La Grande Illusion

I saw La Grande Illusion on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and I recorded it, and so far have watched it twice. It was made in 1934 (or thereabouts) by Jean Renoir. Jean Gabin was a lead in it. It seems to have been Jean Gabin day at TMC. Pretty good stuff.

It is a very good film about war, and if you watch it, you will readily pick out scenes which were bodily lifted into other films, like Casablanca and The Bridge Over the River Kwai.



What caught my interest was the fact that Captain Boeldieu, a member of the aristocracy, was pessimistic about the place of his class in the future. He apprehended that after this bloodletting, things would change, and the privileged class would sort of waste away.

The film was set in World War I, and was a creation of the mentality of those who lived through that time.



I mentioned that I had been reading Mary Roberts Rinehart's murder mystery, The Yellow Room, which was published in 1945, and was a World War II creation. Similarly, the rich and privileged were sensed to be passing away after the present bloodletting. Carol Spencer, the main character, muses on how different things will be after the war, when the privileges her dowager mother is used to will continue their erosion, which had been started by the rationing and shortages of war.



Now once again we face a privileged class: the 5% of the population wherein most of the wealth is concentrated. Shall we once again face some cataclysm and general bloodletting? Will it be war, civil war, or oppression?

I do not know, but it seems that our Capitalistic way of life is cycling through similar scenarios every generation, and there are plenty of warnings, but I guess the overall message is that we are too stupid to see them, for it may well be that concentration of Wealth and Power in the hands of the Few may not merely be injustice and rapacity, but instead may be a symptom of a cancerous disease rampant through the fabric of the Body Social!



The dynamics of history are not Capitalism nor Socialism. The driving force is nothing we have been able to put our finger on. But the stories are there in front of us: Pride goes before the Fall. And all the violence and bloodletting is just the murderous implements that are used by a people who know no other way to conduct themselves when their lives are out of joint.



Over and over, the bitter ironies play out, because we cannot grasp the need to avoid being put in the position where a sudden reversal will wreck our lives.

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Blue Heron

The Blue Heron is my totem animal. Most of the time I see him, he has nothing much to say. He is searching for food.



So I go on and leave him to his hunt. You cannot force meaning. But you should not ignore meaning, either. We have those two problems: we force meaning where there is none, and where there is something, we are too busy to attend to it.



Those powers are not like roses that you can stop and smell. The power in the universe - if you mean to pay attention - demands a chunk of your life.



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Veritable Cinema

If you read this blog, you are used to my heavy-handed use of films for just about anything: I use them as my logic, my inspiration, my references, and my whipping boy. I use films like slate: throw them down as stepping stones on the wet ground to get from Point A to Point B. I disregard them like Schopenhauer's Causality Tram... once I get to Point B, I dismiss the means of my transport, and send them packing back to the archives.



Now, if you wish top read an account of film done finely and insightfully, try this review and discussion of Ozu's films:

 

http://oliverlunn.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-paradox-of-ozus-masterpiece.html



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Image of Obsession: Older People in Exile

 Fahrenheit 451 Monorail Scene

An Image of Future

I have been obsessed by Images and complexes of Images all my life. Their vividness has interfered with my ability to function at some times. For most of my life, they were just nonsense Images, similar to OCD behavior maybe, not quite as strong, not quite as compelling... maybe. Since the turn of the century, however, these Images have taken on more reality and seem to have been forerunners of the images we see in the daily news.

One of the Images that have beset me throughout the last 40 years has been that of old people gathered into their own communities of exile, living out their days apart from a society which does not want them. Over time it became a mimicry of the final scene in Fahrenheit 451 : Oskar Werner reciting and memorizing a forbidden book, walking with Julie Christie, surrounded by the other old people who recited the forbidden books they had memorized; as the camera pulled back, snow began to fall.



It also took the form of an elderly Lord of the Flies, and at times a Swiss Family Robinson combined with Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome... and every day we recite "the Tell", the story of who we once were and where we came from.



There is a sense of having escaped into a refuge; it is a hard life, but better than the one we (yes, "we"!) escaped from, and there is a good life somewhere in the Future!



From Beyond Thunderdome:

Time counts and keeps countin', and we knows now finding the trick of what's been and lost ain't no easy ride. But that's our trek, we gotta' travel it.

And there ain't nobody knows where it's gonna' lead. Still in all, every night we does the Tell, so that we 'member who we was and where we came from...

And we lights the city... for all of them that are still out there. 'Cause we knows there come a night, when they sees the distant light, and they'll be comin' home.

I am beginning to see the Image become Reality in the News.

 

Monorail Trash being used to Shelter the Homeless

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pix

http://oliverlunn.blogspot.com/2010/12/british-landscape-in-frenchmans-film.html

http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=200412114840.french_monorail_trash

Old Posts

Over time, Blogger has had some issues which have caused all of my older posts (and I do not know where the dividing point is)to have lost all paragraph separation, so everything is run together in one paragraph.



Sorry. I'll try to fix some.



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Literary America

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

D. H. Lawrence





I had this quote on a post about Fight Club, and I never felt entirely comfortable with it... until now, that is.

Having read part of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, I see that it is spot on, at least to our souls. The book deals with  KGB sadistic rapists, bisexual girls with fetishes being raped and brutalized, and evil psychiatrists who - by the way - are pedophiles.



What a glorious Boschean depiction of Hell! And how much we enjoy it, turning the book into a phenomenal best seller! What a thrill it must be to read it!



I thought it juvenile... nasty juvenile... juvenile of the dark side, and I threw it away from me and returned it to the library, for I think it bad luck to leave such items within one's house.



The essential American reader's soul is hard, isolate, and a killer.

We are what we create with consciousness. Please stop creating echoes of evil within yourselves.



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Evil

Evil does not require the stereotypical expressions of actors portraying villains. It does not require harsh laughter, sneers, icy genius, darkened rooms; evil can be bright and sunny and just as normal as that guy next door who would not hurt a fly.

Evil may be eight kids on a camping trip to the cabin of the uncle of one of them, and there may be no escaped lunatic killers lurking nearby, nor any mutant sharks in the lake. Just a sunny day and friends. Good and evil are aniconic: they have no real depictions. They are real choices of real people and are as ordinary as the morning toast.



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