Vidas Secas

Vidas Secas [Vidas Sêcas] (New Yorker Video, 2005)
Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 1963
In Portuguese with optional English subtitles

Are we all prisoners in an unknown land or is it just the unfortunate who are fucked like that?  Minus the f-word, that's one of the central questions taken up by Nelson Pereira dos Santos in his 1963 Cinema Novo film adaptation of Graciliano Ramos' subtle, deceptively simple 1938 Vidas Sêcas [Barren Lives].  A relatively straightforward but maybe not so subtle adaptation of the Brazilian regionalism classic, Pereira dos Santos' film follows migrant cowherd Fabiano, his wife Vitória, their two young sons, and their pet dog and parrot on a long, arduous journey through the sertão in northeastern Brazil in search of a new home and a refuge from famine and drought in the early 1940s.  Unfortunately for the parrot, food is so scarce that it gets eaten barely five minutes into the film.  Unfortunately for the rest of the family, life is so harsh that after a brief respite the cycle of misery will continue literally and metaphorically.  Although the film strikes me as if not exactly heavyhanded at least as more monochromatic than the book in some ways, I think it still offers several things of value to the potential viewer.  I'll limit myself to two examples here.  First, the cinematography by Luis Carlos Barreto and José Rosa is fantastic.  Vidas Sêcas was shot on location in Palmeira dos Índios in the state of Alagoas, so it affords the non-Brazilian viewer both a rare glimpse of the city where Graciliano Ramos was once mayor and--more importantly--a visual appreciation of the sertão scrubland that he might have only read about in Ramos', Euclides da Cunha's, or João Guimarães Rosa's works.  For me, worth the price of admission right there.  However, the cameramen also earn high marks for using handheld cameras and point of view footage to establish a you-are-there ambience that makes the burning sky shots of the sun even more unsettling to behold.  Second, although the narrative is raw and stripped down to a fault at times, Pereira dos Santos does a good job at interspersing the occasional surprise (i.e. a scene where Fabiano and Vitória talk over each other as if giving separate interviews to an unseen bystander and another scene where the older child mutters "hell, hell, hell" over and over again to the dog after his mother has cuffed him just for asking what hell is) with what occasionally seems like a static storytelling mix.  Of course, on that note, the best jolt of all is the one already touched on above: the non-showy but extremely effective point of view shots where, borrowing a page out of Ramos' novella, the camera follows each character's line of sight, approximating a subjectivity for the parents, the kids, and even the poor dog Baleia ("sick," possibly with rabies, below).  Baleia has the best and worst scene in the movie just as she does in Ramos' book, by the way, but it may be hard to appreciate the Pedro Páramo-like purity and transcendence of the moment when the human characters are saying things like "I want to die and get it over with" and watching birds of ill omen drink up the dwindling supplies of muddy water required by man and other beasts.

Baleia, as herself

March and April Movie Review Links

Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 Le Samouraï

 

Thanks to the kindness of Novroz of Polychrome Interest who was good enough to remind me recently that there's supposed to be a Foreign Film Festival or something going on at Caravana de recuerdos this year (note: I'm calling it the Foreign Film Festival again although participants may submit reviews from international or domestic movies as they see fit), I'll make every effort to contribute a movie post or two to the event this month after two-months of hardcore slacking on that front in February and March.  It'd of course be nice if anybody else would like to join us for some film chat in lieu of whining about how Amazon is contributing to the decline and fall of Western civilization by taking over Goodreads, but I'll leave that to you to vote your conscience so to speak.  In the meantime, here's one movie review link from Novroz from March with more links from others from March and April hopefully coming soon.

 

March and April Movie Reviews

• Detroit Metal City (dir. Toshio Lee; Japan, 2008; posted by Novroz)

February Movie Review Links

Maya Deren's 1985 Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

 

Although I'd love to tell you that nothing comes between me and my blogging Calvin Kleins, the truth is that a lowly germ has wreaked havoc on my immune system to such an extent this week that I hardly have the energy to sleep much less come up with original material requiring non-dated jokes and references.  That being said, here's a placeholder for February movie reviews if any of y'all would care to join Dwight, Guy Savage and/or me for film talk later in the month.

 

February Movie Reviews

Bolaño cercano

Bolaño cercano (Candaya DVD, 2008)
Directed by Erik Haasnoot
Spain, 2008
In Spanish

"Favorite author documentaries" essentially being a brand new film genre to me, I was quadruply jazzed to discover that my hunt for this 45-minute Roberto Bolaño doc--generously included as a bonus disc alongside the 502-page Bolaño salvaje, a book of essays about and reminiscences on the Chilean novelist/poet published by the Barcelona-based Editorial Candaya--would also lead me to four other book and documentary pairings from Candaya with texts such as Ana Rodríguez Fischer's Ronda Marsé (on Juan Marsé), Jorge Carrión's El lugar de Piglia (on Ricardo Piglia), Margarita Heredia Zubieta's Vila-Matas portátil (on Enrique Vila-Matas), and José Ramón Ruisánchez's & Oswaldo Zavala's Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica (on Juan Villoro) all accompanied by separate DVDs of their own.  In fact, I almost felt like a niche blogger's version of the f'n Octomom given all this Spanish language literature largesse even before I found out that the Piglia title came with a bonus documental on famous Argentinean wacko Macedonio Fernández.  Score!  While I should have lots more to say about the other essay collections and DVDs in coming weeks, right now I'd like to direct your attention to Dutch filmmaker Erik Haasnoot's low-key Bolaño cercano [a difficult to translate title approximating something like Bolaño, Up Close and Personal], which offers up a sympathetic portrait of Bolaño as a loving family man and tireless reader and writer and teases with ever so brief glimpses of his personal library and countless spiral notebooks filled with rough drafts of his novels and poetry and even comic book-like drawings and illustrations. Since the previously unreleased film's a relatively simple affair that largely switches back and forth between a group interview with Bolaño's widow Carolina López and Bolaño writer friends Enrique Vila-Matas and A.G. Porta in Blanes, Spain (left to right above) and one on one interviews with fellow Bolaño writer pals Rodrigo Fresán in Barcelona and Juan Villoro in Mexico City respectively, I'm going to bypass any further commentary on the work to leave space for the transcription of several exchanges which caught my attention for one reason or another (please note that my Spanish is unsteady enough that I could have easily made a transcription error or two here and there without being aware of it--a translation caveat emptor and all that).

Rodrigo Fresán on what he likes about the experimental aspects of Bolaño's poetry and prose

Yo, me cuesta mucho separar los libros.  Es como una especie de organismo multicelular respondiendo a un único supercerebro.  El caso de Enrique Vila-Matas es el mismo, por ejemplo,  Nabokov es el mismo.  El caso de Borges es el mismo, ¿no?  Son escritores que me parece que les preocupa más la visión total y panorámica de las cosas más que de concentrándose en hechos aislados o en libros o en historias autoconcluyentes, ¿no?

[It's a lot of work for me to sort out the books from one another.  It's like a kind of multicellular organism responding to a lone superbrain.  The case of Enrique Vila-Matas is the same, for example, Nabokov is the same.  Borges' case is the same, no?  They are writers who, it seems to me, are more concerned with the overall panoramic vision of things than with concentrating on isolated facts or in books or in stories that are self-contained, you know?]

Enrique Vila-Matas, in response to a question from A.G. Porta (co-author with Bolaño of the 1984 Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce [Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic]), on the noticeable changes in Bolaño's writing as he raced against the clock of his premature death

Bueno, es asombroso.  Los cambios de Estrella distante a Los detectives y de Los detectives a 2666. hay muchos altos y iba ganando en fuerzas, asombrosamente, en muy poco espacio de tiempo.  La  palabra es intensidad, claro.  Con el tiempo que hay entre la publicación de Estrella distante hasta su último libro es un espacio creo de son de 7 o 8 años en los cuales era una especie de tour de force de gran intensidad y de grandes cambios de registro de que estamos pocos acostumbrados en los escritores.

[Well, it's astonishing.  The changes from Distant Star to the Detectives and from the Detectives to 2666.  There are a lot of high points and he was gaining in power, astonishingly, in a very short space of time.  The word is intensity, clearly.  With the time that there is in between the publication of Distant Star until his last book is a period, I believe, of 7 or 8 years in which there was a sort of tour de force of great intensity and of great changes in register which we're not very accustomed to seeing in writers.]

Bolaño's widow agrees, adding that the confidence he gained from knowing Anagrama would publish each book that he wrote and, especially, "la próximidad de la enfermedad le dió mucha más esfuerza" ["the proximity of his illness gave him much more strength"] to risk more in his final writings.

Fresán on where The Savage Detectives fits in within Latin American literature as a whole

Me parece que la gran proeza de la novela, y al mismo tiempo también la enorme astucia de Roberto, está en manipular, reordenar, resignificar y [?] materiales más transitados, más obvios y incluso más erosionados de la gran novela latinoamericana-- la dictadura, el exilio, cierta épica de la derrota, el malditismo de los poetas  --y presentar eso en una manera completa, y total y absolutamente nueva. ¿No?  Sin traicionar la escenografía habitual de lo que supone es la gran novela latinoamericana.  En el sentido de que Los detectives salvajes o 2666 digamos tienen la misma rareza respetuosa que de repente tuvo en su momento 2001: Odisea del espacio de Stanley Kubrick.  En el sentido de que es una película de ciencia ficción, respeta todas de las variantes bastante conocidas del género como, no sé, la súbita aparencia de una inteligencia extraterrestre de una máquina Hal, problemas tecno de astronauta, pero todas contadas de una manera completamente original y nueva.

[It seems to me that the novel's great feat, and at the same time Roberto's enormous cleverness, is in manipulating, reordering, resignifying and [?] materials more common, more obvious and even more eroded from the great Latin American novel--dictatorship, exile, a certain epic of defeat, the wretchedness of the poets--and presenting that in a completely and totally and absolutely new way.  No?  Without betraying the customary scenography of what one expects in the great Latin American novel.  In the sense that The Savage Detectives or 2666 let's say have the same respectful strangeness that 2001: A Space Odyssey suddenly had in its day.  In the sense that it's a work of science fiction, it respects all the fairly well-known variants of the genre like, I don't know, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence in a machine like Hal, technical problems of astronauts, but all told in a completely original and new way.

Juan Villoro on the appeal of The Savage Detectives

Creo que lo más interesante de este libro es precisamente la figura del detective salvaje.  Es alguien que investiga la realidad de manera rebelde.  Es un poeta que no necesariamente escribe obras poéticas.  O sea, no es un poeta cultural, no es un poeta que esté escribiendo poesía.  Puedo hacerlo, pero lo más importante es que él convierte la poesía en una forma de vida.  Él busca vivir poéticamente y esto es lo que yo creo es el gran atractivo de Los detectives salvajes.  Una obra donde la poesía es una forma de la acción, es lo que hacen los personajes, y de allí lo atractivo de lo que ha tenido.

[I think that the most interesting thing about this book is precisely the figure of the savage detective.  He's somebody who investigates reality in a rebellious way.  He's a poet who doesn't necessarily write poetic works.  Or rather, he's not a cultural poet, he's not a poet who's writing poetry.  He can do that, but the important thing is that he converts poetry into a form of life.  He seeks to live poetically, and this is what I think is what's most appealing about The Savage Detectives.  A work where poetry is a form of action, it's what the characters do, and from that stems the appeal that it's had.

The end: a question put to Bolaño in an old interview

¿Qué es lo que finalmente quiere que nos quede como gesto en el rostro a nosotros, sus lectores, cuando terminamos un libro suyo?

 Aquí hay dos respuestas, ésta es una muy buena pregunta.  Primero, que cada lector es dueño de su propio rostro y que yo no tengo nada que ver con el estado en que quede ese rostro.

Y, segundo, que si por casualidad cada lector ha podido ver en mis libros a alguien cercano a él, pues yo me daría por satisfecho.  Sobre todo a alguien cercano que no cerrara puertas, a alguien cercano que abra puertas y ventanas y que luego desaparezca, porque hay muchas cosas por leer y la vida no es tan breve como se piensa.

[What expression would you ultimately like us, your readers, to have left on our faces when we finish a book of yours?

Here are two answers, this is a very good question.  First, that each reader is master of his own face and that I don't have anything to do with the state in which that face remains.

And, second, that if by chance each reader has been able to see someone in my books that's close to him, then I'd consider myself satisfied.  Above all somebody similar who didn't close doors, somebody similar who opens doors and windows and then disappears, because there are many things to read and life isn't as short as one thinks.]

 Erik Haasnoot

The 3 Penny Opera

The 3 Penny Opera [Die Dreigroschenoper] (The Criterion Collection DVD, 2007)
Directed by G.W. Pabst
Germany, 1931
In German with optional English subtitles

With all of my beginning of the year filler pieces now out of the way and a flotilla of future mini-book and movie review posts now the only thing visible on the blogging horizon, I'm happy to embark upon the non-comment generating part of the year (i.e. the rest of 2013) with a few words dedicated to G.W. Pabst's eccentric early talkie and occasional musical The 3 Penny Opera.  I sure know how to pick the crowd-pleasers, eh?  Adapted from the 1928 Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill play of the same name that unexpectedly wowed Weimar theater-going audiences back in the day, the movie version of The 3 Penny Opera is a hugely entertaining audiovisual spectacle that zeros in on the criminal escapades of London dandy/thug/trollop fancier Mackie Messer (a/k/a Mack the Knife) as he, aided and abetted by his fetching young wife Polly Peachum and accompanied by Weill's cabaret soundtrack to his life, rises from being a common criminal to become a much more respectable sort of crook: the owner of a bank.  In Pabst's comedic retelling of Brecht's anti-capitalist "opera," there are a number of deliberate provocations that prefigure the subversive anti-bourgeoisie satire of vintage Buñuel.  In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that the film has a satirical mean streak in that regard.  A significant portion of the plot, for example, has to do with the ill will between Polly's parents and Mackie brought about by the latter's seduction of the Peachum family's tender young daughter.  Yet when we first meet Jonathan Jeremias Peachum, self-proclaimed as "the poorest man in London" but known as the beggar king for holding a monopoly on the issuing of panhandling licenses for which he leeches 50% of the weekly take off of all his clients, he silences a complaint about his extortionate licensing fees from one man by pointing to a Gospel quote from Luke painted on his wall: "Give, and though shalt be given."  Three mannequins in full dummy beggar attire and a number of prop crutches visually frame this mocking use of the biblical injunction.  Later in the film, while attempting to rally an army of the poor and the pseudo-poor to interrupt a public ceremony involving the Queen, the beggar king brags about how he will manage to "wring a few pence out of your poverty" by playing on the pity of the "rich noblemen" and--by extension--the viewing public at large: "For I've shown that the rich of this world have no qualms about causing misery but can't bear the sight of it!"  In spite of its message associating capitalism with criminality and widespread corruption at all levels of society, The 3 Penny Opera seems as dedicated to amusing its audience as provoking it.  It does this through snicker-worthy lowlife humor (Polly: "In Winchester you seduced two sisters, both of them minors."  Mackie: "They told me they were over 30."  Polly: "Both of them together."), and it also does it through the narrator-like street singer who sings songs about the characters while they stand in the audience listening to him and also introduces scenes by addressing the moviegoing audience to boot:  "Ladies and gentlemen," he begins in English at one point before breaking into German for what follows, "you've seen Mackie's bold and restless nature.  I'll now show you how, through a loving wife's cleverness, things take a turn that even you wouldn't expect."  The next scene, typical of all that's great about the film other than the cabaret music that I've barely even touched on, had me laughing out loud, and it's just too good to not share with you here.  Polly: "Gentlemen of the board...one can rob a  bank or one can..."  Interrupting her, a burglar turned board member: "Use a bank to rob others!"  Polly: "Tread the path of a respectable and law-abiding business...as my papa used to say to me.  'Polly,' he always said, 'Who'd be so stupid as to be a burglar these days when we've got laws?'"  Genius.

Mackie (Rudolf Forster) and Polly (Carola Neher)

This post on The 3 Penny Opera is my first submission for this year's Caravana de recuerdos Film Festival and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat's World Cinema Series 2013.  As I said in my intro post the other day, I hope others will consider contributing their own movie reviews to both events.  Until then, other great Pabst films I recommend include Diary of a Lost Girl [Tagebuch einer Verlorenen] and Pandora's Box [Die Büchse der Pandora], both from 1929.

Caravana de recuerdos Film Festival

Anna Karina in Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962)

Since I did such a shitty job of hosting the Caravana de recuerdos Foreign Film Festival last year, I decided to host it again this year as a form of penance.  I gotta tell you, guilt is some serious motivation!  Seriously, though, my apologies to all those who attended the "party" and then wondered where the host had disappeared to during most of the second half of the year.  I promise to do better this year or to cancel the event next year.  In any event, for those interested in giving your failed host a second chance at the movie talk in 2013, please note the following major change to this year's series: all films, foreign and domestic, will now be fair game for participation purposes.  While I hope anybody who contributes movie reviews to the event will continue to concentrate on foreign films (and non-mainstream films in general), I decided to open things up since older movies and avant-garde flicks from any era are often just as "foreign" as foreign films regardless of their country of origin or year of release.  Other than that, though, participation remains pretty much the same.  There are two main ways to play along should you choose to: 1) You review a single movie or multiple movies at any point during the year and then let me know about your post(s) by comment or e-mail (my e-mail address can be found under my profile [perfil] info).  I'll do a monthly link round-up of all participants' movie reviews so that interested parties can visit your blog(s) and check out your movie posts.  2) If you like, you may also challenge me to watch and write about a movie of your choice at more or less the same time as you as part of a group read-like "watchalong."  Tom of Wuthering Expectations was the only person to take me up on this option last year, but the animated short he selected greatly pleased both him and me.  On a final note, I'm happy to report that our friend Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat has announced that she'll be running her own World Cinema Series event for another year in 2013.  I'll post more details here when I have them, but until then I encourage any of you who are thinking of participating in the Caravana event to also participate in Caroline's (update: info on Caroline's World Cinema Series 2013 now available here).  Cheers!

January Movie Reviews

• Bolaño cercano (dir. Erik Haasnoot; Spain, 2008; posted by Richard)
• The 3 Penny Opera [Die Dreigroschenoper] (dir. G.W. Pabst; Germany, 1931; posted by Richard)
• Those Who Remain [Ceux qui restent] (dir. Anne Le Ny; France, 2007; posted by Guy Savage)
• Tristana [Tristana] (dir. Luis Buñuel; Spain, 1970; posted by Dwight)