"There is a part of everything which is unexplored because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown." Gustave Flaubert
Because he was such an extreme perfectionist, none of the productions of Charlie Chaplin's films from The Kid (1923) to City Lights (1931) was without some major complication. They were explained in unapologetic detail in Chaplin's book, My Autobiography. But because it was the product of one of the most difficult periods of his personal life, he barely mentions the film he released to the public in January 1928, The Circus. And he waited until 1967 to do anything about restoring the film and re-releasing it. Always proprietary of his legacy, he finally, grudgingly it seems, struck a pristine new print from his own negative and re-released The Circus with a new musical score he composed (with some assistance - Chaplin couldn't read music) and he also wrote a song that he sings as the film opens. "Swing, Little Girl" isn't up to the level of "Smile" - the beautiful song he wrote for Modern Times. Merna Kennedy swings on rings suspended from high above under the circus tent. Chaplin sings the song in a noticeably old voice, much older than the man in the film, who was almost 40.
The Circus is uncomfortably lodged between Chaplin's two monuments, The Gold Rush (1925) and City Lights (1931). It's consistently funnier than either of them, but it comes up short on "pathos" - it gives you more than enough laughs, but no tears. Tears? Ever since The Tramp in 1915, when Chaplin added a new dimension to his usual knockabout comedy, an emotional undercurrent of sadness based on the inescapable fact that he's a tramp and not a suitable love interest for the girls (played by Edna Purviance until 1923) he irresistibly falls for. No other film comedian could make an audience cry. And we cry every time we watch little Jackie Coogan thrown into the back of a truck that is to take him away to an orphanage, and he reaches out with his little hands and cries out to Charlie, who, back inside their attic room, is being throttled by the social worker and a cop. But Charlie hears the boy's cries for help and finds the strength to fight off his attackers and rescue him. We cry when Charlie, who had fallen asleep waiting for Georgia and her friends to come to his cabin like they promised, awakes to the noise coming from the saloon in town. It's midnight, and the girls forgot their promise. Charlie leaves the cabin, walks over to the saloon and peers through the window at the revels inside. And we cry every time Charlie smiles that shattering smile at Virginia Cherrill, the blind girl who "can see now" because she remembers the feel of his hand.
But there are no tears in The Circus, even when Charlie learns that the circus owner's mistreated step-daughter loves Rex, the tightrope walker, instead of him. Yet Charlie defends her against her step-father's abuse and gets himself fired. She runs away and asks Charlie if he can take her with him. He knows that she can't possibly live the homeless life he leads, so he arranges for Rex to marry her, and he convinces the circus owner to take them back into his troupe. Knowing it's time for him to leave, he watches as the wagons depart and he is alone at the film's close. Because of this attenuated romance, The Circus is Chaplin's shortest feature film, at just shy of 72 minutes long. But the comic invention in The Circus is sustained and intricately timed, from the opening sketch with the pickpocket to becoming trapped in the lion's cage to Charlie's uproarious tightrope walk while being attacked by monkeys. The pacing and sheer poise of these scenes is peerless in silent comedy. In one perfect scene, Charlie tries out as a circus clown. The circus owner and the other clowns, in makeup and costume, gather around to watch. But, amazingly, Charlie cannot be funny. The essence of his clown is just that - his essence. Charlie is funny. He cannot seem funny. The clown is his being, his true face, not his mask.
The most beautiful scene is saved for last. The circus strikes its tent and the wagons trundle away, leaving Charlie alone in the deserted space. As Theodore Huff puts it, "The last scene was deliberately photographed in the harsh, early morning light to bring out the careworn lines of his face."(1) He looks down and notices a scrap of paper at his feet. It is a piece of the paper star through which the girl he loved had jumped from her horse. Heaving a sigh, he crushes the paper star into a ball, drops it and kicks it away, walking jauntily as ever into the middle distance. Remember that painful note - painful for him to write, but (with its poor grammar and spelling) so painful to read - that he left for Edna when he departed from her house in The Tramp? We see him walking slowly, sadly away from the camera. Then he squares his shoulders, shakes off his sadness, twirls his cane and kicks up his shoes as he walks farther down the road. Charlie's exit in The Circus is a lovely reprise of that classic moment.
In his book, The Movies Come from America, Gilbert Seldes, one of Chaplin's early champions, wrote: "I can foresee a bitter attack on Chaplin. He represents the dispossessed, the little man who has never had his share of the good things of the world. Sometimes the victim, as I have said, of cruel chance, sometimes the innocent bystander who suffers from the violence of others, often the direct victim of economic injustice. And yet this little man isnever angry; he brings a flower to mollify an angry boss in a factory; he raises his hat to his eternal enemy, the policeman. There are people who find in this method of Chaplin's a kind of economic defeatism. They are not satisfied with the accidental demolition of the policeman's pride, just as they are not satisfied with the comedy of the man who is trapped in the wheels of the big machine so that a blueprint has to be consulted before he can beextricated. They want the little man of the Chaplin pictures to wreck the machine. They are furious over that characteristic ending of the Chaplin films in which the little man escapes from all the complications and torments of civilized life by walking away along the road that leads to no definite end. I think that they are suspicious of Chaplin because by making people laugh even at their misfortunes he makes life tolerable for them. It happens not to be Chaplin's temperament to make life seem intolerable. He has never shown the rich and the powerful as noble figures. Indeed, the most attractive of his rich men was only human and generous when he was drunk and turned heartless when he was sober. The truth is that Chaplin is like many others, an individualist in his criticism of society, apparently unwilling to join one tyranny in order to destroy another."(2)
Seldes published these words in 1937, and their irony must've seemed more than a little bitter when Chaplin, who had antagonized J. Edgar Hoover and aroused suspicion about his political sympathies when he took part in war bond drives during WW2 supporting the "second front," the Soviet Union, which was, after all, our ally in the war against the Nazis, left the U.S. for a vacation in Europe in September 1952, only to have his return visa revoked. He was duly informed that if he tried to re-enter the U.S. he would be arrested. Chaplin wouldn't return to America for twenty years. An honorary Oscar in 1972 was a ridiculous form of apology. He was never a member of any party, but his allegiances, I think, were pretty clear. "I've known humiliation," he once said, "and humiliation is a thing you never forget. Poverty—the degradation and helplessness of it! I can't feel myself any different, at heart, from the unhappy and defeated men, the failures."
(1) Charlie Chaplin (New York: Henry Schuman, 1951).
(2) The Movies Come from America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937).
Sometimes, when a great artist knows that his days are numbered, his last work becomes, intentionally or not, a farewell. One of the most moving farewells is Mahler's Ninth Symphony, which even incorporates, in its opening bars, the sound of his own irregular heartbeat. John Cheever wrote his last work of fiction, a 100-page novella he called Oh What a Paradise It Seems in late 1980 and 1981. In the summer of 1981, a cancerous tumor was found in his right kidney. Untreated, he was told in November that it had metastasized, and he died the following June. He was 70.
For his final effort, Cheever felt moved to compose a kind of conservationist fable. Set in a fictitious village called Janice (named for a mill-owner's first wife), it centers on Lemuel Sears, a computer hardware executive and widower (twice) and dwells on his struggles to understand the behavior of the people he encounters and to save a pond that is one of the great attractions, for Sears and others, of the village from being obliterated by local politicians in league with the Mob. "This is a story," it begins, "to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night."
Cheever loved ice-skating. According to John Updike, "Ice skating was his exercise, his Wordsworthian hike, his rendezvous with sky and water, his connection with elemental purity and the awesome depths above and below, while he clicked and glided along, in smooth quick strokes (I imagine) like those of his prose."(1) It is due to his passion for ice-skating that Lemuel Sears sets in motion the ecological action of Oh What a Paradise It Seems.
"Swinging down a long stretch of black ice gave Sears a sense of homecoming. At long last, at the end of a cold, long journey, he was returning to a place where his name was known and loved and lamps burned in the rooms and fires in the hearth. It seemed to Sears that all the skaters moved over the ice with the happy conviction that they were on their way home. Home might be an empty room and an empty bed to many of them, including Sears, but swinging over the black ice convinced Sears that he was on his way home. Someone more skeptical might point out that this illuminated how ephemeral is our illusion of homecoming. There was a winter sunset and in this formidable show of light and color he unlaced his skates and returned to his apartment in the city."
Sears returns to Janice to skate again on Beasley's Pond, only to discover that it has become the target of ill-planned re-zoning and waste material is being dumped into it. "When he returned to the city Sears called his law firm and asked them to investigate the tragedy of Beasley's Pond. He also wrote a letter to the newspaper." The letter was published under the heading "Is Nothing Sacred". It was an emotional letter that was later used against his appeal to stop the dumping:
"I have been skating on weekends on Beasley's Pond, in the company of perhaps fifty men and women of all ages and for all I know all walks of life, who seemed to find themselves greatly refreshed for the complexities and problems of the modern world by a few hours spent happily on ice skates . . . Last Sunday, carrying my skates to the pond, I found that it had been rezoned as fill and had become a heap of rubbish, topped by a dead dog. There is little enough of innocence in the world but let us protect the innocence of ice skating."
What hope for such a bigoted romantic in a world becoming exponentially more unnatural with each passing day? Sears's love life takes up the rest of Cheever's story, somewhat surprisingly for a man of his years. He finds himself in bed, and various other places, with Renee, a much younger woman who attends public meetings in basements about god-knows-what (Alcoholics Anonymous? Flat Earth Society?) and never misses an opportunity to tell Lemuel, "You don't know the first thing about women." Yet she allows this man who doesn't know the first thing about her sex significant liberties, and then leaves him hanging (with his pants down) when he grows too demanding. When she jilts Sears, in a scene too funny to be believed, the elevator man in Renee's building takes him to bed.
By the end of Cheever's tale, there have been two mysterious deaths, and the appeals to save the pond are overruled. But a last, desperate act of sabotage carried out by a concerned married woman brings the planned re-zoning and the dumping to an sudden end. Sears is vindicated and Beasley's Pond, a small but precious piece of his world, of his very being, is preserved for future generations of men and women.
Although he was expert at satirizing suburbia, Cheever never expressed hatred for it, or for the great changes that he watched overtake it as the decades tolled. He had seen great changes in himself as well (his overcoming alcoholism and coming out as bi-sexual), and he greeted them with as much humor and generosity as he could allow for himself. He may have felt a sense of displacement, as his memories of a former age returned to haunt him, but regret or nostalgia weren't Cheever's métier. Kenneth Tynan once remarked that Ralph Richardson had the voice of "a man in a perpetual state of astonishment." Cheever had the same yeast in his voice and it is the same voice I hear in Oh What a Paradise It Seems: "The sky was clear that morning and there might still have been stars although he saw none. The thought of stars contributed to the power of his feeling. What moved him was a sense of those worlds around us, our knowledge however imperfect of their nature, our sense of their possessing some grain of our past and of our lives to come. It was that most powerful sense of our being alive on the planet. It was that most powerful sense of how singular, in the vastness of creation, is the richness of our opportunity. The sense of that hour was of an exquisite privilege, the great benefice of living here and renewing ourselves with love. What a paradise it seemed!" Although it was impossible for Cheever to remain on that plane of exaltation for very long, how thrilling it was that he would even reach out for it, time and again, in his writing.
Conservationism has finally gone mainstream now that everyone on the planet is dealing with the effects of Climate Change. For most of my life we have been warned of the consequences of our abuse of the planet's resources and our dependence on fossil fuels, and I find it almost tragic that all but the climate change deniers (an unteachable, unreachable minority) have finally accepted the irrefutable evidence. All but the stupidest politicians know the facts, but corrupt motives prevent them from admitting it. And some of us are beginning to think that it may already be too late to stop us from going over the "tipping point" to a planet transformed by higher temperatures, sea levels, and catastrophic weather events. As British poet James Hamilton-Paterson wrote, years before Climate Change was officially identified:
"Conservation is only ever a rearguard action, fought from a position of loss. It is ultimately unwinnable, and not least because there are no recorded victories over population increase, nor over the grander strategies of genetic behavior such as the laws of demand, political expediency, sheer truancy and a refusal to relinquish a standard of living once it has been attained. There can only be stalemates, holding actions and truces uneasily policed. A few affecting species will be saved, a few million hectares of forest, a few tribes of indians; but the world will never return to how it was when this sentence was written, still less to how it was when reader and writer were born. This has always been true and will continue to be so. The mistake is to extend this sequence backward in time and imagine it leads to a lost paradise. It is a safe bet that as soon as the earliest protohominid could think, it invented a legend to account for its sense of loss."(2)
(1) "The Waspshot Chronicle," The New Republic, December 2, 1991.
(2) Seven-Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds (London: Random Century, 1992.
The 90th birthday of Max von Sydow was celebrated on April 10, and on April 14 news of the death of Bibi Andersson went round the world. Of course I knew of her from the Bergman films I've seen throughout my life. Her beauty and graceful presence gave The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries an unexpected charm. As the nurse in Persona, she was dominant by design, since her patient, Liv Ullmann, had lost the power of speech. She came across as the less neurotic of Bergman's actresses, though her characters were never without their own secrets (this was Bergman country). I think I liked her best as the sole woman between two men in a film I first saw only a few years ago, largely because it was deemed a much lesser effort from Bergman, known as The Touch, produced by the American ABC Pictures Corp. Though with English dialogue and starring the big box office draw of the day, Elliott Gould, it was made entirely on Bergman's terms, shot in Sweden (on the island of Götland, adjacent to Fårö).
If nothing else, what an opportunity to be introduced to a bonafide Bergman film, for audiences who don't watch films in a foreign language - foreign films in more than one sense of the term. There were two versions, reportedly, but the one in which the Swedish actors speak their lines in Swedish has been misplaced. It was known as Beröringen. But the principal actors all speak their own English dialogue. Both Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow had appeared in American films, and could speak English accountably. I don't recall reading a single approving review from the time of its release, either from the daily reviewers like Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, or from "highbrow" critics like John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann. It bombed at the box office and became an embarrassment for Bergman. I don't know if he regarded it as anything more than a fat check. It was revived in 2011 at New York's Lincoln Center and was eventually released last year on DVD/Blu-Ray by Criterion. Since then it has been the beneficiary of a kind of forensic criticism that merely reminds us of the current paucity of films worth viewing. This practice of locating films, that were previously regarded as unworthy of praise, out of their context of 30, 50, 70 years ago and hoisting them up as somehow undeserving of this initial appraisal and now much worthier of praise than ever before is a kind of retroactive cruelty that contemporary critics, in these threadbare days of the film medium, carry out on films from the past.
I don't know how Bergman approached the writing of his script, but the results make me think that he purposely dumbed it down for audiences that were perhaps unaccustomed to the intensity of his writing in Swedish. The dialogue is at times both stilted and banal. In the last scene of the film, Karin has told David that it's over between them. David tries to stop her: "It hurts physically being without you," he tells her. "It's like a constant ache ... I can't live without you. It sounds so utterly ridiculous to hear myself say 'I can't live without you,' but it's true."
KARIN: "Don't say anything more. It just makes it more difficult."
DAVID: "You can't just leave me like this. Please don't go."
When Antonioni wrote the script of Blow-Up with Tonino Guerra in Italian, he got Edward Bond, the British playwright, to translate the dialogue into English. I can't believe Bergman didn't consider doing the same. Some of the dialogue in The Touch is painfully artificial, and only reinforces what Swedish critics always complained about in Bergman's films, his flowery, formal dialogue.
Now for the procedural part. Right out of the gates, Elliott Gould's character, David, comes across as an ass (Karin's husband, Andreas, even shows us a slide show with some pictures of a donkey, not knowing that David has just professed his love for Karin). Since this is a tribute to Bibi Andersson, let me get Elliott Gould out of the way. He loves the film. When it was screened in Brooklyn in 2008, the only print available then was Gould's personal print. He is the only American actor ever to appear in a Bergman film, so he has reason to be delighted by it. But the film portrays him as a bounder from beginning to end. If you ever wondered why Bergman picked Gould to play the American archaeologist in the script, it becomes obvious in his first scene with Max von Sydow. Physically, they are like Jacob and Esau (even when Gould shaves off his beard after the film's midpoint - and then grows it back). Sven Nykvist's lighting of the first sex scene between Gould and Andersson is as kind to Gould as it's possible to be. I couldn't find a single reason, aside from sheer boredom, why Karin jumps into bed with him. Andreas is a very successful doctor whose practice takes up much of his time. It isn't a job he can simply let go of at quitting time. Max von Sydow makes him attentive, vulnerable, and sympathetic. Andreas is an utter bore, but at least Von Sydow delivers his lines with conviction. Gould's readings, especially when the lines are so stilted, are plain awful. He should be proud of being chosen by Bergman, even if he is rather oblivious of Bergman's motives for choosing him. David blunders his way into the lives of a contented Swedish couple, shakes things up between them, and then gets indignant when Karin shows him the door. In a way, The Touch is Bergman's revenge on the Americans and ABC Pictures Corp.
But The Touch, even with all of its inadequacies, is worth watching because of Bibi Andersson, who makes Karin completely substantial, no matter how inexplicable the situations seem. The role was intended for Liv Ullmann, who was unavailable at the time of shooting. Andersson thought she was unsuited for the role, but I can't imagine Liv Ullmann in the part. Andersson lends total authenticity to every scene she's in, and she's in nearly every scene. When she learns that her mother has died in hospital, she is left alone with her body. What do you do in the presence of the dead? Even when it's someone who was very close to you. Karin walks quietly around the bed. Bergman focuses on her mother's face (her eyes are partially open), her hands. Finally, Karin sits down beside the body, takes her hands, embraces her. She waits when the nurse retrieves her mother's wedding rings, then collapses in the cloakroom. And now Bibi Andersson is dead.
When the film wasn't received well, accused of "banality," Andersson defended it: "So long as we are banal human beings with conflicts that are often banal, I think it would be becoming if we were to embrace banality with at least a smile of recognition." I have no problem embracing banality. I'm simply not accustomed to doing it in an Ingmar Bergman film. A great many artists eventually fall into self-parody. They simply can't maintain the same level of intensity for very long. That The Touch is Bergman Lite became all the more obvious when he followed it with Cries and Whispers and Face to Face, films that are flawed, but intensely concentrated.
When Shirley Horn died a number of years ago, I thought that when great singers and film stars die, their work, which was our introduction to them, and which is really our only contact with their lives, will always be there. Thanks to Bergman (and a few other Swedish filmmakers), Bibi Andersson's immortality is secure.
Already, as early as 1964, John Simon could pronounce that "the New Wave is waning." The French New Wave, that broke upon the international film scene sixty years ago with the first films of Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), and François Truffaut (The 400 Blows), found itself, a mere five years later, petering out. Jacques Rozier, now 92, is four years older than Godard, who, if not the heart of the movement, remains its soul. Rozier made his feature debut in 1962 with Adieu Philippine, a film whose style is much less purposefully structured than either Chabrol's or Truffaut's, or indeed as purposefully anarchic as Godard's. It has a documentary, slice-of-life feel, following a young man on his last few days of freedom before his enlistment in the Army and being sent to Algeria. He is helped in his celebration by two young women, who are more than willing to enlist in the cause of his final fling.
The film opens, after informing us of all of the grands prix the film won in '62 and '63, with a title that reads "1960 sixième année de guerre en Algerie". Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini ) is working at a Paris TV station. He runs into two girls, Juliette (Stefania Sabatini) and Liliane (Yveline Céry), outside the station, anxious to see the band performing inside, and he escorts them quietly into the studio. Later, they meet, like all teenagers did, over sodas. Michel gets the girls a tryout for TV commercials that end after numerous takes fail to produce the desired results. With the day of his enlistment looming, Michel manages to get fired from his job (during a live broadcast, he ruins the shot by walking in front of the camera - and I thought I saw Jean-Claude Brialy behind the camera) and he leaves impulsively for Corsica. The girls follow him there.
Because so much of the film looks and, more noticeably, feels improvised, the lack of direct sound becomes a bigger impediment than it would otherwise have been. There is an air of exhilaration about the film. A good example are the scenes in which Michel, with three of his friends, buys an old car and takes it for a joy ride. It's the most literal illustration of a "joy ride" I've ever seen. Rozier indulges in some self-indulgent "filmic" touches that deliberately call attention to themselves, like the boys riding along vocalizing the melody of a waltz as the camera bounces from behind the car (where we can't hear them) to beside the car (where we can). They slow down to follow a pair of girls walking beside the road. Then we see them inside, one in the front seat and one in the back.
At one point, a scene of Juliette and Liliane walking along a Paris street (looking for a pay phone from which to call Michel) is interfered with by two men not in the film who are unaware of the camera recording them. Rozier left them in the film perhaps to remind us of how close to life he wanted to get. But as the actresses proceed along the boulevard, pretending not to notice the camera pointed at them from a passing voiture, plenty of passers by notice it. Filmmakers frequently used this type of shot, and still use it. But it looks especially spontaneous in Adieu Philippine because of a certain rawness of intent. The film was probably planned down to the smallest detail (François Truffaut certainly recognized this), but it feels so masterfully unplanned.
The scene shift to Corsica is abrupt and unsettling. At first, the holiday makers seem frantic in their holiday making. Michel locates the oily producer who stiffed them in Paris, but he escapes. But Corsica - those horrible stony beaches and the constant buzz of cicadas! Michel drifts leeward from Juliette to Liliane. The girls' friendship is momentarily tested but, in a night scene that opens the film's closing coda, they laugh at how seriously they have taken things. But suddenly Michel reminds them that he is serious, and how seriously he regards his last days of liberty, and the girls grow silent. The moment at last arrives when all the fun must come to an end. The mood of the film's final ten minutes is tinged with an unexpected sadness. It reminded me of the end of Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday, when the holiday is over and everyone gathers up their things and departs. The awful hurry of departure, that only allows time to reflect once one is safely aboard. Then, the ship is underway, and the girls run to the very end of the quay, waving their hats until they're too far away to be seen.
Thematically, a rough American equivalent to Adieu Philippine is Nancy Sivoca's 1991 Dog Fight, about a young man in San Francisco in 1963 on the eve of his departure for Vietnam. Cinematically, Rozier's film is far superior, and is completely lacking in the quite layered ruefulness imposed on the American film by its historical context (it is also the night before JFK's assassination). In 1960, the French had already quit Vietnam and although the Algerian War was a comparable disaster for France, Rozier's film conspicuously avoids any foreshadowing and wisely omits the heavy-handed scene ("3 years later") when River Phoenix limps back into Lili Taylor's coffee shop.
I read that one critic compared Adieu Philippine to Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. I see only a superficial resemblance. It reminded me, however, of a short novel by Cesare Pavese called The Beach. It, too, depicts the dalliances among a group of friends that ends on a wistful, plaintive note. Stanley Edgar Hyman called it "the comic ghost of a tragic love story." Adieu Philippine is unlike every other New Wave film I've ever seen, even if it hasn't the heft of Truffaut's or Chabrol's or Godard's first works. Perhaps it's unfair to hold Jacques Rozier to such a high standard. But I enjoyed the company of Michel and Juliette and Liliane and felt an unexpected pang at the film's fin.
I first heard of this film in 1976 when I found a copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films in a college library. Sadoul thought enough of it to include it in his survey. I thought then, 12 years before I joined the Navy, that the title disclosed an alluring subject - something to do with the allure of the Far East and perhaps an exotic woman. Now that I've at last - 45 years hence - watched the film, coincidentally sitting in the middle of a Philippine island province, perhaps I can finally admit that its allure worked, but that in fact there is no "Philippine" at all in the film except an almond with two kernels that inspires Liliane to demand a pledge from Juliette, since they both fancy Michel.(1) Alas, the title's allure was just wishful thinking on my part.
(1) "Noun philopena ( plural philopenas ) 1. A game in which a person, on finding a double-kernelled almond or nut, may offer the second kernel to another person and demand a playful forfeit from that person to be paid on their next meeting. The forfeit may simply be to exchange the greeting "Good-day, Philopena" or it may be more elaborate. Philopenas were often played as a form of flirtation.
2. The occasion on which a philopena is forfeited; the forfeit paid.
3. A nut or almond with a double kernel, as used to set a philopena."
As beloved a writer as Jane Austen (1775-1817) is, and has been for 200 years, too often a serious analysis of her "place" among English novelists arrives at the forbidding word "special". It is indeed a special place, for many reasons, some of them not as edifying as others. What Austen had to overcome to achieve her richly deserved place in English letters is, on examination, staggering. But what had that to do with her standing as a person of letters? When Werner Herzog went to downright dangerous lengths to make his film Fitzcarraldo, often putting his cast and crew in life-threatening situations, in order to maximize (I'm assuming) the film's realism, it didn't make the resulting film and better or worse than it is. And what viewer unacquainted with all of the film's backstory really cares how difficult it was to make Fitzcarraldo if he doesn't like it?
Jane Austen wrote exclusively about people in drawing rooms. Knowing what there is to know about the way she lived, it is perfectly fitting that she should have done so. She does so with great authority and great art. But some critics of Austen have, for 200 years, used the limitations that her life imposed on her writing against her. Herman Melville served in the U.S. Navy, jumped ship in Tahiti, and later manned whaling ships. Most of his novels, including his most famous, Moby-Dick, are drawn from that - very specialized - experience. No critic is his right mind would think of claiming that Melville's experience, just about as exclusively male as you could get in his lifetime, limited him as a novelist.
Virginia Woolf, who wrote novels to stand proudly beside Austen's, was perhaps more acutely self-conscious of being a woman writer than any of her predecessors, illustrious or otherwise. In October 1928, when asked to address students at Girton, the women's college at Oxford, she boldly told the students that before they can even consider taking up writing as a profession, they will need "money and a room of her own." One of the most significant events in Woolf's life, a life rich with significance, took place in 1918 when an aunt (whom she identifies as "Mary Beton" in A Room of One's Own) died and bequeathed her £500 a year. The money set her free, in ways that surprised her and that took her some time to properly grasp.
It took Austen seventeen years to complete Pride and Prejudice. The announced subject of Virginia Woolf's address at Girton was "Women & Literature," and she confronted the problems experienced by the Big Four (Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot):
I thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely to understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have met together in a room—so much so that it is tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were all compelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do with being born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact that the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them? If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain,—"women never have an half hour… that they can call their own"—she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. 'How she was able to effect all this', her nephew writes in his Memoir, 'is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party. Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People's feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels, even though, as seems evident enough, two of the four famous women here named were not by nature novelists. Emily Brontë should have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot's capacious mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon history or biography. They wrote novels, however; one may even go further, I said, taking Pride and Prejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote good novels. Without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely.
Knowing all this about the conditions in which Pride and Prejudice was written, some critics continue to take exception with Austen's subject, which is nothing more or less than the daily lives of "middle class" women, imposed from without by sexual and social circumstance. Stanley Kauffmann, in his reviews of the (mediocre) films made from Austen's novels Emma and Pride and Prejudice, felt duty bound to bring it up: "But the story! Jane, Jane, the story that you worked on for seventeen years! It was most pithily criticized by Emerson in his journals. He disliked Austen's novels for several reasons, but what bothered him most was their dominant theme: 'The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice, is marriageableness; all that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming?' Critics innumerable have either scanted the matter that disturbed Emerson or, allowing it, have rhapsodized about Austen's prose and her perceptions of character.(1) ...Laud Austen's structure as it deserves, her acuteness about character, her wit; still, ultimately this is a story of young women whose sole serious occupation is finding agreeable husbands with money. Was Austen subtly castigating a society that so narrowed a woman's existence? In the late twentieth century we have to hope so: because without believing it, these novels seem pathetic, enraging and just a touch disgusting."(2)
I don't quite understand what is being criticized here. Austen was simply telling us about the lives of the people she knew, living in the world as they found it. How is Austen to blame for telling the truth? Virginia Woolf cuts through to the proper lesson that we should take away with us on reading Austen, the Brontës, and Eliot:
One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year—but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true, George Eliot, escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St John's Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow of the world's disapproval. 'I wish it to be understood', she wrote, 'that I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation'; for was she not living in sin with a married man and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs Smith or whoever it might be that chanced to call? One must submit to the social convention, and be 'cut off from what is called the world'. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady 'cut off from what is called the world', however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.
What matters is the individual writer's ability to observe and to transform his or her observable world into ageless art.
(1) "Family Troubles," The New Republic, December 12, 2005.
(2) "Scotland Now, England Then," The New Republic, August 19, 1996.
Besides her fictional writings, which continue to grow in the esteem of critics and scholars (and, one hopes, readers), Virginia Woolf was also a superb and prolific literary critic. At her death in 1941, her husband was left with dozens of uncollected essays and reviews, which he dutifully collected and published through his own Hogarth Press. Among them was a short review on Lewis Carroll that I found it irresistible to reproduce here. So here it is.
LEWIS CARROLL
The complete works of Lewis Carroll have been issued by the Nonesuch Press in a stout volume of 1293 pages. So there is no excuse -- Lewis Carroll ought once and for all to be complete. We ought to be able to grasp him whole and entire. But we fail -- once more we fail. We think we have caught Lewis Carroll; we look again and see an Oxford clergyman. We think we have caught the Rev. C. L. Dodgson - we look again and see a fairy elf. The book breaks in two in our hands. In order to cement it, we turn to the Life.
But the Rev C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible. He accepted every convention; he was prudish, pernickety, pious, and jocose. If Oxford dons in the nineteenth century had an essence he was that essence. He was so good that his sisters worshipped him; so pure that his nephew has nothing to say about him. It is just possible, he hints, that "a shadow of disappointment lay over Lewis Carroll's life". Mr. Dodgson at once denies the shadow. "My life," he says, "is free from all trial and trouble." But this untinted jelly contained within it a perfectly hard crystal. It contained childhood. And this is very strange, for childhood normally fades slowly. Wisps of childhood persist when the boy or girl is a grown man or woman. Childhood returns sometimes by day, more often at night. But it was not so with Lewis Carroll. For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it. And therefore as he grew older this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins. But since childhood remained in him entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do -- he could return to that world; he could re-create it, so that we too become children again.
In order to make us into children, he first makes us asleep. "Down, down, down, would the fall never come to an end?" Down, down, down we fall into that terrifying, wildly inconsequent, yet perfectly logical world where time races, then stands still; where space stretches, then contracts. It is the world of sleep; it is also the world of dreams. Without any conscious effort dreams come; the white rabbit, the walrus, and the carpenter, one after another, turning and changing one into the other, they come skipping and leaping across the mind. It is for this reason that the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children. President Wilson, Queen Victoria, The Times leader writer, the late Lord Salisbury -- it does not matter how old, how important, or how insignificant you are, you become a child again. To become a child is to be very literal; to find everything so strange that nothing is surprising; to be heartless, to be ruthless, yet to be so passionate that a snub or a shadow drapes the world in gloom. It is to be Alice in Wonderland.
It is also to be Alice Through the Looking Glass. It is to see the world upside down. Many great satirists and moralists have shown us the world upside down, and have made us see it, as grown-up people see it, savagely. Only Lewis Carroll has shown us the world upside down as a child sees it, and has made us laugh as children laugh, irresponsibly. Down the groves of pure nonsense we whirl laughing, laughing --
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope . . .
And then we wake. None of the transitions in Alice in Wonderland is quite so queer. For we wake to find - is it the Rev. C. L. Dodgson? Is it Lewis Carroll? Or is it both combined? This conglomerate object intends to produce an extra-Bowdlerised edition of Shakespeare for the use of British maidens; implores them to think of death when they go to the play; and always, always to realise that "the true object of life is the development of character. . . ." Is there, then, even in 1293 pages, any such thing as "completeness"?
Written in January 1939.
By now, we are familiar with Robert Bresson's wonderful explanations of his work. In September 1970, while shooting his tenth feature film, Four Nights of a Dreamer, he said the following to Charles Thomas Samuels:
"I want the essence of my films to be not the words my people say or even the gestures they perform, but what these words and gestures provoke in them. What I tell them to do or say must bring to light something they had not realized they contained. The camera catches it; neither they nor I really knew it before it happens. The unknown is what I wish to capture."
There is a scene in Bruce Beresford/Horton Foote's Tender Mercies in which Robert Duvall (Mac Sledge) and Tess Harper (Rosa Lee) are alone in a field and he declares his love for her: "I guess it's no secret how I feel about you," he says. "A blind man could see that. Would you think about marrying me?" The moment comes as something of a surprise, since we're given nothing of a "build up" to it. It's treated like just another moment in the lives of these people of so few words - so few words that they turn to country songs for them.
The point is that, while they evidently feel strongly and deeply, the characters in Tender Mercies aren't given to, or equipped for, strong demonstrations of feeling. Once we have made the adjustment that forces us, if we are to care about them, to infer what isn't shown or enunciated by these people, Tender Mercies becomes a very moving and masterfully directed film.
The films of Robert Bresson make the very same demands of an audience when he is AT HIS BEST, in Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Mouchette, and Une Femme Douce. But I had to remind myself of it when, on the "Second Night" in Four Nights of a Dreamer, sitting on a street curb, Jacques says to Marthe, "How many times I was in love!" Marthe replies, "How is that? With whom?" Bresson shows us Jacques walking the streets aimlessly, until he sees a pretty girl and follows her, peering through a shop window, waiting, following her again when she leaves the shop, then passing another girl, and, looking back at the first girl, he follows the second. "With no one, an ideal, the woman in my dream." Marthe: "That's stupid." Jacques: "Yes. And God sends me an angel to show me. To reconcile me to myself." Despite my familiarity with the Dostoevsky story and the 1957 Visconti adaptation of it, Jacques's words arrive out of nowhere.
An art school friend (who resembles Heath Ledger) shows up at Jacques' flat and launches into an unprovoked harangue:
"What's crucial is not the object, not the painter, but the gesture which lifts the presence from the object, and is suspended in a space which delimits it, and, in fact, supports it. Not the object there, not the painter there, but the object and the painter which are not there."
Bresson was a painter, and these remarks are consistent with others he has made about film (see above). Perhaps he is instructing the viewer how to properly interpret his film? The scene merely reminded me of Bresson's fascinating interviews whenever one of his films was released, making somewhat gnomic statements that only seemed to deepen the audience's mystification. Sometimes Bresson made it seem that his defense of his style was more interesting than the style itself.
"White Nights," is a story by Dostoevsky published in 1848, the year before his arrest and exile to Siberia. In Constance Garnett's translation, its subtitle is "a sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer". Written in the first person, it's about a lonely young man's encounter with a forlorn young woman who has a sad story to tell. "From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me." Visconti adapted the story to film in 1957, but the film's artificiality (its snowy cityscape was filmed entirely in Cinecittá), plus an insufferable performance by Maria Schell, made it hard to take in. (Jean Marais looked like he was in physical pain during some of the love scenes with Schell.)
As in Une Femme Douce, in which Dominique Sanda plays certain carefully chosen records to avail us of her emotional state, in Four Nights of a Dreamer, Marthe turns on her radio to a Brazilian sambalero as she disrobes and examines her lovely body in the mirror. And later, by the Seine, Jacques and Marthe listen to a similar samba played by a combo on a tourist bateau ivre as it winds slowly through Paris. Bresson cuts to the combo on the boat performing the song. Of course, the length of the scene suggests that the boat must be moving incredibly slowly for Jacques and Marthe to hear the whole song, but it's an otherwise transcendent moment in the film, the sensual music contributing a further dimension to Jacques and Marthe's desire and longing.
But the film adds up to so little. Bresson's previous two films, Mouchette and Une Femme Douce, so utterly different in tone and texture, are resolved by suicides. When we meet Marthe, she is preparing to throw herself from the Pont Neuf into the Seine. It is the only indication, really, of the depth of her feelings of desertion. Her cheeks are covered in tears as Jacques walks her home. I found it especially puzzling that Marthe's mother, a minor character (but so what?) is barely sketched in by Bresson, despite the fact that she had to be embodied by a flesh and blood person (Lidia Biondi), reduced by Bresson to a kind of depersonalized dummy. When Marthe discovers that the boarder is leaving without her mother telling her, she impulsively packs a bag, enters his room and demands that he take her with him (to Yale, he tells her, on a fellowship). He closes the door, locks it, and commences to undress her. Meanwhile, Marthe's mother calls out to her and Bresson, having to show us that her mother is looking for her in the tiny apartment, puts in a few shots of the mother walking back and forth through a doorway, calling out "Marthe?" Finally naked (just as she was moments before in the film in front of her mirror), Marthe is embraced by him. The shots of Marthe's mother were unnecessary. We could hear her footsteps and her calling out to Marthe. But one could argue that the film is made up of such perfunctory shots. At the opening of the film, Jacques hitchhikes to the country, and Bresson shows us his boyish pleasure at being there by having his actor roll through a meadow and saunter along the road, swinging his arms and humming a tune. These aren't identifiable emotions - Bresson's actors almost never "emote." They are indications of emotions, stripped of their meaning. When Bresson attempted his esthetic approach in Au Hasard, Bathazar with a donkey, he at least could use the excuse that even when a donkey is being highly expressive, how is anyone but a donkey handler going to know? Dostoevsky's narrator says, "I took long walks, succeeding, as I usually did, in quite forgetting where I was, when I suddenly found myself at the city gates. Instantly I felt lighthearted, and I passed the barrier and walked between cultivated fields and meadows, unconscious of fatigue, and feeling only all over as though a burden were falling off my soul. All the passers-by gave me such friendly looks that they seemed almost greeting me, they all seemed so pleased at something. They were all smoking cigars, every one of them. And I felt pleased as I never had before. It was as though I had suddenly found myself in Italy—so strong was the effect of nature upon a half-sick townsman like me, almost stifling between city walls." Dostoevsky goes a great deal further into the narrator's inner life, but the closest Bresson can get to it is Jacques's tape recorder, with which he records the story of his pursuit of an ideal woman, which he plays back to himself as a substitute, I suppose, for an interior monologue. The scenes of Jacques painting, with his canvases on the floor, make it seem like he uses it as therapy. Frustrated, perhaps disappointed at life, at Marthe's rushing into the arms of her former lover the moment he reappears on the Pont Neuf (as promised a year before). But perhaps Bresson would tell me that I'm editorializing?
An otherwise insignificant incident took place at an Italian shrine last week that reminded me of a scene from one of my favorite films. Pope Francis was receiving a line of visitors, one by one. It's something the Pope does routinely. But on this particular occasion something puzzling occurred: when several of the people bent down to kiss the ring on the Pope's right hand, he jerked his hand out of the way to avoid it. It was caught on video (of course) and it went viral. Why did the Pope react that way?
The Guardian reported various takes on the strange event:
LifeSiteNews, a conservative Catholic website that often criticises the pope, called the episode “disturbing” in the headline of an article that included a long history of the rings popes wear and their significance.
Rorate Caeli, a website read by Catholic traditionalists, tweeted: “Francis, If you don’t want to be the Vicar of Christ, then get out of there!”
The papal biographer Austen Ivereigh, a supporter of Francis, countered by tweeting: “He’s making sure that they engage with him, not treat him like a sacred relic. He’s the Vicar of Christ, not a Roman emperor.”
“It’s high time kissing bishops’ rings disappears altogether. It’s just ridiculous and has nothing to do with tradition. It’s an import from monarchies. Much of the pomp around bishops should be ditched,” tweeted Russell Pollitt, a Jesuit priest.
Some Vatican watchers noted that even Francis’s predecessors Benedict, a hero to nostalgic conservatives, and John Paul II did not like having their hands kissed – at least not by long lines of people, for the sake of expediency.
One Twitter user recalled that when he visited John Paul with a group of 50 people they were told specifically not to kneel or kiss the papal hand.
The Vatican did not say why Francis was so insistent on not having the ring – a simple silver one with a cross – kissed in the long receiving line.
“Sometimes he likes it, sometimes he does not. It’s really as simple as that,” said a close aide to the pope who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The aide added he was “amused” by all the reaction.
In the Fellini film Il Bidone I reviewed a few weeks ago, there is a scene in which Broderick Crawford, playing a con artist named Augusto, is disguised as a Catholic Monsignor, about to wrap up an elaborate scam in which he and his accomplices convince a poor farmer to cough up his life savings in exchange for a chest full of fake treasure. Before he leaves, however, the farmer's wife asks Augusto to come and see her young daughter, crippled by polio. I wrote about the scene: "Dumbstruck by her terrifying goodness, Augusto wants to escape, but when he turns to go, the girl reaches for her crutches and pursues him, at last clutching his hand to kiss his ring. "Pray for me," she tells him. Filled with self-revulsion, he pulls his hand away from her and flees."
"You don't need me," he says to her. "And I have nothing to give you."Augusto, in a sudden access of guilt and overwhelming fatigue at his life as a swindler, cannot bear having that beautiful, sad child, believing in his goodness, perhaps in his power to heal, kiss his ring - a ring that is at least as bogus as he is in his disguising vestments. She reminds him of his daughter, who is also 18, and who he wants to help pay her way through college. But then he makes the mistake of trying to rob his own accomplices, who beat him and abandon him where he has fallen and, unbeknownst to them, broken his back.
But the video! The Pope repeats the scene from Il Bidone, but over and over. Was he feeling, by any chance, slightly unworthy that day?
