Best Film of the Year

I wish, now, that I’d seen The Tree of Life in the theater. On the other hand, after a winter of rabid movie-going, it’s a thrill to see a film that has so much going for it that it clearly stands out from the pack.

The Tree of Life is a rendering of childhood in the 1950s, in Waco, Texas. It’s also a visual history of the universe. Through much of the film three brother shout, torture frogs, wrestle in the weeds (Can’t you hear the crickets chirping?), hang out with their deviant friends, play the guitar, obey their domineering father (Brad Pitt), fall in love with their charming mother (Jessica Chastain), go to church, go down to the creek, challenge and test one another, climb trees. Most of the time their conversation consists of murmurs and mumbles. Much of the time it seems we’re hearing what they’re thinking, rather than what they’re actually saying.

There is also quite a bit of whispered voice-over.

To add to the mesmeric effect of experienced childhood (rather than narrative, plot-driven stories about childhood), in The Tree of Life director Terrence Malick brings the jump cut to the level of fine art. (A “jump-cut,” I ought to mention, is a cut between two shots of the same character or scene that have almost, but not quite, the same angle, rather than a reverse angle or a cut to a distinctly different scene or character. This technique, in effect, reminds us of the presence of the camera, but also seems to convey the fluid yet stop-and-go nature of life and memory. After a while you cease to notice it and a dream-like atmosphere develops. It’s the Cubism of cinema.)

Malick frames this central focus on childhood experience between two specific events, one small, the other large. The “small” event is that one of the brothers dies. (We don’t see it and we never learn how, and the event comes so early in the film that I don’t mind mentioning it here.)

The “large” event is actually a sequence of events—the creation of the universe and the development of life on the planet Earth. There is extended footage in the first half of the film of cosmic events—nebulae expanding, volcanoes erupting, micro-organisms developing—with ethereal religious music sounding in the background. It all seems a bit like a cross between that BBC series Planet Earth and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It's interesting to note that for the “creation” sequences Malick turned to Douglas Trumbull, who created the spectacular effects in 2001, but hadn’t worked on a film since Blade Runner. Avoiding computer-generated effects, they mixed liquids of varying viscosity in a tank and filmed the reactions, arriving at an effect that resembles the images sent back from NASA exploratory spacecraft.

But astronomer Volker Bromm, associate professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, also played an important role. He commented later:

When I had the first meeting with Terry Malick he said that he wanted to get it right…he didn’t want to just make up stuff—say you have visual effects in Star Trek or Star Wars—he wanted to do the real thing. The closest we can come is a computer simulation of the universe because at this point we cannot directly observe it; therefore, having a computer simulation is the closest thing to how it really was at that time. He wanted to tell the history of the universe with as much realism as possible. Then we translated our simulation into a visualization. The question was always—Does it look right? Does it catch the scientific idea behind it? The visual effects people were very accommodating in trying to get it right and to make me happy.

The Tree of Life is better than 2001, perhaps, because it remains rooted in organic development rather than the esoteria of space travel and super-human computers.

Well, no need to compare. It’s a different sort of film altogether. What 2001 and The Tree of Life have in common is metaphysical ambition. (In fact, due to the presence of Brad Pitt in the cast, some theaters felt it prudent to post disclaimers warning viewers that they were about to enter a philosophical experience and not to demand their money back if they didn’t like it.)
Kubrick may be asking where life is going, but Malick is asking us to consider what life is really like. Why are men and women so different? Why do kids act out? And most importantly, why is God so unjust?

Music plays a large role in the film. Brad Pitt, in the role of Mr. O’Brien, is a largely unsympathetic character, and the fact that he finds solace and inspiration in playing and listening to music seems to make his authoritarian insensitivity that much harder to take.

On the other hand, his middle son plays the guitar angelically. (Malick’s own younger brother studied classical guitar with Segovia in Spain, later willfully broke both his hands and then committed suicide.)

The soundtrack is loaded with classical gems that sometimes border on cornball, from Smetana’s The Moldau to Górecki’s Third Symphony, along with Mozart, Brahms, Couperin, Berlioz, and an assortment of obscure and atmospheric tone-poems that establish an indelible atmosphere of mystery—alluring or sinister, we’re not quite sure.(To see the complete list, and hear some of the numbers, click here.)

Sean Penn seems like a duck out of water in his role as one of the grown-up brothers, and cynics may chuckle at the Hallmark Greeting Card nature of some of the imagery, especially of the final celestial scenes on the beach. I bought the whole package. I was raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which might be worth mentioning. But the estimable Roger Ebert remarked, “I don't know when a film has connected more immediately with my own personal experience. In uncanny ways, the central events of The Tree of Life reflect a time and place I lived in, and the boys in it are me.”

So, is this a film about boys, and for boys? When the movie was over, my wife Hilary, who was raised in Minnetonka, Minnesota, said, “That’s my childhood. I’ll bet Malick is a Catholic.”

The Mysteries of Lisbon

What a strange four-and-a-half hour film! It resembles Dickens, but without the flamboyant, larger-than-life characters; Austen, but without the wit or the good cheer; Proust, in its labyrinthine regressions into memory; Charlotte Bronte in its depiction of doleful and imprisoned women; and Galdos, Pio Baroja, or any other nineteenth-century Spanish novelist with its priests, pirates, and gypsies.

In fact, the film’s director, Raúl Ruiz, hails from Chile, and the tale on which the film is based is by a Portuguese novelist, Camilo Ferreira Botelho Castelo-Branco,1st Viscount de Correia Botelho, who died in 1890. Branco is said to have written more than 260 books during his career. One critic has observed that Branco’s writing combines “the dramatic and sentimental spirit of Romanticism with … a highly personal combination of sarcasm, bitterness and dark humor.”

Indeed, an atmosphere of gloom and dread, reckless passion and world-weary piety hangs over the action of The Mysteries of Lisbon, which amounts largely to people visiting one another in their gorgeous and rundown country estates or their elegant urban parlors to swap hitherto untold stories about the deep past, stir the cinders of spent passion, or plan routes of escape from their diabolical spouses, invariably male.

At the center of the drama is a boy of fifteen, João, who has no stories. He doesn’t know who his parents are, or where he came from. In the course of the film he finds out a good deal about who he is, and how cruel people can sometimes be to one another.

As the layers of narrative build up, it sometimes becomes difficult to remember which generation we’re dealing with, and a Hundred-Years-of-Solitude-esque mystique begins to envelop the action. I suppose it may have been unwise to watch the film in two parts on successive nights. But after all, a longer version was originally broadcast on European television in six episodes.

It might also have been better to see the film in the theater, I suppose. The camera movement is fluid and the lighting and shot composition are exquisite. It strikes me in retrospect that the effort Ruiz spent planning the character movement of even a single scene probably rivals U.S. Grant’s plotting of the Bayou Campaign against Vicksburg. In fact, I suspect the film has many technical virtues that lie beyond my capacity to notice, much less articulate.

One enthusiast wrote:

“In Mysteries of Lisbon, Ruiz's fluid camera work principally serves his fluid progression of stories, their next-to infinite regression, with re-framings in all but a handful of examples accomplished within rather than without the camera and figure movement universally recapitulated in the visual field through its tight figural identification - moored to his stories' many tellers. The director's long-shot, long-take work also affords for the re-introduction of The Three Crowns of the Sailor's aggressively planar, baroque compositions, at times inorganic and at others not, with servers, in their organic usage, adopting foreground positions where they will overhear the gossip, in the frame's recesses, that will lead to the masters' ceaseless miseries.”

I think the film would have been better had Ruiz paid more attention to fewer characters, allowing us to get to know (and perhaps occasionally even like) them better. Yet in the end, The Mysteries of Lisbon is well worth watching. It has an atmosphere like no other film I’ve seen, and it ranks right at the top in terms of hand-painted wallpaper.

At the same time, it reminded me of another six-part TV show set during the same era that I really ought to see again, The Charterhouse of Parma (1982).

Art Books and Book Arts

I caught the Graphics Show at the Walker on the afternoon of its last day. Plenty of color posters, digital gimmicks, magazine layouts, and branding displays. As we entered I caught sight of the big display of books in a gallery to the left and whisked past the introductory bulletin board with nary a glance.

Why? Because I like books—precious, hand-made books and those with eccentric, avant-garde designs. But the books under the Plexiglas at the Walker reconfirmed my long-held belief that many such productions are fascinating to ogle but very difficult to read. When a book becomes a mere vehicle for lavish design, or beyond that, a piece of sculpture, I begin to lose interest.

You may argue that there’s no need for us to chose between “books” and “book arts.” As the saying goes, “It takes all kinds (of books) to make a world.”

True enough. And I have books scattered all around the house that seem precious to me, at least in part, because they’re so exquisitely crafted. I recently pulled off the shelf a fine copy of The Book of Tea by Okahura Kakuzo, for example, with heavily textured paper, encased in one of those sturdy boxes.

Opening it at random, I read:

“…But when we consider how small after all the cup of human enjoyment is, how soon overflowed with tears, how easily drained to the dregs in our quenchless thirst for infinity, we shall not blame ourselves for making so much of the tea-cup. Mankind has done worse…”

Then again, the squared format, quaint illustrations, and scattered type-setting of the anthology The Cubist Poets in Paris is entirely appropriate to the subject. And what about this tiny cased edition, 2 inches square, of Findings by Ursula K. Le Guin that I hold in my hand. It was published by Don Olsen at Ox Head Press in 1992 in the Minnesota Miniatures Series. You could hold the press on which it was printed in the palm of your hand.

All good stuff. But at the point where “design” or “innovation” begins to obscure the literary import, I become queasy. Such creations often exhibit the same delectable textures that make a fine-press book so, well….fine. But I’m not sure whether I ought to read them or put them on exhibit above the piano. (It seldom becomes an issue, because most such examples of “book arts” are out of my price range.)

It strikes me that this issue of cross-purposes extends even to blank books. I’ve bought a few hand-made blank books in my time, but have difficulty writing anything in them. Nothing that’s going on in my head at any given time seems worthy. Eventually I take the plunge.

I’m looking now at a fine little book I bought in a little shop called Il Tourchio in the Altarno in Florence. Opening it at random, I read:

Dec 4, 1992
Poulenc and wine. Just having finished Judge Dee and the Chinese Lake Murders. And I don’t like this pen.
Music by the moods. What would you be reading if you were listening to Ravel’s Scheherazade? There’s an essay by Cocteau that I wish I had but do not have. Don’t know the name of.”

Do I prove my point?

Varieties of Musical Experience

I can’t help thinking we live in the richest cultural environment the world has ever known. And you don’t have to fly to New York or London to tap into it. Films are everywhere now, of course, presuming you have a DVD player close at hand. Bookstores seem to be on the wane (alas) but access to information about unusual books, and to the books themselves, is greater than ever before. It wasn’t so long ago that book dealers used a weekly used book search magazine, set in very fine lettering on newsprint, to locate those obscure or out-of-print titles for us. Now we can tap into a far wider stock of titles ourselves via the internet in seconds.

Museums? Theater? Live music performance? There aren’t enough days in the week to tap into it all.

I attended two musical events on opposite ends of the musical spectrum recently—maybe that’s what got me thinking about all this.

Last Saturday afternoon we wandered into the second floor gallery at United Methodist Church to hear the Artaria String Quartet perform four of Shostakovich’s string quartets. I’ve never been much of a fan of the man’s orchestral works, which strike me as muddled, bombastic and hermetic by turns, and lacking a core of deep emotion. But hey! The performance was free.


And these more personal works were somehow different. We listened as the Artaria, who’ve been together for twenty-five years, spun their exquisite web of sounds through the pages of the 6th, 8th, 9th, and 10th quartets, none of which I’d heard before. I was listening to a man think, hum, grumble, dance, sing, despair. The sixth was a bit breezy—Shostakovich was on his honeymoon when he wrote it. The eighth was rich and rock solid—I later learned that it’s performed more often than all of his other quartets combined.

Following a lengthy intermission, we returned to our seats to hear the ninth and tenth, which were only marginally less powerful and appealing than what had come before. The couples sitting next to us on either side left during intermission, so we could stretch out a bit on our folding chairs as we listened. Members of the quartet gave brief introductions to each piece, setting it in some sort of biographical context. But for the most part, it was simply the sound of the strings, the patterns of interaction, the rich and difficult harmonies, and the lyric thrust—nothing more. What more could we ask for? It was almost like drinking a glass of cool water after an all-day hike through the desert.

Though it was difficult to see the performers from where we sat, it was pleasant enough to look around at the Old Masters hanging on the walls—especially the huge painting of Jesus healing a young woman as two or three bearded men sit by in astonishment. The painting must be ten feet high at least, and my eyes roamed its surface repeatedly in the course of the two-hour concert.

How different the scene was yesterday at the Brookdale Regal 20-screen cinema, where we attended a live HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s new work, Enchanted Island! The lengthy two-act romance/comedy has been patched together from the works of several Baroque composers, with Handel, Rameau, and Vivaldi prominent among them. The story draws on elements of both The Tempest and A Midsummer’s Night Dream, though it takes on a life of its own from the get-go. There are love potions, mistaken identities, usurped powers, retribution, freedom, and forgiveness. No need to go into details. It was all amusing, sometimes moving, and the lyrical and heavily ornamented vocal lines are the stuff that sends the heart soaring.

The costumes were remarkable, the sets looked like a succession of antique tarot cards, with raging cardboard seas, dark forests inhabited by Bosch-like animals, and creaking castles. One of the most impressive scenes recreates Neptune’s ocean-bottom throne room, with mermaids dangling from wires and Placido Domingo, complete with seaweed hair and an oyster-shell crown, at the center of it all, waving his trident.

The stellar cast also included the winsome Daniele de Niese, Joyce DeDonato, David Daniels, and Luca Pisaroni in the role of Caliban, a Lurch-like figure who cannot seem to get a date. There is a lengthy ballet number in the middle of act two, and also a plug for environmental awareness!?

I listened to the rousing final chorus, after four hours of merriment, with a huge grin on my face, not wanting it to end, and pondering whether it would be worthwhile to attend the repeat performance February 8. Maybe smuggle in a camera?

1968 - at MHS

It all started with a Groupon offer: Join the Minnesota Historical Society for $35. I should have renewed our membership long ago, no doubt. Well, here was my chance.

The next morning, after getting the African chicken stew with groundnuts and sweet potatoes going in the crockpot, we puttered over to MHS to see the highly-touted exhibit dedicated to that tumultuous year, 1968.

It’s a lively and fascinating show, and the entryway to the exhibit was packed when we got there. “It will thin out as we start to move on through,” Hilary assured me. Not true.

The first room sets the scene with a few pieces of sleek furniture, including an old television “console” from the midst of which Walter Cronkite tells us that the war in Vietnam is probably unwinnable and would, at best, end in stalemate. (This grim prognostication, which I believe was from Cronkite’s special, Who, What, When, Where, Why?, stood in stark contrast to the official reports being released to the public in those days.)

Stepping around the corner, we came face to face with a Huey helicopter. Many visitors linger here for quite a while, listening to veterans tell their horrific tales of jungle combat as video clips are projected onto the back wall of the copter’s interior. As a result, there’s a huge bottleneck. But that’s all right. It adds to the atmosphere of crowds and mayhem that typify many aspects of the era.

Skirting around this mob, we began to follow the almost daily timeline of events from month to month. Events from many spheres of life are highlighted, from fashion to foreign policy, from moon shots to Memphis riots. Resignations. Assassinations. Martin Luther King. Mayor Daley. Timothy Leary. Goldie Hawn. Some changed our world, while others are now the stuff of trivia questions.

The Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to quell the Velvet Revolution. A few months later, Elvis started his comeback tour. Women’s liberation groups targeted the Miss America contest, and the American Indian Movement got going in Minneapolis. At the end of the year unemployment stood at 3.3 percent.

I turned sixteen in 1968. I remember the assassinations, the moon shots, the riots at the Democratic convention. But these events took place at the periphery of my “real” world, which was centered around canoeing, poker, the Butterfield Blues Band and Cannonball Adderley, and high school debate. “Resolved: that the United States should prohibit unilateral military intervention in foreign countries.” I could argue either side.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying the album covers. Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Arlo Guthrie, the Moody Blues. The corny patchwork fashions and psychedelic designs of the era are also well-represented. You can even take a close look at a pair of Janis Joplin’s pants! I never liked that stuff at the time, and no one likes it now, as far as I can tell, except at Halloween.

Perhaps I was a bit straight-laced or “culturally aloof” at the time. A friend of mine later wrote in my high school yearbook, “I want to see you down at the University campus next year…wearing beads!”

A Tuscan Brainteaser - Certified Copy

I missed Abbas Kiarostami's latest film at the theater last summer but streamed it last night. It was worth the wait.

As the film opens a small group of Italians has gathered to hear a British author talk about his recent book, Certified Copy. He assures them he isn’t an art “scholar,” and exudes a modest arrogance in his assertion that the issue of authenticity in the art world is overblown. After all, most originals are renderings of something else, he points out—a landscape, a face—while a reproduction can be considered an “original” in its own right. This brief lecture sets the stage for the subsequent conversations between the scholar and a French antiques dealer who owns a shop in town, (Juliette Binoche), not only about art, but also about life and relationships.

Binoche had arrived at the last minute and left early to buy her difficult 11-year-old son a hamburger, after arranging to have the author come to her shop the next morning to sign the books she’d bought. Her son later teases her for falling in love with the man, though she has admitted she doesn’t like his book.

When the author (played by opera singer William Shimell, in his first film role) arrives the next morning, it’s pretty clear he doesn’t like her shop much, either, and they decide to go for a drive while he signs the books. As they drive around aimlessly they discuss art, though the conversation gets more personal as Shimell learns more about Binoche’s sister and her sister's stammering husband. Binoche looks on them as an ideal couple, simple people who have found contentment with one another and their lot in life. “There’s nothing simple about being simple,” is Shimell’s caustic reply.

They go to a small-town museum, then a café, then a historical building that’s become a popular wedding chapel. More talk about art and relationships, including Binoche’s difficult relationship with her son. One of the more interesting conversations is between Binoche and the woman running the café, who thinks the two are man and wife. He’s stepped out into the courtyard to take a call and Binoche plays along with the woman’s error. Though the barista thinks Binoche has a good marriage and an attentive husband, she's a staunch defender of even bad marriages, and sums up her position: “It would be stupid to ruin our lives for an ideal.”

That’s the film: Old World ambiance and cultured talk, sullied by the frustrations of being a single mother in a world where men can deliver lines such as, “Ultimately people must live their lives for themselves.” It contains one or two further odd wrinkles that I’ll leave it to viewers to discover for themselves. Suffice it to say that with Certified Copy, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has created a work that bears comparison with Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia or Antonioni’s La Notte, though it may be better than either of these post-war classics. (For a contemporary equivalent, let me describe it as an Until Sunrise for adults.)

It’s beautifully shot and rich in chiaroscuro. Even the reflections in the windshield of the car are gorgeous. So is Juliette Binoche, who won a well-deserved Best Actress award in Cannes for her quirky, mercurial performance. William Shimell has been widely criticized for his less animated role, but it seems to me he also does a good job. He's basically just killing time with a bright but anxious and slightly distaught woman he hardly knows until the evening train arrives, and he chooses his words carefully for a split-second before speaking, careful to balance truth and tact.

Trypillians and After: Art of the Ukraine

If you ever wondered what the earliest civilizations devised by humankind were like, stop down to see the current show at the Russian Museum before it leaves town. There you’ll see ceramic artifacts from—not the Egyptians, not the Sumerians—but the Trypillians, who occupied the region between the Danube and the Dnieper rivers extending north from the Black Sea, some nine thousand years ago. (The official dates given are 7400 BCE to 4700 BCE.) These mysterious people knew how to plow, kept domestic animals, grew grapes, and erected temples the look of which have been preserved in miniature clay replicas.

About half of the area occupied by the Trypillians (also known as the Cucuteni) is within the borders of modern-day Ukraine, and the show, titled “ Antiquities From Ukraine: Golden Treasures and Lost Civilizations" includes artworks, weapons, jewelry and sundry other items from succeeding civilizations, too—the Cimmerians, the Scythians, and the Greeks, Johnny-Come-Latelys who didn’t begin to colonize the region until 800 B.C.

Some of the large clay jugs on display are reminiscent of far more recent productions of the Hopi and other Southwestern peoples, and no less beautiful. Others carry the spiral ornamentation I associate with the Minoans. The tall, narrow, clay figurines bring to mind fertility goddesses of the Cycladic cultures of the Aegean. But the Trypillians pre-date all of these peoples by far. Considered all in all, the older artifacts on display fall into the category of genuinely Gee-Whiz “cool.”

Perhaps the most intriguing, though not the most attractive, are a set of weird ceramic vessels that consist of several hollow binocular-shaped units fused together. (Maybe we’re looking at the world’s first kitsch candleholders?)

As we follow the faux-flagstone pathway to the rear of the exhibit space, we meet up with the Scythians, who figure prominently in the history of Herodotus. The Scythians were talented horsemen and knew how to make bronze. They buried their kings surrounded by their household staff, who met their end for precisely that purpose. On the first anniversary of the king’s death, thirty of his top horsemen were killed and buried around the tomb, along with their horses. According to the museum text, Herodotus referred to the Scythians as “wiser than any nation on the face of the Earth." I’m not so sure.

The Scythian warrior carried a gold cup on his belt, in imitation of Herakles, and a very fine one is on display. (We used to carry our cups on our belts while out on the trail in the BWCA, too.) Nearby, a golden headdress made of wafer-thin oak leaves and tiny acorns is also staggering. The small gallery at the back of the museum is given over to jewelry from the classical Greek, early Christian, and Byzantine eras, and it’s almost uniformly exquisite. (The buckle you see below is about one inch high.)

Back home, I pulled my Herodotus from the shelf but found no reference to the overreaching wisdom of the Scythians. At one point he says, “The Black Sea is home to the most ignorant peoples of the earth.” He excludes the Scythians from this judgment, however, and goes on to praise them for having discovered what he calls “the cleverest solution I know of to the single most important matter in human life.” He commends them for carrying their homes behind their horses on wagons, rather than building villages and strongholds. “Since they are all expert at using their bows from horseback, and since they depend on cattle for food rather than on cultivated land, how could they fail to be invincible and elusive?”

So elusive, indeed, that they have long since vanished from history.