So I’ve still got Six Feet Under on the brain.  Spoilers, below the fold.

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So last night, we’re flipping through the channels and trying to pretend like we don’t realize that we’re missing the second-to-last Six Feet Under ever, and we stumble across a Japanese-language channel, KBFD, which is apparently airing some kind of soap opera.  Apparently, because while the thing was subtitled, we only saw about thirty seconds’ worth, but those thirty seconds were worth an awful lot.

To wit:  a very good-looking upper-middle class Japanese couple is having a screaming fight.  Or at least she’s screaming; he appears to be in massive retreat.  What we catch of the dialogue is the following:

He:  Okay, okay—and I’ll stop taking the cooking class!

She:  And get rid of your blog right now!

At which point their small child appears, and tearfully asks why mommy and daddy are fighting again.  “It’s okay,” her mother tells her, tears streaming down her own face.  “Mommy’s just very angry.”

I found myself awake much of the night obsessing over this scene.  Had his outside interests really carried him so far away from his familial responsibilities that the benefits of the cooking class were completely overshadowed by the mere fact of his periodic absence from the home?  And what was it about his blog that was so upsetting?  His links to the hot mommy bloggers?  His comment-thread political arguments?  His repeated dissing of the MSM?

Alas, we moved on in our channel-surfing, so I have no idea how it all turned out.  But the speculation is at least 80% of the fun.

I was about to open by asking whether there was a physical equivalent to depression, because that’s what I think I’ve got.  And of course there is:  it’s called depression.  Duh.

I don’t want to overstate my current situation; things are just not all that bad.  I’m enjoying being still, enjoying being lazy.  I’m just monumentally unmotivated to do any of the dozens of tasks on my to-do list.  I recognize that if I don’t do them, I’m going to be setting myself up for a period of total panic before the semester begins.  Even so, I just can’t be bothered.  I need to write memos.  I need to write reports.  I need to write proposals.  I need to read things for my fall classes.  I need to finish compiling statistics.  But I just plain don’t want to.

There are other things I want to do—want to continue tinkering with new hardware and software; want to begin sketching out the new project in earnest; want to keep learning the things I’ve begun learning this summer—but the need to deal with the above administrative stuff is interfering.  It’s impossible to think clearly about the new project, for instance, when I know that I’ve got those memos that need to get written.

So what have I been doing?  As I mentioned last night, some chunk of the weekend was spent in getting caught up on Six Feet Under.  I missed an episode while I was in Rome, and another in a fit of exhaustion after getting back.  Through the miracle of the internets, I was able to see them both yesterday, and then last night’s episode.  And, in case you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll say nothing particular—except that, nine episodes into what has otherwise been a pretty whiny, uninspired season, they’ve finally gotten my attention.  And how.

And aside from that, I spent much of the weekend rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  I picked up Half-Blood Prince in the Houston airport on my way back into the country, but when I started it, I realized that I hadn’t a clue where we’d left off.  So some backtracking, and now I’m ready to move forward again.

There’s a theme there, I think:  the need to catch up before moving on.  There are two things in it, though, that leave me feeling like a lazy, ineffectual slug, a feeling that does little to help motivate me to get more done.  The first, of course, is that both HP and SFU are one-hundred percent, entirely about entertainment.  Despite the fact that each, to varying extents, falls within the boundaries of my field, I know full well that I’ll never do anything productive with either of them.  So I can’t even rationalize all this lying around as being even vaguely work-related.  (And that need—to justify doing something for fun—annoys me quite intensely, so much so that the deep irritation I’ve been feeling toward the profession and its policing strategies completely—if, gods willing, temporarily—overcomes my desire to succeed in it.)

And second, the mere fact of such backtracking leaves me feeling like I’m running in place, stuck on my little wheel, huffing and puffing and getting nowhere.  There’s something a little too revealingly metaphoric about it:  having finished the book, having gotten tenure, having run the marathon, having accomplished what goals I’ve had before me, I’m still pounding on, but aimlessly, directionlessly.  Until something, somewhere, simply refuses to go forward any more.

Yesterday was a fabulous day at documentary boot camp, and a very good note for me to go out on.  There are, in fact, two more days to go in the Flaherty, but I’m off to Louisiana this morning.  And though I’m a little burned out, I’m still regretting missing the last two days of films.

Yesterday’s lineup (during which the morning session was cancelled):

Wednesday, July 15, 1.00 pm

– El perro negro (The Black Dog:  Stories from the Spanish Civil War, dir. Peter Forgács, 2005, 84 min)

Wednesday, July 15, 3.15 pm

Presentation by The Labyrinth Project:

– Tracing the Decay of Fiction:  Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill

– Three Winters in the Sun:  Einstein in California

– Bleeding Through:  Layers of Los Angeles

Wednesday, July 15, 8.00 pm

– La Television y Yo (Television and Me, dir. Andres Di Tella, 2003, 75 min)

– Del Olvido al no me Acuerdo (I Forgot, I Don’t Remember, dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo, 1999, 70 min)

All of these films and interactive projects were wonderful, but La Television y Yo demands special mention; this film begins from its director’s sense that, due to the seven years of his childhood his family spent abroad, he missed some key to Argentine life that could have been found on television.  Di Tella begins an exploration of early Argentine television but finds all possible avenues for investigation to be blocked, and instead gradually comes to recognize that his interests demand in part an exploration of his own family history.  The film becomes part autobiography and part public history, and in no small part a meditation on its own failures to fully comprehend either.

I’m headed to my reunion shortly—how appropriate to be revisiting my own past on the heels of these documentary explorations of memory and history…

Another foreshortened day at the Flaherty; in the middle of the afternoon screening, I began developing a massive headache, so when it was over, I headed home, took a nap, had a quiet dinner, and did some reading.  Print is so soothing after such intensive experience with images—which only surprises me because my usual experience over the last twelve years has been soothing myself with images after ingesting too much text.

Anyhow, yesterday’s bill, as far as I made it:

Tuesday, June 14, 9.00 am

– Paradox (dir. Leandro Katz, 2001, 30 min)

– Afrique, je te plumerai (Africa, I will fleece you, dir. Jean-Marie Temo, 1992, 88 min)

Tuesday, June 14, 2.00 pm

– clip from Time in the Sun (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1940, 55 min)

– Un Banquete en Tetlapayac (dir. Olivier Debroise, 2000, 100 min)

Yesterday’s films were fascinating, but it’s easy for me to understand why my brain short-circuited in their midst.  Paradox is a meditative exploration of the disjunctions of contemporary existence in the so-called “banana republics”; Katz alternates between silent, eerily still images of an ancient idol (the Dragon of Quiriguá) and the frenetic activity of the banana plantation and industry that surrounds it.  The paradox manifests both in these contradictions between past and present, stillness and activity, freedom and labor, as well as in the mysterious absence of their mediating, causal term: the colonialism that destroyed one and installed the other.

Afrique, je te plumerai likewise explores the damage done by successive forms of colonialist rule in Cameroon, but does so with an emphasis on communication, on the role of language, print, and visual media forms in continuing a post-colonial oppression.

The afternoon’s films were of a quite different order, and I wish I could have fully concentrated on them, as I’m pretty sure that what I’ve comprehended is a mere skimming of the surface.  The basic backdrop is this:  in 1930, Sergei Eisenstein traveled to Mexico to begin filming what was intended to be his epic study, Que Viva Mexico!, funded in large part by Upton Sinclair.  Two years later, however, Eisenstein was forced to leave Mexico, both by the deepening economic crisis of the Depression and by Josef Stalin’s demand that the filmmaker return to the Soviet Union.  Eisenstein lost control of the footage he’d shot; Sinclair tried several times to send the footage to Eisenstein in Russia, but as the filmmaker had by this point been denounced as a Trotskyite, the Soviet film industry blocked the importation of the film.  As a result, only pieces of Eisenstein’s film have been released, and only as edited together by others, including Thunder over Mexico (1933), by Sol Lesser, and Time in the Sun (1940), by Mary Seton.  (A project aimed at the restoration of Eisenstein’s original plan now exists, though it’s a bit of a stretch to understand how such a project could ever be “definitive.”)

In any event:  in 1998, Olivier Debroise returned to Tetlapayac, the hacienda where Eisenstein spent much of 1931, in an effort to explore the mysteries surrounding this unfinished film.  Un Banquete en Tetlapayac begins with the shooting death of Rosalita, the sister of one of Eisenstein’s actors, and then proceeds through a kind of imaginative reenactment of the events of that period.  Debroise brings together a collection of contemporary writers and artists, each of whom inhabits the role of one of the figures who spent time at Tetlapayac while Eisenstein was there, figures including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Katherine Anne Porter, Elie Faure, Frances Flynn Paine, Hart Crane, and others.  The film becomes a fascinating series of meditations on the mode of history, and particularly on the impossibility of fully apprehending that for which there are only incomplete records—a circumstance that we come to understand describes the entirety of the past, which is never fully gone, but can never be experienced, either.

I’m going to hope to see this film again at some point; it’s exceedingly rich, both visually and thematically, and my poor over-taxed brain simply couldn’t process it.

No screening this morning, so I’ve got a bit more time to recuperate, before re-entering the theater…

A shorter day at documentary bootcamp yesterday; I only caught the beginning of the evening session, as I wanted to get home and relax a bit.  The films are amazing, but the pace is intense, and I needed a bit more downtime.

Anyhow, yesterday’s bill of fare, as far as I made it:

Monday, June 13, 9.00 am

– Ssitkim - Talking to the Dead (dir. Soon-Mi Yoo, 2004, 36 min)

– Exhumations and Inhumations in Guatemala (dir. Emiliana Aguilar, 2001, 16 min)

– Chile, Obstinate Memory (dir. Patricio Guzman, 1997, 35 min)

Monday, June 13, 2.00 pm

– Suite for Freedom (dirs. Caroline Leaf, Luc Perez, and Aleksandro Korejwo, 2005, 15 min)

– Into the Arms of Strangers:  Stories of the Kindertransport (dir. Mark Jonathan Harris, 2000, 122 min)

If there’s anything to be said of yesterday—a very weepy day in the theater—it’s that I think we’ve turned a corner, from unrelieved death and destruction, through exhuming the dead, to tales of escape and survival.  (Suite for Freedom is a project of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.) I’m thinking—or maybe hoping—that we must be on an upswing.  Last night’s crowd at the evening screening was much rowdier than they had been previously, which I attribute to the catharsis produced by the Kindertransport film, a far more traditional, mainstream, big-budget documentary than anything else we’ve seen.  So I’m heading into today in a guardedly optimistic fashion, looking forward to seeing what’s next.

After further thought, I’ve decided that there was something more to last night’s film than I’ve given it credit for, and that the protracted nature of its brutal imagery was up to something more serious than what it seemed, on first glance.  There’s something in the duration of the images, and the length of the film, that forces the viewer to really encounter the horror of war, to move beyond a desire to look away, to understand that desire as a displacement of one’s wish not to see, to produce instead a visceral response to the damage.  To be brutalized, as are those we watch.

Again, or so I think today.  But I was much too wrung out, much too tired and without emotional reserves, to have been able to fully participate and adequately respond last night.

Today continues in a thoroughly draining fashion.  More this evening, if I can manage it.

[UPDATE 6.14.05, 8.27 am: edit to correct stupid day/date mistakes.]

Yesterday was an up-and-down day at documentary boot camp—more up than down, though it ended on a stunningly bad note.

Sunday, June 12, 9.00 am

– El abuelo Cheno y otras historias (dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo, 1995, 30 min)

– Salvador Allende (dir. Patricio Guzman, 2004, 100 min)

Sunday, June 12, 2.00 pm

films from “Selling Democracy:  Films of the Marshall Plan”

– Me and Mr. Marshall (attr. Stuart Schulberg, 1949, 13 min)

– Es Liegt an dir! (It’s Up to You!, dir. Wolgang Kiepenheuer, 1948, 16 min)

– Houen Zo! (Steady as She Goes!, dir Herman van der Horst, 1952, 21 min)

– Nicht storen! Funktionarsversammlung (Do Not Disturb! Meeting in Progress, dir. Hans Herbert, ca. 1950, 16 min)

– Aquila (dir. Jacopo Erbi, ca. 1950, 21 min)

Sunday, June 12, 8.00 pm

– Los Angeles Station (dir. Leandro Katz, 1976, 7.5 min)

– Oh! Uomo (dir. Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, 2004, 71 min)

So, on the up side:  The morning’s program was stunning.  These two films, particularly in sequence, bring the viewer into a sense of first, the importance of memory in giving life significance, and second, the impossibility of measuring the present against idealized memories of the past.  Salvador Allende was particularly stunning, less for its portrait of Allende himself than for Guzman’s sense of alienation and exile, and for the impossibility of confronting the past in a Chile that wants nothing more than to forget.

The Marshall Plan films were, by contrast, more interesting as period pieces than as films; different pieces had different kind of charms, but they were often clunky and obvious.  Aquila was pretty hamfisted, and yet bizarrely fascinating:  The Bicycle Thief gets a job at a refinery, and everything’s okay!

Leandro Katz, in the evening session, gave a fantastic talk about his installations before showing the brief but haunting Los Angeles Station.  This was followed by Oh! Uomo, which was for me the low point of the day.  This film is the third in a trilogy of films about World War I, which repurposes footage of refugees and other people damaged by the war.  Other critics find the film moving, with a substantive message about the horrors of war; perhaps I’d have come to that conclusion, too, if I’d been able to make it all the way through the film.  I was already exhausted and nauseated when it began, though, and when, after 35 minutes of flickery, grainy images of deformed and starving children, and of injured and tormented soldiers, there was suddenly a much too close up image of an eye, clamped open, about to undergo surgery, and then there was a needle—and I could take no more.

I have never before, not once in my entire life, walked out of a film.  I’m a little shocked that I walked out of this one.  But I could not help but feel brutalized by the images, and more than a little angry about it.  I spent my entire walk home, and some time after, trying to piece together a point to all that:  it’s got to be something much more significant, something much more complex than “the brutality of war” in order to make me watch.  Because if there’s nothing more than that—look at the damage that war can do!  Man’s inhumanity to man!—for SEVENTY-ONE minutes, then it seems to me that these lingering images of malnourished and broken babies become about nothing more than shock value, a gratuitous, exploitative means of getting the viewer’s attention.  And where’s the difference between that and Faces of Death?

I’m headed back this morning, though I’m dragging my feet a bit—last night left a very bad taste in my mouth.

[UPDATE, 6.14.05, 8.28 am:  edit to correct stupid day/date mistake.]

This week, the 51st Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is being held here in town, and so I’m embroiled in what feels a bit like boot camp, a dawn to well-after-dusk schedule of screenings, discussions, and social events.  The seminar keeps up this pace for seven days, which, given my usual tendency to play hooky from a conference on or about the third day, seems a bit grueling; for better or for worse, though, I’m only at the seminar through Wednesday, as Thursday I zip to Louisiana for my reunion.

Anyhow, I’m not going to blog the seminar in any extensive way, but I am at least going to attempt to keep some kind of record of what I’ve seen.

Saturday, June 11, 8.00 pm

– untitled part 3b:  (as if) beauty never ends (dir. Jayce Salloum, 2002, 11 min)

– Retrato Oficial (dir. Francisca Duran, 2003, 1 min)

– Silence (dir. Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas, 1998, 11 min)

– Death Day in Mexico (dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1934, 16 min)

– okay bye-bye (dir. Rebecca Baron, 1998, 39 min)

I admit this morning I’m pretty astonished.  Season 2 of Deadwood was astonishing throughout, but I just didn’t see the final episode coming together terribly well.  There were just so many subplots, and so many of them had become either maudlin or tangential, that I just couldn’t imagine how they’d manage to wrap anything like everything up in an hour.  But the episode was just breathtaking in the way that it managed to dance among the narratives.  The overlay of the wedding with the other various negotiations taking place in the camp was just genius.  And it just hadn’t occurred to me until last night how much I’d missed Gerald McRaney.  And while I said to myself at a certain moment in the episode, “Cy Tolliver’s on his way to being a dead man,” I just didn’t see the mode of conveyance coming.

And all I have to say now is thank god Six Feet Under is about to start again, because I’d be utterly bereft otherwise…