I've seen this guy's movies

In December 2010, Iranian film director Jafar Panahi was given a six-year prison sentence for making an anti-government film without permission (like they'd actually give him permission if he asked) and inciting opposition protests after the widely-criticized 2009 presidential election.  Furthermore, Panahi has also been forbidden to write scripts, speak with the media, express his political views, or travel outside the country for twenty years. 

Panahi's most recent film, Offisde, is about a group of girls who try to find a way to watch a World Cup soccer match despite being forbidden by law to watch it.  I've seen the movie and I like it.  I've also seen The Circle, another one of his films that criticizes the mistreatment of women in Iran.  In fact, I like both films better than the works of Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash), who is one of the two people who signed the Amnesty International email message I received today about Panahi's sentence (the other person is actress and Amnesty International spokesperson Nazanin Boniadi).  Nonetheless, I give Haggis props for supporting this cause. 

Incidentally, the email message mentions several Hollywood insiders who support Panahi, and the Amnesty International website drops even more names.  I'm ambivalent about the heavy use of Hollywood namedropping (I wouldn't look to Harvey Weinstein for moral guidance, for example), although I am pleased to see that Jean-Luc Picard and Professor X both support Panahi (Patrick Stewart is one of his supporters).  In any case, I personally support this cause and recommend that people go to the Amnesty International website to send a message on Panahi's behalf.

By the way, Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof was also sentenced to six years in prison and he is also mentioned in the sample letter provided by Amnesty International.

Sail Away

I have an idea for the opening of a movie.  It is set in pre-Civil War America.  A somewhat scruffy-looking white man is is giving an eloquent, grandiose and highly patriotic speech about the United States.  He speaks with great fervor and apparent sincerity about the virtues and great potential of the land of liberty.  As he speaks, the camera pans back and it becomes evident that he is delivering his oration to a crowd of people.  The camera continues to pan back during his speech, and as his words become increasingly eloquent and heartfelt, the audience sees that he is speaking to a group of dark-skinned people in shackles.  By the end of the scene, the audience realizes that he is a slave trader giving a sales pitch to a group of slaves who are about to be sent to the United States.

I wish I could say that this was a completely original idea that popped into my head out of nowhere.  But I must acknowledge the inspiration for this idea: Randy Newman's song "Sail Away," a ballad with orchestral accompaniment in which the narrator is a slave trader talking slaves into sailing away to Charleston, South Carolina.  The song is particularly affecting because of the contrast between the music, which is quite beautiful, and the subject matter, which is quite disturbing and draws attention to the ugly contradictions in our country's history, where people praised personal liberty while enslaving others.

I also like this song because it demonstrates how Randy Newman is almost a non sequitur in music history.  Starting out in the 1960s, he drew his musical inspiration from atypical sources (at least for the time): New Orleans rhythm and blues, bottleneck blues, and movie soundtracks (three of his uncles composed music for Hollywood, and Newman himself would have a successful career composing films scores).   He emerged as a cult figure during the era of the  confessional (and sometimes narcissistic and self-pitying) singer-songwriter who wrote about their own personal experiences, but Newman specialized in the unreliable narrator.  His songs were often short stories that didn’t pitch a particular political viewpoint, unlike the topical singer-songwriters who were in vogue before the confessional ones.  Instead, he made the listener think about characters they would normally dismiss as unsympathetic (if they thought about them at all), and sometimes he even imbued these characters with a measure of dignity.   For example, the narrator of “Rednecks” is a blatant racist, yet he also makes a valid point about the superior attitude of Northerners who feel that they are better than him despite the pervasive racism in their own cities.    

Newman did write “confessional” songs that were apparently about himself, particularly later in his career, but he still wrote as an unreliable narrator.  This made it even harder to tell whether he was critiquing the narrator’s attitude or actually believed what he was saying. Indeed, one of the reasons why I like Newman is because his songs force listeners to question their own point of view (which, of course, is one of the reasons why fiction writers use unreliable narrators).  Perhaps that is why Newman’s most popular songs, such as his foreign policy commentary in “Political Science” (“We give them money-but are they grateful? / No, they're spiteful and they're hateful / They don't respect us-so let's surprise them / We'll drop the big one and pulverize them“), are generally the straightforwardly humorous songs in which Newman’s real-life attitude is easiest to identify (although sometimes I wonder if Newman might be the type of person who thinks that Dr. Strangelove has a happy ending).

Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou

Pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou was born under the name Yéwédbar Guébrou on December 12, 1923 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  Her father was the prominent Ethiopian intellectual Kentiba Gébrou Désta (I should probably mention at this point that the English spelling of Ethiopian names and locations varies between sources).  She received some of her musical education in Switzerland, where she studied violin and piano, and then continued to study music in Ethiopia in 1933.  Her family was deported to the island of Asinara in 1937 and then to Mercogliano during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Her family later returned to heir homeland and became part of the country's high society, and she was able to study music in Cairo.  However, her ambition of studying piano in England was crushed when Emperor Haile Selassie nixed a plan by one of his sons to sponsor her studies. 

She entered the Guishen Maryam monastery in 1948 and became a Christian nun, taking the name Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou.  She left the monastery after two years because of health problems and taught in an Addis orphanage.  She composed and recorded haunting, contemplative solo piano music, often characterized by rolling left-hand arpeggios, simple melodies and modulations on the right hand, and the use of 3/3 meter that reportedly reflects the influence of Ethiopian music.  Indeed, Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou was influenced by early Ethiopian church music and Ethiopian pop, although her primary influences were European classical composers; her music also sounds a bit like early American jazz piano at times.

She released several LPs, including at least three recorded in Germany, and donated the proceeds to charity.  She returned permanently to the monastery in 1984 and moved to Jerusalem, where she currently resides (to the best of my knowledge).  Her sixth recording, a collection of her solo piano music titled Ethiopiques Volume 21: Ethiopia Song, Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, was released as part of of the Ethiopiques music series on the France-based record label Buda Musqiue in 2006.   I must credit Francis Falceto's liner notes to that CD as the source of most of the information provided here (much of which is also printed on the website for the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, "a non-profit organization registered in the state of Virginia to teach classical and jazz music to children in Africa and assist American children to study music in Africa.)  Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou was also interviewed by the Voice America, but that was not a particularly useful source of information for me since the interview was conducted in Amharic.

If you'd like to listen to her music, here's "Mother's Love"

and "The Homeless Wanderer":

Waste Land (2010)

Can art be a vehicle for social change?  Can it change individual lives?  Is offering poor people who are ignored or regarded as bottom-feeders an opportunity to achieve recognition and fame an honorable way to provide them with the respect that they have been denied for their entire lives?  Is it a chance to empower them by offering them a different way of thinking about the world?  Or is it a way to dangle false hope in front of them and make them more acutely aware of their limited options?  Also, how much real difference is there between a respected arthouse documentary about offering poor people a chance to experience fame and possibly better their lives, and a disrespected reality television show that does essentially the same thing?

The documentary Waste Land (2010) observes Brazilian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Vik Muniz as he visits the massive Jardim Gramacho landfill, which serves the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area, and collaborates with some of the catadores (people who pick recyclable materials from the landfill) to create works of art to be displayed internationally and auctioned for charity. The film doesn't explore all of the previously mentioned questions in depth, but Muniz and filmmaker Lucy Walker are sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge some of the ethical issues raised by this philanthropic project.  Perhaps that is the difference between this documentary and the hypothetical reality show that I mentioned.

Waste Land provides some of the catadores with the opportunity to tell their individual stories, and this is the emotional center of the film, in my opinion.  I don't know if the opportunity to talk about their lives on camera had any effect on how the catadores viewed themselves, but it did affect how I saw them. For example, I learned that many of them chose to pick recyclable materials so they wouldn't have to resort to dealing drugs or prostitution to support themselves.  The catadores emerged as real, three-dimensional people instead of being part of an undifferentiated mass of laborers who nearly blended into the garbage itself.  Indeed, this seems to be the message of this film: that some of the things we regard as disposable, including human beings themselves, have real value.

My Last Sigh

The surrealists were a group of post-World War I painters, writers, and other artists who generally believed in expressing subconscious thought through free form and startling juxtapositions.  There were different factions of surrealists with different philosophies, many of the surrealists regarded their work as a form of political or social protest, and some of them took themselves quite seriously despite the facetious nature of much of their work.  With all of their in-fighting and arguments about who was a true surrealist, they remind me the People's Front of Judea from Monty Python' s Life of Brian.

At least that's the impression I got from reading My Last Sigh, the entertaining autobiography of Spanish-born surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (translated by Abigail Israel).  The surrealists seemed to regard themselves as high-minded revolutionaries who were challenging false rationality and other constrictive aspects of society, yet Buñuel's descriptions make them seem like a petty high-school clique obsessed with the power to ostracize people from their inner circle.  Buñuel's description of the surrealists and other topics seem rather candid (although I have no idea if they're entirely accurate), and even people who don't like his films, or haven't seen them, may find My Last Sigh enjoyable.

Buñuel does have an impressive career as a filmmaker, however.  Born in a small provincial town in Spain in 1900, he moved to France in the 1920s, became in involved in the Surrealist Movement, and directed the landmark surrealist films Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'Or (1930).  Then he returned to Spain (where he directed the documentary Las Hudes (1933)), moved to the United States (he has some choice comments about Hollywood), and relocated to Mexico.  His Mexican output includes the highly regarded Los Olvidados (1950) and several other movies that were more mainstream than his earlier work, although he still managed to incorporate some surrealist imagery into his relatively commercial films.  He also directed some films in France during the 1960s and 1970s, including Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), before passing away in 1983. 

Buñuel enjoyed criticizing the bourgeoisie, yet he also seemed to fit comfortably in it.  Indeed, he seems like he would have been a charming dinner guest who loved sipping martinis (which get quite a bit of attention in the book), making gossipy comments about his famous past associates (including Salvador Dali, with whom he had a fractious relationship), and delivering clever bon mots.  Of course, I don't know if he was as pleasant in real life as he seems in his book, and his views on politics and religion (he was an atheist who was highly critical of the Roman Catholic Church) would not have been well received in some households, where people might not share his attitude about the time that Spanish workers formed a firing squad and "executed" a statue of Jesus Christ

I think part of the charm of the book is that Buñuel is highly opinionated (for example, he hates John Steinbeck’s books and loves marinated herring) but not full of himself, at least by the standards of famous film directors.  He doesn't seem pretentious when describing his own work -- indeed, he doesn't like when other people get pretentious when describing his films -- and he is perfectly willing to admit, for example, that even though he "had been such an ardent subversive, who had so desired the overthrow of the established order," he was terrified by the lack of order and control during the Spanish Civil War.  He also has a knack for seeming both bemused and matter-of-fact, whether he's describing how to mix the perfect drink or how French surrealist André Breton was obsessed with Leon Trotsky's dog.

The Mascot and other films

The Mascot is a circa 1933-1934 short film featuring stop-motion puppet animation.  It was written and directed by Wladyslaw Starewicz, a Russian-Lithuanian-Polish-French filmmaker whose name has several different spellings.  It's a mostly silent film (not counting the musical score) and stars a stuffed dog that goes on a perilous journey to bring an orange to sick child.  The dog ventures onto the street and even goes to the nighttime Devil's Ball; meanwhile, the canine protagonist encounters human-like toys, some of them are made out of random materials such as utensils, as well as infernal vegetables.

OK, it's a weird film.

The animation is really interesting.  According to his granddaughter, Starewicz made the faces of the puppets by sticking wet chamois-leather on their wooden structure and changed the puppets' expressions by modifying parts of the faces frame-by-frame with dentist's tongs.  Someone who posted a copy of the film online mentioned that Starewicz created a blurring effect for fast movement by moving the puppets during the actual exposure.  Anyway, here is the movie:

By the way, there are different versions of the film online. There are also other Starewicz films online, including Frogland (1922)...

and Cameraman's Revenge (1912).

I agree with Terry Gilliam, who listed The Mascot as one of the ten best animated films of all time, that Starewicz' surreal, imaginative work was a predecessor to subsequent films by Jan Švankmajer and the Brothers Quay.   So I'll use that as an excuse to link to Czech surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer's Ossuary.

Silent Frankenstein

The first film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a black-and-white (and color-tinted and color-toned black-and-white) one-reeler made in 1910 by Edison Studios.  This silent movie is only about 15 minutes long (give or take a couple minutes), so it's not surprising that it isn't completely faithful to the novel.  It disregards the book's epistolary form, ignores most of the philosophical issues raised by Shelley, avoids some of the more violent and macabre elements of the story, and both condenses and changes the plot.

While the film seems stagy compared to some other silents of the time period, I have to give it credit for at least one thing: the monster has long hair, as he did in the novel.  Compare the following illustration from the 1831 edition of Frankenstein...  

to Boris Karloff's famous portrayal of the monster in the 1931 film version.

One of the advantages of the film adaptations is that we get to see the creation of the monster. In the 1910 film, the monster isn't created by assembling body parts from corpses and animating them with electricity, as his creation is portrayed in the 1931 movie.  Instead, the monster is created by a form of alchemy.

Despite its flaws, I think the 1910 film is kinda interesting.  It is in the public domain and is available for viewing at the Internet Archive.

By the way, this wasn't the only silent version of Frankenstein.

There was a feature-length (5-reel) version released in 1915 (and re-released with additional footage in 1916) called Life Without a Soul.  Unfortunately, the film is presumed lost, although at least one person has claimed to have seen a print.