"It comes to you, he never was a stranger": three geniuses
Film/Music: Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to see this concert documentary at the Northwest Film Forum at an 11 pm show. Sitting in the dark theater, the 16mm footage close up on a rumpled Leonard Cohen, I realized two things: Leonard Cohen was hot, and more importantly, sitting there was the closest I'd ever get to seeing him in concert. Looking at the sea of 600,000 cold, wet, hungry people at 4 in the morning, it was probably a preferable experience. Plus I wasn't born yet.
If you're a fan, you've heard at least "Sing Another Song, Boys," the album version of which was recorded at this show. The audio in the documentary is crisp, the picture beautiful, and the best parts don't do much moving around. There's a shot that pans from a close-up on Cohen to his back-up singers, leaving a long moment of utter blackness between them, that I think is just beautiful. The music carries it, with occasional shots of the crowd for context. "The Stranger Song," always extremely potent for me, was nearly unbearable in performance (I can only imagine seeing "Dress Rehearsal Rag" live).
The only slips, for me, were in the present-day interviews with people like Kris Kristofferson, who basically can't figure out why the crowd (who had previously engaged in some unrest during Hendrix's set and booed Kristofferson off the stage) didn't like him as much as Cohen. Judy Collins and Joan Baez also weigh in, no doubt to add color, but all that's really needed is Leonard Cohen and the Army. I also lament the fact that "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "So Long, Marianne" are used during credit sequences, and therefore "lost" in the context of watching the concert. It would be nice if the DVD/Blu-ray included some of that footage, as an extra.
If you want to see Leonard Cohen live, you could do worse than this film: it captures something I don't think I'd have had to opportunity to experience any other way, and it was well worth the late night. (Though it is available on amazon.com as well.)
Image unrelated. I have a conquistador lamp, and you don't.
Books/Film: The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune by Stuart Galbraith IV.
As you probably know, I've been watching a lot of Kurosawa and Mifune lately. Kurosawa is still probably the most recognized Japanese director in the Western world, and Mifune his most recognized muse. Mifune's samurai characters are iconic, and despite the fact that they parted ways artistically in the 60s, they were closely associated in the popular mind until their deaths and, in fact, beyond. It makes sense, then, that the only English-language biography I could find about either of them was an enormous joint biography that I finally finished the other day.
As a book, I do not think it is stellar. The writing is serviceable but uninspired, and while I don't necessarily want biographers to engage in a lot of whimsical speculation, I felt 600+ pages of rather dry recitation of fact and other peoples' reviews got very old. I continued only because I wished to know what I could about the lives of these men. I only wish it delved more into what they might have meant--I can divine my own meaning, of course, and I do, but it is somewhat unentertaining to be left entirely to my own devices. Galbraith has copious sources and notes, but the very awkward Japanese documentary that is parceled out on the Criterion discs has much more enlightening stories about the process and people involved.* He also only quotes English-language reviews, skewing the reception of their work towards American tastes. At the same time, that did provide some of the most interesting material, which was the rampant racism some critics showed towards the Japanese. Kurosawa was often bashed for being "too Japanese" and "too Western" in the same film, and in general American writers showed little sensitivity to Japanese culture and often were downright dismissive and bigoted.
What's especially interesting about this bigotry, to me, is that reading about them had a rather opposite effect on me. The early lives of both Kurosawa and Mifune were unimaginable to me: the distance in time, war and culture rendering the basic facts utterly alien. Kurosawa's wartime observations, in particular, are chilling, despite his never being in combat. How, I wondered, do these films speak across such divides of time and experience and context? I've been thinking a lot about how much this says about human nature and its constancy. I suppose racist reviews by American critics have their own lesson to teach.
I am not sure what I wanted from the biography: it's a fine line, being entertaining without compromising your subject and inserting too much of yourself into the reportage. But a little more character would, I think, have been welcome, and made the long slog easier to bear. I feel I know more facts, but I have little more insight into the personalities that made up Kurosawa and Mifune, their relationship, and their art. Despite this, they're both fascinating, and the facts themselves bear that out.
*Seriously, it's hilarious. The interviewers make constant "I'm listening, go on" noises, and often interrupt stories with, essentially, "oh no he didn't!" It's just very different from the "invisible" style we're used to.
This entry is also posted at http://my-daroga.dreamwidth.org/257366.html. Feel free to comment wherever you want.
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to see this concert documentary at the Northwest Film Forum at an 11 pm show. Sitting in the dark theater, the 16mm footage close up on a rumpled Leonard Cohen, I realized two things: Leonard Cohen was hot, and more importantly, sitting there was the closest I'd ever get to seeing him in concert. Looking at the sea of 600,000 cold, wet, hungry people at 4 in the morning, it was probably a preferable experience. Plus I wasn't born yet.
If you're a fan, you've heard at least "Sing Another Song, Boys," the album version of which was recorded at this show. The audio in the documentary is crisp, the picture beautiful, and the best parts don't do much moving around. There's a shot that pans from a close-up on Cohen to his back-up singers, leaving a long moment of utter blackness between them, that I think is just beautiful. The music carries it, with occasional shots of the crowd for context. "The Stranger Song," always extremely potent for me, was nearly unbearable in performance (I can only imagine seeing "Dress Rehearsal Rag" live).
The only slips, for me, were in the present-day interviews with people like Kris Kristofferson, who basically can't figure out why the crowd (who had previously engaged in some unrest during Hendrix's set and booed Kristofferson off the stage) didn't like him as much as Cohen. Judy Collins and Joan Baez also weigh in, no doubt to add color, but all that's really needed is Leonard Cohen and the Army. I also lament the fact that "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "So Long, Marianne" are used during credit sequences, and therefore "lost" in the context of watching the concert. It would be nice if the DVD/Blu-ray included some of that footage, as an extra.
If you want to see Leonard Cohen live, you could do worse than this film: it captures something I don't think I'd have had to opportunity to experience any other way, and it was well worth the late night. (Though it is available on amazon.com as well.)
Image unrelated. I have a conquistador lamp, and you don't.
Books/Film: The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune by Stuart Galbraith IV.
As you probably know, I've been watching a lot of Kurosawa and Mifune lately. Kurosawa is still probably the most recognized Japanese director in the Western world, and Mifune his most recognized muse. Mifune's samurai characters are iconic, and despite the fact that they parted ways artistically in the 60s, they were closely associated in the popular mind until their deaths and, in fact, beyond. It makes sense, then, that the only English-language biography I could find about either of them was an enormous joint biography that I finally finished the other day.
As a book, I do not think it is stellar. The writing is serviceable but uninspired, and while I don't necessarily want biographers to engage in a lot of whimsical speculation, I felt 600+ pages of rather dry recitation of fact and other peoples' reviews got very old. I continued only because I wished to know what I could about the lives of these men. I only wish it delved more into what they might have meant--I can divine my own meaning, of course, and I do, but it is somewhat unentertaining to be left entirely to my own devices. Galbraith has copious sources and notes, but the very awkward Japanese documentary that is parceled out on the Criterion discs has much more enlightening stories about the process and people involved.* He also only quotes English-language reviews, skewing the reception of their work towards American tastes. At the same time, that did provide some of the most interesting material, which was the rampant racism some critics showed towards the Japanese. Kurosawa was often bashed for being "too Japanese" and "too Western" in the same film, and in general American writers showed little sensitivity to Japanese culture and often were downright dismissive and bigoted.
What's especially interesting about this bigotry, to me, is that reading about them had a rather opposite effect on me. The early lives of both Kurosawa and Mifune were unimaginable to me: the distance in time, war and culture rendering the basic facts utterly alien. Kurosawa's wartime observations, in particular, are chilling, despite his never being in combat. How, I wondered, do these films speak across such divides of time and experience and context? I've been thinking a lot about how much this says about human nature and its constancy. I suppose racist reviews by American critics have their own lesson to teach.
I am not sure what I wanted from the biography: it's a fine line, being entertaining without compromising your subject and inserting too much of yourself into the reportage. But a little more character would, I think, have been welcome, and made the long slog easier to bear. I feel I know more facts, but I have little more insight into the personalities that made up Kurosawa and Mifune, their relationship, and their art. Despite this, they're both fascinating, and the facts themselves bear that out.
*Seriously, it's hilarious. The interviewers make constant "I'm listening, go on" noises, and often interrupt stories with, essentially, "oh no he didn't!" It's just very different from the "invisible" style we're used to.
This entry is also posted at http://my-daroga.dreamwidth.org/257366.html. Feel free to comment wherever you want.