The Artist

Last weekend (or thereabouts) I went to see The Artist. After hearing all this Oscar buzz about it, and discovering it's a contemporary silent film - and French - I just knew I had to see it, especially in the theater. Silent films really are best when viewed on a big screen. Some might say this is true for all films, but I will...disagree. I don't recall a big screen (or 3D for that matter) doing much for Beowulf.

In any case, I was a bit put off at first, since I have very specific expectations of a silent film, and it seemed fakey to get into the theater, watch previews in color and sound, and then BOOM be hit with silence. After about five minutes, I got used to it, though. And I loved it.

The story is about George Valentine, the artist: the egotistical darling of the silent screen, whose best and only friend is his dog, and his adoring fans, who toss him aside once talkies burst onto the scene, and he refuses to transition, considering his "art" more important than some fad - the "future." 

The side-story is that of Peppy Miller, Valentine's biggest fan, who is encouraged by him (coincidentally - he never actually has anything directly to do with her decision) to go into acting, and becomes more famous and popular than him. In fact, she steals his thunder and inadvertently destroys his career (well...his divorce and his own egomania contribute) and he becomes destitute and desperate. However, Peppy is in love with him, and saves him in the end. 

I also loved Jean Dujardin as Valentine. He was perfect! I first saw his work in France - he's known there as a comic and for his television roles. While I was living as a student in France, I watched Un gars, une fille all the time with my host sisters - and totally developed a crush on Jean Dujardin.  The show is cute, made up mostly of skits about a young married couple and the shenanigans they get up to - sort of like Friends meets Saturday Night Live, but actually funny.

With just the right amount of modern sensibility, nostalgia, charm, poignant story line and overdone acting, The Artist, to me, deserved all the praise it got through the BAFTAs, the Academy Awards, - every thing. It is one of the most innovative films I've ever seen, in that it is being cutting edge by returning to traditionalism, the roots of cinema, and redefining them. I see The Artist  as an allegory for the modern world: we should look to the past for inspiration - not to relive it, but to consider how we are shaping our world. The past is never dead, but a memory that has evolved into our consciousness, imposing its will on us whether we think of it in that way or not.

American Passages

Living in Austria has taught me a lot about being an American. It's curious in a way that an Austrian film recently released and chosen by my students to see would not only center around the United States and the "American Way of Life" but in doing so give me pause, leaving me to question how I fit in to this picture.

Last night, I went to see American Passages, the new film by Austrian documentary film director Ruth Beckermann at the Votivkino in the first district with the 7th form (juniors) Wahlpflichtfach (English elective class). All the girls (there are only girls in this class) were late, buying popcorn at the concession stand, trudging into the theater after the lights had dimmed and the previews started, sloughing off their winter gear in the row behind me, reserved just for them.

The film we were set to watch was about the American dream, I suppose. Or the inverse-American dream. As a whole, the film had little storyline, not much to connect images to dialog, aside from the fact that the interviews collected from around the United States served as the common denominator. The interviewees were of diverse cultural backgrounds, many of them underprivileged or part of the minority somehow. Pans of Harlem residents celebrating Barack Obama's 2008 presidential win, a bride-to-be in Mississippi telling the audience how she and her husband met, a gay couple living in Arizona explaining how they came to adopt a set of twins and a former pimp and compulsive gambler at the roulette table of a Las Vegas casino all take part in the aural and visual melange Beckermann gives us. The names are not given - just the stories and the circumstances in which they came about. The footage is coherently edited and flows from picturesque landscapes to portraits of denizens, but the stories seem dislocated, abstract, aborted, unfulfilled. Scattered. It is never fully explained who these people are - why they are important. They are all Americans. I suppose in its way, that is enough.

On Beckermann's part, I felt a very skewed version of reality confronting me from the silver screen. A one-sided commentary on the United States from an Austrian: a foreigner who has had little other, actual cultural contact with the USA. I couldn't help but feel her lack of objectivity on the subject not only prejudicial but lacking in professionalism. Displaying each side of the American story coherently and without injecting her own preconceived notions of what she expected to find seemed absent to me. The "documentation" was not unbiased.

My discomfort with the portrayal of Americans was perhaps underscored by the audience. As a scene of a Memorial Day celebration in Mississippi took up the screen, a woman sang the Star Spangled Banner and, upon saying a few words about the armed services - men and women who make the ultimate sacrifice for their country - she began to cry at the podium. Snickering began in the theater, and in some cases, I'm sure I heard full-blown laughter.

Perhaps she has lost a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan. Perhaps she loves her country so much, her empathy overwhelmed her. Perhaps it was just too stinking hot on that May day in Mississippi that she couldn't keep her emotions in check. Because it was not explained, we will never know. Despite why she began to cry, it is to me unfathomable that her reaction should be mocked and ridiculed. This woman, in giving respect to her country and the US Armed Forces deserves respect in return.

This may sound hypocritical, and on some level it probably is. Before I spent any considerable amount of time abroad, I was an America-hater, too. It was a pretentious and rather ugly form of self-hate that I hope I've grown out of. Yes, I hate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hate that all of (what I perceive to be) the bad aspects of American culture (junk food, SUVs and unchecked consumerism being high on this list) have been exported to Europe, and lauded by young Europeans. I hate that non-Americans assume the United States does not have or has not produced anything worthy of the title "culture" but I now realize that, as an American, I am not defined by what my country does or is, unless this is what I allow. I, one person, am not responsible for 300 million. Perhaps the president is, but I am not. I can hate things about America, but I cannot hate being an American. What else do I have?

I've heard from many Austrians that they don't understand American patriotism. They don't have any idea why a person would sport the Stars and Stripes on a t-shirt or bumper sticker, why they would send care packages to the overseas troops. Or why the Pledge of Allegiance must be recited every day in school. I can't exactly explain it myself, but I do think that there's nothing wrong with loving one's country, and being proud to be where you're from.

Xenophobia and dogmatic patriotism are not all right, but most Americans, including the woman who was filmed, are not crazy patriots or bigots because they commemorate the soldiers who served in any war for their country. And since the equivalent of First Amendment rights came so much later to Austria, it's no wonder to me that there's a cultural gap - that freedom is inherent to the human condition, and that it can - by definition - safely mean two different things to two different people.

Stumm und Laut: Silent Film Festival in Vienna

Buster Keaton in a still from The General

Last weekend, I attended the Stumm und Laut silent film festival in Colombusplatz in Vienna.


An aficionado of the silent era, in particular Buster Keaton, I was thrilled to discover such an opportunity in Vienna - and for free! Not only that, two different programs for Friday and Saturday, which meant that I had to go both nights. I did, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.


A note on Buster Keaton: I love Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, all those guys.  But Keaton, a child actor from Vaudeville days, is a particular inspiration to me. He once said, "Most men put their pants on one leg at a time, but I'm not most men. I put my pants on two legs at a time," by which he meant that he purposely bought over-sized trousers. One of his gags involved going to a thrift store or other clothing shop, and,  to avoid a certain person, such as in Cops where he tries to evade the police, he pulls a pair of very large pants off the rack and jumps into them. Disguised in his new duds, he walks away from the unsuspecting policeman.


This prompted me, when I was still a freshman at Lawrence, to go down to the local Goodwill store and buy a pair of my own over-sized trousers, affectionately called my "man-pants" because, of course, to get the right effect, I needed to buy men's pants. They were brown, rather ugly, and intended for a short and stout man (inseam 30", waist 38") and wouldn't stay on without a belt. But I bought them and wore them around campus, and practiced jumping into them when my roommate, opposed to any and all "odd" behavior, was out of the room. I still wear them quite often, since they're so comfortable, and no longer terribly odd-looking, what with the "menswear" fad going on now. I didn't pack them for Austria because I didn't really have room...though in missing them, I did wander around the sales racks of the men's department at Peek & Cloppenburg the other day (an Austrian department store, sort of like a high-end T.J. Maxx).


Getting back to the film festival: they played a Lumière film, L’arrivée d’un train en gare de la ciotat, one of the very first moving picutres; two Méliès films: Panorama pris d'un train en marche and Le tunnel sous la manche. These were all accompanied by an a capella singer - amazing to listen to her make train sounds! - and the last film was a feature, Buster Keaton's The General about a train engineer in the south during the Civil War who saves his beloved and town from an advancing Union army. Sometimes, in our modern times, The General is panned because the hero is a Confederate, and I don't know why that is, but I maintain it's still great movie. Very cute and typically Buster Keaton, with plenty of physical humor, but not slapstick. To call Keaton's on-screen acrobatics "slapstick" is to undermine the beauty and art of The Buster Keaton. 


Reference, if you will, some of Charlie Chaplin's work for slapstick. The Rink, for example (show on Saturday along with Méliès' Le Voyage dans la lune and Le raid Paris -Carlo en deux heures, and two Keatons: Cops and Nieghbors  with accompaniment by a Viennese techno-pop group) is one pie-throwing, tumble-down after another, with everyone in the scene bruised and battered but Chaplin. Keaton, on the other hand, like Harold Lloyd, took the pit falls and rat traps and pies in the face himself. Sure, Chaplin had the Little Tramp, and he became richer and more famous around the world than either Lloyd or Keaton, with a longer career that lasted through the silent era and into talkies. But Keaton and Lloyd had the integrity to do their own stunts, the first two fingers of  Lloyd's right hand infamously being blown off during filming of Safety Last (he wore a prosthetic from then on). The thing that did Keaton in, unfortunately, was alcoholism, which he attributed to his first wife leaving him and not allowing him to see his sons.

An interesting article on Keaton and Surrealism by Gordon C. Waite can be found here, if you desire to read up on the artistic nature of what might otherwise be simply called "comedy."

Famous Austrians VI: Felix Salten

Felix Salten is less famous than his work of fiction, Bambi, a Life in the Woods.

Yes, the Disney movie Bambi is actually originally Austrian! Who'd a thunk?

Salten was born in Budapest in 1869 to a Jewish family, but moved soon after with his family to Vienna. At the turn of the 20th century, he was involved in the Young Vienna movement (Jung Wien, promoting art noveau ventures) and various other artistic endeavors. He made his living as a theater critic, but wrote and published plenty of original poems, plays and stories.

Perhaps this comes as no surprise to those who know how much Austrians love nature and the natural world. Bambi: eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Wald is similar to the movie in many ways, excepting that Bambi is a roe deer in the Austrian version, but a white-tailed deer in the American version (the difference in species being the difference in continents). The novel also goes into much more detail about Bambi's life, following him into old age, having him philosophize about life, death and the mysteries of the universe. The novel was also meant for an adult audience, and after translation became a huge book club success in the United States in the 1930s. Hitler believed the story was an allegory for the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany (and occupied Austria) and banned the book in 1936.

While in exile in Switzerland during the Nazi occupation, Salten wrote a sequel, Bambi's Children. He also sold the rights to Disney at this time. The film version came out in 1942. According to legend, Disney originally wanted to create a live-action version, but discovering it would be too difficult to film deer (um, duh?) he opted for a cartoon feature. Bambi: eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Wald is also considered one of the first environmental novels. Environmentalists can disagree all they want; the Bambi Effect has turned plenty of people into vegetarians.

Let's All Go to the Movies...

At this point, my jet lag seems to have dissipated, so I can finally update...


For anyone reading this blog, you probably know already that at times I am opinionated, critical, a heartless cynic and an all around twerp when I have a bone to pick with society at large. And that by making a list of adjectives to describe my self-righteousness only means I have made said list.

Well, my point is movies. I'm a-talkin' CINEMA here, people. Having been sequestered from the cinema due to the lack of proximity of a theater to my residence in Amstetten, I've been going through movie withdrawal symptoms for a couple of months.So, when I got the chance to watch some: in-flight movies, Netflix and renting videos from the local Family Video, I regarded  it as the highlight of my entertainment life (NB - Family Video? Is that just a Wisconsin thing? Or a Green Bay thing? Mom has brought me to the realization that many things I used to think of as normal and a part of everyone's childhood are really things unique to where I spent my childhood).




In Flight
Let me start with the in flight movies proffered by United on the way from Frankfurt to Germany. I can't remember the exact selection of films offered. I only remember what I watched: The Switch - you know, that one with Jennifer Aniston where she and the guy from Arrested Development where Jennifer decides she wants a baby, but instead of adopting, she decides to hire a sperm donor and have her "own." Regardless of typical social mores and confidentiality, sanitary medical practices, etc., the sperm is switched - and that guy, a.k.a. Jason Bateman, actually becomes the father of the child...incidentally named Sebastian - what I wanted to name my sister while my mother was pregnant with her (Sam ended up being a girl, obviously,  and my parents voted me down anyway).  I'm not going you know, rate this movie with stars or anything. Suffice it to say, I killed a good two hours on the plane.

Also on the list of in-flight films was The Romantics, something I had actually wanted to see. The previews made it look pretty good - and, well, a lot like the sort of thing I or one of my friends might write for a writing workshop (those of you in master's programs, you know what I mean!)...it was first a novel. But the actual production is not stellar. If you are interested in rehashing Dawson's Creek mixed with Rachel Getting Married with as many immature and irritating portrayals of young people as the former and more boring-ass long camera shots than the latter, you're in for a treat. I can't figure out what was more annoying: Katie Holmes' anti-acting or the idea  that a complete asshole who uses you for sex can ultimately be the love of your life, if he would just dump his current girlfriend - incidentally your former college roommate whom you never really liked anyway.

Home

At home, I  watched lots of movies: a nice little Mel Brooks marathon, including Spaceballs and The Producers (the 1968 original). Always entertaining, and lots of fun.

I finally got to see Eat Pray Love, which was grossly disappointing. Don't know what I was expecting, but I didn't get it. Maybe the book is better, but Julia Roberts is a middle aged brat, with an attempt at pithy, visceral vignettes which were actually predictable and annoying shots of her wandering around Italy, India and Bali. No real emotion, no real interesting nuances of a woman's life. I'm not sure if Elizabeth Gilbert herself is an immature and artificial poser, or if Julia Roberts' portrayal of her in the film made her seem indulgent and narcissistic. Javier Bardem was, hands down, the best part - and the only real actor - of the whole film. 


Another Family Video rental was Easy A: again, disappointing. What is the film industry coming to? Although Emma Stone's rendition of a dorky-yet-precocious teenage girl is charming, it is oftentimes too charming - bordering on goddamn annoying. The writer, director and anyone else involved in the content of the film have obviously not been anywhere near teenagers or a high school recently, if ever. No 17-year-old I've ever known has been so self-aware, nor so candid about sexuality.  It also seems not to have occurred to them that teenagers have sex all time, and one Olive Penderghast type's supposed exploits would never make headlines in a huge California school such as the one the character attends. The plot is ridiculous, the puns and pop culture references are nauseatingly "with it" and the ending it trite. I have a feeling said "writers" of this flop have started, but not finished, The Scarlet Letter, having missed the whole point of the novel: sin and repentance, etc. while still retaining the original novel's sentiments of overblown bombast. Go figure.

Mom, Sam and I went to see Black Swan in the theater. Natalie Portman was great, as she often is. The plot was pure thriller: contrived and creepy but with a ballet twist. Maybe a cross-genre chick flick? Vincent Cassel was utterly French and a total creeper (though, by the end, he and Natalie seemed well-matched...) and I couldn't decide who was freakier, him or Barbara Hershey as the psycho overprotective mom. Predictable? Yes - once we figure out Natalie's character is going insane, there's only so far insanity can go. Self destruction often manifests in self mutilation, and, in extreme cases, suicide. Duh. And it wouldn't be the same if she went to a psychoanalyst... For me, the film was trying too hard to be French (or "new wave"?) a la Polanski's Repulsion (1965) with a young, attractive and psychotic Catherine Deneuve. If you see one, you should really see the other.


Return
On the return flight, I finally got to see Goethe! as I had been planning to (but never did) in the theater. From the same vein as Marie Antoinette or The Young Victoria, this is a costume drama all the way - one that probably only a Germanic audience (and Germanophiles) will find intriguing. As I have mentioned before, I love Goethe and Romanticism and the 18th century in general. Goethe! is basically the telling of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, implying how much Goethe did actually steal from real life - well, hey, he was 24 when he wrote it, what do you want? - but perhaps relied less on actual biographical evidence and more on what the director wanted to have happen with Charlotte Buff and Goethe.


I then watched  Going the Distance which, like most romantic comedies, was predictable but cute. And refreshing to have someone who isn't much of a stud play a leading role - sorry, Justin Long. Plus, I really like Drew Barrymore. She seems a lot more genuine that certain other starlets out there...


The third film I watched was Mammuth a new French film with Gerard Depardieu. OMG! Very French, and laugh-out-loud funny! Though probably only to a sleep deprived American who knows French, sitting in the cabin of a 747. It's about a man who works in a slaughterhouse and is getting ready to retire. His wife realizes he won't get his full pension if he doesn't get all of his paperwork into the French Social Security office. So, he takes a road trip on his rusty old motorcycle from the 70s! Perfect.

Wüstenblume

For one of my classes (in the 4th form), the students watched the movie Desert Flower about the life of supermodel Waris Dirie - based on Dirie's autobiography.

the REAL Waris Dirie

One word: AMAZING! This woman is an inspiration. The child of Sudanese goat herders, she was a victim of female circumcision (FGM - Female Genital Mutilation) at the age of 5, ran away from home at 13 because she was being forced into marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and eventually ended up in London and was discovered by a photographer while working in a McDonald's. She became a model, and is currently a UN special ambassador to Africa. She has written five books, including her autobiography (also Dessert Flower) and begun the Waris Dirie Foundation which campaigns against FGM.

The film itself is in English, though it was produced in Germany, and Waris Dirie currently lives in Vienna. SO, you can imagine that it was much more successful here than in the US. A bit...shall I say chick-flick-y? And, um, more graphic than I can typically handle - I am really sensitive to violence. Which is a nice way of saying that I'm a big wimp. I had to fast forward through the genital mutilation scene. 

But its saving grace (aside from the powerful story itself, of course) is that she did not end up with the hot guy at the end (THANK YOU!! A WOMAN'S LIFE IS NOT INCOMPLETE BECAUSE SHE DOES NOT HAVE A HUSBAND!!!!!) although she does get married to this creepy janitor to become a legal British resident. She later divorces him when she gets her permanent residency card.

Also, the completely gorgeous Liya Kebede plays Waris - she is actually Ethiopian, however. Not Sudanese. Does that make a difference in the scheme of things? Perhaps to the purists among us. Also, you may not believe me, but I knew she was Ethiopian from her accent. Like the time in Ottawa where I just knew the desk clerk was Albanian. I could tell from his accent. I am very sensitive to speech patterns.

Another excellent (but also graphic - you've been warned) film is the African-produced Moolaadé, which also deals with FGM and give a very real cultural perspective, and sheds light on this important women's rights issue. Mooladé is less, um...professional than what an American audience is used to in a feature film, but don't let that stop you! 

I am to present a lesson on the film in one week...this is going to be interesting! The class is ALL girls, so I'm hoping they will have lots and lots and lots to say.