Author Archives: Lloydville

PZ'S PODCAST

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If you're one of those who like their spiritual meditations seasoned with the wisdom of popular culture — Hammer horror films, Thornton Wilder, The Twilight Zone, Jack Kerouac, The Ventures, movies about giant crabs — PZ's Podcast was made for you.  Chatty, eloquent, nutty, and surprisingly emotional at times, this series of talks will entertain you for sure, enlighten you most probably and maybe move you to tears at times.

PZ is of course mardecortesbaja contributor Paul Zahl, The Preacher From the Black Lagoon — now unleashed and fully prepared to infect your computer with viral love (against which all known anti-virus software is utterly powerless.)  Nothing can stop him now!

Check out the podcasts here — each one fiendishly timed to coincide with the length of the average commute to or from work:

PZ's Podcast

THE DEPARTURE OF THE WITCHES

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Wait — come back!

At first glance, this looks like a painting by Bourguereau gone stark raving mad, or something Frank Frazetta might have done if he'd been a Victorian academic painter.  In fact, it's a work from 1878 by Luis Ricardo Falero.  Falero did a lot of supernatural-themed paintings with voluptuous nudes, but from what I've seen, this is his masterpiece.

The depth of the image, and the smarmy but delightful eroticism of the scene, are wonderful.

[With thanks to Boing Boing.]

THE AGE OF ANXIETY

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Paul Zahl takes a look here at two films instinct with what might be called “atomic-era anxiety”.  In America, this anxiety produced the classic films noirs, the neurotic suburbias of Sirk and Ray, the mystical flight of the Beats and countless low-budget sci-fi visions of impending apocalypse.  Italy and Japan, losers in the war that the atom bomb ended, seem to have confronted the post-war angst more directly.  [As Paul notes, one of the films he reports on, Rossellini's Europa '51, will be showing on TCM this Friday — you have been alerted!]  Paul's thoughts on the two films:



TWO FUGITIVES ON THEIR WAY TO THE SAME PLACE


It's always fun to discover something new.  In a world I got to know once, the world of academic theology in Europe, you could make your doctoral dissertation in basically one of two ways.  Either you could find a new source, some text that nobody knew about
before; or you could mark a new approach (Ansatz) to familiar material.

I was surprised the other night to see, or seem to see, a new approach
to some familiar material.  My wife Mary and I were watching the 1955 film by Akira Kurosawa entitled I
Live in Fear, about a Japanese businessman seized by an obsessive fear
of the atom bomb.  The man becomes unhinged, insane, you might say; and
his actions make sure he is committed to a psychiatric hospital.  The
question of the movie, however, voiced both by a family court mediator
and an attending physician, is whether the hero, hospitalized and
finally very sick, is the insane one; or whether the world around him,
the citizens of which are going about their business, is insane. 
Kurosawa leaves it for you to decide.




That made me remember Roberto Rossellini's wonderful film with Ingrid
Bergman entitled Europa '51.  In this one, made four years before I
Live in Fear, a young mother of means, living in Rome, suffers a
personal catastrophe that unhinges her completely.  Initially, she goes
to work, as part of her recovery, on the shop floor of a great factory. 
She tries Communism, you might say, in the aftermath of Fascism's
collapse.  The well-intended experiment fails.  As the implications of
her loss grow clearer and louder, the Bergman character becomes more
and more withdrawn.  Finally, after a brief stay in a psychiatric
hospital, where she finds herself identifying, through surges of
empathy, with the  inmates, she begins to get better.  But, as Rossellini
spins his tale, she decides to make a firm decision to stay in place. 
She decides not to return to the world.  The final close-up of Bergman,
gazing out from her hospital cell, portrays her as a saint.




As I compared these two films in my mind — they are of roughly the
same date and both come from environments of defeat, which you could
spell with capital letters — they came together.  They both point to
heroic “prophets” who renounce and repudiate the values of the world. 
Their renunciation is dramatic.  In Nakajima's case, the hero of I
Live in Fear (played by Toshiro Mifune [above] in effective old-age makeup),
an act of industrial sabotage becomes the desired route.

In the
Bergman character's case, it is her conscientious refusal to be
discharged from the hospital, a protest that she is able to carry off
insofar as her husband, played by the English actor Alexander Knox,
finally loses patience with her.  In both cases, the renunciation of
the world is dramatic.


Europa '51 is scheduled to be shown on TCM this Friday afternoon,
August 6th, at 6 o'clock EST.  I caught it early one Friday morning in
2006, taped it, then gave away the tape to a student, who kept it.
Damn!  Needless to say, one is living for the sixth of August.  I
believe you will like this movie.


Then go out and Netflix I Live in Fear, in its new Criterion
(Eclipse) edition.  I think you will be amazed at the parallel.  Oh,
and listen to the score of Fear, which is only heard during the
opening and closing credits.  It's Godzilla-ish, with a theremin
front and center — if that's the right expression for a theremin —
and just breathes the . . . Atomic Age.




Endlich can I add a post-it to this post?


There's a line in T. S. Eliot's play The Family Reunion which sums up
these two movies, works of art, I think, just right.  It goes like this:


In a world of fugitives, those going in the opposite direction appear to be running away.

HAMLET (1948)

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When we were 15, my friend Paul Zahl and I decided that Laurence Olivier's film of Hamlet was “over-directed” — whatever that means.  Nearly a half century later, and having just watched it again on DVD, I am ready to pronounce a different verdict — it's badly directed, plain and simple, in most respects.

The black-and-white cinematography, with its endless swooping through miniatures, its moody superimpositions and backscreens, shows only the rarest trace of compositional skill, of plastic invention.  All the performances are terrific, except Olivier's.  His wimpy, fey Hamlet allows for no tension in the character.  Shakespeare's Hamlet loses his manhood in the course of the play, but Olivier's Hamlet has abandoned his before the movie starts.  Perhaps this is a function of Olivier trying to play younger than he is, but his boyish haircut and simpering manner simply read as weakness.  If Hamlet is weak, if he's not a strong, smart, passionate man, where's the story — what does he stand to lose?



Finally, Olivier's decision to speak the great soliloquies of the play mostly in voice-over is a disastrous miscalculation.  Hamlet is in part about “performing” the self — the self as performance.  Shakespeare's soliloquies for Hamlet are not about letting us in on his character's deepest, truest thoughts — they're meant to show us a man trying to construct a self that he can find plausible as a basis for irreversible actions . . . and failing.

The convention of soliloquies spoken aloud to an audience is artificial, but in this play Shakespeare used the convention to make a comment about the artifice of thought, the artifice of self-reflection.  In a film as self-consciously expressionistic as Olivier's Hamlet, what sense does it make to substitute the movie convention of voice-over for the stage convention of soliloquies when it sends such a different message?



Having said all that, I can't deny that Olivier's film is wonderfully entertaining, because Shakespeare's language is wonderfully entertaining, and no interpretation of Shakespeare's story and characters can ever trump the playwright's ruthless determination not to interpret them.  As long as his characters speak their lines intelligibly, they are alive, immortal.

This film records the extreme skill British players of the last century developed for speaking Shakespeare's language naturally, without losing its poetry, its formal eloquence.  It's absurd to declaim Shakespeare like holy writ, but equally absurd to toss it off like casual conversation.  Nobody in the history of the world has ever spoken casually in strict iambic pentameter and rhyme.  There is a middle way, and Olivier's cast members have mastered it.

Olivier has mastered it, too, of course, and if you listen to recordings of his readings of the lines in this film, they dazzle with their subtlety and modulation and invention.  They don't contribute to a convincing portrayal of Hamlet in the film itself, but they are the product of extraordinary craft and art.

LA RONDE

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The Golden Age of Vienna, the decades just before the Great War, remains a potent image for the modern world.  Everything was splendid in the Austrian capital then, and everything was rotten.  Everyone seemed to know that it was all about to come crashing down in horror.  This produced two responses from artists and thinkers — a deep penetration into the pathology of the modern world, and a sort of prospective nostalgia for the sweetness of what was gay in the present . . . a presentiment of what the world would be like when it was gone.

The pathology of Vienna in that era remains — this sneaking suspicion that our culture is rotten at its heart, that all its supposed splendors are trash.  The gaiety is gone — replaced with a manic consumption of things and experiences, each act of which devalues the currency further.  Beauty, sex, love don't even look real anymore, even from a distance, however skillfully the lighting is arranged.

The Viennese playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler (above) combined a bit of both reactions in his art, though it was mostly diagnostic.  Schnitzler was a doctor, and had a cold side, partly professional and partly perhaps the result of wanting to insulate himself from emotional infection by his patients.  In respect to his work, we are the patients, receiving the worst news a doctor can give, and though he gives it with great elegance, he gives it straight — he doesn't mince words.

Movies have been based on Schnitzler's work since the silent era.  Max Ophuls filmed two of his plays.  The last film Stanley Kubrick made, Eyes Wide Shut (above), was based on a Schnitzler novel.  Of course, all of these adaptations, except perhaps for Kubrick's, have been either Bowdlerized or softened in some way.  Schnitzler is hard to take straight.

Ophuls's 1950 film La Ronde, based on Schnitzler's play Reigen, is softened only a little.  We still have the merry-go-round of sexual encounters, all basically sad, all tending to demolish both romantic dreams and the various social pieties about love and marriage.  But in the extraordinary final episode of Ophuls's film, the director allows us to believe that in the most degraded acts of sexual intercourse there is a tiny trace of human exchange that is redemptive — or might be redemptive, if the participants could credit it.

The feckless count in that sequence, struggling to remember a drunken night of love, is bewildered by what he feels for the whore he wakes up with.  The whore, with her sweet acceptance of his confusion, offers a kind of benediction.  There's a grace present in their exchange which doesn't quite seem to point the way to anything — but it's something, a little something, and it's very moving.

I'm not sure that that little something is still with us, in the utterly degraded culture of the present day — but perhaps a trace of it remains, like the lingering scent of flowers from a corsage lost in a ballroom where brilliant waltzes were danced.

A WOMAN'S FACE

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It's amazing what you can do with a camera and a woman's face.  It's a wonder anyone ever bothers filming anything else.

                                                                    — Ron Salvatore

LONG BEFORE I KNEW YOU

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Found on the original cast recording of Bells Are Ringing, this is one of the loveliest ballads ever written for a Broadway musical.  The fact that Judy Holliday and Sydney Chaplin had to strain a bit to hit their notes only adds to the poignancy of their performances.  Unaccountably, and to me disastrously, the song was left out of the movie version of the show.

Above, Holliday and Chaplin with director Jerome Robbins during rehearsals.