All About Him: Huston’s The Dead

“He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude.”
-James Joyce, The Dead

Director John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation of “The Dead,” the final short story of James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, adds to and alters the text of Joyce’s original story, to both good and bad effect. There are several possible reasons for the alterations. Certainly some are added to support the filmmakers’ interpretation of Joyce’s story, but more pragmatically Huston may have expanded Joyce’s story because a feature film is expected to take up at least ninety minutes. The text of “The Dead” can be read in less time than that and so for the purpose of commercial cinema distribution, incidents were added and scenes were extended. Others have speculated that Huston’s son Tony Huston, while writing the screenplay according to his father’s wishes, still further distorted the text to reflect the personal marital conflict in his, Tony’s, life. However, whatever the causes for these modifications and insertions, they are equally designed to foreshadow Gretta Conroy’s actions at the end of the story; the additions justify a view of Gretta’s character as selfish and thoughtless of her husband Gabriel’s feelings.

Through a close analysis of the text of “The Dead” and of Huston’s film also entitled The Dead, together with an examination of the critical responses to the narrative, I will show how Huston imposes his distorting interpretation on Joyce’s text. Though some might claim that like many of my pieces for this site, I’m again applying “P.C.” views anachronistically to older works, I will demonstrate how Huston creates a negative view of Gretta that is not found in the text, a negative view that is nonetheless reiterated time and again by the (most often male) critics of this film. I will show that Huston’s interpretation of the short story is not singular, since literary critics of Joyce’s original story have also overlooked aspects of the narrative to impose their heteronormative and male-centric reading of the relations between Gretta and Gabriel Conroy.

John Huston said of Joyce’s Ulysses that it was “probably the greatest experience that any book has ever given me. Doors fell open” (Huston, 48). Perhaps for that reason, Huston chose to adapt “The Dead” into the final film of his lifetime, working on it as he was dying of lung disease. While Huston often makes good choices in his decisions in the processes of his frequent adaptations from literary sources such as in The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in the case of The Dead, for all Huston’s reverence for Joyce, the director felt that he should elaborate, clarify or impose his own interpretation on points that Joyce had deliberately left ambiguous. Yet, it would be a mistake to assume Joyce’s irresolution is an oversight on the author’s part. If there are open-ended threads in Joyce’s text, they are there to support the complexity of the protagonists’ behavior. However, Huston attempts to resolve these unresolved narrative passages and he tries to clarify the text in cinematic terms in the only ways he and his son were able within their medium. Unfortunately, the alterations and additions corrupt Joyce’s perfectly orchestrated whole.

Noting the profound influence that Joyce had on Huston’s work throughout his life, Weiland Schulz-Kiel distills the complexity seen in works by both artists: “Joyce and Huston show us views of life as they emerge in their stories’ characters. These interpretations can be discerned in the thoughts of the characters, their consciousness, and in a more concealed form in their words and actions” (Cooper, 213). Shultz –Kiel correctly notes a common strategy employed by both the author and filmmaker to reveal their vison of the world though their artistic productions. However, the depiction of Gabriel, for whom Joyce writes interior thought is complicated because of the nature of film, which relies on direct dialogue and on screen action. Huston resolves the problem of revealing internal dialogue, particularly in the final climatic scene, by using a voice-over.

However, neither version offers any of Gretta’s interior motivation. Her consciousness must be inferred. The reader/viewer only has her spoken words and actions to determine her interior world. Readers are not privy to her point of view in the way that they are to Gabriel’s. It is clearly in the different presentation of the male and female protagonists that Huston sensed an area of flexibility or malleability where he could impose his own interpretation. In fact, the text tracks Gabriel’s position, whereas Gretta is largely revealed to the reader through either Gabriel’s view of her, or from the point of view of the omniscient voice of the narrative. Cinematically, Huston also brings her to life through her interactions with Gabriel. The viewer only sees her when he is present.

Indeed, in Joyce’s story all the descriptions of Gretta’s appearance come through Gabriel’s voice. The most denigrating of these is a recollection of his mother’s comment that Gretta was “country cute,” and the most flattering from a highly romanticized version of Gabriel himself as an artist when he explains how he would like to paint her (127) . He says “there was a grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something…he would show of the bronze of her hair…” (143). In the first case, Gabriel’s memory comes from annoyance about his mother’s criticism of his choice of a spouse, in the second instance, it is similarly a description filtered through the articulation of his self-image. It is all about him; almost nothing about Gretta is actually revealed to the reader.

In the film, the director’s daughter Anjelica Huston is cast to play the role of Gretta, she is an actress whose strong on-screen physicality and elegance is hard to underestimate.

Donal McCann not getting Anjelica Huston

Donal McCann not getting Anjelica Huston

Many critics and academics have seen Gabriel in a positive light. However, Joyce himself clearly saw Gabriel as flawed. In “The Dead”, the main protagonists, Gabriel and his wife Gretta, attend a dinner party held by the elderly Morkan sisters, Kate and Julia. Gabriel and Gretta are late to arrive at the party, which Gabriel immediately upon entering claims “my wife here takes three mortal hours to dress herself” to place the blame on Gretta for their tardiness (Joyce, 120). At this point he goes off with the young maid Lily to remove his winter clothes, but his very second line in the story is to direct Gretta (without addressing her by name) to go upstairs without him, and they are thus separated by his design for most of the earlier portion of the story.

Gabriel has a moment with Lily, who he has watched grow up and who is removing his galoshes where he makes it clear that he has observed her growing maturity—“I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?” and she responds, “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you,” a bitter assessment of male duplicity that apparently includes him, which causes him to blush (121). This short episode shows him to be a man who has a sexual appetite, even though he would prefer to think of himself otherwise.

Luke Gibbons notes that Huston uses Lily’s appearance both to emphasize Gabriel’s erotic nature by “projecting a displaced eroticism” onto her and to draw a comparison to Gretta’s younger self (Gibbons, 114). He further notes that after a poem added by Huston that was not in the original text, a point to which I shall return, Lily and Gretta are visually conflated, “as Huston frames this shot, the profiles of both Gretta and Lily mirror one another, as if Lily were a flashback to Gretta in her youthful days” (140). Lily reappears in Huston’s version for example to put on Gabriel’s galoshes to reiterate how he sees his wife through a similarly sexual lens.

Once at the party, Gabriel spends his time in anticipation of a speech that he will make at the culmination of the expensive, elaborate meal that will be served, nervously rehearsing and questioning his concepts—condescendingly, he worries that the people comprising the gathering are not as intelligent as he, that any poetry he might choose to quote might be something which “they could not understand” and that he might be perceived as “airing his superior education” (Joyce 122). He does end up making quite a pompous and meandering speech, which goes over well enough, but in the course of the story, the view of its gestation serves to reveal Gabriel as an arrogant, self-important and often thoughtless individual. He never notices that his wife is actually listening to him, as he says “there are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here tonight” (Joyce 139). Her later reverie about her young dead admirer is perhaps sparked at this moment. Again, neither the text nor the film gives any insight into her interior reaction, yet it seems that he did not really seek to incite such thoughtfulness. His speechifying is insincere.

Throughout the party Gabriel is inattentive, leaving Gretta to fend for herself in the socially charged landscape for most of the duration and when he is partnered for “Lancers” (a quadrilles) with another younger, unmarried woman who is a working colleague of his at his teaching position, a Miss Molly Ivors, he has a tense and protracted argument with her, which continues through the various crossings and is visible to the rest of the guests, including his wife.

Miss Ivors’ disagreement with Gabriel escalates after she notes a series of nearly anonymous reviews he writes for a paper she sees as unpatriotic and calls him a “West Briton” as an insult (127). She suggests that he is out of touch with his Irishness and that to remedy that, he should visit the western part of Ireland that his wife actually hails from. This resonates oddly to Gabriel and he becomes angered, not least because it is an indicator that his wife’s roots are humbler than his own. He goes so far as to repudiate his Irishness entirely: “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (129). Later, Gretta encounters Gabriel and lets him know that she has noticed his interaction with Miss Ivors as being “a row” (130). By way of explanation, Gabriel tells Gretta of Miss Ivor’s suggestion about him travelling to the west. She is enthusiastic about the idea, and tells him so, only to be verbally rebuffed by her husband: she is “coldly” told by Gabriel, “You can go if you like” (130). Still later, Gabriel approaches as Gretta is standing with Miss Ivors who is preparing to leave and it can be plainly seen that Gabriel and Miss Ivors’ behavior is obviously tension-filled, before the younger woman takes her leave, declining Gabriel’s offer to see her home. Something has occurred between Gabriel and Miss Ivors; to an outside observer it is clear that Miss Ivors’ anger is the result of a frustrated infatuation with Gabriel, but he is too self-absorbed to notice. Gretta however, detects the other woman’s interest in her husband. His gnomic behavior leads her to infer that he is hiding a more invidious relationship with Miss Ivors.

As Anelise Reich Corseuil writes:

…Throughout the film, in the scenes in which Gabriel functions as a filter, he is not shown as a sympathetic character. He is an aloof figure who is only concerned with his own speech, as he is shown as being completely insensible to the characters surrounding him. There is basically no integration between Gabriel and the other characters, as the camera is constantly showing him in his attempt to glance at his speech (73).

Reich Corseuil is correct in her observation of the self-interested depiction present in the film; she points to Gabriel’s lack of empathy. However, she describes his reaction to his wife’s revelations about the dead youth whom she believes has died from her unrequited love by explaining that “in the film a disintegrated narrative allows his consciousness to ‘explode’ just in the end, as a mind divorced from the rest of the film”(77). However, this eruption of empathy comes rather from Gretta’s denial of his sexual passion. He becomes frustrated by her falling asleep. He romanticizes his feelings, yet again turning his emotional state into an artistic/ romantic opportunity to write his own eulogy. In the final scenes in the book, his reaction to his wife’s tragic revelations might be more clearly read as the disappointment of her failure to recognize his poetic, erotic self-projections. Once again he becomes his own audience. Joyce writes, “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (Joyce 152). His “generous” weeping may be seen as either plentiful, or as a gift for his wife, or perhaps from himself to himself, certainly his interior monologue is overly literary and as he references the newspaper’s weather report, Joyce exposes the shallowness of his thinking.

However, as Huston reworks the final scene, he loses much of the irony in Joyce’s telling to reframe Gabriel as a softer and sympathetic man. Huston changes certain pivotal lines from the original, such as in the original: “He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death,” whereas in the film the line becomes “To me her face is still beautiful, but I know that it is no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death” (151). The cruelty of his thought in the book belies any true expression of love and indeed he has declared that he has never known love, but the film version appears to buttress his new found feelings for his wife and also relegate her youthful person into the past, as this is now the face that belongs to her relationship with him. It demonstrates a wiser and kinder Gabriel.

As the party ends and the guests are all leaving, Gabriel notices a woman hesitating in the shadows on the stairs, and his thoughts, as the epigraph of this paper indicates, appropriate this as yet unknown woman’s experience and objectify her: “what is a woman…listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude” (143). But he soon realizes that she is his wife and that she is listening to one of the guests, a tenor, singing a song which evidently plunges her into a state of reverie. On the way home, Gabriel makes a feeble attempt at humor and when Gretta doesn’t respond to his liking, lost as she seems to be in her own thoughts, he seethes with resentment. He eventually gets past that, only to then condescend to her enough to see her as a sex object, as both in the carriage and at their room, his whole focus shifts to a desire to have sex with her and he is greatly distressed when it becomes clear that this isn’t going to happen.

Instead, Gretta surprises him completely by explaining her distraction by an account of how in her youth she toyed with the heart of a young man named Michael Furey, who eventually died, perhaps as Gabriel guesses of consumption but according to Gretta, “I think he died for me.” She then cries herself to sleep, after which Gabriel thinks on what he has been told.

It is clear from the final passages that Gabriel sees only that Gretta had loved someone else in her past. He ignores the indications given by Gretta that Michael Furey’s feelings were not reciprocated by her and that it was precisely that unrequited love that was the reason for his death, and her subsequent feelings of guilt; instead he jealously assumes that although the man has died, Gretta’s love for him has endured intact and that he himself is and always will be secondary in her affections. He underestimates her greatly in assuming that her vows of love and fidelity for him are less binding than his for her. Additionally, it seems that in his mind, she, the lower-class and less-educated woman, is much more ruled by her passions than he, the cool male intellectual. It does not occur to him that after observing his inexplicable misbehavior at the party, his wife might have told him what she did to wake him to the idea that she was (and is) a woman who has feelings of her own, a person of independent consciousness and a life experience that does not simply revolve around him. She is telling him that she might be desirable to other men that felt she was important also, for instance a young man who withered and died of ill health, but even so cared above all for her…and that her aim in recounting such a personal remembrance to him might be intended to make him treat her with more care and affection in future. But in fact, Gabriel’s entire reaction to Gretta’s story about Michael Furey forms only in relation to himself and his feelings about it, not out of any genuine concern for her.

Gabriel’s behavior is obnoxious throughout the story: he delivers a bad and condescending speech, he objectifies the maid, he has a fight with another woman and he ignores and disrespects his wife. My impression is that Gretta has seen all of this and that her story about Michael Furey is a deliberate attempt to put Gabriel in his place. And Joyce makes it clear that Gabriel does not absorb the lesson, but still remains self-oriented, in sympathy only with himself. This is his greatest failing. It is indicative to me of Joyce’s great understanding of human nature and the interactions between the sexes that Gretta’s efforts are wasted on a fool—and one who is, unfortunately, representative of his gender. However, I seem to be alone in this opinion. As far as I know, all of the literature about Joyce (and the filmed The Dead) disagrees with my assessment, if such an interpretation even occurred to the writers; in truth, I have no evidence and can offer no citations that it ever has.

The Huston film’s newly invented character Mr. Grace is one that confounds Joyce’s intent. Peter Dulgar notes Huston’s addition of Mr. Grace as a “major element in the narrative through his recitation of an Irish poem” and that his

…presence has additional meaning and relevance through Huston’s connection of his poem to Gretta and her memories of Michael Furey. This…is important because it presents the viewer with visible evidence that her thoughts are troubled and reminiscent long before the short fiction introduces that idea through Mr. D’Arcy’s song. In the film, Greta is plagued by her memories of the past from this midway point in the narrative, much earlier than the short fiction’s revelation in the third part (Dulgar 95).

Grace recites the poem “Broken Vows” (actually the poem is entitled “The Grief of a Young Girl’s Heart”). This poem is of uncertain authorship, but its translation is by Lady Gregory, “a writer Joyce particularly disliked” (Cooper, 199) and it speaks from the viewpoint of a girl whose lover betrays her. The poem includes the lines:

You have taken the east from me; You have taken the west from me
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me,
And my fear is great that you have taken God from me! (Pederson, 70).

The overwrought quality of all this aside, the last line also adds a religious element which isn’t present in Joyce’s story, in spite of the fact that both Joyce and Huston were avowed agnostics. But for some reason (perhaps a newfound piety sparked by his own approaching end), Huston imposed religiosity on “The Dead” in this way, and others. According to Ann Pederson, who also believes that the poem “offers us…a more tangible account of Gretta’s as yet unspoken experience” (Pederson, 69), it is presented as an early catalyst for her remembrance of the late Michael Furey. Pederson (and other critics) ignore that Greta never claimed to have been abandoned by Michael Furey, and it does not occur to them that the poem might reflect on what Gretta is feeling about the way her husband is behaving at the party. For her part Pederson feels that the poem somehow works to justify Gabriel by the end of the film to believe that “everything including God has been taken from him” (70). So, in this way, Huston’s film is seen to transpose the wounded party from the female to the male. In Gabriel’s mind, everything is all about him. This despite the evidence in the story and the film that it would seem likely that Gabriel is having an affair with Molly Ivors and so, it is Gabriel who abandons Gretta! Or at least, she might need to consider the possibility.

Pederson observes that in any film adaptation from a text source, “thoughts and feelings on the written page must now be expressed by action or vocalization” and so, she says, the foreshadowing created by the poetry reading “is…a powerful elaboration which builds towards Gretta’s final declaration” and overall, the film’s alterations to the original story “add empathy and literary depth which do not detract from but enhance the whole” (70). The usually perceptive James Naremore claims that the added poem “is entirely in keeping with the themes and milieu of Joyce’s story” and Naremore also observes that Huston has rendered Gretta as “constantly and visibly preoccupied by distant music”—he doesn’t delve too deeply into the narrative consequence of these alterations though, other than to say that now by these additions “characters, whom Joyce presented in much more ambiguous terms, are as ‘readable’ as the actors in a good melodrama. Meanwhile, things that Joyce left unsaid or open to conjecture are fully explained” (Cooper, 199). Roger Ebert adds his own Christian-centric twist: “The key emotional moment in ‘The Dead’ does not belong to Gretta, who still mourns for her dead young lover. It belongs to Gabriel, who weeps for the man his wife once loved, a man he never met or even heard of before tonight. To cry for a stranger is to shed tears for the human condition, to weep because in giving us consciousness, God also gave us the ability to know loss and mourn it” (Ebert). The critics of the story and film take it as a given that Joyce intended for the focus of the story to be on the epiphany of Gabriel, who as Linda Costanzo Cahir put it “moves from a state of egotism and isolation to one of empathy” (Cahir 210) and Huston’s film supports a focus on Gabriel rather than Gretta, inflating his significance while diminishing hers. The false note of reverence that also taints the proceedings is, again, of Huston’s invention.

Writing critically only on Joyce’s text story, Anthony Burgess also mistakes the significance of Gretta’s self-recrimination, perhaps because he sees her as “a girl of inferior education” in relation to her husband, who despite this unfortunate clash of classes “does not despise her” (!), which would seem to paint him as generous in his affections even as it diminishes her agency (Burgess, 43). No, she should be grateful that he marries her and in this way brings her so far above her rightful station, even if she does have to suffer such condescension as her mother-in-law calling her “country-cute”—Burgess believes that her telling to Gabriel about Michael Furey comes about merely because she is “distracted,” as one presumes is the wont of stupid peasant women (43). Burgess locates the specific catalyst of her distraction in the tenor’s belated recital. In addition, Burgess equates Gabriel’s disproportionate resentment regarding Gretta’s account, with Joyce’s creation Bloom’s reaction to the “adultery” of his wife with “multiple …fellow-sinners,” as well as with a cuckolding supposedly suffered by Joyce in reality, among other absurdly judgmental comparisons of what is by all indications a chaste relationship that Gretta had, long before she met her husband (44).

But Huston and son seem to have aligned their adaptation with Burgess’s analysis and taken it yet further.
According to the family’s biographer Lawrence Grobel, Tony Huston was invested in tailoring the film’s script to suit a personal angle:

“The Dead” meant so much to him; he still hadn’t gotten over the shock of hearing his wife (Margot) tell him in September he wasn’t welcome in their house anymore–the irony wasn’t lost on him that as he worked on a script about a man discovering that his wife never loved him as passionately as he would have liked, his own wife was telling him the same thing. Didn’t his father once comment that Margot reminded him of Gretta in Joyce’s story—years before they considered making the movie? (Grobel, 15).

In fact, whether the additions are of John Huston’s doing, or Tony’s, or both, their harsh view of Gretta’s unanticipated revelations to her husband are forced on the viewer by the additions to the film, as elucidated by Michael Patrick Gillespie: “self-absorption stands as only the kindest interpretation of a gesture that, if it were at all calculated, could only be seen as profoundly cruel” (Gillespie, 158). Further, Gretta’s claim that her young man “died for the love of me” is dismissed as “unapologetic egotism” and her tearful falling off to sleep after recounting her tale is described as resembling a “post-coital slumber, oblivious to the presence of her wounded husband and presumably no longer engaged by recollections of her former lover” (158). If one does not comprehend Gabriel’s earlier actions as appearing to indicate, or outright reflecting, infidelity, and/or degrees of public disrespect to his wife, then I suppose one might assume she is needlessly cruel. But the fact is, his behavior is highly questionable. Or perhaps, one thinks Joyce wrote the earlier scenes for no reason other than to set up aspects of Gabriel’s character and the petty, selfish Gretta is only present in the story to persecute her poor sensitive husband.

It should also be said that not every one of the Hustons’ additions abuses the source text. There is a substantial and effective digression that occurs in the scene when the aged Aunt Julia sings with the bemused indulgence of the assembled partygoers: the camera wanders away from the primary action to pass among an assortment of objects around the house, a handheld travelling shot that as Jeffrey Meyers details, goes “upstairs to an empty room, focuses on the cherished doll house, embroidery, old photographs, glass slippers, rosary and crucifix…the camera was like a ghost going through this world…this intensely lyrical moment creates subtle tension and gives visual clues to the dominant theme: the enduring influence of the dead on the living” (Meyers, 405). The passage avoids the visual redundancy of simply focusing on the singer and the varying reactions of her audience, which would have echoed scenes elsewhere in the film, instead thoughtfully rendering an intangible feeling engendered by the music in specifically cinematic terms. In its nature, this is a positive addition, one quite in keeping with the feeling of Joyce’s story, but that fully utilizes the medium of the adaptation. Another worthy cinematic digression occurs at the end of the film, when Gabriel is ruminating after his wife has gone to sleep, about the eventual death of his Aunt Julia. At that juncture we are shown in a flash-forward vignette Julia dead in a room of her house with the rest of the family attending.

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This scene not only concretely visualizes a passage of the original story, but it also brings in the subject of the very first story in Dubliners, “The Sisters” which describes a very similar scene of bereavement, a corpse arranged in a home for viewing by family members. “The Sisters” initiates some of the themes brought together and in effect bookended by Joyce in the final story, “The Dead” and incorporates it into the film in an elegant way.

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Thanks to Marguerite Van Cook and William Boddy.

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Primary Sources

Joyce, James. “The Dead” in Dubliners. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. Print.

The Dead. Dir. John Huston. Perf. Anjelica Huston, Donal McCann. Vestron Pictures et al, 1987. DVD: Lion’s Gate, 2009.

Secondary Sources

Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. Print.

Cahir, Linda Costanzo. Literature into Film: theory and practical approaches. Jefferson NC: MacFarland, 2006. 210-214. Print.

Cooper, Steven (Ed.). Perspectives on John Huston. New York: G.K. Hall & Co./Macmillan, 1994. Print.

Corseuil, Anelise Reich. “John Huston’s Adaptation of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: The Interrelationship Between Description and Focalization.” Web: Dialnet. December 1 2015. <dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/4925255.pdf>

Dulgar, Peter. “The Dead and the dead: Adaptation of temporal structure from short fiction to film.” Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 12, 2012: 86-103. Print.

Ebert, Roger. “The Dead.” The Chicago Sun-Times, December 18 1987. Print.

Gibbons, Luke. “The Cracked Looking Glass of Cinema: James Joyce, John Huston and the Memory of ‘The Dead.'” The Yale Journal of Criticism, V 15 #1 Spring 2002. 127-148. Print.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. “The Irish Accent of The Dead,” in John Huston: Essays on a Restless Director. Ed. Tony Tracy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company Inc, 2010. Print.

Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Print.

Huston, John. An Open Book. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1994. Print.

Meyers, Jeffrey. “Raising The Dead.” in John Huston: Courage and Art. New York: Crown Archetype, 2011. Print.

Pederson, Ann. “Uncovering the Dead: A Study of Adaptation,” Literature/Film Index 21:1 (1993): 69-70. Print.

Antonioni and Buñuel: The Ground of Being

Thematic connections and similarities can be seen between scenes in films by the Spaniard Luis Buñuel and multiple works by the Italian Michelangelo Antonioni. Two of the 20th century’s greatest directors,  Buñuel and Antonioni competed for recognition and took turns winning the same awards on alternative years at film festivals. For example, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse competed and won against Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel for the special jury prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival—and so, both directors were doubtlessly in the same room at multiple times in their lives. However, I have been unable to prove that they had any personal interaction. I have also been unable to find Buñuel speaking of his contemporary Antonioni anywhere in the record. For his part, Antonioni mentioned Buñuel only once, when in an interview, he was asked about the method of directing from a monitor placed off-set that he used for the celebrated long take at the end of The Passenger and he said, “Buñuel always uses it” (Antonioni, 183). In fact, Buñuel did direct his films from a separate room where he was able to watch what was happening on a monitor, because he was increasingly hard-of-hearing. At any rate, it can be assumed from this fact that at the very least, Antonioni was familiar with Buñuel’s modus operandi.

Antonioni’s great Italian contemporary Federico Fellini not only lists Buñuel as the director of one of his favorite films of all time, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie from 1972, but Fellini further qualifies him as “a filmmaker of genius. I might say that Buñuel is the greatest filmmaker of all” (Costantini, 200). Buñuel’s biographer John Baxter also claims that his subject considered Fellini to be one of his favorite directors, but says that they both “shared the great directors’ discomfort at seeing the work of their competitors”—so it may be that Antonioni kept an instinctive distance, or the lack of hard evidence of any interchange between Buñuel and Antonioni might simply reflect an omission of inquiry by the film historians lucky enough to speak to those directors (Baxter, 278). Not finding them talking about each other in print and not being able to definitively place them together does not preclude a mutual respect, or even a one-sided influence by one director to the other. And regardless, the correspondences between their films are there.

One of the films that seems to have informed Antonioni, because of his use of certain key elements in several of his films, is Buñuel’s  Exterminating Angel. In this 1962 feature, a group of wealthy people arrive at a huge mansion just as the servants leave under various pretenses. The dinner party congregates in the dining room, where they become inexplicably trapped. There is no direct rationale given, psychological or otherwise, for their apparently self-imposed imprisonment. No obstacle stands between them and the next rooms, much less the outside world, but they cannot bring themselves to pass though the doorways of the single confining room. As Virginia Higgenbotham notes, “It is, simply, a crisis, and the guests are responding to it the way the bourgeoisie usually responds to crises—by doing nothing…the fear of being the first to act, the terrible inertia imposed by conformity upon the group…has rendered them helpless” (153). Over a period of days and then weeks, the party degenerates. They use large urns in a closet for toilets, they begin to starve, they turn increasingly filthy and some of them begin to manipulate the others to fight amongst themselves. They pull pipes from the wall to get water and eventually smash up the very walls themselves for firewood. Their predicament functions as a metaphor for people who are trapped by their self-identification of class; a clue to support this interpretation may be a piece of broken wallboard that hangs down from the top of the impassable doorway to resemble the blade of a guillotine.

The upper-class group’s chaotic and degenerate destruction of a enclosing space is echoed in Antonioni’s Red Desert of 1964, in the scene when a group of Giuliana’s friends or acquaintances meet in a shack by a dock. Within the tiny structure is a smaller enclosed red-painted room. The group of men and women all cluster into this confined space and begin to hint broadly of engaging in an orgy. There is a clear distinction made regarding class; the people within the red room all speak with upper middle class accents, but when another couple enters the shack from outside who speak with lower-class accents, they are not asked to join the group and they leave. As the scene progresses, a noise is heard from outside and the group emerge from the red room. A huge cargo ship is seen to pass outside, disturbingly close to the window and the party proceeds to rip the red room apart, smashing its walls for firewood. Although the commentary track that accompanies the Criterion DVD of Red Desert states that “there does not appear to be any particular significance to this destruction of the interior wall,” little or nothing in an Antonioni film is accidental. Murray Pomerance equates the room with an interior bodily cavity as he asks, “What is that bloody chamber, a womb of sorts? A coliseum? Now with a wall torn down, it radiates at one side of the hut, its interior a messy shambles of pillows and mattresses where these bizarre siblings had lain and out of which they were born” (99). According to Ned Rifkin, it is more about the act of violence as a substitute for sexuality and color reflecting emotion. Rifkin says that when one of the characters puts his foot through the red wall, it shows:

…the weak moral fiber which is present. When Mili and Corrado begin dismantling this wall in order to stoke the fire in the stove, the equation of sexual activity and this destruction is explicitly established…the abortive ‘orgy’ is less exciting for the participants than this act of feeding the flames of passion (red fire) with the fabric of the shack (rotten red wall) (99).

The director observed to his contemporary director Jean-Luc Godard about the Red Desert scenes that take place in a factory, “The interior…was painted red: two weeks later the workers were fighting amongst one another. It was repainted in pale green and everyone was peaceful” (cited in Rifkin, 99). The color red has an enraging affect on humans who are forced to spend time within it, or in its proximity, just as a crimson flag does for a bull. It should also be pointed out that enclosed spaces are a time-worn trope of, and catalyst for, dramatic conflict.

The more pervasive motifs that Antonioni implements are seen first much earlier, in Buñuel’s second film, the 1930 L’Âge d’Or, which was intended to be a follow-up collaboration with painter Salvador Dalí after the pair’s 1929 classic Un Chien Andalou, but the two surrealists fell out just before the production commenced and so Dalí was much less involved with L’Âge d’Or than he had been with their previous effort. It seems certain that Antonioni was familiar with such a seminal work; L’Âge d’Or was, in fact, one of the first sound films ever produced in France, and so by default in Europe. The film which incorporated aspects of the Marquis de Sade’s novel 120 Days of Sodom was made with the backing of a Jewish/American aristocrat who was descended from de Sade, Marie Laure de Noailles, and her husband the Vicomte Charles. The film was famously the subject of much controversy when it was denounced by fascists. A gang of hooligans organized by “The League of Patriots” and “The Anti-Semitic League” rioted at Studio 28, the Paris theatre where it premiered and as a result, the French government in a misguided attempt to avoid conflict banned the film for more than forty years. All but three prints of L’Âge d’Or were destroyed. These are all facts that Antonioni would certainly have been aware of, given his long tenure as a film critic.

I suggest that two scenes in L’Âge d’Or influenced Antonioni’s later work. My first evidence of that comes in one of the introductory passages in the film, which depicts a group of Catholic bishops sitting atop a coral island, who are later seen in the same positions, but decomposed into skeletons. The ominous island that the protagonists of Antonioni’s 1960 feature L’Avventura become trapped on has some similarities to this location. A young woman from a group of people on a temporary stop during a recreational sail disappears from the island that is really just a naked, rocky outcropping surmounted by an apparently deserted hut. Ian Cameron and Robin Wood note that in L’Avventura “the surroundings shape the events. The island, barren and unfriendly, breaks up relationships, isolates the characters from each other” (72). Some of the group ostensibly continue the search for their missing friend for the rest of the film, but they seem distracted by their sexuality, as observed by William Arrowsmith: “the modern Mediterranean nomads of L’Avventura sink, to lose themselves…(on) abandoned islands where life began…Against the background of these immensities the erotic impulse becomes obsessive” (38). The connection between human physicality and the landscape is emphasized by several scenes of men and women embracing against the stark sky, their turning heads and shoulders like islands themselves, pushing over the horizon line of the bottom of the screen.

Another scene that is reminiscent of the “bishop’s island” from L’Âge d’Or is the one in Antonioni’s Red Desert that visualizes a “living island” from the story that Giuliana tells her son. The clean beauty of this ostensibly “imaginary” scene deliberately opposes the polluted, artificially augmented images that represent Giuliana’s “reality” in the rest of the movie. The surfaces of the island’s rocks are deliberately shot to resemble fleshy, writhing human bodies and they are heard by the solitary young girl there (who can be taken to substitute for Giuliana) to emit a wordless song, a siren’s voice that leads her into the sea. For Pomerance, this tactile and aural humanization of inanimate objects signifies “a loss of personal discreteness, a dissolution of the individual self in the surrounding objects and situations of life” (105). Arrowsmith extends this idea to ask, “if the rocks in the island tale are like flesh, why might everything in the film not represent life? All the machines are human constructs, every pipe was molded and soldered by someone, every ship chugs up the canal under the fingers of a navigator at a wheel” (106). As he will in other films, in different ways, Antonioni makes inert and earthly surfaces interface with the human body.

The most striking correspondences I have found between Buñuel and Antonioni, though, are rooted in a scene in L’Âge d’Or in which a solemn ceremony for the laying of a foundation is interrupted by a man and woman who couple violently in the mud. They are pulled apart by the crowd of spectators and the now-enraged man runs off and kicks a dog; then the camera proceeds to follow him through a series of obtuse misadventures. The scene of the lovers entwined on the wet ground is widely noted in the literature about the film; from the citing of the man’s “amorous egoism” (Gaubern and Hammond, 49) to the invocation of an “intense love (which) tears the prejudices, inhibitions and laws of society to shreds” (Kyrou, 22). Buñuel says that his film is “about passion, l’amour fou, the irresistible force that thrusts two people together, and about the impossibility of them ever becoming one” (Buñuel, 117). What Buñuel’s scenario describes as a “fiercely lascivious embrace” may have represented for the sexually repressed director, who always reviled his Catholic upbringing, a “kind of blazing passion that was never part of Buñuel’s experience,” a virility displayed by the “kind of man he may well have wanted to be” (Edwards, 72).

From Luis Buñuel's L'Âge d'Or

From Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or

The writer Henry Miller, himself no stranger to erotic self-indulgence, qualified the scene and the entire film as representing:

…the death knell of the race. Man is doomed to perish; he has betrayed his instinct, he has sacrificed everything to his intelligence…What has man done with his instincts? Denied them. The summation of all his laws, his codes, his principles, his moralities, his totems and taboos, what does it yield? Sterility. Death. Annihilation…Mired in his art, suffocated by his religion, paralyzed by his wisdom. That which he glorifies is not life, since he has lost the rhythms of life, but death (cited in Kyrou,183-185).

The themes shown in Buñuel’s later work have some continuity with L’Âge d’Or, but the correspondences that I note in this paper are not necessarily meant to equate his intent in that early film with that of Antonioni. Still, a recurring motif of couples engaged in romantic or coital acts in the mud and in general, images that conflate sex with dirt or dust and scenes of people interacting with the ground, with the Earth itself in various ways, can be observed time and time again across Antonioni’s oeuvre.

The first instance can be found in his 1955 film Le Amiche about a group of female friends. In a famous key scene, they all take a day at the beach and as they walk by a couple who are necking while lying in the sand, Momina ignores the female’s agency to tell Clelia, “I don’t think a man feels anything for a woman he kisses in public.” In other words, such scenes display an aggressive masculine ego. Pierre Leprohon observes that Le Amiche depicts “not only the desolation of private human relationships but also a social class whose vanity and uselessness were bringing about its own disintegration,” which apparently agrees with Buñuel’s stated object for his frenzied pair (47). At any rate, the image is sufficiently striking for Antonioni that it becomes imbedded in his cinematic vocabulary.

A second set of incidences can be seen in Antonioni’s Il grido, released in 1957. The film pointedly depicts people struggling to survive in the devastated and industrially polluted postwar environment of the Po Valley. In an early scene, women are shown walking in heels in the stark countryside. A torrential rain falls and in close-up, wet dirt is seen to be splashed up on their bare legs. The pointed visual blending of mud and high fashion eroticizes filth. The protagonist Aldo can only ever love one woman, his betrothed Irma. Arrowsmith describes Aldo as “rooted to the ground of his being” in the scene where he sits with Irma under a tree, literally on the roots and on the muddy ground (26). She informs him there that she has fallen in love with someone else. After slapping her around publicly in the town square, he then absconds with their daughter Rosina. Arrowsmith asserts that all that then befalls Aldo is due to:

…an infinity of solitude, the recognition of human smallness in a post-Copernican universe or even an anonymous mass society, and then the consequent erosion of mere responsibility, automatism—leads the individual directly to the malaise of Eros. Love, as an enduring or even stable bond, disappears, replaced by serial affairs, the desperate attempt to make Eros, by sheer quantification and repetition, an anodyne against reality, a shelter of human warmth against immensity (26).

This view of Antonioni’s vision of contemporary love again does not misalign with that of Buñuel. If people are able to find love in the modern world, it is not because of society, but in spite of it and the larger, uncaring universe. In Il grido, Aldo and Rosina wander to be eventually taken in by Virginia, the owner of a gas station, with whom he reluctantly begins a relationship. One day as Aldo is walking with Virginia and Rosina, the adult pair inexplicably desert the child to go off by themselves and they embrace while laying on the ground near some large wooden wire rollers. Rosina comes upon them and the upset girl runs away. This incident is the cause of an estrangement from her father and soon he places her on a bus to be returned to her mother. According to Sam Rodie, “it ruins everything…A series of presences cancel out one another only to be cancelled out in turn….at the precise moment that Rosina leaves and Aldo is ‘free’, he turns his back on Virginia and leaves as well as if he has lost in these cancellations even more of himself, and of others” (95). Aldo moves on to live for a time with another woman Adreina in a flooded landscape, but increasingly he is a shadow man without substance. All that is left to him is to try to return to visit Irma and Rosina, but through the window of Irma’s house, he is depressed to see her with her new partner. Irma glimpses him and follows as he returns to the industrial site he had worked at to climb the tower where he was first seen at the outset of the film and then, he is killed when, exhausted, he loses his balance and falls to the ground at her feet. He has met and impacted with the “ground of his being.”

Another instance of the grappling of earthbound lovers is in Antonioni’s 1961 feature La Notte. Giovanni and Lidia’s failing marriage ends after an all-night party on a vast estate, as they unsuccessfully make love in a sand pit on a part of the lawn that has been given over to be a golf course. Rifkin cites “Giovanni’s feeling of futility…as he lies on top of Lidia, more like a wrestler than a lover, desperately groping for something which they no longer share” (29).

From Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte

From Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte

Giovanni and Lidia’s feeble final encounter is seen by other writers as a “last desperate attempt to substitute physical contact for emotional connection” (Orban, 22) wherein “a complete evacuation of the human is achieved, however briefly, as a return to the mute expressiveness of the natural world” (Brunette, 71). The camera pulls back and the film ends with only a view of the landscape.

There are no muddy sex scenes per se in Red Desert, but in addition to the “fleshy island” tale previously noted, Antonioni’s disturbed heroine Giuliana relates a dream she has had of sinking into quicksand—and there are depictions of a muddy, polluted landscape enhanced with grey spray enamel, a technique that the director also used for many other locations throughout the film, including a patch of woods that was sprayed white, to no avail as it turned out, since the effect turned out to be unfilmable. Later in Zabriskie Point, Antonioni used paint to blend the human figures shown writhing erotically with the desert landscape (I will return to this scene presently). Also in Red Desert, at the factory a huge blast of steam obscures the view of the people in the scene entirely, a visual motif which recurs later on the dock, when Giuliana’s companions dissolve into a thick fog. Figures vanishing into clouds of vapor or dust is another trope that is present in many Antonioni films.

But to return to the repeating motif of bodies on the ground, it next turns up in reflexive form in Blow Up from 1966, when the photographer Thomas stands, snapping his shutter, dominantly straddling the model Veruschka who is splayed on the floor. Both of Antonioni’s visual tics that are noted above are blended when the corpse of a man on the ground in the park that Thomas’ investigation has uncovered dissolves into illegibility in his successive close-up prints. He goes back to the park to confirm the corpse’s existence, and finding it, he touches it, he stands over it, echoing his earlier pose over Veruschka, but this time he is camera-less (emasculated). It seems that the photographer doesn’t perceive the dead man as the victim of a crime that he should be reporting to the police. For him, the corpse is an object that seems only to have much the same novelty value as the huge propeller that he found in the antique shop earlier and then went back to purchase. But by the time he returns to the park with a camera, the cadaver has vanished. Matilde Nardelli asserts that this scene “occasions for the photographer his most lucid, if not only, moment of self-awareness in the film” ( in Rascaroli and Rhodes, 77). In the end, the body of the dead man is less real than the propeller; having disappeared, the corpse and its dissolute image have no evidentiary substance, in fact they have the same degree of reality as the imaginary tennis ball that the mimes pretend to play with—or indeed, the fictional Thomas (because the self-awareness of the viewer also comes into play here), since he is then himself abruptly erased from the image.

In Antonioni’s revolutionary but universally misunderstood 1970 feature Zabriskie Point about the American hippie movement of the 1960s, his protagonist Mark becomes so disillusioned with the inequities of human society after witnessing the murder of an African-American protestor by the police that he literally disconnects himself from the ground by stealing a small plane and flying it to the desert. There he joins with a young woman to enjoy a brief moment of freedom, which Antonioni expands into an allegory for the youth movement. Murray Pomerance relates that the director intended to shoot a massive “love-in” in the part of Death Valley that the film is titled for: “I want to see 20,000 hippies out there making love, as far as you can see.” A park ranger charged with facilitating the project wasn’t amused: “The answer to that is a flat no” (170). Even if Antonioni could have somehow ignored or evaded the Park’s conservative guardians, his production manager Bryan Gindoff says that “the cataclysm amounted to twenty thousand people times $29.15 a day plus meals and penalties and overtime; it was more than I could multiply in my head” (cited in Pomerance, 170). The scene was scaled down, but it remains the most ambitious of Antonioni’s Buñuelian earthy love scenes. In the finished film, the protagonists and dozens of other couples as well as bisexual clusters of lovers are photographed making love onscreen in the nude as Jerry Garcia’s instrumental track meanders lyrically. The lovers roll together, roiling in ecstasy and then they dissolve in an apotheosis of dust. According to Pomerance, “In Antonioni’s sequence, body is finally land, land is body; heat is dust; sound is rhythm…Mark and Daria sense that they have stopped being themselves, that they are part of something vast and historical and old, called life” (173). The scene depicts humans reverted to a primordial state.

From Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point

From Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point

In the run-up to the film’s climax, Mark is senselessly shot dead by the police after returning the plane to the airport he had stolen it from. According to Rifkin, in the film Antonioni uses the desert scenes to represent “a release from modern urban life’s oppressive conditions” and they provide “a context for man’s moral relationship to his perceptual understanding of the world.” By contrast, the urban locations are presented as “analogous to the deathly elements of modern life…in all, it is not surprising that Mark is killed when he leaves the desert for the city,” Rifkin concludes (32). The film’s extremely negative reception at the time of its release and for many years afterward indicates a critical breakdown, if not systematic suppression.

For example, reactionary critic Vernon Young is racist when he refers to the multicultural participants in the believably staged activist meeting at the beginning of the film as “savages” and he is dismissive of the goals and integrity of the idealistic youth movement when of Mark, he says, “The lad…is a lawless punk with no shadow of a claim to any opinion which should be taken seriously.” Young goes on to express ignorance or denial about later documented activities of police and intelligence forces against the American left: “I’m not just ready to believe (despite my aversion to the American police) that cars-full of State patrolmen would be mustered to corral one youngster in a stolen plane, or that he would be shot to death, unseen and without provocation” (538). Even a relatively sympathetic commenter such as Seymour Chatman disrespectfully states, “One almost wishes that the film had been suspended in mid production and that the footage had come down to us unedited, like that of Eisenstein’s Mexican film, so that each of us could have figured out how to put it together,” as if everyone but Antonioni would know better than he how to make his film (168). The hostility directed at Antonioni was not limited to the post-release reaction. Angelo Restivo relates that since it was a MGM-financed film, the director’s trusted Italian crew members had been “doubled by paid American union” workers who were “conservative, disparaging and even went so far as to attempt to sabotage the filming on occasion” (in Rascaroli and Rhodes, 83). The film ran over-budget for reasons outside of Antonioni’s control and on release, it lost money. In these ways it was made by its legions of detractors into such a commercial disaster that five years would pass before Antonioni was able to produce his next feature film, The Passenger.

In summation, unlike the products of Hollywood, the questions posed by the films of Buñuel and Antonioni may not have clear-cut answers, but those questions are often themselves the subject of their films. Antonioni’s films famously resist closure or pat explanations, even those he made for MGM. One might interpret the actions of the couple in L’Âge d’Or to be that they are so overcome by passion that they are unaware of the spectators, but it also might be that they indulge a performative gesture for specific effect, making the private become public. Similarly, some of Antonioni’s uses of the device can be interpreted as representing abrupt, desperate passion, some depict exhibitionist displays, others a melding with the dust from which we sprang and some seem intended to show that the essential nature of man is animalistic.

Most observers then and now trivialize the sexual scene in the desert in Zabriskie Point through a bourgeois lens to represent the fad of “free love” and the whole film as an attempt by an aging, foreign director to depict a cartoonish American hippiedom. However, it becomes apparent that the Death Valley sequence is actually the culmination of the series of Buñuelian “grounded” love scenes that occur deliberately throughout Antonioni’s body of work. As well, this specific instance and indeed, the whole film (including its incendiary apotheosis) serve to reclaim the noblest ideals of the psychedelic generation from the mainstream media where they have been co-opted. Seen also as perhaps an antidote to the scenes of isolated people wandering futilely through polluted, devastated landscapes that Antonioni shot for Il grido and Red Desert, his desert love sequence in Zabriskie Point envisions humans returning to a pre-historical state of being, or perhaps reaching for post-historicity, as they attempt to become one with each other and the Earth, in the end a much saner approach than the oblivious environmental disregard that has brought our planet to the brink of disaster.

Thanks to Giancarlo Lombardi and Marguerite Van Cook.

Film sources.

L’Âge d’Or. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque. Vicomte de Noailles, 1930. Kino, 2004. DVD. Web: Youtube 20 March 2014.  Link.
Exterminating Angel. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, Enrique Rambal. Producciones Gustavo Alatriste, 1962. Criterion, 2009. DVD.
Il grido. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. Steve Cochran, Dorian Gray. SpA Cinematografica/ Robert Alexander Productions, 1957. Kino Video, 2000. DVD.
L’Avventura. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti. Cino del Duca/ Produzioni Cinematografiche Europee/Societé Cinématographique Lyre, 1960. Criterion, 2001. DVD.
La Notte. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti. Nepi Film/Silver Films/Sofitedip, 1961. Criterion, 2013. DVD.
Red Desert. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. Monica Vitti, Richard Harris. Film Duemila /Federiz /Francoriz Production, 1964. Criterion, 2010. DVD.
Blow Up. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Birkin. Bridge Films/Carlo Ponti Production/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1966. Warner Home Video, 2004. DVD.
Zabriskie Point. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Perf. Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Rod Taylor. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Trianon Productions, 1970. Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.

Print sources.

Antonioni, Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision. Eds. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi. New York: Marisilio, 1996. Print.
Arrowsmith, William. Antonioni: The Poet of Images. Ed. Ted Perry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.
Baxter, John. Buñuel. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994. Print.
Brunette, Peter. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.
Buñuel, Luis. My Last Breath. Tran. Abigail Israel. London: Vintage, 2003. Print.
Cameron, Ian and Robin Wood. Antonioni. New York: Praeger, 1968. Print.
Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni or, The Surface of the World. Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 1985. Print.
Costantini, Costanzo, Ed. Conversations with Fellini. Trans. Sohrab Sorooshian. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1995. Print.
Edwards, Gwynne. A Companion to Luis Buñuel. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2005. Print.
Gubern, Román and Paul Hammond. Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Print.
Higginbotham, Virginia. Luis Buñuel. Boston, Mass: Twayne Publishers, 1979. Print.
Kyrou, Ada. Luis Buñuel: An Introduction. Trans. Adrienne Foulke. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1963. Print
Leprohon, Pierre. Michelangelo Antonioni: An Introduction. Trans. Scott Sullivan. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1963. Print.
Orban, Clara. “Antonioni’s Women, Lost in the City.” Modern Language Studies 31. 2. (Autumn 2001) 11-27. Print.
Pomerance, Murray. Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Print.
Rascaroli, Laura and John David Rhodes, Eds. Antonioni: Centenary Essays. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.
Rifkin, Ned. Antonioni’s Visual Language. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1982. Print.
Young, Vernon. “Reflections on Two American Films.” The Hudson Review 23. 3. (Autumn 1970) 533-539. Print.

Microcombobulated at SPX

When I first came to live in New York City in the early 1980s, I worked for a while as a low-paid xerox temp at the World Trade Center. It wasn’t a job I loved. The WTC elevators were unnerving, the vertiginous stairwells even worse and both towers swayed perceptibly in the wind—and I wasn’t overly thrilled with my fellow laborers, at least not with the male “suits” who tended to elbow past the female workers to direct me to do their copy orders first. But in my off-time, I managed to do a little surreptitious production, of several street posters for bands and of art that would find its home in my roommate Seth’s then-new political comics zine World War 3 Illustrated—and also to print a few minicomics (well, I didn’t call them that, but that is what they were), which I consigned to St. Mark’s Comics for a dollar or two. I was eventually fired for serving secretaries before executives and after the WTC blew up the first time, I never went near the place again. That was the end of minicomics for me for some years.

A few weekends ago, I roadtripped with several cartoonists to Bethesda, Maryland for the Small Press Expo (SPX). Besides my usual occupation of Tom Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books table to flog the ebbing supply of my collaboration with my son Crosby, Post York, I was there to debut my minicomic called “Daddy” written by the very, very scary Josh Simmons and published in two colors by Oily Comics. Also, I wanted to be present for the premiere of the print magazine Study Group #3D, for which I contributed a way-too-personally revealing essay/comics adaptation of a William Burroughs piece, a project that had its genesis in an aborted posting for this site. And these things I did do.

SPX resembles the MOCCA Festival and Comic Arts Brooklyn in that like them, it is bereft of the fetishistic superheroes that taint the American mainstream comics industry and also of the Hollywood movies, wrestlers and porn stars that tend to drown out comics at mainstream ComicCons. SPX and other alternative/literary comics gatherings are comprised of people who do comics apparently for the sheer love of the artform rather than to advance obviously mercantile impulses. A significant percentage of the audience at these shows is comprised of the vendors, who patronize each other and form mutual support networks. A good part of the product of these shows are minicomics, quite small xeroxed or offset pamphlets much like the ones I made at the WTC, but often printed on a copier called a risograph which allows for multiple colors. Occasionally, these budding talents will print a comic book “floppy” in full color on slick paper just like the slick output of DC, Marvel or Image, but the effect of alt/lit concept in mainstream drag can be disconcerting. As well, many publishers seem to do well with small prints, limited edition silkscreen booklets and also, many surprisingly young artists have completed graphic novels in a variety of styles, genres and formats.

Lord knows that I held back from long-form efforts for many years—I preferred to hone my skills in short stories. However, publishers balk at anthologies these days. “They don’t sell” is the mantra they chant, despite a comics history that includes such anthology “failures” as decades of romance, war and horror comics at many publishers, all of E.C.’s output including Mad, Warren’s Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, Zap and other underground titles, Heavy Metal, Weirdo, Raw, MOME, Kramer’s Ergot, etc…in other words, many publications that not only sold well for extended runs, but moved the artform ahead. So people are expected to labor for years in isolation (since the default mode in the alternative is for cartoonists to work solo as auteurs) to make 100-page-plus books, for which they have few sounding boards and little or no income in the process.

At any rate, after an period spent in the mainstream in which I drew a few long books but under restrictive circumstances and unhappy with the results, I have forsaken page rates to regain control over my work. In order to immerse oneself in this brave new world of long or short literate art comics for the small press, one needs to frequent shows like SPX, and of course being who I am, I feel the need to share the details with everyone. And so, I present the following set of minireviews of minicomics and books, which represent but a fraction of what I came back with from my trip to Bethesda.
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It Never Happened Again: two stories by Sam Alden
Uncivilized Books $11.99

SPX 006 Alden
I didn’t buy the book by this young cartoonist that won the Ignatz award at the show, Wicked Chicken Queen from Retrofit, but I got two of his earlier efforts, Haunter from Study Group and It Never Happened Again from Uncivilized Books. Both books have an improvisational feel; the bright yet moody watercolors of Haunter carry a large part of the impact of the narrative and the sweet and loose-appearing, but apparently lightboxed, pencil drawings of It Never Happened Again provide atmospheric effects that enhance the delicacy of Alden’s stories.
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Houses of the Holy by Caitlan Skaalrud
Uncivilized Books $6.00

SPX 003 Houses
This mini is made up of a series of full-page, nicely rendered surreal drawings accompanied by poetic snatches of text and punctuated by regularly-paced numbered panels. They tell an oblique narrative that despite its title, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Led Zeppelin. It is a dark fever dream, sort of on the order of The Cage, Martin Vaughn-James’s nightmarish masterwork that was recently reissued by Coach House Books. Tom K tells me that the artist of Houses of the Holy was an outstanding student of his at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and that this is an excerpt from a much longer work that Skaalrud has in process. Uncivilized Books will publish it upon completion and I will be anticipating it.
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Reptile Museum by Cody Pickrodt
RayRay Books #2: $4.00 #4: $2.00

SPX 002 Cody
Cody Pickrodt’s post-apocalyptic saga Reptile Museum reflects the artist’s knowledge of martial arts and his effective storytelling is comprised of pages that take the form of fluid series of free-hanging vignettes. The precise lines and rubbery high-speed physicality of Cody’s comics remind me of nothing so much as the frenetic crime stories of the tragic Plastic Man creator Jack Cole.
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Eye Sees Eye by Kate Lacour
self-published $8.00

SPX 000 Lacour
One of several people who felt the need to inform me of how fucked-up they found “Daddy” to be (I’m totally aware of this and in fact, it is why one would work with Josh Simmons!), this artist came to the Oily table to eyeball me and give me a creepy body-revulsion pamphlet called Hole/Human. Later I passed by her table and examined this book. I didn’t buy it, but it has stuck in my head enough to include it here because it reveals Lacour to be quite accomplished; her anatomical renderings are striking.
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Little Tommy Lost by Cole Closser
Koyama Press $15.00

SPX 015 Koyama
I got a copy of this at SPX, but I had perused it earlier this year when I was an Eisner judge. It ended up as a nominee and deservedly so: Little Tommy Lost replicates the look and tone of clippings of a daily/Sunday strip from the late 1930s quite beautifully. The story of abused urchins does seem as if it might well have been someone’s grampa’s favorite serial strip, now lovingly preserved for posterity.
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Jesus Christ, Jared! by Rainy
self published $10.00

SPX 001 Rainy
This comic is an example of slick printing applied to alternative content to odd effect, but the cover is a compelling use of Photoshop. Of course I am known to be not much of a fan of digital color; still, if it must be done, let it be used to render tears in such an extremely visceral way! The comic is a highly emotional reaction to the persecution of Middle American gay youth by fundamentalist Christians. It is disconcerting to see teenagers who are drawn to look otherwise hip ostracizing the protagonist for furthering the “gay agenda.” This also reflects a phenomena that I saw at SPX that I hadn’t noted at previous comics events: a preponderance of overtly LGBT participants who are finally welcomed to this most intimate and personal of mediums. Rainy and her also talented partner F. Lee positively glowed at their table. SPX’s aura of inclusivity was extended when later, the Ignatz awards ceremony was officiated by a host in drag.
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Fuff #9 by Jeffrey Lewis
self published $2.50

SPX 008 Jeffrey
I first met Jeffrey Lewis in the early 2000s, when he would visit my partner Marguerite Van Cook and I in our old studio in our building’s basement, a refuge that we lost when our landlord freaked out after 9/11 and decided that restaurants were preferable tenants. Even then, Jeffrey’s work had a fully developed sense of place and he would draw some of the most carefully-rendered buildings in comics. In the time since, Jeffrey has stayed the course to produce one of the last standing alt floppy comic books Fuff, while simultaneously pursuing a healthy career in music with his band The Jrams. His strong grasp of the urban landscape is on display, as well as an acute ability for self-caricature, as in the current issue wherein he engages in pitched discourse with his drawing table and imparts the complexities of his love life, in the grand tradition of revelatory alternative autobiographics.
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It Will All Hurt #2 by Farel Dalrymple
Study Group Comics $8.00

SPX 010 Farel
Farel Dalrymple was selling the original art for his First Second book The Wrenchies at SPX and they are very pretty efforts indeed, complete in ink and watercolor. It Will All Hurt is a floppy edition of his ongoing webcomic at Zack Soto’s studygroupcomics.com, also executed in watercolors, but with a very extemporaneous storyline. Farel also did the art for a few of the most effective issues of Brandon Graham’s version of the Rob Liefeld Image Comics title Prophet, or at least I found them so; my feeling is that kids would totally love to pour over these comics again and again, each time finding new details in the densely packed pages.
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Titus and the Cyber Sun by Lale Westvind
self published $7.00

SPX 009 Lale
I’m beginning to see other young alternative cartoonists who, like Dalrymple, are not afraid to use the trappings of science fiction and fantasy, as can be seen in the success of Prophet and other genre-ish efforts. The more recent books of Lale Westvind are in color; those brought to my mind something of the psychedelia of Victor Moscoso, but I was mainly drawn to her black and white comic Titus and the Cyber Sun, which in its ornate stipplings is reminiscent of the French cartoonists of Metal Hurlant and the underground works of the seminal graphic novelist George Metzger.
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Captain Victory #2 by Joe Casey, Nathan Fox, Michel Fiffe and Brad Simpson
Dynamite $3.99

SPX 011 Michel
This isn’t a minicomic or even alternative per se, but it is a continuation of a title begun by Jack Kirby in the early 1980s for a fledgling publisher, Pacific Comics—-that just as I was making my little minicomics at the WTC, literally began the direct market in comics that led to the scene I am describing here—and Captain Victory was the final significant expression by that great cartoonist and brilliant founder of so many comics concepts, as I wrote on this site here. An earlier revamp of the title by Dynamite appeared a few years ago, but it was a cheesy regurgitation of Kirby overwhelmed by what I would term “rainbow unicorn barf” art by Alex Ross and others. This slick new version also seems a rehash of Kirby’s ideas, but the art this time out is done in a vigorously explosive fashion by SVA illustration czar Nathan Fox, working in tandem with some of the alt/lit scene’s more adventure-comics-oriented talents such as Jim Rugg, Ulises Farinas and (pictured) Michel Fiffe, maker of the popular sci-fi series Copra.
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Middle School Missy by Daryl Seitchik
? $3.00

SPX 004 Daryl
I’ve found Daryl’s Oily Comics work to be very amusing and well-drawn; this particular issue of her title Missy doesn’t name its publisher, but it manages the neat trick of being both slick and a minicomic at once! I wouldn’t be surprised to see her rolling in bucks like Scrooge McDuck after Missy becomes one of those edgy, not-really-for-kids animated shows on TV at some point.
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Comics Workbook #5
Comics Workbook $1.00

SPX 007 Mendes
For five bucks, I was able to buy all five issues of this fascinating interview zine, which incidentally resembles my only other self-published effort, the xeroxed zine Comic Art Forum from the early 2000s that I produced with Marguerite. Comics Workbook is a by-product of Frank Santoro’s comics-making classes. The various issues include conversations with Sam Alden, Dash Shaw, Lala Albert and others as well as original comics by Derik Badman, Sarah Horrocks and more, plus articles and reviews by Warren Craghead, Nicole Rudick and the list goes on. In particular, I enjoyed Zach Mason’s exchange with “Ladydrawers” Melissa Mendes and Anne Elizabeth Moore about nonfictional activist comics. I also appreciate Melissa’s poignant Oily production Joey, which details a parental disruption and its effect on the children involved; the art is finished in watercolors and the book looks to be printed by color laserjet, pressing the limits of the minicomic format.
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The Tiny Report: Micro-Press Yearbook 2013 by Robyn Chapman
Paper Rocket $3.00

SPX 005 Robyn
Unfortunately, I missed all of the panels at SPX and I especially regret not seeing artist and Paper Rocket publisher Robyn Chapman’s presentation about micropublishing, but her Tiny Report (cover above by Chuck Forsman) provides a well-organized orientation to the world of small press comics and independent publishing. Robyn rode back to NYC with us and so I was able to quiz her on the way about what is perhaps the most serious issue facing micropublishers today: distribution. Diamond distributes most mainstream comics, but they refuse to carry a lot of smaller publishers’ books, which makes their stranglehold on the business look monopolistic. In NYC, for instance, it seems that in Manhattan, minicomics and other products of the alt/lit scene are only carried by Forbidden Planet, Jim Hanley’s Universe and Carmine Street Comics and in Brooklyn, only Desert Island and Bergen Street Comics. Those are distributed mostly by the apparently overextended Tony Shenton. It sure looks from here like there is a void to be filled by some enterprising distributor, given the vitality of the micropublishing scene.

Some of the biggest mainstream comics publishers do not use Diamond for bookstore distribution of their graphic novels and collections; for instance, both DC Comics and Dark Horse have deals with Random House. More recently, the book trade distributor Consortium Books has been placing the graphic novels of alt/lit publishers Uncivilized Books and Koyama Press in major book retailers around the country—and the word is that the British artcomics imprint NoBrow and Françoise Mouly’s Toon Books have now joined with Consortium, which ups the ante somewhat.
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Reverse-Engineering Fairbanks

Silent film star Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) was hugely popular in his time. He was one of the first performers of whom it could be said that he was less an actor than a star who was considered to be “playing himself.” He was so universally recognized and his audiences’ expectations were so great that in his films, his actual name would come up on the intertitles as he was introduced onscreen. The first part of his career was spent making vigorous comedies full of antic chase scenes, such as His Picture in the Papers, Manhattan Madness and His Majesty, the American, all of which blended his facility for comedic timing with great acrobatic skills. He became the quintessential boys’ hero.

United Artists: Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks

United Artists: Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks

By the time of his formation of United Artists with the even more popular stars, his wife Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, Fairbanks had come to retain considerable control over his movies. He produced, wrote and starred in his own films and was in a position to select his casts and crews from the best talents Hollywood had to offer. With his 30th film, The Mark of Zorro, he initiated the action genre in film. Thereafter, he dedicated the remainder of his career to the costumed adventure genre. He set a source precedent for all of the action stars to follow such as Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster and the nameless protagonist of the My Name is Nobody spaghetti westerns, as well as even the semi-humorous performances of musical star Gene Kelly—and influencing contemporary stars of action/comedy like Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Johnny Depp and “The Rock.”

Fairbanks’ 1920 silent feature film version of The Mark of Zorro derived from the prose serial adventure “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley that ran in six parts in the pulp periodical All-Story Weekly in 1919. Fairbanks’ son Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in his autobiography says that McCulley’s story was brought to his father’s attention by agent Ruth Allen, who was a friend of Anna Sully, his mother and Fairbanks’ first wife. Fairbanks initially was reluctant to diverge from his modernist comedic image to do a period piece, but eventually he was convinced and procured the option. The resulting film became so popular that it determined the trajectory of his future career:

(The Mark of Zorro was) by far the most successful movie he ever made…a more than minor classic of its kind, widely imitated and remade…the phenomenal success of Zorro convinced my father from there on to take more time and concentrate on producing a series of high-quality, expensive films that would be exhibited first for long runs in regular theaters (not movie houses) with reserved hard-ticket seats (Fairbanks Jr. 64).

The exclusivity implied in this type of limited engagement and the increasingly impressive budgets Fairbanks commanded for his productions served to elevate the formerly crass medium of movies into something more resembling an art form. Although, a factor in Fairbanks’ decision to make The Mark of Zorro was a consideration of economy: the events of the film, set in Spanish California at the end of the previous century, were placed in the same location as Fairbanks’ studio in the southern part of the state, which was tremendously convenient and served to keep costs down.

The Mark of Zorro was directed by Fred Niblo, who would also helm Fairbanks’ next adventure film The Three Musketeers, but as was typical for the star, he wrote the film scenario and took a firm hand in all aspects of the production. In his auteuristic capacity, Fairbanks took the initiative to deviate from his pulp source and alter certain story points to telling affect. Significantly, he added several tropes to the original source story that would be credited as the inspiration for Batman and other popular cultural vigilante heroes.

However, while Fairbanks’ Zorro is certainly one of the prototypes for the dark masked hero with a ubiquitous identifying symbol intended to strike fear into the hearts of evildoers (i.e. Zorro’s slashed “Z,” Batman’s “bat signal” and The Phantom’s skull ring, which leaves its impression on the chins of the villains he punches), the earliest precedent for the swordsman vigilante with a symbol and a “foppish” alter ego is Baroness Emma Orczy’s the Scarlet Pimpernel, a hero of adventures set in the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. The Pimpernel’s other identity is Sir Percy Blakeney and at the scenes of his escapades, he’d leave a calling card on which was printed an image of the flower of his namesake. The character first appeared in book form in 1905 and the character debuted in Hollywood as early as 1917, when a silent feature directed by Richard Stanton and starring Dustin Farnum was released by the Fox Film Corporation.

It would seem that Fairbanks took inspiration from the Pimpernel to add the “Z” symbol and to emphasize Zorro’s “effeminate” plainclothes disguise, Don Diego de la Vega. Actually, Don Diego is not Zorro’s true identity, but another smokescreen for a hero who has two false faces. This has been counted as Fairbanks’ innovation by his biographer Jeffrey Vance: “Fairbanks’ exploration of the different natures of masculinity is a source of continuing comment…The Mark of Zorro’s juxtaposition of the effete Don Diego and the vigorous Senor Zorro is the most distinctive delineation…both identities are masks. Don Diego Vega is neither fop nor fox.”

Comics scholar Charles Hatfield concurs and further says that the dual deception of Zorro enables the hero to navigate “an ironic class mobility à la so many versions of Robin Hood” and displays a bending of gender expectations to denote a “masculinity…made triumphant, queerly enough, through flamboyance” (Hatfield 113). These descriptions run very much along the lines of Batman’s alter-ego, Bruce Wayne, who lives in a mansion with only his butler Alfred and his teenaged ward Dick Grayson, an arrangement that was decried as “like a wish dream of…homosexuals living together” by psychiatrist Frederick Wertham in his 1954 expose of supposedly degenerate comics, Seduction of the Innocent, which raised such a controversy that public sentiment turned against the comics medium and a congressional inquiry subsequently served to drive many publishers out of business (cited in Williams, 4).

Hatfield’s sources include an essay by Catherine Williams that takes the gendering questions that arise from considering these depictions much further. Concentrating on the Tyrone Power remake of The Mark of Zorro but making observations that are also applicable to Fairbanks’ original and his prose source as well, Williams first explicates the phallic symbolism of the ubiquitous swordplay of the Zorro films, then offers:

Zorro fights for the aristocracy without their support and, while becoming a folk hero of sorts for the peons, does little to improve their constrained circumstances. It cannot be mere coincidence that Zorro, the flamboyant guerrilla who is outside all political systems, has as his alter ego an openly gay man, an outlaw of sorts himself” (Williams 13).

Williams claims that such closeted homosexuality is deliberately used by the powers that be, which then begins to cross over into the non-fictional real world: “(Zorro) isn’t really about a revolution led by a gay man to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Diego/Zorro’s mission, it turns out, is about preserving the line of succession, about maintaining the system’s power to ‘reproduce’ itself” (13).

With the long-standing, long-accepted “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies of the American military, Williams asserts, “one can ‘be’ gay as long as one does not pursue gay sex or inform the military of one’s orientation” (14). For superheroes and homosocial institutions such as the military alike,

(They) must forego sexual relations in the line of duty while manufacturing a deliberately misleading persona. Thus their ability to serve as warriors is a direct result of a “secret” or closeted identity. What is most terrifying about this link between popular culture and government policy is the way the closet is reinforced as a ‘noble’ or ‘heroic’ institution—something that should be done for the good of the country (Williams 14).

Williams thusly links the closeted identities of fictional vigilante and superheroes to the agendas of the very real military-industrial complex, an enveloping conspiracy if ever there was one.

But, regardless of these implications and perhaps in ignorance of the earlier Scarlet Pimpernel, Batman’s creators credit Fairbanks and his Diego/Zorro as an influence. Bob Kane co-created the character in 1939 with writer Bill Finger, who said, “My idea was to have Batman be a combination of Douglas Fairbanks, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow and Doc Savage as well” (Steranko, 44). The creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, also claimed Fairbanks as a prime influence on their character, whose early appearance often depicted him in the star’s signature hands-on-hips stance.

In fact, Fairbanks’ amendments to Zorro’s character were also assimilated by author McCulley for his subsequent sequels. Such Fairbanks-initiated devices as Zorro’s slashed “Z” symbol and Diego’s ineffectual “handkerchief illusion”, prefaced by the character saying “Have you seen this one?” turned up in McCulley’s follow-up story in the now-renamed Argosy All-Story Weekly, “the Further Adventures of Zoro” (sic) which as I found, thanks to HU contributor Alex Buchet, was deceptively cover-subtitled with “In which Douglas Fairbanks will again play the Hero” :

Left: cover of All-Story Weekly, 1919. Right: cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1922.

Left: cover of All-Story Weekly, 1919.
Right: cover of Argosy All-Story Weekly, 1922.

Fairbanks did not subsequently adapt that story for his own Zorro sequel, the 1925 Don Q, Son of Zorro— but rather, he appropriated some of its elements for another film property entirely, The Black Pirate. According to Fairbanks scholars John C. Tibbetts and James M. Walsh,

Similarities between McCulley’s sequel and the Fairbanks pirate film include scenes wherein the heroine is captured by a pirate ship, the hero scampering about the rigging of a pirate ship, a rescue affected by allies of the hero in a pursuing ship. Even the character of Barbados is echoed somewhat by Donald Crisp’s portrayal of a tough old pirate with a heart of gold. (Tibbetts & Walsh 124).

David A. Cook cites Fairbanks as the originator of the adventure spectacle, whose “star personality so influenced the character of his films that he deserves to be called an auteur”, who embodied the “all-American boy—boisterous, optimistic and athletic—who detested weakness, insincerity, and social regimentation in any form” (Cook 222). Additionally, Cook and other film scholars rank Fairbanks among the earliest champions of experimental film color for his use of the expensive two-color “cemented positive” Technicolor process for The Black Pirate.

It can’t be overstated just how profoundly Fairbanks set the heroic standard of his time. The star kept himself in extremely good physical condition—apart, that is, from his heavy smoking habit. He was famous for doing his own stunt work and a great part of his preparations for his films was dedicated to making his onscreen physical feats viable. For The Mark of Zorro, he engaged the assistance of stuntman Richard Talmadge. According to Vance,

In rehearsals, Talmadge mainly served as a model; Fairbanks, along with his trainer, Lewis Hippe, watched him go through the action in order to eliminate flaws and minimize hazards. Once a stunt routine was effectively refined to Fairbanks’ satisfaction, the star himself executed the feat for the cameras. (…) Invaluable expertise was also provided by a Belgian fencing master, Henry J. Uyttenhove…who choreographed all of the film’s dueling sequences (Vance 96).

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. corroborates his father’s stunt-training methodology with an account of the star’s preparation for Don Q:

One of the principle gimmicks of this Zorro sequel was the expert cracking of a giant Australian bullwhip. In order to learn how to do tricks with the monster lash, Dad had sent for the famous Australian athlete and bullwhip expert Snowy Baker. It didn’t take long before Dad was able to whirl the long blacksnake, make it crack like a pistol shot, and then snap a cigarette out of a brave and steady mouth fifteen or more feet away (Fairbanks Jr. 104).

In this way, Fairbanks used experts to give his stunts a feel of authenticity and won his audience over by displaying what seemed to be incredible feats of physical strength and stamina, in much the same manner as did the earliest incarnations of the “cinema of attractions.”

Fairbanks’ subsequent films were all action/adventures with his trademark comedic touch. One of the greatest is certainly The Thief of Bagdad. Fairbanks’ performance in this film is astounding; he seems more like a dancer than an actor as he moves in fluid choreography through sets which are built on a huge, vaulting scale, nearly dwarfing the performers. The climactic scene where Fairbanks attacks a city with a massive magical army that appears in puffs of smoke reminds me of nothing so much as director George Lucas’ first sequel to the Star Wars trilogy, The Phantom Menace. It is strange to think that in 1999 I waited with my son in line for hours to see what I recall mostly as a screen filled with legions of digitally created, exponentially replicated clone warriors that hardly look any more convincing than what Fairbanks was able to create onscreen in 1924.

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(Note: as with my other HU posts about film, this is a revised version of an essay originally done as a final paper for a recent class. In this case, I accepted my professor’s challenge to write about Fairbanks and to that end, I proposed to “reverse-engineer” a storyboard for one of the star’s  silent films.)

For the preparation of the storyboards that follow, I studied the narrative techniques of storyboard artist and legendary cartoonist Alexander Toth. It is coincidental that Toth is not only one of the most exemplary storyboard artists, but also an artist whose career is inextricably linked with the character of Zorro. In fact, Toth’s most famous comic books are his adaptations of the late 1950s, early 1960s Disney TV version of Zorro starring Guy Williams—and those are among the most refined products of the best-selling and family friendly but often relatively bland Dell imprint:

Alex Toth, “Zorro: Garcia’s Secret,” Four Color Comics #933, 1958

Alex Toth, “Zorro: Garcia’s Secret,” Four Color Comics #933, 1958

In his introduction to the reprint collection of his classic Zorro series, Toth wrote, “Fairbanks…created the visual film persona for all later renditions of Zorro to imitate.” However, Toth claimed to prefer the 1940 remake of The Mark of Zorro, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Tyrone Power. Of Fairbanks’ original The Mark of Zorro, Toth recalled, “I did see this silent classic at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art film seminar series in the 1940s and enjoyed its zesty, witty gymnastics, but the film’s dated style pales in contrast to Mamoulian’s ageless 1940 epic” (Toth 11). Despite this disclaimer, Toth’s Dell comics depictions of Zorro often echo the feel of Fairbanks’ version of the characters and settings equally as much as Powers’ update.

The storyboard is my fabrication to make a point. Fairbanks was unusual in that he not only produced and starred in his own films and did his own stunt work, but he wrote them as well. Though almost all films did eventually came to be done from scripts, in actuality the early silent films were rarely if ever scripted. Fairbanks was known to work from a relatively loose scenario, which left a good amount of leeway for improvisation in the filmmaking process. His films and indeed, all silent films were likely never storyboarded.

Storyboards first were used by the Walt Disney studio for a 1933 short, Three Little Pigs—and the first live action feature to be entirely storyboarded was the 1939 Gone with the Wind. But, Fairbanks is the founder of the action film, a genre that at the present time provides the bulk of storyboard artists’ employment, as action sequences are where their skills are most needed and in the most demand. And so, in order to study how Fairbanks articulated his action scenes, I undertook to make a storyboard for a six minute sequence in The Mark of Zorro. I did not have access to Fairbank’s script, or the source story he adapted his script from, so I watched the sequence in question once and as I did, I lightly sketched a bare-bones layout with action notations, which came out to 13 six-paneled pages. To render this, I then didn’t look further at the film, but wholly reconstructed the images from memory and in many cases simply invented the poses.

The result echoes my previous experience with storyboards, which is that the finished film looks quite a lot like what is drawn, but not exactly—a lot of detail and much greater precision of choreography in how sequences actually play out are developed in the process of filming. The storyboard is not intended to be particularly pretty; it looks and is a bit rushed—it is meant to provide a template, a starting point to guide the filmmakers; and that is what my storyboard looks like, to the best of my abilities within the time constraints I had to deal with, which also reflect the abbreviated schedules that many film productions labor under.

 

Click on images to enlarge:

Zorro 1

Zorro 2
Zorro 3
Zorro 4
Zorro 5
Zorro 6
Zorro 7
Zorro 8
Zorro 9
Zorro 10
Zorro 11
Zorro 12
Zorro 13

Thanks to Professor Marc Bolan and Marguerite Van Cook.
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Sources

The Black Pirate. Dir. Albert Parker. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove. United Artists, 1926. Web. 06 Dec. 2013. Link

The Mark of Zorro. Dir. Fred Niblo. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite De La Motte, Noah Beery. United Artists, 1920. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
Entire film: Link
Storyboarded scene: Link

The Thief of Bagdad. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Julanne Johnston, Anna May Wong. United Artists, 1924. DVD, Kino Video, 2004.

Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Print.

Buchet, Alex. “Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 6): The Fabulous Junkshop.” Hooded Utilitarian, October 24, 2013. Web. 09 Dec. 2013. Link

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1996.
Print.

Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas. The Salad Days. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson, Miss: The University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

Steranko, James. The History of Comics 1. Reading, Pa: Supergraphics, 1970. Print.

Tibbetts, John C. and James M. Welsh. His Majesty the American: The Cinema of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co. 1977. Print.

Toth, Alex and Darrell McNeil. By Design. Los Angeles: Gold Medal, 1996. Print.

Toth, Alex. “A Forward’s Look Back and Askance” (author’s introduction). The Complete Classic Adventures of Zorro. Fullerton, Ca: Image Comics, 1999. Print.

Vance, Jeffrey with Tony Maietta. Douglas Fairbanks. Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Williamson, Catherine. “’Draped Crusaders’: Disrobing Gender in The Mark of Zorro”, Cinema Journal 36.2, (Winter 1997): p 3-16. Web. O9 Dec. 2013. Link

MegaReview

Optic Nerve #13 by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)

In his previous issue of Optic Nerve, Tomine seemed to be playing around with stylistic tics borrowed from Frank King and Dan Clowes. In the main story of the current issue, “Go Owls,” Tomine does some very assured drawing and storytelling in a naturalistic mode that in this case is a little reminiscent of Jaime Hernandez. But there is no doubt, he is his own man and he is getting better all the time. Here the artist breaks significantly away from his previous stories that dealt more with educated young urbanites to depict the relationship beween a Middle-American, more proletariat couple who meet in a recovery program. Reading it, I felt as if I knew them.

Tomine

The guy is an asshole, but Tomine manages to show that without hammering the point; he enables his story to unfold in a quite believable manner and elicit sympathy where he wants it directed with subtlety. The use of varying colors in a very limited palette throughout works nicely and is balanced by the exquisite control shown in the full color story in the back of the book, which also displays the high level of skill and delicacy that Tomine is growing into with his art.

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The Daniel Clowes Reader, edited by Ken Parille (Fantagraphics)

This fascinating collection of some of Clowes’ best works is published in the form of a teaching guide, copiously annotated to the nearly absurd degree of including subglossaries defining miniscule details hidden in the author’s panels. In this way, editor Ken Parille begins to resemble Kinbote, the deranged poetry afficianado from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, whose notes that introduce and permeate the posthumous edition of his idol/victim’s supposed masterwork begin to entirely supplant the work that they are supposed to supplement. It caused me to Google Parille to try to find out if he is real, or if he is an alter ego of Clowes himself. But, Parille apparently exists in his own right and while I might have chosen a few different stories if I had assembled this book, much of it is admittedly essential and well-served by the package.

Clowes

The collection includes the entirety of Ghost World, such seminal stories as “Like a Weed, Joe” along with relevant essays and commentary by sundry credible sources, plus Clowes’ excellent polemical pamphlet Modern Cartoonist and another of my favorite pieces of his, reprinted for the first time from Zadie Smith’s groundbreaking 2007 comics/prose anthology The Book of Other People: the brilliant color short “Justin M. Damiano,” a classic that needs to be read by anyone who writes criticism on the internet.

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TEOTFW (The End of the Fucking World) by Charles Forsman (Fantagraphics)

Forsman’s epic minicomics series is collected into a small, thick trade paperback that I’d prefer was fully titled on the cover, rather than intialized as it is. The story resembles the real-life 1958 murder spree by Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but transposed to modern times and with the gender balance in terms of sociopathy debatably reversed. Forsman’s pair of nihilists are shown to be the results of terrible parenting and are so estranged from human society that they have difficulty feeling emotions and pursuing a viable relationship together, much less to recognise when other people are not psychopaths.

Forsman

Forsman, a graduate of Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies, has a solid grasp of comics storytelling and his lightly drawn page compositions display an intriguing degree of variety. I’d imagine that this would have read in a much more disconnected way in serialized, episodic form; collected, the book reads smoothly and quickly.

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Avery Fatbottom by Jen Vaughn (Monkeybrain)

To my mind, a good thing is that so many of the young cartoonists now emerging reject the contrived plasticity of technique and assembly-line methodology that defines contemporary mainstream comics to instead employ an auteuristic, handmade aesthetic in their work. This can be seen in the work of the cartoonists coming out of comics-oriented schools like that of the Center for Cartoon Studies. Another alumni of that program is Vaughn, who displays a breezy, humorous delivery for her comic Avery Fatbottom, a story of young renaissance fairgoers, which is expressively drawn with loose, appealing brushwork, handlettering and organic watercolor halftones.

Vaughn

Vaughn’s romantic sensibility does not take itself overly seriously and so, her evident pleasure in making her comics has an infectious quality. As with the works of Forsman, these efforts cause those who read them to also want to do their own comics, which is pretty much how I got into this game myself.

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The Outliers by Erik T. Johnson (Alternative)

This comic, the first of a series which apparently is the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign (a large group of contributors are thanked in descending order of generosity inside), has some elaborate production values. It is a small square-bound “floppy” that is printed in two colors, including blue and a sort of lime green that gives it the look of a tract.

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The cover is comprised of sketches of alien-appearing creatures surrounded by squiggly lines and printed with silver ink on black paper, but one doesn’t notice this immediately because it is wrapped in a somewhat undersized full-color dustjacket. The story within has a sort of adolescent breathlessness and the art is brushy and dense while also suitably organic and (mostly) handlettered, as befitting a semi-underground coming-of-age fantasy comic featuring a Bigfootish monster.

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Failure by Karl Stevens (Alternative)

Production values also dominate this handsome but ultimately frustrating trade paperback collection of panels from the author’s weekly strip in the now-defunct Boston Phoenix. Stevens’ clearly evident rendering abilities hark back to those of the engravers of yesteryear, but his photorealism makes me think of nothing so much as an alt/lit Alex Ross.

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After admiring the impressively labor-intensive application of crosshatched tonalities and watercolors, I wished that there was a bit more connective tissue to the semi-autobiographical bones and meat of the book than the most prominent theme of drunkenness.

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Linen Ovens by Keren Katz/Molly Brooks/Andrea Tsurumi/Alexander Rothman (self published)

My favorite of the works I got at Brooklyn’s Grand Comics Festival, this is an anthology that takes advantage of the compatibility of poetry and comics. Poetry can be greatly enhanced by drawings which do not seek to be redundant with the accompanying words, but rather work in an oblique manner with the text, or run parallel to it.

Art by Keren Katz

Art by Keren Katz

Under Tsurumi’s striking cover, handlettering is intrinsic to these pieces; it guides the eye through the soft watercolors of Rothman, for example. Color figures most notably in the semi-abstracted panel transitions of Brooks and the unusual and effective pastel illustrations of Katz.

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The Crow: Curare by James O’Barr and Antoine Dodé (IDW)

It feels to me like a thousand years have passed since the emergence of O’Barr’s pre-Vertigo character/property The Crow in comics and feature films, but here at this late date is a new miniseries drawn with rounded expressivity by Dodé, involving a cop’s desperate search for a child murderer, aided by the shade of one of the pathetic victims. In the two issues I read in PDF form, the title character has yet to rear his head, but the stage is certainly set in a most murky and moody manner by Dodé’s beautifully unforced storytelling.

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The poignancy of the art is further facilitated by its being printed from uninked pencils which are then digitally colored with a limited palette of primarily sepia and pale blues. Of course, since this is an IDW publication, as with most mainstream comics, the lettering is digital, which tries but fails to detract from the rich personality displayed in the artwork.

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March: Book One by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (Top Shelf)

This book is partly written by its subject, the distinguished civil rights pioneer Congressman John Lewis and since it details the early years of the struggle for desegregation in southern states by African-Americans, it justifiably boasts a back cover blurb by former President Bill Clinton. It is a story that we have heard before, but one that bears repeating in a time when a rotten cluster of power has gutted the voting rights that were so hard won.

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One might have expected such a meaningful project to be published by a high-profile mainstream company such as Marvel or DC, who would presumably bring it to the widest possible audience; but instead it is the product of a smaller company known for artist-owned comics, Top Shelf. This makes it odd that the book is copyrighted only to Lewis and his co-writer/press secretary Aydin, omitting the artist who does much of the heavy lifting here, Nate Powell. Because, apart from the unquestionable historical importance of the very real experiences of Lewis, it is surely Powell’s dramatic layouts that make this narrative function as well as it does in the comics form and his lush halftones are some of the best I have seen since the glory days of Ditko and Wrightson in the Warren magazines.

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XIII: The Irish Version by Jean Van Hamme and Jean Giraud (Cinebook)

I really looked forward to the English translation of this book because I wanted to see Giraud drawing in a contemporaneous mode—-and while I am not disappointed in his drawing and storytelling in any way, it is at the service of a somewhat standard adventure story in which the entire Irish/English conflict is boiled down to be the backdrop of the origin tale in a long-running superspy narrative that makes the artist’s Blueberry westerns seem progressive in comparison. Besides that, the art is printed in a format so reduced that it becomes difficult to read, much less show Giraud’s impeccable deep-space compositions to advantage.

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The coloring likewise suffers somewhat from a standardized approach, which drives the point home that Giraud is a much better colorist than anyone his work has been desecrated by since the peak years of Metal Hurlant. However, as he did on his final two Blueberry volumes, O.K. Corral and Dust, Giraud himself put his hand into the coloring to a limited degree to digitally “dirty up” the art, to add lighting effects and ruddier complexions, all of which go a long way to improving the look of what are, sadly, some of the last Moebius comics we shall ever see.

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Bang Go the Caresses

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Contempt inventively deviates from cinematic convention and probes gender relations while it explores miscommunication between people. The storyline is loosely adapted from a 1954 novel by Alberto Moravia, Il Disprezzo [A Ghost at Noon) and depicts the production of a film-within-a film, a cinematic version of Homer’s classic Odyssey. Multileveled ambiguities complicate the narrative of the movie enough that many writers have misinterpreted Godard’s premise. They fail to understand why the female protagonist becomes disillusioned with her husband. I will interrogate those critical misapprehensions to suggest another reading of her response. I will further attend to a sequence that is rarely mentioned in the copious literature about Contempt. The scene in question is a mise en abyme staged in a movie theatre auditorium, which displays in microcosmic form the primary deconstructive and reflexive techniques of visuals and sound that Godard uses throughout the film. In that scene, through a critique of the dominant ideologies of Hollywood and by exploring male and female relations, Godard reveals how women are diminished.

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In an interview done while he was working on the film, Godard reduced the plot down to one simple sentence: “It’s the story of a girl who is married to a man and for rather subtle reasons begins to despise him” (Feinstein, 9). This quote indicates that the director considers the primary theme of the film to be the disaffection of the couple, with a particular focus on the feminine rationale; however, the way in which Godard reveals the response of a woman to her husband’s behavior is far more complex.

The narrative can be more properly synopsized as follows: a young writer, Paul Javal (played by Michel Piccoli), is commissioned to write a screenplay for a filmed version of Homer’s Odyssey, which is to be directed by Fritz Lang, who plays a version of himself. The film is financed and produced by an extremely arrogant American, Jerry Prokosch (played by Jack Palance), who cannot speak the languages of those involved in the film production, but relies on his assistant/interpreter Francesca (played by Giorgia Moll). Prokosch’s demands strain not only the progress of the film, but also Paul’s marriage. The writer takes out the brunt of his frustrations on his wife Camille (played by Brigitte Bardot) and he uses her to curry favor with the producer, which eventually leads to the separation of the couple and her death.

When Contempt was first released in 1963, it was the most widely promoted and renowned of Godard’s films and indeed, of any film connected with the French New Wave. A huge literature has built up around the film in the time since its release and a newer burst of analysis occurred after the release of the Criterion Collection DVD in 2002. However, many of the critics that have been written about it, both at the time of its release and more recently, seem to have misread the reasons why Camille leaves the callow, compromised writer Paul, to go with the crude and bullying American producer Prokosch. This confusion is in spite of, or perhaps due to, the fact that so many writers have dismissed the importance of Godard’s story content. They echo the commentary in David A. Cook’s textbook, A History of Narrative Film: “The narrative portion of Le Mépris, which concerns the dissolution of the scriptwriter’s marriage, is less important than Godard’s use of the self-reflexive conceit” (542). Cook’s claim results in a distorted view of the film because he privileges Godard’s reflexive techniques over the content of his narrative. In fact, the nature of Godard’s practice is such that the representations and socio-political content in his narratives are every bit as important as the cinematic forms of depiction that he uses. They are intricately and essentially bound together. Godard is always self-reflexively pointing to the way the film industry and his personal life are tied together and how representations inform the relationships between men and women.

Alternatively, the cinematographer of Contempt, Raoul Coutard, remarked that the director made the film to be a “million-dollar (love) letter” to his soon-to-be-ex-wife Anna Karina (Horton, 210). Seen in this light, Contempt is Godard’s self-analysis of certain of his own negative behaviors, which by explicating them in the course of the story, he acknowledges to have contributed to the eventual dissolution of his marriage. Therefore, the film is rather a confession or apologia, than a love letter as such. There is a high degree of personal investment in the narrative, which shows that that narrative should be accorded the same level of critical attention as the technical aspects of the film.

Many have said that the success of the film is largely due to the conspicuous presence of the famous beauty Brigitte Bardot in the cast. Her erotic presence and star power inform public reception. Likewise, veteran American tough-guy character actor Palance is used effectively as the American producer Prokosch. His casting incorporates the audience’s expectations, as noted by critic Robert Stam:

In the cinema the performer…brings along a kind of baggage, a thespian intertext formed by the totality of antecedent roles.(…) By casting Jack Palance as the hated film producer Prokosch in Contempt, the auteurist Godard brilliantly exploited the sinister memory of Palance’s previous roles as a barbarian (in The Barbarians, 1959) and as Attila the Hun (in Sign of the Pagans, 1959). This producer, the casting seems to be telling us, is both a gangster and a barbarian, a suggestion confirmed by the brutish behavior of the character (548).

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Palance is so famed as a portrayer of gangsters, even to the French, that his presence in the film telegraphs “villain” to the audience fully as much as Fritz Lang indicates “venerated director” or Bardot indicates “sex kitten.” Palance and Bardot are both used reflexively within Contempt, as their extra-screen images carry meaning in very different ways into the narrative of the film. They each indicate stereotyping, or rather they reflect the traditional male and female characters that are produced for Hollywood narratives, but in Contempt they demonstrate how those stereotypes complicate real-world expectations.

In fact, male/female relations are a central concern of Contempt. At a screening that Lang has arranged to show Paul and Prokosch rushes of the film in progress, the producer arrogantly makes claims to understand how “the Gods” feel, but then leers and sniggers in a degraded way at shots of a nude woman swimming onscreen. He forces his assistant and interpreter Francesca to bend over, while he uses her back as a desk to write a check buying Paul’s rewriting services.

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Disturbingly, Francesca serves his efforts to control the film, since she is not only selective in how she chooses to translate Prokosch’s English words for the film team, but also, she edits what she relays of what they say back to him.

Stam also points out how Francesca chooses to perform her functions as translator: “(she)….mediates between the monolingual American producer Prokosch and his more polyglot European interlocutors.(…) Francesca’s hurried…translations invariably miss a nuance, smooth over an aggression, or exclude an ambiguity” (549). As will be seen to also apply to the other female characters, Francesca primarily is ventriloquized by the male characters; the words of Prokosch and the other male character are filtered through Francesca. She does not speak her own thoughts or opinions, but can only edit, at best. Francesca sometimes subverts her employer’s interests — when Lang frequently makes disparaging remarks about the producer in languages that Prokosch doesn’t understand, she often either mitigates them by altering their meaning, or doesn’t bother to translate them at all. However, her discretions regarding Prokosch’s proclamations and the responses they elicit are wasted on the multilingual Lang, at least, because he is aware of exactly what Prokosch is saying.

Many critics have wondered why Camille falls out of love with Paul in the course of the story For instance Colin McCabe says that he cannot see how Paul’s behavior can “explain [Camille’s] contempt for her husband, nor her decision to have an affair with Prokosch.” (155). McCabe misconstrues the reasons for the couple’s disaffection and blames it, as if by default, on the woman involved. This is a misreading apparently based on the spurious, sexist views of “liberated” female sexuality that were prevalent at the time the film was first released, rather than anything seen in the film. Significantly, Camille is traded like a commodity between Paul and Prokosch. Neither man cares about her opinion. Paul silences her and betrays her trust. He and Prokosch both attempt to remove her agency. This represents the way in which the dominant ideologies of Hollywood deprives women of their voices and uses them only for their physical beauty in films.

Despite any protestations Paul makes to Camille and to Lang in his consultations with the director, whose advice he seems to ignore, the writer goes along with Prokosch’s desires regarding the script he is supposed to be working on. In his behavior, Paul shows himself to be no better in his way than Prokosch is in his. It is notable that to curry favor with Prokosch, Paul repeatedly pushes Camille at the American. First, Paul arranges for Camille to ride with Prokosch in his sports car. It is the first major blow to the marriage. Camille is disgusted that Paul entrusts her to the care of such a man. Paul is then late himself in getting to where Prokosch drives her and he makes an unconvincing explanation for his tardiness. Francesca arrives at the destination on her bicycle belatedly and just after Paul, which gives them the appearance of collusion and we, the viewers, cannot say whether or not there is justification for such an implication.

Subsequently, Camille’s worst suspicions are apparently borne out when later, she enters the interior of the Capri residence to see her husband casually fondling the interpreter. Camille observes that Lang is also forced to work with Prokosch, but shows obvious contempt for the producer.

Throughout the film, Paul displays no ethical backbone at all. He whines to Camille and vacillates about whether or not to compromise his talents, as he is unquestionably in the process of doing just that. He has taken Prokosch’s check after the producer made a fool of himself in an absurd tantrum. Yet, Paul blames Camille for his compromises. He says he must do so in order to make more money to pay for the apartment that she likes. In his escalating argument with her, Paul condescendingly describes Camille as a “typist” who he has somehow elevated in status by his attentions, even though typing is the only activity we see him do.

Additionally, Paul has been hiding things from his wife that she subsequently discovers: that he is a member of the Communist Party and that he has a gun. In the extended apartment scene, the entire relationship slips over the edge when he unexpectedly, shockingly slaps her. She then says that she fears him and that “it wasn’t the first time either,” implying that he has physically abused her previously. Later, Paul pushes Camille on Prokosch again and insists that she leave with him on his boat while Paul remains behind on set. Paul later spies Camille and Prokosch kissing, and blames Camille.

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Paul brings a gun onto the set for the purposes of threatening Prokosch, but he does not follow through, apparently because it would endanger his employment.

The auditorium scene (the chapter titled “7. An Audition” on the DVD) is rarely noted in articles and papers about Contempt, but it forms a microcosmic view of many of the most important themes of Godard’s innovative mise-en-scène. It can be usefully examined by splitting its elements into two parts: one that focuses on the visual aspects of the scene and one that concerns itself with Godard’s use of sound. The scene is staged in a movie theatre and/or auditorium that is being used for a casting call that is set up in the form of a dance performance.
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Visuals

The scene in question is prefaced by another, much shorter scene that takes place in a cab. This short interlude links the very famous long take within Paul and Camille’s apartment to the scene under particular examination here, the casting call that takes place in an auditorium. After the emotional sequence in the apartment, Camille escapes in a cab, trying to leave Paul behind, but he runs to catch up to the vehicle and hops in. There is a brief interchange between the couple and then Camille apparently surrenders, to be taken to the casting call. Her anger and disgust at Paul is emphasized by the abrupt imposition of a dark filter over her image. This is one of several occlusions of Camille, which foreshadow what becomes of her at the end of the film and also echo the use of colored filters in the nude scene at the beginning of the film.

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In the present scene, the dark filter leaves only the silhouette of Camille’s head and the whites of her eyes visible, whites which glitter strangely. The filter simulates a temporal passage from daylight to early evening, but it also represents an occlusion of the character of Camille. The darkening, taken with the swelling at that moment of the non-diegetic score, symbolically predicts her fate at the end of the film.

Inside the theatre, the girl onstage mimes a pop song as she dances in an eroticized manner, wiggling her hips and shimmying from left to right and vice versa. The other performers behind her onstage simply walk in male/female pairs from one side of the stage to the other, only to turn and walk back again, repeatedly. One of the couples separates as a woman goes offstage; her male partner then wanders back and forth among the other couples as if confused. They are all shot with sweeping back-and-forth horizontal movements of the camera. This is similar the other slowly swiveling horizontal pan shots in this film, but in this case the actors have their lower legs and feet cropped out.

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Their movements become groundless and their shifting figures seem to be sliding in different directions, which creates a dizzying, unmoored sensation in the viewer. Simultaneously, the shadows of the performers project via multiple light sources onto the movie screen behind them and above the stage, replicating their images in ghostly overlays and reflexively emphasizing the nature of film itself, as 2-dimensional images representing 3-dimensional reality, created by projected light. The lead dancer lip-synchs the song while she dances with occasional odd high-stepping leg movements, as if pulling to extricate her legs from a mire.

When the view reverses to show the audience and the production team in the auditorium, again with slow, to-and-fro horizontal pans, Lang and Camille are on the left side of the aisle. Camille speaks to Lang and they exchange private gestures of disgust about those on the other side of the aisle, but we cannot hear what she says. Francesca is behind them, reading a newspaper and translating for Prokosch, so she is heard, but she is often blocked from view. On the right side of the aisle, Paul sits with Prokosch, who eventually rests his arm on Paul’s shoulder in an overbearing manner that implies Paul is simply furniture. A photographer repeatedly emerges from behind Paul and Prokosch to crouch in the center of the aisle and shoot pictures with a flashbulb of what is transpiring onstage (aiming towards the fourth wall that separates viewer and film).

As they are leaving, Prokosch crows that he has convinced the singer to appear nude at a later shoot. This resonates with the major demand made on Godard by one of the real producers involved with Contempt, the American Joseph Levine, that a nude scene of Bardot be added to the beginning of the film. Godard managed to turn this compromise to his advantage by making that scene work beautifully and support his narrative. However, that was not Levine’s desire. He just wanted Brigitte Bardot naked in the film for commercial reasons. In Hollywood, even such a star as Bardot is only there to stimulate the erotic desires of a male audience. Sex sells; it is the basis of the economy of cinema. At the end of the scene, the film team goes up through the aisles of seats while discussing the actors’ roles within the adaptation of Odyssey. Camille rejects Paul’s conciliatory efforts, but reserves a smile for Lang when he cites her (Bardot’s real) famous initials, “B.B.” Camille then removes herself from the group to pass through an upper row of seats, separated from the others. Prokosch moves ahead and reaches the exit first; he then turns, dramatically placing one leg up on the seats at the end of the row Camille is navigating. When Prokosch asks Camille why she doesn’t speak, the theatre lights are cut and she is again plunged into darkness, one not quite so deep as that which enveloped her in the preceding scene in the cab, but echoing its affect. The shadow around Camille obscures her and reduces her to just a shadow, as she reiterates her muteness.
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Sound

The sound of the scene is also key to deciphering its reflexive narrative qualities. Camille and the “singer” onstage are depicted as voiceless, sexualized bodies. Francesca is also voiceless, but in a somewhat different way; she functions as a mediator and such limited agency as she has is limited to withholding small bits of information. These characters symbolize the roles forced on women by Hollywood that relegate them to a lower class. Women may perform, but words are put into their mouths by men and their acting roles are most often passive and subservient—they may be mothers, homemakers, servants, secretaries or sex toys. They may mediate between men or be traded as commodities among men, but whenever possible, their proactive participation in the power structure is avoided by the male-dominated film industry, then and often still.

As previously noted, in the taxicab sequence that links the famous apartment scene to the auditorium scene, as Paul forces Camille to accompany him to the audition, a filter darkens the image of Camille as the non-diegetic Moravia score swells up portentously. In this way, visual and auditory cues influence the viewers to ascribe great significance to the obscured image and dramatic music–which with hindsight, appear to foreshadow what will become of Camille as the movie’s events unfold. Then, the scene cuts to the approach to the auditorium.

The team working on the film of Odyssey is at the theatre to watch a casting call occurring on a stage in front of a large movie screen. A “singer” who is not actually singing dances onstage in front of a “dancing” troupe made up of couples who hardly dance. Because there is no alteration in the volume of the lead vocal of the song as she shimmies and slides far past the microphone in either direction, it becomes clear that the woman is lip-synching to a recording. One wonders what role she could be cast for then, since she is just a body, an apparent “speaker” for the music with no voice of her own. The diegetic music is murky, brassy and too loud for the auditorium’s audience to have a conversation over.

However, when the view reverses to show the audience, the diegetic music cuts abruptly so that the conversation of the main characters, seated in the front rows of the audience, can be clearly heard. Harun Farocki explains the significance of this device within the greater arc of the director’s filmed corpus: “…it is Godard’s way of comically obeying a rule of sound mixing which he almost always breaks: the rule that ‘background’ noises should be lowered during conversations” (Farocki & Silverman, 49). Farocki understands how Godard alerts the viewer to the ways in which sound is typically presented, in order to demonstrate its artificiality.

In the commentary track included on the DVD, Robert Stam also finds the reflexive manipulation of the sound of this scene comical. However, what is revealed of the characters in the conversations that become audible because of the dropout of the diegetic music is anything but amusing. Both Lang and Camille display revulsion primarily through miming, each for their own very good reasons. Francesca must mediate between the male parties and Paul sulks, but continues to acquiesce to the crass Prokosch’s ongoing bullying.

Two online commentators who reviewed the more recent DVD release of Contempt have opposing views of the sound in this scene. Glenn Erickson takes the scene to represent a theatrical presentation; he misunderstands the purpose, which is actually that the characters are attending a casting call, but he points to the deliberation of the sound techniques that Godard used:

When the leads attend a typically artificial and unconvincing theater performance, Godard takes the opportunity to deconstruct the movie making process. A ‘slotted’ playback tape is used, to which the supposedly live singer on stage lip-synchs. The audio crew has spliced specific holes of blank tape into the playback reel. The appropriately timed gaps of silence allow the spoken dialogue to be recorded in the clear. It’s a standard musical technique, I saw it used on the big dance number in 1941. But here in Contempt, instead of remixing the scene with clean, uncut music, Godard leaves it raw. The jarring holes in the playback punch in and out, making the scene purposely artificial, unfinished…anti-slick (Erickson).

Even as Erickson misses the narrative point of the scene, he apprehends the technical innovations involved. Godard even has the sound cut-off occur within a single shot. For instance, as the film team is shown, the music is heard, then drops out so we hear the conversation. Then the music resumes before the camera shows the stage. In this way, the director draws the viewer’s attention to the various multi-levels of narrative taking place and the fact that the conversation could not be heard unless the music was muted.

Joshua Zyber understands what transpires in the scene, but he treats the director’s handling as negative and possibly accidental:

Like most of the director’s films, Contempt is filled with pretentious attempts to play with or deconstruct the language of cinema. (…) An overbearing score often drowns out the dialogue. During a scene in which Jerry auditions singers, the music and singing abruptly cut out on the soundtrack whenever the main characters speak (Zyber).

Whether or not Godard’s work is “pretentious” is debatable, but his effects are entirely deliberate. As Zyber notes, the music does “drown out” the dialogue in other scenes, but in this scene, the music drops out whenever Prokosch, Francesca, Lang, or Paul speak.

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They sit in the front row, first Lang beside Camille, with Francesca seated in the row behind them, and then across the aisle, Paul besides Prokosch, who pontificates while Francesca translates. Francesca has no authority or agency; her words are never truly her own, although she occasionally edits her translations in the interests of diplomacy. Rather, she is a conduit between men, she is a body used for transmission. Often Francesca can’t even be seen; her positioning makes her invisible, a disembodied voice that has no apparent source. Her skills as a linguist or mediator are never acknowledged and she is never thanked by those that she serves.

Camille seems to be primarily there as an erotic presence. She is not actually part of the production and she hardly speaks while they are seated. When she does, it is overridden by the diegetic music. Paul speaks to her, but she doesn’t answer him back. Several times, she gestures as if she is exchanging words with Lang, but she cannot be heard. As they leave the auditorium, the party continues to discuss the movie project. Paul attempts to speak to Camille, only to be angrily but silently rebuffed. Lang is reflexively faux-ventriloquized by Bardot, as he ascribes a Berthold Brecht quote to her nickname “B.B.” This reference seems to prompt Camille to soften for a moment and silently smile. Lang then specifies those initials as signifying Berthold Brecht, another reflexive touch.

Prokosch makes an announcement regarding the arrangement he has made with the singer: “She agrees to take off her clothes, Tuesday morning, 8 o’clock on the beach” (ironically reflecting the demands made on Godard and Bardot by the real American producer of Contempt). Again, the singer’s voice isn’t heard, her words are only mediated through Prokosch. As the group traverses the aisle on the way out, Prokosch says in English to Camille, “Why don’t you say something?” As Paul and Lang both turn to look at her, a loud click is heard and the lights of the auditorium come down. Camille is eclipsed in shadow as she looks up at the stage and answers (according to the subtitles), “Because I’ve got nothing to say.” This indicates that as with Lang, Camille also understands English and so is more aware of the significance of the various conversations and manipulations occurring around her than she lets on.

According to Kaji Silverman and Farocki Harun, Camille’s silence reflects her symbolic role within the Homeric allegory that the film represents:

HF: …Camille is the only one of the four major characters who never offers a verbal interpretation of Odyssey—the only one who makes no claim to stand outside it, to relate to it from a distance.
KS: Instead, she accepts her preassigned role from the start, and simply persists in it (50).

This interpretation implies that Camille-as-Penelope is locked into a voiceless role, a view echoed by the singer onstage, who is also voiceless in her lip-synching, who pulls yet cannot extricate herself from the cropped-off, boundless space of the stage and who will also soon enough be stripped bare by Prokosch for his pleasure. Similarly, Francesca has no real voice of her own; she merely parrots for the men more palatable versions of their words to each other.
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Throughout the film, Paul emotionally and physically abuses Camille whenever he has a chance to address her without anyone else seeing. It is his violence, his shallowness and his lack of integrity that drive her away. And the result of all of Paul’s betrayals, compromises and rejections is the worst possible one for Camille: Prokosch is eventually the death of her. In the end, after Camille leaves Paul, she and Prokosch are killed in an automobile accident.

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Camille’s death at the end of the film is also misconstrued by some Godard scholars, such as Douglas Morrey, who says it “appear(s) as distinctly arbitrary and as such, it is difficult not to conclude that Camille is being punished for her actions, and punished indeed for her gender which appears solely responsible for those actions. The sudden death at the end of Le Mépris has no generic or narrative motivation….but nor is it realistically motivated…” (20). But a conclusion such as this seems again to reflect preconceptions on the part of the critic, rather than observation of the events depicted in the film. Camille makes no actions that are not precipitated by Paul’s inexplicably cold, contrary and even abusive behavior.

Few Godard scholars misread Contempt as offensively as does Jeremy Mark Robinson. At the outset of his examination, Robinson writes:

Contempt is a film about Brigitte Bardot’s ass (and a very nice, smooth rounded ass it is too). Bardot’s butt is the super special effect, the mega-buck production value item at the heart of the film. The writer Paul quips in the film that if you show a woman a movie camera, they’re happy to show off their behinds. Contempt demonstrates that, time after time. It’s a film of what Godard called the “civilization of the ass” (161).

Here Robinson attempts to ascribe his own sexism to Godard. But in his quoted comment as well as in his self-reflexive movie, Godard alerts the viewer to the absurdity of the patriarchal film industry, to the idea that the producers are self-important, tasteless “asses” who, ironically, are apt to align themselves with Robinson’s literal interpretation. Robinson says of the initial nude scene with a similarly derogatory tone:

The lengthy shot…frames Bardot’s back and buttocks and legs, cutting out the heads of the couple, and the film will do this a number of times, as if telling the viewer, no, you’re not really interested in faces or what the people are saying, you want to see Brigitte Bardot’s naked body. The instinct of the (sic) Contempt’s producers was spot on, of course. And Godard was happy to do what was asked (167).

Again, Robinson assumes wrongly that he comprehends Godard’s motivations and is qualified to judge his integrity. These quotes instead indicate the depths of the critic’s misogyny and his condescension to the audience.

More reasoned is the description by Colin MacCabe:

…there can be little doubt that Contempt would be a much less beautiful and moving film without the long opening scene of Bardot naked on a bed. This highly stylized scene, both in the repetitive naming of the parts of the body and in the use of very strong primary colour filters, delivers neither the pornographic charge nor the psychological explanation which Levin wanted. It does, however, provide perhaps the most beautiful portrait of Europe’s most photographed woman and a hint of the married bliss which will turn to catastrophe in the course of the film (154).

McCabe appreciates how Godard satisfied the producer’s demands while simultaneously subverting them, no mean trick. As a result, the film can sustain a feminist reading of its depiction of an abusive relationship even as it plays on its status as a star vehicle for one of the most objectified of actresses, Brigitte Bardot. Even by the values of 1963, it should be seen that it is Paul who is as Camille says, “an ass.”

A large part of the shock value of the film is watching a man callously maltreat his wife, as Paul does; the abuse is emphasized in seeing it happen to a character played by the famously desirable Bardot. Her various close-ups, even when subversive in content, still achieve exalted heights of glamour and help to propel the film to legendary classic status. In one profile shot that echoes the painted statue sequences that are interspersed through the film, Camille speaks a transgressive list of obscene curses, then turns and her face crumples in pain. In another close-up, she nurses her burning, slapped cheek.

Despite the actress’s engagement in her role, the character of Camille is as much the intoxicating Bardot as “Lang” is Lang. Godard’s ability to play on this adds to the reflexivity of the film in many overt and subtle ways. In her bathtub scene, Camille reads a biography about Lang, and quotes his words. Lang in his role as himself speaks lines that express Godard’s own theories. And, as noted earlier, in the auditorium scene, Lang quotes Bardot’s ubiquitous nickname “B.B.”

Even as Godard embeds in his film specific depictions of how creative people are used and abused by the money interests of Hollywood and other players in the commercial movie world, he shows how women are specifically maltreated and exploited within that system. Godard pulls aside the curtain on the private emotional interactions between men and women, to expose and comment on the shallowness of male sexism and weakness of character. He shows how relationships can be dismantled through one partner’s realization that their love has been taken for granted, or that their sexuality has been exploited for the purposes of career advancement, or by a victim’s rejection of escalating mental and physical abuse. In this way, Godard makes a classic film, yet one that destroys the artifice of film. Contempt raises questions about female agency and the female voice. It points to problems which it does not answer, but at least Godard notices that the problems exist. He made Contempt to be derisive in tone, towards a society that rewards sexism and cruelty and towards the processes of filmmaking that demand so much compromise from artists.

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Bibliography

Contempt (Le Mépris). Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Perf. Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance. Criterion Collection, 2002. DVD.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Print.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston. The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. State University of New York Press, 1997. Print.

Farocki, Harun and Kaja Silverman. Speaking About Godard. NYU Press, 1998. Print.

Erickson, Glenn. “DVD Savant review: Contempt”. 5 Dec. 2002. Coolector Movie Database. 15 March 2013.

Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. 8th Edition. N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999. Print.

Godard, Jean-Luc. Interviews. Ed. David Sterritt. University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Print.

MacCabe, Colin. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. UK: London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Print.

Morrey, Douglas. French Film Directors: Jean-Luc Godard. UK: Manchester University Press, 2005. Print.

Robinson, Jeremy Mark. Jean-Luc Godard: The Passion of Cinema. UK: Kent: Crescent Moon, 2009. Print.

Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Print.

Temple, Michael, James S Williams and Michael Witt. Forever Godard. UK: London: Black Dog, 2004. Print.

Zyber, Joshua. “Contempt (Le Mépris) (Blu-ray)”. 22 Feb. 2010. Hi-Def Digest. 15 March 2013.

Yearning for Space: a conversation with Tom Kaczynski

I first encountered Tom Kaczynski’s work while delving into the substantial collection of comics-related materials in Columbia University’s Butler Library stacks, where there is a run of Fantagraphics’ anthology title MOME. I very much liked Kaczynski’s deliberately drawn short stories such as “100,000 Miles” and then, when I was lucky enough to get a story of my own in the final issue of MOME (#22)—and having an certain amount of thespian training—I greatly admired his piece “Music for Neanderthals”, an account of an actor who takes his method a bit too far to go completely native. His work often gives the impression that it spans the entire history of the planet, which reminds me a little of another Polish-American I worked with, the late David Wojnarowicz. I definitely feel sympatico with Tom’s use of the potentials of the comics medium to go beyond entertainment and impart information of a philosophical nature, which is not to say that his stories aren’t entertaining, but that they touch on deeper issues as well. He began Uncivilized Books to publish first his own and others’ minicomics and now it produces critically acclaimed hardcover collections by luminaries of alternative comics such as Gabrielle Bell and Jon Lewis. So, at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival last year I approached Tom at his table and a year later, he published my comic book Post York. Now Fantagraphics has released a collection of his short stories, Beta Testing for the Apocalypse. For HU, I talked with Tom via email.

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Tom K cover

James: You use a single color besides black in the stories, often to great effect. To my eyes, the limited color in your work has a strange feeling, removed from the ostensibly similar use of a single color in a lot of alternative comics, a trend that I think was initiated by Daniel Clowes, Seth and David Mazzucchelli et al. In other words, it is not just for indicating lighting or to hark to old book illustrations. Instead, your single color use at its best is really intrinsic to the storytelling…the color holds or overlays add depth to some images or highlight specific parts of a given drawing to draw attention to something that is going on in the image. Outstanding examples are seen in “100,000 Miles”, “10,000 Years”, “976 Sq. Ft.” and “Million Year Boom”. The color separations can add qualities of delicacy of articulation, or of diagramming, or extradimensional elements. The colors you chose in different stories have varying levels of emotional impact as well. Now, I have to note that in a few of the stories, like for example “Phase Transition” or “Music for Neanderthals”, the color seems to only add lighting, it is almost an afterthought or it isn’t as intrinsic. But in most of the stories, for instance in “The New,” it is absolutely part of how the story is constructed—–and that story may be the most advanced use of the technique, besides being your most ambitious piece to date. Can you articulate why using two colors might sit your purposes more than doing full color artwork, or leaving it in black and white?

Tom: I tend to use color as a storytelling device where in certain instances I can focus-in on certain object or characters. I feel I’m still struggling with color in general. Overall I can cite 3 primary ways I use color in the book.
1. Color as a naturalistic element (as lighting, depth, etc.)
2. Color as pure design element.
3. Color as information.
The three sometimes mix in a single panel, sometimes they don’t. “The New” and “Million Year Boom” are the only two stories that were conceived (and published) with color from the get go and as such work the best for me in that respect. That said, it was fun to go back-in and re-imagine the stories with an added color. Now that I’ve seen the results, I would probably push it a little further next time I have a chance to do that.

James: I note some variations in the stories in Beta Testing the Apocalypse from the way they were originally presented. In the collection, the story “100,00 Miles” has a green overlay that is considerably lighter in shade than the more olive color it is run in in MOME 7.

From "100,000 Miles"

From “100,000 Miles”

The stories “Phase Transition” from MOME 10 and “Music for Neanderthals” from MOME 22 did not have a color in their original printings. In Beta Testing the first page of “Phase Transition” is still black and white, perhaps because it is part of a signature that has pink pages. I see that the olive color goes over zipatone in the other three pages and that the toning is slightly different in the Beta Testing version—on page 4 panel 6 you mottled the tone. I wonder if the color is imposed on some of the stories to unify them for this package, or if, as you suggest in your interview in MOME 10, the lack of color in some stories was a result of not having enough time to do a color separation for them?

Tom: The MOME stories were always vaguely conceived as two-color pieces. But because I often handed in art at the last possible minute ([MOME editor] Eric Reynolds can attest to that!), there was often no time left to think about the color in any meaningful way. I generally focused on having the stories work as black & white pieces (with gray tones) and if there was time, I would add color information. The color changed on the MOME 7 story because the original green wasn’t quite what I wanted. I changed it to the color I originally envisioned, but didn’t get right the first time around. The first page of “Phase Transition” is indeed b&w, partly because it falls on the pink signature (as opposed to the yellow one), but I found that it worked storytelling-wise. The color doesn’t come in until the 2nd page of that story and gradually takes over more of the strip.

James: One of your self-published pamphlets is in full color—-do you think you might do an entire book in full color at some point?

Tom: Maybe… I found full-color very time consuming. I may find a good use for it in the future. I don’t want to rule it out. In the near term I don’t have any specific plans on doing any full color comics.

James: From the example shown in the interview that Gary Groth did with you in MOME 10, the strips from The Drama magazine look to be of a similar level of quality as the work here, along similar lines of subject matter and are also 2-color jobs. Is there a reason why you didn’t include them?

Tom: I didn’t think those strips would’ve worked in the book. They were done at least a year before the 1st MOME story, and they are much more ‘gag’ strips. There are some ‘gag’ strips in the collection (the four 1 page stories from MOME 12) but they work with the larger themes of the book.

James: I also see in that interview that you acknowledge J.G. Ballard as an influence, even if Gary didn’t do any follow up questions about him. I noticed the influence immediately in reading your work.

Tom: Yeah, Ballard is pretty big for me. His earlier books like The Drowned World, Crash, High Rise and The Day of Creation were huge for me. I love a lot of his short stories; “The Ultimate City” may be my favorite. I’ve also come to love his later, post-Empire of The Sun (one of the few I HAVEN’T read) work like Super Cannes and his last novel Kingdom Come.

From "10,000 Years"

From “10,000 Years”

James: There are the obvious correspondences in “100,000 Miles” to Crash, but some of your others like “Million Year Boom” and “976 Sq. Ft.” remind me in particular of a few of his perhaps less-known works such as High Rise and Concrete Island. Both of those books depict protagonists who become subsumed in the constructs of a society that in supposedly advancing has actually broken down, that has taken on the quality of an intolerable new “normalcy”. Is it perhaps that, like Ballard, in transitioning between disparate societies at an early age, you have a unique perspective and are able to remove yourself and see where you are in an overview of sorts, or to see around the corners, so to speak?

Tom: I definitely think that the experience of emigration gives you a different perspective on the idea of society. When you are born into one world (Communist Poland), and then are transplanted into another (USA), and then witness the utter transformation of the first (collapse of USSR & the Eastern Bloc), the idea that society can radically be changed (for better or worse) is not that far fetched. That is one reason that the US (a country of immigrants) has been such a successful and dynamic society. The recent political/economic climate in the US feels like an attempt to freeze and define the US as a specific unchanging idea. History is catching up with us, the US is no longer a ‘young’ undefined country. Even many European countries (not to mention countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America) have political & economic structures that are more malleable, that may better cope with future challenges (I got away from Ballard here… but it seemed in the end the question was less about Ballard but about ‘society’).

James: I just read another interview with you that Kent Worcester did, where you cited a specific Jack Kirby image from his 2001 comic, a panel of a man walking up to a building that is just a huge wall of windows—it freaked me out because that is one of my favorites of Kirby’s and it is part of a passage that I had actually thought of mentioning to you! The Earth Jack depicts is so polluted and crowded, a world where pure air can only be breathed out of bottles that one must purchase as we do water, an existence so dehumanized that the protagonist feels he must join the space program, to escape in order to realize any sort of life for himself.

Jack Kirby, from "Norton of New York, 2040 A.D.", 2001 #5, Marvel Comics, 1977

Jack Kirby, from “Norton of New York, 2040 A.D.”, 2001 #5, Marvel Comics, 1977

Your work gives me a similar feeling, as if you are dealing with expressing what it is like to live in a world that has gone beyond the point of no return, but with no escape possible, as if all we can do is construct semblances of sanity for ourselves, that work within the insane structures that we must fit into.

Tom: I love that Kirby image! I believe that was from 2001 #5? I agree with what you’re saying here. One of my favorite J.G. Ballard stories is “Billenium” about an overcrowded world where everyone basically lives on top of everyone else. The protagonists in that story find a hidden room and all that new space is an almost unimaginable luxury. They proceed to share the new space with some friends and family until it fills up and becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the world. We need to find these spaces (whether real or imagined) and inhabit them; to create germs of possible and impossible new worlds… hopefully better ones. There’s a danger in that. Things could get worse… but sometimes not doing anything at all, is worst of all. One thing I hesitate doing in my stories is to destroy the world. If “Billenium” was an Italo Calvino story, that room could be a germ of a new city; an invisible city growing in the midst of the old one… and eventually it would grow to replace it. I think we need a better imagination, one that goes beyond wishing for the apocalypse.

James: I appreciate the format of Beta Testing and the way you have manifested your work so far, because I personally have always preferred to work on short stories, at least partially because of the labor intensive nature of comics—-I like to work on things where I have the opportunity for more variety—for instance, it can get very awkward trying not to be repetitive in the angles and compositions when one is drawing the same characters and backgrounds for many pages.

From "The New"

From “The New”

The last story in Beta Testing, “The New”, is the longest and probably the most ambitious story I have seen you do so far. Do you prefer to work on short pieces or are you working your way towards longer stories?

Tom: I really like the short story (in comics and in fiction) and it’s something I’d like to keep doing in the future. There is something satisfying about a good short comics story. There are more opportunities for a tighter structure… it’s easier to get that certain density of narrative. Dan Clowes’ shorts from Eightball (post-Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron), the ones that ran concurrently with the serialized Ghost World, are the pinnacle of the form for me. “Blue Italian Shit”, “Caricature”, “Immortal Invisible”…they all have tight structures, a satisfying density of narrative. They’re just perfect comics. That said…

James: Can you see yourself writing and drawing an entire graphic novel eventually?

Tom: I’m often frustrated I can’t get all my ideas into a short piece… In fact I almost always wish my stories had a few more pages to develop this or that germ of an idea. So, I’d like to do longer comics at some point. My upcoming book TransTerra is probably the closest thing to a novel-length narrative, but that was still constructed episodically. I don’t mind repetition so much. I think it works well in comics… whether it’s a 4 panel gag, or 300 page GN. It’s almost necessary to set up a kind of visual/narrative rhythm. It was nice to be able to stretch a bit in “The New” and not have every page be crammed with information. After doing a bunch of short pieces in a row, I’ve been yearning for a bit more space…like the character in that story “Billenium”!

James: I’ve never seen an index that alphabetically listed every sound effect in a comic before. And Ballard’s entry leads to a highway sign in a panel for “Ballard Golf Heaven”, and I liked how the table of contents is figured on a greater timeline, but isn’t much help in locating the stories. Such details play with the new climate in comics where we should try to accommodate future scholarship, by ensuring that page numbers are included, etc.—-you certainly left a lot of room for examining this thing through different “lenses”….we’ve come a long way!

Tom: Ha! Well, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do with comics. Indices, notes, and glossaries are some of my favorite things in books and I didn’t want my book to be left out! This all comes out of lots of conversations I’ve had with cartoonists and writers over the last few years. In the end I wanted the index to be another story in the book. One that comments and explicates the other stories. Some entries are in there for fun. Like the sound effects, or cars. Others alert the reader to concepts or phrases that have been quoted, mutated or just plain stolen. One thing that is often left out of comics criticism are the images. They are often examined in terms of plot or composition, but rarely do writers get into the complex visual references that often show up in comics. One of my favorites pieces of writing on comics is a Ken Parille piece on Clowes’ David Boring that excavated the connections to Hitchcock’s Vertigo among many other things. I hope in some future edition, the book can be published with an index. Other cartoonists have played with this kind of material. Kevin Huizenga comes to mind with fake indices & glossaries. In fact I was just working with Kevin (& Dan Zettwoch) on the index to their next book, Amazing Facts & Beyond. It’s amazing and goes way beyond my index! In fact they called it the beyondex! Maybe we can start a trend! Index wars!

The idea for the table of contents come about organically. A lot of my stories were titled after some kind of measure… “100,000 Miles”, “976 sq. ft.”, “10,000 Years”, etc. when time came I wanted to create a unifying design & organizing principle. Also, I saw all these stories taking place in the same world… in my mind for example, “The Cozy Apocalypse” is a prequel to “976 sq. ft.” In his famous book, SMLXL, architect Rem Koolhaas begins the book with a multipage series of charts that detailed his life: time spent flying, swimming, eating, etc. over a period of a few years. In some ways my chart is much more immodest, spanning from the big bang into the far future and covering vast distances.

James: You wrote and laid out a story that Dash Shaw finished in MOME #17. You also collaborated to some degree with me on Post York—we came up with the cover together; and then at one point you suggested that I delete a few panels on the page with the initial ending and leave white space. I wasn’t sure, but I thought on it for a while—and then I decided to take that idea a lot further. I ended up jettisoning multiple panels on nearly every page that didn’t seem needed and those omissions greatly expedited the storytelling and improved the design of the book. It was great for me to be able to break away from the way that DC, for instance, works, where every inch of what they call the “real estate” of the page must be filled. How do you feel about collaborating with other artists, and do you think you might do more in the future?

Tom: I would love to collaborate more! Too many cartoonists are antisocial! I understand the need to sit alone in a room in absolute focus and work on something. But we’re social creatures and being able to collaborate with someone who’s on the same wavelength is very satisfying. It was really eye-opening to see Dash execute one of my stories. His approach is just so different from mine. I’d love to draw someone else’s story.

James: Your first few full hardcover books have gotten a very encouraging response; Gabrielle’s book was picked as a book of the year by Publisher’s Weekly and both her The Voyeurs and Jon Lewis’ True Swamp were reviewed favorably in PW and elsewhere. Is this resulting in an influx of people wanting to work with you?

Tom: I’m grateful I was able to work with amazing cartoonists almost out of the gate. I’ve admired Gabrielle’s & Jon’s work for a long time (and your work too!) and being able to publish them is an honor. I’ve definitely had an influx of submissions and I have a hard time staying on top of them. At the same time, Uncivilized Books is still a very tiny company and I can’t publish everyone. That also means I have to be very picky and reject projects that I really like. I’m still trying to find my specific publishing groove. I just finished figuring out my third season of books and I think I am maybe getting closer.

James: I know that besides doing your comics, you teach. Do you find that the publishing takes even more time away from your already full schedule, or how do you deal with that issue? I mean, I asked this of Sammy Harkham as well; one can get quite involved in promoting other people’s careers and have to fight to find time to do one’s own work. Particularly when one is young, one is developing in leaps and bounds and so one needs to direct one’s energies carefully.

Tom: This year I had to put teaching on the back burner. I still mentor some students and attend critiques and seminars, but I’m not teaching a full class this year. There just isn’t enough time. My own comics tend to be more esoteric and have made me very little money… So, I’ve always had to have some other job to support my cartooning. I’ve never had the luxury of just focusing on my comics, and I’ve always had to claw back time from other endeavors to create my comics. I pretty much assume I have to do something else… if my comics ever make enough money, I may have to re-evaluate my use of time, but for now I try do projects that are interesting. Uncivilized Books has been very rewarding. I’ve learned so much already and I know there’s a ton of learning left in the future.

Some of the output of Kaczynski's publishing imprint, Uncivilized Books.

Some of Kaczynski’s publishing output via his imprint Uncivilized Books.

James: Can you give a rundown of the upcoming projects for Uncivilized Books?

Tom: This is the next season of books:
Incidents in the Night by David B. and translated by Brian and Sarah Evenson.
Amazing Facts and Beyond by Kevin Huizenga and Dan Zettwoch
Sammy The Mouse Book 2 by Zak Sally
Over the Wall by Peter Wartman

James: Will you continue to produce minicomics and “floppy comics” such as the one I did for you?

Tom: I want to! I really see mini-comics as my research & development department. I can work with artists on a smaller scale trying out formats and media like flexi-discs [Post York includes a flexi-disc by my son Crosby–JR] that may be more difficult to do in larger quantities. I wish there was a better distribution network for these formats. I think they are vital formats that I hope will live on.

James: How do you see comics developing in the future? I am encouraged to see people like Joe Sacco using comics for journalistic purposes, or you using them to what I would call philosophical ends.

Tom: I certainly hope comics will embrace a variety of genres and formats. I listened to an interview with Gary Groth (disclosure: he’s our publisher) recently (on BoingBoing) and he said that the boom of comics in the wider book market was a strange thing. He said that most people read comics, not because they are ‘comics’ but only because they deal with some subject matter they’re interested in (like Maus by Spiegelman, or Palestine by Sacco, etc.). They’re not interested in comics ‘as comics.’ I think he’s right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We need those people! We need the reader who is interested in a subject, and chooses to read about it in comics form. They may not be interested in them ‘as comics’ but some of them will grow into that ideal reader… especially if there are many good comics on lots of different subjects. I think the same could be said for books, movies and other media. Most people want something very specific from movies: a blockbuster spectacle, something funny, gory, or emotionally engaging. But only a minority is interested in film ‘as film.’ There’s just a lot more of them because there are more movie goers overall. Books…literature in general is an ancient art form that has gone through many of its own crises and mutations over millennia. Comics as such have been around for only a fraction of that time. Comics emerged from an ephemeral medium. All those floppy comics were not supposed to be kept and written about. Comics in service of something other than commercial entertainment have been around for even less time! It’s going to take sometime to develop and find an audience that appreciates them for what they are. We’ve made great strides over the last decade and a half. We need to be patient and keep producing better and better work. I’m pretty hopeful.

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