Mary Poppins having tea with Walt Disney.

 

Tuinpark Sloterdijkermeer

This was such a beautiful walk in a park that I have to save it here for posterity. A friend has introduced me to a place that is now at the edge of town but originally it was actually out of town (in 1936) and organised as a free park area for Amsterdamers who wanted some peace and quiet that would be easily reachable with bicycle. So there is a whole beautiful Westerpark that eventually continues into another zone, perfectly organised and neat little New York of garden parcels where everybody has a little cottage, garden and some quiet corner. It is very unassuming and simple, very very basic and everybody invests just as much energy and time as they can or as they need - there is nothing fancy here and this is no competition, in fact once you enter the "park" area it is not possible to drive the cars here, the roads are permitted only for the bicycle. If I understand correctly, there are actually two sections: Tuinpark Sloterdijkermeer and Tuinpark Nut & Groeten that kind of merge one into another, but to a visitor like me they look very much alike. 

Miraculously, as the city grew, this "garden area" survived protected, probably because citizens of Amsterdam refused to give up on the idea of having a little quiet zone still relatively close to them. Where in other countries (like my homeland, for example) weekend houses are usually some distance from city and demand car transportation, this garden zone can be easily reached by public transport or simply a bike - come weekend, you can just ride here and spend the day (or weekend) taking care of your little plot and return home in the evening. I had a beautiful, peaceful walk trough a park and everybody was behaving very nice, there was absolutely no noise (forbidden!), people were sunbathing in their gardens, I saw several solar panels and it was just magic. And this was still a relatively cold, early Spring day so surely it looks even more magic later in the Summer! Can't wait to visit it again! 

Yasujirō Ozu

 

Luckily for me, I live in a cultured city with a lots of little art cinemas and right now they were showing a mini retrospective of a famous Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu - who is very highly praised by film critics but nowhere near known as Akira Kurosawa in my opinion. It might be that he is one of those cult figures known to his fans and followers. A friend was pointing me at his direction for a longest time and I did watch "Late Spring" (1949) but it was strange experience - this way of film making is so different than anything in the West that I wasn't sure what to think of it. It is like entering a completely new world with its own rules and aesthetic, definitely an acquired taste. However, Ozu kept lingering somewhere at the back of my mind so I welcomed this retrospective and two days in a row walked after work to a local little art cinema to watch these movies.

"Early Spring" (1956) was like typical Ozu movie incredibly slow. I mean, dead slow. The man had a style where everything important was happening outside of the camera and we are only casually told that something happened elsewhere. For example, a typical Ozu dialogue goes like this: 

"Would you like a cup of Tea?" 

"Yes, I would like a cup of Tea"

"Here is your cup of Tea"

"Thank you'

It is difficult to describe exactly what is the story of this movie because there is no main story - we follow several intertwined lives of individuals working for big corporate company and how they all slowly come to realise this is their life and their destiny, to be a little wheel in a grinding mechanism that will eventually replace them one day. Ryō Ikebe lives in a cold, loveless marriage with Chikage Awashima - later we find out what happened - and out of sheer emptiness has affair with a work colleague (radiant Keiko Kishi) all the while as we are introduced to people who are around him. Even though the story as such is basically non-existent and Ozu is more concerned about impressionistic outline of his character's feelings, something very beautiful happens along the way and suddenly I found myself truly caring about them and being indeed very moved by it all. It was truly like a magic - once you get caught up in his style and slow-burning story, suddenly it feels just right and you actually enjoy it. It have actually left the cinema all dazed and it stayed with me for a long time.

"Tokyo Story" (1953) has a gigantic reputation as one fo the best movies of all time (if not THE best) and according to critics it enjoys totemic place in the history - actually I would not say that is any better than two previous movies I have seen by Ozu. Each of them is like some beautiful dream that is slowly unfolding (very, very slowly) and perhaps the only reason why "Tokyo Story" resonates so much with audiences across the time and place is because it touches a nerve common to everybody, namely the question of parents getting older and children living their lives. Where ""Late Spring" dealt with arranged marriage of unwed spinster and "Early Spring" with adulterous affair, "Tokyo Story" is about the passage of time and how we all find our places in life - parents get old, children grow up and must live their lives. Its interesting to recognise the actors that Ozu preferred for his movies - it is only my third Ozu movie but I can tell he loves the very much the same team, including wonderful Setsuko Hara and Haruko Sugimura. Again, it was very slow but at this point I kinda knew what to expect so didn't really mind, this was his style. These movies are not for everybody and it might be that viewer must be in particular frame of mind in order to enjoy them - if you are looking for lots of action, this is definitely not for you - this is more philosophic reflection on life and very stylish cinema that gets under your skin. Be warned, the other "entertaining" movies might look very banal after this. 

"The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper" by Hallie Rubenhold

I really don't know what was I thinking - probably because for such a long time we took Jack the Ripper story as some exciting thriller and unsolved crime story, we became kind of conditioned to approach it as entertainment: historian Hallie Rubenhold took completely new and fresh approach, where she completely skipped killer himself and focused exclusively on the victims, trying to explain who they were, giving them names and explaining their background."They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs. The courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age, and yet were so singular in the way they ended."  For Rubenhold the identity of the murderer and all the grisly details are not important - they were excessively covered in many other places previously and we know too well how the mutilated bodies looked like when they were found - she decidedly focuses on lives not the deaths of five victims and tries to explain what was the reality of life in Victorian London. 

Perhaps this book could not have been written earlier - it took a writer with modern sensibilities to look closer at the identity of victims and see them as a real human beings and not just crime statistics. Each of them was somebody's child, wife, lover and even (in some cases) mother. You can almost feel the tears of rage when Rubenhold discusses that they were probably not even prostitutes but homeless women - the fact that for some reason means a lot to her but does not change anything - what comes out very vividly is description of poverty and homelessness on the streets of London at the time. It is extremely detailed and often exhausting story - we learn a lot of ugly facts - each of these women starts relatively fine and than sinks in despair of poverty, alcoholism, homelessness, etc - I must be honest and admit that halfway trough the book it became quite repetitious and bleak. Kudos to Rubenhold for not trying to whitewash anything - she might have sympathise with these unfortunate women but she still gives pretty clear-eyed description of how self-destructive they were.

It was bleak and gloomy read. It could have not been otherwise, being about homeless and desperately poor alcoholics. These women were basically victims from the start but as Rubenhold points, there always was way out - marriage, service job, any job, moving to another town, etc - unfortunately many of them succumbed to alcohol addiction and ended up in a gutter. I read this with a knot in my stomach and now need something completely different, something entertaining.