Long Pauses

Author: Darren

  • Nine Questions

    What with Dubya and Tony Blair now promising startling revelations in the coming weeks (what exactly does a dossier look like?), I’d like to join those who are encouraging the President to answer the following questions (courtesy of the editors of The Nation):

    1. Why engage in a risky and potentially calamitous invasion of Iraq when the existing strategy of “containment”–entailing no-fly zones, sanctions, technology restraints and the deployment of US forces in surrounding areas–not only has clearly succeeded in deterring Iraqi adventurism for the past ten years but also in weakening Iraq’s military capabilities?

    2. Why has the Administration found so little international support for its proposed policy, even among our closest friends and allies (with the possible exception of Britain’s Tony Blair), and what would be the consequences if Washington tried to act without their support and without any international legal authority? Isn’t it dangerous and unwise for the United States to engage in an essentially unilateral attack on Iraq?

    3. Is the United States prepared to accept significant losses of American lives–a strong possibility in the projected intense ground fighting around Baghdad and other urban areas?

    4. Is the United States prepared to inflict heavy losses on Iraq’s civilian population if, as expected, Saddam concentrates his military assets in urban areas? Would this not make the United States a moral pariah in the eyes of much of the world?

    5. Wouldn’t an invasion of Iraq aimed at the removal of Saddam Hussein remove any inhibitions he might have regarding the use of chemical and biological (and possibly nuclear) weapons, making their use more rather than less likely?

    6. Are we prepared to cope with the outbreaks of anti-American protest and violence that, in the event of a US attack on Iraq, are sure to erupt throughout the Muslim world, jeopardizing the survival of pro-US governments in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and further inflaming the Israeli-Palestinian crisis?

    7. Can the fragile American economy withstand a sharp rise in oil prices, another decline in air travel, a bulging federal deficit, a drop in consumer confidence and other negative economic effects that can be expected from a major war in the Middle East? And what would an invasion mean for an even more fragile world economy and for those emerging markets that depend on selling their exports to the United States and that are vulnerable to rising oil prices?

    8. Even if we are successful in toppling Saddam, who will govern Iraq afterward? Will we leave the country in chaos (as we have done in Afghanistan)? Or will we try to impose a government in the face of the inevitable Iraqi hostility if US forces destroy what remains of Iraq’s infrastructure and kill many of its civilians?

    9. Are we willing to deploy 100,000 or more American soldiers in Iraq for ten or twenty years (at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year) to defend a US-imposed government and prevent the breakup of the country into unstable Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite mini-states?

  • The Culture of the Cold War (1991)

    By Stephen J. Whitfield

    As with Thomas Hill Schaub’s study of the era’s fiction, the “Cold War” in the title of Whitfield’s book is somewhat of a misnomer in that he has limited his focus to the period of unprecedented national consensus during the Truman, Eisenhower, and (to a lesser extent) Kennedy administrations. The Culture of the Cold War is divided into chapter-long studies of the major voices of popular culture, each of which, according to Whitfield, reflected and contributed to the polarity that characterized so much of the 1950s. By making case studies of such disparate public figures as Whittaker Chambers, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Graham, Lillian Hellman, and Mickey Spillane (among many, many others), Whitfield exposes the dominant ideologies that shaped the politics, the news media, literature, film, religion, consumer culture, and television of the day.

    Whitfield begins by cutting through the hyperbolic rhetoric that dominates so much writing about the Red Scare, calling the period not a “collective tragedy” but a “disgrace.” “Unable to strike directly at the Russians,” Whitfield writes, “the most vigilant patriots went after the scalps of their countrymen instead. Since Stalin and his successors were out of reach, making life difficult for Americans who admired them was more practical.” The McCarthy era witch hunts divided the country into two distinct parties: honest, patriotic, God-fearing Republicans and Communists, a category that included everyone who, for instance, fought for Civil Rights legislation or worried about American poverty or questioned our involvement in Southeast Asia or failed to attend Christian church services regularly. In fact, for a period of several years, Whitfield convincingly argues, anyone who voiced any doubt whatsoever about the perfection of American society was opening up him- or herself to charges of disloyalty, which could then lead to blacklisting, prison, or, in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, execution.

    The most lamentable product of the hysterical finger-pointing was the silencing of all progressive politics. Whitfield captures the moment with effective understatement: “Because an intense concern with unsolved social problems may have betrayed Soviet influence, policy options thinned.” The Kennedys make for an interesting study of how dominant the anti-Communist ideology had become. JFK, then a young Congressman from Massachusetts, voted with the majority against several key pieces of proposed social legislation, and RFK served alongside Roy Cohn as an influential aid to McCarthy. New Deal programs atrophied when they were loudly denounced as “pink” and when funding was funneled instead toward the building of the Military Industrial Complex and the securing of American financial interests worldwide. America quickly shifted its focus to production and consumption. Whitfield writes: “What the Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were supposed to protect was, above all, a lifestyle intimately associated with the blessings of prosperity. Above all the American experiment meant—at home and abroad-abundance, which was the finest measure of manifest destiny.”

    Typical of Whitfield’s book is the case study that closes it. In the final chapter, “Thawing: A Substitute for Victory,” Whitfield looks more closely at the early years of the 1960s, when cracks began to form in the American consensus. Stanley Kubrick’s films offer some timeline of that development: Paths of Glory (1957) was so strangely ambivalent about war that it was preceded by a disclaimer; Spartacus (1960) was based on a novel by Socialist Howard Fast and employed several blacklisted screenwriters, who were given on-screen credit for the first time in years; and Dr. Strangelove (1963) exposed the absurdity of Cold War policy by blending truth and satire in hilariously uncomfortable ways. Whitfield quotes Kubrick on the genesis of the film, which was originally intended to be a straight-forward adaptation of the novel, Red Alert: “ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: ‘I can’t do this. People will laugh.’ But after a month or so I began to realize that all the things I was throwing out were the things which were most truthful.” Whitfield pairs Kubrick with Joseph Heller, whose novel Catch-22 likewise took its form from the “disintegrated” days of Korea and the 1950s. Voices like Kubrick’s and Heller’s, Whitfield argues, helped to bring an end, finally, to the hypocrisy: “The culture of the Cold War,” he writes, “decomposed when the moral distinction between East and West lost a bit of its sharpness, when American self-righteousness could be more readily punctured, when the activities of the two superpowers assumed greater symmetry.”

  • American Pastoral (1997)

    By Philip Roth

    Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth’s alter-ego for nearly four decades now, is settling uncomfortably into old age. Now a literary recluse like E.I. Lonoff, the mentor of his youth in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman has survived prostate cancer (though, given his notorious past, not without ironic complications), and, as the novel begins, has returned once more to his school days in Newark, New Jersey. The device here is a class reunion, a gathering of former athletes, beauties, and outsiders, transformed by time into uncanny snapshots of their own immigrant grandparents. Zuckerman is most surprised to find Jerry Levov there. Now a ruthless, four-times-married Miami surgeon, Jerry had once been important to Nathan only because of the access their friendship afforded him into the private world of Jerry’s older brother, Seymour “Swede” Levov, the finest athlete to ever walk the halls of Weequahic High and Nathan’s lifelong hero. From their brief conversation, Nathan learns that the Swede’s life was forever altered in 1968, when his teenage daughter, Merry, blew up the local post office, along with a local doctor, in protest of the Vietnam War. The rest of the story is left for Zuckerman’s telling.

    The form of American Pastoral is established in two early passages. After his encounter with Jerry, Zuckerman becomes obsessed with the Swede, locking himself away to restore life to his fallen idol. Typical of Roth, the moment is captured in mirror images: “Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day?” After pouring once more over the few “facts” at his disposal, Zuckerman/Roth retreats to fiction, adding, “anything more I wanted to know, I’d have to make up.” And he does just that. One-fifth of the way through the novel, Zuckerman disappears completely, surrendering his own voice to the Swede’s sorrowful lament.

    American Pastoral also finds its structural precedent in The Kid from Tomkinsville, a children’s book the young Nathan had once discovered on the Swede’s bookshelf. It tells the story of a baseball phenomenon whose life is marked equally by stunning success and heart-breaking tragedy. “I was ten and I had never read anything like it,” Nathan says. “The cruelty of life. The injustice of it.” It’s perhaps too literary—too easy—of a device for Roth, but the 400+ page story of the Swede’s fall follows a similar trajectory, as does, Roth implies, the story of America’s recent history. For the Swede is Roth’s finest personification of the post-war American Dream and all the complicated realities that frustrate it. “Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.” The Swede’s longed-for American pastoral becomes its grotesque counterpart, “the indigenous American berserk.”

    What most fascinates me about this novel—along, of course, with Roth’s beautiful prose—is its inability, ultimately, to make any sense of the Swede’s tragedy. Those readers who turn to the final page, hoping to find resolution, answers, grace, will find, once again, only the question that haunts every preceding chapter: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” The Swede, though occasionally chastised for lacking requisite self-awareness, is a good man: hard-working, honorable, a loving father and husband, a good-hearted liberal opposed to Vietnam and actively involved in the fight for civil rights. And yet he is unable to escape the violence, the destruction of his family, the rape of his daughter—that rape that haunts him more than the deaths or the explosions or the decay. He is unable to escape the mysterious, inarticulate pain that has become his life. After a reunion with Merry, the Swede returns home to a dinner party, broken by the sight of his frail, filthy daughter, but unable to speak about it. “He was supposed to do this forever,” Roth writes. “However much he might crave to get out, he was to remain stopped dead in the moment in that box. Otherwise the world would explode.”

  • Black Water (1992)

    By Joyce Carol Oates

    On the opening page of Oates’s novella, Kelly Kelleher, an idealistic 26 year old woman, finds herself sitting beside a famous Senator, seat-belted into a car that is filling quickly with black water. “Am I going to die? — like this?” she asks. Kelly finds herself here after spending the day at a Fourth of July party on Greyling Island, just off the coast of Maine. The unnamed Senator is a friend of a friend, who surprises everyone by showing up at the party and by taking an instant interest in the beautiful Kelly, a Brown graduate too star-struck to admit to the Senator that he was the focus of her Senior Thesis, a paper titled, “Jeffersonian Idealism and ‘New Deal’ Pragmatism: Liberal Strategies in Crisis.” After spending much of the day flirting casually and exchanging a private kiss, the two set off in the Senator’s rented Toyota, bound for the privacy of his mainland hotel room. But then they find the water:

    The rented Toyota, driven with such impatient exuberance by The Senator, was speeding along the unpaved unnamed road, taking the turns in giddy skidding slides, and then, with no warning, somehow the car had gone off the road and had overturned in black rushing water, listing to its passenger’s side, rapidly sinking.

    Am I going to die? — like this?

    Any resemblance between this scene and the actual events of June 1969—when Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in the back seat of Ted Kenney’s car after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island—are, of course, completely intentional. However, while Oates demands that we return to that night in ’69 (and apparently she began taking notes for this novel when the news first broke), she refuses to treat it as an isolated historical event, that is, an occurrence of the past, over and done. Instead, she transposes the story to the early ’90s, making The Senator an amalgamation of Kennedy, Gary Hart, and any number of other prominent leaders who have abused their power for sexual gain.

    That so many of those prominent names belong to Democrats seems to be part of the tragedy at the heart of the novel. Like her heroine, Oates is concerned deeply with “Liberal Strategies in Crisis,” with a political and social present that is none the better for so much past promise. She views that past through a lens of ironic nostalgia (or nostalgic irony, I can’t decide): “Bobby Kennedy’s whirlwind campaign, heady nostalgic days of power, purpose, authority, hope, youth in the Democratic Party—when, disastrous as things were, in Vietnam, at home, you did not expect them to worsen.” But things have worsened. The fireworks displays of Kelly’s day are “lavish and explosive in brilliant Technicolor like the TV war in the Persian Gulf,” conservatism reigns victorious, and The Senator, a man whose “humanitarian ideals” were inspired by the same historical events that shaped Oates, has surrendered to the dominant force in American politics: “compromise.”

    But Black Water is first and foremost a novel about Kelly Kelleher and, by analogy, all other women who have been abused, exploited, and discarded by the powerful and by the media that report it. Black Water is so effective (and affecting) because Oates siphons every word of it through the fading consciousness of a dying woman, restoring life and value where both have been too easily forgotten. The last chapters, in particular, when Kelly fights for breath in the small air pocket that remains, when she realizes that The Senator has used her body as leverage so that he might swim to safety, when she clings to the hope that he will return for her, and when she listens helplessly to the short choppy waves “against the slanted roof of this room-snug and safe beneath the covers, Grandma’s crocheted quilt with the pandas around the border,” these last chapters force us to be rightly reoriented from the political to the personal. It’s an important move and an impressive feat from Oates and this stunning short novel.

  • American Fiction in the Cold War

    By Thomas Hill Schaub

    A more appropriate title for Schaub’s study might be The Liberal Narrative in American Fiction of the 1950s. He focuses the majority of his attention on the early post-war years, turning to the New York Intellectuals—Howe, Trilling, and Schlesinger, in particular—for his diagnosis of the crisis at the heart of the American Left at the start of the Cold War. Quoting heavily from C. Wright Mills’s 1952 essay, “Liberal Values in the Modern World,” Schaub writes: “any ‘democratic or liberal-even humanist-ideals . . . are in fact statements of hope or demands or preferences of an intellectual elite psychologically capable of individually fulfilling them, but they are projected for a population which in the twentieth century is not at present capable of fulfilling them.’ The new kinds of social and political organization which have arisen have left liberal values without any footing: ‘the ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization’” (19).

    Schaub argues that American writers of the New Left responded to this crisis—precipitated largely by the revelation of Stalin’s savagery—by returning to a brand of realism better suited to balance their well-intentioned but ultimately naïve faith in the perfectibility of American society with the hard facts of humanity’s obvious failings. Schaub labels this style of writing the “liberal narrative.” Lionel Trilling describes it as such: “Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination” (22). As an example, Schaub often turns to Richard Chase’s 1949 study of Melville, an author who “presents his reader with a vision of life so complexly true that it exposes the ideas of Henry Wallace as hopelessly childish and superficial” (23).

    Facing for the first time in human history the very real possibility of apocalypse, artists shunned the formal sterility of Henry James and turned inward, exposing the problems of consensus culture by examining those most alienated from it. It’s no coincidence, Schaub notes, that much of the best writing of the era was written by African-Americans, Jews, and women. In chapter 4, “The Unhappy Consciousness,” he argues that the “new liberalism” manifested itself in a shift to first person narration: “often autobiographical, a point of view which embodied in one degree or another the isolation of the speaker, while at the same time issuing from the unimpeachable authority of his consciousness and perception” (68). Schaub describes this new narrative as one based on psychology, a narrative voice barely distinguishable from the author’s own mind. Norman Mailer’s first novel, for instance, begins with “an omniscient confidence, . . . but Barbary Shore begins much more uncertainly and has already acquired the characteristic first person, often disturbed voice of the fifties” (72). The Beats likewise turned to technique as a means of exposing the “phoniness” (to borrow a term from another novel of the day, The Catcher in the Rye) that characterized so much of “mass culture.”

    After setting up his argument, Schaub turns his attention to chapter-long studies of four representative “liberal narratives”: Ellison’s Invisible Man, O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, Mailer’s The White Negro, and Barth’s The End of the Road.

  • The Public Burning (1976)

    By Robert Coover

    In the opening pages of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, the narrator, Vice President Richard Nixon, insecure about his notoriously sinister jowls, thinks to himself, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” Set during the days immediately preceding the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover’s satire explodes the absurd ties that bind infotainment to politics, words to history, and images to morality. Nixon makes a suitable and surprisingly sympathetic anti-hero, then, for he was perhaps America’s first politician to be publicly made, broken, reborn, then destroyed, each act broadcast live on television. Coover assumes our familiarity with those images and puts them to effective use, deliberately sounding echoes of Nixon’s “I am not a crook” Watergate days while revisiting the glorious victory of his “Checkers” speech. Nixon is simultaneously the candidate on stage, sweat-soaked and scruffy beside Kennedy’s sheen, and the President-elect with arms raised, victorious, finally, in ’68.

    “In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities—why did I keep forgetting that?” The fictional Nixon’s question is at the heart of Coover’s satire, and the heydays of the McCarthy Era give him ample fodder. It’s as if Coover is attempting to embody all of the complicated contradictions of the ’50s in a single novel, often to hilarious affect. Betty Crocker comes to life as the personification of idealized Eisenhower-era domesticity. Hollywood horror creatures walk the streets in 3D Technicolor, living projections of xenophobic hysteria. Walt Disney and Cecille B. DeMille elbow each other aside in their fight for marketing rights to the execution. Eisenhower morphs into Gary Cooper, strutting toward a potentially apocalyptic showdown at High Noon while uttering the lyric verse of Time Magazine (the nation’s Poet Laureate). And, most prominently, the irrational demands of the American populace become a walking, talking, cursing, spitting caricature in the person of Uncle Sam, who wants only to defeat his nebulous arch-villain, The Phantom, an enemy that most closely resembles communism, but is actually anything that might be labeled “un-American,” a loaded term, no doubt, in the early-’50s.

    Knowing something of The Public Burning‘s infamous reputation, I picked it up expecting to read a didactic denouncement of conservative hate-mongering built upon an equally didactic eulogy to the Rosenbergs, those most tragic and useable icons of the Old Left. What I got, instead, was something much more ambivalent and cynical: a satire with targets across the political spectrum. In an onanistic fantasy that would make Portnoy blush, Nixon attacks Ethel’s naïve devotion to an irrelevant idealism, voicing the questions that all on the Left have struggled to answer in post-WWII America: “What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh?” Her response is typical of the impotent liberalism that has characterized so much of the New Left. Coover captures this beautifully in an image of Julius and Ethel exchanging letters of praise for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that they root for despite their complete ignorance of baseball. Edith writes: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.”

    The warden at Sing-Sing offers an interesting insight into the Rosenbergs: “the problem has been their habit of behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways—you know, acting like they’re establishing historical models or precedents or something.” There’s a strange irony to the line, given its context within a novel that, even in its title, treats their execution as a sacrificial rite. As with much postmodern fiction of the ’70s, that irony is often so thick here that it becomes difficult to find a foundation. Are the Rosenbergs heroic martyrs or treasonous dupes? Both, Coover seems to say, and neither. Left and Right, right and wrong all collapse into an absurd political/social/moral quagmire that is put on ridiculous display in the novel’s final pages. At the site of the execution—fantastically transposed from Sing Sing to the middle of Times Square—Nixon appears with his pants around his ankles, fully erect, then brings the crowd to a riotous frenzy as history dissolves around them. Abolitionists, comanches, and redcoats stand shoulder to shoulder with the members of the Supreme Court, who roll around in the piles of shit left there by the Republican elephant. Uncle Sam appears in a flash of light, then bends Nixon over, sodomizing him. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy,” is all the Vice President can muster in reply. It ain’t a pretty scene, but neither is America, Coover screams.

  • Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

    Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

    Dir. by Max Ophuls

    Images: Ophuls’s influence on Kubrick is obvious here. His camera moves constantly, but always slowly and gracefully. It tracks forward and backward, from side to side, through the cramped rooms of Brand’s apartment, taking in, with almost novelistic detail, the impressively realized mise-en-scene. An important recurring motif is a dramatic crane shot that appears to float over the stairwell, looking down on Lisa.

    • • •

    An opening title card situates us in fin-de-siecle Vienna, where we are introduced to Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), a graying, but distinguished looking aristocrat, who returns to his apartment late one night to begin preparations for his immediate departure. Brand has chosen to flee Vienna rather than confront the man who would duel him in three hours. His preparations are halted, though, by a letter delivered to him by his mute servant, John (Art Smith). The anonymous letter details the tragic fate of Lisa Berndl (Joan Fontaine) and begins: “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead. . . . If this reaches you, you will know how I became yours when you didn’t know who I was or even that I existed.” The remainder of the film dramatizes the story contained within Lisa’s letter, beginning nearly twenty years earlier, when the then teenage girl first developed her hopeless devotion to the handsome concert pianist who lived in the apartment across from hers.

    Letter essentially follows the trajectory of a Thomas Hardy novel: Lisa pines desperately, refuses the proposal of an honorable suitor, and abandons her parents — all sacrifices made to her absurd romantic delusions of a future happiness with Brand. When our hero and heroine are finally united, Ophuls stages it in the trademark style of his day — their faces are pressed together in a close-up; their passion is heightened by a swell of syrupy strings — but a sense of tragedy suffocates the seduction. Once Brand leaves for a brief concert tour, Ophuls elides the nine months of Lisa’s pregnancy before cutting again, this time to her comfortable life with her husband, Johann (Marcel Journet), and her young son. However, a chance reunion with Stefan soon precipitates Lisa’s ultimate fall, which culminates in the final lines of the letter, a note to Brand added by the nuns who tended Lisa’s deathbed.

    In reading over what little I could find online, I was surprised to find Letter described as a “classic three-tissue melodrama” and a “lush tearjerker par excellence.” I’m almost ashamed to admit my biases against such films, biases that reared their ugly heads at the first glimpse of the 31-year-old Fontaine playing the naïve, pubescent Lisa. But the combination of Ophuls’s camerawork and pacing, along with Howard Koch’s biting (and decidedly unromantic) script were more than enough to overcome my personal baggage. What few remaining reservations I may have harbored were wiped away during the following exchange between Lisa and Johann, who recognizes that his hopes of happiness have been dashed by Stefan’s return:

    Lisa: Johann, you don’t think I wanted this to happen.
    Johann: No. (Pause) What are you going to do?
    Lisa: I don’t know.
    Johann: Lisa, we have a marriage. Perhaps it’s not all you once hoped for, but you have a home, and your son, and people who care for you.
    Lisa: I know that, Johann. I’d do anything to avoid hurting you, but I can’t help it.
    Johann: And your son, you think you can avoid hurting him?
    Lisa: He won’t be harmed. I’ll see to that.
    Johann: There are such things as honor and decency.
    Lisa: I told myself that a hundred times this one evening.
    Johann: You talk as though it were out of your hands. It’s not Lisa. You have a will, you can do what’s right, what’s best for you, or you can throw away your life.
    Lisa: I’ve had no will but his, ever.
    Johann: That’s romantic nonsense.
    Lisa: Is it? Johann, I can’t help it. I can’t. You must believe that.
    Johann: What about him? Can’t he help himself either?
    Lisa: I know now that he needs me as much as I’ve always needed him.
    Johann: Isn’t it a little late for him to find out?

    Rather than a classic melodrama or lush tearjerker, Letter strikes me as their antithesis: an ironic critique of the romance genre (“nonsense,” Johann calls it). As in films like Terrence Malick’s Badlands, we are constantly forced to confront the friction between the harsh, indifferent world depicted on screen and the narrator’s deluded, socialized justification (or deliberate ignorance) of it. My favorite moment comes near the end when Stefan and Lisa are reunited. She returns to his old apartment, knowing that doing so necessarily sacrifices her marriage. Once inside, though, she finally recognizes how unworthy Stefan has been of her devotion, unmasking him for the pathetic, juvenile rake that he is. And yet, as her voice-over speaks the final lines of the letter, we hear her once again profess her undying love for him. That disconnect between the truth of her brutal experience and the fantasy to which she escapes is just fascinating, and it lends the film the same bleak tenor that characterizes O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Actually, Lisa would fit in quite well with the fine folks at Harry’s: “The hell with the truth! It’s the lie of a pipedream that gives life.”

  • The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)

    The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)

    Dir. by Tran Anh Hung

    Images: Remarkably lush, sensuous images of natural world: palm fronds, ripened fruit, insects and frogs, rain. Instead of using traditional establishing shots, Tran often changes scenes by cutting to extreme close-ups that only become recognizable once the camera has pulled away. Another important visual motif is created by lateral tracking shots that follow characters from room to room, usually from a perspective outside of the building, peeking in through windows and open doorways.

    • • •

    When we first meet Mui (Lu Man San), she is ten years old and a recent transplant to Saigon, where she has come, alone, to support herself as a servant. She is welcomed into a home that seems incapable of escaping its own grief: the master’s mother is reconciled to a life of solitary prayer and mourning for a husband who died decades earlier; his photo is joined on the family shrine by that of the master’s daughter, who would have been Mui’s age had she survived a childhood disease. The master and his wife (Truong Thi Loc, in the film’s finest performance) are distant, both emotionally and physically, leading to his periodic escapes with the family’s money. For Mui, life settles quickly into a domestic routine, whose rites she inherits from Thi (Nguyen Anh Hoa), the family’s older servant.

    The heart of the film is Mui’s emotional development, a process mirrored by the film’s two-act structure. After the grandmother’s death, Tran cuts to a scene set within the same home a decade later. The father is now gone, one son is married, and Mui has grown into a beautiful young woman (now played by Tran Nu Yen-Khe), who remains confined to a life of servitude. When she is forced for financial reasons to leave the home, Mui is mourned by Truong, who behaves as if she were losing another daughter. It’s a touching scene: the mother hands to Mui the heirlooms that would have belonged to the young girl whom she has tragically replaced. The remainder of the film concerns Mui’s developing relationship with her new master, Khuyen (Vuong Hoa Hoi), a wealthy, young composer who spends his days at the piano.

    The Scent of Green Papaya is an impressive film, one most memorable for its remarkably sensuous imagery and elegant camera work. By deliberately slowing his pace, by cross-cutting images of the natural and civilized worlds, and by scoring the film largely with the sounds of nature, Tran immerses his viewers in a cinematic Walden, a space of near Transcendental harmony. Thoreau’s fascination with the battling ants outside of his window is even reenacted by a child in Mui’s home. There is something particularly beautiful in Mui’s graceful acceptance of her lot. Even as an adult, she finds a quiet joy in communion with nature, a joy we are allowed to share with her (if only artificially) in the very act of experiencing the film.

    Despite both my sincere fondness for it and my admiration for Tran’s skill, The Scent of Green Papaya strikes me as somewhat politically naïve (as does Walden, actually), particularly on two accounts. It is set in the early-1950s and 1960s, a period of French colonialism in Vietnam. Tran paints the era in nostalgic hues, though, seldom (if at all) questioning the destructive influence of Europe on native culture. Khuyen’s devotion and debt to Debussy, for instance, stands him in stark contrast to the father and brother who play traditional harmonies at the start of the film. That the father deserts his family while Khuyen acts as a Prince Charming to Mui’s Cinderella reflects a reductive privileging of Western practices.

    The same could be said of Tran’s ambivalent treatment of women, who, by in large, are relegated to domestic spheres. (I’m still trying to forgive him for burdening Mui with a caged pet, which was the most hackneyed of overt symbols even when Susan Glaspell used it in Trifles eighty years ago.) Tran undoubtedly cares deeply for the women — particularly for the mother, who evidences impressive strength throughout — but he seems deliberately unwilling to allow Mui a happy ending outside of maternal bliss. In the film’s most moving sequence, we hear the adult Mui’s voice for the first time as she reads to Khuyen. It’s a moment of potential self-realization, but one that, unfortunately, appears to go unrealized. The film soon ends, and we are prevented from hearing Mui express her own thoughts in her own words through her own voice. Instead, she remains barely distinguishable from the natural world that surrounds her: an object of sensuous beauty on which we project our desires. The film actually becomes more interesting to me if I imagine Mui in twenty years, her beauty faded, her husband gone, and her spirit empowered.

  • Bruno Dumont’s Bodies

    Bruno Dumont’s Bodies

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    “For the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures”
    — Flannery O’Connor

    In the “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman boldly proclaims the scope of his project: the forging of a distinctly American poetic tradition. For Whitman, the genius of America can be found in the “common people. Their manners speech dress friendships [sic] — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy . . . these too are unrhymed poetry” (712). His proclamation marked a radical departure from earlier forms and secured his position as the poet laureate of American romanticism. By elevating emotion over intellect and the wild and natural over the tamed, Whitman assaulted his readers, forcing them to abandon pretense and acknowledge their shared humanity and the moral responsibility that accompanies it.

    Echoes of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” can now be heard in the work of French filmmaker, Bruno Dumont, who turned from academia to the cinema out of a need to reconnect with people. Speaking of his first feature, La vie de Jésus (1997), Dumont contrasts his own approach to filmmaking with the ‘cerebral’ navel-gazing that he feels characterizes much of contemporary French cinema:

    What interests me is life, people, the small things. Cinema is for the body, for the emotions. It needs to be restored among the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of joy, emotion, suffering, sympathy in death. They don’t speak, speaking is not important. What’s important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. . . . The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost. (Walsh)

    Like the poet before him, Dumont has turned to the arts in a democratic spirit, celebrating the “common people” in all of their rich complexity. In La Vie de Jésus and its follow-up, L’Humanité (1999), Dumont has restored . . . well . . . humanity to the screen, and in doing so, has transcended the verite and dogme traditions. Instead of simply turning a hand-held camera on ‘real people’ living ‘real lives,’ a manipulative fiction now broadcast nightly on network television, he has, like Whitman, rediscovered the transcendent and the beautiful in the common, by giving us stunning and often shocking images of the body—here, a conflation of the body of flesh with the body politic—and by forcing us to respond truthfully and viscerally to them.

    The cumulative effect of these images on the viewer is, at times, unnerving. Dumont’s films slowly erode the ironic detachment and cynicism that we’ve built as defenses, forcing us to actually feel something. For Dumont, wrestling with the intellectual and political consequences of that emotional response remains an essential but always secondary step. It should come as little surprise that L’Humanité was met by a chorus of jeers at Cannes in 1999, while Sam Mendes’s American Beauty—a film that, in many ways, adopts a strangely similar humanist stance—won a Best Picture Oscar the following year. It appears the majority of audiences have surrendered the ability to recognize sincerity (or, perhaps it has atrophied), objecting loudly when asked to do so. Instead, audiences either opt for or are steered toward easy satire and emotional distance, not to mention Kevin Spacey-sized performances to truthful ones. Ricky Fitts claims in Mendes’s film that “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world that I feel like I can’t take it . . . and my heart is going to cave in,” but the scene ultimately has less impact than a plastic bag. It’s a disposable image, like so many of contemporary society’s manufactured emotions. Dumont refuses to let us off so easily.

    Central to Dumont’s project is his faith in the power of cinema to return us “to the body, to the heart, to truth.” That faith secures his position in the lineage of filmmakers whom he most admires: Rossellini, Bresson, Pasolini. I might also add to the list Tarkovsky, who, like Dumont, saw the cinematic image as a potential vehicle for the revelation of truth through the simultaneous experience of complex and contradictory emotions. (“I am large, I contain multitudes,” Whitman would laugh.) By privileging the audience’s instinctual, visceral responses, and by doing so within the assumed customs of contemporary European ‘art’ cinema (a questionable categorization, I realize), Dumont deliberately places his viewers in an exasperating position and dares them to find a way out: trained to ‘read’ the complex images of the art house with the intellectual rigor of something akin to New Criticism, they fall immediately into the trap of struggling to decode messages, unravel symbols, and impose order, often where little exists. Dumont, however, frustrates the viewer at every turn by lending those messages an impenetrable ambiguity. So instead, we are forced to confront the stunning complexity of emotions that his films wrestle from each of us: empathy/revulsion, desire/pain, longing/fear, awe/confusion, transcendence/alienation. For his films to touch our hearts and reveal truth, as he desires, they must first shake us free from our expectations by confronting our senses.

    That Dumont has succeeded in this, his first goal, is evidenced by the critical response to his work, which reads like a cinematic Rorschach test. The polarized voices that were heard most loudly at Cannes made their way into the pages of Sight and Sound by way of “L’Humanite: Rapture or Ridicule?” a point/counter-point article in which Mark Cousins calls the film “one of the best . . . of the last ten years,” and Jonathon Romney responds by denouncing it as “an unsubtle film and a coercive one.” In separate reviews, Richard Falcon finds the end of La vie de Jésus “almost unbearably and inexplicably moving”; Stuart Klowans calls L’Humanité “off-putting and yet so immediate.”

    Dumont elicits these varied responses through a film style that combines the naturalistic, nonprofessional performances of social-realism with austere, Kubrick-like camerawork. As Tony Rayns remarks in his review of L’Humanité, and as most viewers have likely noticed, Dumont’s second feature is a “virtual remake” of its predecessor. Both are set in Bailleul, the small town in northern France where Dumont was raised and where he continues to reside. Both are concerned with the lives of the working class. And both display Dumont’s trademark cinematographic blend of lush widescreen landscapes, glossy-eyed close-ups, and clinically objective (and graphic) stagings of sex. [Brief plot synopses follow.]

    La vie de Jésus concerns the tragic fate of Freddy (David Douche), an unemployed twenty-something who spends his days collecting welfare checks and aimlessly riding his motorbike alone or with a gang of friends through town and the surrounding countryside. He lives there with his mother (Geneviève Cottreel), who is as disillusioned and as distant as he. Their first interaction, minutes into the film, is typical of their relationship: with Freddy standing before her, she stares past him at television coverage of an epidemic in Africa. “What a shame,” she sighs, responding to the visual messages on TV while ignoring those on her son’s face. Freddy’s only relief from the oppressive boredom comes from his participation in a marching band, his meticulous care for a pet finch, and his carnal relationship with Marie (Marjorie Cottreel), a young girl who works as a grocery cashier and who lives on Freddy’s otherwise vacant street. When Marie welcomes the attention of Kader, an Arab boy, Freddy retaliates violently, kicking him to death on the street.

    Like Freddy, the protagonist of L’Humanité lives alone with his mother in a working class section of Bailleul. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is a police superintendent, called to investigate the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. We learn little about Pharaon’s past, other than that he has “lost” his woman and child and that he seems to suffer from a heightened sensitivity to others’ emotional pain. He apparently has only one friend, a neighbor named Domino (Séverine Caneele), who tolerates Pharaon’s idiosyncrasies, but who prefers the company of her bus driver boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier). Pharaon accompanies them to dinner and on a trip to the sea. He rides his bicycle, tends his garden, and improvises on his electric keyboard. Occasionally, he also devotes some energy to his investigation, and, by the end of the film, the case appears to be solved.

    When reduced to simple plotlines, both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité sound like standard fare: one a social drama concerning disillusioned youth, the other a classic police procedural. They diverge most radically from the norm, though, in their treatment of their ‘heroes’, a label I feel comfortable applying to Freddy and Pharaon only because Dumont clearly sees them as such. They are heroes born of the same stock as Hemingway’s, Eliot’s, and Antonioni’s: characters desperate to discover communion, beauty, and purpose in an alienating and amoral world. Dumont reminds us constantly of their brutal plight by lingering on shots of their bodies, which appear broken and almost grotesquely malformed. Freddy’s body is scarred by frequent falls from his motorbike and is ravaged by epileptic seizures. He is like a younger version of Pharaon, whose sunken chest, stooped shoulders, and hollow eyes lend him the appearance of a man twice his age.

    Dumont’s characters are, in fact, ‘embodied’ by their physiognomies. The director spent ten months casting L’Humanité, then recreated his original ‘prototype’ characters based on the performers’ specific appearance and mannerisms. “I directed them based on what came from within them,” he has said. “I observed their body language and composed my shots around it” (Erickson). One recurring motif in both films is a medium close-up that positions the actor horizontally within the Scope frame, usually in a side view from the chest up. The shots typically last ten to fifteen seconds with little movement and only diegetic sound. For instance, near the end of La vie de Jésus, when he is notified by a police inspector that Kader has died during the night, Freddy sits hunched over in a chair, glancing up slowly to acknowledge the news. As in much of the second half of the film, Freddy is shirtless. The pronounced scratches on his shoulders and arms and the positioning of his body lend him the appearance of one being flogged. A similar image occurs in L’Humanité, when Pharaon leans over to work the soil in his garden.

    Dumont’s broken heroes personify his idealized vision of “the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of . . . emotion.” Both Freddy and Pharaon are, on several occasions, overwhelmed by swells of inarticulate rage. Twice, Freddy lashes out by silently kicking a brick wall. In both instances, Dumont frames him in a long shot, suggesting that these outbursts are as much a part of his routine existence as are his moped rides and band practices. Likewise, the most powerful moment in L’Humanité comes when, while investigating the crime scene, Pharaon lets loose a long, wild scream that is eventually drowned out by the noise of a passing train. A “barbaric yawp,” indeed.

    As most critics have pointed out, L’Humanité is, on the surface, a police procedural that isn’t terribly concerned with the resolution of its mystery. By traditional standards, Pharaon is an incompetent detective, but it is, in fact, those very standards that Dumont is interrogating. The movie detective is an archetypal Western hero: stoic, logical, and doggedly determined. Pharaon, instead, is a man who, perhaps for the first time in his life, is overwhelmed by an empathy for others of which, Dumont suggests, very few of us are still capable. He longs desperately to connect with humanity—to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it, kiss it—but is frustrated at every turn. Even Domino, who wants, at least on some level, to comfort him, is able to offer only her body. Dumont reinforces Pharaon’s longing for connection by again lingering on shots of the body, but now from Pharaon’s subjective point of view: his boss’s sweat-soaked neck, his mother’s hand as she peels potatoes, Domino’s and Joseph’s bodies in the throes of sex, his own hand as he pets a nursing sow.

    This desperate pursuit of human connection is universal in Dumont’s world. Even Joseph and Domino, whose relationship is obviously driven by sex, are drawn together by some instinctive, biological need. Dumont does not censure this primal urge, though. In fact, again like Whitman, his controversial treatment of sex—including a penetration shot in La vie de Jésus —tears down the socio-religious barriers that often prevent us from acknowledging the base desires (words suddenly stripped of their negative connotations) that fuel so much of our behavior. Dumont does suggest, however, that a higher order of connection is attainable, but not without difficulty and sacrifice. In an outdoor cafe scene, we watch as Domino attempts to reach Joseph. She sits silently for several seconds before finally whispering, “I love you.” He’s able to respond only by stroking her hand, then Dumont cuts quickly to a shot of them having sex. A similar moment occurs in La vie de Jésus, when Freddy and Marie float over the countryside on a sightseeing chairlift. “Do you love me, Fred?” she asks. “Sure, I love you. Forever.” They kiss, but both appear more at ease in their embrace than in conversation. When they talk, they sit as far removed from one another as their chair will allow.

    The scene on the chairlift is notable because it exemplifies Dumont’s cinematographic style. Seeing his films for the first time, one is left a bit shaken by the graphic sexuality, by the brutality of the violence, and by the absurdity of his heroes. This, again, is the first goal of his project: to elicit a truthful emotional response from the viewer, even if that response is revulsion. But there’s also a formal beauty in Dumont’s films, a beauty that becomes more pronounced with subsequent viewings. During Freddy and Marie’s chairlift ride, Dumont cuts frequently to their subjective points of view. We see, from their perspective high above the ground, another of Dumont’s trademark images: an extreme long shot of the landscape, the widescreen frame divided by land and sky. The motif recurs with considerable frequency in both films, perhaps most notably in the opening of L’Humanité, a static shot that lasts nearly a minute as we watch Pharaon, dwarfed by the immense landscape, run from one side of the frame to the other.

    Dumont’s attention to landscapes, specifically, and to the natural world, in general, again harkens to Tarkovsky, who saw humanity’s increasing alienation from nature as symptomatic of its tragic loss of divine faith. Dumont has denied any personal belief in the existence of God, but has admitted to a fascination with the human history of Christ, evidenced most clearly in the title of his first film. In both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, Dumont’s camera acts as a mystical agent, offering the audience a glimpse of the transcendent that remains just beyond the reach of his characters. My favorite moment in these films comes just after one of Freddy’s epileptic seizures. He is with his friends, standing beside a road outside of town, when his body seizes, jerking him to the ground. The camera begins near eye level in a medium shot, but then cranes up slowly, rocking slightly from side to side as it climbs, floating over the boys until finally settling on another landscape. It’s a moment of breath-taking beauty that unites Dumont’s preoccupations with the body, the heart, and truth.

    A similar mystical effect is created by Dumont’s frequent subjective shots of the sky, which seem to embody, visually and emotionally, his characters’ search for meaning, a search that is then transferred to the viewer. The first of such shots occurs early in L’Humanité: upon hearing of the rape and murder of the young girl, Domino turns her gaze to the sky, as if searching for some explanation for the abominable act. Thirty minutes later, Dumont echoes that scene, when Joseph and Pharaon stand together, staring out at the sea. Hearing a voice, they both look back and to the sky, where they see Domino looking down at them from atop an old fort. By placing Domino in the position that we might assume to be filled by God (or fate or any number of mystical guiding principles), Dumont lends the image an ambiguity that refuses simplistic resolution.

    The same could be said of a scene near the end of La vie de Jésus, when Marie and Kader seek privacy in a section of a park that “smells like piss.” Finally alone, Marie embraces Kader and asks for his forgiveness. He looks upward, then, after a cut on an eye-line match, we see the sky as if through his eyes. It’s a beautifully complex sequence, one obviously rife with New Testament allusion. Much of the scene’s power is generated by a lovely close-up of Marie’s face pressed against Kader’s shoulder, a shot to which Dumont returns throughout L’Humanité in Pharaon’s many strange embraces. That beauty, and the potential connection that it seems to suggest, is tempered, though, by the aura of inevitable violence that surrounds the couple. The embrace is a desperate gesture for Marie, and one that, even after repeated viewings, I can only explain by acknowledging the powerful desperation I experience sympathetically each time I watch it.

    In “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” Flannery O’Connor defends her preoccupation with grotesque characters and absurd situations by claiming, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures” (806). A devout Catholic, O’Connor wanted to awaken her readers from the apathy and intellectual arrogance that blinded them to God’s presence in their lives, to force them to experience what Herman Melville called the “shock of recognition.” In both La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, Bruno Dumont confronts his viewers from a similar tack. The final skyward glance in La vie de Jésus is Freddy’s. After escaping from the police station and once again wrecking his motorbike, he lies rigid on his back, hidden by tall grass. Dumont’s camera stares down at him as the scene begins to darken, leading us to expect another fade to black. Instead, he cuts to Freddy’s view of clouds drifting across the sun. What follows are two images that return us once again to the body: first, a close-up of an ant walking across his skin (a similar shot occurs in L’Humanité); then, a shot of his hands, dirty and broken beyond their years. As with the notorious final sequence of L’Humanité —Pharaon sits alone, inexplicably handcuffed, after Joseph has been accused of the murder—Dumont leaves Freddy’s fate unresolved. And we are left to wrestle with the consequences. I can’t rationally explain Pharaon’s behavior, nor Freddy’s. Dumont’s world, like O’Connor’s, is recognizable but distorted, heightened, surreal, which might also describe the way I feel when the credits roll: overwhelmed by the experience, but strangely alive to the possibility of something more.

    Works Cited

    Cousins, Mark, and Jonathon Romney. “L’Humanite: Rapture or Ridicule?” Sight and Sound 10.9 (2000): 22-25.

    Erickson, Steve. “Oh, the Humanité!” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. Time Out New York June 2000. (7 Mar. 2002).

    Falcon, Richard. “La Vie de Jesus/The Life of Jesus.” Rev. of La Vie de Jesus, by Bruno Dumont. Sight and Sound 8.9 (1998): 55.

    Klawans, Stuart. “Columbo This Isn’t.” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. The Nation. 10 July 2000. (7 Mar. 2002).

    O’Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” Flannery O’Connor: Selected Works. Ed. by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998. 801-06.

    Rayns, Tony. “L’Humanite.” Rev. of L’Humanite, by Bruno Dumont. Sight and Sound 10.10 (2000): 46-47.

    Walsh, David. “Interview with Bruno Dumont, Director of The Life of Jesus.” 20 Oct. 1997. (7 Mar. 2002).

    Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Norton, 1973.

  • Benito Cereno (1855)

    Benito Cereno (1855)

    By Herman Melville

    Note: The following was written for a graduate seminar on the American Renaissance. It is an attempt to apply theories of cinema narrative to prose fiction.

    “That First Comprehensive Glance”: The Cinematic Suspense of Benito Cereno

    But that first comprehensive glance . . . rested but an instant upon them.
    — from Benito Cereno

    Once the body had been rendered immobile and attention had become focused upon the face or gaze, the law, desire and perversion made their way into the cinema.
    — Pascal Bonitzer (18)

    Abstract

    With the impressive body of literary scholarship generated by Formalist analysis and modern narratological studies at our disposal, the idea of applying film narrative theory to literature — particularly to a story like “Benito Cereno,” written forty years before Thomas Edison first screened moving pictures for an American audience — might seem unfounded at best. The influence of the cinema on artists of the twentieth century has been obvious and well-documented, but, as Mike Frank has recently asked, “What might narratology look like if we were to take cinema — particularly ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ — as the paradigmatic instance of storytelling?” [1] In the strange, and often contentious, case of “Benito Cereno,” film theory offers, I will argue, the ideal framework and vocabulary for explaining exactly how Melville’s narrative functions. Mine is only the latest in the long line of such inquiries, but it will reveal that — as has often been the case for readers trapped in “Benito Cereno”‘s world — previous scholars, hoping for answers, have been forced to look in the wrong direction.

    Survey of Scholarship

    In September 1856, a reviewer for Knickerbocker described “Benito Cereno” as “painfully interesting,” concluding: “in reading it we became nervously anxious for the solution of the mystery it involves.” This sentiment is echoed by many of Melville’s contemporary reviewers, who frequently characterize The Piazza Tales as an enjoyable read and as a welcomed return to form after the “unfortunate” and “morbid” appearance of Pierre. [2] The appeal of “Benito Cereno” can be attributed largely to its much-discussed narrative structure, one that implicates the reader in its mysteries, forcing a suspense-filled and continuous process of mis- and re-interpretation. The form of “Benito Cereno” is, in fact, uniquely and inextricably bound to its content. In a story about ambiguously shifting perceptions, the manner by which we view the action is as significant as the action itself. Critics, both formalists and nonformalists alike, have been universally intrigued by Melville’s precise manipulation of point of view, an interest piqued, no doubt, by the obvious fallibility of its “center of perception,” Amaso Delano, and by the text’s unusual moments of objective narration (Seelye 104). While much of “Benito Cereno” is viewed only as it is reflected through the unreliable and subjective gaze of the American captain, an objective narrator does occasionally intrude upon the narrative, revealing its self-reflexive frame: we are told that the text we are reading is, in fact, some unknown third party’s written narrative and that the events depicted within have been confused by memory, told “retrospectively,” and “irregularly given” (255). That “Benito Cereno” ends with an elided legal transcript — which ostensibly, at least, is intended to reveal the “whole truth” — has been of little comfort to those attempting to systematize Melville’s narrative strategy.

    Melville challenges astute readers of “Benito Cereno” to question the reliability of its sources from the opening paragraphs. In what is perhaps the story’s most often-cited passage, Captain Delano is described as:

    a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine. (162)

    In the century and a half that have passed since the original publication of “Benito Cereno,” “the wise” have consistently judged Delano’s quickness and perception to be far less than ordinary. While some consensus has been reached concerning Delano’s role in Melville’s narrative structure — he is generally described as an “unreliable narrator” whose misperceptions drip with irony — critics have struggled to develop a vocabulary capable of explaining exactly how Delano’s point of view interacts with other narrative voices in the story.

    In one of the earliest formalist readings of “Benito Cereno,” “The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville” (1953), Charles Hoffman accounts for only two of the story’s narrative voices: Delano’s subjective point of view and the objective trial deposition that follows. Hoffman praises the former in Aristotelian terms, claiming, “for dramatic intensity, concentrated action, and structural unity, no better choice could have been made” (426). Delano serves, for Hoffman, as the reader’s surrogate, the “innocent eye” who must make sense of the ambiguous impressions made upon him. This reading echoes through much of the scholarship that has followed. [3]Interestingly, Hoffman describes Delano as “brave and resourceful,” a misinterpretation symptomatic of a highly problematic article. Along with his failure to mention the story’s other narrative voice(s) in any terms, Hoffman skims too quickly over the deposition, calling it a simple rehash of the actual Delano’s original document, an attempt to “gain in verisimilitude,” and an aesthetic failure. “Melville,” he writes, “did not choose or else did not know how to make use of Delano’s point of view as an observer to reveal enough of the mystery so that he might dispense with the cumbersome method of the document” (428).

    Guy Cardwell rejects Hoffman’s overly-simplified reading, claiming that “Benito Cereno” is, ultimately, morally ambiguous, and that the complexity of Melville’s narrative is central to that ambiguity. In “Melville’s Gray Story” (1959), Cardwell criticizes those who have reduced “Benito Cereno” to the level of simple detective story, as if it were “a kind of television melodrama that divides its characters into unequivocally good guys and bad guys” (165). Instead, he sees the world of “Benito Cereno” as one where “optimism and despair are mixed in normal proportions” (164). Cardwell claims that Melville helps us toward this interpretation by “going behind” his characters on two (and only two) specific occasions: the first in the oft-cited description of Delano quoted above; the second just prior to the shaving scene, when Cereno’s assumed affection for Babo is compared to that of Johnson and Byron for their servants. While strangely focused on only two scenes, Cardwell’s discussion is the first to seriously consider a third narrative voice in the story. The consequence, he argues, is the temporary transport of the reader outside of the story, a jarring moment that forces the reader through irony to confront the moral implications of the events he or she is witnessing. “Captain Delano, then,” Cardwell writes, “is not simply the obtuse observer, a detective-story character who watches the plot unfold. He is in a serious sense the perceiving center, . . . With Delano as our guide we see that the world is not neatly dichotomized, does not fall neatly into a simple Manichean dualism” (164). For Cardwell, the deposition serves a similar purpose, pulling us out of a suspense-filled mystery and grounding us in the “real world,” where slavery, xenophobia, and economics are moral issues too complex to be described in black and white terms.

    Cardwell’s differentiation between Delano, as the “perceiving center,” and a separate narrative voice that is able to “go behind” characters is further developed by John Douglas Seelye in Melville: The Ironic Diagram (1970). Echoing earlier scholars, Seelye calls Delano “well-meaning but obtuse,” but then shifts his focus to the narrative voice who is actually directing our reading (104) [4]. “As in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’” Seelye writes:

    the center of perception is inadequate, a seafaring version of the lawyer, but here detached from point of view by a delicate operation that allows a third “person” to interpose his wry perspective, shaping Delano’s simple optimism into a vehicle of facetiousness. We see things through the American’s eyes, but as through spectacles whose rose tints seem somehow discomforting. (104)

    By attributing human characteristics to this “third person” — he is “wry” and able to “shape” our understanding of events — Seelye raises an important question: if the “third person” is deliberately manipulating our perception, then what is his motivation for doing so? [5]

    In Melville’s Short Fiction: 1853-1856 (1977), William B. Dillingham ascribes similar agency to Seelye’s “third person.” Dillingham intends to correct the “common misconception” that “Benito Cereno” is told from only two narrative perspectives, and does so by identifying four distinct voices, which he labels the official, the individual, the authorial, and the reportorial (243). The “official” voice is that of the deposition section, which serves as the “legal stamp” that officially settles the affair. However, like Cardwell, Dillingham identifies Melville’s rhetorical use of irony here, claiming that he “transforms the deposition [into] . . . a commentary on the vanity and foolishness of ordinary mankind who cannot see or will not see the sameness of all”(244). The “individual” voice is Delano’s, distinguished from the others by its literalness and by its simplistic figures of speech. According to Dillingham, because Delano is blunt-thinking and incapable of irony, his perception is likewise limited, provoking juvenile similes like his description of the negresses as “unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves” (198). Dillingham’s is a subtle, but important, distinction, as it necessarily attributes all of “Benito Cereno”‘s complex metaphoric language to the “authorial” voice. “Its style,” Dillingham writes, “is a metaphor for its message. . . . Melville depicts what Delano sees, but the terms of that depiction, that is, the figures of speech that make the correspondences necessary for the idea of similitude, are usually not Delano’s” (244-45). Instead, the story’s trademark irony — which deliberately targets Delano and, therefore, could not represent his own point of view — is clearly “authorial.” Finally, Dillingham identifies a fourth narrative voice, the “reportorial,” which is distinguished from the “authorial” by its neutral tone and informational function. Dillingham cites the story’s opening paragraph as an example of the “reportorial” voice: “It embodies no worldview or any character’s viewpoint. It furnishes facts and is nonevaluative” (243). Dillingham’s struggle to find (or, in fact, to create) a vocabulary for explaining Melville’s narrative strategy is obviously by no means unique. It is also far from effective, leading him to unnecessarily divide one voice — the narrator’s — into two, the “authorial” and “reportorial.”

    A New Vocabulary

    In my summary of existing scholarship I have intentionally remained faithful to the original authors’ language, a decision that has left this paper littered with sixteen different terms all used to describe the same thing. [6] I would like now to propose a terminology that will hopefully provide both a much-needed clarity and consistency and a better-suited entrance into film narrative theory. In forming this vocabulary I have relied heavily upon Seymour Chatman’s Coming to Terms, a book that builds upon Wayne Booth’s and David Bordwell’s work by examining side-by-side the rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film.

    Chatman would simply use the term narrator to describe Cardwell’s “voice that goes behind,” Seelye’s “third person,” and Dillingham’s “authorial” and “reportorial” voices. For Chatman, the most important distinction is between those within and those outside of the story world, those able to see the action and those able only to narrate it. “The narrator’s task,” Chatman writes, “is not to go strolling with the characters but to narrate what happens to them, whether by telling or showing” (120). Therefore, the narrator of “Benito Cereno” is that unidentified person who has constructed the tale from outside of the story world, who comments ironically on Delano’s “undistrustful good nature,” and who admittedly elides the deposition.

    Because of his distinction between the characters within the story world and the narrator who “tells” or “shows” them, Chatman finds fault with the overused term “point of view.” The very term implies seeing, an act from which the narrator is necessarily excluded because of his/her/its location outside of the story. Instead, Chatman proposes a terminological distinction between the narrator’s and a character’s “points of view.” Slant, for Chatman, captures the “psychological, sociological, and ideological ramifications of the narrator’s attitudes, which may range from neutral to highly charged” (143). Much recent study of “Benito Cereno,” then, has been concerned with uncovering those ramifications as they are revealed by the narrator’s slant. Why, for instance, does the narrator elide the deposition, thereby further silencing Babo? To describe a character’s “point of view,” Chatman settles on filter, a term that captures:

    something of the mediating function of a character’s consciousness-perception, cognition, emotion, reverie-as events are experienced from a space within the story world. . . . [Slant] catches the nuance of the choice made by the implied author about which among the character’s imaginable experiences would best enhance the narration-which areas of the story world the implied author wants to illuminate and which to keep obscure. (144)

    Filter seems a particularly appropriate term for describing Delano’s role in the narrative, as much of the story’s action is “filtered” through the lens of his gaze for obvious dramatic and ironic effect. This metaphor will be examined more closely in the final section of the paper.

    Finally, Chatman makes a useful distinction between the unreliable narrator — a term that for decades has been used interchangeably to describe the problematic “points of view” of both the narrator and characters — and the fallible filter, Chatman’s own term for “a character’s perceptions and conceptions of the story events, the traits of the other characters, and so on.” Unreliable narrator, then, is used only to describe those instances when the narration itself is problematic, “since the word presupposes that there somewhere exists a ‘reliable’ account” (149). Whereas fallible filter describes a character’s “inaccurate, misled, or self-serving perception” (150). For Chatman, “fallible” is a term preferable to “unreliable” because it attributes less culpability to the characters. Captain Delano, after all, does not ask to be a “perceiving center.” He is merely living the story, not representing it.

    Film Narrative and Cinematic Suspense

    The distinctions made above, though subtle, are absolutely vital for explaining the workings of “Benito Cereno,” a story that relies not only on a famously fallible filter, but also on a deceptively unreliable narrator. Simply fixing a single terminology and doing nothing more, however, does little but provide some much-needed clarity and consistency to the discussion (or add more unnecessary jargon to the pile, depending on your opinion). The real value of Chatman’s work (and hopefully, by association, this paper) can be found, instead, in its analysis of the interrelations that exist between fiction and film narrative. In the case of “Benito Cereno,” it is Chatman’s discussion of the latter that, in fact, best explains Melville’s strategy.

    In the early chapters of Coming to Terms, Chatman differentiates between Narrative, Argument, and Description, examining closely how each interacts with the other. To Chatman, Description is the most interesting of the “other text-types” because of the complexity of its relation to Narrative. As Gérard Genette writes, “description might be conceived independently of narration, but in fact it is never found in a so to speak free state. . . . Description is quite naturally ancilla narrationis, the ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never-emancipated slave” (qtd. in Chatman 18). In classical Hollywood cinema, Description and Narrative interact in a different, though no less complex manner. [7] To aid in the discussion, Chatman differentiates between explicit and tacit Description, and offers a scene from Touch of Evil as an example. Detective Quinlan’s first appearance has been described in the published cutting continuity as:

    Very low angle M[edium]S[hot] of Quinlan slowly thrusting open the car door: a grossly corpulent figure in an overcoat, a huge cigar in the middle of his puffy face. (qtd. in Chatman 43)

    Here, in this prose description, the compound adjective “grossly corpulent” explicitly describes Quinlan, fixing a particular trait on him. As readers, we are left with little choice but to imagine him as explicitly “corpulent,” as opposed to “obese,” “heavy,” or only “slightly overweight.” In Touch of Evil, however, Quinlan is described tacitly: we see him thrust open the car door, but our focus is directed toward his actions, rather than his appearance. As Chatman writes, “The film shows only features; it is up to the audience to interpret them — that is, to assign them adjectival names” (43). To Chatman, the cinematic description could only be called explicit if Welles then cut to an extreme close-up of the folds of fat in Quinlan’s face. Even then, though, each viewer would still decide on his or her own if Quinlan were “grossly corpulent” or merely stout. The result, then, is an unavoidable ambiguity in cinematic Description. “Only words,” Chatman writes, “can fix descriptions conclusively” (44).

    That last statement, however, is repeatedly called into question by “Benito Cereno,” a story that consistently frustrates readers by its absolute refusal — excepting a few notable instances — to fix descriptions conclusively. Seelye was one of the first, for instance, to notice how precisely Melville uses diction to obscure description, pointing to the 115 conjectural expressions — ambivalent uses of words like seem, appear, perhaps, possibly, evidently, might, presume, conjecture, imputed, and thought — that appear in the story’s 97 pages. [8] “These phrases, instruments of style,” writes Seelye, “reflect the lamination of false appearances and unanswerable paradoxes that confound perception and inquiry, a fiction in which things are never as the ‘seem’” (105). A similar observation is made by Nancy Roundy in “Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’” Roundy notes how the world of “Benito Cereno” becomes blurred by the story’s abundant use of metaphoric language. “A metaphor does not assert that something is,” she writes, “but only that it is like some other thing. Sharp boundaries, certainties, disappear and we are in a world of appearances” (347).

    Another method used by Melville to avoid fixing descriptions conclusively is the double negative, a sentence construction that describes what something is not, thereby forcing the reader to assign his or her own unique adjectival name to that thing that is being described. Examples of this practice occur with astounding regularity throughout the first two-thirds of the story, most notably in the narrator’s description of Delano’s “undistrustful good nature, [he was] not liable . . . to indulge in personal alarms.” But a particularly impressive display of double negatives describes (or, does not describe) Delano’s first impressions of Benito Cereno and Babo:

    But the good conduct of Babo, hardly more than the ill-behaviour of others, seemed to withdraw the half-lunatic Don Benito from his cloudy languor. Not that such precisely was the impression made by the Spaniard on the mind of his visitor. The Spaniard’s individual unrest was, for the present, but noted as a conspicuous feature in the ship’s general affliction. Still, Captain Delano was not a little concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito’s unfriendly indifference toward himself. The Spaniard’s manner, too, conveyed a sort of sour and gloomy disdain, which he seemed at no pains to disguise [my italics]. (169-70)

    That second sentence, in particular, deliberately resists fixing an explicit description on the scene, showing us only the precise impression that was not made on our filter. From the opening of “Benito Cereno” until the point when the scales drop from Delano’s eyes, the word “not” is used more than 170 times. In nearly half of those instances, it is used in a double-negative construction, such as, “not unlike,” “not unwilling,” or “not uncharacteristic.” [9]

    The cumulative effect of Melville”s diction is, as Roundy says, the creation of a “world of appearances.” But it’s a world where even appearance is blurred, a world almost completely devoid of explicit description. Chatman’s discussion of film description again offers an appropriate analogy: as with the diction of “Benito Cereno,” “Film gives us plenitude without specificity. Its descriptive offerings are at once visually rich and verbally impoverished” (39). Like film viewers forced to ascribe particular adjectival descriptions to Detective Quinlan, readers of “Benito Cereno” must actively create its story world with only confounding images as cues.

    But “Benito Cereno” is not completely free of explicit description. Several scholars have pointed to the story’s opening paragraphs as the work of an omniscient narrator who grounds the reader in a world of fact. [10] The narrator returns occasionally to this non-evaluative, non-ironic tone, notably in his description of the cuddy in the opening paragraphs of the shaving scene, and in those moments when we are shown things — such as the two black men who stare intently at Delano — that are “unperceived by the American” (224). There are countless examples of an equivalent narrative voice in film. The opening establishing shots of several Hitchcock films — Rear Window and Psycho, in particular — are frequently cited by narratologists, including Chatman. Rear Window, for instance, opens with a shot of window blinds being raised, followed by several complex extreme long shots, as the camera moves through the window and “randomly” examines the daily activities of the neighborhood. As Chatman notes, were the film to continue in this manner, it might be mistaken for a documentary on city life (46). We as viewers accept this nonhuman agent, this camera, and trust it in much the same way that we trust the narrator of “Benito Cereno.” Just as we believe that Rear Window begins on a hot (94 degrees according to a close-up of a thermometer) morning (we see the composer shaving, the childless couple waking to the sound of an alarm clock), we trust that “Benito Cereno” begins in 1799 and that Delano is from Duxbury, Massachusetts.

    But while many have examined the slant of “Benito Cereno”‘s narrator, few have questioned his reliability much beyond brief mentions of his “retrospective” and “irregularly given” narrating of the story. However, in one passage that has been conspicuously overlooked by previous scholars, the narrator, making manipulative use of his established credibility, deliberately deceives us. In the opening pages of “Benito Cereno,” Delano stands with Cereno and Babo, listening to the Spanish captain tell of his harrowing voyage. Overcome by coughing fits, Cereno has difficulty recounting his tale. Finally, the narrator steps in: “as this portion of the story was very brokenly delivered, the substance only will here be set down” (174). What follows is a long (321 words) paragraph written in the objective, nonironic style of the story’s opening paragraphs. While the passage is clearly marked as Cereno’s telling, the effect of the shift in diction and tone is unmistakable. Already immersed in a world of shifting visions and “modified” appearances, readers cling for stability to the explicit descriptions of the trusted narrator.

    At the time of the publication of Coming to Terms, Chatman had only one famous example with which to illustrate unreliable narration in film. [11] It serves, however, as a helpful analogy to the deceptive shift of tone in “Benito Cereno.” Stage Fright (1950) is another of Hitchcock’s experiments with suspense and cinematic narrative, a film in which the supposedly objective camera serves complicity in the crime. Stage Fright opens as Johnny and Eve speed to Eve’s father’s house. Johnny is telling Eve of his discovery of a murder committed by his lover, Charlotte. “I had to help her,” Johnny says. “Anybody would.” As he begins narrating his story to Eve, the frame dissolves into a “lying flashback,” in which we are shown Johnny’s version of what “really” happened. It is only later, when we learn of his criminal tendencies, that we begin to doubt Johnny’s story. What makes Stage Fright unique is that for the first half of the film, we are given absolutely no reason to question the validity of what the narrator is showing us. As film-goers, we have learned to accept the camera’s rendering of the world as truth, as if it were a binding contract. However, as in “Benito Cereno,” the narrator of Stage Fright has deliberately broken that contract, manipulating our trust for dramatic effect. Again, Chatman’s insights into film are suitably applicable to “Benito Cereno”: when the story’s narrator takes over from Cereno in the telling of his tale, “seeing is precisely not believing” (131).

    In “Benito Cereno,” however, it is not only the narrator who misleads us, a fact that has hardly gone unnoticed. Delano’s fallibility as a filter, as I’ve already shown, is the focus of many of the early analyses of the story. But the existing literature does little more than name Delano’s “unreliability” as such. It is in explaining Melville’s use of perceptual subjectivity that film theory offers its most useful insight into “Benito Cereno.” For while the filter in film still emerges from the perceptual consciousness of a character (as in prose), it does so using different methods, most notably the eyeline match and close-up. Rear Window again serves as a classic (and well-worn) example. After surveying the courtyard outside of the window, the camera then tracks back, revealing the film’s protagonist, Jimmy Stewart’s L. B. Jeffries. He is, we assume, asleep: he is lying, with eyes closed, in a wheelchair, one leg elevated in a hard cast. Hitchcock then elides time by fading-in to a medium shot of Jeffries, who is now sitting up and reaching to answer a telephone. As he speaks to a friend, Jeffries lifts his gaze from the phone to something out of frame, presumably to something behind the camera. Hitchcock then cuts, in an eyeline match, to the familiar long shot of the courtyard. [12] Now, however, it is Jeffries’s view of his neighbors that we see. Now, it is Jeffries who is watching Miss Torso stretch and the sun-bathers disrobe, not the objective narrator.

    The impact of the eyeline match has been of interest to filmmakers and film theorists since D. W. Griffith first began to experiment with the use of close-ups in his early shorts. Soviet filmmakers of the late-1910s pushed the technique even further in their explorations of the emotional impact of montage. Hitchcock, in an interview with Francois Truffaut, described the most famous of the Soviet experiments— that conducted by Kuleshov — and its impact on his own filmmaking:

    You see a close-up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is followed immediately by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now, when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.

    In the same way, let’s take a close-up of Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that’s being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But in the place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he’s seen as a dirty old man! (215-16)

    This concept, long accepted in film theory, seems equally applicable to fiction, assuming that the text resists fixing conclusive descriptions. The above example would obviously fail if it were transcribed as, “Stewart looks at the half-naked girl with complete indifference.” But “Benito Cereno,” as I’ve already shown, does resist explicit description, and operates in a manner remarkably similar to a classical Hollywood suspense film. In “Hitchcockian Suspense,” Pascal Bonitzer writes, “The weight of death, murder and crime have meaning only though the proximity of a gaze. All Hitchcock has done in his films is to make the best possible use, where staging is concerned, of the function of the gaze laid bare by crime” (18). Just as Hitchcock filters our experience of Rear Window through Jeffries’s neutral gaze, so does Melville through Delano’s in “Benito Cereno.”

    Again, the opening pages of the story are a fitting example. After the narrator establishes several facts in the first three paragraphs, the narration shifts to Delano’s filter with the first sentence of the fourth paragraph: “To Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors [my italics]” (161). While the similarities between Delano’s “glass” and Jeffries’s binoculars and telephoto lens are interesting to mention in passing, the significance of the sentence lies in the verb, viewed. Melville’s method for establishing and maintaining his filter is atypical. He does not simply change the tone or syntax of the narration as Joyce does in Dubliners, nor does he create a stream-of-consciousness like Woolf or Faulkner. Instead, he quite cinematically “cuts” between close-ups of Delano’s frustratingly neutral face and the mysterious images that bombard him.

    There is an almost limitless supply of examples with which to illustrate this point. Upon first seeing Cereno’s ship: “Captain Delano continued to watch her — a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, . . . It might have been but a deception of the vapors, but, the longer the stranger was watched the more singular appeared her manoeuvres [sic]” (162). Later, after being startled by something moving in the chains: “He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard” (200). Then, when he has become convinced of Cereno’s guilt: “Captain Delano glanced towards Don Benito. As he saw his meagre [sic] form in the act of recovering itself from reclining in the servant’s arms, . . . he could not but marvel at the panic by which himself had been surprised” (207).

    It is in the shaving scene, though, that Melville’s cinematic narrative is best illustrated. The cuddy is first glimpsed through the nonironic, nonevaluative lens of the narrator. The diction is simple and relatively free from metaphoric language. “The floor of the cuddy was matted,” the narrator informs us. “Overhead, four or five old muskets were stuck into horizontal holes along the beams. On one side was a claw-footed old table lashed to the deck” (211). The description here is explicit: there are no conjectural expressions; seems and appears are replaced with was and were. The narrator simply shows us the room, “randomly” describing the setting like Hitchcock’s camera randomly describes a New York neighborhood.

    In the first four paragraphs of the shaving scene, only once does the narrator’s tone shift. Two settees are described as “black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors’ racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber’s crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment” (211). This isolated sentence draws our attention both by the menacing nature of the similes employed and by the return of conjectural verbs. Again, this shift can be explained in cinematic terms. Bonitzer borrows Gilles Deleuze’s term stain to describe the inexplicable element which creates disorder in an otherwise orderly, natural world. “Hitchcockian narrative,” Bonitzer writes:

    obeys the law that the more a situation is somewhat a priori, familiar, or conventional, the more it is liable to become disturbing or uncanny, once one of its constituent elements begins to “turn against the wind”. . . . The staging and editing of the suspense serve to draw the audience’s attention to the perverse element. The film’s movement invariably proceeds from landscape to stain, from overall shot to close-up, and this movement invariably prepares the spectator for the event. (23)

    And this is, in fact, exactly how the shaving scene operates. After describing the relatively natural furnishings of the cuddy (his familiarity with rooms like it put Delano “at ease”), the narrator draws our attention to the stain — the torturous-looking settees that will soon feature prominently in the story’s most suspense-filled scene. After moving from landscape to stain, the narrator then cuts to a close-up of Delano, reestablishing his fallible filter: “Glancing towards the hammock as he entered, . . .” (211). The remainder of the scene, including the racist meditation on slavery and the terrifying shaving itself, is filtered through the “familiarly and humorously” benign nature of the American (213). Thus, as in Hitchcock’s films, suspense is achieved in “Benito Cereno” through editing and staging, a process that is “sustained by the gaze, itself evoked by a third element, a perverse object or stain” (Bonitzer 28).

    The penultimate instance of an eyeline match occurs at the emotional climax of “Benito Cereno,” when Delano finally realizes the tragic truth of the episode: “Captain Delano, now with scales dropped from his eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don Benito, but with mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt” (233). Until this point (only 72 pages), verbs synonymous with “to see” are used an astounding 244 times. [13] As Rohrberger has noted, Delano’s filter is necessary in order to fully involve the reader in the mystery of the story, but is quickly discarded once that mystery has been revealed. In the remainder of “Benito Cereno,” see verbs are used only four times: “there is no equivocation, no use of suggestive metaphor. Gone are the shadows and the vapors and the air of unreality” (545). Instead, the narrator’s objective slant returns to narrate the final events aboard the ships, to introduce and present the deposition, and to recount the final conversation between Delano and Cereno. [14]

    In the final two paragraphs of “Benito Cereno,” Melville cuts, for the first time, to close-ups of Cereno and Babo. In the former case, he deliberately avoids establishing the character as a filter. We are given one final shot of Cereno, but refused entrance into his subjectivity. Cereno steadfastly refuses to “look” at Babo, even fainting when pressed by the judges to do so. However, the final “gaze” we appropriate is that of Babo’s decapitated head, “that hive of subtlety” (258). That “subtlety” is mirrored in the diction of the 84-word final sentence. Although it is through Babo’s lifeless eyes that we meet the “gaze of the whites” and look upon St. Bartholomew’s church, our vision is once again blurred, preventing us from finally and conclusively unveiling the mystery of ‘The negro.’”

    — Presented at Florida State Film & Literature Conference
    January, 2002

    Footnotes

    [1] From Frank’s call-for-papers for the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, MLA Newsletter 32.1 (2000): 33. I realize that citing a call-for-papers is unorthodox, but Frank’s question has been very helpful as I’ve struggled to form my own position. [return]

    [2] See Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, American Critical Archives 6 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995). Criterion recommends The Piazza Tales for “a companion under the broad branches of an old elm in the hot summer days” (472). Churchman claims that The Piazza Tales “are destined to be read in many a pleasant country house, at watering-places, by the seashores, and among the mountains, during the coming summer heats” (475). And Transcripts predicts the collection will “be a favorite book at the watering places and in the rural districts this season” (476). Reviewers from both the Southern Literary Journal (472) and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (474) praise The Piazza Tales in comparison to Pierre. [return]

    [3] See also Richard Harter Fogle, Melville’s Shorter Tales, (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960). Fogle, like Hoffman, mentions only Delano’s point-of-view, which he describes as a “struggle to comprehend” (120), and the deposition. Fogle also echoes Hoffman’s praise of the opening section’s structure, which he calls “simply projected in the unities of time, place, and action”(122). [return]

    [4] See also Robert Bruce Bickley, The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction (Durham: Duke UP, 1975). Bickley makes a similar distinction between Delano’s point-of-view and “a limited-omniscient narrator, one privileged to enter Delano’s mind alone, but also permitted to draw partially aside the masks that conceal the identities of Babo and Cereno” (101). [return]

    [5] This question is obviously too large to be adequately addressed here. Recently, the focus of narratological studies of “Benito Cereno,” like that of much of Melville criticism, has turned to Post-Colonial and materialist readings. In “Narrative Self-Justification: Melville and Amasa Delano,” Studies in American Fiction 23:1 (1995): 35-53, Richard McLamore argues that both Melville’s and Amasa Delano’s narratives are constructed so as to deflect the “naïve” reader’s attention from the American captain’s economic motivations. McLamore claims that by transforming Delano’s travel narrative into a “fantastic pirate suspense-story” Melville is, in fact, covertly satirizing “Delano’s evasive, contradictory, and greedily hypocritical narrative” (40, 35). [return]

    [6] point of view, center of perception, objective narration, subjective gaze, unreliable narrator, narrative voice, innocent eye, Melville’s narrative, going behind, perceiving center, third person, narrative perspective, the official, the individual, the reportorial, and the authorial. [return]

    [7] Film does, however, offer the unique opportunity for Descriptive emancipation. Christian Metz, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford university Press, 1974), offers the example of a landscape described by “a tree, followed by a shot of a stream running next to the tree, followed by a view of a hill in the distance” (127-28). Chatman responds, “The shot sequence forms a narrative pause. The sign of the pause is precisely the temporally unmotivated shifting from tree to stream to hill” (42). [return]

    [8] See also Dillingham, 245, and Mary Rohrberger, “Point of View in ‘Benito Cereno’: Machinations and Deceptions,” College English 27 (1965), 544. [return]

    [9] With this knowledge, the “knot” of the story takes on an even greater symbolic significance. Some form of “knot” or “knotter” appears 29 times in the same span of pages. [return]

    [10] See Rohrberger, 542-43. She counts twenty-five facts in the story’s first eight sentences. [return]

    [11] Along with the famous example of Robert Weine’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995) operates in a similar manner. Verbal Kint, we learn at the end of the film, is a fallible filter. But the camera has also served as an unreliable narrator, describing the lying flashback from a supposedly objective and trustworthy distance. [return]

    [12] The eyeline match is one of five standard techniques in continuity editing of the classical Hollywood cinema. The others are the 180 degree rule, establishing shot/breakdown, shot/reverse shot, and match on action. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). [return]

    [13] “Benito Cereno,” in this light, reads like a thesaurus: appear, eye, gaze, glance, glare, glimpse, image, impress, look, mark, notice, observe, peer, perceive, regard, remark, scrutinize, see, sight, spectacle, spy, stare, survey, turn, view, watch, witness. [return]

    [14] Film theory might also offer a better explanation for the sudden drop of Delano’s filter and the shift to an objective slant. While the analogy is not perfect, it seems that the conclusion of Psycho operates in a very similar manner. When Lillian Crane discovers Mrs. Bates’ corpse in the fruit cellar and Norman emerges with the knife, the film suddenly drops Norman’s filter, as the mystery it has obscured has been suddenly revealed. The switch to the deposition in “Benito Cereno” is likewise similar to the psychiatrist’s analysis of Norman. See Christopher D. Morris, “Psycho’s Allegory of Seeing,” Literature Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996), 48. Finally, the return to Norman’s/Mother’s filter in the film’s final images mirrors the momentary return to subjectivity in the final paragraph of “Benito Cereno.” [return]

    Works Cited

    Bonitzer, Pascal. “Hitchcockian Suspense.” Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Verso, 1992. 15-30.

    Cardwell, Guy A. “Melville’s Gray Story.” Bucknell Review 8.3 (1959): 154-67.

    Chatman, Syemour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

    Dillingham, William B. Melville’s Short fiction: 1853-1856. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1977.

    Hoffman, Charles G. “The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville.” South Atlantic Quarterly 52 (1953): 414-30.

    Melville, Herman. “Benito Cereno.” Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York, Penguin. 1986.

    Rohrberger, Mary. “Point of View in ‘Benito Cereno’: Machinations and Deceptions.” College English 27 (1965): 541-46.

    Roundy, Nancy. “Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’” Arizona Quarterly 34 (1978): 344-50.

    Seelye, John Douglas. Melville: The Ironic Diagram. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1970. 104-11.

    Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

  • La Notte (1960)

    La Notte (1960)

    Dir. by Michelangelo Antonioni

    Images: Opening titles are cast on nearly abstract shots of skyscrapers, grounding the film immediately in the modern landscape. Actors are frequently framed on opposing sides of the screen, alienating them from one another. Crowds are noisy and hostile, forcing characters to retreat to isolation for solace. Favorite images: the shame and self-conscious look on Moreau’s face when she models her dress for Mastroianni; Moreau walking with a straight back in her wet black dress after the rain storm.

    • • •

    I’m very fond of Edward Hopper’s painting, New York Movie. It’s a great piece of early American modernism, simultaneously revealing, like a Fitzgerald novel, both the techniques of realism and the disillusionment and moral decay of the “lost generation.” Like many of Hopper’s portraits, “New York Movie” features a lone woman — here, a young usher — who suffers in isolation. Her pain is evident in her body language, her closed eyes and slumped shoulders, but, more importantly, it’s communicated by the composition of the painting itself. The woman leans against a side wall, framed in the lower right corner, while the majority of the portrait is devoted to the mass of the public watching a film in darkness. Hopper positions her under a wall sconce that draws our eyes instantly to her shadowed face.

    A similar image occurs in the opening moments of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, when Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) stares out a hospital window, drawn there by the sound of a passing helicopter. Like Hopper, Antonioni composes the frame with his heroine in the lower right corner, alienating her completely from her surroundings. Despite the presence of her husband and her dying friend in the room, Lidia stands alone, here and throughout the remainder of the film.

    La Notte has little plot to speak of. Antonioni follows Lidia and her husband, Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni), through the course of one night, as they wander the streets of Milan, visit clubs, attend parties, and, finally, confront the cold apathy that has developed between them. Both rebuff the sexual advances of strangers, but they seem to do so only out of obligation or respectful loyalty. They are certainly both attracted to the strangers, if only for the temporary connection and passion that they might offer. Giovanni’s attraction to Valentina (Monica Vitti) is mostly physical — he stares at her like he does the black dancers who perform for him in a club — though he, the shrewd intellect, would surely deny the accusation. Lidia is drawn to Roberto (Giorgio Negro) because he simply offers her his attention and respect, neither of which have been available from her husband for years. In one of the film’s most touching scenes, Lidia and Roberto sit alone in a car as rain falls around them. Antonioni remains at a distance, letting them laugh and talk out of earshot. It’s the only time during the film that we see Moreau’s smile.

    By examining in microscopic detail the workings of a marriage, that most essential of all human relationships, Antonioni extends his critique from the specific to the general, from the failings of a particular man and his particular wife to the apathy, solipsism, and alienation that plagues so much of the modern world. His is a world of towering mirrored skyscrapers, decaying brick alleyways, hostile, noisy crowds, and abrassive, intrusive technology, all of which send humanity fleeing to isolation for solace. With all that as its backdrop, the film’s finale plays like a grim satire of cinema’s cliched seduction scene. Lidia and Giovanni separate themselves from the crowd of party-goers (the Hopperesque framing returns once more) and make their way down a large empty field. They discuss their marriage in equal doses of bitterness, resignation, and denial, but finally admit that their love has atrophied. Giovanni’s response is interesting: he becomes emotional, but would probably be incapable of explaining why. Perhaps he is moved simply because Lidia’s confrontation has forced him to suddenly feel something, anything, for the first time in years. In what a less honest screenwriter would call a “fit of passion,” he lunges toward her to make love to her, while she whispers in his ear, “Tell me . . . Tell me.” That she wants to hear that he does not love her leaves the viewer with little hope for comfort.

    My only criticism of La Notte is that too often Antonioni leaves us alone with his characters for extended periods, forcing us to listen to them talk and talk and talk about the human condition or other such matters of self-importance. I recognize the necessity of such scenes, as they reveal (intentionally or not) the emptiness of a purely intellectual existence. But they feel redundant to me. Antonioni’s camera, particularly when it’s directed on the faces of Moreau, Mastroianni, and Vitti, speaks more articulately than his flawed but sympathetic characters ever could.

  • Breathless (1960)

    Breathless (1960)

    Dir. by Jean-Luc Godard

    Images: Typical Godard, though toned down a bit in comparison to his later films: frequent jump cuts and moments of deliberate self-awareness, as in those scenes in which first Michel, then Patricia, address the camera directly. Film moderates between break-neck pacing (the shooting of the police officer, for instance) and slow introspection (Michel and Patricia talking in her apartment). Key point: Godard reminds us constantly that we are watching a movie, as in the carefully choreographed kisses and Michel’s obsession with Bogart.

    • • •

    If asked to define postmodernism, I would probably cheat and just show an early Godard film. Breathless likely wouldn’t be my first choice — I’d take Alphaville or A Woman is a Woman — but it certainly fits the bill. Godard caused a sensation forty years ago with this, his first film, by not only tearing down cinematic and narrative conventions, but by doing so with a sly, mocking wink to his audience. Like the best postmodern art, Breathless blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, elevating B-movie sensation onto the plane of high French art and, thankfully, humbling and demystifying the latter in the process. Its greatest asset, I think, is that it does so with a fun, irreverent self-awareness that prevents us from ever forgetting that the story we’re watching unfold before us — like life itself, some postmodernists would argue — is nothing more than that: a fiction.

    The story is simple: Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a charismatic young thug wanted by police for shooting an officer. Penniless, alone, and, well, horny, he attaches himself to Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a beautiful American student and aspiring journalist. The majority of the film chronicles Michel’s frustrated efforts to: 1) track down money owed to him so that he can escape to Italy, and 2) get Patricia back into bed. Technically, he succeeds in both endeavors, but, as has been the case with all storied young lovers on the run, before and since, his successes are always fleeting. “I want us to be like Romeo and Juliet,” Patricia naively tells Michel. Shakespeare this ain’t, but Michel’s fate is as inevitable as that poor sap’s from Verona.

    Along with inspiring countless imitators, from Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands to Natural Born Killers (not to mention that embarrassing Richard Gere remake), Breathless is most often remembered for — and remains fascinating today because of — Godard’s deliberate disregard for convention, both as a filmmaker and as a story-teller. His technical innovations, particularly the frequent jump cuts and hand held cinematography, have, in the four decades since, become the stuff of prime-time network TV (NYPD Blue comes to mind). Likewise, Godard’s rebellious irony and self-conscious play with film iconography (as seen most famously in Michel’s long gaze at a Humphrey Bogart lobby card) have become key terms in the contemporary film vocabulary — think The Simpsons, Pulp Fiction, Scream, and the like.

    What most fascinates me about Breathless, though, and what makes it still feel revolutionary today, is Godard’s fascination with the parts of life that we (still) rarely see on the screen. Midway through the film, when most “young lovers on the run” movies would turn their attention to a violent heist or a gratuitous sex scene, we follow Michel to Patricia’s apartment, where the two simply pass the time in idle conversation, waiting (like we do) for the excitement to begin again. The scene does help to further develop the characters — Patricia’s love and understanding of art distinguishes her further from Michel, who is still interested only in getting Patricia undressed — but, as was the case for many of his New Wave contemporaries, Godard evidences little hope for genuine communication. Michel and Patricia are characters in a film who behave as if they were characters in a film, performing their superficial roles/lives for the benefit of others, oblivious to the consequences.

    As with much postmodern art, my main critique of Breathless is ethical. The blurring of boundaries between high/low, fact/fiction, performance/life, though vital and beneficial to much that has happened socially and politically in the past four decades, can also collapse dangerously into total relativism. Godard has called Michel an “Anarchist Hero,” meaning, I assume, that his rebellion against authority is a martyrdom of sorts for the cause of greater freedom for all. Noble, I guess, and I probably would have bought it ten years ago. But it feels overly romantic and naïve to me now. Actually, it feels like the unbridled energy and maturing (but still immature) philosophy of a first-time filmmaker.

  • Cries and Whispers (1972)

    Cries and Whispers (1972)

    Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

    Images: Striking contrast between lush, sun-drenched exteriors and the claustrophobic interior of the manor. Bergman has said that red represents, for him, the color of the soul, which he puts to extensive use here, most memorably in the film’s constant fades-to-red (rather than black) and in the side-lit close-ups that mark the beginning and end of each “dream” sequence. Favorite images: Anna holding Agnes in the pieta; Agnes gasping for breath; Karin recoiling at Marie’s touch; Agnes swinging in the final scene.

    • • •

    Cries and Whispers is built from the simplest of premises: two wealthy women, both trapped in loveless marriages, return home to the family estate to comfort their dying sister. Agnes (Harriet Andersson), a beautiful artist in early middle-age, is ravaged by a cancer that sends her into fits of agony. For Bergman, the approach of death is a terror. His camera lingers uncomfortably on Agnes, forcing us to watch her body convulse and her lungs gasp for breath. In the final throes of excruciating pain, she screams out for comfort: “Can’t anyone! Can’t anyone help me?”

    She receives little solace, though, from her sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Marie (Liv Ullman). Both characters are archetypal: the former is cold, distant, and intellectual; the latter childlike, irresponsible, and sensual. Neither is capable of the empathy and selflessness necessary to truly comfort their sister or to find earthly salvation in Bergman’s world. The director establishes their personalities visually in early shots. When we first see Marie, she is asleep in her childhood bed, her face framed by the dolls of her youth. She is an adult in arrested development — a slave to her spontaneous desires, incapable of (and uninterested in) offering herself wholly to another. In her “dream” sequence — the first of three in the film — we see Marie seducing the family doctor (Erland Josephson), a betrayal that leads her husband to attempt suicide. The psychological significance of the act is obvious: too self-absorbed to consider the consequences of her behavior, Marie has destroyed any possibility of discovering meaningful human contact and has only hurt those closest to her in the process.

    When we first see Karin alone, she is sitting rigidly at a table, examining financial records. She seems to have also abandoned the quest for love or connection in her life, focusing her energies, instead, on the pursuit of superficial success. Her marriage to a vindictive ambassador has traumatized Karin in unspoken ways. In her dream we see her performing the loathsome rituals of their marriage: the two sit down to dinner, where she (and we) are subjected to the annoying tedium of his bites and swallows. When the two retire to bed, she takes drastic measures in order to escape the inevitable. In a brutally graphic scene, Karin inserts a shard of glass into her vagina, then rubs the blood on her face. Again, by treating the marriage and Karin’s past in a dream, Bergman is allowed a vocabulary of archetypal and psychological imagery. Marriage, “love,” and sex — or at least the rigid, institutionalized versions of them — seem to bring fallen man only greater pain and isolation.

    Organized religion, as personified by the bishop who administers last rites, is utterly irrelevant. After we have witnessed Agnes’s brutal struggle with death, the bishop’s familiar words sound inhuman: “God, our Father, in His infinite wisdom, has called you home to Him still in the bloom of your youth. In your life He found you worthy of bearing a long and tortuous agony.” He is not far-removed from Tomas, the minister whose crisis of faith is portrayed in Bergman’s Winter Light. Like Tomas, he is tormented by his own human doubts in the presence of his more faithful parishioners. As he addresses the family, he becomes deeply moved, not by the loss of his friend, but by the meaninglessness of it all. “Pray for us who have been left behind on this miserable earth,” he begs of Agnes. “Plead with Him that He may make sense and meaning of our lives.” Then, turning to Marie and Karin: “Her faith was stronger than mine.”

    Only the fourth woman in Bergman’s drama, the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan), is able to genuinely comfort Agnes. Their relationship is represented visually in what is perhaps the film’s most memorable image. When Agnes calls out to Anna in the middle of the night, shaking from cold, Anna comes to her, then lifts the dying woman’s head and places it on her bare breasts. The image returns in Anna’s dream, now filmed in a long shot, making Bergman’s allusion to the pieta unmistakable. It’s interesting to me that Bergman, the atheist, returns to Christian imagery for this most important moment of human contact. Perhaps it can be explained away as Anna’s fantasy — the fulfillment of her motherly duties after her child’s death — but, regardless, the image resonates beautifully.

    After Agnes’s death, the two remaining sisters discover a need for human contact. Marie comes to Karin and asks her why they never speak, why two people who have shared so many memories are so distant from one another. It’s a complicated scene. Karin is, at first, almost violently resistant to Marie’s approaches. “No. Don’t come near me. Don’t touch me,” she demands. “I don’t want you to be kind to me.” But her defenses slowly erode, as Marie caresses Karin’s face.The two collapse on a bench, sharing themselves for the first time since childhood. The reconciliation, however, is short lived. When they part company at the end of the film, Marie turns cold toward her sister, reproaching her for her sentimentality and returning to the comfortable routine of her life.

    Despite the devastating farewell between Karin and Marie and the total failure of the church to bring solace, Cries and Whispers does have a happy ending, or at least by Bergman’s standards. In the coda, we watch and listen as Anna takes Agnes’s diary delicately from a drawer, unwraps it, and begins to read. The entry initiates a flashback to a beautiful day when the three sisters and Anna gathered together in high spirits, enjoying each other’s company on an outdoor swing. As Bergman’s camera tracks forward into a close-up of Agnes’s lovely face, we hear the voice of her diary: “I received the most wonderful gift anyone can receive in this life, a gift that is called many things: togetherness, companionship, relatedness, affection. I think this is what is called ‘grace.’”

    In God, Death, Art and Love: The Philosophical Vision of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Lauder writes:

    The human journey is toward death. As God’s presence dissolved, the human person had to look elsewhere for some meaning in human existence, some hope to cling to in the face of death. Art offers hints of explanations, but without God’s animating presence and the superstructure of meaning that religion once provided for the artist, art’s “answers” can never be adequate. The only hope we have, according to Bergman, is human love. There is no heavenly hope. To make loving contact with one other human being or perhaps with many others is the only salvation available to us.

    It’s a refreshingly succinct and useful summary from what is, otherwise, a very disappointing book. It’s also, in a sense, a perfect synopsis of Cries and Whispers, the first Bergman film to knock me flat. I watched it again the other night, still mesmerized by it all, and still unable to adequately explain its power. The greatest compliment I can give Cries and Whispers is that it is a profoundly religious film, by which I mean that it is deeply concerned, first and foremost, with the struggles of the human condition in light of the presence — or, in Bergman’s case, the absence — of God. That it approaches this subject with such grace and honesty makes it a masterpiece.

  • The Woman Warrior (1975)

    By Maxine Hong Kingston

    Reading The Woman Warrior now, twenty-five years after its original publication, I find it difficult to separate the actual text from the cultural milieu in which it was written. This is very much a book of the 1970s — a creative memoir that, even in its title, gives voice to feminist and multiculturalist concerns. It is equal parts bildungsroman, fable, journal, poem, and immigrant story. At times, it is also really, really good.

    Kingston’s main concern here is with language. Words and their power to construct meaning, history, and identity are at the heart of each of the five tales. Words become Kingston’s weapon for writing a disgraced aunt back into the family history. Words of vengeance are carved into a warrior’s back. Words of Chinese talk-stories serve as a bond between mother and daughter. And, finally, words become the means by which Kingston comes of age.

    It’s only fitting, then, that Kingston’s own use of words is so impressive. I enjoyed the language of The Woman Warrior for the same reason that I’m so enamored of Tarkovsky’s films: Kingston has a gift for capturing images that speak (quite poetically and eloquently) for themselves. In the first story, “No Name Woman,” she imagines the struggle for individuality that her aunt and other women like her must have fought daily in the fields and small towns of China. “Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of beauty,” she writes, “when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched.” Then, in “Shaman,” she recreates the moment when her mother first tasted independence. Her arrival at a medical school is like a scene straight from Virginia Woolf: “The women who had arrived early did not offer to help unpack, not wanting to interfere with the pleasure and the privacy of it. Not many women got to live out the daydream of women — to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself.”

    “No Name Woman” and “White Tigers” are the two sections most often anthologized and deservedly so. The third and fourth stories, which deal more specifically with Kingston’s own family, are less effective. The Woman Warrior is redeemed, though, in its final pages when Kingston melds two beautiful stories. One is an ancient tale of a Chinese woman held captive, who finally returns to her village and brings with her the songs of her captors. The second is the story of Kingston’s own coming of age. The juxtaposition of the two stories is handled brilliantly, reminding us of the value born from the fruitful blending of cultures.

    No Name Woman — the story of Kingston’s aunt, a woman who committed suicide after disgracing the family by having an illegitimate child (though she was likely raped). Kingston attempts to right the great tragedy of the story — the family’s decision to erase her from their collective memory. Kingston gives the “no name woman” depth – love, emotion, shame, pride — by rewriting her into history.

    White Tigers — The story of Fa Mu Lan, the famous Chinese swordswoman who was taken away as child to be trained as a warrior before returning home to take her father’s place in battle and leading an army to victory. Again, Kingston places emphasis on the power of words — the words of vengeance carved into her back, the words casually used by Chinese to dehumanize their daughters, the words of her mother’s talk-stories. Kingston then tries to imagine herself as a contemporary woman warrior in America.

    Shaman — The story of the life of Kingston’s mother, in both China and America. A nice portrait of that frustrating ambivalence we feel toward family, which makes us both proud and embarrassed, wanting to both cling to our heritage and to define ourselves apart from it.

    At the Western Plaza — Brave Orchid’ sister, Moon Orchid, arrives in America to confront the husband who never sent for her. When she does finally meet him, he refuses to allow her back into his life, having found a new life and a new wife in America. Moon Orchid is broken by the move and the betrayal, finally finding something like peace in an asylum.

    A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe — The title of this section comes from the short story that ends the novel. It’s the story of a Chinese woman captured by barbarians with whom she lives for twelve years. When she returns to the Chinese, she brings with her new songs that were formed from the blending of the two cultures. The story could likewise be applied to this entire novel. The final section is about Kingston’s struggle to find her own voice. At one point, she torments another young Chinese girl who absolutely refuses to speak. Kingston finds her voice in a furious outburst at the dinner table.

  • Vive L’Amour (1994)

    Vive L’Amour (1994)

    Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang

    Images: Congested and noisy exteriors contrast sharply with starkly decorated (or empty) interiors. Very little dialogue — perhaps ten minutes total in two hour film, the majority of which is built from long takes, often shots of solitary characters suffering in silence. Favorite images: Hsiao-Kang carressing and kissing a melon; Ah-Jung sillhouted against a large apartment window overlooking Taipei; May Lin looking down a stairwell, where Hsiao-Kang hides unnoticed; Ah-Jung emerging slowly from underneath a bed on which May Lin is sleeping.

    • • •

    Vive L’Amour ends with two stunning sequences. In the penultimate scene, Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng), a closeted and suicidal young man, crawls into bed with Ah-Jung (Chen Chao-jung), an acquaintance who is sleeping soundly. Tsai’s camera lingers on the two men for several minutes, allowing us to watch — trapped in a moment of almost Hitchcockian suspense — as Hsiao-Kang leans closer and closer, finally kissing the other man on the mouth without waking him. It’s a remarkable performance. Lee’s face is written with conflicted emotion: curiosity, terror, longing, shame, joy.

    Tsai then cuts to his heroine, May Lin (Yang Kuei Mei), who is now walking quickly and alone through a park that is muddied by construction. She wants only to put some distance between herself and Ah-Jung’s bed, from which she has recently escaped quietly after another night of anonymous sex. Lin finally rests at an outdoor amphitheater, where she sits and begins to cry. Typical of the director’s style, Tsai frames her in a medium close-up, then simply allows the camera to run. The scene lasts for five and a half minutes, during which May Lin struggles to find composure. But she is able to do so only temporarily before surrendering, again and again, to the sobs. As Dennis Lim has said of the scene, Tsai fades to black “just as you’ve convinced yourself she could go on weeping forever.”

    I recently read an essay by Walker Percy in which he characterizes (somewhat glibbly) the 20th century American novel as a recurring investigation of “the essential loneliness of man.” It’s hardly an original conceit, but I was reminded of it constantly yesterday as I watched Vive L’Amour, a film that represents the alienation of modern life as effectively as any of our great novels. Tsai’s Taipei borders Hemingway’s Paris — both are worlds populated by frightened individuals unable to connect meaningfully with anyone around them. So, instead, they turn to temporary, unfulfilling escapes. One of the most memorable scenes in Vive L’Amour comes just before the two described above. Hsiao-Kang, hiding beneath their bed, masturbates while May Lin and Ah-Jung have sex above him. Their act, though shared, is no less self-satsifying and empty than Hsiao-Kang’s. All three characters end the film as they began it: alone, homeless (literally or figuratively), and incapable of communication.

    This preoccupation with communication — or, more precisly, the failure of language — is another interesting affinity shared by Tsai and Hemingway. Someone (and it may have been Hemingway himself) compared the author’s dialogue to an iceberg: what we read is only 10% of the message; 90% is hidden beneath, left unspoken. His characters don’t communicate, they trade in banalities, because what they refuse to share is too personal, too painful, or too frightening. A reader who fails to seek that subtext is missing the point entirely. The same could be said of Vive L’Amour, a film that, when reduced to a simple plot synapsis — two homeless men move into a vacant apartment, where one of them shares romantic encounters with the apartment’s realtor — sounds like an episode of Red Shoe Diaries (and a really slow, unerotic episode at that). But in Tsai’s hands, the story serves a profound meditation on our inability to connect: May Lin and Ah-Jung sit beside one another, sharing glances, but never speaking; Hsiao-Kang hides at the bottom of a stairwell, unwilling to reveal himself to May Lin; Hsaio-Kang closes his door to Ah-Jung, refusing to answer the other’s questions.

    I now wish that I had seen Vive L’Amour before watching The Hole, Tsai’s most recent release. For whatever reason, I lacked patience for, and interest in, that film. But I now see the end of The Hole — when one of the two main characters quite literally reaches out to the other — as a moving portent of optimism and human triumph. Quite a step beyond May Lin’s endless tears.

  • The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

    The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

    Dir. by Joel and Ethan Coen

    Images: Another beautifully shot film from Roger Deakins. They obviously enjoyed taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by shooting in B&W: Crane smokes constantly, lighting is often in stark contrast, all trademarks of noir. Favorite images: Crane sitting alone in exact middle of couch, Birdy backlit at the piano, and lawyer Riedenschneider bathed in light streaming in from prison window (a scene straight out of citizen Kane).

    • • •

    Joel and Ethan Coen have carved out an enviable niche for themselves. Working for nearly two decades now in relative independence from studio interference, they have written, directed, and produced a series of interesting, if not always successful (either commercially or artistically), films. In doing so, they have somehow managed to garner the affection of both the popular press and the Hollywood community, while simultaneously fostering a rabid, cult-like fan following: those who can quote Raising Arizona for any occasion and who laugh a bit too loud at theatrical showings. On more than one occasion I’ve heard the Coens described as the “saviors” of American film, a moniker that would, I’m sure, inspire quiet, ironic laughter from the men themselves.

    In a word, the Coens have become critic-proof: to criticize one of their films is to resign oneself to a place among the “unhip.” Which brings me to The Man Who Wasn’t There, a film I’m hesitant to describe as a disappointment, if only because, by doing so, I’m setting myself up to the inevitable and tired rebuttals: “The jokes on you. The Coens love to break the rules. They set you up, and you fell for it.” Actually, I do get it. I’m just beginning to lose interest. Or, more precisely, the Coens are failing to hold my interest. But more on that later . . .

    I’m also hesitant to label The Man a disappointment because so much of it is so good. Billy Bob Thornton is impressive in the title role, playing a barber named Ed Crane whose life is lived in futile routine — a mindless job, a loveless marriage. When he becomes embroiled in a messy murder, involving his wife (Frances McDormand), her lover (James Gandolfini), and a traveling businessman (Jon Polito), it appears that, with the excitement, he might also find some meaning in his life. But in typical noir fashion, the exact opposite occurs. In that sense, the conceit of the film is an interesting one: “Modern Man” (as his lawyer refers to him) fights back, becoming active for the first time in his life. But his action leads only to the destruction of everything he holds dear (if anyone is, in fact, capable of holding anything “dear” in a Coen film). Frank Norris would have loved it.

    The problem with The Man is that, perhaps for the first time, the Coens have invested a character with genuine pathos, but seem to have done so (much to my own personal annoyance) only in the interest of later undercutting it with their typical brand of cynical Nihilism. As a pure character study of Ed Crane, the film flirts with honesty and sincerity, which gives certain scenes a quiet grace unlike anything seen in earlier Coen films. For instance, at a Christmas party, Ed discovers a teen-age girl playing Beethoven at the piano. It’s a beautiful scene. Ed is obviously drawn to both the girl — her potential and innocence — and to the music, which seems to offer him some glimpse of beauty.

    But such things — truth, beauty, innocence — don’t exist in the Coen’s world, and any sad sap who believes that they do (like Ed Crane or me, for instance) is just being set up for ridicule. The relationship between Ed and the girl eventually becomes another Coen punchline: the two end up in a car accident after the “innocent” girl leans over to give Ed a blow job. I guess the joke worked. Several others in the theater laughed (a few too loudly).

    The Coens seem to have stepped into an interesting trap here. Never before have any of their films tried so hard to be about something — and, honestly, by the time Tony Shaloub’s lawyer began his speech about “the more you look at something the less chance there is of it making sense” I was just shaking my head — but, ultimately, The Man Who Wasn’t There is only about meaninglessness: the meaninglessness of our lives, the meaninglessness of our loves, and the meaninglessness of this film. I might be willing to buy it all if the Coens hadn’t offered glimpses of something much greater. But, in the end, their cynicism and this film just feel hollow.

  • Another Country (1962)

     

    By James Baldwin

    At its best, James Baldwin’s fiction is lyrical, intense, poetic, outrageous, improvisatory, brutal, and transcendent. The first time I read his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” I was sitting in one of those massive chain bookstores, drinking coffee and trying to block out the pabulum coming from the Muzak. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself choking back tears. The last three pages of “Sonny’s Blues” are as good as it gets: Sonny breaks into a blistering piano solo, finally finding a voice for his repressed pain. Baldwin follows suit — capturing the rhythms, the longing, the give and take of the best jazz — in some of the most stunning prose I’ve encountered.

    Unfortunately, Another Country is not Baldwin at his best. In fact, it’s possibly the most frustrating novel I’ve ever read. Here, Baldwin is so determined to explode the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality — and judging by the variety of sexual relationships on display here, he must have plotted those intersections on graph paper before sitting down to write — that he makes a fatal mistake: instead of being particularly insightful or even shocking, Another Country is preachy, sentimental, and, worst of all, boring.

    Rufus Scott is a young black man who makes his living playing drums in Harlem jazz clubs. When we first meet Rufus, he is wandering the streets, suffering from guilt over his treatment of Leona, a woman we later meet through flashbacks. Leona’s and Rufus’s relationship is based on a shared self-loathing: he feels unworthy of the love of a white woman; she has known only brutal relationships, having come to New York after escaping from an abusive marriage in the South. Rufus’s brutality eventually sends her to an asylum, an event that plagues Rufus, leading him to jump from the George Washington bridge at the end of chapter one. The remainder of the novel charts the effects of Rufus’s suicide on the lives of those closest to him.

    The most interesting relationship is between Ida, Rufus’s younger sister, and Vivaldo, his best friend. Both are struggling artists: she a singer, he a novelist. In Baldwin’s hands, they become a platform for long discourses on the legacies of racism. Before meeting Ida, Vivaldo has known black women only as sexual objects — the cheap whores he frequented in Harlem. Ida has likewise known white men only as victimizers — the men who leered at her and who broke her brother’s spirit. At moments, Vivaldo and Ida come alive in Baldwin’s prose. The flashback to their first meeting, for instance, is handled gracefully. But too often they act as little more than mouthpieces, uttering sappy lines like, “How’s one going to get through it all? How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you do?” Baldwin wisely leaves their relationship in limbo at the end of the novel, offering some hope for reconciliation between the races, but promising nothing.

    Richard and Cass are another interesting couple. Married with children, they struggle to maintain their “traditional” roles amidst the sexual and social tumult (not to mention the heavy drinking) that surrounds them. Richard is also a novelist, but has “sold out,” making him a failure in his wife’s eyes. She escapes to an affair with Eric, an actor friend who has recently returned from Paris, but it brings her little comfort. “I’m beginning to think,” she gushes, “that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet — you drink a little of it every day.” It’s perhaps in this relationship that Baldwin does the most moralizing. Near the very end of the novel he finally enters Richard’s point of view, giving voice to the character who, until this point, had been little more than a personification of failed artistic ambition. Richard’s pain, however, rings more true than that of others in the novel because Baldwin allows readers to experience it in the moment, instead of subjecting us to endless discussions of that pain.

    My frustration with this novel is fueled largely by its obvious, unrealized potential. Baldwin populates Another Country with artists of all sorts and provides them with fabulously romanticized lives in Greenwich Village and Paris. He sets out to deliberately create another “lost generation,” but never seems able to elevate his characters above the prescribed roles they play.

  • L’Humanite (1999)

    L’Humanite (1999)

    Dir. by Bruno Dumont

    Images: Dumont’s style could perhaps be described as a more polished verite. He uses only diegetic sound and shoots non-professional actors in stunning compositions and with impressive grace. Most striking images are those that foreground the “fleshiness” of characters. For instance, we ocassionally enter Pharaon’s POV as he stares at the back of the inspector’s neck or at his mother’s hand. Later, the camera lingers on a close-up of Pharaon, forcing us to listen attentively to his breathing. The explicit and unsentimental staging of sex between Domino and Joseph serves a similar purpose.

    • • •

    What interests me is life, people, the small things. Cinema is for the body, for the emotions. It needs to be restored among the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of joy, emotion, suffering, sympathy in death. They don’t speak, speaking is not important. What’s important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. The spectator must think. He has a lot of work to do. The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost. [He] has something that I’ve lost, that I must find again, I don’t know what exactly. I find that our culture, our civilization, has failed politically, socially, morally.

    — Bruno Dumont

    Walt Whitman would be proud.

    It’s remarkable to hear echoes of Whitman in the voice of a contemporary filmmaker, but there he is, still singing the “body electric” and sounding his “barbaric yawp.” Like the poet before him, Dumont has turned to the arts in a Democratic spirit, celebrating the “common man” (for lack of a better term) in all of his rich complexity. Although I’ve always found the county/city dichotomy a bit reductive, I applaud Dumont’s devotion to it here, for it’s as radical a statement in cinema today as it was when Whitman staked his claim on verse with Leaves of Grass.

    Dumont is, of course, not totally without peer — Abbas Kiarostami is the closest kin to come to mind —but, in L’Humanite, he has made a landmark film that, ultimately, restores . . . well . . . humanity to the screen. In doing so, he has transcended the verite and dogme traditions. He has not simply turned a shaky camera on “real people” living “real lives,” a manipulative fiction now broadcast nightly on network television. He respects his characters, his form, and his audience too much to cheapen them in that way. Instead, like Whitman, he gives us stunning and occasionally shocking images of the body — here, a conflation of the body of flesh with the body politic — and requires us to respond genuinely to them.

    The cumulative effect of these images on the viewer is, at times, unnerving. L’Humanite slowly erodes the ironic detachment and cynicism that we’ve built as defenses, forcing us to actually feel something. It should come as little surprise that Dumont’s film was met by a chorus of jeers at Cannes, while Sam Mendes’ American Beauty — a film that, in many ways, adopts a similar humanist stance — won an Academy award. We seem to have surrendered our ability to recognize sincerity, opting instead for easy satire and emotional distance (not to mention “larger than life” performances over truthful ones). Ricky Fitts claims, in American Beauty, that “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is going to cave in,” but the scene ultimately has less impact than a plastic bag. It’s a disposable image, like so many of our manufactured emotions. L’Humanite doesn’t let us off so easy.

    Dumont establishes the tone of L’Humanite in its opening scene, a static long shot of the French countryside, which lasts nearly a minute. Across the horizon, we see a small figure running from one edge of the frame to the other. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is a police superintendent in a small French town, who is called to investigate the rape and murder of an 11 year old girl. We learn little about Pharaon’s past, other than that he has “lost” his woman and his child. He seems to have only one friend, a woman named Domino (Séverine Caneele), who tolerates Pharaon’s idiosyncrasies, but who prefers the company of her bus driver boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier).

    As most critics have pointed out, L’Humanite is, on the surface, a police procedural that isn’t terribly concerned with the resolution of its mystery. By traditional standards, Pharaon is an incompetent detective, but it is, in fact, those very standards that Dumont is interrogating. Movie detectives are typical of most Western heroes: stoic, logical, and doggedly determined. Pharaon, instead, is a man who, perhaps for the first time in his life, is overwhelmed by an empathy of which very few of us are still capable. He longs desperately to connect with humanity — to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it, kiss it — but is frustrated at every turn. Even Domino, who wants, at least on some level, to comfort him, is able to offer only her body (a too frequent substitute these days).

    The most powerful moment in L’Humanite comes when, while investigating the crime scene, Pharaon lets loose a long, wild scream. It is a moment of pure, inarticulate emotion unlike anything I have ever experienced from a film. That scream alone makes L’Humanite more real, more painful, and more affecting than any other film I’ve seen from the 90s. A barbaric yawp, indeed.

  • Day of Wrath (1943)

    Day of Wrath (1943)

    Dir. by Carl Th. Dreyer

    Images: Elegant, slow tracking shots, often in combination with pans in the opposite direction. Three times during the film, the camera tracks along the row of accusers, as in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Bodies are often half-hidden in shadows while faces, particularly the eyes, remain exposed. Favorite image is high-angle shot of Martin and Anne in a rowboat. Much of the frame is devoted to the water passing underneath, a Tarkovsky-like image of nature.

    • • •

    I can’t imagine how it must have felt to sit in a crowded theater, watching Day of Wrath during its original release in 1943. Set in 17th century Denmark, when rising religious fanaticism gave church leaders the authority to execute those of “questionable” morality, the film must have mirrored, much too closely for comfort, the Nazi atrocities being waged just outside the theater door. In his liner notes of the Criterion DVD release, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that Dreyer cast the blonde actress Lisbeth Movin in a deliberate attempt to diminish the allegorical implications of Anne’s plight, thereby diffusing a potentially dangerous situation. As with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), however, it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction here. Day of Wrath is a damning critique of hypocritical authoritarian power told in very human terms, a modern fable that interrogates faith and sin, love and family, desire and its consequences.

    As a fan of Arthur Miller, I must admit that comparing his play to Dreyer’s film pains me. The former was written for more explicitly allegorical purposes — a direct attack on McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As such, its characters are comparatively two-dimensional. With rare exceptions, they operate, rightly or wrongly, as stock mouth-pieces for Miller’s political and social commentary. Dreyer’s characters, by comparison, are afforded a more recognizably human complexity and moral ambivalence. For instance, we sympathize with Herlof’s Marthe (Anna Svierkier), the old woman accused of witchcraft in the film’s opening scene, not because she is a pious, honorable, and innocent martyr (like Miller’s Rebecca Nurse), but because of her human failings. She has experimented with witchcraft, she does lack Christian faith, and most importantly, she genuinely fears her death — the pain and suffering awaiting her at the stake — rather than her eternity. Dreyer stages Herlof’s Marthe’s scenes in a manner reminiscent of many in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory: they are stark, honest, and completely free of easy sentiment.

    The family drama at the center of Day of Wrath is likewise composed of characters with whom we must sympathize despite their obvious moral lapses. Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose) is, by most standards, a man of admirable faith and conviction. His piety, however, is cooled by intellectual distance. He respects his family and his God, but is incapable, until the very end of the film, of understanding the human cost of his actions. Anne, Absalon’s young wife, is his most obvious victim. She has been robbed of her youth, of joy, and of children by a man who has never even considered her need for love. Yet, despite her victimization, it is impossible to take any vindictive pleasure from her murderous curses. When she takes Absalon’s son, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), as a lover, we are again forced to balance our own sympathies for the young lovers with the troubling moral consequences of their symbolically incestuous act.

    Day of Wrath‘s brilliant final scene must have offered little hope to those first audiences. Even Martin has turned from Anne, leaving her resigned to a fate that has always remained beyond her control. It’s a stunning image — the young widow leaning against her husband’s coffin, whispering a confused confession to her accusers. The critical (but superficial) question of Anne’s guilt or innocence is left unanswered, which makes a fitting conclusion to a film that brutally interrogates our lives, but refuses to offer trite solutions.

  • The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

    The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

    Dir. by Atom Egoyan

    Images: Beautiful compositions in 2.35:1. Notable images: close-up of infant Chloe’s face beside open knife blade; Nicole’s face with rotating Ferris wheel over her shoulder; Mitchell, wife, and child asleep together on mattress. Egoyan constantly returns to wide-angle shots of the sky and the Canadian landscape as a means of representing man’s insignificance in relation to nature. The images of snow-covered, tree-lined mountains, gray skies, and frozen lakes contrast beautifully with the warm interiors of the small town and the close-ups of its inhabitants. The flesh tones reflect their environment: soft and natural when inside, slightly blue when out.

    • • •

    There’s a scene in The Sweet Hereafter in which Mitchell Stephens — a big city ambulance chaser played to perfection by Ian Holm — sits in a cramped airplane seat, telling the passenger beside him a story from when his daughter, Chloe, was a child. The shot is framed with Holm’s face in a tight close-up, his companion to our left, her eyes fixed intently on his. During the entire, nearly six-minute monologue (there is only one brief interruption — a cutaway to a flashback), neither actor turns his or her head more than an inch. Holm’s eyes never look away from the back of the seat in front of him. And yet, it’s one of the most riveting moments from any film I’ve seen.

    And it exemplifies why Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter might be the best film of the 90’s. Stephens’ story is a step into an idyllic past. “It was a wonderful time in our lives,” he says. “We still thought we had a future together, the three of us.” Like Egoyan’s film, the lawyer’s story is an attempt to create a narrative from tragedy as a means of controlling and (hopefully) escaping its grief. The result is a film that is captivating despite — or perhaps because of — its preoccupation with sadness. Its very beauty is catharsis.

    Mitchell Stephens arrives in Sam Dent shortly after a school bus accident takes the lives of many of the small town’s children. Stephens’ goal is to unite several of the families in a class action lawsuit against the “deep pockets” who are to blame. For the parents, placing blame becomes a release, a means of turning their attention momentarily from loss and grief and reuniting the community. Many of Sam Dent’s residents are recognizable from Egoyan’s earlier films. Maury Chaykin and Alberta Watson play Wendell and Risa Walker, the proprietors of the town’s only motel and plaintiffs in the law suit. Bruce Greenwood (the lead in Exotica) is Billy Ansel, a widower who loses both of his children in the accident, but who refuses Stephens’ offer. Arsinee Khanjian (Egoyan’s wife) and Earl Pastko are Wanda and Hartley Otto, another couple grieving for their only child. And Gabrielle Rose plays Delores Driscoll, the bus driver who loses so many of “her children” in the accident.

    The acting is dynamic throughout. Of particular note is the performance of Sarah Polley (Exotica), who plays Nicole Burnell, a survivor paralyzed in the accident. The film demands that she strike a balance between the innocence of childhood and the pain of tragic experience (an important side plot reveals that the bus accident is not the only traumatic experience Nicole is forced to overcome). Polley’s approach is wonderfully subtle and understated. She has said of her performance: “The only way I feel I’m not faking it is to do nothing at all. I really don’t consider myself an actor, or a performer, but maybe as someone able to fill whatever void there is among actors who do too much.” As in Holm’s monologue, Polley is filmed almost entirely in close-ups and medium shots, directing our attention to her remarkably expressive eyes.

  • The Home and the World (1984)

    The Home and the World (1984)

    Dir. by Satyajit Ray

    Images: Film appears to be lit entirely by source lighting. Interiors are often very dark, reflecting the isolation and confinement within the inner sanctum of the estate. Memorable images include: profiles of faces lit by candlelight; Bimala pressed against the wall, staring ahead motionless (followed by dissolve into widow’s whites); crowds of young nationalists, lifting their fists and chanting, “Hail Motherland!”

    • • •

    In 1907, British rulers of India have partitioned Bengal, dividing the Muslims from the Hindus and silencing their collective political voice in the process. In response, Swadeshi, a burgeoning nationalist movement, demands a boycott of all British goods. We experience Swadeshi through the eyes of Bimala Choudhury (Swatilekha Chatterjee), a modern woman (she has been educated) married to a modern man. Nikhilesh (Victor Banerjee) is a wealthy land-owner who was educated in the West and who objects to the repressive treatment of Indian women. He allows Bimala unprecedented freedom, including freedom of movement around their estate, opportunities to meet other men, and English lessons. Against this modern relationship, Ray contrasts Bimala’s more traditional sister-in-law, a woman whose husband was unable to even recognize her face on his deathbed.

    The first man Bimala meets is Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee), a charismatic leader of Swadeshi and former classmate of Nikhilesh. Sandip has arrived in hopes of turning his old friend toward his cause, but Nikhilesh steadfastly refuses, much to his wife’s disfavor. Bimala is instantly taken by Sandip, a man of superficial passion. She is so moved by his zealous rhetoric that she becomes the first female member of Swadeshi. The two begin to meet privately, eventually striking up an affair. Nikhilesh is aware of their relationship, but refuses to intervene, preferring instead that his wife’s love be granted freely, even if to another man.

    Bimala strikes me as an Indian equivalent of Lily Bart. Like Edith Wharton’s famous heroine, Bimala is allowed the freedoms of a modern woman, but lacks the experience and social context necessary to use it effectively. After spending the first decade of her marriage in isolation, forbidden from even seeing a man other than her husband, she is ill equipped to read Sandip’s hypocrisy. She mistakes his performed speeches for genuine passion, and suffers the consequences for her failing. For Ray, there are no simple solutions for the “woman problem”: the fate of Bimala’s sister-in-law is clearly not acceptable, but neither is Bimala’s.

    In The Home and the World there are also no simple solutions to the complex legacy of British imperialism. Ray forces us to listen to several of Sandip’s speeches from start to finish. It’s an effective move, for his words resonate with some truth: by becoming dependent upon British goods, the people of India have surrendered economic clout and filled the pockets of Western manufacturers and importers. In so doing, they have also taken a significant step toward assimilation, internalizing a Western value system that diminishes their own cultural accomplishments and beliefs. Sandip’s chant, “Hail Motherland” (even with its frightening echoes of mid-century European nationalism) sent a chill down my spine like it did Bimala’s.

    But we also see the other side of the issue through Nikhilesh, who refuses to support Swadeshi because of its untold economic consequences on the poor of Bengal. British goods are not only of better quality, but are cheaper; remove them from the local economy and the poor will be forced to buy less for their families and sell less in their markets. Like the manufactured goods sold (or burned) in Bengal’s markets, other British imports — including democracy, education, and greater freedom for women — must be acknowledged for the good and harm they have brought to the people of India.

  • Winter Light (1963)

    Winter Light (1963)

    Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

    Images: Majority of dialogue is shot in tight close-ups, isolating characters from one another, as the small town and small church seem to also isolate them from the world. Discovery and removal of Jonas’ body is filmed in long shots: we see his body manipulated like lifeless flesh, exposed to the harsh elements of the snow storm. The bleak, cold exteriors reflects the inner state of the characters.

    • • •

    Critic Dave Kehr has written of Winter Light: “Routine stuff from Ingmar Bergman, the metaphysician of the middle class. . . . Much suffering, none of it very illuminating.” At the heart of Kehr’s criticism, it seems, is the assumption that for a work of art to be illuminating it must not only pose difficult questions, but provide universally satisfying answers as well. A crisis of faith, however, is a process, an on-going debate that can often seem frustratingly one-sided. Reducing such a debate to a simple question and an even simpler answer — as often happens both in the movies and the Church — only trivializes it. I’m relieved to find a film like Winter Light, which understands that at the very root of faith are those same unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions. Despite its existential bleakness, watching Winter Light was, in fact, a faith-affirming experience for me.

    Tomas (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is a pastor in a small town church. We see him, in the film’s opening scene, performing mass, an act that we later learn has become a loathsome ritual for him. With the death of his wife four years earlier, Tomas became cold, both to his congregation and to God. In what is perhaps the film’s most stunning image, we see him alone in his chambers, his face framed in a close-up and backlit by the sunlight pouring in through a window. In complete silence, he whispers Christ’s words, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” As Bergman tracks slowly forward, the fill light on Tomas’ face dims and the sunlight behind him brightens. This motif — darkened faces against brighter backgrounds — recurs throughout as a visual representation of the spiritual crisis being played out.

    Also suffering are Marta (Ingrid Thulin) and Jonas (Max von Sydow). Marta is Tomas’ some time lover, a woman who was raised without the church, but who seems to have found something resembling faith in her selfless love for the pastor. She makes her love known to him in a letter that contains one of the most devastating lines any Christian could hear. “Most of all,” she tells Tomas, “I was struck by your extraordinary indifference to your Jesus Christ.” Jonas is a father and farmer who suffers anxiety over the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. When he visits Tomas for counsel, the pastor is of little help, able only to speak from his own personal disillusion.

    What little change occurs in Tomas throughout the film, however, is not the result of Jonas’ suicide. He seems, finally, to be moved by the words of the church sexton, a crippled man of great faith, who talks to the pastor of Christ’s suffering — not the physical suffering of the cross, but the frustration and loneliness he must have felt when the disciples slept at Gethsemene, and the doubt and pain he must have suffered when God “forsook” him just before his death. Tomas appears to finally relate to Christ as a man who also felt God’s “silence.” I say “appears” because the film’s final image is appropriately ambiguous: Tomas returns to the empty sanctuary to perform another rite, perhaps changed by the events of the day, perhaps hopelessly resigned to simply playing his role.

  • The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant (1972)

    The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant (1972)

    Dir. by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

    Images: Staged entirely in Petra’s bedroom and filmed largely in long takes, using slow tracking and deep focus shots. Mise-en-scene might be described as early-70s, too-hip opulence: bright colors, shag carpets, cutting edge (but impractical and uncomfortable) fashions. Characters are often dwarfed by a Michelangelo-esque wall mural, which is particularly interesting when the nude male figures can be seen (often only from the waist down) between the faces of the actresses. The film “feels” like a play — broken into several (6?) scenes, each clearly delineated by a fade-out/fade-in.

    • • •

    The title character (played by Margit Carstensen) is a successful fashion designer whose happiness has been shattered by the death of her first husband and by a bitter divorce from her second. Her sad existence is reflected by the mise-en-scene: isolated (there are no windows), grotesquely fashionable, and charged with ambivalent sexuality (her bed is the only practical furniture). After relating to a friend the shameful details of her failed marriage, Petra is introduced to Karin (Hanna Schygulla), a beautiful young woman who apparently shares Petra’s bitterness with life and love. The two become lovers, living together for six months until Karin finds success as a model and returns to her husband.

    Petra’s “bitterness” is more likely the frustration of a woman incapable of selfless behavior. She brutally dominates those close to her — including her mother, her daughter, and her silent servant, Marlene — as if she were a spoiled child. When Karin leaves her, for instance, Petra explodes into a gin-fueled tantrum, shattering her tea set and literally rolling on the floor, beating her fists. Petra is a tragic figure, beautifully realized by Carstensen and Fassbinder. With each scene, she slips into a new character, as if a new wig, a new outfit might offer the cure she seeks. She’s at her most honest and sympathetic, though, in the film’s opening and closing scenes, when we find her lying alone in bed without a wig or make-up.

    Perhaps the most interesting character in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is Marlene, the silent and endlessly accommodating servant. She adds to the film yet another layer of strange sexual politics. (With her tight black dresses and straight-backed walk, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that oft-cited lesbian film icon, Miss Danvers from Hitchcock’s Rebecca.) But Marlene is different from the other women in Petra’s life in her refusal to be dominated. Their relationship, though clearly marked as master/servant, is also clearly founded on Marlene’s terms. When, at the end of the film, Petra attempts to lift Marlene onto an equal plane, Marlene refuses, choosing to remain silent and to leave.

    Fassbinder’s experience in the theater is obvious here. In fact, I can think of few cinematic precedents for this film, but was reminded throughout of plays like Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends, another experimental examination of heterosexual frustrations and repressed lesbian desire that also features an all female cast. Also, the constant tapping of Marlene’s typewriter feels like a direct allusion to Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, a wonderful piece of early-20th century expressionism.

  • My Night at Maud’s (1969)

    My Night at Maud’s (1969)

    Dir. by Eric Rohmer

    Images: Complete lack of shot/reverse-shot. Instead, much of the dialogue is framed in static medium shots, some lasting more than a minute. Speaker doesn’t address camera directly, but the effect is the same, involving the viewer as an active participant. “Our” voice is heard from off screen.

    • • •

    Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a young engineer, spies his ideal woman at Sunday Mass. Francoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) is young, attractive, blonde, and, most importantly, a practicing Catholic. Before they have even met, Jean-Louis determines that Francoise will be his wife. His pursuit is interrupted, though, when he happens upon Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a childhood friend who he has not seen in 14 years. The two spend an evening discussing religion and philosophy, then agree to meet again the following day at the home of Maud (Francoise Fabian), a beautiful divorcee who Vidal has been seeing. When the three meet, their conversation again turns to philosophy and religion, particularly the consequences of Pascal’s wager.

    My admittedly superficial understanding of Pascal’s wager: Given even overwhelming odds against the existence of God (say, 100 to 1), we must bet on that one chance. For if God does not exist, and we lose the bet, then our loss is inconsequential. But if God does exist, then our lives gain meaning and our reward is eternal.

    The three main characters are an interesting study in contrast. Vidal sees the wager as a logical tool for explaining everything, from religion to politics. For Jean-Louis, Pascal is too strict, a logician who has sacrificed sensual pleasure (“Pascal never said, ‘This is good,’” Jean-Louis tells his companions). His stance on Pascal is one of the many contradictions in Jean-Louis’ ideas, as he himself adheres strictly to (or at least claims to) the mores of Catholicism. Maud is a sensual being and an atheist, who tires of Jean-Louis’ pretenses and deftly dissects them. When left alone with Maud, Jean-Louis is forced to test his principles, to overcome his temptation in order to remain faithful to Francoise, a woman he has not yet met.

    I have seen several of Rohmer’s films over the last few months, and they never fail to elicit from me the same response. Thirty minutes into them, I’m typically annoyed, either by the characters or by Rohmer’s style. His film worlds are populated by self-absorbed “navel-gazers” (a common criticism) and his use of voice over narration often seems redundant. But, without exception, I have eventually fallen into Rohmer’s rhythms and become fascinated by those same characters. Most impressive is his ability to build a logical dramatic tension into his finales. The end of My Night at Maud’s — a coda that takes place years later, in which we learn that Jean-Louis and Francoise are married and that she may have had an affair with Maud’s husband —felt more forced than most, but the result is the same: despite the film’s slow pacing (or, more likely, because of it) I became anxious for the film’s conclusion, unaware of which way the story would turn until it did.

  • The Eel (1998)

    The Eel (1998)

    Dir. by Shohei Imamura

    Images: Conforms, generally speaking, to standard Hollywood continuity editing. Rare exceptions include the brutal murder scene at the beginning of the film, when blood appears to splatter on the lens. Also, subjective dream sequences are borderline expressionistic, though no more unusual than those typically used in the west. Favorite image: Keiko lowering a boxed lunch from a bridge as Yamashita and a friend motor their small fishing boat past her.

    • • •

    “If my films are messy,” Imamura has said, “this is probably due to the fact that I don’t like too perfect a cinema.” He has also said, “I love all the characters in my films, even the loutish and frivolous ones. I want every one of my shots to express this love.” Strange to find this quote one day after reading a long interview with Wes Anderson, who has said very much the same thing. There’s a strange similarity between The Eel and Anderson’s work—”quirky” is the first (and admittedly meaningless) word that comes to mind.

    Before the film’s opening titles we see Takuro Yamashita (played by Koji Yakusho) brutally murder his wife after learning of her affair. Imamura then cuts to Yamashita’s release from prison, where he has served an eight year sentence. Yamashita begins his new life by opening a barber shop a few blocks from his parole officer in a small town inhabited by the quirky (there’s that word again) characters we’ve come to expect from small films like this. There’s the widowed fisherman, the young man who is trying to attract the attention of extra-terrestrials, the nameless hanger-on who wears an air-filter mask while driving his convertible, the troubled woman who imagines herself a flamenco dancer, and the drunken ex-con who torments our hero with reminders of his past. And there’s Keiko, the beautiful woman who Yamashita discovers passed out in a field after she has attempted suicide because she “fell in love with the wrong man.” She comes to work in the barber shop, where, inevitably, the two must reconcile their feelings for each other with the ghosts of their past.

    I find it nearly impossible to classify this film. Its murder and sex scenes are more graphic than anything we normally find in mainstream Western films, yet The Eel more often feels like a slightly off-kilter romantic comedy. It maintains a refreshingly slow pace, even while depicting moments of slapstick comedy—the film’s climax, for instance. Like Anderson’s films, The Eel is wonderfully entertaining, perhaps because of the filmmaker’s obvious fondness for his characters and because of the sincere respect he shows them.

  • Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

    Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

    Dir. by Agnès Varda

    Images: Constant movement, both of the camera and of objects and people within the frame (for instance, the rocking chair and swing in Cleo’s otherwise minimalist apartment). Jump cuts, though not used so frequently as in Godard. Long, overhead shots of Cleo as she wanders through the park (think Antoine and his classmates in 400 Blows). And, perhaps most importantly, the stares of passer-bys on Paris streets. As the camera assumes Cleo’s subjective perception, we, the audience, feel the eyes of men on us.

    • • •

    Cleo (Corrinne Marchand) is a beautiful, spoiled, self-obsessed pop singer. As the film opens, she is having her fortune told by a tarot reader, who is startled to discover death and cancer in the singer’s immediate future. Cleo is quite upset, as she is waiting to meet with a doctor to discuss the results of a medical examination. The remainder of the 90 minute film chronicles Cleo’s afternoon, from the time that she leaves the tarot reader until her appointment at the hospital two hours later. We see her return home to her fashionably minimalist apartment, where she tends her kittens, does her exercises, and meets with her songwriters. Exasperated by the jokes of her friends and by her own worries, she sets off alone through the streets, cafes, and parks of Paris, running errands with a friend and meeting a young soldier, Antoine, who is to ship off for the battlefields of Algeria on the following morning.

    Cléo de 5 à 7 is very much a film about perception — about looking and being looked at, and the warped sensibilities formed when worth is based solely on appearances. In that sense, it also seems to be very much a woman’s film (and one ripe for the Laura Mulvey treatment). This is most obvious in several scenes when Cleo is walking through crowded streets. Vardas cuts constantly to Cleo’s POV, using documentary-like footage of faces turning their eyes toward the camera. As a male viewer raised on the voyeuristic thrills of male filmmakers, it’s a disconcerting experience — feeling all of those eyes on me. The implication is that such an existence has disfigured Cleo’s self-image and stunted her emotional development. Vardas contrasts Cleo’s superficiality with the level-headed confidence of her friend Dorothee, a nude model who finds joy and satisfaction in her body, but not pride.

    The end of Cléo de 5 à 7 has some very effective moments, but suffers from a too tidy conclusion. While walking through a park, Cleo meets Antoine, a soldier who puts a human face on the war in Algiers, a conflict that is acknowledged throughout the film through radio reportsand overheard conversations. My favorite moment occurs when he accompanies Cleo to her scheduled appointment. As they ride a trolley across town, Antoine pulls a flower from a passing truck and places it in Cleo’s hair. Vardas lingers on the image, allowing 20 or 30 seconds of silence between the actors, their two faces framed tightly in close-up. There’s an awkward (but very charming) embarrassment between them. It’s a great example of what the New Wave directors have done best: capturing honest and instantly identifiable images. I think I would find the film more satisfying had it ended there. But in the final scenes, when Cleo learns that she is ill but will recover with a few months’ treatment, Vardas too neatly resolves a plot that is secondary to the film’s larger concern. My frustration is that Cleo, a woman whose worth has been formed by the opinions of the men around her, seems to have only found redemption through Antoine, another man. Perhaps a minor quibble, but one that leaves me less than satisfied.

  • A Taste of Cherry (1997)

    A Taste of Cherry (1997)

    Abbas Kiarostami

    Images: Long, high-angle shots of Iranian landscapes, as Badii’s Range Rover climbs hills. The sky (until the final scenes) is rarely seen. Badii always remains outdoors, refusing to enter the taxidermist’s museum or the guard’s post. Only signs of civilization/technology are large machines that seem to be designed only for moving dirt and rock from one location to another.

    • • •

    Mr. Badii (played by Homayon Ershadi, an architect friend of Kiarostami) is a middle aged man who spends much of the film driving through the hill country surrounding Tehran, looking for someone to help him commit suicide. He plans to overdose on sleeping pills, then rest in a grave he has already dug for himself. He needs someone to come to the spot the next morning and either bury his body (if he has succeeded) or pull him from the hole (if he has not).

    The film can essentially be broken into three acts. In each, Mr. Badii explains his plan to a potential accomplice: the first, a young Kurdish soldier, who runs frightened from the car; the second, a 30-something Afghani seminarian, who objects to the plan on religious grounds; and the third, an older taxidermist, who agrees to help because he needs the money for a relative. The film ends without revealing Badii’s fate. Instead, we see him lying in his would-be grave, until Kiarostami cuts to high contrast video footage of the director and actors recording the sound of marching troops.

    A Taste of Cherry fits most easily, I think, into the Neo-Realist tradition of DeSica, Rossellini, and Ray, all of whom, like Kiarostami, employ non-professional performers, shoot largely in exteriors, and focus their cameras on “real” life, shunning sentiment in favor of objectivity. Kiarostami obviously adds a PostModern twist here, employing a bit of self-reflexivity to the film—his “it’s only a movie” coda. Some have criticized the move, but I agree with Rosenbaum:

    Kiarostami is representing life in all its rich complexity, reconfiguring elements from the preceding 80-odd minutes in video to clarify what’s real and what’s concocted. Far from affirming that Taste of Cherry is “only” a movie, this wonderful ending is saying, among other things, that it’s also a movie.

    In the interview included on Criterion’s DVD release, Kiarostami claims that he loves films that might cause viewers to doze, but that haunt them when they return home. I laughed out loud when he said this, because I have had that exact experience with A Taste of Cherry. I’ve been wrestling all morning with that old taxidermist. If Kiarostami is implying through him that life is worth living because of sensual pleasure (the taste of cherries) or because of human relationships (his family), then the film doesn’t really work for me. But hearing the taxidermist’s “tidy” story sandwiched between the conversation with the seminarian and the coda makes it all much more interesting and impressive. It’s that dialogue between faith, humanism, and (possibly) aesthetics that speaks to me personally.

  • Broom of the System (1987)

     

    By David Foster Wallace

    Lenore Beadsman’s life is complicated. The 24 year old heir to the Beadsman baby food empire struggles to balance her career as a call center operator — where the lines of communication seem perpetually crossed — with her, um, complex relationship with her boss, Rick Vigorous, of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing. She also worries about her younger bother, who refers to himself as the Antichrist; her bird, Vlad the Impaler, which has a tendency to curse and prophesy; and her grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein who has suddenly gone missing from her retirement home.

    The majority of Broom of the System, first published in 1987, takes place in the future (1990, actually), which allows Wallace the freedom to distort the otherwise recognizable landscape of his northern Ohio. Here, popular culture has literally shaped life: an entire city has, in fact, been designed to resemble Jayne Mansfield from above. College students meet to watch Bob Newhart and play drinking games; others gather at a bar built around a Gilligan’s Island theme. Wallace, a former philosophy major, had obviously been reading Baudrillard, as he has great linguistic fun interrogating the simulacrum — the copies of copies of copies that have come to replace actual experience in contemporary American culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a man-made blot intended to serve as “A point of reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self.”

    Wallace’s first novel, written as his MFA thesis, is obviously heavily indebted to (but not entirely derivative of) Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Both are detective stories of a Post-Modern, epistemological bent, more concerned with the language that constructs meaning — both in their stories and in the world — than with the literal “truth” that their heroines pursue. And both authors push the conceit to hilariously absurd ends. Wallace even one-ups Pynchon’s famous final scene — Oedipa Maas sits, waiting like we do, for the mystery to be revealed — by actually ending Broom of the System mid-sentence. It’s perhaps too easy of a trick, and one that must surely make the more mature Wallace cringe, but it feels perfectly appropriate here.

  • Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

    Zora Neale Hurston

    In the opening chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God, an elderly African-American woman sits down with her granddaughter and explains the main lesson she has learned during her difficult life, one that has spanned from the final years of slavery to the more promising days of the twentieth century:

    Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nuthin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.

    When Zora Neale Hurston’s greatest novel was rediscovered in the mid-1970s, readers once again heard voices that for years had been silenced by neglect. Hurston, a college educated anthropologist, spent the early years of her adult life collecting stories from the South, “folklore” that she would then transform and elevate into art. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written, Hurston has a “Negro way of saying.” By writing in the dialect of rural and often poor African-Americans, a device that for decades had been employed famously by white writers such as Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hurston took ownership of that voice, made it authentic, and gave it poetry.

    Through the course of the novel, we watch that little girl, who once listened so attentively to her grandmother’s advice, grow into a woman capable of ideas and feelings beyond the elder’s realm of experience. Janie Crawford is a beautiful young woman of mixed race, who was startled to discover as a child that she was different from the white children with whom she was raised. Hurston frequently emphasizes Janie’s light skin and her long, soft hair that make her a constant object of desire by men, both black and white. And it’s through her relationships with those men that Hurston charts Janie’s coming of age.

    As a teen, Janie is married off to Logan Killicks, a much older white man who cares for his wife (in his own way), but realizes that he will never keep her. Their marriage is arranged by Janie’s grandmother, a former slave whose notions of happiness revolve around wealth and security. If the black woman is “de mule uh de world,” then the best she can hope for is some comfort among the toil. For Janie, who at first assumes that love is the inevitable product of marriage, her life with Killicks provides a brutal awakening. Hurston writes: “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

    Janie leaves Killick to follow Jody Starks, a boisterous and ambitious young man, to Eatonville, where he plans to become mayor of the all black town. The couple spend twenty years together there, watching distantly as Jody’s dreams come to fruition. But despite their superficial success, Janie fails to find either love or contentment with Jodie, whose condescending treatment of her and the other townsfolk leave little distinction between himself and her first husband. Hurston transforms Janie’s dreams of a fuller life into a pear tree and a cool breeze: “Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness.”

    After Jody’s death, Janie once again leaves, this time with a younger man named Vergible Woods. “Tea Cake” takes his new bride to the swamps of Florida, where they work the fields as migrant farmers. As some critics have noted, Janie’s path is, in some ways, a journey into “blackness,” a gradual move from white to black community. With Tea Cake and the other workers, Janie finally finds love, fellowship, and self-realization. Hurston’s description of their love-making — the only such description in the book — is passionate and beautiful: “He drifted into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” Janie’s awakening is so wonderfully rendered that even Tea Cake’s sudden death, though undeniably moving, feels less tragic than would be expected. Janie returns to Eatonville, to its staring eyes and gossiping mouths, with remarkable grace.

    Of course, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a landmark novel because of its unsentimental exposure of a black woman’s inner life — and it’s probably the first and still the best American novel to do so — but what most amazes me about it is the beauty of it all. Hurston’s prose at times is awesome (I hesitate to use that adjective only because it has been tarnished by misuse). She writes:

    There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

    And later, when describing a hurricane:

    The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

    For obvious reasons, I will never be able to fully understand the experience of an African-American woman. I can, however touch something of our shared experience through art like Hurston’s. What better reason do you need?

  • O Pioneers (1913)

    By Willa Cather

    Willa Cather was nearly 40 years old in 1913 when she published O Pioneers!, her second novel. It’s difficult, then, to overlook the obvious similarities between her own life and that of her heroine, Alexandra Bergson. At this point, both women had devoted their lives to a single pursuit, sacrificing personal relationships — or, at least those of a romantic nature — for the cause. As she left no autobiography, no memoir, and few letters, we can only speculate about Cather’s personal life. Some have postulated that she was a closeted lesbian, but, as with all such claims, it is only that: speculation. What we do know is that she never married or had children, and that she devoted the majority of her energies during her adult life to writing and to seeing those writings published. It was quite a feat: she left a legacy of 13 novels and more than 60 short stories, which have helped to secure her place now in the company of her more famous contemporaries: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.

    O Pioneers! is a wonderful novel and one that, I must admit, I have put off reading for years simply because its title has always reminded me of those sentimental prairie novels that twelve year old girls seem so fond of. That excuse, as unforgivably lame as it sounds, is not completely unjustified. Like much of Cather’s work, O Pioneers! is inspired by the years that she and her family spent in Nebraska, where she lived among Scandinavian, French, and Bohemain immigrants and where she witnessed first hand the back-breaking work of plains farming. What separates this novel from the pack, though, is Cather’s remarkable blend of lyricism and honest insight. O Pioneers! is an interesting transition piece, a novel caught between the Midwest naturalism of Hamlin Garland and the epistemological experiments of the modernists. While the fate of many of Cather’s characters are determined by forces beyond their control, the novelist holds on to some hope — a hope for real personal happiness and a more perfect future.

    The Bergsons are typical of the immigrant families Cather had known in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The mother and father are first-generation Americans who settled with the hope of owning land and of securing better lives for their children. John Bergson dies young, too soon to experience the fruits of his labors, but soon enough, for “he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.” His children, however, personify the American Dream. Alexandra, through hard work and ingenuity, breaks the land and watches it flourish. Lou and Oscar enjoy their wealth, marry well, and find success in business and politics. The youngest, Emil, graduates from college, sees the world, and welcomes opportunity and freedom, the dreams of every immigrant.

    Their lives, however, do not completely escape the suffering and alienation that so preoccupied artists at the turn of the century. Like Cather, Alexandra chooses to sacrifice her own love and happiness to a single-minded pursuit, in her case the education and unrealized potential of her brother, Emil. It is a “choice,” Cather argues, that many women are forced to make. She captures this plight in a beautiful image of Marie, the Berson’s young neighbor, whose loveless marriage and hopeless pining for Emil slowly destroys her vitality. The passage is typical of Cather’s preoccupation with the connection between her characters and the land they work:

    The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain, until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.

    It’s an ominous passage that prepares us for the tragic end to Emil’s and Marie’s love. Separated by the laws of their land and their churches, they die too soon, killed by Marie’s jealous husband. Cather describes their deaths in brutal detail, but refuses to cast blame. Here, Alexandra becomes a naturalist heroine and Cather’s surrogate: “Being what he was, she felt, [Marie’s husband] could not have acted otherwise.”

    But despite the novel’s tragedy, Cather distinguishes herself from Norris, Dreiser, and Crane by painting the conclusion of O Pioneers! with a tint of optimism. Broken and beaten by Emil’s death, whose fate seems to make her life’s efforts futile, Alexandra is restored by the return of Carl, the man she has loved since childhood. What I find most interesting about this turn is that their saving relationship is built on selfless love, a conceit that her more cynical and disillusioned contemporaries would have likely scoffed as a romantic fiction. It works here, though, saving the novel from the reductive determinism of so much naturalist fiction.