choreographed, this Pit-stage scene. Like some avant-garde performance piece, untrained actors just happy to be there,thrilled to know their lines, get them right, watch the audience react accordingly.
Onward.
Brattle Theatre: last of the art houses. Seats still cramped, uncomfortable. Add your own salt to the popcorn. Screening room basically empty. Just me and an elderly couple, wool-cardiganed, sipping Vitamin water. Lights down. Exit signs cruelly lit to distract audience from on-screen immersion, remind us of the outside world’s continuing existence. Credit screen: Wood and Nail . A film by Dietmar Klee.
Opens wide on some serene wilderness. No animals. Just weak sunlight through leafless trees, ground dotted with snow. Slope of hills, small sound of wind. Close in on a man-made structure, only one for acres around. Entirely built of unprocessed wood, unvarnished, unpainted. Fully tamed, but so expertly as to give the impression that this place has sprung straight from snowy ground, untouched by man, a feat of naturalistic architecture. Like a tree-house cathedral, complete with tresses and turrets, columns and skinny steeples that appear unprepared to withstand nature’s wrath. But they stand resiliently still, don’t shake or shiver. Hammocks in a courtyard gathering dust. Ground littered with burst balloons that look as if they’ve been there for years. Camera moves 360 around this mini-kingdom. Out back there’s a trash pit on fire, contained flames reaching up to the sky.
Cut to inside. Kahn sits in a wooden wheelchair at a lap-level circular saw. Pulls a clean piece from the contraption. Admires it, first with his eyes, then with his fingers. Minutes pass. Kahn’s beard is thick. Carrot-colored curls hang halfway down his back. He’s bundled. A chewed cigar sits smoking in an ashtray. Kahn sips straight from a bottle of rye. Puts thebottle back on the dirt floor. Picks up his piece of wood again. Tosses it violently, with more force than you think he can muster. He has thick arms. The wood hits the wall, weakly splinters, that’s all. Falls. Kahn picks up the cigar. Spits into his hand. Puts it out on his palm. Camera closes in on Kahn’s hand. Cinders stain his skin. Cinders swirl in golden light.
A woman enters, stage left. A beautiful woman: lithe, blond, at least six-two, six-three. Some German giant, genetically blessed, inhumanly symmetrical. She wears a summer dress: gray cotton. You can see that she is frozen. Skin blue. Fingers shaking. No shoes. Dirt between her toes. You can see that she is sad.
Days pass. Kahn sits in silence. He drinks, he smokes, he sleeps. He doesn’t leave the studio. The woman brings him sandwiches. She goes back to her room, to her canopy bed that’s been physically built into the floor, like a dais covered in cotton pillows. She buries her face. She stares into a mirror. She chillily bathes.
Weeks pass. The woman takes a lover. I’m not being precious. On the DVD liner notes this chapter is titled “Woman Takes a Lover.” The lover is the man who delivers the milk. Thick-armed, appropriately flannel-garbed. Good in the sack. They fuck without fuss or conversation. Strip down, insert. Pump away on pillow mountain, slowly sinking to the surface of the bed. They do it loudly, at times angrily, at times ecstatically. All possible positions. It looks like they’re actually having sex, the actors. Real penetration. Certain angles make this obvious. The man’s uncircumcised penis is the size of a small arm. The woman’s blond bush bursts forth like some extinct species of shaggy rodent. In a good way.
This circumstantial shift at first seems to have left no impression on Kahn’s character. He knows about the affair, isneither bothered nor excited by it. But then a strange thing happens. He begins building again. His workshop is arranged for easy use by a man in a wheelchair. Everything is lap level. All tools bolted to the wall within arm’s reach. The room is
Onward.
Brattle Theatre: last of the art houses. Seats still cramped, uncomfortable. Add your own salt to the popcorn. Screening room basically empty. Just me and an elderly couple, wool-cardiganed, sipping Vitamin water. Lights down. Exit signs cruelly lit to distract audience from on-screen immersion, remind us of the outside world’s continuing existence. Credit screen: Wood and Nail . A film by Dietmar Klee.
Opens wide on some serene wilderness. No animals. Just weak sunlight through leafless trees, ground dotted with snow. Slope of hills, small sound of wind. Close in on a man-made structure, only one for acres around. Entirely built of unprocessed wood, unvarnished, unpainted. Fully tamed, but so expertly as to give the impression that this place has sprung straight from snowy ground, untouched by man, a feat of naturalistic architecture. Like a tree-house cathedral, complete with tresses and turrets, columns and skinny steeples that appear unprepared to withstand nature’s wrath. But they stand resiliently still, don’t shake or shiver. Hammocks in a courtyard gathering dust. Ground littered with burst balloons that look as if they’ve been there for years. Camera moves 360 around this mini-kingdom. Out back there’s a trash pit on fire, contained flames reaching up to the sky.
Cut to inside. Kahn sits in a wooden wheelchair at a lap-level circular saw. Pulls a clean piece from the contraption. Admires it, first with his eyes, then with his fingers. Minutes pass. Kahn’s beard is thick. Carrot-colored curls hang halfway down his back. He’s bundled. A chewed cigar sits smoking in an ashtray. Kahn sips straight from a bottle of rye. Puts thebottle back on the dirt floor. Picks up his piece of wood again. Tosses it violently, with more force than you think he can muster. He has thick arms. The wood hits the wall, weakly splinters, that’s all. Falls. Kahn picks up the cigar. Spits into his hand. Puts it out on his palm. Camera closes in on Kahn’s hand. Cinders stain his skin. Cinders swirl in golden light.
A woman enters, stage left. A beautiful woman: lithe, blond, at least six-two, six-three. Some German giant, genetically blessed, inhumanly symmetrical. She wears a summer dress: gray cotton. You can see that she is frozen. Skin blue. Fingers shaking. No shoes. Dirt between her toes. You can see that she is sad.
Days pass. Kahn sits in silence. He drinks, he smokes, he sleeps. He doesn’t leave the studio. The woman brings him sandwiches. She goes back to her room, to her canopy bed that’s been physically built into the floor, like a dais covered in cotton pillows. She buries her face. She stares into a mirror. She chillily bathes.
Weeks pass. The woman takes a lover. I’m not being precious. On the DVD liner notes this chapter is titled “Woman Takes a Lover.” The lover is the man who delivers the milk. Thick-armed, appropriately flannel-garbed. Good in the sack. They fuck without fuss or conversation. Strip down, insert. Pump away on pillow mountain, slowly sinking to the surface of the bed. They do it loudly, at times angrily, at times ecstatically. All possible positions. It looks like they’re actually having sex, the actors. Real penetration. Certain angles make this obvious. The man’s uncircumcised penis is the size of a small arm. The woman’s blond bush bursts forth like some extinct species of shaggy rodent. In a good way.
This circumstantial shift at first seems to have left no impression on Kahn’s character. He knows about the affair, isneither bothered nor excited by it. But then a strange thing happens. He begins building again. His workshop is arranged for easy use by a man in a wheelchair. Everything is lap level. All tools bolted to the wall within arm’s reach. The room is
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