Be that as it may, I located the Unmuzzled Ox interview where Corso responded to Michael Andre’s mention of a Richard Howard essay about his  poetry:

…I met him maybe two or three times, so he gets his shot from what I write. Anybody is going to take me for what I write, then I have the trump card. After all, I know what I am putting down there and why I am putting it down. The poet and his poetry are inseparable [italics mine]. (Writings from Unmuzzled Ox Magazine, 1973, 1975, 1981, p. 140)

Yes, well, maybe. Does the writer really hold a trump card that overrides all else? Must we know what a writer thinks she or he is putting down and why to make a legitimate critical assessment, much less understand it, in whatever sense we may think of understanding these things? Must we read the biography, journals, letters, and so on before taking up the body of a writer’s work?

We bring whatever we may know of an author’s life, background, influences, interests, and passions to bear on what we read, and we hope we mange this with discrimination and acumen, wary of reading into the writing what is not there, but this knowledge is not sine qua non. We appreciate writers about whom we know next to nothing of their lives and thinking, however curious we may be and frustrated when we cannot satisfy that curiosity. Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, and Thomas Pynchon come readily to mind, our appreciation scarcely diminished by how little we know about them. Do we read Nietzsche differently knowing that he composed books during long walks of several hours morning and afternoon? Does this help us understand what he was up to? Or thought he was up to? Does knowing so little about Shakespeare diminish our reading of Hamlet, King Lear, and the rest?

This brings us back to the Brontë project, which I am thoroughly enjoying. Those girls are fascinating, three sisters, daughters of a provincial clergyman, who grew to be young women of formidable intellect and significant literary accomplishment in their all too brief lives. Whether the context provided by a glimpse into those lives aids interpretation of the writing may be almost beside the point. Perhaps what we learn about them by way of biographical and personal details offers a different pleasure, distinct though not altogether separate from the pleasure their novels and poems give us.

More is known of Charlotte than her sisters thanks to her prolific, lifelong correspondence, notably to her childhood school friend Ellen Nussey, her publishers, and more occasionally literary contemporaries such as Robert Southey, Hartley Coleridge (son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Thomas de Quincey, and Elizabeth Gaskell. The letters make clear that while Charlotte and her sisters lived almost their entire lives in provincial isolation, they were anything but ignorant of the wider world, especially the world of arts and letters.

Charlotte (1816–1854) and Emily (1818–1848) were the third and fifth of six children born in a span of seven years, from 1813 to 1820, to Patrick and Maria Brontë in Haworth, Yorkshire. Maria died in 1821, leaving Patrick to rear the brood with the aid of his sister-in-law, who moved in with the family in 1823. More tragedy followed in 1825 when Marie and Elizabeth, the oldest of the siblings, died of tuberculosis contracted at Cowan Bridge School, a clergymen’s daughters boarding school that was by general account a gruesome place. Charlotte and Emily attended the school briefly in 1824 before being brought home by their father after their sisters’ deaths. The school register offers these notes:

[Emily] Reads very prettily & Works a little

[Charlotte] Reads tolerably — Writes indifferently — Ciphers a little and works neatly — Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments — Altogether clever of her age but knows nothing systematically.

Six years later Charlotte attended Roe’s Head School, where she later taught. Emily followed her sister to Roe’s Head in 1835, but formal schooling did not agree with her. She lasted three months and grew miserable, pale, and thin before returning home. The girls were otherwise schooled at home by their father, with Charlotte also teaching her younger sisters.

Literary endeavor was nothing out of the ordinary in the Brontë household. Patrick published two volumes of poems, two prose tales, two pamphlets, and three sermons, beside which several articles and poems appeared in local newspapers. By general account none of it was of any distinction. Maria penned an essay entitled “On the Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns,” described as “[p]ious and sincere, entirely correct in the style of the time…[but containing] nothing original or striking and did not achieve, perhaps did not seriously attempt, publication” (Phyllis Bentley, The Brontës, Thames and Hudson, 1969, p. 12). For the sisters “the highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure [they] had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition.” (Charlotte, quoted in Bentley, p. 13)

One day in 1826 Patrick brought home a box of wooden soldiers for Branwell and other gifts, including a model village, for the girls. The children immediately gave names to the soldiers and made up stories about them, which grew into extensive written accounts of the fanciful kingdoms of Angria (the creation of Charlotte and Branwell) and the darker Gondal (from the imaginations of Emily and Anne).

The family’s high hopes for Branwell, “his Father’s and his sisters’ pride and hope in boyhood” (Charlotte, letter to W.S. Williams, 2 October 1848), did not pan out. Sent to London to study art, he fell in with a bad crowd and returned home after only a week. Thereafter he found gainful employment only sporadically.

[He] drank, got into debt, took opium, wrote wild letters, illustrated by wild sketches…dozed about the Parsonage in a drunken stupor by day, raged and ranted by night, and in general behaved with such feverish irresponsibility as to bring continual disquiet and distress to the Parsonage. (Bentley, p. 84)

At her brother’s death Charlotte wrote,

I do not weep from a sense of bereavement — there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away no dear companion lost — but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior; I had aspirations and ambitions for him once — long ago — they have perished mournfully — nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings — There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death — such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe — I trust time will allay these feelings. (Letter to Williams, 2 October 1848).

There would have been no such expectations for the sisters, career opportunities being not exactly abundant for women in a provincial village in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne determined that their best shot lay in teaching or being governesses, to which they were not particularly well suited, despite their considerable intelligence and learning. Charlotte put it frankly in a letter to Ellen Nussey:

…no one but myself can tell how hard a Governesse’s work is to me — for no one but myself is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are from the employment —  Do not think that I fail to blame myself for this or that I leave any means unemployed to conquer this feeling. Some of my greatest difficulties lie in things that would appear to you comparatively trivial. I find it so hard to repel the rude familiarity of the children —  I find it so difficult to ask either servants or mistress for anything I want, however much I want it. It is less pain to me to endure the greatest inconvenience than to go into the kitchen to request its removal. I am a fool — Heaven knows I cannot help it. (3 March 1841)

How could I not feel kinship with this woman? As for Emily, Charlotte says she “is not very fond of teaching but she would nevertheless take care of the housekeeping, and though she is rather withdrawn she has too kind a heart not to do her utmost for the well-being of the children — she is also a very generous soul…” (letter to Constantin Heger, 24 July 1844, where Charlotte tells of a plan to open a small boarding school at the parsonage).

Their aunt derived some financial resources from her father, who was a prosperous merchant. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily convinced her to send them to school in Brussels where they might improve their French and German and even gain a little Italian and thereby improve their prospects for employment as teachers. At the Pensionnat Heger they studied French, German, music, singing, writing, arithmetic, and drawing. Charlotte wrote of Emily that she “works like a horse” (letter to EN May 1842) and “is making rapid progress in French, German, Music and Drawing —  Monsieur & Madame Heger [who ran the school] begin to recognize the valuable points of her character under her singularities.” (letter to EN July 1842).

The death of their aunt later that year brought the sisters home, where Emily remained when Charlotte returned to the school as a teacher in January 1843. Charlotte did not care for the Belgian girls she taught or the other teachers, and she fell for Monsieur Heger, an unfortunate situation made worse when Madame Heger picked up on it.  A miserable year ended with Charlotte’s departure from Brussels for good in December. Her letters to M. Heger over the next two years convey both her feelings for him and the one-sided aspect of the affair.

The sisters also engaged in some modest investments, which Emily managed “in a most handsome and able manner” (letter to Margaret Wooler, 30 January 1846) for Charlotte while she was in Brussels, evidently with some persnicketiness, to judge by Charlotte’s letter, where she writes of the Railway Panic and their investment in the York and North Midland line. Charlotte assured Wooler, whom the sisters had previously solicited for investment advice, that their capital was as yet undiminished, but she would have preferred moving it to a more secure investment. She was not, however, able to persuade her sisters and would rather run the risk of loss than hurt Emily’s feelings, saying,

…therefore I will let her manage still and take the consequences. Disinterested and energetic she certainly is and if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as I could wish I must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity and as long as we can regard those we love and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by, what appear to us, unreasonable and headstrong notions. (ibid.)

As I write this, I have read Wuthering Heights, about half of Jane Eyre, biographical and critical writings about the sisters from several sources, and a fair number of Charlotte’s letters. Charlotte is interesting on many levels, intelligent, perceptive, witty. To Anne I have given only passing attention thus far. It is Emily, mysterious, reclusive, fiercely intelligent, fiercely independent, who grips my imagination with each reference to her singularities and unreasonable and headstrong notions.

A good deal of what we know about Emily comes from Charlotte; much of the rest is surmise and speculation that draws on Wuthering Heights, the astounding poems, and characters in her sisters’ novels that might be modeled at least in part on her. I quote here at length from Charlotte’s prefatory note to “Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell [Emily Brontë]” for its glimpse into Emily’s persona and for the vivid description of the place the sisters called home.

At that period [when Emily was sixteen] she was sent to school. Her previous life, with the exception of a single half-year, had been passed in the absolute retirement of a village parsonage, amongst the hills bordering Yorkshire and Lancashire. The scenery of these hills is not grand — it is not romantic; it is scarcely striking. Long low moors, dark with heath, shut in little valleys, where a stream waters, here and there, a fringe of stunted copse. Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these valleys; it is only higher up, deep in amongst the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot: and even if she finds it there, she must be a solitude-loving raven — no gentle dove. If she demand beauty to inspire her, she must bring it inborn: these moors are too stern to yield any product so delicate. The eye of the gazer must itself brim with a ‘purple light,’ intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of June; out of his heart must well the freshness, that in latter spring and early summer brightens the bracken, nurtures the moss, and cherishes the starry flowers that spangle for a few weeks the pasture of the moor-sheep. Unless that light and freshness are innate and self-sustained, the drear prospect of a Yorkshire moor will be found as barren of poetic as of agricultural interest: where the love of wild nature is strong, the locality will perhaps be clung to with the more passionate constancy, because from the hill-lover’s self comes half its charm.

My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was — liberty.

Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and inartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindliest auspices), was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me — I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school; and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on. After the age of twenty, having meantime studied alone with diligence and perseverance, she went with me to an establishment on the Continent: the same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system. Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer in this second ordeal. She did conquer: but the victory cost her dear. She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage-house, and desolate Yorkshire hills. —

In 1845 Charlotte accidentally happened on a notebook in which Emily had copied her poems and found them “wild, melancholy and elevating.” Emily was at first furious at this invasion of her privacy. Eventually Charlotte convinced her that the poems merited publication. A volume containing poems by all three sisters was brought out at their expense in 1846 as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, published pseudonymously to avoid the bias of the critics against women writers and to keep the publication secret to their father, brother, and neighbors. The publication was conspicuous for its lack of success, as Charlotte documented in a note to de Quincey signed by Currer Bell:

My Relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.

The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of those two, himself only knows.

Before transferring the edition to the trunk-makers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell — we beg to offer you one in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works — (16 June 1847)

A bit more than a year later, in September 1848, after publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte told Williams that she had no pride in her poems from that first book at the same time she attested to Emily’s strength and originality.

…much of it was written in early youth — I feel it now to be crude and rhapsodical. Ellis Bell’s [Emily's] is of a different stamp — of its sterling excellence I am deeply convinced, and have been from the first moment the M.S. fell by chance into my hands. The pieces are short, but they are very genuine: they stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret. The deep excitement I felt forced from me the confession of the discovery I had made — I was sternly rated at first for having taken an unwarrantable liberty — this I expected — for Ellis Bell is of no flexible or ordinary materials — but by dint of entreaty and reason — I at last wrung out a reluctant consent to have the “rhymes” (as they were contemptuously termed) published — The author never alludes to them — or when she does — it is with scorn — but I know — no woman that ever lived — ever wrote such poetry before — condensed energy, clearness, finish — strange, strong pathos are their characteristics — utterly different from the weak diffusiveness — the laboured yet feeble wordiness which dilute the writings of even popular poetesses.

That the mysterious Emily should so captivate me is no mystery. The iconic Romantic figure of the solitary poet, the solitude-loving raven, walking where her own nature would be leading, vexed to choose another guide, shunning convention, strong-natured and stubborn in Imagination’s embrace of a bleak beauty, is at the heart of what has drawn me to poetry from its first stirrings in me. This is enough to make Emily intriguing even if the writing did not hold up. Because the writing does hold up, her persona adds to the texture and richness of our reading. Because the writing holds up, Emily is not just intriguing, she is important.

Shameless
dir Jan Hrebejk
Czech Republic

Sometimes I think I feel more at home, more at ease, in a dark room waiting for a film to begin than anywhere else in the world. Can this be?

During this year’s festival I recultivated some old habits. Finding myself with time to kill before a film showing at the Broadway Theaters or Whitsell Auditorium in the Portland Art Museum, I wandered up and down the Park Blocks between Salmon Street and Portland State University, pausing to sit on a bench by the Theodore Roosevelt sculpture in the front of the museum, the trees for most part bare, showing only the first hints of bloom, people strolling along, couples hand in hand, a mother pausing to take the hand of her little girl as they crossed the street. Four clean-cut young people, two boys and two girls, stopped to invite me to a church service. I politely declined and wished them a good evening. It is good to sit for a bit somewhere for no particular reason, without purpose, no expectations, nothing to accomplish.

Last Sunday Woman without Piano finished at 3:30, and Room and a Half showed at 6:30, which gave me a good two hours to while away before heading back to the theater to rendezvous with Judith at the head of the advance ticket line, then go down to claim my place in the Silver Screen member line so I could try to save her a seat. I went for the first time in quite a while to the little coffee shop on the Park Blocks up by PSU, Madison I think is the street, for a bowl of chili and a decaf coffee. I jotted down notes about Woman without Piano and gazed out the window and overheard the conversation of two young women seated at the table next to me. The one wearing the hot red dress was telling her friend about the time in high school, which I’m guessing was no more than a year or two ago, when she clotheslined the most popular girl in school in a soccer game, the star, the girl nobody touched. She became known as the girl who clotheslined M. For the rest of the year other girls shoved her roughly into the lockers when they passed in the hall. The woman in the red dress laughed it off, enjoying the notoriety that went with clotheslining M., reveling in her outsider status. The funny thing is, this story sounds familiar, as if I have heard it before. Is it from TV or a movie and did I miss something in the conversation? Or am I imagining that? It is of no great import, just that I found the story amusing and my sense of familiarity with it intriguing.

Yesterday evening I closed out the festival with Shameless, a Czech film about a man who falls out of love with his wife because her nose is too big. Oskar has a good life, family, son who loves him, good job as a TV weather guy. It goes all to hell for him over her nose and the affair he has with the dimwitted Hungarian au pair. Zuzana kicks him out, he loses his job, he accidentally drowns the Hungarian’s pet turtle, and the downward spiral goes on from there.

To top it off Oskar’s parents encourage Zuzana to pursue a relationship with a young man she meets on the playground, himself divorced and with a daughter the same age as her son. Feeling that she would be cheating on Oskar, from whom she is not yet divorced, Zuzana asks her mother-in-law if she ever cheated on her husband. The mother-in-law replies regretfully, no, she was too puritanical. If she had not been such a puritan, she would have had a wonderful time with all the cute boys who helped her onto the tram with young Oskar’s baby carriage.

Meantime, Oskar has an affair with a famous singer old enough to be his mother who wears him out with her voracious sexual appetite. After Oskar introduces the singer to his parents, his father tells him she is beautiful now, and as long as you love her she will be beautiful until the day she dies. The affair does not last. The singer cuts Oskar loose when her ex-husband dies. At the hospital Oskar asks what he died of. Why, she says, old age, of course.

Our sympathies lie wholly with Zuzana throughout this little comedy. She is a lovely person, and Oskar is a creep, though not altogether unlikeable. His most redeeming quality is his love for his son. For this, and knowing that Zuzana overcomes her reservations and falls in love with the young man, who quite likes her nose, we might cut Oskar some slack on his flaws. There is a nice little ending with Oskar and the boy and a carp that may or may not die before they set it free in the river.

I do not generally think in terms of ranking films, books, authors, and so on; but in terms of the films I saw at the festival where I would have missed out on the most if I had missed them, it might go like this:

1a) Room and a Half
1b) Woman without Piano
2) Music on Hold, Gigante, Shameless
3) Home, Reykjavik-Rotterdam
4) The Good, the Bad, the Weird

The ranking is provisional, subject to change on a whim. I enjoyed all of them. Each, with perhaps the exception of The Good, the Bad, the Weird, would reward a second viewing. Woman without Piano and Home almost demand one.

Room and Half
dir. Andrey Khrzhanovsky
Russia

I might have missed this enchanting film about the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) had Judith not suggested it. That would have been a loss on several counts. Judith’s company is to be cherished under any circumstances, and she was the perfect person with whom to see this film, as she speaks Russian, has lived and traveled in Russia, has read Brodsky in Russian, and is a poet herself. So I dropped my troubled-loner persona and joined her for this 130-minute delight that passed in the blink of an eye. What could be more delightful than to hear her singing along quietly in Russian while the screen Brodsky sang what she later told me is one of her favorite Russian songs?

Room and a Half is the first feature film of director Andrey Khrzhanovsky, a 69-year-old animator, and it is quite a debut. He flawlessly employs actors, documentary footage, classical Russian music, still photos, recordings of Brodsky reading his work, and animation to tell Brodsky’s story in the form of a fictional memoir narrated by the poet as he returns by ship to Petersburg, the city of his youth, which he never in actuality saw again after running afoul of Soviet authorities and being exiled from the country in 1972.

I was dubious about the animation but found it deftly woven with the other elements into a marvelous tapestry of inspired sur-reality: cats and crows, flesh and blood and the animated variety alike, instruments of an orchestra floating through the air over the streets of Petersburg, 1960s young people conversing passionately about culture, literature, art, and politics, drinking and smoking, speculating about who will sleep with whom that night, a young boy watching his parents dance after his father returns home from the war in the East.

If my memory serves me well, Brodsky remarks while recalling his youth that for young people of that time cinema was the foremost art form and a crucial aspect of that is going  into a dark room to watch it. While I am not inclined to put a particular art form, or a single genre of an art form, ahead of all the rest, cinema has been right up there for me from the time I discovered it as a freshman at the University of South Carolina in 1970-71, and I am unequivocally with Brodsky that going into a dark room to watch it is an essential aspect of the experience. It is wonderful to be able to watch old favorites and films we missed at the theater at home on the computer or DVD or DirectTV, but that is, to my mind, a lesser experience.

Room and a Half and Woman without Piano are as wonderful as anything I have seen in some time.

The Portland International Film Festival is winding down. It has been a good run for me, though I have no doubt I missed some outstanding films. I bagged the Hungarian film Chameleon Tuesday because I was feeling crummy, an unholy combination of allergies on the rampage and a miserable day at the office. Shameless, a Czech film about which I have heard and read mixed reviews, is on the calendar for Saturday to close this year’s festival for me. For the rest, I look forward to those films that will return to town for regular theater runs later in the year.

With festival’s end I return to other work, not that it was entirely abandoned over the past fortnight. Yesterday morning I astonished myself with some notes toward a poem. A minor fiction titled Until We Remember to Dream progresses slowly, the Brontë project is ongoing, and I am thinking now that Joseph Brodsky might be a good project to take up. Either that or I could get a life, buy a one-way ticket to Paris, and let the chips fall where they may.

More anon. Ciao.

Woman without Piano
dir. Javier Rebollo
Spain

Now this is a film, T-Bone. I hardly what to say about it, where to begin, much less end.

Woman without Piano opens with a plain, middle-aged woman, Rosa (Carmen Macha), and her husband, Francisco, in the front seat of his taxi. As he readies to head out to work, they discuss what she will prepare for lunch. Francisco is not so much distant as indifferent. There is not a hint of rapport between them.

Rosa spends the day removing women’s body hair, a little business she runs out of her home, and doing household chores. She has little interaction with her customers. The daily routine is uniformly drab. There is not a ray of light, no hint of brightness anywhere.

At midday Francisco calls to say he will not be home for lunch. Business is slow and he wants to keep working. That night, after Francisco goes to sleep, just before midnight, Rosa puts on a jet-black wig and bright red lipstick, takes out her suitcase, and walks away from her empty, meaningless existence.

A lot happens during this night. At the bus station Rosa pulls out a cigarette, only to be told by the security guard that smoking is not allowed. She steps outside for a smoke. A prostitute bums a cigarette, then a light, accepting both while acknowledging neither. A car pulls up and the driver, thinking both women are  prostitutes, invites Rosa to come along, make it a threesome. Rosa explains she just came out for cigarette because smoking is not allowed in the bus station. It goes like that.

She returns to the station where she meets a young Polish contruction worker (Jan Budek) who finds meaning in life fixing appliances. They leave together when the station closes for the night and wander through the dark streets of Madrid. What little conversation there is between them reveals less about either. They go to a nightclub, get separated. On a narrow, dark street, Rosa inadvertently bumps into a young man and is berated by him and his friend. Through the night she drinks a number of small glasses of brandy, to all appearances unaffected by it, and in place after place is told that smoking is not allowed when she pulls out a cigarette.

The paths of Rosa and the construction worker cross again. They end in a hotel room. He is asleep in his white jockey shorts. Fully clothed, Rosa gets into bed beside him. When he awakens and opens his eyes, she kisses him, leaving red lipstick smeared across his mouth. I could only think of Aschenbach, played by Dirk Bogarde in Visconti’s film version of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” though the characters do not fit, the construction worker neither the older Aschenbach nor the beautiful Polish boy Tadzio, and Rosa something else altogether. I do not know what.

I also thought of the young Fellini as the film played out. Each scene is exquisitely framed and lovingly shot. The events portrayed are realistic, perfectly ordinary, yet imbued with a sublime sensibility, inexplicable, eerie, rendered extraordinary by so much that is not made explicit, and all that is left open ended.

Rebollo offers no concession to the viewer, no cheap rationale or explanation of motive. Escape is not in the cards. At the end, at the breakfast table in her home, Rosa says, “Francisco.” Her husband responds, “What?” That is it. 

There is something here of what life is that touches us in a way we cannot quite fathom,  some of us at any rate, maybe not Republicans or those tea party people, or a lot of other people as far as that goes, but some of us. This is a film.

Reykjavik-Rotterdam
dir. Óskar Jónasson
Iceland

Reykjavik-Rotterdam is a gritty thriller, dark, grim, and brutal. Kristófer is a former seaman out on probation after doing some jail time for smuggling alcohol. Married with two young sons, in love with his wife, Iris, he wants no part of his old life, but he and Iris are beset by financial woes and he lets his friend Steingrímur talk him into shipping out one last time, on a freighter to Rotterdam, to make last score that will solve his problems.

Things go awry from the get-go as Kristófer and Iris run afoul of a dizzying array of psychopathic thugs brought down on them by her halfwit, screw-up brother, and Steingrímur has his own agenda that does not have Kristófer’s best interests at heart.

Reykjavik-Rotterdam starts slowly, and it took me a while to warm up to the two protagonists. The pace picks up in Rotterdam, where Kristófer and his pal are dragged into an art heist that turns into a wild, shoot-out fiasco from which they unwittingly walk away with what looks to my amateur’s eye like it could be a Jackson Pollack canvas, an item lost on the smugglers, who would not know Jackson Pollack from Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

In the end Kristófer shows himself to be more resourceful and clever than we might think a fellow who’s been popped for smuggling three times already as he outwits the double-dealing Steingrímur, his gang, and the cops while exacting revenge on a petty tyrant of a freighter captain. He might even be worthy of Iris, a tough woman left behind to be terrorized by thugs and betrayed by the one person she thought was a friend she could turn to.

Early on, and even some way into Reykjavik-Rotterdam, I thought I would not like this one. By the time the credits rolled, I found I quite enjoyed it.

Gigante
dir. Adrián Biniez
Uruguay

Gigante will not be to everyone’s taste. Nothing much happens. If that’s a deal breaker, you should probably steer clear of this one. I rather liked it myself.

Jara is a night-shift security guard at a supermarket. A big, quiet, gentle man, he wears t-shirts with the logos of heavy-metal bands, plays video games with his nephew, watches TV, lifts weights, and moonlights as security at a night club. At the supermarket Jara sits in a control room watching the security monitors while the night shift workers clean the store and ready it for the next day’s business. He passes the time working crossword puzzles and looks the other way when cleaning women pilfer inexpensive items such as rice, pasta, and yogurt.

One night he sees a cleaning woman, moving backward as she mops, crash into a huge display of paper towels she did not realize was behind her. An officious night manager witnesses her hapless attempt to reassemble the display and berates her for her carelessness, telling her she will be fired if it happens again.

The next morning, while waiting for the bus, Jara notices the woman walk past to catch her bus. After that, captivated for no particular reason, he looks for her on the security monitors and begins to follow as she walks through the city after leaving work in the morning.

Her name is Julia, and she is from the country. She practices karate and lives in a house, perhaps renting a room, where an older man also lives. She uses the computer at an Internet cafe and has a date with a man she met on an Internet dating site.

Jara is too shy to approach Julia. The most he can do is buy a small plant that he leaves on the floor in an aisle she will be mopping with a note card on which he has written only her name, nothing more.

While he is quiet and gentle, friendly with his coworkers but keeping much to himself, Jara is no pushover. In one scene he follows the Internet date. Walking about a block behind in a part of town where the streets are empty, he sees the man accosted by three street toughs demanding money. The man has no clue what to do. The toughs only become more aggressive when he tells them he has no money and begs them to take his cell phone. Jara starts to walk away, but no, he cannot do that. Without a word he floors the three toughs with a single punch each. He and the man he rescued go to a little cafe, where they chat and he asks about the date, hoping to learn a little bit about Julia. He learns she likes heavy metal music.

In another scene he follows Julia. It is early evening. A cab driver parked by the curb, thinking perhaps to impress her with his wit, calls out, “With an ass like that you don’t need a pussy.” She ignores him. The camera follows her as she walks away. Then a horn blows repeatedly, and the camera cuts back to the cab where Jara stands with his arm through the window, calmly banging the driver’s head against the steering wheel before walking away without a word.

I trust these details give a sense of the character and the film’s feel without giving away too much. Of the ending, I will say only it is pretty much just right, an offering of possibility that promises neither too much nor too little.

Horacio Camandule is little short of astounding as Jara, who emerges as a singular, flesh and blood individual, no particularly quirky or idiosyncratic traits, no fatal flaw, not intellectual or much given to reflection, just a decent fellow. I could see myself fortunate to count him as a friend, someone to meet for a beer or hang out with in the park for part of an afternoon, though he would not share my interest in Beckett and Keats, nor I his taste for heavy metal. He is a decent fellow. There should always be a place in our lives for such people and for wonderful little films like Gigante.

Home
dir. Ursula Meier
Switzerland

Home may not a good film to see with your baby on Valentine’s Day. For this one it’s just as well I’m a troubled loner.

I was drawn not so much by the premise as by the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the cast. She is among our finest actors, with a long and distinguished list of credits, among them Entre Nous (dir. Diane Kurys), Amateur (dir. Hal Hartley), and La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, dir. Michael Haneke). She has never let me down.

Huppert is Marthe, who with her husband, Michel, and their three children enjoys a bizarrely idyllic existence in a house on the edge of an unfinished highway surrounded by empty fields. Each morning Michel drives off along a dirt road through the fields to whatever his employment is. Judith, the older of two teenage daughters, spends her days sunbathing, chain-smoking, and listening to music with the volume cranked up to ear-piercing levels, while Marion and Julien walk off through the fields to catch the bus to school. In the evening they all play hockey on roller blades on the highway.

One day out of nowhere road crews appear and next thing anyone knows the highway is completed and open and traffic whizzing by all hours of day and night, disrupting their lives and wreaking havoc on their psyches.

Michel, Marion, and Julien must climb over the newly installed guardrails and sprint across the highway during breaks in the traffic to go off to work and school. Judith is a distraction to male drivers as she suns herself in her bikini. Marthe struggles to hang out the laundry in the virtual maelstrom created by the constant stream of trucks and cars just a few meters away. The noise is incessant and intolerable.

Michel gets cranky. Marthe is a little left of normal to begin with, even by this family’s standards and even before the highway. She would unable to cope anywhere else, so moving is out of the question. Now she shows signs of cracking.

Marion, the studious counterpart to her sunbathing sister, tracks the number of autos passing by and is convinced the pollution will kill them all. She tells her brother they won’t make it through the summer as she checks his back for lead-poisoning spots.

A highway accident that causes traffic to be stopped in both directions, with men getting out of their cars to gawk at the sunbathing Judith, calls to mind the magnificent traffic jam in Godard’s Week End. It might not be too much of a reach to read Home as a 21st century update of Godard’s 1967 skewering of bourgeois values that ends in its own dark vision of rock and roll, revolution, and cannibalism in the woods outside Paris.

What begins as a quirky, farcical depiction of a family living as much as possible on its own terms in the modern world becomes a dark testament to the impossibility of that vision as they literally wall themselves off from the highway. The film becomes almost static, and a sustained, weird tension is created. Where in the world can Meier possibly be going with this?

This is a strong film, not always a pleasure to watch, somewhat like La Pianiste in that regard, though nowhere near as excruciating. Huppert is superb as a woman quietly at the end of her tether. Finally, awaking from her first sleep in weeks, she takes a sledgehammer to the cinder blocks and mortar construction put up around the house to shut out the noise of the highway and leads her family off through the fields, together except for Judith who at some point disappeared, evidently taking up with some guy who spotted her sunbathing. But where are they going? Where is there for them to go?

15 February 2010

The Good, the Bad, the Weird
dir. Kim Ji-woon
South Korea

A bounty hunter, an arrogant and dandyish, stone-cold killer, a zany thief, several bandit gangs, and the Japanese army race to find buried Qing dynasty treasure in 1930s Manchuria in this Korean homage to Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. Need I say more?

Some cineastes like to see how many movies they can cram into the fortnight plus a couple of days of the festival. I would run myself ragged if I tried to do that. Right now it appears I will catch eight to ten films this year, extending to the festival the maxim I customarily employ with coffee and wine: drink a bit less, enjoy it more.

 13 February 2010

Music on Hold 
dir. Hernán A. Goldfrid
Argentina

Ezequiel is a music composer in the grip of composer’s block. Up against the deadline to complete the music for a film, all he can come up with is trite drivel. Plus, he is broke and behind on his mortgage, the bank is about to repossess his house, and his ex-wife is on his case to return the drill he borrowed.

When he calls the bank manager to cancel an appointment, he gets put on hold while his call is forwarded from functionary to functionary, with the usual “hold on music” in the background. Fate steps in, and one of the recordings gives him an idea for exactly the music the film calls for, but he catches only a snatch of it before Paula, an up and coming young bank executive, picks up. He jots down a few notes, but it is not enough. He remains blocked. He has to find that hold on music.

Meantime, Paula is about as pregnant as one gets and in a tizzy because she has just gotten a call from her overbearing mother, who has flown unannounced from Madrid to Buenos Aires and is eager to see her daughter and meet her grandson’s father. It turns out Paula has been afraid to tell her mother that Santiago the boyfriend did not want to have kids and split when they found out she was pregnant. She decided to raise the child by herself. Her mother will think this is a disaster, and Paula will never hear the end of it. Hence her dilemma. The only resolution she can come up with is to lie to her mother for the rest of her life.

Ezequiel is at Paula’s office trying to find that elusive recording of hold on music when Paula’s mother shows up, and Paula blurts that this is Santiago, her boyfriend, her child’s father. Ezequiel does not have a clue what’s going on but plays along, and the movie plays out from there.

Ezequiel is somewhat bumbling and absentminded, not a man adept at practical affairs, but a good-hearted fellow. Paula is headstrong and stubborn, with something of her mother’s take-charge nature, but also with a good spirit. The two rub each other the wrong way at the outset, but in the spirit of the romantic comedy begin to have feelings for one another as they bumble through one travail after another.

There is nothing profound or especially original here. There does not have to be. One mark of a well-told story is that we come to suspend disbelief and care about what happens to these people. The pace is quick, the dialogue deft, and the actors first rate. I laughed and laughed; and as those who have been around me of late might observe, I can do with some laughter in my life.

No, nothing profound. Just a delight. I would see this one again.

career : n 1 a : speed in a course <ran at full ~> 1 b : course, passage 2 : encounter, charge 3 : a field for or pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement esp. in public, professional, or business life <Washington’s ~ as a soldier> 4 : a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling <a ~ in medicine> <a ~ diplomat>
career vi as a verb: to go at top speed esp. in a headlong manner <a car ~ed off the road>

Meanings 3 and 4 of the noun version are along the lines of what J. had in mind when she spoke of career, implicit in it that this is the manner in which one earns a living. As I have noted elsewhere, if I had it to do over again, I might have sought to make a place for myself in academia. That is where my career would have been if I had one. Youthful romanticism led me away from the university, and I never made my way back. I say this without illusion or idealization, for as a friend recently pointed out, the unfortunate reality is that universities are intensely political places and if you don’t play the politics, you get chewed up and spit out. It is not a given that I would have thrived there. Weighed against that recognition is my experience with  wage-work in a variety of honorable employments among many good and some exceptional people, where I have toiled always diligently and conscientiously and on occasion well but at a cost to what is best in me. The work I found demanded my lesser talents at the expense of those valued more highly and held more dear. Perhaps this is my failing. Had I been more clever, more wise, I might have found a way to make my way.

vocation : n 1 a : a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; esp : a divine call to the religious life 1 b : an entry into the priesthood or a religious order 2 a : the work in which a person is regularly employed : occupation 2 b : the persons engaged in a particular occupation 3 : the special function of an individual or group

My sense of myself as a poet is central to the poetry I make, and this sense is grounded in a notion of vocation or calling. Yes, all very romantic, quite impractical, the kind of thing many people experience in their teens and early twenties and mature out of to make their way in the world of practical affairs. For ill or not, I never did that.

Poets who matter most to us seem to speak directly to our deepest concerns. Not that they offer the final word on age-old questions of existence and meaning. Rather, they keep the cauldron bubbling by stirring our questioning anew.

…Who alive can say,
‘Thou art no Poet — mayst not tell thy dreams’?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

I like to think my soul is not a clod, as John Keats put it in these introductory lines from “The Fall of Hyperion,” and there are moments my spirit soars with vision when the wind is with me and wisps of cloud streak the blue of the sky.

The main body of the poem begins at line 19, opening in an Edenic setting where the narrator finds “a feast of summer fruits, / which, nearer seen, seemed refuse of a meal / By angel tasted, or our Mother Eve.” He “ate deliciously, / And after not long, thirsted, for thereby / Stood a vessel of transparent juice / Sipped by the wandered bee…”

Naturally he drinks and, quelle surprise, the transparent juice turns out to be a powerful drug that renders him unconscious. Upon awakening he finds himself transported to some strange ruin, an old sanctuary with a roof “Builded so high, it seemed that filmed clouds / Might spread beneath, as ‘er the stars of heaven.” (lines 63–64)

To west he sees “far off / An Image; huge of feature as a cloud, / At level of whose feet an altar slept, / To be approached on either side by steps, / And marble balustrade, and patient travail / To count with toil the innumerable degrees” (lines 88–92)

A voice that turns out to be Moneta, the admonisher, warns him:

…’If thou canst not ascend
These steps, die on that marble where thou art.
Thy flesh, near cousin to the common dust,
Will parch for lack of nutriment — thy bones
Will wither in few years, and vanish so
That not the quickest eye could find a grain
Of what thou now art on that pavement cold.
The sands of thy short life are spent this hour,
And no hand in the universe can turn
Thy hourglass, if these gummed leaves be burnt
Ere thou canst mount up these immortal steps.’ (lines 107–117)

To gain the lowest step takes all the narrator’s strength, and in the effort he comes near death, as

…a palsied chill
Struck from the pavèd level up my limbs,
And was ascending quick to put cold grasp
Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat.
…
Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold
Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;
And when I clasped my hands I felt them not. (lines 122–131)

But “One minute before death, my iced foot touched / The lowest stair; and as it touched, life seemed / To pour in at the toes…”

Who is he to feel what it is to die and live again before his fated hour? The goddess explains.

‘None can usurp this height…
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
All else who find a haven in the world,
Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,
If by a chance into this fane they come,
Rot on the pavement where thou rott’st half.’ (lines 147–153)
…
Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,
Whether his labours be sublime or low —
The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:
Only the dreamer venoms all his days,
Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve. (lines 172–177)
…
…’Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?
The dreamer and the poet are distinct,
Diverse sheer opposites, antipodes.
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.’ (lines 198–202)

Ah, I am at a loss to express my delight in these incredibly rich passages. I love this stuff. Two thoughts occur straight off. First, how do these lines play with those from the beginning of the poem: “Who alive can say / Thou art no Poet…”? The earlier passage implies that poetry lies within the province of pretty much everyone, while the goddess suggests that poetry is the fate of “those to whom the miseries of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest.” Or is it dreamers, not poets at all, to whom the goddess refers? Second, and far from least for one such as I, the question must be asked: Am I poet or dreamer? Which is it? We know which I would like to think myself, but who am I to say?

The narrator shouts back at the goddess:

‘Apollo! Faded, far-flown Apollo!
Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies,
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers
And careless hectorers in proud bad verse.
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.
Majestic shadow, tell me where I am,
Whose altar is this; for whom this incense curls;
What image this, whose face I cannot see,
For the broad marble knees; and who thou art,
Of accent feminine so courteous?’

This place is the temple of Saturn, leader of the deposed Titans, who are “…swallowed up / And buried from all godlike exercise / Of influence benign on planets pale,” Saturn himself a God changed into a shaking palsy with no strength left, and the one who speaks is Moneta the muse, sole priestess of Saturn’s desolation.

‘Mortal, that thou mayst understand aright,
I humanize my sayings to thine ear,
Making comparisons of earthly things;
Or thou mightst better listen to the wind,
Whose language is to thee a barren noise,
Though it blows legend-laden through the trees —

Moneta goes on to tell that though the Titans have fallen,

…one of our whole eagle-brood still keeps
His sovereignty, and rule, and majesty;
Blazing Hyperion on his orbèd fire
Still sits, still snuffs the incense teeming up
From man to the sun’s God — yet unsecure.

As the story concludes, Hyperion “leaving twilight in the rear,” the poem drawn thus to an end, the narrator finds himself standing in clear light.

Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion;
His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal Hours,
And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared…

So which is it? Poet or dreamer? Keats, if we take the narrator to speak for him, does not take lightly the charge that he is a dreaming thing, a fever of himself. He is at once generous — “every man whose soul is not a clod / Hath visions, and would speak…” — and not above taking a shot at “mock lyrists, large self-worshippers / And careless hectorers in proud bad verse. / Though I breathe death with them it will be life / To see them sprawl before me into graves.”

Poets who matter most to us seem to speak directly to our deepest concerns. Not that they offer the final word on age-old questions of existence and meaning. Rather, they keep the cauldron bubbling by stirring our questioning anew.

You know my ideas about Religion—I do not think myself more in the right than other people and that nothing in this world is proveable. I wish I could enter into all your feelings on the subject merely for one short 10 Minutes and give you a Page or two to your liking. I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think Poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be struck with its brilliance—As Trademen say every thing is worth what it will fetch, so probably every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer—being in itself a nothing—Ethereal thing[s] may at least be thus real, divided under three heads—Things real—things semireal—and no things—Things real—such as existences of Sun Moon & Stars and passages of Shakspeare—Things semireal such as Love, the Clouds &c which require a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist—and Nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit—Which by the by stamps the burgundy mark on the bottles of our Minds, insomuch as they are able to “consec[r]ate whate’er they look upon“… (Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 13 March 1818)

We look to poets such as Keats to spur us to think of fresh ways to think about ourselves and the paths we have bumbled onto, which may be in part an act of rationalization, but is in better part an assertion of value, a nothing made great and dignified by an ardent pursuit, stamping the burgundy mark on the bottles of our minds insomuch as they bring value to the world. Yes, I know, ignoble ends may be pursued every bit as ardently as noble ones. Our leaps of faith may carry us into the abyss, but as my old French teacher Marie-Laure used to say, “So whacha gon’ do?” We leap. We stand as best we can for what is best in us and in the world.

Three previous essays on John Keats appeared on Memo from the Fringes:

Poets Who Matter: John Keats (1795–1821)
Poets Who Matter: More Keats
Poets Who Matter: Thinking of Keats

The Brontës showed up on the radar a few years ago when I came on Emily Brontë’s poem Stanzas in The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost, edited by Harold Bloom, and was at once struck, even stunned, by it. I am not generally inclined to think in terms of a single favorite book, poem, author, or film. It is enough to note that “Stanzas” is a poem committed to memory, alongside Emily Dickinson’s “A Certain Slant of Light,” Walt Whitman’s “A Clear Midnight,” and just a few others.

“Stanzas” led to other poems by Emily. (I hope referring to Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne informally will avoid awkwardness and confusion; I do not mean to indicate that I take them any less seriously than male authors, say, Beckett, Shelley, or Keats, whom I tend to refer by last name.) The poems are sufficiently good to make it all but inevitable that sooner or later I would take up Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, which are among too many novels prominent in the tradition that I somehow managed to escape reading during my formative years, when my interests ran more to the likes of The Foundation Trilogy (Isaac Asimov), Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein), Childhood’s End (Arthur C. Clarke), Slan (A.E. Van Vogt), and The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester).

High school English teachers were so happy to have eager readers among their students that they sometimes allowed  me to read science fiction for book report assignments when more substantive works would have been in order, however largely wasted on me at the time. I recall slogging through Silas Marner and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and getting little if anything out of either of them. A Tale of Two Cities, junior or senior year in high school, marked the only time in my academic career I resorted to CliffsNotes, borrowed from a pal when I found myself unable to make it beyond the first few pages. Some years later, probably well into my thirties, I picked up A Tale of Two Cities and thoroughly enjoyed it, leaving me to wonder what was the matter with me as a young fellow that I just did not get it.

After returning again to Emily’s poems in the fall of last year, I decided this winter’s project would be the Brontës generally, the major novels Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in particular.  “Stanzas” remains to my mind the most striking of Emily’s poems, with its romantic impracticality — “leaving busy chase of wealth and learning / For idle dreams of things which cannot be” — rejection of convention and authority — “I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces / And not in paths of high morality” — and fierce independence — “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading — / It vexes me to choose another guide.” Where does that nature lead?

Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding,
Where the wild wind blows on the mountainside.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

What exactly does Brontë mean with the final lines?  Even Harold Bloom is flummoxed. “Whatever that centering is, it is purely individual, and as beyond gender as it is beyond creed or ‘high morality.’” (“Introduction,” The Brontës, ed. Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, p. 11)

Firmly rooted in this world that is the world of each of us, she “will seek not the shadowy region,” whose “unsustaining vastness waxes drear.” It is to this world, rendered uncanny, eerie, sublime, that her nature would be leading, this finite existence bounded by death, where waked to feeling we find or make what glory and what grief we may know.

Do I read too much of myself into the poem? Perhaps, tightroping a fine line, for we always bring ourselves to encounters with writers, reading ourselves and our stories into them and theirs, no matter how we try to be open to what may be there independent of our reading.

I do not know if these remarks shed any illumination on why I respond to this poem as I do. Perhaps it can only be said that I simply love it, as we sometimes love those things that we come to call art. It wakes my heart to feeling and carries me away.