Psycho in Paris

Will terror finally wake us up from our sleep? Remember “Macbeth has murdered sleep?” You may have been in a crowd of people who gathered around someone’s iPhone when news of the Paris massacres started to be reported late on Friday afternoon and you  undoubtedly noted a variety of responses. Some people who can’t deal with the fear, go into a kind of shock which is like anesthesia. They're unable to feel anything about it. Others distance themselves with black humor and sick jokes and others fall into a state of uncontrollable anxiety in which literally all of human life appears lethal. Riots and stampedes in soccer, stadiums, the Chilean mine disaster, the fall of the Twin Towers, all blend into one horrifying nightmare become reality. It might not have been helped if that self-same person were listening to the BBC coverage which pre-empted WNYC regularly scheduled programming and gave a blow by blow of the individual executions at the Bataclan. Nor were they helped by those commentators who speculated this might merely be one of a number of planned attacks. Where would they strike next and was it in response to the Pesh Merga’s retaking of Sinjar or even the droning of Jihadi John?  During Nazi bombings Londoners found safety in the Underground, but in the age of the suicide bombers, subways and tunnels now offer the potential of becoming mass graves. If nothing else the history of guerilla warfare has taught us that it’s sometimes easier to fight an institution like the Soviets or the Nazis, than inchoate bands and even lone wolves whose encrypted movements are not so likely to be deciphered by the Alan Turings of our day. ISIS is not so much a state or country as an ideology, a virus which is spread by way of social media and which up until now has proved resistant to vaccines and like some viruses is capable of constantly morphing into even more deadly forms just as it seems on the verge of being eradicated. But think about your most terrifying moment in a movie theater. Was it perhaps that scene in Psycho where Anthony Perkins’ knife hovers over the showering Janet Leigh with Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack acting as an adrenalin booster. It’s not insignificant that the act that's interrupted is both innocent in that it involves cleansing and erotic in that the image of a naked beauty behind a shower curtain produces stimulation in the viewer. Take away the innocence and eroticism and just hold the knife and Hitchcock’s famous montage of blood going down the drain. Does that approximate your reaction to the first news reports coming out of Paris?

La Maison de la radio

Office of Radio France

Everyone knows that radio is transcendent and that of the other electronic media television and movies aren’t even a close second. And one of the great radio institutions of all time is Radio France. Nicolas Philibert’s La Maison de la radio, currently playing at Film Forum, is an inside look at what goes on inside the auspicious circular structure (designed by  the architect Henri Bernard) where Radio France--roughly the counterpart of our NPR and England’s BBC--is produced. The documentary wisely employs Fred Wiseman’s documentary style which to say that it lets the institution speak for itself. There are no voice overs or commentary to cloud the terrain since the movie is a walking voice over in which the charm of French language and syntax is a key part of the script. “Quand meme,” “ecoute,” “ca me rappelle quelqu’un,” “d’accord,” "ca ne vous derange pas” are just a few of the common Frenchisms that are the lingua franca of the broadcasts. When you see them used in the context of the programming they’re virtually untranslatable since they're like breathing. There are all kinds of eccentricities that make French Radio so French. In the movie an interview subject is a storm chaser by avocation. He earns his money as a doctor but won’t reveal his specialty due to the narrowness of the field. Pierre Bastien, a composer who makes mechanized instruments, performs one of his pieces while another studio features a room filled with xylophones and in yet another a hand held mallet hitting a chime marks the time on a quiz show. A sardonic woman editor wants to know if the fourth body found in the Deule was discovered in bits and pieces or as a whole. Another Radio France executive teaches an announcer how to read his script while the director of a play is trying to show one of her actors how to speak French with an American accent. Umberto Eco makes an appearance, along with a motorcycle team who follow the Tour de France. There is only one thing missing and that’s “le mystere.” Seeing La Maison de la radio is a little like going to the Fitzergerald Theater in Saint Paul to watch Garrison Keillor perform. The images and the poetry of radio come from the imaginative space it provides. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Radio France where "le mot juste" is treated with almost the same care that the French give to their cuisine. In this regard, the director's behind the scenes look can be a little like Toto pulling the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.