The Goldfinch is a book I found quite compelling and enjoyable but one I would only recommend to some people, particularly those who like Salinger and Robert Goddard (John Major's favorite writer): the style and first-person narration remind me of Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass while the stolen-art plot reminds me of many Goddard novels. Theo Decker, who narrates most of the book as a thirteen-year-old, is very much like a member of the Glass family, though he is on the East Side and, as he tells his mother early on, "Franny and Zooey was the West Side." And he is rather like Holden Caulfield (on drugs, which Decker starts taking after his mother dies) in his puncturing of adult pomposity and his observant similes:
He looked partly like a rodeo guy and partly like a fucked-up lounge singer.
Like a pair of weakling ants under a magnifying glass.
With svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship.
Everything seemed slow like I was moving through deep water.
Streets gray like old newspaper.
The book has a wealth of intelligent references to everyone from Tacitus to Walt Whitman and shows an understanding and appreciation of New York, including Film Forum, my favorite place to see movies (they have movies worth seeing). As the book moves from New York (where Theo's mother dies) to Las Vegas (where his father dies) to Amsterdam (when he is in his twenties) Theo keeps his thoughts on Carel Fabritius's 1654 painting The Goldfinch, which he rescued from an explosion and is the one permanent thing in his life, and Tartt keeps the narrative going with the appearances of Theo's friend Boris, a strange and helpful personality.
John Ford's Upstream (1927) was recently shown on TCM, part of the series of films found recently in New Zealand, one of the 11 films now known to exist of the 60 or so films that Ford made before 1928. As Tag Gallagher says, in his thorough and excellent John Ford The Man and His Films (1986, University of California Press): "Many mysteries would be clarified, were fewer early films lost." Upstream looks backward to D.W. Griffith, with its emphasis on subtle and low-key acting, and forward to the sound films, with its emphasis on group camaraderie (in this case, in a theatrical boarding house). Ford's ability to convey a great deal within a single shot is very much in evidence here, especially the shot where the elderly drama coach, who tried to teach the importance of the play itself, wearily climbs the stairs behind the celebration for the actor who values his own acting more.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Chaplin
The November issue of The New Criterion has an excellent article on the humanities by Mark Bauerlein:
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/What Dido-did--Satan-saw--O-Keefe-painted-7728
in which he says:
To attract the undergraduate who focuses narrowly on career and the CEO with $10 million to give, advocates should realize, don't wax righteous or pragmatic about the humanities as a bloc or as an instrument. Rather, show them vivid images of architecture in Washington, D.C.; recount Captain Ahab on the quarterdeck enlisting the crew in his obsession, or Dido's reaction once she learns her beloved Aeneas has slipped away in the night, or Satan in the Garden eyeing Adam and Eve, tormented by their innocence and plotting their ruin; stage the avid sadism of Regan and Goneril or the banter of Algernon and Ernest; or run the final scene when the Tramp, just out of prison, turns to face the blind flower girl, now cured, who clasps his hand, grimaces at the sight of him, and mutters, "Yes, I now can see." These are the materials of inspiration, and they are the highest card the humanists can play.
I think this is sound advice, though I will leave for another time the discussion of how effective it will be with the many undergraduates who have never read a book, seen a painting or been to the theatre or a concert. What most impressed me about this passage was the intelligent inclusion of Chaplin's City Lights. Chaplin is one of the few filmmakers who my fifteen-year-old son loves and I think this is not only because he is funny, but also because of his intense humanity and compassion. When I first starting going to the movies seriously the Chaplin films were unavailable, except for poor prints of The Gold Rush, which for complicated reasons had fallen into the public domain. Gradually the films began to be released, the lovely A Woman of Paris last (I knew people who had gone to East Berlin to see the only available copy) and I urge anyone who has not seen them to do so, ideally in a theatre (Film Forum shows them fairly often); one may not find them funny but Chaplin moves like a ballet dancer and constructs his gags elegantly without ever sacrificing the context for a cheap laugh (unlike Woody Allen, who some young New Yorkers said they preferred when the Chaplin movies began to surface). Chaplin's films are amazingly resonant today, when we need laughter and compassion more than ever.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/What Dido-did--Satan-saw--O-Keefe-painted-7728
in which he says:
To attract the undergraduate who focuses narrowly on career and the CEO with $10 million to give, advocates should realize, don't wax righteous or pragmatic about the humanities as a bloc or as an instrument. Rather, show them vivid images of architecture in Washington, D.C.; recount Captain Ahab on the quarterdeck enlisting the crew in his obsession, or Dido's reaction once she learns her beloved Aeneas has slipped away in the night, or Satan in the Garden eyeing Adam and Eve, tormented by their innocence and plotting their ruin; stage the avid sadism of Regan and Goneril or the banter of Algernon and Ernest; or run the final scene when the Tramp, just out of prison, turns to face the blind flower girl, now cured, who clasps his hand, grimaces at the sight of him, and mutters, "Yes, I now can see." These are the materials of inspiration, and they are the highest card the humanists can play.
I think this is sound advice, though I will leave for another time the discussion of how effective it will be with the many undergraduates who have never read a book, seen a painting or been to the theatre or a concert. What most impressed me about this passage was the intelligent inclusion of Chaplin's City Lights. Chaplin is one of the few filmmakers who my fifteen-year-old son loves and I think this is not only because he is funny, but also because of his intense humanity and compassion. When I first starting going to the movies seriously the Chaplin films were unavailable, except for poor prints of The Gold Rush, which for complicated reasons had fallen into the public domain. Gradually the films began to be released, the lovely A Woman of Paris last (I knew people who had gone to East Berlin to see the only available copy) and I urge anyone who has not seen them to do so, ideally in a theatre (Film Forum shows them fairly often); one may not find them funny but Chaplin moves like a ballet dancer and constructs his gags elegantly without ever sacrificing the context for a cheap laugh (unlike Woody Allen, who some young New Yorkers said they preferred when the Chaplin movies began to surface). Chaplin's films are amazingly resonant today, when we need laughter and compassion more than ever.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Revolution
I watched Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba recently on Turner Classic Movies and I am currently reading Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse. What the Kalatozov and Kendall have in common is their demonstration of the hopes and disillusionment of revolution. The Kalatozov film was made in 1964 and shows, with constant camera movement and high-contrast black-and white, what Cuba was like before the revolution. Its four segments show desperate women becoming prostitutes, farmers losing their land to United Fruit, students supporting revolution, and peasants whose homes have been destroyed joining Castro's forces. The film was considered by Cuba and Russia guilty of excess "formalism" and suppressed for years until its rediscovery at the Telluride Film Festival in 1993.
Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse was reviewed intelligently
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/unknown-young-balanchine/
by Jennifer Homans in The New York Review of Books. What Balanchine really thought when he left Russia in 1924 we don't know, but there was still a great deal of hope that traditional ballet could accommodate Balanchine's modern approach. I'm not one who believes that it necessarily enhances one's appreciation of an artist to know about his life but this detailed and extensively researched book about his parents and his training add another level of appreciation to one's view of Balanchine. I have often said that Balanchine's ballets simultaneously show life in a group, in a pair and as an individual so I found it particularly interesting to read about Balanchine as a student, a married man (to Tamara Geva when he was 18) and as a child left to fend for himself as a boarding student in ballet class at the age of 9.
Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse was reviewed intelligently
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/24/unknown-young-balanchine/
by Jennifer Homans in The New York Review of Books. What Balanchine really thought when he left Russia in 1924 we don't know, but there was still a great deal of hope that traditional ballet could accommodate Balanchine's modern approach. I'm not one who believes that it necessarily enhances one's appreciation of an artist to know about his life but this detailed and extensively researched book about his parents and his training add another level of appreciation to one's view of Balanchine. I have often said that Balanchine's ballets simultaneously show life in a group, in a pair and as an individual so I found it particularly interesting to read about Balanchine as a student, a married man (to Tamara Geva when he was 18) and as a child left to fend for himself as a boarding student in ballet class at the age of 9.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Turner Classic Movies
TCM is the one reason to have cable TV, since many of the movies they show are not available on DVD and are not shown elsewhere. Before there was cable TV in New York I would use a stopwatch to time movies on TV between commercials and was not surprised that many movies ran short to allow more commercials and to shoehorn the films into particular time slots. TCM shows movies uncut, uninterrupted and in the proper aspect ratio. The best movie I have seen on TCM recently was Phil Karlson's 99 River Street, intense and gritty. I will say more about it later but for the moment I just wanted to mention what I think are the best films coming up on TCM in November:
Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth. I often say that the best comedies are the most serious and this wonderfully funny film is a serious study of love and fidelity.
John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge, The Rising of the Moon, and The Searchers. Ford, my favorite director, still has not gotten the recognition he deserves, though The Searchers has been widely praised in recent years and has even been the subject of Glenn Frankel's book The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, though that book is more about the historical background of the story than it is about John Ford. Ford was supposedly one of the Klan riders in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of the Nation and his movies often deal with racism as a theme, very much the case in the two Westerns here. The Rising of the Moon is one of Ford's Irish films that, as Andrew Sarris says, "celebrates Ireland's very strangeness."
Blake Edwards's The Party. When I saw this film at MoMA in the 80's there was a small riot in the auditorium when they showed a pan-and-scanned print of this wonderful wide-screen comedy. Edwards uses all the space of the widescreen image for this deadpan low-key film about Hollywood.
John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. Jean-Pierre Melville said, in his interview with Rui Nogueira, that he came up with nineteen variations on his favorite cops-and-robbers situation and that The Asphalt Jungle uses them all.
I also recommend Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be, McCarey's Love Affair, Lang's The Big Heat, and Preston Sturges's Christmas in July, all of which I will be writing about at some point.
Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth. I often say that the best comedies are the most serious and this wonderfully funny film is a serious study of love and fidelity.
John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge, The Rising of the Moon, and The Searchers. Ford, my favorite director, still has not gotten the recognition he deserves, though The Searchers has been widely praised in recent years and has even been the subject of Glenn Frankel's book The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, though that book is more about the historical background of the story than it is about John Ford. Ford was supposedly one of the Klan riders in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of the Nation and his movies often deal with racism as a theme, very much the case in the two Westerns here. The Rising of the Moon is one of Ford's Irish films that, as Andrew Sarris says, "celebrates Ireland's very strangeness."
Blake Edwards's The Party. When I saw this film at MoMA in the 80's there was a small riot in the auditorium when they showed a pan-and-scanned print of this wonderful wide-screen comedy. Edwards uses all the space of the widescreen image for this deadpan low-key film about Hollywood.
John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. Jean-Pierre Melville said, in his interview with Rui Nogueira, that he came up with nineteen variations on his favorite cops-and-robbers situation and that The Asphalt Jungle uses them all.
I also recommend Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be, McCarey's Love Affair, Lang's The Big Heat, and Preston Sturges's Christmas in July, all of which I will be writing about at some point.
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