Growing up in the 1960s, I went to the movies on weekends. My father, who had been a serious and successful poker player in his youth, still managed to satisfy his gambling itch by playing bingo every Sunday after church. He would drop my brother and I off at a movie theater and go to the NCO Club on Fort Jackson, South Carolina and play bingo all afternoon.
One Sunday afternoon I saw a movie called The Art of Love.(1) I don’t know why, but the movie, which wasn’t very good, has stuck with me all these years later so that I remember one of its stars, Dick Van Dyke, and its plot, that involved an artist (a painter) in a scheme with his friend, James Garner, in which he faked his own death. The publicity from his death somehow convinces people that he was a great artist and the value of his paintings increases significantly.
Unfortunately, the artist’s friend gets greedy and demands that he produce more paintings, even though he’s supposed to be dead. Eventually, the scheme is exposed and the artist announces to the world that he’s been alive all the while, etc.
The movie’s plot device is the curious notion that a dead artist’s work is more valuable than a living artist’s, especially if the artist dies tragically, still in his prime. If the artist commits suicide, so much the better. I was reminded of all this when I saw a clip recently from a Dr. Who episode that was aired in 2010. In the episode, Dr. Who brings Vincent van Gogh back to life and transports him to the present. He takes him, rather cruelly I thought, to an art gallery where his paintings are proudly hung beside those of the great masters, like Monet, Renoir and Degas. The brief clip then shows Vincent getting very emotional seeing his paintings being admired by everyone. But his reaction wasn’t the one I expected. Instead of becoming upset that all the effusive admiration being shown to his work has come too late, that he only sold one painting when he was alive and that he was treated for depression and he eventually committed suicide, he goes around the gallery tearfully thanking everyone, shedding tears of joy. Not exactly how the real Van Gogh would’ve reacted. Wouldn’t he have been justified in being extremely resentful – not just about the popularity of his work and how everyone seems to be familiar with his sad life story, but about the ridiculous value being placed on his paintings, how every so many months a new record is broken at an auction somewhere of one of his paintings going for tens of millions of dollars?
By now everyone should be familiar with the story of Yasuo Goto, a Japanese insurance magnate who, In 1987, bought Van Gogh's painting “Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers" (1888) for $39 million. It was then the highest sum paid for a work of art. On his death in 2007, Goto left instructions in his will that the canvas would be cremated along with his body. I suppose we should be thankful that whomever saved it from the flames probably did so not because of its beauty but because of its obvious resale value?
Worse than this are the occasional art thefts that take place in which thieves break into art galleries and strategically steal certain particularly valuable paintings that thereafter vanish from public view for a number of years or for generations until they turn up again in sometimes unlikely places. Where do the paintings that are stolen go? It’s hard not to imagine them hanging in a secret location, probably in a hidden room in a wealthy person’s palatial home. Perhaps they hang on a wall opposite this rich person’s private toilet where he or she sits alone and basks not only in the beauty of the artist’s work but in their own extravagant and obscene wealth.
But what I also couldn’t quite understand from the Dr. Who clip was how moved the show’s fans were by Van Gogh’s utterly unconvincing emotional response in the modern art gallery at the display of his canvases – canvases that were preserved by Van Gogh’s loving brother Theo after Vincent committed suicide. My reaction to the scene was “where were they when he needed them?” Where were all those erstwhile art lovers when Vincent needed them in 1890 when he died, alone and forgotten at the age of 37? When Barbara Walters told Robert Redford after The Way We Were was released that he could have any woman he wanted, he said "Where were they when I needed them?"
Recently, I also chanced upon a passage from Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing that addresses this problem – the problem of the survival of the artist and, separately, of the artist’s work:
The illusion you’re doing something to help yourself helps you. You somehow feel a little better, a little less despondent. You pin your hopes on a Godot who never comes, but the thought he might show up with answers helps you get through the enveloping nightmare. Like religion, where the illusion gets one through. And being in the arts, I envy those people who derive solace from the belief that your doing something to help yourself helps others. The work created will live on and be much discussed and somehow, like the Catholic with his afterlife, so the artist’s “legacy” will make him immortal. The catch here is that all the people discussing the legacy and how great the artist’s work is are alive and are ordering pastrami, and the artist is somewhere in an urn or underground in Queens. All the people standing over Shakespeare’s grave and singing his praises means a big goose egg to the Bard, and a day will come—a far-off day, but be sure it definitely is coming—when all Shakespeare’s plays, for all their brilliant plots and hoity-toity iambic pentameter, and every dot of Seurat’s will be gone along with each atom in the universe. In fact, the universe will be gone and there will be no place to have your hat blocked. After all, we are an accident of physics. And an awkward accident at that. Not the product of intelligent design but, if anything, the work of a crass bungler.
(1) The Art of Love, released in 1965, starring Dick Van Dyke, James Garner, Elke Sommer and Angie Dickinson. The script was written by Carl Reiner, from a story by Richard Alan Simmons and William Sackheim. Interestingly, Norman Jewison later commented that the movie flopped because audiences weren’t convinced that an artist's death guarantees a huge increase in the sales value of his paintings.
Max von Sydow, who died last Sunday at the age of 90, was more than just one of the great screen actors who, like too many others I could mention, lavished his talents on mediocre star vehicles. Though he finally succumbed to the lure of Hollywood in 1965, he was lucky enough to work multiple times with two great filmmakers in his native Sweden - eleven films with Ingmar Bergman and seven with Jan Troell. Although it was with Bergman that he received the most attention, in iconic roles like the knight Blok in The Seventh Seal, who outwits Death in a game of chess, and Töre in The Virgin Spring, who savagely avenges the rape and murder of his daughter, it was for Troell that von Sydow gave his most convincing (and comprehensive) performances. He is at the center of the six-and-a-half hour Emigrants saga, playing Karl Oskar, the patriarch of a Swedish family that emigrates to Minnesota in the mid-19th century. He was totally convincing playing Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun. But it was in the relatively overlooked Flight of the Eagle (Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd, 1982) that von Sydow gave what one critic called "a magnificent, stricken-oak performance,"(1) and that I wish to use as his memorial.
Troell derived the story of the film from Per Olof Sundman's 1967 documentary novel of Salomon August Andrée, an engineer and a staunch technocrat with an interest in ballooning, who came up with the bold idea of flying a hydrogen balloon across the North Pole. In 1896, nearing the very end of the Age of Discovery, Andrée managed to persuade the Swedish King, Oscar II, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Alfred Nobel that the expedition was feasible. It was accepted as a bold plan that would bring prestige to the nation and funding was provided.(2) Andrée recruited two men, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg, and together they trained and outfitted themselves for the journey. The film devotes all the time it needs to these preliminary stages, with its private and public details, to establish not just their historical context but to give convincing life to the three men, to salvage them from history. Troell is abetted in these efforts by his actors, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Fraenkel and Göran Stangertz as Strindberg. Max von Sydow gives us Andrée, a man of some accomplishment who is quite overwhelmed by the efforts of those he has inspired in the realization of his dream. He is neither a fool nor a dreamer, but a practical man of science who, the film makes clear, gets in over his head when he is given the opportunity, in the summer of 1897, to put his plans into action.
The balloon, christened the "Eagle," doesn't leave the ground in Spitzbergen until fifty-five minutes into the film. Just after it is airborne, the balloon is caught in a downdraft and nearly sinks in the ocean. The crew throw enough ballast overboard to raise the balloon, but the accident also severs two of the three long guide-ropes which were going to be used to navigate the balloon. The men notice this, as do members of the ground crew, but the balloon continues on its way. And just sixty-five hours later - thirteen minutes in the film - it is on the ice, never to rise again. What ultimately brought the balloon down was ice buildup on the rigging and gondola, making it too heavy to gain the altitude it needed. From the time when the balloon drifted out of sight in Spitzbergen, the script had to rely on notes taken by Andrée to re-create events, simply because the fate of the expedition remained unknown until 1930. Troell opens the film with photographs taken of the remains that were discovered, including the bones of Andrée himself.
The last hour of the film, when the balloon is brought down and the men have packed sledges to make the trek across pack ice to the nearest island, is one of the most grueling stretches of film ever recorded.(3) Even so, I wondered at Troell’s use of flashbacks, as all three men find in their memories something to give them comfort or strength for the days ahead. I think the last hour would’ve been more harrowing if it had been unrelieved by the men’s glowing (and so splendidly colorful) flashbacks. One moment, however, is unforgettable: Strindberg opens a locket containing a picture of his fiancée and a lock of her hair, he removes the hair and touches it to his swollen and chapped lips.
Once they arrive on Kvitoya, a small island east of Svalbard, the film enters its final phase. Strindberg, whose photographs appear throughout the film (his photographic plates were discovered among the team’s remains) is the first to go. His body was found in a makeshift grave on the island, but there is speculation about the circumstances of his death. Some believe he may have committed suicide, others that he was killed by a polar bear. Troell simply shows him collapsing suddenly on the ice. When only Andrée and Fraenkel are left, Troell shows them, near the end, having a bitter argument, but they embrace pitifully when they realize that all they have left is each other. It is a heartbreaking moment.
It was a time when no one was around to ask the simple question, "What could possibly go wrong?" Flight of the Eagle is more than just a careful record of a doomed expedition. Yes, it was Andrée’s folly. But Troell gives the account a tragic dimension. In the film’s last moments, in which Fraenkel is killed by a polar bear and Andrée begs him not to leave him on the blasted island entirely alone, Max von Sydow emerges from the tent and peers around him at the eventless horizon, one that seems to merge the sky and the earth, and the look in his eyes is devastating. It is a moment that calls to mind a speech by Hamlet:
...
this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. (4)
(1) Vernon Young.
(2) It was the same spirit of adventure that Terry Jones and Michael Palin so brilliantly mocked in their Ripping Yarns episode, "Across the Andes by Frog."
(3) When Flight of the Eagle was in limited release in the US, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, unwitting defenders of middlebrow taste, singled it out for derision on their popular TV show, Sneak Previews. When they showed the clip from the film of the balloon lying, deflated, on the ice and the three men saluting it, Siskel and Ebert both laughed, proving that a jackass can look into a mirror, but a philosopher can't look back.
(4) Act 2 Scene 2.
I turned 61 today - or yesterday. I live in the Far East, but my thoughts are somewhere in North America. A friend wished me a happy birthday and then said "come home". I will, I will. But first there's this rough patch to get through, this unnecessary detour. It's unavoidable, can't be helped. But for now, time to reflect on my progress.
Poets always put a patina on it, getting old, I mean. Like découpage. Two poets I have long admired talked about the common perceptions of age, without really feeling them in themselves. Thomas Hardy saw how his spirit, still willing, had to contend with his flesh, which had altered:
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’
For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
Hardy felt betrayed, by the changes in others and the changes in his physical appearance. But the incongruity of his still youthful passion against the image in his mirror was too much for him, too absurd to accept. Only one can be true, but which one?
Philip Larkin, who was a great admirer of Hardy, felt deeply the difference between his life and the lives of others; a disconnect between what was expected of his life and what his life had amounted to. Not by regret, but by the refusal of others, people he once knew, to imagine their own lives otherwise.
‘Dockery was junior to you,
Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’
Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do
You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how
Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight
We used to stand before that desk, to give
‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?
I try the door of where I used to live:
Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.
A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.
Canal and clouds and colleges subside
Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,
Anyone up today must have been born
In ’43, when I was twenty-one.
If he was younger, did he get this son
At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn
High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms
With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows
How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose
I fell asleep, waking at the fumes
And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,
And ate an awful pie, and walked along
The platform to its end to see the ranged
Joining and parting lines reflect a strong
Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,
No house or land still seemed quite natural.
Only a numbness registered the shock
Of finding out how much had gone of life,
How widely from the others. Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution. Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got
And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
Ah, but Larkin was afraid of dying - not so much death as the moment when he would die. He anticipated it, just as Shakespeare had in Sonnet 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
And Shakespeare died at 52! "Death is but the shifting wind that fills the living sail." I wrote these words when I was 20. How did I know it at 20? "The idea is to die young as late as possible," wrote the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. And Oscar Wilde's lovely line, "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." And poor Oscar was dead at 46!
I feel myself to be exactly the same at 61 as I was at 20 - as I was at 10! One's age is unimportant.
I have in mind a day from twenty-eight summers ago. I was living in a trailer on the edge of a small town called Fallon, Nevada. I was there because the U.S. Navy saw fit to send me to the Naval Air Station to the east of the town.
One weekend afternoon I was watching a video of Laurence Olivier's 1944 film of Shakespeare's Henry V with a friend. He was 20 and I was 32. We watched Olivier's clever and colorful (filmed in Technicolor) film, which was deliberately meant to arouse English patriotism just before the Normandy Invasion, all the way to the scene in which Olivier delivers his "St. Crispin's Day" speech.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
Henry is giving words of encouragement to his weary soldiers on the eve of the decisive battle of Agincourt. By now, it's a familiar speech, and Olivier delivers it honorably, in keeping with the style of acting that his film memoralizes. But his delivery seems unbearably declamatory today. Olivier was a master technician, and the next time you look at the scene, pay special attention to his hands. Olivier's Henry is a stalwart warrior, completely lacking anything so modernistic (and natural) as self-doubt or irresolution.
But far from being impressed by the scene, my friend told me about one that he had seen that put Olivier in the shade. I doubted there could be such a performance, but my friend told me of Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V, and how, on hearing Branagh speak so convincingly the same lines that Olivier had spoken forty-five years before, I would be inspired to join him at Agincourt myself.
I stopped the Olivier video, and together my friend and I drove to a video store in town to look for Branagh's film. We found it and rented it and brought it back to my trailer to watch. When it was over, I had to admit to my friend that, while I regarded - and still regard - Olivier's film to be one of the finest examples of Shakespeare on film, Branagh's film was far more effective, and quite thrilling to watch - something I, honestly, never expected of a film adaptation of Shakespeare.
I have seen them all over the years: Olivier's Hamlet, Richard III and Othello, Orson Welles's Macbeth, Othello, and Falstaff (aka Chimes at Midnight), Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino, and even Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Hamlet (with Mel Gibson). And I have also seen the Shakespeare films that Branagh directed since Henry V, including his four hour Hamlet.
The most striking difference between Olivier's and Branagh's films is the treatment of the play's so-called comic characters - Falstaff, Bardolph, Nym, Mistress Quickly, and especially Pistol. Branagh has his actors (Robbie Coltrane, Richard Briers, Geoffrey Hutchings, Judi Dench, Robert Stephens) play their roles "straight," or as close to straight as possible.
What is most important about Olivier's film is that it was made at a time of national peril. Winston Churchill personally authorized the expense of the production in wartime ($2 million - an enormous sum for a movie in 1944), convinced that it would boost sagging morale in England as the war entered its fifth year.
The place at which both films fail, though for different reasons, is the Big Battle, Agincourt, itself. Olivier shot his battle in neutral Ireland, with hundreds of locals recruited as extras. The tracking cameras and cutting show how much Olivier learned from battle scenes in other films - particularly from Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938). But this is precisely where Olivier succumbs to a common temptation among filmmakers. Writing about Tony Richardson's excellent The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Stanley Kauffmann commented that
"large-scale battle scenes are doomed to remoteness. Whether it's Borodino in War and Peace or Balaklava here, they always seem to reduce to the same shots in differing uniforms: the Alexander Nevsky shot, in which the camera rolls along looking down a line of advancing riders; the cannon exploding in our faces; the quick glimpses of men with lances through their guts; the riderless horses; the ground-level shots of the dead. The big film battle has become a ritual, rather than an experience, often confusing and usually too long. (Having gone to all that expense, they're not going to use only a couple of minutes' footage out of it.) About all that ever really works is the long, wide horizon shot, which conveys only size, not heat."(1)
Kenneth Branagh wanted his Agincourt to look more like real combat (with which most of us are blissfully unacquainted): blood and mud and pain. Instead of the cast of hundreds afforded Olivier, Branagh used perhaps dozens, sticking mostly to close-in shots. Alas, he shifts unnecessarily in and out of slow motion, which ruins the realism. His battle lasts ten minutes, but it could've been as effective in less time.
In France, the "comic" characters Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph are nothing but cowardly thieves. Bardolph is hanged, while Pistol and Nym live up to their job titles as "cutpurses" in the very midst of the battle, stealing everything they can from freshly slain French. Finding Nym has been killed, Pistol speaks his last line in bitter despair, "To England will I steal, and there I'll steal."
In Olivier's film, Robert Newton played a quite traditionally conceived Pistol, about as over-the-top as Newton could reach. But we are supposed to laugh at him. Robert Stephens, in stark contrast, plays Pistol in Branagh's film as a near-tragic bungler. It is a fascinating performance to watch.
That leaves us the two Henrys. Olivier is resolute and noble throughout his film, whereas Branagh is, in his soliloquies, far less sure of himself and much more of a mensch. There is certainly room for either interpretation in Shakespeare's role. Olivier's Henry served its purpose in 1944 as an English zealot, but Branagh's Henry is the more real. And to his credit, Branagh stuck more closely to the play. In the small role of Katharine, Branagh's former wife, Emma Thompson, an invaluable actress and scriptwriter, adds her brilliant presence to her scenes.
Including a scene from Henry IV, Part II in which Hal promises Falstaff that he will abandon him once he is crowned king, Falstaff (Robbie Coltrane) delivers his great line, "We have heard the chimes at midnight. Jesus, the days that we have seen!" But he delivers it to Prince Hal, when it is actually part of a conversation between Falstaff and Justice Shallow:
SHALLOW
Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that
this knight and I have seen!—Ha, Sir John, said
I well?
FALSTAFF
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master
Shallow.
SHALLOW
That we have, that we have, that we have. In
faith, Sir John, we have. Our watchword was 'Hem,
boys.' Come, let's to dinner, come, let's to dinner.
Jesus, the days that we have seen! Come, come.
(Henry IV, Part II, Act 3 Scene 2)
In 1600, when there was no public lighting and the only things that prowled the night were werewolves and men up to no good, it was impressive to be out of doors to hear the chimes at midnight. But my Navy friend and I, having scoured the high Nevada desert of its scant attractions, had heard the midnight chimes and seen the dawn with sleepless eyes and knew the camraderie of fellow sufferers so far from home but even farther from our destinations. He is in St. Petersburg, Russia just now, and I am in the Philippines. Jesus, the days that we have yet to see!
(1) Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light: Film Criticism and Comment, Harper Collins, 1971.
