Kidlat Tahimik | Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) / 1977

the sleeping typhoon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kidlat Tahimik (screenwriter and director) Mababangong bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) / 1977

 

When Philippines filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare was first shown in the United States in 1980, The New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby—despite somewhat disparaging the idea that any film might be described this way—characterized the film as being “primitive,” while also being “sweet, funny, witty” and “intelligent.” But, although Tahimik’s movie is shot in 8-millimeter film stock; presents it titles on hand-held cards; portrays numerous static images in a grainy, slightly washed-out color of the quality of a home-made movie; and casts much of its narrative in the form of fables, Perfumed Nightmare, in its humorously clever analysis of international economic disparities and in its unsentimental embracement of the handmade over what is industrially created, is highly sophisticated, the opposite of “primitive.”

       Just as the director reveals the locally-made jitneys to be far more beautiful and useful than the Westernized modes of public transportation (the Philippine jitneys, moreover, are crafted out of war tanks and other leftover US weapons, machines of war being converted into things of beauty), and as he suggests the narrow village bridge of the small village of Balian to be just as wondrous as the great architectural feats of Charles De Gaulle Airport, so does Tahimik demonstrate that his little film is more pleasurably infectious and moving than many an grand American motion picture—and at a far smaller cost!

      Our hero, performed by Kidlat himself, is a naïve lover of the new, an admirer of everything his economically backward community has no opportunity to offer. Born in the 1942 Occupation of the Philippines, the character Kidlat has spent his 33 years in “a cocoon of American dreams.” Working as a jitney driver in his primitive village, he presides over a small group of young boys and girls as head of the Werner Von Braun fan club, listens nearly every day of his life to The Voice of America on radio, and dreams of visiting Cape Canaveral and witnessing the wonders of American and European technology.                     

     Wise elders attempt to warn him against his absurd idolatry, and his mother even recounts how his father died, in a furious reaction (mythically described as the breath of a typhoon) when, after fighting against the Spanish colonists, he is locked out of Manila by American soldiers. Yet Kidlat remains unconvinced. Why would anybody prefer the old over the new, and how can anyone not recognize that the new is encapsulated by the US?

     At the same time, however, the film slowly builds up a series of images of daily life in Balian that convinces us that these simple people are living, in many respects, a life richer and clearly more satisfying than many of us in the Western world. Sacred white caribous stare down at the natives; a patron saint, carried to the cathedral each morning, protects his community from evil; a rather painful-to-watch mass circumcision deep in the woods, welcomes the young boys into manhood. The beautifully decorated jitneys transport ice, statues, beauty queens, animals, and the citizens of Balaian through the town and across its single bridge in grand style. An old man with a mythical butterfly tattooed across his chest, weaves sturdy bamboo houses that stand up to the most violent of storms, and tells wonderful tales, including his personal myth that when the sleeping typhoon wakes up, it releases the butterflies to new life.

      All of these images, moreover, are accompanied by a lush score composed of sounds, words, songs, and native music that utterly enlivens the narrative.

      Even a rich American visits Kidlat’s small village, disguised, outrageously as a boy scout leader who fails in his demand that he, who is willing to pay money to the organization, be designated as the head of the local troop, reiterating what we all know, that the US perceives itself as the leader of everything, no matter how large or small.

     The American in this fable, stomps out—wades out might be a better description—of this meeting to flag down Kidlat’s jitney to take him to Manila. In the director’s gentle satire, the locals get their revenge as the jitney fills up with villagers and their animals, forcing the indignant would-be “leader” to sit atop the suitcases trailing behind.

 

   Yet he takes a liking to Kidlat, promising to bring him and his jitney with him when he returns to his castle in Paris. Suddenly the whole village is buzzing with news of the event. Kidlat gets his picture taken for his passport (posing with a charming smile that expresses the joyfulness he will leave behind) and a celebration of their soon-to-be wayfarer—replete with marching bands, dancing children, and beauty queens—is organized. One of the few people of Balian ever to imagine flying on an airplane, Kidlat is suddenly the town hero.

     His first views of the West are just as he might have imagined, awed as he is by walkways that move people forward without their walking, doors that open automatically, and bridges, bridges everywhere he looks! Just as the director had created a kind of travelogue in the Philippines countryside, so now does he continue to film Paris: only the Paris he shows us, from Kidlat’s perspective, is quite the opposite of what we know as the stately tourist city. Everywhere he goes, things are crumbling; rooms are over-jammed with junk; buildings are scaffolded, with pylons jutting up like ugly eyesores which block out the view of the great cathedrals and even the Eiffel Tower. The American, it turns out, is chewing-gum magnate, and immediately puts Kidlat to work filling his ugly gum dispensers placed at tourist destinations (including cemeteries) throughout the city. Kidlat’s Paris, in short, is the polar opposite of the glamorous city of lights depicted in most films.

     In his off hours, the likeable Kidlat seeks out the friendship, just as he had back in Balian, of local workers, learning snippets of French and befriending these figures by transporting them about the city in his jitney. He becomes particularly close with an egg seller (each egg containing two yolks) named Lola. Lola and her compatriots work at small carts parked by a mammoth new building project, a supermarket which is also soon to be fitted with several enormous plastic chimneys, that is also gradually eating up the space of the fresh-food vendors. Lola tells him of a dream in which she has been forced to close her stand.

      Finally, Kidlat begins to ask a few questions he has failed to perceive back in his unbeknownst Eden of Balaian. Why displace the beautiful produce of these simple vendors with lower quality foods sold in a vast department store? If the old chimney’s work, why replace them with a chimney big enough for 6 people to live in?   

     Yet Kidlat is still trapped in his “perfumed nightmare,” and granted a several-day vacation, he heads off to Germany to visit the home of his beloved Wernher von Braun.* There he discovers the community about to celebrate a festival for which they each year they build, by hand, an onion-shaped dome. The workers complain, however, that this may be their last year, since factories are now making the same domes out of plastic. Kidlat still cannot comprehend what he sees as their sentimentality: why would they prefer the old to the new?

    During the celebration a pregnant woman he has met in the town suddenly goes into labor, and Kidlat saves they day by taking her to the hospital in his still-elegant jitney. Driving back to Paris, he feels almost as if the newly-born child, who the woman has named Kidlat in honor of her savior, looks somewhat like him.

     In Paris, he discovers that Lola in no longer among the remaining vendors. The American, knowing that the nearby chimneys will soon be belching their smoke in the direction of his castle, announces that he has sold his chewing-gum enterprise, and is planning to return to the US where he has purchased a company which manufactures blue jeans, the logical next step—so he declares—in his rise to become a munitions and tank manufacturer for the US military. Once more, he promises to take Kidlat with him, suggesting he’ll be the first of his kind to fly on the Concorde.

     Before the two leave, however, this “ugly American” plans one final celebration, inviting some of the world’s leaders, who have come to Paris for a conference, to his castle.

     This is a handmade film, one must remember, with no budget for actors with makeup and costumes which might allow them to resemble those dignitaries. Kidlat presents the entire affair somewhat like a masked pageant of old, as each figure arrives decked out in archaic clothing one might expect to find in a film studio storeroom, a handmade mask representing distorted depictions of the celebrities hiding their faces.

     Introduced to these grotesque figures, the normally amicable Kidlat becomes terror-stricken, suddenly feeling that he, like Alice in Wonderland, is growing smaller and smaller by the moment. In reaction to his feelings, Kidlat, like his father before him, suddenly begins to blow up a typhoon, leveling all those before him and destroying the American’s castle. With seemingly nowhere to go, he escapes into one of the giant chimneys, closes it tightly, and flies off in what now resembles a Martian space ship, back to Balian.

      The following credits are presented on a series of letters and postcards, each of them bearing a stamp from a small country that features one of the US space ships, the last of them, a Philippines stamp depicting the chimney in which Kidlat has returned, proving the assertion as he has repeated throughout the film, “I choose my vehicle, and I can cross any bridge.”

     And so too does Kidlat Tahimik prove that he can create a stunningly profound film by his own means, without the help of wealthy financers.

     This is surely one of the gems of the healthy cinema in Philippine culture, and remains one of my personal favorites.

 

*Ex-Nazi aerospace engineer and rocket architect, Wernher von Braun was brought to the US after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip, to work with the US Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program. He helped to develop rockets that launched the United States’ first space satellite Exmpore 1 in 1958. Soon after, he worked with Walt Disney of a series of short films that helped popularize his ideas of space travel from 1955 to 1957. He became a hero in the late 1950s and early 60s, particularly when the Soviet Union began to enter the “space race.” Even I as a child wrote, and received local awards, for delivering a Junior High School speech on “Space, Man’s New Frontier.” In 1975, Wernher Maganust Maximiliam Freiherr von Braun received the National Medal of Science for his role of performing as “the father of rocket science” and the lunar program. He also argued to a human mission to Mars.

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2016).     

Alfred Hitchcock | Rebecca / 1940

a radical resistance to absence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison (screenplay based on an adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan of Daphne du Maurier’s novel), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Rebecca / 1940

 

A few days ago, I reread my 2008 review of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Rebecca, and was a bit astounded to note that I had relatively little to say about the notorious Mrs. Danvers, strange particularly given the major role she plays in the film. Below are my 12-year-old comments:

“Mrs. Danvers may still have illusions, but it is her delusions that dominate her relationship with the second Mrs. De Winter. Believing that Rebecca has returned to haunt the place, she keeps her mistress’s room as a perverse shrine, maintaining everything “just as it was” and attempts to destroy the usurper she sees in Max’s second wife.

     In such a world of horrors, wherein no one knows the truth, is it any wonder that the fresh, young woman who has married the man who has put Rebecca to rest at the bottom of the sea, has no idea where or who she is? Knowing no one of Rebecca’s social class, what is she to do at that desk in that beautiful, fire-lit room.

     If Mrs. Danvers had not gone mad, destroying the great mansion by fire, perhaps the second Mrs. De Winter might have had set those vaulted corridors aflame simply to find her way home to real identity and a place in which to enact it.”

 

     One might accuse me, as Terry Castle has suggested in The Apparitional Lesbian, as being one of those many people who upon witnessing lesbian love in literature and cinema have “trouble seeing what’s in front of them.” However, I was not at all blind to the fact that one might see Mrs. Danvers as the lesbian admirer, if not exactly lover, of the first Mrs. De Winter. But why, even I must ask myself given my long propensity to interpret even films without an obvious LGBTQ sub-texts (The Third Man, Arsenic and Old Lace, Pillow Talk and many others) did I not even bother to mention the fact, particularly when so many critics have written extensively about those very issues?

     I could excuse the oversight simply by arguing that, despite the film’s true focus being upon Rebecca and her past relationships, our attention nonetheless is very much given over to the second Mrs. De Winter’s attempts to simply adapt to the unknowable world into which she has suddenly been flung. With her own husband’s near constant disparagement of her intelligence and ability to survive in his world and, even as she puts it, the fact that she is constantly being eyed up and down by the locals as if she were some prize cow, along with the turmoil in George Fortescue Maximillian De Winter’s soul that she hopes to soothe, that Mrs. Danvers’ and Rebecca’s relationship may appear to be the least of this central character’s (if you argue that she actually is a central character) problems. In this film, the fact that Mrs. Danvers lives in a dead world of her own making forces us to want to shift our eyes to the forlorn younger figure simply trying to discover how to survive in the present—which in fact was very much what my essay was about.

     When Mrs. Danvers sets fire to the house in order to destroy any present pleasure Joan Fontaine’s version of Mrs. De Winter might find in the arms of Laurence Olivier’s Maxim she actually destroys the past, permitting their love to flourish. In short, Danvers unintentionally is a self-destructive force that allows us to accept this gothic-like travesty as a modern romance; with the destruction of Manderley so too are Rebecca and Mrs. Danvers transformed from ghouls haunting the present to become simply the cremated dead, particularly since Maxim has now no possibility, if he even had the desire, to replace the unknown woman buried in the family vault with Rebecca’s newly discovered body. As the second Mrs. De Winter puts it in the ambling prologue recounting her dream of Manderley and its grounds: “It seems has if nature had come into its own again.”

      Yet that very observation seems to demand that we seek to discover what it was previously in that beautiful mansion that was so much against nature that it led to angst, delirium, fear, and death in the living figures entrapped within the house. Homosexuality and the sodomy laws were, obviously defined for centuries as being precisely that: against nature. Lesbian love, on the other hand was not legally outlawed in Great Britain, but it certainly would have been described, when perceived, as being against the natural expression of love by the society at large. Accordingly, it now appears to me to be crucial to explore those very issues involving Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca if we are truly to comprehend what this work is telling us.

     Maxim’s lies about his relationship with Rebecca and his inability to explain facts about the condition of her boat are also against the law. In Daphne du Maurier’s original novel, more importantly, Maxim does in fact kill Rebecca, placing her corpse in her boat before he scuttles it. And, quite obviously, Maxim’s hatred of his first wife, his desire to kill her, and his active attempt to hide her dead body are all also “against nature,” and therefore, like any depiction of homosexuality, were outlawed by the movie industry’s Hays Code. The studio creators and producers were well aware of these problems. As the head of the Production Code Administration, Joseph Breen, wrote to the David O. Selnzick, Rebecca’s producer:

 

“We have read the temporary script ... and I regret to inform you that the material, in our judgment, is definitely and specifically in violation of the Production Code.... The specific objection to this material is three–fold: (a) As now written, it is the story of a murderer, who is permitted to go off "scot free"; (b) The quite inescapable inferences of sex perversion; and (c) The repeated references in the dialogue to the alleged illicit relationship between Favell and the first Mrs. de Winter [the script defines them as cousins], and the frequent references to the alleged illegitimate child–to–be.”

 

     Breen later wrote, in a second letter:

 

"It will be essential that there be no suggestion whatever of a perverted relationship between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca. If any possible hint of this creeps into this scene, we will of course not be able to approve the picture. Specifically, we have in mind Mrs. Danvers' description of Rebecca's physical attributes, her handling of the various garments, particularly the night gown....”*

 

     As we now know Breen’s objection “a” was in fact changed in the script, allowing Rebecca—no matter how unbelievably—to trip and fall, dying quickly from a head injury. Yet clearly Hitchcock and Selznick felt the necessity of remaining close to du Maurier’s text regarding Breen’s second objection in order to maintain the integrity of the story they were telling. Just why the Hays office did not, in the end, reject the in respect to item “c” as outline above is fairly obvious. Perhaps Favell’s flippant remark to the second Mrs. De Winter, “Don’t you know, I am Rebecca’s favorite cousin” simply rendered any actual family relationship questionable, as if being a cousin meant nothing more than a coded way of saying I was like family or I was her best friend meaning obviously someone with whom she was sexually involved. Both heterosexual and LGBTQ individuals have often referenced their sexual partners as being “cousins” or “best friends” to hide their true relationship. And finally, Rebecca is not pregnant with Favell’s child.

     Yet, it appears, little was changed regarding the central scene in which the Fontaine character encounters Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca’s sacrosanct bedroom shrine. Perhaps we shall never know why the Hays board did not censor the film on that account. Lesbians, even for the more puritanical citizens of the US, were not conceived as a big of threat to normative values as was male homosexual sex. And, if nothing else, Rebecca appeared to be bisexual. Nonetheless, the scene to which Breen objected does seem to have been saved from the scissors.

     Even before we have entered that house of horrors Manderley, the young girl who will soon marry Maxim is doing labor for another sort of abuser, working as a companion for the Babbitt-like American Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates), who in her endless chain-smoking habits almost reminds one of the later fire bug Mrs. Danvers. There is also a sense here, particularly given Mrs. Von Hopper’s own illusions about her sexual attractiveness, of a would-be relationship of, if not of an older and young lesbian lover, at least of a mother with an ungrateful child. As Fontaine’s character tells Maxim, “I looked up companion in the dictionary once, and it described it as ‘a friend of the bosom.’”

      Von Hooper would have her even give up her eyes for a view of Monte (Monte Carlo) and remain mute during her own ridiculous attempt at conversation with Maxim De Winter. In her continued demand for attention and full commitment from her young companion Mrs. Von Hopper might almost be said to foretell not only Maxim’s own abuses toward the second Mrs. De Winter, who he clearly perceives as a kind of gauche innocent to engage him while he reminds her of her worthlessness. Even his proposal for marriage is a study in patriarchal abuse: “I’m asking you to marry me you little fool.” And once the second Mrs. De Winter arrives in Mandeley her husband leaves her pretty much to herself without even attempting to help her adjust to the new world that lay outside of anything she might previously have imagined.

      In a sense she becomes his “companion”—as she continually describes their marital relationship—which varies little from the friend of the bosom she has joyfully left behind. This new world is unnatural not just in the way it has been structured around the beautiful Rebecca, her activities, and her desires, but in the way that Maxim has absented himself from any conjugal activities. 

      But if Maxim can be defined by absence, so Rebecca can be recognized in her total presence, her “R” monogram stamped upon every napkin, handkerchief, and letterhead of the house in a kind of radical resistance (in chemistry R is the symbol for the organic Radical, while in electricity it is the symbol for resistance) to the DW (one is tempted to suggest “dead wood” were it not that death is already obviously linked to de Winters last name) that follows on her stationery headings. Most clearly Maxim stands for the tradition, the reason we later discover that he will never publicly reveal his hatred of her sexual aberrations, male or female. The only times that Max goes “off his head,” as his sister, Beatrice describes his brief temper tantrums, is when he is faced with something that might require him to move out of the passivity to which he has grown accustomed, to demand that he act in way different from the past. Of his new wife, he demands that she never wear a satin gown or pearls or ever become 36. In other words, she is to forever remain the naïf he has unearthed to take his mind away from the truths haunting him. It as if Maxim and Rebecca lived in an atmosphere that any moment might explode. In chemistry R stands for gas.

      Is it any wonder that in her foray into the meaningless “morning room” the second Mrs. De Winter, accidentally or not, breaks Manderley’s treasured cupid. For her, she certainly now realizes, love has nothing to do with it—at least her kind of a normative, “natural” heterosexual form of love.

      One has to wonder, moreover, in all these years of marriage to the woman he hated, what Max did precisely to relieve his sexual desires. The film is purposely opaque about this question. But we are given hints when, the day after he has raged against his new wife, Maxim runs off, his with is assistant Frank Crowley (Reginald Denny), to London on “estate business.” For reasons unexplained, Maxim refers to Crowley as “poor Frank,” perhaps related to the fact that Rebecca, at one point, even attempted to arouse Frank’s sexual desires. If Frank were homosexual, obviously De Winter might truly sympathize with his friend’s inability to deal with Rebecca’s flirtations. Near the end of the film, after he has just been cleared of Rebecca’s death Maxim begins to tell Frank, “There something you don’t know...” which his friend immediately interrupts by responding, “Oh no, there isn’t,” a rather assertive and inexplicable statement between a simple employer and his accountant. These two, we finally perceive are much closer to one another than we might have previously been led to expect. And a moment earlier Colonel Julyan, who has just told Favell that he intends to stay the night in London, tells De Winter, “You have a great friend in Frank.” In just a few words—a true intimate, a great friend, and a night in London—Hitchcock and his writers have told us, below the table so to speak, almost everything about Maxim’s and Frank’s relationship, something that clearly did sail right over the heads of the prurient Hays Code board members. Besides, given the British boarding school system male-on-male buggery was fairly traditional. If, however, the code might possibly allow the lesbian scenes to remain, no obvious homosexual allusions would ever have been permitted.

      It is on that day that Maxim escapes with Frank to London that the second Mrs. De Winter unwittingly discovers the real truth about Rebecca’s Manderley. Brooding over Maxim’s departure, the young bride hears voices and for a few seconds spies on Favell’s leave-taking of Mrs. Danvers, who he and Rebecca call by her male nickname, “Danny.” As he starts to walk away he discovers Mrs. De Winter to be in the next room and before an open window stops to talk to her, calling back to Danny that their attempts to be discreet about his visit were all to no avail. Introducing himself, Favell so astounds her with his aggressive behavior that she invites him in for tea, to which Danvers vehemently shows disapproval. “You’re right Danny, we musn’t lead the young bride astray,” exiting the floor-length window through which he has just entered. 

 

      That brief encounter serves as a prelude to just what he has suggested, an attempt to lead the bride astray by Mrs. Danvers. I’m tempted indeed to describe this next scene of six long minutes (the later inquest of Maxim is of the same length, and the only longer scene in the film is the 13 minute long confession and backstory of his Maxim’s life with Rebecca played out in the beach cottage) as “The Seduction.” For immediately after Favell’s last words Mrs. De Winter moves almost urgently to the West wing room that she knows to have been Rebecca’s, having seen an open window flapping in the wind from the East wing which she and Maxim now live. She opens the door to that room, encountering a world of sheer beauty as the trees and sea combine to create a series of stunning shadows across the shimmering curtains.

       Fast behind her Mrs. Danvers arrives to query the unexpected visitor, “Do you wish anything Madame?” and before the young woman can even speak suggests that she has been waiting to show her this room since the day the second Mrs. De Winter arrived.        

     There is an almost other worldly openness about the elderly woman as Mrs. Danvers shows the newcomer the wonders of this preserved tomb (“Nothing has been altered since that last night”), as one might almost describe it, where she and Rebecca spent long hours every night after the endless parties Rebecca attended. “I always used to wait up for her no matter how late,” Danny proudly announces. Ignoring the advice of Maxim’s sister Beatrice (speaking of Danvers, “I wouldn’t have much to do with her, if I were you.”) Fontaine’s character remains almost awestruck as Danvers goes through the various closets of her dead idol, taking out first her firs and holding them close to her face before ruffing the fur across her cheek and offering to do the same for her sudden acolyte (“Feel this!”) 

“I keep her underwear on this side,” continues the woman we now recognize as Rebecca’s lover, displaying the panties and bras as if they were treasures spun of gossamer.

 

 “While she was undressing, she’d tell me about the party she’d been to.... Everyone loved her. When she finished her bath she’d go into the bedroom and over to the drawing table. [Signaling for Fontaine to join her] Come on Danny hair drill! I’d brush it like this [imitating the movement of the brush] for 20 minutes at a time. Then she’d say, goodnight Danny and step into her bed.”

 

     If these several scenarios have been absolutely bizarre and sexually shocking even today in the sense that Mrs. Danvers is revealing what might almost be seen as an intimate involvement of the two in the boudoir, her next movement to the bed itself is beyond suggestive:

 

“[Revealing a nightcase with the letter R embroidered upon it] I embroidered this case for her myself and I keep it here always. [Taking out Rebecca’s nightgown] Did you ever see anything so delicate? [Motioning for Mrs. De Winter to join her] Look, you can see my hand through it!

     In these sentences, Danny has revealed that she perceives her relationship with Rebecca as a permanent one, as a kind of marriage by suggesting “I keep it here always” in the present tense.

     Rebecca’s nudity is further revealed with the description of being able to see through her negligee. For Danny, we soon perceive, Rebecca is still living. She can hear her footsteps throughout the house, she declares. And for a moment, we suspect, that if her new acolyte were able to participate in Danvers’ adoration or, perhaps, even suggest she might replace the dead woman as a “friend of the bosom,” all might have been forgiven for the interloper’s presence in Manderley. Danvers even invites the young woman to lay down and rest for a while, to listen to the sea.

     But like any timid heterosexual, the second Mrs. De Winter is horrified by the performance she has just witnessed and escapes from the room with Danvers shouting “The sea, the sea!” after her.

     The sea, in its endless shifting fluidity obviously captures her and Rebecca’s lesbian sexuality.

As Anita Markoff has written about several contemporary lesbian films:

 

“...Water can also be seen to play a significant part in films dealing with lesbian relationships; such as in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Thelma, and Céline Sciamma’s films Water Lilies and more recently Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

     These films utilize rivers, lakes, and swimming pools to create a build-up of romantic tensions between women. This happens in a unique way in each film, but the one thing which is true across the board is that these queer relationships would be missing something vital without the presence of water. It is a fluctuating substance, in contrast to the more heterosexual constructions of solid and liminal spaces within these films. Water allows movement, and a lack of constriction of desire. It creates the prospect of a sexuality that is fluid, and a longing that is socially acceptable as the presence of water encourages nakedness. It splits bodies in half, allowing the alluring possibility of visually experiencing the secret parts under the surface.”**

 

     I might suggest that this has long been true of lesbian films for a long while. Consider, for example, the film from 1944 which I review below, The Uninvited.

     In any event, the new lady of the house in Rebecca has now retreated by to the East wing, where there is no view of the sea, and when Maxim returns from his “business” in London clings to his neck as if were a life raft.  

     One might think that Hitchcock, having so clearly made his case about Rebecca and Danvers’ queer and, accordingly, unnatural sexuality, need go no further.

     Yet, the story reveals that Rebecca is so very dependent upon Mrs. Danvers that she actually transforms herself into her mother/servant/lover, invoking her name during her visits to a doctor in her escapes to London where, instead of engaging in outsider sex, she hopes to hear the news—in her final revenge against a husband who has stood against everything she represents—that she is pregnant with Favell’s child, making the sleazy monster’s son heir to his beloved Mandeley. If she seeks to rouse Maxim’s anger, she couldn’t have chosen better.

      Rebecca’s full name in the Hebrew means “to tie firmly,” “to bind as in a noose.” And in that fact we can conjecture just how thorough her revenge will be. Not only has she planned a way to hang her husband through a lie which would eat away at his traditional values so deeply that in desperation he would have no choice but to kill her, but she has summoned up a witness by writing Favell to meet her at the cottage.

      Yet this noose, alas, is also wound around her own neck, as she is diagnosed with cancer, clearly symbol of a disease that cannot stop consuming everything and everyone it touches, including herself and the one she truly loves. If she has previously shared everything with Danny, she now has broken the “marriage vow” between them by hiding the most important piece of information, her pregnancy which in this case symbolizes the end of her lesbian sexuality—and, in reality signifies the end of her bodily existence. As Mrs. Danvers screams out in being told of the facts: “It isn’t true! It isn’t true! She would have told me.” Danvers retaliates against the surrounding males, “Men were all a joke to her. She would sit in her bed and laugh at the lot of you.”

        Finally, I suggest, it may have not been Mrs. Danvers attempt to destroy Maxim’s and the second Mrs. De Winter’s life through her ignition of the escaped “gas”—a substance known to have no fixed shape or volume—but to punish the woman who betrayed her, killing herself in the process as well. After all, she believed Mandeley truly belonged to Rebecca not to Max, and in Danvers’ imagination Rebecca was still treading the floors of the house she had made over in her image. If the ties of the past holding back Maxim and his new wife were released through the fire, so was the noose worn so obviously by Rebecca’s suffering lover Danny.

       Presumably Maxim and his bride have now discovered a new happiness, in part due to the formerly awkward bride’s sudden maturity; if not, living in London Maxim will be able to now see his dear friend Frank out of the confining public eye of Cornwall any time he desires. 

    

*I have depended upon the remarkable research of Laureen Johnson in these passages.

**Markoff’s lovely essay should be visited for its excellent study of the films she suggests. See “Expressions of Desire and Water in Lesbian Cinema,” Screen Queens. December 1, 2019.

https://screen-queens.com/2019/12/01/expressions-of-desire-and-water-in-lesbian-cinema/

 

Los Angeles, November 3, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger | The Tales of Hoffmann / 1951

abandoning life for art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Dennis Arundell (screenplay, based on the opera by Jacques Offenbach, with a libretto by Jules Barbier, which, in turn was based on stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (directors) The Tales of Hoffmann / 1951

 

If Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes and Powell’s Peeping Tom are all more successful works of cinema, The Tales of Hoffmann, an opera-ballet based on the Offenbach opera, is perhaps the work most suitable to their temperaments. In this work, given the transformation of Hoffmann’s Stella from an opera singer to a ballerina and the balletic-inspired performance of the Olympia section (both figures performed by The Red Shoes dancer Moira Shearer), Powell and Pressburger could move almost entirely away from the confines of realism, creating a fantasy completely given over to the theatrical in the name of art.

     At times it appears that Technicolor was invented with Powell’s and Pressburger’s sensibilities in mind. Almost all of their works in color use the brightly saturated reds, yellows, greens, and blues as if they were as abstract colorists instead of storytellers. And the looseness of Offenbach’s tripartite tale makes it possible for the directors to pretty much abandon plot.   

     The high art stodginess of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, along with the balletic assertiveness of Léonide Massine bring this work a kind of inherent gravitas in which singers and dancers appear to be striving to emphasize their mastery—all which is gloriously undercut by production and costume designer’s Hein Heckroth’s decision to let loose nearly every gay-decorating convention of overwrought kitsch: rows and rows and rows of gauzy curtains, overwrought baroque bric-a-brac strewn about the sets, brocaded purple waist-coats (for Hoffmann, sternly sung by the pudgy-faced Robert Rounseville), and miles of tasseled cloaks for the work’s scowling villains Lindorf, Coppélius, Dapertutto, and Dr. Miracle (all played by Robert Helpmann and sung by Bruch Dargavel).

    Add to this enough makeup stuccoed upon faces in way that suggests severe tattooing instead of merely highlighting and prettifying eyes, cheeks, and noses, and an absolutely campy mix of anachronistic dresses, hats, pants, and other attire that suggests, long before RuPaul, everyone male and female is competing in a drag competition, and one ends up with a work that makes you want to laugh every time you might be expected to sigh or even cry. Even Cecil B. DeMille, hardly known for his subtle presentations of history—who wrote Powell and Pressburger saying “For the first time in my life I was treated to Grand Opera where the beauty, power and scope of the music was equally matched by the visual presentation”—could not have imagined a Venetian bordello orgy as grand as the gaudy technicolor bash the directors cooked up for The Tales of Hoffmann. The evil magician Dapertutto, with curlicues of green paint strewn across his cheeks, struts among countless candelabrums of rainbow-colored melted candles, gathering their wax to transform them into emeralds, rubies, amethysts, and diamonds, while the courtesan Giulietta (Ludmilla Tchérina) exits her flying gondola in a tight-fitting black pantsuit that might seem more at home on a Federico Fellini set. The bedded revelers lay in a circle around a huge table filled with gastronomic treats not witnessed since the days of Trimalcio’s dinner party in Petronius’ Satyricon.

     Yet as silly as all of this may seem, there’s a definite method in all the filmmakers’ mad commitment to imagery and scenarios that are so obviously “over the top.” And despite the utterly kitsch expressions of art, the way in which Powell and Pressburger have given themselves up to the artificiality of work they have created is so fascinating and spectacular that any critical judgment seems absolutely pointless. Good art or bad art is quite irrelevant when witnessing an artifact created only to be goggled over. To be truly “kitsch” it would to pretend to be something it was not. And as for camp, neither the directors nor the performers (except for the remnant of the Olympia doll) ever winks. If their utter seriousness is, at times, fairly comic, so is that part of the film’s charm. 

      The ravishingly beautiful automaton of the first tale, Olympia, is wound up so tight that she literally spins, from the Hoffmann’s arms, out of control around the golden swathed ballroom where her marionette friends jingle into existence with no strings attached. Her demise in the hands of the vengeful Coppélius, in which he quite literally tears her apart limb by limb, ends with her poor dummy of a suitor, Hoffmann, looking down up her severed head—having broken the spectacles that blind him from the truth—as he watches her eyes snapping open and closed as if she were still in semi-conscious shock. Nearly every object, in fact, is set into self-destructive motion as each is given an opportunity to temporarily sing and dance in Powell’s and Pressburger’s fantastical production: weathercocks spin in the wind in rhythm with Offenbach’s overture, the hand-carved grotesques decorating clocks spring into motion in the opera’s prologue, and in the final “story,” the statuary figure of Antonia’s (Ann Ayers) opera diva mother begins to sing, luring her consumptive daughter to her death. 

     Each of the humans of this work, meanwhile, attempt to become works of art. If the original opera might have seemed to be a drama in which the hero devoted his life to the discovery of love, here he and all the others instead seem hell-bent on giving up their breathing, sentient selves to become vessels or creators of art, soon after to be destroyed or to destroy others in the act. In short, the central human figures of this work are perfectly willing to hand over their souls to the devil-art in order to continue to dance, write, and sing, echoing the theme of the two P’s most famous film, The Red Shoes (1948).

    The ballerina Stella ends up holding the arm of the satanic Lindorf; Giulietta has already given her soul (and body) over to Dapertutto before Hoffmann falls in love; Antonia, choses to pursue her singing rather than protect her health; and Hoffmann, by film’s end, having finished the telling of his tales, has drunk himself in oblivion. Only Hoffmann’s dear companion Nicklaus (performed explicably in a pants role by Pamela Brown) seems to stand apart from the others, attempting to warn his friend as Hoffmann clumsily stomps through life. The directors and writers obviously felt that they had to desexualize the role of this figure representing such a faithful and enduring love so that his friendship has utterly no effect.

    The film ends with yet another flourish of its total artificiality, showing Sir Thomas Beecham, in tails, baton erect, conducting the work’s final chords, before closing his score, upon which the cinematographers quickly stamp a golden seal declaring their “product” to be “made in England.” 

    

Los Angeles, April 11, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).