The Mummy

Karl Freund’s “The Mummy” from 1932 is part of the Universal Studios’ cycle of horror films produced by Carl Laemmle. The movie is short, eerie, and contains a few memorable images, mostly revolving around Boris Karloff’s desiccated menace. Parasitic on the excavations that retrieved King Tut from the dust of the Valley of the Kings, the film begins with British archaeologists conferring in a gloomy storehouse by lamplight. A contorted mummy who has died ‘the nameless death” is framed behind the scholars in an upright sarcophagus. Someone recites the wrong words and the mummy’s withered eyelids twitch just the tiniest bit -- the lighting is designed to catch a faint flicker in the corpse’s slightly opened eye. A man goes mad, laughing uncontrollably and the mummy leaves, never visualized moving, but depicted metonymically by a foul-looking bandage dragged through the dust. Egypt is pillars and columns and pits full of peasants scrambling in the gravel and dust. The desert is an abstract void haunted by the shadowy geometry of mastabas and pyramids -- cold darkness crisscrossed with some patterns ofdeeper blackness. A decade passes and the dead priest reappears as the emaciated, cadaver-stiff Adeth Bey, Karloff at his most dire. Bey helps a new generation of archaeologists unearth a vestal priestess of Isis, her featureless mummy transported to the grim, fortress-like Cairo Museum, a huge building guarded by bare-breasted sphinx figures. The camera shows us the glaring mask on the priestess’ sarcophagus and, then, the film cuts to a party where we see a woman with a strange physiognomy -- this is Zita Johann, the reincarnation of the dead priestess, and an peculiar, uncanny-looking figure herself: she has enormous eyes dominating a head that looks too large for her white throat and shoulders and, later we are shown her squat, compact body exposed in the last half of the film in revealing garments, a couple strands of ribbons pulled over her breasts so that her belly and torso are mostly bare. Karloff’s nightmare priest recognizes the woman as his lost love, now buried for 3700 years, and hypnotizes her. (The film resembles in form Rex Ingram’s “The Magician” made in 1926 -- it has a similarly functioning dream sequence at its center, in “The Mummy’s” case a flashback to ancient Egypt showing Karloff squirming as he is wrapped in suffocating bandages to be buried alive.) To bring the dead priestess to life, Adeth Bey has to burn her lifeless mummy, stab her modern reincarnation to death, and, then, plunge the corpse into a romantically brewed bath of bubbling natron stirred by Noble Johnson, an African-American actor playing a statuesque Nubian. All of this transpires in the dim galleries of the Cairo Museum of Antiquities beneath a glimmering idol of Isis, a voluptuous life-size female form, all curved tits and ass, hovering over the deadly proceedings. Needless to say, the boyfriend arrives just in the nick of time with Karloff’s withered hand gripping a flint knife indenting the soft belly flesh of the heroine squirming on the embalming table. Freund was a great cameraman but the film is not particularly beautiful or impressive photographically and the dialogue, intoned mostly by Karloff in an oracular drone, is a bit wooden. But the film is justly famous for the truly frightening opening episode in which the mummy’s resurrection drives the young archaeologist mad and for several alarming close-ups of Adeth Bey, Karloff embodying (anagrammatically) Death itself, our ancient adversary, with parchment cheeks and withered lips, and glittering eyes lurking in cavernous black eye-sockets. Despite its romantic plot, the film is curiously chaste. Zita Johann is too strange-looking to stir up much sexual feeling in the audience and the handsome physician’s love for her seems contrived. This actress looks like Barbara Steele, the indelibly weird-looking heroine of Italian horror films in sixties -- she has a looming glacially white forehead and gigantic eyes, a face glaring and featureless as a mask, and it’s hard to pay much attention to her body when she turns her lantern-like gaze on the camera.

Fun with Dick and Jane

Judd Apatow remade “Fun with Dick and Jane,” a movie originally released in 1977 in 2005 and the prototype picture is worth a look. Apatow’s film is about the Zeitgeist that produced the great economic crash of 2008 and it seems curious to me that that remake dates back to before the bubble burst -- in fact predating the recession by three years. Ted Kotcheff, a Canadian director, made the first picture at about the time that American enthusiasm was shriveling during the Carter presidency and the original picture is very shrewd about certain aspects of the U.S. economy that have not materially changed (I am sorry to report) in the 36 intervening years. Jane Fonda and George Segal play a suburban couple who find themselves “underwater” when Segal is laid-off from his job in the Aerospace Industry. (Segal’s boss is played by Ed McMahon; McMahon isn’t great but he’s proficient and, certainly, not hesitant to play against type -- in the film, he is a lecherous, unctuous, and corrupt business executive, not the avuncular type you recall from The Johnny Carson Show.) The couple have leveraged themselves to the hilt to buy a luxurious house where a swimming pool is being constructed amidst expensive landscaping when Segal loses his job. Fonda is a housewife who has never worked and her attempts to earn some money as a model are unsuccessful. Segal is forced to apply for unemployment compensation and, humiliated, has to seek assistance from a Latino friend to navigate the welfare system so that he can get food stamps. The film was marketed as a comedy romp involving the couple’s adventures robbing pharmacies and liquor stores to make ends meet but this aspect of the movie is a late and ill-conceived plot development -- no robberies occur until the film is more than 2/3rds done. By far, the best part of Kotcheff’s picture is the realistic portrait of upwardly mobile American wheeler-dealers suddenly bereft of funds and unable to pay their mortgage. The picture was written by the Canadian novelist Mordechai Richler and, for about an hour, the film is witty, incisive, and compelling. But when desperation forces the characters to their crime spree, the film itself seems desperate and the picture deteriorates rapidly into broad, unfunny slapstick, ending as a standard issue heist movie, brightly lit and shot unimaginatively in a way scarcely distinguishable from a TV sitcom. For an hour, though, the viewer can see what attracted Judd Apatow to the film in 2005 and, during it’s first half, the movie is an interesting portrait of American life and social mores in the mid-seventies. Segal and Fonda are appealing although there is no spark between them and, since they are conceived as victims, their roles don’t give them much amplitude for any real emotion -- they are disappointed by life, increasingly pessimistic, but try to remain cheery and that’s about it. There is a sad aspect to the film. The firm that collapses in this movie to cause Segal’s unemployment is a company involved in putting the first man on the moon and the corporate headquarters of the business, where McMahon gets drunk, fires people, and broods that he has “blood on his hands” is decorated with images of astronauts moon-walking. How the mighty have fallen!

Hiroshima Mon Amour

In the first five minutes of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” we see a museum in that Japanese city displaying artifacts from the atomic blast. Floating in jars of formaldehyde are fragments of human scar tissue, ribbons of dead flesh labeled “keloid.” This image is an emblem for the film. Alain Resnais’ 1959 film is about wounds and how wounds heal and about the scars that abide after traumatic injury. A French woman has come to Hiroshima to act as an extra -- she is costumed as a nurse -- in an internationally produced “peace” film. On her penultimate night in the Japanese city, she sleeps with a local man and, then, spends the next day alternatively fleeing and embracing him. The Japanese man was fighting in the war when his city was bombed, but, perhaps, his family perished in the fire-storm. As it happens, the French woman harbors a memory that she has also concealed from her husband and family in Paris: during the war, she loved a German soldier who was shot to death on the last day of the occupation. After the war, she was humiliated by having her hair shaved, went mad for a time, and was locked away in a cellar in her home town of Nevers. The French woman’s encounter with Hiroshima, embodied in her Japanese lover, liberates her to narrate the story of her wartime love and her humiliation after the German boy was killed. Resnais stages his film across a 24 hour period -- the woman’s last day in Hiroshima -- and the film is beautiful and eerie in a somber, mostly deserted way, composed as a series of forboding black and white landscape through which the camera tracks with grave, funereal dignity. Resnais’ melancholy and dignified approach to the film’s visual texture conceals, and obscures, a fundamental moral problem with the picture: the movie’s theme is two parallel atrocities -- the death of the young woman’s lover and her public shaming in Nevers and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. But the equivalence of the two events seems highly questionable, even a bit vulgar. It is the accusation of facile vulgarity that Resnais and his screenwriter, the famous French novelist Marguerite Duras, labor to avoid by imposing a ponderous artistic purity on the material -- there are many tilted angles, desolate plazas and landscapes, corridors in Brutalist concrete hotels that look like anterooms to the Sahara desert, and close-ups of naked lovers, their eyes averted from one another Bergman-style in agonies of sorrow and anomie. The famous opening sequence of the film, intercutting almost unwatchable images of mutilation and death with close-ups of nude bodies, first covered in ash, then, mud, then skin slipping over skin in enormous fragmentary close-ups are justly famous, indelible, and terrifying. But the images make murder and disfigurement into an aesthetic subject and, ultimately, raise very difficult moral issues for the viewer -- is it ethical to use material of this kind as a counterpoint to a rather banal story of a one-night stand in an exotic city? The city of Hiroshima co-stars in this film with Nevers in France and the two locations give the film an extraordinary pictorial density and texture. Hiroshima, in particular, looks spooky, alien, half-abandoned -- there are huge open spaces through which cars zoom without the benefit of lanes or roads, covered arcades, and flimsy-looking pleasure districts full of garish lights in which the buildings seem to have been haphazardly constructed of Lego blocks, the central ruined dome of iron hovering over the vast bombed-out plazas like a black spider. Ultimately, the film argues, we are doomed to forget -- we forget our first loves, our great passions, and the horrors of war and atrocity are likewise forgotten. The grass grows over the torn earth. Scar tissue forms over lacerations. The film wisely takes no moral stance as to whether the dominion of oblivion over horror (and love) is a good or a bad thing -- it is just the way the world works. Emmanuelle Riva plays the French woman. At the start of her career, she made this movie about the risk of universal destruction -- we see her watching a ”Ban the Bomb” parade in her white nurse’s outfit, mournfully watching placards bearing images of mushroom clouds and mangled children carried in procession. In 2012, she appeared in Michael Haneke’s “Amour”, clearly a reference to the film that made her a star 53 years earlier. In Haneke’s equally grave, and terrifyilng, film, her role also concerns death and destruction, but no longer on an universal scale -- “Amour” is about senility and dying as the lonely fate of all of us who survive long enough to become old. It would be nice to draw a contrast between the young and vivacious Riva in Resnais 1958 film and the ruin that time has made of her in Haneke’s 2012 picture. But the contrast is unsupportable. Riva is one of those people who seems to have never been young. In “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, she already seems haggard, ancient, a survivor of unmentionable cruelties and savagery. Indeed, in some ways, she seems younger and more fiercely vibrant in the first half of Haneke’s film than she is Resnais’ famous picture made a half-century before.

The Magician

Forgotten today, Rex Ingram was once regarded as "the greatest director in the world." At least this was how he was described by Erich von Stroheim. Ingram was from Dublin and, in the early twenties, he worked with Valentino on such prestige pictures as "The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse." His films seem to be similar to the later work of David Lean -- stories set in exotic locations shot with lavish production values. "The Magician" is a 1926 horror film made by Ingram from a novel by Somerset Maugham. (The novel apparently was a roman a clef based on the adventures of "the Great Beast," Aleistar Crowley). The film begins with a spectacular sequence, perhaps, the best thing in the movie. An American sculptress working in Paris is in her atelier working on a huge statue of a crouching demon. The statue is made from clay and it is a phallic eruption of malice towering over the center of the room. A lady Cubist, portrayed satirically, is observing the woman caressing the idol's soft clay. With paralyzed horror, she sees that a huge lump of clay is about to calve from the shoulder and torso of the malevolent figure. The big mass of somewhat fecal clay drops on top of the lady artist, crushing her. The woman, played by Alice Terry, is the endangered heroine of the story. A dashing, if somewhat dull, surgeon operates on her in a large glass-walled surgical theater. Looming over the medical action as a spectator is a bizarre figure, the sinister Magus played by the German actor, Paul Wegener. The film was conceived as a vehicle for Wegener and he imparts his extraordinary and grotesque presence to the film. Wegener is a huge boulder of a man, a German star in the mold of Emil Jannings and Wallace Beery. Apparently taller when prone, as the Australian poet Les Murray once put it, Wegener seems fantastically powerful, an evil strong man and he has the features of a goblin -- his face is slavic, with an broad Jack-o-lantern mouth slung between two enormously prominent cheekbones. Wegener's cheeks are so protuberant that, when he is lit from below, his eye-sockets are underlined by black "v"- shaped shadows. Wegener was famous for his proto-Frankenstein role in the three Golem films made in Berlin in 1915, 1917 and 1920. Wegener's magician is plotting to make artificial life in the laboratory, a project that requires life-blood extracted from the heart of a maiden. The wounded heroine recovers and falls in love with the surgeon. Unfortunately, she encounters the Magus who hypnotizes her. Although ridiculous in some ways, the hypnosis scene is a highlight in the film -- mesmerized, the rather vapid heroine has a vision of a Dionysian revel, a crowd of nearly naked folks prancing around and cavorting grotesquely in the light of hellish bonfires. The imagery seems derived from Bosch and features great writhing mobs of nude extras hopping around in a huge set littered with sinister gewgaws and barren trees and weird, vaguely genital-shaped forms. The heroine is embraced by a faun-like creature with cloven hooves and the horns of a ram while the Magician leers, his hair slicked up to form two horns on his head. The point seems to be that the conventional, chaste heroine is secretly wracked with repressed sexual desire and that, perhaps, she prefers the erotic ministrations of the grotesque magician to her conventional boyfriend. Engaged to be married to the surgeon, the Magus intervenes and spirits the heroine away to Monte Carlo and, then, to a remote mountainous village in the south of France. This terrain is familiar to horror film fans: a medieval village with crumbling huts and narrow streets huddled at the foot of a mountain crowned with a phallic knob of tower, the so-called "sorceror's tower" protruding up into the black, lightning cleft sky like a rhino's horn. The hero rescues the maiden who is fettered to a table, half naked, awaiting vivisection by the evil magician. He has been fiddling with long scalpels, delaying until the surgeon can arrive to engage him in herculean session of fisticuffs. The magician is hurled into his own red-hot furnace and the tower is blasted into a million pieces as a result of some strange magical spell. Ingram's film is interesting for the way that contrasts the rather limpid classical Grecian beauty of the heroine, Alice Terry, with the grinning gargoyle face of Wegener's magus. The picture also has an odd campy feeling, a strange sense of grotesque humor. In the middle of dire sequences, Ingram will insert vulgar jokes and low-comedy mugging by his character actors. In one remarkable image, a hunchbacked dwarf, played by a real "little person," gets blown into a barren tree. He hangs from a naked limb with his clothes in shreds, wriggling like a fish on a hook and tormented by crows -- the sight is supposed to be funny but it is like one of the more ghastly visions of Goya. In many respects, the long-forgotten film has had a long after-life. The erectile sorceror's tower, the campy humor, and the implicit disdain that the film shows for normal people all surface again, more powerfully, and in a better picture, James Whale's "The Bride of Frankenstein."

Dylan Moran

Dylan Moran, last name pronounced “More - en”, performed in Minneapolis at the mysterious Women’s Club at Loring Park on October 18, 2013. Moran is an Irish stand-up comedian, known, if at all, in this country, for his performances in “Shaun of the Dead” and Simon Pegg’s “Run, Fat Boy, Run” -- in BBC-country, he has some renown as the star of a three-year series, “Black Books”, a sit-com about a perpetually disgruntled Irish proprietor of a shabby Bloomsbury bookstore. The Minneapolis Women’s Club is an Italianate palazzo located on the south side of Loring Park, a building that seems to have built a hundred years ago and part of an ensemble of strangely authoritarian structures that rise over the lake and pavilions in the small tract of wooded land under the escarpment of the city. The club overlooks the limpid pool of the lake in the park and the cloister-like columns hovering over the park are lit by invisible bulbs, illumined by a pumpkin-yellow tint that suffuses the limestone façade of the building. Jack and Angelica and I were an hour early to this place and, after finding a parking place on the boulevard, we hiked across Hennepin Avenue, surmounting the famous and elegant bridge over that street, to wander in the twilight gloom of the sculpture garden on the lawn of the Walker Art Center. A wedding was underway at the Walker Art Center and elegant-looking couples in black suits and dresses were wandering among the great monoliths and vast Cor-ten iron palisades of the sculpture garden and guests were taking pictures in front of the monumental cherry on the spoon by Claes Oldenburg, that sculpture poised in the center of its little dim lake, a clouded cornea at the base of the city, the art-work glowing with a strange phosphorescent light in the cold dusk. Turned away from the wedding receptions at the WAC (and the screening of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” with Geoff Dyer in attendance), we went back over the bridge and strolled around the park until it was time to queue-up at the Women’s Club to see Dylan Moran. The moon was pasted between two skyscrapers, tawdry and yellow as cheese, a brilliant full-moon casting its light down on Loring Park and oddly official-looking buildings looming over the park. Who could possibly know that a big auditorium is located next to the park? It seems improbable. The whole thing is an enigma -- a Venetian palace hovering over the cold groves and the dim lake with its Victorian pavilions on the edge of murky waters. When we come to the auditorium, a ticket-taker tells us to go to another door and we reach that place and rap on the entry and, it seems, that Moran is just beyond the door, leaning against the window, disheveled hair, half-drunk, talking to a couple of girls who are both ushers and security at this place, Valkyries defending this entrance against our arrival. We are directed back to the crowded auditorium -- the show is sold-out, 500 people] crammed into the gloomy hall. In the seventies, I sometimes attended modern dance programs -- the audience members all seemed to be dancers themselves, with leotards peeping out of their purses and backpacks. Similarly, this audience has a familiar feel, a gathering of cognoscenti, a group of comedy writers, kids in shapeless sweaters and horn-rimmed glasses with their homely girlfriends everyone dressed in funereal black, people who seem to be insiders, guys who write for Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show”, aficiondos of the stand-up comedy scene. Moran's stand-up is funny, highly articulate, and, more or less, predictable. He takes the stage, insults the crowd for awhile and, then, riffs on the standard subjects of stand-up comics -- pets, dogs, vegetarian food, vegans, the difference between men and women. Moran blinks at the audience, threatens them and delivers a series of droll and complex observations about the characteristics of various nations -he has toured in Serbia and Russia and Poland and Berlin. He is a gifted mimic, expert at imitating blandly self-entitled and smug American accents and the deformed speech of Russians and Germans venturing to speak in English. It’s all humorous and amusing enough, but not laugh-out-loud funny, clever comments about current events delivered in a musical Irish brogue. Everything is pretty predictable, but Moran is clever and his remarks are well-phrased and the audience is enthusiastic. Moran is on tour and has come from Milwaukee and Kansas and he makes sardonic remarks about those places and the Minneapolis crowd, tutored to think itself superior to those other venues, roars with laughter. Moran has a bad smoker’s cough and his discourse is frequently interrupted by hacking gasps for air -- at one point, Moran asks: ”Is there a doctor in the house?” and when audience members reply in the affirmative, he says: “Stay away from me. I hate you fuckers!” After about 45 minutes, Moran takes a break, indicating that he is ”just beginning” and only at the start of “repairing “ the ignorance of the audience. After about twenty minutes, Moran returns to the bare stage, palpably more intoxicated -- he is sipping red wine from a big goblet. I can’t tell if he is really drunk or feigning intoxication for the crowd. He staggers around, leaning on the slender reed of the microphone stanchion. Moran is more philosophical and less vehement in the second half of the show and his words display a certain wisdom. The crowd gives him a standing ovation and Moran says that he is working this Friday -- that's the night of this show -- and that the crowd’s approbation is not necessarily pleasing to him since it just means that he has to work longer and has to delay the additional drinks that he hope to consume after he knocks off. He ends the show after a brief commentary about men and women and about children -- he has several kids -- and there is another standing ovation. Moran is very accomplished and his quips are well-phrased and when you smile at what he says you don't feel exploited or mean-spirited, but, in the end, unless you are a fan, it is a bit of an ordeal -- the show is too long by about a half hour, but Moran clearly feels that he needs to deliver good value for the admission price and so he labors dutifully to fill the time and the crowd is obviously enthusiastic and there is another standing ovation as he departs. Moran has made comments on the National Rifle Association, gay marriage, and the dysfunction in Washington, D. C. When he remarks that American English has seized control of the world, someone in the crowd shouts “Sorry!” Moran responds: “You liberal leftist Minnesota assholes can fuck yourself!” In the second half of the show, Moran (whose show is notably chaste) reads from an erotic blockbuster that he imagines to be modeled on “Fifty Shades of Grey”. He recites from that text: “No” he said, his voice cruel and stern and his face impassive like the face of an Easter Island idol caught in a traffic jam.” For some reason, this seems very funny to me. Moran’s wit, I think, is equivalent to the aristocratic disdain that Oscar Wilde displayed when he toured America in the late Victorian era -- periodically, we Americans need to be reminded as to our peasant origins and our lack of culture and this is, I suppose, salutary.

The Audacious Eye -- Japanese Art from the Clark Collection

“The Audacious Eye -- works from the Clark Collections of Japanese Art” is an exhibition currently on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Apparently, the Clarks have donated Japanese art objects acquired over a lifetime of collecting to the MIA -- presumably, parts of this collection will be on display in the future, although exactly how the institution intends to present this art, whether by integrating it into its already excellent Japanese galleries (mostly gifts from the Dayton family), or in some separate housing, is unclear to me. The Clark collection begins with artifacts from the 12th century (Kamakura era) and continues through five or six large rooms to the present. Most of the art objects are jaw-dropping, many of the images bizarre and grotesque. The exhibition demonstrates how little we know about Japan, how mysterious its metaphors and icons are to us, and how baffling and peculiar its artistic techniques and representational strategies. I understood almost none of the images shown in the collection -- confronted by a massive, life-size wall-hanging of a bull, edged with a peculiar densely neon blue, calligraphically elegant (the “ductus” is the hand of a calligrapher using an ink brush on rice paper but in a heroic format), it is hard to know how to react. The image is not naturalistic nor is it abstract nor even particularly stylized -- rather, the image demonstrates a reaction to an animal that is filtered through a sensibility that is precise, intensely intelligent, and completely alien to the way that our visual and literary culture has taught us to imagine a bull. The Japanese beast, a symbol for the passions, I think, in Zen Buddhism, is not fierce and tragic like one of Goya’s animals, nor is it peculiarly masculine like Picasso's bulls, but,rather, almost kittenish, powerful but not really frightening, large and strong but not intimidating. There are vast landscapes with sheer bluffs like stalagmites, the entire vista somehow dank and moist and gloomy like the inside of a limestone cavern. A number of folding screens feature bare boughs, jagged as lightning and slashing upward across a cream void, fierce-looking hawks glaring at smaller birds frolicking on the naked branch -- one of these images is a "three-white" painting, that is, a tour de force in which the artist demonstrates the differing textures of white plumage, white blossoms, and white late-spring snow encrusting the bough. Raffish-looking bodhisattvas frolic near waterfalls like jets of pure pale energy, columns springing from shaggy cliffs. One erotic scross shows intertwined couples, their white faces floating over entangled genitals that look a tree-clogged ravine in some remote mountain landscape. A pop-eyed boy cartoonishly leers at an elegant woman whose kimono is disheveled by the wind. The force of the boy's stare has inflated his face like a balloon and pinkened his eyes. One huge wall-hanging displays a fat frog with bulging eyes, a monster elegantly made by a couple of sweeps of a house-painter's brush. Hidden beneath the dewlaps of the frog is a small, elegant mouse, the whole image overlaid like a palimpsest with text. A series of astounding and melancholy ghosts, painted in the most subtle sfumato, rise like fumes ascending through darkness -- they are dead mothers and their faces are a combination of lily-like beauty and grotesque sorrow. One of the dead mothers hovers over her sleeping child, the baby an abstract pudgy form protected by a mosquito net -- although the woman seems insubstantial, fading from sight as we look at her, she is, also, nonetheless, a half-decayed corpse with sagging mask-like features. Another image shows representatives of the three types of humanity -- a Japanese scholar and a Chinese sage and a balding Westerner who looks a little like a bust of Homer and pages idly through an anatomy picture book. This is curious enough, but the top of the painting shows a lurid blossom of flame, a pink roseate fire burning wildly while tiny figures direct arcs of water against the blaze from hoses. What in the world does this image, or this combination of images mean? Similarly puzzling is a vivid, crowded landscape showing a scene from the Tale of the Genjii. There are lords and ladies and peasants in processions, pagodas and palaces and ornate temples but the image is half-obscured by clouds of gold-leaf, a flat abstract pattern that is supposed to simulate -- what? -- early morning fog, low-lying mist, in any event a sort of glove-shaped void that interrupts the picture surface and conceals completely many of the episodes that I presume we are supposed to discover in the twenty-foot long picture. This is a show that must be seen in the gallery -- the scale of the images is important to their meaning and effect and most of the pictures have an aspect-ratio unfamiliar in Western art: the pictures are either elongated horizontally to stretch across extended folding screens or they are tall and narrow, sheets of painted rice-paper displayed like pennants or banners as wall-hangings. I don't think these images could be easily reproduced in a book because of their format -- they are either too long or too tall to fit readily onto the pages of a book of standard size. Nonetheless, I went to the gift shop anxious to buy a catalog of the collection. I hoped that a written text explicating the images would unlock the iconography and meanings encoded in the pictures. There was an elegant and expensive catalog for sale but I didn't buy it: the text was all in Japanese.

Uncle Vanya

Like "The Seagull," Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" starts quickly: with breathtaking efficiency, Chekhov establishes the situation and induces his characters to bare their souls within the first ten minutes of the play. At this stage in the proceedings, the gloom and morbid defeatism seems hysterical, a theatrical pose. The next two hours demonstrates that the situation is every bit as bleak as the characters have proclaimed, that their plight is as hopeless as they have expressed it to be shortly after the curtain rose on them, and, if anything, things will only go from bad to worse. The trajectory of these plays is from self-dramatizing proclamations of hopelessness to a clinical demonstration that this hopelessness is real, actual, and irreversible to, at last, something approaching a tragic recognition and reconciliation with the fatal destiny that has stranded these characters on this shoal of misery. Chekhov's Vanya and his adversary, the doctor, wallow in their unhappiness and tell us, at the outset, that they are miserable -- as the play progresses, the play pitilessly forces them to earn this misery. The effect of "Uncle Vanya" is that what appears "dramatic" -- that is, contrived and exagerrated in the first half of the play -- seems naturalistic, inevitable, and unavoidable in the second part of the show. "Uncle Vanya" is eerily prescient in the doctor's concern about climate change, deforestation, and the devastation of the Russian ecology, although it's important to realize that the alcoholic physician's opinions on these matters, although forcefully presented, represent his own precise form of failure, his sphere of bad faith, the ridiculous self-absorption and evasion that prevents him from being a good and virtuous man. Modern audiences, applauding the doctor's prophetic environmentalism, perhaps, fail to notice that during the long scene where his opinions are expressed (mostly through Sonya), the physician is preening himself on his apocalyptic predictions while a wounded workman, for whom the doctor has been summoned, is presumably bleeding to death at some noisome factory near the country estate where he is tarrying, awaiting yet another glass of vodka. (Chekhov's technique is extraordinary; the comic velocity of the opening scenes and the playwright's hasty full-throated and bold attack is startling. Further, his device of having one character talk for another -- for instance, Sonya explicating the doctor's environmentalism -- complicates and deepens our understanding both of the doctor's intelligent, if glib, ecological concerns and Sonya's hapless love for him.) The fundamental question presented by the play is to what extent Vanya's bitter hysteria is a representation of the truth. Hysteria, a word applied to Vanya several times, represents one adaptation to entrapment and disappointment; Vanya's hysteria is so abundantly obvious to the other characters that they don't call the authorities when he twice tries to murder the Professor -- he is so feckless and inept that no one even takes his homicidal fury seriously. Other adaptations to the characters' confinement and ineffectuality are demonstrated in the play: Waffles' masochism shows us what happens when someone wallows in misery and allows misfortune to define him. The elderly professor responds to the depredations of old age with sheer panic, another form of hysteria that induces in him an impressive range of (probably) psychosomatic symptoms. Sonya strugges fitfully to escape her fetters, but, ultimately, withdraws from any effective action -- she dispatches her romantic rival to demand an answer from the doctor as to whether he loves her with predictably catastrophic results. What did she think was going to happen? The beautiful Elena protests her loveless marriage to the old man by teasing the other men and sowing discord among them. Only the old nurse and the ancient grandmother seem to have miraculously escaped the seething misery in the household -- the old nurse is compassionate if ineffectual; grandma, an anarchist, calls herself "an old gladiator" and Chekhov symbolizes the cost that she makes others pay for her ruthless self-sufficiency: she is completely deaf and can't communicate with any of those around her. The Guthrie Theater's 2013 production of "Uncle Vanya" boasts a pointlessly complex set -- the play could be presented without any props at all. Brian Friel's adaptation seems a bit too facile to me, too modern, I think -- althought the plight of Chekhov's characters is universal, their circumstances are uniquely Russian and part of the fascination of the play is observing a brittle system of social relations poised on the brink of suicide. Uncle Vanya's plot to murder himself, like all of his stratagems, fails pathetically -- but the society of which he is a part is in the process of killing itself. I thought the performances in the final act were a bit too shrill, as if the hysteria animating the first three acts has not entirely resolved itself into the placid resignation of self-entombment with which the play concludes. Critics in the local newspaper have complained that the play, in this production, is presented with too great an emphasis on humor. I didn't think this was a defect, but thought that the apparently hysterical over-statement in the first half of the play did not convincingly resolve itself into a clarity of emotion in the second part. In my view, "Uncle Vanya" should start loud, desparate, and over-acted with the performances becoming quieter and more involuted as the show proceeds. That wasn't Joe Dowling's approach to this production and, perhaps, the esteem in which I hold this play -- "Uncle Vanya" is one of the greatest of all theater-pieces -- makes me suggest a quixotic and unduly abstract approach to the show.