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Your body cannot lie
Following a rather friably sleepless Easter, I slept nine or ten hours and resent dreaming of poetry without bringing it out with me this time. I was spending time in evocatively broken-down places by the sea.
March ran out so disastrously, I never got around to linking either of these novelettes: M.E. Bronstein's "Bitter as the Sea" (2026) and Michael Cisco's "Tatterdemalion" (2026).
After nearly twenty years of doing nothing with the extras on my Criterion DVD of A Canterbury Tale (1944), I watched the interview with Sheila Sim which was recorded in 2006. I had never seen her as herself with so much time between her memories and her own ghost of hillsides and reflected sunlight, the house in the country where Alison exclaimed, "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that!" exactly as Sim realizes, as if she caught her character's dream, in the more than sixty years since she spoke that line she has done. It was her first film, straight out of drama school with the careful accent that sounds so artificial to her now; she had to learn to act for the camera, in the open air; she did not have to know that the part had been written originally for someone else, whom I have never been able to imagine in it without losing the earth wire of the character. She was right that it became its own kind of continuity through time, more so than even the regular haunting of film:
"I think I'm a little surprised that the film works for young people today—not necessarily young people, middle-aged people as well—but I'm very touched and very pleased in the best sense of the word that it does. Maybe we feel today, rightly or wrongly, that we are losing certain things that we had then. Maybe a kind of nostalgia that makes people love the film. The connection with history and the people who've gone before and the countryside that goes on, the countryside that we to some extent take for granted. We're realizing now in our present world that we are not entitled to take it for granted. It's not going to last."
Not even the film is going to, but on its own terms of folk anti-horror, I do not expect that hillside ever to be without the imprint of Alison Smith and Sheila Sim, even when it's under ocean again, even after the seas run dry.
March ran out so disastrously, I never got around to linking either of these novelettes: M.E. Bronstein's "Bitter as the Sea" (2026) and Michael Cisco's "Tatterdemalion" (2026).
After nearly twenty years of doing nothing with the extras on my Criterion DVD of A Canterbury Tale (1944), I watched the interview with Sheila Sim which was recorded in 2006. I had never seen her as herself with so much time between her memories and her own ghost of hillsides and reflected sunlight, the house in the country where Alison exclaimed, "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that!" exactly as Sim realizes, as if she caught her character's dream, in the more than sixty years since she spoke that line she has done. It was her first film, straight out of drama school with the careful accent that sounds so artificial to her now; she had to learn to act for the camera, in the open air; she did not have to know that the part had been written originally for someone else, whom I have never been able to imagine in it without losing the earth wire of the character. She was right that it became its own kind of continuity through time, more so than even the regular haunting of film:
"I think I'm a little surprised that the film works for young people today—not necessarily young people, middle-aged people as well—but I'm very touched and very pleased in the best sense of the word that it does. Maybe we feel today, rightly or wrongly, that we are losing certain things that we had then. Maybe a kind of nostalgia that makes people love the film. The connection with history and the people who've gone before and the countryside that goes on, the countryside that we to some extent take for granted. We're realizing now in our present world that we are not entitled to take it for granted. It's not going to last."
Not even the film is going to, but on its own terms of folk anti-horror, I do not expect that hillside ever to be without the imprint of Alison Smith and Sheila Sim, even when it's under ocean again, even after the seas run dry.
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There was a ton of dialect leveling over the twentieth century. My grandfather retained his strong Brooklyn accent to the end of his life and the contrast by then was dramatic.
As he hadn't had drama school training, presumably his wasn't put on? Though he may have been asked to ham it up for the camera, dunno.
Sim said he was very natural: she learned screen acting from him not because he had any experience with it, but because he was such an unselfconscious scene partner, always listening and reacting as if there weren't even a camera. (Eric Portman and Dennis Price were useful to learn the more technical sides from. She's very complimentary of all her co-stars and I can only hope they returned the favor. They were such an essential ensemble.)
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I have also not tried it for myself, but I've heard the same thing and I believe it. The RP of her childhood would sound to the twenty-first century like nothing on earth.
Accents are such a Tiffany Problem. I feel like every interview I’ve seen about playing a twentieth-century historical figure includes the actor explaining that they studied old footage or recordings of the person they were going to play, only to be ordered to tone the accent way, way down, lest today’s viewerstm think they were hamming it up.
I find that maddening. I bounced out of Masters of the Air (2024) for many reasons, but an idiosyncratic contributor was the interchangeably standard American of characters who were supposed to have been pulled from all across the continental United States in the 1940's, a decade in which it happens that I have heard an array of American regional accents which would have shown if you put a flyer from rural North Dakota and a flyer from urban Florida and a flyer from suburban New York in the same room. With the short-lived notable exception of Barry Keoghan from Brooklyn, the actors sounded as though they had been instructed to reproduce a generic contemporary accent and it continually grated on me. I would have been less annoyed by media of the time in which they all sounded mid-Atlantically theatrical.
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Especially since “realistic” to the average viewer is so often just a question of what they’re used to.
I would have been less annoyed by media of the time in which they all sounded mid-Atlantically theatrical.
Now I’m remembering Captains of the Clouds and its allegedly Canadian setting. (spoiler: nobody sounded remotely Canadian except Billy Bishop who popped up for a cameo as himself)
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Absolutely.
Now I’m remembering Captains of the Clouds and its allegedly Canadian setting. (spoiler: nobody sounded remotely Canadian except Billy Bishop who popped up for a cameo as himself)
Considering the number of Canadian actors working in Hollywood in 1942, that's impressive.
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I think it's wonderful that you do. It's not even a question that I would visit if it wouldn't take me an international flight.
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I had no idea that had been the first-ever commentary track for a feature film! That does sound like fun to listen to. And then it caught on.
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The shape-shifting and the language are what made me want to recommend it. I loved how it kept changing around both its characters and the reader.
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Thank you! I'm glad she was waiting.
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Mine did!
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It's a line from a song by Sydney Carter.
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You're welcome! It just made me happy.
My experience of folk horror was limited at the time when I first saw A Canterbury Tale, but ten years later when I had seen and read much more, that aspect of its relationship to time suddenly clicked.
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Here's a short story you might like, either to read (it's about 4,000 words) or to listen to: "You are invited to our SPRING CELEBRATION," by Thoraiya Dyer. For reading here. For listening here. (I have only read it, but I've been told it's wonderful to listen to and intend to do that at some point.)
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Thank you. Someone must have taught me once, but it seems to be the way I have always felt about time.
Here's a short story you might like, either to read (it's about 4,000 words) or to listen to: "You are invited to our SPRING CELEBRATION," by Thoraiya Dyer. For reading here. For listening here. (I have only read it, but I've been told it's wonderful to listen to and intend to do that at some point.)
I just read it, but I hadn't seen it before and I love it. Thank you so much for the link! It's a novel in those less than four thousand words.
"And yet. We are in Burnt Rock's elliptic, still. When its shadow, and the shadow of its two burnt moons, falls on us, each Feeling and Thinking Person pauses in its activities to call out three beautiful things that it can see."
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