I'd like to take a moment to play this song in memory and honor of our dearly departed Casey and Molly (as well as every other lost family member and friend.)
Lyrics:
Fly, fly, little wing
Fly beyond imagining
The softest cloud, the whitest dove
Upon the wind of heaven's love
Past the planets and the stars
Leave this lonely world of ours
Escape the sorrow and the pain
And fly again
Fly, fly precious one
Your endless journey has begun
Take your gentle happiness
Far too beautiful for this
Cross over to the other shore
There is peace forevermore
But hold this mem'ry bittersweet
Until we meet
Fly, fly do not fear
Don't waste a breath, don't shed a tear
Your heart is pure, your soul is free
Be on your way, don't wait for me
Above the universe you'll climb
On beyond the hands of time
The moon will rise, the sun will set
But I won't forget
Fly, fly little wing
Fly where only angels sing
Fly away, the time is right
Go now, find the light
Casey: (adopted) 10/5/01~9/10/10
"I know you can't stay, But part of you will never, ever go away; Your heart will stay.,," ~Jordan Hill
"When you lose someone you love they never really leave you. They just move into a special place in your heart."
"I don't want him in my heart;I want him here with me." ~Victor Frankenstein (Frankenweenie)
"If only tears could bring you back to me,
If only love could find a way...
What I would do, what I would give, if you'd
Return to me, someday, somehow, some way....
If my tears could bring you back to me."
~Midnight Sons
Molly:8/8/97~5/9/10
"Energy does not die; I have only changed form.
I will always be with you."
"It came to me that every time I lose a dog,
they take a piece of my heart with them....
And every new dog who comes into my life
Gifts me with a piece of their heart.
If I live long enough, all the components of my heart will be dog--
And I will become as generous and loving as they are."
~Anonymous
I still run, I still swing open the door;
I still think you'll be there like before
{SHeDaisy}
"So long, old friend, I wish that I could see once again. I never knew, the time would come When I'd be losing you.
I hope you know I never meant To treat you badly... And now I know just what a friend like you is for. I never thought that it would end so sadly, And you'd be walking through that door...
So long old friend, I wish that I could see once again. I never knew, the time would come When I'd be losing you.
I always thought our fun and games would just Go on and on.... I never knew I'd have to say...so long..." ~"Here Comes Garfield" ("Garfield and Friends")
"There must be something more to us than you and me; It must be tangled up somehow with destiny. I used to think the sum of one and one was two, But we add up to more, me and you. I don't know how to say the things I'm thinking of, But the something more I'm feeling must be love."
This sweepstakes end on April 23 (this Saturday); it's easy to enter for another chance to win a high-quality Douglas Cuddle Toy product--those are without doubt some of the absolute best plushes ever made...and I of all people ought to know! ;)
*Try to leave enough unfrosted space on back of doughnut hole to be able to handle it with minimal mess.
*Pinch marshmallow slices to see if you can make them more bunny ear- and flower petal-like. I think this test one I made resembles a mouse, since I only pinched a little.
Also unrelated to the old blog, but let's add it here anyway, shall we? Instructions for entering to win a Douglas Cuddle Toy product of your choice are right here! Ends on the 26th...
In psychological terms, “persona” is that self which one projects to the outside world and shows to others. In Greek theatre, it was the mask an actor wore in order to play a role. And in cinema, “Persona” is the title of a psychodramatic masterpiece of deconstructivist post-modernism from the master Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Referred to by Bergman himself as a “poem in images,” “Persona” has had nearly as many interpretations of its messages or questions regarding personal identity and earthly existence as it has had viewers over the decades.
The film opens with a six- or seven-minute montage of seemingly arbitrary and sometimes disturbing images, all having to do with film: inner workings of a camera reel, an upside-down animation loop, a slaughtered sheep, a silent comedy, a nail driven through a palm. Credits are jarringly interspliced with still more images. Next, people who appear to be dead begin to move. A young boy gazes at a large-screen image of a woman’s face as it comes into and out of focus, trying to connect with it. The sequence resembles a bizarre dream stream of consciousness. At last, we’re introduced to a solid storyline revolving around 25-year-old, engaged Nurse Alma, a kindly, contented person with optimistic philosophies. Despite her concerns because she’s relatively new to the profession, she is willingly tasked with caring for a new psychiatric patient: Elisabet Vogler, a young actress who, in the middle of a stage performance, suddenly ceased to speak or move, and hasn’t yet recovered from this freeze.
The hospital’s doctor theorizes that Vogler’s problem is that she is trying to escape from real life, tired of putting on masks to play different parts and realizing that this is what everyone does in everyday life. Everyone in the world is an actor. Instead of acting genuinely, they create false personas—so perhaps it is better not to act at all than to act dishonestly. (Of course, according to existentialist philosophy, action is the one necessary objective of life.) She may be fearful of living, or she may be quietly laughing at and watching, judging, or amused by others.The doctor invites Alma to stay with Elisabet in her isolated island cottage, where Alma slowly starts to reveal to her listener—something she realizes she hasn’t truthfully had in a long time--her most personal secrets (a past affair, an abortion, her sexual encounter on the beach with a teenage boy.) As time passes Elisabet seems to absorb not only the words, tales, and confessions but also Alma herself, who wistfully wonders how easy it would be for them to become one another. Bergman is deliberately ambiguous as to whether the two women’s personalities—or personas--are exactly merging together, Elisabeth is transferring herself onto Alma, they are two sides of the same person, or what is happening, precisely. When Alma reads in her patient’s letter to the doctor that Elisabet is “studying” her, she becomes angry, and things start to fall apart—symbolized by a literal onscreen tearing of the film itself. One shot of Alma blurs, fades, and burns away.
Alma struggles to pull away from whatever state of abnormality she's getting herself into with this woman. She begs Elisabeth to speak just once, accusing her of fooling others by merely acting sane, while hiding malicious intentions. When blind Mr. Vogler appears at the house, Alma strangely pretends to be his wife, encouraged by the actress. The climax is a repeated scene, during which Alma delivers a monologue to Elisabet, telling the patient what she believes she knows about her life and feelings--mainly, that Elisabet detests her son because she was terrified of all the changes motherhood could bring to her life, that she had wished for a stillborn child, and now cannot bring herself to even be with him at all. We first see Vogler’s reactions to hearing this; the second time, the camera is on the speaker, Alma. In the end, Alma asserts her own identity and insists that she is not like Elisabet, but one half of each of their faces blends together onscreen to form one visage. (When Bergman first showed that photo to his two stars, each insisted that it was the other's face!) The two are later shown back in the hospital again, and then Elisabet on stage again in ‘Electra.’ Finally, we see them packing up and leaving the cottage, each apparently released to return to her own rightful life.
This film was made in the mid-1960s, amidst a period of turbulence and change throughout the entire world. Art of all kinds, from paintings to movies, underwent transformations and artists began to actually dissect and question their own modes of expression. “Persona” is an example of a product of this self-reflective, self-conscious media. It’s referred to by the term ‘deconstructivist,’ and indeed the illusion is created that the very celluloid of the movie itself is being torn apart (much like the fabric of society.) Artists, including Bergman, endeavored to make evident through their work their own awareness that what they were making was not real, but a sort of representation of reality, physically manipulated by its creators so that the viewer would see what the director wanted him or her to see. Of course the intention of art is to inspire some type of emotion, reaction, or feeling in its audience--and each individual will still naturally form his or her own ideas based upon what they’re being shown. However, reminders of the director’s ultimate control over his vision and the fact that it comes down to material objects are strongly present.
Over almost an hour and a half, the character of Alma changes a great deal as well, growing increasingly hostile and desperate, and causing us to wonder many times whether or not she’s indeed losing her mind or her own sense of self. For how can we be sure who anyone truly is, or what makes us who we are? Is it just the way we act? Does it have more to do with the psyche and inner life? Bergman allowed his imagination to run wild as he made Persona, as he tried to explore the infinitely complex intricacies of people and personalities. Seeming random images from outside of the plot—the inner workings of movie cameras, an actress being captured on film—are all, in fact, there for a reason. When Vogler watches recorded images of things that are real and did happen, such as a burning monk, they elicit emotional reactions from her because, although she’s merely staring at a screen or photograph, she knows that the events documented come straight from life itself—and had she witnessed these events the feelings would be even stronger. But for her, attempts at creating such reactions through acting and pretending have begun, for some mysterious reason, to lose their power.
Art is made to generate or convey something; it’s an inherent method of communicating with others. Yet while it has much power to create feelings and thoughts in us, critics of Persona remind us that it does so despite our knowledge that it is not actually real. Bergman seems to find this phenomenon curious—the magic of cinema. He nonetheless studies and breaks it down, looking from all sides, and asking whether films can ever be truly adequate to capture those complexities of reality and of spirit.
Bergman is extremely fond of close-ups and extreme close-ups, showing the texture and details of skin, faces, eyes, etc. Certain shots, such as Alma and Elisabet gazing into the mirror or their combined countenance, have become iconic. As in many Scandinavian films, Bergman’s stark landscape of a cold, rocky beach on his island sets the ideal backdrop for a movie which, I was not very surprised to learn, was written from his hospital bed following one of a number of mental breakdowns. His clearly calculated framing is a form of that aforementioned manipulation by the artist, who forces us to see things just as he wishes, because we can’t change what he has recorded. He also appears to have liked centering characters in the frame and letting them stare directly into the audience’s eyes, and perhaps minds. This method is deliberately disconcerting and once again causes people to feel that they, too, are being involved and interrogated in this strange story, although they know inside that they’re merely watching a film that can be switched off at any moment they choose. But viewers are, obviously, supposed to involve themselves in an artistic experience rather than simply looking at it disconnectedly. As the characters grow closer to each other, so they are brought closer to the watcher.
Other scenes, such as the ones in which the two women are seeing one another asleep or sharing an odd and intimate nighttime encounter, are ambiguous and, like nearly everything else about this experimentally abstract movie, open to multiple interpretations. Are they only dreams? Are they sexual? Is Elisabeth a vampire of sorts, literally sucking blood from Alma’s arm near the end? Throughout the film that character has been silent and basically unresponsive, yet much was required of the actress (Liv Ullman) in the way of subtly changing expressions to successfully portray this enigmatic woman. The only word we know for certain that we hear Elisabet speak is, “Nothing.” (Otherwise, it’s possible that the nurse has in fact started to speak for her, somehow sensing or knowing or hearing her thoughts and/or verbalizing them on certain occasions.) Alma has begun to question everything in her well-planned and essentially happy life. She starts to ramble on to Elisabet about “everything and nothing.” Is the movie intended to be about everything—or nothing at all?
I first saw Persona in one of my high school Psychology classes, and it stuck with me. Rewatching it really does remind you why it is such a highly regarded, compelling, and enduring classic; one could almost go on forever analyzing it. Through research I learned more about the director, actors, and their interesting relationships, which add a whole new dimension to my understanding of the film. Bergman was attracted to and romantically involved with both Bibi Andersson (first) and then Liv Ullman, and was fascinated by the similarities he saw between them. “Persona” is an artistic, intellectual film that truly is mostly mental—it gets into your head, makes you think, and asks you to try and put it together into your own rendition of Bergman’s unsolvably mysterious motion picture.
Three storylines intertwine in this tale of very different people whose separate lives briefly collide at the scene of a car crash. To begin with, brothers Octavio and Ramiro live together with Ramiro’s wife, Susana, and their son. They’re a struggling and tense family. Ramiro is an angry, abusive cashier by day and thief by night, while Octavio is in love with Susana and harbors a desire to run away with her (though she'll need some convincing about the idea.) His chance arises when their friendly Rottweiler, Cofi, kills a dog fighter’s Pit Bull Terrier. Realizing Cofi’s potential as a fighting dog, Octavio enters the cruel, bloody world of that “sport,” and suddenly starts coming home with a lot of spending money. Meanwhile, he’s sleeping with Susana. However, he has to have his brother taken out after Ramiro threatens Cofi’s life unless he gets half of “their” dog’s winnings (and temporarily disappears with his wife and baby.) Troubles escalate further when Cofi is entered into a high-stakes fight against a German Shepherd Dog. The fight ends abruptly once Cofi is shot; Octavio rushes him to his new car, returns to stab the offender, Jarocho, and then sets off a wild car chase that ends in a horrible collision.
The second plotline follows Brazilian supermodel and media star Valeria, and her lover Daniel, who recently decided to ditch his wife and two daughters for her. Octavio’s car smashed into Valeria’s, leading to the eventual amputation of her badly mangled leg, and of course, to the termination of her highly successful contract with the perfume company Enchant. As time passes her relationship with Daniel becomes troubled as well. Throughout this trying period of Valeria’s life, she enjoys the faithful company of her beloved little dog, Richie, who gets lost for a long time underneath the floorboards of her new apartment after chasing a ball down a hole, but manages to survive again.
In the backdrop of both of the previous stories has been the activity of a mysterious and scruffy old man, who appears to live on the streets, push a cart about, have several mutts for friends…and also be a hired assassin. As it turns out, this man is known as El Chivo (real name Martin), and he abandoned his wife and daughter (Maru) long ago to head out and try to actively change the world. Now, having failed to do so, he has observed his wife’s funeral and watched his daughter living from afar, observing her life in photographs by sneaking into her bedroom. In the meantime, El Chivo rescues Cofi from the car crash and helps him recover from his injury. Sadly, Cofi’s dog-aggression had been encouraged for so long that the Rottweiler ended up killing all of El Chivo’s other canine friends when left alone with them. Distraught, El Chivo moves to shoot Cofi, but cannot bring himself to hurt the dog.
Following that, a man comes to him requesting that he perform one more assassination, something he had no desire to continue doing. In the end, El Chivo kidnaps the target and traps him inside his temporary home with the man who’d claimed he was a cheat and wanted him dead—his half-brother and business partner. Believing that the first brother is a liar, Martin leaves them both tied up with a gun in between them on the floor, to determine their own fates. He and Cofi then leave, and he works up the courage to enter Maru’s home again and leave a message on her telephone, stating his existence and feelings, sorrows, and regrets. He still loves her and wants to see her again someday when he has the courage to do that. Pasting a photo of his old clean-shaven face over an image of his younger one in her bedroom, the old man sets down the frame and leaves once more. Meanwhile, Octavio has also been injured in the accident, but is still determined to run off with the now-angry Susana, who is more resistant than ever.
Love, in all its infinitely varied forms, is the one consistent theme that runs through each of these stories. (Its original Spanish title does the film a little more symbolic and thought-provoking justice than the American one, although the latter is neither untrue nor inapplicable.) Each of the main characters has at least one ‘perro.’ Dogs are generally often used as symbols of pure, perfect, unconditional love. Humans, on the other hand, and definitely in this film, are another story altogether. They can only aspire to what love means for dogs. Most characters here have some dubious morals at best. Susana might arguably be the best overall person in the entire thing. Octavio seems like a good man, and it’s easy at first to like him and hate Ramiro, yet for money Octavio subjects his loyal companion Cofi to brutal fights in which he kills other dogs. Could someone who truly loves his dog do that? He also has his brother beaten and killed--and regardless of how bad a man Ramiro was, or how deserving he may have seemed, or how good it feels to have him out of the picture, this can still raise further questions, objections, and doubts as to Octavio’s conscience, especially when compounded with some of his other actions. Interestingly enough the issue of murdering one’s own brother arose in the last film starring Bernal, and centered on that actor’s character then, too.
Valeria lies to the public about her love life--in reality, she’s with a man who’s been having an affair, cheating on his wife, and leaving her for the model. Apparently, Valeria has no problem with any of that, despite Daniel’s daughters; in fact, she openly disrespects his family and considers them stupid. And El Chivo/Martin was a complicated, conflicted person: an idealistic, opinionated, headstrong guerilla who believed in making positive changes in the world; a paid assassin who manipulated and tortured and took human life, but still respected it, and eventually wanted to end his business of killing; a man who had failed as a husband and father but deeply regrets it, and just can’t seem to find the strength to try and reconnect with the only family member he has left.
For all of their failings, those characters and others are not without their ability to love intensely, nor their willingness to do or to sacrifice anything for the sake of that love--be it for a woman (say, an in-law), a man, a cause (perhaps worldly justice), a wife, a daughter, or, indeed, a dog.
As a fanatical dog lover, I liked this movie partially due to their significant presence, but naturally found the fighting scenes very difficult to watch--more because of the knowledge that such hideously evil acts occur in real life than anything else. At least, I would very much hope that by the year 2000 no animals would have to be harmed in the making of a movie, even in countries that possibly don’t have a set-monitoring entity equivalent to the American Humane Association. Sadly, this cruelty persists in parts of the world. What I read on the IMDb, however, regarding the dogs being heavily sedated in order to appear dead, was hopefully a harmless truth.
The other technical and narrative aspects of the film were mostly superb as well and synthesized perfectly, from the basic staging of shots to the skillful interweaving of the three plotlines. In particular I felt that it was quite well cast and acted. Each performer (including the dogs) was very real and believable in his or her role, and seemed to have fully inhabited it. The characters felt alive. The slower, more subtle dramatic sequences were counterbalanced by moments of great suspense throughout, meaning that the issue of the film’s potentially being a tad overlong is not an unbearable fault.
