On binging movies by Ozu
and Menzel, and Ray, and Kieślowski, and...
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Next week, paid subscribers will get September’s ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire.
Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get the premium version of The Election Tricycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on this year’s elections in the United States, United Kingdom, and India.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
I loved this piece about a 2007 lunch with Kamala Harris’s mom that is, of course, about more than a lunch 15+ years ago.
This is a great profile of the popular and controversial Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose work you may have read if you’ve read Russian literature in English in the last few decades.
Aymann Ismail has a piece in Slate on how members of the Uncommitted movement are making sense of the Harris campaign in the wake of the DNC.
From the Guardian: “A new documentary on the Nazis’ favourite film-maker and lead propagandist Leni Riefenstahl suggests she was a direct witness to murderous crimes of the Third Reich she later claimed to have known nothing about, and may even have contributed to one herself.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…Ozu and binging film directors!
One evening in late January, my husband and I randomly decided to watch An Autumn Afternoon, the last movie made by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. I didn’t really know what to make of it but I liked it, or parts of it. We bought it on Blu Ray. Still, I distinctly remember telling people after that I wasn’t sure this Ozu guy was for me.
Since then, though, we’ve watched nine other Ozu movies. We’re going to watch an eleventh this evening. I like that he returns to the same themes over and over again. I like that he uses the same actors, the same scenes, goes over the same kinds of familial dramas, over and over again. I like how they pile up on each other. The more I watch them, the more I understand that this Ozu guy is for me, actually.
I was thinking about this this week and realized this is the fourth director in a row that I’ve kind of delved into. Last summer, I watched every movie I could find by Jiří Menzel. This year, in addition to Ozu, I’ve watched eight by Satyajit Ray (actually one of them—The Big City—I watched last year) and 12 by Krzysztof Kieślowski (Dekalog, his 10-film series inspired by the Ten Commandments, I watched during the Days of Awe last year). Each time I do this, I think that this person is the greatest genius I’ve ever encountered.
Part of this is self selecting: If I’m watching a bunch of a director’s work, I obviously liked it at the start enough to keep going. But I think part of what I like is the experience of watching a lot of it. Of understanding them better, of seeing the extent to which their films all fit into one greater project (or the extent to which they don’t). Of looking at another person’s way of presenting the world, over and over again, until I see it a little more clearly myself.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
If you’re in DC: On September 10, I’m moderating an event with the great Karolina Krasuska on her new book, Soviet Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction. Join us if you can!
The Financial Times had a great piece about a London house with hundreds of years of history that was once an active synagogue—and is now becoming a sort of museum on migration.
From the Washington Post: “Police in France have arrested a suspect in an early-morning arson attack on a synagogue in the country’s south, the interior minister said late Saturday.”
From Haaretz: “Israel Police ordered the closure of the Hadash party branch in Haifa for ten hours on Monday due to a planned screening of a film by Palestinian director Mohamad Bakri about Israeli army activities in the West Bank city of Jenin in 2023…Hadash, an Arab-Jewish party, said it ‘strongly condemns the decision by the Netanyahu-Ben-Gvir police to close the movement's branch in Wadi Nisnas and will appeal to the court.’ A protest event was held at the location.”
-ET
Image from IMDB