This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
The month after I started Jonathan's Coffeeblog, I was curious about the process of starting a blog using the Blogger website. I gave my exploratory blog the title "Curious" with the username (changed later) of "curiousyellow," which I made up on the moment, suddenly recalling the 1967 Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow). Since then, curiousyellow has been my username on many social websites, including Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Seesmic. Recently I decided to see the movie again to see if my opinion of it had changed. It has changed.
The film, directed by Vilgot Sjöman, who died last year, concerned the problems of a young woman barely in her twenties, played by Lena Nyman, as a character of the same name. To make three long stories short: 1. The movie was all about Lena's problems during the run-up to the 1968 world political cataclysm; 2. There was much explicit sexual intercourse in the film, guaranteeing its notoriety in the USA; and 3. Sjöman's postmodernesque and proto-hypertextual structuring of the film also guaranteed mass confusion among disappointed US viewers, my young self included. I came to see sex scenes so allegedly outrageous that the film was banned in Massachusetts (yes, that Massachusetts!), and saw nothing of the kind.
I remember the conventional wisdom of the time: the movie was long and boring, Lena Nyman was no Marilyn Monroe, and the sex was not sexy. Looking back forty years, I have to say that all of the above was true, but irrelevant. Curious (Yellow) was and is quite an interesting film.
The length and pace of the film had a lot to do with Sjöman's post-Hollywood style, which I will address in a moment. Lena Nyman was very cute, appeared underage, and her sexual adventures in the film appeared to be the product of sadness, frustration, desperation and unrequited love, not the lewdness one yearned for. Disappointed and outraged by a missing mother, a zhlob of a father, and a sleazebag boyfriend, Lena (the character) was a very confused, and in my mind, sympathetic young lady. If Americans had not been suffering under the yoke of Comstockery (the legacy of Anthony Comstock from 1873), the preposterous banning of the film would never have happened, and the film would have been a mere unmentioned flop in the US market.
Two real-life characters played cameo roles in Curious (Yellow), the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Russian poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, author of the politically incorrect poem Babi Yar, and who now (2007) teaches in Oklahoma and New York. Both were icons of the political earthquake rumbling at the time the film was made.
Another theme running through the film was the Spanish Civil war, in which Spain's Republicans fought desperately against the dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who was backed by the National Socialists of the Third Reich. In the film, Lena's father had gone to Spain to fight Franco, then changed his mind and came home. For this apparent cowardice, Lena never forgave him.
I call the structure of the film "hypertextual" because at many different points it branches off into a variety of topical subjects. Sjöman, in fact, made two versions of the film, Yellow and Blue, named after the colors of the flag of Sweden. (I haven't see Blue yet, but it's on order. It's said to be, not a sequel or prequel, but a restructuring of the same film footage used to make Yellow.) If Curious (Yellow) and (Blue) were in the public domain, it would make a great Internet phenomenon with a variety of texts and images coordinating the links to the various film clips, perhaps posted to YouTube or elsewhere. Of course, in 1967, hypertext was virtually unknown, although Ted Nelson had coined the term two years earlier.
When I call Sjöman's film "postmodernesque" I am referring to its self-referential and paradoxical qualities. It could be called a political film, and is, but Sjöman is no Michael Moore. He is subtle, intellectual, creative, and reflective. It could just as easily, today, be called a psychological study of a young woman, or even a "chick flick," if Lena were not the only "chick" of consequence in the film. Sjöman put himself in the film, as Fellini had done, in the role of the director of the very film one was viewing, and as a lover of Lena, who, like all of her significant others, also abandons her. At any point in the film (example: Lena interviews the King of Sweden) what occurs on the screen, sex included, could be part of the narrative, or more likely, a fantasy in Lena's head.
As for the real-life Lena Nyman, her acting career in Swedish films and TV is still going on, and in 1978 she co-starred with Liv Ullman in Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata. As for my blog, Curious, I changed it to a photoblog, leaving the original posts intact, but I have not posted to it for years.
Every page now has Seesmic/Disqus video commenting. Scroll to the bottom to see or post video comments. There are also Haloscan comments at the end of each separate blogpost article. To read a text-only version of Jonathan's Coffeeblog on your iPhone or other mobile phone, click here. Or to see the graphics with less text, click here.
