(no subject)

[proximoception]

Actually I think the movie as a whole--a whole movie, I mean--wasn't as good as it was for me last time. That was the first time I saw the full version, though, a special gift, and it's only been three years [edit: six(!)]. Also I haven't been in a position to fully concentrate, which is perhaps part of why I've only been able to read Calvino for so long, since he's the best writer who never requires scrutiny, who reliably makes you feel he'll bring you in on whatever he's up to. I wasn't up to the work I was up to last time, the grateful reconstruction of a great whole from the unwinding sequence of fragments. But this time the film was more affecting, too affecting, frightening in a way films don't frighten me, and perhaps my losing sight of the structure, the edges, was part of why.

What was sleeping woke up when Isak told his story; it gave me a piece back, much the way getting to swim did. But what hit me even harder was the grandmother's description of loss, talking with the ghost of her dead son, which I'm sure I appreciated on previous viewings but was in no position to know just how right it is:

My feelings came from deep in my body. Even though I could control them, they shattered reality, if you know what I mean. Reality has remained broken ever since, and, oddly enough, it feels more real that way. So I don't bother to mend it. I just don't care anymore if nothing makes sense.

Funny how the pauses make it mean better, though the transcription still strikes me as exactly right, exactly what it's like.

Books are so clumsy with pauses, or rather readers are clumsy and the books are helpless to help.

Comments

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. Fanny & Alexander's one of my favorite films, and one I tend to rewatch around Christmas (although not last year). Basically I found it when I was small thanks to PBS and moved in, because I needed as place to live, and it was perfect, because that's what I discovered it had been made as, an alternate home for its creator, the imagined home. And so, not surprisingly, even the horror and triumph of the later escape from the Bishop was welcome and perfect.

Among the things newest to me in the longer version is dad telling the kids about the chair. He's completely unlike that in the shorter version - as kind, but never as alive - and so, even though I suppose I might have known he had it in him, I hadn't thought of it until it happened.

And - have you watched the making-of documentary that's part of the set? Because among other things, it has Bergman describing the blocking to all of the actors. He's eloquent, and insightfully dead-on, and it's great.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Strange that we both responded to Fanny & Alexander and to Ordinary People, past their being good movies that is. These days I think of my home life as having been happy, which it selectively was, but I guess the Bishop and Bad Mary Tyler Moore both loomed into it in their fashion. There was a mellowing out when I moved away--or probably even earlier, when I became the strong one. Bergman's great with the fine line of the Bishop's blameworthiness too: he's never let off the hook, but he's never quite blamed either, because he's not worthy of blaming, never achieved real choice. That kind of wrong choice is never a choice, I guess. If we say so it's because we need to put up a quarantine sign, to not make certain mistakes with our trust again. I was able to go back and efface the sign only because I grew the fastest. And I pretty much mean that in the physical sense, but also in the related sense of being able to get control of conversations, of whatever other kinds of force one acquires leaving childhood.

I guess I think of both households as my family, in Fanny. But also that better family is art, isn't it? The family is also the movie--the desire for such a family is what makes such ways of being possible, is what I hope stopped me from ever using my own (relative, objectively puny, largely traditional-sexism-enabled) power to bully. To long to be an Ekdahl is to start to be an Ekdahl.

Have you read John Crowley's Little, Big? Something similar is shot for, as I think it also is in Shelley's poems and Kushner's double play.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Little, Big, despite urging. I guess I'm saving it for a rainy day.

You're right to put F&A & Ordinary People together. Both have an intense, mean, unhappy parent who's shown to be functioning at the bare edge of capacity. The Bishop's desperation. One wants to ask, where does it come from? What did...you know, not anyone's bad behavior, what did just the order and the responsibility, what did the sheer impregnability of that house (just the house, not even the Church) do to make him?

And then there he is, scrawny in a nightshirt. He's totally pathetic. Which leads me to the thought that there's not many depictions of the pathetic. What do you need to depict that? Nerve, pretty obviously. What else?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Putting men in nightshirts seems to do the trick. I wonder why?

I take the medievalness and bleakness of the house as attacks on religion--putting paradise There inevitably drains it from Here.