Up All Night

"Until you've faced the dawn with sleepless eyes, you don't know what love is." (1)


Just about everyone I know, on hearing the words spoken by Falstaff to his drinking buddy Prince Hal, "we have heard the chimes at midnight", would say, "Big deal!"

Midnight in Shakespeare's day was, with a total absence of public lighting, when going out of doors was ill-advised and travel had to be conducted by the light of torches, a much bigger deal than it is today. Hearing the chimes at 3 or 4 in the morning is not even such a big deal any more. But few people have the stamina, unless their work requires it, to stay up until dawn. It's disturbing to watch the night expire and the new day begin when one has been awake for 24 hours straight. It's one thing to awake to watch the dawn, busying oneself for the labors of the coming day. It's a quite different thing to watch the sun come up after being up all night.

I defined the magic hour last week as the period that lasts only about twenty minutes when the sun sets and the earth is illuminated by light coming from the sky but not from a direct source, eliminating shadows and giving everything a glowing, magic quality.

But there is another magic hour in the day, just before the sun rises and the day, as it were, commences. The light at that hour may be identical to the light after dusk, but because it arrives at the end of the night, bringing warmth rather than removing it, a harbinger of what is to come rather than what is past, its qualities are altogether different.

A number of great films have taken us from dusk til dawn, using the sun's arrival as a climax, or anti-climax, a moment of truth or reckoning, when the dramas that have unfolded achieve some resolution. La Notte, Hiroshima Mon Amour, American Graffiti, Le Jour se lève, La Dolce Vita, Smiles of a Summer Night, Melvin and Howard, Elevator to the Gallows. I will be writing about these films, and others, in the coming weeks.

Vernon Young wrote that "the film is in nothing more wonderful than this: it brings us not simply a world we never made but worlds we would not otherwise glimpse. It compensates us for all those lovely dawns we slept away, the sycamore trees under which we never awakened, the rivers we never crossed, the fugitive friendships that never ripened, the Southwest canyons or Bavarian churches we never reached."(2)


(1) Jazz standard "You Don't Know What Love Is", words and music by Gene De Paul and Don Raye.
(2) Vernon Young, "Our Local Idioms", On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art.

Remastering the Film: Hirokazu Koreeda

Hirokazu Koreeda (his patronym is also transliterated as Kore-eda) is, at 49, the youngest filmmaker on my list of Masters of Film. Starting out as a director of documentaries, his first fiction film, Maborosi (1995), is predictably straightforward. But it is constructed around a mystery: was the death of the charming young man we observe in the early scenes an accident or a suicide?

Koreeda is so keen on finding the truth that he leaves the question unanswered, even when the young man's wife learns of the sometimes jealous spirit - "maborosi" - that presides over the perilous lives of fishermen. And she has to live with the mystery. The film has an almost uncanny feel for the quotidian, ordinariness of life that it's as if we are seeing it in this film for the first time. Koreeda's camera explores the quiet corners of the backstreets of a Japanese city (Osaka), as well as the natural splendors around a remote fishing village, with an eye for the strangeness and wonder of the world that we shape to accommodate us but that shapes us in return.

For his next film, Wadafuru Raifu (1998) - known as After Life in the States - Koreeda resorted to the documentary device of interviewing the principal subjects of the film, who have arrived at an unexceptional-looking old building where they are calmly informed that they have died and that they have until the end of one week to choose from among a lifetime's memories the one in which they will spend eternity.

This fanciful premise, which is one of the most attractive notions of the afterlife that I've ever encountered, is brought down to earth by Koreeda's observations of his characters as they try to decide what was most important about their lives. The memories that they choose, with the help of case workers whose status is undetermined, are entirely personal and show us their secret lives. At just the moment when their choices seem most predictable, some detail that they overlooked makes them change their minds. There is even one subject, a young man, who refuses to choose - precisely because he is told that he must. He joins the staff of caseworkers after one of them finally makes his own choice and vanishes on the last day into a memory he hadn't known was the one most cherished by a woman who secretly loved him.

Koreeda makes the old building and its surroundings, in late winter weather, substantially real. Drafty, with a leaking roof and wheezing radiators, it is the most lovely limbo ever conceived.

His next film, Distance (2001), explores a controversial subject: an apocalyptic religious cult similar to the "Aum Shinrikyo" which used Sarin poison gas to kill thirteen people in a Tokyo subway in 1995. In Koreeda's film, some members of the cult carry out the poisoning of a city's water supply and then commit mass suicide. Three years after the event, family members of the dead cult members gather at the lake's shore to observe the anniversary. They meet a survivor of the cult, who disappeared the night before the attack, and together they spend a night in a cabin the cult had used, sharing their memories of the dead. Because of its proximity to the September 11 terrorist attack in New York, and perhaps because of its honest exploration of the reasons for such attacks, Distance was never given theatrical release in the U.S.

Nobody Knows (2004) uses a news report that astonished the Japanese: a group of children were found living on their own in the most shocking conditions. Koreeda constructed a fictional story from the news item. The film is not an indictment of Japanese society. The hardships that the children endure in the film are quite avoidable. The only thing that keeps the oldest child, Akira, from contacting child services is the knowledge that he and his siblings would be separated from one another. Even Yuki's death wasn't exactly preventable, even if she had been taken to a hospital. Being abandoned by their mother is terrible, and her infrequent messages containing cash (but never enough) are feeble attempts to assuage her own guilt.

I suppose if anyone is to blame for the events in the film it is a world that doesn't realize that it could happen, even in the most prosperous country. Enough people get to know Akira and his situation. Yet they can't even make the one phone call that could save the children, or at least lessen their hardships. As soon as Akira makes up his mind that his mother will never return, he is responsible, at the age of 12, for whatever happens next.

Hana (2006) was a complete change of pace and direction for Koreeda. It is a period film, set in 1702 (the same year as the loyal 47 ronin's rebellion), and it is a comedy about a samurai with unaccountable scruples about killing.

Still Walking (2008) is a return to contemporary Japan, and is so masterly it gained Koreeda comparisons to Ozu. Comparing Koreeda to any of the old masters of Japanese film raises difficulties since his films have none of the plot-driven structure one finds in Ozu, Naruse, and Mizoguchi. Nor does Koreeda, like Kurosawa and Imamura, try to impose a vision or an overriding attitude toward people and society in his choice of subjects or characterization. He isn't interested in manipulating life to illustrate a point. He doesn't even seem to be much interested in telling a story.

Koreeda's style might be called "incidentalism" because of its reliance on the subtle accumulation of detail to elicit meaning. His films are closer to life than any other Japanese filmmaker since Susumu Hani. The strongest element of his art is his attachment to actuality. In fact, his films exude the same feeling for life as it is lived that is found in the great films of Ermanno Olmi - The Fiancés (1963) and One Fine Day (1969).

The Magic Hour

For the purposes of a post I am working on, I looked up the definition of the "magic hour", which is also known as the "golden hour" and wound up scratching my head. There is some confusion about the meaning of the term.

Wikipedia defines it thus: "In photography, the golden hour (sometimes known as magic hour, especially in cinematography) is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day, when a specific photographic effect is achieved due to the quality of the light."

At the website magichour.com, the definition is more exact: "In photography the Magic Hour is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day."

At another website, photo.net, some photographers give their responses to the question "When is the magic hour?" One of them states:

"The term refers to the time when the sun is low in the sky. The exact time depends on geography, time of year, and weather conditions. It may only be a couple of minutes long, or the good lighting conditions may stretch for several hours (in the far northern summer, for example). There's a magic hour in the morning, too, but not as many people are awake and out taking pictures during that one."

Another response states:

"In a nutshell, when the term 'Magic Hour' is used, it is generally referring to the 1st hour of daylight and the last hour of daylight."


As I always understood it, the magic hour is actually the short period after the sun has already set, when the sky illuminates the earth. But since the light doesn't come from a single source, it is diffuse and creates no shadows. Everything seems lit as if from within.

In my DVD collection, I unearthed (almost literally, since the case has been mouldering in a corner for years) the disc of a documentary called Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography. Made in 1992 for NHK, the Japanese PBS, it is a splendid exploration of the history and art of cinematography. It contains numerous invaluable interviews with great cinematographers from all over the world, including one with Néstor Almendros, the Spanish-born Cuban genius who photographed some of Truffaut's and many of Eric Rohmer's best films.

The story goes that after seeing Truffaut's The Wild Child (1970), Terrence Malick wanted Almendros to be his cameraman for Days of Heaven (1978).* Many of the outdoor scenes in the film were shot during the "magic hour", which was defined by Almendros himself in the film Visions of Light:

Magic hour is a euphemism because it's not an hour. It's about 20 or 25 minutes at most. It's the moment when the sun sets, and after the sun sets. Before it is night. The skies have light, but there's no actual sun. And the light is very, very soft. And there's something, as you say, magic. It limited us to 20 useful minutes a day. But it paid on the screen.

All this is tempered by the knowledge that, while making Days of Heaven, Almendros was going blind.


*The still at the top is from Days of Heaven.

The Day America Stopped

Clearly, 9/11 was an atrocity waiting to happen. On that day, America was wide open. When Osama Bin Laden was killed, I commented on the day of the attacks and the aftermath. In observance of the 10th anniversary of those attacks, here are a few more thoughts.

In my military career, whenever the "defcon" level was low, I couldn't begin to count the number of times when I drove through the main gate of a military facility completely unimpeded. Often, there was no one there in the guard shack to check my identification or inspect my vehicle. I felt then that a determined terrorist would've had every opportunity to carry out an attack on that or any other military base.

Since 9/11, I have sometimes wondered about the security screeners at Logan Int'l Airport in Boston who saw all those box cutters in the carry on luggage of the men who hijacked the planes, and how they must still feel about that day. They did their job exactly as described in their training. Box cutters were not on their list of impermissible items. They weren't considered weapons. Who could have imagined to what use those murderers would put them?

Looking back at the United States of America of ten years ago leads inevitably, I think, to compiling a list of all the things it has lost. For one thing, the War on Terror has realized one of George Orwell's most grim predictions - that war would some day become permanent.

We have lost a good deal of whatever privacy we had left, what with Homeland Security's authority to listen in on our phone conversations and to read our emails. A year or so after 9/11, I watched a TV program about some of the people who lost family members in the attacks that concentrated on the loss or degradation of their religious faith. But how seriously can we take someone's faith when it was willing to accept the Holocaust but unwilling to accept 9/11?

Airport security has, of course, "improved" - by making air travel an even greater pain in the arse than it was. It is no longer possible to see our loved ones off at the gate or to greet them as they emerge from it. Flight attendants have become more rude and aggressive because they're under so much more pressure. We get x-rayed and scanned and patted down just so there can be a semblance of safety. But all this security won't stop a determined terrorist when we already know some of the lengths to which they will go to kill us.

Then there was our response to the attacks. I say "our" only because the government acted on my behalf, even if I was never consulted, nor were, evidently, any others who had an ounce of objectivity. So the voices that were heard were not only the loudest but the most shrill. President Bush started a war that we can't seem to finish, and two years later invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. I had the inescapable feeling that an opportunity was missed. Aside from doing nothing with the outpouring of goodwill for America from everyone in the world for what happened in Manhattan, the president did nothing with the American people's resolve to follow him anywhere he wished to take them. Instead he told us to go to Disney World.

And then came the decision from very high up to use those despicable "rendition" tactics of which we're only just beginning to learn the details. "Enemy combatants," were stripped of their universally accepted Geneva Convention rights as prisoners of war, flown around on secret CIA flights to secret locations and secretly tortured, before being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, where they still wait to be told what they're charged with. Senator John McCain, who endured torture in North Vietnamese prisons, has insisted that the use of torture is not only ineffective, but something that, when used by a nation that stands as a shining symbol for human rights, compromises our moral authority.

I was in Des Moines ten years ago. At the time I took some comfort in the conviction that the city was probably the unlikeliest target of a terrorist attack. Des Moines has no symbolic value, like New York City or Washington, D.C. But I felt the same chilling effect, which was as much spiritual as economic, that every other American felt in the ensuing days and weeks.

Ten years later, I am amazed at the willingness of Americans to relinquish their privacy and their rights every time another attack is foiled. The notion that we are safer is completely cancelled out by the common perception that we are actually under siege. It will probably take a few more decades to get back to the sense of security we had before 9/11, even if it was false. As Orwell noted about Fascism in 1941: "Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them."*


*George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and The World State", Horizon, August 1941.

Playing With Fire

Captain America is out. Last month it was The Green Lantern, and Thor the month before. Marvel Entertainment is rolling out its second-string properties, with their built-in potential for a franchise of computer games, toys, collectibles, and possible sequelae. The producers of the films have attracted real talent: Kenneth Branagh directed Thor and, awhile ago, Ang Lee made Hulk. But instead of using all their art and imagination creating three-dimensional, believably human characters, such talented filmmakers commit all their energies to making inhuman characters believable in 3-D. The essential silliness of these characters can be measured by the color and cut of their outfits. The Hulk's magic shorts are particularly silly, since, no matter how gigantic he becomes (along with, presumably, gigantic naughty bits), his shorts remain discreetly in place.

After seeing some of these films, I was forced to conclude that I could not disqualify myself, however much I tried, from criticizing them. The best that could be said against my presuming to have an opinion about them came from Chris Rock who once told white people who criticized rap music for its aggressive ugliness to keep their mouths shut because, as he put it, "it ain't for you!" Whom, then, is rap for?

I recently watched the first few scenes from the new X-Men: First Class and I saw how they once again exploited the Nazi death camps to lend something - what? depth? credibility? - to the comic book character Magneto's discovery of his mutant powers. If you haven't seen the film, perhaps you will recall the opening scene from the very first X-Men (2000), in which, in a few shots, the terrible reality of a Nazi death camp is evoked: "Poland 1944", in a driving rain prisoners are being herded by soldiers. One of the prisoners, a boy, notices other prisoners toiling behind the fence, with numbers tattooed on their forearms. The boy is separated from what we can assume are his parents, amid angry shouting and screams, underscored by prodding music. As the guards restrain the boy and his parents are marched away, the boy reaches out and the barbed-wire fence separating him from his parents is pried open by an unseen force. This force, which also pulls the boy, restrained by guards, toward the metal fence, suddenly ceases the moment thatone of the guards knocks the boy unconscious with the butt of his rifle.

This scene is repeated in the new X-Men shot for shot. (I haven't looked closely enough to determine if they were the same scenes. I think it would've required a particularly crass producer to simply re-stage the whole thing and re-shoot it.) In the new film, it is followed by a scene in which the boy is standing in front of the desk of a Mengele-like doctor, played by Kevin Bacon. He rings abell and a woman prisoner is brought into the room by helmeted guards. Bacon puts a coin on the edge of his desk and tells the boy to move it with his "powers". Then Bacon points a pistol at the woman and begins counting down from ten. The boy holds out his hands toward the coin, but fails to move it before Bacon shoots the woman. The boy, enraged by the act, begins to scream and metal objects in the room react - the bell, the guards' helmets, the zinc tables in the examining room, etc.*

I mentioned that the first scene evoked the reality of the camps. But it was evoked in order to enhance the story of Magneto. I was so disgusted by these scenes, and by the filmmakers' insane belief that they could get away with using the Holocaust in such a distasteful and vulgarizing manner, that I stopped watching the film.

The first Iron Man (2008) includes a scene in which American soldiers escorting Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) in Afghanistan are killed in an ambush. Their deaths are used as a pretext for Stark to be captured by Taliban-like thugs, who force him to use his weapons expertise to create a new weapon for them. But that single scene of soldiers being killed, which was, I suppose, an attempt to add topicality to the movie as well as contribute to its schizophrenic anti-militarist message, came too close to home. I have served in the army. I wasn't deployed to Afghanistan, but I have friends who were in Iraq. I can't speak for them, but I found it outrageous that their experience could have been appropriated by a group of obviously cynical people as a plot device in a comic book movie.

In his essay, "Inside the Whale", George Orwell looked at the Auden poem "Spain 1937", which he singled out as "one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war." He took exception, however, to the lines that read:

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

Orwell noted that these lines "could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word." He went on to state that

Mr. Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

If Auden's liberal conscience moved him to write something about the Spanish Civil War at the time, a little more personal commitment to the event, such as Orwell experienced, would perhaps have only made the poem greater. But Auden would have to have been a different person. He was so stung, however, by Orwell's words that he changed the line in the poem and suppressed it in his collected poems.

The makers of these movies seem motivated by something other than conscience in their determination to graft historical fact onto their fantasies. They are playing with fire in the foolish belief that fantasy makes them fireproof.



*Postscript: I had a chance to double check the scenes from X-Men: First Class, and the initial scenes in the death camp do appear to be new. The woman prisoner whom Kevin Bacon summons, speaking German atrociously (to add a little authenticity, you see) is, in fact, the boy's mother. Bacon points his gun at her and counts to three ("ein, zwei, drei"). The men who make these crass movies (notice how women consistently absent themselves from the making of these male juvenile fantasies) believe that nothing is sacred.

Who Let the Dog Out?

While some observers, including President Obama, are delighted at the new deal that football quarterback and convicted felon Michael Vick just signed with the Philadelphia Eagles for $100M, which includes a guarantee of $40M (not taking any chances this time), I for one am bemused.

Vick signed a remarkably similar deal in 2003 with the Atlanta Falcons (1), but it was nullified by his criminal conviction in 2007 for engaging in dog fighting.(2) He was released from his contract by Atlanta at the end of his two year sentence. The Philadelphia Eagles signed him in 2009. Last December, the president took time out of his Hawaiian vacation to telephone the Eagles's owner and personally thank him for giving Vick a "second chance".

The latest contract is further proof of Vick's worth, if not exactly his worthiness. But is it, as so many are calling it, really Michael Vick's second chance? Or should we be calling it his one thousand and second? Vick's athletic career followed a predictable pattern: as soon as it was ascertained that he had what is called "athletic ability", Vick was given a free pass through high school and college (even though he revoked his athletic scgholarship to Virginia Tech after his sophomore year).(3) Evidently, the only thing his talent couldn't get him was a get out of jail free card.

Our culture is so enamored of people who can routinely throw and hit baseballs hard, toss basketballs through hoops and throw and catch footballs that it is now prepared to pay them millions of dollars to do it. George Plimpton famously tried to explain our strange fixation on athletes by saying it's because they can accomplish certain tasks with apparent ease that are exceptionally difficult for the rest of us. The trouble with this explanation, like so many of Plimpton's remarks, is that it is insupportable. Anyone who can juggle four balls or balance spinning plates on sticks with their noses belongs in a circus. The talents of many athletes are not much different.

Now 31, with another year of probation to serve, Michael Vick had his many chances long before he squandered every one of them by taking part in the barbaric hobby that landed him in jail. But really, how else should he have behaved since our culture made it unnecessary for him to waste his time learning how to become a decent human being? If athletes sometimes misbehave, who can blame them? They have been mollycoddled all their lives because of their silly athletic skills and as professional players are being paid ridiculously disproportionate sums of money. How can they not be deluded enough to think they're above the law and common morality?

(I am amazed when Americans complain that our education suystem is a shambles when our culture pays a teacher an average salary of $55,693 and a football player $770,000 [4].)

Will Vick keep his nose clean this time? Or will the easy money he's once again getting and the forgiveness of the president continue to twist his underfed mind? If Vick deserved a second chance, he should've used it to get as far from football as possible.


(1) $62M for six years.
(2) His activities included betting on dogs fighting to the death and the destruction of dogs who wouldn't fight by strangulation, drowning, and electrocution.
(3) A warning on the "welcome" page of his official website reveals something of what Vick relinquished when he dropped out of college: "Any person who comes to this site and make abusive comments or statements to Mr.Vick and or his fans and supporters, the comments will be deleted and the person responsible for making such comments and statements will be immediately banned and all comments will be deleted. There will be no acceptions or reinstatements." (His name should be Michael [Sic].)
(4) 2009 statistics.

The Last Action Hero

Everybody ought to have a maid,
Everybody ought to have a working girl,
Everybody ought to have a lurking girl
To putter around the house.

Everybody ought to have a maid,
Everybody ought to have a menial
Consistently congenial
And quieter than a mouse.

Oh, oh, wouldn't she be delicious,
Tidying up the dishes,
Neat as a pin.

Oh, oh, wouldn't she be delightful,
Sweeping out,
Sleeping in.

Everybody ought to have a maid,
Someone who you hire when you're short of help
To offer you the sort of help
You never get from a spouse:

Fluttering up the stairway,
Shuttering up the windows,
Cluttering up the bedroom,
Buttering up the master,
Puttering all around the house!

-Stephen Sondheim, A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum


Donald Trump delivered one of his most revealing statements during a phone conversation with Piers Morgan during a broadcast of Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN. When asked what he thought about the revelation of Arnold Schwarzenegger's having a son by his Hispanic housemaid, Trump said that he thought the worst thing about it was that Arnold had done it with a maid. It wasn't his infidelity to Maria Shriver or his having kept it a secret for so long, but the fact that the former Guvernator had stooped to having an affair - and a child - with the hired help.

If I hadn't already made up my mind about Trump as a rich clown with a clown's hair, that loathsome statement of his would have done it. All the statement actually did was confirm for me the strong suspicion that this ultimately silly person obviously has disdain for everyone who isn't wealthy or well-off. And it came from a man who briefly entertained intentions of running for president. Evidently, it would never have occurred to Trump, as it obviously occurred to Schwarzenegger, that even a house servant is a human being.

Quite honestly, the news of the affair made Arnold Schwarzenegger immeasurably more likable to me. Having attained at least one of his stated goals in life - marrying a Kennedy* - he at least showed that it wasn't beneath him to be attracted to a woman who wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and who had something to offer him besides money and prestige. Apparently, Donald Trump can buy any woman he wants. The circumstances of Arnold's affair are probably not the stuff of a Hollywood movie, but the suggestion that it was something to be ashamed of is funny coming from a clown like Trump.


*Shriver's mother was sister to JFK and RFK. Arnold's other ambition was to be president, which he can't as the rules now dictate.