Smeared Type

I’ve just attended Palm Spring International Film Festival.  It is the now the largest Film Festival in the US, attracting more than 130,000 moviegoers who were able to enjoy this year, 190 films from 70 countries.  The films vary from US independent productions to foreign films, showcasing a variety of cultures, seeking awards and distribution in the US market. 

The Festival also highlighted films from Australia, and also broadly covers four different sectors of cinema excellence under the titles of New Voices/New Visions, World Cinema Now, Best Foreign Language Films and True Stories, which encompasses thirty unforgettable documentaries.  Of course, I was only able to see a fraction of the 190 films on offer, but these included some intriguing stories that provided me with some unique experiences.

The “White Ribbon” is a fascinating movie shot in black and white, in German with English subtitles.  This movie won the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’or.  It is a disturbing mystery that follows the escalating hateful behavior of a group of adults and children in a rural German village in the years before the First World War.  They live in a society of strict discipline, parental fear, and religious intolerance.  Their village was part of an agriculture community isolated from the militant mechanism that was sweeping the country at that time, and cleverly illustrates human behavior and particularly German behavior.  There were multiple threads of vengeful and just plain malicious deeds in this meticulous period piece, which draws the audience into an increasingly terrifying world. 

The Director has reminded us that the German adults of the Nazi era between 1933 and 1945 were children in the years prior to World War I, and perhaps one can see in this story the precursor to the brutal behavior and genocide of the World War II.

Another movie that I found to be as unique but completely different was a film from Kazakhstan called “Kelin.”  This movie was a remarkable visionary tale of love and desire set in the remote Altai mountains in the Second Century AD.   The film is completely without dialogue, but not without sound and a beautiful music score.  The exquisite photographic beauty of the winter scenes, birch forests, and the snow-clad hills is breathtaking. 

The story starts with two fur-clad hunter herders, bargaining with a father for the rights to his beautiful daughter.  Although the girl prefers the more handsome of the two men, she winds up with the one who pays the most.  “Kelin” (the name of the girl) accompanies her groom to his distant yurt, which he shares with his mother and teenage brother.  She soon adjusts to a life of hard work and sexually pleasing her husband, but one day the losing suitor shows up and kills his rival, and she prefers to follow her heart disgracing her mother-in-law and her husband’s younger brother with dire consequences.

Even though there was no dialogue, the story was clear, the acting was exquisite, and the scenery breathtaking.  There was screaming, singing, chanting and laughter in the film, and that together with the incredible music score made this movie an enchanting experience.

Ellis M. Goodman, author of Bear Any Burden: www.bearanyburden.com

Cover via Amazon

I’ve always enjoyed espionage spy novels.

I recently read two new offerings by a couple of my favorite authors.  THE SPIES OF WARSAW by Alan Furst, and A MOST WANTED MAN by John Le Carré.

THE SPIES OF WARSAW was particularly interesting for me since my own recently published espionage novel takes place in Poland, albeit in 1983 during the Cold War, but covers a lot of history and some of the period of the 1930s, where Furst’s novel takes place.  It is the fall of 1937, and the world is stumbling towards War.  Colonel Mercier, a former First World War officer in the French Army, is attached to the French Embassy in Warsaw, and is working diligently behind the scenes to avoid the conflict between Poland and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  The premise of the story is interesting, and historical facts are woven in cleverly, but perhaps because we know the inevitable failure of the efforts, I found the story less than gripping.

Apart from Colonel Mercier, the other characters appear to play bit parts.  There is no back story, and we don’t get to know much about them.  Nevertheless, much to my surprise, the book got rave reviews in the New York Times, and of course hit the bestseller list.

John Le Carré has always been one of my favorite authors.  His intricate and complex stories coupled with his knowledge of espionage, justifiably earns him the reputation as the “spy master” novelist.  His most recent novel, A MOST WANTED MAN, tackles the up-to-date terrorist threat of a Chechnyian Muslim mysteriously and illegally arriving in Hamburg Germany, ostensibly to start a new career.  He seeks help from an idealistic young German lawyer who inevitably clashes with the authorities – police and counter-terrorism units.

As always with Le Carré, the characters are complex but interesting.  However to me, the story was less than exciting, the ending somewhat predictable, and the action slow.  Needless to say, however as with all Le Carré books, rave reviews and the bestseller lists were inevitable.

We can’t always expect our favorite authors to hit “home runs,” but it occurs to me that sequels, as in some of the movies, are often disappointing shadows of former successes.  Well-established popular novelists sometimes have to do very little, to achieve rave reviews and bestseller success.  It would be interesting to hear other views on this subject.