Another Year: All in good time

Seasons pass, the garden’s tended, visitors come and go. “Nothing changes,” sighs one of our ensemble of mostly middle-aged, middle-class Londoners, though that’s not always bad news where certain cinematic yields are concerned. Honestly, I’m not sure that any new ground is broken in writer/director Mike Leigh’s latest multi-character study, yet it somehow feels fresh anyway. Another Year is chatty and rambling, busy yet plot-free, tender yet merciless about how life can just keep getting more unruly and incomprehensible, and, despite a number of chronically anxious, substance-abusing or otherwise depressed supporting characters—not to mention a harp-heavy score from Gary Yershon that creeps into New Ageyness—it’s also very, very funny.

Tom and Gerri (those sturdiest of Leigh vets, Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen), a chipper geologist and warmly maternal psychologist respectively, are the film’s collective rock. Lucky to have each other, they’re not flawless people, yet each possesses that rare gift for contentment, so much so that you might find yourself wondering if, like Leigh’s recent Happy-Go-Lucky, their story mightn’t become another cautionary tale about the tyranny of the well-adjusted. The film is built around the couple’s hosting at least four festive gatherings and a funeral. At nearly every one of these occasions Mary (Lesley Manville, mannered yet so precise) turns up, merrily envies her patient friends, gets plastered, and only gradually learns not to put the moves on their son (Oliver Maltman). Perhaps she needs someone to help, and she might just find it in an ashen widower (David Bradley) who looks like Motörhead’s Lemmy if Lemmy were a vampire. Good old Ken (Peter Wright) meanwhile may not ever learn to moderate his food intake, nor to stop two-fisting the lager, nor recover his unobstructed view of his own lap, but there’s always hope. Such things take time. Fortunately, Another Year is so pleasurable and sometimes touching that you won’t be in a hurry.

Dennis Hopper, 1936-2010

Apocalypse Now (1979)

I learned of Dennis Hoper’s death in a bowling alley in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, while drinking warm Canadian, trying to figure out what I was doing in this place, and losing badly at five-pin. I tend to take it hard when my heroes die, even when they’ve had a good run, and this didn’t seem the ideal scenario in which to hear sad news. Yet somehow, there in that bowling alley, with the leering local drunks and ill-fitting shoes and the unseasonably bone-chilling, desperately lonesome prairies unfolding forever just outside the doors, it struck me that this place was perfectly emblematic of my personal experience of Hopper’s singular body of work. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Feck, Hopper’s character from River’s Edge (1986), perched by the bar, slapping his artificial leg, embracing his rubber doll, hardening his beady eyes, and launching into a monologue about bikes, beer, and pussy. This gave me comfort.

River's Edge (1986)

Feck. Father. Photojournalist. Frank Booth. For moviegoers of my generation, Hopper’s story didn’t begin with Rebel Without a Cause (55) or Giant (55), or even with Easy Rider (69). It began with River’s Edge and Blue Velvet (86). That famous anecdote, how Hopper phoned David Lynch, already in production in North Carolina, just to assure him that he could play the drug-addled, sexually deranged, murderous, mommy-fixated sociopath Frank Booth because he was Frank Booth, how Lynch got off the phone and confessed to Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan that Hopper’s identification with the character could be great for the movie but how are they going to have lunch with him?, endures not only because it fuels the legend of the then recently rehabilitated Hopper, but, more importantly, because it functions as a declaration of an artist’s devotion to his work. Hopper recognized something of his own weaknesses in Frank Booth, and he used that recognition to elevate what in less disciplined hands might have been a cartoon villain. I will never forget hearing in an interview how the only thing that got Hopper through his worst times was his persistent belief that the cameras were always rolling.

Blue Velvet (1986)

In any case, Frank led me to Feck, then back to Father, his wonderful supporting role in Rumble Fish (83), and to Apocalypse Now (79), and Hopper’s unforgettable photojournalist or, as Hopper enunciates it in the movie, “I’m a photo. Journalist.” Between moments of eerie stillness he rattles off his monologues like a Beat auctioneer, with multiple cameras dangling round his neck like so many eyes, trying manically to take in everything. By the 1980s Hopper’s infamous past exploits, even Easy Rider and The Last Movie (71), didn’t matter as much as what he was doing right then, giving one performance after another that seemed that much more virtuosic, focused, dynamic, scary, and inventive for Hopper’s new straight edge. He seemed to convey genuine craziness with greater force when he wasn’t wasted. His work from this period, at least in the better movies—there were plenty of very bad ones, too—dispelled the notion that the demise of the New Hollywood meant the demise of great ambition in American movies. Blue Velvet was a masterpiece, and Frank Booth a walking, talking, horny, nightmare Id figure, at once terrifying and hilarious and the likes of which we’d never seen, barking lines as impossibly banal as “Let’s fuuuuck!” and rendering them gleeful howls from the collective unconscious.

Night Tide (1961)

Over time I began to grasp the larger story, to catch up with Hopper’s long and winding career, his photography and art collection and years in alcoholic abyss. For years I was merrily tracking down The Trip (67) or Out of the Blue (80) or, wow!, Night Tide (61) on VHS, while still trying to see every new movie he appeared in or directed, which wasn't easy because there were so damn many. He was always coming back, from blacklisting, humiliation, disaster, and addiction, but even Dennis Hopper’s resurrections are numbered. His death from metastasized prostate cancer at 74 came not as the last ember of a long fading away but as a sudden burning out. To the very end he worked like a madman, perhaps because he was a madman, a suggestion not meant to diminish his talents but simply contextualize his sensibility. He radiated unnerving intensity, and while he could play softer, more palatable roles, such as the schoolteacher hero of Carried Away (96), he had a special gift for weirdoes who left such indelible impressions on a movie that he barely needed names, guys known only as Goon, Moon, Prophet, Chicken, Shooter, Cracker, Doggie, and Kansas, his state of birth. He first left Kansas at 13, and it was then he first saw mountains, skyscrapers and the ocean. In every case he was disappointed because in his imagination these things were always grander than reality. For better and for worse he was born to seek grandeur, and through the most ragged and at times ridiculous routes, whether scaling the lower depths or shooting to dazzling heights, his life and work achieved it.

TIFF '09: "Without patience you can't be a fisherman..." Two new films from Mexico

My most treasured discovery at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival came from Mexican filmmaker Rigoberto Pérezcano, whose previous film, XV en Zaachila, was, quite tellingly, a documentary. Northless, co-written by Pérezcano with his producer Edgar San Juan, is imbued with a vivid and intimate sense of place, even if its themes finally have something to do with the difficulty of finding a place where one truly belongs. It follows its protagonist Andrés (Harold Torres, marvelous) from his native Oaxaca to Tijuana, where he makes a series of fumbling attempts to illegally enter the US but unintentionally begins cultivating an attachment to a handful of individuals who give him work, food, and shelter while he comes up with his next scheme to trespass the frontier.


Its interesting to note that the Spanish title of the film is Norteado, which means to be disoriented, or without a compass, or without a sense of north. The English title, though clearly an inaccurate translation, actually strikes me as the richer one, because it makes the north seem like a paradise, which is to say a place that doesn’t really exist, and it renders Andrés a man who is missing something, who suffers from the absence of some state of being he seems to think is necessary for living. His ostensible destination feels increasingly abstract as the story goes on, and his glimpses of it are delivered in a very amusing sort of shorthand—side-by-side headshots of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger—whereas the transitory life he establishes along the border—the most northernmost point he seems able to get to—grows only more welcoming.


What makes the film such a refreshing take on the border-crossing genre is above all its tone. About a third of the way through I suddenly became aware of the fact that the film wasn’t a drama but a comedy, albeit of a very subtle, unassuming kind, pitched somewhere between Jim Jarmusch and Charles Burnett in its use of deadpan humour, static images, repetition, seductive music, and situational comedy. There’s a tremendous warmth that emanates from the film once we get to the scene where our hero finds himself sitting in the front seat of a truck, drinking cans of Tecate and eating peanuts with the older woman who’s taken him in, partly out of kindness and partly out of reasons of her own. The film builds to a climatic sequence that’s too inventive and hilarious to spoil here. I hope you’ll have a chance to see it, and since the latest rumours have it that Mantarraya might be coming on as distributors, the chances seem decent.


I was less impressed with To the Sea, the Mexican film about three generations of men living in a remote fishing community in the Caribbean. I know many people who were deeply impressed by this work, but its beauty struck me as being strictly of the postcard variety, a very conventional perspective on an obviously wildly gorgeous locale. (Young filmmakers should always be leery of locations that offer nothing but spectacular beauty.) The child featured in the film, as well as the egret he befriends, are wonderfully natural presences on screen, but I couldn’t help but feel astonished by how little writer/director Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio brings to the proceedings. His hand as filmmaker is so light it barely seems to exist. It becomes difficult to believe that the characters wouldn’t have more to work out between them. I genuinely believe that Gonzalez-Rubio spent a lot of time with his subjects, got to know them and their lifestyle well. I just can’t believe the dearth of insight into their characters’ experiences he managed to conjure on film. To the Sea feels like a hybrid of a nature documentary and a home movie, but I have to say that I’ve seen better nature documentaries, and I’ve even seen better home movies. Incidentally, this film was in fact produced and will be distributed under the auspices of Mantarraya, though I’m not certain how they plan to get it out to a larger public.

More TIFF notes still to come...

Giant Steps

The titles or authors I can’t recall, the content only barely, but the photos in my elementary school’s surprisingly bountiful selection of Bigfoot books spring back into memory as though only days, rather than decades, have passed. The thing lived on the peripheries of the visible, so naturally it was the images that really mattered. The elusiveness of the creature could not have seemed more carefully designed. The iconic, infinitely reproduced stills from the 1967 Roger Patterson film, sensuously grainy, as though the creature’s fur were mottled with blur, and that pose, looking back over its shoulder like a wounded lover bidding a dramatic farewell, fascinated me like it did millions of other kids, and, I guess, almost as many adults. Bigfoot was already so perfect, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to alter its allure by trying to prove its existence, or by, most appallingly, trying to hunt it down and kill it. Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, to use the more noble-sounding and proudly Canadian term—would only ever be Bigfoot so long as it remained in the shadows, off the grid, never quite seen by prying eyes.

Author Joshua Blu Buhs

Much to the chagrin of those determined to usher the creature into the annals of legitimate science, Bigfoot lends himself quite nicely to being placed within the universal myth of the wild man, a potent symbol of our primal conscience. If he does exist, would Bigfoot be the product of nature, or would be some manifestation of the collective unconscious, a shared desire to believe that something almost human could persevere uncorrupted by the domesticating and soul-deadening effects of civilization, a Frankenstein’s monster built not of disparate body parts but of fragments from our vast cultural swamp? Such questions, however ridiculous the subject matter might seem to some, can yield complex and revealing answers, and I can’t imagine anyone providing better ones that Joshua Blu Buhs does in his engrossing read Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (The University of Chicago Press, $34.95). The book is a biography of a figure whose existence is extremely dubious at best—and Buhs, while remaining respectful of true believers, makes clear from the outset that he’s not among them—and is thus in essence a biography of the conditions under which this figure was cultivated and came to thrive. Buhs tells a great story by weaving together a multitude of interrelated stories taking place over two continents and the better part of a century. There are countless terrific anecdotes: the man who shot Bigfoot and listened to him tell his life story as he lay dying; a guy being abducted by a Bigfoot and held captive in a cave with an entire Bigfoot family, the implication being that he was destined to become the boyfriend of Bigfoot’s daughter; Jimmy Stewart agreeing to smuggle a Yeti paw from Nepal to England. Bigfoot spawned a lot of things, among them great stories, heated arguments, and a hugely profitable industry. But along the way he also spawned a community of misfits, some passionate and articulate, some cynical, some cracked. The story of their formation is one of the book’s highlights.

“What accounts for Bigfoot’s popularity?” Buhs asks. Perhaps it is that the possibility of its existence “was evidence that the world was not yet fully explored, that there was still room for man to test his mettle, to touch the really real behind the false front of consumer goods and scientific arrogance.” This angle, of modern man—and we are talking mostly about males here—alienated by an intellectualized, feminized, materialistic or reductive culture lies at the heart of Buhs’ thesis. The men who made Bigfoot what he is were mostly white, working-class and rural, loggers, hunters, small town reporters, disgruntled scientists and more than a few outright con men, Patterson, as most reports attest, being one of them. Following the emergence of sensational Yeti reports in the Himalayas, sightings of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and of Sasquatch in British Columbia, as well as reports of traces of the creature, such as hair, feces and, most famously, footprints, began to accumulate in the 1950s, leading to an explosion of Bigfoot related material in the 60s, the overwhelming majority of it turning up in magazines devoted to a blend of traditional masculine interests and the paranormal. As Buhs traces the development of Bigfoot iconography a compelling case is built around the creature fulfilling a deep need, becoming a figure of authenticity in a world where so much of what constitutes daily life is composed of the overtly phony, and mass produced.

Yet from almost the very beginning Bigfoot seemed ready to be co-opted. The creature represented a tireless resistance against consumerism within the very culture in which consumerism was born, yet this same creature was all too adaptable not only to the dictates of literature and movies, but to New Age ideologues and people trying to sell more Canadian Club and Kokanee—like a good many backwoodsmen, Bigfoot, it seems, is a heavy drinker. He would with time become safe, cuddly, a best friend to the Hendersons. He would be the poster monster for environmentalists, and a sort of prototype for the teachings of Iron John and Women Who Run With the Wolves. The creature has never been captured, but he has been stuffed with fire-repellant materials and can be frequently found enjoying a wild ride at Disneyland. By taking a closer look at the cultural history, Buhs suggests that with the demise of the primitive Bigfoot and the ascendance of the new, hip, fully tamed one, we can trace some sort of gradual surrender to the unstoppable juggernaut of modern artificiality. The stalwarts, meanwhile, have not given up their vigil. The creature may still be out there, immune to polluted streams and deforestation, smacking his feet into some soft earth as a way to say “I was here,” and laughing at us as he returns to his cave to watch free cable.

The King and I: on the writer-reader's reunion with his childhood boogeyman

I read the bulk of my Stephen King in those wonder years before my teens, the same period during which I collected comic books and gorged on horror movies that approximately 70% sucked. I was attracted, like most people I suppose, to the promise of something morbid, traumatic or fantastic, maybe all three. But, surprisingly, I stayed for the realism. So often with those King novels, once the mechanics of their supernatural conceits began to fully reveal themselves in all their half-baked stratagems, my interest in the undead pets or the car from hell or the apocalyptic battle royale would rapidly begin to drain away. King seemed to be this knack for taking something that seemed best shrouded in mystery and dragging it out into the light where he could overwork it at length. Yet there was something in King’s portraits of lower to middle class life in small to medium sized communities, of ordinary disappointments and frustrations with marriage and kids, health problems or booze problems, with jobs or school, that kept me caring, wondering, reading. They probably taught me something. They were greasy kid’s stuff, but they were about real adults.

I’ve rarely returned to King since. I got rid of a lot of them. My tastes just went in a very, very different direction. But every once in a while, like a whisper from some unseen entity, they call me back. I saw King give a speech last year at a festival in Toronto where he was warmly introduced by no less a heavyweight than Margaret Atwood. King was lively, bright, articulate, unpretentious as always, and totally hilarious. I forgot how funny he could be. He told a story about AC/DC and hip-hop I still repeat to friends, though without the same finesse. And I forgot how frequently he was still cranking out books, some of which were actually supposed to be good, maybe even his best. So I finally got around to it, not to revisiting King, but rather catching up with him.

Just After Sunset (Scribner, $32) is King’s latest collection of stories. Seemed like a good place to get reacquainted. I remembered how much I once loved some of the stories in Skeleton Crew, ‘Nona’ and ‘The Mist,’ or in Night Shift, ‘Grey Matter’ and ‘I Know What you Need.’ What the man could do with forbidding weather and stale beer! But I forgot however how wildly King can over-write. It all came hurtling back to me with brain-piercing clarity as I trudged through ‘The Gingerbread Girl,’ the first, soppier half of which reads like late Michener, the last half of which finds our heroine duct-taped to a chair and being chased by a one-dimensional psycho killer for what feels like an eternity. “You’re making me mad, Lady Jane!” says psycho. “No, you were already mad. As in hatter,” parries woman-in-peril, if only in her mind. At least she knows when a line stinks too bad to be spoken aloud.

Thing is, when you’re Stephen King, you pretty much publish whatever the hell you want, and if you squeezed it out on a whim but still deem it fit for print it’s hardly like some idiot editor’s going to suggest you do some trimming or even, you know, reject the story. What, do they not like money? Or readers? (‘The Gingerbread Girl’ was first published in Esquire, if you were curious.) Fortunately, for those readers patiently working through Just After Sunset, the lesser tales are fairly easy to identify in the first pages, and the better ones, it turns out, occur with greater frequency.

Logorrhea’s a funny thing. It can make fiction an endless plod through a blizzard in a T-shirt or a warm bath after a glass of wine, depending on what lies beneath the flow of words. So while I’d argue that one of Just After Sunset’s briefest stories is in fact one of its finest and most eloquent—the seven-page, crisply rendered and richly imagistic ‘Graduation Afternoon,’ in which a young woman on the cusp of adulthood finds the fleeting nature of youth reflected in an actual apocalypse—I’d still have to concede that some of the longer, more rambling stories possess an immersive quality that can arise only when the author’s allowed to luxuriate a while in his creation. I think especially of ‘N.’ In this longer story, composed of letters and transcripts, we’re gradually ushered into the apparent psychosis of an accountant suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder after visiting a hidden field that, by his own accounts, refuses to be photographed. The layering of and emphasis on counting works wonders—the accountant counts compulsively, he carefully recounts his story—while the sense of voice lulls us as it chills us, drawing us in in the tradition of some of the best 19th century tales of psychological collapse.

There’s also ‘Stationary Bike,’ another excellent description of the strange, troubling little items that can manifest and accumulate in private. After visiting a doctor who warns against obesity, a commercial artist buys a stationary bike that he rides in the basement of his apartment building while staring at a mural of a landscape he’s painted on the wall. He feels as though he's literally riding into the landscape. He buys maps... What’s most compelling is the way King makes his protagonist so down to earth and unreflective. He starts to work on strange paintings in his spare time without knowing why, and before we know it King himself is engaging in a process that’s probably hard for reader or writer to be entirely aware of as it unfolds. He’s making life on the page feel comfortably everyday before slowly allowing some corner of the frame to reveal a flaw and infect the story’s life-image as a whole. It’s a considerable gift for any author to possess, and for all his occasional indulgences, sentimentalizing or unwillingness to accept a dumb, sub-pulpy idea as just dumb sub-pulp, King seems to have this gift locked into his DNA. And I’d wager a guess that it’s this very quality that bridges the gaps between so many readers of all walks of life, and keeps calling us back.

The war at home: Gran Torino

Gran Torino can be read as a sort of western, and not just because of the immense presence of its iconic director and star. Maybe Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is an old soldier looking for a new war. He served in Korea, worked most of his life at a Ford plant, raised kids who are now middle class twerps and virtually estranged. He’s newly widowed, but continues to live alone, save his pooch, in the family house in some corroded suburb in the industrial wasteland of Detroit, where he mows the lawn, does small repairs, sucks back can after can of Pabst Blue Ribbon on the porch, and works hard to keep others away, sometimes with a snarl and a growl, sometimes with a gun. Always with a string of racist slurs.

But Gran Torino, written by Nick Schenk, is among other things the story of Walt’s redemption. Thanks partly to the awkward machinations of the script, but thanks to a greater degree to Eastwood’s particular integrity, this redemption will not come easily. Walt’s encounters with his Hmong immigrant neighbours, the kids especially, will force him to bust his cloistered existence. Teenage siblings Sue (Ahney Her, who tends to swallow her words but is so utterly the character) and Thao (Bee Vang) engage Walt, the former through smart talk, a preternatural insight into curmudgeonly psychology and offerings of delicious Hmong chow, the latter by trying to steal Walt’s prized Gran Torino under pressure from his gangbanger cousins. Walt finds new purpose as Sue and Thao’s protector and will ultimately stop at nothing to ensure they get a fighting chance to wriggle free of the ghetto. He’s an old hand at intimidation, so why should some stupid punks with tattoos and guns worry him? I can’t claim that I buy how it all goes down, but that doesn’t meant it’s not a story worth telling.

Eastwood manipulates his star image brilliantly. He knows the audience sees Dirty Harry up there, that we associate him with vengeance and vigilantism, and he lets all these extra-filmic elements hover around him and feed the tension. Though his directorial work can sometimes slip into implausibility and half-baked sentiment, Eastwood likes his stories tough. And he’s that rare mainstream American filmmaker who tries to make movies about what it means to live in America today. This alone is a reason to if not treasure at least respect his body of work. Rather than mindlessly celebrate his country’s puffed-up triumphalism, Gran Torino surveys a corner of the US that resembles a third world shit hole more than some glorious embodiment of ambition and affluence.

Whatever promise of a better world can be gleaned in Gran Torino must be found in the margins, in the implication that even the least tolerant of us, the disdainful dinosaurs who cling to antiquated notions of masculinity and tribalism, might be lured back into active engagement with others. The film trades in cliché. It cheats here and there to get Walt to the finish line. But Walt himself, which is to say Eastwood the conservative closet humanist, is never less than riveting, and it’s the throwaway moments he shares with his unexpected new friends that are the film’s finest and most affecting. There might just be hope for my cranky old uncle Rick yet. I just hope the movie plays in Gananoque, Ontario, so he can see it. 

Death on the installment plan: Julian Barnes tries to overcome his thanatophobia, fails, writes book instead—and it’s pretty good!

Now the leaves shrivel, brown and fall from the trees to be obliviously trampled into wintry pulp; now the air turns crisp and thin, the days shorten and the nights forbiddingly chill—what better time is there to think about death! I’ve been reading the Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Random House, $32.95), English novelist Julian Barnes’ latest work of non-fiction. I’ve been reading it mostly outdoors, perhaps because my denial of summer’s end is nearly as resilient as our collective denial of that bigger, more ominous End. My reading of this divertingly morbid little volume has passed largely over pints of rich, opaque, iron-fortified beer on a tavern’s dusky patio until my fingers ached, a sensation that starts to blur its origins—is it just the coldness or the weakening effects of time on my digits?—once you reach a certain age, and that age likely depends on whenever it was you experienced le réveil mortel, a handy term dreamed up by Charles du Bos which Barnes suggests is best translated as “the wake-up call to mortality.”

I don’t know if this sounds like somebody’s idea of bragging, but I actually can’t even remember my own réveil. It seems like it was always there, already hatched and doing its work on my well-fed anxieties before I even knew what anxiety was. There are those, I’m told—and not only those who ascribe to religious beliefs—who aren’t plagued by fear of death. For them, Nothing to Be Frightened Of should hold some anthropological curiosity, a primer on what the fuss is all about. For the rest of us, Barnes’ pithy, anecdotal and arguably kind of amiably aimless thanatophobist’s memoir is all too familiar in its chronicles of late night sweats, those special sorts of panic attacks reserved for involuntary nocturnal “pit-gazing.” Barnes, now 62, is a non-believer, so his pit, for the record, is truly fucking fathomless, and the title of his book needs to be read with the emphasis on that first word: it is precisely nothing that’s so frightening.

Barnes goes through any number of age-old forms of philosophically intoned consolation, from the religious to the genetic, and finds more than adequate grounds for dismissing every one as insufficient. But consolation, that is, grown-up consolation as opposed to the rubber nipple type, doesn’t seem to be what this book is all about—unless we consider the value of the simple consolation of recognition, the reminder that we’re all in the same boat… even if it’s eventually going to smash into an iceberg.

“It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish,” observed Jules Renard and quoted by the Francophile Barnes, and for me this rings true. Literature, perhaps above all texts that survive their authors, holds a singular link to mortality, and books, hand-held, intimate by nature, closely invoke our private dialogue with time. Barnes, while claiming that if given a strict number of days left would probably chose the emotional mainline of music over books—also pretty sensible if you ask me—thus makes the refrain of Nothing to Be Frightened Of references to the books and authors he knows best, which seem mostly to be late 19th century and early 20th century Euros, like Flaubert, Zola or Turgenev, who, as cited by Barnes, once claimed that Russians have a unique talent for swatting away thoughts of death, making them disappear into the “Slavic mist.” “Nowadays,” Barnes later points out, “both the gesture and the mist are available pharmaceutically.” I guess this would be an example of another form of consolation here: humour, which is something Barnes appears to be in no danger of losing.

Barnes’ book is hardly all-encompassing, its consideration of “how we die” being largely confined to how middle-class westerners with reasonable access to health care die. No matter how universal a chord he strikes in his candid exploration of his own thanatophobia and that of people he’s been close to, Barnes never even begins to account for the varieties of thanatophobia that distinguish us culturally. But in a sense, the specificity of Barnes’ book, the personal aspect of it, is its real strength. As much as anything else, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is about Barnes coming to terms with death through the prism of his own family, through recalling the deaths of his parents and grandparents—each of whom are fun characters to spend time with and vividly drawn by the author—or consulting his renown philosopher brother; through trying hard to remember things about the past and about people, all the while acknowledging that memory and the imagination are nearly interchangeable. Barnes seems perfectly comfortable with the vagaries of memory, since as a novelist he’s vocationally inclined to believe some deeper truth may be gleaned from the (re)construction, however founded on the unintended fictions of our murky consciousness. And in these truths are perhaps a third and last form of consolation: our number may be up sometime, but before then, at least there might be one more sublime spark of understanding. All for naught perhaps, but a spark all the same. 

Ascension, nostalgia, illusion and transcendence: Eclipse offers a pair of remarkable films from the forgotten Soviet era master Larisa Shepitko

Larisa Shepitko was born in 1939 in the Ukrainian city of Artemovsk. She attended the Moscow Film School and studied under the great Alexandr Dovzhenko, director of Arsenal (1928) and Earth (30), but being an all-too-apt pupil, and part of what would prove an iconoclastic generation of Soviet filmmakers, she would not uphold or even reconfigure the traditions of her mentor so much as follow his example as an innovator and exacting aesthete, developing an utterly distinctive voice, one that would seek poetic methods of externalizing internal, individual transformations rather than, in accordance with official Soviet ideology, speak for the glory of a people.

Wings (66), one of two films in Eclipse’s new no-frills Shepitko box, begins with an image of pedestrians moving in several directions on a village street. This image of public life, at first inexplicably strange, seemingly slightly distorted, somehow alienating, is revealed as something literally separate from the quiet, tidy world we’re entering when a figure suddenly enters the frame and moves toward us, the camera tracking backwards to show that the crowds are on the opposite side of a window from him. The figure is a bespectacled, anonymous tailor, unimportant to the rest of our story, but his duty in this first scene in emblematic: he’s measuring Nadezhda Petrukhina (Maya Bulgakova) for her power suit.

A decorated World War II fighter pilot, Nadezhda is being costumed for her new role as director of a provincial trade school, her severe new threads rendering her androgynous and angular. The job is intended as a reward for her heroism yet it quickly finds her uncomfortably trying to fit into the role of an authority figure over a generation for whom her past means little. The sense of falseness associated with her position is echoed throughout Wings with several theatrical or illusory scenes in which key elements disconnect: a soundless speech on a TV; firemen apparently running toward but in fact only running through a drill; two middle-aged women in an empty café reminiscing for their lost youth over beer and plates of meat, who begin to sing and waltz together, until it is revealed that a crowd of men with arched brows are observing from just outside the café windows, and the women embarrassedly separate and smooth out their clothing. So much of this place Nadezhda inhabits seems to exist as simulation.

Nadezhda will frequently be seen attempting, with barely contained desperation, to strike a tone of merriment amongst her colleagues, family and townsfolk, but one of the only scenes in which she seems to truly feel herself is one where she’s essentially alone. She stands in the street as it begins to rain and the other villagers all run for shelter. She gazes toward the newly vacant horizon and her point-of-view seems to lift off, taking her into the dampened sky and into an episode of helpless nostalgia for the days when she flew fighter planes and was so in love with a fellow pilot whose death she witnessed from her own cockpit. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking scene, emotionally matched only by the film’s finale, where an act of panicked escape becomes something transcendent.

These themes of transcendence and flight are inherit in the very title of the other film in Eclipse’s Shepitko box, The Ascent (76), set in 1942 Belarus, where starved and weary Soviet partisans are on the run from Nazi invaders, in a landscape so seized by winter that only the barren, inky, crooked foliage breaks up the grey-whiteness that’s seemingly melded earth and sky. The film follows two of the partisans eventually captured by the Nazis, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin), sent out to forage for food. Sotnikov, who already seems the physically weaker of the pair, is badly injured, yet as their plight worsens and they, along with three other locals, are set to be executed, Sotnikov unearths some immense inner resolve, devises a plan to become a sort of martyr, and little by little seems to glow, becoming increasingly beatific as he nears his own death.

The Ascent is a very grim film that does not flatter human nature, but it is inspiring in its lyricism, strange development of tension and paradoxical equation of escape with surrender. Music is seldom used, but when it is it makes for eloquent, nearly dream-like passages. The almost hallucinatory, not to mention Christian mystical tone that envelops the story as Sotnikov’s face takes on a more iconic light in Shepitko's consistently remarkably close-ups, aligns it to the contemporary work of Tarkovsky, films like Andrei Rublev (69) and Solaris (72), as does the use of Tarkovsky regular Anatoli Solonitsyn, appearing here in the very enigmatic role of a Russian interrogator working for the Nazis.

Shepitko would doubtlessly have gone on to further establish herself as among the greatest filmmakers of the late Soviet era and beyond, but sadly, The Ascent would be her last film. She was killed in 1979 along with four of her collaborators while scouting locations for her next project Farewell to Matyora. The film was later completed by Elem Klimov, her husband, the director of another masterful war film, Come and See (85).

The shoes are a dead giveaway; the monkey, I don't know what that's about

In Paul Cronin’s enormously entertaining book of interviews with Werner Herzog, entitled Herzog on Herzog, the legendary Bavarian filmmaker confesses that he’s long considered opening a film school, one where the entrance exam would consist of nothing more than traveling alone on foot—the suggested distance is 5000 kilometres—and writing about the journey. Upon examining the notebooks, Herzog, a proud autodidact, would then be able to discern who’d walked the full distance and who hadn’t, and thus who would make the cut. “While walking,” Herzog explains, “you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom.”

The irreverence of this statement is hardly lost on me, yet the truth is it strikes me as an utterly solid idea. Anyone who truly engages in a creative act, however reliant on the imagination, however ostensibly sedentary, knows perfectly well that to create is physically demanding. I’d even propose that the more restraining the activity, the more strenuous the physical discipline needed to counterbalance it. By this logic, if making films requires walking, something as contained as writing requires an activity more aerobically demanding. But then, I’m totally biased. I’m one of those people: a running writer.

To say the least, I’ve never been athletic, but, to the surprise of many of my friends, running seems to suit me. It’s basically free, keeps me outdoors (where I’m often happiest), allows me to wander and daydream, to meditate or, just as importantly, wipe the slate blank and think of nothing. It’s also a form of preparation, of focusing, of testing one’s endurance, something you need a lot of when you’re sitting alone in a room with this arguably rather strange task ahead of you. (With any luck it’ll also, you know, keep me from getting fat.)

Writing and running both being essentially solitary acts, I only realized how relatively common running writers were when I found them by accident, like my dear friend Saskatoon novelist Shelley Leedahl, who, to my astonishment, I caught diligently doing her daily morning run in the staggering, sticky heat of Mérida, Mexico, where we met during an artist residency. I then discovered some writers who actually wrote about running, like Joyce Carol Oates in her memorable 1999 essay for The New York Times. And now, most satisfying of all, I’ve been able to read Haruki Murakami’s new memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Bond Street Books, $27.95), its title a re-working of Raymond Carver’s most well-known story collection, which Murakami translated into Japanese. (I'm pretty sure Carver wasn't a runner.)

Even if you didn’t know Murakami was a runner, if you’ve read a few of his novels you probably wouldn’t be too surprised. In Kafka on the Shore, to draw out an obvious example, Murakami’s titular protagonist experiences a transcendental state after hiking at an increasingly rigorous pace through wilderness while listening to John Coltrane’s rendition of ‘My Favorite Things’ (Murakami’s as obsessed with jazz as he is with running). This sort of transcendence is described in Murakami’s trademark everyman’s prose when he recalls running the final stretch of an ultramarathon. It was, he writes, “like my body had passed through a stone wall… I don’t know about the logic or the process or the method involved—I was simply convinced of the reality that I’d passed through.”

Most of the time however, the experience of running chronicled in What I Talk About is of a perfectly banal sort—and I mean that in a good way. Murakami not being a competitive sort, or by his own confession even a sociable sort, treasures running as a way to meet his own private goals: 36 miles a week, six miles a day, six days a week is the routine he describes from his desk, which at various points is located in either Massachusetts, Hawaii or Hokkaido. He runs at least one marathon a year and, perhaps more difficult to comprehend since he doesn’t seem to like cycling, has also tried to squeeze in an annual triathlon to boot. He talks about fun incidentals, like what music he listens to (mostly rock, from Beach Boys to Beck), and shares anecdotes about running in exotic places and under diverse, sometimes humorous conditions. He’s frank about facing the realities of aging—he’s now approaching 60—and he reveals a keen eye for the eccentricities of running culture, even inventing a term for something most long-term long-distance runners probably know well: “runner’s blues.”

But I suspect that the tread running through What I Talk About that will appeal to the most readers, especially those who write, run, or both, is Murakami’s conveyance of the relationship between running and writing, both of which, not coincidentally, he took up around the age of 30. Analogies between running and writing allow Murakami to weigh the relative merits of self-destructive versus healthy behaviour—exercise junky he may be, but Murakami also loves beer and Dunkin’ Donuts—of talent and discipline, of pacing versus pushing one’s limits. He also offers some interesting techniques for both activities, such as quitting for the day when you still have some juice left in you, a sort of necessary reserve to utilize tomorrow.

At one point Murakami also mentions how the act of writing fiction releases “a kind of toxin that lies deep in all humanity.” As with that stone wall I mentioned earlier, he writes of this mysterious toxin without ever breaking his average guy, down-to-earth tone, as though it were the most acceptable notion in the world. This matter-of-fact treatment of the mysterious if of course something Murakami fans adore about his work, and even in non-fiction, it’s hard to imagine a Murakami book without a splash of it.