I can never endure Chekhov, though it's clearly a defect in me, and not in him, because so many great people love him. Can you explain what the appeal is for you?
Several years ago, I took some film classes about documentary cinema. They discussed a lot of the standard questions of documentary film: the ethnographic gaze (and the gaze in general), recreation, the tradition of reenactment, etc.
We saw many documentary films: Nanook of the North, Hotel Terminus, and parts of Shoah. But one of the discussions that most interested me was a discussion about Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia, with Ingrid Bergman and George Saunders.
Now, at some level, it was just bizarre that we watched a film with two big-name actors playing parts in a class on documentary film. But the prof talked about it in these terms: often, documentary is about describing or recording an event or a thing or even a culture. Rossellini was clearly trying to play with more cinema verité elements in Viaggio, but that, in and of itself, doesn't make it a documentary. But my prof talked about it in terms of trying to document and record the post-war zeitgeist. How can you capture "the time" -- its spirit or feel?
A big part of what I like about Chekhov is that he creates these wonderful snapshots of pre-revolution Russia. The notion of the revolution is always hanging over the characters in the plays: whether it's Trofimov from Cherry Orchard or Baron Tuzenbach from The Three Sisters. These characters know that they're living in a society that's on the verge of a profound change, but most of them aren't capable of looking that in the face. Confronting that is too scary for them.
I think that what the shows convey most is small communities of people who reject almost all of their agency. Sometimes the characters have goals, like the three sisters' dream to go to Moscow that they just never seem to find the will to follow. Sometimes there are crucial decisions that need to be made -- whether or not to sell the cherry orchard to pay debts -- and the characters can't bring themselves to confront them. And I just think that that's something interesting to depict -- mostly because it's different than all of the stories about heroic individualism.
How do you depict passivity? How do you tell a story about people's deep contentment with sitting down to watch American Idol, rather than have an important but difficult conversation with a loved one.
For me, Chekhov has constructed these wonderful diorama's of a moribund society. And part of what makes it moribund is unsettlingly familiar. And I'm probably not doing a very good job about explaining why that's interesting to me, but that's interesting to me.
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regna
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Date: 2009-12-04 01:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-05 01:54 am (UTC)We saw many documentary films: Nanook of the North, Hotel Terminus, and parts of Shoah. But one of the discussions that most interested me was a discussion about Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia, with Ingrid Bergman and George Saunders.
Now, at some level, it was just bizarre that we watched a film with two big-name actors playing parts in a class on documentary film. But the prof talked about it in these terms: often, documentary is about describing or recording an event or a thing or even a culture. Rossellini was clearly trying to play with more cinema verité elements in Viaggio, but that, in and of itself, doesn't make it a documentary. But my prof talked about it in terms of trying to document and record the post-war zeitgeist. How can you capture "the time" -- its spirit or feel?
A big part of what I like about Chekhov is that he creates these wonderful snapshots of pre-revolution Russia. The notion of the revolution is always hanging over the characters in the plays: whether it's Trofimov from Cherry Orchard or Baron Tuzenbach from The Three Sisters. These characters know that they're living in a society that's on the verge of a profound change, but most of them aren't capable of looking that in the face. Confronting that is too scary for them.
I think that what the shows convey most is small communities of people who reject almost all of their agency. Sometimes the characters have goals, like the three sisters' dream to go to Moscow that they just never seem to find the will to follow. Sometimes there are crucial decisions that need to be made -- whether or not to sell the cherry orchard to pay debts -- and the characters can't bring themselves to confront them. And I just think that that's something interesting to depict -- mostly because it's different than all of the stories about heroic individualism.
How do you depict passivity? How do you tell a story about people's deep contentment with sitting down to watch American Idol, rather than have an important but difficult conversation with a loved one.
For me, Chekhov has constructed these wonderful diorama's of a moribund society. And part of what makes it moribund is unsettlingly familiar. And I'm probably not doing a very good job about explaining why that's interesting to me, but that's interesting to me.