Far from Hardy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ciao Professore!

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word "professorial" in British English as "of or like a professor." The American Urban Dictionary defines the same word in very much different terms: "approaching hot real life issues in an analytical, absorbed, and abstract manner." Instead of being a term of praise to Brits, it means to Americans being aloof, difficult, superior. It seems to me that it is precisely when confronting "hot real life issues" that such an approach is most effective. But try and convince Americans.

And try and convince Americans that such a demeanor is a good thing in a president. If the otherwise inexplicable success of Donald Trump, a bonafide fool, reveals anything about his followers, it is that, for them, eight years of a "professorial" president has been a nightmare. Not to mention he's the wrong color. And belongs to the wrong party. But the real reason why Obama's "professorial" demeanor as president has not gone down well with so many Americans is because they have never had much respect for teachers or for learning.

In American politics, 2016 is quickly becoming a year of astonishments. That finding a successor to Barack Obama was going to lead to surprises was to be expected. In the case of the Democrats, two candidates are running who have either upheld some of Obama's accomplishments or questioned them. Hillary Clinton is clearly the candidate most likely to accept Obama's inheritance and to carry on some of his triumphs, like managing to keep us out of further wars, and maintaining the slow but steady improvement of the economy. Bolstering what has, for better or worse, become known as "Obamacare" is something that Clinton promises to do. But Bernie Sanders, who uses the scary word "revolution" too much (this is coming from a fellow socialist), says that he plans to expand Obamacare into something like Britain's NHS - despite Prime Minister Cameron's efforts to undermine it. Sanders is also promising the moon for anyone who wants, but can't afford, to go to college.

The debates on the Democratic side have been substantive arguments about the direction in which a post-Obama presidency should try to lead the country. Although a degree of skepticism about precisely what Obama's accomplishments have been in eight years of Congressional gridlock, I didn't expect there to be such a wholesale debunking of them by the opposing side. The state of the nation is decidedly different from what it was in 2008, which was the last time a Republican was the Commander-in-Chief. George W. Bush ran the country like there was no tomorrow - and there damned near wasn't one. But the stories that have circulated since the election of the first African-American to the highest office - stories that I once considered too extreme and rather insulting expressions of Conservative angst - now seem to have been true. How many Americans awoke on the morning after the election in November 2008 thinking that Obama's victory was a bad dream, only to turn on their TVs and discover that it wasn't a bad dream but (for how many of them?) the most unimaginable result?

The nature of the unimaginable is, I'm almost afraid to believe, probably of racial origin. There's a black man in the white house. It's just as simple and outrageous an objection as that. Not only is Obama the representation of everything (or just about everything) that they despise, he is the physical embodiment of it. When the various anti-Obama movements manifested themselves one by one, with their avowed ambition to de-ligitimize his presidency and remove him from the White House by an means necessary, many observers who were black saw only that their opposition, which seemed to be so angry, was being directed not at a president who happened to be a black man, but at a black man who happened to be the president.

Just a few weeks ago, while most of the world marked the historic occasion of a sitting U.S. president setting foot in Cuba, Fox News was talking about what a betrayal it was of JFK, who started the ridiculous embargo. JFK, you'll recall, green-lighted the Bay of Pigs debacle, only to pull the plug on it during its execution, stranding thousands of Cuban-American volunteers on the beaches without air cover.

I have commented before about how some presidents get elected because they are - or seem to voters to be - the antithesis of the preseident who came before them. It seems obvious to me that George W. Bush, an unsubtle man of few words, succeeded Bill Clinton, who was branded "Slick Willy" by the press, not simply because he managed to slip out of so many potential legal prosecutions, eventually even surviving impeachment, but because it was difficult to get a straight yes or no answer out of him. Bush was utterly unequivocal, which was a refreshing change from eight years of Clinton's masterful equivocations.

Donald Trump appears to be the candidate who is most unlike Obama. Not only are his racial credentials impeccably WASP (Trump is American for the German name Drumpf), but he is the absolute antithesis of a thoughful, studious (if rather aloof) professor. Instead, he is a bullying doofus who shoots his mouth off before its fully loaded (half-cocked).

I stole the title of this post from a film released in the States in 1992. The distributor of Lina Wertmuller's film, known as Io speriamo che me la cavo (Me, Let's Hope I Make It) in Italy, gave it the American-release title "Ciao Professore!". The film is about a conscientious teacher who is sent by some bureaucratic error from a relatively prosperous school district in northern Italy to an urban school in a poor district of Naples. Like Obama in the White House, the teacher, faced with seemingly impossible odds, uses his wits to convince his students and their parents the value of learning and the unwisdom of taking the easy way out of their problems.  

While Bernie Sanders would claim that Barack Obama is too close to the center to be effective, Hillary Clinton - to her favor, I think - is promising to carry Obama's legacy forward. While I agree with Sanders about the dubious history of Centrism, I think in the balance that Obama was a successful president.

Obama will officially depart from the White House on January 20, 2017. Will Hillary return, as she might to a cherished old home to which she grew attached for eight years (even if some of the activities of her husband under the same roof showed lapses in judgement - not to mention taste)? Will it be darling old Bernie Sanders who puts his feet up on the furniture? Or will Trump move in with his trophy Slovenian wife, and turn the White House into another Trump hotel casino? A letter by Harper Lee from 1990 has recently surfaced in which she tells a friend that "the worst punishment God can devise for this sinner is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City." Four years of a Trump presidency might seem like an eternity to many Americans, an ill-devised punishment for our sins. But if we're not too careful, Trump may turn out to be exactly what we deserve for not being "professorial" enough to properly educate our citizens.

Je Suis Beirut

There is a running gag in Luis Bunuel's wonderful last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) that has become, over the years since the film was made, uncannily portentous. At several moments throughout the film, armed men appear suddenly or explosions take place, there is a momentary pandemonium as people scatter and scream, and, just as suddenly, the armed men exit the scene and, strangely (hilariously), everything returns to normal as if the guns and explosions were never there. It was Bunuel's last - sadly - surrealist attack on everyday European life, what he might have called bourgeois normalcy. What is funny about these scenes is how little the terrorist attacks interrupt the story of the film and the lives of its characters.

There were terrorist attacks in Spain, in which Obscure Object was made, carried out by separatist groups like the Basque ETA, after the death of Franco. Some of them were large-scale attacks, in which there was substantial loss of life and property damage. Bunuel, who always hated middle class European society, lampooned it in his last films, like The Phantom of Liberty and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. He was always waiting for cracks to appear in the carefully-crafted edifice of modern society because he knew that it was nothing but that - an edifice. Underneath it were all of the old passions and hatreds that had always threatened to tear society apart. Surrealism was a kind of artististic terrorism, attempting to tear holes in the thin veneer of civilized life. Bunuel was clearly in favor of society's destruction, and probably saw the terrorists as catalysts, blowing it apart - literally and symbolically. (1)

When the Paris bombings took place last summer, and the outpouring of sorrow and sympathy followed in their wake, I remember someone asking why there was no such outpouring of feeling after similar bombings had taken place in Beirut a week before. The immediate response to the question, which no one dared utter, was that it was Paris that had been bombed, not Beirut; that no one is geniuinely surprised when they see reports of bombings in a place like Beirut.

Last month I watched a report from Beirut in which someone said that when a bomb goes off in Beirut, people's lives aren't interrupted. Life goes on as if the bombings were just another part of everyday life in the city - whereas when bombs go off in Paris, "the whole country goes into a coma for three months."

Now the focus of international sympathy is on Brussells. Flowers are being laid in the city squares, messages are being scrawled in chalk on the pavement. "Je suis Bruxelles" has replaced "Je suis Paris," which was itself a replacement for "Je suis Charlie Hebdo." Despite such shows of solidarity in the face of terrorist acts - whose aim, besides death and destruction, is to inspire nationalism, to disunite people, to close borders and for Europeans to reconsider the EU - fractures are already appearing in Europe. Right-wing, ultra-nationalist political parties are scoring victories in elections. Concerns about terrorism and about the stanchless flow of Muslim refugees into Europe, like blood from a bullet wound, are inspiring countries formerly known for their openness toward immigrants, like Denmark, to pass laws limiting future immigration to their countries.

Terrorist acts are always the same. They vary only in scale and ferocity. They are considered atrocities and not acts of war because they aren't directed from any specific country, even if the country "sponsors" terrrorists and belongs to George W. Bush's comic book "Axis OF Evil." Military responses are invariably counter-productive, since all they manage to do is arouse more hatred and resentment and result in the multiplication of potential enemies. Will our major cities eventually become Beiruts? Will we be living in the world Bunuel foresaw so clearly in his last film? Somewhere Luis is heaving another sigh.(2)


(1) I am not suggesting that Bunuel was in sympathy with terrorists. He saw them for what they are - dangerously deluded characters in a melodrama written by someone they never met, in a war among shadows.
(2) Bunuel's gave his memoir the title "My Last Sigh" (Mon dernier soupir).

Erin Go Home

Just as I was at the point of despairing of finding suitable material for a St. Patrick's Day post, theguardian.com handed one to me this morning. The headline reads: "Gerry Adams expresses anger after being denied entry to White House."

"Gerry Adams," the Guardian reported, "who was refused entry into the White House to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, has described the incident as an 'unacceptable development'. The Sinn Féin leader turned up for the annual Irish reception hosted by the US president, Barack Obama, on Tuesday evening only to be stopped over a 'security' issue. It is understood he left after being forced to wait for an hour and a half to get clearance. In a statement confirming the incident, he said Sinn Féin 'will not sit at the back of the bus for anyone'."

As an Irish-American, I know who Gerry Adams is. More than that, I know who he was. Just now he is the president of Sinn Féin, a Northern Ireland political party that has a long and spotty history. Adams was also a prominent leader of the Irish Republican Army, the military - some (like me) would call it the terrorist - wing of Sinn Féin. In 2014, Adams was arrested by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and held for four days while being questioned about his role in the murder of Jean McConville, one of the "disappeared" of the Northern Ireland "Troubles." He was released and a report stated that it was due to insufficient evidence to detain him further.

Some of you may remember how Adams petitioned for a visa to the United States in 1993, about how President Bill Clinton personally approved the visa and how Clinton later welcomed Adams to a visit to the White House on St. Patrick's Day, 1995. Adams requested entry to the U.S. in order to facilitate his party's fund-raising efforts among Irish-Americans. Last year on this day, Hillary Clinton was inducted to the Irish-American Hall of Fame and posed for photographs next to Adams in New York City. She has stated that she regards Adams as an important figure in the history of Northern Ireland comparable to Nelson Mandela's position in South Africa. I find her views typically obtuse and disgusting in the extreme. Unlike South Africa, there are no heroes in the Northern Ireland Troubles - only victims, some living and some dead.

I, for one, was appalled in 1995 to see an American president shake hands with a known leader of a terrorist organization. But Clinton and his friend Tony Blair claimed that it was the only way that Sinn Féin could be relied on to cooperate in peace talks that led eventually to the Good Friday Accord in 1998, and the announcement in 2005 in which the Provisional IRA agreed to abandon its "armed campaign" and embrace a democratic political solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Recently released transcripts of phone conversations between Clinton and Blair the day after the Omagh bombing in 1998 (four months after the Good Friday Agreement) reveal Clinton's misgivings about trusting Adams, whose murky ties to the IRA he was never able to clarify.

The trouble is, Gerry Adams, while maintaining his evasive stance regarding his terrorist past and attempting to excuse his past actions with the blanket alibi, "we were at war," is the head of a Marxist/Leninist political party that remains committed to revolutionary change.

I have described in previous posts how in my teens I went through my own Irish Republican phase. Like many Irish-Americans, I embraced the quite ludicrous version of Irish history in which the British Army's intervention in Northern Ireland in the 1970s was just another example of British colonialism, and I, too, listened to the Paul McCartney song, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish," among other, much older rebel songs. As I grew up, however, I gradually realized that the situation in Norther Ireland was far more complex and that the struggle between the Protestants and Catholics was about power and political control of the six counties of the North. The IRA wanted the British Army out so that they could wage war on the Protestants with impunity.

I grew sickened by the stereotypical image of Irish-Americans, especially on this day, sitting in bars all across America, tearfully swapping stories about the Old Country and handing over their hard-earned dollars to organizations like Sinn Féin, clandestinely funding terrorist acts. My feelings, then as now, are those of an interested observer of events that the Irish themselves have shaped. No one was as surprised as I was by the Good Friday agreement, but peace has not come without resistance.

When president Bill Clinton first welcomed Adams to the White House in 1995, I thought that it was a terrible precedent. Perhaps Bill Clinton considered kissing a terrorist's arse on the White House premises a small price to pay for establishing a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. Whatever the reason for refusing Adams entry to the White House for this year's celebration, I think it's high time he was shown the door. Erin go bragh.

Pépé le Moko

The term "poetic realism" doesn't really work. Poetry is the redemption of reality. The particular style of filmmaking one encounters in the best French films of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, from Rene Clair's Le Million (1931) to Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), is much more poetic than realistic. There is a moment near the end of Pépé le Moko, Julien Duvivier's marvelous 1937 film, in which Pepe is at last leaving the Casbah to join Gaby on a ship to Oran. As he walks, determinedly and almost joyfully, Duvivier resorts to using a process shot, a rear-screen projection, that shows us Jean Gabin walking facing towards and away from the camera as dizzying images of the Casbah's labyrinthine streets are projected behind - and in front - of his head. Of course, it's only Gabin pretending to walk in front of a screen on which the exterior shots are projected. At first one is tempted to object to this intrusion of patented falsity - until one realizes that it is actually Duvivier's poetry. It was never intended to look real. The images even dissolve into one another as Gabin mimes his long walk to freedom.

Pépé le Moko is a distinctively French film, but looking at it eighty years after its initial release, so much of it is so intolerably contrived that it was halfway to Hollywood when it was being made. There are too many Europeans trying to pass for Arabs, too many types trying to pass for the real thing. (One character, L'Arbi, is played by the great Marcel Dalio, made up as an Arab, tarbush and all.) It explores the Casbah of Algiers as thoroughly as Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers did thirty years later. Algeria was French in 1936, almost as close to Marseilles as Mexico was to Hollywood. The extended montage depicting the Casbah, with the French Chief Inspector's voiceover, is a virtual rogue's travelogue.

Pépé is a legendary thief, hated by the police and loved by the people of the Casbah, especially by women. When, for example, he is moved by his gratified love for Gaby to sing from a rooftop, women of all ages, shapes, and sizes, hear him and smile. "Pépé is happy!" they shout, running and clapping beneath his terrace. But the police are always waiting for Pépé to make some mistake, to expose himself in a vulnerable place, or to go outside the safety of the Casbah. He meets a beautiful Parisian woman, who has entered the Casbah as much for a chance to see Pépé as to take in its exotic attractions. Beguiled by her jewels and by her knowledge of the Paris that he longs to see again, he falls for her and wants to escape from the entrapment of his life in Algiers.

There are many celebrated scenes, like the one in which Pépé and Gaby recite the Paris Metro stops one by one until they arrive simultaneously at the same stop. Or when Pépé first sees Gaby, and his eyes pass first to her rings and bracelets, then to her her pearl necklace and earrings, until he finally notices the beauty of her smiling face. Then there is the scene in which an old cocotte sadly sings along with a recording of a song that she sang when she was young and hopeful. With tears in her eyes, surrounded by souvenirs of her desirability, she gives us an indelible image of sadness for a lost youth, a lost beauty.

In Algiers, the American remake of Pépé, Charles Boyer played Gabin's role. He was an effective actor - Hollywood's stock suave Frenchman, but he was no Jean Gabin. Gabin brings Pépé to life. He is convincing no matter what he does or says. Perhaps only James Cagney could've pulled off a performance of such power. But Cagney was a short man who made up for his lack of size with toughness and tenacity. Gabin's best scene is the one in which he gets roaring drunk after the death of Pierrot and, longing to escape the Casbah and see Gaby, he is almost caught by the police when he starts walking down towards the port. Ines, a girl who loves him, tricks him into returning to his house where, she tells him, Gaby waits for him. When he learns that she lied to him, instead of getting angry at Ines, Pépé sees her love for him and that her lie saved him from getting caught.

Among Pépé's henchmen there is Gilbert-Gil, as Pierrot, a young crook whom Pepe has taken under his wing, who looks strikingly like Jean-Pierre Leaud. Gaston Modot, who plays incessantly with a child's toy, hasn't much else to do except remind us of his much more substantial roles in L'Age d'Or and La Regle du Jeu and Les Enfants du Paradis.

Something must be said about Mireille Balin, the beautiful actress, born in Monaco, who plays Pépé's Gaby. During the German Occupation, she fell in love with a Wehrmacht officer named Birl Desbok. When Paris was about to be liberated by Allied forces in '44, they fled towards the Italian border, but were arrested near Nice. The couple were separated, with Desbok probably killed and Balin beaten and raped. She was imprisoned until after the war, when she was forbidden to appear in films for one year. When the prohibition was lifted, she made only one more film, in 1947, before withdrawing from society completely. She died in 1968, without a sou.

Pépé le Moko is by far Duvivier's most popular film, if not his best. It isn't every day that a foreign film is so popular that Hollywood not only tries to cash in on its success but also tries to reproduce it virtually frame by frame. For the Criterion DVD of Pepe, a shot-by-shot comparison was made with Algiers, and the extent to which Duvivier's film was stolen is undeniable, if somewhat funny by now. But there is enough location photography, matched with clever studio-shot scenes, to give Pépé an authenticity that Hollywood could only dream of. And Duvivier's realistic poetry lends lyricism to an otherwise unedifying tale of a happiness too far away to reach.

Form and Feeling

The piece I published at the beginning of February, "The Lovely Woods," centered on a reading of two poems by Robert Frost, "Come In" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I mentioned how both poems have been noted for their "optimism" and for their (surface) beauty, but that they betrayed depths that have gone largely unexamined. This is a particular danger with poetry, especially in poetry, because of the concentration of criticism on its verbal effects alone - on its technical accomplishments, its euphonic effects of word-sounds assembled in lines and stanzas. Some poets, however, deliberately combine a surface loveliness with depths of meaning that are a tacit betrayal of such loveliness. Frost must have been aware that his poetry is misinterpreted and/or underestimated precisely because of its surface simplicities.

Frost was very attuned to the euphonic effects of words. He wanted to move poetry away from poetic language and from the sclerotic condition that poetry was in at the end of the 19th-century and restore everyday speech to a poet's vocabulary. But Frost was also very much aware of the sense of poetry, of making his spoken American English a tool for the expression of the same themes - about love and death - that poets have addressed for centuries.

A few days ago I encountered something written by R. P. Blackmur in a preface to a collection of poetry criticism:

"[Denis] Donoghue ... has a point when he goes on to say that many people feel confident enough in talking about fiction — novels and stories — but are more or less tongue-tied when it comes to poetry. Doubtless this condition has something to do with their desire, as he says, to 'come to themes and issues directly, without the hesitations enforced by considerations of form, structure, and style.' This bears out my experience that students come from secondary school prepared to think of poetry as a very deep art indeed, and that their task is to penetrate its depths and arrive at something called the real meaning. Thus Frost’s 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,' with its snowfakes and harness bells, is 'really' about death, perhaps about suicide. In other words, the poem’s enchanting surface ('The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake') exists only to be seen through to something beyond or under it. If there is a single principle holding these essays on poets and poetry together, it is that style needs to be attended to, not just at the beginning of our reading but continuously, and that readers should invest in an engagement, sometimes a prolonged one, with the surface of a poem — with its events that can be seen and heard as they reveal themselves over time."

Blackmur was, I think, trying to justify - as if he needed to - his lifelong devotion to the study of poetic form. But if the 20th century can be noted for a single accomplishment in criticism, it is that form is inseparable from content, that you cannot judge discuss one in complete isolation from the other.

What else is Frost's "Snowy Evening" about,if not death? Was Frost simply doing what everyone seems to think he was doing - merely describing a beautiful scene for our pleasure in words that mirror in their sound the beauty of the scene they describe? Blackmur, who was no great fan of Frost, knew what Frost was getting at, but also wanted to emphasize how Frost's use of language wove a spell of its own over the scene.

In a broadcast he made for the BBC, whose text was later published in The Listener, George Orwell, who chose a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins - "Felix Randal" - to illustrate his point, said:

"... in any criticism of poetry, of course, it seems natural to judge primarily by the ear. For in verse the words - the sounds of words, their associations, and the harmonies of sound and associations that two or three words together can set up - obviously matter more than they do in prose. Otherwise there would be no reason for writing in metrical form. . . . [But] one cannot regard a poem as simply a pattern of words on paper, like a sort of mosaic." ("The Meaning of a Poem," 14 May 1941)

Orwell went on to relate the special circumstances of Hopkins' life, his close readings of early English poetry, his service as a Catholic priest in an English village, and about how his position in the village gave him a special perspective on the lives of its inhabitants. Orwell wanted to prove that Hopkins' choice of words and his choice of subject were not, by the time he came to write "Felix Randal," accidental and that they were deliberately and directly reflective of his past life.

I feel obliged to finish with an example of what I've been discussing, a poem that is equally mellifluous in its use of words and in the sense that the words convey. Philip Larkin was one of those poets who hated the academic approach to poetry. For him, structure and meaning in a poem are all of a piece, so that it is impossible to isolate the one from the other without departing from what, he believed, was essential to both: the communication of a striking experience, an astonishing realization, in carefully chosen words that invokes the experience in the reader's mind.

‘When first we faced, and touching showed’

When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for your mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change
The world back to itself – no cost,
No past, no people else at all –
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

20 December 1975

A lifetime of waiting for a moment like that, the oblivion in her arms. That's what Larkin lived for, and lives on for.

Orwell finished his broadcast with words that, I think, settle the argument once and for all:

"I have tried to analyse this poem as well as I can in a short period, but nothing I have said can explain, or explain away, the pleasure I take in it. That is finally inexplicable, and it is just because it IS inexplicable that detailed criticism is worth while. Men of science can study the life-process of a flower, or they can split it up into its component elements, but any scientist will tell you that a flower does not become less wonderful, it becomes more wonderful, if you know all about it."

Indecision 2016

I took part in my first presidential election race in 1964. I was six and my dad was a Republican, so he taught me a jingle: "Goldwater, Goldwater, he's our man! Johnson belongs in the garbage can!" He even dropped me off on election day on the side of some road in Albany, Georgia with a Goldwater sign and told me to hold it up and yell whenever a car went by. Goldwater lost. And Johnson, against McNamara's - JFK's appointed Secretary of State - advice, got the country mired in Vietnam. I learned early that Americans don't always make the right choice when they vote.

For a progressive like me, the rise and rise (followed by, I can only hope, an eventual fall) of Donald Trump has been a little terrifying. He is clearly going all-in for the presidency, not in terms of the money he intends to spend to get there, but because he is making a greater number of enemies the longer he stays in the race. He probably knows this (I'll give him that much credit), but he probably considers that it's a small price to pay for becoming president. I can't for the life of me imagine what President Donald Trump will be like, but I also can't see anything positive coming from a Trump presidency.

This past week, Pope Francis said that Trump isn't a true Christian. Of course he isn't. He's a typical capitalist bully. And if all human relationships are based on either love or power, it obviously wasn't love that made Trump a billionaire, and it also explains why he wants to be president.

Many pundits are watching this loathsome man's advance with rapt disbelief, like they're watching an unfolding disaster in a movie (a fully loaded dump truck has lost it's brakes and is hurtling toward a schoolyard filled with children) and are powerless to intervene. Knowing the outcomes of some previous presidential elections, how could they not be fearful? In 2004, George W. Bush, who led us into a war on utterly mistaken, or possibly manufactured, evidence of WMDs - a war that resulted in the ascendence of ISIL - was nominated by his party and beat John Kerry in the general election. By the time he left office, the nation was on the verge of economic collapse. How can anyone trust in the judgement of the American voter any more?

I kind of understood Dubya's appeal to a majority of Americans. I think that he won the election in 2000 because, after eight years of Slick Willy, the great equivocator, what they wanted more than anything else was a president who was not subtle, who always said what he meant. But how he managed to win re-election is a deep mystery to me.

But there have been other examples of voter culpability in presidential elections that are even more mysterious. There was a bumper sticker that was popular in the years following Nixon's re-election in '72 that read: "Don't blame me, I voted for McGovern." But is it enough to oppose, to accept the defeat of one's candidate and watch as the guy who won drags the country into a grossly unnecessary war and subjects prisoners-of-war to illegal imprisonment and torture? Some faint-hearted Liberals were talking of moving to Canada after the results of 2004's election. I can't say I blame them, but whose country is it anyway, and do they think it might be worth the trouble to try and take it back?

While the followers of Trump don't give me much confidence in their intelligence, there used to be an implicit trust is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. The old saying is, "I'd rather the country were run by the first hundred names in the white pages than the deans of all the Ivy League schools." The reason was that, while the deans are more knowledgable, those one hundred nobodies in any big American city probably possessed more wisdom, more practical experience of solving problems and making decisions.

That formula doesn't inspire much confidence any more, if it ever did. The Republican candidates are uninanimously attacking President Obama, without convincing anyone with eyes in his or her head that America is worse off than it was four or eight years ago. They tried to pull the same wool over voters' eyes in 2000. How could anyone seriously believe that the policies of Bill Clinton made America a worse place than he found it in 1993? So, too, only the incurably stupid would suppose that the country has not recovered from a near-meltdown of the economy, restored from the brink of another Great Depression.

Trump's emphasis on immigration is a typical red herring to distract voters from an unemployment rate below five per cent and gas prices under two dollars. What I would like to ask Trump is why all those Mexicans (and other Latinos) are streaming across our border? Could it be because America is successful and that there are jobs for the taking? If Trump spent a week with an undocumented immigrant, from the border to Anywhere, USA, he might be forced to reassess his low opinion of the American economy, not to mention his opinion of immigrants. The working people who support him say they want a president like him because he's a "job-maker." What none of them seems to realize is that Trump only creates jobs - making other people work for him - to make himself richer.

The word "electability" is being tossed around by people of both political persuasions. It shows that alot of voters are less concerned that their favorite candidate should get their party's nomination than that their party wins. The reason why exit polls aren't allowed to be broadcast until the last polls close is that projecting a winner will discourage people from voting if they know that their candidate is projected to lose. This is somewhat surprising, but American life, it seems, is all about winning.

The few people who were smart enough to vote for George McGovern in 1972 and Al Gore in 2000 had at least the satisfaction of being proved right. Whatever they might have accomplished as presidents, we might at least have been spared the national disgraces of Watergate, the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing disgrace of Gitmo.

Easily the best candidate in the race this year is Bernie Sanders, who was all but ignored by the media because he is so beautifully unpresentable. Makeup artists preparing him for a television appearance must be in despair. A bespectacled, white-haired septegenarian with a Brooklyn accent, and a lifelong socialist, is definitely not ready for prime time. But Hillary Clinton seems to be propelled by a kind of manifest destiny - a destiny promised her some time ago by the DNC. If Sanders somehow confounds all of the back-room wheeling and dealing and wins enough delegates, this might turn into an election worth taking seriously.

Occasionally in American elections a candidate comes along who is worthy of my vote, but in most cases the best candidate is the lesser of two evils - the one who is the least likely to lie to us, to get us into or more deeply involve us in a war, or make us look like a bunch of fools to the rest of the world for having elected him.

Hollow Man

Film didn't invent the star player. They existed in the theater from its beginnings in Greece, even when the actors were masked. But film has made it possible for an actor to be in many places at the same time, reaching incalculably more people, if only in effigy. "But why," asked Siegfried Kracauer "is anyone chosen for stardom while others are not? Evidently, something about the gait of the star, the form of his face, his manner of reacting and speaking, ingratiates itself so deeply with the masses of moviegoers that they want to see him again and again, often for a considerable stretch of time. It is logical that the roles of a star should be made to order. The spell he casts over the audience cannot be explained unless one assumes that his screen appearance satisfies widespread desires of the moment — desires connected, somehow, with the patterns of living here presents or suggests."(1)

Often, an actor will do his best work for one director, even becoming a director's muse or inspiration. For instance, in Japan, actor Toshiro Mifune made several films, containing his best performances, with director Akira Kurosawa. In Sweden, Liv Ullmann appeared in several films made by Ingmar Bergman. In Italy, Giancarlo Giannini became an international star through the films of Lina Wertmuller.

In Hollywood, directors often create stars and shape their careers. Josef von Sternberg made Marlene Dietrich a star in a series of films. John Ford worked repeatedly with John Wayne, mostly in Westerns, contributing to his outsized, larger-than-life image. More recently, Martin Scorsese gave Robert de Niro opportunities to excel in several of his films. There are, however, some examples of actor-director partnerships that have not been as fruitful.

In Hollywood, at any given moment, there are twenty to thirty people - stars - who have the power to "open" a film. Their names on a contract, their agreement to appear in a film, is a guarantee that a film will get made. Because of this, these people are inundated with scripts, with offers, with pitches, from producers, directors, and script-writers who want them in their films not because they are the best choices for the parts, but because, without them, their films are unlikely to ever reach the big (or the little) screen. It is often a perilous bargain. So many of the people on the "A-List" didn't get there through great acting. They got there out of luck most of the time - the lucky accident of being in the right place at the right time - or the right role in the right film. The result is that films get made that are no better or worse than they have ever been.

For the people fortunate enough to arrive on the A-List, salaries are peaking at somewhere around twenty million dollars per film. This means that when the film's budget is determined, the salary for the person whose agreement to make the film has mobilized the small army of technicians who, together, put all the pieces together, is one of the first expenses to be factored in. Currently, there are some genuine actors among the people on the A-List, but acting talent is not at all a prerequisite. The general inability of critics to judge actors' performances, which exposes their ignorance of what it takes to be an actor, often accounts for the success and lengthy careers of some A-listers. The sometimes inexplicable choices of AMPAS, the organization that annually hands out Oscars, contributes to the shelf-life of many incompetent and unworthy actors.

A single case in point. I first noticed Leonardo DiCaprio in the Lasse Hallstrom film What's Eating Gilbert Grape? in the early 90s. He played the role of a mentally disabled boy so convincingly that, never having seen him before, I took him for a genuine idiot. The role was a lucky break, as it would've been for any fledgling actor. The only people who called it a great performance don't know what acting is. As any real actor can tell you, playing the part of a disabled person is easy.

But in the next few roles I saw him in, which seemed to arrive like the morning paper, DiCaprio played, in a scarily invariable manner: an overconfident young gunslinger, an Irish stowaway aboard a doomed passenger liner, the man in the iron mask, a luckless Western tourist in Thailand, and Arthur Rimbaud. He was equally terrible in each terrible film. And the films each made a boodle, largely due to the phenomenal boodle pulled in by one of them - Titanic. This made DiCaprio, before he was even able to shave, one of the most sought-after stars in the world. Miscasting him has become a lucrative profession.

But, as any moderately intelligent artist knows, box office success isn't enough. Probably needing desperately to justify his success, DiCaprio wanted also to be taken seriously. In my review of Revolutionary Road from 2011, I wrote: "He has struggled so valiantly, hasn't he, to convince us these past ten years that he can play a man. He is getting there." After what he decided was a sufficient length of time to grow - physically at least - into mature roles, he approached the man who is - or was - widely regarded as the best American film director, Martin Scorsese, and in 1999 Gangs of New York, which was a long-cherished project for Scorsese, came into being.

Without knowing the details of his struggles with Harvey Weinstein, of all the fine actors that Scorsese got to appear in Gangs of New York (Daniel Day Lewis, Liam Neeson and Jim Broadbent, to name the finest), it was DiCaprio's name in a lead role that probably got the film green-lighted. The finished film has some great touches in it, most of which are directorial, and no one could argue that it should not have been made, that a director as great as Scorsese should not have been provided with the wherewithal to realize it. But, like so many other vanity projects, there is always a gap between design and conception and the film that ends up on the screen. That DiCaprio, who manages to be far less amateurish than he might have been in less capable hands, used his clout to help Scorsese realize his dream is nothing but laudable. But that it should inspire Scorsese, both out of gratitude and monetary need, to cast DiCaprio in his next three films is gratitude run amok. Every director has to make a living, but surely things like Shutter Island (2010) disqualifies Scorsese from making an honest living?

It was 2004's The Aviator, which actually cost more to make than Gangs of New York, that best reveals the inadequacy of DiCaprio and the impact of that inadequacy on Scorsese's legacy. Whatever Howard Hughes had been to his friends, his business partners and competitors, he was manifestly a man. His wealth may have been a major part of Hughes's appeal, but casting DiCaprio in the role of such an outsized personality made Scorsese's film seem hollow.

It was equally painful to find DiCaprio cast as Jay Gatsby in the fourth (but not the worst) screen adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel. Baz Luhrmann's insistence on DiCaprio in the role reminded me of Richard Burton's insistence that his wife Elizabeth Taylor should be cast as Helen of Troy in his low-budget production of Doctor Faustus in the 1960s. When critic Vernon Young saw the film and heard Burton intone the famous line, "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" Young was moved to shout (in a crowded theater) "Not bloody likely!"

Currently, DiCaprio is in the running again for the Best Actor Oscar. His performance this time, in Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant in the role of the legendary trapper Hugh Glass, made me wonder why no one but me remembers a 1971 Richard Harris film called Man in the Wilderness, in which he plays Zachary Bass, a character based loosely on Glass, who is mauled almost to death by a bear and then left for dead by members of an expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Bass survives and tracks down the expedition to wreak vengeance, only to find, at the film's conclusion, that his hunger for revenge was what saved his life and that, with his chance for revenge at last in sight, he walks past the men who left him for dead and heads in the direction of civilization, where a son he never knew is perhaps waiting for him. After reading a synopsis of the story of The Revenant, Bass's tale sounds far more edifying.

Richard Harris, in full Man Called Horse mettle, was memorably moving in the role. His bear-mauling was, for a 1971 film, when CGI was no more than a distant dream, equally difficult to watch. Who cares if the exteriors, meant to evoke an American wilderness, were shot in Spain, when The Revenant was shot in Argentina? And Harris had the further advantage over DiCaprio in being unarguably a man; not just a star with enough glued-on hair and painted-on wounds to make him look like one. Harris's film, directed by Michael C. Sarafian, goes in for some blatant "revisionist" effects, not the least of which is its unflinching portrayal of human - and animal - brutality. Iñárritu, who relies heavily on close-in handheld camerawork (just as he did in Birdman), is working in the same vein, trying to burrow underneath the surface of a conventional Western whose elements are all there: the dirt, the horses, the natives, the bears and buffaloes, and the knife's-edge separation of life and death. But at the center of his drama is Leo DiCaprio, physically beefier than he once was, but just as slight an acting presence as ever.

Will someone worthier supplant DiCaprio on the A-List? (This as an appeal, not a rhetorical question.)


(1) Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, Oxford University Press, 1960.

Kitchen Stories

Can a film about a sociologist's efforts to observe the movements of an aging farmer in his kitchen be described as a love story? Yet, by the end of the 2003 Norwegian film Kitchen Stories, that is just about the only explanation that makes sense of what we have watched for an hour and thirty-five minutes.

Beginning in 1944, a study was conducted by a group of Swedish sociologists that sought to track the movements of housewives in their kitchens so that future homes could be designed in such a way that their movements, puttering around the kitchen, could be minimized. (And if such a study sounds ridiculous, try to imagine what Google and Facebook are doing with all the data they're collecting about your online likes and dislikes, dear reader.)

Through an agreement with Norway (according to Bent Hamer's fictional screenplay), the sociologists proposed to extend their study to the kitchen traffic of ordinary Norwegian men. The film opens by informing us that there are subtle but significant differences between Norway and Sweden, as we watch a small convoy of identical cars with identical tiny trailers hitched to them advance toward us on the left side of the road. A sign in three languages (one of them is English) tells them that upon crossing the frontier they must drive on the right.

One of the field researchers, Folke, follows a tractor driven by a farmer named Grant to the house of Isak, who has agreed to take part in the study. But Isak won't answer the door. Folke waits. Hours pass. Folke's boss Malmberg climbs a ladder to reach an upper window and knocks. The next day they bring the local doctor to reason with him. Another day elapses with no sign of Isak. Folke climbs the ladder alone to the upstairs window. Isak opens the blind and is confronted with Folke's face outside. Isak draws the blind and Folke climbs down. He relaxes inside his trailer, listening to music on the radio. I should mention that it's the dead of winter and everything is covered in snow. In the morning Folke notices Isak emerge from the barn (how did he get there?) and he leaves the door of the house open for Folke. These scenes of inaction introduce us to what will be the pace for the rest of the film, a pace like one might expect the life of a bachelor farmer to be --- slow. It isn't often that a film asks us (and so soon after it has begun) not to expect any of the things that most films promise (but so rarely deliver): thrills, sex, and violence. The late E. L. Doctorow, who regarded film as "the enemy" of writing, once said that films are usually about faces or explosions. Kitchen Stories is about faces.

Folke erects a tall chair, like the ones used by tennis judges, in a corner of Isak's spartan kitchen, and takes up his post. We've not heard them speak a word to each other. Days pass with Folke watching and tracing Isak's kitchen putterings on a diagram of his kitchen. Whenever Isak leaves the kitchen he turns off the light. Days go by. Overnight, Isak has cut a hole in the kitchen ceiling above Folke's chair and he quietly spies on him. Folke presents his initial "findings" to his boss and asks for a different "host." His request is denied.

Because it's a scientific study, Folke is not supposed to interfere with his subject. Until one morning when he gives Isak some tobacco to fill his pipe. Isak follows by pouring Folke a cup of coffee, and Folke climbs down to drink it. He speaks his first word, "thanks," to Isak. The ice broken, they begin to have conversations in the kitchen. Late one evening, Isak finds Folke asleep in his chair and he covers him with a coat. Folke gives Isak some of the provisions he gets in the mail from his aunt, like canned herring (Isak eats nothing but porridge). Folke's boss arrives to inform him that one of the researchers and his host have become drinking buddies.

There is nowhere a suggestion of sexual interest between the men, even when Folke watches Isak bathe, and, in a beautiful moment, Isak claims that the fillings in his teeth allow him to receive distant radio signals and puts his open mouth next to Folke's wondering ear. But the closeness they develop is something more than merely friendly. It's a fondness, an affection, brought on by their unacknowledged loneliness (no surprise - Folke is also a bachelor) and their need for companionship. (It should be noted that, except for a woman accompanying the eccentric head of the firm, there are no other women in the film.)

But when Folke throws (if that is the word) Isak a birthday party and they get drunk together, Grant, an old friend of Isak, who has been spying on them and is, perhaps, jealous of their closeness, reports Folke to his boss for such brazen fraternization. In a jealous rage, Grant takes his tractor and tows Folke's trailer, with Folke asleep inside, to a railroad crossing and leaves it on the tracks. Isak sees him and gets out his ancient horse to quietly return the trailer. Throughout the scene, Folke never wakes.

But Isak's horse is dying. And Malmberg, Folke's boss, orders that everyone pack up their equipment - the project is cancelled. When Folke tells him he resigns, that he's staying, Malmberg reminds him of his "contractural obligations." And so we see the little convoy of cars and trailers returning to the border - except this time, Folke pulls off the road right before the checkpoint and unhitches his trailer and tells Malmberg he quits. Malmberg is left struggling to hitch the trailer behind his own car as the border guard watches him.

But Folke returns to Isak's house at night in time to see his horse being loaded into a truck and an ambulance in front of the house. Grant approaches Folke with news he can't bring himself to speak. Despite this apparent end to the story, the film gives us one last scene that leaves us with an airy and sweet ambiguity. We see Isak's house, but everything around it is green. Inside, Folke is alone but the telephone rings three times - just as it had when Grant let Isak know he was coming over for a haircut - and he smiles broadly. On the table is a pipe and tobacco and two coffee cups.

Is the film a sendup of the so-called detachment of sociologists? It certainly gives Swedes a gentle ribbing. By the end we've been introduced to a group of human beings who discover a little of their own humanity. Very gently and without much of a fuss, Bent Hamer evokes the loneliness of life in a tiny community where winter lasts half the year.

The acting from a cast heretofore unknown to me (except for the splendid Sverre Anker Ousdal as the head of the firm sponsoring the study) is flawless. Joachim Calmeyer plays - inhabits - Isak, a man who finds himself rather defenseless against advancing age. And Tomas Norstrom gives us Folke, a dedicated scientist at first who gently bends the rules set for him with interjections of gentleness. How he goes about winning the trust and friendship of Isak - seemingly without even trying - is quietly beautiful. But it is the time and especially the place that are brought to breathing life by Hamer and his cameraman, Philip Ogaard. The film's luminous imagery matches the beauty of its illuminated lives.

The film suggests immeasurably more than it shows us. For instance, Isak's life through the years, alone in his farmhouse, reminded me of Frost's "An Old Man's Winter Night":

A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man - one man - can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.