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Film Portraiture 3: THE HITCH-HIKER (1953)

20 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by in film noir, gangster films, painting and photography, Uncategorized

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We are six minutes into the film, when the hitch-hiker gets into the back seat of the car, his face in dark shadow. By this stage we know a great deal about him. We have seen one killing told in bits: feet, car number-plate, dead victims, no faces. These are all ‘accidents’ of the hitch-hiker’s persona. So do we then get to see his substance, namely his face? Well, we get it at one remove when we are shown a photograph of the man on the front page of a newspaper under the headline, “Be on the lookout for this man!” and we learn his name, Emmett Myers.

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Next, we see another killing, same pattern: shadow of hitch-hiker on road, car pulling up, hitch-hiker getting in (but no face) then night, a dead body being rifled, hitch-hiker’s feet walking away, car driving off. It turns out that this is all overture to the main event: away from home on a fishing trip, Bowen and Collins are planning to stop in Mexicali. They should have, but chance decrees they drive through it and out of it, chance metamorphosing into fate. The camera dissolve shows feet, then cuts to headlights, the silhouette of a hand hitching a lift, the car coming to a halt, the hitch-hiker getting in. (Note that by this stage it is not ‘a silhouette’ or ‘a car’ or ‘a hitch-hiker’. We are being forcefully told how this drama is going to unfold.) In a front view we see Bowen and Collins, with the hitch-hiker in the back, his face still in the dark. Bowen offers him a cigarette, and in reply a gun in close-up comes into view, glinting in the light. Only at this point do we get to see the face, the soul of this demon: the camera dollies in onto the hitch-hiker’s face moving into the light.

Pulp fiction at its sharpest. A man’s feet introduce us to someone who is always on the move, the part standing for the whole. But it is a cheap shot too, since you only need to do one take of a man’s feet standing by the side of the road. The concept gives speed and low cost, essential B-movie film-making. Second, you show his face except you don’t since it is in the dark. The close encounter only comes when you show the face harshly lit up as he moves forward on his seat. It’s kinda mean, to put it in mild terms. This is chiaroscuro film portraiture that grabs the attention.

This is how The Hitch-hiker begins, a quintessential black-and-white film from 1953. The face moving into the light is the idea probably (but who can be certain?) of Nicolas Musuraca, a high-quality film-noir cameraman. Hats off possibly also to Harold Wellman credited with ‘photographic effects’. The synecdochic opening, plunging you into the story even while the credits roll – as near to in medias res as you can get – is the work (probably) of the director Ida Lupino, one of the very few pre-feminism women in Hollywood playing a creative role behind the camera. It feels telling to me that ‘The Kings of the Bs’, an excellent anthology of material about Hollywood B-movies published in 1975, does not even mention Lupino in its list of directors. Definitely Kings not Queens.

Back to Emmett Myers, robber, murderer, hitch-hiker, into whose clutches the innocent Collins and Bowen fall. In the Westerns of the 1950s – I think especially of Budd Boetticher’s cowboy universe – the decent hero outwits the bad man. But this is a film noir, not a film blanc. Myers has complete mastery over Collins and Bowen, not just physical because he has got a gun and they have not, but psychological: he has the evil brains and nerve to bend the two innocents to his plans, and refashion American manhood not in a heroic but a Satanic image. Musuraca and Lupino let the camera revel in the situation.

Lupino directed five films between 1950 and 1953 but then went into television. More’s the pity, she could have been a contender.

Although the titles at the beginning credit the screenplay to Ida Lupino and Collier Young and an adaptation by Robert Joseph, IMDb says Daniel Mainwaring wrote the story for the film uncredited. If this is true, he is a link to Musuraca since both had worked on Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947).

One intriguing sequel to the film is this. When I saw Myers’s face I thought I recognised it. Only when I spotted that he was played by William Talman did things click into place. Talman became well-known on TV as Hamilton Burger, the hapless DA who is regularly outwitted by Perry Mason in the TV series. (Mason was played by Raymond Burr, himself turning over a new leaf like Talman, having previously been the terrifying heavy in Anthony Mann’s Desperate and Raw Deal.) In the TV series, Talman’s face becomes familiar and therefore ordinary, so it took Lupino’s innate intelligence to see what his face could really convey, and Musuraca’s brilliant lensing to fix it on film.

-The film is on YouTube in a reasonable enough albeit imperfect copy: go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UqbNhnArJ4&t=962s

-Lupino’s credits as a film director include:

  • 1949: Not Wanted (uncredited; co-produced and co-wrote)
  • 1950: Outrage (also co-wrote)
  • 1950: Never Fear (also produced and co-wrote)
  • 1951: Hard, Fast and Beautiful
  • 1953: The Bigamist (also starred)
  • 1953: The Hitch-hiker (also co-wrote)

– Two other posts on film portraiture from 2018 are at 15 April and 3 May 2018.

 

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PORDENONE FESTIVAL OF SILENT FILM 2018

18 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in silent cinema, Uncategorized

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DSCN1145

Italy is rich in its cities and towns. I had never heard of Pordenone, a small to medium town an hour or so north of Venice on the plain fronting the Dolomites, until I was persuaded to come to its Giornate del Cinema Muto or Silent Film Festival, an Italian gift to the world but this is yet another attractive Italian place. This Italian richness comes also from their food and their ice creams, and from their architecture, for which they have a special genius.

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Duomo by day . . .

Duomo at night 1

. . . and by night

Look at Pordenone’s Piazza San Marco with Duomo facade and bell-tower (above), and the mediaeval Gothic town hall, at the core of the historic centre (below), a portion of which was lost to Allied bombing in December 1944.

DSCN1166    bell tower reflected

But also striking was the Piazzale 20 September, a broad square with a hospital for war wounded put centre stage (see at end). This is a piece of Fascist-era (I think) architecture, with a resounding inscription: quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur; quicquid erit, superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est (which being translated reads: “Where Fate keeps leading us, let us follow; whatever it will be, all conquest comes through endurance”). This is iron-clad, golden-era Latin by Vergil, the poet of Roman imperialism, who like Fascist-era architecture is in our present time suspect but whose time will surely come again. Just as good is the newly built Teatro Verdi in which the majority of the festival’s films were shown, an imposing modern building of clean lines and curves.

Teatro Verdi day

Teatro Verdi night

The Pordenone Festival had several themes, two of particular interest to me: the silent films of John M Stahl, and a scatter of Scandinavian films. I found myself being drawn to the idea of reputations, how they are received and built and knocked down. Here are five thoughts:

1              John Stahl is a forgotten film-maker, undeservedly. In the new book, ‘The Call of the Heart –John M Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama,’ Charles Barr, one of the co-editors, argues that his strong association with melodrama and the ‘woman’s film’ is a key to this neglect. “Those mainstays of popular cinema are no longer the object of critical scorn or indifference, but Stahl has until now hardly benefited from this welcome change in attitude.”

Bruce & Charles

Bruce Babington and Charles Barr, joint editors of ‘The Call of the Heart’, leading a discussion on the merits of John Stahl

What is more, Stahl died too early to feature in Kevin Brownlow’s ‘The Parade’s Gone By’ (1968) or to be lionized as one of the Hollywood long-distance auteurs such as Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Walsh and others.

It probably made it harder that the genre he worked in was melodrama which I once thought of as an acquired taste, but as I have got older, I find I have acquired it and can now accept that narrative implausibility can be trumped by dramatic impetus. I think Robert Bresson himself was not immune to the seductions of melodrama in which the ordinary is rendered as extraordinary; at least, his Diary of a Country Priest (1950) can be seen through the lens of melodrama, and his first film, The Angels of Sin (1943), which is set in a nunnery, even more so.

2              Ernst Lubitsch’s career has a different trajectory. The filmgoer in the radical 1960s could read about his reputation and his fabled ‘Lubitsch touch’. Consider the verdict in Georges Sadoul’s ‘Dictionnaire des Cinéastes’ published in 1965: “An able man who even when he was vulgar never lacked verve and know-how.” To me it all felt old-fashioned at the time, and in several decades of rather desultory contact with his films, I have not found Lubitsch to be my glass of tea. A screening of his Forbidden Paradise (1923) in a pristine print and with beautiful musical accompaniment of violin, piano and percussion was a chance to overturn my prejudices. It did not do so, although the rest of the audience was positively enthusiastic; my embarrassment was deepened by the fact that the screening was attended by Lubitsch’s daughter, Nicola, now an elegant and vivacious elderly lady who, in a separate session, reminisced with engaging stories about her father and her life. I felt I should treat her father better than I could bring myself to do.

Nicola Lubitsch w D Robinson & J Weissberg

Nicola Lubitsch with David Robinson and Jay Weissberg (on right), the Giornate Director

Nothing risks suffering from shelf-life like comedy. Forbidden Paradise is about Catherine the Great of Russia’s love affairs. A revolution was going on in the background, entirely free of violence; the Imperial soldiers were kitted out like a chorus line in over-the-top uniforms; the lord chamberlain advising Catherine (Adolphe Menjou) was a forerunner of Sir Humphrey in the TV sitcom, ‘Yes, Minister’. It was as if Lubitsch hid reality behind a veil of lightness for fear of confronting its tragic quality. This is a perfectly tenable position, if not my own, and it is a reflection on our present time that Lubitsch should be coming back into fashion. Reputations rise and fall, and rise again.

3              I did not feel that the reputation of Jacques Feyder was enhanced by a showing of his L’Atlantide (1921) torpedoed in the middle third of its narrative by the dreary décors of the secret city of Atlantis and even more so by the casting of Napierkowska as the Queen, who was definitely lacking in the femme fatale department. Georges Sadoul wielded the knife in describing her acting as ‘très 1910’.

4              The fourth reputation I had to revise in my mind was that of Gianbattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), the painter of walls and ceilings in churches and palaces to enhance the illusion of heavenly space. I went on the bus tour to the nearby town of Udine to see the Tiepolos in the Diocesan Museum created from the archiepiscopal palace. Most extraordinary was the waiting room where his technique could be studied close to, and the throne room where a remarkable version of the Judgement of Solomon

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was painted on the ceiling. Like other great painters, he had the technical mastery of sky, light, fabrics, faces and flesh, and allied these gifts to compositional brilliance, taking Renaissance perspective to a more elevated level.

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the angel appearing to Abraham’s wife Sarah

Tiepolo is closely linked to the flourishing of baroque architecture, another taste I have had difficulty in acquiring. I sense that fifty years ago his reputation was perhaps not as stellar as it is now and he provides another example of the fickleness of human taste. In our present culture of hyperbole, he has become an adornment.

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staircase in the archiepiscopal palace

5              Like painters, filmmakers have to adjust to the ravages of time, a process which brings us back to the festival. Its purpose is to ensure that silent films get exposure, since without it they are never going to receive the critical judgement and appreciation due to them. Without the work of archives and the exposure of their labours at events like the Giornate we would be deprived of the opportunity of seeing the Scandinavian films of the silent era. We know about Hollywood before the coming of sound, about German Expressionist cinema, about French masterpieces of the time, about silent Hitchcock in the UK, but alongside these must be put the dramatic masterpieces coming out of Scandinavia. A film-maker like Victor Sjöström from Sweden made remarkable use of landscape and setting, and in Körkarlen / The Phantom Carriage (1921) one of the great ‘bottle or bible’ narratives, silent or sound; Carl Dreyer from Denmark was represented by his Prästänkan / Parson’s Widow (1921), a delicious comedy that turns powerfully poignant by the end. But there were other film-makers as well. I especially liked Walter Fürst’s Troll-Elgen/The Ghost Elk (Norway 1927). One hopes that further opportunity can be given to showing these Scandinavian films, since their reputation is only going to grow.

*

I do not quite know why but being in Italy always prompts in me bizarre reflections, so I must conclude with them:

item 1:      why should the grand Hotel Villa Ottoboni accompany its breakfasts, held in a grand breakfast room, with relentless europop? The mighty are fallen.

Item 2:      I need a decent bowl of decent muesli to set me up for the day. In this same hotel, the best cereal they could offer was coco-pops – but fear not, it was labelled brazenly as ‘muesli’. In the country that produced the two greatest writers on the gap between the appearance of power and the reality of power, namely the Roman historian Tacitus and the Renaissance thinker Machiavelli, what you read is not what you get.

Item 3:      from the outside and in the news Italy appears to be a single unified country, but the reality is that it is fissiparous. I spotted two sets of graffiti on motorway bridges: ‘Basta Italia, semi Veneti / Italy go to hell, we are Venetians,’ and then later ‘Basta Roma, basta tasse / Rome go to hell, we’ve had enough of taxes.’ Despite these sentiments, Italy is still one country, so perhaps the solution to this problem is to conclude that while Italy’s appearance is of a divided country, in reality the country is unified by its dislike of central authority.

Piazzale XX Settembre

The Piazzale XX Settembre: the date records the capture of Rome as the culmination of Italian unification in 1870. 

‘The Call of the Heart – John M Stahl and Hollywood Melodrama’ is published by John Libbey Publishing (see http://www.johnlibbey.com). It is distributed by Indiana UP,  and is available on Amazon. It covers all his films and I have contributed the essay on Stahl’s The Keys of the Kingdom (1944).

FIRST REFORMED second time round

14 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Bresson, God, literature and film, resurrection, spiritual cinema, Uncategorized

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This film (see previous entry) continues to stick in my mind. At the end of July I attended a service at St Paul’s episcopal church at Port Townsend, in Washington State (tip of NW corner of USA, looking out on Puget Sound). My Anglicanism is very much Catholic But Reformed, but this Rite 1 communion service was emphatically Protestant, very much focussed on the Word. Just like First Reformed I thought. The church even looks a bit like the one in First Reformed.

St Paul's Port Townsend

Subsequently I dreamt up a Stem of Bernanos, like the stem of Jesse:

Stem of Bernanos PDF [click to open]

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes and what they can teach film-makers

15 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by in artists' film, avant garde, Brakhage, Uncategorized

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Short films on Vimeo – there’s a lot of them out there. Some are even good, and you can ‘like’ them, and choose to follow the filmmaker. But, to make a generalisation, very few of these film-makers have thought enough about ‘form’.

Form can be imposed at two points: the editing bench springs first to mind, which is where Eisenstein, the author of the celebrated ‘Film Form’, placed a particular emphasis. But it can also be imposed in the camera, at the moment the film is being shot. This is Stan Brakhage’s major contribution to film aesthetics: even if he did not discover it, yet in view of the magnitude of his corpus, it is where the idea was most explored.

Now compare music. The same challenge exists: how do you impose form on a sequence of sounds? Western music answers this differently, since it has some eight or nine centuries of history behind it (assuming, arbitrarily I concede, a starting-point of Gregorian chant). Those centuries have been used to explore expressiveness of effect, but also to explore expressiveness of means. Composers have asked themselves questions about how to juxtapose notes, sequences of notes, sections of music – as it were, words, sentences and paragraphs.

Film is 120 years old, but has it concerned itself with these formal questions? Not nearly enough, because film is assumed to be made from representing persons, objects, dramas. It is not: it is made from frames and shots and sequences.

Music is made in the head, in itself, of itself. Film can be made in the head, but for the most part it is made from what is in front of the camera. It may be made ‘in itself’ but it is assumed mostly to be made ‘of something else’.

This train of thought is prompted by hearing the pianist, Cédric Tiberghien, perform John Cage’s ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ at Snape in Suffolk on 12 June. This is music made in Cage’s head, seemingly outside the Western tradition since he took his inspiration from Eastern philosophy and the sound of Eastern music. He wanted to break the listener out of the expectation which he or she brings to the music, in order to enlarge their understanding of the world. However, Cage did not jettison Western music. For a start he used the pianoforte – and then radically amended its sound world by the idea of the ‘prepared piano’.

Cage prepared piano - June 2018

This ropey image shows the piano prepared by the insertion of screws, nuts, bolts etc. between the strings to alter their timbre and make the piano sound more percussive, a process which Tiberghien said took him five hours. As we peered into it before the concert began, someone said, “Isn’t that fabulous?” – before she had even heard the noise the piano would make. Then someone commented, “Look at those screws. It’s hard to get that kind these days.” When I took this photo, someone asked, “Did you get a photo? People will never guess what it’s of.”

Secondly, the title ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ looks to Western compositional tradition, an AABB structure going back to 17th/18th-century sonata form, at least for thirteen of the sixteen sonatas. It is in the interludes particularly that Cage breaks away from this (which is why they are interludes). And the overall structure is a formal one: sonatas 1 to 4/interlude 1/sonatas 5 to 8/interludes 2 and 3/sonatas 9 to 12/interlude 4/sonatas 13 to 16. Listening to it brought to mind Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, whose ‘thirty variations reiterate the harmonic implications of the same bass in thirty different forms’, so that when at the end the opening melody is brought back, we hear it differently. It feels cyclical.

I think cyclicality is a part of the Sonatas and Interludes. I read that it starts and ends in G major, although in my musical ignorance I could not hear that, except subconsciously perhaps since when the piece came to a close you could feel a sense of a journey completed.

So, is hearing the Goldberg Variations a cerebral exercise, and hearing the Sonatas and Interludes an ‘emotive’ one? No, since they are both cerebral, and both emotive. At Snape, in a darkened auditorium (where I could not read my notes to give me an intellectual way into the piece), I listened transfixed to the sounds, the clusters of sound, and each of the twenty pieces, and experienced a direct communication across the darkness from the pianist’s hands to my brain processing what my ears were hearing. This was underlined by the softness of the sounds as a result of the dampening and detuning provided by the piano being ‘prepared’. The result is much more piano than forte.

This served Cage’s purpose well. Drawing on ideas he had read in the work of the Indian sage Coomaraswamy, he wanted to convey eight ‘emotions’ (humorous, angry, fearful etc.) that led the novice to a ninth state, that of tranquillity. I could not hear any of the eight emotions, except perhaps anger, but you get a strong feeling of tranquillity being the core of the piece, its purpose and its effect. Again, Cage (I think) rejects the Western idea of ‘programme music’ for an ‘atmosphere’.

Sonatas and Interludes therefore looks both east and west, an idea confirmed by Cage’s very helpful comment that the bell-like sounds are from Europe and the drum-like sounds – metallic, wooden, dampened, detuned maybe – are from Asia. This is what makes it such a major work, straddling a divide between east and west, a bold attempt at global synthesis, suitable it may be considered for a country that had just fought a major war on two fronts, Europe and the Pacific – and had won. The USA was opening itself to the world, in effect was de-isolating itself.

Cage is therefore very much of his time, and it is also true that his originality allowed him to be fascinated and seduced by an Asian sound world, notably the gamelan orchestras of Indonesia. After Cage came the Japanese Toru Takemitsu, a master of ‘Japanese sound’ influenced by French musical impressionism, Debussy, Messiaen and others. And his rain music evoking rain-drops on water, patterning it to the eye, and resonating it in the ear, is very close to the sound world of the Sonatas and Interludes.

So, it was a wonderful concert. But as someone interested in film, I was envious: why cannot our film-makers do something like this? Take Brakhage’s Text of Light (1974, 67 minutes). This is an abstract film composed entirely of light patterns, but any sense of form eludes me. You can admire its textures and their variety, and the idea that “All that is, is light”, but where do you enter this work, where do you leave it? In defence, Brakhage might invoke the idea applied to Sonatas and Interludes, that Cage is “following a system, but he has no idea where he is going” (see James Pritchett in ‘Six Views of the Sonatas and Interludes’ at  http://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/writings/six-views-sonatas-interludes/), but this is admirable only up to a point, for where is the system being followed?

So, going back to Vimeo. Too many of the films I have been looking at feel too experimental, too random. There may be virtue in jettisoning Western ideas of order, tradition, proportion, a classical architecture as it were, but as I watched and admired these films I longed for those ideas to be brought back. But because film has not got all those centuries behind it, it lacks the grounding which Cage had in launching his experiments.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

A REMBRANDT CHRISTMAS CARD

10 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Bible on film, Nativity, painting and photography, spiritual cinema, Uncategorized

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Rembrandt etching of shepherds

You could make a film of the Life of Christ based on Rembrandt paintings and etchings. Here is ‘The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds’ from 1634 (when Rembrandt was 28) etched and engraved, plus some drypoint. One of his larger etchings, by the way, but still only 26 x 22 cm.This episode from the Nativity of Christ, often portrayed rather statically, is here full of movement, movement which makes the moment seriously exciting. Naturally it contrasts brightness with shadow and darkness, Rembrandt’s speciality. In order to enhance the brightness round the angel, he has enlarged the piercing in the cloud and filled it with putti. Pity really, as I could have done without them, and I feel it breaks the Rembrandt rule of making the ordinary extraordinary. Instead he makes the extraordinary more so, thus achieving a diminishing return. However the shepherds are terrific, and the animals too, achieving a gothic level of fright. Overall the effect is of a fantastic landscape in which a fantastic event occurs.

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What a contrast to the 1651 etching ‘The Flight Into Egypt: a night piece’ (13 x 11 cm), in which the darkness presses in on the Holy Family as they flee from King Herod. Seventeen years on, at the age of 45, Rembrandt has a fuller sense of the sombreness of the ordinary world, a world that remains extraordinary.

I learnt all this from ‘Rembrandt: Lightening the Darkness’, Norwich’s current contribution to civilization. It is an exhibition of the significant holding of Rembrandt etchings in the Norwich Castle Museum, running until 7 January 2018. It has a good catalogue by Giorgia Bottinelli and Francesca Vanke too.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

CZAR VLADIMIR PUTIN

09 Thursday Feb 2017

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A recent ‘Spectator’ competition invited readers to submit a poem about a politician and an item of clothing. I entered but didn’t win so my  parvum opus went unpublished in the illustrious pages of The Spectator, so I publish it here. In case non-British readers were not aware, the media made a stir in the autumn of 2016 with a picture of PM Theresa May wearing leather trousers.

putin-w-rifle  mays-trousers  trumps-jacket

CZAR VLADIMIR

Being Russian, he’s out-and-out iconophile:

fur hat, fur trim, leather jacket’s his style.

Vlad the Terrible, when it comes to shootin’;

His apparel proclaims we are dealing with ‘Putin’.

 

What’s more, there’s a rough side to Vlad the Scary –

he loves his bare chest, all hairy and bear-y.

Clothes are needless: he wallows in snow,

embracing a tiger to show how he’s macho.

 

Bomber jacket commands, ‘Bomb’em to hell!’

Children . . . Women . . .  All who rebel.

His boyars must know they’ve lost the plot when

Vladimir trumpets, “Make Russia great again!”

 

Now, Trump’s jacket was made out of leather,

May’s trousers ditto. It prompts questions whether

they got the idea from the Vlad’s bear hide.

But it is faux. He is foe too, not on our side.

 

(c) Tim Cawkwell / Feb. 2017

 

Antonioni’s Metaphysical Cinema

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Antonioni, Italy, metaphysical film, surrealism, Uncategorized

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In Antonioni’s La Notte, Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) is in his study, aimless as usual, much as he drifts throughout the film. When he bends over his desk, a painting is visible on the wall behind him, not just any old painting but one by Morandi.

notte-6

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) is famous for his obsessive painting of grouped bottle and vases, an idea which preoccupied him all his life. He lived in Bologna, down the road (well, 50 kilometres) from Ferrara, where Antonioni was born and brought up. When Antonioni left home it was to go to study Economy and Commerce at Bologna University. There he began to develop his interest in art and theatre which led him to the cinema and Rome.

Did he encounter Morandi’s pictures during his time in Bologna? And in doing so, did he connect them with the paintings of Giorgio De Chirico, whose brief sojourn in Ferrara from 1915 to 1918 led to a number of his key paintings? If there is a metaphysical school of painting, De Chirico and Morandi are its most notable figures. But what connects them? De Chirico’s troubled reality is populated by architecturally strong but unadorned buildings: arcades and porticoes, such as Bologna is thronged with, especially attracted him, and in some of the Ferrara paintings the brute majesty of the Castello Estense. These townscapes are depicted with strong if colliding perspectives, and by their unexpected juxtapositions, they produce a surrealism before Surrealism. In the streets and piazzas figures are silently frozen in time. Morandi’s bottles and vases are in the ‘still life’ genre but stillness is an absent quality. He paints them so that they jostle with each other as if they were not always comfortable in each other’s presence. I have always thought of them as people, or at any rate objects with distinct characters of their own.

What connects the two painters? De Chirico turns the urban scene into a still life; Morandi takes stillness and sets it quivering. So, in that respect they contradict each other. On the other hand the atmosphere of the paintings in both feels melancholic, and often unsettled, even troubled. The ordinary aspect of things and of places is replaced with something spectral in De Chirico’s case, and in Morandi’s with something disconcerting. Both take everyday reality and make of it something strange, and it is in this I believe that they earn the title of ‘metaphysical realists’.

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Film criticism has for some time now made the connection between Antonioni’s visual style and Metaphysical Painting, and I am especially grateful to Donato Totaro for alerting me to the echoes of De Chirico in Antonioni’s films.

While Antonioni’s film-making mindset was forged by the neo-realist films being made around him, and the intellectual atmosphere in which they were created, from the beginning his feature films looked for a different appearance of the world than the purely realist one. When filming interiors, he was very attentive to objects as adding a specific tone to a scene, and when he was filming places, or rather spaces, he wanted – and found – a new photographic language to depict people within them. There are echoes here of the exploration of perspective by Italian Renaissance painters whereby people were placed into a grid of lines. Antonioni sees the world if not geometrically then as planes and shapes to which his figures must conform themselves, rather than the other way around.

Can we speak of Antonioni as an exponent of metaphysical cinema because he was drawn to the metaphysical painting of De Chirico and Morandi? This feels insufficient. Nor is he ‘metaphysical’ in the sense of Bresson, Tarkovsky or Kieślowski, to take three important names who all look beyond realism for a spiritual realm. (See my essay ‘Kieślowski before Kieślowski’ at: http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk/kieslowski-before-kieslowski.) However, Antonioni’s metaphysical cinema is close to the concept of ‘metaphysical rebellion’ that Camus proposes is the proper position for artists of all kinds, as articulated in his book L’Homme Révolté / The Rebel, published in 1951. This rebellion is a “necessary blasphemy against the created order” which disputes “the end of man and of creation”. In Antonioni this did not produce revolutionary rage as it did in some, but it did produce a deep melancholy about human relations and human purposes. This attitude allowed him to distil something essential about the twentieth century.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

 

 

Sewer films

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in Polish history, sewer films, Uncategorized

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The Third Man 3

When I first wrote about Brighton Rock (1947), the film made by the Boulting Brothers from the novel by Graham Greene, I had this to say:

“The script, on which Greene himself collaborated with Terence Rattigan, does convey the startling contrast between Ida’s pursuit of Right on the one hand and on the other Rose and Pinkie, bewitched by Good and Evil and the possibility of divine mercy even for the corrupted.  When Ida says to Rose, ‘I know one thing you don’t.  I know the difference between Right and Wrong,’ Rose thinks to herself that ‘their taste was extinguished by stronger foods – Good and Evil’.  She knows Pinkie is evil, so ‘what did it matter in that case whether he was right or wrong?’  While Greene is far from being explicit, he is taking a swipe at Britain’s Protestant institutions based on upholding human justice, which are dwarfed in his mind by divine law and the ‘appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’.”

The most arresting element in Greene’s brilliant novel is not the petty gangster milieu or the disenchanted depiction of Brighton, but the way Rose cleaves to Pinkie in spite of everything, including the contempt he harbours for her. Ideas of good and evil trump those of right and wrong.

What I had written ten years ago was brought to mind again by seeing The Third Man (1949) again, a masterpiece created from an assembly of talent, not just Carol Reed’s direction, Orson Welles’s mesmerizing presence, Anton Karas’s (tiresome) zither music, and Robert Crasker’s camerawork and use of chiaroscuro, but also, very importantly, Graham Greene’s script. An idea he reprises from ‘Brighton Rock’ is the way Anna, Harry Lime’s girlfriend, cleaves to him and to his memory despite the evidence of his cynical depravity. She has no inclination to pass moral judgement, just like Rose, “who knows Pinkie is evil, so ‘what did it matter in that case whether he was right or wrong?’” This is a version, in Greene’s mind, of divine love given without pre-condition or judgement. This may feel strange, but the idea is the essential fuel of the drama: should we respond to Harry Lime’s conquering charm, or to his vile actions?

One of the attractions of Greene as a writer is the intensity of his universe, which lends his work coherence and (in my own case, although perhaps not everyone’s) credibility. This is a universe which he keeps exploring, Greeneland as an undiscovered country. In The Third Man Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), the American, blunders about in his search for justice as soon as he arrives in Vienna, making trouble for everybody; no wonder Anna keeps her distance from him. This idea, which is subversively realized so that it is very funny initially and then turns serious without our realizing it, is given a searching reworking in ‘The Quiet American’ (1955), where the activities of the idealistic American, Alden Pyle, lead to the carnage of the terrorist bomb planted in the main square.

And going off at a tangent here’s another connection that idly sprang to mind. The 1948 film noir, He Walked by Night, finishes with a manhunt in the storm drains of Los Angeles: tunnels, backlighting, a man running (second image below). Reed’s version of the idea in his film is more bravura (first image below). Presumably it’s a coincidence, or did someone mention to Reed that there was a low-budget film rendered extraordinary by a manhunt sequence

The Third Man 1          He walked by night 3

filmed in the storm drains? Was it Greene himself, who after all had been a film critic of some perspicuity? Actually the release dates undermine any notion of influence because their productions runs in parallel rather than in sequence. He Walked by Night was first shown in LA in November 1948, and in New York in February 1949. The Third Man’s première was at the end of August 1949. In any case the Vienna sewers were famous enough, it seems, to attract Greene scouting ideas for his screenplay in 1948 (Wikipedia s.v. ‘The Third Man’). The story of the production seems to be such a mixture of the fictional, the shady and the suspicious that the facts of the case have become very hard to pin down, leaving the field open to a speculation that only enhances the reputation of the film.

There are also two famous Polish sewer films (Kanal, 1956, and In Darkness, 2011) both set in wartime. These did not need any films to influence them; they are prompted by true stories of resistance against the German occupation conducted in the sewers.

Perhaps all this starts with Victor Hugo using the Paris sewers as an escape route for Valjean in ‘Les Misérables’.

Resurrection folk tales

28 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in resurrection, Rohmer, Uncategorized

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Conte d'Hiver 3

Éric Rohmer’s Conte d’Hiver / A Winter’s Tale consciously re-works William Shakespeare’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’. As others have remarked it echoes too Dreyer’s Ordet, and, Rohmer, being so well-read, I am sure had Euripides’ ‘Alcestis’ in mind as well.

All four works form milestones through the passage of time, giving this story something approaching a folktale quality, or folk myth: Classical Greece (Euripides), Jacobean England (Shakespeare), a backward-looking 20th-century Denmark (Dreyer), contemporary Paris (Rohmer).

Which of the four is the most moving? This is an empty competition, not to be pursued, but it is striking how all four play the moment of Resurrection for all its dramatic power. When the dead women (Alcestis, Hermione, Inger) move from lifelessness to life, they unleash the power of the Recognition moment (anagnorisis in the Greek word). In these three cases the male gaze is transformed from stupefaction to desire by the woman’s re-appearance (Alcestis unveiled to Admetus, ditto Hermione to Leontes, Inger awaking in her coffin). Rohmer is more modern: when Charles and Félicie look at each other in the bus, they awaken mutual desire, and their love feels instantly resurrected.

Rohmer is different in another way. The other three stories show a deus/dea ex machina figure orchestrating the ending: Heracles (Euripides), Pauline (Shakespeare), Johannes (Dreyer). No such figure appears in Rohmer’s Conte d’Hiver, but instead one of Rohmer’s teasing philosophical ideas. Is it chance that Félicie and Charles meet on the bus, or is it an answer to Félicie sitting quietly in Nevers Cathedral, not praying (on her own admission) but thinking hard of the possibility of finding Charles again? Something supernatural is surely at work, something more than chance, but Rohmer eschews using a character orchestrating the meeting on the bus, out of delicacy: he is making this magic story plausible enough to feel contemporary, which a deus/dea ex machina would disrupt. However it brilliantly achieves the quality of the miraculous, ‘beyond custom and experience’, in a secular setting.

The film revels in its New Wave aesthetic: real interiors, many exterior sequences, sequences on buses and trains. This contemporary patina is in strong contrast to Dreyer’s Ordet, with its calculated interiors (Dreyer would fully dress a set, and then reduce the furniture and fittings by more than a half). The Recognition moment in Rohmer takes place in public view: Charles looks and recognises, Félicie looks and recognises – the camera observes almost casually.

Conte d'Hiver 1.png       Conte d'Hiver 2

In Ordet, on the other hand, the camera is a firm and far from casual presence, and makes the viewer a participant both in the high drama of Johannes’ command to the dead to arise, and in Inger’s moment of awakening.

Ordet 7 - Inger wakes

There is a fifth version of this story, told slightly differently: in the Gospel versions of Jesus’ resurrection, all four evangelists are conscious of the dramatic power of the idea. Later, Piero della Francesca captured its terrifying quality in his ‘Resurrection’ in the Museo Civico in Sansepolcro, Italy:

Piero - Resurrection, Sansepolcro

Titian underlines the delicacy of the moment in his ‘Noli Me Tangere’, in the National Gallery in London, when Mary Magdalene encounters the resurrected Jesus in the garden:

Titian - Noli Me Tangere

In his ‘Alcestis’, Euripides understands this delicacy too: Alcestis come back to life is not to speak for three days because she has already been dedicated to Death for that period. Shakespeare similarly keeps his last scene short, unburdened by practical explanation of what is happening, so that the curtain falls on Leontes’ and our astonishment.

Rohmer ends in untrammelled delight: Félicie and Charles reunited, Élise provided with a father, Charles invited to a New Year’s Eve dinner party, and the children playing by themselves. Félicie and Charles are not just the union of Leontes and Hermione resurrected, but Florazel and Perdita as well, innocence made flesh. What happens to them in maturity is for another story, or since Félicie believes in reincarnation, for another life. To mention this idea is inappropriate and risks violating Rohmer’s cinematic touch as a Master of Delicacy.

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There is yet another version of this story in Carlos Reygadas’ very fine film, Silent Light (2009) – see image below right, a reworking of Ordet (left) set in a Mennonite community in Mexico.

ordet 2    Silent Light (640x288)

I write about both films in ‘The New Filmgoers Guide to God’, and link Ordet to Babette’s Feast and Breaking the Waves, further versions of the Resurrection story. See http://bit.ly/TroubadorPress.

An 18th-century photographer

08 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by in painting and photography, Uncategorized

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He painted portraits in the 18th century, but not as we know them. For a start, they are usually in pastels not oils. Secondly, they establish an unusual relationship of equality between painter and sitter. They respect the sitter’s social position, but the sitter looks at the painter or out of the frame without superciliousness. Thirdly they can sometimes be tinged with informality.

Since pastels produce an exceptional, brushstroke-free smoothness to the flesh, like make-up in their way, the faces attain the luminosity of formal photographic portraiture.  In some of them an informality in gaze, in gesture or in costume suggests the camera’s naked truth rather than the varnished version of classical oil painting.

When he painted, there were 200 to 300 years of tradition in artists’ self-portraits, but the image for which he is perhaps best known – the artist’s face turned towards the viewer, hair a bit unkempt, his index finger pointing off-frame right, and laughing – is not just a self-portrait but a selfie. Let us then call it the first selfie, an accolade which we have only learnt to bestow in the 21st century, the selfie era. He made at least a dozen versions of himself spread throughout his life.

Liotard self-portrait

The painter is Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702 to 1789), whose scattered artistic remains are to be found in all sorts of collections, but which are now all too briefly gathered at the Royal Academy in London until the end of January (having been at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh in summer 2015). Catch them if you can. On the other hand, because the paintings have this photographic feel, and because I have long felt photographs are best appreciated in a book on the lap rather than framed on the wall, the catalogue is very rewarding.

It wasn’t all good. Fingers are definitely not his forte, the lips can sometimes look fuzzy, and his noses look too soft: where is the bone beneath the skin? But the draughtsmanship is often superb, the eyes of his sitters are lit with a vital spark, the skin tones are delicious, the fabrics gorgeous. The peaches on the table in his terrific portrait of Suzanne Curchod look so ripe and perfect that you long to eat one.

Liotard - portrait of S Curchod

Francis Bacon I suspect would not have approved. He felt painting should be something other than an illustrational process. “A non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.” Liotard’s portraits on the other hand start by illustrating a society and an age, its facts as it were, but to my mind they ‘leak back’ if not into sensation then into enquiry. I would like to know more about these people, to have made their acquaintance at the least, and possibly more than that, for their appearance, while often plain, just as often suggests to us that there is more to the world than being ‘skin deep’.