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“I Am a Bricklayer” – Carl Th. Dreyer’s Ordet and the Character of Johannes

November 3, 2009 at 7:42 pm | In Art, Movies, youtube | Leave a Comment

Last night I went to see my very first Carl Th. Dreyer film, namely Ordet (“The Word”). I’ve been eager to see a Dreyer film for years; so many film directors, Lars von Trier for instance, claim to be inspired by Dreyer, and he is always mentioned among the great masters of cinema, even internationally. Once I actually came very close to seeing his Day of Wrath. I happened upon it at Blockbuster and couldn’t believe my luck, so I tried to rent it, but the girl behind the counter regretted to inform me that the tape (this being back in the stone age, before DVDs had taken over the market) had gone missing. Instead, I rented a video called Comedy Zoo featuring a series of stand up routines from 1997. The girl behind the counter commended me on this decision. “I think that’s a much better choice than that sad, old thing you first tried to rent.” she said.

So my Dreyer virginity was not taken until just last night with Ordet. I have to say, though, that it was a rather bizarre experience. Intense, yes, but bizarre. I think it was the overt religious theme of the movie that freaked me out a little. I mean, it wasn’t even religious in the Seventh Seal existentialist kind of way, it was more in the sense of “GOD IS HERE!HE EXISTS!!1! ACKNOWLEDGE HIM!!!!1!”. And why would this freak me out? I’m not sure. I’m a fairly devout Lutheran myself. And I knew that the movie script was a play written by Lutheran minister Kaj Munk, so I don’t know how it managed to surprise me that there would be a religious theme in the film. I guess the whole thing was just a little overwhelming and will need to let it sink in. I’m not sure what to make of it just yet.

Still from Ordet

That said, there was one part of the movie that was immediately appealing to me: The character of Johannes Borgen. For those of you not familiar with the film, Johannes is the central character in the story. He is the son of farmer Morten Borgen, who encouraged his charismatic son to study theology, hoping that he would be able to spread the word of the Lutheran church in their local society which is becoming increasingly dominated by fundamentalists. However, Johannes seemingly suffers a mental break-down during his studies and becomes convinced that he is Jesus Christ himself.

The part is played by Preben Leerdorf Rye, which is an absolutely brilliant casting on Dreyer’s part. Leerdorf Rye has the strangest personality and really draws you in with his big, sparkling and round eyes underneath his neat centre parting. His movements are strangely slow and almost ghostly or zombie-like. And infamous in Danish cinema for his rather odd diction (I grew up with my father’s impersonations of his voice), Leerdorf Rye gives the voice of Johannes a strange, almost musically intoning and admonitory sound that is absolutely perfect for this character who lingers dangerously somewhere between the physical and the metaphysical.

Leerdorf Rye simply seems off, perfectly so, and this becomes most startlingly apparently in his relationship with the rest of the characters – or, rather, his lack of same. Because part of what makes Leerdorf Rye’s Johannes so captivating is the way he interacts with the other characters, yet never seems to react to them. His eerily slow movements and his thundering voice stay the same in the face of his frustrated surroundings who, frightened by his behaviour, turn a deaf ear to his preachings.

A good example is this scene, in which the new town minister pays the Borgen family a visit and is met by Johannes:

It’s the tension between Johannes’ presence and lack of presence in his surroundings that fascinates me about this scene. “Pick up the scraps so that nothing goes to waste,”, Johannes solemnly preaches to himself, but he demonstrates his sombre words by picking up a left-over cookie. Similarly, Johannes seems lost in his thoughts, but he still has the presence of mind to reply “Come in” (in the exact same intonation that he just used for preaching!) as the minister knocks on the door. Filled with a divine power, Johannes dwells ambiguously between this world and another throughout the movie.

The result is… well, I don’t know exactly what the result is. I still don’t know exactly what to make of the movie. But whatever Dreyer wished to achieve with this ambiguous Jesus figure of his, the casting of Preben Leerdorf Rye makes for one of the most effective and haunting movie characters I have ever seen.

John Book and The Crisis of Witnessing: Reviewing “Witness” (1985)

October 2, 2009 at 9:20 pm | In Art, Movies, Reviews, youtube | Leave a Comment

(Yeah, so I watch a lot of Harrison Ford movies these days. What of it?)

witness

Witness is a favourite crime movie of my parents’ and it caught my eye on their DVD shelf when I was visiting them recently, not just because of Harrison Ford’s likeness on the cover, also because of the title, “Witness”. You see, the literary theory I’m using for my thesis is the theory of Testimony and Witness. The theoretics of testimony have arisen in the wake of the Holocaust and were founded primarily by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their book Testimony - Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. The basic idea of testimony theory is to debate how or, indeed, whether it is possible for literature and art in general to bear testimony of an event that is so horrible that it leaves no witnesses capable of giving testimony of its horrors (i.e. the Holocaust). I find it a most inspiring branch of literary theory because of the fact that it ties together literature with reality; it seems so meaningful to me.

As a consequence I’ve been reading a lot of books lately with the words “Witness” or “Testimony” in their titles, and that’s why this 1985 movie caught my eye. I had seen the movie once before on T.V., but I was about 15 or so, and all I remembered from the movie was that:

A cute little Amish boy named Samuel witnesses a murder
Harrison Ford is a cop who goes to live among the Amish
Harrison Ford and the Amish raise a barn in a field
The little boy’s mother takes a spongebath, and Harrison Ford sneaks a peek at her, and -
I was daydreaming for weeks afterwards about escaping from my complicated!!1!!! existence as a highschool girl and going to Pennsylvania to live the simple life as an Amish woman, taking spongebathes, and raising cute little sons with biblical names, and, possibly, getting involved with a random hot cop at some point.

So I decided it was time to re-watch it and see if the movie might have anything to contribute with in terms of the theory of testimony.

So did it, you ask? No, it didn’t, not really. That would have been a little surprising anyway. Felman & Laub’s Testimony wasn’t even released until seven years after Witness premiered. But it’s still an excellent and rather underrated movie (one of the best crime flicks there is, I’ll venture), and it did have some very interesting things to say about witnessing that I definitely didn’t remember from the first time I watched it.

Police Corruption and the Impossibility of Witnessing
The story deals with police corruption (the murder young Samuel witnesses is related to a group of crooky Philadelphia policemen who deal impounded drugs), and I’d never really thought of this before, but police corruption is a kind of crisis of witnessing in its own right. Not in the sense we see in Felman & Laub’s book, where testimony becomes impossible because the Holocaust leaves no witnesses, but in the sense that if what we witness is police corruption, then we have no one to turn to with our testimony. Testimony is a triple concept that presupposes the act of seeing, knowing, and telling about it, and as Paul Ricoeur has noted, language and society could not exist if not for this institution of truth that the credible witness makes. In the legal sense, this institution is dependent on the police. The police are supposed to administrate our testimony, but if they are corrupt our testimony is, at best, ignored, or, at worst, used against us.

This is what John Book learns the hard way at the beginning of the movie as he falls victim to attempted assasination after he has reported the police corruption to his boss. And so it becomes more than just a Hollywood shtick when John flees the city along with Samuel and his mother Rachel to go underground with them in their Amish community.

The Amish as Reluctant Witnesses
Because the Amish community may be the one place John can go where he may be able to free himself of the damning testimony that has made a fugitive out of him. I won’t claim to be an expert on the Amish, but from the way the community is depicted in the movie, it is a community that to some degree avoids being witnesses. In a poignant scene, Samuel’s grandfather Eli talks to Samuel about his having witnessed the evil and violence of the outside world. “By seeing you become one of them,” Eli says, “What you take into your hands, you take into your heart. ‘Wherefore come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing’.”

The Amish community, in other words, offers John Book a chance to escape from the realm of testimony, at least for a while. That this can only be temporary goes without saying – even if the bad guys weren’t able to track down Book, the entire Amish approach to life is too different from his: John wants nothing more than to touch the unclean things – to pick them up by his hands and throw them into the trash.

Like any good crime flick, however, nothing is entirely black or white, and the theme of witnessing is twisted and turned several times throughout the movie, making the Amish the eager witnesses, and John Book the reluctant one. “You’ll see so many things!” Rachel’s Amish suitor Daniel tells Samuel with an excited smile as Samuel is set out for his first visit to Philadelphia at the out-set of the movie. Similarly, when Samuel first delivers his dangerous testimony by pointing to a picture of McFee in the police court, a shocked John Book covers Samuel’s pointing finger with his own hand.

At its perhaps clunkiest and least subtle, the theme of witnessing is also present in the name of the main character: John Book. The name is undoubtedly a reference to the tenth and eleventh chapter of The Revelation of St. John, in which John is given a book to eat and is asked to “prophesy” and in which we are introduced to the two witnesses of Revelation.

Rachel at her Bath
The differences between the Amish and John’s world come into play most obviously in the increasingly romantic relationship between John and Rachel. Love stories between two opposites are always touching, and so are doomed love stories, and of course you just know that a love affair between the hard-boiled cop and the Amish woman is bound to be a doomed one. What I especially like about it, however, is that it manages to be an erotic cinematic love story in a way that is both unconventional and ties in very well with the theme of testimony and witnessing.

There is no actual sex scene between John Book and Rachel Lapp, and I would say that it is open to discussion wether the two ever even have sex off-screen. Even so, we get a startlingly erotic scene between the two – the sponge bathing scene mentioned earlier. This is also an example of a movie scene that manages to use frontal nudity in a meaningful, rather than pornographic way.

In the scene, we see a semi-nude Rachel washing herself with a sponge. The camera lingers on Rachel, the dim lighting of the scene emphasizing the aesthetics of her body, but we only gradually become aware of the fact that John Book is actually watching Rachel in the process: Along with Rachel we see John in the reflection of Rachel’s mirror, gazing at Rachel through a partly opened door. The image of John’s face between the door and the door frame recalls the image earlier in the movie of Samuel watching the murder unfold from a bathroom stall, and it thus re-establishes the theme of witnessing: John Book witnesses Rachel’s semi-nudity in the shower.

As any art connoiseur will know, the image of a man peeping at a woman at her bath is a recurrent image within art history: There are numerous interpretations in paintings of the old testament story of the Elders peeping at Susanna at her Bath (or, indeed, of Peeping Tom looking at Lady Godiva. Or Actaeon looking at Artemis at her bath).

Rembrandt's Susanna

The image is piquant not just because of the naked female body, but because the part of the spectator is emphasized: As spectators contemplating the picture showing Susanna in her bath, we in turn become a kind of double to the peeping Elders, staring as we do at the naked Susanna. (There is without doubt a lot more to be said about this motif, but I am not an art historian, so I will leave it at this).

In the scene in Witness, however, the peeping Tom situation gets an extra dimension, because as Rachel sees John, she doesn’t turn away bashfully or try to hide her nudity as is the case with Susanna. Instead, Rachel turns and looks directly at John (and, thus, directly into the camera, facing us, and meeting us with what feminist film theorists term the taboo of the female gaze), returning his gaze and revealing her exposed and naked breasts, and this is what gives the situation its sense of something reciprocally erotic. Not only does John witness Rachel’s nudity, Rachel witnesses John looking at her, and her gaze back at him is testimony to the fact that she’s aware of what he has witnessed.

One might argue that the theme of witnessing is also there in the scene in which John and Rachel dance together in the barn loft after John manages to fix his car radio. The song that they are dancing to is Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World”, the lyrics revolving around the theme of knowing versus not knowing (“Don’t know much about history/Don’t know much about geography/[...] But I do know that I love you.”).

But the sponge bathing/peeping Tom scene is definitely the more memorable love scene, and the one that truly reveals to us how much is at stake for both John and Rachel in this budding relationship. It’s also worth noting that John never touches Rachel in this scene, and actually casts down his gaze, seemingly overwhelmed with the situation. Just as Rachel engages in an markedly un-Amish situation of witnessing, the usually very hands-on cop John keeps “separate” from Rachel and “touch[es] not.

Death by Corn and Raising the Barn
There are also plenty of scenes where the theme of witnessing isn’t especially prominent and in which the movie is allowed to be simply an exciting crime flick. The scene where the dirty cops catch up with John Book and chase him around the farm is an example of this. The scene in the silo, where one of the dirty cops finds his death in the corn is especially outstanding. A most disturbing movie moment! And brilliantly effective. Choking to death as tons and tons of corn is being poured over you has to be one of the more unusual deaths in the history of crime flicks, and there is something almost biblical about perishing in a flood of corn, so it goes well with the biblical theme of the movie.

And then there are scenes in the movie that are just so aesthetically pleasing that they transcend the genre. Kelly McGillis looks beautiful, like she stepped out of a Dutch 17th century oil painting in all of her scenes. And the barn raising scene is an absolute classic: pictures and music really come together in this beautiful scene. I’ve heard some people say that they regret that the music wasn’t arranged for a full orchestra instead of a synthesizer, but I actually disagree. I think the synthesizer lends to the scene that kind of dreamlike, transcendental touch that electronic music excels at. One might also argue that the synthesizer music combined with the old-timey images of straw-hat-donning craftsmen raising a barn establishes the conflict between 80s cop John and the old-fashioned community of the Amish. In any case, I think a full orchestra would have been over the top and kind of cheesy.

You can watch the scene here:

Awesome Ford, Adorable Haas, and a Random Viggo Mortensen Cameo
And then the movie is very well acted. John Book is often mentioned as Harrison Ford’s best performance ever, and I’m inclined to agree. Ford plays equally convincing John’s scenes as a hardboiled cop whacking drugdealers and his more sensitive ones like the one where he stands breathless and passive in front of Rachel. Kelly McGillis has a good take on the hidden spunk of her otherwise demure Amish character, and Lukas Haas is absolutely adorable as Samuel and a very appropriate cast: His big, dark, expressive eyes alone are enough to strike up the theme of witnessing.

Also, the attentive viewer may spot a very young Viggo Mortensen as one of the men inthe Amish community. Don’t blink or you’ll miss him, though. He hardly even has any lines.

Clunky German Lines
Oh, and speaking of the Amish and their lines; that’s one of my only peeves about this movie. The Amish are depicted as speaking German to each other, but I don’t think the movie was meant for an audience that actually understood the language, because the lines they’ve written for them are awful. Very clunky. The Amish go around saying ridiculous things to each other like “The man is afraid! Very bad!” (after seeing a fatally wounded John Book for the first time) or “Those are not his own clothes – those are the clothes of Jacob!” (after Rachel has lend John some clothes that belonged to her late husband Jacob). They might have hired some kind of German speaking coach to help them write some better lines. Nobody talks like that.

Natalie Imbruglia – A Mime Interpretation

October 1, 2009 at 7:30 pm | In Internet Findings, Music, Pop Culture, youtube | Leave a Comment

I haven’t been updating the blog as much as I’ve wanted to these past few days - busy week, that’s all. But until I’m ready with a more substantial blog entry, I thought I’d go for the easy youtube solution and give you a little treat. The following is a video showing mime Johann Lippowitz a.k.a. David Armand doing an interpretation of Natalie Imbruglia’s hit song ”Torn”. My mime-enthusiasm may come as a surprise to some of you, since I have in the past expressed some suspicion when it comes to mimes, but trust me, this guy is a genius!

My favourite part has to be his display of growing frustration from chorus to chorus, as expressed in his interpretation of the line “You’re a little late”.

“Danish Mother Seeking…” and Fast Women in Folklore

September 17, 2009 at 7:02 pm | In Folklore, Gender, Internet Findings, youtube | Leave a Comment

I guess since I’m Danish and a woman, I ought to comment on the infamous “Danish Mother Seeking…” video that the Danish tourist organisation VisitDenmark issued this month, in which a pretty blond Danish woman named Karen allegedly seeks the father of her infant son August whom she reveals to be a tourist whom she met during his stay in Denmark. Karen’s identity and her story were, of course, fake. If you haven’t already seen the video, you can watch it here:

I am deeply offended and disgusted by this marketing stunt, as is every Danish woman I know. The campaign has since been withdrawn by VisitDenmark who have also issued an apology for the video, but I still cannot believe that they actually went as far as to make this stunt in the first place. It is extremely demeaning towards women, and I find it utterly tasteless that a serious tourist agency would market Denmark as a country where you can go to have unprotected sex with promiscuous women.

The video got me thinking, however, about folklore and how there’s a tradition within (modern?) societies to boast of their only too willing women. We’ve in fact been doing that for decades in Denmark before Karen and her baby boy August came along, in the shape of an urban legend about a particular Copenhagen sculpture namely The Lure Players:

Lurblaeserne

This monument showing too vikings playing the lure stands on a high pillar right overlooking the Copenhagen city hall square, and according to the legend, the lure players will start blowing their lures whenever a virgin (in the sense: virginal woman) crosses the square (in some versions it’s a virgin over the age of 18). The joke being of course that the lure players never do blow their lures (because they’re made of bronze…), thus indicating that Danish women are a promiscuous lot.

I always thought that this was a unique Danish legend, but I found out via Snopes.com, that I was mistaken. In the U.S.A. there are similar legends about a number of colleges, including one about the statue of a soldier who will shoot his rifle if a virgin walks by (and, accordingly, he is nicknamed ‘Silent Sam’), the statue of a university founder (Duke) who will tip his hat, and a pair of stone lions that will roar. The message is always the same: “Look! Ours is the most fun college – all our women are wild and willing!”

I’m not blind to the lure (heh) of such legends – I can see the joke, and legends about sculptures getting up and moving are always somewhat fascinating in a fairy-tale kind of way. But even so, I think it’s important that we at least consider the consequences of these attempts to equate a society’s appeal with how easy it is to get the women there to spread their legs. That we at least pause to consider what kind of gender roles legends this gives rise to. Especially when the tendency spreads beyond folklore and into the sphere of advertising and branding, as has so blatantly been the case with VisitDenmark and their viral marketing stunt video.

Indiana Jones and the Awesomeness of Marion Ravenwood

August 16, 2009 at 12:45 am | In Fandom, Gender, Indiana Jones, Movies, Odes, Pop Culture, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | Leave a Comment

Last week I finally saw the first Indiana Jones (Raiders of the Lost Ark). I don’t know how I’ve managed to miss that one all these years, but I’d actually never seen it before. I’ve watched my older brother play the Indiana Jones computer game on his Amiga 500 in the early 90s, I’ve seen Temple of Doom numerous times during my childhood (somehow it was always on TV when I was a kid), I’ve seen The Last Crusade once (and it scared me half to death), and I even saw the fourth one in the theatres last year (and holy Christ, what was the deal with that one? Aliens? What the hell??), but I’ve never seen the one that started it all.

And what a shame that is, because it’s such an awesome movie! There is hardly one dull moment, and the movie had such a great energy that I couldn’t help being sucked completely into it, despite not generally being into the whole action-adventure genre. Harrison Ford does a great job at establishing himself in the part of Indy, particularly because he’s got a knack for the self-irony that’s needed if the character wasn’t going to turn into a total Mary Sue. The opening sequence, with Indy retrieving the golden idol from the cave, is a classic moment of cinema, as is Indy’s nonchelant shooting of the scimitar guy in the bazaar, and the opening of the Ark. People are always saying that the special effects of the latter scene are laughable by today’s standards, but I don’t agree at all. Or, well, yes, I suppose I do, to a certain extent, but like I mentioned in my Scaries Movie Scenes entry I don’t think it matters. Special effects aren’t everything and the scene is so perfectly directed and composed that it hardly matters that you can tell that the melting Nazis are merely wax figures. It’s still completely bone-chilling.

But I think my favourite part of the movie is Marion. She’s just so completely awesome. Karen Allen plays the part with as much self-irony as Ford, so she never turns into a Mary Sue either. She also has a great sexual chemistry with Ford that’s established right from their first scene together, and you easily believe that the two have a history together even if it is never made clear exactly what happened between them – we only know that Marion was the daughter of Indy’s mentor Abner Ravenwood, that she loved Indy, and that he let her down somehow. And she’s gorgeous to boot: Not too skinny, slightly buxom actually, but still fit, and a bit of a hammerhead, which is always cute. Just look at her!:

Marion Ravenwood

And then she’s got that perfect combo of being tough, resourceful, and brave and squeamish and scared. See, this is what went awry in The Temple of Doom.

Okay, to be fair, a lot of things went awry in Temple of Doom: it is my personal conviction that Spielberg failed as a director with this sequel because he was determined to suck up to his audience of pre-teen boys (by creating the character of Short Round as an object of identification for them, and by stuffing the movie with gory scenes like the Monkey Brain/Eye Soup one that they could talk about in the schoolyard).

But the female lead in Temple of Doom was a major problem, too. The character of Willie is just way to squeamish. She does nothing but scream and fret throughout the movie, and it does nothing for the dynamics of the movie, and, I might add, nothing for the female Indiana Jones audience. Indy is still cool in Temple of Doom, but it seems rather too easy to be cool when you’re constantly contrasted by a screaming woman. Indy is much more interesting with a competent woman by his side who’s woman enough to challenge him, and to make him look stupid every once in a while, without him liking her any the less for it.

Sure, Marion does get kidnapped, she does scream a little every now and then, and needs to be saved by Indy in shining armour a couple of times, and I don’t really understand why we need to see Marion squeeze into not one, but two different uncomfortable and inconveniently tight dresses during the movie (first the one she’s forced into by Belloq, then the silky one she’s miraculously given as a present aboard the ship). But she also stands erect by Indy’s side, hits a villain over the head with a frying pan when needed, or uses her feminine charm (and impressive ability to hold her liquor!) to pull evil Belloq’s leg. “I’m your goddamn partner!” as she tells Indy early on, and she truly is. It makes Indy seem all the more manly, which, in turn makes him sexier to a female audience and more appealing to the male audience, while Marion makes a likeable character for the female audience to relate to. Everyone’s a winner!

In fact, Marion is so awesome that to me her mere presence was an extenuating circumstance in the trainwreck that was The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, too. I simply have to admire Spielberg for having had the sense to make up for the mistake of leaving Marion out of both Indiana Jones # 2 and 3 in his last Indiana Jones movie. I love it that in Crystal Skull Ford wasn’t paired up with, say, Megan Fox, or some other eye-candy starlet decades younger than him, I love it that Karen Allen looked middle-aged and fabulous, I love it that they provided us with a story that explained why Indy and Marion split up between the first and the third movie (Temple of Doom was a prequel to the first movie, so that does to some extend excuse Marion’s absence in that one), and I love it that they got to get married in the end, and that they’d managed to produce Shia LaBeouf together before Indy left Marion in the 1930s.

I found a great video on youtube by The Movie Critic which lists the ten most f’n awesome Indiana Jones Moments:

I agree with the list for the most part and think it’s a great tribute to Indiana Jones altogether, but I still feel that Marion deserves a list of her own. So here it is – below. If you notice any errors in my summeries of the scenes in question, please let me know. I don’t own the DVDs, so I had to do the list from memory. And with a little help from Wikiquote here and there.

The 10 Most Awesome Marion Ravenwood Moments

10. Drinking Match
I agree with The Movie Critic that Indiana Jones’s character is wonderfully established in the opening sequence of Raiders. But so is Marion Ravenwood’s character in her first scene where we see her kicking a big man’s ass in a drinking contest, to the point where the guy is literally unconscious, while Marion just gets up and leaves triumphantly with not as much as a reeling in her walk. We know at that moment that Indy will meet his match in this woman.

9. “Indiana Jones. Always knew someday you’d come walkin’ back through my door.”
And if there had been any doubt left about whether or not Marion would turn out to be Indy’s match, it’s all cleared up during their first scene together in Raiders: Marion seems pretty cool and calm while first greeting Indy as he enters the bar where she’s a bartender, so Indy’s caught completely off-guard when Marion punches him in the face. “I was a child! I was in love!” she goes on to chastise him, destroying any hope Indy might have had that their failed relationship was long forgiven and forgotten, and that Marion would make things easy for him.

8. Still feisty, twenty years later
In Crystal Skull Indy finds Marion in Peru where she’s been captured by Russians, and it’s been 20 years since he’s seen her. When he first sees her, Indy walks up to her incredulous, and he does this wonderfully goofy grin, obviously expecting to have a warm, tearful reunion with Marion. He really ought to have known better. Because the last time Marion saw Indy, he practically left her standing at the altar, and she’s not about to let him forget about that. The goofy grin is quickly wiped off of Indy’s face as Marion brushes past him unimpressed. Shortly after the following conversation ensues:

“Indy (confused, to Mutt): Marion Ravenwood is your mother?!
Marion: Oh, for God’s sake, Indy, it’s not that hard!
Indy: Well, I know, I just thought-
Marion: That I would never have a life after you left!
Indy: Well, that’s fine…
Marion: A damn good, really good life!
Indy: Well, so have I!
Marion: Really? Still leaving a trail of human wreckage behind you, or have you retired?
Indy: Why, you looking for a date?
Marion: With anyone but you!”

Awesome.

7. Drinking Belloq under the table
Belloq, the chief villain in Raiders, is such a smug bastard. Constantly outmatching Indy using foul play and teaming up with Nazis while wearing a flimsy straw hat that doesn’t hold a candle to Indy’s rugged, brown fedora, he also manages to kidnap Marion and sneaks a very un-gentleman-like peek at her as she slips into a fancy dress that he’s forcing her to wear. Sleazeball. But as has been established early on in Raiders, Marion has a knack for drinking people under the table, and she puts this ability (plus her ability to sex men up) to good use in the scene…

A fellow Marion fan has put up the scene on youtube:

6. Marion and the frying pan
While being chased at the Cairo bazaar in Raiders, Marion manages to outsmart a villain by running into a house, hiding behind the doorframe, and then hitting the guy over the head as he tries to follow her into the house. We don’t actually see her hitting him, we just see her going in, the guy following her, the sound of a frying pan hitting a human head, and then, promptly, the guy falling out of the doorframe, unconscious. It’s a wonderfully slap-stick moment that has even earned the action figure!Marion Ravenwood a frying pan as her attribute:

Marion_1

5. Whac-a-Mole Marion
A little earlier in the bazaar scene, we see Marion and Indy fighting the villains together. While Indy’s doing some heavy fist-fighting, you can see Marion in the background, hitting some of the bad guys over the head with some boxes found in the bazaar. The scene goes on for quite some time, and Marion just keeps at it as if she were a kid at a Whac-A-Mole, going in for the big prize.

4. “Mutt… I mean, his name is Henry… He’s your son.”
See, this is what’s so nice about Marion. She’s feisty, but she still has a big heart, and obviously loves Indy more than she’d care to admit. In Crystal Skull when she believes that she and Indy are seconds away from perishing in drysand, she’s not about to let Indy die without letting him know the truth about her son Mutt, who’s served as Indy’s young partner during the first half of the film: Indy is his father – he fathered the kid unwittingly before he left Marion in 1937. A warm and fuzzy, and also funny moment, nicely played by both Allen and Ford.

3. “We can never seem to get a break, can we, Indy?”
It’s only natural that in the real love scene between Indy and Marion in Raiders, it’s Marion who initiates things, feisty girl that she is. Indy is in bed, and Marion’s next to him, and you can tell that things are heating up between them. Except Indy’s all bruised and battered from having performed a series of impressive stunts in the previous scene, and he whimpers every time Marion tries to touch him. She loses patience with him, and in a scene slightly reminiscent of the scene between Zerlina and Masetto in Don Giovanni ( “Ahi, ahi! La testa mia!” ) Marion asks him to just point out to her the places where he’s not hurting. He starts off innocently, by pointing to his forehead and such, which she kisses, but he keeps getting bolder, and eventually Marion leans down to kiss Indy deeply on the lips. It’s Marion, too, who wants things to go further after this kiss – only to find that the exhausted Indy has fallen a sleep while kissing her and is unable to deliver. Too bad! But then she got her chance later on, as Mutt is living proof to.

2. The Well of Souls
See, this is the difference between Marion and Willie: Marion only screams when she has just cause for it. And she certainly does in the Well of Souls scene. Snakes everywhere, and dried-up dead bodies falling down on her all over the place! So she does a fair amount of screaming in this scene, but she still has the energy to clutch her stiletto-heel shoe, yell at Indy, and curse at Belloq (“You bastard! I’ll get you for this!”). Classy! And awesome.

You can see the whole scene here:

1. “They weren’t you, honey”
There’s a nice bit of conversation in Crystal Skull where Indy and Marion discuss the time that’s gone by since they last saw each other:

Marion: “I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to go on with my life. There must have been plenty of women for you over the years.”
Indy: “There were a few. But they all had the same problem.”
Marion: “Yeah, what’s that?”
Indy: “They weren’t you, honey.”

I swear, half the audience when “Awww!” at this line when I saw the movie in the theatre. Arguably it’s mostly Indy being awesome in this little bit of dialogue, but I like to see the line as a nod to Indy fans – an apology for having replaced Marion’s character with tedious “Indy” girls in Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade.

The Beatles Anthology, Revisited

August 12, 2009 at 8:23 pm | In Fandom, Music, Pop Culture, Television, youtube | Leave a Comment

thebealtes-help

Part of me just knew that I never should have written that entry about my five favourite eary Beatles sons with vocals by John Lennon. It totally launched a new round of Beatle-mania in me, and I’ve been listening to The Beatles for the past few weeks more than I’ve ever done since I was 13-14 and first discovered the band. It’s a good thing that the new opera season is slowly approaching, so that I will have something else to obsess over soon.

But then it’s been really nice to re-discover those four lads and their songs. One thing I especially enjoyed was re-discovering the documentarty series The Beatles Anthology, which I re-watched over the past week, and I thought I’d do a review here.

Telling the story of how The Beatles first got together, rose to fame, reinvented themselves, and then broke up, the series is surprisingly well executed, especially because of the way it works as a testimony to the fact that what the rest of us perceive as a glorious tale of a fabulous band’s fantastic oeuvre, must have felt like a turbulent, chaotic story to the four band members themselves who went almost directly from the streets of Liverpool to the top of the pop at an age where most of us are still figuring out what to major in at college.

Help!
The title sequence itself is obviously created with this in mind: We zoom in on The Beatles playing the song ”Help!”, only to zoom out again, making the four musicians seem smaller and smaller next to some huge characters that spell out the band’s name, while the music is graudually drowned in the noise of an audience of girls screaming at the top of their lungs.

I was surprised to find at first that there is no narrator in the series, no steady, comforting, distinguishly English voice to guide us through the story, but I think that’s actually part of what makes the series so great: Because how could there be just one narrator of the story of four such different persons and the numerous people who surrounded them? A cacophony of voices is instead achieved as the documentary series is made up from a number of interviews with Beatles members themselves and key figures in the making of the band and their music. Brand new interviews were made with Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, and the three are mostly interviewed seperately. This is a particularly nice touch because it allows us to get - often very - different perspectives on an event.

George Martin and the fantastic stars
Another important interviewees in the programme is producer George Martin. Martin is endearing – he simply seems like such a nice person, and very knowledgable when it comes to music. If the programme introduces us to the four Beatles’ genius, it certainly also testifies to the genius of Martin, and to the importance of his intellect and down-to-earth personality. He recounts a particularly poignant (and very amusing!) anecdote at one point, when he’s trying to illustrate how innocent and ignorant he was when it came to The Beatles use of drugs: Once when Lennon had accidentally taken acid in the studio and was feeling strange, Martin took the reeling musician to the roof of the building for some fresh air, without ever realizing that Lennon was under the influence – although he did find it strange that Lennon kept staring at the stars and calling them “fantastic!”. “I suppose they would have been particularly fantastic to him…” as Martin muses.

“There are seven levels.”
The three surviving Beatles themselves, however, also seem to have developed a healthy distance to the chaos they lived through in their Beatles years. Paul McCartney obviously still has a keen eye for appearance and the theatrical (as the footage from their concerts show, he always was the one Beatle to put on the most elaborate stage show), and does a great job at imitating his and his band-mates’ high-strung earlier selves as he recounts situations from back then to the camera. An especially funny anecdote is Paul’s memory of the first time he smoked pot: He was at a party and in his stoned condition he was suddenly certain that he’d cracked the meaning of life, so he asked for paper and a pen, so that he might write it down. The next day, when he was sober, he was eager to see the note again, but somewhat taken aback that all it read was “There are seven levels.” McCartney’s delivery of the punch-line is hilarious.

If McCartney is theatrical, George Harrison and Ringo Starr both seem much more laid-back. They come off as two genuinly nice guys, and George Harrison had a wonderful sardonic humour to boot. May he rest in peace.

“The movement you need is on your shoulder”
And naturally the three ‘95 interviews with the three ex-Beatles leave a terrible void. One keeps expecting a 55-year-old John Lennon to pop up there on the screen along with the three others - it would have been so interesting to hear what he made of things all these years later, and to see what he looked like now - and of course he doesn’t. But much isn’t made of his death, and that’s a nice touch, too. After all The Beatles Anthology is a documentary about The Beatles specifically, not about the three Beatles and what they did after the band broke up. And the loss of John Lennon is present in the documentary regardless. Like when Paul McCartney talks about how he first played “Hey Jude” to John. Paul told John he wasn’t happy with the line “The movement you need is on your shoulder”, but John told him not to: That was the best part of the song – ‘95!Paul gets a little misty-eyed as he tells us this and confesses that that was one of the things that was so great about working with John, and one of the things that made him sentimental to think about now.

Original footage of Mozart’s ass-jokes
Apart from the 1995 interviews, the documentary is rich with footage from the Beatles years – perhaps almost too rich, one might argue. There are lengthy clips from concerts, and while it’s always a pleasure to hear the Beatles’ songs, it does slow down the pace of the series somewhat, and it’s these clips, in part, that make me think that the series wouldn’t be terribly interesting to anyone who wasn’t a hardcore Beatles’ fan.

But then of course one has to remember that when the series was made, this was the first time that a lot of this footage was ever published, and it was sensational at the time, I do remember that. The footage of failed takes from the studios, with John Lennon mising a note or Paul McCartney giggling his way through “And Your Bird Can Sing”, are all over the internet by now, but at that time, it was a unique look behind the scenes, like getting to peep through a hole in time and see Wordsworth strolling around in Tintern Abbey, or seeing Mozart make an ass-joke.

“Free As a Bird”
And the footage is put to great use in the end sequence of the series when we are shown the video for “Free As a Bird”, a song that John Lennon recorded, but never released, but which was refined by the three other Beatles in ‘95. The song itself is so-so. But the idea of the Fab Four performing together again is incredibly touching, and the video is just marvellous. I still remember seeing the rush of seeing that video for the first time on TV back then, and marvelling at the fact that the editing of the video actually allowed me to see the four Beatles walking in a Liverpool street, down Strawberry Fields and past the barber in Penny Lane, and – most fantastically – go through the corridor from the street into The Cavern to see The Beatles performing on stage. I’ll freely admit that the video can still make me sniffle:

Other fun things I learned from the documentary:
- the fact that The Beatles used to lie on top op each other and drink whiskey during the winter when they were touring in their first tour car, because it got so cold. HoYay!
- the fact that the three surviving Beatles all seemed to agree that John wrote “Help!” mostly because he was “getting pudgy” at the time and wasn’t feeling good about himself as a result.
- the fact that The Beatles were harassed at the Philipines because they turned down an invitation on their day off to see Imelda Marcos.
- the fact that Ringo and Paul once ran seven miles away from the set during the filming of Help!, because they were eager to smoke a joint. And the fact that the filming of the movie was pretty much sabotaged by the four Beatles’ stoned condition throughout the proces.
- the fact that Sgt. Pepper wasn’t much of a big deal to either of The Beatles. And that Ringo was downright bored during the recording of it. I always thought Abbey Road was a better album.

Rusalka Likes tha Moon!

July 20, 2009 at 7:49 pm | In Music, Opera, youtube | 2 Comments

I totally already linked to this video. But since today is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, I thought I’d post it once again. So here it is: Rusalka’s beautiful song to the moon! As sung by Renee Fleming.

Another song to the moon is the one by the Spongmonkies. Not exactly beautiful perhaps, but still awesome:

Happy moon day, everyone!

Top 5 Favourite Early Beatles Songs with Lead Vocals by John Lennon

July 6, 2009 at 3:00 pm | In Fandom, Music, Pop Culture, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 3 Comments

youngjohnlennon

I know, I know. Writing a blog entry about The Beatles. I might as well put up an entry that reads “You know what’s really cute? Kittens and bunnies. Kittens and bunnies are really cute.” or titled ”Why Racism is Wrong”. Even so, I’m writing this entry.

I went through this whole big Beatles-phase in the eighth grade, where my best friend and myself would sit around in each other’s rooms after school and listen our way through every Beatles album ever released. It got really freaky for a while, the way fandom usually does when you’re 13 years old. I remember wearing black and mourning all day on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death, and realizing at some point that I knew the lyrics of every single Beatles song ever written. I also think that thanks to this adolescent Beatles phase of mine, Help! is still the movie I’ve seen the most times.

My friend and I neatly divided the fandom between us so that she liked Paul McCartney the best, and I was all about John Lennon and thought he was the most divine man ever to have lived. I like to think that I’m over that by now, but the truth is I’m really not. I think “Imagine” is an awful song and actually pretty much dislike the entire oeuvre of his solo career, but I still think he was incredibly awesome when co-working with McCartney, and he was undeniably a genius songwriter.

And then he had a singing voice that can still make me all school girl-ishly weak in the knees whenever I hear it. Which is what I really wanted to write about in this entry, my Top 5 Favourite Early Beatles Songs with Lead Vocals by John Lennon, or, more idiomatically, my T5FEBSLVJL. Because John Lennon had such a good singing voice for rock ‘n roll music. And I think people sometimes tend to forget this, focusing mostly on his songwriting abilities, or even his heavy-handed fight for world peace, so I thought I’d bring attention to it in this entry. His voice simply sounded sexy, I think, like leather jackets and five-o-clock-shadows and sweet nothings whispered into your ear at a scruffy bar late at night. It’s especially prominent in the high notes when his voice sounds like it’s almost about to break, allowing a kind of passionate desperation to creep into his clarinet-like barytone that brings a certain edge to the songs. And while I love the later Beatles songs, I think the earlier songs tended to set off this particular edge the best – perhaps because the early songs otherwise sound relatively innocent to the modern ear. Here are my five favourite examples of this phenomenon:

5. “Mr. Moonlight”
This is not a Beatles song in as much as it’s not written by The Beatles; rather it’s written by Roy Lee Johnson. All in all it’s a pretty forgettable song, but John Lennon’s voice in the intro is so awesome.

4. “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”
Another song that isn’t actually a Beatles song. It was written by The Miracles, but I think that the Beatles’ recording of it is actually the best there is. John’s vocals seem to be balancing on the upper edge of his high range, truly adding to the desolate ambience of the lyrics. George Harrison delivers the harmony, but it’s John’s voice that stands out.

3. “You Can’t Do That”
One of John Lennon’s more macho songs, thematically related to “Run for Your Life” , and this makes the aforementioned raunchy sound of his voice even more apt.

2. “Twist and Shout”
It almost seems redundant to mention this one, because it’s so famous, but I’m doing it anyway, because John does that almost-breaking-voice thing constantly in this live cover version of a Top Notes song:

1. “This Boy”
“This Boy” is my favourite example when it comes to John’s voice. Which is funny because I actually find most of the song to be slightly dull and monotonous – but it’s saved by the bridge where John gets to display the full potential of his voice, as he takes the lead and breaks free from the morose harmonies of the song. The result is incredible. And then he is just so impossibly cute in the video when he raises his eyebrows while reaching the high note! Eeeee, look at him! I don’t know what all those girls were on about, screaming their lungs out over Paul McCartney with his puppy dog eyes and awkwardly bopping head.

Top 5: Favourite Opera Dagger Scenes

June 16, 2009 at 1:13 pm | In Gender, Music, Opera, Top 5/Top 10, youtube | 2 Comments

Ok, so this Top 5 may seem way far-fetched, but bear with me here. I wanted to do an entry on the subject of opera, because I haven’t done one of those in ages, and I wanted to do another top 5, but I’m studying for an exam, and this was the first thing that popped into my head.

And when you think about it, it’s not really that far-fetched. There are a lot of daggers in operas. I’d say it’s what kills about 60% of all opera characters. In fact, if I were to make a graph of opera deaths, I imagine that it would look something like this:

operagraph

And it’s no wonder that librettists are so fond of daggers, really. A dagger is an easy prop to carry around stage, it may be aesthetically pleasing with its blade flashing in the stage light, and one might say that the dagger is the opera version of Chekhov’s Gun: You just know that someone’s going to be bleeding to death from a stab wound later on if a dagger is shown or mentioned at some point in an opera.

And thus I would say that it’s justifiable to make a top 5 of my five favourite dagger moments in operas:

5. The Foreshadowing Dagger – Macbeth: “Mi si affacia un pugnal?”
“Is this a dagger which I see before me?” - probably one of the most famous literary mentions of a dagger, featured here in Verdi’s opera based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth is still debating whether or not to take his wife’s advice and kill King Duncan in the name of ambition, as he suddenly seems to see a dagger floating before him, urging him on. The ghostly dagger is a foreshadowing both of the murder that Macbeth will later commit and of the hauntings that he will experience subsequently (by the ghost of Banquo and by his own conscience both). Macbeth is not my favourite opera, but the music here is very appropriately dramatic and hectic:

4. The Jealousy Dagger -Wozzeck: “Dort links geht’s in die Stadt”
The dagger scene in Wozzeck is related to other opera jealosy dagger scenes, such as the final scene in Carmen, where (SPOILER!!1!!) Don José stabs Carmen to death. But I chose this one because it’s a got such a singularly eerie atmosphere. The entire opera is eerie, just as the original play by Georg Büchner is, and in every scene you get that feeling that there is something dreadful and horrible lurking just around the corner. In this scene, it’s the dagger, and you kind of know that it’s coming: Wozzeck is a poor soldier who has only one thing to live for: His beloved wife Marie and their little son. But alas, Marie has been fooling around with the flashy donjuan the Drum Major, who even has the nerve to ridicule Wozzeck as the two share a scene together. “Better a knife in my body than your hands on me” Marie says spitefully, as Wozzeck confronts her with his suspicion. Famous last words…

3. The Suicide Dagger – Otello: “Niun mi tema”
Another jealous husband, yet a completely different use of the dagger. I’ve included this one because it always manages to come as a bit of a surprise for me. We’re at the ending of Otello where the title character has just strangled his wife Desdemona to death in the belief that she has been unfaithful to him with the handsome Cassio. Only too late is he informed that the whole thing was a scheme orchestrated by Otello’s vicious ensign Iago, and that Desdemona was innocent. Otello is crushed as he finds out about this, and the music turns solemn like a funeral march as he bids the pale, tired, mute, and beautiful Desdemona goodbye. It’s easy to get the impression that the opera is over now, and that there’ll be no more drama. That is, until suddenly there’s a crescendo, and Otello draws a dagger…

2. The Who-Will-It-Be? Dagger – Rigoletto: “Ah! Piu non ragiono!”
This is probably the most suspenseful opera dagger scene I can think of. In the scene, the hitman Sparafucile is preparing to kill the Duke, whom he’s been hired to kill by Rigoletto, who wants to avenge his daughter Gilda’s loss of virtue to the womanizing nobleman. However, things start to go amiss as Sparafucile’s wanton sister Maddalena has developed an elaborate crush on the Duke and tries to talk Sparafucile into sparing his life and killing Rigoletto instead. To make things worse, Gilda, who’s still madly in love with the Duke, shows up at Sparafucile’s door and overhears Sparafucile saying that if someone were to knock on their door before midnight, he’d agree to kill that person instead of the Duke. As midnight approaches and a thunder storm rages, a terrible plan forms in Gilda’s head…

What’s so great about the scene is that even if you’ve never seen the opera before you just know that by the end of the scene someone will be stabbed with a dagger and killed, and the suspense rises along with the crescendo of the storm depicting the music: Will Sparafucile kill the Duke? Or will Rigoletto be the victim? Or will Gilda sacrifise herself for her heartless seducer? The explosive auditory effects of the thunder storm makes for a horrifying on-scene stabbing; you can almost feel the sensation of blood mixing with rainwater as the dagger penetrates the victim’s drenched skin at the end of the scene… Gruelling, wonderfully so!

1. The Penetration Dagger – Tosca: “Questo è il bacio di Tosca!”
In Catherine Clement’s book Opera or the Undoing of Women, Clement recounts the anecdote of a young woman, an opera newbie, who went to see Tosca and returned saying that the ending was wonderfully feminist – that it was so great that Tosca got away with the murder of Scarpia. The explanation was, of course, that the woman had mistaken the second act for the last one, which is an easy mistake to make, really. The outcome of the second act with the death of Scarpia seems like such an appropriate ending, not least because of the dagger. Most of the second act has been like a foreplay from Hell, with Scarpia terrorizing Tosca by making her listen to her boyfriend Mario’s screams of agony from the adjacent torture chamber, and finally Scarpia forcing Tosca to have sex with him in exchange for Mario’s life. So you could say that the entire act is embued with the anticipation of a penetration, climaxing as Scarpia, having obtained Tosca’s reluctant consent, rushes to embrace her. What he doesn’t realize at this point is that Tosca has fetched a dagger from his dinner table and is preparing for an entirely different kind of penetration…
This would have been a feminist ending to the story, indeed! But then we would have missed out on the entire third act.

Here is the scene in the 1976 movie version with Kabaivanska, Milnes, and Domingo, which was the first Tosca I ever saw: