From the archives: American Thanksgiving, 2001

Nice weekend, as demonstrated by two primary documents:

Wednesday, November 21, 2001: Our friends the Astes have invited us up to Park City, to hang out at their friends' condo for the weekend.  We have a pleasant drive up, anticipating.  (Sharon's long-time best friend) Erin is already there.   It’s pretty nice.  We settle right in.  Our kids and their kids haven't been together in a while, but they pick it back up perfectly.  They go right to the jacuzzi, then play a ton of game boy, and a bunch of Catchphrase, and don’t watch too much TV, all things considered.  The ladies labour over some pre-feast preparations.  I'm happy to be on Claire detail.  (Claire is four months old.)  I have the best job, it turns out.  We're back in the bedroom.  I read a chapter or two, watch her doze off, come out for a bit of chatting and supervising, then back again. 

Sharon tries to put a load of dishes through and finds that there’s no hot water.  Erin calls the maintenance man.  He comes over, looks in, and has a fit.  “We don't own this unit!  This is someone’s house!”  It seems their paperwork, and the key that actually opened the door, are all wrong.  We lug everything one building over.  The kids moan scandalizedly—“the new TV’s smaller!”—but there are expressions on their faces, and animated conversations, that suggest that this will be the weekend’s best incident.

Thursday, November 22: What a nice day!  Matt (3) wonders why he woke up in a different place than the one he actually fell asleep in.  Snow is falling, and the Jacuzzi starts a-bubbling.  While large people talk and play scrabble and prepare food, the kids stay out there, three, five hours at a time.  They all do very nicely.  Several of them go Finnish, and run howling into the mounting snows to roll around like loonies.  Even Drew (10) gives it a try.  Sarah (8) streaks over a hill and right out of sight.  

Jacuzzing: http://abouthomemovies.org/2012/07/19/hot-tub/

Dinner’s nice, though we’re awfully short on potatoes!  Another round of Catchphrase follows.  Sarah rules!  “What’s the opposite of heaven?”  Much inappropriate TV gets watched.  I take Claire back to the reading room.  Spence (5) and Matt just walk up and down the hall with an umbrella that they imagine into a walking stick.  Sharon and Caitlin clean up.  Drew and Sarah play on that Game Boy.  No harm was done, seemingly.  It's Matt's turn to say the prayer.  “Thanks for the night, so we can play ghost in the graveyard and go hide and seek.”

Friday, November 23: Lots of snow.  Breakfast by Steve.  The kids play scrabble.  Erin gets up very late.  “What’s a’ matter, Erin?” asks Steve.  “Did you have to go to the bathroom?”  Time passed lightly and slowly.  Good times.  We hit weather on the way home, but all is harmoniouis, or the boys fall asleep, and we arrive in one piece.  

It’s a cloudy winter afternoon.  The girls go to Harry Potter (I) with the Swensons (cousins from California).  I give Claire a bottle, put a long movie on for the lads, and drop heavily off before the warm air.  Whoo!  Everyone comes back.  Drew is outraged at how poor the movie was.  We have a round of Boggle, and then it's bedtime.  The Swensons come back for a late visit.  Claire smiles and smiles. 

Sunday, November 25: The snow continues.  This is always exciting.  The Swensons come to church with us.  After they get a picture taken in the back yard.  Snowballs start flying.  Philip hits Caitlin in the ear, then Matt in the chest.  Matt's brows turn thunderous.,  “Guys!  Stop that!”  Later a bit of tension boils up.  It is amazingly diffused by a couple of home movies.  Thank goodness for our archives! 

Please excuse all of these posts about Sarah, but she really is our best kid

Athlete/scholar/all-round guy:

 

The bigger one, in the middle

Sarah, on the 2nd team of the Pac-12 Conference All-Academic squad for the 2nd year running.

Utes' press announcement:

http://utahutes.cstv.com/sports/w-soccer/spec-rel/112113aaa.html

From the Pac-12:

http://pac-12.com/article/2013/11/20/pac-12-names-womens-soccer-all-academic-teams

Three dance films by Antonio Gades and Carlos Saura

Blood Wedding 

(Spain, 1981)

The dancers and musicians arrive, they warm up, they do a run-through of this very concise adaptation—Lorca—and they’re done.  It’s all very simple, efficient, even unvarnished—the more to bring out the fiery passion of the whole thing.  Is that an Iberian stereotype?  If we go by the conviction and authority with which those stereotypes are played out, not a bit.  It would seem that fiery passion is a main ingredient of Flamenco, as well as an actual part of actual Spain, whether you like it or not.

The original production, remounted

The long prologue to the actual performance demonstrates the viability, the real pleasure of that unvarnished strategy.  As mentioned, there's a lot of footage of the troupe simply getting ready.  It’s really them, and this is really how they do it.  And it's evident that they’ve done it a thousand times, too.  But what might have been boring actually ends up as a very convincing demonstration of German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer’s old idealistic notion: the right kind of framing, the right kind of attention, will lift the framed thing up.  Kracauer called it the redemption of physical reality.  Here it seems a kind of exaltation, or maybe, since the performance is so stylized, and the narrative will eventually bring us to infidelity and killing, some kind of operatic apotheosis.

Denouement

There’s a wonderful bit in which choreographer/lead Gades puts on his make-up while looking right into the camera's lens.  As he does so there’s a voice over in which he explains how it is that he went from obscurity to mastery.  This short sequence is a great example of Paul Rotha’s notion of the picture and the sound working in counterpoint.  The two of them don’t quite match, the result being that they actually multiply.  Also, just a minute later we see a fabulous, outright electrifying utilization of the rehearsal space.  The parade of pirhouettes!  Clapping!  And more proof that there’s really nothing in the cinema quite as thrilling as a moving camera. 

This whole practically documentary equation is somewhat complicated by the fact that these are actors/dancers, that they are obviously and always performing, that they are ridiculously talented and attractive.  This means multiplicity: we’ve got a performance preserved, dancing in which the camera, and even the flat bed, are successfully made a part of the choreography, and a demonstration of the complications and satisfactions of observational and interactive documentary.  The movie is a whole bundle of satisfying things.

Carmen 

(Spain, 1983)

That first shot!  This expands the method of Blood Wedding quite considerably, though some of the basic ideas and methods are still in place.  Treat everyday things beautifully and those everyday things emerge as beautiful in themselves.  In addition to those satisfactions, Saura gives us a really challenging and satisfying meta-narrative.  Rehearsal bleeds into performance, actors meld with the characters they’re portraying, dance and theatre and film intermingle.  It’s complicated, but it’s clear as well.  Lots of things are effectively addressed: perceptions of Spain as they come into conflict with Spain itself, or the way that Spaniards field and adapt those perceptions.  We have the power and perversity of women, and the possibility that the perversity is really a projection of men’s controlling impulses.  There are also tremendous echoes of portentous precedents: here is a worthy, Renoirian meditation on how stylized art or figurative arts bring us so paradoxically and powerfully to our own realities.  It’s The Golden Coach.  It’s The Red Shoes.  It’s Olivier’s Henry V, and maybe even more successfully.  In other words, as Michael Powell said, “all art is one.” 

Note that there are tons of spectacular little moments, if spectacular and little can properly go together.  Like when the extremely charismatic guitarist Paco de Lucia discovers their own musically, culturally indigenous way into Bizet's pastiche.  And again, the clapping!  The aftermath of the card game, and then the way they drop character and become friends again.  Just before killing each other.  Latins, artists... 

Fake, but not:

El Amor Brujo

(Spain, 1986)

Gades, and that set

Once again Saura starts with an aggressively stunning shot.  Once again, the point of it is to establish not only setting but also strategy.  However convincingly dressed, this is always a big sound stage, and another Henry V-type contemplation of how theatricality and reality can aid each other.  Once again, theatricality and reality (including heritage and tradition) do just that; they’ve got this concept down.  The wedding sequence is tremendous, especially the contemporary parts—the plugged in musical ensemble—which only show that the modern is always and only secondary to antiquity. 

This one feels really operatic, more even than the previous two.  Is it because of all of the Spaniards and gypsies?  These things, and it's also operatic because it’s so outsized, and so convicted in its extravagance.  This production—all of these productions—invites, requires our own investment, and a real suspension of disbelief.  All this smouldering!  It’s fantastic, and almost always on the brink of being silly.  In the previous two films the way everyone just starts dancing or clapping or ululating is pretty amazing.  It feels so spontaneous, and it’s so wonderfully done.  Here you might say that it occasionally feels like a bit of a mannerism, or even a bit of not very good. 

All of that is more noticeable because this film’s source is pretty thin, dramatically.  Or maybe it’s just pretty small—de Falla's suite only lasts twenty-three minutes, after all.  Mind you, it really is stirring when those familiar musical airs arrive.  Also, the cross-casting between the three films starts to yield real benefits.  Gades (who is getting interestingly older), Cristina Hoyos—look at the camera compositions; in a way the whole story/myth comes back to the fact and figure of her breasts—the surpassingly sluttish Laura del Sol, and, in a stunningly dissolute turn (just as in Carmen), Juan Antonio Jimenez start to register both as old friends and out and out archetypes.  

The official view: http://www.criterion.com/boxsets/502-eclipse-series-6-carlos-saura-s-flamenco-trilogy

Utah Utes, 2013: some of what happened, some of what it meant

Sarah's garden, November 2013

http://www.dailyutahchronicle.com/?p=2595218&utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Nov_+19+Top+Stories&utm_campaign=20131103_m117794236_Nov_+19+Top+Stories&utm_term=Manning_3A+_E2_80_98They+deserved+it_E2_80_99

College Station, TX; NCAA women's soccer tourney, 2013

Kids, do you know about this?

Hey, children.  This is the best thing I ever wrote, I think.  It's in four parts.
It's about a great film artist, whose work dealing with a very specific time and place and series of events ends up revealing all of time and the whole wide world.

Take a look, sometime.

Jennings, directing

http://duncantalkingaboutfilm.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/humphrey-jennings-1907-1950-pt-1/

http://duncantalkingaboutfilm.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/humphrey-jennings-1907-1950-pt-2/

http://duncantalkingaboutfilm.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/humphrey-jennings-1907-1950-pt-3/

http://duncantalkingaboutfilm.wordpress.com/2013/05/31/humphrey-jennings-1907-1950-pt-4/

Remembrance Day

Two war films:

The Battle of Russia

US, 1943

Directed by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak

It’s kind of a false division, but what if you were to pit entertainment against education, and have this film represent the better part?  It's no contest, overwhelmingly.  This isn’t Hollywood rescuing and compromising dull information; it’s information rendered with the spirit it deserves, and producing the electricity native to it.  It's not often that you can say this, but blessings on the war department!  They’re motivating an audience, and eventually an entire population.  They’re propagandizing, even, of course.  But in this case it's progaganda in the very best sense.  Like the NFB/Stuart Legg films that precede and then accompany these Why We Fight pieces, emotion comes always and only after a proper and very detailed establishing of context.  Facts, two parts worth, selected and ordered and interpreted, are way more exciting than show biz can ever be.  First because they’re so much more important than frivolous escapism.  Second because they’re so much more interesting!  In the present instance our filmmakers even dispense with Great Men, in favour of acknowledging the Soviet collective.  They’d reap the whirlwind for that seeming miscalculation, but in fact they are right, anthropologically and morally.  The right thing to do is to tell their story, not your cultural or ideological take on their story.  And what a story!  This feels like the Churchill museum, in London, and as follows.  After the unspeakable hardship (not fully rendered, for modesty’s and decency’s sake) and incalculable loss of the Leningrad siege, and in the impossible stand at Stalingrad, this is that rare historical reduction, that rare historical simplicity.  This was the most important thing happening in the whole world, and this was the whole world’s salvation.  The result is so thrilling, and so moving.

Memorial

Blockade

Compiled 2006

Directed by Sergei Loznitsa

Leningrad, from the inside.  This is challengingly and beautifully unvarnished.  So much quieter than the noble Capra film, and an amazing supplement thereto (or vice versa!).  So much of the indescribable, incalculable event isn’t here.  Some of what remains is surprisingly run-of-the-mill, or everyday.  Look at those wide streets.  Look at how powerfully wintery it is.  Look at how the feudal, the ancient operates right alongside of the modern.  And of course as the siege continues things get increasingly feudal, which is the quotidian flip side of the astonishing idea, the only partially reflected reality of 800,000 dead.  The foley work (sound effects—this footage was originally recorded silently) is very effective, and respectful too.  It pushes us out of the realm of merely historical stock footage into that of sparse elegy.  Here is a great demonstration of how history is an account assembled out of raw materials, and that inevitably, even advantageously, there are many accounts of any event, no matter what the magnitude.  And with the power and weight of even the little stuff here, you can’t but conclude that everything in the world is finally magnitudinous.  What a fortuitous discovery, what an essential addition to the record.  (Special note: water, sleds, the mass graves—it’s not just Nazi atrocity, but the terrible necessity of disposing of all those bodies [and what a range of transport and affect!], the fireworks, the hanging!)

Matt and Claire and their costumes

The characters are franchised, and the ensembles are home-made.  (Dr. Who/David Tennant, Ann Withers/Whitney Call...)

 

Bone of contention

There's a whole set of stories behind this seemingly innocent photograph.

A lot of the family, on a beautiful autumn afternoon (love and happiness)

Miscellaneous images of Drew and Sarah

Raiding FB photo archives to preserve and celebrate the lifestyles of these two fine collegians ...

Drew, Washington DC, summer of 2013:

Sarah, from all over the time and place: