evening welcome to a fish bowl of popcorn i marilyn campbell's the moderator for today's show and will be our usual panelists bob brown janet her and cara welsh tonight we're going to be discussing two films both of them were kind of unusual in narrative one was one of the foreign film nominees for best foreign film he sort of a performance artist poet videographer and this is very typical of her work and has gotten great reviews so let's start off with the plot summary that the fans and bobby's going to do embrace of the serpent right since i just thought about an hour ago as you said marilyn this is a film from columbia in fact i understand it's the only colombian film that was ever nominated for an academy amazon the first was in the early part of the twentieth century a german explorer who was looking for a particular kind of who sit in janick plant among other things and also recording everything he saw a drip made drawings and he of that's right that's right and he's very sick and his companion who is be friended him another indigenous person brings him to the only show him on that is known to be able to cure whatever he's got and the is a little suspicious but he decides to join them and you'll see flashforwards to what's purported to be an explorer forty years later who is traveling the same route and encounters  showman forty years older who claims that he somehow forgotten all of his indigenous lore and knowledge and together they are both looking for that elusive plant we don't find out until later in the film what the second explores real project is but he too is a german apparently i know we don't go there again well he's american but what he says in the film is notes for previous german explorer so he speaks german he speaks spanish you speak whatever need language you need to mean there's so many languages in this but it's a very dreamy film it's based on trying to  show how western invasion into that area has destroyed cultures and at the same time shows how these cultures have somehow impacted western thinking or should i suppose there's an agenda film clips obviously but she it's it's an extended meditation about loss and she talks about the loss of her dog first of all lola belle was this cute little and she talks a lot about her dog but she also talks about the death of her father she talks about nine eleven she doesn't so much talk about the death of her husband but you can just feel that that sort of so fuse lou reed who who was her husband who passed away a few years ago he learned her pain he appears very briefly in the movie playing a doctor i think playing a bad doctor who tells her she's never going to walk again and then at the end he says there's footage of him with the dog with lolo belle and there's a song of his planning so it's a it's an interesting film it's not a traditional film no certainly not because actually he appears in win a little league fan well we'll have to see it again so that it's very much in the vein of her performances you've you've never seen a performance by her she has projections and dream is very much a part of how she present things you there are a common entre of hers into well pieces well i had a dream yes and then it goes into what that dream is and indeed the first scene of the movie for lack of a better word with back projections and videos that she does so this film is is in a way it's sort of a new not live action you know laurie anderson performance a nd i think besides being about dreams it's also more than her usual stuff about memories about memories of her childhood about memories of her dog and about losing your memory which i think makes a connection to embrace of the serpent because embrace of the serpent is also about indigenous memory because they don't have a written language in this remote part of the amazon  carries the history and and knowledge of the community it's people's memories and how that is threatened by bringing in written language and is the last of his troth he understands he's the last to strive he has no one to impart his knowledge to and in the later in the scenes where he's older because he appears in reading an interview with the director whose name is ciro guera the director of embrace of a serpent and he said that he hired all these nonprofessionals to be the people in the film there were among them nine languages and he thought he would have a lot of trouble getting them to act getting them to act period but he didn't and the reason he didn't was because he found them to be exquisitely listeners listening is such was such a huge part of this culture and the telling of a story and so he would phrase things in that way and they would pick it up very quickly and laurie anderson i think also focuses on telling a story teller what it is to tell a story and how it and then you lose it and it drips in and out of you so there is that connection as well and in the case of embrace of the serpent he the director was very worried that this is the end of this culture and he was going to tell the story in a way fascinated and profoundly interested in the plant and that plants are of ultimate importance to these tribes to these natives yet so they are finding finally two men separated by many many years who at least share that with them at least except that i think it was very interesting that they're in the second journey because the first journey never gets to the place where the planned her right they they are forced to turn back before they get to that area but in but in the second film and the second journey they find the plant growing but it's called the vague because the natives have learned that there's a market for it that they  it to peruvians who are very bad and he says that's absolutely not the culture that you don't cultivate it you find it and that the finding the finding of the story as you say janet their discovery of the story means you have to leave all things all things behind you so you have to walk into the jungle and you have to follow the soul of the plant so the idea of which is very interesting is coat or agriculture but back a long way but in these people who lived in the jungle it's not cultivating it's living with the play also letting the plants find you rather than your find  just they're just getting you drunk or just getting hot yeah and that's that he finds that shamash aman finds that the pour the relationship of the sherman to plants extends to the making of the film also i just remembered this too that when the director proposed coing into the amazon jungle and filming to a sherman sherman said let me have a night alone with the forest so i can find out and so he spent the night alone talking to the forest would he be ok unlike the furnace hertzog completely decimated everything he comes into contact with at the end of his night with the forest he said it would be ok there would not be raff there would not be anger from the forest too and you know how cognizant they were of cycles like didn't they say no eating no fishing on trial a certain right it might be like to live in the jungle you know way from what we call civilization without lights with you know it's a dark place that we would find very scary but if you're a native person this is your way of yes scenes where they show people who have been forced to harvest forever rubber in the forest for white entrepreneurs and are terribly terribly abused but also speaking of another  amazonian film the mission by roman jet was a time jet and i didn't see it that has jeremy irons oh yeah about the religious people going into the forest and wanting to eradicate the native then based on sort of christian myth but they were all perverted but i think again the sense of that acted on what i understand is that the the jungle the forest is such a spiritual place that if you strip it of that spirituality by plundering and and all of these other things that the white plunderers do you leave a vacuum and into that vacuum did act in that way that seemed like the message of the message was more important than the story it seemed to me that that was a very gentle way drawn out even though there were horrible horrible scenes but the but the lessons very pinpoint already talked about dreams and i think that's very important but i also we should mention i i think i mentioned so slightly in the part that narratively it's a little different because the first period and second are these things are just imposed in ways certainly a lot of of scenes begin with you're just seeing a panel going through the water and the canoe and nothing nothing around  were very very like so let's turn back a little to what the content of worried anderson is film and perhaps what messages there are there are there are no messages it's just a personal oh i don't know they're on the passage i definitely think it's about loss it's about death of life and figuring out where what your place is and what what the purpose of art is actually underneath it all there's a lot dead so the person understands that they are in the next forty nine day transition in which they will then go into another phase of their life right to life to come so you can very much get that kind of t yeah rather than though i think that this is also not not necessarily always about gentle deaths but also things that are more traumatic because there is one to me very striking sequence where she talks starts talking about after nine eleven she left her apartment in lower manhattan and went to california right to didn't expect it and that little bell was responsible not only for everything around her but everything above as well yes yes and she sniffed around in the grass but suddenly that's not the only dimension there's another dimension o more things to worry about in this world that we visit strange connection to that there's a book by i think it's e b white called this is new york that was written in thirty four days for the employee and in a passage later in that little short novella if you want to look at new york there's a speculation about planes flying into the empire state building what will happen if yeah and it's eerie to read that in light of what happens many decades  i'm amazing to me it was another scene where she talks about making a foolish dive into a swimming pool when she was young and falling right on the edge of the pool instead of in the pool and breaking her back right wish led to her being in hospital for many months in a unit that also included children who had been badly burned right every i guess the pediatric intensive care unit that she resigned and how her memory tricked her because she didn't remember how horrible it wasn't till much later that she suppressed yeah i mean she's talking there about the limitations of story and she's talking about how she's told the story many times about her being in the hospital but she sort of edited out that part the horror of listening to these children scream in their in their death and it was sort of interesting for  storyteller who who is so dependent or this is what she does she tell stories to point out that sometimes stories have limitations and sometimes telling i think she says more and told the story the more false a guy in some way took some of the horror out  i think it was a case of zip that memory every time you were called something it changes a little bit until the further away you are from it the further away you want to think what actually happened and it struck me that perhaps that this had where she said her mother was dying and she i was trying to feel sad because she didn't have a great relationship with my mother she came from a very large family and she was like a middle c right and and her mother was fairly busy with a large family and and never really you know his his love for her his intense love for her comes through his song oh yes absolutely just he just adored her i mean this was the love of his life and that's how i knew or guess what series so it's so through when i sort of was it disappeared and going to this movie i thought oh you know it's really about the death of her dog while she talked about the death of lou reed you know i mean she maybe she had difficulty with them but by the end i convinced that the reason she wasn't explicitly talking about him was because it was too painful well you know but also there's the eyes you know about really a lot of this you know of lol about as you say i mean there's kind of ghost images of him throughout it it's really  the film is about that love affair i think it and somehow that's even more powerful as a touchstone for the morial than anything else is not to say what's the most obvious but we just have a couple of minutes left in our show so just quickly go around and say thumbs up thumbs down starting with bob well i love laurie anderson anything she does by and i love this and i downloaded the complete score you can get it as a non film is an oral thing ok the entire film but without the images the serpent film very evocative i thought it was a little longer than it might have been but but i wish that i were an artist because i don't feel i could appreciate it i mean i think she has you have to see it again she's so lucky that it was such a good artist in so many did that i think i think a lot of where i feel about her art is that you really don't get that first feeling  and try to catch these films if they're streaming or if they're in a theater here and thanks for joining us and it's full of popcorn