Wed - April 19, 2006

A familiar mountain scaled anew 


Mann’s masterpiece sparkles in a newish translation 

I first read The Magic Mountain in 1971, and have returned to it at approximately seven-year intervals ever since. You do the math: it was time. Each reading has put a different book before my eyes, but this time out, taking it up almost exactly 35 years since my first ascent, I found myself unexpectedly daunted, the familiar H.T. Lowe-Porter translation somehow more granitic and unwelcoming than I remembered it. A couple of days later, at the home of my good friend Rose Barquist, I noticed John Woods’ 1995 English version on the shelf, and asked to borrow it.

I’d looked briefly at this edition shortly after it was published, and was repelled. I was accustomed to Lowe-Porter’s stately cadences (it has been said that she contrived on behalf of English readers to translate Mann—into German), and a check of a couple of favorite passages in the new version made me flinch. I'm here to tell you (all three of my regular readers) that I've changed my mind. Woods' translation is an order of lit magnitude fresher than poor Helen Lowe-Porter's received text, and I suspect that it's closer to the brisk humor of Mann's original prose.

The story is simple, although told at great length: Hans Castorp, a young, unremarkable marine engineer about to begin his career, stops at a Swiss sanatorium to visit his cousin, confined there for treatment of tuberculosis. His three-week visit is extended longer...and longer...and longer until, another 360 weeks having passed, the cataclysm of WWI ejects him from his alpine enchantment. I've never been able to convey persuasively why I love this book, but it has been enormously gratifying on every reading, and never as much so as on the one I concluded last night. I recommend this translation unreservedly to the first-time reader. 

Posted at 07:26 PM    

Fri - November 25, 2005

D is for Downer 


...not that you’d know it from our stony-hearted group 

Notwithstanding some ambitious promises (intimations, anyway) held forth in January, the Società italiana del cinematografo del punto di Adams has not contrived to present its features oftener than once a month; nor have I been conscientious about posting reviews here of each film as screened. We have, however, managed not to miss a calendar month yet, which means that six days ago De Sica’s Umberto D. was the eleventh flick to pass in progressive scans upon the Great Screen of Life before a selection of the usual suspects up in the garrett. I thought it was a worthy successor to Bicycle Thieves, but at the time of its original release (1952, around the time of my original release) critics sneered and audiences in droves found other things to do. De Sica suggested that the straitened circumstances worn, perversely, as a badge of national pride in the shellshocked postwar environment had become four years later in the early years of the economic boom rather by way of an uncomfortable memory. The story is simple: elderly, somewhat prickly retired civil servant (ouch!) on a fixed income (ouch!) is forced out of his longtime lodgings by an avaricious landlady (been there, done that, couldn’t afford the t-shirt afterward) and finds himself on the indifferent streets of Rome with just his dog and his suitcase. Resolved upon self-slaughter, and unable to place Flike the Wonder Pooch with a good home he decides...ah, no, you’ll have to see it yourselves, friends. I previewed the feature precisely so that I could inoculate myself against the sheer pathos of the thing, and I must tell you, o my brothers and only friends, that a tear or two trickled down my craggy visage during the closing minutes of the film. But that night, when a subset of the usual suspects assembled (Rose Barquist, Ashton Brown, Art Weller, Gail Coney, Tanya Sirkin, Elena Spichek, your humble narrator and the Bride of Urschleim), there was not a damp eye in the house. Everyone seemed to enjoy the film, but I have to assume that all the others, ranging in age from 21 to 81, have each and every one been hardened, jaded, desensitized, debauched by by our gross modern cinematic conventions. I can think of no other explanation (although as the admirable Richard Dawkins observes when the “Intelligent Design” set bleats that there couldn’t possibly have been any intermediate stages between a fully functional eye and no eye at all, this is properly described as "the argument from personal incredulity") for the apparent equanimity with which everyone else in attendance watched the sniffy tale unwind—and this after I’d laid in a dozen boxes of absorbent tissues and paid a hefty retainer for a local therapist to be on call that evening. Go figure.

In other news I've switched this evening to a newer iteration of my rather bare-bones blogging software, and a small operation in distant Hindustan is 920 rupees the richer for it. Here’s hoping—because the reviews on VersionTracker blow hot and cold, praising the new version to the skies or damning it to the deeper precincts of magma—that it works out. My thanks to surprising reader (because I'd always assumed that my four or five regular readers were all personal acquaintances) Lionel Chollet for alerting me to the fact that I wasn't RSS-compatible. Perhaps he’ll let me know if this upgrade has done the trick. 

Posted at 05:48 PM    

Sun - February 20, 2005

A leopard, not a cheetah 


Slow, but beautiful; beautiful but intelligent; intelligent but slow 

The second installment of the Società italiana de cinematografo del punto di Adams film series was duly presented this past Friday: The Leopard, Luchino Visconti's epic tale of world-weary aristocracy, personified perfectly by a dubbed Burt Lancaster, gracefully giving way to youthful opportunists and social climbers during Italy's Risorgimento, and given the full Criterion Collection treatment on DVD.

Any description of the film to those considering a first viewing should probably begin with the fact that it's about three hours long, and that these hours pass...very...slowly. I do not say that this is a bad thing, or the consequence of unskilled direction. The milieu under consideration is, after all, that of the Sicilian aristocracy in the 1860s, and we are not speaking here of life in the fast lane (indeed, the resistance of sleepy old Sicily to the currents of modernity is one of the principal elements of both the novel and the film). The stately pace of the life portrayed is part and parcel of the rigorous authenticity Visconti insisted upon when he set about to make the film, an authenticity which sets, costumes and the cinematography (gorgeous in its own right and magnificently restored for this release: the film looks brand-new) are made as well to serve. We might also keep in mind that all our sensibilities have inevitably been debauched by contemporary styles of film editing, which would have seemed inhumanly frenetic a generation ago. If you thought that the Matrix series ought to have been more tightly cut, then The Leopard probably does not represent the optimal use of your entertainment dollar.

For those willing to gear themselves down, however, there are delights aplenty to be had. As a meditation on power, class, change and changelessness ("in order for things to remain as they are, everything will have to change," as Prince Salina's ambitious nephew tells him, and as the prince himself repeats to a hunting companion who clings to the old order), as a look back, in its way as persuasively evocative as Satyricon, at a vanished age, as a visual feast (the austere Sicilian landscapes, the sprawling palaces, Lancaster's own marvelously expressive face and, come to that, Claudia Cardinale, who is very easy on the eyes, and of whom a minor character says reverently "her sheets must smell like paradise!"), and for skillful performances at every level, including Romolo Valli doing a droll turn as the Salina clan's tame padre (and looking for all the world like the animated infant cyclist from The Triplets of Belleville)—all these elements will delight persons of breeding and discernment (for the rest of you rabble there's Kill Bill, Vol. 2).

A bit more about Burt Lancaster's performance as Don Fabrizio, Prince Salina, the "Leopard" of the title. According to the (very enlightening) supplemental documentary included on the Criterion DVD, Lancaster was forced on Visconti by the producers (whom he subsequently bankrupted in the course of the production), who wanted a "star" for international (and American) box office draw. Visconti bitterly resented having "this American gangster" inflicted on him, and for the first few weeks on the set went out of his way to be disagreeable to the actor when he deigned to speak to him at all. Lancaster met pique with professionalism, though, and long before shooting was finished the two men were fast friends, and remained so until Visconti's death in the mid-1970s, Lancaster actually intervening to save one of the director's last projects when it looked as though the financing would fall through.

Many of us have had the experience of seeing a cherished novel adapted for the screen only to groan at some egregious piece of miscasting (or, contrariwise, of being pleasantly surprised, as I was with Russel Crowe, whom I was prepared to dislike, in Master and Commander). Burt Lancaster is simply dazzling as Prince Salina, and seeing him made me realize anew how much more there is to acting than mere diction—although it must be said that whoever did his Italian voice was a gifted performer in his own right. But in bearing, gesture, carriage and, supremely, in the play of his marvelously subtle and expressive features, Lancaster is every inch the hale, cunning, vigorous yet world-weary, confident yet resigned, snobbish yet tactful, fastidious, proud, harried aristocrat sprung to life from the pages of Lampudesa's novel. It must have been the role of a lifetime; I had not previously paid particular attention to Burt Lancaster's career, but now I find I must undertake to discover whether he ever topped this mark. It probably didn't impede the warming of relations between the two men when Lancaster, after pondering how best to inhabit the character, had the happy inspiration to pattern his performance after the director himself.

If the film has one shortcoming—and I do not know whether it is just to fault a director for failing to achieve something he likely did not attempt—it is the absence of one particularly appealing but necessarily intangible element of the book, which was the narrative distance, the deliberately twentieth-century stance embodied in the telling of the tale, in which, while events of 1860 are being discussed, a metaphor is casually introduced evoking, say, Sergei Eisenstein, or Freud, or World War II (example: "From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal, but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943"). In this respect Lampedusa's novel is similar to John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, set in the same period, the screen adaptation of which did attempt, by means of an ingenious if not wholly successful framing device, to convey the disconnect between the sensibilities of the Victorian principals and the disembodied modern narrative voice. I can't begin to guess how Visconti might have attempted this feat had he wished to, and he was probably wiser not to try.

Summary: Slow but beautiful; beautiful but intelligent; intelligent but slow: fire up DVD player by 6:00 PM and give yourself an intermission after scene 16. Belay that—fire up the DVD player half an hour earlier and take in the twenty-minute talk by a University of Pennsylvania historian on the Risorgimento period: I had a passing acquaintance with the particulars, but derived much benefit from the brief refresher; if you're not aware of the historical context at all you'll be depriving yourself of a dimension or two of resonance as you take in the main feature. There are riches aplenty here for them as have the wit to stop and savor them. 

Posted at 03:14 PM    

Fri - February 4, 2005

Società italiana del cinematografo del punto di Adams 


Other times, other places 

I remain moderately disheartened at the state of the commonweal—the old North American Republic appears as though it will be content to die in its sleep—and find myself responding by means of a gradual withdrawal of my attention from public issues. The morning newspaper, over which I used to pore with coffee and unfiltered cigarettes to sharpen my attention, is now just skimmed most mornings and sometimes skipped altogether (of course, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle has become progressively thinner gruel over the years, and I no longer smoke), newsweeklies receive scarcely more attention and even NPR, my principal window on the world these two decades past, is losing its earshare to my iPod. Accordingly this household has launched, if for no other reason than to take our minds off this country and this age, an Italian film series.

I have long been fond on principle of European art films produced within ten years or so either side of 1960 (you could put Last Year at Marienbad chronologically and stylistically at ground zero here, although I recognize that what I find hypnotic other people may find soporific), and in recent years I have set about gratifying this tropism by accumulating representative titles on DVD for the permanent collection. I'm not certain why the notion of an Italian-themed series seemed appealing, except that I had a slight plurality of these titles at the outset; that a Swedish series would necessarily have been dominated by the oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman, and hence not, ah, entirely conducive to the festive spirit of the evening parties to which I propose to attach the screenings; that Japanese flicks are not to everyone's taste; that a selection of French flicks would be stylistically too diffuse...

Anyway, Italian it is. We announced the series via snailmail to selected Bay Area chums last month, and drew a modest response, with some falling off of promised attendees for the first selection, Fellini Satyricon. I should perhaps mention that we decided to arrange the films not in order of production date but rather by historical period, which should give us some interesting abrupt shifts in cinematic sensibilities now and again. I had seen Satyricon as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, and had carried to the present date only the impressions that the film was long on spectacle but short on narrative coherence. I was prepared to discount a portion of the latter impression on the assumption that one or another of the exotic alkaloids then circulating might have contributed to that memory of discontinuity, but this time around, impaired by no more than three goblets of chianti over the course of, it must be said, a not-tightly edited flick, I am prepared to report that it is on visual spectacle very nearly alone that the flick's reputation must rest. Yes, Federico, the privileged classes of Tiberius' Rome were vain, gluttonous and cruel: tell us something we didn't know. What we didn't appreciate, lulled as we were by the drawing room dramedies such as I, Claudius, was how remote and foreign and un-English things were at the center of what then passed as Western Civilization two millennia ago, and there Fellini has done a stellar job. You'll need all your patience to sit through this, but it's a remarkable accomplishment, and I can't think offhand of a film I've seen recently that has approached the job this one has done of a total immersion in an alien culture.

The remaining titles, subject to additions and substitutions, are:

The Leopard
Death in Venice
Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Seven Beauties
Night of the Shooting Stars
Open City
The Bicycle Thief
Umberto D
Roman Holiday (not really an Italian film, I know, but after two bleak neorealist classics I suspect people will be wanting a break)
Variety Lights
The White Sheik
I Vitelloni
Terminal Station (I haven't made up my mind on this one, which is something of a bastard production, but its credentials are at least sounder than Wyler's Roman Holiday)
La Strada
Nights of Cabiria
Big Deal on Madonna Street
La Dolce Vita
Il Posto (not to be confused with 1994's Il Postino, although I may add that one to the list before we get to chronological 1953)
I Fidanzati
La Commare Secca
L’Avventura
La Notte
L’eclisse
8 1/2
Juliet of the Spirits
Roma
A Brief Vacation
Swept Away

The stretch I'm personally looking forward to is the one comprised by films made from 1945 to 1964—represented above approximately by Open City through L'eclisse—which have the characteristics I really associate with Italian cinema. I'm rather hoping that by the time we reach its place in the sequence Bertolucci's Before the Revolution will have made it onto DVD and may be added to the bill. It remains to be seen whether interest can be maintained in our circle over the course of the year or more it will require, at the projected intervals of two to four weeks, to run through the roster. I will in any event be posting reviews here as each title is screened. 

Posted at 07:00 PM    

Sat - January 8, 2005

Digging “Six Feet Under” 


Behind the curve as usual: notes from a life without cable 

Actually when I joined the landed gentry in 1999 there was a live cable hookup that included HBO (television was never the major fraction of my entertainment grazing even in childhood, and I've always resisted the notion of paying for the service lest I should feel compelled thereby to watch the thing regularly) and in due time we discovered, the SO and I, The Sopranos. Eventually the cable company did an electronic audit of the neighborhood and cut the cord; they have since that time pestered us with blandishments and, latterly, veiled threats in order to persuade us to subscribe. Their representatives appear to believe that we in fact continue to receive a bootleg signal (I have checked; we do not) and insist that they should be allowed onto the premises to confirm this (Lina, a crackerjack attorney as well as a first-rate SO, smiles and tells them "Try"). All this is a bit beside the point.

Since our Sopranos fix was severed we have had to rely on rentals of subsequent series on DVD, and are waiting a bit impatiently for the fifth season to reach that useful medium. In the meantime Lina has stumbled upon Six Feet Under, and we are hooked.

I was aware of the series—had read praise from critics I respected—but "edgy drama about a family of morticians" didn't grab me, even though we count a member of the profession among our circle. Of course, I also resisted The Singing Detective twenty years ago, and that drama remains the sublimest expression the medium has ever achieved in the English-speaking world. I’m here to tell you that Six Feet Under (hereafter SFU) is a winner.

Sure, it’s soap opera, or perhaps formaldehyde opera. The Fisher family’s lives are more complicated and interesting than yours (then again—if the lives portrayed on TV were drabber than your own, would you ever bother powering up the home entertainment center?), but they're thoughtfully rendered by writers and performers who never insult the audience’s intelligence and seldom come close. The characters are complex, appalling and appealing by turns, and largely believable. I am particularly impressed—and this will perhaps sound odd coming from one who regards Christianity, at least in its most visible current-day manifestations, as an expression of some of the vilest parts of our national character—by the series’ treatment of the characters’ spiritual lives. Several, perhaps most, are practicing Christians, and the place of religion in their lives is neither elevated, nor sentimentalized, nor trivialized, nor condescended to. As a—how shall I say?—as a “mystical agnostic” I am open to the notion of a cosmic organizing principle (or even principal, hereafter COP) beyond our ken, although I doubt whether in attributing “consciousness” to the hypothetical COP merely because we happen to possess that ambiguous attribute we aren't in a position something like a race of sentient grizzlies whose All-Highest would of course be a very, very large bear that valued salmon above all things. Myself, I’m still digesting mystical input of suspect provenance from over a third of a century ago, and have yet to reach a conclusion, but I recognize that others are more comfortable treating these issues within a better-defined structure—although my own residual impressions dispose me to dismiss the monotheistic creeds that emerged from the Mediterranean as childish oversimplifications—and I respect SFU for portraying this demographic with what appears to me a clear eye.

JoeRand sez: check it out. 

Posted at 04:43 PM    

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