Wagner's Ring - Turning the Sky Around

“Hello everyone.  I’m C Sanchez-Garcia, and I’m a Ringhead.”

“Hi C Sanchez-Garcia.  Have you rehabilitated yourself?”

Adolf Hitler was a Ringhead.  Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead are Ringheads.  They come out of the woodwork like garden gnomes whenever Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungun operas are performed. 

I became obsessed with this opera cycle a few months ago when I heard a portion of it on Werner Herzog’s version of “Nosferatu”.  Since then I’ve been wondering what it is that can make this story get under someone’s skin so strongly.  I believe it comes from the pull of mythical archetypes.  I think stories like this speak to some deeper level beyond our reach.

This is what happens more or less -  

There are four operas, Wagner thought of them as a trilogy and a prequel, though he would not have used those terms.  The story is based on the ancient pantheon of Germanic and Nordic gods, lately familiar to Marvel comics fans and movie goers. 

The prequel is “Das Rheingold” which begins inauspiciously with a poor devil of a dwarf named Alberich, chief of a tribe called The Nibelungs and three sexy mermaids called “Rhine Maidens” or “Rhine Daughters”.  At the bottom of the Rhine River the mermaids guard the “Rheingold”, a small pile of gold with a cosmic secret.   Alberich lusts for the Rhine Maidens, flirts with them, makes a serious grab at them one by one but he is way out of his league.   They tease him pretending each to have fallen in love with him on first sight and take turns humiliating him, crushing his heart and generally busting his balls beyond endurance.  Afterward they carelessly chatter the secret of the Rheingold – whoever  curses love and fashions a ring from it will rule the world.  That’s what you get for entrusting this kind of thing to bimbos.  By this time poor Alberich is perfectly ready to curse love; he  up and steals the gold and makes from it a magical ring of power.  During the next three operas “The Valkyrie”, “Siegfried” and “Gotterdammerung” the cursed ring passes through three generations of Gods and mortals bringing destruction and betrayal in its wake and ultimately leading to the downfall of the gods and the beginning of a new world of mortal men and women based on love instead of law.  This marathon musical experience is a good seventeen and half hours long and it has the power to change your head. 

Love versus power is a theme that runs through the opera cycle.  It becomes a kind of zero-sum game where you can have one or the other but not both equally.  Those who acquire ultimate power must renounce love, a theme that resounds through great literature and movie making like “Macbeth” and the “Godfather”.

In Jungian dream study, a dwarf is to the unconscious a symbol of stunted psychic growth.  The waters of the Rhine are the unconscious itself, the primal collective consciousness from which individuation emerges.  The Rhine Maidens are the voices of our instinctual nature, the sexual guardians of the Rheingold.  The Rheingold, hidden at the bottom of the dark waters of the unconscious is the spark of individuated self-aware consciousness.  When Alberich steals the Rheingold, he is Prometheus stealing fire from the gods themselves, consciousness emerging  defiantly from the pool of animal nature which is instinctual and unaware.  The Rheingold is the manifestation of the Self.  The violent birth from the waters of the mother womb of consciousness.

He has renounced love for power which gives him the magic to make a ring from the gold.  He abuses the other Nibelungs  to amass vast wealth for himself alone with which he hopes to raise an army to overthrow the rule of the Gods and make himself lord of the world. 

The other great player in the story is Wotan, as he is called in German, but also known as Odin, the all father of the gods of the air.  Valhalla has been built for him by two giants, Fafner and Fasolt who have demanded Freya, goddess of sex and youth in return.  Without her the gods immediately began to age and weaken as their great life force is possessed by the giants grip.  Loge, god of fire, advises Wotan to steal Alberich's gold as well as the Ring and offer to the gold to the giants in ransom for Freya.Sex has always been associated with youthful vitality in many belief systems, and with spirituality itself.  Though a minor character in the story, without Freya’s function of youth and sexual vitality the gods will wither and quickly age.  

Loge and Wotan journey underground, find Alberich, deceive and bind him and bring him up to Valhalla as their prisoner.  Wotan orders Alberich to give him the Nibelung's hoard to pay the giants in return for his freedom.  When Alberich refuses to part with the ring , Wotan attacks him and wrenches the ring by violence from Alberich’s hand, becoming himself a thief.  But not before Alberich places a mighty curse on the ring that it will bring death and despair to whoever owns it and envy to all who see it.  It is as though he has placed a curse on free will itself.

The giants demand the ring in addition to the gold and Wotan refuses.  Erda, the goddess of mother earth (are you counting? That’s all four elements now) appears ghost like and advises Wotan to let the ring go and then predicts the decline and fall of the gods.  All things must end, says Erda.  Wotan gives the ring to the giants and Freya is returned.

The giants are symbols as well, of strength without imagination.  Fafner kills Fasolt and keeps the hoard and the ring for himself.  He spends the rest of his days as a dragon, sitting inertly on the gold, possessing wealth and power but no plan what to do with it until he is finally killed in the third opera, “Siegfried”.  The gold, and his fear of letting go of it has trapped him into an empty life without purpose.

In the next play, we meet the daughters of Wotan and Erda – the Valkyries, warrior maidens who bring fallen heroes to Valhalla to stock Wotan’s army against the rise of Alberich.  The Valkyries laugh over the death of the slain they collect from battlefields, they are beings entirely without empathy for the dead.  But Wotan has lost something of his own soul, ruling only by cold laws and contracts carved on a spear shaft.  When his Valkyrie daughter Brunhilde comes to warn Siegmund, Wotan’s mortal son, that he must fall in battle but will go to paradise in Valhalla, Siegmund refuses because he will not chose Heaven if it means leaving his great love Sieglinde behind.  For Brunhilde this refusal of paradise stirs a powerful psychic epiphany and she discovers her own spiritual awakening through Siegmund’s compassion.  She is fully human.  She has discovered love.  Her own moral awakening and compassion inspires her to rebel against her father’s will.  She has acquired individuation, independence and passion and is no longer fit to be a god.  She is disowned by Wotan and her sister Valkyries and cursed to live life as a mortal woman as the price of discovering her humanity.  

In the third opera we meet Wotan’s grandson, Siegfried, the child of Siegmund who has been raised in solitude by a dwarf named Mime in hopes of using Siegfried as a tool to acquire the Ring of Power.  He is a morally vacuous and egocentric hero, who is brave because he is unaware of fear and unaware of the feelings of others.  Up until the moment he meets Wotan he has only met two other people and killed them both.

Clinically a sociopath, his purity and bravery are the product of his psychic stuntedness, having been raised without parents or the company of others.   Wotan seeks him out in disguise with a grandfatherly affection, but Siegfried's personality so enrages him that within minutes they are in combat.  Using the sword of his mortal father - a phallic symbol - Siegfried breaks Wotan's spear ending his power.  Defeated, Wotan departs and Siegfried finds Brunhilde in an enchanted sleep on a rock surrounded by Loge's fire, a flame so fierce only a fearless hero can pass through it.  When he awakens Brunhilde from her virginal sleep and sees a woman for the first time he has his first taste of fear and wonder with his awakening sexuality.  The emotional and sexual collision  between this pair of strange virgins is almost brutal in its intensity and is one of the great romantic scenes in all of operatic drama.

Ultimately he betrays Brunhilde and Brunhilde exacts revenge on him resulting in his murder.  In the final scene of the final opera, Christ-like she throws herself on Siegfried’s funeral pyre while wearing the Ring.  The flames flare to the clouds and consume Valhalla and all the gods.  Suddenly the Rhine river swells in a surge quenching the flames and the Rhine Maidens appear and snatch back the Ring of power from the charred hand of Brunhilde, the image of consciousness and rebirth and bring it back to the dark depths of the unconscious. 

The archetypal symbols of the Ring of the Nebelung are the story of the journey of consciousness to self realization and the creation of the world itself.  There is no story I know of that covers so many universal  themes in its course.

 We don’t think of it that way when we listen, but a deeper part of us recognizes it’s own language of symbols and images.  The Rhine Maidens sing to the waters within us.  I think this is what religion does for many people, it has a way of invoking in images and stories what cannot be simply said in words.  I think this is what must be at the highest level of story telling,

The Dickens with words

I’ve always loved reading. Since I started writing it seems I read even more—the printed word is in my sight every spare hour I have—and oh, how marvelous some of those words are. Words, phrases and sentences I wish I had written —wish I could write!

When I think of the consummate writer I think of Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol. I can practically quote the entire book, page by page, I’ve read it so many times in so many various editions and seen every movie adaptation.

One of my favourite lines is when Scrooge is addressing Marlowe’s ghost —"You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

  

More of gravy than of grave…how marvelous, and Dickens description of Scrooge at the beginning of the story is so spot on, and at the same time so eloquent—

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.

Had I been describing him it would have been more like— He’s a rotten old miser with bad breath. Hasn’t quite the same ring to it, has it?

Some years ago a talented friend of mine wrote a musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac. I hadn’t read the book so off I went to the library to catch up. Remember those days? Libraries instead of the internet. After reading the first few pages I was hooked on Rostand’s powerful prose. Here’s an example….I had to look this up in my copy to get the exact words and almost couldn’t put it down again!

“And what is a kiss, specifically? A pledge properly sealed, a promise seasoned to taste, a vow stamped with the immediacy of a lip, a rosy circle drawn around the verb 'to love.' A kiss is a message too intimate for the ear, infinity captured in the bee's brief visit to a flower, secular communication with an aftertaste of heaven, the pulse rising from the heart to utter its name on a lover's lip: 'Forever.'”

That last bit —the pulse rising from the heart to utter its name on a lover’s lip—I mean, jeez why can’t I dream up stuff like this? Well, I’ve always got my vampires and their sometimes archaic way of speaking to play with I suppose. But I’m certainly not going to hold up an example to compare with Cyrano’s ‘What is a kiss?’ Not that silly.

Other than the classics I love mysteries. Lisabet wrote about Janet Evanovich. I like her too, along with Sue Grafton and P.D. James. I first caught up with Baroness James—fancy that!—when she wrote Death Comes to Pemberley. I really admire the way she took on what is almost a sequel to Pride and Prejudice and gave the characters new life. Darcy becomes more human, Wickham an even bigger arse and there’s this lovely line from Darcy’s nasty auntie—

“I have never approved of protracted dying. It is an affectation in the aristocracy; in the lower classes it is merely an excuse for avoiding work.”

 
Somewhere I read this, from Isabelle Allende, of all people—“In erotica you use a feather, in pornography you use the whole chicken.” Love that, and I like to think that I use a featherlike touch when I write gay erotica. The raunch might be there, but there’s also the kiss that  rises from the heart and whispers "Forever."

The Re-education of an Elitist Snob

By Lisabet Sarai

Literary erotica is a niche genre. Even the most renowned authors in this genre are virtually unknown outside that small circle of aficionados for whom the manner of expression matters as much as the mechanisms of coupling described. Secretly, we erotica writers may dream of seducing millions of readers with our tales, but most of us recognize the tiny likelihood that this will ever occur.

However, it appears that the world's indifference to my writing has turned me into something of a snob.

I care deeply about language. When I read, an author's ability to fashion graceful and evocative prose is as important to me as the plot or the characters. Perhaps as a consequence of my own focus on literary craft, I'm frequently disappointed by the quality of the writing in the books I read. As I've become more aware of my own strengths and weaknesses as an author, the foibles of others have become painfully obvious.

There's nothing wrong with being a discriminating reader. However, I recently realized that I've come to expect an inverse relationship between mass popularity and literary quality. This elitist attitude is partially supported by examples such as the Trilogy That Shall Not Be Named, but a bit of soul-searching reveals that sour grapes plays a role too. I write well (I believe) but my books remain obscure. Ergo, quality writing must be the antithesis of popular success. According to this logic, best sellers, especially best selling series, enjoy a huge market because they're poorly written. They stick to stereotypes, follow formulas, fulfill expectations, and employ simple language that doesn't tax their readers too much. If I were willing to compromise on quality for the sake of popularity (I tell myself sometimes), I could send my books to the top of the New York Times list.

Some recent reading, though, has convinced me that this is a fallacy. Several months ago, my husband and I bought a new load of used books at a library sale. When DH showed me his selections, I'm sure my eyebrows shot up. His stack included several titles by Janet Evanovich, creator of best selling Stephanie Plum mystery series: One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly... you get the idea, right? At this point, she's up to number twenty. We bought number five (High Five) and number eighteen (Explosive Eighteen). DH dove right into both novels, and obviously found them entertaining, but I was skeptical. How could anyone so popular be any good?

I resisted for quite a while, but one evening when I was too tired to tackle any of the more “serious” titles I'd been working on, I picked up High Five. In ten minutes I was laughing out loud. In twenty I was apologizing to my husband for impugning his taste. High Five might not be the great American novel, but it is a near-masterpiece of craft.

Ms. Evanovich's characters are quirky (to the point of being bizarre) and yet totally believable. They inhabit the ethnically mixed neighborhoods of Trenton, New Jersey, a place I've never visited but which felt concrete and plausible despite the outrageous events that take place there. Stephanie – twenty-something native of Trenton, a perennially broke lingerie salesgirl turned bail bounty hunter – jumps off the pages. Her wry, self-deprecating first person narrative draws you into her world of unpaid bills and doughnut dinners, car bombs and church bingo, smothering family and sexy guys with hidden agendas.

What I admired most about the book, though, was the dialogue. I'd consider selling my soul to be able to create such vivid, lively, hilarious conversations. Ms. Evanovich has an expert grasp of dialect as well as an enviable capability for giving each speaker a totally distinctive voice. More than once I had to stop and share some snippet with my husband, full of admiration – even though he'd already read the book, had in fact been the one who chose it over my reservations. He very generously refrained from gloating.

By the time I'd finished, I had to admit it: popular, mass-market fiction though it might be, High Five showed signs of true artistry, albeit employed for the sole purpose of entertainment. My elitist beliefs had been crushed. I can't dismiss best selling authors purely because of their success. They may write as well, or better, than I do. Genre and market do not pre-determine quality. And I can't use a focus on craft as an excuse for my own poor sales, either.

It's a bit of a hard lesson, but hopefully one I won't forget. After all, there are a lot of books out there that I might not have considered reading previously – but that I now understand might be worth a try.

Love and War

by Jean Roberta

Movies have been described as a modern version of opera. They have everything: costumes, sets, music, drama, sometimes choreography. As a child, I was lucky to be taken to watch live musicals even before I started school, and I’ve always been attracted to big shows, the ones that resemble operas.

Two movies about war and star-crossed love (those standard subjects of opera) linger in my memory.

I heard the soundtrack of West Side Story long before I saw the movie. In 1962-63, I was in sixth grade in California, where my academic father was writing his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University. I had a glamorous teacher who looked like Elizabeth Taylor and who had avant-garde taste, which she demonstrated by playing the vinyl record of West Side Story (“Maria!” “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way”) during free time in school. My parents were avant-garde too, which is clearly why they didn’t complain about a teacher who exposed their innocent child to a musical about juvenile delinquents. I knew that my mother had grown up in Manhattan, but I was sure her life was nothing like the plot that was suggested by the music on the record.

Years later, I watched the movie, made in 1961 and based on a hit Broadway musical which, in turn, was an Americanized version of Romeo and Juliet. I was riveted. By the time I saw Natalie Wood playing Maria on the screen (“When love comes so strong, there is no right or wrong”) she had already died under mysterious circumstances. The creepiness of the star’s actual tragic death enabled me to forgive her for not being a very convincing Puerto Rican on-screen. (Maria is supposed to be fresh off the boat from Puerto Rico and still thinking in Spanish.) The luminous, hopeful quality of the two stars as lovers is heartbreaking against a background of gang warfare.

Bear in mind that when the movie was made, the Civil Rights movement hadn’t yet made much of a dent in American racial/ethnic segregation. By the standards of the time, the love affair of Tony (a white boy who is not exactly WASP) and Maria is interracial. And urban violence is the context in which the lovers meet and recklessly dream about a wedding. Teenage boys with switchblades and brylcreemed hair are the stars of this show. They wear jeans (not allowed in public schools at that time), while their girlfriends sashay up to them in outfits that would induce hissy fits in every school administrator in the nation. There was nothing I couldn’t love about this movie, except maybe the polarized gender roles and intense heterosexuality presented as Fate, but those features were part of the Shakespeare tragedy on which the plot was based.

Then I met my Spouse, a Latina from Chile. We both joined the local queer choir (part of an international network); actually Spouse has been musical all her life, spawn of a musical culture, so I felt she was born to sing, while I was there to keep her company and support the soloists by singing harmony. When the choir did a medley from West Side Story, I was chosen to do a very brief solo: “Maria!” (spoken in the voice of lovesick Tony, gazing up at Maria’s fire escape). This is the introduction to the song of the same name, in which Tony (represented by the whole choir) serenades the girl of his dreams. Spouse and I had both been fond of the movie before that time, but since we actually sang the music together in public, it has seemed like part of the soundtrack of our relationship.

And then an epic movie about actual war came to the local Film Classification Board in 1995. By then, I was privileged to be part of a small board of citizens whose job was to watch brand-new Hollywood movies that arrived at our basement screening room in cans. (Only one member of our board knew how to run the ancient projector that constantly threatened to burn up the celluloid with an open flame.) We took notes, discussed what we saw and voted on a classification (General, Parental Guidance, Parental Accompaniment or Restricted) which then became law throughout the province of Saskatchewan. Our ultimate boss was the Minister of Justice.

When I learned that on my next shift, I was assigned to watch Braveheart, featuring Mel Gibson in a kilt, playing fourteenth-century Scottish hero William Wallace, I told my family. Spouse and I were still raising all three of our kids: her two sons and my daughter. Youngest Stepson, at age 14, was more excited by my news than by the release of a new video game. He desperately wanted to come to the basement screening room with me, and see Braveheart before any of his friends. Please, please, please, he said.

So Spouse and I brought Stepson to the very first screening of that movie in our neck of the woods. The head of the Film Board was not impressed that I brought such a young family member, considering the amount of onscreen violence. Technically, though, the film had not been rated yet when we all watched it, so the presence of Stepson didn’t violate any laws.

Gratuitous violence in movies generally turns me off, but anything that might encourage young people to study history usually overrides my aversion to blood. The scenes of late-medieval warfare with shields, bows and arrows in Braveheart are spectacular. And the hero (as distinct from the actor) is irresistible: a Man of the People, but fluent in Latin as well as several more current languages. (He actually delivers lines in non-English words, with subtitles.) The significance of the Scots as underdogs was not lost on Stepson, the son of two political refugees in Canada.

And then there is the French princess, played by Sophie Marceau, who has been imported to the English court as a bride for the king’s son and a means of continuing the line of succession (the time-honoured role of princesses). It was heartening to see her admiration for Wallace, a fellow-outsider, and to watch her play her trump card after Wallace has been condemned to death. As the king lies dying, she whispers in his ear that she carries in her womb a child that is not of his line. Checkmate!

Even though I was watching in an official capacity, it felt like a family date night. Stepson asked me questions about the actual history behind the movie which encouraged me to think he might grow up to be an intellectual who would make all his parents proud. For weeks afterward, he seemed like a vicarious Scottish nationalist with an interest in claymores.

In my mind, I won several imaginary arguments with lesbian-feminist friends who seemed to disapprove of: 1) movies about war, 2) Mel Gibson, 3) sons in general, including stepsons (a child who is not of my line, but mine by choice), and 4) popular culture as a bad influence on the young. Hell yes, I thought, I watch epics about patriarchal bloodshed and intrigue, and expose my loved ones to such stuff. I also teach the literature of the past. Bring it on.

There is nothing like an ambitious movie to take me out of my everyday life while showing me that the most over-the-top spectacles can serve as metaphors for things I’ve seen in real life.
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Off the Beaten Path: Documentaries

by Amanda Earl

I am a fan of documentaries, not outright docugandas but specifically those which portray  unusual or obscure people or tell us something about well-known artists we might not have known. I am chiefly fascinated with these phenomena: the force of the imagination and what drives people,  how they live their lives, how they survive great tragedy and carry on, the passion and inspiration of artists to create. Imagination and people are the central preoccupations of my creative work.

Here are some documentaries or documentary series that have stood out for me over the years.

1. Michael Apted's  "Up Series," 1964 to present

In 1964 Apted began this series in which he follows the lives of fourteen British children every seven years. The premise of the series is "Give me a child until he is seven and I'll show you the man." Francis Xavier.  The series deals with this as a hypothesis of Britain's class structure with Apted interviewing the subjects every seven years. The series is now up to 56 and I've been fascinated from the first program, which I saw in the 90s. The subjects undergo major life changes. Neil for example goes from being a very imaginative child to a sullen, taciturn 21-year old who lives in a squat and then later becomes a politician.

2. Agnès Varda's  "Les glaneurs et la glaneuse" (the Gleaners & I), 2000

Varda was one of the few women members of the French Nouvelle Vague Cinema. This documentary deals with the resurgence of gleaning in France, that is picking up the remains of the harvest. Economic difficulties in the 21st C. have led to this resurgence. But while Varda shows the various harvesters of vegetables, grapes etc in action, she also extends the idea to those who salvage old junk and turn it into art. She uses the opportunity to make connections with her own work, with the ways in which she has gleaned subjects for her films.  In some ways, this is very much like the Up Series in that it is about people attempting to surmount horrendous obstacles, but it is also about art, the inspirations for it, the waste of food and objects that occurs every day and the way we choose to interact with our world.

3.  Jessica Yu's "Henry Darger In the Realms of the Unreal," 2004

Darger was a reclusive writer and artist living in Chicago who died in 1973. After his death, it was discovered that his apartment was full of art that he'd created. This 2004 documentary talks about Darger and his art. His work is considered to be part of what is referred to as "Outsider Art" or "Art Brut" for the work of self-taught artists. What is amazing about Darger's work is that it is incredibly imaginative and bountiful. "In the Realms of the Unreal" is a huge opus with over 15,000 pages of water-colour illustrations and writings, mostly about an invented group of young girls called "the Vivian Girls."

4. Agnieszka Piotrowska's "Married to the Eiffel Tower," 2008

This film is about object fetishists or objectum sexuals, women who feel sexual desire and romantic love for objects…from roller coasters to the Berlin Wall to the Eiffel Tower. The topic  is treated by Piotrowska very sensitively through in-depth interviews with the subjects.

Honourable Mentions

"A Lady's Guide To Brothels" is a documentary about the attempts of  Britian's Hamshire Women's Institute to get prostitution legalized.

"Be Here To Love Me" about the amazing but troubled singer songwriter Townes Van Zandt.

"Love Shines" about Canadian musician Ron Sexsmith's journey with his Bob Rock produced album "Long Player, Late Bloomer."

"Lou Reed's Berlin: Live at St.  Ann's Warehouse," a film by Julian Schnabel, is the live performance of the album in Brooklyn, New York, 33 years after its release.

"Woodstock" about the big outdoor music festival in the 70s.

"Dont Look Back," a rokumentary about Bob Dylan's 1965 concert tour in the UK.

"Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey" about the strange life of the creator of this ghostly instrument.

"Grey Gardens" about former socialites living in a rundown mansion with their cats. Various adaptations were made, including a musical and an HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore.

"Hoop Dreams" about inner-city kids and their attempt to rise from poverty through basketball.

"Dream Tower" about Rochdale College, a combo of university and student residence in Toronto in the 60s where rogues, drug enthusiasts, intellectuals and free thinkers hung out.

Simon Sharma's "Power of Art" Series, especially the Mark Rothko episode.

"Rivers and Tides," a portrait of Andy Goldsworthy's amazing nature sculptures.

"Être et avoir" (To Be and To Have) about a one-room rural school in France. 

& if you movies that spoofs documentaries or mockumentaries, I highly recommend

"A Hard Day's Night" which is a fictionalized account of several days in the lives of the Beatles.

Woody Allen's film "Zelig" about a non descript fellow who becomes a bit of a celebrity in the 20s. 

"This is Spinal Tap" follows the rise  and fall of a fake metal band.

"Anvil! The Story of Anvil" about a Canadian heavy metal band's struggle to become famous. Both "This is Spinal Tap" and "Anvil!" are interesting and funny even for those of us who are not metal fans. 

"A Mighty Wind" spoofs folk music and stars some of the old Second City gang; 

If you're interested in documentaries, you might enjoy this list of 50 best documentaries from Time Out. or IMDB's list of weird docs.

In Canada, the CBC's "the Passionate Eye" series and TV Ontario offer excellent documentaries; in the USA, there are several notable documentary film makers, such as Ken Burns and Michael Moore. Both PBS and NPR offer great documentaries. In Britain, I know the BBC produces and shows documentaries as well. France is also a big producer of documentaries.

Getting hold of these documentaries isn't always easy. They are sometimes available for free online or can be ordered as DVDs. In Ottawa we have a great DVD store still impossibly around against all odds called Invisible Cinema. It has a prodigious documentary section. Public Libraries are often good places to find documentaries as well.

A post script: I always prepare my blog posts for Oh Get A Grip in advance and edit them as I go, so it is a lovely bit of serendipity that Daddy X and I both chose documentaries as our subject. Nice to be simpatico with a fellow member of the group and erotica writer. 

The Real Deal

by Daddy X

No fiction, no plot, some character development. Conflict, yes.  Resolution of a sort. But in general, quite informative and unique in approach.

The documentary.

“Grass … A Nation’s Battle for Life.”  1925    Merion C. Carver; Ernest Schroedsack; Margurite Harrisson

Depicting the annual nomadic search for pasture in 1922 Iran.

Follow the entire Bakhtiari nation, of ‘oriental rug’ renown, transecting an extreme and varied topography into western Persia (now Iran).  The tribe traverses an inhospitable landscape of rivers and mountain ranges—fording swift icy cataracts, scaling snowy mountain passes; sometimes having to repair precarious cliffside trails as they go. Men, women, and children—all their worldly belongings: livestock, tents, rugs, looms, cooking utensils, tools—the entire population suffering through a tough and desperate existence on the move.

The massive migration crosses rivers by using blown-up animal skins as a kind of freaky water wing affair, starting way upstream, hoping to find footfall and pasture on the other side. This was the first time westerners had witnessed the trek.

The goal obviously not gold, riches or fame—but grass. Grass to feed the cattle, sheep and goats upon which the people’s find lives depend. Much is lost and gained each year, and did I mention? The Bakhtiari wear no shoes on the journey.

What will amaze is that the technology of the times would even allow filming such a punishing ordeal. It is also a naive representation of the Hollywood “Orientalist” attitudes of the times, regarding “primitive” people.  

“Harlan County, U.S.A.”      Barbara Kopple 1976

Still regarded by some critics as the best documentary film ever made. Won an Oscar in 1976. Not to be confused with “Harlan County” starring Sally Field a (pretty okay) dramatization of the original film.  The current TV series “Justified” is set in the same geographical area and capitalizes on many aspects of the documentary’s grand testimonial.

Harlan County is coal mining country. The film captures a violent standoff between a town, its people, a mining company, the company scabs and hired ‘gun thugs’ versus the union representing the workers. Koppel studies, in emotional detail, elements surrounding a contested strike and how the battle affects a desperate community who need not only the mine to survive, but each other as well.

Seems as though the town, and the union, mostly run by men, is going to give up. But then along come the women! There is one scene, a woman giving an impromptu speech at a town meeting, that will blow you away. The patterns of wise country vernacular, the music, the involved anguish of the town and the feel good ending will energize with tears of sorrow and tears of joy, even though we are painfully aware that unions are barely viable entities now. We can track the success and failure of the ‘American Dream’ by the rise and fall of unions.  

“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”    Werner Herzog 2010

The best use of 3-D I’ve seen.

Herzog was skeptical of 3-D until presented with the project of documenting the 25,000 year-old cave paintings in Chauvet Cave in France. Not as famous as Lascaux, Chauvet is off-limits to practically everyone. Toxic levels of carbon dioxide and radon restrict each filming session to four hours per day. This crew of three (plus Herzog himself) was allowed six excursions into the cave for a total of twenty-four hours filming time. All equipment had to be battery-operated and hand-carried. They were not allowed to touch the walls or walk on the floor.

Today, when filming 3-D, we are generally talking about working on a set. The equipment is installed on-site and ready for use each day when the actors show up to work. But for Herzog and crew, everything had to be removed from the cave each time and re-assembled on the next visit. Considering the extremely sensitive environmental conditions in the cave, everybody and all equipment had to remain on a two-foot wide walkway.

Three dimensions allow us to see how the ancient artists used the contours of the cave to convey literal shapes. A 2-D film wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling, losing that sense of the third dimension that the artist consciously worked with to such advantage. A convex bulge became a bison’s shoulder. A boulder suggested the size and shape of a lion. Paint it and it comes alive.

And how this world is depicted! Aurochs in full gallop—bounding deer, vicious sabertooth tigers, wolves tormenting horses, muscles defined, all implying sensual and rhythmic movement, brought to life in the flickering light of ancient torches, relating information worth knowing in the past and reporting it forward to us over the millennia.   

During the involved filming, it became apparent that one prehistoric artist, with a missing tip of a pinky finger, had signed his or her work by dipping that hand in pigment and pressing it near the painting on the wall—or boulder—or ceiling. A rare insight into an individual from ancient times. You wouldn’t need to be an expert or see the signature to tell which works were the signer’s. Often there were unique artistic characteristics—skill and vision—that an astute observer could recognize as consistent in an individual’s style.  

“The Artist is Present”    Matthew Akers 2012

Performance artist Marina Abramovic is profiled in this engaging story of a true original. From her background in cold war Serbia we leap forward to her work with long-time collaborator and some-time lover, Ulay, who makes a surprise appearance in the museum performance featured in the film.

Some may remember Abramovic and her performances with Ulay from the seventies. This charismatic and transformational woman is sometimes simply brushed off (by simple idiots) as a masochist, but her drive to draw out what it is that makes us who we are has gone way beyond simple labels.

Years ago she did an installment entitled “Rhythm 0” where she was in a room stocked with 74 tools, household objects and whatnot that attendees could use on her for pleasure or harm as they wished. There were feathers, a rose, a pair of scissors, honey, a gun, a single bullet, gloves and myriad other enticements to the imagination.

She relies on human nature. After many performances, Abramovic says she has learned that there are takers and there are protectors. She often depends on the audience to rescue her from positions she has put herself in, often suspended somehow, sometimes lying on a block of ice, sometimes incapacitated by catatonic drugs, all part of the performance.  

Abramovic does one experiment, setting up an attractive man and woman on either side of a narrow passageway. The two are naked, standing facing each other and very close together. To get to the exhibit, the audience must choose which way to face when walking sideways between them. Who to touch and who to try and avoid? 

The focus depicted in this documentary, in addition to a retrospective of much of her earlier works (performed for the first time by others) involved sitting at New York MOMA eight hours a day for two and a half months, (736.5 hours total). Attendees who take turns sitting across from Abramovic are visibly taken and transformed by nothing more than the experience of staring across a table into each other’s eyes. No words are spoken. No touching. At one point she decided to remove the table for the remainder of the show. Without the table as a buffer, the encounters became exponentially more personal. This allowed her transcendent and charismatic personality to come into its own.

Although Abramovic has been around long enough to call herself the Grandmother of Performance Art, she still has a lot of spunk. She reminds me of a perfect subject for Readers Digest’s “Most Unforgettable Characters” (RD likely wouldn’t have her).

This film has led me to at least two other documentaries with her as the subject. I’m also ordering “Marina Abramovic: The Biography of Biographies” by Michael Laub.  

Should be an ‘out’ read.

  

The Big Screen

Sacchi Green

I remember when the movie theater in our old mill town seemed enormous to a child, and glamorous even though the gilded curlicues along the ceiling’s dome and above each door were dingy and the once-plush seats were nearly threadbare. It never occurred to me then, but the building had probably been an actual theater/opera house combination way back when the town was halfway prosperous. The screen was set in behind a substantial stage, and live events like beauty pageants were still sometimes produced there.

I remember always looking for a seat in the first row of the balcony, where you could look down on the folks below, and during the raucous Saturday matinees you could toss popcorn and candy wrappers down onto the kids below rather than having them tossed down onto you. Well, I didn’t actually toss things, but it was fun to know you could. What I really wanted, what was so wonderful about the first row of the balcony, was that you could gaze out through space at the movie screen with the sense that there was nothing in between, nothing to keep you from becoming so immersed in the movie that it felt as though you were actually there. There with the cowboys on their beautiful horses riding through redrock western landscapes (it took a while to notice that no matter what the movie was called or who the cowboys were, the redrock background was always the same,) or with Dorothy and Toto in the Technicolor world of Oz. What I wanted from movies was a different world to inhabit for a while, places I had never been and places no one could ever go except in imagination.

When I think about movies I’ve seen I realize that the ones I love best, or at least remember best, give me a sense of being in a different world, with expansive vistas and bigger-than-life characters and emotions. Lawrence of Arabia always grips me, time after time, although the best time to watch it is on a cold winter night, just as the snowy plains of Dr. Zhivago are best for hot summer viewing. The Lord of the Rings movies can always catch my attention and draw me into their mythic universe, and so can the Harry Potter series with its intricately detailed world so close and yet so far from our own. In all those cases I’ve read the books (or, in the case of T.E. Lawrence, some biographies,) and in most ways I prefer books, but the movies can give a sense of space and light that is very hard for books to deliver.

Another thing movies can deliver is the emotional impact of background music. I’m not particularly into war movies, but I do like historicals, and the music of Gettysburg sweeps me along into that time and those events. Sometimes the music is even a big factor in the action. I love Michael Caine’s first major picture Zulu, most of all for the scene at the tiny fort at Rourke’s Drift in South Africa where the small band of surviving British soldiers, mostly Welshmen, are surrounded by thousands of Zulu warriors on the hilltops chanting their war song. It’s a hopeless situation, but the Welshmen are rallied by their choir director, and hurl back their own ancient war song, “Men of Harlech.” It’s impossible for me to impart the stirring impact of this in prose, but in the movie it was overwhelming, and in real life the Zulu are said to have felt that, too, and honored the bravery (and musicality) of their enemy by chanting once more and then departing with no further attacks.

There are many things that books do better, and I often prefer the book version to a movie made from it, but there’s still something close to magic that movies can do for me. It’s a matter of light, and space, and sound, especially music.

Well, I admit that it’s also a matter of great actors. I do like Frances McDormond, as mentioned by Giselle, and I’ll watch nearly anything with Judi Dench and/or Maggie Smith in it. Or Olympia Dukakis. And Cher in Moonstruck was great. With men, I tend to remember the ones from yesteryear most vividly, from Gregory Peck to Peter O’Toole to Richard Burton.  It’s not that I don’t like some of the newer guys, but maybe I was more impressionable way back when.

I haven’t said anything about sex in the movies, which doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy what there is of it, but this topic has made me realize that sex is one thing I really prefer to dwell on in prose rather than on the screen (although sex in the flesh always, of course, comes first.) Maybe I’m somewhat of a prude in that way, even though I have no trouble standing up in front of an audience and reading my erotica out loud. Or maybe it’s just the way my particular type of imagination works. The Big Screen is great for transporting me into other worlds, but for the really intimate, physical, sensual scenes, I’d rather watch it in the privacy of my own smutty mind.