#Dialogue with a Somnambulist

[lazyydaisyyy]

There's a term in German, Kopfkino, which means the imagination left to run wild, often magnifying the disturbing, unpleasant thoughts best kept at the mind's edge. The image offered by its literal translation, mental cinema, is what I envision takes place each time I lay my head on the pillow: the projector switches on and the reel starts its endless loops, a whirring machine that comes alive just as I feel ready to shut down.

Chloe Aridjis, “Kopfkino” from Dialogue with a Somnambulist

[eruptedinlight]

Doug Jones’ Face in Every Role | 9 / ?

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - Cesare

[sixty-silver-wishes]

continuing my series of reaction threads to "Caligari" adaptations, I'm finally getting around to watching the 2012 ballet by the Astra Dance Studio! I'd like to thank @the-malfunctioning-somnambulist for sending me the link to it. I was meaning to watch it months ago, but haven't gotten around to it, so I'm excited!

Initial thoughts: Despite the fact that I love classical music, musicals, and opera, I'm really not much of a ballet fan. I've seen a few, but I'm not as familiar with ballet compared to other forms of live theatre. So as a result, I'm not going to be watching this and discussing anything about ballet as an art form, so no specifics on dance and technique and all that. I'll mainly be focusing on the music, story, set design, costuming, characters, etc.

Going in, I'm really excited that a ballet adaptation of Caligari exists at all. I think this is actually the perfect medium for an adaptation of the original silent film- ballet usually contains little, if any, dialogue, so there's no issues with adapting the script to a spoken medium. Ballet and Expressionist silent film acting both employ exaggerated movements and facial expressions to make up for the lack of dialogue, and because theatre of any medium employs the concept of suspension of disbelief, which Caligari as a concept hinges upon, I think elements could potentially translate very well. Much of the original film also relies on open-ended plot, character, and thematic elements, and while other adaptations with spoken dialogue risk lessening this through over-explaining, ballet could theoretically allow a lot more to be left open to interpretation. There's a ton of potential here, so I'm really eager to get into it and share what I think!

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Although it doesn’t contain the types of scares modern-day audiences are used to, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has a haunting, eerily chilling quality. This movie is over a hundred years old. Everyone who starred in it, who was behind the camera when it was made, who saw it upon its initial release is dead and gone. All that’s left of them are these strange images in this imaginary story. No one involved could’ve imagined that a century later, their work would still be influential. Made before sound recordings or colour cinema was possible and before modern-day cinematic techniques were established, it looks unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Combined with its subject matter, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari feels less like a movie from long ago and more like a glimpse into another reality.

Told in flashback, the story takes places in Holstenwall, where the town fair is in full swing. Francis (Friedrich Fehér) and his friend Alan (Hans Heinz v. Twardowski) attend a new attraction presented by Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss). He commands a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt) to tell audiences about the future. Cesare’s predictions of death prove to be true: there is a serial killer in Holstenwall.

The most striking aspect of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the art direction. Buildings lean unnaturally, doorways, stairs, and streets twist like something out of a madman’s notebook. Pieces of furniture are disproportionate to the people who use them. Trees are hardly recognizable as living things. The architecture's angles, curves, and spirals are such that you might not notice a broken window in the background despite it being intact in the previous scene. The shadows are painted, which means people can move through them without disturbing the light. It’s like these places and people are merely fragments of an un-reality, or (appropriately enough) ghosts reliving their actions as best they can considering their life is over. More than an experiment in style, these visuals emphasize the panic Francis and his sweetheart Jane (Lil Dagover) experience as the murders continue. They also employ excellent graphic design techniques. Your eye is naturally drawn to important objects or characters as they follow the bold lines on-screen.

To casual moviegoers, the performances in old films tend to feel over-the-top. We’re used to natural performances, realistic dialogue and sets that mimic our world. Nothing you see in Caligari resembles real life but that’s the point. Even the title cards use a font reminiscent of insane asylum scribbles. The performances turn out to be just about perfect because of how they exaggerated they are. Rather than feel dated, this 1920 film is immediate and mesmerizing.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the kind of movie you could watch a hundred times and still feel like you haven't seen it all. You can tell why it had an impact on filmmakers like Tim Burton and is very much the sort of movie that makes you repeatedly go "Oh! That's where that's from!" It’s so different from what we’re used to that you cannot forget the way it looks or feels. (On Blu-ray, January 15, 2021)

[silenthillmutual]

horror/thriller movie recommendations based on your fave Danganronpa 1/2 character

the series in general: Saw (2004, dir. James Wan) - i can’t give much of a reasoning for this as i haven’t seen it but the “punishment fits the victim” trope appears to be a thing in Saw?

Makoto Naegi: It (2017, dir. Andres Muschietti) - as much about the power of friendship as it is about a fear beyond all others. the premise is probably relatively well known by now for the fact that there’s a big clown in it. content warnings: clowns, unsanitary, implied incest and csa.

Sayaka Maizono: Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) - this suggestion is an incredibly cheap shot, please forgive me. famous film, not sure if i can talk too much about the plotline without giving away the most important part.

Mukuro Ikusaba: Us (2019, dir. Jordan Peele) - doppelgangers show up to wreak havoc on an american family. themes of identity theft. much bloodier than Get Out. 

Leon Kuwata: Scream (1996, dir. Wes Craven) - admittedly haven’t seen this either yet. i know, i know, i’m a fake horror fan. but i know that it was made as a sort of tongue-in-cheek homage to the tropeyness of horror films, and i didn’t want to put any movie too blatantly humorous here. i thought this would fit Leon.

Chihiro Fujisaki: A Quiet Place (2018, dir. John Krasinski) - monsters that attack based on noise terrorize a family. most dialogue is delivered through sign language. also has a really touching family dynamic, especially between the father and his children.

Mondo Oowada: Pet Sematary (1989, dir. Mary Lambert) - haven’t seen this one either, whoops. all i know is it’s about, like, bringing people back from the dead or something, and that it’s based on a Stephen King book.

Kiyotaka Ishimaru: The Stand (1994, dir. Mick Garris) - technically a miniseries, but i wasn’t really sure what other horror story fit him. it’s the world at the end in a final battle between good and evil, and nothing says Ultimate Moral Compass more than that to me.

Hifumi Yamada: Strangers on a Train (1951, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) - the whole “i’ll do your murder if you do mine” kinda hits for chapter 3 i think. i also remember his hostage being his sister, so he’d probably like the relationship between Anne and Barbara.

Celes Ludenberg: Crimson Peak (2015, dir. Guillermo del Toro) - there’s a line the main character says that’s something to the effect of how she’d rather be like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley because she died a widow? that’s Celescore. content warning: incest.

Sakura Oogami: Hereditary (2018, dir. Ari Aster) - both in the way that her dojo is a family business and in the themes of being afraid of hurting your loved ones. content warnings: child death, car accident, decapitation, possession, drug usage.

Toko Fukawa: Rebecca (1940, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) - again haven’t watched or read the book on which it is based but the fact alone that it is based on a book? and it’s not directed by stanley kubrick’s book-ruining ass?

Byakuya Togami: Rope (1948, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) - based on a play which itself was probably based loosely on the Leopold & Loeb case, it’s famous in part for its protagonists being gay. also they have superiority complexes and think that the privileged few should be allowed to murder inferior people because they’re above morality.

Yasuhiro Hagakure: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven) - i feel like this is closer to what his brand of horror would be, but also people not really believing that what’s happening is actually happening is kind of his m.o. too. content warning: i don’t remember if this is explicit in the original or not, but Freddy Krueger was a pedophile.

Aoi Asahina: Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham) - again i just think this is closer to what Hina’s brand of horror would be, but also i feel like the summer camp aesthetic would be for her.

Kyouko Kirigiri: The Secret in Their Eyes (2009, dir. Juan Jose Campanella) - i don’t totally remember it but detective going off the rails trying to solve a rape & murder case. Very intense, but very good.

Junko Enoshima: Midsommar (2019, dir. Ari Aster) - gaslighting people into joining a death cult? yeah, that screams junko. content warnings: graphic suicide, drug usage, gaslighting, people on fire, nudity, sex.

Monokuma: Child’s Play (1988, dir. Tom Holland) - creepy toy carrying the soul of a murderer. still need to finish watching this one, other than “creepy doll” i don’t have anything to offer in the way of content warnings. 

Hajime Hinata: Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele) - reluctant to go too much into details because i wouldn’t want to spoil the film for those who haven’t seen it, but the experiment done on Hajime vibes w this movie. content warning in that this film is about racism.

Twogami: Vertigo (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) - too many details would give away spoilers but the identity theft theme of the film fits for a guy whose talent is in identity theft.

Teruteru Hanamura: Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter) - had a hard time thinking of a horror movie for Teruteru, but Halloween (and 80′s slashers in general) have a tendency to punish the horny.

Mahiru Koizumi: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, dir. Jim Gillespie) - would it be too much of a spoiler to say there’s similarities between this film & what gets Mahiru killed in-game?

Peko Pekoyama: The Purge (2013, dir. James DeMonaco) - people using masks to enact what they feel is justified revenge on the one day of the year when all crime is legal.

Hiyoko Saionji: The VVitch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers) - based on colonial-era folk tales about witches. very atmospheric, features the same kind of abusive slut-shaming verbal assaults Hiyoko hurls at others. content warning for briefly implied incest, some nudity, and parents being shitty.

Ibuki Mioda: Green Room (2015, dir. Jeremy Saulnier) - still need to see this one; punk band tries to survive to the end of the night after witnessing neo-nazis commit a murder.

Mikan Tsumiki: Carrie (1976, dir. Brian De Palma) - another film based on a stephen king novella, and also a pretty famous story. a longtime bullying & abuse victim starts to lose her shit after she begins developing telepathy. content warning for some nudity, fire, and an abusive mother.

Nekomaru Nidai: Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960, dir. Georges Franju) - wasn’t really sure where to go with him either, at first, and settled on body horror considering what happens to him later in-game. a doctor attempts to find a new face for his daughter after she is left disfigured from an accident. 

Gundham Tanaka: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921, dir. Robert Wiene) - a mad scientist claims his hypnotized ‘somnambulist’ can see into the future, including the deaths of carnival-goers. highly influential silent film, german expressionist so peak aesthetic.

Nagito Komaeda: The Silence of the Lambs (1991, dir. Jonathan Demme) - it’s probably well enough known for Hannibal the Cannibal being in it, but it’s worth noting he’s not the primary antagonist of the film. he is the most memorable part of it, and his psychoanalysis is what made me think of Komaeda. content warnings for gore, sexual harassment, referenced cannibalism, period-typical transphobia (period is the late 80s/early 90s).

Chiaki Nanami: V/H/S (2012, various directors) - a horror anthology film of found-footage type shorts, not shown in chronological order of events. i don’t really remember the contents enough for warnings, check at your own risk.

Akane Owari: The Blair Witch Project (1999, dirs. Eduardo Sanchez & Daniel Myrick) - don’t really have a good reason for this one other than “they all go feral, which Akane is seconds from doing at any given moment.” i think she’d dig it. no real content warnings to be had, the original found footage film.

Kazuichi Souda: Jaws (1975, dir. Stephen Spielberg) - i’m not even entirely sure i know what would make him like it, maybe just the mechanical shark? i think we all know this as the movie that made people double down on their hatred of sharks. i don’t particularly care for it, but it’s popular.

Sonia Nevermind: Perfume: Story of a Murderer (2006, dir. Tom Tykwer) - follows a would-be perfumer as he murders women in an attempt to create the perfect scent. in retrospect i probably should have picked something based on a real crime, but i still think she’d like this one.

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu: M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang) - when the police fail to catch a serial child murderer, the criminal underworld steps up to take action into their own hands. fitting, no?

Usami: Trick ‘r Treat (2007, dir. Michael Doughtery) - another sort of anthology film that follows what happens to townsfolk when they don’t abide by Halloween traditions. i put it for Usami because i thought it was actually kind of cute, as far as horror films go.

[trashcanalienist]

Finally got around to reading that Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari comic I have. It's issue 2 of 3, and I don't have the others, but I've seen the film a couple hundred times.

There's so much dialogue ahaha but it does make it easier to differentiate between Alan and Francis because they have. You know. Personalities. And they don't look quite so similar.

Cesare looks beautiful, as always, but sometimes they add little things (character moments) that make me think they don't know that he's not fully aware of what he's doing (being a somnambulist and all)

And there's nothing nicer than seeing Silent Film Eyes in a comic from the nineties. I'm not being sarcastic, it's lovely. (Silent Film Eyes - watch any silent film and pay attention to how the young women move their faces. It also spilled over into early talkies - Dracula, The Mummy, etc - but was gone by the late 30s.)

Oh, that's...that's it, that's what's so strangely beautiful about Cesare (besides everything). He has Silent Film Eyes too.

[nubianamy]

THE GRIFFIN & SABINE CHEAT SHEET When you scratch beneath the surface of the book(s) what do you get? At first appearance, Griffin & Sabine a love story...but it is also more. It's: A mystery A pursuit of self-understanding A passion masque A struggle to awaken A hero's journey (or two) A chess match with darkness A sensual dance with Duende And an alchemical marriage. Where do the names come from? Griffin or Gryphon, is a split creature in transition (mythic and real, lion-eagle). Sabine comes from the Sabine Women who historically represent 'unity'. So what's actually going on? Griffin is, like all of us, engaged on a hero's journey (Joseph Campbell). He is also alone and struggling to come to terms with the contradiction of internal opposites (anima v animus, dark v light) that have him frozen in a state of fear. In an attempt to free Griffin from his lock-down, his psyche instigates a dialogue (gestalt) between the two sides of his internal divide. However, when Sabine emerges, she is already as real as Griffin. In fact, her world is just as tangible as his, because she has equally created him out of her needs. The couple start-out from the opposite sides of two hemispheres—on one side, logic thinly coating cynicism and fear, the other intuition, hope and imagination. Gradually they move toward one another, trying to find a way to combine. Who is Frolatti? Frolatti is Anubis (The Jackal), The Somnambulist, and a Dark Angel, a senior representative of those who chose to keep us all asleep. He wants Griffin to believe that Sabine is a manifestation of insanity, but when Griffin accepts Sabine as his lover, Frolatti takes physical form in order to censor the couple's correspondence (which has become a bridge between opposite worlds). What role does Minnaloushe the cat play in all of this? Part trickster, part lion, part samurai; Minnaloushe keeps Frolatti at arms length. He defends Griffin's back, giving Griffin and Sabine time to come together. The name Minnaloushe comes from the poem The Cat and the Moon by W.B. Yates. Another poem by Yates, 'The Second Coming' runs as a thread through the whole story. But unlike Yate's rough sphinx buried in the desert, this beast represents not Armageddon, but a Renaissance.

[watching-pictures-move]

Viddying The Nasties #31 | Frozen Scream (Roach, 1975) & The Slayer (Cardone, 1982)

“It is one of those works that has proceeded directly to the status of Great Movie without going through the intermediate stage of being a good movie.” Roger Ebert said this about Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, and these words came to mind when I was watching Frank Roach’s Frozen Scream. It’s got a plot that’s total nonsense, seems to be slapped together with no grasp of normal filmmaking language and and is never less than completely fascinating. If I can describe the story, it involves the hero investigating a pair of mad scientists who are searching for the secret of immortality, which to them means enslaving people and turning them into braindead zombies. (The exact method involves freezing people to near death and then reviving them, hence the “frozen” scream in the title.) The hero narrates his quest in a robotic monotone that brings to mind Microsoft Sam, and calls out one of the villains’ “bad acting”, which is a bold claim to be making in this movie.

What follows is a mishmash of dreams drifted into and out of, visual non sequiturs that puncture the somnambulist ambience, a lot of the flat acting one associates with the marginal productions of regional horror but seems thematically appropriate here, and dissonant synthesizer music that serves as the score. I scrambled to jot down notes as I watched this in a desperate attempt to make sense of what I was seeing. A grim reaper in a dream with a scream, a fetching blonde, said blonde appearing topless in what might be another dream, a reflection of a character’s boyfriend turning out to be the blonde, the blonde choking her Paul Simon-ish date (okay, clearly I was a fan of the blonde), a character squawking as they were strangled, a really strange Southern accent, a reference to witches and goblins that seemed like an overreaction, and a cheerful line of dialogue (”I’m not going to guilt, I’m going to hell”). Yet it was no use, as these elements seemed to blend together into one surreal fever dream, assembled with a filmmaking sensibility that seems completely alien to our own.

The characters behave as if they are parodying human behaviour (I mentioned the flat acting earlier, which extends to some really robotic pillow talk), with the “star” (and producer) of the picture, Renee Harmon, shaking up the proceedings with her bizarre, left-field presence. I understand that Harmon has written several books about different aspects of filmmaking, yet if there is any conventional wisdom to be found in those books, none of that is seen on screen. On Harmon’s face is always the threat of a really out-of-place smile, one which never feels all that reassuring. Harmon produced this and other movies and seemed to place herself often in starring roles, yet for her lack of what most would call “talent”, I don’t find her presence egotistical but rather endearing in its strangeness. The violence is crude yet startling, and the ending manages to pierce through the strange fog cast by the film and tap into the genuine existential terror the material deserves.

I was similarly enthralled by The Slayer, which is much closer to what most people would define as a good movie, yet also operates on its own distinct wavelength. There isn’t a whole lot to the story. Four friends vacation on an island off the Atlantic coast while the heroine is taking some much needed rest from her emotionally draining work as an artist. One by one they start to get killed off. Who or what is doing the killing seems to be an afterthought, although a couple of explanations are offered by the ending (it seems to split the difference). The word “dreamlike” can be used to describe vastly different horror movies, from the gory non sequiturs of Lucio Fulci to the shifting menace of the original Nightmare on Elm Street to the low key ambience of Jean Rollin or Jess Franco, and I think this movie definitely feels like a dream in which the characters are adrift and the plot has dissolved. An almost abstract sense of menace hangs over the proceedings, one which sporadically becomes literal when the movie decides to deliver the slasher goods.

The movie has a delicate, elusive atmosphere not unlike what you would find in the work of Rollin or Franco, yet makes it its own by imbuing it with the presence of its island setting. (Herzog’s “voodoo of location” comes to mind, and the inclement weather does wonders to cast a sense of doom over the action.) The proceedings are channeled through the frayed nerves of the heroine and grounded by the mature, lived-in performances of the cast, sliding occasionally into the surreal but never losing grasp of its distinct mood. The sense of isolation is palpable (as in a series of deft cuts after the heroine discovers another victim) and the bursts of violence (which are not all that explicit by the standards of the genre yet are nonetheless grisly) are genuinely jarring. The ending, which offers only ambiguity to conclude the mystery, might be called a cop-out by the less generous, but with its forgoing of easy answers and embrace of the irrational, I think it achieves a deeper unease than a clean denouement would have allowed. The strange spell cast by both these movies can’t be explained away.

[lazyydaisyyy]

I once described the music of my youth as a twilight always waiting to unfurl, but now that darkness has dramatically deepened in tone.

Chloe Aridjis, “The Tension of Transience” from Dialogue with a Somnambulist

[sixty-silver-wishes]

marveling at how cesare the somnambulist has actually one of the saddest concepts for a character I've ever seen and the dude only has one line of dialogue. that's impressive

[meditativeyoga]

Release the tension

Total leisure is the best. That's the minute when one comes to be a buddha. That is the minute of realisation, knowledge, christ-consciousness. You could not be totally loosened up right now. At the inner core a stress will certainly persist.

But beginning kicking back. Beginning from the circumference-- that's where we are, and also we could start only from where we are. Unwind the circumference of your being-- relax your body, unwind your practices, unwind your acts. Walk in a loosened up method, eat in a kicked back way, talk, pay attention in a relaxed method. Decrease every procedure. Don't remain in a hurry and do not be in haste. Tension implies rush, worry, question. Tension indicates a consistent initiative to secure, to be protected, to be safe. Tension suggests preparing for the tomorrow now, or for the afterlife-- worried tomorrow you will not be able to deal with the fact, so be prepared. Tension suggests the past that you have not lived truly however only in some way bypassed, it hangs, it is a hangover, it borders you.

Remember one really fundamental feature of life: any kind of experience that has actually not been lived will hang around you, will certainly persist: 'Complete me! Live me! Full me!' There is an innate top quality in every experience that it tends as well as intends to be ended up, completed. Once finished, it vaporizes, incomplete, it lingers, it torments you, it haunts you, it attracts your interest. It says, 'Just what are you going to do about me? I am still incomplete-- meet me!' Your entire past spends time you with absolutely nothing finished-- since nothing has been lived truly, every little thing in some way bypassed, partly lived, just moderate, in a lukewarm means. There has actually been no intensity, no passion. You have been relocating like a somnambulist, a sleepwalker. That previous hangs, as well as the future produces fear. And in between the past as well as the future is smashed your present, the only reality.

You will certainly need to unwind from the circumference. The very first step in relaxing is the body. Keep in mind as lot of times as possible to search in the body, whether you are bring some tension in the body someplace-- at the neck, in the head, in the legs. Relax it consciously. Just most likely to that component of the body, and encourage that component, state to it carefully 'Kick back!'

And you will certainly be shocked that if you approach any part of your body, it listens, it follows you-- it is your body! With shut eyes, go inside the body from the toe to the head browsing for any type of area where there is a stress. And then talk with that component as you talk with a close friend, allow there be a dialogue in between you as well as your body. Tell it to unwind, as well as tell it, 'There is nothing to be afraid. Do not hesitate. I am below to take care-- you could unwind.' Slowly, slowly you will learn the propensity of it. The body comes to be relaxed.

Then take one more step, a little much deeper, inform the mind to loosen up. And if the body pays attention, mind also listens, however you can not start with the mind-- you need to start from the beginning. You could not begin with the center. Lots of people begin with the mind and they stop working, they stop working since they begin from a wrong place. Whatever should be carried out in the ideal order.

If you become with the ability of unwinding the body voluntarily, after that you will be able to help your mind kick back voluntarily.

When the mind is kicked back, after that start relaxing your heart, the globe of your sensations, feelings-- which is much more intricate, extra subtle. Currently you will certainly be relocating with trust fund, with terrific trust fund in yourself. Now, you will certainly know it is feasible. If it is feasible with the body as well as possible with the mind, it is possible with the heart also. Then only, when you have undergone these 3 steps, could you take the fourth. Now you can most likely to the innermost core of your being, which is beyond body, mind, heart: the extremely centre of your presence. As well as you will be able to unwind it too.

And that leisure certainly brings the biggest pleasure possible, the best in ecstasy, acceptance. You will certainly teem with happiness and also rejoicing. Your life will have the quality of dancing to it. The whole of presence is dancing, other than male. The entire of existence remains in a very kicked back activity, activity there is, certainly, yet it is absolutely loosened up. Trees are expanding and birds are chirping and also rivers are flowing, stars are relocating: whatever is entering an extremely relaxed method. No rush, no haste, no concern, and no waste. Other than man. Male has actually fallen a victim of his mind.

Man could rise above gods as well as fall below animals. Guy has a wonderful spectrum. From the least expensive to the highest possible, male is a ladder. Begin with the body, and after that go, slowly, slowly, further. And also do not begin with anything else unless you have very first addressed the key. If your body is strained, do not start with the mind. Wait. Job on the body. And just small things are of enormous help.

You stroll at a certain speed, that has become habitual, automated. Now try to walk slowly. Buddha utilized to claim to his disciples, 'Walk really gradually, and take each action very purposely.' If you take each step consciously, you are bound to stroll slowly. If you are running, hurrying, you will neglect to keep in mind. Buddha strolls very gradually. Simply try walking very slowly, as well as you will be surprised-- a new high quality of recognition starts occurring in the body. Consume slowly, as well as you will be shocked-- there is terrific leisure. Do whatever slowly ... just to transform the old pattern, simply ahead from old habits.

First the body needs to become entirely kicked back, like a toddler, after that only start with the mind. Move scientifically: first the most basic, after that the complicated, then the a lot more intricate. And after that just can you loosen up at the ultimate core. You ask me, 'Will you state something extra about relaxation? I recognize a tension deep in the core of me and also think that I have possibly never been entirely loosened up.' That is the circumstance of every human being. It excels that you realize-- millions are unaware of it. You are honored that you are conscious, because if you understand then something could be done. If you are not conscious, then nothing is possible. Awareness is the start of transformation.

Relaxation is one of the most complex sensations-- extremely rich, multidimensional. All these things are component of it: let-go, trust, surrender, love, acceptance, going with the flow, union with presence, egolessness, euphoria. All these are component of it, and also all these begin happening if you find out the means of relaxation.

Your supposed religions have actually made you very strained, due to the fact that they have developed regret in you. My effort below is to assist you do away with all sense of guilt and also all concern. I want to inform you: there is no hell as well as no paradise. So don't be afraid of heck and don't be money grubbing for heaven. All that exists is this moment. You can make this minute a hell or a paradise-- that certainly is possible-- however there is no paradise or heck elsewhere. Heck is when you are all strained, as well as paradise is when you are all loosened up. Complete relaxation is paradise!

[chiseler]

HEROES FOR SALE: How Warner Bros. Sold the Revolution... and Then Took It Back

As a darkened inventory of American life in the years after the Great War, William A. Wellman’s Heroes for Sale has few peers. Like its drug-addled protagonist, it’s quick with a furtive grin to cover its nervous tension; its rhythms are sinuous, punchy, never maudlin yet prone to trembling fits. It is a film that moves from scene to scene, incident to incident, with a rash self-assurance, and a grim determination to embody everything that carried the United States, its people and its institutions, to a condition of deep estrangement. And it was released on June 17, 1933.

Three months prior to that date, Saturday March 4th, Franklin Roosevelt took an Oath of Office that had been recited 31 times before him, whereupon he stood, anchored to the podium and began to turn the reality reflected in Wellman’s film inside out. Prosperity was right around the corner. Of course, the President could perform such miracles in rhetorical terms, but he would end by tinkering with the economic system’s status quo. Indeed, the Great Depression itself would continue for many years.

If the mythos of FDR, the man who transformed Capitalism is just that, a story we Americans tell ourselves then Heroes for Sale represents another kind of storytelling – one firmly rooted to the soiled experience of the period. Amid portrayals of a nation on the skids – thuggish cops, corrupt bankers and bone-weary war vets (slogging through more rain and mud than they’d ever encountered on the battlefield) -- one rather pointed and moving reference to America's emerging New Deal drags itself from out of the grime. “It’s just common horse sense, ” claims a small voice. Will national leadership ever find another spokesman as convincing as the great Richard Barthelmess, that half-whispered deadpan amplified by a fledgling technology – the Vitaphone? After enduring shrapnel to the spine, dependency on morphine, plus a prison stretch, his character Tom Holmes channels the country’s pain; and his catalog of personal miseries – including the sudden death of his young wife – qualifies him as the voice of wisdom when he explains…

“It takes more than one sock in the jaw to lick 120 million people.”

How did Richard Barthelmess – owner of the flattest murmur in Talking Pictures; a far distance from the gilded oratory of Franklin Roosevelt – manage to sell this shiny chunk of New Deal propaganda? How did he take the film's almost-crass reduction of America's economic cataclysm, that metaphorical sock on the jaw, and make it sound reasonable? Barthelmess was 37 when he made Heroes for Sale; an aging Juvenile who less than a decade earlier had been one of Hollywood's biggest box-office titans. But no matter how smoothly he seemed to have survived the transition, his would always be a screen presence more redolent of the just-passed Silent-era than the strange new world of synchronized sound. And yet, through a delivery rich with nuance for generous listeners and a glum piquancy for everyone else, deeply informed by an awareness of his own fading stardom, his slightly unsettling air of a man jousting with ghosts lends tremendous force to the New Deal line. It echoes and resolves itself in the viewer's consciousness precisely because it is so eerily plainspoken, as if by some half-grinning somnambulist ordering a ham on rye. Through it we are in the presence of a living compound myth, a crisp monotone that brims with vacillating waves of hope and despair.

Tom is “The Dirty Thirties.” A symbolic figure looming bigger than New Deal economics, towering over Capitalism itself, he’s reduced to just another soldier-cum-hobo by the film’s final reel, having relinquished a small fortune to feed thousands before inevitably going “on the bum.” If he emits wretchedness and self-abnegation, it’s because Tom was originally intended to be an overt stand-in for Jesus Christ��� a not-so-gentle savior who attends I.W.W. meetings and participates in the Bonus March, even hurling a riotous brick at the police. These strident scenes, along with “heretical” references to the Nazarene, were ultimately dropped; and yet the explosive political messages remain – along with what feels like the entirety of post WWI American experience.

The furious pace of Warner Brothers/First National movies makes the task possible. And yet Heroes for Sale (variously titled during its development Breadline and The Forgotten Man) possesses even more jittery gall than might be expected. The first five minutes of the film, dealing with Tom's wartime experiences, compress events equal to the first half hour of Kubrick's Paths of Glory into five tense minutes, complete with battle, cowardice, prisoner taken, protagonist left for dead, cowardly officer falsely credited with heroism.

Within fifteen minutes of the movie's start, Tom is in civvies, nursing a drug habit brought on by his wartime injuries, and about to lose his job in the bank where he works alongside the cowardly officer (son of the manager). An unsympathetic bank manager espouses the unfeeling view that veterans cannot expect to be treated better than anyone else now the war is over, in the first of many scenes harnessing political points about the malaise of America to the incessant forward thrust of the narrative.

Director William Wellman channels the quivering, muscular style of Depression-era Warner Brothers, the fastest and most febrile of the studios. A war veteran himself (but a flier: "I hate the infantry!") with a steel plate in his head, "Wild Bill" brought a pugnacious, propulsive quality to all his work, carefully seeding it with little sentimental moments. Like all his contemporaries at Warners, Wellman slowed his pace as the forties began, but unlike most of them he never lost the taste for cartoonish simplicity, brutality, and forceful statement which mark Heroes for Sale so incisively.

Of course that other, wholly unexpected element creeps into the film’s production history: blatant Socialism via Christian theology – the Barthemess character standing in for the Son of God. Abortive or not this direct reference to Tom Holmes as Jesus is definitely a wet flounder to the back of the head. True, Warner Brothers often churned out incendiary films like The Mayor of Hell and Wild Boys of the Road – yet in terms of sheer chutzpah, nothing approaches the attempted deification of a morphine-addicted Wob, who renounces personal wealth in favor of mass solidarity.

While it takes real discipline in these latter days to imagine any motion picture studio, particularly one with the industrial majesty of Warner Bros., embracing any model of Socialism, in 1933 that notion took on a logic it did not have before, and would not have at any time thereafter. Unemployment hit record highs. And as America’s collective belly howled, political “extremism” became so mainstream that at least one Hollywood genius merchandized it with stupendous results.  

The role of Darryl F. Zanuck in the creation of Heroes for Sale is as crucial as it is, ultimately, obscure. In one sense, his memos to Wellman, the director usually addressed with an easy, confident familiarity as "Billy," reveal the not uncommon spectacle of a motion picture executive of that epoch, freely exercising power over the plot and presentation of a film he was otherwise not involved in the creation of, but emerging from the stenographic ooze is a question whose answer is no more than murky: To what extent did Zanuck grasp that some of his advice to Wellman, indeed the very direction he was moving the project, little by little, could be construed as politically volatile, even radically anti-Capitalist?

The internal documents are fascinating on this point, in part because they're absolutely terse and clearly, consciously motivated by a perfectly honorable instinct for good storytelling. And yet, in at least one crucial, breathtaking instance, Darryl Zanuck came perilously close to advocating a kind of Socialism that would dwarf the New Deal ethos that Heroes for Sale, in the end, embraced. For it was the executive producer himself who ordered that Tom Holmes become an all-talking incarnation of Divinity: “we are doing nothing but telling the life of Christ, a man who lived and died for the people but they never realized it until centuries after he was gone.”

In the same memo, dated January 27, 1933, Zanuck dictates the final scene of the film, which, at the time, was still being called Breadline…

“Last night I reviewed the story of Breadline in my mind. I think the finish should be exactly as outlined, or at least something close to it. After all, what our story must leave the audience with at its finish is a feeling of hope. In other words, we must not feel that Barthelmess has lived and died in vain and I think the following scene gives it to us.

“After the newspaper expose in Washington in which they print Tom’s past record, bringing out the fact that he was a narcotic addict sentenced to an asylum, that he was a red and served a term in prison for inciting a mob to riot, etc., which paints Tom in the blackest light, we lap dissolve to the office of the little mission and we see the little girl putting up the bronze placard on the wall while Tom’s son, a little boy of about six, stands watching. The dialogue runs something like this:

    BOY:     That’s my Daddy, isn’t it Mary?

    The girl has tears in her eyes. She nods.

    BOY:     He was a wonderful man, wasn’t he?

    GIRL: (Nods)     He lived for everybody but himself – he lived for the people –

    BOY:     Was there ever anybody else like him?

    GIRL:     Yes – another man – a man who died on the cross at Calvary nineteen hundred years ago.                            

    BOY: (Wistfully looking up at the picture)     When I grow up I want to be a man like my Daddy.

“The camera zooms outside and we see a breadline, a block long, standing in the rain. Fade out.”

Heroes for Sale is a film on tenterhooks – even the sonic presence of Wellman’s masterpiece, highly concentrated in the delivery of its leading man, conveys addled fatalism… Rain never sounded so much like doom, nor have awkward silences implied so much dread, though Wild Boys of the Road and The Mayor of Hell do leap to mind. All three pictures, not incidentally, hit screens in (the aforementioned nadir year) 1933. In the case of Heroes, zeitgeist may well have had Zanuck by the nose, compelling him to move beyond his stated support for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Chalking up another curiosity to Great Depression metaphysics: Wellman, director of both Wild Boys and Heroes had an un-credited hand in The Mayor as well – three of the most cantankerous, anti-establishment talkies ever made; meanwhile the man was a registered Republican.

Important to keep reinforcing that Zanuck and Wellman were consummate professionals for whom storytelling trumped all, so that the marketability of revolutionary themes may have been a temptation too great to resist. Slogans like “Give Depression the Warner Wallop!” tend to explain the studio’s output of pugnacious Leftism as a matter of supply and demand… an alternative strategy to MGM, with its ethos of ermine bathmats. Capitalism was leaving itself wide open to a cinema of opportunistic body blows.

We’re still in the first reel when Barthelmess is freed of his drug addiction in a swift montage which reduces him to a filing card, promptly marked "CURED." Discharged, he meets Loretta Young, Warners' resident sexy saint, as well as Aline McMahon and Robert Barrat, an immigrant communist and inventor. Most Wellman films feature some overdone caricature figure, and Barrat is this one's, but he's a fascinating character all the same, a vehicle for denouncing Capitalism while also suggesting that revolutionaries are all phonies.

(Hollywood's attitude toward revolutionaries is exemplified by the character played by James Ellison in Fifth Avenue Girl, 1939, who is denounced by Ginger Rogers for using a lot of fancy words he doesn't even understand in order to deny his romantic emotions.)

The story's developments from here are equally abrupt, surprising and cataclysmic: Barrat invents a revolutionary industrial process which Barthelmess sells to a sympathetic boss (Grant Mitchell, a frequent, ineffectual patriarch for Warners) who sadly dies: the new bosses use the invention to render the human workforce redundant. A protest turns into a riot, and Loretta dies. Barthelmess has been rejected by his former colleagues and is now imprisoned for his role in the riot which in fact he tried to stop. His most loyal friend is Barrat, but Barrat is now a Capitalist swine: his anti-society stance masked a fundamental contempt for humanity which can be fulfilled just easily in the role of millionaire.

Barthelmess, eventually released, uses his share of the incoming fortune to set up a soup kitchen, but detectives from the anti-Communist squad hound him out of town. Sheltering under a bridge with fellow hobos during a torrential rainstorm, he meets the WWI comrade who stole the credit for his heroism. The real hero and the phony are both reduced to the same squalor, but Barthelmess faces the future with optimism...

Squatting in the downpour, he makes his famous pronouncement on FDR’s New Deal.

Moments later the cops arrive to harass, humiliate and goad the men elsewhere.

The endless trek begins all over again, and Tom’s cowardly pal asks…

“Now where?”  

by Daniel Riccuito, Tom Sutpen and David Cairns

This article first appeared in the pages of Cineaste.

[kybalious]

Echoes (Diaspora)

Catechism

You were once a human being, weren’t you? You’ve come a far way since that day, however. I know what it’s like, though. Denying your nature, trying to find meaning in every little incessant detail that pops up in the mundane day to day routine that is life.

It’s like going to church. A ritualistic decision that serves no functional purpose, other than to pay your dues to the air that surrounds you. Maybe there is a God, maybe God is a myth; Maybe we all are God? I’m sorry, I ramble.

Do you remember what it was like, being taught that the world was the dark place you were always told it wasn’t? How people would rape, murder, deceive, and steal, just to get their way? See, for me, I never was explicitly told that. I more or less was made to find out of my own accord.

To that end, I have become somewhat of a moral relativist; to me, there is no such thing as good, nor is there such a thing as evil. All of these strange perceptions that we use to judge reality around us, are just a series of artifacts of the human mind.

Now, that isn’t to say that some acts aren’t bad. Sure, an act can be bad, but in the a priori state of not having been executed and not having any intent or will attached to it, an action is inherently neutral. It’s only the corresponding meaning that the actor applies to the action that really gives the action any moral standing.

That’s why you’ll hear stories of cops killing people and being lauded for their bravery, but then you’ll flip over a few channels and hear another story about how some homicidal maniac killed multiple people, and suddenly they’re the pariah that you were looking for.

“Who are you talking to?”

A man came up and sat next to me on the bench where I was currently located. At that moment, I realized I was just mumbling all of my internal monologue out loud.

“Oh… I must have been thinking out loud. I’m sorry, did I disturb you?”

“Disturb would be a good word for the things I heard coming from your mouth.”

I looked over to the man, to view the bewilderment in his eyes. It was almost as if his eyes were caught ablaze with the conflagration of confusion and disorientation. He scratched his head rather roughly while he just looked at me, trying to comprehend why it was that I said all these things.

“You know, nothing is even real anyways.”

“Wait, where did you go?”

I had looked away for a brief moment, to investigate the source of a strange sound I had heard, when, upon returning my gaze to the man, I came to find that he was no longer there. For one brief instant, I felt as though I were completely lost. Like I didn’t belong in this universe. Like everything was just a myth, anyways.

Somnambulist

It was a cold day in mid-December, when he found himself lying out in the grass, staring up at the stars. This seems like it should be snowing weather, he would muse to himself, while he let the radiation from light years away penetrate his eyes and dig themselves into his brain, that he may perceive the points of light.

“I wonder what happens when we die. No… I wonder what happens before we’re born.”’

He would find himself musing on thoughts like these often, pondering the ineffable nature of the world around him. He found comfort in knowing that there were plenty of unknowns in the world; having an unknown gave him a meaning to keep trying to know, more and more.

It was times like this, when he was pondering the nature of the universe, that he found himself more and more enraptured in the thoughts coursing through his mind. To him, it was almost as if his mind were veins, plotting the course of existence, and his thoughts were the lifeblood that kept him ever propelling forward through life. There was no sense of a “wrong” thought.

He would sometimes hear voices in his head, but it never concerned him too much. He would just assume that it was just a thought that had came into being in his head of its own volition, as he was always used to having these uninspired thoughts. Throughout the years, though, the voices started to become more dominant.

It was almost as though his thoughts were talking to him, trying to direct him in some strange sort of way. Upon thinking about it, he came to the realization that it seems like, instead of making a decision of his own volition to perform an action (“I think I’m going to go take a shower now”), his mind would speak to him and mandate the action that he should be performing (“You should go take a shower now”).

Predicate

Before he acted, he would always consult with the voice in his head. It used to be several different voices, but now it’s just one: a gravelly, unidentifiable bark lodged in the back of his head. Well, it seems like it’s the back of his head, to him, but, when you really get down to it, does it matter what the physical location of such a voice is?

Anyways, the voice in his head became like a companion to him. He came to adore it, so much so that he gave it an identifier. He would refer to that disembodied source of sound as “J”, for it just seemed proper to do so.

“He keeps looking at me… Doesn’t he? I can feel his vision burning into my flesh.”

“You should go and do what needs to be done.”

“But what should I do? I don’t know how to handle this.”

“Child, how long have we been going over this?”

“Well, you’ve been here for years, it would seem… I don’t know. I just want to know what to do.”

“Just go forth, child. Go forth, and act.”

With that bit of dialogue, his husk of a body suddenly went cold; his eyes, once a window into his soul, vibrant with energy and awareness, faded into a muted darkness, fixated on the man he believed was watching him.

And without thinking, without meaning, his body began to lurch forward, further and further, picking up speed with each passing moment, towards the Watcher.

Meanwhile, the Watcher, as he had come to identify the man in his mind, was sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper, sometimes looking up from his newspaper to check if the bus was coming yet. He had this ritual, daily. He didn’t believe too much in driving his own vehicle, because he felt it was just fiscally irresponsible, so he relied a lot on public transport.

After a moment, the Watcher noticed that something seemed strange. He saw someone gradually approaching him.

“Is he coming towards me? I can’t tell… “

A few steps more.

“Why is he coming to me? I don’t know this guy…”

Back to the subject, the voice in his head has become a roar. Furiously, it kept pushing him forward. Go on, you can do it, just show him why he shouldn’t be watching you! Don’t be a coward!

He broke into a run, dashing madly towards the Watcher. He kept sprinting and sprinting until he was right up in front of the man, and tore his newspaper away, throwing it into the wind.

“I know you’ve been watching me. I’ve seen you, every day, for weeks now, constantly peeking at me over the edge of your newspaper.”

The man shuddered, and looked at him, unable to speak due to the fear coursing through his body.

“I-.... I-i-i.....”

“There’s no time for your words now. You know what must come next.”

“What is that sup-“

And just like that, he slipped behind the man, and twisted his neck as precisely and quickly as he could. The man hunched over, his body now minus a soul, just an empty cocoon of blood and organs, waiting for someone to come and take him away.

“You’ve done good, child. You should leave, before anyone sees what you’ve done. We aren’t meant to take credit for our actions, no matter how much they may make the world a better place. You should go and reward yourself. Go see a movie.”

And with that, he ran off into the horizon, headed to the nearest cinemaplex that his memory could allow him to locate.

[erminecore]

me: deliberately writes characters who don’t know jack shit so I don’t have to obsessively fact check the setting and don’t have to look up weird shit like period accurate carpentry or hypothetical economic structures also me: viscerally wants to use words like “somnambulist” and “vintner” and have it mesh with dialogue/story flow bc I like them :>