In 1908 Richard Wagner's third opera Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribune was put on in Linz. This production, though as such it wasn't earth-shattering in artistic significance or otherwise, nevertheless was to have grave and unforseen consequenses in world history.
It was literally to change the world.
The Linz performance was attended by a certain August Kubizek, a man whom by and large history has forgotten. Herr Kubizek was a musician and an avid Wagnerian. At that time he lived in great squalor in a "gloomy, bug-ridden back room" in Vienna. With him at the theatre he had his room mate, an awkward provincial youth of nineteen who knew nothing of Wagner. The youth's musical taste was rather less refined, vulgar even. What he loved was Lehár and especially The Merry Widow. When he whistled it was most often the cheerful and delightful ditty "I'm off to Chez Maxime". In his daydreams he was the dashing Danilo, beloved and adored and coveted by every woman in the land. In reality women would have nothing to do with him.
Lehár, Kubizek thought, what tosh! But there's more to music than that, Kubizek thought. Music can be a mighty force, a force to be reckoned with. It can be philosophy. It can show us the way. It can change us beyond recognition. It veritably can give us a reason to live. Therefore Kubizek took it upon himself to educate his young friend. The most important thing was to teach him about Wagner.
Hence Linz and Rienzi.
"It was at that moment it all began", the youth reminisced thirty years later in Bayreuth. It was when Rienzi sang: "But if you choose me as the protector/ of the people's given right's,/ then you may look back upon your forebears,/ and see me as the people's tribune!" Whereupon the people reply: "Rienzi, hail to you, the people's tribune!"
The youth was called Adolf Hitler.
Wagner became his god and Rienzi became the opera for him. It was the Rienzi overture that opened the Nuremberg Rallys, by Der Führer's insistence. When Robert Ley, head of the Labour Front DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront) and the leisure organization KdF or Kraft durch Freude, suggested the piece be substituted with something slightly more modern, something more "National Socialist" in tone and appeal, Hitler became quite livid. "You know, Ley, it's not accidental that the Party Rally always opens with the overture from Rienzi. It's not just a musical question. By invoking the splendours of the Imperial past, this son of a small inn-keeper succeds, at 24 years of age, in persuading the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate. It was while listening as a young man to this divinely blessed music in the theatre of Linz that the inspiration came to me that I was likewise destined to unite the German Reich and make it great."
The libretto of Rienzi, though from a historical novel by Bulwer-Lytton, is based on a true story from the 14th century. Cola di Rienzi is a modestly born fellow who becomes a tribune, brings down the rule of the aristocracy, defies the Church and becomes the de facto ruler of Rome. Then things start going against him and in the opera both the aristocracy and the mob, egged on by ecclesiastical powers, turn on him. He seeks refuge in the Capitol but the mob sets fire to it and in the end he is buried in a sea of flames amid collapsing stone walls.
It's quite easy to see why young Adolf was drawn to the story. He and no one else was Rienzi. It was his holy mission - nay fate - to unite and purify Germany and make the Vaterland mighty once more. From then on that was his single goal in life, that and nothing else.
I wonder, would Hitler ever have become so obsessed with his mission or fate had he never seen Rienzi or encountered the opera at a later and far less impressionable age? Would that have made a great difference in historical terms? Would Nazism perhaps never have been born, or more likely, adopted a far less rabid and contagious form? I wonder. Maybe.
If so: Cheers, Kubizek, nice one.
Hitler's career does in fact parallel Rienzi's career in an eerie fashion. They have roughly the same humble background, the same metoric rise, the same power over the masses. They are both frighteningly, alarmingly beloved by their almost mesmerized people. The end is particulalry eerie. Rienzi meets his in the burning collapsing Capitol, Hitler his in the burning bombed Berlin bunker; both surrounded by the enemy, both having lost the favour and adoration of the people.
In the end Hitler wanted as much death and destruction as possible. If his dream failed to materialize then everything deserved to be destroyed. If his people failed him in the end then they deserved to be destroyed. Only his fate mattered, nothing else. Because his fate was Germany's fate.
There's an interesting footnote about the end. When once it became clear that Germany would be defeated and his dream was not to be, Hitler in his Führerbunker started to retreat into himself. His health started tottering. He'd kept going by the dubious shots and pills his personal doctor, the remarkably shady Dr. Morell, had administered. (His favourite pills were called Dr. Köster's Antigas Pills and were a well nice mixture of strychnine and belladonna.) But Morell abandoned him the first chance he got. So no much needed medication.
Hitler sought comfort in music. The record player was on the whole time.
What did he listen to? Rienzi, the opera that started it all and uncannily predicted his fate? Götterdämmerung - another powerfully apocalyptic opera? Lohengrin? Maybe Parsifal or Tristan und Isolde? No. None of them.
Apparently, according to reliable witnesses from the bunker, what he listened to over and over and over again, in a plethora of different recordings, was The Merry Widow and especially Danilo's cheery tune about being off to Chez Maxim.
Maybe, just maybe, when the bombs started coming down in heavy showers and the destruction of his world was imminent, there was a small part of him that wished he'd been Danilo instead of Rienzi.
22/11/2009
17/11/2009
Viddy well, little brother, viddy well!
For Stanley Kubrick no detail was ever too small or insignificant. Everything was important. Not perhaps equally important but still significant. Everything counted. If it could have any bearing on the film it counted. In spades. He would have someone investigate.
He liked to control everything.
That's why he had agents, or Irregulars as his assistant Anthony Frewin nicely put it, all over the world. Was the sound loud enough in The Shining in Winnipeg? Was the copy of 2001 too dark in Manila? To find out he'd employ spies who'd report back to him. He also had cuttings of advertisements for his movies from all over the world sent to his house where he'd go over them. Were the ads as they should? Were they as large as they ought to be? If not he'd send somebody to find out why they weren't. Questions would be asked and answered until he was satisfied. No matter how small a matter or how distant.
He was occasionally called obsessed, deranged, crazy even. However. It seems clear to me that it was his unrelenting focus on even the tiniest details that made his movies what they were.
This was clearly how his mind worked.
He had to know everything, see everything. If, like in Eyes Wide Shut, a scene took place in a toy department he'd want to see photos of just about every toy department in the south of England. If a scene took place in costume shop he'd want to see pictures of every single costume shop available. If Alex and his droogs were to wear hats he'd want to see any kind of hat there was. Preferably on the droogs.
Which was a lot of work. And took a long time. His preproduction time was usually long enough for his colleagues to complete their entire film in. Maybe even a couple.
But he was patient. If anything he was patient.
Because everything had to look right. But he didn't necessarily know what right was until he'd seen all the options. Only then could he make up his mind. Only then did it become evident.
There was also a great deal of secrecy involved in any given project. Most of the time he made sure the people he employed didn't have a clue for whom they were working. He had, for instance, a lot of people reading scripts and novels for him, in order to find something for him to film, and they had absolutely no idea it was Kubrick who employed them. When Frederic Raphael, as he writes in his fascinating book Eyes Wide Open, was asked by Kubrick to turn a short story into a movie script, Kubrick refused to tell him the name of the story and who'd written it. Raphael was sufficiently well read to pin it down anyway, making Kubrick a bit annoyed.
He did not give out information. That wasn't his game. He collected it. He hoarded it. He stashed it in boxes (the cornucopia of which we can witness in Jon Ronson's documentary Stanley Kubrick's boxes) and filed it away, to be used if and when it was needed. Often it was never needed.
But it was there. Just in case.
He couldn't help himself. Collecting information was his nature.
Kubrick was like a spider, sitting pretty in the middle of his gigantic international web, feeling every twitch of every thred, controlling it all: "He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them." To quote Doyle.
Bear in mind also that he was ever the chess player. For him facts were like chess pieces. The more information one had, the more facts one had and hence the more pieces one had. The more pieces, the more options and moves. The more options, the better film one could make. For in that multitude of moves there lurked the perfect move, or at least the almost perfect one. Therefore it was imperative to have as many pieces as possible. Only then could anything like perfection be approached.
The secrecy, I believe, stems from the same source. A chess player never lets anyone know what his next move will be. That would entirely ruin his game. The element of surprise is in fact half the game. There's also a very practical aspect. Letting for instance script readers know they read for Kubrick would have influenced them. They would have started reading for Kubrick. They'd have started to anticipate what he would want in a script. Which isn't what he wanted at all. How could they anticipate his wants when he himself didn't know what he wanted?
John le Carré once tried to write a script for Kubrick and failed miserably. He attributed it to the fact that Kubrick had these images in his head that he wanted le Carré to write but he could not put them into words. That's what he needed le Carré for. To write what was in his, Kubrick's, head. But as he couldn't communicate what he wanted the task was virtually impossible. The scripts always were a struggle. Many a writer was squeezed dry and tossed aside to be replaced by a new and fresh one. The man just doesn't know what he wants, most writers thought. Maybe so.
But Kubrick did know what he wanted. He wanted a story. A story he'd want to tell. A story he'd fall in love with, as his wife put it.
That's not too much to ask, is it?
He liked to control everything.
That's why he had agents, or Irregulars as his assistant Anthony Frewin nicely put it, all over the world. Was the sound loud enough in The Shining in Winnipeg? Was the copy of 2001 too dark in Manila? To find out he'd employ spies who'd report back to him. He also had cuttings of advertisements for his movies from all over the world sent to his house where he'd go over them. Were the ads as they should? Were they as large as they ought to be? If not he'd send somebody to find out why they weren't. Questions would be asked and answered until he was satisfied. No matter how small a matter or how distant.
He was occasionally called obsessed, deranged, crazy even. However. It seems clear to me that it was his unrelenting focus on even the tiniest details that made his movies what they were.
This was clearly how his mind worked.
He had to know everything, see everything. If, like in Eyes Wide Shut, a scene took place in a toy department he'd want to see photos of just about every toy department in the south of England. If a scene took place in costume shop he'd want to see pictures of every single costume shop available. If Alex and his droogs were to wear hats he'd want to see any kind of hat there was. Preferably on the droogs.
Which was a lot of work. And took a long time. His preproduction time was usually long enough for his colleagues to complete their entire film in. Maybe even a couple.
But he was patient. If anything he was patient.
Because everything had to look right. But he didn't necessarily know what right was until he'd seen all the options. Only then could he make up his mind. Only then did it become evident.
There was also a great deal of secrecy involved in any given project. Most of the time he made sure the people he employed didn't have a clue for whom they were working. He had, for instance, a lot of people reading scripts and novels for him, in order to find something for him to film, and they had absolutely no idea it was Kubrick who employed them. When Frederic Raphael, as he writes in his fascinating book Eyes Wide Open, was asked by Kubrick to turn a short story into a movie script, Kubrick refused to tell him the name of the story and who'd written it. Raphael was sufficiently well read to pin it down anyway, making Kubrick a bit annoyed.
He did not give out information. That wasn't his game. He collected it. He hoarded it. He stashed it in boxes (the cornucopia of which we can witness in Jon Ronson's documentary Stanley Kubrick's boxes) and filed it away, to be used if and when it was needed. Often it was never needed.
But it was there. Just in case.
He couldn't help himself. Collecting information was his nature.
Kubrick was like a spider, sitting pretty in the middle of his gigantic international web, feeling every twitch of every thred, controlling it all: "He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them." To quote Doyle.
Bear in mind also that he was ever the chess player. For him facts were like chess pieces. The more information one had, the more facts one had and hence the more pieces one had. The more pieces, the more options and moves. The more options, the better film one could make. For in that multitude of moves there lurked the perfect move, or at least the almost perfect one. Therefore it was imperative to have as many pieces as possible. Only then could anything like perfection be approached.
The secrecy, I believe, stems from the same source. A chess player never lets anyone know what his next move will be. That would entirely ruin his game. The element of surprise is in fact half the game. There's also a very practical aspect. Letting for instance script readers know they read for Kubrick would have influenced them. They would have started reading for Kubrick. They'd have started to anticipate what he would want in a script. Which isn't what he wanted at all. How could they anticipate his wants when he himself didn't know what he wanted?
John le Carré once tried to write a script for Kubrick and failed miserably. He attributed it to the fact that Kubrick had these images in his head that he wanted le Carré to write but he could not put them into words. That's what he needed le Carré for. To write what was in his, Kubrick's, head. But as he couldn't communicate what he wanted the task was virtually impossible. The scripts always were a struggle. Many a writer was squeezed dry and tossed aside to be replaced by a new and fresh one. The man just doesn't know what he wants, most writers thought. Maybe so.
But Kubrick did know what he wanted. He wanted a story. A story he'd want to tell. A story he'd fall in love with, as his wife put it.
That's not too much to ask, is it?
15/11/2009
Poor Siegfried
Being Richard Wagner's son can't have been easy. Being a homosexual probably didn't help. At all, really. And wanting to be a composer - well that just sounds like a recipe for disaster.
No, being Siegfried Wagner never was the easiest thing in the world.
I first heard his music in '94 in, of all places, Bayreuth. Bayreuth might at first seem the natural place to encounter the music of Siegfried: it not only being his hometown but the seat of the family dynasty and quite unequivocally the town of Wagner.
Well it wasn't and it isn't. Bayreuth is such a small town there's hardly enough room for Richard, who - truth to be told - does demand rather a lot of space. There simply isn't room for two Wagners in Bayreuth, not two composers of that sacred name and certainly not two Wagners both of whom write operas.
Still, they can't ignore him completely. He is the master's son, after all. So in '94 there was a Siegfried exhibition in Haus Wahnfried and they even played bits and pieces of his music. To me they sounded quite interesting, fascinating even. Problem was, in those faraway days there just weren't many recordings. Not recordings one could lay one's hands on anyway.
So Siegfried remained a mystery, a weak and fairly ludicrous character. The man who was eternally in the shadow of his gigantic father. The man completely dominated by his bullying mother, Liszt's daughter, the formidable Cosima. The man who was, pretty much against his will, forced to marry a Welsh orphan in order to play down his sexual indiscretions of the blatantly sodomite variety - which after all were a fairly serious crime in the Germany of the day.
The man whose audacious wife openly flirted with this deranged Viennese nobody Hitler. When Hitler was put behind bars for a while after the disastrous Munich putsch, Siegfried's wife Winifred supplied him with paper and writing materials with which to occupy his time in gaol in a productive fashion. Herr Hitler proceded, on those pure white sheets presented to him by the Wagner clan of Bayreuth, to write a nifty little shocker: Mein Kampf.
This slow and slovenly man who never ceased to look like a soft and pampered schoolboy; as overgrown as he was overfed. This man who seems to have despised the vulgarity of Hitler and what he stood for, yet covertly been mesmerised by the brutal ideology. Which, had he lived, certainly would have crushed him without a trace of pity, son of the divine Wagner or not.
This man whose operas nobody took seriously.
Who did he think he was - bloody Wagner?
But Siegfried never gave up, never gave in, writing some sixteen operas all in all. He also wrote his own libretti, just like his father had. There weren't many performances. The opera houses weren't interested. They already had a Wagner. The real thing. Why on earth would they want a cheap copy? Some of Siegfried's operas never went on during his lifetime. Oh there were plans, grand plans, but somehow they never materialised.
When at long last I came across one of Siegfried's operas I at once purchased it. Der Heidenkönig was written in 1913. The premiere was in 1933, three years after Siegfried's death.
As the CD (published by the Naxos owned label Marco Polo) wasn't furnished with a libretto I have only a very hazy idea of what the action is about. It's mediaeval. Something to do with Balticum and Christianity. And Teutonic knights. Not, as such, particularly promising stuff.
The music, however, is quite strong and forceful, extremely Wagnerian in the overly ripe romantic manner with lots and lots of boisterous brass and warlike manly singing, with the occasional high dramatic soprano hysterically butting in. Bits of it easily could have been written by old Richard. Still it doesn't actually sound derivative or unoriginal. It just isn't particularly original.
By no means is it bad. There are haunting melodies in it, strains and chords that will not go away. That keep on echoing in one's head. Dark, mournful and sombre melodies. Simple but highly effective dirges. And they just won't go away. Then one slowly begins to like them.
Der Heidenkönig seems to be, if I'm not very much mistaken, Siegfried's Parsifal, his holy and sacred opera, maybe even his magnum opus. What he's best known for is comic opera. His first, Der Bärenhäuter, is probably his most performed and best loved piece. But Siegfried was a deeply religious man and the Christian message was vitally crucial to him. No doubt he, therefore, would consider Der Heidenkönig far more important than Der Bärenhäuter.
I'd dearly like to know what precisely it was I heard in Bayreuth. Whatever it was it sounded fresh and dynamic, and a bit quirky. Der Heidenkönig often sounds stale and stuffy, a bit claustrophobic, as if its own importance were suffocating and slowly draining the life out of it, so it certainly wasn't Der Heidenkönig. Could it in fact have been Der Bärenhäuter? I'm beginning to wonder.
Parts of Der Heidenkönig I grow tired of very quickly, other parts I cannot get enough of. Odd.
Having heard only the one opera by Siegfried Wagner I obviously can't say anything very definitive about him as a composer. I do have a hunch though. I strongly suspect that were his surname not Wagner both he and his work would be far better known.
On the other hand. Without his surname he might have disappeared completely.
I'd quite like to proclaim him a forgotten genius. I'm very much afraid he's no such thing. Not even slightly. Then again, very few composers are. Geniuses, I mean. Forgotten or otherwise.
No, being Siegfried Wagner never was the easiest thing in the world.
I first heard his music in '94 in, of all places, Bayreuth. Bayreuth might at first seem the natural place to encounter the music of Siegfried: it not only being his hometown but the seat of the family dynasty and quite unequivocally the town of Wagner.
Well it wasn't and it isn't. Bayreuth is such a small town there's hardly enough room for Richard, who - truth to be told - does demand rather a lot of space. There simply isn't room for two Wagners in Bayreuth, not two composers of that sacred name and certainly not two Wagners both of whom write operas.
Still, they can't ignore him completely. He is the master's son, after all. So in '94 there was a Siegfried exhibition in Haus Wahnfried and they even played bits and pieces of his music. To me they sounded quite interesting, fascinating even. Problem was, in those faraway days there just weren't many recordings. Not recordings one could lay one's hands on anyway.
So Siegfried remained a mystery, a weak and fairly ludicrous character. The man who was eternally in the shadow of his gigantic father. The man completely dominated by his bullying mother, Liszt's daughter, the formidable Cosima. The man who was, pretty much against his will, forced to marry a Welsh orphan in order to play down his sexual indiscretions of the blatantly sodomite variety - which after all were a fairly serious crime in the Germany of the day.
The man whose audacious wife openly flirted with this deranged Viennese nobody Hitler. When Hitler was put behind bars for a while after the disastrous Munich putsch, Siegfried's wife Winifred supplied him with paper and writing materials with which to occupy his time in gaol in a productive fashion. Herr Hitler proceded, on those pure white sheets presented to him by the Wagner clan of Bayreuth, to write a nifty little shocker: Mein Kampf.
This slow and slovenly man who never ceased to look like a soft and pampered schoolboy; as overgrown as he was overfed. This man who seems to have despised the vulgarity of Hitler and what he stood for, yet covertly been mesmerised by the brutal ideology. Which, had he lived, certainly would have crushed him without a trace of pity, son of the divine Wagner or not.
This man whose operas nobody took seriously.
Who did he think he was - bloody Wagner?
But Siegfried never gave up, never gave in, writing some sixteen operas all in all. He also wrote his own libretti, just like his father had. There weren't many performances. The opera houses weren't interested. They already had a Wagner. The real thing. Why on earth would they want a cheap copy? Some of Siegfried's operas never went on during his lifetime. Oh there were plans, grand plans, but somehow they never materialised.
When at long last I came across one of Siegfried's operas I at once purchased it. Der Heidenkönig was written in 1913. The premiere was in 1933, three years after Siegfried's death.
As the CD (published by the Naxos owned label Marco Polo) wasn't furnished with a libretto I have only a very hazy idea of what the action is about. It's mediaeval. Something to do with Balticum and Christianity. And Teutonic knights. Not, as such, particularly promising stuff.
The music, however, is quite strong and forceful, extremely Wagnerian in the overly ripe romantic manner with lots and lots of boisterous brass and warlike manly singing, with the occasional high dramatic soprano hysterically butting in. Bits of it easily could have been written by old Richard. Still it doesn't actually sound derivative or unoriginal. It just isn't particularly original.
By no means is it bad. There are haunting melodies in it, strains and chords that will not go away. That keep on echoing in one's head. Dark, mournful and sombre melodies. Simple but highly effective dirges. And they just won't go away. Then one slowly begins to like them.
Der Heidenkönig seems to be, if I'm not very much mistaken, Siegfried's Parsifal, his holy and sacred opera, maybe even his magnum opus. What he's best known for is comic opera. His first, Der Bärenhäuter, is probably his most performed and best loved piece. But Siegfried was a deeply religious man and the Christian message was vitally crucial to him. No doubt he, therefore, would consider Der Heidenkönig far more important than Der Bärenhäuter.
I'd dearly like to know what precisely it was I heard in Bayreuth. Whatever it was it sounded fresh and dynamic, and a bit quirky. Der Heidenkönig often sounds stale and stuffy, a bit claustrophobic, as if its own importance were suffocating and slowly draining the life out of it, so it certainly wasn't Der Heidenkönig. Could it in fact have been Der Bärenhäuter? I'm beginning to wonder.
Parts of Der Heidenkönig I grow tired of very quickly, other parts I cannot get enough of. Odd.
Having heard only the one opera by Siegfried Wagner I obviously can't say anything very definitive about him as a composer. I do have a hunch though. I strongly suspect that were his surname not Wagner both he and his work would be far better known.
On the other hand. Without his surname he might have disappeared completely.
I'd quite like to proclaim him a forgotten genius. I'm very much afraid he's no such thing. Not even slightly. Then again, very few composers are. Geniuses, I mean. Forgotten or otherwise.
14/11/2009
Library Nights
Alberto Manguel was sixteen years old and worked in a bookshop. The shop was called Pygmalion and it was an Anglo-German bookshop, if that is of any significance. One night he was propositioned by this shabby-genteel old geezer. Come over to my place and we'll have a right good time, the geezer said. Alberto, being an adventurous youth, went - even though he knew that the old geezer was in the habit of propositioning right and left. Just about anybody would do. He wasn't that particular. He just couldn't get enough.
The city was Buenos Aires. The old geezer was called Jorge Luis Borges. Alberto's task: to read aloud to Borges. Sometimes he even got to write down poems and bits of prose Borges had composed in his head. When the poem or story was finished Borges used to stick it between the pages of a book. That's where he stored things. Also his money. When money was need he went to his bookshelf, pulled out a book and paid whatever needed paying. Sometimes he found his banknotes. Often he didn't.
These encounters obviously had a profound effect on Alberto. He himself grew up to become a writer. One of the books he wrote, a slim and elegant volume, is called With Borges. In it he recounts his sessions and what conversing with Borges meant to him.
I re-read this volume recently, while re-reading Borges. I keep re-reading Borges all the time, just about, because he's one of the very few authors that absolutely demand it, but this time it was because I came across a slightly battered volume of Kerrigan's Ficciones (which I'd never read) at the local library where somebody had left it for anyone to pick it up for free. Which I did, without missing a beat, even though I of course have all the stories in several translations and several languages. And a most of them in Spanish too; a language I am not particularly familiar with, fluent in or cognizant of. But still one tries. It's always nice to see what the man wrote. I mean really wrote. Word for exact word.
One grasps nary a syllable of it but it's still nice. One sees things, one hears things with the inner ear: there are always the rhythms, the patterns, the alluringly exotic words which seem to carry deep and resounding significance. Not perhaps quite what the author intended but significance nonetheless. It becomes like music. One needn't understand every bar, one need but enjoy them.
And the translations all taste quite different. Reading Borges in English is nothing like reading him in Swedish. And reading Borges in Finnish is really remarkably bizarre as the language is in no way related to Spanish nor any other Indo-European language. It's like transposing a classical symphony for a Balinese gamelan group. There are similarities, of course, but these seem sporadic and almost unintentional. The pitch is different, the orchestration off and none of the rules apply any longer.
But in the Borgesian world this is normal. One never can read the same book twice. The book is always different. Every time. That's because the reader never stays the same but changes. This automatically alters the book as well. One cannot step in the same river twice. That's what makes Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote such a mind blowing experience: because it applies to everyone and all reading. The experience never can be repeated. Therefore every book is infinite. There is no end to how often it may be read or in how many ways.
Dare I say: every book is all books?
One thing that rather amazed Manguel when he stepped into the sanctum sanctorum that was Borges's apartment was the smallness of his library - merely a few shelves. That was incredible: this man who was the archetypal librarian (and former head of the National Library), this man whose entire universe was a library. This man who seemed to write about nothing other than books, libraries and writing. And there were so few books in his home.
"For a man who called the universe a library, and who confessed that he imagined Paradise 'bajo la forma de una biblioteca', the size of his own library came as a disappointment, perhaps because he knew, as he said in another poem, that language can only 'imitate wisdom'. Visitors expected a place overgrown with books, shelves bursting at the seams, piles of print blocking the doorways and protruding from every crevice, a jungle of ink and paper. Instead they would discover an apartment where books occupied a few unobtrusive corners."
There were the encyclopedias: the Encyclopaedia Britannica (eleventh edition, with essays by De Quincey and Macauley, purchased in 1928), the Brockhaus, the Meyer, the Bompiani. On the lower shelves there was fiction: Stevenson, Chesterton, Kipling. Wells, Wilkie Collins, James Joyce. Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll. And of course detective fiction. Fairly much of that actually. And Don Quixote.
But still, far far less books than anybody had a right to expect. I mean, this was Borges. Mr. Library himself.
And he owned so few books.
This was, naturally, because Borges believed reading was essentially re-reading. He constantly read (or had read to him) the same old favourites, the same books he now knew by heart. He was Pierre Menard. The books constantly changed. They lived for him. He lived so they lived. He changed so they changed.
The game isn't reading as much and as widely as one can. It's about reading as deeply and as profoundly as one can. Therefore re-reading is essential. One might almost go as far as saying: re-reading is reading.
That, I suspect, is also why Borges never ceases to return to his old themes, the ones he's used so frequently in the past in every variation imaginable. Rewriting is writing. Or maybe I go to far.
I already mentioned Manguel became a distinguished writer in his own right. I hunted down another book he wrote. It's called The Library at Night. And it's about - libraries. Seems very interesting indeed.
And if it does turn out to be as good as it looks I may even consider re-reading it.
The city was Buenos Aires. The old geezer was called Jorge Luis Borges. Alberto's task: to read aloud to Borges. Sometimes he even got to write down poems and bits of prose Borges had composed in his head. When the poem or story was finished Borges used to stick it between the pages of a book. That's where he stored things. Also his money. When money was need he went to his bookshelf, pulled out a book and paid whatever needed paying. Sometimes he found his banknotes. Often he didn't.
These encounters obviously had a profound effect on Alberto. He himself grew up to become a writer. One of the books he wrote, a slim and elegant volume, is called With Borges. In it he recounts his sessions and what conversing with Borges meant to him.
I re-read this volume recently, while re-reading Borges. I keep re-reading Borges all the time, just about, because he's one of the very few authors that absolutely demand it, but this time it was because I came across a slightly battered volume of Kerrigan's Ficciones (which I'd never read) at the local library where somebody had left it for anyone to pick it up for free. Which I did, without missing a beat, even though I of course have all the stories in several translations and several languages. And a most of them in Spanish too; a language I am not particularly familiar with, fluent in or cognizant of. But still one tries. It's always nice to see what the man wrote. I mean really wrote. Word for exact word.
One grasps nary a syllable of it but it's still nice. One sees things, one hears things with the inner ear: there are always the rhythms, the patterns, the alluringly exotic words which seem to carry deep and resounding significance. Not perhaps quite what the author intended but significance nonetheless. It becomes like music. One needn't understand every bar, one need but enjoy them.
And the translations all taste quite different. Reading Borges in English is nothing like reading him in Swedish. And reading Borges in Finnish is really remarkably bizarre as the language is in no way related to Spanish nor any other Indo-European language. It's like transposing a classical symphony for a Balinese gamelan group. There are similarities, of course, but these seem sporadic and almost unintentional. The pitch is different, the orchestration off and none of the rules apply any longer.
But in the Borgesian world this is normal. One never can read the same book twice. The book is always different. Every time. That's because the reader never stays the same but changes. This automatically alters the book as well. One cannot step in the same river twice. That's what makes Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote such a mind blowing experience: because it applies to everyone and all reading. The experience never can be repeated. Therefore every book is infinite. There is no end to how often it may be read or in how many ways.
Dare I say: every book is all books?
One thing that rather amazed Manguel when he stepped into the sanctum sanctorum that was Borges's apartment was the smallness of his library - merely a few shelves. That was incredible: this man who was the archetypal librarian (and former head of the National Library), this man whose entire universe was a library. This man who seemed to write about nothing other than books, libraries and writing. And there were so few books in his home.
"For a man who called the universe a library, and who confessed that he imagined Paradise 'bajo la forma de una biblioteca', the size of his own library came as a disappointment, perhaps because he knew, as he said in another poem, that language can only 'imitate wisdom'. Visitors expected a place overgrown with books, shelves bursting at the seams, piles of print blocking the doorways and protruding from every crevice, a jungle of ink and paper. Instead they would discover an apartment where books occupied a few unobtrusive corners."
There were the encyclopedias: the Encyclopaedia Britannica (eleventh edition, with essays by De Quincey and Macauley, purchased in 1928), the Brockhaus, the Meyer, the Bompiani. On the lower shelves there was fiction: Stevenson, Chesterton, Kipling. Wells, Wilkie Collins, James Joyce. Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll. And of course detective fiction. Fairly much of that actually. And Don Quixote.
But still, far far less books than anybody had a right to expect. I mean, this was Borges. Mr. Library himself.
And he owned so few books.
This was, naturally, because Borges believed reading was essentially re-reading. He constantly read (or had read to him) the same old favourites, the same books he now knew by heart. He was Pierre Menard. The books constantly changed. They lived for him. He lived so they lived. He changed so they changed.
The game isn't reading as much and as widely as one can. It's about reading as deeply and as profoundly as one can. Therefore re-reading is essential. One might almost go as far as saying: re-reading is reading.
That, I suspect, is also why Borges never ceases to return to his old themes, the ones he's used so frequently in the past in every variation imaginable. Rewriting is writing. Or maybe I go to far.
I already mentioned Manguel became a distinguished writer in his own right. I hunted down another book he wrote. It's called The Library at Night. And it's about - libraries. Seems very interesting indeed.
And if it does turn out to be as good as it looks I may even consider re-reading it.
11/11/2009
Luottakaa meihin, Sir Henry
Pakko se on myöntää. Olen kuunnellut kolmisenkymmentä jaksoa alkuperäistä versiota (The Men from the Ministry) ja puolisen tusinaa jaksoa ruotsalaista versiota (I plommonstop och paraply) ja havainnut ne hyviksi ja hauskoiksi. Mutta suomalainen versio Knalli ja sateenvarjo pesee ne kyllä mennen tullen.
Mistä tämä johtuu? Näyttelijävalinnoista? Englannin ensimmäinen Hamilton-Jones on My Fair Ladystakin tuttu eversti Pickering eli Wilfrid Hyde-Whyte jonka erinomaisuudesta ei liene epäilystäkään. Ruotsissa HJ on varhaisten Bergman-elokuvien suvereeni veteraani Gunnar Björnstrand. Nämä miehet ovat millä mittapuulla hyvänsä mitattuina maailmanluokkaa, kansainvälisiä huipputähtiä. Kauko Helovirta ei häviä heille milliäkään.
Suurin ero ja syy suomalaisen version ylivertaisuuteen (josta pitkäikäisyys, etten sanoisi ikuisuus kielii) on lähestymistavassa ja toteutuksessa. Alkuperäisen version idea on elävässä estraadiviihteessä, jaksot on toteutettu suorina lähetyksinä yleisön edessä. Yleisö tietenkin tuo tiettyä spontaania energiaa esitykseen omilla reaktioillaan ja onnistunut vitsi palkitaan heti. Tässä on huomattavissa ongelma - näyttelijät lähtevät helposti lypsämään repliikkejään palkkion toivossa. Painottamalla repliikkiä tietyllä tavalla saa taatusti hyvät naurut. Aina se ei silti ole hyväksi kokonaisuudelle.
Suomalaiset lähtivät eri tielle. Sarjaa ruvettiin alusta saakka toteuttamaan radioteatterina - ei estraadiviihteenä. Näin ollen esitysten dynamiikka ja energia on aivan erilainen kuin alkuperäisessä (ja ruotsalaisessa) versiossa. Se mikä välillä energiassa ja yleisön tarttuvassa riemussa hävitään, voitetaan replikoinnin tarkkuudessa ja fraasin nyanssoinnissa. On vaikea tehdä kovin hienostunutta näyttelijäntyötä kun repliikki jää yleisön naurunremakan alle. Ja suorassa lähetyksessä monet näyttelijät varsinkin pienemmissä rooleissa (jotka usein on tuplattu) tuppaavat lukemaan repliikkinsä suoraan plarista ja välillä vähän sinne päin. Eikä uusintaottoja tunneta. Suorissa lähetyksissä ei myöskään voi saada aikaiseksi kuin mitä alkeellisimpiä erikoistehosteita.
Kaikki tämä puhuu minusta selvää kieltään suoria lähetyksiä vastaan.
Radioteatterimaisuus kohottaa sarjan suomalaisversion omalle tasolleen. Jaksoa voidaan lähestyä läpikirjoitettuna kokonaisuutena eikä vain sarjana irtovitsejä. Vitsejä ei tarvitse alleviivata vaan ne voi esittää subtiilimmin jolloin ne yleensä ovat hauskempia. Tehosteilla voi loihtia huikeita tehoja. Eikä väärin lausuttuja ja hätäisesti korjattuja repliikkejä tarvitse pitää mukana vaan ne voi korjata seuraavassa otossa. Ja kun äänimaailma on puhdas yleisön taustahälinästä ja yleisestä melusta niin nyanssit kuuluvat ja pienikin ääni oikein mitoitettuna ja sijoitettuna tuntuu suurelta.
Suomalaisessa versiossa - ja uskon tämän johtuvan juuri lähestymistavasta - sivuroolitkin on miehitetty mykistävän hyvillä näyttelijöillä. Suorissa lähetyksissä sivuroolit tuppaavat jäämään joko hätäisen yksiulotteisiksi tai pelkäksi juonta kömpelösti edistäväksi pakkopullaksi, meillä ne ovat rikkumaton nauha kirkkaita loistavia helmiä. Olavi Ahonen, Risto Mäkelä, Keijo Komppa, Pia Hattara, Topi Reinikka, Jussi Jurkka, Marita Nordberg, Esko Nikkari, Tuula Nyman, Heikki Kinnunen, Pirkka-Pekka Petelius ja Marjatta Raita (monen muun muassa) todistavat kiistattomalla tavalla ja kerta toisensa jälkeen sen ettei ole olemassa pieniä rooleja, on vain pieniä näyttelijöitä. Viisasti täytetyt sivuroolit ovat koko sarjan suola ja nostavat sen humahtaen kertakäyttöviihteestä klassikoksi.
Välillä tuntuu melkein siltä että sivuroolit ovat liiankin hyvin miehitettyjä, että HJ ja Lamm jäävät sivuroolisoolojen jalkoihin ja joutuvat itse statistin osaan. Tämä on kuitenkin tervetullutta sillä se tuo sarjaan syvyyttä, ulottuvuutta ja rikkautta. Jaksot vanhenisivat paljon nopeammin jos kaikki olisi koko ajan pelkästään päänäyttelijöiden harteilla. Kuten muualla.
Tarkoitukseni ei ole millään muotoa vähätellä päänäyttelijöitä - aivan päin vastoin. Huimempaa nelikkoa kuin Helovirta, Pekka Autiovuori, Aila Svedberg ja Yrjö Järvinen on vaikea keksiä. Ainakaan minun. Yhteispeli hipoo parhaimmillaan täydellistä - ja tekee sen usein. Kaikkia yhdistää sama harvinainen taito (kuten sivuosienkin näyttelijöitä): he saavat ladattua uskomattomat määrät tunnetta repliikkiin. Tämä on radiossa tärkeämpää kuin muualla. Me emme näe heitä, kuulemme vain. Siksi se miten he sanovat asian on usein tärkeämpää kuin se mitä he sanovat. Kun Helovirta on masentunut me kuulemme kuinka hänen viiksensä ovat lerpahtaneet. Kun Yrjö Järvinen puhuu nuorista naisista me kuulemme kuinka hänen joka huokosestaan tihkuu kiimaa ja irstautta.
Siinä mielessä Edward Taylorin tekstit ovat mitä oivallisinta materiaalia taitaville näyttelijöille. Ne eivät ole ylikirjoitettuja. Niissä on tilaa tulkinnalle. On hauskempaa kuulla äänensävystä miten asiat ovat kuin saada selostus siitä. Show, don't tell.
Alunperinhän sarja kirjoitettiin muuten mittatilaustyönä Lammin esittäjälle Richard Murdochille. Siksi hän on varsin selvästi englantilaisen sarjan keskushenkilö. Suomessa Helovirran ja Autiovuoren välinen dynamiikka on demokraattisempi. Olisikin mahdotonta - ja älytöntä - pitää Helovirran tasoista taitajaa vähäisemmässä roolissa. Omalla luontaisella gravitaksellaan hän ottaa luonnollisen paikkansa. Sir Henry (tai siis Sir Gregory, kuten hän alunperin on!) on sekä englantilaisessa että ruotsalaisessa versiossa yksiulotteisempi ja siksi marginaalisempi hahmo. Auktoriteettiasemassa oleva Sir Henry karjuu ja on vihainen ja . . . niin . . . siinä suunnilleen se. Koko henkinen skaala ja tunteiden kirjo. Yrjö Järvinen tekee hänestä huimasti moniulotteisemman, lataa tulkintaan uskomattomat määrät pönäkkää itsetyytyväisyyttä ja sokeaa itserakkautta, alistavaa tyrannimaisuutta, lipevyyttä, irstautta, vahingoniloa, halveksuntaa, sadismia, hedonismia, tekopyhyyttä, ja (oman esimiehensä edessä) hurskastelevaa nöyryyttä, ja tekee Sir Henrystään sellaisen cocktailin ettei moista aikaisemmin ole kuultu.
Järvisen Sir Henry on varsinainen huonojen ominaisuuksien renessanssi-ihminen jolle mikään alhainen ei ole vierasta. Jokainen valhe, jokainen potku tulee suoraan sydämestä. Siksi Järvisen Sir Henryn auktoriteettiasema ei ole pelkkä tyhjä klisee vaan aidosti pelottava. Ja siksi HJ ja Lamm tuntuvat entistäkin inhimillisemmiltä protagonisteilta.
Mutta toisaalta, Järvisen Sir Henryn rinnalla kuka (tai mikä!) tahansa vaikuttaisi inhimillisyyden perikuvalta.
Knallissa ja sateenvarjossa operoidaan kliseillä. Helovirran, Autiovuoren, Järvisen ja Svedbergin käsittelyssä kliseet muuttuvat joksikin muuksi. Lyijy jalostuu kullaksi, hiili timantiksi.
Ei siis mikään ihme että täällä sarja pysyi elossa kun se muualla, kotimaassaankin, kuoli pois. Täällä siihen suhtauduttiin vakavammin, täällä se otettiin tosissaan. Täällä siihen satsattiin parhaat voimat, niin kääntäjien, ohjaajien kuin näyttelijöidenkin osalta. Täällä se ansaitsi jäädä henkiin.
Täällä se tehtiin paremmin kuin muualla.
Mistä tämä johtuu? Näyttelijävalinnoista? Englannin ensimmäinen Hamilton-Jones on My Fair Ladystakin tuttu eversti Pickering eli Wilfrid Hyde-Whyte jonka erinomaisuudesta ei liene epäilystäkään. Ruotsissa HJ on varhaisten Bergman-elokuvien suvereeni veteraani Gunnar Björnstrand. Nämä miehet ovat millä mittapuulla hyvänsä mitattuina maailmanluokkaa, kansainvälisiä huipputähtiä. Kauko Helovirta ei häviä heille milliäkään.
Suurin ero ja syy suomalaisen version ylivertaisuuteen (josta pitkäikäisyys, etten sanoisi ikuisuus kielii) on lähestymistavassa ja toteutuksessa. Alkuperäisen version idea on elävässä estraadiviihteessä, jaksot on toteutettu suorina lähetyksinä yleisön edessä. Yleisö tietenkin tuo tiettyä spontaania energiaa esitykseen omilla reaktioillaan ja onnistunut vitsi palkitaan heti. Tässä on huomattavissa ongelma - näyttelijät lähtevät helposti lypsämään repliikkejään palkkion toivossa. Painottamalla repliikkiä tietyllä tavalla saa taatusti hyvät naurut. Aina se ei silti ole hyväksi kokonaisuudelle.
Suomalaiset lähtivät eri tielle. Sarjaa ruvettiin alusta saakka toteuttamaan radioteatterina - ei estraadiviihteenä. Näin ollen esitysten dynamiikka ja energia on aivan erilainen kuin alkuperäisessä (ja ruotsalaisessa) versiossa. Se mikä välillä energiassa ja yleisön tarttuvassa riemussa hävitään, voitetaan replikoinnin tarkkuudessa ja fraasin nyanssoinnissa. On vaikea tehdä kovin hienostunutta näyttelijäntyötä kun repliikki jää yleisön naurunremakan alle. Ja suorassa lähetyksessä monet näyttelijät varsinkin pienemmissä rooleissa (jotka usein on tuplattu) tuppaavat lukemaan repliikkinsä suoraan plarista ja välillä vähän sinne päin. Eikä uusintaottoja tunneta. Suorissa lähetyksissä ei myöskään voi saada aikaiseksi kuin mitä alkeellisimpiä erikoistehosteita.
Kaikki tämä puhuu minusta selvää kieltään suoria lähetyksiä vastaan.
Radioteatterimaisuus kohottaa sarjan suomalaisversion omalle tasolleen. Jaksoa voidaan lähestyä läpikirjoitettuna kokonaisuutena eikä vain sarjana irtovitsejä. Vitsejä ei tarvitse alleviivata vaan ne voi esittää subtiilimmin jolloin ne yleensä ovat hauskempia. Tehosteilla voi loihtia huikeita tehoja. Eikä väärin lausuttuja ja hätäisesti korjattuja repliikkejä tarvitse pitää mukana vaan ne voi korjata seuraavassa otossa. Ja kun äänimaailma on puhdas yleisön taustahälinästä ja yleisestä melusta niin nyanssit kuuluvat ja pienikin ääni oikein mitoitettuna ja sijoitettuna tuntuu suurelta.
Suomalaisessa versiossa - ja uskon tämän johtuvan juuri lähestymistavasta - sivuroolitkin on miehitetty mykistävän hyvillä näyttelijöillä. Suorissa lähetyksissä sivuroolit tuppaavat jäämään joko hätäisen yksiulotteisiksi tai pelkäksi juonta kömpelösti edistäväksi pakkopullaksi, meillä ne ovat rikkumaton nauha kirkkaita loistavia helmiä. Olavi Ahonen, Risto Mäkelä, Keijo Komppa, Pia Hattara, Topi Reinikka, Jussi Jurkka, Marita Nordberg, Esko Nikkari, Tuula Nyman, Heikki Kinnunen, Pirkka-Pekka Petelius ja Marjatta Raita (monen muun muassa) todistavat kiistattomalla tavalla ja kerta toisensa jälkeen sen ettei ole olemassa pieniä rooleja, on vain pieniä näyttelijöitä. Viisasti täytetyt sivuroolit ovat koko sarjan suola ja nostavat sen humahtaen kertakäyttöviihteestä klassikoksi.
Välillä tuntuu melkein siltä että sivuroolit ovat liiankin hyvin miehitettyjä, että HJ ja Lamm jäävät sivuroolisoolojen jalkoihin ja joutuvat itse statistin osaan. Tämä on kuitenkin tervetullutta sillä se tuo sarjaan syvyyttä, ulottuvuutta ja rikkautta. Jaksot vanhenisivat paljon nopeammin jos kaikki olisi koko ajan pelkästään päänäyttelijöiden harteilla. Kuten muualla.
Tarkoitukseni ei ole millään muotoa vähätellä päänäyttelijöitä - aivan päin vastoin. Huimempaa nelikkoa kuin Helovirta, Pekka Autiovuori, Aila Svedberg ja Yrjö Järvinen on vaikea keksiä. Ainakaan minun. Yhteispeli hipoo parhaimmillaan täydellistä - ja tekee sen usein. Kaikkia yhdistää sama harvinainen taito (kuten sivuosienkin näyttelijöitä): he saavat ladattua uskomattomat määrät tunnetta repliikkiin. Tämä on radiossa tärkeämpää kuin muualla. Me emme näe heitä, kuulemme vain. Siksi se miten he sanovat asian on usein tärkeämpää kuin se mitä he sanovat. Kun Helovirta on masentunut me kuulemme kuinka hänen viiksensä ovat lerpahtaneet. Kun Yrjö Järvinen puhuu nuorista naisista me kuulemme kuinka hänen joka huokosestaan tihkuu kiimaa ja irstautta.
Siinä mielessä Edward Taylorin tekstit ovat mitä oivallisinta materiaalia taitaville näyttelijöille. Ne eivät ole ylikirjoitettuja. Niissä on tilaa tulkinnalle. On hauskempaa kuulla äänensävystä miten asiat ovat kuin saada selostus siitä. Show, don't tell.
Alunperinhän sarja kirjoitettiin muuten mittatilaustyönä Lammin esittäjälle Richard Murdochille. Siksi hän on varsin selvästi englantilaisen sarjan keskushenkilö. Suomessa Helovirran ja Autiovuoren välinen dynamiikka on demokraattisempi. Olisikin mahdotonta - ja älytöntä - pitää Helovirran tasoista taitajaa vähäisemmässä roolissa. Omalla luontaisella gravitaksellaan hän ottaa luonnollisen paikkansa. Sir Henry (tai siis Sir Gregory, kuten hän alunperin on!) on sekä englantilaisessa että ruotsalaisessa versiossa yksiulotteisempi ja siksi marginaalisempi hahmo. Auktoriteettiasemassa oleva Sir Henry karjuu ja on vihainen ja . . . niin . . . siinä suunnilleen se. Koko henkinen skaala ja tunteiden kirjo. Yrjö Järvinen tekee hänestä huimasti moniulotteisemman, lataa tulkintaan uskomattomat määrät pönäkkää itsetyytyväisyyttä ja sokeaa itserakkautta, alistavaa tyrannimaisuutta, lipevyyttä, irstautta, vahingoniloa, halveksuntaa, sadismia, hedonismia, tekopyhyyttä, ja (oman esimiehensä edessä) hurskastelevaa nöyryyttä, ja tekee Sir Henrystään sellaisen cocktailin ettei moista aikaisemmin ole kuultu.
Järvisen Sir Henry on varsinainen huonojen ominaisuuksien renessanssi-ihminen jolle mikään alhainen ei ole vierasta. Jokainen valhe, jokainen potku tulee suoraan sydämestä. Siksi Järvisen Sir Henryn auktoriteettiasema ei ole pelkkä tyhjä klisee vaan aidosti pelottava. Ja siksi HJ ja Lamm tuntuvat entistäkin inhimillisemmiltä protagonisteilta.
Mutta toisaalta, Järvisen Sir Henryn rinnalla kuka (tai mikä!) tahansa vaikuttaisi inhimillisyyden perikuvalta.
Knallissa ja sateenvarjossa operoidaan kliseillä. Helovirran, Autiovuoren, Järvisen ja Svedbergin käsittelyssä kliseet muuttuvat joksikin muuksi. Lyijy jalostuu kullaksi, hiili timantiksi.
Ei siis mikään ihme että täällä sarja pysyi elossa kun se muualla, kotimaassaankin, kuoli pois. Täällä siihen suhtauduttiin vakavammin, täällä se otettiin tosissaan. Täällä siihen satsattiin parhaat voimat, niin kääntäjien, ohjaajien kuin näyttelijöidenkin osalta. Täällä se ansaitsi jäädä henkiin.
Täällä se tehtiin paremmin kuin muualla.
09/11/2009
Herrschaft des Verbrechens
I've always had a soft spot for the early work of Fritz Lang, partly perhaps because they were such standard fare in the film clubs of my youth. Never a season without Metropolis or M, it seems like.
Metropolis even had a commercial run in the theatres in the mid '80s with a spanking new and remarkably loud and fairly ghastly score by Giorgio Moroder. I'm still not quite over that experience, to be perfectly honest. But hope does spring eternal, or so they say.
Othet stout Lang favorites are the fascinating international spy thriller Spione (1928) and the massive historical fantasy Die Nibelungen (1924), in two parts, which draws on the same material as Wagner's Ring cycle (or the last two operas Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, to be specific), Das Nibelungenlied, though Fritz does the mediaeval epic more justice than did old Richard. The special effects are pretty spectacular. In their day they were almost beyond belief. I've only ever seen it on video so I probably can't imagine how spectacular the effects really are. But the intrepid Siegfried slaying the dragon works whatever the format.
Two of his early films I've never come across (well there are more, of course, but these two irk me no end): the very early adventure yarn in two parts Die Spinnen (1921) and the absolute science fiction classic Frau im Mond (1929) that defined the way space crafts and interstellar travel would look on film for decades to come. Even the Moon got its definitive look by Lang and wasn't redefined (prior to the landing, that is) until along came Stanley Kubrick almost exactly 40 years later.
Now that I come to think there are a couple of things that the Lang films that I like have in common. They were made in Germany (and hence in German) and, perhaps most importantly, written by Thea von Harbou. Harbou's name may ring no bells today but in the '20s and '30s she was a pretty big fish, a screenwriter, a succesful novelist, and she even directed a few films. Harbou and Lang were married for a while and the time of their marriage constituted the golden age in both their professional careers. They made quite an ideal team. The scripts were extremely well balanced dramaturgically and featured everything a good film needed: exciting locations, mysterious circumstances, riveting chases, exotic killings, a smattering of esoteric philosophy, extremely modern or even futuristic contraptions, and a solid plot that moves with fierce speed and is told mostly visually. Harbou provided the setting and the conceptual frame, Lang the innovative visual splendours. As a mix it was well-nigh perfect.
So perfect that it was sometimes hard to notice that the scripts didn't bear a closer inspection as they were essentially puerile nonsense. Metropolis, for instance, looks grand, bold, even intellectual, but makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's just hokey. A lovely movie and deservedly a true classic but still nonsense. The images, however, live on.
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is the perfect Lang-Harbou collaboration. It's a crime story with supernatural elements and even vague but chilling political implications. The mad master criminal Mabuse (first seen in the 1922 movie Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler) has spent the last decade in an asylum, in a state of near catatonia, scribbling nonsense on sheets of paper all day. Yet his crime empire still functions. And seems to be led by him. How?
Now ordinary crime is no longer enough for Mabuse, he's striving for world domination by the means of Herrschaft des Verbrechens - The Rule of Crime. This he will achieve by chaos. He will wreak so much havoc, instill so much insecurity, reduce society to such a state of fear, anxiety and weakness, that people will welcome him as their leader and do anything he wills. For crime is the true strength of man and anything else is mere weakness. Anybody resisting will be eliminated: "Menschen die eine Gefahr für die Organization bedeuten sind ausnahmlos sofort zu vernichten." The militarily led organization has its own branch to take care of that: the assassination unit Abteilung 2-B.
It might possibly be worth to mention that the movie was made in 1933.
I'm not certain how deliberate and conscious the Nazi references are. To me they seem quite obvious and unambiguous. The criminals cannot but be seen as Nazis as they salute their omnipotent leader by bowing and clicking their heels. They have their Sektions and Abteilungs. The ruthless vocabulary is the same. Vernichtung - annihilation. The ideology of the mastery of crime, the superiority of violence, the supremacy of power - isn't that exactly what the Nazi Party craved and realized? What else was the rulership of the Party during those twelve bleak and abominable years than Herrschaft des Verbrechens? The Rule of Crime?
However, Harbou was quite the Nazi, eventually becoming a member of the Party (though she seems never to have been a racialist or an antisemite). And one does have to bear in mind that Lang was - very early on - well in cahoots with the Party: Die Nibelungens actually being a solid favourite in Nazi circles, indeed even something of a cult movie about the superiority and superhumanity of the Aryan race and its mythical and mystical past. How could it not warm a Nazi heart with blood and gore and brutal sword-fighting and the slaying of dragons and on top of that the Nazi of Nazis: Siegfried? I seem to recall it even having been the favourite movie of one Dr. Goebbels. Lang was well on his way of becoming the official movie director of Das Reich and would certainly have become it, and welcomed the position, had it not been for one unfortunate and rather embarrasing fact: he was Jewish. Even Dr. Goebbels couldn't overlook that slight piece of information in all eternity. So ultimately Lang had to flee the country.
Clearly Harbou and Lang didn't at first quite know what to make of the Nazis. Were they a bunch of thugs and criminals or the saviours of Germany? They were sensitive artists, they could see and sense things others couldn't. They seem also to have been ever so slightly opportunistic and ready to avert their eyes from the truth about Nazism and the banal horrors it entailed, were the Party willing to bestow favour upon them. And in fact the dynamic duo and their cinema would have been an invincible propagandistic tool for the Nazis, far superior than poor old Leni Riefenstahl, because they knew how to entertain, bewitch and lead the masses on. There is always a slight but unsound fascist undertone in any Harbou-Lang movie, a hypnotic element that disturbs one but also beckons. Can you find a more fascist piece of cinema than Metropolis?
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse didn't best please the Nazis. Goebbels was no fool. He saw what it was and didn't like it one bit. Dr. Mabuse's plans were almost exactly those of the Nazis, likewise his meas of realizing his plan. Goebbels delayed the premiere but didn't ban the movie.
Not much point, really. They already were in power.
There's a brilliant scene in the movie, by the way, where a handful of Mabuse's men get cornered in a flat with no way out. One of the criminals goes mental and declares that no one gets in or out - if anyone goes near the door they are going to get it. Better for everyone to die inside the flat than surrender. Again Vernichtung. The way he speaks, or rather shouts and barks in semihysteria, bears a striking resemblance to the way Hitler makes his speeches. In the end they can't keep the police out so the Adolfian crook ends his life by shooting himself. Eerie echoes of the bunker, I always think. 12 years before the fact. Does gives one quite the willies.
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse was the last movie Lang ever made in Germany. One day, after having received a warning, he took the train to Paris and didn't return. Thea von Harbou stayed on in Germany but had a pretty unspectacular career without Lang. On their own they were never much good. I shudder to think what villanous, dastardly, megalomaniac propaganda movies they might have made together in and for Nazi Germany had Lang's Jewishness been hushed up or overlooked
I'd also very much like to see them.
Metropolis even had a commercial run in the theatres in the mid '80s with a spanking new and remarkably loud and fairly ghastly score by Giorgio Moroder. I'm still not quite over that experience, to be perfectly honest. But hope does spring eternal, or so they say.
Othet stout Lang favorites are the fascinating international spy thriller Spione (1928) and the massive historical fantasy Die Nibelungen (1924), in two parts, which draws on the same material as Wagner's Ring cycle (or the last two operas Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, to be specific), Das Nibelungenlied, though Fritz does the mediaeval epic more justice than did old Richard. The special effects are pretty spectacular. In their day they were almost beyond belief. I've only ever seen it on video so I probably can't imagine how spectacular the effects really are. But the intrepid Siegfried slaying the dragon works whatever the format.
Two of his early films I've never come across (well there are more, of course, but these two irk me no end): the very early adventure yarn in two parts Die Spinnen (1921) and the absolute science fiction classic Frau im Mond (1929) that defined the way space crafts and interstellar travel would look on film for decades to come. Even the Moon got its definitive look by Lang and wasn't redefined (prior to the landing, that is) until along came Stanley Kubrick almost exactly 40 years later.
Now that I come to think there are a couple of things that the Lang films that I like have in common. They were made in Germany (and hence in German) and, perhaps most importantly, written by Thea von Harbou. Harbou's name may ring no bells today but in the '20s and '30s she was a pretty big fish, a screenwriter, a succesful novelist, and she even directed a few films. Harbou and Lang were married for a while and the time of their marriage constituted the golden age in both their professional careers. They made quite an ideal team. The scripts were extremely well balanced dramaturgically and featured everything a good film needed: exciting locations, mysterious circumstances, riveting chases, exotic killings, a smattering of esoteric philosophy, extremely modern or even futuristic contraptions, and a solid plot that moves with fierce speed and is told mostly visually. Harbou provided the setting and the conceptual frame, Lang the innovative visual splendours. As a mix it was well-nigh perfect.
So perfect that it was sometimes hard to notice that the scripts didn't bear a closer inspection as they were essentially puerile nonsense. Metropolis, for instance, looks grand, bold, even intellectual, but makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's just hokey. A lovely movie and deservedly a true classic but still nonsense. The images, however, live on.
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is the perfect Lang-Harbou collaboration. It's a crime story with supernatural elements and even vague but chilling political implications. The mad master criminal Mabuse (first seen in the 1922 movie Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler) has spent the last decade in an asylum, in a state of near catatonia, scribbling nonsense on sheets of paper all day. Yet his crime empire still functions. And seems to be led by him. How?
Now ordinary crime is no longer enough for Mabuse, he's striving for world domination by the means of Herrschaft des Verbrechens - The Rule of Crime. This he will achieve by chaos. He will wreak so much havoc, instill so much insecurity, reduce society to such a state of fear, anxiety and weakness, that people will welcome him as their leader and do anything he wills. For crime is the true strength of man and anything else is mere weakness. Anybody resisting will be eliminated: "Menschen die eine Gefahr für die Organization bedeuten sind ausnahmlos sofort zu vernichten." The militarily led organization has its own branch to take care of that: the assassination unit Abteilung 2-B.
It might possibly be worth to mention that the movie was made in 1933.
I'm not certain how deliberate and conscious the Nazi references are. To me they seem quite obvious and unambiguous. The criminals cannot but be seen as Nazis as they salute their omnipotent leader by bowing and clicking their heels. They have their Sektions and Abteilungs. The ruthless vocabulary is the same. Vernichtung - annihilation. The ideology of the mastery of crime, the superiority of violence, the supremacy of power - isn't that exactly what the Nazi Party craved and realized? What else was the rulership of the Party during those twelve bleak and abominable years than Herrschaft des Verbrechens? The Rule of Crime?
However, Harbou was quite the Nazi, eventually becoming a member of the Party (though she seems never to have been a racialist or an antisemite). And one does have to bear in mind that Lang was - very early on - well in cahoots with the Party: Die Nibelungens actually being a solid favourite in Nazi circles, indeed even something of a cult movie about the superiority and superhumanity of the Aryan race and its mythical and mystical past. How could it not warm a Nazi heart with blood and gore and brutal sword-fighting and the slaying of dragons and on top of that the Nazi of Nazis: Siegfried? I seem to recall it even having been the favourite movie of one Dr. Goebbels. Lang was well on his way of becoming the official movie director of Das Reich and would certainly have become it, and welcomed the position, had it not been for one unfortunate and rather embarrasing fact: he was Jewish. Even Dr. Goebbels couldn't overlook that slight piece of information in all eternity. So ultimately Lang had to flee the country.
Clearly Harbou and Lang didn't at first quite know what to make of the Nazis. Were they a bunch of thugs and criminals or the saviours of Germany? They were sensitive artists, they could see and sense things others couldn't. They seem also to have been ever so slightly opportunistic and ready to avert their eyes from the truth about Nazism and the banal horrors it entailed, were the Party willing to bestow favour upon them. And in fact the dynamic duo and their cinema would have been an invincible propagandistic tool for the Nazis, far superior than poor old Leni Riefenstahl, because they knew how to entertain, bewitch and lead the masses on. There is always a slight but unsound fascist undertone in any Harbou-Lang movie, a hypnotic element that disturbs one but also beckons. Can you find a more fascist piece of cinema than Metropolis?
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse didn't best please the Nazis. Goebbels was no fool. He saw what it was and didn't like it one bit. Dr. Mabuse's plans were almost exactly those of the Nazis, likewise his meas of realizing his plan. Goebbels delayed the premiere but didn't ban the movie.
Not much point, really. They already were in power.
There's a brilliant scene in the movie, by the way, where a handful of Mabuse's men get cornered in a flat with no way out. One of the criminals goes mental and declares that no one gets in or out - if anyone goes near the door they are going to get it. Better for everyone to die inside the flat than surrender. Again Vernichtung. The way he speaks, or rather shouts and barks in semihysteria, bears a striking resemblance to the way Hitler makes his speeches. In the end they can't keep the police out so the Adolfian crook ends his life by shooting himself. Eerie echoes of the bunker, I always think. 12 years before the fact. Does gives one quite the willies.
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse was the last movie Lang ever made in Germany. One day, after having received a warning, he took the train to Paris and didn't return. Thea von Harbou stayed on in Germany but had a pretty unspectacular career without Lang. On their own they were never much good. I shudder to think what villanous, dastardly, megalomaniac propaganda movies they might have made together in and for Nazi Germany had Lang's Jewishness been hushed up or overlooked
I'd also very much like to see them.
31/10/2009
Becoming Hyde
Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) isn't the first movie version of Stevenson's classic novel. Nor is it the last, obviously, not by a long chalk. It is however pretty phenomenal in its way, better by far than most of its successors: the special effects are in fact quite stunning - not only for its time but any which way one cares to look at them. They convince even today, even the jaded viewer who's seen everything done digitally cannot help but emit a slight gasp at the sheer audacity of the effects. How ever did they do it?
The angelic Dr. Jekyll transforms into the beastlike Mr. Hyde in front of the camera with nary a cut and with almost an unpleasant realism; the clean and sober, suave and debonair charmer Frederick March becomes, before our very eyes, a rough and gruff protosimian creature with hair sprouting in unruly tufts in the most unlikely places and a forehead lower than that of a Neanderthal. (I would in fact be slightly surprised if the grotesquely gorillaesque comic book version of Hyde by messieurs Moor & O'Neill didn't owe more than a nodding thanks to March's precursor.)
An achievement indeed.
Every single Jekyll & Hyde movie has to show how Jekyll painfully morphs into Hyde, and show it as graphically and in as much detail as possible. Makes or breaks the movie. Most of them do it abominably badly. Which of course kills off any credibility.
Jekyll turning into Hyde is the crowning moment of the story, has been since the earliest theatre days, probably. It's a wonderful piece of show biz at its best.
I happen to think it pretty redundant.
Even cataclysmically wrong.
It's a brilliant metaphor of man's Manichean duality, ever duelling within us. When examined closer it becomes, well, a bit dodgy at best. Its clearly a concept of and for the mind, to be visualised by the mind's eye but not seen. When put on stage or on film it immediately becomes crude and unconvincing - nothing more than crass showmanship. It is not Hyde's physical appearance that is essential but his soul. His outer visage is but an aspect of his soul and its reflection, of course, but focusing so doggedly on his brutish and apelike physique - and the almost magic transformation - makes it all seem so very shallow. Not at all like Stevenson's immortal poetic vision.
The quintessence of the tale is far subtler.
Hyde's atavistic looks are a metaphor for his black and crooked soul, not the focus of the entire tale. Splitting Jekyll into two is a magnificent tool whereby Stevenson tells his poignant tale of good and evil. What works so magnificently well on the page becomes self-indulgent when we see it. What is subtle becomes banal. What is real becomes improbable.
Which, in my view, is why all movie versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are failures. And are bound to be so.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a gripping tale of the soul. Almost a parable. It cannot be taken too literally. It belongs in the shadows of the subcoscious. Make a realistic version of it and its meaning fades away. And what is left is merely an empty shell, a fairly entertaining story about a doctor who meddles with things "man is not meant to know."
And that's one of the biggest bores there is.
I'm not saying it would be entirely impossible to make a good and true movie (or theatre) version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've just never come across any.
What I am saying is: you can't beat the book. Don't even try.
The angelic Dr. Jekyll transforms into the beastlike Mr. Hyde in front of the camera with nary a cut and with almost an unpleasant realism; the clean and sober, suave and debonair charmer Frederick March becomes, before our very eyes, a rough and gruff protosimian creature with hair sprouting in unruly tufts in the most unlikely places and a forehead lower than that of a Neanderthal. (I would in fact be slightly surprised if the grotesquely gorillaesque comic book version of Hyde by messieurs Moor & O'Neill didn't owe more than a nodding thanks to March's precursor.)
An achievement indeed.
Every single Jekyll & Hyde movie has to show how Jekyll painfully morphs into Hyde, and show it as graphically and in as much detail as possible. Makes or breaks the movie. Most of them do it abominably badly. Which of course kills off any credibility.
Jekyll turning into Hyde is the crowning moment of the story, has been since the earliest theatre days, probably. It's a wonderful piece of show biz at its best.
I happen to think it pretty redundant.
Even cataclysmically wrong.
It's a brilliant metaphor of man's Manichean duality, ever duelling within us. When examined closer it becomes, well, a bit dodgy at best. Its clearly a concept of and for the mind, to be visualised by the mind's eye but not seen. When put on stage or on film it immediately becomes crude and unconvincing - nothing more than crass showmanship. It is not Hyde's physical appearance that is essential but his soul. His outer visage is but an aspect of his soul and its reflection, of course, but focusing so doggedly on his brutish and apelike physique - and the almost magic transformation - makes it all seem so very shallow. Not at all like Stevenson's immortal poetic vision.
The quintessence of the tale is far subtler.
Hyde's atavistic looks are a metaphor for his black and crooked soul, not the focus of the entire tale. Splitting Jekyll into two is a magnificent tool whereby Stevenson tells his poignant tale of good and evil. What works so magnificently well on the page becomes self-indulgent when we see it. What is subtle becomes banal. What is real becomes improbable.
Which, in my view, is why all movie versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are failures. And are bound to be so.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a gripping tale of the soul. Almost a parable. It cannot be taken too literally. It belongs in the shadows of the subcoscious. Make a realistic version of it and its meaning fades away. And what is left is merely an empty shell, a fairly entertaining story about a doctor who meddles with things "man is not meant to know."
And that's one of the biggest bores there is.
I'm not saying it would be entirely impossible to make a good and true movie (or theatre) version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've just never come across any.
What I am saying is: you can't beat the book. Don't even try.
"Ich will Jesum selbst begraben"
Otto Klemperer's St. Matthew Passion. Not, I fear, everybody's cup of tea. It's so so slow that it never seems to end - the man just stretches it to the point of it being slightly ludicrous and far beyond. A lot of people seem to loathe it intensely, partly because it just isn't kosher meaning authentic. The tempi are all wrong, wrong, horribly wrong. A piece of phony romantic crap, is what many might call it. A grave sin that in the age of the blessed St. Leonhardt and the beatific St. Harnoncourt.
Of this I had absolutely no idea when I purchased it. The price seemed reasonable, even fair, the cast pretty dashed nice: Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda, Walter Berry. Pretty dashed nice? I mean superb, I mean fairly stellar actually.
Had a quick listen in the record shop, seemed okay, not that I really paid much attention - I mean St. Matt is St. Matt innit? - no time for anything more than a few self-evident bars: had to be somewhere else for something ultimately unimportant and meaningless - no time to loose, as Monty Python so wisely teaches us.
Then, at home, a nasty shock.
What is this rubbish?
Is it even St. Matthew?
Doesn't sound like it.
Not even remotely.
It was. Some snatches of it I seemed to recognize vaguely, through a glass darkly as it were, others were just plain bizarre and deliberately perverse. And the whole fabric of the piece was all wrong. Stretch it too far, timewise, and it becomes shapeless, formless, a hideous grotesque heap of jumbled jarring notes with no connection whatsoever to the notes around them. It falls apart. Becomes a travesty, in fact.
However, I had purchased it, paid good money for it, and there was nothing physically wrong with the CD, so taking it back didn't seem a gentlemanly option. A clear case of lumping it, then. Alas and alack, poor little me.
Before I condemned it to eternal damnation I had another listen. Didn't seem quite as bad the second time around. Still pretty bad, though. Probably just imagining the slight decrease in absolute abysmality (if there is such a word, which I seriously doubt). The third time I played it I was no longer certain of its glorious ghastliness. So I had to listen some more. Ended up not playing much anything else between Christmas and New Year. Which is pretty much when I found myself hooked on it, once and for all.
And other, more authentic, renderings of the piece started to sound - well odd. What's the hurry? Where's the fire?
Now Klemperer seems to be quite the norm for me. It's majestic tempi seem just right to elicit every ounce of feeling from the score. And the slowness is slow no longer. It becomes something else, it very much reaches beyond. Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit, wrote Wagner in his Parsifal: Here time becomes space. The slower it flows the more solid it becomes, the more lucid, the more powerful.
The piece is, in fact, in its soul-baring simplicity, a prolonged psalm, an incantation, capturing the essence of not only religion but humanity as well. Somewhere between the lines I seem to hear Klemperer's personal anguish: the anguish of having lived a Jew through the Nazi era, the horror of the Concentration Camps and the Holocaust, the decline and fall of the entire Western Civilization - with The Bomb as the delicious cherry on the cake - the loss of any kind of faith in any kind of future.
And yet . . .
Yet it's one of the warmest, kindest, most humane performances one can imagine. The human spirit will prevail, must prevail. Does prevail. There can be no other belief for mankind. Klemeperer's St. Matthew is one of the few, very few, pieces of music that make me wonder if indeed there could be anything in religion after all.
It almost, to misquote Agent Mulder slightly, makes me want to believe.
Almost.
Of this I had absolutely no idea when I purchased it. The price seemed reasonable, even fair, the cast pretty dashed nice: Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda, Walter Berry. Pretty dashed nice? I mean superb, I mean fairly stellar actually.
Had a quick listen in the record shop, seemed okay, not that I really paid much attention - I mean St. Matt is St. Matt innit? - no time for anything more than a few self-evident bars: had to be somewhere else for something ultimately unimportant and meaningless - no time to loose, as Monty Python so wisely teaches us.
Then, at home, a nasty shock.
What is this rubbish?
Is it even St. Matthew?
Doesn't sound like it.
Not even remotely.
It was. Some snatches of it I seemed to recognize vaguely, through a glass darkly as it were, others were just plain bizarre and deliberately perverse. And the whole fabric of the piece was all wrong. Stretch it too far, timewise, and it becomes shapeless, formless, a hideous grotesque heap of jumbled jarring notes with no connection whatsoever to the notes around them. It falls apart. Becomes a travesty, in fact.
However, I had purchased it, paid good money for it, and there was nothing physically wrong with the CD, so taking it back didn't seem a gentlemanly option. A clear case of lumping it, then. Alas and alack, poor little me.
Before I condemned it to eternal damnation I had another listen. Didn't seem quite as bad the second time around. Still pretty bad, though. Probably just imagining the slight decrease in absolute abysmality (if there is such a word, which I seriously doubt). The third time I played it I was no longer certain of its glorious ghastliness. So I had to listen some more. Ended up not playing much anything else between Christmas and New Year. Which is pretty much when I found myself hooked on it, once and for all.
And other, more authentic, renderings of the piece started to sound - well odd. What's the hurry? Where's the fire?
Now Klemperer seems to be quite the norm for me. It's majestic tempi seem just right to elicit every ounce of feeling from the score. And the slowness is slow no longer. It becomes something else, it very much reaches beyond. Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit, wrote Wagner in his Parsifal: Here time becomes space. The slower it flows the more solid it becomes, the more lucid, the more powerful.
The piece is, in fact, in its soul-baring simplicity, a prolonged psalm, an incantation, capturing the essence of not only religion but humanity as well. Somewhere between the lines I seem to hear Klemperer's personal anguish: the anguish of having lived a Jew through the Nazi era, the horror of the Concentration Camps and the Holocaust, the decline and fall of the entire Western Civilization - with The Bomb as the delicious cherry on the cake - the loss of any kind of faith in any kind of future.
And yet . . .
Yet it's one of the warmest, kindest, most humane performances one can imagine. The human spirit will prevail, must prevail. Does prevail. There can be no other belief for mankind. Klemeperer's St. Matthew is one of the few, very few, pieces of music that make me wonder if indeed there could be anything in religion after all.
It almost, to misquote Agent Mulder slightly, makes me want to believe.
Almost.
28/10/2009
Black Will & Shakebag
"The Lamentable and Trve Tragedie of M. Arden of Feuersham in Kent. Who was most wickedlye murdered, by the meanes of his disloyall and wanton wyfe, who for the loue she bare to one Mosbie, hyred two desparat ruffins Blackwill and Shakbag, to kill him. Wherin is shewed the great mallice discimulation of a wicked woman, the vnsatiable desire of filthie lust and the shameful end of all murderers."
This compelling argument is from the title page of the play Arden of Feversham, published anonymously in 1592. A fascinating play - on several levels.
What strikes me most is how remarkably fresh the play is even today. The best way to describe it is as a solid mix of true crime, hard boiled crime story and pulp. There's no poetry for the sake of poetry in this play. It's all muscular prose and meaty realism. The wife plays around. She and her fancy man hatch a plan. Who needs hubby? Get shot of him and collect the dough. So they hire two pros to do the honours. They snuff him, then it all goes Pete Tong and the accusations fly. Unhappy ends all round. Crime don't pay.
Classic noir. Could have been written in 1952 instead of 1592. And it's based on a true murder case, one that occurred in 1551 and even got a mention in Holinshed's Chronicles.
Another thing that makes a great impression is how the plot and the murder are described. First she tries poison. The victim gets away. Then they hire two murderers. The murderers get a bit iffy but the money's good, too good not to do it. They try a hit. It's a miss. Another attempt. No go. More tension. Third try. Still he lives. Everybody getting seriously jittery. Fourth attempt. Still no joy.
And all the time Arden knows his wife is two timing him. But he has no idea she's trying to off him.
Everybody has complex and conflicting motives. Maybe this isn't such a good idea after all. Arden's wife, however, has paid or bribed Arden's whole household and others with gold and silvery tongued promises. It really is in no one's interest to let the man live. So they don't and at last the victim is almost ripped to shreds - as by Eumenides in a Greek tragedy. It's all a dirty, messy, brutal and vicious business. Like slaughtering a pig. Then there's all the blood, so much blood to get rid of. And it never goes away. That's how they get caught - bloody footsteps leading away from the house, traces of blood inside the house.
The messiness and the viciousness make the play all the stronger and more convincing. Plans are laid. They go awry. Things happen. There are unforeseen consequences. Nothing quite goes how it's supposed to go. Nobody quite acts like they're supposed to act. People have second thoughts. It's all good and well to wish murder, talk murder, plot murder. But a very different thing to actually commit it. In cold blood.
That's one of the things that stand out in the play - the sound psychological characterization of even minor characters.
So, who wrote it?
Kyd? He's a popular candidate. In my opinion no, wasn't Kyd. Too streamlined for him, too straightforward, too - well - lucid. Who? Shakespeare? Would have been pretty early for Shakespeare but not entirely impossible. Though, to be honest, nobody really knows when it was written or first performed. We only know when it was published. The Oxfordians credit it, no surprises there, to the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, who apparently wrote virtually every play in the Elizabethan era. Marlowe? Perhaps the best candidate. He's vicious enough, doesn't go in for useless poetic nonsense and knows how to tell a story to the best effect.
SHAKEBAG: Black night hath hid the pleasures of the day,
And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth,
And with the black fold of her cloudy robe
Obscures us from the eyesight of the world,
In which sweet silence such as we triumph.
The lazy minutes linger on their time,
Loth to give due audit to the hour,
Till in the watch our purpose be complete
And Arden sent to everlasting night.
Greene, get you gone, and linger here about,
And at some hour hence come to us again,
Where we will give you instance of his death.
There definitely does, whoever wrote it, seem to be a strong and somewhat cryptic Shakespearen connection.
Arden. The name of the victim. Arden is one of England's oldest noble families, one of only three (I think) that can trace their noble lineage on the male side to the Saxon days before the Norman conquest. Shakespeare's mother was an Arden. Possibly related to the high and mighty one's, though nobody's ever been able to prove that. On the other hand nobody's ever proved that she definitely wasn't. We just can't say. Still, Arden was her name and her family.
What really gets me, every time, are the names of the murderers. Black Will and Shakebag. Will and Shake? Can this be mere coincidence? Will and Shake murdering an Arden? This, surely, can be no mere accident or happenstance? It beggars disbelief.
Surely the author is having a go at Shakespeare? And if the author is none else than Kit Marlowe that would seem the most natural thing in the world. The experienced veteran Marlowe slipping the loudmouth upstart Shakespeare a juicy one in the seat, as it were.
Maybe Shakespeare even, when he was a young actor, performed the role of Shakebag, as has been speculated. Now there's a happy thought. Maybe that is precisely why Shakebag is called Shakebag (originally he was called Loosebag) - because Will played him. Of course there is not even the slightest evidence for this.
Of course, if it's true that the names of the actual killers, given by Holinshed in his book, were in fact Black Will and Shakebag (as is also claimed; not having read Holinshed I really wouldn't know one way or the other), then that would pretty much ruin my lovely theory.
Still, bit of a coincidence that. A bit thick.
Anyway, Arden of Feversham is one of the best crime stories ever. Is my humble opinion. Whoever wrote it. (And my belated thanks to the very erudite Mr. Dyer, in whose library first I came across and read the play all those years ago.)
This compelling argument is from the title page of the play Arden of Feversham, published anonymously in 1592. A fascinating play - on several levels.
What strikes me most is how remarkably fresh the play is even today. The best way to describe it is as a solid mix of true crime, hard boiled crime story and pulp. There's no poetry for the sake of poetry in this play. It's all muscular prose and meaty realism. The wife plays around. She and her fancy man hatch a plan. Who needs hubby? Get shot of him and collect the dough. So they hire two pros to do the honours. They snuff him, then it all goes Pete Tong and the accusations fly. Unhappy ends all round. Crime don't pay.
Classic noir. Could have been written in 1952 instead of 1592. And it's based on a true murder case, one that occurred in 1551 and even got a mention in Holinshed's Chronicles.
Another thing that makes a great impression is how the plot and the murder are described. First she tries poison. The victim gets away. Then they hire two murderers. The murderers get a bit iffy but the money's good, too good not to do it. They try a hit. It's a miss. Another attempt. No go. More tension. Third try. Still he lives. Everybody getting seriously jittery. Fourth attempt. Still no joy.
And all the time Arden knows his wife is two timing him. But he has no idea she's trying to off him.
Everybody has complex and conflicting motives. Maybe this isn't such a good idea after all. Arden's wife, however, has paid or bribed Arden's whole household and others with gold and silvery tongued promises. It really is in no one's interest to let the man live. So they don't and at last the victim is almost ripped to shreds - as by Eumenides in a Greek tragedy. It's all a dirty, messy, brutal and vicious business. Like slaughtering a pig. Then there's all the blood, so much blood to get rid of. And it never goes away. That's how they get caught - bloody footsteps leading away from the house, traces of blood inside the house.
The messiness and the viciousness make the play all the stronger and more convincing. Plans are laid. They go awry. Things happen. There are unforeseen consequences. Nothing quite goes how it's supposed to go. Nobody quite acts like they're supposed to act. People have second thoughts. It's all good and well to wish murder, talk murder, plot murder. But a very different thing to actually commit it. In cold blood.
That's one of the things that stand out in the play - the sound psychological characterization of even minor characters.
So, who wrote it?
Kyd? He's a popular candidate. In my opinion no, wasn't Kyd. Too streamlined for him, too straightforward, too - well - lucid. Who? Shakespeare? Would have been pretty early for Shakespeare but not entirely impossible. Though, to be honest, nobody really knows when it was written or first performed. We only know when it was published. The Oxfordians credit it, no surprises there, to the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, who apparently wrote virtually every play in the Elizabethan era. Marlowe? Perhaps the best candidate. He's vicious enough, doesn't go in for useless poetic nonsense and knows how to tell a story to the best effect.
SHAKEBAG: Black night hath hid the pleasures of the day,
And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth,
And with the black fold of her cloudy robe
Obscures us from the eyesight of the world,
In which sweet silence such as we triumph.
The lazy minutes linger on their time,
Loth to give due audit to the hour,
Till in the watch our purpose be complete
And Arden sent to everlasting night.
Greene, get you gone, and linger here about,
And at some hour hence come to us again,
Where we will give you instance of his death.
There definitely does, whoever wrote it, seem to be a strong and somewhat cryptic Shakespearen connection.
Arden. The name of the victim. Arden is one of England's oldest noble families, one of only three (I think) that can trace their noble lineage on the male side to the Saxon days before the Norman conquest. Shakespeare's mother was an Arden. Possibly related to the high and mighty one's, though nobody's ever been able to prove that. On the other hand nobody's ever proved that she definitely wasn't. We just can't say. Still, Arden was her name and her family.
What really gets me, every time, are the names of the murderers. Black Will and Shakebag. Will and Shake? Can this be mere coincidence? Will and Shake murdering an Arden? This, surely, can be no mere accident or happenstance? It beggars disbelief.
Surely the author is having a go at Shakespeare? And if the author is none else than Kit Marlowe that would seem the most natural thing in the world. The experienced veteran Marlowe slipping the loudmouth upstart Shakespeare a juicy one in the seat, as it were.
Maybe Shakespeare even, when he was a young actor, performed the role of Shakebag, as has been speculated. Now there's a happy thought. Maybe that is precisely why Shakebag is called Shakebag (originally he was called Loosebag) - because Will played him. Of course there is not even the slightest evidence for this.
Of course, if it's true that the names of the actual killers, given by Holinshed in his book, were in fact Black Will and Shakebag (as is also claimed; not having read Holinshed I really wouldn't know one way or the other), then that would pretty much ruin my lovely theory.
Still, bit of a coincidence that. A bit thick.
Anyway, Arden of Feversham is one of the best crime stories ever. Is my humble opinion. Whoever wrote it. (And my belated thanks to the very erudite Mr. Dyer, in whose library first I came across and read the play all those years ago.)
18/10/2009
I am not what I am
Orson Welles's movie Othello was completed with virtually no budget whatsoever. Welles paid for the movie himself. His funds dried up time and again, which is why it took almost four years to complete it. A little bit at a time. Filming was suspended and then picked up again. He'd star in someone else's movie, take the money and work on Othello, then go away and star in another movie. Like Carol Reed and Graham Greene's The Third Man. Then back to Othello it was. Othello wasn't quite produced shot by shot, but it's a close thing.
The whole project started badly (just after the disaster with his previous movie Macbeth which ended up being cut up and butchered quite severely as the studio didn't much care one way or the other - which is why Welles now felt that he had to have complete control over his film, however long it took to finish): the Italian backer went bankrupt. Iago, Everett Sloane, walked away during the early days of filming. Which meant that a great deal of film had to be re-shot. Sloane had played key roles in his previous movies: Bernstein in Citizen Kane and Bannister in Lady from Shanghai. He'd been with Welles ever since the Mercury theatre and radio days. Apparently there was real tension between the Sloane and Welles. Sloane was fed up with Welles's ego and quite possibly resented him. Maybe he was envious of Welles and his success. Which of course would have worked perfectly on film - Iago resenting and envying Othello (and who else would play the warlike Moor of Venice than Welles himself?). But Sloane decided to call it a day.
When Welles asked Carol Reed to approach James Mason for him for the role of Iago, Reed said Mason was all wrong and suggested the great Irish actor Micheál Mac Liammóir instead. Welles was sceptical but went along. So off the crew was to Morocco where the movie was to be filmed. Where, almost immediately, his Desdemona received a better offer and was out of there like a shot. Welles didn't let that minor setback impede the filming, he just started shooting around Desdemona, until he could get someone else.
Next the project was hampered and even seriously jeopardized by Mac Liammóir's sexual peccadilloes. The homosexual Mac Liammóir had a whale of a time picking up strange men all over the place. He especially enjoyed the company of policemen (and curiously enough quite a lot of them seemed to enjoy his company) and was constantly trying to seduce them. The governor had the film crew under surveillance and insisted that Welles read the reports daily. This embarrassed Welles a great deal. When Mac Liammóir found out that Welles knew exactly what he was up to and with whom he was delighted. It egged him on no end to have an audience for his rompy pompy. When the filming shifted to Venice Mac Liammóir was miserable as the move put an end to his happy carefree love life. He did however manage to have it off with a gondolier in so tempestuous a fashion that the gondolier was knocked right into the Canal Grande and almost drowned. Took a lot of money to hush it up.
Othello was Mac Liammóir's first movie even though he was in his fifties. (His only other notable film was the 1970 spy thriller The Kremlin Letter by John Huston in which Helsinki was tarted up as jolly old Moscow, as usual.) In Ireland he was a big name, a playwright, writer, manager, actor, designer, poet, painter, raconteur. He'd founded the famed Gate Theatre with his partner Hilton Edwards in 1928, played all the big roles, established himself as a stalwart champion of native Celtic culture. He wore an ill fitting black toupee, ever slightly askew, and painted his face a rather startling shade of orange. As if this wasn't quite enough he always wore a lot of mascara. According to Welles he looked like an "unemployed gypsy fiddler who ought to try and pull himself together." It was in fact Mac Liammóir who gave Welles his first professional acting job. That was in Dublin. Welles was sixteen at the time and loafing around the Irish countryside trying to become a painter. Which he soon chucked as he decided he wanted to be an actor instead. So he went to the Gate Theatre, bold as brass, and announced that he was an American actor and wanted a job. He also lied about his age. A complete fraud. Mac Liammóir took him on, maybe because he recognized something in young Welles, him being a complete and utter fraud himself. Mac Liammóir was in fact the ultimate fraud as everything about him was phony. He wasn't really Irish at all. He just made it up. He was a native Londoner called Alfred Willmore who just moved to Ireland, took a fancy to the place, learnt Irish, started using an Irish name, and told everybody that he was Irish. And everybody bought it. Which just goes to show that a successful actor really needs to be a huge fraud. (But fraudulence only succeeds when you're an interesting fraud, otherwise it's just a waste of everybody's time.)
Later the relationship between Mac Liammóir and Welles went sour. When Welles left the Gate he felt he'd been treated shabbily. Mac Liammóir, like Sloane, resented Welles's success and meteoric rise to fame. Who did this upstart boy think he was? Again, a good starting point for Iago and Othello, this mutual and heartfelt hostility and common grudge. You can't buy that stuff.
In 1952, at long last, the movie was finished - just in time for Cannes where it won the Palme d'Or. That didn't cut much ice with American distributors. Othello was released over there in 1955, after Welles had re-cut it and re-dubbed it. His recording equipment had been absolutely terrible and a lot of scenes had been shot with no sound at all. Interestingly enough he removed all of Desdemona's lines and did some of them himself.
Obviously, after all the work, all the effort, all the years he'd invested in the movie, all the money he'd spent on it, the movie was a complete commercial disaster. The critics quite liked it, the audience stayed away in droves.
How does the movie look today? Parts of it are superb, majestic, striking and visually exquisite. A lot of it, especially the bits in Venice, are cramped and poky, the pace is nervous, the images are never allowed to linger and have any sort of effect. There are too many words. The voice overs are horrible. The words eat up the power of the pictures and very much so vice versa. Shakespeare and film is never a happy match. In order really to do justice to Shakespeare on the silver screen one would have to cut most of the lines and tell the story in pictures instead of words, use the visceral poetry of images. Shakespeare's verse is too thick, too complex, too allencompassing, its texture too tightly knit to let anything else breathe in its vicinity. Unfortunately Shakespeare's words conjure up far more potent pictures than any film maker could. So most efforts are usually doomed before they start. Welles might have given it a very decent try, if only he'd have had money and time. It's painfully obvious that there was no money, even less time. He has the scenery, he has the settings, but such is his penury that he cannot stop to make use of them. There is no time. When you cannot show it you have to use a voice over. The dubbing is at times embarrassingly out of synch. Many of the shots are poorly lit, even alarmingly dark, which not only makes them look drab but also makes the action hard to follow even for one familiar with the play. A fight scene that was started in Morocco is finished in Rome. Because Welles ran out of money and had to go get some more.
But Iago is simply splendid. He's cold, scornful, superior. His unnaturally pale face is the face of debauchery and evil, his frigid little eyes as dead as his soul, his voice with it's almost charming (and inauthentic) Irish lilt seductive and seditious. He oozes menace and mendacity from every pore of his being. Many of his best lines are cut, his monologues are all gone, but still his presence is the very heart of the movie. Iago is the movie. He quite steals it away from Welles and his strangely subdued Othello. Even when Welles really gets going there's Iago behind him, lurking in the shadows, whispering, stirring it up, causing affray, undulating evil. That is what he does, what he is: "Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe." Or: "Though in the trade of war I have slain men, yet do I hold it very stuff o'the conscience to do no contrived murder: I lack iniquity sometimes to do me service: nine or ten times I had thought t'have yerkt him here under the ribs." Splendid fellow, Iago.
Somewhere around the middle of the film or a bit thereafter things start improving markedly. The shots live and breathe, one gets a definite feel of the tragedy and its participants. This, I imagine, must be because we get scenes that were shot when doom wasn't imminent. When there were still prospects of a kind. And funds. The worst scenes, those shot in Venice, are the one's that open the movie. In them it is clear that all hope is lost.
But the end is good, solid, gripping. Desdemona's death grabs one by the throat, starts choking and won't let go.
Othello could have been Welles's independent masterpiece. Should have been. It isn't.
The whole project started badly (just after the disaster with his previous movie Macbeth which ended up being cut up and butchered quite severely as the studio didn't much care one way or the other - which is why Welles now felt that he had to have complete control over his film, however long it took to finish): the Italian backer went bankrupt. Iago, Everett Sloane, walked away during the early days of filming. Which meant that a great deal of film had to be re-shot. Sloane had played key roles in his previous movies: Bernstein in Citizen Kane and Bannister in Lady from Shanghai. He'd been with Welles ever since the Mercury theatre and radio days. Apparently there was real tension between the Sloane and Welles. Sloane was fed up with Welles's ego and quite possibly resented him. Maybe he was envious of Welles and his success. Which of course would have worked perfectly on film - Iago resenting and envying Othello (and who else would play the warlike Moor of Venice than Welles himself?). But Sloane decided to call it a day.
When Welles asked Carol Reed to approach James Mason for him for the role of Iago, Reed said Mason was all wrong and suggested the great Irish actor Micheál Mac Liammóir instead. Welles was sceptical but went along. So off the crew was to Morocco where the movie was to be filmed. Where, almost immediately, his Desdemona received a better offer and was out of there like a shot. Welles didn't let that minor setback impede the filming, he just started shooting around Desdemona, until he could get someone else.
Next the project was hampered and even seriously jeopardized by Mac Liammóir's sexual peccadilloes. The homosexual Mac Liammóir had a whale of a time picking up strange men all over the place. He especially enjoyed the company of policemen (and curiously enough quite a lot of them seemed to enjoy his company) and was constantly trying to seduce them. The governor had the film crew under surveillance and insisted that Welles read the reports daily. This embarrassed Welles a great deal. When Mac Liammóir found out that Welles knew exactly what he was up to and with whom he was delighted. It egged him on no end to have an audience for his rompy pompy. When the filming shifted to Venice Mac Liammóir was miserable as the move put an end to his happy carefree love life. He did however manage to have it off with a gondolier in so tempestuous a fashion that the gondolier was knocked right into the Canal Grande and almost drowned. Took a lot of money to hush it up.
Othello was Mac Liammóir's first movie even though he was in his fifties. (His only other notable film was the 1970 spy thriller The Kremlin Letter by John Huston in which Helsinki was tarted up as jolly old Moscow, as usual.) In Ireland he was a big name, a playwright, writer, manager, actor, designer, poet, painter, raconteur. He'd founded the famed Gate Theatre with his partner Hilton Edwards in 1928, played all the big roles, established himself as a stalwart champion of native Celtic culture. He wore an ill fitting black toupee, ever slightly askew, and painted his face a rather startling shade of orange. As if this wasn't quite enough he always wore a lot of mascara. According to Welles he looked like an "unemployed gypsy fiddler who ought to try and pull himself together." It was in fact Mac Liammóir who gave Welles his first professional acting job. That was in Dublin. Welles was sixteen at the time and loafing around the Irish countryside trying to become a painter. Which he soon chucked as he decided he wanted to be an actor instead. So he went to the Gate Theatre, bold as brass, and announced that he was an American actor and wanted a job. He also lied about his age. A complete fraud. Mac Liammóir took him on, maybe because he recognized something in young Welles, him being a complete and utter fraud himself. Mac Liammóir was in fact the ultimate fraud as everything about him was phony. He wasn't really Irish at all. He just made it up. He was a native Londoner called Alfred Willmore who just moved to Ireland, took a fancy to the place, learnt Irish, started using an Irish name, and told everybody that he was Irish. And everybody bought it. Which just goes to show that a successful actor really needs to be a huge fraud. (But fraudulence only succeeds when you're an interesting fraud, otherwise it's just a waste of everybody's time.)
Later the relationship between Mac Liammóir and Welles went sour. When Welles left the Gate he felt he'd been treated shabbily. Mac Liammóir, like Sloane, resented Welles's success and meteoric rise to fame. Who did this upstart boy think he was? Again, a good starting point for Iago and Othello, this mutual and heartfelt hostility and common grudge. You can't buy that stuff.
In 1952, at long last, the movie was finished - just in time for Cannes where it won the Palme d'Or. That didn't cut much ice with American distributors. Othello was released over there in 1955, after Welles had re-cut it and re-dubbed it. His recording equipment had been absolutely terrible and a lot of scenes had been shot with no sound at all. Interestingly enough he removed all of Desdemona's lines and did some of them himself.
Obviously, after all the work, all the effort, all the years he'd invested in the movie, all the money he'd spent on it, the movie was a complete commercial disaster. The critics quite liked it, the audience stayed away in droves.
How does the movie look today? Parts of it are superb, majestic, striking and visually exquisite. A lot of it, especially the bits in Venice, are cramped and poky, the pace is nervous, the images are never allowed to linger and have any sort of effect. There are too many words. The voice overs are horrible. The words eat up the power of the pictures and very much so vice versa. Shakespeare and film is never a happy match. In order really to do justice to Shakespeare on the silver screen one would have to cut most of the lines and tell the story in pictures instead of words, use the visceral poetry of images. Shakespeare's verse is too thick, too complex, too allencompassing, its texture too tightly knit to let anything else breathe in its vicinity. Unfortunately Shakespeare's words conjure up far more potent pictures than any film maker could. So most efforts are usually doomed before they start. Welles might have given it a very decent try, if only he'd have had money and time. It's painfully obvious that there was no money, even less time. He has the scenery, he has the settings, but such is his penury that he cannot stop to make use of them. There is no time. When you cannot show it you have to use a voice over. The dubbing is at times embarrassingly out of synch. Many of the shots are poorly lit, even alarmingly dark, which not only makes them look drab but also makes the action hard to follow even for one familiar with the play. A fight scene that was started in Morocco is finished in Rome. Because Welles ran out of money and had to go get some more.
But Iago is simply splendid. He's cold, scornful, superior. His unnaturally pale face is the face of debauchery and evil, his frigid little eyes as dead as his soul, his voice with it's almost charming (and inauthentic) Irish lilt seductive and seditious. He oozes menace and mendacity from every pore of his being. Many of his best lines are cut, his monologues are all gone, but still his presence is the very heart of the movie. Iago is the movie. He quite steals it away from Welles and his strangely subdued Othello. Even when Welles really gets going there's Iago behind him, lurking in the shadows, whispering, stirring it up, causing affray, undulating evil. That is what he does, what he is: "Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe." Or: "Though in the trade of war I have slain men, yet do I hold it very stuff o'the conscience to do no contrived murder: I lack iniquity sometimes to do me service: nine or ten times I had thought t'have yerkt him here under the ribs." Splendid fellow, Iago.
Somewhere around the middle of the film or a bit thereafter things start improving markedly. The shots live and breathe, one gets a definite feel of the tragedy and its participants. This, I imagine, must be because we get scenes that were shot when doom wasn't imminent. When there were still prospects of a kind. And funds. The worst scenes, those shot in Venice, are the one's that open the movie. In them it is clear that all hope is lost.
But the end is good, solid, gripping. Desdemona's death grabs one by the throat, starts choking and won't let go.
Othello could have been Welles's independent masterpiece. Should have been. It isn't.
22/09/2009
The Napoleon of Crime
Coming across John Gardner's Moriarty (2008) was a bit of a surprise. I'd heard of his previous Moriarty books from the '70s but never read them. Then I'd sort of all forgotten about them, as in those bygone and faraway days ordering books on the net wasn't an option. And now there was a spanking new one. Brilliant.
Fascinating character, Moriarty. Possibly because he's quite a shadowy figure, used very very sparsely by Doyle in his Holmes tales. In The Final Problem he makes his sinister, coldly menacing entrance - and in the same tale he makes his spectacular exit as well. He is never actually seen by Watson - what little we hear of him is told by Holmes to Watson, and by default, to the reader. Moriarty is a shadow lurking in the fog. He is omnipresent, well-nigh omnipotent and always almost inhumanly absent.
In physical appearance he is quite distinguished, as well befits an academic. "He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion." The description Holmes gives might, actually, be thought to bear something of a resemblance to himself? The tall gauntness, the bulging forehead, the cold pale cerebralism, the extreme asceticism? "He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them."
Because we know so very little about him we're almost compelled to fill the blanks by ourselves. He's too big a character to be so absent in the Canon. Or is it his absence, or his suspected or even partly sensed presence, that indeed makes him so big?
The description Doyle gives of him is curiously incomplete, even flawed. His name is James Moriarty and he has two brothers - at least one of whom is also called James! Is James, then, a surname? Or do the three brothers share a common name? Rummy, to say the least, jolly rummy.
According to an erudite article by the learned Doylean scholar Owen Dudley Edwards, published in The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6: 1995), the name might well hail from Doyle's schooldays at Stonyhurst. There he attended the lessons given by the Jesuits alongside no less than two Moriartys, both winning prizes in mathematics - and one of them a J. Moriarty! James? Would that be too easy an explanation? (It would indeed: when once more I glance through the article I find that Moriarty's name is in fact John and that later he becomes a distinguished barrister, a K.C., and ends up a Lord Justice - there's irony for you!) Fascinatingly enough Edwards also found a Sherlock among the pupils, a Patrick Sherlock, a particularly dim boy according to the Jesuits. So Doyle naming his almost supernaturally clever detective Sherlock may have been nothing less than a huge joke. (Although young Sherlock seems to have had some talent in acting.) But I'm digressing.
In Nicholas Meyer's excellent classic The Seven-Per-Cent Solution Moriarty turns out not to be a master criminal at all, but rather young Sherlock's tutor with whom his mother had an illicit affair, causing Sherlock's father to kill her and then himself. In Robert Lee Hall's pretty nifty Exit Sherlock Holmes Moriarty, like Holmes, turns out to be a genius renegade time traveller from the future. According to an essay by William Leonard in a 1957 issue of The Baker Street Journal (also found in Peter Haining's A Sherlock Holmes Compendium) the horrid professor is no less a personage than count Dracula.
Or was there ever such a man as Moriarty? Because Watson never sees him, because we only ever hear of him, might he not be a pure fabrication? Just something Holmes makes up as he goes a little funny in the head? A distinct possibility, one surmises, especially bearing in mind how like Holmes Moriarty is supposed to be - a veritable black Holmes. Why does he spring Moriarty so suddenly on Watson? Why has Watson never heard of him if he's such a king pin in the London underworld and the great detective's constant adversary? Yet Holmes has never bothered to mention him to Watson, never once. A bit odd, innit? And then Holmes just disappears for three years. How convenient. How bizarre.
Well be that as it may, Moriarty has a huge role in the Sherlockian mythology, particularly when one considers that he's only ever mentioned in three stories: The Final Problem, The Empty House and the novel The Valley of Fear. In the movies, especially the older ones, he's pretty much the stock villain, chewing the carpet and foaming at the mouth like nobody's business.
Gardner approaches Moriarty a little differently, which is quite refreshing really. He strips the character of any and all Sherlockian mythology and makes him a Victorian crime boss. Not a super-villain at all (never mind what the back cover of my paperback claims!). In fact, professor Moriarty isn't even professor Moriarty but his youngest brother the station master who's killed the professor and taken his place - a slightly bizarre twist that. And yes, all three brothers are called James.
Interestingly enough good old Sherlock merits nary a mention in the book. The novel is quite serious and realistic, almost naturalistic, the pace slow and deliberate, the settings elaborate and careful and superbly researched. Gardner knows a lot about Victorian London and its criminal underworld and he's not afraid to let it show. The plot, in short, is as follows: Moriarty has been away for a while and now he returns. Upon his return he finds he has a problem. One of his closest men is a traitor, working for the thoroughly despicable rival crime boss Sir Jack Idell or Idle Jack who's trying to take over Moriarty's turf and businesses.
Some of the subplots are pretty hilarious - like Moriarty's acquiring a dead ringer for the late lamented Prince Albert and using said ringer to produce a set of highly lascivious pornographic pictures with which to blackmail the Queen! Not a really viable idea, as it turns out. Not surprisingly.
But all in all the novel didn't do much for me. The pacing was too slow, the characters lack-luster and plain dull, the plot surprisingly heavy going, almost plodding. I found myself just not caring what happened or to whom. Turned out that Moriarty without Holmes was quite an unglamorous and dull fellow. I might have enjoyed the book as such a great deal more if the protagonist wouldn't have been called Moriarty and if there had been no Holmes connection whatsoever. His shadow is too large, and his presence too powerful even when he isn't present.
Moriarty was published posthumously. Gardner's two previous Moriarty books (Return of Moriarty and Revenge of Moriarty) were published in the '70s. There was supposed to be a trilogy then but he had a row of some sort with his publisher and the third book was never published. Was it, I wonder, written over thirty years ago or quite recently? Would be interesting to know. Haven't read the first two ones, as I already mentioned (don't know if they've ever been re-issued), so I may judge the last book too harshly. Maybe it all makes perfect sense when you've read the entire trilogy. Dunno. Still, bit of a disappointment all said and done.
Fascinating character, Moriarty. Possibly because he's quite a shadowy figure, used very very sparsely by Doyle in his Holmes tales. In The Final Problem he makes his sinister, coldly menacing entrance - and in the same tale he makes his spectacular exit as well. He is never actually seen by Watson - what little we hear of him is told by Holmes to Watson, and by default, to the reader. Moriarty is a shadow lurking in the fog. He is omnipresent, well-nigh omnipotent and always almost inhumanly absent.
In physical appearance he is quite distinguished, as well befits an academic. "He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion." The description Holmes gives might, actually, be thought to bear something of a resemblance to himself? The tall gauntness, the bulging forehead, the cold pale cerebralism, the extreme asceticism? "He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them."
Because we know so very little about him we're almost compelled to fill the blanks by ourselves. He's too big a character to be so absent in the Canon. Or is it his absence, or his suspected or even partly sensed presence, that indeed makes him so big?
The description Doyle gives of him is curiously incomplete, even flawed. His name is James Moriarty and he has two brothers - at least one of whom is also called James! Is James, then, a surname? Or do the three brothers share a common name? Rummy, to say the least, jolly rummy.
According to an erudite article by the learned Doylean scholar Owen Dudley Edwards, published in The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6: 1995), the name might well hail from Doyle's schooldays at Stonyhurst. There he attended the lessons given by the Jesuits alongside no less than two Moriartys, both winning prizes in mathematics - and one of them a J. Moriarty! James? Would that be too easy an explanation? (It would indeed: when once more I glance through the article I find that Moriarty's name is in fact John and that later he becomes a distinguished barrister, a K.C., and ends up a Lord Justice - there's irony for you!) Fascinatingly enough Edwards also found a Sherlock among the pupils, a Patrick Sherlock, a particularly dim boy according to the Jesuits. So Doyle naming his almost supernaturally clever detective Sherlock may have been nothing less than a huge joke. (Although young Sherlock seems to have had some talent in acting.) But I'm digressing.
In Nicholas Meyer's excellent classic The Seven-Per-Cent Solution Moriarty turns out not to be a master criminal at all, but rather young Sherlock's tutor with whom his mother had an illicit affair, causing Sherlock's father to kill her and then himself. In Robert Lee Hall's pretty nifty Exit Sherlock Holmes Moriarty, like Holmes, turns out to be a genius renegade time traveller from the future. According to an essay by William Leonard in a 1957 issue of The Baker Street Journal (also found in Peter Haining's A Sherlock Holmes Compendium) the horrid professor is no less a personage than count Dracula.
Or was there ever such a man as Moriarty? Because Watson never sees him, because we only ever hear of him, might he not be a pure fabrication? Just something Holmes makes up as he goes a little funny in the head? A distinct possibility, one surmises, especially bearing in mind how like Holmes Moriarty is supposed to be - a veritable black Holmes. Why does he spring Moriarty so suddenly on Watson? Why has Watson never heard of him if he's such a king pin in the London underworld and the great detective's constant adversary? Yet Holmes has never bothered to mention him to Watson, never once. A bit odd, innit? And then Holmes just disappears for three years. How convenient. How bizarre.
Well be that as it may, Moriarty has a huge role in the Sherlockian mythology, particularly when one considers that he's only ever mentioned in three stories: The Final Problem, The Empty House and the novel The Valley of Fear. In the movies, especially the older ones, he's pretty much the stock villain, chewing the carpet and foaming at the mouth like nobody's business.
Gardner approaches Moriarty a little differently, which is quite refreshing really. He strips the character of any and all Sherlockian mythology and makes him a Victorian crime boss. Not a super-villain at all (never mind what the back cover of my paperback claims!). In fact, professor Moriarty isn't even professor Moriarty but his youngest brother the station master who's killed the professor and taken his place - a slightly bizarre twist that. And yes, all three brothers are called James.
Interestingly enough good old Sherlock merits nary a mention in the book. The novel is quite serious and realistic, almost naturalistic, the pace slow and deliberate, the settings elaborate and careful and superbly researched. Gardner knows a lot about Victorian London and its criminal underworld and he's not afraid to let it show. The plot, in short, is as follows: Moriarty has been away for a while and now he returns. Upon his return he finds he has a problem. One of his closest men is a traitor, working for the thoroughly despicable rival crime boss Sir Jack Idell or Idle Jack who's trying to take over Moriarty's turf and businesses.
Some of the subplots are pretty hilarious - like Moriarty's acquiring a dead ringer for the late lamented Prince Albert and using said ringer to produce a set of highly lascivious pornographic pictures with which to blackmail the Queen! Not a really viable idea, as it turns out. Not surprisingly.
But all in all the novel didn't do much for me. The pacing was too slow, the characters lack-luster and plain dull, the plot surprisingly heavy going, almost plodding. I found myself just not caring what happened or to whom. Turned out that Moriarty without Holmes was quite an unglamorous and dull fellow. I might have enjoyed the book as such a great deal more if the protagonist wouldn't have been called Moriarty and if there had been no Holmes connection whatsoever. His shadow is too large, and his presence too powerful even when he isn't present.
Moriarty was published posthumously. Gardner's two previous Moriarty books (Return of Moriarty and Revenge of Moriarty) were published in the '70s. There was supposed to be a trilogy then but he had a row of some sort with his publisher and the third book was never published. Was it, I wonder, written over thirty years ago or quite recently? Would be interesting to know. Haven't read the first two ones, as I already mentioned (don't know if they've ever been re-issued), so I may judge the last book too harshly. Maybe it all makes perfect sense when you've read the entire trilogy. Dunno. Still, bit of a disappointment all said and done.
19/09/2009
Ladies in lakes or pools
Dames. They're just shifty. Especially if they're beautiful. Can't trust them in a noir. Not even once. When are fellows gonna learn that? Well, hopefully never. Wouldn't be any noirs if they did, would there?
Been watching a lot of noirs lately. They're pretty good even when they're pretty bad.
Hadn't seen Lady in the Lake, curiously enough. It's one of the earlier Marlowe movies (made in 1947, only a few years after the novel was published) with Robert Montgomery as the director and also, alas and alack, as our hero. Despite that it isn't altogether a worthless movie.Been watching a lot of noirs lately. They're pretty good even when they're pretty bad.
What makes it quite interesting is the direction. Or, actually, the camera work. We see everything through the eyes of Marlowe. The camera is the hero, as it were. Now this idea occurred to Welles also before he made his Citizen Kane. His original idea was to make Conrad's Heart of Darkness precisely that way, have the camera see everything Marlow saw, have the camera be Marlow. Then he abandoned the idea. Don't quite know why. But, having seen Montgomery's Lady in the Lake I have a pretty good idea.
Still, a very brave experiment. Got to give them credit for that. I have a gut feeling that Welles pulled the plug on his Heart of Darkness because he realised that it just wasn't a viable project. Interesting idea but couldn't be done. Montgomery probably went ahead because he wasn't savvy enough to realise that.
The dames aren't as bad as they could be, or, indeed, as they rightfully should be. The murderess is only seen in two shortish scenes and the other skirt turns out not to be nearly as nasty as she at first appears. So Marlowe has a soppy, wholly gratuitous and quite boring romance with her. Miss Wonderly she ain't, despite a promising start. But neither is Montgomery Bogart. He isn't even Dick Powell (who's best remembered for his musicals), and that's really saying something.
And Gene Tierney ain't half bad either. No great surprise there.
The villain of the piece, a delightfully smooth and suave José Ferrer (shortly before he became Cyrano, by the way) in whose mouth even butter wouldn't melt, sees to it that Tierney doesn't get prosecuted for a spot of shoplifting she's done. Scandal is avoided but now Tierney's at the mercy of Ferrer. She believes he's trying to blackmail her and writes him a cheque. He plays it very gently, destroys the cheque and hands her the evidence that proves her guilt. He only wants to help her, he says. She wants to believe him. He then hypnotizes her so that she overcomes her sleeping disorder. Then he hypnotizes her some more and frames her for a murder he commits.
The latter part of the movie doesn't quite hold up, doesn't deliver what the first part promises, and the ending's just too easy and far from convincing. It all becomes a muddle, really. Slightly rewritten this might have made a pretty good episode of Columbo. Funny thing is, Ferrer did later appear in an episode of Columbo. Played the villain, obviously.
Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1947) may be one of Welles' best movies. I like the mood, the imagery, the settings. The story isn't much to write home about but one hardly notices. Or cares. It just doesn't matter. Rita Hayworth is about as beautiful as she's ever been and she is the movie. No question about that.
Nice as well to see a lot of familiar faces from the Mercury era, a lot of them having worked with Welles even in the old radio days. Which makes for a tight cast working together like clockwork.
The final scene with the mirrors is considered a classic. To me it's slightly tacky and far from being genius. It works but is scarcely as profound as the diehard Wellesians would have it. But. It is memorable. It is what everyone remembers about the movie. So I may well be wrong.
Finally there's Detour (1945), a minor cult classic by Edgar G. Ulmer. Here's another one I'd managed to avoid for far too long. Detour is a tight and nasty little shocker, a veritable short story of a movie, only about an hour long. I'd love to say there's not an ounce of fat anywhere in the movie. Truthfully, I'd cut several early scenes as they really don't add anything to the movie and just hold up the action.
Tom Neal plays a New York pianist who's off to L.A. to see his girlfriend. He's short on money so he hitchhikes. One of the drivers goes and dies on him in shady circumstances. Neal figures the cops are going to pin the death on him, so he ditches the body and takes the driver's identity.
On the way he picks up a girl, the aptly named Ann Savage. Big mistake. Turns out the savage Savage recognises the car and knows Neal isn't who he's pretending to be. She starts putting the screws on him. She's as hard as nails and knows there's some way money might be made out of this. Maybe they should sell the car when they get to L.A.
They try to do that. Then Savage discovers something.
She finds out that the driver's father is a rich man and he's on his deathbed. The driver left home in his teens so nobody knows what he looks like today. Neal could pretend to be him and collect - collect big. They'd both be set for life. Neal doesn't want to do that. She pleads with him. He utterly refuses. But Savage has a hold over him, she can spill the beans to the cops - there's no way Neal could convince anyone he didn't kill the driver. Not after he stole his car and identity. Nobody would ever believe him. Not the way Savage would tell it.
They go to their hotel room. They drink. The bicker and argue. Savage makes a pass at Neal. Neal shoots her down. She doesn't much like that. She locks herself in the bedroom to sulk. Neal tries to phone his girlfriend. Savage hears and threatens to call the cops. She snatches the phone and again locks herself in the bedroom. Neal tries to stop her by pulling on the cord.
He accidentally strangles her with the phone cord. Now he really is a murderer. He makes his getaway but knows the game's up. The movie closes with the cops picking him up. He makes no effort to try to escape. What's the use. He never gets a break.
A great little film. Would have been a lot better with a more polished and balanced script but the studio, the tiny PRC, didn't believe in wasting money on foolish things like that. Ulmer did a great job with what little resources he had. Savage is outstanding. The way her mood swings, the way she reacts, the way she spits out her sneering lines, the way she manipulates poor Neal. Savage in Detour is the quintessential film noir dame. What makes the performance so shattering is that it's so real, so believable, so true. This is a real woman. And all the more lethal for it.
18/09/2009
Fallet Tulindberg
De senaste månaderna har komponisten jag mest aktivt hållit på med (bortsett från de självklara gubbarna Bach, Händel och Wagner) hetat Erik Tulindberg. Först för att jag tyckte att han var en charmant kuriositet, sedan för att jag snabbt insåg att han är lite sjuttons bra. Och ju mera jag lyssnar på hans verk desto mera begeistrad blir jag.
Namnet kan vara något obekant även för den som är bevandrad i musikens annaler. Erik Tulindberg (1761-1814) är Finlands första komponist. Så heter det och så är det. Hans produktion är liten men av synnerligen hög kvalitet. En del av kompositionerna har försvunnit men kvar har vi sex fräscha stråkkvartetter, en dynamisk violinkonsert och något litet för soloviolin. Åtminstone en violinkonsert är borta, det vet vi.
Det imponerande med Tulindberg är att han komponerade allt han komponerade när han var kring tjugo, lite på. Sex kvartetter, två violinkonserter, och ingen vet väl riktigt hur mycket har gått förlorat. (Det måste finnas ett och annat.) Och allt detta medan han studerade i Åbo (eller kanske man borde säga levde ett glatt studentliv i Åbo?). Han var en munter karl, ytterst god violinist, och tog ej sina studier med alltför mycket allvar. 1782 utexaminerades han och 1784, 23 år gammal, flyttade han till Uleåborg där han blev tjänsteman. Till slut blev han rent av landets finansminister. Stackars människa.
Inga kompositioner efter det. Inte en enda. Han spelade gärna violin, särskilt kvartetter, men det var inte möjligt att göra det alltför ofta i den dystra och avlägsna provinsen där det musikaliska livet var outvecklat. När upptäcktsresanden Giuseppe Acerbi reste till Lappland gjorde han sin resa via Uleåborg och besökte Tulindberg. Acerbi var en splendid violinist han också och herrarna musicerade nöjt tillsammans. Spelade de måhända Tulindbergs egna kvartetter? Det känner vi inte till. En satisfierande tanke dock.
1797 valdes Tulindberg in i Kungliga Musikaliska Akademin, men inte för sina kompositioner. Nej. Utan för att han hade samlat in folkmelodier.
Naturligtvis glömdes han bort. Helt och hållet. Hans produktion var ju trots allt liten och rykte mer eller mindre lokalt. Spelades han utomlands? Åtminstone Stockholm verkar sannolik, men på den tiden hörde man ju ihop.
Och bortglömd förblev han i generationer. Ända tills 20-talet. Det var nämligen först år 1925 som någon upptäckte sex stycken dammiga partiturer på universitetsbiblioteket. Stråkkvartetterna. Först trodde man att Tulindberg hade kopierat någon annans kvartetter. Det var en närmast omöjlig tanke att någon i Finland skulle ha kunnat komponera så intrikata och originella stycken så tidigt som på 1780-talet. Sedan studerade man partiturerna lite noggrannare och insåg att de faktiskt var Tulindbergs egna kompositioner - och landets tidigaste stråkkvartetter. Och styckena var så pass fina att de var fortfarande värda att spelas.
Men. Det fattades en stämma, andra violinen. Detta bevisade, ansågs det, att kompositionerna verkligen hade uppförts och en av musikanterna hade glömt bort att återlämna sina noter. Stämman återskapades. Först av John Rosas och Toivo Haapanen, sedan av Kalevi Aho och till sist av Anssi Mattila. Så nu existerar det tre lite olika versioner av Tulindbergs sex stråkkvartetter. Inte så dumt det heller.
Violinkonserten i sin tur hittades år 1956 i Kungliga Musikaliska Akademiens bibliotek. Så att kanske hade den uppförts i Stockholm?
Det gör nästan ont när man tänker på hur mycket Tulindberg kunde ha komponerat. Och hur fina styckena kunde ha - skulle ha - blivit. Symfonier, operor, konserter. Allt. Men nej. I stället för att bli Den Finländska Musikens Fader valde att bli tjänsteman istället.
Jag vet inte. Kanske hade han inget mer att säga som komponist. Men en riktig konstnär kan väl bara inte sluta sådär? Och leva i det filistinska mörkret och den småborgerliga kylan i över trettio år? Kanske komponerade han en stor mängd saker men rev sedan sönder dem för att de trots allt inte blev så bra som han ville?
Eller, kanske, kommer någon en dag att göra ett sällsamt fynd någonstans i Uleåborgs vildmarker?
Namnet kan vara något obekant även för den som är bevandrad i musikens annaler. Erik Tulindberg (1761-1814) är Finlands första komponist. Så heter det och så är det. Hans produktion är liten men av synnerligen hög kvalitet. En del av kompositionerna har försvunnit men kvar har vi sex fräscha stråkkvartetter, en dynamisk violinkonsert och något litet för soloviolin. Åtminstone en violinkonsert är borta, det vet vi.
Det imponerande med Tulindberg är att han komponerade allt han komponerade när han var kring tjugo, lite på. Sex kvartetter, två violinkonserter, och ingen vet väl riktigt hur mycket har gått förlorat. (Det måste finnas ett och annat.) Och allt detta medan han studerade i Åbo (eller kanske man borde säga levde ett glatt studentliv i Åbo?). Han var en munter karl, ytterst god violinist, och tog ej sina studier med alltför mycket allvar. 1782 utexaminerades han och 1784, 23 år gammal, flyttade han till Uleåborg där han blev tjänsteman. Till slut blev han rent av landets finansminister. Stackars människa.
Inga kompositioner efter det. Inte en enda. Han spelade gärna violin, särskilt kvartetter, men det var inte möjligt att göra det alltför ofta i den dystra och avlägsna provinsen där det musikaliska livet var outvecklat. När upptäcktsresanden Giuseppe Acerbi reste till Lappland gjorde han sin resa via Uleåborg och besökte Tulindberg. Acerbi var en splendid violinist han också och herrarna musicerade nöjt tillsammans. Spelade de måhända Tulindbergs egna kvartetter? Det känner vi inte till. En satisfierande tanke dock.
1797 valdes Tulindberg in i Kungliga Musikaliska Akademin, men inte för sina kompositioner. Nej. Utan för att han hade samlat in folkmelodier.
Naturligtvis glömdes han bort. Helt och hållet. Hans produktion var ju trots allt liten och rykte mer eller mindre lokalt. Spelades han utomlands? Åtminstone Stockholm verkar sannolik, men på den tiden hörde man ju ihop.
Och bortglömd förblev han i generationer. Ända tills 20-talet. Det var nämligen först år 1925 som någon upptäckte sex stycken dammiga partiturer på universitetsbiblioteket. Stråkkvartetterna. Först trodde man att Tulindberg hade kopierat någon annans kvartetter. Det var en närmast omöjlig tanke att någon i Finland skulle ha kunnat komponera så intrikata och originella stycken så tidigt som på 1780-talet. Sedan studerade man partiturerna lite noggrannare och insåg att de faktiskt var Tulindbergs egna kompositioner - och landets tidigaste stråkkvartetter. Och styckena var så pass fina att de var fortfarande värda att spelas.
Men. Det fattades en stämma, andra violinen. Detta bevisade, ansågs det, att kompositionerna verkligen hade uppförts och en av musikanterna hade glömt bort att återlämna sina noter. Stämman återskapades. Först av John Rosas och Toivo Haapanen, sedan av Kalevi Aho och till sist av Anssi Mattila. Så nu existerar det tre lite olika versioner av Tulindbergs sex stråkkvartetter. Inte så dumt det heller.
Violinkonserten i sin tur hittades år 1956 i Kungliga Musikaliska Akademiens bibliotek. Så att kanske hade den uppförts i Stockholm?
Det gör nästan ont när man tänker på hur mycket Tulindberg kunde ha komponerat. Och hur fina styckena kunde ha - skulle ha - blivit. Symfonier, operor, konserter. Allt. Men nej. I stället för att bli Den Finländska Musikens Fader valde att bli tjänsteman istället.
Jag vet inte. Kanske hade han inget mer att säga som komponist. Men en riktig konstnär kan väl bara inte sluta sådär? Och leva i det filistinska mörkret och den småborgerliga kylan i över trettio år? Kanske komponerade han en stor mängd saker men rev sedan sönder dem för att de trots allt inte blev så bra som han ville?
Eller, kanske, kommer någon en dag att göra ett sällsamt fynd någonstans i Uleåborgs vildmarker?
15/09/2009
Autobiographical Python
One thing in particular struck me while I was reading The Pythons Autobiography by The Pythons, very ably edited by Bob McCabe (who to my great surprise and considerable relief turned out not to be the same fellow at all as Graham McCann who wrote a pretty bleak and amazingly unfunny book about Fawlty Towers - something that quite honestly I thought would not be humanly possible): the Conflict.
However did these chaps agree on anything? Cleese seems aloof. He's really got better things to do. It's all a bit silly really. Not to say repetitive and somewhat boring. Chapman's drunk. Mostly. Or then he's off chasing boys. Terry Jones is obsessed with every slight detail and disagrees with anything Cleese says. Cleese is his bete noire. And he just won't give in. And if he does he'll recant tomorrow. Terry Gilliam wants to be heard and taken seriously. I mean, although he is an American, he's still a Python. Idle is the lone wolf. He's always the underdog. Cleese and Chapman write together, so do Jones and Palin. So in a vote they've got two votes automatically, by default. Who's Idle got? Sweet FA, that's who. Palin is just too nice and can't say no. He shrugs away from conflict. That's a problem.
Whenever anyone in the book says anything (the book is composed of quotes), another Python entirely disagrees. "This was terrible" is at once countered with "What a great success". "This was our aim" is countered with "That was never what we tried to do". To the outside eye it very much looks like these fellows never agree on anything. It is indeed a miracle that anything gets done. But it was. And we all know the absolute heights they scaled.
It all spells serious conflict. Now that's important. The internal conflict within the group. It seems to me that it's quite impossible to achieve anything worthwhile if everybody agrees. Conflict guarantees that everybody will do his best. There's no alternative. There's always a lethal competition going on. Second rate ideas just won't cut it. Sometimes even first rate ideas won't do - if someone's feeling bloody.
It works. The results are, notoriously, amazing. The conflicts just guarantee that no substandard material will end up in the series or in any movie. Then, after a while, nothing. The conflicts are too great. There's no cohesion any longer. Everybody's got other things to do. Chapman's dead. (And insists on staying dead.) Palin travels. Jones writes books, makes BBC thingies and directs. Gilliam is in Hollywood. Cleese is in business. Eric Idle is the only one who really wants Python. Who needs Python. The other ones would like to, sort of, but it's simply too difficult. So after The Meaning of Life it all falls apart - and even the Meaning suffers from a lack of polishing the script; it's not a movie at all but a collection of skits, and just because the Pythons couldn't be bothered with finishing the script. So they simply didn't. It's funny, contains some of the best Python sketches, but a movie it isn't.
So the thing that makes them great eventually pulls the group asunder. That's the nature of the beast. Control it or it will destroy you. And in the end it will destroy you no matter what.
Well, they had good innings. We're satisfied.
However did these chaps agree on anything? Cleese seems aloof. He's really got better things to do. It's all a bit silly really. Not to say repetitive and somewhat boring. Chapman's drunk. Mostly. Or then he's off chasing boys. Terry Jones is obsessed with every slight detail and disagrees with anything Cleese says. Cleese is his bete noire. And he just won't give in. And if he does he'll recant tomorrow. Terry Gilliam wants to be heard and taken seriously. I mean, although he is an American, he's still a Python. Idle is the lone wolf. He's always the underdog. Cleese and Chapman write together, so do Jones and Palin. So in a vote they've got two votes automatically, by default. Who's Idle got? Sweet FA, that's who. Palin is just too nice and can't say no. He shrugs away from conflict. That's a problem.
Whenever anyone in the book says anything (the book is composed of quotes), another Python entirely disagrees. "This was terrible" is at once countered with "What a great success". "This was our aim" is countered with "That was never what we tried to do". To the outside eye it very much looks like these fellows never agree on anything. It is indeed a miracle that anything gets done. But it was. And we all know the absolute heights they scaled.
It all spells serious conflict. Now that's important. The internal conflict within the group. It seems to me that it's quite impossible to achieve anything worthwhile if everybody agrees. Conflict guarantees that everybody will do his best. There's no alternative. There's always a lethal competition going on. Second rate ideas just won't cut it. Sometimes even first rate ideas won't do - if someone's feeling bloody.
It works. The results are, notoriously, amazing. The conflicts just guarantee that no substandard material will end up in the series or in any movie. Then, after a while, nothing. The conflicts are too great. There's no cohesion any longer. Everybody's got other things to do. Chapman's dead. (And insists on staying dead.) Palin travels. Jones writes books, makes BBC thingies and directs. Gilliam is in Hollywood. Cleese is in business. Eric Idle is the only one who really wants Python. Who needs Python. The other ones would like to, sort of, but it's simply too difficult. So after The Meaning of Life it all falls apart - and even the Meaning suffers from a lack of polishing the script; it's not a movie at all but a collection of skits, and just because the Pythons couldn't be bothered with finishing the script. So they simply didn't. It's funny, contains some of the best Python sketches, but a movie it isn't.
So the thing that makes them great eventually pulls the group asunder. That's the nature of the beast. Control it or it will destroy you. And in the end it will destroy you no matter what.
Well, they had good innings. We're satisfied.
14/09/2009
Science Fiction Treasure Trove
Right ho - this is a splendid one: StarShipSofa.com. Came across it on Facebook, so I guess Facebook isn't always and every time an utter and complete waste of everyone's time. (Or do I express myself too strongly? The verdict is still firmly out on that one.) What it is, is a weekly (!) magazine filled with absolute science fiction goodies. I mean really the best of the best, so to say. But it's not something to be read, it's something to be listened to: a podcast. A podcast magazine, in fact. Now there's a thought. And a good one to boot. It works!
I especially enjoy the publisher, Tony C. Smith, with his broad and boisterous Newcastle accent and his invincible good humour when he does his editorials. Good and intelligent stories are fun so why not let it show?
And the writers! Well there's pretty much everybody who's anybody. Neil Gaiman, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Geoff Ryman, Neal Asher, Elizabeth Bear, Spider Robinson, Karen Joy Fowler. To name but a few. There's a quite heartrending contribution by the incomparable Michael Bishop, a story he wrote after his son was killed in the Virginia Tech massacre. And, on a more positive note, there's a story by talented compatriot Hannu Rajaniemi (kudos, young Sir!) called His Master's Voice. But it would be entirely pointless to catalogue all stories. They're legion and they're solid, so there. Don't just take my word for it, check them out for yourself.
But. Here's the thing. What really annoys me. I mean, honestly. Is there any defence? I mean any? Hardly. Don't think so. Couldn't possibly be. What I want to know is: why haven't I been told about this site earlier? How come, to use a very apt Americanism. Who's to blame? Me? (I'll let that slide just this once.) But, luckily, it don't matter none that I'm a johnny-come-lately, all the previous podcasts are accessible, so no harm done really. Easy to download and a pleasure to hear.
But. There are something like a hundred issues of StarShipSofa out there. So no time to loose. Gotta get cracking.
I especially enjoy the publisher, Tony C. Smith, with his broad and boisterous Newcastle accent and his invincible good humour when he does his editorials. Good and intelligent stories are fun so why not let it show?
And the writers! Well there's pretty much everybody who's anybody. Neil Gaiman, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Geoff Ryman, Neal Asher, Elizabeth Bear, Spider Robinson, Karen Joy Fowler. To name but a few. There's a quite heartrending contribution by the incomparable Michael Bishop, a story he wrote after his son was killed in the Virginia Tech massacre. And, on a more positive note, there's a story by talented compatriot Hannu Rajaniemi (kudos, young Sir!) called His Master's Voice. But it would be entirely pointless to catalogue all stories. They're legion and they're solid, so there. Don't just take my word for it, check them out for yourself.
But. Here's the thing. What really annoys me. I mean, honestly. Is there any defence? I mean any? Hardly. Don't think so. Couldn't possibly be. What I want to know is: why haven't I been told about this site earlier? How come, to use a very apt Americanism. Who's to blame? Me? (I'll let that slide just this once.) But, luckily, it don't matter none that I'm a johnny-come-lately, all the previous podcasts are accessible, so no harm done really. Easy to download and a pleasure to hear.
But. There are something like a hundred issues of StarShipSofa out there. So no time to loose. Gotta get cracking.
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