Before I let go of November, I have one more duty to perform - saying goodbye to one more of my heroes. The critic John Simon died last Sunday, the 24th, at the age of 94. His obituary was published hard upon in the New York Times. It had been waiting in their obituary files for a long time, when it became clear that Simon wasn't going away expediently. It is a balanced obituary, if not exactly fair, that touches all the bases: Simon's origins, between the wars, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Serbia, his fluency in languages, his education in English public (i.e., private) school, moving to the U.S. in 1941, finishing his itinerant education with a PhD from Harvard in Comparative Literature. When he reviewed the Peter O'Toole remake of James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips, he wrote with uncharacteristic emotion:
I must confess that Goodbye, Mr. Chips moved me to tears. But I must also confess that I attended the Leys School in Cambridge, the subject of Hilton's novel, and that I was one of those new boys who at the start of every Michaelmas term tramped up Trumpington Road to have tea with the kindly old retired master who was the model for Chips. So I may not be an unbiased judge.
He was mentored by Jacques Barzun, Dwight Macdonald, and Robert Brustein. On the dust jacket of Simon's 1971 collection Movies Into Film is this blurb from Macdonald: "John Simon is still our best film critic. He's literate, readable and scrupulously toughminded in his judgements."
Quite by accident, Simon was my introduction to contemporary film criticism. (James Agee was the first real film critic I encountered, but he died exactly three years before I was born.) Compared to his colleagues whom I was reading with equal avidity (both of whom - Vernon Young and Stanley Kauffmann - he singled out for praise), he was more exacting, less compromising, and his writing, though grammatically perfect (he frequently savaged other critics for their grammatical and syntactical gaffes), was inelegant and preoccupied with sometimes arcane puns. His fluency in several languages often saw him performing the invaluable - though thankless - task of correcting the dreadful subtitles of the many foreign-language films available on American screens.
I sometimes disagreed with him, but I found him, more often than any other critic I was reading in the '70s and '80s, to be right in his judgements. Whether or not I was right only posterity can prove. With John Simon's passing, what some called the Heroic Age of American film criticism has come to a close.
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| The one in the back |
Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.
On the eve of Thanksgiving, I have learned in the space of only a few hours that two of my heroes have died - Jonathan Miller and Clive James. I dedicated some space to them before here on this blog, Miller ten years ago in A Bitter Pill and James most recently in Clive James is Still Not Dead. I won't revise that last statement, now that they are both immortal.
I first became acquainted with Miller, like we all did, through Beyond the Fringe, the Edinburgh Festival revue that "went viral" in the early 1960s and propelled him and his three co-conspirators, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett onto international stages. Strangely, it was the better performers, Cook and Moore, who were the most famous, and who were the first of the quartet to go. Miller and Bennett were just as irreverent, when necessary, but their contributions were more cerebral. Bennett is now the last of the Fringes. Miller was a physician, one of the greatest champions of Britain's NHS, which is in real peril of "privatization" (aka profitization) now that the Tories are being handed their long-awaited license to kill it. He was also a theater, opera, film and television director. In the '60s he made what I consider to be the best film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
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| Clive James |
James's achievements are multifarious, including being one of the finest critics anywhere - on every subject. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2010, the only effect it seemed to have on him was to force him to think about death - for nearly a decade. His condition exacerbated his emphysema, so much so that he couldn't stand the long flight home to Australia. So he settled down to die in Cambridge.
To choose just one of his many famous quotes, there is one that I can actually verify: “Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to jail, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.”
What better way to end than in what sounded like James's fond farewell poem (which he wrote two years ago):
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
Many thanks to them both. A somber occasion, but my Thanksgiving cornucopia is full to bursting.
Le Silence de la Mer (1949), Jean-Pierre Melville's first feature-length film, has become legendary - so much so that the accounts of its making widely differ. Having been prevented by the rigid requirements of postwar French film production from breaking into the profession on the ground floor, Melville felt that, if he was ever to become a filmmaker, he had to declare himself an "amateur" and create a production company of his own. This is why he was such a hero of the Cahiers du Cinema critics. They, too, looked forward to becoming filmmakers, but without having to satisfy the qualifications of the industry.
After repeated efforts to gain the approval of Jean Bruller to make a film of his novel, which had become a best-seller in France after the war, Melville informed him that he would make the film without acquiring the official rights, but would submit the finished film for the approval of a tribunal of judges, all former members of the Resistance. If it failed to gain their approval, Melville vowed to destroy the negative and all positive prints of the film. Bruller agreed to Melville's proposal. However, examination of the film's shooting script, which fell into the possession of the Cinémathèque Francaise, reveals that Bruller was closely involved in the production.
Howard Vernon (born Mario Lippert, Swiss father, American mother) plays Werner von Ebrennac, and he has just the sort of classical ugliness that the role needed. When he looks entreatingly at Nicole Stéphane (born Baroness Nicole de Rothschild [1]), it's intended to make our flesh crawl. This German officer, whose ridiculous speeches about a "marriage" of Germany and France, gradually becomes hateful to himself. He emphatically quotes to his captive audience a speech from Macbeth (Act V Scene 2):
Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
He's trying to apply this speech by Angus to French president Laval, but he neglects to add the very next speech in the play (by Menteith) that bears directly on himself:
Who then shall blame
His pester'd senses to recoil and start,
When all that is within him does condemn
Itself for being there?
As he slowly learns what the German occupation of France is really about - the complete destruction of French culture, Hitler's revenge on Versailles - Ebrennac grows to despise his role in the occupation, and eventually volunteers for combat duty (though I wonder of what use a lame lieutenant would be at the front).
The turning point comes when the Frenchman has to visit the Kommandatur to turn in a routine fire report when Ebrennac sees the old man's reflection in the mirror. Ebrennac has a look of almost panicked guilt on his face, like he's been caught in the act - a Hitler functionary going about his daily routine of occupation and oppression. He bows to the old man and turns to leave the room.
What impact do the extreme strictures of Melville's budget have on the film? In other words, does his economy of means translate into an economy of ends? There are a few moments in which Melville covers a missing shot (of the Lieutenant's staff car, for instance) with a sound effect. Or when Ebrennac stands waiting for the arrival of a train that we never see. One could argue that the shots are unnecessary, but they call attention to themselves. To some extent, Melville was anticipating Bresson's elisions.
The scenes in which Ebrennac relates his visit to Paris on leave seem strange at first. Like a tourist travelogue, we see him standing against various Paris landmarks, cleverly intercut with newsreel footage of German soldiers in Paris. At one point a soldier in a newsreel salutes someone off camera and Ebrennac returns his salute. The fellow Wehrmacht officers he meets are suitably monstrous, with one of them telling him how Treblinka has become obsolete and how future death camps will accommodate the killing of 2,000 prisoners per day.
Melville handles the monotony of the narrative extremely well, developing a rhythm that captures the suffocating routine of life under the Occupation. Edgar Bischoff's music is overwherlming at times, but it reflects the great emotional undercurrent that the images can't show. For ordinary Frenchmen, the saying "life goes on" was especially galling from 1940-44. The decision was made by a traitorous French leadership that surrender was preferable to defeat in battle, to the physical destruction of France.
What a unique, one-off film; like all great films, a one-off. Made with no money - apparently. Shot in Bruller's own house outside Paris. Three characters (two of them aren't even named). I counted five interior sets. We never hear the voice of the niece - the one time she speaks, her uncle's narration drowns her out. Melville was a member of the Resistance, and no other film that I've seen, save Marcel Ophuls's Le chagrin et la pitié, captures something, the feel, of what it must have been like to be a Frenchman under German occupation.(2) The silent treatment that the old Frenchman and his niece give the Wehrmacht Lieutenant is a strange game at first - an odd condition, really. Carrying on their daily routines: him with his pipe, her with her sewing and knitting - carrying on as if nothing were wrong, nothing had changed: it was how all Frenchmen behaved - even those enlisted in the Resistance had covers, day jobs. It wasn't as if there was an active front, to which uniformed fighters marched away to war. The front was, as it were, everywhere.
(1) The Baroness was instrumental in Melville's career, even after a car crash forced her out of acting. She turned to producing independent films by Georges Franju and Melville. Late in her life she was Susan Sontag's lover.
(2) Losey's Monsieur Klein effectively conveys nightmarish, Kafkaesque aspect of the Occupation.
[A personal note that intrigued me is when the Uncle tells us how he drinks coffee in the evenings because it helps him to sleep. Perhaps it's my own advancing age, buy I, too, find that coffee is an excellent soporific.]
Now that I have Turner Classic Movies back in my life (don't ask me how), I had the pleasure of watching their late Saturday night movie - late Sunday morning for me - Crossing Delancey (1988). I had fond memories of the first time I watched it thirty years ago. I don't remember where I was when I saw it, though I was probably in Nevada on my first tour of duty in the Navy.
Crossing Delancey is billed as a romantic comedy, but it's thin on both. Immediately on being reminded that the film's leading character works at New York's "last privately-owned bookstore", I thought of You've Got Mail and what a relief it is to be deprived of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Instead we have Amy Irving and Peter Riegert, and instead of a plot stolen from Lubitsch's Shop Around the Corner, Crossing Delancey was adapted by Susan Sandler from her own play.
Isabelle works at the aforementioned bookstore, which is where she feels she belongs, among bohemian types, like a Dutch author, played by Jeroen Krabbé, whose marriage is complicated enough for him to show interest in Isabelle. He recites to her lines from the Chinese Book of Songs:
Ripe plums are falling
now there are only five
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time
Ripe plums are falling
now there are only three
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time
Ripe plums are falling
i gather them in a shallow basket
may a fine lover come for me
tell me his name
The Dutchman is only interested in Isabelle's plums, but she's oblivious of just how manipulative and smarmy he is. Meanwhile, Isabelle's grandmother, Ida, whom Isabelle calls her Bubbie (the Yiddish word Bubbe, or grandmother), has enlisted a matchmaker, a real horror played by Sylvia Miles, to find a nice Jewish boy for her. The matchmaker comes up with Sam (Peter Riegert) who inherited a pickle store from his father. He's down-to-earth and prosaic, and has been - unbeknownst to her - interested in Isabelle for awhile. According to the rules of romantic comedy, there's supposed to be some suspense involved about which man Isabelle will choose - although the plot has more to do with which life she will choose: a life of the mind, the arts (which Micklin Silver portrays as pretentious posturing) or a life in the real world of pickles, living up to the expectations of her Jewish family. Lost somewhere in the shuffle is Isabelle living a life of her own instead of the one outfitted for her by her Bubbie. There is no real conflict, however, as the Dutch writer is exposed as an ass (in one scene, Rosemary Harris tells him to go back to the Netherlands to his own language - sage advice) and Sam shows Isabelle what a fine dancer (and kisser) her is.
What makes the formulaic bearable in this case are the actors. I will single out the two leads, Irving and Riegert, and one more - Reizl Bozyk as Bubbie. For an all-too-short time, Amy Irving was the darling of American film. She married the Brazilian filmmaker Hector Babenco (divorced 2005), who gave her the lead in his beautiful film Bossa Nova (2000). She gives a fine performance in Crossing Delancey as a big girl lost. By now it's hard to believe that Peter Riegert was a pledge in the Animal House (1979) fraternity. He made a much bigger - and memorable - splash in Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983). In Crossing Delancey he does a nice turn as a Jewish New Yorker. In fact, it's the parochial (if that is the word) Jewish world in which Crossing Delancey is solidly situated that gives it a flavor that is strong, if not exactly distinct. It's Reizl Bozyk, a longtime actor in the Yiddish theater, playing Bubbie, her first film role, that adds a ring of truth to an otherwise predictable story.
Some elements of the production seem too imposing, like the almost incessant music, supplied mostly by The Roches (Suzzy Roche plays Isabelle's friend Marilyn) and the otherwise distinguished American composer Paul Chihara. (Though I was puzzled by a late piano solo in the film that borrows considerably from Dave Grusin's theme from On Golden Pond.) But the shots of 1980s Manhattan supplied by Theo Van de Sande, including a handball game in real Manhattan afternoon sunlight, were nicely done, along with the clothes and the hair all now redolent of the time. There's a scene in a crowded deli in which Run DMC blasts from a boom box, only to be interrupted by an old woman in stage makeup who comes into the deli off the street and launches into "Some Enchanted Evening" to the now dumbstruck crowd, including Isabelle, closing with the lines,
Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love,
When you hear him call you across a crowded room,
Then fly to his side and make him your own,
Or all through your life you may dream all alone.
Once you have found him, never let him go,
Once you have found him, never let him go.
Joan Micklin Silver had an uneven career. I still like her 1979 film, Chilly Scenes of Winter, with Mary Beth Hurt and the late John Heard (and Peter Riegert). Without having seen it in almost forty years, it lingers pleasantly in my memory of when I was in college in my early twenties. How splendid that so many of the people I have mentioned in this review, Irving, Riegert, Silver, the Roches, are still around and still "active."
With the new film Jojo Rabbit confusing critics and delighting audiences with its depiction of Adolf Hitler as the imaginary friend of a German boy whose mother is hiding a Jewish girl in her attic, I found a clip on YouTube in which the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke commented a few years ago on the German film Downfall, that shows us Hitler's last days in his Berlin bunker. "First of all," Haneke told a Hollywood Reporter interviewer, "I have to say that I argued with Bernd Eichinger [the producer of Downfall] about the film. I found it both repulsive and dumb."(1) The interviewer had asked Haneke if a film about Hitler had the potential to "humanize" its subject and therefore cause people to sympathize with him.
When the film Downfall was released in the U.S., Stanley Kauffmann praised it for its cinematic qualities, but he was also puzzled by it:
Thus the very virtues of the film leave us disturbed and puzzled. Why was Downfall made? Was it an attempt to balance the world's black view of Hitler, to show that at least he was sincere and brave? It would have been stupid to alter the account, to film a comic-book cartoon of those last days with all the Nazi bigwigs as craven weaklings. But, since the film had to be made this way if at all, why was it made? What was the purpose in the minds of Eichinger and Hirschbiegel?
Many, I hope, remember Hitler, A Film From Germany (1977) by Hans Jürgen Syberberg. It is not strictly a film about Hitler: rather, it is a visionary, philosophical fantasia about a felt need in Germany for Hitler, and about his creation. (In one scene the dead Hitler, clad in a toga, speaks to Germany from the grave of Wagner: "I was and am the end of your most secret wishes, the legend and reality of your dreams. . . . ")
Syberberg called Hitler "the greatest film-maker of all time," asserting that Hitler created World War II for the same reason he commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to film the Nuremberg Party Congress, "in order to view the rushes privately every evening.... It is very interesting that the only objects to remain of the Third Reich are fragments of celluloid: nothing else exists--not the architecture of Albert Speer, nor the borders of the big German Reich of which Hitler dreamed--only the celluloid record of his existence, of the war." To that celluloid record, Downfall is a well-wrought, troubling postscript.(2)
Clive James, writing about film critics, used Downfall as an example of how some films are tests of our credulity:
Similarly, if you know too much about the movies but not enough about the world, you won't be able to see that "Downfall" is dangerously sentimental. Realistic in every observable detail, it is nevertheless a fantasy to the roots, because the pretty girl who plays the secretary looks shocked when Hitler inveighs against the Jews. It comes as a surprise to her. Well, it couldn't have; but to know why that is so, you have to have read a few books. No matter how many movies you have seen, they won't give you the truth of the matter, because it can't be shown as action.(3)
In the clip I mentioned above, the Hollywood Reporter interviewer asked Michael Haneke if he would consider making a film about Hitler. "No," Haneke replied.
It's impossible for me to do that because of the idea of creating entertainment of this, turning this into entertainment, and that's why I have problems with Spielberg's film about the concentration camps, for example. The idea, the mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water. That to me is unspeakable ... Anything that treats such a subject as entertainment is for me unspeakable.
How interesting that one particular scene from Schindler's List, in which dozens of naked women are crammed into a dark room that they don't know is either a shower or a gas chamber, stuck in Haneke's memory as it did. Did he find it "entertaining?" I'm an admirer of some of Haneke's films, but this is the man who admitted in another interview, "I once said to Isabelle Huppert that the ideal scene should force the spectator to look away." I would bet that Haneke couldn't bring himself to look away from Spielberg's "entertainment."
Is it unspeakable to have to remind ourselves occasionally (because we don't like to remember unpleasant truths) of what we are capable as a species when we allow ourselves - because it cannot happen without our consent - to be duped by a false prophet, when we surrender our will, when we follow a leader who promises us impossible things like mastery of the world or a return to the past?
Once more I turn to Primo Levi: "I do not find it permissible to explain a historical phenomenon by piling all the blame on a single individual (those who carry out horrendous orders are not innocent!)."
As for Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary shown in Downfall to have been oblivious of Hitler's evils, Levi wrote:
In Hitler's Germany a particular code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which seemed to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.
For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannahs and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.(4)
Only yesterday it was announced that the house in which Hitler was born will be converted into a police station. A synagogue would've been more fitting, but I'm sure that Austrian authorities have to be careful not to offend neo-Nazis' sensibilities.
(1) Michael Haneke disagrees
(2) "Last Acts," The New Republic, February 21, 2005.
(3) "How to Write About Film," The New York Times, June 4, 2006.
(4) The Reawakening, translated by Stuart Woolf (London: The Bodley Head, 1965).
God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master. (Aeschylus, Agamemnon - the Browning version)
Reading a post recently on the Criterion web page devoted to Martin Scorsese, who just turned 77, I stumbled at the headline: "Wishing a very happy birthday to the incomparable Martin Scorsese! Here he is with Kent Jones in conversation about his 1993 romantic masterpiece THE AGE OF INNOCENCE." With all the deference I could summon on the occasion of the birthday of an old American filmmaker who has spent much of his life risking a great deal more than his vanity on projects that were guaranteed to fail, I cannot see how on earth anyone with any critical acumen could think that The Age of Innocence was a masterpiece, let alone a romantic one. I accept the fact that even Criterion, an enterprise devoted to the discovery, preservation and/or restoration of examples of film art from far and wide does so for profit and that not every film they submit to the Criterion Treatment is going to meet my own exacting standard of worthiness (looking through their catalog provides me with equal amounts of pleasure and pain). But The Age of Innocence? A film that, if he is as honest as I expect he is, even Scorsese should look back on with mixed emotions. And even after considering that he only remade Cape Fear to please his producers long enough to persuade them to let him make The Age of Innocence, it was a misstep for Scorsese - honorable and laudable for a filmmaker who was eminently entitled to a misstep.
Even if I were to accept that, at the age of 77, Scorsese is deserving of the title of Master filmmaker (how many former masters have there been? Scorsese is eager to inform us of his own choices for the title), that doesn't mean that every film he made is a masterpiece. I would be happy to argue that about 90% are not masterpieces, and had I the time and the inclination I could demonstrate why. But the problem has nothing to do with the application of critical standards. It's about the limitations of scholarship and how some of the greatest film scholars make the lousiest film critics. The two disciplines can rarely even touch each other, for quite basic and important reasons. Film scholarship and film criticism are distinct - and sometimes antithetical - pursuits. In the film Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois, Langlois himself stated:
Since like everybody else, I was full of silly prejudices I missed out on incredible things. Salome with Theda Bara was for sale. I thought, 'Fox, Theda Bara, American spectacle...who needs it?' Now the film is lost forever. It was probably quite good. From that point on, through trial and error, I saw that people, intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything and buy everything. Never assume you know what's of value.
So, the moment that Langlois made a value judgement on material that he had the power to preserve or to consign to oblivion, he made an enormous mistake. Thanks to the efforts of archivists like Langlois and to scholars like Kevin Brownlow, whose magnificent books beginning with The Parade's Gone By, the idea that films of the past are deserving of preservation is popularly accepted. But film scholarship, which is the dedicated study of the who, what, when and where of films, has the responsibility to tell us everything we might need to know about any given film except the success or failure of its design. If it was intended to entertain, does it stand or fall? And if it was reaching for something higher, for art, for instance, does it make it or fall short?
A perfect demonstration of the difference in disciplines came about with the publication in 1966 of Donald Richie's landmark book, The Films of Akira Kurosawa. In his review of the book, Dwight Macdonald wrote of Richie:
His book on Kurosawa is comparable in scholarship, mastery of detail, interpretation and good writing to Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce. I don't know any other study of a director's work that approaches its scope and intelligence ... He goes into technique so extensively that I should think the book would be useful as a practical exposition of film-making regardless of one's special interest in Kurosawa.
But this impressive praise (with which I wholly agree) is followed by the point Macdonald was getting to and where Richie's book comes up conspicuously lacking:
A masterpiece of scholarship, but not of criticism. Perhaps the very qualities that make it the former prevent it from being the latter ... There is almost no qualitative discrimination between the twenty-three films: all of them are valued on the same (high) level, which is untrue to life, artists being men, not gods, and therefore fallible.
But how was Richie going to attract interest to an all-too-human artist who reached his peak in 1954 with Seven Samurai, and then rode his roller coaster slowly - if circuitously - back down to earth?
Looking over the films of Scorsese's that I have seen, there is a clear distinction that can be made between those that succeeded in realizing the filmmaker's intentions simply by being coherent and resonant as statements, regardless of the relevance of the points he was trying to make, and the others that were made to satisfy one producer or another. At some point in the 1980s, Scorsese attained a mastery of technique that made it possible for him to say and do whatever he wanted with the medium. It's easy to distinguish his commercial work from his personal work. In the latter category you can find Mean Streets (1973), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), Gangs of New York (1992), and Silence (2016). Each of these films is intense in a way that most of Scorsese's films are - intensely conceived (at least in visual terms), intensely executed, and intensely framed into a whole. But even here, with his most personal, most individualistic works, problems arose, on every occasion, in the writing stages of each film. I have always had the conviction that Scorsese is a filmmaker most completely at odds with the commercial constraints of American film, but that he is happy to be known as an American filmmaker - partly because of his reverence for a tradition that I don't believe exists in American film. Had Scorsese been making films in Italy, like the filmmakers Rossellini and Visconti, whose work he most reveres, we would certainly have had a greater appreciation of his formidable abilities and have been spared unnecessary work like Cape Fear, Casino, and the films of his deplorable DiCaprio phase, like Shutter Island. Stanley Kauffmann wrote of Scorsese that "patently his films are the work of a man who lives in cinema as a bird lives in the sky. He has invested himself with the history of the art in a way that empowers him without making him an imitator." His work is, I think, the most telling chronicle of the extreme difficulties of a film artist in America.
Yes, masterpieces aren't possible without masters, but lonely is the master with all his masterpieces a long way behind him.
Primo Levi gave the title The Truce (La Tregua) to the second volume of his memoirs. It deals with the events in his life from his liberation from Auschwitz to his eventual arrival in his native city of Turin. The book's alternate title is The Reawakening, but it ignores the point that Levi was making with The Truce. In his Paris Review interview, Levi spoke about an incident that had an effect on his understanding of war:
Have you read my book The Reawakening? You remember Mordo Nahum? I had mixed feelings toward him. I admired him as a man fit for every situation. But of course he was very cruel to me. He despised me because I was not able to manage. I had no shoes. He told me, Remember, when there is war, the first thing is shoes, and second is eating. Because if you have shoes, then you can run and steal. But you must have shoes. Yes, I told him, well you are right, but there is not war any more. And he told me, Guerra es siempre. There is always war."(1)
The end of the war for Primo Levi, then, was only a temporary suspension of hostilities, a truce. This is an especially sobering reminder on this Day of Remembrance, marking 101 years since the armistice that ended the First World War, the "war to end all wars," as Europeans disingenuously called it. Another survivor of the war against fascism, a Pole, is represented in the fictional film The Real End of the Great War (Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny - 1957). Juliusz Zborski is liberated from a concentration camp (2) physically and mentally enfeebled, unable to communicate beyond smiles and nods to everyone around him. His wife Róża, who had given him up for dead, is compelled to become his caretaker. The film opens like a horror movie - a woman (Róża) is disturbed by someone, or something, fumbling at the door handle of her cluttered bedroom. She runs to the door and presses against it, speaking as if to a child on the other side to let her sleep. The noise stops and the woman turns to face us with tears in her eyes. She returns to bed, closes her eyes and we fade in to a 1938 New Year's Eve party where the woman, the camera taking her place, is dancing with a smiling handsome man. The dance finished, we return to the woman in bed. She turns out the light. And we realize that the person trying to open the door is Juliusz, the same man with whom Róża was dancing.
The following morning we are shown the sleeping arrangements: Juliusz is exiled to the sofa, and Róża sleeps in the bedroom behind a locked door. Róża has moved on, just as Poland did when the catastrophic war was over. Early in the film, when Juliusz runs an errand for the housemaid (who dotes on him), we are shown Warsaw in the process of recovery, with construction cranes prominent against a morning sky. Juliusz wanders, smiling, across a bustling construction site. He had been an architect before the war (the camera shows us the nameplate on the front door of his flat), and two men on the construction site recognize him and address him. He merely nods and smiles at them, and walks away.
Before the war, Juliusz was also a man who loved to dance. The scene of him leading Róża in a dizzying waltz at the opening of the film is shockingly mocked in the film's first flashback to Juliusz in the concentration camp, with the camera spinning, this time from Juliusz' perspective. The prisoners are forced to hobble and twirl in a mad, exhausted imitation of dancing, while a conscripted band plays. And they must dance until they drop. Juliusz is the last one standing - dancing, as the guards stand around and laugh at him. The flashback is provoked in Juliusz when, at a party, a guest tries to dance with him. When she turns her attention to tuning the radio to a suitable station, Juliusz drops the glass platter he was holding and, to everyone's alarm, begins to spin on the spot where he stands, the room spinning and dissolving in flashback to the camp.
Róża is tentatively involved with a colleague, Professor Stęgień. She is still young and attractive, and she wants to be happy. Lucyna Winnicka, the actress who plays her in the film, was the wife of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, who directed. She would later appear, to international acclaim, in Kawalerowicz' Night Train and Mother Joan of the Angels.
The Real End of the Great War never had a theatrical release in the U.S., probably due to its baleful subject. Because it never had an American distributor, the film couldn't find its way to home video. Way back when I was a dedicated and intrepid filmgoer, I was tantalized by a review written from Europe by Vernon Young that called it "a Polish masterpiece":
Kawalerowicz is one of a nucleus of Polish film-makers which, mainly within the last four years [this was written in 1959], has produced a half-dozen films equal to any which have emerged from Europe since the rise of Italian neo-realism over a decade ago. The True [sic] End is the most deeply disturbing of those I have seen (and each of them disturbs, by either its crucial violence or its wounding sadness). Were it not for Kawalerowicz' dazzling virtuosity, I would be moved to acknowledge the film as virtually insupportable, since it conveys an ordeal so painful as to refute that vestige of belief which the most professedly disenchanted among us nourish in their hearts - the belief that there is a finally discernible compensation for the infliction of extreme suffering.(3)
I got on with my life without seeing the film, all the while keeping it, as I've grown older, on that ever-shrinking list of "films to see before I snuff it." I found it not long ago and I watched it over the weekend. I wasn't disappointed - it's everything I expected it to be. Kawalerowicz' triumph is in not passing judgement on any of the characters. Juliusz tries to reach Róża in any way he can. But he fails, and when he sees how complete his failure is, he takes the only way out that he knows. Róża is freed, but in the film's final shot, as she and the maid in their mourning dress walk past the waiting Professor Stęgień, she shows us her commitment to Juliusz.
The three flashbacks are presented somewhat too expressionistically, almost as if Juliusz were changing into Mr. Hyde. But the camp scenes themselves are presented exclusively from Juliusz' perspective, dancing deliriously. Until the guards pick him up off the floor in the last flashback, an SS orgy with topless girls, and throw him through a window. Everything else in the film is presented with the utmost subtlety.
Vernon Young noticed the resemblance in the film's last scene to the last scene of The Third Man, with Alida Valli walking away from Harry's grave past Joseph Cotten:
She walks on by, as all those bloody leaves fall, and that, too, is an image that will remain ... When Europe stood aghast at what it had done to itself, that was the hour to make a film on the subject. Later, it was too late without overreaching. I think the only other film that expresses a phase of the tragedy as deeply is The True End of the Great War (Kawalerowicz) but its so unbearable one can't see it twice. Many I know couldn't sit it once.(4)
The obscurity of Real End of the Great War is unpardonable. It deserves a place beside the best films on the subject of the aftermath of war, which are actually very few in number. It invokes neither history nor politics in its portrayal of unheroic ordinary people suffering the after-effects of war.
(1) Primo Levi, The Art of Fiction No. 140, The Paris Review.
(2) There were 23 main German concentration camps in Poland, with hundreds of "subcamps".
(3) Vernon Young, "A Condemned Man Escapes: Five Films on the Subject," 1959.
(4) Vernon Young, "A Sad Tale's Best for Winter: On Re-seeing The Third Man," 1969
"The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced." Randall Jarrell, A Sad Heart at the Supermarket, 1962.
How hard it must be to be a polyglot like Harold Bloom in an age as stupid as ours. His enemies hated him because, from their low perspective, he was nothing but a big bully, punching so far down at them that he had to get down on one knee. He was smarter than his harshest critics, but that didn't make him invulnerable to criticism. Polyglots - and Bloom was one of the best - simply cannot be experts at everything. His intellect was imposing and wide-ranging, and he followed it into areas like Talmudic scholarship that were presumably safely hermetic. He claimed, for example, that some of the first books of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, had been composed by a brilliant woman from the highest echelon of royal society. Of course, his claims are are entirely speculative and ultimately unprovable. Similarly, Samuel Butler claimed that Homer's Odyssey had been written by a woman.
Bloom's close textual analysis was best applied to literature, and it was as a literary scholar and critic that Bloom made his greatest impact. He only came up with such a short list of 26 literary works that he regarded as essential to any Western canon off the top of his head to satisfy his editor. It was a mistake that trivializes every great book on the list and further marginalizes all the ones he left out. But Bloom knew that it was a terrific conversation starter. As cranky as he seems in some of his interviews, I am not alone in noticing how he sometimes resembled Zero Mostel.
He lived through, fighting all the way, the steady decline of what is now known (mostly with contempt) as High Culture, i.e., not just the culture itself and its standards, but our understanding of what it is and of what it consists. Harold Bloom acknowledged that there are sometimes dramatic shifts in taste. But he held firm to his conviction that our culture's bedrock is made up of solid blocks of creative achievement that haven't shifted in centuries and that they are unmoved by modern political fashions. George Orwell saw the beginnings of a movement that tried to marginalize literary work that was at variance with certain contemporary radical tastes. Orwell saw the importance of aesthetic standards, whereby a literary work cannot be considered good one day and bad the next. But he also insisted on praising good work that presented a worldview or a political agenda that was markedly different from one's own. However, Orwell would've called Bloom's insistence on a strict avoidance of political partisanship as just another political position.
It wasn't that Bloom lived too long - though it may have looked that way to him. He went down fighting, which explains the coolness of so many of the eulogies. It has been sad, but also a little funny, to watch how so many of the people who wrote notices of his passing had to stand on their own necks trying not to seem to praise him. I can't see how not praising him is possible. He hurt people's feelings, people who were trying to forge new standards by smelting all the old ones. Some of them were so cheapjack that they didn't survive a single generation. But I doubt that Bloom took much satisfaction from watching them fall by the wayside. He called out the ignorance he saw all around him because no one else would. He didn't have to alert some of us about the poverty of popular fiction, but he would never have taken up the subject if some intellectuals who should've known better hadn't gone slumming. He only punctured overblown reputations because he wanted, above all, to be clear about what was good in the midst of everything that was plain bad.
Is it even possible for a wise old man to not come across to some as patronizing? I think that our feverish fidgeting for total equality may not have much room for teachers - people who know more than we do and who are appointed, even if only by nature, to help us up to their knowledge. The erosion of literature has a strong American streak of anti-intellectualism. Bloom deposited entire libraries in his own head and was free with the expression of his knowledge, solicited or otherwise. He was opinionated and he held firm to his opinions. Someone I knew in the Army paid me what I took to be a backhanded compliment - he told me that I had probably forgotten more than he'd ever know. Harold Bloom probably held in his memory, to the last, more than the rest of us will ever forget.
