"Yara" / "Ears, Eyes and Throats: Restored Classic and Lost Punk Films 1976 - 1981" 190908

Yara

Being an American watching foreign films has become perplexing - always anticipating some sort of violence to be just around the corner, confused when it isn’t, and needing to re-watch movies just to remove that gnawing expectation and just enjoy the experience. It’s getting tough to remember that narrative conflict can be rich and propel well-told stories without people having to hurt each other.

(Spoilers ahead)

In Yara, a young girl’s development into a young woman is laid out via day-in-the-life scenes amid the remote mountains of Northern Lebanon. She lives with only her grandmother, is occasionally visited by a travelling grocer, helpful cousins, and – increasingly – Elias, a charming young man who jokes (?) that he wants to take her with him to Australia.

We witness her simple life - doing chores, chatting with her Sitti about her deceased parents, eating stuffed squash, feeding the animals, venturing out to find lost sheep and chickens, worrying about a marauding jackal that threatens them from time to time, etc. 

This is framed throughout by a rapturous mountain landscape.

So what holds our interest besides the sierran beauty? Where’s the conflict?

Simply that she is no longer a little girl who, even in a remote, mostly abandoned village, must now pay heed to how others perceive her budding femininity, how to respond to her growing relationship with Elias, and how will she face the challenges and precariousness of her future.

Ears, Eyes and Throats: Restored Classic and Lost Punk Films 1976 - 1981

Peter Conheim has curated a fascinating time capsule of oddball music films from around 1980. The San Francisco scene is represented first by the Residents, the Offs, the Dils, the Avengers, Renaldo and the Loaf, and hmmm, my band MX-80 Sound.

The last section features “Bored in Pittsburgh: The Obscure Film That Immortalized 1980s Punk” Bill Bored’s scattered tour of Pittsburg’s scene with the Cardboards, Hans Brinker, the Shakes, and the Dykes.

Some of the footage is pretty awful, some conjures fuzzy nostalgia, and some is a flat-out scream (like The Dykes’ “Hysterectomy”), but it’s all quite spellbinding in that way that looking at a one’s checkered past – including everything from the idyllic to the cringe-worthy parts – tends to be.