In the Key of E: March 2018

11 March 2018

Conchita, Bertha, and Charlotte

Women are objects of obsession for the men in the works below. In two out of three, the men die ... without consummating their "love."

None of them feel romantic.

Luis Bunuel's film is intentionally absurd. Two actresses play the same character. Or two actresses portray different sides of the character. Or the man has prosopagnosia. On second viewing, I paid more attention to the presence of political terrorism in its story world.

"Torment" was Ingmar Bergman's first produced screenplay and stars Mai Zetterling as Bertha, a schoolboy's first love and an older man's torture toy. Bertha is a template for female Bergman protagonists to come - a complicated female role that could either be a product of his genius or misogyny (maybe both?).

Jules Massenet's "Werther" is overwrought and mercifully short. Is it the way Jonas Kaufmann plays him or is it the way the role is written? Kaufmann goes from gloomy to desperate to dead. It's dull to sing in the same "key" for four acts.

***

That Obscure Object of Desire

(1977, dir. Luis Bunuel)

Conchita times two;

No matter who plays her, man

Only wants one thing.

***

Torment

(1944, dir. Alf Sjoberg)

Life lessons valued

More than schoolwork for expelled

Man in Bergman script.

***

Werther

(1892, composed by Jules Massenet, libretto by Edouard Blau, Paul Milliet, and Georges Hartmann)

(2013-2014 Season, The Met: Live in HD, dir. Richard Eyre)

Poet loves, pines for

Charlotte. Long drawn out death ends

Our miseries.

01 March 2018

WWII: Camera Moves

In playwriting class, Professor Levy taught us that if we were to set a play in the middle of the 20th century, then we need to ask what our characters did during the war, especially if we had male characters. "Saving Private Ryan" (two years after the class) impressed in me a better understanding of those war years. A visit to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans a few years later made me understand my grandfather more.

WWII is arguably the first war when the film medium played an important part: in propaganda and in processing its aftermath. The body of work is also immense because the war affected many countries. If I were a film curator, I would program films across the globe and group them into pre-war, the war years, and post-war.

The three films below stand out because of their technical peaks. The camera movements feel more agile. I wonder how much of that is due to how documentarians shot the war.

The racing scenes that open "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" pump adrenaline and the levitating camera in the duel scene embodies a God's-eye view of a world at war.