Aconitum-Napellus

Route 66. Incident On A Bridge. Part 4 of

1. Dvorovoi regains consciousness on the belt and, when Tod stops it, leaps from it onto a pile of gravel. It seems as if he has no fear.

2. Now he’s angered, it seems, while Buz is on the receiving end of the other man’s violence. He picks up a wrench and goes after the fighting men. He throws Tod off as if he’s a fly. Gorilla or intellectual? Perhaps the two can co-exist.

3. It takes both Buz and Tod to hold him. (Buz is pleasingly grubby.) But he’s told by Volovich that he’s through at the gravel works. ‘You’re through. You’re evil.’

4. He looks stunned. He’s just as ineloquent as before, grunting rather than speaking, mouth gaping open.

5. ‘I’ll take care of him, with a pitchfork,’ the other man (Orlov) says. Of course Tod and Buz – and we – assume he means violently. It has overtones of lynch mobs. But no, it’s a custom, to put a pitchfork in the fence of the house.

‘Why should I tell them anything? Who are they?’ Orlov asks when Volovich tells him to explain. It’s very much us and them, their customs, their community, as something alien to Tod and Buz.

‘In the old country a dvorovoi is an evil spirit,’ Volovich tells them. ‘It comes from nowhere, like this one I send away now, and it brings the dark with it, and the evil.’ You put a pitchfork in the fence to keep the evil spirit out.

‘I don’t believe any of that stuff, see,’ Orlov tells them. His accent is conspicuously American. ‘But I’ll do it anyway, just to show the neighbourhood that I got rid of him.’ But if Dvorovoi comes back after that, Orlov threatens to get rid of him ‘my way.’ Presumably the violent way, rather than sticking safely to custom and ritual.

6. ‘Listening to Volovich and Orlov, I felt that something had torn loose,’ Tod muses in voice-over. ‘Something no longer planned. Something already out of control, pulling all of us towards some unspeakable and savage end. I wonder what would have happened if Buz and I had left right then and there. I wonder if things might have been any different if we hadn’t stayed.’

Is this about culture clash – about problems that are unleashed when two cultures rub up against each other like plates on the earth’s crust? Would everything be all right if it weren’t for the interference of outsiders? It’s an interesting possibility – that Tod and Buz are not the helpers this episode, but the agitators.

7. As Tod speaks in voice-over, Dvorovoi walks a lonely path out of the yard…

8. The gravel yards blend into something very obviously foreign – a Russian church, it seems, as Dvorovoi walks up to Russian Hill. It’s up to Tod to imagine what might have been going on in Dvorovoi’s mind – but even he doesn’t give voice to it. There are two kinds of muteness in this episode.

9. ‘People in the neighbourhood who saw him that morning, going in to pack, going in to get his few things and his one suitcase, told the others later on that he walked like a dead man,’ Tod’s voice-over tells us. It’s so clearly a ‘foreign’ neighbourhood in the middle of an American city. Everyone is Russian here.

10. Lois Smith, who always carries with her an undefinable beauty. What a beautiful shot this is. She moves with an ungainly grace. Inside the house, in the half-light, half-dark, shadowed in the stairwell.

katie-kalahan:

Julie Chen, Panorama

“Panorama explores the issue of climate change from an artist’s perspective, simultaneously expressing hope and helplessness in the face of this growing crisis. Opening to a full width of 5 feet, Panorama engulfs the reader/viewer in an experience both moving and surprising with large format pop-ups and interactive folded sections that interlace personal thought with aspects of a more universal reality. The edition of 100 copies was printed letterpress on a variety of papers using photopolymer plates.”

(via iggypoptarts)

(Source: eviscerateyoungcaptain, via closertodanger-fartherfromharm)

martytodpete:

aconitum-napellus:

Route 66. Incident On A Bridge. Part 1 of

1. What a beautiful bridge to start with. But this is not the bridge. This is not the gritty central point of this Cleveland tale…

2. This is the bridge. Much more menacing and imposing and powerful. An opening bridge that lets boats up the river and trains across. As the central section lowers down there’s something menacing about it, as if it is a weight lowering to crush what lies beneath.

3. Here are our boys, rather beautifully shot by a gradually approaching camera that must be mounted on the rails. The intro music gives way to jazz on a record player – an odd and rather incongruous thing in this bleak and cold setting.

4. I just like this. The record player on the ground, and all the feet.

5. ‘Almost worn clean through,’ the detective says of the record.

‘It was the only one she had,’ Buz tells him. He looks right holding a record.

6. Tod’s looking rather nice too, especially with Gormless there next to him. He does have a spot on his coat, though, but this is the end of an Event, we can tell, so we can forgive him the spot. This is one of those retrospective episodes. The plot’s already happened. We’ve caught the tail end, and soon were going to be sent on a journey back through time. Something momentous and odd has happened. ‘She’ carried the record player way up to the top of the bridge. It’s the kind of poetic mystery only Route 66 can explain.

7. They’re both looking chilly. The detective’s asking them why she carried the record player up to the top of the bridge when she was trying to get away from someone. They tell him they don’t know, but it’s obvious there’s more to it.

8. Buz has a withering look when the detective asks him if he knows why. Buz is cagey, Tod is defensive. The detective’s not stupid, and knows there’s more to it.

9. Not only is Tod pretty here, but you’d never guess there was a policeman entirely hidden behind him.

10. See?

Tod is nicely poetic about it. ‘I thought about Jack and the Beanstalk. I thought maybe he just took her with him and they climbed up that ladder and they kept climbing till they vanished into thin air.’

‘I’ll try that theory on the commissioner,’ the cynical detective replies. Poor guy. He didn’t bargain for poetics.

Buz is more pragmatic. ‘They’re gone, aren’t they? And that’s all that’s left?’

This is an amazing episode.I wish I felt better to comment more..;-( But thank you for the lovely Milner caps!

I try to get him looking pretty when I can :-)

martytodpete:

slave2744:

martytodpete:

aconitum-napellus:

Route 66. Incident On A Bridge. Part 2 of

1. Look at that railway stretching off into the distance through the dark cage of the bridge (and the slight Buz-lookalike guy on the left. At least, lookalike from behind.)

2. I’m sorry, but they’re just pretty here. The detective thinks it’s a clear cut murder-suicide case, If course it isn’t. This is Route 66.

3. Buz is in withering mode when the detective finds out how short a time Tod and Buz knew the man and the girl for. ‘Look, you can’t measure everything with a clock or a calendar,’ Buz says. ‘Either you dig it, or you don’t, Lieutenant.’

The Lieutenant tells him to not play cute, but Buz can’t help being cute. I’m not sure why he’s being so antagonistic, to be honest, unless it’s just because he’s a cynical cop.

4. Tod can’t help being cute either. Tod doesn’t believe that the girl, Anna, or the man, Dvorovoi, are dead. (What a mellifluous name.)

5. End of scene. The railway stretches away forever. Possibilities are endless.

6. Cue the flashback! They even do the wavy camera thing as the car rolls in along a street far below the camera.

And look at that! It’s industry, industry, industry. This must have been a era that made America proud.

‘We came to Cleveland last Thursday,’ Tod says in voice-over, ‘over the central viaduct, the flats below and around us. Every kind of industry you can think of, all going full blast. It made me feel small, somehow – and I said so to Buz.’

7. Buz, of course, has a differing opinion – which is what makes their relationship so great. They get along without always having the same point of view, widening each other’s minds. (I’ve just come off the back of all the Tod/Linc episodes, where this agreeing to disagree is never so harmonious or beneficial.)

‘The more we travel around, the further away the horizon looks and the taller the buildings seem,’ Tod opines.

‘It’s just the opposite,’ Buz says, always one more for internal personal growth than external wonder. ‘The more we travel around, the bigger we get. Sooner or later, if we keep rolling like this, we’ll be giants, because you’ve gotta match the scene.’

Tod humours him with a little laugh (in a nice way). Best of friends. Buz is suddenly reminding me, with his philosophical bent, of Chris from Nothern Exposure.

8. All of Cleveland is industry and bridges, it seems. A great place built on steel, built on building things. What optimism there is in a place like this.

9. Look at that. The almost-natural against the angular skyline, the gravel heap that resembles a mountain, swamping a telegraph pole like a natural force. The earth comes together with human hands and machinery and builds great things. (Sorry if I’m getting carried away with this. But what a bright and optimistic place America still seems to be at this time. What sadness and disillusionment must have come later.)

10. This is where they first meet Mr Volovich (Muni Seroff), Anna’s father. He seems amazed that these two guys are the ones who have come for the job. ‘This is job for gorillas,’ he says. But he seems genial enough, offering them lodgings at his boarding house and accepting that they are crazy enough to want the job. But we’re already establishing that this episode is about human nature and animal nature, brute force and intellect, basic needs and philosophical thinking. It’s about how all those things can be put together in one person, and perhaps you see a gorilla and miss the thinker beneath, as with Dvorovoi, or see a thinker and miss the gorilla, as with Tod and Buz.

Love the photography on Route 66.I’m also glad they went to so many places and made the locations the focal point.I’d venture a guess and say 99% of all the locations are gone.Route 66 will help us remember it all.*I wish my copies were as great as these dvds…

Heh—-interesting you should happen to mention this, Diana….I’ve realized that one episode of Route 66 (I think the title is “Of Walnuts and Wine” or something close to that) was filmed in Oregon City, Oregon, which is only 6 miles away from my home here.  I can personally tell you that almost all the landmarks/buildings used in that ep are still standing: The OC-West Linn bridge, the OC municipal elevator and the buildings on that block, the paper plant that serves as the place they worked, even the house the boys stayed in, and probably some other places too, as I’ve never seen the episode but have seen some screencaps from it. I was thinkin’ that when I get to the point in the series when I view that ep that it could be fun to hit you up to take some screencaps of some of the above settings and I can take color pics of same to show how they’ve changed (or not). It could also be cool to take those B/W caps, print them out as 8x10s and hold them up against the exact locations today and take pictures of those. :) 

That would be so awesome.So glad to hear there are some places ‘progress’ hasn’t destroyed! I have crappy copies of Route 66 so my caps wouldn’t work well.Maybe Anna could do them for you in the future.I would love to see how the locations look now. ;-)

Yes, that would be awesome to see!! I suppose some things have gone and some stayed. It’s life, really.