The documentary film My Architect: A Son’s Journey (2003) tells the story of director Nathaniel Kahn’s quest to find the father he only vaguely knew. Nathaniel’s father Louis, a legendary architect on par with Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, lived for his work and, possibly for this, very few truly knew him. He only created a handful of works: a few in the United States, a few in India. But Kahn’s few works are celebrated for their mystical use of geometric forms, concrete, brick, and natural light. One critic said that visiting a Kahn work “can change your life.” Bankrupt and lacking identification, Louis died of a heart attack in 1974, when Nathaniel was only 11. We soon find out that Nathaniel was Louis’s illegitimate son and that his father, in fact, had three families. One was his wife and daughter; the other two were secretive relationships about which most of Louis’s closest friends and colleagues were unaware.
In Nathaniel’s attempt to discover who his father was, few questions are answered and even more mysteries are unfurled. We only get the roughest sketch of the great, if contradictory, man. Having emigrated from Estonia as a young boy, Louis attended UPENN and worked all of his life to establish a lasting legacy. He was, like Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (I realize that he was based on Frank Lloyd Wright), totally uncompromising in his artistic vision, even if that meant losing many clients in the process. In the respectful, even awestruck, way in which Nathaniel photographs his father’s work: light streaming inside buildings, close-ups of the purposely unpolished concrete, perfectly symmetrical squares and crosses of a ceiling, artificial waterfalls cascading next to concrete rectangles, red sunset surrounding brick cylinders, and a young boy standing stationary and gazing at the permanent structure in the background (this is a motif Nathaniel utilizes); the point seems to be that Louis may have abandoned young Nathaniel, and no one may have known him aside from his work, but does this really matter if all of this is sacrificed for great art? That is, did Louis give humanity something greater than a father’s love?
It’s a beautiful and moving film and one that asks lots of interesting questions about art, form, the balance between work and family, art and society, love and faithfulness, social conventions, and costs of leaving a mark on the ever changing world.
Mack Sennett and Keystone Studios, one Hollywood’s earliest film production companies, hired Charles Chaplin in 1913. Before his short stint at Keystone, Chaplin was a little-known British vaudevillian. In only a year, Chaplin established his Tramp character, became a major film star who was widely recognized in the U.S. and abroad, and learned how to write and direct films. Chaplin at Keystone, a four-disc DVD set from Flicker Alley, collects 34 of 35 of Chaplin’s Keystone films (one is now lost). While none of these primarily short films reach the quality and sophistication of later silent masterworks (The Kid [1921], The Gold Rush [1925], City Lights [1931],and, Modern Times [1936]), it’s still fascinating to watch Chaplin as a developing actor, director, and comedian. Chaplin directed 17 of the 34 films and wrote the scenarios for 20. A few of them are admittedly slow, especially for a modern audience, but I found most thoroughly entertaining. My six-year-old son even watched most of them with me. He was a little confused sometimes, but he always laughed during the drunken brawls. (Who wouldn’t?) And there are plenty of drunken brawls to like.
Charlie and Fatty Arbuckle
Speaking of brawls, Keystone certainly did not shy away from repetitions. In nearly every film we see exceedingly drunken characters, men lusting after women other than their spouses, buffoonish policemen, or straight policemen who are easily duped. But only two of the films, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914)—considered the first feature-length American comedy— and The Knockout, showcase Keystone’s trademark Keystone Kops. By 1914, Sennett began putting the Kops in background roles in order to highlight up and coming actors like Chaplin and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whom we see in several of the Chaplin films.
Despite the lack of superlatives in these early Chaplin films, a few standout. The Tramp character makes his first appearance in Chaplin’s second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914). The film’s basic situation is pretty simple; a film crew documents the auto races, but the Tramp persistently walks into the frame, looking at the camera and usually playing with his hat. The director talks to him and then pushes him out of the way, but he quickly returns. Here is Kid Auto Races from Youtube:
In His Prehistoric Past, Charlie has a dream in which he lives in prehistoric times. A king has a harem of young and beautiful women and Charlie’s character, wearing bearskin and a bowler hat, seduces one of the women and tries to kill the king. With this, the last of Chaplin’s Keystone films, we clearly see the development from films made earlier in the year. His Prehistoric Past has a more sophisticated story, slightly more complex characters (though I wouldn’t take that too far—they are still basically stock characters), humor that is mostly in keeping with the story itself, and a more fluid pace.
What’s a bit surprising in watching Chaplin’s earliest work is that the often tragically pathetic and utterly human Charlie that we know and love today started by playing some real rapscallions. In one called “Mabel at the Wheel,” for instance, Charlie plays the unsympathetic villain—something akin to Captain Terror on Speed Racer or Dick Dastardly from the Hanna and Barbara cartoons, who themselves were clearly inspired by silent movie villains. Charlie kidnaps and ties up a man, makes a few cars crash, and has two idiotic henchmen to assist him. Even when Chaplin plays the Tramp, it’s not the sympathetic character we are used to. He’s often drunk and sort of mean. In one scene two lovers are kissing and Charlie rolls his eyes and mockingly kisses a tree in parodic fashion.
But not all of his characters are mean. And whether Chaplin is mean or kind or desperate or unassuming, he is a joy to watch. Even as a novice, we can see Chaplin’s bright future ahead.
You can watch all of the films mentioned above on Youtube, but the quality is not going to be as good as the restored Flicker Alley collection, which is unfortunately not available on Netflix. I got it from the King Country Library.
Here's a link to Dave Kehr's review from The New York Times:
When we visited Prague a few weeks ago, I took my students to the Kafka Museum. Located on the banks of the river Vlatava and next to the historic Charles Bridge, the museum houses some interesting artifacts of Kafka, whom many (myself included) consider one of the 20th-century’s greatest authors. Anything but a traditional exhibition, the museum’s organization, exhibits, and design are quite creative and reflect a modern, Kafkaesque style. Opened to the public in 2005, the Kafka Museum includes hovering three-dimensional exhibits, sets of file cabinets that house drafts and letters, holes in walls available to peep through, and two video installations projected on large walls and running on a loop. The videos are both surreal in style with strange cuts and wavy, dreamlike images and montages; one video is projected in a small mirrored room which has the effect of making the images of Prague and Kafka both more expansive and also strangely inclusive since you see yourself while you are watching.
Kafka had a conflicting relationship with Prague, where he was born and spent most of his life. He called it a “dear little mother with claws,” and the museum emphasizes the claws and horrors of the city and his writing. In fact, if I have a criticism, it’s that the museum leaves out the humor of Kafka’s writing and emphasizes only the darkness. To be honest, I thought it presented him as a bit of a psychopath, and maybe that’s how some see him, but I don’t. He was clearly troubled, but he wasn’t a budding serial killer either. It’s true that there are stories you can point to, like “In the Penal Colony”—where a foreign visitor inspects a ghastly torture device—that demonstrate the horrific and humorless, but I think these are the exceptions to Kafka’s oeuvre.
Dying of tuberculosis in 1924 at age 41, Kafka only published a few short pieces before his death, including The Metamorphosis, which famously begins: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Gregar spends the rest of the story tortured over how he is going to get to work and then feeling great shame over leaving his family in seeming financial ruin. When he finally dies, his family is relieved of the burden and embarrassment their son has created for them, and they go for a drive “in the warm sun.” His family can move into a different apartment now. And their daughter has “blossomed recently, in spite of all the troubles which had made her cheeks pale, into a beautiful and voluptuous young woman.” She’ll now be ready for marriage. The story ends with this sentence: “And it was something of a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when at the end of their journey their daughter stood up first and stretched her young body.” The metamorphosis is complete.
The Metamorphosis is just one of several stories that reflect Kafka’s tortured but also darkly humorous outlook on life. Life for Kafka was absurd, surreal, and ridden with guilt. It was also strange and mysterious. Nowhere do we see the enigmatic aspects of life more clearly than in his unfinished novels The Trial and The Castle. Kafka asked his literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his work when he died, but Brod ignored Kafka’s dying wish and published nearly everything he had given Brod. Even though both The Trial and The Castle are incomplete (The Castle actually ends mid-sentence!), they are still masterpieces and have great depth and complexity. I’ve taught and had some success with The Trial, but I think The Castle (at least Mark Harmon’s new [1998] translation) is even more accessible for students.
The Trial tells the story of a man named Joseph K. who gets arrested one “fine day” for no apparent reason. He spends the rest of the novel attempting to navigate the labyrinthine legal system, an arbitrary, confusing, convoluted, and unjust structure. Like The Trial, The Castle’s world is also an impossible labyrinth. In this novel, a man simply named K. (for Kafka?) has been hired as a surveyor by a village with a large, dominate castle, which is ruled by its obfuscating and impenetrable bureaucracy. Once K. arrives in town, he is given two idiotic buffoons as assistants, but no one can confirm that he was in fact hired, let alone tell him what he is supposed to survey. It’s impossible for him to even look at Klamm, the village chief, and he certainly can’t meet with him. There are characters who think they have connections and either boast of these in front of K. or advise him, but we never know whether even they are just fooling themselves. Perhaps no one really knows how the system works.
Max Brod believed that all of Kafka’s works were about finding God and salvation. But works like The Trial and The Castle have also been interpreted in other ways. Possibly they represent our futile attempt to find order in a meaningless and absurd world. Maybe they are a commentary on modern bureaucracy and the idea that as humanity has progressed, we have created systems that are impossible to navigate or understand (though this has always seemed to me the most simplistic reading). Maybe they can be likened to Plato’s cave allegory, but in Kafka’s allegory the Truth or the outside world simply does not exist—or at least his characters never find it.
We can’t help but ask ourselves: what if Kafka had finished these novels? Would the meaning be more clear? Well, reading “A Hunger Artist” and other published works proves that even published Kafka is difficult to decipher. There are no easy answers in Kafka’s world. In fact, if Kafka had been able to revise them, I doubt the revisions would very much impact the ideas in the novels. They would probably be primarily structural and syntactical alterations. But who knows?
Reading Kafka, whether published or unpublished, finished or not, is like playing a trivia contest where you never know the answers. It’s a world of endless possibilities—where meaning may be tentative but it is always evocative. And that’s the real joy.
Tree of Life begins with a quote from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth...When the morning stars sang together?” It’s God speaking to Job at the end of the story after God has allowed Satan to test Job’s faithfulness. Satan begins by destroying all of Job’s many possessions and children. After this first assault, Job reacts faithfully—if mechanically—and says, “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” So Job does not curse God, and Satan loses the first round. With God’s permission, Satan then curses Job with a terrible skin disease, Job’s wife tells him to “curse God and die,” and Job’s friends arrive. Instead of comforting Job, Bildad, Zophar, and Eliphaz lecture their friend and tell him to repent, for he must have done something wrong, something to really anger God. After all, they believe, we are only punished when we do evil. God rules a just and orderly universe.
So, why does Malick begin his film with the Book of Job quote? I think part of the answer has to do with themes both works share. Both deal with a seemingly random and meaningless tragedy, both explore the nature of human suffering, both show the mysteries of the universe and the decidedly human quest to find answers to life’s questions, and finally, both highlight the power of God and, conversely, the smallness and insignificance of humankind. Now, I don’t really think Malick believes in God, per say, for him God is nature, the universe itself. He’s clearly a neo-Romantic influenced by Wordsworth, who also found God in nature—at least in his early works like “Tintern Abbey.” But for Malick the universe has both positive and negative connotations: it is paradoxically beautiful and ugly, peaceful and violent, serene and frenzied, rejuvenating and destructive—or any number of dichotomies. The Sean Penn character is also a kind of Job figure, a man searching for justice in what seems to be an unjust world. Possibly one interpretation of Jack’s work as an architect is that, like Job, Jack is also trying to reach the heavens and confront God. Maybe Jack creates buildings and structures that remove him further away from God (nature) because he does not want to be close to the force that killed his brother. Maybe the buildings are emblems of Jack’s attempt to create order in a chaotic world.
One of many striking images from Tree of Life.
Neither Job nor Jack gets his answer to the question of why (this isn’t ever directly asked in Tree of Life, but it is implied). But I think the answer is pretty clear: for no reason at all. Terrible things happen to good people, and auspicious things happen to bad people. There is no justice. What Jack might learn is what fundamentally makes us human. We are weighed down with suffering, tragedy, guilt, and shame. But we shoulder these burdens and move on. That’s the miracle. Think about Oedipus. He doesn’t kill himself as most people would expect. After he discovers that the prophecy has already been fulfilled despite his futile attempts to circumvent fate, he stabs himself in the eyes and becomes a wanderer. I’ve always thought he does this to show the gods that they can’t control everything. We can determine our final ends, not the gods. So Oedipus, Job, and Tree of Life are all saying that we are nothing next to God, but there is a kind of nobility in our insignificant mortality. We experience something the gods cannot. We live.
And God said, let there be Malick, and there was Malick. And God saw Malick’s Tree of Life, that it wasgood. Winner of the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes, Tree of Life—a film about creation, life, suffering, death, and the meaning of life—is only Terrence Malick’s 5th film in 38 years. So it goes without saying that Malick is anything but prolific. His most ambitious and experimental film, Tree of Life feels like an art film, especially the first 45 minutes and the last 20. Of course, Malick disregards conventions in all of his films. From Badlands to Days of Heaven and now to Tree of Life, his films scream idiosyncrasy, independence, and romantic imagination. They are all—whether you like them or not—powerful artistic statements about what it means to be human.
The story (if you can call it that—there’s not much of a plot here) takes place in Waco, Texas.Jack is the oldest of three boys growing up in the 1950s. Tragedy strikes, and Jack grows up to what appears to be an architect (it’s never quite clear), a lost, alienated man living in a modern world that boxes him in tall skyscrapers, empty boardrooms, and glass elevators. But Malick is more interested in fleeting images of domestic life, waves crashing, volcanoes erupting, and the sunlight shining through trees than he is in telling a story about Jack’s family, so there are lots of gaps here.Like the French director Claire Denis and her predecessor late-19th-century-painters Monet and Manet, Malick’s work is aptly called impressionistic. Malick provides us impressions of life and nature in the film. Snapshots in a photo album that serve as an aesthetic counterpoint to the realism or stylized realism presented in most films.But his work might just as easily be labeled expressionistic since he uses the music and images to express his inner emotions and ideas about modern life and its complexities.
Regarding its cinematography, Tree of Life contains possibly the most beautiful images ever put to film. Ever. Bob Mondello of NPR said, “There's not a frame of The Tree of Life—not one—that I wouldn't love to have hanging on a wall in my home.” But I would go further and say that watching this film is like walking through a museum and gazing awestruck at a van Gogh or a Vermeer. One of the most visually striking shots utilizes an upside-down camera to frame several distorted shadows of boys playing, possibly a metaphor for the darkness within our souls. In the scenes from our modern world, the camera almost constantly tilts upward, looking through the glass roofs of modern buildings, looking to the heavens, searching for an absent God, searching for hope. The beautiful images and sounds (we hear selections from Bach, Brahms, Berlioz, Mahler, and others) are so powerful that we can’t help but feel the spiritual power while we watch. But for Malick the transcendence is not a result of religion; it’s about the sacred in the secular, the sacred in nature. There are also lots of gorgeous images from the Hubble telescope when Malick flashes back to tell the impressionistic story of the creation of the world. In my view, these early creation shots, though beautiful, went on too long and were pretentious, but this is a minor complaint in an otherwise powerfully affecting film.
While the cinematography is probably the most memorable element in the film and I was left with lots of images seared on my brain, the acting is nothing less than astounding. It depicted convincingly realistic portrayals of sibling interactions, and mother-child, father-child relationships. Much of the emotional impact rests in the hands of a pair of wonderful child actors, who are natural, raw, and real. This is probably Brad Pitt’s strongest performance, too, and Jessica Chastain, who plays the mother, is also excellent. In a whispering voiceover, Jack says, “Father, mother, always you wrestle inside me,” and I suppose the parents are meant to represent polar forces in our world. The yin and yang of nature and society. She is ethereal, soft, luminous, smiling, watchful, full of what she calls grace. There’s even a scene of her floating and dancing in mid-air. He is earthy, loving but hard, driven, intellectual, stern, and sometimes explosive like the volcano we see in the early days of creation. Walking on the grass and teaching his son to tend the garden and lawn, he connects himself to the earth and savors his time treading on land, even though he works in aviation and aspires to soar to the heavens like Daedalus. He demands respect and wants his sons to love him. But for him respect is more important than love. He also wants his sons to be strong and hard, prepared for the real world, and in one scene encourages them to punch him in the face. They merely stand and stare.
There is no easy-to-comprehend message in this film, which is both frustrating and fascinating. You have to work pretty hard at figuring things out. And even after thinking about it for a while, the answers will probably still be out of reach. But this is typical of Malick’s films. He’s a skeptic who is not really sure about answers to life’s big questions, so he is certainly not going to simplify things for his audience.
The ending feels incomplete and in many ways it is dissatisfying, but I suppose that’s part of the point. We only get a series of snapshots from this family and we are left to fill in the blanks on our own. We can’t and won’t ever have all the answers to everything. We can’t know all of the beginning and the end.
Here's the official trailer from Youtube:
Here are several other takes on the film, both positive and negative and in between:
I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I’ve been an off-and-on J.J. Abrams fan since Felicity. I say embarrassed because if there ever was a chick-flick television show, Felicity was it. But I watched it because it was smart, I cared about the characters, and it made me nostalgic for my recent college years. Plus, Keri Russell is totally hot! It’s true that I only saw a couple of episodes of Alias, which is basically Felicity with Guns, and I only just watched the highly acclaimed Lost (I know, finally…), so I’m not the most devoted fan or anything. When Abrams made his first big-screen film (MI3), I was curious but a bit skeptical, and I was even more skeptical about Star Trek. But both turned out to be strong and entertaining blockbusters, which aren’t usually my cup of tea, but if they are well made and have a good story, I’m right there. In fact, Abrams’s newest film comments on this idea. A group of 14-year-old boys are making a zombie movie for the Cleveland Super-8 Film-Festival, and their director explains to his crew that their film will be forgotten if nobody cares about the characters and the story. This is a lesson that Abrams (mostly) takes to heart and something that makes Super 8 stand apart from most of the summer-blockbuster drivel.
Watching Super 8, I couldn’t help but count the references to the films of Abrams’s idol Steven Spielberg, who also produced. The film is partly an homage to War of the Worlds, E.T., Close Encounters, Jaws (well, sort of), and Goonies. The gang of boys also reminded me of Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me. I can’t say Super 8 is a great film, but it is good and there are touches of greatness in it. Some might say it doesn’t pack the emotional punch of a Spielberg film, but I would say that’s a mark in its favor since most or maybe all Spielberg films suffer from high doses of sentimentality. The two lead characters played by Dakota Fanning’s sister Elle and newcomer Joel Courtney are excellent. I was struck by one small scene where Joel’s character Joey explains to Elle’s character Alice how a zombie acts and, click, Elle suddenly becomes one of the most convincing zombies I’ve ever seen (and I’m not embarrassed to say I’ve seen many of them). The best scene, though, comes during a rehearsal on Alice’s first shoot. It’s an amazing scene that you have to see.
But the rest of the gang are just OK; I’m not sure if it was overacting or poor scriptwriting—or both. Every time I hear the word “mint,” I’m going to wince. And there are some ridiculous details, the worst being that a man hits an oncoming train head-on with his truck--and survives! And what’s the deal with movies where the kids figure everything out way before the adults? Probably my biggest complaint, though, is one that not many others care about. I wish that Super 8 had more of the ambitious big ideas that were present in Lost. Super 8 is partly about loss of innocence and partly about recreating a not-so-distant past (1979, to be exact), and it does say some interesting things about the feared and alienated Other, but nothing is very deep. Nonetheless, a fun, entertaining film that’s great for light summer viewing.
I read The Iliad recently, and while I have read three different translations of The Odyssey and taught it several times, I’ve never previously read the former poem. It was one of those major literary works that I always wanted to read but never got to—or, more precisely, there were always other books that I placed in front of it in my never-ending “to-read” stack.
First, in general it was more exciting that I expected it to be. I love The Odyssey, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s pretty slow in parts, and I expected about the same from this earlier work. Here is one moment that stands out as an example. Toward the end of the poem, after Achilles has avenged the death of his close friend Patroclus, the Greeks participate in funeral games to honor Patroclus: boxing, archery, running, and others. The most thrilling to me was the chariot race, the winners receiving a woman “skilled in crafts” and a tripod (1st prize), an “unbroken” pregnant mare (2nd), and a cauldron and gold bars for 3rd and 4th.Homer cuts back and forth between the race itself and its audience who sometimes cheer and sometimes rudely but humorously insult each other. A young up-and-comer named Antilochus, the son of King Nestor of Pylos, approaches fast behind King Menelaus, husband of Helen, whose unfaithfulness causes the war to begin in the first place. Antilochus gains ground on Menelaus as they charge neck and neck. Nearing a section of the course far too narrow for two chariots to ride side by side, Menelaus commands the younger risk-taker to pull back, for they will surely crash. Antilochus refuses, and in what must be the first literary example of a game of chicken, they dangerously careen toward the narrow stretch. At the last moment, Menelaus pulls back, and Antilochus goes on to win second prize and the respect of Achilles and all the Greeks.
Not counting Gilgamesh, The Iliad really must be the first major tragedy. Everyone is doomed by an ineluctable fate, and the poem ends not with the war’s end but with the funeral of the fallen hero Hector, to me the only representative of civility and honor and (national?) pride in the poem (despite Hector’s foolish decision to wear Achilles’ armor after killing Patrolus). A great city has fallen and a noble hero is no more. Hundreds of years before Sophocles’ Oedipus and Aristotle defined tragedy, Homer created the first tragic hero in Achilles (again, with the exception of Gilgamesh). Achilles is larger than life, doomed to fail, and pulled down by his hubris. He experiences peripety (a reversal of fortune) in the death of his closest friend and demonstrates anagnorisis (an awakening or seeing the world in a new way) when King Priam begs him to return his son Hector. Achilles realizes something in this moment about humanity and honor that he couldn’t grasp before.
There is a kind of paradoxical attitude that Homer seems to have about war. While it brings glory and honor to those who fight and win, it also clearly brings out the worst in people. This could just be my biased, modern-pacifist perspective skewing what Homer was trying to say, but my sense is that even Homer had mixed feelings about the brutality and viciousness of war. For instance, he’s constantly using similes to compare fighters to lions and other animals, and this is done not to glorify or venerate the fighter but to show how brutal they are. While Homer admires Achilles’ power and courage and fighting skills, he also clearly thinks Achilles goes too far at times. The tragic and completely disrespectful example of Achilles attaching and dragging Hector’s body around Patroclus’ funeral pyre comes to mind. Homer seems to be asking: Is this really what humans do to each other? Maybe this is a different topic, but there is also the ridiculous image of Achilles, bloodthirsty and single-minded in his quest to seek revenge, fighting a river. A river! How foolish and arrogant humans can be to think they stand a chance against the powers of nature.
