Monday, 3 March 2014
Sunday, 2 March 2014
RENDEZ-VOUS with FRENCH CINEMA 2014
Every year
several New York cinemas team up to present the best in French cinema over the
past year- Rendezvous with French Cinema. Some are destined for NY distribution
(as noted) but many you may never see here again even on the internet. Out of the 24 films
showcased (many directors are in attendance for their screenings) surprisingly
only one or two might cause your wallet to wobble in hindsight. And in a week
when the Oscars’ magic dust cloud slowly settles it’s sobering to realize many
of these French films have been nominated or lauded with France’s own Oscar: the
César. But outside France who cares? A shame because certainly the
acting talents are on par with any American and the same could be said in most
instances for all other film production departments.
That being
said does anything really astonish in the Rendezvous season? In the sense of La
Haine or an early Luc Besson or indeed Godard? Alas, no there isn’t. Michel
Gondry conjures his wacky, wonderful world in Mood Indigo (L'Écume des Jours)-
Drafthouse Films -that will either
delight or irritate as with his star Audrey Tatou. Confession here of
inhabiting the former camp. Serge Bozon’s (also an actor in Miss and the Doctors) Tip Top- wacky in another sense (and certainly to the relief of
Isabelle Huppert offered something inventive to read) droley and sincerely tips
an internal affairs police drama on its head in ways never dreamed of by the
Police Academy comedies Stateside. (Kino Lorber)
If moody amour fou crime capers are your thing Playing Dead (Je Fais Le Mort) with France’s younger ‘Jean Reno’ François Damiens (also in Tip Top), Love is the Perfect Crime (L'amour est un crime parfait) and Tonnerre won’t disappoint. More serious wackiness with great casting in If You Don’t I Will (Arrête ou je continue)- that again will either inspire or irritate. Sex and amour, of course, are all over this French season. Nothing comes close to a Catherine Breillat, but Jacques Doillon’s Love Battles (Mes séances de lute) Adopt Films - is notable here- essentially a couple literally wrestling their compatibility like dancers for an entire film. Again, intriguing or infuriating. Suzanne tells its tale with aplomb and sincerity with its rising star Sara Forestier also seen as the nympho Annie seducing Mathieu Amalric in Love is the Perfect Crime. Ozon’s keenly awaited new film Young and Beautiful (Jeune & jolie) -Sundance Selects- is in Breillat territory without trekking into her jungle of desire. Actress Marine Vacth in the lead impresses.
After all those films Agnès Jaoui’s Under the Rainbow (Au bout du conte) feels a little fey hinting at early Ozon without the follow through, though Agathe Bonitzer (whose mum wrote/directed for If You Don't, I Will) is a quirky talent to watch. The Gilded Cage (La cage dorée) and A Castle in Italy (Un Château en Italie) written, directed and starring the irrepressible Valeria Bruni Tedeschi are both films that will set you dreaming about villas afar- or maybe just confirm your prejudices against your jet setting penthouse neighbours and allow you to dream realistically. Eastern Boys has all elements firmly in place for its story of illegal youngsters that needs telling. Problem being, though, that the director in garnering our sympathy makes even the ‘baddies’ just a bit too nice. Reality just ain’t that forgiving.
So cut to
the chase. Most New Yorkers barely have time or the will to see one film a
month let alone... So singling out the following four films as must see only
has relevance in the context of all 24 on view. Justine Triet‘s first
feature The Age of Panic (La Bataille de Solferino) is very impressive with scenes filmed on location as election
day unfolds Sunday May 6, 2012- Socialist François Hollande ousting Nicolas Sarkozy.
Actor Vincent
Macaigne is France’s new
disheveled guy next door (also in Tonnerre and 2 Autumns, 3 Winters-
Film Movement) – though one
of my colleagues found him habitually irritating.
There’s a personal fondness here for The Marchers (La marche) 1963 true story- a band of anti-discrimination that sets foot from the south of France to Paris where it’s become a symphony. A fondness because actor/director Nabil Ben Yadir’s (though the script wobbles) not only endears but allows you to remember each character along the way. It’s not as inventive, sharp and left field as say Tip Top but Nadir’s next passion project is keenly awaited.
The
Festival’s opening night film On My Way (Elle s'en va)- Mrch 14 Cohen Media Group- shows aging French icon Catherine
Deneuve still on the up and up with her career choices. Question of course is
would the film still work without Deneuve? As with Place Vendôme
(1998) it is a resounding yes. Deneuve’s presence elevates these films one
plateau higher simply because of who she is and her talent. Director Emmanuelle Bercot’s skill
is allowing all of these ordinary people and their lives to engage the audience
for 2 hours rather than bore them. Bercot’s son Nemo Schiffman as Charly the
kid being a kid in this road movie almost steals the show.
Closing
night film The French Minister is uproariously funny as it satirizes the mad
doings of France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Director Bertrand Tavernier is
a deft old hand at getting to a character’s core and this film excels at
delineating the balance between comedy and levity such is the collaboration
between him and the original Quai d'Orsay graphic novelist Abel Lanzac (pseudonym for Antonin Baudry) who worked there for real.
Monday, 3 February 2014
Philip Seymour Hoffman-actor (July 23, 1967 – February 2, 2014)
Died yesterday (Sunday) in his New York apartment.
His acting legacy is best summed by New York Times critic A.O. Scott:
He did not care if we liked any of
these sad specimens. The point was to make us believe them and to recognize in
them — in him — a truth about ourselves that we might otherwise have preferred
to avoid. He had a rare ability to illuminate the varieties of human ugliness.
No one ever did it so beautifully.
Mr. Seymour Hoffman directed and acted (one of life's less sad specimens-"the sort of people who wouldn’t even make it onto a television makeover show") in the beautiful movie of Robert Glaudini's play Jack Goes Boating. New York is really quite a small place. Yet to many at times of sadness it's often so very hard to even see the horizon.
The Daily Show's tribute
The Daily Show's tribute
[A postscript that Mr Seymour Hoffman would hopefully
approved of.:
It is very easy to judge people for their failures- in this
case drug addiction (the lack of judgement precisely what made
Hoffman’s characters unforgettable). The Panic in Needle Park is not a film
about drugs. It is a film about being human. Of New York. Of belonging, loving, forgetting,
trying to remember: when the truth will always lie within oneself.
The UK Second Sight DVD is better than the Fox US 2007
version.]
And
people will say
In
far away blue days
It
will become clear
What
is false and what is true
What
is false will perish
Although
it rules today
What
is true shall come –
Although
it dies today
Playwright Ödön von Horváth died in Paris on the evening of
June 1, 1938, when a tree limb broke
off during a thunderstorm, hitting
him on the head and killing him
instantly. One of the items found
in his pocket was a cigarette pack with this poem written on it. He'd just been to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in a cinema on the Champs Elysées. No joke.---Judgement Day
(Translated by Ian Huish)
-------Saturday, 1 February 2014
Thursday, 2 January 2014
To be at all you must be something in particular
Make of yourself a doubly sheltered being,
So no one who looks or tries to see may
Know more than the garden that you are-
A garden private and ostensible,
Behind which common flowers lightly touch
The grass so spare not even you can spot it…
Advice (Fernando Pessoa)
Is cinema a
private or communal experience? For thinking back on a year’s film going the
answer seems resoundingly former. And yet perhaps it’s more akin to yoga where
we may be with the many and, though mindful of the whole, it is our own breath
we must seek. By its nature that isn’t a passive act. Seeming somewhat
pretentious to start with all this but what really is germane to the film going
experience? At its worse, film manipulates us so that we no longer have any
sense of our own mind or breathe. Like music, film is the space between the
notes not necessarily the notes themselves. Is all that a long winded way of
saying film is therapy? What was everyone really thinking when they exited Alfonso
Cuaron’s very slender Gravity with such exhilaration? Interesting double-bill with Lois Patiño’s Coast of Death.
Ari Folman’s
follow up to Waltz with Bashir (and
most certainly not unrelated) is
another animation, though this time with live action, The Congress (based on a 1971
Stanlislaw Lem short novel The Futurological Congress)- (Tarkovsky used Lem’s Solaris). A "psycho-chemical"
where people can live out their fantasies (hello The Wolf of Wall Street and
the not so distant past). In fact it was originally Polish director Andrzej
Wadja’s idea to set the story in a giant hotel (as Folman does for the
final half).
And though
it’s a film of this year (initially playing in New York as part of the NY Jewish Film Festival) seeing the
film last year had a profound effect on how one considered that year’s
experiences. You are what you manifest in The
Congress . "'We keep this civilization narcotized, for otherwise it
could not endure itself. That is why its sleep must not be disturbed...' "
Symington tells Tichy in Lem’s novel. Many humans have chosen to inhabit or
rather imbibe a world of hedonism without pain. The film strides a territory
that you just wish Spike Jonze (his first solo screenplay) had entered in Her, though
arguably that film’s real life protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) does gain greater self-knowledge
through emotional pain. But does Samantha the voice-activated ‘OS1’ system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson)
with which/whom Theodor falls in love get ‘emotionally smarter’? Or is that
missing the point? The point that she never will have ‘real’ ‘emotions’ or
‘creativity’? “Isn’t that funny. The past is just
stories we tell ourselves. I’m afraid I’ve felt everything I’m going to feel,”
muses Samantha. As an aside, there must be an oddly mundanely brilliant award
for the hidden human emotions of Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (UK Masters of Cinema (Jan 20) let alone Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color.
The ‘system’
is an obvious protagonist in both Her
and The Congress and yet so it was in
most films last year. And at almost every turn (Fruitvale Station and Dirty Wars notable
exceptions) it fails miserably either very loudly (as in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) or ever so
quietly. Or is that judgment of ‘failure’ too simplistic? One doesn’t expect every
museum guard to be like Johann in Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours (UK site). He seems
contented with his ‘lot’ in life - that contentedness if not happiness stemming
from a belief in oneself and a fascination with individuals, art and nature rather than
fueled by any external system. MoMA’s Our Town: Baltimore (a sort of mini-John Waters retrospective) appears even more
contemporary now in an ever Conservatizing America. Worth remembering that
Fellini’s prospects for Ginger and Fred were numbed
when Ginger Rogers took out a law suit to have the
film stopped. A more affectionate waltz than Fellini’s for those aging in show
business would be hard to find.
One of the
year’s most outstanding films anywhere was Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition: married
couple, performance artist D (performance artist Viv Albertine) and architect H
(conceptual artist Liam Gillick) live in a modernist house that never actually
speaks rather whispers within the human silences dictating their behavior- “the
house is the third character of this movie”- Hogg. And it’s hard to think of an
American equivalent to Hogg’s parallel (though completely other) Antonioni
universe. Matthew Porterfield’s I Used to Be Darker (though in
and of itself) just doesn't quite come close.
Back in the
90s architects savored or devoured Deleuze’s new book Le Pli (The Fold):
the ‘superfold’ will be the result of three ‘future’ folds:
the fold of molecular biology - or the discovery of the genetic code; the fold
of silicon with carbon - or the emergence of third generation machines, cybernetics
and information technology; and the folding of language - or the uncovering of
a ‘strange language within language’, an atypical and asignifying form of
expression that exists at the limits of language i.e. inside
is nothing more than a fold of the outside, following from pre-Socratic Greek
philosopher Protagoras’ book The Truth
- "man is the measure of all things". But more of that later: All that is solid melts into air.
Is either
character’s ‘love’ in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour
(Criterion DVD-Feb 10) (UK DVD March 17) influenced
by society or is it simply a story of youthful amour?
The end with Adèle leaving Emma’s
triumphant art gallery private view surely is ambiguous rather than ill fated.
Just as the Marivaux novel -so-called unfinished La Vie de Marianne- ends maybe deliberately so in a snub to Descartes. Is Adèle’s older
female lover indicative of a society that at one and the same time represents
progressive difference and yet falls for the same old trap of conformity? The
same ethos Kechiche showed in The Secret
of the Grain (2007) – failure is not really an idea let alone a word
against the system.
One wishes
to have sat through all of the Film Society Lincoln Center’s The
Discreet Charm of George Cukor retrospective. What was the
director’s real attitude toward women? We can tell from his movies that women
come across as the savior of the human species rather than its demise. While
the ending of A Life of Her Own shows how
studio demands for a happy ending can inadvertently make for a better picture
(Cukor wanted to end with the model’s suicide). But is Keeper of the Flame quite as
clear cut then as most would deem it to be in the light of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism?
Also in the
retrospective was Cukor’s Justine that had a rare airing last
year in MoMA’s To Save and Protect. Cukor didn’t
have much to say about the whole enterprise (taking over the last minute reins
from Joseph Strick) but it remains a fascinating and by no means ill-fated
endeavor. And of course redolent with the rage a half century later in The Square. Young girls
like Wadjda
aren’t just a modern invention.(UK DVD Soda
Pictures -Jan 20). Interview with the director Haifaa Al Mansou.
Jerry
White’s review of Ida (New York Jewish Film Festival) (London Film Festival) in
Cinemascope argues the following:
The freedom that Anna/Ida finds and
Wanda could never reconcile herself to is grounded in a Western conception of
individualism that, given both Pawlikowski’s chosen symbolic vehicle and the
film’s sociopolitical context, strikes me as utterly wrong. In the first case,
jazz was never just about the virtuosity of a single player: Coltrane’s greatest,
most spiritually searching improvisations were unthinkable without the backing
of McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison. The film’s grasp of Polish Catholicism’s
relationship to Judaism is similarly misguided: coming to grips with your
nation’s relationship to its Jewish community basically by becoming more “true
to yourself” is to substitute personal becoming for collective being. The same
extends to Pawlikowski’s depiction of Anna/Ida’s life in the convent as
intensely solitary: while this clearly serves the film’s ultimate thematic
ends, it not only evinces a rather blind investment in the notion of the
individual self as the alpha and the omega, so to speak, but it propagates a
rather radical misunderstanding of what cloistered religious communities are
all about (compare, say, Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills [2012]).
He cites
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as having “a much sadder and, ultimately, a
more fully thought-through sense of the relationship between modernity and
individualism”. Well, I’d agree with the Ceylan opinion. But isn’t the crux of
Ida that young Anna/Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) is old before her time and that Wanda
remains the youngster who never grew out of socialist idealism? That the
greatest leaps of faith are born out of an enormous personal search. It’s hard
to feel a simplistic approach to Ida i.e. she’s initially disconnected from her
family history and therefore a solitary nun, thence though Wanda she is reconnected,
and thence back to the convent fold. Not that the Cinemascope review suggests that. And
to say that most jazz musicians are ‘loners’ is not to suggest that they don’t
grow through the communal experience. What makes them great musicians, though,
is that very singularity. And surely that is what the film Ida is all about. Whatever
‘system’ we choose will always fail us in some respect because it was never
set up for ‘us’ in the first place. It is a collective (though in many
instances oligarchical) resource that grows in varying degrees through the
singularity of its flock.
Whatever one
thinks of its filmic virtues, The Jewish Cardinal is a
fascinating airing of the real life story of Jean-Marie Lustiger including his
removal of the Catholic Carmelite nun cross in Aushwitz. But you want
provocative and essential education in how history gets re-configured then see Claude
Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust (London Film Festival).
After all
the violence and despair in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (London Film Festival) is
said and done the ending is almost absurdly blackly comical when the girl
applies for a ‘normal’ job – ‘so you’re over that now’.
to be continued...
To say that they all share a post-Berlin Wall misanthropy is perhaps going a little far. But they all err in that direction. Nor do any of them need to be the enormous length of Filipino Liav Diaz whose latest (Norte, The End of History) played the NYFF while Batang Westside (5 hours) had a very rare airing as part of MoMA’s To Save and Protect. Diaz develops a strange hold on the viewer as the hours pass. Is it the plethora of detail (that his detractors argue could easily be honed down to 2hours)? Romanian director Cristi Puiu keeps his films short but with the same fascination about the intricacies of nothingness that become everything in our life: Three Interpretation Exercises as does Corneliu Porumboiu in When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism.
Avoiding Oscar talk for a film buff is like claiming ice cream means nothing to you in summer. Lactose intolerant get-out excuse maybe. Not sure what an Oscar equivalent of that might be. And whatever one may think of Scorsese's epic everyone must be glad he's finally had 'a hit' so that Hollywood can remember who he is and allow him to make another Hugo. “Nobody calls me,” said Silent Running's Douglas Trumbull at Locarno this year.
CarteBlanche: Ken Jacobs showcased Jacob's new 3D cam 4 parter Joys Of Waiting for the Broadway Bus - a far more revealing way of looking at the world than many a film you may see while Tim’s Vermeer in all its time-consuming research and dedication made one look and think again at what may or may not be so. For a very surrealist take on all that former Brit Independent on Sunday film critic Jonathan Romney made a highly original and accomplished short L'Assenza .
Audible smile of the leaves,
“An
unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose
that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time. ” Louis-Ferdinand
Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
There were
many really great American films that made it into American mainstream cinemas
last year, but before that discussion, many of the year’s subtlest foreign
films were seen in MoMA’s The Berlin School: Films from the Berliner Schule
(selections from the past decade but the following are very recent):
SleepingSickness (Ulrich Köhler)
The Robber (Benjamin Heisenberg)
In the Shadows (Thomas Arslan)
I am Guilty (Christoph Hochhäusler)
The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler -2010)
To say that they all share a post-Berlin Wall misanthropy is perhaps going a little far. But they all err in that direction. Nor do any of them need to be the enormous length of Filipino Liav Diaz whose latest (Norte, The End of History) played the NYFF while Batang Westside (5 hours) had a very rare airing as part of MoMA’s To Save and Protect. Diaz develops a strange hold on the viewer as the hours pass. Is it the plethora of detail (that his detractors argue could easily be honed down to 2hours)? Romanian director Cristi Puiu keeps his films short but with the same fascination about the intricacies of nothingness that become everything in our life: Three Interpretation Exercises as does Corneliu Porumboiu in When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism.
The To Save and Project: The 11th MoMA International Festival is always a
palace of delights catering to every celluloid desire. This year ranged from
the Warhol world premiere of Tiger Morse and
Markoupoulos’s short portraits, Bruce
Connor’s Crossroads, Chantal Ackerman’s early New York films that resemble some contemporary video art in
their stark slow long pans of rooms, hallways and streets. Alain
Cavalier’s rivetting rarely seen French heist flic aired that never saw the
light of American distribution day it was supposed to- Pillaged (Mise à sac). Fredric
March‘s haunting, mundane and mesmeric performance in the 1951 Death of a Salesman (shamefully rarely seen due to rights issues) - making The Wolf
of Wallstreet seem totally redundant not to say half-baked- and the chilling almost
revolting 10 Rillington Place (selected by Alexander Payne) with Richard Attenborough (as the great young
actor), and a baby John Hurt.
Last year Studio Canal Blu-ray released the shamefully and unbelievably hitherto un-restored version of René Clément's Plein Soleil: actor Alain Delon's greatest director he states in an interview extra, Henri Decaë's lighting and cinematography, and a great Roman Polanski on set anecdote.
Couldn’t you just see one of Willy Loman’s boys perhaps become an American Hustle Carmine Polito – principled, honest and loyal to the core - utterly devoured by the system's sharks when he never even dained stepping on a jellyfish?
John Sayles latest Go For Sisters strangely didn’t get a look in at MoMA and as with all Sayles it is quietly coruscating: and though his characters inhabit a system they are usually 100 timers stronger and more interesting than it. Dallas Buyer’s Club is just too good for words in so many respects- who knew a crooked kitsch painting on a wall could well the tears. What makes Nicole Holofcener’s films a pleasure always is her observation of human mundanity: Enough Said.
Last year Studio Canal Blu-ray released the shamefully and unbelievably hitherto un-restored version of René Clément's Plein Soleil: actor Alain Delon's greatest director he states in an interview extra, Henri Decaë's lighting and cinematography, and a great Roman Polanski on set anecdote.
Couldn’t you just see one of Willy Loman’s boys perhaps become an American Hustle Carmine Polito – principled, honest and loyal to the core - utterly devoured by the system's sharks when he never even dained stepping on a jellyfish?
John Sayles latest Go For Sisters strangely didn’t get a look in at MoMA and as with all Sayles it is quietly coruscating: and though his characters inhabit a system they are usually 100 timers stronger and more interesting than it. Dallas Buyer’s Club is just too good for words in so many respects- who knew a crooked kitsch painting on a wall could well the tears. What makes Nicole Holofcener’s films a pleasure always is her observation of human mundanity: Enough Said.
With MOMA ‘s
Contenders season one almost
had no need for eyes to creep into a multi-plex. There they all were/are
including a brave programming of Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma (King of independence) latest Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1 -aisles
crawling with cast members in all their distorted glory with an onstage dance
routine to cap it all off. Bruce Dern was a great raconteur post Nebraska screening (he also turned out for the far less busy screening of Smile from 1975). Remember Silent Running (great Blu-ray extras) or The King of Marvin Gardens?
Avoiding Oscar talk for a film buff is like claiming ice cream means nothing to you in summer. Lactose intolerant get-out excuse maybe. Not sure what an Oscar equivalent of that might be. And whatever one may think of Scorsese's epic everyone must be glad he's finally had 'a hit' so that Hollywood can remember who he is and allow him to make another Hugo. “Nobody calls me,” said Silent Running's Douglas Trumbull at Locarno this year.
Very strange it was putting one’s
hands- nay fingers - around the waist of a Joan Crawford dress not to say
Doris Day. But where have all gone the human blooms? Is it
false sentiment to almost treasure these things? The Maltese Falcon is perhaps
more understandable. But the white dress of Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon whose legs leveled all Albert Camus philosophy? Tap shoes or anything of the Nicholas Brothers? If it was a choice between Astaire's black and white Band Wagon spats and...sometimes there is just no logic or deference to greater talent.
And so we have Steve McQueen’s ‘Hollywood music’ sprinkled
real life 12 Years a Slave that undoubtably deserves much of its kudos. But a
tiny few of us long for McQueen to return to the visceral viscous ‘art’ quietly
applauded of yesteryear. Many cried sentimental of Lee Daniel’s The Butler –
rather surely it is full of sentiment?! Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker giving really great-understated
performances. Unless you’ve personally known someone such as Cecil Gaines The
White House butler (what a fantastic real life story) perhaps it is hard to
understand how such a double-life is lead and just how moving is the tie and tie-pin
finale of that film. Could the same also be
said of the Coen brothers Inside Llewyn Davis? Just how important truth over
fun in music is for many who never reach the top of their profession and who
for the life of them can’t lead a double-life?
The other night at MoMA Eszter Salamon: Dancefor Nothing brought
everything down to earth with her dance interpretation of John Cage's Lecture on Nothing (originally published August 1959)-
dancing whilst speaking the text and listening to Frances Marie-Uitti rendition on
ear plugs) : “Originally we were nowhere; and now, again, we are having
the pleasure of being slowly nowhere.” And yet the disabled cast members
of Jerome Bel and Theatre Hora (New York Live Arts, Nov 12-17) appeared
definitely excited to be going somewhere.
CarteBlanche: Ken Jacobs showcased Jacob's new 3D cam 4 parter Joys Of Waiting for the Broadway Bus - a far more revealing way of looking at the world than many a film you may see while Tim’s Vermeer in all its time-consuming research and dedication made one look and think again at what may or may not be so. For a very surrealist take on all that former Brit Independent on Sunday film critic Jonathan Romney made a highly original and accomplished short L'Assenza .
Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is his most
popular and (not wanting to deter anyone from seeing it) yet probably his least
interesting film to date in its avoidance of complexity- he’s made some very strangewondrous movies. (UK Blu-ray -Jan 13), Criterion Collection
(March 24).
Yet maybe that view is
bonkers. Because surely all the male protagonists of Sorrentino’s films wade
inexorably through their demons while everything Sorrentino makes harks back to his first
film One Man Up (L'uomo in più -2001). The Marcel Ophuls’
(Max’s son) documentary Ain't Misbehavin' (there should be the = sign before the orig French title Le Voyageur) on the other
hand brims with survival of life’s rip tides and ironies.
Hans Josephsohn’s moving (in all sensesof the word) sculptures are on view at Hauser and Wirth (New York)
"I live
in this country [Japan] as the water insect lives in the pond, skating across
the surface, not so much unmindful as incapable of seeing the depths"- writer
and film historian Donald Ritchie who died last year. "I cannot imagine Plato
thriving here, with all his absolutes (“the truth,” “the beauty”) … Maybe that
is why Japan is so backward (by comparison) in some areas: philosophy,
diagnosis. And perhaps why it is so forward in others.” Thackeray or Jane
Austen he thought would relish “the abyss between intention and fact.” In The Inland Sea (based on his
1971 book) he observes the West’s modern
trinkets in cafes “ready to be put together like pieces of some giant scattered
puzzle". Elia Kazan fought his way to America and always seemed in need of proof to himself: America, America (1963). But as critic David Bordwell observed of Ritchie, "he accepted being out of place".
Audible smile of the leaves,
Just the
wind at that place,
If I gaze at
you and you gaze
At me, who
is it that smiles
First? The
first to smile laughs.
Laughs, and
gazes suddenly
So as not to
gaze,
At where can
be sensed in leaves
The noise of
the breeze as it goes.
All is
breeze and disguise.
But the gaze
has returned from long
Gazing where
gaze there's none;
And we two
stand talking on
Of what
words, as usual, shun.
Is it the
ending or begun?
Fernando Pessoa
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