Brecht, in a letter during the war, describes American soldiers on a train talking to each other; no country, he says, has made itself familiar as this one, through the cinema. David Thomson develops this simple idea in his discussion of Chinatown; if you live in the US you can't help dropping into some of the dialogue from the film-'well nobody's perfect' and so on. Further, as time goes by, LA themes in the film (exploitation, greed etc) come to look like 'real' LA This is his idea of 'the whole equation'-we see ourselves as if in a film. This notion has obvious appeal for J G Ballard. Does our world view, he wonders, come from Disney or Canterbury Cathedral. Or, he goes on, how would the equation work in Japan or Sweden-psychotic stares or glacial silences? Or what about the UK? -Passport to Pimlico or Brief Encounter?
Brecht concludes, re the train episode, that 'maybe the movies don't tell the whole story'. So film and life don't equate? They don't have to: consider Jan Nemec's Late Night Talks with My Mother. There is a connection between this film and Oratorio for Prague together with The Ferrari Dino Girl but it is up to us to work out what the equation is or make up our own equation from elements like Skvorevsky, jazz, east european jazz, Boruvka etc.
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