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Conversion of the Santa Maria do Bouro Convent into a State Inn, Amares, Portugal. Photo by Luis Ferreira Alves. |
[It] can be traced to the trauma of two world wars and the associated political barbarisms and intellectual nihilisms that caused those conflicts and flourished in their wake. It is not just that our young were lost but that they butchered each other as swathes of our philo-tyrannical intellectuals cheered them on ... morosité is also the result of the gulf that has opened up between mainstream politicians and voters in recent decades about three revolutionary changes: economic globalisation, political integration, and mass immigration. Each has unsettled citizens, melting into air all that was solid, but each has been placed beyond polite discussion by the political class and the mainstream media. Anxieties are routinely pathologised.
When did you know you were going to be a writer?
One day I noticed that I talked to myself. On the way to school, in winter, I saw the letters of my breath rise out of my mouth. When I arrived at my class, I tried to recreate that writing in the air. Those were the first poems I had published in a magazine.
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| (c) Todd Rosenberg |
Iceland is the Guest of Honor at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair and the website Fabulous Iceland is full of great info about the country and its literature and culture.In the case of Bozon and company, however, the “New Wave” analogy is arguably more apt, not only because they are a group of cinephile critics turned filmmakers, but because their work has been produced and distributed completely outside of the French studio system, under the auspices of a few maverick producers (in particular David Thion and Philippe Martin of the company Les Films Pelléas), and in at least one case (Jean-Charles Fitoussi’s 2008 magnum opus Je ne suis pas morte) entirely self-financed.And:
If Bozon, Ropert, and Fitoussi all bring varying degrees of whimsy to their work, Civeyrac could be considered the group’s tragic romanticist and Pierre Léon its brooding old Russian soul. All, if it isn’t already obvious, are devoted to narrative modes of storytelling in a way that runs counter to the verité fact/fiction hybrids and ethnographic minimalism that have become the dominant enthusiasms of international film festivals in recent years. And yet we are somehow still on the surface of these works, which are perhaps most striking for the uncommon sincerity and lack of postmodern snark with which they address such eternal dramatic questions as the nature of valor (Bozon), the possibility of true love (Fitoussi), and the existence of virtue in a corrupt society (Léon).
I believe in rules. I believe in artistic limitations, and I always have. I've always thought that setting out a set of rules before you start, and then being completely consistent with them, is the only way to make a really good film. These particular [Dogme] rules are austerity rules. They force you to deal with the storyline and the characters, and that's it. And I thought it was a real challenge in a positive way. There was a number of good films coming out from this set of rules.
The British Film Institute continues its retrospective of the French director's work with screenings of his later films from March 12th-28th. Meanwhile, the magazine of the Institute, Sight & Sound, features a cover story on Truffaut's "British Connection" in the March issue.Francois Truffaut followed up Jules and Jim (1962), one of his most critically acclaimed and popular films, with another love-triangle story, The Soft Skin (1964). Though it was poorly received upon release (and still often overlooked today), Truffaut’s fourth feature, about a married, middle-aged, celebrated literary critic who has an affair with a flight attendant in her twenties, stands as one of his most emotionally sophisticated, thanks largely to the performance of Françoise Dorléac as the object of desire.
... Margarita K. and I discovered we had much in common. She, too, then left for Paris to join her mother, and on her return shyly showed me a large notebook in which, in her characteristic childlike scrawl, were a dozen or so pieces of writing, some just one paragraph or two long, others a little longer. I was stunned by their power as well as their unique form. I told her they were brilliant and that if she continued to write more, they could be turned into a book. She was incredulous at first, but was eventually convinced, and applied herself to the task. I undertook to translate each one after she wrote it, and would do my best to find a publisher in the US. Any consideration of publishing them in Greece was out of the question a) because they would have to be approved by the stupid, prurient military censor, and b) because writers in Greece had determined, following the example of Nobel Laureate George Seferis, not to publish their work in Greece while the country remained subjugated by the military junta.
Thus began our two-year collaboration on what became Kassandra and the Wolf. I myself had suggested the name Kassandra for the child-heroine, which she readily agreed to adopt, but she rejected my suggestion of a title—The Hour of the Wolf—although the phrase does come up, trenchantly, in one of the vignettes. Of course, in our discussions during the process of her writing, her opinion (when we disagreed) prevailed.
McEwan of course, like The Hitch and Dawkins, is an avowed atheist and when we talk about the Christian belief in an afterlife he says: “Do you think they really believe it? I’ve been to funerals where I was pretty sure the majority were atheists and they listened to the vicar say that the deceased had gone to a better place and everyone’s toes curled.
“We can’t prove it’s not so, but the chances that it is are rather meagre. If they did believe you all meet up again in this big theme park in the sky why were they crying? How can you say you believe in the afterlife and weep at the finality of death?”
Mastroianni Day [Exp–Adj]: in accordance with the universal lexicon, a day is deemed to be “Mastroianni” (from Marcello, Italian actor, 1924–96) when spent merrily sauntering about in the company of beautiful women, blown along by the whim of circumstance, devoid of any sense of purpose. The classic “Mastroianni Day” requires a three-piece suit, dark sunglasses, and, preferably, a hat. Some lexicographers would also include compulsive self-adulation, the drinking of dry martinis and/or gin and tonics, shallow metaphysical crises, betting on horses, mixing in unfamiliar circles, and attending parties uninvited.
Even in his final years, with his (partially realized) dream of building an opera village in Burkina Faso—an enterprise that was at first announced as a vague form of European reparations to Africa but turned out to be some kind of social project or adventure—he was toying with the idea of healing the world through art, though his notion of this was closer to Albert Ayler’s than to Wagner’s. At the same time, he could not stick to any one solution to the problem of how to produce art that would speak to an environment of commodified mass culture. The disavowal of his own projects was not only a constant in his practice but also precisely the characteristic that allowed him to become the voice of his generation: inordinately boasting, deploying all the aplomb that might be mustered by a boy whose parents always listened reverently when he spoke—only, in the very next moment, to despair over this primal scene of individual subjectivity. This might well be the biographical core that he acted out with more virtuosity, energy, insistence, and sheer effrontery than any of his artistic contemporaries.
In Absinthe 14 (Autumn 2010), my Shout from Copenhagen, “A Visit to Hunger 120 Years Later” was carried on pages 81-2. I had written the column shortly after having viewed, for perhaps the tenth time, Henning Carlsen’s 1966 film version of Knut Hamsun’s extraordinary novel from the late 19th century, Hunger. Particularly striking about Carlsen’s film was the magical performance of Per Oscarsson, the Swedish actor who played the starving character from the novel and who also played in the more recent film versions of the very popular Stieg Larsson books..
A tragic and macabre footnote to this tale of a visit to a book inspired by the capital city of Norway: On December 30th, 2010, at the age of 83, Oscarsson burned to death with his wife in their isolated home in the Swedish countryside. The wind was so violent that night that it blew away the smoke which might otherwise have awakened Oscarsson and his wife. The house burnt so completely that nothing was left standing but the chimney, and the authorities had to sift through the ash for days before finding remains of the Oscarssons.
Oscarsson's masterful performance from 1966 lives on.
Greetings from the ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)
