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Saturday, May 17
THIS WEEK'S ORSON WELLES ON THE AIR: LES MISÉRABLES, Part Five
by
Lloydville
on Sat 17 May 2008 03:47 AM PDT
Gather the household around, dim the lights, click here -- then sit back and enjoy the radio theater of Orson Welles.
This week . . . "The Grave", the fifth episode of Welles's brilliant seven-part adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables
in which Welles stars as Jean Valjean and also reads the
narration.
This show will only be on the site for a week, so download it if you
can't listen to it right away -- and tune in next week for the sixth
episode of Les Misérables.
[You can get more information on Welles's radio work and listen to or
download many of his broadcasts here -- The Mercury Theater On the Air. Many more broadcasts
can be downloaded at this resource page on Wellesnet.
If you get hooked, you can buy a remarkable collection of almost all of
Welles' radio work, as both actor and director, in MP3 format on 7 CDs
at OTRCat -- which also offers the discs separately.]
 1 Attachments
Thursday, May 15
A VICTORIAN POEM FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 15 May 2008 01:14 AM PDT
- Jenny kissed me when we met,
- Jumping from the chair she sat in.
- Time, you thief! who love to get
- Sweets into your list, put that in.
- Say I'm weary, say I'm sad;
- Say that health and wealth have missed me;
- Say I'm growing old, but add --
- Jenny kissed me!
The poem, called Rondeau, was written by Leigh Hunt (pictured above) and first published in 1838. Hunt was a minor literary figure of the Victorian era, a friend of Shelley and Keats and Dickens. His poetry has a simplicity that can make it seem trivial, but I think Rondeau is perfect. It's music allows its simplicity to breathe, and reminds us of that sincerity of unselfconscious sentiment which the Victorians at their best could summon -- a sincerity which 20th century literature, charting the age of irony, completely lost touch with. Virginia Woolf, early in the century, lamented the loss, distressed that poets could no longer write lines like these, by Christina Rossetti:
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a purple sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me. Such directness of feeling did survive in the popular arts, in pop songs and in the movies -- any place where the arbiters of high culture had no influence.
Most improbably, Orson Welles recited Rondeau at the close of a pilot for a TV talk show he made towards the end of his life (which wasn't picked up.) Welles was an unregenerate Victorian, which was a source of much of his secret power, and almost all of his films deal with loss, with the memory of some sweet, unrecoverable moment in time that haunts the present . . . a characteristic Victorian theme.
Rosebud, Mr. Bernstein's girl on the ferry, the Amberson's ball, a long-past love affair with the Baroness Nagel in Warsaw, the chimes at midnight . . . all these are one with Jenny's kiss.
Leigh Hunt wrote, "Every one should plant a tree who can. It is one of the cheapest . . . as well as easiest, of all tasks." Trees, said Hunt, "are green footsteps of our existence, which show that we have not lived in vain."
Rondeau is such a tree.
Wednesday, May 14
A SONG FOR TODAY: JIMMY GIUFFRE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 14 May 2008 12:05 AM PDT
Jimmy
Giuffre died last month, at the age of 86 -- I just heard about it. Giuffre was a
jazz clarinetist with a cool, mellow style, influenced by Lester Young. He was a fixture of the laid-back West Coast jazz scene in the 50s
and 60s and I was lucky enough to hear him play once in the 60s at my
boarding school in New England where he and his small group (a trio, I
think it was) were hired for one of our rare entertainment
treats. I can't imagine how that happened -- I never identified
anybody on our faculty who had a passion for jazz -- but I'm sure glad
I got to hear the cat blow in person.
Here's an early cut to give you an idea of how sweet he could be
-- Someone To Watch Over Me (recorded in Los Angeles in 1955). You can buy a CD with the cut
here. (The song will be up here only for a limited time.)
1 Attachments
Monday, May 12
COOL
by
Lloydville
on Mon 12 May 2008 09:49 PM PDT
Assuming that Hillary Clinton Can't lead the Democratic Party and the
rest of the country into Bizarro World, there's a good chance that
Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. By
my reckoning, that would make him only the fourth cool President in our
history.
A genuinely cool President has to be someone who would be cool even if
he or she wasn't President, someone you'd think it would be cool to
hang out with in a situation that had nothing to do with
politics. That leaves us with Thomas Jefferson, Theodore
Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Kennedy makes the list by the skin of
his teeth, since it would only be cool to hang out with him somewhere
like Las Vegas or Hollywood, and only if you were in serious party mode
and relatively drunk. You'd have to be able to forget that he was
a married man with two small children. (Bill Clinton was cool in
a similar sort of way, but only if you grew up on a farm and met him on
a rare visit to a roadhouse on a rocking Saturday night.)
Jefferson and Kennedy were sexual creeps, so Obama would be only the
second cool President who was also a decent human being in his private
life.
How cool is that?
Sunday, May 11
¡VIVA EL PELO!
by
Lloydville
on Sun 11 May 2008 02:53 AM PDT
I don't know how to translate the title of the above painting by Julio Romero de Torres -- every possible rendition of ¡Viva el Pelo! into English sounds silly -- but el pelo
means the hair, so you get the idea. The image reminds me of a line by the poet Robert
Duncan, "in the dark of the moon the hair rules". This in turn
reminds me of something the poet Robert Browning said about his wife
Elizabeth Barrett Browning after her death, when he was asked what it
was like being married to such a famous person (she was far more famous
than he was during her lifetime.) Yes, she was known to the
world, Browning admitted, "but I knew her on the dark side of the moon" --
the side of the moon the world never sees . . . where the hair rules.
Friday, May 9
A CALENDAR GIRL FOR MAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 09 May 2008 12:21 AM PDT
Hello?
By Al Moore, for Esquire, 1950. (With thanks to ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.)
Wednesday, May 7
CLINTON ROLLS OUT "BIZARRO WORLD" ARGUMENT TO SUPERDELEGATES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 07 May 2008 01:51 PM PDT
Today, Hillary Clinton argued that in Bizarro World, she would now be
the undisputed nominee of the Democratic party. "In Bizarro
World," she explained, "the candidate receiving the least number of
votes in an election is the winner. Superman and Lois Lane are
also husband and wife in Bizarro World. I think everybody wants
to see those two hook up -- in Bizarro World, it's a done deal.
As president of Bizarro World, I'll be ready to hit the ground running
amidst heavy sniper fire. In Bizarro World, my campaign has
loaned me eleven million
dollars. In Bizarro World, I'm the transformative black candidate
and Barack Obama is the cynical white woman in a pants suit."
Clinton added, "I urge all unpledged superdelegates to join me in
Bizarro World -- or, as it's affectionately known to millions around
the world, Washington, D. C."
Monday, May 5
ESSAY IN HONOR OF ANDRÉ BAZIN: MONTAGE AND SPACE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 05 May 2008 10:25 PM PDT
Follow this link for the fourth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin . . .
Sunday, May 4
JOHN FARROW
by
Lloydville
on Sun 04 May 2008 10:14 AM PDT
John
Farrow wasn't by any means a great director but he was a very
interesting man and he made some very interesting movies. A devoted
Catholic and a serious student of Catholicism -- he wrote a book about
the history of the Popes -- he was also known as a mean son-of-a-bitch
on the set who liked to bully his actors and crew. After shooting
wrapped on California (above), star Barbara Stanwyck demanded that he make a public apology to everyone who worked on the production.
On the other hand, she gives a terrific performance in California,
way better than the mediocre script deserves, and the film is filled
with surprising passages, notably a number of extremely long and
complicated scenes played out in single takes with extensive camera
moves. None of these, however, is framed or choreographed
dynamically, so they don't have the excitement of the long takes found
in the films of Welles or Renoir.
California doesn't have a
coherent tone in any respect. It has odd, grandiose montages with
opera-like chorales playing under them, and conventional Western
musical interludes in which characters sing improbably. The
gritty, sexy frontier hustler created by Stanwyck seems to be from
another movie.
Farrow didn't seem to have a good feel for genre or for script. Plunder Of the Sun (above), filmed entirely, and very evocatively, on location in Mexico has one of the most stylish and promising film noir
openings ever concocted, but the story just dribbles away, turns into a
conventional treasure-quest adventure. Again, a superb central
performance -- this time by Glenn Ford, tense with understated despair
-- is wasted.
Still, there's usually something in a John Farrow movie worth paying
close attention to -- some flight of inspiration that redeems the
clunkiest programmer. He had a kind of ambition, a kind of
vision, but it seems to have come to him in fits and starts.
Maybe the frustration of that was the source of his on-set rages.
Friday, May 2
SAMBA!
by
Lloydville
on Fri 02 May 2008 04:06 AM PDT
In a previous post about Orson Welles's ill-fated Brazilian film It's All True
I mentioned that Welles came to see the history of the samba as the key
to Brazilian culture. I wondered if there might be a CD
collection that showcased that history. Of course there was, and
of course it was French -- the French having a knack for combining
passion about American music with a logical approach to presenting it.
Fremeaux & Associates offers several historical surveys of
Brazilian music which give a good idea of what Welles found when he
visited the country in 1942. The one above surveys the samba
alone, which originated around 1917 as music for the Carnival and
eventually became a highly commercialized form of dance music
throughout the Americas in the 1940s.
The great revelation of this set is Carmen Miranda in her pre-Hollywood
days. Before she became a musical comedy star, famous for her
tall fruit-basket hats ("Bananas is my business!"), she was one of the
musical treasures of Rio -- a terrific and very sexy singer.
But samba, as it turns out, is just the rio
into which all streams of Brazilian music flow. The oldest style
it incorporates is choro, an instrumental form meant for listening, not
dancing. It usually features ornate flute lines accompanied by
various stringed instruments. It started out very European in
sound, with African rhythms adding flavor, but later became a bit more
rambunctious. Its evolutions are charted in the collection
illustrated above.
Other subsets include brass marching-band compositions and various
regional styles, many of which are charted in the Fremeaux
&
Associates collection above. Fremeaux offers a couple of other
historical surveys, but these three will give you a comprehensive
picture of Brazilian music in the first half of the 20th Century.
The pleasures they deliver are not primarily scholarly, however.
There's hardly a song on any of the two-disc sets which is less than marvelous, and all of them
will set you either dreaming or dancing. (The imported sets can
be found on Amazon, most cheaply through their Amazon Marketplace
sellers.)
Listening to these CDs you'll see right away what so enchanted Welles
back in 1942 and grieve anew that he never got a chance to finish his
film about Brazil and the samba.
Wednesday, April 30
JULIO ROMERO DE TORRES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 30 Apr 2008 02:58 AM PDT
This wonderful portrait, Carmen Of Cordova,
is by Julio Romero de Torres, a Spanish painter of the late Victorian
and early modern eras. His images are dark, earthy and
erotic, with a hint of the perverse.
He started out doing conventional Victorian narrative tableaux, like the one above -- titled Look How Beautiful She Was! -- but eventually developed a more eccentric vision. Below, a twist on a famous paiting by Velasquez:
Like any respectable Spaniard he both loved and feared women . . .
. . . and also tended to see them in a mystical light:
His sensibility represents an odd blend of the carnal and the spiritual
-- always in his work, however sensual, we can hear the Spanish saying
"Where the body goes, there goes death."
Above, the artist in his studio with a model and a visitor.
Romero de Torres was born and spent most of his life in Córdoba, taking
time out to serve as a pilot in WWI and to visit the Argentine, where
he got sick, returning to Córdoba to die at the age of 55. There
are no books in English which collect his work, although twelve more
books about the mildly amusing advertising artist Andy Warhol were
published last week.
Something is terribly wrong with our civilization -- but you knew that.
There is a museum in Córdoba which lovingly preserves his house and work, which you can visit virtually here.
Thanks, as so often, to Little Hokum Rag and Femme Femme Femme for pointing the way to this enchanting painter.
Tuesday, April 29
ELECTRIC EDWARDIANS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 29 Apr 2008 01:02 AM PDT
Jean-Luc
Godard once observed that, with the passing of time, the fantasy films
of Georges Méliès have become actualities, now that man has in fact
made a voyage to the moon, while the actualities of the Lumière
Brothers have become fantasies, since they record lost worlds to which
we can never return, as mythological now as Oz.
I thought of this while watching Electric Edwardians,
the Milestone DVD of Mitchell & Kenyon actualities of Edwardian
Britain. I must say I was blown away. It's the most
gorgeous collection of cinematic images outside of Intolerance or Sunrise or Welles's Falstaff, lyrical and deeply moving.
With the
possible exception of a few infants who lived to a great age, all the
people in these films are dead. As a commentator on the DVD
observes, the young boys in the films were part of a generation that
would be swept into oblivion long before their time by the mass carnage
of the Great War a decade or so later. The bustling street life
that most attracted Mitchell & Kenyon becomes for us now a memento
mori, incredibly sweet and sad.
I can't imagine
that anyone who loves movies and owns a DVD player wouldn't want to
have this DVD and to watch the films on it over and over again.
They may constitute a kind of unconscious art, but it's art of a very
high order.
Monday, April 28
IT'S ALL TRUE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 28 Apr 2008 01:22 AM PDT
In 1942, right after he finished principal photography on his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons,
but before editing on it began, Orson Welles headed off to make a film
in Brazil promoting inter-American friendship. America was at war
and Welles had been convinced by the government that it was his
patriotic duty to undertake this assignment, designed to keep our
neighbors to the south from drifting into the sphere of Axis influence.
Welles, exempted from military service by various ailments, could
hardly have refused. He planned to make an omnibus film mixing
fictional and documentary episodes
-- a kind of essay on aspects of South American culture. He fell
in love with Brazil and groped his way slowly towards a form in which
to convey what he found there, finally settling on the history of the
samba as a key to the society.
His groping frustrated his corporate masters at RKO back in
Hollywood. They were also worried that much of his documentary
footage of Carnival and the samba clubs of Rio showed what they called
"jigaboos" mixing and dancing with white people. It was precisely
this racial diversity that Welles admired in the Brazilian culture.
Eventually RKO pulled the plug on the project. Welles was left
with one camera, no sound equipment, 40,000 feet of black-and-white
film and $10,000. Hoping to salvage something from the adventure,
he headed north to what was then the small coastal village of Fortaleza (below) to make a documentary-like reconstruction of a
legendary event in recent Brazilian history -- the 1500-mile voyage of
four fisherman on a crude sailing raft to present grievances to the
government in Rio.
The voyage made the four men national heroes, and they were received by
Brazil's strongman leader, a sort of populist dictator, who granted the
substance of their demands.
Welles shot most of the footage he needed for this film-within-a-film,
but was never allowed to edit it. After his death, the footage
was assembled into something presentable and included in a documentary
about Welles' ill-fated Brazilian project. The documentary is now
available on DVD:
The episode of the four fishermen, even crudely reconstructed, is
simply stunning. It may be the most beautiful semi-documentary
ever made. Eisenstein's very similar project, done in Mexico a
decade earlier, ¡Que Viva Mexico!, looks like static fashion photography by comparison. Four Men On A Raft, as Welles called the episode, also blows away the semi-documentaries of Robert Flaherty (like Nanook Of the North) and Michael Powell (The Edge Of the World.)
Welles's images are dynamic, lyrical, full of movement and yet also
convey a convincing documentary feel. They are cinematic poetry
of the highest order.
Simon Callow, in his multi-volume biography of Welles, says that if
Welles had shot nothing else in his life but this footage he would have
to be recognized as one of the supreme masters of cinema. This is
true.
While Welles was creating this miracle in Brazil, the executives at
RKO, with the aid of some of Welles' most trusted associates, were busy
mutilating The Magnificent Ambersons.
They blamed the collapse of the South American film on Welles's
procrastination and extravagance, even though he had not exceeded the
project's budget at the time it was scrapped. The vandalism of Ambersons
had a vindictive quality to it, to judge by internal RKO correspondence
on the subject, and the myth of Welles as an irresponsible artist,
created by RKO to justify its actions, which included the dismantling
of Welles' production unit at RKO, haunted him for the rest of his life.
RKO made a point of destroying the footage they cut from Ambersons, although Hollywood figures like David O. Selznick begged them to preserve it, but the It's All True footage somehow survived. It includes ravishing Technicolor sequences shot in Rio, some of which can be seen in the It's All True documentary . . . and the material for Four Men On A Raft. (The color images above are not from the film.)
Do
yourself a favor sometime and have a look at the material on the DVD --
unfinished as it is, it's still one of the treasures of 20th-Century
art.
Sunday, April 27
THE IMMORTAL GEORGE SIDNEY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 27 Apr 2008 12:20 AM PDT
George Sidney was a journeyman director but a first-rate craftsman -- his film The Harvey Girls,
starring Judy Garland in one of her most enchanting performances, is a
classic MGM musical of the second rank . . . which is to say, merely
miraculous.
But it has transcendently great moments -- two, in fact -- and they're among the most glorious in all of cinema.
One occurs during the big production number built around the movie's Oscar-winning song, On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,
by Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren. It's a complex sequence
depicting (and celebrating) the arrival of a train in a small Western
town. It has several movements involving scores of dancing and
singing extras, a number of featured performers doing small bits of business and eventually Garland at the center
of it all.
The second movement starts when Garland appears on the platform of the
train, descends and moves into the crowd, joining in the song. In
one long, exhilarating shot, lasting more than two minutes, Garland lip syncs her vocal part, engages
in various intricate and tightly choreographed evolutions and mini-dances amidst the
crowd, followed by a continuously moving camera on a tracked crane.
The choreography was worked out in advance with a Garland dance
double. Garland then, according to Sidney, appeared on the set,
watched a run-through of the number with the double and said she was
ready to shoot. She performed it flawlessly, adding a few touches
of her own, in one take -- the take used in the finished film.
This doesn't seem possible, but Garland did it. It was George Sidney, of course, who asked her to.
Interestingly, Sidney, towards the end of his career, directed what is probably the best of the Elvis movies, Viva Las Vegas.
Elvis's performance of the title song is also done in a single long
take, with some moderately complicated choreography involving a gaggle
of showgirls, multiple camera moves and constant lighting
changes. It wasn't quite on the same level of technical
challenge as Garland's feat in The Harvey Girls but it's almost as exciting.
Elsewhere in the film Ann-Margret performs a song in one long shot that
involves even more complicated logistics, but it's not a very good song
so the virtuosity seems wasted, alas. Still, it's yet another
example of the way Sidney got inspired from time to time to try a piece
of bravura filmmaking, and of his uncanny ability, given a great
performer, to pull it off.
There's another musical number in The Harvey Girls
which isn't quite as virtuosic but is in some ways more
impressive. Garland, a young Cyd Charisse and Virginia O'Brien
sing an oddly melancholy, wistful song, It's A Great Big World, about their hopes and dreams as
they're getting ready for bed. Between verses they do some
simple, grave dances with each other, dressed in their
nightgowns. It's all very quiet, slow, dreamlike, touching --
and vaguely, very vaguely, erotic. It's one of the high points of
the MGM musical oeuvre and not quite like any other.
With a few sequences of sublime, breathtaking cinema dotted here
and there throughout his work, George Sidney achieved his own modest but undeniable measure of immortality.
Friday, April 25
WARSAW
by
Lloydville
on Fri 25 Apr 2008 03:34 AM PDT
[With plot spoilers . . .]
Mr. Arkadin,
Orson Welles's very strange film from 1955 (also known as Confidential Report), is a kind of parody of an
international suspense thriller -- with a cartoonish expressionism of
style that sometimes verges on the Gothic, on the perfectly preposterous. Welles plays
the fabulously wealthy tycoon Gregory Arkadin, a man who is not at all what he seems to be
-- and he plays him in a false nose and a bad beard and an even worse
wig that seem to make a joke of the whole proceedings.
Arkadin is ostensibly trying to keep the secret of his scandalous past
from his daughter, but this aspect of the story is barely dramatized
and totally unconvincing. We have no sense that the daughter has
anything invested in the image of her father as a respectable man, no
sense that she (or anybody else) sees him as a respectable man, and we're offered no psychological insight into why his daughter's good opinion of him matters to Arkadin.
But Welles never had much interest in psychology -- anymore than
Shakespeare did. For a great dramatist, psychology is always a
reductive science. Why does Hamlet pretend to be mad? To
make himself seem less threatening to Claudius? To amuse himself
with play acting? Os is it because he is mad, and knows he's mad,
and enjoys the black irony of pretending to be what he actually is?
There are no answers to these questions. People have been
psychoanalyzing Hamlet for 400 years precisely because Shakespeare
didn't.
There's no point in psychoanalyzing Arkadin, either -- he is a perfect
blank at the center of Welles's film. But, by a wonderful mystery hidden in the storyteller's art, we learn all we need to
know about him at the fringes of the film -- including his terrible
"secret", which, like the character of Arkadin himself, is not at all what it seems to be.
The clue to everything lies back in Warsaw, before 1927 -- the year in which
Arkadin claims he was afflicted with amnesia. We eventually learn that the
"amnesia" was self-induced. But what was he trying to forget?
The petty crook Arkadin hires to investigate his supposedly lost past
talks to people who knew Arkadin or his associates in
Warsaw. Although they are recalling a criminal underworld, they
all speak of Warsaw as though it was, in fact, a lost paradise -- now
(in 1955) locked behind the Iron Curtain, a place they can never revisit.
Finally, what "Warsaw" really means is revealed by Arkadin's old lover
there, now a faded beauty who speaks of him and of their time together as worth the
betrayal that ended it all. "Warsaw" is simply youth -- it's the
loss of this that Arkadin cannot abide. It's what has engendered
his vaguely incestuous obsession with his daughter, it's what leads
him to kill off all his old associates from Poland. Not to hide his
crimes but to wipe away the evidence of passing time, of the lost
paradise -- the evidence that he was a
lover once, that he had comrades-in-arms . . . a connection to other human beings.
Welles's performance as Arkadin offers us only one moment when real
emotion seems to grip the character. It's the moment when he
looks into the decayed face of his last surviving friend
from Warsaw -- and laughs, with an imperfectly disguised fury that is
genuinely chilling. When asked what it is he finds so funny,
Arkadin replies, "Old age."
The story of Mr. Arkadin had its origins in a script Welles wrote for an English radio series he starred in, The Lives of Harry Lime.
There the name of the man of mystery is Mr. Arkadian, with its clear
reference to Arcadia, the mythological paradise which is also used as a
synonym for death, as in the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego . . . "even
now I am in death."
In the film, Arkadin recounts a dream he has of walking through a
cemetery whose tombstones all record very brief lifespans. He
learns that they in fact record the spans of friendships -- these being
the true measures of a life. This is the graveyard Arkadin now
inhabits -- literally killing off his old friends is just his expression of
rage that they are dead to him already, and thus that he is dead.
The Latin phrase quoted above found its way into the Anglican Book Of Common Prayer,
in the burial service -- "In the midst of life we are in death."
That might serve as Arkadin's motto -- one he cannot accept.
In the end, scared of losing his last friend, his daughter, he kills
himself. Because of the oblique way Welles has chosen to tell his
tale, we feel no great emotion at this. But our minds keep
drifting back to the monologue about the old days delivered by
Arkadin's aging lover from Warsaw -- one of the most memorable scenes in cinema history. This is the narrow aperture
though which we get a glimpse of the real Mr. Arkadin, fleeting,
devastating, heartbreaking. Like Kane, he is, very simply, a lost
soul, bewildered and ultimately destroyed by his aloneness.
To have told us this in so many words would have been to trivialize the
insight. By making us tease it out for ourselves, feel it as a
haunting melancholy at the edge of consciousness, Welles takes us
inside Arkadin in a way Dr. Freud could never have managed.
Thursday, April 24
MORBID INERTIA
by
Lloydville
on Thu 24 Apr 2008 03:55 AM PDT
The Democratic Party continues its triumphant march to
oblivion. John McCain can probably nap between now and 4 November
and still wake up on the morning of 5 November as the President-elect.
What we're seeing I think is a phenomenon characteristic of monopoly
"capitalism", something that might be called morbid inertia.
Large
institutions which are accustomed to monopoly power in some arena
cannot change, even when they are marching towards the edge of a cliff.
So the recording industry, faced with widespread consumer revolt
against the shoddiness and overpricing of its products, made possible
by a virtual monopoly over distribution, will not change its products
or its marketing methods when a new system of distribution
emerges. It tries instead to enforce the old distribution system
by legal (and illegal) actions which have no logic and no hope of
success. It sues soccer moms for downloading a few songs, it
introduces the concept that consumers don't own the songs they buy, or
even the machines which play the songs they buy.
So the television networks, losing market share steadily, year after year,
refuse to adapt to new conditions and keep doing the same old
things over and over again -- going for the last cash they can squeeze
out of a paradigm which even a child can see is doomed.
So Hollywood refuses to make films for large segments of the public and
concentrates instead on the one segment it thinks it knows best, young
males, and fails to satisfy even them on a regular basis. The
market, reacting in kind to this contempt for consumers, resorts to
casual piracy, which Hollywood then identifies as the source of all its woes.
So the establishment of the Democratic Party, faced in Barack Obama with the almost unimaginable gift of a
transformative candidate who is swelling its ranks with new, young
voters, the Democrats of the future, and building a new and virtually
inexhaustible fund-raising base of millions of small-time donors,
clings to its old ways and tries to muscle an establishment, machine-anointed candidate
into the White House against the will of the majority of voters.
The larger issue underlying all this is a general atmosphere of greed
and despair, a philosophy of "get it while you can before the whole
thing blows up in your face."
The great institutions of our culture believe in nothing these days
except oblivion and grabbing a little more short-term power or
short-term cash before the apocalypse. The catchphrase of our time
is "The fierce urgency of me." It's utterly irrational of
course. What good will power and money be after the apocalypse?
[Images by the redoubtable Fluharty.]
Wednesday, April 23
SOME LINES BY TENNYSON FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 23 Apr 2008 12:43 AM PDT
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-- from Ulysses
Engraving of Tennyson by G. J. Stodart
Tuesday, April 22
EDWIN S. PORTER
by
Lloydville
on Tue 22 Apr 2008 02:21 AM PDT
Check out The Art and Culture Of Movies,
a great blog by filmmaker and writer Matt Barry, for some interesting
thoughts about film pioneer Edwin S. Porter (director of the The Great Train Robbery from 1903.) The post is illustrated with terrific screen shots from Porter's films. (The frame above is from It Happened On 23rd Street -- shot in 1901 on a block, between 5th and 6th Avenues, which looks almost the same today, architecturally speaking.)
Sunday, April 20
IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER: MUSICAL NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Sun 20 Apr 2008 03:53 PM PDT
It's Always Fair Weather,
from 1955, is the saddest and darkest musical ever made in
Hollywood. It represented a radical experiment in expanding the
tonal range of the musical form, an experiment that didn't find favor with
audiences of the time, who greeted it with a shrug. On its initial release it barely made its costs back.
It had other problems besides its eccentric tone. Gene Kelly and
Stanley Donen, who co-directed, didn't see eye to eye on the film and
fought constantly. Kelly reportedly cut out major numbers which
featured his co-stars because he was afraid that they would outshine him.
The
redoubtable Cyd Charisse is left with only one big set-piece -- though admittedly
it's a knock-out -- and never does a number with Kelly. The whole structure of the film seems slightly off-kilter.
The film has many great moments but few transcendent passages, where song, dance and camera
soar into ethereal realms -- the sort of passages that can redeem
otherwise undistinguished musicals -- and the songs themselves are
mostly
forgettable.
But it's an oddly moving film for all that -- deeply melancholy in
powerful ways. It opens with three returning war vets having a
drink at a bar in New York upon their discharge from the service.
The best of pals, they vow to meet again at the same bar in ten years
to celebrate an unbreakable bond. The years duly pass but the reunion doesn't go
well. Life has changed the men, disappointed them -- they not only
have little in common, they actually find each other irritating.
The story offers a grim view of post-war America. The great
democratization of the war years has unraveled -- the citizen soldiers
have reverted to the prejudices of their respective classes. They
have not lived up to their youthful dreams. One, an aspiring
painter, has become an advertising executive. One, who dreamed of
becoming a fancy chef, runs a hamburger joint. The Kelly character,
the one they all thought was destined for greatness, has become a bon vivant hustler.
It's not just the men who have failed -- there's a strong sense that
American society, with its triviality and materialism and cynicism, has
failed them. The story involves a Tashlin-esque satire of the
worlds of television and advertising and sports. One of the three
friends has a marriage that is falling apart, another has avoided
marriage like the plague. Charisse plays a tough-as-nails career
women who wanders into their reunion. She doesn't need men and has elaborate strategies for deflating
their egos and keeping them at arm's length. Relations between
the sexes in 1955 America are shown as highly problematic.
The film is steeped in angst -- the same sort of angst that plays out in other, more violent ways in film noir.
This being an MGM musical, the story ends in a hopeful and touching
reconciliation between the former pals -- not in the
bleakness of a traditional film noir
-- but it's a quiet sort of denouement, hardly triumphant, laced with
rue. It involves an acceptance of the fact that the grand hopes
aroused by the war are not going to be fulfilled.
In part this is about men growing up, but it's also in part about
America losing its optimistic joy, its sense that anything is
possible. "We won the war," the film seems to be saying, "but
where did it get us?" The subject was a brave one for the Freed
unit at MGM to tackle, and if the film is ultimately a failure, on
various different levels, it's a noble one, and highly instructive
about the mood of post-WWII America.
Saturday, April 19
MÉLIÈS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 19 Apr 2008 12:48 AM PDT
From
a strictly historical, generic perspective, the work of Georges Méliès
was a kind of magical dead end. Although his films are commonly
spoken of as the precursors of science fiction and all forms of film
fantasy involving special effects, they are in fact so peculiarly
original in form, so deeply rooted in the traditions of the stage, that
they presaged nothing.
Méliès
was a magician and the operator of a theater dedicated to stage
magic. He used cinema as an extension of the sort of acts he
performed and presented in his Théatre Robert-Houdin, built as a
showcase for his own art by Robert-Houdin, the great 19th-Century conjurer, the
legendary pioneer of modern theatrical magic (and the man after whom
his masterful successor Houdini named himself.)
Méliès
saw cinema as a way of presenting stage magic and amplifying its
effects by the use of in-camera tricks like stop motion and
super-imposition. His images evoked the stage precisely, with
strict proscenium framing and frankly theatrical painted flats and
props. He used many practical tricks from the stage, like flying
people and objects on wires or making them appear and disappear
through traps. He added his camera tricks on top of these
time-worn effects.
The problem was that camera trickery is not the same as live trickery
in the presence of the trickster -- the novelty of camera tricks
dissipates quickly, once you become familiar with them. Méliès's
films were wildly popular for a while and then, with the rise of the
narrative form in movies, suddenly went out of fashion -- to a degree
that live magic shows never have. In great live magic shows, you
know you're being tricked, but you can't for the life of you figure out
how. You may not know exactly how a camera trick works, but you
know it has to do with some fundamentally technical resource of the
medium -- and so can't
be real magic. As early as 1905 people began to get wise to the
mechanical tricks of movies, as this postcard, part of a series, shows:
In movies, if the tricks are not done in the service of a story, or at
the very least in the service of creating a convincingly unified
alternate reality, they grow stale. Méliès
never tried to create a convincingly unified alternate reality -- his
reality was always the reality of the stage, without the excitement of
the live presence of the performers. His magical stop-motion
substitutions were charming as ideas but could never take the breath
away like the "impossible" substitutions of the live magician.
Méliès
could not, in short, enlist the magic of the camera as an extension of
the magic of live stage performance. He created a vision of a
theater where anything was possible but in the process he lost the core
of the theatrical experience -- the tangible presence of its spectacle.
Méliès influenced other filmmakers, like Edwin S. Porter, in the area of narrative. Méliès's
films occasionally have simple narrative structures, but these are
always just the armature for his tricks. He called his scenes
tableaux -- they were self contained, and he was perfectly happy to
sell individual scenes as stand-alone attractions to the fairgrounds
showmen who constituted the initial market for his films. Each
scene had a gag, after all, and he saw the gags as the principal element of his
art.
When story films began to dominate the market he lost interest in the
industry, even as his audience lost interest in him. Storytelling wasn't at the heart of his ambition.
This is all speaking to the formal side of Méliès's work, but of course it had qualities which transcended its formal side. Méliès
had a sweet, antic, energetic, whimsical imagination which comes across
excitingly in his films, even today. It reminds one of the
imagination of the great Warner Brothers cartoonists of the 1940s,
silly, flip and surreal. But cartoon animation was of a piece and
so created an alternate universe that was of a piece, that audiences
could surrender to wholly. Méliès,
who never could leave the imaginative precincts of his beloved stage,
doesn't allow that kind of identification -- we are always reminded
that we are, and are not, in a theater.
Méliès
was, in one sense, a great artist who made ephemeral art, in a form
that had no future. But his irresistible sensibility often soars
above the contradictions of his formal means. His films will
always be fun to watch, simply because it's so clear that he was having
an incredible amount of fun making them. He communicates his joy in stage magic and his
joy in camera magic, even if he never quite finds a way to reconcile
the two practices aesthetically.
In the history of cinema, his only legacy is joy -- but there are many more important formal pioneers who left us less.
Thursday, April 17
ORSON WELLES ON POPULAR ART
by
Lloydville
on Thu 17 Apr 2008 12:12 AM PDT
Nothing has ever been too good for the public.
Nothing has ever been good enough for the public.
Amen.
Tuesday, April 15
ESSAY IN HONOR OF ANDRE BAZIN: THE ENCHANTMENT OF DREAMS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 15 Apr 2008 11:33 AM PDT
Follow this link for the third in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin . . .
Sunday, April 13
CITIZEN KANE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 13 Apr 2008 08:44 AM PDT
Citizen Kane
is a hard film to "see". It's so alive with invention, so dense
with magical images (and camera tricks) that it's difficult to process
them in detail. The film also has a relentless narrative drive,
aided by visual, musical and other sound transitions of exceptional
virtuosity which keep one in a perpetual state of anticipation.
The rap on the film has always been that all this razzle-dazzle
distracts one from the fact that Kane is hollow at its center -- an
exercise in sensation rather than substance. This is a complaint
that was often made about Welles' stage productions -- that they were
thrilling while you were watching them but evaporated instantly from
the mind afterward. Pauline Kael saw Kane
as a magic show -- and a magic show is another kind of theatrical
experience that lives only in the moment, that has no artistic echo.
I myself disagree with this view of Kane.
There is a hollowness at the center of the film but it's the hollowness
of Kane himself, of the character -- not the actor who plays him or the
film's director (who of course are one and the same man.) The
sharp dialogue and knowing wit of the film, the insistent technical
bravura of the filmmaking, tend to disguise the fact that Kane is a grandly sentimental work, a work of great compassion and feeling.
I have no doubt that this sentiment and compassion came from Welles
himself, though he may have been steered into it sidewise by his
screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, who put a lot of Welles into Kane under
the cover of the roman à clef
element that related the character to William Randolph Hearst.
Welles always said that the Rosebud theme was all Mankiewicz's doing,
and that he wasn't terribly fond of it himself. I would argue
that the Rosebud theme, far from being the artificial MacGuffin it's
often dismissed as, even by Welles, is in fact exactly what it seems to
be -- the key
to Charles Foster Kane and to the film. This may have been
something Welles could not admit because it struck such a deep nerve in
him.
Welles is often treated as a uniquely mysterious character, a mass of
irreconcilable contradictions, but I think this is no more true of
Welles than it is of Kane. Everything about Welles makes perfect
sense if you remember that he lost his mother, an adoring but demanding
woman, to jaundice when he was 9, and that he lost his father, by a
longer process, to alcoholism, which finally killed him when Welles was
15.
Welles cut himself off from his father six months before his death, in
an effort to get him to face his drinking problem, and never forgave
himself for the betrayal, for allowing his father to die alone and
estranged from him -- something he could never make up for. It's
not dime-store psychology to see these traumas as the forces which
fueled and warped the unfolding of Welles' genius -- they are primal
emotional events. And so with Kane's abandonment by his mother
and father.
The nostalgia for Rosebud, for what it represents, does sum up Kane's
life, and it's not a simplistic analysis. The loss of a parent in
childhood is a wound that never heals -- it can be endured but never
overcome. A child always sees the loss of a parent as a rejection
-- in the case of Kane, his mother's decision to send him away was on one level a literal rejection, however well-motivated.
Simon Callow, Welles's most astute biographer, is dismissive of Welles's performance in Kane,
feeling that it never achieves depth, and he feels this way about most
of the performances in the film -- with the notable exception of that
by Agnes Morehead as Kane's mother. We don't see her for long but
we sense worlds of grief in her as she sends her son out to the wider
world, where she hopes he'll have a better life.
It is a singular performance in
the film, but I think its singularity makes perfect sense. Kane
has a hole in his heart which robs him of personal substance, makes him
a perpetual performer incapable of real intimacy with anyone. And the
significant others in his life are content to be his audience --
thrilled or appalled by his "act", excited and inspired, but with no more real
commitment to him than a theater audience has for the lead actor in a
play after the curtain comes down, or after his celebrity fades.
We share their guilt in this, of course -- we the audience are also
thrilled and appalled by Kane's act, excited and inspired, amused by his rise and morbidly delighted by
his fall. But Welles won't let it go at that.
The story of Kane is a shadowplay, with one real person at its center
-- Agnes Morehead's Mary Kane, who has unwittingly, in an act of misguided
sacrifice, turned her son into a shadow. There are many moments
in the film, especially as Kane ages and begins losing everything, when
Welles lets us (though not the other characters in the film) into his
psychic universe, a place of bewilderment and pain.
Welles is curiously least convincing when he plays Kane at
the age Welles actually was when he made the film -- he's like an older
man doing an unconvincing imitation of a younger one. It's as
though Welles doesn't know how to be young -- but that works for the
young Kane, a man born to power and wealth, who has to play at being a
regular lad. Yet Welles is utterly convincing as the older Kane
-- as though he knew in advance what it would be like to hold the world
in your hands and then see it slip from your grasp. Callow
suggests that the young Welles is preserved in Kane
like a fly in amber but the truth is far stranger -- the
older Welles is on display in that film, fully formed (and deformed) by
the vicissitudes of failure and disappointment.
This is uncanny, of course, and in retrospect disturbing -- but it
represents a brilliant imaginative leap for the young actor, one he summoned up from the core of his being, and it's very
moving. Welles asks us,
and allows us, to pity Kane, to forgive him -- and he gives us good and
sufficient reason to do both.
Rosebud.
The ambiguity, the unknowable quality of Charles Foster Kane is the real MacGuffin
of the film. Rosebud is its heart, hiding in plain sight in the
last scene just as the truth of Kane hides in plain sight throughout the
film.
[Thanks to six martinis and the seventh art for the screen grab of the sled in the snow.]
Saturday, April 12
THE HIGGS BOSON
by
Lloydville
on Sat 12 Apr 2008 12:15 AM PDT
This November, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
above, will become operational in a tunnel underneath the border between Switzerland and
France. The tunnel is circular and 17 miles in length. It is hoped that this accelerator will reveal the Higgs
Boson, an hypothesized but never detected particle that is part of the
make-up of "empty" space. The theory is (as far as I can
understand it) that what we think of as a perfect vacuum is in fact a
super-conductor, and the Higgs Boson is the medium of conduction.
This particle would help explain how other particles acquire mass and
point the way to a Grand Unified Theory of physics.
Albert Einstein
said, "Space is not merely a background for events but
possesses an autonomous structure." The Higgs Boson would help
define that structure. I have always loved Einstein's statement,
since it seems to explain, metaphorically, the function of space in the
plastic arts, like ballet and architecture -- and movies. The
illusory space on the other side of the movie screen feels to me like
something solid, which can be molded, carved, shaped by movement within
it -- even, in a purely imaginative way, by the potential for movement
within it. It is plastic -- in the sense that it can be molded.
The LHC (seen above under construction) could also result in other observable particles and phenomena
-- one of which is tiny black holes. Some scientists believe that
it could create a black hole large enough to suck up the
entire earth, resulting in the total annihilation of the
planet. There is a pending lawsuit which is seeking to prevent
the operation of the accelerator on just these grounds. Most
scientists believe that if black holes are
created they will be so small that they will break up of their own
accord. If they don't, we will never know about it, since we will
be instantly consumed by them.
Back in 2000, when some Catholics were fearing that the end of the
world was at hand, based on secret revelations supposedly given by the
Virgin Of Fatima, Pope John Paul II said that if the world was coming
to an end we should face the prospect "with dignity and
courage". That strikes me as the best policy, all things considered.
One other possibility is that the LHC will reveal nothing, which will
be a signal to physicists that almost all current thinking about the
nature of the universe is heading in the wrong direction. That
would be interesting, too.
Thursday, April 10
A WILLIAM BLAKE QUOTE FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 10 Apr 2008 05:29 AM PDT
There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet.
Wednesday, April 9
DAISY KENYON
by
Lloydville
on Wed 09 Apr 2008 03:53 AM PDT
Fox home video has been releasing a lot of terrific DVDs in their Fox Film Noir
series -- great transfers of entertaining films with generally
excellent commentaries and brief featurettes about the movies and their
creators. They're running out of films from their vaults which
can plausibly be called noir -- except that these days, apparently, just about anything can plausibly be called noir.
Daisy Kenyon, the 23rd title in
the series, is an extremely interesting film by Otto Preminger from
1947 which could plausibly be called domestic noir,
though it doesn't involve crime or violence in any significant
way. It's basically a soap opera centering on a very complicated
love triangle, but it's disturbingly dark, in ways that wouldn't have been
conceivable in Hollywood before WWII.
Joan Crawford plays a career girl in New York who's having an affair
with a married man, played by Dana Andrews, a charming self-centered
lout. Neither character seems to feel any moral qualms about the
affair, and Preminger presents it with an almost cynical nonchalance
that's strikingly adult and modern.
Crawford meets an equally charming but somewhat unstable returning war
vet, played by Henry Fonda. Fonda's character feels that the
world and everyone in it has become dead, and isn't sure if this
feeling has to do with the loss of his wife in a car accident or with
his experiences in combat. The war, and its collateral moral damage, are also referenced in an off-screen subplot in which
the Andrews character defends a Nisei war vet whose farm was stolen
from him while he was off fighting for his country, heroically, in
Italy. He loses the case.
According to Preminger's biographer Foster Hirsch, these elements
were not prominent in the novel on which the film was based. It
was Preminger and his
screenwriter who chose to associate the moral confusions and neuroses
of the characters with the broader anxieties of post-war American
society, issues of guilt over the price of victory, over the
psychological wounds suffered by the soldiers who won that
victory. It's a theme one finds
in many noir and noir-inflected films of the time, sometimes explored explicitly, as it is here, sometimes only by implication.
Perhaps Preminger was too explicit. Daisy Kenyon
was a box-office disappointment. Without the cover of the
crime-thriller genre, elements of which figure to one degree or another
in most other domestic noirs, the film's investigation of post-war American angst may have cut too close to the bone for contemporary audiences.
The mood of the film is almost unbearably tense and unsettling,
eventually involving child abuse and a scandalous divorce trial played
out in the tabloid press. There had always been soap operas like
this in American movies, of course, but there was always a clear sense
of when moral boundaries were being crossed and what the consequences
would be. Daisy Kenyon plays out in a world in which moral boundaries seem to have been erased.
The Spanish title of the film translates as "between love and sin"
but the tale offers few clues as to where one stops and the other
begins. The romantic triangle is resolved at the end, more or
less, with everyone doing the "right" thing -- but there's hardly a
sense of moral triumph. We feel that all the characters are going
to remain adrift in a morally ambiguous universe, trying to walk a line
that none of them can see clearly. This is noir territory, all
right, but strictly domestic, and explored primarily from the point of
view of the female protagonist, which distinguishes it from the classic
noir cycle.
Tuesday, April 8
A BOUGUEREAU FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 08 Apr 2008 08:00 AM PDT
Once a poster boy for bourgeois bad taste, Bouguereau is starting to
look more and more radical -- certainly more and more bizarre.
The solidity of his angels here is uncanny. The wings of angels
in art are often merely symbolic -- in this image they
seem like practical appendages, as necessary to flight as a bird's
wings. They give these angels a monstrous quality, as though
they're the product of some unholy genetic experiment. On the
other hand, it may be that the sight of real angels would produce the
same impression and that real angels, if photographed, would look exactly as
they do above.
For a lengthier meditation on the work of this extraordinary artist, go here:
Bouguereau and the Über-Photograph
Monday, April 7
CHARLTON HESTON
by
Lloydville
on Mon 07 Apr 2008 07:06 AM PDT
Charlton Heston has died at the age of 84. In life he never got
the appreciation he deserved -- damned with faint praise as an actor of
limited range, damned in more direct terms for his right wing politics
and defense of gun rights. As an artist, however, he was a
genuine hero.
It was Heston who lobbied Universal to give Orson Welles the job as director of Touch Of Evil
(above), at a time when no one else in Hollywood would give Welles the
time of day, and he single-handedly kept Sam Peckinpah on Major Dundee by offering to kick back his own salary into the production.
In movies, presence is sometimes more important than range -- one might
argue that it's always more important than range -- and presence
requires more than mere personality. It requires its own kind of
craft and courage. There was no other actor of his generation who
could have held his own in El Cid, and his "presence" helped make that film a masterpiece. It also elevated The Planet Of the Apes from a B-picture to a pop classic.
I am personally grateful to him for Touch Of Evil
-- mangled as it was by the studio it's still one of the great American
films, and it wouldn't exist without the artistic heroism of Charlton
Heston.
And for those of you who can't get past his efforts on behalf of the NRA,
remember that he also stood with Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March
On Washington -- one of the few Hollywood celebrities with the guts to
take a public stand like that in 1963.
Sunday, April 6
MIKE WALLACE AND THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
by
Lloydville
on Sun 06 Apr 2008 02:54 AM PDT
Here's link, via Boing Boing, to a collection of Mike Wallace interviews from the 50s, including one with Gloria Swanson:
The Mike Wallace Interview Archive
Wallace's
technique was to get as close to insolence with his guests, especially
his female guests, as possible without crossing the line into
rudeness. The lack of respect he shows to Swanson is sickening
and she barely keeps her dignity intact. Swanson observes that
"something has gone dreadfully wrong with the American man," and
Wallace, puffing away on a cigarette throughout the program, proves her
poi |
