Films
I spent the $5 to order La Vie En Rose from OnDemand last night. I had wanted to see it since it came out. I’m glad I watched it, but it seemed very disjointed with all the flash backs and flash forwards, along with having to read the subtitles.
It was not exactly a pleasant evening’s entertainment. Watching a kid grow up abused then wrestle with demons throughout her adult life is sad, absent the success she had. But that success was bought at a price most of us would not want to pay.
The acting was fabulous. I suspect the melancholy mood stems from good acting. I got sucked in and felt like I was actually seeing Edith and not the actress.
What I could not understand, when it was over, was whether the story was told better through flashbacks or chronologically. Directors sometimes do things for effect but end up doing the opposite of what they intended. It’s really hard to say whether this approach was the best way.
Despite the need for subtitles, I thought the story was best told in French. It seemed necessary. When someone spoke English, it seemed out of place. Of course, being a French film …
Marion Cotillard did a fantastic job of bringing Edith to life in the film, even as they aged her. I would suspect the role to be daunting with all sorts of snares lying in wait. Her Golden Globe and Academy Award were well-earned, to say the least.
About the only thing that caught my attention in a negative way was the fact that they neglected World War II entirely. I would think that would merit the telling.—George B.
Books
Written in 1958 and so far it is the best history book of the banks I’ve read. I’m also halfway through Fire on the Beach, which is a bit of a different view. A historical biography of Richard Etheridge, this book follows him from his birth, service with the union army in the USCT, to being a captain in the U.S. Life-Saving Service.—Alan M.
Stick is the classic Outer Banks writer, and his Graveyard of the Atlantic, which is a very thrilling read, has never been out of print since it was first published almost 50 years ago. Fire on the Beach is extremely interesting too. The landscape down there keeps shifting around as the wind and tides move it. The lifesaving stations and lighthouses are the oldest landmarks, and the people associated with them are the real history of the Banks.—Gary M.
TV Series
The War
Directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
Written by Geoffrey C. Ward
I think I’ve seen nearly all, if not all, of The War. I think along with Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, it goes farther in describing the utter horror of war than anything we’ve ever seen before. It neatly weaves reminiscences of soldiers, sailors, and folks back home into a storyline that is woven into the fabric of the overarching story of the war.
The diary of that girl in the Philippines was amazing. What a childhood memory to lug around a lifetime! The irony of Japanese Americans fighting for a country that locked their families behind barbed wire was underscored by accounts of their service. Also the African Americans who went off to fight a war against the very discrimination they faced at home, then returning to face it all over again was vividly explored. And the Native American’s exploits were poignant to say the very least.
I noticed that some of the stock war footage was played over to illustrate different scenarios. But it didn’t detract from the storyline for me.
The accounts of the Marines on Okinawa were unsettlingly vivid. How they lived through that and resumed their lives after the war is beyond my ability to understand. Similarly, the survivor of Bataan Death March and imprisonment in Japan related his sense of hopelessness and belief that he would die in ways that made me understand his feelings.
A well-done and necessary series. Our generation loses sight of what our parents went through. This brings it all back.—George Beetham Jr.
The above review spawned the following conversation between Beetham and Gary Mawyer:
Mawyer: This is an attention-grabbing series and it has some new elements. I think the frame device (war as experienced by 3 picked communities) is at odds with the overall informative goal. For instance, Burns mentioned the Hurtgen Forest debacle but it wouldn’t have cost Burns anything to mention why the Germans were just sitting there and why they should have been left to sit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Model
The Hurtgen casualties represent a pretty solid plurality of the total US casualties in Europe, and it’s welcome to see this mentioned but a little frustrating to see the context left vague, for example. And some of the interviewees were colorful without being informative, such as the old lady in Mobile, who was a treat to listen to, but in all fairness had little enough to say.
I agree this is five-star programming and well deserves a Hokie or whatever it is television Emmies are called. It’s not as informative as the old BBC/Laurence Olivier World at War series, which even had better interviews, but the BBC had a lot more time to play with and a truly international outlook, and no framing device to repeatedly explain away. The BBC “Infantryman” episode interviewing infantry survivors from the various armies remains the best thing of its kind I’ve seen. However, it was great to see Sledge in the Burns series. Sledge’s With the Old Breed book is all over the freshman English syllabi around here, or was until recently anyway. I don’t know a better US memoir unless maybe it’s William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness.
I was glued to the Burns series like a chicken hypnotized by a corn snake, and I have already rewatched some it, but I guess I was just slightly disappointed in the end. It was not the equal of his Civil War series. Burns’s Civil War is so far ahead of everything else that it has no competition. There’s nothing to compare it to. I would tell any student, watch that first and don’t bother with anything else on film. But for World War II, I would tell any student to watch the BBC series first in order to have a context for the Burns film and Band of Brothers.
Saving Private Ryan is super, but after the first couple of reels it gradually devolves into a classic “buddy film” with the regionally integrated small unit having a Sands of Iwo Jima experience until the Hanks modification of the Stryker role is “kilt off,” as the Highland Scotch say. Band of Brothers on the other hand is artistically the greatest film/fiction treatment of WWII I’ve ever seen. You can find other films that momentarily touch that level (and then fall off) but Band of Brothers holds its tone all the way through and never strikes a false note.
Beetham: Certainly agreed on the Band of Brothers assessment.
My comparison between the three was not so much an evaluation of overall merit as noting that all three underscore the sheer horror of war. I had distinct feelings that I wanted to dig a foxhole in Ryan and Brothers. Those were the first films I ever saw that accurately portrayed the mechanics of M1 Garand operation, notably the ping when the metal clip ejects. That, plus eight rounds ain’t much when you’re up to your ass in alligators.
I thought the incorporation of folks back home into the fabric of the stories was good. They certainly felt the losses of combat and had opinions about what was going on. The support of the WWII civilians was probably unprecedented and never equalled since. We so rarely hear about the home front that it seemed to me a good idea to incorporate their feelings and reactions to things.
The choice of a few communities as focal points did narrow things down a bit, but I think that was both intentional and an interesting concept. Things were pretty much the same all over, but regional differences did exist to cast a local flavor. I thought it was interesting how they went from big city euphoria over V-J day to Luverne, Minnesota, where the reaction was very much more subdued. Shades of Garrison Keillor!
I’ve seen so many films and documentaries about WW II, and I literally grew up with the aftermath. I remember some of the boys who came back from the war who would gather on our street to repair cars and the like. They didn’t talk about the war at all. It was always the right here and now.
So another history of World War II would not have been of much value in my mind. All of these first hand accounts by people caught up in the times was very valuable in my estimation. They caught it all—bond rallies, scrap metal drives, rationing, people working in defense industry, the conversion from civilian manufacturing to defense production…it was all there, along with how people felt about kids going off to war.
Sledge’s recollections were vivid indeed, as were those of many other soldiers/sailors/airmen. Those guys really opened up and spilled their guts. I kept thinking how strange it was that they could smile after going through all that, or even find balance after returning home.
It was an odd assortment of people and points of view. But then that’s pretty much what we crazy Americans are all about.
Mawyer: It is tough to be Ken Burns and do anything. I didn’t see much of it but apparently his Baseball series was an apotheosis. The Jazz series was so good it hurt. His role on PBS appears to be to crash all the boundaries and produce documentaries that are practically transcendental. So now he’s reached the point where critics have nothing left to say.
Beetham: The baseball series was fantastic. Where else could you find Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Buck O’Neill waxing poetically philosophical about a sport?
We all have our best efforts and we all have our worst efforts. If my worst effort were equal to that of Ken Burns, my life would be an overwhelming success. Perhaps the expectations are not well founded.
I don’t think I’d want to watch The War over and over again. I can watch any of the baseball series any time, anywhere. Same with Band of Brothers. I think The War is pretty much a one-time shot, perhaps twice.
Mawyer: The War rewatches well, or at least the parts I rewatched did. All that old footage is so rich in minutiae that you could watch it an awful lot. There’s a journalistic problem with interviews though. Part of the fascination of the interview is “what will they say?” Will Norman Podhoretz declare that his real name was always Sven Turgiddsson? Will Jeb Bush be smoking a bong during his interview? Will the Pope declare that bears really are Catholic, and very good ones too? We have no idea! It could be anything! But when you re-watch an interview, they always say the same thing.
The good interviews are with people who are not saying; or who plainly have their own agenda and it isn’t to be truthful; or who are really trying to say something that can’t actually be said. There aren’t a lot of examples but one you might be able to catch if you get the Doxumentary Channel is The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl which at 3 hours would seem threateningly long, but I have watched it 3 times and learned from it—and yet Riefelstahl obviously lied in the interview here and there, and was caught at it, and gave strange and complex answers even when she was trying to tell the truth. And yet Leni obviously had one of the great visual imaginations (and dark visions) ever.
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/26/riefenstahl.html
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/41/007leni.htm
Beetham: I didn’t get the sense that these were interviews per se. They seemed more like reminiscences than interviews.
Of course people speak about themselves in favorable lights when they recount their life experiences. I doubt there’s ever been a person who did less, although some people stretch truth farther than others to a point where we’ve coined a term for those people: politicians.
But I didn’t think these folks did a lot of embellishing, and probably less than they might have been entitled to embellish. Things are rarely like we remember them, but when we go through really powerful emotional experiences those do seem to burn themselves into our minds. The more likely lapse is to over-simplify things, which is probably what Riefenstahl did. Then too, how do you sugar coat Naziism?? But the process of the Nazi rise to power was likely akin to a religious experience for a lot of Germans. There was a lot of mysticism associated with it.
I thought Sascha’s experiences when people back home would encourage her to talk about what she went through in the internment camp in the Philippines and then told how much they sacrificed because of rationing was pretty amazing. Dude: it ain’t the same thing!!! By a long shot!
Well, we all do that from time to time. Maybe not quite that extreme, but we all do it.
What particularly struck me was that these were just ordinary people. Generals and Admirals were not involved. It was the people, and their reaction to the horrible experiences they were caught up in. They weren’t asking for pity. They were just telling what they went through and how it affected them. I thought that was powerful.
Mawyer: Sascha’s account was one of the most interesting things, I thought. Inouye was also really interesting. The Minnesota vignettes in general also held up—the fascination of the very small.
Leni R. was a different kind of beast. She fought with the filmmaker, Muller I think was his name, and often gave him a pretty stiff verbal thrashing. Leni’s account of why Marlene Dietrich hated her guts was totally convincing. Her claims, however, that Goebbels was her personal enemy and that she despised Goebbels produced pyrotechnics when Muller ambushed her with extracts from Goebbel’s diaries recounting “went to theater with Gerda and Leni” and “Leni dropped by for dinner—what a peach!” and stuff like that. Riefenstahl burst out that of course even Goebbels’s diaries would all be lies—and she said she cared nothing about Hitler, that Hitler was just a cipher to her and might as well have been a shadow on the wall—which I doubt very much was even remotely true. It was utterly amazing to see Riefenstahl touring the ruins of the Nuemburg stadium and standing on the pier she’d filmed when it was decorated with Adolph. No, the Riefenstahl documentary is not just an ordinary thing—it’s terribly complex and pretty much a Sherlock Holmes job for answering the question, to what extent Leni R. was a Nazi or if, as those criticism pieces suggest, Nazisim was an esthetic as well as a politics, and a takeoff on a certain kind of art from the 20s that Riefenstahl just happened to purvey.
Beetham: I certainly don’t want to make excuses for Riefenstahl, but my best guess is that in the near religious fervor that was the Nazi movement at Nuremburg, she was likely caught up in the mystical power that was resonating. As kids, my younger brother went forward when our family took us out to a Billy Graham Crusade at the old ballpark. He was caught up in the moment like lots of other people. I wonder if they kept records of how many people who went forward stayed with the church for more than a couple of months.
So I can at least understand how a young woman could get caught up in the moment and later felt a sense of horror when she finally realized what the Fuhrer actually stood for, just as I can imagine how some people voted for Bush and later felt duped. Whether that was the case or not, I have no idea. Despots don’t ride public opinion by revealing their worst side.
Mawyer: No no, it was Hitler who was caught up in Riefenstahl. http://www.dasblauelicht.net/ He saw The Blue Light when he was just a starving junior propagandist and snitch working the streets for beer and weinerschnitzel. She was already very famous. Riefenstahl’s early films were not only the basis for Hitler’s new definition of “Aryan,” Leni herself became Hitler’s ideal female. His niece (the first suicide to be associated with Hitler), Eva Braun (also a suicide), and the female test pilot whose name I forget but who was the last woman to go out of her way for Hitler (flying an experimental ultralight through the Russian barrage and landing outside the bunker, then taking off again and escaping the Red Army by a mere hour or two) were all substitutes for the unreachable Leni. Leni only liked big, muscular, athletic men, preferably blue-eyed mountain climbers with very low IQs. Hitler simply did not cut it with her. She could not take him seriously. His magnetism was somewhat lower voltage than hers. This was why Marlene Dietrich hated her—“raus raus mit zer Leni, I cannot be photograph next to her.”
It is fascinating, and illuminating, that Leni’s last man, the huge Aryan mountain climbing brute you see as her companion in the documentary, was 40 years younger than Leni. I forget who the cynic was that said, “Men want to rule the world; women want to rule men.” Leni’s defense in the postwar trial, that she never even considered joining the party, has to be understood in terms of the fact that Hitler’s allegiance was to her, not the other way around.
Beetham: Shows how much I know about the issue! If it please the court, I’ll enter a plea of ignorant.
Mawyer: On the positive side, here is a whole new history-and-photography subject to massage your intellect with! Putting aside the fascinating biography, and the neat posters to look at for the old German mountain climbing films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will are film & photography icons. Triumph in particular is amazing for having no dialogue—and for not requiring any. The soundtrack is the natural sounds of the rally—except for the intro and a few bridges where Wagner overtures were excerpted in.
I thought the single neatest thing in Wonderful, Horrible Life was the footage and argument about the previous party congress. Riefenstahl was filming that too. It was a shambles (not the film, the congress). The formations are all out of step, some of the SS have 2 left feet and do the sadsack hop-skip march, the leadership straggles around, they get the salutes & handshakes backwards, the whole thing resembles Laurel and Hardy. They cut production in the middle. The reels turned up in the ruins and the interviewer asked Riefenstahl about that. She started by saying, there was no film. Then, there was film but she did not film it. Finally, yes, she was cranking a camera but “that is not making a film. I insist there was no film.” It’s wonderful. The botched Congress included Roehm and the “unreformed” SA, at the point when it could not be said for sure that Hitler was safe from being putsched by Roehm. Himmler is a junior guy from nowhere and the SS guys are still learning to salute. In the interval, Roehm and the SA organization had been purged on the “Night of the Long Knives” by the new SS assassins, some murdered and others dragged off and tortured for a while to get them to confess to their Al Qaeda memberships. So when Triumph is filmed the SA is a reformed organization, Hess is #2, Himmler is #3, the SS are the star showstoppers, and Speer has taken over the choreography and staging, with perfect results.
