The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt

 

The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt by Lotte H. Eisner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't know where or when my fascination with silent movies began. Definitely not as a child. I couldn't stand the things back then. I think it might have been after I discovered The Dark Side of the Rainbow and realized that the same technique of watching one piece of visual media while listening to another piece of aural media could easily be applied to silent movies. Suddenly, these often-campy, over-acted films could become something sublime or something sinister, with the right music. Eisner's book was grist for that mill in enough volume to last me the rest of my life. Though I was very familiar with a few of these films and had already tried the trick of using two tabs of Youtube in a web-browser - one (the film) set on mute and the other (the music) with volume UP - I found several other good combinations and a couple of great ones. I will continue exploring this way.

If you'd like to give it a try, look up The Student of Prague (1913) or Waxworks on Youtube. Mute that tab. Now open another tab, go to Youtube, then play something like Ligeti's "Lontano" or Penderecki's "Symphony No. 1" (or, for real ambience, play it on vinyl!) with the volume UP. Or, perhaps you'd like to go another route and listen to some more . . . modern music? I have a few suggestions linked here.

I suggest watching without subtitles turned on, if you can. just enjoy the visual and auditory experience. It's a stark contrast from watching the movie alone, even when, or especially when, someone has attached an old-timey organ soundtrack to the movie. It's your experience - make it yours!

Incidentally, because of this book, I understand why sub-titles are called sub-titles. Only took 52 years to be enlightened. "Titles" was the term originally used in silent movies for the words that flashed up on the screen, in the absence of spoken dialogue. "Subtitles" appear, as the name implies beneath the titles. These are, as you know, most often translations from the original language into another.

52 years.

You can teach an old dog new tricks.

Speaking of new tricks, the early years of cinema were a sort of wild west, when it came to creative innovation, especially when constraints brought on by conflict interfered with the procurement of some materials. Interestingly, the lack of materials in the last years of World War I led to playwrights and cinematic directors using light and shadow, rather than elaborate sets, as they used to use, to give depth to the settings and to indicate the passage of time. A happy accident for early German movies.

The recollections of Carl Boese on how the special effects were done for Der Golem (1920) were absolutely fascinating. These practical effects were very dangerous, so volunteers were asked to try them out. The first stunt-men, perhaps. Knowing this has given me an excuse to watch the movie again. Of course, I will also have to reread Gustav Meyrinks novel, which has little to do with the movie, but hey, a good excuse is okay. After all, the book and the movie were both highly influential on one of my own creative works.

And, speaking of old dogs . . .

Eisner has a fixation on the melancholy and gloom inherit in the German soul, as he sees it. I tend to agree to some extent, but when I see this was first published in 1952, I wonder if some of the hyperbole isn't post-holocaust apologetics or manifestations of guilt. There's a bit too much of "Germans are brooding, dark-minded people as a whole" for me. It's overstated and I wonder why?

It is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.

These generalizations of German people as a brooding bunch keep coming up again and again. I don't fully disagree, but frankly (and I don't mean "in the manner of the French"), it got a little, well, old.

But if you can ignore the repeated caricature of an entire nation as, well, goths, there is much to be enjoyed about this work. I would also recommend (whether you read the book or not) following the Pagan Hollywood instagram or twitter account. Sometimes NSFW, you'll want to maneuver carefully, but if you want to catch the glamor of early cinema (and much more) in still photos, that's a great place to start. There's also a great interview with Pagan Hollywood's founder, Charles Lieurance over on Youtube, while you're at it.

I must note that the early text on Doctor Caligari instructed "see frontispiece". I turned to the front of the book, and noted the ragged edges where that key marker had been torn out of the book.

Was that a sign that I should not have entered the realm of the torn page?

Maybe I should have heeded it.

But I'm glad I didn't.



View all my reviews

__________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

Pollen: A Novel in Black and White

 

Pollen: A Novel in Black and White by Beresford Egan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pollen is a novel, a work of art, really, from the delicious prose to the lavish black and white illustrations by the author and artist Beresford Egan, to the stunning presentation by publisher Sidereal Press - a novel that unfolds in so many ways, revealing itself in a long, slow burn that takes the reader by surprise, in time, like a frog discovering it's being boiled after having hopped into a nice cool pan of water on a heretofore unlit stove. That's not to say that there is any degree of deus ex machina here, no, not at all! There is a natural progression of attitudes and events, but they are handled so deftly that one realizes what is happening and damns their lack of foresight, only right before the consequences strike.

The narrative mostly centers around the actions of one Lancelot Daurimer, "man of the world" as they say, a dilettante, a scoundrel, an aesthete. At times, one sees aspects of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, at others, Huysman's Essientes, and others, Wilde's Dorian Gray. And yet, he is his own man, a man who changes throughout the novel while, in the end, remaining very much himself. Lance Daurimer is one of the most compelling characters I've read in many, many years. He reflects us at our cruelest, our most irresponsible . . . and our most repentant and most vulnerable. For me, this carried a strong emotional resonance with my own life and the changes I have undergone through the years. In some ways (but, thankfully, not all), I am Lance Daurimer. I understand that this novel is semi-autobiographical for Beresford Egan, and one can tell that the depths of pain and self-loathing that are laid out on the page come from the author's personal experience. Egan was exorcising some demons here, but it never feels self-indulgent.

It is clearly evident that Egan paid careful attention to his text while writing and editing it. For example, the banter between Lance Daurimer and Vernon Batty is quite good. It feels natural, but on very close examination, you can see the grammatical and metaphorical craftsmanship with which it was created. I wish we had more dialogue like this in more (post?)modern literature. Dialogue can be witty and baroque and yet still feel natural if the characters participating in it are both cynical and humorous. Egan rides the razor's edge between the decadents and the modern without missing a step. though it was written in the 1930s, it feels like it is bridging the gap between the 1880s and the 1920s. But it does so without self-awareness; fluidly.

For all its cynical humor and wit, this book is definitely not a comedy. Even if it was to take a strong turn into comedic channels and stay there till the end, the laughter would always be echoed by a sense of sorrow and loss. The pain here is quite real, as we learn in the conversation between Daurimer and his father. The dialogue here is brilliant, even in its own darkness. Pollen is complex and requires something on the part of the reader: the ability to unpack and examine the growth of character (not just Daurimer's, it should be noted). Though it reads smoothly, it is not an "easy" read. One might be forgiven for thinking the book is much less than it is if the reader doesn't read the book to the end. This is one that rewards the reader who sticks it out to the end, not because of any surprise ending, but because at the end of it all, the reader can look back and fully appreciate what Egan has built here in all of it's elegance and depravity.

While there really is no "weird" or "fantastical" element, Daurimer has a daytime vision in which he sees "Lucifera," the feminine aspect of the devil himself. What decadent-leaning novel would be complete without a hallucinatory manifestation of Lucifer's feminine aspect? It goes with the territory, N'est ce Pas?

Egan's illustrations are possibly the "weirdest" feature of the book. One should probably expect this from the same author who drew illustrations for one of the more beutiful presentations of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. Most of it would be considered quite risque in 1930s England, though Egan eschews pornography, per se, in the concluding essay "Black and White Art - What Is It?" which Sidereal rightfully saw fit to include after the book's conclusion. This essay actually tells quite a bit about what Egan was trying to do with Pollen without referring to Pollen at all. It was not to take sides with good or evil at all, but to side only with Art, erasing the man-made lines between "good" and "evil". In this novel, he has quite definitely succeeded.

View all my reviews

__________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A crushingly poignant work. Now, I "get it", whereas when I read this as a teenager, I didn't. As a child, I was so bent on loving the anti-heroes that I missed the tragedy, the squandered possibilities, not within Gatsby, but within everyone else. As I read it, Gatsby isn't really the hero or the anti-hero at all. He is a hub around which the real stories churn. He is a soft, vulnerable, naive, ambitious machine. And while everything and everyone revolves around him, he is, in the end, abandoned, though not forgotten, by all but a few. But the real question remains, just who have they abandoned? And in remembering him, are Jordan, Tom, Daisy, Wolfsheim and others creating a man that was never really there? Gatsby is like a raw onion at the dinner table. The center of attention both because of his ability to flavor any dish and because of his stink. But to focus on the raw onion in the middle of the table is to miss the delectable dishes that compose the rest of the meal.

Fitzgerald knows how to pull at the heartstrings. I thought back to friends and girlfriends of long ago, situations, not the same, but similar to those of many of the characters that I've seen either in my own life or in the lives of those close to me. This book has a way of causing you to delve down behind the bookshelves of your mind and pull out those long-mangled scraps of paper, some of which you have been looking for for a long time, some of which you'd rather just forget.

The writing herein is beautiful. I'll leave with one admittedly (and indulgently) long quote, which speaks to the beauty of the work, as well as the feeling that Fitzgerald gives the reader of continuously being placed on the edge of an emotional precipice overlooking a drop to the ocean, hundreds of feet below. It's exhilarating, thrilling really, and quite, quite dangerous.

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily
joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to
shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of
ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and
hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and
chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of
men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives
out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey
men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud
which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift
endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.
J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and
gigantic--their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on
waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an
hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was
because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress.

View all my reviews

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help my creative endeavors, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!

The Dream Weavers: Tales of Fantasy by the Pre-Raphaelites

The Dream Weavers: Tales of Fantasy by the Pre-Raphaelites by John Howard Weeks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Confession: I never did finish this book when it was assigned reading for my senior seminar on Victorian Arts and Culture. I read enough, at that time, to complete the assigned critique of one story that we enjoyed. Thankfully, this came four stories into the anthology, freeing up study time for other projects in a very busy semester.

To say that Victorian art and literature has had an influence on my own fiction is a gross understatement. I've been accused of, and guilty of, the same flamboyant prose that was popular a couple of centuries ago. I've worked hard lately to be free of those tentacles, or at least to have them resting a little more loosely over my throat.

But a series of nostalgic hankerings has been pulling at me lately, and I thought "it's about time I finish that book". After all, the Pre-Raphaelite artists are not only the subject of one of my novels, they produced some of my favorite visual art of all time.

Unfortunately, what pleases the eye visually does not necessarily make for good prose. Oftentimes, the artists-cum-writers are too free in adding embellishments to their words that ought to have been reserved only for their paintings. Some of them were decent poets, but stretching a poem out into a long narrative, rather than watering the words down, as one would expect, only allows more room for treacle to be poured into the ensuing gaps. Many of the stories in this volume are practically drowning in treacle and baroque language, which makes for a sickly-sweet jolt that should be enjoyed only in small servings.

That's not to say that every story is a failure. Far from it. I found aspects of several of these stories rather refreshing and intriguing.

For example, Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Dead Love," in which the Lady Yolande de Craon falls in love with and, through that love, subsequently revives the body of the knight Jacques d'Aspremont (who had previously killed her husband in battle), shows an interesting ambiguity between what is good and what is evil, what is romantic and what is perverse. This is a much more nuanced take on morality than I would have expected from a story of its age.

In Swinburne's "The Portrait," the painter, Peter, after hatching a plot with a wicked woman (you will find this trope throughout) to kill her husband by means of a painting that would kill a man should he look upon it, is described as "a man that rejoiced in all manner of shameful dealing, and was also unclean of his life, as is the fashion of men that paint and men that make songs and verses; for this Peter also made many amorous poems, and played upon stringed instruments marvellously [sic] well. And the lives of such men as are painters, or such as are poets, are most often evil and foolish; therefore it may be well conceived of this Peter that he was a very lewd man."

I'm not sure if this is an attempt by Swinburne at self-effacing humor or if it was meant as a kind of marketing ploy for the shock value of its self-admitted wickedness. One wonders if he and his contemporaries, Huysmans and Verlaine were not all customers of the same marketing agency.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Orchard Pit" was the story that, as an undergraduate, I chose to examine in detail. I won't bore you with the amateurish rantings and ravings of a college senior who actually thought he knew what he was talking about. Suffice it to say that this remains one of my favorite stories in this volume, a hallucinogenic prose poem that beats a trance-inducing mental cadence in the reader's mind.

Sprinkled throughout these stories are what I will call "Odes to the Cult of Weakness," passages that seek to heroicize the androgynous as being simultaneously better than their peers and, yet, harboring a critical vulnerability that is, in a strange way, lauded. This is evinced in the description of Charo dell' Erma in Rossetti's story "Hand and Soul":

The extreme longing after a visible embodiment of his thoughts strengthened as his years increased, more even than his sinews or the blood of his life; until he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons.

Thankfully, not all of the characters in this volume are infected with that same ultra-sensitivity (it grows tedious very quickly). And, in fact, I wonder if editor John Weeks intentionally followed up Rossetti's shriveling little daisy with Edward Burne-Jones' tale "The Druid and the Maiden". This is a solid story of love, betrayal, patriotism, double crosses, and ghosts in the shadow of the Roman Empire's invasion of Brittany. It is much less florid than the stories that precede it and a welcome, prosaic relief from the extreme poetic acrobatics that permeate the collection.

Burne-Jones continues to display a spark of modernity in his tale "The Cousins". This story is downright Dickinsonian (thank you, Doris, for providing me with the right word!), yet it is punctuated, in the middle, by a long scream straight from Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable that the narrator refers to as "a missing year".

Finally, I quite enjoyed William Falford's "A Night in a Cathedral," not because the hackneyed story about being locked away, alone, for a night in a cathedral had anything to recommend it (it didn't), but because it summoned from the dead caverns of my mind a series of images from childhood: those of Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat being harangued by cartoon, ghosts and skeletons. I needed the laughs, if nothing else, to counter the grave seriousness with which this author, and several others in the volume, took himself.

View all my reviews

________________________

If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!