Theater of the Absurd and cinema: Bunuel

Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel is a weird, short, social and political parable told in a quirky, even absurdist manner - not sure of the exact date (1960 or so) but you can clearly see the connecting lives between his cinematic work and near-contemporary theater of the absurd, esp Ionesco and Pirandello. As even those who haven't seen this film know, it's about a dinner party for some Spanish aristocrats - 20 or so guests gather for a midnight post-opera dinner - and find that, after the dinner, they are unable to leave the party - they're for some inexplicable reason trapped in the host's mansion, in fact in the dining all of the mansion. Before the dinner, most of the servants leave the estate rather than stay through the night serving the many courses - and they're told curtly that they shouldn't bother ever showing up for work again. Then we see the dinner party with his vapid and pretentious table talk, and a lot of under-the-table flirtation and assignation. We see, in short, that the ruling class is despicable and narcissistic - and of course they get what they deserve. It's unexplained why they can't leave, for days - but some kind of military or police rescue force gathers outside of the mansion - so the whole scene seems like a hostage situation. Throughout, I kept thinking about Ann Patchett's novel about the hostages in a Peruvian embassy, including a great opera singer as one of the guests - Bunuel must have influenced her, though her work lacks his absurdist humor. The absurdist qualities keep us from identifying with or feeling for the captured characters; the touches remind us that this is not in any way meant to be a literal, natural, or realistic drama. One example, a brown bear and a few sheep seem to wander at will through the mansion; the sheep get the last word, so to speak, as a few of them, the last frame of the film, bleat along a walkway and enter a church - about as literal a symbol as Bunuel ever created, skewering the flocks that follow the teachings of the church, especially in the class-bound dictatorship that ruled Spain in the 1960s.

A great compainion piece to 12 Years a Slave: Sansho the Bailiff

For those who can't imagine watch a b/w narrow-screen Japanese period piece from 1954, surprise yourself and check out Mizoguchi's unfortunately titled Sansho the Bailiff - unfortunately because the title conveys nothing of the movie's drama, themes, or emotions, which are abundant. What the hell's a bailiff, and Sansho's not even the main character, anyway. Story set in feudal Japan, a powerful leader refuses to pay tribute to the warlike emperor because his people are starving and they can't afford to give up resources - he's sent into exile. Sometime later, his wife sets off to re-join him, two young children in tow. The children are kidnapped and held for 10 years in slavery, in service to Sansho. Son escapes, through various ploys he rises to power in Japan, frees all the slaves in his province, then gives up his title, and finds his mother, near-blind, near-mad, aged and ruined, on an isolated island. That outline tells you that this is an epic, dramatic tale - but conveys nothing of the beautiful mood and sensibility - nor of the many powerful and beautiful sequences: the abduction of the children, as their mother gets hauled away by boat almost disappearing into the white sea; the celebration of the slaves upon their liberation, the final sequences of mother and son embracing on a seaweed-wracked beach. This film may remind many of the excellent Twelve Years a Slave; they make a good companion set - both about class, oppression, cruelty, the difficulty of opposing the barbarity of slavery. 12 Years is the more personal story - in Sansho the characters are less deeply developed, they're a little remote and we're not meant to truly identify with them. The actions are at times improbably and melodramatic - but this movie, as noted in its opening frames, is based on a folktale or legend and not meant to be taken quite literally. Yet it's one of those rare films that hold you start to finish, at 2 hours plus it didn't feel a moment too long.

Questions about the conclusion of The Killing

Obviously many spoilers here re the conclusion of the final (4th) season of The Killing: I don't think many fans of this series will be satisfied w/ the 4th season the core murder investigation is, as in the 3rd season, rather gory and preposterous, but I will say that the final 3 episodes really try to get at some aspects of the relationship between Linden and Holder, which is of course what's drawn us to this series in the first place. As they fight and turn on each other - under pressure of the investigation into Linden's execution of Lt. Skinner, the mass murderer, as the end of Season 3, we see some of the better writing and acting in the series; unfortunately, that's set against some of the crappiest writing and acting, which we see in their investigation of the Stansbury family murders and the hazing rituals as the military boarding school, a plot that we don't believe for a second and that makes little sense on examination. At its best, in the first 2 seasons that is, the series played of the Holder-Linden dialectic against an intriguing and far-reaching and for the most part realistic murder that stirred the Seattle community. The murder investigations went off the rails in the last 2 seasons, though, to the detriment of the show. Wondering what others think about the conclusion of the final season: Holder and Linden end in deep antagonism, and then we "flash forward" about 3 years and see that both have left the police force (I agree, how could they stay in after what they know and what's known about them?), Holder has broken off with what's her name his glass-of-water girlfriend but is a good single dad (yes, he loves kids and, yes, she was a total mismatch), and Linden has spent 3 years on the road - really? living how? doing what? That's not explained. She stops in Seattle to visit him, they briefly agree that their time driving around the city in her crappy car was the best time of all (echoes of Sentimental Education here? at least for me there were) and then she head off again on her solo journey - and honestly I thought it should have ended there but, no, the pressure of convention is just too great, and she comes back to him, they look at each other longingly, and embrace. Very sweet if it were an embrace as friends, but we're clearly meant to see that at long last each recognizes the rightness of their relationship - but how can we not know it will last about 10 days? that it will be all wrong? that it feels almost incestuous? No, she should be heading north to Alaska or something, not making yet another mistake and ruining what was good.

The Killing Season 4: What a falling otf

I am dutifully watching the final season, six episodes, of The Killing, but lamentably have to note what a falling off is there: the first two seasons were terrific, as Linden and Holder unravelled the complex case, Who killed Rosie Larsen? The 3rd season was not nearly as good as it went for a grotesque, sensational, and highly improbable case, as opposed to the original case which was, on the surface, more or a routine homicide that proved intriguingly complex and ambiguous as more facts emerged in each episode. The great thing about the first season was combined minimal and maximal approach: a lot of the focus was on the family of the victim, who at times were suspects themselves, and also on the politics of the city, as a mayoral candidate got caught up in the sweep of the investigation. And of course the developing relationship between Linden and Holder, made especially interesting in these two seasons as we never quite knew whether we could trust Holder. By the 3rd season, he was more rock solid and the two of them were like a thousand other buddy cops trying to solve a case. Few were satisfied with the wrapup of season 3, and that's where season 4 picks up, but the season never gets off the ground. L & H begin investigating another pretty gruesome case - the killing of an entire family save for the son who's at a military academy and immediately becomes a suspect. We know by now that the formula is to shuffle through a sequence of likely suspects, each one cleared in turn, until finally settling on someone we'd least suspect (or so they think - I figured out season 3 pretty quickly). The main element of the story (spoiler for those who haven't seen season 3) is L & H trying to conceal the fact that she executed Lt. Skinner at the end of season 4. There are so many loose ends to this plot element that it's not even worth analyzing or thinking about; I would say however, that episode 3 has a few fine moments centered on Holder, who, surprisingly, is beginning to crack under the pressure of concealing their crime - returning to drink and drugs, pretty much breaking up his relationship with a nice young woman (they seem a terrible mismatch, however), heading for the deep end. It's the personal stuff, not the baroque plotting, that can maybe save this final season of the series.

Fascinating story from start to finish: Finding Vivian Maier

As a work of cinema it breaks no new ground - and I really wish contemporary documentaries would give up on the idea of a pulsating, beat-driven musical score - but John Maloof's Finding Vivian Maier tells an incredibly fascinating story and is riveting from start to finish - constantly amazing us and provoking us with complex and unanswerable questions about a strange genius with a dark and mysterious personality. As all probably know, Maloof bought a cache of undeveloped negatives at a Chicago auction house - he was looking for some pictures of old-time Chicago for a history project he was working on - and found the photos he bought to be of extraordinary quality. He engaged in the research of a historical detective - he must have training in the field, as well as incredible drive, tenacity, and curiosity - and found that the photographer, Vivian Maier, was a complete amateur with no training - she worked for many years as a nanny in suburban Chicago. The film consists of interviews with the for whom she worked, the now-adult children in her charge, as well as some photographers and film historians. Maier shot thousands of frames - as well as some super 8 film - over the course of her life and never made any serious effort to show her work to anyone. Anyone looking at these knows right away that these are simply great photographs - and now they've been exhibited quite widely and she's gained or is gaining posthumous recognition as one of the great street photographers of the 20th century. It's incredible and shameful that nobody recognized this in her lifetime, but she just didn't have the connections - right school, right agent, right gallery, right friends - to get her work seen. She also was hindered by her very odd personality (actually, her oddity is probably what allowed her to approach people, often people in pain and suffering, and take beautiful photos) - she was clearly a victim of abuse, was distrustful and even hateful of men, was often cruel to the children in her care, later in life because a very serious hoarder - apparently a few people she worked for and with helped her out in the last years of her life (she died in 2009) but Maloof leaves this a little vague. She died in poverty, though, and her photos are now worth a lot of $ - Maloof quite frankly says he wishes he could share his bounty with her in some way. I think he has! One of the astonishing moments - maybe not surprising, when you think about it - is when he shows that he offered her collection to MOMA only to receive a form letter saying sorry not interested. Connections matter, I guess - be they wish now that they'd actually looked at what Maloof was offering. BTW I would not consider Maier an "outsider" artist; she was an outsider person, but her work is not outside of any tradition of unusual in itself - it is direct (as Maloof notes) in line with the great street photographers who were her contemporaries or predecessors - Arbus, Cartier-Bresson, et al.