Joseph Cornell | Jack's Dream / 1938

jack and his ejaculating friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Cornell (director) Jack’s Dream / 1938

 

A sleeping pet dog’s 4-minute dream, using extant images from film, reveals a very troubling vision of the male species as well as danger for his female keeper in artist Joseph Cornell’s 1938 fantasy film.

   To the sorrowful dreams of the dog Jack, Lawrence Jordan has “realized” Cornell’s early film with music by Erik Satie, Jordan using the original images and attaching the soundtrack which Cornell has evidently suggested should accompany it.

    In some senses this is a version of the “Little Red-Riding-Hood tale arriving presumably at her grandmother’s house. Only Red, who it appears does not even get the opportunity to enter the fairy-tale mansion, is soon replaced by the snoozing pooch, Jack, who provides his own version of the action, a much more complex vision of reality.

    In this world, the puppet husband and wife are witnessed cleaning up the after-dinner dishes, as Jack has a dream vision of a 19th century sailing ship sinking, where all men aboard are swallowed up by the sea. He is clearly troubled by his dream as he half-awakes, barking in distress.   

    In the next few long seconds in this very short film we catch images of sea horses moving about their underwater estate. If you recall—and of which I was coincidentally reminded of through a friendly Facebook or Instagram image just this morning*—male sea horses in their mating rituals are implanted with the semen or ejaculate of the female species in a special pouch from which, after the proper time necessary for gestation, eventually expels hundreds of tiny versions of his species from his pouch, representing a true alteration from the mammalian female births.

    A few frames later, the female housewife puppet observes what appears to be a fire-breathing dragon supping on the family’s leftovers, looking quite similar to the seahorses we have just previously observed. The “monster” attacks the mistress of the house, presumably in a rather perverse attempt to capture her ovarian eggs, as Jack, awakened by her cries for help, barks. She attempts to push the dragon/seahorse out the door, as Jack continues protesting the action of the monster against his mistress, finally sending the “monster” on his way.

      We return to the frigate, as the attack begins, a man falling to his death in gun fire. And strangely enough Jack fall’s back into sleep, as the ship again sinks into the ocean—the symbol of masculine dominance being destroyed (?) as we return to perhaps an alternative world where the masculine becomes transsexual, even transgender in order to continue the survival of the human species. The dragon proves himself to be a kind of progenitor of new possibilities, much as in Wagner’s operas, whom Siegfried must destroy in order to continue the human race. Forget Little-Red-Ridding-Hood. The wolf has been killed before Red even crosses the door of her grandmother’s house.

      The sun rises, a rooster crows. New baby chicks are presented before our eyes. The puppet couple who own their home resume their incomprehensible normative conversations.   

 

*As I have observed many times, coincidence is a major aspect of my life. That I should have quite accidentally encountered a short film about seahorse male birthings the very day that film critic Earl Jackson reminded me of this short Cornell film, which I’d previously seen but never comprehended, seems to be more than a dream, but an impossible insertion into my consciousness which obviously seeks out such intrusions. My world has long become wonderfully coincidental, where at every moment one thing leads to another.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Federico Fellini | La Strada (the Road) / 1954, USA 1956

the pebble’s purpose

by Douglas Messerli

 

Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano (screenplay, based on a story by Fellini and Pinelli), Federico Fellini (director) La Strada (The Road) / 1954, USA 1956

 

Yes, Fellini’s La Strada, at moments, is highly sentimental, using stereotypes instead of developed characters, and employing symbols to stand-in for a credible story! With this movie, moreover, Fellini declared his rupture with Italian neo-realism—at least the kind of neo-realism that demanded the ideological political and anti-religious perspectives. Indeed, along with Roberto Rossellini and, soon after, Michelangelo Antonioni, Fellini helped to destroy the neo-realist moment! How the Marxist critics hated what they saw as Fellini’s betrayal.

 

   Fellini himself has described the filming of this seemingly simple story as nearly impossible, resulting near the end of the shoot in a complete nervous breakdown. Actor Anthony Quinn remembers it as a bone-wearying experience (“He drove me mercilessly, making me do scene after scene over and over again until he got what he wanted.”), but, Quinn continues “I learned more about film acting in three months with Fellini than I’d learned in all the movies I’d made before.” Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina (as Gelsomina) complained that the director was being particularly mean to her during its shoot. And there are moments, finally, when—as marvelous as she is playing the slightly retarded naïf—Masina, as Roger Ebert notes, is a shade too conscious and knowing, playing to her audience.

      Yet for all this, La Strada is simply radiant in its look, subject, and portrayal of deviant love. From the very first moment of this film, when the small-time circus performer, Zampanò (Quinn), returns to Gelsomina’s mother, reporting that the daughter he has previously bought from her, Rosa, has died, and purchases the second daughter for 10,000 lire, we know such a cruel transaction can lead to no good for the young woman. But the very thought that she might be of any value to anyone excites her, as she merrily joins the brutal strongman on what will be a voyage into death.

      Zampanò, true to his appearance, rapes, whips, and psychologically maltreats her as he leaves her waiting for his return home—a perfectly ridiculous cart hooked up to a motorcycle—from his dalliances with other women. Yet gradually Gelsomina does learn, not only to beat the drum while announcing “the Great Zampanò,” and, after the performance to pass the hat; but also to play a comic in the absurdly badly acted sketch which begins by the strongman describing his rifle as a “fifle.” She even learns to play the trumpet.

      What she also learns, however, is just how painful life can be, behaving a bit like Fellini’s later high-spirited prostitute in another of his “road” movies, Nights of Cabiria. And she not only learns from Zampanò, but from a passing nun that life, even an itinerant life, can contain great joy and nobility. From the tight-rope-walking fool, Il Matto (a wonderful Richard Baseheart), she discovers that she might be a credible performer and, more importantly, that she does have a purpose in living, even if it is the role of a pebble in her “husband’s” life.

    The Fool, however, cannot resist taunting Zampanò, calling him “fifle,” and mocking the strongman’s greatest accomplishment: his ability, through flexing his abdominal muscles, to break a link of chains in which he has been wrapped. When Gelsomina is asked to also perform in Il Matto’s act, Zampanò grows wild, chasing the Fool with the intention of killing, an act that results with both putting performers in jail—Gelsomina waiting outside the prison.

    Even when she attempts to speak up for herself, arguing that her servitude to Zampanò is unconscionable, ultimately leaving him for a period, she is still blindly attracted to another kind of a circus, in the form of a religious procession of a small town’s patron saint, compelled to join up with her brutish “husband” once again. Only when, after encountering the Fool once more on the road—this time with the result of Zampanò’s beating and accidently killing him—is Gelsomina completely transformed from a passive clown to a figure of conscience, even if her new-found moral being carries with it an aspect of insanity. Unable to cope with her insistent reminder that he is now a killer along with being a brute, Zampanò leaves her once more along the roadside as she sleeps, this time forever.

 

      We later discover that Gelsomina is found along a beach, eventually wasting away and dying. Hearing of the story from a woman whose father has taken Gelsomina in, Zampanò gets drunk and wanders to the nearby beach, where he breaks down in despair for having lost the woman to whom he could never acknowledge, even to himself, he loved.

      If Fellini’s work is a simple playing out of body, soul, and mind (Zampanò, Gelsomina, and Il Motto) it is also a profound statement about the Postwar world which the film portrays, a bleak landscape in which the souls and minds of the body politic have been clearly ravaged by the brute force of Italian Fascism. The tawdry circuses Fellini reveals as weak—if also sometimes charming—imitations of more serious entertainments such as literature, cinema, and drama, remind us of Juvenal’s satiric statement: “Two things only the people anxiously desire—bread and circuses.”

     For Fellini, it is clear, the circus of life is a merely a coarser version of the vast mythic fantasies conjured up by the imagination—particularly his own. The very straightforward emblematic approach of La Strada is an early, provincial exploration, of the grand orgiastic entertainments he will later role out before our eyes in the Roman landscapes of La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, and Fellini Satyricon. If I prefer the later works over this gently personal remembrance, even if they only that they represent elegantly deft fantasias that the characters of La Strada might never even have imagined. But then, it would be hard for any of us to imagine the gifts Fellini left us when he became determined to go “full throttle.”  How can a pebble, no matter how useful, match the whole of Italian society—as Fellini portrayed it—gone berserk?

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (January 2014).

Marcel Carné | Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) / 1945

a sleepwalker on a roof

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Prévert (screenwriter), Marcel Carné (director) Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) / 1945

 

“I would give up all my films to have directed Children of Paradise.”

                                                                                               —François Truffaut

 

I love movies so much that I don’t like picking out my favorites—there are so many!—but if I were required to select my very favorite film, I might be tempted to name Les Enfants du Paradis, which I watched with absolute delight once more the other day. Certainly it is a “stagy” film, a film in a grand theatrical manner, with dramatically-acted performances that might be said to represent the very last great example of its own genre. Later films of the novelle vague would be far more spontaneous, clever, and more deeply involve their audiences, but none has the luster and polish—like a perfect pearl—as does Prévert’s and Carné’s tale of the Paris theater scene of the early 19th century. And there are very few films made that can match its sophistication, and no film that I know has its narrative depth, even though the storyline is quite simple. Gone with the Wind, the American film to which the French one has been likened, in comparison is a tinny music box, while Children of Paradise sings out like an organ accompanied by an entire orchestra.

     Much has been written about the miracle of the making of this film during the Vichy rule of France, when the director and cast feared not only censorship but Gestapo arrest: one of the leaders of the Resistance was arrested as an extra on the set, and the film’s set designer, Alexandre Trauner and one of the composers, Joseph Kosma, had to remain in hiding because they were Jewish. Starving extras, so Carné revealed in an interview, made off with food to be filmed on the banquet table, even going so far to hollow out the bread from beneath the crust of a baguette. That the openly homosexual Carné survived without arrest is a wonder.      

       Yet Carné insists that it was a work largely free from internal tension, which can only be attributed to the high level of professionalism among the entire cast, at the center of which stands the beautiful and calm Arletty, playing Garance Reine, a woman loved, each in their own manner, by three very different men, a shy romanticist who acts as a pantomime (Baptiste, played by the unforgettable Jean-Louis Barrault), a loquacious and self-assured actor (Frédérick Lemaître, acted by Pierre Brasseu), and wealthy and snobbish Count (Comte Édouard de Montray, performed by Louis Salou). A fourth man, the true villain of the piece, Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) might also love Garrance if he had a heart, but he is so selfish, so locked within himself that when he finally acts out his jealousy by killing the Count, it represents more of a meaningless murder than an act of honor.

       Surrounding these central characters are numerous other actors, including the gentle Nathalie (Maria Casares) who deeply loves Baptiste, various street figures—in particular the ragman Jérico (Pierre Renoir) and a blind man who turns out to have perfect sight—and a cast of thousands who throng the Boulevard du Crime and the audiences, particularly those “gods” hovering at the top of the grand Funambules theater. These “gods,” the poor who shout, clap, boo and openly evaluate the performances below, are the “children of paradise” who make or break the actors’ careers, and ultimately through the course of this more than three-hour epic, bring both Frédérick and Baptiste to fame. 

     No one in this Breughel-like world is entirely appealing. Although Garance may be beautiful and desirous to all, she, from the first scene is presented as a narcissist as she gazes at herself in a tub of water while men pay to ogle her. She is also witness not only to Lacenaire’s robberies, but is told by him of his murderous deeds without her even blinking an eye. In the original script, moreover, there were several moments which suggested Lacenaire was homosexual, but were mostly cut from the script for fear of censorship by the Vichy government. However, as critic David Melville Wingrove have observed, "I still think Lacenaire's homosexuality comes through very clearly. His two campy male sidekicks are a dead giveaway. The character is clearly modelled on Vautrin, the homosexual evil genius in the Balzac novels Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low."

      The only statement of morality Garance utters, when Lacenaire declares “I’d spill torrents of blood to give you rivers of diamonds,” is the muted “I’d settle for less.”     

     Frédérick, on the other hand, may be suave and handsome, but is also a rake, willing even to bed his landlady, Mme. Hermine, in order to keep his room and double bed. The actor, like Garance, is also quite self-centered.

      The Count, with whom Garance ultimately and unhappily settles into a relationship, is dismissive of almost the entire world of the everyday people who make up this movie, and is willing to duel with almost anyone at whom Garance smiles. Even the self-centered and despicable Lacenaire is more honest than the self-deluded Count.

     Although Natalie may appear innocent in her true love Baptiste, she is selfish enough to try to prevent Garance from even seeing him. 

      It is Baptiste, finally, who we realize is the true “hero” of the piece. He is the only one who, when he speaks of love, truly means it, even though he has never comprehended love’s often superficial simplicity, perceiving only its darker difficulties, which he plays out time and again in the great pantomimes he performs before us. Like his character, Baptiste is a willing lover, but has no ability to effectively express himself; he is mute, able to express his seriousness only through comic gestures and the pained expressions of his beautifully gaunt face. In short, Baptiste is himself almost the Pierrot figure he portrays, an eternal outsider always swooning for a woman with whom he can never hope to consummate his love, associated not only with the eternal outsider but with the homosexual. Yet, strangely he is the only he who wins the love of the two central women of the work, Garance and Nathalie.

       But for that very reason, for his inability to accept his difference from the others, even the likeable Baptiste is dishonest, if not with others, at least with himself. He is a dreamer always, a man of the moon, who, as Natalie aptly describes her fears for him when he finally does attempt to consummate his love with Garance: “He is a sleepwalker on a roof,” a man who if he is not carefully left to awaken himself may fall to his death. 

 

       Several critics and directors, over time, have complained that the film, despite its length, seems attenuated, cut away from a series of deeper stories we still desire even after the rich narratives the film has revealed. In part this is simply because the film, like a Balzac novel or great Victor Hugo epic, is a fiction that has given us such a rich palette, we feel slightly betrayed that it must come to an end. At the same time that I viewed this movie, I was reading Proust, and the similarities of the texture between the two are notable.

      But also, I think we feel the work is slightly truncated not only because of its narrative density, which seemingly demands, in turn, more and more stories, but because we never do observe Baptiste’s awakening. At work’s end, the lovestruck “clown” goes rushing after Garance’s carriage as she, a seasoned cynic when it comes to love, determines to awaken him by rushing back to her wealthy Count—without knowing he has been murdered. The great film ends only with Baptiste’s pleading gestures, the welling tears in his eyes (as well as in the audiences’ eyes surely); he remains a sleepwalker, a dreamer rather than a skin-and-bones character who might come to terms with the love of his wife and son. The theater of Carné’s world, in short, does not even come to a close with the curtain’s fall, and certainly everyone in those 1945 showings must have realized that the world it was depicting, the allegorical presentation of a golden pre-War France, had in fact died. If love was still possible, it was only through the cold vision of more open eyes. Our hero’s love represents an impossibly romantic and idealized concept of what simply keeps the human race warm and excited. He remains a fool, and for that reason maintains his outsider status. A man in the real world is not permitted such complexly gentle and confused emotions.

       Just as Proust’s vision, Carné’s was a remembrance of things of the past, allowing little in the way of direction for what lay ahead.

Los Angeles, June 18, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2013).

 

Lucas Santa Ana | Las Ilaves (The Keys) / 2011

unfinished business

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Santa Ana (screenwriter and director) Las Ilaves (The Keys) / 2011 [10 minutes]

 

A handsome gay couple enter an apartment hardly able to control their sexual feelings for one another as they kiss, with the apartment door open, before finally Matías (Luciano Prieto) slowly closes it, depositing the key by the entrance, one of an entire collection of such keys, as his new lover Lucho (Francisco Amaya) suddenly realizes.

 

     They proceed in their sexual lust, until finally Lucho cannot resist in enquiring why his new lover, Matías has all those keys beside his door, one hook of which belongs still to his former lover, Pedro (Hernán Morán).

      In comic suspension of belief, Matías pauses to explain the many different key hooks. It seems everyone has a key to Matías apartment, his brother, mother, a neighbor, a friend in Spain, and, most significantly, his former lover. Each are given a place in which to display and protect it their entry into the house.

      But as they move in, still kissing, to the living room Lucho cannot be but rather taken aback, as he engages his new lover to a tight sexual lock-hold, that all the walls are covered with pictures of him and his former lover Pedro. As one might expect, he asks his new lover “How long has it been since you’re broken up?” “A few months,” declares Matías, “but I don’t want to talk about him.”

      As Lucho points out, however, it’s not just one photo but dozens lining his walls of the two of them. In Argentinian director Lucas Santa Ana’s film, it’s hard to for new lover to even concentrate. Clearly, as Lucho insists, Matías has some “unfinished business” with his former lover that makes it difficult for him to commit himself to their new sexual engagements.

      To prove him wrong, Matías grabs up the keys on Pedro’s hook and is ready to toss them off his high-rise apartment building to prove the relationship is over; but he cannot. He’s frozen in space, revealing that something about his past is still there which he can’t escape.

      To further prove to his would-be new lover that he’s serious, he calls up Pedro demanding he come to retrieve his keys. But the indolent former lover—a man hard to imagine that the handsome

Matías might ever find someone he loved—tells him he’s had another set of keys made, and there is no closing down of their former relationship. A telephone fight intrudes upon what might have been a romantic adventure with Lucho, the newcomer attempt to find the right keys to escape the apartment in which he is now locked.

      Finally, as Lucho finds the right keys that might lead to his escape, Matías hangs up, admitting what his former lover has insisted nothing is ever “finished.”

      Together he and Lucho bury the old set of keys in a potted plant, symbolizing that at least they’re ready to move on from the never-ending past that exists in everyone’s life. We can only presume that the sexually attractive new couple find their way into the bedroom to spend the night without all the reminders of the past Matías has not yet bothered to remove from his walls. In the light of a new day, they certainly might cull that collection into a kind of scrapbook of simple memories instead of leaving them to serve as a shrine. And just maybe, Lucho can help his new lover rid himself of the endless keys we all unintentionally collect to enter worlds which we have long since abandoned with friends who no longer have meaning to us.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

 

Ernst Lubitsch | The Shop Around the Corner / 1940

love’s balance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samson Raphaelson and Ben Hecht (screenplay, based on the play Parfumerie by Miklós László), Ernst Lubitsch (director) The Shop Around the Corner / 1940

 

If there was ever example of what is generally described as the “Lubitsch touch,” the magical ability to combine drama and gentle comedy, it is his 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner. Beginning with the rather ordinary comedy, Parfumerie by Miklós László, Lubitsch and his writers switched the location to a kind leather goods/gift shop, now called Matuschek’s, where the top salesman Alfred Kralick (James Stewart) works under Hugo Matuschek (the wonderful Frank Morgan) with several other employees, Pirovitch, Vadas, Flora, Ilona and Pepi, portrayed by wonderful studio regulars such as Felix Bressart, Joseph Schildkraut, Sara Haden, Inez Courtney, and William Tracy.

 

    To create dramatic intensity writers Samson Raphaelson and Ben Hecht unweave the two twines of plot of the original play, beginning—unlike in the original play—without Kralick’s love-hate interest, to demonstrate that something is already amiss in the store in Matuschek’s sudden irritation with his senior employee before Klara Novak (Margaret Sullivan) arrives in search of a job.

      Although the store has no current positions, she gets a job by selling a ludicrous cigarette box that plays “Ochi Chërnye” every time it’s opened, a product which Kralick had been against carrying in the store. Kralick, accordingly, is suddenly hit from two sides, with the slowly growing irritation of his boss and the boiling hostility of his new co-worker.

     Temporarily suspending the action, the writers focus on the snippy relationship of the two salespeople while gradually revealing the reasons for Matuschek’s growing anger. This allows time for great conversations between the kind and gentle Pirovitch (more mean-spirited in the original) and Kralick about the latter’s increasing love of an unseen pen pal. Although we may certainly suspect that Klara and Kralick’s mysterious lover are one and the same, the film withholds that revelation as long as possible, the discovery revealed only to Kralick at the very moment he is fired, so that the one new dilemma of his life is counterbalanced with the astonishment of the new facts.

      Behind Matuschek’s growing displeasure is his suspicion that his wife has been having an affair with his senior salesman. And when he discovers, through a private detective, that his wife’s lover is not Kralick but a fellow salesman, Vadas—who, it is made clear throughout, is a dislikeable being—Matuschek attempts suicide, saved at the last moment by the errand-boy Pepi.

      Here again, moreover, Lubitsch and his writers carefully balance this truly dark element with the necessary return of Kralick to the shop and the busy hustle and bustle of the Christmas season in which the play takes place. In short, every darker aspect of his tale is counterbalanced with a lighter, romantic or comedic event. So does Kralick’s return send Klara to bed with a fever, but now, given Kralick’s worry and caring about his former nemesis, her illness permits a gradual shift in their relations to take place, as the two grow warmer and warmer in their feelings for each other at the very moment when, on Christmas eve, the store racks up more sales than ever before. In a very capitalistic spirit, accordingly, romantic love is here equated with financial gain, just as previously a great deal of the discussion about marriage throughout the earlier scenes concerns issues regarding whether or not Kralick can afford to get married. A Christmas bonus from now divorced Matuschek (in the original play he remains married), obviously, helps in that matter!  As his employees quickly scurry off to celebrate the holiday, the now lonely boss heads off for dinner with the new errand boy, Rudy, citing the wonders the child is about to face while creating another bittersweet moment in the drama.

 

     Everything is nearly perfect with this gentle comedy—except, strangely enough, for Stewart’s slightly boisterous acting. While the others, even the sometimes hammy Morgan, have toned down their American accents, suggesting—if not actually achieving—a somewhat old-world sensibility, Stewart whips through his performance with a “hee-haw-like” small town American accent that he would trot out again, more appropriately, six years later in his performance in It’s Wonderful Life.

      The most troubling aspect of the play is that Kralich waits so long before revealing to Klara that he is her correspondent. But in the film, Stewart’s portrayal, at times, seems similarly despicable, not only because of the lies he tells to Klara about meeting her pen pal, but in his reactions to and later firing of the piece’s villain, Vadas. Vadas may be a home wrecker and a rake, but, in the end, he is far more charming throughout than is the aggressive Kralick is as portrayed by Stewart. Stewart’s rambunctious bellowing is matched only by the adenoidal whining of Pepi, the work’s singular comic figure. Only in the final moments of the movie, when quietly revealing that he is Klara’s secret lover, does the actor somewhat redeem himself, playing a role closer to the love-stricken Scottie he would later play in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo.

      Despite these qualms, as I noted in the first paragraph of this short remembrance, The Shop Around the Corner is the embodiment of the director’s “magic touch.” We watch it every Christmas at our house.

 

Los Angeles, Christmas Eve, 2013, (revised June 20, 2014)

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2013).