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If I knocked out every tooth of everyone who tried to break my body
And how do you celebrate your cultural heritage, I am often asked by absolutely no one. Well, for Saint Patrick's Day I found myself explaining the history of the hedge schools and this evening it was the complications of Ashkenazi surnames.
At the moment the universe appears to be offering me no end of hills to die more or less literally on, but I was linked to this video analyzing Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Emeric Pressburger is a hill I will sprint to if someone is wrong about him on the internet. I should be clear that I approve of people enthusing about the films of the Archers and I have not been immune myself to uninformed pronouncements about them, most notably a solid ten years of misidentifying the primary authorship of my beloved A Canterbury Tale (1944) when cathedrals or no, it makes a sense as deep as time as a film written out of dispossession and tradition. But when a pair of critics keep characterizing the partnership as "so staunchly Christian and religious in some of their other messages . . . very Christian filmmakers . . . Christian ideals . . . them being Christian filmmakers, death isn't the end for them, there's a lot more that exists beyond this life, it's a transitory experience," I want to know who the hell does a so-called deep-dive review without knowing that the whole reason Pressburger was working in the British film industry from the mid-'30's instead of continuing the career he had started at UFA in 1920's Berlin was his Jewishness. Fortunately there are commenters already dragging them for this blunder, but I am still chipping in my two fillérek because come on. Pressburger wrote The Glass Pearls (1966), still possibly the most hauntological Holocaust novel I have read. His Other World of A Matter of Life and Death is far more beit din than harp-haven.
The good news is that I actually, really slept, revolving my dreams primarily around the fictitious shelves of a library for my family's combined books, and thus had the clarity of mind to disagree with someone else's film criticism. My ambition for the rest of the evening is to watch a film myself.
At the moment the universe appears to be offering me no end of hills to die more or less literally on, but I was linked to this video analyzing Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Emeric Pressburger is a hill I will sprint to if someone is wrong about him on the internet. I should be clear that I approve of people enthusing about the films of the Archers and I have not been immune myself to uninformed pronouncements about them, most notably a solid ten years of misidentifying the primary authorship of my beloved A Canterbury Tale (1944) when cathedrals or no, it makes a sense as deep as time as a film written out of dispossession and tradition. But when a pair of critics keep characterizing the partnership as "so staunchly Christian and religious in some of their other messages . . . very Christian filmmakers . . . Christian ideals . . . them being Christian filmmakers, death isn't the end for them, there's a lot more that exists beyond this life, it's a transitory experience," I want to know who the hell does a so-called deep-dive review without knowing that the whole reason Pressburger was working in the British film industry from the mid-'30's instead of continuing the career he had started at UFA in 1920's Berlin was his Jewishness. Fortunately there are commenters already dragging them for this blunder, but I am still chipping in my two fillérek because come on. Pressburger wrote The Glass Pearls (1966), still possibly the most hauntological Holocaust novel I have read. His Other World of A Matter of Life and Death is far more beit din than harp-haven.
The good news is that I actually, really slept, revolving my dreams primarily around the fictitious shelves of a library for my family's combined books, and thus had the clarity of mind to disagree with someone else's film criticism. My ambition for the rest of the evening is to watch a film myself.
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I did not actually watch the complete video myself—it's a format I find extremely difficult to extract information from—but I did listen to select passages in order to make sure that the auto-generated transcript was not misrepresenting their assertions and since it wasn't, WTF no.
Moving on.
Indeed!
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--I hope it turns out to be a good one!
And I'm glad (a) you got sleep and (b) you got to spend time in a dream library.
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Thank you! I watched an incredible one at the start of the month and then the month since has not been conducive to writing about anything.
And I'm glad (a) you got sleep and (b) you got to spend time in a dream library.
*hugs*
I also dreamed of rewatching part of a real-life movie, which I hadn't even been thinking about before bed. If it wants to be reviewed, it has to get in the queue.
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I certainly think of him as one.
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Thank you!
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Hooray for sleep :)
I remember back when I was a christian I was taught to see any expression in fiction of the numinous side of life as being either directly Christian or a substandard reflection of Christianity via a false faith. It's a very very narrow way to look at the wide human universe. Feh.
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Thank you!
I remember back when I was a christian I was taught to see any expression in fiction of the numinous side of life as being either directly Christian or a substandard reflection of Christianity via a false faith. It's a very very narrow way to look at the wide human universe. Feh.
But instructive for me to hear you say, because it hadn't occurred to me that the two critics from that video might be themselves more than culturally Christian and filtering the film through that lens, in which case they are still somewhere between embarrassingly and insultingly wrong, but at least I know what happened.
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Thank you!
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I recommend it! It remains for me the one of their films that is most like films by other people, but that has not stopped me from coming around to really liking it. There are things in it that no one else would have thought of.
Yay for sleep, and that sounds like an interesting dream!
Thank you!
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I am very far from an expert on Powell and Pressburger, but almost everything I've read about them includes somewhere in the first paragraph, occasionally the first sentence, something about Powell's upper-class Englishness and Pressburger the Hungarian Jewish refugee.
And I wouldn't have thought of Powell as being Christian by belief, rather than through Dulwich School praxis.
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Right! One of the famous engines of their partnership!
And I wouldn't have thought of Powell as being Christian by belief, rather than through Dulwich School praxis.
I'm not sure he was. He doesn't talk about it much in his memoirs, but Kevin Macdonald characterized him as a non-practicing Anglican with a mystical bent, the latter being a major substrate of his common ground with Pressburger. Christianity is just not the metaphysical structure of their movies.
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I as a person who has also not seen Hellraiser am laughing in amazed horror (but also at the deserved dunking).
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I really don't worry about you going off with 180° headcanons unless they are actually interesting and textually supported!
(I have read Clive Barker's short fiction, which makes short work of the idea of anti-kink conservatism.)
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*cheers you on* I'm glad the comments had your back before you even got there, though. It's understandable to make blunders when YT people are just reacting to something or whatever (because a large part of that is going in blind), but not when someone's doing a deep review and hasn't even done the most rudimentary google first to check their wrong assumptions. *throws up hands*
revolving my dreams primarily around the fictitious shelves of a library for my family's combined books,
Ooh, all this and Mimic too? Clearly you needed some compensation for the previous crappy nights! *hugs*
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Pretty much everybody!
It's understandable to make blunders when YT people are just reacting to something or whatever (because a large part of that is going in blind), but not when someone's doing a deep review and hasn't even done the most rudimentary google first to check their wrong assumptions.
I also had issues with the carelessness of their situation of A Matter of Life and Death in the tradition of Hollywood afterlife fantasies, so it may just be that they are not the world's greatest critics of Powell and Pressburger.
Ooh, all this and Mimic too? Clearly you needed some compensation for the previous crappy nights!
I seem to be starting to dream normally after about a six-month interruption and I have to say that while it does not improve the information I have to deal with as soon as I wake up, it is nonetheless making me feel better.
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Thank you. I still think the novel called for it.
*hugs*
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I'm boggling at the "Christian filmmakers" thing.
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Thank you!
I'm boggling at the "Christian filmmakers" thing.
I hope commenters keep showing up to drag them, because seriously.