Adventures in Vertigo

A Little Night Music

2011-12-28T12:51:00.000-08:00

I didn’t see the car that night until a second before impact. I remember having enough time to be confused by the sight of a car moving so close in front of another moving car going in the perpendicular direction. I said the name of my friend in the driver’s seat: “Terry?” Suddenly, I heard a tinny clunking noise — nothing like in the movies — and was jerked suddenly to one side by the car seat. The move was so sudden that it knocked the wind out of me. And I found myself gasping for air, unable to breathe.

Panic grabbed my body. I heard Terry get out of the car and say to someone I couldn’t see, “I’m all right, but my friend is hurt.” That statement might have wounded my pride. Me? Hurt? I didn’t like the sound of that.

Then, this voice in the back of my mind said to me, “Don’t panic. Just stay calm. Take things slowly, and you’ll be able to breathe.” I did everything I could to still my body and stop gasping. You know what? That cranial voice was right! To my own amazement, I started to breathe again — like nothing had happened.

Having run around the front of the car, Terry opened the door on my side and, with his string-bean shadow gangling above me, asked if I was all right. I jumped to life — as right as rain. “Yes, I’m okay!” I tried to sound upbeat and unshaken, as though I hadn’t just been in a car collision.

How did I get into this situation? It was early 1981, and I turned 21 in the state of California. That meant that I could now imbibe alcohol legally in Los Angeles. This wasn’t a big deal for me. I didn’t drink very often, and my home state’s legal drinking age at the time was 18, so I had plenty of opportunities to get sloshed in the town where I grew up. But I drank very little and never over-indulged.

Still, this age was something of a milestone in my newly adopted state, and Terry offered to take me out on the town that night to celebrate. We drove over to the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown L.A. and walked among the restaurants and bars around the lobby. The hotel was an impressive building, but after walking around for a while, the idea of having my first California-legal drink stopped appealing to me. I told Terry that we should drive back.

It was during this stone-sober return trip that I had the experience which — for a few seconds at least — took my breath away. I’m sure the irony of not drinking and getting into a car wreck crossed my mind sometime during that night.

The other driver turned out to be a young Frenchwoman who was — say it with me — driving without a license. From the otherwise empty streets, an eyewitness emerged from the darkness and said that the other car had run a red light. After hearing this, our traveler from the Continent, eyes welling, lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. It was about that time that I noticed an unsettling sensation sneaking up on me: little by little, my left side started aching as though it was being gnawed on by tatter-toothed gremlins.

Terry called a friend of his who drove us to the hospital. Well, a kind of hospital, anyway. The friend drove us to Kaiser-Permanente private hospital, which counted Terry as a member, but since I wasn’t, no one would examine me. I entered the building’s lobby, clutching my increasingly agonized side. (The gremlins had given way to ravenous trolls.) But the attending nurse waved me away. Members only. I could feel the bewildered look on my face. “Okay,” I thought to myself, “why did Terry bring me here?”

I didn’t stick around for an answer — Terry’s friend took me somewhere else. I don’t remember very much about rest of the night. I can only say that I eventually made it to a hospital with a more welcoming staff, where I was diagnosed with bruised ribs. Given that I had been in a car wreck earlier that night, I was relieved that things weren’t worse, but I can’t recall ever hurting so much in my life.

I finally made it back to my student-housing apartment, which I shared with three other undergraduates, at about 3 a.m. I was dead-dog tired, but I knew that I’d never get to sleep with my bandaged ribs still sadistically reminding me of the car crash earlier that night. Since trying to sleep would have been a fool’s errand, I decided not even to make the attempt, but to listen to some music instead.

One of my roommates had recently purchased a new record album. It was by Dire Straits, a group I had heard of but didn’t know much about. The title of the LP was Making Movies, an agreeable moniker, I thought. So, I put the vinyl disc on the turntable, turned out all the lights, plugged in the headphones, and lay back on the carpeted floor.

There, in the pitch darkness, with only my aching ribs for company, this is the music that filled my ears. I’ve been listening to it ever since.

The Wisdom of Jesus

2011-12-25T12:35:00.001-08:00

John, Paul, George & Ringo!

2011-11-30T17:33:00.000-08:00

Another repost of something I wrote on BeatleLinks Fab Forum in 2005:

I was just thinking what a stroke of serendipity it was that the four Beatles each had such memorable names that — when put together in a phrase — rolled off the tongue so easily (an ad man’s dream). Just think of it: three monosyllabic first names common in the English-speaking world, followed by a more exotic, uncommon polysyllabic one to finish off the phrase. The list of the four names has its own kind of peculiar poetry.

After all, you don't usually go around calling the Rolling Stones “Mick, Keith, Charlie...” and whoever else happens to be in the group that day. A simple “Stones” suffices. Not so with the Beatles.

Isn’t it sorta strange that things worked out so well? What if things had worked out differently? If Pete Best had stayed in the band, I don't think that “John, Paul, George, and Pete” would have had the same ring (so to speak) to it. If Paul had been known by his first name, instead of his middle one, “John, James, George, and Ringo” would have had the advantage of the first three names being alliterative, but I think that most Americans would have been put off by the formal sound of the full name “James,” and if it were shortened to “Jim,” John and George might have seemed a bit too stodgy for not also using nicknames.

On the other hand, what if they each had different names? Coming from England, where certain common names are not as common here in the States, it’s lucky that the monickers were so identifiable to us Yanks. What if this hadn’t been the case? “Nigel, Trevor, Leslie, and Squiffy” would have been a definite non-starter.

Yes ... I have way too much time on my hands.

Foolishly Fooling Around with SFX

2011-11-15T11:12:00.000-08:00

Christophe à la plage

Lee Van Cleef - The Good, the Bad, and the Pixelated

Hommage à Munch

Natalie Tran - Glasses & Brass

Selbstportrait

Be sure to check out Natalie Tran’s YouTube alter ego: communitychannel.

Happy 11/11/11!

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

Happy 11/11/11, everyone!

As I type these words, it is now 11:11 on 11/11/11

Location, Location, Location

2011-11-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

It took a poorly made 1950s exploitation movie to make me realize the importance of location filming to the development of cinema. If motion-picture cameras had been confined only to the inside of the studios, I doubt that filmmaking could have been revitalized by Italian neo-realism of the 1940s, the international New Wave of the 1960s, or other independent film movements. It’s not that these new cinema movements never used soundstages for their interior scenes, but location filming was absolutely vital.

The work that made me realize this was Phil Tucker’s Dance Hall Racket (1953), a cheaply made, by-the-numbers exploitation movie whose only real distinction is that it was written by Lenny Bruce and marks his only appearance as a credited actor. Unfortunately, the film’s wafer-thin plot — an underworld figure, Umberto Scalli (Timothy Farrell), uses the sleazy taxi-dance hall he runs as a front for diamond smuggling — barely materializes as a linear narrative. This is regrettable because the story shows occasional flashes of insight into the workings of the underworld with an unflinching honesty that Martin Scorsese might appreciate. And because its plot is so disjointed, the movie’s 60-minute running time has to be padded with burlesque-style comedy routines and a laughable dance number. Almost the entire movie is shot on a flimsy soundstage with sparse decoration that can’t conceal the artificial environment where the action is actually taking place.

However, when its last scene appears on screen, Dance Hall Racket seems to transform into a different film altogether, if only for a couple of minutes. At the story’s end, Scalli’s henchman Vincent (Bruce) double-crosses his boss and makes off with the smuggled diamonds and the racket’s ringleader as hostage. By this time, the police have traced the smuggling to Scalli’s business and chase after Vincent, who shoots at them before dying from return fire.

What makes the scene feel like a moment from a completely different — and better — film is its exterior setting. Presumably shot in an alleyway behind the studio, the location exudes a grittiness and naturalism in marked contrast to the threadbare artifice of the interiors. Also, this climactic shoot-out is wordless and thus free of the stilted acting that plagues so many of the movie’s dialogue scenes. The location setting lends the gun battle an air of realism and credibility so utterly missing from the rest of this otherwise trashy film.

When I first saw Dance Hall Racket, which I watched primarily because of Bruce’s involvement, the slipshod quality of the movie lulled me into a languid stupor. But the neo-realistic atmosphere of the climax snapped me awake again. I started wondering how more location shooting might have enhanced the picture. If Dance Hall Racket had been able to film in an actual bar or taxi-dance hall, the movie might have avoided the substandard production values that diminish its already fragile integrity. I’m guessing that the film’s budget was so submicroscopic that lugging the camera from one location to another was never even a gleam in the director’s eye. Granted, more location work wouldn’t have rescued the movie — the script is too loose and episodic to cohere into a solid story, even if it had decent actors — but the stark and truthful atmosphere that elevates the last scene might have elevated the entire film.

Thinking about this also drove home to me that much of the success of the 1960s New Waves was utterly dependent on the newly available tools that permitted location shooting, particularly lightweight cameras and sound equipment and “faster” (more light-sensitive) film stocks, tools not available to earlier generations of movie-makers. Much of the freshness of these New Wave films came from the documentary-like flavor of some titles — Shadows (1959), Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), Accattone (1961), even the costume drama Jules & Jim (1962), and others — which liberated the camera from the studio and endowed the stories with an immediacy and urgency largely missing from the Hollywood product of the era. If New Wave filmmakers were as bound to the studio as Dance Hall Racket’s previous scenes, there might not have been a New Wave at all.

The sudden eruption of invigorating cinéma-vérité in the climactic scene of an otherwise stagebound and stodgy programmer throws the rest of the risible movie into relief. The abrupt appearance of a dilapidated back-alley location evokes the idea of an alternate version of Dance Hall Racket, one whose low budget might have been an asset instead of a liability, one whose use of seedy naturalistic settings might lend the cynical story a greater realism, and one whose script would better foretell the hard-hitting and insightful views of human frailty that screenwriter and actor Lenny Bruce would later realize more fully in his pioneering stand-up comedy. Despite its copious flaws, Dance Hall Racket marks a moment in American film history where the promise of location filmmaking for low-budget productions stood in obvious and eye-opening contrast to the limitations of the soundstage. In doing this, Dance Hall Racket even today provokes the viewer to imagine the more compelling, studio-emancipated movie that might have been.

Trailer for ‘Dance Hall Racket’

‘Chu Chin Chow’: A Musical Museum-Piece

2011-11-04T12:56:00.000-07:00

Oscar Ashe and Frederic Norton's musical retelling of “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves,” Chu Chin Chow, made into a 1934 British film by Walter Forde, doesn’t withstand the test of time. If anything, the movie version of this 1916 London stage show — now available on DVD — illustrates how the musical has changed over the decades.

In the years of Chu Chin Chow’s success, the musical comedy was a relatively undemanding form. In both Britain and America, popular musical shows used rather thin, breezy plots that served primarily as a vehicle for the songs — pop hits which were expected to be sung in concerts and over the radio long after the show had finished its theatrical run. So entrenched was this tradition of the musical theatre, that very few shows before World War II strove to develop more substantial stories, and those that did have become enduring classics to postwar audiences: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927), George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s Pal Joey (1940). The stage musical that changed the form into one that regularly developed the story on a level equal to the songs was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s phenomenally successful Oklahoma! (1943). Regrettably, Chu Chin Chow is not part of this more demanding evolution of the musical.

Instead of employing its musical numbers to advance plot and character, Chu Chin Chow sings about rather arbitrary subjects not directly related to story progression, and then distracts the viewer with its Arabian Nights-style pageantry. The musical’s lack of cohesiveness is exemplified by its very title. If a narrative is titled Chu Chin Chow, after one of its characters, the audience would reasonably expect that character to be significant in some way, whether as the protagonist or as a thematic presence throughout the story (such as James Joyce’s Ulysses). But who is Chu Chin Chow? He’s the murder victim of the musical’s main antagonist, Abu Hasan (Fritz Kortner), and whose identity the bad guy then adopts for only part of the narrative. (I’m led to believe by the DVD’s supplemental materials that the character of Chu Chin Chow was somewhat larger in the stage show than in the film, but hardly more significant.) Not only that, but the musical’s Chinese title misleadingly suggests that the story is set in East Asia, rather than in the Middle East. This would be like Rodgers and Hammerstein titling their Oklahoma-set musical “South Philly.”

Fritz Kortner and Anna May Wong in ‘Chu Chin Chow’ (1934)

When Chu Chin Chow was re-released in 1953, the film’s distributor chopped out all the musical numbers and rechristened it Ali Baba Nights (this truncated version is included on the DVD), a less deceptive title. This should surprise no one. With the arguable exception of the numbers sung between the romantic leads, Nur-al-din Baba (John Garrick) and Marjanah (Pearl Argyle), the songs are intrusions onto the story. For example, “The Cobbler's Song” is a relatively long number given to a character whose function in the story is minimal; the song comes off as an extensive digression. As for Ali Baba (George Robey), he’s given very few numbers, and his central showpiece, “Anytime’s Kissing Time,” is sung for polygamous reasons to a woman who is not his wife — not something that will endear him to the audience.

In fact, the seemingly arbitrary use of non-germane songs by minor characters emphasizes Chu Chin Chow’s lack of focus. What is the central narrative thread? Who is the main character? Is it Ali Baba? He begins the film as its most active character but then grows rather inactive by its conclusion. Is it Nur-al-din and Marjanah? They play a major role in the climax but have comparatively little impact upon the story until then. Is it Abu Hasan? Although Kortner plays the role with over-the-top gusto, Hasan is a hard character to like, and the narrative is too light and airy to demand that the audience plumb the dark depths of identifying with a bad guy. The movie’s razzle-dazzle Arabian Nights spectacle may distract us momentarily from these questions, but it can’t rescue a movie sadly in need of a stronger narrative arc.

With all this going against the movie, the only reason to watch Chu Chin Chow is to behold Anna May Wong’s performance as Zahrat, the slave who begins as Hasan’s spy and lover, but who ends the story with different loyalties. The movie is an all-too-rare chance to see the underutilized Chinese American actress in a prominent role, perhaps the film’s most important character. But even Wong’s admirable efforts aren’t enough to reclaim Chu Chin Chow for the thoughtful viewer. In keeping with the film’s flamboyant tone, Wong joins the other actors in chewing the scenery and otherwise exaggerating her emotions; this is disappointing because her best performances are wonders of subtlety and restraint. Also, despite her centrality to the first half and climax of the movie, Wong spends much of the film’s second half off-screen. Chu Chin Chow might have made for a more enduring tale if the narrative had made Zahrat the clear protagonist from the start and didn’t waste so much time on Ali Baba and the other characters, who only distract the rambling storyline with expendable tangents.

As an uncommon chance to savor the screen presence of Anna May Wong in a lavish-for-its-time British musical extravaganza, Chu Chin Chow holds some modest rewards. But the film is, first and foremost, an artifact of the kind of musical that stronger and more story-driven Broadway offerings surpassed long ago.

DVD trailer for ‘Chu Chin Chow’

The above review was originally written for Amazon.com in 2004.

‘Writing the Romantic Comedy’

2011-10-28T11:23:00.000-07:00

Here is a review that I wrote for Amazon.com back in 2004:

I’m a sucker for romantic comedies. Watching stories about cuddly, charismatic couples falling in love can turn this hard-bitten cynic into a mushy puddle of Jell-O in no time. They’re this writer’s Achilles’ heel. You could show me the worst romantic comedy ever made, and I’d still probably find something good to say about it. So, I was delighted to come across Billy Mernit’s Writing the Romantic Comedy.

Although I’ve done some screenwriting in my time, my head isn’t exactly bursting with ideas for romantic comedies. But since I’m an admirer of the genre, Mernit’s book felt like a guided tour through a favorite building when you don’t have any plans to construct a building of your own.

Hollywood producers notoriously hate to read, so if you’re a Hollywood writer, you need to pick up a few tricks to make reading as easy for them (or their surrogates) as possible. As a writer for the entertainment industry, Mernit has obviously picked up a few tricks of his own, making his book a brisk and enjoyable read. The historical overview is appreciated almost as much as Mernit’s disassemblies of some of the rom-com’s stand-outs to show how the genre ticks.

Although the book is sprinkled with a few factual errors (for example, on page 177, he refers to author Milan Kundera as “Polish” instead of Czech), these aren’t enough to upset the taco stand. Mernit’s explanations of the genre’s components are straightforward, artful, but clearly presented. And his dubbing of the Mr. Wrong character (a convention in many rom-coms) as the “Bellamy,” after actor Ralph Bellamy who specialized in such roles, had me laughing out loud. My only criticism of the book is a mild one: There ought to have been at least a handful of movie stills illustrating some of the films that Mernit talks about at length — this would have heightened the book’s visual interest. I highly recommend Writing the Romantic Comedy even if you’re not a screenwriter. Understanding how the genre works may make you appreciate it even more.

I do have one word of advice for aspiring screenwriters: If you’re just starting out in the craft, you won’t want this to be the first book on the subject that you read. Start off with something that teaches you the nuts and bolts of scribing for the movies, like Screenplay by Syd Field or one of its clones. Next, I would recommend Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay by Andrew Horton, which talks a little more in depth about the vital components of character and structure. For good measure, you might also want to check out Making a Good Script Great by Linda Segar for advice about how to tighten a screenplay. Only then will you want to give Mernit’s book a thorough going-over. If you’re an old hand at screenwriting, you’re probably already familiar with these books.

Once you’ve got all of them under your belt, you’ll be inspired to sit down at the keyboard and write and write. It may only be your name over and over, but you’ll still be inspired to write.

A few months later, I came back and typed: I take it back. I’ve seen the worst romantic comedy ever made. It's called Soap Girl. I can’t think of a good thing to say about it.

‘DWTS’: Broadway Week?

2011-10-25T18:39:00.000-07:00

Last Monday, the series Dancing with the Stars had each of its seven remaining star-contestants dance with their professional ballroom partners to a song from Broadway. But what struck me about that evening’s show was that a number of the songs danced to weren’t written directly for the Broadway stage.

The first couple to take the dance floor that night (because I’m not interested in the horse race, I won’t mention the performers’ names) cut the rug with a cha-cha to the song “Walk Like a Man.” The tune is from Jersey Boys (2005), a jukebox musical (a musical scored to pre-existing songs, rather than having numbers written especially for it), but the ditty was released as a pop song in 1963.

The next dance was a fox trot to “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from Monty Python’s Spamalot (2005). But the song was originally written for the British film Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979).

The third song — at last — was actually from a Broadway musical: “We Go Together” from the teenage-musical spoof Grease (1971). Yes, the first number of the evening specifically written for Broadway was from a spoof.

Next up was a quickstep to a second song written for the Broadway stage: “Luck Be a Lady” from Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (1950). However, the song was obviously sung in the style of Frank Sinatra, not in a way reminiscent of how it was performed onstage.

The fifth dance was a tango set to the song “Phantom of the Opera” from the eponymous 1986 musical, a musical originally written for London’s West End and which migrated to America’s Great White Way two years later.

The two remaining individual dances that night were — for a nice change of pace — actually from Broadway shows: Rent (1996) and Chicago (1975). The much-anticipated group dance, where all the celebrities and their partners take part, was to a medley of two tunes: “Hey, Big Spender” and “Money Makes the World Go Around.” The first song is from the 1966 Broadway musical Sweet Charity. The second number was said to be from Cabaret. However, the tune wasn’t from the 1966 Broadway show, but was written specifically for its 1972 film adaptation, written specifically to have two of its characters, Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) and the Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey), perform a duet together, which they did not on the stage. I think Dancing with the Stars could have done a better job representing Broadway.

I’ve probably been sounding very snooty and pedantic just now. (Okay, we can leave the “probably” out of that last sentence.) You may think that I am once again insisting on a firm, restrictive definition for what is and is not the term defined — in this case, “Broadway show tune” — but I don’t mean to. “Broadway” has always been a rather fluid word, from its origins in vaudeville (with its eclectic series of unintegrated acts) to the recent phenomenon of the jukebox musical (a reflection of the stage’s reliance on familiar material in the face of spiraling production costs). So, “Broadway” has always had an elusive definition, and I don’t intend to capture it with a restrictive meaning that would only become obsolete tomorrow.

However, Broadway also has a rich songwriting tradition that has boasted world-class tunesmiths like Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and Oscar Hammerstein. These writers of music and lyrics have given a melodic voice to the shaping of an American sensibility in the 20th century, and the primary vehicle for their songs was the Broadway stage. It would have been nice to see at least one of these composers represented in Dancing with the Stars’s Broadway tribute Monday night.

Sticking Up for Shakespeare

2011-10-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

I was waiting to write this post sometime later, but now seems like as good a time as any. As many readers know, a new film is coming out later this month called Anonymous, dramatizing the idea that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, did not write the literary works attributed to him. Recently, the publicity arm of Sony Pictures, the movie’s distributor, released a short video of the director, Roland Emmerich, citing ten reasons why he believes Shakespeare is a fraud. I want to respond to Emmerich’s reasons point by point, but first, I would like to say a few words about the Shakespeare authorship question in general.

First of all, William Shakespeare of Stratford (1564-1616) is the overwhelming consensus among scholars and historians as the author of the plays and poems bearing his name. Disputing this consensus is a fringe position largely undertaken by those who are not professional historians with academic credentials. Armchair historians contesting Shakespeare’s authorship are akin to armchair scientists contesting Darwin’s theory of evolution or Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Secondly, Shakespeare wasn’t proclaimed the greatest writer in the English language during his own lifetime or in the century that followed: only by the late-18th century did his significance become a majority opinion. The notion that William of Stratford did not write the works of Shakespeare is a relatively recent phenomenon that began in the mid-19th century, about the time that “Shakespeare” became a monument worth toppling. Before then, there is no evidence that anyone doubted Shakespeare’s authorship. The writer was successful and well-known during his lifetime, which presumably led to some public scrutiny, so if any contemporary skepticism existed, there should have been evidence for it back then.

To me, this entire authorship question is impelled by elitism. The anti-Stratfordians (as Shakespeare doubters are collectively known) seem motivated by a refusal to believe that someone of such humble origins wrote the English language’s greatest works. One anti-Stratfordian website addresses the snob factor this way: “The authorship question asks not who could have written the plays but who did.” But why bother asking who did in the first place — and going against the enormous historical consensus — unless Shakespeare didn’t fit some pre-conceived notions about who could have?

I am not a Shakespeare expert. For all I know, William of Stratford did not write any of the works bearing his name. But to say that the historians’ common-view author did not write them — and moreover, that their true author’s identity was suppressed because of a vast conspiracy — is an extraordinary claim. It’s difficult to believe that a scheme surrounding such an important matter could have begun some 400 years ago and not unraveled well before the 19th century. As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And the evidence that the anti-Stratfordians point to is not extraordinary.

The anti-Stratfordians’ first assumption is that records for those who lived in Elizabethan and Jacobean England should be as complete as today’s documentation. For the era, record keeping in Elizabethan England was relatively extensive, and documents regarding William of Stratford, while not great, are as plentiful as those for the average middle-class Londoner of the time. What gaps there are in the historical record can be explained by Shakespeare being a closet Catholic in an England where Protestantism was compulsory and where variation on this religious norm was seen as a sign of treason, which could be punished by death. (For example, Jews were banished from Britain during this time.) Many scholars believe that Shakespeare came from a Catholic household and had reasons to be secretive about his spiritual beliefs — in effect, about anything personal that couldn’t be veiled in a sonnet — for fear of his life. To the extent there is a “Shakespeare mystery,” his clandestine Catholicism explains most of it.

Now, I’d like to focus on Emmerich’s specific reasons for disbelieving Shakespeare’s authorship.

1. No documents — plays, letters, etc. — exist in Shakespeare’s hand.

A successful entrepreneur in the Elizabethan theatre, Shakespeare owned stock in his acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men), and the building where they performed, the Globe Theatre (later other performing spaces as well). In all likelihood, Shakespeare would not have written out full copies of his plays, only rough drafts that would then be copied out by other hands. Once duplicated, these manuscripts became the property of his company, not himself. Why didn’t Shakespeare write letters to his wife? Because she couldn’t read, and evidence suggests that the writer didn’t really love her. Why didn’t he write any surviving letters to anyone else? Well, why put your innermost thoughts down on paper if they could be used against you by a state that regarded your family’s religion as treasonous?

2. Shakespeare’s daughters were illiterate.

By and large, women were second-class citizens in England (as well as elsewhere) in this era, despite the monarch’s gender. Literacy for females was not a great priority (only boys attended grammar school). Shakespeare would have needed to go to great lengths in order to make sure his daughters were literate. The fact of their illiteracy tells us nothing about the authorship of the plays.

3. Why would a common-born writer be so obsessed with the aristocracy and so intimate with the workings of upper-class politics?

First, politics were not unknown to Shakespeare’s family. The writer’s father, John Shakespeare, held various offices in Stratford, including High Bailiff, the de facto mayor. Second, once Shakespeare became a successful playwright early in his career, he evidently associated with members of the nobility, especially Henry Wriothesley (rhymes with “grisly”), the Third Earl of Southampton, to whom the writer dedicated his epic poems (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece) and with whom he was apparently intimate. This could have very well given him an insider’s glimpse into the workings of the aristocracy and their politics. As for the plebeian playwright always “mocking his peers” and identifying more with those higher on the social scale, one Shakespeare play that upends this characterization is The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which members of the middle class humiliate a knight.

4. His six known signatures — none of them on literary works — are “shaky and inconsistent.”

This isn’t a very compelling argument. Any number of factors could have prevented Shakespeare from having exemplary penmanship.

5. Why doesn’t Shakespeare mention the death of his eleven-year-old son in his very emotional and heartfelt sonnets?

The mission of the sonnet in Shakespeare’s time was for the writer to say just enough to express himself without blatantly spelling things out. However, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 33 has been interpreted to be on this very subject, his young son’s death: “[M]y sun one early morn did shine/With all triumphant splendor on my brow;/But out, alack! He was but one hour mine;/The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now./Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;/Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.” In this interpretation, the word “sun” is a melancholy pun on “son.”

6. Why doesn’t the writer with the largest English vocabulary in history show greater evidence for his education?

Listening to the anti-Stratfordians, one would think that reams of documentation existed for all students in 16th-century Stratford except William Shakespeare. To the contrary, very few school records survive for any of Shakespeare’s Stratfordian contemporaries. Also, there are anecdotes, with some possible supporting evidence, that young Shakespeare worked as a schoolmaster in Lancashire during his so-called “lost years.” If true, this would suggest that by then, young William had acquired enough knowledge to pass on to others.

7. Why didn’t Shakespeare write plays and poems after retiring?

First, only three years elapsed between Shakespeare’s retirement in 1613 and his death in 1616. In 1613, during a performance of one of his last plays, Henry VIII (co-written with John Fletcher), the Globe caught fire and was badly burned. Afterwards, Shakespeare sold his shares in the company and retired to Stratford. The burning of the Globe and his divestment from his theatre company may have given him a different outlook on playwrighting for the next three years. Second, if he had written works in retirement, with whom would he have shared them? Not with his illiterate family. And what is the likelihood that such works would have survived outside the city? Also, after his retirement, Shakespeare continued to be involved in real estate in both London and Stratford, so that may have been where he put his energies.

8. None of Shakespeare’s plays are set in contemporary England, yet he never traveled outside the country’s borders, and his plays demonstrate a great knowledge of foreign lands.

The theatre was a suspect undertaking in Elizabethan London as a possible breeding ground for sedition. In fact, in the years before, the theatre was illegal, and it was only legalized by Queen Elizabeth shortly before Shakespeare’s birth. Because of this, authors had to be careful to avoid any appearances of inciting treason. One way for a writer to achieve this was to set his plays in the distant past or in foreign lands. As a result, none of Shakespeare’s plays are set in contemporary England (and the one that arguably may be, The Merry Wives of Windsor, has a lead character from the 14th century, Sir John Falstaff). While there is no evidence that Shakespeare had ever been outside Britain, books with information about foreign lands existed at the time, books that the writer could have read.

9. An early image of Shakespeare’s monument in Stratford shows the man holding a sack and not a pen.

The image that Emmerich shows is from a 1656 book, The Antiquities of Warwickshire by Sir William Dugdale, but to quote Wickipedia, “the engraving was done from a sketch made in 1634 and, like other portrayals of monuments in [Dugdale’s book], is not accurate.”

10. Shakespeare’s will does not include any literary property, whether his own or by others.

Again, presumably all of Shakespeare’s literary output was the property of his theatrical company or the Earl of Southampton, not himself. Also again, why would he leave any literary properties by others to a family who couldn’t read?

When all is said and done, I’ll probably see Anonymous when it is released. As far as I’m concerned, anything that casts William Shakespeare in a prominent light is a net positive. I only hope that audiences approach the film with skepticism and regard it as historically accurate as Shakespeare in Love. But given America’s fondness for conspiracy theories — from the identity of J.F.K.’s assassin to 9/11 being an inside job — that may be too much to ask.

Black & White, Part Three

2011-10-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I talked about some color films that I wish had been made in black & white. For this one, I’d like to talk about some films that I’m glad are already in black & white. These movies might have been made in color with relative ease, but the fates, to my eternal gratitude, deemed otherwise.

Although three-color Technicolor had been available since 1932 — with the first three-color feature film, Becky Sharpe, released in 1935 — the process was quite expensive, tripling a production’s cost. Requiring three different rolls of film for each take, Technicolor movies in those early years were usually short subjects, animated cartoons, or highly prestigious features like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939). But in 1951, with the introduction of Eastmancolor, a color process needing only one roll of film, polychrome features became more affordable and, because of the movies’ rivalry with the new medium of television, more common.

However, by the mid-1950s, Hollywood saw a film’s sale for TV broadcast as its most lucrative aspect, and since most television was still in black & white, the number of polychrome feature films actually declined. With the arrival of color TV a decade later, virtually all Hollywood features were shot in color by 1967.

The five monochrome movies mentioned below — each, as it happens, from a different genre — were made during the years of color’s ascension. So, had events worked out differently, a polychrome film may very well have been made instead. But had these films been made in color, I don’t think that I would appreciate them quite as much as I do.

High Noon (1952)

Technicolor westerns had started as early as Henry King’s Jesse James in 1939. While many westerns by the early 1950s were still shot in black & white, the trend was towards color. The year 1952 saw the release of color westerns like Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River and Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, and the next year would see Shane, The Naked Spur, and others. So, it’s easy to imagine the producers of High Noon wanting their western in polychrome as well. Instead, Fred Zinnemann’s chamber drama of a horse opera was made in black & white (more for economic reasons, I understand, than for any other). In color, westerns could revel in the majesty of their wide-open-spaces settings, as well as hint at the glory of Manifest Destiny, as good people settled the American West. But High Noon portrays its western denizens in a more ambivalent light.

With an old enemy coming to town and promising to gun him down at “high noon,” a small-town sheriff (Gary Cooper) hopes to deputize a posse and prevent any gunplay — but he can’t find any townspeople to volunteer and has to face his enemy’s gang on his own. High Noon’s black & white cinematography drains the town of any high-minded qualities and robs its story of any sense of moral triumph in the settling of the Wild West. In other words, the film casts a rather cynical eye on figures usually eulogized by popular culture, which, given the mythologizing splendor associated with the western genre, would have been harder to achieve in color. It also seems that director Zinnemann was something of a fan of black & white: when Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn hired Zinnemann to direct the film adaptation of the novel From Here to Eternity (1953), the mogul envisioned a movie in color, but the director talked him into making it in monochrome.

Seven Samurai (1954)

Japan’s first color feature, Carmen Comes Home (カルメン故郷に帰る), was released in 1951, with notable color films like Gate of Hell (地獄門, 1953) following in the subsequent years. Akira Kurosawa might have shot his epic Seven Samurai (七人の侍) in color, but he didn’t. And we know the reason: the director was dissatisfied with the color processes of the time; in fact, Kurosawa wouldn’t make a color feature until 1970. I’m glad that Seven Samurai is in black & white. Like the Hollywood western in the context of the U.S., Japan’s samurai genre has a tendency to glorify the bygone years. This effect is redoubled when the films are in color: the scenery and landscapes of a historical past shown in full hue sanctify the olden days as heroic, aiding a sense of majesty and epic sweep. Such a rarefied setting suits the samurai genre’s stories of skilled swordsman besting their foes with impossibly impeccable dances of the blade.

But Seven Samurai isn’t a generic samurai movie. For one thing, its title characters are not, in fact, samurai; they are rōnin, warriors without a master. In fact, to call them samurai is slightly subversive. A samurai, strictly speaking, is an underling to the aristocracy, not to the lower orders, and class divisions throughout Japanese history were extremely strict. By calling these rōnin “samurai,” the film implies that the peasant villagers who employ these masterless warriors have impudently assumed the place of those higher on the social scale. Also, the swordfights in the film are not the perfectly choreographed duels typical of the samurai genre but the kind of flailing swordplay more common in the world outside the theatre. In color, Seven Samurai would have had a monumental grandeur, and this, in turn, would have glorified the on-screen actions that Kurosawa wants to deglamorize; it would have been one more mythologization of a past in need of greater humanization. In color and widescreen, the film’s Hollywood western adaptation, The Magnificent Seven (1960), comes across as just another (though quite well-done) epic hagiography of the Wild West’s settling. But in a standard-aspect-ratio black & white, Seven Samurai strips its story of a heightened sense of derring-do, showing battles not for glory, but for sheer survival. In color, the film would be received as just another samurai movie. In black & white, it’s clearly something more than that.

The Apartment (1960)

Romantic comedies tend to be cute and overly optimistic. The idea of two people falling in love while talking in zingers warms the cockles of our hearts by assuring us that true human tenderness does indeed exist, appealing to the romantic in all of us. And color cinematography in romantic comedies is often used to highlight the hopefulness and idealism that we associate with boy meeting girl. But some romantic comedies — some sterling examples of the genre, in fact — are not based on candy-coated optimism but more on the disenchanting aspects of human existence and sustenance. One case in point is Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. The film begins with an amusing but cynical situation: a low-level employee at a large New York insurance firm (Jack Lemmon) lets some of his superiors use his apartment for their extramarital affairs; he does this both in hopes of a promotion and to keep his job. When the company head (Fred MacMurray, in his best role) finds out, he monopolizes the apartment for his own illicit liaison. The worker is crushed when he learns that the unmarried elevator operator he’s taken a shine to (Shirley MacLaine) is the boss’s mistress. However, her suicide attempt at his apartment throws the two together.

This set-up, to put it mildly, does not exactly have “romantic comedy” stamped all over it. Adultery, attempted suicide, cravenly clinging to one’s workaday job — these aren’t topics that rouse our most idealistic selves. Yet, Wilder manages to wring a witty and romantic story with a happily-ever-after ending out of such unpromising material. The Apartment’s black & white cinematography conveys Wilder’s jaded view of his protagonist’s dilemma and the general dearth of human warmth in the big, cavernous city. But monochrome is still versatile enough to brighten the screen when the boy finally gets the girl. I can’t envision The Apartment being as effective in color. In the flatly lit, eye-lulling polychrome of early-1960’s Hollywood, the Lemmon character’s ultimate renunciation of his superiors and their world wouldn’t have resounded quite so triumphantly.

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (1964)

In the black & white of A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles scamper and romp with an abandon that recalls the silent comedies of cinema’s earliest years. The downscale associations that many viewers have with monochrome recalls rock & roll’s humble, unprestigious, underdog origins. Also, director Richard Lester’s use of hand-held photography and location shooting — as well as the story’s picaresque structure — recalls the European New Wave films that had become so influential at the time. But where so many of these New Wave features focused on stories of social discontent with downbeat endings, A Hard Day’s Night is a musical comedy (sans love story) fueled by rock & roll: as though the disruptive film grammar of the New Wave had finally found a musical and cultural companion to give an optimistic voice to the camera’s critical eye.

But while A Hard Day’s Night is, to me and many others, unimaginable in color, the film might have been shot that way if its producers had realized just how popular the Beatles were at the time, and how long they would last. According to the making-of documentary on the film’s DVD, Lester says that shooting A Hard Day’s Night in black & white wasn’t a major artistic decision: he had only a short time to make and release the movie, and monochrome was Britain’s default film stock at the time. Of course, once the Beatles’ first film had cleaned up at the box office, their second, Help!, a send-up of James Bond-style thrillers (also directed by Lester), was given a bigger budget and shot in polychrome. That A Hard Day’s Night has proven the more enduring of the two affirms the power of its black & white images.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965)

Sometimes, I think that Orson Welles was physically incapable of making a bad film. And of his 13 completed features, all but three of them are in a shadow-etched black & white. Welles’s employment of the monochrome image is nothing short of extraordinary. Even when using cinematographers whose work for other directors is unexceptional, Welles creates visuals with a depth and dynamism unlike any others. One of cinema’s great ironic tragedies is that one of its greatest directors labored in the film industry for over four decades but finished only a baker’s dozen of titles. And one of cinema’s great joys is that all of them range from good to superlative, including perhaps the best film ever made, Citizen Kane (1941). Another Welles gem is one of his three Shakespeare adaptations, Chimes at Midnight, the actor-director’s condensation of the four plays featuring the character of Sir John Falstaff.

Co-produced by one of the men behind the James Bond films, Harry Saltzman, and made at the same time as a number of Hollywood historical epics, it’s something of a miracle that Chimes at Midnight wasn’t shot in color. If it had been, I think that Wells’s more intimate take on Shakespeare’s stories would have been overwhelmed by the pageantry. Color would have needlessly gilded and distracted from Shakespeare’s poetic dialogue, instead of complementing the words, as the film does, with more elemental visual forms. And color might have unwittingly glorified the gut-wrenching sequence of the Battle of Shrewsbury, which, in monochrome, distills the soldiers’ grisly combat into the quintessence of war’s brutality and barrenness. My favorite Shakespeare film, Chimes at Midnight is a wistful eulogy to “Merrie England” and, fittingly, Welles’s final finished feature in black & white, a tool he used so masterfully.

Black & White, Part Two

2011-09-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I talked about my weird habit of watching the DVDs of some color films in black & white on my TV. I also tried to articulate some of the aesthetic rewards I get from watching black & white movies in general, giving some indication, I hope, of why I would resort to such a peculiar way of viewing these films. Now, I don’t watch all of my DVDs in black & white, and there are many color films that I like a lot (I particularly like westerns in color). But black & white cinematography is a vanishing art form that deserves special attention. For this post, I’d like to talk a bit about the color movies that I do like watching in monochrome. When I’m done, I hope that my pigment expunctions won’t seem so strange to you.

For starters, you might wonder how I got into this habit of watching color films in black & white. It all started with Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (花樣年華 , 2000). Watching Wong’s story of an early-1960s extra-marital affair on the big screen reminded me of the films of the great Italian director Michaelangelo Antonioni. Where Wong’s earlier films had been photographed (in color by the amazing Christopher Doyle) in a kinetic cinéma-vérité style, the director rendered In the Mood for Love, inspired by the black & white Chinese-language melodramas of earlier decades, in a more stately manner. Instead of fast-paced, hand-held cinematography, Wong slowed down his camera to float serenely and capture the subtle, unspoken emotions of his socially repressed characters, like Antonioni had done in his best films. Given all this, I wondered from my first viewing what In the Mood for Love would look like in an era-evoking, Antonioni-esque black & white. I wondered this even though the film beautifully uses a broad color palette in very intricate and deliberate ways, especially in lead actress Maggie Cheung’s parade of ornately patterned and pigmented cheongsams (her form-fitting Chinese dresses).

After I bought In the Mood for Love on DVD a few years ago, the question continued to haunt me: How would this majestic movie look in black & white? I didn’t know where my TV remote’s color control was at the time, but I decided to find it after a couple viewings of the film. I located the button and turned the color all the way down. I was delighted by what I saw. Although the image was muddy in places (see Part One), the overall look of the film shimmered in silver. Not only did the image remind me of the Antonioni of L’Avventura (1960) and L’Eclisse (1962), but black & white also did a better job of replicating In the Mood for Love’s dilapidated atmosphere of Hong Kong (actually filmed in Thailand) before the island became a chrome-covered economic powerhouse. In addition, the absence of color did more to suggest the lead characters’ absence of emotional freedom, and Maggie Cheung’s face looked absolutely opalescent emoting in monochrome. Even her colorful cheongsams still looked good in black & white. I’ve viewed my DVD of In the Mood for Love a number of times since then, but in all that time, I’ve never watched it in color.

The “juvenile delinquent” genre started with a handful of B exploitation movies like Jail Bait (1954), Female Jungle (1955), and Hot-Rod Girl (1956), films seemingly designed more to make a quick buck with a sensationalistic subject than serious dramatic meditations on the topic. But Rebel Without a Cause (1955), directed by Nicholas Ray, marked an interest in the genre by one of the major studios, Warner Brothers. I understand that the movie was originally intended to be shot in black & white, but the studio switched to color and a bigger budget to take advantage of lead actor James Dean’s burgeoning stardom. I don’t know if that story is true. It’s just as likely that Warner Brothers had always intended a prestige production to lift the juvenile-delinquent genre beyond the exploitation market. But it’s always seemed to me that a “prestige” production of a juvie movie is about as incongruent as Lawrence Welk playing death metal.

While most juvenile-delinquent exploitation pictures of the studio era ended with an obligatory denunciation of youth led astray, the messy, rough-hewn atmosphere of those low-budget, black & white toss-offs captured and inadvertently affirmed the rebellious spirit of the kids on the screen (a good quality to distract from the “kids” being played by actors in their 30s). To me, watching Rebel Without a Cause in monochrome replicates that low-budget atmosphere and better conveys the paroxysmal cinema stylings of director Ray, a bit of a rebel himself. Also, the first time I watched Rebel Without a Cause was as a young kid on a black & white TV, and I was struck by the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting of the opening scene. But when I saw the movie in color on a big screen for the first time, the scene looked much less compelling. Now, when I watch Dean’s iconic movie, I do so — you guessed it — with my TV’s color turned down. Yep, I wish that Rebel Without a Cause had been filmed in black & white. However, if it had, I’m certain that post-1950s, more monochrome-averse audiences would regard it as dated; they would not have embraced it in black & white the way they have embraced it in color. And the film — and maybe even James Dean himself — would not be the iconic avatar of discontented youth that has endured for decades.

Lou Ye’s underrated Chinese film Suzhou River (苏州河, 2000) takes place in two narrative realms. One is the ostensibly “objective” Shanghai of the unseen Narrator (Hua Zhongkai) and his disenchanted girlfriend Meimei (Zhou Xun). The other is the Narrator’s more subjective imagining of the backstory of ex-con Mardar (Jia Hongshen) and his lost love Moudan (also Zhou Xun). The Narrator imagines this strand of the film’s story because of Meimei’s growing friendship with Mardar. The film’s story of Mardar and Moudan is a heartbreaking tale of love betrayed. But we never know if what the Narrator imagines actually happened — it’s all in his head. Even when Mardar and Moudan meet again at the end of the film, it’s all envisioned by the Narrator: we don’t know if the event transpired this way or how it led to the young couple’s fate. I’ve always wanted to see Suzhou River draw a greater visual distinction between the two narrative worlds, so when I watch the film on DVD, I watch the “objective” portion in all its exuberant color, but I watch the story of Moudan and Mardar in black & white. Monochrome endows this portion of the film with the frenetic energy of the 1960s New Wave, as it captures the ethereality of a fantasy world. And it’s easy to assume that the Narrator’s daydreams would be in black & white: he is, after all, a videographer by profession, so he would likely have a cinematic imagination. Another advantage, for me, of watching Suzhou River in monochrome is that it’s shot on a high-contrast color film stock that looks good in black & white. A single film cutting between color and monochrome may seem like a shopworn device to some cinephiles, but in the case of Suzhou River, it enhances the complex and chimerical story.

I don’t like all of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003), Quentin Tarantino’s tributary pastiche of Asian and occidental action movies (which, as its title suggests, was followed by a sequel), but I do like the episode in the film titled “Showdown in the House of Blue Leaves.” In this lengthy segment, the lead character, a former assassin known as the Bride (Uma Thurman), seeks bloody revenge on yakuza donna and erstwhile colleague O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). The world of the film makes no pretense to be the world of the audience: actions and ambiance are hightened to mimic a hyperbolic, over-the-top actioner. In this spirit, Kill Bill appropriately exaggerates its color scheme with bold saturated hues, in most sequences, that would seem more at home in a comic book than in the off-screen world. The “Showdown” sequence has slightly more muted colors, but not by much. This may be to evoke the female assassin of the color Japanese action movie Lady Snowblood (修羅雪姫, 1973), whose hairstyle and white kimono are the model for O-Ren’s appearance in her sword-fight scene.

However, at one point during the Bride’s battle with O-Ren’s henchmen, Kill Bill suddenly switches to black & white for only three and a half minutes. I can’t see anything in the story that would motivate this fleeting use of monochrome (the Bride pulls out a henchman’s eyeball, but so what?), so I’m sure it’s partly a salute to Japan’s black & white action movies. Examples of the genre as late as Samurai Rebellion (上意討ち拝領妻始末) and Samurai Wolf II (牙狼之介2：地狱斩) in 1967 and Kill! (キル) in 1968 were still being made in black & white, when most other Japanese features had long ago adopted color. In fact, I think that in Kill Bill, Tarantino’s fondness for Japanese action movies from the 1960s explains the sequence’s early-’60s atmosphere, especially in the women’s clothing and hairstyles. I like all kinds of black & white cinematography, but the look of Japanese monochrome movies from the early-’60s is my favorite: there must have been something about monochrome film stock in that place and time that gave it such intriguing high contrasts between the blacks and the whites and gave it such silvery grays. I can’t reproduce this kind of monochrome by turning down the color on my TV screen, but because I like the Japanese films of the early 1960s so much, and because the “Showdown” sequence’s costuming conjures up that era, I like to watch that section of Kill Bill in black & white.

Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) is a bit different. Like a lot of other viewers, I suppose, when I first saw this movie, I was overwhelmed by its opulent japonaiserie and its rarity as a Hollywood production with Asian lead characters. It only gradually dawned on me that this Dickensian rags-to-riches story, with its plucky Japanese heroine who struggles against patriarchal oppression the only way she can — with her beauty — ultimately condones the patriarchy that oppresses her. If lead character Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang) can overcome her cruel circumstances with grace, determination, and talent, the film seems to say, then those (very picturesque) circumstances couldn’t have been all that bad. The constraints that Sayuri’s domineering society place on her come across as her necessary, character-building means for growth and self-realization — a relatively positive stepping stone toward female empowerment — a bit like the difficult steps in a Shaolin monk’s martial-arts training. Instead of giving a broader glimpse into why her hierarchical society forces her into very circumscribed roles, the story reduces its conflicts to a soap-operatic rivalry between Sayuri and her nemesis Hatsumomo (Gong Li). Moreover, Sayuri polishes her beauty by tormenting her body before selling it to the highest bidder, this in order to achieve her desired social status. And Sayuri’s ultimate triumph is complete when she becomes — don’t you envy her? — the mistress of a married and much older man, which the movie portrays in a favorable light. While the film does cast an occasional critical eye on Sayuri’s circumstances, the criticism never intimates a means of female empowerment outside of catering to the expectations of men.

Compared to the similar-themed films of the late Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, who spent a lot of celluloid criticizing the plight of women in both old and new Japan, Memoirs of a Geisha does more to soothe the audience than awaken it to injustice. Granted, Mizoguchi often relied on downbeat endings to drive home his critical points, endings that are anathema to today’s Hollywood and presumably not an option for Marshall’s movie. So, perhaps the comparison is a little unfair. Still, when I watch Memoirs of a Geisha, I like to imagine the Mizoguchian movie that might have been, that might have done less to dazzle the eye and more to challenge the mind. Therefore, when I watch my DVD of Memoirs of a Geisha, not only do I turn the color all the way down, but I also turn on the disc’s English subtitles and French soundtrack. (If the DVD had a Japanese soundtrack, I’d listen to that instead.) Through the monochrome and between the lines, I can catch glimpses of that phantom feminist film that Hollywood will never make.

Black & White, Part One

2011-09-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

I’m a nut for black & white movies. All things being equal, I’m liable to find a monochrome image much more fascinating than an image in color. I’d usually rather watch a black & white movie up on the big screen than a color one. Flipping through the channels of my TV, a black & white image will command my attention and take my finger off the remote in a way that color images seldom do. But I also do something on occasion that confirms my enthusiasm for monochrome (and maybe confirms my slipping grip on sanity as well): there are a number of color movies that I prefer to watch on my TV in black & white. Before you ship me off to Bellevue, I’d like to say more about that, and more about black & white in general.

What is it about black & white cinematography that I find so fascinating? I’m sure that part of its appeal to me is nostalgic. When I was growing up, local television stations would regularly broadcast vintage black & white movies, which is how I discovered cinema in the first place. As a kid, I enjoyed those gentle monochromatic universes with their simpler conflicts and guaranteed happy endings — insulated from the realism of lived experience — that seemed easier for a young boy to take in than the grittier contemporary fare (only later would I learn about the Hollywood Production Code, which mandated that films of that era be family-friendly). But even then, my young mind wondered why more recent films didn’t use the option of shooting in black & white.

As I grew (or at least got older), I developed a taste for more unidealized views of the world and for non-Hollywood films. Then, black & white came to mean something new to me: since many of the canonized “great” motion pictures had been shot in monochrome — The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Citizen Kane, La Strada, The 400 Blows, Through a Glass Darkly — that kind of cinematography signaled a worthwhile work of art made some time in the past. But while my interest in black & white began with a basis in nostalgia, it didn’t stay there.

‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1919)

Of course, with the rise of color television in the 1960s, viewers have become resistant to monochrome images. And many audiences simply will not watch films that aren’t in color. (I’m told that a major reason why Peter Jackson produced his 2005 color remake of King Kong was because younger movie-goers refuse to see the black & white original.) Nowadays, a director or producer will need to have considerable clout with the studio brass in order to make a Hollywood-financed movie in monochrome: Lenny (1974), Manhattan (1979), Raging Bull (1980), Rumble Fish (1983), and Schindler’s List (1993) are all by big-name directors tackling important themes. But even then, a director’s pull is sometimes not enough. I understand that Martin Scorsese expressed an interest in wanting to shoot his Hustler sequel, The Color of Money (1986), in black & white (like its progenitor) but was quickly overruled by the studio (imagine how ironic the title would be if Scorsese got his way). And I heard something similar regarding Brian De Palma and The Untouchables (1987). Except for its use in commercials and isolated vignettes in feature films or TV shows, black & white cinematography appears to be all but extinct.

Scorsese’s ‘The Color of Money’ (1986): colorless

So, why do I watch some color films in black & white? Part of it is my own resistance to this vanishing of monochrome in contemporary cinema, as well as evoking another era of filmmaking, but that’s not the whole story. The visuals of most movies are rendered more ordinary by color. Even in those films where the color has been adjusted to make the picture somewhat non-naturalistic (such as 2000’s Tears of the Black Tiger), polychrome’s imitation of the off-screen world will still usually lead to an uncritical acceptance of the image as little more than a “window on the world.”

By contrast, monochrome cinematography emphasizes the compositional form of the image over a naturalistic mimicking of the objects within the frame. This is something I first noticed as a kid while watching black & white horror movies from the 1930s and ’40s on TV. This characteristic of the monochrome image intrigued me as a youngster, and as I watched more and different kinds of black & white movies, I became more attuned to how the figures were arranged and represented on the screen than I was when watching a color image, especially one whose verisimilar depiction of the world practically pleaded to be taken for granted.

In other words, black & white cinematography encourages greater activity on the part of the audience to create the world on the screen — to recognize the lived off-screen world, with its myriad pigments and hues, in the positionings of the various shades of black, white, and gray within the frame. So, watching a film in black & white is comparable to the way a viewer recognizes the lived world in the blatant brushstrokes of an Impressionist painting. This more active spectatorship also requires the viewer to infer color upon the monochrome elements when necessary. Below is a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s black & white comedy Modern Times (1936). Although the gag in this clip hinges on the color of an object, that object, to the viewer, is not the color it’s supposed to be. Because the audience must “read” a different color into the object than the one it is on the screen, this makes the scene funnier, I think, than it would have been if shot in Technicolor: enlisted to “complete” the scene’s coloration, the viewers have a greater involvement in the on-screen event and thus a greater engagement with the playing-out of the gag:

Black & white can also endow a film with certain qualities more difficult to achieve with color. A striking example is the difference between the black & white movies and the color movies directed by Yasujiro Ozu. I’ve written elsewhere that I’m not a big a fan of Ozu’s films, but I still respect his unusual style (low-to-the-ground camera angles, eyeline mismatches, lingering shots without people in them, etc.), a style that seeks to represent a frame of mind that could be called spiritual or transcendent. Although Ozu’s stories, taken as a whole, strike me as disagreeably reactionary, he does seem to capture a meditative atmosphere in his movies’ quieter moments.

Ozu’s black & white ‘Tokyo Story’ (1953)

Of his postwar family dramas, the ones in black & white instill these scenes, where little overt action is taking place, with a sense of the ephemerality of human existence and (especially in his unpeopled shots) the enduringness of a world that will go on when the characters — or even all of humanity — are no more, this despite his stories themselves being decidedly human-centered. Because people don’t perceive the world in monochrome, Ozu’s use of black & white places the audience at a remove from the world of the characters. By rendering these relatively static, relatively mundane scenes in black & white, Ozu displaces an anthropocentric view of his characters with a potential perspective unbounded by a human lifetime, a perspective where the human-valued phenomenon of color is superfluous. Despite their regressive qualities in other respects, Ozu’s black & white films hint at a plane of existence beyond the mortal world.

Ozu’s color ‘An Autumn Afternoon’ (1962)

When Ozu turned to color in 1958, his films lost this atmosphere of ethereality. His polychrome images harden their subjects into concrete material objects solidly existing in the here and now. Because naturalistic color encourages the viewer to take the image at face value, any non-anthropocentric intimations are harder to perceive in the director’s polychrome images. In color, Ozu’s films don’t quite capture the transcendental atmosphere of their black & white brethren, even though the director retains his unusual close-to-the-ground, jump-cutting film grammar. As a result, his color scenes lacking in major events seem all the more uneventful.

In trying to describe Ozu’s use of black & white, the word “timeless” comes most readily to mind. His monochrome films have an air of “timelessness” about them — a sense that what is transpiring on the screen need not be rooted in any one era — in a way that his color films do not. In fact, his color films look dated by comparison. But “timeless” isn’t an especially helpful word: all things material, including film, are of a time, regardless of appearances. Still, Ozu’s color films appear instantly located in a particular time and place while his black & white films do not.

So, turning down the color on my TV set can bring out qualities in a film that aren’t so apparent when watching them in full hue. Although watching a color film in monochrome doesn’t automatically endow the movie with an Ozu-like sense of the transcendent (even Ozu’s polychrome films seen in black & white have a hard time producing that effect), it can alter my approach to what is on the screen.

Of course, merely draining a polychrome film of its color doesn’t usually create an ideal black & white image. Color movies, to state the obvious, are made to be seen in color. As such, these movies are shot on color film stocks, and most of them, especially today, capture a wider range of tones than most black & white film stocks can. For an ideal black & white image, the film stock will need a certain amount of contrast to set the photographed objects apart from each other. Most color film stocks don’t use this higher degree of contrast because color acts as its own means of object separation. And even those color film stocks that do have a higher degree of contrast are often lit more to emphasize the hues within the image. So, when watching a polychrome movie in black & white, the objects tend to be similar shades of gray that smear into each other, which gives the frame a muddy quality. (For an example, see the color-siphoned frame from Notting Hill [1999] below.)

‘Notting Hill’ (1999) with its color removed: muddy

Also, an ideal black & white image will have its main subjects within the frame “pop,” will have them stand out in relief from less important objects and the background, usually by making the central elements brighter than the others. But because of its film stock’s broader tonal range, a color movie in monochrome will seldom make its important visual elements stand out, and those elements that do “pop” are usually the wrong ones.

The aspects of the color motion-picture image that I have just discussed are given great consideration by cinematographers. Most directors of photography on feature films go to significant lengths to chose film stocks, choose exposure settings, choose the color palette, and carefully fine-tune the hues within the frame for a pleasing and/or thematically informed image. In other words, they put in a lot of work to get the “look” of the film just right. So, if they knew that I watched their many-pigmented movies in black & white, the cinematographers would probably hunt me down and turn my TV set’s color back on.

For the second part of my post, I will talk about a few color films that I prefer to watch in black & white and what I get from watching them that way — unless I’m interrupted by a posse of angry cameramen breaking down my door.

Siskel and Ebert’s ‘Hail, Hail, Black & White,’ Part 1

My Answers to ‘The Movie Ifs Game’

2011-09-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, the website Movie Fan Fare asked its readers to answer a few hypothetical questions. These questions were inspired by the book If... (Questions for the Game of Life) by Evelyn McFarlane and James Saywell, but the website’s queries concerned themselves exclusively with film. Here are Movie Fan Fare’s questions and my answers to them:

1. If you were in charge of casting the movie of your life, who would play you?

I actually asked myself this question several years ago, and in all that time, I haven’t come up with an answer. (If someone else were doing the casting, they’d probably go with Peter Dinklage — if he’s not too rugged.)

2. If you could dine alone with any person from any period in movie history, who would you choose?

Hands down: Groucho Marx (although I’m not sure I could withstand his barbed wit directed at me). If I were in a more romantic mood? Joan Chen (although there’s the matter of the husband thing).

3. If you could change the ending to one movie, what movie would you alter?

Piccadilly (1929): Wilmot and Shosho discover that interracial relationships are not a sin against nature, and so does everyone else around them. The couple get married, and Shosho graduates from dancer to co-owner of the successful nightclub. Happy ending! (I also have an alternate ending to Triumph of the Will, where Hitler announces that he’s going to become a monk, and he returns Germany to democracy. But that one’s a bit less clear to me.)

4. If you were to occupy the world of any movie, which movie’s world would you enter?

The Tahiti of The Bounty (1984).

5. If you could eliminate one movie from the face of the Earth, which movie would it be?

In the real world, I’m on the side of those who say that no movie should be eliminated from history. Free speech and all that. But this is a hypothetical world we’re talking about, and in that world, my answer is Philip Kaufman’s xenophobic, blood-libelous Rising Sun (1993).

6. If you had to switch places with a movie star and live his or her career, which star would you trade places with?

[The author of the post said that he would choose George Clooney, not only because of the actor’s “impeccable good looks,” but also because of his good selection of projects. I also picked Clooney for the same reasons.]

7. If you could have a film composer from any period in movie history write a symphony for you, which composer would you enlist?

My first choice would be Philip Glass — he would write something out of this world. My second choice would be Danny Elfman — he would write something fun. And my third choice would be Nino Rota — he would write something heartbreakingly beautiful.

8. If you were the bad guy in a movie, which film villain would you become?

Scaramanga from the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). I don’t want to kill anyone. But the threads, the women, the private island, the Christopher Lee coolness? I’m there!

9. If you could do something (outside of making a film) that would make movie history, what single thing would you want to accomplish?

To rescue as many lost, decaying, or destroyed movies as I could — especially Juraj Jakubisko’s destroyed Czechoslovak film The Deserter and the Nomads (Zbehovia a pútnici, 1968). I guess I’d want to make up for question 5.

10. If you could add one question to the Movie IFs Game, what question would you submit?

If you could recast any movie from any time with any actors from any time, what would the movie be and who would the actors be? [My answer inspired my post on recasting the role of the Fool in La Strada with Roberto Benigni.]

Foolishly Recasting ‘La Strada’

2011-09-17T18:37:00.000-07:00

In many ways, Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) is a near-perfect film. From its opening shot of the idyllic seashore, the film abruptly switches to a scene of an impoverished mother selling off her child, a scene that might have come from a miserablist Italian neo-realist film. After this, La Strada beautifully balances its somewhat paradisical view of the rustic countryside with its more realistic view of the hardscrabble people who live there. Anthony Quinn’s turn as the cudgel-faced itinerant strongman Zampanò and Giulietta Masina’s as Gelsomina — the clownish, childlike woman he “buys” from her mother and often abuses — remain two of my favorite performances in cinema. The musical score by Nino Rota has rightly become legendary. And Otello Martelli’s camerawork captures both the lyricism and the cynicism of Fellini’s vision.

But in other ways, La Strada bugs me a bit. One way is its depiction of a woman, even one who’s mentally underdeveloped, faithfully sticking by the man who abuses her. Granted, Gelsomina makes one unsuccessful attempt to escape Zampanò, and her innocence makes his brutishness all the more apparent. And Fellini obviously isn’t advocating spousal abuse. So, this issue isn’t enough to repel me from the film.

However, another facet of the film also bothers me whenever I watch it: I think that Richard Basehart was miscast as Il Matto — the Fool.

Richard Basehart in ‘He Walked by Night’ (1948)

Now, I don’t mean to challenge Basehart’s talent as an actor. In the right role, he can be a very compelling screen presence. My favorite Richard Basehart performance is as a serial killer in the film noir He Walked by Night (1948). His handsome face gives the appearance of an all-around regular guy, but the rest of his body language conveys something sinister lurking inside. Speaking very few lines of dialogue for a movie lead, Basehart still seethes with a restless intensity that energizes every scene he’s in. In He Walked by Night, Basehart was perfectly cast. In La Strada? Not so much.

The role of the Fool in La Strada cries out for a performer with a comic on-screen presence. As an actor, Basehart can call upon many traits, but comedic warmth isn’t one of them. The incongruity of the performer to the part is compounded by the choice of the voice actor who dubs Basehart in the Italian-language version of the film. Where Basehart speaks with a moderately deep voice that one would expect from a man of his sturdy bearing and full-grown appearance, the voice synchronized with his lips in La Strada is a high-pitched near-falsetto. To anyone familiar with Basehart’s speech from his other roles, the speaking voice of the Fool is a vexatious distraction. But more than that, Basehart’s solid physicality clashes with the slightness of the Fool’s vocalization. It’s as though the filmmakers tried to compensate for the on-screen actor’s serious demeanor with an ill-fitting comic voice on the soundtrack.

Richard Basehart and Giulietta Masina in ‘La Strada’ (1954)

Okay, so all of this raises the question: Whom would I prefer to see in the role of Il Matto, the role of the Fool?

Of course, proposing to recast a canonical film like La Strada is as heretical to many movie buffs as proposing to recast Citizen Kane (1941) or any other cinema classic. I appreciate these film aficionados respecting movie history as it now stands, but they can rest assured that I have no intention of sneaking into the vaults and replacing La Strada’s footage of Basehart with substitute footage of my own.

I’m merely posing a foolish question, and here is my foolish answer: Roberto Benigni.

Roberto Benigni

I can already hear some readers gagging on their garganelli as they read that last sentence. And I can understand. But I’m not saying that Fellini should have picked comic-actor Benigni over Basehart for the role of the Fool at the time the film was being made. When La Strada was released in September 1954, Benigni was one month away from turning two-years old, and back then, I understand, he didn’t quite have his comedic chops down. I’m merely imagining what a vintage film might have been like if one of today’s talents had been able to fill one of yesterday’s roles. Indulge me for a moment.

Now, like a number of other critics, I agree that Benigni is — to put it mildly — not the most nuanced of actors. For instance, I think that his Academy Award for Best Actor in Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è bella, 1997) was undeserved. That film surprisingly pulls off the unlikely conceit of a Jewish father (Benigni) in a Nazi concentration camp convincing his young son that their imprisonment is only a game, but the Italian comedian delivers a one-note performance in a role that calls for a wide dramatic range. I believe that the statuette was awarded more for the writer-director-star’s offbeat treatment of the Holocaust than for his emotional depth. This particular Oscar can only be rationalized in that this apparently ever-optimistic character in this horrific situation was embodied by Benigni’s singular comic persona.

However, if he had been able to travel back in time and play the part of the Fool in La Strada, Benigni’s modest acting skills would have been compensated by the unique comedic qualities he could have brought to the role. Where Basehart’s solid corporeality weighs down the Fool’s fluttering body, Benigni’s buoyant physicality is imbued with a lightness that billows above the more serious characters in his films. In Benigni’s rubbery face and nonchalant disposition, I can see the character who dispassionately defies death on a tightrope, the character who temerariously taunts the furious Zampanò in one scene and then casually asks for his help changing a tire when they next meet.

Anthony Quinn as Zampanò in ‘La Strada’

Also, had Benigni played the Fool, Zampanò’s manslaughter of such a joyful and gentle soul would have compounded the strongman’s brutish behavior even more, as though he had killed Harry Langdon or Harpo Marx — as though he had killed a true double for Gelsomina. (Perhaps such a spiritual kinship to wife Giulietta Masina, who plays Gelsomina, is why Fellini chose Benigni to star in the director’s final film, The Voice of the Moon [La Voce della luna, 1990].) As it stands, Zampanò’s murder of the serial killer from He Walked by Night just isn’t as effective.

Alberto Sordi in ‘An American in Rome’ (1954)

But you might say to me, “Benigni was still in diapers when La Strada was made. Why even bother imagining such far-fetched transhistorical casting?” Okay, fair point. But I would at least like to see an actor with more comic warmth as the Fool. If a would-be time traveler is too preposterous for you, how about a comedic contemporary of La Strada like Alberto Sordi? After all, he was the star of Fellini’s two previous pictures: The White Sheik (Lo Sceicco bianco, 1952) and I Vitelloni (1953). Which leads me to wonder: Did Fellini offer Sordi the part of La Strada’s Fool? And if the director did, would the movie-star Sordi have accepted this supporting role? As Il Matto himself might say, foolish questions.

For all I know, Fellini’s casting of Basehart as La Strada’s Fool is a stroke of cinematic genius that I’m simply too dense to see. But my foolish imaginings remind me that movie viewers aren’t just passive spectators of the mass or classic images in front of us. In a manner of speaking, we’re co-creators of the way these visions and stories inhabit and interact with our minds, as the phenomenon of fan fiction can show. And — who knows? — maybe our daydreams might eventually intervene in and impact the concrete world beyond our mind’s eye. In that case, maybe my imaginings aren’t so foolish after all.

Scenes from ‘La Strada’

Bruce Springsteen - Empty Sky

2011-09-10T12:39:00.000-07:00

Johnny Clegg and ‘Gumba Gumba Jive’

2011-09-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

I turned instantly into the fan from hell.

I rushed up to him as he was getting ready to sit down at the sushi bar. “I love your music!” I enthused, my voice probably slurring from sake.

Before he lowered himself into his chair, he pulled a cassette from the front pocket of his jeans. The tape inside the casing had wormed its way loose and soon dangled onto the floor. “That’s the new album,” he said in his staccato South African accent. Rolling the tape back into the cassette, he sat in his chair with an air of exhaustion. He must have spent most of the day recording and was now looking forward to a peaceful sushi dinner.

That didn’t stop me. I began to pepper him with my opinions about his songs. I love this song! I love that song! I’m sure a third song came up as well. He seemed to grit his teeth and humor me.

But my most important interjection was the question: What the hell happened to “Gumba Gumba Jive”?

Okay, back up. The beleaguered recording artist was none other than Johnny Clegg, whom I ran into at a Los Angeles sushi restaurant. This must have been 1992, the year before his album Heat, Dust & Dreams — which I probably saw in its primordial state dangling on the restaurant floor — was released. Although he’s a white South African, Clegg (I hope you already know) speaks the Zulu language fluently and mixes indigenous African song styles with Western-derived rock music (just like most black South African musicians do). He famously co-founded the group Juluka with his friend Sipo Mchunu, reportedly the first integrated South African band to play in front of paying audiences, although not always in the usual commercial venues. This was in the days of apartheid, government-enforced racial segregation, in South Africa, so the very existence of a group like Juluka was a political statement. And this political sensibility was often the subject of their sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly anti-apartheid songs, which occasionally led to scuffles with the law.

Born in Britain and raised in South Africa, Clegg grew up fascinated with the indigenous South African musicians around him. This led him to befriend them and learn from them, both music and the local Zulu language. In fact, he became so good at speaking Zulu that he authored a textbook on the subject. This familiarity with and enthusiasm for the local culture allowed Clegg and Mchunu to utilize many African elements in their songs, some of which are written, in whole or in part, in Zulu. When he and Mchunu disbanded in 1985, Clegg formed a second group, Johnny Clegg and Savuka, which continued making music in the same heterogeneous style into the post-apartheid years. Savuka split up in 1997, and after briefly reuniting with Mchunu, Clegg has performed as a solo artist since 2000.

Clegg’s beat-driven music beggars description. Pulse-pounding and infectiously insistent, blending with his rough-at-the-edges tenor, Clegg’s tunes explode with an energy that portends the rising of an intercultural identity too long suppressed. Even his slower numbers like “Asimbonanga,” a threnody for the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela, are more stirring than saddening. But of all the effusive, irresistible, uplifting tunes that Clegg has performed with Savuka, my favorite by far is the exhilarating “Gumba Gumba Jive,” which begins with a rousing riff on drums and electric guitar before detonating with an exuberant dance beat and buoyant melody, as well as with some of the most affirmative lyrics I’ve ever heard:

You’ve got to roll with the punches and change with the times
Don’t let today forget yesterday's smiles
Undermeath all some things never die
We’ve got to listen to the rhythm, keep moving, you and I ...

So, I’m bewildered that “Gumba Gumba Jive” has vanished from the face of the Earth. Or at least from the marketplaces of America.

I first heard “Gumba Gumba Jive” when I bought Johnny Clegg and Savuka’s debut album Third World Child (1987) on cassette. The fourth song on the first side, “Gumba Gumba Jive” jumped out of my speakers in a way that none of the other songs did — and the other songs were very catchy in their own way. In fact, I would recommend all of the songs on Third World Child as outstanding, but “Gumba Gumba Jive” was even more so, a standout from an album of standouts. Later that year, I decided to buy the album on vinyl (this was the B.C.D. era — before compact disks). I purchased the LP in a hurry, so it wasn’t until I got home that I realized that my favorite tune on the album had been excised and replaced with a not-as-good version of the older Juluka tune “Scatterlings of Africa.” I checked my neighborhood record stores, and the other for-sale LPs of Third World Child had also replaced “Gumba Gumba Jive” with the inferior facsimile of the song that had been performed so well by Clegg’s earlier group.

As the years danced by, I would occasionally try to seek out the song, with no luck. About the year 1990, Clegg was a guest on a local radio show (he was probably plugging Savuka’s just-released third album, Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World), and the program invited listeners to call in with their questions. Of course, I called up to ask about “Gumba Gumba Jive.” My voice wasn’t broadcast by the show, but my question was relayed to Clegg. He said something about the album Third World Child being a collection of diverse Savuka recordings made over a period of time and put together by the record company. He made it sound as though he did not have a very great hand in putting the album together and therefore didn’t know why “Gumba Gumba Jive” had first appeared on the record and then disappeared from it. The answer disappointed me, but at least my question got through.

A couple more years went by.

One night, I had just finished eating (and drinking) by myself at a local (and very delicious but not terribly crowded) sushi restaurant. I stood up from my chair at the sushi bar, put on my jacket, picked up my reading material, and got ready to go. Into the small restaurant walked a lone figure. With his curly brown hair, square jaw, strong frame, and piercing eyes, he looked very familiar, but since he was all by himself — no entourage or even a civilian-shielding companion — he couldn’t have been a celebrity. Maybe it was my third sake that made his face look famous. As he selected a chair to sit in and took off his jacket, I said to him: “You look a lot like Johnny Clegg.”

“I am Johnny Clegg,” he answered. You can imagine what happened next. (If not, see above.)

Before I left him alone (to his relief, no doubt), I suggested that he put “Gumba Gumba Jive” on a greatest-hits album. Concentrating on breaking apart his chopsticks, he said that he didn’t really have much say in a project like that. I wished him a good night and staggered ... uh ... walked out of the restaurant, glowing with the gratitude that I just met the celebrity I had most wanted to meet. But I was still a little dissatisfied with the unavailability of “Gumba Gumba Jive.”

In this day of iTunes and mp3 downloads, “Gumba Gumba Jive” still isn’t available for purchase on any of the above-ground commercial websites in the U.S. (But with music-sharing sites, the song isn’t entirely inaccessible.) I can only conclude that “Gumba Gumba Jive” must be entangled in some kind of legal complication.

As for the song’s title, I’m a bit mystified by it. I understand that “gumba-gumba” is South African slang for a portable music player, basically the Zulu equivalent of “ghetto blaster.” So, the title may mean dancing to music being played on a boombox. And Gumba Gumba Records is a division of South Africa’s Gallo Record Company. But “Gumba Gumba” is also the title of a song recorded by the South African kwela group Alexandra Black Mambazo (whose name would later inspire that of the better-known Zulu group Ladysmith Black Mambazo), with Mahlathini on background vocals, sometime in the 1950s and issued on 78 r.p.m. by that country’s division of Columbia Records. All I know about this song is that it has a fan-made YouTube video. But if a legal dispute is indeed behind “Gumba Gumba Jive’s” disappearance, perhaps the older tune is the source of it. I can’t think of any other reason why such a catchy song would become the musical equivalent of Jimmy Hoffa.

Johnny Clegg and Savuka sing ‘The Crossing (Osiyeza)’

Mary McCaslin - Things We Said Today

2011-08-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

Mary McCaslin - Things We Said Today - The best bloopers are a click away

A lot of Beatles fans out there won’t sit still for cover versions of the legendary band’s songs. To many of these listeners, the rock group “owns” every song they ever did, and any cover version will always be a pale imitation of their original recordings. I don’t blame the fans who feel that way. The Beatles are certainly a hard act to follow, and virtually every acetate they made is a miniature masterpiece.

But I believe that any truly great song is never “owned” by any one person (at least, not in the legal sense). To me, if a song can truly stand the test of time, it should be able to stand up to several different musical interpretations as well. When a cover version of a Beatles song is merely following the original recording’s instrumentation, then, I agree, such covers sound uninspired. But different arrangements of these songs can bring out other aspects to them that weren’t all that apparent in the originals.

Which brings me to my favorite Beatles cover: folk singer Mary McCaslin’s acoustic version of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Things We Said Today,” which originally appeared on the Beatles albums A Hard Day’s Night in Britain and Something New in the U.S.

The Beatles’ version is given a full-band arrangement, with all four members chipping in on acoustic and electric instruments to surround the listener with a steady swirl of sound. But McCaslin strips the song down to two acoustic guitars and her solo voice, only occasionally double-tracked at strategic moments. McCaslin’s insistent picking of the guitar strings stresses the bass line and drives the song forward, while also emphasizing the tune’s wistful minor key. In place of the Beatles’ harmonizing vocals, McCaslin’s lone voice refocuses the lyrics as the thoughts of one individual, a quality of many Beatles songs that the group’s harmonies often clouded, and the unsynched double-tracked lyrics conjure the narrator’s haunting thoughts of her beloved.

Are you one of those who say a Beatles song can never be decently covered by another artist? Then listen to Mary McCaslin sing “Things We Said Today,” and see if you don’t change your mind. Somehow, I will know.

Nekkid Hero

2011-08-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I watched a live-action Japanese shot-on-video film, based on a manga (Japanese comic book), about Kekko Kamen, a superheroine who wears a mask, gloves, boots — and nothing else. It was one of the most ridiculous films I have ever seen. A laughable plot, contrived conflicts, unrealistic characters — all of these showed me the absurd lengths to which some filmmakers (if that’s not too generous a word for the creators of Kekko Kamen) will go to put some female skin on the screen.

In addition to being a manga and live-action video series, Kekko Kamen also exists as an anime series. The basic plots of all the episodes — manga, anime, and live-action video — are the same: a young, innocent schoolgirl at a sadistic boarding school run by a sinister and thuggish faculty is tormented by her teachers, often in a lewd and extravagant manner, only to be rescued in the nick of time by the almost-unclad Kekko Kamen, who uses her nude torso to distract the villains while her face-covering mask conceals her identity. Her alter ego is never revealed to us. Each episode begins and ends the same way, leading the serious-minded viewer to ask, “Why don’t the girls just leave the school?” Obviously, Kekko Kamen takes place on an exaggerated alternate Earth where such a question would never be asked and such a peculiarly costumed superhero wouldn’t be arrested for indecent exposure.  

The reason why I mention this absurd exploitation movie is because Kekko Kamen makes farcical use of something that I think is a potentially serious concept: the nude hero. Today, when a nude body appears in story-telling media, that body will usually belong to a female, and her state of undress will signal her defenselessness in the face of the story’s malignant forces (think of the average slasher movie). This is understandable: conflict in stories (the engine of the narratives) is often expressed by violence, and the undressed body — to state the obvious — is not an optimum defense against brute force. So, the narrative idea of nudity as weakness is culturally overdetermined. And the naked human body — an organic locus of being which we all possess and which needs demystification — in a story will signal a potential victim or a work of eroticism, which is a rather limited way to perceive such an essential entity.

But this wasn’t always the case in representational media. Centuries ago, Greek, Renaissance, and Classical artworks expressed nakedness as power in statues and paintings of bare-bottomed Herculeses and Aphrodites seeming to draw strength and vigor from their absence of clothing. Granted, this is only a superficial view: volumes have been written about the nuances of nudity in works of art, how vintage depictions of the underdressed ancient gods were, for example, often a veiled form of eroticism. Still, this tradition in art marked one serious context that depicted nudity as something other than vulnerability and victimization. Could this tradition of nakedness as power be continued in non-erotic audio-visual media for mature audiences?

 But depicting nude women also brings up another issue: the naked female as disempowered sexual object. While this approach is one very legitimate way of addressing this topic, it isn’t the only way. Much scholarship has been written about patriarchal artists and filmmakers using the image of the female nude to “control” feminine representation — and by extension, feminine behavior — in society. But even this academic view is premised on the idea that there is something worth controlling, that women are by their very nature something more than passive objects. Of course, one element that patriarchy usually seeks to control is women’s sexual attractiveness. And such patriarchal means of control can express itself in everything from the burka (keeping attractive women hidden) to the “girlie” magazine (channeling female attractiveness into a benign outlet so that it won’t channel itself into a more subversive one). Such efforts to “control” indicate that female attractiveness — including female nudity — carries its own disruptive power. True, this is a power that can easily be appropriated by patriarchy, but it is a power nevertheless. So, for all the talk of female nudity as disempowering “objectification,” a woman can still utilize her own nakedness as a source of strength — sexual, self-confident, and so on.

However, because nudity as a significant narrative element has been neglected by the more prestigious story-telling media (mainly out of a desire to reach their largest possible audiences, understandably), narrative emphasis on the bare human body has usually been relegated to eroticism or exploitation — hence, a cheaply made and silly toss-off like Kekko Kamen. But if a story were to use a knowingly naked hero or heroine in a serious and/or realsitic situation, what would such a use of nudity look like? For an idea, I would point to media that is, for the most part, disdained, disregarded, or little-seen.

A naked hero in a more solemn vein is Richard Corben’s science-fiction comic Den (also brought to the screen as a segment in the 1981 animated feature Heavy Metal). Den’s story takes place in an alternate, primitive world where fighting the bad guys and monsters sans apparel — as its muscle-bound eponymous hero does — is no big deal. Often grim and bloody but also whimsical, Corben’s comic serves as a serious rejoinder to Kekko Kamen’s laughably ludicrous stories. Still, like the Japanese manga (and the mythology-based paintings before it), Den signals to its readers that nakedness and heroism can only co-exist in a surrogate universe.

‘Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ (1977)

A depiction of heroic nudity on this planet — albeit in one of its remote corners — can be found in the otherwise schlocky and cheesy Italian exploitation movie Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali, 1977), an entry in the so-called “Black Emanuelle” series of soft-core sex films, starring Laura Gemser, a Dutch model of Indonesian descent. In this movie, a civilian expedition of the Amazon — which includes the female photojournalist of the title (Gemser) — crosses into one of the region’s unexplored territories, an area inhabited by brutal and bloodthirsty cannibals. In the film’s climax, when the youngest member of the expedition is captured by the flesh-eaters, Emanuelle strips out of her clothes and walks into the cannibals’ encampment. Pretending to be their fertility goddess, Emanuelle is able to spirit away the equally naked abductee. Only later do the cannibals realize Emanuelle’s ruse and chase after her.

What I like about the scene (when I can ignore the condescending portrayal of the “cannibals”) is that Emanuelle’s nudity becomes an agent of her personal power. The cannibals are so in awe of her naked body, and the confidence with which she wields it, that they surrender their prisoner to her. For all its obvious emphasis on the erotic, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals is notable for its depiction of a woman who doffs her clothes and knowingly walks into a dangerous situation, and who escapes that situation precisely because she is naked to begin with. In one of those rare moments in the movies, a woman’s nudity is not a mark of vulnerability or victimization — but of strength. It’s difficult to think of a similar scene in all the rest of cinema.

However, a maker of more prestigious movies, Hungarian art-film director Miklós Jancsó, also uses nudity in an unconventional way. While in some of his films, Jancsó depicts the naked body as a sign of his characters’ humiliation and victimization by the antagonists, he depicts it in another way in many of his other movies. While Jancsó’s earlier films took place in naturalistic settings with traditional, story-driven narratives, his later ones became more allegorical, with characters representing larger themes rather than individuals with believable motives and behaviors. In these films, Jancsó utilizes nudity more for its symbolic value than as an indication of a character’s psychology.

One such film is Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1972). Notionally based on a failed Hungarian peasant uprising in the late 19th century, Jancsó’s “story” is more of a meditation on the issues surrounding how a proposed workers’ state would be philosophically different from the hierarchical capitalistic order with which it would have to struggle to come into being. The film is set entirely on an open field, but the place is more of a conceptual site for the conflicting agencies of Hungarian history to interact than it is an actual physical space. Consequently, Red Psalm doesn’t focus on any of the peasants or members of the ruling order individually; the people only represent the classes they belong to, with only a few of the characters differentiated from their groups. Made at a time when Hungary was a communist regime, this proselytizing film unambiguously takes the side of the proto-communist peasants, painting the ruling class and the army that supports it as less than fully human. In this context, Jancsó’s employment of nakedness serves to emphasize the peasants’ humanity, in contrast to the inhumanity of their uniformed and well-dressed opponents.

Miklós Jancsó’s ‘Red Psalm’ (1972)

In one scene, when the army threatens the rebellious peasants’ village, three women workers bare their breasts to ward away the soldiers. Then the three walk off into the distance, removing all their clothing. The soldiers charge towards the women, apparently to attack them, but ultimately run or ride past them. The other peasants surround the nude women protectively as the soldiers rush away from them. In this scene, the naked body proclaims a state of defiance. It serves as an organic instrument with the innate power to keep its opponents at a distance, at least temporarily. The three peasant women reappear throughout Red Psalm in various states of undress, personifying the fecundity of the land and the workers closeness to it. This scene is another depiction of nakedness more as strength than as weakness.

However, precisely because the film is allegorical, the scene’s portrayal of powerful naked women walking undaunted into danger is just as fanciful and unbelievable as anything in Kekko Kamen (in a more naturalistic setting, the soldiers would likely attack the women). Red Psalm may be more serious and thoughtful than anything to do with the Japanese manga character, but the Hungarian film is no closer to portraying a practical and true-to-life imagining of naked heroism.

The physical body is a vital part of who we are as human beings, and its unclad state is a reminder of how we came into the world, as well as our being a part of it. For this reason, it seems limiting to relegate depictions of the naked body in our story-telling media primarily to erotic and exploitative cinema. The world of Classical art, for all its limitations, provided images of human nudity (even if primarily in the form of anthropomorphic deities) not solely in the realm of eroticism — and perhaps beyond it. I would like to see films, videos, and other contemporary story-telling media find a similar non-erotic (or not exclusively erotic) way of portraying the naked human body in a serious, verisimilitudinous context. One portrayal could be human nakedness as a sign of strength and power, rather than as a sign of titillation or vulnerability. And works like Kekko Kamen, Den, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, and Red Psalm indicate just how far off such an earnest and naturalistic depiction of naked heroism is.

Perhaps American society will first need to reverse the unclad human body’s social stigmatization. Perhaps its ghettoization into eroticism and exploitation is a reflection of society’s unacceptance of nudity outside very restricted contexts. But if we could get beyond this, we would still need to imagine what a more liberated use of the naked human body in film would look like. And how might it change cinema?

The trailer for ‘Red Psalm’

Film Noir, Part Three

2011-08-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

Here is a post that I originally wrote on the Internet Movie Database:

Still from the trailer for ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

Stylistically speaking, The Big Sleep (1946) is not the most exemplary film noir. The best noir films seethe with hard, stark shadows and heroes (or anti-heroes) feverishly unraveling under ominous circumstances. And The Big Sleep is missing this kind of visual and narrative delirium. The cinematography, compared to other film noirs, is relatively even-toned, and the lead character is too self-assured, and too reassuring to the viewer, to allow the story to spiral into uncertainty. In fact, Foster Hirsch, author of the book Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, considers The Big Sleep to be the most overrated film noir.

However, The Big Sleep boasts something that no other film noir can: the ultimate film-noir actor — Humphrey Bogart — playing the ultimate film-noir character — quintessential hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe. And this distinction more than makes up for any stylistic shortcomings.

I wish that Bogart had done more films as Raymond Chandler’s creation. Wouldn’t it have been terrific if Warner Brothers had shortly afterwards adapted Chandler’s The High Window (a.k.a. The Brasher Doubloon) and The Lady in the Lake with Bogart playing Marlowe, instead of the adaptations that were ultimately made with other actors by other studios? In such a case, maybe Robert Montgomery’s noble experiment of a Hollywood movie seen almost entirely from a subjective camera — which his Lady in the Lake (1947) was — could have been based on a less canonical hard-boiled book. (But Dick Powell’s turn as Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet [1944] is so good that I wouldn’t want to erase it from the history books.)

Some might say that Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, also played by Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), was the more definitive film-noir private eye and wish that Bogart had done more movies as that character instead. But Spade only appeared in that one novel, while Marlowe appeared in a series of novels by Chandler.

Since the actor’s death in 1957, Humphrey Bogart has become an icon, a true star of the cinema whose image and mannerisms are indelibly ingrained in our popular consciousness — so much so that the American Film Institute named him the greatest male screen legend of all time. Bogart has come to define the postwar Hollywood hard-boiled hero as much as John Wayne has come to define the western-movie hero. Even now, when a mystery movie depicts a streetwise sleuth, that character — however tangentially, however unconsciously, and often deliberately — evokes Bogart. And yet, he played fewer investigators in his varied career than his popular image would suggest.

I can’t help wondering what it would have been like if Bogart’s filmography did more to live up to that image of the definitive hard-boiled private eye. And I think that our popular conception of this kind of fictional figure owes more to the character of Philip Marlowe than it does to Sam Spade, whose name is usually invoked in summoning up this kind of detective. For these reasons, I think that a handful of big-budget films with this archetypal actor as this archetypal character would do better justice to the standings of both Bogart and Marlowe in our popular culture and our collective unconscious.

The trailer for ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

I’m a ‘Movie Fan Fare’ Guest Blogger

2011-08-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

The website Movie Fan Fare has posted a review of mine, a condensed version of my blog post about Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure. They posted it Monday, and it’s received 39 comments so far. Not too shabby.

My 10 Favorite Action Films

2011-08-03T18:19:00.000-07:00

I became a movie buff by watching the great art films, character dramas, and romantic comedies of decades past. Those are the kinds of movies that I truly love. When I was becoming aware of the cinema, “action movies” meant Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson or some other monosyllabic marksman blowing away or beating up some two-dimensional bad guy in stories with no emotional depth or narrative complexity. Only the balletic martial-arts moves of Bruce Lee and the other emerging kung-fu stars of Hong Kong provided an alternative, where action did not mean cruelty, and strength did not mean sheer brute force. But as much as I relished their artful acrobatics, the Hong Kong films themselves seemed crudely made and thematically underdeveloped.

Only more recently, in my view, have filmmakers coupled clever and intelligent story lines with action scenes whose cinematic engagement packs the same visceral punch as the physical conflicts they depict. So, I have become an aficionado of action movies fairly late in the game. And by “action movie,” I mean those stories of derring-do, those somewhat pulpy parables where men and women of great physical skill draw upon their best resources to defeat an impending evil. I do not pretend to be a connoisseur — after all, I'm sure that I have seen relatively few Asian or occidental action movies compared to those who seek them out and live on a steady diet of rifles and roundhouse kicks. But of those that I have seen, these are my favorites...

1. SEVEN SAMURAI

Directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1954)

Really more than a mere “action movie,” this tale of seven masterless rônin — who defy the class distinctions of feudal Japan to rescue a peasant village — brims over with keen human insight. The story sensitively explores how the adventure disrupts the lives of both the warriors and the villagers, all of whom are drawn as fully dimensional characters. But the film’s fervid action scenes hold the sprawling story together. Epic in the best sense of the word.

2. YOJIMBO (a.k.a. The Bodyguard)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1961)

Another major work by that Shakespeare of the chambara (and of virtually every other kind of film he directed), Akira Kurosawa. A wandering rônin comes to a small town ruled by two feuding crime families, and he sets them against each other. The story is cunningly clever and complex, matched by the swift precision of the swordfight scenes. As the “bodyguard” of the title, Toshirô Mifune has never been more charismatic. Later remade as the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and the gangster picture Last Man Standing (1996).

3. MAD MAX 2 (a.k.a. The Road Warrior)

Directed by George Miller (Australia/USA, 1981)

Running at a lean 91 minutes, this parable of post-apocalyptic road rage is a no-nonsense story of easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. In a world after nuclear holocaust, an outsider tries to save a village preyed on by marauders. The plot isn’t especially complex, and the characters are little more than action-movie archetypes. But the tautness of the story and the adrenaline-pumping impact of the car-chase scenes thrive on their own. The movie that made an international star of Mel Gibson.

4. PEKING OPERA BLUES

Directed by Tsui Hark (Hong Kong, 1986)

I may be a little prejudiced because this was the first of the “New Wave” Hong Kong action films that I saw, but I still think it’s the best of the bunch. The story is a bit comic-bookish — a ragtag team of republican revolutionaries in post-imperial China struggles against corrupt warlords and an evil gang boss — but it also touches on some surprisingly complex subjects: political commitment, family loyalty, female empowerment, and even transvestism. Director Tsui skillfully balances electrifying action with genuinely hilarious humor, all of which leads to a rousing climax. Pulpy, playful, and unpretentiously profound all at the same time.

5. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

Directed by Ang Lee (Taiwan/ China/USA, 2000)

Okay, so everybody already knows about this critically lauded and surprisingly popular “martial-arthouse” movie. But it has also garnered more than its fair share of hostile comments. Many have argued that it’s not particularly original and that its action scenes pale in comparison to the Hong Kong wuxia movies of the 1960s and ’70s. But Crouching Tiger can boast much better developed characters, a carefully cultivated story, and effective performances by the cast. In addition to having visceral, vibrantly staged fight scenes, this film has soul.

6. ROBOCOP

Directed by Paul Verhoeven (USA, 1987)

The notorious Dutch director’s Hollywood debut not only possesses some gut-wrenching action, a strong story line, and weighty themes of identity and individuality, but the movie is also a very witty political satire. A policeman is brutally killed in the line of duty but resurrected as a crime-fighting android. The man-machine is supposed to have no personality, but the policeman’s memory comes back and discovers high crimes committed by the company that revived him. In addition to its heart-pounding shoot-’em-up scenes, the movie is an incisive meditation on the loss of humanity in a corporate culture. To quote one of the film's bad guys after he has just demolished a building with a munitions-grade firearm, “I like it!”

7. THE TERRA-COTTA WARRIOR

Directed by Ching Siu-Tung (Hong Kong, 1989)

An underappreciated gem from Hong Kong, this swordplay adventure tells a genuinely touching story of a guardsman to China's first emperor who awakens in the 20th century and believes that he’s found his lost love. The mythic narrative and Ching’s deft handling of the martial mayhem would automatically make this movie worth watching, but the film’s real standout is its off-kilter casting. Not only is the dual-role female lead played by dramatic diva Gong Li, but the action hero is played by her then-significant other and art-film director Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, House of Flying Daggers). Just imagine Ingmar Bergman playing John Wayne, and you’ll get an idea of how bizarre the casting is. Still, Zhang makes an effective leading man, and the stars’ off-screen auras never interfere with the gripping story.

8. PROJECT S (a.k.a. Once a Cop; Supercop 2)

Directed by Stanley Tong (Hong Kong, 1993)

Michelle Yeoh reprises her comeback role as Inspector Yang, the by-the-book Chinese policewoman she created in Tong’s Police Story III: Supercop, opposite Jackie Chan. In this superb spin-off, Inspector Yang is summoned to Hong Kong to catch a gang of master thieves, only to learn that the gang is headed by her fiancé (Iron Monkey’s Yu Rong-Guang). Yang’s struggle between her feelings and her duties gives the air-tight story a surprising and effective emotional depth. And the action scenes pack an equally powerful punch. The dubbed and edited version available on video in the U.S. under the title Supercop 2 does no great damage to the original and actually better helps to convey the characters’ emotions to an English-speaking audience.

9. ROMEO MUST DIE

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak (USA, 2000)

Wherefore art thou Romeo? Valid complaints that Jet Li’s “Romeo” ends the movie as more of a platonic pal to his Juliet — and the dehumanizing stereotype of an Asian parent having his own child murdered — have unfortunately overshadowed this film’s strengths. The plot is plausible, intriguing, and easy to follow. The action scenes wallop the eye. And the characters display more emotional depth than the typical pulp-action archetypes. Jet Li’s first Hollywood starring vehicle remains a hard act to follow.

10. THE EAST IS RED (a.k.a. Swordsman III)

Directed by Ching Siu-Tung and Raymond Lee (Hong Kong, 1993)

No movie list is complete without something from the category of weird and whacked out. In this spin-off to 1992’s supernatural swashbuckler Swordsman II, the very feminine Brigitte Lin of Peking Opera Blues goes tranny again by reprising her role as Asia the Invincible, a man who gained magical powers by having himself castrated. Gender is bent past the breaking point as Lin’s ruthless and destructive sorcerer moves easily between male and female identities. The uncertainty of Asia’s sexual identity suggests a similar uncertainty of Hong Kong’s national identity on the eve of its hand-over to China. And this gives the explosive mayhem at the movie’s end an insurgent edge: the cataclysmic climax implies both national anxiety in the face of totalitarian takeover and a fiery display of defiance. Deliciously delirious — and a bit ludicrous in places — but with an urgent undertone of political rebellion.

Recent Discovery: LEGEND OF THE BLACK SCORPION (a.k.a. The Banquet)

Directed by Feng Xiaogang (China/Hong Kong, 2006)

A retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet transposed to tenth-century China, but with a twist — the usurping emperor’s queen (Crouching Tiger’s Zhang Ziyi) is also the prince’s beloved. In other words, imagine Hamlet if Claudius took over the Danish throne and married Ophelia instead of Gertrude. The complexity of the plot and characters matches the sumptuousness of the art direction. The fictional figures of the story are as intricate as those in any drama (which the film aspires to be, hence its less action-oriented alternate title), but the heightened conventions of the kung-fu film — gravity-defying combatants, superhuman swordplay — suffuse the narrative as well. A resplendent combination of high drama and populist entertainment uncommon in occidental cinema.

Another Take on Faith in Politics

2011-07-31T17:41:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Another Side of Bob Dylan’s Voice

2011-07-30T16:58:00.000-07:00

Do you want to know how much angry feedback I got over my blog post about my not liking Bob Dylan’s singing voice? Well ... none actually. In fact, the only feedback I got to it was regarding the post’s illustrative photo. But I can imagine a lot of angry music fans who like Bob Dylan’s voice taking me to task for not appreciating his ragged vocals as much as I enjoy many of the songs he’s written. And I can imagine them being very indignant about it, as people who are passionate about any subject can become. To calm my concocted critics, I’ll add this caveat: I do enjoy his singing on his debut album, the ingeniously titled Bob Dylan.

In fact, I enjoy his singing on his eponymous first album — one of the few Dylan albums I owned previously — so much that I recently bought it on CD. So, why do I like his singing on this album and not others? In light of my previous post, I’ve been asking myself this question since my purchase. I think I may have found an answer.

Unlike the singer’s subsequent albums, Bob Dylan contains very few original compositions, only two out of 13 songs. At the time the record was recorded in 1961 (it was released in 1962), Dylan was known more for his eccentric performances in folk clubs than for his then still-burgeoning songwriting, although he was beginning to be recognized for that as well. Consequently, most of the songs on Dylan’s debut album were coffee-shop standards, whether traditional folk songs or compositions by vintage bluesmen. Of the two original tunes, one, “Talkin’ New York,” is a talking-blues song that isn’t dependent on a singing voice, while the other, “Song to Woody” (a tribute to his hero Woody Guthrie), is an early composition that doesn’t foretell its writer’s coming musical sophistication.

In other words, the writer who would pen hooky melodies like “If Not for You” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” isn’t in evidence. The songs that Dylan sings are elemental in their backroad origins and make use of only limited chord changes. So, such rough-hewn tunes are a good fit with Dylan’s rough-hewn voice.

A compelling case in point is Dylan’s take on the Blind Lemon Jefferson song “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” Where Jefferson’s original version is solid but unruffled, Dylan’s raspy interpretation of the lyrics — “There’s one last favor I’ll ask of you/You can see that my grave is kept clean” — sounds like the final yelp of a perishing mortal actually in his last throes. This lends the song a strong sense of desperation that Jefferson’s version only hints at. The other regional songs on Bob Dylan also make good use of the singer’s scarred voice to convey the urgency of the lyrics.

But after the singer’s eponymous debut album, his subsequent records featured his own songs, relegating traditional tunes to the occasional anomaly. And his original songs — as all music lovers know — went well beyond the primitivism of the folk standards that inspired him. On his own, Dylan came up with more intricate melodies whose chord changes created inspired passages that could instantly catch the listener’s ear. Unfortunately, Dylan’s gift for writing melodies outgrew the mere functionality of his voice. These songs now called for vocalists who could hit and give shape to these compelling notes and lyrics, something that Dylan’s straggly voice was seldom able to achieve.

For example, compare the songwriter’s own vocalization of “If Not for You” to George Harrison’s cover version on his album All Things Must Pass. Dylan’s original vocal only skims over the song’s melodic lines, not capturing every note, thus leaving a full vocalization more in the listener’s head than in the ear. By contrast, Harrison’s cover (a version that many of the song’s fans consider definitive) gives unpretentious voice to all of the notes and does justice to every melodic line — in addition to boasting a buoyant acoustic-based arrangement. The difference between the two versions is like that between a demo and a finished recording.

If you like the way Bob Dylan sings, I don’t want to interfere with your enjoyment. And I agree that, as with the case of the album Bob Dylan, there are certain kinds of songs where his abrasive voice is an asset. But the talented tunesmith outpaced the singer’s pedestrian voice long ago. I admire Dylan’s stature as a tireless and undaunted force in both music and popular culture. But his songs now demand skillful singers who can give full voice to their tuneful melodies. Bob Dylan’s captivating songs now demand a singer better than Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan sings ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’

Westerns

2011-07-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

John Wayne in ‘Stagecoach’ (1939)

Here is a recently rediscovered Internet article that I wrote back in 2001 for a website no longer on-line, an article that I thought was lost forever. I wrote it not long after reading several books about western movies, among them The B.F.I. Companion to the Western and Sixguns and Society. I also included some thoughts derived from Robert B. Ray in A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. I wasn’t as thorough with my ideas as I hoped to be (I have added some observations in brackets), but at least I got my comments back from Internet oblivion:

Movies deal with myths. And myths are a way for peoples and cultures to set up and play out the problems of life, survival, and sheer existence. For the full panorama on the importance of myth and its role in making sense of who we are as humans, I refer you to the books of the late, great Joseph Campbell.

The genre of the western arose, I believe, because Americans of European ancestry needed to make sense of their (our) existence in a “New World.” In particular, Euro-Americans were living in a land in which they were not the original inhabitants. So, Euro-American culture needed a mythology to shape and make sense of the conflicts of European survival in the New World. And in doing so, the ideology of such a mythology functioned, in part, to confirm the rightness of Euro-Americans to inhabit the North American continent over that of the indigenous people, the Native Americans.

Why did Americans of European ancestry need a mythology? Because, I imagine, when North America started to be settled by white immigrants, they were not certain of their identity or the possibility of their survival on the continent. These uncertainties are best illustrated by Wener Herzog’s German film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), the story of an ill-fated mission by Spanish conquistadors in the Amazon jungle. Although the context is Latin American, Aguirre’s concerns are just as applicable to those in a North American context. Herzog’s film portrays a world where European culture seems inherently incompatable with the American continent. In the end, the American wilderness crushes the party of European adventurers, who are portrayed as petty and corrupt, unworthy of survival. Aguirre is the ultimate anti-western. If it was to survive, the European presence in America needed stories that affirmed the goodness and justness of white American culture and its worthiness to flourish. This is what the mythology of the western provided.

As it arose and developed in both literature and film, the western taught its audience that the important problems of existence occupied a rural context, and that these problems needed to be solved through physical action, intelligently employed. Consequently, westerns are marked by their rural settings and their action-filled climaxes. Therefore, an action story set in an urban setting would have difficulty claiming to be a “western” as the gere is commonly understood (e.g., Coogan’s Bluff, Death Wish). And a story with a Wild West setting that is not resolved through a violent climax would likewise have trouble being seen as a western (e.g., The Ballad of Cable Hogue, The Good Old Boys).

[In other words, the western is an action genre. If the movie’s central problem isn’t solved by a shootout, a fist fight, or some other form of physical struggle, it’s not an action film — and hence not a western film. I roll my eyes every time I hear Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) described as a “gay western.” Since the film doesn’t end with an action scene — in fact, there’s hardly any violence in it at all — the label “western” doesn’t do justice to this drama. Now, if the film had been about Jesse James getting it on with Billy the Kid...]

[Although there are exceptions, the typical western is set in some place (specific or non-specific) on the North American continent west of the Mississippi River sometime between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century. Why this time period? Like other film critics, I believe that the overwhelming majority of westerns are set after the Civil War because the United States needed to overcome its founding flaw of slavery and the national disunity that schismatic issue provoked. Only afterwards could the mythology of a truly unified country develop. In many westerns, lingering resentments over the “War for the Southern Confederacy” emerge, only to be resolved by the end of the story. And the 1890s marked the end of the Indian wars. Afterwards, the continental United States was officially settled.]

Gary Cooper in ‘High Noon’ (1952)

Another intriguing aspect of the genre is that the classical western hero, usually a cowboy or gunfighter, exists at the intersection of civilization and the wilderness. He (the western hero is almost always male, of course) is seen to embody the best of both worlds: the intelligence and expansionism of civilization, and the instinctiveness and brute strength of the wilderness. He can’t be completely one or the other. This is why the sixgun is so important to the wilderness-dwelling western hero: it marks his primary connection to and reliance upon Western civilization, of which he is a harbinger on the frontier.

It’s very interesting, for example, that the mythology of the western did not develop to privilege “going native” narratives, where Europeans or their descendents completely cast off Western culture and adopt Native American culture (even James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans remained resolutely tied to his white identity). To do so, of course, would have suggested that Western culture was somehow inherently suspect, and the purpose of the western genre was to convey exactly the opposite. The classical western hero needed to be bound to his European roots. So, even though there have been a few successful “going native” westerns — particularly Little Big Man (1970), A Man Called Horse (1970), and Dances with Wolves (1990) — this is not the mainstream of the western movie.

In fact, Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse were made during the Vietnam era, when many Americans were questioning the very validity of Euro-American culture, and these films are a reflection of that crisis of identity. Apparently, the “going native” mythology was so threatening to the legitimacy of Euro-American culture that America’s most successful and enduring rendition of the “going native” myth — Tarzan — had to be set on another continent.

Although the western, at its core, affirms that white people are more deserving to live in America than the Indians are, this isn’t necessarily to say that all westerns are overwhelmingly racist — no more so than other mythologies that seek to affirm the European presence in the non-European world. Because he exits at the crossroads of Western culture and the wilderness (to which that culture stands in contradistinction), the western hero may be seen as an implicit critique of Western civilization, as well as its harbinger on the frontier. The western hero may stand as an ideal symbol of rural Euro-American culture before it became “corrupted” by the more impersonal forces of urban civilization. Therefore, not only can the western hero be the uncritical champion of Euro-American civilization, but he may also function as a figure of resistance to it.

Because of this, it’s not all that surprising that when American culture reached its greatest identity crisis of the second half of the 20th century — the quagmire of the Vietnam War and the counterculture that crisis spawned — the outfits and hairstyles of the counterculture drew largely from the western: blue jeans, denim jackets, cowboy hats, long hair, droopy moustaches, etc. For example, the two main characters of that exemplary “counterculture” movie Easy Rider (1969) were both named after western icons: Wyatt (as in “Earp”) and Billy (as in “the Kid”). So, the Vietnam-era “counterculture” was at least as beholden to the western mythos as it was critical of its expansionist ideology, of which the Vietnam War was seen as an extension. At the same time, the Vietnam Era (the 1960s and ’70s), marked an upsurge in revisionist westerns: Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), etc. — films which criticize the western myth, but also may be seen to affirm it in other ways.

‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969)

I think the primary reason why big-screen westerns aren’t being made as often as they used to is because American ideology now views contemporary problems primarily in an urban and technological context. Also, the crisis of the Vietnam War may have tarnished the rugged “purity” of the frontier setting: in light of the war, the American frontier of the 19th century came to look increasingly like just another European military expansion into the Third World, rather than the mythic landscape for the triumph of white American culture. In other words, the western lost its innocence.

In any event, Euro-American culture no longer seems to be uncertain of its legitimacy to inhabit North America, so that crisis of identity may now have been played out and resolved — at least in a rural, pre-computer-age context. This would explain why the urban/gangster thriller and the science-fiction adventure have now displaced the western as Hollywood’s primary action genres. However, the mythic images of the western — the idea of a rugged loner drawing upon his best resources and physical strength to resolve a great crisis in an “unspoiled” landscape — remain too powerful to die out completely, even in the imaginations of those who aren't white, aren't American, or aren't male. Westerns are still being made, though primarily for television. And the occasional big-screen western still makes its appearance, such as this year’s [2001] American Outlaws. Because it is so basic to the shaping of the American identity, the western — in some way, in some form — will always be with us.

My 10 Favorite Films

2011-06-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

I don’t know why I didn’t post this a long time ago, but here’s the list of my ten favorite films (today’s favorites, at any rate). I’ve shown this list and others like it to friends who are fellow cinephiles, and most of them fault my inventory for including only canonized classic art films. Couldn’t I include, they ask, at least one disreputable title? How about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians? How about Women’s Prison Massacre? Or, at the very least, Ernest Goes to Splash Mountain? Sorry. Maybe I’ll do a follow-up of favorite sleazies sometime, but art films, believe it or not, are the kind of movie I like best. So, for right now, here is my list of faves — art-house-heavy, un-cool, and drowse-inducing though the roll call may be — these are the ten titles that I get the most out of:

10. THE OTHER FRANCISCO

Directed by Sergio Giral (Cuba, 1975)

In his highly original film, Afro-Cuban director Giral adapts a 19th-century Cuban anti-slavery novel, criticizes its middle-class limitations, and then goes on to envision a radical retelling. Where the novel ended with a slave’s suicide, Giral’s version ends with a slave uprising. Inspiring.

9. LA STRADA

Directed by Federico Fellini (Italy, 1954)

This story of a mentally underdeveloped waif tormented by a boorish brute is outstanding for its wondrous and understated observations on the nuances of rustic life in post-war Italy. Fellini’s early neo-realist film barely hints at the near-hallucinatory fever dreams that he would become famous for later in his career.

8. CHUNGKING EXPRESS

Directed by Wong Kar-Wai (Hong Kong, 1994)

Wong defies audience expectations and captures the frenetic atmosphere of pre-hand-over Hong Kong in this film about people trying (and not quite succeeding) to find romance in the big city. Special kudos for the audacity of putting two unrelated stories in the same movie. Wong’s companion piece Fallen Angels (1995) is worth checking out as well.

7. A HARD DAY’S NIGHT

Directed by Richard Lester (UK/USA, 1964)

The energy and vitality of the 1960s New Wave + the rhythms and irreverence of the Beatles = a cinematic masterpiece. Although we tend to think of the rock-’n-roll ’60s in psychedelic color, this film’s black-and-white cinematography lends it a Chaplinesque timelessness.

6. DR. STRANGELOVE ... OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

Directed by Stanley Kubrick (USA/UK, 1964)

With alternating horror and hilarity — and a cunningly clinical camera — Kubrick gets us to laugh at the unthinkable: nuclear holocaust. The performances by Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, and Slim Pickens remain the highlight of their careers.

5. RASHÔMON

Directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1950)

Kurosawa’s mesmerizing story of four conflicting accounts of the same crime encourages the viewers to question their own sense of truth and the passage of time. Toshirô Mifune’s feral turn as the bandit remains one of the cinema’s all-time great performances.

4. THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC

Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer (France, 1928)

A minimalist interpretation of the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, Dreyer’s film makes up in emotional intensity what it eschews in conventional big-scale spectacle. Never before or since has the fissured human face appeared so riveting on the screen.

3. THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES

Directed by Sergei Paradzhanov (USSR, 1969)

Not a “narrative” movie in the traditional sense of the word, Paradzhanov’s film is instead a kaleidoscopic visual meditation on the life of the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova. Upon completion, it was cut and banned by the Soviet authorities for its narrative non-conformity and implicit Armenian nationalism.

2. L’AVVENTURA

Directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni (Italy/France, 1960)

Jeered at its first screening, director Antonioni’s film isn’t interested in what happens in the story. Rather, the director uses his watchful camera to reveal his uncommunicative characters and expose their alienating environments. The story isn’t concerned with external actions but with the audience’s apprehensions of the characters’ unstated internal complexities. Antonioni reinvents the language of cinema.

1. CITIZEN KANE

Directed by Orson Welles (USA, 1941)

In his freshman film, theatre director Welles boldly broke the conventional bounds of Hollywood narrative to tell the story of a newspaper tycoon with uncommon depth and complexity. The intricate story line is matched by the intricate visuals of master cinematographer Gregg Toland. A milestone in the annals of cinema.

Napoleon Bonaparte: Not a Short Dude

2011-06-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

One of the pervasive ideas of world history is that Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), the French military and political leader and one-time emperor of the country, was a short guy.

Whenever the historical figure of Napoleon is invoked, some mention of his height usually isn’t far behind. In film, thoughts turn to Ian Holm, a relatively short-statured actor (5’6”) who played the part of the French leader a number of times, in Time Bandits (1981) weeping over other allegedly dwarfish military commanders not remembered as such, or Napoleon as portrayed by Ron Cook in Quills (2000), his dangling feet not touching the floor of his throne. There have been other cinematic portrayals of Bonaparte as a man of average height — Marlon Brando in Desirée (1954) or Rod Steiger in Waterloo (1970), for example — but the idea of the French commander as a martinet is dominant in the modern imagination.

So, it may come as something of a surprise to most people that Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t short, especially for his time.

As recorded in his book The Height of Your Life (1980), Ralph Keyes wrote to France’s Musée de l’Armée in Paris with the intention of determining Napoleon’s actual height. The reply came back:

The height of Napoleon was 5 feet 7 inches. ... This measurement is one given in the memoirs of Mr. Darling, carpenter of Saint-Hélen [a.k.a. Saint Helena, the island where Bonaparte spent his last years in exile] who was appointed to construct Napoleon’s coffin. I think that we can consider this measure as completely correct. (p. 93)

And 5 feet 7 inches was “slightly above the average height for Frenchmen” of that era, in the words of biographer and physician R. Frank Richardson, quoted by Keyes. So, why is Napoleon remembered as being short? One conjecture is that he was perceived as shorter because the military strategists with whom he surrounded himself were taller. Another faults British anti-Napoleonic propaganda, which depicted him as short in an effort to make him look ridiculous. Yet another attributes the misperception to a mistranslation from French measurements to English ones.

Whatever the reason, Napoleon Bonaparte was not short for his era. So, why does the idea of him as a diminutive military leader have such staying power, despite the facts to the contrary? I think that the popular imagination clings to the image of a pint-sized Napoleon as a figure of hubris, as a personification of megalomaniacal overreach. After all, what if Napoleon had been decisively tall? Would his march across Europe during the Napoleonic Wars bear any resemblance at all to an act of overcompensation, as some today perceive his military exploits, a perception that has given rise to the term “Napoleon complex”?

Contrast the popular image of the diminutive, defeated Bonaparte with the image of the tall, victorious George Washington. (The historical Washington was 6’1.5” according to Wickipedia.) These two historical archetypes convey the socially sanctioned message that a man’s fitness for victory — military or otherwise — is manifested by the height of his body. The message seems to be that short stature embodies (so to speak) humanity’s limitations, while tall stature incarnates one’s strengths. This idea isn’t very consoling to those of us even shorter than Napoleon is believed to be. It’s as though because of something we can’t control — how tall our bodies grow — we shorter men can’t live “up” to what an adult male is supposed to look like and thereby manifest our physical potentials as productive humans. It’s as though that just by acquiring our height-determining DNA, we have already met our waterloo.

‘The Importance of Being Earnest’: A Capsule Review

2011-06-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

This is something that I wrote on my Facebook page in response to a friend recommending the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Oscar Wilde’s classic 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest:

And if you can't catch the new production (and if you haven't already seen the thing 83,673,469,386 times), you can watch the 1952 Anthony Asquith film of the play, which is available for instant viewing on Netflix. The cast is superlative: the ever-earnest Michael Redgrave, the effervescent-voiced Joan Greenwood, the liltingly lugubrious Edith Evans, and especially the car-salesman-smooth Michael Denison. A movie not to be missed — nor mislaid in a handbag, for that matter.

Rachel McAdams: The Blonder, the Blander

2011-06-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is going to be totally superficial — but that wouldn’t be a first for the Internet. I want to talk about Rachel McAdams’ hair. Now, I’m not commenting at all on the Canadian-born movie star’s talent (I don’t think that anyone is interested in my opinion on that, anyway). But I need to say something.

That something is this: I can’t think of another woman whose looks are so dramatically transformed by blonde hair color — transformed for the worse.

Full disclosure: I generally find darker hair more attractive on a woman than lighter hair. Although I have my exceptions, the darker the hair color, the better, in my book. (I guess I’m no gentleman.) Of course, I don’t need to tell anyone just how beautiful Rachel McAdams is. With her liquid hazel eyes, elegant chin, and supple lips parenthesized by two delicate dimples, the Canadian coquette will haunt many a movie-goer’s dreams for years to come.

In most of her films that I’ve seen, she usually sports a head of gracefully flowing auburn hair. In some of her other movies, her cascading tresses are slightly lighter, maybe a burgundy brown, but still agreeably dusky. The darkness of these hair colors brings out the best in her tan-tinged beauty. But in a few of her films — and in most of her red-carpet and other off-the-set photos — her hair is bleached blonde. The obviously artificial yellow in her curls blanches the crinal frame of her face, a face with a tincture of tawniness that clashes with such a bright color.

Rachel McAdams’ Internet Movie Database trivia page says that her hair is naturally blonde. This is hard to believe. Ms. McAdams is an “autumn” (to use the outdated beauty-parlor parlance) in every other aspect of her appearance, but blonde hair belongs on a “summer.” Another on-line article says in one paragraph that her hair is “naturally brown” and in another that it’s “naturally blonde.” I guess that clears things up. But a YouTube video of her audition for her breakout movie The Notebook (2004) shows her with dyed blonde hair over grown-out auburn roots. Did this “natural blonde” dye her hair a deep brown in order to bleach that color over with an artificial blonde? If so, why?

I think the best explanation is that Rachel McAdams’ hair is naturally brown, as the rest of her coloring would indicate, not naturally blonde. But if the actress does indeed have a natural hair color — blonde — that is inexplicably inharmonious with the rest of her looks, she patently helps it along by man-made means. It’s the synthetic quality of this blonde look that subtracts from her attractiveness.

Or in plain old English: The otherwise extremely beautiful Rachel McAdams just does not look good with bleached-blonde hair.

On the other hand, this disagreeably artificial look can sometimes aid her characterizations as an actress. The difference between her hair’s various visual effects upon an audience is most noticeable in her two films co-starring Owen Wilson. In the romantic comedy Wedding Crashers (2005), a brunette McAdams plays the ingénue whose affections Wilson fights for. Like the rest of the cinema patrons seated around me, I rooted for Wilson to win over the dark-haired beauty. In their second film together, Midnight in Paris (2011), a bottle-blonde McAdams plays Wilson’s fault-finding fiancée. Given this off-putting character’s ersatz appearance, it was easy to root against the relationship, which is certainly the audience reaction that the film desires.

In fact, when I first saw Wedding Crashers, the face of the beautiful brunette who played the female lead really stuck in my mind. What I didn’t realize was that I had seen this same actress the year before as the blonde antagonist in Mean Girls (2004), and her face never really registered with me. I think that says a lot about how McAdams’ hair color can change the perception of her appearance — and, as in Midnight in Paris, how pejoratively the audience perceives her when her hair is yellow.

I can imagine a movie in which a male lead is torn between two female love interests, one blonde and the other brunette. And — I’m sure you saw this coming — both women would be portrayed by Rachel McAdams. This conceit of a male lead who divides his affections between two different women played by the same actress has been done before in Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (心中天網島, 1969), in which Shima Iwashita plays the roles of both the weak-willed lead’s wife and his mistress. Shinoda’s use of casting the same actress in two different parts underlines the indecisiveness of his anti-hero and the somewhat capricious character of romantic love. (And this concept is different from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo [1958], in which Kim Novak plays only one character: a dark-haired woman who disguises herself as a blonde.) The way I envision it, this casting of my imaginary movie would be an experiment to weigh the contrasting attractiveness (or unattractiveness) between blonde Rachel and brunette Rachel. I know which one I’d want to prevail. My hypothetical movie’s writers could make brunette Rachel the most despicable character in cinema, and I’d still want to see the male lead end up with her. Yes, McAdams looks that bad blonde.

There you have it — my raindrop-in-a-bucket diatribe about the ever-urgent issue of Rachel McAdams’ hair color. I know that she has some fans who absolutely adore her blonde. And I know that my opinion won’t matter to anyone else, least of all Ms. McAdams herself. So, I know that she will wear her hair whatever color she pleases, as she should. But I think it’s a shame that a woman with an exceptional beauty best enhanced by darker hair seems to spend so much time lightening her locks for a look that — and this word is very apt — pales in comparison. I believe that Rachel McAdams would better serve her exquisite features by keeping her tresses brown, thereby making the most of her coppery coloring and avoiding an inorganic appearance that makes her look like just another Hollywood blonde. But it’s not for me to dictate what the actress does with her hair.

Unless maybe I could get blonde bleach declared a controlled substance.

A compilation of trailers for movies with Rachel McAdams