Daily #5

BattleGround_There’s a scene in the movie showing army trucks ferrying corpses from the fort that had been turned into a lazaret for Spanish flu-infected soldiers. Am I the only one who thought of the ambulances driving off the Italian city of Bergamo, one of the epicenters of COVID in its very early days? What is fascinating about this film is its unrelenting, Dostoyevskian focus on the persistence of evil in our world, its essential presence in the acts of men. At the same time, the film can burst into present history with powerful force, showing that war and disease are the nightmares that we face and faced every year of our lives. Franco Piersanti’s music accompanies Amelio’s dry narration with sporadic interventions, all quite precisely calibrated. In the beginning, a few organ phrases are merely hinted at; in the second part, when Spanish flu takes war’s place in finishing off the young soldiers, delicate string riffs seem to float into the void.

One to One: John & Yoko_We didn’t know John Lennon used to record his phone calls right after he moved to New York. Was that an obsession for total control? Was he aware that he was in the CIA’s watchlist, and wanted to prove he had no involvement in the accusation Langley was fabricating against him? The concert that Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the Elephant Mercury Band gave in New York in 1972, which the film shows in its most intense moments alternated with Lennon’s phone calls and TV clips of the time, is not a miracle, quality-wise. What I mean is that sounds, as we hear it, is rough and aggressive, though certainly it shows John Lennon’s wish to get back on stage after years of absence, due to the Beatles’ decision to focus on studio recording only.