Berlin Faces
March 1st, 2008
In no particular order: the guys from Babel, David Hudson of GreenCine Daily, Mama und Papa, the friendly proprietor of Absinthe Depot, Andew “Filmbrain” Grant, Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger, Danny Kasman, Martin Scorsese, Charlie Watts, and a selection of medival statues from the Bode Museum, which you can also find in a flickr set that prompted my favorite flickr mail ever:
:: hi
I add you ass contact because I’m interessting about a trip
in germany and by your photo you make my day …….Ich bein
er berliner the Holy Germanic Empire’s rising again by your
art
Well then. From last year’s visit, more photos from the Bode and other Berlin museums.
The Valley of the Bees
March 27th, 2007
In this Czech New Wave film, the medieval warrior-monks who break the oath to their crusading order are thrown to the dogs: literally, down a deep well, to starving hounds who rip them to shreds. And yet, Ondrej wants to leave–after all, he joined only because his father threw him against the wall after he brought his new stepmother a wedding present of spring blossoms concealing a heap of dead bats. In other words, just another day in Bohemia.
When Ondrej runs off, his friend Armin, much more serious about the monk’s strict demands, is sent to chase after him and deliver swift punishment. The themes are grand — sin, murder, forgiveness — but the drama isn’t what makes The Valley of the Bees. The film’s sharp, rigorous style develops its own pull; it’s every bit as ascetic as the monks themselves.
Udoli vcel. Frantisek Vlácil, 1967. ***
The Name of the Rose
February 25th, 2007
Monk double feature! At first glance, The Name of the Rose and Into Great Silence couldn’t be any more different — one is a plotless meditation on stillness and solitude, the other an overstuffed megaproduction that bursts at the seams with narrative twists and gleeful cliches. One movie is about the absence of language, the other one revels in linguistic jokes and a cornucopia of literary allusions high and low. But by approaching their common subject from very different points of view, the two films illuminate (ha!) each other.
All things considered, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s bestseller has held up well. Eco’s intellectual games are filtered through Annaud’s lurid lens, by the way of German producer Bernd Eichinger’s taste for the blockbuster: Eco dressed up semiotic theories with the trimmings of popular entertainment, and in Annaud/Eichinger’s hands, the erudition falls by the wayside in favor of freakish brothers (witness Ron Perlman ham it up as hunchback heretic) and forbidden sex.
It speaks for Eco’s talents as storyteller that even when you rid his book of the lengthy debates about medieval scholarship, it’s still a rip roaring good story, overloaded with literary references (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jorge Luis Borges are the most obvious ones), men who speak “all languages and no language” for him to better hide his polylingual puns, and a tightly plotted story that hinges on all the tropes of monkhood: secret libraries, blind fathers, flagellation, mad heretics, ancient secrets, repressed homosexuality, evil inquisitors, damsels burning at the stake. The Name of the Rose is bursting with signifiers, pointing everywhere at once, while Into Great Silence makes a strong effort not to point anywhere at all, to just be here now. Both movies are using the monastic life for their own ulterior motives; I’d argue that this one does it somewhat more successfully. (The interiors of The Name of the Rose were shot at Kloster Eberbach, a few minutes from where I grew up.)
Der Name der Rose. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986. ****
- Wikipedia: Middle Ages in Film
