The Pianist [2002] - Polanski's Masterpiece

In my blog for April 13th, 2010, I pilloried Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds as a piece of ineptitude and adolescent indulgence. Watching one kind of moviemaking can often cause us to forget temporarily the larger story. There have been countless movies made about World War II, and the complexities, dislocations and human dramas, both real and imagined, which it caused. For a long time--three decades, really--the movie industry gave us military adventures, espionage, suspense, and political intrigues about the war, but they shied away from dealing directly with the Holocaust. 

 

A list of movies which touch on, but do not deal directly with, the subject of the Holocaust, would include The Diary of Anne Frank [1959], Exodus [1960], Judgment at Nuremberg [1961], Cabaret [1972], Holocaust (TV miniseries) [1978], but it wasn't until Sophie's Choice [1982] that we really get an unsanitized narrative devoted to the creepy details and up-close graphic violence of the Nazi tyranny. Then, of course, there is Schindler's List [1993], a sort of epic of the Holocaust, which some have complained about as being too generalized, and unfocused, except perhaps on Oscar Schindler, the Polish industrialist responsible for salvaging a few hundred Jewish factory workers from being sent to the Death Camps. 

 

Aside from Mel Brooks's The Producers, I can't think of another production--cinematic or legitimate--which treats the Nazi phenomenon comically, the way Tarantino appears to do. And Brooks's ironic approach is in fact a savage attack on Nazism, rather than the indulgent bit of mischief from Tarantino. 

       

It's difficult to understand why the shenanigans of a spoiled, overgrown aging-teenaged lout like Tarantino can be accepted as quality film-making, when there are so many examples of superior work made from the same material. What kind of a mind derives unfettered amusement in depicting cold-blooded killers and their collaborators as fascinating, comical marionettes, utterly without moral ambiguity or irony? I asked, rhetorically, before how such material would be handled by a skilled film-maker, with a sensible view of history, instead of by someone like Tarantino. 

 

Perhaps the best example would be Roman Polanski's film The Pianist. Based on a real character, Wladyslaw Szpilman, a classical pianist who survived to tell the tale of his years of concealment during the Nazi occupation of Poland, it accurately portrays the Kafka-esque existence of a fugitive living a shadow-existence for years in the Warsaw Ghetto, narrowly escaping capture and death, as the city is systematically gutted around him. The devastation of a whole people--as seen through the eyes and travails of a single, vulnerable, lucky witness--is made emphatically clear, and immediate, in a way that no dramatized account of personal heroism or valor could accomplish. Indeed, the value of witnessing history is raised to a high level here, as opposed to futile sacrifice.        

       

Among contemporary film-makers, Roman Polanski is perhaps uniquely qualified to have directed The Pianist, since he was a direct participant in the events which the story depicts, having been trapped, as a child, in the Krakow Ghetto, his mother perishing at Auschwitz. Escaping the ghetto, and living as a Roman Catholic, he managed to survive the War and the occupation, to become the auteur we know today. Polanski's personal history gives to his handling of The Pianist account a biting veracity and immediacy. (One is reminded of Kosinski's The Painted Bird, another harrowing tale of a child wandering around Central Europe during the War years.)

 

Crucially, from a perspective of Polish nationalism and the plight of Poland in the 20th Century, it's important to note that The Pianist evokes nativist sentiment through the identity of Chopin, Poland's greatest composer, and one of the giants of classical music, and of the keyboard in particular. Chopin felt profoundly committed to his nation and his countrymen, and many of his compositions--particular the Mazurkas--are fervent hymns to, and evocations of, a proud patriotism. Making the central figure of the story a pianist who specializes in playing Chopin's keyboard works enables Polanski (a Polish nationalist himself in a way) to unite a sense of patriotic feeling with the victimization of the Holocaust, so that Szpilman's fate is identified as a symbol of Polish culture itself. It isn't just Jews who came under attack by the Nazis, but all of Polish history and civilization. 

 

Szpilman isn't a particularly strong man, or a courageous one. It's his vulnerability, fragility which impresses one, rather than his cunning or intrepidness. He's a survivor, but his survival is almost an accident of fate. History chooses unlikely witnesses, and the testimony they provide is often greater than the value of their individual lives. (I touched on this previously in my post about Jan Karski, the Polish freedom fighter and underground courier, whose book Story of a Secret State [1944], documents his travails on behalf of Poland in those years.) 

 

Polanski's film, thus, serves as an extended, partially fictionalized, witness to history account not only of the Holocaust generally, but to the plight of Poland and Polish Nationalism generally. It may be seen that this apparent de-emphasis of the Jewish bias in documenting the Holocaust is in fact a more comprehensive view of the meaning of racism and ethnic persecution than has traditionally been employed.       

 

            

Within the scope of the whole film in its final version, the key episode, towards the end of the story, occurs when Szpilman's hiding place in an attic of an abandoned building, is discovered by a German officer, Captain Wilm Hosenfeld. In what is probably the most suspenseful segment of the movie, Hosenfeld asks him to play something on a piano that has survived in the building. Obviously impressed by Szpilman's playing, deferring his natural inclination to kill him or turn him over for disposition to the camps, Hosenfeld allows him to live, and even brings him food and offers him his coat. Polanski plays the scene neutrally, allowing us to appreciate Hosenfeld's almost clinical appraisal of Szpilman's performance as an acknowledgment of the power of art, rather than of his sympathy with the pianist as a merely vulnerable human being. The power of the officer to give or take life is balanced against the rationalistic appreciation of beauty and genius, which may in his mind transcend the comparative pettiness of duty, even at the risk of his own honor, though at this late stage in the War, the Germans know that time is running out, and they're running out the string as the eventual losers.        

   

 

Polanski has said that this scene is the key one for him in the movie. And indeed, from a biographical perspective, the director's own role as a persecuted artist--widowed by the Manson murders, and pursued by the American legal system for a case of statutory rape dating back to the 1970's--comes directly into play. Szpilman's jeopardy, as a talented artist wrongly persecuted because of his ethnicity and national identity, is held precariously at risk. Forced to abandon Hollywood, in 1978, in order to avoid an anticipated imprisonment, Polanski has lived for 30 years as a French citizen, until being arrested in Zurich last September at the request of U.S. authorities. The final outcome of this episode in Polanski's life has yet to be determined.

 

There have been many turns in Polanski's interesting life. There is no question that he is one of the greatest movie directors of all time, with The Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Tess, The Ninth Gate and The Pianist. There's no way to tell how many other good efforts he might have turned in, had he not been excluded from the movie capital of the world during the primary years of his career. Orson Welles, similarly exiled from Hollywood, under somewhat different circumstances, fared less well artistically, his directorial work severely limited after Citizen Kane [1941] to just a few productions, and, aside from The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] and Touch of Evil [1958], rather forgettable.

 

In terms of Polanski's career, The Pianist occupies a central position, both for the power of its subject matter, as well as for the importance is carries in his biography. He could hardly have chosen a more useful narrative to express the dilemma of his own artistic life. Adrien Brody's performance earned him an Oscar, as did Polanski's direction. 

 

Despite whatever happens in the justice system's case against him, Polanski's award vindicates in some measure the enforced neglect and frustrations that have dogged him throughout his life. As a witness to the hardships, both deserved and undeserved, which talented people may endure, his example is not without interest. You don't have to like people to admire what they may accomplish. Looked at in its entirety, Polanski's life is complex, and morally ambiguous. But he has turned his experience and feelings into high art. Art as witness, as the powerful testimony of history, may be the greatest gift any of us can give. That is what The Pianist is. And that is why it is so much more than anything someone like Tarantino can do. There's simply no comparison.         

Believe You Me Crocodile - Eigner Cummings The Typewriter & A Poem

In my essay "The Text as an Image of Itself" in the Stanford University Press edition of the Collected Poems of Larry Eigner [Edited by Curtis Faville & Robert Grenier, 2010], I reference Larry Eigner's acknowledgment of E. E. Cummings's influence on his work. Crucially, both Cummings and Eigner composed their poems on the typewriter, though for somewhat different purposes. Eigner, who was disabled from birth, was unable to write with sufficient ease longhand, and the typewriter enabled him to compose poems. Cummings, on the other hand, actually preferred the typewriter as a medium, believing that it allowed him to make a visually organized impression. Cummings was both a writer and a plastic artist, and liked to refer to himself as a "draughtsman of words" and an "author of paintings." This sense of composition--conceiving of writing poems as both a visual, as well as an aural process--is a key element of some post-Modern literature, and the work of Eigner presents one of its most direct expressions. Below is an image of Cummings's portable typewriter. In our edition of Eigner's poems, we chose as the frontispiece of volume I, a photo of Eigner's battered old typewriter. The image of this device, at the beginning of the collection, is intended to foreground our apprehension of Larry's work as a poetry which originates, and is expressed through the mechanical characteristics of this handy tool of modern technology, now rapidly becoming extinct since the inception of the computer age, and the personal cathode ray tube projection screen, with connected keyboard and accompanying automatic printer.                   

 

 

 

From an historical perspective, the era of the typewriter--assuming that its use is never revived in the future--looks like a transitional device in the development of the mechanization of print technology, mid-way between the invention of the printing press (with later augmentations and efficiencies) and the arrival of the personal computer. The effect of this device upon writers and artists in the 20th Century has been largely ignored, but it's likely to be recognized, going forward, as an important, integral component of the creative process during the segment of its effective life (1900-1995)--just as computer technology is influencing the writing of literature in the present era. Just as the typewriter enabled writers to generate their own print text, without the intermediate step of writing it out longhand or dictating it beforehand, the computer has expanded the capabilities of writers to compose texts visually, using different fonts and spatial arrangements with a great facility, and has brought, too, a capability for rapid reproduction of text, incorporating the data-driven copy machine. We're just beginning to understand how this may affect literature--the generation of material and non-material texts--in the future.         

 

     

By any measure, E.E. Cummings was a fascinating man. Raised in a cultured milieu--his Father was a Harvard professor and Unitarian minister--Cummings was a precocious child, who began writing and drawing while still in his teens. At Harvard, Estlin (as he was called, to distinguish himself from his Father) graduated cum laude in 1916 with a Master's Degree in English and Classical Studies, delivering a commencement address on "The New Art" in which he noticed important new Modernist trends. A minor controversy ensued. For the rest of his life, Cummings would resist convention, maintaning an iconoclastic profile with respect both to intellectual pretension, and popular opinion. 

 

The familiar account of Cummings's enlistment in the ambulance corps in WWI, his unjust imprisonment, and his book about this, The Enormous Room [1922], are all well-documented. Of more pertinent interest, here, is the incredibly prolific burst of literary production which began after his release, continuing up through the mid-1920's, during which period he wrote over 1000 pages of startlingly original, and unusually skillful poetry (only some of which was published in a sequence of books--Tulips and Chimneys [1923], & [1925], XLI Poems [1925], is 5 [1926], ViVa [1931]). Composed about equally of classically inspired sonnets, and eccentrically set lyrics and satires, it forms a body of work--both in its mood and appearance on the page--unlike anything that had come before in the history of literature.

 

What Cummings noticed, uniquely, was that the way a poem looked on the page was an integral part of how it was perceived. As a serious plastic artist, he was sensitive to the ways in which a text expressed both our sense of the progression of its unfolding (as read), as well as the overall design and energy of its visual shape. These were revolutionary ideas in 1920, ideas which virtually no one else was exploring at the time. 

 

As a teenager in the early 1960's, I was immediately attracted to Cummings's love poems, which were, and continue to be, among the most direct, frank and romantically lyrical ever written. Their apparent innocence, sense of mischief, and adventurousness were all aspects likely to interest young people, as they have done now for the last four or five generations. The sense of fun--of the "virtual pin-ball" quality of their typographical structure--not only moving words and phrases around on the page, but fussing with punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar--to suggest alternate kinds of address--is irresistible, especially in contrast to the air of gravity and solemnity with which poetry is usually presented in the classroom and on the podium.                              

  

         

One of my favorite Cummings poems, which I must have read when I was perhaps 13, long before I could have understood, really, what it meant, was "MEMORABILIA". Unlike most of Cummings's poems, it has a title, which is an immediate tip-off about tone, and what it sets out to accomplish. MEMORABILIA is a satiric rant, a full-fledged swipe at the ugly American tourist class, so dear to Henry James and Edith Wharton, who made the "pilgrimage" to Europe along the Grand Tour route, spending conspicuously and looking for suitable matches among the landed class.    

 

  

MEMORABILIA   

 

stop look &

 

listen Venezia: incline thine 

ear you glassworks 

of Murano; pause 

elevator nel 

mezzo del cammin’ that means half- 

way up the Campanile, believe   

 

thou me cocodrillo—   

 

mine eyes have seen 

the glory of   

 

the coming of 

the Americans particularly the 

brand of marriageable nymph which is 

armed with large legs rancid 

voices Baedekers Mothers and kodaks 

--by night upon the Riva Schiavoni or in 

the felicitous vicinity of the de l’Europe   

 

Grand and Royal 

Danielli their numbers   

 

are like unto the stars of Heaven….   

 

I do signore 

affirm that all gondola signore 

day below me gondola signore gondola 

and above me pass loudly and gondola 

rapidly denizens of Omaha Altoona or what 

no enthusiastic cohorts from Duluth God only, 

gondola knows Cincingondolanati I gondola don’t   

 

--the substantial dollarbringing virgins   

 

“from the Loggia where 

are we angels by O yes 

beautiful we now pass through the look 

girls in the style of that’s the 

foliage what is it didn’t Ruskin 

says about you got the haven’t Marjorie 

isn’t this wellcurb simply darling” 

                                                          --O Education: O 

 

thos cook & son   

 

(O to be a metope 

now that triglyph’s here) 

 

I'm not sure whether, as readers, feeling warm about Venice, Italy matters much in one's appreciation of this mockery of American speech and upper middle-class pretension. As with most Cummings poems, the vituperation and ill-humor seems less important than the delight he takes in lampooning hapless targets, in twirling webs of impish tricolor bunting around the over-dressed ingenues and their matronly escorts, like mummies being readied for entombment.

 

But the first aspect of the poem that catches my attention is its mimicry of American advertising "ad-speak" or annunciatory journalese. "Stop, look & listen" is like the huckster's command, except that here it is addressed to the city of Venice [Venezia]. Then we get the quotation from Dante nel mezzo del cammin ("mid-way upon the journey--of life"), meaning, here, the interrupted "elevator" ride up the picturesque red-brick Campanile (bell-tower) in the main plaza in Venice. Believe you me, crocodile! In the mock language, then, of The Battle

Hymn of the Republic--"mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Americans particularly the brand of marriageable nymph which is armed with large legs rancid voices Baedekers Mothers and kodaks." At night, strolling the esplanade along the water's edge before the stylish hotel Danielli their numbers are legion, we hear the palaver of English and Italian voices mingling in the warm night air--

 

I do signore 

affirm that all gondola signore 

day below me gondola signore gondola 

and above me pass loudly and gondola 

rapidly denizens of Omaha Altoona or what 

no enthusiastic cohorts from Duluth God only, 

gondola knows Cincingondolanati I gondola don’t  

 

--the repetition and enjambment (Cincinnati/gondola) of the word gondola like a chant or frustrated mimicry of the tourists arguing with the gondoliers. The unimpeded translation of this sequence would be I do affirm, all day below me and above me pass loudly and rapidly denizens of Omaha Altoona (or what?), no!, enthusiastic cohorts from Duluth, God only knows!, I don't! Followed by the jumbled tour-guide/lady's companion (Baedecker guidebook in hand) summoning (invoking!) Ruskin (The Stones of Venice) to inspire the attention of Marjorie to notice the pretty well-curb, all in furtherance of her Education (!). Whence interferes the office name of Thomas Cook & Sons, the venerable travel agency and money-changing office, even then a by-word for foreign travel exigencies. 

 

(O to be a metope 

now that triglyph’s here) 1

 

I suppose I maundered over that couplet for several years, before finally discovering that it referred to the bas-relief sculptured figures along the channeled tablet of a Doric freize, which are common in classical architectural detail. Just the sort of specific detail, of course, which tourists would be commanded to appreciate. Indeed, the implication clearly suggests that these "substantial dollar-bringing virgins" from America have become themselves a brand of metope along the metaphorical triglyphs (promenades) of modern-day Venice. 

 

Like many Cummings poems, this one manages to look and feel thoroughly contemporary, while rehearsing what is, in substance, a very traditional broadside against the pretensions of the ruling class, a class which served as the subject for a whole segment of our literature (a la James and Wharton)--of the relationship between the old and new worlds, the 2000 year old culture of Europe (and beyond that, of the ancient Mediterranean world), and that of the grand spanking, brand new world of Am-MARE-ee-ka! The "content" of the poem, again ostensibly about the old world revulsion at the crudity of the new, is really about the objectification of speech through an autonomous projection of a disembodied voice. In 1920, the technology of media was in its relative infancy: there was the telephone, and radio, still quite novel in their use; crude motion pictures were just beginning; musical and voice recordings were very new. The objectification of speech--as projected autonomously through a device--spontaneously inspires the sense of language (and sound) as a kind of oral-visual environment. Different levels of address--shifting, conflicting contexts of prose, lyric, advertisement, signage, noise--mix chaotically as tapestries of raw data, received haphazardly and discerned as accidental dialectic and atonal progressions. In the Cummings poem, these voices intertwine and mix in a cacaphony of competing economic and cross-cultural currents--a dance of conditions--an anthem to the procession of history across continents, a parody of the modern mating-dance ("nymphs").             

 

The Modernist American poets of the first half of the Twentieth Century--Eliot, Pound, Stevens, H.D., Marianne Moore, Zukofsky, Oppen, Stein, Williams, Crane and Cummings--broke with European formalist models, choosing to create works out of native materials, or re-casting traditional models within new contexts. The post-Modern poets built upon the experiments of Modernism, though they were largely freed from the impinging conflicts of repudiating convention as a social act. A poet like Larry Eigner could treat the page, and the occasion of writing a poem, as a much freer and uninhibited adventure than Cummings could, in 1920, not having, as his predecessor had, to defend his right to make new statements about the world in a way no one had ever thought of doing before. What Cummings had tried, 30 years before, opened a pathway that led to further experiment. But while Cummings had been hemmed in by strict categories of literary purpose--love, satire, pastoral--Eigner was able to concentrate, for instance, upon pure perception or imaginative flight, without the interposition of a classical address. The Cummings poem, then, is a classical exercise, not unlike something Catullus might have appreciated, in satirical vituperation, though couched in what looks superficially like modern public address speech. Nevertheless, its form, and movement, suggest new different ways of scoring words in space, and this is what Larry picked up when he first read Cummings's work in the late 1940's.                            

 

On a metaphysical level, Cummings's visual/typographical experiments suggest a multi-dimensional approach to subject-matter, in which the ostensible matter of referents is revolved like a prism, separating constituent colors, textures and caricatures into helixes of language, pulling or jamming grammar and syntax apart or together, to create gigantic mobiles of free-form word-sculptures, the poet either bound up in the persona of the poem's voices, or standing back, manipulating its means. Thinking of a poem's potential in this way was an entirely novel notion in 1920, one that would have seemed profoundly alien to writers in earlier centuries. To achieve it required a consciousness sufficiently objective in its relation to the material text--the print technology derived from mechanical means (the printing press)--that it could imagine moving words, stanzas, phrases, individual letters even, like pieces on a board. The independence from the tyranny of externally produced, mechanically generated alphabetical texts, clearly made this imaginative leap possible. Sitting at his manual portable typewriter, inspired by the new techniques from painting and sculpture and music, Cummings realized that he was engaged with a machine which could perform--within given limits--the same kind of functions which a paint-brush could on a canvas. Not abstract shapes or actual colors or textures, but linguistic settings, variable in sound and movement, within the space--line, increment and grid--of the typewriter page. 

  

Neither Cummings nor Eigner went so far down the road of alphabetical disintegration that they literally tampered with the symbolic system of writing itself. But they were able to adapt it to their respective interests: in Cummings's case, the jagged vernacular mimicry of colloquial slang, the playful toying with punctuation and capitalization, the lightly-inflected sense-&-nonsense-puns and so on; in Eigner's case, the subtle vectored intuitive leaps, covertly hidden inside conversational observations and asides, the multi-dimensional forward and back through time and space, placing the reader in a speculative position with respect to sequence, locus, and meaning.

 

Eigner's authorial persona is of the static observer, whose power to move about freely in a poetic space is not bound by fixed intervals of prosodic extent, or by the narrative flow of the poem's "argument". That persona is neither in a dialectic with the "reader" nor omniscient in the old sense in which he's totally in control of everything that "happens" inside the parameters of the poem. The typewriter page is a work space--it looks a little messy because it's "unfinished" during its process.

 

The evolution from the inter-spliced voice-ings of the Cummings satire, to Eigner's spacial arrangements is a clear instance of a progression in the development of the influence of media over literary form, and the way in which an incrementally expanding sense of linguistic contexts occurs. The linkages may seem indirect and slightly gratuitous, until we look at the minute particulars of each writer's work. Their respective differences are a measure of the rapidity of change occurring over a half century of cultural time.                                 

      

___________

1. Parodic take on Robert Browning's poem "Home Thoughts From Abroad"--the line "Oh to be in England / Now that April's there." 

Painting above by E.E. Cummings, "Fourth Dimensional Abstraction", copyright the Estate of E.E. Cummings.

GIANTS Season off to a BANG !!

 

This year--at least for as far back as I can remember--the Giants have gotten off to their best start in years. They led the Spring Training standings for all of baseball, and now they've jumped off to a 7-2 start, with a splendid mix of timely hitting and solid starting pitching.  

 

None of this is a surprise to anyone who has seen the team building itself over the last three years. They nurtured Cain and Lincecum to stardom, at a point in their development when most teams would doubtless have traded one or both of them in order to shore up their flagging offensive power. Since the loss of Bonds after the 2008 season, the team has struggled to find an identity consistent with its eccentric park (China Basin). Even during Bonds' last three seasons with the team, it was clear that a change had already begun, but there were no sparkling prospects in the farm system, or available on the free agent market, to replace him. 

 

As the aging journeymen of the last five years have left, one by one--Durham, Vizquel, Winn, Roberts, Snow, Alfonzo, Feliz, Alou, Aurilia--the team has concentrated on building a cohesive, integrated unit, but without any singular power figures. The best homer totals one might expect would be 20 from Bengie, 30 from Sandoval, 18 from Uribe, and maybe 16 from Rowand. DeRosa and Huff, acquired in the off-season, promise to give more stability in the middle of the line-up, though their power numbers will almost surely suffer given China Basin's empty right field spaces. But given a team ERA in the 3.00 range, it's less important than it would have been back when it was well over 4.00 (in the Schmidt/Rueter/Lowry/Morris era).

 

As in any given year, the coincidence of good performances by any group of journeymen position players can produce a happy result. Sheer power, or sheer lights-out pitching can put you in the running, but for most champions, secondary players have to rise with the occasion, or the team balance becomes lopsidedly dependent upon two or three star players. Great power teams will win lots of games, but in the end, in the play-offs, it's pitching that makes the difference. The Giants' chances this season rest mainly on the performance of their second-level players: If Sanchez has a great year, and Affeldt repeats as a great set-up man, the pitching should be superior to almost any other team in baseball. If Huff and Renteria and DeRosa and Rowand have great years, then Sandoval and Molina might be enough to produce the necessary runs, especially in close games. With Lincecum and Cain and Sanchez coming at you 1-2-3, the team can believe in its chances every day.  Zito is a key factor in all this, but even if he just breaks even, say, going 12-12 for the year, while the other three are mowing down the opposition, it could be a very entertaining season.  

 

Renteria started off the season hitting .700. There's no doubt that he's not star material any more, but if he could only hit .275 with 12 homes and 75 RBI's, the line-up could present interesting problems for opposing managers. Uribe and Rowand are both streak hitters; if they could stay hot for a whole season, it would make a huge difference. If Bengie can curb his natural gullibility and impulsiveness, he might break 100 RBI's for the first time in his career.

 

Philadelphia and Colorado still look like the power teams. The only question is their pitching. Can the Phillies consistently score 5+ runs per game? Quite probably. Can Colorado? Yes, but in both cases, that may not be enough. In a 5 or 7 game play-off, a power-based team can hit a bad patch and be neutralized.  

 

I think our chances this year look the best they've been since 2005, or five years ago. The wheel turns, and the odds adjust. I don't know what Las Vegas is saying about the Giants this year, but you can't count them out, especially given the evidence of their quick start.               

A Prose Poem After Lorca

 The Blind Man and The Birds                                               

 

                  

After Lorca      

There once was an old blind man who lived in Madrid.  He lived on the third floor, and he had a balcony which overlooked the street.  On this balcony he kept a bird cage, in which there were two canaries.  The man couldn’t see the canaries, of course, but he could hear their song.  Each day he would feed them, and once a week he cleaned their cage, gingerly opening the door, and changing the newspaper at the bottom.  The cage was invisible, but the old blind man did not know this.  The birds could not see the cage either, though their sight was perfect.  They were so faithful to the old man that they never tried to fly away.  One day when the old man got up, he had a strange sensation—he could not hear the canaries!  He rushed to the balcony to see what might have happened.  Then he heard a scream.  Another scream.  People began running in the streets.  He stood at the balcony and tried to understand what was happening.  “The Fascists are coming.  They are shooting anyone on sight!” they cried.  Then he heard a shot.  Then another, then a volley.  Then running steps, and cries.  Invisible bullets singing through the morning air.  “What will happen to my canaries?” he cried, when he suddenly thought about them again.  He rushed over to the cage, and felt the thin wires with his fingers.  He reached into the cage and felt for their soft feathery fluttering wings, but they had flown away. “It is a sign from Heaven,” he cried, “God has set them free!”  

Tarentino's Cheek - Is There Any Excuse For This Stuff?

Inglourious Basterds

I can distinctly recall the first time I saw Quentin Tarantino interviewed--on television. It was not long after he had made Pulp Fiction [1994]. Critics were gushing over its excesses, and there was a lot of pleasant talk about how it had enabled John Travolta to resuscitate his worn-out career. I found Tarantino to be rather like an apoplectic, slightly demented teenager. In my own youth, there had been a boy rather like this in my neighborhood. This guy, let's call him Tommy Caffey, was the only child of two grossly overprotective parents who spoiled Tommy to an inordinate degree, indulging him in every single one of his cooped-up fantasies. Tommy developed a weird fascination with all things Nazi, and eventually acquired dozens of Nazi memorabilia and authentic souvenirs--uniforms, weapons, insignia'd ephemera, etc. (As I later came to understand, such spooky interests weren't that unusual, even among otherwise healthy-minded individuals--Ian Hamilton Finlay, for instance, was also obsessed with Nazi imagery and symbolism.) My point here isn't that Tarantino is a Nazi-obsessed freak, but that he exhibits all the usual symptoms of a cooped-up adolescent mind, undisciplined, credulous, faddish, and immature. 

 

In the interview, it was clear that Tarantino trusted in, invested in, his own enthusiasms to a degree unbecoming, and dangerous for a creative talent with the authority to command significant amounts of capital and influence. Somehow, on the strength of two cartoonish blood-and-guts Black Comedies, he'd taken Hollywood by storm and was set to try out all his childhood dreams of movie-making. 

 

Hollywood has seen other directorial talents gone awry in this way, though seldom so early in their career(s). Sam Pekinpah, for instance, who began as a hack Westerns writer-director in the late 1950's (Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, etc.), eventually ended up making ridiculous, overblown, blood-and-guts showpieces like The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, etc. The Wild Bunch was most notable, for instance, as being, at the time of its release, the most obsessively, gratuitously, ghoulish violent movie ever made, in which dozens and dozens of men are gunned down, with evident relish, accompanied by guffaws and resolute conviction. A movie whose raw brutality suggested troubling, deeper levels of psychological abnormality than even his most ardent fans had been led to expect. Anyone who thought this kind of portrayal represented some kind of verite vision of the true wild west needed to have his head examined. Spaghetti Westerns had been based on an aesthetic of the gesture and lyricism of the prairie and desert landscapes, the cliches of maverick heroism and graphic contrasts, but they could be forgiven for misinterpreting the meaning of the American Westerns genre.

 

Brian De Palma, another, younger director--about mid-way in generational terms between Pekinpah and the younger Tarantino--is another director who shares an interest in extreme versions of genre fantasy. In such examples as Obsession, Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and The Untouchables, he showed a certain flare for setting up "classic" situations and relationships, built out of the stock B- and C-movie tricks and techniques, creating suspense, using sexual innuendo, sadistic undertone, and fixing upon gratuitously gory detail--all traits which mainline cinema had once shunned.

 

The idea of combining the worst aspects of B-movie horror, porn, noir and surreal comedy is not new. A thin line separates the sharp-etched satire and black comedy of Dr. Strangelove [1964], or Catch-22 [1970], from, for instance, the bizarre semi-mainstream work of Russ Meyer (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) or the chain-saw movies so beloved of Joe Bob Briggs, or something indefinable like Blue Velvet [1986].

 

                           

Tarantino's metaphorical cross-dressing style in Inglourious Basterds derives from a complete dressing down of the serious war movie drama, just as Pulp Fiction was a deconstruction of latter-day Noir. But Tarantino is no caricaturist, no well-meaning or mischievous satirist out to puncture people's pieties or offend the tender sensibilities of academic movie-critics. 

 

What's most obvious--and undoubtedly most thrilling to his fans--is the lack of allegiance to any vestige of dramatic purpose, tragic or comic, in favor of a distorted sequence of exaggerated, misconceived, and ultimately meaningless scenes. 

 

In pulp fiction--the kind of badly written, one might even say deliberately bad writing, which characterized the popular pulp magazines and story pamphlets of the 1930's and 1940's--improbable actions and cardboard personae, vied for the attention of an audience no more sophisticated than that of the standard comic book fan-base. 

 

"Bam!! Bop!! CarraackK!!!" Dull serial material and low-grade radio and early episodic television fodder. The expedient excuse for this kind of stuff is that it's cheap to make, and no one invests much emotionally in any of it. With the rise of camp, and cult, critics began to think of this kind of pap as a separate set of vagrant generic categories. A series like Wild Wild West [1965-1969], with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin, which turned the standard Western into a hybridized, synthetic spoof on itself, was one marker in the evolution of the type.

 

If Tarantino's style owes something to the blurring of categories brought about by television, his ambition has been, on the contrary, to exploit that confusion, by manipulating stereotypes, pushing the limits well beyond improbability, and then depending upon the audience's flexible tolerance to suggest that the whole history of narrative is somehow nothing more than a playground, as if a precocious 8-year old had been given a blow-torch and invited to burn half the books in the Library of Congress. Ha ha ha.        

 

Post-Modern audiences, already massaged and softened up with liberal doses of New Wave absurdity and European automatism--having graduated from Bogart to Belmondo to Giancarlo Giannini to Sean Connery to Arnold Schwarzenegger--have shown they're ready for anything, even movies couched in tiresomely familiar "pulp" plots and settings, with equally over-the-top stylized wooden acting, stoned editing and cinematography. 

  

Ordinarily, directors will get the benefit of the doubt from audiences when they take liberties with generic order. But what about the inside-out appreciation of violence and gore and fake romance and action for action's sake? Is it possible to make a movie in which the audience's suspension of disbelief--and its patience with bad patches--is sublimed into a state of absurdity in which anything--even slicing up bodies or bashing in heads with baseball bats--becomes the occasion for hilarity? When Schindler's List was first shown in local theatres in the Bay Area, it was reported that young audiences would begin to snicker, then break into full-throated guffaws, when Jewish characters were thrown from five-story windows by Gestapo thugs. It was even reported that many teenagers thought it must all have been an elaborate put-on, a fake bit of apocryphal history to cover up the sins of the Yids!                           

 

     

If Tarantino's the harbinger of some new kind of conceptual cinematic vision, I wonder what its ultimate message is. If the end of the first 75 years of ambitious movie-making is the gleeful conflagration of all of its most impressive traditions--i.e., the burning of the celluloid--what is there left to do? 

    

Despite whatever dramatic involvement adult audiences may find in serious movies, the celebration and lionization of this kind of trash by the industry audience itself--the movie was nominated for (count'em) 8 academy awards (!)--does give one pause. 

 

The purposes to which the raw material of human experience can be put, in art, are dependent upon the desired ends. Making movies is a very complex endeavor, involving the cooperation and participation of hundreds of individuals, all working towards a single vision, a carefully constructed set of sequenced visual events, interactions, effects. Cynics like Tarantino will suggest that chance and laziness and impulsive decision-making can be as useful as story-boards and precise dialogue. Differences in style, after all, are what make different directorial efforts unique. But deliberately planned ideas and insight--such as that of Hitchcock, or De Palma--aren't accidents. When they make a "mistake" it's a clear failure of intention, or a misinterpretation of the medium. 

But with Tarantino's movies, you get the sense that such mistakes don't matter, or, if they do, they're just incorporated into the complacent, confused, opportunistic flow of his imagination. Casting Brad Pitt--an actor who, though with somewhat limited range and limited looks, has managed to put together a pretty impressive string of roles--as a savage, naive, middle-aged hick Army officer in charge of a party of blood-thirsty Jewish assassins, is painfully wrong. And yet, one has the feeling that Tarantino grooves on this kind of absurd wrongness, that he'd rather Pitt act against type, than have it played the way Tom Hanks played Captain John H. Miller in Saving Private Ryan.  

 

Ask yourself how Tarantino would have made Schindler's List, or The Pianist, or Saving Private Ryan. It's not enough simply to say that these aren't movies that Tarantino would be unlikely to choose, because they lie outside his area of skill or concern. He'd be unable to do them competently because he lacks an essential ability which is crucial to any movie director: He fails completely to see dramatic material except in the way a selfish, capricious, mischievous, spoiled teenager would see it: As the chance to get away with murder.

 

Giving people like this unlimited budgets and big-name actors to work with is disastrous--a waste of resource and talent hardly seen before, in the whole history of cinema. It's almost Shakespearean! It would take a Robert Altman just to document the chaotic misappropriations and false notes of a full-scale mess like the making of Inglourious Basterds must have been.

 

But it wouldn't be a comedy, it would be a tragedy. 

 

Oddly enough, I find I've spent a whole blog discussing a movie, without even outlining its plot or individual performances. That's because the movie, as a whole, left so little impression on me that I felt no compulsion to account for the intricacies of its shortcomings. When you come away from a movie that has this much faux-history, this much violence and weirdly twisted emotional strain, without any sense of resolution, or participation, or concern for any of the characters or their outcomes, you know something's terribly wrong. In order for audiences to care about whether the guy gets the girl, or to care about people who get casually killed, you have to make them care about those people in the first place, an ability which Tarantino not only lacks, but which he seems to feel is really unnecessary to the making of narrative. You begin to wonder if the guy isn't just a little cracked in the skull.  

  

At least pulp noir was occasionally fun, even when it was bad. Inglourious Basterds is very bad, and no fun at all. Unless, perhaps, you're Quentin Tarantino himself.    

                 

 

Post-Colonial Elephants

 

Post Colonial Elephants    

 

                                                                       post-Colonial Elephants 

                                                                       learn to tread softly 

                                                                       their great flat feet 

                                                                       placed with care 

                                                                       they gracefully shift 

                                                                       from side to side 

                                                                       their world is our room 

                                                                       our world is their room 

 

Jack Gilbert - It's Later Than You Think [Part III]

 

 

In 1982, after a hiatus lasting fully 20 years, in which he had been living for the most part abroad, mostly in Greece, Jack Gilbert broke his aesthetic fast and published his second collection of verse, Monolithos. Poems 1962 and 1982 [Knopf].

 

Imagine what the effect would be if your poems could only survive as fragments, moth-eaten papyri stashed in caves and forgotten for a thousand years in an arid, sparsely settled land. Would you be content to let half your lines--say, the left half--exist as testaments to the partial content of your assertions, to the sum of your sentiments? Are your poems as full enough of what you most wish to endure, over time, that what would survive would be somehow sufficient to your purposes? 

 

But our lives and our poems are like different versions of the shadows of our selves. Who knows what Sappho looked like, what she liked to eat for breakfast, or what color of skin appealed to her? Perhaps it isn't important that we know--certainly we never shall--only that the quality of feeling she was able to transmit, much in fragmentary shards, is apprehensible to us, across the barriers of time, language, context, and material surface. 

 

         

THE CUCUMBERS OF PRAXILLA OF SICYON

 

What is the best we leave behind?

Certainly love and form and ourselves.

Surely those. But it is the mornings

that are hard to relinquish, and music

and cucumbers. Rain on trees, empty

piazzas in small towns flooded with sun.

What we are busy with doesn't make us

groan ah! ah! as we will for the nights

and the cucumbers.

 

 
 

If we could decide which part of ourselves we wanted others to know of, which part would it be? Our humor, our fidelity, our joy, our misfortune, our sins, our failures? Would we be satisfied if the truth could be known, if our poems could convey who we truly are, instead of who we maybe wished we had been, or could be? Or would we be content merely to know that in writing our poems, we had reached a place in our knowledge that would otherwise have been withheld from us, had we not engaged life with words, in the hope of discovering what really mattered, what might sustain us in moments of crisis? 

  

In the movie Zorba the Greek [1964], the actor Anthony Quinn tells his English friend Basil that he dances, spontaneously, at moments in his life of greatest intensity, whether out of intense joy or intense grief (such as the death of one's child). His dancing is a sublimation, a purgative and purification of the soul.

 

Gilbert lived for some years on the island of Paros, in the Cyclades. Though a tourist destination, it remains largely unspoiled, somewhat rigorously rustic. Clearly, for Gilbert, it signified a setting in which he might test the oppositional tendencies of his nature, against the hard Mediterranean light, the unyielding white stone, the intense blue of the sky and sea, the slower pace of an unmechanized, still-primitive folk culture. The clarification afforded him a release from cosmopolitan distraction(s), the blandishments and nuisance of media--allowing him to focus on food, love, exertion, blocks of time and space for meditation and the writing of poems. Poems which proceeded by increments of uncertainty, changes of heart, rueful, reluctant admissions, cries of splendour and agony. Conducted like quiet conversations after love-making, difficult disagreements, awe-inspiring music--moments, in short, in which a relaxation of inhibition, or inspiration spurred by profound impression, released the mind from habit and familiarity into a space of disclosure and permission: Poems, in short, that mattered.     

  

 

THE REVOLUTION

 

Robinson Crusoe breaks a plate on his way out,

and hesitates over the pieces. The ship begins

to sink as he sweeps them up. Sets the table

and stands looking at history for the last time.

Knowing precision will leak from him,

however well he learns the weather or vegetation,

and despite the cunning of his hands.

His mind can survive only among the furniture.

Amid the primary colors of the island, he will

become a fine thing, perhaps, but a different one.

       

 

  

If we watch ourselves thinking, too carefully, we may miss something that passed, as swiftly as a hummingbird, just there along the top edge of the hedge-row. The harder we try to solve the momentary conundrum, the less likely we are to see the elusive flutter, the hidden clue. A bird in the hand is a poem to the mind. And the hand is empty.  

 

 

SINGING IN MY DIFFICULT MOUNTAINS

 

Helot for what time there is

in the baptist hegemony of death.

For what time there is summer,

island, cornice. Weeping

and singing of what declines

into the earth. But of having,

not of not having. What abounds.

Amazed morning after morning

by the yielding. What times there are.

My fine house that love is.