wikipedia page

Excellent read, morally obligatory. Points of interest:

1. The recent publication date, due to the absence of mnoral-nationalistic simplification. Not only can a Nazi officer be capable of saving the lives of the oppressed, there are good and bad people on all sides, which (obviously) doesn’t mean they exist in identical proportions. Interesting how bad people are and how it takes us to accept these facts in specific cases.
2. The Nazi officer is the one who talks about religious morality. He blames the decline of Germany embodied in Nazi thuggishness and sadism on the collapse of Western Christianity. There’s nothing in this book about the Jewish religion, the values of Władysław Szpilman are those of a cultured liberal. A Communist friend of his provides optimistic morale-boosting analysis of the war, and his ideas turn out to be correct.
3. Can’t wait to see the movie, which Professor Geras recommends (also why I read this book).

Yes, very decent book readable and quite interesting. If I was looking for the other side of the story to Joan Didion’s then I was disappointed, she barely figures here except as part of “us”, the screenwriter partnership Dunne tells his tale about. By the end of the book my initial, yes, but why be a Hollywood scriptwriter anyway, if that’s what it is like? reaction changed to, well why not, and also the money and the Oscar night parties. I did not laugh though, the jokes went right over my head, or rather seemed un-funny.

The Didion-Dunnes perhaps sum something up about America, or cover some odd contradictions about America, in their Hollywood/ New York, screenwriter/ serious novels and heavy journalism career. It seems remarkable that they achieved those things, but their marriage might be the achievement most people are interested in these days. None of the films were impressive hits.

From this interview:

Maria Delgado: [to PA]: When Bad Education came out, you spoke about women inspiring you to write comedy and men to write tragedy. Do you still think that’s the case?Pedro Almodóvar: Yes, I’m conscious of that. I don’t know why - maybe that should be a question from a psychiatrist. But it’s true that when I write about women, I can use more humour than if I write about the male universe. Perhaps it’s because that’s the gender I belong to, perhaps I’m more interested to show the darkest places of myself, and I don’t joke about it. But it’s true. So after Bad Education, I wanted to go back to the female universe that I feel much more comfortable in.

Pedro Almodóvar: Absolutely. I know what Lorca said more than 60 years ago, and it’s still true. Maybe it’s the culture, maybe it’s the cliché of Latino machismo, but the Mediterranean male character is more dull than the female character. Women are more surprising and they have fewer prejudices. Perhaps it’s because they were condemned to be silent for centuries, so they create inside them a much richer world. In many cases, that is true - you can find good actresses of every age in Spain, but not actors.

It seems that Almodovar’s films about women are more popular, whereas the gloomier films about men are regarded as worthy and impressive etc, but just not as much fun. I can see why. As to which are most important/ good- that seems a whole other issue.

imdb

This film starts with a massacre at a wedding and gets progressively more violent from there. It’s meant to be hilariously funny, but I got completely stuck on the blood etc and failed to laugh much. Maybe some other time. Even I could tell it had a lot of clever witty ideas and lively insanity. It’s not that all the humour was bloody, just that you clearly need to view it from the proper very considerable emotional distance in order to appreciate it. And be a bit sick.

link

This is a slice of life film about Kurdish children on the Iraq/ Turkey border before and during the latest Gulf war. The children are mostly orphans, surviving by collecting and selling landmines, quite a few of them are missing limbs and the main story revolves around a young girl trying to get rid of the toddler she had as a result of being raped previously. I don’t see any signs of real hope or optimism in this film. Possibly this is because the director is a Kurd and consciously focussing on the plight of his people, and them Kurds don’t have a country yet or any sign of getting one. This is a great film if you want to go home either suicidal or murderously angry at the whole entire world; whether either of those states is very constructive is another matter.

It’s also quite confusing in its meaning, so there are probably other interpretations available (where the central theme is “meaninglessness” ambiguity generally arises).

This is a very very brilliantly written book, terribly sad of course and full of penetrating insights worth hanging onto. I did have to read most of it twice, though, her style is so careful and rather dense, and the occasional sections she quotes from novels make me think they would be too dense and difficult. Also the immediacy of this book is all from its True Experience real-ness. I mention these impressions, because Didion and her husband both wrote novels, and worked extremely hard doing so, it seems, and I imagine took them more seriously than other writing they did, such as their “crash rewrite” of a screenplay that was never made, and the profile of Natalie Wood John Dunne finished shortly before his death, and so on. But apparently he may have felt regret for not devoting his life to something worthier: and I wonder if The Year of Magical Thinking might not be the most powerful thing they both produced. This would be ironic, in the literarily incorrect sense.

Her rational tone is very revealing and wonderful when applied to the mess and disaster of real life. She’s an uphill journalist, going against the grain, not a person who wants to get out there and meet the world at all, but a writer who can’t help experience it. This makes for an amazing kind of unintentional (?) tension.

Minerva just read a Russian book, and I like her summary of the off-putting side of Russian novels: navel gazing in extremis and having to master all those names and patronymics. Add to that the sheer length of some of these books, and there in a nutshell is why I didn’t read any for more than a decade. But this time round, I absolutely loved the style of Crime and Punishment, didn’t find it at all navel-gazey, even though nearly the whole novel is people talking to each other wondering what the things they are saying all mean.

C&P doesn’t even have a real plot. Something happens, then you wait to see what’s going to happen for six hundred odd pages of pondering and meandering and people getting to know one another somewhat, and then something else happens that could easily have happened six hundred odd pages earlier. But I found it all tremendously exciting, with no dull patches at all. The meanderings seemed to me important newsworthy events.

However, it’s a very peculiar writing and narrative style from the Western perspective, I think. There is a sort of “grey area” of speech and consciousness, where characters might be exploring their own ideas and feelings as they articulate them, and formulating them through the act of speech. They might be drunk, of sick, or half-asleep or mad or in an emotionally heightened state while doing this. The normal boundaries between the feelings and behaviour, the unconscious/ emotional and conscious/ rational mind, are not in place. It’s a very Russian thing, and a creative state of mind rather than a self-absorbed pondering one, but comes over as the latter to the more literally rational, (ancient) Greek-minded Western mind. The most thoughtful and sensible character in C&P, in fact, Razumikhin, seems in some ways more bonkers than the rest: he admits to his own thinking aloud, changes his mind openly, and you can hear the thinking through his speech. I think this is something we consider a bit dozy and embarrassing in the West.

So my thought of the day is that possibly everything significant and dynamic in C&P, and no doubt other Dostoyevsky & Russian stuff too, comes from this area of mental fusion that is the source of creative thinking, at least artistically and literarily, probably in terms of life, morality and being human, maybe more.

Also, I can’t really see how Dostoyevsky would make sense to staunch atheists ever.

I found this Salon article about Satin Rouge annoying and superficial. The film is Tunisian, about a dowdy widow who finds new expression and passion for life through belly dancing, an unrespectable activity she hides from her daughter and neighbours.

One cannot attempt to understand a film like this by peering through the blinkered spectacles of a school of Western critical thought such as feminism. There is more in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, and surely that is the entire point of watching a film about Arabic people and their culture. Films aim to create an experience for the audience, they are not just political pamphlets. If we are going to start understanding other peoples, which is what we say we want, we must switch off our paradigms on the way into the cinema, and allow ourselves to be challenged and changed through the experience of truth that art, when it is good, can bring.

Lovely film, well worth seeing.

imdb entry

Another Almodovar film. Patterns are starting to emerge. First of all, although Almodovar famously makes films about women, even where there are no men at all, those men who are mentioned totally dictate the stories of the lives of the women. For instance, by being corpses, or from having disappeared. Secondly, Almodovar does do men as well as women (Talk to her is about two men), and when he does, the lives of the men may revolve around women, who may also be missing or dead, or in this case, in comas and/ or “persistent vegetative states”. His fundamental interest is the ways we are defined by our relationships with both the same and the opposite sex, by birth, death and marriage as well as friendship. These are great big dramatic themes, which I would argue come more from his sense of the tragic genre, through Gabriel Garbia Lorca, than through soap opera. Almodovar respects the old-fashioned “high” arts, and doesn’t seem to have a lot of time for junk TV at all.

It annoys me when artists are not taken seriously just because they seem to belong to some minority or other. “Gay” doesn’t have to mean “lightweight”. Almodovar writes about oddball characters for sure, but he uses them to represent humanity. Teenage girls become accidental murderers, anyone’s absent father might turn out to have been transsexual- only bigotry separates “those people” from “people like us”, in reality. Almodovar is truly revolutionary, as all great artists should be, in the way he makes the extraordinary seem mundane, and reveals the extremes behind mundanity. Dullness isn’t even a choice, only a delusion. He’s right about that. Life itself is bizarre and wacky. Almodovar makes you feel uncomfortable with your prejudices, and that’s a good thing. Individuals don’t conform to generalities, and expecting them to is narrow-minded.

There always seems to be something scary about watching an Almodovar film. You never know what will happen, but you always expect it to be bad. It generally is. Life is like that too. But then people work with it and around it and get over it, and on the way they do beautiful funny things and love each other.

Great film, Almodovar is definitely one of my favourite geniuses. I was slightly disappointed at the relative lack of hysterial humour and high-power-energy that this film has compared to the only other one I’ve seen so far, but am reserving judgement on that until having seen a few more.

(It is rather annoying that most seem to be out of DVD print at the moment, hopefully this is temporary.)

Volver is a Gabriel Garcia Lorca style tragedy, but turned around. It has the primal geography-based definition of humanity (the East Wind that drives the turbines, and makes the villagers mad, enables and covers up murder, and provides a general sense of mystery); the madness that is saner than conventional norms (believing in ghosts is humane, while TV shows attack one’s moral core); but in Volver people can also take their life into their own hands and win, in some sense. It’s purgatorial, but it isn’t hellishly devastating.

Also Penelope Cruz’s chest looks very impressive, of course.