Three kinds of biography

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"In search of Chopin", "Once my mother", "Reaching for the moon", biography, Narooma Kinema

 

John at the Narooma Kinema provides a stunning program of art house movies in a small theatre in which I have been sole audience more than once. The theatre itself is a gem, with an Art Deco flavour, inside and out. It's on the National Heritage Register, and has been screening films since 1928.

Last weekend I created my own mini film festival at the Kinema – three movies in two days. All three movies were biographical in very different ways.

 

 

“Reaching for the moon” is the love story of Pullitzer prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop and Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, who conceived and constructed Flamengo Park in Rio de Janeiro. They are very different creative people, Elizabeth shy and uncertain; Lota energetic and definite. At least at first. The background is the stunning hinterland of Rio de Janeiro; the instability of Brazilian politics; the adoption of a child; and the creative output of the two women. Lota's strength unravels when the Flamengo Park project stalls and Elizabeth leaves. She commits suicide, and Elizabeth goes on to greater glory.

There are many memorable scenes: Lota blowing up a hillside to create a studio with a view for Elizabeth; Elizabeth washing Lota's long hair against the background of an evolving poem; Lota totally involved on-site in the construction of the Park; Elizabeth chatting to Robert Lowell about her poetry by the lake in Central Park.

This is biography based on a novel based on two real lives, presented as drama, but the broad picture matches reality, insofar as such matching is ever possible.

I've encountered a sprinkling of Bishop's poems over the years in anthologies, always taking huge pleasure in their detail, vividness and thoughtfulness. You can enjoy them here

Click to access elizabeth_bishop_2004_9.pdf

The Paris Review interview with Elizabeth Bishop is worth reading too, for her own version of her liife.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3229/the-art-of-poetry-no-27-elizabeth-bishop

 

 

“In search of Chopin” was a very different approach to biography. It revealed plenty about Chopin's life, but through the medium of his music and his letters, as he moved from Warsaw through Vienna to Paris. A number of the interviewees and performers were Polish, and the terrible history of Poland was in the background of his life and his music, even in the twenty years he lived elsewhere. I became quite homesick for Warsaw as images proliferated of places I was familiar with: the University; the second floor apartment where the family lived; the now-Presidential Palace where he performed; the Holy Cross Church where his heart is buried.

 

 

“Once my mother” is an astonishing movie, telling a number of stories quite beautifully and heart-wrenchingly. The director and script-writer, Sophie Tukiewicz, tells her mother's story as she tries to understand why her mother put her in an Adelaide orphanage for two years. Once her mother … was orphaned at a young age; put out to fend for herself in a Polish village; sent to a Siberian work camp by the Russian invaders (one of 2 million Poles this happened to); released when Russia joined the Allies; walked 4000 km through inhospitable country and weather to Tashkent; was moved to refugee camps in Persia and Northern Rhodesia; became pregnant to an Italian POW; and was finally accepted as a migrant to Australia.

The daughter struggled with this story for many years, fictionalizing bits of it in two earlier films, refusing to understand her mother's decision to put her in an orphanage. This time she tells the story raw and complete, using archival footage, some re-enactment, a visit to her mother's birth village, photographs of herself as she moves through her own life, and deeply poignant interactions between herself and her mother as they reconcile and talk about the life that shaped them both. It's a confessional biography of two people, and an account of a vast forgotten part of history.

Sophia Turkiewicz was at the Narooma Kinema at one showing of the movie to answer questions. I didn't go that night, which I regret with one part of me. However, I was so profoundly affected by the story, that at the end I didn't want words at all, just the chance to think.

It's one of the few movies I've seen that I'd like to own. It's worth listening to two interviews Turkiewicz gave on the ABC and having a look at the movie website.

http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2014/07/22/4051374.htm

http://oncemymother.com/

 

 

 

 

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Visiting Pompeii

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Herculaneum, Pompeii

This week I spent a morning amongst the treasures and artifacts of Pompeii. I was in the hands of expert guides who were sometimes also “frisky”. I didn't have to hop on a plane for London. All I had to do was drive to Narooma and, along with a meager five other people, pay my $11 at the door of the Kinema. For the first time the British Museum was presenting an exhibition for the world live in HD. This luxury in an obscure town on the NSW south coast, which includes coffee delivered to your seat, never fails to amaze me.

 

Gripes first. The two MCs were far too excitable and prurient and tended to interrupt. I could have done without the giggling about phalluses and the persistent talking-over.

 

However there were many things I could not have done without. Starting the tour with dogs was a master stroke. The mosaic dog on a leash in the atrium was charmingly real; the Beware of the Dog mosaic was suitably savage; and the form of a dog preserved in ash began the long journey into the horror of the eruption and its aftermath.

 

 

For me in museums the simple things often have the most impact. A round loaf of bread converted to charcoal expressed the dailiness of lives cut short. An Italian baker had tried to replicate the loaf and explicate its features. The imprint of a name indicated communal oven where people brought their own mix to bake. The ridge around the base? He created that with string which could then be used to carry the loaf home, where the rim gave a good grip when using the bread for dipping or lifting food.

 

 

After following people in Pompeii through a normal morning of breakfast and toilette, we finally reached the eruption; the descent of the lethal cloud hurled so high in the air; and the burying in the pyroclastic flow. The exhibits become excruciatingly moving: the family found under the stairs, mother, father and two children; the objects those trying to escape took with them to the beach (a wooden money box with a few coins; a set of medical instruments; a bracelet weighing half a kilo; a sword, dagger and woodworking tools); the child's cot turned to charcoal.

 

A few striking things emerged from the commentary: slavery was the foundation of Roman life, 50% of the population were in fact freed slaves. These two facts were demonstrated through a heavily decorated goblet (Who cleaned it? Who filled it? Who put it away?) and a noble-looking statue (not an emperor: a business man who had been a slave.) The questions that exercise me every time I read a historical novel (how much are we like the people of the past? And how can we know?) were well aired. The experts were totally engaging: I think particularly of the Oxford professor who made her favourite one of mine by her colloquial translation of the Latin written above the images of drinkers and quarreling card players. The dilemma of diggers was also debated: do you keep excavating sites where there is still plenty buried, or do use limited resources to process and preserve what has already been dug up?

I emerged into the bright sun and roadworks of a Narooma morning and headed off to buy a life jacket, accompanied by images from lives cut short nearly 2000 years ago.

 

 

 

 

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Going to the movies

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"Searching for Sugarman", Narooma Kinema

As a child, I didn't go to the pictures very often. This may may have been because of parental poverty or parental snobbery, or even parental puritanism. My father had, after all, been a methodist lay preacher in his youth. Even as a young woman I wasn't an avid movie-goer.

Then I met my movie mentor, a man who had been around movies all his life. For many years I carried around a slightly greasy brown paper bag on which he had pencilled a list of movies I had to see. Under the guidance of the paper bag I began to go to the movies and now I'm a regular. My taste is for documentary and art house, and I vigorously avoid Hollywood.

I'm lucky to have a cinema close by that indulges these tastes. The small cinema at Narooma only seats 25 (there is a larger one that shows “stuff like Potter”) and often there are a only a handful of people in the audience. There I have seen Of time and the city, The cove, Barrymore, Where do we go now?, Marley, Caves of forgotten dreams and First grader. I've also seen the New York Met's Madame Butterfly (most of it – a blackout cut it off in the middle of the third act), the whole of don Giovanni, and from the National Theatre One man, two guvnors and Hamlet.

Last week I bumped into my movie mentor again. “There's this movie you've got to see. Searching for Sugarman” he said. I've been in Warsaw for five months in a movie drought, so I take the recommendation and join three other people for Saturday afternoon at the movies.

 

Searching for Sugarman begins when a South African fan suddenly realises that the record sleeve for Rodriguez's Cold fact album contains no biographical information, and it documents the search for the man behind the music that was more popular than Elvis in apartheid South Africa.

I am not an ex-hippy or a rock and folk fan. My predilection for such movies as this is an interest in the documentary form and the sleuthing that is necessary to build the story. I'm also eager to encounter landscapes, conundrums and thought-provokers, the unexpected and interesting sidelights to a life where there's an intersection with history (Bob Marley singing at the Zimbabwe independence celebrations). Searching for Sugarman gave me all of these.

The landscape of Capetown was spectacular and beautifully filmed: the roughly conical hills and the road swooping round that stunning coastline. The Detroit footage was very different: run-down backstreets, tired snow and blocky skyline. So my landscape hunger was fed.

The conundrum for me was not so much why Rodriguez was ignored in America as how the rumours of his death in such public and dramatic ways (self-immolation or suicide by gunshot on stage) could have taken hold, since they were seemingly so checkable. One answer gave an insight into the power of censorship under apartheid, and that's where the power of the Sugarman story lay for me: the way his lyrics expressed the seethings against the oppression of apartheid. The image that encapsulated the regime was the record in the archives with a track scratched so it couldn't possibly be played.

The movie also offered a counter-narrative to the narrative of celebrity. The story of Rodriguez doesn't fit the usual celebrity story. At no point is he presented as a celebrity-seeker, with gimmicks to create that celebrity. The powerful introduction to him, and the defining image, is a journey through the fog of the streets into a smoky bar, with a vague shape gradually emerging, which proves to be him strumming, back to the audience. Maybe that's the answer to his lack of traction in America: absolutely no drama for audiences and media to sink their teeth into.

The unexpected lay in the trajectory of the story. High-powered managers expected Rodriguez to rocket up the charts, and he was a fizzer in the US. He doesn't end up living his life onstage, although when he is tracked down he does perform, mainly in South Africa. It's not a conventional rags-to-riches story. He doesn't seem to feel the need for verbiage or celebrity and its trappings. He continues to live in his rundown house in Detroit.

These were the things the movie offered me. I wonder what gifts it gave the three people who watched it with me.

 

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