Rec.

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Steelhead,

of course Bunuel, who also has, like Pynchon, close ties to Mexico.
A tiny example: somehow the dog chased by Pointsman on the page 42 
("escaping into similar darkness") brings to my mind the dog running
in the end of _Los Olvidados_. Admittedly, there is no slapstick
(like toilet-bowling that follows in _GR_) in *that*, great, film by LB.

I'd say Bergman has "uncheap", high modernist films, too, that are great
as such but not very close to Pynchon. This has set the rules for Bergman 
criticism, which long regarded _The Seventh Seal_ as a dead-serious 
allegory; nowadays it is much easier to experience it as a serio-comical, 
unpsychologizing, heteroglottic, yes, even "postmodernist" film.
_The Magic Flute_ and _Fanny and Alexander_ have no doubt changed the 
atmosphere somewhat. Whereas Cocteau was *always* irrevocably serious and 
cheap.

_Closely Watched Trains_ comes from Chech(oslovakia), by the way. By
Jiri Menzel. Who, unlike Forman and Kundera, never left the country.
Maybe he should have, but who am I to say. _CWT_ is a funny and moving
film. Written by Bohumil  Hrabal, a great writer, too. A successor of 
both Kafka and Hasek. Kundera is in my mind a most un-Pynchonian writer. 
So elitistically European. What is "kitsch" for him is "camp" for 
American writers.

Kafka is something very different. (I had to admit one day that he
is even more important to me than Pynchon. Perhaps the only writer who is.) 
Which leads us back to Welles, whose reckless version of _The Trial_ has 
to be mentioned in this connection.

Heikki