Eduardo Galeano on Brecht

From Century of the Wind, the third volume of a three volume tome of the history of the Americas, called Memory of Fire.

1942: Hollywood

"Brecht"

Hollywood manufactures films to turn the frightful vigil of humanity, to the point of annihilation, into sweet dreams. Bertolt Brecht, exiled from Hitler's Germany, is employed in this sleeping-pill industry. Founder of a theater that sought to open eyes wide, he earns his living at the United Artists studios, just one more writer who works office hours for Hollywood, competing to produce the biggest daily ration of idiocies.

On one of these days, Brecht buys a little God of Lucky for forty cents in a Chinese store and puts it on his desk. Brecht has been told that the God of Luck licks his lips each time they make him take poison.

Why We Fight: Three Artists in Wartime

Hear -- and read-- why the three producers of War, Inc. made their film.

Altered States

I've recently succumbed to a vague impulse to see again, after a gap of 27 years, the film Altered States.

As a younger man, I found the film entertaining, if rather overblown and somewhat pretentious.

And I suppose all of that still applies. But this time around the film, I've realized, makes some fairly compelling claims on its viewers, and despite Ken Russell's (as ever) hoary, heavy-handed direction, Altered States feels in some ways credible, somehow authentic. I've read some of the old reviews of the film, and the fairly thorough Wiki entry, and was pleased to find that renegade scientist John C. Lilly approved of the film. In fact, Lilly alleges that screenplay writer Paddy Chayefsky may have seen the galleys for Lilly's book The Scientist, which describes very similar events surrounding Lilly's own isolation tank experiments. Lilly is, characteristically, high-minded about the whole affair.

At any rate, I do recommend seeing Altered States (the Mexican magic mushroom scenes alone are worth the price of a DVD rental), and anyone can read more about the film here.

Radio On

Chris Petit's post-punk film Radio On uses its soundtrack to propel the narrative in ways that are evocative and memorable. For example, a long tracking shot at the film's beginning explores the nondescript, dimly lit apartment of protagonist Robert's brother, who has committed suicide in the bath. The camera finally comes to rest on a radio at the foot of the tub, on which David Bowie's "Heroes/Heldon" plays at high volume. Those familiar with "Heroes" will recognize the dialectic in operation here: the romantic, desperate bravado of the song's lyrics and delivery in relation to the context of the suicide itself.

Later, Bowie's tune "Always Crashing in the Same Car" (a tribute to J.G. Ballard's novel Crash) plays while Robert cruises past a seemingly endless array of identical high-rise condominiums. The song ends strategically as Robert leaves this ultramodern, over-lit realm (the same high-rises can be seen, incidentally, on the cover of The Jam's LP This is the Modern World) to descend into the grim depths of nighttime Bristol, the site of his brother's suicide.

Finally, towards the film's end, as Robert succumbs to his own disaffected despair he leaves his car in an abandoned quarry while Kraftwerk's static-laden Radioactivity blares on the car's tapedeck.

But still, the film ends on a high note as Robert catches a train, fleeing this overdetermined and alienating landscape. This is an idyllic, panoramic scene (shot from overhead) of the station bordered to one side by the sea and on the other by the English hills, and I always imagine it with Kraftwerk's "Airwaves" thrumming urgently and lyrically (surely their most plaintive melody) along in the background, the low key vocals intoning simply, again and again:
"When airwaves swing
Distant voices sing."

Damnation

I've recently seen a film by director Bela Tarr--Damnation. While I appreciated the film's decadant cynicism, and its sense of defeated existentialism, the thing I found most remarkable was a camera technique Tarr uses in virtually every scene of the film. It seems that always, when two figures are framed in a dramatic scene, Tarr pulls the camera back to pan across their surroundings. This forces the viewer to always regard the characters and their dilemmas in a larger, social dimension. No act, it seems, can be seen outside of its historical context (for Tarr here it's Hungarian society collapsing under the weight of Soviet occupation) It's a simple yet elegant technique--one I'll take with me.

A good introduction to Tarr's major films can be found here.

Overnight to Distant Cities, Never Closing the Spaces Between Us

September 29, 1912--July 30, 2007

Red Desert (1964). This was Antonioni’s first film in color, and its scenes of belching factory smoke, and overall muted, depressive palette, are unforgettable. These hideous colors are only accented by their contrast with the one fantasy sequence, the story Monica Vitti tells her son about a paradisaical beach: here the lighting and the colors are excessively bright and clear, too much so, with the airbrushed perfection of the most expensive advertising. This is the bourgeois vision of beauty as compensation and escape, as unrealizable ideal: Antonioni shows it to be only the flip side of the industrial pollution that dominates the rest of the film. Antonioni’s own aestheticism resides, rather, in the waste and pollution itself. I think of his use of the color red, as in the scene in the cabin, where Vitti tries (unsuccessfully) to transform herself into orgy mode; and also the scene in the hotel room, her tryst with the engineer, where the wall subtly changes color behind them as they writhe on the bed. Related to that, in turn, though with a different palette, is the scene in the ship yard, at night, where Vitti wandering alone is briefly propositioned by a foreign sailor: not speaking Italian, he tells her, in English, “I’ll love you, I’ll love you,” as she passes by. It’s a scene that could be an epigraph for all of Antonioni’s movies, with their pain and blocked eroticism, and with the force of the disinterest by means of which Antonioni transfigures them.

Read the rest of this very astute analysis of Antonioni's oeuvre, by Steven Shaviro, here .