27 aug '00
Michael Winterbottom picks out a few faces in the crowd
of today's working-class London to tell the story of
Wonderland. What is so refreshing about the film is
the unpredictable reactions of the characters under stress.
For instance, there is Nadia's laughter over the news of her
once-contented sister's marital problems. Or the desperate
tactics their mother engages in to silence a neighbor's
incessantly barking dog, including barking back.
L'Humanité (Humanity) has a few
strong images, like the opening extreme long shot of Pharaon
running cross-country, or the fist-fight seen from several
stories up in an office tower. It can be read as a
picaresque Christian parable disguised as a police
procedural. But mostly what it is is slow. Dead-dog
slow, in the colorful expression of my colleague Mark.
I didn't take much away from Denis Johnson's The Name
of the World, save for two striking turns of phrase:
This is what our imaginary conversations...
often touched on. The indiscernible points, the little
dimes, where fate takes its sharpest turns.
And this paragraph from a scene in a titty bar:
I doubt there were more than a dozen others
at the tables around us. All men. Middle-aged,
middle-income, midwestern. Golfers. In this twilight they
were more imagined than seen, but I felt surrounded by the
practitioners of a sacred mediocrity, an elegant mediocrity
cloistering inaccessible tortures. I don't know quite how to
put it. People, men, proud of their clichés yet full
of helpless poetry. Meanwhile the music whamming and
blamming. The women shaking themselves almost shyly.
The unsettling prologue keeps you going through Cornell
Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man, the last selection
in the Library of America collection of crime novels from
the 30s and 40s. The prose style in the main body of the
book can be overly wrought:
Yet it couldn't have been the valise alone
that seemed to pull her arm down so, it must have been the
leadenness of her heart....
She moved down a step of two around the turn to meet him,
leaving the valise behind her, doffed hat and coat flung
atop it now.
6 aug '00
Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's
Languages, by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine
Sixty percent of the world's languages are in
danger of extinction, write Nettle and Romaine. Other
writers have pointed out that a mere nine countries of the
world comprise 60% of the world's cultural diversity and 60%
of the world's biological diversity, and the authors of the
present volume find this to be no coincidence:
It is political, geographical and economic
factors which support the maintenance of linguistic and
cultural diversity. These need to be considered
holistically, as part of an ecology of language, an approach
that sees language as part of the larger natural
environment.
The book offers intriguing, persuasive hypotheses, even
if it doesn't always substantiate them. First, that there is
a close linkage between the loss of cultural diversity and
that of biodiversity. Second, that there is a natural
linguistic equilibrium point, at which new languages evolve
at the same rate that they are extinguished, leading to a
diverse distribution of many languages, each with relatively
few speakers. This equilibrium has been punctuated by two
waves of exploration and development from Eurasia over the
past 1,000 years. The authors refer to the work popularized
by Jared Diamond that
accounts for the biological and cultural dominance of the
West.
They offer a few juicy examples of the variety into which
human language has evolved. Consider Tuyuca, spoken now by
less than an thousand people in Brazil and Colombia, which
has five degrees of "evidentiality." Verbs take on different
forms according to the certainty of the speaker's knowledge
of the stated facts. For instance, changing one verb ending
can distinguish between the ideas "I saw him play soccer
with my own eyes" and "It is reasonable to assume that he
played soccer."
Examples of the pernicious means by which majority
languages have suppressed minorities are also given. The
Welsh "Not" was a wooden badge worn by a nineteenth-century
pupil who was caught speaking Welsh.
The wearer was in turn allowed to transfer
the badge to any of his or her peers overheard speaking
Welsh, and so it passed from child to child. At the end of
the week, whoever had it in his possession was punished by
flogging.
The book's most extreme political statements are just
that, but it's hard to argue with the thesis that the right
to choose one's language is a human rights issue.
The book centers on the potential loss of Third World
languages, and one wishes for some discussion of besieged
majority languages, like French, which is 13th in the league
table of world languages, spoken by 1.2% of the population.
But perhaps that is a different book.
Alan Rudolph applies his quirky, almost sleepy romantic
style to the murder mystery genre in Trixie. Emily
Watson in the title role brings such an earnest commitment
to the stream of malapropisms that come from Trixie's lips
that she almost redeems a gimmick that wears too thin.
Rudolph loses his way after an hour or so, when he realizes
that his detective really does have to solve the mystery.
Jeremy Podeswa's The Five Senses joins a group of
very fine films created in Canada in the past decade or so.
Comparisons to the work of Atom Egoyan, Don McKellar's
Last Night, and The Red Violin are in order.
Five interlinked narratives play out, and in each the
central role is characterized by one of the five aspects of
human sensation. The creamy images come as close as they can
to capturing some of the essence of the three non-visual,
non-auditory senses: the smell of burning paper, pastry chef
Rona's cakes that have no savor, the full-body empathic
healing from massage therapist Ruth.
In an ensemble piece, Daniel MacIvor is to be singled out
for his winning turn as the lovelorn bisexual Robert.
Rachel's story of gender identity and seeing is the most
interesting, and the least neatly resolved at the end.
Podeswa doesn't give us five clear, happy endings, and this
is a good thing.
the chorister's c ||| pedantic nuthatch
©2000
David L. Gorsline.
All rights reserved.
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