Now I'm here, now I'm gone

With the help of ericmvan's living room (and television, which must be larger than some movie screens), the miniature film festival in honor of Bergman and Antonioni actually came off last night. gaudior, weirdquark, nineweaving, sharhaun, and captainbutler all showed up, and in despite of home construction, lab schedules, and circadian rhythms, we managed to watch both L'avventura (1960) and The Seventh Seal (1957). It was fantastic. I had never seen anything by Antonioni, so I had no idea what to expect from L'avventura—its opening scenes and the way its first half played out reminded me of Hitchcock, but at the point where in a Hitchcock film the tension would have pulled to the point of unbearability and the pieces begun to drop inexorably into place, in L'avventura the tension dissipates and the story keeps going. There is no solution, because what we are watching is not a mystery. There is no closing scene that we can feel coming up, because nothing ever resolves. Lives are untidy, full of loose ends, inconvenient desires, half-made decisions, all the words that people either say too easily or cannot say at all. About halfway through, gaudior commented, "So this movie is about how Italian gender roles are fucked." Which everyone is; men no less than women. And the only way out may be to disappear. The Seventh Seal I hadn't seen since 1999, when I first watched it for a freshman seminar at Brandeis, but I love so many things about the film, I will content myself with simply saying that there is a reason it was my favorite movie for about seven years.* The Criterion DVD wins no points with me, however: its translation was actually less comprehensive and less accurate than the original English subtitles. (So whose edition do I wait for now . . . ?) Next week we're planning on Blow-Up and Persona (1966), and I have no idea what to expect from those, either: but I expect to like what I see.

This next bit is much less artistic. Earlier this week I discovered the existence of a storytelling game based on the tall tales of Baron Munchausen, and intrigued by the examples given of premise and challenge—"Grand Poobah, please tell our assemblage about the time you singlehandedly defeated the entire Turkish army using only a plate of cheese and a corkscrew!"; "But, my dear Grand Poobah, is it not true that you have a horrible allergy to cork?"—I mentioned fleurdelis28 that I really wanted to know how the hypothetical player got out of that one. "Make something up!" she not unreasonably responded. So . . .

The corkscrew had never been used, naturally. I commissioned it from Gustav Fabergé himself with the solemn oath that never would a creation as delicate and intricate as his be used for any purpose so common, cheap, and coarse as the drawing of corks—a vow to which I kept religiously, even when tempted with that rarest of vintages, the Château Invisible 1782, by Her unacknowledged Highness Alexia of Trebizond.

. . . and now I kind of want to know what happens next. I wonder if this counts as fanfiction.

*It may have been displaced by A Canterbury Tale. Whatever that tells you about me.