"Lloyd, no! No!"
"He told me he was going to wear that costume for Halloween, but I didn't believe him. The fool. The mad fool!"
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Wednesday, October 31
TRICK OR TREAT
by
Lloydville
on Wed 31 Oct 2007 06:41 AM PDT
"Lloyd, no! No!" "He told me he was going to wear that costume for Halloween, but I didn't believe him. The fool. The mad fool!" Tuesday, October 30
A MCGINNIS FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 30 Oct 2007 01:56 AM PDT
 The women on Robert McGinnis' paperback covers were often scantily clad, looking as though they might slip out of whatever they were wearing at any moment, but he also did straight-ahead nudes. The modest parasol here, warding off the sun's gaze, gives this example a certain teasing piquance. Monday, October 29
AMARILLY OF CLOTHESLINE ALLEY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 29 Oct 2007 02:24 AM PDT
 I fell in love with Mary Pickford when I watched this film a few years ago. I know you're probably thinking, "What took you so long?", but I really hadn't seen much of her work before -- some of the Biograph shorts she made for D. W. Griffith and Sparrows, one of her later silents. I liked Sparrows a lot, thought it was a very well-made film, and admired Pickford's craft extravagantly . . . but there was something self-conscious about it, something built into the idea of a masterful artist playing a child, which had the flavor of a brilliant (a really brilliant) stunt. But when I watched Amarilly Of Clothesline Alley all my resistance melted. First of all, Pickford plays a sexually mature female, innocent by choice but well aware of her options -- and she's very sexy, very self-possessed and powerful, which makes her goodness all the more vexing. The whole film is permeated with a strong aura of female power, expressed most poignantly and convincingly in the easy camaraderie between Amarilly and her mother -- you get a sense that there's no problem on earth these two can't solve . . . and haven't solved, in a sense, keeping a fatherless family together in crushing poverty. (You also get a clear echo of Pickford's actual early life, growing up too fast, more of a peer than a daughter to her own mother.) The wry eye they throw on the rest of the world, especially the world of men, delightfully underlined in the snappy intertitles by Frances Marion, their exuberant enjoyment of each other's company, and of life itself, exactly as it is, suggest a whole universe of female self-sufficiency and dominion which our culture has managed to eradicate almost entirely from the mainstream of popular art. (I begin to think that the national euphoria over Pickford's marriage to Douglas Fairbanks may have reflected America's pride, and perhaps relief, that the country managed to produce a man worthy of her.)  The style of the film as a whole, and Pickford's performance in particular, is shockingly casual, fast-paced, breezy and naturalistic -- Amarilly seems to have a whole and real and complicated inner self which she chooses to share with others, and with us, out of sheer generosity and goodwill. Virtue has never seemed so alive, so glamorous. Well, I'm not the first person this has happened to, and thanks to the miracle of DVDs, I won't be the last. Sunday, October 28
DEBORAH KERR
by
Lloydville
on Sun 28 Oct 2007 02:58 AM PDT
 Over at the Alternative Film Guide, Andre Soares has a wonderful appreciation of Deborah Kerr (who died recently at the age of 86) in which he tries to unravel the mystery of her subtle erotic appeal. Such mysteries are ultimately unravel-able, of course, but Soares comes close, and reminds us why Kerr's performances are always so alive and vexing. I've written about her previously in a review of The Sundowners. Saturday, October 27
AN A. E. HOUSMAN POEM FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Sat 27 Oct 2007 01:36 AM PDT
It's one of my favorite poems of all time because it looks at things so coldly and reminds us that sincerity is not the highest of virtues. Today we tend to think of virtue as a state of mind -- if you mean well, you're a good person. To Housman, as to the ancient Greeks, virtue was action, pure and simple. Friday, October 26
THE COLDEST WINTER
by
Lloydville
on Fri 26 Oct 2007 02:00 AM PDT
 When he died in a car crash this Spring, David Halberstam had just finished his 21st book, The Coldest Winter, an epic study of the Korean War. It's partly a work of military history, with combat narratives based on interviews with veterans of the conflict, but its greater value lies in the way Halberstam places the war in the context of the post-war world, of American and global politics and strategy. It fills in yet another piece of the puzzle of America's mood after WWII -- dark, anxious, bewildered, unsure of its new role as a world superpower, veering between arrogance and lunatic paranoia. There are many lessons for our own times to be learned from the book -- not least about the ways the Republican party managed to box the Democrats into policies they mistrusted under the threat of being labeled "soft on Communism". Substitute "terrorism" for "Communism" and you will see the same dynamic at work today.  The war in Korea all but wrecked Truman's presidency, but he was confident that history would judge him more kindly than his contemporaries, as indeed it has. Among the high-ranking soldiers and politicians, Matthew Ridgway and Truman emerge in Halberstam's book as the true heroes of the war. Ridgway learned how to fight the Chinese because he was willing to take them seriously, to respect them as soldiers, something the racist high command under MacArthur could not do. Truman was willing to buck popular sentiment and risk political ruin to oppose MacArthur, whose madness served the purposes of the right-wing Republicans in Washington but whose insubordination threatened the very core of the American system of government, the principle of civilian control of the military.  Among the boots on the ground, there were heroes by the thousands, though they got no glory out of it, or even much recognition from the folks at home. Korea was a war Americans wanted to forget, even while it was happening -- which is just the kind of war that needs to be remembered and studied with care. We're in one like it right now -- part of the price a nation pays for forgetting the grievous mistakes it has made in the past. Thursday, October 25
THEME TIME RADIO HOUR
by
Lloydville
on Thu 25 Oct 2007 11:37 AM PDT
 This is a poster designed by Jaime Hernandez, of the awesome comics duo Los Bros Hernandez, for Bob Dylan's great show on XM Satellite Radio, which might be the best radio music show of all time. Each week Dylan plays songs he likes on a given topic. The songs are great, but it's also great to see how Dylan organizes music in his mind. It's much the way he organizes images in his songs -- according to associations and affinities that don't follow conventional rules or categories. I don't listen to the show much because like more and more people these days I have a hard time dealing with scheduled entertainment -- unless it's something live like a baseball game. If it's digital and I can't download it or get a copy of it to enjoy at my leisure, it's too much trouble, too annoying -- too much about the convenience of the provider and not enough about my convenience. [With thanks to Boing Boing for the link.] Wednesday, October 24
A SCHOOLYARD RHYME FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 24 Oct 2007 11:56 AM PDT
 It is in the rock, but not in the stone; It is in the marrow but not in the bone; It is in the bolster, but not in the bed; It is not in the living, nor yet in the dead. This is a riddle, of course. Can you guess the solution? [From I Saw Esau, edited by Iona and Peter Opie.] Tuesday, October 23
A DEGAS FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 23 Oct 2007 10:38 AM PDT
 Degas' work is an odd combination of academic and Impressionist strategies. His draftsmanship tended to be rigorous, almost photorealistic -- he often worked from photographs -- and he shared the academic's preoccupation with the dramatic, expressive possibilities of space. At the same time his surfaces shimmered with a life of their own, in the Impressionist way, creating a powerful counter tension. The image above is very unusual. The design offers a bold recession of spaces, in three dramatic stages, while the treatment of the surface flattens it all out again, as in a Japanese print, also a strong influence on Degas' style. I can never feel comfortable calling Degas an Impressionist, but he wasn't an academic, either. He was just Degas. Monday, October 22
A SHAKESPEARE SONG FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 22 Oct 2007 10:53 AM PDT
 Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o' the great; Thou art past the tyrant's stroke: Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning-flash, Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finished joy and moan; All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust. No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have; And renownéd be thy grave! I've always loved this song, from Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's late plays, especially this couplet: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. It's so Shakespeare -- speaking of the gravest things in the lightest and most lilting way. I can't help but see it as a reflection of the country humor Shakespeare grew up with, when hard things, all too familiar, needed to be tossed off carelessly at times -- sort of like the phrase "he bought the farm."  At any rate, the tone echoed through English literature -- A. E. Housman derived a whole oeuvre from it, as in the following: With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid, The rose-lipped girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.  I also love the image in this couplet from Shakespeare's song: Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages . . . Though Shakespeare became a wealthy man and a speculator later in his life, he never got too far, imaginatively, from his working-class roots. Life to him was always a job of work, literally and metaphorically. He died soon after giving up his trade as a playwright -- in his heart, I suspect, the end of work and the end of life were more or less the same thing, as they were for most English country folk of the time. It took me a while to realize where the image in the couplet above comes from, specifically -- Saint Paul's letter to the Romans, where the apostle writes, "The wages of sin is death." Saint Paul didn't exactly mean that death was a punishment for sin, or that if you lived a sinless life you could escape death, because no one can live a sinless life. He was just making a general observation, as Shakespeare was, about the condition of man, imperfect by nature, doomed to die. When you take your last wages in this world, all you can buy with them is the farm. Sunday, October 21
THE DIFFICULTY OF DEALING WITH GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sun 21 Oct 2007 09:08 AM PDT
 A guy is talking with God and he says, "God, what is a million years to you?" God says, "A million years is a second to me." The guy says, "God, what is a million dollars to you?" God says, "A million dollars is a penny to me." The guy says, "God, could I have a penny?" God says, "Sure -- just a second." Saturday, October 20
MORE ON FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Oct 2007 05:55 AM PDT
 Although, as I wrote earlier, I don't see film noir as expressly concerned with theological issues, there is a sense in which the idea of "the death of God", as a kind of metaphorical expression for existential bewilderment, gets close to the heart of the tradition. Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour, a low-budget thriller from 1945, was arguably the first true film noir. It offered a vision of the world as a moral maze from which there was no exit -- an image that accorded well with the unconscious dread which gripped America in the wake of WWII and in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. In this light, it's interesting to look at Ulmer's The Black Cat, a strange Universal "horror film" from the early 30s. There, the source of the horror that ensnares its innocent protagonists is a modernistic version of the old dark house -- which sits on the site of a ghastly battle from WWI, somehow infected by the mass slaughter that took place there.  This may not be enough to prove that Ulmer saw a connection between the moral chaos of Detour and the horrors of WWII but it certainly suggests that there may have been an unconscious association of the two ideas in Ulmer's mind. Certain modern commentators want to see film noir as a phenomenon with essentially political implications -- something that's not hard to argue given the leftist leanings of many of the great masters of the noir tradition, a number of whom were eventually blacklisted. But seeing film noir as essentially political expression I think sells the phenomenon short. Film noir reflected an existential dread far deeper than politics could encompass. "The death of God" gets closer to expressing this than "the corruption of Capitalism". Curiously enough, the French critic Luc Mollet said that Ulmer's whole body of work expressed "the loneliness of man without God". A recent essay on Jules Dassin's Brute Force, included in Criterion's DVD edition of the film, quotes Mollet dismissively and ironically, suggesting that he was just offering a kind of smokescreen for the political underpinnings of the noir vision. But I think it makes more sense to see the nutty, irrational Stalinism of many noir filmmakers as a smokescreen for the more comprehensive psychic dislocations of post-WWII America, in which Communism and Stalinism were just faddish, ill-conceived replacements for a God who seemed to have abandoned the world in the desert outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, after clearly announcing, at places like Auschwitz, his plans to retire permanently from the world's affairs.  If film noir were simply a reflection of the politics of its leftward-leaning makers, it ought to be terribly dated today, after the demystification of Communism and Stalin, those ephemeral shibboleths for which the Hollywood radicals martyred themselves. But film noir still speaks to us as strongly as it ever did -- perhaps because "the loneliness of man without God" still troubles the spirit, while the passing of Stalin and Communism go conspicuously unlamented. [Thanks again to Tony D'Ambra of films noir whose posts on film noir and the death of God prompted the thoughts above -- and to Michael Mills' classic film blog for the Detour advertising art.] Friday, October 19
EMILE FRIANT: A VICTORIAN ARTIST YOU SHOULD KNOW
by
Lloydville
on Fri 19 Oct 2007 08:34 AM PDT
 Émile Friant painted portraits and scenes of the French countryside. He had, to me, a decidedly cinematic eye -- his genre paintings are not sentimentalized and they have a bold, dynamic quality based on spatial compositions of great though subtle power. They remind me of Bertolucci's images in 1900.  The painting above uses a technique Tissot was fond of -- creating a space in the foreground that instantly occupies one's attention but which also opens up into a deep space beyond. Spaces opening up into deeper spaces instantly summon up the idea of movement, of the potential for movement -- they almost produce a sensation of movement. This and their photorealistic quality are what to me give them a cinematic quality. Friant was a late Victorian -- he lived until 1932, well into the era of the Impressionist triumph. Like John Singer Sargent he borrowed a freer approach to brushwork from the Impressionists while remaining true to the basic aesthetic ideals of the Victorian academy. You can see more of his paintings here, at the Art Renewal Center. Thursday, October 18
FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 18 Oct 2007 03:27 AM PDT
 In a comment here (and currently on his own web site films noir) Tony D'Ambra posts an intriguing quote from Mark Conrad about the connection between film noir and existentialism: "My proposal, then, is that noir can also be seen as a sensibility or worldview which results from the death of God, and thus that film noir is a type of American artistic response to, or recognition of, this seismic shift in our understanding of the world. This is why Porfirio is right in pointing out the similarities between the noir sensibility and the existentialist view of life and human existence. Though they are not exactly the same thing, they are both reactions, however explicit and conscious, to the same realization of the loss of value and meaning in our lives." [This is from Conrad's book The Philosophy of Film Noir: Nietzsche and the Meaning of Noir: Movies and the ‘Death of God’.] I agree with the gist of the quote, and with Tony's assertion that film noir and existentialism have a lot in common -- though I'm not sure that there was a direct influence on the former by the latter. I think Conrad is on the right track when he locates the essence of film noir in a particular moral orientation to the universe and not in a style or in subject matter. I'm also not sure that the death of God is quite the right way to explain film noir, though -- except as a metaphor for "the loss of value and meaning in our lives". Film noir, to me, is more about moral bewilderment as a social phenomenon, with social causes, than about loss of faith in God. It's about male insecurity and fear of women, about a creeping dread that the world isn't what it seems to be, doesn't work anymore -- if it ever did. These sorts of feelings have theological implications of course, but they don't lead automatically to atheism or to existentialism -- not in America, with its strong Protestant tradition, which has always preached what the theologian Paul Zahl calls a "low anthropology", holding that the world is intrinsically corrupt, redeemable only by supernatural Grace.  Hitchcock's The Wrong Man is an apt illustration of what I mean. The film is pure noir -- except in its denouement, when the protagonist is saved not by a good woman or luck or some kind of desperate action but by the direct intervention of Jesus. This is not a whole lot more improbable than the ways some other protagonists get saved in the film noir tradition. We needn't go this deep, however, to find the core, and the enduring appeal, of film noir. The feelings it deals with, though brought to the surface by the peculiarly horrific experiences of the generation that suffered through WWII and afterwards lived in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, are common to all men and women at some moments of their lives.  Such feelings may lead to atheism, to philosophies like existentialism -- or to religious epiphanies like the one Saul had on the road to Damascus. Because film noir is art, not theology or philosophy, it is not concerned with such outcomes. It is only concerned with the feelings, with certain particular conditions of the heart -- with bringing them to the surface and allowing us to engage them. Wednesday, October 17
THE DARK FIFTIES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 17 Oct 2007 02:08 AM PDT
 We sometimes think of the Fifties, the Eisenhower years, as a time of blandness, naive optimism and conformity. As a kid in the Fifties that's how it seemed to me -- I took everything at face value. I was a member of the Mickey Mouse Club -- I had the ears.  Looking back today at the popular culture of the Fifties, with wiser eyes, perhaps, the picture is much different. The sunny side of things looks like the thinnest of veneers. Film noir flourished in the Fifties. Pulp fiction got unspeakably bleak and harrowing. The subversive sexuality and energy of rock and roll bubbled up from the black underclass with astonishing ferocity. Some white performers tried their best to tone it down, but it stayed dirty. Ed Sullivan could present it as a kind of vaudeville novelty act, but kids knew better -- soon it would become the soundtrack for everybody's life.  The Beats had already started turning on and dropping out, in an unsettling but compelling rehearsal for the Sixties. At the time it seemed like a bizarre aberration.  The film cycle depicting middle-class teen-aged angst and rebellion was born.  An old guy to the Brando character in The Wild One: "What are you kids rebelling against?" Brando: "What have you got?"  Low-budget sci-fi movies retailed images of apocalypse by the score.  Even the kinder, gentler manifestations of popular culture reveal, on closer examination, dark undercurrents. Charles Schulz said this of his mildly satirical comic strip Peanuts: "All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; and the football is always pulled away."  And consider the apparently frivolous comic visions of Frank Tashlin -- which are, if examined closely, savage deconstructions of popular American culture.  Indeed, the more you look at Fifties culture the more it comes to seem that those mouse ears weren't at the heart of it -- they were distractions from a deep national anxiety, a brooding sense of dread that permeated everything. |
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