Before I review tonight's film, I should mention another classical music pick. I keep forgetting to do so because I've been getting carried away writing about recent movies, haha. But I don't want to neglect the music, especially since I already started going through my list and have named my favorite pieces by Bach, Chopin, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Mozart. A couple nights ago I said I would do Wagner next, so here goes. I need to preface my pick by confessing that I don't know much of Wagner's work. I have the Ring Cycle on cd, and I was fortunate to see the "Valkyrie" section of the cycle performed by LA Opera in 2008. Five hours long, and incredible from beginning to end. I've also heard parts of other Wagner operas on KUSC, such as "Tristan und Isolde" and "Parsifal".
But there is one piece, from the opera "Tannhauser" that is played regularly on the station, so often that it could be considered a Top 40 hit. :) It is the Overture from "Tannhauser", and you may know it yourself. I first heard it about ten years ago, or at least that was when I paid attention to it for the first time. Slowly, as time passed and I heard it repeatedly, it became a classical music version of an earworm. One day, I was driving along listening to an especially good version of it and I got major goosebumps. This was maybe four or five years ago. Now I get goosebumps every time I hear it.
I was talking to my friend Mike B., who passed away last year, and I cannot remember if this conversation took place the last time I saw him, at the PFM concert at the Whisky in 2015, or if it was online on Facebook, but at any rate, now that I consider it, it must've been on FB, because I probably had posted the Tannhauser Overture and my post would've led to Mike's comment on the piece.
I may have remarked on the towering greatness of this piece of music, and Mike's reply was that it could be considered the greatest piece ever written.
It certainly is a contender for that honor, and without doubt it fills the listener with powerful emotion, as if the music is a living force.
The "Tannhauser Overture" all by itself is enough to confirm Richard Wagner as one of the greatest composers who ever lived. Listen to the Youtube version by the Berliner Philharmoniker, as conducted by Herbert Von Karajan. I posted it on my FB a few weeks ago. I don't even know what to say about such music, to be honest with you.....//////
The movie I watched tonight was called "Wooden Crosses" (1932), a World War One battle film directed by a Frenchman named Raymond Bernard. I had never heard of Bernard before last December, when his name and his Criterion Eclipse dvd set came up in an Amazon recommendation. He was an early sound director in France, and like the early American directors (Griffith, DeMille, Hawks), his milieu was spectacle.
I apologize for using the word "milieu", but I was drawing a blank until it came up. I promise not to use it again this year.
Anyhow, think of Raymond Bernard as you would a big studio director in America during the Golden Age. He had substantial budgets to work with (his next film was a four hour plus version of "Les Miserables"), and with "Wooden Crosses" he wanted to put his stamp on the war commentary.
I am tired because of early morning Sunday, so I will sum up my review by saying that this is possibly the most brutal war film ever made, at least until some of the more ultra graphic ones surfaced in recent years. "Wooden Crosses" was made 87 years ago, however, and is even more realistic looking because, like Pabst's "Westfront 1918", it was produced about a dozen years after the war ended, close enough so that the horror was fresh in the minds of the storytellers. We have seen two WW1 masterpieces this weekend, "Westfront" and "Crosses". The former told the German side of the story, the latter the French. Both directors, Pabst and Bernard, wanted to lay out the relentless, exhausting absurdity of the experience, of soldiers on both sides enduring days and days of constant artillery barrages. The shells rain down on the French/German wasteland without cease until it looks like a moonscape strewn with blackened tree stumps and parts of dead bodies. Sorry to be grim, but it seems like WW1 was even more gruesome than 2, in a way, because the violence seems so pure, so organic and evil, without purpose. Men are bombing each other for weeks, with nothing to obtain. The land is scorched and bare, with only more artillery shells to go around.
What you take away from "Wooden Crosses" is the sheer absurdity that men could find themselves in such a situation, created by other more calculating men, who have more authority and who don't have to be on the battlefield. You think, "how could humanity come to this"?
But of course the Devil has been in the world for a long time now, and that is how humanity Comes To This, in any given calamitous situation. I could go on a tirade against the Devil, because he is weak and it is fairly easy to resist him. All he can do is tempt. He has no other power; he has never created a mountain or an ocean, or the sky or the universe. All he can do is try to influence a human being in the wrong direction. And all a human being needs to do is to say no, and refuse to go along.
When you watch a movie like "Wooden Crosses", with it's otherworldly imagery that looks like it is taking place on the moon, with humans engaged in unceasing violence, the only conclusion you can come to is that the Devil has had a major influence in our world, because what you see on the screen makes no sense in any other context. It is horrible but also absurd, and the Devil is that, too.
Which is why we resist, and believe in Peace and Love. /////
Two Enormous Thumbs Up for "Wooden Crosses", though it is not an easy film to watch.
I am Super Tired so I will see you in the morning, with tons of love til then. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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