M is for Movies

M is for Movies.

I grew up watching them.

My parents loved movies.

But more importantly? They loved film, cinema, the real deal.

I was taken to important films from the time I was young.

Oh, we went to the blockbusters, the kid flicks, the fun things.

But also? Serious films. The ones that meant something, opened you up, pulled you apart, turned you inside out, put you back together differently.

You don't think a film can change you?

Then you've been watching the wrong movies.

When I was eight years old, on the 4th of July?

Instead of fireworks (which still frightened me a bit at that age anyway) my parents took me to the movies.

Zeferelli's Romeo and Juliet.

It was rated "M" for Mature audiences (in 1968 there was no R yet, no PG-13).

I still remember the beauty and lyricism of Shakespeare's words. And Romeo's naked butt.

My parents loved classic films. I watched hundreds of old black and white movies on the TV, was no stranger to Bogey and Bacall; Katherine Hepburn my idol. 

My mother loved musicals. And I loved Barbra Streisand passionately. Hello Dolly and Funny Girl, of course, but also The Owl and the Pussycat where Barbra plays a sometime hooker who drops the F-bomb (the first time a female star ever uttered that word in a Hollywood picture).

(At the time, I had no idea why I loved her so much. But looking back I can clearly see she is the only star who looks anything remotely like me, Jewish and significantly shnozzed and all.)

My parents took me to foreign films. With subtitles. And we watched them fervently on public television.

I remember being very tired in the mornings for a whole month of the 11th grade because Cinema 13 was hosting a Japanese film festival nightly at 11 PM.

This was in the days of broadcast TV.

There was no cable. There were no VCRs.

If you wanted to watch something? You had to show up. You had a date with your TV for when it was being broadcast.

And we really wanted to watch Kurosawa, Ozu and Teshigahara. I was the only 15 year-old I knew whose favorite film was Woman in the Dunes.

(Until it was eclipsed by Bergman's Persona the next year.)

We loved Woody Allen. He was ours. (The uber-New York Jew.)

We loved Robert Altman (no explanation necessary).

We loved the actress Ruth Gordon and quoted lines from Where's Poppa? and Harold and Maude as part of our private family patois.

Films informed my whole life.

I studied film in college, became a film and video maker, made my living in a branch of the business.

Studying film was delicious. I got to watch so many wonderful films, as well as learning how to make them.

There were times I would become a bit... obsessed with certain films.

Watching them over and over, finding truths in their flashing frames. A string that would vibrate in my soul every time a moment played out, an image seared into my brain, imprinted, that my eyes wanted to see.

Over and over.

Like these films, among many others...

Hiroshima Mon Amour (Possibly my favorite film of all time. About memory. And love. And everything else.)

Dr. Strangelove  (First seen as a child on New Year's Eve, with the end-of-the-world mushroom cloud explosions perfectly timed with the stroke of midnight)

Diva (If you have never seen this film? I don't know how to describe it, nor to adequately convey how consumed I was by it when I first saw it, and then watched it again and again and again. Yes, obsession was the operative word here. Yes. I have not viewed it again in years, don't know if it holds up, am almost afraid to find out.)

The Lion in Winter  (This moment... Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine says to her jewelry: "I would hang you from my nipples but it would shock the children." Perfection.)

Stealing Beauty (Whatever you think of Liv Tyler, this is Bertolucci and a luminous film. Do not let your teenage virgin daughter watch if you want her to stay that way.)

Burden of Dreams (A film-making friend of mine was obsessed with this film & pulled me into her obsession, making me watch with her, over and over. It's a documentary made by the filmmaker Les Blank, who was in turn obsessed with the obsessive nature of Werner Herzog while making Fitzcarraldo, a film about a man obsessed with a  boat. Sensing a theme here? At one point Herzog says, "I shouldn't make films anymore, I should be in a lunatic asylum.")

Blade Runner  (I know you're thinking: Wait. What? That's a big blockbuster film, a genre film from a commercial director, not a personally meaningful work from an "Auteur." Where did that come from?

Well, a great film is a great film. And I have always loved Science Fiction. And this film? Was something else. Something new. Ever since you laid eyeballs upon it, you cannot picture the future without either referencing or refuting this film's vision of it, so completely did it create that world.

It is in our psyches. Permanently. And I wouldn't have it any other way.)

When I was a young girl, my parents business, an Art Gallery, was located on the main street of our suburban town, right next door to the movie theater. On the other side of the theater, physically part of the same building, nestled into a little chunk of its side, was a delicatessen and candy store.

I went to work with my parents on Saturdays, as did the Deli owner's daughter, Diana, a girl my age. We were friends.

And because her parents were friendly with the movie theater's owner? We got to see the Saturday matinee movie every Saturday. For free. Even the popcorn was free, if we brought our own paper bags to put it in.

My parents didn't have much money back then so the free part was wonderful for them. And it took me out of their hair for two hours or so. Win.

And I? Was in movie-loving heaven.

The matinees were movies for children. Occasionally classics like The Sound of Music or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but often pure kid fodder like Island of the Lost or With Six You Get Eggroll. We didn't care.

This was of the time before multiplexes, before theaters resembled nothing more than rectangular boxes with another glowing rectangle up front for you to fix your eyes upon.

This theater was old, it had nooks and crannies. A vaulted ceiling, cherubs. Deep red, velvety wallpaper softening the walls.

And a loge, where we sat, week after week, my friend Diana and I. Sucking on rock candy from her parents store, slipping fistfuls of popcorn from brown paper bags, grown greasy, into our hungry mouths.

We were there to be transported. Even drek like Destroy All Monsters called forth the magic. It didn't matter, for we were learning to see.

To see in the dark.

And now, what is it my autistic son Jacob loves more than anything else in the world?

Movies.

He loves movies.

He is learning about the world though them; he is learning to see.

To see in the dark.

This post has been inspired by and linked up to Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday writing meme. And isn't "M" is such a lovely letter? Shaped like a mountain, it is.

I'm also linking this post up to Maxabella's I'm grateful for...  because I am grateful that my life has been enriched by the existence of wonderful movies, and most especially for the parents who taught me to love film.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

The Cube and I

I am sitting crosslegged on the sofa, ignoring the cat batting at me, attempting to wrest the Twinkie from my hand. She sprints to the living room’s windowed wall, fantasy-stalking the birds flitting about the feeder, newly filled by my mother.

Their hungry chirps an invitation to come outside and play before this winter afternoon’s blue light fades to black.

Though the huge nor’easter was two weeks past, there are still deep piles of snow out back, making odd, lumpen shapes out of our backyard’s buried furnishings: picnic table transformed into igloo palace.

But the pull of something else bears a stronger seduction: an ugly square box with golden antennae perched atop. Curved glass holding shifting ghosts of black and white.

It’s 4:30 PM. Sunday afternoon. I am watching TV.

And after today, February 23rd, 1969, my brain will never be the same again.

I am, as is common, alone; my parents busy, elsewhere…  Mom in the laundry room perhaps, Dad in the darkroom.

I turn on the TV set. Channel 4, NBC. OK, why not?

Something comes on. Something I have never seen before, and, for many years afterwards, am not sure I had actually seen then, not just hallucinated:

“The Cube.”  

I see this...

There is a man alone in a small white room.

Perfectly square.

A cube.

Each wall, floor, ceiling made up of a 4x4 grid of white squares, in turn.
 
The man is searching, questioning: What is going on? Why is he here?

People begin to enter the cube, interact with the man.

But no one gives him answers.

They only draw him into their own dramas.

The mystery deepens.

Existential angst engulfs.

People talk:

“None of us are real, he’s not real, we’re all projected.”

“Well, as I interpret what you’re doing here, this is all a very complex discussion of Reality versus Illusion. The perfect subject for the television medium!”

Reality shreds, hangs on by a thread, disappears completely, appears to return, and then? Poof, in a whiff of strawberry jam, it is gone…

What remains?

The Cube.

So yes, at age eight and a half, I had my already precocious mind completely blown by a bit of TV.

Produced for NBC Experiment in Television, directed & co-written by Jim Henson (yes, that one).

This will be hard for those born into the cable-TV-10,000-channels-that-must-be-filled-at-all-times years, but this aired exactly twice.

Once, the day I saw it, February 23, 1969, and once again in 1970.

Then it disappeared.

When I would describe it to friends, with a few rare exceptions, they would look at me as if I had three heads, shake their own heads and declare that nothing that strange had ever appeared on television; I must have made it up, so fantastic did it sound.

But oh, it was real. Very real.

If you have never seen it (and I am guessing this describes 99.9% of you) you must.

Here:

"The Cube" a tele-film by Jim Henson (& Jerry Juhl), 1969

Now imagine yourself a hyper-sensitive, highly intelligent not-yet-nine year old girl with an over-active imagination and a developing penchant for getting stuck in the revolving doors of her own mind, watching THAT alone on a long ago February afternoon...

Anybody have any questions as to when the seeds were planted for me to become a student of avant-garde filmmaking at an experimental college at 17? A hippie, lesbian, college-drop-out, bean-sprout farmer living in a primitive geodesic dome on a ridgetop in Northern California at age 20?

And then, at 33, a married, Manhattanite, globe-trotting corporate video producer with a closet full of suits?

I thought not.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post about a TV show from your past. 

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Dunia

Asked to picture my grandmother in her vital days, before the stroke that laid her low, creating the shadow who hovers dimly in the background of my later childhood years, this image comes:

Dunia, in her kitchen; yellowed light from an ancient ceiling fixture suffusing everything with a sulfuric glow, wiping her hands on her ever-present stained apron, a cigarette stuck to her lower lip, as if by glue and not mere spittle, the red edge of a pack of Pall Malls peeking up out of the apron's torn pocket.

Moments before, her hands were furiously busy with wooden bowl and gleaming blade, chopping up the eggs, onions and chicken livers whose frying smell hangs close, blends with the cigarette smoke to create a thick haze in the kitchen: the smell of Grandma Dunia's house. (I have that chopper now, passed down the maternal line, its metal handle still retaining a hint of the red paint that once caught my eye, there in my grandmother's kitchen.)

Outdoors the air is fresher though also strange, dank, loamy; her yard deeply shadowed by old tress, old bushes grown tall and feral. The lilac that stands by our own garage door comes from these here, my flower-loving mother happy to have a piece of home with her. But somehow, here, even the lilacs seem dour, moody, menacing as they tower over me, the smallest, palest thing around for miles.

The old swing-set in the backyard is miraculously still standing, and I push the upstairs tenant's twin toddlers higher and higher to their squealing delight. At eight, I am the big girl, enjoy watching the little girls' flashing smiles, marvel at the many tiny pink-barretted braids it must have taken their mother hours to tame their hair into.

I do not know this will be my last visit, that my grandmother's days of independence are swiftly numbered. I will miss spending time with these little girls, the only young, new things in this creaking old house.

Finally the gloaming completely engulfs the yard, a perfect background for the fireflies dancing delight. But it is time to head inside, the night being no time for young girls to linger outdoors in this now rough neighborhood.

Smoke swirls through all the rooms of this house, as my grandmother lights one cigarette off the dying ember of the previous, a chain that will, by necessity, end the soon-coming day she keels over.

My mother, once a smoker too, now quit, waves her hand in front of her face to clear a small circle of air, hoping to breathe freely.  She knows better then to ask her mother to stop smoking, in spite of the wheezing it now brings on. She knows better than to ask her mother for anything, empathy and generosity running decidedly short in this house.

We do not visit often, but when we do I marvel at how different it is here than in my home. Her ancient standard poodle skulks like a ghost from room to room, large and silent, its one eye turned milky strange, a frightening apparition to a child used to frisky cats.

The television is round at the edges, encased in a huge wooden cabinet, almost unrecognizable to me, but for the comfort it provides; the familiar images appearing therein reminding me that I still inhabit the same solid world, though the frame has shifted.

While I watch TV, the grown-ups talk and talk. I do not try to listen in. When my grandmother tells a joke, though the telling is in English, the punch line is always in Yiddish, a language I do not understand. Even the laughter here bears a sharper edge, a tang, is not easy and light. 

When it comes time to leave, my mother comes to sit in the back seat with me, her lap my pillow, a sleepy girl's fondest wish. The car's windows are open, inviting night's fresh air to rush all around us, and we gratefully inhale.

She strokes my head, her hands ever gentle with me, as her mother's never were with her.  And I drift off, knowing I will wake up in the arms of my strong father carrying me from the car, bringing me home.


Curious about my unusual Grandmother? I have written about her before: here, and here.

This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post inspired by this photo:

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Cheryl

Asked to write about Kindergarten, my usual free-flowing memory fails me.

I spent just one year in that school. (We moved the summer after.)

And of that year? Nothing remains.

The memory box is empty.

Of the building that I entered daily? There is nothing, less than nothing, not even a shadowy pseudo-memory, mocking me with its vagueness. Just... a blank, a black hole.

Of the classroom where many hours were surely logged, I get... nothing. Almost nothing. A feeling that the walls might have been green. The smell of thick paste and finger paint.

I think my teacher's name began with an "F."  Mrs. F... nothing.  I have been told that I loved her, that I looked forward to school each day.

This is inconceivable.

I am someone who has memories of laying in her crib. I have sketched the layout of the city apartment my family inhabited from my birth to age three and a half, accurate to the utter astonishment of my parents.

I remember elevator rides from a two year old's perspective, buttons frustratingly, impossibly high, mockingly out of reach. The shock of a Central Park orange creamsicle to my toddler mouth on a summer day.

I remember. Everything.

But that whole year of my life?

Astonishingly. Nothing.

Except this: a person.

One girl.

A friend.

Brown pigtails. Blue dress. Brown eyes. Brown skin.

Big smile, just for me.

A friend.

A best friend.

Cheryl.

Inseparable.

Until we moved, that afterward summer, to the other side of town. Across the divide: Old Country Road.

A different school, a different, "better" school district. Decidedly paler.

Separated.

Somehow, improbably, our friendship remained intact, though we became occasional friends, different than schoolmates.

Of Cheryl, much remains.

Games of hide and seek with her older brothers Darrell and Victor that always involved basements and crawl spaces, delicious in their slight danger.

The sulfur smell of cap guns mingling with burning leaves on crisp autumn days.

Watching "The Birds" on the little TV in her bedroom and scaring ourselves silly.

The smile that broke across her handsome, dignified, Doctor father's face in the presence of his children.

Her southern raised mother, calling me "Sugar" and melting my heart.

Her mother's home cooking attempting to put some meat on my then skinny bones.

A love pervading that house that was ceaselessly demanding yet unconditional. A rare combination. The sense, always, of high expectations for those children, including the brother with Cerebral Palsy. An example set, which I have never forgotten.

Sleepovers.

Late night whisperings, gigglings. Eventual sleep.

Riding home from a sleepover in her father's strange, wonderful car. The intoxicating smell of sun warmed leather rising up from the seats.

Our neighbors wondering who the hell we knew who drove a Rolls.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a memoir piece about kindergarten.

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.