the moon (and sun) is prime evidence in nature of the repetitive cyclical character of reality (Ecclesiastes), a notion that is a radical challenge to the conception of time and sequence inscribed in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible, where things are imagined to progress meaningfully towards fulfillment. Trademark of Reha Erdem: the moon, a stationary indifferent dazzlingly bright spherical ornament, obnubilated and obtenebrated by pillars of clouds and the impenetrable murky blackness of night. Then we hear a cow's heated, guttural mooing, moans from the bowels of the earth, and brightly-lit circular clocks whose hands are stuck, stuttering, no forward motion, and looks almost as if the hands are trying to move counterclockwise.
Battal, a prophet, a wild, feral man with a wondrously mellifluous voice flowing with honey, trilling ululations like a wolverine, his veriloquence enrapturing the townspeople just as Ecclesiastes has enraptured listeners and readers for over fifteen-hundred years. Most of his dialogue straight out of Ecclesiastes, a few bits come from the Book of Job and Song Of Songs. I must segue into Ecclesiastes for a moment, before returning to the film.
Howling wolves and cawing birds and whirling water and tintinnabulations of bullet spray ricochet against a ululating Battal chasing the girl, the masculine and feminine are primitive and hymnal and delightful and sensual and fierce and stimulating as the sun and the moon and the river.
Pieces of music by A Silver Mt. Zion rake through certain scenes like sunlight (or G-d's light...), the music a golden threnody of weltschmerz, the musicality evincing the sadness over the evils of the world that encapsulates the sum total of the mood of the film and the director's mindset as he was composing this cinematic masterwork.
A wanderer, hero, a prophet, a wild animal, a mute, a bully, what next? Astral sounds jettison and we see thin cow legs deep in the snow, heated gutturals reminding us of slaughter, and like lighting, a visual of short wave sci-fi sound: circuitously tinseling the tenebrous blackness of night, Saturn's Rings, meteor trails, a time-exposure of millions of car lights streaking by fast in the black of night, spiraling galaxies, and then a plain, a deserted lunar plain ontologically blanked by the consuming expanse of an impenetrable black sky, catch your breath as a city of the plain, formed of fallen stars, shimmers and twinkles across the horizon, a radiating band of light trumping the ineluctably of dark.....
And this is just the beginning.
Battal preaches to any and all, chases after three women, performs miracles, self-heals his cigarette burn, spirits out the infernal cough of an ailing old tailor, pleasures the teacher out of her migraines, guilts the boy who stole money from him into speaking again after being mute for a year), steals money to pay for sustenance but also gives the stolen money to others in need, howls like an animal in pursuit of Neptune, scales trees and roars ferociously and religiously peregrinates through the squalid, run down streets of the town where rabid dogs prowl and where buildings are vacant empty shells. Battal, wanderer, foreigner, hero, radical prophet, thief, wild animal, lover, healer, hedonistic, generous.
Kosmos (2010) laments the lack of faith that afflicts our modern world and the contemporary human, the lack of faith in existence, nature, humankind, the interconnectedness of the world.
Battal's dialogue is directly lifted from, in film order, Ecclesiastes 9:2-9:5, Ecclesiastes 3:16-3:20, Ecclesiastes 2:20-2:26, Song Of Songs (Solomon) 4:13-4:15, Song Of Songs (Solomon) 6:10, Ecclesiastes 11:2- 11:3, Ecclesiastes 7:29, Ecclesiastes 4:9-4:10, Ecclesiastes 4:11, Ecclesiastes 5:2, Job 15:14, Job 22:14
The film opens with inhuman howling winds whirling round and round over a white wintry snows-cape, and on its rounds the wind returns (Eccles 1.6), snowing the whole world over, shifting to night, with its hoary silver-gray sky menacing a vacant snows-cape, shifting to day again, a pure argent white snows-cape undisturbed and unperturbed by a background speck of movement, a lone feral-like man running breathlessly, at full speed towards white nothingness, wailing at whatever he's left behind - a vast boundless vacant snows-cape of white nothingness. But then the run ends at the snowed-over cliff, and he takes in the view, right out of an impressionistic painting: the outline of a snow-swept medieval town sculptured by the blizzard and hewed right out of the rocks of the valley, domes and spires of trees and serpentine roads completing the vista. The wind echoes, the sound of emptiness reverberates across all the corners of the earth, synclastically returning to this medieval town, hallowed out of the stones of the earth.
The man, among rocks, a whirling wine dark river tessellating impartially alongside him as he takes a knotted mess of money out his shoe. Catacoustical, tintinnabulation sounds of nature and mechanical melt into each other: fermenting water and crunching snow and echoing rocks spectral intersecting with distant sounds of machinery and battle. A young girl, howling a wail, and the man, abandoning his wealth to the rocks, runs responds to the call: he runs into the ferocious slate ice waves to save a child drifting unconscious in the water. Breathing the child back into life, he then collapses, his winded breathing the sound of a wounded animal.
Cross-cut of the moon: representing the cyclical movement of day and night, the moon (and sun) is prime evidence in nature of the repetitive cyclical character of reality (Ecclesiastes), a notion that is a radical challenge to the conception of time and sequence inscribed in Genesis and elsewhere in the Bible, where things are imagined to progress meaningfully towards fulfillment. Trademark of Reha Erdem: the moon, a stationary indifferent dazzlingly bright spherical ornament, obnubilated and obtenebrated by pillars of clouds and the impenetrable murky blackness of night. Then we hear a cow's heated, guttural mooing, moans from the bowels of the earth, and brightly-lit circular clocks whose hands are stuck, stuttering, no forward motion, and looks almost as if the hands are trying to move counterclockwise.
Battal, a prophet, a wild, feral man with a wondrously mellifluous voice flowing with honey, trilling ululations like a wolverine, his veriloquence enrapturing the townspeople just as Ecclesiastes has enraptured listeners and readers for over fifteen-hundred years. Most of his dialogue straight out of Ecclesiastes, a few bits come from the Book of Job and Song Of Songs. I must segue into Ecclesiastes for a moment, before returning to the film.
Howling wolves and cawing birds and whirling water and tintinnabulations of bullet spray ricochet against a ululating Battal chasing the girl, the masculine and feminine are primitive and hymnal and delightful and sensual and fierce and stimulating as the sun and the moon and the river.
Pieces of music by A Silver Mt. Zion rake through certain scenes like sunlight (or G-d's light...), the music a golden threnody of weltschmerz, the musicality evincing the sadness over the evils of the world that encapsulates the sum total of the mood of the film and the director's mindset as he was composing this cinematic masterwork.
A wanderer, hero, a prophet, a wild animal, a mute, a bully, what next? Astral sounds jettison and we see thin cow legs deep in the snow, heated gutturals reminding us of slaughter, and like lighting, a visual of short wave sci-fi sound: circuitously tinseling the tenebrous blackness of night, Saturn's Rings, meteor trails, a time-exposure of millions of car lights streaking by fast in the black of night, spiraling galaxies, and then a plain, a deserted lunar plain ontologically blanked by the consuming expanse of an impenetrable black sky, catch your breath as a city of the plain, formed of fallen stars, shimmers and twinkles across the horizon, a radiating band of light trumping the ineluctably of dark.....
And this is just the beginning.
Battal preaches to any and all, chases after three women, performs miracles, self-heals his cigarette burn, spirits out the infernal cough of an ailing old tailor, pleasures the teacher out of her migraines, guilts the boy who stole money from him into speaking again after being mute for a year), steals money to pay for sustenance but also gives the stolen money to others in need, howls like an animal in pursuit of Neptune, scales trees and roars ferociously and religiously peregrinates through the squalid, run down streets of the town where rabid dogs prowl and where buildings are vacant empty shells. Battal, wanderer, foreigner, hero, radical prophet, thief, wild animal, lover, healer, hedonistic, generous.
Kosmos (2010) laments the lack of faith that afflicts our modern world and the contemporary human, the lack of faith in existence, nature, humankind, the interconnectedness of the world.
Battal's dialogue is directly lifted from, in film order, Ecclesiastes 9:2-9:5, Ecclesiastes 3:16-3:20, Ecclesiastes 2:20-2:26, Song Of Songs (Solomon) 4:13-4:15, Song Of Songs (Solomon) 6:10, Ecclesiastes 11:2- 11:3, Ecclesiastes 7:29, Ecclesiastes 4:9-4:10, Ecclesiastes 4:11, Ecclesiastes 5:2, Job 15:14, Job 22:14
Ontological Eye: pure white light, hovering: Creation: formless diaphanous white cloud nebulae veiling vast primordial impenetrable expanses of black and olive-green boreal spruces and pines, canopy after canopy, unplumbed profundity, the teeming earth-nourishing impenetrable wilderness filling the face of the antediluvian deep. The Divine Eye hung there in arrested immobility, surprised to see above the earth again. I hear the breath of all space, cosmogony choreographed into existence, indestructible, time untapped, nature's possibilities as numerous as the stars in the heavens and as the sands on the shore of the sea. A sea of tree tops stretching and spiring skyward into the heavens, untouched forestry multiplied most mightily. Watery delta wetlands, a shimmering river watercourse (the Athabasca), the waters under the heavens gathered in one place, swiftly rushing alongside Alberta's rich Boreal Forest, a forest yielding seeds of each kind contained within it upon the earth, replenishing itself and its domain for eternity, the heavens and the earth completed, and all their array.
The river branches, curves, and carves out teardrop-shaped mounds of land. Cutting a powerful strong course through boundless burgeoning wilderness, pearled sky above and river below hugged by limitless vegetation, the Ontological Eye dips down to take a closer look at water that should be swarming with swarms of living creatures, water that should be shimmering with the divine spark of the sun as it should. The river, unnatural, sullied, poised, the Eye refusing to believe the refuse, this mephitic, foul exhalation from earth, corrupted currents, the Eye pulling up and way in disbelief, past white sky into clouds of clouds and the Eye slowly pans over a metropolis (Fort McMurray), unholy trinity of water and air and city, an unholy cosmogram, then gliding into pacifying powder blue and white ocean haze filling the screen, zooming back and it's pollution from smokestacks, massive quantities of carbon dioxide released into the air, livid flames licking the goodness of out the sky and spewing back foulness, the Divine Eye, having had enough, pulls back and zooms out, and there it is, the hidden ugliness that the powers that be do not want you to see, a slagland wasteland out of a fantasy novel, the landscape slagheaped and scorched, spavined and vitiated, legions of beige mud streaked with black bitumen, the disunity of scenery causing the Eye to once again become immobilized and arrested above the earth again, outraged to see the earth itself was filled with outrage. The flaming heat of smokestacks destroying the Creation of the flaming heat of whatever prevailing cosmological theory the viewer cleaves to.
Deep tracks in the landscape look like bare uprooted trees unnaturally stretched out on a torture wrack mazarine lithochromotics of uprooted roots, polluted lagoons the shape of tear-drops (officially called 'tailing ponds', perhaps named after the tail of a teardrop....), the water opening its eyes and crying, tortured eyes, tortured ghosts, golden-coloured lava lunar landscape, clouds smoke as the Tower of a bitumen upgrader plant (Syncrude) emerges from view, flanked by a square-shaped football-field size courtyard comprised of polluted water, as the angle shifts and smoke cascades left, I see a face: the building is the nose, the square water is an eye, the horizontal machinery is the mouth.
From this moment forward, I've lost my mind, because not only do I externally and internally see and feel the disunity of the microcosm and macrocosm, but my mind gets completely tangled up in the union of things that should not be a union, I see things that I should not be seeing, as if I've suffered through a temporary degenerative metamorphosis of sanity.
The Camera Eye has now become the consciousness of the machinery looking at itself and looking with....awe? insouciance? celebration? at the destruction it has wrought. It's consciousness amplifies the deeper it glides into the world of open pit mining. The Camera Eye's robotics are felt as the camera is adjusted to see more clearly. The technical readjustment of the camera, its mechanization, the feeling of helicopter movement, echo the ontological readjustment viewers should be undergoing as their eyes and hearts and minds and souls try to make sense of the destruction they're beholding. The Camera Eye's perspective pondering the choreography of destruction wrought by humankind's industrialized machinations, the Divine Eye arrested at the thought that humankind has created a world where petroleum's power is supreme, the Ontological Eye staggered by what it is seeing: humans filling the earth and conquering it, eliminating the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth. And G-d saw all that We had done, and, look, it wasn't very good.
Humankind, breathtaking in its artistry and destruction Land, thermally crackled and covered in black crud The tar sands, a manifestation of our current oil-based lives, a manifestation that reflects humankind's current lack of awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, a lack of consciousness, a lack of values, a lack of enlightenment, a lack of spirituality, a lack of faith, a lack of thirst for divine enrichment, every illness and every plague in existence humankind bringing down upon itself and this land, the vines are dried up, the fig trees cut off, the pomegranates, the date palms, the apples, all the trees of the field, dried up, for humankind's heart has hardened and its rivers have stopped flowing, the desire for material wealth supplanting the drippings of the honeycombs of nature and G-d, humankind's fires consuming earth in every capacity, leaving behind a wasteland.
Humankind breaching natural limits, moving out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene, a new of era of devolution defined by humankind's biological, chemical, geological transformation of earth's global ecological and environmental systems, key planetary systems.
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?
The river branches, curves, and carves out teardrop-shaped mounds of land. Cutting a powerful strong course through boundless burgeoning wilderness, pearled sky above and river below hugged by limitless vegetation, the Ontological Eye dips down to take a closer look at water that should be swarming with swarms of living creatures, water that should be shimmering with the divine spark of the sun as it should. The river, unnatural, sullied, poised, the Eye refusing to believe the refuse, this mephitic, foul exhalation from earth, corrupted currents, the Eye pulling up and way in disbelief, past white sky into clouds of clouds and the Eye slowly pans over a metropolis (Fort McMurray), unholy trinity of water and air and city, an unholy cosmogram, then gliding into pacifying powder blue and white ocean haze filling the screen, zooming back and it's pollution from smokestacks, massive quantities of carbon dioxide released into the air, livid flames licking the goodness of out the sky and spewing back foulness, the Divine Eye, having had enough, pulls back and zooms out, and there it is, the hidden ugliness that the powers that be do not want you to see, a slagland wasteland out of a fantasy novel, the landscape slagheaped and scorched, spavined and vitiated, legions of beige mud streaked with black bitumen, the disunity of scenery causing the Eye to once again become immobilized and arrested above the earth again, outraged to see the earth itself was filled with outrage. The flaming heat of smokestacks destroying the Creation of the flaming heat of whatever prevailing cosmological theory the viewer cleaves to.
Deep tracks in the landscape look like bare uprooted trees unnaturally stretched out on a torture wrack mazarine lithochromotics of uprooted roots, polluted lagoons the shape of tear-drops (officially called 'tailing ponds', perhaps named after the tail of a teardrop....), the water opening its eyes and crying, tortured eyes, tortured ghosts, golden-coloured lava lunar landscape, clouds smoke as the Tower of a bitumen upgrader plant (Syncrude) emerges from view, flanked by a square-shaped football-field size courtyard comprised of polluted water, as the angle shifts and smoke cascades left, I see a face: the building is the nose, the square water is an eye, the horizontal machinery is the mouth.
From this moment forward, I've lost my mind, because not only do I externally and internally see and feel the disunity of the microcosm and macrocosm, but my mind gets completely tangled up in the union of things that should not be a union, I see things that I should not be seeing, as if I've suffered through a temporary degenerative metamorphosis of sanity.
The Camera Eye has now become the consciousness of the machinery looking at itself and looking with....awe? insouciance? celebration? at the destruction it has wrought. It's consciousness amplifies the deeper it glides into the world of open pit mining. The Camera Eye's robotics are felt as the camera is adjusted to see more clearly. The technical readjustment of the camera, its mechanization, the feeling of helicopter movement, echo the ontological readjustment viewers should be undergoing as their eyes and hearts and minds and souls try to make sense of the destruction they're beholding. The Camera Eye's perspective pondering the choreography of destruction wrought by humankind's industrialized machinations, the Divine Eye arrested at the thought that humankind has created a world where petroleum's power is supreme, the Ontological Eye staggered by what it is seeing: humans filling the earth and conquering it, eliminating the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth. And G-d saw all that We had done, and, look, it wasn't very good.
Humankind, breathtaking in its artistry and destruction Land, thermally crackled and covered in black crud The tar sands, a manifestation of our current oil-based lives, a manifestation that reflects humankind's current lack of awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, a lack of consciousness, a lack of values, a lack of enlightenment, a lack of spirituality, a lack of faith, a lack of thirst for divine enrichment, every illness and every plague in existence humankind bringing down upon itself and this land, the vines are dried up, the fig trees cut off, the pomegranates, the date palms, the apples, all the trees of the field, dried up, for humankind's heart has hardened and its rivers have stopped flowing, the desire for material wealth supplanting the drippings of the honeycombs of nature and G-d, humankind's fires consuming earth in every capacity, leaving behind a wasteland.
Humankind breaching natural limits, moving out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene, a new of era of devolution defined by humankind's biological, chemical, geological transformation of earth's global ecological and environmental systems, key planetary systems.
I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?
Pharaonic Labour. 450 years of medieval colonialist servitude, then machines.
Machines: deliverance or dispossession and displacement? Lack of social/cultural/infrastructural evolution for 450 years, sun and sea and salt and fish, barren landscape, anachronistic idyllic utopian machine, inhabitants fixed unchanging volitionless coefficients for 450 years, until an external colonialistic entity introduces variation in the form of machinery/industrialization.
Sea salt is what remains when water is spent, when matter is spent, when the body is spent, when energy is spent, a fusion of sunlight and water crystalized into a bright glowing white geometrical structure, a cubic structure seemingly forged from liquid light energy, dregs, ashes, dust, classified as a mineral, a mineral comprised of 80 essential chemical elements, a mineral essential in sustaining human and animal and ocean life, in addition to many plant lives. Salt is essential to amniotic fluid; like the seas and oceans, amniotic fluid is extremely salty and that salty environment is necessary to producing and fostering the growth of the human embryo.
The human mechanics of salt milling parallel anatomical interactions of salt and water: pre-programmed robotic factoryline clockwork, precise, balanced, each gesture and and cellular process hereditary. Except sea salt mining necessitates dehydration of water from shallow water pockets in order to isolate and extract salt, whereas the human body, replete with oceans of water within the cells and throughout the body, necessitates a perfect balance of salt and water to avoid the debilitating and lethal effects of dehydration.
It's hard to lambast the exploitative machine of salt mining because salt is essential. Everybody needs salt and somebody has to extract it. The director muted the political/social critique, instead translating the labour into something that is part of the natural order of the universe of Araya, the people a special species created for the sole purpose of salt extraction, an approach that invites challenging questions. Isn't human labour part of the natural order of the universe? What is wrong with manual labour? Do we really want to introduce mechanical industrialization in such a purely natural environment? Do we really want to introduce into this environment all the social/political mechanisms designed to protect workers and enhance their quality of life, mechanisms that always do as much harm as good? Why interrupt something that is not as bad as it appears to be? Fruit pickers and slaughterhouse workers and landfill/soild-waste workers in the USA have it 1000x worse than the people of Araya did 50-something years ago pre-machinery. There is nothing wrong about people choosing to live an isolatory life of salt milling and fishing. Their lives are free of all the capitalistic consumeristic materialistic poisons destroying most of the world, so why introduce those trappings there? It's a double-edged sword, local inhabitants doing all the hard work is colonialist exploitation and must be stopped but "stopped" really means "replaced by machines" and we know that really means all the trappings of the west are unleashed into a purely natural traditional environment, and two of those trapping (industrialization, environmental degradation) visually punctuate the end of the film. Many challenging issues raised in Araya. A bounty of issues that are dominating the social/political spectrum right now.
Machines: deliverance or dispossession and displacement? Lack of social/cultural/infrastructural evolution for 450 years, sun and sea and salt and fish, barren landscape, anachronistic idyllic utopian machine, inhabitants fixed unchanging volitionless coefficients for 450 years, until an external colonialistic entity introduces variation in the form of machinery/industrialization.
Sea salt is what remains when water is spent, when matter is spent, when the body is spent, when energy is spent, a fusion of sunlight and water crystalized into a bright glowing white geometrical structure, a cubic structure seemingly forged from liquid light energy, dregs, ashes, dust, classified as a mineral, a mineral comprised of 80 essential chemical elements, a mineral essential in sustaining human and animal and ocean life, in addition to many plant lives. Salt is essential to amniotic fluid; like the seas and oceans, amniotic fluid is extremely salty and that salty environment is necessary to producing and fostering the growth of the human embryo.
The human mechanics of salt milling parallel anatomical interactions of salt and water: pre-programmed robotic factoryline clockwork, precise, balanced, each gesture and and cellular process hereditary. Except sea salt mining necessitates dehydration of water from shallow water pockets in order to isolate and extract salt, whereas the human body, replete with oceans of water within the cells and throughout the body, necessitates a perfect balance of salt and water to avoid the debilitating and lethal effects of dehydration.
It's hard to lambast the exploitative machine of salt mining because salt is essential. Everybody needs salt and somebody has to extract it. The director muted the political/social critique, instead translating the labour into something that is part of the natural order of the universe of Araya, the people a special species created for the sole purpose of salt extraction, an approach that invites challenging questions. Isn't human labour part of the natural order of the universe? What is wrong with manual labour? Do we really want to introduce mechanical industrialization in such a purely natural environment? Do we really want to introduce into this environment all the social/political mechanisms designed to protect workers and enhance their quality of life, mechanisms that always do as much harm as good? Why interrupt something that is not as bad as it appears to be? Fruit pickers and slaughterhouse workers and landfill/soild-waste workers in the USA have it 1000x worse than the people of Araya did 50-something years ago pre-machinery. There is nothing wrong about people choosing to live an isolatory life of salt milling and fishing. Their lives are free of all the capitalistic consumeristic materialistic poisons destroying most of the world, so why introduce those trappings there? It's a double-edged sword, local inhabitants doing all the hard work is colonialist exploitation and must be stopped but "stopped" really means "replaced by machines" and we know that really means all the trappings of the west are unleashed into a purely natural traditional environment, and two of those trapping (industrialization, environmental degradation) visually punctuate the end of the film. Many challenging issues raised in Araya. A bounty of issues that are dominating the social/political spectrum right now.
Like a symphony the film has four movements, the first is a lively ode to soil: its creation, purpose, function, diversity, aesthetic beauty; the second is a gently rolling patchwork plow across the nascent global spread of organic sustainable farming methods; the third is rapid round-up of front line anthropogenic threats to our planet and the role sustainable organic farming and nutrient-rich soil will play in averting those threats as well as radically reorienting the way we live our lives; and the fourth and final movement occurs after the credits roll: the movement of we the viewers, the movement of our consciousness towards a science-based awareness of our earth that better informs our choices, a movement of responsibility for this planet, a movement into our front yard/backyard to begin our own gardens and composting, a movement towards organic food, the fourth movement is what we the viewer take away from the viewing and re-invest back into this world we live in, and that movement is in our hands The film is a visual feast transforming the earth into desert food Earth in space; sunlight glows down on glaciated region, next shot shows elliptical swath of sun glow over glaciated region (Norway); sunlight gives and earth receives A glacier in Norway; rock ground down by water; luscious creamy folds of mineral; viscous and seminal and spermy and pearly; nature's amniotic elixir; biblical humus from the soil to fashion humans ('adamah' means the soil), pottery folds ready to be swirled into earthenware, mineral slough ready to be soldiered into the pencil, mineral newly minted for casting into coin and printing into paper currency; molten cement and granite ready to pour into the foundations; congealing lava spent of fury; raw cookie dough ready for baking; thick loamy creamery to churn into a vat of homemade pistachio ice cream; buttermilk biscuit batter or doughnut glaze or almond mocha pie puree; vanilla mint malted shake; portobello soup; a poultice for regeneration; this creamy mineral is the constituent ingredient of the recipe, the porridge, the quickening gruel, the beginning of soil, a floe/flow of natural capital And so it begins, life complexes upon itself, living things growing on themselves Dr. Ignacio Chapela digs out (with what looks like a large cake cutter) a large carbon cube of peat that descends downward a thousand years in age, with wild green grass on top and strong egg white roots trailing down; looks like a super-sized chocolate brownie, a thickly textured richly fluffed intricately porous and tunneled double-handed block of double-decadent devil's food cake laced with vanilla candy strips yum yum yum, then he digs out a bouquet of chocolate cotton candy, flips the chunks over and they look like succulent blocks of double-decadent chocolate icing An underwater shot of pure white coral floating within blackness, friable like soil, carbon and calcium trappers, latticework sugar domes of white sprinkles and white nonpareils (aka Sno-Caps), confectionery crystals, sugar plums, frosty snowflakes, cellular configurations, star structures, then the scientist lifts up square blocks of the sandy oat bran and they look like rice krispies treats, his fingers crumble the blocks down, delicate matrices of diverse soil crumble at a touch, keystone infrastructures propping up existence are crumbling because of the human touch A sequence in Hawaii is a visual presentation of Creation and fertilization and cataclysm, of perpetual geographic, biologic, thermodynamic activity, the law of the conservation of energy and the first law of thermodynamics on display in perpetuity Soil has parents just like we have parents; wind is the parent of the Palouse loess, bringing clay and sand together; other parents include but are not limited to water: overflowing waters of the Mississippi deposit alluvium, a spectacular aerial shot of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain follows, a flood of sunlit water gilding an expanse of green farmland with heavenly alchemy; next shot is the actual alluvial deposit, its harmonious design a grand universal tree of life magnifying the interrelation of everything, its roots deep in the earth and its branches scrolling celestial ward, our soil is rooted deep in the earth and stratifies itself upward then branches outward to generate and maintain everything we need to exist; 70% of the world's soil is immigrant soil, its constituent parts carried across the earth by wind and water before finally settling into a marriage to birth soil The next sequence is a Peter Greenwayesque visual metalpesis of soil taxonomy, accompanied by individual lively brass musical themes representing each type of soil A superb watercolour animation about photosynthesis links together photosynthesis with cellular processes, galactic processes, and sperm-ova fertilization Life below ground mirrors life in the cells mirrors life above ground mirrors life in the cosmicsphere A quick montage showing the beauty of decomposition and (wormy) organisms, there are many gorgeous (and heavily-metaphorical) time-lapse moments and archive footage and montages through the film Importance of developing dynamic relationships between agriculturalists, environmentalists, farmers, cooks: the spectrum of people directly involved in handling soil represent a world bank of knowledge that when combined produce a synergy of shared stewardship invested in and dedicated to naturing and nurturing our natural capital stock of soil in the healthiest most sustainable way possible The documentary winds down to extemporize over the future ramifications of "conventional" chemical farming and the depletion of organic matter, and the future role soil will have to play in a world increasingly destabilized by increasing energy costs, depleting water resources, depleting land availability, unstable climates and severe weather events (anthropogenic global warming), the inability to keep up with feeding a growing global population, etc; we need to fundamentally change the way we produce our food; return to the fundamentals of the soil; organic regenerative methods; community waste composted to rejuvenate soil and build local farms and shared food hub that employ and feed community and revitalize local economy and bring people together
I never drink alcohol and know nothing about wine but while watching this I felt like I gushed down a bottle of dark velvet punch liqueur of earth and night and grape and leaf, darkblueberrygrape ambrosial ichor of the spring substrataflauted through with chocolate-gentrified soil liqueur And of course was reminded of the magnificent wine conversation between Maya and Miles in Sideways (2004) - Organic farming: no need for chemicals - Healthy soil produces healthy plant - Healthy plants of Frog's Leap resist disease - Soil breaks down organic matter into nutrients for plants - Soil provides a healthy soil structure to hold reservoirs of moisture, reservoirs necessary for dry months and droughts and winter - Soil's reservoirs of water negate the need for irrigation; this is cultivation, and it's also known as dry-farming - Yellow waves of peas and oats and vetches are grown as cover crops to add organic matter back to soil (give back what you take) - Grape pumice composted to add organic matter back to soil (give back what you take) - Composting and cover crops and other biodynamic methods evolve soil into a living, thriving, nutrient-rich water-holding sponge - Plow ploughes up dark chocolaty soil waves of Hostess' Ho-Ho's - Grape flavour comes from soil - Grapes and wine take the character of the soil - Every molecule in the grape, every molecule in the vine, is directly connected to the soil, coming from the very foundation of the grape terroir - Terroir: set of special characteristics that the geography, geology and climate of a certain place, interacting with plant genetics, express in agricultural products such as wine, coffee, chocolate, hops, tomatoes, heritage wheat, and tea - Vineyard's soil is a dark punch sea of nestle's quik and devil's food cake mix - Moisture is held deep down in the soil - Grapevine explores that soil and plunges its roots down deep to soak up that moisture, in the process extracting flavour from the soil and deepness of the earth - Grapevines evolved for millennium to plunge their roots down deeply into the earth - Grapevines also know to slow down their growth (devigorate) when the vines know they're going to run low on water, self-preservation - Another vineyard is explored and it's a chemically-farmed and irrigated vineyard, the soil is hard and compacted, it's dirt (dead soil), water produces weeds which require chemicals to eradicate, the grapevine is forced to adapt to irrigation method, grapes have a watered-down undeveloped flavour-structure radically inferiour to organic grape's flavour-structure, chemically-farmed grapes are left to hang longer to increase sugar levels to help strengthen flavour, chemicals also used to add flavour, whereas organically-farmed grapes have low sugar levels because they are not intentionally left to hang long and their flavour is not predicated upon sugar and they do not require chemical cocktails to generate flavour - The average lifespan for chemically-farmed vineyards in the Napa Valley is 12-15 years, whereas the organic dry-farmed Frog's Leap Vineyard is 33+ years old - Owner John Williams muses over chemical vineyards adding chemicals to create flavour (which they themselves depleted) when the flavour already existed as a G-d given gift and all that was required was for us to give more attention to cultivating the living breathing healthy soil organism that was already a flavour unto itself - To return to dry-farming, chemically-farmed vineyards would need to replant from scratch, which poses a difficult challenge to challenging chemical-farmers to change their method of farming - Ancient Greek clusters of dark purple grapes hang tantalizingly down in 2011, bursting with secrets within, harvest time, the store I shop at sells organic and vegan wine jam spread made in the Napa Valley, going to have to purchase a vat of that - Frog's Leap vineyard are certified organic and they also produce a selection of certified vegan wines - A healthy pound of soil is just like a sponge, doesn't easily crumble, can squeeze a brownie block of the soil without the soil crumbling, it holds 9 pounds of water - When it's dry the grapevines sense it's time to invest all their energy in delving down deeper and deeper beneath the soil to drink up water, in the process the grapevine devigorates (slows down its top growth to ensure it does not dry out because the vine knows it's low on water), and in the process the roots drink up earth's elixirs, and the deeper the roots delve down the more sure the vine is that water is sparse and it's time to ripen: the wisdom of nature - While grapes ripen, all the other plants are in full bloom, providing vibrant sea of colours and aromas for humans, food and pollen for insects and honeybees (pollen+bees = extremely important....) and birds, and most importantly, providing the soil with a highly nutrient-rich meal of organic matter, re-investing back into the soil what the grapevines heave up for us, a symbiotic cycle enriching everything above the soil and everything below the soil, bringing health and happiness back into the farming systems and into our lives, the planet's existence flickers a few milliseconds less Thank you Frog's Leap Vineyards
A&E's special on The Impressionists is Luminous. Principle writer and director Bruce Alfred illustrates the revolutionary, artistic impulses of a brilliant young group of painters who feverishly worked together to break the confines of 19th century traditional painting. Alfred fuses together the historical context of 19th century art Europe with delightfully animated biographies of the Impressionist artists.
In 1859, Claude Monet, the youthful, rebellious, dazzlingly artistic, fame-seeking leader of the group burst forth onto the Parisian scene like balefire. Knowing he was a brilliant painter, Monet sought to breathe new artistic ideals into the electrifying Parisian art scene. He wanted to challenge the prestigious Salon Jury with his exquisite seascape paintings. Monet painted the Life and Nature surrounding him, instead of painting traditional, historical paintings. He immediately befriended liberal Camille Pissaro, an avant-garde painter of landscapes and everyday Island life, who was also longing to abandon traditional painting.
Together, Monet and Pissaro banished from their canvases the traditionally accepted historical, mythological, and religious paintings of their time; instead, they began painting life as they experienced it. They began to paint Sensations - fractured sun light enveloping trees, water shimmering with light, Parisians rushing down a busy street.
By 1862, Monet and Pissaro surrounded themselves with other, artistically adventurous visionaries: traditionalist August Renoir, the notoriously shocking and egocentric Edouard Manet, obsessive-compulsive Edgar Degas, and the oppressed Bertha Morisot, who would receive artistic praise from these brilliant men, inspiring her to remain the sole female artist in the male-dominated art world.
It would take 12 years (1874) before art critics would finally have the chance to critique their paintings. The critiques, however, were ill-fated; their works were deemed incomplete; critics considered the works "impressions" of what the completed paintings might look like, if the artists went back and finished their paintings. The artists, however, did not...
This group forged a lifelong friendship, painting together amidst war, poverty, mental anguish, love, rejection, disappointment, and finally, in their dying years, positive recognition.
In 1859, Claude Monet, the youthful, rebellious, dazzlingly artistic, fame-seeking leader of the group burst forth onto the Parisian scene like balefire. Knowing he was a brilliant painter, Monet sought to breathe new artistic ideals into the electrifying Parisian art scene. He wanted to challenge the prestigious Salon Jury with his exquisite seascape paintings. Monet painted the Life and Nature surrounding him, instead of painting traditional, historical paintings. He immediately befriended liberal Camille Pissaro, an avant-garde painter of landscapes and everyday Island life, who was also longing to abandon traditional painting.
Together, Monet and Pissaro banished from their canvases the traditionally accepted historical, mythological, and religious paintings of their time; instead, they began painting life as they experienced it. They began to paint Sensations - fractured sun light enveloping trees, water shimmering with light, Parisians rushing down a busy street.
By 1862, Monet and Pissaro surrounded themselves with other, artistically adventurous visionaries: traditionalist August Renoir, the notoriously shocking and egocentric Edouard Manet, obsessive-compulsive Edgar Degas, and the oppressed Bertha Morisot, who would receive artistic praise from these brilliant men, inspiring her to remain the sole female artist in the male-dominated art world.
It would take 12 years (1874) before art critics would finally have the chance to critique their paintings. The critiques, however, were ill-fated; their works were deemed incomplete; critics considered the works "impressions" of what the completed paintings might look like, if the artists went back and finished their paintings. The artists, however, did not...
This group forged a lifelong friendship, painting together amidst war, poverty, mental anguish, love, rejection, disappointment, and finally, in their dying years, positive recognition.