there :>)

hope people can donate a ruble, sou or dollar or two, tanx!

also links to http://poncer.blogspot.com/ whose catch cry: The mass of bloggers lead lives of quiet respiration. made me smile...

TS wrote:

The Reality of Flowers

Modern movies are so different from the 1940s/1950s movies. Just watched the 1950 film “The Flowers of St. Francis” (hat tip to Ham of Bone). A lot of people tend to think one age is the same as another, proclaiming there was no “golden age of piety“ but you can’t help but get a sense of how different our time is by watching The Flowers of St. Francis and considering how unlikely something like that would be produced now by someone of the talent of Roberto Rossellini.

Roberto's daughter Isabella (isn't it fun to say 'Isabella', drawing out the syllables Italian style?) says that her father and Italian filmmaker Fellini were at one time close but disagreed profoundly concerning art. Fellini was of course a surrealist and Rossellini a realist and Rossellini thought that fantasy was narcissistic in the protrayal of what you imagine only you have could've thought up. Rossellini, by contrast, wanted to portray what the bulk of humanity was thinking. (I recall writing letters to my grandmother a few years ago and how it eventually dawned on me that I was narcissistically writing for myself, not her, by the use of obscure words and engaging in poetical flights of fancy. She liked to get letters and I liked to write so it seemed like a fine match, but it was only when I started writing more prosaic letters that I think she really appreciated them.)

Isabella said that The Flowers of St. Francis was as close to Fellini's style as her father could could come since there is something very fantastic about St. Francis. That would be God, who is Reality, but who so transcends our limited thinking.

I also watched this movie two weeks ago, and found it very quaint but inspirational in an olde worldy way. Madness, mysticism and mankind enjoy a strange symbiotic relationship....