Schmüdde

© Metin Demiralay

Satori is the art of knowing which only comes through experience.  The inside feeling of rightness validates the functional mechanics of life.  “You alone are the replete knower and the method of your knowing is the self.”

In any fulfilled life there must be time to listen to yourself.  As R. Murray Schafer likes to point out: silent and listen are anagrams - you cannot have one without the other.

(photo credit: Irwin Romain Jules Arthur)

The smell of autumn.  The sound.  Endless poetry has been written.  It is one of the joys of the four seasons.  It reminds us of the importance of the senses - there is a vitality in the changing seasons. 

The colors of the leaves pictured above.  The sound of walking through them.  The smell of the earth in the crisp air.  The tactile sensation of the experience goes far beyond what can be communicated in image and yet more and more of our time is spent looking at things and less is spent touching things.

The Onion ran one of my favorite headlines in recent memory: Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles. 

I imagine that the next generation - the generation which lives in an increasingly virtual world of digital books, digital games, distant friends - may revolt.  There might be a movement of the real.  Like the Hollywood New Wavers of the early 70s trying to get at the human experience itself rather than derivative man-eating sharks and laser-zapping ships whooshing through space.

Or maybe not.  Today, the greatest asset of these glowing rectangles is not the experience they provide but the accessibility.  The ease of escape.  The low investment.  One thing that cannot be argued about even the most advanced digital media of 2009 is that it has a lower resolution than even everyday occurances - the touch, the smell, the sounds and even the visuals - and yet it is the primary way that some of us navigate through our weeks.

[Photo: 35mm Fuji Velvia]

Issues of sexuality inevitably come up when you teach a class that surveys the history of film because it is tied in the very fabric of the art form.  In a previous quarter we were discussing Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (1952) - as beautiful and sweet as any film that has ever been made.  De Sica’s films directly responded to Italy’s previous fascist regime which promoted the ideal citizen as a holistic venture.  There is a certain way to look, act and think.  All outsiders of this segment were ostracized.  The Italian Neo-Realisist filmmakers that followed Mussolini’s propaganda were determined to show the beautiful within the imperfect reality that we all live in.

One such character in Umberto D. was the innocent servant Maria who essentially acted as a more open-minded and less judgmental foil to the film’s other characters.  She was unwed and pregnant with a child that had two possible fathers.  When discussing the script I saw her as a window character that enabled the hero, Umberto D, to succeed.  Essential and beautiful - as well as deeply flawed.  When I asked the students what their opinion of the character was without divulging my own, one girl disdainfully opined that she was “a total skank”.

I never thought of this student as trashy or unintelligent.  She was well manicured and attractive, more articulate than most with a relatively broad cinematic vocabulary for a freshman.  She also has a child of her own.  Maybe she was making a joke but no one laughed; her opinion was actually shared by many of her peers.  I was astonished.  I understand that having a baby out of wedlock with an unknown father might be blasphemous enough to shame a woman into secrecy in the 1950s but these were young men and women entering college in 2009 that live in a major metropolis.  These things happen in a city.  They will always happen.  Everywhere.  And although we’ve been through the “sexual liberation” of the 1960s and bare more skin in popular culture than ever, many people in America still have the same antiquated thoughts on sexuality.  Men who sleep around are conquerors, women who do are sluts.  Seemingly harmless words in detail, these ideas are insidious in the larger consciousness.  Jaclyn Fridman goes on to succinctly demonstrate how far this goes:

“I think it’s important to understand a few key things. The first is that rape is everyone’s business, not just because we all should care about it, but because it impacts every one of us directly, whatever our gender, whether or not we’re a survivor or a perpetrator. When we have sex right now, we’re having sex in the context of a rape-enabling culture, one that shames women for having sexual appetites and shames men for not ‘scoring’ at every opportunity. We all take that into bed with us, at least in part, and the things that make women safer and give women better access to their own authentic sexualities also directly benefit men in numerous ways.”

This is exactly the type of real and pervasive social inequity that De Sica was fighting against.  Inequality affects everyone, not just the victims, not just those who directly perpetuate it.  Yet we as a culture allow it everywhere, even in our own bedrooms and the language we use everyday.

Structure: IV
by David Barnes