Art and You
March 31, 2006
The image that\’s attached to this post is a photograph of one of the islands that the artist Christo surrounded in pink plastic in 1983. Christo is one of those artists whose work completely baffles people who don\’t \”get\” modern art. His work is controversial for a number of reasons, particularly because of their mammoth scale. This particular project took a crew of 430 people to install. This is the sort of project that critics of public funding of the arts point to as the sort of thing that couldn\’t get funding if left to the marketplace.
I\’d like to talk about this last part for a second. Christo\’s work is on such a scale that it must be funded by some kind of grant or endowment from the NEA, right? Wrong. Christo\’s work is entirely funded by the artist, through sales of the preliminary materials: models, drawings, photographs, etc. One revenue stream comes from the documentaries that Christo makes about each project. Christo has been collaborating with the Maysles Brothers since the early 1970s–the Maysles brothers are documentary filmmakers best known for the Rolling Stones concert film, Gimme Shelter. Anyone who is interested in the politics of art or the concepts behind projects like this would do well to take a look at them. They\’re on DVD. You can even get them from Netflix. But I digress. The point is, there IS a market for this sort of thing. It may be small, but a smart artist–and Christo is a VERY smart artist–has done his homework and knows how to target that market. This is important: there will always be artists. There will always be people interested in the experience of art. This is a basis for an economy. The trick is to get them together. In any event, all of this is a bit off the point I want to make.
Somewhere in the middle of the Islands documentary someone on the Miami city council asks Christo what the \”meaning\” of his project is. A lot of artists would have given the man some \”artspeak\” doubletalk, but not Christo. His answer: \”First of all, I think it will be very beautiful.\” That is first and foremost what the audience for art is looking for. And that audience for art is all of us.
You may not know it, but you interract with art on a daily basis. There is art all around us, whether it is the music on your stereo, the movie on your dvd, the design of your living room, or the desktop pattern on your computer. We all live and breathe art, but for all that, most people have the same relationship with art that a fish has with water: it\’s all around, but we barely notice it. The genius of Christo\’s work is that it intrudes on that ignorance. We can\’t help but notice it. It\’s an art that takes \”art\” out of the ivory tower of an art gallery so that it can engage the people. As \”elite\” and \”inaccessable\” as Christo\’s projects seem, they are actually a very democratic kind of art. It\’s an art that shocks us into awareness. That\’s a good thing.
Art is important. Art beautifies our surroundings. Art questions the status quo. Art exercises the imagination. Art makes us smarter.
Have you had your art today?
Art and You
March 31, 2006
The image that\’s attached to this post is a photograph of one of the islands that the artist Christo surrounded in pink plastic in 1983. Christo is one of those artists whose work completely baffles people who don\’t \”get\” modern art. His work is controversial for a number of reasons, particularly because of their mammoth scale. This particular project took a crew of 430 people to install. This is the sort of project that critics of public funding of the arts point to as the sort of thing that couldn\’t get funding if left to the marketplace.
I\’d like to talk about this last part for a second. Christo\’s work is on such a scale that it must be funded by some kind of grant or endowment from the NEA, right? Wrong. Christo\’s work is entirely funded by the artist, through sales of the preliminary materials: models, drawings, photographs, etc. One revenue stream comes from the documentaries that Christo makes about each project. Christo has been collaborating with the Maysles Brothers since the early 1970s–the Maysles brothers are documentary filmmakers best known for the Rolling Stones concert film, Gimme Shelter. Anyone who is interested in the politics of art or the concepts behind projects like this would do well to take a look at them. They\’re on DVD. You can even get them from Netflix. But I digress. The point is, there IS a market for this sort of thing. It may be small, but a smart artist–and Christo is a VERY smart artist–has done his homework and knows how to target that market. This is important: there will always be artists. There will always be people interested in the experience of art. This is a basis for an economy. The trick is to get them together. In any event, all of this is a bit off the point I want to make.
Somewhere in the middle of the Islands documentary someone on the Miami city council asks Christo what the \”meaning\” of his project is. A lot of artists would have given the man some \”artspeak\” doubletalk, but not Christo. His answer: \”First of all, I think it will be very beautiful.\” That is first and foremost what the audience for art is looking for. And that audience for art is all of us.
You may not know it, but you interract with art on a daily basis. There is art all around us, whether it is the music on your stereo, the movie on your dvd, the design of your living room, or the desktop pattern on your computer. We all live and breathe art, but for all that, most people have the same relationship with art that a fish has with water: it\’s all around, but we barely notice it. The genius of Christo\’s work is that it intrudes on that ignorance. We can\’t help but notice it. It\’s an art that takes \”art\” out of the ivory tower of an art gallery so that it can engage the people. As \”elite\” and \”inaccessable\” as Christo\’s projects seem, they are actually a very democratic kind of art. It\’s an art that shocks us into awareness. That\’s a good thing.
Art is important. Art beautifies our surroundings. Art questions the status quo. Art exercises the imagination. Art makes us smarter.
Have you had your art today?
Dream dream, even for a little while
March 31, 2006
Does the world have you down in the dumps? Are the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to making your life miserable? Fear not! For music hath charms to soothe the savage beast. Here are five songs guaranteed to be ambrosia, that nectar of the gods that lifts the spirit and provides surcease of sorrow…
5. \”You Can Get It If You Really Want\” by Jimmy Cliff–remarkable uplift from the heart of oppression and poverty. There is a relentless, completely sincere optimism in this reggae masterpiece that can\’t help but make you rather bear the load than put it down entirely.
4. \”River Deep, Mountain High\” by Tina Turner–in which Phil Spector\’s infectious \”Wall of Sound\” comes smack dab against a voice that completely upstages it. Tina\’s voice soars from the peaks of ecstasy to the valleys of passion.
3. \”Walking on Sunshine\” by Katrina and the Waves–the original version is an explosion of euphoria, like falling head over heels in love for the first time. The subsequent version still has the same kick, only mildly diluted. It\’s easy to get drunk on this song. Pity that it\’s been appropriated by advertising, but what can you do?
2. \”What\’d I Say?\” by Ray Charles–once upon a time, this ran afoul of the guardians of public morals for its musical simulation of really good sex. They had a point, it IS a simulation of really good sex. And like really good sex, there\’s a lovely afterglow.
1. \”Dreaming\” by Blondie–one of the five or six greatest rock and roll songs ever recorded, this is nothing but pure joy, distilled into three minutes of driving drumbeats and Debbie Harry\’s siren-song voice. A song for dancing wherever you hear it.
Dream dream, even for a little while
Dream dream, filling up an idle hour
Fade away, radiate
I sit by and watch the river flow
I sit by and watch the traffic go
Imagine something of your very own
Something you can have and hold
I\’d build a road in gold just to have some dreaming
Dreaming is free
Dream dream, even for a little while
March 31, 2006
Does the world have you down in the dumps? Are the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to making your life miserable? Fear not! For music hath charms to soothe the savage beast. Here are five songs guaranteed to be ambrosia, that nectar of the gods that lifts the spirit and provides surcease of sorrow…
5. \”You Can Get It If You Really Want\” by Jimmy Cliff–remarkable uplift from the heart of oppression and poverty. There is a relentless, completely sincere optimism in this reggae masterpiece that can\’t help but make you rather bear the load than put it down entirely.
4. \”River Deep, Mountain High\” by Tina Turner–in which Phil Spector\’s infectious \”Wall of Sound\” comes smack dab against a voice that completely upstages it. Tina\’s voice soars from the peaks of ecstasy to the valleys of passion.
3. \”Walking on Sunshine\” by Katrina and the Waves–the original version is an explosion of euphoria, like falling head over heels in love for the first time. The subsequent version still has the same kick, only mildly diluted. It\’s easy to get drunk on this song. Pity that it\’s been appropriated by advertising, but what can you do?
2. \”What\’d I Say?\” by Ray Charles–once upon a time, this ran afoul of the guardians of public morals for its musical simulation of really good sex. They had a point, it IS a simulation of really good sex. And like really good sex, there\’s a lovely afterglow.
1. \”Dreaming\” by Blondie–one of the five or six greatest rock and roll songs ever recorded, this is nothing but pure joy, distilled into three minutes of driving drumbeats and Debbie Harry\’s siren-song voice. A song for dancing wherever you hear it.
Dream dream, even for a little while
Dream dream, filling up an idle hour
Fade away, radiate
I sit by and watch the river flow
I sit by and watch the traffic go
Imagine something of your very own
Something you can have and hold
I\’d build a road in gold just to have some dreaming
Dreaming is free
Horrors
March 27, 2006
After a week or so of downers, I thought I\’d liven things up a bit by talking about one of my passions. I\’m a nut for movies, as anyone who has read this blog can see. My first love with movies was horror movies. For me, they provided the gateway into the rest of cinema. If it weren\’t for that long-ago viewing of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I might not be the person sitting behind this here keyboard. I should note that horror movies are not my main area of interest these days, though they are never far from my affections. These days, my main cinematic appetites are for Asian films and American film noir, but of course I don\’t watch these to the exclusion of all else. And, as it so happens, both of these interests intersect the horror movie at key points. My favorite Kurosawa film, for example, is Throne of Blood. It\’s a samurai version of Macbeth, sure, but it\’s also a great horror movie. But I digress.
The horror movie is cyclical. It rises and falls every generation or so, depending on the political and social mood of the world. New generations percolate new fears through the cultural myth pool. The conventional wisdom states that the last great era for the horror movie was the 1970s, in which the horror movie expressed the multifarious social upheavals of that decade through the genre\’s curious dream logic. Since then, the conventional wisdom states, the horror movie has been in decline. It\’s like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, a faded southern belle, once beautiful but now tawdry. I\’d like to challenge that notion. The current period, sez I, is one of the periodic golden ages for horror movies. You wouldn\’t know it if you went by the marquee at the multiplex, though. Horror movies are a going concern around the world, but the studios that hold the keys to the theaters would just as soon you didn\’t know about it, because it would show their own fraudulent and substandard product for what it is. Which is a pity. It\’s been like this for longer than you might expect. The great horror movies of the late sixties and early seventies were often as not underground products. Night of the Living Dead came from the fringes. So did Halloween. So did The Evil Dead.
In any event, I thought I would present a list of 50 horror movies made since 1980 that belie the notion that the horror movie is dead or the exclusive province of teen-agers. I\’m not usually comfortable with list making, so you\’ll have to take this with a grain of salt. This is ranked only so far as it\’s the order in which I thought of the movies and I\’ve surely omitted something that I\’ll regret after I publish this. Also, I have an unusually broad definition of what is and isn\’t \”horror,\” so caveat emptor.
The list:
1. Dead Ringers (1988, David Cronenberg)
2. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, Ji-Woon Kim)
3. The Devil\’s Backbone (2001, Guillermo Del Toro)
4. Aliens (1986, James Cameron)
5. Re-Animator (1985, Stuart Gordon)
6. Frailty (2001, Bill Paxton)
7. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, John Naughton)
8. The Terminator (1984, James Cameron)
9. The Fly (1986, David Cronenberg)
10. May (2002, Lucky McKee)
11. Heavenly Creatures (1994, Peter Jackson)
12. The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)
13. A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, Ching Siu-Tung)
14. Near Dark (1987, Kathryn Bigelow)
15. Clean, Shaven (1994, Lodge H. Kerrigan)
16. Mulholland Dr. (2001, David Lynch)
17. Fun (1994, Rafal Zielinski)
18. Street of Crocodiles (1986, The Brothers Quay)
19. Alice (Neco z Alenky) (1988, Jan Svankmajer)
20. Smooth Talk (1985, Joyce Chopra)
21. The Passion of the Christ (2004, Mel Gibson)
22. Dawn of the Dead (2004, Zack Snyder)
23. Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988, Guy Maddin)
24. Paperhouse (1989, Bernard Rose)
25. Titus (1999, Julie Taymor)
26. The Silence of the Lambs (1992, Jonathan Demme)
27. The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988, Wes Craven)
28. Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)
29. The Blob (1988, Chuck Russell)
30. The Ring (1997, Hideo Nakata)
31. The Howling (1981, Joe Dante)
32. Videodrome (1982, David Cronenberg)
33. Séance (2000, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
34. Los Sin Nombre (1999, Jaume Balaguero)
35. Pumpkinhead (1989, Stan Winston)
36. Cure (1999, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
37. The Eye (2002, Danny and Oxide Pang)
38. Tesis (1996, Alejandro Amenabar)
39. Sleepy Hollow (1999, Tim Burton)
40. Hukkle (2002, György Pálfi)
41. Memento Mori (1999, Tae-Yong Kim and Kyu-Dong Min)
42. From Beyond (1986, Stuart Gordon)
43. Ginger Snaps (2000, John Fawcett)
44. Ravenous (1999, Antonia Bird)
45. The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shamalyan)
46. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005, Mike Newell)
47. Hosszú alkony (1997, Attila Janisch)
48. Humanoids from the Deep (1980, Barbara Peeters)
49. We Are Going to Eat You (1980, Tsui Hark)
50. The Changeling (1980, Peter Medak)
What are we to make of this? First, some comments: there are no slasher movies on this list. I hate them, so I don\’t list them. Second, there are very few big studio productions here. Third, it\’s surprisingly international, with entries from the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Korea, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Hong Kong, and Czechoslovakia. Finally, there are a LOT of entries made after 1999. I suspect that milennial unease was the trigger for the current boom time, but the real-life horrors of the 21st Century have fueled it.
I\’m sure to get some grief about some of these movies. To my mind, The Passion of the Christ is a horror movie–and a damned good one, at that–but some people will find the idea offensive. Regardless, it has the same plot as The Exorcist and a more disturbing conception of Satan. Of the recent horror films in which torture is the centerpiece, The Passion is the best. Back when The Passion was burning up the box-office, it was dethroned as box-office champ by the remake of Dawn of the Dead, another film about the dead returning to life. The irony is not lost on me. Some of the other controversies I\’ll leave to anyone who cares to comment.
Enjoy.
Horrors
March 27, 2006
After a week or so of downers, I thought I\’d liven things up a bit by talking about one of my passions. I\’m a nut for movies, as anyone who has read this blog can see. My first love with movies was horror movies. For me, they provided the gateway into the rest of cinema. If it weren\’t for that long-ago viewing of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I might not be the person sitting behind this here keyboard. I should note that horror movies are not my main area of interest these days, though they are never far from my affections. These days, my main cinematic appetites are for Asian films and American film noir, but of course I don\’t watch these to the exclusion of all else. And, as it so happens, both of these interests intersect the horror movie at key points. My favorite Kurosawa film, for example, is Throne of Blood. It\’s a samurai version of Macbeth, sure, but it\’s also a great horror movie. But I digress.
The horror movie is cyclical. It rises and falls every generation or so, depending on the political and social mood of the world. New generations percolate new fears through the cultural myth pool. The conventional wisdom states that the last great era for the horror movie was the 1970s, in which the horror movie expressed the multifarious social upheavals of that decade through the genre\’s curious dream logic. Since then, the conventional wisdom states, the horror movie has been in decline. It\’s like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, a faded southern belle, once beautiful but now tawdry. I\’d like to challenge that notion. The current period, sez I, is one of the periodic golden ages for horror movies. You wouldn\’t know it if you went by the marquee at the multiplex, though. Horror movies are a going concern around the world, but the studios that hold the keys to the theaters would just as soon you didn\’t know about it, because it would show their own fraudulent and substandard product for what it is. Which is a pity. It\’s been like this for longer than you might expect. The great horror movies of the late sixties and early seventies were often as not underground products. Night of the Living Dead came from the fringes. So did Halloween. So did The Evil Dead.
In any event, I thought I would present a list of 50 horror movies made since 1980 that belie the notion that the horror movie is dead or the exclusive province of teen-agers. I\’m not usually comfortable with list making, so you\’ll have to take this with a grain of salt. This is ranked only so far as it\’s the order in which I thought of the movies and I\’ve surely omitted something that I\’ll regret after I publish this. Also, I have an unusually broad definition of what is and isn\’t \”horror,\” so caveat emptor.
The list:
1. Dead Ringers (1988, David Cronenberg)
2. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, Ji-Woon Kim)
3. The Devil\’s Backbone (2001, Guillermo Del Toro)
4. Aliens (1986, James Cameron)
5. Re-Animator (1985, Stuart Gordon)
6. Frailty (2001, Bill Paxton)
7. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, John Naughton)
8. The Terminator (1984, James Cameron)
9. The Fly (1986, David Cronenberg)
10. May (2002, Lucky McKee)
11. Heavenly Creatures (1994, Peter Jackson)
12. The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)
13. A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, Ching Siu-Tung)
14. Near Dark (1987, Kathryn Bigelow)
15. Clean, Shaven (1994, Lodge H. Kerrigan)
16. Mulholland Dr. (2001, David Lynch)
17. Fun (1994, Rafal Zielinski)
18. Street of Crocodiles (1986, The Brothers Quay)
19. Alice (Neco z Alenky) (1988, Jan Svankmajer)
20. Smooth Talk (1985, Joyce Chopra)
21. The Passion of the Christ (2004, Mel Gibson)
22. Dawn of the Dead (2004, Zack Snyder)
23. Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988, Guy Maddin)
24. Paperhouse (1989, Bernard Rose)
25. Titus (1999, Julie Taymor)
26. The Silence of the Lambs (1992, Jonathan Demme)
27. The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988, Wes Craven)
28. Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)
29. The Blob (1988, Chuck Russell)
30. The Ring (1997, Hideo Nakata)
31. The Howling (1981, Joe Dante)
32. Videodrome (1982, David Cronenberg)
33. Séance (2000, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
34. Los Sin Nombre (1999, Jaume Balaguero)
35. Pumpkinhead (1989, Stan Winston)
36. Cure (1999, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
37. The Eye (2002, Danny and Oxide Pang)
38. Tesis (1996, Alejandro Amenabar)
39. Sleepy Hollow (1999, Tim Burton)
40. Hukkle (2002, György Pálfi)
41. Memento Mori (1999, Tae-Yong Kim and Kyu-Dong Min)
42. From Beyond (1986, Stuart Gordon)
43. Ginger Snaps (2000, John Fawcett)
44. Ravenous (1999, Antonia Bird)
45. The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shamalyan)
46. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005, Mike Newell)
47. Hosszú alkony (1997, Attila Janisch)
48. Humanoids from the Deep (1980, Barbara Peeters)
49. We Are Going to Eat You (1980, Tsui Hark)
50. The Changeling (1980, Peter Medak)
What are we to make of this? First, some comments: there are no slasher movies on this list. I hate them, so I don\’t list them. Second, there are very few big studio productions here. Third, it\’s surprisingly international, with entries from the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Korea, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Hong Kong, and Czechoslovakia. Finally, there are a LOT of entries made after 1999. I suspect that milennial unease was the trigger for the current boom time, but the real-life horrors of the 21st Century have fueled it.
I\’m sure to get some grief about some of these movies. To my mind, The Passion of the Christ is a horror movie–and a damned good one, at that–but some people will find the idea offensive. Regardless, it has the same plot as The Exorcist and a more disturbing conception of Satan. Of the recent horror films in which torture is the centerpiece, The Passion is the best. Back when The Passion was burning up the box-office, it was dethroned as box-office champ by the remake of Dawn of the Dead, another film about the dead returning to life. The irony is not lost on me. Some of the other controversies I\’ll leave to anyone who cares to comment.
Enjoy.
The Appalling Banality of Evil
March 22, 2006
I’ve been re-reading Hannah Arendt this week. I’m halfway through her Eichmann in Jerusalem. Does anyone else reading this blog know Arendt? She was a political philosopher who concerned herself with the problems of violence and totalitarianism. In 1961, she was sent to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann after he had been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina. Her first impression of the man is memorable: “Nicht einmal unheimlich.” Not even sinister. Eichmann, Arendt discovered, was an “efficient bureaucrat” rather than an SS monster like the commandant in Schindler’s List. This “efficient bureaucrat,” enabled the Holocaust to proceed. He’s the man who organized the logistics. He’s the man that made the trains run on schedule. The face of evil, Arendt notes, is thoughtless and uncomprehending and utterly banal. “The banality of evil” is a well-known principle forty-odd years after the fact, but it was Arendt who first gave words to the concept.
As I watch the unfolding of politics this year, I’m haunted by Arendt. Not just her thoughts on Eichmann, but her observations in The Origins of Totalitarianism, as well. The conditions in the United States are not so very far from the conditions she describes in that book. I don’t see the United States as a totalitarian regime just yet, but there are disturbing markers. A state of “constant” conflict (The War on Terror), a demonized “other” to inspire zenophobic hysteria (Islam, Al Qaeda, the terrorist in the abstract), a militarized economy. What we lack, thus far, is a leader with a personality cult. Despite the protests on the left, there is a wide gulf between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler. Bush has his devoted followers, true, but nothing like the personality cult that surrounded Hitler, Mao, or Stalin. Bush is not Hitler, and thank heaven for that. Bush seems to me to be more like Eichmann. He’s the cog that enables things. He’s the functionary placed in power by the petroleum industry. As such, the face of George W. Bush is utterly banal. It’s what got him elected, after all. He’s an everyman. Not too bright. Plain spoken. You might go on a hunting trip with him and have a good time (but stay away from Cheney). But that doesn’t make what he has done to the world any less evil. Oh…the numbers arent’ nearly as grotesque just yet–wait for the Iraqi civil war to run its course, wait to see whether the United States ends up in a war with Iran, then count the cost in human life. Regardless, I look at this administration and I see evil. Blank-faced, utterly stupid evil. And really, who’s more dangerous? The dreamer who dreams evil dreams? Or the man that enables those dreams to become real? Himmler or Eichmann? Exxon or George W. Bush?
What set me off on this particular tangent? No one thing in particular. There are the grotesque words of South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli defending his advocacy of that state’s new abortion ban. There’s an article in the UK Guardian noting that the aims of the Iraq war have been fullfilled (those aims are to create an Iraq that produces LESS oil, in line with OPEC, so that petroleum profits would soar). There’s that comment by a Bush administration official that “America is an empire now; reality is what we say it is.” But mostly there’s a letter that arrived in my email last week, noting that Christ was coming and that homosexuals like myself would be “cleansed” by holy fire. Not even an invitation to repent and get saved, but President Bush was mentioned prominently. He’s an enabler for rabid intollerance, too, it would seem.
I want to hope that this is a bad dream that the country is having–it’s had them before–and that the nation will wake up from it soon. Hell, I’m even engaging the political process more fully than I ever have before, because, as the saying goes, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” But these are bad times. We are seeing the tyranny of evil men reasserted in the United States. And I’m not hopeful for the immediate future.
Cheers.
Illiteracy and Gender…
March 19, 2006
Basically, men cannot read. Right? I mean, that HAS to be the explanation. I state quite clearly on my web page that I will not reply to men who send me a picture of their privates, but men continue to do this. Then yesterday, I state that I will delete anyone who sends me a chain letter. So what’s waiting for me in my mailbox this morning? That damned chain letter again.
Sigh.
Yes, I know that I’m quite fuckable, thank you. But YOU’LL never know if you keep sending me that damned message.
Grrr…..
Working the Chain Gang
March 17, 2006
So I got another one of those damned chain messages today, one that I thought had died out. Frankly, I’m sick of these. The sender of this message was unceremoniously removed from my friends list, post haste.
It’s simple: send me a chain letter, you get deleted.
I mean it.
Cheers.
Christi\’s Movie Picks Return!
March 14, 2006
I\’ve been slacking again. It\’s been a while since I had a new cinematic suggestion for all my dear and faithful readers. Again, send someone over to spank me. Please.
Ahem…
Today\’s movie is a delight from the Prague spring. For those of you who don\’t know film history, nor even history in general, the Prague spring was a loosening of restrictions on free expression in what used to be Czechoslovakia. The result was a renaissance of sorts among Czech artists. Notable artists who emerged from the Prague Spring were writer Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and filmmaker Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo\’s Nest), among others. At the time, Czechoslovakia was under the thumb of the former Soviet Union. The Soviets were NOT as sanguine about the Czech experiment in artistic freedom and brutally supressed it when they invaded the country in August of 1968, putting an end to the Prague Spring. Films like Closely Watched Trains are one of the reasons why.
Made in 1966 by director Jiri Menzel, Closely Watched Trains is ostensibly a portrait of life under the Nazi occupation and a love letter to the resistance. This sounds like it would be the basis for an action movie, but Closely Watched Trains is far, far from being an action movie. It is a subtle, none too gentle tweaking of totalitarian bureaucracy that realizes that, for the most part, people are more wound up in their own lives to take any action that isn\’t motivated by their own self-interest. The movie posits the idea that most spontaneous \”heroic\” actions performed without an immediate threat to life, limb, and property are undertaken as a way of impressing girls. But before all of that, it\’s a portrait of a coming of age. We follow a young man who has just embarked on a career at a train station. He does his job, like most people, but he\’s young enough to be obsessed–as many young men are–with the opposite sex.
Our young hero is terrified of women, particularly a young conductress on his line. He\’s absolutely smitten with her, but when he finally gets her into bed, he can\’t perform. Distraught (who wouldn\’t be?), he tries to kill himself. His doctor suggests a more practical therapy. He must distract himself. One of the things that distracts him is a beautiful resistance fighter who teaches him that he isn\’t, in fact impotent. His gratitude leads him into folly…
Not exactly Von Ryan\’s Express, eh? Well, never mind. The movie has a rhythm and cadence all its own. The film charms more than it overwhelms. It doesn\’t hurry to where it is going, but before you know it, you\’re locked into a tragedy that is as inevitable as it is unexpected. In addition, we get a tweaking of the authorities. This is the important part of the movie when it comes to understanding the real-world events that surround it. The Nazi functionary assigned to keep the trains running is hillariously incompetent at selling the party line. Instead of crushing defeats at the hands of the allies, German Armies are engaging in \”victorious retreats.\” The word \”Nazi\” is never used in the film. Because of this, it is easy to see the REAL target of the film\’s barbs, and they didn\’t like it one little bit…
Enjoy.
