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And this line is your path
Tonight ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving and I began our projected Powell and Pressburger film festival, albeit a little less auspiciously than we had hoped. I screened A Canterbury Tale for her and in return she showed me half of The Red Shoes (1948) before the computer seized up—the DVD was too scratched to play past the point where Victoria is offered the principal role in the fateful, eponymous ballet, so our current plan is to reconvene next week and watch an undamaged disc and Black Narcissus (1947).
So far, I like what I've seen. Below are some reactions, although mostly additions and annotations to last night's post. I'm not sure I'm particularly qualified to comment on The Red Shoes until I've seen more than the first hour, but the same caveat on spoilers applies.
I unfortunately missed the first five minutes, so I don't know the intended atmosphere
It turns out that I didn't lose any of the present-day storyline, but the preface that splices the prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales together with a rhyming meditation on the current state of the Kentish countryside, the distance between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries bridged by a falcon that becomes a fighter plane, may actually have increased the weirdness of the film. I didn't think that was possible.
a stranger in the shadows who bumps into her and runs away—though not before splashing glue in her hair.
Having it be glue with which the girls are assaulted is genius: at once absurdly childish, like a kindergartener in a tantrum, and sexually threatening, for the obvious reasons; bizarre and harmless and still creepy. It suits Colpeper, who is both an eerie, initiatory figure, a magician keeping hallows with the past, and a dodgy, faintly ridiculous one, a middle-aged elected official scuffling around corners in the blackout. Of course he's more than this split, but as I commented tonineweaving, I think one of the reasons this film resonated so strongly for me was that its trickster is not comfortable. He's unexplained, unsettling and not unsympathetic. Even during a quiet scene like the cloud-watching, I felt a certain suspense: as much as I liked the character, I never knew what he would do next. Incidentally, I have no idea how this film came up with a U certificate.
In the backyard is Thomas Colpeper, scything down weeds like an illumination from a book of hours or an angel of death in a broad-brimmed hat
It struck me only tonight that the scythe is also an attribute of Father Time: Saturn whose reign was the Golden Age, who presides now over seasons and harvests and the measures of human life. Dawn, meet Marblehead.
Or when Alison asks Colpeper if he ever thought of inviting the girls to his lectures, and the brusqueness with which he replies, "No," answers more than her immediate question.
In more than one review, I have seen the character described as misogynistic: I'm not sure this is the case. It's true that as the glue man Colpeper only targets women, and I won't pretend that his comment about the ducking stool is laudable, but I'm not convinced that he has such high opinions of people in general. Perhaps he's been so wrapped up in the past that the present has always fallen short. He has always been the moral arbiter, the man who knows that he knows best even when no one listens to him. But when he watches the clouds with Alison, that might be the first time in his life that another living person—a contemporary—has become human for him, not just an obstacle to his aims or a point of law to be decided or a savage in need of enlightenment, and the realization alters him. I don't know if he loves her. (A fault of mine: if there's ambiguity, romance isn't the first way I read a relationship.) Certainly they share a rapport that surprises Colpeper, and I think a lesser film would have paired them off by the finale. Where he initially dismissed her from farm work on the grounds of her gender, he now offers to nudge the Agricultural Office to have her assigned back to Chillingbourne, which placement she specifically requested. Hidden in the hillside grass from the approaching voices of Gibbs and Johnson, they might be mistaken for surreptitious lovers. Their last interaction is, even for Colpeper, peculiar: in the garage where Alison discovers her beloved caravan full of moths and spiderwebs, he tells her that life is full of disappointments, that the trouble with things with wheels is that they move on, a scant moment before she is informed by the garage's owner that her fiancé is still alive; turned up in Gibraltar, and his father has waited three weeks in Canterbury to tell her in person. In the seconds when her head swims with the shock, Colpeper disappears: were his words of resignation meant for himself? But she is not his love, she is his catalyst, and for her there is no contradiction between desire for a person and delight in the land; the two are fused in her glorious two weeks with her fiancé, whom perhaps she will bring back to the bend in the Pilgrim's Road someday. If Colpeper receives a blessing along with his penance, it's Alison. After her, there's no more glue man. And underneath the closing credits, to one of Colpeper's lectures flocks a crowd of soldiers: and their girls.
Angels make miracles for others, they don't benefit from them.
Except that all the characters are angels: seekers and granters at the same time. Not only Gibbs, but all of Canterbury benefits from the music that he plays on the cathedral organ, at last allowed his heart's desire (and haloed, on the train, with a burst of sunlight right on his skeptical cue). Without any intention to, Alison shows Colpeper a way out of the tangle and freeze he's fixed himself into. Even Johnson's friend Mickey Roczinsky refers to himself as a heavenly messenger, right before he hands over the packet of weeks-delayed letters that prove the fidelity of the sergeant's distant girlfriend. One way or another, everyone's healed.
I want to see the second half of The Red Shoes. I don't know if I would have recognized it and A Canterbury Tale as the work of the same writer-directors if I had discovered the films separately, but now that I've seen them back-to-back, even incompletely, I can't help but notice some of the ways in which they chime. Both are stories to which obsession is central, whether the various longings in which the characters of A Canterbury Tale are caught until their miracles free them, or the untapped hunger that draws Victoria Page to respond to the impresario Lermontov's patronizing, "Why do you want to dance?" with the folklorically unwise, "Why do you want to live?" If Colpeper is a Kentish Dionysos, Boris Lermontov might be the dancer's Mephistopheles. They are not the same archetype, but they share shadows. Lermontov views people as instruments of ballet, whose only purpose is to contribute to the dance—whoever loves anything else more, let them seek employment elsewhere and fast. Colpeper is more interested in "pouring knowledge into people's heads" than in the heads he pours his knowledge into. Both are detached, superior, flavored with the supernatural. In A Canterbury Tale, the myth runs right under the surface; the very title of The Red Shoes pulls the story up into the open, telling us that someone here will dance until she dies. Or die to stop dancing: whichever is cause and whichever is effect, Victoria has already linked the two, and Lermontov's promise that "a dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer" puts the third side in that triangle. I want your mystery, but he wants your soul . . . I will continue this anon.
nineweaving and I began our projected Powell and Pressburger film festival, albeit a little less auspiciously than we had hoped. I screened A Canterbury Tale for her and in return she showed me half of The Red Shoes (1948) before the computer seized up—the DVD was too scratched to play past the point where Victoria is offered the principal role in the fateful, eponymous ballet, so our current plan is to reconvene next week and watch an undamaged disc and Black Narcissus (1947).So far, I like what I've seen. Below are some reactions, although mostly additions and annotations to last night's post. I'm not sure I'm particularly qualified to comment on The Red Shoes until I've seen more than the first hour, but the same caveat on spoilers applies.
I unfortunately missed the first five minutes, so I don't know the intended atmosphere
It turns out that I didn't lose any of the present-day storyline, but the preface that splices the prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales together with a rhyming meditation on the current state of the Kentish countryside, the distance between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries bridged by a falcon that becomes a fighter plane, may actually have increased the weirdness of the film. I didn't think that was possible.
a stranger in the shadows who bumps into her and runs away—though not before splashing glue in her hair.
Having it be glue with which the girls are assaulted is genius: at once absurdly childish, like a kindergartener in a tantrum, and sexually threatening, for the obvious reasons; bizarre and harmless and still creepy. It suits Colpeper, who is both an eerie, initiatory figure, a magician keeping hallows with the past, and a dodgy, faintly ridiculous one, a middle-aged elected official scuffling around corners in the blackout. Of course he's more than this split, but as I commented to
nineweaving, I think one of the reasons this film resonated so strongly for me was that its trickster is not comfortable. He's unexplained, unsettling and not unsympathetic. Even during a quiet scene like the cloud-watching, I felt a certain suspense: as much as I liked the character, I never knew what he would do next. Incidentally, I have no idea how this film came up with a U certificate.In the backyard is Thomas Colpeper, scything down weeds like an illumination from a book of hours or an angel of death in a broad-brimmed hat
It struck me only tonight that the scythe is also an attribute of Father Time: Saturn whose reign was the Golden Age, who presides now over seasons and harvests and the measures of human life. Dawn, meet Marblehead.
Or when Alison asks Colpeper if he ever thought of inviting the girls to his lectures, and the brusqueness with which he replies, "No," answers more than her immediate question.
In more than one review, I have seen the character described as misogynistic: I'm not sure this is the case. It's true that as the glue man Colpeper only targets women, and I won't pretend that his comment about the ducking stool is laudable, but I'm not convinced that he has such high opinions of people in general. Perhaps he's been so wrapped up in the past that the present has always fallen short. He has always been the moral arbiter, the man who knows that he knows best even when no one listens to him. But when he watches the clouds with Alison, that might be the first time in his life that another living person—a contemporary—has become human for him, not just an obstacle to his aims or a point of law to be decided or a savage in need of enlightenment, and the realization alters him. I don't know if he loves her. (A fault of mine: if there's ambiguity, romance isn't the first way I read a relationship.) Certainly they share a rapport that surprises Colpeper, and I think a lesser film would have paired them off by the finale. Where he initially dismissed her from farm work on the grounds of her gender, he now offers to nudge the Agricultural Office to have her assigned back to Chillingbourne, which placement she specifically requested. Hidden in the hillside grass from the approaching voices of Gibbs and Johnson, they might be mistaken for surreptitious lovers. Their last interaction is, even for Colpeper, peculiar: in the garage where Alison discovers her beloved caravan full of moths and spiderwebs, he tells her that life is full of disappointments, that the trouble with things with wheels is that they move on, a scant moment before she is informed by the garage's owner that her fiancé is still alive; turned up in Gibraltar, and his father has waited three weeks in Canterbury to tell her in person. In the seconds when her head swims with the shock, Colpeper disappears: were his words of resignation meant for himself? But she is not his love, she is his catalyst, and for her there is no contradiction between desire for a person and delight in the land; the two are fused in her glorious two weeks with her fiancé, whom perhaps she will bring back to the bend in the Pilgrim's Road someday. If Colpeper receives a blessing along with his penance, it's Alison. After her, there's no more glue man. And underneath the closing credits, to one of Colpeper's lectures flocks a crowd of soldiers: and their girls.
Angels make miracles for others, they don't benefit from them.
Except that all the characters are angels: seekers and granters at the same time. Not only Gibbs, but all of Canterbury benefits from the music that he plays on the cathedral organ, at last allowed his heart's desire (and haloed, on the train, with a burst of sunlight right on his skeptical cue). Without any intention to, Alison shows Colpeper a way out of the tangle and freeze he's fixed himself into. Even Johnson's friend Mickey Roczinsky refers to himself as a heavenly messenger, right before he hands over the packet of weeks-delayed letters that prove the fidelity of the sergeant's distant girlfriend. One way or another, everyone's healed.
I want to see the second half of The Red Shoes. I don't know if I would have recognized it and A Canterbury Tale as the work of the same writer-directors if I had discovered the films separately, but now that I've seen them back-to-back, even incompletely, I can't help but notice some of the ways in which they chime. Both are stories to which obsession is central, whether the various longings in which the characters of A Canterbury Tale are caught until their miracles free them, or the untapped hunger that draws Victoria Page to respond to the impresario Lermontov's patronizing, "Why do you want to dance?" with the folklorically unwise, "Why do you want to live?" If Colpeper is a Kentish Dionysos, Boris Lermontov might be the dancer's Mephistopheles. They are not the same archetype, but they share shadows. Lermontov views people as instruments of ballet, whose only purpose is to contribute to the dance—whoever loves anything else more, let them seek employment elsewhere and fast. Colpeper is more interested in "pouring knowledge into people's heads" than in the heads he pours his knowledge into. Both are detached, superior, flavored with the supernatural. In A Canterbury Tale, the myth runs right under the surface; the very title of The Red Shoes pulls the story up into the open, telling us that someone here will dance until she dies. Or die to stop dancing: whichever is cause and whichever is effect, Victoria has already linked the two, and Lermontov's promise that "a dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer" puts the third side in that triangle. I want your mystery, but he wants your soul . . . I will continue this anon.
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I love discovering books and movies like that. Or when you return to something from your childhood, and instead of having diminished with the years, it's richer and stranger than you thought.
I'm sure there will be a post about Black Narcissus, when we get around to it.
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Thank you. (When I like things, I think about them . . .) From you in particular, that is high praise.
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Nope. For years, all I knew about The Red Shoes was that several dozen people had told me to see it and my mother called it the saddest film she'd ever seen. (It's based on Hans Christian Andersen; I don't see how anyone could have expected it to be cheerful . . .) I have a lot of movies to catch up on.
I haven't seen any other Powell and Pressburger, and I have to say I'm really looking forward to The Tales of Hoffmann.
I am planning to acquire A Canterbury Tale on DVD as soon as I am not catastrophically broke, and would you like to join us next week for The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus? I am a little ambivalent about The Tales of Hoffmann because I love the opera (and the original stories) so much, but we'll probably end up watching it anyway. I think Powell and Pressburger are going to be like Jeunet and Caro for me; it doesn't matter what they do, I'll watch them.
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I should stock up on snacks...
Nine
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I don't know if he loves her. (A fault of mine: if there's ambiguity, romance isn't the first way I read a relationship.)
I didn't read it that way either. I thought he might be curious about her, but he seemed to me like someone without the sexual self-consciousness to notice an infatuation in himself, at least for some time.
None of the characters seem to attach any sexual meaning to his actions, which I think is mainly a reflection of people in the 1940s not generally being very sexually conscious. However, I do think the Archers were well aware of what they were doing with that glue. I've noticed this in a lot of movies from the period--sort of naughty messages in bottles sent across the waters of time to this modern audience. They'd get past the censors because the censors themselves were pretty innocent.
I think a lesser film would have paired them off by the finale.
Yeah. I love that none of the main characters pair up (also, I was fervently hoping the whole movie that Alison wouldn't end up with Bob, as I found Alison adorable, and Bob breathtakingly annoying. No surprise this was his only role, ever, and that he was, in real life, an actual U.S. army sergeant).
Their last interaction is, even for Colpeper, peculiar: in the garage where Alison discovers her beloved caravan full of moths and spiderwebs, he tells her that life is full of disappointments, that the trouble with things with wheels is that they move on
Actually, he says, "There's something impermanent about a caravan. Everything on wheels must be on the move, sooner or later." I think your reading is accurate, but I also think there's something in there of Colpeper lamenting his inability to move, himself. As though he's been trying to construct a feeble happiness in his stationary life, and he feels bitterness towards Alison's more vital, healthier happiness--he's simultaneously lamenting his own lifestyle and taking pleasure in it. When he learns a moment later that her happiness isn't so dead, he can't take the blow at all and is compelled to flee. If not for that detail, I'd have been rather disappointed that Alison's fiancé survived. I sort of felt the real human toll of the war ought to have been recognised.
A village idiot who stands with outstretched arms in the twilight like the love child of a scarecrow and a clock. Johnson and Gibbs on an afternoon street, playing catch with an apple.
Something I like about the Powell/Pressburger films I've seen is the almost indefinable quality of fullness. There's a kind of static lushness to each scene. I actually find the films better after the first viewing, as without the tension of wanting to know what happens next, I enjoy simply lingering in the scenes. Imagery, story, and atmosphere just keenly and sweetly mingle.
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Thank you. I'm very glad you liked it: I hate when recommendations fall flat.
I've noticed this in a lot of movies from the period--sort of naughty messages in bottles sent across the waters of time to this modern audience. They'd get past the censors because the censors themselves were pretty innocent.
Plus the offhand reference to marijuana, which I will admit I associate more with the 1960's than the 1940's.
(also, I was fervently hoping the whole movie that Alison wouldn't end up with Bob, as I found Alison adorable, and Bob breathtakingly annoying. No surprise this was his only role, ever, and that he was, in real life, an actual U.S. army sergeant).
I was also fervently hoping that she wouldn't end up with Bob, but more for the conventionality (although I think I will never have to fear that with Powell and Pressburger) than because I found him annoying. He did seem more of a cartoon than the other characters until well into the film, with his exclamations of "Holy cats!" and "Swell!" not to mention starting every other sentence with "Gee," or "Say," and other stereotypical Americanisms, but somewhere in the second half he fleshed out into a person I could believe, even if I remain dubious that any soldier of the 1940's actually spoke in that idiom. And I love his face, high-boned and brushy and faintly woodcarved; no one in this movie is standardly attractive, even Sheila Sim.
Actually, he says, "There's something impermanent about a caravan. Everything on wheels must be on the move, sooner or later." I think your reading is accurate, but I also think there's something in there of Colpeper lamenting his inability to move, himself. As though he's been trying to construct a feeble happiness in his stationary life,
"I was born here, and my father was born here . . ." I didn't notice until the second time around that the Colpeper Institute was founded in the 1860's. The film takes place in 1943; I don't think the character's above forty-five. He seems, appropriately, to have inherited his fascination with the past. And, yes. Where he is when the story starts, he hasn't yet found a way to be rooted in the past and still alive in the present.
and he feels bitterness towards Alison's more vital, healthier happiness--he's simultaneously lamenting his own lifestyle and taking pleasure in it. When he learns a moment later that her happiness isn't so dead, he can't take the blow at all and is compelled to flee.
His last appearance in the cathedral, too, when he stands beside the door as the crowd funnels in for services, hat literally in hand, and as Alison passes him, her fiancé's father puts an arm around her shoulders: not consciously to shut Colpeper out, but that's penance for you.
If not for that detail, I'd have been rather disappointed that Alison's fiancé survived. I sort of felt the real human toll of the war ought to have been recognised.
This may be the only film I have ever seen where someone returns unexpectedly to life and it doesn't feel like a cheat.
Something I like about the Powell/Pressburger films I've seen is the almost indefinable quality of fullness. There's a kind of static lushness to each scene. I actually find the films better after the first viewing, as without the tension of wanting to know what happens next, I enjoy simply lingering in the scenes. Imagery, story, and atmosphere just keenly and sweetly mingle.
That is beautifully put. And it is that quality of depth, detail and richness, the careless wealth of everyday, that most the writers I love also possess—Angela Carter,
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It almost never happens to me, for some reason. I can usually tell ahead of time whether I'm going to hate something. But I'm very open minded, so it's hard. Anyway, it's Powell and Pressburger.
Plus the offhand reference to marijuana, which I will admit I associate more with the 1960's than the 1940's.
Marijuana was made illegal in the U.S. in 1937, so it hadn't quite reached the level of demonic legend in 1944 that it later attained thanks to the Right. Also, I don't think it was widely known as "marijuana" in Britain at the time, and may have been another attempt to inject an American colloquialism.
He did seem more of a cartoon than the other characters until well into the film, with his exclamations of "Holy cats!" and "Swell!" not to mention starting every other sentence with "Gee," or "Say," and other stereotypical Americanisms,
Hehe. Yeah, and meanwhile I noticed some of his basic grammar still seemed suspiciously British.
her fiancé's father puts an arm around her shoulders: not consciously to shut Colpeper out, but that's penance for you.
Aw. Heh--you know, if I made a fanfiction, there'd probably be a scene of Alison pouring glue on her naked chest while Colpeper looked on--"Oh, Mr. Colpeper, this dreadful glue of yours had gotten me so very dirty. It's going to take an awful long time, and an awful lot of hot water, for you to clean me . . ."
I don't have it. I wish I did.
Your writing is quite lovely. It does make an atmosphere.
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Okay, now you're just trying to give me a headache . . .
(I'd been about to claim that I couldn't see anyone writing Powell and Pressburger fanfiction, but this page proved me wrong. Fortunately, I think, the link is broken.)
Your writing is quite lovely. It does make an atmosphere.
Thank you . . . I still read people I admire and am amazed.