Asakiyume mita

Last week I saw No Other Land (2024; Oscar-winning documentary on destruction of a group of small hamlets in the West Bank, filmed from 2019 through 2023).

In it, at one point the father of Basel Adra (one of the two main young men making the documentary) takes several of the children in the extended family to school in a van. (The school is later destroyed.) The children are chanting in the van, they say--

We have grass; it exists.
We have a mountain; it exists.
We have a chicken house; it exists.
We have a rock; it exists.

There may have been other things they say--those were the ones I scrawled down in my notebook in the theater.

This could be something similar to playing "I spy with my little eye" ("I spy with my little eye something striped!" and then people guess what you see). Or part of a nursery rhyme or something that doesn't rhyme when you translate it into English.

But to me, watching that movie, it felt like a verbal way of touching, and touching base with, things that are really there and won't disappear. It felt like a spell, even.

Although the chicken house does, in fact, get bulldozed.

mallorys_camera put me onto La Chimera, the story of a haunted English archaeologist working with a gang of small-time Italian tomb robbers (tombaroli), digging up Etruscan artifacts and selling them to Spartaco, an mysterious black-market art dealer. It was so moving--I saw it alone first (but not quite alone: I took the photo I have on my desk of Lloyd Alexander and showed him the last few minutes of it, because I knew, knew, knew that he would understand and love the ending ). Then I got wakanomori to watch it with me, then I put my dad onto it.

mallorys_camera speaks about the film beautifully here, but the line I want to seize on in what she writes is this:

Its sense of place is strong as is its sense of temporal duality, a feeling that the past is so strong, nothing is there to stop it from consuming the present.

The dead and the living are equally present. Arthur, the Englishman, is balanced between their worlds. Except actually their worlds aren't even really separate.

Things keep changing, depending on the light they're in, depending on whose hands they rest in, depending on who's just spoken, depending on the season. Tomb robbing seems, prima facie, a bad thing, but when you see the small, ancient items of daily life in the hands of the tombaroli and their friends, it doesn't feel that way. It's like the items are living again and cherished again--until a character named Italia (great name for someone speaking out about the theft of the patrimony of the country, but also ironic! Because she's from Brazil) calls direct attention to the enormity of what they're doing:

What are they going to do? Steal from the souls? ... Those things aren't made for human eyes.

And then your vision swings around to desecration, destruction. Light hits ancient paintings of birds and a sheen of something, some magic or divinity, melts away from them. Ordinary people ("they weren't all pharaohs," one of the tumbaroli points out) speak plaintively of their missing grave goods ("There was also a golden fibula ... it meant a lot to me").

It's a very sensual film. You feel the cold. You feel the wet. You feel the warmth and light. The sound of birds is always with you.

Some words that are spoken near the end of the movie, by a character who's transformed an abandoned building, really lingered with me:

It didn't belong to anyone or it belonged to everyone ... [This is] only a temporary setup. But life itself is temporary.

It's a current film, so you have to pay to see it, but it is so, so worth it.

It snowed!

I knocked the snow off the clothesline and it fell all at once, from the entire length of the clothesline, a rope of snow hitting the ground.

I'm back from my dad's house, but while I was there, I found a tiny nature preserve that has been set up across the street from my high school. It's on low-lying land unsuitable for development: a land conservancy has bought it and made it into a preserve, so high school students can learn about wetlands and local people can go for walks.

Because it's a wetland, there are sections with plank walkways to keep you above the water. For one of them, the beams are laid out lengthwise, and when you walk on them, it's musical, like a marimba (you have to turn your sound up to hear; it's a not-great 10-second phone video):



The creator signed it:


The other walkways have the planks laid out crosswise--they don't give the same music (but are fine for walking on!)


I saw an odd but funny and entertaining movie on Netflix, Army of Thieves (2021). In it, a young German bank clerk who has been mastering safecracking in his spare time is recruited to break into a series of bank vaults designed by a master locksmith and themed on Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung operas. (The vaults are named Reingold, Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.) For each vault, the guy tells the story of that opera, and the music plays in the background, and then you get an image of all the gears and tumblers moving as he goes into a trance, listening to the clicks and slides and whirs. So cool! And the rest of the gang are hilarious characters. I feel like sartorias would enjoy it.

Weirdly, the movie is a prequel to a zombie film, Army of the Dead. This film is not a zombie film at all! Is this a thing that happens often? A prequel that's a totally different genre from the original film? The only way zombies figure in Army of Thieves is that you hear news stories about this zombie outbreak in Nevada, and sometimes the hero has bad dreams about zombies. I think he's the only carryover from one film to the other...

I just saw the Afrofuturist film Neptune Frost (2021; dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman), and whoa. It's pure resistance poetry from beginning to end; it fights the gender binary; it braids pessimism and resilient hopefulness, and it's *beautiful*. The music, the colors--and the languages! Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French, and English. Amazing.



Here's how one review summarizes it:

When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.

It's a pretty stream-of-consciousness film, but you don't need to be able to connect all the dots to love the experience.

Editing a whole book on the Titanic made me FINALLY willing to take the plunge and watch James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which I have successfully avoided all these years.

But it's so long, people! A Night to Remember (1953) is so much shorter, and lets you see things on the Californian and the Carpathia.

Never mind, I took the plunge over the past two days. I have the following observations:

(1) 1997 was just about the last year that movie could have been made and have it set in the movie's own present-day. Rose was 17 at the time the Titanic went down; they say she's 101 in the movie's present-day . . . which actually makes the movie's present day 1996. Rose would be turning 102 in 1997.

I mean, there are people older than that who are alive and even active. But not a whole lot of people.

(2) The romance element was a thousand times less annoying than I was expecting it to be. I really thought I'd be fast-forwarding through most of it; I have no interest in rich-girl poor-boy stories (or in rich-boy poor-girl stories either, really, thought the reason for my dislike in the two cases is different), but these two were so exuberant and lively together I was actually kind of charmed. There was a decided absence of Drama between the two of them, THANK GOD, and also not too much cooey syrup either THANK GOD.

I did fast-forward through most interactions involving the Evil Fiancé, who had a Terminator-like quality to him.

(3) I really liked the character of Chief Engineer Andrews. I wasn't expecting (in spite of its reputation) to actually cry watching this film, but when Rose and Jack encounter him near the end, and he says "I'm sorry I couldn't build you a stronger ship, young Rose," I did tear up.



(4) The whole disaster-movie section of the film felt ... a bit repetitive. Many permutations of the same scene (people trapped behind gates, for example, or water crashing through windows or surging through corridors). On the plus side, it allowed for you to see different solutions to a problem. Gate is shut? Try using a piece of furniture as a battering ram. Try getting the steward to unlock it. Try turning around and going a different way. On the minus side . . . idk, I could have used a few fewer permutations. There were more shots of chinaware falling off shelves than I would have included if ****I**** were the director, Mr. Cameron!

(5) I really admired and enjoyed both Rose and Jack's resourcefulness at different moments. Though Rose, I would have gone for the axe solution sooner. But I forgive you; you're in a stressful situation.

(6) It was fun to see the different passengers Doug had referred to in his book--like Mr. Guggenheim and his butler.

(7) I found the very ending, where the ship comes alight again, and you are looking through Rose's eyes, as she enters the room with the grand staircase, and everyone is there, characters you saw throughout the film, even if they had no speaking role, and they are all smiling and welcoming, and Jack is there at the top of the staircase to take her hand, SUPER DUPER MOVING. I burst into tears watching it, and then again describing it to Wakanomori and again talking to the ninja girl, and I'm not exactly dry-eyed typing this, so.

(8) It was great to see from Rose's photos that she had lived life so fully, done all the things.

When I used to hear about this movie, I resented that she survived and he died, that he was like her manic pixie dream boy (so I thought) and that he sacrificed himself for her. But watching the film, it didn't feel so much that way. She does save him at least that once, and chooses to be with him on a sinking ship rather than a lifeboat. Ideally once they're in the water, they would have splashed around looking for a piece of flotsam for him to climb on, too, but there's a limit to what you can do when you're in hypothermia.

My final verdict? Very pretty, a bit long, but overall, satisfying.

Wakanomori and I watched this early Kurosawa film just now, and wow--what a story, what actors, what cinematography. There's a scene in the middle, where the tired down-and-outers at an all-night bar start singing the Japanese-language version of Auld Lang Syne, that shows a love of humanity that brings tears to your eyes--it's as stirring as when everyone sings the Marseillaise in Casablanca, though for completely different reasons.

It stars a very young Toshiro Mifune as an artist (Ichiro Aoi [correction! It's Aoe]) and Yoshiko Yamaguchi ** as a singer (Miyako Saijo) whom paparazzi photograph in a compromising position, although there's nothing between them.

It's not what it seems!


The scandal rag Amour prints a racy story, to their mutual distress, and Aoe announces his intention to sue. Enter Takashi Shimura as down-at-the-heel attorney Otokichi Hirata [Correction: Hiruta, omg where am I tonight], who begs Aoe to hire him for the case. A less appealing entrance you can't imagine: he coughs a wet cough, wipes his nose with the back of his hand, and complains about having stepped in raw sewage out in the street--and then empties out his boots and wrings out his socks, right in the room.



Aoe's model and friend Sumie (Noriko Sengoku) warns him not to hire Hiruta, but Aoe sees something good in his eyes. After Aoe meets Hiruta's bedridden daughter Masako (Yoko Katsuragi), he's even more sure he wants to hire the lawyer.

But Hiruta is a very compromisable and soon compromised man. So what will happen?

There are aspects of the film that seem like they'd push it to sentimentality. You could see Masako that way, for instance. But the bits of dialogue designed to show her goodness feel so entirely like they belong to a real person that for me at least, she escaped that fate. (At one point the subtitles have her say "my imagination keeps me busy," but what she actually says is more like "I daydream about so many things that I'm positively busy/rushed")

But what really prevents the film from being sentimental is its clear-eyed, understated recognition of how hard it is to be human in a cold world, and the incredible affection and respect you can feel flowing from Kurosawa, via Aoe, toward everyone (with the exception of the publisher of Amour, who forfeits his right to respect through his self-interested lying and manipulation). The people in the bar scene I mentioned earlier could have come out of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

( faces )

It's also notable and noticeable that there's no romance in the movie (though you can imagine one springing up after the film ends)--it means that other emotions and types of love stand forward.

I highly recommend it. It's available through Netflix DVD or on YouTube. sovay, the refined lawyer Dr. Kataoka seems tailor made for you. Although he's the publisher's attorney, he's an honorable man.


Posters advertising the salacious story near the beginning and at the end of the film:






**Actress who was born in Japanese-colonized Manchuria, made Japanese propaganda films during the war, was an actual singer and later a member of parliament, and who died in 2014 at age 90.

I finally saw this movie, which sovay has written about eloquently several times. It's a retelling, more or less, of The Scarlet Pimpernel, starring (and directed by) Leslie Howard, who played the Scarlet Pimpernel in the 1934 film. Pimpernel Smith was made in 1941 and set in 1939; in this version, it's a mild-mannered archaeology professor who spirits people out of Nazi Germany.

It's a *smashing* film. I loved the 1934 Scarlet Pimpernel, but I love this version equally well, maybe better. The ending soliloquy was like lightning, and if you feel dispirited about the voracious viciousness of the power structure today, it may electrify you as well. I'm going to quote sovay's post, because no one can say it better than she has:

The final soliloquy is still as good as everyone remembers—hauntingly prescient, spoken as prophecy in a year in which the outcome of World War II was far from assured. A thin-faced professor in the shadows of a railway station, unarmed at gunpoint, his eyes glinting like a cat's in the dark. An anti-Nazi picture made during the Blitz by a Jewish man, his half-immigrant's quintessential Englishness carefully learned, deeply felt. He did not live to see the winning of the war his character so confidently predicted; he vanished into history like the last word into a curl of cigarette smoke and shadows of their own spiraled up around his disappearance. If he foretold his own death, he made a spell of it:

"May a dead man say a few words to you, for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred, and still you will have to go on—because you will find no horizon, and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers, and one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words."

I have thought of them more and more often these last four years. He was right then, that ghost speaking out of the dark. May he still be right now.

If you want to see just the monologue--but really I recommend the whole film, because there are so many brilliant moments (bleeding scarecrow and aftermath! "American journalists" tour a concentration camp!)--you can view it here. The lines quoted above start at 2.21, but you won't want to miss what comes before (the whole scene is 5.30 minutes).

In this entry, osprey_archer talks about short films she's watched recently, and one of them, "Lost World," by Cambodian American director Kalyanee Mam, captivated me.

It's narrated by a young woman, Vy Phalla [surname comes first here], who lives on the island of Koh Sralau. The way of life there is threatened by sand dredging: sand is dredged in Cambodia and taken to add landmass in Singapore.

Scooping up Cambodia ...



... To create more Singapore




The film's write-up at shortoftheweek.com says, "Kalyanee Mam’s film encompasses vast juxtapositions in a slow-motion lament against environmental degradation, loss, and rapacious capitalism." Yes. It is that, powerfully.

But I was also there for foraging clams at low tide, in among the mangrove spiracles:





And for hopping from prop root to prop root, looking for snails (though the kids did complain about the mosquitos).



Beautiful place to live...



... very different from futuristic Singapore**



At one point Phalla sings a beautiful song about the mangroves. "The beauty of the mangrove forest / rivals the palace gardens" So right.

mangrove seedling



And Phalla goes to see the palace gardens, so to speak: in Singapore she visits an artificially created cloud forest. "Lost World," the exhibit is called. Please do not touch, the signs admonish. "Camelia," Phalla says. "I've only heard the name. Now I see its face."



Back in Cambodia, watching the dredgers, she says, "The law has given us all kinds of freedoms. Here we only have the right to sit, shed tears, and witness the destruction." ... I would like to say something in answer to that, but I think maybe the appropriate thing is to sit, witness, and maybe shed tears.

Thanks for sharing this with me, osprey_archer!

Lost World from Go Project Films on Vimeo.

**Don't take this entry to be anti-Singapore. You can point out a wrong practice without condemning a country (or person or organization or....) wholesale.

Initially I hadn't been thrilled by the notion of this film; I think because I feared (completely unjustifiably) that it would be purveying trite truths of one sort or another. But several of my friends reviewed it favorably, and finally last night I got to see it--and really loved it.

It's a totally different kind of film from Winter's Bone (by the same director), a very **gentle** story, and quiet, even though elements of the story aren't gentle at all. In fact, all through the movie there were moments when, primed by what Hollywood often does, I was on the edge of my seat expecting something horrible to happen--and it didn't.

The situation is that Tom (a girl) has been living with her PTSD-suffering war-veteran father in a national park, foraging, growing their own food, collecting rainwater--and occasionally going into town to buy things (which they finance by dad selling the medication he gets from the VA to other vets). They get found out and forced to reassimilate into society. Tom is adjusting, but her dad is not, and he announces they're taking off again. Reluctantly, she leaves with him, but things are much harder and grimmer this time around.

What I loved about it most were the moments with animals and the sense of how healing and enriching sharing time and space with animals can be. There's a scene where the dad is stroking a horse, and the horse rests its head against the dad, and the dad rests his head against the horse, and they're just still together for a moment, and oh my heart! Same with Tom stroking a rabbit she finds hopping along the road and returns to its owner; same later on when an older woman shows her the miracle of a hive of bees.

The beauty of the natural world resonates through the whole film, too, but the film understands that it's beauty that will kill you if you're underprepared--and Tom and her father understand that; in fact, everyone in the movie understands the situation and everyone else pretty well: the problem is what people can live with.

Thinking about everyone understanding brings up another thing I liked about the film: there wasn't really a villain. Even the state isn't villainous: it tries its best to accommodate Tom and her dad's unique needs within a framework of what's societally acceptable. It's just that it won't work for the dad.

I think that's the saddest thing in the film--that the dad just can't feel at ease in, apparently, any situation near other people, except his daughter, whom he loves very much, whereas she's growing into a person who wants to be near other people, though she loves her dad very much. But I'd call the ending happy: it's a good one for Tom, and it's set up in the film as one that's not doom-and-death for the dad either.

Sometimes in yoga class, we balance on one foot. If we're all balancing with no problem, the instructor suggests we try it with our eyes closed. "It's much, much harder," she says. Have tried, can confirm.

This came up in the movie Roma, which I watched the other day. The protagonist--young housekeeper Cleo--is trying to get in touch with the asshole father of her baby, who's doing some kendo-style training out in the back of beyond. They're all chanting Japanese numbers in unison and taking stances, and then a guest sensei-type says he's going to show them something impressive, and he asks for a blindfold. Blindfolded, he balances on one foot with his arms forming a diamond over his head.

"You think this is nothing much?" he says to the trainees and those watching. "You all try." So everyone starts trying, and everyone's losing their balance and hopping around and falling over. Except Cleo. In a long-distance shot of her up on the ridge, with other onlookers, you see her balancing perfectly. It's just for a moment.

... Annnnd it doesn't really have any significance? The movie just keeps going along.

I was telling the story of this to the healing angel, and she immediately tried doing the thing--of course, who wouldn't! But she really, really wanted to be able to do it, and this was making me think how driven people are to have external markers of specialness, regardless of any meaning or context. If she could do it, or if she gets to be able to do with with practice, what will that mean... other than that she can balance in a manner that very few people can do? Is that in itself an accomplishment? I mean, if it makes you happy and doesn't harm others, I don't have a problem with it, but.

... Which is also making me think of an assignment the students had at the program I help out at (not the jail, the other one)--they had to talk about the use of the word "special" as an insult. One of the other volunteers went so far as to say that no one ever wants to be special in any way; everyone just wants to blend in. I don't think this is how most people feel; I think a lot of people would like to be special if it's a good kind of special and not a bad kind, especially in societies that set a high value on individualism. But maybe I'm conflating good-specialness with excellence.

... Just random thoughts. I haven't posted in a while and wanted to share something, and that's what came out.