Ta-ta-ta-dam! Ta-ta-ta-dam! Or indeed, as Stephen Fry described in his (In)Complete and Utter History of Classical Music, DE DE DE DERRR! DE DE DE DERRR! I have been listening to Beethoven's 5th. That is the stuff. Not only because of the first two bars of course. I love the whole lot, for example the beautiful, melodic string parts of the second movement and the triumphant, glorious theme in the fourth movement. To quote Stephen Fry again:
'Think how amazing and how violent, almost, the Symphony No 5 must have been when Beethoven let it loose on an unsuspecting public. Up until now, the most amazing thing in the world of symphonies has been Mozart or Haydn. They're both fab, don't get me wrong, but still, nothing in their entire symphonic oeuvre could possibly have prepared anyone for [SEE QUOTE ABOVE]. You see. Even written out like that, it looks somehow amazing, doesn't it? If you hear a great version of it now, it's still amazing. It's one of those pieces that can make you think that you've never heard it before. And not just the opening movement. Think of the last movement, in all its glory. It's MASSIVE. Huge and glorious, it takes no prisoners, it's immense.'
It's a rainy, dismal day outdoors, perfect for working. I indeed worked good many hours and made good progress on my article. The text is just about there, it just needs editing to make good.
And then the music, glorious music. Which leads me to popular culture. A friend pointed out Beethoven in The Clockwork Orange. It's true, young Alex in the film likes Beethoven, Beethoven's 9th particularly. Of course, young Alex is also probably the nastiest person in the whole history of cinema. On a lighter note, we must not forget the Monty Python sketch, in which Beethoven is hard at work composing, trying to get the first two bars of his 5th symphony right, but keeps getting disturbed all the time by Mrs. Beethoven.
I've also been going to the cinema a lot lately, as my brother and sister-in-law and my lovely little nephew gave me a set of five free movie tickets for my birthday. I used one on Thomas Vinterberg's new film Submarino, which is about two brothers, fatherless sons of an alcoholic mother who in adulthood try each on their own to hold their lives together It's a brilliant film but gut-wrenching, as there are precious few glimpses of light in the story, the misery of the brothers' life effectively emphasized by the generally grey world of the film. The other four tickets I used in the annual Love & Anarchy film festival that is currently going on in Helsinki. I've noticed that many films in the underground/indie cinema are either those über-violent Asian flicks which are oddly popular (or perhaps not oddly, thinking of all the Hollywood films with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and the likes slaughtering people left and right), or are about kinky/sick/weird subjects in a consciously 'look at me, I'm daring!' kind of way. I skipped all of those in the programming and instead tried to find different angles.
The first, His & Hers, an Irish film by Ken Wardrop, a beautiful and warm-spirited documentary of 70 Irish girls and women of different ages (from a toddler to grandmothers) telling about the important men in their lives - fathers, sons, boyfriends, husbands. No men are present in the film, just the women talking: ordinary things which are at the same time important; e.g. a 5- or 6-year-old telling how her dad always tells her to 'clean up your room!', a teenager saying how her dad is teaching her to drive, a 80-year old telling how she misses her and her late husband's moments in arm chairs in front of the fire.
The second film, Women without Men, by Iranian first-time film director Shirin Neshat, is set in 1953 in Tehran, just before and during the CIA and MI6 organized military coup that overthrew the democratically elected and progressive Mossadegh government. The film's characters are four women who each in their own way need to escape their life. There is a woman in her late twenties, living with her religious brother who tries to force her to stay indoors and to marry, who finds a new meaning in the communist party; there is her friend, religious and in love with her brother, who is raped by two men; a young prostitute who cannot bear her life; and a 50-year-old former singer, member of the wealthy, westernized upper class, who is tired in her marriage with a general. The latter buys an orchard as a refuge, and the second woman and the prostitute find their way there.
The premise of the film was interesting but its execution was a disappointment to me: I understand that the point of the story are the personal experiences of the four women and that the political disturbance can be seen as a parallel of the turmoil in the women's lives, but I would have expected the film to make in some way apparent why it was placed in these particular events and not some other time of disturbance in Iran's history. The tone of the film was magical rather than entirely realistic: in the beginning, we have the first woman jump off the roof. Her brother and friend bury her. Later, when her friend has obtained a spell to ruin the brother's impending marriage and, following the instructions, goes to bury the spell in the house's garden, she hears the dead woman's voice saying "I can't breathe". She begins to dig and finds her friend alive. Subsequently the latter finds her way to the communist party, but again at the end we are taken back to the suicide scene. As the woman's connection to the outside world was the radio on which she listened to news of the current events and sympathized with the anti-imperialist demonstrators and the Mossadegh government, I wondered whether the audience is supposed to get the impression that her joining the communist party was her imagination during the seconds of falling from the roof. The dream-like effect of the story was emphasized by the mist in the orchard and the sound track which was composed by a Japanese ambient artist. I like this sort of elements in a film but here they somehow didn't seem to gel. The final problem with the film was that the characters seemed more sketches than persons of real flesh and blood. The film is based on a book, so I should probably get it and read it. Films based on books are seldom better or even as good as the original stories.
For the third film, I went for an award-winner, this year's Sundance winner Winter's Bone. It's set in a meth-riddled, poverty-stricken hicksville in the mountainous Ozark plain of Missouri. 17-year-old Ree Dolly takes care of her younger siblings and mentally fragile mother; her father, a meth-cooker, is in prison. One day the sheriff comes to tell that her father has posted bail and put up the house as security, but has disappeared, and if he doesn't show up for the trial they'll lose the house. So Ree goes off to find her father and finds herself in very dangerous waters. Superb cinematography and excellent acting performances, but I didn't really connect because I wondered about the filmmakers' point of choosing such an extreme story (another film based on a book). It seemed somewhat exaggerated. Ree's character also didn't seem all that different from what has been seen in numerous stories before: an inhabitant of remote mountain regions, maybe white trash and rough but tough and with pride and certain dignity.
The last ticket was spent on Picture Me: A Model's Diary, a documentary by Sara Ziff and Ole Schell about the reality of the fashion industry. Sara Ziff is among the top fashion models of the recent years who also now studies in Columbia University, so it was interesting to see a real insider's view of the business. That the models are basically well-paid clothes hangers for the designers was not new to me, but I didn't know before how common sexual harassment is in the industry.
To end, here is a lovely evening mood from yesterday. I picked trumpet chanterelles in the nearby woods until it got dark and then went to the park beside the woods to take pictures, using the bucket as a stand.
