the groundhog day project

I don't want to talk about Son of Saul as a holocaust film. Not just because the director and star have been quoted in articles about how it isn't your usual holocaust film. They talk about the content. The content is good, sure. But, I'm more interested in the style, the format. In the same year that Tarantino, explicitly, and Inarritu, implicitly, (just to take two examples) are promoting filming out in the great wide open, with Son of Saul director Lazlo Nemes quite deliberately frames everything as small. We are forced by a narrow aspect ratio and a camera that never ventures far from our protagonist (until the end of the film, as it follows a child then leaves us alone in the woods). We look on the world of Son of Saul . From just behind or next to Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig). When we look away, it is Saul's POV we take. If it isn't obvious, this positions us in the audience firmly into the situation with Saul. There are no wide shots, no establishing shots...

That Jonathan looks like his grandfather and (middle) namesake is not just a coincidence, or a cinematic convenience. That workers at the airport at the end of the film look like characters Jonathan has met on his rigid search is also not merely a coincidence, nor a cinematic joke. (I'm not even sure that it's a coincidence that both of Foer's novels involve an old Jewish man who was close to two young women when he was younger; when Lista says her mother thought Safran should marry Augustine because she was older, it reminded me very much of Anna and her sister in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close . Both of the primary plots are driven by objects, as well--the photograph in Everything Is Illuminated , the key in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , but I don't think I'm dealing in objects today.) These people look alike because this story is universalizing. It seems a part of the human condition that we want to know where we come from, and that's vital ...

Opening shot: close up on amber. Gradually, as the camera moves, we see that there's something in the amber. It's a cricket, or a grasshopper. This bit of amber, from a necklace Augustine wore (in the film version of the story) and presumably gave to Safran, was the first thing--or so it is implied--that Jonathan collected . He took it from the bedside table by his grandfather's deathbed. The thing about a bug in amber--and it's an ant in the book, not a cricket or grasshopper or whatever insect that is from the order Orthoptera--is that it is like time standing still, a remnant of the past. (And, if Hollywood (or Michael Crichton, anyway) can be believed, we can get dinosaurs out of them.) I assumed until I saw a couple people online calling is a cricket that the insect in amber in the movie was a grasshopper. Considering Grandfather's attention, a few times, to the moon, I appreciated the grasshopper's link to the wax and wane of the moon via Japanese tra...

Where was I? Adorno, perhaps. This: "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Which isn't what he said. Not really. Brian Oard, in his Mindful Pleasures blog, points out that this quotation is "always taken out of context and rarely footnoted." Hell, I quoted it indirectly from a study guide that has no clear author and which did not identify the specific source for the quotation. Fortunately, Adorno is well enough known among those who know him--he's come up, for me, in my undergraduate history program and my graduate communication program--so a quick google search and I've found more specific reference. The line is from a 1949 essay, "Cultural Criticism and Society." In a bit more context (from an English translation of the collection Prisms ): The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threa...

The thing about Everything Is Illuminated is it suggests--at the same time, mind you--that it's never too late to get over your past and your past will always catch up to you. If The Grey was purgatory , this is somehow both heaven and hell... or maybe just another form of purgatory... or maybe just life. The movie returns us to the idea that life is just stories , the what we choose to remember-- how we choose to remember it--matters more than the reality. Stories change over time. So do memories. Each return of a memory is affected by the previous one--that was a detail in the latest Pixar movie, Inside Out that I rather liked, in fact; positive memories turn negative, joy turns sad... and vice versa, I suppose. Bittersweet is introduced. Everything Is Illuminated is based on Jonathan Safran Foer's first published novel. It is, of course, about a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer going to the Ukraine in search of family history, specifically, the woman in a photo...