HOOKED ON FRENCH MOVIES

Over the years I've been watching netflix movies, I like to give myself film festivals from various countries and directors. I've done Scandinavia, Russia, Japan, China, Germany, Italy, Poland and independent USA. I've been putting off the French,  having a pretty good idea that when I jump into French films, I won't want to see anything else for a long time. In film, the French have that je ne sais quoi (I don't know what) particular to the French and runs through all French art forms, cooking for example. Polish director, Kieslowski, moved to Paris and transcended himself. I've seen French films from my first years of watching foreign films, 1962. and appreciate their subtleties like no others. In I think it was 1966 or 67 I took an overnight train to New York specifically to see the new French film of the moment, A Man and a Woman. Anouk Aimee was in it. She had been in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, my first film with subtitles, and 8 1/2. I also saw on that trip Maureen Stapleton in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo on stage. During college years I went to New York about every other year to see plays and contemporary art. Went to Museum of Modern Art every trip. Then the admission fee became so expensive I had to remind myself memory would do. In London museums, you just walk in. Two French films that are part one and part two of the same story arrived in the mailbox a few days ago, Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring. They were made from the writings of Marcel Pagnol, popular French writer of the 20th Century, also film maker. Seeing it at the top of the Q, I told myself the French film festival has begun.

 

 

 

I took the dvd out of the envelope and saw it was four hours long. I wasn't ready for a marathon film. I didn't watch it. Another French film came the next day, Army of Crime, so I watched it. I decided yesterday to watch half of the four hour film and half the next day. I could do that. I set the film in motion and was hooked within five minutes. I was ready to go the whole four hours. It started with the film, Jean de Florette. I noted right away major French actors in it, Yves Montand, Daniel Auteuil, Gerard Despardieu, and Elisabeth Despardieu. I settled back into my chair seeing something on the order of an epic begin to unfold. The scenery, the buildings, the village, the landscape, mountainous southern France, had the look and feel of the realism in pre-Impressionist paintings by Millet and Courbet. The film looked at all times like a painting from that period. Claude Berri, the director, accomplished not just that likeness, but got the feel of the local people and their culture, rural France before electricity. The people of the village in the film were local people from the place the film was made. Much of the time it didn't even seem like a film, but like being there in the midst of the people and their lives. The story had the 19th Century manner of Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy, a well told story of human nature acting out. I see so much in this film I want to tell you about, but don't want to cross the line into telling too much. YouTube has videos of the trailers of the two films and several scenes from it. It was released in 1986. It has a turn toward the end I did not see coming. The story starts on a whim and ends being told to a priest in a deathbed confession. I don't think anything I expected might happen even came close. Pagnol told a good story full of surprises. I think I especially liked that a whim kicked it off, a whim that grew way out of control in ways nobody could foresee. 

 

 

 

I had settled in my mind to sit through the four hours. At the same time, I was thinking about pausing it for awhile and having an intermission, End of Part One. Turn the disc over for Part Two. I turned it off and decided to see the second side tomorrow (today). Part Two was titled Manon of the Spring. Manon is a girl's name and the spring is a ground water spring. In the first story, Jean de Florette, the girl is young, a child, and she's up in her teens in Manon of the Spring. She is played by Emmanuelle Beart, the French beauty of her moment with the innocent, untouched charisma of early Bridget Bardot. She's a woman who runs with the goats. A herd of goats goes with her wherever she goes. Donkeys were in the story, and mules. The story has for me the powerful impact of a film like Life of Pi, a powerful impact. It goes along like a regular story and then it turns into something so much bigger than what I thought it was, it changed everything that went before. The great actor, Yves Montand, played it so right he became it. And Daniel Auteuil is an actor you'd have to see a lot of French films for him to be familiar. He is one of the great French actors of now, who was younger then. I found a recent film with Auteuil in it, The Well-Digger's Daughter, and ran it to the top of my Q. Found a few more French films to add to the Q. I'm still stunned by how powerful these films are. It's one of those very rare stories that surprises you such at the end that it sends your mind reviewing the story backwards all the way to the first scene and jaw drops. It was a tour de force, a very powerful force. And it was so beautiful it was lush with beauty from scene to scene.

 

 

 

 

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DOMINION OVER

rhododendron

The snow continues with us. The sun came out today and took the temperature up to forty for awhile, melting the top of the snow just enough for it to freeze after dark to make a coat of ice on top. It's not a bad thing; it will inhibit drifting. I'd heard it was drifting in different places where the roads had been scraped. This ice coating will keep it in place. I'm not even going to try to dig out the car. It's too much. The road grader came by in the night and piled the snow from the road into a wall a couple feet high where my driveway joins the road. I could get out if I wanted to, but I don't want to. The mail won't run for several days. Wind-rain-sleet-or-snow has fallen as far into the forgotten past as to-serve-and-protect, only good now for test questions in high school history class. It is days like yesterday and today that I miss a dog the most. Good days for a walk through the woods along the creek at its most beautiful, the waterfalls covered over with ice and the snow on the ice, water flowing behind the ice mask. A good time to walk down there to get pictures. The snow is easy walking and deep enough to cushion a fall. I went down to the waterfalls on a full moon night with about this much snow in my early years when everything was new. The shadows of the tree branches on the snow make one of the wonders of this world. Moon shadows are black. Walking in such a wonderland with a dog is a sublime experience. Alone, it is boring as watching tv football by myself. I can't go walking without a dog. 

 

maple

 

I feel like old man Tom Pruitt at close to the same age I am now the day I went to his door after a gorgeous snow I'd not seen the like of since, told him to come outside and see it. He said, "I seen better." This day was in early October, all the leaves in full color, a few inches of snow so wet it stuck to everything, and no wind. It looked like Candyland. Tom asked me to come in and he told me what he'd seen that was better. A fog settled in the winter night with temperature below freezing. In the morning it was blue sky clear, the sun came up and all the tree branches and twigs were covered in ice and glistening in the early morning sunlight. Everywhere. It was moments like this when I realized that this old hillbilly who appeared to be devoid of an aesthetic sense had one well developed. It was the beginning of my learning the mountain aesthetic. They didn't care about drawings or representations. They had the real, living thing in abundance all around them. I was surprised in the beginning to see how many couples from the area go riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway and around the back roads in the county just to enjoy the scenery. It's something of a tradition here for a couple to go out when the mountains are especially beautiful and ride around on the back roads in a 4-wheel drive pickup. They call it God's country and appreciate it as such. It's a living beauty. They don't talk about it---there's nothing to say. The old-time mountain people lived solitary lives working the farm and hunting. They didn't talk much. I knew one old boy who never said anything standing around with some of the other men before and after church. They'd talk and he'd say, "Aw heck." It's all he ever said, Aw heck. He punctuated everything they said with, Aw heck. In spare time, he made frames for wall clocks with popsicle sticks. Popsicle stick art was his aesthetic. He raised bees, he also trapped coons, tanned the hides and sold them in Wilkesboro. Aw heck used to be a common thing to say, still is among a few people.       

 

spring lizard creek

 

I don't need to go walking in the snow anymore. I've done it. I have memories. An older woman I knew in the latter half of the 1980s, Dewitt Hanes, told me, "To have done something in the past is the same as doing it now." I can look into the woods, see what it's like and be satisfied. Driving up Mt Rogers and Whitetop in SW Virginia, I look into the forest on both sides of the road and know what it is like walking in there. It's the same trees, rhododendron and ferns that grow at my place. A creek runs through it with big rocks good for sitting on. I'm not comfortable in the woods anymore without a handgun that has stopping power. We have red wolves, gray wolves, coywolves, coyotes and big black bears. The dogs run in packs and the bears are solitary. I'm happy they are here. I like having them in this beautiful land that is theirs. But I don't see they have a future in the mountains. Oceans rising will send the coastal people to the mountains. The Appalachian chain could be like the Japanese islands in the not too distant future. It would be gradual, several generations of people moving to the mountains. The towns will become cities and the space between them farms again, maybe. The wild animals have that much time left. Americans tend to have little sensitivity to wildlife. But that's not my concern. I am being a conscientious steward of the acreage I have legal control over. I'm not poisoning it. I'm supplying it with nutrients in donkey droppings, keeping it grazed and fertilized at once. In my time, no chemicals have been on it but for blow-over  and run-off from the Christmas tree fields on three sides. I have in my dominion a few acres of meadow and forest, and the old schoolhouse of Air Bellows, my home. It is my graduate school, the most avant-garde advanced education; no faculty, no administration, no curriculum, just follow my own light. I don't need or want more than this.

 

forsythia

 

In my first weeks in the mountains, having no idea where I was except on a map, the owner of the farm I was caretaking asked the county agent from the NC forest service to come and give us some advice on the Christmas trees that had been planted before my arrival. My only memory of the experience was the forestry man telling my employer about killing deer. He justified it by Bible, "God give us dominion over the animals," and he quoted the verse. To his mind, dominion meant the right to kill. To my mind it meant responsibility to take care of. I realized at that moment the entire western world's interpretation of this scripture is and has been the right to kill. To me, that's tyrannical dominion. Columbus's first voyage landed him on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic) southeast of Cuba. Before he left, he and his men had killed so many of the local Indians that had befriended them the tribe could not recover and faded into extinction soon after the white men left. That was step one in the genocide of an entire continent, now with fracking killing the continent itself. White man thinking: dominion is right to kill. White man steps ashore and says, I take dominion. When I was little, a neighbor spoke to my mother about letting up on the kid, and mother replied, "He's my kid! I'll kill him if I want to!" Dominion. The last time she told me of the exchange, I almost said, but stopped myself, "You're my mommy. I'll kill you if I want to." She'd have taken it for a smart-mouth thing to say. They talk about what's wrong with me because I've not had to do with family throughout my adult life, moved as far away as land allows. He's a reader. By the time I left parents, they had lost all rights of dominion over me. I took dominion unto myself interpreting it as the responsibility to take care of. I have nurtured myself through adult life to balance the anti-nurturing dominion that twisted my inner being into such knots I've spent my adult life untying them, one at a time, healing. I hang onto dominion over myself jealously. In this lifetime, it's not available to anyone. About the time somebody starts believing they have dominion over me, I'm gone, long gone. No second chance. I get told I'm just sensitive. I answer, You're right. Don't feel sympathy reading this, please. I long ago turned the lemon into lemonade and by now am grateful for the lemon.  

 

 

openings to squirrel tunnels in the snow

 

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SNOW ON DONKEY EARS

 

jenny's icicles

 

It's a foot of snow outside. Walking in it, it doesn't feel like it's an inch deep. The snow is dry and powdery. It offers no resistance. It's a beautiful, pure snow. I don't go out in it except to feed the donkeys and the birds. The snow was not the problem outdoors. It's the cold that bites. I button my jacket at the neck and still the snow finds a way to crawl down the back of my neck. My first impulse seeing the icicles over Jenny's eyes was to break them off, but I knew she would not like me reaching my hand toward her eye. She wouldn't like that at all. She didn't seem to be bothered by them, so I left them alone. We humans are fussy. The animals are not. I didn't get the impression that Jenny minded having a minor glacier between her eyes. I took hay to them twice. Didn't want the portion they couldn't eat right away to be snowed on all day. Took more carrots to Jenny the second time. She's become so jealous of the carrots that she pushes Jack away from me and the calf knows by now to stay away from Jenny at carrot time. I don't know what to do to teach her sharing, so I don't do anything. It's their natures that they understand better than I do. I don't want to train them to human ways of thinking. So Jenny has become the carrot hog. I make it a point to hand carrot to Jack over to the side away from Jenny. I throw one to the calf, but today with a foot of snow, the carrot would have gone to the bottom of the snow and the calf would not have found it. Jenny's mood this morning was gentle. I had the feeling she was too cold to act up. Jack was the usual Jack. He's easy going with reggae playing in ear plugs, going along with few necessities, a good-natured donkey all the time. Jack's humility is remarkable. 

 

jenny's whiskers



 

I took camera on the afternoon feeding run and walked around behind the house to get some pictures of the creek that runs through here, Spring Lizard Creek, with the rocks in it piled high with snow. In front around the birdfeeders, snowbirds were hopping about looking for something to eat. I took two big paper cups of sunflower seeds and threw one in the direction of one birdfeeder and the other at the other feeder. Thirty or so snowbirds were out there. The birdfeeder serves one at a time. On days like today when the birds are desperately hungry, I spread the seeds over the ground so they can all eat at once. The birds, too, have their comical interactive behavior. Jack had been having a drink of water when I went out this morning. It was one of those moments that I regretted not having the camera set on video and ready. He came running and the snow flying in small clouds from his hooves, and him braying. He was on me before I could even lift the camera to start pushing buttons. I let the thinking about the camera go, and watched him bray while he ran in the snow. It was too beautiful not to watch. He came up to me braying, his pink tongue flat in his mouth. Jenny let out some squeals meant to be brays. I don't think Jenny gets it yet that a bray takes a full physical commitment. It's not just mouth and throat. It is the whole body. Jack looks like he's in a trance when he brays. He has to twist is neck just right. Once the bray starts, it's like it takes a life of its own and won't set him free until he sang every verse. She'll figure it out. I'm more convinced daily that Jenny is pregnant. The baby already has its name, Sherpa. Jenny keeps her ears back while she's eating, very jealous about her food. But that's only at the beginning. Later, after everybody's hunger from the night is satisfied and they're munching because that's what they do, Jenny shows no jealousy.

 

jenny, calf and jack

  

Jack has his ears back in this picture, though it's because the calf's head and ears are so close he doesn't want them touching. Jenny's left ear she holds back tight to keep from connecting with the calf's ear, again, not wanting to touch. I see more and more subtle behavior the closer I study donkeys. I mourn for all the donkeys down through time that have been hit and yelled at because humans didn't have what it took to notice they are sentient beings. I'm sure, however, that many people who dealt with donkeys learned their ways and appreciated them. Not all men are cement heads, but enough are that a cement headed nature appears to be a side-effect of testosterone poisoning. It pains me to see guys of my generation become cement heads in their later years. I've felt the cultural tug to go that direction, but refuse to go. I will not do that. It's my inspiration for going to rock concerts in my later years and mixing with hundreds of "the kids these days," to keep myself reminded that old-man thinking is bullshit. It's cultural. It's not natural. Like racism, it's learned. I stay out of that mind. Its easy to generalize about the kids these days; television, computers, cell phones, facebook, twitter, google. Seen from the inside, it's quite another story. I know several kids these days. A couple of them got PhDs from Berkeley. I couldn't even fantasize being accepted at Berkeley. And one of them I've known since she was a baby. The kids these days I know, a fairly random sampling, are brilliant people, conscientious people, given a few exceptions. Also, none of the kids these days I know suffer from Affluenza. They're only different from the kids of my days because the culture today is different from what it was then. School isn't much different, but everything else is. Our politicians don't support education because an educated public costs more to manipulate. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina relies on ignorance. He's not going to do anything for education, like the other remote-control robots.

 

frosty donkey jack

 

A Rolling Stones song is in my head, Beast of Burden. I took a break and went to YouTube to review the words. They're funny. It is Jack's song to Jenny. He's had enough, and he is spilling to her his issues; Am I not hard enough, am I not tough enough, am I not rich enough? In the song, he's frustrated because nothing he does can please his woman. Mick Jagger writes a song of simple lyrics, though they have their something special that makes them Rolling Stones songs. Beast of Burden is simple, simple lyrics, but they tell a living story. Tumbling Dice, Brown Sugar, Wild Horses. Jack is Jenny's beast of burden. I'd better not tell him. He knows it too well. I suppose this is Jack's fate to have a woman he can never be good enough for. I don't believe it will always be that way. She keeps her ears back much of the time when he's nearby. It's her body language for, Don't do what you're thinking. Jack says, What am I thinking? I didn't think nothin Baby. Jenny says, I know you better than you think I do. Jack, at the same time, is Mr Cool. He knows he's Mr Cool and it doesn't rock his self-esteem at all that Jenny doesn't get it. He'd just like her to settle down and let him hump her all the time. Since she won't let him do that, he hangs around close enough to smell her. She likes having him around, though it would be better if he could let her rest. Yet, she likes the attention. Over a period of time they'll fall in tune with each other's rhythms and flow together. She would not be his pick, and he would not be her pick. But they're beasts of burden. They're subject to the luck of the draw. Seems like they're flowing together very well by now. Jack is not as demanding as he once was, and Jenny is not as aloof to him now as she used to be. Where one is, the other is close by.     

    

 

jenny says

she's satisfied with jack

 

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AS THE SNOW DEEPENS

night snow

Snow is falling steadily in small flakes, has been for several hours. I'd venture four inches by now. Not going outside to measure it. Going by how it looks out the window, how high the snow is piled on top of the bird feeders. I feel for my donkey friends and the calf. The snow is coming out of the east, or anyway the wind carrying it is coming out of the east, flowing into the donkey shelter. It looks like the temperature is somewhere between fifteen and twenty. I'd like to be able to give my friends a place out of the cold, the wind and the snow, but it can't be done. They have to take it like a beast. Jenny has been in moods lately, makes me wonder what she'll be like in the morning going out into the snow. I'll give them hay close to the fence where they are not so exposed. It's a cove of three trees along there and the wind current that runs through the meadow doesn't include this corner of the meadow. The three of them are doing whatever they are doing. They might be taking turns through the night to be the one with the back to the cold. Yesterday I saw the calf licking Jack behind an ear and then licked Jack's neck. Jack stood and let the calf do its licking. I saw the calf and Jenny eating from the same small mound of hay, their noses a few inches apart. I've seen the calf munching like that with Jack, too. They have become friends to the calf. Jenny has brought the calf to life. Now that it is lively she has to teach it to stay out of her space. The calf is catching on. It stays back at carrot time. Jenny won't let it approach me for a carrot, so I toss a piece to the calf. When the calf became conscious, it had to start learning the rules. It is in learning process now. I see every day its uncertainty about the rules in a given situation. When it's caught on to the donkey rules, it will be at home and comfortable. I'm catching on that the calf has learned to kick backwards from the donkeys and I stay away from the calf's backside.

 

shadow on snow

 

The birds will be anxious for seeds in the morning. The squirrels and chipmunks will hole up and maybe snack from a midden somewhere close to where they nest. If the snow continues all night, we will have appreciable accumulation by morning. Snowed in. One thing I love about being snowed in is my mind relaxes its ongoing mantra, I GOTTA. I don't gotta nothin. If it can't be done inside the house or within easy walking of the house, it's not getting done. It is a fine powdery snow. I've been told it was really a slick snow. Justin was driving on Glade Valley Road when it was maybe a quarter inch on the road. He said when he was at a place where he had some room, he stomped it to see what would happen, a big pickup. It spun in a 360 and he kept on down the road to home. He loves driving in ice and snow. For him, that spin was the hillbilly equivalent of doing a 360 in the air on a snowboard. On a snowboard would be cool, but he thinks it's a whole lot cooler in a truck. He likes to go out after a good snow before the back roads have been cleared and nobody is out driving. He practices high speed driving at slow speeds in the snow, drifting slowly around a tight curve. It's driving practice for him. He is in full control when he is spinning in the road. He is in full control at all times behind the wheel. I feel safe when he is driving, safer than when I'm driving. Going by what he said about the snow being especially slick, I see these tiny flakes ice crystals showering down. The state's present remote-control republican government has cut funding for everything having to do with the people, and giving tax breaks to big corporations. Snow plows have not been by and won't be for a few days. Budget for the state road crews has been slashed to give the major corporations what they want, which trickles down into the politician's bank account.

 

the new round bale

 

A freak out is coursing through facebook dreading the snow. Mark the calendar, nIne months from today, a baby boom will occur in the South. Mid November. Thousands of kids with the same birthdays. The lumps on the ground out the windows are levelling out. It's like a sandstorm passed through and left sand everywhere, white sand. In the morning it will be big white desert everywhere with trees and fence posts sticking up. I can't help but think the fracking that is fracturing the crust of the North American continent is making desert. Texas will be the first place to go to desert as it's so close anyway. China advanced desert into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia by destroying the grasslands, attempting mass agriculture. Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas will turn to desert next . The Appalachian chain will no longer be the water source it once was. Springs have been drying up steadily over a period of several years. Fracking is fracturing all the Appalachian chain. If you'll look at maps, you'll see rivers start in the mountains all over the world. America's rivers are being dried up at their source. Another century and the Mississippi river basin could be an arroyo. The damage has already been done and there is no reversing it. White man came through, superior to all other races in his own mind, and turned a continent that was a cornucopia of plenty into desert in just a few hundred years. White man is not a good steward. American individualism degenerated in a hurry to self-serving narcissism. Altruism isn't even an alternative. It went poof, like irony.  

 

more snow

 

The snow outside is piling up. It is almost level with just a few humps that a few more inches will level. I'm recalling a year with sixteen inches of snow, electrical and telephone lines out. Neighbor Tom Pruitt walked down the road with a cane in snow up to his knees. He came to the door and asked me to walk up to the barn and put some hay out for the cows. In the meadow I found a newborn calf, born on the snow. I knew I had to do something, but did not know what to do. I decided to pick the calf up off the snow and carry it to the barn, put it down on some hay and let mama take care of it in the barn. Mama would not follow me. I carried the calf to the barn. I carried it back to mama to give her a sniff of it and asked her to follow. She didn't. I put the calf down in the barn, took hay out for the cows and made a nest of hay on the place where the calf was born, carried it back from the barn to the hay nest. The calf was light picking it up at first, but carrying it back and forth it grew heavier and heavier until I was glad to be done with it. I did not feel that anything I did was sufficient to the need of the moment. At the same time, I could not find anything else I could do. Couldn't get there with the truck. Roads not even graded yet. The calf made it. That done, I walked up to Tom's to tell him what I'd found and how I took care of it. I wanted him to know right away in case he could tell me something I could do that I had not thought of. Nothing to do. I sat down by his fire and we talked awhile, him telling me something from his experience that the calf born in the snow brought to mind. I went to the door to look outside to see if snow was falling. It had stopped, but wind was blowing snow off the roof suggesting it was snowing. I saw how easily that snow blew and my mind's eye saw big drifts all over the roads as soon as a wind comes along. It's a beautiful snow. It will be easy to walk in, powdery and dry. Maybe it won't be so hateful for the donkeys, a fluffy snow that offers little to no resistance to the feet.    

 

jack and jenny before the snow

 

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