Key Largo

To start my journey through cinema, I'll write about Key Largo (1948, directed by John Huston), the one film in my top ten that doesn't appear at all in the Sight and Sound poll. In fact it's rarely been given much critical commentary, and I only came across it by chance. A few years ago in my determination to see as many Howard Hawks films as possible, I bought a set of DVDs featuring the four films Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made together: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep (both directed by Hawks), Dark Passage (a real clunker directed by Delmar Daves), and Key Largo. Key Largo took me quite by surprise, and it engaged me even more than the brilliant Hawks films. The film takes place on the eponymous island, where Lauren Bacall and her father, Lionel Barrymore, run a hotel. Humphrey Bogart plays the former commanding officer of Bacall's brother, who was killed in the Second World War, and he comes to visit his friend's family. While he is there, a group of gangsters, led by Edward G. Robinson, decides to hide out in the hotel, which is closed for the off-season. A hurricane blows through and everyone is pushed to their limits.

The chemistry between Bogart and Bacall in this, their fourth and last film together, may not sizzle quite as much as it does in To Have and Have Not, but as actors both have gained immensely in their comfort with each other, Bacall especially by also having four more years of film experience behind her. Both are very much at home with their characters in the film and with their general 'star' personae. But good as their performances are, they are outshone by their supporting cast members. Lionel Barrymore gives the best performance of the late phase of his career, keeping in check the mannerisms often imitated by the likes of Mickey Rooney. Here we see the great actor instead of the cliche. Better yet is Claire Trevor, playing the mistress of Johnny Rocco (Robinson), the head gangster. She won an Oscar for this film, due mostly to her drunken performance of the song 'Moanin' Low', which Rico forces her to sing. She carries this off with an emotional honesty very rare among Hollywood actors of the time. But best of all is Edward G. Robinson as Rocco, standing in for the idea of resurgent post-war totalitarianism. Rocco is terrifying in his determination to make a comeback.

This leads us to the political stance offered by the film, made as the Cold War was starting to heat up. It is based on a play by the unjustly forgotten playwright Maxwell Anderson. The play was set in the 1930s and isn't Anderson's best work. Instead of the Second World War it takes the Spanish Civil War as its back story, and the gangsters even more explicitly represent fascism. The film, written by Richard Brooks and Huston, is an improvement on the play because the stakes seem higher, even though there wasn't a war on in 1948. 1948 was one of the first big 'red scare' years, and Bogart and Bacall were heavily involved in shielding the film industry from it, so their personae in this film make it an even clearer anti-fascist statement. The gangsters are clearly standing in for the right-wing extremists in the US at the time, and the film was somewhat ahead of its time in this way (All the King's Men, which was released the following year, had more of an impact on making people notice what was going on behind this kind of rhetoric. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to stop McCarthyism from destroying a lot of lives). The gangsters are very effective in showing the paranoia inherent in far-right thinking: Rocco talks big but deep down he is frightened of his own vulnerability, a fear that leads to his downfall. This film deserves to be talked about more these days, with far-right gangsterism making such a frightening comeback.

Claire Trever's performance of 'Moanin' Low' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vh8veUgPt8) forms the emotional centre of the film, and also makes the strongest point against the gangsters, whose lifestyle has made this woman miserable. Huston's staging of the scene is extraordinary. Trevor only appears alone in shot as she sings; a more conventional way to film the scene would be to mix the close shots of Trevor with group shots of her and her listeners, but instead Huston separates her from the listeners, shooting the latter (especially Robinson) mostly in close-up. She sings to the lone accompaniment of blowing wind and rain, heightening the sense of isolation. Here is a woman who has been chewed up and spit out by her exploiters. This is one of the bleakest scenes in all of cinema.

Though it ends happily, Key Largo isn't a particularly uplifting film. There are many more Johnny Roccos out there, and not many Humphrey Bogarts to bring them to justice. As a piece of filmmaking it is taut and tight, it has some fine performances, and its message is also important (even though it is not a 'message movie'). Search this one out if you haven't seen it!

Trailer (makes the film look more conventional than it is): http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/7829/Key-Largo-Original-Trailer-.html

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040506/

American Musicological Society

I'm going to be presenting a paper at the American Musicological Society Southwest conference at Texas State University on October 6th:

The Influence of Theatre Architecture on Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea

Space is often neglected in opera studies in favor of abstracted sonic aspects, but opera is a multi-sensory experience: audiences see a stage and an auditorium, sit in a chair, and experience an acoustic. This paper is an examination of the buildings in which three major, and very different, European productions of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea took place, seen within a few months of each other in 2010: Pier Luigi Pizzi’s production at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Robert Carsen’s at Glyndebourne, and Dietrich Hilsdorf’s at the Cologne Opera. I will first explore the relation of the audience to the stage due to the presence or absence of a proscenium arch. Both Glyndebourne and Madrid’s Teatro Real are proscenium theatres, though the Madrid production attempted to erase the proscenium through the layout of the stage and the orchestra. The Cologne production was held not in a purpose-built theatre but in the central hall of a former corporate headquarters, a proscenium-less space with the audience seated on two sides of a traverse stage. These layouts had different effects on the performances and on the audience’s response to them, affording different opportunities to their directors and different processes of audience engagement. I will then compare the present-day audience’s spatial experience of this opera with the way its seventeenth-century audiences may have experienced it, arguing that the changes in theatre architecture over the centuries have a significant (and overlooked) impact on our results in creating historically-informed operatic performances.

Ten Best Films

In the spirit of the newly-released Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, I thought I would compile my own list. Mine is obviously not as well-informed as those of the critics polled as I've not seen nearly as many films as they have (I especially lack experience with Japanese films and silents), so this is really a list of the best films I've seen, rather than the best of all time. It's a list that will surely change as I see more films. To compile it I wrote down all of the films I felt I couldn't live without (I came up with eighty), then I painstakingly put them in order. These are the ten that came out on top:

1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
2. Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
3. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
4. Key Largo (John Huston, 1948)
5. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
6. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1951)
7. The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
8. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
9. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
10. Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

So it isn't a particularly surprising list, and all of these but Key Largo (I wasn't aware how much I like it!) showed up somewhere in the Sight and Sound poll (all the results can be seen here: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/). It looks like I'm definitely a Hitchcocko-Hawksian Cahiers du Cinéma-style auteurist, and I'm not sure how I feel about that...

Now the grand project is to write about each of these films, and eventually all eighty on my list.

Best Picture Nominees: The Rest

Moneyball

This wasn’t too bad for a baseball movie, a genre in which I have very little interest. Luckily there weren’t too many scenes of game play (other than an interminable montage of the record-breaking win), as the film is more about the behind-the-scenes world of the game. The subject matter, therefore, is interesting, but the film falters in many places in its craft. What I found most grating was the constant use of shot/reverse-shot setups. Nearly every conversation was staged this way, with alternating shots of one actor speaking or reacting to another. Using more two-shots not only adds variety, but also gives the actors more space to act with rather than against each other. For more effective editing of dialogue scenes, see any Howard Hawks film (and it helps that his dialogue is of rather higher quality than that in Moneyball). So this really isn’t an actors’ film, though Jonah Hill gives a very good performance and deserves his nomination. The other grating element is the score, which was simply awful. It is a fine example of how music can detrimentally overdetermine a film’s action. Ironically, the score to The Artist is much less intrusive even though there is so much more of it. But my biggest qualm is the treatment of the ball players: the film gives a good illustration of how professional sports players are bought and sold like horseflesh, but it should have gone further in critiquing that exchange of bodies. Even though the film’s message would seem to be that you have to look below the surface to best use someone’s talents, the characters on both sides of the ‘moneyball’ theory act in the same way, exchanging people as commodities. In summary (before I turn into Adorno), Moneyball was not as bad as I feared it might be, but it still wasn’t very good. Unfortunately this seems to be a mantra for many of the nominated films, most of which have some glaring flaws but none of which are truly bad (for the record, my benchmark for the truly bad is Black Swan, to which I might devote another post).

The Tree of Life

This is definitely the most ambitious film of the year, and it’s a mess, but a compelling one. Some scenes are stunning, especially those that focus on nature. Malick doesn’t film people very well: there are far too many steadicam and handheld shots, which results in a sense of vertigo, and the many jump cuts draw attention to the camera rather than to the acting and the subject matter. Many have called this a deeply philosophical film, but it’s really rather obvious: you try to reconcile between the way of the Father and the way of the Mother. The scenes of the creation of the world don’t fit but they’re beautiful; maybe Malick should become a nature documentary filmmaker. The present-day scenes with Sean Penn aren’t enough a part of the film to really feel necessary. We don’t need the extra layer. That said, the last dream-like scene is great, as is the first montage of the three brothers growing up. In those scenes, more about mood than about character, the camera’s fluidity works well. The sound design and integration of music is excellent throughout. In short, this is the twenty-first-century version of 2001, just with Berlioz’s Requiem instead of Ligeti’s. Both films share the attempt to tell you everything about life in a little over two hours, and although both fail they are worthy attempts.

War Horse

I seem to remember enjoying this when I saw it last month in the cinema, but I’ve quite forgotten everything about it by now. It’s that kind of film.

Notes on the Best Picture Nominees: Midnight in Paris

I wanted to like this film much more than I did. It looks wonderful on paper: modern writer gets transported mysteriously to 1920s Paris. But in execution it seems slight, more like checking off a list of famous artists to be found on the Left Bank in the ‘20s than anything more probing. The scenes set in the past are too vignette-like (camera pans to Buñuel, camera pans to Dalí, camera pans to Hemmingway, etc.), and those set in the present are just dull. In a way, the characters of the past are too interesting for the small amount of time they’re given, and those of the present are too boring for their greater amount of screen time. Maybe if it were half an hour longer this would have been a better film. It is nice to see Woody Allen returning to the fantasy of some of his earlier films like The Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig, but I wish he had combined that with the maturity of some of his more recent films.

Notes on the Best Picture Nominees: Hugo

I detest 3-D. The whole time I was watching Hugo I was thinking how much better it could have been in two dimensions. 3-D in film is counter-intuitive and distracting. For example, it makes nonsense of careful focus-pulling: if 3-D is meant to immerse us in the screen how can one use anything but deep focus, allowing the eye to look clearly at any element of the image? Scorsese favours classical image-making, in which careful use of focus is important to the mise-en-scène, and the 3-D cinematography goes against that kind of visual discourse. It also makes everything look CG even if it isn’t (and judging from what I’ve read it seems that a great deal of effort was taken to make the set dressing and design true to 1930s Paris). I think there was a very good film behind the bad cinematography. The plot is certainly engaging, especially for someone like me who loves early twentieth-century Paris and film history. Ben Kingsley is very good as Méliès, and the two kids are also great. I look forward to watching this in glorious 2-D on DVD, when I’ll be able to form a better opinion of the film.

Notes on the Best Picture Nominees

This year I’ve managed to see all nine of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. Below are my short comments on each film, four today with the other five coming tomorrow.

The Artist

This is, as common knowledge has it, the front runner, and it does deserve its place at the top of the list. It is beautifully filmed, acted, and designed, and though it certainly isn’t the second coming it’s still one of the best films of the year. It would be lovely to see a scherzo-like film win the top prize (The Artist shares that light quality with Midnight in Paris), as critics and cinephiles often have the misguided view that films need to be deadly serious to be ‘great’. Everyone calls this ‘the silent film’ but it isn’t actually silent: it has a fine score by Ludovic Bource, and two very effective scenes with synchronised sound. The only major fault is the use of Bernard Herrmann’s love theme from Vertigo at the film’s emotional climax: though the music works for the scene it takes one out of the film because of its time (there isn’t much music that is less evocative of the early 1930s!) and its strong connection to Hitchcock’s film. But the final tap-dance makes up for any previous mis-steps. One really can’t complain much about a film that leaves one in such a good mood.

The Descendants

Though this film is very well acted, I found it utterly unoriginal and uninventive. The plot is pure cliche. Though it is a plot that works, and which has worked many times over, that isn’t really enough to make a good film. Its downfall is the predictability of its style: there are no unexpected camera angles or moves, no unexpected settings for the various scenes, and no inventive uses of the Hawaiian milieu. Though it wasn’t as annoying as Sideways, and I didn’t ever feel like running out of the theatre, it isn’t a film I would need to see again. It doesn’t fit Italo Calvino’s definition of a ‘classic’, that one should get something new out of a work each time one encounters it. Everything here is spelled-out, leaving no space for personal invention (on the poietic, or creative, side) or interpretation (on the aesthesic, or reception, side). The Descendents seems like the most calculated Oscar-bait of all the films here, and it ticks all the boxes of a generic Best Picture nominee: among others, family drama ending happily, love affairs, the death of a loved one, a touch of the ‘ethnic’, a pretty setting, lightly comic moments mixing with high drama, and George Clooney. I hope that the Academy doesn’t vote for the easy option.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I was looking forward to seeing this film because I couldn’t believe it could be as bad as so many critics said it was. As it turned out, it wasn’t that bad, but it certainly doesn’t deserve its nomination, especially when films such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Skin I Live In weren’t nominated. This film isn’t offensive or exploitative as so many have suggested: its critics didn’t understand that it was presenting New York as a fantasy world in which a tragedy occurred, rather than being a social drama about a healing city. I found its fairy-tale view of New York refreshing. Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks weren’t very good in this, though their characters were poorly written. Max von Sydow was excellent, though much more could have been done with the similarities between his Second World War experiences and young Oskar’s 9/11 one. So here we have a film whose execution doesn’t live up to its general idea. The parts don’t quite come together into a convincing whole. The film is rather more interesting for its critical reception, which tells more about the critics than about the film itself. People feel adverse to any artistic response to 9/11 unless it deals in platitudes (which this film does not). There are various psychological and political reasons for that, but the basic reason, I think, is that people felt this event very personally. Any response that is very different from their own therefore makes them uncomfortable. Stephen Daldry’s mistake was that he didn’t try to bridge the gap: his hero is too idiosyncratic in his response to attract empathy from the narrow-minded.

The Help

Of all the films nominated this year this one has the best all-around acting, without a weak link in the cast. It is also very well crafted, with a nicely-structured screenplay and highly competent camera work. As many critics have pointed out, the problems lie in the film’s ideology. It isn’t quite the racist film some have claimed it to be, but it does open up various interesting issues about representation and voice to which the screenplay gives short shrift. It is never quite clear what kind of book Skeeter has made out of her interviews, as we never get more than short excerpts. Is it a true-life novel? New-journalistic reportage? Ethnographic study? We don’t even know to whom the book is credited, other than the anonymous author on the cover: is it all from Skeeter’s point of view, or is it an edited collection of testimonies? From Skeeter’s conversations with her editor I would suspect that it leans toward the true-life novel side, and that it is from Skeeter’s point of view. But whatever the case, it is a commercial book rather than an academic one, and questions of authorship are raised (and because of that the film would make a good starting point for discussion in a class on methods in social anthropology). Is it ethical of Skeeter to sell the stories of her informants? Though the fact that she gives some of her payment back to the individuals she has interviewed is meant to make the character magnanimous, the gesture comes across as somewhat paternalistic. The quality of the performances, especially from Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, save the film from these problems. Perhaps a more hard-line critical theorist would say that the acting hides the problems from the audience, but Brecht doesn’t sell (at least not in the American box office). For me the best aspect of the film is the use of Jessica Chastain’s role: bringing out the similar place on the margins of the power-holders’ community of the black maids to that of someone considered white trash makes the film something more than the essentialising text it could easily have been (and which many consider it to be anyway).

Greetings

Welcome to this new blog. Having finished a doctorate in musicology at Oxford University, I need some kind of project to while away the time between sending out applications for academic jobs. This will be a rather free-flowing blog, with various posts on music, film, theatre, philosophy, or whatever else I feel like writing about. As with most blogs, this is all about self-indulgence. It's a bonus if anyone else takes an interest in what I've got to say. I welcome comments and arguments (preferably civil, though I don't mind a little vitriol from time to time).

My doctoral dissertation is called 'Monteverdi on the Modern Stage', and it deals with the modern performance history of Monteverdi's operas (the three extant ones: L'Orfeo, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, and L'incoronazione di Poppea). Monteverdi is therefore at the centre of my interests, but they shoot off in all sorts of directions from our Cremonese hero to take in the philosophy and ontology of performance, the effects of audio/visual recording, opera aesthetics, dramaturgy, performance practice, seventeenth-century arts, twentieth-century arts, linguistics, film, etc. So enjoy!