Nature Happens, or The Best-tasting Bug in Town

Blue jays are ordinarily pretty noisy birds, but yesterday there was a racket coming from a tree behind my house that was excessive even by their high standards. It was two or more jays squawking loudly, and as I looked over to find out what the deal was I saw one of the birds flop down from one branch to another in a clumsy flutter and with a startled chirrup that I assume translated to "Ow! I mean, I meant to do that." At the same time I became aware of a loud, high-pitched buzzing, like something you might hear from a high-voltage electrical device that was getting ready to explode. The buzz got louder and started moving in my direction, and then there was a loud thunk! on the porch post right next to my shoulder. After a stunned pause, the buzzing continued on away from me, and I just glimpsed an oversized bug droning off into the lower branches of a spruce twelve or fifteen yards away.

The blue jays had the bug's number, though. Two of them flew to the top of the spruce and started squawking again while another flew down to where the bug was. There was some more rough-and-tumble bonking of branches and then the buzz got quieter and stopped.

I don't know if the birds disliked that particular kind of bug or if they just really really wanted to eat it, but the whole thing was like a sloppy mob hit; it was like when a stool pigeon escapes from a basement and runs down the middle of the street shrieking while a bunch of freaked-out gangsters chase after him with whatever blunt objects happened to be nearby, like hammers or a tennis racket.

Maybe I've just been watching a little too much film noir lately.

Battleship Potemkin

My brother-in-law and his wife gave me a copy of the Kino DVD of Battleship Potemkin for my birthday, and I watched it earlier this week. It's a restoration that was done a few years ago in Germany, based on the Soviet reconstruction of the film that came out in the 1970s. The DVD features improved picture quality and a new soundtrack, the latter being an adaptation of the original film score from the Berlin premiere.

I have a VHS copy of the '70s Soviet reconstruction, which up to that point was arguably the best version of the film available and the closest approximation to what the "director's cut" might have looked like.* However, as the documentary in the supplementary materials explains, the Soviets did not feel that it was fitting to have the score to their national treasure be written by a foreigner, so they substituted Edmund Meisel's score with music by Shostakovich. The problem is that rather than tailoring the music to the film, they tailored the film to the music, specifically by slowing the film down down in certain places, sometimes dramatically.

The Kino version shows the film at the correct speed, and the difference is amazing. Suddenly the film is a lot more kinetic; the screen is constantly in motion, and there is a sense of rhythm that moves everything along. By comparison the old Soviet version is dull and lugubrious, since parts of the film are literally in slow motion; this is particularly the case in Act III, in which the people of Odessa come to see the dead sailor lying on the waterfront. In the film we see throngs of people moving towards the water and passing by the dead man, and in the Soviet version this forceful, wave-like movement is slowed to a crawl and the film all but grinds to a halt. It's just plain boring.

The new version, however, crackles with constant, clashing movement across the screen, and now we can better see Battleship Potemkin for what it is, not a boring old artifact from back when people didn't know how to have fun, but something which was experimental, avant garde and really kind of far out there. Since the 1800s the cinema had slowly been extricating itself from the swampy legacy of the theater and trying to find its own language and storytelling tools, but Eisenstein's movies were like a rocket sled barreling off into the new era. We are no longer a fly on a fourth wall, watching a scene play out from a distance and only occasionally buzzing in to get a closer look, instead we are everywhere, seeing the action from every angle, flashing up and down and back and forth. Instead of being built in massive clunky clods, Battleship Potemkin is an intricate mosaic of fragments which, when viewed from the right distance, tell an intense and detailed story. One of the most famous examples is the critical moment of a sailor reaching his breaking point and smashing an officer's dinner plate; instead of having this act be all one camera shot, it is broken up into seven or eight smaller shots that are cut together quickly. It was completely unnecessary, and yet incredibly effective; the cutting up of the motion creates a a sense of frenzy and violence that would be hard to create otherwise. It transforms a hissy fit into a revolution.

So with this new DVD release one of the most important films in the history of the medium is suddenly much, much more watchable for the average viewer. You might even say it's entertaining. It's still a tricky movie, though; beyond the uncomfortable ickiness of the propaganda, there is also sometimes a kind of intellectual coldness to the film. The movie is not really about characters, but rather about "the people," whoever they are; individuals tend not to fare very well in Battleship Potemkin, and that can be jarring to those of us who have grown up with the opposite propaganda, that the individual is everything. Also, there are times when the action on screen borders on abstract dance, like Man Ray, but with sailors instead of nails.

Still, the Odessa steps sequence is a jaw-dropper, even for modern audiences, and those who have only seen censored versions will really be in for a shock. It's violent, man.


*The film had been recut and censored many times over the years, with no copy of the original cut surviving; the soviets made a reconstruction by following a listing of the individual shots.