Rembrandt in Minneapolis

The Rembrandt show that opened last week at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is a wonder. Well, I guess Rembrandt himself was something of a wonder. But we’re used to see his paintings hanging in solitary majesty here and there in the Dutch Wing of large museums, where they often seize our attention, leaping out from the midst of blue-gray Van Ruesdael landscapes and sloppy portraits by Franz Hals. The brilliant and delicate handing of fabric, flesh, and shadow stand out.

The exhibit at the MIA gives us something different: a large selection of Rembrandts’ own work hanging in the midst of other, generally very fine and Rembrandtesque paintings done by his students and contemporaries.

We follow the course of his development, the transformations of his style, and also the arc of his personal life from budding but unknown talent, to wealthy and celebrated painter of the high and mighty haut-bourgeoisie of early seventeenth-century Amsterdam. In the middle rooms we become acquainted with the death of his wife, mounting domestic and financial difficulties, and a decline in both fortune and social standing, though not in artistic interest.

At one time there were close to a thousand “Rembrandts” hanging in museums, private homes, and speculators’ vaults around the world. Today that number has dropped to roughly three hundred, as experts cull from the list the paintings that are now felt to be the work of imitators. Rembrandt made lots of money teaching other talented painters to paint just like him, and the resultant canvases were his to keep, sign, and sell, if he deemed them worthy—that is to say, if he felt he could make money from them without compromising the Rembrandt “brand” too much.

Part of the fun at the MIA show is to second-guess the experts. A number of the paintings in the show are supreme masterpieces that you could stare at for twenty minutes without losing interest. The skin, the clothes, the lighting, the countenance—all of them perfect. In this group I would put several paintings from 1632: Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak, Private Collection, New York; Portrait of Joris de Caullery, San Francisco; Portrait of Marten Looten (LACMA); and An Old Man in Military Costume (Getty) I would also add Self-Portrait at 53, 1659, (National Gallery of Art, Washington). I’m sure I’m forgetting quite a few.

But there are also sveral paintings in the show attributed unequivocally to Rembrandt that lack the preternatural subtlety of his best stuff. And some of the paintings in the show now attributed to students are also very fine. Evidently Rembrandt was not only a great painter, but also a pretty good teacher.

During the last decade of his life Rembrandt appeared to lose interest in flesh tones. It’s easy to see that the brushstrokes become loser, the paint shinier, the blacks more crudely black. In fact, quite a few paintings in the fourth and final room of the exhibit might almost have been done by Velasquez, Manet, or Daumier.


The portrait of Rembrandt’s son Titus is probably the most genial in the show, though it’s a matter of dispute whether Rembrandt himself painted it. It’s a solid work, though it has little of the dignity and strength with which the Rembrandt brand is usually associated.

Which brings to mind the question of whether even the best of Rembrandt’s portraits convey genuine psychological insight, or a merely generic perfection and intensity. I left the galleries with the impression I’d been in the company of someone far larger than life—someone who remains more than a little incomprehensible. Definitely someone to take seriously.

Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science

Carol Kaesuk Yoon, a science writer for the New York Times, has done her level best, in Naming Nature, to make taxonomy interesting. The field has been shaken by several methodological “revolutions” in the last half-century, and as it turns out, these are fascinating in themselves. So much so, that readers may find themselves rehearsing the Shakespearean quip, “Methinks she doth protest too much.” Yes, taxonomy is interesting. On the other hand, Yoon’s attempts to popularize it and place it within a larger philosophical context suffer from a shaky grasp of the underpinnings of the “naming” process itself.

The habit of naming species goes back to the Stone Age, no doubt. Hunters knew which animals to pursue, gatherers knew which roots to unearth, shamans knew which herbs to boil. And they passed on this information from generation to generation by recourse to names. God presented Adam with the opportunity to name the creatures in the Garden of Eden, which suggests that the naming process has always been, to some degree, arbitrary, rather than divinely inspired.

Yet from the first, the distinctions established by Stone Age taxonomy were scientific, in so far as they were based on observable differences between types of things. But they were in no way systematic. It was not until the eighteenth century that the Swedish naturalist Karl Linnaeus developed the nomenclature still in wide use today, with two-part Latin names and a vast scheme of kingdoms, classes, orders, families, and species, in a cascading series of nested groups.

Yoon describes the development and significance of Linnaeus’s new system thoroughly; it’s the one we still use today. But like other systems before it, the family trees Linnaeus developed were often inaccurate, because species that look similar aren’t necessarily closely related.

The rise of Darwinian theory presented taxonomers with a new challenge: to develop a scheme that accurately reflected the chains of organic development through which various species evolved. In the course of the twentieth century, new techniques were developed to expose these relationships. Yoon describes how numerical taxonomy was developed in Lawrence, Kansas, by an obscure researcher named Robert Sokal, who, using bees as his subjects, coded a wide variety of characteristics on punch cards and then determined how closely the various types matched one another.

This is what taxonomists had always done. But in the past, it had been common practice the “weigh” characteristics that were deemed especially significant—a judgment that was based on nothing but intuition. Sokul stuck religiously to the data, and came up with a tree of relationships that different is several respects from the then-accepted pattern.

Then, in the late 1950s, chemists began to study proteins, amino acids, and other such stuff with a view to determining how closely various species were related. By working on a molecular level, these researchers were able to establish plausible relationships between species that could never have been compared before—humans, rabbits, kangaroos, turtles, snakes, and yeast. The fruits of these investigations often resulted in taxonomies very similar to those derived from more traditional methods, though they also produced a few whopping surprises.

The third “revolution” in taxonomy came about as the result of the publication, in 1950, of a book with the forbidding title Grundzüge einer Theorie der Phylogenetischen Systematik by a German fly specialist named Willi Hennig. In brief, his approach was to determine relationships between species by identifying similarities that were shared by them and no other groups.

Yoon spends a good deal of time explaining how this method works, and its’ time well spent. The more basic point is that Hennig, for the first time, “determined which characteristics mattered, which could be counted on to point a taxonomist in the right instead of the wrong direction.”

Hennig’s theories didn’t gain a significant following until twenty years later, but eventually, on the basis of the principles he espoused, the science of cladistics was born—a development that threw taxonomy into yet further controversy and disarray. Cladistics teaches us, for example, that mushrooms are animals and there is no such thing as a fish.

Yoon does a good job of bringing to life the often nerdy protagonists of this drama, and she loves to explore the arrogance, ridicule, and ego-bruising that peppers the tale, though such emotions almost inevitably accompany radical changes in any academic field, as accepted wisdom slowly gives way in the face of new evidence.

But Yoon also has a broader theme: that as taxonomy removed itself from the hands-on study of organisms toward statistic or molecular levels of inquiry, human societies also became gradually more removed from the natural world, so that nowadays very few people know much of anything about their natural surroundings.

Yoon anchors this theory by means of an obscure German concept, umwelt. The word itself is actually not so obscure. In German—so I’m told—it simply means “environment.” But Jakob von Uexküll made use of it to suggest that every animal species lives in a different world due to the fact that each species has a different capacity to sense things. Dogs are color blind but can detect an astonishing array of smells. Thus the world they inhabit “looks” very different from that of a human, who sees much but smells little, or a wood tick, who is sensitive only to body heat and the odor of butyric acid.

Yoon’s contention is that the human umwelt once encompassed a firm and detailed grasp of the natural world. In the course of time, she suggests, we have lost nearly all of our rapport with our natural surroundings. She refers nostalgically to the indigenous tribes of Mexico, who may know the names and uses of a hundred plants by the age of five.

All of this may well be true, though it’s a mistake to imagine the human umwelt must refer only of the natural world. The challenges humans face in their struggle for survival also include avoiding being run down in traffic, responding appropriately at job interviews, and knowing when to pull their retirement funds out out of the stock market.

And regardless of which elements figure prominently in the human umwelt, Yoon is stretching the reader’s credulity in suggesting that changes in the science of taxonomy have anything much to do with it. No doubt, the fact that urban folk no long have any real contact with plants or animals is a more significant factor. And yet this is precisely her thesis. This is precisely the link that holds these two elements of the book together.

Regarding the rise of numerical taxonomy, for example, she remarks, “There was nowhere left now for our unwelt to hide. Subjectivity and the sense and intuition of the order of life—all the gifts of the umwelt—were being viewed not only as problematic for the doing of science but just plain wrong.”

A few pages further she suggests there may be a connection between new taxonomic methods and a broader change in the way people relate to nature: “It wasn’t just scientists who were stepping away from luxuriating in the sights, smells, and sounds of the living world. The rest of us were, too.”

To borrow an expression from the American South, “This dog won’t hunt.” The human umwelt, such as it is, has never been based on a formal or scholarly taxonomic system, Linnaean or otherwise. Rather, it has always been based, in so far as it refers to the natural world, on what urban academics typically refer to as woodcraft and folklore. I would be surprised to find that even one in a hundred adults from Western Europe or America has heard of Karl Linnaeus, not to mention those academics—Hennig, Sokal, and the rest—who, in recent decades, have significantly modified his system. We can be pretty sure that the children of Tzeltal Mayan families who, even today, know the names of 200 plants, didn’t learn them from a book. Thus Yoon’s repeated, and eventually tiresome, lament for the withering of the human umwelt sits very uneasily within the often fascinating history of modern taxonomy.

At one point near the end of the book, Yoon writes, “With the triumph of science, what traces of the umwelt can still be seen today?” The answer must be: “Modern science is our umwelt.” And for the most part, it’s a good one. It’s a bit surprising to find how little respect this New York Times science writer has for it. Nor does such a scientific umwelt preclude the more intuitive understanding of our natural surroundings that Yoon seems to see slipping away. As different species have different umwelts, so may different individual humans. If you take a walk in the woods with Eliot Porter, Gary Snyder, and David Koch, you will be exposed to three rather different umvelts, I suspect.

George Steiner's Poetry of Thought

Just one of those brilliant mornings that start out with a trip to the store for milk at 5:45. The staggeringly clear light transfuses the supermarket parking lot, reminding me of a similar early-morning scene years ago in Apache Junction, Arizona—without the cactus wrens.

Reading in the shade of the deck—George Steiner’s The Poetry of Thought. A new Steiner book is always cause for celebration…and dismay. But Steiner admits as much himself: “Thus Heraclitus both celebrates and wrestles with—all celebration is agonistic—the terrible power of language to deceive, to demean, to mock, to plunge deserved renown into the dark of oblivion.”

This is a typical example of Steiner-speak. Is all celebration really agonistic? (No) Does Heraclitus actually celebrate the power of language to deceive? (Where?) Steiner never misses an opportunity to cram every remark with subsidiary and often irrelevant or misleading allusions that often obscure rather than illuminate the points he’s trying to make. Meanwhile, he doesn’t present even a single remark attributed to Heraclitus himself to illustrate his point. How about this?

The Sun is the width of a man's foot.

Of Heraclitus he writes at another point: “He quarries language before it weakens into imagery, into eroded abstraction.” That's an insulting (and also an uncomprehending) thing to say about imagery. There is nothing abstract about poetry. That’s the point.

The very title of the book gives the game away. The Poetry of Thought? It should have occurred to the venerable polymath by now that poetry is a form of thought.

Yet we struggle forward, stimulated by the errors and more than occasionally intrigued by the references. And in his better moments, Steiner does seem to be trying to tease out the ways philosophers make use of metaphor in spite of themselves. This is an interesting subject and I’m sure a few insights will gurgle to the surface eventually through the many layers of Wittgensteinian child's-play.

I came across a remark recently in Roy Blount, Jr.'s Alphabet Juice that's ringing in my ears:

Except perhaps in mathematics, there is no such thing as entirely straight-forward, assumption-free reasoning. Language is always to some extent tendentious. This is what we have to work with. Think of words in terms of foodstuffs: whatever we cook up won’t be composed of pure nutrients: it will derive from odd life-forms that breathe underwater or grow in the ground. But we can use fresh, organic ingredients, we can wash contaminants off them, and we can avoid globbing them up with heavy batter and frying them in oils that clog our arteries. Actually, it’s a lot harder to do that with words than with trout or carrots, but it’s the goal for an honest writer to aspire to.

At 7, I was reading an article in the Star-Tribune online about a trout stream that’s being revitalized near the Mall of America, when Hilary suggested we take a morning walk through the neighborhood. Lots of brown beetles on the asphalt under the ash trees. June bugs I suppose. The sight of them reminded me of a passage in Witold Gombrowicz’s journals, but there’s no time to go into it here. Along the way we talked to a neighbor who had accidently killed off a large swath of grass with Round-Up and was trying to re-seed.


Back at the computer, I opened my design program and added a few new recipes to my ever-changing 24-page home cookbook (copies available on request)—Curried Chicken Quinoa, and Seaside Slaw from Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica.

By eight thirty I was tracking down some references to a book called Dynamics in Action; Intentional Behavior as a Complex System by Alicia Juarrero. I happened upon a 35-page abstract of the book in PDF format, which I downloaded but didn’t print out. (Ain’t computers great!)

Then it occurred to me suddenly that I ought to buy a copy of Gombrowicz’s journals, which have recently been re-translated.

Another pot of coffee. Now I’m thinking I ought to go down to Hopkins tonight to see the Transit of Venus. (What would Heraclitus have made of that?)

Summer Reading - Geoff Dyer’s Human Condition

At the age of twenty, Geoff Dyer conceived the ambition of emulating William Hazlitt, a man who had loitered his life away doing things that he enjoyed and then writing essays about them. To judge from the contents of this new collection of essays and reviews, during the last quarter-century Dyer has succeeded pretty well in doing just that. The editor of an earlier, slimmer collection had urged him to organize his scattered pieces into some sort of theme, but Dyer, on the contrary, was keen to emphasize how diverse and unrelated they were.

“If there was one thing I was proud of in my literary non-career it was the way that I had written so many different kinds of books: to assemble a collection of articles would be further proof of just how wayward my interests were.”

I think it’s fair to say, on the basis of this stout collection, that Dyer’s position as a "late-twentieth-century-early-twenty-first-century man of letters” is secure. Among the subjects under review are D. H. Lawrence; photographer Joel Sternfeld; Rebecca West’s rambling travelogue about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb, Gray Falcon; Rilke and Rodin; jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s career; Albert Camus’s Algeria; the Polish journalist-raconteur Rysard Kapuscinski; the literature produced about the invasion of Iraq; and an assortment of personal pieces about comic books, book-collecting, being an only child, and other such effluvia. In one penetrating piece, Dyer examines the widely-reviewed book by W. S. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, in light of Austrian heavyweight Thomas Bernhard’s personal memoir of the period, showing that many of the things Sebald claims Germans never talked about after the war, Bernhard actually did talk and write about.

For the most part, however, Dyer approaches his subjects in an engaged yet light-hearted, almost conversational way. His own restless personality can be felt throughout, though he usually steers clear of the flippant asides that make his shorter travel pieces (not included in this volume) so funny.

Is Otherwise Known as the Human Condition destined to become a classic of world literature? Perhaps not. Then again, how many essayists and reviewers have been granted ingress into that pantheon since Montaigne invented the genre? How many of us read Hazlitt nowadays?

I just now lifted my Centenary edition of Hazlitt’s Collected Essays from the shelf (Nonesuch Press, 1930) and immediately notice that whereas Hazlitt’s subjects are of a general nature—“Why Distant Objects Please,” “On Hot and Cold”—Dyer’s are almost invariably about particular writers or works of art. For now I’ll take Dyer’s collection. And I’ve found it far more mature and engaging than Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché (2001), for example. Dyer can’t quite match the vast erudition to be found in Anthony Burgess’s 600-page collection, But Do Blonds Prefer Gentlemen? (1986) Then again, who could? As Dyer remarks in another of his books: “That’s one of the things about traveling, one of the things you learn: many people in the world, even educated ones, don’t know much, and it doesn’t actually matter at all.”

Yet essayists need to know things. And Dyer knows his chosen subjects well—or well enough. When he doesn’t know something that seems important, he might simply say, “I forget.” Or “I should know that, but I don’t.” The approach is personal and candid, devoid of attempts to make definitive statements. Quite the contrary. In a recent interview he remarked, “I've always just been temperamentally disinclined from having this separation between ‘stuff you live with in your actual life’ and ‘stuff you study.’ ”

No doubt we’d learn more about European history and culture by reading Charles Rosen’s recently-published anthology, Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature, which has the same page-count as Dyer’s collection. But I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.

This juxtaposition of “old” culture and “lived” culture leads me on to a second comparison. In a small way, Dyer’s occasional writings might well be compared to Stendhal’s diaries. Like Stendhal, Dyer is a great enthusiast who enjoys a good party though he’s also prone to boredom, introspection, and love-affairs that sometimes take place largely inside his head. The observations are penetrating while the style occasionally teeters on the edge of “flighty.” A buoyant clarity keeps everything moving ahead. Perhaps some Charles Rosen of the future might write an essay about him?

In any case, Human Condition would be a perfect choice to take to the cabin or the beach. If you grow tired of reading about the Indian vocalist Ramamani, flip a few pages and we’re at a fashion show on the outskirts of Paris. What next?

Yellow-Billed Cuckoo, Minnesota-Style

I’ve seen a few cuckoos in my time. (What do they say: Takes one to know one?) The sightings have been so infrequent, however, that for the most part, I remember exactly where I saw each one.

• In the willows on the south side of the Luce Line, west of County 19.

• In the willows on the bank between the railroad tracks and the Mississippi at Reed’s Landing.

• On a branch above the little pond near the lower gate in Eloise Butler Wildflower Sanctuary.

• In a slough on the NW corner of Blueberry Lake in Webster County, Wisconsin.

• In a slough on the St. Croix near Oseola, Wisconsin, while canoeing with our nieces Liza and Sarah.

• In the underbrush by the Root River southwest of the open fields at Forestville State Park.

All of these were black-billed cuckoos, and all were perched.

Then, last spring, on the Natchez Trace, a few miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, I saw a yellow-billed cuckoo high up in a tree. I could clearly see its pearly-white breast and the double-row of white lozenge-shaped circles on its very long tail. “Oh, they have those birds down here!” I said to myself, a little joyously, presuming we’d see quite a few more in the course of our visit. But that was the only one we saw.

The cuckoo is a beautiful and exotic bird, and when I look off into swampy willows I often say to myself, “There could be a cuckoo down there,” fully aware that if there is, I probably won’t see the secretive creature.

But this morning, Hilary and I were birding with her folks at a county park on the Cannon River south of Miesville. It was mid-morning, the temperature was rising fast, but there was bird song everywhere.

A rowdy bunch was just putting their tubes into the river at the end of the road, a little ways downstream.

“Care to join us?” they shouted, with devil-may-care insouciance.

“Next time,” I shouted back.

Goldfinches and yellow warblers were zipping here and there, a red-bellied woodpecker was shrieking from the top of a dead tree. We picked up an indigo bunting, three rose-breasted grosbeaks in a merry group, phoebes, a red-eyed vireo. Then I saw something—a lithe, mid-sized bird—fly across the river. At first I thought it might have been a kestrel, though it wasn’t that bulky or determined in its flight. All at once it occurred to me—the thin frame, the very long tail—“That was a cuckoo.”

I had never seen a cuckoo in flight before. Wasn’t at all sure. It almost might have been a bird from the tropics, or an imaginary one from Green Mansions. It vanished into the foliage, but a minute later we heard its weird song again. It sounded to me like someone knocking two hollow coconuts together.

“I’m going to track him down,” I said.

“I think I saw him fly into those trees over there,” Hilary’s mother, Dorothy, said, pointing to a stand of mid-sized walnut trees at the edge of the forest.

I took a few steps forward across the grass, turned my attention in that direction, and began to scour the trees, slowly, branch by branch.

Then I saw it. Plain as day. White breast, yellow bill, huge eye. A very good sighting, side-on, unobstructed. Suddenly, as I watched, a second cuckoo appeared within my binoculars’ field of view and landed on top of the first one.

“I found them. Here they are. They’re mating!” I exclaimed. “See those two trees on the far side of the path. Bring your binoculars up through the foliage about 30 feet directly between them.”

Soon everyone had the bird in their field of view. Just then the second bird reappeared, landed on the back of the first once again, and fed it something. Then vanished once more. Wow!

We watched the first bird for a while, it occasionally flipped its tail upward almost to vertical. And I noted that though the bottom bill was bright yellow, the top bill was black. These are the kinds of details you look for, when you’re really not sure what you’re looking at.

But you also can’t help noticing how damned beautiful the thing is. One might almost say “demure.” A bird said to nest in Minnesota as far north as Mille Lacs, though you’ve never seen it before—at least not north of Jackson, Mississippi.

In the course of the day we saw thirty-seven bird species, ate lunch at The Tavern in Northfield (I had the duck), visited the huge Cambodian temple outside Hampton, and watched for half an hour as the Hampton Cardinals, already trailing 10-2, attempted to get a third out off the Miesville Mudhens. (Only later did I learn that the big draw of the day was that Hampton’s Joe Robinson—whoever that is—was letting people admire the new bling rims on his “pick-em-up” truck.)

But the sighting of the yellow-billed cuckoo—that made the day.

It might have made the summer.

Film Fest 3

As the film festival enters its third week, one might expect the fever to dissipate, the enthusiasm to wane, as a certain ennui descends on the scene. But no! Where else can you approach the ticket-taker and be greeted by the pleasant inquiry, “Women with Cows”? From what other event do you find yourself rushing home (from a matinee, no less), seizing a pitchfork from the garage, and scampering to the compost pile in the backyard to see what’s “cooking”?

No, the film festival never gets old.

And it’s not even that important to choose wisely among the hundreds of screenings. Even the most obscure entries are likely to be unlike anything you’ve seen before. Perhaps they more than any!

I found myself, last week, attending several films devoted to agricultural subjects. The best of the lot was Symphony of the Soil, a documentary that could hold its head high alongside that classic from the 1950s which many of us watched in grade school during the 1960s, Our Mr. Sun.

Where does soil come from? In the opening scenes we watch water trickle out from the base of a Norwegian glacier. The glacier has ground the rock into very fine dust, and as it drifts with the current it forms a luscious gray slurry—entirely mineral.

Eventually such stuff solidifies and attracts the attention of microbes, bacteria, lichens, and other stuff, most of which is too small to see. At that point the fascinating dance begins during which organisms extract what they need from the earth, die, and deposit organic material that accumulates, little by little, until something on the order of genuine soil is formed.

We watch people dig deep into Irish peat bogs and Hawaiian volcanic fields to find soils of various provenance and consistency, cradling the rich brown stuff in their hands with sensual delight.

There follows a sophisticated animated sequence explaining how plants emit chemicals to entice the microbes they favor into the soil, thus creating the environment they prefer for growth. Biologists explain how important nitrogen is to the soil, and describe how a particular set of plants—the legumes—have succeeded in capturing that often self-satisfied and inert chemical. Eventually we arrive at the point, following the bomb-making frenzy of WWII, where artificial fertilizers and Round-Up arrive on the scene. And we travel to India to experience, first-hand, the horrible legacy of the Green Revolution.

This is fascinating stuff. Not the perfect date movie, perhaps. But the thought crossed my mind on several occasions, “I’d like to see this again…I’ll bet Hilary would like it.”

Everyone loves forests, and lakes, and wildlife. Director Deborah Koons Garcia and her team have succeed in making soil itself an object of intrigue and affection and even reverence.

Near the end of the work some Biblical scholar—I don’t remember who—remarks that Adam and Eve, in the Hebrew, might just as well be called “earth” and “life.” His comments seem an appropriate wrap-up to all that has come before. The interchange between mineral and vegetable has taken on a poetic dimension, and as a result, I suspect those who view this film will never look at a piece of lichen in the same way ever again.

Slightly less engaging, perhaps, but certainly worth a look, is In Organic We Trust. Director Kip Pastor has asked, and answered, quite of few of the questions that face us every time we go to the grocery store. What does “organic” mean? Is it worth the money? There’s a cheery, Happy Days atmosphere to the film, as Kip marches up to the nation’s capital to grill the Department of Agriculture (they cancelled the meetings), or interrogates a member of the Hoover Institute (who gives some straight answers).

The best statistic from Symphony of the Soil was: “It takes 1,700 gallon of fresh water to make a gallon of ethanol.” The best statistic from In Organic We Trust was:“In 2010 there were more than 13,000 applications for “organic” certification. Only ten failed the test.”

But Pastor’s intent is not to pooh-pooh the organic food industry. His conclusions dove-tail nicely with those offered by the more scientific and cinematically sophisticated Symphony of the Soil.

And his film has a more practical bent, examining school lunch programs and urban farming initiatives, for example. Kip's graphics are charmingly crude. And both films end with more or less the same conclusion—stop growing so much corn! Stop eating so many hamburgers! Visit the farmer’s market more often. Try growing a few things yourself.

(Yes, but how many people who eat hamburgers or grow corn go to the farmer’s market, or for that matter, attend the Mpls. / St. Paul Int’l Film Festival?)

With the film Women with Cows, we get an inside look at a Swedish farm enterprise that’s totally detached from current debates about organic farm practices. Two sisters manage eleven cows on a farm bequeathed to them by their father. (Their mother died when they were infants.) Britt has become a hunchback, due to accidents with the cows. Yet she loves them and can’t think of any other life for herself than milking them. Her sister Erica hates the cows, hates to milk. She’s raised a family herself, yet she feels impelled to help keep the operation going for her sister’s sake.

It’s a character study, as much about cows as about people, perhaps. But it captures a certain dedication to the things a person has grown to love that outstrips many of the conventional romances we meet up with at the Cineplex. Flies and cats and cows and helpful neighbors abound. Lovely rural landscapes. Nettles and hay.

The Moon is Jewish examines the life of a young man who was once a Polish skinhead soccer fanatic, dedicated to brawling with black and Jews—not to mention fans of the opposing team—but later found out he was Jewish himself. He turns to Orthodox Judaism and applies the same intensity to that “calling” that he once exerted in the name of the home team.

But this film fails to deliver. The soccer fanaticism is only weakly portrayed. (And they never show any soccer!) And our hero’s newfound dedication to Hasidic Judaism seems shallow and only tangentially related to the humanity and compassion one tends to associate with religious conviction.

In short, our hero is a fascist, whether he’s beating up rival soccer fans or cleaning up a hotel restaurant kitchen seeking to meet the requirements of kosher operation. We leave the theater feeling that he likes his new “calling” because it allows him to boss around his wife and children the same way he used to attack fans of the opposing soccer team. Not good.

Meanwhile, Ub Lama offers an avenue of ingress into the lives of poor folk in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. The main character is 12 years old. He’s no good at school, and prefers to sell cigarettes in the local market. His father is dead, and his mother hopes he’ll be accepted as a lama at the local monastery. He listens to rap on TV, and is a pretty good break-dancer. Nothing much happens…Yes, but have you ever been to Ulaanbaatar?

Film Festival 2

Halfway through the film festival, we reach new heights.


Harbor of Hope
The Holocaust is a horrible thing, though half a century old now, and more. Harbor of Hope focuses on one of its more inspiring moments—the efforts of the Swedish Red Cross to bring 30,000 concentration camp internees from Germany to Malmö, Sweden, in the waning days of WWII, with the permission of the German government, who knew by that time that the jig was up.

The film makes good use of government film archives, but focuses on the relatively few passengers on those boats who are still alive and could be located. The director, Magnus Gertten, (who was present at the screening) made a few simple but effective decisions regarding the shape and content of the film—for example, of showing the faces of those speaking but not at the time when they were speaking—which resulted in a far more immediate and moving narrative than such documentaries usually offer.

Many were saved. We see them disembarking from the boats. We hear the voices of those who have being identified and recently located on the soundtrack: “Oh, look! There’s my mom. And there’s me!” I had a lump in my throat throughout most of the film.

One of the featured survivors, Joe Rosenberg, ended up in Minneapolis, and he was present at the screening. In the film he had remarked that he was “angry at God” for what had happened, and during the question-and-answer someone in the audience asked him if he was still angry.

After a moment’s hesitation he replied, “Yes.” Then he told us a story about how some of the men who had been saved were urging all the Jewish survivors at Malmö to get together and say a Kaddish for those who had died. The Kaddish, he explained to the goys in the audience, is a funereal expression of gratitude on the order of “May His great name be blessed forever, and to all eternity.” And Rosenberg replied, “No! How could you be praising the Lord for the death of all your relatives.”

We follow other survivors to South Africa or Poland. It’s a rich experience, setting a bourgeois yet powerful humanity against the dark shadows of Nazi atrocities.

West Wind: The Vision of Tom Thomson
Canadians with an aesthetic bent are very proud of the Group of Seven, or the Algonquin School, who painted the landscapes of the Canadian Shield during the early decades of the 20th century. Many of these artists were inspired by Tom Thomson, who developed a radical approach to painting in the years preceding the First World War.

West Wind tells the story of Thompson’s development as a painter and his frequent trips to the lakes, pine forests, and bogs of eastern North Ontario. The story is made more compelling by the fact that Thomson, a reticent individual, was likely murdered in 1917 on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park. The mystery has never been solved. It’s officially presumed that Thomson drowned, though he was an expert swimmer and canoeist. Several alternative scenarios are offered in the film, and a few even more interesting possibilities were offered during the Q & A with the director and the producer, who were both present at the screening.

The film details Thomson’s training at a business school in Seattle and his subsequent employment at a design firm in Toronto. It goes on to chronicle the influence of a exhibit of Scandinavian Impressionist and Art Nouveau paintings held in 1913 in Buffalo, NY, which convinced Thompson and his colleagues that they could fashion a similar school devoted to the unique beauties of the Canadian countryside.

When painting on location in north Ontario, Thomson used a small wooden sketch box to carry his oil paints, palette, and brushes. The resultant sketches were executed on bits of wooden planking. The best of them were later recreated on canvas. These painting on wood are usually small, and one of the great merits of the film is to enlarge them many-fold on the screen, where their radical beauty can be more fully appreciated.

A patriotic theme runs through the movie—Thompson is consider the “quintessential” Canadian artist. On the one hand, this might be considered odd, in so far as 75% of all Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border, and have probably never been to the bogs and lakes that Thompson and his admirers and successors depicted so dramatically. I suspect that more urban Minnesotans, with the BWCAW right in their backyard, have actually experienced such stuff than have Canadians. I could be wrong. But that’s why we came to the film.

Payback

Payback, reputed to be a documentary about debt, is in fact a rambling think-piece about crime, punishment, forgiveness and restitution, human and environmental degradation, capitalism, and social responsibility. It jumps back and forth from the mountains of Albania to the BP oil spill to the Florida tomato-fields, with repeat stops at an unnamed Canadian prison, an abandoned prison that seems to have been turned into a museum, and a university economics classroom.
Unlike such popular and compelling documentaries as Inside Job, An Inconvenient Truth, and Food, Inc., the theme of Payback is too ill-focused, and the shifts in scenery too frequent, to establish any sort of compelling argument or thesis. We return too often to a wealthy executive (and former convict) expounding fatuously on the Canadian system of justice, and in one segment a counselor of some kind—I never caught her name—who tries laboriously to explain that when the perpetrator of a crime is forgiven, it doesn’t mean that everything has returned to the pristine condition before the crime took place.

Theologian Karen Armstrong gives us a mini-lecture on the golden rule as described by Confucius. And Margaret Atwood, who wrote the book on which the film is based, appears again and again, delivering a lecture, typing on her laptop, crossing out a phrase on a typed document as she muses about what she’s written, reciting a tale about Ebenezer Scrooge, or “thinking out loud” in some other way that adds little to the punch of the film and sometimes all but insults the viewer’s intelligence.

In short, Payback is a perfect film festival entry. The mountains of Albania are spectacular and the rural life-ways we witness there is fascinating; the Gulf oil spill is gorgeous, seen on the big screen from the window of a helicopter; and the adroitness with which Latino migrant workers toss heavy buckets full of green tomatoes high into the air toward a slow-moving truck has to be seen to be believed.

As we struggle to identify and assay the unifying concept at work (there isn’t one) the individual stories begin to sink in, and we leave the theater frustrated at having been jerked around so haphazardly, but also convinced that we need more and better 1) drug rehabilitation programs for prison inmates; 2) labor laws; 3) environmental regulations; 4) documentaries about social conscience.
As for the Albanian blood-feuds, I’m not sure there’s much that we, or even the Canadians, can do about that.

Leaving
Absurdist farce may seem like just another tired and slightly irrelevant genre these days, alongside fey Noel Coward comedies and dour Ibsen melodramas. But how often do you get to see a film written and directed by the long-standing former president of a major European country?

Václav Havel is the brains behind this light-hearted work, which lends a little more weigh to remarks delivered by the protagonist on the order of: “Tony Blair once told me….”

The main character is a long-standing chancellor who’s just been voted out of office. The entire film takes place on the terrace in front of the government-owned villa that he fears he and his family will soon be required to leave. Our “hero” is surrounded by an entourage of loved ones, servants, and hangers on—especially the former advisor to a former advisor who mans the gate-house on the estate, announcing the arrival of journalists and photographers, rivals and friends.

There are bits of slapstick, chunks of arch political rhetoric, petty rivalries, some Shakespearean histrionics, a disco scene in the fountain, and a few surprise turns of plot, but the entire production seems more like an extended Laugh-In skit than The Rules of the Game. There is much to be enjoyed here, but little, in the end, to think about.

Shortly after being elected to the presidency of Czechoslovakia in 1990, Havel remarked in a speech he gave in Jerusalem:

I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to some quarry to break rocks. Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake.

At the end of Leaving,the former chancellor departs from his villa in a covered wagon piled high with trunks and furniture and driven by someone who might well be Gabby Hayes’s grandson. A fitting exit, perhaps, to a very unusual career. (Havel died shortly after completely the film.)


Argentinian Lessons
When we think of Argentina, we think of Buenos Aires first, perhaps, then Patagonia. This film takes us to the remote village of Azara, in the northeast part of the country, where the director, Wojciech Staroń, moved with his wife and son after she secured a two-year appointment teaching Polish there. Staroń, better known as a cinematographer than a director, got his camera out and shot footage of his son’s struggles to adjust to this new and strange locale. The film actually focuses less on seven-year-old Janel than on his new neighbor and friend, eleven-year-old Marcia, who lives in a large brick garage nearby with an antique car, her unstable mother, and several siblings.

Shot in 16-millimeter, and with very little dialogue, the film has the look and feel of a home movie, but Staroń, with twenty-some productions behind him, knows how to frame and cut a scene, drawing us into a dream-like environment of gravel roads, primitive houses and schools, flowing brooks, run-down vehicles, fields, sunshine, and the slow creep of time.

Marcia’s father has left town to work on a rice plantation, and much of the film deals with her attempts to raise money for the family by harvesting yerba maté, making bricks by hand, and setting up a kiosk near the highway to cater to passing traffic—of which there seems to be very little. Janel tags along, lending a hand, and even accompanies Marcia on a midnight rail trip to her father’s plantation.