Guardians of the Galaxy

Charming and spectacular, Guardians of the Galaxy is wonderfully entertaining from beginning to end.  This film is by far the best of Marvel franchise pictures combining vivid and likeable heroes with special effects action sequences that are almost gratuitously beautiful.  The influence of Pixar films is evident in this movie:  the boldly drawn and pungently characterized protagonists are like the talking toys or cars or fish in those computer-animated pictures.  The heroes are bundles of fascinating characteristics brightly outlined, endearing, and almost instantly appealing -- this is film making as handmaiden to advertising and, to some eyes, there may be something sinister about cartoon-like characters so effectively presented as to launch entire commercial empires -- I assume that will be the financial effect of this film.  But there is serious art and high endeavor in making a movie that combines elements of childish comedy, sophisticated adult banter, and jaw-dropping special effects action.  If this film is accepted for what it is, the picture is well-nigh flawless, an entertainment designed to amuse every sort of spectator, diversion for brows of all dimensions.  In this respect, Guardians of the Galaxy reminds me of old Disney animated features (and the film is produced under Disney's auspices):  the picture is designed to keep five-year olds amazed and engrossed while periodically offering morsels of more complex, even profound, substance to the adults superintending their children in the theater.  The film's plot is rudimentary and primitive but effective.  At one point, the earthling hero, Peter Quill, says:  "It's got that kind of ark of the covenant, Maltese falcon kind of vibe about it."  An orb contains matter from before the universe erupted in the Big Bang.  This matter is powerful beyond all imagining and confers vast destructive energies upon the possessor of the metal sphere encasing these shards of primordial plasma.  Of course, an evil lord, something like the bad guy in the Star Wars films sends his hideous minions out into the universe to search for this sphere.  A group of outlaws called Ravagers is also on the hunt for the sphere.  One of them is Peter Quill, a human boy who was snatched from the bedside of his dying mother in 1988 and recruited into the ranks of the scruffy extraterrestrial renegades -- their leader uses a guided and lethal arrow to slaughter his enemies and speaks with southern accent; he's like a blue and green-faced reptilian version of Jesse James or Clyde Barrow.  A genetically modified raccoon and his side-kick, a massive tree-shaped creature called Groot, are bounty hunters.  They target Quill for a bounty on his head and end up being entangled in the mad pursuit, an extended chase across the universe, with the sphere as its objective. After some wonderful Mad-magazine style adventures designed to push the protagonists into collision and, then, alliance with one another, the five protagonists league together to save the universe by capturing the movie's MacGuffin, the sphere from the evil chainmail-clad villain, a bad guy named Ronan.  The Guardians are the sardonic talking raccoon, Groot, the tree-man, a woman warrior with cadaverously high cheekbones and brow and blue skin, a huge brute covered in iridescent red and gold tattoos, and Peter Quill.  These characters are sufficiently unpredictable to be interesting, but also provided with strong, heroic attributes.  The film celebrates friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice and its sentimental scenes are genuinely moving.  The plot, although very simple, makes sense and small details are coherently developed:  the death of the hero's mother by cancer, a jarring note at the outset of the film, involves events and motifs that return in satisfying manner at the movie's climax.  (Indeed, the movie is almost too obsessively coherent in some of its details:  as a huge falcon-shaped metal space-ship crashes down on a city, we see a woman with bright red skin holding a baby with similar complexion both of them cowering as the vast vessel explodes -- it's a startling and memorable image.  In the last two minutes of the movie, woman and baby are revealed to be John C. Reilly's family who have been saved by the film's heroes.  This film makes sense of a five second image embedded in a titanic special effects sequence.  Very few action films of this sort have this kind of crazy, and unnecessary narrative integrity.)  The action sequences are clearly choreographed and filmed lucidly -- they actually make sense even when filled with hundreds of complicated moving parts.  Unlike most films of this sort, the climactic battle scenes are shot in bright daylight not the typical special effects murk afflicting many similarly designed pictures -- everything is clearly visible down to the tiniest detail and the screen is packed with information, gags, and interesting things to see.  Indeed, the movie is exhausting because it is so generously imaginative, so densely crammed with curious and wonderful things to delight the eye.  For reasons too complex to explain in this note, the movie is largely scored to old pop songs and R & B standards and this gives the picture a cheerful tone, a sort of bounce and insouciance that is undercuts the solemnity of all the exploding planets and armies of villainous space-troopers blasted into pieces in the film's light-show battle-scenes.  The movie doesn't take itself seriously and some scenes that would droop and bore spectators in most pictures of this genre -- for instance, a lengthy council scene in which the five characters debate their prospects for retrieving the MacGuffin from the bad guys -- are witty, delightful and laugh-out-loud funny in this film.  The movie is filled with gorgeous colors, weird landscapes, and strange creatures -- all of this is derived from the Star Wars films but this picture, in my view, is much better, much funnier, more inventive, better shot and staged, and, ultimately, much more exciting.  In the opening scene, the hero dances through caverns filled with monsters, shucks and jives avoiding huge luminous geysers, and periodically picks up little lizard-like monsters, miniature T-rex creatures, that he holds in front of his mouth like a microphone, lip-synching to one of the soundtracks golden oldies -- it's a wonderful image, light on its feet, scary and spectacular at the same time, and, curiously, joyful and light-hearted.  At one point, the hero is told by the beautiful woman warrior that his space-ship is filthy.  We know that he's seduced all manner of ET girls in this vessel.  He says:  "I should show her the place in black-light.  It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting."  This film is excellent on all levels and I recommend it highly.

The Immortal Story

Orson Welles directed this adaptation of a novella by Isak Dineson, "The Immortal Story," in 1968.  The film was made for French TV with a tiny budget.  It is Welles' first picture shot in color and stars Jeanne Moreau and the aging film maker -- in The Immortal Story, Welles plays a wealthy American, ill with gout and mostly immobile:  he has the rheumy eyes and distraught, anxious expression of the old Major Amberson in the director's film, The Magnificent Ambersons.  Perverse in the extreme, The Immortal Story is a curious testament, an elegy about the power of narrative and the relationship between storytelling and death.  In his mansion in Macao, the sick Mr. Clay sits on his verandah with a Polish Jew, his accountant.  Normally, the Jew reads to the merchant from his account books but on this night, the bookkeeper opens a phylactery and recites a prophecy from the book of Isaiah.  Mr. Clay is offended and says that he despises prophecy, primarily, it seems, because his time has run out and all auguries are against him at this stage in his life.  The old man says that he will tell a story and begins a tale about a wealthy gentleman who went to the harbor, selected "a fine sailor," and, apparently, paid him 5 guineas to have sex with the elderly wealthy man's young wife.  But before the story can be narrated -- and the tale always breaks off at the point where the "fine young sailor" receives his stipend -- the Jew says that he has heard the story as well; "everyone knows that story," he says.  The fact that the story is twice-told or, even, as common as the rain troubles Mr. Clay.  It seems to him that a story that has broad currency can not possibly be true and he proclaims that the only tales that he admires are true ones.  Then, the old man conceives of a way to make the story uniquely his, to withdraw the narrative, as it were, from common currency as it were and make it unique to himself.  He tells the Jewish accountant to hire a courtesan to enact the part of the girl, to locate a fine young sailor and to pay him five guineas to have sexual intercourse with the young woman.  In this way, it seems that the rapacious old man will add the story to his own store of wealth -- he will appropriate it to himself by making the events actually happen.  The Jew hires a local courtesan, played by Jeanne Moreau, to play the girl.  Moreau says that she is too old, that her youth is behind her, and, furthermore, she is a bitter enemy of old Mr. Clay -- he betrayed her father, Clay's former business partner, resulting in his suicide.  Moreau's face is a mask of tragic beauty, a leonine theatrical visage that looms over us in immense, marmoreal close-ups throughout the short film -- the movie has the sort of abstract and simplified terribilita of the late Michelangelo; somehow, it is huge, monumental, statuesque.  A suitably beautiful young sailor -- he has a wonderful head of blonde hair and startling blue eyes -- is selected.  He also knows the story and understands the assignment before it is even pitched to him.  The young man has just been rescued from a desert island where he lived in awful isolation for nine months and he has almost lost the power of speech.  (He is also a virgin and, for a few moments, seems possibly gay -- it's just performance anxiety and soon enough he's copulating with Moreau's courtesan, but the actor is so remarkably beautiful that there is a homosexual resonance to the way that he is filmed:  he is shot as an object of desire and his Greek-athlete torso and peroxide hair make him look like one of the boys in an erotic film by Kenneth Anger.)  The couple are united in the room where the woman's father committed suicide in the big, dark house.  Mr. Clay lurks outside the door.  At one point he says:  "You think you are jumping jacks.  Your limbs are so full of blood and lust.  You think that you are acting on your desire.  But actually you are acting entirely according to my will."  At dawn, the birds sing and the lovers part and Mr. Clay dies.  The sailor leaves a beautiful shell for the woman and, when the Jew tilts it to his ear, he thinks he can hear a song that he has heard before...but, he can't quite recognize the melody.  The final shot with a wicker chair holding the corpse of Mr. Clay, the dead body invisible to us, the Jew with the seashell cupped to his ears, and Jeanne Moreau in the distance, peering into the dawn after her departing lover, is as gorgeous and tapestry-like as a late painting by Bonnard.  The film is slow, comprised mostly of close-ups, and there is little of the camera pyrotechnics and explosive editing that made Welles famous as a young man.  This is a late work, suitably dignified, ecstatic, and enigmatic -- it seems to have a deep and fundamental meaning, but I don't know exactly how to define that meaning.

Othello (at the Gift Theater, Chicago -- August 1, 2014)

Theater-culture is robust in the Windy City and, indeed, there are small, but ambitious troupes of actors everywhere in Chicago.  An acknowledged species of theater in that town is the "store-front" operation.  The Gift Theater in Jefferson Park belongs to this category.  Jefferson Park is a largely Polish enclave at the western edge of Chicago, only a couple miles from Des Plaines and the airport.  (The neighborhood is so Polish that the El signs posted at the train station are written in that language.)  The Gift occupies a storefront next to a martial arts dojo on Milwaukee, a thoroughfare bustling to the point of desperation at rush hour, but, otherwise, deserted in the evening.  The renowned Chicago artist, Ed Paschke, has a gallery near the theater and there is a nice, rough chop-house that is obviously a local hang-out,The Gale Street Inn, a couple of blocks away.  At 7:15, when we queued-up for the show (entry is general admission only and there's no lobby to speak of), Milwaukee was quiet and the shadows were lengthening on the still sidewalks and a bearded gent, apparently a graduate student in art history, at Paschke's Art Center was locking the place up -- the muffler and transmission business next door to the studio was already shuttered for the evening.  In Paschke's gallery, there is a big and famous painting by the artist showing King Tut's mask and the golden glint of the bright paint on that large canvas was the brightest thing in the neighborhood.  Paschke's work is self-consciously vulgar but brilliant as well and the large, garish paintings in his storefront seemed to shine as if stained glass transfixed by the sunset.  The Gift Theater is tiny:  four rows of cheap seats, the kind of furniture you might encounter in a Holiday Inn banquet room, are arranged in front of a tiny stage.  The stage is comprised of a riser two-inches above the tile floor and about eight feet wide.  For Othello, the set consisted of four hinged metal columns that could be opened or closed by the actors in the gloom between scenes.  The metal columns were purely functional with a modest monolithic character a bit like the enigmatic upright-standing stones is 2001.  The lighting was merely functional and the play was performed without costumes in modern street dress -- in a couple of scenes the characters consulted cell-phones and while Iago is pouring his malevolent poison into Othello's ears both military men are scribbling notes on clipboards holding what seemed to be routine requisition orders.  Iago uses a wheelchair -- apparently, the actor is, in fact, paralyzed from the waist down:  his name is Michael Patrick Thornton and he is the artistic director of The Gift.  Thornton's Iago was effective, speaking his lines very quickly in an unassuming, continuous patter that could be construed as helpful, even friendly.  In one scene, when Iago wheeled himself idly around the stage, improvising malice against Othello and Cassio, his eyes had a dead quality -- it seemed to me that this Iago was contriving his plot out of sheer boredom with the day-to-day drudgery of military service.  Othello was splendidly played by Kareem Bandealy, a charismatic performance enhanced by the actor's rugged and muscular physique and his noble diction.  The theater seats only sixty spectators, fifteen per row, 61 if you allow for a bar-stool on which one of the audience members perched during the sold-out show.  The stage is no more than ten feet from the back row, only about three to four inches from where I was seated with Angelica in the front.  Shakespeare is messy business, particularly when the room is sweltering hot with no apparent air-flow -- the wooden risers forming the stage were puddled with saliva (Elizabethan English require much spitting of sibilant words) and moist with sweat spilled off the actors.  The play began on a swift high-note -- Shakespeare's attack in this work is very, very quick and decisive.  The plot always gets mired in Iago's morbid conniving -- there seems to be way too much scheming in the play and everything is vastly, even comically, over-determined.  Othello succumbs so swiftly to the green-eyed monster that it seems that Iago's carefully plotted campaign of disinformation is too cunning by half.  There are always tedious moments in Shakespeare and these occur in Othello just before the intermission, taken at the end of Act Three.  The emphasis on cuckoldry is obsessive to Shakespeare, clearly some sort of personal wound that the writer probes and worries like a hollow, aching tooth and there are times when we feel that we are beholding some sort of trauma private to author and not really even accessible to the audience.  (I have always wondered how female viewers perceive Othello's insane jealousy egged on by the equally insane and misogynistic skepticism of Iago.)  The climax of this production of the play was certainly horrific enough, terrifying and monstrous, particularly when enacted only three or four feet from where you are sitting.  The show is big and tremendously ambitious and it seemed odd for so much energy and passion to be expended for a tiny audience that is, perhaps, only three times the size of the cast deployed darting on and off stage.  (Although this is a bit of a misnomer:  the theater really has no offstage -- during the intermission, Iago withdrew to a nook next to the door leading into the tiny theater and sat there brooding with his back to the audience.  We went out to the sidewalk where the air was moving, if only slightly, and watched Slavic-looking kids and beautiful blonde girls smoking cigarettes cruising by on Milwaukee.)  At the end of the play, Iago is asked why he committed the calumny that has resulted in all this mayhem:  he says:  "You know what you know" -- referring to what we have seen as being the best evidence for his motivation, surely one of the most devastating lines in all of theater.     

Under the Skin

Viewers of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2014) get to see Scarlett Johannson naked.  But, as they say, there is a price to be paid.  Glazer's film is a gloomy, rebarbative sci-fi picture about an alien predator stalking human beings.  Morose and uncommunicative, the picture is a high-brow version of pulp that you have seen in a thousand different variants -- the beautiful black widow who lures men to their dooms, a kind of high-tech siren or Lorelei.  Fabricated for the purpose of ensnaring men, Johannson's alien tools around Glasgow and adjacent moors in a white van.  She picks up men, interviewing them to determine whether they are without family and alone -- this detail makes no sense because the glamorous alien, at least initially, has no concept of the consequences of her predation, seems to regard an ant that she plucks off the body of one of her victims as equivalent to her human prey, and doesn't make distinctions between skin and clothing, it's all just an outer covering to her.  If the hapless man meets the alien's specifications, she transport her victim to an abandoned house in the suburbs, entices him inside, and, then, immerses her prey in some sort of black, viscid liquid.  The alien can walk on the surface of this liquid, but the victim, pursuing her with penis fully erect, slips into the fluid where he is embalmed in a kind of semi-coma; ultimately, the victims innards are extracted by some occult process, leaving the man a tube of skin, a sort of human-shaped pennant that wriggles disconsolately in the black broth.  The film's emphasis on solitude, loneliness, and darkness -- the interiors where the alien's prey are processed are vast, jet black voids, far larger than the shabby and disheveled homes where the encounter is supposed to be taking place -- seems symbolic in a dreary sort of way.  The highly stylized scenes involving Johannson entrapping her victims in the black syrup have allegorical overtones -- it's as if the victims are sinking into some sort of ebony slough of despond.  (Some critics have found a feminist subtext in the picture:  the predator's stalking of human beings symbolizes, some claim, the way men hunt for sexual prey -- but I don't think this reading really works:  for one thing, the lads that Johannson's creature devours are not particularly sexist or repulsive or macho -- their just ordinary blokes.)  Johannson's alien has a factotum on a motorcycle roaring across the moors and dismal upland highways and, with its sinister but iconic heroine and the helmeted emissary of doom on his motorbike, the movie sometimes seem to be channeling The Man who Fell to Earth (with David Bowie as a similarly opaque space creature) and Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus.  As in The Man who Fell to Earth, the vestigial plot is a variant on "The Little Mermaid" -- the space alien gradually acquires some compassion for human beings and her abstract predatory interest in them becomes tempered with something like affection:  perhaps, she wishes to become a human being herself.  In the end, the poor, lonely space-monster flees to a remote and ghastly-looking forest --  again the imagery is like something from The Faerie Queen or John Bunyan (the forest is full of slit-shaped puddles like half-open eyes and gnarled trees).  In the forest, a bad guy turns the tables on the predator and treats her as prey.  He rapes her and, then, sets her on fire.  Scarlet's sinister motorcycle assistant arrives too late.  By this time, the space creature has molted her comely human form and stands revealed as....as...one of the Blue Man group, but black instead of blue.  On paper, the movie is better and more interesting than it seems on screen.  The theme of disguise versus appearance (surface versus truth) is dramatized by the fact that the glamorous movie actress seems to be hidden in plain sight in the film -- none of her victims seem to recognize that they are dealing with a movie star who is famous throughout the world.  This is an issue because the movie was shot with tiny hidden cameras and most of the blokes that Scarlet's predatory monster encounters are just ordinary Glaswegians.  Street shots and images showing Scarlet in a shopping mall are also filmed with hidden cameras -- no one notices the famous star in their midst.  The movie opts for authenticity on all levels:  the scenes with a grotesquely disfigured young man are not performed with make-up or CGI effects -- the poor fellow is really disfigured.  (The implicit irony is that because Johannson's monster regards all humans as wholly fungible, she doesn't notice that this guy looks startlingly different than her other prey -- the disfigured guy gets the only comical shot in the film:  he pinches himself to determine whether he is dreaming when the predator, blithely indifferent to his hideous appearance, starts to seduce him.)  The use of hidden cameras to film most of the picture doesn't really pay any dividends -- if you didn't watch the featurettes or read reviews like this one, you wouldn't know that the men that the predator interviews and picks up are non-actors who have no idea that they are being stalked by Scarlet Johannson and being filmed in the process; similarly, the viewer would regard the disfigured man as simply a particularly fine and convincing example of the make-up artist's craft.  It seems that the theme of the film, which is, I think, disguise and stealth and concealment, is reflected in the way that the movie was made -- the hidden cameras, the non-actors caught in moment's of candor and yearning, the dim and rainswept Glasgow streets:  all of this is viewed from a covert perspective, from, in fact, the alien's point of view; the movie has a little of glacial, inhuman purity of Michael Haneke's Cache.   But the casual viewer can't distinguished what is staged from what is documentary in this picture because it is all uniformly muted and de-dramatized.  The most effective and wonderful parts of the film are the landscapes:  we see fog-shrouded moors and icy mountains that look like they are on moons of Jupiter, romantic unearthly vistas, and there is a scene on a beach involving enormous waves crashing against a rock-girt coast that is reminiscent of Flaherty's Man of Aran.  In one particularly beautiful shot, the alien lies on her side to sleep cradled in a forest of superimposed trees rocking back and forth in the wind -- it is a wonderfully poetic, if icy, image.  This film is a heroic failure -- nothing in it really works although some of the landscapes are indelible:  a scene in which the naked disfigured man wanders across a moor toward a miserable-looking suburb is like something imagined by William Blake.  The movie was made over a period of ten years and financed by the British Film Institute (the financier of last resort for UK films that are challenging and without commercial prospects -- BFI sponsored Terence Davies' masterpiece, The Long Day Closes), but all of this labor and craft seems to have been in vain:  the movie is neither fish nor fowl -- it's not lurid and scary enough (and its effects are too strange) to be successful as a thriller or a horror film, and, at the same time, it's too pulpy and predictable to be effective as an art-house picture. 

Rene Magritte (Chicago Insitute of Art -- August 1, 2014)

The exhibition of paintings by Rene Magritte at the Chicago Institute of Art is diverting and spooky, but pointless. Magritte is the least painterly of the Surrealists and, I think, probably the most pure:  beauty didn't concern him much during the period addressed in this show and his images are astringent, dry, and highly conceptual.  For this reason, reproduction of Magritte's canvases as plates in books or on postcards suffices for the viewer to get the point -- the pictures are singularly lacking in "aura" and seeing them in person doesn't add to their appeal.  In fact, the show includes several versions of Magritte's most famous inventions reproduced by the artist as woodcuts or black and white engravings in chap-books -- and, indeed, I'm not sure whether the black and white graphics precede the paintings or vice-versa.  The works of art in the exhibition were made in Brussels and Paris during the period from 1925 to 1938 when Magritte was an apostle of Andre Breton; labels next to the images document Magritte's inevitable falling-out with the "Pope" of the Surrealists.  Many of Magritte's "greatest hits" are displayed in the show:  you can see the lovers kissing one another with their heads swathed in sinister-looking hoods, the shoes with toes on their reddish leather exterior (two versions), the locomotive rammed into the hearth in a cozy little room, the nude woman wrestling with a shadow man who is also her coat, an oddly distorted, trapezoidal frame containing an image of a woman's pubis and so on.  You've seen all of these images in books and the paintings are just larger, brighter, more dramatically lit, versions.  Magritte was enormously inventive and his paintings featuring words have a philosophical depth; they are like quirky exercises by Wittgenstein:  A picture of a pipe, most famously, accompanied by the French inscription "This is not a pipe" and a dozen or so other canvases with images either mislabeled or frames vacant except for a word painted there like "sky" or "wind".  But you don't take any pleasure, other than an abstract, intellectual one, in studying these pictures.  In a few of the early works, Magritte toyed with painting parts of the canvas as if it were ripped or torn, anticipating, it seems, Lucio Fontana, and some of his picture that feature pasty white discombobulated body parts seem to influenced Robert Gober.  The pictures are shown in darkened halls and the last gallery consists of a long corridor with specimens of Magritte's art hung seriatim in dim nooks.  Displayed in bright neutral light against a neutral background, I think these pictures would likely lose whatever appeal that they have as painted objects -- but the darkness and the grim, sepulchral silence of the spectators (why are people so terribly pious in art museums?) gives the pictures the monitory effect of emblems.  Only one object in the show struck me with any force:  this was a death mask of Napoleon, it seemed, the creamy white cast painted with a pale blue sky adorned with fluffy clouds.  Lit dramatically, this sculpture had an impressive effect.  (The Chicago Art Institute is too large for comfortable viewing and there were several other things on display worth careful perusal -- unfortunately, ocular exhaustion sets in after about two hours and it's hard to give things seen later in the day their due:  the photographer, Josef Koudelka, is represented by a huge retrospective of his images -- many of them, particularly, the late panoramas are spectacular -- he photographs the ruins of Greek and Roman cities as if they were Hiroshima or Nagasaki and images of the Russians invading Czechoslovakia in the sixties and European gypsies were suitably harrowing.  Bruce Nauman's hideously annoying, but important, video installation "Clown Torture" was on display:  Pete and Repete were sitting in a boat.  Pete fell out.  Who was left?  There was also an impressive, although opaque, display of Mexican political woodcuts and engravings -- I didn't have the energy to decipher the imagery to figure out who was satirizing whom.)

Matthias Goerne (at the Ravinia Music Festival on July 31, 2014)

Reached by commuter train, Ravinia Music Park seems a place set apart, a sylvan locus amoenus hidden in the woods.  The northbound Metra Train, headed for Waukegan and Kenosha, forges ahead through a tunnel of forest, a dense wall of green on both sides of the right-of-way.  For all I know, this rail-side thicket is merely a boundary grove, shrubbery at the rear of some rich man's estate or the trees veiling the parking lot of a big shopping mall.  But from the moving train, the woods along the right-of-way look dark and deep and mysterious with shadow.  The park itself seems also enclosed in forest, a few acres of lawn with wooden pavilions of uncertain age and provenance, some restaurants in buildings that look like National Park lodges, sculptures and statuary on pedestals along the paths and backed into niches in the groves along the edge of the property.  Noble trees shade the grass and elegant-looking people are dining al fresco, reclining like the Romans of the Decadence on lawn chairs, dazzling white tablecloths spread on the grass as a background to their wines, their artisan breads, their brie and camembert.  For this Thursday night concert of German art-songs, sparsely attended as one might imagine, the gelato concessions and the kiosks selling souvenirs are shuttered.  The evening advances and the lawn becomes dark and, for the concert in the Martin Theater, the ushers open front and side doors to the night and one expects that bats, perhaps, will penetrate the concert hall and enliven it with their swoops and dizzying lunges.  I don't know what is beyond the railroad track, the small parking lot next to the right-of-way and the tunnel that leads under the tracks into the music park with its arched, wooden gate.  Perhaps, a bustling city is just beyond the wall of trees but who knows?  Here, the night is grey and smooth as the fur of a Siamese cat and the remote arcades of trees are hushed.  Matthias Goerne is a Weimar-born baritone, the heir to Fischer-Dieskau.  His voice is a gift from the gods, almost too lush and candied.  He used his ordinary speaking voice on several occasions to announce encores (both cabaret-style ballads with words by Brecht), and, even in that application, the tone of his speech was remarkably resonant -- like an old-time FM disk-jockey whispering into the microphone after the midnight hour on a show featuring smooth jazz.  Goerne sang selections from the Hollywood Song Book, mostly small lapidary Lieder with words by Brecht set by the composer Hanns Eisler in 1942 -- the songs were not performed until 1982.  Eisler was a refugee from the Nazis who washed-up like many other German emigres in Hollywood.  He wrote scores for Hollywood features including the noteworthy Hangmen Also Die directed by Fritz Lang from a screenplay by Brecht but seems to have detested southern California, was appalled by the overt, if honest, hucksterism of the movie business, and suffered pangs of homesickness.  Goerne's voice is almost too rich for the Hollywood Liederbuch -- Brecht's poems are sardonic and ferocious, frequently obscene (the "angels" of Los Angeles smell of KY jelly and sport gold pessaries), and seem to suggest something less honeyed that Goerne's fantastically beautiful tones.  Nonetheless, it was a great pleasure to hear Goerne's voice and his phrasing and, of course, musically the concert seemed to me impeccable.  The little songs slip by at high speed, sung without more than a few seconds intervening, and some of the Lieder are only forty or fifty seconds long.  Eisler, who was deported from the US during the Red scare, ended up in East Germany where he actually wrote the DDR's national anthem.  On the evidence of the songs Goerne presented, Eisler was a dour, humorless German of exquisite musical sensibility -- one important element of his art is Eisler's modesty:  his songwriting is essentially unassuming and the little songs remain miniatures -- Eisler doesn't have the singer repeat important lines for emphasis, doesn't embellish, and doesn't overtly dramatize the words.   Between sets of Hollywood Liederbuch songs, Goerne presented a half-dozen or so longer and more ambitious-seeming songs by Hugo Wolf, particularly some very lush late Romantic settings of poems by Goethe.  The orotund declamatory beauty of those settings seemed to me, perhaps, more ideally suited to Goerne's supernaturally rich voice.  Also part of the program were Eisler's settings of several sonnets by Michelangelo -- these were more conventionally declamatory as well, fierce, operatic and defiant and, therefore, well-suited to Goerne's instrument, and one of these songs, featuring a narrator who turns out to be dead was sufficiently eerie and surprising to send chills up your spine.  Several of Eisler's songs, called Ernste Lieder ("Serious Songs") set Hoelderlin odes to music -- Hoelderlin's difficult diction and the complexity of his verse, often rife with odd unexpected reversals of meaning, is almost too dense for musical presentation.  Goerne's work on those poems was splendid but the songs were hard to grasp in this setting and, I suppose, profound, requiring additional study.  (Similarly, two Eisler songs in English based on Pascal Pensees were too dense and abstract to be appreciated on first hearing.)  Goerne is a small, dumpy-looking German who would not be out of place at a beer festival in New Ulm.  He has a pasty complexion and staring, completely globular eyes that look as if they were inserted into his skull by a taxidermist.  He is a good actor -- a necessity for a practitioner of Lieder (and, indeed, an opera star) -- and, at times, when singing some of the more unheimlich and satirical Hollywood songs (a few feature Dante-esque imagery), he glares at the audience with alarm as if he has just seen a ghost.  He gestures but in a constricted way, holding his short arms close to his belly and gives the impression of an irritated Tyrannosaurus Rex.  There is something wrong with his lower right leg -- he seems to have suffered a severe injury to his ankle and calf and his leg bends inward from the knee:  it looks like an ill-fitted prosthesis or the effect of a motorcycle accident.  One of the songs is about suicide and Goerne embalms the words in sickly self-pity using an uncanny and unearthly falsetto for the word "unbearable":  unertraeglich ("ihr unertraegliches Leben fort" - casting your unbearable life away) -- Goerne twists and distorts the word, tilting it askew with Gesualdo-like quarter-tones, then, he barks out the word fort as loud as he can.  The audience jumped about a foot in the air. The Martin Theater, where the recital was performed, is a comfortable shed with a lofty, rafter-built ceiling.  The singer performs on a small stage in front of the grand piano played by his accompanist.  To the right and left of the stage, there are banks of brightly colored organ pipes -- whether these are functional was unclear to me but they were decorative, garlands of shapely, painted columns.  During the second half of the concert, the house-lights were left on so that the audience could better follow the lyrics in both German and English in a hand-out provided at the door.  A Liederabend is not successful unless the audience can read the words as they are performed and this was possible, even easy, during the second part of the program.

Wise Blood -- Film Group Essay

　

　
A disheartening, or, perhaps, thrilling (depending upon your perspective), aspect of Flannery O’Connor’s writing is that her short stories and novels are always allegorical in an obvious way. Her characters are not intended as representative of actual human beings; rather, they are ciphers or place-holders for theological concepts. As with John Bunyan and Nathaniel Hawthorne, her narratives must be deciphered: the text must be translated from the ordinary world into a metaphysical landscape. Furthermore, the metaphysical landscape invoked by O’Connor is very distinct, and particular – her writings must be construed in light of the particular species of southern Roman Catholicism to which the writer subscribed. (Since Roman Catholics were distrusted and, even, the victims of discrimination in small-town Georgia, where O’Connor grew up, there is a cryptic element to her literary practice: she conceals with allegory meanings that it might be inconvenient, or, perhaps, dangerous to express outright.)

John Huston, who directed the 1979 adaptation of Wise Blood, was an avowed atheist who despised organized religion. Unwilling to translate the narrative into theological terms that he disdained, Huston thought that he was making a grotesque southern Gothic comedy. Only when the film was cut and edited did Huston acknowledge "I’ve been had!" telling the producer: "I guess Jesus wins."

Theological allegory operates through stereotypical characters, usually figures with only one or two salient attributes – someone who represents faith or charity or despair – who act in a generalized nondescript landscape. In a fundamental sense, allegory can’t be filmed. A flesh and blood human being acting on film always has more dimensions, more possibilities of action, than an integer presented on the page. Similarly, the actor must be presented in some sort of landscape or milieu – there will be buildings, streets, passers-by, road-signs, cars, all the furnishings of reality confounding the simplicity and tight focus of an allegorical presentation. To some degree, Huston and his screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, generalize the landscape temporally – when does the action of Wise Blood take place? The hero has returned from a war with an unspecified wound. But what war? He takes an old-fashioned steam engine that billows smoke and steam to Taukingham. But we see modern cars on the streets of the city and there are several shots of Hazel Motes’ driving on a freeway. And if the period in which the story, which O’Connor would claim as "timeless," is unclear, confounded by inconsistent clues, the city where most of the action occurs is specific and readily identifiable: we are in Macon, Georgia.

Wise Blood embodies the difficulties of transferring a generalizing archetypal allegorical narrative into a medium that is photographically specific: we are never looking at a "city street" in a general or abstract sense; rather, film makes us look at this specific city street, a place located in a specific time and place and occupied by specific people. (Wise Blood was shot entirely on location in Macon; part of the film’s appeal is its dense and realistic evocation of that place. But one must question whether a film like this might not be better produced on a film studio set. Film studios are expert in producing generic locations: "a city street" as opposed to "Jefferson Davis Avenue in Macon, Georgia.")



The Fitzgeralds

Wise Blood was produced by Michael Fitzgerald. The script is credited to Benedict Fitzgerald (with John Huston). Who are these people and how did they become connected with this project?

Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald are the sons of Robert Fitzgerald. Robert Fitzgerald was among the leading classicists in the post-war (what war? WWII) literary scene. Fitzgerald lived in Redding, Connecticut and taught at Yale. Fitzgerald was friends with the great American poet, Robert Lowell. (Fitzgerald was acclaimed for the highly poetic quality of his translations from the Greek – most famously his Iliad and Odyssey.)

Robert Lowell had met Flannery O’Connor, probably at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. (There is a picture of her with Arthur Koestler of all persons touring the Amana Colonies in Iowa.) Lowell knew that O’Connor had written some excellent and disturbing short stories and that she was trying to convert some of those stories into a novel. (O’Connor’s imagination was essentially that of a short story writer – her two novels are comprised of episodes that were previously developed in short stories.) It appears that the young and impressionable O’Connor was in love with Lowell but the older man rejected her advances. O’Connor needed a quiet place to write, remote from family demands in Milledgville, Georgia where she lived. Lowell suggested that O’Connor rent a room from Robert Fitzgerald and his then-wife, Sally, in Redding, Connecticut. He spoke with Fitzgerald who agreed to this plan and Ms. O’Connor spent several months living over the classicist’s garage – on the East Coast, a place like this is called "a mother-in-law apartment." The Fitzgerald’s were devout Catholics and so the relationship between landlord and tenant was close and strong.

O’Connor babysat for the Fitzgerald’s two sons, Michael and Benedict. At that time, they were toddlers. She became close to the Fitzgerald’s, particularly Sally Fitzgerald. Michael Benedict says that his father was translating Oedipus Rex at that time and claims that the self-blinding motif in Wise Blood originates in discussions between Robert Fitzgerald and O’Connor about the Sophocles play.

O’Connor moved back to Georgia and in 1949 was diagnosed with terminal lupus erythematous. She survived 14 years although in an increasingly debilitated condition. She remained very close to the Fitzgerald’s, particularly Sally, and appointed them to be the literary executors of her estate. Michael and Benedict recall her visits to Connecticut after her illness – she walked with a cane and was obviously unwell. O’Connor died in 1964.

Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald were raised in Ireland. (Although this part of the story isn’t clear, it seems, that marital troubles between Robert and Sally required that they live there for extended periods of time.) In the early seventies, they returned to the United States and went to Los Angeles to seek their fortune. They knocked-about Hollywood for a couple of years, trying to peddle film scripts with no success. Benedict decided to write a film adaptation of Wise Blood. (It is probably best not to inquire too closely into the circumstances by which Benedict acquired rights to adapt the novel from his mother, executor of O’Connor’s literary estate. Sally Fitzgerald is named as one of the producers of the film.)

Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald knew John Huston slightly. Huston had a lavish country estate in Ireland and, apparently, had some interactions with the Fitzgerald’s. On the basis of this slight acquaintance, Michael called Huston and asked him if might be interested in directing a film adaptation of Wise Blood. Huston was a figure larger-than-life, very generous, although also tyrannical and self-centered. Huston was intrigued and invited the Fitzgerald boys to discuss the project with him. (This took considerably chutzpah since the script was not even remotely complete at this time.) Huston invited the boys to his home, said that he would make the movie, and, even, took them with him to his compound in Mexico (a souvenir of his work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) to discuss the project. (There is a wonderful photograph of the bearded and grizzled Huston emerging from the water like the Old Man of the Sea a half-dozen yards from a pristine beach adorned with thatched huts – it looks like a production still from a movie, which, indeed, it probably is.)

It took Benedict three years to complete the script and raise money for the film – the movie was shot nonunion on a budget of $500,000 using mostly unknown actors. Huston, a highly experienced and professional studio film maker, shot only footage that he thought was necessary to be edited into a finished cut. Location camera-work was accomplished between the end of January and St. Patrick’s Day 1979. The film was cut in another two months and ready for the Cannes Film Festival in that same year. Wise Blood was an international success and highly regarded by critics; reviews were unanimous that the film was one of Huston’s best pictures. The picture is often cited as an example of an independently-produced movie that has been exceptionally successful.

(The story has a sequel of sorts. Mel Gibson hired Benedict Fitzgerald to write the script for The Passion of the Christ. That movie, of course, is the most successful independently produced film of all time. Fitzgerald worked for a small stipend because Gibson represented to him, Fitzgerald alleges, that the movie had a tiny budget. In fact, the budget was much larger than was disclosed to Benedict Fitzgerald and, when the film became a juggernaut at the box-office, Fitzgerald sued for a percentage of the profits, alleging that he was defrauded by Gibson. The lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum of money.)

　

Flannery O’Connor’s Theology

These propositions are embodied in O’Connor’s writing:

1. By natural law, all creatures are equipped with only those instincts and appetites necessary to secure their creaturely existence;

2. Unlike the lower animals, human beings have an instinct for the divine and an appetite for salvation (I will call this "the religious impulse");

3. Since human beings have this religious impulse, they ceaselessly manufacture idols and false gods; similarly, our religious impulse causes us to ceaselessly devise systems for our salvation that are not only false but wicked – "no man with a good car needs to be justified," as Hazel Motes says;

4. The religious impulse can be truly satisfied only by the exercise of devotion consistent with the revelations of the Old and New Testaments and the teachings of the Holy Mother Church (that is, the Roman Catholic Church);

5. Human beings often repress their religious impulse and, even, inauthentically pretend that it doesn’t exist. But in extremis, when people are facing death, mutilation, or catastrophetheir religious impulse surfaces and they seek salvation;
6. There are only three ways for human beings to exercise their innate religious impulse.
                   – they may pretend it doesn’t exist and go about cloaked in their animal nature;

                   – they may follow a false savior;

                   – they may subscribe to, and follow, the teachings the Roman Catholic Church.

7. There is only one true path to salvation: exercise of devotion in accord with Roman Catholic doctrine. All other pathways are heresies that lead to destruction and damnation.

This is a summary of the doctrine that underlies Flannery O’Connors’ writings. She is a near-great writer. Had she lived longer, she might have become a great writer on the model of Dostoevsky.  As a near-great writer, O’Connor works out the implications of her creed in her fiction, reviews, and criticism. A great writer would question her creed and work out the implications of her skepticism and doubt as to whether doctrines that she holds true and necessary are, in fact, worthy of belief. (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Melville have this trait of greatness: that is, believing with all their heart and soul that a certain doctrine is true and, yet, at the same time doubting whether that doctrine is consistent with human nature.)

Both Enoch and Hazel Motes in Wise Blood exemplify O’Connor’s views as to the fate of human beings who have not received the doctrines of the Holy Roman Church. Enoch, in fact, is a parody of Hazel Motes just as the character of played by Ned Beatty also caricatures Motes. Enoch elects a shriveled mummy that he has stolen from a museum to be his savior. He is a "natural man" who works in the zoo tending to the creaturely needs of animals. When Hazel Motes destroys Enoch’s savior – the withered mummy – Enoch decides that he will become an animal. He murders the inhabitant of the Gorgo ape-suit and hides his humanity under the gorilla costume. He denies God by trying to become a mere animal. Hazel Motes puts his hopes in his car, the literal vehicle of his salvation. He defies God by founding the Church of Jesus Christ without Jesus Christ, a "Protestant sect" as Flannery O’Connor pointedly observes. As far as O’Connor is concerned, religious piety without the ordinances of the Catholic Church, always devolves into Protestant schism and heresy. She makes this clear by showing that Hazel Motes’ religiosity decays into fanaticism, self-mutilation, and madness when the secular vehicle for his salvation (his car) is destroyed. With an evangelical directness, O’Connor further drives the point home by showing that Hazel Motes’ Protestant church simply engenders heretical imitations – that is, heresies of heresies. (O’Connor would have regarded the Methodist and Baptist Churches as quack parodies of Lutheranism, itself a damnable heresy.)

O’Connor viewed most organized religion and piety with disgust. Her faith was pure, austere, and hopelessly inhuman in the demands that it placed on mere men and women. She wrote:
...No one can do again what Christ did. These modern "Christ’s" picture on war posters and in poems –"every man is a Jesus; every woman Mary...have made (French theologian Leon) Bloy retch. The rest of us have lost our power to vomit.
Nonetheless, O’Connor regarded the deep South as "Christ-haunted" – that is, at least, close enough to the Truth to recognize what had been lost.

The fate of human beings, intrinsically and instinctively religious, yet lacking the true revelation offered by the Catholic church is grotesque. Hence, the quality of the grotesque characteristic of O’Connor’s writing. The interesting difficulty that O’Connor’s allegories pose is that she shows every possible and grotesque variant of deformed religiosity, but is uninterested in displaying true faith and true religion. In other words, she provides her readers with negative exemplars of her doctrines but never produces anything like a positive depiction of what it might be like to be truly saved. There is no Father Zosima (as in The Brothers Karamazov in her work).



Philology

What is a "chifforobe?" Recall that in the first few minutes of Wise Blood, Hazel Motes returns to the rotting home where he was raised, discovers the "chifforobe," and posts a note on that piece of furniture claiming it.

A chifforobe or chifferobe is a free-standing armoire that contains a tall space for hanging garments and a chest of drawers. These items of furniture were first marketed to the masses in 1908 in the Sears and Roebuck catalog. The word chifforobe is used in the American south, but has been attested in rural environs as far north as Vermont. By some confusion, the word has also come to mean "water closet" or "potty" in some places – although this is by no means common.

　



John Huston


John Huston was sort of director whose personal charisma and adventures threaten to eclipse the films that he made – his biography is more colorful and interesting than some of his films. (Another "man’s man," Clint Eastwood directed an excellent film about Huston, White Hunter, Black Heart, a 1990 picture lightly fictionalizing events that occurred during the shooting of The African Queen on the dark continent). People who aren’t interested in film as an art-form admire Huston: he made vigorous, sinewy no-nonsense pictures and was a master narrator. Watching his movies sometimes is a little like attending to the words of a marvelous half-drunk raconteur in an Irish tavern. And like many such raconteurs, Huston’s vice, on occasion, is mistaking his passionate interest in things like soldiering and skirt-chasing for an interest always shared by his audience: like many great barroom story-tellers, he is sometimes too full of himself and a bit of a bore.

Huston was the product of a broken family, devoted to a domineering mother whose influence he sought to conceal by displays of machismo. His father, Walter Huston, was a great Broadway and Hollywood actor and figures in an important role in one of the director’s most indelible films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1949). Huston wrote many famous scripts for the studios in the thirties and first directed in 1941; his maiden film was The Maltese Falcon. It would be tedious to list Huston’s many movies, most of them highly regarded. Highlights are The African Queen and The Red Badge of Courage, both made in 1951, Moby Dick (1956), The Man Who Would be King (1974), Prizzi’s Honor (1979), and The Dead, his last picture and a distinguished adaptation of Joyce’s novella, released to much acclaim in 1987. He also made the eccentric Beat the Devil (1953) and a two remarkable documentaries about the effects of World War Two combat, The Battle of San Pietro (1944) and Let there be Light (1945) about shell-shock. Both movies commissioned by the United States Army were so powerful and truthful that they were promptly censored and not shown for twenty-five years. (The luster of The Battle of San Pietro, long regarded as the most authentic portrayal of infantry combat ever filmed, has been tarnished a bit by revelations that many of the film’s harrowing battle scenes were filmed on maneuvers or were staged.)

John Huston was a film maker particularly favored by my father and I recall seeing many of his movies on TV when I was a small boy. I thought The Maltese Falcon dull, perhaps, because I didn’t understand the erotic byplay between Bogart and the nefarious Mary Astor – I still think the picture is over-complicated and tedious. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was too long for a child, particularly when shown on TV with many commercial interruptions, but, of course, once seen the madness of Fred C. Dobbs is something that will stay with you the rest of your life. Moby Dick astounded me: I saw it when I was eight or nine and it changed my life. I immediately sought out Melville’s novel, read the book with voracious appetite and, then, re-read the book with critical notes. The second reading interested me so much that I developed a lifelong avocation for literature. Huston was also a great, if wildly flamboyant, actor: his monstrous Noah Cross is one of the best things in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1971).

For Huston, film is storytelling. The medium is transparent: in a Huston film, you aren’t supposed to notice camera work or editing. Acting is foremost and all effects serve the story. Huston didn’t care about art and he subordinated style to narrative. By the time, he was 15, Huston was a well-known semi-professional boxer in California. He rode with the Mexican cavalry and, once, when he made love to a beautiful socialite in a borrowed bed, they broke the bed. He hunted big game, played high-stakes poker, collected art, and once co-wrote a film-script with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was the Master of the Fox Hounds in County Galway, Ireland and directed Marilyn Monroe twice – in her debut picture, The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and a decade later in her last film, The Misfits with Montgomery Clift.