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. 

Ryan H. Walsh's 'Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968' (2018)

Ryan H. Walsh, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. New York: Penguin Press, 2018.

A kaleidoscopic time portal into trippy Boston centering around 1968, but opening out into the 1960s and 1970s. The possibilities for further study of its phenomena are wide and deep. 

The biggest revelation for me was musical, with Boston bands like Ultimate Spinach (a sort of psychedelic Doorsy head band); and interesting historical context for powerful music with which I was already quite familiar (James Brown, Velvet Underground, Van Morrison).  

And you get all sorts of crazy details about the local music scene, clubs, musicians, cultish and political activism (particularly "the Lyman family"), underground newspapers, Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970), the freaky What's Happening, Mr. Silver? show, Howard Zinn, Timothy Leary, Steve McQueen, the Boston Strangler, Tony Curtis, Aerosmith, Maria Muldaur, astral projection, Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, Barney Frank -- and more! 

Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 probably syncs well with an altered state, too, or so one can imagine. Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: The Self. 
   

The Charge of the Light Brigade: Take One

Tony Richardson's version of The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) leans more on the Charles Wood-John Osborne script than on Alfred, Lord Tennyson's wildly famous 1854 glory-poem of the same name ("Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die"). And well-written this film is -- darkly satiric, entertaining, interesting. We watch the English officers and troopers and horses of the 11th Hussars ("Hoo-SARS," the men say) training, preparing and heading off to the Crimean War (1853-1856). We see women and men of different socio-economic classes, how they relate  -- a study in manners (including romance) that lets us think about what's different now, what's the same, nearly 160 years later. By the end of the film, we much better see "the reason why" the "Charge of the Light Brigade" happened at all.

Excellent ensemble actors include Trevor Howard as Lord Cardigan, commander of the 11th "Cherrybums" and the whole Light Brigade (hilarious as a character, nightmare as an aristocratic officer); John Gielgud (playing the befuddled one-armed Lord Raglan, veteran of Waterloo); Jill Bennett (as the enthusiastic Fanny Duberly, who has a crush on gruff Lord Cardigan); David Hemmings (the protagonist in Antonioni's Blowup / Blow-up, 1966) as Captain Nolan, steely veteran of conflicts in India; and Vanessa Redgrave (also from Blowup) as Clarissa, part of a ménage à trois involving Nolan and her kindly but dullard husband. Good beans, Wellington! Now: The Brigade will advance! Trumpeter, walk . . . march!

Today's Rune: Growth.         

Not Fade Away

Not Fade Away (2012), David Chase's theatrical film debut, has strong elements -- the historical backdrop of the 1960s, both locally (New Jersey) and broadly; James Gandolfini as the father of a nuclear family; three sisters from two families, all interesting; extended family and friends; ditch-digging workers; and period music, with visual footage -- but all in all, it can't surpass any single episode of Chase's The Sopranos on HBO, nor Mad Men on AMC. The problem is point of view. We hear narration from one of the sisters, which is fine, but the main focus is on a dingbat brother who lacks charisma, charm, drive or courage as he becomes part of a fledgling garage band.* Much better results would come from a closer, sustained look at life from the perspective of the James Gandolfini character -- he is put upon, he becomes physically sick, he has epiphanies -- or either of the Dietz sisters (Joy and Grace, played respectively by Dominique McElligott and Bella Heathcote), both Bohemians, one mentally unstable and the other rock steady.

I enjoyed the period feel and details of Not Fade Away, brief scenes of and banter about the Rolling Stones, blues and the times, and quips about Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup / Blow-Up (1966). About Antonioni's film, Grace Dietz suggests that the rustling of trees serves as musical soundtrack during a key scene, rather than a more heavy-handed signaling of how specifically to respond as film audience. Small victories for Not Fade Away, but better than a total wash.

Today's Rune: Warrior. *Of the band members, only Gene (Jack Huston) shows any spark.   

In the Port of Amsterdam -- or Copenhagen

If cameras serve as visual "recording angels," here's a mystery along the lines of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup / aka Blow-Up (1966). It imprints the possibilities of a story or some sort of reconstructed memory. 

Resurrecting images from a scanned negative, even though I snapped this picture there's only a twin-trickster memory of such an interior -- Amsterdam and Copenhagen / København. 1980s. An intense examination would yield results -- there's lettering visible in this cropped blowup, for example. But for now, it remains a mystery of sorts. More will be revealed -- or not.

Here the setup looks sort of like the final scene in The Sopranos.

And here we pull back to the beginning image. What is this place?

In corresponding textual memory of Amsterdam and Copenhagen, I remember locales such as the Melkweg / Milky Way, Zorba the Buddha, Musikcaféen and the Texas Saloon, plus certain international hostels. Could this be a small antechamber attached to one of them?  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.   

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.   
  

Roman Polanski: Repulsion

I was so impressed with Yvonne Furneaux in Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche / The Girlfriends (1955) that checking her out in Roman Polanski's first English language film, Repulsion (1965), seemed natural. In this London-based tale of one person's descent into madness, Furneaux plays Hélène, the healthier older sister of Carole (Catherine Deneuve). It's an excellent, stylish and sometimes creepy black and white film made on a modest budget. 

Here,  Hélène (Yvonne Furneaux) tries to assure Carole (Catherine Deneuve) that she'll be all right during the former's trip with her married paramour to Pisa.  

But Carole is strange, her reality even stranger . . . and someone left a straight razor in the bathroom . . .

Today's Rune: Gateway.   

Michelangelo Antonioni: Le amiche / The Girlfriends

Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (1955) plays like a compressed black and white season of Sex and the City -- if a character like Charlotte was easily defeated and cyclically suicidal. Here we see the changing opportunities for women in post-World War Two Italy, somewhat porous socioeconomic class structure, men adrift. Though not really a comedy, there are in Le amiche pithy quips about friends and frenemies, artists and industrialists, builders and architects, fashions and fashion designers, married couples and single couples, singletons, married paramours, and everything in between. In this, Le amiche feels very contemporary. Certainly Italians and classic style go hand in hand -- most of these folks would still seem contemporary even in the early 21st century.

Based on Tra donna sole / Women on their Own, a 1949 novella by Cesare Pavese, Le amiche retains a certain amount of gravitas about life choices in the face of social and personal change.

To me, the real star of Le amiche is Yvonne Furneaux as Momina de Stefani. Though her character often comes off as flippant and even casually cruel, Furneaux (on far right above) pretty much jumps off the screen with charisma. That said, the entire ensemble cast is strong. Even as a cultural snapshot, another fascinating film by Antonioni.

Today's Rune: Journey.    

Michelangelo Antonioni: Zabriskie Point (Take II)

In Zabriskie Point (1970), Antonioni gives a sort of take (or double-take) on 

1) what's going on in the USA at the time; and 
2) how things change with time as new technologies and modes of exchange are injected into our daily lives. 

Some of this overlaps with his Italian-location films such as Il Grido / The Cry (1957) and Il deserto rosso / Red Desert (1964-1965). Some details are peculiar to American culture.

Many things are going on in Zabriskie Point, albeit often at what seems like a slow pace. Development, for instance. Rod Taylor (The Time Machine, 1960; The Birds, 1963) plays a quintessentially aggressive real estate developer, pushing out into the desert with "Sunny Dunes," a place to "get away from it all" -- despite issues of water shortages and general ecological impact. This development thread may be the most important thrust of the movie and remains completely relevant in the 21st century.

More specific to the latter 1960s and early 1970s, there are in Zabriskie Point organized upheavals on college campuses. These include the twin thrusts of Black Power and development of counterculture alternatives to "dominant paradigms."  The students are, for the most part, knowledgeable about what's going on with the Establishment, about civil rights and the then ongoing US-Vietnam War. We see some of this from time to time now (compare the recent Occupy Wall Street movement, and the highly organized Act Up campaigns), but there's nothing quite like eliminating the Draft and opening up voting to 18-21 year old citizens to take the air out of resistance to War and the Establishment in general. 

In the last post, I mentioned Antonioni's taking notice of the timeless gun obsession element of American culture, and there's more to express about this, but for now, it's worth noting another more time-specific element: letting it all hang out in small communes and collectives, with hippies, be-ins and that kind of stuff. Antonioni sure seems to sympathize with Daria (Daria Halprin) as she questions the Establishment status quo and wonders around on the road from LA to Phoenix. There are scenes involving her that remind one of Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (1967-1968), Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and similar types of countercultural outpourings that even now seem to make a lot of people nervous.

Today's Rune: Signals.    

Michelangelo Antonioni: Zabriskie Point (Take I)

With a little Pink Floyd mixed in, far out is what it is: Michelangelo Antonioni's full color English language film Zabriskie Point (1970). It's fueled by ghosts in the machine, the late 1960s Zeitgeist, Time-Ghost, spirit of the time. Pictured here: Kathleen Cleaver, now a professor at Yale. How cool is that?

The main actors, Daria Halprin (as Daria -- Dennis Hopper was a spouse in "real life") and Mark Frechette (as Mark) are a joke as far as delivering lines (hello, Earth? Is anybody out there?), but Zabriskie Point works anyway.  Antonioni knows exactly how much Americans obssess about guns -- there's a sequence in a gunshop that could have been filmed in 2013, in fact -- and about planes (Mark steals one, for little apparent reason other than that he's a certifiable nut).

Let's not forget explosions -- and Wonder Bread debris flying through the air to the tune of Pink Floyd's "Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up" (a reworking of "Careful With That Axe, Eugene"). Far out, indeed.

Today's Rune: Fertility.  
  

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.
 

Cindy Sherman in Dallas

Got to check out the Cindy Sherman exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) -- fantastic. Photos large, gigantic and miniature, in black & white and in full garish color. Cindy Sherman -- like Tracey Ullman, eh? They're both in their fifties, come  to think about it. Still absorbing how it's different to see in person vs. with eyes only, refracted. Notice how in this image she looks like a character in an Antonioni movie?

Today's Rune: Joy.
   

Michelangelo Antonioni: L'Avventura (Take II)

In the basic set-up for Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), we see Anna (Lea Massari, pictured above) at odds with her monied father, who is pointing to a new housing development project that involves decimating a beautiful villa.

Anna is rich but not particularly happy. Her sporadic fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) irritates her. She is restless. Her state of mind reminds me of the Iggy & the Stooges lines:

Sick of hanging around your pad
Sick of your Mom and sick of your Dad
Yeah and [Sandro] it's sad but true
Now I'm even sick of you . . .

Anna and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) eventually go along with Sandro to meet up with a handful of others for a boating trip on the Mediterranean. At one point, Anna dives into the sea for a swim -- and then yells "Shark!" This turns out to have been a lark, but she only tells Claudia.

The boating party eventually lands on a little island off the north coast of Sicily. There are ancient ruins there, and at one point, a bumbling dude holds up a centuries-old vase only to drop it -- having survived for ages, he manages to smash it into fragments in a matter of seconds.

All of this early stuff leads up to a pivotal scene in which Anna basically tells Sandro off -- she doesn't want to marry him, etc. He is dismissive and takes a nap. When he wakes up, Anna is gone. But to where?

That's the set-up. A lot of other developments accrue in response. Characters forced to do various and sundry, make decisions. Too bad for them!  As for Anna, there are sightings of her on Sicily and so forth, sort of like Elvis sightings. Is she alive? Is she dead? What next? What next includes a drawing together of Claudia and Sandro in a strange sort of way (though not so strange for Sandro, I suppose). And there's more!

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.  

Michelangelo Antonioni: L'Avventura (Take I)

In Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), we're still in Italy, but unlike Il Grido, we're now following ultra-wealthy developers, royalty and their entourage instead of working class people. Visually, it's another stunning black and white film, focusing here on Italian Mediterranean land and seascapes (particularly around the Regione Siciliana), ancient and new architecture, abandoned fascist-Futurist projects (the police and/or military still wear fascist-looking uniforms), and travel by boat, rail, foot and automobile.

A little more on the set-up in the next post.

Today's Rune: Warrior.       

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take III)

Now for the basic set-up of Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957). In the small Italian village where Aldo (Steve Cochran) works as a mechanic at the local mill less than a dozen years after the end of the Second World War, Irma, his seven-year paramour, learns that her absentee husband has died overseas. Turns out she has another man, too, Luigi (though we never see him). With her husband dead, she breaks things off with Aldo, despite the fact that they have a young daughter (Rosina).

Aldo freaks out, and after trying to change Irma's mind, quits his steady job and heads out for a vagabond trip with Rosina to parts unknown. Along the way, they have adventures involving an ex-paramour and a new one (Virginia -played by Dorian Gray aka Maria Mangini, pictured above), before he decides to send Rosina back. Aldo then vaguely hooks up with a freelance prostitute (Adreina -- Lynn Shaw) who is struggling to survive. 

My favorite section is Aldo and Rosina's stay with Virginia and her boozing father Guerrino. Here we learn more of representative socioeconomic changes already noticeable in earlier parts of the film. Guerrino is losing his farm to development, and Virginia has taken him to a house/petrol station on a pre-superhighway transportation route where she can eek out a living and give him a place to stay. Virginia's husband is dead (possibly as a result of the war), as well as her mother. Aldo helps out -- for a while. We come to understand all of them better from this experience. Poor drunken Guerrino tries to throw rocks at developers as they are cutting down some of his trees. This "Myth of Sisyphus" moment is repeated on a grander scale in the final section of the movie. 

Even though from the retelling Il Grido may seem like a pitiful tale, it has a stark beauty to it, almost like a mix of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and a Thomas Hardy novel. It contains both tragedy and straight realism. Too, Aldo at times appears almost comic in his brooding, which adds another dimension to the film. All five of the major women characters seem to "get" him better than he understands himself. Aldo and Irma's daughter Rosina adds urgency and poignancy to the story, raising the stakes. The way she sees things (including many strange people) is made clear, drawing one's attention to various additional social details.

Poor Aldo. But in the end, my favorite characters are Virginia, Guerrino, Rosina and Adreina. This inspires a question: what makes certain characters more appealing than others? 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.     
    

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take II)

And now it's time to delve into the title of Antonioni's absorbing film Il grido (1957).

The raw English translation ("The Cry") doesn't do it justice, doesn't convey the necessary gravitas. Nowadays in English, a "cry" sounds almost feeble, or baby-like. Something more like jeremiad or lamentation is suggested.

Most readers will have seen some kind of representation or reproduction of Edvard Munch's 1893 painting called in English The Scream and in Norwegian Skrik (and in German, as part of a set, Der Schrei der Natur), yes? 

Check out the Italian variations for Skrik: L'urlo o Il grido. Now we're getting somewhere that's not lost in the translation. Consider Il Grido more like The Scream than The Cry. Despair in the face of change and instability. Aldo, the main protagonist (played convincingly by Steve Cochran, an American), despairs to such a degree that one can easily imagine his inner psyche reflected by the Munch painting.

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Michelangelo Antonioni: Il Grido (Take I)

Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido (1957) spotlights a fleeting period in modern life. Here, the setting is along the Po River valley in northern Italy less than twelve years after the end of the Second World War. A lot is going on in the background. There's painful recovery from the mass destruction and dislocation of war. And there's new mechanization, encroaching corporate development, evident transition from agrarian ecology to industrialization. Displacement. Wandering people, and people attached to villages and farms even as they are being upstaged by petrol stations, trucks moving up and down the main pre-superhighway transporation routes, speedboats racing in the river, airplanes droning overhead. The poor, for the most part, remain poor, scrounging from day to day and week to week.

Traditional delivery continues apace. We see a woman come by a house and sell a handful of fresh eggs from a basket, and a man delivers fresh milk, ladles it into a pot for heating up. Men work at a local sugar refinery in the first town we see, a transitional industry not yet fully automated. Food is hand-picked at the local market, in small towns that have one. A raised handmade flag on a stick signals for a passing doctor to stop and make a housecall. "It's just malaria," he says. It's a world away from today's "West," these black and white scenes from Italy in the 1950s, and it's astonishing to see.

Today's Rune: Protection.         

Michelangelo Antonioni: The Passenger (Take II)

Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) is an odd sort of road movie that takes its main character (played by Jack Nicholson) on a journey dicated largely by a dead man's day planner. Why does he do it? Having assumed another's identitity, why does he insist on walking in the other man's shoes? Therein lies one mystery.

The ambience that permeates The Passenger feels like fate, like myth, like an inevitable time and place and outcome. What we see are detailed (and often beautiful) shots of people and buildings, vehicles, landscapes and skies set in, around and above North Africa, London, Germany and Spain.

The Passenger sticks with me like the memory of some strong dream; somewhere down the line it eventually conjured up in my comparative memory what could be seen as a companion film: Wim Wenders' Der Amerikanische Freund / The American Friend (1977), starring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz. Both delve into identity and coincidence, fate and the big picture, and there be Germans.

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.        

Michelangelo Antonioni: The Passenger (Take I)

Another absorbing (and strange) film by Antonioni is The Passenger (1975), starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. In English and in color. Locations are as wide-ranging as in a Bond film, starting with Francophone Chad, the African nation just south of Libya. It's largely about identity, or social contructs if you prefer. And, preconceived notions of what makes people tick. The setup if this: Locke (Nicholson) is a BBC reporter covering Africa; he's made friends out in the field (at a desert inn, to be specific) with Roberston, a man with a heart condition, secret arms dealer by trade. When Locke finds Roberston dead of "natural causes," his immediate instinct is to switch identities. And then off he goes back into the world, leaving his wife in London a "widow." Much happens as a result of this decision.

Usually in movies, such identity swaps are played for laughs, but a similar dramatic switch forms the backdrop for Don Draper (Jon Hamm) in the AMC series Mad Men. 

Today's Rune: Possessions.  

Michelangelo Antonioni: La Notte / Night (Part II)

A little more on Michelangelo Antonioni's masterful film, La Notte / The Night (1961). Besides the sheer delight of Jeanne Moreau, Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti in fraught existential meditation, look for the shapes and signs of civilization, part changing and part grounded in ancient culture.

Do we still startle at the sudden dropping into view or earshot of helicopters, jet fighters, flailing construction equipment?  Does a sudden cloudburst send you scurrying? 

Besides shapes, patterns, and careful observation, there's a relaxed jazz backbeat and another one of those strange Antonioni scenes involving constructions of race. In La Notte, two "black" performers do jazz-backed circus tricks while the married couple (Mastroianni and Moreau) look on dazedly, restrained by their own "white" limitations. If this doesn't make many people feel a little uncomfortable in 2013, probably nothing will.  

Pictured above: Giovanni (Mastroianni) looks on in horror as his possibly soon-to-be-ex-wife Lidia (Moreau) exchanges interesting thoughts with his possibly soon-to-be-new-paramour (Vitti), while simultaneously considering a job offer by the latter's ultra-wealthy father. All in a day's work for the writer. Imagine think bubbles floating above their heads. Earlier, when visiting Lidia's ex-paramour Tommaso as he lay dying in a hospital, Giovanni asks the poor man (a fellow writer, pumped full of morphine) if he really likes his new book? Then they drink champagne with his mother. Que Sera, Sera.

Today's Rune: Fertility.