Rock Crystal: Lost in the glittering winter darkness, and happily so

“In most places, midnight as the very hour of his birth is solemnized by ritual of great splendor, to which the bells ring out their heartsome invitation through the still darkness of the wintry air; then with their lanterns, along dim familiar paths, from snow-clad mountains, past forest-boughs encrusted with rime, through crackling orchards, folk flock to the church from which solemn strains are pouring—the church rising from the heart of the village, enshrouded in ice-laden trees, its stately windows aglow.”

Adalbert Stifter

I realize now that, as a child, whatever magic surrounded Christmas for me seemed drawn exclusively from the past: old movies and old storybooks; my grandmother’s anecdotes of her own childhood Christmases; paintings, photographs, or other such images culled from or invoking of antiquity. I’ve just read Adalbert Stifter’s novella Rock Crystal (New York Review of Books Classics, $14.95), quoted above. It was written in, I believe, 1853. I was immediately entranced and even moved by the book’s delicate evocation of a time of year that as an adult I’ve come largely to dread—I’m irreligious, have no children, dislike frantic shopping and hate most Christmas music—and this relationship between Christmas’ former allure and such elements as the darkness of long nights unadulterated by streetlamps and luminous skyscrapers, genuine quietude, ancient rites and activities, and the serenity of an era that predates modern consumerism, now seems very obvious to me. I didn’t want to be transported to a mall; I wanted to be transported back to several decades before my birth. I’ve always had a special attachment to Ingmar Bergman films—maybe I just wanted to share my holidays with Fanny and Alexander.

The story of Rock Crystal is easy enough to summarize: two children travel from their tiny Alpine village to a slightly larger Alpine village to visit their grandmother on Christmas Eve; on the way back they’re lost in a snowstorm and forced to pass the night outdoors. The problem with offering such a synopsis is that this little drama constitutes only about half of Rock Crystal’s page-count. The first third or so, in which Stifter’s trickling prose runs through descriptions of the villages of Gschiad and Millsdorf, their inhabitants and customs, their relationship to the world beyond and most especially to the natural splendour surrounding them, initially seems to promise no drama at all. It seems rather like a work of wondrous, affectionate anthropology, until we gradually realize that everything Stifter details foreshadows the children’s journey: the hubris of their shoemaker father, the gifts provided by their grandmother, the discovery of the remains of a baker in the woods. Stifter draws his narrative from an exacting sense of place, an approach that, along with Rock Crystal’s setting, may have had a considerable influence on Visitation, a wonderful recent novel by the contemporary German author Jenny Erpenbeck.

W.G. Sebald

I don’t know how I first came to hear about Stifter, who was born in Bohemia in 1805, and died in Austria in 1868. Everything I’ve read refers to him as unknown or forgotten, but my finally getting around to reading Stifter this past week was prompted by W.G. Sebald, that specialist of the forgotten, who cited Stifter as an influence and, indeed, whose ornate sentences not only owe something to Stifter’s, but whose particular obsession with history possessed an unmistakable precedent in Rock Crystal, whose descriptions are so rapturous that it’s as though posterity depends on sheer urgency and devotion. (Incidentally, Stifter’s description of how the residents of Gschaid “are obliged to keep their dead with them over the winter till they can bring them to the valley for burial after the snow has melted” reads almost exactly like the description of dealing with the dead in Sebald’s own Alpine village offered in Sebald’s 1998 Writers & Company interview with Eleanor Wachtel.) In the writings of both Stifter and Sebald, memory is a living force, the past inextricable from the now, and the dead remain somehow present. Reading their work inevitably comes with an air of melancholy, but it also comes with deep consolation, perhaps most of all during these longest nights of the year.

The bittersweet sixteen: Stranded on DVD

It was not like a shipwreck, one survivor explains. Rather, it was somehow closer to being lost at sea, the snow being just as unruly, oppressive and deadly a force. At first, some wondered if they’d awoken to find themselves in the hereafter, the vastness and blankness of their surroundings evoking some realm of heavenly purity, of desolate, austere beauty, and it was only the cries of agony, the tremendous, unimaginable suffering endured by all those who didn’t instantly perish that convinced them otherwise. This place they found themselves in was indeed very much of this world, but to listen to their testimonies you’d think they’d returned from a distant planet.

Watching Gonzalo Arijón’s Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains is an exhausting experience. And after you’ve seen it, the idea of telling this story in any other way, at least cinematically, starts to feel vulgar or insufficient in comparison. While there are well-staged and evocative re-enactments to help us visualize their narratives, so much of the film is comprised of now middle-aged men simply sitting, remembering, speaking—yet it’s absolutely riveting. Each of its subjects, articulate, vivid storytellers the lot, talk us through their memories of the incident, the 1972 crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in the Andes. Of the 45 people on board only 16 lived to see rescue some grueling 72 days later. Yet the fact that 16 survived, that any survived, is about as close to a true miracle as most of us will ever know of.

The plane carried the Old Christians, a rugby team from Montevideo, Uruguay, en route to a match in Santiago, Chile. They did not reach their ostensible destination, but the situation in which they found themselves would prove to be a defining moment in each of their lives. They shared numerous traits that one can’t help but interpret in retrospect as somehow essential to their survival: youth, nationality, physical fitness, education, class, an ethic of teamwork, and varying degrees of religious conviction. To this day they all live within a short distance of one another. The durability of their faith and sense of brotherhood would come to lend heightened meaning to their team’s moniker, seeing them through the most horrific and despairing depths of their 72-day trail. They had no outdoors training and were unfamiliar with the mountain conditions. One survivor describes how the crash gave him his very first contact with snow—which he immediately waded in up to his chest. They had little food, poor clothing, nothing to create heat with, and, despite there being two medical students among them, no medical supplies. They would eventually be forced to resort to cannibalism. Yet here, most of all, they took comfort in their religious beliefs, citing Christ’s offering of his flesh during the Last Supper as precedent and permission for the carnal communion they came to partake in. For all their lack of supplies, they did have a functioning radio—which meant that they were able to listen to broadcasts announcing that the search for them was called off due to weather conditions. The assumption was that they were surely all dead.

Many of us already know this story, through news reports of the day, through journalist Piers Paul Read’s 1974 bestseller Alive, Frank Marshall’s 1993 adaptation of Read’s book starring Ethan Hawke, or the recent memoir by Fernando Parrado, the survivor played by Hawke. But you haven’t heard the story in a way that even approximates the power and intimacy of Arijón’s documentary. There is a scene in which a man describes speaking lovingly to his wife’s corpse as it lay in the snow, which eventually swallowed her up altogether. Parrado and Roberto Canessa eventually set out to find help, despite having no idea where they were or in which direction they should venture. After 12 days, from across a river, they finally encountered a Chilean huaso named Sergio Catalan, who they could only communicate with by writing a note in lipstick, attaching it to a rock, and tossing it across the water. There is a scene in which Catalan describes Parrado and Canessa as literally smelling of the grave. No animal would approach them, he says. These are things you can’t invent.

Arijón’s task of having to work all these incredible stories into a two-hour whole itself must have been arduous. Zeitgeist’s new DVD supplying us with scenes left out of the final cut, some of which are so rich its difficult to imagine how Arijón could bear to lose them. But I think Arijón, who grew up with some of these men, was wise to focus on making the train of disparate memories as fluid as possible, emphasizing the collective experience, since what is finally perhaps most remarkable about this story is how utterly devoid of infighting conflict it is, how unlike any of the number of ruthless tales of survival we know from novels and movies. For all its appalling, infernal details, what we’re left with by the end of Stranded is, strangely enough, a testament to optimism, love, interdependence and grace in some of the worst possible circumstances.

Mountains, war, vocation: three by Herzog

Central to the ongoing thematic concerns of Werner Herzog’s cinema is the question of vocation, of what activities, often wildly ambitious, seemingly pathological or downright peculiar, call out to certain, often-eccentric individuals, giving their lives a sense of almost divinely inspired purpose. It’s one of the things that allows the not un-eccentric Herzog to connect to so many subjects he might otherwise feel unable to relate with, from the tyrannical conquistador in Aguirre: Wrath of God (1972) to the delusional would-be bear savior Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man (05).

Legendary mountain climber Reinhold Messner—whose ‘My Quest for the Yeti,’ much to my friends’ amusement, occupies a permanent spot on my bookshelf—is surely not a guy Herzog would find completely simpatico, given the filmmaker’s outspoken aversion to all things New Age. But Messner possesses at least one characteristic with which Herzog’s in complete alignment: a fierce impulse to test both the limits of human endurance and the benevolence of nature. And it surely scores points in Messner’s favour that he openly acknowledges the loopiness of his pursuit, calling the desire to climb mountains a “degeneration” of the human psyche.

Herzog’s ‘The Dark Glow of the Mountains’ (85) profiles Messner before and after he and Hans Kammerlander’s unprecedented excursion over a pair of 8000-metre high Himalayan peaks. The strength of Messner’s resolve is beyond doubt—he confesses that he has only four toes left, the remainder presumably lost to frostbite. He continues to climb even after the death of his brother on a previous ascent. Herzog clearly reveres Messner’s obsessiveness, something Messner refers to as a form of creativity. Yet one of the most fascinating moments in the film comes when Herzog questions Messner about what else he could imagine doing with his life besides climbing. Messner confesses that he’s love to walk, without itinerary, “until the world stops.” Herzog, off-camera, admits to maintaining precisely the same fantasy: “I like the idea of just disappearing, walking away, turning down the path and carrying on until there is no path to follow. I would like to have huskies with leather saddle bags and just walk and walk until there is no road left.”

This desire to slip away into the infinite is beautifully mirrored by the camerawork: the tracing of majestic peaks in the upward gaze of a pilgrim, circling a full 360º as if to announce full enclosure in this forbidding environment; the tracing of a narrow, equally jagged crevasse with its rushing waters frothing far below; the static image of Messner and Kammerlander slowly vanishing into a field of rock and snow. Not that every scene in ‘The Dark Glow’ is composed solely of reverie and awe. There’s a sublimely comic interlude where Messner gets this unusually expressive massage from one of his porters, a little guy wearing giant mirror aviator shades, who dances his hands all over Messner’s head while Messner goes on about something I couldn’t concentrate on for doubling-over in laughter.

‘The Dark Glow’ can be found on New Yorker’s Herzog Shorts Vol. 2, a nice collection of relatively obscure works, and a package for which I have only one, albeit sizable, complaint. ‘The Dark Glow’ has no subtitles! Instead it offers supremely lame English-language dubbing over of both the narration and Messner and Kammerlander’s comments. Anyone familiar with Herzog’s distinctive oratorical style will surely be distracted by this, though if for some reason the original German soundtrack was unavailable I guess I’m just grateful to be able to see the film at all, as well as the other two others featured here.

‘Ballad of the Little Soldier’ (84) begins with the image of a child in a jungle singing merrily along to ‘La Niña de la mochila azul,’ a Mexican ranchera playing on a portable cassette player. He’s also wielding what if I’m not mistaken is an AK-47. Co-directed with Denis Reichle, who was himself a soldier in the German national militia at the age of 14, this investigation into the proliferation of Miskito child resistance fighters in Nicaragua seems at first blush the most didactic work in Herzog’s oeuvre.

But while Herzog’s sober voice-over strives to educate viewers on the plight of the Miskitos, who allegedly suffered tremendous losses at the hands of Sandinistas, leaving countless children without parents and hungry for justice, ‘Ballad’ clearly divorces itself from any polemical arguments for or against the Sandinista cause. It’s a truly heart-rending, nerve-wracking film—with Herzog himself apparently filming under fire—that, like Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (64), reveals just how disturbingly devoted children in warfare can be. Robbed of family, familiar with death yet regarding their future as something altogether abstract, they lack the sort of fear that can paralyze adults in certain decisive moments.

The final short on the disc is ‘Precautions Against Fanatics’ (69), a wonderfully bizarre, 11-minute film sculpted like an avant-garde poem. There is a man—perhaps a precursor to Treadwell—who’s appointed himself a guardian of racehorses. He demonstrates his capabilities by karate chopping pieces of wood. There is another man, older, moustahced, with one arm tucked inside his clothing, who says only he understands the horses and demands that the first man should go away. Which of these is the real guardian of the horses is a genuine mystery, though I must say I never sensed the horses were in any grave danger.

Just because you're paranoid: revisiting three terrorific tales by Guy de Maupassant

I’d happened upon a dog-eared copy of his collected stories while staying alone for a few days in this sort of cottage belonging to the father of a friend, a little place in the Rockies. This was years ago and I recall knowing next to nothing about Guy de Maupassant, really, though some sliver of a memory told me ‘Le Horla’ was supposed to be something special. I cooked up some coffee, rubbed my knees to get warm, nestled by a foggy widow in the kitchen, figuring I’d kill a little time with some light reading. I didn’t figure on being unshakably creeped out. Or on the story being so deliciously wrought.

It seems Maupassant’s not read so much these days, at least in English. I don’t know his novels, but his stories are marvelous. I’ve been reacquainting myself with several of them, partially because I've been realizing just how many great filmmakers have adapted Maupassant—Buñuel, Ophüls, Godard—but mostly because autumn is the time of year I habitually set aside for reading anything that might raise the little back-of-the-neck hairs, which often winds up being something from the 1900s, that century haunted by the clash of scientific discovery and persistent folklore, by anxieties drawn from exploration, colonialism and industrialization. Several of Maupassant’s best stories are sly examinations of class insecurity, some, like the marvelous ‘Tellier House’ or ‘Mademoiselle Fifi,’ focus specifically on the fortunes of wily prostitutes. Relatively few could be considered horror in the strictest sense, and those that come closest are relentlessly ambiguous with regards to the supernatural—yet the very particular breed of unease in which they trade functions as a sort of bridge between Poe and Paul Bowles, while exhibiting a flair for economy that looks forward to Hemingway.

‘The Hand’ is a terrific example of Maupassant’s deft managing of the short, sharp macabre, one of those tales relayed by a party with only limited knowledge of what truly passed. A magistrate promises a small audience of women—it seems always the women who are openly curious about all things ghastly or inexplicable in these stories—his memory of “a case that truly seemed to verge on fantasy,” involving an Englishman residing in a Corsican town, a place teeming with legends of violent vendettas. The Englishman possesses an impressive collection of trophies from his travels to exotic lands, among them a human hand, shackled at the wrist, which belonged to an American, the Englishman’s “worst enemy.” Things get especially interesting when the Englishman is mysteriously murdered, and I love the way Maupassant has his otherwise very orderly narrator stop in the midst of describing a crime scene to conspicuously note that the culprit was never found. A finger, however, eventually is. I won’t tell you where.

‘The Inn’ was supposedly a big influence on Stephen King’s The Shinning, though its narrative simplicity and formal elegance could have just as easily informed countless subsequent stories of cabin fever. It concerns a pair of guides looking after an inn nestled in “those bare and rocky gorges that cut through white mountain peaks,” a place that serves as refuge for travelers going through the Gemini Pass. As the story begins the guides are escorting their summer guests down the mountain on the eve of winter, when the inn becomes a “snowy prison” and the area impassable. Ulrich, the younger of the guides, is heartsick for one of the daughters of the departing family, and Maupassant, in spare language, vividly evokes the ache felt as the desired girl carries on past the point where the guides must turn back, disappearing into the distant valley that will soon be erased under a blanket of white.

But the pain of the girl’s absence felt by Ulrich will eventually be replaced by his panic over the absence of Gaspard, his elder co-worker and sole companion for the six-month long off-season, aside from their dog. With Gaspard’s disappearance, paranoia replaces longing, rising like a presence within the “death-like hush of the sleeping mountains.” Maupassant traces Ulrich’s growing worries in prose that keeps within the constraints of reportage, always cool and detached, the antithesis of the histrionics that can makes the work of H.P. Lovecraft, for one, hard to take at times.

Oddly enough, Lovecraft cited ‘Le Horla’ as a source of inspiration for his own ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ though whatever tonal resemblance they share might be explained by the fact that ‘Horla’ is written in the first-person as a journal, allowing Maupassant to indulge in flights of subjective inner turmoil on behalf of his lonesome, deeply troubled protagonist, who, regardless of how we interpret his claims of being pursued by some invisible entity, is clearly losing his marbles. Maupassant’s prose is by nature not overtly poetic, yet there’s much poetry in his looping of images which shift in meaning upon return, as is the case with the ship from Brazil sailing down the Seine. When first it appears our protagonist is so inexplicably moved by its grace that he salutes it. By the time it returns, this ship will become a harbinger of catastrophic malaise.

The journal keeper is tormented by a heightened awareness of the invisible influences at work in the world, phenomena that seems to him sufficiently grounded in both science and common sense. His sleep is gradually invaded by the sensation of some succubus-like presence, what would today be likely diagnosed as the effects of parasomnia. He sees containers of water and milk mysteriously drained every night. At one point he witnesses the power of hypnosis on a relative and is overcome with terror of the psyche’s frailty, all the more reason to feel susceptible to the elusive force he characterizes as spying, watching, penetrating and dominating. He’s spiraling into some sort of psychologically induced abyss, clearly, yet this doesn’t mean that the entity won’t succeed in corrupting and finally ruining him.

“Solitude is certainly dangerous for active intellects,” the protagonist of ‘Le Horla’ tells us, which may remind us of the inherent solitude of the writer. At one point the protagonist complains about having never read anything that might describe his condition—but how did Maupassant feel toward the end of his life, shortened by syphilis and its accompanying madness, knowing that not only had he read about such conditions but actually wrote about them? Some say he was already going mad when he wrote ‘Le Horla.’ He died, a year after attempting suicide, on June 6, 1893. He was 42.

Journey to a hollow Center: new 3D variation on Verne adventure classic is really in your face

3D, they say, is a thrilling experience all over again. By way of confirmation, the vast experiential gulf between watching Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D and “normal vision” is swiftly established in the very first images displayed. A crab thingee’s antennae thingees wave in your face! A guy falls from a cliff and seems to get really far away! Brendan Fraser brushes his teeth in an utterly pointless jump-cut sequence and the glass he gargles from comes really close! Whoa! Of course you also get to wear—and, I think, keep—the new generation of 3D glasses, more nerd chic than Devo. If they keep doing press screenings in 3D, pretty soon I can start my own band! (Of course it'll be a half-blind band, since 3D glasses tend to have the reverse effect of normal prescription glasses.)

But right, the movie. Hunky dreamer Trevor Anderson (Fraser, a perhaps slightly more convincing science teacher than Mark Wahlberg) gets stuck minding grumpy nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) just as volcanic activity in Bolivia, Hawaii and Iceland is looking really good, so, anxious to prove a longstanding theory about volcanic tubes that would redeem the legacy of his ten-years-missing brother—who’s also Sean’s dad—Trevor scoops up the 13-year-old and flies to Reykjavik, where the pair gear up for high adventure underground. With little in the way of a plan they luck out, meeting Hannah, an Icelandic beauty whose dead dad also shared dead bro’s “Vernian” notions about subterranean wonders, and who also happens to be an expert mountain guide, leading the boys safely into creepy caverns where fun awaits. (In a movie where pretty much everything is a special effect, the filmmakers managed to get a genuine Icelandic beauty, Anita Briem, to pay Hannah.)

A rollercoaster ride through a mine shaft, razor-toothed jumping fish, burbling lava, glow-in-the-dark bird buddies and carnivorous vaginal plants: there’s more than enough stuff in Journey to the Center of the Earth to wave under our noses, though little of it seems terribly frightening. Director Eric Brevig, who, believe it or not, has a resume mostly jam-packed with visual effects work, takes minimal interest in much outside of the film’s stable of spectacles, and the cast can only make up for so much when a solid third of their dialogue consists of screaming each others’ names and saying “Look out!” or “Hang on!” It’s basically an amusement park ride—but it does have the virtue of being half the length of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: a masterful, hallucinatory pageant brimming with sensuality, colour, natural beauty, mustaches

Great myths and folktales endure not on account of their universality—which is beyond question—but on the capacity of our finest storytellers to render them vividly, to renovate them according to changing modes of expression, to bring a personal voice to them, and endow them anew with vivacity. Such stories speak of the business of living in terms that transcend the limits of reason, thus, in 1964’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv), when one man is suddenly driven to slay another, when a tormented, lonesome lover allows himself to be carried writhing down rapids on a spindly raft of lumber, or when that same lover, now physically wounded, scavenges the forest at night hoping to be enveloped by death as a means to finding himself once again in his lover’s embrace, the events feel like the opposite of mere artifice. They resonate as more truthful than what we generally refer to as realism.

But then Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors—the artistic breakthrough of Sergei Parajanov, a Georgian born to Armenian parents who had the decidedly mixed fortune to find himself forging a career within the Soviet film industry—has its finger on the pulse of myth like few other films. The slaying of the man is followed by an enigmatic flash of red horse silhouettes; the lover on the raft captured in a long, unbroken, rapturous camera sweep (which can't help but look forward to numerous like images from Werner Herzog); the search in the forest constructed from close-ups of faces seemingly floating through a web of trees, cheeks brushed by branches with near-palpable sensuality. The tirelessly adventurous camerawork, care of the great Yuri Ilyenko, a writer/director in his own right, is somehow at once delirious and precise, full of low, creeping angles where foliage brushes the lens and breaks up the frame; of careening flights through the collective rituals of Carpathian village life; of scenes that at times resemble some hallucinatory staged anthropological documentary. More than four decades after the fact Shadows still feels vibrantly exotic, a thing set apart, its particular poetry uncorrupted by the rest of the world’s culture of movies.

Shadows, set in the early 19th century, is based on the book by Ukrainian writer Mikhaylo Koysyubinskiy and functions as a carefully detailed window into the daily life of the Hutsuls, the highland people who for centuries have inhabited the Ukraine, as well as the northern extremity of Romania. The film is a sumptuous pageant of traditional costumes, religious rites and iconography, strange, powerful music made with impossibly long trumpets, and a dazzling array of elaborately groomed moustaches. At its narrative centre is an ebullient variation on Romeo and Juliet: Ivan (the deeply haunted Ivan Mikolajchuk) and Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova) grow from a childhood characterized by bloodshed and blissful interaction with nature to an adulthood characterized by harsh weather, hard work, adultery, sorcery, drunkenness and betrayal, all the time concealing a forbidden love that slowly plunges into morbid obsession, though finally proving itself to be even stronger than mortal life.

The man at the helm of all this was reaching the height of his talents and would subsequently feel the wrath of governmental forces bent of punishing such vision as unacceptably decadent. While still young, Parajanov showed great affinity with music and painting, and both mediums heavily inform the sensibility at work in Shadows, which possesses a compelling, lyrical fluidity broken by flutters of striking frozen images, as well as a richness of colour and is heightened by the movement of elements and animals. This dialogue with other mediums is but one of numerous cinematographic ingredients unmistakably mirrored in the contemporaneous films of Andrei Tarkovsky, especially 1962’s Ivan’s Childhood, and it comes as no surprise to discover that Parajanov and Tarkovsky were great, mutually admiring friends who shared similar difficulties with Soviet censorship and even died of the same disease. Like Ivan’s Childhood, Shadows fixates engagingly on horses, water and trees, and its soundtrack seems always to return to a motif of voices calling out names into vast landscapes. Unlike that of Tarkovsky however, Parajanov’s approach is gifted with a willful, buoyant naïveté and effervescent sense of freedom, moving effortlessly between broad symbolism and an uninhibited, textured emotionality.

Though it deals in symbols and mysticism, it needs to be emphasized that Shadows is grounded in feelings and experiences of tremendous immediacy. In the end, Ivan’s story is simply that of a man who even after settling into a potentially happy, normal life with a sexy, loving wife, can’t quite shake off the grips of the one that got away. It’s what distinguishes a film like Shadows from ones we think of as fairy tale flicks, delighting viewers with its folkloric spectacle and archetypical imagery while penetrating those murkier, very adult feelings locked up inside us. Parajanov wasn’t able to make many films during his life, but the legacy of Shadows and its follow-up The Colour of Pomegranates are alone enough to cement his place among the most important filmmakers of cinema’s first century.

Old Joy: fleeting glimpses as feature film

It's one of those moments when the flickering image nearly becomes something else, a portal, when the audience’s perspective overlaps that of the characters’: though the car window a wild landscape passes, the characters sealed within, longing for what’s outside. Once the car’s parked, the doors opened, the invisible barrier is penetrated and the spell broken, the fluidity of steady movement replaced by awkward stumbling onto rough earth. There are these pesky moments that only touch you when passing you by.

I’m referring to moments in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, adapted by Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond from Raymond’s short story. The premise is so simple –two estranged friends reconnect for a night of camping and day-hike to a hot spring– that such reveries just bubble up from the fortitude of the atmosphere, accentuated by Yo La Tengo’s hushed score. It’s a different sort of character identification than we’re accustomed to, one entirely about implications drawn from few rather than innumerable cues.

The friends are Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, whose music shares a particular kinship with Reichardt’s vision). Both are in their late 30s, with the period of their lives in which they could easily relate to one and other clearly far behind them. Mark has more or less settled into grown-up life in Portland, Oregon. We first see him attempting half-convincing yogic meditation when he gets the surprise invitation from Kurt, resulting in disapproving glares from his very pregnant wife.

Mark’s reserved, perhaps uncomfortable. Kurt effortlessly assumes control of the conversation once on the road. He’s a lonely, non-committal, restless spirit with vaguely New Age tendencies, still sniffing around for some elusive satori that convention advises is best found in our 20s. Gradually Kurt’s nervousness hints at a deeper, long-simmering panic. He confesses that this trip was intended to rekindle their friendship, though once the words leave his mouth it’s obvious such hopes are in vain.

I’m told the film’s title refers to a Chinese proverb. It slips into the film’s spare dialogue as Kurt recounts a strange, affecting dream. That Old Joy seems founded in proverb, in a piece of wisdom honed down to something both essential and multifaceted, seems appropriate, directing us toward a reading of the film that might do justice to its measure of depth in tone and feeling.

There were more than 10 years between Reichardt’s debut feature River of Grass and this, her follow-up. (In between was a short entitled ‘Ode,’ with music by Oldham.) I’ve no idea what Reichardt did in the meantime, but there’s something curiously satisfying in the fact that she’s waited so long to –in the literal sense– say so little. Old Joy’s only 76 minutes long, distinguished by a dearth of narrative events, and feels utterly out of time, an accumulation of details and feelings more than a story. Yet I don’t think there’s a single moment that doesn’t hold the glow from the filaments at the film’s core.

Reichardt lets things play out in a way that’s pointed, poetic and maybe not as dire as it first seems. After parting ways with Mark, Kurt appears unnervingly aimless on a nocturnal urban street, passing some change onto a homeless guy as an act of fleeting communion, or way to stave off fear of eventually winding up in the same place. The camera swings off into the street that gives way to the darkness on the edge of town and the title suddenly appears, abandoning Kurt but leaving him very much alive in the closing moments of this quiet film that only grows in meaning and beauty after its over.

A book as daunting as this beard: War and Peace, Part One

The signs preceded the announcement of the book’s publication. I moved house in July, and my new neighbours turned out to be Russians, a whole shwack of them whom I could watch go about their yard work and endless renovations through a series of large windows as though they were the subjects of some Bruegelesque panorama. They’re cute. They shout a lot. Later on I attended a normal party that my friend Peter mistook for a costume party. He came dressed as Napoleon, brought with him a bottle of brandy, sort of sulked much of the night. Finally, I got talking to this homeless guy who camps out front of a coffee shop I frequent. He never says much, just leaves out a collection plate and hunches over a book. I decided to ask him what he was reading. It was a dog-eared copy of War and Peace.

I’m not especially superstitious but I am fond of coincidence. Mere days after my chat with homeless guy I saw it on Amazon: a brand new translation of War and Peace by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the Sonny and Cher of Russian-into-English translation, superstars in their field, and rightly so. The new hardcover edition looked regal, enormous, glorious. Its appearance was accompanied by trumpets in my mind, a proclamation that now, now the time has come for me to finally read Leo Tolstoy’s gargantuan magnum opus about Russian society during the Napoleonic era. I felt a surge of readiness and ordered a review copy.

Full disclosure: I am not qualified to be a books columnist. Among my chief deficiencies are two items that apply directly to this column: 1) I haven’t read all the classics of world literature, I mean like not even the top five. 2) I have a problem with big books. Now, the first deficiency might come down to my lack of education or, more self-flatteringly, my diversity of interests that keep me from pursuing any sort of regimented reading program. The second deficiency however I consider to be a professional hazard. I review books. I read slow. There’s a lot of books out there. So tell me how a guy’s supposed to pay the bills reviewing all these new books and still have time to catch up on every literary doorstop in the Everyman’s Library?

But enough excuses. The moment had come, and along with it the holidays. Surely Christmas in Cowtown with the folks would provide ample time for Tolstoy. Yet it proved impossible. There were visits. There were sudden meals occurring at strange hours. There were walks in need of shoveling. There was booze. More problematically, every time I endeavoured to dig in my heels and just get going already I found the book unexpectedly forbidding. The entire first paragraph is in French for god’s sake. I’m a bad, bad Canadian. Je ne parle pas francias. I’m from Alberta. Okay, so there’s footnotes with all the English, but still…

This pathetic farce continued. I spent a promising night in the mountains, but got sidelined by two books I purchased at The Banff Book and Art Den –F. González-Crussi’s On Seeing and John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed, both of which are really good. Then came my Christmas gifts –Brad Pager’s critical study of Werner Herzog and some long out-of-print volume with the delicious title of Sex and the Occult– which added further, enormously pleasurable distraction from what I was now thinking of as my War and Peace self-betterment project. Then January came, deadlines were looming. I was, it seemed, an utter failure.

Then a funny thing happened. This time, not a coincidence exactly, but a sort of accidental gift. Having finished with writing for the day, I decided to hike over to a quiet coffee shop a good half-hour’s walk away to get in some reading. I scooped up my satchel and left, not realizing until I got there and ordered something hot that I scooped the wrong satchel, not the one containing whatever book I should be reading for work but the one with, you guessed it, War and Peace. Fuck it, I thought, and settled into it.

…And having made it past the first few pages this time, I realized something: it’s terrific, even fun. The French bits began to feel rhythmically appealing, of a piece within the social pretensions of the many characters, who gradually didn’t seem so difficult to keep track of but rather came vibrantly to life through sly descriptions –“Being an enthusiast had become her social position”– and even more so through the dialogue –“Opinions are opinions, but you see what a good and nice fellow I am,” says Pierre, not long before we find him tying a police officer to a bear and tossing them into the Moika. “Precisely because you’re father is rich, I don’t consider myself his relation,” Boris tells Pierre –as Pierre’s father lays dying and Boris’ mom is hanging around making an embarrassingly desperate play for the gasping man’s pity cash.

I’ve still barley cut into War and Peace’s 1224 pages, but I am now officially under its spell. I’m equally aware of course that it’ll probably take me a while to get through it, to truly savour it, and so I will report on my progress in future columns. For now, adieu, mon petit liseur. And please feel free to correct my miserable, condescending French.