King of the Ukrainian fiddlers

was, as I have just discovered, a man named Pawlo Humeniuk, a track of whose, “Urkainska weselia w Americzki” appears on the rather wonderful “Stranded in the USA“, released by the German Trikont label (my love of this label and the obscure yet utterly delightful music they release (klezmer, yodelling, Bavarian folk, disaster songs - browse their site to get an idea) cannot be put into words…)

Anyway, this is a collection of songs recorded by (mainly) European immigrants into the US in the early 20th century for the burgeoning ethnic music market - Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle” gives an insight into the world inhabited by these new Americans, and although the pride in Irishness has been subsumed by rampant hedonism, there are still many proud ethnic groups in the US who celebrate their native cultures (and in some cases act as a repository for traditions wiped out in their homelands by war/politics/modernity (delete as appropriate)) - and strangely, the clearest example I can think of at the moment is the first half an hour of “The Deer Hunter“, with an entire traditional (as far as I can tell) Rusyn wedding translated to late-1960’s Pennsylvania.

Anyway, I digress, this CD is, if you are at all interested in some of the more obscure roots of American popular music (beyond the clear blues and Irish folk that can be heard in traditional country music and all its descendants, including rock’n'roll), packed with Klezmer and Central European (both of which have recently had a renaissance amongst the young in London), but also Italian (in the style of the great crooners - and probably an influence on Sinatra et al), Austrian, Swiss, German, but most interestingly, Finnish. Finnish has never appeared to me (in the little of it I have ever seen written, or even less heard spoken) as the most musical of languages, apart of course from Fredi in 1976:

And yet they are musical, and even if understand less than a single word, there is a sense of yearning that the Finnish songs share with the ditties from the other supposedly more passionate and emotional ethnic groups. Gloomy, yes, but passionately gloomy (if such a thing is possible).

Finno-Ugricism

has been the flavour of the evening. ‘Leningrad cowboys go America‘ and now ‘Taxidermia‘. Oh and goulash for dinner from the Polish shop (does that count?).

Minging

headache today. Neither paracetamol nor hydration nor more sleep has helped clear it. A shame, really, as I was looking forward to watching Bornedal’s “Nightwatch“, a delightfully creepy thriller (remade in English with Ewan McGregor), that I was most taken with when I started at university in London. Hopefully it will stand up to re-viewing. This exchange from it is slightly entertaining:

Martin: You know what Hans Christian Andersen did? Every time he had masturbated he wrote a little X in his diary.

Jens: If I had written down an X every time I had masturbated, there wouldn’t be any pencils left in the whole wide world.

The Renegade Master

Back once again from Ashby de la Zouch and a visit to the National Forest - didn’t know we had one, but it is a far better way of reclaiming former collieries and other disused industrial sites than simply filling them with household waste…

So a couple of other quick things before I put the washing on and disappear out for the day to Southall to top up my sunburn and try to buy a shower curtain. March’s CD is done - post if you want a copy…. This month’s coffee is Yemeni, brought back by my dear nephews from the plantation itself near Sana’a following their recent sojourn there - I may be travelling there later in the year…

Oh yeah, Portsmouth beat Manchester United to throw the Premiership race wide open, and Tiger blew the US Masters. And I saw the last 30 minutes of Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of Christ’ - visually stunning, but far too Catholic altogether for my tastes. Although I would like to watch the whole film to see just how outrageous his portrayal of the other religious and racial groups is. I also had issues distinguishing it from ‘The Life of Brian’ at time, and frequently expected this kind of silliness to erupt:

Pan’s Labyrinth

is amazing. Please post any thoughts you have about it if you have seen it here. Let’s have a roundtable. And if you have not yet seen it, get yourself down to the video store pronto.

The Party and the Guests

has finally arrived from Second Run DVD - after repeated delays I finally managed to see the film banned forever by the Czechoslovak authorities in 1973. The film had been made in 1966, banned, released in 1968, and then, as I said, banned forever. Or until 1989 at the very least.

And not without reason, I might add. The film has a dark absurdism, rooted firmly in the very nature of Czechoslovak history, especially of the 1950’s and 1960’s, yet also drawing on literary works, both Czech (Kafka looms large over the film, especially the Trial and the Castle), and more international - Beckett and Ionesco would both have revelled in the situation the director dreams up for the protagonists. And yet as allegorical and playful as the film is, one cannot help but see the dark heart that beats just beneath the surface, as the various characters change their behaviour over the course of the film.

The film opens with an idyllic scene of the main characters, four men and three women, three couples and a charming single man, enjoying a picnic in forest clearing (standard Slavic romantic images of birches and meadows along with a sense of bourgeoisie calm) - they are going to a banquet/celebration/party (the word ’slavnosti’ is problematic to translate - similar to the German ‘Fest’) to be held nearby later. So, they eat, drink, and be merry.

They then dress up and head off to the party. As they walk up a path, they are accosted by a strange individual, Rudolf, who asks them numerous personal questions and refuses to leave them alone. As they try to leave him, a group of men appear from the woods and lead them off to a clearing.

The men form a perimeter, and a table and chair are set up at one end of the clearing. The seven guests stand before it, and the Rudolf sits down, holding a folder. He again questions them, and at the suggestion of the other men, they split themselves in to two groups, men and women, and stand in an area marked out as an enclosure. The single charming man engages with his interlocutor, whilst another falls silent, and a third tries to leave. He is grabbed by the thugs and beaten.

At this point, the host arrives and apologises profusely - Rudolf and the other men, it turns out are his adoptive son and other guests from the party.

At this point I need to head off to bed as I am still recovering from a cold, but more will follow tomorrow, hopefully with some images and maybe even a trailer. There is so much more to outline, before I even try to get started properly on analysing it…

I hate Almodovar.

There, I’ve said it. I should duck for cover now, I suppose. Volver is absolutely dreadful as a film. A waste of nearly 2 hours of my life. Clearly his Catholic homosexual oedipal complex has a great appeal for a great many people - not least the thousands of people who go to see his films each year, then buy them on DVD. He is number 8 in the 50 men who really understand women - as Penélope Cruz states: ‘Pedro loves women, he is very curious about the way we think, the way we feel. He finds us complicated and he likes that complication.’

No, he doesn’t - his women may be complex, but the complexity is an almost cartoon style, in which the most feminine traits are amplified to hyperreal proportions - his characters are as paperthin and as far removed from real women as the heroines of comic books, or silent films, or Dostoevskii novels. He paints them with poster colours, even the promotional material for the films echoes this. All About My Mother, Talk To Her and Bad Education all suggested to me that he was maturing as a filmmaker - despite the occasional lapses (absent transexual fathers, for example), all of these displayed psychological subtlety, but his latest effort has far more in common with his earlier films.

It is a tragic indictment of the Spanish film industry that he is the foremost director - many of the directors are still using the Civil War as a backdrop (even Pan’s Labyrinth), and therefore deal with this topic, no matter how tangentially. Where is the heir to Bunuel? Latin American cinema, despite a comparative lack of investment, produces far more interesting and engaging films. Most other European cinemas have overcome/are overcoming the effects of far more strict censorship and repression than Franco’s regime imposed and in a shorter period.

Building up

very slowly to watching ‘Satantango‘ by Bela Tarr (please excuse the lack of accents in both the titles and the director’s name, but my knowledge of the Hungarian keyboard and/or the html codes for these characters is somewhat non-existent).

Almost eight hours of Tarkovskii/Antonioni- influenced Central European gloom. This is the most readily available (in the UK at least) of the 24 most important films listed in The Cinema of Central Europe. It is seemingly a film composed of very long, static shots, a film in which very little happens.

How does one cope with this? I saw the Star Wars trilogy in a single 8-hour sitting as a six-year old (with breaks between each film), but that was about the single most exciting thing to have happened in my life up to that point. Andrei Rublev was intolerable in Petrozavodsk, yet I have watched it several times since with no overwhelming urge to either kill myself or to dig my way out of the room with my bare hands.

I suppose that watching it at home frees me somewhat from the necessity to watch it all in one sitting. I can get a drink, I can go to the loo. But will this impact on my perception of the film as a whole. If one leaves a shot of a muddy road in the rain and returns some 15 minutes later to what you believe to be the same shot, will my understanding of the film be compromised? Or simply any feelings of empathy I may feel to wards the protagonists’ predicament?

In certain ways, the same question(s) are raised when watching Sokurov, especially Days of Eclipse or his documentaries about Russians living on the peripheries of the former Soviet Union - his use of filters, long static shots and so on draw one into the tedium and apparent lengthening of even the shortest periods of time that the characters experience, as well as the oppressive nature their surroundings, be it the Central Asian desert, mountains, or even the confines of a submarine.

The difference between false memories and true ones

is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Salvador Dali

12.08 East of Bucharest raises a great many questions about the nature of memory and the different interpretations of a single event from the varying perspectives within and without it. In this case, the flight of the Ceaucescu’s in December 1989, and the question(s) of the varying degrees of involvement of individuals in the events in a provincial Romanian town.

I found this particulary interesting, not least because (I thought) the images of the dead President and his wife are one of my clearest memories of the collapse of the Communist regimes, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The question, however, for me, at least, is how much of this I have (re)created after the event - in fact, I m no longer even sure that the footage of the two dead bodies actually appeared on British TV, and I can’t find a copy on YouTube or anywhere else to check, and even if I did, I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t simply fulfilling the expectations I have having read about the footage in a number of other sources.

This period, or rather the UK media’s coverage of it, was one of the major influences that has fired (and, of course continues to fire) my passion for all parts of the former Soviet Bloc. So, dear readers, can any of you confirm, either way, whether or not the footage appeared on the Beeb?

Four good things today

1. Starting work on the two Russian translations I have at 8.30 this morning.
2. Wong Kei for dinner.
3. 12.08 East of Bucharest.
4. Mike Leigh in the next urinal at the cinema.