With a big storm coming through... I am thoroughly tired of winter... We are into March - we ought to be getting some relief... right? any day now, right?
I cannot blame the weather for this blog's complete stagnation in February, though. I suppose I can blame the classes I'm taking. It is probably relevant that they both directly compete with blogging - both have weekly assignments that are virtually blog posts in themselves: a page, 3-400 words, whatever, of comment on that week's assignment. I could probably post the assignments here and no one would notice the difference... Indeed - last week's modernity post is almost a mash-up of the two papers I wrote that week... I don't really want to take over the blog with this - but I might. One of the things I have always liked about taking classes, maybe especially when I'm taking them mostly for the plain pleasure of it, is that they create habits of thinking and writing, and provide material to write and think about. Writing spawns writing. But this year, all that writing has been aimed at those two classes, and none of it at this poor blog. But that is because I have not been posting all that material here - maybe I will start. Or more likely - I might try using this as a runoff. 3-400 words on Hamlet or The Blue Angel is not a lot - a lot of the effort of writing those papers is cutting them down, sticking to one idea: that can generate a lot of discarded ideas, that I ought to be able to turn into blogging...
And finally - there are things that come up, in one class or another, or, like those comparative modernities, between the two, that don't quite belong in the classes, but are interesting enough to think about. I am always fascinated by issues of adaptation, for example - into film, primarily, but in fact, in any medium. Plays to films - history to plays, films, novels, things like that - fascinate me. And I am fascinated by the idea of the "theatrical" in film - whether the presentation of performance (as in Blue Angel), or the use of performance in a film, either story or style (as in Mabuse the Gambler) - or even in negative terms, like the staginess of very old films (Caligari and Student of Prague, say). These issues come up - especially viewing films of plays, adaptations of Hamlet, say - the ways filmmakers play the theatrical against the cinematic, or the ways they try to hide one or the other.... For example, the drama class watched parts of the 1957 adaptation of Oedipus Rex - an attempt to film the play as the Greeks might have staged it. An interesting game, but whatever merits the staging (with masks and highly formalized movements and so on) might have had is lost because the filmmakers insist on cutting it to fit conventional standards. So it is cut, and the camera is placed inside the action, and it is edited to fit the story - big speeches get closeups, there are shot/counter shots - sure sure, it's not exactly Hitchcock, but the filmmaking basically erases the effect of the "traditional" performance and staging... A strange, counterproductive, decision...
Okay: that's all of that. Since I am posting once a week at best these days, I might as well make this one worth while - movies seen? stars provided as substitute for analysis....
Gomorra - *** - terse, brutal gangster film set largely in a ghastly apartment block in Naples... a network narrative, with five stories winding around the gangs and building - it's being sold as an expose of sorts, but the film itself has very little exposition - nothing is in context: we see the violence and cruelty and stupidity as a kind of natural condition of things...
Secret of the Grain - *** - a story about a group of Arabs in a dying port city in France; the paterfamilias is laid off - he gets the notion to buy a derelict freighter and turn it into a couscous restaurant, featuring his ex-wife's fish couscous. He is aided in this largely by the daughter of his current lover, though relations are strained there since he is working with the ex... the film traces his efforts to get this place going - though it also devotes much of its running time to his family, his friends at the lover's hotel (musicians, particularly), and so on. In the end, the sins of the sons are visited on the fathers, while the various women almost carry the game off... It's a surprisingly good film - the kind of film that can go either way, and this goes well. Amusing, sad, moving, very smart.
El Cant dels Ocells - ***1/2 - Albert Serra's film of the three wise men. Three Catalan peasants walking around the Canary Islands. Stunningly beautiful - gorgeous landscapes, the play of light and shadow, clouds, rocks, lines and shapes, composition and textures, the human figures in this world. And a fascinating way of telling stories, with the familiar text, almost completely eliminated, reduced to the human behavior between significant events. Serra called it "flat" - saying he was trying to flatten everything - the imagery (black and white, DV, shot to break depth cues), the story (actors as bodies, with no idea of the significance of their characters), and the characters themselves (the wise men as icons - people we know nothing about, except the gifts they brought). It's marvellous. Compared to Pasolini in the Q&A, but reminding me as much of Olmi's Cammina Cammina, which of course plays with the same story in similar ways...
Waiting for Sancho - ** - documentary shot on the Birdsongs shoot by Mark Peranson, editor of Cinemascope magazine and actor playing Joseph. It reveals much of the method of Serra's work - shooting people in spaces, using DV to take hours of footage, to be pored over to create the film later - showing the backstage camaraderie on the shoot, the process. Nice film. (Two stars, by the way, is good - any stars are positive, 2 is good, 3 very good, 4 great - that's my scheme.)
And on DVD - more Woody Allen: Deconstructing Harry - **1/2 - mid-90s Woody, and pretty good stuff. Here Woody plays a writer who is a sex fiend and a jackass and puts his life in his books - he's got writers block (I won't tell you his whole name), and he's having visions - film alternates between Harry's "real" life and reconstructions of his books - then starts alternating those with flashbacks to the real people - then starts confusing the two.. contains a somewhat silly plot of Harry going to be honored at his old college, bringing along a prostitute, a friend and his (kidnapped) son... though like a lot of Allen's films, it degenerates into self-congratulatory self-pity, it is pretty amusing, and contains some genuinely witty visual tricks, like the out of focus actor. Things can sometimes freeze up on screen, but there is some nice use of space, and Woody leans hard on jittery editing, lots of jump cuts, which can be pretty funny in themselves. But overall - not bad, not bad at all....
And finally? a couple bits of bloggage - nothing big.... a nice discussion of VHS at Tractor Facts... (And Anthony Kaufman's article at Moving Image Source)... Ebert of Saint Agnes of Montparnasse - Agnes Varda...
And goodbye, Paul Harvey... a radio personality who seemed to have always been there, at least on the stations my father listened to through all these years...
Showing posts with label theater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theater. Show all posts
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Modern Dancers
I have mentioned that I am taking classes this spring; there are two, on German films and another on the history of drama. I should probably try to find something else to blog about (and stop using it as an excuse not to write anything), but this week provided an uncanny overlap, too interesting to ignore. The film class covered Mabuse the Gambler, Fritz Lang, 1922. The drama class covered Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, 1592. The two resonate with one another in many ways.
The odds are good that Mabuse draws on Faust, fairly explicitly. Lots of films do, especially German films. Here, the influence is less the idea of selling your soul to the devil for power than the character of Faust, updated in Mabuse himself - the slippery identity, the conjuring tricks, the illusions, the acting - as well as the power, attained through manipulation of others, and usually employed to manipulate others. There are, as well, elements of the divided self implied by Faust, and the idea of gaining power by sacrificing individuality - Lang's film plays out as if Mabuse is both Faust and his own Mephistopheles. He manipulates technology, clocks and railroads and all the rest, and those tools become the source of his power, much as Mephistopheles is the source of Faust's power. And - the source of his destruction...
But the element that linked the two works for me was more the way both Faust and Mabuse are figures of their times - and specifically, figures of modernity. I mean modernity in a broad sense - in the sense of a whole new way of living, a new conception of the world and man replacing existing ideas. Faustus is a figure of a changing time. The late 16th century was a time of profound change - it's the beginning of the modern world, really. The world changed in the 16th century - I mean that literally: the world doubled in size after 1492, and the subsequent century kept expanding it, changing everything there was to change about the world. And - the dominant cultural institution of Europe also changed, utterly, in the 16th century, with the Reformation. And that led to a remapping of the world. And to new forms of government, new ideas about the state. And all this is in addition to the almost equally profound changes of the Renaissance: the birth of humanism, of capitalism, everything that happened in the 15th century. All these changes to the world changed what it meant to be human: changes how the individual interacted with society, how people defined themselves, everything. All reflected in the play....
All of which is equally true of the early 20th century, when things changed as profoundly in half the time... During the 19th century broadly, and especially the stretch from 1875 to 1925 (say), the world, again, completely changed. Political and social and cultural changes turned the world on its ear - though the real stunner was the technological changes. It's hard to really do justice to how much changed in that period. To consider how utterly differently we relate to thew world in 1925 than 1875 (more or less). The age of exploration may have doubled the size of the known world - but the technological changes of the late 19th century changed the perceptual, experiential sense of the world even more radically. The relationship between time and space were changed (an idea I'm borrowing from Tom Gunning) - space could be eliminated; space became a function of time. By 1900 it was possible to cross vast distances in short periods of time (steam ships and trains, then cars, then airplanes...). It was possible to send messages to someone on the other side of the world, in a second. Possible to talk to them. To hear their voice, to see their picture.
All these things are reflected in Faustus and Mabuse. Marlowe's play is full of travel, Faustus traveling around the world, flying up to the heavens to study the stars, wandering around Europe; it reflects facts of the 16th century - the appearance of new foods in Europe (the scene of the duchess asking for fresh grapes, which Mephistopheles fetches from around the world reminds me of the scene in Blackadder where Sir Walter Raleigh presents Queen Elizabeth with a potato.) Political schisms and religious controversies. Even the appearance of professional theater - Faustus by the end seems more like a theatrical entrepreneur than a magician, putting on shows for the nobility... It's also a story about a man who gives up all the traditional signs of identity - family, home, state, religion - in search of power, knowledge, and his own self. He is a performer - and his identity becomes a performance...
Which is also true of Mabuse. He's a gambler and an actor - the film starts with Mabuse looking at a deck of cards with his various disguises on them (like an actors' head shots.) But he's also a figure of the media - he manipulates information, directly, indirectly (in the opening stack fixing scheme especially.) He's a master of modern technology - the phone and the railroad and clocks and stock tickers - and he is presented, in that opening sequence, especially, as a master of time itself. Everything timed to the second... He's the master of the gaze, as well - a hypnotist, which Lang presents with some fascinating editing and framing of sequences - he uses hypnosis to win at the tables, not cheating at cards: manipulating, again, the game from outside, but in. He works, somewhat surprisingly, within the systems of the modern world - he exploits the railroad timetables; he uses the fact that people trust the newspapers; he takes advantage of the timing of the closing bell at the stock market. He takes advantage of the importance of maintaining the game, when he's gambling - he depends on keeping the game going, on the idea of people paying their debts, he uses all the well learned politesse of civilized life...
And they both come to highly symbolic ends: Faustus alone begging for another hour, another minute, only to be torn to pieces by devils... and Mabuse trapped in one of his own hideouts by a machine he made to keep his minions from stealing; powerless, because the men trapped with him are all blind, and his hypnotic powers are useless; surrounded by piles of his worthless counterfeit money, and then surrounded by ghosts - no longer able to control the illusions... (all that copped from Gunning's comments on the film, more or less...) Alone and mad, both of them.
The odds are good that Mabuse draws on Faust, fairly explicitly. Lots of films do, especially German films. Here, the influence is less the idea of selling your soul to the devil for power than the character of Faust, updated in Mabuse himself - the slippery identity, the conjuring tricks, the illusions, the acting - as well as the power, attained through manipulation of others, and usually employed to manipulate others. There are, as well, elements of the divided self implied by Faust, and the idea of gaining power by sacrificing individuality - Lang's film plays out as if Mabuse is both Faust and his own Mephistopheles. He manipulates technology, clocks and railroads and all the rest, and those tools become the source of his power, much as Mephistopheles is the source of Faust's power. And - the source of his destruction...
But the element that linked the two works for me was more the way both Faust and Mabuse are figures of their times - and specifically, figures of modernity. I mean modernity in a broad sense - in the sense of a whole new way of living, a new conception of the world and man replacing existing ideas. Faustus is a figure of a changing time. The late 16th century was a time of profound change - it's the beginning of the modern world, really. The world changed in the 16th century - I mean that literally: the world doubled in size after 1492, and the subsequent century kept expanding it, changing everything there was to change about the world. And - the dominant cultural institution of Europe also changed, utterly, in the 16th century, with the Reformation. And that led to a remapping of the world. And to new forms of government, new ideas about the state. And all this is in addition to the almost equally profound changes of the Renaissance: the birth of humanism, of capitalism, everything that happened in the 15th century. All these changes to the world changed what it meant to be human: changes how the individual interacted with society, how people defined themselves, everything. All reflected in the play....
All of which is equally true of the early 20th century, when things changed as profoundly in half the time... During the 19th century broadly, and especially the stretch from 1875 to 1925 (say), the world, again, completely changed. Political and social and cultural changes turned the world on its ear - though the real stunner was the technological changes. It's hard to really do justice to how much changed in that period. To consider how utterly differently we relate to thew world in 1925 than 1875 (more or less). The age of exploration may have doubled the size of the known world - but the technological changes of the late 19th century changed the perceptual, experiential sense of the world even more radically. The relationship between time and space were changed (an idea I'm borrowing from Tom Gunning) - space could be eliminated; space became a function of time. By 1900 it was possible to cross vast distances in short periods of time (steam ships and trains, then cars, then airplanes...). It was possible to send messages to someone on the other side of the world, in a second. Possible to talk to them. To hear their voice, to see their picture.
All these things are reflected in Faustus and Mabuse. Marlowe's play is full of travel, Faustus traveling around the world, flying up to the heavens to study the stars, wandering around Europe; it reflects facts of the 16th century - the appearance of new foods in Europe (the scene of the duchess asking for fresh grapes, which Mephistopheles fetches from around the world reminds me of the scene in Blackadder where Sir Walter Raleigh presents Queen Elizabeth with a potato.) Political schisms and religious controversies. Even the appearance of professional theater - Faustus by the end seems more like a theatrical entrepreneur than a magician, putting on shows for the nobility... It's also a story about a man who gives up all the traditional signs of identity - family, home, state, religion - in search of power, knowledge, and his own self. He is a performer - and his identity becomes a performance...
Which is also true of Mabuse. He's a gambler and an actor - the film starts with Mabuse looking at a deck of cards with his various disguises on them (like an actors' head shots.) But he's also a figure of the media - he manipulates information, directly, indirectly (in the opening stack fixing scheme especially.) He's a master of modern technology - the phone and the railroad and clocks and stock tickers - and he is presented, in that opening sequence, especially, as a master of time itself. Everything timed to the second... He's the master of the gaze, as well - a hypnotist, which Lang presents with some fascinating editing and framing of sequences - he uses hypnosis to win at the tables, not cheating at cards: manipulating, again, the game from outside, but in. He works, somewhat surprisingly, within the systems of the modern world - he exploits the railroad timetables; he uses the fact that people trust the newspapers; he takes advantage of the timing of the closing bell at the stock market. He takes advantage of the importance of maintaining the game, when he's gambling - he depends on keeping the game going, on the idea of people paying their debts, he uses all the well learned politesse of civilized life...
And they both come to highly symbolic ends: Faustus alone begging for another hour, another minute, only to be torn to pieces by devils... and Mabuse trapped in one of his own hideouts by a machine he made to keep his minions from stealing; powerless, because the men trapped with him are all blind, and his hypnotic powers are useless; surrounded by piles of his worthless counterfeit money, and then surrounded by ghosts - no longer able to control the illusions... (all that copped from Gunning's comments on the film, more or less...) Alone and mad, both of them.
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