Time passes differently here (Microcosmos, 1996)

Time passes differently here (Inspired by Microcosmos)

a wasp polishes its face 

a praying mantis washes its leg 

bees wipe stingers and wings

searching for nectar in poppies

at a water hole

ants feed  

pull seedpods

until a quail pecks

with beak stamps and cracks

in a hive wasps feed larvae

armored beetles roll dirt boulders up hills

water bugs dance

with mirrored images

spiders lay eggs

in underwater nests

filled with their own air

two snails kiss

beetles attack

their red claws reaching out

Sumo wrestlers

until the clash ends

The night gives way once more.

a tall insect emerges  

shadows doubling its size

praying monk 

Kabuki dancer

fly away with a hum

Is Water a Right?: The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Environmental Law

The “big guys” versus “little guys” dichotomy found in a variety of westerns pertains not only to cattle ranching and mining, as it does in Open Range (2003) and Pale Rider (1976); it may also highlight a battle over water rights or flood control. Definitions of the western as a genre tend to promote the transformation of the desert lands of the southwest into a garden, pointing to water rights and irrigation as mechanisms of a prosperous West, so it comes as no surprise that many western films foreground consequences of “big guys” controlling water use, so that “little guys” must either pay exorbitant prices or suffer drought conditions and thirst. In John Wayne’s Riders of Destiny (1933), for example, the antagonist in the film, James Kincaid (Forest Taylor) has one of the only sources of water in the area, and is charging area farmers outrageous prices to use it. Small farmers and ranchers, then, are forced to sell their land because they cannot afford Kincaid’s prices until a government agent (Wayne playing Singin’ Sandy) ensures that area farmers have free access to water.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue(1970), however, most clearly illustrates the effects land acquisition laws had on development and, ultimately, environmental damage in the West. The Ballad of Cable Hogue demonstrates the negative consequences of progress, whether for the few (progressivist) or the many (populist). As a powerless individual, Cable constructs an empire for himself based on ownership of water, a commodity he sells for profit. The water sustains him but is doled out to travelers by the cup for a fee. Commerce underpins Cable’s use of resources and highlights the consequences of progress as empire building in the West: environmental degradation and loss of community.

The majority of Westerns take place in an arid landscape of the Southwest where irrigation and water rights provide life to cattle, farmer’s crops, and to settlers. The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), especially, illustrates the impact land and water rights issues had on the environment of the American Southwest.  The Ballad of Cable Hogue most clearly illustrates the effects land acquisition acts had on development and, ultimately, environmental damage in the West. The film takes a populist approach to progress and shows what happens in a desert when there’s “water enough for two, not three.” Instead of arguing for communal use of free water, the film sympathizes with a lone hero, who profits off a water hole found on land he claims for his own. The hero has also been searching for gold in the desert, but makes his profit from water. In a film immersed in the environmental history of the old West, this lone hero battles a different corporation, a stagecoach company, as well as criminal gold mining partners, and wins. But that victory comes at a cost.

In The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Cable (Jason Robards) is the “little guy” and illustrates populist views of progress as a working class miner who uses water rights policies to build himself a small empire. Even though the film promotes a broadened view of access to property and encourages “wise use” of water because its use is limited by the price Cable charges, Cable’s property is built on exploitation of resources and signifies movement into a modern world where, in the end, technology usurps Cable’s place. In fact, modern technology literally destroys Cable and appropriates his space in the Western landscape.

After surviving wayward friends and the desert Cable finds water near a stage coach route. befriends a prostitute, Hildy (Stella Stevens), and builds a relationship with Preacher Joshua (David Warner), but Cable’s relationship to water is most prominent in the film. The preacher tells him he has “builded an oasis out of his wilderness” and names it Cable Springs. More importantly, he explains to Cable that he must file a claim to keep the land, so Hogue takes the preacher’s horse and goes to town. Hildy points Cable to the United States Land Office where the proprietor tells him, “under The Desert Land act an individual can file for up to 320 acres for $1.25 per acre, plus proof of reclamation.” The proprietor explains that “land without water is not allowable” unless he can substantiate either agricultural or horticultural development.

The film’s explanation for the Desert Land Act is based in fact. On March 3, 1877 the Forty Fourth Congress enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States passed Chapter 107, “An act to provide for the sale of desert lands in certain States and Territories.” The Act asserts,

 That it shall be lawful for any citizen of the United States, or any person of requisite age “who may be entitled to become a citizen, and who has filed his declaration to become such” and upon payment of twenty five cents per acre—to file a declaration under oath with the register and the receiver of the lead district in which any desert land is situated, that he intends to reclaim a tract of desert land, not exceeding one section, by conducting water upon the same, within the period of three years thereafter;

The scenes surrounding the stagecoach line’s response to Cable’s claim begin to highlight the power of water. The company attempts to dig water holes near Cable and fails to find water, so the stagecoach line cuts a deal with him, and Cable places an American flag on his claim to show he’s a stop on the stagecoach trail. After years of business, Cable builds a windmill and upgrades his home and the stage stop, but he will not sell his stagecoach stop and leave with Hildy until he has avenged his former partners’ treatment of him. The former partners finally come to the waterhole and attempt to rob Cable, so Cable kills one (L.Q. Jones) in self defense and almost sends the other former partner, Sam (Strother Martin), out in the desert.

When Hildy drives up in a horseless carriage, Cable seems to have reached his apex: He has avenged his partners’ mistreatment of him and now can sell his water hole and run off with Hildy. Instead, it’s not the desert—nature -- but technology that kills him. When Cable tries to stop Hildy’s car from rolling away, the car rolls over him. Cable eventually dies, and water remains the film’s focus till its end. On Cable’s grave marker, Hildy and Preacher Joshua have written—“He found this water where it wasn’t.”

Although the film’s message differs from that of earlier films focused on water rights, it is still immersed in historical memory, in references to environmental history that attempted to both settle the West and turn its desert lands into a garden, an attempt that fails in Cable Hoguebecause water serves only as a resource for financial gain. The Ballad of Cable Hogue demonstrates the negative effects that even a populist version of progress can have on individuals and their environment. Both populist and progressive visions of progress are represented by the changing road that passes by what was Cable’s stagecoach stop. Cable both literally and figuratively “stands still” as stagecoaches and wagons turn into motorcars.

The film seems to valorize Bailey’s claim that economic growth facilitates environmental action, but it merely shows how a lone miner is able to exploit water resources for profit. No fecund valley emerges from Cable’s discovery. His water hole does not promote a garden in the desert. Cable uses water only for profit, not for community growth. Most telling, however, in Cable Hogue is the use of technology as a signifier of progress. In The Ballad of Cable Hogue, progress literally runs over Cable, suggesting that unchecked progress may result in death not only for nature but also for ourselves. 

UPA, Gerald McBoing Boing, and Mr. Magoo

Created by children’s book author, Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel) and the writer for Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bill Scott, Gerald McBoing Boing centers on Gerald, a boy who could only speak in sound effects. Instead of inhibiting his success, however, Gerald’s “defect” becomes an asset when a radio station hires him as their sound effects department. This premise embraces an environmental message that takes an ambivalent stance toward technology. Although Gerald does find his sound effect voice beneficial when a mysterious corporate officer stops him at the railroad tracks and hires him to work for a radio station, he is shunned by friends and family and nearly runs away from home to escape their scorn. In Gerald McBoing Boing, technology becomes a tool only when it subsumes the language that would make Gerald human and connect him with both the human and natural worlds.

The goal for Cannon and Hurtz was to, as Hurtz put it, “boil[ ] it down” (quoted in Barrier 525). Hurtz explains, “What can we get rid of? We frequently talked about that, Bobe and I, saying, ‘Let’s be sure we don’t get too much of so and so’…. We decided to dispense with all walls and floors and ground levels and skies and horizon lines” (quoted in Barrier 525-6). Such a stylized, almost abstract, animation aesthetic illustrates a modernist edge and foregrounds the notion of a dynamic landscape or space.

The same thematic and aesthetic philosophy underpinning Gerald McBoing Boing guides 1001 Arabian Nights. Gerald McBoing Boinghas clear connections to Mr. Magoo, the protagonist of 1001 Arabian Nights. According to Don Markstein’s Toonpedia, for example, when Mr. Magoo was included in Dell Comic Books, he shared most of the production space with Gerald McBoing Boing.

UPA’s off-the-cuff creativity contributed to Magoo’s success as a bumbling virtually blind character, but, according to Barrier, “what made Magoo more pitiable was the way his nearsightedness magnified his personality” (521). As John Hubley explains, “A great deal in the original character, the strength of him, was the fact that he was so damn bull-headed. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t see very well; even if he had been able to see, he still would have made dumb mistakes, ‘cause he was such a bull-headed opinionated old guy” (quoted in Barrier 521).

Such a focus on blindness as a personality trait highlights both narrative and aesthetic elements that link Magoo with Gerald McBoing Boing. Wells asserts that Magoo’s character’s “whole agenda is concerned with perceived reality” (Animation in America66), an agenda produced by the 1950s context in which he and UPA were placed. That same agenda drives Gerald McBoing Boing, a character with another sense distortion that builds his personality. As David Fisher explains in 1953, “Mr. Magoo represents for us the man who would be responsible and serious in a world that seems insane; he is a creation of the 1950s, the age of anxiety; his situation reflects our own” (quoted in Wells Animation in America 66). Note also that both Magoo and Gerald are people, not animals, the most prominent characters in Disney, MGM, and WB cartoons.

Magoo’s character was connected to its modernist context in philosophical and aesthetic ways, as well. As Wells suggests, Magoo’s “shortsightedness and irritability” were more an “inability to see” that required “a philosophical approach to perception, and to the possibilities of syn-aesthetic cinema, and ways of ‘post-styling’ the reality of both the real world and the Disneyesque orthodoxy” (Animation in America 67). John Hubley embraced this aesthetic. In an interview, Hubley explained the central premise of his work as “an image that plays dramatically (a visual metaphor) and will develop into a scene” (quoted in Wells Animation in America 67). According to Wells, this image “aspires to the work of modernists like Picasso, Dufy, and Matisse, while also embracing the freedom of jazz idioms” (Animation in America 67).

Although Hubley did not direct 1001 Arabian Nights, his imprint remained embedded on Mr. Magoo’s character and contributed to its view of nature and a technology-driven culture as not only interdependent but indelibly connected. In fact, in 1001 Arabian Nights technology plays a vital role in building not only the stylized aesthetic, but also in driving a narrative in which Magoo’s bumbling character assists his hapless son only because technology intercedes.

1001 Arabian Nightsbecame UPA’s first animated feature because financial support wasn’t available for their original idea, producing Don Quixote with Magoo as Quixote. According to Jules Engel, one UPA’s principle players, “We had Aldous Huxley in to write a script for that. He did about a thirty-page skeleton script, but the bank wouldn’t buy it. They had never heard of Don Quixote, but they had heard of Arabian Nights, so we got money for Arabian Nights (quoted in Maltin 335). Because Pete Burness left the studio, UPA hired Jack Kinney, a Disney veteran, to direct and his brother Dick to write the story. Robert Dranko supervised the production design (Maltin 335). Although critics found fault with the film’s narrative and the relevance of Magoo’s character, most, like Maltin, agree that it “boasted sophisticated design and color” (335). Hal Erickson agrees and notes that “Many of the character designs seen in Arabian Nightswere reused on UPA’s weekly 1964 TV series The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo.”

For us, that sophisticated design and color augments a narrative in which the technology of a genie in his bottle, a flying carpet, and a magic flame supersede bumbling and incompetent human and nonhuman nature. Yet technology does not serve as a tool for destruction in 1001 Arabian Nights. Instead, it serves to preserve and protect humans and their natural world and illustrates the interconnected interdependence between culture and the nature of humanity. The technologically driven aesthetic in UPA’s 1001 Arabian Nightsdemonstrates this interconnectedness between technology and human nature throughout the film.

*Gasland* as Documentary and Water Rights Argument

Gasland, a well-regarded documentary, highlights the dangers to groundwater aquifers caused by natural gas drilling. As Robert Koehler of Variety asserts, “Gasland may become to the dangers of natural gas drilling what Silent Spring was to DDT” because it so effectively demonstrates and illustrates the horrific repercussions of injecting chemicals and extracting natural gas from underground shale—toxic water and poisoned aquifers. Visions of flaming water faucets and dying cattle, dogs, and aquatic animal and plant life make it clear in the film that hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” at least without effective regulations, may have catastrophic results for a region’s drinking and agricultural water. The film concentrates on the problem, however, without offering a solution other than perhaps eliminating hydraulic fracturing altogether.

Gasland begins from the premise that natural gas supplies in the United States are a virtual ocean in the shale basins of the East and West. The assertion from gas companies is that natural gas is good for the nation, for our economy, and our environment and poses no credible threat to drinking water because hydraulic fracturing, “fracking,” occurs deep under ground and is regulated by the EPA. Filmmaker Josh Fox, however, calls these claims into question by telling his and his region’s own “fracking” story. Fox first tells the story of his house in Milenville, PA, built in the 1970s near a stream connected to the Delaware River during the time when Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act into law. But the house is now atop the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, Fox explains, the Marcellus Shale Formation of the Appalachian Basin, and he is being offered nearly $100 thousand for leasing his 19 acres. The goal, he is told, is for Americans to adopt natural gas as the fuel of the future.

     But because it is seen as such a necessary energy source, an energy bill passed in 2005 for Halliburton Technology, the source for some hydraulic fracturing technology, exempted “fracturing” from the Clean Water Act and local, regional, and national drinking water laws. The film explains “fracking” in detail, demonstrating that the process requires the use of chemicals such as diesel fuel, which contains benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, xylene, and naphthalene, as well as polycyclic oromatic hydrocarbons, methanol, formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, glycol ethers, hydrochloric acid, and sodium hydroxide. The process also requires approximately 7 million gallons of water each time fracking is used to drill a deep shale gas well. Fox attempts to talk to Halliburton—or any other company—about this process, including T. Boone Pickens. But none of the companies will speak with him, so Fox draws on the nostalgia that opened the film, providing memories of the stream near his house before the rush for natural gas as “alternative” fuel.

     The images contrast dramatically with the 2010 context in which more than 40 gas wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania in a few months. The hydraulic fracturing process now is poisoning landowners’ water supplies. According to Fox, complaints are growing about wells going bad around the natural gas sites in Pennsylvania. A well explodes on New Years Day. Animals lose their hair and begin vomiting. A cat now refuses to go outside. Horses now have no good water to drink. One family complains that they can light their drinking water on fire as it comes out of the faucet. If they turn on the water, it could explode because it is contaminated with natural gas. Water produced from the fracking process has been dumped into fields and onto streams, poisoning water for humans and their animals and crops. Fox finds similar repercussions in Nebraska and Wyoming and Texas. Gasland reveals many of the disastrous repercussions of “fracking,” but as Sight and Sound reviewer Sam Davies asserts, “The effect is to leave the viewer with the disturbing sense of the sheer quantity of evidence amassed by Fox, and what Gasland has had to omit.”

    

Paisan and Landscape of War

Paisan (1946) is the second film in Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy. The first, Rome: Open City (1945), focused on the resistance to German occupation in 1943-44 in that city, while the third, Germany Year Zero is rooted in Berlin, examining the aftermath of a city physically crushed in defeat. Paisan, however, is a travelogue, divided into 6 distinct stories, set in 6 distinct geographical places. It starts with the Allied invasion of Sicily in July of 1943 and slowly works it ways up Italy until the 6th story ends 20 months later in the bitter fighting in the northern Po Marshes.

While many admirers were and remain awed by Rossellini's inventive style, wedded to content that was fresh and unseen in Italy for for most of its 20 years of living under Fascist control, others point out the director's sensitivity to landscape and in Paisa we move from the rocky countryside of Sicily through the southern port of Naples to the relatively undamaged Rome, to the bitter inner city fighting in Florence, to the serene monastery of Romagna untouched by battle or history, ending in the grim marshes of the Po.

While the film can be easily read as "news from the front", Rossellini has other clear goals. He examines the effects of war on everyone he trains his camera on. The war's characters are also reinforced by how nature and the towns and cities they move through help construct them. Sicily is seen at night as a small town is now in the hands of Americans patrolling to the sea. Townspeople want the soldiers to tell them of missing relatives. The soldiers are seeking a guide to the area. No one can speak the others language well, but a young woman offers to guide them to a castle and while the patrol pushes on she is left with one soldier who is killed by a sniper while she is dragged off by Germans who casually throw her to her death off a cliff. The returning patrol finds their mate and curses the woman for his death. There will be no explanations.

Naples is a port city traumatized by war and now teeming with Allied supply ships, thousands of troops, and numerous displaced refugees, along with countless street urchins all hustling to stay alive. A drunk American is being guided by a young boy, eager to steal his boots. He takes the soldier to a puppet show, but when he passes out, the boy is gone and so are his shoes. A few days later we see the soldier, now as an MP, driving his jeep through the clogged streets. He sees the boy, grabs him and demands his shoes back. The boy takes him to his neighborhood and the man is stunned by the absolute number of homeless families living in squalor while they hover about open fires, cooking whatever is at hand. The MP understands this world and loses all interest in shoes and leaves the area as the story stops.

In Rome, 6 months of freedom from the German occupation has turned the city into a respite area for combat soldiers. The starving young women have been reduced to party girls and prostitutes for the thousand of American and British soldiers and the story focuses on a drunk tank driver who is taken back by a woman who recognizes him from the moment of liberation a half year earlier. She hopes for some kind of reconciliation. He staggers off after sleeping off his bender to find his ride back to base and a note with a number that he tosses off as garbage.The woman is left huddled in a courtyard in the rain hoping for the man's return.

The 4th tale brings us to the horrors of combat in the ancient city of Florence. An army nurse and an Italian father team up to get into the center of the city. The nurse wants to find her lover who now is a famous resistance leader. The father seeks his family. They refuse the warnings of the observors outside the fighting and work their way through the streets and roofs of the city, dodging bullets to reach the partisans. Here amidst the cruel street fighting, the nurse discovers that her lover is dead and the father disappears into the maze of the fighting to continue his own search. The episode ends with the partisans suddenly throwing two Fascists they have captured onto the street where they gun them down.

Rossellini, after presenting endless grim reporting of war's cruelty, suddenly shifts to a gentle examination of three Army chaplins seeking shelter and food for the night from an ancient order of monks in an untouched rustic monastery.The chaplins have been together for all 20 months of the fighting and are awed by the fact that they have found this brief respite from their duties. The monks are stunned that their guests are not just Catholic but a Jew and a "follower of Luther". Their confusion of being briefly thrust into theological modernity, is countered by the Catholic chaplin's devotion to his two mates. Religious tolerance and ancient kindness meet briefly before the final scene.

Here Rossellini's vision of the cruelty of combat is centered in the marsh land of the Po Valley. The tranquility of Romagna is completely shattered by the desperate situation that Italian partisans aligned with a few American special operations officers find themselves engaged in. Short on food, ammunition and cut off from communication, except by radio, the soldiers move quickly by small skiffs through the reeds to elude their superior German opposition who control the area with large boats and overwhelming numbers. The Germans kill any partisans they find and the scene opens with an executed partisan floating down the Po tied to a life preserver and a warning sign stuck to his corpse.

The partisans retrieve and bury him. While hoping for some kind of air drop that never comes, the partisans find food from a small village. This kindness is repaid by the Germans returning to the area and killing everyone that they can find. It is a battle with no quarter and when the partisans are finally captured they are quickly separated from the surviving Americans and prepared for quick execution. Hands tied behind their backs they are casually tossed into the river from the side of a German gunboat. When two Americans attempt to intervene they are gunned down.The scene and film ends with a postscript that tersely explains that this action has taken place a few months before the declaration of peace.

The abrupt ending of the scene is characteristic of Rossellini's vision of the war. The conflict is a nightmare that effects both population and landscape. Trying to reason why is nowhere near as important as witnessing it as it occured. Others can try and explain. Paisa exists to show. The fact that the film stills feel fresh and contemporary is Rossellini's success. If the concept of "neo-realism" is ever to be understood, Paisan is the film that helps explain it in the most concrete fashion.