Dziga Vertov: Man with a Movie Camera, Part 1

Here's a cool Soviet avant-garde silent movie released in 1929: Man with a Movie Camera / Человек с киноаппаратом by Dziga Vertov (aka David Kaufman), Elizaveta Svilova (editor), and Mikhail Abramovich Kaufman (cinematographer).

Just about everything we've ever seen in cinema is here as far as angles, shots and imaginative use of motion pictures, or at least everything possible without the aid of computerized special effects. Worth seeing for the technical effort alone, it also provides a frenetic look at modern life. There's very little in it we wouldn't recognize in life, even now in the 21st century. In fact, I saw horses just the other day. Certainly airplanes (albeit less sleek than today's), trams, trains, factories, roadways, sidewalks, park benches, buildings, fashion styles and accoutrements, sewing machines, typewriters, telephones, coal miners, smoking chimney stacks, motorcycles, carts, buses, cars, construction sites, municipal water, cameras, hats, luggage, telephone poles, baskets, scarves, shutters, trees, water fountains, glasses, elevators and lots of movement.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

The Archaeology of Home

Katharine Greider's The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set on a Thousand Square Feet of the Lower East Side (2011) is going to serve as a writing prompt. In her book, she researches the history of an address, a house, its inhabitants and changes through and over time. Her writing is driven by two things that I strongly advocate: curiosity and contemplation. Why not add, as she also does, research, gathering facts, attempting interpretations and seeking universals while we're at it?

Now, dear reader, take your living space. Is it newer, older, in between? Where is it situated? How is it situated? What remains from before your time? Is there stuff you carried in with you, old family artifacts and treasures? How about the exterior, yard, interior furnishings, street facings, street names, walkways, trees, brickworks, stones, coal bins, basement, attic, breezeway, outbuildings, anything at all?

Go back in time with this abode space. Ten years. A hundred years. A thousand years. A million years. A billion years. That should provide plenty of variables to work with. Now, go to town with it. Whatya got?

Today's Rune: Defense.  

The Tillman Story

Seeing them back to back, one can see how Amir Bar-Lev's The Tillman Story (2010) parallels Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon (2011) and vice versa: documentary format, three brothers, divorced parents, fame; but instead of being raised Pentecostalists like the Followills, the Tillmans are freethinkers; and instead of forming a rock band like the Followills, two of the Tillman brothers (Pat and Kevin) become US Army Rangers, and one of them is killed by his own men.

The Tillman Story is a compelling documentary (with subtle narration by Josh Brolin) about the Tillman family, but it also provides insight into soldiering in Iraq and Afghanistan, and specifically a clear focus on the "friendly fire" death of Pat Tillman in 2004, its subsequent coverup, and distorted reshaping as a propaganda tool.

Today's Rune: Defense.    
     

Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon

Kings of Leon -- for those not yet in the know, a major American recording and touring band that first made it big in Europe -- made news in Texas recently when they cancelled a show-in-progress, ostensibly on account of the excessive heat. My curiosity about this got me to check out Stephen C. Mitchell's documentary, Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon (2011).

Cutting to the quick, it's really good. Why? Because it goes to their roots, the greater family, swirling around a sprawling family reunion in Oklahoma. The three Followill brothers (Caleb, Nathan and Jared) were raised as Pentecostalists, and a primal Christianity permeates the entire milieu. Holy Ghost, speaking in tongues -- all of it. Their parents have been divorced since before Kings of Leon formed as a band; in fact, it seems as if the divorce itself created the space in which they could form it with their cousin Matthew Followill, in Nashville, Tennessee. Mitchell gets at things from the perspectives of both parents. The father was a preacher, the mother feared hell and damnation. "We were taught that television was the one-eyed Devil," she notes. "Rock and Roll was Devil music." She seems still to think so, and so does her ex-husband. But the latter had other demons to fight, like alcohol. Out of this came the band, driven and driving. It's a remarkable story.



Bottom line: Talihina Sky is an impressive freestyle documentary with no overarching narration. It's like total immersion in another culture, another town, another family system, and it took me a little while to get my bearings. Well worth the effort. 



Today's Rune: Breakthrough.  

Buñuel: Simon of the Desert

In Luis Buñuel's Simón del desierto / Simon of the Desert (black and white, 1965), a saintly ascetic lives atop first one pillar, then another, where he is thrice tempted by the Devil (in the guise of Silvia Pinal). Third time's the charm.

Simon as Holy Fool and Wise Man (played grandly by Claudio Brook) could represent any religious tradition in his primal existential ascetic stance, but he is in fact based on a real person, a Syrian Christian saint now known as Symeon the Stylite (ca. 390-459 A.D.) and also Saint Simeon Stylites the Elder; there were other stylitoe ("pillar-hermits"), too. Maybe we'll see more of them in the throes of the 21st century? 

The central dramatic conflict in Simón del desierto -- Simon vs. the temptations of the Devil -- is largely unseen or ignored by various pilgrims and other visitors to Simon's pillar-shrine. Below the pillar, priests, various monks, Simon's mother (who lives in a nearby hut), a foul-mouthed dwarf, hungry poor and even a possessed monk seem more concerned about what Simon can do for them than anything else. Yet when a miracle occurs -- a man whose hands have been chopped off for stealing bread has his hands restored -- the crowd seems ho-hum or even pissed off about it. Such ungrateful people.

I won't even go into the nice little twist at the end of this short masterpiece.

Silvia Pinal, whose 80th birthday is coming up on September 12, 2011, here plays the Devil, just about to pop out of a casket to tempt Simon anew.

Today's Rune: Gateway.

Buñuel: The Phantom of Liberty, Part 2

Taking Liberties. Many times, one may be free to choose suicide, but once the choice is carried through, liberty is nullified through the act of oblivion.

Once upon a time in America, a group of people who called themselves "Confederates" fought to be free to own slaves. Think about it: they-fought-to-be-free-to-have-the-right to-own-slaves.

Typically, slave owners denied the "natural right" of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to their slaves. If slaves attempted an escape to liberty and were caught, they might have a foot cut off, or worse, have their heads chopped off and put on a wooden pole as warning to others yearning to be free. Once upon a time in America.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Pictured here: Opening image of Luis Buñuel's Le Fantôme de la liberté / The Phantom of Liberty (1974): Goya's Los fusilamientos del tres de mayo / The Third of May 1808. Napoleon's variation on the above motto: Liberté, Ordre public / Liberty, public order.

By Order of Alfonso,  King of Castile, León and Galicia and King of the Germans, 1265 A.D.:

ON LIBERTY. All creatures of the world naturally love and desire liberty, especially men who have authority over others and, for the most part, those who are of noble heart.

Law 1: . . . Liberty is the power that every man has by nature to do what he wants, except in those areas where the power or the right of law restrains him.*

*Source: Women and Slavery in America: A Documentary History, edited by Catherine M. Lewis and J. Richard Lewis (University of Arkansas Press, 2011), page [1].  

Today's Rune: The Self.

Buñuel: The Phantom of Liberty, Part 1

In Le Fantôme de la liberté / The Phantom of Liberty / El fantasma de la libertad (1974), Luis Buñuel explores the idea of liberty (aka freedom) from a surreal perspective. On the one hand, he shows, social conventions, morals, customs and laws seem (or are) absurd, and are malleable over time; on the other hand, complete freedom of the individual carried to its ideal translates into chaos, anarchy and mayhem. Is there a "reasonable" middle ground?

The Phantom of Liberty is half presentation of, half comedy of manners. Liberty has consequences. People are social animals. Try shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, for instance, or driving 100 mph in a school zone during operating hours.

Or consider what is taboo in one culture or social group yet accepted in another.

In one scene, a professor speaks of Margaret Mead and anthropology, puts forth the idea of polygamy as an example. He also opens up all sorts of religious beliefs for scrutiny.

Are we truly "at liberty?"

In addition to all sorts of triggering sounds (church bells gonging, horses hooves clattering on brick pavement in a courtyard, sirens wailing, clocks ticking, water pouring), Buñuel deploys various animals (some wondering into rooms, or straining against bars at a zoo) and social archectypes in motion: police (gendarmes), soldiers, monks, government officials, young children, senior citizens, servants, teachers, doctors, lawyers, judges, nurses, an inn keeper, a sociopathic sniper, S & M exhibitionists, a Spanish guitarist and a flamenco dancer, and more -- plenty to work with, certainly. Let's just say some are more at liberty than others.  

Today's Rune: Journey.