Nature and movies

2010.10.03
Days Remaining: 239

1. This evening I watched the Black Stallion and Black Stallion Returns films on Netflix. I've been intending to view them for a while, as I had fond memories of both from my childhood, but they only recently became available for streaming, and I figured this would be a lovely way of spending the evening. The two films have different directors, though Francis Ford Coppola executive produced both, and they had the same actors (even the same horse as playing the Black, though there were apparently supplemental scenes with another horse in the second film). I enjoyed both of them, and they are largely as I recalled, plot-wise, but the difference in directors was nothing short of astonishing. Carroll Ballard directed the original film (he also directed Fly Away Home and, most recently, Duma) and it was far and away the superior of the two. First off, there is almost no musical soundtrack throughout, and when you do hear music, it is all the more compelling for its otherwise absence, as well as the way in which the classical music is allowed to integrate into natural sounds at both the beginning and end of its appearance (one crescendo actually blurs with waves crashing, for instance). Second, the film has very little speech throughout, and allows ambient sounds to filter through. When the protagonist and the horse are stranded on an island, you can hear the loneliness, and when the horse is spooked by a thunderstorm later, you can feel exactly why.

2. The reason I mention this is that I have been having a very interesting email exchange with one of the students in my Native American Religions class. I had them read Leslie Marmon Silko's short story "Yellow Woman," which is a retelling of a traditional Laguna Pueblo (southwestern Native American) story about a woman, Yellow Woman, who is abducted from a river bank by a spirit being and taken to his home on a mountain top. In the modern short story an unnamed narrator meets a strange man by a riverside and goes with him to his house up on a mountain. The narrator is never certain if the man is human or a mountain spirit, and cannot tell if she is role-playing a story she once heard, using the story as an excuse to do something she would otherwise not do, or if she is living out the story literally. One of the things we talk about is the problem of the man's nature and why Silko would retell a traditional story (commonly, but problematically, called a "myth" by most academics) in such a way as to leave the narrator and audience never quite sure what is going on. It's a very skillfully executed story, one of my personal favorites, and the students were left unsure what to make of it (which, I believe, is Silko's intention). I offered one internal detail that leads me to think that the man may be a spirit (though in the end, it's only one detail and not decisive). So my student wrote to me after class and said that she had other reasons to think he was a spirit, and laid them out. I responded with counterpoints to her arguments, and asked for her further reflections on what it would mean for the story if the man was a spirit: how would she read it differently than if he were just a man?

3. Her response was especially intriguing. If he were a spirit, she said, then it would be more straightforwardly fiction, and become comparable to fantasy literature and films. She offered, as a follow-up, that the entire story felt like a dream recounted, and said this was due to the occasional extremely lucid detail about the physical environment offered throughout (very vivid visual description, or close attention paid to some minor element of the setting). This, to her, felt like details in dreams, rather than in waking conscious apprehension of the everyday world. I had not expected this at all: my general understanding of this element of Silko's style is actually the opposite of the dream interpretation: I think these details are interwoven to ground the stories in physicality and render them, in some way, believably concrete. They also, I think, highlight the general deadening of our senses in industrial culture, where we are both subjected to constant overwhelming data streams demanding our attention and asked to handle them in a very quick fashion. Specific hard details that arise in our consciousness in punctuated fashion or over time often strike us a incongruous or even unsettling, but they are more what our systems evolved to handle.

4. This is where the Black Stallion cinematography and soundtrack come back in. The director chose to tell a story, one based on a book, in such a way that the natural world (and the horse within it) spoke much more directly and meaningfully than as background. They were brought into focus throughout as crucial elements to the viewer's perception of what is going on in the story; not scenery but characters in their own right. It served to integrate the boy and the horse into the world so that they only way to understand them was to see where they were and to see and hear what they were seeing and hearing. Ballard used to make documentaries, and it shows. The sequel, directed by someone else (can't remember right now and don't care enough to look it up) is a much more typical movie with intrusive soundtrack, animate character-focused plot and background for the sake of getting the action going. I preferred the first film tremendously, though I enjoyed the second. If you get a chance, I recommend both, but especially the first.