Where Hate Has No Home

Where Hate Has No Home

Her perfect life disintegrated before her eyes as first her father, then her mother, then her husband were all deported to the concentration camps and death; following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. She and her son would only survive when they were deported in 1943, because of the music she had to offer the authorities.  Even Terezin, the special camp filled with Jewish artists and created by the Nazis for propaganda purposes to disguise their genocidal actions, was as dark and ludicrous as anything an existentialist novel could depict. 

To this day, one of her aged friends who herself survived Terezin puts it bluntly, “We were dancing under the gallows.”  In response, Alice Hertz-Sommers counters, “But even the bad is beautiful, if you know where to look for it.” 

While she calls music the place of the soul and divinity itself, with the capacity to transport, she does not forget nor flee from the bitter stanzas of her life’s opus. It is as if she has never had to forgive those unspeakable acts that befell her, because she has never given hate a home, that would then require such a monumental task.

Click on the image above to read the full review.

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Road Trip! A Commentary on the film, "Nebraska"

Road Trip!  A Commentary on the film, "Nebraska"

[Note: On March 29th, some Mountain Shadow members gathered for the first “Encore Evenings,” where we enjoyed seeing once again a great commercial film from this last year and having some in-depth discussion. This commentary, written by Mountain Shadow director, John Bennison, accompanied the event.]

Take the mythic hero’s journey and turn it upside down. Then give it a slight twist, and you have Alexander Payne’s stark portrayal of a father-son sojourn across the bleak landscape of a Midwest Americana that time forgot. 

One might react to the film in any number of ways. One might describe it as funny, grim, crude, depressing, sobering, and the characters – or caricatures – as painfully honest and real. But if you’ve ever played the part of a father or a son in an estranged or awkward relationship you might relate.  And against this backdrop shot in black and white there are myriad shades of gray that make up the three-dimensional characters of this story; including some of the shadows of their former selves.

Click on the image above to read the full review.

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A Lullaby Called "Helium"

A Lullaby Called "Helium"

Note: This 2014 Oscar Best Short-Action film from Denmark was screened at Mountain Shadow's March event, along with the delighful film from Saudi Arabid, Wadjda.  Mountain Shadow director, John Bennison offered the following commentary.  Your comments are encouraged at the end to continue the conversation!

 The old moon laughed and sang a song,
   As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
   And the wind that sped them all night long
   Ruffled the waves of dew.
   The little stars were the herring fish
   That lived in that beautiful sea —
   "Now cast your nets wherever you wish —
   Never a’feared are we";
   So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
   Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

                                           Eugene Field, 1889


Before the time we learned how to expand the known world by enlightened scientific methodologies -- including the wonders of modern medical wizardry --  certain truths were not bound by the requirements of factual verification. The Ancients instead relied on the kind of storytelling that found far less distinction between the known world and the inexplicable mysteries left only to the imagination.  

Nowadays such tales are often relegated to the realm of children’s stories; the subtleties of which are regrettably more often than not wasted on the young.  Now, for everyone, there’s Helium.

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What’s Love Got To Do With It?

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

A Commentary on the film, “Fill the Void”

     Origial title: “Lemale et ha’halal”  A Film by Rama Burshtein

 Commentary by John Bennison

As alien as the marriage customs of Hasidic Judaism may be to our own contemporary way of living and looking at the world -- it is the same question that is at the heart of the storyline and setting in Israeli director Rama Burshtein’s film, Fill the Void. 

What’s love got to do with it?

Sometimes described as a Jane Austen-like melodrama set in the ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jewish community of Tel Aviv, Fill the Void tells the story of a young woman who is pressured and/or persuaded by family entanglements into an arranged levirate marriage to an older widower with a young child.

In a day and age when popular sentiment suggests anyone ought be allowed to betroth oneself to whomever one chooses and call it marriage, the notion that social custom, religious dictums, cultural traditions and familial obligations should interfere with one’s individual rights may seem a bit rigid and arcane, at best.  

Our reviewer discusses the film and sets it in the context of modern day demellas.  

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Commentary: “Mine Vaganti” (Loose Cannons)

Commentary: “Mine Vaganti” (Loose Cannons)

The Italians Are Coming … Out!

Commentary by Mountain Shadow Director John Bennison

       “You’ll never be able to extinguish your love for Antonio. The earth can’t disown a tree.”
          The Tuscan girl

Basic plot: Tommaso is the younger son of the Cantones, a large, traditional Italian family operating a pasta-making business. On a trip home from Rome, where he studies literature and lives with his boyfriend, Tommaso resolves to tell his parents the truth about himself. But when he’s finally ready to come out, his older brother Antonio ruins his plans with a confession of his own.

Some viewers might see the characters more as stereotypical caricatures with what -- on the surface -- seems a well-worn theme; in which case, the multiple sub-plots might seem somewhat tedious. But this ain’t Utah, and there are more loose cannons than just some campy queen scenes in Mine Vaganti.

Complexity in a film can offer both a challenge and opportunity for the viewer. When there are multiple, simultaneous plots – intermingled with flashbacks from the past – it can either become a rich tapestry or unravel in a confusing juxtaposition of messages.

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Commentary on “Joyeux Noel”

Commentary on “Joyeux Noel”

A Film by French writer/director Christian Carion
Mountain Shadow screening: Dec. 22, 2013

By Mountain Shadow Director, John Bennison 

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
S
louches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Excerpt, The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) 

One hundred years ago, nation states had taught their young to hate the Hun, the French and Englishman.  And by 1919, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats had borne witness to what four years of human slaughter had wrought upon the world he knew.  

His poem, “The Second Coming” not only ushered in the literary era often referred to as modernist poetry, but challenged subsequent generations to name that “rough beast,” as he called it, that “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” 

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