Fate strikes

As predicted in today's paper. Three very busy blogging weeks ahead!

GEMINI Today your ruler, Mercury, moves into a fellow air sign. That means the next three weeks are a wonderful time for expressing your thoughts.

Now I'll check the tea leaves [tasseography] for alternatives!

Archives

The past two days have seen a blundering archivist at work. He has never followed the rules of the professional. That is, to store safely, catalogue accurately (with appropriate cross-references), and have proper retrieval procedures. Now time is catching up with this amateur. The cardboard boxes are being unearthed, the contents spread across every inch of level flat space in the house, and the goodies being unruffled and placed first in categories, then assigned spaces and places of their own.

The thought behind this action has been of long-standing. But stand it did, without any movement. Until recently. The German Film Archives made a generous and irresistible offer to restore a film completed 28 years ago. Which brought the chronicler instinct to the fore. But simultaneously raised many questions.

We realise that certain of the records and artifacts are of international interest. Those we have separated from the family treasures. We also know from experience that Archives tend to be preoccupied with preservation and are anything but “user-friendly”. And those with an hospitable bent are scattered in nooks and crannies around the globe. So what to do with this conglomeration?

One option is to digitize and open our own cyber-archives, then hand the originals over to the best caretakers wherever they may be. But who would caretake the cyber-archives?

And of course we must first write the book before relinquishing the source material. He says with a wry grin.

And the odd item may be of interest to our children. Like the glass-framed original silhouette of Galahad at the completion of the Quest when the ghostly maidens enter the hall. And he cries out, “In the name of God, stay a moment!”

Illustration by Lotte Reiniger from Roger Lancelyn Green’s book, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table [1953 - Penguin]

The Reconciliation of Carl and Jean

In my opinion the richness of “reconcile” has been somewhat debased by the bean counters. They use it to mean the verification of financial accounts. But reconciliation has much more potential than simply ticking off the items on a credit card statement. I think that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu had it right, in principle.

What got me thinking about it was the first time that Jean Renoir and Carl Koch really met. Of course they didn’t know about that meeting until later. I will let Renoir tell the story himself.

Carl Koch had been a German army captain of artillery in the First War. In 1916 he was in command of an anti-aircraft battery in the Rheims sector. “It was a good sector,” he told me. “Nothing against it except the incessant attack of the French squadron opposite us.” As it happens, in 1916 I was flying in a reconnaissance squadron in the same sector, and we were the main target of a Germany battery which gave us a lot of trouble. Koch and I concluded that this was his battery: so we had made war together. These things form a bond. The fact that we were on opposite sides was the merest detail.

From: My Life and My Films by Jean Renoir 1974

We met both Carl and Jean long after they had died. Carl’s wife, Lotte Reiniger, introduced us to them both with delightful stories of their first meeting in Paris at the première of Lotte’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. And their subsequent adventures in working together on the Renoir films. Glorious days in Meudon as well as dedicated work on such masterpieces as La Marseillaise and La Grande Illusion. Carl left first, and when he did Jean wrote to Lotte from his home, which was by that time in Hollywood.

“The best times in my life working in film were with Carl. It was through this connection that The Rules of the Game was such a success. Carl, from Heaven on high, must surely be laughing.”

True reconciliation.

Leisure?

A recent article by Mark Kingwell stimulated me to reflect on this theme. Thoughts somehow led to Chaucer, and whether the pilgrims heading to Canterbury were engaged in work or leisure. I know little about his work, although we did explore The Tales as a possible project to be animated in the classical style of Lotte Reiniger. But I do love the oral flavour of his language, and presently have the leisure to track down his use of the very word for my “spare time”. From his The Book of the Duchesse:

165    Amid the valey, wonder depe.
166    Ther thise goddes laye and slepe,
167    Morpheus, and Eclympasteyre,
168    That was the god of slepes heyre,
169    That slepe and did non other werk.
170      This cave was also as derk
171    As helle pit over-al aboute;
172    They had good leyser for to route
173    To envye, who might slepe beste;

Why not read the whole poem? If you have the time.

Anyway, Kingwell’s article explores J. K. Galbraith’s notion
that increasing affluence and its attendant desire for
material acquisition would taper off as sufficient
goods and services brought about fulfillment of those
needs. He refers briefly to the classical Greek attitudes
to the contemplative life. Although without reference
to a slave society, and to the undoubted fact that
philosophical reflection required collaboration and hard
labour from the local vineyards***.

With insight, although not complete clarity, he examines
why this has not happened. The parameters have changed
as leisure in its many forms has been progressively
redefined and co-opted by commercialism. Leisure now
requires one to buy. The transformation of advertising
raises the question as to whether consumption itself is
consuming us. [see also previous posting
The Cult You're In August 22/07]

In the meantime, even my leisure time requires being
plugged in at a cost. 

***Horace’s Ode to a Wine Jar

Things Happen

It was January 1993, Thursday the 21^st to be precise. I know that’s exact because I usually start out the New Year with my agenda fairly accurate and complete. And I save agendas the way schoolboys used to stuff their pockets with horse chestnuts. I had just finished a meeting with What’s His Name and was killing time before meeting Barry for lunch. At the Irish Pub on Richmond at Victoria where we almost always meet.

My first choice to use up a spare few minutes in the city core is to nip into a bookstore. But there wasn’t one at hand. So instead I checked out the nearby department store book section, and riffled through the reduced price bin. One slim book caught my eye instantly.

Pat and I had just been discussing the general idea of a mystery cartoon series for kids. It would have a stronger narrative line than Scooby Doo, but not the frenetic pace. Of course it would be exciting and with loads of drama and cliffhangers, full of ominous events, but sans blood, violence, or weapons. Something our eight grandchildren would like.

Bicycle to Treachery fairly popped out of the box. Written and illustrated by Robert Quackenbush, it features a world of anthropomorphic ducks. Inspired by Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Miss Mallard and her providential nephew Willard search out the wrongdoers every time.

There is much more to this story. Perhaps to be told later. Seven years later there were 26 half-hour episodes of The Miss Mallard Mysteries being shown to children in every continent. Except Antarctica.

There are now fourteen grandchildren who love Miss Mallard. Yes, “things happen”.

Signs & Portents

It’s a pleasant walk most of the time. But today as we set out for the Marché Jean-Talon the weather was perfect. Low humidity, fitful breezes, a cloudless blue sky and the thermometer at 21C. We always take the shortcut through the hole in the fence and over the CPR tracks, rather than using the underpass. Unless of course a string of freight cars blocks our way. Or the ice and winds of winter make it precarious for old folks like us.

After that we cross diagonally through the Parc de la petite Italie which lives up to its name. Often retired men gather there to play cards, swap news from back home, or chat, no doubt, about the years of their youth. When they left their sunny homeland to work in the post-war construction boom in this once foreign land.

A small leaf caught my eye, lying as it was face down on the cobbled walkway. Yes, the red tinge showed through from its obverse. Face up, it became a messenger of things to come. A sign, or perhaps, a portent. I picked it up.

As we dropped in to Milano to get a block of Parmesan Grana Padano Parmigiano, I was mulling these two words over. They are both delicious, magic, and Biblical in their import. But could a little pinky red leaf be a sign or a portent? If Joshua were here might he trumpet, “That this may be a sign among you.......”?

I decided that signs and portents are much in the eye and the mind of the beholder. For me, the little red leaf tells me that in a few weeks I may have to take the underpass on the way to the market.

Seeking Berthold

Maria was a lovely woman. Full of enthusiasm and joy despite a hard life, and having lost her husband. He had died in 1968 I think, just a few years before we met. We had tea, or was it coffee, in their tiny apartment on rue du Vieux-Colombier, not far from St-Sulpice and the trendy cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The apartment was on the walk-up level, one floor above the elevator limits, as befitted an artistic couple on a sub-modest income. Pat and I met her once again, and she showed us Berthold’s paintings.

They were stored carefully under the bed. He had suffered from arthritis and his painter’s hands were too crippled to produce the large canvases which were then most popular amongst the art buyers of the day. Besides, he hadn’t had much public exposure. In the one show he had at a provincial gallery in the Pas-de-Calais region, the Curator wrote:

Le Monde a ignore Bertold Bartosch. Parce qu’il ne pouvait plus faire du cinéma, il a consacré les huit dernières années de sa vie à la peinture.

Born in the land of Rilke, he had made his way to Berlin where he was involved with the artistic ferment of the post-WWI era, a period which saw artistic talent crossing all borders. There he became involved in movies and made a remarkable film, l’Idée, based on a story and woodcuts by Masereel. Subsequently his anti-war and anti-fascist stance led him and Maria to settle in Paris, where he worked painstakingly on another film. But war overtook them and it was destroyed before it was completed.

Many months after Pat and I had dined at the Vagenende with Maria, I sent her a letter and received no response. Some time later her neighbours, the Flannerys, kindly sent me a postcard to tell me she had died. But where are the paintings? Some months ago I contacted the current management at the Musée de l’Hotel Sandelin in Saint-Omer, where Berthold’s work had been shown in 1973. There has been no reply.