Kaili Blues and Bi Gan (Film Group Note)

Kaili Blues and Bi Gan



Bi Gan was raised in a lower middle class household in Kaili City, Guizhou province, China.  He was born in 1987.   He is ethnic Miao – that is, Hmong.

Kaili City is an industrial blue collar metropolis.  To the north of Kaili, coal mines and cement factories dominate the landscape.  South of city, the landscape becomes more rugged and the river valleys are deeper and narrower.  This is the scene karst landscape of the “Ten Thousand Peaks” area.  The people living to the south of Kaili are ethnic Miao.  The Miao speak languages related the Hmong and are mountain dwellers with an entirely different culture than the Mandarin-speaking Chinese who live in Kaili and the other metropolitan areas.  At present, the economy of this area is dominated by the tourist trade – Chinese people come to see the picturesque karst topography where a popular Tv show, Journey to the West, a sort of Mandarin equivalent to Game of Thrones was filmed.  Visiting ethnic Miao villages is also an important feature of the tourist business in this area.

Kaili City is poor and Bi Gan claims that there were no movie theaters in the town when he was growing up there.  He watched TV and considers himself a “child of TV.”  He had no interest in film until he attended a junior college and took courses in TV production.  One of those courses briefly addressed the history and esthetics of film.  In that course, Bi Gan was required to watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.  Bi Gan says that he hated the film at first and thought it would be impossible to watch to its conclusion.  But he persevered and, now, says that this film influenced him to become a director.

Bi Gan did some Tv work, made a couple of well-received short films, and, then, received funding, largely through the Guizhou regional film authority, to make Kaili Blues.  The movie was internationally premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Italy in 2013.  The picture won numerous international awards – Bi Gan was, then, 26.

His next film, A Long Days Journey into Night, was completed in 2018.  It was also premiered to some acclaim.  Unfortunately, however, the movie was released on Valentine’s Day and marketed as a date movie.  Several million Chinese couples paid to see the movie that was alleged to be a romantic comedy.  In fact, the film is an experimental picture that is incomprehensible on first viewing.  (At least, this was my impression when I saw the picture in May, 2019 at the Walker Art Center.)  Lots of couples demanded that their money be returned and Bi Gan says that the film has a bad reputation based on the way it was marketed.

It’s not clear to me what he is currently directing.  He toured with A Long Days Journey into Night as well as earlier with Kaili Blues.  A number of interviews with him can be watched on You-Tube.  Bi Gan is short stocky man with a buzz-cut hair do.  He looks a little like a less sinister and more merry Chairman Kim.  He likes to drink and, frequently, claims that he is a bit intoxicated during interviews.  He seems to understand some English but can’t speak the language.  His answers to questions posed to him are generally evasive.

Although Bi Gan’s work seems related to some of David Lynch’s films, particularly the American’s nightmarish Inland Empire, an uncompromisingly abstract experimental film, he admits only to admiring Blue Velvet.  Bi Gan claims as his primary influence the Taiwanese director, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, particularly that film maker’s Goodbye, South, Goodbye (1996).  Hou Hsiao-Hsien is famous for his extremely long sequence shots, often implemented by intricate camera movements.

Bi Gan writes poetry.  He claims that he is more influenced by classical Chinese poetry than films or TV.  In particular, he cites as influences the poetry of 9th century Tang Dynasty and the prose from the Song dynasty – in both types of writing, he notes a rhythmic alternation between long and short lines.

Tarkovsky’s book on cinema is called Sculpting in Time.  Bi Gan says that film allows the director to compose with light, color, shadow, and time or duration.  The duration of shots is integral to the design of Bi Gan’s films.  He relates the alternation between long and shot to ci, a technique in classical Chinese poetry in which long lines alternate with short phrases.

Bi Gan shoots his films in Mandarin.  He maintains an outsider status – he is not part of the Chinese commercial film industry, producing his movies in remote Guizhou Province.  China also has a thriving and internationally acclaimed experimental or avant garde film community.  Art-house or independently produced films are, generally, made by directors based in Beijing.  Bi Gan is not associated with the avant garde scene in Beijing either.  In interviews, he affects the posture of a blue collar Asian hillbilly, a hard-drinking montagnard from the boondocks.


Cheat-Sheet

Kaili Blues presents a narrative that can be stated in a diachronic sequence.  Of course, by unscrambling the plot, I am betraying certain aspects of the film – clearly Bi Gan wants his viewers to decipher the plot from information that is scattered and, often, mentioned in an off-hand manner thoughout the film.  However, one must recognize that most viewers are not going to have the leisure or opportunity to watch the movie several times in order to ascertain what happens and who is doing what to whom.  Furthermore, the film poses difficulties to non-Chinese viewers that don’t confront people seeing the picture in Mandarin and with some familiarity with the circumstances that the movie depicts.  Clues as to the narrative may be muttered by a character and shown so briefly in subtitles that the viewer can’t react or assimilate the information.  Furthermore, there are clearly two types of experience presented by the movie – there is reality, as represented by events shown to happen in and near Kaili City (although this is confounded sometimes by elliptical flashbacks that may not clearly delineated or set apart) and, then, there are experiences occurring near Dangmai, after the young man picks up Chen Sheng at the reservoir.  These experiences are largely compiled within several long takes – the first involving Chen Sheng’s “shaggy dog” story about being beaten in prison and the second, a 42 minute long sequences without any cuts, that takes around the river village and involves a complex series of interactions with the inhabitants of that village.  I will not attempt to unravel exactly what takes place in that scene because it is, as Chen Sheng says, “like being in a dream”.  The dream-like character of these long sequence shots is particularly remarkable because we can see exactly what happens without any edits or ellipsis – there’s no ambiguity of any kind about what we see, but, of course, there are very significant questions about what these events mean.


The Characters

Since Chinese names are a little tricky, we need to first establish the relationships between the characters.  Bi Gan casts family members who are, in fact, related similar to the way the family was constituted by actors (also related) in Vardas’ Le Bonheur.

Chen Sheng, the protagonist, is a medical doctor and poet.  He is the uncle of an eight-year old boy, Wei Wei (a nickname).  Chen Sheng has written a book of poems called Roadside Picnic.  The poems are ostensibly introduced on TV in an early scene that, in fact, provides credits for the film – the TV show purports to introduce a program in which Chen Sheng’s poems will be recited.  (The film’s actual titles occurs about a half-hour into the movie.)

Crazy Face is Chen Sheng’s younger half-brother.  He is the father of Wei Wei.  Like many of the apparently aimless Miao characters in the film, he seems to be some kind of low-ranking gangster.  (The film implies that he runs a chop-shop for stolen motorcycles.)  Crazy Face sometimes works at a carnival in Kaili City, but also spends a lot of time gambling on a games that seems to be like dominos.

Guanglian is an elderly female doctor who is Chen Sheng’s partner in their somewhat shabby medical practice in Kaili.   Guanglian (Mandarin: “Lotus Light”) was a revolutionary Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.  At that time, she had an affair with Lin Airen, a Miao musician.  But she has not seen Lin Airen for many years.

Pisshead is a drunk affiliated with the gangsters in Kaili City.  Pisshead is also a member of a rock and roll band in Dangmai.

Monk is a gangster for whom Chen Sheng once worked.

Yang Yang is a hair stylist in Dangmai.  Her friend, whose name we don’t know, is revealed by flashbacks to look exactly like Chen Sheng’s wife.


The film takes place in three places:

Kaili City – this is where Chen Sheng practices medicine with Guanglian and interacts with is brother, Crazy Face, and his nephew, Wei Wei.

Dangmai – this is river valley town somewhere between Kaili City and Zhenyuan.  The name in Miao means “Hidden Place” – it’s not found on any maps.  As Herman Melville remins us “real places” are never “found on maps.”

Zhenyuan – this is tourist town catering to tourists who want to interact with the Miao (Hmong) tribal people.  Bananas are produced whole-sale there.


Some of the plot:

1. As a young man, Chen Sheng worked for the gangster called Monk; he was a “street kid” abandoned by his mother who lived, from time to time, in Zhenyuan;
2. One of Monk’s henchmen owed money to another gangster, apparently a female mobster;
3. The female mobster punished the debtor by burying his son alive after cutting off the child’s hand – I presume the hand was cut-off to provide evidence that the boy had been actually killed.  The film implies that the child may have penned onto his wrist a watch to imitate the flashy way that Chinese mobster’s dress;
4. Chen Sheng accepted the justice of burying the boy alive but thought that the hand amputation went too far;
5. Chen Sheng attacked the female mobster and may have murdered her;
6. Chen Sheng was convicted of murder or assault and sent to a labor prison (a coal mine) for nine years;
7. While Chen Sheng was in the labor camp, his wife left him and, then, died;
8. Presumably in prison, Chen Sheng learned medicine and became a doctor;
9. While in prison, Chen Sheng’s mother (who wore slippers embroidered with a Batik pattern) died.  Crazy Face cared for his mother while Chen Sheng was in prison.
10. Crazy Face and Chen Sheng are estranged because their deceased mother gave Chen Sheng the family house.  Furthermore, Chen Sheng is angry at Crazy Face because of his neglect of Wei Wei;
11. Guanglian, the woman in medical practice with Chen Sheng, asks her partner to track down her former lover, Lin Airen, and give him a casette tape and, also, a batik shirt;
12. Lin Airen is thought to be living in Zhenyuan, the Miao village – he is said to be old and sick;
13. Chen Sheng accuses Crazy Face of evading his responsibilities to Wei Wei and, in fact, says that Crazy Face sold the child to Monk and that the boy is living with Monk in Zhenyuan.
14. So Chen Sheng sets out on a road trip to go to Zhenyuan via Dangmai for two purposes: first, to find Lin Airen and give him the shirt and cassette tape, gifts from Guanglian; and, second, to retrieve Wei Wei from Monk.




Titles

Bi Gan’s titles for his films are curiously allusive and unhelpful.  He initially called Kaili Blues, The Book of Disquiet after the volume of prose poems by the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa.  He wrote the script to the film now called A Long Day’s Journey into Night under the title Roadside Picnic.  Roadside Picnic is the name of the novel by Alexander Strugasky that was adapted by Tarkovsky (very loosely) into the film Stalker.  He decided to release Kaili Blues under the Chinese name Roadside Picnic –this was because Bi Gan’s book of poems, nine of which are read in the film, was published under the title Roadside Picnic (Lo bien ye can in Mandarin).  “Because of this decision,” Bi Gan says, “I had to call my next film A Long Day’s Journey into Night”, although the Chinese name for the film is The Book of Disquiet.”  This suggests that we shouldn’t devote too much critical energy to deciphering the relationship between Bi Gan’s titles and his films – the titles seem to be simply allusions to books that he is reading or admires.  A Long Day’s Journey into Night, of course, is the title of a play by Eugene O’Neill (1941-1942, first published in 1956) which seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Chinese film of that same name directed by Bi Gan and released in the United States this year. 


Poetry and Time

What is Kaili Blues about?  Many years ago, the Italian film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote an essay on cinema and poetry. (Pasolini was also an important Italian poet.)  Pasolini said that film is absolutely objective and absolutely subjective – by this he meant that the camera is always recording a real thing in real light and real space, but that the selection of the thing to be photographed and the way the image was edited into the film’s continuity was wholly subjective.  Film’s subjectivity in marshaling into real objects into pictograms or ideograms (that is, constellations of juxtaposed images) is poetic.  In this respect, Pasolini’s ideas comported with many of the theories underlying modernist poetry in English – William Carlos Williams famously proclaimed that there are “no ideas but in things” and Ezra Pound as well as T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore created a verse comprised of citations, fragments of prose and verse, arranged to create ideograms.  Bi Gan, also a published poet, devises his film as a sequence of indelibly tangible images that, nonetheless, are suffused in a poetic atmosphere.  Kaili Blues is about trains, watches, tunnels, dripping water, batik fabric, disco balls, humidity and rain fall – these are the elements from which the film is constructed.  But Kaili Blues is about the poetry of these objectively real things displayed against a luminous background of impenetrable enigma – the things in the world are everywhere present to us, but they can’t quite be grasped.

In his book, The Red and the Black, Stendhal says that the novelist uses prose like a man carrying a mirror through the countryside.  The novelist writes in order to reflect reality.  Bi Gan adjusts this image to warp and fracture his mirror into a reflective disco ball – an emblematic image often shown in Kaili Blues.  The disco ball reflects reality but shatters it into innumerable prismatic shards – the world is reflected in a discontinuous series of broken images.  Poetry and memory assemble these scattered reflections of a world into a structure that makes meaning.  There are many different ways of assembling the prismatic fragments of memory – we can construct a diagram of the past, that is, decrypting the shards into a narrative; we can devise plots that explicate, justify, or defend our actions; or we can make poetry (and reverie or dreams) out of these broken shards of reality.  Bi Gan typically opts for an order that does not explicate – this is the order of poetry.  He opts to reconstitute memory into a poetry that simulates, in some ways, dream.  More accurately, Bi Gan is interested in the transitional half-lit zone where memory becomes dream or memory becomes poetry.  “Cinema is too realistic for dream sequences,” Bi Gan has said.  “Dream sequences seem phony.  I’m interested in the transitions from dream to reality.”

Consider Bi Gan’s deployment of train imagery in the film.  Wei Wei rides a small train that runs in a loop at the carnival in Kaili City.  Crazy Face seems to have a train projected on fabric on the wall of his apartment.  Chen Sheng rides a train to the reservoir above Dangmai and, then, ultimately to Zhenyuan.  (At the end of the movie, he seems to be returning to Kaili City on the empty train.)  Throughout the history of film, trains have signified the onward rush of time, the march of history, the irreversible nature of historical events – consider the train in Bertolucci’s 1900 resplendent with red Communist flags that appears at the end of his film.  An old man lays on the tracks between the rails and the train passes over him – when the red train has passed, time has reversed and the old man has reverted to being the child that he was 70 years earlier.  Yang Yang tells Wei Wei that she will go with him back to the City “only if you turn back time.”  At the end of the movie, we see a train which Wei Wei has covered with graffiti of clock faces seeming to reverse time.  Film is comprised of photographs which have frozen or stopped time – time can be reversed by running a film backward.  The windows of a train are metaphorically like the individual frames from which movies are (or were) made.  A moving train is like celluloid strip of frame moving through a projector.  (We will need new metaphors in this digital age.)  Einstein used trains to demonstrate relativity – the fact that clocks will seem to run at different speeds according to the frame (that word again) in which the clock is observed.  Time may move like a locomotive in one direction, but we also experience times as spiral or circular – events reoccur and history cycles in loops.  One poem in the movie addresses “42 windmills” – this is the whirligig that Yang Yang buys on the other side of the river, but also the ubiquitous spinning fans in hot apartments (when first started, the rotors seems to run backward), the faces of the clocks with or without hands, the clock inscribed on the train that reverses time – 42 windmills also seems to identify the 42 minutes that comprises that long take in the film’s second half.

The landscape in Kaili Blues also is inflected with time.  The linear flow of time is like the linear flow of a river – rivers are also emblematic of time and, in Kaili Blues, a great river bisects the landscape running in deep narrow gorge.  Space is defined as upriver or down river.  (It comes as an almost physical shock when Yang Yang moves cross-river defying the linear logic of the roads and elongated villages in the river valleys.)  The climax of the film is when the two trains pass one another and we see time reversed.

Memory reverses time.  Memory is like dream in which linear time doesn’t really exist.  (The Diamond Sutra argues that space and time are both illusions.)  Memory also corresponds to reincarnation.  The Chinese proverb tells us that “every meeting is a reunion” because everyone we meet we have encountered in a previous life.  Chen Sheng’s (Bi Gan’s) poem says that “reunion is in a dark room.”  The dark room is the cinema in which memory counteracts time’s arrow.  The dark room is also our dreams – a closed, twilight space in which people from all times in our lives brush elbows and are all simultaneously present.  A poem is a kind of waking dream made from memories.  Ultimately, there’s no point in explicating a poem – if the poet wanted the meanings of the verse to be reduced to prose, he or she would have written those meanings out in prose.  But, of course, we explicate poetry endlessly, fascinated precisely by a structure that will not yield to explanation.  It’s our melancholy fate as human beings to move from the entrancing experience of poetry to its explication – but without explication poems are merely onanistic, masturbatory, a sort of self-pleasuring. What we explicate in poems is the communal meaning that can be expressed.  This explication leaves us with an excess, with something left-over – that left over thing is my own personal, private, inexplicable response to the poetry, my visceral reaction.  When I have reduced (and I intend the verb) the poem to its meanings, I have described in the common language what can be said about the poem and what we can share in our understanding of it.  But there’s a hermetic core, a secret center of the poem, that I may feel but can’t express.  We can say what happens in Kaili Blues and may, even, devise some ways of explaining those events – but the essence of the movie, like the essence of a poem, is communicable only in the language of emotion and memory which is not a language at all.





Notes

Batik – Batik is a technique for producing colorful fabric using a wax-resistant pattern while dyeing.  Batik is an Indonesian term, probably related to a Asian verb for “tattooing.”  Fabric is marked with hot wax painted onto the cloth.  The fabric is, then, dyed.  After dyeing, the wax is scraped off the fabric leaving an undyed area on the cloth.  This process can be repeated several times to produce complex and colorful patterns on the cloth.  Batik has been invented various times and in various places – Indonesia is famous for its Batik-patterned fabrics.  The technique is used extensively in Africa and India and also among the Hmong in southwest China.

Diamond Sutra – This Buddhist scripture dates to 200 to 400 Common Era.  The text is written in Sanskrit but was translated into various other Asian languages within a hundred years of its inception.  “Diamond” is a translation for the Sanskrit vajra – which means “lightning bolt that cuts like a diamond.”  The short scripture, it is 6000 words long, is thought to be a “diamond that cuts through the appearances in the world and reveals all things to be illusory.”  The sutra is very popular, often memorized, or carried about in folding pocket editions.  The Diamond sutra is also the oldest printed book – a copy of it was found printed from woodblocks circa 868 CE.  This Chinese language translation was commissioned by Wang Jie in honor of his parents and, according to its colophon: “for universal free distribution.”

The sutra proceeds by the logic of negation to deny the reality of everything, including the self.  The text purports to be a dialogue that took place between the Buddha and a monk Subhuti near the Jeta grove outside the Indian city of Sravasti.  The most famous passage of the sutra is the admonition “to view this fleeting world (as) a star at dawn, a bubble in the stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.”

In Kaili Blues, Bi gan quotes the part of the sutra in which the Buddha tells Subhuti that he knows the minds of all gods, men, and sentient beings because all of those minds are alike in sharing the same error, that is, the mistaken notion that time exists.  The Buddha says “the past is not to be attained.”  Similarly the “present is not to be attained.”  And the “future is also not be attained.”  This means that the mind can not truly “grasp” or comprehend the future because it has not yet happened, the past because it has vanished, or the present because it is too ephemeral and elusive to be seized.

Little Jasmine – this is a pop song released in 1980 by the Taiwanese singer Mei Sheng Bao.  (Not to confused with the very famous and much-played “Jasmine Flower” (“Mo Li Hua”), an 18th century Chinese folk song that you have heard a dozen times playing in the background at Chinese buffets.)  Mei Sheng Bao’s record is simply called “Songs” – it was an enormous hit in Asia.  (The song is an example of so-called Mandopop – Mandarin pop.)  Chen hears the song being played while riding with the musicians in the back of the white pickup truck.  Later, he tries, without much success, to sing the melody on the street where the Miao rock and roll band is playing.  He learned the song in prison so that he could sing it to his wife upon being released.  We know she died before his release.  However, the hair stylist who cuts Chen’s hair looks exactly like the hero’s wife – we know this from several flashback scenes.  Therefore, Chen’s wife is standing on the street listening to him when Chen tries to sing “Little Jasmine.” 

Wei Wei – typically a nickname.   When applied to a boy, the name is written with characters that denote “loftiness” and “Power” – an English equivalent would be “Biggy”.  (When applied to a woman, the characters mean “Little Fern”.)  Bi Gan’s nickname as a child was Wei Wei.

Cymbeline (August 2) and Macbeth (August 3, 2019)

The Great River Shakespeare Company, a summer festival troupe in Winona, Minnesota, presented productions of Cymbeline and Macbeth on its 2019 closing weekend, Friday evening and Saturday matinee, at the Vivian Fussillo Theater at Winona State University.  These shows were part of the 16th season for Great River Shakespeare Festival.  In both instances, the plays were competently acted and ingeniously staged.  The mostly young company performed with zeal to audiences that must have seemed disappointingly small to the players.  I found much admirable in the presentation of these plays and little to criticize -- the acting is somewhat inconsistent, ranging from impassioned and excellent to merely tolerable. The sets and costumes were generally drab, although serviceable enough.  Shakespeare generally has to be edited to be performed -- in Cymbeline, the unstageworthy stuff involving a tablet deposited on the breast of the sleeping Posthumus was mercifully omitted; a few of the apparitions were excised from Macbeth and the witch's lines about seasoning their potion with the"hand of a blaspheming Jew" and the thick lips of "a Turk" were redacted.  But, by and large, the audience was served with Shakespeare, more or less, uncut together with large doses of Shakespeare's bombastic and bizarre gibberish, his weird circumlocutions for simple concepts and his ornate formulations that mean more than the ear can possibly decipher.  On occasion, the lighting faltered.  Whoever was operating the spotlight aimed at the principals in Cymbeline seems to have fallen asleep for a couple of scenes -- the actors were shrouded in darkness while the focused beam of the spotlight aimlessly lit a few yards of the stage adjacent to them.

Cymbeline is a daunting production and intimidating to even professional repertory companies.  The play is long and vastly intricate with more plots and subplots than can be productively described.  Set in a fairytale England around the date of Jesus' birth, the play involves a pointless dispute between Britain and Rome in which both sides posture at length and, then, end up reaching an accord and satisfaction that renders all their earlier bellicose speechifying meaningless -- medieval kingdoms always sought to establish their roots in ancient Rome (hence, the Holy Roman Empire, as our professors used to say:  neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire) .  Similarly, the English during the renaissance seem to have felt it necessary to wed the ancient peoples indigenous to the isle to the Caesars, hence, the rather vapid subplot about whether the English mythological king, Cymbeline, refuses to bend the knee to pay tribute to Imperial Rome.  This subplot is merely incidental to a complex series of improbable, if romantic, misadventures involving members of Cymbeline's family:  his wife, the Queen, is a wicked stepmother who seeks to poison the King's natural daughter Imogen.  (I'm not sure she wants to poison Imogen or Imogen's husband, the dimwitted Posthumus, who spends most of the play mercifully off-stage and in exile, inexplicably changing sides several times in the conflict between the Britons and Romans.)  There's a "yellow" (swarthy) Italian Iachimo who tries to seduce Imogen -- it's a typical Cosi fan tutti wager on the chastity of Imogen, so wicked in tenor that the bet compromises the moronic Posthumus so severely that he's implausible as a hero thereafter..  (To the extent that there's a hero it's the forthright, enterprising, chaste and loyal Imogen.)  The evil stepmother's son, the cloddish Cloten, plans to rape Imogen.  But, after dressing up in Posthumus clothing (for reasons that make no sense), he gets his head chopped off by one of Cymbeline's two sons, twenty-year old princelings who were kidnapped by a "mountaineer" Belisarius, and raised as his own children.  Waking up next to the headless corpse of Cloten, dressed as Posthumus, Imogen immediately concludes that her husband is dead and, so, she dresses as a man, and, after spending some time in disguise as the saucy and waggish Fidele, encounters her two actual brothers supping on venison in Belisarius' cave. (I have the sequence of these events out of order, but you get the general gist.)  A sort of spasmodic skirmish between the Brits and the Romans brings Cymbeline into the field.  Posthumus is captured, about to be hanged, but, then, ends up with all the characters on stage for the final enormous scene, said by one Victorian critic, to resolve as many as 24 plots in one uninterrupted action presented across about the same number of pages.   By a reasonable count, the final scene resolves about 9 or 10 simultaneous narratives and ends with everyone happily reunited, the bad folks (Cloten and the wicked Queen) decisively dead, the married couple restored to their joy, and Britain and Rome yoked in some kind of  blessed political wedlock.  It's ridiculous but, also, involving in its own abstract way and critics are always astonished that this snarl of absurd plots is actually quite stageworthy -- it may be easier to watch than to read.  That said, the full play is an exhausting experience -- the verse is dense and coagulated to the point of being almost stagnant;  some of the metaphors are so elaboarately developed that you can't keep track of the point while reading the text let alone as the performers stammer the poetry at you.

The play was presented on thrust stage with jagged-looking blades of metal blocking vantage across grim-looking horizon with a single great cloaked obelisk standing mute as a megalithic menhir in the background.  Flanking the stage were groups of audience members, useful to the actors who used these choirs of spectators as an audience to whom to declaim their lines -- a lot of the speech is ornate declamation, arias of poetry and its helpful to have the audience represented on-stage and present to be hectored by the actors; somehow, this enlivens the proceedings.  As Harold Bloom points out, much of the play seems bitter self-parody of Shakespeare's other works and, in fact, the play, often, operates to mirror itself in an overtly unflattering way.  The transcendentally beautiful verse "Fear no more", sung on the occasion of the double burial of the comatose Imogen and the beheaded Cloten is parodied by the gaoler who, about to hang, Leonatus Posthumus, tells him that his death will free him from tavern bills and other sordid debts, "fear no more the tavern reckoning", the gaoler merrily says.  Posthumus deranged misogynistic speech triggered by his belief that his wife has cuckolded him is mirrored by Imogen donning men's clothing and, then, being told by her page, Pisanio, how to act like a young man, that is, like a strutting, quarrelsome fool.  The theme of doubling, one character represented by someone similar but grotesquely caricatured, is mirrored by the production's casting -- the whole show, requiring upwards of thirty speaking parts, is performed by about ten actors, each of them playing two or more roles.  Most noteworthy is casting a handsome Black young man to play both Posthumus and Cloten,, revealing that, at heart, the two characters may be uncomfortably similar to one another -- Posthumus is merely earnest, dull, densely stupid when he bets on his wife's fidelity and hysterical when he learns that Imogen seems have cuckolded him.  Cloten acts like a pimp from an HBO show like The Wire or the The Deuce -- he wears sunglasses, has a loose-gaited strut, and has his shirt pulled open to show chains displayed around his throat.  It's a showy racist conception, a sort of modern minstrel blackface conception -- but the show gets away with it, I suppose, because of the enthusiastic, if offensive, mugging of the Black actor playing the part.  There are two theatrical coups:  in the convoluted finale, one of the actresses acts as if she's confused herself by the flurry of revelations and denoument and she shouts in alarm, then, darts to the side of the stage to get herself properly costumed for resolution of the next plot point on the list of things to be concluded before the curtain -- it's very funny and makes a point about the wildly implausible ending as well as the hazards and difficulties of staging the show with 10 actors when more than 30 are specified by the Bard.  Equally effective is a moment when mighty Jupiter is supposed to appear -- in the script dangling down from some kind of baroque stage-machine.  In this staging, an actor goes to the group of people seated on stage-left, apparently all of them spectators with their tickets in their pockets, selects a "ringer", a tiny, puny-looking woman who, then, mounts on high and with the use of a golden sash about 45 feet long speaks Jove's lines.  It's a spectacular and wholly unexpected solution to a problem that the play poses, particularly to modern audiences -- particularly startling because the woman tapped to play Jove is so petite and seemingly ineffectual:  the effect captures both the splendor of the conception and the fact that we moderns are not going to find this element of the play very convincing.  (The play's structure is remarkable -- the audience knows the truth about all of the secret identities and the web of relationships that power the play's plot has been dramatized for the spectator.  By contrast, all of the characters have only incomplete and partial knowledge of the true state of affairs.  The intricate final scene has the effect of restoring equilibrium to the play -- the knowledge imbalance, as it were, is corrected:  at last, the characters are made privy to what the audience knows -- that is, the characters come to understand what the audience already has been shown.  The play's resolution, therefore, has a double authority:  conflicts are resolved but, also, and, perhaps, more importantly the resolution of these conflicts involves a sort of gnosis.  That is, the characters can not be freed from their conflicts without coming to know what the audience already understands to be the case.  This is different from the construction of Shakespeare's other plays -- for instance, we don't know that Macduff is not born of woman until the same instant that Macbeth learns this fatal fact.)

Ultimately, Cymbeline with its headless corpse and vials full of poison is infected by death, this shown by the famous dirge that provides the most hair-raising and awesome poetry in a text crammed with poetic gems.  In the face of death, it seems pointless to heap more deaths on those already seen or intimated -- thus, the play's powerful themes of redemption and forgiveness.  Even the loathsome Iachimo, whose slander against Imogen has driven Posthumus temporarily insane and nearly cost Imogen her life on several occasions (he's an Iago figure, but trivialized) , is slapped on the wrist and forgiven.  The piling up corpses in tragedies is revealed as absurd and futile -- death after all is never really a solution nor a plot-point and this is what Cymbeline as a play dramatizes.  Accordingly, the romance is a good counterpoint to the frenzied and hyper-violent Macbeth -- the nihilistic Macbeth is tragedy reductio ad absurdam, a play that starts with butchery evolves through murder and massacre and simply ends in more slaughter, proving nothing other than that once we indulge in violence, we are so steeped in blood that it is better to simply play out the pattern of deadly homicide since it would be "tedious" to retreat through the torrent of gore.  Cymbeline demonstrates that the elements of tragedy demand forgiveness; Macbeth dramatizes both why tragedy is so compelling but also how the form can readily disintegrate into sheer nihilistic murder.  As such Cymbeline can be read as a corrective to the lethal darkness of Macbeth.

Macbeth is presented without the audience members on-stage, without proscenium on a thrust platform in front of what looks like an intricate iron jungle gym.  The fence-like metal balconies and stairs are equipped with racks on which numerous five-foot long 2 x 6 boards are hung -- these wooden pieces will be used to simulate Birnam Wood.  A pike with a scary-looking metal point dominates one side of the set -- this is where Macbeth's head will ultimately be impaled.  The three witches are on-stage throughout almost all of the action -- they play menials, servants, and murderers.  One of the witches is a man with dark black shadow haloing his eyes.  He also plays the part of the porter in the famous interlude of pitch black comedy in play's second act.  Very early in the action, we see the witches eavesdropping on conversations about the Thane of Cawdor -- this undercuts the notion that the "weird sisters" have prophetic knowledge.   Rather, they seem to be merely reporting on what they have learned by non-supernatural means.  The fact that the witches appear in every scene naturalizes them -- their dire presence is not occasional and extraordinary but rather continuous and unremarkable.  The things of darkness are omnipresent, simply a part of this nightmare landscape.

In an interesting way, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are symmetrically defined characters:  Macbeth hesitates and scruples before killing Duncan, but, then, has no regrets thereafter -- once committed  to a course of action, he has no time for regrets.  Lady Macbeth, by contrast, has absolutely no hesitation in inciting her husband to murder the King -- in fact, she is wholly murderous from almost her second or third spoken line.  But, of course, she then suffers endless, disabling regret once she has incited Macbeth to murder.  Viewed across one trajectory of action, the play seems to be about scruples.  Macbeth has scruples but once he overcomes them, they vanish as if they were never present in the first place.  Lady Macbeth has no scruples until it is too late -- and, then, her conscience kills her.  The theme of scruples is explored thoroughly in a scene that always seems slightly extraneous, an interruption to the frenzied action but which I think is thematically central.  Young Malcolm is urged to take up arms against Macbeth  -- but the boy fears that if he becomes King he will devolve into some sort of homicidal maniac (or rapist) such as Macbeth has become.  He expresses enormous scruples and, in fact, declares himself unworthy of rule because of his latent tendencies toward lust and rapaciousness.  Then, in a puzzling exchange, a peripeteia, he reverses and nullifies everything he has just said.  The importance of this scene is that it demonstrates the essence of Macbeth's tyranny, a word used repeatedly in connection with the play's protagonist.  To be a tyrant is to allow your fantasies to become real -- to actualize what may only be dreams of lust or power.  Malcolm reveals himself tainted by violent and lecherous fantasies but avows that he will not succumb to them.  By contrast, the fantasy of absolute power that afflicts Macbeth is one that he can't resist and that he embodies by increasingly murderous and tyrannical acts.  In order to do evil, one must first imagine evil, that is fantasize evil -- this is the gist of the scene in which Macbeth hallucinates an imaginary dagger and, then, seizes it and is aghast that it is decorated with gouts of blood.  At the heart of tyranny is the fantasy that one can have anything, any pleasure, that one desires.  But what does Macbeth desire?  Ultimately just more violence and more murder.  Clearly, Macbeth harbors murder in his heart from the outset -- he disembowels an enemy from "the nave to the chops" and the slaughter on the field of battle is likened to the crucifixion at Golgotha.  The moment the witches prophesy that he shall be king, Macbeth's mind leaps to the murders necessary to accomplish that oracle -- his mind doesn't rest on the privileges and pleasures of being King (he's not a policy wonk); rather, he immediately fixates on the homicides that he will have to commit to seize the throne.

Macbeth's power lies in its apparent realism, notwithstanding all the supernatural machinery of spectral parading kings, resurrected corpses, and witches.  An example of the play's realism is the scene preceding the murder of Lady Macduff and her four children -- Lady Macduff doesn't bear her husband's flight from their castle with equanimity; she sees herself as abandoned to the violence of her husband's enemies and bitterly decries the situation.  Her complaints on this subject make the scene in which she and her children are murdered all the more horrific -- Shakespeare makes her as real and plausible as possible before she is butchered.  (The show has a very effective bit of business -- Ross brings Macduff souvenirs of his dead children, a toy sword and a doll.  Macduff puts these artifacts in his shirt, next to his heart when he embarks on his mission to destroy Macbeth.  The toy sword is symbolically significant -- every one plays murder with their boy-children, rough-housing with them to simulate the battlefield.  In this world, one learns murder as a mere toddler.)  Ultimately, the show's darkness is unremitting.  The production's commitment to the blackest kind of nihilism is shown in the final scene.  After Macbeth's corpse has been beheaded, his head in a bloody sack is carried up onto cage-like ramparts and stuck on the pike --the head must be simulated by a cabbage or melon or something because, at first the gory thing doesn't give, resisting the pointed pike until with a grotesque, liquid sound, the shell breaks and the spike sinks in deep.  The three witches, then, raise their arms in a sort of fascist salute -- it looks like an image from Fuseli.  The witches salute an abyss of nothingness, a corpse's head:  to be king is to be tyrant is to be nothing at all:  it's a world in which "our monuments shall be the maws of kites."

The new fashion in staging Shakespeare, at least at Winona, is to extend the sword-to-sword combat as if Shakespeare required, like Star Wars, protracted duels with light sabers.  In each play, the stage combat was lengthy and intricately choreographed.  This is almost always a bad idea.  Even the best designed stage combat always looks like professional wrestling -- every move is elaborately worked-out (otherwise someone would get hurt).  It never looks real and, always, distracts the audience from the more important business in the plays.  There's another convention that I think is equally ludicrous, although I'm not sure how it can be  avoided.  In many scenes, the characters engage in deliberations and, then, turn sharply on their heel and, then, march resolutely off the stage.  This resolute, martial fast march looks improbable and, also, distracting.  It would be better, if possible, to just black out the scene before the characters spin on their heels and hustle off-stage.  The resolute manly march always seems, more than a bit foolish-- everyone shows identical fortitude in hustling off to fight and sometimes die.  Wouldn't, at least, someone show a bit of hesitation?

War and Peace

Sergei Bondarachuk's War and Peace (1967) is a massive, grandiose production, completed as Mosfilm and premiered in the West in 1968 -- I saw the film at the Suburban World Theater in 1969 when I was fourteen:  the six hour move was shown in two installments on consecutive weekends.  (The movie was awarded an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1968).  At the time of its release, I was astounded by the picture and still admire it immensely -- although, perhaps, there is a mixture of unhealthy nostalgia in the regard that I have for the movie.  It has been recently re-released on a Criterion Blue Ray and this version seems to be complete, about two hours longer than what was shown in the theaters in Western Europe and America.

Bondarachuk was anxious, it seems, demonstrate his knowledge of advanced film techniques and make the move as up-to-date in style as possible.  Accordingly, War and Peace contains many jump cuts, shots alternating from extreme long shots to close-ups, slow motion and fast motion, freeze frames and sequences shot in different types of film stock.  In many ways, the handheld camera and the quick, jerky editing betrays a fascination with the French New Wave -- in fact, I think the film's style can be fairly characterized as an extravagant blend of New Wave pyrotechnics and old school Soviet film making evoking Sergei Eisenstein.  Often Bondarachuk uses ironic analytical montage, for instance, in a sequence alternating between scenes showing the death of Count Bezukhov and the Natasha's father doing the "Daniel Cooper" dance at her family's palatial estate.  Furthermore, the color scheme often seems influenced by the strange palette used in the technicolor sequences in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Part Two).  Faces appear waxen and cadaver-white against glowing backgrounds infused with deep greens and purples -- Prince Andrei stalks through the soirees like a zombie, pale and white amidst the plumage of the other guests; the scenes in which Count Bezukhov is shown dying are clearly derived from imagery in Ivan the Terrible and have a horror-film expressionism about them. After the film's ecstatic and pantheistic invocation of Mother Russia's verdant landscape, we see the famous party scene that begins Tolstoy's novel -- the second shot in the sequence, showing dandified aristocratic Russians in a stark and artificial tableaux is pure agit-prop and could have been extracted from a film made in the twenties:  the image has a weird silent movie powdery sort of appearance.  But, in general, the film is pretty apolitical -- it's a prestige product for export and not intended to be offensively Communist. 

The first section of War and Peace involves Prince Andrei.  Inevitably, the viewer who knows Tolstoy's book looks to the film for exemplary highlights -- that is, favorite passages as staged by the director.  We see madcap drinking parties, Andrei and Pierre wandering the white night at St. Petersburg, Pierre's stilted courtship of the bovine Helene as well as Pierre's first encounter with the radiant Natasha -- the second half of the film shows the battles at Schoengraben and Austerlitz (these were cut into a single sequence in earlier American versions of the film but here are specifically delineated):  of course, these sequences are majestic and disturbing at the same time.  Bondarachuk captures Tolstoy's view that war is fundamentally alien to human nature and the battle scenes have a terrible inhuman and science fiction-like aspect.  The first part of the movie, about an hour and forty-five minutes long concludes with Napoleon on horseback surveying the fallen and paralyzed Andrei, draped in a flag that he was carrying when he was shot, remarking "A splendid death."  (In fact, on additional viewing, I find that the first part of the film -- "Movie One" as it is named -- extends for another forty minutes, encompassing the harrowing death of Andrei's wife in childbirth, Pierre's duel and, then, his separation from his wife, Helene, some philosophical dialogue with Prince Andrei (illustrated by more swooning aerial shots of the watery Russian landscape) and, at last, Andrei's first encounter with Natasha.

The second movie is entitled Natasha Rostova.  It's shorter than the first installment and follows Natasha's adventures between about 1807 and 1812.  There are no battle scenes in this part of the film which is about an hour and 38 minutes.  Bondarchuk pulls out all the stops, however, in the famous ballroom scene at the imperial palace and, then, stages some spectacularly melodramatic episodes involving Natasha's planned elopement with the serpentine Anatoly Kuragin (the brother of Pierre's wife, Helene).  After dancing with her at the Czar's ball, Andrei becomes infatuated with Natasha and proposes to her, after first soberly discussion the matter with the young woman's mother.  (His own elderly father, the fierce Prince Bolkonsky, is opposed to the union and makes himself ridiculous dramatizing this opposition.)  Andrei is concerned about Natasha's age and inexperience (appropriately enough) and puts off the marriage for one year.  Natasha is resentful and bored.  She spends the period waiting for her marriage to Prince Andrei by engaging in weird soothsaying activities, cross-dressing for sleigh parties, and riding to the hunt in a bravura scene involving a desperate wolf and packs of handsome-looking Borzoi hounds.  After the hunt, Natasha dances to the balalaika at her uncle's rustic chateau, another famous scene both in the novel and Russian cultural history -- in a voice-over Tolstoy's narrator marvels that this daughter of privilege, "raised by French governess" could be so "thoroughly and completely Russian in every fiber and vein" when she dances to the music made by peasant instruments.  At the opera, a highfalutin' affair that Tolstoy compares adversely to the folk music at the hunting cabin springing, as it were, from the Russian soul, Natasha's pretty head is turned by Anatoly Kuragin and she makes plans to elope with him.  These plans are thwarted by her family members who lock her in her rooms and repel the attack by Kuragin.  Pierre, who loves Natasha, almost beats Kuragin to death, but, then, buys him off.  Prince Andrei coldly concludes his relationship with Natasha,  Pierre declares his love for her and Napoleon, standing on a river bluff, admires three enormous columns of troops crossing the river into Russian -- the invasion is an event, Tolstoy says "both contrary to human reason and human nature."  A comet shines in the sky and the peasants think the end of the world is at hand.  Bondarchuk applies every possible film technique to this episode -- he uses split-screen both for grandiose effects (the treaty between Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and for intimate scenes:  Andrei and Natasha at their respective abodes excitedly telling others of their love.  There are long spooky scenes in which action just stops -- these equate to similarly weird and surreal sequences in the novel that dramatize Natasha's boredom waiting for the year to elapse before her nuptials with Andrei.  The wolf hunt filmed in an autumnal palette is spectacular -- the camera gliding along the tawny hillsides behind the horsemen and packs of ravening hounds.  There is much voice-over, mostly whispered asides by the characters -- Natasha, at the Ball, wondering if anyone will dance with her, Nicolai, her brother, hoping desperately to distinguish himself by taking the wolf, and, even, the wolf himself memorably speaking in a voice-over:  "Forward? Backward? It's all the same."  Tolstoy's art is to give everything voice and Bondarchuk follows the author's lead -- at times, the movie seems like a precursor to Terrance Malick:  the whispered voice-over asides, the half-spoken prayers on which we eavesdrop -- this technique is similar to the ubiquitous voice-overs in Malick's films, particularly The Thin Red Line.  Tolstoy's characteristic estrangement effects, his ability to make the familiar seen uncanny and bizarre, are hard to replicate on screen -- for instance, Tolstoy's novel describes the opera at which Natasha is seduced as if an anthropologist were patiently narrating the events to a Martian:  it's his thesis that the profoundly unnatural ambience of the opera seduces and almost ruins Natasha..  But this sort of thing can't be effectively caught on film -- film is too literal a medium for many of Tolstoy's estrangement effects and, of course, a movie can't really do justice to prose that is based, in large part, on irony.  Natasha, as played by the Bolshoi ballerina Ludmila Savelyeva is radiant and charming (she resembles Audrey Hepburn who played the same role in King Vidor's 1956 version) -- one can readily see why all the men in the film are in love with her.  It's a bold performance, like one of Griffith's heroines, she literally flits about scenes, dashing this way and that with youthful effervescent energy -- Bondarchuk takes this to the verge of what is plausible (it's an expressionist performance) but never tilts over into absurdity.

"Movie Three" as identified in the Criterion two-disk box is entitled 1812.  This installment is the shortest of the four pictures, clocking in at about 1 hour and 21 minutes.  About two-thirds of this episode involves the Battle of Borodino, an awesome if, somewhat, repetitive and obvious spectacle that seems to have involved tons of pyrotechnic ordinance and about half the Red Army (apparently, some scenes employ 130,000 extras).  Before the battle, we see the daunting Prince Bolkonsky who has now become senile -- he is confused and restless and dies begging forgiveness from his long- suffering daughter.  (No priests are anywhere in evidence at Bald Hills where the old man dies -- he's a man of the Enlightenment and an atheist.)  Pierre again expresses his love for Natasha and, then, wearing a ridiculous white top-hat and cream-colored suit departs for the Front. Bondarchuk's exhaustive presentation of the huge battle is consistent with Tolstoy's novel --  Borodino occupies about a hundred pages in most versions of the novel and Tolstoy took pains to present the battle on the basis of the best-existing historical accounts.  In many ways, the battle is central to Tolstoy's conflicting theses about history:  first, the chaotic fighting shows the idiocy of carefully devised military strategy (as Mike Tyson used to say:  "everyone's got a plan until you get hit in the face."); second the battle contrasts Napoleon's icy and inhuman calculus with the warmth of the Russian general Kutuzov.  Kutuzov is a big fat man, apparently a lecher, drunkard, and glutton  -- we see him lasciviously eyeing a plump serf who is holding a big roast chicken for him.  But Kutuzov is kind, cares about his men, and, ultimately, understands that battles are won by those who are willing to sacrifice themselves and are persuaded of the justice of their cause.  No one has invited the French to Russia and Kutuzov, who falls asleep at councils of war, gnaws on chicken during Borodino, frequently kissing people and weeping, vows that he will make the French "eat horsemeat."  Napoleon paces around giving orders while his armies of toy-like soldiers march up and down the green hills as orange explosions rivet the horizon.  The difference between the two men is that Napoleon thinks that he controls the battlefield; Kutuzov has no such illusions -- as the day progresses, the battle takes on a horrific life of its own, monstrously murdering men by the tens of thousands.  Bondarchuk stages the battle as a kind of pageant at first -- armies of men build trenches and embankments for artillery batteries, the icon of the Virgin of Smolensk is carried among the troops and Kutuzov himself kisses the ground beneath the ancient image, then, vast numbers of men form into groups of two or three hundred and march this way and that, all keeping in step, while cavalry darts back and forth over the green fields and cannons spout fire in all directions.  Bolkonsky's men are held in reserve.  (He has rejected Kutuzov's offer that he stay near him as a member of his staff -- Bolkonsky wants to be commanding his troops on the battlefield even though he knows the battle will likely kill him.)   As the battle scene progresses, the imagery becomes more agitated and confused -- ultimately, the screen roils with clouds of black-powder smoke, impenetrable walls of cordite fumes and fire billowing up over heaps of corpses.  In one long pan to the left, the camera tracks the embankment where batteries are firing, one after another, under lowering clouds of smoke and fire -- at the end of the tracking shot, one of the cannons rolls off the embankment almost hitting the camera as it explodes.  The camera, then, tracks to the right, a series of shots showing  cavalry attacking through walls of orange fire -- more batteries flash and dozens of horses smash to the ground pitching riders through the air.  In a burning village, the camera tracks to the right for hundreds of yards, rolling through fiery stables and houses, passing by duels between frenzied men with bayonets, ending in plumes of explosion and fire that fill the entire screen.  The sky darkens and still the nightmarish battle rages, chiaroscuro of fire and blue sub-aqueous shadows.  Bolkonsky is badly wounded.  Pierre's white hat and suit are smeared with mud and gore.  At a field hospital, Bolkonsky watches as surgeons ampute the leg of the screaming Anatoly Kuragin, his nemesis.  The battle is unlike anything ever shown on film and, certainly, a tremendous and horrifying assault on the audience (although it is not nearly as gory as a modern version would be) -- this was all done before any kind of CGI:  the explosions and burning villages at the horizon, the towering clouds and the fog of gunsmoke, the thousands of men running desperately in one direction and, then, another, all of this is palpably real -- this chaos was staged over what appears to be locations four and five miles deep and as many miles broad.  You can't tell who is killing whom and, of course, this is ultimately Bondarchuk's objective, that is, to render the whole thing as an incomprehensible chaos like a storm at sea or a volcano or earthquake.  The episode ends in intellectual chaos as well -- a voice-over representing Tolstoy proclaims two completely opposite and irreconcilable concepts:  Napoleon, an evil man, is the architect of all this violence, solely to blame for what is mass murder on an apocalyptic scale, and he is defeated because the Russians are good and merely defending their motherland.  But Tolstoy also declares:  the battle is beyond all human control and, in fact, represents the fact that history proceeds according to quasi-statistical rules:  there is no causation and so-called "great" men, despite their megalomaniacal urge to control things are the victim of supra-human forces unleashed, more or less, at random. 

The last film in the quartet of pictures comprising War and Peace as originally released in 1967 is called Pierre Bezukhov after the character whose story is threaded through the entire epic history and family chronicle -- Bezukhov is the homme moyen sensual whose adventures unify the novel and the film, a character who represents Tolstoy, I think, and serves as a surrogate for the audience as well.  War and Peace, in large part, is Pierre's search for metaphysical meaning among the tragic and stupefying chaos of the Napoleonic Wars in Russia.  Unfortunately, a sort of fatal exhaustion afflicts the film's final hour and forty-five minutes -- Bondarchuk is faced with illustrating interior states of mind, conversions, and ecstatic revelations, that don't have clear visual correlates.  The attempt to portray what is essential invisible and deeply personal thwarts the mighty film's last episode and the viewer is left with a baffling series of images that seem rushed, tentative, and incompletely imagined. (I suspect that Tolstoy's Russian Orthodox piety exemplified in many passages near the end of the novel may have been suspect to the Soviet authorities and may have inhibited Bondarchuk's approach to this material.)  Whereas the first four hours of the film, and, even, within the limitations of battlefield spectacle, the third installment, seem to tell a story, the fourth episode in grandiose but, also, strangely vague and uninvolving.  The intense emotional connection to the characters forged in the first two films -- exemplified, I think, by Pierre's duel that is viscerally horrifying because of our fear that the hero will be killed or maimed -- now seems attenuated.  By this point, as well, some of Bondarchuk's visual devices have grown stale -- one of his trademark camera motions is to begin with the lens hovering high over the scene, usually a battle or pictorially spectacular landscape (for instance, the wolf hunt):  Bondarchuk launches the camera on what seems a zip-line soaring over the spectacle but also inexorably diving down into the chaos.  (In some instances, at least, twice by my count, these shots simulate cannon balls falling in a deadly trajectory to the earth and end in big explosions.)  He uses this showy camera device several times in this episode as well and, by this time, we've seen the dizzying zip-line descent from high overhead to the earth enough to be slightly jaded.  The shot is so showy and spectacular that repeating it a couple of times in each episode tends to defeat the point.  The destruction of Moscow by fire is a massive spectacle, shot with frenzied handheld camera that repeats the pattern of editing and imagery in the Borodino sequence -- what begins as a relatively comprehensible sequence of images ends in a roaring conflagration that fills the screen with pillars and clouds of fire.  This part of the film also feels a bit derivative -- Bondarchuk uses Goya as his model for some horrific execution by firing squad scenes -- the man are being massacred in a cabbage field.  He repeats Goyaesque compositions a little too readily and the images are too showy and "artistic" to have the terrible force that is intended.  (I compare to their detriment these scenes with the images of the partisans being murdered in Rossellini's Paisan -- there's nothing "artistic" about these pictures; they are strictly documentary and, therefore, all the more terrible because of their plainness.)  Pierre's death march as a French prisoner is not sufficiently horrific.  His interactions with the peasant Platon, from whom he learns something of the meaning of life, are reduced to a few allusions -- this makes Pierre's later ecstatic discovery that "man is made for happiness" ring a bit hollow.  This simple truth is something that Platon has established with his endless peasant proverbs -- this is another aspect of Tolstoy's novel that probably couldn't be filmed without a modern audience wanting to strangle the peasant sage.  Tolstoy was obsessed and terrified by death and he returns repeatedly to scenes involving dying characters -- people dream about their deaths and we see their visions.  Unfortunately, these images incline toward the bombastic and unpersuasive -- this is particularly true with respect to Prince Andrei's extended death scene.  There are many fine and memorable things in this part of the film -- Bondarchuk's instinct for imagery doesn't wholly desert him.  Natasha and Andre's sister, Princess Maria are, often, filmed against luminous glowing voids -- the effect is more than a little like icon images of saints hovering in a fog of gold.  A final scene showing the French staggering out of Russia in an endless beleagured column, a drizzle of frozen corpses in its wake, is horribly impressive, particularly when accompanied by a belligerent and pompous speech by Napoleon on the soundtrack.  Finally, an image of freezing soldiers congregating in great ragged circle around a bonfire embodies many of Tolstoy's themes, particularly those relating to the brotherhood of man, in a memorably spectacular shot.  But there's an awful lot of aerial photography of Mother Russia, lots of trees and flowers blowing in tempests, lots of enormous sky-scapes and fields through which huge rivers drain.  The last part of the movie labors inevitably under the memory of the atrocities of World War II and its unpleasantly jingoistic (and, therefore, not at all like Tolstoy) with respect to its rather vengeful patriotism.  And, then, the movie just comes full-stop to an end -- we don't even get to see Pierre and Natasha together in the final scenes. 

Deeply flawed, Bondarchuk's War and Peace establishes the standard for the film epic.  It contains things (mostly huge battle scenes) that will never be duplicated.  Some of the film is a folly and it is grandiose, of course, because of the way the Soviets produced movies.  But it retains (and rewards) the viewers attention richly enough for me to recommend that people devote the time necessary to watching (and arguing) with this film.  It is beyond doubt one of the most impressive adaptations of a great literary work ever attempted.

Film group note: I Walked with a Zombie and Jacques Tourneur

I Walked with a Zombie and Jacques Tourneur


A Dutiful Son

Jacques Tourneur was the son of a famous film maker, Maurice Tourneur.  Maurice Tourneur was born in Paris in 1876.  He appeared as an actor in the Paris Theater and, then, made some short films.  Some of these movies caught the attention of the Hollywood studios and Tourneur was recruited to work in the American film industry.  Beginning around 1914, he directed a number of silent films, almost all of them lost.  His style was said to be poetic, relying heavily on careful lighting and tinting effects.  His best received film was The Last of the Mohicans (1920), an artistic and box-office success although much of the film seems to have been actually directed by Clarence Brown – Tourneur suffered from ptomaine poisoning on location that side-lined him for much of the shoot.  (Maurice Tourneur also received critical accolades for his direction of an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlincks’ symbolic drama The Blue Bird).  Tourneur clashed with the studio bosses in 1926, walked off the set, and moved to France.  He directed a dozen or so films for various French studios, many of them highly regarded at the time but forgotten today.  His son, Jacques, whom his father called “Jack”, worked on some of his father’s French films as a cameraman and second unit director.  In 1934, Tourneur returned to Hollywood, where he had been raised, and immediately found work with the studios.  He directed a number of shorts and very low budget feature films, gradually achieving a reputation for no-nonsense dependability.

Maurice Tourneur was always considered eccentric.  In 1924, he wrote an essay in a film review magazine in which he declared that not only were films “not art”, they “would never be” – he justified this view based on the fact that films are made by committees of men who are beholding to a business that must compromise to sell the greatest number of tickets.  Notwithstanding this opinion, Tourneur later wrote a letter to Variety, praising his son “Jack’s” work for MGM and signing the correspondence “the Michelangelo of the movies” also known as “the Frank Sinatra of the Riviera.”  Maurice Tourneur was terribly injured in a car crash in 1948, the year that he made his last picture – a suitcase roped down atop his car came lose, fell onto the road, and, when Tourneur tried to retrieve it, another motorist ran over him.  His leg had to be amputated.

Maurice Tourneur lived until 1961, spending his last years translating American crime novels into French.  In 1951, Tourneur worked with an old actor who had been directed by his father in the 1919 film, The White Heather.  Tourneur told the old man that he would be “happy if he was half as great a director as his father.”

Digression: Albion, Nebraska – 1942

My mother detests cats.  She has been afraid of the creatures all of her life.  She attributes this phobia to a fright that she received in 1942.  She recalls that she went to a movie about a woman who turned into a cat and murdered people.  The movie appalled her and she left the theater shaken – she was, then, about six years old.  As she walked home, someone crept up behind her and threw a hissing and spitting cat at her.  That event marked her for life.

The movie that my mother attended was Cat People, Jacques Tourneur’s first horror film produced by Val Lewton for RKO.


Some doubts about the auteur theory

Who is the “author” of a film?  Movies are made by groups of people working under the supervision of directors, producers, studio bosses.  American film historians note that studios such as MGM or Paramount had “house-styles” – that is, a certain “look” with respect to camerawork, sets, and couture.  In most instances during the classic Hollywood era, the studio style was more obvious than the directorial flourishes and signature touches.  Of course, there were exceptions and film had director auteurs long before there was a fancy French word to name these artists: D. W. Griffith put his monogram on each intertitle, signing his films in that way, as did his competitor Thomas Ince.  Audiences were encouraged to enjoy the so-called “Lubitsch-touch” in the Viennese (and later Hollywood) director’s sophisticated sex comedies.  Preston Sturges and John Ford were bankable directors and their films were distributed under their names.  But, generally, the movies released by Hollywood were products, most often anonymously constructed as vehicles for the stars under contract to the studios.

In the late thirties, Tourneur worked for MGM under David O. Selznick.  He was assigned Second Unit work with Val Lewton, Selznick’s story editor, on A Tale of Two Cities.  It was a prestigious assignment: Tourneur was in charge of directing action sequences, some of them involving as many as 3000 extras.  With Lewton, he contrived spectacular scenes dramatizing the tumult of the French Revolution – in fact, the studio was so impressed that Tourneur and Lewton were given a special on-screen credit for “arranging...Revolutionary Sequences.”  Some historians think this credit was intended to give the film a greater cachet of authenticity because of Tourneur’s French name.  Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that the best things about the big and expensive Ronald Coleman historical epic are the second unit street-battles, the rioting and the storming of the Bastille.

Lewton was a Russian immigrant, born in Yalta and the son of a Jewish moneylender.  (His birth name was Vladimir Leventin.)  He came to the United States in 1909 and worked as a journalist.  He was an enthusiastic progenitor of “fake news” and, in 1920, was fired from a newspaper for inventing a story (something about the death of a truckload of kosher chickens) from the whole cloth.  Lewton formally studied journalism at Columbia and, then, worked writing pulp fiction.  His 1932 book, No Bed of Her Own was adapted into a risque pre-code film No Man of her Own.  Lewton had been working at MGM as a script doctor but quit the job when his novel became a best-seller.  He wrote three other novels without making much money and, then, returned to MGM where he was employed as story editor with Tourneur on A Tale of Two Cities and, later, Gone with the Wind.  (The famous scene in which Scarlett O’Hara walks from a train station into a field hospital where thousands of wounded men are lying on the ground – possibly the most famous crane-shot in film history – was invented by Lewton.)  Tourneur said that Lewton was “a dreamer.  He had the most fantastic ideas.  But I always had to talk him back to reality.”

In 1942, Lewton was lured away from MGM to work as a producer at RKO.  Lewton was paid $250 a week, told that he had to make horror films for less than $150,000 a picture, and advised that the titles for the films, selected to make the pictures as marketable as possible, were under the control of the studio.  No film was to be longer than 75 minutes – the pictures were devised as the B movie for double features.  Working within these constraints, Lewton produced nine horror films that are now regarded as among the greatest pictures ever made in that genre.  The first three pictures were directed by Jacques Tourneur: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943).  Also in 1943, RKO released under Lewton’s supervision, The Seventh Victim (directed by Mark Robson) and The Ghost Ship, also directed by Robson.  In 1944, Lewton produced The Curse of the Cat People, a sequel to the extremely successful 1942 film that inaugarated the RKO horror cycle; The Curse of the Cat People was directed by Gunter von Frisch with the assistance of Robert Wise.  Between 1945 and 1946, Lewton produced three films with Boris Karloff, among that actor’s very best performances – Karloff said that Lewston had “restored his soul.”  The Karloff films are The Body Snatcher (directed by Robert Wise), The Isle of the Dead (Mark Robson) and Bedlam (Mark Robson).

Although these films are all ostensibly written by various hacks employed by RKO, no doubt exists that Lewton was responsible for the final script and supervised the direction of these movies so closely that they all bear the unmistakable traces of his style and sensibility.  (Several of the Karloff pictures are actually credited to Lewton – however, the credits are fanciful: Bedlam’s credits claim it was written by William Hogarth, the 18th century engraver of The Rake’s Progress – one of the prints in that series shows the notorious insane asylum.  Isle of the Dead is based on a painting by Arnold Boecklin.)  These films are all excellent, a quality product that is literate, suspenseful, and remarkably atmospheric given the poverty-row budgets within which Lewton worked.  And these films raise serious questions about “authorship” – it’s generally thought that the auteur with regard to the nine RKO horror pictures is Lewton.  This idea seems corroborated by the fact that several of the directors credited on the films were workmanlike but dull in their other work – Mark Robson and Robert Wise never did anything as good as their films made for Val Lewton.  Working in other conditions, their movies are efficiently directed but generally conventional and tediously inert.

Jacques Tourneur is a different case – he was a first-rate director in his own right.  After The Leopard Man, RKO split up Tourneur and Lewton, allowing Tourneur to work alone on several films.  Tourneur noted that the studio motivation was mercenary – “we were making so much money for RKO that they thought they would double their income by having us work separately.”  At RKO, Tourneur made Experiment Perilous (1944), a suspense film starring Hedy Lamar that is one of his best pictures.  In 1946, he directed Canyon Passage, a superb Western set in the Pacific Northwest.  Working with independent producers, Tourneur then made Out of the Past (1947), a quintessential film noir with Robert Mitchum.  Stars in my Crown, Wichita, and Great Day in the Morning are all excellent low-budget Westerns.  Anne of the Indies was made in 1951 for 20th Century Fox as was The Way of the Gaucho (1952) made in Argentina, both films highly regarded today.  Finally, in 1957, Tourneur directed The Night of the Demon in England, an extraordinary horror film based upon a story Montague R. James.  All of these films, and a half-dozen not listed, show that Tourneur was an extremely reliable and often brilliant director.  He is a film maker’s film maker – Martin Scorsese in particular reveres him.  Tourneur began drinking heavily at the end of his career and his last several pictures made in the early sixties are pedestrian.  Working in TV, he did, however, create one impressive episode for The Twilight Zone, “The Night Call” in 1963.

Tourneur died in 1977.  (Lewton had died from series of heart attacks in 1948.)  Looking back on his career, Tourneur said: “I’m a very average director.  I did my work the best I could; we’re all limited in one way or another.”  Asked what he thought his role would be in cinema history, he said: “Nothing, none.  There is nothing more evanescent that an image on celluloid.”

The leading exponent of auteur theory in American criticism is Andrew Sarris.  Sarris ranked Lewton as a third-rate director under the rubric “expressive esoterica.”  American auteur critics were unimpressed by Tourneur – he “lacks thematic coherence” and the only unifying principle in his work is “strict adherence to the text” (of the script).  In the late seventies, critics like Manny Farber expressed the idea of “termite” art – that is, low-cost, competent, popular film making that eschews grand ideas and grand statements of principle.  Tourneur, who worked successfully in all genres, was proclaimed as one of the best of the “termite” directors.  This remains his reputation today. 


I Walked with a Zombie – production notes

Lewton and Tourneur shot the film two months after completing Cat People.  (The movie was premiered in April 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio the home of the author who ostensibly inspired the film, Inez Wallace.)  The movie was shot before Cat People was released.  Production took place between October 26, 1942 and November 19, 1942 – the budget was described as “shoestring.”

The studio insisted on the lurid title, derived from a magazine article about voodoo in Haiti written by Inez Wallace for American Weekly Magazine.  Other than the title, the magazine article has nothing to do with the film.  Wallace’s story involves the assertion that plantation managers in Haiti made use of zombie-labor – that is, persons who had been drugged and hypnotized to the point that they had no volition of their own.  Lewton insisted on detailed research and spent several weeks studying voodoo while the script was being written.

The script, very loosely based on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is credited to Ardel Wray and Curt Siodmak.  Lewton undoubtedly contributed to the final version of the script as actually filmed.

Ardel Wray was a woman script-writer who worked with Lewton on I walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, The Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam.  A former model, she first worked in the film industry as a script writer and story editor beginning in 1933.  She followed Lewton to RKO immediately after his arrival at that studio.  She wrote her last script for Lewton in 1945 when she was pregnant.  In 1948, she returned to the movie business and wrote a very highly regarded script for a film about Lucrezia Borgia – the movie was not produced. (She also wrote a film about the pirate Blackbeard, similarly never produced.)  In the early 1950's, she was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC during the McCarthy hearings on communism in Hollywood.  She refused to name names and was “grey-listed” – her name was taken off a film with Alan Ladd and, for twelve years, she was denied any screen credits.  Her appearance before HUAC was probably the result of her brief liaison with Dalton Trumbo and her   work with him on his notorious anti-war novel Johnny Got his Gun (1938).  In the sixties, she worked as a story editor and screenwriter for a number of television shows produced by Warner Brothers including 77 Sunset Strip.  She died 75 years old in 1983.

Curt Siodmak, the other screenwriter, was a German Jewish emigre to the United States.  He came from a mercantile Leipzig family and studied mathematics at the University of Berlin.  After graduation, he published several novels but with interested in producing films.  He invested in film royalties in a movie written by Billy Wilder and directed by his brother Robert Siodmak and Edward G. Ulmer, both later well-known for their work as directors in Hollywood.   The resulting film, made in 1929, Menschen am Sonntag (“People on Sunday”) is one of the best of the movies made during the waning days of the Weimar period.  (The film is a slice-of-life, ultra-realist portrait of the activities of four young people in Berlin in the day-off-work, Sunday.)  Siodmak wrote many novels and produced scripts for several science fiction films made in Weimar Germany prior to 1933.  In that year, he heard an anti-Semitic rant by Dr. Joseph Goebbels and decided it was prudent to leave Germany.  He moved to Hollywood and secured employment with Carl Laemmle, the producer of horror films at Universal heavily influenced by German expressionist cinema.  Siodmak wrote the script for The Wolf Man in 1941.  He later wrote scripts for The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) about the hand of a murderer grafted onto a pianist with dire results and several other iconic films, including The Earth v. Flying Saucers (1956), the progenitor of the UFO genre.  Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain (1942) tells the story of man’s brain preserved after his body is destroyed; the brain, extracted from a vicious megalomaniac financier, gradually seizes control of those around it, hypnotizing them into doing criminal acts.  The story, ridiculous on most levels, has had an immense appeal – Orson Welles dramatized the tale in a radio broadcast in 1943 and the novel has been filmed, at least, three times.  Siodmak died at age 98 in Three Rivers, California.  I Walked with a Zombie is surprisingly restrained for a script by Siodmak and, it seems, that Ardel Wray’s influence is probably predominant in the finished product.

Sir Lancelot was a calypso artist from Trinidad.  He was hired to devise a sort of choral commentary on the action in I Walked with a Zombie.  A number of scenes were shot in which Sir Lancelot’s music and lyrics comment on the action.  That footage was largely scrapped – all that remains is his indelible performance where he sings “Fort Holland”(actually a tune called “Shame and Scandal”, a big hit from 1940)) song in the outdoor café.  (Tourneur recalled that he was like a “Greek choir” strolling about an commenting on the action in “eight or nine scenes” – only one such scene remains in the finished 65 minute cut.)    Lewton recognized that Sir Lancelot had a tremendous screen presence – he appears in The Ghost Ship and The Curse of the Cat People.  In both of these films, his contribution is mostly acting – in the second Cat People film he doesn’t sing at all.  Sir Lancelot was classically trained, lived in New York, and was initially known for his performances of opera arias and German lieder.  He was politically active, a Leftist and involved in the promotion of Civil Rights.  Sir Lancelot continued performing and working as songwriter through the mid-sixties when he retired – he was tapped to perform the title song for Gilligan’s Island, a jaunty sea-shanty written very much in his musical style.  (Unfortunately, someone else recorded the tune for the iconic TV show.)  Sir Lancelot Pinard (his real name) was a faithful Roman Catholic – his last record was called Pinardhymns in which he is identified as a “Knight of the Holy Trinity”, the first and only experiment in the genre of “religious calypso”.  The singer is credited with being the first musician to popularize calypso music in the United States – in the forties, he was a fixture of Greenwich Village music venues, including The Village Vanguard. 

Zombies and Vodoun

Tourneur experimented with make-up to create zombie effects in the film.  The results were unconvincing – some still photographs show characters in rags and exaggerated minstrel-influenced Black face with staring eyes.  Lewton wasn’t satisfied with the appearance of these monsters and, so, he agreed to purchase the services of several actual zombies.  An RKO purchasing agent traveled to New Orleans, met with some Voudon priests (Houngan) in that city, and, ultimately, issued a shipping order for two zombies, cash on delivery from Port au-Prince subject to a letter of credit from a bank in Santa Domingo guarantying payment.  (Relevant documents are on file from the RKO production records for I walked with a Zombie.)

The zombies were received in two wooden shipping boxes filled with excelsior.  When Tourneur pried the boxes open, he discovered that one of the zombies was badly damaged in shipping, was missing limbs, and could not be revived to act in the film.  The other zombie was intact, but, also couldn’t be resuscitated from its dormant state.  Accordingly, Tourneur and Lewton had to retain the services of specialists to revive the zombie sufficiently for its appearance in the film.

To understand these problems, it’s important to draw some distinctions.  Haitian zombies differ radically from the lumbering undead featured in films like Night of the Living Dead.  A Haitian zombie is ordinarily an agricultural laborer who has offended some powerful person on the sugar plantation where he is employed to work.  Persons who have offended the plantation manager are kidnaped and, then, treated with so-called “zombie powder”.  This powder is a gritty and abrasive substance made from dried and ground up puffer fish, mummified human remains (also macerated and, then, ground to powder), hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms, and pulverized glass.  The powder is rubbed into the victim’s elbow, the glass particles breaking down the skin, and allowing the psychoactive agents in the substance to enter the victim’s blood stream.  Puffer fish contains a powerful paralytic neurotoxin called tetrododoxin.  This substance paralyzes the victim, slows respiration, and, then, causes coma – in this comatose state, the putative zombie seems to be dead.  However, the victim is conscious, fully sensate, but simply unable to speak or move or show that he is still alive.  A specialized Houngan, called a Bokor, applies the compound to the victim, abrading the skin to poison the person.  The seemingly dead person is, then, afforded Catholic rites of burial and interred alive in a simple wooden casket.  (Usually, a large tarantula is put in the casket with the zombie to “keep him company.”) The night of the burial the living corpse is exhumed, taken from the casket, and, then, another compound, this called a deliriant (delirium-producing agent), is blown into the zombies nostrils using a reed-straw.  The deliriant is made from Hyla tree frogs, a powerful mania-inducing hallucinogen.  This substance, once inhaled by the zombie, counteracts the paralytic qualities of the tetrododoxin and revives the person, although only to a limited extent.  The zombie remains in a state of chemically induced psychosis, delirious and profoundly disoriented.  In this state, the zombie can be forced to work along side others similarly situated, comprising a kind of nightmarish midnight shift of agricultural laborers at the sugar plantation.  At dawn, the zombies are treated again with paralytic, stored in vaults underground, and, then, revived with the inhaled deliriant at sundown to continue their work.

The difficulty confronting Lewton and Tourneur was that the one undamaged zombie was paralyzed and the shipping bokor had failed to send the vivifying Hyla (tree fog) inhalant with the creature.  The risk was that the zombie would gradually resume consciousness and, then, run amuck in the absence of a substance to eliminate its volition.  Tourneur did some research and summoned to the studio the most knowledgeable authority then existing as Haitian Voudon.  This was Katherine Dunham, the celebrated African-American anthropologist and folk dancer from the University of Chicago.  Dunham was corresponding that time Eleonora Derenskowka (later known as Maya Deren).  Maya Deren was then living with her husband, a cinematographer, in Los Angeles.   She accompanied Katherine Dunham to the RKO studio to observe the work on the zombie.  Dunham and Deren found the zombie comatose, exhibiting classical signs of locked-in syndrome – that is, completely paralysis of the skeletal muscles.  The mode of injection was clear: a scabbed-over patch at the antecubital joint caused by powdered glass abrasion.  Surmising that the paralysis was similar to that induced by so-called “pot curare” (Amazonian curare packed in terra cotta pots), Dunham suggested an intravenous injection of an anti-paralytic, neostigmatine delivered in a nicotine solution.   (These drugs had been in use beginning the 1930's as an antivenom agent for snake-bite.)  The snakebite anti-venom was injected with the result that the zombie began to blink its eyes, twitch violently, and, then, sustain seizures with concomitant loss of bowel continence.  Although the zombie had suffered some muscle atrophy from prolonged paralysis, the creature ultimately was able to walk, albeit with assistance.  A physical therapist from Los Angeles County Hospital, on a secret retainer to the major studios, was summoned to the RKO set to provide exercise treatment designed to improve the creature’s gait and enhance muscle tone.  This therapy, provided over the course of four days, was largely successful.

Unfortunately, other problems immediately ensued.  The zombie was incoherent at first, but later began protesting his plight in Haitian creole.  No one knew the lingo and, so, Katherine Dunham, who had done field work in Haiti, was recalled to the studio.  She was able to assure the zombie that all was well and that he would be sent back to Port au-Prince when the shoot was concluded and, in fact, paid for his labors by being provided a 1941 Pontiac Streamliner shipped by steamer to the island.  Needless to say, the zombie was very hungry after a month of poison-induced paralysis and dined, more or less, continuously at the RKO cafeteria.  Agnes Moorehead, then at the studio as an actress in Orson Welles The Magnificent Ambersons writes in her memoir – ‘You saw all sorts of exotic folk in the studio cafeteria.  I particularly remember a very tall and haggard zombie working on one of Val Lewton’s horror films.  At first, I was immensely impressed by the exquisite make-up work done to render this animate corpse as a realistic, flesh and blood apparition.  But, then, when I spoke to the fellow (he answered in something that sounded like barbarous French), I realized that the specimen was not made-up, but was, rather, some kind of living and grotesque human anomaly.  Despite his oddity, the zombie was very popular with the girls and seemed to be possessed of an enormous, inordinately exuberant appetite.  It was majestic and awful to see the creature tucking into a plate of spaghetti and meatballs or devouring trays of stuffed cabbage with jello dessert.”  As one might expect, the zombie (now nicknamed “Doudou”), gained weight.  Studio photographs show the cadaverous monster with a pot belly and a double chin.  This was quite unacceptable and Lewton ordered that another dose of paralytic be administered to Doudou to render him more tractable to direction.

Formulating this additional dose of paralytic proved to be difficult.  Puffer fish was occasionally available at Asian markets but only expert chefs knew how to extract the poison from the animal’s flesh and swim bladders.  (Puffer fish is a delicacy in Japan).  The leading Japanese specialist in preparing these fish was inaccessible – incarcerated with other Nisei at an internment camp in the Owens Valley near Lone Pine.  Tourneur himself made the drive through the Mojave Desert and up the valley to the place where the internment camp was located, a dozen miles below the icy and serrated Sierra ridge at Mount Whitney.  The famous chef was depressed and angry and refused to cooperate.  Tourneur went back to Los Angeles and decided to dose Doudou with curare.  To everyone’s surprise, the improvised curare potion (made from wood ivy and largely used in vivisection experiments) was effective.  Doudou’s appetite reduced radically and he became much more amenable to Tourneur’s direction.  (Tourneur remarked that it was not really much different from the studios administering enemas and Corpu-leans or Redusol diet tablets containing 2,4 dinitrophenol to their starlets to keep them trim.)

Tourneur and Lewton slimmed down the zombie and planned to shoot Doudou’s scenes (he was to play Carre-Four in the film) at the end of the production schedule.  But, then, another completely unexpected problem ensued.  The Screen Actors Guild (S.A.G./AFTRA) intervened, claiming that the use of zombie actors by RKO violated the applicable collective bargaining agreement between the actors and the studios.  (S.A.G. was founded in March 1933 and was always closely observant of the horror film genre due to the presence of Boris Karloff on its Board of Trustees from the very inception of the Union – he was motivated by Hollywood’s use of actual monsters in early Universal films, particularly Tod Browning’s Dracula and thought the practice abusive.)  Remarkably enough the S.A. G. steward who inspected the RKO set in late 1942 and discovered Doudou’s employment was Ronald Reagan, then, an outspoken Screen Actors Guild activist.  Reagan and S.A.G. threatened an NLRB complaint alleging unfair labor practices.  Under pressure from the Union, Lewton agreed not to use Doudou in the film and, instead, hired Darby Jones to play the part of Carre-Four in the film.  Accordingly, the entire difficult and expensive attempt to use an actual zombie in I Walked with a Zombie turned out to be futile. Nonetheless, Tourneur's ill-fated attempt at documentary realism had a number of interesting consequences.  Maya Deren was confirmed in her lifelong interest in Voudon worship. After making several very famous avant-garde and experimental pictures in the forties, most notably The Meshes of the Afternoon, she traveled to Haiti to make The Divine Horseman, an important documentary about Voudoun religious practices. Ronald Reagan acquired prestige with S.A.G. as a result of his intervention in the labor dispute with RKO -- he later said that his union work, particularly the episode with RKO, encouraged him to enter politics.

Doudou never returned to Port au-Prince.  Lewton kept him mildly sedated and he served the producer as a butler and personal valet at his Laurel Canyon mansion.  (Lewton used the studio physician for sedatives who was much later implicated in the death of Marilyn Monroe, Dr. Hyman Engelberg.)  Doudou was a hit at parties and was said to be quite a ladies-man – he is supposed to have fathered no less than ten children during his six years serving Lewton.)  He grew enormously fat, favored Havana cigars, and was found mysteriously drowned in Lewton’s swimming pool in 1949.


Carre-Four

In the film, the zombie Carre-Four represents the petro loa (angry divinity) le Maitre Carrefours.  Le Maitre Carrefours is a wrathful version of Papa Legba.  He favors drinking rum laced with gunpowder.  Carrefour is thought to be a version of the West African lunar deity, Kalfur.

A Houmfort is a Voudon temple.

Darby Jones who plays Carre-Four was born in Los Angeles in 1909 – he was a child actor and performed in Hollywood from the time he was nine until the mid-fifties.  Jones reprised his role as Carre-Four in the comedy Zombies on Broadway (1949).  He played Pullman porters, waiters and bellman, and African tribesman – generally the only roles available for Black actors during most of his lifetime.  He died in1986.  Before his death, he was interviewed and remembered his work for the studios fondly – although he realized that the roles that he played were demeaning, he says he didn’t mind because the pay was good and he got to prowl around the studios watching films being made.