At first glance, it may appear strange that what looks to all purposes like a silly little French sex comedy could almost begin a riot. But that’s precisely what happened when Jean Renoir premiered his newest film in Paris, 1939. Not only did the audience boo the movie, but some people began to fight, and one patron actually attempted to set fire to the theater. Seems as though Renoir just may have struck a nerve . . . I don’t know what the most extraordinary thing about this mind-bending masterpiece is. Is it its sheer audacious daring, its meticulously baroque plotting, its fast-pace humor, its insane cast of characters, its pure classical beauty, its impossibly byzantine camera movement, or its ultimate sense of the sad dignity and grace of humanity. I think, perhaps, its director’s greatest accomplishment is to keep all of these balls up in the air at the same time, while showing himself as a character in the center of it all, utterly helpless, yet trying to keep it all from flying apart! The Rules of the Game is the ultimate ensemble cinematic triumph. It moves to its own internal rhythm like no other. There is no other movie that even comes close to sustaining its remarkably balanced, yet seemingly chaotic action so smoothly aligned to sheer perfection. It is one film that reveals more and more complexity and layers of irony with every successive viewing. In short, the more you watch it, the greater it becomes, the more it unfolds its riches. More remarkable still, it not only becomes more funny and more sad, but more shocking every time you see it. And it was shock that accompanied its appearance right on the eve of the beginning of the Second World War. For without a single mention of the growing conflagration on the immediate horizon, Renoir unveiled so all the world could see, the frivolous, stupid, empty behavior of the idle and pretentious bourgeoisie of Europe who, by their very oblivion to the reality of their times, had let things come to such a horrific, unstoppable path. It is no wonder that Paris reacted with indignation and violence. Nobody wants to stare into a mirror that large and unflattering. Actually all of the classes of French society take in on the chin in the film. The servants ape their masters in matters of sex, seduction and duplicity. But the greatest sin of all, in Renoir’s vision, is the one of sheer negligence - the act of looking the other way. When one must play one’s role, regardless of the implications or the outcome - even if the result is the tragic destruction of a human life - how can any one person be truly indicted? This was Renoir’s great transgression - he appeared with precisely the right message that absolutely nobody wanted to hear. We are the enemy. At the very center of the two acts of criss-crossing lovers, deceits, cheats, lies, performances public and private, the film bursts wildly, appallingly and deafeningly to its horrific and devastating centerpiece. The hosts and their proper and distinguished guests all traipse casually out into the beautiful winter outdoors. Servants rush through the woods with sticks, frightening birds, rabbits and other wildlife ahead of them, until they emerge, unprotected, into an open area where the carefree, thoughtless humans mow them down in an epic, high-speed bloodbath of brutal carnage. I don’t care how you feel about hunting - after witnessing this vicious ritual enacted by such shallow, callous dilettantes, you may be tempted to start a riot yourself.
Okay, so I was going to write about the 1,000 greatest albums of all time, based on a compilation site called BestEverMusic. But then I discovered another one that might be more authoritative (whatever that means in this context) called Acclaimed Music, which also ranks songs. While both sites are drawing from many of the same sources, and feature many of the same albums, they differ in their rankings quite considerably. What on earth should I do, I queried? Finally, it hit me - like I was shot through the forehead with a diamond bullet - compile the compilers! Yes, it’s such a simple solution. Just take the ranking from each site, divide by two and I’ll have the perfect ranking system. Here’s how they stack up (as of yesterday) in their assessment of the top ten albums of all time: ACCLAIMED MUSIC 1. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds 2. The Beatles: Revolver 3. Nirvana: Nevermind 4. The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico 5. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 6. The Clash: London Calling 7. Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On 8. The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. 9. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde 10. Radiohead: OK Computer BEST EVER ALBUMS 1. Radiohead: OK Computer 2. Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon 3. The Beatles: Revolver 4. The Beatles: Abbey Road 5. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 6. Nirvana: Nevermind 7. Radiohead: Kid A 8. Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV 9. Arcade Fire: Funeral 10. The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico Okay, so I combined the rankings of each, thinking it would yield me the perfect ranking. This is what I got: COMPOSITE SCORE 2.5. The Beatles: Revolver 4.5. Nirvana: Nevermind 5. The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 5. Radiohead: OK Computer 7. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds 7. The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico 9. The Clash: London Calling 11.5 The Beatles: Abbey Road 11.5. Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon 17. The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St. 18. Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV 19. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde 20. Arcade Fire: Funeral 22. Radiohead: Kid A Well, this is better - more balanced, don’t you think? Except Nevermind is still ranked above Sgt. Pepper’s. And that’s fucked up. Oh, well, no compilation can be perfect. So I suppose I’ve got nothing left to do but report my findings and give my commentary. Once again, the most important thing is that these are all great albums, and that your lives are ABSOLUTELY EMPTY without them! So I guess I’ll go ahead and start with Revolver. Even if it’s not the best album ever. (Even if it’s not the best BEATLES album ever - sigh.) The main thing is that it will give people something very important to argue about. Coming to you soon! ("'Cause I'm the taxman/Yeah, I'm the taxman . . .")
Many film-lovers in the West are not that well-acquainted with the works of Yasujiro Ozo, but in his native Japan, he is considered one of their greatest directors, on the same plane with his more-famous countryman, Akira Kurosawa. But the approaches of these two masters to the world of cinema could not be more different. Ozo might be seen as more quintessentially Japanese, in a formal sense. While Kurosawa’s camera broadly sweeps across both sets and landscapes with daring grace, Ozu carefully constructs his cinematic world with stationary formal shots, usually from a lower, floor-sitting level, and uses the natural interiors and exteriors to carefully frame his characters in a calm, orderly manner that almost seems meditational. While some Western viewers, more accustomed to Hollywood action, might feel that little happens in an Ozu film, the sheer, unflinching formalism of his brilliant craftsman’s style serves as a magnifying glass through which the patient, attentive viewer can see through to the very souls of the people on the screen. And more importantly, his camera is often a gateway or a mirror, directed back into the very depths of their own selves.
Tokyo Story is one this master’s greatest works, and one that through the decades, continues to grow both in the estimation of critics and in the hearts and minds of audiences, all the world over. This leisurely journey of an elderly small-town couple traveling to Tokyo to visit their grown children, this movie with such seemingly little significant dialogue, speaks volumes about the very nature of family, love, change, space and time. All told, it is one of the profoundest meditations every created for the screen about the very essence of life itself.
When Sukichi and Tomi Hirayama (Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama) arrive in Tokyo, they find that their son and daughter, both married, with their own jobs and children, have little time or inclination to visit with them or to show them around the big city. Although polite to the older folks, it soon becomes clear that their presence is actually more of a nuisance than a joyous reunion. This situation becomes highlighted as their daughter-in-law Noriko (played by the beautiful Japanese star Setsuko Hara), who was married to another son who was killed in the war, is genuinely delighted to see them and treats them with great affection.
Disappointed with their children, the old couple decide to return home early. However, Tomi gets ill on the train ride back, and dies soon after they return home. All the children must return to their home town for the funeral. Ozu and his actors keep everything perfectly balanced and low-keyed. Everyone behaves formally very well, though feelings of regret and bitterness subtly begin to surface.
During the film’s climactic scene, the couple’s youngest daughter, Kyoko (Kyoko Kagawa) releases her anger to Noriko at the behavior of her older siblings. Noriko breaks down in tears and tells her younger sister-in-law that even she (Noriko) is no better or worse herself, that she will probably remarry, move on and forget, as the essence of life is change and disappointment.
Tokyo Story is a film of sheer brilliance - everything rings true to life and nothing is overplayed. Yet the reality of the situation is so universal that it easily moves one to tears. As Roger Ebert said, it is one film that makes you want to be a better person.
Stravinsky’s first big success was The Firebird, a ballet produced in Paris by the Russian company, the Ballet Ruses in 1910. Impresario Sergei Diaghilev had launched the project the year before with the purpose of introducing Russian works to French audiences, including piecesby Stranisky’s late teacher and mentor, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Diaghilev heard one of the 27-year-old Stravinsky’s early orchestral works performed in a concert in St. Petersburg, and was sufficiently impressed to approach the young composer about writing the score for an original ballet based upon a Russian poem and a folk-tale.
Diaghilev was highly ambitious to introduce new and modern 20th century works to the Parisian audience. His company was composed of some of Russia’s finest dancers, including Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, and many others. Artist and designer Alexandre Benois and choreographer Michel Fokine collaborated to create a story of a magical glowing bird, who is caught and released by a prince. After considering other young Russian composers, Diaghilev finally decided to offer the opportunity to Stravinsky.
The ballet premiered on June 25, 1910 and quickly became a sensation with the French public. The costumes, set designs and choreography were all highly stylized and innovative - it was a brilliant, unprecedented production. Nobody had ever seen anything quite like it. But holding it all together was the majestic, audacious music of this then-unknown Russian composer. This would quickly change Diaghilev brought Stravinsky back to write two sequels, each one more advanced and daring than the other. By the middle of the decade, Stravinsky was arguably the most famous and controversial composer in Europe.
The music for The Firebird was highly influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov, who had been one of the most forward-thinking late Romantic composers in Russia. But audiences were quick to notice a powerful individual voice emerging that would quickly blossom into the most radical new musical style since Wagner. Already in The Firebird, we find Stravinsky’s love for rhythm as a forceful and formidable element in music. We also hear for the first time his total mastery of tonal blending of instruments, particularly with various groupings of woodwinds and horns.
Stravinsky also had a flair for exotic melodies, which he put to full effect in the strange fairy-tale setting. There are long, eerie stretches of sound as themes slowly and ominously develop, followed by savage eruptions of loud and furious boldness marked by extreme chromaticism and the willingness to change meter to drive the action forward.
And finally, of course, we have the finale, one of the most beautiful and awe-inducing two-plus minutes of glorious music ever written. (For all of you old Yes fans, this is the startling, exciting fanfare that the group would play over the PA before each of their concerts before bursting onto stage.) Everyone who truly loves music needs to have a copy of Stravinsky's first masterpiece, or one of the suites that he later created for orchestral performance.
And for anyone who has never witnessed an actual ballet performance of The Firebird, I am including a particularly exotic, exciting video that is filmed in such a way that it might suggest some of the initial excitement and wonder that Stravinsky and Diaghelev created over a hundred years ago back in Paris - an event that would herald a brand new era in music.
Just as Pablo Picasso, among others, were radically reshaping the world of modern painting and sculpture, Stravinsky's bold ideas of rhythmic and harmonic abstraction would soon change the face of Western music. A bold new century had indeed begun, and the face of the new "modernism" would forever change the course of all the arts and all currents of thought. It's no wonder that Pablo liked to draw Igor's picture so often - though one was a Spaniard and the other a Russian, they truly were "birds of a feather."
The first time I saw Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece was the ideal way to first encounter it: it was in a theater, I was 12 years old, and I had no idea what it was about. Of course, after I exited the theater, I still had no idea what it was about. But I knew that I had just experienced something that would forever change not only the way I viewed cinema, but the way I viewed reality. There’s a very short list of movies that can do that. We have to remember that when 2001 was first released, we hadn’t even landed on the moon yet. There were no computer graphics to astound us. Kubrick’s vision of space in the near future was mind-bogglingly realistic and immediate. But it went further than that. God, did it go further than that!
First of all, the whole first section of the movie was about grunting ape-men. What was with that? And what was that huge object that suddenly appeared among them? Next thing you know, we’ve flashed to the future and they’ve discovered the same damn thing on the moon. What the . . .? And the ending? What was happening here? Yes, it was mind-blowing and colorful. This was a trip I never even got on drugs. And he ends up in a room eating dinner? Kubrick’s co-writer, Arthur C. Clarke wanted to clear up what Kubrick wanted to keep oblique, and when I read his novelization of the film, it answered a lot of questions I had, but it destroyed some of the mystery. I truly wish I had never read it and would have been forced to puzzle the whole thing out for myself - the movie had so much more power when I only had Kubrick’s images to chart my course. But that doesn’t mean the film is no longer enigmatic! Kubrick’s silence of space is like the silence of God. At the end, when the earth is seen next to the giant embryo, and we hear Also Sprach Zarathustra one last time, is this a celebration of our infinite potential for evolution? Or is it a cynical portrait of determinism and cosmic meaninglessness? Believe me, I’ve read plenty of articles over the years arguing both ways. And there’s no way Kubrick was going to add a word of explanation. I could go on forever about the devastating power of the imagery. That’s all obvious. Anyone who’s ever seen the film knows all about that. (And it all still holds up!) If that’s all the movie were, it would still be one of the greatest landmarks in cinematic history. No, what truly gives the movie its endless power is its eerie emptiness, its matter-of-fact acceptance of the extraordinary. It’s so strange to watch the dull, banal humans utterly unaffected by this miraculous universe - and their own presence in it - while you sit there in shock and reverent awe. It took me a long time to realize it, but the real center of the film is HAL. This computer, this marvel of artificial intelligence just may be superior to us, and therefore just may have the right to succeed us on our evolutionary path. That is the cold and scary truth. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the one movie you can put right up there next to the pyramids and the Sphinx as one of the great, mind-bending achievements of humankind. In short, it’s a monolith.
The real shame of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo, is that it can only be seen for the first time once. Of course that’s true of all films, but I can think of no other movie that has the power of this one to hold a viewer in a true state of macabre wonder and obsession as this one does on first viewing. Hitchcock, is of course, the master manipulator of cinema, and this strange, disorienting story of a man (Jimmy Stewart) becoming obsessed with an unearthly beautiful woman (Kim Novak) who is seemingly coming under the possession of a dead woman is told with such a compelling and deft technique that the viewer is nearly driven as mad as the man who is desperately trying to solve her mystery.
Hitchcock here utilizes everything he has learned in a lifetime of a personalized vision of cinematic identification to pull the viewer, slowly, deeply and irrevocably into this impossible maelstrom of confusion and disorder. There is no character in movie history as completely controlled and haunted as Stewart’s "Scotty" Fergesun, a retired detective recruited by an old college friend to follow and spy on his beautiful wife, Madeline. No movie exercises more complete control over a viewer, as Hitchcock employs long sequences of Scotty following Madeline around San Francisco, which becomes a character in itself in the film, its winding streets mirroring the mounting confusion and chaos inside his mind, its stunning monuments standing out like visions in a haunted nightmare.
The richly saturated color of the film is probably the greatest use of Technicolor in history (especially in the restored edition), with its strategies of greens against browns and greys, as well as the powerful use of red at precise moments to heighten tension. This may be the most voluptuously beautiful movie ever filmed. Likewise the score, by the legendary Bernard Herrmann, is probably the most lavishly seductive sustained piece of music in any movie. (When the music ceases after Scotty’s breakdown and he wanders the streets alone, the film abandons him to a strange limbo state where you can "hear" his broken isolation.)
Some people will always criticize Hitchcock’s decision to give away the mystery at the point that he does, but it is the correct move all the way. Once the viewer is armed with the knowledge that Scotty does not possess, his every move becomes more and more transparent, and we squirm watching a man with which we have identified for so long descending further and further into obsessive madness, and we want to scream at the characters to make them stop what they’re doing.
But there is no point. These people are doomed. Hitchcock makes very, very clear the price one may have to pay for projecting an idealistic fantasy on a real flesh-and-blood human being, and he makes us suffer and pay for it, the way that his characters do. Like all great Hitchcock, this is a powerfully moral film, and while its cautionary message is sincere, the compulsive world that the director has so carefully devised leaves absolutely no room for escape. Scotty has to go up those stairs, and we are pushing him with every step. Once we do, we all get what we deserve.
Of course, the most amazing thing is that we continue to make the same mistakes every time we watch the film. Even after we know better. Now that’s cinematic mastery!
Ancient Crete: A Reconstruction Do you know was the first civilization to emerge historically in Europe? Interestingly, before 1900, no one did. In that year a very dedicated British explorer, historian and reporter-turned-archaeologist named Sir Arthur Evans began excavating on the large island of Crete in the southeast Mediterranean. What he uncovered there were the remains of a once-mighty maritime empire, which had flourished during the second millennium BCE. To his delight and amazement, Evans and his team uncovered an ancient "palace" composed of over 1000 rooms at the site of Knossos, located near the northern central coast. The rambling edifice put Evans in mind of the legendary Cretan "labyrinth" of Greek mythology, and inspired by the thrill and sense of wonder at his discovery, he dubbed this ancient civilization "Minoan," after the famous King Minos, the Homeric master of Crete and his island realm - the home of the mighty monster, the Minotaur.
King Minos
Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941)
Palace at Knossos It was one of those extraordinary discoveries where fact met fancy, and our entire picture of our own ancient history began to change. As Evans and his team worked on, it soon became obvious that this "Minoan" civilization was so old that it even pre-dated the recently discovered Bronze Age "Mycenaean" civilization that had been unearthed by Evans’ German forerunner and contemporary, Heinrich Schliemann just a few years earlier. A long-distant world that had been considered for centuries as the invention of later Greek minds was being summoned from the earth into actual factual existence!
But what was myth and what was reality? In ancient legends, Crete had a complex and important role in the development of the Greek world. There the mighty Minos, a son of Zeus by a mortal woman named Europa (who gave her name to the continent) ruthlessly ruled for generations. His wife, Pasiphae (the daughter of Helios, the sun god) had a thing for . . . well . . . a bull. To be fair, this was no ordinary bull. It was a beautiful white one that was a gift from Poseidon, god of the sea himself. Indeed, so much did she crave the "company" of this mighty beast that she instructed the master craftsman Daedalus to create for her a hollow cow in which she could she could hide, and through her positioning and its strategic design, she could safely mate with the object of her passion.
Unfortunately, after one such coupling (which one imagines must have been pretty intense), Pasiphae unfortunately conceived, and ultimately gave birth to the monstrous beast known as the Minotaur, who had the head of a bull and the body of a man.
Greek bust of the Minotaur Naturally, King Minos was not terribly pleased when he heard the news, especially since this hybrid creature devoured men and women with an astonishing ferocity. Minos summoned Daedalus and demanded that he do something about it. Daedalus and his son, Icarus, immediately went to work and constructed a vast maze called the "labyrinth" to keep the creature contained.
The Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth Now, naturally Freud could have had a field day with all of this material, but as far as being any more that a product of the always-wild Greek imagination, no one had given much credence to the story. But as Evans and his crew continued their excavations into the Knossos palace, they were stunned to discover a wealth of bull’s horns placed as religious devotional objects. Even more shocking were statues and elaborately painted frescoes of people participating in what can only be called a ritual act of "bull-leaping!" Bull-leaping fresco from Knossos
A "bull-leaping" figure Just what the hell was going on here on this Greek island more that 1500 years ago, anyway? Had there really been a King Minos? Of course, nobody thought that there had been an actual Minotaur, but could the story be a very, very ancient piece of evidence of a bull-worshipping cult on Crete? Some intellectuals, such as the pioneering anthropologist and mythologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) speculated that the bull was an ancient sun symbol, and that the myth of Pasiphae’s dalliance with the beast was a remnant of an ages-old symbolic union between a queen and a fertility god. This was just speculation, of course. But just what exactly were the Minoans religious beliefs and practices? Well, to tell the truth, no one exactly knows. You see, we can’t read their language. In the palace at Knossos there were discovered thousands of clay plates with a pre-alphabetic script written on them. There were two different kinds, from two different time periods. The first one, Evans called "Linear A," the second "Linear B." Eventually, "Linear B" was decoded to reveal that it was a very ancient form of Greek. To this day, nobody has yet deciphered the "Linear A" texts. But we know it’s not Greek. In fact, it’s nothing that resembles anything else that we’re familiar with. Just who were the Minoans? Where did they come from, and just what were they doing there? Did they really jump over bulls? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT MORE!
