O Brother, Where Art Thou?

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?             A                    

USA  Great Britain  France  (107 mi)  2000  ‘Scope  d:  Joel and Ethan Coen

O Muse,

Sing in me, and through me tell the story

Of that man skilled in all the ways of contending

A wanderer, harried for years on end…

Writing, directing, producing, and editing their own films, this series of FARGO (1996), THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998), and O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? may be the peak of the Coen Brother invention and creativity.  Originating in the mind of Preston Sturges from the great American classic Sullivan's Travels (1941), this Coen Brothers manic romp through the American South plays like a double bill, stealing the title from the film Sullivan originally wanted to make about the Great Depression, returning to the era of the 1930’s.  While the film is a wildly exaggerated comical farce throughout, creating a mythical landscape filled with colorful characters that all resemble Southern stereotypes, similarly evolving through a series of surrealist, Odysseus-like misadventures, turning into a meandering heroic journey of self-discovery, overcoming plenty of “ob-stack-les” along the way.  While this doesn’t have the heft of the original, where madcap comedy is mixed with rare dramatic realism, creating an underlying core of poverty-laden bleakness, the Coens are instead content to maintain a subversive tone of screwball comedy throughout, where much like Sullivan’s conversion at the end of his travails, he just wanted to make a tribute to comedy.  Who better than the Coens to make a mockery of some rather grand Southern traditions, yet in doing so, they retain something essentially American in the process, where free speech is one of our founding principles.  Opening with a prison break, 3 escapees from the Mississippi Parchman Farm chain gang become our anointed heroes on the journey, the slick-haired, sharp-tongued George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill, the ringleader of the pack, with John Turturro as Pete, the eternally pessimistic and constantly complaining sidekick, and the ever loveable Tim Blake Nelson as the sweetly generous and overly optimistic but “dumb as rocks” Delmar.  Chained together in prison garb, they create quite a sight, but the clue to their success is their constant, congenial banter, where Ulysses is always philosophizing about some nonsense, with Pete his constant foil and nemesis, with Delmar always dreaming about something else entirely.  Adding to the film’s massive appeal is the eclectic country music soundtrack produced by T-Bone Burnett, including spirituals, gospel, delta blues, country, a capella, folk music, and swing, becoming a major component of the film, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year in 2001 GRAMMY® Album of the Year for 2001, O Brother, Where Art Thou ..., where the movie is single-handedly responsible for a bluegrass revival in America.  

Adding a digitally enhanced sepia tone, the cinematography by Roger Deakins captures that dusty look of endless dirt roads and golden hue’d crops, where the prison breakout music used is “Big Rock Candy Mountain” BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAINS - Harry Mac McClintock ... - YouTube (2:29), adding an element of fantasy and colorful hobo storytelling, where the period-specific music continues to be part of the story.  With the bloodhounds after them, almost immediately we’re immersed in the mythical aspect of the tale, where a blind black man drives a railway handcar that they hoist themselves onto for a getaway, where he mystifyingly foretells their future in exact detail, a reference to Homer, the ancient blind Greek author of The Odyssey.   After a brief incident with the law, where Ulysses can continually be heard muttering “Damn! We're in a tight spot!” a little kid gets them out of a jam with his reckless driving, exactly as in the Sturges film, where we discover Ulysses has a thing for Dapper Dan hair gel, leaving a trail of empty tin cans behind.  Despite their continuing series of misadventures, discovering sexually promiscuous sirens at a riverbank The Sirens - O Brother, Where Art Thou? (5/10) Movie ... - YouTube (3:30), picking up Tommy, a young black guitarist (Chris Thomas King) at a crossroads who sold his soul to the Devil, a reference to Delta blues great Robert Johnson who wrote the song “Cross Road Blues” Robert Johnson CrossRoads - Cross Road Blues ... YouTube (2:29), making a brief appearance at a rural radio station where as the Soggy Bottom Boys they cut a record that becomes an instant hit across the South (even to Mobile, Alabama!), O Brother Where Art Though - The Soggy Bottom Boys - I ... - YouTube (3:29), a bullet-filled run-in with Pretty Boy Floyd on a bank robbery spree, where they never appear far from the chain gang, who continually reappear throughout the film.  Again mirroring a scene from the original, but with a slightly demented twist, Ulysses is in a movie theater with Delmar discussing the unavoidable untrustworthiness of women in general when sheriffs appear with rifles at both exits and the movie stops.  Thinking they are in another tight spot about to be apprehended, the sheriffs usher the chain gang into the theater, as they are granted permission to watch the movies.   

Cultural references abound in this film, where in several instances the screen visualization is a reference to Eudora Welty WPA photographs, where a remote broken down shack matches the boyhood home of Ulysses, MWP Welty Gallery: Home with Bottle-trees (photograph), while earlier we saw two young kids carrying large blocks of ice down a country road, Carrying the Ice Home for Sunday Dinner « AZ SOAP.  A corrupt governor’s race becomes part of the background, with all the hick populist mannerisms and good ‘ol boy jokes, where the song “You Are My Sunshine” was the theme song of Louisiana’s two-term “Singing Governor” Jimmie Davis Jimmie Davis You Are My Sunshine - YouTube (2:54), and where Ulysses’ long unseen wife Penelope (Holly Hunter) is being courted by the campaign manager of the reform candidate, promising more of a stable future than Ulysses can offer, leaving him moping about his rotten luck.  In what is easily the most controversial sequence, in a film that features remarkable set pieces, our heroes have an accidental run-in with a Klu Klux Klan rally, which is choreographed like a Busby Berkeley musical, yet resembles the menace of the flying monkeys marching in formation in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939).  Our heroes are honor bound to crash the lynching party to rescue Tommy, where the Grand Wizard is, of course, one of the gubernatorial candidates who is seen later getting run out of town on a rail.  Escaping under cover of Marx Brothers style mayhem and pandemonium, this is all part of the Coen Brothers whimsical comic madness, where the entire film is a series of setbacks, disasters, escapes and near misses, where death is always close at hand.  Yet through it all, these lead characters maintain their essential goodness through their flair for comic goofiness and unending naiveté.  George Clooney apparently rehearsed for weeks to sing the signature song “A Man of Constant Sorrow,” ultimately sung by Dan Tyminski, a member of the band Alison Krauss and Union Station, but he does get credit for his own on-stage moves, a kind of Appalachian chicken dance that the choreographers hated but always made the Coens laugh, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU - Constant ... YouTube (7:05).  A film literally steeped in popular culture, it shows America at its best, warts and all, where folksy, down to earth humor literally rules the day.  It was Sullivan who had a change of heart and decided even the most wretched and troublesome souls facing a lifetime in prison could be moved by the joy of laughter, where humanity universally has a soft spot for comedy.

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW – DigiBeta video         B                     

Great Britain  Holland  France  (105 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Sophie Fiennes

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.                             

—Genesis 3:19

Sometimes you wonder how certain artists get their funding, as there is certainly an unequal distribution of the wealth, especially considering the massive size of some of their works, something that would require a substantial piece of Fort Knox.  Others create art from next to nothing, from discarded trash, odd pieces of junk, or everyday ordinary objects.  This film is about a large scale conceptual artist, German Anselm Kiefer, who studied under controversial artist Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf, a member of the Nazi youth that participated in book burnings, who joined the German Luftwaffe during the war.  Kiefer purchased just under 100 acres of land near Barjac in the south of France ten years ago, a former industrial and manufacturing district, the site of a deteriorating silk factory.  Using bulldozers and construction material, he has spent the last decade building an immense installation known as a Gesamtkunstwerk, an industrial landscape based on his conception of the end of the world, where only the demolished ruins of a former civilization remain standing, much of which resembles the destroyed rubble from an earthquake, broken glass lying all around, concrete cinder blocks uprooted with the wires sticking out, crumbled to the earth surrounded by rocks and gravel and dust, but all around it wild grass grows, leaving the effect of “over your cities grass will grow.”

The film is divided into three sections, where the first and last are completely wordless, where the director uses slow moving pans in and around the artist’s work, which also includes the dug out excavation of the world below the buildings, much of which resembles a cave.  In fact, viewers of Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D (2010) will be reminded of this slowly moving exploratory style, one which brilliantly contrasts darkness and light, but rather than focus on actual prehistoric cave art that is some 35,000 years old, this film projects some futuristic apocalyptic design where man’s imprint has been left behind, still standing like a piece of petrified wood, where the hauntingly quiet emptiness of the partially demolished structures resemble the grown over remains of a WW II German concentration camp, where the gently swaying grasses in the wind betray the violent, tortuous atrocities that took place on these grounds.  Accompanied by the surreal and otherworldly music of Jewish composer György Ligeti, familiar for his use in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), notably the composer used during the Monolith sequences, this film takes us on another journey, one also distinguished by the arduous length and endurance of Homer’s Odyssey, a mythical journey that reflects upon mankind's heroic strength and bravery, where he had to use great wisdom and cunning to survive. In the middle section, we see Kiefer at work with several helpers in a giant indoor industrial art studio, where thematically he makes great use of fire, preferring to use the burnt remains of various sized books, many of which are gigantic, hovering above or beside wall-sized paintings that resemble decay and destruction, like portraits of trees standing in dark forests that have been covered in ashes before blowing the ashes away like dried leaves, leaving behind a composition that reflects permanent decay and decomposition, a work that will continue to decompose over time.  Kiefer is interviewed by German journalist Klaus Dermutz in a local library, discussing the origins of his work and his sources of inspiration.  He describes childhood as a period in one’s life filled with moments of boredom, describing a philosophical principle from Heidegger that suggests only when humans have idle time filled with boredom do they begin to reflect upon their lives and their existence in the universe.  As if on cue, after about a 20-minute in depth interview of utter seriousness without an ounce of humor, what appears to be his son tip-toes behind him, as if he’s been severely reprimanded in the past not to disturb his father.  But, of course, as he’s still a kid, he causes a noticeable disruption that hilariously makes his father lose his concentration. 

When assembling the various large scale objects that require the use of a crane, Kiefer tyrannically barks out instructions to his team to try this or do that, where he is incessantly ordering other people around while he visually observes the creative process, trying to duplicate in reality what he’s only seen in his imagination.  His method of producing massive sized artworks that reflect a world in chaos has a precise order to it during the construction stage.  While the entire area becomes part of his canvas, including the trees and the natural grounds between the constructed art objects, one never sees any viewers walking the grounds, as it’s all in the construction stage.  A few viewers in the audience afterwards were impressed enough by the film that they suggested a desire to go to visit the site of Barjac, but the intention of the film, like Herzog’s cave footage, is to immerse the audience in the entirety of the work, to give them the hypnotic feeling of being there, where the people onscreen go away and leave the viewers alone as the camera slowly inspects each artwork with a perceptual eye, akin to Tarkovsky’s shift of focus to a close examination of a painting at the end of ANDREI RUBLEV (1966).  This ponderous, quietly reflective cinematic method adds a layer of depth and introspection that wouldn’t otherwise be there.  Kiefer claims The Bible is filled with multiple references about the destruction of the world, suggesting his reproduced apocalyptic landscape is meant to reflect both the origins and the end of the world, where all that’s left is viewed in the haunting and solemn silence of the end of the human race.  The film adds a respectful and funereal tone, mournful and elegiac, where all thoughts about what constitutes the essence of the human soul are notable by their absence.