In which the tone of the blog shifts dramatically.

King Kong

Donkey/King Kong - the miniature monstrosity.

There's a tradition (read: possibly a fib) in my mother's family that Fay Wray is a great aunt or cousin many times removed. My grandmother used to tell me, "That's where you get your blonde hair", a theory that flies in the face of logic and genetics, not least because Fay wasn't even blonde. Regardless, there's a certain mythology about this film which is a bit difficult to understand from a modern perspective. It's a significant stretch to link my blondeness to Fay Wray's through the tenuous connection of a shared family name, but clearly someone in the Australian Wrays was enamoured enough with the film, and with Fay, to insist that there was one. It might not be productive to interrogate King Kong's position as a 'classic' of the classical Hollywood tradition, but the reasons for the film's continuing appeal are an interesting entrance into its style and themes.

I've read other blog entries saying their automatic response watching King Kong was laughter, and I can definitely understand that. Parts of it are so clunky, the dialogue and narrative arcs so contrived, that it's hard to take it seriously. How much this is due to the passage of time and how much to actual flaws in the film is difficult to tell, although I think when watching the Peter Jackson version I rolled my eyes a fair bit as well. The notion of the love-struck beast carrying off the frail maiden just doesn't appeal anymore, and outside of maybe a James Bond I can't think of a recent movie revolving around the kidnapping by ruthless thugs of a dainty lass. Perhaps the St. George and the dragon mythology persists, but we're too cynical these days to accept a simple rescue scenario. If a lass is kidnapped, the most likely explanation will be that she was double-crossing the hero all along. I may be getting sidetracked with modern comparisons but the premise of the film certainly seems to have suffered over time.

The enduring appeal, I believe, lies in the idea of the primitive - not the coconut-bra wearing, grass-skirted, running and screaming 'natives' of the 1933 film, but the lasting sense of pathos and innocence inherent in our (perhaps patronising) notions of pre-modern or untouched civilisations. When Kong crashes through the walls of his enclosure it becomes clear that the structure didn't necessarily serve to keep him in, its best function was keeping the outside world out. Like my Donkey Kong, proudly smashing through the glass walls of his terrarium, intent on spreading terror and regaining his property, he is unaware that he's just a miniature in a world of skyscraping overabundance. Modernity has no respect for the natural, the untouched, but only for spectacle. Even our sense of pathos for Kong's death must be viewed through the lens of cinema, as Denham continues to force his story into the camera's frame by insisting, "It was Beauty that killed the Beast", when clearly Kong has been destroyed by a modern society impatient for spectacle.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Move along. Move along. Nothing but happy turtles and other such nonsense.

Charles and Ray Eames - Short films

Here's an interesting not-fact from Charles and Ray Eames's Wikipedia page:

Charles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architecture scholarship. After two years of study, he left the university. Many sources claim that he was dismissed for his advocacy of Frank Lloyd Wright and his interest in modern architects. He was reportedly dismissed from the university because his views were "too modern."

Sounds oddly familiar.

Thinking about what I wrote earlier about The Fountainhead and the way Rand kept pushing the idea that innovative designers were being universally maligned, I thought the video of the Eameses on The Today Show was interesting for what it revealed about design as high-concept as opposed to design as experienced by the majority.

Compare the H and eiffel based and wire backed chairs with the outfits the women are wearing. To me, it was like watching time travel. How could these objects, so clean and elegant in their lines and carefully contoured to the body, possibly have found popularity of this kind in a time when women still wore shin-length petticoats and corsetry? 

The Dior 'New Look' Bar Suit - 1947

Designed at the same time as Dior's New Look, an extremely flattering but not remotely natural triumph of boning and padding, (a fascinating look into the interior of these clothes, if you're into that sort of thing, can be found on Gertie's New Blog) the Eames chairs seem to belong to a different way of life. The Dior suit is most definitely architecture for the body, but maybe more architecture in spite of the body rather than in service of it. In making women resemble buildings or cakes, this fashion was restrictive, complicated, and completely altered the natural shape of the body. Odd considering Dior claimed his dresses were "molded upon the curves of the feminine body". According to this sewing blog:

If re-created accurately, New Look garments should nearly stand up by themselves; the interlining, linings, interfacings, bonings, and stiffenings Dior used all but supported his garments on their own.

Bit scary, no? (Although I have heard the argument that if women still relied on structured undergarments to create the ideal body shape, instead of diet and exercise, they wouldn't feel so much pressure to alter themselves and there'd be less of an epidemic of eating disorders and such. I get it but I also enjoy the free and easy motion of my ribcage and NOT dying of consumption.)

There's something asynchronous in the development trajectories of fashion and art in the middle of the century - design moves swiftly towards the sleek, the streamlined and the efficient, while fashion dawdles behind, aside from a brief flirtation with the look in the twenties. It seems incongruous to me that THOSE skirts would sit in THOSE chairs. Perhaps that's just me, and to other eyes the two styles seem harmonious. Or maybe it's that the designs of the chairs are so ubiquitous today that I tend to see them as distinctly modern things, whereas the Today Show presenter's background dress (it's called a background dress, don't ask me why) is emphatically From The Past. To me though, it seems an example of the disparity between the design ideals of the few and the actual lived experience of the majority - it takes a while for the latter to catch up with the former, or for the former to condescend to take the latter into consideration. This idea is probably still influenced more by Rand than by the Eames's films.

In a similar vein though, while I was watching the films, particularly Toccata for Toy Trains, and wishing the camera would just back up a little so I could see how the thing was done, I never wondered why. It wasn't until other people in the class said the same thing that I started considering it. Watching King Kong I never had any desire for the trick to be revealed and the illusion spoiled. My theory was that maybe in watching these short films we're constantly aware that it's just Charles and Ray playing with toys, filming it all in their office or their home. The sense of professionalism is lacking, and as a result we see it more as a kind of handicraft than a polished, commercially produced artwork. But I'm certainly not set on that point. Maybe it wouldn't matter who produced it, we'd still have that curiosity about the way it was done.

The Fountainhead - less crossly but still a little cross. And longer.

It’s difficult to look at this book objectively, since it’s a rare book I am physically violent against (it joins Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole in that dubious honour). These books are alike, in that I really, really liked parts of them and despised other parts with an almost irrational passion, mostly because they were so forced and tedious compared to the good parts. 

On an aesthetic level, much of this book is appealing. I found a lot of Rand’s figurative language, like the plot, forced and tedious, but purely for style this is a world I’d happily move into, for a little while at least. The spaces sound so elegant. Simple details, like Dominique's white chair or European god statue, give an impression of restrained opulence. The image of one of Roark's buildings, rising out of the black rock as if thrown up by the earth itself, gives chills. These are buildings, as the characters themselves say, that you would have to live up to. It's an appealing idea, to have yourself displayed to your absolute best in the form of your home, as somehow truthful and honest, not deceitful or fake.

It aims at an aesthetic ideal recognisable in other studies of interior decoration from the Victorian period onward. Two in particular: novelist Edith Wharton and architect Ogden Codman’s book The Decoration of Houses, published in 1898, and an essay by the writer Willa Cather called “The Novel Dèmeublè”, written in 1922 and published in The New Republic. The former addresses interior design, outlining the ideal way of decorating the home, and derides the ornate Victorian style of the time (like Peter Keating’s apartment), favouring a simple, elegant style which prioritises utility and function. The latter addresses furnishings in literature, decrying the Realist trend of accumulating detailed description of furnishings. Put these two together and you can see, as has been observed, that this trend against the overblown Victorian style had already been established by the time Rand was writing. Which isn’t to say Rand shouldn’t bother with her own argument, on the contrary I think it’s an admirable aesthetic philosophy, but there's a reason that kitsch and overblown decoration persisted (and you could say persists, even today). Like romance literature and melodrama, ornate furnishings fill a need. In The Architecture of Happiness Alain de Botton describes a housing estate designed by Le Corbusier. Despising the unnecessarily ornate styles of the past, Le Corbusier built simple, pared back structures with flat roofs, plain windows, and no ornamentation. But the factory workers who lived in the houses weren't tired of ornamentation. In fact, they needed it to escape from their daily work in the factories. So they added shutters to the windows, built picket fences, and even added pitched roofs to their boxy houses. Fortunately, Le Corbusier wasn't Howard Roark, and didn't blow them all up for their intransigence.

Perhaps what's so deeply offensive to many, and it is to me, about The Fountainhead is that this is an individual showing us how we ought to live, and what beauty really is. Rand's minimal aesthetic might be appealing for people who have always been surrounded by opulence. It might seem refreshingly simple to someone like Edith Wharton, who built this, to strip away the brocade and the flocked wallpaper and the gilt and live without clutter. Doing so may make them feel more natural, less buffered from the rest of the world, as though they are living more wholesome, simple lives. But to people who aren't inured to ornamentation, and whose lives are plenty simple enough, stripping away the upholstered surfaces and decorative touches - unnecessary though they may be - might only serve to remind them how little stands between themselves and destitution. This is how de Botton reads the tendency towards ornamentation, anyway, and in relation to The Fountainhead it seems to show why, after the new minimalist, almost utilitarian, style had apparently been adopted, Rand would still be railing against the foolish masses who don't know what beauty and greatness really are. It also partly explains, to me anyway, why this book ended up hurled across the room. Like the music in Man With a Movie Camera, this book is so BOSSY. Sure, the spaces sound appealing and the furnishings are amazing, but we don't want to be shown how to live. This book poses a phenomenological reading of aesthetics, in which everyone perceives the same things to be good or beautiful, you just have to get them to admit it. It's deeply reductive and really, sort of offensive.

Fountainhead - briefly and crossly

To my mind, The Fountainhead fails as a novel because it’s a polemical tract, and fails as a polemical tract because the novel it’s forced into contradicts its whole philosophy. Form ought to follow function? Eschew decoration in favour of utility? THIS IS A SEVEN HUNDRED PAGE NOVEL. If it was a building, it would have an eight-storey facade covered in plaster mouldings, with mullioned bay windows, carved lintels, Doric columns and gargoyles on every eave. Inside would be one long, narrow hallway which would twist and turn and lead you back every five minutes to the same room, with a statue of a naked Howard Roark with the words ‘YOU ARE RIGHT’ carved around the base. Because ultimately, all this novel tells us is that our basest, most arrogant impulses are correct: I am right, everyone else is an idiot, and the only reason they don’t admit as much is they’re jealous of how awesome I am. In this world you have to stand up for your ideals to be worth anything, and your ideals have to be Howard Roark.

The library of the sewer people

Bender: 'There's nothing down here but crumpled pornos and Ayn Rand.'

Andre Bazin and his kitty via Writers and Kitties

Piccadilly

As a disclaimer, I've taken the Silent to Sound film studies class, so I'm familiar with silent films, and generally like them. But for some reason I found Piccadilly intensely boring. The problem, I think, was that I was comparing it all along to another film from the same year, Pandora's Box. Pandora's Box is a German silent film about a dancer whose uncontrollable sexiness leads to despair, death, and her own eventual murder by Jack the Ripper. Lulu, as played by Louise Brooks, is part free-wheeling innocent, part scheming seductress, and it's her performance that makes the film what it is. Interestingly in relation to Piccadilly, Brooks popularised the bubikopf - the short, sharp bob haircut Anna May Wong's hair imitates in this film.

Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora's Box.

What I like most about Pandora's Box is the unabashed joy Louise Brooks/Lulu has in her own seductive powers. She loves people, and she loves to be loved. The film is set in Berlin at a time when the city was known for its hedonistic, avant garde, and sexually open artistic sphere. The musical/film Cabaret romps through this world, showing its final days prior to the rise of fascism in Germany. German films of the Weimar era drew on a futuristic aesthetic, a kind of hyperactive art deco, and while Pandora's Box isn't as abstract in its design as films by directors such as Fritz Lang, it still has that grand, modern style. The fashion and hairstyles, as well as what is regarded as the first depiction of a lesbian in film, make Pandora's Box ahead of its time when compared to American films of the same era. Released about six months before Piccadilly (in Germany) I feel that Pandora's Box is doing a similar thing in a more interesting way.

Vic, Mabel and Shosho in Piccadilly.

 I suppose it depends what you see Piccadilly as attempting to do, but if the moral is one read along gendered lines (assuming there is some sort of moral, and ignoring the racial aspect) both films seem to have a message about women who are commodities (performers, in particular) attempting to turn their commodity status into a kind of purchasing power of their own. Lulu, Mabel and Shosho's lives go awry (or end) when they misinterpret their commodity value as power and try to wrangle themselves stable positions as the wives of the men who employ and exploit them, rather than settling for their appropriate partners; other employees. Mabel should go with Victor, who is the real attraction in their partnership. Shosho should stick with Jim, her equal in race and class. In Pandora's Box, Lulu toys with the son of her... the man she is the mistress of (you can't exactly say 'master', can you? But there isn't a name for it! You can be a concubine, but not a concubiner, a mistress, but not a master), before marrying the father. Lulu attains a bit of a coup here, stealing her man-she-is-the-mistress-of (who also backs the shows she dances in) back from his (wealthy, sophisticated) fiancee by throwing a screaming tantrum (see top two images above). After the wedding, her husband finds her with his son's head in her lap, and attacks her. In the ensuing tousle he is killed, and Lulu faces prison. From there it gets rather messy. The lesson for Lulu is that she has overplayed her hand in trying for the father rather than settling for the son, who is more her equal.

I would say Shosho is Lulu's parallel in Piccadilly, and while I don't know that Piccadilly could feasibly have been influenced by Pandora's Box the thematic similarities are notable, as are the physical similarities between Anna May Wong and Louise Brooks, in their hair and their small, slim body types. Next to the curvaceous and handsomely feathered and upholstered Mabel, Shosho looks tiny, and very young. Lulu and Shosho, young, slim, often near-naked, with their hair close about their heads, are indicative of a new type of femininity. The New Woman is androgynous, free spirited, alluring and flirtatious. The kind of slang recorded in this 'Flapper's dictionary' indicates something about the attitude of this type of young woman in the 1920's. To my mind, while Lulu still ends up murdered in an icy London garret, Pandora's Box seems to offer a more forward-looking view on this trend in its more thorough exploration of Lulu's character. Shosho is less sympathetic largely because we don't see enough of her. I found Piccadilly less interesting because I didn't care for any of the characters in the same way I cared about Lulu. Piccadilly's view on the New Woman seems particularly grim, with none of Lulu's joy.

Berlin: Symphony of a City and Man With a Movie Camera

I just went on an internet journey in researching this post which pretty much peaked when I found this quote: "The male lead, played by Ewan McGregor ("Trainspotting"), is a bisexual translator named Jerome who spends most of the film with his uncircumcised penis flapping in the wind." Sounds fairly promising, I think. The journey itself was fairly straightforward, it's from a Salon interview with director Peter Greenaway, and I've been trying to track down an interview I heard last year on ABC Classic FM in which he discussed the changing nature of film viewing. The interview isn't there any longer, but hopefully I won't completely mangle what he said in trying to remember it. 


I was reminded of this interview because in it he discussed the way he watches films. He said he hadn't been to the cinema in about ten years, and that he much prefers to watch films at home, where he can eat what he likes, talk, answer the phone, and stop, start and rewind at a whim. In other interviews, such as this recent one with The Guardian, he says artists should always be at the cutting edge of technology, and it's this technology that imparts more control over the text to both the creator and the spectator. This is obviously a modern way of viewing, turning the film into less of a cinematic experience and more of a personal commodity. To an extent, silent films have an element of this non-universality of experience in their music, which would necessarily be different everywhere the film was shown, and possibly in the projection rate. But this is still a communal experience, whereas the viewing style Greenaway talks about, and the style most of us were talking about regarding these films, is very much isolated and personalised. 


I noticed our discussions of Rutman and Vertov kept coming back to what role music or YouTube or silence played in individual understanding or appreciation of the films. Personally, I watched both of them with the Cinematic Orchestra soundtrack for Man With a Movie Camera. I already had the soundtrack and I didn't know when I watched Berlin that it and Vertov's film were almost identical in intention, style, and (crucially) length. I just stuck it on and marveled at my own ingenuity when the results were so excellent. It seemed less miraculous the next week when I watched Movie Camera and it was practically identical. 


This sense of control over the film by playing the music I wanted with it was undermined by a guilty feeling stemming from not watching it with its intended soundtrack. Until I actually tried watching it with the 'real' soundtrack, of course, and it was so didactic that I would rather have watched it with practically anything else. I've decided to watch silent movies with music that makes me feel more sympathetic to the film, rather than what might be contextually appropriate (although the question of trying to be sympathetic to the text and put the wishes of the creator first is fraught itself). So, for example, if I watch Metropolis I prefer this soundtrack by The New Pollutants, because it's brilliant, and modern in a way that suits the futuristic aesthetic of the film. 


Given that the films we're watching are concerned with and reflective of the modernity of their own times, it seems appropriate to use the technology available in watching them. It doesn't seem to me to be a question of whether or not this is how the films were supposed to be experienced, but I know there's an argument for the immersion of a communal experience of theatre viewing out there which might be convincing. 


And to demonstrate the wizardry of the internet, this quote from the Guardian interview about Greenaway's latest film Nightwatching links me neatly to the previous post: "Martin Freeman plays Rembrandt: oddly plausible and often nude". I've never seen a Greenaway film but they sound like the sort you watch with headphones on and one eye on the door.

Hello, CinMod

In (moderately) relevant things, this is the South Korean trailer for the BBC show Sherlock. Apparently whoever does the trailer editing for this particular station is a fanfic obsessed teenage girl. THE MUSIC! It's only mildly relevant to the subject, but I think it's hilarious, not to mention I'm obsessed with the show. It's fairly easy to mess with a show like this, particularly considering they let the homoerotic not-so-sub-text run pretty much rampant, with actors like Benedict Cumberbatch (who has the kind of intense gaze that burns holes in my tiny girl heart), and Martin Freeman, with his little quizzical wounded puppy face, not really helping. I'd be interested to know why it was cut together this way, whether the person who did it genuinely thought this was the main thrust of the show or if they were trying to appeal to a particular audience (the mad teenage fangirly one?). The kinds of shots they've used, much like the ones in the Law and Order video, are actually ones where they're all 'I deduce she's from Cornwall, she's been in London four hours and she's having multiple affairs' about a dead body, and aren't even remotely romantic. That 'look of disgust on account of having just seen a man's body washed up on the shore of the Thames' is easily transmuted into 'sorrowful look reflecting on difficult love for a man who's kind of a jerk' with a bit of romantic music and a dissolve. I think it's brilliant, and since the reason I found it was it was tweeted by Steven Moffat, who wrote the show, it's obviously something they were well aware of in making it.