Manchurian melodrama*

My daughter recently returned from a study trip to Shanghai. In honour of her return, we sat and ate Pocky and watched the Hong Kong wartime and martial arts drama ‘Ip Man’ (2008).

While the historical accuracy of the nationalistic narrative, set in Foshan under Japanese occupation, was obviously complete bollocks, the martial arts sequences and choreography were supurb and I enjoyed it all hugely.

At the same time, I’d been absorbed in ‘What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting’ by Marc Norman, and a comment he makes early in the book about the popularity of melodrama as a dramatic form in the 19th Century popped into my head. Here surely, I thought, is pure melodrama.

The dominant theatrical narrative form at midcentury – the one everyone enjoyed rather than admired – was melodrama. No longer the inner torments of giants from Shakespeare or Goethe, not even the brittle one-set comedies of Sheridan – the zeitgeist had taken a lurch and moved on. Melodrama, at its simplest, was high conflict resolved by fierce confrontation. … It was fundamentally about justice. No longer the ambiguities of a Macbeth or a Faust; with melodrama, the dark angel on one shoulder and the white on the other of internal conflict were exteranlized into hero and villain, white hat and black. … Melodrama, as it evolved on the English and American stage in the mid-1800s, was not about aspects of character or inventions of narrative – it was about action; action was its given, and from that action, the pleasure of tension.

These comments intrigue me, because I’ve been taxed by the vagueness of my understanding of this still-common term ‘melodramatic’. Here is as good and clear a definition as I’ve ever read, “high conflict resolved by fierce confrontation” with dramatic tension founded in action rather than character.

By that definition, this movie was completely melodramatic – no shame in that of course, most action movies by that measure are utterly of a piece with 19th Century melodrama as Norman depicts it, even down to an emphasis on the mechanics of the spectacle (CGI, 3D, etc). Many a theatre company bankrupted itself trying to provide ever more astonishing spectacle and realistic action for the theatre-going public in the 1800s.

‘Ip Man’ is a melodrama in this 19th Century sense because the drama is founded in action, while ambiguity is avoided. Tension is created and released after a dramatic situation is created – Ip Man, a wealthy family man who has devoted his time and energy to perfecting his martial arts, is confronted with several choices after the Japanese invade and enslave his community. The tension is created over the question of action: what will he do? There is an ‘arc’, a transformation, but it is only subtley registered and not dwelt upon; what sort of choices will the hero take and therefore, what sort of a man will he become? It is melodramatic because there is never any question about the outcome; his action is inevitable because he has no real conflict, nothing to lose. We know what he will do as soon as the situation becomes clear.

Similarly, the Japanese characters – to the extend that you can call them ‘characters’ – are presented without ambiguity; there are simply shades of evil. One is simply a stupid sadist while the other is a less stupid sadist.

This prompted a question for further research. Every Chinese film I’ve ever seen – and I am a long way from an expert – has been a melodrama in this 19th Century sense to a greater or lesser degree. Does China have another dramatic tradition that I’ve missed?

An equivalent comparision that occurs me would be India, a similarly developing country with a huge film industry. But while Bollywood’s products are certainly melodramas, there is always Satyajit Ray, so at least in India’s case the answer is a firm no. What about China?

(* Yes I know… A bit geographically imprecise but you can’t go past alliteration in a headline.)

The Marshalite

Down at Bicentennial Park in Chelsea the other week, I came across this blast from my past: a mechanical traffic signal.

I was extremely taken with this sign when I was a child, whenever we drove through a particular Edithvale Road / Nepean Highway intersection beside the railway line. This would have been in the mid to late seventies. The sign was still functioning then, its jaunty white arrow eternally making its way round and round, no longer actually signalling traffic since that function had been taken over by traffic lights. It was like a heritage building that no one could bring themselves to tear down.

It has something over the current equivalent in that it clearly shows the driver exactly how long they have to wait. It puts me in mind of the failure of digital speedometers in cars. Drivers want a visual reference and the radial clock is infinitely better for the purpose than the digital display. Take that, technological determinism!

The Bat Computer tells me it was called the Marshalite, designed by Charles Marshall in 1936 and is an Australian original, utterly of its time. The last one running was on the Nepean Highway so no doubt the one I enjoyed as a kid was the last of its kind in the world.

Museum Victoria has a fully restored one on display.

Best Films of the 00s (that I’ve seen): part three

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (or just Amelie) (2001)
The very definition of joie de vivre. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s style is kinetic, the camera whipping about to follow any subjective whim of the central character (or whoever happens to narrating that particular bit). It’s tone is whimsical, romantic, often grotesque, taking place in a magical ‘Paris’ of the imagination rather than a real city. Some found the mix too rich and sweet, like a cake with too much icing. I wasn’t one of them.

Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003)
Might as well consider them as a whole since their qualities are common to all three. Peter Jackson took the subject up like a personal crusade to convince the rest of us that Tolkein’s world was not just for hippies, and he did it straight, without a hint of irony. Could have been kitsch in the extreme (and it sails close to the edge at times), but is delivered with such bravado and conviction, I couldn’t help but be swept up in its epic wake.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Sure, it was uneven and I sensed a lack of certainty about the tone, but that’s because Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles were blazing a trail, which doesn’t happen too often, especially in comedy. Basically a mix of prepared sketches and seat-of-the-pants situational improvisation around a connecting theme, one is constantly astonished at Cohen’s preparedness to put himself in danger (literally and comedically) and “go where no man has gone before”.

Michael Clayton (2007)
Its finale should be taught in screenwriting 101: ‘The Forgotten Art of the Perfect Ending’. Written by Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter of the Bourne films. A political thriller that just about restores one’s faith.

Grizzly Man (2005)
The other great documentarian of the last few decades (see Errol Morris, below) is Werner Herzog, whose fact-based films are as important as his features and whose themes are a direct continuation of his particular obsessions. This displays many of them: nature as an implacable, and often malevolent, force; a visionary central character bordering on madness. Unforgettable.

Gosford Park (2001)
Robert Altman goes at the country house murder mystery with his typical dry and ironic disregard for the conventional trappings of genre. Instead of the hollow figures which usually inhabit these kind of things (Colonel Mustard in the hall with the candlestick), he furnishes the film with insightful, wry and funny observations about character and class. Various esteemed character actors have the time of their lives.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
Errol Morris’s signature interview technique of placing his camera so that the subject speaks directly into it has an almost painful intensity and gives the traditional ‘talking head’ a confessional quality. This has been demonstrated nowhere better than this film about the life and career of Robert McNamara, the highly controversial former U.S. Secretary of Defense. We witness a man attempting to make sense of the moral ethical choices he made, choices which may have lead directly to deaths of thousands, and come to appreciate the chiasm between intention and consequence. A film whose philosophical consequences are immense.

The Lives of Others (2006)
Successfully gives the uninitiated a taste of life as it was lived by innumerable millions under Communist rule across Europe until about 1990. Sure it’s wish-fulfilment, and someone like the Stasi agent either couldn’t have existed in the first place or wouldn’t have survived long enough to perform the transformation depicted here, but it sure looks and feels like a genuine slice of the DDR, a 20th century panopticon.

The Others (2001)
An old fashioned horror movie, in the very best sense. So effective and skillfully told that it earns comparison to the best of the 1940s and 1950s. Nicole Kidman’s nervy brittleness as an actor has never been better utilised. Underrated.

Almost Famous (2000)
It’s neither as sharp or as funny as it probably should be, but has a grace and warmth that is memorable. Manages to feel perfectly credible without a line of coke or defiled groupie in sight. Owes a big debt to Billy Wilder, particularly ‘The Apartment’.

Other ‘Best films of the 00s’ posts here and here.

Welcome, America

“Welcome, America, to the world of universal health care. It will be alright. Really. Trust me. We’ve been there. We’ve had it for years, and we’re doing well, thanks very much.”

– The Rest of the World

The Banquet of Cleopatra

The Banquet of Cleopatra by Giambattista Tiepolo (1743-44)

The episode represented in Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra is drawn from the Roman historian Pliny’s Natural History (written in AD 77). Here Pliny recounted the tale of a famous contest between the Egyptian and Roman rulers (who became lovers), whereby Cleopatra wagered that she could stage a feast more lavish than the legendary excesses of Mark Antony. Tiepolo’s painting shows the dramatic moment at the end of Cleopatra’s sumptuous repast when,
faced with a still scornful Mark Antony, she wins the wager with her trump card. Removing one of a pair of priceless pearls that adorn her as earrings, Cleopatra dissolves the pearl in a glass of vinegar and drinks it, an extravagance that causes Mark Antony to lose his bet.

From a text by Ted Gott on the National Gallery of Victoria’s website.

A billboard off Smith Street, Fitzroy.

‘Basterds’ the best film of 2009? Not bloody likely

So radio Three Triple R’s ‘Film Buff’s Forecast‘ program has just brought down its listeners’ votes for the films of 2009, and I’m not happy.

Every year since I was about 16 I’ve been listening to the show’s annual votes for best, worst, most overrated and most underrated films of that year. I go back to when John Flaus and Paul Harris were the only voices heard. These days it’s a whole gallery of voices, which is fine when they engage in constructive disagreement but not so much fun when some nameless voice, whose authority I have no way of assessing, goes on at length with opinions I disagree with! So I particularly enjoy the discrepancies between the critics’ films and those voted by listeners.

Some think lists are childish but I’m a sucker for lists of all kinds. In my worst moments, I’ve resembled John Cusack’s character in ‘High Fidelity’: “Ten best album tracks, side one, track one…” They’re a kind of intellectual chewing gum, designed to get the juices flowing.

But jeez, ‘Inglourious Basterds’ as the best film of 2009? God help us. The critics and listeners were united on 3RRR and I’m appalled.

Okay, so it was stylish in that swashbuckling Tarantino style that he does so well. Bravura, I think it’s called, and ten points for sheer balls. Very few film makers of any generation have the strength of their convictions to such an extent as to back themselves and their intuitions against what was, I imagine, widespread scepticism that such a bizarre idea would ever get made.

But its juvenile brutality and fascism is harder to forgive. It’s certainly not the only film of the last couple of years to show an almost autistic lack of appreciation or understanding of the experiential weight of violence in cinema; ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ comes readily to mind. But while that film also had a historical setting (or in the case of ‘I.B.’ an alternative-historical setting), it took place in a fictional space that relied on the Spanish Civil War only as a contextual frame for the hard-edged fantasy that was really the interest of the movie.

‘I.B.’ on the other hand, doesn’t make sense without the emotion and moral heft that the Holocaust subject matter brings with it. Tarantino relies on that historical and cultural burden to charge the events he asks us to experience with significance. What at first annoyed me and then by the end of the film made me angry, was that he uses the faith that we the audience place in him that he won’t exploit a historical truth (whose significance doesn’t need to be expanded upon) cheaply or to no good end. But that’s exactly what he does do.

There is no necessary connection between the events of history and their cultural reflection in this universe. The Holocaust, the Second World War as a whole, is nothing but a set of cultural tropes he can move around and play with with a grin on his face. This war movie is not a film about war, but a film about films about war. The difference is crucial. There is therefore no debt to experience, to life.

But the film has it both ways. To a large degree, it misleads badly with the first scene, which introduces the main character, the anti-hero Col. Hans Landa, as he interrogates a french farmer on suspicion of harboring Jews, who we are allowed to see cowering under the floorboards. The scene unfolds slowly, with discipline, resulting in great suspense. Nail biting, as they say. It ends badly, but its emotional kick is not just a mechanical function of the classic techniques of suspense, but also an extratextual response to the affect of the subject matter. We know what is at stake for the innocents under the floorboards because we know that their fate will be to disappear into ashes.

This scene leads an attentive viewer (I believe) to frame an expectation that what we are about to watch will keep faith with that stock of memories, images, stories we have all inherited as children of the twentieth century. This faith, having been set up, is gleefully torn up in the subsequent spectacle.

This early discipline is also jettisoned for the rest of the film. I have not heard a single critic notice how interminable is the central key scene in a cellar bar, where allied soldiers impersonating Nazi officers attempt to make contact with a resistance figure in the French underground. An English officer with a proficiency in German attempts to maintain the mask, but his unusual accent gives him away to his audience. This would have been dealt with by a classical director like William Wellman or John Ford in a few minutes of tension, but instead it drags on and on, pointlessly. What is worse, during the whole scene, one of the other impersonators remains mute – yet he is the only authentic German in the bunch! Why?

Finally, Tarantino has his English officer give himself away by making a typically English – not German – hand gesture. The only problem is that when it happens we don’t know what it means until it is explained to us by one of the characters later! A moment which should be tense beyond endurance for the audience is thrown away in sluggish editing and sloppy writing.

Lovers of the film will no doubt object that I am guilty of a lack of appreciation for Tarantino’s use of ironic self-reference and intertextuality. Maybe I am. Maybe the subject matter just doesn’t lend itself to merrymaking in the playpen of ironic detachment. It is plain that the final third of the film, which is an extended revenge fantasy where Hitler and all the members of the Nazi High Command perish in a burning cinema (oh the jolly irony!) while the fleeing audience is strafed with machine guns held by the ‘good’ guys. You can tell they’re good guys because they’re Jewish. If this sounds dumb, it’s because it is dumb, beyond words.

After this, it hardly matters any more when the brutal but charismatic Landa has his forehead slowly carved up with a very large knife. By that stage I was numb, which I suppose means that this movie was not for me. I figure I was supposed to enjoy this, feeling that the villain got his comeuppance, just as I was supposed to cheer as the cinema audience (shot from above) screamed as they were being machine-gunned to death. Instead I felt as if I was being made complicit in a bloodthirsty spectacle without moral reference point. A film that had started out doing everything it could to evoke an emotional response for the oppressed and against the oppressor, reversed the poles, asking me to cheer indiscriminate murder on the basis that it was being perpetrated against the ‘right’ enemy. There’s a name for this. Goebbels would have recognised the technique, since he virtually invented it.

This is not the first time a blindingly stupid and immoral film has been lauded by critics almost universally, but I’m mainly disappointed because people whose judgements I generally respect have either been so easily fooled, or don’t care.

Shorpy

Michael Leddy coined the wonderful expression ‘dowdy world’ to describe glimpses of bygone times that occasionally pop up in old movies, television shows, or anywhere at all. His definition: “modern American culture as it was before certain forms of technology redefined everyday life”.

Well, ‘Shorpy’ is the dowdy world on rollerskates.

It is one of the handful of websites I can’t live a week without visiting at least once, and I love it with an ardent passion.

My favourites are the bizarre pics from from the archive called the National Library…

…and the breathtakingly detailed images of turn of the century city architecture, like this one of the Philadelphia Post Office in 1900.

The site describes itself: “Shorpy.com: History in HD is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.”

It appears to be a shared site where a very select number of contributors upload images in very high definition. They appear to have been scanned from the original negatives. This is astounding because the site has a large collection of truly classic images, including many pictures by the greats Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine.

Most of these pictures are not the recogniseable classics from photographic history, but the now vast collection is a more comprehensive picture of each photographers’ working practice than would be possible in even the biggest survey exhibition. In the case of Lewis Hine in particular, I’ve had to reassess my view of his significance to the medium.

When I was taught photography, the conventional view of Lewis Hine I intuited was that he was a great documentarian but whose credentials as an artist were somewhat in question. A view was that the haunting quality his pictures so often had was more to do with the heartbreaking subject matter of child labour and exploitation that he did so much to reveal than any completely conscious and expressed aesthetic intention.

Certainly the subject matter is compelling (and there is art in that), but there’s clearly more here than just the handprint of a great documentary photographer. Very frequently, too frequently to be an accident, he invests an apparently utilitarian image with the grace and insight of a true portrait.

The achievement becomes all the more awe-inspiring when we consider the circumstances under which many of the images were taken. His period of greatest activity in the social documentary field was the first decade of the century, when he worked for social activist magazines and for social documentary projects like the Pittsburgh Survey. He also worked for the National Child Labour Committee for eight years and published two books of his pictures, ‘Child Labour in the Carolinas’ (1909) and ‘Day Laborers Before Their Time’ (1909).

Taking these images often involved working under great pressure. To gain access Hine sometimes hid his camera and posed as a fire inspector.

In 1916 Congress eventually agreed to pass legislation to protect children. Owen Lovejoy, Chairman of the National Child Labour Committee, wrote that: “the work Hine did for this reform was more responsible than all other efforts in bringing the need to public attention.”

Hine had great difficulty earning money from his photography. In January 1940, he lost his home after failing to keep up repayments. Lewis Wickes Hine died in extreme poverty eleven months later on 3rd November, 1940.

Here’s to Shorpy Higginbotham and to Lewis Hine, who sought to record his existence, reflect his experience, change the conditions under which he worked and to create art.

Histoire des races maudites

Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry.

For most people this would be agreeable, perhaps even pleasurable. For the 40-something mother-of-three, the story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for a thousand years.

Marie-Pierre is a Cagot.

From Sean Thomas in The Independent.

Phineas Gage: wonders are always fascinating

A daguerreotype made public last week is believed to be the only known image of Phineas Gage (1823-1860).

Gage was a 25-year-old foreman, fit and well-regarded. His crew were digging a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vt. Late on the afternoon of Sept. 13, 1848, he wielded a specially made iron – it measured 3 feet 7 inches long and weighed 13 pounds – to pack blasting powder into rock.

An explosion erupted. “And we think the tamping iron went all the way through the skull – like a missile,’’ said Dr. Ion-Florin Talos, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

A close examination of the object clutched by the man in the picture shows an inscription matching the engraving on the tamping iron, which reads in part, “This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phineas P. Gage.’’

He has had enduring fame as the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, he is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients.

“It’s kind of a wonder,’’ Dr. Talos said, “and wonders are always fascinating.’’

From the Boston Globe.

Another fascinating account of the case appears at Neurophilosophy.

Classically white

When we use the adjective ‘classical’, we mean to suggest certain qualities possessed by the classical Greek and Roman worlds: restraint, symmetry, clarity and seriousness of purpose, harmoniousness of proportion, a lack of excessive ornament. Whatever image we conjure up to accompany the idea, whether it’s a building or a piece of sculpture, one thing is certain: it will be white.

I had read before that those ancient buildings and statues were originally not white at all, but brightly coloured. It’s hard to keep that it in mind while contemplating the corridors of marble white sculpture in the Vatican Museum, though. The whiteness of them seems to accord with very deep cultural prejudices and is hard to shake.

The New Scientist reports that a team at the British Museum has found the first evidence of coloured paints used on the Parthenon, built in the 5th century BC. Researcher Giovanni Verri has developed an imaging technique sensitive to Egyptian Blue, a pigment known to have been used in ancient times. Shining red light onto marble, the pigment absorbs the red spectrum and emits infrared light. Through an infrared camera, any area that was once blue will glow.

Traces of the pigment have been found on statuary and on the building itself.

Ian Jenkins, a senior curator at the British Museum, says the temple would have looked “jewelled” and “busy”. Judging by similar Greek sculptures, the pigments used were probably blue and red beside contrasting white stone, and liberal use of gold leaf.

Seeing evidence of this kind of painting for myself at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples was an aesthetic shock. The realism of ancient art was something I just wasn’t prepared for, keeping in mind that the statues were so often painted as well as sculpted with astonishing fidelity to life.

The annoyingly conscientious guards stopped me from taking pictures, but this one, of Scipio Africanus the Elder, is floating about the internet. It has painting on the eyes still intact, but is plain otherwise. My memory is that others still had bits of flaking paint attached to them.

The figures I saw came from the Villa of the Papyri, the house of a wealthy and cultured lover of philosophy and the arts who lived at Herculaneum, the less famous neighbouring town of Pompeii. Unfortunately the town and the villa met the same fate as their sister city in 79 AD.

Still, had they not been subsumed in rock and ash on that terrible day, these breathtaking sculptures would not now be in a museum upsetting the smug preconceptions of twenty first century folk like me.