Poetry Reading: Daniel Thomas and Thomas Smith

Poets Daniel Thomas and Thomas Smith read poems recently published at Magers & Quinn, an Uptown Minneapolis bookstore, on June 26 , 2019.  The well-attended reading was about an hour long, both poets presenting between 8 and ten poems each.  The program reminded me that poetry is immeasurably deepened and amplified by the human voice -- a carefully read poem has considerably more urgency when recited aloud than the text holds on the written page.  This principle may not apply to densely constructed and complicated verse -- I would guess some poems by T. S. Eliot or John Donne or, for that matter, Geoffrey Hill's late work would not be succeed in recitation.  The complexity of allusion and syntax requires print and the reader's ability to slow reception until it is commensurate with understanding.  But both Thomas and Smith write beautifully honed, articulate, and lucid lyric poetry -- the works are reasonably short and, most importantly, preserve the grammar and syntax of ordinary, if heightened, speech.  Therefore, these poems seemed wonderfully encased in their utterance. 

Thomas read from his book Deep Pockets, a publication gathering writing from several decades in the poet's life.  The verse is personal, autobiographical in tenor, even to some limited degree confessional.  (Confessional poetry often seems cringe-worthy to me -- Thomas reveals just enough to catch your attention but is sufficiently decorous and wedded to poetic form to avoid embarrassing himself or his readers.)  His poems are short and intense, generally about a page and a half as printed in his book.  The verse is intensely alive to sensation and, often, exemplifies the way that some closely observed impression or transient feeling becomes defined first as an emotion and, then, blossoms into an idea inseparable from the tactile revelation of that idea.  I read Thomas' book with close attention and great delight -- indeed, I have re-read the book several times.  However, this oral recitation or reading was surprising to me, disclosing elements of the poems that I had forgotten or overlooked when perusing the words on the page.  In particular, reading gave these poems a more piercing topicality -- they seem more precisely descriptive of the experience of the poet.  (As an additional bonus, the out-loud reading of these poems revealed wit and humor that had not been the focus of my literary reading -- several of the poems are quite funny.)  "Meeting You" is an exquisite poem about the impact of love -- eros as disruptor and destroyer of cities, but, also, of course, builder of relationships and families.  "Home Pregnancy Test" is a bravura celebration of life.  A quartet of poems about Mr. Thomas' children -- "Nothing New Under the Sun," "A Look out the Window", "Away at College" (a moving verse that contrasts complaints about a boyfriend by the poet's daughter with the writer's own divorce), and "The Quiet", a short and quietly devastating poem about the poet's son and his service in Iraq comprised this suite of works.  "Dog as Master", "Happiness" and "Learning Italian" are lighter in tone and funnier.  "Learning Italian" is the most purely sensual of the poem's read, a celebration of the taste, as it were, or mouth-quality, of Italian.  (The poet's mother spoke Italian and came from an emigrant family.)  "Happiness" is a poem about facing uncertainty, written in the wake of the poet's mid-life change in profession -- it is a powerful work and, even, inspirational in tenor.  "Ice Storm", the last poem on the program, shows Thomas' range -- beginning with close observation, the verse transforms in the course of a few lines into a meditation on the fragility of civilization.  Mr. Thomas read these poems unpretentiously, with great deliberative intent and flawless articulation -- his work is humane, lucid, enthralling, and consolatory. 

Thomas Smith is a self-described nature poet.  Of course, he finds much to mourn in contemporary politics and the threat of climate change.  He is also, however, quite witty and his poetry did not slip into mere admonition or despair.  Smith read from a new book entitled Windy Day at Kabekana, a collection of prose poems.  These works are short, about a half page of prose, and tightly focused.  Smith seems more influenced by surrealism than Thomas and I detected hints of Lautreamont and, even, Baudelaire in his verse.  (These echoes are possibly imaginary -- Smith was apparently closely connected with his mentor, Robert Bly, and, later, translated letters by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.  I recall, however, that some of Bly's verse, for instance, "The Tooth Mother naked at last," a semi-hysterical poem about the Vietnam war and the figure of the vagina dentata had strong surrealist inclinations.)  Smith also seems to have a wide range -- his poem "Breath Together" ("Con - Spire") about conspiracy theories was disconcerting:  I couldn't tell whether Smith was mocking or endorsing such theories, an extremely interesting and unstable stance for a poem of this kind.  "First Guitar" is autobiographical as is "Waiting Room St. Mary's" (about the illness of the poet's father).  "Praying Mantis" invokes 1950's horror movies like Them and Mothra.  "This Abundance" attempts, plausibly I think, to give voice to the rationale, flawed as it might be, for climate denial.  "Martin's Ferry, Ohio" about James Wright was densely allusive. 

After reading, the two poets answered questions from the audience.  Thomas Smith made some interesting observations about "prose poems",  a form that I don't particularly admire -- I think the form has, more or less, ruined Anne Carson.  Smith noted that the order of the sentences in prose poems doesn't really matter -- there isn't an exact cadence to these works and you can stuff the syntactic elements into the paragraph in any order.  I don't think this is literally true but it is an interesting concept. Smith was adamant that prose poems are a wholly different genre than verse poems.  Smith is concerned that each of his books have a thematic coherence -- however, he views this editorial obligation as less pressing when compiling a book of prose poems.  Both poets noted that they came to verse through music -- indeed, each attributed an early interest at 13 or 14 in poetry to acquiring a guitar and learning to play that instrument.  (I know that Dan Thomas is a gifted composer and has developed some verse intended to recited against ambient musical accompaniment.)  Thomas doesn't write "prose poems" because he is fascinated by line-endings and the formal techniques involved in creating cadences in his work.  Thomas reads his work aloud while composing; Smith does not publish a book until he has read the whole text aloud and listened carefully for lines or transitions that don't work.  Both Smith and Thomas are good friends and, indeed, workshopped poems together for many years -- Thomas makes his home now in Santa Barbara,California; Smith has taught poetry for many years at The Loft, an institution for writers in Minneapolis. 

A disclosure:  Dan Thomas was my roommate more than 40 years ago.  I haven't seen him in person, however, for, at least, 35 years.  I know Mr. Thomas to be brilliant and wonderfully gifted.

The reading was enthusiastically received by the forty or so people gathered to hear these poets recite their works. 

Hearts of our People (Native Women Artists)

Hearts of our People (Native Women Artists) is well-meaning and very extensive exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  Moving at a reasonable pace, the show requires about 50 minutes to see -- it would be possible to linger much longer if the viewer were so inclined.  The exhibition is politically correct in all respects and, indeed, checks all of the ideological boxes now in vogue -- there is even some beadwork done by an intersex or transgender native person.  Ash-tray like receptacles have been built into the corners of some of the rooms so that viewers (if Native American) can leave small offerings to honor the art presented.  (I don't know if White people are authorized to leave tokens of their admiration in those corner-pocket receptacles; I suspect this would be viewed with disfavor as some kind of cultural appropriation and bad karma to boot.  Based on my observations, most of the offerings seemed to be ticket stubs, quarters, and bus passes.)  The show is free to Native Americans -- exactly how one would prove this status is unclear to me.  I assume that enrolled members of tribes would pass muster.  The labels are presented both in English and Native languages, mostly Dine as far as I could see, although there are labels in Lakota and Pueblo languages as well.

The art on display consists of a variety of modern work, mostly uninteresting identity politics installations and some fascinating traditional artifacts.  Handsome ceramics made during the last century or produced for the Southwestern tourist trade are on exhibit as well as very intricate ceremonial garments, cradle-boards, and beadwork pouches and purses.  I've never had much interest in fashion or clothing and so the beauty of these garments is probably wasted on me.  I can see, however, that many of the garments and other textile artifacts display fantastic levels of craft and are never less that extraordinarily handsome.  Wall placards inscribed with poems, including work by Louise Erdreich appear at intervals and speakers broadcast recitation of some of this verse to the gallery-goers.  The modern stuff is largely forgettable.  However, there are a couple of notable exceptions.  Some elegant and simple fabric shrouds, cut to resemble abstract hoods, represent native dancers -- as you pass by these delicate objects, your body displaces air and causes them to nod and beckon to you.  A number of molds of phallic-looking antlers are suspended from a ceiling -- a strange, organic installation that looks a bit like the minimalist work of Eva Hesse and has a curiously haunting aspect.  There is a rabble-rousing but brilliantly executed meditation on canvas about the imbroglio that occurred when the Walker Art Center commissioned an artist to build a scaffold that turned-out to be based -- at least in part -- on the hanging platform on which 38 Dakota warriors died in December 1862.  The painting shows the scaffold as a small skeletal structure surveyed by a white girl who is also extending her tongue to lick the iconic Claes Oldenberg cherry on the spoon in the  WAC sculpture garden.  Next to the white girl sprawled across the canvas, there is a sinister-looking but elegant coyote, darting to the side of the painting with what looks like a bird crushed in the beast's jaws.  The image is supposed to be a political allegory about the insensitivity of the WAC to Native American concerns but, like many allegories, the image has a surrealist charge and is exquisitely rendered.  The artifacts made with natural pigments have a refined and graceful quality that the modern stuff, the product of a more agitated age, doesn't possess.  Do we really need to see an enclosure shaped like a wigwam with a target (actually it looks like the view through a rifle sight) next to a machine gun with bullets installed, after the manner of Damien Hirst, in a sort of sparkling aquarium?  The installation merely states the obvious and, although the machine gun has a malicious sort of glamor, there's not much that a work of this sort can tell us.  Similarly obvious is a knee-high heap of broken china, made apparently with buffalo bone, displayed behind a barricade, with video images of bison snorting and stamping -- the china is pretty enough and, even, fractured has a kind of Victorian charisma: the point about the death of the bison to make the china seems confused to me and hectoring. 

The exhibition is pricy -- it costs 20 bucks to enter.  I won't say that the show is over-priced:  it is, after all, very large occupying, I think, four big, dimly lit galleries.  The show wasn't to my taste, even though I enjoyed viewing some of the objects.  I think the gallery-goer is better advised to skip the show and tour the adjacent gallery (free)containing many beautiful Native American masks and other objects including some tremendously beautiful Cheyenne ledger drawings, simply rendered in lead pencil and a few crayon colors and extraordinarily expressive.  The horses and mounted warriors are precisely drawn, stylized and portrayed as moving with an exquisite balletic choreography -- it looks like an early Picasso. 

Film group noteL D.W. Griffith and Isn't Life Wonderful?

D.W. Griffith and Isn’t Life Wonderful?

　

1.

Dylann Roof went to the Emmanuel Methodist Church in Charleston, an African-American congregation, and murdered nine people in a Bible study group. Roof is a White supremacist.

After this event, a petition was issued circulated to change the name of the David Wark Griffith Middle School at 4765 East Fourth Street in Los Angeles. The school, of course, is named after the film director, D. W. Griffith. Griffith’s most famous film, The Birth of a Nation (1914) is a historical epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction. The picture’s climax involves the rescue of a White family besieged by a Black mob in their cabin in the South – the Ku Klux Klan ride to the rescue and save the family from certain death at the hands of the African-American criminals. The Birth of a Nation is an effective film – from a cinematic perspective, this sequence remains thrilling and is clearly the progenitor of a thousand other last minute rescues featured in narrative movies. But the movie had a malign effect – it led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and its program of terrorism.

The David Wark Griffith Middle School is 100% minority. The LA School System web-site describes the school for 6 to 8^th graders as a "magnet school". Notwithstanding this designation, the School has shown poor performance – only 17% of its students are proficient in math (compared to 35% elsewhere in the State); only 35% of its students are proficient in reading (the State-wide average is about 70%).

Petitioners noted that the school was named after a "famous racist" whose work was instrumental in fomenting the "murder of people of color." Reference was made to the murders in Charleston.

The Griffith School is in a poor neighborhood where education isn’t important to many people. Poverty makes people passive – the struggle for existence takes up all their time and poor people often have little energy for politics. The great majority of the students at the school had no idea who the place was named after. Presumably, the teachers and administrators had little interest in an old dead white man, someone who spent the last 15 years of his life mostly drunk, chasing girls at the old Knickerbocker Hotel – Griffith died in 1946. The Petition went nowhere. People had more pressing needs to address. As I write this note, the Griffith School is still named after David Wark Griffith, the pioneering film maker.

Griffith’s name didn’t fare so well with the Director’s Guild of America. In the late 1990's, the DGA determined that it’s highest honor, the Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement, should be renamed. The award is now simply called the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award. The first of these awards was given to Griffith himself in 1938 – in 2012, Milos Foreman, the Czech-American director received this award; in 2016, the award was bestowed upon Ridley Scott.

What about Griffith Park? The battle scenes from Birth of a Nation were shot in that hilly enclave north of the downtown skyscrapers. But Griffith Park is not named after the film maker. Rather, the park is named after Griffith T. Griffith, an entrepreneur who had an ostrich farm in that area, the former Rancho Los Feliz. Griffith T. Griffith was no saint – he savaged his wife in 1903 and almost killed her. So far as I know, no one has yet proposed renaming the Park because many people, I suppose, think that the park’s eponym is the notorious director. (Whatever if it turned out that there was a Minnesota guy named Calhoun after whom Calhoun Lake was really named? Would we spare the name in that circumstance even though most people, if they think about the question at all, would think the lake named after the racist Southern politician?)

Writing in July 2006 in the excellent Australian film journal, Sense of Cinema, John Steinle begins his survey of Griffith’s films and legacy with these words: "Is there anyone today – any historian, any student of film, anyone with the least political sensitivity – who will dare to praise D. W. Griffith today?" Steinle notes that Griffith’s name was taken off the DGA Lifetime Achievement award and, then, remarks that "Griffith remains the most reviled and detested film maker in history, with the possible exception of Leni Riefenstahl." This is a far-cry from the hagiographic treatment of Griffith that governed film studies when I first began to read about Griffith in the late sixties. At that time, Griffith was almost universally praised for this pioneering innovations, his invention of film grammar, and the powerful emotional effects that his picture’s achieved. Critics as politically disparate as Pauline Kael, William Everson, Kevin Brownlow, and Richard Schickel all regarded Griffith with awe. Even Steinle in his essay is obliged to admit that some of Griffith’s films achieve a stature that elevates them above all other movies: Intolerance (1916), Steinle calls, "the grandest, most ambitious failure in film history."

2.

Griffith was born in 1876, the son of a prominent Kentucky legislator, "Roaring Jake" Griffith. Griffith’s father had fought in the Civil War and was an unreconstructed Confederate. "Roaring Jake" died when his son, David Wark Griffith, was ten years old. Misery ensued – Griffith’s family lost the farm where they lived and moved to Louisville. In that city, Griffith’s mother opened a boarding house, the last resort for the genteel poor in the Victorian era. But the boarding house also failed. Griffith joined a traveling vaudeville company and acted in road-show theatrical productions. This experience with late 19^th century theater proved to be decisive – despite his technical innovations, Griffith’s sensibility is that of a man of the theater: all of his cinematic inventions are designed to amplify and adorn the melodramatic effects expected by largely unsophisticated Victoran era theater-goers. Griffith applies his film wizardry to creating spectacles that are often maudlin and simple-minded. His camera-work and cunning with editing and other technical effects look forward to the Cubism – but the ideology implicit in his films is rooted in the specious moral verities underlying 19^th century barn-burner melodramas.

Traveling theater companies come and go. Griffith was down on his luck in 1908 when he sought work at Edison’s Biograph Studios at Broadway and 13^th Street in New York City. He appeared in a number of early one-reel films, but didn’t show much promise as an actor. He wrote some scripts, barely eking out a living. Late in 1908, Griffith was on-set at Biograph when the film’s director was too sick to continue the production. Griffith stepped in as the sick man’s substitute, working with Billy Bitzer, the cameraman with whom he made most of his famous films during the next 15 years. Griffith had a flair for directing and made 48 films in his first year at Biograph. In the next several years, Griffith invented modern film grammar, developing the close-up as an expressive tool and increasingly sophisticated narrative editing. Audiences responded to Griffith’s innovations and advertisements began to identify him as the director of the pictures that he made – he was the first auteur in film history.

In 1910, Griffith made Old California on-location – another of his film innovations. Old California is the first known picture made in Hollywood and the foundation for the industry in that place. Judith of Bethulia (1914), a biblical epic, is the first feature-length film and the first large-scale spectacle made in the United States. Griffith’s success concentrated the film industry in southern California – this was at the expense of several flourishing regional film industries most particularly Svensk films in Sweden (famous for directors Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom), the pre-Revolutionary cinema in St. Petersburg where Evgeny Bauer made his pioneering movies, and the Italian studios at Cinecitta south of Rome where the first actual epic spectacle films were made, most notably Cabiria in 1908 with a literal cast of thousands and an erupting volcano.

Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first international blockbuster – no one knows how much money the movie made and no less than the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson commended the picture to the public saying that the film "was like writing history with thunderbolts." On the strength of Birth of a Nation, made for Mutual Studios, Griffith formed his own production company. His next picture, one of the most expensive ever made in Hollywood, Intolerance (1916) was self-funded. The movie was not a success at the box-office and Griffith lost money. He made several other notable pictures in the late ‘teens, Hearts of the World (1918), a rabble-rousing anti-German war film and the tragic and indelible Broken Blossoms (1919). By the early twenties, Griffith’s Victorian sensibility was out-of-date – it was the Jazz age with bathtub gin and flappers, cynicism prevailed and Griffith’s sententious moralizing was regarded as old-fashioned. Nonetheless, he was sufficiently successful to form United Artists, a partnership between Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Griffith. Under that aegis, he made a number of films including the tremendously effective Orphans of the Storm (1921), a huge epic about the French Revolution starring Griffith’s protegees, Lilian and Dorothy Gish, America (1924), another historical epic about the American Revolution, and Way Down East (1920) with its archetypal climax in which Lilian Gish leaps from ice-floe to ice-floe in a river rushing toward a waterfall, and several pastoral idylls True Heart Susie (1919), The Romance of Happy Valley (1919) and Sally of the Sawdust (1925). While participating in United Artists, Griffith also operated an independent studio, Griffith Productions, located Marmoraneck, New York – Isn’t Life Wonderful? was the last film that Griffith produced independently; the movie’s disappointing box office receipts, in part, led to the demise of his studio. Griffith’s smaller scale films made between 1919 and 1925, including Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1924) are now rated as among his best – these pictures, generally shot on location, have semi-documentary feel and are considered precursors to Neo-Realism. But these more modest movies, featuring complex characterizations, were unpopular at the box-office. Isn’t Life Wonderful? shot almost entirely on location in war-ravaged Europe, in particular, was a critical success (Variety characterized the film as one of his "best") – but American audiences weren’t interested in sympathizing with displaced persons in old Europe and would not invest their emotions in the suffering of Germans (or nominally Polish refugees, the identification given by Griffith to his protagonists in the film). Not surprisingly, Isn’t Life Wonderful? was best received in Germany where the picture inspired a generation of film makers like G. W. Pabst to make documentary-style movies about post-war poverty – the so-called Kammer ("Chamber") films produced in the style of the Neue Sachlichkeit ("New Objectivity") by the German film industry. Pabst’s picture The Joyless Street (1925), in particular, shows Griffith’s influence and, in turn, is regarded as progenitor to Italian neo-Realism.

Hollywood loves success and despises failure. Griffith soldiered on, but his budgets became smaller and smaller. United Artists collapsed and the shell of the enterprise was sold – the name persisted but the artists were gone. Griffith continued his pioneering work in developing technical innovations for sound film in his last two pictures, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931), a semi-documentary about alcoholism – both films that failed when they were released but are now highly regarded. By this time, Griffith was himself alcoholic and living in the Knickerbocker Hotel. Woody Van Dyke hired Griffith to shoot and edit the montage of the great San Francisco earthquake for his 1936 film San Francisco – Griffith’s eye had lost none of his cunning and the earthquake sequence is stunning. He continued working sporadically on scripts and set design – as late as 1940, Hal Roach hired him as a "consultant" on One Million Years B.C., a cave man movie. Griffith died alone in 1948 in his hotel suite at the Knickerbocker. He was a life-long Freemason and his funeral was held at the Los Angeles Freemason’s Hall. By this time, he was regarded as an embarrassing (if intimidating) relic of the past and very few Hollywood professionals attended his obsequies. There is a story that Griffith visited the set of David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun in 1946 – several of his alumni actors were cast in that film, specifically Harry Carey, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore. The cast and crew were awestruck at Griffith’s presence and began to make foolish errors – Griffith ultimately had to watch the proceedings from a concealed vantage point behind a set.

　

3.

Film histories and biographies of Griffith often invoke the notion of atonement. Griffith is said to have made films intended to atone for his earlier racially and politically incendiary movies. The notion seems a bit dubious but it has been put forth so frequently that the idea deserves consideration. Even a sophisticated film critic like Roger Ebert subscribed to this notion. He wrote: "As slavery is the great sin of America, so The Birth of a Nation is Griffith’s sin for which he tried to atone all the rest of his life. So instinctive were the prejudices he was raised with as a 19^th century Southerner that the offenses in his film actually had to be explained to him."

This concept have given rise to much debate about the film Griffith made after his Civil War epic, Intolerance. Some film historians believe that Griffith’s picture, showing slavery in Babylon as vicious and cruel, as well as the movie’s general endorsement of politically liberal ideas, is intended to atone for The Birth of a Nation. Yet others argue that Griffith felt persecuted when the NAACP lobbied congress to ban showing of The Birth of a Nation and that Intolerance was made to denounce the "intolerance" implicit in political correctness – in other words, Griffith seizes the mantle of the oppressed and claims that he is the true victim of intolerant critics. (There is some justification for this theory in that the movie’s modern story shows so-called reformers as the source of intolerant attitudes that lead to disaster.) Probably, the film that Griffith made to intentionally display his liberal and progressive attitudes is Broken Blossoms. At a time when marriage between the races was illegal as miscegenation, Broken Blossoms celebrates the love between a Chinese cook and an abused Cockney waif.

Similarly, Griffith himself announced that Isn’t Life Wonderful? was intended as reparation for the jingoist anti-German "hun" imagery integral to his melodramatic World War One film, Hearts of the World.

In a letter written from Germany while Isn’t Life Wonderful? was being shot, Griffith wrote: "Germany must be restored or Europe is lost." Of course, he was right.

4.

Isn’t Life Wonderful? stars Carol Dempster. Dempster was born in 1901 in Duluth, Minnesota, the daughter of a Great Lakes sea captain. The family moved to Los Angeles when Dempster was ten and the young girl was enrolled in the influential dance school conducted by Ruth St. Denis. In 1915, Dempster played a dancing harem girl in the Babylon sequences of Intolerance. She went on to appear in a half-dozen of Griffith’s films made between 1918 and 1925. Griffith was unhappily married to the film star Linda Arvildson but had separated from her in 1912. Dempster became Griffith’s lover and remained with him throughout the entirety of her Hollywood career. In 1926, she ended the relationship with Griffith and married a wealthy banker – she dropped out of sight and died in 1989, making a sizeable bequest to the museum of fine arts in San Diego.

Dempster is often compared invidiously to Lillian Gish and the string of movies that Griffith made featuring his inamorata are, often, said to be flawed on the basis that the relatively plain actress lacks the star power of Griffith’s earlier protegees such the Gish sisters, Mae Marsh, and Mary Pickford. In the context of Isn’t Life Wonderful? the comparison is unfair to both Dempster. Carol Dempster was somewhat plain and appears haggard, even gaunt in Isn’t Life Wonderful? Of course, these aspects of her appearance are integral to the film – the movie is almost entirely about starvation.

　

5.

Like all of us, Griffith was a mixture of good and bad qualities. He was courtly, well-spoken, and, of course, immensely industrious. He was loyal to his friends and colleagues. He was capable of maintaining in his mind the general argument and scheme of a four hour movie such as Intolerance on the basis of handwritten notes scribbled on paper the size of a napkin. He was an inveterate skirt-chaser, booze-hound, and, most unforgivably (for modern audiences) a racist of the worst sort. Th question raised by Griffith’s work, and the work made by people like Ernst Juenger and Celine, is whether a right-wing reactionary can successfully create art of the highest order. At one time, Griffith’s intellectual and personal flaws were simply ignored: the man was his work and, with one notable exception, The Birth of a Nation, the work was thought to be luminous, extraordinary, and what is most important, intricately influential on those artists that followed him. We judge things today by a different rubric – the man is no longer redeemed by his art, rather, his art is subverted and denigrated by the man and his flaws.

So the question remains: does Griffith exemplify a man with evil tendencies who happened to be a great artist? (It will not do to answer this question by observing that racism was endemic in the United States in 1914 -1915 and that, probably, most White Americans shared his views. The fact is that the racism on display in Birth of a Nation went quite beyond what was socially acceptable in public discourse even at the time of its first release and that many protests were lodged against the movie by both Black and White critics.)

A first response to this question, the central issue arising in connection with D. W. Griffith, is to observe an element of bad faith or, at least, a disjunction between the man and his work with respect to the director’s principal, and, indeed, obsessive idee fix. Griffith’s most thoroughly realized films are about families facing attack by outside, hostile forces. For Griffith, the extended family was the fundamental unit of civilization. Griffith imagines this basic cultural institution as under attack by exterior agents – sometimes, the attack is literal; on other occasions, it is symbolic or figurative. It is curious that the man who makes films celebrating the family as a bulwark against barbarism was himself no "family man" – rather, Griffith was a serial philanderer, a drunk with whom it was impossible to live, who died alone in a rented room in downtown hotel. The man whose movies focus intensively on the joys of home was himself essentially homeless, estranged from his own family. (There is an echo of this situation in the disconnect between the films of Yasujiro Ozu and that great director’s personal life. Ozu is famous for his gentle, endearing, and profound movies about families. But he was himself solitary and, also, a drunkard. Perhaps, we are tempted to idealize what we can not enjoy ourselves.)

Griffith’s displays his obsessive concern with the family and those forces seeking to destroy it in the most literal, even vulgar, imagery. His pre-1914 Westerns, establishing central tropes in that genre, feature savage Indians besieging isolated pioneer cabins. The perimeter of defense is increasingly straitened; the murderers break through the fence and the stockade, batter down the outside door, and the last stand takes place inside the house itself with only a fragile lathe wall and door defending the hysterical women and children from assault – as the savages come ever closer to smashing apart this last bulwark, the men prepare to turn their pistols on their wives and children to spare them the dishonor of rape and torture. (Of course, the cavalry always arrives just in the nick of time.) The same scenario is enacted in Birth of a Nation, the little group of Southern gentry beleagured by a mob of villainous Negroes who progressively smash down defense after defense before being routed by the "white avalanche" of Ku Klux Klan horseman. What do the savages want? Griffith makes this crystal-clear: they want our women, they desire our wives, sisters, and daughters.

These paranoid visions affect Griffith’s construction of cinematic space. (A characteristic of great film making is the creation of an imaginary space in which the movie’s action takes place: consider Kiastorami’s zigzagging mountain roads, huge aerial vistas and tight car interiors in a film like The Taste of Cherries or Bergman’s spectral dreamscapes in The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.) For Griffith, the grounded center of all action is the home, typically defined as a threshold, several rooms always shot from the same camera angle, and, then, a picket fence or garden hedge defending the territory. Griffith uses establishing shots to designate the home, always filmed from a set, and unvarying vantage. People venture away from home at their peril. Home for Griffith implies home invaders and conflict always involves something like a siege. The space besieged is variable from film to film – in Broken Blossoms, Lillian Gish retreats into tiny closet that is battered down when her father, Battling Barrows, beats her to death: the film dramatizes this horrific sequence with harrowing shots of Gish spinning in circles inside her tiny, desperately imperilled refuge. In other films, the home territory is huge – in Intolerance, Babylon is surrounded by an immense wall, 22 miles in circuit, and tall as a skyscraper. (In fact, the Ishtar gate to Babylon, an astonishingly huge structure, is the first gargantuan set built for an American movie – the scope of the construction, made in 1915 by Italian craftsmen, remains unprecedented: in fact, the set was so immense, so disproportionately large, that it is ineffective in the film, dwarfing the humans forced to interact with it.) Of course, the breach of this wall and the destruction of the city enclosed within comprise the main action of the Babylonian sequences in the film.

In his smaller scale domestic films, the family is endangered by disruptive emotional or social forces. The Struggle, Griffith’s last film, involves a family half-destroyed by alcoholism. In Way Down East, and other films in the pastoral idyll cycle, Griffith shows families contending with out-of-wedlock births, erring children, and tyrannical parents. Sally of the Sawdust (1925) involves a young woman cast out of her family when pregnant – the girl joins the circus and her child is raised by a crooked, if kindly, con man, played by W. C. Fields (the role that first made him famous). After various adventures, Judge’s granddaughter, the titular character, proves her heritage and is reunited with her family of origin. A fat, happily married real estate tycoon falls for a vamp in Battle of the Sexes (1928). After his family is cast into disorder and a suicide attempt, the tycoon eschews his affair and rebuilds his broken family. Examples can be multiplied – the point is that Griffith’s interest in the travails of the family, either literally under attack or figurative ruptured by the conduct of its members, persists throughout his entire career.

In this context, Isn’t Life Wonderful? assumes a central significance in Griffith’s work. His World War I picture, a propaganda film called Hearts of the World (1918) shows Belgian families under siege by vicious inhuman huns. Isn’t Life Wonderful? overtly defined by Griffith as a sort of apology for the atrocities depicted in his earlier war movie, forces the director far beyond his ordinary "comfort zone". In the 1924 film, Griffith’s protagonists are not only threatened with homelessness – they are, in fact, literally without homes when the movie begins. The movie chronicles the family’s struggle to survive in the face of deadly poverty – the film shows people who are slowly starving to death. The films static compositions and, apparent, aimlessness in its early scenes mirror the plight of Griffith’s protagonist – hunger and despair paralyze. Furthermore, the outward conflict between family members and a roving band of thugs is unsettling for several reasons – first, the thugs are motivated by a desire to provide food for their own women and children; secondly, the bravura climax in the pine forest shows a battle over a cart-load of potatoes in which the hero and heroine are defeated – the cavalry never comes to their rescue: there is no group of mounted chevaliers like the Klan to ride to their assistance. After the film’s strange climax, at once dispiriting and inspiring, Griffith, of course, appends a happy ending – the family has a home now and a garden and seem to be precariously thriving. (One critic noted that Isn’t Life Wonderful? is refreshing because the violent conflict does not besiege the heroine’s virtue – there is no attempted rape – but, rather, her potatoes.) Some viewers note that in the film’s coda, a child tries to dance but seems too weak to do so convincingly – accordingly, even in the supposed happy ending there are discordant elements. Happiness doesn’t cancel or erase the earlier suffering endured by the characters. In many respects, Isn’t Life Wonderful? represents the most mature, and thoughtful, presentation of Griffith’s lifelong obsession with the family in his film career.

6.

Film makers and critics are continuously rediscovering Griffith. His percussive editing and cross-cutting for suspense was imitated by the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein who acknowledged Griffith’s influence on his films such as The Battleship Potemkin and October. German directors such as Pabst adopted Griffith’s sober, documentary-style realism for films made in the late twenties and early thirties. The Italian neo-realists were influenced by Broken Blossoms and, indeed, Fellini quotes passages from that film in his picture La Strada. After World War Two, Akira Kurosawa remade Isn’t Life Wonderful? in 1947 as One Wonderful Sunday. Two of the founders of the French New Wave, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette cited Griffith’s 1919 idyll True Heart Susie as central to their cinema. Whether Griffith will have any influence in the future, particularly in light of his irrefutable and reflexive racism, remains unclear?

　


QUIZ:
1. Griffith cuts between a group of wealthy people enjoying a feast and a bread line in his 1908 movie based upon a novel by (NAME) called A Corner in (....)
2. War harnesses human beings to carts. Paul and Inge pull a cart containing potatoes at the climax of Isn’t Life Wonderful? Perhaps influenced by Griffith’s film, very well-received in Germany, Bertolt Brecht has his heroine drag a cart full of food in his 1939 play (NAME) and her Children.
3. Potatoes are the perfect food: How many calories are in a medium sized russet potato: (a) 150 (b) 512 ( c ) 49 (d) 975 ?
4. A medium-sized russet potato contains 70% of recommended daily requirements for Vitamin (what vitamin); 30 % of recommended daily allowance for Vitamin B-6 and 25% recommended daily ration of potassium.
5. To punish German people, the Allies systematically reduced calorie intake in Germany between April 1945 and the "hunger winter of 1946 to 1947 on the basis of Joint Chief of Staff Order 1067 (JCS Directive 1067) to (a) 750 calories per day; (b) 1000 to 1250 calories per day; ( c ) 1600 calories per day; (d) 2500 calories per day.
6. During World War One, Germany suspended the "gold standard," imposed an income tax, and began copiously printing money to finance its war effort – the notion being that the acquisition of industrial areas in France and the Low Countries would shore up the economy. But Germany lost the war. During the hyperinflation that followed, a loaf of bread that cost 160 marks in January 1922 was priced at (a) 1000 marks; (b) 10,000 marks; ( c ) 750,000 marks; (d) 200,000,000,000 marks by December 1922.

The Trial (Ballet)

The Trial is a 100 minute ballet devised by Jiri Bubenicek, a Czech choreographer.  The piece is theatrical, ingenious, and confusing.  No one except inhabitants of the Czech Republic speak their language and, so, the artists in that nation have invented clever ways of making theatrical works that don't require spoken words -- of course, opera has this benefit, but the Czechs are also masters of shadow play, puppet theater, black light spectacles, and lurid animated films in which visual effects are paramount.  Ballet, similarly, is created for the eye and doesn't require subtitles.  If a Czech wishes to reach an international audience, he or she will likely make work that communicates via pantomime or caricatured gesture, performance configured for understanding without words.  Bubenicek operates within this métier.  However, he also aspires to retain and display much of the material in Kafka's unfinished novel.  Kafka, by contrast, is notoriously chatty -- his characters harangue one another, fruitlessly ranting for pages on end.  Furthermore, the very concept of Kafka's Trial is linguistic -- someone purports to pronounce judgment, evidence is adduced, and arguments are made.  All of this fundamentally verbal activity, registered in Kafka's studiously neutral and bureaucratic German, is invisible to the eye -- hence, much of Bubenicek's Trial is inscrutable.  A person attending this show would be well-advised to have in hand a plot summary of Kafka's novel -- without that crib, the spectacle is full of sound and fury, but, often, seems to signify nothing or close to nothing.

The Trial begins with a reference to another signature work by Kafka, The Metamorphosis.  The man who we come to know as Josef K awakes in bed in a tangle of limbs -- there are two other men under the covers with him and between them they raise six legs that wiggle in the air in a futile way.  K is not only doomed by the juridical proceedings but begins the show as a scuttling Ungeziefer, some kind of cockroach or other vermin.  The stage is largely black with an expressionist wall and door embedded in a barn-size floating set.  Sometimes the set opens so that figures can roll out of it -- K's lawyer in his bathrobe and underpants slides casually out of the wall in an avalanche of dislodged books and legal documents.  Small windows open in the floating set and sometimes white-painted faces appear in them, taunting and accusing K.  Even before K is introduced, there is a kind of prologue -- a bulbous, gelatinous-looking something hangs on a huge hook.  Men wearing tin-foil cone hats and tin-foil capes dart about, seemingly worshiping this misshapen suspended idol.  Weird screams come from off-stage.  Central to the work's presentation is off-screen yowling of Mieskuaru Huutajat, billed at the Finnish men's "screaming chorus."  We don't ever see them but often they intone words and phrases ominously and, then, shout en masse at the hapless protagonist.  I suppose much of this is quite witty.  Indeed, in one scene, the dancers all cavort wildly, whirling around Josef K as if some kind of climax is imminent-- but, then, stage manager shuffles on-stage, raises his hand to put an end to the dancing, and grunts:  "This scene was left unfinished".  Other stage hands appear and manhandle the set off to the side of the stage and the ballet corps is dismissed -- they tramp off the stage in a disheveled, disorderly way.  Everything goes black for twenty seconds and, then, the show re-boots.

Kafka's books contain surprising amounts of sex.  Every woman encountered in Kafka's Trial or The Castle seeks to compromise K by seducing him.  These sexual encounters provide Bubenicek with lots of juicy material -- he choreographs lascivious pas de deux waltzes and polkas for K and the various vamps that he encounters (one of them is a sleek lass in black who wears a natty red hot chili on her head as a hat).  There's a lurid scene in which an executioner in bondage and discipline gear flogs a couple of lackeys -- lots of muscular buttocks are visible in this episode.  Bubenicek throws in scenes from Kafka's short story "The Judgment", a tale in which the poor hero brings his girlfriend home to meet the family -- but, unfortunately, the family is dominated by the hero's old Dad, a sickly fellow who either shrinks into mummified insignificance or towers over his cowering son pronouncing hellish imprecations on him and, then, seizing the boy's girlfriend for his own use.  All of this is shown quite literally, with lots of groping and grabbing, while choruses of figures dressed in white checkerboard patterns or wearing 19th century frock coats prance about.  In some scenes, the upper half of the huge stage is a lattice of hanging books.  The painter, Titorelli, has several half-naked models and, of course, they also employ their wiles to seduce K, further distracting him from the defense of his case, a defense that is difficult to make since K is not at all sure as to the accusation that has prompted his trial.  An enormous God's eyeball is rolled out on stage, pushed around, and, then, becomes a platform on which dancers climb.  In the end, a mob of lanky brutes wearing dresses and top hats drags K to the forefront of the huge stage where they take turns stabbing him.   There's a sort of epilogue:  a tiny slit opens far in the rear of the stage and we can see a cozy alcove or nook where the lawyer is reclining among huge heaps of books, an exit sign glowing in a companionable way over his head.  On the soundtrack, we hear a plaintive Yiddish (I think) folk song.

The ballet is impressively mounted.  Much of dancing bears the imprint of Pina Bausch (and her Tanztheater Wuppertal) -- that is, quotidian gestures and movements are stylized, repeated again and again, and slowly subsumed into a kind of abstract regimented writhing.  The figures in the ballet have a spidery look, like insect-like personages in engravings by Callot or Ensor.  The whole show is redolent of the sort of natty, grotesque, puppet-like gestures that we find in Alfred Kubin's work or the stories of ETA Hoffmann.  Although the ballet is about utter perdition, the dancers hop about merrily like automatons or wind-up toys or black crickets:  they cut dashing figures against the darkness but we know they are doomed.  In fact, we know that the arrogant little dancers aren't even fully real.  This show, which I didn't fully understand, requires an army of dancers.  There are six Judges alone, all of them suitably gaunt and hideous with huge patriarchal beards.  The score is a wild, expressionist mix of atonal music by Schnittke and Hans Eisler, folk songs, and, of course, much grim and noisy shouting by the Finnish men's ensemble.  It's difficult music and, to my ears, the Swedish National Orchestra had mastered the score and performed it with aplomb.  I saw this production at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, Sweden on June 11, 2019.  The dancers were members of the Royal Opera House ballet company and, as far as I could ascertain, all performed brilliantly.

Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue

A puzzle picture and ornate hoax, Martin Scorsese's 2019 Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue is long, crammed with spectacular musical performances, and, ultimately, baffling.  Scorsese subtitle to the film is "A Bob Dylan Story", a clue at the outset that a third (or more) of what we see depicted on the screen is a tall tale and fictional, although presented with such persuasive documentary assurances that the viewer is bound to feel more than a little cheated upon discovering that much of the material, most conspicuously the "talking head" commentary is entirely invented.  Viewers will either find this approach to material that is intrinsically compelling either fascinating or distracting or simply annoying.  In an era where claims of "fake news" are weaponized, it is more than a little disconcerting to observe Dylan and Scorsese conspiring to invent their own mythology to enhance, or illumine, the indisputable reality of the famous Rolling Thunder Revue.  In fairness, Dylan himself gives ample warning that the road ahead will be a devious one -- very early in the movie he makes two oracular pronouncement:  he says he can't talk about the tour because it happened forty years ago, "before (he) was even born"; second, Dylan repeats the claim that a man wearing a mask is the only person upon whom you can count to tell you the truth.  Fundamentally, Dylan's concept of truth telling seems rooted in a couple of sources.  First, there is evidence that the singer is painfully shy and reticent, a Midwestern characteristic that forbids him from talking too expansively about himself and his work.  (This is illustrated by a striking anecdote in which a girlfriend says that Dylan pleaded with her to "help him" when new people were about to appear -- a plea that she perceived to be based in Dylan's anxiety.  Like much in the movie, there is only one problem with this story:  it's fictional, told by the actress Sharon Stone, playing the role of "the Beauty Queen" as listed in the credits, but who, in real life, had nothing to do with the tour.)  Second, Dylan's lyrics have always been enigmatic and, I suppose that the songwriter, tiring of offering interpretations, simply decided to either evade all questions of meaning or, in the alternative, proffer false responses -- this is apparent from Dylan's insistence throughout his career that "the meaning is in the words", that is, the songs speak for themselves and are, indeed, the only evidence of what they really mean.  Finally, Dylan views show business as inherently deceitful -- performers pretend to be something that they are not.  In recognition of this notion, Dylan's own efforts at documenting his musical tours have generally relied upon extremely arcane fictional narratives.  His own film displaying footage from the Rolling Thunder Revue, Renaldo and Clara, was some kind of improvised melodrama featuring Joan Baez (as Clara) passionately attempting (without much success) to elicit some kind of emotional response from the distant Dylan (named Renaldo).  Renaldo and Clara is never mentioned in the Scorsese film, although much of the concert footage seems extracted directly from that film -- and Dylan's 1978 movie, much derided by critics, must be regarded in some respects as the primary source material for an understanding of Rolling Thunder Revue.  (Renaldo and Clara is actually much better than it looks on first blush; I should know -- I saw the movie with a roommate who is a Dylan fan three times and the picture is more than four hours long.  I suspect that most of the movie was shot and designed under the influence of drugs and the picture is beautifully shot and, in fact, seems portentously meaningful, if you watch it while smoking marijuana.) Sam Shepherd was brought on board to script Renaldo and Clara but quickly found that there was nothing for him to do -- Dylan insisted on improvising the whole thing, a questionable decision based upon a very fraught and, even, cringe-worthy exchange displayed by Scorsese as a sort of exhibit from the earlier movie:  the sequence involves dialogue between the songwriter and Joan Baez in which both of them appear to be acting, although not at all persuasively.  It should be noted that Dylan's more recent pseudo-concert film, Masked and Anonymous (2003) was similarly enigmatic and featured evasive fictional narrative as well.  In that film, Dylan adopts archetypal poses and performs in a stoic, bland, and deliberately non-expressive manner. Accordingly, Scorsese pays homage to Dylan's famous elusiveness exemplified in earlier pictures by staging a third of his film as an elaborate confidence game.

The reality of the situation, something not readily discerned from the proceedings on stage, is that Dylan formed a touring company in October 1975 -- the company originally included Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson from David Bowie's band, David Mansfield, Scarlet Rivera playing gypsy violin, T Bone Burnett, 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Allan Ginsberg to recite poems, and Joan Baez, who may have been Dylan's lover at the time, although they both seem to have been married to other people during the tour.  The plan was to begin the tour at Plymouth and play smaller venues in the Northeast, particularly Boston and Connecticut.  Dylan apparently wanted to restore his connection with the audience and engaged houses that held about three to four-thousand spectators.  (Economically, this plan was a recipe for failure -- the venues couldn't support Dylan's huge band and his entourage which traveled by bus.)  The tour ended with a show at Madison Square Garden in New York, a benefit for Ruben "Hurricane" Carter, the contender for boxing middle-weight championship of the world, a man that Dylan felt had been wrongly accused and imprisoned for murder.  (Carter makes a flamboyant appearance in the movie.)  The tour was rebooted in the Spring and played in the southwest -- when the last show was performed at Salt Lake City in May 1996, it was generally thought that the energy among the performers was exhausted and, even, soured and the final concerts were said to be listless affairs.  Scorsese's film suggests that the tour was a quest, a venture in self-realization, in which each participant was driven to become "the most extreme version of his (or her) self."  Along the way, the tour accumulated camp followers and other performers who played with the Revue for a week or two, most notably Joni Mitchell.   Scorsese's film begins with Fourth of July celebrations in 1976, in effect after the tour was completed, and shows the so-called tall ships encircling Manhattan with the twin towers rampant overhead.  Only after reading about the tour do I now understand that these opening scenes are taken out of context -- the tour was, in fact, done by the time of the Bicentennial, although Scorsese and Dylan collude to suggest that the concerts were all played in honor the nation's 200th birthday.  In fact, the opening concert scenes, shot at Folk City in New York, were filmed a year earlier in on October 23, 1975.  This sequences begins the film with a bravura series of performances:  Patti Smith works herself into an ecstasy while Bette Midler looks on sarcastically and, then, flirts with Dylan -- Patti and Bob exchange gibberish.  The Rolling Thunder Revue scenes are exquisitely shot and Scorsese allows the footage to roll throughout the entirety of the musical numbers performed -- he rarely cuts away from extremely close shots of Dylan.  In the tour, Dylan took to wearing masks for his first number, casting the disguise aside for the second tune "It Ain't Me, Babe", and, later, appears in elaborate "white face" resplendent under a glacially white John B. Stetson hat decorated with roses and, in one case, a peacock's plume.  Dylan was at the height of his powers on this tour -- his voice is clear as a bell and he twists and mangles his lyrics to wring the maximum meaning from them.  Often, he pantomimes aspects of his songs and rolls his eyes like a Kabuki actor making fierce faces.  In fact, the attack on the songs is best characterized as "fierce" even fearsome -- his account of the ballad about Hurricane Carter is rapid-fire and actually sounds like a wild, lethal tempest.  Scarlet Rivera accompanies Dylan's singing with vaguely middle-Eastern riffs on her violin:  she has a serpent painted on her forehead and her cheeks are glazed white.  (Dylan tells us straight-faced that she had a trunk "with all sorts of things inside including chains and mirrors, daggers and candelabra, and, even, a snake".  Other informants say that she wore a sword like a pirate and anyone who tried to grope her got himself cut.)  The music is fantastic, although I think most of that imagery, comes full cloth out of Renaldo and Clara -- I vaguely recalled some of the concert footage from that film.

The fictional apparatus accompanying the monumental and awe-inspiring musical material is often tedious.  Dylan and Scorsese invent a European film maker, Stefan von Dorp, who claims to have shot all of the film used in the movie and denounces the documentary's producers for stealing his footage (the footage, in fact, comes from Dylan's Renaldo and Clara as I have earlier observed).  Van Dorp is plausible and I thought he was a real person:  in fact, the entire character is imaginary -- the role is played by Martin von Haselberg, the German performance artist married to Bette Midler and formerly one of the anarchic Kipper Kids.  Sharon Stone appears, recounting that she was brought to a concert by her mother, and stayed to join the entourage as a groupie.  This is completely fictional although again, it seems, plausible.  An unnecessary digression involves Dylan's relationship with Jimmy Carter -- we see Carter fawningly quoted the singer and, then, with him at the White House (the foil it should be said for the gloomy Dick Nixon and his protégée, Gerald Ford who appear briefly in newsreel footage).  Michael Murphy appears as Tanner, the fictional congressman, and there's an entire anecdote about the legislator attending Dylan's show in Niagara Falls that is invented out of the whole cloth.  Dylan often appears at the wheel of his bus, driving with a cigarette in his hand like a latter-day Neil Cassidy -- I doubt very much that Dylan actually drove the tour bus, although the film suggests this is true -- again, I think it's an evasion:  someone asks:  "Where was Bob?" with the reply given "always driving the tour bus." The film is filled with weird information, but I can't tell to what extent it is true:  for instance, someone asked Mick Ronson what he thought of Dylan and the English guitar player replied:  "I don't know.  He never said a word to me."  Entwined with made-up material is footage that seems realistically documentary -- Joan Baez muses ruefully on Dylan's charisma while seemingly implying that the man himself is a complete asshole.  Joni Mitchell sings "Coyote" in a spectacular improvised sequence.  In the end, Allen Ginsberg pronounces the film's farewell -- he suggests that the tour was a visionary quest and that it made each participant (and the audiences) into the persons that they should have been, that is, their best and truest selves.  This is an inspiring conclusion and gives heartfelt meaning to Dylan's words that the tour resulted in nothing, that it's just "dust and ashes" -- his point being, I think, that we can't dwell in the past but that we must use our memories, which now are about a world that no longer exists, to propel us into a new and better future.  Dylan has never dwelt in the past -- he looks forward always to the next day and the day after that:  if you are not busy being born, you are busy dying and this notion, I think, accounts for the singer's refusal to dwell on events that happened more than forty years ago.  It's all in the music, Dylan would insist, and this is made evident in the final number, a wild-eyed and half-hysterical version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Gate" in which Dylan and Roger McGuinn mug like Maori warriors.  Greil Marcus called Dylan's work with the Band at Big Pink and his Rolling Thunder Revue reversions to the "old weird America" of traveling jug bands, medicine shows, religious revivals, and snake-oil salesmen, all of this with a stiff dose of Melville's The Confidence Man thrown in to boot. And this is what you will find in this current Netflix film.  The whole thing is vaguely, and curiously, uplifting -- particularly the list of Dylan's tour venues from the Rolling Thunder Revue to 2018.  Indefatigably, the artist continues to play 150 to 200 shows a year. 

History Lessons

History Lessons (1972) is an adaptation of an unfinished novel by Bertolt Brecht, a book called The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.  The film is challenging and, probably, better than it looks when you are watching it.  Straub and Huillet's approach to Brecht's didactic text is equally didactic and, perhaps, may be accused of being "uncinematic" -- I think a better word for the film is that it employs a minimalist style so as better to emphasize the parameters controlling the picture and any deviations from those parameters.  David Bordwell, as far as I know, coined the term "parametric" to describe a certain kind of abstract style deployed by some directors, most notably Bresson and Ozu.  A film built according to a "parametric" mise-en-scene establishes certain abstract norms, that is, specific regularly repeated images or types of images, a pattern in the editing that may be non-narrative, and an approach to the material that shapes the plot (or film's argument) to stylistic parameters as opposed to the contrary approach in which the style supports and enhances the narrative by emphasis or dramatization.  Parametric films, often, give the impression of being austere and intentionally unexpressive -- History Lessons is an excellent example of a movie designed according to abstract parameters.  Film critics have counted 49 shots in the movie which is about ninety minutes long.  A third of the film consists of imagery shot from the back seat of a small car navigating the claustrophobically narrow and busy streets of Rome. A young man drives the car in "real time", shifting gears, eluding collisions with oncoming cars, sometimes trapped in traffic jams, on other occasions having to back up to yield to oncoming vehicles confronting him in the tight alley-like lanes.  These shots are lengthy and without edits -- as long as ten minutes.  Between the traffic scenes, we see actors dressed in vaguely antique costume, modified Roman togas -- these actors speak, in some cases, in lengthy monologues or, in other cases, respond to the questions of the interlocutor.  (The interlocutor turns out to be the young man in the car -- he is posited as a kind of journalist or investigator seeking information about Caesar.)   Images of water -- a rushing mountain stream, a fountain, a turbulent bay on a rock-girt coast punctuate the film and serve, in two instances, as establishing shots.  The film ends with a lengthy immobile shot of an ornamental fountain in Rome disgorging a stream of clear water from the mouth of a bas relief face, a sort of staring Gorgon spitting water into a basin.

The monologues describe Julius Caesar's activities in terms of economics.  The four characters provide elaborately detailed information about Caesar's investments, the structure of the Roman economy particularly with regard to the interplay between the ruling classes and the proletariat and the role that war plays in furthering economic interests.  (These speeches are lengthy and complex and the subtitles provide translation for only about half of what is spoken -- my German isn't quick enough to reliably translate the parts of the monologues or dialogue not put into English in the subtitles.  However, as far as I can tell, the most characteristically Brechtian aspects of the monologues -- that is, acerbic asides, parenthetical remarks, additional footnote-type detail -- is not put into subtitles, that is, left untranslated.  In effect, the subtitles provide only a bare outline of what is being said.  In the monologues, filmed generally from a high close angle in lengthy three or four minute shots, the characters discuss the relationship between the price of grain, the growth of the great estates, the repression of the peasant class, and the expansion of slave trading.  Caesar's adventures in Spain are not depicted in a martial light but instead described as efforts to compel a primitive mountain-dwelling tribal people to labor in silver and copper mines.  Various battles with pirates at sea, many of them involving "the great Pompey," are revealed to be the military epiphenomena to a vigorous competition between slave-trading businesses -- the Romans want to monopolize the slave trade in Asia Minor but are confronted by aggressive and entrepreneurial pirates competing for the same commodities and markets.  Characteristically, history presents this conflict as a struggle between law-abiding Roman merchants and lawless pirates -- in fact, both sides to the conflict are merely businessmen trying to outflank their opponents in a lucrative mercantile endeavor.  The crucial difference between this situation and modern business competition is that the victors get to literally crucify their adversaries.  The influx of huge numbers of slaves into the agrarian economy destroys the livelihood of the peasants (their farms can't compete with the huge estates operated with efficient slave labor).  The peasants swarm into the "City" as Rome is called in the film and form an underclass that "democrats" like Caesar manipulate.  And so it goes -- the level of legal and economic commentary is very sophisticated and hard to follow:  it's like a graduate level lecture on the Marxist implications of Roman commerce and war.  The most loquacious of the commentators is a well-groomed middle-aged Roman who seems to know everything there is to know about Julius Caesar's (he calls him "C") business dealings.  At first, we hypothesize that this actor is playing Caesar himself.  Only at the end of the film is it revealed that this fellow is Caesar's banker.  The film ends establishing the close relationship between Caesar's enterprises and the bank -- "thus," the banker says, "as Caesar prospered, our little bank was little no more."  In the final ten minutes of the movie, the young man from the car scenes, the interlocutor, sits with his hands folded on his lap with his arms not inserted into his jacket:  this creates a curious image of impotence -- the man's arms don't seem to be quite properly connected to his body.  The banker's monologue also results in the most surprising and, even, viscerally shocking cut in the film:  the banker, after his first monologue, sits bemused, motionless, without speaking; the camera lingers on him for a long period of time, creating an oddly uncanny ambience, and, then, suddenly without warning, the image cuts to a close-up of water tumbling in rapids down a hillside, a torrent of water with its sound loudly amplified on the soundtrack.  On a small screen, this effect was startling -- in a movie theater, I presume the cut would cause the audience to jump out of its collective skin. 

History Lessons is tedious, albeit in learned, scholarly sort of way.  The film does focus your attention -- minor aspects of the imagery, the way someone sits or speaks, the color of the rhododendrons in the garden where the banker is speaking, a row of vases on a parapet, or, in one scene, the young man picking a fallen leave off his jacket and, then, flicking it away, all have substantial impact.  The movie schools you in a certain kind of precise, concentrated looking.  The traffic scenes are nightmarish -- the impression that they provide is of continuous progress in the face of innumerable obstructions:  the driver weaves between pedestrians and oncoming cars in tiny, narrow alleys, many of them congested with parked cars.  It's a sort of ballet involving a continuous threat of collision.  I presume that these images are intended as a metaphor for the labyrinthine course of economic history -- its stops and starts and obstructions.  In this film, things flow -- people speak in long monologues, a stream surges through an idyllic valley, the sea crashes against rocks, money and commodities change hands,  currency is valued and devalued, a stone mouth vomits water into a fountain. 

Queen of the Desert

Some years ago, I saw a picture called Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.  If I  recall correctly the movie was about a flamboyant transsexual traveling by bus through the Australian outback.  The movie was colorful, irritating, and contained beautiful shots of the desert.  I was surprised to see this film on Netflix, clicked on Queen of the Desert and encountered something equally colorful, irritating, and unlikely -- Werner Herzog's 2014 biopic of Gertrude Bell, the doughty female desert explorer, starring Nicole Kidman.  The film has been lavishly reviled, unjustly in my view.  It's a strange picture.  Of course, all of Herzog's movies are strange.  But this film is peculiar in ways that suggest Herzog should never have attempted this movie -- most of the picture goes against his grain and it's hard to know what to make of the resulting film.  An adjective that Herzog often uses in interviews is "fluffy" -- by this he means, "soft," "gentle", and even, "compromised."  Queen of the Desert vacillates between scenes undercut by silly, didactic dialogue and images of great beauty.  Much of it is fundamentally "fluffy" and it's hard to know what Herzog thought he was doing in some sequences.  Plotting has never been a strong point in Herzog films and his movies have rarely, if ever, featured showy or important parts for women.  Queen of the Desert plays as a kind of cross between the bodice-ripping romance of The English Patient and the wide-screen Orientalism of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.  Herzog has always been primarily a documentary director -- his fiction films generally purport to "ecstatic truth" and are remarkable in large part due to the rigors endured in making them.  Thus, Herzog harbors a powerful and intrinsically German streak of didacticism -- this aspect of his sensibility is also on display in the film's extended scenes involving historical exposition.

Queen of the Desert begins with a bunch of men dressed up as dignitaries discussing how the British intend to carve-up the Middle East.  The cigar-chomping Winston Churchill is on display as is T. E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson) and a courtly, handsome Dudley-do-right sort of guy, Major Wylie.  (Wylie is played by Damien Lewis, best known to me as Axe from a "guilty pleasure", the Showtime series Billions -- here his perpetual sneer is masked by a moustache.)  The dialogue is wooden and nakedly expository -- someone suggests that the territories can't be divided without considering Gertrude Bell's discoveries.  This puts some of the men into a state of enraged apoplexy -- although, Major Wylie is soft-spoken and suggests that she knows better than all the ways of the desert folk.  After this baldly expository beginning, the film shows us Gertrude Bell as a debutante -- she dances with various men at a ball and finds them all ineffectual and dull. (Kidman who had to be in her forties when the film was made convincingly plays the ingénue role.) Gertrude prevails on her doting father to allow her to travel for adventure to the British embassy in Damascus.  There she meets a dashing military attaché played by James Franco at his most smarmy.  Franco's character teaches Gertrude Farsi and together they construe and translate Omar Khayyam -- "so this word means 'jug'?"  "Yes, this is 'jug' and this word means 'loaf"." So a jug of wine and a loaf of bread and 'you' -- what is that verb? 'singing'?"  Of course, translating these erotic verses leads to a torrid love affair.  Gertrude goes back to her country estate in England to plead with her father that she be allowed to marry James Franco's military attaché.  For some reason that seems unclear Gertrude's father refuses.  Franco pitches himself off a cliff at their trysting place, committing suicide in such a way as to send an unmistakable message to Gertrude that she has failed him.  Gertrude mourns extravagantly and considers herself "widowed."  She returns to Damascus where she encounter Major Wylie.  Wylie falls under her spell -- this is not surprising since she is fantastically beautiful, willowy, and towering.  Compared to the little beleaguered men in the movie, Nicole Kidman is a goddess and Herzog's camera is under her spell as well, often shooting her in pools of light that are expressionist and not realistically motivated -- she seems to absorb the light and folds of her alabaster white desert robes glow with mystical radiance.  Herzog's films often involve journeys across dangerous and exotic terrain and in the second half of the movie -- it's about two hours long -- he is working in a genre that he invented and in which he is comfortable.  The picture involves not one but two spectacular journeys across vast expanses of blowing sand -- this is a very windy movie.   First, Gertrude travels to the Druse sheikh with whom she discusses poetry -- she earns his trust and gives him a pair of expensive and beautiful dueling pistols that, for some reason, Major Wylie had given her back in Damascus.  She returns to Damascus where Wylie expresses his love -- but, unfortunately, he's still unhappily married.  Gertrude goes back into the desert, this time on a mission to determine whether Ibn Rashid or Ibn Saud will gain hegemony over the Bedouin tribes.  After many difficulties, she reaches Ibn Rashid's fortified city --  Rashid is in hiding and the town seems under the control of Fatima, a sinister Aunt.  Later, the young Emir arrives, a mere boy who seems to be about 16.  He demands her for his harem.  Imperiously, she notes that the prophet would never condone a man touching a married woman -- and she regards herself as married.  With regal dignity, she simply walks out of the prison-like labyrinth where she has been confined pending the boys arrival and returns to Damascus.  There, Wylie announces that he can't marry her (his wife would commit suicide) and has enlisted in a combat position -- it's 1915.  Predictably,  Wylie is killed in battle.  Gertrude sees Churchill and other military men posing for pictures at the pyramids -- Herzog lavishes scorn on Winston Churchill whom he regards as a feckless bully.  Gertrude travels into the desert a third time to meet with two young men inexplicably sitting in a tent in the wasteland with falcons on their wrists.  She prophecies that the young men will be kings and, then, rides alone into the infinitely vast and featureless desert.  Several closing titles tell us that the two young men later became the kings of Jordan and Syria.  Ibn Saud consolidated the desert tribes under his rule.  And Gertrude Bell, a title says, "delineated" the boundaries of the countries in the present Middle East.

It's hard to know how we should interpret this ending.  Obviously, the British-imposed boundaries "delineating" the Middle East have proven to be catastrophic -- are we supposed to blame Gertrude Bell for 9 - 11 or the various wars between Iraq, Iran, the Kurds, and the USA?  Are we supposed to blame her for the Druse militia and the collapse of Syria?  Most scholars believe that the arbitrary assignment of nation-state boundaries upon heterogenous groups of people who never really liked one another has caused enormous turbulence and instability in the Middle East.  (The film is curiously silent about Palestine.)  Most of the film is very conventional -- even somewhat stolid and dull.  Herzog excels in the travel scenes, using drone-borne cameras to show the caravans moving through endless seas of sand.  Most remarkably, the film's interiors are splendid, as remarkable as the landscapes -- Herzog shows dimly lit Alhambras full of fountains, tapestries, with marble gazebos under domes and pointed archways surrounded by elaborate filigree patterns.  Beams of light pierce the darkness and, when Nicole Kidman stands in those lime-lit pools of sun, she glows with an otherworldly radiance.  The tiny desert hamlets and fortified villages (the film was shot in Morocco and Jordan) are all spectacular.  There are impressive shots of Gertrude and her guides wandering in deep, dangerous-looking slot canyons.  At the end of one canyon, rather predictably, we encounter Lawrence of Arabia with a boyfriend excavating the Nabatean city of Petra -- Lawrence has not yet become warlike and he talks like Oscar Wilde.  The soundtrack is conventional -- there are no operatic arias.  In fact, Herzog seems generally exceedingly restrained in the way he has devised this movie.  There are only a couple of avowedly Herzogian sequences -- in one, Herzog displays his love for the Roman poet, Virgil; the action stops while Gertrude and the Sheikh of the Druse discuss the distinction between "naming" and "describing" particularly vis a vis Virgil's Georgics (poems about farming) that I know from various interviews to be Herzog's favorite work of poetry.  In another scene, a desert ruler shows his contempt for the British by sending a dwarf from the gates of his city leading two men who ride backward on donkeys -- apparently, this is some kind of profound insult.  The problem with the film is that the love scenes although passionate enough aren't really Herzog's métier and he seems vaguely embarrassed by them.  Similarly, the film's structure is prosaically repetitive -- there is not one but two dangerous journeys through the desert, two times when Bedouins firing guns encircle Ms. Bell's troop and two occasions on which she gives lavish gifts to Sheikhs -- in one case the dueling pistols and, later, a pair of binoculars.  The question of whether Gertrude Bell is, in fact, a British spy is left curiously confused -- we see her indignantly turning down the request that she spy but her intelligence and maps turn out to be fundamental to the British management of the Middle East. 

In general, this was an ill-advised project for Herzog.   The film doesn't succeed.  Herzog can't claim that control was wrested from him -- he both wrote and directed the movie and seems to have had a large budget.  The problem is that the material is formless and would have been better managed as a two-hour documentary.  Kidman is radiant and Herzog seems to adore her, but the picture is a little bit dull.  It's certainly not as bad as its reputation and, if the viewer has an interest in this subject matter -- which is intrinsically fascinating -- the picture is worth viewing.