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Sunday, January 31, 2010

Baudelaire: La Chambre Double

Mariette Lydis - La Chambre Double, 1948
etching/aquatint
(http://www.idburyprints.com/)


Superb depiction of Eternity as space of erotic dreaming! Eternity, desirable as only dreams are, fragile as only dreams are. And Time, horrific as a spectrum, killing the forever and imposing the stupid present.

Note the elegant accolade to Chateaubriand, enamored of his imaginary sylphide: the great line of French poetry!

The illustration of Michèle Battut, with her subtle minimalism: the space of erotic desire is inside, the present, of prosaic indifference and potential hostility, is just there, outside the window.




Une chambre qui ressemble à une rêverie, une chambre véritablement spirituelle, où l'atmosphère stagnante est légèrement teintée de rose et de bleu.

L'âme y prend un bain de paresse, aromatisé par le regret et le désir. -- C'est quelque chose de crépusculaire, de bleuâtre et de rosâtre; un rêve de volupté pendant une éclipse.

Les meubles ont des formes allongées, prostrées, alanguies. Les meubles ont l'air de rêver; on les dirait doués d'une vie somnambulique, comme le végétal et le minéral. Les étoffes parlent une langue muette, comme les fleurs, comme les ciels, comme les soleils couchants.

Sur les murs nulle abomination artistique. Relativement au rêve pur, à l'impression non analysée, l'art défini, l'art positif est un blasphème. Ici, tout a la suffisante clarté et la délicieuse obscurité de l'harmonie.

Une senteur infinitésimale du choix le plus exquis, à laquelle se mêle une très-légère humidité, nage dans cette atmosphère, où l'esprit sommeillant est bercé par des sensations de serre-chaude.

La mousseline pleut abondamment devant les fenêtres et devant le lit; elle s'épanche en cascades neigeuses. Sur ce lit est couchée l'Idole, la souveraine des rêves. Mais comment est-elle ici? Qui l'a amenée? quel pouvoir magique l'a installée sur ce trône de rêverie et de volupté? Qu'importe? la voilà! je la reconnais.

Voilà bien ces yeux dont la flamme traverse le crépuscule; ces subtiles et terribles mirettes, que je reconnais à leur effrayante malice! Elles attirent, elles subjuguent, elles dévorent le regard de l'imprudent qui les contemple. Je les ai souvent étudiées, ces étoiles noires qui commandent la curiosité et l'admiration.

A quel démon bienveillant dois-je d'être ainsi entouré de mystère, de silence, de paix et de parfums? O Béatitude! ce que nous nommons généralement la vie, même dans son expansion la plus heureuse, n'a rien de commun avec cette vie suprême dont j'ai maintenant connaissance et que je savoure minute par minute, seconde par seconde!

Non! il n'est plus de minutes, il n'est plus de secondes! Le temps a disparu; c'est l'Éternité qui règne, une éternité de délices!

Mais un coup terrible, lourd, a retenti à la porte, et, comme dans les rêves infernaux, il m'a semblé que je recevais un coup de pioche dans l'estomac.

Et puis un Spectre est entré. C'est un huissier qui vient me torturer au nom de la loi; une infâme concubine qui vient crier misère et ajouter les trivialités de sa vie aux douleurs de la mienne; ou bien le saute-ruisseau d'un directeur de journal qui réclame la suite d'un manuscrit.

La chambre paradisiaque, l'idole, la souveraine des rêves, la Sylphide, comme disait le grand René, toute cette magie a disparu au coup brutal frappé par le Spectre.

Horreur! je me souviens! je me souviens! Oui! ce taudis, ce séjour de l'éternel ennui, est bien le mien. Voici les meubles sots, poudreux, écornés; la cheminée sans flamme et sans braise, souillée de crachats; les tristes fenêtres où la pluie a tracé des sillons dans la poussière; les manuscrits, raturés ou incomplets; l'almanach où le crayon a marqué les dates sinistres!

Et ce parfum d'un autre monde, dont je m'enivrais avec une sensibilité perfectionnée, hélas! il est remplacé par une fétide odeur de tabac mêlée à je ne sais quelle nauséabonde moisissure. On respire ici maintenant le ranci de la désolation.

Dans ce monde étroit, mais si plein de dégoût, un seul objet connu me sourit: la fiole de laudanum; une vieille et terrible amie; comme toutes les amies, hélas! féconde en caresses et en traîtrises.

Oh! oui! le Temps a reparu; le Temps règne en souverain maintenant; et avec le hideux vieillard est revenu tout son démoniaque cortège de Souvenirs, de Regrets, de Spasmes, de Peurs, d'Angoisses, de Cauchemars, de Colères et de Névroses.

Je vous assure que les secondes maintenant sont fortement et solennellement accentuées, et chacune, en jaillissant de la pendule, dit: Je suis la Vie, l'insupportable, l'implacable Vie!

Il n'y a qu'une Seconde dans la vie humaine qui ait mission d'annoncer une bonne nouvelle, la bonne nouvelle qui cause à chacun une inexplicable peur.

Oui! le Temps règne; il a repris sa brutale dictature. Et il me pousse avec son double aiguillon. -- Et hue donc! bourrique! Sue donc, esclave! Vis donc, damné!


Now look at the lithograph of Bernadette Kelly: I think is offers a more dramatic interpretation, Forever and Now seem to be together, in intimate fight, superb Forever and insoleht Now



Here is an English translation:

A room that resembles a reverie, a truly spiritual room, in which the motionless atmosphere is lightly tinted with pink and blue.

There the soul takes a bath in laziness, scented with regret and desire. --- It is something like twilight, bluish and pinkish; a dream of sensual delight during an eclipse.

The shape of the furniture is elongated, prostrate, languid. The furniture appears to be dreaming; it seems to be endowed with a somnambulate life, like vegetables or minerals. The fabrics speak a mute language, like flowers, like skies, like setting suns.

On the walls, no artistic abomination. Relative to the pure dream, to unanalyzed impression, definite art, positive art is a blasphemy. Here, everything has the sufficient clarity and the delicious obscurity of harmony.

An infinitesimal fragrance of the most exquisite selection, to which is blended a very-light humidity, swims in this atmosphere, where the slumbering spirit is rocked by hot-house sensations.

Muslin rains abundantly before the windows and the bed; it overflows in snowy cascades. On the bed the Idol is sleeping, the queen of dreams. But how has she come here? Who brought her? What magical power installed her on this throne of reverie and of sensual delight? What does it matter? There she is! I recognize her.

There indeed are those eyes in which flame cuts through twilight; those subtle and terrible lamps that I recognize by their frightening malice! They draw, they subjugate, they devour the gaze of he who is imprudent enough to contemplate them. I have often studied them, those black stars that command both curiosity and admiration.

To what benevolent demon do I owe being thus surrounded by mystery, silence, peace, and perfumes? Oh Beatitude! That which we generally name life, even in its happiest expanses, has nothing in common with this supreme life which I now know and which I savor minute by minute, second by second!

No! There are no more minutes, no more seconds! Time has disappeared; it is Eternity that reigns, an eternity of delights!

But a terrible, heavy knock resounded at the door, and, as in infernal dreams, it seemed to me that I had been struck in the stomach by a pickaxe.

And then the Specter entered. He is a bailiff who has come to torture me in the name of the law; an infamous concubine who has come to cry poverty and to add the trivialities of her life to the pains of my own; or else the messenger boy of a magazine editor, come to demand the next installment of a manuscript.

The paradisiacal room, the idol, the queen of dreams, the Sylph, as the great René would say, all of that magic has disappeared at the brutal knock struck by the Specter.

Horror! I remember myself! I remember myself! Yes! This hovel, this abode of eternal boredom, is indeed my own. Here is the stupid, dirty, worn furniture; the stove with neither flame nor ember, soiled with spit; the sad windows upon which the rain has traced trails in the dust; the manuscripts, covered with corrections, incomplete; the almanac upon which a pencil has made note of sinister dates!

And that perfume of another world, upon which I intoxicated myself with a perfected sensibility, alas! It has been replaced by the fetid odor of tobacco mixed with an unidentifiably nauseating odor of mildew. What one breathes here now is rancidity and desolation.

In this world so narrow, but so filled with disgust, a single familiar object smiles at me: the laudanum vial; an old and terrible friend; like all friends, alas!, fecund in caresses and in betrayals.

Yes! Yes! Time has returned; Time rules as sovereign now; and with the hideous old man has returned all of his demoniacal train of Memories, Regrets, Spasms, Fears, Anguishes, Nightmares, Angers, and Neuroses.

I assure you that now the seconds are forcefully and solemnly accented, and each one, bursting from the clock, says: I am Life, insupportable, implacable Life!

There is only one Second in human life whose mission it is to announce good news, good news that causes everyone an inexplicable fear.

Yes! Time rules; it has reestablished its brutal dictatorship. And it prods me with its double goad. -- Gee-up now, you ass! Get to work, slave! Get on with your life, damned one!


Mariette Lydis - La Chambre Double, 1948
etching/aquatint
(http://www.idburyprints.com/)



(Baudelaire)

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Saturday, January 30, 2010

Two Essays on J. D. Salinger

Two essays on J. D. Salinger, by Henry Allen and David Lodge.

J.D. Salinger pictured in 1961, Photo: POLARIS


Henry Allen in Washington Post:

At the end, with J.D. Salinger dead at 91, we have no memories of him.

That is to say, we have no cranky anecdotes about thrown drinks, no second cousins who once stood next to him at a roulette table, no paparazzi pictures of him with his long face and solemn eyes staring with predatory kindness at some starlet in Malibu (careful not to look at her breasts, of course).

He was a sort of saint to his upscale readers, a foe of the cruel and the vulgar, a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, it was said, a man who in his writing found his masculinity in sensitivity and self-deprecation.

Not like Hemingway on safari or Fitzgerald in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel or Kerouac hurling himself back and forth across America.

They were famous public figures. Salinger was merely famous, idolized, envied; an acutely private figure who was a recluse for more than 50 years in Cornish, N.H. He was still famous when he died.

But we have no memories of him, to speak of, aside from gritty memoirs by his daughter, Margaret, and the writer Joyce Maynard, who, as a freshman at Yale, found herself in a claustrophobic grind of a relationship with him. And lawsuits protecting his privacy and copyrights, and the endless rumors of insanity or Buddhist monkhood.

Back when he was publishing -- his last short story appeared in the New Yorker in 1965 -- he was a demigod in a cult that seemed like a conspiracy between his books and his readers. He had mystique and a second-hand charisma that came from his prose, not his persona. His glamour dwindled with the decades. Once, believe it or not, boys wanted to be J.D. Salinger, cool and knowing. They thought they were, in fact, Holden Caulfield, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger's first book and only novel, now appearing on better high school reading lists.

Making reading required takes its toll on culture heroes. And writers were once culture heroes in America, people you wanted to touch, like weeping statues or movie stars.

Salinger was once considered subversive, in his wry, quiet, tweedy way, the sort of guy who stands in a corner for the whole party and then goes home with the most beautiful girl there. But how can you be subversive when your books are assigned by the sort of educational pooh-bahs whom Holden might have spotted as phonies -- a concept he taught us in an age when authenticity was the great virtue to sensitive outsiders?

In their better moments, Holden and members of Salinger's vast, epically self-conscious Glass family would have seen the phonies for what they were, but -- saints that they were -- they would have forgiven them with the ironic condescension that rang clear and cool as a tuning fork in their creator's prose.

Gone, all gone: the authenticity, the spirituality, the writer as hero, the belief that literature could save us, as a critic and prophet named Lionel Trilling said somewhere back then.

Still, for those of us growing older until we find ourselves growing old, hope lives on, and Salinger's death is a happy occasion.

The manuscripts: There are said to be novels, stories, maybe even haiku -- Salinger brought haiku to our attention, never dreaming that they would become banal, refrigerator poetry brought home from school. These manuscripts are in bank vaults or salt mines or someplace safe from the clamoring crowd, it is said.

Does he become America's Proust, with endless chronicles of the Glass family, some of whose children, notably Waker and Walt, had yet to come on stage when Salinger stopped publishing?

One hears of a war novel and thinks of his finest short story, For Esme -- With Love and Squalor, about a sensitive, ironic, condescending but forgiving soldier whose nervous system is shattered by combat, as Salinger's seems to have been, in World War II Europe.

Could a whole novel be that good? If so, if so . . .

On the other hand, his last published story, called Hapworth 16, 1924, was a pretentious, self-reflexive slog of the sort you might expect when a writer creates a 7-year-old genius-saint character, Seymour Glass, who writes a 25,000-word letter from camp.

The story is not about the letter; it is the letter.

Even in 1961, when Time magazine was putting Salinger on its cover, the Glass family saga was getting a little tiresome, and it would get more so, to the point where we, his faithful readers, found ourselves forgiving Salinger, rather than Salinger forgiving us.

Salinger had gone out of his way to meet Hemingway during the war, and Hemingway was said to have called him a helluva talent.

Hemingway was a writer who made unhappiness beautiful. Salinger took it a step further -- with the same uncanny ability to evoke the world his characters move through, he made it a virtue.

Oh, how I needed this reassurance when I was 12 or 13. (I'm 68 now.) One day, I was looking at my parents' bookshelves and asked about that odd title.

It's too old for you, my mother said with a tone bearing not a little ulterior motive.

That night, after my parents had gone to bed, I turned on my light and started reading.

Catcher got me with the first line, and I became a devotee, newly coined from the dross of adolescence into the gold of irony and self-consciousness. I wasn't just agonized with my despairs. I was a member of some order of righteous adolescence, a kid standing in the corner and watching the phonies at the party.

I could go on, but I'll take caution from that first line: If you really want to hear about it . . . You don't, of course, because you may well have your own Salinger story to tell.

We can hope, in the name of redemption, both his and ours, that Salinger has his own stories waiting for us, at long last.


--------------

David Lodge in NY Times:

The life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest and saddest stories in recent literary history. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger’s career — consisting of a long short story called Hapworth 16, 1924 that reads as though he allowed the pain of hostile criticism to blunt the edge of self-criticism that every good writer must possess, followed by 45 years of living like a hermit in the New Hampshire woods — to overshadow the achievements of the first half.

The corpus of his good work is very small, but it is classic. His was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Of course nothing is absolutely original in literature, and Mr. Salinger had his precursors, of whom Hemingway was one, and Mark Twain — from whose Huck Finn Hemingway said that all modern American literature came — another. From them he learned what you could do with simple, colloquial language and a naïve youthful narrator. But in The Catcher in the Rye Mr. Salinger applied their lessons in a new way to create a new kind of hero, Holden Caulfield, whose narrative voice struck a chord with millions of readers.

The narrative is in a style the Russians call skaz, a nice word with echoes of jazz and scat in it, which uses the repetitions and redundancies of ordinary speech to produce an effect of sincerity and authenticity — and humor: The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl ... she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them. I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn’t any brains. I don’t know. They tell me to stop, so I stop.

It looks easy, but it isn’t.

Nearly everybody loves The Catcher in the Rye, and most readers enjoy Mr. Salinger’s first collection of short stories, Nine Stories. But the work that followed, the four long short stories paired together in two successive books as Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, were less reader-friendly and provoked more critical comment, leading eventually to the retreat of the wounded author into solitude.

This was as much the consequence of critical failure as of authorial arrogance. These books challenged conventional notions of fiction and conventional ways of reading as radically as the kind of novels that would later be called post-modernist, and a lot of critics didn’t get it. The saga of the Glass family is stylistically the antithesis of Catcher — highly literary, full of rhetorical tropes, narrative devices and asides to the reader — but there is also continuity between them. The literariness of the Glass stories is always domesticated by a colloquial informality. Most are narrated by Buddy, the writer in the family, who says at the outset of Zooey that what I’m about to offer isn’t really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie.

The nearest equivalent to this saga in earlier literature is perhaps the 18th-century antinovel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. There is the same minutely close observation of the social dynamics of family life, the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative structure, the same teasing hints that the fictional narrator is a persona for the real author, the same delicate balance of sentiment and irony, and the same humorous running commentary on the activities of writing and reading.

How Shandean, for instance, is Buddy’s presentation to the reader in Seymour of this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((( )))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bow-legged — buckle-legged — omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.

Seymour Glass first appeared in one of the Nine Stories, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, as a disturbed veteran of World War II (as Mr. Salinger himself was), who on vacation with his rather shallow wife, after a charmingly droll conversation with a little girl on the beach, shockingly shoots himself in the last paragraph. The late stories are all in some way about the attempts of Seymour’s surviving siblings to come to terms with this action. This often takes a religious direction, and presents the Glass family as a kind of spiritual elite, struggling against a tide of materialism and philistinism with the aid of Christian existentialism, Eastern mysticism and a select pantheon of great writers.

This cultural and spiritual elitism got up the noses of many critics, but I think they overlooked the fact that Mr. Salinger was playing a kind of Shandean game with his readers. The more truth-telling and pseudo-historical the stories became in form (tending toward an apparently random, anecdotal structure, making elaborate play with letters and other documents as evidence), the less credible became the content (miraculous feats of learning, stigmata, prophetic glimpses, memories of previous incarnations, and so forth). But what were we asked to believe in: the reality of these things, or the possibility of them? Since it is fiction, surely the latter; to suppose it is the former is to lose half the pleasure of reading the books.


(A Life in Books)

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Manga and Love


Manga and Love. (and the melody goes on, Just when I thought I was over you, it's Air Supply). Well, the author of the video says that's yaoi rather than manga, so don't like, don't watch:)


(Blogosphere)

Baudelaire: L’Étranger

Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis ? Ton père, ta mère, ta soeur ou ton frère ?
- Je n'ai ni père, ni mère, ni soeur, ni frère.
- Tes amis ?
- Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m'est restée jusqu'à ce jour inconnu.
- Ta patrie ?
- J'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.
- La beauté ?
- Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.
- L’or ?
- Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.
- Eh ! qu'aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger ?
- J'aime les nuages... les nuages qui passent... là-bas... là-bas... les merveilleux nuages !




L'Étranger was published in 1862 among 14 poems of Petits Poèmes en Prose. Here is an English version:

—Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best? Your father, your mother, your sister or your brother?
—I have no father, no mother, no sister, no brother.
—Your friends?
—You are using a word whose meaning is still unknown to me to this very day.
—Your homeland?
—I don't know under what latitude it's located.
—What about Beauty?
—I would love her gladly, goddess and immortal.
—And Gold?
—I hate it as much as you hate God.
—Well, What do you love then, extraordinary stranger?
—I love the clouds ... the passing clouds... over there ... over there ... the marvelous clouds!


I found two videos on youTube, with this poem. The first is with Léo Ferré. the second is a funny reinterpretation of the text. Enjoy!


(video by a70b)



(video by fnjv)

(Baudelaire)

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Baudelaire: Je Vis, et Ton Bouquet

Je vis, et ton bouquet est de l’architecture :
C’est donc lui la beauté, car c’est moi la nature ;
Si toujours la nature embellit la beauté,
Je fais valoir tes fleurs... me voilà trop flatté.



Michèle Battut, Je vis, et ton bouquet, 1988
(https://www.idburyprints.com/)



(Baudelaire)

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Baudelaire: N'importe où Hors du Monde

This lithograph is what I like most from all Michèle Battut's illustrations that I've seen so far. By a strange association it calls in my mind Kiarostami's Five: a piece of driftwood there, facing the eternity of sea, here a book, the ultimate resilient part of our world when our world doesn't matter anymore. Think at Borges, his Book of Sand! Or, is it Baudelaire's Book of Poems? Does it matter? A book, any book, it's the Book of all Books.

The poem of Baudelaire is a cri of désespoir: n'importe où pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde! As long as it's out of this world! because this world is a hospital (think at Chekhov's Ward No. 6). The illustration of Michèle Battut is a wonderful replica: anywhere you are a book brings you out of the world!


Michèle Battut, Anywhere Out of the World, 1988
(https://www.idburyprints.com/)


Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit. Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poële, et celui-là croit qu'il guérirait à côté de la fenêtre.

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme.

Dis-moi, mon âme, pauvre âme refroidie, que penserais-tu d'aller d'habiter Lisbonne? Il doit y faire chaud, et tu t'y ragaillardirais comme un lézard. Cette ville est au bord de l'eau; on dit qu'elle est bâtie en marbre, et que le peuple y a une telle haine du végétal, qu'il arrache tous les arbres. Voilà un paysage selon ton goût; un paysage fait avec la lumière et le minéral, et le liquide pour les réfléchir!

Mon âme ne répond pas.

Puisque tu aimes tant le repos, avec le spectacle du mouvement, veux-tu venir habiter la Hollande, cette terre béatifiante? Peut-être te divertiras-tu dans cette contrée dont tu as souvent admiré l'image dans les musées. Que penserais-tu de Rotterdam, toi qui aimes les forêts de mâts, et les navires amarrés au pied des maisons?

Mon âme reste muette.

Batavia te sourirait peut-être davantage? Nous y trouverions d'ailleurs l'esprit de l'Europe marié à la beauté tropicale.

Pas un mot. -- Mon âme serait-elle morte?

En es-tu donc venue à ce point d'engourdissement que tu ne te plaises que dans ton mal? S'il en est ainsi, fuyons vers les pays qui sont les analogies de la Mort. -- Je tiens notre affaire, pauvre âme! Nous ferons nos malles pour Tornéo. Allons plus loin encore, à l'extrême bout de la Baltique; encore plus loin de la vie, si c'est possible; installons-nous au pôle. Là le soleil ne frise qu'obliquement la terre, et les lentes alternatives de la lumière et de la nuit suppriment la variété et augmentent la monotonie, cette moitié du néant. Là, nous pourrons prendre de longs bains de ténèbres, cependant que, pour nous divertir, les aurores boréales nous enverront de temps en temps leurs gerbes roses, comme des reflets d'un feu d'artifice de l'Enfer!

Enfin, mon âme fait explosion, et sagement elle me crie: N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!

Here is an English version:

This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. One wants to suffer in front of the stove and another believes that he will get well near the window.

It always seems to me that I will be better off there where I am not, and this question of moving about is one that I discuss endlessly with my soul

Tell me, my soul, my poor chilled soul, what would you think about going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you'll be able to soak up the sun like a lizard there. That city is on the shore; they say that it is built all out of marble, and that the people there have such a hatred of the vegetable, that they tear down all the trees. There's a country after your own heart -- a landscape made out of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!

My soul does not reply.

Because you love rest so much, combined with the spectacle of movement, do you want to come and live in Holland, that beatifying land? Perhaps you will be entertained in that country whose image you have so often admired in museums. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts and ships anchored at the foot of houses?

My soul remains mute.

Does Batavia please you more, perhaps? There we would find, after all, the European spirit married to tropical beauty.

Not a word. -- Is my soul dead?

Have you then reached such a degree of torpor that you are only happy with your illness? If that's the case, let us flee toward lands that are the analogies of Death. -- I've got it, poor soul! We'll pack our bags for Torneo. Let's go even further, to the far end of the Baltic. Even further from life if that is possible: let's go live at the pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and augments monotony, that half of nothingness. There we could take long baths in the shadows, while, to entertain us, the aurora borealis send us from time to time its pink sheaf of sparkling light, like the reflection of fireworks in Hell!

Finally, my soul explodes, and wisely she shrieks at me: It doesn't matter where! It doesn't matter where! As long as it's out of this world!



(Baudelaire)

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Friday, January 29, 2010

VERSUS on youTube

VERSUS, made in 2000 by Ryûhei Kitamura: a great cult, for many reasons: it's insane (VERSUS means Zombies fighting VERSUS Yakuza, you've got the point); it's irreverent to anybody and anything, including all cult and horror clichés; it completely humiliates our sense of logic. And its breathing freshness: it's a low-budget movie made by enthusiast youngsters for enthusiast youngsters. You should read the interview that Ryûhei Kitamura gave to Midnight Eye to enter a bit in his universe.

A mention for Tak Sakaguchi in the lead role: a street fighter who gave up fighting on the streets to fight in cult movies. This was his first role.

And another mention for Yûdai Yamaguchi, who co-authored the screenplay. I met with him firstly in Yume jû-ya (Ten Nights of Dreams), where he directed the last vignette: as crazy as this movie is, and more! I saw then Jigoku kôshien (Battlefield Baseball): director Yûdai Yamaguchi, lead role Taki Sakaguchi, co-producer Ryûhei Kitamura. Honestly, I liked more VERSUS.

I found a youTube copy of VERSUS; I'm afraid it's not the best copy, anyway the English subtitling sucks: it is totally out of synch with what you hear.


VERSUS: Part 1/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 2/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 3/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 4/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 5/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 6/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 7/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 8/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 9/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 10/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 11/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 12/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 13/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 14/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 15/16
(video by annatrieu)




VERSUS: Part 16/16
(video by annatrieu)



(Ryûhei Kitamura)

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Leni Riefenstahl: Olympia


The Diving Sequence
(video by David Herkt)


Olympia, by Leni Riefenstahl. Here is the whole movie:









(German and Nordic Cinema)

(Filmele Avangardei)

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J. D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger
1919 - 2010


We will miss your teenager angst, your either/or, your world of spiritual voyagers unable to understand our phony world of morons, and we will miss your flow of poetry permeating things.

You see, we are a bunch of friends very different each other, in everything. Each of us sees the world differently. Each of us came from a totally different background. And we quarrel often, and some of us even don't talk to each other any more. deb, and rim, and ad, and dan, and me. We have however something in common: The Catcher in the Rye.

Rest in Peace, J.D.




(A Life in Books)

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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

(Keith): Ryûhei Kitamura Slashes Back!

(Pierre): After reluctant months of hard work in university, my friend Keith is finally here to talk about one of his favorite subjects: Cinema, and precisely Japanese Cinema! Here is what he has to say about Ryûhei Kitamura:

(Keith) The main dish is a really fried one, the bad-ass from Osaka slashes back in 2010 for an American remake of his own Japanese movie...VERSUS! Yes, you guessed right, Ryûhei Kitamura is on show business again.



It's not whispers though it's only quotes for now, saying he still needs time to work on the script and polish the overview. So basically here is what you can read on www.dreadcentral.com:

In the year 2000 a Japanese zombie action epic called Versus exploded onto the scene, thereby putting director Ryûhei Kitamura on the map of just about every horror fan who knows their stuff. Now he's ready to give us Westerners a Versus of our very own!

Butane called in from Fantasia with this report, Kitamura just announced that he's working on an American version of Versus. He just finished a draft of the script and will do one more to polish it up. It's going to be a few years before it's made, as he's doing an action film first, but he stated, and I quote: The US Versus will be insane! Bring it on, baby! - Uncle Creepy! (I assume Uncle Creepy is this Butane guy, or is it you, Keith? Pierre wondering:)

I personally was a fan of Ryûhei's early movies and even liked what he kinda failed (who said Sky High?! whose fault is, actors were excellent but the cast was distributed like stickers on a fringe! it's like asking Jason Statham to act as Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, not convinced it would brake the same records...knowing Jason it would only brake...bones!). Poor Takao Ôsawa, his performance was astonishing as usual...and Eihi Shiina, too good to hold a sword without shaking...it was like wasting caviar and champagne to eat a sandwich, but let's get back to the remake.

Versus was a turnover in my life (well, I'm only 23! bleh!), a real 90° turn in my how crazy in love I’m for Japanese cinema.

As a martial artist I was crazy about the whole plot (not much of a story!) two hours with like 10 minute talking and 110 minutes fighting bare hands, gun-fighting, zombie-fighting, running-away, zombie-fighting, sword-fighting, zombie fighting, brother-fighting with tons of flash backs and oh yeah, I forgot...more Zombie fighting!!

It was a low-budget movie and so had Ryûhei to come with dazzling ideas to create good shot and high speed camera effects, that's how he came with the turn-over-me-please. You liked the matrix effect right? Imagine the same thing without special effects...but with good acting skills! (don't make me say Keanu Reeves is a bad actor it's one of my favorites...but yes rich Hollywood movie makers can be lazy!)

Same camera effect used at the end of Azumi (n°1) but he kinda worked on it so it was even better (though the whole movie was not so good, but action scene was there a lot, enough to fill ten movies)

Too bad it wasn't his idea to produce death-trance but Tak Sakaguchi was there and that was enough for me. Hopefully he went with the movie love death not less an alien than Sky High, and gods knows I love U.F.O.!

Now, saying that the new Versus is gonna be better than the original, when watching the so waited for dragon ball felt like waiting for a Jaguar or an Impreza and receiving a Volvo with a V16 turbo engine (might be a good engine but look where you put it! it's a grave, man!)

So no personal opinion about the news...hoping Ryûhei will come back to earth, like he did with Longinus (why, why on earth was it only a short movie!!!! Please someone where can we find the bonus cd?) and stop his new delirium party in hey now I got money... will I keep on making great stuff? you'll see lard! oops sorry i missed two movies again...run-away

Notice that his 2008 movie midnight meat train looks pretty good! and had an excellent critic...so we know he can do great things...hoping for the best, waiting for the movie's coming out and see you later everyone ;)

Ahmed-Keith Reziki

(Ryûhei Kitamura)

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Ryūhei Kitamura




Ryūhei Kitamura (北村 龍平) was born in Osaka in 1969 and grew up watching movies. At sixteen he dropped out school and went to Australia to become a filmmaker. He entered the School of Visual Arts in Sydney. After graduation (at 19) he came back to Japan and established his own production studio, Napalm Films. His popularity is growing.



(Japanese Cinema)

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Dance of Snow


feel the heat, keep the feeling burning, let the sensation explode

A great video created by Mattie, one of the most gifted video artists I know. Great masters of the cinema come in mind while watching. Some likeness with the imagistic approach in the movies of Wajda, maybe, at the beginning. And Ozu, of course: the delicacy of the images tells me a lot of Mattie's profound passion for the cinematic universe of the Japanese film director. And this image, is it not like one from In the Mood for Love (so, Wong, Doyle, Lee)?


But the whole structure of the movie, its rhythm like of a sarabande calls in mind Regen of Joris Ivens. Yes, the same pace, and the same order of things! It's just amazing!


And I come back to In the Mood for Love, for I think the same tagline should be for the Dance of Snow:

feel the heat, keep the feeling burning, let the sensation explode.



(Vlog of Mattie)

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Monday, January 25, 2010

Truth in Motion: The U.S. Ski Team's Road to Vancouver

Wolfgang Held worked last fall in Switzerland and Austria, together with a full crew of cinematographers, to make a documentary about the training of the US Ski Team. It's Truth in Motion: The U.S. Ski Team's Road to Vancouver, a movie telling the unique stories of these elite athletes as they prepare for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

The experience of filming this movie was also unique: it's so great to be so close to the ski team as they work out, to follow them with the camera, to immerse in their universe! I know now very well Wolfgang Held and I envy him for all his filming experiences, near the Olympic team, or on a carrier, or in Beijing in an old German neighborhood, or in Bucharest following the rough life of some kids... and all over the world!


The movie will air first January 30 at 8pm EST on NBC, followed by an appearance on the USA Network on February 6 at 5pm EST. It will also run three times in primetime on the Universal Sports Network.




(Wolfgang Held)

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Ozu: The Munekata Sisters (1950)



Munekata kyōdai (The Munekata Sisters) - the story has a great elegance: Setsuko (played by Kinuyo Tanaka) is unhappily to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a bad drinking habit; she had always been in love with Hiroshi but both of them failed to propose when Hiroshi left for France a few years ago; now he is back and Mariko (Setsuko's sister) tries to reunite them; she too is secretly in love with Hiroshi. (I quoted here the summary offered on imdb by phs). It's the world of the heroes of Ozu, living their dramas with that unforgettable Chekhovian restraint.

The script, like in all Ozu's movies after the war, belongs to him and to Kôgo Noda. It's based on a novel by Jiro Osaragi, and here is what Ozu said about this movie (quoted by Donald Richie in his monograph, Ozu, His Life and Films), to be frank, I find it difficult to make a film out of a novel; you're forced into reworking the imagination of the author, and then have to select someone to play a role already created; when I write, I always write with an actor in mind from the beginning, and this helps create the role in film.

However Ozu overcame all these and gave us, with The Munekata Sisters, one of his gems.


(Yasujiro Ozu and Setsuko Hara)

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Friday, January 22, 2010

A Bit of Ozu in Illinois

It's morning, and a writer from Urbana, Illinois (P. Gregory Springer), is running his car while watching on his laptop movies by Ozu. Two universes in an unexpected meeting: the universe of Ozu, the universe of Illinois.



I think the movie from the first video is Tôkyô Monogatari, I don't know what movie is on the second video. If someone can help me, thanks in advance:)


(Yasujiro Ozu and Setsuko Hara)

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Katyn

Katyn, made by Andrzej Wajda in 2007.



Katyn: Part 1/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 2/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 3/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 4/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 5/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 6/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 7/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 8/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 9/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 10/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 11/12
(video by cozee0)




Katyn: Part 12/12
(video by cozee0)



(Filmofilia)

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