It rained all day Thursday and much of Friday. But the long range forecast says no more for a whole week. We shall see. The grass has not yet been cut, though I may try some tomorrow. The grass is still squishy. I managed another clear night on Wednesday, and I ended up at Hallam, the club observatory. My friend Larry was also there. I have not observed from there in a couple of years now, preferring to go 7 miles further east where the skies are noticeably better. I hadn't seen Larry in a very long time, either, so it was great to talk with him (in the dark).
Last weekend and week was my bimonthly film festival. I get to choose three extra films over my usual two per week. For a long time now I have been concentrating on the Czech New Wave series from the 1960s that Criterion is featuring. This month we finally saw the final two films in that experimental and quite fantastic series.
All My Good Countrymen is from 1970, and is a fairly devastating account of communism taking over well run privately owned farms, and turning traditional villages and village life into depressing, demoralizing undertakings. Though nothing says it better than Orwell's Animal Farm, the Czech film seems to conjure up, in Deb's opinion, Eastern European folktales, as we follow the fate of seven or eight good friends before and during the advent of communism. As one man says to one of the village directors, "You are just like the Nazis." All in all it's a pretty impressive film.
Next was The Ear, a film about the paranoia of living in communist Czechoslovakia. It focuses on a man and his wife as they go to a party, coming home afterwards and getting into a serious argument. They begin to discover all the hidden microphones in their house, and their paranoia increases to a fever pitch. It makes you wonder about all the yahoos (in Canada and elsewhere) who march for "freedom," not even knowing that the fact they can march for it means they already have it. Trying to imagine how it would be to live in such an environment (currently Russia and Belarus, to take only two examples) is a pretty terrifying look into an alternate reality not many people would welcome. And now in some of the US states, civilians can turn in their neighbours and friends for seeking out abortions. Land of the free. Anyway, this is a very taut and suspenseful film, with an ending that is both unexpected, and expected.
My 3rd festival choice was a very obscure silent film from 1928, by a virtually unknown Detroit black director, Richard Maurice. Produced and largely filmed in Detroit, ELEVEN P.M. is "a surreal melodrama in which a poor violinist named Sundaisy (Maurice) tries to protect an orphaned girl (Wanda Maurice) from a small-time hoodlum. The story, which may or may not be a dream concocted by a struggling newspaperman, has one of the most bizarre endings in film history, when the spirit of the deceased Sundaisy possesses the body of a dog in order to take vengeance upon the crook." One of the weirder films in the Criterion collection, I came across it in the catalogue just by chance.
Now that the Czech New Wave collection has been viewed, I am moving on to something called Afro-Futurism, a collection of films that are part SF, part mystical musical, and part story of the Black experience on this planet. Seems very promising, with lots of experimental things to watch.
Mapman Mike
No comments:
Post a Comment