Reading Notes: Weimar, A Cultural History by Walter Laqueur

Weimar: A Cultural History by Walter Laqueur. 308 pp. Perigree, 1974 [1980].

1.

The four note motif running through the chorus of The Threepenny Opera’s ‘Barbara Song’ is a crowded bunch of notes – it moves like a dancer stepping on his own toes – and seems to be just about the most cynical, corrupt, sleazy and sexually knowing four-note motif in music.

“Nice chaps” who knew “how to treat a girl with due respect” once tried to court the young Polly Peachum. But Polly was armed with a code of chaste behaviour that, in Joanna von Koczian’s 1958 performance, is explained first with a facetious tone of wide-eyed sincerity and then, in the next chorus, with a shocking cynical cackle:

Ja, da kann man sich doch nicht nun hinlegen!
Ja, da muß man kalt und herzlos sein.
Ja, da könnte so viel geschehen,
Ja, da gibt’s überhaupt nun: Nein.

(Oh, you can’t lie back, you must stay cold at heart!
Oh you must not let your feelings show.
Oh, whenever you feel it might start,
Ah, then your only answer’s: No.)

Dropping the punchline to her hilariously sick joke, Polly reveals to her horrified parents the reason why this code has allowed her to be seduced by the murderous criminal Macheath (aka Mac the Knife): he was “someone who didn’t ask at all…as he’d no idea of treating a girl with due respect, I could not tell him ‘No.’”

[The 'Barbara Song' scene from G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film.]

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s vision of Victorian Soho – a doppelgänger for Berlin of the nineteen-twenties – is totally corrupt. Polly’s father Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum is an entrepreneur who supplies to the city’s beggars costumes and prosthetics “that will touch the hardest of hearts.” Macheath’s best friend is the Police Sheriff Tiger Brown. This crooked pair remember army days in India in the ‘Cannon Song’:

If it should rain one night
And they should chance to sight
Pallid or swarthy faces
Of uncongenial races
They’ll maybe chop them up to make some beefsteak tartare!

Here we have the Weimar Republic as it is lodged in the popular imagination: a place of sexual debauchery, poverty, corruption, violence and decadence. The idea of decadence – not just in the moral sense, but also in the sense of the end of civilisation, a doom – was of course prominent on both right and left amid the political and economic shambles of postwar Germany; according to Walter Laqueur in his Weimar: A Cultural History, it was a sense of finis Germaniae. But surely this sense of doom is also a retrospective attribution on our part; Weimar culture is coloured by our knowledge of the horror that was to totally destroy it.

The period left behind a mass of cultural relics, much of it still vital: The Magic Mountain (1924), The Threepenny Opera (1928), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922), the work of Kokoschka and Kandinsky. The Weimar settings of films such as Cabaret (1972, based on Christopher Isherwood’s wonderful Sally Bowles stories), Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog (1992), even Ingmar Bergman’s maligned Serpent’s Egg (1978), as well as the performances of cabaret revival singers like Ute Lemper, have maintained the milieu in the public imagination.

Walter Laqueur calls Weimar “the first truly modern culture”. His book covers the establishment of the Republic after World War I; the intellectual hostility to the Republic from both the factional idealistic left and the chauvenistic idealistic right; novels, plays, music, art and architecture; university life; operetta, coffeehouses, cinema, jazz and cabarets. Of course “as much a part of the Zeitgeist as the Bauhaus, The Magic Mountain, Professor Heidegger and Dr Caligari,” writes Laqueur, “[were] knickerbockers (even Thomas Mann wore them), mass tourism, the growth of department-stores, the death mask of l’Inconnue de la Seine, the hit songs of the period, occultism, nudism, the immense impact of radio and the cinema.”

To the left intellectuals, the democratic Weimar consitution did not compare to their utopian vision of society and had to be scorned. As in many other countries, the left was viciously factional and hence politically ineffective. Inevitably there was much hatred and squabbling between the communists and the Social Democrats.

On the other hand, the right intellectuals (they resented the description) viewed the new constitution as an unpatriotic insult and Weimar culture as decadence and degenerancy: kulturbolschewismus (cultural Bolshevism). This was a vague term “assuming in all earnest that Dada, Brecht’s refrain Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral [“Feed us before you preach to us”], or Walter Mehring’s Merchant of Berlin represented the aesthetic theory and the moral philosophy of Marxism-Leninism.” In reality the contemporaneous Soviet attitude to the arts was equally anti-Modern (this was the period of girl-meets-tractor socialist realism). But Laqueur concludes that these intellectuals ultimately played little part in the rise of the Nazi thugs. The Nazis were bluntly anti-intellectual.

2.

According to Laqueur Berlin was not the sole cultural locus of Weimar Germany. Frankfurt, Munich, Dresden, Hamburg, Breslau and Leipzig were each major centres for arts and ideas. And German literature at the time had “no spiritual or geographical centre” – not even, as might be expected, at the famous Romanische Café in Berlin which is evoked as a “literary caravanserai” populated by school reformers, revolutionaries, thieves, junkies, vegetarians, and the salonkommunisten, a group that included such fascinating characters as the great Dada satirist and painter Georg Grosz.

Terrace of the Romanische Café, Berlin (Photo: H. Hoffmann)

Laqueur puts the great Thomas Mann in the category of ‘Republican Classics,’ those who were “real representatives of the spirit of the new Republic.” Mann was a bürger, “a conservative socialist in politics, a conservative innovator in literature,” who did not assume the role of “educator or prophet.” Major writers of the 1920s included Stefan George and Hermann Hesse, but those who best captured the zeitgeist were Heinrich Mann (elder brother of Thomas), Jakob Wassermann, Alfred Döblin (whose Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is “unrivalled in world literature as a symphony of big city life”), Arnold Zweig, Leonard Frank, and Lion Feuchtwanger.

But it was the stage that was most expressive of the spirit of the age: most notably in the productions of Max Reinhardt, as well as Reinhardt’s antithesis Leopold Jessner and the proletarian theatre impresario Erwin Piscator.

Bertolt Brecht – “anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment, anti-respectability” and for all his Marxism “basically not a political animal” – wrote Baal (1923), In The Jungle of Cities (1923) and with Kurt Weill the very successful Threepenny Opera and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny (1930). Laqueur is somewhat puzzled by Brecht’s impact and endurance: he feels the plays are inconsistent in quality, and Brecht’s idea of “Non-Aristotelean epic theatre,” which was “meant to show man not just in his individuality but in his dependence on society,” did not take off. Laqueur’s praise goes to Carl Zuckmayer’s obscure comedy The Captain of Köpenick (1931).

On the limitations of looking to literature to explain Weimar, Laqueur concludes: “It is possible to understand the spirit of the twenties without George, Hesse, The Magic Mountain; it cannot be understood without reference to the mood of the survivors of Langemark, Verdun and the Somme.”

3.

Although we tend to associate Weimar with the apex of the Expressionist movement, “periods of cultural history hardly ever coincide with those of political history,” Laqueur explains. “Roughly speaking, the great break with cultural tradition occurred, in Germany as elsewhere, between 1905 and 1914.”

Expressionism, as defined by Laqueur:

…totally rejected aesthetic standards: the painters were fascinated by ugliness; the composers threw harmony overboard, gradually moving towards dissonance; the poets and playwrights were preoccupied by the madness of great cities, parenticide and rats emerging from rotting corpses…underlying all this was the wish to shock a self-satisfied, satiated world and the artists’ enemies, which included the state, the middle classes, the philistines and authority in general…Beauty was a lie, ugliness was true, because it depicted man in all his weakness and spiritual poverty. The purpose of art was not to cater to aesthetic taste but to give expression to the most basic religious, individual and social experiences.

Laqueur considers it “a movement in the Romantic tradition, perhaps the most extreme form of Romanticism that ever existed.”

Germany had world-class orchestras and conductors such as Furtwangler, Klemperer, Walter, Kleiber, Toscanini. But musical revolution had occured before the war in Vienna and Paris: Debussy’s impressionism, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Schönberg’s atonality. By the time of the Republic even Richard Strauss was a “classic rather than a revolutionary.”

Likewise with visual art: the most important artists of the Weimar period had already exhibited before the war. The Dresden group Die Brücke (centred around Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Ludwig Kirchner and Emile Nolde) painted ambivalent city scenes that reflected the same malaise as the Expressionist poets. But after 1913 the group split and the Expressionist mode was to diminish, particularly in the work of Schmidt-Rottluff and Heckel. Still, the work of alumni of Die Brücke as well as that of Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Carl Hofer, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix and (not mentioned by Laqueur) George Scholz has left a remarkable imaginative vision of the Weimar era:

Georg Grosz, Suicide, 1926

Otto Dix, The Salon 1, 1921

Georg Scholz, Self-Portrait before an Advertisement Pillar, 1926

The circus and carnival world had its fascination for artists such as Max Beckmann:

Max Beckmann, Carnival (Fastnacht), 1920

Then there is the real avant garde:

Wassily Kandinsky, White Cross, 1922

The working class never took to this avant garde; as Paul Klee said, “Un trägt kein Volk” (“We are not rooted in the people and are not supported by it”). Modern art, particularly work by Kandinsky and Klee, was denounced by critics as “gangsterism, un-German, a ferment of decomposition, Bolshevist.” But the greatest attacks were aimed at modern architecture, particularly towards Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school. Ironically, it was this architecture that became Weimar Germany’s most enduring legacy in the rest of the world.

Why was Weimar Germany such a dynamic place for the arts? Laqueur concludes that the Weimar era had “an abundance of talent as well as of sources of conflict, combined with the political freedom which made experimentation possible.” Weimar: A Cultural History is a useful cultural survey of an era in twentieth century history that inevitably continues to fascinate.

[I have quoted from both the Desmond I. Vesey/Eric Bentley and Ralph Mannheim/John Willett English translations of The Threepenny Opera. The Otto Dix and Georg Scholz paintings are from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s website. The Georg Grosz painting is from an online article by Mario Vargas Llosa.]

[Postscript 7 March 2008: Eric Hobsbawm's essay on his youth in Weimar Germany appeared on the London Review of Books website on 24 January. It is much recommended. Hobsbawm in turn praises Eric D. Weitz's recent book Weimar: Promise and Tragedy.]

Australian Election ‘07 part 2: Howard’s legacy

Eleven years in power: Downer, Howard, Costello.

[UPDATE: John Howard's Liberal-National Coalition lost the Australian election on 23 November 2007.  In a particularly satisfying result, Howard lost his own seat of Bennelong. Treasurer Peter Costello has stepped out of the new opposition leadership race. The end of a dark era in Australian politics.

Below is a pre-election recap of John Howard's long reign in Canberra]

The Howard government drastically accelerated the “free-market” reforms that were begun by Labor during the Hawke (1983-1991) and Keating (1991-1996) governments. This meant mass privatisation and deregulation, as well as the destruction of the existing Industrial Relations system. Union power has dwindled to the point where ‘union’ is now a dirty word to throw at the Labor Party. Howard’s economic model is essentially Thatcherist. Like Thatcher, he has had the long-time support of Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd. The difference in Australia is that we have an extremely concentrated news media; just one major daily newspaper in Sydney (the Herald) is not owned by Murdoch.

Socially, Howard has assumed the persona of a conservative traditionalist. He has interminably invoked a mythical Australianness through the imagery of Gallipoli, Don Bradman, and vague concepts such as “mateship.” He has adopted Geoffrey Blainey’s contemptuous expression “the Black Armband view of history” to attack those undermining the glory of Australia’s colonial past for its racial atrocities. This ‘man-of-the-people’ image has proved popular in contrast to Paul Keating’s perceived persona as a snob in favour of multiculturalism, the arts, native title rights, French clocks, etc. There is a widespread hatred in the community for what are called urban ‘latte-sipping’ or ‘the chardonnay-swilling elites’ (these days, those are the ‘elites’ with no power and no money). See Marian Sawer’s Financial Review essay on this phenomenon.

Much of Howard’s political success came in his response to the unexpected popularity of the independent MP Pauline Hanson, whose maiden speech in federal parliament was the big political story of 1996.

Pauline Hanson

Hanson ranted about the supposed “privileges Aboriginals enjoy over other Australians.” She also said:

“I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.”

While much of the public was disgusted by Hanson’s fascistic politics, it turned out there was a large community of disenchanted working class voters receptive to such ideas. Another of Hanson’s appeals was her image as a renegade politician free of the spin that had made Australian politics entirely removed from everyday voters. Hanson launched a political party, One Nation, that did very well in the Queensland state election of 1998 (11 seats or 25% of the vote). It claimed 8.43% of the House of Representative vote in the 1998 Federal Election, although this did not win it any seats (the party won a single seat in the Senate).

Howard’s views on race and immigration had been controversial in the 1980s, and in the wake of Hanson’s success, his policies were able to explicitly capitalise on this apparent racist and xenophobic sentiment among some working class voters. We saw the freezing of the Aboriginal reconciliation process until it essentially disappeared from the public sphere. Asylum seekers were held in detention centres for years as their claims were (and in many cases are still being) ‘processed’. In the lead-up to the 2001 election, Howard refused to allow 400 Afghan refugees rescued by the Norwegian ship Tampa to land on Australian soil to claim asylum.

Refugees onboard the Tampa, 2001

Just after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, Howard defamed another group of refugees by claiming they had thrown their children into the sea in an ruthless ruse to be rescued by the Australian Navy. Although this claim was highly dubious at the time (and later proven to be a complete fabrication), Howard’s hard line on “queue-jumpers” was a major component of his election victory. A Liberal Party slogan was: We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come. Howard’s explicit race politics effectively rendered One Nation an obsolete political force.

Of course, it makes no economic sense for the working class to have turned to Howard. But putting aside the racially-motivated vote of the Hansonites, the religion of aspirationalism has taken hold in much of the public imagination. People think of themselves on an even playing field that simply rewards hard work with material success. So it has been easier in this climate for Howard to push through his anti-worker reforms. In 1997 the government introduced a ‘Work For The Dole’ scheme (playing on the great Australian myth of the “Dole Bludger”). A regressive Goods & Services Tax (GST) was introduced in 2000. A “Welfare To Work” package in 2005 made it much more difficult to access welfare. A “Voluntary Student Unionism” bill was passed to destroy union-funded political activism on campus (VSU also had other, detrimental, consequences for students). And the radical “Work Choices” legislation undermines many decades of struggle to now favour the rights of employers over employees. It may be “Work Choices” that has finally lost Howard the working class swing votes he needs.

Howard and Bush, 16 May 2006

Perhaps the most shameful aspect of Howard’s reign is his complete concord with President George W. Bush on the so-called “War On Terror”. This led to our military involvement in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the basis of fradulent “Weapons of Mass Destruction” propaganda. The massive anti-war demonstrations of February 2003 signalled widespread public dissent but Howard managed reelection in 2004, surely in part because of Labor’s unpopular candidate Mark Latham.

Howard is the only Prime Minister in Australian history to run a campaign promising not to stay for a full term. If he wins tomorrow he will hand over to Peter Costello mid-term.

Deception and outright lies have been a constant in the Howard years. Right now the Liberals are under attack for a shameless attempt at ‘ratfucking’: distributing fraudulent political leaflets from the fictional ‘Australian Islamic Federation’ in one Sydney electorate “implying the Labor opposition supports terrorism” (BBC News Story). Here is a PDF copy of the leaflet itself. David Marr at the Herald writes of this event in the content of the Howard Government’s long-term race politics.

The polls are showing a Labor victory. I’m cautiously optimistic this is the end of Howard. Kevin Rudd has played the campaign very safe and boring. He’s socially and economically conservative. Perhaps that is what is needed to win. But I have some worry he will ape Tony Blair and lead the Labor Party further to the right to trample all over the Liberal’s ground and render them a spent political force. Why shouldn’t I be worried? Even Murdoch’s philistine Daily Telegraph is now backing Labor.

Still, my recommendation is to vote Labor in the House of Representatives and Greens #1 above the line for the Senate: (Greens Website).

Film Notes Revisited #3: The Barefoot Contessa (1954)

The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954)

The Barefoot Contessa has never received an excess of unqualified praise and tends to be passed over for Mankiewicz’s 1950 film All About Eve (although Truffaut and the Cahiers crowd did consider Contessa a major film). Is there another Hollywood film of this era whose tone is so deeply infused with such weary cynicism? We have a Cinderella story that turns nasty bound up with the bleakest satire of Hollywood and the ‘international set’. We have Bogart, very near the end, at his most sardonic.

We begin in the rain at the funeral of the Contessa Maria Torlato-Favrini aka Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner) in the Italian seaside town of Rapallo. Hollywood writer-director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) recalls her short career. We flashback three years to a nightclub in Madrid. The humourless movie mogul Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) is on a talent search. Harry, just on the wagon and otherwise unemployable, is under contract and forced to travel around with Kirk’s entourage. They are a depressing lot. Harry tells us that Kirk’s sweaty-faced public relations man Oscar Muldoon (the wonderful Edmund O’Brien) does “many things, unrelated and not public at all.” Kirk’s mistress, a cynical blonde named Myrna (occupation: “she travelled”), wonders what kind of champagne is Spanish. The quartet are there to investigate Maria, who is working as a dancer. But Maria is surprisingly inaccessible and shows little interest in a Hollywood career or Kirk’s millions. It is Harry’s trustworthiness that succeeds where Oscar’s obsequiousness fails. Maria agrees to make a screen test in Rome.

Everybody agrees she is a star-in-waiting. Out of decency (and as a kind of personal revenge) Harry engineers the situation so that Kirk is unable to take control of Maria. Her subsequent career is a Cinderella story, but she never succumbs to a Prince Charming, preferring affairs with the sort of men Harry describes as “mean and dirty”. During air raids in her childhood, you see, she would burrow her barefooted self in the dirt, and this earthiness has never left her. For some reason Harry is angry that she is “half in the dirt, half out” and cannot decide which world she wants to live in. It is never made very clear why Harry has such disgust for Maria’s “mean and dirty” men. It is not a matter of jealousy, and these men (flamenco guitarists, etc) are never once shown doing anything bad to her.

During a terrific though over-the-top Hollywood party scene, Kirk has an argument with the hedonistic South American millionaire Alberto Bravado (Marius Goring). It’s “Goliath against Goliath.” Bravano points out their only difference: Kirk is a hypocrite. “I waste my money with pleasure,” Bravano says, “but yours is just a waste.” Maria becomes the trophy in this clash of egos. She’s having none of this but (in a bit of a plot stretch) ultimately agrees to join Bravano’s Mediterranean yachting party to humiliate Kirk.

At this point in the film, Harry disappears and the narration is picked up by Oscar, who has defected to Bravano’s entourage. There is a segment attacking the ‘international set’, those fallen European aristocrats and American tycoons who congregate on the French Riviera every season, “the way an annual fungus gathers on a beautiful tree.” They’re a bored and boring bunch. What must be Mankiewicz’s own sardonic voice is channelled through Oscar’s narration but almost entirely without the mediation of Oscar’s character. Still, it’s all very witty: a deposed king is labelled a “pretender”, but it is observed that “in a world of pretence, a pretender is the best thing you can be.”

Maria is courted by the handsome and brooding Italian Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi). The Cinderella story is back on track. But still Maria yearns to slip off the glass slipper and get her feet dirty. She wants to dance with the peasants outside the castle at her wedding. She is told that would spoil their fun. “Difficult to believe living in this day and age,” she says. World-weary Harry is amused. “What makes you think we’re living in this day and age?”

But after the wedding the Count reveals a war wound has left him impotent (a Sun Also Rises touch). This is told with Hays Code ambiguity. Maria, hoping to solve her husband’s anguish over the impending end of his noble line, decides to fall pregnant to a mean and dirty servant. The Count murders her.

If The Barefoot Contessa is not a truly great film, it seems to be for the first ten minutes (the Madrid nightclub scene). But there is a definite obscurity in the relationship between the Harry and Maria characters. Despite Bogart and Gardner’s chemistry the scenes feel a little emasculated, as if Mankiewicz was not prepared to fully dramatize the relationship. They speak a private language.

For his characters Mankiewicz seems to have drawn on the lives of, among others, Rita Hayworth, Aly Kahn, Howard Hughes, and Porfirio Rubirosa. That anyway is the milieu. Fellini would pick up another side of it for La Dolce Vita (1960). According to Kenneth L. Geist’s biography Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (New York, Scribners, 1978), Howard Hughes’ threat of a libel suit forced the director to authorise last-minute changes to his film. TWA flew editor William Hornbeck all over the world to re-record bits of the narration. You can hear the shift in the quality of Bogart’s voice in some sections. Kirk Edwards was changed from a “Texas tycoon” to a “Wall Street lion”. Sequences were cut, including one of Kirk being chased out of the Roman villa in which he has imprisoned Maria (apparently based on a real incident involving Hughes and Gina Lollobrigida). These cuts probably damaged the film. I’d love to track down a copy of the original script. I hope those scenes someday emerge from a vault and are included as DVD extras.

The structure of Contessa resembles Citizen Kane – a postmortem account of a life through multiple viewpoints. That is not surprising because Joseph L.’s older brother was Kane screenwriter Herman J.. As far as I know it is the only screenplay by Joe Mankiewicz from his own source material, and was to have originally been a novel (a tantalising thought).

[Original review: 22 November 2001; Revised: 21 November 2007]

[Trailer]

TV Notes Revisited #1: My Three Sons – ‘Robbie’s Underground Movie’ (1966)

Repeats of 1960s American sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and Get Smart were a staple of Sydney television in the eighties and nineties. Colour episodes of My Three Sons ran for occasional stretches on Channel 7 on weekday afternoons at least up until the late nineties. I remember because the show was a welcome distraction during my HSC study. A bit of kitsch goes a long way when you’re procrastinating. Some years later I found an episode at the end of an old VHS cassette. I reviewed this episode (just one of 380 filmed between 1960 and 1972) for the Internet Movie Database under the alias ‘Alvy Singer’. I’ve been amused to see my review referenced online over the years, including at www.tv.com. Well, I claim authorship. Here is a totally revised text.

My Three Sons, series 7, episode #7.7 or no. 223: ‘Robbie’s Underground Movie’ (first broadcast on CBS 27th October 1966).

“A typical family, prisoners of conformity, mechanically going through drab routines, ignoring what’s true, human and important.”

As a depiction of idealised middle-class US suburbia in the 1960s, My Three Sons is a charming artefact. I’m going to look in detail at one specific episode written by John McGreevey and directed by James V. Kern. ‘Robbie’s Underground Movie’ is a satire of non-conformism and avant garde art, and by the same means a defense of Hollywood mass entertainment and family values.

Steve Douglas (Fred MacMurray) returns home from work one evening to consume the proverbial milk and cookies (MacMurray had enough star clout to insist that his season’s worth of scenes be filmed out of sequence in one easy hit, which surely meant a massive daily dose of milk and cookies). Not-too-bright eldest son Robbie (Don Grady) announces that he is taking a film course at college as a way to make time with a girl named Gina Rose (Linda Foster). Robbie has been converted to her anti-establishment philosophy of “validity” and “honesty”, in opposition to the middle-class suburban life as lived by the Douglas family, a “daily denial of reality, of beauty…the incubation of conformity and hypocrisy.”

Yes, Robbie has been brainwashed by crazy ‘artist’ types. With breathtaking naïvety he dares to plan a film criticising the suburban utopia of Bryant Park, Illinois. He will contrast “drab, meaningless family routine” with “freedom, honesty, the unconventional,” as personified by the nubile Gina Rose. It’s not amazing that Robbie is so easily led away from the path of common sense, even if he’s had a lifetime of brainwashing in televisionland. Really he’s just an all-American guy thinking with his dick. That’s okay as long as he learns a lesson in the end (i.e. don’t think with your dick). We are never in doubt that the social order will be restored to perfect harmony because we are assailed by repeated cuts to Steve’s gentle, affable, amused, self-satisfied, tolerant, seen-it-all-before grin. I imagine MacMurray simply filmed a stockpile of these reaction shots for the editor to splice in at random.

In class, after viewing a student film focusing on nothing but a dripping faucet (title: What We Anticipate Seldom Occurs), Robbie dares the opinion that “nothing happened of a probing nature.” The other students, especially Gina Rose, roll their eyes and talk about unrealised potential: “It speaks with muted eloquence of our common frustrations!”. Well, Robbie is a dolt. But he might be on the money because these pseudo-experimental films by pseudo-pseudo-intellectuals are scored with Frank Devol’s zippy Disneyesque music as opposed to, say, Cecil Taylor. The next film is four minutes of blank celluloid by an overzealous student who asks the audience to “project its own images”. I’d like to think this is a reference to John Cage’s 4′33″ because that would show some awareness on the part of the writer of what he is trying to parody.

So, the students like “the more artistic efforts, far above the taste of the masses,” sneers Steve. It’s true. Gina Rose moans that “every artist has to contend with the masses”. Well, damn it, Steve is gonna defend the worth of “that commercial junk” made by Hollywood for the common taste. Junk like My Three Sons, I’m guessing. You can almost hear the indignant pounding of the typewriter keys.

There’s a subplot. The chairman of the board kindly rewards Steve for the overtime he has been putting in at the office: a present of two kite-tailed guppies. Corporate America is a real nice place, you know. Robbie gets the idea to put the fish in his movie (“symptomatic of the meaningless swim round and round”). Eternally haughty Uncle Charlie (William Demarest) also volunteers his services as an actor, doing his best Eye-talian.

Sanity is restored when Robbie’s student film is completed and it dawns on him that “the family pictures turned out real and honest” while Gina Rose’s sequences are “phoney”. It’s phoney alright. The makers of the show don’t seem to have had a clue about what was actually happening in mid-1960s America. Gina Rose is no pretentious pale-skinned beatnik avant garde film student chick of 1966. She wears the same bland clothes as her peers except when she appears, for no real reason, in a French Can-Can outfit (it’s as if they raided the CBS costume department and grabbed the first thing that came to hand). Instead of a dimly-lit coffee house with a folk singer or poet in the background, she hangs out at an all-American diner drinking milkshakes with Robbie – or ‘Robert’, as she insists on calling him, a strange formality for someone so desperate to reject conformity. This fantasy of a ‘non-conformist’ says a lot about Hollywood in 1966: There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear. Fred MacMurray’s reaction shot is the epitome of tolerant establishment smugness, but it has the hint of a snarl of total contempt – not an uncommon reaction to youth culture as the sixties blew up with anti-Vietnam protests and inner-city race riots.

Get Smart, with its occasional frugging party scenes and dopey beatniks, was much more aware of what it was satirising and therefore much funnier (the episode titles are a good indication: ‘I Am Curiously Yellow’, ‘Closely Watched Planes’, `The Mild Ones’). The corny depiction of ‘Beatniks’ in mainstream American culture, particularly 1960s TV, has been examined by Outré Gallery Press in a book called Beatsville.

My Three Sons is good fun for those who like television with an irony deficiency.

[A CBS promo c. 1966-67]

[Original review: 15 November 2001; revised: 19 November 2007]

Film Notes Revisited #2: Shadows and Fog (1992)

 

Shadows and Fog (Woody Allen, 1992).

Tonight I watched Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German (2006), a self-conscious pastiche of wartime Hollywood melodrama, particularly Casablanca, and noirish postwar moral quandaries like The Third Man. I have a soft spot for this sort of thing. It put me in the mood to revisit my thoughts on Woody Allen’s twentieth full-length feature film, Shadows and Fog.

Allen’s work is regularly derivative of European cinema, appropriating plots and imagery from the classic movies of (usually) Fellini or Bergman. But only very occasionally does Allen indulge in an all-out genre pastiche. These films are rarely well-received. A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) retreads not only Shakespeare but also Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) is a noirish private eye spoof in the Bob Hope vein with a bit of orientalist hypnotism. In Shadows and Fog, based on Allen’s one-act stage play Death (included in his 1975 collection Without Feathers), Allen works with the German Expressionism of Pabst and Murnau with dashes of Kafka, Weill and Brecht, and Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel. We are in a stylised early-twentieth century middle European town, probably Weimar Germany, although there is no attempt to recreate an exact place or time. The characters speak English and the currency is dollars.

A crazed killer is on the loose and the enraged citizens of the town are taking the law into their own hands. Kleinman (Allen), a small and timid Jewish ‘little man’, is woken in the middle of the night by the vigilantes and told he is part of a ‘plan’. Like a Joseph K., Kleinman can never discover what this plan actually involves. He is thrust into the dark, claustrophobic, confusing streets, the fog wafting in on a chill wind. “They say the killer has the strength of ten men,” whines Kleinman. “While I have the strength of a small boy. With polio.”

Camped on the outskirts of the town is a circus. Sword-swallower Irmy (Mia Farrow) and the clown Paul (John Malkovich) are having relationship problems. This is a Woody Allen picture, so Paul must pontificate about the morality of the artist, et cetera. Shocked by the discovery of one of Paul’s infidelities, Irmy runs off into the fog, hiding out in a brothel, and later accompanying Kleinman as he evades the vigilantes, who are now after him.

Heavy themes are worn heavily. Timothy Holland in Sync magazine draws attention to the focus on “the absence of God, the alienation of man, and the search for meaning – through art, science, philosophy, religion, sex, love and family – in a seemingly godless universe”. Several times throughout the evening, Kleinman is asked whether he believes in God. “I would love to, believe me, I know I’d be much happier,” he says, but “I can’t even make the leap of faith necessary to believe in my own existence”. The movie is a pretty blunt Allenesque metaphor for humans lost, unable to find purpose and meaning in life, yet horrified by their own mortality.

Despite the killer’s escape from justice, the film ends with some optimism. Kleinman finds the courage to leave his subservient job and join the circus as a magician. Magic and magicians appear often in Allen’s work, notably in Stardust Memories (1980), Oedipus Wrecks (1989), Scoop (2006) and the 1980 play The Floating Lightbulb. But despite its promise of adventure and freedom, the film acknowledges such a life as just another distraction from those heavy existential dilemmas. Distractions fill our lives with the illusion of purpose, and that is a necessity of survival. Allen has since cited this belief as the basis for his career as a writer (“busy fingers are happy fingers”). Says one circus character, who specialises in creating illusions, people “need [illusions], like they need the air”.

The cast is populated with famous names, and several give excellent performances: Donald Pleasance is hilarious as a morbid doctor who wants to dissect the killer’s brain, “to find out something definitive about the nature of evil.” Kleinman counters, “Is it not possible that under the microscope there’s something you can never see?”. The Doctor is skeptical. “What are you implying? A soul that lives on after we’re dead? A God?” Pointing at a dismembered corpse, he moans, “Ask him if there’s anything else.”

Woody Allen gives an above-average comic performance as the meek and ingratiating Kleinman. For once he has ditched the trademark black-rimmed glasses in favour of thin wire frames. John Cusack plays a student who seeks fulfillment in brothel sex, and who is bewitched by Mia Farrow. He returned to work with Allen in Bullets over Broadway (1994). Julie Kavner is very funny as Kleinman’s resentful ex-fiancé (whom he placates with “look, we just had your best interests at heart…your sister was a wonderful girl, she worshipped you like a goddess, she was singing your praises, I promise you, till the moment I slipped her pants off.”). Other cameos, such as those by Madonna, Jodie Foster, William H. Macy, and Fred Gwynne, are so fleeting they are merely distracting.

Santo Loquasto designed the massive set at Kaufman-Astoria Studios, New York. If for no other reason, see this film for the set and Carlo Di Palma’s Expressionist black and white photography that wittily draws attention to the movie’s own artificiality:

[Click for larger images]

Kurt Weill’s ‘Cannon Song’ from The Threepenny Opera is used most effectively as the title music: jaunty, kinky, dangerous.

It is strange that so few critics remark on Allen’s stylistic diversity from project to project. His next film was the drama Husbands and Wives (1992), shot with handheld cameras and natural light, and edited with jump-cuts.

Shadows and Fog is a searching and entertaining piece, one of my favourites among Allen’s close to forty films. The movie was not well-received by critics and almost immediately forgotten. It’s ripe for reappraisal.

Below is a ten minute clip featuring highlights:

[Original review: 7 December 2001; revised: 18 November 2007. The DVD stills are from DVD Beaver.]

Reading Notes Revisited #1: From Dawn To Decadence by Jacques Barzun

Happy 100th birthday, Jacques Barzun. A few weeks ago the New Yorker published an appraisal that has now turned up online: Age Of Reason by Arthur Krystal.

As part of my new program of reclaiming, revising and republishing pseudonymously written pieces, here are my thoughts on Barzun’s magnum opus. The review in its original form was published at www.amazon.com on 17 April 2006 under another appalling alias (Carlos Giraldi).

From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun. 877 pp. Harper Collins, 2000.

Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence is a vast, idiosyncratic history of the last five hundred years of the West. This is emphatically a ‘cultural history’: Barzun explores the Modern Era through its literature, music, theatre, painting, sculpture, philosophy, science, clothing, food, and architecture. This is not really the book for those seeking a comprehensive history of politics and war since the Reformation. Barzun unifies his text by looking at recurring themes, which he defines as “not historical ‘forces’ or ‘causes’ but names for the desires, attitudes, purposes behind the events or movements, some embodied in lasting institutions.”

He divides his history into four eras defined by four revolutions –

Part One (1500-1660) focuses on the period beginning with the Protestant Reformation (a Revolution of Religion), and discusses the Renaissance and then 17th Century Science.

Part Two (1661-1789) starts with the Monarch’s Revolution, the idea of the nation-state. Barzun explores the time of Louis XIV, the Baroque, the 18th Century Enlightenment, and finishes with the French Revolution.

Part Three (1790-1920) deals with the rising demand for liberal ideals (the Revolution of Liberalism). The focus is on the Romantic Era, the demand for Parliament, the Victorian Age, and the fin de siècle cultural and technological developments leading up to World War I.

Part Four (1921-2000) is defined by a Social Revolution. We see the disaster of World War I and what Barzun calls ‘The Great Switch’ (the reversal of Liberalism into its supposed opposite, Socialism). Modernism does not have a unified single style because “the impetus born of the Renaissance was exhausted”. Barzun believes that from this point on “culture and society are in a decadent phase.” The final chapters look first at the West’s embrace of the Absurd and then at the way we live now. The “loss” of our current era is “one of Possibility.”

The first 750 pages of From Dawn To Decadence are incredibly wide-ranging, learned, and well-considered. There are too many great aspects to enumerate here (I typed over thirty pages of notes and summary). But at the risk of implying that I don’t consider the book extremely valuable, I was not sold on Barzun’s discussion of the post-WWI era. In fact I rejected it outright. There is a cursory approach to this part of Barzun’s history. For instance, while he devotes several pages to the achievement of Dorothy Sayers, there is just one paragraph devoted to Ulysses – possibly or probably the major artistic and intellectual triumph of the 20th century – and it is a mean little paragraph that, heaving Joyce’s novel with The Wasteland onto the scrapheap of postwar modernist desolation, denies Ulysses all of its life-celebrating glory (“Bald description, satire through parody, calculated ramblings permit nuances within disgust, and even at times a sad sort of sympathy,” says Barzun). Perhaps the problem is that I’m all for Leopold Bloom at stool while Barzun is clearly not.

Barzun barely glances at cinema and jazz, the two major new artforms of the 20th century. For the former he makes a couple of extremely simplistic references to the innovations of D.W. Griffith but says nothing about Eisenstein or Welles (and naturally nothing of Godard or Bergman or Tarkovsky). And Barzun seems to think of jazz as merely the fun dance music of his youth fallen victim to heavy intellectualisation. So no Duke, Satch, Bird, Miles or Trane.

Although the publishers have tried to play down the fact that Barzun’s book is overwhelmingly negative in its judgement of contemporary times (“he is not a prophet of doom”), Barzun’s essential position is that the ideas that have recurred in the West since 1500 – especially the drive to EMANCIPATION, INDIVIDUALISM, SCIENTISM, ABSTRACTION and PRIMITIVISM (his capitals) – have been pushed to extremes that are unworkable and often self-contradictory.

Well, Western Civilisation may well be in decadence according to Barzun’s definition. I generally concur with his dismay at the declining standards of education. But there is a tendency in the final chapter, ‘Demotic Life and Times,’ to draw grand conclusions about the decadence of the West from what seem to be the insignificant quirks of contemporary life such as casualness in dress (ripped jeans, t-shirts in church, etc). The tone of contemporary historian – past tense but present culture – is also a bit grating (“The need to hurry, real or imagined, had created fast food…”).

Barzun’s conservative politics are clear. He insists on the unworkability of the welfare state but says nothing of the military-industrial complex which continues to send the US into unprecedented debt while the infrastructure of the country crumbles. He is particularly unsympathetic to the student protesters of the 1960s; that is hardly surprising as he was at the time a long-time member of the academic establishment. He condemns our contemporary atmosphere of overt sexuality. And he glosses the endemic crime and violence and numbers of incarcerated (strangely making the exceptional USA stand for the rest of the West).

But don’t allow these reservations to disuade you from reading the book, especially if you feel deficient in knowledge of the arts and ideas of the period 1500-World War I. Compared to Barzun, almost anybody would be deficient. Barzun’s prose is always very readable and often witty. The amount of reading that has gone into this book is staggering. Its obvious why Barzun has found it necessary to live so very long.

To compliment From Dawn To Decadence, I’m looking forward to reading Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places (Knopf, 1999), which explores the culture of the 20th century. Its long subtitle is: How Life and Art Were Transformed In A Century Of Revolution, Innovation and Radical Change.

[Original review: 17 April 2006; revised: 15 November 2007]