timecapsules.

Reason #178968 Why I Love Film: It really takes you back.

I mean, it really takes you back.  On Saturday, I went on an accidental 6mi walk with my friend Oksana.  We hadn't quite meant for it to last around four hours, just like I didn't quite mean to have my barely-shod feet cemented in pond-mud when I went chasing after a small leopard frog at the end of our walk.  What happened is what usually happens when Oksana and I get together: we couldn't stop talking.  We touched on everything from amazing book series, high school memories, phantom beavers...  Relevant to this post, however, we both realized that we had film to develop.

We undertook this task today.   I knew mostly what would be on mine two rolls since they were only one year old, but her disposable cameras were four, some even five, years old.  We handed them over to be processed, went out for frozen yogurt, spent an unnecessary (but totally necessary) amount of money at a used bookstore, and then headed back to pick up our pictures.  Just like tiny time capsules, with each seal broken, we were suddenly escorted back to an older, ostensibly simpler time.  She had pictures from our first tubing trip down Darby Creek, when my hair was still ridiculously long and my waist ridiculously smaller.  Our last day of high school, our last ever chance to open the door of portable classroom B-2.  There were smiling pictures of people we could barely remember, waddling penguins, Christmas trees wearing slippers.  Every time she moved one to the bottom of the pile to reveal the next, our faces lit up and we laughed.  I said "Oh, my God" like a broken record.

Well, anyway, my smallest roll of film (only 12 exposures) featured Oberlin, and mostly my first Josh Ritter concert last Fall.  My friends and I sat in the balcony, pretty far away, so you really can’t make out much of his face, but the organ pipes in Finney Chapel .tower majestically over the audience.  Even with  my minimal talent, I've also played on that stage, under that organ.  How many audiences those pipes must have seen!  And then there is Tank, my humble abode for one and a half years.  The sun is shining as we eat on the lawn.  It’s open mic night, so there are people dancing in the background, people singing on the porch.  Everyone looks happy.  Everyone was happy.

It really made me think.  We get so caught up in the moments of our lives that we don’t realize we’re happy.  I’ve shed so many tears at Oberlin, for crushed dreams, friends who have passed, turned down invitations, academic insecurities.  But in only 12 frames I managed to capture so much of what I often forget.  Good music, good food, green lawns, historic houses, smiling faces…  It was a gentle reminder that i’m going to go back in the fall, and it’s going to be okay.  So, this is where I want to say that film is better than digital.

Why?  Well, I'll tell you why!  Unlike digital where you have a mistake margin of 600,000 pictures on your memory card and the ability to see and delete the crappy ones to make room, with film each frame is precious, not to be wasted.  And you don't get to say "Oh, I look bad!  Delete it!  Let's do it again!"  With each candid frame, you relive the moment just as it was when you hit the button--the original laughs, not the recreated ones.  Even through the smiles, you can see sadness if it is there.  The colors are real, the face are real.  Every sense is captured on film.  Even the developing is an experience--for me, sometimes of love, and sometimes very much of hatred.  Nothing is more exhilarating to me than to flick on the lights in the negative room, finally open the developing tank, rinse the negatives, and then unroll them, revealing the thumbnails of your success.  And nothing is more heart-wrenching than unrolling a set of 36 blanks--wasted time, wasted chemicals, lost memories.  You run into the enlarger room and can make prints for hours of any size.  It's your choice, and your fault if it screws up.

I'm not saying I don't like digital images.  I don't think I would have been able to deal with wrestling my flim camera and my laptop all the way around Europe, and I don't think I'd have been able to fit that much film in my suitcase.  All I'm saying is I don't feel the same connection to digital images, where all I have to do is copy & paste from my memory card, then resize if I want to, maybe play with the color settings a bit (make it look like I don't have a zit on my chin, y'know)... There's no sense of a battle fought and a battle well won, and I don't have anything to hold in the end.  And, most importantly for this post, there is no element of surprise in digital images (if there is, it is almost minuscule).  When I take old digital photos to be printed, I know exactly what I'm gonna get.  When I look at my digital images, it's hard for me to feel any satisfaction comparable to what I feel when I look at the very first picture I took with my SLR, the very first picture I developed.  I can remember where I took it, how I felt when I took it, who helped me develop it, how nervous I was...  And then I can look at what I can do now, and it makes me so proud!  It's been a long time since I had the luxury of marveling over negatives, so pardon me if I sound a little lovey-dovey.  It just... well... it really takes me back.  :)

könig des mondes, der märchen

Very few characters in history have excited me more than King Ludwig II of Bavaria.  Alright, let's rephrase a bit.  Very few characters in European history have excited me more than Ludwig II.  On a superficial level, this probably has more to do with the fact that I am not well-versed in European history than any ultra-special exclusivity of my VIP list.  However, there's also something deeper about it.  The fact that, almost five years later, I'm still enchanted is testament to that.  Apart from James Madison and Bobby Kennedy, he's one of the few I've actually managed to read more than half a biography for over the long, hot, humid Ohio Summers.  So, as I made my fourth trip up to Neuschwanstein in the middle of a thunderstorm (ironically, with no intention of paying for another tour of the interior--yeah, I know, rotten idea), I began to wonder... why?

at least the weather added to the drama of the view?

It was about a 2-hr train ride back to Munich from Füßen, and, instead of listening to the American sisters sitting across from me complain about their too-big ice cream bars and uncomfortable seats (which is a lie--I love DB train seats! Trenitalia is a different story all together...), I decided to drown them out with some good ol' Schumann on my iPod and ponder that very question.  Why is Ludwig II so fascinating?  Lucky for me, there was a special exhibit, as part of the Bayerische Landesaustellung at Herrenchiemsee, that set about to explain just that.  With so much water under my proverbial bridge, it's hard to recall exactly what I drew from the German reading materials, tour, and audio guide I was provided (that's what I get for ordering my Inselkarte auf Deutsch!), but I can break it down into three easy bullet-points...

1) He was a child.  At the very entrance of the Götterdämmerung exhibit, there was an amazing quote from him that ran a little like this: my self (the German word he used was 'das Innere' and I still can't think of an appropriate equivalent) is as sensitive as photo paper--every image, every experience leaves an impression that will last a lifetime...  When his father died, he was only 19, two years younger than I am now, still only beginning his university education.  So suddenly, he was wrenched out of that world of safety and experimentation and made king of Bavaria.  I guess it was a little like how the US felt when JFK was elected.  Here was this youthful, bashful, handsome, intelligent boy being crowned your leader--like any teenager, the nation begins to feel invincible and anything seems possible.  And that, I guess, fit in with Ludwig's image of himself as well.  It was all a fantasy--where heroes triumph and evil is left to dust.  He hated, despised, abhorred warfare because it interrupted these fantasies--it was cruel, expensive, and deflated morale.  I think that's what Wagner meant to Ludwig.  Through his operas, Ludwig was able to escape to the murals of his mother's castle at Hohenschwangau, where heroes existed and damsels in distress awaited rescuing.  Everyone has fantasies.  The only difference is that not everyone has the luxury of living them even after they're older.

 

this was the book i managed to read half of four summers ago--i just think he looks so sweet & innocent on the cover

2) He was a paradox, and historians love a good contradiction.  Here was a young boy, tossed into a situation beyond his years, in an age of increasing republicanism, who desperately wanted to be a divine, absolutist ruler like Louis XIV.  In an age of technology, he wanted to believe in magic.  "I don't want to know how it works," he said of technology, "I just want to see it work."  He had outdated beliefs about kingship, yet he remained popular with his people for a surprisingly long time.  He had some of the most technologically advanced castles in the world with electricity, multi-colored lights, heating, running water, and yet he didn't seem really to care how it functioned.  Torn between two worlds and aging (in an older man such eccentric, childish delusions were no longer acceptable), he tried to keep his world united and remain forever young.  And, as if we needed one more piece of irony to complete this point, two months after his death, his noble family made the decision to open the castles to the public against his last wishes in the hope that it would further convince the Bavarian public that their king had been a total nutjob.  In fact, it did quite the opposite, and he remains beloved--if even more so now than before.

the castle at herrenchiemsee was built, as a tribute to louis xiv, to be a lager-than-life homage to versailles

3) He was an artist.  So many kings and princes want to be artists and they pour their treasuries into commissions and parties, to which they will try to entice the leading artists of the day.  But Ludwig poured a great deal of his funds, impressively, into his own art.  Everything he created was a symbol, a work of genius.  He wrote poetry, designed buildings, made drawings, played music (unless I'm getting him confused with Frederick the Great, which is entirely possible)... He seemed to do it all.  It was an escape for his imagination that only seemed to grow as he did.  Near the end of the exhibit, there was this satire between Ludwig and Wagner, where two actors argued the question of whether either of them could have existed without the other.  Ludwig starts by talking about the opera house he wanted to build, which pops up as a bubble above his head.  But then he gets distracted and more and more bubbles begin to pop up until the screen is full of his ideas.  And then, just like that, they all shatter.  When the people walked through the glittering sanctuaries of their king ,they of course saw an eccentric, but, what's more, they saw an artistic genius.  Instead of condemning him as the nobles and wished, his castles ensured him a spot in the historical memory of Bavaria, probably forever.  God, I love history.  Don't you?  :)

this is the first room you walk into on the tour and it just takes your breath away.  the rest of the rooms that were completed don't disappoint.

As far as visiting Herrenchiemsee goes, I would definitely recommend it.  It's more off-the-beaten-track than Neuschwanstein and your ticket also includes a visit to a monastery and probably other things too that I missed for want of time.  Personally, I had the hardest time getting there.  I missed my first train, and then indecision kept me on the next train and I missed the Prien a. Chiemsee stop.  I decided to continue onto Salzburg, where I dropped my bags at the hostel and then sprinted back to the train station.  I missed the next train, so I caught the next next train.  Due to some drunk Irishmen (of all people to meet on a train in Austria) that unsettled some of the other passengers, our train was late arriving in Prien and I missed the little train that would take me to the ferry, so, again, I sprinted (about 20 minutes) to make it to the docks in time.  Thankfully, I did end up making it, ordered my ticket, and made it to the castle in time to catch my tour.  Phew!

it's an amazing boat-ride--clear blue waters, a view of the alps, a crisp breeze...!

So, if even after all that unfortunate bustling about, I would still recommend Herrenchiemsee, you know it had to be good.  The Landesaustellung exhibit is open until October, I believe, so if you're in Bayern or Salzburg and looking for a good day trip, GO FOR IT!  They've opened the unfinished rooms of the palace for the exhibit and you get to see cool things like old sketches, his Christening gown, photos, letters, and movie portrayals.  Included is great insight on what it was like to live in Bavaria at the time.  Five stars to Herrenchiemsee, I'm telling you.

(He also has another castle in Oberammergau [?] called Linderhof, which I also recommend.  Seriously, just do a Ludwig tour if you're in Bavaria.  It's what I would have done if I had one extra day.  If you need any convincing, here's a picture of Linderhof from when I visited it four years ago...)

And with this, my friends, we can officially leave Germany and enter Austria.  Huzzah!  I'm sure you're all excited!  :)  Until next time!