Tuesday, July 24, 2012

I have moved to Tumblr for the summer

http://pmarkert.tumblr.com/

The blog I keep here is getting sort of frustrating.  Perhaps I am not keeping up with how to do things, but the last few times I tried to post, it didn't work exactly.  Anyone who reads my blog thank you!
Please join me at pmarkert.tumblr.com

It is a much simpler experience there.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

George Stoney, a man who made a difference

George Stoney was 96 when he died this summer but he was still teaching at NYU in the spring. I think of his life as exemplary. New York Times


I audited his documentary film course at NYU. He said little during class, preferring to have visitors show what they were working on and take credit for their work directly in the viewing. Visitors included D. A. Pennebaker, director of Don't Look Back, the seminal Bob Dylan documentary, and many of his former students including Jim Brown, who had gone on to create important films.

Beginning in his twenties, Stoney worked on issues of social justice. He was with Gunnar Myrdal in the 1930s when Myrdal was conducting research on the "race" question which would grow into the civil rights movement. Stoney was on hand for the filming of the The Plow that Broke the Plains, a bit of propaganda to prevent further dust bowls in the 1930s. He studied the labor movement, midwives, and produced the movie about the Weavers, Wasn't that a Time.

One of my favorite movies he made is How the Myth Was Made, a probing, not irreverent look at Flaherty's Man of Aran. Flaherty is credited with beginning ethnographic documentaries (starting with Nanook of the North). Stoney went back to the places where the Man of Aran was made along the rugged coast of Ireland, and examined what was real and what was invented for the service of the story of these hardscrabble fishing farmers. This was a question Stoney brought up in class. What did the filmmaker owe to his subject? Here he is talking about the ethics of documentaries, and re-enactments, just three years ago.



I feel lucky to have known such a humble but great man.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Iron Lady



Meryl Streep is a brilliant voice actress. Consider the range of characters she has played, a Polish emigrant, a California actress with a drug problem, Karen von Blixen, Silkwood, French Lieutenant's Woman, an Irish peasant, an Australian mother, a fashion editor, and on and on. In this movie, she is Margaret Thatcher, that woman with the big hair and the steely voice. Streep's natural voice is there, in the center of an impersonation which has wrapped itself in the middle class accent of a British prime minister both reviled and adored by millions.

The writing of the screenplay centers on Thatcher's mental confusion, her grieving over the loss of her husband, Dennis, played brilliantly by Jim Broadbent. Streep and Broadbent together are very companionable. It looks as if they are having a good time together, as if they are truly married, truly crazy about each other, and driving each other crazy too.

The best scene in the movie takes place in a doctor's office when Thatcher is asked how she feels. She answers that people worry too much about feelings and not enough about ideas which lead to action and action leads to habit which forms character. Ask me what I think she demands. I feel fine.

Streep makes you forget about anything but the ideas being expressed at that moment. There is command in her voice, and something else, an embodiment of another person in another time.


The Fourth of July in Narrowsburg

It made the New York Times, the conflict between fireworks and fledgling eagles living on the Delaware River.


The parade went on as usual. At three o'clock you could hear the fire engines making their way down Main Street. The bridge was closed while the parade passed through. The eagles never knew they had it so good. No fireworks tonight. Just stars I hope.