La Voie lactée

La Voie lactée (2007 DVD)
Dirigida por Luis Buñuel
France, 1969
En francés con subtítulos en inglés

La Vía Láctea es una sumamente divertida road movie sobre dos mendigos franceses que van con rumbo a Santiago de Compostela en Galicia. Aunque el objeto de su viaje no es lo de ir en romería sino lo de estafar la plata a la gente, Luis Buñuel usa el camino como una plataforma para dirigir varias flechas al dogmatismo de los fanáticos, a la hipocresía de algunos creyentes, e incluso a la barba de Jesús. Entre la serie de imágenes y escenas provocadoras a lo largo del camino, se destacan un debate sobre la transubstanciación decidido por el hecho de que un conejo puede nacer y convertirse en el quintaesencial ingrediente de un pâté a la vez; un ensueño acerca del fusilamiento del Papa por parte de revolucionarios a Tours; un duelo de esgrima entre un jesuita e un jansenista cerca de Bayona; y la aparición de dos Virgenes (o sea, la Virgen y otra virgen menos conocida) en el País Vasco. No voy a decirles lo que pasa en Santiago de Compostela al final de la película, pero ¡cuidado! porque esta comedia pícara también incluye camafeos por el diablo, los albigenses, y el marqués de Sade. Genial.

*****

The Milky Way is a highly entertaining road movie about two French beggars who are on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Although the real object of their trip is hustling money out of people and not making a pilgrimage, Luis Buñuel uses the camino as a platform for launching various barbs aimed at religious fanatics' dogmatism, the hypocrisy of some believers, and even at Jesus' beard. Among the provocative scenes and images along the route, standouts include a debate about transubstantiation settled by the fact that a rabbit is capable of being born and of being transformed into the main ingredient of a pâté at one and the same time, one character's daydream about the Pope being executed by revolutionaries at Tours, a sword fight between a Jesuit and a Jansenist near Bayonne, and the appearance of two Virgins (or rather the Virgin Mary and another less famous virgin) in the Basque country in Spain. I won't tell you what happens in Santiago de Compostela at the end of the film, but be careful because this picaresque comedy also features cameos by the Devil, the Albigensians, and the Marquis de Sade! Genial. (http://www.criterion.com/)

Fue un día negro para el Papa/It was a bad day for the Pope

The Pilgrimage to Santiago

The Pilgrimage to Santiago (2001 paperback)
by Edwin Mullins
UK, 1974
ISBN 1-56656-371-2

"That evening, talking with Padre Agustín, there was no doubt at all in my mind that the cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos was among the most radiantly beautiful places on earth. Should I perhaps have been disturbed by my own very peace of mind? Here was I, after all, an atheist, brought up tepid C of E and now standing in a Roman Catholic monastery chatting to a monk who referred to my home city of London (albeit chucklingly) as 'Babylon,' and I dared to experience such a thing as peace of mind. But the thought did not disturb me. I merely became aware of how few secular buildings in the world were capable of inducing such a condition of peace. Why, asked General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, should the Devil have all the best tunes? And why, I felt, should God have all the best buildings?" (Mullins, p. 159)

OK but occasionally uninspiring account of the "long journey to heaven" (120) also known as the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. While I didn't bond with Mullins quite as much as I would've liked to given the vividness of passages such as the one cited above, his hybrid travelogue/art history work/historic overview of the camino does a nice job of looking at its subject from the point of view of someone enamored of all the art and architecture along the various routes. I use the plural here because Mullins spends a good deal of time--a little too much for me, in fact--celebrating art finds on and off the beaten track of all four of the main pilgrim roads out of France. One problem with this approach is that it took the frequent use of a car to make visiting all these sites possible, something that seems to have prevented the author from conveying the first-person passion of a quality backpacker's account like Conrad Rudolph's engaging Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela (University of Chicago Press, 2004). In the final analysis, this may be less meaningful a book for those wanting to understand the pilgrim experience (medieval or modern) from an insider's perspective than it would be for those merely curious about architectural-oriented travel in France and Spain near the end of the Franco era.

• Mullins, Edwin. The Pilgrimage to Santiago. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2001. (http://www.interlinkbooks.com/)

Santiago de Compostela

(NB: This is a probable alternate for one of my Back to History Challenge books. Conrad Rudolph, the humble "backpacker" mentioned above, doubles as an art historian/medievalist in his spare time!)

7 heures du matin

Un video original de cette chanson de 1967 n'existe pas, mais celui-ci sur YouTube "interprétée" par MissVicCherie nous suffit. Jacqueline Taïeb, vous êtes digne de cinc étoiles. Sublime!

Il est sept heures du matin

Faut s'réveiller

Haaaaaaaan, j'ai sommeil

Alors un peu d'musique pour se mettre en train, chais pas moi

Quelque chose comme

Talkin' 'bout my ch-ch-generation

Ouais c'est pas tout à fait ça

J'trouve plus ma brosse à dents

Où elle passée celle-là encore?

Euh, la bleue est à mon père

La rouge est à ma mère

La jaune est à mon frère

Z'avez pas vu ma...brosse à dents?

*****

Tiens on est lundi aujourd'hui

Ah, pour demain j'ai un d'voir d'anglais

Mmmmmmmm, j'aimerais bien avoir Paul McCartney

Pour m'aider

*****

J'ai envie d'mettre un disque pour embêter les voisins qui roupillent toute la journée

Euh, quelque chose comme un bon Elvis Presley

Ah, mais c'est vrai celui-là il en est resté à

Olobopalluba alopempom wa

*****

Un peu d'eau sur la figure pour me réveiller

Le dodo...c'est terminé

Je suis presque prête et ça va beaucoup mieux

Euh, je mets mon shetland rouge ou bien mon shetland bleu?

*****

Mon shetland rouge? Mon shetland bleu?

Mon shetland bleu!

Eu, mon shetland rouge

Oh mon shetland bleu

Mon shetland rouge

Euh le bleu...le bleu...le rouge

Mon shetland rouge...

*****

Grâce à http://www.bide-et-musique.com/ pour les paroles. Jacqueline Taïeb a un site officiel ici.

Catalogne, the Magazine

Dear Readers,

Finnish catalanophile Merike of Finès entre tots i totes fame, one of my blog friends, recently asked me for some more information about a travel magazine I had mentioned on her site. Rather than burying the details in another comment box, I decided to post the information here in case anybody else out there is also interested in vacation ideas for Barcelona and other parts of Catalunya.

The magazine in question is called Méditerranée Magazine, a French language publication of Milan Presse , and the Catalogne special issue is from Spring 2008. Since I've only really flipped through the thing at this point, I can't comment on the quality of the coverage--but here's a list of the contents for whatever it's worth.

• Chronologie
• Tarragone laisse du temps au temps
• Sagrada Familia, la cathédrale ensorcelée
• Le musée total (le musée de la Science)
• Lazlo Kubala, l'apatride catalan
• L'ombre du temps (le photographe catalan Francesc Català-Roca)
• Route buissonière de Port-Bou au delta de l'Èbre
• D'amour et de vin rouge (Priorat, Penedès, Conca de Barberà)
• Entre le ciel et la terre (des parc naturels situés dans les différentes montagnes catalanes)
• Domènech i Montaner: l'autre architecte
• Des châteaux en Espagne (ou presque...) (la tradition des "châteaux humains")
• La Bisbal, la mutation des potiers
• Suivez le guide
• Agenda
• Bibliographie

Before I go, here's a link for more tourist/cultural reading about Catalonia with descriptions in French and info in Catalan. And for those interested in a couple of other morsels on France and the other side of Spain from a less touristy perspective, I'll have a bite-sized book review post on the pilgrimage to Santiago and a movie review on Buñuel's La Voie lactée (1969) coming soon. Fins aviat!

La Niña santa

La Niña santa (2005 DVD)
Dirigida por Lucrecia Martel
Argentina, 2004
In español con subtítulos en inglés o francés

Aunque no me gustó tanto la película anterior de Martel (La Ciénaga, 2001), me encanta esta atrevida continuación de los sucesos que tienen lugar al ficticio Hotel Termas en la provincia de Salta. El argumento tiene que ver con lo que pasa cuando se celebra un congreso de medicina al hotel. Un día, un tal Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso) la toca obscenamente a Amalia (María Alché) en la calle, un acto que suscita una desconcertante mezcla de emociones en la adolescente. Influida por su grupo de reflexión católica, la joven empieza preguntarse si el encuentro podría ser "una llamada" desde El Señor para salvar al hombre del pecado. "Es cosa mía", la dice a su amiga Josefina, "es mi misión, yo ya sé". Como con Hables con ella de Almodóvar, esta materia delicada está manejada con destreza y sutileza. La actuación de Alché y Belloso es impecable, y Martel contrasta los temas de la enfermedad y la curación, la pasión sexual y la compasión celestial con gran autodominio. ¡Un fuerte aplauso! (http://www.hbo.com/)

Lucrecia Martel

Cristina Mendoza: "Quatre Gats and the Origins of Picasso's Career"

I can't believe it's already been over three months since our last BCN and Modernity post, but Cristina Mendoza's catalog entry on Picasso and the Quatre Gats provides a perfect excuse to revisit the theme. While Mendoza does a nice job explaining the young artist's links to the tavern during the very brief time he was associated with it, Ramon Casas' 1900 portrait of Picasso in Paris, foregrounded between the Sacré-Coeur and the Moulin de la Galette in the distance above, and Picasso's own 1900 autoretrato below (note the discreet "yo" near the top left) rank among her chapter's happiest visual offerings on display. Note: The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam recently hosted an exhibit called Barcelona 1900, which those wanting more information on this key year in Catalan arts and history can read about here.

• Mendoza, Cristina. "Quatre Gats and the Origins of Picasso's Career." In William H. Robinson, Jordi Falgàs, and Carmen Belen Lord, eds., Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miro, Dalí, New Haven and London: Cleveland Museum of Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2006, 80-91.

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud

Elevator to the Gallows (2006 DVD)
Directed by Louis Malle
France, 1957
In French with English subtitles

• Louis, a young French kid: "My generation has other things on its mind. Four years of occupation, Indochina, Algeria."
• Horst, an older German: "Bravo! Bravo! To Europe!"

A murder, a double murder, a staged "suicide" and an attempted double suicide are plenty noir enough for me, but Malle's groundbreaking policier also flaunts itself as a romantic love story in which the doomed amants tragiques never actually meet onscreen. In focusing on not one but two pairs of star-crossed lovers, Ascenseur pour l'échafaud additionally stands out as a gorgeous-looking, technically-perfect piece of filmmaking that uses its parallel narratives to satisfy genre expectations as much as it subverts them. Jeanne Moreau's forlorn but beautiful nighttime walk along the Champs Élysées, lit only by shop lights, street lamps and her own inner radiance, deserves all the props it's earned over the years, but Henri Decaë's wondrously atmospheric cinematography and Miles Davis' moody original jazz score definitely point the way to something equally new and exciting in terms of the storytelling devices in play. Interestingly, Malle apparently saw his two male leads (Maurice Ronet's charismatic but cold-blooded killer Julien Tavernier, a weary young veteran of action in Indochina and North Africa, and Georges Poujouly's equally amoral teenage thug Louis) as representatives of a specific time and place in late '50s France when arms dealers and an approaching consumer culture were byproducts of the country's modernization efforts--something that makes the characters' shared fate, deserved or not, even more bleak when it comes right down to it. Exceptional. (http://www.criterion.com/)

Miles et Mademoiselle Moreau