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And she's hooked to the silver screen
Yesterday was friends and movies. It was wonderful. I need more days like that.
In the morning, I met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 for lunch at the Thai restaurant around the more-or-less corner from her apartment,* and after several hours of the kind of conversation that remind me that I need to see friends more than once every couple of weeks (and in some cases, years), we went home, waited for the cable guy, pieced together patter songs from Gilbert & Sullivan, and watched Russian Ark (2002). Cut for more of a review than I had originally intended.
I can say definitively that this is one of the stranger films I have seen recently, and I loved it. If you dropped acid immediately upon passing your exams in Russian history, Alexander Sokurov's ninety-minute, single-shot drift through three centuries in the Hermitage Museum is rather like what might happen to your brain. Its protagonist is never seen, a bemused voice-over who awakes from a dimly remembered accident into snow falling from a clouded sky and the sumptuous commotion of carriages arriving at the Winter Palace in time for a ball. Following these laughing young hussars and their elaborately dressed ladies inside, he proceeds to wander as easily through time as through the museum's endless rooms, accompanied by the sardonic, flamboyant, rustily black-clad figure of the nameless Stranger (whose biographical tidbits identify him as the Marquis de Custine), a French ex-diplomat from the early nineteenth century who paces through the centuries caustically unimpressed with the culture around him—he gravitates toward Italian sculpture, criticizes the tsars as barbarians, and complains that Russian music gives him hives—and nonetheless serves as guide and foil to the narrator's camera eye, a cranky Virgil in an underworld of history.
Around them, layers of time shift as fluidly as Chrysom's maze,** without the usual markers of fades or dissolves or even changes of location, so that the narrator can glimpse Catherine the Great at two different ages little more than five objective minutes apart; closed doors can open onto court ceremonies or family dinners or the frozen hell of war-blasted Leningrad, and in some galleries the period is indistinguishable and unimportant. The strains of a waltz by Glinka, played at the ball in 1913, are heard in the same room where the narrator attempts to prevent the passionately Catholic Marquis from hectoring a startled twentieth-century student about religion; a nervous clerk from the eighteenth century trails them suspiciously into a conversation with two modern sailors and a blind woman who seems as timeless as the art she cherishes. And time flows around them, eddying, quietly pooled, recursive and intrusive and presently out to sea.
If I had one complaint about the film, it was with the subtitles. The major lines are all translated, but in a movie filled with overlapping dialogue—the narrator's dreaming wonderment against the Marquis' constant potshots at Russian culture, background chatter from various time periods, and in one scene a whispered conversation which the narrator interprets for the Marquis—I would have appreciated knowing what most of it meant. If nothing else, I might have felt less confused in terms of time-frame; often I had to rely on costumes to tell me the era, which meant I could be accurate within, oh, about a hundred years. But that's a problem easily fixed. If nothing else, there's always, asrushthatspeaks suggests, the screenplay.
**Patricia McKillip, The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991). The book is worth reading for its mythscape alone.
And in the evening, I saw This Movie Is Not Yet Rated withgaudior and rushthatspeaks at the Kendall Square Cinema. I cannot recommend this documentary highly enough. If you don't see it for its information, see it for the interviews with directors and actors; and if not for the interviews, for the animated explication of the MPAA ratings system, for God's sake. The movie left me disturbed by its import, cautiously hopeful that it existed at all, and wanting to see any number of films that were excerpted or discussed therein. And unexpectedly, at least to me, pieces of it were hilarious. (See aforementioned animation.) We dropped in on nineweaving afterward. A good time was had by all.
And so far today, my life has has mostly involved laundry. Tonight there will be apples and honey. Momentarily, there is a silly quiz.
. . . Is it a sign of intelligence and/or ego that I object to the misspelling of "craziness" in my own ingredient list? Or is there optional pedantry salted on the rim of the glass? I want a slice of lime.
Hey, years have started on stranger notes.
*Even now that I've been there twice, I'll need better evidence before I believe that the ordinary laws of geography apply to its block. It could be a pocket universe: I wouldn't be surprised.
In the morning, I met
fleurdelis28 for lunch at the Thai restaurant around the more-or-less corner from her apartment,* and after several hours of the kind of conversation that remind me that I need to see friends more than once every couple of weeks (and in some cases, years), we went home, waited for the cable guy, pieced together patter songs from Gilbert & Sullivan, and watched Russian Ark (2002). Cut for more of a review than I had originally intended.I can say definitively that this is one of the stranger films I have seen recently, and I loved it. If you dropped acid immediately upon passing your exams in Russian history, Alexander Sokurov's ninety-minute, single-shot drift through three centuries in the Hermitage Museum is rather like what might happen to your brain. Its protagonist is never seen, a bemused voice-over who awakes from a dimly remembered accident into snow falling from a clouded sky and the sumptuous commotion of carriages arriving at the Winter Palace in time for a ball. Following these laughing young hussars and their elaborately dressed ladies inside, he proceeds to wander as easily through time as through the museum's endless rooms, accompanied by the sardonic, flamboyant, rustily black-clad figure of the nameless Stranger (whose biographical tidbits identify him as the Marquis de Custine), a French ex-diplomat from the early nineteenth century who paces through the centuries caustically unimpressed with the culture around him—he gravitates toward Italian sculpture, criticizes the tsars as barbarians, and complains that Russian music gives him hives—and nonetheless serves as guide and foil to the narrator's camera eye, a cranky Virgil in an underworld of history.
Around them, layers of time shift as fluidly as Chrysom's maze,** without the usual markers of fades or dissolves or even changes of location, so that the narrator can glimpse Catherine the Great at two different ages little more than five objective minutes apart; closed doors can open onto court ceremonies or family dinners or the frozen hell of war-blasted Leningrad, and in some galleries the period is indistinguishable and unimportant. The strains of a waltz by Glinka, played at the ball in 1913, are heard in the same room where the narrator attempts to prevent the passionately Catholic Marquis from hectoring a startled twentieth-century student about religion; a nervous clerk from the eighteenth century trails them suspiciously into a conversation with two modern sailors and a blind woman who seems as timeless as the art she cherishes. And time flows around them, eddying, quietly pooled, recursive and intrusive and presently out to sea.
If I had one complaint about the film, it was with the subtitles. The major lines are all translated, but in a movie filled with overlapping dialogue—the narrator's dreaming wonderment against the Marquis' constant potshots at Russian culture, background chatter from various time periods, and in one scene a whispered conversation which the narrator interprets for the Marquis—I would have appreciated knowing what most of it meant. If nothing else, I might have felt less confused in terms of time-frame; often I had to rely on costumes to tell me the era, which meant I could be accurate within, oh, about a hundred years. But that's a problem easily fixed. If nothing else, there's always, as
rushthatspeaks suggests, the screenplay.**Patricia McKillip, The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991). The book is worth reading for its mythscape alone.
And in the evening, I saw This Movie Is Not Yet Rated with
gaudior and rushthatspeaks at the Kendall Square Cinema. I cannot recommend this documentary highly enough. If you don't see it for its information, see it for the interviews with directors and actors; and if not for the interviews, for the animated explication of the MPAA ratings system, for God's sake. The movie left me disturbed by its import, cautiously hopeful that it existed at all, and wanting to see any number of films that were excerpted or discussed therein. And unexpectedly, at least to me, pieces of it were hilarious. (See aforementioned animation.) We dropped in on nineweaving afterward. A good time was had by all.And so far today, my life has has mostly involved laundry. Tonight there will be apples and honey. Momentarily, there is a silly quiz.
| How to make a Sovay |
| Ingredients: 1 part intelligence 1 part crazyiness 1 part ego |
| Method: Layer ingredients in a shot glass. Add a little emotion if desired! |
. . . Is it a sign of intelligence and/or ego that I object to the misspelling of "craziness" in my own ingredient list? Or is there optional pedantry salted on the rim of the glass? I want a slice of lime.
Hey, years have started on stranger notes.
*Even now that I've been there twice, I'll need better evidence before I believe that the ordinary laws of geography apply to its block. It could be a pocket universe: I wouldn't be surprised.
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5 parts mercy
1 part courage
1 part energy
Combine in a tall glass half filled with crushed ice. Add a little cocktail umbrella and a dash of emotion
Personality cocktail
From Go-Quiz.com
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The major lines are all translated, but in a movie filled with overlapping dialogue
A lot of fan-subs of anime series' I see have multiple subtitles for overlapping dialogue, but I'm not sure even that would be adequate for the amount of overlapping in Russian Ark, which, as I recall, was a lot.
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Subtitles & Russian Ark
Worse, because I keep getting distracted by instances where they could have translated a line differently and shone light on a different aspect of the situation. (The translation was actually very good; it's just that no translation can catch all nuances).
I found the scene with the whispering people un-understandable even after multiple viewings, but that is likely more a problem with my vocabulary and range-of-hearing (often whispered English is hard to understand) than with the movie.
I would argue against using multiple subtitles in this movie. On many occasions where the Marquis' and narrator's dialogue overlaps, the full translation was either provided a moment later or, in the great scheme of things, didn't matter--much of it is small interjections on the order of "hm" or "oh?" And in the instances that don't fit either of these, I feel that the tone if not the substance of the language was conveyed adequately in the subtitles.
Another reason against multiple subtitles: It would obscure the brilliant view of the movie, which is part of its wonder.
Another reason: often Russian cinema tends to go to the extreme with its subtitles (different neon colors for each speaker, animated pictures dissolving into a mist or a rain of blood a la Nightwatch (not that this cannot be interesting, but it gets a bit old after a while)). I am pleased that they avoided such gimmicks and stuck with a reasonable font and color scheme.
The extras (did you watch them?) were really quite amazing; my favorite was the semi-documentary about the Hermitage. For my money, the best line I've seen to date in Russian film.
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