David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: Buñuel
in the Labyrinth of the Turtles and Honeyland)
For those who don’t need to have their brain swacked
at the mall by Hustlers or It Chapter Two …
Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles
Here is an odd movie, one befitting the greatest surreal
director, Luis Buñuel. Salvador Simó has made an animated salute to the 1932
making of Buñuel’s once scandalous, now obscure Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread). Using a little budget, after
his anarchist friend Ramón Acín won the lottery (Buñuel spent much of it on a Fiat
touring car for the filming), Tierra imitated
and slightly spoofed the vogue for “ethnographic” documentaries about exotic
places. Unemployed after his MGM-paid visit to Hollywood, and stung by falling
out with Salvador Dalí after their scandalous Un Chien Andalou and even more subversive L’Age d’Or, Buñuel’s exotic place was in his homeland: Spain’s remote,
western Las Hurdes region of medieval poverty and superstition, an outback ripe
for the coming of fascism. The main fiesta involved caballeros pulling the heads off live roosters. A key local income
was the state stipend for taking in poor orphans (soon multiplied by the Civil
War – Franco’s regime would ban Tierra
Sin Pan).
The animation is elegantly simple and austere, with only
a few flourishes (as in the image above). No need to hype the subject
graphically, given the still disturbing clips inserted from Tierra. Simó’s team comes through, as
did Buñuel’s little band (which included one assistant on assignment from … Vogue!). Did Buñuel, prompted by the
Marian idolatry of villagers, really have erotic dreams of the Virgin as the
one cartooned here? His compassion, notably for a sick girl, is shown
touchingly. He also “improvised” certain incidents, including a chicken’s exit and
probably a mountain goat’s. He was young, angry and whipped along by his muse,
and so: a surreal documentary (he was
Werner Herzog’s soul father). This is a moving tribute, too close to his spirit and the harsh themes
to be just a cinephile valentine. It
hops along the gears of creativity with sprightly assurance.
Buñuel is, like surrealism, a past-century sensation,
and yet his best movies (El, Viridiana,
Los Olvidados, Robinson Crusoe, Nazarin, Tristana, Exterminating Angel, Belle
de Jour) remain vitally entertaining and almost timeless (for purity of
Buñuel read his memoir My Last Sigh).
He compared movie-viewing to both hypnosis and rape, and while this moving and
even charming postscript film avoids both of those conditions, it invades our
imagination compellingly. Turtles and
Tierra (which can be found on You
Tube) would make quite a double video – those title turtles refer to the
archaic stone-shelled houses of the villagers.
Honeyland
We know bees are in trouble. None of us know it like
Hatidze Muratova, a rustic beekeeper in Macedonia, north of Greece. In the
docu-dramatic Honeyland, the spindly,
sunbaked (she could be 40 or 55) Hatidze crops honeycombs of wild or semi-tamed
bees. She admires their dense social labor and, ecologically astute, always leaves
them at least half the golden honey (sharing her half with her old, fading mother).
Honey and no dentistry have left spinster Hatidze’s teeth like a decimated Stonehenge.
Directors Tamara Koterska and Ljubomir Stefanov relish her tough spirit, stoical
kindness and Ma Joad femininity. At the market down in town she buys modern
hair dye – chestnut brown – and says “Everyone likes to look nice, Mom, even me.”
Not nice are new, locust-like neighbors who spill from
their big truck. They have nearly feral kids and some skinny cattle. The father
is a crude scrounger who ignores Hatidze’s advice, his greed ravaging his hives
and even spoiling hers. This is less primal capitalism than a Hobbesian state
of semi-nomadic abuse. After helping some of the exploited and bee-stung
children, Hatidze steels herself for sheer survival. This curious movie’s best
value is the fertile buzz of the hives, the rough Balkan landscape, and hard-scrabble
Hatidze staring up at the stars or the contrails of planes: aliens from a less
rooted world.
SALAD (A List)
Remarkable
Dramatic Movies About Poverty
In order of arrival, with year and director:
The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford 1940), The
Bicycle Thief (Vittorio de Sica
1948), The Little Flowers of St. Francis
(Roberto Rossellini 1950), Los Olvidados
(Luis Buñuel 1950), The Lower Depths
(Akira Kurosawa 1957), Nights of Cabiria
(Federico Fellini 1957), The Exiles
(Kent Mackenzie 1961), A Taste of Honey
(Tony Richardson 1961), Hunger
(Henning Carlsen 1966), Mouchette (Robert
Bresson 1967), Killer of Sheep
(Charles Burnett 1978), Ironweed (Hector
Babenco 1987), City of Joy (Roland
Joffé 1992), Always Outnumbered Always
Outgunned (Michael Apted 1998), Rosetta
(Dardenne Bros. 1999), The Pursuit of
Happyness (Gabriele Muccino 2006), Le
Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino 2010), Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik 2010).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
Orson Welles had a yarn for any assistant who came up
with multiple excuses for not doing something:
“(Austrian Emperor) Franz Joseph is riding in his carriage through this
tiny provincial town, plumes and all. The trembling mayor sits next to him and
says, ‘Your Imperial Highness, I apologize to you in the profoundest terms for
the fact that the bells are not ringing in the steeple. There are three
reasons. First, there are no bells in the steeple …’ And Franz Joseph
interrupts him with, ‘Please don’t tell
me the other two reasons.’ Now, that’s a good answer for every assistant
director in the world, working for you in any capacity.” (OW to chum and
director Henry Jaglom in My Lunches with
Orson.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Who
should better dream than a down-and-outer?
After
old Howard’s prospecting pitch in the Tampico flophouse in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Fred C. Dobbs “rolls over on his cot,
with a sneer: ‘Think I’ll go to sleep and dream about piles of gold getting
bigger, and bigger and bigger.’ At daybreak he will wake up inside the dream,
hooked, and soon tells Curtin that ‘gold don’t carry any curse with it. It all
depends on whether the guy who finds it is the right guy.” The dream becomes, of course, his nightmare. (Quote
from the Bogart/Treasure chapter in my
book Starlight Rising, available via
Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
After
a drinking night, uprooted Native American men head “home” through L.A.’s Bunker
Hill tunnel in The Exiles
(independent release 1961; director-writer Kent Mackenzie).
For previous Noshes,
scroll below.
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