The Great Movies: Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box
G. W. Pabst, 1929

I think I've read that there were people around back in the day who thought that adding sound to movies would ruin them. It's kind of hard to imagine that perspective now. Stripped of the fundamental ability to depict people having conversations with each other, silent movies seem incredibly limited in the kind of stories that they can tell. It is no wonder that slapstick and swashbuckling were popular during the silent era; those are among the few realms of human endeavor that don't require words.

That's why you have to respect Pandora's Box for its ambition, if nothing else. Battleship Potemkin was a moving propaganda poster, The General was a long chase scene, and Metropolis was a visual extravaganza posing as social criticism, and you can still tell why they were successful. But Pandora's Box tries for something much more difficult, the silent drama. And it pulls it off surprisingly well.

What makes it work is terrific acting. The leads project a lot of subtlety of mood and intent, and there is a large cast of extras who always perform very naturally in the background. Characters are actually nuanced, something other than heroes, villains, or dupes. Pandora's Box is the only silent film I've seen thus far that you could say this about.

Plot: It was probably a little hackneyed even then: a girl from the wrong side of the tracks wants to break into show biz, but can't ever catch a break. During her decline and fall, she drags many a many down with her. People are forever bursting into rooms where couples who aren't supposed to be kissing are kissing.

Visuals: I was impressed by the composition of the scenes. The settings look authentic, and the depth of activity in the background establishes mood and veracity.

Dialog: n/a

Prognosis: If we didn't have the talkies, I'd think this movie was GREAT. Since we do, its entertainment value plunges to virtually nil. Mostly interesting to people with a particular enthusiasm for the silents, I'm afraid.

The Monday Quiz LXII

Looking Down on Big Cities

In recognition that this might be, well, a little harder than usual, this time you have seven chances to make five. Name the cities shown in the various aerial images. Three of them are American, and two are European, but that's it for the hints.

1.

2.


3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Submit your answers in the comments.

Coffee Table Book Party: "The Games We Played"

Margaret K. Hofer, The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board & Table Games. Princeton Architectural Press, 2003.


This photo collection of board and parlor games from the turn of the 20th Century is endlessly charming in its own right, offering beautifully photographed gameboards and gamepieces grown exotic by the passage of time. But is also a fascinating glimpse into the beginnings of the modern middle class, with its new level of leisure time and discretionary income to spend on mass-produced trifles.


The subtitle -- "The Golden Age of Board and Table Games" -- is a bit of a misnomer. Hofer freely admits that in terms of gameplay, very few of the games of this era amount to anything more elaborate than rolling dice, advancing a gamepiece, and perhaps following the instructions printed on the space landed on. Even the more sophisticated of the games of the era are thus little more than "Chutes and Ladders" in drag.


Today, there are much better games available to people who want to exercise their strategic and tactical abilities with something besides chess -- and of course, we have Scrabble now, a major step forward for our civilization! Yet, it is also true that our publishing houses persist in pouring out dozens of worthless titles every year, most tied by phat marketing deals to movies or television shows produced under the same bloated corporate umbrella. Will these look as charming in 100 years as "Bicycle Race," a game that capitalized on the newfangled craze of the safety bicycle?



As of this posting, Amazon has used copies of this lovely book for as low as $9.74. Powells has one new copy at about $25.

Michael5000's Guide to Awesome Science Fiction, Part II

Literary Science Fiction

"Literary Science Fiction" is generally a code for books that treat traditional scinece fiction tropes -- futurism, the impact of new technologies, space travel -- but which are written from outside of the genre. Among your classics, the dystopian future of Orwell's 1984 was a sort of Literary Science Fiction; in the 1980s, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was a blockbuster, if flawed, speciman.

Literary Science Fiction brings with it the advantage of fresh approaches and voices. Often, an LSF writer escapes some of the stylistic conventions and cliches of the genre. Traditional Science Fiction prose, if we are honest, tends to be either fairly spare and hard-boiled, or heroic with a tendency towards pomposity. LSF writers, by contrast, are generally more -- duh! -- literary, with a tendency toward a more poetic, lyrical use of language.

The disadvantage of LSF is often that, having no grounding in the issues that good science firction writers have already been thinking about over the decades, they often lovingly depict an imagined world that is not really very well thought through. This is what I remember most from The Handmaid's Tale, although in fairness it has been over 20 years since I read it: it worked, more or less, as a grim feminist parable, but it didn't contain the sense of a plausibly imagined world or future.

The difference between genre Science Fiction and Literary Science Fiction is of course largely a matter of convention and marketing. Ursula LeGuin certainly writes with a literary voice, but she is generally considered a genre writer -- indeed, one of the genre's core masters. So yeah, to an extent this is a pointless distinction. But it is a pointless distinction that gives me the priviledge of recommending the following four books.


Haruki Murikami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. -- Murakami is a sort of stand-in here for an entire spectrum of postmodern "magic realist" fiction that arguably trades in the core concepts of Science Fiction. Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, Kazuo Ishiguro -- all of these guys have written books that, with different cover art, would be right at home in the Science Fiction ghetto of the booksotre. Saramago's Blindness and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go are straight up, undeniable, classic Science Fiction stories -- awesome ones -- but they are clad and marketed in carefully literary clothing.
Hard-Boiled Wonderland, although not the best of Murikami's work, is probably the one with the most Science Fiction elements. Unabashedly trippy and weird, with a strong dose of melancholy, it is certainly not for everyone. But maybe it's for you?


Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day. Mrs.5000 introduced me to this book. I tend to forget the title and call it "Quakers in Space," which is far more descriptive of the content. The novel follows the practical and societal adventures in a space habitat inhabited by pacifist religious non-conformists on a multi-generational journey to colonize a new planet. Gently paced and concerned with exploring the benefits and problems of decision by consensus, the story takes place within a richly imagined microecology.



Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife. The Time Traveler's Wife falls, consciously or not, in the great Science Fiction tradition of stories that sets up a simple counterfactual scenario -- in this case, what if there was this guy who sporadically travelled involuntarily back in time? -- and explores what the ramifications might be. In this case, we end up with a beautifully rendered story about the nature love, loss, and the passage of time. These are universal themes, of course, the same ones that are explored in much mainstream literature. But The Time Traveler's Wife also serves as a good example of, how by imagining people in unprecidented and extreme situations, the Science Fiction author can provide fresh insights, or at least a fresh viewpoint, into human nature.

In addition to being good Literary Science Fiction, incidentally, this book offers a great romance, strongly drawn characters, and an intricate puzzle of twisted and overlapping timelines. The two primary characters experience events in different orders, often knowing what lies in store in the future of the other; as readers, events are revealed to us on yet a third timeline. It is an intricate puzzle of cause and effect, and Niffenegger has structured the book masterfully to keep us thoroughly engaged in what will happen next. Or what will have happened next. It is a wonderfully crafted text.



David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas. Another brilliantly constructed book, this is an intricately nested series of stories. Initially the components of the novel seem completely unrelated, and only as you approach the end does the overall pattern cohere. It can be read as a dystopian adventure story, as a meditation on the nature of individuality, as (perhaps) a study in chaos theory, or simply as a series of strange, highly evocative sotries with some quirky common threads connecting them together. Fabulous.

The Thursday Quiz LXXI

The Thursday Quiz!

It's the return of the Thursday Quiz in its beloved classic form! A twelve item is-it-or-isn't-it test of your knowledge, reasoning, stamina, and moxie!

Remember always the Fundamental Rules of the Thursday Quiz:

1. The Thursday Quiz is a POP quiz. No research, Googling, Wikiing, or use of reference books. Violators will never be able to look at themselves in the mirror again.

2. Don't get all stressed out about it! It's supposed to be fun!

Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, it's:
Science!

Twelve basic concepts from various branches of science are below. But ARE THEY are AREN'T they defined correctly?

1. Astronomical Unit (AU) - a unit of measurement based on the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri, one of the nearest stars.

2. catalyst - A substance that increases the speed of a chemical reaction without being consumed by the reaction.

3. condensation - the process of a substance changing state from a liquid to a gas.

4. density - the ratio of the mass of an object to its volume.

5. electrolysis - the emission of an electrical charge by a molecule when its protons are separated from its neutrons.

6.emulsion - a substance comprised of droplets of one liquid suspended within another liquid.

7. inertia - the tendency of a body to remain at rest or to remain in motion unless acted upon by an external force.

8. inorganic compounds - compounds composed primarily of carbon.

9. ions - molecules that have a positive or negative charge due to an unequal number of protons and electrons.

10. isotopes - Atoms that have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons.

11. light year - The amount of time required for light or any other electromagnetic energy to travel one Astronomical Unit.

12. plane of the ecliptic - The surface area of a fluid through which waves can convey energy.

Postulate your hypotheses in the comments.

Inspector5000 and the Case of the Elderly Uzbek

Michael5000 was hard at work at the office. Suddenly, there was a commotion in the lobby! A elderly man from Uzbekistan had been found on the light rail, disoriented and unable to find his way home. When asked for an address, he gave a street number in Tashkent.

A conversation broke out in Russian, which michael5000 does not know. He watched the man for a while, noting his too-thin jacket, his belly-length white beard, and his poorly fitted dentures that kept threatening to leap out of his mouth as he spoke. But, with the conversation continuing in Russian, michael5000 eventually went back to his desk.

After a while, a coworker came by to confer. "We don't want to scare him by calling the police," she said, "but we just don't know what else to do! He can't tell us anything except his name and the names of his children. We've run them through all our databases, but none of them have ever been served by our office. We've called all of the organizations that serve people who speak Russian, but they don't know who he is either. I guess we'll have to call the cops."

"I'm not so sure about that," said michael5000. "I might be able to help."

What did michael5000 do to get the man home?



[this story, as with all stories related to my work, has been highly fictionalized to protect the confidentiality of the people I work with]

The Great Movies: "Persona"

Persona
Ingmar Bergman, 1966

Here's what the emperor’s clothes look like, according to the blurb on the cover of the Persona DVD:

This "exceptionally beautiful specimen of movie-making" (The New Yorker) is recognized as a modern masterpiece and "a landmark in late twentieth-century art" (Time Out London).

The New Yorker is a fine publication, of course, and no doubt Time Out London is good too. And, I've long made it clear that I have the deepest respect for Robert Ebert, whose "Great Movies" list is of course the reason I had to watch this movie. However, in the case of Persona, I don't just disagree with their assessment. I'm really kind of embarrassed for them.

Persona is a movie that thinks it is using the medium of film in daring, innovative ways, and that it is probing deep philosophical questions about identity and experience. It certainly isn't probing deep, philosophical questions, however. It is merely batting around the kind of superficial questions about the nature of reality that fascinate you when you are in junior high school and again, if you have a regular regimen of smoking weed, in college.

The characters act in unnatural ways and say things that no one has ever said in real life. They are not people but variables in a dumb philosophical thought experiment. It is intellectually painful, but fortunately it is also very tedious, which dulls the pain.

It is hard to say how innovative the cinematography may have seemed at the time, but to modern eyes it is almost unbelievably pretentious. We get sudden, inexplicable collages of clips from old films spliced with quick cuts of shocking images, such as quick glimpse of an erect penis that is the film's first and most random shot. We get occasional stylistic incongruities, such as a deliberately sappy narrator who appears once and only once to explain a transition in the action. We get occasional moments where the film is made to appear to break or melt in the projector. We get a long and especially dull scene shown twice, consecutively, from two different points of view. These kind of bombastically high-art shenanigans would be forgivable in a first-semester film school project or a hard-rock video, but in a full-length feature film they are insufferable.

Plot: After a dumb opening montage of random imagery, which no doubt conveys Deep Meaning if you are In The Know, a brutally expository exchange of dialogue sets up the story, such as it is: A famous actress refuses to talk, and a young nurse is assigned to her full-time. You know, because people are so often given round-the-clock medical attendants when they are acting weird.

The doctor decides that the hospital is not a good setting for the actress, so she sends patient and nurse to her own private beach house. You know, like doctors do when they think their patients need a change of scenery. What, your doctor never lets you stay at her beach cabin? You should change your HMO or something.

Anyway, while at the beach the two women act very strange and have experiences that are supposed to suggest that there is some kind of ambiguity or blurring of their individual identities. Whatever. The one who talks tells the one who doesn't talk the least sexy sex story ever told. One or both of them may be in love with, hate, or be completely indifferent to the other. It is all very ambiguous, yet manages to be not even the slightest bit intriguing.

Visuals: The visuals are great! They really are. A good experiment for Persona would be, watch it with the sound off and play a hard rock album instead. Or, if you have a regular regimen of smoking weed, a Pink Floyd album. I am almost sure you would have a superior experience that way.

Dialogue: Preposterous.

Prognosis: Recommended for storage in research libraries.