Perhaps it's too easy to find in Thomas Hardy's fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, a rebuke to Jane Austen's chronicles of courtship - splendid women absorbed in the puerilities of landing suitable husbands. Hardy's story begins with an independent and courageous young woman, with the usual fantastic Hardy name of Bathsheba Everdene, resisting the proposals of three stalwart men and ends with her eventually marrying all three. Hardy's story ends with one of the men dead (interestingly, the only one who has had sex with Bathsheba), and a second as good as dead - he will hang for the murder of the first. The man she ends up with, a rather stolid shepherd named Gabriel Oak (!), was the first to propose, but it's safe to suppose that she doesn't love him. If Bathsheba can be pinned down to loving any of them, it was the first, the one who seduced her.
After watching the latest of four film adaptations of Hardy's novel, it's tempting to think, comparing it to the expensive and expansive first adaptation, from 1967, "What a falling off was there." Recalling that film, directed by John Schlesinger and photographed by Nicolas Roeg, so many scenes stand out: the sheep dog driving Gabriel Oak's flock off a cliff, Sergeant Troy demonstrating his swordsmanship to Bathsheba, Troy breaking open the coffin of Fanny Robin, the gothic church's rain spout disinterring Fanny's grave, Boldwood's wedding party interrupted. But the simple fact that one recalls only scenes from Schlesinger's film exposes its essential weakness. It isn't a cohesive - or even a coherent - work. Top-heavy with three great actors, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp, perfectly cast, they appear to revolve in the memory around a beautiful nullity - Julie Christie, whose stardom was one of the most baffling flukes of the 1960s. Why she was never expected to act by David Lean and Schlesinger (who was her lover for awhile), is one of film history's greatest mysteries. But the technicolor imagery summoned up by Roeg, who would shortly embark on his own meandering career as director, caught fleeting glimpses of Hardy's fatalistic Wessex tale. Hardy belived so overwhelmingly in the inevitability of disappointment (especially in love) and grief that he could get away with devices like coincidence and foreshadowing, all of it to establish his sense of a powerful Fate ruling the lives of his characters.
In the new movie, there is a much airier feeling, a particularization of detail that has something other than the plot to justify it. The Danish director, Thomas Vinterberg, shows us how people lived in Victorian Dorsetshire, the English county that Hardy redubbed Wessex. The costumes are marvelously explicit. (When I reaquainted myself with the Schlesinger version twenty-five years ago when I was in the Navy, and Terence Stamp walked on in all his dragooned glory, I said, "Now that's a uniform!" A friend corrected me: "No. That's a costume.") The actors don't behave as if they're wearing costumes, but their everyday clothes, which is a subtle but marvelous touch.
Carey Mulligan heads the cast, as she should - since it's Bathsheba's story to tell. She provides this version with a much sturdier center, with her three male swains (Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Sheen, and Tom Sturridge) providing their parts with supporting substance. But how I missed Bates, Finch, and Stamp in those roles! There are no English actors around today who could properly replace them. Mulligan carries the film well, even if she isn't as superficially toothsome as Julie Christie was in 1967. Vernon Young was right, though, when he pointed out that Christie missed her true calling as a flight attendant (he used the quaint term "stewardess"). Mulligan breathes life, if not fire, into Bathsheba, the same life that Hardy gave her on the printed page.
One other dimension missing from Vinterberg's film is the music, an absence that would've been welcome since it's so overused in today's films. Craig Armstrong composed a somewhat murky score for the film, along with a quasi-English folk song sung by Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen. But Richard Rodney Bennett supplied the Schlesinger film with a score worthy of Ralph Vaughan Williams, even if the film wasn't quite worthy of it. Vinterberg's choice of the Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen replaced Nicolas Roeg's lugubrious atmospherics with sunny, sharp images in keeping, perhaps, with the Dogme dogma of avoiding photographic effects (filters, underexposure, artificial lighting, etc.). It's an improvement, I think, on the Turneresque look of too many Hardy adaptations.
In keeping with the latest literary adaptations, the new Far from the Madding Crowd is just shy of two hours, which is a serious short-shrifting of the novel's density. The Schlesinger version was a hefty 169 minutes, but few audiences today have the patience for such long-hauls. Which means, of course, that it isn't just their loss but ours, dear reader. Vinterberg's film only managed to scrape in $30.2M worldwide. This time the madding crowd stayed away.
Wednesday, 18 May 2016
Sunday, 8 May 2016
From the Cockpit
As of right now Filipinos, around forty million of them this year, are standing in line outside voting centers all over the Philippine archipelago waiting for their turn to cast their vote for candidates running for president, vice president (an office elected separately from the president), senator, all the way down to municipal mayor. Even if most of the 7,107 islands that constitute the geographical area of the country are uninhabited, the Philippine Committee on Elections (COMELEC) has transported automated voting machines made by a company called Smartmatic to as many populated areas as possible. Starting with the 2010 elections, COMELEC decided to replace the time-consuming manual voting system - in which voters filled out a ballot, folded it and put it into a secured box, and which resulted in a lengthy waiting period while the voting boxes were gathered from far and wide, unlocked, and the ballots counted by an army of volunteers (a process that could take weeks) - with a machine that works like a fax, transmitting every voter form via secure connection to a central receiving station in Manila. Vote tallying is over in a matter of a few days. For some reason, people actually believed that this faster process would prevent, or at least discourage, cheating.
In the past week, Filipinos hung around their barangays waiting for representatives of the candidates who carried lists of registered voters and satchels filled with envelopes. The envelopes contained cash of various denominations, from twenty pesos (45 cents) to one hundred pesos ($2.10). In provincial gubernatorial elections, which can get heated, the money in the envelopes can be as high a one thousand pesos ($21). An average voter, if he was patient, came away with maybe five to ten bucks this past week. It's called vote buying - a quite simple quid pro quo between poor people and the unimaginably rich people who rule them. I have seen it with my own eyes - the bank notes even had the candidate's name on a piece of paper stapled to them.
For a majority of Filipinos, cock-fighting is more than just an unofficial national sport - it's a metaphor of the political process that Filipinos experience. When they vote, it's easy to see their votes as a bet for the cock that they believe will win the fight. What happens after the winning cock/candidate takes office isn't a factor Filipinos consider when they vote. Despite no one ever acting in their interests in the seventy year history of their republic, Filipinos take voting seriously - far more seriously, strangely enough, than Americans - but they don't expect anything in return. For example, the common rationale behind the election of President Benigno Aquino III in 2010 was that he was already rich enough not to feel the need to steal from the people, as every president before him did. Ferdinand Marcos managed to steal billions of dollars (not pesos) from his people before they'd had enough and drove him from power. To our shame, Marcos's personal friend, Ronald Reagan, requisitioned two C-130 transport aircraft to carry the Marcos family, a small retinue of cronies, diaper bags crammed with jewels and gold bars, along with pallets of millions of freshly-minted Philippine peso notes to Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii where he was given asylum (and where he died of cancer a few years later).
Among the candidates running for president this time is a former mayor of Davao, a sprawling city in the Philippine Wild West (or South) on the island of Mindinao, named Rodrigo Duterte. Since he announced his candidacy, he has become wildly popular among voters, mostly the poor and uneducated, for his tough talk about mass executions for drug dealers. One rumor going around is that he shot and killed his own son when he discovered he was doing drugs - crystal meth, known hereabouts as "shabu." He has been labelled the "Philippne Donald Trump" because of his routine outrageous statements, like wishing he had been the first to have a go at an attractive Australian woman who had been gang-raped and murdered in a Philippine prison. Duterte makes Donald Trump look like Gandhi. Like Trump, however, he is ahead in the polls, and looks like a winner in this cock fight.
Also running, but for Vice President, is Senator BongBong Marcos, the only son of former dictator Ferdinand. He goes by the nickname BongBong, I suppose, because his real name is Ferdinand Jr. He was last polled to be in a dead heat with another candidate. He has been trying to paint a far different picture of his father's presidency since he arrived on the public stage, claiming that Ferdinand was interrupted in his project to transform the Philippines into another Singapore, and that he intends to continue that legacy if he makes it to president. Since Duterte has dictator written all over him, provoking current president Aquino (whose father, by the way, was murdered by Ferdinand - a fact that has never been legally established) to warn Filipinos that Duterte may actually do what he says he will do and throw out the Philippine constitution, Marcos may have to wait his turn to plunder his country.
Philippine politics has always resembled a two-ring circus, with the forces of corruption and the status quo in one ring amassing as much stolen wealth as they can before they get caught, and the forces of reform and fair governance in the other going about the piecemeal and arduous task of holding a window - if not a mirror - up to the antics being carried out in Ring #1 so that everyone can see. The Philippines is just about to conclude a six-year period of economic increase, brought about by Benigno Aquino III, son of the rich and powerful - and long-standing Hacendero - Cojuanco family. Like American president Barack Obama, his term (only one 6-year term) has been spent down in the weeds of governance unknown to ordinary Filipinos. It was uneventful, lacking in drama, boring in Circus Ring #2. Perhaps that was exactly what voters wanted in 2010, after twelve years of corrupt presidents, plunder, impeachments, and stolen elections. But now, evidently, once again they want to see what the first ring will give them - or what they will spectacularly steal.
In the past week, Filipinos hung around their barangays waiting for representatives of the candidates who carried lists of registered voters and satchels filled with envelopes. The envelopes contained cash of various denominations, from twenty pesos (45 cents) to one hundred pesos ($2.10). In provincial gubernatorial elections, which can get heated, the money in the envelopes can be as high a one thousand pesos ($21). An average voter, if he was patient, came away with maybe five to ten bucks this past week. It's called vote buying - a quite simple quid pro quo between poor people and the unimaginably rich people who rule them. I have seen it with my own eyes - the bank notes even had the candidate's name on a piece of paper stapled to them.
For a majority of Filipinos, cock-fighting is more than just an unofficial national sport - it's a metaphor of the political process that Filipinos experience. When they vote, it's easy to see their votes as a bet for the cock that they believe will win the fight. What happens after the winning cock/candidate takes office isn't a factor Filipinos consider when they vote. Despite no one ever acting in their interests in the seventy year history of their republic, Filipinos take voting seriously - far more seriously, strangely enough, than Americans - but they don't expect anything in return. For example, the common rationale behind the election of President Benigno Aquino III in 2010 was that he was already rich enough not to feel the need to steal from the people, as every president before him did. Ferdinand Marcos managed to steal billions of dollars (not pesos) from his people before they'd had enough and drove him from power. To our shame, Marcos's personal friend, Ronald Reagan, requisitioned two C-130 transport aircraft to carry the Marcos family, a small retinue of cronies, diaper bags crammed with jewels and gold bars, along with pallets of millions of freshly-minted Philippine peso notes to Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii where he was given asylum (and where he died of cancer a few years later).
Among the candidates running for president this time is a former mayor of Davao, a sprawling city in the Philippine Wild West (or South) on the island of Mindinao, named Rodrigo Duterte. Since he announced his candidacy, he has become wildly popular among voters, mostly the poor and uneducated, for his tough talk about mass executions for drug dealers. One rumor going around is that he shot and killed his own son when he discovered he was doing drugs - crystal meth, known hereabouts as "shabu." He has been labelled the "Philippne Donald Trump" because of his routine outrageous statements, like wishing he had been the first to have a go at an attractive Australian woman who had been gang-raped and murdered in a Philippine prison. Duterte makes Donald Trump look like Gandhi. Like Trump, however, he is ahead in the polls, and looks like a winner in this cock fight.
Also running, but for Vice President, is Senator BongBong Marcos, the only son of former dictator Ferdinand. He goes by the nickname BongBong, I suppose, because his real name is Ferdinand Jr. He was last polled to be in a dead heat with another candidate. He has been trying to paint a far different picture of his father's presidency since he arrived on the public stage, claiming that Ferdinand was interrupted in his project to transform the Philippines into another Singapore, and that he intends to continue that legacy if he makes it to president. Since Duterte has dictator written all over him, provoking current president Aquino (whose father, by the way, was murdered by Ferdinand - a fact that has never been legally established) to warn Filipinos that Duterte may actually do what he says he will do and throw out the Philippine constitution, Marcos may have to wait his turn to plunder his country.
Philippine politics has always resembled a two-ring circus, with the forces of corruption and the status quo in one ring amassing as much stolen wealth as they can before they get caught, and the forces of reform and fair governance in the other going about the piecemeal and arduous task of holding a window - if not a mirror - up to the antics being carried out in Ring #1 so that everyone can see. The Philippines is just about to conclude a six-year period of economic increase, brought about by Benigno Aquino III, son of the rich and powerful - and long-standing Hacendero - Cojuanco family. Like American president Barack Obama, his term (only one 6-year term) has been spent down in the weeds of governance unknown to ordinary Filipinos. It was uneventful, lacking in drama, boring in Circus Ring #2. Perhaps that was exactly what voters wanted in 2010, after twelve years of corrupt presidents, plunder, impeachments, and stolen elections. But now, evidently, once again they want to see what the first ring will give them - or what they will spectacularly steal.
Wednesday, 4 May 2016
Look at Me
Nothing demonstrates a society's faith in the rock-bottom decency of human beings than the manner with which it treats its criminals. Of course, the faith of some people in human decency appears to be far greater than that of others.
On April 20, a verdict was returned by the Oslo district court in Norway regarding a case brought against the state by Anders Behring Breivik. As everyone should know by now, Breivik is a Norwegian man who, on July 22, 2011, set off a bomb near a government building in Oslo, killing eight people. After lighting the bomb's fuse inside a parked van, Breivik then proceeded directly to a tiny island called Utøya where the country's ruling Labor Party was sponsoring a youth summer camp. With two guns, a Ruger carbine and a 9mm Glock, and a bag full of ammunition, Breivik strolled around the island for more than an hour, shooting everyone he encountered, often at point blank range, killing sixty-nine. When police finally arrived, he quietly surrendered to them, as if it, too, was a part of his plan. Before leaving his mother's flat on that horrific morning, where he had been living and where he had manufactured the bomb, he emailed a 1,500-word manifesto to a thousand online recipients in which he stated that he wanted his actions to provoke a revolution in Norway, and in every other European country, against immigrants, especially against what he called a "Muslim invasion." He also uploaded a 12-minute video to YouTube declaring the same message.(1)
Almost immediately after being taken into police custody, Breivik began to complain about the most trivial things. Asne Seierstad, in her article in The New Yorker, wrote:
"When his bloodied shoes were put in a plastic bag and he was given slippers, he refused to wear them. 'I don't want to be seen in these; they are riduculous,' he said." (2)
Then Breivik discovered that, during the shootings, he had somehow cut his finger and was bleeding. He remembered that, during the shootings on Utøya, he had been hit in the hand by something - probably a piece of the skull of one of his victims whom he had shot in the head. He continued until his interrogation, when he demanded a bandage. One of the policemen present muttered that he would get "no fucking bandage" from him. So Breivik refused to any more questions until he got a bandaid. Someone got it for him.
At the end of his ten-week trial in 2012, in which there was conflicting psychiatric opinion about his mental state (the court concluded he was not psychotic, although his total lack of remorse clearly showed that he was a sociopath), he was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, the longest penalty under Norwegian law, but the sentence can be extended indefinitely.
In prison, Brievik was subjected to daily strip-searches, found himself separated from visitors by a glass partition, was prevented from communicating with his followers, and was restricted to solitary confinement for lengthy periods. Breivik complained to prison officials, as well as directly to the press about other things as well, such as having to use a Playstation 2 rather than a Playstation 3, having to drink cold coffee or not having enough butter for his bread, and about the total absence of artworks in the prison. He claimed that the resulting psychological damage made him a fan of a reality television dating show.
Last year, Breivik filed suit against the state because some of the conditions under which he is obliged to live are, he claimed, a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting "inhumane and degrading treatment". Having to see him again every night on Norwegian television as his case was presented to the court, made the wounds of the families who lost a son or a daughter, a sibling or a friend in the massacre, bleed again. Seeing Breivik obviously relishing the publicity, his taking the stage once again, enraged everyone. Yet the law required that the court hear Breivik's complaints. And last month the court ruled in his favor, agreeing that there was deliberately inhumane and degrading treatment of him, but that some of the terms of his confinement, like his being prevented from communicating with his followers, should continue. And now the state has appealed the court's decision, Breivik will be provided with still more attention from the press, and Norwegians subjected to further outrage.
Some of the most acute minds in Norway have spent the years since the Utøya massacre trying to figure out how Breivik could have brought himself to the point of committing mass murder, and then to have carried it out without the slightest comprehension of wrong-doing. In another New Yorker article, published a year ago, Karl Ove Knausgaard tried to comprehend Breivik. "The most logical approach is to view his actions as a variation on the numerous school massacres that have occurred in the past decades in the United States, Finland, and Germany: a young man, a misfit, who is either partly or completely excluded from the group, takes as many people with him into death as he can, in order to 'show' us. . . He wanted to be seen; that is what drove him, nothing else. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me."(3)
If Breivik had committed his massacre in the U.S., it's fairly certain that by now he would be dead. Like Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (an act that Breivik tried to repeat with his Oslo bomb) and who was put to death by lethal injection in 2001, Breivik would have been expeditiously tried by a federal court, convicted, and sentenced to death - all out of consideration to the victims and in the interests of "justice." In Europe, however, capital punishment has long since been abolished. Brevik must spend the rest of his life in prison. The survivors of the massacre and the families of the victims never expected justice, since no matter what they did to Breivik, the seventy-seven dead will never be brought back. The responsibility of the state, therefore, is to keep him in one sort of confinement or other until he, too, is dead.
What is the purpose of incarcerating convicted criminals? My father, after his retirement from the Army, got a job as a guard at a prison in South Carolina, and it gave me a lesson in the confusion Americans evidently had towards prison inmates. Because of his experience with weapons, my father worked in one of the prison towers with a high-powered rifle and instructions to shoot anyone who tried to climb over one of the high fences near the main gate. Since he worked the graveyard shift, I remember he drank alot of coffee and slept all day.
The prison where he worked, down by the Congaree River in Columbia, was officially known as the South Carolina State Penetentiary. Penetentiary is an old word, betraying an old conception of imprisonment that has little meaning any more. It's where "penitents" - confessed sinners - go. The state department was called the Department of Corrections. That prisons "correct" prisoners is a liberal 20th-century idea that is the expression of a different understanding of what happens when someone breaks the law and what society needs to do about them.
Anders Breivik seems determined not to go quietly into the living oblivion that Norwegian law has sought to place him. "Every time his name appears in public," Knausgaard wrote, "he gets what he wants, and becomes who he wants, while those whom he murdered, at whose expense he asserted himself, lost not onky their lives but also their names - we remember his name, but they have become numbers."
(1) Charles Manson believed that the Tate-Labianca murders carried out by members of his "family" would spark a race war.
(2) "Mercy for a Terroist in Norway," The New Yorker, April 25, 2016.
(3) "The Inexplicable: Inside the mind of a mass killer," The New Yorker, May 25, 2015.
On April 20, a verdict was returned by the Oslo district court in Norway regarding a case brought against the state by Anders Behring Breivik. As everyone should know by now, Breivik is a Norwegian man who, on July 22, 2011, set off a bomb near a government building in Oslo, killing eight people. After lighting the bomb's fuse inside a parked van, Breivik then proceeded directly to a tiny island called Utøya where the country's ruling Labor Party was sponsoring a youth summer camp. With two guns, a Ruger carbine and a 9mm Glock, and a bag full of ammunition, Breivik strolled around the island for more than an hour, shooting everyone he encountered, often at point blank range, killing sixty-nine. When police finally arrived, he quietly surrendered to them, as if it, too, was a part of his plan. Before leaving his mother's flat on that horrific morning, where he had been living and where he had manufactured the bomb, he emailed a 1,500-word manifesto to a thousand online recipients in which he stated that he wanted his actions to provoke a revolution in Norway, and in every other European country, against immigrants, especially against what he called a "Muslim invasion." He also uploaded a 12-minute video to YouTube declaring the same message.(1)
Almost immediately after being taken into police custody, Breivik began to complain about the most trivial things. Asne Seierstad, in her article in The New Yorker, wrote:
"When his bloodied shoes were put in a plastic bag and he was given slippers, he refused to wear them. 'I don't want to be seen in these; they are riduculous,' he said." (2)
Then Breivik discovered that, during the shootings, he had somehow cut his finger and was bleeding. He remembered that, during the shootings on Utøya, he had been hit in the hand by something - probably a piece of the skull of one of his victims whom he had shot in the head. He continued until his interrogation, when he demanded a bandage. One of the policemen present muttered that he would get "no fucking bandage" from him. So Breivik refused to any more questions until he got a bandaid. Someone got it for him.
At the end of his ten-week trial in 2012, in which there was conflicting psychiatric opinion about his mental state (the court concluded he was not psychotic, although his total lack of remorse clearly showed that he was a sociopath), he was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, the longest penalty under Norwegian law, but the sentence can be extended indefinitely.
In prison, Brievik was subjected to daily strip-searches, found himself separated from visitors by a glass partition, was prevented from communicating with his followers, and was restricted to solitary confinement for lengthy periods. Breivik complained to prison officials, as well as directly to the press about other things as well, such as having to use a Playstation 2 rather than a Playstation 3, having to drink cold coffee or not having enough butter for his bread, and about the total absence of artworks in the prison. He claimed that the resulting psychological damage made him a fan of a reality television dating show.
Last year, Breivik filed suit against the state because some of the conditions under which he is obliged to live are, he claimed, a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting "inhumane and degrading treatment". Having to see him again every night on Norwegian television as his case was presented to the court, made the wounds of the families who lost a son or a daughter, a sibling or a friend in the massacre, bleed again. Seeing Breivik obviously relishing the publicity, his taking the stage once again, enraged everyone. Yet the law required that the court hear Breivik's complaints. And last month the court ruled in his favor, agreeing that there was deliberately inhumane and degrading treatment of him, but that some of the terms of his confinement, like his being prevented from communicating with his followers, should continue. And now the state has appealed the court's decision, Breivik will be provided with still more attention from the press, and Norwegians subjected to further outrage.
Some of the most acute minds in Norway have spent the years since the Utøya massacre trying to figure out how Breivik could have brought himself to the point of committing mass murder, and then to have carried it out without the slightest comprehension of wrong-doing. In another New Yorker article, published a year ago, Karl Ove Knausgaard tried to comprehend Breivik. "The most logical approach is to view his actions as a variation on the numerous school massacres that have occurred in the past decades in the United States, Finland, and Germany: a young man, a misfit, who is either partly or completely excluded from the group, takes as many people with him into death as he can, in order to 'show' us. . . He wanted to be seen; that is what drove him, nothing else. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me."(3)
If Breivik had committed his massacre in the U.S., it's fairly certain that by now he would be dead. Like Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (an act that Breivik tried to repeat with his Oslo bomb) and who was put to death by lethal injection in 2001, Breivik would have been expeditiously tried by a federal court, convicted, and sentenced to death - all out of consideration to the victims and in the interests of "justice." In Europe, however, capital punishment has long since been abolished. Brevik must spend the rest of his life in prison. The survivors of the massacre and the families of the victims never expected justice, since no matter what they did to Breivik, the seventy-seven dead will never be brought back. The responsibility of the state, therefore, is to keep him in one sort of confinement or other until he, too, is dead.
What is the purpose of incarcerating convicted criminals? My father, after his retirement from the Army, got a job as a guard at a prison in South Carolina, and it gave me a lesson in the confusion Americans evidently had towards prison inmates. Because of his experience with weapons, my father worked in one of the prison towers with a high-powered rifle and instructions to shoot anyone who tried to climb over one of the high fences near the main gate. Since he worked the graveyard shift, I remember he drank alot of coffee and slept all day.
The prison where he worked, down by the Congaree River in Columbia, was officially known as the South Carolina State Penetentiary. Penetentiary is an old word, betraying an old conception of imprisonment that has little meaning any more. It's where "penitents" - confessed sinners - go. The state department was called the Department of Corrections. That prisons "correct" prisoners is a liberal 20th-century idea that is the expression of a different understanding of what happens when someone breaks the law and what society needs to do about them.
Anders Breivik seems determined not to go quietly into the living oblivion that Norwegian law has sought to place him. "Every time his name appears in public," Knausgaard wrote, "he gets what he wants, and becomes who he wants, while those whom he murdered, at whose expense he asserted himself, lost not onky their lives but also their names - we remember his name, but they have become numbers."
(1) Charles Manson believed that the Tate-Labianca murders carried out by members of his "family" would spark a race war.
(2) "Mercy for a Terroist in Norway," The New Yorker, April 25, 2016.
(3) "The Inexplicable: Inside the mind of a mass killer," The New Yorker, May 25, 2015.
Wednesday, 27 April 2016
An Auteur's Revenge
I had the pleasure to see a brief documentary produced by Criterion for the 2014 release of their DVD of Serge Bourguignon's Sundays and Cybele (Cybele, ou Les Dimanches de Ville-d'Avray, 1963). Bourguignon, speaking English throughout the short film, recalls the making of the his first feature film, the preparation of the script, the casting of the two leads, Hardy Kruger and Patricia Gozzi, the discoveries and difficulties during shooting, and the release of the film and its phenomenal success. But the critical reaction to the film, as Bourguignon recalls, wasn't unanimously positive. One specific group of critics that might have been relied on by a young French filmmaker making his first film as a source of support, the critics writing for Cahiers du Cinema that included Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, and Truffaut, attacked the film and, according to Bourguignon, their disapproval cast a shadow over the rest of his career.
Having been an admirer of Bourguignon's film since I first saw it forty years ago, I always wondered why he didn't have as full and rewarding a career as some other French directors. In his Dictionary of Film Makers, Georges Sadoul encapsulated Bourguignon's career:
"BOURGUIGNON, Serge Dir. France/USA. (Maignelay Sept 3,1928- ) Studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC). He is passionately devoted to the cinema, delighting in beautiful images and the exotic, but he is sometimes a little mannered. His Sundays and Cybele won an Academy Award."
That last sentence. How final. In the Criterion documentary Bourguignon tells how Cybele was released in France and abroad in the same year as Truffaut's Jules and Jim, one of the great films of the Nouvelle Vague, and, it turned out, Truffaut's last great film. Cybele was entered in competition for the Cannes Palm d'Or against Jules and Jim, and Cybele won. And since France could enter only one film in competition for the American Academy's Best Foreign Language Film, Cybele was entered instead of Jules and Jim. So, what could have been Truffaut's Big Break, a break that might have changed the direction of his whole career, became Bourguignon's.
A common mistake made by critics is to call every French filmmaker whose first film was made between 1958 and 1965 a member of the Nouvelle Vague. Alain Resnais, for example, who saw his first feature film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, released in 1959, is often - incorrectly - labelled a member of the New Wave. The Nouvelle Vague belongs to the group of former critics writing for Cahier du Cinema, the film magazine founded by Andre Bazin. Unlike Bourguignon, who was a graduate of IDHEC, the world famous French film school, the Cahiers critics who created the New Wave made their first films with no prior technical knowledge of how films are made. Bourguignon knew all about lenses and focal lengths and about all the established rules of filmmaking like line-of-sight and reverse angles. The Cahiers critics went to the film school of the Cinematheque Francaise, and their professor was Henri Langlois, who advised them all to consume films at a profligate pace.
For their first efforts, Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and Rohmer had to rely on the technical knowledge of their collaborators, most notably cinematographers like Raoul Coutard and Henri Decae. One of the reasons why they became filmmakers was so they could express more directly their hatred of the Old School of French filmmaking, represented by directors like Rene Clement and Marcel Carne. Their condemnation of this generation was both deeply political and psychological. The Cahiers critics had all grown up during the German Occupation of France (1940-1944), and had inherited the guilt of the generation of Frenchmen that preceded them. But they also had to kill the old in order to establish the new - kill the old kings of French cinema so that they could supplant them.
The irony was that the two most successful directors of the New Wave, Chabrol and Truffaut, to a large extent became what they had once hated. It was almost inevitable. Entering the industry against the mainstream, they forced the stream to change course, and their films became the mainstream; their work was the new status quo. Godard could see it happening to his old brothers in arms, and he tried to point this out to them. His famous falling out with Truffaut was a direct result of Truffaut becoming a commercially successful film director, of growing comfortable in his position and of his wanting to remain there. Chabrol's work, which had started out with two or three honest and personal films, was, by the mid-60s, almost entirely given over to potboilers redeemed only by their elegant style. Truffaut tried to return to his lost innocence with more Antoine Doinel films and with a more direct retelling of the story of Jules and Jim, in which the two men become Two English Girls. But he never recovered the nerve that had made his first three films so challenging and original.
In the Criterion documentary, Bourguignon lamented that his career subsequent to Cybele was made up of promising projects that never got off the ground, films that he never had an opportunity to make. He suggested that the negative appraisal of Cybele by the Cahiers critics had a negative influence on film producers. But he hoped, in the charming last moments of the documentary, that - who knows - his career might yet get off the ground again. (Bourguignon was 86 when the interview was conducted.)
The fact is, Bourguignon's career wasn't the first that was sabotaged by the Cahiers critics. When Bertrand Tavernier wanted a collaborator to help him writer the scripts for his first films, he located an old French script writer, Jean Aurenche, whose impressive career as a successful script-writer in the 1940s and 50s was brought to an abrupt end by an attack in the pages of Carhiers du Cinema on a script he had written in collaboration with Pierre Bost. They had been hired to write an adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel, The Diary of Country Priest. The filmmaker who was directing the film was Robert Bresson, who rejected the Aurenche-Bost script and eventually wrote one of his own. Since Bresson was not in any sense a mainstream French director, making only thirteen films in a forty year career, his work was held in highest esteem by the Cahiers critics. Bresson's reasons for rejecting the Aurenche-Bost script were due to their approaching the novel as just another work of literature, instead of some sort of spiritual masterpiece by a devoutly Roman Catholic novelist.
But Bresson's rejection of the Aurenche-Bost script was used as an example to illustrate how ossified French film had become, of how even important works of literature had been adapted in the same dull manner year after boring year, mostly by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. The result of the Cahiers dismissal of their work effectively ended their careers. Tavernier saw this as an injustice, and worked with Aurenche on the scripts for his first three, highly celebrated films, The Clockmaker, The Judge and the Murderer, and Let Joy Reign Supreme. He would later adapt a novel by Pierre Bost for the film A Sunday in the Country.
Sundays and Cybele remains an effective, off-beat tale of innocence destroyed. It is a remarkable achievemnt for a first-time filmmaker. But compared to Jules and Jim, it looks awfully tepid. Of course, if compared with Jules and Jim, just about every film would look second-rate. The savants on the Cannes jury made a mistake. (The Oscars probably didn't.) Maybe if Truffaut had won, he would've felt comfortable enough to avoid being compromised, and his friendship with Godard might never have ended.
By now, all this is nothing but an anecdote in the history of film. After Cybele, Bourguignon would make only four more films, the only one of which I've seen was The Picasso Summer, a fascinating portrait of a young architect's efforts to meet an elusive Pablo Picasso in the south of France, using brilliant animation sequences of Picasso's paintings coming to life. (There was a dispute between Bourguignon and his producer during filming that precipitated his quitting the location.) I was always curious to know why Bourguignon seemed to vanish after that. But this is too often the fate of filmmakers who choose to go their own way. The fact that Bourguignon momentarily answered the call of Hollywood (something that Truffaut managed to resist) might also explain how Bourguignon somehow lost his way. I can name several talented filmmakers who suffered the same fate.
Having been an admirer of Bourguignon's film since I first saw it forty years ago, I always wondered why he didn't have as full and rewarding a career as some other French directors. In his Dictionary of Film Makers, Georges Sadoul encapsulated Bourguignon's career:
"BOURGUIGNON, Serge Dir. France/USA. (Maignelay Sept 3,1928- ) Studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC). He is passionately devoted to the cinema, delighting in beautiful images and the exotic, but he is sometimes a little mannered. His Sundays and Cybele won an Academy Award."
That last sentence. How final. In the Criterion documentary Bourguignon tells how Cybele was released in France and abroad in the same year as Truffaut's Jules and Jim, one of the great films of the Nouvelle Vague, and, it turned out, Truffaut's last great film. Cybele was entered in competition for the Cannes Palm d'Or against Jules and Jim, and Cybele won. And since France could enter only one film in competition for the American Academy's Best Foreign Language Film, Cybele was entered instead of Jules and Jim. So, what could have been Truffaut's Big Break, a break that might have changed the direction of his whole career, became Bourguignon's.
A common mistake made by critics is to call every French filmmaker whose first film was made between 1958 and 1965 a member of the Nouvelle Vague. Alain Resnais, for example, who saw his first feature film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, released in 1959, is often - incorrectly - labelled a member of the New Wave. The Nouvelle Vague belongs to the group of former critics writing for Cahier du Cinema, the film magazine founded by Andre Bazin. Unlike Bourguignon, who was a graduate of IDHEC, the world famous French film school, the Cahiers critics who created the New Wave made their first films with no prior technical knowledge of how films are made. Bourguignon knew all about lenses and focal lengths and about all the established rules of filmmaking like line-of-sight and reverse angles. The Cahiers critics went to the film school of the Cinematheque Francaise, and their professor was Henri Langlois, who advised them all to consume films at a profligate pace.
For their first efforts, Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, and Rohmer had to rely on the technical knowledge of their collaborators, most notably cinematographers like Raoul Coutard and Henri Decae. One of the reasons why they became filmmakers was so they could express more directly their hatred of the Old School of French filmmaking, represented by directors like Rene Clement and Marcel Carne. Their condemnation of this generation was both deeply political and psychological. The Cahiers critics had all grown up during the German Occupation of France (1940-1944), and had inherited the guilt of the generation of Frenchmen that preceded them. But they also had to kill the old in order to establish the new - kill the old kings of French cinema so that they could supplant them.
The irony was that the two most successful directors of the New Wave, Chabrol and Truffaut, to a large extent became what they had once hated. It was almost inevitable. Entering the industry against the mainstream, they forced the stream to change course, and their films became the mainstream; their work was the new status quo. Godard could see it happening to his old brothers in arms, and he tried to point this out to them. His famous falling out with Truffaut was a direct result of Truffaut becoming a commercially successful film director, of growing comfortable in his position and of his wanting to remain there. Chabrol's work, which had started out with two or three honest and personal films, was, by the mid-60s, almost entirely given over to potboilers redeemed only by their elegant style. Truffaut tried to return to his lost innocence with more Antoine Doinel films and with a more direct retelling of the story of Jules and Jim, in which the two men become Two English Girls. But he never recovered the nerve that had made his first three films so challenging and original.
In the Criterion documentary, Bourguignon lamented that his career subsequent to Cybele was made up of promising projects that never got off the ground, films that he never had an opportunity to make. He suggested that the negative appraisal of Cybele by the Cahiers critics had a negative influence on film producers. But he hoped, in the charming last moments of the documentary, that - who knows - his career might yet get off the ground again. (Bourguignon was 86 when the interview was conducted.)
The fact is, Bourguignon's career wasn't the first that was sabotaged by the Cahiers critics. When Bertrand Tavernier wanted a collaborator to help him writer the scripts for his first films, he located an old French script writer, Jean Aurenche, whose impressive career as a successful script-writer in the 1940s and 50s was brought to an abrupt end by an attack in the pages of Carhiers du Cinema on a script he had written in collaboration with Pierre Bost. They had been hired to write an adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel, The Diary of Country Priest. The filmmaker who was directing the film was Robert Bresson, who rejected the Aurenche-Bost script and eventually wrote one of his own. Since Bresson was not in any sense a mainstream French director, making only thirteen films in a forty year career, his work was held in highest esteem by the Cahiers critics. Bresson's reasons for rejecting the Aurenche-Bost script were due to their approaching the novel as just another work of literature, instead of some sort of spiritual masterpiece by a devoutly Roman Catholic novelist.
But Bresson's rejection of the Aurenche-Bost script was used as an example to illustrate how ossified French film had become, of how even important works of literature had been adapted in the same dull manner year after boring year, mostly by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost. The result of the Cahiers dismissal of their work effectively ended their careers. Tavernier saw this as an injustice, and worked with Aurenche on the scripts for his first three, highly celebrated films, The Clockmaker, The Judge and the Murderer, and Let Joy Reign Supreme. He would later adapt a novel by Pierre Bost for the film A Sunday in the Country.
Sundays and Cybele remains an effective, off-beat tale of innocence destroyed. It is a remarkable achievemnt for a first-time filmmaker. But compared to Jules and Jim, it looks awfully tepid. Of course, if compared with Jules and Jim, just about every film would look second-rate. The savants on the Cannes jury made a mistake. (The Oscars probably didn't.) Maybe if Truffaut had won, he would've felt comfortable enough to avoid being compromised, and his friendship with Godard might never have ended.
By now, all this is nothing but an anecdote in the history of film. After Cybele, Bourguignon would make only four more films, the only one of which I've seen was The Picasso Summer, a fascinating portrait of a young architect's efforts to meet an elusive Pablo Picasso in the south of France, using brilliant animation sequences of Picasso's paintings coming to life. (There was a dispute between Bourguignon and his producer during filming that precipitated his quitting the location.) I was always curious to know why Bourguignon seemed to vanish after that. But this is too often the fate of filmmakers who choose to go their own way. The fact that Bourguignon momentarily answered the call of Hollywood (something that Truffaut managed to resist) might also explain how Bourguignon somehow lost his way. I can name several talented filmmakers who suffered the same fate.
Friday, 22 April 2016
Will I Was
A man died four hundred years ago today. The man was an English playwright named William Shakespeare. His plays wouldn't become works of literature until two of his friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, went to considerable expense to publish his plays seven years after his death. On the day he died, according to Shakepeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, there was no great outpouring of public grief. In fact, no one paid more than passing attention to Shakespeare's passing.
Two days ago, Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday was observed with general congratulatorial appeal. And the R&B singer Prince was pronounced dead of, as yet, unexplained causes to general outpourings of shock, grief, and praise. There will be no such displays of emotion today, despite Shakespeare's towering reputation as the greatest writer in English.
Some people, however, don't even think Shakespeare wrote any of the plays attributed to him. Stephen Greenblatt has called them "Shakespeare deniers," and has even remarked that their skepticism is in some way comparable to Holocaust denial. In a recent essay for The New York Review, however, Greenblatt insists that Shakespeare can't be found in his plays, that, unlike Marlowe or Jonson, he is one of those writers whose biography is of no importance to the plays. "It is not really necessary to know the details of Shakespeare's life in order to love or understand his plays."(1) This may be a problem for some people, for whom the artist must always supercede the art. The history of art, as an astute observer once described, started with works whose creators were anonymous, deliberately or otherwise, and ends with the works being supplanted by the reputation of the artist. An unsigned painting, sculpture, or cathedral replaced by a monumental signature. This is how a heretofore nondescript canvas in an storage room whose value has always been considered low has recently been discovered to be a Caravaggio, valued in hundreds of millions. Why did the painting's value AS A WORK OF ART suddenly shoot up merely because its creator is now believed to be Caravaggio instead of some unknown master? I admit that this is a silly question since money, which spoils everything, has long since despoiled the world of art.
Greenblatt now insists that Shakespeare's passing four hundred years ago passed unnoticed by the public because the plays are what matters, and the plays have only increased in vitality in four hundreds years. To an ultimately unimportant majority of people, Shakespeare's plays are inaccessible, what with all of those THEEs and THOUs. As everyone who has seen one of his plays performed knows all too well, Shakespeare's language is strikingly and magnificently clear. How else could he have been so popular in his day?
Greenblatt argues that "the real 'life' of the characters and their plays lay not in the texts but in the performances of those texts. The words on the page were dead letters until they were 'revived' by the gifted actor. This belief should hardly surprise us, since it is the way most audiences currently respond to plays and, still more, to film."
In his classic study Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster wondered how the dramatist's art could survive the onslaught of actors who "appear to side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the play as a whole, and more often to be the mortal enemies of both."
"Is it not extraordinary," Forster asks, "that plays on the stage are often better than they are in the study, and that the introduction of a bunch of rather ambitious and nervous men and women should add anything to our understanding of SHakespeare and Chekov?"(2)
But Greenblatt insists the opposite: "We speak of Shakespeare's works as if they were stable reflections of his original intentions but they continue to circulate precisely because they are so amenable to metamorphosis." It is a commonplace of Shakespeare productions for the past fifty years to set Timon of Athens not in ancient Greece but in the Havana, Cuba of 1959 or to set Richard III not in 15th century England where there was an actual king named Richard III but in Nazi Germany. Whenever I read the play, I read of an old Saxon king named Lear roaming, half-crazed, across an all-too-genuine English heath or a Roman general named Marc Anthony, familiar from Hollywood films, throwing off his armor to embrace Cleopatra in the Alexandria, Egypt. Certainly the context in which we find his plays allows for plenty of imaginative exercise. But the insistence that it is better to set Macbeth in Brooklyn because audiences will somehow comprehend what is happening is a disservice both to Shakespeare and to the audience.
So, so what if we know so little about William Shakespeare's life except the barest of essentials, registered dates and signatures on titles and deeds? Why should it lead some people to suppose that his obscurity was deliberate instead of a natural condition? Anthony Burgess once claimed that if he had to choose between the discovery of a lost play by Shakespeare or Shakespeare's laundry list, he'd go for the dirty laundry every time. But why? Obviously (to me anyway), the play's the thing. Shakespeare is dead. His bones - sans his skull, as recent ground-penetrating radar revealed - are buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-on-Avon. His plays can be found everywhere in the world.
(1) The New York Review, April 21, 2016.
(2) Aspects of the Novel, Harcourt Inc., 1927.
Two days ago, Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday was observed with general congratulatorial appeal. And the R&B singer Prince was pronounced dead of, as yet, unexplained causes to general outpourings of shock, grief, and praise. There will be no such displays of emotion today, despite Shakespeare's towering reputation as the greatest writer in English.
Some people, however, don't even think Shakespeare wrote any of the plays attributed to him. Stephen Greenblatt has called them "Shakespeare deniers," and has even remarked that their skepticism is in some way comparable to Holocaust denial. In a recent essay for The New York Review, however, Greenblatt insists that Shakespeare can't be found in his plays, that, unlike Marlowe or Jonson, he is one of those writers whose biography is of no importance to the plays. "It is not really necessary to know the details of Shakespeare's life in order to love or understand his plays."(1) This may be a problem for some people, for whom the artist must always supercede the art. The history of art, as an astute observer once described, started with works whose creators were anonymous, deliberately or otherwise, and ends with the works being supplanted by the reputation of the artist. An unsigned painting, sculpture, or cathedral replaced by a monumental signature. This is how a heretofore nondescript canvas in an storage room whose value has always been considered low has recently been discovered to be a Caravaggio, valued in hundreds of millions. Why did the painting's value AS A WORK OF ART suddenly shoot up merely because its creator is now believed to be Caravaggio instead of some unknown master? I admit that this is a silly question since money, which spoils everything, has long since despoiled the world of art.
Greenblatt now insists that Shakespeare's passing four hundred years ago passed unnoticed by the public because the plays are what matters, and the plays have only increased in vitality in four hundreds years. To an ultimately unimportant majority of people, Shakespeare's plays are inaccessible, what with all of those THEEs and THOUs. As everyone who has seen one of his plays performed knows all too well, Shakespeare's language is strikingly and magnificently clear. How else could he have been so popular in his day?
Greenblatt argues that "the real 'life' of the characters and their plays lay not in the texts but in the performances of those texts. The words on the page were dead letters until they were 'revived' by the gifted actor. This belief should hardly surprise us, since it is the way most audiences currently respond to plays and, still more, to film."
In his classic study Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster wondered how the dramatist's art could survive the onslaught of actors who "appear to side sometimes with the characters they represent, sometimes with the play as a whole, and more often to be the mortal enemies of both."
"Is it not extraordinary," Forster asks, "that plays on the stage are often better than they are in the study, and that the introduction of a bunch of rather ambitious and nervous men and women should add anything to our understanding of SHakespeare and Chekov?"(2)
But Greenblatt insists the opposite: "We speak of Shakespeare's works as if they were stable reflections of his original intentions but they continue to circulate precisely because they are so amenable to metamorphosis." It is a commonplace of Shakespeare productions for the past fifty years to set Timon of Athens not in ancient Greece but in the Havana, Cuba of 1959 or to set Richard III not in 15th century England where there was an actual king named Richard III but in Nazi Germany. Whenever I read the play, I read of an old Saxon king named Lear roaming, half-crazed, across an all-too-genuine English heath or a Roman general named Marc Anthony, familiar from Hollywood films, throwing off his armor to embrace Cleopatra in the Alexandria, Egypt. Certainly the context in which we find his plays allows for plenty of imaginative exercise. But the insistence that it is better to set Macbeth in Brooklyn because audiences will somehow comprehend what is happening is a disservice both to Shakespeare and to the audience.
So, so what if we know so little about William Shakespeare's life except the barest of essentials, registered dates and signatures on titles and deeds? Why should it lead some people to suppose that his obscurity was deliberate instead of a natural condition? Anthony Burgess once claimed that if he had to choose between the discovery of a lost play by Shakespeare or Shakespeare's laundry list, he'd go for the dirty laundry every time. But why? Obviously (to me anyway), the play's the thing. Shakespeare is dead. His bones - sans his skull, as recent ground-penetrating radar revealed - are buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-on-Avon. His plays can be found everywhere in the world.
(1) The New York Review, April 21, 2016.
(2) Aspects of the Novel, Harcourt Inc., 1927.
Wednesday, 13 April 2016
Change Your Heart
Based solely on the world in his novels, on the characters - the human figures - he invented and the conflicts through which they moved, Charles Dickens has been affiliated to a wide range of political sympathies. George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton adopted him as a highly moral writer, while others insisted that he was a revolutionary. In his famous essay on Dickens, George Orwell showed how dangerous it is to attribute any specific or developed political stance whatever to his work:
"His whole 'message' is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent....It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different from Creakle's 'as good is from evil'. Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a 'change of heart' - that, essentially, is what he is always saying....If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A 'change of heart' is in fact THE alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the STATUS QUO."(1)
The Dickens tale that presents a change of heart most directly is A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge, a selfish and spiteful old miser, finds his comeuppance in the form of four ghosts who visit him on Christmas Eve: Jacob Marley, his longtime business partner, and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. The book has been adapted to film at least twenty times, from Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost, made in 1901, to the Robert Zemeckis "action capture" 3-D version from 2009. The success of any adaptation of the book is, I think, based squarely on the performance of the actor playing Scrooge. This has something to do with the talent of the actor who can manage to pull off Scrooge's overnight transformation from the detestable miser into a loving and generous human being. But the actor's talent can't improve the failure of Dickens himself to pull off the transformation, since it represents such an enormous change of heart - a lightning-like spiritual awakening that both terrifies and delights everyone who knows him.
Frankly, as sweet and endearing as A Christmas Carol is (as a work of literature - the movie adaptations are almost invariably and unbearably sentimental), it is a bit hard to swallow outside of its holiday context, rather like stale fruitcake. It is, after all, a Christmas story: a genre that is subject to a specific - and narrow - set of rules. Scrooge's transformation requires an act of faith from the reader in order to work. It is an excellent illustration of the meaning of the word "melodrama" - a sudden, otherwise inexplicable change of a story's (or drama's) direction.
The reason why Scrooge's transformation is singularly unbelievable is that there simply isn't evidence for its existence in what we call real life. It fails to convince because it never happened. We all know the type of person that Dickens presents to us in A Christmas Carol - a person who devotes his life to acquisitiveness, to the accumulation of material value at the expense of everyone around him, including his own family. However much people may believe in justice, whether it is divine or earthly, in the great righting of great wrongs, or whether they believe in karma, the change of heart required to transform such a person as Scrooge into a loving and giving human being is the domain of fairy tales, of which A Christmas Carol is a brilliant example.
At about the same that Orwell was writing his essay, Edmund Wilson wrote "The Two Scrooges," in which he addressed the central problem of Dickens's novels - his inability to create rounded, three-dimensional characters. They are all either completely good people or completely bad. Only on a few occasions was Dickens able to show us a character who could be both. "The only complexity of which Dickens is capable," Wilson wrote, "is to make one of his noxious characters become wholesome. The reform of Scrooge in 'A Christmas Carol' shows the phenomenon in its purest form.
"Shall we ask what Scrooge would actually be like if we were to follow him beyond the frame of the story? Unquestionably he would relapse when the merriment was over - if not while it was still going on - into moroseness, vindictiveness, suspicion. He would, that is to say, reveal himself the victim of a manic-depressive cycle, and a very uncomfortable person."(2)
In latter-day psychobabble, Scrooge would turn out to be bi-polar. The holidays passed, he would show up for work on the first frozen Monday of the new year, in that terrible return to reality that we all endure after Christmas, believing, perhaps, that the visitation of the ghosts was what he first said it was, "a slight disorder of the stomach, an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."
Dickens knew that trying to change society, consciously and deliberately trying to make it more just and fair, could lead to yet another tyranny, worse than the last. The only solution he could see was on a personal level, on an individual's realization that something is wrong with the world and that the reformation of his life could put it right. But his choice of metaphors - the Christmas spirit - couldn't have been more of a cliche. And wasn't Scrooge right about Christmas after all?
"A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice.
"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas-time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books, and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?"
The forbidding chill of a January morning, with yet another long year ahead of us, is enough to wake us from the dream.
The true irony is that Orwell - who found Christmas to be a harmless break in people's daily routines, a sweet contrast that makes ordinary people aware of happiness, which they can only know in terms of contrast - advocated a society that would banish both extremes, the grasping, greedy Scrooges as well as the Tiny Tims with their turbercular legs. Evidently Dickens didn't know how to solve the world's biggest problem which, then as now, was the obscene gulf that separates the richest from the poorest. The only solution, he believed, was the change of heart illustrated by Scrooge, even if he didn't believe in it. The Scrooges, as Dickens knew well, never change their ways, and the Tiny Tims always die. It was the nightmare vision of Christmas yet to come that was, like the nightmare vision of Pottersville in that other Christmas favorite, It's a Wonderful Life, closer to the truth.
"Spirit," said Scrooge with an interest he had never felt before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."
"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die."
(1) "Charles Dickens," March 11, 1940.
(2) "The Two Scrooges," The New Republic, March 4, 1940.
"His whole 'message' is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent....It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different from Creakle's 'as good is from evil'. Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a 'change of heart' - that, essentially, is what he is always saying....If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A 'change of heart' is in fact THE alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the STATUS QUO."(1)
The Dickens tale that presents a change of heart most directly is A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge, a selfish and spiteful old miser, finds his comeuppance in the form of four ghosts who visit him on Christmas Eve: Jacob Marley, his longtime business partner, and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. The book has been adapted to film at least twenty times, from Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost, made in 1901, to the Robert Zemeckis "action capture" 3-D version from 2009. The success of any adaptation of the book is, I think, based squarely on the performance of the actor playing Scrooge. This has something to do with the talent of the actor who can manage to pull off Scrooge's overnight transformation from the detestable miser into a loving and generous human being. But the actor's talent can't improve the failure of Dickens himself to pull off the transformation, since it represents such an enormous change of heart - a lightning-like spiritual awakening that both terrifies and delights everyone who knows him.
Frankly, as sweet and endearing as A Christmas Carol is (as a work of literature - the movie adaptations are almost invariably and unbearably sentimental), it is a bit hard to swallow outside of its holiday context, rather like stale fruitcake. It is, after all, a Christmas story: a genre that is subject to a specific - and narrow - set of rules. Scrooge's transformation requires an act of faith from the reader in order to work. It is an excellent illustration of the meaning of the word "melodrama" - a sudden, otherwise inexplicable change of a story's (or drama's) direction.
The reason why Scrooge's transformation is singularly unbelievable is that there simply isn't evidence for its existence in what we call real life. It fails to convince because it never happened. We all know the type of person that Dickens presents to us in A Christmas Carol - a person who devotes his life to acquisitiveness, to the accumulation of material value at the expense of everyone around him, including his own family. However much people may believe in justice, whether it is divine or earthly, in the great righting of great wrongs, or whether they believe in karma, the change of heart required to transform such a person as Scrooge into a loving and giving human being is the domain of fairy tales, of which A Christmas Carol is a brilliant example.
At about the same that Orwell was writing his essay, Edmund Wilson wrote "The Two Scrooges," in which he addressed the central problem of Dickens's novels - his inability to create rounded, three-dimensional characters. They are all either completely good people or completely bad. Only on a few occasions was Dickens able to show us a character who could be both. "The only complexity of which Dickens is capable," Wilson wrote, "is to make one of his noxious characters become wholesome. The reform of Scrooge in 'A Christmas Carol' shows the phenomenon in its purest form.
"Shall we ask what Scrooge would actually be like if we were to follow him beyond the frame of the story? Unquestionably he would relapse when the merriment was over - if not while it was still going on - into moroseness, vindictiveness, suspicion. He would, that is to say, reveal himself the victim of a manic-depressive cycle, and a very uncomfortable person."(2)
In latter-day psychobabble, Scrooge would turn out to be bi-polar. The holidays passed, he would show up for work on the first frozen Monday of the new year, in that terrible return to reality that we all endure after Christmas, believing, perhaps, that the visitation of the ghosts was what he first said it was, "a slight disorder of the stomach, an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato."
Dickens knew that trying to change society, consciously and deliberately trying to make it more just and fair, could lead to yet another tyranny, worse than the last. The only solution he could see was on a personal level, on an individual's realization that something is wrong with the world and that the reformation of his life could put it right. But his choice of metaphors - the Christmas spirit - couldn't have been more of a cliche. And wasn't Scrooge right about Christmas after all?
"A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice.
"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas-time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books, and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?"
The forbidding chill of a January morning, with yet another long year ahead of us, is enough to wake us from the dream.
The true irony is that Orwell - who found Christmas to be a harmless break in people's daily routines, a sweet contrast that makes ordinary people aware of happiness, which they can only know in terms of contrast - advocated a society that would banish both extremes, the grasping, greedy Scrooges as well as the Tiny Tims with their turbercular legs. Evidently Dickens didn't know how to solve the world's biggest problem which, then as now, was the obscene gulf that separates the richest from the poorest. The only solution, he believed, was the change of heart illustrated by Scrooge, even if he didn't believe in it. The Scrooges, as Dickens knew well, never change their ways, and the Tiny Tims always die. It was the nightmare vision of Christmas yet to come that was, like the nightmare vision of Pottersville in that other Christmas favorite, It's a Wonderful Life, closer to the truth.
"Spirit," said Scrooge with an interest he had never felt before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."
"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die."
(1) "Charles Dickens," March 11, 1940.
(2) "The Two Scrooges," The New Republic, March 4, 1940.
Wednesday, 6 April 2016
A Little Chaos
The film A Little Chaos, which premiered a year ago in the UK and which I had a chance to see only yesterday, doesn't come bristling with historical details about its subject: the construction of a beautiful grotto-like outdoor ballroom-cum-fountain, the Bosquet de la Salle-de-Bal, at Versailles; or its setting: the court of Sun King Louis XIV. Nor are we treated, as we might expect, to views of the architectural wonders of Fontainebleau or the Palais du Versailles, then under construction. We get very little of the magnificent clothing of the period. Nor do we get what would have come cheaply - the harpsichord-driven music of Couperin or Lully.
All that was forsaken by the film for a largely personal, internal drama about certain characters, including Louis XIV (played by the late Alan Rickman, who also co-wrote and directed the film). A Little Chaos would seem to be not much more than an excuse to use Kate Winslet, who seems to have been away for a few years, perhaps to give a few other actresses, like Cate Blanchett, a chance to shine.
Winslet plays a fictitious character, Sabine de Barra, a horticulturalist and designer of gardens, who is summoned to Louis's court to assist his chief landscape engineer, Andre Le Notre, in the layout of the gardens of Versailles. We learn by stages that she has recently lost her husband and young daughter in an accident in which the coach they were riding in loses a wheel and careens down a hill. (Sabine feels responsible for the accident, and in the staging of the scene, she actually appears to cause the accident when, noticing the shaky rear wheel, she runs after the coach and throws herself in front of it, causing the horses to panic and the driver to brake suddenly.) But precisely why the film takes so long to inform us, via flashback, of the accident isn't clear.
Some critics have questioned how such a "modern" woman (i.e., one in control of her own destiny) could have existed in late 17th-century France - as if strong-willed, fully-realized women are an invention of the 20th century. As played by Winslet, Madame de Barra is an outsider at the court, a stranger to its self-fascinated ways. She is even underwhelmed by the king himself when she meets him, sitting alone in a garden, mourning the death of the queen Maria Theresa. Dressed simply, without his splendid wig and coat, he is charmed by Madame de Barra (who wouldn't be?) and pretends to be the king's gardener until his ignorance of gardening exposes him and she carefully curtsies before him. He insists, charmingly, that the illusion be allowed to continue for awhile.
When summoned to court (and again, nothing is made of the opportunity by the film's costume department), Sabine is introduced to the court's prominent ladies, many of whom are or have been the king's mistresses. After introductory pleasantries, they learn of Sabine's lost family and tell her of all the children they've lost to disease or to the king's momentary favorite. When the king enters, Sabine boldly presents to him a four-seasons rose and employs it as a metaphor for the women who attend him, whose fragile beauty can only fade with time.
Louis himself is presented as an absolute benevolent despot whose authority, though unquestioned, is tempered less by whim than by genuine feeling. As acted by Rickman, he comes across as an all-too-human ruler, grown so weary of the "crush" of the court at Fontainebleau that he's having it moved out into the muck of the country, a country that is "better for the children," one of whom cheerfully announces to him at the start of the film that he's soiled himself.
Despite setbacks, which include the sabotage to the construction of her fantastical amphitheater of Andre Le Notre's jealous wife, Francoise, the project is completed, and the film closes on a lengthy, CGI-assisted crane shot of the king wryly smiling while he dances in the center of Sabine's strange and beautiful dancefloor surrounded by the geometrical perfection of the Versailles gardens. CGI had to be used because the film was shot entirely in England.
A Little Chaos was the second film Rickman directed. His first, The Winter Guest (1997), starred Emma Thompson, and moved Stanley Kauffmann to comment that Rickman "has an extraordinary eye," and that his use of the camera "suggests certain Japanese filmmakers - Ozu, Imamura - with a sense that many shots have been incised, not photographed, and with a tendency toward the rectilinear, straight lines used vertically and horizontally." (1)
I don't know what Kauffmann would've made of Rickman's last directorial effort, except perhaps to remark on its singular lack of what one had every right to expect of a film about the creation of Versailles - namely, splendor. The acting is somewhat disappointing, given the great bookends of Winslet and Rickman in the cast. Stanley Tucci, as Louis's brother, the Duc d'Orleans, provides humor to his few scenes. The Belgian actor Mathias Schoenaerts is a little stolid as Andre Le Notre, even when he falls in love with Sabine and expresses his passion to her. In a tiny role, Phyllida Law, who is Emma Thompson's mother, and who also appeared in The Winter Guest, graces the scene of Sabine's introduction at court.
Winslet does all she can with a somewhat nebulous role. If some critics thought that she doesn't quite fit in late 17th-century France, it is probably due to the conception of her role, which seems out of place because it is so ill-defined. Alan Rickman is perfect, however, as Louis XIV, magnificent yet weary of his magnificence. He doesn't appear to be enjoying himself at the center of his world - until the transcendent moment when he dances with Sabine in the film's final shot. A Little Chaos could've been sharper, more rigorously upholstered with period detail that would've given it greater substance. But I found it a delightful distraction from the appalling run of the blockbuster mill.
Rickman liked playing Louis and directing his film: "The only way I could do it was because in a way, he's like a director, Louis, so you kind of keep the same expression on your face. As a director, you see everything somehow. It's like a huge all-encompassing eye that sees everything, and it's able to cherry pick; 'Move that,' 'Don't do that,' 'Do it this way,' ' Change this colour'. And I don't know where that comes from, but it does once you're given the job, and I have a feeling Louis probably would've been a great director." (2) Peace to Alan Rickman, but I think Louis would've been a terrible director.
(1) The New Republic, January 5, 1998.
(2) insidemovies.ew.com 9 September 2014.
All that was forsaken by the film for a largely personal, internal drama about certain characters, including Louis XIV (played by the late Alan Rickman, who also co-wrote and directed the film). A Little Chaos would seem to be not much more than an excuse to use Kate Winslet, who seems to have been away for a few years, perhaps to give a few other actresses, like Cate Blanchett, a chance to shine.
Winslet plays a fictitious character, Sabine de Barra, a horticulturalist and designer of gardens, who is summoned to Louis's court to assist his chief landscape engineer, Andre Le Notre, in the layout of the gardens of Versailles. We learn by stages that she has recently lost her husband and young daughter in an accident in which the coach they were riding in loses a wheel and careens down a hill. (Sabine feels responsible for the accident, and in the staging of the scene, she actually appears to cause the accident when, noticing the shaky rear wheel, she runs after the coach and throws herself in front of it, causing the horses to panic and the driver to brake suddenly.) But precisely why the film takes so long to inform us, via flashback, of the accident isn't clear.
Some critics have questioned how such a "modern" woman (i.e., one in control of her own destiny) could have existed in late 17th-century France - as if strong-willed, fully-realized women are an invention of the 20th century. As played by Winslet, Madame de Barra is an outsider at the court, a stranger to its self-fascinated ways. She is even underwhelmed by the king himself when she meets him, sitting alone in a garden, mourning the death of the queen Maria Theresa. Dressed simply, without his splendid wig and coat, he is charmed by Madame de Barra (who wouldn't be?) and pretends to be the king's gardener until his ignorance of gardening exposes him and she carefully curtsies before him. He insists, charmingly, that the illusion be allowed to continue for awhile.
When summoned to court (and again, nothing is made of the opportunity by the film's costume department), Sabine is introduced to the court's prominent ladies, many of whom are or have been the king's mistresses. After introductory pleasantries, they learn of Sabine's lost family and tell her of all the children they've lost to disease or to the king's momentary favorite. When the king enters, Sabine boldly presents to him a four-seasons rose and employs it as a metaphor for the women who attend him, whose fragile beauty can only fade with time.
Louis himself is presented as an absolute benevolent despot whose authority, though unquestioned, is tempered less by whim than by genuine feeling. As acted by Rickman, he comes across as an all-too-human ruler, grown so weary of the "crush" of the court at Fontainebleau that he's having it moved out into the muck of the country, a country that is "better for the children," one of whom cheerfully announces to him at the start of the film that he's soiled himself.
Despite setbacks, which include the sabotage to the construction of her fantastical amphitheater of Andre Le Notre's jealous wife, Francoise, the project is completed, and the film closes on a lengthy, CGI-assisted crane shot of the king wryly smiling while he dances in the center of Sabine's strange and beautiful dancefloor surrounded by the geometrical perfection of the Versailles gardens. CGI had to be used because the film was shot entirely in England.
A Little Chaos was the second film Rickman directed. His first, The Winter Guest (1997), starred Emma Thompson, and moved Stanley Kauffmann to comment that Rickman "has an extraordinary eye," and that his use of the camera "suggests certain Japanese filmmakers - Ozu, Imamura - with a sense that many shots have been incised, not photographed, and with a tendency toward the rectilinear, straight lines used vertically and horizontally." (1)
I don't know what Kauffmann would've made of Rickman's last directorial effort, except perhaps to remark on its singular lack of what one had every right to expect of a film about the creation of Versailles - namely, splendor. The acting is somewhat disappointing, given the great bookends of Winslet and Rickman in the cast. Stanley Tucci, as Louis's brother, the Duc d'Orleans, provides humor to his few scenes. The Belgian actor Mathias Schoenaerts is a little stolid as Andre Le Notre, even when he falls in love with Sabine and expresses his passion to her. In a tiny role, Phyllida Law, who is Emma Thompson's mother, and who also appeared in The Winter Guest, graces the scene of Sabine's introduction at court.
Winslet does all she can with a somewhat nebulous role. If some critics thought that she doesn't quite fit in late 17th-century France, it is probably due to the conception of her role, which seems out of place because it is so ill-defined. Alan Rickman is perfect, however, as Louis XIV, magnificent yet weary of his magnificence. He doesn't appear to be enjoying himself at the center of his world - until the transcendent moment when he dances with Sabine in the film's final shot. A Little Chaos could've been sharper, more rigorously upholstered with period detail that would've given it greater substance. But I found it a delightful distraction from the appalling run of the blockbuster mill.
Rickman liked playing Louis and directing his film: "The only way I could do it was because in a way, he's like a director, Louis, so you kind of keep the same expression on your face. As a director, you see everything somehow. It's like a huge all-encompassing eye that sees everything, and it's able to cherry pick; 'Move that,' 'Don't do that,' 'Do it this way,' ' Change this colour'. And I don't know where that comes from, but it does once you're given the job, and I have a feeling Louis probably would've been a great director." (2) Peace to Alan Rickman, but I think Louis would've been a terrible director.
(1) The New Republic, January 5, 1998.
(2) insidemovies.ew.com 9 September 2014.
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