Paper Dracula

I'm awarding the title of "Most Obnoxious Adaptation of Dracula" to Guy Maddin's 2002 Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, ostensibly a film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's adaptation, but footage of the dancers make up but one mutilated ingredient of this post modern, short attention span, smugly stupid stew.

I guess this is what happens when numbskulls get their hands on insightful analyses of a classic work. Analyses that discuss the xenophobia and the fear of immigrants inherent in Dracula as a character here prompt Maddin to use title cards at the beginning thrusting the subtext down your throat.

Meanwhile, the subtly frightening sexual quality of Lucy's blood transfusions is changed to show Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, and Quincey Morris apparently gang raping her.

It all becomes a trite, dim witted commentary on patriarchy. It's like a left wing minstrel show (which, I guess, considering the state of the Democratic party at the time of minstrel shows in the U.S. would make it just like a minstrel show). Instead of a story that humanises and explores prejudices and fears in society, it demonises the opposition, setting them up as an Other far more starkly than was done to eastern Europe through Dracula's characterisation. And, incidentally, it's not as though Stoker was stuck in modes of thinking--he was an Irish Protestant but that didn't stop him from showing Van Helsing's Catholicism as being far more useful against Dracula than the Church of England.

There is a cute moment where Mina seeks to emulate the sexual experiences in Jonathan Harker's journal, which shocks him, but once again, the female characterisations still fall below the even antiquated feminism of the novel itself. The women are shown as being little more than sex starved victims.

Maddin is praised by many critics for his emulation of silent film, which really surprises me as the movie couldn't look more modern in my view with its hyperactive cutting and dopey close-ups of one note performances. I was reminded of Ginger Roger's quote about Saturday Night Fever, "The young people to-day--they think they can dance with their faces." Certainly we can't blame the ballet company in this instance since they typically perform this stuff on stage. If only Maddin had sought out some vintage silent ballet footage.

I really am baffled by the almost universal acclaim this Maddin guy receives. I didn't actually think much of a Chinese dancer being cast as Dracula--I figure you need to go with the best dancer when it comes to ballet and, anyway, it fits with the Attila heritage Dracula was so proud of. However, Roger Ebert writes;

[Dracula] is played here by the ballet's Zhang Wei-Qiang, whose stock melodramatic Asian characteristics are made not much more subtle than with D.W. Griffith's Cheng Haun in "Broken Blossoms" (1919).

Please hear David Tennant's delivery when I say . . . What?

Twitter Sonnet #469

A big ball of hate sticks with the sad lint.
Vulpine gavones perplex the wan flower.
The platinum thumb tacks are Heaven sent.
May poles speed bulletins up the tower.
Chess cheese falls like snowflakes across the dough.
Alternate networks give check to the phone.
Masseurs count stegosaurus as a foe.
Pachinko players can never atone.
Vaunted llamas cost two beans to Lando.
Sick soup bases are unfair and wicked.
"Early towed taco cures friend your speedo,"
The gagged face carved of grapefruit said.
The new potato face choked on a beard.
Tinted wasps are inadequately weird.

The Shadows Everywhere

"This is the tale of the strange adventures of young Allan Gray . . . Preoccupied with superstitions of centuries past, he became a dreamer for whom the line between the real and the supernatural became blurred."

It's easy enough to say that Carl Dreyer's 1932 masterpiece Vampyr is dreamlike. Events occur in the film that lead to others on the basis seemingly not of waking logic, but logic based on fears and interests mutual to the viewer and the characters. But the extraordinary thing is that it's not a dream, nor is it a portrait of waking experience, it's a convincing halfway point between the two that emphasises aspects of both worlds for the hero that otherwise would not be clear. Which is not to say that what we're seeing is a metaphorical version of events that are "really" happening. It's more like dream infects reality, reality infects dream, and both do so without regard for linear time. Reality has always been infected, dream has always been infected, and they both always will be entwined.

The protagonist is aptly named, therefore, Gray. He's played by the film's financer, Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, who may not have been a particularly good actor, but he's perfectly adequate for the task of a man who moves through the film in a wide eyed dream state. The movie tells the story of his battle with an elderly vampire woman in a village called Courtempierre.

Filmed in the early days of sound films, Vampyr was largely conceived of in the cinematic language of silent film, which contributes to its dreamlike quality. When Gray encounters a household where he witnesses a man being murdered, he strikes up a relationship with one of the man's daughters, Gisele, with almost no dialogue. The film takes it as understood that the two become a couple, something that in a silent film would have been customary, but here seems as though the two are bound as it is their natural place as entities in this dream life.

Similarly, the villains of the film show themselves as villains often for reasons that only make emotional sense, as when the doctor who serves the vampire woman angrily tells Gray that there are no children or animals in the village, despite the fact that Gray remarks on hearing both.

It's amazing to think that Dreyer actually thought he was making a movie with mainstream appeal, even when he altered events in the script meant to take place in a marsh to taking place within a mill, just because in scouting locations he came across a place where light filtered inside, playing on the walls like, in his words, "white fire." Perhaps this is the genesis behind the shadows in the film we see moving independent of their owners, signifying that these people are spirit servants of the vampire.

There are two moments in the film that most fascinatingly show the blurring between dreaming and waking reality. The first is when the murdered man visits Gray in his hotel room before they've met, in order to give Gray a parcel which is, the man says, "to be opened after my death."

After Gray sees the man shot, he opens the parcel some time later to find that it is a book about vampires.

The other scene where the two realities intrude on each other most strikingly is when Gray appears to use astral projection, separating his spirit from his body to investigate a ruined castle where he sees himself being buried alive by servants of the vampire. This gives Gray information as to the whereabouts of the vampire, expressing an apparent connexion between the two ideas composed entirely of fear. The coffin may be the vampire's natural habitat, but the terrible quality it has to a living man connects it somehow to the evil the vampire represents.

The movie was supposedly based on le Fanu's "Carmilla", but there's actually a great deal more resemblance to Dracula in the two young women of the film, who seem more like Mina and Lucy than Laura and Carmilla, particularly when Leone, the sister infected with vampirism, sleepwalks to a place where the elderly vampire is feeding on her when Gisele and Gray find them, upon which the vampire flees.

The movie's complex use of the supernatural and the dead around the central vampire is closer to Dracula as well than it is to "Carmilla". As is the use of human servants of the vampire, one of whom provides poison for Leone which Gray learns of in an amazing vision of a skeleton holding a poison bottle.

The beautifully and ingeniously shot film altogether conveys a sense of a dark cloud of fear and anger surrounding death as a concept, secretly permeating reality, perceptible to one gifted with sight like Gray's.

The Criterion edition of the movie comes with some nice special features, as usual, including a documentary/interview with Dreyer made in 1966. It contains footage of Dreyer meeting a number of great European filmmakers from the 1960s including Henri-Georges Clouzot and Francois Truffaut. We also see him meet Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, a fascinating moment considering how Godard had shot Karina in close up in Vivre sa vie, crying as she watched on screen Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, in which Dreyer had shot his protagonist crying in close up.

It's a vivid reflection of Dreyer's influence. However unsuccessful Jeanne d'Arc and Vampyr may have been in their initial release, one appreciates when Truffaut says in the documentary that the relatively few films Dreyer was able to make in his lifetime were immensely important parts of cinema history because Dreyer never compromised his vision.

King Under the Goblin Stomach

I think I've finally gotten the flu like everyone else. Well, I'd had a cough and shortness of breath for a few weeks as well as a fever so I thought I was getting through the thing with just mild symptoms. I was kept up for much of last night by nausea, though. So far no puking.

I really think playing chess before bed time is a part of it. Maybe I just caught something at the mall yesterday when I went to see The Hobbit again with Tim, who hadn't seen it yet. We saw a 2d show, old fashioned twenty four frames per second and I must say, it's a far better experience than the Imax 3d. As I said to Tim, who hadn't seen a 3d movie yet, "The best I can say about 3d is sometimes you stop noticing it."

Somehow I noticed a lot more in the movie this time, things looked clearer. I complained in my review about Thorin failing to kill Azog despite the fact that we see Azog being dragged off by dwarves. This time, I could clearly see that Azog was being dragged away by his fellow orcs, despite Azog's bellowing protest. Now it makes a little more sense, but still not as much sense as Tolkien's version of events wherein the dwarves, having won the day, finished off Azog. I have trouble, too, buying that orc subordinates felt so much concern for their commander that they pulled him off the field for his own good. I mean, orcs eat each other.

But, I guess we had to have the boss battle between Thorin and Azog. I've been thinking about it with all the Dracula adaptations I've been watching--why is it always so out of the question to just film the damned book? I remember hearing Ray Bradbury say something to that effect at Comic-Con, and gods know he had reason to complain.

I spent my Barnes and Noble gift cards from Christmas on two leather bound books and one movie. I figured I'd buy books I most felt ashamed of getting on a Kindle--so I got a collection of Bradbury's works--The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and The Golden Apples of the Sun--since he expressed such a passionate hatred for e-books. And I got an illustrated Arabian Nights translated by Richard Burton. It looks so much like the copy in Coppola's Dracula except, sadly, lacking graphic sex.

The movie I got was the really beautiful Criterion edition of Carl Dreyer's Vampyr, which I watched last week for the first time in ten or so years. I've been waiting for the right time to write about it and, judging from how dizzy I am, this isn't it.

Old Words

It seems like I've been doing a lot of reading lately which has been diverting me away from Moby Dick, which I'm still only halfway through. But when I saw in Second Life that a reading group was going to be discussing Dracula, I decided to take the opportunity to read it again for the first time in at least ten years. I kind of marathoned it on Wednesday, spending most of the day reading the latter half of it, after reading the first half over the preceding weeks. I enjoyed it a lot more than the first time I read it.

I love how thoroughly it creates a world. So much more than any of the film adaptations I've seen--I've yet to see one adaptation that has included information about the various local dishes Harker tries on his way to Dracula's castle, and so far only the 1977 BBC production has included anything of the sea dogs Mina and Lucy chat with regularly. The device of using journal entries, newspaper clippings, and letters to tell the story, too, adds to the verisimilitude, an effective found artefact technique.

I realised that the only Mina Murray that resembles the one is Stoker's novel is the one in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (I don't have to point out I'm not talking about the movie, right?). Mina has more wherewithal than any of the men except for Van Helsing, having the foresight to remember train schedules, actually deducing Dracula's plans at one point, and talking about how she admires female journalists and emulates them. It makes sense that she would grow tired of the socially prescribed sexual dynamic, and that her strange experience with Dracula would help to break her free of any prejudices that might hold her back.

There's an interesting symmetry between the strangeness of Dracula, and the rules Harker encounters in eastern Europe, and Van Helsing's assertion to Seward that one needs to proceed without prejudice, to learn to accept strange things, in order to have any hope of combating their enemy.

I came across this interview the other day where Christopher Lee talks about his dissatisfaction with the Hammer Dracula films;

I found it interesting that the aspect of Dracula Lee fixated on from the book, which indeed is very rarely addressed in adaptations, is Dracula as an older man who grows young. Even Coppola's version, the sense I get isn't so much that Dracula desires to become younger as that he desires to present the image of youth in order to facilitate his other intentions. It's true, Dracula's motives are different in Coppola's version with the inclusion of the romance between him and Mina. Though apparently he doesn't realise Mina's his reincarnated lover until after he's already retained an English solicitor in the hopes of going to England.

Lee mentions actually being able to play the character from the book in Jess Franco's version, which indeed he does, in this, the best scene from an otherwise sadly underwhelming film;

After the first section with Harker, there's actually very little of Dracula in the book--he seems to function as a faceless force of nature, the root cause of a story of illness as punishment for the inescapably animal nature of being human. But what Lee captures here is a sense of a man displaced, a man who finds himself in a world that no longer functions on and respects the values that shaped his whole personality. One could say the book is his argument that these values of conquering by sex and violence are still, and always will be, more valid than the feeble bulwark of Victorian morality.

Last night I also read "BLIND FISH", Caitlin's newest story in her Sirenia Digest. It's another nice Lovecraftian tale, also, I think, influenced by Danny Boyle's film Sunshine in that it centres on a psychologically scarring scientific expedition, in this case in the ocean, in a submersible. I was also reminded of Onibaba, a Japanese horror film from the 1960s which uses a pit, referred to in titles as "The Hole" as part of its nightmare portrait of women who have become killers and thieves. There seems like there might be a thematic connexion in Caitlin's story between the protagonist's dread of The Hole described in the story, which is at the bottom of the ocean and where the trauma occurs, and his preoccupations with his human/fish hybrid lover, his dwelling on her strange anatomy and misgivings about her capacity for compassion, or any lover's stake in a relationship being more than fundamentally selfish. This impression seems strengthened by a description of the submersible's entry into the hole; "The hole had obligingly swallowed them in a single gulp. How long had it been waiting, indescribably patient and hungry. Insatiable."

Okay. Now back to Moby Dick. At least until school starts in two weeks. Sometimes I do wish I wasn't such a slow reader.

Twitter Sonnet #468

Trunk hands elementally shower tusks.
Ivory is no soap in this dusty land.
Comb over dragonfly wings make weak husks.
Pawns lose themselves among big grains of sand.
Gravity capes condemn the news of grass.
Alternate boulders take the slope for Lent.
All sanctions calibrate the prince's past.
Lucy can't read every note Mina sent.
Curving pipes cancel the tobacco train.
Absconding abattoirs tranquilise toes
When they're tripping on tacks along the main
Ranges of mountain thighs in snowy hose.
Soured sun flares crinkle in the saline.
Nebulae linger deep in hole eighteen.

They Enjoy Draining You

There's very little about Bela Lugosi's performance in 1931's Dracula that specifically resembles the Dracula from the book. But it is a fascinating performance that combines well with Tod Browning's lovely, spooky visuals in the first part of the film, as well as his unpredictable cutting, and Dwight Frye's fervently manic Renfield to make an absorbing film.

Like many great movie monsters, Lugosi seems to possess a mind alien in an inexplicable way. There's a sense of barely contained delight in the mischief he means to perpetrate and something about his pointed face implies hunger and an exceptional ability to savour his meals.

But the fundamental lack of any desire to repress his violent and abusive impulses is the key to his strange and threatening portrayal. This is in line with Stoker's character, as is the implication that Dracula's impulses have a long history of support from culture and tradition very far removed from the morality of Victorian England.

The movie is based on the 1924 play, and much of the latter portion of the film feels stage bound. The beginning of the movie is where Browning's visual sense is most in evidence, as Renfield travels to Dracula's Transylvanian castle.

My favourite Renfields so far are Tom Waits and Klaus Kinski, but Dwight Frye's distinctly 1930s madman is fascinatingly tormented. One senses a consistency of motive without ever learning exactly the nature of the motive--we know he's an essentially decent gentleman before he falls under Dracula's thrall. His strange, clenched teeth, sucking laughter afterwards suggest someone whose intellect has prescribed laughter as a reaction to things he couldn't hope to cope with rationally. Each laugh sounds like a bitter medicine he's forcing down his throat.

The movie was originally released with very little music--only a bit from Swan Lake played over the opening credits. In 1998, Philip Glass with the Kronos Quartet composed a very nice score for the film, though the film with his score is a very different experience. It has a delightful fluidity, drawing you through a sense of doom contrived with diabolical glee, but there's also a very effective, cold, surgical feeling to the film's original form.

Neck Lubricant

Take off your panties now, ladies, because Count Dracula's here to have sex and sell margarine and he's all out of margarine. John Badham's 1979 adaptation of Dracula is a bit like watching a cart of beautiful ornaments and paintings being shoved off a cliff. This is a pile of elements, some good, some bad, that poke out from all over a glossy, big budget tarp.

Despite much of the dialogue between him and this version's Lucy sounding like a cheap conservative romance novel, and despite the costumes, effects, and staging that put him in the context of a cheap, conservative soap opera, Frank Langella as Dracula is one of the best parts of this movie.

In a production broad and aesthetically loud, Langella is an anchor of restraint and subtle menace, recalling Christopher Lee somewhat, though a touch gentler. It's a gentleness that's appreciable despite cheesy deviations in dialogue designed to make Lucy feel tender towards him, as when the famous "children of the night, what sweet music they make" line is changed to, "The children of the night, what sad music they make," so Lucy can coo over him and say it's actually very sweet and lovely music.

Langella is ported over from a stage production, a revival and revision of the same 1924 play that inspired the 1931 film. The 1979 version revises the story still more, beginning with the Demeter wrecking on the beach outside Dr. Seward's asylum. Dr. Seward in this case is played well enough by Donald Pleasence, written at times as kind of a putz, in one scene angrily yelling an instruction to Mina for her to breathe over and over in response to the fact that she's unable to. This is one of the many examples of a screenplay that seems like, on each line, it was torn from the hands of one writer by another, yelling as he did so, "No, this is how you write this character!" adding a line without deleting the previous to which he'd objected.

This is exemplified by Lucy, who functions mainly as the Mina in the novel--as in most adaptations, the names have been inexplicably swapped between the two women. I had trouble deciding whether she was an ineptly conceived feminist conception or a sexist's slander of feminism. In any case, she shifts between being a dick and a swooning slave. In an early parlour scene, when everyone thinks Dracula is just a mysterious foreign nobleman lately arrived in England, he responds to some sudden physical pain experienced by Mina with hypnotism, telling her in her entranced state that she has no pain, upon which Lucy suddenly remarks irritably, "And no will of her own, either!" despite having moments before supported Dracula's method in argument with Dr. Seward.

Dracula says he likes independent women with "blood in their veins" before the two of them begin waltzing. It's like everyone periodically draws their motivations from a hat.

Carfax Abbey is inexplicably a big gothic fortress since we never get to see Castle Dracula, unless it's the big unmentioned place shown in the opening credits, accompanied by a score from John Williams that peculiarly recalls the one he wrote for Superman.

Laurence Olivier makes a very good Van Helsing, and despite having a lot of screen time, he feels underused. Maybe the best scene in the movie is the confrontation between himself and Dracula, despite it having begun with the line originally used for Harker's shaving mirror in the book being transplanted for a massive, expensive wall mirror Dracula hurls a vase at. "Forgive me, Doctor, I dislike mirrors. They are the playthings of man's vanity," as though this were in some way a plausible excuse for what he'd just done, and he congratulations Van Helsing when the professor miraculously perceives it as suspicious behaviour. But Langella and Olivier play it really, really well.

Oh, and;

Sylvester McCoy! In a shot with Laurence Olivier and Donald Pleasence and whoever the guy is playing Harker! McCoy's part is tiny as a servant for the Seward household and asylum, but his distinctive physicality is in evidence nonetheless.

Dracula flippantly tosses his cloak to McCoy in his first entrance, the latter man taking it stiffly and nervously. McCoy is later seen bobbing rigidly as he runs words together to report Lucy's abduction from the asylum, this following a funny collision with an inmate where he spills his tea. Every day should include a little Sylvester McCoy.

Unpleasant but Not Abnormal

In Blade Runner, there's a test administered to determine whether or not someone is human or a replicant, called an empathy test. In the movie's first scene, one of the questions posed from the test paints the pictures of a tortoise lying helplessly on its back, unable to right itself without the assistance of the interviewee, who is then asked why he does not help the tortoise. Maybe this will help explain why I find it so hard to form any thoughts on 1980's Cannibal Holocaust, how all impressions I might form are dominated by one scene in the film where the actors take a large turtle, turn it over, cut off its head while it lives before tearing it apart and eating it. The image of killing a turtle or tortoise in this way seems a perfect image of horribly puerile cruelty. And yet, from the fact that worse is done to a large extent every day just to keep McDonalds in hamburger patties I cannot agree that the makers of Cannibal Holocaust have done any real, extraordinary cruelty. Ruggero Deodato, the film's director, has nonetheless since expressed regret over what he'd done to animals in the course of making the film. In pioneering the "found footage" technique of horror filmmaking, the movie is undeniably influential to anyone willing to look at cinema without prejudice, and I'm certainly capable of enjoying an exploitation film, but I couldn't find any joy in this one.

I don't like to give a hard time to people I know who eat meat. I would be a hypocrite, considering I wear a fur fedora and a leather jacket. I've always said, quite honestly, that I'm a vegetarian only because I don't enjoy the taste of meat. But maybe it's because I don't eat meat that I haven't found reason to build up the necessary calluses, the dissociation between the enjoyable food and the needless killing done to procure it. But I'd also say I wasn't really bothered by the presence of actual animal death in Apocalypse Now or even the extraordinary number of horses killed for Charge of the Light Brigade. I suppose in the latter case it was because I didn't find out until later that the horses were killed, otherwise the triumphant charge sequence at the end would be too grimly ironic.

I think the reason it's so particularly troubling in Cannibal Holocaust is because of the way it was filmed. Not, as so many reviews and analyses say, for the realism of the filming but for the conspicuous artistic intent behind it. I suppose in 1980 when shooting a horror film in such a way, apparently inspired by Deodato's mentor Roberto Rossellini, was still new it might have seemed shockingly naturalistic. Though even Rossellini's films, compared to other Italian Neorealist films of the 1940s, have an artificial quality to them. What disgusts me about the way the animal killings were shot in Cannibal Holocaust is that they were shot lingeringly as they're killed in slow and unusual ways, particularly the coatimundi and the turtle, with oddly tranquil music, giving the moments the quality of a porno, as though audiences are supposed to masturbate to these images.

This style more appropriately suits the rest of the film which has the unreal qualities of a porno, despite being shot on location in South America with actual members of indigenous tribes. Before getting to the found footage segments, there's a long sequence starring porn star Robert Kerman as a professor seeking information about the group of young documentary filmmakers who form the subject of the movie's latter portion. In one absurd scene, to gain the trust of the Yanomamo, who don't appear to even be present at the beginning of the scene, Kerman takes off all his clothes, and walks a ways into a lake, when magically a number of beautiful young naked women appear and run into the water to play with him. Despite the fact that we're meant to take them as Yanomamo, their physiques and mannerisms show them to clearly be from a first world society. The movie also features a number of gratuitous sexual assaults that I wasn't remotely disturbed by as they were so clearly fake, the camera clearly showing several times that vaginal penetration was being mimed, if the inauthenticity of the performances wasn't enough to tell me that already.

Likewise, it seems bizarre now that Deodato was charged with murder by the Italian government as there is no convincing killing of a human being in the movie. Only animals.

Twitter Sonnet #467

Time is the worn lederhosen of pop.
Boiling water begets grateful oil.
Cocoanut's exotic to the milksop.
Dice grow hydra when planted in soil.
Twisty tie vampires remain in bread.
Notable glimpses of Argentina
Resemble tongue balloons vacating dead
Space whales in the tides of Inverse Lina.
Diamond brittle sweater vests pull the gang.
Opposite breaks in the broadcast pop grey
Sounds that shift from orbit gardens of Tang
Feeding astronauts who have naught to say.
Darkening daguerreotypes of sharp teeth
Sew soft curls into the scalp of belief.

The Big Self

I sympathise with Jodie Foster insofar as the Golden Globes crowd seems like it was a really tough crowd. Not because they weren't receptive to what she had to say, but because everyone seemed so sedated by alcohol, their egos, and who knows what else that the reactions from the crowd made it seem like Foster was in an empty room except for the camera cutting to teary eyed, barely comprehending pretty faces. It's no wonder she felt the need to directly ask for audience responses a few times, particularly after announcing to everyone that she felt like the prom queen. Who wants to be a prom queen in a room of lazily masturbating zombies?

That being said, the fumes of self congratulation and self adoration that wafted through my computer screen were a bit stifling. I didn't watch the Golden Globes live because I don't have a working television and I couldn't find an online stream, but I watched reactions live on Twitter and saw everyone was either calling Foster's speech admirable or incoherent and crazed. My opinion leans towards the latter. I mean, vaguely alluding to the fact that she's gay, which I think was mainly done to get some kind of response from the audience--it certainly is nice to see public figures showing that it's nothing to be ashamed of, but it seems like such a tiny component of the wobbly maelstrom of nerves she was presenting onstage.

It is weird, too, as a lot of people are saying, seeing someone get a lifetime achievement award at fifty. I guess she has had a long career that began when she was young, and, to be fair, Judy Garland received the same award when she was 39. Foster is among the younger recipients, though, and it's not hard to think of people it might have been more sensible to give the award to--Christopher Lee, Ennio Morricone--how the hell is it the song by Seth MacFarlane from Ted was nominated for the best original song Oscar and "Ancora Qui" by Morricone from Django Unchained wasn't?

Okay, the Oscar nominees--Lincoln is nominated for nearly every category, which I suppose means I need to see it, but the prospect of dragging myself through another Spielberg movie after seeing Warhorse is a bit daunting, I'll admit. And I managed to get through Cannibal Holocaust last week (I've been putting off writing about it). Maybe I'll wait until more people who don't seem like shills recommend it.

I came close to seeing Les Miserables a couple weeks ago. I was actually standing outside the movie theatre at the mall with my gift card in hand when I was overcome with a feeling of meh, generated mainly, I think, from memories of Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway singing together at the Oscars a couple years ago. I can enjoy Jackman as Wolverine and Hathaway as Catwoman well enough, but singing together they just seem to shimmer with those fumes of self-adoration I mentioned above. It's really unfair of me to judge that way, I guess. And although I have yet to read Victor Hugo's novel, I have quite a few experiences with adaptations under my belt to give me context for viewing the film--the film with Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush, Orson Welles' radio adaptation (my favourite so far), and the actual stage musical upon which the new film is based. It doesn't seem from that old entry like I was too impressed with the stage musical when I saw it, but that was almost nine years ago, and I'm a different person in a lot of ways, so who knows how I'd react now.

A few people I respect, including Caitlin, are saying they felt Cloud Atlas was the best movie of the year. I remember Caitlin being especially fond of the Farscape episode "Unrealised Realities" so I kind of see her love of the film as a predisposition in her to love stories about alternate potential identities in human beings. Mostly, though, I can't quite account for why people are so taken with it. I didn't hate it. It actually reminded me a lot of my feelings for The Matrix; a decent, exciting story, but taking too hard a line in terms of morality to be something I'd consider a masterpiece. Obviously this didn't stop me from loving Battleship Potemkin. Maybe it's because Potemkin was more a self-conscious work of propaganda and I feel like the Wachowskis might actually see the world as made up of good and evil people. Well, it's unfair to make such strong assertions about an artist's personal beliefs from their work, but I guess the impression comes from the fact that Potemkin seems to focus more on the struggle, the circumstance, while the Wachowskis' movies are more broadly about good versus evil.

I'm less disappointed, I think, by their heroes than I am by their villains. I remember reading Quentin Tarantino saying in an interview that he's obsessed with Birth of a Nation, and how disturbed he was in reading about D.W. Griffith that he found he began to understand him, which, as Tarantino observed, is far more disturbing than a blank, two dimensional villain. I guess my taste in stories is similar.

From Russia with Beets and the Spiders from Mars

I borscht! Then I ate it!

My cousin's wife gave me some canned beets for Christmas--it was to give some physical weight to a bag containing gift cards to Barnes and Noble, Regal Cinemas, and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. I didn't quite know what to do with the beets until I watched Battleship Potemkin and decided to google this borscht stuff people were mutinying over. And lo, the chief ingredient was beets!

The old fashioned way is to make it with beef broth, but there were several vegetarian recipes online, most of which seemed to require two hours. I went with this one, which required only about half an hour and is probably rather far from the real thing, but, sorry, two hours just exceeds the amount of time I'm willing to give to soup. This is why I'll never be a cook, I guess.

Anyway, I used low sodium vegetable broth instead of vegetable stock--I'm still rather fuzzy on the difference between stock and broth--and I omitted carrots because I just didn't feel like carrots. Also, of course, I didn't use sour cream and I used some pre-grated black pepper instead of freshly grated which I'm sure made so much difference.

I'm pretty sure I fucked up, and I'm developing theories as to precisely how. I think the problem is that there was too much water with the beets from the can when I sautéed them--I'd dumped out most of the water first, but I guess not enough of it, because I don't think the olive oil quite evaporated and/or soaked into the vegetables properly. Now that I've been bitten by the borscht bug, I may try this again but with fresh beets.

The oily, beety result of my endeavour wasn't so bad, and very good to dip bread in. The first serving gave me a stomach ache, so to-day I separated the hard stuff from the liquid, heated them up, and just used the liquid to dip bread in and ate the soft, abused vegetables by themselves. It was good.

Okay, enough with grossing you out. Here's last night's spider in my bathroom;

The camera somehow translated the contrast of lighting from my flashlight and the bathroom light to make the spider on the shower curtain look like a spider on the surface of lace Mars.

Meet the New Egret, Same as the Old Egret

A young egret I met yesterday. Seemed to be rather unselfconscious at this age.

Finding myself with an itchy drawing finger a couple days ago, I doodled.

This is called "On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad" after the Sylvia Plath poem.

This is "Reclining Courtier". I'm starting to think I may need a better scanner. One that can handle a normal sized sheet of paper, maybe.

Twitter Sonnet #466

Spherical deer believe in the sky square.
Kinder boxes conduct the kids to desks.
Math makes the one in a blazer a bear.
Don't ask how sequoias learn about sex.
Deaf chiefs dispense privacy to the cops.
The dumb khaki collects on the deep grave.
Spatula City's misdelivered mops
Are cheap supplies for a chef's cooking cave.
Terrible legs gamble for gambrel bling.
Armadillo dalliances delete
Morality when observed from Sing Sing.
The dance floor echoes with burning black peat.
The nerve shaped star clusters conceived makers.
Rows of ghosts kiss the black circuit breakers.

The Thin Wall

The mind compulsively invests meaning and identity in silence, darkness, or blankness. This begins with, or extends to, the self, a foundation for the crisis explored in Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film Persona. It's a film of ghostly, black and white beauty and an examination of human nature with extraordinary depth featuring performances by two brilliant actresses.

Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann play a nurse, Alma, and an actress, Elisabet, respectively, and the bulk of the movie takes place at a seaside summer home where the two have been sent by the doctor under whom Alma is employed. The purpose is Elisabet's convalescence--the actress having suddenly become silent for several minutes during the performance of a play where she played Elektra before bursting into laughter. Since then, Elisabet, despite having no discernable physical or mental affliction, has entirely refrained from speaking.

Alma expresses to the doctor some trepidation in taking the assignment, as she perceives Elisabet as having a strong personality and herself as delicate and inexperienced, in danger of being overwhelmed by the subject of treatment.

The doctor confronts Elisabet before she sends the two younger women to her summer house, telling the unresponsive actress that she recognises and admires the commitment to her non-participatory role, and encourages her to maintain it as long as it works for her.

Persona is one of those wonderful movies that is very simply itself, contained very precisely in its execution, and yet which can have millions of valid interpretations from viewers. The reason for Elisabet's silence can be interpreted by the viewer as well as by the other characters in the movie. And like the interpretations of those other characters, the viewer's interpretation may say more about the viewer.

In my view, Elisabet's laughter followed by silence indicates an epiphany she's had regarding the nature of personae; she sees them for the meaningless, absurd masks that they are and so she refuses to participate any further and so effects silence. This is the reason, I think, she reacts in horror to footage of a self-immolating Vietnam War protester--the idea of destroying the physical body for a complex set of abstract ideas and beliefs seems monstrous. She's fascinated and horrified by a photograph from the holocaust for the same reason.

In this picture, the only person whose face shows recognition of what's about to happen is the little boy, and it's the boy whom Elisabet focuses on.

It's like a cruel version of "The Emperor's New Clothes". The others may know what's going to happen, but outwardly, and probably on the surface levels of their consciousness, they're not acknowledging it, too caught up in their identities and the reality those identities were crafted to exist in, even though that reality is no longer relevant. Only the kid is able to abandon his ego for truth because his ego is as yet undeveloped and not firmly rooted in his psyche.

The time the two women spend together is initially pleasant. Alma responds to Elisabet's silence as a perpetual demureness, an almost holy humility. Alma is as unguarded with Elisabet as one is with a pet, except Elisabet understands Swedish, and seems to implicitly absolve Alma or forgive her. Alma says she's considered a good listener and has rarely had opportunity to talk about herself before this and seems exhilarated by the circumstance.

She vividly describes to Elisabet an impromptu orgy she took part in on the beach a few years earlier, when a couple boys had found her and her friend Katarina sunbathing nude. In his essay on the film, Roger Ebert says, "The imagery of this monologue is so powerful that I have heard people describe the scene as if they actually saw it in the film." It is extraordinarily vivid and more effectively erotic than any pornography I've seen. Somehow by describing orgasm under the implicitly fictional context of a dramatic movie, Bibi Andersson and the screenplay create a more satisfying rendering than the screaming fits of even the best porn stars. Oddly enough for a piece of cinema, I think this is evidence of the unique power of prose.

But the orgy is at the centre of an existential crisis for Alma. Although she describes the encounter with pleasure reflecting the extraordinary pleasure she must have felt during the experience, it turns to pain as she recounts the abortion she'd had to undergo and the acknowledgement of how the experience of that day had conflicted with her self-conception. Her cries of dismay to Elisabet are deeper than moral shame, although she feels this too. The greater horror she feels is expressed when she asks if beliefs have any reason for being at all. The horror is in the realisation that she could experience pleasure and a sense of self-affirmation by engaging in activities contrary to what her persona dictates ought to give her pleasure. So what is the point of this persona, this collection of ideals?

Driving into town to deliver hers and Elisabet's mail, she opens a letter Elisabet had written to the doctor, and finds in it, in addition to expressions of affection for Alma, also a description of the orgy Alma had confided in her about.

Alma's retaliation is to leave a piece of broken glass on the ground where Elisabet might walk barefoot. When Elisabet indeed wounds herself this way, Bergman cuts to Bibi Andersson coldly watching before looking directly at the camera while scratches appear on the film, as though it's breaking. This neatly conveys an idea of violent, painful tears forming in the intimacy between Alma and Elisabet, at the same time that it conveys the extent of that intimacy. Bergman uses a variety of techniques to convey the idea of the two women merging, often shooting their faces overlapping, concluding at the end of the film with a monologue repeated twice, first showing Elisabet's silent reaction to it, then showing Alma's delivery of it. The monologue is Alma's theory as to the reason for Elisabet's silence, having to do with the shame Elisabet feels about not loving her child. The point in the repetition is to show how each woman exists in the other, the mirror of reaction being a reality. At the end, Alma feels horror because the idea of Elisabet's disgust for motherhood is so contrary to the self-loathing Alma has nurtured regarding her abortion.

Earlier in the film, Alma talks about Elisabet's strength for being an actress, as though Elisabet is bullying Alma in some way through her more sophisticated perspective on personae. Alma's anger is only slackened when she threatens to cast a pot of boiling water at Elisabet, which finally causes Elisabet to speak, to scream, "No, don't!" satisfying Alma that Elisabet can, too, lower herself to self-preservation. The fear is that beneath the clothing of identity there is nothing more than an animal, and the concept of identity is protected with animalistic ferocity.

A Face for Massacres

Familiar aspects of the self are a catalyst for a chain of dream logic terrors in Tobe Hooper's 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The self, both physical and mental; an unexamined every day intimacy with flesh and blood is teased out into a cunning, gleefully beautiful and grotesque nightmare. Even the extraordinary skill and talent for filmmaking on display aren't enough to account for the singular brilliance this movie achieves.

A group of two young women and three young men are on a road trip, travelling in a large green van, when they pick up a strange hitchhiker despite the misgivings of the more superstitious of the two women.

Maybe the guy isn't so strange, because despite the unaddressed red stain on his face and his jittery mannerisms, he and the paraplegic Franklin initially bond over knowledge and love of the slaughter house, taking turns admiring each other's knives before the hitchhiker shows his interest in slaughter extends not only to human flesh but to his own as he ecstatically slices his palm for them, apparently surprised and confused the action only produces horror in his audience.

And yet, later, after they've kicked out the hitchhiker and are alone, Franklin can't disguise the admiration he feels for what he saw, examining his knife with the barely concealed morbid hope he'll find a trace of the man's blood on it.

Franklin is the most developed character of the group of young travellers, the others existing as little more than types, adequate sketches to serve as point of view vessels. The bodies of the young women are emphasised, not only for their vulnerability but in order to connect sexuality to cannibalism, to show a lust for meat and bone that eclipses libido.

One of the young women, Pam, wears a halter that leaves her back totally bare. Hooper must have known this would draw the eye, and he exploits it when he has Leatherface mount her on a meat hook through her back. The connexion drawn early on between the desires of the cannibals and the normal practice of eating meat makes this peculiar imbalance of lusts seem not altogether alien, rendering it the more horrifying for it.

Visually, the film is absolutely amazing, especially considering its low budget. It was shot, by necessity, with low grain 16 mm film that required a great deal of light, creating intense contrasts for a look that was frequently replicated intentionally in films afterwards.

The effects in lighting that Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl create with this look both naturalistic and fascinatingly expressionistic.

The apparently natural darkness, which must have actually been accompanied by a great deal of light so that anything would be visible at all, highlight the vulnerability of a young woman pushing a fat guy in a wheelchair through wilderness.

The entryway of the cannibals' house is really nicely conceived, looking like an open wound with pale walls leading to an off-centre room of bright red and bone.

The sudden first appearance of the piggish Leatherface makes me jump every time.

The bone sculptures of the cannibals are strangely beautiful, too, and nicely enforce the theme. But my favourite shot is Pam and Kirk approaching the cannibals' property, the foregrounded wild daisies not so much providing a contrast from the gory colouring of metal structures and equipment, but complimenting them.