A clip of Slavoj Zizek talking about the classic musical The Sound of Music. I need to see the film again but let me think about this for a moment. The film was a Broadway remake, I wonder if there was an evolution of the imagery. A classic carnival persona is Mikhail Bakhtin’s cultural mirror image. Here Zizek claims that the mirror image itself is just a metaphor, it’s a bit of a cheap shot. Because in reality Nazis were impersonating the Jews all along. Look, here is the basic Nazi idea – the Jews want to dominate the world, the are in control of the European politics, music, art, banking, culture, etc. So instead of denouncing the very idea of the cross border domination, the Nazis said that’s exactly what we Germans want to do. We want to forcibly cross-dress as the Jews and dominate all aspects of the European culture and there could not be two nations playing this role at the same time. You see how it becomes easy to reverse engineer Nazis into Jews even in the film. Except Zizek is not telling you that this was always the Nazi ethos to become the Jews and the bucolic agricultural nationalism versus the cosmopolitan industrial, rootless domination was the central stage of the horrible conflicts. And of course Hitler himself being an Austrian from a small beautiful village makes the role reversal complete. Check it out: ►►►read more
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I weep easily, but this film in Hebrew is just hard to describe. Half a century in half an hour. Lodz, Frankfurt, Auschwitz, Arkhangelsk, Samarkand, Tel Aviv, Rego Park, Paris, Sinai. This film is a heartbreaking masterpiece.
The fatal story of a family discovered with detective precision based on the photos found in a garbage container in Tel Aviv. The film is strikingly minimalist, yet hauntingly beautiful. The dramatic suspense of the biblical fate punctuating one family, one of many. The unsettling proximity of the tragic century (the video is slow to load but well worth it, pay no attention to the commercials): Ynet – תעלומה במכולה הירוקה
This is an episode from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema by Slavoj Zizek. In you listen to Zizek’s introduction you can see how an online character is more real than a real persona. But the fear is not that the real people we meet, the visible landscape of out life is a lie. But the devastating fear expressed by Andrei Tarkovsky in Stalker that when we are given an opportunity to be ourselves, to express our essence in real life, we no longer know what it is, or perhaps we reach the limits of our existence.The Stalker’s “Zone as Koidesh HaKadosim, Holy of Holies. The curse of the elusiveness of the essence. ►►►read more
The 1938 masterpiece by Sergei Eisenstein, music by Sergei Prokofiev. A prophecy about the German invasion. Wikipedia: “The film depicts the attempted invasion of Novgorod in the 13th century by Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire and their defeat by the Russian people, led by Prince Alexander, known popularly as Alexander Nevsky. It begins as the knights invade and conquer the city of Pskov with the help of the traitor Tverdilo and massacre its population. In the face of resistance by the boyars and merchants of Novgorod (urged on by the monk Ananias), Nevsky rallies the common people of Novgorod and in a decisive Battle of the Ice, on the surface of the frozen Lake Chudskoe.” The battle was on the 5th of April, 1242. ►►►read more
On the subject of A Serious Man, the Film by and about Coen Brothers. Jason Solomons – The Guardian – 2009 in film: our critics’ picks:
“My number one film for the 2009 is the Coen brothers “A Serious Man”. One of the finest films ever made about religion, particularly about Judaism. It’s the most Jewish film ever made, it makes “Yentel” look like the “Passion of the Christ”.
I noticed this remarkable review by Slavoj Zizek of the 2006 film “The Children of Men”. In the apocalyptic, sterile world in 2027, the hero Theo Faron (Clive Owen) comes to visit his friend who is one of the leaders of the dying civilization. The friend filled his castle with abandoned masterpieces of art, like Picasso’s Guernica (above), Michelangelo’s David, etc. Taken out of the historical context, without a contextual reference, the art means nothing. Actually we live in the word of museum objects that lost connection to historical context and cultural thread, our art became and artifact. BTW, “The Children of Men” has the most amazing warfare scenes. A sobering epic.
To take my review Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog, a notch deeper. Freudian Death Wish is not a death wish at all. A good rule of thumb with these concepts is to turn the obvious reading on its head. The Death Wish is the desire to control the most uncontrollable event, to become a master of own destiny. Freud’s Death Wish is an attempt to reach for the eternity, to become transcendent, to live forever and ever.
The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) is the latest in line of the characters who can only become good by being bad. This mirroring of good and evil classically played out between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the 1995 hit “Heat”. There Al Pacino is faced with the eternal dilemma – to catch the bad guys he must enter their world, become as bad as the bad itself. Can he stay human in the process?
Fast froward to the Werner Herzog’s take on the subject. The Bad Lieutenant Terence McDonagh descends to the dark side, till he becomes indistinguishable from the criminals, he actually partners with the dealers and killers. He is a gambler, a junkie and by becoming part of a murder he solves the crime. Can he still remain a human? This is an open-ended question but there is hope also involving a symmetry and a reversal. In the beginning of the movie the Bad Lieutenant unselfishly saves the life of a prisoner and sustains a life long injury. The same former prisoner appears in the last frames of the film to save the Bad Lieutenant’s life, again a symbolic reversal. Also in a reversal the killer Big Fate is dreaming of being ” good”, of turning the town around, of a legitimate businessmen as he disposes a corpse.
But there is another character, the Jewish gangster Eugene Gratz (Marco St. John) who seems without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. We know he is a Jew because the writer William Finkelstein (of LA Law fame) makes him say two Yiddish code words – shvantz and punim. And true to the symmetry he must be the very goodness in the evil disguise. In an unscripted moment Werner Herzog shows his swirling soul dance after he is murdered, he is the transcendent. Growing up in the postwar Bavaria, Hertzog knows a thing or two about those hovering souls.
The new New Orleans police drama by Werner Herzog. This is not even close to Hertzog’s early Amazon masterpieces. Yes there is carefully selected profound music, the trademark unexpected visuals, etc. But the rouge cop story is overused. OK, Nicolas Cage plays a junkie cop with authority.
(After the film I looked online for reviews. I discovered that even in the New York Times a film review is just a regurgitation of a plot with some innocuous, minor, meaningless color around the edges of the thousand words jive.)
I was thinking last night, comparing this film to the Coen brothers personal epic (see my post A Serious Man, the Film by and about Coen Brothers). Despite what I wrote in that post about the Coen brothers rejection of the “textual”, perhaps it meant narrowly the Jewish ethos. They are after all the perfectionists writers. The immaculately written scrips, the exquisite dialog is one the most fascinating aspects of the Coen brothers talent. And this was precisely the strength of Werner Herzog’s early films like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo” with Klaus Kinski. Werner famously spoke how he wrote the Aguirre script on an eight-hour binge bus ride with his drunken soccer teammates. Alas the “Bad Lieutenant” is a remake of a remake. And remarkably all the memorable moments in the film are improvised “off the script”, like the episode with the iguanas or the dancing soul.
Werner Herzog’s cinematographic vision is legendary. Werner is unmatched by any filmmaker with his sense of an unexpected musical overtone, he is far superior to Coen brothers musically. But what Werner Herzog is missing in the “Bad Lieutenant” is the holistic authorship of the narrative.
I admit I expect more from Werner Herzog but the film is tight. There are some genuinely funny moments. The energy stays high, it never ebbs. As a two-hour entertainment candidate the “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” is excellent!
I mentioned the caricatures of the movie in the previous post A Serious Man, the Film by and about Coen Brothers. The exaggerated and mechanical movements, the distorted facial proportions, the surreal closeups. If not for the context of movie there would have been a scandal. Everyone speaks in code. The most cataclysmic life events are wrapped in a camouflage; nobody ever says what they mean. No wonder the Coen brothers prefer visual texture to the textual verbiage. To top the caricatures are the three Rabbis. I dont want to completely spoil it. Just go and see for yourself. But there is also the ever present and invisible character of God AKA Hashem. Larry Gopink asks every one of the Rabbis about it. He really wants to understand what the meaning of his struggle is. And of course the answers that he gets from the Rabbis is more profoundly grotesques than the facial idiosyncrasies.
P.S. As far as props go, that shelf in the background gets A+!
I have been thinking about this film for a couple of days, a serious work of art. This is not a nostalgic flick, nor is this a sugar flavored tale set in the old country. This is a very personal film about St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. The film is set in 1967, the year the character of the movie Danny Gopnik and the older brother Joel Coen had his bar mitzvah. Although 1967 is not mentioned in the film, the brothers are very specific, in an interview they said “if it was 1966 or 1968 it would have looked differently”.
There is this idea promoted by Tyler Cowen (another misspelling of Cohen?) in his blog and in his latest book. He speaks of the new Internet Autism. Tyler says that autistic people channel the world, they ignore and block-out vast areas of human experience and instead focus intensely on a specific channel. Hence the new Internet Autism that enables all of us to channel and remix the news and the information stream hyper locally and super narrowly and autistically ignore the rest. Perhaps now I have the key to the body of their work. The Coen Brothers are autistically sensory, they recognize the smells, the images, the sounds, the faces, the tension with the goy next door, the village hottie, the inevitable uncle with an intestinal problem, etc. And this is the reason their (and Tarantino’s films) resonate so viscerally today when this sensory range is at the forefront of the contemporary culture. But the curse of the Jewish is in the Text, it autistically ignores precisely the sensory range so dominant in Coen’s (and Tarantino) films. This is in a nutshell is the age old problem with Jewish education and tradition, sometimes mislabeled as the problem with the “Jewish Religion” (although it’s hard to separate the two).
And so the Coen Brothers created a personal epic, the most meaningful film about suburban Jewish America. Granted I see the film through the eyes of Danny Gopnik, not his father Larry who is the main character of the movie. After all this is the personal vision at the heart of the story.
Larry Gopnik in his class
“A Serious Man” is the most amazingly textured film that condemns the textual. The horror and the dull ugliness of a Midwestern suburbia recreated with the vividness of a sensitive teenager. The minor characters bulge to the screen as grotesque exaggerated caricatures with comic bodies and movements. Those minor characters hold the film together, the story is framed in between the visits to the three Rabbis. And then there is the musical channel, the Jefferson Airplane song “Somebody to Love” takes turns with a Yiddish song. In an interview the brothers said it was the musical backdrop – “rock ‘n’ roll and the Cantorial music”. And this brings us to the channel that is autistically tuned off by Danny Gopnik, the day school and more broadly the textual. He sits in his Hebrew class with a secret radio plug in his ear and goes through school, and specifically through his bar mitzvah ceremony in a pot induced daze.
The film opens with a rashi quote: “accept with simplicity everything that happens to you”
( תמים תהיה עם ה’ אלקיך (דברים י”ח : י”ג
התהלך עמו בתמימות ותצפה לו, ולא תחקור אחרי העתידות, אלא כל מה שיבוא עליך קבל בתמימות, ואז תהיה עמו ולחלקו
Larry Gopnik, the father, enters a Kafkaesque plot preempted by the five-minute Yiddish mini-film. An episode with the Dybbuk somewhere between Lvov and Lublin. And although there is no obvious connection to rest of the story, I see it as an announcement by the Coen brothers that the film is about Jews who call themselves ivrim because they are m’ever, from the other side of the river and everything they do is connected to what happened elsewhere, i.e not here. Ethan Coen said “it feels right”. The paradox of this film is that you are not really sure if this is a comedy or a horror. I am leaning and landing on the horror side of the river.
Danny Gopnik meeting Marshak
P.S. Notes from the nitpicking department (blame Scarsdale Rabbi Dan Sklar, the consultant):
- If you are in Poland don’t mix Polish and Litvish Yiddish dialects.
- Dybbuk is the Amercan projection on the Polish Yiddish culture (even though the original movie Dybbuk was produced in Poland), you could do better to authentically evoke that time .
- In Poland they wouldn’t call the holy town of Lemberg, Lvov (this is the Russian name of the town after the Ukrainian Lviv).
- Mrs. Gopnik, not having a get doesn’t mean you are an aguna.
- The character of the 3rd Rabbi Marshak. My guess is that the prototype was Rabbi Jacob Twerski? I doubt he had an open Sephardic style Sefer Tora with a human skull lodged in it, nor is Rabbi Jacob Twerski going to have a reproduction of the 1601 “The Sacrifice of Isaac” by Caravaggio on his wall. But knowing the Twerskis, he indeed could have had some strange animals in formaldehyde around.
- The suede yarmulkes (and those metal clips) were not yet invented in 1967.
Caravaggio, "The Sacrifice of Isaac" 1601 -1602, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
The Caravaggio published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art
This is Speed Levitch episode from the animation “Waking life”, really a remix of his dialogues. Really, really good. ►►►read more
