Cine-Ham

Film actors have a genius for developing various stratagems to maximize their face-time on screen.

Common among those thespians with sufficient clout is suddenly discovering that the script needs to be rewritten, in ways that, astoundingly enough, significantly increase the number of lines, closeups, and other assorted shots afforded the discoverer. Dustin Hoffman is said to be master of this facet of the craft.

Then there are the practitioners of “the rugby school of film acting,” as director Terry Gilliam once put it, actors who physically fight for space. Gilliam describes watching Italian actress Valentina Cortese engage in such manuevers during the making of his film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen:

[W]herever the camera was pointed she knew exactly where the cross-hairs were, so that in scenes with lots of people she would always be dead centre. The other actors used to complain to me that she was kicking and elbowing them out of the way to get to the centre of the shot. Valentina got her comeuppance on her very last day, when we were shooting the scene where she enters with the headless king. That day there was a Swiss documentary crew doing a piece on her and she was being wonderfully grand, but the girl who was playing the king’s headless body was pushing and shoving her mercilessly. Suddenly she sank to the floor, sobbing, “Terry, make her stop, I can’t stand this.”

More Than This

It was Labor Day, and I was slogging through the supermarket, in search of cold remedies, because the season is changing, and Someone has decided to afflict the humans of this household with Bugs. I was drudging, no credit to sentience, just plodding through the day, “putting one foot to front of de other,” as Cecil the bartender describes it in Robert Stone’s A Flag For Sunrise.

And then I had a Moment.

Cineman: Crashing The Gates

A friend of mine this spring became embroiled in a tedious and prolonged conflict with Authority. As can sometimes happen in the course of such conflicts, my friend found himself now and again fantasizing about piloting a motor vehicle through the front window of the headquarters of said Authority.

This would have solved nothing, of course, but the mere mental expression of it served to satisfy the desire, as well as relieve his blood pressure, at least for a bit.

There was a piece last week in the New York Times about this, titled “Why The Imp In Your Brain Gets Out.” It considered the mental phenomenon of receiving a seemingly irresistible impulse to, say, moon your boss, or hurl hors d’oeuvres at a boor. According to a paper submitted to Science, a “susceptibility to rude fantasies in fact reflects the workings of a normally sensitive, social brain.” Well, that’s a relief. Apparently the “adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as on action”; thus, “to avoid blurting out that a colleague is a raging hypocrite, the brain must first imagine just that.” Things can get tricky, though, for once the brain is inhabited by such a thought, “the very presence of that catastrophic insult . . . increases the odds that the brain will spit it out.”

So: yet another manufacturer’s defect.

Anyway. My friend’s situation led me to muse a bit about memorable scenes in cinema of people who do not manage to contain the irresistible impulse, to corral the imp, and so set about physically assaulting the edifi of Authority. Problem is, in raking through my brain, I found the place kind of arid. After a lifetime of deep immersion in film, I’ve recently fallen out of the habit of frequenting the cinematic well—haven’t been to a theater in more than a year, not much better in watching DVDs. As a result, I guess, my filmic memory has pretty much dried up.

Oh well. Maybe the seven films feebly recalled on the other side of the “furthur” will have something for somebody. 

He Got Old

This morning in a medical waiting room I happened upon a dated copy of Sports Illustrated, in which a young professional basketball player, whose name escapes me, is asked to name his favorite movies.

He first cites some very recent film, and then opines that “if you’re talking about classics,” he would select He Got Game.

Now, He Got Game—my favorite Spike Lee joint—was released in 1998. In the film trade, the “classic” era is generally held to encompass the years from the late 1920s through the late 1950s. Meaning Spike’s Game misses by about 40 years.

Then again, to this guy, flowering there in his very early 20s, a film created before he reached puberty would seem naturally to have attained “classic” status—when you’re that young, eleven years can be a long, long time ago. Stuff just a decade or so past can seem nearly as remote as the Middle Ages.

When I was this guy’s age, watching films from the 1940s and 1950s, they seemed to come from a world long ago and far away.

Today, thirty years on, not so much.

Einstein was right: all is relative.

I grow old . . . I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Things Keep Their Secrets

I live in the high foothills of northern California, along the Cascade-Sierra divide, on land where Ishi once lived.

Ishi, “the last of the Yahi.” The marooned American Indian famously portrayed, with no little sympathy, by Theodora Kroeber in Ishi In Two Worlds. The man who, on August 29, 1911, most probably walked across what is today “my” “land,” on his way down out of the wilderness, into a corral occupied by east Oroville butchers. Who was briefly jailed, then spent the four remaining years of his TB-shortened life as a museum piece, literally living in a Museum of Anthropology, at the University of California in San Francisco.

Ishi, in his four short years among whites, didn’t say much. He never, as an example, revealed his name. At all times, however, whenever among whites, he was adamant: he was the last of his tribe. All other Yahi, all his relations, alpha to omega, had died.

This is my 34th year (on and off) on Ishi’s land.

And I will tell you this: Ishi was not the last of his tribe.

And, in this diary, I will tell you why that is all I will tell you.

Reruns

The arguments of ignorance tend to recur. It will always be so: ignorance is by nature a limited beast. Originality and creativity are not required, to persist in seeing through a glass darkly.

If you live long enough, you will witness the marshaling of the same arguments at different instances of space and time. If the arguments prove ignorant on the first go-round, you can generally expect that they will likewise wobble wrongly in succeeding revolutions. This is part of what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he wrote:

Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished.

The cohorts of George II at present instruct that we must pursue all over the planet a War On Terra because “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll have to fight them over here.” If you slip in a disc of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, you can watch one of the first known invocations of this same mantra, as a band of ur-men brandishing bones crushes the skulls of a rival band at a strategically important watering hole. Fast-forward the planet some several million years, and you may observe hundreds of thousands of Americans and Australians, awash in the same shibboleth, floating over to Europe for WWI, there to ensure Germans do not occupy Topeka, and Turks do not site a mosque on Ayers Rock.

In my youth, the United States transformed Southeast Asia into a charnel house in order to “there” put a stop to Communism, so that “here” we would not be forced to burn all our money and construct refrigerators out of cement. The US lost that war, but there don’t now seem to be any more Communists here where I live than there were before the defeat. Just the same one guy, an economics professor at the university, ready soon to retire. The US will lose the War on Terra, too, but I don’t expect that as a result my daughter will be immured in a burka, or that I will be impressed into service as a dervish.