Sounds & Fury

An Inexplicable Error Of Judgment

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 10:19 AM Eastern on 4 May. See below.]

We yesterday viewed for the first time in a decade or so the Coen brothers' film Fargo and the viewing served to confirm for us our previous assessment of the film as one of the most perfectly realized films ever made save for a single, egregious, and inexplicable error of judgment; an error that would require but a single, simple edit to set right.

And the inexplicable error? The out-of-order placement of one of the film's final four scenes.

As released, the film's final four scenes (described below in sharply truncated form) are:

Final Scene 1: It's snowing. Marge discovers the killers' car in front of a cabin. She finds Grimsrud stuffing his buddy-in-crime into a wood chipper, announces her presence, and shoots Grimsrud in the leg as he tries to escape. He falls to the snow-covered ground. Marge, gun in hand and pointed at him, carefully approaches him.

CUT TO...

Final Scene 2: Camera moves fairly slowly down an empty, snow-covered road along which, we discover after a bit, Marge is driving her police cruiser. It's still snowing. Then the interior of the cruiser, Marge at the wheel. Grimsrud sits in the rear seat which is separated from the front seat by a wire screen, hands cuffed behind him. Behind Marge's cruiser a squad car, gumballs spinning, punches through the white of the falling snow. It approaches in slow motion. An ambulance punches through after it. Then another squad car. Marge hears their distant sirens, brings her cruiser to a halt and sets its gumballs spinning to await them.

FADE OUT. FADE IN ON...

Final Scene 3: A shabby motel next to a highway on a snowy, windswept plain. The terrified Lundegaard is discovered in the motel by two cops who've been alerted he's on the run and who capture and cuff him while he screams in terror and frustration.

CUT TO...

Final Scene 4: Marge and Norm's bedroom. Both are in bed. Norm tells Marge his design won the competition for the three-cent stamp. Marge tells him how proud she is of him. Norm reaches over to rest a hand on Marge's pregnant belly. "Two more months," says Norm. Marge absently rests her own hand on top of his. "Two more months," she says.

FADE OUT. FINIS.

And the out-of-order scene? The above Final Scene 3 of course. It should have been Final Scene 2 and the above Final Scene 2 should have been Final Scene 3.

This is no minor clumsy misstep. It not only jarringly defeats what should be, both logically and dramatically, a seamless transition from Marge's police cruiser and the approaching ambulance and squad cars to Marge and Norm's bedroom but, worse, much worse, virtually shatters the film's until-then pitch-perfect-ness and prior unbroken perfection of realization at which one cannot help but feel cheated, even robbed, by the filmmakers.*

Perhaps one day the Coen brothers will come to see the matter as we do and correct the error with the simple edit that would be all that would be required to set things right.

Uh-huh.

Not in this life.

* Just between us chickens, we would have ended the film with the transposed Final Scene 3 (what shows above as Final Scene 2) and done away with Final Scene 4 altogether. That transposed Finale Scene 3 is hugely powerful visually, partly because it evocatively echoes the film's opening sequence, and powerful dramatically because Marge's last words in that scene, thoroughly banal as the writers intended them to be ("And [all that killing]. For what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't unnerstand it.") — words addressed as much to herself as to Grimsrud in the rear seat who, blank-faced and unhearing, is paying no attention whatsoever — neatly sum up her entire wonderfully implausible character (played to absolute perfection by Frances McDormand) and her equally wonderfully implausible outlook on life and the world.

---

Update (10:19 AM Eastern on 4 May): Following is the opening sequence of Fargo (best viewed full screen and in 720p HD resolution) with its strangely haunting music by Carter Burwell based on an old Norwegian folk melody. This opening theme is also used over the closing credits and the harmonic skeleton of which is used often throughout the film. Like everything else about the film (the single exception being the subject of this S&F entry), we can't imagine music more perfect.

Grin And Bear It

As it had no choice but to do, the Met is reviving its production of the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen beginning 6 April 2013 with Das Rheingold and continuing in three complete cycles ending 11 May 2013 with Götterdämmerung. Grin and bear it. After this mandatory revival perhaps we'll be rid of the thing forever.

A member of a venerable online opera forum asked:

The new [Met] Ring, I loved it, in the Met and in HD. The sets were fantastic, and elastic. The singing was very good as well. So why exactly are so many against it?

To which we replied:

Because it ended up being a Robert Lepage spectacular (actually, a spectacular that failed as a spectacular; but that's quite beside the point) with Wagner's music serving as sound track and Wagner's drama given only lip service. Mr. Lepage's focus seemed to be on what he could get Le Machine to do that would result in some visually arresting effect for its own sake at any particular moment rather than on how the capabilities of the contraption could best be exploited to support, express, or frame the drama moment by moment from work's beginning to end. It's a tail-wagging-the-dog approach that's all but guaranteed to result in shallow (at least attempted) coups de théâtre pretty much every time, precisely as it did in this production.

After a repeat viewing of the Met's HD film of the tetralogy (via our HD DVR recordings of the HD PBS telecasts), we saw nothing to alter that opinion. For our comments on each of the music-dramas as telecast, you might want to consult the following S&F entries:

Das Rheingold
Die Walküre
Siegfried
The Lepage Staging Of The Ring: A Brief Summing-Up (Götterdämmerung)

On another online opera forum, a member remarked to us that we ought to be grateful and accept the Lepage staging of the Ring as the lesser of two evils. After all, at least the Lepage staging was not a Eurotrash (i.e., Konzept) Regietheater staging, to which we replied:

While I take your point (and it's a reasonable one), saying we ought to accept the lesser of two evils with some measure of gratitude is hardly an answer to the problem. The Lepage staging of the Ring is in every way unacceptable, especially for a company with the prestige and stature of the Met. And what makes it unacceptable is NOT fixable except by doing away with it altogether as it's flawed conceptually. The Lepage staging centrally features Le Machine as the looming, hulking, impotently conspicuous star of the show as it could not otherwise be, and that's utterly and fundamentally perverse.

And when I say the staging must be done away with altogether, I mean doing away with both Lepage and his humongous, dead-weight, ill-conceived, Frankenstein contraption to which contraption he's devoted entirely. The ONLY way such a contraption could justify itself is if it were capable of becoming THE ENTIRE STAGE ITSELF, perfectly plastic and malleable, and by so doing become invisible or transparent as a contraption. That's nowhere in the cards with Le Machine, either technically or practically; ergo, it has to go, along with its creator who cares infinitely more for it than for Wagner's great work which work both he and it were supposed to serve.

And so it goes.

The Met's François Girard Staging Of Parsifal

We watched the entire Met HD film of its production of the François Girard staging of Wagner's Parsifal the other night courtesy of a YouTube bandit — Blessed be he or her! — who posted a digital copy of the Met's HD film to YouTube spread across three HD videos, one for each act (all of which have now been taken down on a just and justified copyright infringement complaint by the Met) and were both surprised and hugely disappointed by the staging. From the very brief snippets we'd seen of that staging previously, all of which gave promise of its being truly splendid, and from all the enthusiastic talk about it on online opera forums, opera blogs, and in much if not all the mainstream media, we suppose we expected far too much. The very best we can say about the staging is that it's not Eurotrash as monsieur Girard at least recognized his responsibility and obligation to Wagner and Parsifal by trying, to the extent of his gift, to realize the full spirit and sense of Wagner's vision and concept rather than impose a vision and concept of his own devising. The resulting staging, however, is, in our not so humble opinion, seriously flawed and in places just out-and-out off the rails, and while not Eurotrash, is badly misguided and largely ineffective. What rescues the production are the sterling music-making and gripping onstage dramatic performances by all involved which music-making and dramatic performances are so strong as to almost convince one the staging is on an equal par — or so we imagine is the reason of this staging's widespread acclaim.

Too bad (for us). We were really looking forward to and had high hopes for this.

On The Appropriate Camera Shot Syntax For Filmed Staged Opera

Now that (digitally) filmed staged opera performances have become a regular and popular inhabitant of our cultural landscape, it's time the one responsible for determining what appears or doesn't appear in a shot — viz., the film's director — recognizes the special requirements of the camera shot syntax peculiar to the successful presentation of filmed staged opera and cease assuming, as filmed staged opera film directors almost always do today, that the camera shot syntax appropriate for works created originally and specifically for film is equally appropriate for the presentation of filmed staged opera. It most decidedly is not. Filmed staged opera requires its own camera shot syntax, and it's one that couldn't be more simple or straightforward.

One of film's most powerful expressive tools, a tool unique to cinema, is the close-up in its various forms — from the extreme close-up that focuses on some minute detail, to the "head(or face)-shot", to the "head-and-shoulders-shot", to the "one-shot" (i.e., half-to-full-length one-person close-up most often referred to as a "medium close-up"), to the "two-shot" (i.e., half-to-full-length two-person close-up, also most often referred to as a "medium close-up"), etc. — and so, quite naturally, the close-up is used with great frequency in works created originally and specifically for film. It might even be called film's workhorse shot.

In the filming of staged opera, however, the close-up should never be used with anywhere near that sort of frequency and in fact ought to be used only with the utmost discretion. Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann notwithstanding, opera singers, generally speaking, are not meant to be seen up close when working but are most favorably and advantageously viewed when seen at a discreet distance. Ditto certain parts of a production's set or costumes (certain sets and costumes in Julie Taymor's Zauberflöte for the Met spring instantly to mind). Therefore, in filmed staged opera, and barring any special circumstances, the workhorse shot should always be the so-called "medium-shot", unexciting in itself as it may be: a shot that includes all those onstage who are part of the central action at any point in time, or are a dramatically meaningful part of the reaction to that action, close-ups being interjected only when dramatically clarifying or revealing, or interjected only occasionally and fleetingly as visual spice. Further, and contrary to the standard shot-hierarchy of film where the "long-shot" (i.e., the so-called "establishing-shot" that shows the entire overall setting of the action) is used only rarely, typically only at scene's opening, in a filmed staged opera the long-shot should be used fairly often so that the film audience is regularly provided a satisfying overall orientating view; a view available at will at all times for an audience in the opera house.

And excepting special effects, that's pretty much it. That would seem to give short shrift to those benefits film is able to provide an audience; benefits not available to them live in the opera house. But that's not the way filmed staged opera is experienced in practice when done properly where the shot "palette", so to speak, and shot tempo are used with intelligence and real dramatic understanding. Rather, filmed staged opera done in that way is almost invariably experienced as a satisfying simulacrum of the Real Deal. While there no doubt will be those who care little for or are indifferent to opera as genuine dramma per musica and who will object bitterly to being deprived of constant, up-close-and-personal views of their favorite songbirds, there's nothing for it. About such fans one can say only: let 'em eat cake.

Paragon

We've just finished watching — uncut, unedited, and uninterrupted by commercials, all courtesy of that invaluable cable channel TCM — the 1973 Oscar-winning movie The Sting written by David S. Ward and directed by George Roy Hill starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and even after six or seven previous viewings over the years it remains fresh and a source of unalloyed pleasure. From its intricate, suspenseful, twisty plot, to its brilliantly realized characterizations, to its casting, to its soundtrack (Scott Joplin rags adapted and arranged by the late Marvin Hamlisch), to its costumes, to its cinematography, to its minute attention to detail throughout, it is positively lapidary; a very paragon of the well-made Hollywood movie; an exemplar of the breed.

Since the mid-70s we've visited a movie theater only rarely (only three times, to be more precise) and so ask the question: Does Hollywood make such movies anymore, or have 21st-century movie audiences become too sophisticated and/or lost their taste for such intelligent if unserious fare? We honestly don't know, but judging from what eventually makes it to the TV screen from current-day Hollywood we would guess such movies are today considerably out of fashion and would fail to be appreciated.

If so, too bad. In a world and era fraught with difficulty and danger, such supremely well-made intelligent if unserious fare is just the ticket if only to provide but a few hours of soul-satisfying escape and relief from the prevailing Zeitgeist.

An Apologia For Serious Critics And Criticism

If there exists a finer, more compelling argument for the need, necessity, and value of dedicated (i.e., professional), serious, deeply informed and literate critics and criticism in the arts and literature than the one written for The New Yorker titled "A Critic’s Manifesto" by Daniel Mendelsohn we've never encountered it.

An excerpt:

By dramatizing their own thinking on the page, by revealing the basis of their judgments and letting you glimpse the mechanisms by which they exercised their (individual, personal, quirky) taste, all these [professional] critics were, necessarily, implying that you could arrive at your own, quite different judgments—that a given work could operate on your own sensibility in a different way. What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically — which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period.

[...]

And so the fact is that (to invoke the popular saying) everyone is not a critic. This, in the end, may be the crux of the problem, and may help explain the unusual degree of violence in the reaction to the stridently negative reviews that appeared in the Times Book Review earlier this summer, triggering the heated debate about critics. In an essay about phony memoirs that I wrote a few years ago, I argued that great anger expressed against authors and publishers when traditionally published memoirs turn out to be phony was a kind of cultural displacement: what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Similarly, I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put. When, after hearing about them, I first read the reviews of Peck’s and Ohlin’s works, I had to laugh. Even the worst of the disparagements wielded by the reviewers in question paled in comparison to the groundless vituperation and ad hominem abuse you regularly encounter in Amazon.com reviews or the “comments” sections of literary publications. Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

RTWT here.

Ave Atque Vale, Gore

For the second time in the space of a month our hiatus from blogging is interrupted by the death of yet another irreplaceable artist whose passing we cannot let go without comment.

Gore Vidal — writer; public intellectual; notorious wit, provocateur, and celebrity figure — died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles from complications of pneumonia reports The New York Times. He was 86.

Mr. Vidal possessed an almost embarrassing abundance of gifts: handsome to the point of beautiful, his cutting acerbic wit and sharpness of intellect were wonders to behold on numerous occasions on television talk shows and on the lecture circuit. As if those weren't gifts sufficient, Mr. Vidal, one of this country's most prolific writers, was perhaps the most elegant writer this country has ever produced, a gift on display in his 25 novels and scads of essays too numerous to count, not to mention several plays and a number of TV dramas and Hollywood movies.

With Mr. Vidal's passing, the world has been deprived of one of its most accomplished artists.

Atque in perpetuum, Gore, ave atque vale.

Ave Atque Vale, Nora

The gifted humorist, essayist, journalist, screenwriter, and filmmaker Nora Ephron died today at age 71 from pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia according to The New York Times.

We first encountered Ms. Ephron's work in a short humor piece she did for Esquire magazine in the '70s, if our memory can be trusted, titled simply, "Crabs" (we can't seem to locate it online and so can't link to it), which, it struck us at the time, was one of the most perfect pieces of humor we'd ever read. She once said of writing (this a close paraphrase as we can't locate the source of the verbatim quote): "Beginnings and endings are easy. It's the stuff in the middle that's hard." That's no doubt true (as it is of life as well) but one would be hard-pressed to discern that in Ms. Ephron's writing so effortlessly does it all seem to flow whether it be for the page or the screen. The film When Harry Met Sally for which she wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay is a case in point and a sterling example of Ms. Ephron's pitch-perfect, bitingly humorous but deeply sympathetic and insightful commentary on contemporary male-female behavior and interaction, and her short, best-selling, thinly-veiled autobiographical novel Heartburn another case in point and a sterling example of her ability to find humor (if at times of the dark sort) in even the most painful personal experience. Hers is a voice absent which the world will be a poorer and less bright place. She will be sorely missed.

Atque in perpetuum, Nora, ave atque vale.

Something To Be Thankful For

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 4:20 PM Eastern on 26 Nov to make more specific a few vaguely worded generalities.]

This Thanksgiving we felt it meet and very American to view two classic movies from classic Hollywood's golden age; that period in the 1930s just before the beginning of the two-decade forced dismantling of the studio system that had ruled Hollywood almost since its very beginnings: the big-budget swashbuckler, The Adventures Of Robin Hood (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1938); and the humongous-budget epic, Gone With The Wind (Selznick International, 1939), and what a startling comparison the two made.

Unless one shifts one's dramatic and aesthetic senses into indulgent mode, the much celebrated GWTW is almost painful to watch so hokey and hammy is it throughout — from the too-often vulgarly employed three-strip dye transfer Technicolor photography, to the maudlin script (by Sidney Howard), to the overwrought Hollywood music (by Max Steiner), and to the performances of the actors the stellar and iconic performances of Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara) and Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) notwithstanding.

Watching TAORH, on the other hand, is an unalloyed joy on all fronts: from the beautiful and beautifully executed three-strip dye transfer Technicolor photography; to the sparkling and literate script (by Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I. Miller); to the lushly Romantic music (by Erich Wolfgang Korngold); and to the performances of all the actors from bit players to stars including a bravura and iconic performance by Errol Flynn who, even to this day and like Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara in GWTW after him, seems the very incarnation of the essence of the movie's central protagonist. This is Hollywood mythmaking at its finest, an exemplar of classic Hollywood moviemaking, and we all ought to be thankful this Thanksgiving season for the miracle of cinema which, unlike, say, theater or opera, preserves intact a dynamic artwork and permits us to see the work at firsthand and in perpetuity as it was intended to be seen, and exactly as it was seen by its very first audiences.

A small thing to be thankful for in the larger worldview, perhaps, but eminently gratifying nevertheless.

For Halloween

While we're a great admirer of aesthetic economy and especially so in matters musical, when it comes to the sort of economy on display in music written by those composers who adhere to the principles of the so-called "Minimalist" movement (or school), not so much. As with most things, however, there are exceptions. One such exception is music written for Halloween — John Carpenter's made-on-a-shoestring ($325,000), 1978 movie Halloween, that is. The music was written by Carpenter himself (who also co-wrote, directed, and co-produced the movie) and is responsible in no small part for the movie's seminally (and today iconic) creepy effect that defined (and spawned) a new genre of slasher horror flick where the visceral horror of gore and blood plays second banana to horror of the psychological sort.

And so, without further ado, we give you for Halloween the title theme from «shudder» Halloween.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Halloween Theme Song

For Bernard Herrmann — Belatedly

Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of perhaps the greatest of all composers for film, Bernard Herrmann. In our estimation no composer has ever matched his astonishing ability to capture, reinforce, and enrich the emotional essence of whatever scene was playing out on-screen without the music ever calling attention to itself while doing so yet at the same time so impressing itself on one's consciousness that a mere replaying of that music is enough to recall vividly to the mind's eye the images to which it was so intimately wed. Herrmann's brilliant score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is, of course, the most famous example of this. Here's another. Less famous, perhaps, but hardly less an example.

In Memoriam — Elizabeth Taylor, 1932-2011

The Importance Of Rosebud

In the film Citizen Kane, fairly early on in reporter Thompson's search for the meaning of Charles Foster Kane's dying utterance, "Rosebud," we are witness in flashback to an exchange between the young Kane and his wealthy banker-guardian, Thatcher, that takes place in Kane's ratty office in his newly acquired first newspaper property, The Inquirer, in which newspaper Thatcher has just read the outrageously alarmist (and false) headline, "ENEMY ARMADA OFF JERSEY COAST":

THATCHER (gesturing to the headline): "Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper?"

KANE: "I don't know how to run a newspaper, Mr. Thatcher. I just try everything I can think of."

That was precisely Orson Welles's position vis-à-vis filmmaking when in 1939, at age twenty-four, he arrived in Hollywood as a filmmaker for the first time knowing virtually nothing about filmmaking, lured there by RKO's new studio head George J. Schaefer who in order to secure Welles's services had signed Welles to a contract to make one film a year; a contract that gave Welles unheard of control over the finished product including the film's final cut. And what was Welles's very first film shot a mere one year later? Why, Citizen Kane, of course, as today just about every moviegoer worldwide knows.

For Welles to have created Citizen Kane right out of the box, so to speak, is fully the equivalent of, say, a Richard Wagner creating Tristan und Isolde the very first time he ever put pen to manuscript paper. Quite impossible, of course, but create Citizen Kane is exactly what Welles managed to do, and without so much as breaking a sweat creatively (there were other matters connected with the project that caused Welles to sweat copiously, but those matters are outside our concerns here).

Over the past almost three-quarters of a century since its premiere, so much has been written about Citizen Kane (and about Welles himself, for that matter) that there really seems little one can say that hasn't already been said. We do, however, want to say a word or ten concerning several ancient but only recently read critical pieces on Citizen Kane by critics now deceased whose writings we respected in the past (although rarely agreed with), among them The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and The New York Times's Bosley Crowther, which critical pieces viewed Citizen Kane's Rosebud with some contempt calling it a gimmick and a rather hokey one at that. Some twenty years after the fact of the film, Welles himself, although for reasons that must be held somewhat suspect, declared Rosebud a bit embarrassing and confessed it to indeed be merely a hokey gimmick; "dollar-book Freud," as Welles wryly put it.

Well, Rosebud most certainly and most clearly is Freudian. But "dollar-book Freud" and merely a hokey gimmick?

We think not.

In 1941, the year of the film's release, the great Jorge Luis Borges had a few unkind words to say about Citizen Kane famously calling it, among other not so good things, "a labyrinth without a center." Clearly, Borges didn't much care for Rosebud either and so dismissed it entirely from consideration. How do we know that even though we've never read Borges's piece in full? Because "a labyrinth without a center" is exactly what Citizen Kane would be absent Rosebud, for Rosebud is precisely the center of the labyrinth that is Citizen Kane. The film (and the final draft of the screenplay) was structured that way from Day One.

There's nothing the least gimmicky or "dollar-book Freud" about Rosebud as it's handled in Citizen Kane although in less skilled hands it could very easily have become both. One has only to consider the film's great coda to appreciate the fact. That coda is dramatically, logically, emotionally, and psychologically quite perfect and no mere O. Henry twist; an exemplar of Welles's idea that,

You could write all the ideas of all the movies, mine included, on the head of a pin. It’s not a form in which ideas are very fecund. It’s a form that may grip you or take you into a world or involve you emotionally — but ideas are not the subject of films. [...] That is why, I think, my films are theatrical, and strongly stated, because I can’t believe that anybody won’t fall asleep unless they are. [...] For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn’t come alive.

If one ever doubted our contention that Welles as a filmmaker was Wagnerian to the very core, an idea long held and frequently expressed by us in the past, the above should convince him otherwise.

Not only is Rosebud the center of the labyrinth that is Citizen Kane, it provides as well the proper final and central piece of the enigmatic jigsaw puzzle that is Charles Foster Kane himself whose life and actions as revealed in Citizen Kane are perfectly consistent, psychoanalytically speaking, with a man who as a young child was abandoned by a beloved mother (abandoned being how a young child interprets the separation no matter the actual reason), feels himself to blame for the loss of her love (which is how abandonment is interpreted by a young child no matter the actual reason), represses (in the strict Freudian sense) the psychic trauma, and is then driven unconsciously the rest of his life to attempt to wash away his imagined but undefined sin and win back his mother's love while at the same time never allowing himself to become deeply attached to a woman for fear of again being abandoned although he has no conscious inkling whatsoever of any of this or of what's driving it.

More like leather-bound, gold-leaf-edged Freud we'd say and no gimmick, hokey or otherwise. Of course, if one is inclined to dismiss all things Freudian just on general principles and is looking instead for social or political or spiritual or existential relevance, or social or political or spiritual or existential moral point or the like, then one will surely find Rosebud to be a hokey gimmick and "dollar-book Freud," and Citizen Kane to be something less than the consummate work of art others such as ourself consider it to be. For instance, the great filmmaker Ingmar Bergman — as a filmmaker, as Mozartian to the core as Welles was Wagnerian — was no fan of Citizen Kane or of Orson Welles.

For me [Orson Welles] is just a hoax. [Citizen Kane is] empty. [Citizen Kane is] not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of, is the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie has is absolutely unbelievable! [...] In my eyes [Orson Welles is] an infinitely overrated filmmaker.

Oh dear. Well, what can one say. It may be Bergman's entirely honest assessment or, in part at least, payback for Welles once declaring (a declaration with which we are not in the least in sympathy) that,

I don’t condemn that very northern, very Protestant world of artists like [Ingmar] Bergman; it’s just not where I live. The Sweden I like to visit is a lot of fun. But Bergman’s Sweden always reminds me of something Henry James said about Ibsen’s Norway — that it was full of "the odor of spiritual paraffin." How I sympathize with that! I share neither Bergman’s interests nor his obsessions. He’s far more foreign to me than the Japanese. [...] There’s an awful lot of Bergman ... that I’d rather be dead than sit through.

Again, what can one say?

But all that's quite beside the point, the point being that Rosebud is as essential to Citizen Kane as was the gas in the Inquirer's gas lamps the day Kane first drafted his "Declaration of Principles" after which time Citizen Kane was everywhere recognized as the masterwork it so clearly is and subsequently elevated to its rightful place among cinema's greatest and most enduring achievements.

Providential Unfairness

If ever proof positive of Providential unfairness were needed, one has but to glance at this photograph...

and then read this article.

So, all are equal in God's eyes, are they?

In a pig's eye they are.

There Just Has To Be A Better Way

When the Met's plan for simulcast HD movie-house showings of live Met productions was first announced we thought it a swell idea. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic's plan for simulcast HD movie-house showings of live LAP concerts was first announced we thought it not so swell an idea. Is this just us going all elitist on everyone again with our snob engine operating full-out on all twelve cylinders? We think not (although we take unashamed pride in our elitist view of things). Consider, please...

One idea behind these HD movie-house showings is to reach and engage new (and younger) audiences for these artforms and to encourage these new audiences to attend live performances where they can experience the real thing. In the Met's case this makes perfect sense as opera is fundamentally a stage art even though music is at its very core and so simulcast HD movie-house showings of live Met productions for the purpose above noted is the right way to go. Not so in the case of the LAP.

Fundamentally, a classical music concert is not at all a stage art, the stage being little more than a convenient place to set the musicians where they can be heard to best advantage in a concert hall. A classical music concert is not about being a staged performance although that's an unavoidable if collateral consequence of setting the musicians on a stage in the first place. Fundamentally, a classical music concert is about one thing and one thing only: the music. Period. Full stop. The instant the stage itself is centered upon conspicuously as it can't help but be in a HD movie-house showing of a live concert the focus of the audience is shifted to exactly where it should NOT be: musicians performing onstage as part of a staged performance, the consequence — the unavoidable consequence — being that the music itself becomes a soundtrack; part of the show rather than the thing of principal interest the entire enterprise consequently devolving into just another entertainment in a culture oversaturated with mere entertainments.

This is not a good thing, not a good thing at all; is, in clear fact, perverse in the extreme. And we won't even speak of the matter of the reproduced sound, even at its best, being but a mere simulacrum of the real thing as heard live in a concert hall no matter how good the movie-house sound system.

What to do? There just has to be a better way.

We're working on it.

Not So Good News

Why does this news make us cringe.

Opera houses, ballet companies, even the National Theater in London, are competing to lure audiences to live high-definition broadcasts in movie theaters, many of which are then shown again. It is the HD-ification of the arts, and it is already affecting programming decisions along with costume and set design, lighting choices and even ticket prices.

Now orchestras are jumping on the HD bandwagon, hoping that big screens can entice new fans to watch black-clad men and women playing musical instruments. The Los Angeles Philharmonic announced on Monday that it would start beaming live orchestra performances under the baton of its charismatic music director, Gustavo Dudamel, to 450 theaters in North America.

RTWT here.

Urban Intellectual Fodder

There is a certain kind of art made here in America for a lofty but banal purpose: to enliven the contemporary educated mind.

You know: the mind of you and me, dear 3QD reader -- the NPR listener, the New Yorker reader, the English major, the filmgoer who laps up subtitles, the gallery-goer who can tell a Koons from a Hirst.

This art is superior to the cascading pile of blockbuster kitsch-dreck-crap that passes for pop culture, but only superior by a few pips.

This art sure ain't Picasso, or Joyce, or Rossellini, or the Beatles, or even Sondheim. It's more Woody Allen than Ingmar Bergman, more Joyce Carol Oates than James Joyce, more Jeff Koons than Duchamp, more Arcade Fire than the Beatles.

It does not expand the borders of art or wreck the tyranny of the possible or enlarge our hungry little minds.

It is art of the day to inform the conversation of the day by the people of the day who need to be reassured that their taste is a little more elevated than that of the woman on the subway reading Nora Roberts.

For want of a better label, here's a suggested honorific for this kind of art:

Urban Intellectual Fodder.

RTW Spot-On T here.

Say What? Crocodile Dundee Hounded For Unpaid Australian Taxes?!

The Australian Taxation Office is after Crocodile Dundee for millions in unpaid taxes, and has forbidden him to leave the country until the debt is settled in full.

Say what? Dundee is singlehandedly responsible for bringing tens-of-millions, perhaps even hundreds-of-millions, into the coffers of the Australian national treasury, and for, no matter how implausible, making Australia and Australians look attractive to the rest of the world via his three Crocodile Dundee films and his many commercials on behalf of Australia and Australian-produced products. The bloody Australian government ought to be nothing but grateful to the man and declare him a national hero. Instead, they persecute (and might even prosecute) him.

Harrumph! Gross Impertinence! as Nigel Bruce's Dr. Watson would say.

The RSC Hamlet

Today, the assertion, "Shakespeare is the greatest playwright who ever lived," comes easily to the lips as does, say, the assertion, "Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player of all time"; even to the lips of those who've not read so much as a single line written by Shakespeare much less seen his plays performed onstage, or to the lips of those who've never so much as watched a baseball game. They're commonplace givens today; even axiomatic. And while one may get a dissenting argument from experts regarding the latter, no such arguments can be lodged in earnest against the former. One has but to be confronted by a superbly played and mounted production of a play such as Hamlet to quell all argument on the point. Just the sheer beauty of Shakespeare's language, and the dramatically resonant depth and profundity of his trenchant, psychologically spot-on dialogue are, by themselves, enough to bring one to the verge of tears.

Such a production is the superbly played and mounted TV film production of Hamlet directed by Gregory Doran produced for the BBC by England's Royal Shakespeare Company, a film aired here for the first time this past week on PBS with David Tennant as Hamlet, Sir Patrick Stewart as both Claudius and The Ghost, Penny Downie as Gertrude, and Oliver Ford Davies as Polonius. We just finished watching our tape of the film (the first time since its airing we've had a quiet three consecutive hours to devote to it), and were simply riveted by it. Questions of interpretation aside, and with the single exception of a cringe-inducing and embarrassing couple of minutes when David Tennant as Hamlet, in his, "O that this too too solid flesh would melt" soliloquy, forgot or disregarded Hamlet's instructions to the Players to play their roles and speak their lines without "tear[ing] a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings," the performances by everyone, principals and bit-players alike, were just sterling, and the production, lushly but tastefully set.

If you missed seeing this film first time round, you owe it to yourself to make good the deficit. For that purpose, the film can be seen in full here.

What's that I hear you saying? What's the deal with that modern-dress, 21st-century setting?

Say what? Modern-dress, 21st-century setting?

Oh.

So it is.

Divertissement

A brilliant and iconic speech, from a brilliant and iconic film, brilliantly and iconically delivered — cum graphics.

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)