Season 6, Episode 28 (#181):

Jim (06:19.503)
We've now reached the part of the game where the different creators of the fabulous new technology that's going to change the world have started suing each other. And I find that entertaining.

Nothing more needs to be said. I'm just telling you, I find it entertaining. I'm not going to defend that. I just find it entertaining, okay? Fine. Fine. Yeah, it's awesome. How are you doing?

Lionel (06:44.034)
fine. It's great. Fine.

Lionel (06:51.054)
I'm fine.

Jim (06:52.155)
Okay, all right. We have a guest, Sarah Elkins, guest host, really. We have some guest hosts that appear. Sarah Elkins is one of them. Sarah Elkins has appeared on Funny Not Funny a number of times before. And usually we talk about very interesting movies or books or topics, actually. One time we talked about whether the universe was made of ideas, which was enraging. And happy to have you back. This time we're going to talk about

Sarah (06:56.768)
Hello.

Jim (07:22.105)
Well, two movies, wait, two movies and a third movie, I think, that Lionel actually turned us on to that was related that I found interesting. No, a third series of TV shows from a long time ago. And the two movies are Grass. Now, what's the full title? I just call it Grass, but it's a 19. Yeah, yeah.

Lionel (07:41.154)
nation battles for survival or something like that a nation's battle for life

Sarah (07:45.501)
a nation's battle for life.

Jim (07:49.627)
Yeah, really, really intense. And it was made in 1925. It's a really early documentary, maybe one of the first documentaries made. And the other one is Daughters of the Dust, which was also, luckily not by the Italian director Sica, Vittorio Sica, but De Sica, but...

Lionel (08:10.232)
to see.

Jim (08:16.473)
You were right, Sarah. Different. Different than everything else, I think, that we've watched so far. Completely different style. Yeah. Yeah.

Lionel (08:21.816)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah (08:23.307)
That's what I was going for when I made this suggestion.

Jim (08:27.547)
So I don't know how we should proceed. Lionel, do you want to launch into what you were thinking when you saw? Should we talk about grass first or maybe daughters of the dust first?

Lionel (08:39.522)
Well, grass. OK. Well, the interesting thing about grass. So to set up for everybody who's listening, grass is an hour, a little over an hour. It's a silent film. It's a travelogue. It's black and white. And like a song film, it has these cards.

Sarah (08:42.452)
Okay?

Jim (08:42.458)
Yeah.

Lionel (09:03.66)
You know, every now and then there's a card that explains, know, has some kind of text on it that explains what's going on. And the film is basically a documentary of the migration of a trans-Yuman pastoralist herd, a group of people in Persia and Iraq called the Bakhtiari. And it's a rather harrowing trip that they have to make with all their flocks. They have to...

cross raging rivers and they have to walk across basically the Himalaya, know, what looks like the Himalaya mountains barefoot in the snow. And what I found is it's a good movie to watch. I found the version that has music when they reissued it in like 19 something, they found they actually got like Kyrgyzstan and yes, what Sarah?

Jim (09:51.791)
Hmm.

Sarah (09:58.183)
I was waving my fingers excitedly because that's cool that you found a version that had intentional music. I found my own music to go in with it, but I'd love to hear more about your remastered version that you found.

Lionel (10:10.029)
Yeah, it's like music from that area. It's a lot of oud and lot of santor and a lot of these Persian instruments. And I thought it was really good. And that was on the Criterion Channel, the version that's posted on the Criterion Channel. I think they actually did that around the time they came out with Doors of the Dust. I think it's a 1990s thing. But anyway, so that's sort of in a nutshell.

Jim (10:14.714)
Yeah.

Lionel (10:36.921)
grass. Now what I found fascinating about it, there's a couple things I found really fascinating about it. One, the movie's kind of harrowing. You know, it's not dire, and it's not gruesome, and it's not horrific, but you know, they're photographing some real things going on here.

And then the placards are so goofy. put like these interstitial placards. Like people are walking barefoot. know, these four-year-old kids are walking barefoot up like the Himalayas and they put a placard that says, brrr. It's a little more... But actually...

Jim (11:01.269)
Hehehehehe

Jim (11:10.17)
Alright.

Yeah, some of the goats don't make it.

Sarah (11:13.525)
Right, was almost animated, the burr. They were doing more with the title cards than I was expecting, because there were things like when there was the giant windstorm, it's like the words were moving around like they were being waved by the wind. So I loved that. That was a little more than I was expecting.

Lionel (11:18.2)
RING!

Lionel (11:21.647)
Yeah!

Lionel (11:27.556)
yeah, no, there have been a...

I was too and I was like, you know, part of me said, this is kind of inappropriate. Part of me says, this is a nice relief. At least they're having, you know, it sort of, it sort of cuts the tension a little bit. The other thing which I thought was fascinating about the movie is, which they don't make clear in the movie is that the Bhakti are you do this twice every year.

Jim (11:50.188)
Ugh. Ugh.

Lionel (11:52.067)
They go over the mountain and then six months later they come back over it. They are transhumant pastoralists, which means they have to move their flocks constantly because they have to go where the grass is for the flocks because they completely live on the flocks. And if they stay in one place, what the hell are you smiling about, Jim?

Jim (11:56.432)
Yeah.

Jim (12:09.327)
I'm sorry, they are what? They are transhumanist pastoralists?

Lionel (12:15.449)
Transhumant, T-R-A-N-S-U-H-U-M-A-N-T, transhumant pastoralists, which means they're basically, migrating shepherds. They basically are permanently shepherds who are constantly moving their flocks back and forth. They have really no fixed place to abode. And so they do this twice a year. So it looks harrowing.

Jim (12:19.831)
You- human-

Pastoralists, all right.

Jim (12:36.795)
All right.

Lionel (12:44.547)
But honestly, you figure it, and of course the documentary builds tension. like, they've hit a cliff wall, 2,000 precipice of solid rock. What will they do? And it's like, they've been here before. Trust me. They do it every year. They know exactly where the path is. They know where the Hojo is. know where the rest stops are. They're good with it. And as I mentioned in my email to you guys,

Jim (12:56.347)
They're like, they do it every year. They do it twice. Yeah. You see the eye roll from the, from the Bakhtiar, like, yeah, come on.

Lionel (13:14.159)
This reminded me of I met them before I met the the the Bakhtiari before back when I was a kid watching Jacob Bernowski's The Ascent of Man And he did a great job and he he he did a great job And his was a little more harrowing than theirs He didn't he didn't focus on the danger of the trip, but he said if the elderly people can't make it they're left behind

Jim (13:17.849)
Right.

Jim (13:28.11)
Yeah.

Jim (13:41.467)
They didn't put that in the documentary. Yeah. And it, it's this particular river, right? I forget the name of the river that they have to cross. is just deadly and they have to swim it. in the documentary, they made, flotation devices out of goatskins in, in, I've already forgotten his name in the later, the 1970s mentioned of it in the dawn of man, they just swim. So

Lionel (13:43.107)
They don't put that in the documentary.

Lionel (13:49.678)
Yeah.

Jim (14:09.187)
I thought that was interesting. mean, what happened to the people who knew how to make the, cause those goatskins were not easy to make, right? You could tell like that was like a high level of skill to even inflate them. And they had to like patch them up and then they made rafts out of it. But in the 1970s, what he's showing is just people jumping in the water and swimming across. Some of them don't make it.

Lionel (14:16.249)
They're not easy to make, right?

Lionel (14:21.898)
yeah.

Sarah (14:23.306)
Right.

Lionel (14:30.221)
Yeah, who knows? mean, right, well, the thing he also says, the point he's trying to make is that if the elderly can't keep up, you get left behind. This is the nature of a society like this. Because what he's talking about, Bernaske's talking about the emergence of cities. And he says, to understand what a city means, to understand what settled life is, you have to go to...

what came before it, and this is what it is. And what he drives home is that, you know, there's no possessions, there's really no memory, there's no change because you can't, you can only take what you can carry on your back and you're not gonna carry anything that's not absolutely essential to you. So nothing ever changes. And if you can't make it, it's like, okay, we're gonna leave you by the side of the river, bye, you know, say hello to the wolves for us. And so it's, you know, that's the point he was making.

in that whole thing is that the point he was trying to make is that a society like that doesn't evolve any further, culturally it doesn't evolve.

Jim (15:32.965)
Sarah, you saw the Dawn of Men episode or part of it?

Sarah (15:37.311)
Yes, I watched the Ascent of Man. I think it's the second episode of the series, which was on PBS in the 70s, I think. And so I watched the first 20 minutes of that, which went a little further than the Bactrians. I'm sorry if I've mispronounced that, but that Bactari. And it was very interesting. I don't necessarily agree with.

Lionel (15:56.035)
Bhaktari, the Bhaktiari, I think, yeah.

Lionel (16:02.319)
you

Sarah (16:03.583)
Jacob Bronowski on everything he said. It's certainly true that if you have a very large tribal group that has all the sheep and goats and cows that can possibly live on a patch of land, yeah, one day and they have to move on. But you don't have to have a tribe that that's big. I mean, he's kind of making some assumptions here. There are plenty of farmers that starve to death.

Lionel (16:29.507)
Mm.

Sarah (16:32.437)
There are plenty of people in cities that have to work three jobs to stay alive. And he's saying, the nomad tribes, you know, had to be hand to mouth every day and there was no time for leisure. And I'm like, you're kind of making some assumptions there because there have definitely been some people on pasture lands where there was tons of grass and they only had to move maybe, you know.

Lionel (16:47.354)
Maybe, not. Yeah.

Sarah (16:57.671)
three months or something like that. So he's making some assumptions there to make his point saying mankind couldn't evolve until we moved away from nomadic life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know,

Lionel (17:08.047)
It's 72, yeah, it's 72. You gotta cut them some slack.

Jim (17:09.859)
Yep. think that's a really important, that's an interesting point though. That's an important point is that the Bakhtiari have, they have two, they have two patches of land they can, they, that they can stay in. Now that might be defined by old, you know, tribal disputes and certainly by, you know, modern cities in towns that have grown up in the areas. So yeah, they just have a particularly long trek, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case for all nomadic people.

Sarah (17:15.264)
Yeah.

Sarah (17:20.711)
Right. Right.

Sarah (17:27.519)
That's right.

Sarah (17:38.995)
Right, I mean, I thought...

Jim (17:39.343)
I mean, the Laplanders, for example.

Sarah (17:42.613)
That's right. Right. And they made the point in the documentary that the laplanders just follow the animals, but the tribes that have domesticated animals kind of to the point of stupidity can't just follow them around as they migrate and find grass. They have to be the ones that move those stupid sheep who can't think for themselves.

Lionel (17:43.1)
Let's see those those people.

Jim (17:50.159)
That's it's different, yeah.

Lionel (18:04.899)
Yeah, over there. No, over there. said, where I'm pointing. Where I'm pointing. No.

Jim (18:06.501)
Wait,

Sarah (18:12.329)
Hahahaha

Jim (18:12.955)
In defense of goats and sheep, they just don't have migratory patterns. mean, is that because they were domesticated or because they just don't work like that? Because they choose those animals, they have to lead and not follow. That's the main thing about the bacteria. Fascinating. I had no idea about any of this.

Sarah (18:27.09)
Right.

Right.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, yeah, I thought, I'm really glad, Lionel, that you pointed to that as kind of a, the, Brunelsky, The Ascent of Men as a, as a kind of a different angle on the 1925 movie that we watched. I thought both were really interesting. And even though I disagree with some of what Brunelsky said, had a ton of good information in there too about it.

Lionel (18:53.273)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah (19:02.963)
The differences between the migrations, one thing that came along is now a number of that tribe migrate by rail. And I guess like on some Indian railroads, they stick a lot of their animals on, you know, I mean, clearly in the Brunowski, in the Ascent of Man,

like Lionel said, yeah, they were just jumping in the water instead of building goatskin rafts and so on. Maybe they didn't have 3,000 goatskins lying around anymore to build rafts with. But there definitely been some changes in the way they do their migration, but a lot of it is, I'm sure, still extremely tough. The 1925 thing, there were three

Jim (19:33.019)
All right.

Sarah (19:57.291)
white people, Anglos, who went with them for this documentary. They were the first to ever go on this migration route with them, at least from the whole way to the end. And they got an ambassador to sign off on this at the end of their journey. That was the last few shots of this documentary where they were showing the document.

Lionel (20:17.828)
Yep.

Jim (20:18.981)
Hmm.

Sarah (20:23.049)
that said, yes, I attest these are the first, and I forget if it said Americans, white people or European descent, something like that to go with them. But my understanding is, so there were two guys and a woman, and I think maybe the woman is the one who knew about it first.

Jim (20:33.979)
Yeah.

Lionel (20:44.665)
She's the adventurer. The lady's the adventurer. She's the one who's in the shot. The two guys, one guy was sort of like, I guess the business manager and the other one was the cameraman. So you never see them. You never see them again. You just see her. Yeah.

Sarah (20:56.427)
Right, right, you see him right at the start. So those two guys that you see at the start, yeah, you see the woman popping up now and then in videos as she's, you know, walking through snow and all of that, the two guys. So Marion Cooper, he's who got me interested in that. That's the director of King Kong eight years later.

Jim (20:58.181)
They're at the Hojos.

Jim (21:10.297)
Yeah.

Lionel (21:16.685)
That's right.

Sarah (21:23.883)
1933, that's, Marion Cooper, he did several documentaries. He was a reporter earlier and he got more and more into film. And then, you know, after this documentary had some success, he did some more and then managed to get into doing King Kong. it's really, I mean, of course.

Jim (21:27.522)
Wow.

Jim (21:46.604)
Wow.

Sarah (21:50.229)
King Kong has its issues, it's got racist views of tribes and so on, but...

Lionel (21:56.781)
It's got a gorilla grabbing a biplane. mean, come on. How can you lose?

Sarah (22:00.275)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So, I mean, it's not that racism isn't important, but what I was interested in was just I wanted to see this documentary that this guy had done. And I kind of think of Carl Denham, the...

Jim (22:01.315)
Yeah, we can overlook the other stuff.

Jim (22:09.445)
Tie the white woman to the post. Yeah, that'll do it.

Sarah (22:24.487)
obsessed director from King Kong. He's the one that drags this whole film crew off to Skull Island to do the movie and his drive and ambition, I kind of think of that as Marion Cooper making this movie. And the other guy that's with him on this journey was with him on King Kong and a bunch of films in between too.

Lionel (22:41.624)
Interesting.

Jim (22:42.297)
Hmm.

Sarah (22:53.983)
I just found the story of the making of the movie interesting as well as, yes, seeing these people on a journey that nobody else had ever been on before. And there had been some shorter documentary clips of various things, various people and so on doing things, but this was only the second film that's called Ethnographic.

documentary where you're embedded with a local people for a good amount of time. That's right.

Lionel (23:26.839)
What's the first one, Nanook of the North? Because that's usually held forth as like the original documentary, like the groundbreaking work.

Jim (23:32.537)
Yeah, yep.

Sarah (23:33.429)
That's right, but this was the first and it was only a year or two later. anyway, this movie was the documentary.

Sarah (23:52.575)
There were a lot of scenes in it that caught my eye. I watched the cheap Wikipedia page version, not the Criterion.

Jim (24:02.795)
There's a YouTube version without music. That's okay. It's actually a different edit. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah (24:07.411)
Okay, interesting. What I did was I searched for, because the journey, they start in Ankara, Turkey, which I think we now call Ankara, and moved across at least two rivers. One of them was the Rapids and the other was a more simple ford across the river operation and big mountains. And they wind up in

Lionel (24:16.153)
Right.

Sarah (24:37.323)
Persia slash Iran. And I noticed in the documentary, it actually mentions Iran, which I thought was a term that came along later than 1925, but there it is in the movie. So that's fine. Anyway, so they're making this migration and.

There were some fascinating moments in there. From the middle of the movie, this old guy with a musket, an old, old gun, old gun, where you see him pack in the powder. And then you see him stick in some kind of shot or pellet or something. And then you see him put in the wadding. And then you see him take a long, long, long, thin...

Lionel (25:10.339)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (25:15.46)
Go again.

Jim (25:19.055)
Yes.

Sarah (25:27.527)
stick, a metal rod, and pack it all down. And then he has this portable

Lionel (25:27.651)
Ramrod.

Lionel (25:36.079)
I couldn't believe that.

Sarah (25:37.515)
It's a portable hunting screen that he kind of, it's sort of like unfolding an umbrella and you know, he just puts it in front of him. Yes, it's got a lot of holes in it. And then he camps out by a cliff and first he picks off a bird and in the documentary you actually see the bird falling down the cliff. And then he takes out 150 pound goat from that cliff and,

Jim (25:37.979)
Camouflage, yeah.

Lionel (25:43.326)
Right. has two little eye holes in it. I love that.

Sarah (26:07.179)
That was just really interesting to me to see, you know, his techniques.

Lionel (26:17.377)
think of it. You know, now that you mentioned it to me, I agree with you. And think about the camera work. Like what they did. I was really impressed with the camera work for 1925. And they're they're in the middle of nowhere. It's not like they not like they can call DHL and have another reel of film like driven in by FedEx. They got to take everything with them in a challenging situation. But the way they filmed him doing all those steps loading that rifle, I bet you there was a lot of editing there.

Sarah (26:46.805)
Yeah.

Jim (26:46.937)
Yeah, Yeah, I'm not, you know what I find a little bit weird? Don't you? He shot a goat. And what do they have in plenty? They have goats. I know, they don't wanna shoot one of their goats. But you know, the thing that I was aware of is like, he's so hidden, but there's the camera guy with a camera going, brrrr. It's like, nice demonstration, but. Hey, Zoe.

Lionel (26:57.594)
Don't

Sarah (26:57.973)
That's not one of their goats,

Lionel (27:02.542)
Yeah.

Lionel (27:08.943)
yeah, it's all make believe.

Sarah (27:12.373)
Well, I don't know. I don't know. I know a movie they made later, they kind of, or another movie, this is compared to Chang, which I think they were also involved in for that one, they recreated some scenes. My understanding is this documentary was more just a lot of shooting and a lot of editing.

Lionel (27:30.297)
Yeah.

Sarah (27:37.411)
And yeah, I don't know how they covered up the noise of, you know, the recording and all of that, but maybe they all had little hunting blinds with them too. Yeah. Right.

Jim (27:37.659)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (27:42.915)
Yeah, those cameras were not quiet.

Lionel (27:47.459)
Well, he plugged that Ibix from a long way away. I mean, if you believe the shot, he was pretty far away, which I don't believe. mean, it's...

Jim (27:47.514)
Man.

Yeah.

Jim (27:55.395)
Is an ibex a goat or what is it? It's a wild mountain goat. Yeah. Not one that they would have with them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. That was an incredible shot. mean.

Sarah (27:57.639)
It was the big mountain goat with the big curls, you know, as opposed... no, no, no. And yeah, mean, shooting your own herd would be kind of like eating your own seed corn. know, those are, that's what you have for your milk, for your babies and all of that. So anyway, that part was interesting.

Lionel (28:01.507)
I think it's ibex. Yeah. But I mean that gun from like 1820.

Jim (28:12.409)
Yeah, you don't, you don't.

Jim (28:16.804)
Yeah.

Sarah (28:21.821)
a couple of the saddest shots to me, there was no real commentary on them and maybe it's my squeamish 2020 sensibility, but one of the very first shots in that documentary is a poor bear cub that's being made to dance around for the entertainment. And that was a little upsetting to see. mean, those people had brutal lives, but it was still upsetting to me to see that.

Jim (28:39.971)
Yes. Yeah. was brutal. It was brutal.

Lionel (28:40.174)
yeah, well yeah.

Are you?

Lionel (28:50.765)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jim (28:51.599)
And I think the attitude in 1925 with just regarding animals in general is sort of like, isn't this cute? And he's he's poking this bear cub. It's horrible.

Sarah (28:54.75)
yeah, very different from our... right.

Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing, a couple of silent shots, you talked about the harrowing crossing of the river, where there are a couple of times when they're filming the river crossing, where you see an animal that's swimming and it goes under and it never comes back. And it doesn't say, that animal's dead. We're left to figure it out. But yeah, there were animals that died and

Lionel (29:18.959)
Mm.

Jim (29:18.969)
Yes. Yeah.

Sarah (29:29.531)
There was something with the leader of the 50,000 tribes people and half a million animals, I think is what was said in the documentary. And the leader said, it's gonna be a good year if we only lose 10 % of our animals in the crossing. And I'm like, wow, yeah.

Jim (29:39.984)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (29:49.765)
That's right. Yeah. Well, and Brunowski talks about that, too. Just the amount of attrition in the river. Yeah. But we saw it in the documentary. I it was certainly it aligned. But I just want to say one thing and then we should move on to the next film. But the the the it's funny that Brunowski is like they don't have time to invent. They don't have time to, you know. What's the word? They don't have time, you know, to.

Sarah (29:56.539)
maybe I got them mixed up. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, we saw. Yep.

Okay.

Jim (30:19.227)
update their equipment to create new, to invent new. And yet we did see...

Sarah (30:22.483)
and he even said they don't have time to develop any culture. And I just think that's wrong.

Jim (30:26.453)
Right, which I think is kind of weird. mean, especially because you notice there is a piece of technology in the 1925 documentary, which he must have watched, and that wasn't present in the 1970 documentary that he shot. And that was those flotation devices, which were not anything to sneeze at. They were really quite impressive considering you have to carry everything with you. I mean, he had some good points, Brunowski did, but there definitely huge blind spots, I think, because he's trying to make this whole point and some of it's biblical.

Sarah (30:48.401)
Right. sure.

Jim (30:54.829)
and you know, whatever, still very interesting. I thought it was a great show.

Sarah (30:54.899)
Right. Right. I mean, before they start on their big migration, there's a whole scene where this leader of the tribe who's the best at everything, they show him dancing and there's music. And so it's not that they don't have culture. They probably have a great storytelling culture too. That's just oral. And so that doesn't get nearly as much cred from Westerners.

as written history does. so, yeah, I'm really glad to have seen this. I would never have watched it if I hadn't been looking into what else did the director of King Kong do. And I just, I'm really glad that I got to watch it. I am glad that I found that Turkish music to watch along on the Wikipedia version, which was probably not as...

good quality, you know, showing as the criterion. But it was good enough for me to really be absorbed by watching the whole hour and 10 minutes.

Lionel (31:59.576)
Hmm

Jim (32:05.499)
It was really something.

Lionel (32:05.593)
So here's another interesting thing, another rabbit hole that I went down, which has unusual connections to our present day, which is the Bakhtiari of course still exist. And a lot of them abandoned, a lot of them settled down and they became a very powerful, became a significant factor in Iranian politics and were instrumental in the various revolutions in Iran. think they were instrumental perhaps in putting the Shah on the throne.

Sarah (32:20.522)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (32:34.699)
and had an effect in him being toppled. You can read about it. It's fascinating. And so there is a line leading from that documentary right up to today with the Bhakti Ari. Interesting, interesting stuff. read that. Yeah, that's all. That's all I just want to point out. The Bhakti Ari are still alive and kicking. And the other thing also that really reminds me of something that really fascinates, something that has always

Jim (32:41.797)
Wow.

Sarah (32:47.978)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (32:56.759)
No,

Lionel (33:04.449)
obsessed me and which I'm studying even more now, which is, every now and then these people come out of nowhere and blow everything up. Okay. The Mongols, the Vikings, you know, the Magyars, the Huns, Timberlake, where are they coming from? I mean, and why do they come over here? Like what's going on? Where are these people coming from and why are they

Jim (33:16.859)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (33:29.945)
It's funny how you went from talking about Iran and to people who just show up out of nowhere and start blowing things up, but I'm going to let you get back to what you were saying.

Lionel (33:36.719)
Yeah, but I'm talking about like mass migrations. I'm talking about like the Mongols It's like why in the middle of the 12th one? Go ahead. You have something to say Sarah

Sarah (33:46.101)
So at least for the Vikings, current scholarship is saying they think there was a big climate change that was pushing the Vikings. They could no longer grow their happy, know, a lot of Vikings were agrarians. And then suddenly it's too cold. Our crops aren't happening. We've got to go find food somewhere. Hey, look, that village has food. We're taking that food.

Lionel (33:55.447)
Yes, exactly.

Lionel (34:10.787)
Well, thanks for stealing my my narrative thunder there, OK, because that's what I was working up to. Of little ice age. You know what? I'm going to rage quit this damn podcast. No, but but the whole point, I think the missing actor. So another thing I'm fascinated by is history is mostly when we talk about history, we're mostly talking about books. You know, we're mostly talking about books.

Sarah (34:14.251)
I didn't realize that was a rhetorical question, Lionel, that you already had the answer going there. Sorry.

Jim (34:14.779)
The Little Ice Age. I called this five episodes ago.

Jim (34:25.307)
Alright.

Lionel (34:40.151)
And the problem is there's a very large part of this planet that there's no books about. And it's that huge central Asian step, which includes the lands of the Bakhtiar, which includes Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and Mongolia. is incomprehensibly enormous. And everybody says, there's nothing in there. It's the steps of central Asia. It's empty. It's like, even if there's like one person per square mile, that's like a couple of million people.

Okay. And the thing is, is that if the weather's good and the forage is good, yeah, you can support a lot of people because that's a lot of horses and that's a lot of herd animals and you can live really well. But if things go bad and there's a drought, you've got a lot of people who are very good at moving around. That's the one thing they really know how to do. They know how to get their ass in gear and go to the left or go to the right. And they're probably really adept at like bow and arrow or whatever kind of weapon is around.

Jim (35:08.859)
Right. Right.

Jim (35:30.425)
Yeah.

Lionel (35:37.753)
And that's why you have the Mongols who come out of nowhere in the 1200s and basically whack the entire world. So I'm just fascinated by this whole, I'm fascinated by the history of of Lands Without History, the forgotten people, as the producers of that movie say so breathlessly at the beginning. We're gonna go find the forgotten people. It's like, there's a lot of forgotten people and they've really impacted history quite a bit because it's like the Magyars, the Magyars came,

Jim (36:00.709)
Yeah

Lionel (36:07.225)
from Central Asia and they got to a certain point and then they had an argument amongst themselves and a bunch of them went north and a bunch of them kept going straight and the ones who went north turned into the Finns and the ones who went straight became the Hungarians, the Mugyards because those are the only two members of what are called the Finnic-Yuric language group but I digress so that's enough. I've pissed away enough time on that one. You wanna talk about Daughters of the Dust?

Jim (36:29.221)
Watch your mouth.

Jim (36:34.553)
I do, but first I want to say that aside from the people who are currently in the comment section on Patreon, if you want to support this independent podcast, please consider becoming a member of our Patreon account. And yes, yes, yes. So producing this podcast sounds like it's an easy thing. We just have a conversation. The truth is there's a lot of cleanup. Each of the episodes is at least two and a half hours of editing. And it does, it also does cause something to run the software that we need to do all this stuff.

Lionel (36:53.688)
It is.

Jim (37:04.347)
So it does take something and it really would, a little bit from you would help. So if you're interested, go to our website, is funnynotfunny.bigego.com or funnynotfunny.net, they both go to the same place, or just go right to the Patreon, which is my Patreon, which is patreon.com slash Jim Infantino, which is phonetic. So that's all for that. Thank you so much. And then we are going to talk about another forgotten people in Daughters of the Dust.

which I also found really fascinating, great choice, Sarah. So I don't know, maybe I can say a little something because I think my ideas about it are very vague. First of all, the style of the film is dreamlike and yet anything but a dream. But it has a kind of a magical realism feel. There's something about the living on those islands that are sort of only just barely islands right off the coast of Georgia that

Sarah (37:35.711)
Thank you.

Jim (38:01.339)
that gives this sense of just sort of being stranded on a beach and forming a civilization. And of course, they were brought there as slaves and then held onto something of the Yoruba culture and traditions. it's wonderful. And it's about an extended family that is breaking apart.

And of course it's a fictionalized account, but it's real. And I found it delightful and unlike anything I had really seen before.

Sarah, what made you recommend this film aside from all the great things or including all the great things?

Sarah (38:48.307)
Well, I saw this movie when it came out in 1991. I had gone to college in Charleston, South Carolina, which so these this Gullah culture that's that's Gullah Geechee that's that's featured in the movie is off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. And I know a little bit about them.

But it wasn't, I had graduated and moved away and then this movie came out and it blew me away how much I didn't know when I saw the movie. There's a whole world going on there and I have learned since then about some of the visual details that are not really explained in the movie and it's just so rich and I loved it because it showed me there was a whole world I'd been unaware of that

Jim (39:23.355)
Mmm.

Sarah (39:44.714)
was right by me. I would walk right by the old ladies weaving sweet grass baskets, which you see one little scene of that happening in the movie. And I was well disposed towards them, but clearly so ignorant of so much going on. So, so much history in that movie.

And I think a lot of people have forgotten about it, but this wonderful full remastered version came out in 2016, which added subtitles, which weren't there before, which made it much more easy for a lot of people to take in and appreciate it. Now I had an ear for that speech. know, it's kind of a Gullah Creel and a lot of people

Jim (40:34.235)
Hmm

Right.

Sarah (40:40.171)
When I talked to people, I reviewed it on Usenet at the time, very excited about it, and someone was like, I couldn't understand a word they were saying. And I was like, oh, I went to college. I heard that. I had enough of an ear for it that immersed, I could follow along with new subtitles in 1991. So anyway, I wanted more people to see it.

Jim (40:55.493)
Yeah.

Sarah (41:09.92)
They're perhaps some...

I'm not sure I would, there were a couple of parts that maybe not everyone would appreciate, which we can get into if we want to do any dramatic criticism. But for me, a lot of the movie is about the importance of the stories we tell about ourselves and that those stories can change over time. The stories we tell about each other and particularly in family. Having had some family,

Jim (41:32.507)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah (41:42.187)
issues since then that had not blown up in 1991. Seeing this family that some of them care so much about staying together, others of them are completely dismissive of some members of the family. There's a lot of emotional content to this movie and a lot of history. It's so rich. And I can talk more.

it but I'll just stop for now because Lionel hasn't said anything yet. Would you like to say anything Lionel? very well.

Jim (42:13.955)
Don't let Lionel say anything. Let me, me, let me add a little something to this. I just want to put a little context in for people who haven't seen it. The, so what we're, what we're really looking at is a, a community of people that have, that have stayed since they were freed. And it's taking place in the early, in the early 1900s, 1902 specifically 1902 at which point, so they had been there since the slaves and slavery ended a little later, I think in, in, the silence, right?

Sarah (42:30.027)
1902.

Sarah (42:41.397)
some parts of South Carolina, yeah.

Jim (42:43.469)
Yeah. It's also the, it's the location of Igbo Point or Igbo Point where, which is a very famous story about slaves that had been brought over and turned around. I think that had, they overcame the people on the ship, the slavers, and they walked, they walked into the sea with their chains on. And, and there were, there were a number of mythologies that grew up out of that. They were told by the people of Igbo Point.

And right, mean, it just, is a, so obviously the whole community is black, but except that there is also a Native American population living nearby or somewhere, and also intermarrying sometimes. And so then some people were called yellow. And I don't know if that was in relation to like, whether it was one of the first nations. Yeah.

Sarah (43:37.675)
So that's a term in racial differentiation, know, quote, racial, where if you had a white parent, your skin was lighter and those, you know, depending on how much less completely black you look, those people were called by each other, high yellow.

Jim (44:05.563)
High yellow. Yellow Mary was one of the characters,

Sarah (44:06.811)
And so, right, there's a whole plot point with one of the characters who's whiter than most of the other black people on the island, but she's from that family. And so all these things going on in the movie showing, you know, they're dealing with frequent rapes by white people. you know, in some cases the family gets over it and in others they feel the person is ruined and completely

Jim (44:26.981)
Yeah.

Sarah (44:36.805)
arms, you you're no longer one of us. So there's so much going on in this movie that

Jim (44:44.227)
And it's unexplained. it's not spelled out at all. Yeah.

Sarah (44:44.327)
is not all spelled out. This is an immersive movie. This is not a handholding for white people movie.

Jim (44:51.419)
And we should let Lionel talk. I was just kidding Lionel. I'm sorry.

Lionel (44:57.647)
I'm listening. I'm just listening.

Jim (44:59.803)
So what do you think we might have missed? mean, I watched this once. So given what you know, what more? Yeah, go ahead.

Sarah (45:06.899)
Right. So, local religion. One of the characters, Hagar, I think is her name, is very, very, very negative about what she calls Hoodoo, what other people of the area call root magic or roots magic. So two big things going on that I noticed that were

Jim (45:26.959)
Hootoo.

Jim (45:31.183)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah (45:36.075)
part of the movie. There's the bottle trees. Now, for some Southerners, bottle trees are specifically to catch evil spirits. So the idea is that the spirits get in and they're trapped like mosquitoes or something in the bottles and can't get out. But other Southerners look at bottles as ways of

Jim (45:39.269)
Yeah.

Jim (45:52.759)
Mm-hmm. Mm.

Sarah (46:01.577)
honoring ancestors. And both of those things are happening in this movie because Nana, the grandmother of the family, seems to be in it for honoring family. She cares so much about the family. Look at what they survived. They've got to keep being a family is her idea. And yet one of her grandchildren, Eli, is furious that these bottle trees haven't protected them.

Jim (46:06.191)
Yeah.

Jim (46:21.881)
Yeah, can't forget.

Lionel (46:30.031)
Ahem.

Jim (46:30.639)
Yeah.

Sarah (46:30.773)
that his wife, Eula, was raped. And he takes a big stick and smashes up some of the, right. So that's one thing that's going on. Another thing going on, you may have noticed that Nana is, she works on little purses, tiny little purses. Those leather pouches are fetishes and they are a protection, a family thing. There's a part where she pulls out,

Jim (46:33.498)
Right.

Yeah, that was a big scene.

Jim (46:49.435)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sarah (46:58.987)
She's redoing some fetishes to take for the family who are doing the Great Migration, which is most of them. Most of them are going to leave these islands and are part of the whole Great Migration trend of the time. She's opening up these little fetish bags and so, you know, takes out, here's my mother's hair and puts it back in. And now I've added my own hair. So there are a lot of little visual elements like that.

Jim (47:06.501)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (47:12.027)
to the north.

Jim (47:20.282)
Yeah.

Sarah (47:27.411)
There was a lingering scene when Eli and Yula are at different times going through their local family cemetery. And you can see that there is these decorations and art objects and so on that have been attached to some of these grave markers. I'm sure they mean something, you know, and I don't know what. So those are a few of the things that I, yeah, those names.

Jim (47:36.859)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (47:42.523)
you

Jim (47:48.921)
Right.

Well, the names are heavy. And Nana talks, I think, talks about, even though we are free, we still keep the old slave names like Iona. Yeah, or Iwona. Yeah, Iona. And there were a couple of others. And when you hear that, you're like, ow.

Sarah (48:02.794)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah (48:07.285)
Right.

Sarah (48:12.448)
Right.

Sarah (48:16.191)
Yeah, and Eli, when he's so upset in the cemetery and pretty much yelling at Nana, his grandmother, he's upset and he kind of reels and hangs onto a tombstone that has the name Eli Palmer on it. know, his name is Eli, you know, there's all these family names that keep repeating.

Jim (48:27.291)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (48:34.937)
Right.

Sarah (48:44.043)
So those are certainly some of the visual aspects. and we should talk about, this is such a gorgeous film.

Jim (48:53.251)
It really is beautiful.

Sarah (48:55.435)
The islands of South Carolina and Georgia, these big huge trees, they're hanging on the gorgeous beaches. This is a movie you, I wouldn't, but you could just turn off the sound and watch, because there's so much beauty in it.

Jim (49:10.573)
You don't have to really understand yet what they're saying. It's it is. And I don't know. What did you think, Lionel? So several times they're talking about the migration of the people are going to have the family. Most of the family, except for a few, are going to leave and move to the North. And I keep thinking, don't don't go. It's so beautiful here. You have no idea. You know, you think that it's going to be so much better in Nova Scotia and Boston and New York. And it's like, you know, in 1902. Ouch.

Lionel (49:28.729)
Yeah.

Sarah (49:40.159)
Well, in those lands, the reasons those slaves and Cherokee were able to hide out and hang out there was because those lands were seen as valueless, because they were constantly being assaulted by hurricanes. So you couldn't do a lot of building there that would last. you know, different ways of looking at country at the same time. A couple of other things.

Lionel (49:52.079)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (49:52.431)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jim (49:58.683)
True, true.

Jim (50:05.477)
Sure.

Sarah (50:09.927)
from the movie. One, they talked about indigo and they showed the making of indigo being put into indigo blocks. So Eliza Pinckney in the 1700s, she married into a Charleston family and she made it rich because she is the one who brought indigo cash crop cultivation and processing to Charleston.

Jim (50:16.805)
Yes.

Sarah (50:39.077)
She read about it, she figured out how to do it. They were doing some over in Jamaica and so on, but she was the financial genius who founded the Pinkney's, know, later on were senators and congressmen and basically they ruled Charleston for a long time. Preslavery and then, you know, post-slavery

Jim (50:39.705)
Jim (50:44.197)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (50:55.097)
Yeah.

Pre slavery Eliza Pickney is. Yeah. Or sorry, pre sorry, pre emancipation. What am I talking about? Pre emancipation. When was when was pre slavery was what? 1200? Yeah, never mind.

Sarah (51:08.593)
Right, right, right. Well, well, but you know, that was what ramped up a lot of the slaving in South Carolina, because they didn't know how to make money, really much. You know, they were doing a lot of subsistence crop farming. And then she came up with Indigo. And rice came after that. Really, Indigo was the first cash crop of the Carolinas in Georgia.

Jim (51:31.163)
Hmm.

Jim (51:35.291)
And they had cotton on the island too, I noticed. That was a very high valued cotton, but it was mostly indigo. Yeah.

Sarah (51:38.515)
There was some, you couldn't make money off that the way you could off of indigo. mean, India was doing cotton. So anyway, there's so much history in this. they talk about it a little. You see that some of the women have black stained hands, and that's from the indigo processing. And you see some of them smearing indigo that they've processed into bricks for shipment.

Jim (51:46.395)
Yeah.

Jim (51:55.749)
Yes.

Sarah (52:06.939)
And that's one of the memories. not sure, I don't think that was actually happening at this family reunion weekend. There were memory pictures that come up partway during the movie.

Jim (52:06.96)
Right.

Jim (52:13.517)
It goes.

Jim (52:18.041)
It jumps back to her childhood, to Nana's childhood a few times. But she said it poisoned our hands, that it poisoned us. So Indigo has poisoned us.

Sarah (52:20.158)
Yeah.

Sarah (52:26.261)
Yeah.

Like any processing, if you don't care about the people who are doing it, they're likely to suffer from the effects of the work.

Jim (52:35.14)
Right.

Jim (52:39.322)
Yeah.

And that gumbo, I wanted some. wonderful.

Sarah (52:44.539)
that wonderful feast that they prepare. Yeah, there's so many things going on. Viola, the Christian, the member of the family who's very Christian, and she's trying to get everyone to give up the old ways. She doesn't want them to kiss the book that Nana has put together, which is family, because she dismisses the whole thing as hoodoo.

Jim (53:11.93)
Miss Hoodoo.

Sarah (53:14.031)
She, she's a human being. She's not just some bad villain character because you see her smiling. You see her spending a lot of time with the children, reading to them and talking to them. She brought along that photographer because she wants their way of life. She wants that to be captured. She wants the family to, you know, she wants them to have those photos forever. And so

Hagar also, I think I've got her name wrong, but anyway, the other woman of the family who's so negative to Yellow Mary and others, she's in many ways an even less sympathetic character, but there are moments where during that big wonderful feast that they're all having, she's smiling and laughing and gets on better clearly with some members of the family than others.

Jim (53:52.484)
Yes.

Sarah (54:12.907)
It's kind of, she married in, yes. And that's definitely something that they're paying attention to. They talk about the griots who had to keep track because the masters, the slavers weren't keeping track of who is whose daughter and then making them, and that's real history. They would make sons.

Jim (54:14.051)
She married in though, didn't she? Wasn't she from somewhere else? Yeah.

Jim (54:31.707)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (54:35.161)
Yeah.

Sarah (54:39.303)
have children with sisters or mothers or others and the griots were the the the africans the enslaved people who were keeping track of all of that so that they at least would know what was going on Lionel you tried to say something okay all right

Lionel (54:55.873)
No, I didn't. No.

Jim (54:57.211)
What did you think, Lionel? What was your impression of the film?

Lionel (55:00.617)
I was really confused. was like, what's going on here? Really? I mean, generally, yeah, you get through the sense of this is a extended family of people and everybody's going to move away, but Nana may be staying. And that's about as far as I got. was just like, okay, how, why are they coming here on boat? Where are they coming from? What caused them to come here?

Jim (55:02.852)
Hmm?

Lionel (55:28.831)
And there was yellow Mary, but a company yellow Mary was this other woman who never says a word.

Jim (55:35.705)
Yeah, little... Yeah.

Sarah (55:38.869)
Pretty pretty, beautiful women.

Lionel (55:41.623)
No, but I'm saying who the hell is she?

Sarah (55:45.033)
So,

Jim (55:45.379)
That was a little racy, I thought. Like, you know, there was kind of a love affair going on, I thought. Yeah.

Sarah (55:50.293)
yeah, yeah. So she brought her girlfriend, Trula, with her because this was gonna be her last visit to the island and she wanted Trula to see where she came from. Near the end of the movie, Trula realizes, Yellow Mary's not coming back with me. She's gonna stay with her grandmother. I have lost the love of my life. And she goes running off into the field for a while. And then you see her at the, I think the very last shot of the movie.

is her on the boat, Trul is on the boat with the other fam, the rest of the family and doing a very small little hand wave to Yellow Mary that she's probably never gonna see again. and Yellow Mary was the one with, yeah, this movie is not trying to tell a very linear experience. There's the whole thing with the.

Lionel (56:32.703)
Okay. Well, I didn't get in. What's the last eight minutes?

Jim (56:33.379)
Yeah, but they were full on they were full on lovers. Yeah.

Sarah (56:43.359)
baby girl who hasn't been born yet narrating part of the movie. There's a lot going on that, I mean, to me, this movie bears rewatching. But, and it can be, certainly some people bounce right off it because it's not your standard narrative. And Julie Dash said she was

Lionel (56:45.39)
Right, yeah.

Jim (56:45.967)
Yeah.

Sarah (57:09.983)
tired of the standard narrative and wanted to do something different.

Lionel (57:15.353)
Yeah, it's okay, I'm sorry. Just honestly speaking, what it reminded me of was a story I read one time in the Wall Street Journal, and it was a story about how Mattel had the opportunity to, was approached about teenage mutant ninja turtles.

Sarah (57:18.283)
Mm-hmm. Sure.

Lionel (57:39.021)
and they turn it down and it's considered one of the most epic failures in the history of toy manufacturing in America. that Mattel turned this down and they interviewed the president Mattel. He says, yeah, the story is this a bunch of dead dinosaurs. The spirits of dead dinosaurs have been reincarnated into the bias of turtles with names taken from Renaissance artists and they joined forces to battle a person called Rita repulsa who lives in the moon. Yeah, I didn't get it.

I'll be the first one to stand up and say, I didn't buy it. And I just sort of felt that way watching this movie. was like, okay, I mean, you get sort of the basic idea, but it's just, also I just didn't feel like the emotional reactions from people really matched up. just, I don't know. And then it has that incredibly 1991 soundtrack, which does not help the film.

It's got that DX7 Mark Isham, Enya kind of soundtrack, which is lovely. But for me, I've developed sort of an allergy to the DX7 soundtracks and stuff like that. just seems really, it really struck me as like the rest of it. there's you can't figure out like if there's a plot or what the plot is, but it's okay.

Jim (58:38.317)
Hmm

Jim (59:01.732)
Right.

Lionel (59:05.135)
Because it's a hang. You're hanging with the movie. And it's all about authenticity. It's all about these people who've been, you know, these people who've got their way of life. And then you layer on top of it, this Enya Mannheim steamroller soundtrack on top of it. I was just like, it just would have been a lot better if you hadn't played anything.

Jim (59:08.036)
Right.

Jim (59:17.211)
Do PX7!

Jim (59:25.603)
or something with instruments that were physical and not synthesized would probably have been better. Anything.

Lionel (59:31.831)
Yeah, or something really atmospheric, maybe just a piano or something like that. But you know, the thing that also reminded me, that would also remind me of two, yeah, it's just.

Jim (59:34.331)
Yeah. Yeah.

Banjo something, yeah. Yeah, you're totally right. Sorry, you're totally right. I mean, it is funny. It went right by me and I didn't notice, but you always notice soundtracks and I don't always notice, even I should, right? But I don't. That's a very valid critique of the film. I agree.

Lionel (59:57.123)
Yeah, well, it's just, it's just tough. mean, again, that the woman, there's Yellow Mary, and then there's this woman standing next to her who doesn't say anything. And it's like, what is she doing here? Like nobody's talking to her and she's not talking. I mean, she's laughing with Yellow Mary every now and then, but she doesn't interact with practically, she doesn't, maybe a tiny bit.

Jim (01:00:06.617)
They never explain. Yeah.

Sarah (01:00:18.379)
Yula. So Yellow Mary and Yula, the woman who was raped by a white guy and is going to have a baby soon, and Trula hang out on the beach together a lot. And I think that's one reason that Yellow Mary stays behind, because Yuli's going to stay behind. Oh, sorry people, spoilers for 1991 movie. Anyway, some of them are going to stay behind. And so there is some time where they're just hanging out on a dune and hanging out.

Lionel (01:00:24.303)
Right, well there's yellow Mary and yellow Lib, I'm talking about the other, woman who's a... Yeah.

Jim (01:00:29.059)
Right, they all talk.

Lionel (01:00:37.187)
Spoiler alert!

Jim (01:00:41.68)
Yeah.

Sarah (01:00:46.763)
in a big tree with big low branches. But you're right, it's not explained. There are also some big emotional screaming speech moments, which I think the foundation was laid for them, but they are definitely not gonna be everybody's meat. Some people aren't gonna wanna sit there while, know, Yula is upset about.

Lionel (01:00:49.411)
Yeah, and they, yeah.

Yeah.

Lionel (01:00:58.414)
Yeah.

Sarah (01:01:12.585)
the rejection of Yellow Mary by the family, et cetera, et So there's definitely.

Lionel (01:01:15.887)
I liked it. mean, I thought it was okay. I think it went on a little bit long. But she's a really I really, I really dug the performances. I mean, I dug the people. I really dug it. And also, go ahead.

Sarah (01:01:19.124)
Yeah.

Jim (01:01:24.249)
Yeah. Well, that's it. Sorry, it's immersive. I felt like I was spending some time on that island with them. was and it none. And part of it was things didn't make sense. Like it wasn't a linear narrative and there weren't any character arcs. Well, there were, but they weren't the they weren't the average arcs. They were really unique. Actually, that's something I really dig in storytelling is something where you don't have the hero's journey, you know, and you don't have these typical arcs that we see over and over and over and over again.

Lionel (01:01:36.644)
Yeah.

Jim (01:01:53.903)
This didn't have any of that. This was something completely other, which I thought was refreshing. But the DX7, totally inappropriate. Yeah.

Lionel (01:01:56.675)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (01:02:02.819)
Yeah. I mean, it was all the rage then. I mean, it's like a Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, late Kate Bush, late Peter Gabriel, DX7 with the Fretless bass played by Pico Palladino or, you know, one of those guys. And that just that frickin DX7 Fender Rhodes sound.

Jim (01:02:13.669)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (01:02:26.167)
On the wings of love. It's like, my God, shoot me. The only thing they didn't use is that fricking bell sound from Taco Bell that Enya used to death, the infamous DX7 bell sound. It's on every Taco Bell commercial when they ring the bell at the end of the commercial. It's a DX. It's that one. what?

Jim (01:02:28.357)
No!

Jim (01:02:39.227)
It's that one. What do you want to bet the director? What's the director's name again? Julie Dash. I bet she was like, I don't want a soundtrack. I don't want any music. And they're like, well, if you want to release this film, you're to have to some music. And they're like, I know a guy. He's got a synth. Right? Yeah.

Sarah (01:02:49.717)
Julie Dash?

Lionel (01:02:49.775)
Julie Dash.

Lionel (01:02:59.791)
Yeah, it sounded like Mark Eicham. It very much sounds of that age of ambient music. And there's a lot of people doing that music at that time. But that's fine, whatever it is, it is. And then I didn't, other than that, was like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I had no idea what was going on. It's like, okay, we're on a beach. I got that, and they're making food. Good, okay. Roll with it.

Jim (01:03:25.371)
Yeah, yeah. the food. Holy crap.

Sarah (01:03:25.599)
Hahahaha

Lionel (01:03:28.088)
what it reminded me of though, one thing that actually twigged in my mind, because what does it remind you of James Blair in Fentino? There's a voiceover, days of heaven, yeah.

Jim (01:03:36.574)
Days of Heaven? Yeah, and in fact, had the same, don't you think about it, it had the same narrative style of the little girl who's sort of on the outside of the drama, talking about what had happened and then carrying on with her journey. And I was thinking of that just as you were talking about the unborn daughter, yeah.

Sarah (01:03:42.784)
Yeah.

Lionel (01:03:47.213)
voiceover of the child.

Sarah (01:03:48.159)
Yep. Yep.

Sarah (01:03:56.893)
And both with such beautiful imagery. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lionel (01:03:59.727)
Yeah, where the landscape is one of the key actors in the film. But I looked it up. Yeah. Days of Heaven is 79, 78, 79. Amazing how amazing that movie looks for 78, 79. It's mind blowing. That was 91, believe. Daughters of the Dust is 91. Yeah, so it's 91. So you're talking at least a decade afterwards. But I would be, you know,

Jim (01:04:07.897)
It might have been an influence.

It's true that, yeah.

Sarah (01:04:13.16)
yeah.

Sarah (01:04:17.823)
So Daughters of the Dust with 91, yes.

Sarah (01:04:23.669)
Right.

Lionel (01:04:25.815)
That's immediately what I thought, the voiceover from the child and the luscious cinematography and sort of the cryptic utterances of the people in the movie.

Sarah (01:04:30.941)
Did you see they made it?

Jim (01:04:36.527)
Yeah. And the days that go by, just this kind of sense of a length of time. So outside of our go to work and go home and do the thing, just something outside, even though in days of heaven they're working, et cetera, but it has that sense of kind of an expanse of time that you got on the island as well. Yeah.

Lionel (01:04:54.733)
Yeah, you're in a sea, you're in a sea of grass. It's like a bunch of people. Anyway, yeah, Sarah, you're saying?

Sarah (01:05:02.027)
If I read it right, it was made for $100,000, Daughters of the Dust. It was made dirt cheap, amazingly cheap. She got some stake money from American Playhouse, because nobody in Hollywood would fund it. yeah, so she got people to... Most of the actors were non-union. She got a few union in...

Jim (01:05:08.598)
Wow.

Lionel (01:05:09.4)
Wow.

Sarah (01:05:29.931)
So the non-unions were people who already were local Gullah people. then she brought, go ahead. Okay, right, brought in some actors, professional actors, and got them coached. And she got people to make materials for the dresses and the, you know, the...

Lionel (01:05:34.081)
Okay, well.

No, you go ahead, you finish.

Lionel (01:05:44.676)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah (01:05:53.487)
houses that were made local materials. know, pretty much the money they spent was pretty much on the film to capture the movie. Pretty much.

Lionel (01:06:00.335)
100 grand? That's just enough to buy the film stock for God's sakes. Yeah.

Jim (01:06:01.943)
Yeah, that it wasn't digital. And that's where it's very different than Days of Heaven, which probably cost a billion dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should round up. Yeah.

Lionel (01:06:10.095)
bazillion dollars, but I gotta tell you a funny story, because I know we're getting close to time, but I gotta tell you this story. Okay, got, give me two minutes. So I'm listening to Malcolm Gladwell, his podcast, and he's got this one called, he's got this new series, a new sub-series of his podcast called Mistakes, and this one's called The Sony Hat.

Jim (01:06:21.317)
Hmm?

Lionel (01:06:32.439)
And what it's about is about the time that Sony released a movie called The Interview and in return, the government of North Korea hacked Sony, whacked all their systems and posted all the emails. So Malcolm Gladwell is interviewing the head of Sony Studios at that time who greenlit that project. And they talk about how they all met and they all read the script for the interview and he was so excited about it.

Jim (01:06:43.417)
Right.

Lionel (01:07:01.837)
He green lit it and it tanked his career because it got hacked afterwards. And you should listen to it. It's only the first 15 minutes. And the thing that blew my mind and the thing I kept saying to myself is, okay, let me get this straight. And he sounds like a wonderful guy. Really, I really liked the guy a lot. I really do. But I'm like, you're the head of a major studio. Somebody comes to you with a script about assassinating.

Jim (01:07:06.701)
Haha!

Lionel (01:07:29.111)
an actual living head of state.

And you didn't think that maybe we should run this pass legal?

Jim (01:07:37.743)
Yeah!

Lionel (01:07:39.689)
Maybe, you know, you know, and he said, I wasn't aware, you know, he said, you know, and then there's this, obviously there's this big thing between Japan and North Korea. I'm like, hello? Yeah.

Jim (01:07:50.799)
Yeah, it's a faraway land. It's a faraway land. They'll never see it. Yeah. So that's so what do you call that? That's Orientalism, right? Is it is like

Sarah (01:07:53.213)
Right. These people aren't real.

Lionel (01:07:56.353)
No, it's amazing!

Lionel (01:08:01.142)
Ignorant?

Sarah (01:08:01.418)
out of touch.

Lionel (01:08:04.911)
No, it's not, it's just, I was just like, how do you not know that this is gonna piss off North Korea? How do you not know? mean, seriously, it's not like we're talking about a movie that takes place in Laos, okay? know, Zambia. You know, it's North Korea. They're on the headline every night for like 20 years there, okay? They have these big parades where nuclear missiles go down the street, okay? And they've got this nut job.

Sarah (01:08:05.012)
Yeah.

Jim (01:08:23.888)
Yeah.

Jim (01:08:27.205)
They have phones, they have TVs. Yeah.

Ha ha ha.

Lionel (01:08:35.149)
dictator who's constantly threatened to blow us up and blow up the South Koreans and he's kidnapping people and setting things up. How can you possibly, how do you become the head of a major studio?

Jim (01:08:44.571)
What if this was about France? How would that work out? Hmm.

Lionel (01:08:47.919)
Yeah, we're gonna make a movie about how somebody kills Macron by burying him under a pile of feces. Oh, that sounds hilarious. Let's go. Where's the camera?

Jim (01:08:56.271)
And yeah, YouTube is going to flag this one for sure now.

Lionel (01:09:02.959)
But it's just, to me, I think it's fascinating, one of the things, and I'm almost done, one of the things that we have talked about many times, Jim, and I know it's something near and dear to your heart, is that, do people occupy positions of power and renown in this society because they actually have some talent, or are they just lucky? And I'm telling you, it sort of parallels my thing. Is our lives, are our lives,

Jim (01:09:22.384)
Yeah.

Lionel (01:09:28.973)
governed more by DNA or by our circumstances. And what I can tell you is that with each additional year, nobody's coming forward with any evidence that circumstances. Every year, it's more more evidence that your DNA, like your lifespan, it's basically your DNA. They said you can go smoke cigarettes. I mean, yeah, it might shift the markers like one or two years in either direction, but you're gonna die at a certain date. And the same thing with the fame. Like you're talking about the beef between Elon Musk and Altman.

of open AI. Are these people at the top because they're truly talented? No!

Jim (01:09:58.991)
Yep, yep.

I think we're getting a big lesson in that it's that it is neither smarts nor talent. Yeah. And it's a very expensive lesson, but I will not go down that road right now because we have gone down it ad infinitum ad nauseum and I'll stop. But yeah, I agree.

Lionel (01:10:08.921)
No!

Lionel (01:10:14.735)
Right.

Yeah, take a listen to this. Because he's a lovely guy. He sounds like a wonderful guy. He may be a great movie exec, but to make a blunder.

Jim (01:10:22.243)
Right? Not Eon, but the movies. Yeah, yeah. It is unbelievable. Sarah, Sarah Elkins, thank you. Thank you for joining us again. And thank you so much for the recommendation of this film. I loved it. And we both loved grass and not that not the movie about 420, but about the migration of the.

Lionel (01:10:26.924)
Okay.

Unbelievable.

Lionel (01:10:36.249)
Thanks.

Sarah (01:10:39.764)
You are welcome.

Jim (01:10:50.821)
Bhakti and Bhaktari.

Sarah (01:10:53.631)
That's Grass, a Nation's Battle for Life. If you're trying to find it. That one, that subtitle, yes.

Jim (01:10:57.295)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tagline. Yeah, that's true. Very good. Very good. And in the case, if you happen to be lucky enough to have the Criterion collection, we're becoming an advertisement for it, which we're not getting paid for. it is available. Daughters of the Dust is available on Criterion and Grass. on Canopy. There you go. Yeah, very good. Even better. Great. Yeah.

Sarah (01:11:16.039)
And on Canopy, the library app. I'm stubbornly sticking to free, and it's the remastered 2016 version. You can watch subtitles there. So I'm stubbornly sticking to free movies for now. Yeah, yeah.

Lionel (01:11:18.18)
Yeah.

Jim (01:11:28.557)
I haven't hooked it up. need to I need to hook that up. That's that's another great option because I'm sick of all these subscriptions. And then can you say the name? was the dawn of man. It's the Ascent of Man.

Lionel (01:11:41.027)
The Ascent of Man by Jacob Rynowski.

Jim (01:11:45.229)
It's old and it's outdated. Some of what he says actually still does hold up. did kind of research a lot of what he said and it hasn't been kind of buried in terms of, I watched a couple of other episodes and it's still pretty current and pretty accurate. But I love that we were able to kind of poke a couple of holes in that because there are some, you know, he has, I don't know what to call it. Prejudices, I guess, or he has slant. He has a slant. Yeah.

Sarah (01:11:49.398)
yeah.

Sarah (01:11:58.635)
Mm-hmm.

Lionel (01:12:08.803)
Well, he's recounting a standard narrative. He's recounting a very standard narrative that people have been saying for the last 150 years. And it has shift anyway. So, but it's interesting to look at him. And what's also interesting is to look at him and look at how, and then if you're interested, what I think is the best of all those series is the day the universe changed with James Burke, which I think is one of the most amazing pieces of television ever put together, which unfortunately does not have

Sarah (01:12:11.955)
Yes.

Jim (01:12:19.119)
Yeah.

Lionel (01:12:38.659)
the shitty BBC radiophonic workshop, title music to it actually has like a trumpet and like a piano and stuff like that. But James Burke, you could, if you watch a couple of James Burke, the universe changed episodes and compare them to Bernofsky, you can tell that Burke is really in conversation with Bernofsky. it's very interesting stuff.

Jim (01:12:44.283)
Yeah.

Jim (01:12:56.503)
Interesting.

Sarah (01:12:58.869)
do just want to say real quick, Jacob Bronowski, Ascent of Man, ideas about civilization. Thinking about that and Daughters of the Dust, where the people from the mainland are so convinced that they're civilized and the people on the island are these backwards people who need to be rescued from their backwardness. And I just, I was interested by how that tied together.

Jim (01:13:09.04)
Yes.

Jim (01:13:14.448)
Right.

Lionel (01:13:24.239)
Mm-hmm.

Jim (01:13:24.517)
I think that's a critical theme that we didn't even touch on, but I think you're absolutely right. And it really ties into what we know, the views of the nomadic people. yeah, there's actually so much more we could talk about, but we don't have an intimate amount of time. And I really appreciate your being here and I appreciate the discussion and we'll see you all next week. Not you, Sarah, but we'll see you. Maybe you'll be in the comments. Good night.

Lionel (01:13:36.195)
We gotta go.

Lionel (01:13:42.543)
Okay, bye. Well, you'll be in the comments again.

Sarah (01:13:45.801)
Thank you, everybody.