At kottke.org, a trailer or partial trailer for the forthcoming third season of Downton Abbey.
Elaine and I watched the first two seasons this summer and agree with our daughter Rachel: first season, great; second season, meh. The first season is driven by character; the second, by increasingly improbable melodrama. Or to say it plainly: the show turned into a soap opera. But I’m curious enough to watch the third season: I can’t just abandon these people. Sense of duty and all that.
[Dang: someone else has thought of Petula Clark.]
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Downton Abbey, third-season trailer
Tim Page, boy filmmaker
As a boy under the spell of the silents, Tim Page made films with the neighborhood kids. From his memoir Parallel Play (Anchor Books, 2009):
I wrote detailed, surprisingly objective critiques of our films, some of them quite brutal. Here are my thoughts on The Affairs of Peter Lawcerse, which, I noted, had been “released” on November 13, 1966: “This is the stupid and unintelligible story of a man who has an affair with his mother and is finally shot by his best friend’s wife. Bad sets, bad acting, bad photography. . . .” But I liked most of The Immigrant: “From the beginning, everything works. All acting, except for Tim Page, is perfect. The film merits comparison with every film up to Opus 21 [which I made a year later] and nearly all after. It is short and to the point and can still move a sensitive viewer.”That charming last sentence in particular makes me think of J. D. Salinger’s Seymour Glass.
And I mimicked a feature that has been running in Sunday newspapers for some fifty years now — the celebrity question-and-answer column called “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade.” There I addressed such deathless questions as “Is Betsy Page off the screen for good, now that her contract has expired?” (“She hasn’t renewed it,” I replied to myself tersely — we must have had a tiff.) I wrote capsule, breathlessly hyped biographies of all my players: “Dean Cook is probably the fastest growing star in the industry. His first picture was the recent The Fall of a Nation, in which he gave such a fine performance that his position with the finer actors was assured.” Or — my favorite — “Becca Brooks is Debby Brooks’s sister. She made her debut in the Anne Beddow film The Widow’s Villa. She was the perfect choice for the little girl, for she has that rare thing in kindergarteners — realism.”
The first edition of Parallel Play bore a subtitle — Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s — that helps explain what’s going on here. Parallel Play is a beautifully written memoir of a life with great deficits and great gifts.
In 1967, young Page’s filmmaking became the subject of a short documentary by David Hoffman, A Day with Filmmaker Timmy Page. You can read more about it and watch the trailer here. Let me also recommend Hoffman’s unrelated 2008 four-minute TED Talk.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Von Freeman (1923–2012)
Music clip of the day pays tribute to his favorite tenor saxophonist, Von Freeman. The Chicago Tribune has an obituary.
A new Dickinson daguerreotype?
“Should the new image stand up to scrutiny and verification, it will become only the second existing photographic likeness of the reclusive Amherst poet”: New Dickinson Daguerreotype? (Emily Dickinson Museum).
Monsieur Lazhar
Monsieur Lazhar (2011)
directed by Philippe Falardeau
French with English subtitles
94 minutes
Monsieur Lazhar joins Être et avoir (dir. Nicolas Philibert, 2002) as one of the great films about teaching. Philippe Falardeau’s film is also about displacement, loss, memory, and guilt, and it offers a reminder that every participant in a classroom, student or teacher, enters with a history whose details might be impossible for others to imagine.
Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag, billed as “Fellag”) is an Algerian immigrant in Montreal, working as a substitute teacher in a classroom of eleven- and twelve-year-olds. He is an old-school fellow, arranging the desks in rows and requiring daily dictation (Balzac, at first). But he is no martinet: he is compassionate, funny, and devoted to his students. He is no Robin Williams character either: there’s no treacle here. That M. Lazhar succeeds is testimony both to his ability and to his students’ willingness to accept a newcomer and learn on his terms. His terms: the only other men at the school are a gym teacher and a janitor.
As Elaine observes, it’s easy at times to forget that this film is a fiction and not a documentary. The acting is a matter of understatement; the cameras are often handheld. Fellag and young Sophie Nélisse (as Alice L’Écuyer, M. Lazhar’s favorite student) give brilliant performances. I saw the film with an audience that must have been full of teachers: the laughter came from those on the inside.
My favorite moment: M. Lazhar’s discourse on the classroom as a place of friendship, work, and courtesy. May it ever be thus.
Monsieur Lazhar arrives on DVD on August 28. Three cheers for east-central Illinois’s Art Theater for getting hold of this film.
[Do Canadian schoolchildren typically call their teachers by their first names? Inquiring minds want to know.]
Writing instruments
At Submitted for Your Perusal, two poster-like images of Writing Instruments Through the Ages. The second reminds me of this old paperback cover.
On being an information packrat
At BrownStudies, one, two, three, four engaging and thought-provoking posts on being an information packrat. Do I identify? Yes, I identify.
[Now where did I put that PDF?]
Monday, August 13, 2012
Lands’ End (back to school)
Nancy, back to school
[Nancy, September 5, 1944.]
The horror. Nancy awakens in the final panel to say “WHAT AN AWFUL DREAM --- AND IT’S TRUE.” Notice though that even in nightmares, school opens after Labor Day, not in the near-middle of August.
The lines radiating from Nancy’s head on a Tuesday in September 1944 radiate from my head today. School opens next week. And now if you’ll excuse me.
Other Nancy posts
Charlotte russe
The greatest Nancy panel?
Nancy is here
Nancy meets Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo)
Nancy meets Billy Wilder (The Seven Year Itch)
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick (The Shining)
[Nancy panel by Ernie Bushmiller, from Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012). Yes, in Nancy, three hyphens --- “some hyphens” --- constitute a dash. See Art Speigelman’s explanation of “some rocks.”]
Bill Madison on the Ryan nomination
“Ryan is best known in Washington policy circles for a stubborn resistance to government intervention, and for fierce opposition to taxes (‘revenuers’)”: Bill Madison on the Ryan nomination.
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