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Austro-Hungarian illusions and allusions
Sep. 5th, 2006 11:35 amI’ve watched the few bloggers I’ve followed for a few years degenerate from the daily creation of engaging and lyrical prose pieces to the recitation of daily happenings that not even they appear to care about. So I’m leery of falling into the trap of writing about current movies (especially since I so seldom have time to go to any) days after they opened in the provinces.
[and here I feel compelled to go to the marvels of LJ-Cut, because after wading through all the online reviews of The Illusionist, I discover that, indeed, one critic or another has picked up on all the points I make in this concisely meandering expression of puzzlement. Any fantastic-realist movie about Austria-Hungary 1900 that arrives from the makers of Sideways, with a film score by Philip Glass, arouses expectations. But:]
( ”Re: )
I suspect I may be over-critical because I’ve been reading around again in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water, the 1986 segment of his three-volume account of the trip he made in 1933-34 “on foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland.” Fermor encapsulates Central European history so succinctly, and captures the flavor of the late adolescent experience of traveling from castle to castle (he had excellent and fascinating places of refuge in between the tougher segments of his trek). No film can compete with his prose, I’m afraid.
Fermor insists that although volume one appeared in 1977 and volume two in 1986, the concluding volume is still an active project even after his ninetieth birthday.
Maybe he encountered the problem of timing that Claudio Magris narrowly avoided with his marvelous book Danube. Magris' delectably sprawling narrative is a similarly sophisticated combination of historical account and travel journal of the Danube from its marshy beginnings (at a dripping faucet, Magris puckishly claims) to its marshy terminus at the sea. Magris published his book of lovely historical ruminations just before history took a great lurch forward in 1989, suddenly complicating his evocations of the deep past versus the moment in the mid-80s that turned out to be the end of a 40-year-long stasis.
[and here I feel compelled to go to the marvels of LJ-Cut, because after wading through all the online reviews of The Illusionist, I discover that, indeed, one critic or another has picked up on all the points I make in this concisely meandering expression of puzzlement. Any fantastic-realist movie about Austria-Hungary 1900 that arrives from the makers of Sideways, with a film score by Philip Glass, arouses expectations. But:]
( ”Re: )
I suspect I may be over-critical because I’ve been reading around again in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and the Water, the 1986 segment of his three-volume account of the trip he made in 1933-34 “on foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland.” Fermor encapsulates Central European history so succinctly, and captures the flavor of the late adolescent experience of traveling from castle to castle (he had excellent and fascinating places of refuge in between the tougher segments of his trek). No film can compete with his prose, I’m afraid.
Fermor insists that although volume one appeared in 1977 and volume two in 1986, the concluding volume is still an active project even after his ninetieth birthday.
Maybe he encountered the problem of timing that Claudio Magris narrowly avoided with his marvelous book Danube. Magris' delectably sprawling narrative is a similarly sophisticated combination of historical account and travel journal of the Danube from its marshy beginnings (at a dripping faucet, Magris puckishly claims) to its marshy terminus at the sea. Magris published his book of lovely historical ruminations just before history took a great lurch forward in 1989, suddenly complicating his evocations of the deep past versus the moment in the mid-80s that turned out to be the end of a 40-year-long stasis.
