Archive for the 'film studies' Category
Posted in 18th century, 18th century novels, 18th century picturesque, Costume drama, feminism, Film adaptations, film studies, Outlander, romance, soap opera, Time-traveling tale, TV, women's novels, women's art, womens' films, tagged heroine's text on November 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (San Heughan) bidding adieu just before battle of Alamance (Episode 7, "Ballad of Roger Mac")
We covered The Fiery Cross and Season 5 in the context of the books and seasons thus far as a miracle of dramatic stillness and intensity; then Episodes 1-5 as a series of "her-stories," using voice-over, remembrance, juxtaposition brilliantly. Episode 6-11 continue the emphasis on women's issues, being a kind of culmination of discussions and dramatic events in previous seasons, with Claire now taking Marsali on as her apprentice and true daughter, while under the pseudonym of Dr Rowling she publishes advice on contraception and other women's matters. This is interspersed with Jamie and Roger moving from antagonism, semi-alienation to an increasingly close friendship and alliance, and lastly wry ironic mutual interdependence. The father-son theme is reinforced by the return of Ian (John Bell), Jamie's nephew-son, as Roger's voice is silenced after he came near death from hanging, and Jamie repeats this feat of coming near death and then escaping, after he is bitten by a venomous snake. An outlook from previous seasons (especially over Culloden) re-asserts itself: Jamie has evolved to the point of a fierce anti-war stance (insofar as he is able), so that when Murtagh is senselessly slaughtered (and the grief of Jamie is terrible) Jamie at long last lashes out at the hypocrisy of the British establishment in fomenting these conflicts so as to tax and control the less powerful.
Marsali (Lauren Lyle) and Fergus (Cesar Domboy) seen working alongside Roger and Claire rescuing the hay (Episode 6, "Better to Marry than to Burn")
One of many scenes between Claire and Brianna doing all sorts of daily things together, here they take an opportunity to walk along the sea (Episode 10, "Mercy ….")
There are two weaker episodes, 6, "Better to Marry than to Burn," where the patterned manners of the characters as they attend Jocasta's (Maria Doyle Kennedy) marriage, produces a stiffness and artificiality reminiscent of some of the scenes at the French court and in Parisian elite society in Season 2 (Dragonfly in Amber). A sense of forced construction is also found in the clumsy machinations it takes for Jamie and Claire to set a meeting with Bonnet (Ed Speelers) as smuggler. This feeling is more prominent in Episode 10, "Mercy May Follow Me," where underlying clichés when Bonnet kidnaps Brianna and threatens her and she pleads with him come out in a stage-y (corney) way. Then the ease with which Jamie, Claire, Roger, and now Ian with them, find and beat up Bonnet in the midst of selling Brianna to a trader re-enforces this feeling of a superfluous almost filler episode.
Episode 6 is almost retrieved by Roger rescuing the crop of Frazer's Ridge when locusts descend by remembering how smoke can drive them away (so he enlists all the people living there, and becomes a hero in ways that come natural to his character and knowledge). And Episode 10 transcends its clichés when at its close we see Bonnet being executed by slow motion drowning, hastened only slightly by Brianna becoming a sharp-shooter and shooting him with a long-range rifle in the head. Each of the young women in this series when raped, beaten, abused carries a rage in her that each satisfies when opportunity for revenge is offered (e.g., Mary Hawkins stabbed her assaulter through the chest, Season 2).
The rest is marvelous.
Time is marked and measured in different ways, the colors of our lives were changing, the vibrant greens of summer faded beneath the ever-varied canvas of the sky, and blue violet shades of indigo dye, replaced by the russet tones of autumn, brown hues of harvest …
An over-voice time-passing sequence, Episode 11, "Journeycake")
All Outlander combines a form of heroine's journey that can be regarded as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (see Patti McCarthy, "The Heroine's Journey, Claire Beauchamp reclaims the feminine," in Frankel's Adoring Outlander collection; also Maureen Murdock, Heroine's Journey). The call to adventure for the male here becomes a call which is also an awakening (think of Claire looking at the vase on her honeymoon, of her dissatisfaction with Frank and his with her). Then she crosses the threshold (the stones), and experiences deep changes within her over many trials, which in Claire's case include meeting with a protective alluring animus, confronting false males, bonding with other women and becoming a mother. Books 3 (Voyager), 4 (Drums of Autumn) and 5 (Fiery Cross), move from a return, to ordeals to more thresholds, to making a home (yes all this effort to come back to make a nest), and becoming a powerful woman from having learned who she is and developed a path for herself.
A more specific vein of this journey is seen across the series (see Nicole M. DuPlessis, "Men, Women, and Birth Control in the Early Outlander books," in Frankel's Outlander's Sassenachs): the first four books too deal with specifically the themes of birth, mothering, breast-feeding, abortion, rape: e.g., Claire helps Jenny in a breech delivery; Claire almost dies in childbirth; she develops a deep relationship with Mother Hildegarde (Frances de la Tour), Geillis's witch-like (Lotte Verbeek) qualities includes her handing out of abortifacients, herbs, and herbs to induce early labor; Geneva's (Hannah James) pregnancy by Jamie at Helwater; Claire's offer to help Brianna abort the fetus once she realizes Bonnet's rape of her may have led to her pregnancy (and Jamie's objections). The Fiery Cross, taken as a whole, from the early episodes on wife abuse (a Bluebeard punished), tyranny over a daughter (Brownsville), an adoption of a baby) seems to intensify these with Claire now seeking to educate young women to prevent pregnancy, married women they do not have to accept physical abuse, Roger's agreement to help stop Brianna from getting pregnant again. Perhaps the book moves so slowly because Gabaldon has taken on the function and content of unusually frank magazine articles.
Roger hung, lower part of his body seen (9, "Ballad of Roger Mac")
Brianne realizing
Supremely moving, exciting, riveting were the episodes, 7, "The Ballad of Roger Mac," and 8, "Famous Last Words," returning us to the anti-war stance in the midst of terrible violence we saw in the Culloden sequence at the close of Season 2 (Episodes 9-12, especially 9, "Prestonpans") and opening of Season 3 (Episodes 1-3, half each of "The Battle Joined," "Surrender"): Roger is literally hung at the close of 7, just pulled down in time, and revived by Claire, he is unable to speak for most of 8, "Famous Last Words," driven and haunted by memories (the directors were inspired when they decided to show the trauma through old-fashioned black-and-white reels)
There was a battle of Alamance between the Virginia Militia, mostly white upper and middle class British people born in the UK and lower class farmers ("regulators") fighting excessive taxation (they had no representation) and the militia won — they murdered many of the regulators, gave no quarter — just the kind of thing Howard Zinn describes in The People's History of the US, and happened at Culloden. We see Jamie and then a Protestant priest trying to persuade Governor Tryon against the battle; there was an offer of compromise, but he feels this will help his career to be seen to have crushed an uprising (if he can). I just loved how Jamie horrified and deeply grieved by the murder and death of Murtagh who dies trying to reassure Jamie (it's just unbearable as he screams over his father-brother-friend "help me" [someone] and brings Murtagh back to Claire) cries out against what is written in history books and what happens for real
Will it be written in history, sir — that ye killed and maimed and paid no heed to the destruction ye left? That ye brought cannon to bear on your own citizens, armed with no more than knives and clubs? Nae, it will say that ye put down rebellion and preserved order, that ye punished wickedness and did justice in the King's name. (then) But we both ken what happened here. There is the law and there is what is done. What you've done is kindle a war — for the sake of your own glory. [Tryon's jaw clenches and his men move toward Jamie — protective of the Governor. No one speaks this way to Tryon. But Tryon waves them down.] GOVERNOR TRYON: Colonel Fraser. I had no personal stake in this, no need to glorify my exploits, as you put it. JAMIE: None but the governorship of New York. GOVERNOR TRYON: I told you I would not leave North Carolina in a state of disorder and rebellion. I have done what I have done as a matter of duty. And because you have done your duty, as promised, I'm going to overlook your insolence. JAMIE: Aye. My debt is paid and I'm finished with my obligation — to you — and to the Crown. You may have yer coat back, sir. Jamie wrests off the red coat Tryon made him wear, now stained with Murtagh's blood, and lets it drop into the mud … (written by Toni Graphia).
Roger ends up so badly by chance; the same governor carelessly gives an order to have three men hanged. Roger had tried to reach Murtagh to tell him that Brianna remembered the battle would go terribly for the regulators Of course it's too late to stop anyone. On his way back to Jamie's camp, Roger encounters Morag Mackenzie he met in a ship coming over, whom he had saved from being drowned, together with her baby. Who is a relative of his clan. They hug and what happens but her thug of a husband (played by Douglas McTavish brought back as this different fierce character) fiercely acts out male jealousy, twists his wife's arm, beats Roger up — with other thugs. Roger is just not a violent man. He goes missing and is not found until the last scenes when the family group comes upon him apparently dead from hanging. We had now and again seen him singing across the series. He's a gentle soul – a professor is what Jamie has begun to call this son-in-law. Roger is no match for this world of senseless bullying male violence. He is thrown on a pile and taken up to be hanged. We see what the Governor's (and Trump's) much vaunted law and order really is.
Episode 8 brings home Ian with Rollo (his beloved companion dog) from the Mohawks, and it is Ian who goes with the stricken Roger to measure and survey a gift of land the governor has offered in compensation for his error. The return of Ian, his melancholy but joy upon coming home, Jamie's attempt to understand, Claire's reciprocal nurturing all form the mood of Roger's slow recovery. The episode is punctuated by the black-and-white memories until near the end. It begins with a flashback to the 20th century where Roger had been teasing a class over what would one want to say when you are on your deathbed.
Jamie on the stretcher, Roger pulling him back to the Ridge (9, "Monsters and Heroes")
Episode 9, "Monsters and heroes," is the culmination of Jamie and Roger's finding a modus vivendi for living together in understanding, respect and friendship. The monster is the venomous snake who bites Jamie's leg and makes it swell, risking gangrene; the heroes Jamie, Roger, and Ian who all have to cope with this seriously limb-, if not life-threatening condition (Jamie comes near to having one leg amputated). At least 2/3s of the episode traces the close relationship and knowledge the two men for the first time gain of one another. Roger gets lost, he cannot kill anything much (he confesses he does not like to kill anything), but he understands infection and lances and sucks out the poison insofar as he can. He makes a miserable kind of stretcher and proceeds to try to drag Jamie home. Jamie is the one who misbehaves — terrified he will die, frightened for the three 20th century people dependent on him, he begs Roger to kill Bonnet for him, to promise this and promise that; he refuses to have the leg amputated if necessary, bringing down on him Ian's wrath for the way he, Jamie, seems suddenly to regard disabilities — remember Ian's father, Fergus's loss of his hand (I thought of Hugh Munro).
There are almost no distractions of other episodes: we hear of Jenny and Ian back in Scotland, a scene between Lizzie Wemyss (Caitlin O'Ryan) and Isiash Morton (Jon Tarcy) was put into deleted scenes; Marsali gives birth on her own with just a little help from Fergus. Thus we have long uninterrupted scenes of characters talking, interacting, Claire at Jamie's bedside, her intense presence stirring in him a will not to die; her invented penicillin does not work because her needles and instruments were destroyed and she can administer it only as a drink, not into Jamie's veins. The episode gives the woman an important role again; Claire is doctor, but Roger remembered to cut the snake's head and top of body off, and when back in their cabin, Brianne remembers you can draw from it the venom which can act (it seems) as an anti-venom and herself invents a syringe. In the manner of almost all the episodes of the season, this one is self-contained, resolved almost fully by the end with Roger taking mild revenge by teasing remarks as he sits next to Jamie's bed.
The stones into which Brianna, Roger, and Jemmy tied together disappear, presumably poof, and Ian left to stare
Episode 11, "Journeycake" is the fearful penultimate hour. It opens with an over-voice and montage, and time passing, and the family of four adults returning back from town to come upon a house burnt to the ground, all its inhabitants murdered or burnt to death, one shivering in pain near death. All four remember the obituary Brianna brought back to the 18th century of her parents being killed just this way. Lord John (David Berry) who has been given too little to do, is returning it seems for good to England, to take care of young William's interests again. He will take Ulysses (Colin MacFarlane) with him. He gives Jamie another miniature of the boy and this gives Jamie a chance to tell Brianna she has a half-brother. It is discovered that little Jemmy can time-travel, Ian demands and finally is told the truth about Claire, and it is he who drives the three to the stones and watches them disappear into them near the end of the episode. The sorrow here is that Jamie's deepest bonds are with these three people, including Claire and they are all safer in the 20th century. At its close, Jamie and the Fraser Ridge men have been tricked into leaving the house area, and the Browns who have several males who have reason to resent Jamie and hate Claire (particularly the one whose daughter she has protected, whose wife she has helped against his violence), who come and abduct Claire, murder one of the people in Claire's surgery and leave Marsali for dead.
Next blog: the astonishingly powerful conclusion, Episode 12, "Never My Love"
Posted in 20th century culture, 21st century culture, Costume drama, film studies, general, Movies, Poetry, political novels/films, politics, travel, US social life, visual art, tagged anti-war film, Immigration, male violence, refuges on September 4, 2020| 4 Comments »
Shots of different parts of the long cortege of a village near Arras, May 1940
A fine film very much worth watching just now. Christian Carion's Come What May more or less uniformly condemned by reviewers is a beautiful intelligent anti-war film centering on an exodus across France, now forgotten, as villages fled the German invasion. The still below is one of the many black-and-white photographs that introduce, are scattered throughout the film, and conclude it. The film itself is in beautiful colors, accompanied by remarkable touching appropriate music by Ennio Morricone. Carion is telling a family story: he was born in this area; his mother had been part of this exodus; it is also crucial French history he feels. The film may be regarded as a coda to A French Village; there the people stayed put; here they went into flight. Our particular group turns round and heads back home. Interpersed is the story of three young men, Scottish (Matthew Rhys), German (August Diehl) and French (Laurent Gerra). A boy (Josioh Marion who stands for the thousands of children separated from parents), another Mayor, a cafe owner. Another bridge is blown up. And we have a goose who is really terrified of the sounds of the airplanes and passing tanks. A Review.
You owe this blog to my determination to tell whoever comes here that pace the reviewers of this film who disdained it, this is a very good film. They seem to have pushed it right out of the theaters with their obtuse disdain and distrust (I must call it) of any tender feeling, belief in some kind of responsibility in people, impatience at orchestra music. For all these characteristics, this is a fine film for our time. I urge my readers to watch it (streaming on Amazon prime, as a DVD from Netflix, as a good DVD with three feature to buy) and tell others. I find myself half-wondering if the reason it seems so hard to persuade people to act on their social instincts, to feel for others as themselves, is that a film like this is sneered at. As a result our entertainment is FX type fascist hard violence and Barbie doll strong genital sex; characters must be presented as mean, performative, competitive or we are supposed unable to believe in them.
I watched Come What May as a sort of short companion piece, a coda to A French Village (about which I have written three times, Scroll down and also click on the links). In A French Village, mayor and people decided to stay put. In Come What May, they tried to escape the power-hungry cruel Nazi and French collaborative regime. In type Carion liked the film to a western in genre: the landscape is a character with wanderers in its purview.
For a third time, last night I was just immersed in Christian Carion's Come What May (En Mai, Fais ce qu'il plait). The first night I watched I was touched by the story, involved with the actor-characters, just loved the music, the quiet lyricism of the whole treatment, and then was astonished to discover that the reviews hardly covered what happened (like wikipedia can barely be bothered), or outright condemned it! At RogerEbert.com Odie Henderson resented it as "feel good" schmaltz — how this can be when two of the major male characters are killed, with many other unnamed minor ones, when we see a village fleeing in terror of the German's desire for revenge (for WW1) and then turn around to go back after they've been hit hard twice (airplane bombing, tanks) and realize they will only meet more of the same at the coast. Far from one dimensional, the characters are suggestive presences within a larger group.
Another more complained it was not violent enough; people not sufficiently ravaged, not really a war movie at all. This is probably true, as the extraordinary composer who wrote the original score (beautiful, evocative, and uneasy), Ennio Morriconne says (in one of three features on the DVD) he agreed to write the music because the film is not a "movie about war, it is a movie during the war," not filled with violence, speed, terror, but about the people who are enduring war, their experience, about a journey, flight, hardship, people behaving under pressure.
The first encounter of two of our heroes, the Scottish captain, Percy (Matthew Rhys) and the German communist, Hans (August Diehl) — Percy on his way to Dunkirk
The teacher who adopts Hans's son, Suzanne (Alice Isaaz) and the Mayor, Paul (Olivier Gourmet) emerge as leaders
Propaganda film-maker (Arriflex)
The second time was when I watched this feature about the music, the orchestra, then the feature The making of Come What May, where we learn how this is a family story for Carrion: he came from Arras, his mother experienced just this exodus when she was 8, and he was hurrying to make the film before she died. Carion said his parents wanted to reach Canada but they never left France at all. His father was a mayor of a village. One of the extras hired was an 80 year old woman who had been four in 1940 and been part of the exodus; he brought along a goose because his mother said his family had had a goose and the goose proved to be expressive, hiding with terror during the sequences of passing planes and tanks:
The goose's eyes would just peep out
For him the film also realizes a moment of crucial French history, where the gov't made the wrong choices (capitulation because the people were so exhausted still from the horrors of World War One). Far from "sentimental" (another review found it mawkish), what Carion is showing us incident by incident is bleak history of savage senseless destruction, with storekeepers on the way seeking to charge high prices for water and food, complete indifference in the Germans to whoever they come upon; with aimless throwing of high powered fire weapons, wreaking death. Yes our sensibilities are not allowed the close-up thrill, the super-shock of barbaric exultation. No over-excitement, incessant noise and distraction. One German dies quietly banging his head against his tank, asking the boy to help him die.
Carion's conscious method is to epitomize history by anecdote (that's true) so the opening tells through a single incident how at the opening of the war 300,000 Germans fled Germany (communists, Jews, homosexuals) and came to France as the land of liberty; they were rounded up, put in camps and after the "armistice" was signed, sent back to Germany, slaughtered on the way or at the camps when they got there. I then watched with the voice-over commentary where Carion talked of how difficult it was to film this in the northern countryside, to traipse about with a couple of hundred people, animals: horses (exhausted and frightened at the bombs and high startling noises now and again), pigs, cows, and young babies too.
Percy and Hans, with the third hero, the French peasant farmer, Albert (Laurent Gerra) who is simply carelessly shot to death by the film-makers in order to intimidate a group of African soldiers — it seems this kind of scene of camaraderie especially offended the reviewers
The third time, stubbornly (I felt) just the movie itself now that I had enough to appreciate what I was invited slowly to experience. Then I concentrated on the famous actors and was affected by the serendipity of what happened. The film and performances had much quiet humor, as life does. The story proper begins (like A French Village) in May 1940, where a village is more exercised by its wind-mill and water pump than the coming Nazis. We see the important townsman in the local central cafe; the teacher adopts the boy of the German man they have turned over to authorities (Hans).
Suzanne and Max (Joshio Marion)
After the imposition of rationing and terror tactics from the air, the town decides to leave and we see them packing up. In these transition momemts Morricone's music is especially effective.
Morricone: "I will make the music for the people to decide to live and find another place to be safe. To fine liberty, to walk with self-possession."
Prisons are opened up — and Hans escapes. Hans meets in the countryside Percy; they both stumble upon Albert. Carion says he wants to pay tribute to types of people in the way. The English held out. Core scenes are where the men learn to be friends, learn to lean on one another to succeed.
Deserted family home
Carion says he now saw himself as John Ford as he filmed the landscape as another character; the people are resisting sorrow, drinking and dancing companionably the second night, dancing to radios happening. The teacher encourages Max to leave notes on the blackboard in chalk for his father. Max cries, but he write them, cheerful notes to Papa. But as the walk goes on, the atmosphere darkens; we see bodies along the side of the road (some killed), colonies of people shot up. The mayor joins forces with the cafe owner as they become a lead couple. There are a series of scenes at a store, and in a deserted farmhouse. Soldiers frightened, shoot to kill. The pass a village, and the thee young men are now close behind.
The cafe owner, who also drives one of the trucks is Mado (Mathilde Seignier)
Now an attack by the airplanes (computer generated and tough to pull off as really there, making the right sounds too), and as the bombs fall, Max flees. The teacher is forced to leave him behind. Hans comes next and thinks his son among the young children buried. There are scenes of the group passing bridges, and in one case it is blown up behind them — bridges are ever being blown up in war films (wars too). They see from afar or pass by other groups of (it seems) pilgrims. On the road, Percy captured.
In a final set of scenes, the film-maker seems to persuade Percy to play his bagpipes freely for the film; in fact Percy had seen the film-maker murder Albert and when the camera is finished, Percy shoots the film-maker directly so irritated is he by this phonyness — a self-reflexive sequence. Alas Percy then shot to death in turn. In a fantasia sequence, Hans finds his son Max.
You can take it as a dream, but it is meant to be real, for eventually Suzanne catches up and joins Hans and Max. The village has decided to turn back, but she will forge ahead. They are on their way to the north shore, Calais, with an address given them by Percy.
The last image we see is that of the three people, a new family walking into the horizon.
At the opening, throughout and again with the credits there are photographs from the 1940s of this real history exodus or evacuation.
Burdened with children and the aged
Man smoking
Another monumental woman
Don't miss this film. It enabled me to forget for a while the nightmare circus of an aspiring dictator (Trump) ruining an election, spouting fantastic lies and distortions, fomenting racial killings to justify sending into "democrat cities" brutal police — in an effort to turn all into criminality and lawlessness where he thinks he can thrive on fear and imprisonment. What the people in the film are fleeing is an earlier Hitlerian-Goebbels arrangement (only Trump has Barr, Wolf, Pompeo, McConnell …)
Posted in 21st century culture, cyberspace, film studies, mini-series, Movies, Music, politics, TV, US social life, tagged Amanda Vickery, Andrew Marr, Boswell, documentaries, Hugh MacDiarmid, Liz Lochhead, Lucy Worseley, Mary beard, Robert Burns, samuel johnson, Scots novels, Scottish literature, Walter Scott, Winston Churchill on August 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
Andrew Marr on Winston Churchill: a superlative treatment of Churchill as a painter, showing, explaining, contextualizing many of the paintings:
What unites the best of popular documentaries is the persona of the narrator, of the person at center who is making the series or hour: we delight in the witticisms of Marr, the costumes of Worseley, the profoundity of thought of Simon Schama, Amanda Vickery's feminist point of view, Mary Beard's compassionate personality and her bike, her long hair, her refusal to dress to please men, Michael Moore shouting economic truth to power (he goes about nagging and exposing capitalist crooks).
The particular pleasure of these documentaries with favored character-personalities at the center is how much I like to watch and re-watch them. Far more than a fictional narrative movie.
During this profoundly worrying summer when it appears that a minority party, the Republicans, as headed by a criminal liar, is readying up to prevent the majority of US citizens from voting or having their votes counted lest they rightly throw out of office these people who are doing all they can to inflict harm, take away economic security, ruin the environment, make warring arms deals & money with the worst dictators around the world (consider 150,000+ Americans dead in 5 months, and a devastated economy), not to omit destroying even the ancient post office, it would seem understandable that no one notices in print the prevalence of documentaries in on-line movie theaters.
Or on YouTube — many a nowadays virtual conference places part of their presentations on YouTube. Comedians, people lecturing on areas of concern to subgroups of people (Tony Attwood and Temple Grandin on Aspergers and autism), universities sharing lectures, to which are nowadays added thousands of people coming online to cheer one another up: reading whole novels, reading poetry, playing instruments, doing dungeons and dragons. I'm there too with my "The Modernity of Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barset.
Let's admit among all this outpouring, some are inevitably very poor (if well-meant), many banal (there needs no ghostly presence come from an ipad to tell us this), more troublingly, some made by crazed fantasists (QAnon, people who hate others and encourage hatred and violence), and political groups, nowadays many fascistic (see above) determined to spread misinformation, to screw up democratic elections.
More commonly as on popular TV stations, some are superficial, gimmicky (this is true of too many of Lucy Worseley's — exceptions are Jane Austen At Home and Suffragettes), disappointingly insidiously right-wing under a patina of liberal wit (alas too often Marr himself in for example his History of Modern Britain), too compromising (Spaceship Earth), too careful, guarded, worried lest they give offense ("Just one of those things:" on Ella Fitzgerald), which seems odd as the makers cannot really believe they will gain a large audience outside those sympathetic to their subject.
It is also true the professional or paid-for movies are probably there because the movie-theater operators are holding off on their movie "block-busters" for when all the millions of people are (it is imagined) to begin to return to going out to crowded movie-theaters once again. I would not hold my breath. (Maybe 2022? but not in the same way.)
Yet many of these are within the terms they set out to cover, on their own terms, remarkably good, excellent — as the above by the famous BBC interviewer, journalist, once strong man of the left, and now a centrist maker of documentaries, Andrew Marr about Winston Churchill's incessant hobby and apparently real achievement as a painter of effective contemporary pictures. These (along with online university level courses when they are good, e.g., Future Learn) are the silver lining in a dark and frightening time.
What unites the best of documentaries is the persona of the narrator, of the person at center who is making the series or hour: we delight in the witticisms of Marr, the costumes of Worseley, the profoundity of thought of Simon Schama, Amanda Vickery's feminist point of view, Mary Beard's compassionate personality and her bike, her long hair, her refusal to dress to please men, Michael Moore shouting economic truth to power (he goes about nagging and exposing capitalist crooks)
Not all are this way: it's the distinction of Frederick Wiseman to remain absent from his severely controlled documentaries. They are famous for nothing much happening at intervals except the rain or quiet daily life. In Central Park, a duck goes upside down in the water to capture a fish and eat it. Wiseman, let me say it, makes genius level films with serious insightful critiques of the way organizations are at the heart of reality. Cathy Come Home (Tony Garnett), Culloden (Peter Watkins), and other British radical political films are unforgettable. When the subject is a revered or political hero, the documentary maker may make him or herself secondary. So in the documentaries about John Lewis, Malcolm X. Ada DuVernay wants us to pay attention to what the realities of African-American life have been since the inadequacy of the 13th amendment, how it has been undermined almost from the very beginning. But I think the most popular type documentaries, the ones where the documentary maker keeps making them are those where the documentary maker is our chief character, whom we are made to delight in
I've written about a few of both types these over the years: Amanda Vickery's At Home with the Georgians some years ago; more recently Mary Beard's excursions into classical history across Europe on her bike. John Lewis: Good Trouble. But you can't do better if you are looking to cheer yourself with a realistic (not fatuous) slice of life than Ceyda Torun's Kedi: Cats of Istanbul. All three women. Women do documentaries: I don't say they prevail in numbers, but their woman's point of view is not the usual rare minority. Lucy Worseley is a case in point.
Beyond calling your attention to the numerous good documentaries available at a single click for not much money or for free (once you've paid your electricity and internet computer bill) I mean to alert the reader of this blog to a couple of Marr's lesser known documentaries about literature because they are very good, and may serve to divert the viewer's mind from the over-arching calamity (Trump winning again, or stealing the election and then turning the US into a deeply dangerous rotten brutal fascist dictatorship) while leaving us with some relevant knowledge-food for thought and perspectives.
In his wider ranging work (like telling us "the history of the world"!), he often slides by serious and unexamined art. He has a ready wit with quips that can dismiss Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in a memorable (if misleading phrase — for the sake of the joke) but in these two he is sincere, earnest even, taking us (and himself) back to the younger man who meant to make the world better and acted at times bravely, with some integrity. That's why Noam Chomsky bothered to chide him.
But in these on literary and art topics and with enough time given over, he is superb. He is himself by birth a Scotsman (born in Glasgow).
I treat first (in time) his Great Scots, a 2014 three-part series where he explores some of the problematic aspects of Scottish identity and political and geographical history through meditations on four male Scottish writers and one English: Part One is on James Boswell, whose work cannot be separated from Samuel Johnson, and their famous tour to through Scotland to the Hebrides. Part Two is mostly on Walter Scott with Robert Burns brought in as a strong contrast. Burns, Marr rightly says, was a political radical who had to suppress himself, or communicate indirectly to protect what income he had (Burns nonetheless died at 37, partly from hard work and exhaustion, poverty) while Scott was politically high Tory and very much a unionist, though endlessly trying to do justice to specifically Scottish culture, sensibility and the old Jacobite cause (at least explain it).
The series was made in 2014, just before the referendum on devolution and it's clear that Marr is on the side of "no" (stay, not leave England) in Part Three which he devotes to Hugh MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve): while Marr presents the beauty, depth of thought and interest of MacDiarmid's poetry fairly and with high praise, he treats MacDiarmid's separatist point of view as a fantasy which for a long time was not taken seriously by those who read him. All three hours have beautiful photography, the sections of the books read aloud are done brilliantly by actors and readers, we are taken to the truly appropriate interesting places. I knew nothing of MacDiarmind before I watched this hour and now feel I do understand something of the man; I know a great deal about Boswell & Johnson, Burns & Scott (I have read far too much Scott over my life — especially in my teens and early 20s) and can vouch that they are presented with real insight.
I do wish he had included a couple of women, at least mentioned one (?), and was hoping (when I learned of the series) for a survey, but I admit his choices are well taken and by sticking to three primarily he treats the writings of these men in depth. I wish even more that these were online for American viewers. At best there are podcasts, commentaries, and if you are lucky, you may find them reprinted on DVDS in sets of Marr's work on Amazon at UK.
More recently (2016) he has made a quietly brilliant three part analysis and feelingful projection of the popular subgenres of the novels he identifies as Sleuths, Sorcerers, and Spies. I rejoice that these are on YouTube. First Sleuths:
Second Sorcerers:
And thirdly, Spies:
Marr's persona comes across more strongly in these three than his series on Scotland or his political series: he portrays himself as decidedly un-aristocratic, far from a member of any elite or academia, a "smart-aleck" who is, if not anti-intellectual (he cannot present himself that way as he is so patently perceptive and analytic), at least not a self-satisfied public one. The subtext of these is a kind of vehement anti-snobbery: he wants to counter anyone who looks down on these "paperback heroes" (and heroines) and their best-selling authors to show that their books mirror the eras and worlds they wrote in and bring home to the alert viewer their deeper problems and anxieties and needs. He presents himself as uncovering the "rules" each genre follows religiously.
Yes, they are formulaic. It may be said he hams his material up, but the result is fun, and his interviews with working novelists and quotation from those no longer literally living are of real interest. As this is more popular entertainment, I cannot find a serious review — so perhaps he failed at his seeming aim. Not so, when you can watch them over and over.
How to close? Myself I'm a lover of Scots literature (as the reader to this blog and my Austen Reveries must know), went to Edinburgh for the equivalent of a honeymoon, and have visited Scotland now three times, once all the way to Inverness and up to the Hebrides (across the way, still the mainland on a bus). One of my favorite 19th century novelists is Margaret Oliphant. In my studies of historical novels and romance, I often find the authors whose books I so enjoy also wrote in this distinctively different genre (these thrillers are until very recently usually masculinist even when women write them) and try to understand the relationship between these genres in book and movie form.
My most recent reading for sheer pleasure and interest has been Nancy Brysson Morrison's The Gowk Storm, to learn the truth of a still wrongly maligned destroyed woman, Margaret Macaulay's The Prisoner of St Kilda (the true story of the indeed unfortunate Lady Grange, shocking even today), Elizabeth Taylor Russell's Tomorrow (it takes place on an island off Denmark — in the same kind of edge-marginalized culture).
But from years ago and more recently, I am a strong admirer of Liz Lochhead, a brilliant poet, playwright, polemicist too. So (as my title promised), first two poems by Liz Lochhead:
Rapunzstiltskin
& just when our maiden had got
good & used to her isolation
stopped daily expecting to be rescued,
had come to almost love her tower,
along comes This Prince
with absolutely
all the wrong answers.
Of course she had not been brought up to look for
originality or gingerbread
so at first she was quite undaunted
by his tendency to talk in strung-together cliches.
Just hang on and we'll get you out of there!
he hollered like a fireman in some soap opera
when she confided her plight (the old
hag inside etc. & and how trapped she was);
well, it was corny but
he did look sort of gorgeous
axe and all.
So there she was humming and pulling
all the pins out of her chignon,
throwing him all the usual lifelines
till, soon, he was shimmying in & out
every day as though
he owned the place, bringing her
the sex manuals & skeins of silk
from which she was meant, eventually,
to weave the means of her own escape.
All very well & good, she prompted,
but when exactly?
She gave him till
well past the bell on the timeclock.
She mouthed at him, hinted,
she was keener than a TV quizmaster
that he should get it right.
I'll do everything in my power, he intoned, but
the impossible (she groaned) might
take a little longer. He grinned.
She pulled her glasses off.
All the better
to see you with my dear? he hazarded.
She screamed, cut off her hair.
Why, you're beautiful? he guessed tentatively.
No, No, No! she
shrieked & stamped her foot so
hard it sank six cubits through the floorboards.
I love you? he came up with
as she finally tore herself in two.
from Part Three of Lochhead's The Grimm Sisters collection: 'Hags and Maidens'
Everybody's Mother
Of course everybody's mother always and so on…
Always never
loved you enough
or too smothering much.
Of course you were the Only One, your
a machine
that shat out siblings, listen
was the original Frigid-
aire Icequeen clunking out
the hardstuff in nuggets, mirror-
slivers and ice-splinters that'd stick
in your heart.
Absolutely everybody's mother
was artistic when she was young.
was a perfumed presence with pearls, remote
white shoulders when she
bent over in her ball dress
to kiss you in your crib.
Everybody's mother slept with the butcher
for sausages to stuff you with.
mythologised herself. You got mixed up
between dragon's teeth and blackmarket stockings.
she failed to give you
Positive Feelings
about your own sorry
sprouting body (it was a bloody shame)
but she did
sit up all night sewing sequins
on your carnival costume
so you would have a good time
and she spat
on the corner of her hanky and scraped
at your mouth with sour lace until you squirmed
so you would look smart
And where
was your father all this time?
at the war, or in his office, or any-
way conspicuous for his
Absence, so
what if your mother did
float around above you
big as a barrage balloon
blocking out the light?
Nobody's mother can't not never do nothing right.
And then she is online too — at the Edinburgh Festival:
Posted in 21st century culture, Costume drama, feminism, film studies, mini-series, Plays, political novels/films, politics, TV, women's memoirs, women's novels, women's art, women's lives, tagged A French Village, movies, My Brilliant Friend, National Theater London, pandemic, shakespeare on May 19, 2020| 10 Comments »
Olivia Manning's WW2 Balkan Trilogy & Alan Plater/James Cellan Jones's BBC Fortunes of War
Posted in 20th century culture, 21st century culture, Film adaptations, film studies, historical fiction, literary scholarly work, mini-series, novels of sensibility, political novels/films, politics, romance, soap opera, women's novels, women's art, women's lives, tagged heroine's text, imperialist war, Rumania, World War Two on February 8, 2020| 5 Comments »
Opening moments of Fortunes of War (1987 BBC 7 part series)
Tonight I had intended to write a blog-essay on the first two novels of Manning's superb six volume cycle of novels, Balkan Trilogy followed by Levantine Trilogy set across World War Two (1939-44) and its equally fine film adaptation by Plater and Jones, Fortunes of War, famously starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh. But I find to my slight amazement, I've already written a blog on precisely this material, where I had also finished The Great Fortune, and reached the end of the second novel, The Spoilt City and vowed to go on to the third, Friends and Heroes, and then the second trilogy — and never did. (I have begun Friends and Heroes.) As when I first began reading these novels for two sessions of a five session course at Politics and Prose (bookstore in Northwest Washington DC), and discovered my mind was a complete blank over them (I forgot I had made my files of notes), so I had completely forgotten this blog.
I know why. I read the novels during the first half of the summer when Jim was dying but I thought he might live and then had the shock of realizing the doctors had filled us (or me) with false hope and allowed, nay encouraged him to take a dreadful operation (an esophagectomy) on the supposition it could help stop the spread of the cancer. It did no such thing, and when the cancer metatasized into his liver, his inability to eat anything without having it slosh back with acid and sour tastes of the worst sort made the last two and one half months of his existence a yet worse hell than even it was.
2013 was a long time ago now. Seven years have gone by in my life, and I've changed a lot and had many new experiences (yet not changed at all and remain the same person unable to do very different things — mostly because I don't want to). I remember reading somewhere the body replaces itself every seven years. More to the point for Manning's books and TV series, the political world has shifted dramatically so that my perspective at the time — one where I compared the art of the books to the art of Jane Austen — emerges as obtusely unimportant, showing how this influence led to the making of a more delicate nuanced art, but missing or de-emphasizing why one reads these books and what made them important in shifting political world of 1970s as a reflection of the world of the calamitous 1940s. I grant my old blog this much: I retell the basis story and outline the themes of two of the books and the movie. But in 2013 we still had Barack Obama as president, and however troubling was the state of the world and retrograde many of the attitudes in public that dominated over social, sexual, economic, political life inside the US and the cultures worlds like it, all that is nothing to what this US gov't, the public world of our society, and all sorts of norms have become or been contested into since Trump took office in January 2016.
Suddenly Manning's depiction of how the average person will experience the step-by-step closing in of a military dictatorship, disintegration of many aspects of society (from closing of schools, to wiping out of all sorts of accustomed freedoms — like movement, to new forms of imprisonment, destruction of social services, many protections), ruthless killing in say the streets and just over the hill of the skies in another country (where "anything goes") is starkly relevant. This first part or the first three novels are basically a woman's view of war, what she gets to see (a lot) and how she copes with it. The second three take us to Egypt and into the desert war where the characters who dominate (or become Harriet's friends) are men fighting in battle and coming back shell-shocked; we witness war itself, the blowing up of people, of trucks, of towns directly. Gentle reader, I cannot rewrite the blog nor do I want to transfer it so I leave it to you to read the details of its summary up to the third of six books and about the TV film series.
An evening in the Pringles' flat in Rumania ….
To that I want to bring out this time the brilliance of making Yakimov as third central character through the first trilogy. Because he is so perceptive, alienated and amoral, yet calm because he expects nothing else, his reflection as a mirror of say the fearful and hurryingly hidden passengers on the trains, the seeming and real luxury of the hotel lobbies become electrifyingly frightening in an uneasy tragi-comedy. I want to do more justice to Harriet as our moral commentator: she registers far more than I was giving her credit for. Guy is not a joke, but a genuine idealist and sociable man whose idealism as socialist-communism, and lack of personal ambition, his philosophy wholly inadequate. That's important.
Ronald Pickup as Yakimov — oddly we grow very fond of him, our Pandor, despite his betrayal of his friends — he is suddenly senselessly killed
There is also Manning's uncanny ability to create the atmosphere of war for civilians just outside a war zone (the book is autobiographical). We feel the cold and we feel the hunger as Guy and Harriet are helping others in a kitchen for a job and themselves not fed. The not knowing what is happening while you watch the bombs go off. While you watch one group of people take power and another be imprisoned, tortured, disappeared. Then how do most of us experience war in a war zone? as unnerving terror, as flight, as death and disappearance of people all around us, how the dreadful to see and experience becomes the normal. We can't imagine it until we've lived it and only those who try to get it down in imagination can help us — so I must now read the Levantine Trilogy.
The Danger of Tree was a considerable literary success (she was disappointed not to win the Booker); the other two are The Battle Lost and Won, and the posthumous The Sum of Things
Now I refer my reader to Manning's Extraordinary Cats, and conclude this brief survey of Manning's masterpiece by returning to that first blog once again where my then close and now old friend, Judy Geater spoke of how the film adaptation lacked the deeper sense of the books about hunger, about clothes turning into rags, about desperate living conditions.
I did feel the whole theme of hunger and poverty which dominates large sections of the books is underplayed in the series, and in the books everybody is also increasingly ragged – Yakimov's grand fur coat is falling to bits. Of course it would be difficult to show all this fully, as you can't starve your actors, but the desperate beggars in the streets are a constant presence in The Balkan Trilogy and almost never seen in the series.
She saw the two cats as not only creatures to whom the love-starved Harriet can attach her but also doubles, doppelgangers for Harriet herself
In the novels Harriet also starts to look after a second cat later, which is half-starved, at a time when the characters are all desperately hungry – this cat didn't feature in the series. While reading the books I felt as if both of the cats were possibly doubles for Harriet, playing out what is going on in her mind, as her thoughts become increasingly "fierce" and desperate and then later she is starving for both food and love and with nowhere she can call home, like the second stray cat.
The kitten in the TV series
Last time I had a chapter from Thomas Staley's Twentieth Century Women Novelists to recommend and summarize (see last quarter of the blog), a review of Deirdre David's biography by Margaret Drabble to convey and one essay by Mary Salmon about Manning's deep feeling of not belonging to cite. Now I can add David's biography itself, and say I find it to be far better than is acknowledged — insightful, beautifully written, giving full depth to Manning's life, taking the reader along that life and moving back and forth between time past when a novel takes place and time present when she's writing it. Manning spent her life writing so the effect is to go from book to book, sometimes the book providing the past and sometimes its context another parallel present time. Her Anglo-Irish background and time in Palestine are done justice to. I also found a book-length literary reading and study: Carmen Oliver's A Literary Reading of Olivia Manning's World War II Trilogies. I found it as a pdf (which has now vanished, but if any readers are interested, contact me and I'll send it to you by attachment). Finally a new pattern interests people: the refuges, the hard lives Harriet and Guy live — half-starving as refuges are discussed by Eva Patten, Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning's Fictions of War, reviewed by Heather Ingman, in the Irish University Review (43:1, 2013).
I am just now reading two further books about women at war: DuMaurier's King's General where the heroine is hopelessly disabled (her legs paralyzed, twisted) and for a time lives in a war zone; Sontag's Volcano Lover where the core deeper characters are the women attached to William Hamilton, our collector, and for a stretch we experience the terrors and insane cruelties wreaked on the Jacobin revolt in Naples.
Olivia Manning (an appealing close-up)
Olivia Manning had one close woman friend, Stevie Smith, also someone who didn't fit in, didn't belong, was at heart a spinster type (no matter if she had affairs too), and could also become close to cats, as seen in Smith's Cats in Color. My two close companions nowadays are my beloved cats too. So as I began with myself I end on similar use of the cat, unsentimental and metaphorically to that found in Smith and Manning's The Balkan Trilogy.
The first is by a post WW1 and 2 German poet, Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-74): Die Katze
The cat that someone found sat in a construction site and screamed.
The first night and the second and the third night.
The first time, passing by, not thinking of anything,
He carried the scream in his ears, heard it waking from a deep sleep.
The second time he bent down over the snow-covered ditch,
Trying in vain to coax out the shadow prowling around there.
The third time he jumped down, fetched the animal,
Called it cat, because no other name occurred to him.
And the cat stayed with him seven days.
Her fur stood on end, refused to be smoothed.
When he came home at night, she leapt on his chest, boxed his ears.
The nerve in her left eye twitched constantly.
She leapt up onto the curtains in the hall, dug in with her claws,
Swung back and forth, so the iron rings rattled.
She ate up all the flowers he brought home.
She knocked vases off the table, tore up the petals.
She didn't sleep at night, sat at the foot of his bed
Looking up at him with burning eyes.
After a week the curtains were torn to shreds,
His kitchen was strewn with garbage. He did nothing anymore,
Didn't read, didn't play the piano,
The nerve of his left eye twitched constantly.
He had made her a ball out of silver paper,
Which she had scorned for a long time. On the seventh day
She lay in wait, shot out,
Chased the silver ball. On the seventh day
She leapt up onto his lap, let herself by petted, and purred.
Then he felt like a person with great power.
He rocked her, brushed her, tied a ribbon around her neck.
But in the night she escaped, three floors down,
And ran, not far, just to the place where he
Had found her. Where the willows' shadows
Moved in the moonlight. Back in the same place
She flew from rock to rock in her rough coat
And screamed.
(from The Defiant Muse: German Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to Now, ed. trans. Susan Cocalis)
The second a paragraphy by Hilary Mantel, her final devastating critique of life in Saudi Arabia is in her last paragraph of Eight Months on Ghazza Street: how relieved she is not to have to see the state of their cats, like ours, an emblem of us:
The street cats swarmed over the wall, looking for shelter, and dragged themselves before the glass. She watched them: scared cats, starving, alive with vermin, their faces battered, their broken limbs, set crooked, their fur eaten away. She felt she could no longer live with doing nothing for these cats. Slow tears leaked out of her eyes.
A magnificent Porgy and Bess at the Met
Posted in 20th century culture, 21st century culture, African-American literature, film studies, literary scholarly work, Met HDOperas, Movies, Poetry, political novels/films, racism, romance, social criticism, Time-traveling tale, tagged 21st century opera, HD Met opera, Porgy and Bess on February 1, 2020| 4 Comments »
Porgy (Eric Owens) and Bess (Angel Blue)
I have little to add to Anthony Tommasini's finely discriminated strong praise of the new Metropolitan Opera production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess as realized by a group of effective nuanced performances — the nuance, subtlety, and self-reflexive comic distance, which the actor-singers brought to the parts did a lot to de-emphasize and re-shape most of the white perspective on black people. I invite my reader to click and read Tommasini on the individual singers and specific events within the opera on stage.
To me it was a splendid appropriately pitched production. I sat there mesmerized. The songs were beautifully sung by each and all the performers, the play acted believably, the dancing, singing and then individual behavior of the large black chorus on stage made the action into a modern masque that figured the pleasure and repeatedly last minute, unexpected (yet perpetually expected) tragedies of the people in the streets and on the docks, in the apartments and in the symbolic community buildings, and its Esser-like structures. The opera reminds me of the couple of mid-20th century American operas I've seen, e.g., Aaron Copeland's A Tender Land: it is an ensemble meditative lyrical piece. There are dramatic scenes and a story line, but the emphasis is the group, individuals stand for types within a group, acting out necessary roles.
I thought Owens as Porgy outstanding and Angel Blue as Bess perfect in each phase of her role — the acting was in general pitch perfect from caricature to deeply felt. Everyone else is supportive or contrasting (the two bully males who Bess succumbs to). I was drawn by the strong women characters, amused by the comic males (Sporting Life was done tongue-in-cheek), aware of the stories and losses of individuals. Archetypes were used and strongly emphatic performances.
Sporting Life (Frederick Ballentine) and Bess (Angel Blue)
There was a continual use of comic exaggeration to distance us and make us think about what we are seeing and as entertainment:
Maria (Denyce Graves) and upside-down the bully Crown (Alfred Walker)
The applause at the end was thunderous, and without meaning to take away anything from what literally happened on stage, as John Berger averred long ago, nothing occurs in a vacuum and I felt that everyone watching and acting was aware we as a group are living in a larger society now driven by bigotry, a renewal of race prejudice and open vile violent punitive behavior not seen openly in several decades. To do this opera and in this lavish way is to create a meaningful counter-punch against all Trump and his Republican party and their ignorant voters can do and assert belief in. The production is selling out and more performances than originally intended are now scheduled.
One of many ensemble scenes — there is much dancing, some ritual-like
The opera has a complicated often thwarted history because it has had to make its way in a racist society. The talk here shows how the opera is being seen as rooted in its context; its past and the surrounding society then and now embedded in the present production which has a message of hope, at least endurance and survival in a better future. Now we attend to the use of African music, the songs of African-Americans intermixed with the Broadway music and song rhythms and how this is worked into mid-century operatic traditions, both sentimental and stereotypical. And it is still daring to have a home-y kindly aging disabled man for a hero, a heroine who is raped in one scene (when Crown drags her off from the picnic) but in others succumbs to temptation, who sees the better way and cannot leave off her addiction.
Bess and Porgy in a companionable moment
Just a taste of the memorable poignant sensual Summertime as sung by Clara to her baby, a lullaby (the soprano Golda Schultz):
For this production the Met has mounted a show of black performers at the Met since its inception: it's made up of pictures and the memorabilia of all black singers, and dancers too who were in operas on stage. It's called Black Voices at the Met, though some of the people commemorated are there for costuming, sets, choreography. It seems also to remember those excluded: Paul Robson is there
I end on two poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!
Baldwin & Jenkins's If Beale Street could talk — Morrison's Bluest Eye & Eliot's Mill on the Floss — tragedies of American racism
Posted in 20th century culture, 21st century culture, African-American literature, Costume drama, Film adaptations, film studies, political novels/films, politics, racism, US social life, tagged African-American art, Barry Jenkins, george eliot, James Baldwin, male violence, Martin Luther King Day, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison on January 20, 2020| 5 Comments »
Fonny (James Stephen) and Tish (Kiki Layne) as we first see them walking together
Gradually appearing intertitle introducing the film
I wanted to write something for Martin Luther King day on the web itself. So I read most of Baldwin's If Beale Street could Talk, and then rewrote a blog written about If Beale Street could talk mostly just as a movie and from commentary about the book: I was startled to find what a tender tone is suffused throughout the book because of the inner spirit of the narrator, Tish (Clementine is a give-away of sorts, a symbolic name). It is a sort of romance! But also a book much like The Bluest Eye (a Coming of Age for girls book), except (one could say) Bluest Eye is l'ecriture-femme, Beale Street from a more masculine point of view. My theme is the tragic waste of US American racism for all, the pity of it, the terror too.
Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day: here in Virginia finally some mild gun control legislation has been passed by a democratic house and governor, and the result has been a threatened violent riot in Charlottesville, Va., organized by white supremacist groups with credible evidence they mean to cause havoc and use their guns; they are misrepresenting the legislation which does not at all infringe on the right of legitimate gun ownership. This demonstration and its misrepresentation of the passed gun control law has been endorsed by Trump. Governor Northam called in the FBI to investigate and three people were arrested. The day chosen was naturally this one, our National Holiday for remembering Martin Luther King, who might have been the best president we ever had — if he had lived. Murdered at 37 (before 40 like Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and other black male leaders), MLK was responsible for a movement which culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights act, today partly gutted by the Supreme Court. The demonstration was not violent but was immense as was the state police presence; OTOH, something a sizable majority of Virginians support gun control, and the democrats won on the issue. It is hopeful that no violence occurred because it may be that if Trump loses the next election, riots on his behalf to keep him in the presidency will be prevented.
If Beale Street could talk, book and film, tell the same terrible tale we learn about in When They See Us. A system of incarceration whose structure and rules give African-Americans no hearing, only injustice and the felt hostility of blind chance & dependence on other vulnerable frightened people.
I began with the film, which I've wanted to watch for quite some time: we are thrust into the story of two lovers walking down a paved alley in a park, and they vow love to one another, and determine they will tell their families, who, it seems, may not approve. Cut to Tish's voice saying "I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love…through glass:" we now see her sitting in a prison visiting room on one side of a glass waiting for Fonny to be brought out to sit on the other side. They cannot touch one another, they cannot hear unless they pick up the phones attached to each side of the booth they share. We are puzzled for a long time: why is he in prison. He seems utterly upstanding, he makes little money as a sculptor, but he is the son of church-going people, not an alcoholic, not drinking, trying to get together money to bribe someone willing to rent to them. Much of the film is interwoven flashbacks and we see in one: someone finally offers them a concrete garage space that is described as a loft (so the man can charge more). Most of the time no one will rent to them.
Gradually the story unfolds bit-by-bit: flashbacks interwoven and a narrator's voice to connect is the mode: so throughout with increasing poignancy we see their ecstatic first days and nights of love. But then after he is jailed, she finds she is pregnant, then (something she dreads) she has to tell her family and then his without him, because he is in prison (still unexplained): her family accepts the baby and coming marriage:
His mother does not, nor his sisters who speak in ugly spiteful ways using church dogma as a cover.
More time goes by in the ongoing forward time narrative as Tish gets a job selling perfume (one she is told she should be grateful for as she is black), and then one night in a flashback while they are walking in the street we see how from out of nowhere Fonny was accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman, Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios), he never met and was nowhere near. They are told she singled Fonny out in a police-formed row of men; and are gradually led to a white lawyer (Finn Whittrock), well-meaning, who tells them the woman has fled to Puerto Rico. Fonny is beginning to become angry, frantic, violent, resentful, half-crazy in the bare cell room.
Then finally, either as flashback, just before or after, we see a brief encounter between Fonny and a sly angry-looking, resentful white police officer whose name we learn is Bell (Ed Skrein) grows livid when after he accuses Fonny of stealing, the store owner vindicates Fonny. Fonny himself is proud, often hot-tempered and has to be controlled by Tish. Bell warns Fonny he will get back. Early on Tish remarks what happened was the result of Fonny's strong pride. Yes and it took just one resentful white man.
The police officer, seen only once, his sneer hardly has time to register
And all came clear to me. This white officer incensed at Fonny has lied, pressured the woman into accusing him, probably helped her to flee. There is no way Fonny can clear himself of this crime unless the Puerto Rican woman comes back to refute her testimony.
The movie seemed to me and now I know is a deeply felt adaptation of a novel by Baldwin, both of which (book and movie) dramatize as the on-going story the need African-American people have of one another. Again we see the two family groups early on, and Fonny's mother and sisters are incensed, cruel and corrosive in what they say. After Fonny is imprisoned, the two fathers getting together to steal little-by-little to get up the money for Sharon Rivers, Trish's mother (Regina King) to go to Puerto Rico to speak to the woman.
Mrs Rivers is so brave, ever changing her clothes, her wig, wanting to look presentable, right somehow, so intense, worried, tight, hopeful still, goes and at first is rebuffed by the woman's older male relative, but eventually he yields (perhaps a bribe) but then Victoria becomes hysterical and refuses to go back to withdraw her testimony. She asks Mrs Rogers if she has ever been raped. This is the desolate climax of the film.
Mrs Rivers trying to appeal to Victoria
But Victoria is herself walled in by her own anger, resentment hopeless impoverishment
When it's clear they can't count on any evidence in their favor except there is no evidence but the identification by a woman who won't come to the court, at first the lawyer holds out, but we see the case is going nowhere, there is no trial set. Tish gives birth to her baby; fast forward and Tish tells us that he plea bargained and it's clear they are waiting for the years of prison to go by as they meet regularly in a freer prison room for visitors. His son is a small child and they try to act as a family during the time they have together. Eat, play a board game, tell each other how the week has been. This is how the film ends; the family in a visiting room in a prison, with the wife's salary and will power holding them together.
I now got hold of and read the book, before rewriting the original blog — as well as returning to David Leeming's commentary and quotation of Baldwin in his James Baldwin: A Biography, and Joyce Carol Oates's review for the New York Times of the book and film before writing this blog.
Crucially, no one in the feature that came with the film never anywhere said that Fonny was framed; that he will spend years of his life behind bars helplessly. Not one person said it was the spite of a single police officer. I wanted to read the book to make sure (since in the film this is never made explicit) this a parable about how vulnerable black people are at any moment to be plunged into non-life, death in prison. Why keep silent? This is supposed to be Beale Street talking at last, telling. What is startling is how tender the tone of the novel when it comes to Fonny; the book is also a loving deeply sad romance, mourning how Fonny never had a chance.
It's an instance of what we experience in When They See Us: it is the same story writ little from the point of view of the woman who loved the man. In the US if you are black and someone somewhere with some authority who is white can destroy you.
Baldwin emphasizes the story is a parable about "the black man's bondage … everywhere; and "the emotional imprisonment of whites." I again admit I didn't see that much, only that the lawyer was as helpless as his client finally. In David Leeming's biography, Baldwin says he also meant to show how isolated black are at the same time that they recognize they must be involved with one another, recognize their need of one another, share and bond experience in a way of imprisoned (if often invisible) life. The context is a "battle for integrity" in a world where the struggle to survive makes them have painfully to give integrity up — or compromise reality.
Joyce Carol Oates, like the people in the feature to the DVD, seems to want to make this an affirmative story about the endurance of African-American people helping one another Oates says it is a "traditional celebration of love:" and it is all she says, including a portrait of the white lawyer as sympathetic and doing his weak best.
Regina King as Sharon and Colman Domingo as Tish's parents
The white lawyer
Her review doubts the wisdom of using Tish as a narrator (voice-over) retrospectively — there seems to me her doubt of this young girl having gravitas enough doubt about a woman's gravity and seriousness, and a black woman. I admit Oates goes over and makes plain the horror at the center of this disaster, but did she have to say "so patiently," of course the police officer is a villain (who has killed a 12 year old black boy some time ago), and to de-emphasize this seems racist to me.
Now I see that the film, through an integrated back-and-forth series of flashbacks tells the story of both Fonny and Tish since they were children bathing together, the stages of their earliest life in black-and-white photos. I thought of the third-century Greek romance, Daphnis and Chloe, the later 18th century Rouseauistic Paul and Virginia. We see his friendship with a man who gives evidence him (coerced); moments of Fonny doing sculpture, Tish selling things, coping with customers, the two of them begging a meal when they have no money, fixing their apartment, but I suggest a thread through the love affair is Tish's mother's support of them, of her; Tish's sister gets the lawyer but Tish's mother helps her to give birth and bathe the baby first. And especially Tish coping from pregnancy to still waiting.
Tish giving birth with her mother's help
Bathing the baby
The film rightly was nominated for many awards; it should have won more. At least Regina King won for Best Supporting Actress.
It's a beautiful book and wish I had known about it before; I had placed a version of this on my Reveries under the Sign of Austen blog because the narrated voice and point of view is that if the young woman and her mother. It has many scenes of intimate domestic life: the kinds of furniture black people can afford; Fonny and Tish doing all sorts of things in their lives: he with friends, she in the subway. The book is a heroine's text. A poignant romance where courage is holding out (like Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop). It is a woman's film using the characteristics of women's art to powerful effect.
An iconic scene from their beginning love story
But today I know it belongs on my general blog and I have moved it here, and widened my purview in a coda where I offer my first response to Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which I began reading for the first time yesterday.
What a masterpiece of a first book. I recommend it and her Beloved on this day. The Bluest Eye is quiet, unassuming, the story of an American black family from the point of view of one of the younger daughter/sisters, Claudia. It brings home to me what a tragedy it is that working class white and black people in the US do not realize how much we have in common. As I read although my family did not have quite these hideous experiences (the house is burnt down – something white people did regularly to black people and got away with until the last part of the 20th century) many of the desolating exclusionary experiences her family members know we knew. The attitudes of mind remind me of what we knew. So much in common and denied because of the use of "middle class" which skews whom one identifies with and enables people to ignore their real circumstances, what are their real expectations/hopes. Howard Zinn in his History of the People of the US shows that from the very beginning of the US state, the upper classes have been concerned to keep better off and poor whites from identifying with Native and African-Americans.
The story of the girl being given a white doll and destroying it bit by bit reminded me of Maggie Tulliver in Eliot's Mill on the Floss. How Maggie hated that doll too and took it up to the attic to abuse it. I didn't hate my dolls but an ugly story occurred around one, after which I destroyed it and had no more dolls but one Ginny (age 11) and tired of her soon with her fancy wardrobe &c The title comes from a little girl in the book, Pecola, who Claudia's mother is kind enough to take in (her family has been smashed) and who tells her new friends, Claudia and her sister, Frieda, she longs for a blue eye, though all her features are African. Claudia is out of sympathy with this, thus producing an alienated perspective within an implicitly alienated earnest one.
The book has several of the classic incidents of a mature young girl's novel, for example, when Pecola menstruates for the first time, is very frightened and how she is treated. By the way none of these occur in Little Women (another is sexual harassment, the closest Alcott gets to this is Meg Goes to Vanity Fair when Meg allows her hostess to sexualize her dress.) My last image for this blog is Emily Watson playing Maggie Tulliver in a 1997 BBC Mill on the Floss; she has been the best Marmee thus far too (in the 2017/8 BBC 3 part Little Women). When I got to the end of the book I was so angry, I threw it across the room and then through it out. The book ended with her forgiveness of a brother who had destroyed her life, her senseless death trying to rescue him.
We are reading these two novels by Morrison now on WomenWriters@groups.io; the last two months we read Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter: she mentions only three girls' books but two are Little Women and Mill on the Floss — she identified with Jo and Maggie. Well Claudia and Pecola and Clementine (Tish) are three more such heroines in the same vein ….
For Martin Luther King day a great powerful African-American literature and its close parallels with great powerful European-American literature by women — novels of girls growing up and the choices inflicted on them …
Unexpected fresh outlook on Winston Graham's Poldark & Non-Poldark novels: through allusion, ironies, female POVs
Posted in 20th century culture, film studies, historical fiction, literary scholarly work, novels of sensibility, Poldark, political novels/films, TV, Winston Graham, tagged Cornwall, heroine's text, male violence, Winston Graham on December 16, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Warleggan, the original or first 1953 cover — in line with the first covers for Ross Poldark and Demelza (we gaze through the windows of imagination into the Cornish landscape & seas)
The Black Moon, the original 1973 cover
Study of allusions (or intertextuality), uses of dramatic and plot-design irony, female POVs, working class allegiances yield a new kind of reading of Graham's books
My readers, I hope, have not begun to give up hope on my projected book on Winston Graham — not that anyone should care but me. Well, I'm still working on it. Since last in mid-July I outlined very sketchily a new approach to this book I've decided I must take (The Poldark World: A Matter of Genre), I am ever working on it, sometimes more slowly and for entertainment, as it were living with the characters in Poldark (participating in the detailed discussions of these 12 books which go on on a face-book page called Poldark Book Discussions; watching the two series, one every few nights with occasional breaks), and sometimes more progressively, consistently and as study. Before the fall term ended I read two written during the first quartet of Poldarks:
Night Without Stars, 1950
Fortune is a Woman, 1952
Night Without Stars, 1950, the original or first cover
Like so many of Graham's novels, Night Without Stars features a disabled person, this time seriously disabled, the hero, a man blind for a long period after his war-time service; it also (unfortunately kept secondary) includes a telling story of the nearly destroyed life of a French woman during the war
Still I must admit I couldn't understand why or how Graham could take time out from the Poldark world to write these since they seemed to me so faded, at moments so cliched, without strong vivid characters (especially Fortune is a Woman), inferior to all Graham's historical fiction (I much admired The Forgotten Story, 1945, set in 1898 Cornwall; Cordelia, 1948, set in the 19th century with a female point of view). One must conclude writing in this male genre was compulsive to him. Even stranger to me, both were adapted into commercial cinema movies, with Night Without Stars presented so weakly, and Fortune is a Woman downright embarrassing to watch. The first movie adaptation of a Graham novel, Take My Life, 1947, had been turned into a memorable film noir.
But once term started to slacken off (early November) I've been steadily reading these or what I call his mid-career non-Poldark books, the ones written during the 20 year interval after Warleggan and before The Angry Tide. I've not yet finished this phase of his writing career, but have read for the first time, begun to study, or re-read and/or read some background books for
The Little Walls, published 1955 (the only one of Graham's books to win a prestigious prize)
The Sleeping Partner, 1956 (a movie was made, just awful)
An attractive stark cover for the first edition: the appeal in the letters
Greek Fire, 1957 (remarkable use of the internecine politics of the era)
The Tumbled House, 1959 (very fine, impressive)
The Portuguese cover for Marnie: a rare one to suggest the actual content of the book with some discrimination
Marnie, 1961 (the notorious but nowadays much admired and influential Hitchcock film, 1963)
The Grove of Eagles, 1963 (but begun 5 years before, worked on for a long time), set in Cornwall
After the Act, 1965
The Walking Stick, 1967 (one of Graham's best non-Poldark novels, & made into an intelligent movie)
A still from the movie, Walking Stick, suggesting Graham's derisory description of it as a kind of Elvira Madrigan is false — this flat just off the docks is one of the central settings of the movie
I skipped Night Journey, 1966, having read it the 1941 version, which I found had something of the power of the amoral "entertainments" of Graham Greene during the war (say The Ministry of Fear); at the time I immediately went to on to compare this WW2 book with this shorter, 1966 revision and found the later one commercialized, slicker, so much lost by the streamlining and updating, "modernizing."
I stepped back, and have now reread my various blogs on the earliest novels (1930s), and the World War Two ones (you may find them by clicking on the tag Winston Graham, or using the search engine for the blog). I have three to go: a final suspense book for this period, Angell, Pearl and Little God, 1970 (I have read it and found it powerful – I can here imagine a strong movie); a 1971 book of varied short stories, gathered under the title The Japanese Girl (some gothics, one ghostly; one historical fiction, one rather nasty O. Henry type story among them), and the non-fiction 1972 history, The Spanish Armadas (once again it's a matter of Cornwall, this time the battle during the late Elizabethan period). But I thought first I would use this blog (as I have others) as a way of thinking about, seeing some patterns in this group that interest me.
Cordelia, from the 1960s Bodley Head edition of 12 of Graham's novels — most covers for this novel are anachronistic (the characters are given mid-20th century clothes, or they are much sentimentalized doll-like visions of a picturesque 19th century set)
I've been paying attention to which books have a female POV: thus far:
1938 Giant's Chair (rural Wales), Mary Seymour, 3rd person
1939 Keys of Chance, Norah Faulkner, 3rd person
1945 Forgotten Story (1898 Cornwall): young boy moves into older cousin Patricia Veal Harris, back and forth, 3rd person
1949 Cordelia, Cordelia Blake Fergusson (19th century fiction Manchester), 3rd person
1963 Marnie – Marnie Elmer, genuine first person point of view* (with intermittent breaks and movement into omniscience, for Mark's point of view
1967 Walking Stick, Deborah Dainton, who is lame genuine first person point of view*
1998, Ugly Sister, Emma Spry, maimed on one side of her face, genuine first person point of view*, historical fiction, 19th century Cornwall
So just two in this mid-career sub-set.
In this mid-career sub-set, though, several take place in and around the Mediterranean world or have long sequences which occur on one of the islands, all of which show much knowledge of these areas. Greek Fire practically maps Athens and parts of Greece for the reader. Water ways are ever important in Graham's fictions
More interesting as art: several use irony centrally. In Marnie, the POV may be Marnie (except when the author has changed allegiances to Mark) but there is perpetually an ironic distance between the author and his character, one only implied and not without sympathy. This ironic distance is even stronger but less obvious in After the Act, where Morris Scott's self-loving view of himself is even less shared by the author; arguably, he is an unredeemable shit. In The Walking Stick it takes us most of the novel to realize the heroine has been lured into a web of lies, and most of what she believes of this working class deprived man she falls in love with is not true; he is a self-pitying utterly conscienceless criminal. The character see himself positively (as does the sexually promiscuous wife murderer of After the Fall) as perhaps does Stephen Carrington in the Poldarks
Last, four have remarkable central uses of allusions to other books or films that I found wholly unexpected, and lifted the Graham book into another realm of meaning. He had used literary, art and even music allusions interestingly before (Strangers Meeting, Merciless Ladies) but not so intertextually.
Richard Chamberlain and Eileen Atkins, said to have been the best actors in the central roles of Lady's Not for Burning
Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning is important in The Tumbled House (one of the superior suspense novels, indirectly highly autobiographical)
Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey tells us how Marnie is intended to be understand as about an angry working class girl, to fit into the literature of the period about exploited downtrodden (not that Marnie will allow that) working class lives
A.L. Rowse's Tudor Cornwall is simply the central source for Grove of Eagles (despite much research into documents too)
Jean Anouilh's Waltz of the Toreadors (a bitter farce about man wanting to murder his aging inconvenient wife turned into a tasteless movie with Peter Sellers) for a frame for After the Act (one-third of the way in this "hero" murders his nagging embarrassing wife and the rest of the novel is his remorse and ultimately the ironic showing of him getting away with this in a kind of triumph because his work makes so much money for others — a personal nightmare, self-flagellation?)
Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (called by WG in the novel "a strange somber classic" with the narrator a woman writing three remarkable paragraphs about the movie); and Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma for the remarkable Walking Stick (another superior book, WG said it sold more than any other or made him more money). A cornucopia of allusions to Browning, Shakespeare, Donne
Over the last couple of days I've been reading and then watching the really fine 1987 TV film adaptation of The Lady's Not for Burning, featuring Kenneth Branagh, Cherie Lunge, a very young Susannah Harker (impeccable in her part), and thinking about the parallels between what is said in it about human life and relationships and what is found in The Tumbled House; also how it can be related to other of Graham's fictions. I just loved the movie and scripts (both stage-play and screenplay are by Fry).
But this blog has gone on long enough. I'll end by recording I'm about to embark on the same study of A Taste of Honey (play, 1961 movie by Tony Richardson) for Marnie. Also relevant the French film Tony Lee Moral discussed: Sundays and Cybele (about a child deprived of parents, or a home life taken up by a mentally troubled man after WW2). I find all movies made after Hitchcock mentioned by Lee, of which I've now tried three, are mesmerized by the core paradigm Hitchcock pulled out of it, which resembles the core paradigms of most Hitchcock movies so are more or less worthless — not Sean O'Connor's play but I cannot reach the text. I've a good book on Delaney and will return to Margaret Foster's fiction of this era, and Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman (about two working class [one "in service" for a while] lives).
I mean to go on to do the same for Waltz of the Toreadors (which I saw at age 13 with my father watching too and commenting on what was then Channel 13 in NYC — a remarkable production) and After the Act, which to my mind anticipates Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. I must re-watched Wild Strawberries and I've obtained a copy of Shaw's Doctor's Dilemma and will rent the movie (yes there was a movie made). Graham is much interested in doctor's dilemmas in his work, most notably through his beloved Dwight Enys. My heart has warmed towards Luke Norris: I've come to love the way he does the part in the New Poldark.
This promotional shot of Luke Norris as Dwight Enys in the 4th season emphasizes his beauty — but he is more often seen seriously about doctoring, and troubled over how little he can do, aware he must not dominate his patients, he is their advisor, not their boss.
So here's where I am, just before the Winter Solstice in 2019.