The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

The bureau chief dislikes 3-D as, apparently, does Werner Herzog who none the less used it in his film, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams", in order to make the most of a special opportunity. Herzog was anointed by the French government to make a cinematic record of the Chauvet Cave in southern France, the location of the oldest known paintings by humans. The cave will never be open to the public because people's breath would destroy the delicate 35,000 year old works of art. It is only open to scientists for a very limited time every year.

The film begins with the camera moving through rows of grape vines in what appears to be a Steadicam shot but then rises up and flies above the vineyard (at the end of the film we see that the camera is mounted on a model airplane). As it soars above the landscape it reveals the central problem with 3-D. The trees and vines below don't look real, they look hyper-real, as if we are looking at a diorama or an architectural model. Smart people have pointed out that 3-D actually diminishes the power of a panoramic shot, minimizing the perceived vastness of it. This was not an issue in the confines of the cave where the filmmakers had to stay on a two foot wide walkway and were not allowed to touch anything. The prehistoric artists had incorporated the bulges and curves of the rock in their painting and 3-D allows the viewer to appreciate this.

The paintings are amazing. They are not stylized but very realistic, very observational, like pages torn from a Renaissance artist's sketch book. At one point it's mentioned that the paintings were done over a 5,000 year period before the cave was closed by a rock slide. 5,000 years is how long we have had writing, in other words, recorded history. This allows one to appreciate the magnitude of 35,000 years, back when our forebears coexisted with our cousins, the Neanderthals.

Herzog documents the paintings extensively and interviews the Paleontologists, who are a charmingly quirky bunch. At the very end of the film there is a Herzogian moment. The director learns that there is a nuclear power plant within a 50 mile radius of the cave and that an entrepreneur is using the warm waste water of the plant to raise tropical plants and albino crocodiles. He can't resist the opportunity.

This is a very cool film.

The Return of the Agile Goat

The bureau chief and his comrades in the BHP treasure a quote from a 1894 article in the San Francisco Chronicle describing then semi-rural Bernal Heights as, "That paradise of the agile goat and the speckled hen." On Friday of last week, one block off of Cortland Ave, Mme Le Chef and I saw this.

The goats weren't exhibiting any special agility but were exhibiting a healthy appetite. Apparently it was a flock brought in to eat the weeds around the Holly Park Reservoir.

Pier 24 Photography

Madame Le Chef and myself are vacationing at home this summer and we’ve been having a very good time. I’ve now lived in San Francisco for 34 years and feel qualified to say (contrary to the usual geezer line) that the city is better and more beautiful than ever. One of the fairly new cultural additions is Pier 24 Photography. This is a private photography collection housed in a renovated warehouse on a pier under the Bay Bridge. In order to see an exhibition you have to sign up on line. They only let 20 people in at a time and it's free.

The current show is called "Here" and consists of photographs shot in the extended Bay Area by photographers based here or passing through. Because California has been a magnet for photographers the lineup of artists is pretty amazing, going from Watkins and Muybridge through Weston, Arbus and Frank, up to the present day. The revelation of the exhibit is Larry Sultan. They gave an entire room to his show "Homeland" which he shot from 2007 to 2009, the year of his death. He photographed Hispanic looking men posed on bits of undeveloped land next to various suburban developments. Obviously the photos make a historical point but are also just beautiful images. I would recommend the exhibit just for Sultan's work but the whole thing is wonderful. Highly recommended.

Briefly Noted

Of course this billboard (click) makes no sense. It wouldn't make much sense if it were on a rural highway, where it was apparently intended to be, because the motorcycle cop behind the billboard is more a creature of 50s Hollywood films and magazine cartoons then current reality. (Last time I looked, most of the traffic seemed to be on the superhighways.) But on the side of a yoga studio on Cortland Avenue, in Bernal Heights, it's ludicrous.

It does, however, conjure up the vision of a cop interrupting his downward dog pose and leaping up from the yoga mat to run outside and give a speeder a ticket. What were they thinking?

Ed Hardy Tattoo the World

It’s currently fashionable among hip young people to hate on the various lines of Ed Hardy clothing, shoes, coffee cups etc that apparently generate tens of millions of dollars in sales around the world. The bureau chief, who prefers his clothes without images or visible trade marks, has no problem with that reaction but there is a delightful historical irony to the scorn. That tattoos are now popular and indeed virtually omnipresent among young people, in a way that was impossible to imagine in the 1960s, is because of the very same Ed Hardy and also of Lyle Tuttle.

This is made clear in Emiko Omori’s excellent documentary, “Ed Hardy Tattoo the World”. (Full disclosure: Emiko is a friend of myself and Madame Le Chef). The film is not currently in theaters but will hopefully be out on DVD later this year. Madame Le Chef and I were lucky enough to see a screening of it at the San Francisco Art Institute where Ed Hardy was an undergraduate print-making student in the 1960s. He was good enough to be offered a graduate fellowship to Yale but he turned away from "fine art" and entered the then outré world of tattooing.

Hardy worked as a tattooist for 40 years and only stopped a couple of years ago to devote himself totally to painting, drawing, ceramics and other forms. He currently has a show at the SFMOMA Artist's Gallery  at Fort Mason if any Bay Area readers are interested. We saw it this past Saturday.

The gallery is in a great setting. Click.

A self portrait.

Baron Samedi?

I don't know Russian.

Vase.

Red Beard

Akira Kurosawa's "Red Beard" begins with a man in a kimono, a short sword in his sash, walking. The camera is behind him, looking up, and his head and back fill the center of the screen. He's walking towards a cluster of wooden building that indicate we're in pre-20th century Japan. If you're a fan of Kurosawa, you've seen this shot in many of his samurai films, and the man's sword indicates that he is a member of that class, but rather than being an errant swordsman, he's a young doctor, straight out of medical school, who has been sent to do his residency at a clinic. This is a story of doctors, and of the people they take care of, shot like a widescreen, black and white, samurai epic. It's a great film.

The two central characters of the film are Dr. Yasumoto (Yuso Kayama), the character we saw at the beginning of the film, and "Red Beard", Dr. Niide (Tosiro Mifune), the director of the clinic. The central story of the film is the development of Dr. Yasumoto from a spoiled, self centered, young jerk to a compassionate and dedicated doctor, under the gruff tutelage of Red Beard.

In a previous post I compared Kurosawa and Capra. Watching this film I thought of Kurosawa and Dickens. They both managed to combine a belief in the goodness of people with a totally bleak vision of the poor's plight, suffering under a callous and corrupt social system. This vision allowed them to alternate sentimental scenes with scenes of the blackest humor. This is not an action film but there is one fight where Red Beard explains to a bunch of pimps, who are trying to prevent the two doctors from removing a 12 year old girl from a brothel, that, “You know, a bad doctor can kill you. I won’t kill you, but I might break a couple of arms or legs." You should listen to your doctor.

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen has made a film almost every year since 1977, when he made probably his best film, "Annie Hall". He was on a roll through the 70s and 80s but quality declined in the 90s and in the 00s of this century. The bureau chief, who at one time saw every Allen film that came out, adopted the wait for the reviews and see method after watching some truly wretched efforts. Expectations have been greatly diminished so it's a pleasure to be able to say that "Midnight in Paris", the director's latest, is a very enjoyable little film.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a successful screenwriter who despises his own trade. He has a sexy but horrible fiancée, Rachel McAdams, and equally horrible future inlaws, and he wishes that he could be working on his novel, in 1920s Paris, among the Lost Generation. He gets his wish, after midnight, every night. It's an English Major's wet dream where he gets to hang out with Hemingway, Scott and Zelda and Gertrude Stein. He also meets a lovely French woman, Marian Cotillard, who, a woman of the 1920s, longs for the Belle Epoque of the turn of the 20th century. Clearly this is a wry meditation on the nature of nostalgia but with a light touch.

The film is funny. The biggest crowd pleaser is Hemingway, played by unknown-to-me Cory Stoll, as a Hemingway hero speaking Hemingway prose. But Allen gets humor from all the notables who appear, to the point where just their appearing is amusing. This film, and "Vicky Christina Barcelona" demonstrate that the director still has some things to show us.