Tuesday, February 14, 2017
And now this: AP-AE. Was really missing another administrator
The Georgia Institute of Technology invites applications and nominations for the position of Associate Provost for Academic Effectiveness
(AP-AE). Reporting to the provost and executive vice president for
Academic Affairs, the AP-AE will work closely with the deans and
academic leadership and advises the president, provost, and senior
Institute leadership on matters related to academic planning and is
responsible for ensuring the effectiveness of Georgia Tech’s academic
programs through quality assessment and review processes.
Monday, November 07, 2016
You better brush up on your Rabelais ... (or, when to say this PhD thesis is good enough)
August committee co-members
We,
denizens of the Upper Aetherial Realms, commit all our work to our common repository
(well, Professor Heartthrob commits our common work to [Spam] folder, but the rest of
us do :) so we are up to very latest latest on the latest PhD thesis saga:
On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 3:23 AM, TheStudent wrote:Author: TheStudent
Modified:
thesis/thesis.pdf
Log:
I've addressed everything I intend to
Let me translate this for you.
In Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais thus describes the birth of the giant Gargantua (AKA PhD thesis):
In Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais thus describes the birth of the giant Gargantua (AKA PhD thesis):
Whereupon an old ugly trot in the company, who had the repute of an
expert she-physician, and was come from Brisepaille, near to Saint
Genou, three score years before, made her so horrible a restrictive and
binding medicine, and whereby all her larris, arse-pipes, and
conduits were so oppilated, stopped, obstructed, and contracted, that
you could hardly have opened and enlarged them with your teeth, which is
a terrible thing to think upon; seeing
the Devil at the mass at Saint Martin's was puzzled with the like task,
when with his teeth he had lengthened out the parchment whereon he
wrote the tittle-tattle of two young mangy whores.
... and so
has TheStudent's thesis adviser been lengthening out the parchment whereon
he has been writing his desiderata for the said theses; TheStudent reports
that it is a multi-branched, exceedingly lengthy affair with rewrites of
the rewrites. The said adviser has pulled the same trick as for TheStudent-1 a year ago. He ignored our thrice, clearly and loudly repeated request that we
take the signed committee approval of the thesis over to Chair, and
is clutching it to his breast, unsigned by him as until such time he is
fully satisfied with the said student's implementation of the
aforementioned multi-sheeted Riemann parchment diktats.
One
is inclined to think that this all has to either with male menopause,
or something Newt Gingrich adds to the water in Gingrichland, north of
I-285, but no - unbeknownst to the adviser, the aforementioned thesis
committee member made TheStudent-2 write an entire new
chapter in the 2008 thesis, before giving up hope, and writing to the
lowly student that this was the Thesis of Missed Opportunities. Which is the
work that in periods is one of the most cited article in the lowly
Journal of Aqueous Mechanics, and upon which the entire reputation of several professors of tenure as honorable plumbers' guild members rests. But
who are they to judge, with their lowly Cornell and MIT pedigrees.
So starting today, what TheStudent says in the above is: No More Rewrites.
The matter is coming to the head fast, as the thesis has to be
approved and uploaded in a week:)
Servus
Aeternally Yours
Panurge
Panurge
PS clearly, this is an email from a professor who should instead be glued to grants.gov, completing the NSF report in the face of a very fast approaching deadline :)
PPS This actually is not our favorite translation. You can try it in the original, if your medieval Latin and French are in good shape - the modern French footnotes for each page tend to run to many pages:)
Monday, May 09, 2016
God misfathering, the first decades
Usually you are -like- not even born when your mother sticks Godparents on you, for some reason that seemed obvious right then, but no one remembers 30 years later. Godparents have long since moved to Toledo and dedicated their lives to Orphaned Samoyeds of Northeastern Ohio.
But not so when you get appointed to God-parenting Jun 1, 2015 by a fully-fledged Superchile herself. As perfect Aphrodite emerging from Zeus' split head. With a feel and the zeal of Born Again Godchile.
Cannot speak for Professor S., but for me it all started innocently enough. If I am made to enter a mall, I start developing green spots within the 1/2 hour of confinement. So Godchile and Godchile's Mom, who is a pro in all things Cuban Latin American Princess, drove me to the scariest, meanest of all the malls in this town, and within 20 minutes I was owner of fancy Japanese tweed pants (I've never been able to find that miraculous textile again), cargo pants, and a flower-patterned shirt that my department's Black secretaries compliment me on to this day, and we were out of the Mall again.
We did not get a pair of sneakers, so that's a Mall visit still awaiting: getting me my J'z :)
Then I went to Copenhagen, and Godchile had flipped the script for me - with the new pants, shirt
and a gay boy cut young women saw me again. Reborn. Even fell in love
with the 23 year old Nína from Iceland (did not take much -
she actually started talking to me) but no need to alert the
authorities, it was over by the 2:30am night bus and nobody noticed. Except I have like one zillion pics of a woman with flowers in her hair.
Strictly speaking it was not illegal, but it was pushing it, with my puzzled nephews and
nieces, thinking "WTF? Why is uncle P. sitting out there in the night on a
bench with Nína, 47 years out of sync?"
Godchile and I share secrets that no one will ever be able to crack:
Me: "Check mine (scroll down for the details) https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/
Godchile: "Ahhhh vintage aluminum! Before I was subjected to the pothole addled
streets of New York, I rode nothing but Aluminum bikes.Very whippy and like an extension of the body. Once had an Italian
steel bike.
The Italians definitely know something about frame building - it was the
only frame I've ever ridden that had the responsiveness of aluminum but
the forgiveness of steel."
Godchile: "Love cleats I just don't like the shoes I have as much. Current pair of shoes belonged to my friend who is dead so the mojo is skewed. But regardless with properly tensioned pedals you never think of releasing your feet it traffic. Like driving stick. Oh and surely you are referring to SPD pedals ? There is no other way to go in the city."
So I got Corky for Godchile. (Corky is a heroine of Jarmusch "Night on Earth"). My post-teenage year's idol, could not do better. But Heathers? Godchile: "At the same time I was memorizing every word in Heathers, I was reading and rereading Brave New Word and using it as the subject matter for my Paideia application essay. Shouldn't that have been a greater cause for concern than Heathers? Seems like I must have grown up in the Wild West days of parenting..."
But that could not last. After splitting a decade between two very miserable though decent men, the Godchile was on a move again, sucking me instantly into the eye of a falling-in-love hurricane.
Godchile: "In
other news I have a viable crush on a mathematician (with Standford credentials and all) at work. Everything was fine until our
offices moved and they sat him across from me. Now I'm deeply
distracted."
Me: "Wonderful news. But, what was his PhD on?" Godchile: "Ultimately he had to be eliminated due to the fact that his PhD in Math is in fact - UNFINISHED."
Godchile: "I met Mr. R. at the bar downstairs and I have a terrible
crush. I am still trying to gather my wits and connect the dots. I have not had a crush in at least 12 years and I
am - to say the least - not very good at it. Though this guy definitely does very
good work and what good's a crush without excellent brains??? So now you get to truly be my godfather because I feel like I'm TWELVE."
Godchile: "I had a nightmare about Mr. R. last night. I
was sitting at the same bar where were met, he walked in and sat down
next to me. Proceeded to say nothing. And I was suddenly MUTE and unable
to say anything either. Then some woman walks in, sits
down next to him and captivates his attention. After observing his
hands on her legs for at least five eternal minutes, I wake up feeling
bad."
"I have since consumed 5 shots of espresso and dyed my hair black. Well... not jet blue goth black but dark enough."
Me: "Cute. You are a LAP (Latin American Princess) and it cannot be helped. You have not had a
conversation with him yet, and you are already fending of the Other
Woman? :)"
Godchile: "Oh but i HAVE had a conversation with him! The most scintillating hour I spent all year, so much so that then i panicked and ran! I may yet have some LAP in me but i do NOT get crushes without conversations :) Shit, I got NO moves. Maybe you do need to come up here and seduce him for me."
Me: "I'll go to bed with him, ungay as I am, if that's what it takes. Decade ago he claimed to be dating a woman (“Nurse, pass the vagina!”), something some of the attractive NY men have done at some time or other. Well, maybe. There is always the issue of the hair on his back. "
Godchile: "My first instinct upon meeting Mr. R. was to run like hell. So after 45 min of conversation that spanned what seemed like several universes, I bolted leaving no phone number, no suggestions and only my name. When the article came out a month later I emailed him. We had a few e-exchanges wherein I have also failed to suggest anything outside my affinity for brains and an overwhelming disdain for the FDA. Thanks for considering it as ungay as you are."
Godchile: "Other than that, I have been working 80 hours a week and have little to report. Oh, I'm going to have some art in an upcoming gallery show in Chelsea. I'm going to shave my cat now."
All this adrenaline - it had to go somewhere. And indeed, things took a darker turn next:
Godchile: "Tomorrow
I will return to my local climbing wall and meet Schauerbach (don't they
all have such WHITE names??) and enjoy the falling and the catching for
what it is and be happy that at least I have confirmed that his back is
totally free of hair"
Me: "Well, if the brain is what it seems to be, a hairy back is a minor
distraction, quickly forgotten. A funny smell, however, can be
insurmountable. We are mammals."
Godchile: "We had a friendly outing today to the rock climbing gym. A
VERY good place to go with a crush it turns out. How ridiculously
appropriate is it that one belays the other and then if and when one
falls, (which I certainly did) the other one catches the one falling but i'm sure you've
rock climbed and can appreciate this"
Me: "I
like the physicality of it - falling, catching, holding - no better way
to be mammals together. I might be over romanticizing your physical
prowess, but this Youtube.com/watch?v=0bHF5Yfu_
All I can say about that is that I am still alive. Nothing like this had ever happened to these keyboard tapping hands. However, and I says this with all proper Godfatherly decorum: in the same setting, my Godchile is very presentable.
The `climb' cured me forever of feeling excessively guilty as a dead-beat Godfather. It's a job a wimp like me cannot live up to. Me, the dancing chicken! , just happy that we have each other.
Tuesday, February 02, 2016
Windbag senior calling, and what Googlitta understands
If a woman from Inhuman Resources records a message for me, Googlitta transcribes it 100% spot on. But if it my beloved calls, or Stanford-trained literata reads a sonnet, or my most articulate Columbia professor calls, what Googlitta transcribes is a 100% riot. Here are three consecutive calls:
I, of the Atlanta Command Center, found the address of the Manhattan restaurant, and directed the Windbag Senior to it. He writes:
and the 2nd attempt:hello hello you are receiving this message i can tell there's a lot of blood in my ear from your phone so i don't know what it was okay anyway so few days back you more calls anyways he's in town everyone starting to change you supposedly machine's not keelin chinese food say one see this movie with me please call betty mccollough i was talking to somebody else in the room so i didn't quite catch it alright i know that the restaurant hello kitty street facility but i don't know her name because it in my could you tell me the date so we agreed to meet but i don't know what we're supposed to meet at like a copay every night so i'm trying to find you tomorrow and i can i guess persian cat doesn't exist anymore at least her number is answering machine or some such so i'm calling to ask you if you have any information on how i could reach you 2 more can you give me his phone number which turns out to be a cell number is you but it doesn't sound like the correct number could you send text to let number but it's not doing any good so you a little advice or even listen to solve this problem and i would be grateful for it and i send you my humble apologies for this foolishness but i don't know what else to do thank you for your ever use your help bye bye
Play message
and the 3rd attempt:pembroke there's some guy talking on my computer and i think he's pretending to be you but i couldn't tell what language it was it something about a persian cat i don't know what the hell it was so good morrow my road to confirm our appointment which i don't think it's too late but i miss printed and i said 48th street and he's confirm 48th street where is the other days and 58 so i still have it i don't know if since i don't know how to get to it i think if you're available i know something about 3 up over this chinese restaurant is i would be very grateful if you would call and tell me I'm sitting by the cellphone that you chose and hope for the best but this is crazy read well allen wolf another problem but i won't go into that now so please tell me what the hell is going on bye bye
Play message
Who needs poetry when we have Deep Data.but i have not reached period she told her which color heard was her computer and i'm by the computer my computer there was a voicemail of a voice i don't recognize it all it'll i think it was claiming to be you what's going on in the world and asked to enter mark well he hasn't improved there it is bye bye
Play message
I, of the Atlanta Command Center, found the address of the Manhattan restaurant, and directed the Windbag Senior to it. He writes:
I finally reached I., but before I got your timely message. We agreed to meet on the corner of 48th St. and 5th Ave.But you know how it is with mice and men. Wu Liang Ye is closed for renovation. After some phone calls, I. led the troops to Shun Lee, formerly on 24th St. It's not the place for staying slim. Even I. admitted to being a bit overweight.May Aeolus smile on your ventures. ---- Sine labore nihil
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Academics Say
another problem we face: I just cannot do twitter, the idea of a constant stream of tweets is too scary. But this is hilarious, so here is a link (for myself), so I can find it again:
The Pedants' Revolt
Deep down, academics want the same thing as everyone else: acceptance, with minor revisions.
Why doubt yourself, when anonymous reviewers will do it for free.
In the end, we are all two drinks away from being interdisciplinary.
Warning: conference deadlines are closer than they appear.
"Having trouble addressing the final point from this proofreader."
A doctoral student and their advisor walk into a bar. The advisor orders a rough draft and they sit in awkward silence for eight months.
To err is human. To err repeatedly is research.
twitter.com/AcademicsSay
The Pedants' Revolt
Deep down, academics want the same thing as everyone else: acceptance, with minor revisions.
Why doubt yourself, when anonymous reviewers will do it for free.
In the end, we are all two drinks away from being interdisciplinary.
Warning: conference deadlines are closer than they appear.
"Having trouble addressing the final point from this proofreader."
A doctoral student and their advisor walk into a bar. The advisor orders a rough draft and they sit in awkward silence for eight months.
To err is human. To err repeatedly is research.
Kaj mogu, purger sam
Fjesbuk je velika crna rupa, pa cu ovdje ovo sačuvati:
Kaj mogu, purger sam, Gollmayer mi kmetiška rodbina gre pač za nemške priseljence, ki so pa bili vsaj že v 1. pol. 18. stol. udomačeni v radovljiškem okraju. Zato i kazem: ajnprenica, buhtla, perec, knedla, auspuh, blic, cimer, beštek, farba, feder, flaša, fleka, fušariti, gemišt, gojzerica, hauba, haustor, karfiol, kek, kifla, kinderbet, koštati, kremšnita, klofati, krigla, krumpir, lojtre, kremšnita, kupleraj, majstor, oberliht, plac, paradajz, pegl, rolete, remen, rostfraj, ruksak, sekirati se, šajba, šalter, šank, šarafnciger, šeflja, šihta, šlag, šlank, šlamperaj, šminka, šnicla, špotati, špek, špahtla, špica, špreha, štand, šteker, štikla, štrudla, švercer, tri frtlja sedam, vešmašina, na vuri, zacopati se, zrihtati se, žemlja.
Kaj mogu, purger sam, Gollmayer mi kmetiška rodbina gre pač za nemške priseljence, ki so pa bili vsaj že v 1. pol. 18. stol. udomačeni v radovljiškem okraju. Zato i kazem: ajnprenica, buhtla, perec, knedla, auspuh, blic, cimer, beštek, farba, feder, flaša, fleka, fušariti, gemišt, gojzerica, hauba, haustor, karfiol, kek, kifla, kinderbet, koštati, kremšnita, klofati, krigla, krumpir, lojtre, kremšnita, kupleraj, majstor, oberliht, plac, paradajz, pegl, rolete, remen, rostfraj, ruksak, sekirati se, šajba, šalter, šank, šarafnciger, šeflja, šihta, šlag, šlank, šlamperaj, šminka, šnicla, špotati, špek, špahtla, špica, špreha, štand, šteker, štikla, štrudla, švercer, tri frtlja sedam, vešmašina, na vuri, zacopati se, zrihtati se, žemlja.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Tom Kinoshita, oral history interview by Bob Crease - Predrag excerpts (Gauge invariance is the bane of my life)
Excerpts from AIP Oral History Interview - January 9, 10 & 18, 2016 Robert P Crease
Crease:
Oh, right. ok. And now you do another sixth-order radiative correction paper.
Kinoshita:
Yeah.
Crease:
Paper 53.
Kinoshita:
And this was my graduate student.
Crease:
How do you pronounce it?
Kinoshita:
Cvitanović.
Crease:
Cvitanović, oh.
Kinoshita:
And this is the beginning of the serious g-2 work.
Crease:
Why do you describe this as serious as opposed to the other papers?
Kinoshita:
Because the other papers were approximations. These are all approximations. You cannot be serious. So is this. If you use the renormalization group technique, you only calculate the leading term, not the complete calculation. But this is the beginning of a complete sixth-order calculation. And he was a very good student.
Crease:
Where was he from?
Kinoshita:
From Yugoslavia, or whatever that…
Crease:
Where is he now?
Kinoshita:
He’s at Georgia Tech or someplace in mathematics. After writing this paper and a few more papers on physics, he decided not to work on physics. [pause] To work this, we wrote several papers with Cvitanović. These are all different parts of the same problem.
[... later...]
Kinoshita:
[...] But experiment is better than 10%. And so, you have to do eventually the exact calculation to all the sixth-order terms. That’s what I did. By that time, I said—I did a few more diagrams with Brodsky, but he had something else to do, so I took care of all the remainder. In particular, I had a very good student, and he was responsible for filling out how to do the sixth-order in a numerical way.
Crease:
Who was that student?
Kinoshita:
I just [laugh] need to remember. Cvitanović.
Crease:
Cvitanović, oh yes.
Kinoshita:
And then after—many years after, we solved numerically the sixth-order problem, not only the light-by-light, but all the terms, with the help of Cvitanović
[... later...]
Kinoshita:
You see, when we did the sixth-order with Cvitanović, algebra formulation was general enough you can apply to any order. So, the [inaudible] was already sort of set up. So, going from sixth-to eighth-order theoretically there was no roadblock to worry about except that it was a much bigger problem [laugh] and you needed much bigger computers. [...] I wouldn’t do any calculation unless some experiment has come out with a challenge, a new measurement and so on. At this time, when I finished the sixth-order, I thought that was the end of my calculation of g-2 because it was better than the experimental result coming out of Michigan.
[... later...]
Kinoshita:
Yeah. But anyway, this was at the international conference at Tbilisi in 1976.
Crease:
Tbilisi, yeah.
Kinoshita:
I was attending the conference, and then a guy named Lowell Brown at the University of Washington told me that I had to get busy again [laugh] because Dehmelt was doing a new experiment using a Penning trap which was three orders of magnitude more accurate than the [inaudible] precession experiment at Michigan. And Dehmelt, a few years later won the Nobel Prize for that work. So, that’s why I started the eighth-order. Or no, let’s see is that eighth-order or tenth-order? I’m not quite sure. Tenth-order essentially I start around year 2000, so later than that. So, must be eighth-order.
[... later...]
Ok, anyway, so Lindquist started on the eighth-order and because of Lowell Brown’s information that Dehmelt was now setting up a new experiment or he was getting new results which were three orders magnitude better. So, the eighth-order has to be done. That’s why [laugh] I did it. And as I said, the machinery for eighth-order was already available due to the work of Cvitanović in the sixth-order. So, that was not a big problem. The computer at Cornell was never as good as I wished, so I used some national computers at San Diego or someplace. But anyway, the requirement for the computer at that stage was not really big, and so we could get some preliminary results fairly quickly. But then when Dehmelt’s result came out, certainly I wanted to do the next order, the tenth-order, because the tenth-order can be as big as the contribution of the eighth-order. [...]
Rashômon (what I remember)
Predrag's addendum
Gauge theory is indeed the bane of my life 🙂 , as you can see if you click a bit around here:
So, I have opinions , but no theory progress to report that would buttress these opinions.
I have tried to teach grad students many, many times - I hate to see them suffer through all those stupid gamma mu nu calculations,
but with no success. I do not think I teach it well at all:
So, that's my story. It's orthogonal to what any professional field theorist is likely to teach you. I'm working on turbulence,
as I believe that's the right approach to the strongly interacting gauge theories.
Perturbative QED - Flying to Brookhaven with box-fulls of cards - and why did I do this? - Gauge invariance is the bane of my life - Finite QED
Saturday, January 09, 2016
Poincaré's work habits
[...] his way of working further dismantles the idea that Poincaré pursued a path of pure intuition. He worked regularly from 10 till 12 in the morning and from 5 till 7 in the late afternoon. He found that working longer seldom achieved anything, but that it was not always possible to switch off, which was why he never worked in the evenings. He took a complete rest when on holiday.
Henri Poincaré
A Scientific Biography
JEREMY GRAY
from Flannery O'Connor's diaries
She said she treated everybody alike whether it were a person with money or a black nigger. She told me all about the low life in Wilkinson County. I seldom know in any given circumstances whether the Lord is giving me a reward or a punishment. She didn't know she was funny and it was agony to laugh and I reckon she increased my pain about 100% .
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Banned books
Isn't it great? Almost any book we think of as a great book had been banned by someone, sometime.
Thursday, December 03, 2015
How important is this news item to me?
What the "news" chose to obsess about is both unhealthy for you, and largely waste of your time. When you buy cigarettes, you are warned about lung cancer, and when you buy a cereal, the seller is obliged by law to inform you about its caloric and (non)nutritional content. So I would like every news item, before you suffering any further trauma of your gentle neuronal cells, to have a little number in the lower right corner:
the SBL (Struck By Lightning) number:
What does this number mean? Here are some of your primordial fears:
= If you are a parent, about 100 children are abducted by strangers every year, so likelihood of that happening to you is 4 SBL.
= The likelihood that a child is killed by mother’s male partner is 1.5 SBL
= The likelihood that a child is killed by mother is 20 SBL
= The likelihood that a child under 12 commits suicide this year is 120 SBL
= The likelihood that your child is a Harvard undergraduate this year is 460 SBL
= The likelihood of an American citizen being killed by ISIL is 0.3 SBL
= The likelihood of an American citizen being killed by a refugee is 0.004 SBL
= The likelihood of a US resident being killed by furniture is 1 SBL
= The likelihood of a US resident being killed by a mass shooter is 1 to 10 SBL.
= The likelihood of a white male being killed by a stranger black male is 25 SBL.
= The likelihood of a being killed while bicycling is 30 SBL.
So, what are the numbers worth paying attention to?
= the likelihood of a being killed while driving is 1,400 SBL.
= the likelihood that you will die from a hospital infection is 3,250 SBL
= the likelihood of an American age 20 to 25 firearm suicide is 4,000 SBL
= the likelihood of an American dying age 20 to 25 is 60,000 SBL
= the likelihood that your identity is stolen is 96,000 SBL
= the likelihood that your child's soc security number is stolen is 140,000 SBL
= the likelihood that you are dead is 115,000 SBL
= the likelihood that you are lesbian, gay, or bisexual is 350,00 SBL
= the likelihood of an American citizen being religious is 10,500,000 SBL
Basically, you are most likely to be victimized by your bank, and have 50% chance that the stranger you are talking to believes in Rapture. Terrorism and people of other hues are the least of your worries. Hundred thousand times less likely.
Economist has some numbers here.
So, what are your most pressing risks? You (and your children!) have almost 10% chance of identity theft, thanks to big corporations and government who mishandle your "private" data - this podcast is 50min, but well worth listening to:
the SBL (Struck By Lightning) number:
in 2013 twenty three people were killed by lighting in US, out of 316.5 million. So your likelihood of being killed by lightning is 7.2/10^6 %, orSBL = 0.0000072 percent per year
What does this number mean? Here are some of your primordial fears:
= If you are a parent, about 100 children are abducted by strangers every year, so likelihood of that happening to you is 4 SBL.
= The likelihood that a child is killed by mother’s male partner is 1.5 SBL
= The likelihood that a child is killed by mother is 20 SBL
= The likelihood that a child under 12 commits suicide this year is 120 SBL
= The likelihood that your child is a Harvard undergraduate this year is 460 SBL
= The likelihood of an American citizen being killed by ISIL is 0.3 SBL
= The likelihood of an American citizen being killed by a refugee is 0.004 SBL
= The likelihood of a US resident being killed by furniture is 1 SBL
= The likelihood of a US resident being killed by a mass shooter is 1 to 10 SBL.
= The likelihood of a white male being killed by a stranger black male is 25 SBL.
= The likelihood of a being killed while bicycling is 30 SBL.
So, what are the numbers worth paying attention to?
= the likelihood of a being killed while driving is 1,400 SBL.
= the likelihood that you will die from a hospital infection is 3,250 SBL
= the likelihood of an American age 20 to 25 firearm suicide is 4,000 SBL
= the likelihood of an American dying age 20 to 25 is 60,000 SBL
= the likelihood that your identity is stolen is 96,000 SBL
= the likelihood that your child's soc security number is stolen is 140,000 SBL
= the likelihood that you are dead is 115,000 SBL
= the likelihood that you are lesbian, gay, or bisexual is 350,00 SBL
= the likelihood of an American citizen being religious is 10,500,000 SBL
Basically, you are most likely to be victimized by your bank, and have 50% chance that the stranger you are talking to believes in Rapture. Terrorism and people of other hues are the least of your worries. Hundred thousand times less likely.
Economist has some numbers here.
So, what are your most pressing risks? You (and your children!) have almost 10% chance of identity theft, thanks to big corporations and government who mishandle your "private" data - this podcast is 50min, but well worth listening to:
Diane Rehm show.org How-to-protect-yourself-from-identity-theftIf you want to be entertained by identity theft, check out mother-daughter duo Alina and Inna Simone - it's a riot:
RadioLab.org Darkode[I'm notoriously bad with numbers, so grateful for any corrections :)]
If you live in Bangladesh, all these numbers have to be recomputed.
Wednesday, September 09, 2015
Phoenix - E's essay
Phoenix is about surviving the war and worse, and, we are not quite in Kafka, about finding a way out of the mess and damage, indeed, finding out who you are, now, under radically changed circumstances. The "identity" of the three main characters in Phoenix remains open, due to what has happened. They are actually in search of who they are and can be. The issue of "identity" and its uncertainty is established with the first scene, when an American soldier, the reigning power, is checking the passengers, including Nellie, badly wounded and with a bandaged head. He doesn't trust the wrapping, he wants to see beyond the bandage, wants to see the face, and then, after the initial forceful bluster and command of the situation, is promptly forced to mumble a brief word of apology, and so the Leitmotiv of the movie is introduced. How can, how does one respond to the evidence of what has happened? The soldier can afford to limit his response; he is so to speak an innocent observer. How much more difficult must it be for an accomplice to look the truth in the face, let alone find any kind of response, ever inadequate?
There is no doubt that the film does not flesh out a lot of things, e.g. the pressure to divorce a Jewish spouse, or the mass migration, the millions, literally, of displaced persons fleeing the East at the end of the war, of which this Nellie lookalike might be one. In addition the film presents the story in an opaque way which requires filling in all kinds of motivation, e.g. in the case of Lene's seemingly sudden suicide (which actually is prepared by her expressing her bottomless disgust at Nellie and by her literally final proclamation: da mach ich nicht mit--I am not going to be part of it, namely of any kind of accommodation--but what is left then?). The film also requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief--at the latest since Oedipus slept with his mother without knowing it we might as well assume the unlikely, otherwise we have problems, not only with Michelangelo's painting of God's finger. Film may be a medium eminently suited for a realistic depiction of the world, and it may be fooling us into thinking that it on occasion succeeds, but it is not any more bound to notions of verisimilitude than any other art.
Johnny's denial of the obvious is implausible but I take it as an indication of the depth, the strength of his feeling guilty. He cannot, again the topic, face the truth. It is safer, for his own psychological survival, to assume that his wife perished than to acknowledge that she returned from the dead, from hell where he had helped send her. His relationship to the lookalike Nellie is based on the conviction, firmly held against all evidence (the hand-writing!) that this cannot be Nellie. He begins his new life by trying to destroy his file (from which Lene learns that he divorced Nellie, presumably under pressure and in accordance with Nurnberg Laws) and now wants to be Johann, thinking he can bury the culpable Johnny. It is another fine touch that Johann is the busboy in the new order, employed to clean up.
Lene doesn't understand Nellie, Nellie doesn't understand Johnny, and Johnny refuses to understand what is in front of him--and we, in the end, sit almost if not quite as speechless as Nellie's audience: how does one acknowledge, how does one talk about the unspeakable? Lene wants a complete break with the past and falters at the enormity of the task, of finding a way out (she is deeply helpless, if that is even the right word, given the difference from other forms of helplessness, e.g. that of Nellie's seemingly comfortable in-laws at the end who, just as Johnny, cannot find any words); Johnny wants to pretend that what happened doesn't matter "going forward" with a new identity; he is, for good reasons, more comfortable in attempting, for authenticity's sake, to erase a number that he assumes is not there than to face the number that confirms what would condemn him. And Nellie also wants the impossible, her old face back, wants to be recognized as the woman she no longer is--the number is there, and if it were erased there would be a scar. (Ruth Kluger, a colleague, has an essay trying to explain why, after decades, she decided to have the number erased.)
And then one can of course argue that the film is all too obvious, from Nellie's bandaged head to her learning to walk and talk and even sing, finding her voice (there is a youtube clip of that immensely moving, spell-binding effort), and that specifically the film's ending is actually a cop-out: instead of walking into the sunset Nellie surfaces into the bright light which, metaphor to the end, dissolves her.
Ida, a film from Poland, goes in a different direction. Ida's understanding of who she is, is quite settled and only intermittently, not fundamentally, challenged, let alone denied and destroyed. Ida learns a fact about herself that is at odds with her life--and decides to stick with her life: identity is not in the blood but in our upbringing--and what others make of one which is why Lene rejects Nellie's claim of not being Jewish. More briefly: for Ida return is an option; not so for the persons in Phoenix.
"Barbara" and "Ida" are next, and "Two Lives" is yet another exploration of identity, with Norway, luminous and rainy, and the grey GDR as locales ...
All the best und nichts fuer ungut--may the day stay reasonably sunny.
There is no doubt that the film does not flesh out a lot of things, e.g. the pressure to divorce a Jewish spouse, or the mass migration, the millions, literally, of displaced persons fleeing the East at the end of the war, of which this Nellie lookalike might be one. In addition the film presents the story in an opaque way which requires filling in all kinds of motivation, e.g. in the case of Lene's seemingly sudden suicide (which actually is prepared by her expressing her bottomless disgust at Nellie and by her literally final proclamation: da mach ich nicht mit--I am not going to be part of it, namely of any kind of accommodation--but what is left then?). The film also requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief--at the latest since Oedipus slept with his mother without knowing it we might as well assume the unlikely, otherwise we have problems, not only with Michelangelo's painting of God's finger. Film may be a medium eminently suited for a realistic depiction of the world, and it may be fooling us into thinking that it on occasion succeeds, but it is not any more bound to notions of verisimilitude than any other art.
Johnny's denial of the obvious is implausible but I take it as an indication of the depth, the strength of his feeling guilty. He cannot, again the topic, face the truth. It is safer, for his own psychological survival, to assume that his wife perished than to acknowledge that she returned from the dead, from hell where he had helped send her. His relationship to the lookalike Nellie is based on the conviction, firmly held against all evidence (the hand-writing!) that this cannot be Nellie. He begins his new life by trying to destroy his file (from which Lene learns that he divorced Nellie, presumably under pressure and in accordance with Nurnberg Laws) and now wants to be Johann, thinking he can bury the culpable Johnny. It is another fine touch that Johann is the busboy in the new order, employed to clean up.
Lene doesn't understand Nellie, Nellie doesn't understand Johnny, and Johnny refuses to understand what is in front of him--and we, in the end, sit almost if not quite as speechless as Nellie's audience: how does one acknowledge, how does one talk about the unspeakable? Lene wants a complete break with the past and falters at the enormity of the task, of finding a way out (she is deeply helpless, if that is even the right word, given the difference from other forms of helplessness, e.g. that of Nellie's seemingly comfortable in-laws at the end who, just as Johnny, cannot find any words); Johnny wants to pretend that what happened doesn't matter "going forward" with a new identity; he is, for good reasons, more comfortable in attempting, for authenticity's sake, to erase a number that he assumes is not there than to face the number that confirms what would condemn him. And Nellie also wants the impossible, her old face back, wants to be recognized as the woman she no longer is--the number is there, and if it were erased there would be a scar. (Ruth Kluger, a colleague, has an essay trying to explain why, after decades, she decided to have the number erased.)
And then one can of course argue that the film is all too obvious, from Nellie's bandaged head to her learning to walk and talk and even sing, finding her voice (there is a youtube clip of that immensely moving, spell-binding effort), and that specifically the film's ending is actually a cop-out: instead of walking into the sunset Nellie surfaces into the bright light which, metaphor to the end, dissolves her.
Ida, a film from Poland, goes in a different direction. Ida's understanding of who she is, is quite settled and only intermittently, not fundamentally, challenged, let alone denied and destroyed. Ida learns a fact about herself that is at odds with her life--and decides to stick with her life: identity is not in the blood but in our upbringing--and what others make of one which is why Lene rejects Nellie's claim of not being Jewish. More briefly: for Ida return is an option; not so for the persons in Phoenix.
"Barbara" and "Ida" are next, and "Two Lives" is yet another exploration of identity, with Norway, luminous and rainy, and the grey GDR as locales ...
All the best und nichts fuer ungut--may the day stay reasonably sunny.
Monday, September 07, 2015
Dusko - a film can alter how you see something that lies well outside movies
And here is where I come to my last conversation with "Phoenix," because sometimes, a film can alter how you see something that lies well outside movies. As soon as I got home from seeing the film, I opened my copy of Salka Viertel's memoir, "The Kindness of Strangers." She grew up in a well-to-do and cultivated Jewish family in Sambor, Galicia, which is now part of Ukraine, moved to California with her family in 1928, wrote screenplays (including "Queen Christina" and "Deep Valley") and turned her home into a magnet for people fleeing Hitler's Europe.
When I read the book, I couldn't understand Viertel's decision at the end of this passage, and I am not sure I do now. But in my mind, the trajectory of Petzold's heroine is now caught up with the following story, permanently.
Viertel's brother Siegmund, known as Dusko to the family, didn't make it out of Sambor in time. By 1946 Viertel was convinced that Dusko hadn't survived; she got one unconfirmed report that her brother had jumped off a train to the camps and been killed by the SS. Frantic to keep any details of Dusko's fate from their elderly mother, who had managed to reach the U.S. in 1941 and was living in her daughter's home in Los Angeles, Salka made a point of intercepting the mail every day.
One morning, Viertel opened a letter from a woman named Viktoria, an orphaned Galician who had been raised alongside Salka and Dusko in Sambor, as part of the family. Viktoria wrote, "In 1943 [Dusko] came to my house begging me to hide him, but as we are living in a rented place I could not do it, and since the last German Aktion I have not heard from him again." Aktion, Viertel knew, was the word used to mean rounding up Jews.
Viktoria closed the letter by saying she now had four children, and asking, "would Salka, who has always been like a sister to me, send us a food parcel?"
Viertel started to reply.
When I read the book, I couldn't understand Viertel's decision at the end of this passage, and I am not sure I do now. But in my mind, the trajectory of Petzold's heroine is now caught up with the following story, permanently.
Viertel's brother Siegmund, known as Dusko to the family, didn't make it out of Sambor in time. By 1946 Viertel was convinced that Dusko hadn't survived; she got one unconfirmed report that her brother had jumped off a train to the camps and been killed by the SS. Frantic to keep any details of Dusko's fate from their elderly mother, who had managed to reach the U.S. in 1941 and was living in her daughter's home in Los Angeles, Salka made a point of intercepting the mail every day.
One morning, Viertel opened a letter from a woman named Viktoria, an orphaned Galician who had been raised alongside Salka and Dusko in Sambor, as part of the family. Viktoria wrote, "In 1943 [Dusko] came to my house begging me to hide him, but as we are living in a rented place I could not do it, and since the last German Aktion I have not heard from him again." Aktion, Viertel knew, was the word used to mean rounding up Jews.
Viktoria closed the letter by saying she now had four children, and asking, "would Salka, who has always been like a sister to me, send us a food parcel?"
Viertel started to reply.
I wrote her that she had forfeited the right to appeal to my sisterly feelings. She had cruelly denied shelter to a hunted Jew, whose father and mother had given her love and devoted care since she was born, and she had allied herself with monsters and torturers. My tears stained the paper and I had to stop. Could I reproach this cowardly woman for not risking her life? Hadn't others, more powerful than she, stood by indifferently when these unspeakable horrors took place? She was only one among millions ….
I tore up the letter, mailed a CARE package to Sambor, and never told Mama what happened.
Sunday, September 06, 2015
Phoenix - notes (and I was always in love with Thulin)
...the warped narrative functions as an allegory for the stories that people and nations recount to themselves in order to go on surviving....
... Phoenix boldly offers us a war without heroes, only ghosts of broken people moving through a broken world, searching in vain for their former selves.
...opening line is an altered quote from Much Ado About Nothing — "Speak low when you speak, love"...
... In an early scene Nelly catches sight of her new face in a shard of mirror — not just any mirror, but a broken relic from the site of her former home, now reduced to rubble.
... Until then, "Speak Low" has figured nominally in the story: At one point Nelly listens to a recording of it with Lene, also a singer, who praises it almost in the same breath as she speaks of her eagerness to leave Germany — with Nelly in tow — for Palestine. "I can't stand German songs anymore," she says, making a wry, unwitting joke. She seems to have forgotten that Weill is as German as they come.
... "Speak Low" is from the 1943 Broadway musical "One Touch of Venus."[In] the 1948 movie [...] Robert Walker has brought to life this statue of the ideal woman (Ava Gardner, that is to say, a goddess), and still can't control her; "Speak Low" is she sings as she leaves her mortal lover.
...Ah yes, those old friends of Nelly and Johnny, who show up towards the end of the film. That brings me to one movie Petzold, surprisingly, says he hasn't seen: "Return from the Ashes," directed by J. Lee Thompson in 1965, based on the same Hubert Monteilhet novel as "Phoenix." Ingrid Thulin plays a Jewish anesthesiologist who falls in love with Maximilian Schell's scheming, social-climbing chess pro. They marry just as Paris falls to the Nazis, and she is arrested and sent to Auschwitz. [...] The one scene that can stand up to logical comparison with "Phoenix" is the first. "Return From the Ashes" begins on a train to Paris late in 1945. The carriage is full of tired middle-class people, an elderly man, a matronly woman traveling with a little boy of about 10 years of age, and Ingrid Thulin. (Thulin here looks remarkably like post-surgery Nelly: hollowed-out cheeks, bruised eyes, straw-like hair, even a similar shabby raincoat.) The train is traveling very fast. The boy entertains himself by kicking the door to the outside of the rail carriage—bump, bump, bump, as steady and as maddening as a dripping faucet. Then we see his bored, curious hand reach for the door latch. The old man sees it too, shouts "be careful," but it's too late. The little boy opens the door and falls through a blast of smoke and air, presumably to his death. The mother wails, someone pulls the cord, the train halts and the carriage fills with people, as the conductor comes to lead the distraught mother away. And of all these passengers, the only one who doesn't so much as shift in her seat is Thulin. She is utterly still, staring. "Really, such lack of feeling," says one woman, and the old man starts to agree. Then he breaks off mid-word, as the camera moves to show us the number on Thulin's arm.
...When Nelly is dolled up in a black suit with a veiled hat, it evokes Hanna Schygulla, maneuvering through a new but still-ruthless Germany in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun."
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cinema-scope.com/features/face-another-christian-petzolds-phoenix/
... Phoenix boldly offers us a war without heroes, only ghosts of broken people moving through a broken world, searching in vain for their former selves.
...opening line is an altered quote from Much Ado About Nothing — "Speak low when you speak, love"...
... In an early scene Nelly catches sight of her new face in a shard of mirror — not just any mirror, but a broken relic from the site of her former home, now reduced to rubble.
... Until then, "Speak Low" has figured nominally in the story: At one point Nelly listens to a recording of it with Lene, also a singer, who praises it almost in the same breath as she speaks of her eagerness to leave Germany — with Nelly in tow — for Palestine. "I can't stand German songs anymore," she says, making a wry, unwitting joke. She seems to have forgotten that Weill is as German as they come.
... "Speak Low" is from the 1943 Broadway musical "One Touch of Venus."[In] the 1948 movie [...] Robert Walker has brought to life this statue of the ideal woman (Ava Gardner, that is to say, a goddess), and still can't control her; "Speak Low" is she sings as she leaves her mortal lover.
[Predrag: One Touch of Venus is a sweet light musical, with a very beautiful Ava Gardner, enchanting Kurt Weil's "Speak Low" and nothing to strain your neurons. Curiously, the really wonderful Roman Holiday (1954) (a remake of Oscar-winning Princess O'Rourke (1943), which itself loosely follows Thirty Day Princess (1932)) follows the same plot: a princess instead of a goddess, but the escape from Olympus/court is only 24 hours, there is dancing by the water, and the plain clothes in similar very obtrusive suits and hats.]...as Nelly sings and Johnny plays, the audience of blandly indifferent post-war Germans regard Nelly with no trace of guilt. They have already convinced themselves that they did nothing that needed forgiving.
...Ah yes, those old friends of Nelly and Johnny, who show up towards the end of the film. That brings me to one movie Petzold, surprisingly, says he hasn't seen: "Return from the Ashes," directed by J. Lee Thompson in 1965, based on the same Hubert Monteilhet novel as "Phoenix." Ingrid Thulin plays a Jewish anesthesiologist who falls in love with Maximilian Schell's scheming, social-climbing chess pro. They marry just as Paris falls to the Nazis, and she is arrested and sent to Auschwitz. [...] The one scene that can stand up to logical comparison with "Phoenix" is the first. "Return From the Ashes" begins on a train to Paris late in 1945. The carriage is full of tired middle-class people, an elderly man, a matronly woman traveling with a little boy of about 10 years of age, and Ingrid Thulin. (Thulin here looks remarkably like post-surgery Nelly: hollowed-out cheeks, bruised eyes, straw-like hair, even a similar shabby raincoat.) The train is traveling very fast. The boy entertains himself by kicking the door to the outside of the rail carriage—bump, bump, bump, as steady and as maddening as a dripping faucet. Then we see his bored, curious hand reach for the door latch. The old man sees it too, shouts "be careful," but it's too late. The little boy opens the door and falls through a blast of smoke and air, presumably to his death. The mother wails, someone pulls the cord, the train halts and the carriage fills with people, as the conductor comes to lead the distraught mother away. And of all these passengers, the only one who doesn't so much as shift in her seat is Thulin. She is utterly still, staring. "Really, such lack of feeling," says one woman, and the old man starts to agree. Then he breaks off mid-word, as the camera moves to show us the number on Thulin's arm.
[Predrag: For the first 1/2 Return from the Ashes follows the same plot, but then the
wealthy Jewish widow, Dr. Michele Wolf and former Dachau SS whorehouse inmate turns into blond Ingrid Thulin, and from then on this is a thriller with Holocaus forgotten. Filmed in black & white, and staged like a theater play, it cannot even begin to be compared to Phoenix. Maximilian Schell is over-acting, and Ingrid Thulin is not the Bergman Thulin I love so much.]
...When Nelly is dolled up in a black suit with a veiled hat, it evokes Hanna Schygulla, maneuvering through a new but still-ruthless Germany in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun."
[Predrag: Les yeux sans visage is a straight horror movie - especially the long sequence of removing a girl's face is sickening, but Phoenix owes much of the border-crossing and hospital sequences to it. The debt to the plastic surgeon sequence in Dark Passage is greater, even though that is a relatively light-hearted version. The debt to Vertigo is deep. At 1hour 40 min it starts making sense. At 1:50 he says: "Color your hair".
Petzold started with his actors by watching Les demoiselles de Rochefort together, with Gene Kelly and Catherine Deneuve? It's like getting in the mood for Aguirre, Wrath of God by watching Mama Mia.
I have not seen either Yella (2007) or Barbara (2012).]
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cinema-scope.com/features/face-another-christian-petzolds-phoenix/
The early sequences of Nelly stalking the halls of the Berlin hospital where she's gone to have surgery on her ruined face conjure up Georges Franju's Les yeux sans visage ("Eyes Without a Face", 1953), and not only visually; just as Franju's film mobilized mad-doctor tropes to evoke the medical atrocities of the Holocaust and the spectre of Aryan racial purity, Phoenix frames Nelly's operation in metaphorical terms: "a new face," the surgeon assures her, "is an advantage."
Nelly doesn't need her new visage to evade the authorities à la Humphrey Bogart's wrong-man character in Dark Passage (1957). But as in Delmer Daves' film, it proves useful in exposing the guilt of another.
It's here that Phoenix comes down with a distinct case of Vertigo (1958) and also becomes brutally moving, as Nelly is instructed by a man she has reason to suspect may have been behind her incarceration how to act more like "herself"—already wearing the face of another, she begins to see herself through a different pair of eyes as well.
What's remarkable about Phoenix is how its Farockian didacticism—the fact that Nelly would rather try to reclaim her place and her identity in a German society that tried to exterminate her rather than go with Lene to settle in Palestine—is blended into its drama so that it becomes a film of ideas that is also a film of emotions. For this critic, at least, the feelings in Jerichow, with its cuckolded Turkish version of Cecil Kellaway, and even the markedly superior Barbara, which trapped Hoss' eponymous heroine in an East German hospital while she harboured fantasies of the West, were mostly theoretical: the films, and their social critiques, were so neatly turned out that they didn't leave any residue. Phoenix is neat, too, and perhaps even more chokingly claustrophobic than its predecessors—not least of all when Nelly revisits the spider-hole where she hid from the Nazis—but it also has a plangency that's distinct from being simply and expertly spartan.
Les yeux sans visage is a good starting point to talk about Phoenix, since they are both movies about women's faces that are also images of nations in wartime—the idea of trying to graft a more beautiful face onto a ruined one.
Nina Hoss:
I always have the feeling with Christian that his movies are really about German identity, or about individuals in search of their own identity.
I thought very much about how I could express her journey in her body. When you see the pictures of the people who were at Auschwitz or the other concentration camps, they are so thin and in a way not really there. They look like they don't want to be seen, so they don't get into trouble. That's what I was working on, the fear. I also wanted to show how [Nelly] grows slowly over time, like a flower. Her head goes up and she can remember what it is like to be in the body again.
Christian Petzold:
I didn't show the Franju movie to the actors. I don't want to show them movies like Les yeux sans visage or Dark Passage, because they're too near to their characters, and too faraway in the same moment. The first movie we watched during the rehearsals was Jacques Demy's Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967).
While we were doing The State I'm In (2002), we were talking about Nuit et brouillard (1956) by Alain Resnais. I'd seen the film as a pupil in school. When it screened at Cannes in 1956, all the Germans at the festival left, because of the movie. Harun told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, it was the movie that showed them what had happened in the concentration camps, and so it was the movie that divided them from their parents.
[Ronald] worked so hard. He looked at 25 movies from the time. He always had cigarettes and dollars in his pockets, because he wanted Johnny to be a real person. But Johnny is dead. From the first moment on the set, I said to him that the tragedy for him as an actor is the same as the tragedy for Johnny as a person—that he's dead. The end of the movie is not him coming back to life; it's that he knows that he's dead.
We shot for three or four months, and then Nina and I have had no connection to each other. It's not because we don't like each other any more. It's because the directing of a movie starring a blonde actress and what goes on in Johnny's basement…the two things are not so far away from each other. At the end of the movie, it wasn't just Nelly who was going away, it was also Nina saying goodbye to my fantasies as well. When the shooting ends on my films, there is always a party, and the Barbara party lasted for days. With this party, everyone went home after 12 minutes. Nobody talked to each other.
There are two questions that people can ask about the movie. One is, "Where is her face?" The other is, "Why didn't Johnny recognize Nelly?" My answer to both is that people who ask these questions don't like movies. It's what Hitchcock called "the plausibles." There's a German word for it too, and it's a bad word. But it's also a question of morality that he doesn't see her face.
Harun Farocki [...] died five weeks ago. I don't reflect about it. In the future when I'm writing, I'm going to go to his grave like in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). There is no other collaboration that I can think about. I'm going to take a break next year.
In our work together, everybody thought that Harun was the cold-blooded intellectual and I was the warm-blooded, emotional guy. It was totally the other way around. I'm the constructor in the stories, and Harun was always on the side of emotion.
We read three or four books by [Austrian essayist] Jean Amery. After he survived Auschwitz, he wrote in one essay, about being in a camp for displaced persons, and how after he came back to Germany, he thought the people there would embrace him and show their interest in forming a new society. He came back and nobody looked at him. Friends didn't recognize him. His friends had cut him not only of their memories but also out of their senses. He said, "I'm like a ghost."
At first I didn't want to make "Phoenix" because "Vertigo" exists. Harun said the same thing. It's a fantastic movie but we hate it a little bit, too. We changed perspective to a female perspective. At the beginning she is bandaged and you think she is a victim, like all of the survivors' victims. But at this moment, when she is in the basement, she starts to be the director of the movie and the director of the love affair. She was bringing back his memories. This is the turning point I like so much.
In the early '30s the Germans had made all of these great films, like "People on Sunday," the Billy Wilder, [Edgar G.] Ulmer and [Robert] Siodmak film. These movies were full of life. All of these great Jewish directors had to leave Germany and they made film noir: "Lost Weekend," "Detour," "The Killers." They changed their positive light into the dark light of the night. I said to the cinematographer [Hans Fromm] that we need color, because we have to have the natural and beautiful qualities of the world, but also the noir and the realistic. We have to use 35-millimeter. I like to shoot on 35-mm because I don't have the [playback] monitor. There's one camera and you can't see the rushes until two days later. You have to trust the things of what you saw. What's fantastic about 35-mm is that two days later, as the rushes are coming, you see them projected at a screening and it's not your movie. It feels a little bit strange. It's done. I like that very much.
Nelly doesn't need her new visage to evade the authorities à la Humphrey Bogart's wrong-man character in Dark Passage (1957). But as in Delmer Daves' film, it proves useful in exposing the guilt of another.
It's here that Phoenix comes down with a distinct case of Vertigo (1958) and also becomes brutally moving, as Nelly is instructed by a man she has reason to suspect may have been behind her incarceration how to act more like "herself"—already wearing the face of another, she begins to see herself through a different pair of eyes as well.
What's remarkable about Phoenix is how its Farockian didacticism—the fact that Nelly would rather try to reclaim her place and her identity in a German society that tried to exterminate her rather than go with Lene to settle in Palestine—is blended into its drama so that it becomes a film of ideas that is also a film of emotions. For this critic, at least, the feelings in Jerichow, with its cuckolded Turkish version of Cecil Kellaway, and even the markedly superior Barbara, which trapped Hoss' eponymous heroine in an East German hospital while she harboured fantasies of the West, were mostly theoretical: the films, and their social critiques, were so neatly turned out that they didn't leave any residue. Phoenix is neat, too, and perhaps even more chokingly claustrophobic than its predecessors—not least of all when Nelly revisits the spider-hole where she hid from the Nazis—but it also has a plangency that's distinct from being simply and expertly spartan.
Les yeux sans visage is a good starting point to talk about Phoenix, since they are both movies about women's faces that are also images of nations in wartime—the idea of trying to graft a more beautiful face onto a ruined one.
Nina Hoss:
I always have the feeling with Christian that his movies are really about German identity, or about individuals in search of their own identity.
I thought very much about how I could express her journey in her body. When you see the pictures of the people who were at Auschwitz or the other concentration camps, they are so thin and in a way not really there. They look like they don't want to be seen, so they don't get into trouble. That's what I was working on, the fear. I also wanted to show how [Nelly] grows slowly over time, like a flower. Her head goes up and she can remember what it is like to be in the body again.
Christian Petzold:
I didn't show the Franju movie to the actors. I don't want to show them movies like Les yeux sans visage or Dark Passage, because they're too near to their characters, and too faraway in the same moment. The first movie we watched during the rehearsals was Jacques Demy's Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967).
While we were doing The State I'm In (2002), we were talking about Nuit et brouillard (1956) by Alain Resnais. I'd seen the film as a pupil in school. When it screened at Cannes in 1956, all the Germans at the festival left, because of the movie. Harun told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, it was the movie that showed them what had happened in the concentration camps, and so it was the movie that divided them from their parents.
[Ronald] worked so hard. He looked at 25 movies from the time. He always had cigarettes and dollars in his pockets, because he wanted Johnny to be a real person. But Johnny is dead. From the first moment on the set, I said to him that the tragedy for him as an actor is the same as the tragedy for Johnny as a person—that he's dead. The end of the movie is not him coming back to life; it's that he knows that he's dead.
We shot for three or four months, and then Nina and I have had no connection to each other. It's not because we don't like each other any more. It's because the directing of a movie starring a blonde actress and what goes on in Johnny's basement…the two things are not so far away from each other. At the end of the movie, it wasn't just Nelly who was going away, it was also Nina saying goodbye to my fantasies as well. When the shooting ends on my films, there is always a party, and the Barbara party lasted for days. With this party, everyone went home after 12 minutes. Nobody talked to each other.
There are two questions that people can ask about the movie. One is, "Where is her face?" The other is, "Why didn't Johnny recognize Nelly?" My answer to both is that people who ask these questions don't like movies. It's what Hitchcock called "the plausibles." There's a German word for it too, and it's a bad word. But it's also a question of morality that he doesn't see her face.
Harun Farocki [...] died five weeks ago. I don't reflect about it. In the future when I'm writing, I'm going to go to his grave like in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). There is no other collaboration that I can think about. I'm going to take a break next year.
In our work together, everybody thought that Harun was the cold-blooded intellectual and I was the warm-blooded, emotional guy. It was totally the other way around. I'm the constructor in the stories, and Harun was always on the side of emotion.
We read three or four books by [Austrian essayist] Jean Amery. After he survived Auschwitz, he wrote in one essay, about being in a camp for displaced persons, and how after he came back to Germany, he thought the people there would embrace him and show their interest in forming a new society. He came back and nobody looked at him. Friends didn't recognize him. His friends had cut him not only of their memories but also out of their senses. He said, "I'm like a ghost."
At first I didn't want to make "Phoenix" because "Vertigo" exists. Harun said the same thing. It's a fantastic movie but we hate it a little bit, too. We changed perspective to a female perspective. At the beginning she is bandaged and you think she is a victim, like all of the survivors' victims. But at this moment, when she is in the basement, she starts to be the director of the movie and the director of the love affair. She was bringing back his memories. This is the turning point I like so much.
In the early '30s the Germans had made all of these great films, like "People on Sunday," the Billy Wilder, [Edgar G.] Ulmer and [Robert] Siodmak film. These movies were full of life. All of these great Jewish directors had to leave Germany and they made film noir: "Lost Weekend," "Detour," "The Killers." They changed their positive light into the dark light of the night. I said to the cinematographer [Hans Fromm] that we need color, because we have to have the natural and beautiful qualities of the world, but also the noir and the realistic. We have to use 35-millimeter. I like to shoot on 35-mm because I don't have the [playback] monitor. There's one camera and you can't see the rushes until two days later. You have to trust the things of what you saw. What's fantastic about 35-mm is that two days later, as the rushes are coming, you see them projected at a screening and it's not your movie. It feels a little bit strange. It's done. I like that very much.
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