Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel

i also recommend george clare's "last waltz in vienna," which, even more than the zweig, portrays the creeping menace of nazism as it encroaches on a life the jews thought perfectly secure.

this paragraph by cynthia ozick in a recent review of a kafka biography, which i read the day after i saw GBH, resonated for me:

The persistence of “transcend” is still more troublesome. What is it that Kafka is said to “transcend”? Every actual and factual aspect of the life he lived, everything that formed and informed him, that drew or repelled him, the time and the place, the family and the apartment and the office—and Prague itself, with its two languages and three populations fixed at the margins of a ruling sovereignty sprawled across disparate and conflicting nationalities. Kafka’s fictions, free grains of being, seem to float, untethered and self-contained, above the heavy explicitness of a recognizable society and culture. And so a new and risen Kafka is born, cleansed of origins, unchained from the tensions, many of them nasty, of Prague’s roiling German-Czech-Jewish brew, its ambient anti-Semitism and its utopian Zionism, its Jewish clubs and its literary stewpot of Max Brod, Oskar Baum, Franz Werfel, Otto Pick, Felix Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann, Ernst Weiss. In this understanding, Kafka is detached not from the claims of specificity—what is more strikingly particularized than a Kafka tale?—but of a certain designated specificity.

The best selling author in Germany who was so assimilated the only thing that made him conspicuously Jewish was anti-semitism?

― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:52 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, if you were to make a movie about this milieu before the rise of the nazis, yes, you could ignore the context. after wwii, it's unignorable. you can't talk about stefan zweig, knowing what happened, without acknowledging the swift and merciless destruction of the illusion of assimilation.

LWiV is excellent. So is 'A Nervous Splendor' and 'Thunder at Twilight' and the pertinent sections of Clive James' 'Cultural Amnesia.'

Have you ever read Schnitzler or Joseph Roth?

i have read both a nervous splendor and thunder at twilight! and those sections of clive james. and schnitzler and roth.

we're on the same page here michael!!!

swift and merciless destruction of the illusion of assimilation

More than anything, I think the Nazis' relentless rejection of an assimilation many Jews thought to be quite successful was what lead him to kill himself.

Or more that the Nazis could get away with convincing the Germans this was a good thing.

i agree!

i grew up with my parents telling me "you might not think of yourself as jewish, but never forget that's how the world sees you."

I can't imagine Zweig as much of Zionist, though. All he writes about is European culture and its great moments. Telling him he couldn't be a Jew and a European basically broke his heart.

I knew a lady from somehwat similar circumstances. She was born in Lodz to a well-to do Jewish family in the textile business. She and her husband survived Auschwitz and moved to New York where they started an entirely new life and a good one at that. Several years before her death, she finally went back to Poland with her daughter and her daughter told me that the starngest thing about the trip wasn't her mother's relative stoicism faced with reminders of all that horror and sadness but how much fun her mom had, 60 years after leaving the country, speaking Polish to people from her hometown.

not entirely to the point, but an interesting story:

my grandmother was born in st petersburg in, i believe, 1910. she moved with her family to poland after the revolution and lived there through the war, with a detour to hide out in siberia. 60-70 years later, her nurse, russian, told us that she spoke with a 19th-century, czarist-era russian dialect.

(she was also constantly talking about how ashamed she was of her bad polish.)

19th-century, czarist-era russian dialect

This is so cool.

I knew an old lady in France who pronounced faisait and faisaient differently and who deplored the way mdoern French people said various things. From a sociological and linguistic point of view, it was always a hoot to talk to her.

there's also the way that yiddish is basically middle high german + hebraicisms, or quebec french for that matter...

No wonder I can't understand them...

Quebec is so weird to me, I wanna go there

Kovacs is like the "Smith" of Hungarian last names.

to portray the viciousness of the nazis, to portray the cultural destruction they wreaked, and to specifically put in a cultural world so conspicuously defined by jews—assimilated or not—who were all forced by those nazis into exile, best-case-scenario, or more likely, shipped off to the camps—while making it all about the loss of courtesy and fine manners and delightful things, it just seems like a blind spot to me

I think those concerns are valid. I guess I just don't care, insofar as I think any "political" consequences of this film are pretty much nil (and that's where I part with the fire-breathing Jacobin writer who pissed all over the film). the Jacobin-type stuff reminds me of how a friend described a film professor we know as "seeking the revolution in a blockbuster film." maybe I too-easily dismiss the political meaning of popular films, but I just fail to see what the stakes are. will we forget the Holocaust because Wes Anderson?

I don't think Anderson is really all that (to use a word I usually despise) "deep." what he's said about prewar Europe and Hollywood's "mittle-europa" and Zweig has never really passed the threshold of platitude and basic (obvious) observation. that he makes such an entertaining film partly out of these materials is why he's Wes Anderson and we're not.

morbs, there are tons of Nazi comedies. in fact it's a veritable subgenre. I mean, Hogan's Heroes etc.

can you breath fire and piss at the same time?

(btw is there a thread for the raid: redemption/the raid 2?)

cmon, let's not compare JL to HH! also, Hogan's was a wee bit controversial when it aired.

those who did not take offense were lulled to sleep, I imagine

I think those concerns are valid. I guess I just don't care, insofar as I think any "political" consequences of this film are pretty much nil (and that's where I part with the fire-breathing Jacobin writer who pissed all over the film). the Jacobin-type stuff reminds me of how a friend described a film professor we know as "seeking the revolution in a blockbuster film." maybe I too-easily dismiss the political meaning of popular films, but I just fail to see what the stakes are. will we forget the Holocaust because Wes Anderson?

no, and i'm really not "taking him to task" or anything here, but i think it is an interesting omission, particularly when i read reviews that ascribe to the film a particular profundity in its lamentation of a lost world etc

and yeah if you want a nazi comedy how about to be or not to be?

which i think is a great example of acknowledging jewishness, in 1942 of all times

that feature is unique in a number of ways.

particularly when i read reviews that ascribe to the film a particular profundity in its lamentation of a lost world etc

i've long been in the unusual (?) position of being a wes anderson supporter (even in tough times) who finds such critical plaudits missapplied.

I don't remember how many characters are presented as Jews in the Lubitsch film. (Not Benny and Lombard, I think.)

a lot of it is just in the casting. there are certain actors who pop up and they might as well have payos down to their toes, they are so strongly marked as jewish.

one such actor being lubitsch in weimar-era germany btw

how about to be or not to be?

Tanked at the box office btw

Greenberg even gets to make the Shylock speech!

Hollywood's "mittle-europa"

I think this is the key phrase, the film is set in a Ruritania/Syldavia/Freedonia, a pastiche of a pastiche of Europe.

Greenberg even gets to make the Shylock speech!

― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Wednesday, April 16, 2014 6:27 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ this

It'll get a terrific laugh...

yeah I remember that scene now. I still don't think WA's film is intended to be similar in style or content, tho.

Reminds me of the Wilder/Wyler exchange at Lubitsch's funeral. Wilder ruefully said, "No more Lubitsch," and Wyler said, "Worse than that. No more Lubitsch pictures."

seeing this tonight!

Reminds me of the Wilder/Wyler exchange at Lubitsch's funeral. Wilder ruefully said, "No more Lubitsch," and Wyler said, "Worse than that. No more Lubitsch pictures."

― J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de (Michael White), Thursday, April 17, 2014 10:15 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

then they both nodded and said in tandem, "let's write that down."

And then they made out.

this was great, Morbz otm. having spent some time in Eastern Europe just after the wall came down it was very evocative of a specific kind of "lost" age, the crumbling hotels, former glories etc.

also yeah Kovacs is a specifically Hungarian name, but not one that's specifically Jewish. (Oddly unlike s1ocki all the Hungarians I know are non-Jews)

why would that be odd?

When Hungary joined the war against the Allies, nearly 20,000 Jews from Kamenetz-Podolsk who held Polish or Soviet citizenship were turned over to the Germans and murdered. However, the extermination phase in Hungary only began later, after the Nazi invasion in March 1944. Until then Horthy refused to succumb to Hitler’s pressure to hand over the Jews. At this time there were more than 800,000 Jews living in Hungary, as a result of annexations of regions from Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. In May 1944 the deportations to Auschwitz began. In just eight weeks, some 437,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After October 1944, when the Arrow Cross party came to power, thousands of Jews from Budapest were murdered on the banks of the Danube and tens of thousands were marched hundreds of miles towards the Austrian border. In all, some 565,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered.

http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/about/09/hungary.asp

it's just odd that our experiences with Hungarians are with exclusive subsets

I am well aware of the Hungarian holocaust btw

i imagine you are, it's just odd to wonder why all the hungarians you met aren't jews....

my wonderment goes the OTHER way, ie s1ocki must know a fairly unusual group of Jews who got out before the war or something (altho tbf there are still a bunch of Jews in Budapest)

We all know Andy Grove

my grandfather got out long before the war, though he has some fairly incredibly tales to tell about brushes with violent anti-semitism (or rather, had stories to tell).

i also know some who survived the holocaust.

and i believe some who got out in '56, when everyone else did.

visual effects breakdown

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/watch-impressive-vfx-reel-for-wes-andersons-the-grand-budapest-hotel-20140428

Great movie

Best WA since FMF

I'm a little ashamed at how skeptical I was upthread

Somebody mentioned WA's 'natural voice' upthread and I think his truest voice might be Eli Cash's writings in Royal Tenanbaums ("the friscalating dusklight") + Gustaf's poems in this

found this quite enjoyable, but it didn't leave much of a mark