But mortals, as you may have noticed, take what they can get

[sovay]

So this has been, actually, a very good couple of days. On Thursday, my dear friend without a livejournal came up to Boston for the day. He now lives in Vancouver; we had not seen one another since July; we spent the day walking around Lexington, with a brief flyby into Harvard Square, and in the evening went to the ICA to see Der Purimshpiler (1937), which we loved.¹ It's an odd film, a musical tragicomedy set in a Galician shtetl just prior to World War I. Its hero, Getzel, is an itinerant Purim player, Ahasuerus on the 14th of Adar and a jack-of-all-trades and sometime beggar the rest of the year—a tall, shy, gently beaky shlimazl with a silent clown's gift for hopeless love. He glimpses a beautiful girl singing in an apple orchard, takes work with the shtetl's shoemaker when he discovers she's the daughter of the house.² For a little while, everyone's fortunes rise. But when Esther asks Getzel to run away with her, it is not going to end well for him. It's that kind of story. (Yes, of course I'm going to screen this for nineweaving.) The two speakers afterward made a point of the film's ethnographic aspects, like the fact that it was shot on location in Kazimierz and all the extras actually lived there; it is not a documentary, but it has that memorial quality for an audience who knows that within two years of the film's release, its world had disappeared. The Purim sequence is just about our only recording of a traditional Purimspiel in the wild. I don't know why there isn't more exploration of cinema as an inherently haunted medium: in the end, it all comes down to ghosts playing in the dark. I wonder if even the apple orchard is still there.

Yesterday, meanwhile, in another world altogether, Viking Zen and I watched the first seven episodes of the second season of Avatar and wow. The new characters and developments deserve their own post, but may I just put in: yhlee, will you not take it as calumny if I bet that a certain lightning-wielding sociopath is dear to your heart? And someone please tell me that Zuko is not about to pull a Londo Mollari, because I have become rather fond of him. Uncle Iroh maintains awesome.

And I should really leave, if I want to make tonight's peformance of Coriolanus by the Actors' Shakespeare Project. I have never seen a production, their Duchess of Malfi blew me away, and my college roommate is assistant-directing, so I think it should be good. Reports when I return.

1. The only downside was the three kids behind us who kept laughing in all the wrong places. I don't know who goes to see a seventy-two-year-old foreign-language film just to make fun of the production values and the acting style, but I wish they wouldn't.

2. On a note of random genetic diversity, it was really neat to see a film in which the beautiful people did not look like everyone in Hollywood and were never intended to. Miriam Kressyn has a classical soprano and a song-and-dancer's grace of movement; she is idealized and adored by the camera and she would never be mistaken for someone whose family came from Dublin or Lyons, unless they had come from Poland first. She's lovely. This is awesome. Don't get me started on the live-action Avatar casting.

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Glad it's been a nice couple of days. Sorry to hear about the idiot kids laughing at the film. I can't imagine how anyone could laugh at something like that. The lack of basic historical knowledge is appalling in anyone old enough to be at a film without parental supervision.

I hope that Coriolanus is at least as splendid as The Duchess of Malfi, if not rather more so.

[sovay]

Glad it's been a nice couple of days.

Yeah. It's a nice change. I'm hoping not to blow it.

Sorry to hear about the idiot kids laughing at the film. I can't imagine how anyone could laugh at something like that.

I have no quarrel with their laughing at the sequences that were comedic, or even ruefully at some of the ones where irony is not our hero's friend, but the tragic parts? I wanted to turn around and belt them one for Getzel. I should have. They were in the back row, we were in the next-to-back. No one would have noticed.

The lack of basic historical knowledge is appalling in anyone old enough to be at a film without parental supervision.

Well, that's the other part. I have no doubt that there's bad Yiddish literature out there; I see no reason to believe Sturgeon's Law works only in English. God knows I've MST3K'd my way through enough movies that deserved it (which does not necessarily contradict my fondness for them. I think there's about an hour of decent movie buried inside the three-hour runtime of The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), and I've met toasters that could act with more nuance than Stephen Boyd, but if I saw a copy in the bin at Barnes & Noble? I'd buy it in a heartbeat.) But if art and music and film are all that remain of a culture, at least do it the courtesy of not snickering.

I hope that Coriolanus is at least as splendid as The Duchess of Malfi, if not rather more so.

It was not more splendid than The Duchess of Malfi, because the latter was extraordinary, but it was very much worth seeing. I am not as well versed in his plays as I should be, but Coriolanus struck me as fascinatingly non-standard for Shakespeare: no romances, no bits of business, a hero who lacks the self-awareness to soliloquize; it's almost a play of ideas, where usually I think of Shakespeare as character and language. The complex political sensibility is the point, not the backdrop. Not just because it's set in Italy in the fifth century BCE, it's a very classical play. Achilles and Aeneas would have a lot to talk about with Caius Martius, later Coriolanus. And the staging was terrific—the sets are skeletal and the blocking often stylized, but the protagonist painfully naturalistic; the fight scenes are enacted through shadows and drums, red-lit. I'd recommend you see it, but the last performance is a matinée tomorrow . . .

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I have no quarrel with their laughing at the sequences that were comedic, or even ruefully at some of the ones where irony is not our hero's friend, but the tragic parts? I wanted to turn around and belt them one for Getzel. I should have. They were in the back row, we were in the next-to-back. No one would have noticed.

I know the feeling. Some people need to be belted. (Of course, this is why it's probably a good thing that I'm not a mad scientist. An I were, I'd be severely over-tempted to create a bunch of clockwork automatons--fitted with rubber mallets, or perhaps springloaded boxing gloves--which would hang around theatres and deal with situations like this.)

I see no reason to believe Sturgeon's Law works only in English.

I don't, either.

But if art and music and film are all that remain of a culture, at least do it the courtesy of not snickering.

Exactly.

It was not more splendid than The Duchess of Malfi, because the latter was extraordinary, but it was very much worth seeing.

Excellent.

I'd recommend you see it, but the last performance is a matinée tomorrow . . .

Ah, too bad, that. Although I'd probably have trouble making it to Boston, in any event.