“Metropolis” (1927) has been celebrated, desecrated, lost and found, but continues to grow in renown through nearly nine decades. I’ll wager I’ve mentioned this title times nine if I’ve mentioned her once. Most of what I’ve referred to is how so many subsequent science-fiction filmmakers have quoted aspects of director Fritz Lang’s visual style, a style which he attributed to his first view of New York City steaming into New York Harbor.
What impresses me first, in watching “Metropolis” this time, is how rudimentary some of the acting is, but at the same time, how effectively those actions communicate the character’s mood even today. Lang was by no means the first filmmaker to exploit how pantomime stands in for the human voice in silent film. Any good actor’s job is to employ novel ways to hold the attention of the audience all the way to the back of the auditorium.
Not all of the people that would watch his film would be able to read the intertitles, understand the language they’re written in, or fully comprehend the futuristic setting. So he directed his actors to project emotions with overstated body language and mask-like faces as if they were live on stage playing to a huge house. As motion pictures evolved, a more naturalistic acting style was tailored to the intimacy of motion picture screens.
Lang’s approach to directing actors was emblematic of the German cinema of his time. I wonder if the gaudy Expressionists weren’t always deliberately playing to the least educated viewer. I’d grant extra credit to any storyteller that tunes in, not just to his or her own immediate peer group, but audience members that exist in the cultural eddies. Consider the utterly diverse group of folks that have seen this film since it was first made.
Let’s aim our prism now into the heart of this film. What makes “Metropolis” more popular today than when it was first released, and more popular this year than last? Allusions to the apocalypse and the whore of Babylon aside, I don’t know how much has been written about Fritz Lang and his co-writer lifting their structure from Judeo/Christian scriptures, but few have wondered, out loud at least. I think it may be the key to why the footage has been spliced no less then five different ways, producing five distinct editions with as many different running times. Makes no difference whether Lang just lucked out, or knew what he was doing, the storyline in “Metropolis” reads like the book of Moses. Wise storytellers down through the ages all agree. You stand a better chance with your audience when you base your tale on a popular one from the good book. Interestingly enough, Fritz was raised a Catholic by a Jewish mother.
The handshake at the conclusion of Lang’s dystopian deliverance saga, is probably the best explanation for the controversy. The exceedingly tidy ending of “Metropolis” attracted the greatest amount of criticism during the first run and still does to this day. It was as if Moses and Ramses II hugged each other at the end of “The Ten Commandments.”
The second most paradoxical twist of this film’s fate was the lame excuse American sensors produced in order to impose a trim on the import. It was trumped up from a trivial detail, namely that Freder’s deceased mother’s name was “Hel.”
Helen, Helga, Hilda, Hilary Olga, and such all share their roots. Hel, is still a common name in Europe. Hell, it wouldn’t be a problem at all except, way back then, apparently not enough women in America were named Hel-somethingorother to help us understand. It would prove too much for Americans to associate that ancient root with anything but the devil’s wicked plan. Underneath all this “Metropolis” was penalized for fumbling with scripture. The masterpiece was circumcised before it ever played in America. Three different negatives went on to be snipped away at until the original eventually vanished altogether.
The colorful history of “Metropolis” includes a fascinating foray into the realm of film preservation and restoration. Fans of the subject are treated to a rich cache of support materials in the 2010 release from Kino/Lorber entitled, “The Complete Metropolis.” Not only will you be able to watch the newly restored, authorized edition that most nearly replicates the one screened in Berlin at its premiere in 1927. In the same package there is an enticing documentary “Voyage to Metropolis” on the state-of-the-art transfer process that it went through after being considered lost for 80 years. The last uncut negative of Lang’s “Metropolis” was thought to have been destroyed.
The account of how the forgotten print was found in a film archive in Buenos Aires in 2008 plays better than fiction. It’s a compelling excavation into the discovery of lost treasure. One of the greatest achievements in the silent film era was brought back from the abyss. Ironically, that cinematic resurrection becomes one of the all-time greatest achievements in film preservation.
The reception of “Metropolis” was paradoxical from the start, having been savaged by the intelligentsia for its sentimentality and congratulated for ushering in massive technological breakthroughs to the motion picture arts. Astoundingly, Fritz Lang famously pronounced “Metropolis” a disappointment as well as an embarrassment. What should really have embarrassed him is the fact that he placed half the blame on his former wife and collaborator. I wonder if he was really blaming the Nazi party, for liking it. His wife became a Nazi sympathizer, a fact which was attributed as the cause of their breakup. Lang’s private life would make the subject of an interesting movie of its own. If anybody will put up the funds, I’ll write a treatment.
I referred to Lang’s denunciation of his most famous film once before, a couple of posts back. Pronouncing it a “fairytale” was the flimsy criticism he supplied. The filmmaking is so skillful and the directing so audacious I don’t believe Lang could have regretted “Metropolis.” Perhaps he said so under duress, allowing some wrong voice to influence him for a time. I read another quote in which he called it his greatest movie. All arguments aside, I’ll bet not one of his detractors ever contributed more to our culture, with all their best works combined, than Lang did with this one heartfelt workingman’s blues.
I don’t mean “Metropolis” should never be picked on, but getting us all to agree to what’s bogus and what’s not is another thing. Whatever its shortcomings the film remains important enough, to enough folks, to keep gaining popularity and garnering more praise, year after year.
Next month, we’ll delve into specific characters and scenes in “Metropolis” highlighting some passages of brilliance and virtuosity that make this film worthy of long-term study.
At the mid-point of the newly restored edition of “Metropolis,” the transformation of beauty to beast takes place with a series of gorgeously designed and impeccably executed composite shots depicting the world’s first sex drone’s fabrication and release. Born on the silver screen, in a genetic engineering lab circa 2026, this replicant is brought to its feet to the beat of a lavish score by Gottfried Hupperts. Come watch the inaugural motion picture melding of woman and thing and lift your senses to the sights and sounds of some all-time great science fiction scenes.
In his epic dystopia, Fritz Lang contrasts Maria, the human being with Maria the insatiable machine. Appreciate, with me, the filmmaker’s decision to cast the fine-boned ingénue Brigitte Helm for a parable in which she transforms from pale maiden into erotic hardware. Note how, in the progression of scenes in which Helm appears, Lang shrewdly uses her to court one side of our nature and then the other.
The opulent pagan pageant set at the film’s center seems calculated to launch audiences into primal passion. The media’s a bit saturated with sex these days, but try to imagine the effects on the early 20th century audience of this nimble, naked robot fatale. The segment’s aimed to drive you into your most animal core, where you become engine-like as well, programmed to procreate, come heaven or hell. If you fall under her spell, place yourself in that chaos up on screen, a creature of craving, a slave of desire compelled by the biological imperative to dominate the queen.
So this mechanical mistress makes her debut as a high society whore and pussy whips the flock of fortunate sons into a frenzy on the dance floor. The fantastic art direction takes its cues from biblical prophecy, updating the vision in St. John’s Book for the modern day. Note how the baddest babe in Babylon was outfitted for the 21th century. Lang’s android is a corporate mole, robot rapper and psycho-slut rolled in one. The only detail about our 21st Century wonder widget that Fritz Lang got wrong is that she can fit into the palm of our hand.
Meanwhile our reluctant hero’s dad, Joe Frederer, the industrialist sends the sexy thing into the streets impersonating a saint. She’s been programmed to pull the strings of the masses and operate the populace like one of his machines. Never before had the manipulation of a crowd been so blatantly exposed, nor had we been provided with such a prescient preview of unwieldy industrialization tipping the ecological scale.
In the first act, Maria predicts their deliverer will rise up among her fellow poor. The one to whom she refers she calls the “Mediator.” Her words of faith transfix the weary workers assembled in a catacomb beneath the town. After demoralizing hours of repetitive tasks, her beatitudes help them relax. But before long, her appearance is cooped by the machine and she inflames them to engage in a violent uprising.
I saved these thoughts on “Metropolis” for the final posts in this yearlong inquiry into the Man and Machine because its accuracy at envisioning our present day jamb is unsettling. Despite the countless uncanny forecasts we’ve examined in other films in this series, I worry that this one is the most succinct in describing one that we are currently living.
The nearer we come to the 100 year anniversary of this landmark silent film, the more our modern world resembles it. An elite class is living in luxury, ignorant of ecology, insulated from adversity, obsessed with technology, reliant on slavery, or what we now refer to as income inequality and determined to keep it that way. The rest of us are living day to day.
What is perhaps most prescient about Fritz Lang’s forecast is that his metropolitans, rich and poor, will be visited by a Tsunami-like deluge. Pumps will fail and shafts fill up. Everyone is threatened by a nuclear screw-up. At the height of this film we are watching waves of panicked children fleeing their homes. The once vibrant city becomes an exclusion zone.
“Metropolis” proved early on that, with the invention of motion pictures, we are given the opportunity, not only to review the past, but to peer into the future. Alas, almost ninety years later we have barely begun to take it’s lessons to heart. The filmmakers whose movies mimic this film have given us endless additional opportunities to take it apart.
“Metropolis” was not intended to vilify machines. Lang understood they are just ideas born in the imagination, copied from nature, manifest in the physical world, operated under our guidance. If machines were evil we’d have to condemn the movies as well. And if motion pictures, in the world of automated things, indeed prove to be among the greatest ones ever invented, then we may yet still learn to thrive in a world of machines.
From a certain angle, “The Skin I Live In” makes a fascinating time at the movies out of some au courant medical ethics issues. More importantly to my own fascination is the fact that one more master has held up the fable of “Beauty and Beast” before the eyes of a modern audience.
Re-imagening our fable in his characteristic, tawdry, telanovela fashion, if I were called upon to name Almodóvar’s 2012 masterpiece, it would be, “The Recently Widowed Super-Surgeon’s Revenge,” but thematically “The Skin I Live In” lovingly teases apart our obsession with human perfection and makes art out of the slick sciences that promote it.
Sr. Almodóvar imagines his story at the junction of where art and science are increasingly intertwined and how that phenomenon, coupled with the film medium itself it would seem, along with the characters in the story, all combine to reflect our current disposition towards gender. His characters also conveniently embody all the archetypes of the popular fable we have been discussing in the past three posts.
The fable “Beauty and the Beast” fits perfectly under the surface of this “Skin,” with an opening identical to the other three–the Beast eavesdrops on Beauty through a glass. From there on out,“The Skin I Live In” takes the notion of scrutiny, surveillance and invasion of privacy to outlandish lengths through the character of Robert, the super surgeon who uses every means at his disposal, from giant screens to microscopes to get to the bottom what makes Beauty immortal.
At home he sits in front of a monitor zooming in and out on his captive with the leer of a peeping tom. At work Robert busies himself in the operating theater with research, examinations and invasive procedures upon his unwitting model.
The story threads together a panorama of relevant scenarios involving the sculpture of skin, the culture of clothes, assorted aspects of gender identity that relate to flesh, fashion, hide, masks, mirrors, armor and genitals.
As far back as we look there exist stories of gods and mortals who suffer from such dire cases of unrequited love that they simply must sculpt an idol to their ideal and make love to it. Almodóvar assumes we are still caught up in this preoccupation in modern times.
In this case Robert’s ideal is a dead ringer for his wife. He just happens to be fashioning her out of a young man who Robert believes ruined his daughter’s life. In the most perversely artificial way imaginable, Robert’s revenge conveniently manages to keep his love for his wife alive as well.
Addressing the artist/model relationship from the previous posts, there is always a predicament for the model in having to share the attention of the master with the creation he is working on, “The Skin I Live In,” imagines a case of the model being literally transformed into his creation.
Gender hybrids in art interests me in the light of the fact that Leonardo and Michelangelo, among others, painted women’s heads as well as their organs on men’s bodies to communicate the Renaissance concept of God-given human perfection. Though this all sounds chauvinistic now, we cannot possibly judge the mentality behind such choices with accuracy from the cultural reference point of our times. Was this really blatant disregard for woman, or some desire to imbue her with man’s strength? In other words, if only you could take the best of men and combine it with the best of women, that would be perfection. But who knows if that’s what was intended or something else?
If you are an artist absorbed in the act of creating, you work at all hours, often in the middle of the night, imagining, observing, probing, shaping, and caressing. The work becomes like a lover with whom you gladly elude sleep. Robert’s falling in love and sleeping with his Vera would be nothing scandalous if it weren’t for the revenge plot which makes a twisted horror flick out of our familiar fairy tale.
Most, if not all, of Pedro Almodóvar’s films portray situations of abduction and victimization. He’s well known for trafficking in images of rape, incest and assorted taboo which I’ve always assumed relates to the director’s feeling like a female trapped in a male body.
Within the first forty minutes of “Skin,” we’ve been shown kidnapping, drug abuse, burglary, a flaming car wreck, rape, bloody murder and several shameless breaches of medical code. Vera’s story should be interesting to anyone that feels trapped in a male dominant paradigm. Almodóvar’s story should be interesting to all genders when it addresses anxiety generated within our rigidly enforced hierarchy’s dominant sexual codes, and Beauty’s story should be interesting to all humanity in any way it might articulate our frustration when we are confronted with any of life’s polarizing dilemmas.
Indeed, one could read endless comparisons into the dynamic between the super-surgeon and his subject, not the least one being the corporation vs. consumer relationship and perhaps that is what makes the horror of Vera’s situation so disturbing to us.
Irregardless of connotations, intended or otherwise, the quality of the film making is superb. His country’s illustrious fine arts heritage seems to have taught the director well. Visually speaking, the flourish with which some of the technological imagery is presented recalls the most poetic science sequences in cinema from Lange to Kubrick.
“The Skin I Live In” expresses an undeniable dedication to the goddess of beauty. The filmmaker’s deeper allegiance is made obvious for us, for example, by posting enormous reproductions of “Venus D’Urbino” by Titian, along side “Venus in a Mirror” by Rubens, in the upstairs grand hallway. Like those masters before him, this one lavishes loving attention even on the most obscure element in the piece, investing painstaking care in the way it contributes to the refinement and dimensionality of the finished product.
A meticulously matched soundtrack selection, for instance “Shades of Marble,” by Anders Trentemøller evokes, with strident strings, the violent occlusions of geological upheaval. Almodóvar repurposes it ingeniously to express the fragility and vulnerability of flesh to intrusion by the scalpel, or the violent will of rapist against victim while, at the same time, paying homage to the classic Greek sculptors that labored to encode our modern obsession with flawless beauty.
Beginning with this past June’s post, I have been discussing Bertolluci’s charming coming of age flick, “Stealing Beauty” from 1996. Along side it, I have compared Jacques Rivette’s artist/model drama “La Belle Noisseuse.” From 1991, and proven that all are re-workings of the Jean Cocteau’s venerated classic, “La Belle et la Bete,” from 1947.
This final variation is the most exotic extreme. Whereas, in “La Belle Noiseusse”, the role of Beauty was stripped down and exposed, by the rigors of the master’s process, to possess a kernel of the beast inside. The genius of Almodóvar turns the screw a notch deeper, forcing man to be changed into woman against his will, for the purposes of sexual slavery, effectively transforming the Beast into Beauty to let him feel what it’s like to be preyed on.
In the opening credits of “Stealing Beauty,” Bertolucci casts his audience as the Beast to achieve essentially the same thing. All three are cinematic stunts designed to place the Beast in all of us, in Beauty’s point of view in order to foster compassion and respect for her. All three are acts of homage to idealized feminine and an appeal for her welfare which is too often taken advantage of in real world scenarios. All the more reason why she must be defended in our make believe ones.
This is part 2 of a continuing investigation into a Cult of Venus that thrives today in modern movies.
I recommend, if you haven’t recently, or perhaps ever, take a look at “Stealing Beauty”(1996) and “La Belle et la Bête” (1946)–a double feature in which we compare a movie that is often ignored with one that is beloved by all.
We might as well resume with a film made by someone from the culture that gave Venus her name. Bernardo Bertolucci has been probing, adoring and obsessing over modern versions of her for over five decades. Take his movie, in which Liv Tyler plays a cosmopolitan virgin on the verge.
“Stealing Beauty” has been trivialized by some critics who fail to find real nourishment beneath its confectionary facade. To be sure, the picture looks like something a food writer might describe as pastel farmhouse over a bed of grapevine on terra cotta crust. Why the visual excess? Because “Stealing Beauty” is a fable. If you do not subscribe to this, you may be dismissed.
Anyone who paid keen attention would be able to guess, with the backdrop of idealized nature, archetypal sculpture and the way director and crew pump the painterly schema, “Stealing Beauty” automatically adopts an atmosphere of mythic escapades.
Young love never looked so yummy. It smacks sugar sweet indeed, but there is blood at the center of a good allegory and a hyper touch of it’s color is found in almost any composition in this film. Take Lucy’s last act skirt, or her father’s first act shirt–a photographic rapport that suggests their bond. The attention-getting hue calls to mind menstrual flow, birth blood and wedding night scarlet too, but especially the precious, stirring succulence that circulates the limbs of holy youth which fine art and the movies entice us to adore.
While we’re delving in to Bertolucci’s eye candy, let me point out that silk-draped portal off the barn that billows like some feverishly stoked kiln, which is echoed later by that campfire that permits just enough exposure in the obligatory scene.
Before the days of color cinematography there worked, in motion pictures, a fanatical servant of Orpheus. He too, like Bertolucci, was a poet before he became a filmmaker. He was born before cinema, but then perhaps we are speaking of the first poet of cinema too. They became one in the same in Msr. Jean Cocteau.
I cannot contain my suspicion that Bertolucci installed his curtain in the farmhouse to connect it with a fabulous opus on celluloid that the first poet took upon himself to frame. With his stolen one, Bertolucci often cheers Beauty on from the sidelines of that French master’s enchanted tale. He is also, coincidentally, restating for everyone or at least everyone paying attention, that this film is a fable like Cocteau’s inimitable “Beauty and the Beast,” better known as “La Belle et la Bête”.
If you’ve watched Cocteau’s masterpiece, you’ll never forget the sequence in which the character of Belle, played by the luminous Josette Day, arrives and enters Bête’s magic castle. Watch as she pushes in those massive doors and is snagged by the magnetism of her terrifying host. The halls are lit both-sides with regiments of disembodied arms, sprouted from walls instead of human ribs and each supports a glowing candelabra. One room is followed by another even more mysterious. The inner sanctum is decorated with a row of moonlit, floor-to-ceiling-draped windows.
The magnetism of La Bête grows so strong, by then, that something between the floor and Beauty’s feet conveys her to Him. The possessed castle inhales and sucks the diaphanous shades toward the swooning Belle. She comprehends only later that this is Bête in magic drapery drag, privately pawing her as she passes.
This brief passage is one of the most sumptuous in film history. It reveals not only the perverse pleasure that Bête takes in observing Belle without reserve, but takes in the ravishment of the senses that she experiences inside his enchanted in-breath before fear sets in.
First hints of dread come from a dressing room laid out for Belle. Objects in there whisper aloud, offering their service to her. With such animation in the world of things she is unfamiliar, or perhaps she comprehends, finally, that this castle has eyes to which she does not wish to be further exposed. So she runs but, naturally, all roads lead to La Bête. Suddenly, there he towers, with dashing, full-face beard, ivory fangs and diamond spangles. “Ue Allez Vous,” he bellows, blocking her way, and the trembling, exquisite, adorable and defenseless Belle instantly faints…
…meanwhile, back in our movie seats, ten bucks makes the goddess appear overhead, flick, flick, flick. Once more, radiant Venus descends to the world of men, flicka, flicka, flick…
The opening credits of “Stealing Beauty” play over a home made video. Here again we have a voyeur stalking a beautiful maiden from behind a magic glass. In his prying lens, Lucy is unsuspecting captive. Ironically, it is Bertolucci voice issuing from the secret admirer as he drops the tape of Lucy in the sky down to Lucy on the tracks. The video was recorded on the plane from America and then by train to Siena. It’s all we’ve had to look at so far. We’ve watched a lot of claustrophobic angles of Lucy sleeping, thinking, looking out the window, moving freely about the cabin, listening to music, sleeping some more. We get a cool glimpse of some drool dripping down her chin.
Why cool? Because this is Venus, adorable, immortal, woman-child, sex diva, war goddess. Though it should not be true of the audience, all of this is lost, of course, on luminous Lucy who embodies a ravishing ideal of lady luck with, delectably, zero awareness of our prying eyes.
Now would you just look at how that hand of hers sleeps so close to her blue jean-ed crotch. Is it meant to recall that infatuating pose painted by another celebrated high-priest of Her sect? He who is nearly five hundred or so years Bertolucci’s senior, and is known as Titian, a northerner like him, but from Venice instead of Parma. That Titian was a titan of Venus.
In case you never have, allow your gaze sufficient contact with the “Venus d’Urbino” to observe how gratified she is to lay naked in your presence. It is enough to make one doubt her virginity no? Edward Manet recaste that archetype a few centuries later, transforming Venus into Olympia, a haughty, prosperous, young whore (1864). Next up, Signore Bertolucci rigs his photo reel to ritually restore Venus’ virginity so he can steal it once more.
What is it about this little rite in which movie going mortals regularly love to partake? It is far from the first time that Venus has been around this block. That hottie and her posse are preserved in stone hewn from cultures that reach back to earth’s earliest inhabited zones.
Meanwhile, back to the future, Lucy’s awake again and looking out the window, descending to the land of men. She never acknowledges being watched by them though. You, I and the filmmakers are as graced as La Bete to peek into this pure maiden’s personal space.
Getting back to Bertolucci’s “Beauty”, is Venus really listening to those headphones? No, she’s asleep again. So we begin probing even closer, with the insistence of this mystery lens–much closer than we should. The filmmaker has gradually imposed on his audience a hip, ethical predicament, but it’s not our camera, so we can’t be blamed. Right? We are only watching.
Is that right, or wrong? We’ve just been going along. Now, we begin to ask ourselves if we should continue on when, suddenly, Venus is awakened by the mystery documentarian, advising her to un-dock now, having arrived at her destination.
Lucy grabs her grips and flits onto the platform stopping quick to fix a lace. “What are you doing?” she asks, staring down the lens for very the first time? “I was on the plane.” He whispers, just like Beauty’s dressing mirror in “La Belle et La Bête”. “This is for you.” The tape drops out the window. “Shit!” Lucy exclaims as fright breaks over her fetching forehead. Bingo, Bernardo, you just scored! That furled brow shows how it feels to be Venus in a Venus crazed world.
Because the maidenhead of a virgin is referred to as “her secret,” it makes sense that there is a secret at the core of this story. Is it the same mist that shrouds the sculptor when he wonders why Lucy’s stepfather wants him to sculpt her? “Why did he send her to me?” he confides to his fellow Irish ex-pat wife. “He’s never liked my work?”
I prefer to think the sculptor and Lucy’s step-father both understand why the step-father sent her from New York. I prefer to think that the sculptor’s wife, with whom he is speaking at this moment, does not know the reason and the sculptor is probing just to be certain.
There is also, most definitely, a beast at the core of this Beauty tale. It amounts to almost everyone else in the script. The whole world seems to be chasing this fox. The character of Richard presses most aggressively but, ever since the man with the video camera, each new character from the sculptor to the dying playwright is poaching after her. Every female in the script is getting off on Lucy in some way or other as well. Beastly nature–what can you do?
If I had a daughter, I’d encourage her to see this film as she approached adulthood, with the hope that it could provide a pertinent preview of the pleasures and pressures of becoming sexually active.
After the close call with a young seducer, it is a relief that the boy Lucy eventually connects with is not a slave to the sexual mores of his peers. Lucy’s salvation materializes in the form of the rake’s gentler cousin, a boy of the same age. Osvaldo is the only character in the story that hasn’t attempted to steal her beauty. His head of bucolic locks spells out “nature boy”, cinematically, and foreshadows the spherical canopy of a great tree suspended over Beauty’s sexual setting free.
This iconoclastic heist flick argues that all larcenies perpetrated on Venus are not equal. The sculptor has permission and his wife’s offense, for instance, is petty and meant to amuse when she outs the 19 year-old’s maidenhood. She and her family and friends all indulge in good-natured gossip out of sheer boredom.
Other predators in the upper age limit commit benign infractions as well, filling out this randy romance with spicy minor roles like a sleepwalking art dealer, played, most charmingly, by none other than our most beloved Beast player of all, the French matinee idol Jean Marais and Jean Cocteau’s erotic muse until death. Does anyone out there still dismiss the notion that this film is Bertolluci’s “La Belle et La Bête”?
Embracing a bountiful bouquet of wildflowers that she’s gathered from a classic Monet meadow nearby, Lucy finally asks the sculptor point-blank for the last piece of her puzzle. Where were you in August of 1975?” He takes a while to answer, “That must have been when I did your mother’s portrait.” With this line, the sculptor admits to Lucy her paternal claim. “That’s what I thought,” she replies to accept it. The sculptor levels his next line so that it’s meaning cannot be misunderstood. “It was one of the few times we (he and his wife) have ever been apart.” “Oh, I wouldn’t ask her,” she says, to assure she’s understood. “These are for you.” Lucy hands her father the bouquet, then dabs a tear. Whether it comes from a sense of profound connection or the lack thereof is only next made clear.
The master shows the finished work for which she modeled. It is pure essence. A massive tree trunk yields to sensuous curves in smooth, even grain, articulating immaculate skin on cheeks, forehead and chin. All this is presided over by inquisitive eyes of a curious, absorbent youth in soft, yellow pine. The sculptor confesses, in an earlier scene, his works are about himself. In this case it rings true at least a couple of ways.
Rather than dwell on his accomplishment, the sculpture praises Lucy for how lovely she turned out and she, in turn, looks proud as any branch could ever be for being immortalized by her secret trunk in the trunk of a real tree. To prevent hurt feelings with the sculptor’s wife, it is framed as cool to keep their truth concealed. On this she does agree, then father and daughter embrace, finally. Ironically then, the camera tracks away, in a wide radial around that great chunk of tree, finally showing some respect for Venus’s privacy.
This surprise plot detail attempts to define the unique bond of the artist and model. It points to a shared ambiguity, the secret to which each of them holds a key. I haven’t time to go into this subject here carefully but I will, in the next installment of this series on Venus, so stay tuned, please, if you will. Now, with Lucy’s daddy I.D.’d, we can get on with her inaugural foray.
Sweet surrender in the Siena hills under the verdant ball of an enormous tree. Earth pauses on the head of a pin for Venus and the Chosen One to get it on. Come spy with me on the pretty pilgrims perched above a vine-rowed rise, with the Tuscan sunset reflected in their eyes. Dappled cloudheads cradle rising stars. Campfire illuminates breeze-blown branch sighs, while down slip virgin panties from virgin buns and thighs. Nature Boy avails and proceeds to make love instead of screw. The coolest thing, besides the obvious, is next morning when Osvaldo confesses, “It was my first time too.
Many vaudeville and cabaret illusionists were among the first to nurture film in its infancy, but let a professional trickster from France named Georges Jean Méliés be named first magician of motion pictures. He delivered audiences into the modern age mastering motion photography as his modus operandi. Anyone who wishes to travel back in time can meet the master.
He never claimed to be anything but a showman and frowned on any practitioner peddling the paranormal, but that is not to say that Méliés wasn’t serious about casting a spell. He was practiced at the art of shape shifting, among other things, where, in “The Conjurer” (1899), for example, we see a ballerina transform into a cascade of confetti. Then the conjurer himself turns into the ballerina and back again. Finally, he disappears in a cloud of smoke. Poof! Go ahead, try that at home.
Since motion pictures and magic tricks both blend the past, present and future, I’m going to propose that a movie camera is simply a clock with a lens for capturing time on celluloid. The thought first occurred when I learned Méliés was a clockmaker. It makes sense that a man well versed in its measurements would discover how to exploit it. Ironically, Méliés had the time trade in common with two other prominent magicians. Robert Houdin (from whom The Great Houdini took his name) and Houdin’s top rival, John Nevil Maskelyne.
Another interesting intersection took place when Méliés purchased Houdin’s theater in Paris. It was the dawn of the last century. Let that date and address mark the precise coordinate point where live magic performances morphed into motion picture presentations. Here, a clockmaker turned himself into a ghost and, with the advent of a new kind of mass hypnosis, generated the first special effects blockbuster grosses.
Méliés could have lost them entirely when he closed his popular live act and swapped it with a fake, but unprecedented crowds craved the new counterfeit variety and endowed the celluloid master with even greater notoriety.
Global distribution networks grew up exclusively to accommodate Méliés’ fame. His status went viral long before the web, before television or even radio. I’m not overstating when I say, the stalk that morphed into the information age, which links our globe today, sprouted partly from Msr. George Jean Méliés.
Let us examine this feat from the viewpoint of a practitioner of the magic arts. Vanishing into motion pictures, Méliés literally made his body disappear from the stage, leaving behind an immortal double with striking charisma and prodigious powers.
Like those clocks before, Méliés toyed with his audience now. Instead of springs, gears and trip mechanisms, he tinkered with human reasoning, response and reaction. An overflowing auditorium enabled the master to develop considerable finesse. Science and art became partners to help make Méliés a grand success.
The fraction of Méliés films that survive today are a treasure of early motion picture tricks. Effects of Méliés’ devising can be found in films that come afterword, from the early years all the way up to today. “The Wizard of Oz” throws a farmhouse up inside a tornado’s eye. The optical printing technique used for that sequence, can be observed 37 years earlier in Méliés 1902 film “L’homme à la tête de Caoutchouc.”
But it is not only his trickery that is imitated. His elaborate set designs from “Le Voyage Dans la Lune” was lifted for some of the of Hogwarts set in the “Harry Potter” series as well, so Méliés magnetism remains undisputed to this day.
While Méliés the man faded into semi-obscurity even before his life was over, his work has been digested and assimilated by succeeding generations, turning up in films made by the likes of Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, George Lucas and Peter Jackson to name a few.
A disembodied entity, based upon Méliés life, is played by Ben Kingsley in the 2011 3D masterwork “Hugo.” This is an unparalleled achievement in the history of the magic arts. The master managed to have himself resurrected in 3D, in the present day, with the assistance of modern movie wizard Martin Scorcese. Thank you Marty. Long live Msr. George Jean Méliés.
By now, movies have documented the work of magician, wizard, sorcerer, jongleur, Jedi, witch, warlock, and conjurer. We’ve observed them practice with strange mystical attraction in supernatural settings beyond the far horizon.
These all represent literal examples of magic in the movies, but what about the role of the movie maker as modern shaman in the present day? A shaman is a healer, teacher and keeper of medicine in any society with which they identify. Filmmaker as shaman is the next subject examined as the magic in movies series continues in April on openchannelcontent.com.
“Metropolis” (1927) has been celebrated, desecrated, lost and found, but continues to grow in renown through nearly nine decades. I’ll wager I’ve mentioned this title times nine if I’ve mentioned her once. Most of what I’ve referred to is how so many subsequent science-fiction filmmakers have quoted aspects of director Fritz Lang’s visual style, a style which he attributed to his first view of New York City steaming into New York Harbor.
