Blog pause ...
May 10, 2022
In September I had planned to begin work on my next book but I had an illness that prevented both that and making regular blog entries. I began writing that book (with a working title of "Gathering Plum Blossoms") in earnest in October and have be consistently researching and writing that book since then. While it is progressing nicely, my blog energy has been, for now at least, captured by that project. My mind is both consciously and subconsciously preoccupied with shaping that work.
I plan to release GPB in five stages and when the first volume is complete, I will announce that here and link to the published eBook. It is a book of poem criticism based on poems that were made interesting to me by students.
That being said, I miss writing in my blogs and I can imagine that I might suddenly place something here.
It is because of my students, their intelligence, curiosity, and warmth, that I write blog entries. That feeling has not changed since I retired, nor do I expect that it ever will change. Thank you for your inspiration.
Giri / Haji (BBC multi-episode crime drama, 2019)
August 3-15, 2021
An 8 episode BBC drama. Two primary languages spoken: English and Japanese.
This is a relatively violent crime drama set in Tokyo and London. It has many characters. The relationship between two brothers is at the center of the story.
There is a mutual understanding between reader (viewer) and creator as to the degree in which there will be a balance between safe viewing and disturbing viewing. Where this balance will be is, I think, usually signaled early in a work so the reader / viewer has an opportunity to prepare (or stop reading / viewing). This understanding (that the greater will courtesy-preview the balance for the reader) is sometimes ignored for surprise value. And how far the greater will lean into disturbing material is not clearly articulated since this would reduce suspense and viewerly trepidation, which can be helpful for engagement. Giri / Haji creates a dangerous and uncomfortable world from its early minutes. This creates a space where we are uncertain of the level of violence that will be depicted, or the level of protection around the characters we care about and root for. The threats are multiple with some external to these characters with others internal to the characters and still others in the relationships between characters. Little is spared.
Settings. This drama excelled, for me, in capturing the atmospheres of its various settings, aiding is a sense of “being there” which brings the story close to the heart. Police offices, bars, car interiors, apartments, seashores, and so on — the drama is rich in its variety of spaces and conveys the feeling of each with care and detail. Given how much I loved “The Atlantics” for its depiction of Dakar, I think “space” is one of the most important story elements for me. The Dune novels provided this for me. Harry Potter, I’m sure, has provided this to many readers although I am not one of them. The film (and novel) “The Quiet American” (set in Vietnam) also did this for me and I still feel I traveled there and left a bit of my heart there, even though I saw this movie almost 20 years ago.
What looks like an explicit statement of theme arrived early in the series: how one’s actions affect another even though it may be a long time before that influence takes an explicit form. But in fact that is only a portion of the theme. In more essential terms it is that each of our actions affects others so much that we are all hopeless entangled in those webs of consequences.
Atmosphere. There is an overall cloud of negativity and despair which brings it close to naturalism as the Japanese literary writers like Nagai Kafu understood it: life isn’t very clean, isn’t very pleasant, isn’t kind. While this is depicted authentically, there were times for me when this was so heavy-handed that it make is all some not convincing at all and rather just a writer in a bad mood.
Character (human vision). All the characters share a desire to hope and be hopeful. All share deep imperfections. Nearly all have unlikable aspects. Most make inept choices that are irritating to the viewer who has a wider perspective. But the drama succeeds in being non-judgmental. I remember yet again Kawabata’s calligraphy: “It is easy to enter the world of the Buddha. It is difficult to enter the world of the devil.” To show with loving detail but without judgment the mess of a character’s heart / mind is not easy. I would have respect this if the creator had not been so relentless and insistent on this point.
Atlantics ("Atlantique" film, 2019)
June 4-11, 2021
Atlantique (“Atlantics”) was for me supremely engaging as storyworld. It moves from a gritty mundane world to a magical one with promises of an unknown but inspiring future, shifting in little steps that took a moment for me to notice the physics of that storyworld from ordinary to extraordinary. Another way of thinking about this is that the daily space (hardships of work and marriage) comes to intersect with the non-daily space of spirits and in that intersection arises hope.
The dark scenes (there are many dawn, dusk or night scenes) invite this crossover. The soundtrack and cinematography generate a strong atmosphere that is key to conveying the magic, mystery, and sense of unknown of that non-daily space.
Character! The central protagonist is well-conceived (and well-acted) as a woman with many thoughts that she keeps to herself for her reasons. Like the way the film is disciplined and does not waver from its theme of faith (belief in oneself, conviction in love), the central protagonist makes her decisions with very little trepidation and with a full willingness to accept responsibility for them. I found her personal strength inspiring and very appealing.
This movie is a fluid, rich, deep metaphor for the pain of severe disenfranchisement and exploitation and a brave response to it. Brilliant in marshaling the forces of multimedia to articulate this without falling into the trap of complaint or victim mentality.
The Half of It (film, 2020)
May 23-28, 2021
This film have a generous portion of typical romantic comedy tropes. (I'm using “tropes” in this case in the spirit of “commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works” — Wiki “Trope (literature)”.) These include interpersonal misunderstandings, hesitancy, everyone loving the wrong person, inviting us to root for romantic success for the characters, and so on. However, the film counterpoints this array of predictable tropes with a witty, dry, smart script that is well delivered by a witty, dry, smart protagonist/narrator.
In so doing, this film puts its hopes and fortunes into tone (which we should find amusing and likable) and character (with whom we should feel empathy and a natural identity: everyone longs for someone, everyone is unsure of themselves). This film is a good example of the power of narrative tone to draw us into the story. But relying on tone has an Achilles heel: if you cannot find the central character likable (if you don't like the tone which is the central feature of that character), it is unlikely that you connect with the movie.
The above sounds like I did not like this film but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It comes up short on its use of Sartre ("Hell is other people"), since I spend a lot of time thinking about him and he is more interesting than the movie makers think he is. But I thought it did an excellent job of expanding the idea of creative boldness into the realm of romantic boldness.
I am always interested in the "model reader" that the creator of a story visualizes. In our 173 course, sometimes this was analyzed in terms of the narratee (the person to whom the story is being told by the narrator). In the case of this film, the narratee intrigues me: teenagers navigating their early years of romantic attraction to others. That it is for teenagers is obvious by topic, focus, the how characters common in teenage life (parents, teachers).
But, through how the narrative manages time, the narratee is also older people being invited to return to their teen years and re-imagine or reconstruct that time because the meta-time of the narrative is from a point in time after the story— is the recounting of past events (with added nostalgia for those who remember 1970s songs as their high school songs). This makes the narrator with whom we are to identify and empathize, in present time, older by a few or many years. In a sense, the narratee is an invitation to the reader: "Become, for a while, this type of person to whom I am addressing, join us in our world regardless of who you might be in your daily life." Teenage movies can make us feel young when they try to include us or make us feel old when the story seems to exclude us.
I would like to end with a comment on point-of-view. The narrator is homodiegetic (inside the story) and the focalization is internal (we know the thoughts of this first-person narrator very well but we know less well the thoughts of the characters around her). Yet, because it is a film, not a print story, our actual visual gaze is external to her—we look upon her. So, in fact, we are at times external to her and at other times sharing her gaze and looking out at the world. But this isn't achieved by a camera angle where we would seem to be looking out from her eyes. Instead, we identify with her reactions and so are "with" her through that identification. For example, in the screenshot below, her friend has invited her to his family house for dinner. Yet, when they arrive, the table is crowded and noisy. They look upon the scene appalled. We are appalled with them. We, too, had hoped they could have some pleasant time together but that looks impossible. They think that. We see their expressions and we think that. So, although the camera is situated among the others at the dinner table our real perspective is as if we were them, looking at the crowded table from their end of the room. Thus point-of-view is not something literal bound by laws of physics; it is cognitive and emotive. Camera focus helps to tell where to centralize our attention. Two teenagers, looking at how silly "older" people can be. (I'm in my 60s. There are not older people to me. But when you are 17, people in their 20s are older people and the movie makers know this.)
Nightcrawler (film, 2014)
May 16-19, 2021
I would like to subtitle this film — “Nightcrawler: the long night of transactional relationships”.
This film is of the sort that offers a view of human behavior that (in my opinion) we almost universally think is wrong but also almost universally (in our more honest private moments) think is actually like who we, ourselves, are. Therefore, it plays on fear of who we are inside and who others are around us: cold, selfish people who lack a “normal” level of empathy.
Most of us take the capacity for empathy as a key element in valuing someone as good and/or warm. We also believe empathy helps to keep everyone’s selfish, destructive tendencies in check and, when it is missing, we think people may well gravitate towards behaviors that are dangerous to us personally. Because of that, this film holds our attention through suspense as we are constantly feeling a need to calculate the level of empathy of the protagonist who we know from the beginning has very little. The narrative reveals slowly that the level of empathy of both the male and female protagonists are even lower than we had estimated. So plot reveal in this narrative is highly controlled and exceptionally effective in challenging our desire to hope to find some empathy-emergency-brake in the main characters, which turns out to be entirely missing. Put another way, the horror of the film is rolled out slowly.
Interest (a 173 class criteria): For those who have never thought the world could be this selfish, or for those who have moral outrage at this type of selfishness, this film probably pushes their buttons (and mine) effectively.
Synchronic (film, 2019)
May 4-9, 2021
This film succeeded in haunting me. There is so much story logic fail that I was distracted for a time. But now, a week later, its spirit of “the horrible is about to reveal itself” and the response “in these times, you recognize the value of your relationships and act on that” works together well for me.
But, well, haunting. It is haunting: Time slips around, so certainty is taken away, and the ugly violence of humans is everywhere. The “horrible-to-be” is better evoked than the “life is found in relationships” …. So, I don’t think of this a reassuring film. But it is not a cynical film.
Narrative elements used effectively: suspense (holds us at the screen), atmosphere (the theme is almost the atmosphere itself, one of “tired hopefulness”), and tone (the narrator’s warmth and humanity).
Since this is a 173 blog, I won’t comment on cinematography but, yeah, it was great.
Interest (a 173 class criteria): This holds up well for me after viewing. I’m very glad to have seen this film and think quite a few others would find it interesting too.