In other "news," tonight I wound up watching two films as different from one another as possible (neither for the first time), Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 Alexander Nevsky and Y Tu Mama Tambien. That's a double bill I'm sure no one would have imagined, but thanks to Canuckistani television, that's what came up; and Nevsky was in the original Russian but with French subtitles, which made things a trifle difficult for someone whose French is as rusty as the Tin Man's pecker. Watching Nevsky again, I was reminded of how ill-at-ease I am with Eisenstein, and I was nagged by questions of Eisenstein's reputation, and how much he tends to forgiven for what, even at the time, was rather jagged and awkward storytelling. (These questions were once much more central to my work; I was, a lifetime or three ago, supposed to be co-authoring a book on the bugger, but like almost everything else it never finally happened.) But we're a sophisticated lot these days, at least when it comes to film; we're so used to elaborate special effects that most movies before 1970 tend to look rather naive. So, yes, we're a more "sophisticated" lot in that sense, but we're far less sophisticated in other ways. Our use of language is surely far less sophisticated than it was in the past, as we've inched toward dryer and more descriptive sensbilities and we've become more manifestly prosaic. Strange the two directions of things, don't you think? It probably says something about our imaginative capacities. But, then again, even in critical circles no one talks about imagination anymore, unless one's trying to historicize Wordsworth or Coleridge or Blake. And we surely don't listen to ourselves, let alone others, very much anymore, attending on "points" we assume people are trying to make rather than engaging in the active process of hearing. We've become the culture of opsis to the chagrin of melos. There's something very worrying about that, at least to me. And people wonder why their kids don't listen; they've never been trained to listen. By the way, the chap in the picture there is the Soviet actor Nikolai Cherkassov, who plays the title role in Nevsky (and the infamous czar in both completed parts of Eisenstein's truly bizarre Ivan The Terrible); he was a formidable dramatic presence in his way, and it's a bit of a shame almost no one knows his name outside of the former SSRs. There was, after all, a snowball's chance in Hell that I'd post any images from Y Tu.... With that, I should apologize for what will likely be a minimum of posting this week as I take care of a bunch of matters, almost all of which have to do with figuring out Things To Say. I'm no longer used to having to have relevant or meaningful things to say, as all of you reading this blog can surely discern. Tomorrow promises trying to make a silk purse out of a cow's arse (the traditional pig's ear being unavailable) with a minuscule array of largely (to me) undecipherable engineering material. It's proof positive that I must have been a very, very, very bad man in a past life. So, onwards & upwards. Cheers.
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