Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema (1968) doesn't just flirt with the ridiculous: it plunges into full-bore idiocy with both feet. Pasolini didn't do things by half-measures. You find yourself resisting this film and its crazed thesis with all your critical acumen. But ask yourself -- when was the last time, a movie made you feel that you had to defeat it, that you had to resist its weird and seductive power? In terms of demented conviction and absurd excessiveness, Teorema succeeds spectacularly, but, of course, on its own uncompromising terms.
As the title implies, the movie is stark, abstract, and minimalist: it is a geometric proof as barren as its symbolic landscape, the smoking slopes of ash and cinders atop Mount Aetna, an image that reoccurs through the film. Like Pasolini's The Gospel according to St. Matthew, an austere film made in 1964, Teorema presents the parable of a kind of savior entering the world and affecting its people. At a party, the son and daughter of an industrialist observe a beautiful young man. The young man is played by Terence Stamp and he looks like a sculpture hewn by Donatello, an exquisite faun with curly hair and eyes the color of blue steel. The young man is invited to the palatial manor owned by the industrialist. There, in quick succession, he has sex with everyone in the house -- he sleeps with the maid, Emilia, after she has been driven to distraction by gazing at his tightly trousered crotch (the sex-savior always sits with his knees wide apart); Emilia first attempts suicide, then, exposes herself to the youth who obligingly embraces her. Next, the young man seduces the gawky adolescent son, Pietro -- like Francesco and Paolo, the two read a book together (in this case a monograph on Francis Bacon) until lust makes them "read no longer." The industrialist's wife sees clothing strewn all around her summer house -- in this movie, people are forever disrobing and leaving their underpants on the lawn -- and, going into the woods, sees the young man frolicking with the family dog, half-naked in the trees. She promptly strips, arrays herself on the porch as if sunbathing and enjoys a romantic interlude with the lad. Next, the boy seduces the family's prudish and repressed daughter. The paterfamilias seems to be ill and the visiting youth reads Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyitch" to him, whereupon Dad rallies, goes for a road trip with our hero and ends up having sex with him next to a canal in a vacant lot somewhere near Milan. After Stamp's character has had his way with each of the members of the family -- I'm not certain about the dog -- there is a (no doubt) strained dinner in which the fatal youth, like Christ, says that he is going away. He vanishes from the picture and the last half of the movie depicts the results of his sexual forays with this haute bourgeois family: the daughter becomes catatonic and has to be institutionalized, the son, Pietro, begins painting on glass, layering the panes to create complex images -- he says he is unwilling to erase a stroke because each of his brushmarks are irrevocable and so must correct his abstract images on successive planes of glass. Mom cruises the mean streets of Milan looking for attractive, tow-headed adolescents whom she picks up for sex. Dad gives away his factory, ceding the entire vast enterprise to his workers. Most remarkably, the maid, Emilia, returns to her village, sits without eating for a month on a bench next to a barn, and, then, becomes a saint: she heals the sick, levitates over the farm buildings, and subsists only on nettle soup. In the end, an old woman takes her to a dreary industrial site, the wall marked by a huge hammer-and-sickle, and buries her in the earth -- the trickle of tears from her eyes creates a spring. Dad goes to the dingy railroad station in Milan and, in the smoky train-shed, strips off all his clothing. In the last scene, shot on the cinder heights of Mount Aetna, the naked father wanders through the wasteland and, when he screams at the camera in close-up, the movie ends.
The film's opening ten minutes invokes Godard: musical cues stop and start apparently randomly under documentary style imagery of factory workers debating the political significance of the owner of the factory having turned the enterprise over to its workers. "Is this the end of the class struggle?" someone says in a worried way, suggesting that the arrival of the Messiah, even a Communist Messiah, is always more of a bother than a benefit. Some sepia-toned sequences that are vague in intent and execution introduce the family members -- but since we don't know what is going to happen, this aspect of the movie has to be revisited once the film has finished and we have seen the fate of these people. The sexual messiah appears casually out of nowhere -- he has no back-story, no family, and I don't recall Pasolini so much as giving him a name. Once, Pasolini starts filming the material that interests him -- the seductions, the sex, and, then, the ensuing madness, he drops his Godard affectations and presents his narrative chronologically with a minimum of esthetic pretentions. The majority of the film is scored to Mozart's Requiem. Of course, Pasolini was homosexual at a time when being gay was considered a psychic disorder and his homo-erotic imagery is melodramatically excessive and, even, I suppose, a little campy -- gay is not just good and life-affirming; here homosexuality (or more accurately bisexuality) is eschatologically messianic, the savior fucks the world into the Kingdom of God. The film is gendered in an interesting way -- it's impossible to conceive of the movie's messianic implications applying to the exploits of a young, sexually promiscuous woman. She would merely be a vixen or a vamp and not the savior of the world as Pasolini seems to envision his satyr protagonist. Some of the scenes are overtly shocking -- an image of the Emilia levitating over a barn while peasants pray to her is extraordinary and, in fact, extremely frightening. Her later burial in the mud, with her tears congealing in a little filthy puddle next to her staring eyes, is also startling. Like other films with a very simple parable-like premise schematically worked-out -- I am thinking of Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur for instance or Bunuels Exterminating Angel -- the movie raises an infinity of implications. Memorable and utterly absurd, Teorema is too extreme and stylized to be a great movie -- it lacks anything like realistic or precise observation of the world -- but, on its own terms, the film is very powerful. I will have to think about the movie and, if it still afflicts my thoughts, in a month, I will have to deem this work a great film.
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Saturday, November 28, 2015
The Private Life of Don Juan
Made in London in 1934, The Private Life of Don Juan was Douglas Fairbanks last picture. Alexander Korda's direction is highly accomplished and the film is lavishly staged, but strangely uninvolving and inert. The effect arises from the movie's revisionist stance toward its material; the film's raison d'etre is to disenchant its audience and there is something curmudgeonly about the picture's rigor in that respect. In the film, Don Juan is middle-aged, afflicted with back pain, and has lost his sexual elan -- a matronly lady-innkeeper proposes a marriage of convenience remarking that Don Juan has "no brawn, no looks, no brain...and is no longer a spring chicken." Worse, the hero has an imitator, a younger man, more adept at "balcony-climbing" who is courting the married ladies of Seville. When the ersatz Don Juan is cut down in a duel, the real Lothario takes the opportunity to decamp from Seville and, thereby, avoid a woman to whom he is espoused and who has been making various demands on him. In his new surroundings, Don Juan, disguised as a retired military officer, finds that he has become legendary -- everyone is reading about his exploits in a penny-dreadful called the The Private Life of Don Juan. When he attempts to seduce a woman, she is invariably reading this chapbook, entirely engrossed in the story, and so, completely distracted and unresponsive to the hero's lovemaking. Escaping disappointing romantic entanglements in his place of refuge, Don Juan returns to Seville to find that his adventures are the town's common currency, dramatized everywhere, and that actors playing the famous lover are ubiquitous -- there are puppet shows, plays, and operas about the great seducer and Don Juan finds himself in the unenviable position of having to compete with himself and his own legend. Returning to the last woman he kissed in Seville, he visits a glamorous Flamenco dancer who recalls Don Juan's embrace with immense nostalgia and sends flowers daily to his supposed grave -- but she has no time at all for the real man who has become much less than her memories of him. At the theater, Don Juan stops the show just before the stone Commendatore steps down from his pedestal, the great lover protesting that he is the authentic hero of the story -- no one believes him and he is hooted off the stage. At last, Don Juan returns to bedroom of the woman that he jilted; she has been patiently awaiting his return. She boots him out of her house, insisting that he enter her boudoir as of old, by climbing the side of the building and entering over the cast-iron grillwork of her balcony. Don Juan obediently scurries up a slack, rope ladder, showing for just an instant, Douglas Fairbanks' famous athleticism and, then, the camera pans to the marital bed while the woman triumphantly remarks that all men could be Don Juan if they only attended more diligently to their connubial obligations. Fairbanks was famous for his gymnastic skills and, in silent movies like The Gaucho, his physical prowess is remarkably. But by 1934, time had taken its toll and Fairbanks apparently had lost some of his strength and much of his insouciant beauty. We get to see him effortlessly fencing with an enemy but the kind of spectacular swashbuckling stunts that were Fairbanks' métier in his wildly popular silent films are, by and large, absent from those movie and, so, the audience feels just a bit cheated. (To keep comparisons from being invidious, the wannabe Don Juan is conspicuously flatfooted and clumsy -- he climbs balconies awkwardly and, when he drops from a height, can't land with Fairbanks' feline grace; instead, he stumbles, staggers, and falls.) Furthermore, Fairbanks' voice is a little reedy and has braying quality -- he sounds very American, like an over-eager used car salesman. Alexander Korda is influenced by early Goya, some of whose paintings appear in the background. Early Goya, in turn, imitated Tiepolo and, so, many of the shots have a rococo prettiness -- this is particularly true of images showing the supernaturally beautiful Merle Oberon pushed on a swing while little clouds like cherubs scoot through the windy heavens. The sets are large and ornate and, often, overwhelm the rather pallid, cynical action underway in the film. A late sequence shows the problem with Korda's direction -- we see some kind of nighttime festival in Seville and hordes of extras are running this way and that, many of them carrying banners with grotesque devices: grinning monsters and colossal simpletons. One particularly effective and macabre banner shows a fat, grimacing face with mouth wide open and that flag, too good to waste, appears in about half of the shots in the sequence. It's effective, at first, indeed, even, startling but Korda just keeps repeating shots of the extras charging around under their flag next to clinically-clean and castellated walls -- we don't know what is going on, why the people are running wildly in all directions, and the picturesque banners integral to the scene remain completely mysterious -- it's not clear why the banners are being displayed or what is the purpose of the celebration and so, in the end, this large-scale and expensive sequence just seems futile and completely unnecessary
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Bullitt
Peter Yates' police thriller, Bullitt (1968) is strangely abstract. Steve McQueen playing the eponymous protagonist is basically inert throughout the movie -- he ponders things and looks this way and that but doesn't have much to say and he is so still that he doesn't seem anything like the kind of frenetic action heroes that movies feature today. The story is stripped down to a theorem: a cop has to protect a witness, the witness is killed, and the cop, concealing the death of the witness from the bad guys, lures the villains into a confrontation in which they are destroyed. The movie consists of preparations for three chases -- in one of them Steve McQueen pursues a killer on foot through a hospital and its environs; the second chase is the much-celebrated 11 minute automobile pursuit through San Francisco and its suburbs; the last chase takes place in the darkness at an airport with the hero and his prey darting about on runways as huge planes oblivious to them coast along the runways, taking-off or landing. By modern standards, the movie is only modestly violent -- the witness and a cop are shot, two thugs die in the car chase, and another villain (and a hapless airport security cop) die at the end. (A girl is found murdered as well). Since the amount of bloodshed is limited, the film seems fairly rational -- it never succumbs to the sheer bloodlust that motivates most action films in the past thirty years and that renders them both unbelievable and farcical. Furthermore, Yates' makes the killings realistic and shows the consequences of violence in some startlingly graphic and disturbing hospital scenes and, when Bullitt guns down the last bad man, the hero decorously covers the bloody corpse with his jacket. Like the later police and gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, pictures that Bullitt emulates, the movie is tough, laconic, and without any interest in character at all. The figures in the film are simply ciphers, men and women in motion against a carefully rendered cityscape. For instance, Bullitt is gratuitously given a girlfriend, Jacqueline Bissett, but she has literally nothing to do in the movie except to occupy the hero's bed -- at one point, she briefly whines about the cop's standoffish ways, due she thinks to his being immured in the sewer of police-work. But the dialogue goes nowhere and after reproaching her boyfriend she returns to his bachelor pad to sleep with him at the end of the movie. The famous car chase remains intensely exciting and is, even, better than you remember it -- a combination of thrilling behind-the-wheel shots, pictures taken from in front and behind the speeding vehicles, and documentary-like fixed camera shots showing the cars shedding hubcaps and fenders as they careen around corners, clipping other vehicles and skidding wildly sideways. The chase has a rhythm -- it starts slowly and builds to more and more frenzied action and there is a great moment when the bad guy driving the escape car -- he is wearing black driving gloves -- pauses to click-on his seatbelt. Bullitt's design is heavily inflected by Pop Art -- the texture of the film is all glittering surfaces like a painting by James Rosenquist: panes of glass awash with reflections, brightly shining chrome, the fuselage of planes gleaming in the night like tubes of neon. In one scene, the camera is very low and we see a woman's black purse -- the polished leather on the purse glistens with reflected light; a tie-tack sparks like an acetylene torch. This effect of continuous scintillation is accomplished by shooting the movie with very dark and lustrous blacks -- this strategy extends to the title character, Bullitt's bright eyes glitter with scintillation but his torso is always covered by a jet-black turtle-neck sweater. At the time the movie was make, of course, police officers were not everyone's idea of heroes -- the movie addresses this issue by making Bullitt casually anti-establishment: he bucks the demands of the smarmy politician played by an unctuous Robert Vaughn. (This guy is so bad we see him reading the Wall Street Journal in the last scene). The anti-establishment tone, in keeping with the North Beach setting, is inflected by cool jazz -- Bullitt is a kind of beatnik with a gun: the soundtrack simmers with Lalo Schifrin's percussive music. It's an excellent movie, surprisingly schematic and stripped-down and, even, aggressively minimalist.
Saturday, November 21, 2015
And the Ship Sails On
And the Ship Sails On is a maddening, obtuse failure directed by Federico Fellini in 1983. Notwithstanding its flaws, the film is remarkable and weirdly prescient as well. I write this note on November 21, 2015, eight days after a terrorist attack on Paris, an event that has prompted some 36 American governors to belligerently (if unconstitutionally) announce that they will not allow Syrian refugees to enter their States. The final third of Fellini's film involves a group of Serbian refugees who have fled tyranny in their homeland. The refugees have attempted to escape by sea and a great luxury cruise-liner comes upon their beleaguered and over-crowded raft in the stormy Mediterranean sea. At first, the bedraggled Serbians are kept on the second (lower) deck of the huge vessel. Later, they wander throughout the ship, offending the upper class aristocrats and artists who have specially commissioned the cruise-liner to carry the ashes of a prima diva to the island of her birth, a tiny volcanic place, shrouded in mist called Erimo. The Serbians are ultimately confined, kept in a roped-off enclosure on the deck, much to the dismay of the more humane Italians and Germans on the ship. Demagoguery has prevailed: one of the security forces exclaims: "Among those you so kindly define as refugees there are lurking professional assassins." And, indeed, this turns out to be broadly accurate: a bomb is thrown and much mayhem ensues. It is July 1914 and, soon enough, as presaged by the events on the cruise liner, the Gloria N., the Great Powers will be engaged in fratricidal world war with one another. The film has great power because it is hard-wired into Fellini's own dreams and fantasies -- in a famous sequence in Amarcord, the villagers of seaside resort go out in small boats at night to watch a great luxury liner cruise by them. And the Ship sails On imagines what was taking place on that beautiful and remote vessel.
Summaries of And the Ship Sails On suggest that the film is a sort of political allegory, a fantasia about the events leading to World War One. In fact, this is not the case. The movie is actually an extremely complex meditation on the nature of art and the role of the artist in the modern world. At the film's outset, the imagery is shot in sepia, soundless except for the noise made by an antique projector, and we see the principal characters gathering to board the huge ship. These scenes are shot in a way that convincingly replicates old newsreels from before World War One -- we see curious interlopers entering the frame to gaze into the camera and there are crowds of children, stevedores, and servant women wandering around as big sedans arrive to disgorge the elite men and women boarding the vessel. As the image slowly morphs into color, a man directs the extras like an orchestra conductor and a great chorus is sung as the cast, in a ceremonial procession, boards the ship. It seems that the greatest opera singer of all time, Edmea Tetua, has died and the people on the vessel intend to participate in her obsequies at the isle of Erimo, more than three days cruise from this port. One of Fellini's greatest strengths is his casting and the aristocrats and artists on the ship all have extraordinary physiognomies -- everyone looks like a figure in one of Edward Gorey's more sinister graphic narratives: the men wear high-top coats with ermine collars or tuxedos and they have their hair wafted into the most remarkable ornamental hair-styles - and they have names like Sir Reginald Dongly. The women have sphinx-like faces, many of them veiled, and they wear immense plumed hats. There is a putty-faced silent film comedian, a Russian bass who can sing so low as to paralyze chickens, a child prodigy, a famous fat tenor who looks like the Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, a wild-eyed Byronic poet who seems to have aspired to be a lover to the dead woman, a very plump, pale and androgynous Grand Duke who wears a Prussian Pickelhaube; this Grand Duke, who is a teenage boy, travels with his Aunt, with whom he seems to have a sexual relationship -- the Aunt is played indelibly by the very great Pina Bausch, the formidable director the Wuppertal Tanztheater. At first, the film doesn't really cohere -- a master of ceremonies with a remarkably expressive face, Signor Orlando, explains what is going on and there are a number of peculiar and amusing, if inconsequential, episodes -- the singers compete for the attention of the sweaty musclemen shoveling coal in the great ship's boilers, a rhinoceros in the hold is sick with love (the rhino looks nothing like a real animal -- the great brute is modeled after Duerer's emblematic, heavily armored beast.) There are love affairs, a séance that is genuinely very scary, and various musical interludes -- a seagull flutters around in the dining hall to the music of the Blue Danube waltz. Mr. Orlando falls in love with a beautiful blonde girl but, of course, is much too old for her and doesn't declare his love -- she later becomes enamored of a handsome Serbian lad, Mirko. There is a remarkable sequence involving translation -- Mr. Orlando is interviewing the Grand Duke who says in German that "we are living near the Schlund of a mountain." A dispute arises about what "Schlund" means -- should the word be translates as "edge" or "mouth of a crater." In the end, the Grand Duke settles the dispute by mimicking an explosion: "Pum, pum, pum," he says. The film darkens when the Serbian refugees appear and things become very grim, indeed, when an Austria-Hungarian battleship, a vast grey floating ziggurat approaches and demands that the Serbians be turned over to them. By this time, the Serbians and some members of the crew have begun to fraternize and there has been a kind of wild gypsy dance involving most of the upper class tourists on the cruise liner. In the end, as with the Titanic, the great ship goes down. As the ship sinks, the camera tracks back to reveal that we have been watching an enormous machine, rocked to and fro by hydraulic stanchions and we see dozens of grips and lighting technicians and men holding smoke pots and Fellini himself, hidden by a camera, that is tracking across the huge set. This shot is preceded by a sinister overhead image of people fleeing across the deck, the motion cranked fast and so, a bit accelerated and jerky like silent documentary -- the footage bears an uncanny resemblance to overhead shots representing the Russian revolution with agitated crowds scattering this way and that. As the ship settles to the bottom of the ocean, Mr. Orlando notes that he will escape and that rhinoceros milk is "very nourishing" -- in the last image, we see him adrift with the big rhinoceros on his little life-boat. Mr. Orlando has suggested four possible endings to the film -- the Prussians and Austria-Hungarians are touched by the beauty of the funeral for the great singer and depart without demanding transfer of the Serbians or the people on the cruise-liner valiantly refuse to surrender the refugees or, of course, the contrary: they give the Serbians to the soldiers on the German battleship. There is another alternative suggested by the meta-fictional images of the Cinecitta studio where the movie is being shot -- it is, after all, all opera, but like opera not indifferent to realism and life, but representing life at its most essential, that is opera representing life as it should be. The film's incoherence is evident in the last couple shots -- Fellini means everything to be whimsical, light, nonchalant, even improvised. But the huge hydraulic apparatus manipulating the obviously plywood and paper-mache ships is anything but casual and improvised -- rather, the film founders on its own gravitas. It is not so easy a thing to share a life-raft with a huge, armor-plated rhinoceros. But, notwithstanding these reservations, this film is truly extraordinary in many respects -- one shot in which a scheming Archduke kisses the Grand Duke's Aunt and we see her red-rimmed blind eyes upturned to the Archduke's closed ones is eerie and terrific enough to justify the whole quixotic enterprise.
Summaries of And the Ship Sails On suggest that the film is a sort of political allegory, a fantasia about the events leading to World War One. In fact, this is not the case. The movie is actually an extremely complex meditation on the nature of art and the role of the artist in the modern world. At the film's outset, the imagery is shot in sepia, soundless except for the noise made by an antique projector, and we see the principal characters gathering to board the huge ship. These scenes are shot in a way that convincingly replicates old newsreels from before World War One -- we see curious interlopers entering the frame to gaze into the camera and there are crowds of children, stevedores, and servant women wandering around as big sedans arrive to disgorge the elite men and women boarding the vessel. As the image slowly morphs into color, a man directs the extras like an orchestra conductor and a great chorus is sung as the cast, in a ceremonial procession, boards the ship. It seems that the greatest opera singer of all time, Edmea Tetua, has died and the people on the vessel intend to participate in her obsequies at the isle of Erimo, more than three days cruise from this port. One of Fellini's greatest strengths is his casting and the aristocrats and artists on the ship all have extraordinary physiognomies -- everyone looks like a figure in one of Edward Gorey's more sinister graphic narratives: the men wear high-top coats with ermine collars or tuxedos and they have their hair wafted into the most remarkable ornamental hair-styles - and they have names like Sir Reginald Dongly. The women have sphinx-like faces, many of them veiled, and they wear immense plumed hats. There is a putty-faced silent film comedian, a Russian bass who can sing so low as to paralyze chickens, a child prodigy, a famous fat tenor who looks like the Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, a wild-eyed Byronic poet who seems to have aspired to be a lover to the dead woman, a very plump, pale and androgynous Grand Duke who wears a Prussian Pickelhaube; this Grand Duke, who is a teenage boy, travels with his Aunt, with whom he seems to have a sexual relationship -- the Aunt is played indelibly by the very great Pina Bausch, the formidable director the Wuppertal Tanztheater. At first, the film doesn't really cohere -- a master of ceremonies with a remarkably expressive face, Signor Orlando, explains what is going on and there are a number of peculiar and amusing, if inconsequential, episodes -- the singers compete for the attention of the sweaty musclemen shoveling coal in the great ship's boilers, a rhinoceros in the hold is sick with love (the rhino looks nothing like a real animal -- the great brute is modeled after Duerer's emblematic, heavily armored beast.) There are love affairs, a séance that is genuinely very scary, and various musical interludes -- a seagull flutters around in the dining hall to the music of the Blue Danube waltz. Mr. Orlando falls in love with a beautiful blonde girl but, of course, is much too old for her and doesn't declare his love -- she later becomes enamored of a handsome Serbian lad, Mirko. There is a remarkable sequence involving translation -- Mr. Orlando is interviewing the Grand Duke who says in German that "we are living near the Schlund of a mountain." A dispute arises about what "Schlund" means -- should the word be translates as "edge" or "mouth of a crater." In the end, the Grand Duke settles the dispute by mimicking an explosion: "Pum, pum, pum," he says. The film darkens when the Serbian refugees appear and things become very grim, indeed, when an Austria-Hungarian battleship, a vast grey floating ziggurat approaches and demands that the Serbians be turned over to them. By this time, the Serbians and some members of the crew have begun to fraternize and there has been a kind of wild gypsy dance involving most of the upper class tourists on the cruise liner. In the end, as with the Titanic, the great ship goes down. As the ship sinks, the camera tracks back to reveal that we have been watching an enormous machine, rocked to and fro by hydraulic stanchions and we see dozens of grips and lighting technicians and men holding smoke pots and Fellini himself, hidden by a camera, that is tracking across the huge set. This shot is preceded by a sinister overhead image of people fleeing across the deck, the motion cranked fast and so, a bit accelerated and jerky like silent documentary -- the footage bears an uncanny resemblance to overhead shots representing the Russian revolution with agitated crowds scattering this way and that. As the ship settles to the bottom of the ocean, Mr. Orlando notes that he will escape and that rhinoceros milk is "very nourishing" -- in the last image, we see him adrift with the big rhinoceros on his little life-boat. Mr. Orlando has suggested four possible endings to the film -- the Prussians and Austria-Hungarians are touched by the beauty of the funeral for the great singer and depart without demanding transfer of the Serbians or the people on the cruise-liner valiantly refuse to surrender the refugees or, of course, the contrary: they give the Serbians to the soldiers on the German battleship. There is another alternative suggested by the meta-fictional images of the Cinecitta studio where the movie is being shot -- it is, after all, all opera, but like opera not indifferent to realism and life, but representing life at its most essential, that is opera representing life as it should be. The film's incoherence is evident in the last couple shots -- Fellini means everything to be whimsical, light, nonchalant, even improvised. But the huge hydraulic apparatus manipulating the obviously plywood and paper-mache ships is anything but casual and improvised -- rather, the film founders on its own gravitas. It is not so easy a thing to share a life-raft with a huge, armor-plated rhinoceros. But, notwithstanding these reservations, this film is truly extraordinary in many respects -- one shot in which a scheming Archduke kisses the Grand Duke's Aunt and we see her red-rimmed blind eyes upturned to the Archduke's closed ones is eerie and terrific enough to justify the whole quixotic enterprise.
Fargo (FX TV series -- 2015)
It's heresy, I suppose, to report that the much-celebrated FX series Fargo, produced by Joel and Ethan Coen in the spirit of their famous film of the same title, is more than a little tedious. Indeed, I have never managed to sit through an entire episode without briefly falling asleep. Perhaps my somnolence is an artifact of mismanaged blood sugar, or the dull and repetitive commercials that interrupt the action, or the fact that the program airs at 9:00 pm and doesn't ever exactly end on time -- the show usually concludes around 10:10 or 10:15. But I don't think so -- the show is leisurely paced and extremely repetitive: the same thing tends to happen over and over again. Although Fargo is very handsomely produced and beautifully acted, the series is simply too long for its rather simple-minded subject matter. Furthermore, unlike Twin Peaks, the obvious precursor to this series, the show labors mightily to remain rooted in something like plausible Midwestern verisimilitude -- during the six or so episodes that I have seen the show never drifts into the kind of febrile, hallucinatory and sex-drenched delirium that characterized David Lynch's foray into TV-land. In fact, the show's annoying assertion that it dramatizes a real story and the fact that the program features Minnesota accents that are exaggerated, but, nonetheless, recognizable, as well as the Minnesota folkways more or less realistically displayed and the peppering of the script with the names of local cities and villages -- people talk about going to Mankato and Sleepy Eye and the action takes place in Rock County at the county seat of Luverne -- all of these gestures toward an operatic verismo induce in the viewer the sense that the show's story should be, at least, quasi-realistic. And it is on this count that the program fails most dramatically: by the sixth episode, the program's body-count had risen to proportions roughly equivalent to Minnesota's losses in World War One. The amount of carnage, and the characters' blithely casual response, to heaps of corpses -- each show features about eight graphically staged killings -- finally induces in the viewer not only a willful refusal to suspend disbelief, but, in my case, slumber. I generally fall asleep at the beginning of the last third of the show, catnapping for about four or five minutes until aroused from my sleep by the screams of yet another murder victim or another protracted fusillade of gunfire.
The show's plot involves an ancient formula -- combat between two ruthless crime families, a conflict in which a variety of innocents find themselves entangled. This plot works well for a three or, even, four hour movie -- the Godfather pictures are a noteworthy example -- but can't be sustained over six hours or more. The first episode, so far much the best, was wonderful and induced in me a sort of euphoria -- this show was going to be something unprecedented on Tv, something radically new and brilliant. The program is exquisitely shot, although not in Minnesota but in Alberta, Canada, where, I suppose, snowfall is more predictable. The show is edited into a slow-moving, but forceful combination of close-ups showing evil, snarling villains and bemused innocents intercut with carefully composed long shots showing confrontations against the vast snowy horizons of the plains of Alberta. The small town simulating Luverne, Minnesota looks nothing like that place, but, effectively, represents the small cities on the prairie, places like Pipestone and Jasper, Minnesota -- it is pleasing to see these elegant little villages with their classical architecture portrayed on screen. The acting by people like Kirsten Dunst and Ted Danson is appropriately faux naïf -- everyone channels Frances McDormand's great performance in the Coen brother's movie although without that film's sense of the immense and pathetic wastefulness of violent crime. The shoot-outs are staged with fierce and balletic precision and the violence is filmed so as to contrast the ugliness and folly of human beings against the indifference and natural beauty of the snowy northern landscapes. The film preserves much of the quirky perspective of the Coen brothers and the musical cues are uniformly brilliant and moving. My criticism of the program is that, although there is a lot going on, it is all macabre stuff of the same sort. The opening episode, before aspects of the show went stale, was, possibly, the best television ever filmed, but the show couldn't sustain that level of excellence. A dour, Gothic family of thugs named Gerhardt lives in the snowy wasteland near Fargo -- these gangsters are led by a fearsome matriarch in default of their Godfather's disability (the man is catatonic due to a cerebral hemorrhage); the Gerhardt's have a family history dating to the Weimar Republic and their most terrifying factotum is soft-spoken Indian with long black hair and a menacing immobile face. Rival mobsters from Kansas City threaten to muscle into their territory. Various Baroque threats are exchanged and war is threatened. At the outset of the show, one of the Gerhardt boys travels to a Waffle Hut near Luverne in an attempt to intimidate a female judge from Fargo -- we never really know what motivates him, but he is clearly doing the family's business. The Judge is as ferocious as the matriarch who commands the Gerhardt family and, after the obligatory colloquy of bellicose and poetic insults, the young man shoots the woman and everyone else in the place as well. As he is fleeing the scene of the bloodbath, a hairdresser hits him with her car; the thug finds himself bleeding to death and inserted through the left front of her windshield. The hairdresser, played by the nubile Kirsten Dunst, is an example of "Minnesota Nice" gone berserk. She transports the dying bad guy to her garage and, since her husband is a butcher... well, you can imagine the rest. Like the other women in the program, Dunst's character acts in a completely conventional way, speaks in platitudes, and looks like she has just come from a potluck at the Lutheran Church -- but she is completely amoral, implacable, and relentlessly ruthless. In this respect, she is similar to the paralyzed crime boss' granddaughter -- she lures a number of men to their death while sleeping with the Black gunman dispatched from KC to slaughter the members of her family. This girl is sufficiently savage to betray her family by calling in a bloody raid designed to kill her own father. (The girl is also sexually adventurous -- after one tryst with her lover, the Black mobster says: "You surprised me with that thing with your finger." "I thought you'd like that," the girl says. "I didn't say I liked having your finger stuck up my ass. I said you surprised me." To which the girl blithely replies: "It wasn't my finger. It was my thumb.") The problem with this is that each week is, more or less, the same; nothing really develops and there is the sense of starting back at zero each episode -- imprecations are hurled this way and that, the good folks struggle to understand the ever-increasing heap of corpses piling up, the local eccentrics act eccentrically, a character introduced about two episodes before gets rubbed-out (this is supposed to surprise the viewer) and more of the army of extras have their heads blown-off. There are some arcane aspects to the enterprise -- Ronald Reagan played with damning precision by Bruce Campbell is campaigning at Sioux Falls in South Dakota (the casting of Campbell best known as Ash in The Evil Dead films is an excellent joke in itself) and, from time to time, people see what may be UFOs -- the latter detail seems a homage to the Coen's highly idiosyncratic film The Man Who Wasn't There, a 2001 picture that also featured as a deux ex machina some flying saucers. These elements of the show, which are the most interesting parts of Fargo, are not well-developed and, at this writing, I can't tell where this part of the plot is headed. Fargo is excellent, but because it is produced by the Coen brothers and invokes a film masterpiece, must be judged by the highest esthetic criteria -- and, by those criteria, I can't quite deem the show to be a success.
The show's plot involves an ancient formula -- combat between two ruthless crime families, a conflict in which a variety of innocents find themselves entangled. This plot works well for a three or, even, four hour movie -- the Godfather pictures are a noteworthy example -- but can't be sustained over six hours or more. The first episode, so far much the best, was wonderful and induced in me a sort of euphoria -- this show was going to be something unprecedented on Tv, something radically new and brilliant. The program is exquisitely shot, although not in Minnesota but in Alberta, Canada, where, I suppose, snowfall is more predictable. The show is edited into a slow-moving, but forceful combination of close-ups showing evil, snarling villains and bemused innocents intercut with carefully composed long shots showing confrontations against the vast snowy horizons of the plains of Alberta. The small town simulating Luverne, Minnesota looks nothing like that place, but, effectively, represents the small cities on the prairie, places like Pipestone and Jasper, Minnesota -- it is pleasing to see these elegant little villages with their classical architecture portrayed on screen. The acting by people like Kirsten Dunst and Ted Danson is appropriately faux naïf -- everyone channels Frances McDormand's great performance in the Coen brother's movie although without that film's sense of the immense and pathetic wastefulness of violent crime. The shoot-outs are staged with fierce and balletic precision and the violence is filmed so as to contrast the ugliness and folly of human beings against the indifference and natural beauty of the snowy northern landscapes. The film preserves much of the quirky perspective of the Coen brothers and the musical cues are uniformly brilliant and moving. My criticism of the program is that, although there is a lot going on, it is all macabre stuff of the same sort. The opening episode, before aspects of the show went stale, was, possibly, the best television ever filmed, but the show couldn't sustain that level of excellence. A dour, Gothic family of thugs named Gerhardt lives in the snowy wasteland near Fargo -- these gangsters are led by a fearsome matriarch in default of their Godfather's disability (the man is catatonic due to a cerebral hemorrhage); the Gerhardt's have a family history dating to the Weimar Republic and their most terrifying factotum is soft-spoken Indian with long black hair and a menacing immobile face. Rival mobsters from Kansas City threaten to muscle into their territory. Various Baroque threats are exchanged and war is threatened. At the outset of the show, one of the Gerhardt boys travels to a Waffle Hut near Luverne in an attempt to intimidate a female judge from Fargo -- we never really know what motivates him, but he is clearly doing the family's business. The Judge is as ferocious as the matriarch who commands the Gerhardt family and, after the obligatory colloquy of bellicose and poetic insults, the young man shoots the woman and everyone else in the place as well. As he is fleeing the scene of the bloodbath, a hairdresser hits him with her car; the thug finds himself bleeding to death and inserted through the left front of her windshield. The hairdresser, played by the nubile Kirsten Dunst, is an example of "Minnesota Nice" gone berserk. She transports the dying bad guy to her garage and, since her husband is a butcher... well, you can imagine the rest. Like the other women in the program, Dunst's character acts in a completely conventional way, speaks in platitudes, and looks like she has just come from a potluck at the Lutheran Church -- but she is completely amoral, implacable, and relentlessly ruthless. In this respect, she is similar to the paralyzed crime boss' granddaughter -- she lures a number of men to their death while sleeping with the Black gunman dispatched from KC to slaughter the members of her family. This girl is sufficiently savage to betray her family by calling in a bloody raid designed to kill her own father. (The girl is also sexually adventurous -- after one tryst with her lover, the Black mobster says: "You surprised me with that thing with your finger." "I thought you'd like that," the girl says. "I didn't say I liked having your finger stuck up my ass. I said you surprised me." To which the girl blithely replies: "It wasn't my finger. It was my thumb.") The problem with this is that each week is, more or less, the same; nothing really develops and there is the sense of starting back at zero each episode -- imprecations are hurled this way and that, the good folks struggle to understand the ever-increasing heap of corpses piling up, the local eccentrics act eccentrically, a character introduced about two episodes before gets rubbed-out (this is supposed to surprise the viewer) and more of the army of extras have their heads blown-off. There are some arcane aspects to the enterprise -- Ronald Reagan played with damning precision by Bruce Campbell is campaigning at Sioux Falls in South Dakota (the casting of Campbell best known as Ash in The Evil Dead films is an excellent joke in itself) and, from time to time, people see what may be UFOs -- the latter detail seems a homage to the Coen's highly idiosyncratic film The Man Who Wasn't There, a 2001 picture that also featured as a deux ex machina some flying saucers. These elements of the show, which are the most interesting parts of Fargo, are not well-developed and, at this writing, I can't tell where this part of the plot is headed. Fargo is excellent, but because it is produced by the Coen brothers and invokes a film masterpiece, must be judged by the highest esthetic criteria -- and, by those criteria, I can't quite deem the show to be a success.
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Delacroix and Modern Art (Exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art)
The exhibit of paintings by Delacroix and other late 19th century artists on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art argues this thesis: Delacroix's influence is integral to the work of later painters such as Renoir, Redon, Degas, and Cezanne. This claim derives from John Canaday's famous book, Mainstreams of Modern Art, an art history narrative that commences with David and ends with Picasso and Kandinsky. For Canaday, art's mainstream flowed through Paris and Delacroix (with Gericault) was a transitional painter, a bridge between David's impassioned classicism and the early Impressionists. This argument is based on Delacroix's highly visible and ebullient brush stroke -- the artists slathers paint onto his canvases in thick, vivid swaths and leaves the surface of his paintings, apparently, unfinished, that is, serrated with ridges of bright pigment. Delacroix's subject matter is as vehement as his attack on the canvas -- he begins his career illustrating violent episodes in the poetry of Byron (rapes and massacres) and ends his career with a final painting made in 1863 depicting a nasty little skirmish in the mountains of north Africa. Although many French painters in the mid-19th century claimed Delacroix's influence as decisive, in fact, it is not easy to perceive and the show is seems unpersuasive to me -- Redon's works, at least as presented in this show, don't look anything like Delacroix. Similarly, early paintings by Cezanne and Degas display traces of Delacroix's violent and Romantic subject matter but are far more cerebral, more sophisticated in their design, than the rather primitive and exuberant works by the earlier painter. To the extent that later painters copied Delacroix's subject matter -- particularly his paintings showing north Africa, a coincidence of subject doesn't really show influence: various painters essayed views of Tangiers, for instance, but this doesn't necessarily show anything other than the fact that a walled Moroccan city by the sea is a picturesque thing to paint and that canvases on that subject were probably readily saleable. The curious thing about the show, accordingly, is that many Impressionist or proto-Impressionist painters claimed allegiance to Delacroix, but this seems merely lip-service -- in fact, their own homages to the painter are very different in form, style, texture, and feeling than the work of the man they claimed as master.
The wall labels in the MIA show talk about "emulation". The younger artists emulated Delacroix's work and, I think, that word is useful in considering the relationship between the paintings in the show. By all canons of criticism except one, Delacroix is not a good painter -- indeed, the artist's works have always been a "hard sell" to me. Delacroix's draftsmanship is very clumsy and his grasp of the human body seems amateurish. The artist's famously agitated tigers either look like Chinese gargoyles or stuffed cats with bulging cartoonish eyes. His landscapes are shadowy daubs and Delacroix never seems to have mastered perspective. In his final painting made in 1863 of the Berber tribes fighting, a canvas that I greatly admire, the artist is completely unable to figure out how to make his figures recede in space. The exotic warriors are essentially decals pasted onto a poorly designed and irrational landscape. In the default of rigorous pictorial design, draftsmanship, and anatomical accuracy, Delacroix offers vivid, explosive colors and something like "authenticity." It is, in fact, easy to trace a line from Delacroix's vivid and expressive, if poorly represented, scenes of violence to Jackson Pollock's canvases -- Delacroix institutes, I think, the cult of authenticity. The man can't paint but he wears his multi-colored heart, leaking pigment, all over his sleeve. Accordingly, Delacroix seems to have been a youthful enthusiasm for the other artists featured in the show. Like some rock-and-roll or country-western music, Delacroix's seemingly artless paintings suggest that anyone who has enough heart and desire can make an interesting canvas -- if you can play three chords, you can be a rock star; if you can smear paint on a stretched canvas with exuberant gestures, you can be an artist. Accordingly, I sense that Delacroix for highly sophisticated artists like Cezanne and Degas was a youthful enthusiasm -- he's the kind of artist that suggests to the viewer this proposition: I could do this myself. But youthful enthusiasms are readily and quickly outgrown. Once Cezanne and Degas learned to paint in their own styles, all traces of Delacroix's influence vanish entirely. Thus, Delacroix seems to have been a painter who encouraged younger artists to be bold and to paint experimentally. The apprentice works of Cezanne and Degas, as might be expected, aren't very good and don't even show much trace of the brilliance of these artist's later careers -- thus, to the extent that Delacroix influenced Cezanne and Degas, he seems to have influenced them to paint badly. Only after outgrowing Delacroix's influence, did this artists come into their own. (In fairness to Delacroix, I should note that a film accompanying the show makes this important point -- to his young admirers, Delacroix was most importantly a painter of murals, for instance in the Church of St. Sulpice. Murals, particularly the dome and ceiling panels in a place like St. Sulpice were made to be seen from a distance and not closely studied. Delacroix vivid colors and broad, expansive, and melodramatic posturing are effective when seen from a vantage 100 feet away.)
Degas painted several completely uncharacteristic "history" paintings under the influence of Delacroix. One of these paintings, showing youths competing in Sparta, is large, ambitious, and shows poor draftsmanship -- already, Degas' palette, later heavily influenced by pastels and water-colors, is vastly more sophisticated than Delacroix' flamboyant blood-reds and shadowy, russet landscapes. One of Degas' wonderful paintings of young dancers is included in the show -- it is a mature work by Degas and looks nothing at all like Delacroix; Degas' compositional sense is photographic, snapshot-like whereas Delacroix poses everyone in the most theatrical way possible -- it is as if we are staring at a group of provincial actors appearing in a bad play. Similarly, the show juxtaposes some of Delacroix's scenes of violent action with a weird, large canvas by Cezanne called "Abduction." In Cezanne's painting, a bizarre muscle-bound figure seems to be carrying away a pale maiden -- it's a prototype for monster movies in which a swooning actress is abducted by a staggering and hideous monster. Cezanne's drawing of the abductor is so grotesquely bad as to be risible -- the figure is all lumpy with big misplaced muscles like tumors. The picture may be influenced by Delacroix, but it's a catastrophe. On another wall, a Delacroix painting of bathers is shown next to a small, crystalline and elegant Cezanne canvas of the same subject. Delacroix's water is completely unpersuasive, a sort of silky carpet into which his nudes, females with heavy hips and small breasts, are sinking -- the picture is pretty, but unsuccessful. It simply doesn't look wet at all. Cezanne's picture, a turquoise geometry of vertical vector-like trees and stalking nude giantesses is equally unrealistic but the picture is completely successful on its own semi-abstract terms and totally incongruent to Delacroix's painting.
The show contains a late copy of Delacroix's most famous and sadistic painting "The Death of Sardanapulus" -- it was a pleasure for me to stand near the dozent attempting to explain to a group of fifth graders what was going on in that painting. "What is the man doing to that girl?" one of the boys quite reasonably asked. The painting is extraordinary in any format, an allegory of the sadistic solipsism of the imagination, and the perfect marriage of Delacroix's painterly zealotry with the violent subject matter presented. The force of the image is so great that it doesn't matter that Delacroix can't get the perspective right and just sticks the pale writhing victims of the tyrant onto the canvas like stamps in a stamp book. A "Lamentation" shows one of the Mary's peeping under Christ's shroud to inspect his genitals -- a bizarre image that is, perhaps, a mistake in the way Delacroix painted the gesture. Delacroix's images of Tangiers show a white, castellated city occupying a crevasse in a mountain escarpment something like an Alaskan or Norwegian glacier hovering over a fjord. The landscape except for the city is just a blur of grey and brown pigment, painted without any interest whatsoever -- indeed, in many of Delacroix's paintings vast parts of the canvas seem to have been completely disregarded by the artist, he just smears them with nondescript colors to better highlight the action in the center or lower part of the painting. The artist's painting of "The Convulsionists of Tangiers", owned by the MIA, dramatically demonstrates Delacroix's weaknesses as a draftsman. At the center of the picture, one figure's head, prominently displayed, can not be plausibly connected with any body shown in the image -- the head seems to float, thrust forward, in empty air. The "Convulsionists" although not one of favorite pictures, seems to me successful on its own terms -- the artist's objective was expressionist: he wants to convey to you the sense of the uncanny and eerie aspects of this north African religious cult and the strangely disembodied head creates in the spectator a distinct sense of unease. Similarly, the final canvas painted by Delacroix, the smoky battle of Berbers in the mountains, although incoherent, is effective as well -- the picture with its vignettes of disconnected action, its prosaic mountain setting, something like the flats for a mid-century opera, and the smoky, impressionist void at the center of the image -- a pale fog in which we can only slightly see agitated figures is entirely successful and persuasive as an expressionistic account of the chaotic battle. The fact that the composition doesn't really make sense doesn't matter.
A collection of many Japanese woodcuts, so-called Shin Hanga ("New Print") graphics, is pretty, highly accomplished, and technically impressive. But the pictures are mostly uninteresting images of 'pretty women' and Kabuki actors. The "pretty women" pictures, in particular, verge on kitsch. Upstairs, there is a small exhibit of aquatints, all of them silky, menacing, and exceptionally beautiful -- in particular, there are some horrific war images by both Goya and Otto Dix. Goya's nightmare image called "Bobolicon" ("Simpleton") in which a misshapen clown-shaped colossus confronts a man who is hiding behind a strangely passive, possibly dead, and shrouded woman is the sort of picture that once seen can not be forgotten.
The wall labels in the MIA show talk about "emulation". The younger artists emulated Delacroix's work and, I think, that word is useful in considering the relationship between the paintings in the show. By all canons of criticism except one, Delacroix is not a good painter -- indeed, the artist's works have always been a "hard sell" to me. Delacroix's draftsmanship is very clumsy and his grasp of the human body seems amateurish. The artist's famously agitated tigers either look like Chinese gargoyles or stuffed cats with bulging cartoonish eyes. His landscapes are shadowy daubs and Delacroix never seems to have mastered perspective. In his final painting made in 1863 of the Berber tribes fighting, a canvas that I greatly admire, the artist is completely unable to figure out how to make his figures recede in space. The exotic warriors are essentially decals pasted onto a poorly designed and irrational landscape. In the default of rigorous pictorial design, draftsmanship, and anatomical accuracy, Delacroix offers vivid, explosive colors and something like "authenticity." It is, in fact, easy to trace a line from Delacroix's vivid and expressive, if poorly represented, scenes of violence to Jackson Pollock's canvases -- Delacroix institutes, I think, the cult of authenticity. The man can't paint but he wears his multi-colored heart, leaking pigment, all over his sleeve. Accordingly, Delacroix seems to have been a youthful enthusiasm for the other artists featured in the show. Like some rock-and-roll or country-western music, Delacroix's seemingly artless paintings suggest that anyone who has enough heart and desire can make an interesting canvas -- if you can play three chords, you can be a rock star; if you can smear paint on a stretched canvas with exuberant gestures, you can be an artist. Accordingly, I sense that Delacroix for highly sophisticated artists like Cezanne and Degas was a youthful enthusiasm -- he's the kind of artist that suggests to the viewer this proposition: I could do this myself. But youthful enthusiasms are readily and quickly outgrown. Once Cezanne and Degas learned to paint in their own styles, all traces of Delacroix's influence vanish entirely. Thus, Delacroix seems to have been a painter who encouraged younger artists to be bold and to paint experimentally. The apprentice works of Cezanne and Degas, as might be expected, aren't very good and don't even show much trace of the brilliance of these artist's later careers -- thus, to the extent that Delacroix influenced Cezanne and Degas, he seems to have influenced them to paint badly. Only after outgrowing Delacroix's influence, did this artists come into their own. (In fairness to Delacroix, I should note that a film accompanying the show makes this important point -- to his young admirers, Delacroix was most importantly a painter of murals, for instance in the Church of St. Sulpice. Murals, particularly the dome and ceiling panels in a place like St. Sulpice were made to be seen from a distance and not closely studied. Delacroix vivid colors and broad, expansive, and melodramatic posturing are effective when seen from a vantage 100 feet away.)
Degas painted several completely uncharacteristic "history" paintings under the influence of Delacroix. One of these paintings, showing youths competing in Sparta, is large, ambitious, and shows poor draftsmanship -- already, Degas' palette, later heavily influenced by pastels and water-colors, is vastly more sophisticated than Delacroix' flamboyant blood-reds and shadowy, russet landscapes. One of Degas' wonderful paintings of young dancers is included in the show -- it is a mature work by Degas and looks nothing at all like Delacroix; Degas' compositional sense is photographic, snapshot-like whereas Delacroix poses everyone in the most theatrical way possible -- it is as if we are staring at a group of provincial actors appearing in a bad play. Similarly, the show juxtaposes some of Delacroix's scenes of violent action with a weird, large canvas by Cezanne called "Abduction." In Cezanne's painting, a bizarre muscle-bound figure seems to be carrying away a pale maiden -- it's a prototype for monster movies in which a swooning actress is abducted by a staggering and hideous monster. Cezanne's drawing of the abductor is so grotesquely bad as to be risible -- the figure is all lumpy with big misplaced muscles like tumors. The picture may be influenced by Delacroix, but it's a catastrophe. On another wall, a Delacroix painting of bathers is shown next to a small, crystalline and elegant Cezanne canvas of the same subject. Delacroix's water is completely unpersuasive, a sort of silky carpet into which his nudes, females with heavy hips and small breasts, are sinking -- the picture is pretty, but unsuccessful. It simply doesn't look wet at all. Cezanne's picture, a turquoise geometry of vertical vector-like trees and stalking nude giantesses is equally unrealistic but the picture is completely successful on its own semi-abstract terms and totally incongruent to Delacroix's painting.
The show contains a late copy of Delacroix's most famous and sadistic painting "The Death of Sardanapulus" -- it was a pleasure for me to stand near the dozent attempting to explain to a group of fifth graders what was going on in that painting. "What is the man doing to that girl?" one of the boys quite reasonably asked. The painting is extraordinary in any format, an allegory of the sadistic solipsism of the imagination, and the perfect marriage of Delacroix's painterly zealotry with the violent subject matter presented. The force of the image is so great that it doesn't matter that Delacroix can't get the perspective right and just sticks the pale writhing victims of the tyrant onto the canvas like stamps in a stamp book. A "Lamentation" shows one of the Mary's peeping under Christ's shroud to inspect his genitals -- a bizarre image that is, perhaps, a mistake in the way Delacroix painted the gesture. Delacroix's images of Tangiers show a white, castellated city occupying a crevasse in a mountain escarpment something like an Alaskan or Norwegian glacier hovering over a fjord. The landscape except for the city is just a blur of grey and brown pigment, painted without any interest whatsoever -- indeed, in many of Delacroix's paintings vast parts of the canvas seem to have been completely disregarded by the artist, he just smears them with nondescript colors to better highlight the action in the center or lower part of the painting. The artist's painting of "The Convulsionists of Tangiers", owned by the MIA, dramatically demonstrates Delacroix's weaknesses as a draftsman. At the center of the picture, one figure's head, prominently displayed, can not be plausibly connected with any body shown in the image -- the head seems to float, thrust forward, in empty air. The "Convulsionists" although not one of favorite pictures, seems to me successful on its own terms -- the artist's objective was expressionist: he wants to convey to you the sense of the uncanny and eerie aspects of this north African religious cult and the strangely disembodied head creates in the spectator a distinct sense of unease. Similarly, the final canvas painted by Delacroix, the smoky battle of Berbers in the mountains, although incoherent, is effective as well -- the picture with its vignettes of disconnected action, its prosaic mountain setting, something like the flats for a mid-century opera, and the smoky, impressionist void at the center of the image -- a pale fog in which we can only slightly see agitated figures is entirely successful and persuasive as an expressionistic account of the chaotic battle. The fact that the composition doesn't really make sense doesn't matter.
A collection of many Japanese woodcuts, so-called Shin Hanga ("New Print") graphics, is pretty, highly accomplished, and technically impressive. But the pictures are mostly uninteresting images of 'pretty women' and Kabuki actors. The "pretty women" pictures, in particular, verge on kitsch. Upstairs, there is a small exhibit of aquatints, all of them silky, menacing, and exceptionally beautiful -- in particular, there are some horrific war images by both Goya and Otto Dix. Goya's nightmare image called "Bobolicon" ("Simpleton") in which a misshapen clown-shaped colossus confronts a man who is hiding behind a strangely passive, possibly dead, and shrouded woman is the sort of picture that once seen can not be forgotten.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Friendly Persuasion
Prestige films made in the fifties were often adaptations of novels and, so, these movies don't have narratives that are readily assimilated to our expectations today. These movies contain a wealth of events and characters intended to convey the impression of an entire world. Accordingly, films of this sort are loosely constructed, episodic, leisurely -- it is often not entirely clear what the movie is supposed to be about. In this regard, William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion (1956) resembles pictures like John Ford's My Darling Clementine or How Green was my Valley-- the focus is on a community of people and the actual dramatic conflict motivating the film seems secondary for much of the movie's running time. In Friendly Persuasion, the conflict between the pacifist Quakers and their neighbors who are embroiled in the Civil War is central to the movie, and, given its release eleven years after the Second World War, afforded the theme of principal interest to contemporary audiences -- presumably, veterans of World War Two were interested in whether there were other peaceful ways to resolve conflict. Indeed, near the climax of the film, a non-Quaker neighbor salutes Jess (played by Gary Cooper) for refusing to join the fighting -- the man says: "I'm glad that you're refusing to fight. Maybe, it will show us another way of solving these things." This is a generous sentiment, intrinsic to the film's simple humanity, and, probably, reflects the viewpoint of many Americans who had experienced war first-hand in Europe or the Pacific and, now, wanted no part of further conflict. And the film's pacifist narrative is mirrored by its structure and digressive plot -- Friendly Persuasion, based on a best-selling novel by Jessamyn West, is really about peace and its humble pleasures and conflicts; the movie is a war film only briefly and incidentally.
Friendly Persuasion focuses on a Quaker family lives in an idyllic setting among orchards and ponds in southern Indiana. The film's camerawork is extraordinary -- the trees around the Quaker homestead have the soft, luminous quality of landscapes by Corot and the rivers and lakes have a particularly moist, intensely liquid quality, mirroring the bucolic fields and barns and mills like gorgeous Impressionistic canvases. Wyler is capable of staging action in depth -- in some scenes, there is foreground action, people in the middle distance, and, then, horsemen, for instance, approaching or receding in the shadowy distance. The interiors are softly lit and, again, feature different zones of action -- in one memorable scene, husband and wife and their eldest son are debating the boy's determination to join the war effort when the family's daughter, still aroused from a romantic encounter, sweeps into the house and climbs some wooden stairs with languorous yielding step. The combination of the family crisis with the young woman's sexual awakening creates a powerful emotional effect, all accomplished by staging the two events in one continuous, well-defined space. The action is logically developed, playing out over terrain that has certain features to which the camera returns again and again -- the meeting houses, dirt lanes where Gary Cooper races his buggy against his neighbor, a covered bridge. The movie is quite bawdy for its time -- there is an overtly sexual encounter between the Quaker youth (played by Anthony Perkins) and three sex-starved farm girls at an isolated farm governed by a leering matriarch, the Widow Hudspeth, played by Marjorie Main. The "friendly persuasion" named in the title seems to be sexual in nature -- for instance, Jess who is enamored with music persuades his straitlaced Quaker wife (she is actually the preacher and leader of the sect) to allow an organ in their home after a sexual rendezvous in the barn to which she has retreated in anger after the sinful instrument was delivered to her home. We see Gary Cooper pathetically grateful to his wife after this encounter, his shoulders covered with straw from the barn where they have spent the night. After some initial scene-setting in which the Quaker opposition to the Civil War is established -- the Quaker priestess says: "I will not kill one man to free another" -- the movie concerns itself with the rivalry between Jess and his neighbor about the speed of their trotting horses, the daughter's romance, a trip to the county fair in which one Quaker youth wrestles a professional fighter called "the Billy Goat," and Jess' business trip to Ohio that results in his meeting with Marjorie Main and her sex-starved family of nubile young women -- the young engage in flirtation while Jess horse-trades with the matriarch. Jess buys an organ at the fair, a purchase that puts some strain on his marriage, but repairs the breach with his tryst with his wife in the barn. There is a pet goose named Samantha and a little boy who, in classic Hoosier fashion, is shown fishing from a ramshackle dock his head covered in a tattered straw hat -- he looks like a figure from a James Whitcomb Riley poem. (The little boy is the enemy of aggressive goose, Samantha, a big, loud creature that harasses the child mercilessly and that the boy also relentlessly teases, an allegory for the conflict between human beings that results in warfare -- a pointless, mindless conflict that everyone enjoys until the play gets a little too rough.) The family harbors a runaway slave and, when the war comes close to the farm, the Black man takes up a rifle and joins the irregular forces who plan to repel a rebel invasion at the ford in the river. The last 25 minutes of the film -- and it is about 145 minutes -- concerns the Confederate invasion. The Quakers find themselves plunged into the war and, of course, their pacifist values are compromised when real violence engulfs them. The son, played by Anthony Perkins, impetuously joins a civilian force of guerillas poised to ambush the Confederates at the river and, when a man is killed next to him, joins in the battle. His father later finds him wounded on the battlefield, grief-stricken and unable to leave the side of the Confederate boy that he has killed in hand-to-hand combat. When a foraging rebel tries to snatch Samantha the goose from the family's farm, the Quaker woman beats the soldier with a broom, appalled at her own violence. The Confederate soldier, filmed from an angle that suggests rape (we see his crotch and his big belt buckle emblazoned with the confederate emblem) reacts in a courtly manner, doffing his hat to the enraged woman and advising her that he wished he had known before-hand that the goose was a family pet. The film is politically conflicted about pacifism in a realistic and compromising way-- it acknowledges the nobility of the Quakers' beliefs but, also, suggests that they can not be implemented in the real world.
I saw this film on the night after ISIS claimed responsibility for massacring over a hundred civilians in Paris. The French have vowed to "punish severely" those responsible for the attacks. In Friendly Persuasion, the Quaker woman-preacher did not allow music in her home, notwithstanding the fact that we learn that she was once a good dancer -- indeed, her husband wooed and won her on the dance-floor -- and we see her tapping her foot to music at the county fair, watching the couples dancing with a wistful look until she sees her own daughter among them, dancing with a handsome Union soldier on leave. Of course, the Taliban were famously against music and instituted an auto da fe of musical instruments when they seized power in Afghanistan. The pressure of themes in Wyler's Friendly Persuasion remains with us today -- and, indeed, is, perhaps, even more significant in November of 2015 than in 1956 when the film was made.
Friendly Persuasion focuses on a Quaker family lives in an idyllic setting among orchards and ponds in southern Indiana. The film's camerawork is extraordinary -- the trees around the Quaker homestead have the soft, luminous quality of landscapes by Corot and the rivers and lakes have a particularly moist, intensely liquid quality, mirroring the bucolic fields and barns and mills like gorgeous Impressionistic canvases. Wyler is capable of staging action in depth -- in some scenes, there is foreground action, people in the middle distance, and, then, horsemen, for instance, approaching or receding in the shadowy distance. The interiors are softly lit and, again, feature different zones of action -- in one memorable scene, husband and wife and their eldest son are debating the boy's determination to join the war effort when the family's daughter, still aroused from a romantic encounter, sweeps into the house and climbs some wooden stairs with languorous yielding step. The combination of the family crisis with the young woman's sexual awakening creates a powerful emotional effect, all accomplished by staging the two events in one continuous, well-defined space. The action is logically developed, playing out over terrain that has certain features to which the camera returns again and again -- the meeting houses, dirt lanes where Gary Cooper races his buggy against his neighbor, a covered bridge. The movie is quite bawdy for its time -- there is an overtly sexual encounter between the Quaker youth (played by Anthony Perkins) and three sex-starved farm girls at an isolated farm governed by a leering matriarch, the Widow Hudspeth, played by Marjorie Main. The "friendly persuasion" named in the title seems to be sexual in nature -- for instance, Jess who is enamored with music persuades his straitlaced Quaker wife (she is actually the preacher and leader of the sect) to allow an organ in their home after a sexual rendezvous in the barn to which she has retreated in anger after the sinful instrument was delivered to her home. We see Gary Cooper pathetically grateful to his wife after this encounter, his shoulders covered with straw from the barn where they have spent the night. After some initial scene-setting in which the Quaker opposition to the Civil War is established -- the Quaker priestess says: "I will not kill one man to free another" -- the movie concerns itself with the rivalry between Jess and his neighbor about the speed of their trotting horses, the daughter's romance, a trip to the county fair in which one Quaker youth wrestles a professional fighter called "the Billy Goat," and Jess' business trip to Ohio that results in his meeting with Marjorie Main and her sex-starved family of nubile young women -- the young engage in flirtation while Jess horse-trades with the matriarch. Jess buys an organ at the fair, a purchase that puts some strain on his marriage, but repairs the breach with his tryst with his wife in the barn. There is a pet goose named Samantha and a little boy who, in classic Hoosier fashion, is shown fishing from a ramshackle dock his head covered in a tattered straw hat -- he looks like a figure from a James Whitcomb Riley poem. (The little boy is the enemy of aggressive goose, Samantha, a big, loud creature that harasses the child mercilessly and that the boy also relentlessly teases, an allegory for the conflict between human beings that results in warfare -- a pointless, mindless conflict that everyone enjoys until the play gets a little too rough.) The family harbors a runaway slave and, when the war comes close to the farm, the Black man takes up a rifle and joins the irregular forces who plan to repel a rebel invasion at the ford in the river. The last 25 minutes of the film -- and it is about 145 minutes -- concerns the Confederate invasion. The Quakers find themselves plunged into the war and, of course, their pacifist values are compromised when real violence engulfs them. The son, played by Anthony Perkins, impetuously joins a civilian force of guerillas poised to ambush the Confederates at the river and, when a man is killed next to him, joins in the battle. His father later finds him wounded on the battlefield, grief-stricken and unable to leave the side of the Confederate boy that he has killed in hand-to-hand combat. When a foraging rebel tries to snatch Samantha the goose from the family's farm, the Quaker woman beats the soldier with a broom, appalled at her own violence. The Confederate soldier, filmed from an angle that suggests rape (we see his crotch and his big belt buckle emblazoned with the confederate emblem) reacts in a courtly manner, doffing his hat to the enraged woman and advising her that he wished he had known before-hand that the goose was a family pet. The film is politically conflicted about pacifism in a realistic and compromising way-- it acknowledges the nobility of the Quakers' beliefs but, also, suggests that they can not be implemented in the real world.
I saw this film on the night after ISIS claimed responsibility for massacring over a hundred civilians in Paris. The French have vowed to "punish severely" those responsible for the attacks. In Friendly Persuasion, the Quaker woman-preacher did not allow music in her home, notwithstanding the fact that we learn that she was once a good dancer -- indeed, her husband wooed and won her on the dance-floor -- and we see her tapping her foot to music at the county fair, watching the couples dancing with a wistful look until she sees her own daughter among them, dancing with a handsome Union soldier on leave. Of course, the Taliban were famously against music and instituted an auto da fe of musical instruments when they seized power in Afghanistan. The pressure of themes in Wyler's Friendly Persuasion remains with us today -- and, indeed, is, perhaps, even more significant in November of 2015 than in 1956 when the film was made.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)