La curée – Fonda & Vadim

I enjoyed this film version of Zola’s novel, The Kill [see here and here] from 1966, released under the English title, The Game is Over.  It focuses on one part of the story, the love affair between Maxime Saccard and Renée, the young wife of his wheeler-dealer tycoon father, his stepmother.  In the book, part of Renée’s attraction to Maxime is her revelling in the crime of incest, but that’s dropped in the film – more modern times, the swingin’ 60s!

My only other knowledge of Roger Vadim is Barbarella, a thoroughly awful film, so I was prepared for the worst.  In fact, this film is quite restrained, and it closely follows the narrative of Zola’s story, while skillfully updating it.  Maxime’s and Renée’s characters, their total immersion in their affair, and their privleged place within the swirling realms of the super rich are very nicely shown.  Too late for me now to know if I would have dismissed it as a piece of junk, as this NYTimes reviewer did, or if it stands up on its own regardless of whether you have read the book.  Certainly, it’s pretty good if you read, then watch, as I did.

Dogs are everywhere – Jane does a video avant la lettre…

Two kids who like to play, sometimes with guns…

Mama and the boy get serious…

As in Zola, much of their affair is carried on in the huge hothouse of the mansion.

“He’s going away!  We can do what we want!”  “No – I can’t deceive him when he’s not in the house.”  Huh??

On a rural retreat, they get their car stuck in a pond.  To retrieve it, they seek help from a friend whose brother works in a factory.  Production actually happens here, unlike with Daddy’s financial chicanery.  Looks to me like a sulfur plant – the color is great, and all that brimstone!

She confesses her love, he plays with his favorite toy.  Meanwhile, at home, the dogs prowl.

Sometimes, I could just shoot that boy!

A tête-à-tête, and she decides to ask the Boss for a divorce.

Reality intrudes again.  “Sure thing, babe, do as you like.  Oh…what will you live on? “

In the end, papa fixes up his son with a rich, pretty friend whose father is loaded.  That will tide the Boss over until his schemes pan out.  Renée is just darned inconvenient now.  She tries suicide, but changes her mind.  Back in the gym, during a costume ball, the Boss talks sense to her.  Game over.

Who were they?

Yes, indeed!  I am certainly proud of them.  After all, they produced these paintings at the Chauvet Cave, in France, which are more than 30,000 years old.  Absolutely mind boggling to contemplate…

Our ancestor was here…

Just sayin’…

You can click on the images to enlarge them…

Comics keep me going.

So many movie adaptations…

Van der Weyden – pure genius

Such tales from his memoirs!

Revelation yet again, and always.

The ultimate trip?

Police, adjective

From Avatar, a bloated techno-marvel of contemporary cinema, to the other extreme of the film world:  Police, adjective, a Romanian movie about, well about a cop with a conscience.  I’m not going to recommend this film, although I liked it a lot, because if you see it, you may never read my blog again – it’s hard to watch at times. 

When I was in school, my friends and I sometimes played a game that I called Dictionary Madness – we would try to find definitions in Websters that were totally opaque, unhelpful, and totally dependent on other definitions that nobody knew.  Dictionaries can be that way – circular and elliptical in their “helping.”  Sort of like the Molière character who explains that opium puts one to sleep because it has a “dormative virtue.”   Ultimately, this  film hinges upon a fit of dictionary madness in which the book of words becomes an instrument of authoritarian humiliation. 

Cristi thinks he has a “conscience,” but can he properly define what that means?  Who makes the meanings of words anyway?  The users of them, or the Romanian Academy, to which his grammar school teacher wife refers during their bizarre and arcane discussions of pop songs and rhetoric?  Or is it The Boss, to whom the hapless Cristi must report, and suffer his cold, withering, and totally calm application of the dialectial method?

My wife said this was the most boring film she’d ever seen, and I can’t really argue with her.  In  all those police and detective films you’ve seen over the years where they stake out a suspect, what do they do?  They sit in a car across the street, chat, eat doughnuts,  skip through time under the knife of the editor so that we feel that time has passed, but it goes pretty quickly.  Not a bad way to earn a paycheck, eh?  Not in this one!  Nooosirrreee!!  He waits, we wait, and wait, and wait, and wait…and wait some more.  Work for a cop in a decrepit post-communist state that hasn’t quite gotten with the democracy program is pretty bleak.  And what is he waiting for?  Evidence to nail some teenagers who smoke hash on the corner.

I loved the locations – I have a taste for the shabby and ramshackle – and everything in this movie is just that.  How does an entire country live in this environment? 

The title of the movie comes from one of the definitions of “police” that they read in the climax.  It can mean:

• noun – the people who enforce the law:  The police subdued the criminal.
• verb - to enforce law and order: The men were ready to police the concert grounds.
• adjective - a type of story that follows the progress of a police investigation, sometimes referred to in French as a policier – a detective story, of which, of course, the film is an example.

Himalayan snowball fight

Is there anyone interested in the topic of climate change who is unaware of the recent flap over the glaciers of the Himalayas?  An ad showing an image similar to the one above was running on the New York Times Science page for some time during the recent conference in Copenhagen.  The image on the left is from 2007, while the one on the right is from 1921, clear evidence of melting, right?  So, we have this story, widely circulated in the media world (all emphasis added):

October 5, 2009 (CNN) — The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding quicker than those in other parts of the world and could disappear altogether by 2035 according to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.[link]

This follows on an earlier alarming report on CNN:

Glaciers a canary in the coal mine of global warming

August 8, 2009 (CNN) — U.S. scientists monitoring shrinking glaciers in Washington and Alaska reported this week that a major meltdown is under way.

A 50-year government study found that the world’s glaciers are melting at a rapid and alarming rate. The ongoing study is the latest in a series of reports that found glaciers worldwide are melting faster than anyone had predicted they would just a few years ago.

It offers a clear indication of an accelerating climate change and warming earth, according to the authors. [link]

But not everyone agreed.  After the 2007 report of the IPCC came out, the Indian Ministry of Environment did its own research and published a report that concluded the melting of the glaciers was part of a natural cycle going on worldwide.  The response was quick and furious, a veritable snowball fusillade:

November 9, 2009 Guardian.UK:  India ‘arrogant’ to deny global warming link to melting glaciers

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri accuses Indian environment ministry of ‘arrogance’ for its report claiming there is no evidence that climate change has shrunk Himalayan glaciers. [link]

…and…

November 16, 2009:  Indian Express – Pachauri rubbishes report on glaciers

Rubbishing the claim by a government-backed study that melting of glaciers was not due to climate change, leading environmentalist R K Pachauri on Sunday dubbed it as “totally unsubstantiated scientific opinion” and flayed Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh for endorsing it.

Pachauri, head of the Nobel prize winner Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said it was universally acknowledged that glaciers were melting because of climate change and the same applied to Indian glaciers.

“Everywhere in the world, glaciers are melting due to climate change, the Arctic is melting because of climate change. What is so special about Indian glaciers?” Pachauri said.

The study by former deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India V K Raina has claimed that while most glaciers are in the process of retreat, some Himalayan glaciers, such as the Siachen glacier, are actually advancing and some others, such as the Gangotri glacier, are retreating at a rate lower than before.[link]

As the snowballs flew to and fro, some people started to look into it:

December 1, 2009, BBC News:  Himalayan glaciers’ ‘mixed picture’

A scientific debate has been triggered over the state of glaciers in the Himalayas.

Some recent findings seem to contradict claims that the glaciers are retreating rapidly. Some glaciers are even said to be advancing.  There are clear signs of glacial retreat and ice melt from other parts of the world, but few field studies have been carried out in the Himalayas.

Its glaciers too were widely believed to be receding fast. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had said that Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world.

The panel observed: “If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” [link]

Eventually, we heard from the Indian Minister of Environment in his own words:

NEW DELHI  December 2009 – Recession of Himalayan glaciers part of natural process:

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh said the recession of Himalayan glaciers was part of the natural cyclical process which could be attributed to various reasons, including global warming.  Replying to supplementaries during Question Hour, he said the melting of Arctic ice and Himalayan glaciers could not be compared as ecological conditions in each case were different.

According to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Himalayan Glaciers are receding faster than in any part of the world and if the present rate continues, there is a likelihood of their disappearing by 2035, he noted.

However, Ramesh said the studies carried out by the Geological Survey of India have revealed that majority of Himalayan glaciers are passing through a phase of recession, which is a worldwide phenomenon.

“The recession of glaciers is part of the natural cyclic process of changes in the size and other attributes of the glaciers. These changes could be attributed to various reasons including global warming,” he said…

He said long term studies are required to conclusively establish the causes and impacts of melting of Himalayan glaciers. [link]

Finally, alas, it all turns out to have been a little mistake:

December 5, 2009 – BBC News:  Himalayan glaciers melting deadline ‘a mistake’

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says.  J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

He is astonished they “misread 2350 as 2035″. The authors deny the claims. 

When asked how this “error” could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” [link]

You can read about the whole thing in more detail by following the links from this blog.

Avatar

Just went to see the new film, Avatar.  Wonderful special effects, excellent 3-D effect, and very  nicely realized fantasy world.  It was so long, I found myself saying to myself, “C’mon now, move it along, get to the final fight of the good guys and the bad guys…“  I feel like I’ve seen the story before in westerns and sci-fi movies galore over the years.  The bad invader who goes native and switches loyalties – wasn’t that what Dancing with Wolves was all about?

The interesting new twist was the incorporation of the eco-green-enviro-religiosity:  the innocent forest people in tune with the sacred wellspring of life,  a sort of Ygdrasil, the holy tree; the bad earthlings who killed the green part of their world and are willing to destroy this new one, Pandora, for a metal, Unobtainium – I like that comic touch of the name because I’ve been helping my son with chemistry lately!  If it had been 60 minutes shorter, I would have enjoyed as a piece of brilliantly done entertainment fluff, but it was soooo pretentious and predictable.

Today, Adam Cohen of the NY Times, an intelligent and thoughtful guy, gushes over the movie, saying:

The remarkable thing about “Avatar” is the degree to which the technology is integral to the story. It is important to show Pandora and its Na’Vi natives in 3-D because “Avatar” is fundamentally about the moral necessity of seeing other beings fully…

The central love story reaches its culmination with the lovers declaring, “I see you.” The movie’s ending, which I will not give away here, brilliantly drives home, one last time, the importance of how one sees things…

The ability to see Pandora’s natives for who they are is the movie’s moral touchstone.

Funny…all these statements about the movie are true (except the first one) and it was still boring.  De gustibus non est disputandum.

The Christmas season is upon us…

…And unto us a child is born…

Background material to this picture here, and original source material here.

Liberty for all

“When I am old, I shall write criticism; that will console me, for I often choke with suppressed opinions.”

Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Georges Sand

I feel compelled to unburden myself on the topic of libertarianism.  There are all sorts of people who describe themselves as libertarians, and it’s hard to make sense of the mix.

• You have gun-obsessed Rambo-wannabees like the guy who created the picture here (Click on it to visit his blog if you have a robust tolerance for the way out!).
• There are folks like Clint Eastwood who once remarked, “My political philosophy is simple.  Everybody should leave everyone else alone.”  Yep, good one, Clint.  That’s a real roadmap for governing a modern industrial state of 300 million.
• There are those inpsired by the crackpot intellectual, Ayn Rand, who at least must be granted the credit for inventing a new literary genre, the philosophical soap opera.
• And then there are thoughtful people, like a fellow I work with, who are quite reasonable but seem to revel in the libertarian cachet of ornery contrarian thinking.

I often find myself in agreement with specific critiques of libertarians, whether they are left-libertarian nearly-anarchists or right-libertarian, free market ideologues.  In fact, many of the respectable, i.e., rational and scientific, critics of the global warming point of view (AGW) are, in fact, libertarians.  But, in the end, I find it to be a bizarre and utopian political philosophy that is in full denial of the facts of human history.  As a point of view that influences the political choices you make, yes, I can see that, but anything more…?  Closer to wacko.

For libertarians of all stripes, the state, um…I mean, THE STATE, is the greatest evil.  The state, and “collectivist” actions that seek to improve life, or enslave others.  I’m all against enslavement, but I rather like improving life, even if the agent is the evil state.  Libertarians would say that’s a Faustian bargain, bound to end in the Gulag or the death camps.

Why The State?  Why not money?  Isn’t that the root of all evil?  Or…language?  Without language, now state, no money!  It’s a rather simplistic point of view.  Are they realistic in their expectations of what would succeed the present situation of vigorousl state activity?  Do they care?  Do they want to revert to pre-industrial, geographically isolated “eco-regions?”  I dunno…

Sure, some state solutions fail.  Bureaucracies are cumbersome and can mutate into strange things that frustrate the very improvements they were created to bring about.  What else is new in this, the fallen state of mankind?

As a practical political philosophy, liberatarianism is pure hokum.  People advocating it are either naive or dishonest.  Naive if they believe that a general attempt to apply libertarian principles would result in anything other than the most powerful economic and political forces capturing the state and bending it towards their own ends, which is what they are always trying to do; or dishonest because they are part of those forces and they see libertarianism as a nifty way to pursue that goal under cover.  Mostly the former, I think, because corporate and political power has captured so much of state power today, that libertarianism is probably more of an annoyance than a help.

Wild Abandon!

Zola as prefiguring film noir – now there’s a thought.  And if you think his writing is limited to depressing catalogues of social realities, remember, he can be damn funny too, in a dark, satiric way:

He was a man of superb stature, with the white, pensive face of a great statesman,  and since he was a marvelously good listener, with a deep gaze and a  majestic calm in his expression, it was possible to believe that he was engaged in a prodigious inner labor of comprehension and deduction.  Of course, his mind was completely empty.  Yet he had a disturbing effect on people, who had no idea whether they were dealing with a superior man or an imbecile.  [One of the fellows madly on the make, in The Kill]

And the city as one giant bubbling pot of money and flesh:  what does The Naked City have that Zola lacks?

Meanwhile, the Saccards’ fortune seemed to have reached its apogee.  It blazed like a gigantic bonfire in the middle of Paris.  It was the hour when the hounds were ardently devouring their share of the spoils [La curée, translated as The Kill] …The appetites that had been unleashed at last found contentment in the impudence of triumph, in the din of crumbling neighborhoods, and fortunes built in six months.  The city had become a orgy of millions and women.  Vice, come from on high, flowed through the gutters, spread across ornamental basins, and spurted skyward in public fountains, only to fall again upon the roofs in a fine driving rain.  And at night, when one crossed the bridges, the Seine seemed to carry off all the refuse of the sleeping city: crumbs fallen from tables, lace bows left lying on divans, hairpieces forgotten in cabs, banknotes slipped out of bodices – everything that brutal desire and immediate gratification of instinct shattered and soiled and then tossed into the street.  Then in the capital’s feverish sleep, better even than its breathless daylight quest, one sensed the mental derangement, the gilded voluptuous nightmare of a city driven mad by its gold and its flesh. Violins sang until midnight.  The windows went dark, and shadows fell upon the city.  It was a like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last vestige of modesty extinguished.  In the depths of the darkness, there was now only a great gurgle of frenetic and weary love, while the Tuileries, at the water’s edge, reached out its arms as if to embrace the vast blackness.

Not quite a new story for Paris.

When did Paris become romantic?

When did Paris get to be the city of romance and of young lovers?  No doubt, the photographs of Robert Doisneau had something to do with it.  Is it a post WWII phenomenon?  I think of Paris for the period before that as being the city of loose women, artists, intellectuals, free-wheeling nightlife, but not exactly romance.  As the WWI song went,

How ya’ going to keep them down on the farm,
after they’ve seen Gay Pa-ree?

This referred to all those rural American doughboy soldiers who’d gotten a taste of Sodom’s delights while on leave in the big city.  And before that, during the Second Empire and the fin de siècle, Paris was the city of sin, lust, greed, wild financial wheeler-dealing, whores and nightclubs, drugs and absinthe, “ballet” dancers for purchase by rich sybarites, and plunging décolletage.  Not exactly the stuff of…romance.

And then there’s the Paris of brutality and political insurrection.  The bloody suppression of the Commune, the revolutions in the streets of 1830 and 1848, with barricades and hand-to-hand fighting.  Looming over it all, the Big One, The French Revolution of 1789, and the ensuing Terror.  Again, not to much romance there.

People talk about how beautiful Paris is, as if the urban plan and the regular facades of the streets exude loveliness and, of course, romance.  More and more, when I think of Paris, I think of its reconstruction under Napoleon III and Hausmann, the ruthless demolition of neighborhoods, the eviction of thousands, the fraud, the corruption, and the waste incurred during the pell mell rebuilding of the city in Napoleon’s image until his ignominious exit in 1871.  The long avenues and the open circles seem to me the marks of authoritarian planning, a dictatorial City Beautiful [in America, urban renewal was called by some negro removal; in Paris, it would have been worker removal] all of which has been imitated by dictators of various intellectual calibers since, from Romania to the Ivory Coast.

I guess I’ve been reading too much Zola.  I was surprised to find how many of his novels deal with precisely this topic, the rebuilding of the city.  The Belly of Paris and The Kill are two that come to mind immediately.  And as for décolletage, he documents it in several texts, most tellingly here where he is describing not a prostitute or courtesan, but a society lady:

When Renée entered the room, a murmur of admiration greeted her.  She was truly divine…her head and bodice were done up adorably.   Her breasts exposed, almost to the nipples…the young woman seemed to emerge stark naked from her sheath of tulle and salin… [more here]

Does the objectification of woman get any more explicit?  Romance?..  A few images from now and then…

   

    

Down the memory hole!

The good old days of airbrushing history away – as Comrade Stalin always liked to say, “No man, no problem!”:

     

Not so easy anymore, as pointed out in this (unintentionally?) amusing story in the New York Times:  Accenture, as if Tiger Woods Were Never There. 

I miss Venice

I last spent time in La Serenissima about thirty years ago.  How time … [insert cliche here.]  I was on my way to India via the land route, and stopped for a week or so, drunk with architecture.  It was September, and I thought that the high tourist season would be over by then, but I was wrong.  I spent my first night on the Lido beach, I recall.  The sight of boats laden with tourists gliding through the dark, surrounded by crowded walkways, reminded me of Disneyland, but I knew why I was there.

With daylight, I found my way to the Giudecca, the Jews’ island, where the International Youth Hostel was.  I ate for free during the several days of the Festival of Unity staged by the Communist Party – delicious.  The irony was tasty too – I am neither an observant Jew nor a communist.  Moreover, the Jewish ghetto of Venice was never located on that island, which is home to one of the great Renaissance monuments, the church of Il Redentore  by Palladio.

Venice seems to have a special place in the imagination of Europeans, even Italians, as well as tourist hordes worldwide, and it is featured in films often. Two films I like very much that feature Venice are Italian for Beginners and Bread and Tulips, one Danish, one Italian, both romantic comedies.  Then there are the films I don’t like, and films I thought were great but that I’m too scared to watch again.

When I was studying the history of architecture, a grad student told me that “everyone loves Venice.”  That is, all architects and planners, regardless of their stylistic bent or ideology (and the latter can be pretty fierce among architects – intensity seems inversely proportioned to the number of completed projects…) all point to the city of Venice as the exemplar of whatever they hold most dear.  It is often cited as a supreme example of “organic” urban growth, and indeed, from the air, it looks sort of like a schematic fish!  I have always thought the Grand Canal, snaking through it, looks like the main intestinal tract in higher animals, and once again, that is, sort of, what it is for the city as a whole.

Now, the city is a fossil, without an economy independent of tourism, although we shouldn’t despise it for that since in our “spectacular age,” tourism is an industry like any other.  The sinking has stopped with the cessation of pumping in Mestre and other places, but high water, as always, is a problem.  The flood gates are under design to preserve the physical fabric of the place from inundation, but the lower stories  of many structures, already sunken to the point that portions are permanently submerged while they were designed for occasional flooding, are crumbling and need shoring up.

I don’t really care – the city is a physical creation unlike any other in the world and should be appreciated for that beyond all else.  It is a monument to the amazing creativity of the urban collective, and it provides an ideal point against which to measure any urban fantasy, because it was as real as real can be for centuries.  Pity it, laugh at its not-too-clean canals, dismiss it as a decaying urban theme park:  what city can claim to have been so powerful, so rich, so influential, and so fantastically beautiful in a way unmatched by anyplace on earth for so long?

Oh, and then there’s that Fourth Crusade, with its never-ending lessons for the rest of us…