A clear autumn day is to be highly valued, the supply of them being so low at the moment...

So, just to cheer myself up, I post an autumn morning shot off the ferry at Turku (åbo in Swedish). Turku is Finland's second largest city (I think)...anyway, it is the old capital of Finland, before the Tzar moved it to Helsinki (invariably pronounced Char by my Finnish friends). The highlight there would be the Turku Art Museum which currently houses the Kalevala artworks exhibition, ongoing till 10 January. It has all the major pieces of Kalevala artwork collected from the various museums in Finland. I had been puzzled not to find any artwork on the Kalevala at the Ateneum, Helsinki's main art museum, but now I know that it's been collected at Turku in conjunction with the 160th anniversary of the publication of the Kalevala. I strongly recommend a visit, if you're taking the Stockholm-Turku ferry to get to Finland. It's very cheap for students, about 3 euro compared to the horrible prices for museum admission in Helsinki.

Anyway, although I started out about Autumn, the picture has reminded me of my time in Turku and the Kalevala exhibition. The Kalevala deserves a few words, because a nationally adopted myth tells a lot about how a people call themselves a nation. It is interesting that the Kalevala is one of the latest oral epics to be transcribed. It was published only in the nineteenth century, and there are voice recordings of the singers of Kalevala stories. Compare this to the existence of only a handful of known manuscripts of The Oddysey and the Iliad, Greek epics dating back to 900 BC.
The Kalevala is a Finnish oral epic which originated from Karelia. As far as I can make out, that's some area between Finland and Russia--and mostly lost to Russia during the second world war. I was told this by my host in Turku, whose parents were apparently Karelian refugees. In an attempt to express Finnish-ness and find a national spirit, Finnish artists turned to the Kalevala. Many of them made research trips to the Karelian songlands to find out about traditional Karelian life and Karelian landscapes.
My favourite artist of the Kalevala is Akseli Gallen-Kallela. He depicted the myth with the most dynamism, and many critics felt that he had portrayed the spirit of the Kalevala.

Defending the Sampo, by Akseli Gallen Kallela.

The centre of a myth, if it is to be interpreted for nationalistic purposes, is about the indomitability of a people in the face of what threatens them. In this case, Väinäimöinen of Kaleva must defend the Sampo, a powerful object, from being taken by Luohi, the Mistress of the North.

What the artists leave out of their powerful depictions, though, is the not-so-consistent backstory. The Sampo had originally been given to the Mistress by none other than Väinäimöinen himself, in return for her daughter whom he wanted to marry. I think she eventually marries Ilmarinen, the guy who forges the Sampo. I'm typing from memory here, don't have the time to do research. So forgive any errors. But check out Forging the Sampo : this article has the painting by Gallen-Kallela and a more detailed---and accurate--discussion of the myth. Anyway, when Väinäimöinen hears of the prosperity that the Sampo has brought to the Mistress's land, he decides to go and get it back, with the help of some of the other characters. The Mistress is really just vengefully reclaiming her treasure. Was Väinäimöinen a thief as well as a hero? *

The question is perplexing, because a myth does not really have a straightforward interpretation. It always digresses, and gets reinvented by its storytellers, so when it is compiled (and even the compiler, Elias Lonrött, added his own stanzas to link the various cycles together), it is not necessarily consistent. To interpret for nationalistic purposes means re-inventing the myth yet again for purposes other than the original one.

* The story of Väinäimöinen ends when he leaves the country after a new child-king is crowned. The child-king is born of a woman who eats a berry, rather like the Virgin mother and Christ (the Kalevala was still developing late enough for the Christian influence to show). The woman and child who displace the old man and his values is a very interesting image, but the portrayal and the participation of women in the Kalevala is really a whole other essay... I will just say for now that it is interesting how the men all get into trouble from wooing and winning maidens, like Lemminkäinen, who drowns in an attempt to capture the Swan of Tuonela (realm of death?), one of the tasks set for him in order to win a daughter of Luohi. His mother heroically resurrects him by collecting the pieces of his body and sewing them together. Another figure of interest is Aino, who drowns herself (commits herself to the water spirits) rather than give in to Väinäimöinen's lust.

Hmm, what started as a post on a clear autumn day has turned into a discussion of the Kalevala.

Review: Nation

Best rewrite of Crusoe ever. This time, Pratchett really is guilty of literature.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

A sequel with a vengeance. It did all the horrible things you hope sequels never do, and did it with gusto too. Irrelevant (and often campy) details such as Mrs. Witwicky's loopy behaviour, Sam's maladjustedness, and the sexual awkwardness (or obsession) of adolescence, which, in the first movie were touches of humour, got blown entirely our of proportion in the second one. Campiness pretty much upstaged the noble autobot mission for half of this 150-minute long flick, followed by an interval of aaargh! aargh! aaargh! chased by deceptic---aargh! aargh! aargh! And then a long explosive battle scene when everybody gets their 15 minutes of fame, except for the autobots. The US army gets about half an hour, so does Optimus. The other bots just flash in and out of the scenes, unlike the first movie where there was at least some effort at drawing out the characters of the different bots.

I could rip the screenplay and storyline apart, but then it is a teen flick meant to ride on the wave of profits and hype generated by the first movie, so maybe it's not worth the effort, nor even fair to do so. I'll just say that it had something going for it, but flashy CGI cannot make up for the terrible pacing, in which each meaningful chunk of the plot deflates in an anticlimactic and prolonged joke of a scene, like Mrs. Witwicky's antics, or the twin robots' antics, or Witwicky's roomate's antics. Perhaps the team was aiming for the comic book's ability to pitch from slapstick comedy to rough talk, to noble ideals--mashing and bending genres. But it looked more as if, in putting together big, flashy and putatively emotional scenes, tastelessly decked out with innuendo and campiness, they lost artistic control of the overall effect.

There is truly nothing like a bad sense of rhythm to spoil what ought to have been at least an enjoyable movie. The beginning was a series of repeated episodes about the ridiculousness of Sam's family and the awkwardness of his first day at school, hyper-exaggerated by his actions under the influence of the Allspark (no, it's not a type of drug). The middle was generally a lot of running and screaming and things exploding left right and centre, followed by more running and screaming; it felt like a failed hybrid of horror and action. Even the climactic battle scene dragged on a little too long, despite being so fast-paced that one hardly knew who was who at times (which is all part of the fun, I feel, in this particular movie)--this mostly again the fault of random cut scenes to irrelevant jokes that dragged on for half a minute at a time. Hey, forget slow motion, there's nothing like campiness and weepiness in the middle of a big battle to impress upon the audience the all-important desire to focus on the fight. Yes, camera, let us see anything except that smart-talking soldier or hysterical college kid, please please, please.

Well, to admit, I only watch these movies because I admire CGI, and I think special effects artists who put so much work into their creations should get admired. Scripts and screenplays coming out of the US don't seem to hold much right now. All bowing to mass consumption, profit margins and the like. It's obvious when a screenplay rehashes to an audience what the writers/producers think the audience wants. You end up with an inchoate and contradictory piece, rather than a piece which says something, if not about the world, at least about itself.

Compare

Because I like taking apart movies to the point that you don't enjoy them anymore.



One of my pet peeves: the horrible horrible script in the Star Wars prequels. Here is the scene that takes the cake, where Amidala tries to dissuade Anakin from the Dark Side in too many words, and Obi-Wan and Anakin discuss what we already know in case you were too dense to notice. And in case you happen to fall asleep, their discussion is punctuated with the musical farting of the surrounding lava spouts, guaranteed to wake up any bored moviegoer who's waiting for the sabre duel to start. Notice the red look and the bubbly lava which heightens the already over-the-top emotion. They may as well put on masks and act out Greek tragedy with the overblown melodrama. Or a spoof of a Greek tragedy--the lines are too bad to do the classics justice.

Compare that to the superb scene from The Last of the Mohicans below, which carries the equivalent amount of emotion in just a handful of lines . The mise-en-scene obscures rather than illuminates. Though blue is often used to give a calming effect, the scene here is mainly in blue and black which heightens suspense because of the obscurity. The emotion is intensified because we see so little of their faces that every gesture takes on meaning. Just compare: Amidala's moment is "Anakin, you're breaking my heart!" (I'm not heartless, but I couldn't help laughing); when Cora has her moment she is just a still silhouette gazing in Hawkeye's direction. Hawkeye's glistening hair, Cora's shining eyes...everything serves to intensify the emotion, not meaninglessly amplify it and rob the audience of the chance to use their imagination. Daniel-Day Lewis and Madeleine Stowe could have acted badly and it'd still be a good scene (but good acting has made it one of the greatest romantic scenes I have ever watched--ok, the greatest. I don't watch very many movies).

Diary of a Bad Year by J.M Coetzee

When you read a Coetzee, you have to ask yourself, how far can you take the art of compression in a novel--if this book can be called a novel in the first place. First thing that struck me when I flipped it open: two horizontal bars invariably on each page, demarcating three journals of two different characters involved in the story. The three-in-one gets rather annoying, especially when the narrative breaks off mid-sentence and continues on the next page--you're not sure whether to flip over and continue or skip to the section below first, which continues the second character's story.

Not that there's much of a story. The plot is relatively simple, involving only three characters. An old, dying writer who is attracted to a young Filipina, Anya,his neighbour. He engages her as his typist for a series of opinion pieces; she has a boyfriend, Alan, who wants to cheat him of his money. The story is actually sidelined for the opinion pieces, which appear in the first bar, followed by the journals of the nameless writer and woman. I was not a Coetzee fan, after Waiting For The Barbarians and Disgrace but for Diary I respect the careful crafting that went into developing the characters' stories as an ironical counterpoint to the writer's opinions on authority, political responsibility and social conscience. While such grandiose themes were being proclaimed, the journals reveal a writer on shaky ground, unsure if he is able to finish his task before he can no longer write. The personal histories of the three ask questions of personal ethics and individual conscience, and the irritating yoking together of these seemingly disparate themes, without saying as much, forces the reader to consider the relationships between the individual and the history he is born into--whether we owe the world an apology, not for who we are but for where we come from and who we're with, just as Anya feels she owes JC (the only name appearing for the writer--probably Coetzee writing as himself) an apology for her boyfriend's desire to cheat him.

(Spoiler alert!) I accuse Coetzee of unabashed reader manipulation when several empty slots in the writer's journal towards the end caused me to think the persona had died or just given up writing--but fortunately he does reappear, only for Anya's journal to start revealing her fantasy on saying the best goodbye to him at his deathbed: "sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest," she would wish to say. By that time the writer, through the twenty-odd opinion pieces we have read, has come to embody the best aspirations of humanist modernism, the search for humanity's transcendence or rebirth, for a united push to seek a way of living approved by the conscience. But the book is written during the Iraq war, post September 11, and during the Guantanamo Bay exposure, and makes clear that there is no escaping a scarred conscience. It seems to simultaneously attempt to reclaim those visions as well as sound a death knell for modernism, while searching hesitantly for an ethic, a moral framework, for a very different world--the world of Alan, the rapacious and remorseless investor, and of Anya, his pleasure-seeking, materialistic girlfriend.

All in all, a book worth looking into.

Friday by Michel Tournier

Friday by Michel Tournier, translated by Norman Denny

Friday is a lighter but also more philosophical and reflective retelling of Robinson Crusoe. Shipwrecked off the South America, Crusoe undergoes a journey of self-discovery as he seeks to build a sense of order and domesticity on his island kingdom. Instead of ending there as the original tale does, Tournier pushes his Crusoe to explore human identity beyond the trappings of civilization.

In Friday, taming the island and developing a one-man civilization becomes a way of deferring the lure of reverting to primal instincts in a trope already familiar through the tortured symbolism of Africa in Conrad's Heart Of Darkness. Crusoe eventually transcends that stage to find his meaning in expending himself in creating more order and abundance on his island kingdom.

But this does not last. The largest twist in this story is that Crusoe fails to civilize the South American Indian Friday, whom he saved entirely by chance. He only manages to teach Friday enough English (or French?) for them to interact. Friday's spontaneity and capriciousness tear through Crusoe's attempts to order the island, and enlighten him on a life liberated from order, capable of endless invention, free from a sense of time and responsibility--a kind of utopian liberation as man's highest state of awareness.

Through these progressive episodes of life on his island, Crusoe traces in broad strokes the construction of the individual in the varied forms it has taken since the Renaissance. Despite certain sections of philosophical meanderings in which the authorial voice seemed to take over Crusoe's, it makes a compelling read.

Bratja and Review: FullMetal Alchemist

Here is an interesting combination to consider as an example of globalization and cross-border cultural flow. This song comes from FullMetal Alchemist, a Japanese anime. The story's world is based on an alternate universe in which the world developed along the lines of medieval alchemy, and so the characters have Germanic names (Edward and Alphonse Elric). This song, written specially for the series, is in Russian. I also found an AMV made by a French person for the song.

On the anime: The clip won't make much sense unless you've watched the series, but the basic premise is that these two brothers attempted to resurrect their mother through alchemy, which is forbidden. As a result, the younger brother loses his body and his soul is attached to a suit of armour, while the older brother loses his arm and leg. They then attempt to find the Philosopher's Stone to return their bodies to normal (what alchemical story would be complete without it?)

Sounds pretty bizzare, but that's Japanese anime/manga for you. It's creative, setting up alternate realities which often deal with existential or social issues (or just idealized or romanticized notions of justice, chivalry, etc). Anime or manga of this genre also balances slapstick humour with serious themes, often with sudden switches between both modes with a total absence of liminal space. I'd say that's probably the part I love best about anime--its reflexivity and playfulness despite the tragic themes it might deal with. Ok so I'm just a postmodern mass media/ pop culture junkie. You'll even see this technique in some of the comic scripts I've written. I'd like to say I got it from Chekov or Beckett or something, but really I got it from anime. *sees Distinction Between High And Low Art throw itself out the window.*

I followed the series to its end and found the story arc in the anime very compelling. Its strength lies in its brevity and the consistent character development: the heroes learn about life, death and sacrifice along the way. So do the villains. The subplots are tied up neatly and each ending carries a thematic concern related to the overall story. There isn't much subtlety in the dialogue , and the theme of guilt, revenge and forgiveness is treated about as deeply as you'd expect for a cartoon for teenagers, but it is the coherence and arcing of the plot, the fine interweaving of subplots that impressed me. The series also has moral core centring on self-sacrifice and forgiveness. (Aside: it's interesting to note how many top-rated Japanese anime are centred on themes of redemption, sacrifice, a search for forgiveness and some sort of end to restlessness. Think Samurai X/Rurouni Kenshin which is an anime much more deeply rooted in Japan's social history.)

Finally, plus points for the music which is not as repetitive throughout the three seasons that it ran, as it is with some other longer-running anime.