Playing with fire in France - Lyon's Fête des lumières

For the last four days, for just two hours a day, a big chunk of the center of Lyon has been converted into a kind of artsy urban theme park.  The theme is light – illuminations, light sculptures, and short films projected against every convenient large flat surface.  It's the Fête des lumières!

It is something to see, a French city emptied of cars and buses, surrounded by soldiers, and packed with people – several million people – wandering around, sipping hot wine, and taking what must be some desperately bad cell phone photos of light-based art exhibits.  I know most of my photos were awful.

This one is not bad.  An example of a light sculpture, the flying fish flapping around.  Or perhaps it is a bird, since I know, in spite of the bad crowd, that there is a nest in middle of the fountain, because I saw people constructing it earlier in the week.  I know there is a fountain because etc.  This is one of the pleasures of living in Lyon, witnessing not just the festival but the preparations for the festival.  To see a bubble appear around a fountain.

The short films attract large enough – enormous – crowds that I was being literal about the theme park.  Ordinary city streets are converted into cattle chutes, or whatever they call the crowd-control corridors at Disney World.  Get in line, wait, advance, wait, and emerge in one of the big city plazas to watch the cartoon.  The highlight for me was the tribute to film (visible on Youtube) that made simultaneous use of the facades of the City Hall and the Art Museum.  Only in France would the films selected for a cute cartoon make a pretty decent syllabus for an Intro to Film course; only in Lyon would the spectacle start with a long excerpt from Workers Leaving the Factory, the first film.

Curiously, the festival has a religious purpose as well.  The first sign that the festival was upon us was the appearance of the illuminated words “MERCI MARIE” on the hill over the city.  A religious procession mounts the hill and thanks Mary for protecting the city from pestilence and revolution and so on.  I glimpsed the procession on Friday while helping build a candle-sculpture at the base of a Roman amphitheater.  You can see the shape of the head, yes?

That night, the wind and rain and sleet were so bad that there were not many candles lit when we gave up.  Saturday, the weather was good and the artist was more ambitious, so it was a solid two hours of lighting candles with a gas campfire starter.  I am not sure what the design is, exactly, because by the time we had the whole thing lit, the crowds above us were too thick to bother with.

I was supposed to help again tonight, but the weather was and is too miserable.  Still: constructing candle art that a million people will see in a Roman theater while a procession of priests pass by – when else will I have the chance to do this?

Lyon dispatch - the Lumière film festival

The Lumière film festival is wrapping up as I write.  Lyon is the city where film was invented, more or less, by the Lumière brothers, and the festival, a recent invention, only in its ninth year, is a tribute to that history.  It is not a showcase for new films, but a massive course in film history, from the French perspective.  The big – or biggest – retrospective features were for Wong Kar-wai, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Harold Lloyd, which gives an idea of the scope.  It is a festival where five thousand people fill a giant hall to see Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, and on another night five thousand fill the same space to see The Lion King.

I have perhaps alluded in the past to some aspects of French culture that I envy.  The Lumière festival was in this sense a painful week for me.  I will describe a single event.

Here we see the Hangar of the First Film at the Institut Lumière.  The festival’s screenings are scattered all over the city, but this theater is the headquarters.  The movie theater is literally built on the site of the first film, Workers Leaving the Factory (1895).  The theater is built out of and around the remnants of the building featured in the first film ever made.

I mean, come on.  I am going to see King Kong (1933) here.  I had already been here, before the festival, to see the restorations of Jean Vigo’s L’Atlante and Zero de Conduite.  The regular programming of the Institut Lumière is a year-round film festival.

The chairs at the hangar have little brass plaques on the arms with the names of important filmmakers.  I am sitting “between” Buster Keaton and Stanley Kubrick.  As with every event at the festival, nearly every seat is filled, a substantial number of them by schoolchildren.  Almost every film I saw was attended by school groups.  Every film is introduced, often by someone well-known.  A random early Clouzot movie I saw was introduced by Vincent Perez.  But this time we get:

On the left is the director of the festival; in the center is Bertrand Tavernier, president of the Institut and one of France’s greatest living directors; on the right is Michel Le Bris, who is talking about (see screen) Kong, his new 950-page novel about the directors of King Kong.  Le Bris is among other things a Robert Louis Stevenson expert.  How I would like to read this book.  Maybe someday.

My point is that at a screening of King Kong, the first twenty minutes are spent in the discussion of a novel, and the film itself is discussed as if it is something serious, as if it is a work of art, and this is all taken as entirely normal not just by the film buffs but by a hundred or two French school kids.

To top it off, Tavernier, who presumably has things to do, sits down to watch King Kong with the rest of us.  Afterwards, on the way out, I speak to him.  I tell him that he had created a beautiful film festival.

“I’m no critic, I only know what I like.” - emptying my bag of McTeague notes

“Of course,” she told the dentist, “I’m no critic, I only know what I like.”  She knew that she liked the “Ideal Heads,” lovely girls with flowing straw-colored hair and immense, upturned eyes.  These always had for title, “Reverie,” or “An Idyll,” or “Dreams of Love.”  (Ch. 10)

Frank Norris absorbed French fiction pretty thoroughly.  He mocks the bad taste of his characters.  He’s as bad as Flaubert.  Trina – that’s Trina, who marries McTeague, speaking – decorates their apartment with magazine illustrations that “inevitably” included “very alert fox terriers and very pretty moon-faced little girls” (Ch. 9).  Norris is so mean.

He also turns Trina into a cruel miser, borrowing now from Balzac, from Lost Illusions and Eugénie Grandet:

“Ah, the dear money, the dear money,” she would whisper, “I love you so!  All mine, every penny of it.” (Ch. 16)

“She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there” – fantastic.  Norris understood Zola the way I do, that his fiction is a kind of baroque Romanticism disguised in drab.  Norris does not share Zola’s baroque descriptive tendencies, but his imagery is pretty good when he wants.  This is across the bay in Oakland:

At the station these [poles] were headed by an iron electric-light pole that, with its supports and outriggers, looked for all the world like a grasshopper on its hind legs…  Clouds of sea-gulls were forever rising and settling upon this mud bank; a wrecked and abandoned wharf crawled over it on tottering legs…  (Ch. 5)

As far as I know, these animated ruins do not have a strong thematic connection to anything else, but I may have missed something.  They do dimly link to a long theater scene that features the Kinetoscope, the earliest reference to motion pictures that I have seen in an American novel:

McTeague was awe-struck.

“Look at that horse move his head,” he cried excitedly, quite carried away.  “Look at that cable-car coming – and the man going across the street.  See, here comes a truck.”  (Ch. 6)

His future mother-in-law is on to the seductive deception of movies, though: “’I ain’t no fool; dot’s nuthun but a drick.’”  This terrific chapter, which is packed with theatrical entertainment, also includes a little boy who desperately needs to pee, something else I had not seen in earlier fiction.

“Owgooste, what is ut?” cried his mother, eyeing him with dawning suspicion; then suddenly, “What haf you done?  You haf ruin your new Vauntleroy gostume!”

Poor little August, constantly humiliated by Norris, stuffed into that Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, “very much too small for him.”

What else?  Ah, Frank Norris gives himself a cameo in his own novel, near the end (Ch. 20).  I needed the help of a footnote to know that.  Pretty funny.

I would not call McTeague a great novel, but it is full of amusing things.

Vachel Lindsay goes to the movies - the face of the whole earth changes

From A Doll’s “Arabian Nights”

(A Rhymed Scenario for Mae Marsh, when she acts in the new many-colored films)

I dreamed the play was real.
I walked into the screen.

Vachel Lindsay is anticipating Buster Keaton.  Lindsay wrote a number of poems about actors, including at least one more about Mae Marsh, one of D. W. Griffith’s favorite actresses.  I do not think the acting poems are among Lindsay’s best, but I am interested in their existence. 

I am the one poet who has a right to claim for his muses Blanche Sweet, Mary Pickford, and Mae Marsh.  I am the one poet who wrote them songs when they were Biograph heroines, before their names were put on the screen, or the name of their director…  There are two things to be said for those poems.  First, they were heartfelt.  Second, any one could improve on them.  (p. 4, Modern Library edition)

He loved movies; he theorized about movies.

The result, more important than the poems, was The Art of the Moving Picture (1915, revised 1922), “dated and cranky,” “hyperbolic and self-appointedly supreme” (says Stanley Kauffmann, p. viii) – Lindsay wants people to politely converse during the movie – he titles a chapter “The Substitute for the Saloon” and means it – yet insightful and thorough.

His vocabulary requires some transposition.  Crowd Splendor, Patriotic Splendor and Fairy Splendor. Sculpture-in-Motion, Painting-in-Motion and Architecture-in-Motion.  He is categorizing spectacle and imagery, looking for the uniquely cinematic aspects of film art.  Lindsay is almost an auteurist, praising the aspects of films that are not simply copied from the theater – strong images, intimate but non-verbal acting, crowd scenes, dream sequences.  Chases and special effects (“the wizard element”).

I have said that it is a quality, not a defect, of the photoplays that while the actors tend to become types and hieroglyphics and dolls, on the other hand, dolls and hieroglyphics and mechanisms tend to become human.  (94)

And this in a world almost without auteurs.  Georges Méliès is never mentioned; Charlie Chaplin only mentioned uncomprehendingly.  The one great artist for Lindsay is D. W. Griffith – “he is the star of the piece, except on one page where he is the villain” (124).

The feature-length film is only four or five years old when Lindsay is writing.  Part of the strangeness of the book, I admit, is imagining my way back into the world Lindsay inhabits, where Hollywood has not been built but is one of his correct predictions (Ch. XVI, “California and America”), where every aspect of movies is no new, and changing so fast, and where Lindsay can title his last chapter “The Acceptable Year of the Lord,” and can preach the Gospel of Beauty, prophesying “dreams deeper than the sea and higher than the clouds of heaven”:

It has come then, this new weapon of men, and the face of the whole earth changes…  by faith and a study of the signs we proclaim that it will go on and on in immemorial wonder.  (187)

"The Cameraman's Revenge," a bug-infested animated film from a century ago

At the Caravana de Recuerdos, Richard has been running a Foreign Film Festival all year long.  He encouraged watch-along challenges, and I responded with “The Cameraman’s Revenge” (1912, 12 min.) the landmark of animation by pioneering Polish puppeteer Wladyslaw Starewicz, available in a marvelously tinted version at archive.org.

Starewicz’s puppets are insects (and one hapless frog).  Actual insects, killed and preserved and turned into puppets.  They do uncanny things.  The grasshopper or whatever it is on the left actually paints that portrait.  At a cabaret performance, a stag beetle applauds by clicking its mandibles together while a grasshopper drums on the floor with his long legs.

Given that he has for some reason begun filming insect puppets, what did Starewicz think to do with them?  His answer: domestic melodrama.

Mr. Beetle is amorous and picks up a beautiful dragonfly who performs at a nightclub.  A jealous grasshopper and camera buff and, why not, bicyclist, secretly films their assignation which he later projects – the grasshopper is also the projectionist at the local cinema – for the world to see (on the right, filmed through a keyhole), humiliating Mr. Beetle and enraging his wife, who beats him with her parasol.

Now Mr. Beetle wants his own revenge which lands Mr. and Mrs. Beetle in jail, where they perhaps reconcile their differences.

What do you do with your taxidermic bug puppets?  The freedom, inventiveness, and light-hearted insanity of the great early filmmakers is a thrill to see.

The real virtues of the film are threefold, first, as I mentioned above, Starewicz’s attention to detail in the actions of his puppets, as we see them paint, operate a camera, fight, and come dangerously close to an explicit bug-puppet sex scene.

Second, and closely related is the casual surrealism of seeing the insects riding bicycles, going to a movie or checking into a seedy hotel for an assignation.  The décor of the Beetles’ home for some reason strikes me as especially fine, although at a small scale it may be too difficult to make out their modish Asian theme, including the porcelain monkey statuette on the fireplace mantel.

Third, form determines content in this case, as it is a movie about movies, both about the kinds of stories told in movies and about the medium itself.  The movie shown in the theater up above is made of scenes from “The Cameraman’s Revenge,” and in the ensuing fight Mr. Beetle escapes by punching his way through the screen.

How did Starewicz come to make such an odd film?  I will quote from his biography at IMDb.com: “fascinated by insects, he bought a camera and attempted to film them, but they kept dying under the hot lights.”  So he made them into puppets so he could film them in action.  And then that action turns out to be packing a suitcase and driving a car.  There is a step missing here.

I hope Richard enjoys the movie!  When I founded Wuthering Expectations I thought I would write about movies a lot, the good old ones like “The Cameraman’s Revenge.”  But I was wrong.

Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope - Pope Bartleby in a Chekhov play

A movie for a change, one that was, unknown to me, full of 19th century literature.

In Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope (2011), a newly chosen Pope (the flawless Michel Piccoli) has a crisis of conscience, or a psychological breakdown, or an existential attack.  The other cardinals are no help, an outside psychiatrist (played by Moretti) is no help, nothing is any help.  The film splits:  in one strand, Piccoli escapes the Vatican and wanders Rome, in a plot reminiscent of fairy tales where the king becomes a commoner, while the B plot is spent with the College of Cardinals in the sealed Vatican.  They do not know the Pope has fled.  The psychiatrist organizes a round robin volleyball tournament.

Two directions to go with We Have a Pope (2011).  One would be to pair Moretti with W. G. Sebald, not in thematically but as another creator of essayistic fiction.  Please see the 1993 Caro Diario and the 1998 Aprile for evidence.  Maybe avoid the one about the Communism and water polo.  I do not want to pursue this – not with this movie – but I will say that Moretti is a more interesting artist than any single film reveals.  This was my fifth Moretti movie so some of my pleasure was seeing how he reworked many of his early ideas and images.

The other direction, the literature.  The new Pope, before his election, is Cardinal Melville.  I assumed, and Moretti says, that the name came from director Jean-Pierre Melville, whose work I do not know well.  So as I was wondering aloud what the connection was ma femme said “Bartleby, you nitwit, the Pope is Bartleby!”  I am paraphrasing; she was much meaner than that.  But she was right, Cardinal Melville would prefer not to be Pope.  By the end of the movie he learns to say something besides “I would prefer not to,” but it takes him a while.

It is, of course, highly unrealistic that someone who has risen to the rank of Cardinal would suffer from a Bartleby-like anxiety, but Moretti is not a Realist.  “But I saw The Son’s Room (2001) and it is entirely realistic!”  I know, that one is different.  In this one, the College plays volleyball and the climax of the movie takes place at a mad performance of The Seagull, lines of which we have been hearing through much of the movie.

Anton Chekhov is the explicitly invoked literary figure in the movie.  Melville, before he joined the priesthood, wanted to be an actor.  He stumbles upon a theater company performing Chekhov.  The great Chekhovian themes of reduced energy, lost purpose, and failed endeavors are emphasized almost too strongly.  But Chekhov and the art of acting are forces of vitality in the movie, whatever the content of the play.  Bartleby prefers to watch Chekhov plays.

Stanley Kauffman, in his review of the film, argues that “Moretti and co-writers [Francesco Piccolo and Federica Pontremoli] came upon a good premise – the retreating pope – but have not used it to a really large enough conclusion.”  Meaning that a pope is probably not an ideal Chekhov character.  Probably not.  I suspect, though, that with the expectation of the Big Surprise removed, the film will grow a bit with repeated viewings.  Moretti’s movies are always filled with rewarding small surprises.

There is a Providence, there is a God - ideas, or the lack thereof, in The Count of Monte Cristo and Slumdog Millionaire

On Monday, I mentioned that I did not think there was much reason to re-read The Count of Monte Cristo. I meant something specific. I might want to re-read the novel because my brain has softened to the point where I have forgotten the story. The re-reading won't be much different than the initial one.

The novelist Lorenzo Carcaterra, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition, appeals to nostalgia. This novel was important to him as a child living in a bad neighborhood; it spurred his imagination, led him into the bigger world. That's interesting enough as a story about one reader's response, but how it's useful to readers whose young imaginations were instead fired by Treasure Island or Harry Potter or Alice in Wonderland, I don't understand. Still, another reason to re-read is simply to revisit the pleasures experienced in the past.

I suspect, though, that The Count of Monte Cristo does not offer much else to the re-reader. There won't be many moments of illumination - oh, now I see. No, it turns out I saw everything the first time. Dumas gives up his secrets right away.

This is just a guess, since I have merely read the book. It's my view of the lack of depth of the novel, its art and its ideas, the latter especially. Like many best-sellers before and since, Monte Cristo is plated with a thin layer of seemingly serious ideas about justice, evil, and providence that serve to motivate the characters and give the story a little more heft. See, for example, Chapter 84, "The Hand of God":

"'No,' said Caderousse, 'no; I will not repent. There is no God, there is no Providence - all comes by chance.'

'There is a Providence, there is a God,' said Monte Cristo, 'of which you are a striking proof, as you lie in utter despair, denying him; while I stand before you, rich, happy, safe, and entreating that God in whom you endeavor not to believe, while in your heart you still believe in him.'"

Not much in the way of subtlety here. Did I mention that Caderousse has just been stabbed and is expiring?

Is the Count justified in his revenge? Can evil acts be redeemed? Should the sins of the father fall on his children? If one wanted to discuss these ideas, the novel would work as a conversation starter, but I'll bet the discussion won't spend much time with the book itself. There isn't any depth, or resolution, or surprise in the content of the ideas. Dumas doesn't really mean any of it, or doesn't care.

I saw Slumdog Millionaire recently and was amused to find that another Dumas novel, The Three Musketeers, plays an important part. I was less amused to find that the movie was overlaid with a set of "ideas" about destiny that were just as shallow as those in The Count. They were decoration, slipcovers for the story's clichés. No one involved actually believes any of it.

I sound so negative. There may be other, more interesting, thematic ideas, in the movie or in The Count of Monte Cristo (the economic development theme, maybe?) and other reasons to see the movie. Still, most of the characters (the love interest, the gangsters, the cops) are clichés, as is most of the plot, and are reviewers mentioning that you have to sit through almost an entire episode of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? I could not believe I had paid money to watch something I didn't want to see when it was free.

As a counter-argument, I will link to an ingenious symbolic explication of The Count of Monte Cristo involving Dante's Purgatorio. I find it completely unconvincing, working only by ignoring most of the book, but it gave me something new to think about.

Friday at the 19th century movies

I'm too tired to write anything. I think I'll watch a movie instead (about 50 seconds, with music).



Did you see that? It's like the train was coming right at you!

One of the greats.

"L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat", Lumiére brothers, 1895