The Dead Live

We are always looking for a poet who speaks to us directly, in almost personal terms. But that is what all true poets do - they can reach further and deeper into our lives than any prose writer can in ways that are still largely mysterious. Like music, poetry touches us like nothing else can. However it accomplishes this, it is non-rational, using language almost like signals that trigger emotions and ideas. In his introduction to Conrad Aiken's Selected Poems, Harold Bloom wrote: "Aiken's flaws are palpable enough: his rhetoric is too consistently eloquent, and frequently he gives us poetry rather than poems. And yet it is poetry, cognitive music, free of all ideology, and courageous in confronting family madness, solitude, death-as-annihilation, chaos."

I first knew Aiken as the author of a short story that I read when I was a boy - a boy about the same age as the boy in the story. It was "Silent Snow Secret Snow," and the story's haunting portrayal of a boy's fantasy world in which it is always snowing captivated me when I was living in the American South, where snow was a very rare and, for me, magical occurrence. I quickly divined the power of snow to slow things down: snarling traffic, closing schools, knocking out power.

Like everyone else, I, too, am always on the lookout for a poet who I feel speaks directly to me. Aiken is not such a poet, but he is a fine, serious writer of poetry. In his late poem "Hallowe'en" he appeals to us to restore to the holiday its original meaning and function. In many Catholic countries, including the Philippines (where I write this), there is a tradition for remembering the dead, not as they were, but as they still are - gone but a part of us and of our ongoing lives. 

Hallowe'en

I

All Saints', All Hallows', All Souls', and Hallowe'en,

which is the evening of the last of October,

and the harvest moon full:

and the first of November, Allerheiligen,

and the second of November, Allerseelen.

The moon, dead brother, lights her bonfire

behind Sheepfold Hill, old corpse-fire

blazing through the oaktrees, the bone-fire

which, in the forests, the priests called ignis ossium.

And again you come to complain and to haunt me,

you and the others, the homeless: the bells

trill in the twilight, held by no fingers,

touched by no hand of the living, the voices

under the bronze cloud circle the bonfire,

wing-voice and bat-voice and tree-voice:

and the spotted pebble, flung hissing in flames,

is lost in the ashes, and with it your soul.

It is you at the fire's edge, grandfather—!

your skeleton dancing, the pumpkin-head glaring,

the corpse-light through the pierced eyes and slashed mouth,

you, past the gas-works and the power-plant drifting,

and the old car-tracks and the railroad crossing,

but not, no, not again to the Heath of Simmering

where you watched little rafts of gay candles

floating like fireflies down the Danube, the souls

of those who had drowned in the river! There you

with alien eyes saw the ancient god, there heard

with alien ears the Allerseelen, Allerheiligen,

the candles on grave-mounds, and the flowers,

the procession of the living with wreaths

to the hillside cemeteries in the mountains,

and, after dark, the processions of the dead

to the lost threshold, the lost hearthstone.

And now you come back to complain and to haunt me,

you, and my brother, and the others.

Was your vision of god not enough, that you come

for the vision of the not-yet-dead, and the cricket's

chirp on the still-warm hearthstone?

II

ln the old time, the old country,

these two days, these two holy days,

were devoted to the dead. At the end of summer,

in the first haze of autumn stolen in from the sea,

at Samhain, the end of summer,

salt smell of kelp mixed with scent of the windfall

and whirled up the chalk path at daybreak,

we sacrificed a white horse to the sun-god

and kindled great fires on the hills

and nightlong we danced in circles

with straw-plaits blazing on pitchforks.

We sacrificed too to the moon-god,

an effigy, a simulacrum,

on this night, Hallowe'en, for we knew

the spirits of the dead were released, and would come

to rattle our latches and sit at the table. At Vespers,

in the dank churchyard, in the ossuary,

where the bones from an over-full graveyard were crammed,

we went in and knelt among bones. And the bones

(wing-voice and tree-voice and wind-voice)

suddenly were singing about us

joined in complaint and besought us

for prayers and more prayers, while the candles

flickered in the draft on grave-mounds.

Then on clean cloth we laid out the supper,

the hot pancakes, and the curds, and the cider,

and banked well the fire, and set the chairs round it,

said a prayer, and to bed.

In the old time, the old country:

but now none remembers, now they become

the forgotten, the lost and forgotten. O lost and forgotten,

you homeless and hearthless, you maskers and dancers,

masquerading as witches, as wild beasts, as robbers,

jack-o'-lantern leaping in the shadows of walls,

bells thrilling at the touch of bone fingers,

you come back to abuse and to haunt us,

you, grandfather, and my brother, and the others:

to the forgetful house, yourselves not forgetful,

(for the dead do not forget us, in our hearts

the dead never forget us)

you return to make mischief and to enter the house

you return once more to remind us.

The pumpkin-head lit with a candle, the cry

help the poor, help the poor, help the poor!

comminatory cry from door to door

and the obolos paid that the ghost be laid:

it is our ancestors and children who conspire against us

life unlived and unloved that conspires against us

our neglected hearts and hearths that conspire against us

for we have neglected not only our death

in forgetting our obligations to the dead

we have neglected our living and our children's living

in neglecting our love

for the dead who would still live within us.

III

All summer it rained: day after day, from morning

to sodden noon and eave's-drop eve, it rained:

day after day the heavens and the clouds complained.

Heavy the honeysuckle poll with over-ripe blossom:

rank the myrtle by the doorstep: bleeding the bosom

of the rainsick rose who broke her heart on the tomb.

The dry wells filled, and the vaults, and the cisterns:

and the cellars with underground music: the furrows of clay

glittered with water: rotten under water the wheatfield lay.

In the drear suburb, beyond the greenhouse, and the stonemason's,

on the Cove Road, among the marble shafts and porphyry basins,

and the cold eyeless angels with folded wings,

(there where we fished as children

looking over our shoulders at tombstones)

at last, undermined by water, the headstone fell,

sank softly, slowly, on the grave-mound,

and lay thus, a month neglected, on hollow ground.

And the spirit, the unappeased houseless spirit,

whose dwelling should be in ourselves, those who inherit,

even as our dwelling is in the tomb,

homeward once more looks now for prayer and praise

to be with laurels blest

and in our breast

live out his due bequest of nights and days.

IV

And so it is you at the dark's edge, grandfather,

revenant again to complain and to haunt me,

cavorting at the fire's edge, leaping through the flames,

while the moon, behind Sheepfold Hill,

lights her old bonfire, old bone-fire, and our ancestors

gather down from the hillside, gather up from the sea-wall,

and come home to be warmed. You, from the Geissberg,

the 'Rhine full of molten gold, and the Neckar Valley

echoing the slow psalm of the curfew,

from 'a lecture by Humboldt,' and a ship at sea

'which, as she took up the winds,

and rose in triumph over the waves,'

was a symbol to you of our relation to god:

'the absolute, the eternal, the infinite, a shoreless sea,

in unconscious rest, all its powers in repose,

to be used at man's will.' And the Iphigenie

von Tauris, at Heidelberg read with delight,

while the little Humboldt, 'his small face flushed,

eyes small, bright, and piercing,'

transcribed the last page of his Kosmos.

'And I thought, as he moved off, helped by his servant,

had I waited a twelvemonth, I would never have seen him.'

All Hallows' Even, Hallowe'en,

the evening of the last of October,

and the harvest in-gathered:

and the first of November, Allerheiligen,

and the second of November, Allerseelen.

Was your vision of god not enough, that you come

for the vision of the living, and the cricket's

small share of the hearthstone? Or is it some other,

some humbler, more human, news that yon crave?

Your children?—Long dead; and Cousin Abiel, the Quaker;

and the house with the hawthorns torn down;

and your own house a chapel; and the whaleships

departed: no more shines the eagle

on the pilot-house roof at the foot of the hill.

Yet no, not these are your loves, but the timeless and formless,

the laws and the vision: as you saw on the ship

how, like an angel, she subdued to her purpose

the confused power of ocean, the diffused power of wind,

translating them swiftly to beauty,

'so infinite ends, and finite begins, so man

may make the god finite and viable,

make conscious god's powers in action and being.'

Was it so? is it so? and the life so lived?

O you who made magic

under an oak-tree once in the sunlight

translating your acorns to green cups and saucers

for the grandchild mute at the tree's foot,

and died, alone, on a doorstep at midnight

your vision complete but your work undone,

with your dream of a world religion,

'a peace convention of religions, a worship

purified of myth and of dogma:'

dear scarecrow, dear pumpkin-head!

who masquerade now as my child, to assure

the continuing love, the continuing dream,

and the heart and the hearth and the wholeness—

it was so, it is so, and the life so lived

shines this night like the moon over Sheepfold Hill,

and he who interpreted the wonders of god

is himself dissolved and interpreted.

Rest: be at peace. It suffices to know and to rest.

For the singers, in rest, shall stand as a river

whose source is unending forever.

Aiken's appeal for the dead is most succinctly stated in the lines 

it is our ancestors and children who conspire against us

life unlived and unloved that conspires against us

our neglected hearts and hearths that conspire against us

for we have neglected not only our death

in forgetting our obligations to the dead

we have neglected our living and our children's living

in neglecting our love

for the dead who would still live within us.


We have a tradition of "restless spirits," walking the earth, like Hamlet's ghost, with a score left unsettled. These spirits are perturbed because of our neglect of them, our habit of forgetting people as soon as they are dead. But the dead have a place in our lives, if we allow them one. Even if we do it only once a year, it is an important reminder. Happy Hallowe'en.

For the Record

I was wrong. For several weeks after the death of my sister a year ago today, I didn't know the cause of her death. Recklessly, I speculated on this blog that she may have deliberately taken an overdose. I had no intentions of impugning my sister's name or her legacy, and whatever indications may have led me draw such a conclusion, I merely wanted to know the truth.

This is as much as I know. A friend stopped by her apartment in Anchorage to drop off some groceries. Because there was no answer to hs repeated knocks on her door, he went to the apartment manager who had the authority, and a key, to enter her apartment. My sister's body was found on her living room floor with the telephone in her hand. I learned later that her phone had been disconnected on the 24th. A neighbor told my sister's friend that when he saw her three days before, her face was "black and blue" and that earlier on the day she died, he responded to cries of help from the parking lot where he found her in her car, without enough strength to get out and make it back to her upstairs apartment.

Her death was from "natural causes." She was just 65 years old. She had been diagnosed a few years before with artereo sclerosis and had been waiting to have an outpatient procedure performed that would implant a "stint" in one of the clogged arteries to her heart. Because she had no health insurance, she sought various ways of paying for the procedure. Since she turned 65 in July, I expected her to apply for medicare. She never told me if she applied or not.

Based on this skimpy information and from what her neighbor had reported about her face being black and blue, my entirely uneducated guess is that my sister likely died of congestive heart failure. And possibly a broken heart as well. What continues to amaze me is that a woman who had had five husbands still managed to die alone. She was waiting for me to come home, and had prepared a place for me on my return. She waited as long, longer, than she could. And a year ago her wait was finally over. I will be sorry for this for as long as I live, but at least I have the luxury of being sorry.

One of the reasons why I miss my sister so much is because every time I encounter something beautiful - a song, a film, a poem - I can no longer share them with her. As happens occasionally, I will hear a lovely piece of music and I will immediately think of her, of how she would've been moved by it as much as I. But since she is no longer able to listen to it, I think to myself that I am her ears, that I am enjoying something beautiful for her.

I am not the fatalist that Thomas Hardy was. But his profound fatalism prevented him from ever forgetting the dead. One of his greatest poems on this theme is "During Wind and Rain." 

During Wind and Rain

They sing their dearest songs --
He, she, all of them -- yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss --
Elders and juniors -- aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!

They are blithely breakfasting all --
Men and maidens -- yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them -- aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.


We are so close to Hallowe'en, a day that is supposed to be for the people we have lost, every one of them. Next Tuesday, I will expand on the subject.

Siberian Lady Macbeth

Based on my research (details on the internet are skimpy at best), in 1961 Andrzej Wajda, fresh from Samson (yet another film dealing with the past) and still riding the crest of the success of Ashes and Diamonds (the past), left Poland in protest of its lack of creative freedom and went to Yugoslavia to make Siberian Lady Macbeth (Sibirska Ledi Magbet) with a cast and crew that spoke no Polish. Later Wajda complained that the experience was creatively frustrating and that it was better for him to seek creative freedom in Poland.

The Nikolai Leskov novella Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, published in 1865, is more famous for its 20th-Century adaptations than for its literary merits. It's a bit like The Brothers Karamazov if Grushenka were the central character and if she had been sexually insatiable. How refreshing, though, to find sex treated as it is in Leskov, and not as part of some moral agenda in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. (Turgenev was virtually asexual, which is probably why Henry James admired him so much.) "Oh! Oh! Let go of me, Katerina Lvovna moaned softly, weakening under Sergei's hot kisses, and involuntarily pressing herself to his powerful body." Not what students expect to encounter in a Russian Lit. class.

The brilliant 29-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich chose Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as the subject of an opera that not only altered the course of his career but radically changed the course of all "official" artistic expression in Stalin's USSR. Composed in 1932, the opera was already phenomenally successful when Stalin decided to go and see it in January 1936. After storming out of the performance during the last act, the opera was denounced in Pravda (the USSR's official news source) two days later. The opera closed and Shostakovich expected to be arrested and possibly sent to Siberia. Stalin imposed strict guidelines on artists, insisting that their work reflect the ideals of "Socialist Realism," keeping far from modernist abstraction or, in the case of composers like Shostakovich, atonality. Shostakovich survived and eventually managed to be rehabilitated in the eyes of Stalin. His opera, however, was never performed again in its original form in Shostakovich's. After Stalin's death, he reconstituted the opera and called it "Katerina Izmailova". It was first performed in Moscow in 1963. On being expelled from the USSR, Mstislav Rostropovich smuggled the manuscript of the 1932 opera to the West and recorded it in 1979.

The memory of the original opera outlasted Stalin's censorship. In the opening credits of Wajda's film, Dušan Radić is credited with the music, "based on the motives [sic] of the opera 'Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk' by Dmitri Shostakovich". Even filmmaking with such broad strokes as Wajda uses in Siberian Lady Macbeth, the use of Shostakovich's music is not intrusive but quite effective, especially the scene in which Sergei and Katerina dispose of her husband's dead body in a pigsty full of strange woolly pigs.

We are introduced to the precincts of a well to do merchant named Boris Izmailov, whose son Zinovy is away assessing the damage to a mill by a recent dam burst. It seems the old man has nothing to do all day but shout orders to his serfs, collect dead rats that have eaten the poisoned bait he leaves for them under the floor boards, eat and drink tea. Katerina, his daughter-in-law, who has failed to give his son a child, has even less to do with her husband away but walk around the house like a panther pacing her cage. Nothing to do, that is, until a strapping young swineherd named Sergei sallies forth.

In the opening shots, the setting looks like something from a Western - plain, makeshift buildings in the middle of a flat, dusty landscape. The widescreen photography, by Alexander Sekulovič, reinforces the impression that we are on a frontier where domesticated animals outnumber people. It is all exactly as Leskov describes in his novella:

"It was clean everywhere, it was quiet and empty everywhere, icon lamps shone before the icons, and nowhere in the house was there a living sound, a human voice. Katerina Lvovna would wander and wander about the empty rooms, start yawning with boredom, and climb the stairs to her marital bedroom in the small, high mezzanine. There, too, she sat, looked at how they hung up hemp or poured out flour by the storehouse again she would start to yawn, and she was glad of it: she would doze off for an hour or two, then wake up again the same Russian boredom, the boredom of a merchant's house, from which they say you could even happily hang yourself."(1)

Sergei no sooner meets Katerina than he changes into a proper shirt and heads straight for Katerina's bedroom. She feins indignity at his advances, until he's on top of her in her marriage bed. Afterwards (and there never was a more disappointing segue), her father-in-law enters downstairs, Katerina tells Sergei to scram and the old man catches him climbing down from the bedroom window. Old as he is (in the novella he's supposed to be 80), Boris hauls Sergei to the barn where he beats him mercilessly. Katerina covers her ears, but Sergei stifles his own cries by biting into his nice shirt (a nice touch Wajda copied from Leskov). Finished beating Sergei, Boris, exhausted, returns to Katerina and threatens to drag her naked through the streets. Without hesitation, she poisons his soup.

After the funeral, Katerina and Sergei spend all their time in bed until, without warning, her husband Zinovy returns. Having heard of his father's death and the rumors of his wife's infidelity, Zinovy confronts Katerina. Emboldened by the poisoned tea he has just drunk, Katerina, instead of denying the accusations, brings in Sergei (who was hiding outside) and, when Zinovy attacks him, together they finish off Zinovy.

There is an ecstatic scene in which Katerina and Sergei are riding in a horse-drawn wagon with Sergei joyously whipping the horses onward and Katerina lying back on the sacks of flour. But Katerina's problems are far from over. A relative arrives with claims on her estate. Another murder must follow. Wajda planned to tell the story in flashbacks as Katerina and Sergei plod on their long journey to Siberia. Incidentally, Mtsensk in a city in Ukraine. Siberia is where Katerina is exiled after her trial. I think Wajda was right to abandon the idea and tell the story straightforwardly. It gives the film a cumulative effect that is far more satisfying. In fact, when the two are at last caught and sentenced to life in exile, I thought, "the film should end here. Why continue?" But the final moments of the film are worth waiting for, as Katerina drowns Sergei's new girl and then herself in the river as the ferry drifts away behind the rain. It's a spectacular ending to a shamefully neglected film.
Special mention must be made for Ljuba Tadic as Sergei. He is almost pitiable in the final sequence, subject to his own nature, acquiring socks from Katerina to warm his feet on the road to Siberia, only to trade them for the favors of a pretty blonde in the group of exiles.

One searches in vain for antecedents for this film. Bergman's The Virgin Spring, made just two years before Wajda's film, comes close - except there is no violated virgin in Mtsensk. The violation(s) are all committed by Katerina Lvovna. There is also a spooky scene in which Katerina and her maid invoke the fertility of a pregnant mare. I have to admit that I found Katerina's (Olivera Markovic) arms around the mare's belly, pressing her breasts against it and kissing it, disturbingly erotic. The scene corresponds to the witch's (Gunnel Lindblom) appeal to Odin in The Virgin Spring. Bergman tried to repudiate his film by claiming he was heavily under the influence of Kurosawa. Kurosawa, to bring influences full circle, was deeply indebted to Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky.

As for the influence of Siberian Lady Macbeth on subsequent films, the two most famous Bulgarian films, The Peach Thief (1964) and The Goat Horn (1972), show clear echoes of Wajda's film. Harold Bloom once claimed that Kurosawa's Throne of Blood was the greatest "Shakespearean" film ever made. Bloom had probably never seen Siberian Lady Macbeth, but using his definition of "Shakespearean" (Kurosawa's film, coincidentally based on Macbeth, had to dispense with all of Shakespeare's text), there are very few films that come as close to the spirit and power of Shakespeare as Siberian Lady Macbeth.


(1) Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.


[Dept. of Corrections: I have had to edit the above piece after re-checking (very important!) my facts. I realized that I had trusted Wikipedia's page devoted to Andrzej Wajda too much, especially its filmography listing. It lists Samson as the film that Wajda made after Siberian Lady Macbeth. According to Wajda's official webpage and to IMDB, Samson came before. My apologies.]

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

In 1964, Rod Serling bought the rights to the short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge for $25,000. I'm stealing it back.

Robert Enrico's film, produced in France under the title La Riviere du Hibou, was based on the short story by American Civil War veteran, journalist and fiction writer Ambrose Bierce. Enrico had already adapted the Bierce story "Chickamauga" and later incorporated it and a third Bierce adaptation, "The Mockingbird," in Au coeur de la vie, after the original title of Bierce's collection of stories In the Midst of Life first published in 1891. I haven't seen the other two films but I've heard high praise for Au coeur de la vie.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge had won awards at Cannes in 1962 and at the Oscars in 1963 for Best Live Action Short. The producer of the fantasy/horror television series The Twilight Zone, hosted by Rod Serling, saw the film and finagled the broadcast rights for $20,000. An additional $5,000 was spent on re-editing. I probably saw the version originally broadcast in 1964, but I can't attest to its alterations of Enrico's film, except for Serling's obtrusive editorializing at the film's conclusion:

"An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: in two forms, as it was dreamed... and as it was lived and died. This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination... the ingredients of the Twilight Zone."

The episode has since passed into legend, but it is due solely to the power of Enrico's film, which has been done a disservice by having been assigned to the fantasy/horror genre. Though it draws a considerable amount of its force from the brevity of Bierce's style, the film stands on its own as a remarkable work of art. It is simply the story of a man who knows that he is about to die and the thoughts that pass through his mind in the moments leading up to his death.

Bierce saw so much death in the Civil War and was so personally affected by it that his war stories are haunted by astonishing visions and frequented by ghosts. His accounts of the war, both journalistic and fictional, are a fitting companion to the war photography of Mathew Brady. In their uniqueness and in their power to make something as common as violent death in battle so shockingly new and real, they are, I think, as valuable as Isaac Babel's stories of the Russian Civil War written thirty years later.

Under the credits, the first thing we see is a charred tree stump on which a poster has been placed that reads:

ORDER

ANY CIVILIAN

caught interfering with the railroad bridges,

tunnels or trains will be

SUMMARILY HANGED

The 4th of April 1862

Moving among the trees, the camera shows us a railroad bridge suspended across a stream. By the time the credits are over, we see a small group of soldiers in a single rank. An officer orders them toward the bridge. Preparations are being made for what appears to be a hanging: a soldier with sergeant stripes walks to the center of the bridge, throws a rope over a suspended beam and improvises a noose at one end. A man dressed as a civilian has his hands tied behind him and he is led forward by the arm to where a wooden plank is resting on top of the rails, with one end reaching a few feet over the water. With an officer standing on the other end of the plank, the man is moved onto it and placed near the outer edge, turned around, and the noose is placed around his neck. Two men bind his legs together at the knees and ankles. All the while the man is looking around him with a look of fear in his eyes. He glances below him at the slow-moving stream and we hear him thinking [exactly as in Bierce's story], "If I could free my hands, I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home."

What the film hasn't told us is that the Owl Creek Bridge is in Northern Alabama, that the man about to be hanged is Peyton Farquhar, whose family lives thirty miles away, that he is a slave-owner and keenly supportive of the Confederate cause, and that he sought to set fire to the bridge, was captured and summarily sentenced to death according to the order of the Union commandant.

In the film, the condemned man closes his eyes and we are shown his thoughts - a large house in the sunlight, two children playing and a woman in a hooped skirt getting up from her needlepoint and walking towards us, all in slow motion to the distorted sound of a ticking clock. The condemned man is startled from his reverie by an order shouted by an officer, and the sergeant adjusts the noose around the man's neck and a gold watch is removed from his pocket. This is Robert Enrico's visualization of the following paragraph:

"He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift — all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by — it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and — he knew not why — apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch."

Enrico's liberties with Bierce's text are minor. For instance, in the story the rope doesn't snap right away under the hanged man's weight. In the film he plunges straight into the creek. Upon his reaching the surface of the water and filling his bursting lungs again with air, the man's rapturous rediscovery of the beauty of the Spring morning that was to be his last is immensely moving in Enrico's film. And everything he experiences thereafter until the tale's abrupt and shocking conclusion is brilliantly handled. 

I would compare this utterly unique short film with one made in 1954 called A Time Out of War by Denis Sanders, that captures the strangest quality that the American Civil War exudes all these years later. There seems,  especially now, to be an immense distance between that particular past and the present that no film or work of fiction has been able to bridge. I am not the first to notice this, but the people who were engaged in one of the most decisive events in American history still seem (and in photographs look) like aliens from another planet. Isolated from its historical context, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge remains astonishing.

Le Amiche

There are moments in some of Michelangelo Antonioni's films in which one of his characters is obviously bored and can't seem to find anything to occupy them. They are extraordinary moments because they are so courageous - provoking critic John Simon to ask how a filmmaker can accurately portray boredom without boring the audience? Comparably, how can a filmmaker accurately portray superficiality for the entire length of a film without seeming to be superficial?

Antonioni's fourth film, Le Amiche (The Girlfriends) looks inside the world of a circle of fashionable women in Turin. Every one of them, including a talented artist invited to exhibit her work in New York, is a sphinx without riddles. Even Rosetta (played by Madeleine Fischer), who fails in a first attempt at suicide and succeeds in a second, throws herself at the husband of a friend, who is poorly equipped to love anything but his own illusions of artistic talent.

A professional woman, Clelia (Eleanora Rossi Drago), arrives in Turin to oversee the opening of a fashion salon and is plunged into this tepid pool of nullities when she happens to find herself in a hotel room adjoining the one in which Rosetta has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. She is pulled into the group of Rosetta's friends - Momina, Nené, and Mariella - out of curiosity about the lives of these privileged women (whom Clelia had once held in contempt) and about Rosetta's motive for taking an overdose. 

Men play various roles in their lives, as lovers and husbands (or both), but they are, typically in Antonioni's films, colorless and ineffectual. Gabriele Ferzetti plays Lorenzo, husband of Nené (Valentina Cortese) and lover of Rosetta. And it's as if his role is a dry run of Sandro in L'Avventura, also played by Ferzetti - another disaffected artist (an architect) who always manages to let the women who love him down. Then there is Cesare (Franco Fabrizi), architect for Clelia's salon and estranged husband of the permanently unfazed Momina (Yvonne Furneaux). Carlo (Ettore Manni) presents Clelia with a sentimental journey through her working class origins, but he is also a big letdown as we watch him at the film's conclusion hiding behind a mobile newstand as Clelia's train pulls out of the station.

We, too, become involved with Rosetta's troubled life, but not because she is any more substantial than her friends. She throws her life away, after all, because she is rejected by Lorenzo. She is unable - or unwilling - to see his advances for what they are, as definitive proof of his unreliability. For his part, Lorenzo refuses to leave Nené because she alone understands this about him. ("But why do you still love me?" he asks her. "Perhaps because I pay such a high price for you," she replies. Valentina Cortese even places her hand on the back of Gabriele Ferzetti's head, the same gesture used by Monca Vitti at the end of L'Avventura.)

Clelia manages to avoid prolonged suffering over Rosetta's suicide by throwing herself into her work, returning to her job in Rome. She is the most complex character in the film by far because she is the most self-sufficient. Carlo represents her sentimental nostalgia for her youth in Turin. Wandering the streets looking for furniture for her salon, she and Carlo happen upon her old neighborhood. She even thinks she recognizes a woman from her past life, now older, and wonders if she herself might have turned out like she did if she had stayed in Turin. Carlo even suggests that they might have married. But Clelia is too intelligent to give in to such daydreams. And so, ultimately, is Carlo.

Winter in Turin. The cinematography, by Gianni di Venanzo, is superb, especially in the exteriors of Turin and an excursion to the sea that is supposed to cheer up Rosetta. The beach in winter is cheerless ("Look how dirty the ocean looks!" Momina exclaims), but it provides Antonioni with opportunities for some striking compositions - figures grouped in foreground and background, a slight movement of the frame taking in a pair of lovers in the sand. And always Rosetta isolated against the surf. Some of the girls express concern, but Momina tells them, "Listen, if she would throw herself into an ocean like that, there's really no hope." Rosetta eventually throws herself into the still dirtier Po River.

Antonioni based his film (liberamente ispirato) on the next-to-last work published in the lifetime of Cesare Pavese, who committed suicide (in a hotel room) with an overdose of barbituates in 1950. In his novella, Tra Donne Sole (Among Women Only), Pavese's strategy was to introduce to an established milieu a character from the outside who provides us with an objective view of it and his own inability to engage with it, either because he doesn't have the proper emotional equipment or simply because he or she is incapable of escaping from their native solitude.

By making Rosetta's motivation for killing herself more explicit than in Pavese, Antonioni somewhat lessens its impact. That Pavese's suicide was partly motivated by his fizzled affair with Hollywood starlet Constance Dowling may have been in Antonioni's mind. Still, it is a plot device from a filmmaker who would eventually eschew plot altogether in his best work.

Antonioni uses his long takes effectively. The film looks splendid, as every Antonioni film does. I watched as eight principal characters - five women and three men - systematically fail one another until one of them can't take it any more and drowns herself in a river. The remaining characters blame one another or console one another, but nothing changes except Rosetta is no longer there to disturb the sleek surface with her troubled presence. It reminded me at times, unflatteringly, of a Visconti film.

A curious encounter occurs near the end of the film that has no bearing on the story. At the Turin train station, Clelia is waiting for Carlo to appear before her 10 PM train departs. She stops at a phone booth and tries to call him. A man, with his back to the camera, acts as if he recognizes Clelia or wishes to speak to her. When he approaches her we see him smiling at her, but she simply gives him a deprecating look and walks away to her train. There are similar scenes in both L'Avventura and La Notte in which Antonioni shows us women (Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau) being confronted by the unwelcome attention of men. In both cases, the woman walks away and the film resumes on its course. One is left wondering if such scenes represent Antonioni's attitude toward the human male or toward a certain class of Italian males.

Unlike Pavese's novel, which was published in 1949 when Italy was still regaining its feet, what the film exudes from the start is affluence. The women are all dressed like they stepped out of Vogue, circa Winter 1957. (All of the clothes in the film were supplied by the House of Fontana.) In fact, the actors' clothes are more than a little overwhelming. Even Rosetta is dressed in an evening gown and earrings when they find her after her suicide attempt. This was always Antonioni's chosen world, and he would explore it in his subsequent work, with the exception of the experimental Il Grido.

I'm guessing that the smothering fashionable clothes was Antonioni's point - that these people, as much use as so many tapeworms, are so frivolous, what they wear is what they are: fashion statements that are timely for only the moment, chic but shallow. He would visit the world of fashion again in Blow-Up, in which he was absorbed by the life of a successful young photographer and by what he witnesses - or thinks he witnesses - take place in a pretty little London park.

Looking back on Antonioni's career, every film that he made prior to L'Avventura (1960) was a failure. But they weren't all the same failure. Since every film he made in the '50s leads us to L'Avventura, one of the greatest films ever made, we can be thankful for them. In every one of them, in The Story of a Love, The Lady Without Camellias, even in the muddled Il Grido and the three-part I Vinti, we can see that Antonioni was reaching for something he couldn't quite grasp. In Le Amiche, however, he managed to touch, at moments, what he was reaching for. It is the best of his films before L'Avventura. If any other director had made it, its admirable qualities would've caused us to remember him. Asked in an interview when Le Amiche was released what advantage, if any, he had over Cesare Pavese, Antonioni said simply "I'm alive."