Here is Merlin Sheldrake eating his words (eating the oyster mushrooms that grew on his book!)
On his site, he highlights the designer Iris Van Herpen whose most recent collection could have been inspired by the images of the film:
And here is a conversation between Merlin Sheldrake, Louie Schwartzberg, director of Fantastic Fungi, and Michael Pollan whose latest book How To Change Your Mind looks at fungi as medicine. I learned a lot from the film, but the talk below provides a great follow-up to that overview.
Last night I saw Daughters of the Dust at the BAMPFA, a film by Julie Dash from 1991. I saw it when it first came out and I recall that I found it very beautiful and unique. The restored print was gorgeous. Richard Brody presents the film for The New Yorker:
Last night I attended a screening of Francis Ford Coppola's film The Conversation (1974) at BAMPFA. Walter Murch, editor and sound designer for the film, spoke after the film with a Russian geneticist friend. I had seen the film many years ago in the theater, probably a few years after it came out because I'm pretty sure I didn't go see it when I was in high school. I remember being absolutely mesmerized by it, and I know I re-watched it online a few years ago. Seeing it in the theater again, I was surprised at how much I had forgotten, how the twists were still effective, and how inventive the camerawork also was, along with the sound and editing. Several key elements in the film were due to Murch's input; they ran out of money before they finished shooting, so they had to reshape the screenplay in ways that probably made it a better movie because less was explained. And the music is great.
Murch is a hugely innovative and influential sound designer who has won awards for work he has done over the years with a variety of different sound technologies.
Easy Living (1937) was written by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen. Jean Arthur stars as a young woman whose fortunes change when a sable coat lands on her head while she's riding a double-decker bus. I'd seen it years ago and remembered it as funny and entertaining. It's full of pratfalls, mistaken identity, and a great sequence in an automat.
Well, I am not the target audience for American Horror Show, but I did end up watching the Ryan Murphy series Hollywood after all, despite having heard it was not great. It was definitely entertaining in a trashy way: it's a fantasy "what if" story--what if Hollywood wasn't as bigoted as all that. On the one hand, it was bunk. On the other hand, wouldn't we have loved it if a story like this could have happened, where people defied prejudice and didn't get blackballed? Jim Parsons plays a loathsome agent who abuses everyone, but gets a redemption arc and tries to make amends to "Rock Hudson" and decides to make a movie that's a love story between two men. This made me realize that I don't know what the first movie was that portrayed a real love story between two men, before Brokeback Mountain. I found this list on imdb of films worldwide with LGBTQ+ themes and so many of them seem to be bound up in stereotypes, equating homosexuality with depravity, or punishing gay characters to conform to the Hays code, enforced until 1968. This slideshow is more centered around how U.S. films and Hollywood represented LGBTQ+ themes or characters, although it doesn't mention underground films like Warhol or Kenneth Anger. I did watch The Celluloid Closet on the plane on my way to Spain.
Today I met up with folks who I've been seeing by zoom for months now in my cinema chat groups. We had lunch at Zut Cafe on 4th Street. It was great to get to know people a little better and to feel their presence. When I got back home, I decided to watch a Judy Holliday comedy instead of the next in the neo-noir series on Criterion, so I watched Born Yesterday. She's wonderful. The best scene in the movie is the gin rummy game.
Here's the story of how she rescued the Broadway play when Jean Arthur dropped out at the last minute, and went on to win an Oscar for her role:
Here's the Criterion clip with an overview of her career:
As a follow-up to The Cloud-Capped Star, which had so much music, some of us decided to watch The Disciple on Netflix, a film in Marathi directed by Chaitanya Tamhane. It's about a singer of North Indian classical music who is a purist about his art but whose talent doesn't qutie live up to his own high standards. The measured pace of the film allows tension to develop between his ascetic ideals and moments of musical connection and the harsh realities of practice, performance, lessons, self-doubt, impatience, jealousy: what to wear to a performance, caring for his teacher's aching joints, a sore throat before a concert, mean comments on a video, a music historian's contempt for his masters.
A recurring motif in the film is the singer riding his motorbike through the streets while listening to the taped lectures of Maai, a revered singer whose impossible standards he holds over himself. The film manages to show the motorbike alone on the road as if in a dream, and these sequences are hypnotic counterpoints to the inventory of insecurities he endures as a student, as a performer, and finally as an entrepreneur attempting to preserve North Indian classical music with a production company. The last sequence shows the singer with a wife and child on a train, as a busker sings in the aisle; the music hasn't disappeared but it's heard in completely new contexts. If he wasn't able to reach the heights of his youthful ideals, he has made a life with his music and beyond his music. That has to be enough.
There are quite a few musical performance set-pieces in the film. I wish I knew more about the music iself., but I appreciated the opportunity to get a glimpse of that world. I lived with a singer (in the Western classical tradition) for a while. I thought of him as I watched this movie. He worked incredibly hard and was very talented. But I got a back seat view of just how difficult it is to make it as a singer of any kind. It's not enough to be good; you have to be great. It's not enough to work hard; you have to have luck, connections, incredible persistence, an entourage of agent, manager, and probably a partner who picks up your tuxedo at the cleaners. You have to make so many sacrifices. There's no money in it for most. You may end up singing or teaching, but very few make a living as performers, and even fewer reach an audience that will consecrate their talent. My friend ended up singing for free in small regional productions, sang in a major opera chorus, and eventually giving voice lessons, but the elusive goal of getting hired in Europe to start a career never worked out. It's hard to adjust one's expectations and ambition to these limits. The Disciple really communicated the love and anguish of that vocation so well.
For cinema club tomorrow, we are watching The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara), directed by Ritwik Ghatak in 1960, is set during the aftermath of the partition of Bengal, an event that marked the director's life and work. A woman sacrifices herself for her ungrateful family as they struggle with the gap between the middle-class expectations of education and their poverty. Nita works to support her refugee family while the rest of them badger her for money every time she gets paid. The oldest son doesn't work because of his musical ambitions, and is constantly begging for money. The younger son wants new cleats for soccer; he quits school to work in a factory that wants him to play on its soccer team, but suffers a work accident. The younger sister steals Nita's boyfriend, whom she has also been supporting. The mother nags and chides. The father has had an accident that prevents him from working, but is also shown to be willing to overlook his daughter's plight. Nita works herself to the bone, coming down with TB. Eventually, though, the oldest has become a successful musical artist and is able to help out his family, but it is too late for Nita. Filmed in expressionist black-and-white, the movie uses sound, music, and musical performances in ways that are both obviously meaningful to the uninformed viewer, and also deeply rooted in Indian musical traditions in ways that benefit from explanation.
He also makes great use of natural sounds--birds, the train, sounds of cooking--but also symbolic sounds like the cracking of a whip, as at the end of this song.
For the Asian/Asian-American cinema chat club, we watched The Road Home (1999) directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Zhang Ziyi in her screen debut. A gorgeous film, it frames the love story of a village girl and the new schoolteacher with the story of how their son returns after the man's death and tries to satisfy his mother's demand for a traditional funeral procession, in which people would carry the coffin from the hospital back to the village. Because so many young people have left to work in the city, it seems there won't be enough to carry out her wishes, so the son attempts to hire men from a neighboring town. The black-and-white present-day tale, a snapshot of a society in transition and in which the old ways are being abandoned, lovingly frames the son's narration of his mother and father's courtship, filmed in color. When a new teacher comes to the village, the two young people see each other and are enamored without words. She woos him with food; he gives her a hair clip--so chaste! In a social world of arranged marriages, theirs is a love match. Through the materiality of daily life in a pre-modern rural village, Zhang evokes values that he seems to want his viewers to recall, just as he shows how the villagers will return for the burial procession out of respect for their former teacher. But is this just nostalgia for village rural life, or should we also notice that he portrays a relationship that stands in contrast to the norms of village life for being the result of the woman's desire, initiative, and stubbornness?
Barely have the two managed to acknowledge their interest in each other when they are separated, as he is called back to the city. Although no clear explanation is given, it is likely that it is for political reasons that he is first called back, and then punished for two years because he tried to return to the village when he heard she fell ill waiting for him in the snow. But he does return, they marry, and we see how her devotion to him after his death is as fierce and stubborn as was her determination to make sure he noticed her fetching water from the well near the school.
You can either see this as a pure and simple love story as do most of the reviewers on Letterboxd, or as nostalgic schmalz, as do a few cynics (including one of my chat group colleagues). Or both. Sometimes we just want our pure and simple beautifully filmed schmalz.
Tonight one of my cinema chat groups is going to talk about the Alice Wu film Saving Face (2004). It was her first film and received a lot of critical acclaim for a small independent feature. It was the first Hollywood movie centered on Chinese-Americans since The Joy Luck Club--amazing. Much of the story is drawn from Wu's own experience of coming out to her mother (who rejected her at first but came to a reconciliation after some years of estrangement).It's a sweet rom-com, with dialogue in both Mandarin and English, and a great New York setting in Flushing.
In the film, the main character, a doctor named Wil, finds herself living with her mother, a widow who has gotten pregnant at 48 and who refuses to tell anyone who the father is. (I have to say that the idea of having a baby at 48 made me tired. I was late enough having mine at 37!) Wil is also beginning a relationship with Vivian, a dancer who is part of her extended Chinese community. Wil is not out to her family and we see how Vivian is impatient with her for not being open. But when Wil finally tells her mother she's gay (although her mother already had reason to know) her mother responds by saying "I'm not a bad mother. My daughter is not gay." The denial is devastating. Everyone's experience of coming out is unique, and the stakes are high if you might lose your primary family connection. I was a little impatient with Vivian's lack of empathy although I understood her feelings.
I did like how the trope of rushing to the airport to stop the loved one from leaving is a failure. You can't just stop an airport. But there is a happy ending for both the mother (whose lover turns out to be a much younger very handsome man) and for Wil and Vivian.
For cinema club today* I watched Soleil O (1970) by director Med Hondo. Fifty years after it was screened at Cannes, it was restored as part of a group of 50 African films by Martin Scorsese's World Cinema initiative, and issued by the Criterion Collection, allowing it to be seen by a new audience. Hondo worked as an actor, founded a theater company that produced works by black authors, and directed several films. In France, he earned money and was well-known as the dubbed voice of black actors such as Eddie Murphy, Morgan Freeman, and others. Early on, he used some of the money earned by dubbing to finance his films. I'm glad to know that he was able to participate in many screenings of the restored Soleil O and see audiences' reactions to his work.
*well, actually it turns out it's for next week. Did my homework early!
Jane is a 2017 documentary, directed by Brett Morgan, about Jane Goodall. Drawing on 100 hours of footage that had been lost in the National Geographic archives until 2014, it documents her beginnings as a primatologist in Tanzania. The musical score is by Philip Glass. Things I learned: she had no scientific background and no degree, and thus was not steeped in some of the prejudices of the time; she seems to have had the ability to scramble bare-legged through the bush without getting scratched; her young son Grub hated the chimps (probably because they took his mother away from him) and now builds boats in Dar es Salaam. The shots of caterpillars and birds are as glorious as those of the chimps and other animals.
Haider (directed by Vishal Bhardwaj) is an Indian film set in Kashmir that rewrites Hamlet. Haider is the son of a doctor who has been disappeared by the military for performing surgery on a militant leader. When Haider returns home, he becomes angry when he sees his mother laughing with his uncle. He sets out to try to find out whether his father is alive or dead. The film shows the situation of being caught between military occupiers and Pakistani-backed resistance, with both sides attempting to manipulate Haider, and family and friends betraying him. The grimly realist tone of some portions gives way to heightened musical interludes in others. Our discussion group mostly wanted to map the film onto the play and didn't have much to say about the film itself. The biggest difference for me was that the internal conflict of Hamlet becomes the political conflict over the revenge story. Finally, whether or not Haider shoots his uncle to complete his revenge is moot because the uncle has been fatally wounded by Haider's mother's act of self-destruction with a suicide bomber's vest.
The play-within-the-play is a big production song-and-dance number:
One thing I do like about the film is the way the credits are displayed as Oscar Wilde flips through a book of the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, giving us the opportunity to see this suite of amazing illustrations before the play is performed.
Alla Nazimova was a fascinating figure: born in Yalta, she came to the US after studying with Stanislawsky, and was a huge success in the theater. She then moved to Hollywood where she also met with success both as actor and producer/director/writer (although not always credited for her work). She was a lesbian (or possibly bi) who had relationships with many celebrated women in Hollywood. She purchased an estate that she called the Gardens of Allah, where she threw lavish parties, and later turned into a hotel. At the end of her life, she had lost most of her money and rented one of the villas at the hotel. The buildings were torn down, but Frank Gehry purchased the site and is building a complex on it that he says will, in some way, be inspired by Nazimova.
El agente topo (The Mole Agent) is a Chilean film that is nominated for Best Documentary and also Best Foreign Film in tonight's Oscars. Since it's raining, I decided to catch up on a couple of the nominated films before the ceremony. The premise of the film is that a woman hires a private detective to investigate the institution where her elderly mother is living, to see if she is being treated well. The private detective in turn hires a man in his eighties to go live in the home and report back on conditions and the treatment of his client's mother. The man who is hired, Sergio, is given a pen with a camera and glasses with a camera. At the same time, the documentary crew has already been installed in the home, ostensibly to make a film about the everyday life of the elderly. When Sergio arrives, they are able to film his interactions with the residents, as he goes from spying for his job to getting to know the residents, almost all of them women, who are mostly lonely because nobody comes to visit them. The film is touching and funny, and I did cry.
I had some misgivings about the invasion of privacy inherent in the project: not so much for the nursing home and whether or not they were mistreating the residents--they were treating them very well--as for the residents themselves. They may be elderly, but do they want their frailty, their memory problems, their emotional struggles, to be fodder for an undercover genre experiment? I wondered if all the residents who ended up in the film were given releases to sign. The director says yes, that they showed the home the rough cut, and they ended up being very favorable to the film because it focuses on the plight of the lonely elderly, and the home comes off well.
I saw the preview for the movie Minari (미나리) back when we could still see a movie in the theater, and was really eager to see it. I finally rented it on YouTube (for $21!) because it's next up in the Red Lantern film discussion group. It is really good, and I loved it, in spite of my farm disaster anxiety.
The plant minari is also called Water Celery, Water Dropwort, Japanese parsley, Chinese celery, Indian pennywort. I bet I can get it at the Berkeley Bowl. Here's an easy recipe for minari namul, a seasoned side dish.
The lovely and talented Han Yeri (Monica in the film) is someone I have seen in the kdramas Six Flying Dragons, Age of Youth, and My Unfamiliar Family. She was really outstanding in all three of these excellent shows. I did not know she also sings. Here she is singing the song from the end credits of the film (with film's soundtrack composer Emile Mosseri):
Tonight's movie for discussion is Nomadland. I watched it last month but I may watch it again this afternoon.
When I became ill some years ago and was losing my job and career in slow motion I thought I would no longer have an income, so I started thinking about how I'd survive. My disability benefits kept getting cut off by the insurance company my employer used to get rid of disabled employees, and the struggle to get them reinstated each month made me sicker. Drastic action seemed necessary.
I seriously considered relocating to Mexico. I didn't think I'd be able to handle life in Mexico City. The last time I was there, for a conference, it felt grim and foreboding. I read some blogs by "expats" only to realize that I would not have the mental stamina to wrestle with the logistics of such a change, even if I spoke fluent Spanish and had enough money to live relatively well. Even though one of my dreams was to spend time in Oaxaca in a house with bougainvillia, I felt overwhelmed by the logistics of relocating. I was still very sick.
I also thought of becoming a digital nomad abroad. After all, travel was one of my dreams. But I couldn't afford to live short-term in the places I was most interested in visiting and I didn't think I could manage as an older woman alone in some of the places I could afford. I'm too old to backpack.
I also gave real consideration to getting a camper and hitting the road but quickly recognized that I was too daunted by the idea of keeping the vehicle repaired and dealing with the bathroom and bathing issues. This was before the book (and movie) Nomadland revealed how many older people in my situation were turning to van living as a way to survive while working exhausting temp jobs. I also had little interest in exploring the U.S. backroads--I felt too alienated.
One issue I wasn't thinking about as I weighed my options was how isolated and lonely life on the road would be; I was only looking at the budget. That was years before the pandemic gave us all the chance to deal with radical isolation and loneliness from the comfort of our own homes. Another issue is how to get my meds while traveling.
My situation changed and I didn't have to make those choices. I now have sufficient income to live close to family, modestly but well enough. Who knows, maybe travel will become safe again one day.
Here's a really interesting take on the movie by a woman who was an extra in the film, who is herself an RV nomad
Yes, the movie is a story of grief, not just that of Fern (Frances McDormand), but also a collective experience of grief over an American dream, and especially the experiences of older women. Carolyn used to live in the SFBay Area and says she saw the writing on the wall and made a conscious choice to change her life after the crash of 2008. Maybe if I hadn't had this health crisis (how to manage refilling a Rx on the road is a whole chapter) and were twenty years younger, I would have had the guts to give it a shot.
Luchino Visconti's 1954 film Senso is the next film for our discussion group: splendid technicolor and high melodrama with so many floating veils, sweeping skirts, white uniforms with white capes, La Fenice and Venice by night, the beautiful veneto countryside. Do we feel sorry for the Countess who betrays her family, and the cause of Venetian independence from Austria, for a man who turns out to be a loathsome snake? She has her revenge in the end when she rats him out as a deserter and gets him shot.
Visconti uses Anton Bruckner's Seventh Symphony as its score, but maybe the best part of the film is the opening sequence, set during a performance of Il Trovatore in La Fenice. We get to hear the duet between Manrico and Leonora, and then"Di quella pira" as the film uses the opera to present its themes of doomed passion and patriotic fervor.
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