--- Mark Bennett <mab at straussandasher.com> wrote:
> Yesterday I had to drive into downtown Los Angeles
> from the south, via Interstate 5. The sheer
> ugliness of the landscape I drove through - South
> Central El Lay - staggers the mind. It is a cliché
> to call it a vision of Hell, but clichés are clichés
> because they are substantially true.
Several years ago when I still lived in central CA in one of those playgrounds for the rich (or rather nearby, since I am not rich), I took a train from Salinas to New York via Los Angeles. It took us the whole day just to get down to LA, where I hung out for a few hours before boarding a train for Chicago. BTW, the art deco Union Station in LA is really beautiful http://www.westworld.com/~elson/larail/laus.html.
We departed late evening and I fell asleap for a while and woke up in AZ near Flagstaff. It was dawning, I looked through the window and thought I went color blind. All I saw was the colorless flat surface covered with dust. Only after a while I realized that the desert was not colorless at all, but it was full of very subtle earth tones half-tones and shadows. After the kitschy vistas of LA, with its screaming billboards and neon lights, the hackeneyed Venice Beach sunsets, palm trees and the artificial paradise cum slum look it was a breathtaking minimalist aesthetic experience, where nuance and understatement shocked and forced the spectator to see something that he would not otheriwse even notice. Anyway, it was then when I realized how ugly and pretentious LA and its environs really is, its art deco architecture notwithstanding. Especially Orange county.
Actually, the United States as seen from a train has a certain off beat quality a la Jim Jarmusch (_Stranger than paradise_, _ A Night on Earth_) or even Alexander Payne (_About Schmidt_)that makes it aesthetically interesting. It is the vast wasteland of manicured suburbia, strip malls, MacMansions, endless parking lots, and freeways that is really ugly.
> What did you find so impressive about it, Woj?
A few things. First, the documentary within the documentary narrative i.e. the actual documentary footage shot by Timothy Treadwell enveloped in the documentary footage shot by Herzog, which very effectively projects the notion of multiple layers of reality. Both, Treadwell's and Herzog's narratives document real life events, yet the one that is so real that it resulted in the death of the cameraman appears as surreal, and it is Herzog's mononotnous narrative that anchors the audience back in what we conventionally consider real. Which gets us to Herzog's theme of the social construction of reality cf. _Jeder fuer sich und Gott gegen alles_ or Where the Green Ants Dream_ where the purely experiential, unreflexive and unadulterated reality appears surreal, and the social construct aka civilization appears as real.
Another quality is the minimalist, drama-free narrative, which I very much appreciate. The film contains no dramatic "moments" (e.g the bear attack) and the audience is told that upfront. We know from the beginning that the uneventful footage shot by Treadwell and Herzog's interviews is all that we will see, yet the film is captivating to the end. It is thus the cinematographer and his filmmaking skill alone, not the shock value of the portrayed events that makes the film interesting. Not many feature films can accomplish that - Bindler's _Hands on a Hardbody_ is another one that comes to mind http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116481/.
And then there is the main character himself which is quite likeable, despite being nuts. I think he nicely expresses a certain theme or trope in Western civilization, the escape from civilization back to nature, and the nature as hyper-reality (cf. Umberto Eco, _Travels in Hyperreality_) a human construct, and artifice imitating reality (theme parks and dioramas in Ecos' essay, Treadwell's 'relationship' with bears in Herzog's film) that appears more real than reality itself. Eco sees it as the quintessential element of the US culture of theme parks and re-enactments of historical and mythical events. But unlike Eco, who treats the US hyper-reality in a subtly patronizing and condescending way, Herzog's portrayal of it is critical, level-headed, and deconstructing, yet sympathetic as the audience identifies with the main character. It is like saying, the guy may be nuts, but his madness revels something embedded in every one of us.
Anyway, I liked the film's minimalist asthetic, the off-beat story with slighgtly melancholic and nostalgic overtones, and of course its main character.
Wojtek
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