jürgen fauth’s muckworld

I had a strange dream last night about Romania and Malta, India and Switzerland. In my dream, Francis Ford Coppola had made a new movie, something about an old man who is hit by lightning and grows a new set of teeth. He collects roses and languages and Bruno Ganz was there, too. He owned a German-made tape recorder, for which he apologized. A beautiful woman spoke in tongues and changed her name and lived in a cave for a thousand years. In Walter Murch’s hands, close-ups of cigarette smoke turned into drifting clouds illuminated by the full moon. Mad Nazi scientists electrocuted horses, and I couldn’t remember if I left the third rose in a safe deposit box or inside a shattered mirror. There was never enough time. By the seaside, I made promises and broke them, but all of my friends were at the Cafe Select.

I know, I know — there’s nothing duller than listening to other people’s dreams. And yet… the shared fantasy Coppola created from Mircea Eliade’s novella weaves a strange magic, mysterious, playful, philosophical, and loopy with romance. I’d like to hold on to that gossamer enchantment for just a little while longer, privately, before it’s time to take out the stainless steel critical apparatus and cut this one open. Check back for a proper review before the opening on December 14. With Tim Roth and Alexandra Maria Lara.

Youth Without Youth. Francis Ford Coppola, 2007. ****

The trailer:

Initially, I was quite smitten with this slim volume because Colin McGinn’s central thesis–that movies share essential qualities with dreams–is intuitively convincing and inviting. Why is it that nobody has to learn to watch a movie, that the free-roaming eye of the camera and the time-and-space-dissolving qualities of montage don’t disorient us (unless they’re meant to)? What is the key to the movies’ powerful emotional hold over us?

In somewhat clunky prose, McGinn, a philosopher, diligently unpacks these questions. The first half of the book, where he investigates “the metaphysics of the movie image” and the way we perceive it, is required reading for anybody trying to get a better handle on what it is, exactly, those flickering shadows do to us in that dark room. He lays out a theory he calls “film mentalism,” which asserts that the movies present us with “consciousness externalized,” a highly charged way of seeing straight into the minds of other people. In the process, he reveals realism/formalism debates as a false dilemma. (Ken Wilber calls this strategy “transcend and include.”)

In the final stretch, though, McGinn loses himself in conjecture and pursues all the wrong angles. The psychological similarities between film and dreams he painstakingly ferreted out leads him to conclude that dreams must be subject to a production process that’s similar to that of a movie–written, produced, and edited ahead of time, stored up until triggered by emotional necessity or external stimulus. Unfounded assertions like these are dubious and somewhat beside the point. A quick excursion into lucid dreaming contradicts most of what I have read on the topic. Some of the most interesting conclusions to be drawn from his thesis are dismissed with brief paragraphs that miss the point entirely: if McGinn’s thesis is correct–and I believe it is–wouldn’t it be worth paying special attention to the movies’ immense power of suggestion and the shared nature of the experience?

Colin McGinn. The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact. 2005. ***

Still getting my head around this making-of documentary on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, which turned out to be both more and less disturbing than expected. Less, because the catastrophes that bedevilled Herzog’s production in the Peruvian jungle aren’t quite on the scale of Apocalypse Now (as chronicled in Hearts of Darkness), and because Kinski is making more and more sense to me. In Burden of Dreams, he appears as the sanest person around–and that in itself is mighty disturbing. The real maniac here is Herzog, even though the film barely includes anyone else’s point of view. In the end, Herzog gives a rousing speech about his responsibility to make movies (”If we don’t articulate our dreams, we might as well be cows in a field”)–but it’s not his own life he risked trying to pull a boat over a mountain, and others had to die. The Criterion DVD comes with Les Blank’s short film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”

Burden of Dreams. Les Blank, 1982. ****

[tags]film, 4 stars, german, peru, werner herzog, klaus kinski, fitzcarraldo, dreams, documentary, filmmaking[/tags]

A more glamorous version of Who Killed the Electric Car, the exuberant story of a failure, and a good-natured indictment of corporate malfaesance and the death of the American Dream. Christian Slater, Joan Allen, and Martin Landau are always welcome; Sofia sweeps through in a party scene, and Dean Stockwell makes an appearance as Howard Hughes. In the title role, Jeff Bridges plays the designer of a forward-looking car that was too innovative for its own good. Only 50 were ever built before the big car companies put him out of business. A flying version of the Tucker appears in Revenge of the Sith:

Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Francis Ford Coppola, 1988. ***

[tags]film, francis ford coppola, 3 stars, cars, dreams, corporations, jeff bridges, preston tucker, star wars[/tags]

Good stuff from Werner Herzog, who lets Dieter tell his own story: the German-born US Air Force pilot was downed in Laos and suffered some terrible times in the jungle, of exactly the kind that get the director of Aguirre all riled up. I wish there was some more about Dieter’s life after he was rescued, but instead, Herzog is about to release a fictionalized version, starring Christian Bale. The night after I watched this, my dreams were being narrated by Herzog–very frightening.

Wilber led to Steiner, and both kept mentioning lucid dreaming in such a peculiar way that I figured it’d be worth looking at. This is the popular book by the leading researcher, and there’s enough practical advice here to start practicing. I usually have trouble remembering my dreams at all, and that’s the first step. Then you have to get used to checking for “dreamsigns.” Once the critical state test becomes second nature, you can expect to check while you’re dreaming–and becoming lucid. I had a first success two nights ago, but the moment I realized I was dreaming I got so excited I woke up….

I got a second book about lucid dreaming from a Buddhist perspective–Tibetan Dream Yoga–that seems much less utiliterian than this one so far.