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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
point.
There's also a
touching interview with Jean Seberg, age 19, just after the disaster of
her performance in Saint Joan, her first film, in which Seberg, too, struggles,
somewhat more successfully, to keep her dignity in the face of
Wallace's insinuating smugness. "What will happen to your
career," Wallace asks, "when it comes time for you to get married and
devote most of your time to your family?" "I hope I'll marry a
man who lets me continue with my career," says Seberg, looking slightly
bewildered by Wallace's attitude.
The two great
stars, speaking from different ends of their careers, manage to make
Wallace's cigarettes look like accurately-sized phallic symbols.
What we're seeing in these interviews is the birth of modern
journalism, in which hacks try to elevate themselves by patronizing
their betters, treating their accomplishments as the same sort of
hollow flim-flam the hacks are practicing.
What we're also
seeing is further proof that modern feminism was a response not to an
over-powerful patriarchy, but to a patriarchy in full-on psychic
collapse. Wallace comes off here as a truly pathetic figure.
Friday, April 4
OBAMA CAMPAIGN PLAYS THE ASSHOLE CARD
by
Lloydville
on Fri 04 Apr 2008 12:16 AM PDT
Frustrated
by reports that the Clinton campaign is arguing to Super Delegates in
private that Barack Obama "can't win" in November -- presumably because
he's black -- some Obama surrogates have countered with the argument,
also expressed privately but widely reported, that Senator Clinton can't win in November
because she's an asshole.
The attempt seems to be to associate Clinton with unpopular Republican
Presidents who are generally seen as assholes -- like Richard Nixon and George
Bush. Clinton supporters have been quick to point out that Bill
Clinton, still a popular figure in Democratic circles, was also an
asshole, but still managed to balance the budget and keep America safe.
Other Clinton backers expressed outrage over the Obama tactics.
"Hillary Clinton can't help being an asshole," said Governor Ed Rendell
of Pennsylvania, "anymore than Barack Obama can help being a
Negro.
Criticizing a person on the basis of some inherent characteristic
demeans the public debate." In response to questioning, Rendell
said that "Negro" was not a term he normally used himself, "though it
does reflect the language of many voters in my state, who may not be
ready to vote for a person they see as an uppity jigaboo.
Naturally," he added, "that attitude doesn't reflect my personal
views." Reporters said that Rendell winked repeatedly at the
camera during these remarks, though an aide later explained that the
Governor had simply gotten something in his eye.
CNN political analyst David Gergen warned that the Obama argument could
backfire. "Assholes make up a significant percentage of the
American electorate," he said. "Naturally, they're attracted to a
candidate who is also an asshole and sensitive to attacks on that
candidate, whom they perceive as 'like them'. Barack Obama can't
win the Presidency if he totally alienates the asshole vote, which
could determine the outcome in many swing states, like Florida."
Obama's only comment on the controversy -- "American politics has no
place for assholes" -- has struck many observers as ambiguous, at best.
Thursday, April 3
LEAP YEAR
by
Lloydville
on Thu 03 Apr 2008 01:32 AM PDT
In
1920, Roscoe Arbuckle became the first great comedian of the silent
screen to make a full-on transition from shorts to feature films.
Chaplin had appeared in the feature comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance
as early as 1914, but under Mack Sennett's direction and as a second
lead. Chaplin wouldn't release his own first feature until 1921. Buster
Keaton starred in The Saphead in 1920 but he continued to make
shorts after that until 1923, when his feature career began in earnest
with Three Ages.
Arbuckle
made nine feature films in the two years before scandal interrupted
his career, and never appeared in another. I believe that all but three
of them are lost, and the last two were never released in America, due
to the scandal. One of these, Leap Year, survives and is included on
the magnificent DVD set The Forgotten Films Of Fatty Arbuckle. It's
absolutely fascinating.
In
the earlier shorts offered in the collection we can see Arbuckle
transition slowly from the comic actor of the Sennett farces to the
full-blown silent clown of the Comiques. Chaplin and Keaton seemed to
have intuited almost from the moment they stepped in front of a camera
that the silent cinema was perfectly adapted to a fixed clown persona
-- a character who could migrate from film to film yet still stay
essentially the same, with a way of moving, of being in space, that,
along with a few clothing props, singled him out as a distinct,
slightly hyper-real being, much like a circus clown or a figure from
the Commedia dell' Arte.
Roscoe
moved slowly from being a comic actor who did funny physical bits to
incarnating "Fatty", the slapstick clown, and all along the journey he
was pulled back to the former mode. In the films he did with Mabel
Normand, character, especially as embodied in their relationship, took
precedence over slapstick -- at least until the trademark Sennett
mayhem of the climax. In one of the Sennett films Roscoe directed, He
Did and He Didn't, he takes this mode even further, edging into the
realm of upper-class drawing-room comedy, with very sophisticated
lighting and photography.
Until
I saw Leap Year I would have seen this mode as a detour in Arbuckle's
development as a comedian -- a detour on the road to the Comiques,
where Arbuckle takes his place with Keaton and Chaplin as a classic
slapstick clown. Leap Year, though, totally altered my sense of what
Arbuckle was about. It's as far from the universe of the Comiques as
it's possible to get.
It
inhabits, in fact, the universe of P. G. Wodehouse, whose gentle,
kindly satires of the young and well-heeled beautiful people of his
time were immensely popular in 1920. Leap Year perfectly captures the
sweetly daft world of Wodehouse's slightly nutty, vaguely dimwitted but
immensely lovable trust-fund kids of the jazz age.
The
miracle of it is that Arbuckle, knockabout comedian extraordinaire,
funny slapstick fat guy, fits so perfectly into this world. He does it
by simply behaving as though he's Cary Grant in a romantic comedy, Fred
Astaire in a romantic musical -- and because he doesn't doubt it for a
moment, neither do we.
Roscoe
plays the feckless nephew of a rich man, presumably the heir to a vast
fortune. This could explain part of the reason he's so irresistible to
the women in the film -- but not all of it. He's a genuinely romantic
leading man. His sweetness and his physical grace sell us on that. He
just dances through the role.
The
film doesn't allow for much slapstick, but Arbuckle finds ways of
slipping it in delightfully -- most notably in a scene in which he's
trying to convince his would-be brides that he's having fits. The fits
are little masterpieces of physical comedy, as fine as anything Chaplin
and Keaton were capable of at their best.
But
the performance doesn't depend on these things, and the film remains a
frothy drawing-room farce. The farce becomes strained at times,
particularly towards the end, and the froth congeals a bit, but the
overall effect is of lightness and joy. It reminded me a little of
Murnau's The Finances Of the Archduke from 1924 -- particularly in
its use of the sunny Catalina settings of the film's middle section, in
which the landscape seems to conspire in the fun, as the Dalmatian
coast did in Murnau's film..
Was
this really the sort of film that the mad surreal clown of the Comiques
wanted to make? He certainly seems to be fully committed to the work
and having a hell of a good time. Were the other Arbuckle features
anything like this? If Arbuckle's career had continued on its natural
course, and he'd taken greater command over his films as a director --
where on earth would he have ended up?
This
film expanded my appreciation of Arbuckle's range and genius and
altered my sense of the comic landscape of films in 1920. It's easy to
think of Arbuckle as an actor whose journey towards becoming another
Chaplin, another Keaton, was tragically diverted. But maybe he would
have become something else entirely -- something we can't even imagine,
because he wasn't able to show it to us.
Wednesday, April 2
JULES BASTIEN-LEPAGE: A VICTORIAN ARTIST YOU SHOULD KNOW
by
Lloydville
on Wed 02 Apr 2008 02:48 AM PDT
Jules Bastien-Lepage died tragically young, in 1884, when he was in his late thirties. He painted one masterpiece, Joan Listening To the Voices (above),
which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It's impossible to describe the effect of this large canvas, with its
complex and convincing illusion of space, which Joan seems about to step out of,
prompted forward by her visions. It's an example of a
photo-realistic technique enlisted in the service of mystical drama.
Bastien-Lepage groped about a bit in his short career, with stylized
works of grandiose ambition that seem clumsy and pretentious and
modest genre paintings that seem trite, but his über-photographic style
could occasionally produce miracles, like this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Bernhardt,
which has the quality of a bas-relief:
No other evocation of Bernhardt, in literature, art or photography,
brings us as close as Bastien-Lepage's portrait does to the charisma of
the great artist. Nadar's photographs of the young actress
humanize her, touch the heart -- Bastien-Lepage's portrait records the
determined audacity of her genius. She seems powerful and
vulnerable at the same time, part of the alchemy of a star.
The American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens did a remarkable
bas-relief portrait of Bastien-Lepage in bronze, which makes a fine
pendant to Bastien-Lepage's portrait of Bernhardt -- both have a
tactile grace that takes the breath away, both summon their subjects into
our immediate presence, obliterating time and mortality:
Tuesday, April 1
THE OTHER SIDE OF KANE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 01 Apr 2008 01:04 AM PDT
Yesterday, Showtime screened a rough assembly of Orson Welles' legendary uncompleted film The Other Side Of the Wind,
which Peter Bogdanovich is restoring for the cable channel. The
select group of critics in attendance were stunned to find that the
film bore no relation whatsoever to the brief excerpts from the film or
to the script pages which have previously seen the light of day.
The film unveiled was in fact a shot-by-shot remake of Citizen Kane using sock-puppets in place of the original actors. Citizen Kane
is considered Welles' masterpiece, and many have pronounced it the
greatest movie ever made -- a stunning debut which Welles never managed
to live up to in the course of his subsequent career.
Bogdanovich explained the "very Wellesian" ruse involved -- "He shot
fake footage and wrote a bogus script to keep his real plans a
secret. 'Everybody wants another Kane,' he told me, 'so I'm going to give it to them. I'm going to shove it up their ass.'"
Bogdanovich believes that the sock-puppet Kane
will eventually be recognized as a greater work than the original --
"though it may take awhile. Orson was always years ahead of his
time."
Bogdanovich hopes that the restoration of the Kane
remake will be completed towards the end of this year and screened by
Showtime in 2009. It will appear under the name Welles chose for
it shortly before his death -- Kane You Believe It?
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