Bernardo Bertolucci | The Sheltering Sky / 1990

travelers without a destination

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci (screenplay, based on the fiction by Paul Bowles), Bernardo Bertolucci (director) The Sheltering Sky / 1990

 

Although I had seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 film, The Sheltering Sky when it premiered, I wasn’t truly looking forward to watching this rather long (138 minutes) film again. I had taught Paul Bowles’ original fiction several times at the University of Maryland, and I remembered the film as a rather plodding and straight-forward rendition of a work that, at least when I first read it, seemed far more suggestive and even mysterious. Bowles himself has written, “The less said about the movie the better.” As writer Frederic Tuten commented on my review, "Hard to make a film of that novel. Much of it is a gorgeous National Geographic film."

     Perhaps I should add that in Sun & Moon journal I published several small pieces by Paul Bowles as part of his "Points in Time."

       I knew something of the lives of the author and his amazingly talented wife, Jane, but I had not yet read all of their works nor quite perceived the extent of their open bisexuality.

      This time around I liked the movie much better, although I still found it, at times, a rather a flat-footed version of the original. But then, perhaps that was part of the problem with the original fiction as well, wherein the character Port Moresby is clearly a kind of heterosexual stand-in the homosexual Bowles and Kit, another heterosexual version of the lesbian Jane. Perhaps the author, writing in 1949, was simply trying to make his couple more palatable to the general audience at a time hostile to LGBTQ identity (long before there were even such a term). I feel he was also quite-reticent about his gay identity, particularly in the US, while he felt freer to express it in Central America and Morocco, despite consorting with major gay American and British figures—he was a music student of Aaron Copland and became good friends with Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal, while later drawing nearly every gay writer and poet to his residence in Tangiers, including Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Even my Spanish book agent joked that when she was young her mother would not allow her to visit the Bowles’ in Tangiers. My former agent is now dead.

    Perhaps his fiction was simply a kind of fantasy to play out the difficulties of this bi-sexual couple in a more simplistic context than their real lives allowed. Yet, in the novel there are all sorts of hints that something else was going on, while in Bertolucci’s film there are only a couple of occasions when the screenwriters suggest there might be something more here, as when Kit (Debra Winger), now attracted to their handsome traveling companion, George Tunner (Campbell Scott), declares that it is not her problem as much as it is her husband’s. Mostly, Bertolucci simply skips over any attempts at explaining what these “travelers,” as opposed to “tourists” are truly seeking.

       In short, I now feel there was something inherently dishonest in Bowles’ original work, which shows up in the Bertolucci film as a kind clumsy lie.

       But if you forget that there is anything even slightly autobiographical about this work, or that an openly gay man is writing about the collapse of the heterosexual romance, the movie actually works quite nicely. It is beautifully filmed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who won awards from BAFTA and The New York Film Critics Circle), who, after introducing the credits in a black-and-white paean to New York City—presumably to establish the period and the characters’ roots—turns his lens to tawny browns and yellows to establish the Moroccan and Algerian landscapes.  

      Moreover, the music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, combining Arab calls to prayer, North African music, and a lush Hollywood score, is equally memorable, winning him several awards as well.

       If at first I was a bit disturbed by John Malkovich’s deadpan portrayal of Port, I realized by film’s end that it was not, perhaps, so very different from the kind of high-cultured disdain of Bowles himself, who narrates a few passages (as an observing dinner guest in a hotel restaurant).

     Winger as Kit is a bit more problematic. In her perky, raspy-voiced characterization of Kit, she doesn’t quite fit the superstitious and problematic figure who, on some days, we are told, sees signs in everything about her, falling into bouts of inexplicable fears and depression. In this version she seems far more hardy and ready for battle than the character who Bowles describes needed Port to make all decisions so that she might not be responsible for life. Here, she becomes the far dominant figure, as Port moodily moves through the desert spaces, particularly after he begins to suffer the signs of Typhoid Fever. She, in fact, appears to be the far stronger individual in their relationship, and even attempts to nurse her dying husband back to health.

      Only after his death does she fall again into near passivity, flagging down a local Bedouin group, whose leader takes her on by dressing her up like a boy (another almost unobtrusive reference to Jane’s identity) so that he might sexually assault her. What is interesting about Bertolucci’s portrait of Bedouin life is that it is the men who wear the burkas, while the women openly expose their faces.

      In her passivity at the end of the film, it is almost as if Kit were allowing into her life all of the others whom Port (and she) had previously attempted to escape from, including Tunner, whom Port plots to send off to other desert frontier cities to keep him away from Kit, and the Lyles, the nasty British travel guide writer and her monstrous adult baby, Eric (the always wonderful Timothy Spall), who she keeps at her side by denying him money or any of his adult desires for drink and, presumably, male companionship. He represents one of the most notorious examples of a mamma’s boy outside of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or Psycho.

      Yet, strangely, it is precisely these reprehensible people who this generally incompatible couple need: if nothing else the Lyles bring some comic relief to their unhappy lives, and Tunner provides (perhaps for both) some empty-headed romance, as well as some financial stability that Port and Kit might seek, particularly after being robbed of both billfold—although Port does retrieve that—and his passport, which he refuses to retrieve in order to escape further encounters with Tunner. One might almost argue, in the end, that the Moresbys' problem is that despite their adventurous personalities, they won’t dare themselves to hang out with all the wrong people, who could, in fact, bring them closer to one another. They want to be travelers without a true destination, making them, in fact, more tourists than the people whom they describe, “when they arrive somewhere immediately want to go home.” Tunner, indeed, in his attempt to reign in Kit’s almost mad wanderings, is perhaps more of a true world traveler than Kit and Port were ever destined to be. In the end, Kit simply disappears into thin air, while the handsome Tunner stands still as a testament, if nothing else, of himself and his jaunty American-ness.

      The reason The Sheltering Sky’s major characters both die and disappear is the fact, perhaps, that they simply cannot put down real roots. The images of Manhattan in the credits are all an illusion. They might have lived in that city (actually for a brief period of time the Bowles resided in a Brooklyn Heights house with other noted gays and open-minded artists W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, and Gypsy Rose Lee), but they could never stay too long in one place, which is really what Bowles’ novel and Bertolucci’s film is all about; endless traveling can ultimately look a lot like tourism, and wise Americans such as they were can easily become ugly.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2018).

 

Derek Jarman | The Garden / 1990

the antithesis of cold silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman (screenwriter and director) The Garden / 1990

 

Diagnosed as HIV positive in 1986, Jarman moved soon after to what might have been perceived as a retreat, to a seaside cottage in Dungeness, Kent, between a power station and a nature reserve. But instead of resting, Jarman built a garden there among the stones with hardy plants that could survive both the wind and the cold. Indeed, through several late cinematic works, the director built up a world there that came to stand almost for the end of the world, certainly his world, but perhaps also for the end of England considering what it had previously stood for. Just as in his earlier films, centered on major figures who lived their difficult and tortured lives in a world which set them apart of the rest of society, so Jarman’s garden in the midst of what looked like desert, offered a possible new vision for the society, like him, on its death bed.

    Now, in his fourth year of suffering from AIDS-related conditions, Jarman determined to focus on what that “garden” stood for, not only the lost world of Adam and Eve, but the lost opportunities of entire cultures which had rejected their often most vital and moral figures, by turning the moral lessons of religion and learning on their head in their perpetual miscomprehension of love and morality. The director himself had argued that, in fact, “I feel the moral high ground—particularly in the ‘80s with the AIDS crisis—was held by gay men and women. I feel that strongly.”*

  Jarman, like most others of  Britain’s gay communities, was even more disturbed by the British government’s lack of action against AIDS and even worse, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government’s introduction of Section 28, adding in 1988 to the Local Government Act of 1986, the clause stating: a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality of publish material with the intention of promotion of homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” The shocking demand to close all ears and eyes to homosexuality in the very midst of the AIDS crisis struck most of the LGBTQ community, Jarman among them, as not only perverse but as representing a kind of public abuse and murder.

      As “The Cinephile Gardener” nicely puts it (in his site devoted only to gardens in film): “The Garden is a howl of rage from a dying man.”

      In the film, the poem the director himself had written in his diary about AIDS appears at the very end, read by Michael Gough; but I think it might be interesting to consider the poem before approaching the film, a work which in some respects is the very opposite of Dylan Thomas’ insistence to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” yet clearly incorporates those sentiments. But here there is a kind of “cold”—the key word, along with “silence,” that dominates this work—objectivity of what is going on around him and will soon surround himself:

 

I walk in this garden

Holding the hands of dead friends

Old age came quickly for my frosted generation

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

Did the forgotten generations scream?

Or go full of resignation

Quietly protesting innocence

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

I have no words

My shaking hand

Cannot express my fury

Sadness is all I have

Cold, cold, cold you died so silently

 

Linked hands at four AM

Deep under the city you slept on

Never heard the sweet flesh song

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

Matthew fucked Mark fucked Luke fucked John

Who lay in the bed that I lie on

Touch fingers again as you sing this song

Cold, cold, cold we died so silently

 

My gilly flowers, roses, violets blue

Sweet garden of vanished pleasures

Please come back next year

Cold, cold, cold I die so silently

 

Goodnight boys,

Goodnight Johnny,

Goodnight,

Goodnight.

 

     Given his fury that cannot be properly expressed, Jarman chose the most possible open-ended structure he could create. Unlike the objectivity of the poem, the film is almost entirely subjective, whirling around the director’s own private associations, his visions of other possibilities for a religious hagiography while including highly personal associations of place and friends (as in several of his films, actor Tilda Swinton is a major figure) as well as several comic, almost music-hall tropes that swing the otherwise terrifying and quite serious story of the crucifixion among other religious stories into joyfully comic satires such as the performance of Roger Eden’s song of fashion insanity (perfect for the Barbie film-days in which I am writing this review) “Think Pink” from the movie Funny Face (1957). Even The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin recognized the work as a “virtually wordless 90-minute assemblage of turbulent images…a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury,” turning Jarman’s thoughts on AIDS, Christianity and intolerance, “into a feverish vision of far-reaching decay.”

      If you might think, however, that decades after the provocatively open-ended works of everyone from Antonioni to Fassbinder Maslin could make sense of the cinema, you’d be mistaken as she bows out of a full review by simply summarizing her exhausted emotions: “motivation, like everything else here, is rather too widely open to interpretation.”

      In fact, the motivation is the one totally clear aspect of this film, as I already have argued. Its form, moreover, if disjunctive is no more difficult to assimilate than a film by Resnais or Tarkovsky.

     Indeed, Jarman himself has rather nicely summarized some of its parts:

 

“The film is structured like a dream allegory, in a poetic tradition, rather like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The film is a dream allegory of the author, in this case, myself. I could have put somebody else into it, but really dreams are always in the first person, though people often invent proxies. I go to sleep and go on a mental journey. Sleep can take lots of side turnings and in turnings a lot of things can happen. …It starts off with the Garden of Eden, then it progresses through various moments in Christ’s life, again not in a particular way. …You have recognizable scenes like the Judas kiss or Pontius Pilate and the arrest. There is no problem identifying and knowing where you are. Then there is another whole level of my childhood memories. This kid—Jody Gruber—is in a way my childhood self. A strict schooling and everything else. The schoolmasters’ canes become the canes of the flagellation.”

      Indeed, early in the film the narrative makes quite clear that his is the story of Christ, beginning with his birth in Nazareth, and even citing passages from the Bible. What changes are the figures who perform those characters, how they are presented, and how famous Biblical scenes are transformed into personal associations very much the way the noted US dramatist Richard Foreman does in his plays and films.

       Highly formalized ways of perceiving events shift when recontextualized with contemporary contexts. For example, Tilda Swinton as the Madonna with child begins in the usual images art has long taught us to perceive them but quickly grow ludicrous as the paparazzi, their heads in  balaclavas begin photographing her, gradually disrobing both child and mother, and eventually, as they move in closer and closer to get their shot, almost hinting at an attempted rape, as she, going on the run, abandons her baby and finds herself, time and again, rolling under the crushing bodies of photographers in a manner that reads almost like a prophecy of what would happen to Princess Diana 7 years later.

      Judas hangs with an extended purple tongue while he attempts to sell credit cards on TV. The Devil (Pete Lee-Wilson) is a sleek leather daddy presenting his famous song-and-dance. Mary Magdalene (Spencer Lee) is a drag queen dressed in a blue sequined gown who is attacked and stoned by the members of the local community, mostly cis-gender women. The Twelve Apostles are imagined as the same number of women in babushkas sitting at a Last Supper-like setting as they run their fingers around the rims of wine glasses creating an ear-piercing hum.

     I have previously argued in discussing short works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Peter de Rome of 1962 and 1972 that Yēšūa of Nazareth was the perfect homosexual. Obviously, Jarman agrees, turning his Christ into a gay man who finds a lover as a young local sailor (possibly even being a boy who he encounters on the desolate beach) the two eventually becoming a model gay couple, complete with baby. Together the gay Christ couple (Johnny Mills and Philip MacDonald) spend most of their time making love and simply standing in slightly moony poses, child-often-in-hand. It is in one of these scenes, as our pretty boy Christs are dressed in pink tuxedos that West End performer Jessica Martin sings her rendition of “Think Pink.”

     Jarman comments on his obvious religious desecration: “Putting the two young men in certain elements of the passion draws immediate attention and shows that this whole morality thing is topsy turvy. These people are the ones one should be admiring and actually listening to. … Though the most appalling things happen to them, the myth remains intact and they are resurrected in the end. In carrying the whole thing through by putting them in the position of being the Christ figure, you can say it’s a great muddle, but I can’t see how else one can deal with it. It is all too enormous.” One wonders whether such a movie could possibly even be made today without riots in the street. In the art-house world of Jarman’s day, the fundamentalists fortunately did not even notice. Today, this film might have shown up in the US Supreme Court, the majority insisting it stands against the original signers of the Constitution’s beliefs.

     We begin to realize, however, that their situation is becoming dangerous in the narrative of the film when, as they sleep, “three sinister Santa’s sing” (I’ve stolen Maslin’s lovely alliteration) each stanza of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" louder and louder until our sleeping Christs are rudely awakened.

     The court of Pontius Pilate looks more like the steam room out of Hollywood movies such as The Robe and Spartacus, with Herod and Pilate licking their tongues in lust as other cute boys are slowly massaged while our Christ couple cower together in the middle of the room.

      The soldiers to whom Christ and his lover are consigned are a mix of the standard Teutonic bullies, in this case first torturing the two by pasting chocolate Nutella all over their foreheads and hair before tearing apart their own uniforms to pull out the feathers in order to finish their tar-and-feathering torture.

      The brutal flagellation comes later, reminding us of the professor’s canes striking time and again upon the table where earlier on the young boy who joined Christ was attempting his lessons.

But here blood and pain are far more obvious, the Christ men suffering before their long walk to Golgotha. But along that slow march, Mary Magdalene, still in her blue gown, appears and bends to kiss both their feet.

 

      In and amongst these narrative tales are endless images of earth, air, wind, and fire along with the storyteller himself in this version of the Christian mythos. Yet as Pat Brown observes in the 2019 Slant review “…Despite being guided by a dream logic that’s nightmarish more often than not, the film isn’t oppressive. Jarman appears in a few roles, including that of a dreamer, asleep on a bed in a shallow sea as white-linen clad figures circle around him holding flares. … The film’s images burn, yet Jarman understands that fire can symbolize both destruction and creation. After all, one burns the vestiges of last year’s crops before replanting, and The Garden isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.”

      The intent of this film is quite obvious, but the result, alas, remains in the hands of its viewers. Alas, I am afraid a lot of weeds of grown up in the garden Jarman—who died of AIDS in 1994—once planted, instead of the beautiful flowers he had intended.

 

*The comments by Jarman, which evidently appeared in the material published in connection to the release of the movie, were reprinted in on-line site, The Metropole.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

 

Kidlat Tahimik | Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) / 1977

the sleeping typhoon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kidlat Tahimik (screenwriter and director) Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) / 1977

 

When Philippines filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare was first shown in the United States in 1980, The New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby—despite somewhat disparaging the idea that any film might be described this way—characterized the film as being “primitive,” while also being “sweet, funny, witty” and “intelligent.” But, although Tahimik’s movie is shot in 8-millimeter film stock; presents it titles on hand-held cards; portrays numerous static images in a grainy, slightly washed-out color of the quality of a home-made movie; and casts much of its narrative in the form of fables, Perfumed Nightmare, in its humorously clever analysis of international economic disparities and in its unsentimental embracement of the handmade over what is industrially created, is highly sophisticated, the opposite of “primitive.”

       Just as the director reveals the locally-made jitneys to be far more beautiful and useful than the Westernized modes of public transportation (the Philippine jitneys, moreover, are crafted out of war tanks and other leftover US weapons, machines of war being converted into things of beauty), and as he suggests the narrow village bridge of the small village of Balian to be just as wondrous as the great architectural feats of Charles De Gaulle Airport, so does Tahimik demonstrate that his little film is more pleasurably infectious and moving than many an grand American motion picture—and at a far smaller cost!

      Our hero, performed by Kidlat himself, is a naïve lover of the new, an admirer of everything his economically backward community has no opportunity to offer. Born in the 1942 Occupation of the Philippines, the character Kidlat has spent his 33 years in “a cocoon of American dreams.” Working as a jitney driver in his primitive village, he presides over a small group of young boys and girls as head of the Werner Von Braun fan club, listens nearly every day of his life to The Voice of America on radio, and dreams of visiting Cape Canaveral and witnessing the wonders of American and European technology.                     

     Wise elders attempt to warn him against his absurd idolatry, and his mother even recounts how his father died, in a furious reaction (mythically described as the breath of a typhoon) when, after fighting against the Spanish colonists, he is locked out of Manila by American soldiers. Yet Kidlat remains unconvinced. Why would anybody prefer the old over the new, and how can anyone not recognize that the new is encapsulated by the US?

     At the same time, however, the film slowly builds up a series of images of daily life in Balian that convinces us that these simple people are living, in many respects, a life richer and clearly more satisfying than many of us in the Western world. Sacred white caribous stare down at the natives; a patron saint, carried to the cathedral each morning, protects his community from evil; a rather painful-to-watch mass circumcision deep in the woods, welcomes the young boys into manhood. The beautifully decorated jitneys transport ice, statues, beauty queens, animals, and the citizens of Balaian through the town and across its single bridge in grand style. An old man with a mythical butterfly tattooed across his chest, weaves sturdy bamboo houses that stand up to the most violent of storms, and tells wonderful tales, including his personal myth that when the sleeping typhoon wakes up, it releases the butterflies to new life.

      All of these images, moreover, are accompanied by a lush score composed of sounds, words, songs, and native music that utterly enlivens the narrative.

      Even a rich American visits Kidlat’s small village, disguised, outrageously as a boy scout leader who fails in his demand that he, who is willing to pay money to the organization, be designated as the head of the local troop, reiterating what we all know, that the US perceives itself as the leader of everything, no matter how large or small.

     The American in this fable, stomps out—wades out might be a better description—of this meeting to flag down Kidlat’s jitney to take him to Manila. In the director’s gentle satire, the locals get their revenge as the jitney fills up with villagers and their animals, forcing the indignant would-be “leader” to sit atop the suitcases trailing behind.

 

   Yet he takes a liking to Kidlat, promising to bring him and his jitney with him when he returns to his castle in Paris. Suddenly the whole village is buzzing with news of the event. Kidlat gets his picture taken for his passport (posing with a charming smile that expresses the joyfulness he will leave behind) and a celebration of their soon-to-be wayfarer—replete with marching bands, dancing children, and beauty queens—is organized. One of the few people of Balian ever to imagine flying on an airplane, Kidlat is suddenly the town hero.

     His first views of the West are just as he might have imagined, awed as he is by walkways that move people forward without their walking, doors that open automatically, and bridges, bridges everywhere he looks! Just as the director had created a kind of travelogue in the Philippines countryside, so now does he continue to film Paris: only the Paris he shows us, from Kidlat’s perspective, is quite the opposite of what we know as the stately tourist city. Everywhere he goes, things are crumbling; rooms are over-jammed with junk; buildings are scaffolded, with pylons jutting up like ugly eyesores which block out the view of the great cathedrals and even the Eiffel Tower. The American, it turns out, is chewing-gum magnate, and immediately puts Kidlat to work filling his ugly gum dispensers placed at tourist destinations (including cemeteries) throughout the city. Kidlat’s Paris, in short, is the polar opposite of the glamorous city of lights depicted in most films.

     In his off hours, the likeable Kidlat seeks out the friendship, just as he had back in Balian, of local workers, learning snippets of French and befriending these figures by transporting them about the city in his jitney. He becomes particularly close with an egg seller (each egg containing two yolks) named Lola. Lola and her compatriots work at small carts parked by a mammoth new building project, a supermarket which is also soon to be fitted with several enormous plastic chimneys, that is also gradually eating up the space of the fresh-food vendors. Lola tells him of a dream in which she has been forced to close her stand.

      Finally, Kidlat begins to ask a few questions he has failed to perceive back in his unbeknownst Eden of Balaian. Why displace the beautiful produce of these simple vendors with lower quality foods sold in a vast department store? If the old chimney’s work, why replace them with a chimney big enough for 6 people to live in?   

     Yet Kidlat is still trapped in his “perfumed nightmare,” and granted a several-day vacation, he heads off to Germany to visit the home of his beloved Wernher von Braun.* There he discovers the community about to celebrate a festival for which they each year they build, by hand, an onion-shaped dome. The workers complain, however, that this may be their last year, since factories are now making the same domes out of plastic. Kidlat still cannot comprehend what he sees as their sentimentality: why would they prefer the old to the new?

    During the celebration a pregnant woman he has met in the town suddenly goes into labor, and Kidlat saves they day by taking her to the hospital in his still-elegant jitney. Driving back to Paris, he feels almost as if the newly-born child, who the woman has named Kidlat in honor of her savior, looks somewhat like him.

     In Paris, he discovers that Lola in no longer among the remaining vendors. The American, knowing that the nearby chimneys will soon be belching their smoke in the direction of his castle, announces that he has sold his chewing-gum enterprise, and is planning to return to the US where he has purchased a company which manufactures blue jeans, the logical next step—so he declares—in his rise to become a munitions and tank manufacturer for the US military. Once more, he promises to take Kidlat with him, suggesting he’ll be the first of his kind to fly on the Concorde.

     Before the two leave, however, this “ugly American” plans one final celebration, inviting some of the world’s leaders, who have come to Paris for a conference, to his castle.

     This is a handmade film, one must remember, with no budget for actors with makeup and costumes which might allow them to resemble those dignitaries. Kidlat presents the entire affair somewhat like a masked pageant of old, as each figure arrives decked out in archaic clothing one might expect to find in a film studio storeroom, a handmade mask representing distorted depictions of the celebrities hiding their faces.

     Introduced to these grotesque figures, the normally amicable Kidlat becomes terror-stricken, suddenly feeling that he, like Alice in Wonderland, is growing smaller and smaller by the moment. In reaction to his feelings, Kidlat, like his father before him, suddenly begins to blow up a typhoon, leveling all those before him and destroying the American’s castle. With seemingly nowhere to go, he escapes into one of the giant chimneys, closes it tightly, and flies off in what now resembles a Martian space ship, back to Balian.

      The following credits are presented on a series of letters and postcards, each of them bearing a stamp from a small country that features one of the US space ships, the last of them, a Philippines stamp depicting the chimney in which Kidlat has returned, proving the assertion as he has repeated throughout the film, “I choose my vehicle, and I can cross any bridge.”

     And so too does Kidlat Tahimik prove that he can create a stunningly profound film by his own means, without the help of wealthy financers.

     This is surely one of the gems of the healthy cinema in Philippine culture, and remains one of my personal favorites.

 

*Ex-Nazi aerospace engineer and rocket architect, Wernher von Braun was brought to the US after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip, to work with the US Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program. He helped to develop rockets that launched the United States’ first space satellite Exmpore 1 in 1958. Soon after, he worked with Walt Disney of a series of short films that helped popularize his ideas of space travel from 1955 to 1957. He became a hero in the late 1950s and early 60s, particularly when the Soviet Union began to enter the “space race.” Even I as a child wrote, and received local awards, for delivering a Junior High School speech on “Space, Man’s New Frontier.” In 1975, Wernher Maganust Maximiliam Freiherr von Braun received the National Medal of Science for his role of performing as “the father of rocket science” and the lunar program. He also argued to a human mission to Mars.

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2016).