Notes on Central European Cinema

The clip above is from the beginning of Daisies by Vera Chytilová. As our film technician pointed out to me the other day, it's hard for most people really to grasp how completely innovative much of the technique was that Chytilová used in making this film in 1966. Apart from the incredibly subversive content of the film, both in terms of the private lives of these two wacky characters, but also in terms of the film images of explosions and other signs of broader social critique, the film is also pretty amazing in terms of the images she managed to produce on film in the absence of digital technologies.

. . .For those of you who didn't know, I'm teaching a Central European cinema course with a professor at U of M this term. I am bracing myself for the upcoming films, Adoption (Örökbefogadás) by Márta Mészáros* and A Woman Alone (Kobieta Samotna) by Agnieszka Holland (better known in the US for her Holocaust film Europa, Europa).



Adoption (see first image above) isn't quite as painfully depressing as Holland's devastating film (see second image above), but both have a kind of unnerving, creeping loneliness that penetrates you as you're watching them. If they weren't genius, I don't know that it would be bearable.


For our other films about gender and women under state socialism, we watched Milos Forman's wonderful 1965 film Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky; see image above), Dušan Makavejev's Man is Not a Bird (Covek Nije Tica; 1965) and Vera Chytilová's masterpiece Daisies (Sedmikrasky; 1966; see the clip above!) in the past couple of weeks, since we finished the unit on Holocaust film.

* See the entry on Mészáros here, too, if you're interested, and more on Makavejev here. For a discussion (in Czech) of Loves of a Blonde that includes lots of stills from the film, check this out. For some more discussion of women in Polish women filmmakers' films, check out this discussion in Kinoeye.)

Writing this little entry is getting me really excited about seeing some of these directors' other films, like WR: The Mysteries of the Organism, the film that got Makavejev exiled from Yugoslavia for its sexual-political content (see image below), and Mészáros's Eltávozott Nap, the first feature-length film made by a female filmmaker in Hungary. Oh, and Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I somehow never managed to see before!

Below is a little clip of Mészáros's Eltávozott Nap.

By the way, in an only distantly related vein, one of the stranger pieces of news from this part of the world recently is that electricity seems to be nothing more than a game of cat and mouse in Albania. No, really. I wonder if I might be able to use this piece of contemporary trivia to my advantage in convincing a friend of mine to watch Emir Kusturica's bizarre and hysterical film Black Cat, White Cat (Crna Macka, Beli Macor; 1998; see below) with me. (Of course, when I refer to a 72-hour blackout in a European capital as "trivia," that is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, perhaps drawing on the older meaning of trivia -- that is, etymologically speaking, a crossroads where three roads meet).

One Semester of Spanish - Love Song

La la la la da . . .
Me gusta la biblioteca,
Vivo en la casa roja,
Yo tengo dos bicicletas,
Muchas gracias y de nada . . .

Ride to Remember

One thing about Livingston County that sometimes mitigates the magical joys of the natural environment here is the rampant knee-jerk conservatism of most of the people who live in the area.

I was impressed to see the effort of close to 200 motorcyclists honoring the soldiers from this county who have died in Iraq in the Livingston County Ride to Remember on the local TV broadcast, and had a moment of wishing I'd been present for that. But the spin always turns the public attention back to war support and patriotism instead of merely a celebration of the lives of the men and women who served -- or a somber reflection on the losses of their families.

I can see on some level why this happens; if you come to the conclusion that this war is unjust then you have to accept that they effectively died in vain (at best), or in the service of an administration promoting an imperialist and highly counterproductive agenda abroad (at worst), and it makes the loss of these young people all the more tragic and difficult to accept.

But it makes it hard to stomach going to such an event, even though my heart goes out to those families, because I don't accept that such a display is really "about patriotism". I would love to go there and show my support for the families without that gesture shifting into a vote of confidence for the mess that this administration has made in Iraq, Afghanistan, and therefore the world over (because of the anti-American public opinion emerging as a result of our foreign policy).

I guess that I'm always going to be a bit of a black sheep here in this "red" county -- which I suppose is okay. I never actually thought it would be a permanent home.

Sometimes I wish I were more of a geek. I'm trying to geek out with my old Western Digital 500 GB My Book external hard drive that began to make the "click of death" that I wasn't informed enough to recognize about six months ago, and which just stopped working altogether about a month and a half ago. (Apparently, I learn now, WD drives have a pretty bad reputation among some folks -- See Markwilson and even Wikipedia. Of course they had great reviews when I shelled out the grant money for it back when I thought it would be a reliable place to keep my data.)

I've gotten as far as pulling the plastic casing away and I have lots of screws and screwdrivers and pieces of sticky foil tape and cables and green electronic plates all around, thanks to my own prowess and some guidance from Ransackery.

But here I am with the core metal box of the external drive now, and a whole lot of questions about SATA, and not enough confidence to open up my brand-new Dell desktop to make an internal connection between my computer and this second drive. I think I will have to shell out for a data recovery specialist, and hopefully they will be able to get at all the material contained in this little thing.

I have a similar set of issues with my old wireless router, which served me well for several years, but which I started a small fire in last week when I accidentally connected the AC power adapter for the Vonage telephone adapter to the router. I blew out the lapping flames inside, and the smoke subsided, and when I plugged in the correct cable, I had a surprising and exhilarating moment of the power lights coming up before the whole thing went completely dead. So, with the help of a friend, I opened up the thing, and he identified the one single part that got fried in the process, and it's possible that I might be able to solder a small piece of lamp wire into the thing to get it up and running again. But alas, I have no soldering iron (yes, even this daughter of an engineer), and so will probably end up ordering another unit, perpetuating the coal-fueled consumer goods industry in China that my mother says is the biggest culprit behind Bay Area air pollution (thanks to the winds across the Pacific). And this thing, which may have only a half-inch of "problem" will likely end up in a landfill.

Yeah, that thing I said earlier about the losses and gains of modern life . . .? Dealing with compatibility issues and data loss, consumption, pollution, and the world system always brings me back to that set of questions. Now where'd I put my antidepressants?

Oh, the rain on the lake. It's so. . . very . . . lovely.

Loungechair anthropologist philosophizing

I'm convinced that working with your hands is fundamentally nourishing. As the Shakers said, work is a gift to the person doing the work. Why turn it down? When you knead bread, you're kneading all the channels and acupuncture points in your hands. Whether or not you call that a spiritual benefit or just a physiological one, doing something with your hands is just incredibly invigorating to your whole body. -- Edward Espe Brown

Since I've had a bit more time at home with the end of the crazy winter term, I've taken up baking yeasted breads again, something I hadn't done by hand in years, maybe since I was living in San Francisco.

I bake my yeasted breads mainly from a second-hand copy of the Tassajara Bread Book that my mom bought at an estate sale at the home of the then-recently-deceased artist Susan Seddon Boulet. Apart from the simple joy that Edward Espe Brown always brings to me, there's something added in baking from Boulet's old cookbook, complete with age and water spots, an unexplained hole punch through the front cover, and a recipe for "Homegrowen Chocolate-Hazelnut Torte -- Chronical - Nov. 92" penned into the last page in what I assume is her own handwriting. There's something so intimate and human about it that only enhances the already earthy experience of handling dough on a wooden board and participating in its transformation over the span of several hours.

Baking, like anything else, has a remarkable way of serving as a microcosm of life, and a vessel of wisdom that often seems obscured by the strangely anti-quotidian life we seem to lead in the fast-paced, sanitized, convenience-oriented world of the metropolitan United States. When I clip fresh thyme and marjoram from my garden plot or toast up a fresh slice of spelt-wheat-buckwheat bread I produced myself, I can't help but wonder whether the gains really outweigh the losses in the way we've established our lives here.

There's a funny sense I have right now that my life has opened up its arms to me in a newly gentle and loving way recently. Is it the friends who are dear to me? The quiet beauty of waking beside the lake in the morning? The lilacs in bloom all around? Spying rabbits, turtles, fish, snakes, and deer around the place I call home? I'm not sure -- and I don't know what it means. But yesterday, on a solitary walk through the woods beside the Huron River at sunset, I became newly aware of the depth of my gratitude, even in the absence of certainty.

Mmmmm, I want to try Red Sea Ethiopian Restaurant in Ypsi.