Day: June 1, 2011

Kids, Imagination & The Arts

Production art for "The Golden Compass" (2007).

By David Ross. Over two years, my nearly-six-year-old daughter and I have blown through all of Narnia, all of Harry Potter, and nearly all of Phillip Pullman’s great Dark Materials trilogy. She was attentive to Narnia and delighted by Harry Potter, but Pullman has entranced her to the extent that her face goes long with shock and anguish when I close the book and tell her to shout down the stairs for her nightly cocoa. Our next adventure is The Hobbit and its sequels. After tramping the roads with Frodo for six months, she will be primed for The Odyssey, beyond which lies the great Western sea of literature in all its dimensions of imagination and idea.

This program depends on the strict suppression of competing media (broadcast television, computer games, and web-surfing are verboten) and the realization that kids are by nature imaginative and that all attempts to subordinate the imagination to didactic and activist aims will produce a backlash of reluctance and indifference. Heather has two mommies, you say? This is a curious detail, worth a question or two, but not conducive to make-believe games or ruminations in the dark of bedtime. How much better if one of Heather’s mommies were a reincarnated Egyptian princess or a fairy queen cruelly trapped in a mortal body. This is not a political or literary judgment, merely an observation about developmental psychology.

Barbara Feinberg’s useful memoir of her kids’ reading, Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up, elaborates much the same point. Her basic thesis is that kids resist reading because contemporary books are insufferably pedantic and boring. This assumes that kids still read books at all. These days, schools seem happy enough to replace books with assorted ‘educational materials,’ not realizing or caring that these have all the romantic resonance of the suburban office parks where they were developed.

J.W. Waterhouse's "Hylas and the Nymphs" (1896).

With the right bait, the fish is easily hooked. Not long ago my daughter happened to look over my shoulder as I perused a book of paintings by J.W. Waterhouse, the pre-Raphaelite master. She drank in the scowling witch (Circe) and the dead lady in the snow (St. Eulalia) and the beautiful lady in the boat (the Lady of Shalott) and the young man saying hello to the beautiful water fairies (Hylas and the Nymphs). These are images to trigger reactions in recesses of the brain not usually exercised in school, in comparison to which the images of her everyday visual field – all those bright socially aware posters in the hallways, for example – are pablum. She added the Waterhouse book to her “birthday list,” which in our house is the ultimate form of canonization. Continue reading Kids, Imagination & The Arts

LFM Review: Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme

By Joe Bendel. A Mediterranean cruise sounds like a pleasant indulgence, but of course, none of the standard rules apply to Jean-Luc Godard. Certainly narrative and aesthetic conventions will be flaunted, as will polite decorum. Indeed, some might argue Godard’s latest and possibly final film (he has been somewhat coy on the subject) represents the height of self-indulgence. Yet, for hardy cineastes, the arrival of Film Socialisme, Godard’s latest cinematic-essay-provocation is as serious as a heart attack. Needless to say though, there will be plenty of shaking heads in the audience, even amongst the initiated, when Socialisme opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center.

Dubbed “a symphony in three movements,” Socialisme is not Breathless, which proceeds along a more or less traditional narrative course, despite Godard’s periodic winking subversions. It is closer to his 1987 anti-adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, but even there Godard left enough structural building blocks laying around for viewers to impose their own order. Rather, like his other post-2000 works, Socialisme is largely a cinematic collage providing viewers hints of narrative only for the sake of immediately snatching them back.

As Socialisme’s initial non-setting, the luxury ocean liner offers Godard a vehicle for some striking images and a frequent water motif. Just how the non-characters came to be on this cruise scarcely matters. Though a colorful assemblage – including a French philosopher, a war criminal of undisclosed nationality, a spy of some sort, and a chanteuse (played by Patti Smith) – they are only here to give voice to Godard’s polemical slogans. As he segues into his second and third movements, the film becomes something of a movie mixtape, juxtaposing text and visuals for ideological purposes.

It is not snarky to question just whom Socialisme is meant for, because of Godard’s signature gamesmanship. While the French dialogue is relatively conventional (if stilted), Godard’s subtitles are translated into crude Tarzan-like English, formatted in a style befitting e.e. cummings. Are English audiences seeing Socialisme as it is truly intended, or were the French, for whom it was presumably exhibited sans subs? Perhaps the film is best appreciated by those fluent in both languages, watching outside the francophone world. Is this a film primarily produced for French expats?

Naturally, Godard’s mischief is not limited to subtitles, but extends to soundtrack drop-outs and film-stock adulterations as well. As one would also expect, his extremist politics are also front-and-center, including a preoccupation with the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rather unsettling observation: “strange thing Hollywood Jews invented it.” Continue reading LFM Review: Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme