Donald J. Raleigh: 'Soviet Baby Boomers' (2012), Part IV

Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

"The Soviet practice of sending work cohorts on vacations together made it complicated for families to travel together, giving rise to vacation romances." (page 206

Families became smaller. "At the end of the 1970s, 52 percent of Soviet families with children had only one child . . ." (page 206)

On Lithuanians: "The people . . . are very peculiar  . . ."  (page 208)

Marina Bakutina, guide-interpreter: "'I could think whatever I liked, but not say it.'" (page 209)

"The Baby Boomers also continued to have vicarious encounters with foreign cultures through movies and books . . ." Olga Kamayurova: "'I like the films they used to show at film clubs, that is, complicated, sophisticated films not for ordinary viewers . . . They showed us lots of such films, including, my heavens, Fellini and Antonioni. It was like food for us movie lovers . . . Sometimes, when they picked some sensational film, I would think . . . this is so extraordinary.'" (page 210)

When some of the Soviet Baby Boomers moved to the USA, they were appalled by the high cost of health care and education (page 217).  

Travel: "'It's better to see something once than to hear about it seven times,'" goes the Russian proverb."

Viktor D. on the late Soviet era: "'health care was free and unequivocally on a higher level than now. Education was free, including higher education and graduate school . . . People received apartments, they had confidence in tomorrow. Maybe everything was on a lower level than in America, but there was stability.'" (page 237)

The Brezhnev to Chernenko era became an embarrassing gerontocracy, "'an awful spectacle.'" (page 240) "Yelena Kolosova recalled asking, 'Who's Chernenko? He was even worse than Brezhnev, absolutely nothing more than a joke.'" (page 243)

Oddly, at the New World resort in Crimea, some Russian Baby Boomers became New Age types, or joined Osho (the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh movement that spread worldwide, with a "Zorba the Buddha" style colony in Oregon) . (See page 246)

Ideas of existential freedom. L. G. Ionin: "'The Soviet people chose from among the available choices and understood freedom as having choices from among what was.' In this regard, for a free person, the Soviet Union was a free society. Freedom existed as a real choice, as an individual emotional experience." (page 249)

[to be continued.]

Today's Rune: Possessions. 

Roberto Rossellini: 'Roma città aperta' / 'Rome, Open City' (1945)

Roberto Rossellini: Roma città aperta /  Rome, Open City (1945).

"All roads lead to Rome, Open City." -- Jean-Luc Godard (1959).

"In 2013, [Pope] Francis spoke to Rome’s La Repubblica newspaper and expressed his deep feelings for [Rome, Open City,] Roberto Rossellini’s realist war drama, which is a ground-zero account of the city under Nazi siege — and which features a Catholic priest as its main character." -- Source: here.

Rome, Open City has touches of Casablanca and any number of "under siege" tales, but its nearness to real events, shot among real war ruins, gives the film a powerful boost. It's raw.

An iconic image of Pina, played by Anna Magnani (1908-1973), in German-occupied Rome. 

The Criterion Collection version with extra features, part of the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy box set (2017).  

Aldo Fabrizi (1905-1990) as Don Pietro Pellegrini, a goodly priest who says: "It's not hard to die well. The hard thing is to live well."  And, akin to Pope Francis: "I am a Catholic priest. I believe that those who fight for justice and truth walk in the path of God and the paths of God are infinite."

Today's Rune: Partnership.  

Roberto Rossellini: 'The Flowers of St. Francis' / 'Francesco, giullare di Dio' (1950)

Roberto Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis / Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950). Vignettes of the original Franciscans, played by real Franciscan monks, with a medieval feel, beyond normal time, in black and white. This is the kind of little gem of a movie that distinguishes cinema from books as an art form.

Federico Fellini co-wrote the minimalist script, which is more evident in some of the chapters than others. 

San Francesco d'Assisi / Saint Francis of Assisi lived from about 1181 to 1226 A.D. 

The main cook for the early Franciscans was Fra Ginepro / Brother Juniper, who died in 1258 A.D. He was a bit of a "jester." 

Here, Franciscans spread a feeling of peace in the village, near the end of the film. They also redistribute food to the hungry. 

St. Francis and St. Clare at St. Mary of the Angels. Santa Chiara d'Assisi / Saint Clare of Assisi lived from 1194 to 1253 A.D. 

This memorable film provides an alternative to the many human-directed miseries already wrought in the 21st century. The Criterion Collection package includes extra interviews. Isabella Rossellini (born 1952), daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, provides impressive insight in one of them.  

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Shawn Levy: 'Dolce Vita Confidential' (2016)

Shawn Levy's Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016) takes us on a wild Italian ride from about the end of World War Two until the mid-1960s. 

Barely five or ten years after the war, economic activity "mushroomed . . . recasting Italy from the buffoonish ally of Nazi Germany into a hive of style, culture, fine craft, genteel living, and even heavy industry."  (pages 195-196). During that time, it became one of the hippest places in the world to experience firsthand. 

There are so many characters in Dolce Vita Confidential, some large and some small, that one cannot help being drawn in. 

Consider Alfonso Antonio Vicente Eduardo Angel Blas Francisco de Borja Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Marquis of Portago (aka Fon de Portago), a Spaniard by lineage and sometime race-car driver, and his philosophy of life:

"'I want to live to be 105 . . . I'm enchanted with life. But no matter how long I live, I still won't have time for all the things I want to do. I won't hear all the music I want to hear, I won't be able to read all the books I want to read, I won't have all the women I want to have. I won't be able to do a twentieth of the things I want to do. And besides just the doing, I insist on getting something out of it.'" (page 214).

In 1957, the Fon was killed in a racing accident while driving a Ferrari -- along with a slew of others -- at age twenty-eight.

In addition to memorable stories about film directors, actors, designers, photographers, expatriates, and trouble-makers, Dolce Vita Confidential includes very helpful endnotes, bibliography and list of films from the period, making it a nifty reference work as well as a tasty treat. 

Today's Rune:  Breakthrough. 

Gaius Petronius Arbiter: 'The Satyricon' (circa 65 A.D.) / 'Fellini Satyricon' (1969 A.D.)

With The Satyricon, what we have available to read as of early 2017 A.D. is a fragment of a longer work completed about 65 A.D. by Gaius Petronius Arbiter (circa 25-65 A.D.) who lived and died in the time of the deranged Roman emperor Nero (37-68 A.D.), a moment not unlike our own. Federico Fellini, one of the word's great filmmakers, adapted the Roman text into a movie, with new scenes added and some of the original scenes kept off screen, calling his adaptation Fellini Satyricon (1969 A.D.). Both versions are in turn colorful, grotesque, philosophical, poetic, garish, freakish, lurid, ghastly and a little on the demented side, as befits those -- and our -- times. Stunning visuals, but overall not for the squeamish.

In both versions, the aging poet Eumolpus is a major character. He tends to break into recitations of poetry, much to the annoyance of most of the people who can hear him. A running joke has his audiences throwing food or rocks at him, such is their fear and loathing of poetry! When not pining after teenaged boys, he's either mocking the ultra-rich and powerful or philosophizing about the human condition.  

Foil to Eumolpus is Trimalchio, a man far too rich for anyone's good. Even worse, he fancies himself a great poet, plagiarizing freely. When Eumolpus calls him out on this, Trimalchio orders the old man to be hounded and thrown into the street (and in the Fellini version, threatens to throw him into the flames of a large furnace). Eumolpus has a Trumpian personality, abusive yet always seeking unfettered adoration. He builds great monuments to himself and stages a mock funeral for himself, so that he can witness his servants and sycophants weeping and mourning for him, even though everyone involved knows it's a great theatrical sham.

Fellini brings a lot of energy and dazzling visuals to his film version but even so, Fellini Satyricon is certainly not for many besides the adventurous.

Today's Rune: Initiation. 

The Eyes of Texas: T Bone Burnett at the Lone Star Film Festival (2010)

In remembering that T Bone Burnett had brought up Marshall McLuhan during the 2010 Lone Star Film Festival in November, 2010, I dug up my notes from his talks. Saw him at three different venues on or around November 13, 2010. These scribbles were made during T Bone's interview with Bobbie Wygant. 

T Bone has worked on many projects, ranging from his own albums to the music for Coen Brothers' films (The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Inside Llewyn Davis) to Walk the Line and Crazy Heart.

Bobbie Wygant asked T-Bone about his inspirations while living in Fort Worth, Texas.

There was a place called the Capri Theatre and they showed [Luis] Buñuel films and [Jean-Luc] Godard films and [Federico] Fellini films and [Sergei] Eisenstein and [Akiro] Kurosawa . . . these incredible foreign films in Fort Worth, Texas, & it was like a portal into another universe . . . I appreciated it so much. I learned. I would say it was through these two places, the Capri Theatre and Record Town, that I sort of learned everything I've lived my whole life on.

[My 2015 update]: The Capri (which also went by other names) was torn down I think in the 1980s. Nothing has replaced it. Fort Worth needs independent "art house" theatres -- at least one, for God's sake. Fort Worth's three major art museums are wonderful resources, and "Magnolia at the Modern" screens independent and international movies on weekends. However, new art does better in less controlled, contained or restricted environments; that is, via more free-wheeling & Bohemian focal points.

At another venue in 2010, T Bone Burnett spoke of his agreement with Marshall McLuhan, that a new medium envelopes an old medium and lifts elements of the old medium into higher art forms.

Examples: TV becomes more engaging when eclipsed by the internet (The Sopranos, etc.); analog music (vinyl record technology) becomes more absorbing when made obsolescent by digital music. 

Let's be mindful that we are surrounded by an electronic envelope of many layers. 

There's more, but that's a taste of it.

Today's Rune: The Self. 

Federico Fellini: Le notti di Cabiria / Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Back to one of Federico Fellini's masterworks in black and white, Le notti di Cabiria / Nights of Cabiria (1957), starring Giulietta Masina in the lead role as an Italian prostitute in crisis. Fantastic.  

In Nights of Cabiria, Fellini is able to make trenchant observations about class, poverty, celebrity, wealth, the complexities of the Catholic Church, gender, money issues and the post-World War II Italian social milieu.

Cabiria has fights, dreams, hopes and fears, heightened by the dangers of her profession. Here she finds a "lucky interlude" with a movie star.   

Nights of Cabiria is another film for the ages.  And oh, yeah: it's also highly entertaining. 

Today's Rune: Protection. 

Federico Fellini: Il Bidone / The Swindlers

Federico Fellini's Il Bidone / The Swindlers (1955) features Americans Broderick Crawford and Richard Basehart plus a slew of Italians, including Giulietta Masina and Franco Fabrizi. It shifts gears throughout. Sometimes it's mordantly amusing (the way certain grifters pull the wool over their targets' eyes), sometimes unsettling, sometimes sad or tragic, sometimes exuberant. Hey, it's Fellini in black and white!

The ensemble actors work well together. Certain other things stand out. One, these swindlers take advantage of down and out people, mostly poor and desperate in the wake of World War II. Two, the wealthier people, even ones who started their careers as swindlers, are protective of their situation and the (new) status quo. Three, television is starting to make a splash in early 1950s Italy. At a raucous New Year's Eve party, the host insists on watching the New Year come in on TV -- as has become traditional ever since. Real people celebrate in a room while watching, some of them, ghostly shimmering figures of other people celebrating on the tube. Only then, I suppose, it still seemed weird so to do.  

Overall, Il Bidone shows nimble Fellini touches that have an artistic lineage. There's a feel for human nature not unlike parts of Decamerone di Giovanni Boccaccio. Cognominato Principe Galeotto and Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, for example. I dig.

Today's Rune: Protection. 
    

Federico Fellini: Lo sceicco bianco / The White Sheik

As a fair amount of people know, the term "Felliniesque" conjures up weird, strange, grandiose types of characters, often mixed together in the same scene. And so it should come as no great surprise that Lo sceicco bianco / The White Sheik (1952), Federico Fellini's first feature film as solo director, includes a fair number of weird, strange, grandiose types of characters. It's fairly absurd and the stakes are not particularly high, but it's got mucho gusto. 

Ivan (Leopoldo Trieste) brings Wanda (Brunella Bovo) to Rome for their honeymoon. He has everything tightly scheduled to the point that says control freak, to the point that she even has to "ask permission" to take a bath. But in fact, Wanda (having assumed the ludicrous pen name "Passionate Dolly") has a huge celebrity crush on "The White Sheik," (Alberto Sordi) a pop culture star in picture books (fotoromanzi / fumetti), and she wants to see him (the actor portraying The White Sheik) in person. So, while she's supposed to be taking a long bath, one wacky thing leads to another, and there's your basic set-up.

And so . . . Will the newlyweds manage to remain married for more than a few days in the early 1950s? Will the neophyte husband "fail" his constantly propinquitous relatives? Will they all get to meet the pope, as planned? And for God's sake, what the hell is going to happen next? 

And so again, nothing earth-shattering outside of the arc of a marriage or two. But: Fellini fans will delight in all the little flourishes, shot in black and white. Even an open-minded "general" audience might enjoy it. Who knows? Crazier things have been known to happen.

You can see the influence of The White Sheik on just about any surrealist-tinged director ever since, including American directors ranging from Woody Allen (see To Rome with Love, 2012, for instance) to David Lynch. And there's a clear connection to another Italian director I've written a fair amount about, too -- Michelangelo Antonioni. That's because he came up with the original story idea and first draft for The White Sheik.

Today's Rune: Journey.   
  

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il deserto rosso / Red Desert

Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film -- Il deserto rosso / Red Desert / El desierto rojo / Le désert rouge  (1964), presents a stunning palette, splashing colors and light onto buildings, characters and ecosystems in gyroscopic motion. Wild, man, with strange surreal interludes. Fellini's Giulietta degli spiriti / Juliet of the Spirits (1965) takes a similarly wild and colorful plunge. Both films have other things in common, too. For instance, both have a primary woman protagonist -- Monica Vitti, Antonioni's paramour at the time, as Giuliana in Red Desert, and Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, as Giuletta in Juliet of the Spirits. Weird enough. Both characters are a bit "touched" -- by an angel, perhaps, but also by post traumatic stress, too. Both are married and somewhat estranged from their husbands. Both experience the world in otherworldly ways.

In Red Desert, we see a dizzying range of shapes and forms, some natural, some human-made. We see mists and steam and fumes and ships and shacks and puddles and pipes and even a robot ~ it's all in there, and it's all pretty strange when laid out sequence by sequence. The music is a bit "touched," as well. The imagery and sound effects remind me of William Blake, responding to the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s:

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Many of these patterns and shapes are beautiful, too, bringing to mind Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal / The Flowers of Evil (1857).

In Red Desert, Antonioni seems to be saying, this is the way it is. Get used to it, or not. And really, what's remarkable is how contemporary this film looks fifty years later. The cooling towers, the electrical grids, the waste pools and toxic fields: all of it could be here and now  -- and is.

Today's Rune: Harvest. P.S.: A fond farewell to Roger Ebert.
 

Woody Allen: To Rome With Love, Take One

Italy and Woody Allen. A languid pace, relaxed and low-key. Music, color and people interacting. A touch of magic, a hint of surrealism; gentle, knowing humor. The power of seduction.  

"Opportunity makes a thief" -- one of several traditional aphorisms you might pluck from Woody Allen's To Rome With Love / TO ROME WITH LOVE aka  De ROMA Con AMOR (note the ROMA/AMOR anagram in the Italian poster version).

What does any one person find seductive? Food, drink, sex, money, power, control, authority, celebrity, art, fame, love, beauty, influence, attention, intimate connection, understanding, talent, wit, competition, danger, jealousy, violence, renunciation, fashion, luxury, comfort? One of the above, none of the above, all of the above, some of the above? You tell me.

Today's Rune: Warrior.
   

Fellini: Giulietta degli Spiriti

Giulietta Masina married Frederico Fellini near the end of the Second World War and remained in that interesting social compact (unconventionally) for fifty years, at which point Fellini died; Masina died five months later. Giulietta degli Spiriti/Juliet of the Spirits (1965) takes an indirect look at their relationship near its halfway point, or so it would seem. As one character states in the movie: "The interpretation is up to you. What can we say?"

Masina plays Giulietta/Juliet, a mostly self-contained middle-aged woman with a strong Catholic background; when confronted with her husband's infidelity, she falls through a metaphorical rabbit hole. This is Fellini's first color movie, and all its heightened effects work together to radiate a world of the spirits. Colors are wild and vivid; sounds echo; the camera moves and all is in motion. The sharp images, incandescent hues and frequent use of shadow create a dreamy, sometimes hallucinatory feel for Giulietta's derangement of the senses. The characters are, well,

Felliniesque . . . Diane Arbus in color. It's a luxurious and unrushed ride.

What I see immediately after viewing Juliet of the Spirits are a series of artistic "hyperlinks" to other movies: back through time to The Wizard of Oz and Fritz Lang; over the rainbow to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal; and coming our way through such visually stunning films made between 1965 and 1986 as Rosemary's Baby, Barbarella, The Exorcist, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Carrie, The Shining, Stardust Memories, and Blue Velvet; and even closer, to the great HBO series of recent years. Interesting company, indeed; with, however, almost no violence at all in Juliet of the Spirits. The music at times reminds me of Woody Allen, for sure; the Italian dialogue is beautiful to listen to, even while keeping up with the subtitles.

To me, the coolest thing in the movie is the furiously fluttering artificial fire that surrounds Juliet as she is being (pretend) burned to death in her childhood school play rendition of a Catholic martyr, a striking image that visits her from time to time.

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Je me souviens

Sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday is an ample filling of memory. Je me souviens, amarcord, I remember, we remember: it's been a great trip.

It's sometimes astonishing to think how little of the past is remembered, absorbed,  or understood on a conscious level, and how little we can really know about the details of the future. But being surrounded by people with quite a bit of shared experience can be so refreshing, renewing, and memory-inducing -- especially in a peaceful and stable environment. And here in Saxapahaw it has been that way. Any number of memories have been induced by conversation, of course, and also by sights and aromas, things like the enclosed wooden cabinet lined with hundreds of small vessels and containers filled with spices and other food-related accessories. I'd never thought to ask until now, but turns out this finely refinished cabinet just around the corner from where I'm writing goes back at least three generations to Mary Daley St. Bonnet McGinnis, one of my maternal great grandmothers. This is just a small sampling.

I could also write about escorting one of my sisters in the cold of winter from Durham, North Carolina, to the Twin Cities, Minnesota, many years ago now, and once having arrived, going back to see where our whole immediate family at the time had lived when I was a little kid in the late 1960s in Mendota Heights (St. Paul). But I'll save that one for another post. If I remember, in the near future, as sharply as I do right here and now.

One thing's certain: this revelry expands my memory. 

Happy Cyber Monday to all, but meanwhile, to all a good night! 

Today's Rune: Gateway.        

Alejandro Jodorowsky: El Topo, Part 1

Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970) is the strangest movie I've ever seen. Take the archetypal Sergio Leone Western, blend with Fellini, Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), ingest some kind of metaphorical hallucinogen, pore over Surrealist art, and presto, that is El Topo in a single mushroom cartridge.

El Topo builds a garish shimmering bridge between Sergio Leone's Wild West and the Road Warrior world of Mad Max that would begin, in the olive of time, in 1979. It is primal myth, dueling it out with the 20th century on the astral plane. Leone's world looks positively comforting by comparison.

Today's Rune: Signals.

Deepa Mehta: Water (Reprised)

Indian-born Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005) is subtly powerful, a gem, a work that I strongly recommend. Water is vivid, one of the most gorgeous looking films I’ve yet seen. Its elements are timeless, seemingly eternal traditions conflicting with modern change. It is compassionate and empathetic to all its characters (a rare thing in film), underscored with beautiful music and cinematography.

There are strong individual stories set within the larger matrix of historical change. Much of Water is seen through the eyes of Chuyia, a lively eight-year old widow who is sent to an ashram to live out the rest of her days among other discarded widows. The year is 1938, and though in India, under British rule, there are legal alternatives to the ancient Hindu practice of sending widows to pasture, tradition remains well-entrenched. Besides living in an ahsram, widows could marry a husband’s brother if he and his family would accept her; or, more drastically, there was the sati alternative: self-immolation on the husband’s funeral pyre. These are obviously cruel alternatives, as even “the best” option, living in an ashram, is like being consigned to a lifelong orphanage for girls and women only.

Besides changes in law, other challenges to the status quo abound in Water. Indeed, the movie itself, simply by showing the marginalization of widows (still evident to a large extent in South Asia), has been taken as a challenge to societal norms. Deepa Mehta’s sets were attacked and burned by angry traditionalists during the first attempt to complete this film in 2000. She resiliently tried again and filmed in Sri Lanka in 2004.













Within the intertwining narratives of Water, widows, religious leaders, the ascendant Gandhi, and Narayan (John Abraham), a Gandhi proponent, all explore peaceful but often radical alternatives to the old ways.

All of the performances are outstanding. Chuyia (Sarala) is wonderful (and I’m not often a fan of children characters/actors) and serves as the perfect character for introducing the viewer to the milieu. Mehta’s use of a moving camera is particularly effective following Chuyia as she runs through narrow streets and alleyways. Madhumati (Manorma) is perfect as the slothful, crabby head of the ashram who pimps out Kalyana (Lisa Ray), one of the more rebellious widows, in order to pay the rent. Gulabi (Raghuvir Yadav), her eunuch pimp, is colorful and creepy, a Felliniesque character.















My favorite character in Water is Shakuntala, a strong, thoughtful, deeply religious Bengali widow played evocatively by Seema Biswas. She, perhaps more than most, subtly undergoes change in her outlook during the course of the film.

Water is the third in a trilogy of Deepa Mehta films. Earth (1998) is set against the backdrop of the partition of India and Pakistan. Fire (1996) involves intense relationships between women. Water (2005) is well-named, as virtually all of the film takes place against the backdrop of the sacred river, the Ganges (Ganga) where it flows by Varanasi (Benares). Metaphorically, of course, water represents a myriad of deep spiritual traditions, dreams, and possibilities.

Today's Rune: Possessions.

Aleksandr Askoldov: Commissar: Take Two

I'd like to try to place Commissar in some kind of context. Aleksandr Askoldov directed only this one film -- for which he was banned from making any other -- but his cinematographer, Valeri Ginzburg, had already worked on movie productions since the 1950s; he continued to do so into the 1990s.

The look and feel of Commissar (remembering that it's in black and white) reminds me in a very good way of works by a number of other great filmmakers and their production teams. For example, Fernando de Fuentes' Mexican Revolution tales; Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (intense, sometimes surreally-tinged studies of families and people in various tense situations interacting with each other); and Sergio Leone via integration of music, sound effects and action. The story itself has a similar framework as Philippe de Broca's Le Roi de Cœur (1966) with protaganist hiding inside a town or city in between lines, leading the audience to question the sanity of mass humanity. King of Hearts is set in World War One, immediately preceding the Russian Civil War period in which Commissar is set. Whether it influenced Askoldov directly is hard to say: such feelings and worldviews among artists seem to have been part of the convulsive 1960s Zeitgeist, time ghost or spirit of the times -- even before the era's 1968 global crescendo and regardless of country or dialect.   

Today's Rune: Harvest.

La Dolce Vita: Fifty Years Down the Road

Watched La Dolce Vita / "The Sweet Life" (1960; US release, 1961) again. The passage of time even since the last time I saw it in 2008 has made it all the better. It's hard not to be dazzled yet again by Anita Ekberg, Nico, Marcello Mastroianni, and my personal favorite in this film, Anouk Aimée (Françoise Sorya Dreyfus).

Fellini follows the existentially lost Marcello as he longs to become something more than a well-heeled celebrity journalist -- often in company with frenetic paparazzi associates (Fellini's character Paparazzo in La Dolce Vita inspired the jaded term we now take for granted). Though maddening in his indecisiveness, Marcello somehow remains sympathetic (he really wants to write novels, but seems to lack self-discipline of any kind). Perhaps because he's mortal and flawed and occasionally has flashes of self-understanding.














Here: Marcello Mastroianni and Nico.

In black and white, sometimes brash, always stylish and meditative, La Dolce Vita provides insight into today's world and refracts a colorful funhouse from the Fellini Rome's chiaroscuro nights and dawns of fifty years ago. The pace may be too whimsical for some ADHD viewers to endure in one shot, but the imagery is breathtaking. Maybe sample a little at a time first and go from there.  

Today's Rune: Journey. 

Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita

Revisiting movies that made a big impression years ago, I recently watched La Dolce Vita / "The Sweet Life" (1960) again. The passage of time has made it all the better to my eyes. It's hard not to be dazzled by Anita Ekberg, Nico, Marcello Mastroianni, and my personal favorite in this film, Anouk Aimée (Françoise Sorya Dreyfus).

Fellini follows the existentially lost Marcello as he longs to become something more than a well-heeled celebrity journalist -- often in company with frenetic paparazzi associates (Fellini's character Paparazzo in La Dolce Vita inspired the jaded term we now take for granted). Though maddening in his indecisiveness, Marcello somehow remains sympathetic (he really wants to write novels, but seems to lack self-discipline of any kind). Perhaps because he's mortal and flawed and occasionally has flashes of self-understanding.

In black and white, sometimes brash, always stylish and meditative, this Fellini classic provides insight into today's world and refracts a colorful funhouse from the Fellini Rome's chiaroscuro nights and dawns of fifty years ago.



Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Honey for Oshun: Dreaming in Cuban

As the US government belatedly normalized relations with Vietnam in the 1990s, the next administration will have the opportunity to make things better between the USA and Cuba. I can't wait -- visiting Cuba legally and straight from the States is definitely something for my bucket list. . .

Meanwhile . . . one can enjoy Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban: A Novel (1992). Garcia's work looks at interrelated families affected by the Cuban Revolution over three generations.


Juan Gerard's Cuba Libre / Dreaming of Julia / Cuban Blood (2003) gives a coherent look at the last year of Cuba under Batista (1958) from the perspective of people living in the small town of Holguín. Not a masterpiece like Federico Fellini's Amarcord / I Remember (1973) but similar in its approach, Cuba Libre is not terrible. Harvey Keitel is funny. Gael García Bernal of The Motorcycle Diaries / Diarios de motocicleta (2004) is good, too. With some more editing and a change of narration, Cuba Libre could easily be made more accessible to a wider audience. As is, Erik's Choice: B-

Humberto Solás' Miel para Oshún / Honey for Oshun (2001) is a beautiful little independent film. Cuban-born Solás has a deft feel for modern Cuba, foibles and all. Essentially, the story revolves around a Cuban-born man's desperate quest to find his long lost mother. They've been separated for most of his life, and she is thought to still be living in Cuba. Oshun is an Afro-Cuban spirit goddess associated with a Catholic saint, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre. Erik's Choice: A-

Jorge Perugorría as Roberto with Isabel Santos as his artsy Cuban cousin, Pilar. Roberto's parents split because of the Revolution -- his father took him to the States and she stayed behind.

Soy Cuba / i am Cuba / I Am Cuba / Ich bin Kuba (1964) is an interesting product of the Cold War. Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, the plot is as cartoonish from a Soviet communist point of view as Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz is from the other side. Clownish depictions of capitalist rogues contrast with sympathetic vignettes of the heroic common people. But the glory of this movie is Kalatozov's collaboration with cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky resulting in imagery that transcends the fractured "Cuba for Dummies" narrative. The continuous shot techniques of Soy Cuba have influenced many other filmmakers --and still amaze. Erik's Choice: Story line C+, cinematography, A.

Today's Rune: Journey. Happy MLK Day!

Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents, Parts I-II

Many Jewish European visionaries have profoundly changed the way we think and see the world and ourselves. A handful of examples: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Martin Buber.

As I started to get my 1928 apartment in fighting trim for the fall, I came across the often hilariously pensive little volume of Freud's, Civilization and Its Discontents / Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1929). It's a wonderful jumping off point for all sorts of creative endeavors. Reading through it again, it reminds me that Woody Allen's filmic worldview dovetails nicely with much of this work. As does much of Fellini's. Just as Fellini remarked about recreating the Remini of his memory via Ostia, Italy, so Freud speaks of the layered remnants of ancient Rome: "Their place is now taken by ruins, but not by ruins of themselves but of later restorations made after fires or destruction."

In the first two sections of the 92-page book, Freud examines all sorts of things dear to artists: the pleasure principle/pain avoidance, the reality principle, the libido/id, the ego, plus the nature of love, art, religion, and life. His comic Woody Allenesque gloominess asserts things like: "Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures." He then goes on: "There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of the kind is indispensible." Ah, yes.

And what is it about these three measures he has in mind? "Voltaire has deflections in mind when he ends Candide with the advice to cultivate one's garden; and scientific activity is a deflection of this kind, too. The substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality, but they are none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in mental life. The intoxicating substances influence our body and alter its chemistry. It is no simple matter to see where religion has its place in this series. We must look further afield." He goes on to say that organized religion is a "mass-delusion." Freud was a funny man, indeed. I was lucky enough to check out his main dwellings and office spaces in Vienna and London back in the 1980s. He died in London in 1939, having escaped from the Nazis.

(British) English translation by James Strachey (1961).

Auf Wiedersehen!