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

[sovay]

It sounds like it was a beautiful film

I think it was. That doesn't mean I won't acknowledge some of the uneasy seams between the musical comedy and Getzel's melancholy or the social satire and the shtetl romanticism—I want a timeline in which Joseph Green had the chance to direct more than four films in Yiddish, because this one has the feel of something much stranger trying to build itself out of the genre's expectations. It's not La Strada (1954), but Getzel and Gelsomina might recognize one another as they passed on the road.

and I know what you mean about beautiful people who have a different sort of beauty....

They do exist in contemporary film, but there are never enough of them. I tend to be quite fond of them when I find them.

what you say about "our only recording of a traditional Purimspiel in the wild"--about all that disappearing... it's so sad, I almost can't look at the thought directly.

What is terrifying is how quickly a culture vanishes: how little memory persists. There's a line from Jane Yolen:

History is a yahrzeit candle.
One terrible wind could blow it out.

It is true.

I remember what you wrote about The Duchess of Malfi--hope Coriolanus is awesome.

I seem to have posted a review in response to ap_aelfwine . . . It was not love at first fascinated wince as with The Duchess of Malfi, but I am glad I did not let it pass unseen. It's really strange for Shakespeare. I like strange. I like difficultly sympathetic protagonists. I like echoes from the ancient world. And I like that when Bertolt Brecht decided to write an adaptation, he found that Shakespeare had already gotten in most of his favorite effects before him.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

"love at first fascinated wince"--Sovay, that one line deserves a story. Okay, I'll look at what you wrote to ap_aelfwine.

And yes, about how terrifyingly quickly a culture vanishes. I didn't know the quote from Jane Yolen, but that's exactly what I was thinking. How fast and completely things can vanish from human memory.