Criticultura em Portugal

Part 2 (of 3): Films of the 1950's and 1960's Last time, I discussed varying levels of connection between the life of an author and the works he produces. It varies. This now brings me to Ingmar Bergman, many of whose films I have seen for the first time in the past 3 months. This immersion gives me a meta-perspective on this artist that is harder to acquire by gradually seeing the works over one's lifetime. Bergman seems to belong to a unique subcategory of my Level 3 (Indirect/subliminal connections between life and art). The connection of Bergman's life to his work is clear, but not usually in an autobiographical way. Remarkably he seems to create many of his films to  reflect on  and  come to terms with  his many demons. Work as psychotherapy, in short. This places the viewer in the painful, exciting, voyeuristic role of watching another human's struggles and therapy up close. Bergman's camera moves in so close to his actors that you are not just a fly on ...

Part 1 (of 3): Prologue I recently watched most of the major films of Ingmar Bergman made after 1955. The films have a sense of progression, reflecting ongoing events in Bergman's life. There is even (intentional?) titular relationships with the seasons of a man's life in four of the films made over 30 years: The Virgin Spring (youth) , Smiles of a Summer Night (young adults) , Autumn Sonata (middle age) , Winter Light (old age). Viewing these films was a remarkable experience, but an uncomfortable one, very unlike seeing the works of other cinematic masters like Kubrick, Mizoguchi, or Truffaut. I felt like a voyeur, peering into Bergman's self-administered psychotherapy. I have rarely experienced art in which the intent seemed as much to benefit the artist/author as the viewer. Thinking about this idea of composing/painting/filming to externalize and assuage one's own demons provoked this larger question for me: how does an artist's personal life affect his/her a...

It seems that it takes several decades after most large national traumas for artists to produce high quality reflections on them. Germany is only now examining the Holocaust artistically. In the USA 9/11 still has few quality reflections (Paul Greenglass' taut 2006 film United 93 is one, the ending almost unbearable), and analysis of the US in the turbulent 1960s is still remarkably short on high quality art (the novels American Pastorale  by Philip Roth and Rabbit Redux  by John Updike do it well, see my reviews ). "The Troubles", the bloody Northern Ireland conflict between Catholics and Protestants that peaked in the 1970s but lingered to the end of the century, should be excellent fodder for artistic reflection. Paul Greenglass succeeded in his characteristic docu-drama, hand held camera manner in the 2001 Bloody Sunday ..  This conflict has all the qualities that should make for compelling drama--religious intolerance, centuries-old resentments, hate of foreigners v...

The past week has placed different versions of America in high relief for me. I took the train out to elite Baltusrol Country Club in New Jersey to see the PGA golf championship, along with an overwhelmingly white male crew. The discussions on the train and golf course trended to (along with golf) business, cigars, money, and hot women. A more apparently uniform group of Trump supporters could not be found. As a tonic to this, I ventured into the Bowery last night to see The Maids (1947) by Jean Genet, an irascible, gay, ex-con, socialist, anarchist, sado-masochistic, innovative playwright and essayist who hung out with Camus, Foucalt, and Derrida. Simply getting to the Outliers Theater Company production was interesting. The very off-Broadway tiny playhouse was in a dingy, somewhat threatening neighborhood near Chinatown, where I passed the notorious Manhattan jail The Tombs, plus dark ambiguous storefronts like "The Shaftway" below, which I interpreted to be some sort ...

What is The Great American Novel? It probably should be epic, cover at least one important era critical to our history, feature characters reflective of the American experience, and somehow leave the reader with a feeling that only an American could really have written or truly appreciated the experience. My recent reading has allowed me to sample several candidates for The Great American Novel. Do any make the grade?  Philip Roth's The Great American Novel  (1987) begins: "They call me Smitty"--like Moby Dick  (a candidate), the prelude introduces us to the narrator, here an early 1900s sportswriter named Smitty who is fond of alliteration and extravagant language, and who seeks to write a great novel about baseball (hence the tongue-in-cheek title). The novel is an amusing yarn about the demise of the fictional Patriot League, an early competitor of the American and National leagues. Roth uses ample sarcastic humor to parody modern sports foibles (the players dope on ...