The Corona Diaries Vol 12: Winter Cinema

March 2021

Spring just keeps creeping closer. Soon it will be the one-year anniversary of starting to work from home. Tempus fugit! I am eagerly awaiting the return of the robins and red-winged blackbirds. And any other migratory birds too.

I know that I am not alone in wanting spring to arrive. My neighbor's chickens are also keen on its arrival.

I'm not sure what breeds they are. Perhaps heirloom ones? I know that, when the polar vortex was hanging around, the chickens were all huddled together in the coop trying to keep warm and I felt terribly for them. At least there were some windows to block the wind.

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I don't make proper new year's resolutions like vowing to lose weight and the like but I do try to convince myself to do things that I'd been meaning to do but haven't yet done, generally because of procrastination/laziness. Although it's only early March as I type, I have accomplished something I've been putting off for nearly 20 years:

I have finally read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

It came out in 2000 and, if memory serves, I heard about and bought it not too long afterwards. But I never read it until this year. Better late than never, right?

It's described as a piece of ergodic literature which, as far as I can tell, simply means that it's difficult to read. Another way to think of it is that it requires more effort to read than your average text.

House of Leaves (every instance of the word "house" in any language is blue in the book) is difficult to describe. It's presented as the writings of one Johnny Truant who came upon a manuscript written by his deceased neighbor, a guy named Zampano. Truant annotates the manuscript and adds his own tale to the mix. For its part, the manuscript is an exegesis on a movie called The Navidson Record which documents the mysterious events experienced by the Navidison family, namely dealing with the entrance to an eldritch labyrinth that appears in their house one day.

At first, they notice that rooms in their home are slightly larger than they were previously. Then a doorway appears which leads to a cold, dark hallway and in turn to various room and a grand staircase that takes days to descend. Something apparently lives in the labyrinth as growls are heard coming out of the dark as the rooms are being explored.

While the plot/structure of the story is convoluted, apparently what makes the book ergodic is the layout. For instance, you have text that isn't justified and is instead strewn about the page to reflect events in the plot.

There are copious footnotes in the book and sometimes the footnotes are footnoted. It makes for a reading experience that is a bit like surfing the Internet. You read the "main" part of the story which references a footnote so you read the footnote. This footnote has a footnote so you go to read it. These secondary footnotes sometimes go on for pages while other times they refer you to something in one of the book's many appendices. So, do you follow it to an appendix or do you stick with the "main" story?

There is text that offset from the rest and some of that mirror imaged.

Here the left-hand column is a footnote continued from the previous page, the right-hand column is the "main" story, i.e. – Zompano's manuscript, and the reversed text in the box is something I cannot recall. It may be another footnote. You get the idea.

I surely missed a lot of meaning when I read it. References here and there, reasons why text is mirror imaged, and so on. But the storyline of people exploring the labyrinth is creepy as all get out. Not scary horror but really unsettling. BBC Radio 4 dramatized this part of the novel to great effect. I listened to it at night and got pretty scared. I made sure I was tucked in tight.

Perhaps not my favorite book of all-time but I enjoyed it and finally got it under my belt.

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I really miss going to the theater. A couple weeks ago I watched Ice Station Zebra and the opening credits noted it was shot in Super Panavision 70 and was presented in Cinerama. I sat there thinking about how good it must have looked up on the big screen. Thinking about the theatrical experience led me to becoming a bit sad at not being able to go to the cinema. Safely, anyway.

Instead, I have been taking advantage of the library's DVD/Bluray collection. My local branch is about a mile from home so I get in some good walking before and after sitting on the couch for a couple hours. You see, in addition to reading things I should have read years ago, I have also been catching up on my movie watching.

I admit to being a bit nerdy and keeping a list of films to see and have been maintaining it for a while now. Probably just shy of 20 years, in fact. It began life as a way to track new movies that I wanted to see but had never made it to Madison cinemas (and I didn't find the time to see them in Chicago or Milwaukee). Thusly it was fairly modest to start. Then I began adding other movies to it.

Sometimes they were older films recommended to me. Other films made the list because of their reputation. For instance, I learned that the lyrics to one of my favorite albums, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, were partly inspired by a viewing of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo so it was added. I saw A Field in England by Ben Wheatley in the theater and immediately added the rest of his oeuvre. And of course there are films that are just part of the cinematic canon that any cinephile should see.

My list is organized largely by genre the way our local video rental store, Four Star, does it. Slightly tangentially, Roger Ebert was a big fan of Four Star and would stop in whenever he was in town, usually as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival. I've been donating money to Four Star over the winter and plan on renting from them once again soon now that the weather makes heading downtown a bit more palatable. It is a treasure that no number of streaming services can compete with.

With the list having grown too large, I decided to spend this winter doing some serious movie watching from my couch and pare it down before I started adding a lot of pandemic-era titles. I started at the top with animation, moved on to documentaries, followed by silent films, westerns, short films, movies with folkloric stories, the two most recent James Bond films, horror, and, finally, war movies. Auteurs are next but they may wait until the fall when the weather is worse as I hope to get out and about as much as I can during the spring and summer.

There is one movie I regret having watched this winter and that is Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, a documentary made by a Russian fellow named Dmitry Vasyukov and Werner Herzog, one of my favorite documentarians. It chronicles the life of trappers from a small village in Siberia. I found it really interesting to learn about these guys and their lives spent trapping sable. There are themes of isolation, man vs. nature, rural vs. urban, et al. It was a wonderful film. But a lot of it takes place during the winter and I felt really, really cold on my couch watching it. I shivered.

In one scene, one of the trappers remarks that it's only 20 below so it's plenty warm enough to go outside and work on his shelter. Since I watched it during the winter, I couldn't turn my head and look outside at a nice, verdant scene. All I saw was snow, snow everywhere. A great movie but one I highly recommend watching on a rainy summer day.

I have also watched several silent films this winter, a cinematic blind spot for me. It's not that I haven't seen any – hey, I own The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – but there were just a lot of classics on my to-watch list. And so I finally got around to watching Steamboat Bill, Jr.

I'd seen the bit where the wall of the house falls over him many times but it was nice to see it in context of the film. The whole storm scene was really fun but I admit that it did not make me a big Buster Keaton fan. I am not sure why. The gags just seemed to be overly repetitive. But repetition doesn't deter me from being a big Three Stooges fan. Maybe I just need to watch more Keaton flicks. 

Similarly, I watched Safety Last! for the first time.

The Frau and I watched it together. We both hate heights and got very nervous during the famous climbing scene. She hid her eyes more than once and let out a breathless "No!" a couple times. For my part, I sat in silence twiddling my phone or petting the cat but I was scared sh*tless on the inside.

I watched my first Oscar Micheaux film, Within Our Gates.

I think I read that it's the earliest (feature length?) film directed by an African-American that exists (more or less) in whole. I have also heard that it was a response of sorts to The Birth of a Nation but I don't know if Micheaux ever made any comments to that effect or if that is shared critical opinion.

Wikipedia says it took 2 months in 1920 to get the OK from the Board of Censors in Chicago, who were apparently nervous that scenes depicting a lynching and attempted rape would inflame violence in the city which was still reeling from the race riots of the previous year.

It was definitely a whole different ball of wax after watching a few F.W. Murnau films which had no black people in them and the Keaton & Lloyd films where they were basically simpletons or fools in the background playing bit parts. Here black people were just people, not stereotypes. There were good ones and bad ones; some were successful, other failed; they fell in and out of love.

I look forward to seeing more Micheaux.

There aren't many westerns on my list but Tombstone Rashomon was one of them and it was a lot of fun.

It tells the story of the shootout at the O.K. Corral a la Kurosawa's Rashomon with the people being interviewed all recounting the same events and the motivations of those involved differently from one another.

One last film: Lucifer Rising by Kenneth Anger. I first heard of it while I was in high school as I'd read that Jimmy Page, he of Led Zeppelin fame, had composed and recorded a soundtrack for it that went unused. Anger is really into the occult and the likes of Aleister Crowley and I guess this is considered his masterwork in that vein.

It was a fun, colorful flick but, as the director commentary indicated, a lot of the details were rather esoteric. Actions, characters, bits of the set design wouldn't mean a whole lot unless you were familiar with the occult and Egyptian mythology. And so most of this movie went way over my head. Still, I finally saw a film that had been on my to-watch list for well over 30 years.

I highly recommend listening to Page's unused soundtrack and associated recordings. The 20 minute piece intended for the film is based around a drone with chanting, Mellotron strings, synths, and percussion added into the mix. It is moody - ethereal - with some great melodies. I love how it starts off based on the drone, goes off on tangents and then returns to it. And check out "Lucifer Rising - Percussive Return" with percussion that sounds positively proto-industrial.

Many more movies to come! The Heroes of Telemark is now available for me to pickup!

Bonus photo: On a recent walk I saw a crane in the distance. Spring is so close…