In Woody Allen's simple, but compelling, Irrational Man (2015), a nihilistic philosophy professor arrives in a small college town for the purpose of teaching several summer session courses. The teacher, named Abe Lucas, is a mess -- he continuously sips booze from a silver flask, can't finish his book (yet another self-righteous tome on Heidegger and fascism), and, although he effortlessly attracts both undergraduate girls and unhappily married professorial types, is impotent with them. At a party with some of his students, the professor's self-destructive behavior reaches its nadir -- he demonstrates his existentialism by playing Russian Roulette. (One would think that these antics would put a period to Lucas' professional career, but Allen's film is a fable and lapses in narrative plausibility don't concern the director or us.) At a diner, Lucas hears a woman complaining about a corrupt judge who has deprived her of custody of her children and decides that he will murder the man. Inspired by this resolution, Lucas discovers that life's savor has returned -- he is resolute, productive, writes love poems, and recovers his masculine virility. The professor, after helpfully annotating a copy of Crime and Punishment -- Irrational Man's Abe Lucas is a pint-sized Raskolnikov -- murders the judge with poison and congratulates himself on committing the perfect crime. Of course, the scheme comes unraveled and the professor finds himself facing unanticipated consequences of his acte gratuite.
Irrational Man begins with a reference to Immanual Kant and seems to endorse the Prussian philosopher's uncompromising ethics. In his first class, Lucas challenges Kant's categorical prohibition on lying -- he uses the same example that a thousand community college professors have deployed: what if the lie was to protect Anne Frank concealed in your attic from her Nazi persecutors? A student plausibly argues that authorizing some lies will cast us onto a slippery slope -- it will be hard to ascertain which lies are permissible and which are not, and given mankind's well-known propensity toward rationalization, all hell will break loose if we open the floodgates. (I've always admired Kant's ethics and, it seems, that Woody Allen in his old age, may have come to my point-of-view. The better argument in favor of Kant's impractical and dogmatic argument against lying is dramatized by the film: we don't have the capacity to measure all of the consequences of a lie -- a falsehood may be justified in terms of its immediate beneficial consequences but we can't predict the unintended consequences that may subsequently ensue.) Although there is some desultory love-making in the film, Woody Allen's primary interest seems to be in unteasing the implications of Kant's categorical imperative. Lucas has sex with both a student and a married woman, but the sexual transgression is not viewed as a moral problem -- rather, the sexual relationships exist for a very fundamental plot purpose: Abe Lucas is a loner and he needs someone to talk to -- this function is played by his two love interests, the needy and decadent older woman, played by Parker Posey, and the dewy-eyed undergraduate ingénue (Emma Stone). As is often the case with Woody Allen films, autobiography lurks only a little beneath the surface: Allen's characters always have love affairs with women vastly younger than them and, I think, the director was involved in a famously contentious child custody battle with Mia Farrow -- hence there is an element of wish fulfillment in the plot involving the murder of the judge. Irrational Man is a late work as that term is sometimes used in art criticism: the story is schematically developed with absolute clarity -- indeed, Allen uses unnecessary voice-over narrative (Lucas and the undergraduate girl) to make certain that the viewer doesn't miss any information of significance. The film eschews any kind of fancy editing and there are no attempts at pictorial beauty -- each shot is logically constructed and cut for maximum intelligibility. The movie is similar to Bresson except that the French director's minimalism sometimes is foregrounded and has a showy aspect -- all those picture of people's feet in L'Argent, for instance. Allen's work is even more minimalist than Bresson in that he doesn't draw any attention to the extreme economy of means used to propel his- narrative. In late work, an artist uses larger-than-life characters to make his points, tends toward allegory or parable, and eliminates unnecessary complications -- Irrational Man shows all of these characteristics: Lucas' flaws are overt and dramatic, the story is exceedingly schematic, and there are no subplots or unnecessary characters in the film. Considered in these terms, there is a risk that the viewer might find the film cold and abstract. But this risk is avoided by two elements. First, the viewer knows that Woody Allen is quite capable of dramatizing crime that has no consequence or that, indeed, actually enriches the perpetrator -- both Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point involve premeditated murders that are successful, that are unsolved by the police, and that, in fact, serve the best interests of the protagonist. Thus, the viewer has the frisson of knowing that, in Woody Allen's world, crime sometimes pays -- this means that there is a good chance that Abe Lucas will get away with this murder. Second, the film is scored to a pulsating and jaunty jazz score that considerably enlivens the proceedings -- whenever, things seem to get too abstract and airless, the jazz music on the soundtrack saves the day.
Monday, February 8, 2016
Superbowl half-time entertainment and Rammstein
The last ten minutes of the first half in this Spring's Greatest Game in the World reminds me why I don't waste my time watching professional football. Obviously, the bookies in Vegas and the sponsors needed parity, or something close to it, at the end of the 2nd quarter -- if one team pulls away from the other, a risk exists that consumers might start switching stations and, thus, forsaking million-dollar a second commercials. And, so, the fix was radioed to the teams and they spent ten minutes of game time haplessly throwing the ball away, dropping passes that would ordinarily be easily caught, committing infractions to stall their advances, and, when necessary, simply pitching the ball to the ground in a series of scarcely simulated fumbles. It was obvious to anyone watching that this part of the game was as scripted as pro-wrestling if rather ineptly and obviously. After about the third fumble, it was clear that one or the other of the teams was still moving the ball successfully on the ground -- it was impossible for me to tell which team was which. Accordingly, Payton Manning, a famous quarterback with unerring aim, had to throw an interception in order to reverse his team's momentum -- the whole spectacle was disheartening and pathetic. Whenever football teams take to the air -- that is, throw lots of passes -- they are doing the bidding of their masters, the bookies and odds-makers: it is much easier to fix a game by manipulating forward passes than by running. (After all, some of these players are speedy and it looks foolish for them to slow down so that their much less fleet adversaries can bring them to ground.)
After a cavalcade of car commercials and ads for junkfood and prescription medication, Chris Martin took the stage for the half-time show, hopping around on a weird platform shaped like a four-leaf clover. Martin is the lead singer in Cold Play and he bounced up and down enthusiastically while the platform beneath him changed colors -- nothing too psychedelic, but rather whirling arrays of pastels the color of different types of bubble-gum. Crowds of Middle School girls sawed at their violins in ranks around the stage and, then, marching bands emerged from the sidelines flanked by dancers whirling like dervishes under pink and green and aquamarine blossom-shaped parasols. The Game was played on the West Coast and the half-time show had the distinct disadvantage of being performed in broad daylight, without glamorous mists of spotlight-pierced dry-ice vapor, and so, I'm afraid, the whole spectacle was more than a little prosaic. While Cold Play was still performing Bruno Mars appeared out of nowhere -- at least, the spectacle was edited in that way -- with a cadre of dancers all wearing black vinyl butcher-boy suits. He danced around and crooned and, then, the tall and shapely Beyoncé arrived at the party as well, leading a phalanx of dancers with identical bodies and hair-dos -- each girl had her Afro teased out into two buns at the side of her head, thus giving the dancing girls the general appearance of Mickey Mouse. The folks who effectively film the football game from every possible vantage, cutting together the action to create suspenseful micro-narratives (will the team get a first in ten? why does the coach look so distressed? is the field-goal kicker up to the task?), seemed to have no concept how to film this show. Clearly Beyoncé and Bruno Mars were located somewhere on the same platform and, from their feral snarling and mating displays, one could conclude that the two tribes of dancers were approaching one another -- but the cameramen never drew back into a long shot to show the relationship between the opposing groups of dancers. It was an obvious defect and one that left a huge hollow in the presentation -- Mars and Beyoncé cut together as if dancing on different planets when, in fact, the entire micro-narrative operative in this part of the show was their gradual coming together, their coalescence into one packed group of dancers. Ultimately, the union between the two groups occurred and the dancers collided, more or less, and the regimented troops of child fiddlers and plumed marching bands and spinning-top daisies and daffodils, all crowded around the platform, moving rhythmically after the manner of a patriotic North Korean spectacle while the lobes of the platform flashed out images from past Superbowl shows, all of them (with the exception of the jetpack guy who looked like the Duff beer guy on The Simpsons) regrettably better than this presentation, and, then, the directors of this show pulled out one of the oldest chestnuts in the repertoire, necessary in this case because the sun resolutely refused to set so as to impart any glamor to the proceedings, the old trick of members of the audience flashing cards in unison to blink out a message to the heavens, spelling out in house-high cards something about love.
The night before I watched another spectacle, probably not much more edifying, but far more dramatic. This was a DVD of Rammstein performing at Madison Square Garden in 2010. Before the intermission, Till Lindeman, the band's singer hopped on a pink cannon the size of a front-end loader and ejaculated immense quantities of some kind of white foam into the audience -- this was the climax of a humble little ditty called "Pussy." In the second half of the show, Till squatted on stage rhythmically hammering away at his knee while a dozen yards behind him the impish Flocka mimicked him, all of this occurring within a dense industrial haze of smoke and fire and puddles of leaking oil. Flocka jumped on a treadmill and marched in place while playing his keyboard and, then, Till appeared in the polluted fog wearing a carapace of iron wings, the scaffolding of tubes and pipes and valves about ten or twelve feet tall. Till spread his wings and, then, fire billowed out of their tips and, from hidden spigots in the floor, more fire fountained up in orange pillars and, in the audience, 50,000 kids in black leather bellowed German words that they could not understand in the slightest. Rammstein performs without subtitles and the DVD didn't translate the lyrics -- Till purports to consider the words to his songs as mere noise and, therefore, says that he doesn't care if the audience understands what is being sung. This is unfortunate because Till, is, in fact, a talented German lyric poet, a writer on the order of Trakl or Stefan Georg and, when he is not engaging in naked provocation, his verses are well-constructed, rhyme neatly, and contain lines (and, even, whole stanzas) that would not be out of place in Goethe's Erlkoenig. It is hard to exactly articulate the appeal of Rammstein's noisy industrial pyrotechnics, but the band has a presence that is impossible to ignore. I hope that they will be invited to perform at the Super Bowl soon.
After a cavalcade of car commercials and ads for junkfood and prescription medication, Chris Martin took the stage for the half-time show, hopping around on a weird platform shaped like a four-leaf clover. Martin is the lead singer in Cold Play and he bounced up and down enthusiastically while the platform beneath him changed colors -- nothing too psychedelic, but rather whirling arrays of pastels the color of different types of bubble-gum. Crowds of Middle School girls sawed at their violins in ranks around the stage and, then, marching bands emerged from the sidelines flanked by dancers whirling like dervishes under pink and green and aquamarine blossom-shaped parasols. The Game was played on the West Coast and the half-time show had the distinct disadvantage of being performed in broad daylight, without glamorous mists of spotlight-pierced dry-ice vapor, and so, I'm afraid, the whole spectacle was more than a little prosaic. While Cold Play was still performing Bruno Mars appeared out of nowhere -- at least, the spectacle was edited in that way -- with a cadre of dancers all wearing black vinyl butcher-boy suits. He danced around and crooned and, then, the tall and shapely Beyoncé arrived at the party as well, leading a phalanx of dancers with identical bodies and hair-dos -- each girl had her Afro teased out into two buns at the side of her head, thus giving the dancing girls the general appearance of Mickey Mouse. The folks who effectively film the football game from every possible vantage, cutting together the action to create suspenseful micro-narratives (will the team get a first in ten? why does the coach look so distressed? is the field-goal kicker up to the task?), seemed to have no concept how to film this show. Clearly Beyoncé and Bruno Mars were located somewhere on the same platform and, from their feral snarling and mating displays, one could conclude that the two tribes of dancers were approaching one another -- but the cameramen never drew back into a long shot to show the relationship between the opposing groups of dancers. It was an obvious defect and one that left a huge hollow in the presentation -- Mars and Beyoncé cut together as if dancing on different planets when, in fact, the entire micro-narrative operative in this part of the show was their gradual coming together, their coalescence into one packed group of dancers. Ultimately, the union between the two groups occurred and the dancers collided, more or less, and the regimented troops of child fiddlers and plumed marching bands and spinning-top daisies and daffodils, all crowded around the platform, moving rhythmically after the manner of a patriotic North Korean spectacle while the lobes of the platform flashed out images from past Superbowl shows, all of them (with the exception of the jetpack guy who looked like the Duff beer guy on The Simpsons) regrettably better than this presentation, and, then, the directors of this show pulled out one of the oldest chestnuts in the repertoire, necessary in this case because the sun resolutely refused to set so as to impart any glamor to the proceedings, the old trick of members of the audience flashing cards in unison to blink out a message to the heavens, spelling out in house-high cards something about love.
The night before I watched another spectacle, probably not much more edifying, but far more dramatic. This was a DVD of Rammstein performing at Madison Square Garden in 2010. Before the intermission, Till Lindeman, the band's singer hopped on a pink cannon the size of a front-end loader and ejaculated immense quantities of some kind of white foam into the audience -- this was the climax of a humble little ditty called "Pussy." In the second half of the show, Till squatted on stage rhythmically hammering away at his knee while a dozen yards behind him the impish Flocka mimicked him, all of this occurring within a dense industrial haze of smoke and fire and puddles of leaking oil. Flocka jumped on a treadmill and marched in place while playing his keyboard and, then, Till appeared in the polluted fog wearing a carapace of iron wings, the scaffolding of tubes and pipes and valves about ten or twelve feet tall. Till spread his wings and, then, fire billowed out of their tips and, from hidden spigots in the floor, more fire fountained up in orange pillars and, in the audience, 50,000 kids in black leather bellowed German words that they could not understand in the slightest. Rammstein performs without subtitles and the DVD didn't translate the lyrics -- Till purports to consider the words to his songs as mere noise and, therefore, says that he doesn't care if the audience understands what is being sung. This is unfortunate because Till, is, in fact, a talented German lyric poet, a writer on the order of Trakl or Stefan Georg and, when he is not engaging in naked provocation, his verses are well-constructed, rhyme neatly, and contain lines (and, even, whole stanzas) that would not be out of place in Goethe's Erlkoenig. It is hard to exactly articulate the appeal of Rammstein's noisy industrial pyrotechnics, but the band has a presence that is impossible to ignore. I hope that they will be invited to perform at the Super Bowl soon.
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Hail Caesar!
Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels is a persistent influence on films made by the Coen Bros. O Brother Where Art Thou lifted its title from the Sturges' movie and the chain gang prelude in the Coen's invokes the ending of Sullivan's Travels in which the errant movie star is confined, and, even, tortured in work camp in the deep South. Other Coen brother's films, Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy invoked the fast-talking, blithe world of Sturges' pictures. Hail Caesar!, an affectionate tribute to the old Hollywood studios, is a version of Sullivan's Travels focusing not on the movie star who flees the set to slum with the common man (although this is an element of the movie), but instead features the travails of a secondary character in Sturges' movie, the glib, tough money-man, an over-worked and cynical executive charged with keeping the studio's various productions on-budget and on-time. As in Sullivan's Travels, a movie star absconds -- George Clooney, the star of a Ben Hur knock-off, Hail Caesar!The Story of the Christ, is drugged on the set, kidnapped, and joins a cabal of conspirators plotting against the Hollywood studio system. But in the Coen brothers' film this problem is only one of several challenges eating-away at the self-confidence of Eddie Mannix, a brash studio executive who is at the end of his tether. Mannix, played by Josh Brolin, is a familiar type -- a busy producer who makes decisions Aaron Sorkin-style while hiking from soundstage to soundstage. You've seen a thousand pictures featuring this character -- a hard-drinking workaholic surviving on cigarettes and antacid: Hail Caesar! is primarily about Mannix and his hectic efforts to keep the various films that he is supervising on track. Lockheed, that is the military industrial complex, is courting Mannix, offering him better compensation, less agony, and much more off-work family time. The film takes place across a period of a day-and-a-half, observing, as it were, something like the classical unities since everything occurs sequentially in the period of time between two midnight confessions made by Mannix to his priest, the action all revolving around the studio executive, his difficulties with the pictures that he is producing, and his temptation to leave the show-business for the profession of arms-dealing: the recruiter for Lockheed flashes at Mannix a polaroid of the H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll, telling the studio exec that this top-secret event occurred six-months earlier -- this means that the film is set in October 1954, a half-year after the Castle Bravo test. At Capitol Studios, Mannix is beset by a sea of troubles -- the leading lady in his Esther Williams' mermaid extravaganzas, played by the foul-mouthed Scarlett Johansen is pregnant with no father in sight; upper management has cast a yodeling cowboy actor as the protagonist in a drawing room comedy with predictable results; dueling twin gossip columnists threaten to expose the Studio's most important property, the dim-witted if handsome leading man, George Clooney, as a sodomite and, most bafflingly, that actor has gone missing. The film is effectively directed and, as in all Coen brothers' films, the minor roles are wonderfully realized and evocatively cast -- Coen brothers' extras and supernumerary players always have a distinctive look and the reek of real life. The movie is witty with many effective episodes, but it doesn't always exactly cohere and some strands of the complicated plot are not sufficiently developed -- the movie would be more effective as a six to eight hour mini-series in which the subplots, many of them of very interesting, could be explored in more detailed. As it stands, the film scatters its energy among the different stories and, curiously, is just a tiny bit dull -- we don't really ever get enough of any subplot to be fully engaged with it. As an example, Scarlett Johansen's character, the mermaid, is fascinating but we don't see that much of her -- and her story is resolved so swiftly, mostly off-screen, that if you leave the theater for a minute to buy a soda pop or visit the restroom, you will miss the climax of that narrative. There is a very funny conclave of pastors and priests convened to address questions of religious propriety in the Ben-Hur knock-off -- not surprisingly, the conversation devolves into theological squabbles, after the Priest notes that the gimmick of the chariot driver leaping from horse to horse seems "faky" -- that adjective very precisely chosen and redolent of my own childhood. (I have a fond spot in my heart for the Coen brothers because their films inevitably involve passages or ideas that are very close to my own childhood concerns growing up in a suburb twenty miles away from the middle-class Minneapolis enclave where they were raised.) The religious experts include an intensely argumentative rabbi who fiercely opposes everything said, but, then, when asked if he has any opinions says: "Eh? No, I don't have any opinions" -- the point being that Jewish rabbis of a certain kind are intensely contrarian and adversarial although the point is not to win an argument but merely to enjoy the debate for its own sake. Curiously, the film ends on an inspiring note that is not too far from the conclusion of several of Preston Sturges' films -- it is a noble vocation to entertain others and, after all, the show, even if absurdly difficult, must go on. The studio executive slaps George Clooney, who has slithered into a flirtation with Communism, back to his senses -- henceforth, the actor will be a reliable servant of Das Kapital, that is, Capitol Studios. Repenting of his assault on the poor, trembling actor, the hero confesses to his priest: "Forgive me, father, for I have struck a movie star." Ultimately, the Coen brothers, as shown most powerfully in Fargo and A Serious Man, are moralists and their film is didactic, an edifying entertainment about fortitude, faith, and common sense virtue. The yodeling cowboy, who can shoot a villain at 70 paces riding upside down on his horse, can't pronounce a line of drawing room chatter to save his soul -- but it doesn't matter because the cowboy is a good man and he will be awarded, perhaps, with true love, by the end of the film. The aspect of this movie most likely to make critics uneasy is the Coen brothers' approach to the blacklist and the Red scare -- as far as this film is concerned, a cadre of sinister Communist writers were in the employ of Moscow and, led by a homosexual song-and-dance man (played spectacularly by Channing Tatum) actually meet a Soviet submarine in Malibu Bay, that actor in a role resembling Gene Kelly, defecting to the Russians. The Communists are led by Dr. Herbert Marcuse, as far as I know a real person, and the film certainly, and perversely, I think, seems to endorse the idea that Hollywood was infested by cryto-Communists, at least some of them homosexual. Like the ferociously opinionated rabbi, the Coen brothers seem to want to pick a fight on these issues with other Hollywood intelligentsia -- I'm not sure that they endorse all of Tailgunner Joe's theories about the Communist conspiracy, but, at least, the evidence of their apparent acceptance of some of his more lurid theories is visible, on the screen for all to behold. Furthermore, the movie betrays, I think, more than a little evidence of standard issue Christian piety, also a peculiar trait in a film made by these ultra-hip Jewish directors, but, I think, characteristic of the fundamentally moral and didactic aspects of their best films. (Many of the Coen's best films involve a strange issue of iconoclasm -- the prohibition upon depicting the divine and there are allusions to this topic in the film: when Saul is confronted by the blaze of light that converts him to Christianity, the incomplete film cuts to a title "Image of Divine Presence"; at the end of the film, a character looks to the sky where a water tower is labeled "BEHOLD" to see nothing but an empty heaven full of light.) Hail Caesar! is not one of the Coen brothers best films by any means, but it is diverting, clever, and contains several wonderful parodies of films made in the mid-fifties and, viewed in the context of their larger work, is very interesting in its development of themes important to this writer-director team.
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
The Murder of a President (American Experience - PBS)
A successful documentary makes researchers of its audience -- you want to know more and should be inspired to seek additional information about the subject, if nothing more than venturing a few click-and-point Wikipedia searches. By this standard, PBS documentary about James Garfield, The Murder of a President, succeeds. The 100 minute program flies by without longuers and the terrain covered is mostly terra incognito -- the Gilded Age, a period in American history somewhere between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson and, generally, I think, poorly understood by most viewers. Before tuning into this show, I knew very little about James Garfield -- indeed, I think my knowledge was limited to an old Believe it or Not cartoon that I saw as a boy: Alexander Graham Bell's prototype metal detector failed to find the lead slug poisoning poor Garfield because the iron springs in his bedstead confounded the instrument, an assertion that the documentary doesn't make, focusing instead on the sinister Dr. Bliss and his medical malpractice. For my ignorance, the show substituted a procession of miracles and wonders, stuff so improbable that you couldn't make it up.
Garfield was raised in wracking poverty -- unlike other great men, he didn't romanticize his miserable boyhood and very reasonably thought that his early hardships had been a grave impediment to his success and not a spur to later fame. With her life savings, Garfield's mother financed one quarter of college for her son (tuition and board was $17). Garfield was so astonishingly brilliant that after a couple of years at Case-Western, he was promoted from janitor (working for his tuition) to a full professor of literature and ancient languages. He married, a match that seems to have been unhappy until he engaged in an extra-marital affair, confessed his transgression, and, then, revived his love for his wife, Lucretia. Of course, he fought with distinction in the Civil War and was elected, without campaigning and while at the Front, as an Ohio Senator. (Garfield didn't want to leave the battlefield, but Lincoln told him he had enough generals and that he needed more senators.) Garfield's uncanny luck continued through 1880 when he delivered an oration at the Republican nominating convention in Chicago, impressed the delegates, and, then, was drafted as the presidential candidate to break a deadlock -- on the first 32 ballots Garfield received less than five votes; he had fifty votes on the 33rd ballot and 399 on the 34th. Elected to the presidency, he served only 200 days when he was shot in the back by a deranged assassin, Charles Guiteau. Abruptly enough, Garfield's luck changed -- one might say he was lucky until he wasn't. Garfield's medical treatment was entrusted Dr. Bliss, a vicious quack, who essentially murdered the president by his ministrations. Bliss had been a wound doctor in the Civil War and didn't believe in the "germ" theory of disease -- indeed, he felt that sepsis was a sign of recovery. As a result, Garfield's wound suppurated and the President rotted away from within; unable to keep down anything but milk, Garfield was fed by rectal infusions of rich food (things like beef broth and eggs laced with opium). The last third of the documentary details Garfield's slow-motion slaughter by Bliss and it is nightmarish -- the viewer learns about such aspects of Gilded Age medicine as "nutritious enemata," "laudable pus," and "pus cavities." Ultimately, Garfield demanded that he be transported to the New Jersey coast so that he could die in a room in his beach house overlooking the sea. The wounded president was transported by train and, by this time, regarded as a martyred saint -- crowds strew the railroad tracks with straw to soften Garfield's ride and two-thousand volunteers laid the last couple miles of track to the cottage door; when the train stalled on a steep gradient near the beach house, the multitudes simply pushed the cars uphill. The last part of the movie contrasts Garfield's protracted death with the imprisonment and execution of Charles Guiteau, his assassin. Guiteau was a bizarre figure, probably a paranoid schizophrenic in the grip of tertiary syphilis. Abused as a child for his stammer, Guiteau compensated by becoming an orator and claimed that an obscure speech that he had delivered had catapaulted Garfield to the presidency -- in fact, Guiteau was the paradigmatic loner assassin, afflicted by delusions of grandeur; he was a sort of refugee from the Oneida commune in New York, a place where free love via coitus interruptus was practiced, although the talking heads that comment on the action note that Guiteau was so hapless, that even at Oneida, he couldn't get laid. Garfield was apparently an advocate for equal voting rights for freed slaves and, at one point, the Fisk Jubilee Singers serenaded him at his home; Frederick Douglas endorsed him for President. The film suggests that Garfield was, in today's parlance, "an uniter and not a divider", and that he was a champion for the working man, an enemy of the so-called Stalwart wing of his Republican party, the Gilded Age robber barons representing what we call today "the one percent." PBS is much condemned on the Right for supporting liberal policy by encoding that agenda in its works -- Ken Burns specializes in advancing the policies of the liberal Democrats in his documentaries. This film, made in the manner of Burns by Rob Rapley, is no exception -- the film ends with the mantra that Garfield supported "equality of opportunity," suggesting that the hero was a sort of proto-Bernie Sanders. (Indeed, the notion of the brokered convention resulting in Garfield's nomination seems attractive to the film-makers.)
The documentary is not without serious flaws. For some reason, the film makers have tarted-up the production with period reconstructions -- probably about a third of the documentary consists of actors in costume acting out scenes on sets furnished with period details. The show begins with a tawdry exploitative sequence -- Garfield's assassination and, then, a gory scene in which his wound is probed with metal sounds while the poor actor playing the wounded president has to bellow and writhe in pain. It's unpleasant, undignified, and, essentially, meretricious -- PBS can't compete with Game of Thrones and so shouldn't try. Furthermore, the period reconstructions are distracting -- you end up comparing the features of the actors with the photographic images of the actual personages involved. None of the actors can summon the intelligent ferocity shown in the eyes of the protagonists as depicted in their 19th century photographs -- Guiteau's face blazes with zealotry and Garfield has the gaze of a gunfighter. (He also has a remarkable beard that seems comprised of steel wires or, in some pictures, looks as if it were sculpted in bronze over the lower half of his face.) Only Paul Giamatti could successfully play Garfield and he's not in the show and, therefore, the period reenactments are unsuccessful -- I thought that the protracted scenes showing Garfield's death agony were like, most sex scenes, at once gratuitous, implausible, and tasteless. The documentary, based on a book by Candace Millard, draws parallels between Guiteau and Garfield that are, perhaps, farfetched -- Garfield survived a near-drowning on the Erie Canal and emerged from the experience thinking that providence had spared him for greatness; Guiteau survived the fiery wreck of the Stonington, a collision between a steamer and a ferry in the Long Island Sound and, also, felt that his life had been spared for an apocalyptic destiny. The show also needs villains -- VP Chester Arthur, a strangely soft and girlish-looking plutocrat, is portrayed as the puppet of the sinister and corrupt Roscoe Conklin, a New York politician representing the cabal of Robber Barons called the Stalwarts. Several confrontations are staged between Garfield and Conklin, the Trump-style bad guy, and these are replete with baroque and sinister threats -- you have the sense that these scenes belong in Billions or The Wolf of Wall Street. Ken Burns' style documentaries are immensely long and Garfield's amazing life doesn't really fit into the 100 minute format -- there are strange and unsettling lacunae in the story: we don't know the Democratic candidate for President that Garfield defeats and there is no accounting for the 15 years between 1865 and 1880 -- what was our hero doing in that period? Finally, we don't know for sure what happens to Chester Arthur or his Machiavellian master, Roscoe Conklin -- it is suggested that the office emboldened Arthur to defy Conklin but this seems too convenient to me. Notwithstanding, these defects The Murder of a President is thoroughly fascinating and highly recommended.
Garfield was raised in wracking poverty -- unlike other great men, he didn't romanticize his miserable boyhood and very reasonably thought that his early hardships had been a grave impediment to his success and not a spur to later fame. With her life savings, Garfield's mother financed one quarter of college for her son (tuition and board was $17). Garfield was so astonishingly brilliant that after a couple of years at Case-Western, he was promoted from janitor (working for his tuition) to a full professor of literature and ancient languages. He married, a match that seems to have been unhappy until he engaged in an extra-marital affair, confessed his transgression, and, then, revived his love for his wife, Lucretia. Of course, he fought with distinction in the Civil War and was elected, without campaigning and while at the Front, as an Ohio Senator. (Garfield didn't want to leave the battlefield, but Lincoln told him he had enough generals and that he needed more senators.) Garfield's uncanny luck continued through 1880 when he delivered an oration at the Republican nominating convention in Chicago, impressed the delegates, and, then, was drafted as the presidential candidate to break a deadlock -- on the first 32 ballots Garfield received less than five votes; he had fifty votes on the 33rd ballot and 399 on the 34th. Elected to the presidency, he served only 200 days when he was shot in the back by a deranged assassin, Charles Guiteau. Abruptly enough, Garfield's luck changed -- one might say he was lucky until he wasn't. Garfield's medical treatment was entrusted Dr. Bliss, a vicious quack, who essentially murdered the president by his ministrations. Bliss had been a wound doctor in the Civil War and didn't believe in the "germ" theory of disease -- indeed, he felt that sepsis was a sign of recovery. As a result, Garfield's wound suppurated and the President rotted away from within; unable to keep down anything but milk, Garfield was fed by rectal infusions of rich food (things like beef broth and eggs laced with opium). The last third of the documentary details Garfield's slow-motion slaughter by Bliss and it is nightmarish -- the viewer learns about such aspects of Gilded Age medicine as "nutritious enemata," "laudable pus," and "pus cavities." Ultimately, Garfield demanded that he be transported to the New Jersey coast so that he could die in a room in his beach house overlooking the sea. The wounded president was transported by train and, by this time, regarded as a martyred saint -- crowds strew the railroad tracks with straw to soften Garfield's ride and two-thousand volunteers laid the last couple miles of track to the cottage door; when the train stalled on a steep gradient near the beach house, the multitudes simply pushed the cars uphill. The last part of the movie contrasts Garfield's protracted death with the imprisonment and execution of Charles Guiteau, his assassin. Guiteau was a bizarre figure, probably a paranoid schizophrenic in the grip of tertiary syphilis. Abused as a child for his stammer, Guiteau compensated by becoming an orator and claimed that an obscure speech that he had delivered had catapaulted Garfield to the presidency -- in fact, Guiteau was the paradigmatic loner assassin, afflicted by delusions of grandeur; he was a sort of refugee from the Oneida commune in New York, a place where free love via coitus interruptus was practiced, although the talking heads that comment on the action note that Guiteau was so hapless, that even at Oneida, he couldn't get laid. Garfield was apparently an advocate for equal voting rights for freed slaves and, at one point, the Fisk Jubilee Singers serenaded him at his home; Frederick Douglas endorsed him for President. The film suggests that Garfield was, in today's parlance, "an uniter and not a divider", and that he was a champion for the working man, an enemy of the so-called Stalwart wing of his Republican party, the Gilded Age robber barons representing what we call today "the one percent." PBS is much condemned on the Right for supporting liberal policy by encoding that agenda in its works -- Ken Burns specializes in advancing the policies of the liberal Democrats in his documentaries. This film, made in the manner of Burns by Rob Rapley, is no exception -- the film ends with the mantra that Garfield supported "equality of opportunity," suggesting that the hero was a sort of proto-Bernie Sanders. (Indeed, the notion of the brokered convention resulting in Garfield's nomination seems attractive to the film-makers.)
The documentary is not without serious flaws. For some reason, the film makers have tarted-up the production with period reconstructions -- probably about a third of the documentary consists of actors in costume acting out scenes on sets furnished with period details. The show begins with a tawdry exploitative sequence -- Garfield's assassination and, then, a gory scene in which his wound is probed with metal sounds while the poor actor playing the wounded president has to bellow and writhe in pain. It's unpleasant, undignified, and, essentially, meretricious -- PBS can't compete with Game of Thrones and so shouldn't try. Furthermore, the period reconstructions are distracting -- you end up comparing the features of the actors with the photographic images of the actual personages involved. None of the actors can summon the intelligent ferocity shown in the eyes of the protagonists as depicted in their 19th century photographs -- Guiteau's face blazes with zealotry and Garfield has the gaze of a gunfighter. (He also has a remarkable beard that seems comprised of steel wires or, in some pictures, looks as if it were sculpted in bronze over the lower half of his face.) Only Paul Giamatti could successfully play Garfield and he's not in the show and, therefore, the period reenactments are unsuccessful -- I thought that the protracted scenes showing Garfield's death agony were like, most sex scenes, at once gratuitous, implausible, and tasteless. The documentary, based on a book by Candace Millard, draws parallels between Guiteau and Garfield that are, perhaps, farfetched -- Garfield survived a near-drowning on the Erie Canal and emerged from the experience thinking that providence had spared him for greatness; Guiteau survived the fiery wreck of the Stonington, a collision between a steamer and a ferry in the Long Island Sound and, also, felt that his life had been spared for an apocalyptic destiny. The show also needs villains -- VP Chester Arthur, a strangely soft and girlish-looking plutocrat, is portrayed as the puppet of the sinister and corrupt Roscoe Conklin, a New York politician representing the cabal of Robber Barons called the Stalwarts. Several confrontations are staged between Garfield and Conklin, the Trump-style bad guy, and these are replete with baroque and sinister threats -- you have the sense that these scenes belong in Billions or The Wolf of Wall Street. Ken Burns' style documentaries are immensely long and Garfield's amazing life doesn't really fit into the 100 minute format -- there are strange and unsettling lacunae in the story: we don't know the Democratic candidate for President that Garfield defeats and there is no accounting for the 15 years between 1865 and 1880 -- what was our hero doing in that period? Finally, we don't know for sure what happens to Chester Arthur or his Machiavellian master, Roscoe Conklin -- it is suggested that the office emboldened Arthur to defy Conklin but this seems too convenient to me. Notwithstanding, these defects The Murder of a President is thoroughly fascinating and highly recommended.
Monday, February 1, 2016
The Blue Bird
In Winona, Minnesota, there is a tooth-shaped pillar of rock atop one of the steep, green bluffs overlooking the Mississippi river. The bluff and its molar-like excrescence at its crest is called "the Sugar Loaf" and it is a local landmark. No one really stops to think about what the term "sugar loaf" means. But, in fact, a century ago sugar was, apparently, sold in crystallized pillars or blocks, columns of sugar that were called "loaves." This is apparent from Maurice Tourneur's intensely poetic fantasy film, The Blue Bird, a picture that was famous in 1918. In that film, a character, the mother of the child-protagonists, bids her daughter Myltyl to bring "the sugar loaf" to the table; the girl obliges by taking from the shelf a two-foot high stela , a rounded pillar of marble-white sugar that looks, more or less, like the leading edge of a tube of lipstick. Made 98 years ago, The Blue Bird is intrinsically foreign to modern viewers -- it contains a lyrical glimpse into a world that is long-gone, the world of the diaphanous symbolic impressionism too fragile and esthetically intricate to survive its brutal bludgeoning by World War I.
The Blue Bird is a fairy-tale based on a symbolic play by Maurice Maeterlinck, a theatrical spectacle from 1908 that was widely popular before the Great War. The film version is, as it were, an after-vision of that once famous spectacle of son et lumiere, a fading bruise on the retina like a shadow retained in the eye after we have gazed at something too bright for us. The story is a literary attempt to capture the evanescent and primordial simplicity of a fairy tale. Two children, Tyltyl and his sister Myltyl live in a humble foresters's cabin in the middle of a forest -- on one side of their cottage, there is a shanty occupied by a poor sick girl and her hideous mother; on the other side of their home, a palace rises above the trees, the domicile of the rich children. The mother of the poor dying girl visits our hero and heroine and asks of they will give her a "blue bird" that might cure her sick daughter. The little boy and his sister are afraid of the hag -- she is stooped, carries a club-like crutch under her arm, and has masculine features sometimes half-concealed by grotesque round goggles that she wears. The children fear the witch and refuse to help her. Tourneur cuts periodically away from the encounter between the hag and the children showing the dying child, a little girl propped up in her bed and delicately lit by the window through which she gazes -- the composition and lighting is derived from Edvard Munch's painting and engraving of "a dying girl." The children go to sleep and dream. In their vision, household objects become "ensouled" (a concept that their mother has earlier impressed upon them.) We see the soul of the water, the fire in the hearth, and, most remarkably, the bread and sugar-loaf in their kitchen. The family's dog and car appear as dancers crouching yet graceful and the hag from next-door is transmuted into a fairy. It is evident that imagery from this film had a long and profound influence on later Hollywood pictures: in particular, the fairy is, more or less, identical with the good witch in The Wizard of Oz, likewise the dog, who seems a bit humble and cowardly, later disports himself with pugilistic gestures that are exactly imitated by the cowardly lion in that same film from 1939. In the company of the fairy and the various ensouled and animate household items, the boy and girl depart on a mystical journey, seeking the elusive "blue bird of happiness."
On the evidence of this film, Maurice Tourneur was one of the great fabulists in film history. The fantastic journey undertaken by his protagonists delves into a number of magical realms, all of them portrayed vigorously and with ingenious and effective special effects. The film's lyrical fantasy is grounded in periodic glimpses of a solid, realistic world -- the children's parents share a single grubby bed and wear shabby nightclothes: they look convincingly intimate in a way that later films would censor and repress: by the thirties, men and women could not be shown occupying the same bed. Periodically, Tourneur cuts away from the arabesques and fantasy chiaroscuro of his elaborate sets to simple outdoor landscape -- and the effect is invariably invigorating. Like Griffith, Tourneur knows how to turn an unprepossessing stretch of real estate -- a stony beach or a curving path up a hill in a forest, into mysterious and beautiful landscapes. Much of the film is set before spectacular black silhouette castles and palace or spiky landscapes of stylized trees -- these sorts of silhouette furnishings are very similar, and precursors to, the German film made a decade later, The Adventures of Prince Achmed directed by Lotte Reiniger. Conceived as a series of ordeals that the enterprising children must survive, The Blue Bird explores dream terrain expressionistically imagined to correspond with certain psychic states. The Palace of Night is full of dark chambers and menacing veiled figures; pale gibbering faces loom out of the darkness -- these are night terrors, brooding thoughts, images of sickness. Obligatory to all epics styled on the Odyssey is the visit to the underworld and the spirits of the dead -- here the children encounter their dead grandparents, visualized as living cadavers convincingly palsied with age -- a baby with a peculiarly shaped face and head creeps on the floor and a mob of dead children gather around a dinner table. (The film reminds us that in 1918 most people had more dead, than living, children.) One of the film's rare dollying shots tracks into the cottage filled with dead children and there is packed into that slight camera motion more wonder and dread than you might find in a half-dozen Marvel comic book superhero stories. In the ornate Palace of Happiness, true and false pleasures vie with one another in a placid, neo-classical garden -- they are sylphs that leap and caper like Isadora Duncan. A final stop in this phantasmagoric itinerary is a garden where the souls of unborn children wait to be born, an astonishing vision: grizzled Father Time opens the gates and the children stream forth to find their mothers -- throughout the film, Tourneur luxuriates in pale Madonna-like mothers, figures such as might have been painted by Raphael. In our world of abortion on demand, I think, that it can't be denied that mawkish Victorian imagery of this sort, when thoroughly and unabashedly expressed, has a peculiar power and disquieting effect. A fundamental esthetic device is inducing surprise in viewers and every shot in this film contains something strange, inexplicable, or unexpected. At the end of the film, the children approach the camera and address the audience directly -- of course, the blue bird of happiness, the antidote to the dying girl's sickness, was always at home, always singing in its neglected cage in the corner of the cottage but disregarded by all those around, a memorandum later developed at the end of The Wizard of Oz.
The 1918 version of the film is, probably, the third adaptation of Maeterlinck's play. The play was adapted two more times, including in the early nineteen-seventies by George Cukor. Cukor undoubtedly had seen Tourneur's version when he was a young and, probably, was influenced by it. But this strange and poetic film is now almost a hundred years old, belongs to a different world, and, probably, has lost its ability to impress filmmakers today and, so, I suppose no more versions of the story will be filmed. The carefully conserved version of the film shown on Turner Classic Movies was badly damaged and to viewers used to HD TV probably unwatchable -- the decomposition was like a silvery waterfall pouring over the images or, sometimes, vertical columns flickering like fire on the edge of the image. This is a patina that appeals to me but would repel most people.
The Blue Bird is a fairy-tale based on a symbolic play by Maurice Maeterlinck, a theatrical spectacle from 1908 that was widely popular before the Great War. The film version is, as it were, an after-vision of that once famous spectacle of son et lumiere, a fading bruise on the retina like a shadow retained in the eye after we have gazed at something too bright for us. The story is a literary attempt to capture the evanescent and primordial simplicity of a fairy tale. Two children, Tyltyl and his sister Myltyl live in a humble foresters's cabin in the middle of a forest -- on one side of their cottage, there is a shanty occupied by a poor sick girl and her hideous mother; on the other side of their home, a palace rises above the trees, the domicile of the rich children. The mother of the poor dying girl visits our hero and heroine and asks of they will give her a "blue bird" that might cure her sick daughter. The little boy and his sister are afraid of the hag -- she is stooped, carries a club-like crutch under her arm, and has masculine features sometimes half-concealed by grotesque round goggles that she wears. The children fear the witch and refuse to help her. Tourneur cuts periodically away from the encounter between the hag and the children showing the dying child, a little girl propped up in her bed and delicately lit by the window through which she gazes -- the composition and lighting is derived from Edvard Munch's painting and engraving of "a dying girl." The children go to sleep and dream. In their vision, household objects become "ensouled" (a concept that their mother has earlier impressed upon them.) We see the soul of the water, the fire in the hearth, and, most remarkably, the bread and sugar-loaf in their kitchen. The family's dog and car appear as dancers crouching yet graceful and the hag from next-door is transmuted into a fairy. It is evident that imagery from this film had a long and profound influence on later Hollywood pictures: in particular, the fairy is, more or less, identical with the good witch in The Wizard of Oz, likewise the dog, who seems a bit humble and cowardly, later disports himself with pugilistic gestures that are exactly imitated by the cowardly lion in that same film from 1939. In the company of the fairy and the various ensouled and animate household items, the boy and girl depart on a mystical journey, seeking the elusive "blue bird of happiness."
On the evidence of this film, Maurice Tourneur was one of the great fabulists in film history. The fantastic journey undertaken by his protagonists delves into a number of magical realms, all of them portrayed vigorously and with ingenious and effective special effects. The film's lyrical fantasy is grounded in periodic glimpses of a solid, realistic world -- the children's parents share a single grubby bed and wear shabby nightclothes: they look convincingly intimate in a way that later films would censor and repress: by the thirties, men and women could not be shown occupying the same bed. Periodically, Tourneur cuts away from the arabesques and fantasy chiaroscuro of his elaborate sets to simple outdoor landscape -- and the effect is invariably invigorating. Like Griffith, Tourneur knows how to turn an unprepossessing stretch of real estate -- a stony beach or a curving path up a hill in a forest, into mysterious and beautiful landscapes. Much of the film is set before spectacular black silhouette castles and palace or spiky landscapes of stylized trees -- these sorts of silhouette furnishings are very similar, and precursors to, the German film made a decade later, The Adventures of Prince Achmed directed by Lotte Reiniger. Conceived as a series of ordeals that the enterprising children must survive, The Blue Bird explores dream terrain expressionistically imagined to correspond with certain psychic states. The Palace of Night is full of dark chambers and menacing veiled figures; pale gibbering faces loom out of the darkness -- these are night terrors, brooding thoughts, images of sickness. Obligatory to all epics styled on the Odyssey is the visit to the underworld and the spirits of the dead -- here the children encounter their dead grandparents, visualized as living cadavers convincingly palsied with age -- a baby with a peculiarly shaped face and head creeps on the floor and a mob of dead children gather around a dinner table. (The film reminds us that in 1918 most people had more dead, than living, children.) One of the film's rare dollying shots tracks into the cottage filled with dead children and there is packed into that slight camera motion more wonder and dread than you might find in a half-dozen Marvel comic book superhero stories. In the ornate Palace of Happiness, true and false pleasures vie with one another in a placid, neo-classical garden -- they are sylphs that leap and caper like Isadora Duncan. A final stop in this phantasmagoric itinerary is a garden where the souls of unborn children wait to be born, an astonishing vision: grizzled Father Time opens the gates and the children stream forth to find their mothers -- throughout the film, Tourneur luxuriates in pale Madonna-like mothers, figures such as might have been painted by Raphael. In our world of abortion on demand, I think, that it can't be denied that mawkish Victorian imagery of this sort, when thoroughly and unabashedly expressed, has a peculiar power and disquieting effect. A fundamental esthetic device is inducing surprise in viewers and every shot in this film contains something strange, inexplicable, or unexpected. At the end of the film, the children approach the camera and address the audience directly -- of course, the blue bird of happiness, the antidote to the dying girl's sickness, was always at home, always singing in its neglected cage in the corner of the cottage but disregarded by all those around, a memorandum later developed at the end of The Wizard of Oz.
The 1918 version of the film is, probably, the third adaptation of Maeterlinck's play. The play was adapted two more times, including in the early nineteen-seventies by George Cukor. Cukor undoubtedly had seen Tourneur's version when he was a young and, probably, was influenced by it. But this strange and poetic film is now almost a hundred years old, belongs to a different world, and, probably, has lost its ability to impress filmmakers today and, so, I suppose no more versions of the story will be filmed. The carefully conserved version of the film shown on Turner Classic Movies was badly damaged and to viewers used to HD TV probably unwatchable -- the decomposition was like a silvery waterfall pouring over the images or, sometimes, vertical columns flickering like fire on the edge of the image. This is a patina that appeals to me but would repel most people.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Rusalka
Dvorak's opera, Rusalka, rapturously received by audiences at the Minnesota Opera Company's performance in late January 2016, is a baffling and idiosyncratic work -- not so much one work, as three one-act operas implausibly stitched together. The first act, most of which takes place at the bottom of lake, involves a water nymph who has fallen in love with a mediocre princeling, a little swaggering, self-satisfied fellow. The mermaid consults with her father, a Vorodnik, or water gnome who duly warns his daughter against consorting with humans. But free will must prevail and the Vorodnik also uses his deep and monitory baritone to instruct his daughter that there is a certain witch, a Jezibaba, who has the power to convert immortal lake creatures into mortal human beings -- death, the inevitable price that the nymph must pay for her passion. (Dvorak's opera contains another theatrical coup -- the water nymph, once human, must remain entirely mute, a perverse and extraordinary fate in a work of musical theater). Rusalka, the nymph, consents to the transformation, and, as "a white doe" (presumably a euphemism for her nudity) encounters and seduces the princeling. This act begins with water naiads taunting the Vorodnik in an obvious homage to Wagner's Das Rheingold and contains a long scene in which the surly gnome lectures his obstinate daughter, an exchange that seems related to Wotan's nagging at Bruennhilde in other episodes of the Ring cycle.
The second act of Rusalka takes place in a fortress of brutalist Soviet-style pre-fab concrete. In this unlikely environment, a sort of party is underway. Needless to say, the beautiful, if mute, water nymph -- really more like a lobster or muskellunge than a human girl -- is profoundly out of place. Furthermore, the princeling turns out to have a bellowing mezzo-soprano as a fiancée, a big woman dressed like a white wedding cake who howls at her lover and, completely, dominates the action with her imperious demands. The human rival is made up to look like Cruella de Ville from A 101 Dalmations or other Disney harridans such as the evil Queen in Cinderella and the Seven Dwarfs -- she has the same ueber-Waspish appearance, complete with an indomitable and pointed chin. (She also fully twice the size of the swarthy little princeling, a mismatch that contributes to the comic effect in this act). The human lovers in this act are lousy specimens, getting drunk, slapping one another, and brawling in a Polonaise staged as a slapstick ballet. Needless to say, Rusalka is abandoned, appalled, and returns to her watery haunts where her soprano voice is restored to her. This Act is generally comic, over-the-top and the best part of the show -- the wretched human lovers are funny to watch and the water-nymph's discomfiture at their behavior is appropriately pathetic.
The final act of the opera, again staged on the bottom of the tarn, is the most peculiar. Here, Dvorak reverses his meanings: the forsaken Rusalka, Czech for "water siren", becomes a kind of zombie vampire. When her moronic human lover staggers into her embrace, she kills him with her icy kiss. This is a complete inversion of what the audience expects -- up to this point, the opera has played like a supernatural version of Madame Butterfly with the nymph in the role of the abandoned lover and the little, selfish princeling acting the part of the swinish Pinkerton. Although the music swoons ecstatically, we have no sense of tragedy whatsoever about the death of the egocentric and fickle prince -- if anything, we sense that the fellow deserves his demise. This aspect of the opera assumes the character of an ecological allegory -- human beings are depicted as cruel, their hands "red with blood," and the Rusalka complains that the princeling has injected anthropomorphic human passion into a being that is entirely indifferent and devoid of anything like mortal passion. The price for this transgression against nature is death, a penalty that Rusalka metes out to the princeling while moaning and groaning about how sad she is to destroy her erring lover. In the final moment of the opera, she stalks away from the corpse of the loathsome little prince while the music strives (and fails) to achieve a Wagnerian Liebestod. This last act feels padded and, like much opera, contains a comically and interminably extended death scene. There are also oddities -- the three mermaids who taunted the curmudgeonly Vorodnik in the first scene now seems to be wood nymphs or dyads: we see them plaiting wild flowers into garlands before reprising their initial Wagnerian-inspired taunting of the gnome.
Dvorak's music is curiously without memorable melodies although lushly and gorgeously orchestrated in the style of Strauss. The libretto is poorly conceived and the viewer often has the sense that the music is struggling to catch up with what has already happened -- in several scenes, something occurs and, then, the characters sing about it later. The soprano, Kelly Kaduce, a very beautiful woman, is memorable as the Rusalka and acts bravely -- she disguises her beauty in the last Act in zombie-revenant make-up and moves spasmodically as she is first learning to walk (and, later, struggling as one drowned at the bottom of the icy lake). The staging was simple but effective, the bottom of the lake a wavering maze of watery reflections with great banners of sea-weed fluttering overhead. Images of the natural world, including a vast, malevolent moon, were projected on the flats to good effect. The audience delivered a standing ovation. I thought the entire enterprise was puzzling and that the story was too strange in an oddly cerebral and over-calculated way to warrant much applause.
The second act of Rusalka takes place in a fortress of brutalist Soviet-style pre-fab concrete. In this unlikely environment, a sort of party is underway. Needless to say, the beautiful, if mute, water nymph -- really more like a lobster or muskellunge than a human girl -- is profoundly out of place. Furthermore, the princeling turns out to have a bellowing mezzo-soprano as a fiancée, a big woman dressed like a white wedding cake who howls at her lover and, completely, dominates the action with her imperious demands. The human rival is made up to look like Cruella de Ville from A 101 Dalmations or other Disney harridans such as the evil Queen in Cinderella and the Seven Dwarfs -- she has the same ueber-Waspish appearance, complete with an indomitable and pointed chin. (She also fully twice the size of the swarthy little princeling, a mismatch that contributes to the comic effect in this act). The human lovers in this act are lousy specimens, getting drunk, slapping one another, and brawling in a Polonaise staged as a slapstick ballet. Needless to say, Rusalka is abandoned, appalled, and returns to her watery haunts where her soprano voice is restored to her. This Act is generally comic, over-the-top and the best part of the show -- the wretched human lovers are funny to watch and the water-nymph's discomfiture at their behavior is appropriately pathetic.
The final act of the opera, again staged on the bottom of the tarn, is the most peculiar. Here, Dvorak reverses his meanings: the forsaken Rusalka, Czech for "water siren", becomes a kind of zombie vampire. When her moronic human lover staggers into her embrace, she kills him with her icy kiss. This is a complete inversion of what the audience expects -- up to this point, the opera has played like a supernatural version of Madame Butterfly with the nymph in the role of the abandoned lover and the little, selfish princeling acting the part of the swinish Pinkerton. Although the music swoons ecstatically, we have no sense of tragedy whatsoever about the death of the egocentric and fickle prince -- if anything, we sense that the fellow deserves his demise. This aspect of the opera assumes the character of an ecological allegory -- human beings are depicted as cruel, their hands "red with blood," and the Rusalka complains that the princeling has injected anthropomorphic human passion into a being that is entirely indifferent and devoid of anything like mortal passion. The price for this transgression against nature is death, a penalty that Rusalka metes out to the princeling while moaning and groaning about how sad she is to destroy her erring lover. In the final moment of the opera, she stalks away from the corpse of the loathsome little prince while the music strives (and fails) to achieve a Wagnerian Liebestod. This last act feels padded and, like much opera, contains a comically and interminably extended death scene. There are also oddities -- the three mermaids who taunted the curmudgeonly Vorodnik in the first scene now seems to be wood nymphs or dyads: we see them plaiting wild flowers into garlands before reprising their initial Wagnerian-inspired taunting of the gnome.
Dvorak's music is curiously without memorable melodies although lushly and gorgeously orchestrated in the style of Strauss. The libretto is poorly conceived and the viewer often has the sense that the music is struggling to catch up with what has already happened -- in several scenes, something occurs and, then, the characters sing about it later. The soprano, Kelly Kaduce, a very beautiful woman, is memorable as the Rusalka and acts bravely -- she disguises her beauty in the last Act in zombie-revenant make-up and moves spasmodically as she is first learning to walk (and, later, struggling as one drowned at the bottom of the icy lake). The staging was simple but effective, the bottom of the lake a wavering maze of watery reflections with great banners of sea-weed fluttering overhead. Images of the natural world, including a vast, malevolent moon, were projected on the flats to good effect. The audience delivered a standing ovation. I thought the entire enterprise was puzzling and that the story was too strange in an oddly cerebral and over-calculated way to warrant much applause.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Billy Budd
Peter Ustinov's steely version of Billy Budd (1962) channels Melville's brutal allegory through Kafka. When Terence Stamp playing the handsome sailor, Billy Budd, is impressed into service on a British man-of-war, he cries out: "Farewell, old 'Rights of Man'." Budd, who is illiterate and strangely vacant, is simply referring to the merchant marine vessel from which he was snatched, a big ship with a figure-head of an African slave breaking his chains at its prow. But the warship where he now must serve is a paranoid place, a self-contained universe operating on the basis of its own inscrutable laws, and Budd's valediction to his previous ship is interpreted as an indictment of the system prevailing on the Man-of-War. Since Budd is beautiful, forgiving, and naïve, of course, he must be destroyed -- there is no place for him in the iron machinery of war that defines the gunboat. In Kafka's stories and novels, one has the sense that the bleak and enigmatic systems governing his characters are complete and all-encompassing. When I read Kafka, I experience the sense that there is no outside, no exterior vantage from which to view the events narrated -- the whole universe is a penal colony; the castle defines an entire world from which there is no exit and only death provides an escape from the punitive processes described in The Trial. Similarly, Ustinov's adaptation of Billy Budd suggests that, once the handsome sailor finds himself on the Man-of-War, that vessel is a totalizing system -- there is nothing beyond or outside of the ship and its savage mission. The first flogging depicted in the film, an event that sickens Budd, ends with his inquiry as to why the man was whipped -- no one has any answers and the only thing that seems certain is that, sooner or later, all of the seamen will find themselves trussed-up to be flogged. The film is noteworthy for its rigor and discipline -- Ustinov eschews anything that is picturesque; although the film takes place entirely aboard seagoing vessels, the ships are not portrayed in any way other than purely instrumental -- there are no impressive seascapes, no real tempests. The war ship is viewed in a matter-of-fact way. Robert Ryan plays Claggart, Melville's version of Satan, and he is weirdly still and soft-spoken with little demonic points of light in his eyes. (I saw this film on the same weekend that I watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens and note that the Darth Vadar figure in that movie did not project one-tenth of the menace quivering in Ryan's portrayal of the vicious Claggart.) Billy Budd, played by Terence Stamp, is profoundly ambiguous -- the officers on the ship can't quite determine whether his Mona Lisa smile is ironic or not. A kind of holy fool, Budd is continuously suspected of depths that he doesn't really possess. Stamp's performance doesn't quite carry the metaphorical and allegorical weight of Melville's descriptions -- after all, Melville stages Budd and Claggart's encounters as Christ tempted by Satan -- but he is sufficiently uncanny and unpredictable, a kind of sovereign man, to be effective in this film. (I can see why Pasolini engaged him to play the bisexual saint and martyr in his later film Teorema -- Stamp has a blithe, otherworldly presence; he is like an animated statue by Donatello.) Ustinov is brilliant as Captain Vere, a man haunted by the terror of mutiny and the other officers, particularly David McCallum, are impressively feckless and mutable. Ustinov's film is true to the nightmare logic of Melville's last novella -- the argument that maintenance of our systems of perpetual war requires a steady source of sacrificial victims. Furthermore, Ustinov's scene showing Billy's hanging is true to the novel's description of the saintly sailor's death without any kind of spasm -- with exquisite taste, Ustinov simply cuts away from the hanging; we aren't shown Billy's death at all -- it's a solution to Melville's inflamed and turgid prose about Billy's hanging that is restrained and, ultimately, accurate to the book, the sort of solution that Rossellini in his later films would have contrived, a mise-en-scene that is as precise as it is understated. The movie's only false step is its ending -- after Billy has been hanged the men are about to mutiny when a French ship suddenly appears and there is a brief nautical battle. The battle, also filmed without any particular emphasis, puts a period to the movie -- in the final shot, we see the two ships in their minuet around a barren island. It's impressive and cinematically effective, but, I think, a bit untrue to Melville -- in a way, the short battle scene suggests an egress from the film's Kafkaesque prison, an outlet that doesn't exist in Melville's novella.
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