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The first is about an ageing German film-maker, who is allowed entry to a cave filled with ancient paintings and bones of now extinct species. Gazing at the paintings - so vivid he is moved to comment that one looks like it could have been painted yesterday - the film-maker, Werner Herzog, ponders the nature of what he calls "modern man", a species he distinguishes from Neanderthal man primarily on his inclination to create, to draw, to represent. What yearnings in the human soul, he questions, do these paintings indicate?
Interviewing one of the many scientists involved in the project, Herzog asks the question of what makes a human. His interviewee cites the ability to adapt well to one's environment and to interact effectively with other beings (he is French, so the latter word is pronounced "be-eengs" - an awkward, double vowel sound that gives it greater emphasis than usual). Herzog does not seem satisfied with this answer. Surely humanity involves something more? A quest for meaning? A quest for beauty and truth?
Another one of his interviewees seems to agree, noting at another point in the film that the name homo sapiens - the man who knows - is grossly inadequate as a description of our species. He offers instead the name homo spiritualis. The sacred choral film score in the background resonates in agreement.
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The second story is of an ageing French illusionist, who finds himself in Edinburgh attempting to make a living for himself plying his craft at a run-down music hall and renting a room in a hotel he shares with acrobats, a washed-up clown and an equally washed-up ventriloquist. He is accompanied by a young girl, Alice, who believes in the magic that he only fakes. Alice becomes enthralled by the world that he brings her into, but it never satisfies him. He wanders through it all with the same baffled nonchalance that his creator, Jacques Tati, epitomised. Few of the characters speak the same language. Those that speak English are rarely coherent, and there are never subtitles when French or Gaelic are spoken. Yet the characters - all animated - are magnificently real and vivid. The film so often pauses on pathos-laden images of desolation: of the drunken ventriloquist sleeping in the street, his dummy going for an ever-decreasing price at a local antique store; a clown drinking alone while vaudeville tunes play on a faltering old gramophone.
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The third and final story is on a Lygon Street tram returning from the cinema, a local homeless man who I recognise from years spent on this street entering the tram near me. Somehow he has acquired a slab of beers, one of which he is drinking now, lying back on the plastic concertina wall that unites the two halves of the tram, glassy-eyed, not quite tranquil. I pray for him until he exits the tram. As he gets off, a man helps him zip his backpack up again to avoid losing all the beers stored in there. I'm not quite sure it is an act of kindness. When I get off the tram, the troubled and troubling lady who frequents my tram stop stands at the lights on the corner of Lygon and Stewart Streets, howling at the wind and the traffic and the rain.
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How long, O Lord, how long?
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