American Film comedy

For the past few weeks, I have been showing some friends examples of American film comedy. We began with silent comedy - Keaton, Lloyd, Arbuckle, and Chaplin. Then we sampled the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Screwball Comedy, and Bob Hope. I wrote short notes for the evening's viewing. Anyhow, this week we are sampling Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The film is Artists & Models. We also begin with a cartoon. Here are the notes for this week's viewing. Shall I post the other notes?

Puss ‘N Booty (1943)

            This is the last black and white cartoon made by Warner Brothers Studio. Leon Schlesinger was the producer. He first had his own studio and then came to run Warner’s cartoon unit. The Director of this film is Frank Tashlin who had worked with Schlesinger for some years. Tashlin would later go on to make live-action features such as The Paleface with Bob Hope and Artists & Models with Martin and Lewis. Tashlin made a number of films with Jerry Lewis. His films had something of a cartoon sensibility. Puss “N Booty is notable for its deviation from the standard cat-stalks-canary story line. Here the cat has actually eaten a canary, and we get to know something of its personality before the usual series of attacks on the bird cage. Tashlin keeps changing direction in the film. We have the opening search for the missing canary (feathers let us know that the cat has eaten the canary), the impatient wait for the arrival of the next canary, and the attempt of the cat to catch and eat this new canary. Then the “surprise” ending.

The Comedy Team

            For reasons that elude me, comedy likes to come in teams of two. Wheeler & Woolsey, Olson & Johnson, Allen & Rossi, Rowan & Martin, Tommy and Dick Smothers, and of course the better-known duos: Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Crosby & Hope, and Martin & Lewis. These are just a fraction of all the comic duos we have had on stage, on radio, on film, and on television. Typically the comic twosome consists of the gagman and the straight man. The straight man is the worldly one, experienced and serious; the gagman is the innocent, a child confronting a dangerous world. The straight man is also the ladies man, the good-looking one, whereas the comic foil is the jester, the clown, the funny-looking one. The straight man sets up the jokes or provides relief from the comic moments. In the case of Martin and Lewis, Dean Martin is usually the one who gets the girl (occasionally each of the comic team gets a girl – e.g. Artists & Models), and he is also the one who does the crooning. Dean is a singer, the Bing Crosby to Jerry Lewis’s Bob Hope. But Jerry is quite unlike Bob Hope in his infantilism. Jerry plays the boy to Dean’s adult. Jerry’s comedy relies on bodily and facial expression, voice, and physical contortion. He is a very visual comedian. His humour often relies on mime (see his film The Bellboy in which he does not speak at all). Early in Artists & Models, Jerry mimes eating a meal beginning with one bean and some ketchup. In fact, as a team Martin & Lewis began over time to focus more on the antics of Lewis than on the charm of Martin. After a 10-year partnership the duo separated in 1956. Lewis went on to make a series of films in which he gained more and more control and experimented with film form in interesting and comedic ways. As for Dean Martin, he went on to become an important recording artist and an actor in dramatic films.

Artists & Models (1955)

            1954 saw the publication of a book that has since become infamous: Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederic Wertham. Wertham’s book is an indictment of comic books and the comic book industry. It argues that comic books are destroying the moral fibre of America’s youth, inciting disobedience against parents, violence in schools, sexual deviance, and even smoking. The book was sufficiently influential that the government instituted the Comic Book Code, a form of censorship meant to ensure the moral purity of comic books. This bit of historical information informs the story in Artists & Models. In the film, Rick Todd (Dean Martin) is a comic book artist with aspirations of becoming a “real” artist. His roommate, Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis), is captivated by comics, especially comics with the character, Bat Lady. His infatuation with comics generates the first catastrophe in the film. Rick and Eugene have neighbours who also work in the comic book industry, two women, Abigail Parker (Dorothy Malone) and Bessie Sparrowbush (Shirley MacLaine). The plot involves the two women connecting with the two men. The names of two of the characters let us know who will pair with whom (Fullstack and Sparrowbush are obviously meant for each other).

The comic book industry is notable for the lurid nature of its products. Much of the action turns on Eugene Fullstack’s dreams. These dreams provide sensational material for Rick’s comic books, but they also contain secret military information. This part of the plot gathers in another topical theme: the cold war and the fear of the Communist Menace. Espionage enters the plot. The year Artists & Models reaches the screens of America is the year, roughly, that the McCarthy paranoia abates. It abates, but it does not by any means disappear. The film is a spoof of earlier anti-Communist films such as The Red Menace (1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953), and On the Waterfront (1954).

            The opening scene of the film involves a giant billboard with huge lips. (Why does this remind me of La Dolce Vita?) The play with this (at the time) high-tech gadget is clever and prurient. The jokes here are deeply embedded (as it were) to escape the censors. Indeed, much of this film skirts with censorable material. Probably the reason for this is the direction of Frank Tashlin. Tashlin began his career as a director of cartoons and when he graduated to live-action films, he brought his cartoon sensibility along with him. Artists & Models is noteworthy for its colour (something we will not fully appreciate in the washed out copy that we will see). The film is extremely colour conscious, as you might expect in a film about an artist. The comic book has always been a colourful medium (at least it has been so since the advent of inexpensive colour reproduction in newsprint and paper). The film, like comic books, is colourful. The first scene with those red lips and the three cans of paint that topple onto the big wigs draws attention to colour right at the beginning. This is a colourful film with flamboyant characters, lively songs, and zany antics.

            A side note: Jerry Lewis plays an aspiring children’s book author in the film, and the director Tashlin was himself a writer of children’s books.

I haven't been here for a while. Here is an old piece on a film I like.

Repo Man (1984)

"The life of a Repo Man is always intense." (Bud)

The strangeness of this low budget film is not its off-the-wall sensibility in evoking the world of Punk youth in the early 1980s, but rather its use of the repo man as the focus of critique and hope. The job of repossessing cars from people who cannot maintain their payments is about as sleazy a job as we can imagine. The film makes this clear in its vision of the Helping Hand offices, the environment of burned out Los Angeles, the violent and crude behaviour and language of the people who work in this job, and the general malaise of city life. The repo man is just a shade above the criminal in his way of doing business, as we see the first time Otto meets Bud. Later Bud tells Otto the repo man code; he may have a code, but he still takes cars from people without asking and without seeking the aid of law enforcement. His code is akin to the code of the west; it is a frontier code tested in fights and flights and conflicts. The repo man is a creep. And yet in this film, one repo man ends up flying high in a mystic Malibu. The older man lies dying while the younger man, the protégé, leaves the ground with the shamanistic grounds keeper, named Miller.

The film influenced the style and tone of such films as the Coen Broithers’ Raising Arizona and Scorsese’s After Hours. In turn, it shows the influence of Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and a host of teenage angst films from Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause to Arnold’s High School Confidential. It also shows the influence of Weekend and other surrealist films by the likes of Bunuel, Kubrik, and even John Carpenter (his Dark Star has something of Repo Man in it, or I should say that Repo Man has something of Dark Star in it).

But what is the film about? Most definitely this is a Cold War film. It begins with the shot of a map showing Los Alamos in New Mexico where the Atomic Bomb was first created, and it follows a car with dead aliens in the trunk. This might make us think of Roswell, New Mexico, cite of alien encounters. The driver speaks of the neutron bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact. We see what he means when a couple of people open the trunk only to be burned to nothing, leaving just their smoking boots behind. The dead aliens raise the theme of the alien, and we have enough characters in the film who are “aliens” that we get the point. The whole punk sub-culture is an alien culture. Teenagers are aliens. Otto, whose name reminds me of a guy named Otto Binder who wrote books about flying saucers when I was growing up, tries to enter normalcy by getting a job in a grocery store, but he discovers that normalcy is a rare commodity. Most people are aliens, when you get right down to it. Then he meets Bud who works for the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation. All Bud’s associates have names associated with beer (Bud, Oly, Miller, Lite). Bud takes Otto under his wing, so to speak, teaching him the repo man code. Then the two of them get caught up in the chase for a 1964 Chevy Malibu worth $20,000. Also looking for the car is Agent Rogersz who has a strange metal hand, and the Rodruiguez brothers, rival repo men. Meanwhile, Otto’s parents, refugees from the 1960s, spend their time (and money) watching the Reverend Larry on TV and smoking dope. The film’s plot has many coincidences with characters turning up in ways that suggest the world is smaller than we might think. TV screens show a world of televangelism and imperialism in Central America (Nicaragua). The implication is that consumerism, hucksterism, and downright greed have pretty much taken over spiritual and political life. Repossession is the order of the day in a world gone rotten. The metaphor that best communicates the modern world empty of spirituality is the lobotomy (remember One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest). The driver of the Malibu has had a lobotomy and now he feels much better than he did. Otto’s parents have lobotomized their brains with dope and fundamentalism. (The lobotomy is like another metaphor for modernity’s zonked out mind meld – zombieism.) About the only spiritual person in the film is the grounds keeper at the Helping Hand, a character named Miller who does not drive because too much driving makes you less intelligent. He spouts a cracker barrel philosophy and speaks of a cosmic consciousness, something the film may invoke at the end when he and Otto go for a drive in the hot (literally) Malibu. The end quotes the end of Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Otto looks out at the city below and an array of coloured lights form a display in front of him. We have here the splendor of new hope associated with raised or cosmic consciousness. The other intertext here is Spielburg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which aliens offer Richard Dreyfus an escape from the mundane. Before he goes for this cosmic drive, Otto’s girl friend, Leila, asks: “What about our relationship?” And Otto replies: “Fuck that.” And off he goes. The stuff of everyday youth rebellion and youth activity pales alongside the beckoning shimmer of the mystic Malibu. This film, like Weekend and perhaps even like others we have seen (Freaks, Johnny Guitar, The Searchers) has its apocalyptic aspect. Apocalypse means “revelation” and “uncovering.” We usually associate apocalypse with a cataclysmic change – the end of one way of being and perhaps the beginning of a new way of being (a new Heaven and a new Earth). The paradox is that the revelations we experience are mysterious. “He muttered underneath his breath/Nothing is revealed” (Dylan’s “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”). Apocalypse is that explosive moment when everything is revealed and nothing is revealed. Apocalypse is the opposite of what happens when a neutron or a hydrogen bomb falls. For Otto, apocalypse is raised consciousness, a consciousness that rises above the degenerate state of modern Los Angleles. For Bud, apocalypse is a belly ripped open by bullets.

In short, Repo Man is a film about disaffected youth in a world ruled by the cash nexus (represented by the context of Reaganite and Thatcherite conservatism). It catches the anger of the punk sub-culture by challenging the sensibility of viewers who look for mainstream film. This film is “popular” by virtue of its willingness to be as rebellious as the youth it champions. It refuses to exonerate a youth that tries to lay blame on society for youth alienation; Otto tells Duke that he is “just a suburban white punk.” The film blends genres; it is a combination of Sci Fi, youth rebellion, buddy, coming of age, western, and gang films. It mixes all these elements in a series of scenes that are largely self-contained. Early in the film, we see one of the Punks wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt that uses the line from the Paul Anka/Frank Sinatra song, “I did it my way.” This is a song that Johnny Rotten famously spit out. The line, “I did it my way,” strikes me as a nice encapsulation of Alex Cox’s film. He made a film his way. The film somehow manages to make a statement about human desire for meaning in a world largely divested of meaning. As in Weekend, the car becomes a focal point for desire. People want cars, and they get them even when they cannot pay for them. Everyone wants the Malibu in this city of angels.

What best typifies this film is the absence of brand names on various products we see: beer is Beer, cereal is Corn Flakes, and so on. We have generic products, for the most part, packaged in white boxes or cans with blue borders. Supposedly, the reason for this has to do with keeping the cost of making the film low. However this may be, the generic packaging reminds us of generic lives, lives lived according to stereotypes (the Punks, the hippie parents, the blond generic CIA agents, the mad scientist, etc.). The generic packaging draws our attention reminding us of consumerism, emptiness, branding, homogeneity, and blandness. Intensity is what makes the life of a repo man different. Intensity is what separates a life lived and a life accepted. Only by transforming the car into a shimmering center of energy can the repo man inherit the intense life that is his to experience. 

The Seven Samurai: Yes, this film is not a western

A colleague recently expressed some surprise when I indicated that I owned a copy of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film, The Blood of a Poet. My colleague expressed this surprise by saying “I thought you only knew about westerns.” What can I say? I do know about westerns, and over and over again I read just how some of Akira Kurosawa’s films have the sensibility and even of some the plotting of the American western. And it is true that a number of Kurosawa’s films have been recast as westerns – Roshomon becomes The Outrage (Martin Ritt, 1964), Yojimbo becomes A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964) and also Last Man Standing (Walter Hill 1996), and of course The Seven Samurai becomes The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960). We can also find quotations from The Seven Samurai in a number of westerns from John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1968) to Tonino Valerii’s My Name is Nobody (1972). The line of riders appearing on a horizon, slow motion deaths, ritualistic duals with close-ups, cross-cutting to create tension, a boot hill cemetery, the town with a bridge at one end, the training of combatants, all of this and more have become familiar, if not overly familiar, in film after film since The Seven Samurai appeared in 1954. This film was Kurosawa’s 14^th feature and his first samurai film.

The Seven Samurai has the epic proportions of the western, although it is far less interested in the land than in the people who share the land. As Kambei, the leader of the Samurai (Takashi Shimura), says at the end of the film, the Samurai have lost and the peasants are the victors. Kurosawa himself echoes this point in an interview. The film details the uneasy relationship between the Samurai class and those beneath them, the peasants. The samurai do not deal easily with the peasants because they carry some disdain for these lower class people, and the villagers harbour their own distrust of the samurai, a distrust most evident in Manzō’s (Kamatari Fujiwara) insistence on cutting his daughter’s hair and disguising her as a boy. The seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), serves as a bridge between the samurai and the villagers because he is himself a peasant, but a peasant who aspires to be a samurai. Notice Kikuchiyo’s excessively long sword (it sometimes comes right into the camera as Kikuchiyo moves). The sword reflects Kikuchiyo’s histrionic personality, his braggadocio, and also his intense desire to be that which he fears he cannot be. This sword might remind us of special guns sometimes worn by cowboy heroes – the buntline special, for example, that Burt Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp wears in The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957).

A paraphrase of the film’s plot may also sound familiar to viewers of westerns: a small village is terrorized by a gang of wandering bandits, rogue samurai who have banded together to make a living by pillaging vulnerable and passive peasants. The villagers debate what to do about the recurring assaults of the marauders, and they decide to seek out a small number of samurai to help them. They can offer only food and lodging as recompense. A few villagers, among them the hothead Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), go to town to seek out the samurai. What follows is the now familiar gathering of the group. Once the band of samurai (or more precisely the ronin or samurai without a master) have come together, they accompany the peasants back to the village where they make plans for battle and transform the village into a makeshift fortress. To help orient the viewer to the layout of the village, we have scenes in which Kambei, the leader of the seven, examines each entrance to the village, using a map. Finally the brigands arrive and a three-day battle ensues. The samurai and the villagers succeed in defeating the brigands and the village returns to normal, the film ending with a scene of the villagers singing and planting the next rice crop. The action of the film takes approximately a year.

In short, we have set-upon villagers rescued from their plight by heroic good guys, a plot that might describe many westerns that precede The Seven Samurai, such as Law and Order (Edward L. Cahn, 1932), Tombstone: The Town too Tough to Die (William C. McGann, 1942), My Darling Clementine (John Ford 1946), Shane (George Stevens, 1953), and many B westerns in which a hero arrives in a community tyrannized by a big rancher or a big banker or just a band of looting marauders and cleans things up only to leave at the end. The hero or heroes are not part of the community. And so the connection between Kurosawa’s masterpiece and the Western film as produced in Hollywood or Rome is well established. This is unfortunate because The Seven Samurai is much more than a Japanese western.

The western may provide one source for The Seven Samurai, but Kurosawa’s sources range far beyond the western. The close-up of villagers, especially villagers at work in the fields, invoke the films of Sergei Eisenstein. Echoes of John Ford appear repeatedly, although the influence works both ways because the cemetery above the village as well as a concentration on doorways appear later in Ford’s The Searchers. The lighting often reminds me of the films of Josef von Sternberg, as well as the distinctive contrast of dark and light in American films following Citizen Kane (1941). Deep Focus keeps us constantly aware of action in the entire frame. Acting, as well as the blocking of actors, often involves practices of silent cinema. In short, The Seven Samurai is something of a compendium of film practice. Nothing is gratuitous. Take for example, two fleeting glimpses of a puppeteer in the scene in which Kikuchiyo blunders drunkenly into the evening gathering of the six samurai. This character, the puppeteer, does not appear elsewhere in the film, and here he only appears in the background. He is, however, important. The puppet tells us that the fates of these characters are controlled. But what controls their fates is a combination of personality and history, personal history as well as national history. Kikuchiyo’s fate is apparent right from the beginning.

We can also see the force of personality and identity as formed by history and class in the early scene in which Kambei cuts his topknot and has his head shaved so that he can disguise himself as a priest to fool the kidnapper of a young child. The villagers look on in amazement as Kambei’s head is shaved; they identify him with his hair. Similarly, the young girl Shino finds identity in her hair. But neither Kambei nor Shino take their identity or their character from their hair. Who they are lies much deeper than the hair on their head.

The Seven Samurai is also a film that reflects it own time. As a late postwar production, The Seven Samurai continues to communicate the mood of Japan as it comes to terms with its occupation by foreign troops (the occupation ended in 1952), and as it continues to reconstruct its economy and social life after a period of upheaval. The story takes place in the early 16^th century, a time of civil war and change in Japan. The samurai represent a way of life quickly becoming something other than it had been.

The Seven Samurai contains much to occupy the eye. It has kinetic camera pans with cuts while the camera is in motion; these cuts take us from one pan to another, creating an intense sense of movement, as well as passing time. The film contains amazing crane shots such a the one that tracks down a steep hillside near the village. Deep focus allows us to see activity on several planes- in the foreground, the middle ground, and the background. Wipes shift from one scene to another, forcing us to acknowledge the formality of the camera, its intrusion into our sense of actuality. The black screen punctuates major shifts in time and space. The close-up, the two-shot, and the reaction shot bring us close to these characters; we come to understand who they are and why they act and react the way they do. The telescopic lens brings the viewer as close as possible to the action. Multiple cameras shoot scenes so the action can be fully and dramatically captured. Accented lighting highlights facial features, creates shadows, and enhances the contrast between outside and inside, time of day, and mood of the characters. Famously, Kurosawa composes his scenes in a painterly manner, even as characters enter and leave the frame.

For a film of over three hours, it moves quickly even as it keeps action slow, almost still. For example, the scene of the duel between Kyūzō (Seiji Myaguchi) and a would-be master swordsman is, in effect, an action scene. However, the action that takes place in the two duels, the first when the swordsmen use wood rather than steel and the second in which they use real swords and the challenger dies, has the pacing of a dream. The camera gives us the faces of the crowd as it watches the duel, the faces of the combatants, a distanced shot that takes in the field of the duel and the crowd that watches; we shift from perspective to perspective several times before the burst of action that ends in the first instance in stillness as the two men stand with their wooden swords on each other’s shoulders, and in the second instance in the slow motion death of the challenger. Kurosawa captures the ritual nature of the duel, the interest and concern and admiration and shock of the crowd, and the professionalism of Kyūzō in a long take that stretches time just as the camera stretches space when it frames the duel from a distance.

The camera also catches images that serve as leitmotifs communicating both emotion and idea. Examples include the waterfalls that appear twice in the film, the waterwheel, a stream, the flooded fields, and the torrential rain. Water is one of the four elements and the other three also catch our eye. The earth is front and center when we see the grave mounds above the village and when we see flowers and forest and mud. Air is evident in the wind that blows at significant times accentuating characters emotions. As for fire, we have fire a few times in the film, one instance I’ll look at here. Near the end of the film, just before the final battle, Katsushirō (Isao Kimura), the youngest of the samurai, meets the girl Shino (Keiko Tsushima) and the two surrender passionately to each other. They meet in the dark one on each side of a blazing fire. They move from the fire to inside a nearby building where they fall to the straw amid a chiaroscuro formed by the dazzling combination of light and shade, a shot reminiscent of a shot in Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930). The fire of course communicates the young couple’s passion and the chiaroscuro lets us know that this passion is troubled, roughened by circumstances.

Another motif is the circle and the open circle. At the beginning of the film, the brigands ride in silhouette across the horizon and come to a stop on an outcropping above the village. We see the village from the brigand’s perspective, with the riders in the foreground looking down upon the village. The village has a circular form. The opening for the road would break at the bottom end of the village, but the brigands effectively close off our sight of this road and consequently they complete the circle effect. Shortly after this, we have a scene in which the people of the village gather in a circle to discuss what to do about the brigands. We have a sequence of shots from above, close-ups, and the disruption of the village circle by the agitated and angry character, Rikichi who wants to kill the brigands any way he can, but the other villagers refuse to accept his hot-headedness. A crane shot shows Rikichi leaving the group, walking away from the others and slumping to the ground. A cut shows him from nearly ground level as he sits apart from the others who are now in a horizontal line behind him. The camera lens flattens the visual field so that we see the figure in the foreground (Rikichi) not so much isolated from the group as blening with them. First one person emerges from behind Rikichi, and then others come to bring the hothead back into the fold. He is reintegrated into the group.

Another example of the circle at work occurs when the samurai have accepted the job and are traveling to the village with the peasants who have recruited them. At this time, they are six samurai. Coming along behind in a hang-dog sort of way is Kikuchiyo. The scene takes place on the road and we view the characters from a position up the road from where they walk. At one point the group stops, turns, and looks back up the road to see Kikuchiyo at the horizon. The group in the foreground forms an imperfect circle, with an opening, an opening that will eventually be filled by Kikuchiyo. This insistence on the circle is picked up in the image of the water wheel, an image that captures all four elements: the wheel is a water wheel, it serves to turn the mill to grind the earth’s grain, it rises into the air, and it crashes in flames when the final battle takes place.

Another geometric figure we see is the triangle. We have triangles formed by weapons, architectural features, burial mounds, and characters. The formality of the circle and triangle gives an indication of control and order. This control is evident in the manner in which the early fights are staged, and in the rhythm the film sets with its balance of slow action punctuated by bursts of action. Control and order come to ruin in the final battle in the rain. Here the world and its order descend into the primeval ooze. As the rain falls and the mud spashes any semblance of the formality of circle and triangle disappears in a maelstrom of bodies and weapons and horses and running about. The chaos of the final battle uncovers the ugliness of death and violence.

Horses constitute another motif. They provide energy in their galloping, an energy that is inevitable, natural, and powerful. They also provide comic relief a couple of times in the film. The scene in which Kikuchiyo rides the horse through the covered bridge, and then emerges chasing the horse is both comic and also proleptic, a reminder of failure. Kikuchiyo is associated with nature; he captures a fish bare-handed; he rolls about the earth when he is drunk; he tries to ride the horse; he has kids follow him and laugh at his antics. He is, in short, a character marked by his tragic past, and consequently doomed.

Just as the film has much for the yes, it also has much for the ear. It uses sound carefully. Kurosawa uses music sparingly, but when he does it is important. Characters have their specific themes, the samurai theme, Kikuchiyo’s theme, the villagers’ theme and so on. Natural sounds – wind and rain, the sound of fire, the chopping of wood, the pounding of horses’ hoofs, the insistent sound of the mill – all these intensify the emotional impact of the film.

Finally, this is a film of faces. The faces of the people we see register the full gamut of human emotion from grief to exhilaration, from anger to sly interest, from fear to relief. Kurosawa has often been praised for his humanism, his interest in and compassion for human beings. He often gives us characters who do not quite fit in to their world – Dersu Uzala, Kanji (Ikiru), Taketoki (Throne of Blood), Sanjuro (Yojimbo), Kyoji Fugisaki (The Quiet Duel), for example. Here the obvious outsider is Kikuchiyo, but as the final scene suggests, none of the samurai fit into the world that is taking shape. The guns we see and hear in this film are correct for the early 16^th century Japan, but they also signal change. The world is passing and leaving the samurai behind. This is, perhaps, why the final shot gives us the cemetery with the graves of the four samurai who died in battle. This film is an elegy for a time of honour and bravery and community.

Meditation on Metaphor: Shelley's Sword

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it." (Shelley's Defense of Poetry)

Wow. This is writing at white heat. Top o' the world, mama. Apocalypse now. As rhetoric, this passage attempts to persuade us that poetry is of cosmic importance; it is engaged in some activity akin to Armageddon. This is writing that asks for belief, not analysis. So let's analyze. And here are the parts for analysis: sword/scabbard; lightning; and "consumes."

1. sword/scabbard:

Shelley's metaphor is martial, implying that poetry wages some sort of battle with some sort of foe. One source for this metaphor is Revelation in which Christ appears with a flaming sword in his mouth, an iconic bit that commentators have interpreted as Christ's power of word. The sword is neither a despoiler of the human body nor a ploughshare; it is word of mouth. To equate the word with the sword is to locate power in words rather than actions; words are deeds. The metaphor intends to convince us that poetry is powerful: sharp and bright and capable of enacting deeds of valour.

Like most swords, poetry comes with a scabbard, but Shelley's metaphor erases the scabbard even as it names it. What is the scabbard that finds itself erased or more accurately "consumed"? If the sword is that which does battle, then the scabbard is that which keeps the sword from doing battle. As Shelley says, it contains the sword. Containment means keeping in check, controlling, holding down, restraining, or preventing an enemy from advancing. The word "contain" is consistent with the martial and political implications in the evocation of a sword, although what Shelley does is to set sword and scabbard at odds. They are in an adversarial position here. Why? Well, if poetry is the power of the word, then the power of the word has the effect of challenging, waging war with, power of other kinds--say political or economic or social power. In other words, poetry is that which allows for the continual challenging of vested interests and entrenched systems. Nothing can contain it; all containment is an attempt at silencing the word. Poetry's function is radical, critical, and threatening to that which would contain it: that is political and economic and social vested interests. In short, the scabbard represents all those things that seek to place a quiescence on us; the sword seeks to break that quiescence. For Shelley, poetry has political impact.

Before I go on, I note that Shelley's rhetoric might manifest his very insecurity. He writes at a time when systems of patronage for the artist had pretty much broken down, and poetry was beginning to be shouldered to the periphery of the literary polysystem and of the social system generally. I mean, who takes poetry seriously today besides poets, professors of poetry, and those few apparently eccentric souls who spend time reading the odd poem and even taking courses in creative writing and critical appreciation? The audience for poetry today is tiny compared to what it was even in Shelley's day when it was beginning to shrink. In other words, Shelley's desire to convince his reader of the importance of poetry is frantic; it arises in part from his fear that poetry's importance is lessening in the face of a changing world. The poet now, remember, must assume a place in the market like any other hawker of goods. If the poet wishes to find buyers for his or her product, then convincing the buyer that poetry is a good buy is imperative. Poets are legislators, right? Shelley indulges in a bit of wishful thinking, but I confess that his wishful thinking convinces me. Would that everyone wished for what Shelley envisaged.

But let's go back to the sword and scabbard. Obviously the metaphor is martial, as I have said. But regarding Shelley's raised sword from the vantage point of the early 21st century, even assuming that the sword protrudes from the mouth, we cannot but think of Freud. Can we? We all know full well Freud's take on pointy or tubular objects. We all know about cigars or baseball bats or poles or pens or swords. Before I hear a ho-hum, I hasten to note two things about Shelley: 1) he is a poet of the erotic; like Blake he placed his faith in the liberatory effects of sex; and 2) his theory of poetry in the Defense insists on the relation of poetry to the body. Poetry and love are synonymous, and this explains why Shelley argues that "social corruption" has one aim--to destroy pleasure, erotic pleasure. The great poets are men who "celebrated the dominion of love" (524). Shelley is speaking of a sublime (implied in the sword metaphor) that is distinctly masculine, that conquers not with the force of arms, but with the force of words and words that tell of "erotic delicacy."

The phallic implications of Shelley's metaphor bring together phallus, sword, pen, and word. We have here what we have learned to call phallocentrism and logocentrism and phallogocentrism. In other words, Shelley lives in a world in which people like him can jettison traditional religion (Shelley was an avowed atheist), and yet maintain a belief in the power of the word to reveal truth. The "deep truth" may be "imageless" (Prometheus Unbound), but it is nevertheless existent and words in the form of poetry as erotic consummation can reveal it to us. Poetry is revelatory. In Blakean language, poetry is the Last Judgment.

But another echo deconstructs Shelley's metaphor. If poetry is a sword of lightning that consumes, then it reminds us (me, at least) of the flaming or covering cherub (see Ezekiel 28:16 and Genesis 3:24), that which bars the way back to Eden. This flame reveals not the deep truth, but rather the confinement of humanity in a fallen world, a world of woe and oppression, precisely the world Shelley so fiercely wants to topple. If we take Shelley's metaphor from this perspective, then poetry is, like all forms of language, that which keeps us from unity and perfection. Poetry is divisive, just as swords are divisive. That Shelley cannot escape this "abyme" is because he, like Wordsworth before him, cannot accept a theory of language that stipulates a logical and essential connection between the word and the thing, or what we have come to think of as signifier and signified. Because the deep truth is imageless, all words can do is continually slide between signified never fully knowing which one to take as a final resting spot. In fact, to find that final resting spot would be to stop the sliding and to stop the sliding is to stop living as we know it. I'll conclude this section with Keats's lines from "Ode on a Grecian Urn":

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Addendum to this section: Feminist note:

The scabbard as that into which the sword slides is a vaginal metaphor. Male sword and female scabbard might set up a further binary of male poetry and female nature (or world). The scabbard as female or as world might lead to the scabbard as mother, that from which the sword emerges, that which gives birth to the sword. The connection is between mother--mater--matter. The body produces the sword, gives birth to it. Shelley, however, is rooted in the masculine sublime; according to his metaphor, the sword consumes the scabbard. In some bizarre sense, for Shelley the sword can do without the scabbard, and if this is so, then the sword can produce that which we might have thought the scabbard itself produced. In other words, the sword gives birth--delivers that golden world Sidney speaks about. (I'll return to this later.)

2. lightning:

Shelley's metaphor is, however, not single; it is double. Poetry is not only a sword, but it is also a sword of lightning. I guess I've alluded to this aspect of the metaphor above, but let's contemplate "lightning" a bit more. The most obvious thing to me is the notion of "light" here. Poetry brings us out of darkness, and as such it is a civilizing activity. Commentators have stated this for eons: we have seen this argument in Sidney, Vico, Pope, Blake, and Wordsworth. We could find it in any number of other writers. From the beginning of human society, poetry has been that which brings people together. The argument rests, in part, on the notion that poetry begins in an oral context. Pre-literate societies communicate important truths and information through poetry. It is also true that certain religions pass on certain mysteries and doctrines orally, refusing to allow these truths and doctrines to be inscribed because they are too precious for such hardening. Light can blind when it flashes willy-nilly without the guiding voice of the special person: priest, intercessor, swami, poet. In any case, the metaphor points to the notion of poetry as that which distinguishes the civilized society. Light brings with it relationship and love.

But of course, Shelley's metaphor speaks not simply of light, but of "lightning." Lightning has something to do with electricity, and the Shelley's interest in electricity will be familiar to any viewer of any of a number of "Frankenstein" films. For Shelley, the metaphor of lightning is both backward looking and forward looking: it looks back to the ancient sky bolts of Jove or Jupiter and forward to the new science of electricity emerging in Shelley's day. Poetry is both something that connects us with the past, and something that carries us into the future. I think here of Wordsworth's connection between Science and Poetry in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

Lightning has yet another force here. In Shelley's day, as Frankenstein indicates, people considered electricity the life force. Electricity was that which animated organic activity. What I am getting at is a force of metaphor we still use today when we speak of two people having an "electric" attraction. In short, for Shelley electricity is of the body. I'm back at Shelley's insistent connection between poetry and the body. In Wordsworth's language, poetry is "felt along the blood" (see Tintern Abbey). What I am suggesting is that in these writers we have an incipient sense of what it means to write the body or to equate poetry with the body, with sexual pleasure, with jouissance. Or we might consider the generative effect of electricity; it is that which may give birth (as it does to Frankenstein's monster). In this sense, we are back to a reading of Shelley that marks him as essentially masculinist.

3. consumes:

The allusion here is to the biblical text that speaks of God as a consuming fire (Exodus 19:18; 24:17). To make this connection is to replace God with poetry, and to replace God with poetry is to install poetry in the place of religion, a move made more firmly in Mathew Arnold's writing later in the century. As traditional religion becomes more and more ungrounded through the "higher criticism" and the finding of science, the need for something to replace it emerges. That "something" is for many poetry. This is one reason why pious Victorian writers such as George MacDonald and Gerard Manly Hopkins could revere Shelley despite Shelley's claim to be an atheist. They simply did not believe him. In any case, we do see emerging in Shelley what we know of as "liberal humanism," a belief that through poetry the individual can gain spiritual strength and access to eternal truths about the human condition, truths that apply across racial, national, gender, class, age boundaries.

The metaphor here moves from notions of destroying and squandering and burning to the more obvious eating ("devouring" is a word sometimes used in the biblical text). To consume is to eat in large quantities. This means that poetry does not simply destroy that scabbard which seeks to contain it, but rather that it eats it. The metaphor of eating is interesting, especially if we keep in our minds the scriptural echoes in Shelley's prose. The disciples eat Jesus, just as Catholics continue to do so each time they partake of the sacrament. Eating in this sense is not destructive; rather it is empowering. For poetry to consume its scabbard, it assimilates it, absorbs it, surrounds it, takes it in, in short "contains it." This is imitation in a rather large sense: imitation as assimilation. If poetry can consume the scabbard, and if the scabbard is the world that in its own way tries to consume (take in, surround, contain) poetry, then what poetry does is transform the world through containment. The poet delivers a golden world, and this golden world is the Real world touched by the transforming blade of poetry. We can hear echoes of Plato filtered through Plotinus here.

"Consumes" also connects with "consummate," which my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary informs me means: "to make perfect"; "to make (marital union) complete by sexual intercourse." The marriage metaphor is one that recurs with great frequency in Romantic texts. You can find it in spectacular use in Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Usually it invokes the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb in Revelation, that apocalyptic moment in which time is no longer. Shelley too uses it this way in Prometheus Unbound. In other words, we are back to that notion of poetry as revelation I discussed earlier. And yet, we are still on this earth in the presence of a marriage that includes consummation as sexual intercourse. The body returns. Poetry and the body are inextricably connected. We have, in effect, an oxymoron: the body of poetry (a term used to describe both a single poet's oeuvre and the whole gathering of literature). I say oxymoron because poetry signals something unworldly, something of the non physical, and body signals something decidedly physical. Here is an attempt on the part of Shelley to bridge the phenomenal and the noumenal, flesh and spirit, physics and metaphysics. Here in a nutshell is Shelley's defense of poetry: poetry enacts the impossible communion of fact and fiction, flesh and spirit, time and eternity.

Do you believe all this?

Visuality & Evaluation

So we were reading Christopher Paul Curtis's Bud, Not Buddy, and the question of evaluation came up. Henry James once spoke of an author's donee. That is, an author's given subject and approach. The reader either accepts these or does not, but the reader who does not might as well shut up since whatever the reader says is not going to change the author's donee. Closer to my own history, I was a student of Northrop Frye, and Frye always insisted that value judgments were a dime a dozen, and consequently not worth much. To say that one person's opinion is somehow better than another person's may or may not make sense, but to base a study of literature entirely on such evaluative pronouncements is to accept that reading and criticism are elitist activities. I prefer to think of reading as a democratic activity, an activity in which everyone can participate. The catch is that understanding literature is not something one has naturally; to understand literature means approaching literature the way a scientist approaches the natural world. We read literature through a particular medium, that medium being criticism. (A scientist approaches the natural world through the medium of botany or zoology or chemistry or whatever.) We study the criticism of literature, rather than literature unmediated. Unmediated literature, like unmediated nature, is akin to Lacan's Real: amorphous, chaotic, fearsome, messy, even monstrous. The reader who has studied criticism and studied criticism with a degree of thoroughness will carry a certain authority. This authority does not mean that this person's opinion rules, but rather that this person's understanding of the grammar of literature will garner respect, but not necessarily agreement.

But back to evaluation. So I deride Curtis's novel for not being gritty and realistic and true to history, whereas another reader praises the book for dealing sensitively with African American experience and presenting a positive image of African Americans. Which one of us is correct? And if one of us is black and the other one white, how does this relate to which one of us is correct? Ultimately, an informed reader will know whether this book is good or not so good and won't have to bother telling others. The key here is "informed." What is an informed reader? An informed reader is a reader who knows the many and varied conventions of literature, and who is also informed on matters relating to the book that she or he is reading. When is a reader informed? To put this another way, I might ask, how many 12 to 14 year-old readers are informed? Will the youthful reader of Bud, Not Buddy know about the Great Depression? Will this reader know about the history of race relations in the United States (Jim Crow, for example)? Will this reader know about the connection between a certain kind of music and Black history? Will this reader know what jazz is? Will this reader know that for many decades in America there were segregated professional baseball leagues? And the crucial question: does it matter if a youthful reader does not know these things? Can the book stand on its own as a structure of words?

Visual Culture

We were also studying a couple of graphic novels and a student noted that we are now a visual culture rather than a culture that privileged the printed word. The catch here is that plays, television, graphic novels, all those things the student mentioned have their basis in the written word. Take graphic novels, for instance. Many of these are collaborative. The best known example is probably Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. We know that Alan Moore provides his collaborators (Gibbons in this instance) with detailed written descriptions of pages and panels. In other words, the artist works from a written script. The centrality of the written word may be less apparent in single-authored graphic works such as Stitches, but even here we do have words, not only in speech balloons but also in paratextual matter, like the back matter in this book. This is not to say that completely wordless books do not exist (for adults, I mean). For example, Lyn Ward was publishing wordless books for adults over 70 years ago. My point is not that we are not largely a visual culture now (we are), but that our visuality rests securely on the written word, and the printed word has always rested securely on the oral word. Whereas, for example, the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment took place precisely because of the centrality of the written word, the twenty-first century marks a shift from Enlightenment's privileging of the written word to a privileging of the visual sign. The difference between the visual sign today and the visual sign in the day of cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphics is that the visual sign today exists precisely because of the written word. In other words, sign systems interconnect. Take music, for example. Music traditionally had its own sign system (musical notes and stuff I know nothing about), but now we understand that music intersects with non musical signs such as painting (the afternoon of a faun), poetry (and hence the written word), the graphic arts (see Watchmen again), and even politics (check out Charles Mingus's Fables of Faubus).

And so, we may be a visual culture these days, but our visuality exists because we have the written word. In short, the teaching of writing remains important.

Perhaps the centrality of the visual marks a departure from Enlightenment principles and this departure allows for the emergence of the non rational as somehow acceptable. Why, for example, do many Americans appear to approve of Sarah Palin as a possible presidential candidate? She has great difficulty with the written (and spoken) word, but she looks okay. And she knows how to use television to improve her stock. In other words, as the visual gains prominence, so too does the illogical make its way against the logical. I might say the same thing of the stunning phenomenon of voters willingly voting for candidates who stand for policies detrimental to voters' best interests.

The Big Heat (Fritz Lang 1953)

This film has a reputation that may exceed its accomplishments. It is usually credited with bringing such familiar cinema noir themes as revenge, brutality, and pervasive corruption into domestic space. In other words, this film shows us a bit of the home life of both the hero (Detective Dave Bannion) and the villain (Mike Lagana). The entrance of violence into domestic space (the killing of Mrs Bannion), results in Dave Bannion going on a campaign of vengeance. He becomes or nearly becomes as violent and brutal and callous as his adversary, Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), Lagana’s muscle. Bannion proves to be lethal for the women he deals with. First he meets Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green) in a bar; the next thing we know, Lucy has been tortured and killed. Then his wife (Jocelyn Brando – yes, Marlon’s sister) gets blown up in the Bannion car. Then Debbie Marsh (Gloria Grahame) has a pot of coffee flung in her face, and later her boyfriend shoots her. And we must not forget Mrs. Duncan (Jeanette Nolan) who receives a few bullets courtesy of Debbie Marsh, who thinks she is doing Bannion and the law a favour. We might conclude that Bannion’s reluctant respect for Debbie saves him from shooting Vince and becoming as murderous as the bad guys. In other words, this film shows how deep violent instincts are in the human psyche.

But how can we relate the film to HUAC and the mood of the early 1950s? What we need to look at is the background to the story – and to the infiltration of the public into the private.

1. Background: by “background,” I mean the environment Bannion navigates. Remember the paranoia of films such as Rear Window and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and remember the pervasive corruption in films such as On the Waterfront and Pickup on South Street, and remember the emphasis on individual responsibility in 12 Angry Men. In The Big Heat we have a world in which corruption runs deep. We know that Lagana runs things. We have scenes in which we see Vince Stone playing cards with the Police Commisioner. Remember in On the Waterfront, Johnny Friendly is not the head honcho. In Kazan’s film, we have a mysterious Mr. Upstairs, a faceless man who lives in a posh place with a butler. The point is that corruption is top down, rather than bottom up. This is the world as Senator McCarthy saw it – a place in which even the highest places have been infiltrated by the “bosses.” No place, not the police and not the city government is free from corruption.

2. Public and Private: in the world pervaded with paranoia, no place is immune to invasion by the forces of evil. In The Big Heat, we see Bannion’s home life in all its ideal purity. Husband and wife share things – cigarettes, scotch, beer, a steak, washing up. They have what appears to be an ideal marriage. They banter. They entertain. They go to the movies. But this apparently safe and pure private life is vulnerable to the ugliness from outside. When Dave Bannion asks his wife what the man on the phone said, she replies that he knows the four letter words she listened to. Then Bannion goes to Lagana’s house while Lagana’s daughter is having a party. Lagana says he will not have talk of murder and crime in his house. But we see murder and violence in domestic space throughout this film. The Bannion car blows up in their driveway. The shooting of Bertha Duncan takes place in her house. The scalding of Debbie takes place in her domicile. No place is secure. Even to make his brother-in-law’s place safe for his daughter, Bannion has to agree to have four army buddies stand guard with guns in their belts.

In other words, this film is not directly about HUAC or Communists or surveillance (although we do have shots of police surveillance) or paranoia. But it does fit neatly into the paranoid sensibility of the early 50s. We might recall that Fritz Lang left Germany in 1933 because he felt he could not work to support Hitler’s regime. In other words, he could not support restrictions to basic human freedoms. The Big Heat is a film that examines how corruption and violence lead to more violence. The title of the film evokes the Cold War in its nod to nuclear heat. The Big Heat is what follows a nuclear blast, and it is pervasive spreading far beyond the epicenter of the blast. When corruption begins, it spreads like a virus or like a big heat. We might begin to see the relevance of the heat in such films as 12 Angry Men and Rear Window. The war may be “cold,” but it may heat up. In the film, we have the fire that tears through the Bannion car after the blast, and the scalding heat of the coffee to remind us of just how hot it can be when corruption is everywhere.

Another connection with the paranoia of the 1950s is apparent in the duality of so many of the characters. Note when near the beginning of the film, Bertha Duncan sits in front of her three-paneled mirror in her bedroom, while downstairs the police are going over the scene of her husband’s apparent suicide. When Bannion enters the bedroom, we see a double reflection of him in the same mirror. The moment is crucial because it shows us visually that both Mrs. Duncan and Bannion are two people. They have their exterior, public faces, and they have their interior private selves. Mrs. Duncan is the grieving widow and she is also the blackmailing black widow. Bannion is the upright family man, and he is also the vengeful cop capable of almost anything, even strangling Mrs. Duncan. The duplicity of other characters is also apparent: the Police Commissioner is obviously on the take, Lagana has his good citizen side and his gangster side, Debbie Marsh is both a good-time party girl and a sentimental dame. We do have straight-arrow cops such as Wilks (Willis Bouchey), and thorough-going creeps such as Vince Stone, but the main characters all have their double-sidedness. We might reflect on the paranoia of the McCarthy years when people feared that “they were among us.” Even the person next door could be on the wrong side of the law, and we might never know because he or she looks so normal.

Little Water and the Gift of the Animals

I like the texture of the pictures in this book, and on the whole this, along with Taylor's ability to draw animals, is what makes the book work for me. And so I'll concentrate on texture here. By texture, I am thinking of both the colour and the application of paint. Taylor defines her shapes by colour and brush. Not being trained as an art critic and not being able to draw a stick person successfully, I lack the language to articulate precisely what I am driving at. But I'll work up to what I want to say by stepping back for a moment and noting that in a picture book, the pictures take pride of place. To the person who sees a picture book (as opposed to a person who only hears it read out loud), the eye dominates the ear. Not only this, but the eye will first take in that which is representational and colourful, and then second, it will take note of the printed letters and words. Strangely, we learn to read print before we learn to read pictures, and yet we are capable of identifying pictures before we can read printed words. For example, a young child who cannot read the words on the cover of this book will nevertheless be able to see and identify the head and neck of a person, and above the person the heads of several animals, whether or not he or she can identify these as an eagle (the book says "hawk"), a deer, a bear, a turtle, and a wolf (the otter on the extreme right is hardly available to the sight of anyone who has not read the story inside this book). We may have the illusion of knowing what this picture"says" because we recognize a human head and several animal heads. But what does this cover tell us?

To answer this question, I'll begin with a mechanical listing of the obvious. The cover of Little Water and the Gift of the Animals tells us:

1. the title of the book and the author (this is available only to those who can read printed words).

Note: we may be able to read the name of the author here, but unless we know other books by this same author, books with notes on the author (absent here), or unless we look carefully at the dedication and publishing information page (here at the back of the book), we will not know whether the author is a man or a woman.

2. that the book will feature a main character who has long black hair with feathers hanging from it, brown skin, a necklace with smallish black decorations, and several objects which may or may not be clear to the viewer. Because of conventional associations of Native people with long hair, feathers, necklaces of the kind depicted here, and nature we probably conclude that this person is a Native Canadian or American.

3. that animals will feature in the book

4. if we follow the picture round the spine to the back, we will see more people and some dwellings, smoke, pumpkins, and trees in autumn colours, a drummer, along with other things. This may simply confirm our first impression that the book will deal in some way with Native people.

5. that a relationship exists between the human figure on the cover and the animals that appear above him. The title, of course, also tells us this. The animals are a boon to the human being here. They offer a gift. But the picture begins to fill in what this gift might be. We begin to discern that this picture communicates something specific about the relationship between animals and human.

I break off here because I think what I have outlined so far is self-evident to most readers or viewers of whatever age. What I an going on to not will not, I think, be available to the person without a conscious habit of "reading," that is, scanning the picture for what it communicates beyond the most obvious representational level. The six animals above the human's head are actually in the picture twice: once above and behind the human, apparently in the sky and once in front of the human or actually on his body. Even without reading the book, we might notice that objects in front of the human are feathers, antlers, and pouch or bag probably made of skin since we are apparently in the context of Native culture. Once we have twigged to this, we might connect the antlers to the deer in the sky, the feathers to the eagle, and the pouch to an animal skin, say an otter. The necklace might now come into focus as a necklace of bear claws, and the paddle-like object cutting a diagonal across the picture might well relate to the turtle (it is a turtle shell rattle, we will learn when we read the story). In other words, the gifts of the animals appear here in the foreground and the animals themselves appear in the background. Only the gift of the wolf does not appear pictured here.

Okay, so what? Well a number of other things call for comment. The human depicted here is the largest figure in the visual field, placed prominently beside the title and between the animals and the gifts. Although this figure--let's call him Little Water--occupies the right side of the visual field, he appears to be the centre of a compositional field, a circle of sorts formed by his head and then by the animals above and the gifts below. This hint of the circular seems to me to be repeated in the turtle-shell rattle, in the curve of the antlers and the curve of the white feathers, and most importantly in the long curve of the rainbow in the sky behind the animals. In effect, we recede in this picture from the water in the extreme foreground and left of the picture to the gifts, to Little Water, to the animals, to the rainbow. The rainbow wraps the whole image in an embrace of colour.

Now, what does all this signify? Here's where colour becomes important. The blue and white of the water in the lower left finds balance in the blue and white of the sky with its animal clouds. In between we have black, brown, green, yellow, grey, white, and red. In other words, the relatively colourful foreground contrasts with the sky blue. The animals in the sky are not coloured realistically, and they are not real in that they are in the sky. Situated above and behind Little Water, who is presented fairly realistically, the animals are a vision or a dream; they exist in a spirit realm, a realm of blue, colour of mystery and contemplation and coolness and spirit. Shot through, as it were, by the rainbow, the animals represent something spiritual. Here the rainbow nicely revisions the biblical rainbow to represent a convenant between Little Water and the animals. The colours of the rainbow in the sky pick up and connect with the colours of earth and objects below. Blue, green, yellow, and red: things primary and fundamental. This book is about fundamental things. The hope here is the hope of connectedness, the connectedness of human and animal, human and nature. This book will be about the deep connection between all things inside the circle of this world. To put this in a different way, I will say this book looks inward to spirit, rather than outward to the world. Note Little Water's eyes. His eyes appear half closed; he does not look directly at us despite the full frontal view we have of him. He appears to look downward, or better yet, inward. His is a contemplative look. Perhaps he is thinking of the animals we see behind him.

But let's look for a moment at brown. Although blue dominates the overall effect, brown is important and once we move inside the book I think brown becomes the dominant colour. Here we have the brown face, brown neck, brown feathers, and brown shirt. This last is perhaps the key. The brown of Little Water's face reflects the brown of the earth just below the antler. But more significant is the lighter brown of what might be his shirt. I say "what might be his shirt" because this light brown is obvioulsy not just Little Water's shirt; it is also the ground to his right (our left). I might note before I make the point that the edge of the picture assists in this assimilation of Little Water into nature. The white feathers on the lower right curve round and off the page, but if we could follow the line they make, then we would run smack into the water. Another connective between Little Water and the water are the red ribbons that tie the otter-skin pouch. The one strand dangles over the space where the water is. The point I am making is that Little Water is assimilated into nature here; he is a part of nature; he grows, as it were, right out of the earth. He is, in short, of the earth. From a purely conventional point of view, we might say that in this picture Little Water takes his place squarely amid the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. The last of these--fire--is the only element not literally here in the picture, but the red ribbons and the red of the leaves in the upper left at least hint at fire. And then, if we look around the spine we will see the smoke of the camp fire. Only Little Water's hair sets him apart from that which surrounds him, and this too shows the effect of the breeze. His hair wisps to connects with that which is around him.

So before I go on, I will summarize. The force of the story we will read is here on the cover. If we looked no farther, we would nevertheless have a good idea of what this book is about. Once inside the covers, we will see repetitions of what we see here. A few examples will suffice. Most pages have an insistent compositional feature: a circle, sometimes a circle which recedes or funnels inwards as if taking the eye inside, sucking the viewer deeper into the mystery that is nature. The book's title page is dramatic, presenting a circular picture of Little Water and the wolf. Here we are in, as it were, the eye of nature. The first pages do not illustrate this circularity dramatically, but a hint of what I'm observing is here in the open space of brown ground surrounded by trees, wolf and Little Water. Nature is a series of holy spots. The second illustration presents this perhaps as clearly as any page in the book. Here the centre of the composition takes the eye inward through a tunnel of trees to the old man, the lake, and the camp on the opposite shore. Next we have larger images of Little Water and the Old Man with the lake as holy space between and behind them. The fourth illustration, of course, takes us out of sight of holy space--at least it apparently does so. Here is turmoil, storm, conflict. Things are so bad here that Little Water's quiver has fallen off despite the fact that it was on his back and he is falling forwards. Anyhow, he tumbles toward a darkness with rocks. We might see this as a moment in which Little Water falls into nature--he needs to experience nature in an extreme way if he is to be successful in his quest to feed his people. Next we see what I am calling "holy space" in the foreground with water and shore a little omphalos where Little Water has come to rest.

At this point we reach the centre of the book. The center double-page spread has five pages on either side of it. Here we are literaly in the centre, and so although the space of holy ground, the omphalos, not as obvious a feature of landscape here, the large round moon reminds us of the circle of life I am positing as the deep significance of this book. The next page, like the first page in the book has only hints of the space I'm focusing on, but the one following is all circle, a vortex of animal life into which the dreaming Little Water moves. From here to the end of the book, the circle of life has moved inwards, as the final illustration, the one we also see on the cover of the book, makes clear. Strangely, this book is about individual relationship with nature, and about community. Like a folk tale, this Seneca legend, explains the need for the rituals of song and dance to maintain connection to animal life. The music and dance are reflections of the animals' gifts: the shell-rattle, the wolf-song, the peace of the hawk, and so on.

But what of texture? I have to return to my beginning. As a non-native reader of this book, I must confess to some distance to it. Some of the drawing leaves me unmoved; for example, the face of Little Water on the cover or the pudgy drawing of the otter in the double-page spread in the center or the bowl-like shell on the turtle in the cover illustration. Much of the drawing strikes me as rough and although I suspect this is a deliberate attempt to capture what I can only call a "primitive" quality in the art, I don't find it compelling. But the medium itself I do find attractive for this book (and for all Taylor's work that I have seen). I mean the paint (oil, I suspect). The paint is a very apt medium for Taylor to use since she is interested in nature and a "natural" affect. By "natural" here I don't necessarily mean "realistic." Some pictures seem to me quite unrealistic, but natural nevertheless. The colours are natural and what I refer to as the texture is almost palpable. If we look closely at the painting--on the cover, for example--we can see the weave of the paper or canvas or whatever material Taylor applied the paint to. Look at the face of Little Water here; the texture is visible. This texture, along with the predominant earth tones throughout, give the book the feel of the natural world. Surface is everything here and the surface is textured. The experience of reading this book through its pictures is an experience of a visceral art, an art that communicates mostly through its texture, rather than through its designs or its compositional patterning or its graphic detail. Taylor wants to take her reader into a particular mind-set, one that is not predominant in European art. This is why the rainbow on the cover is so startling. The rainbow is a familiar symbol in much European painting and of course it has Christian significance. Here is takes on a thoroughly new (yet still familiar) role. It is part of the texture of colour, the weave of colour throughout the book that constructs a world connected through that which lies on the surface, the elemental stuff of life.

If I seem to struggle here, this is because I do. I keep trying to get at this book and find it resists my attempts to read it through my limited training. Note the flatness of the cover illustration. Not much in the way of dimension is here, not a lot of depth. Everything is on a surface plane even though reason tells us that the placement of things in the visual field demands that some things are in front and others behind. But the flatness, the surface texture makes everything somehow equal, connected. I keep coming back to the same things: surface, connectedness, elementary things, circle of life.

I note that I have concentrated entirely on the pictures in this book. But this is a picture-story-book, that is, it consists of words and pictures in relation to each other. If I were to argue the priority of one over the other (and I have already done this at the outset by noting that we look at pictures before we read words), I would note that pictures "wrap" the book. By this I mean that the first and last pages of the story contain pictures that occupy more than half of the page, running as they do across the canal pushing the words to the extreme left of the verso. And in the middle, we have the double-page spread that pushes the words to the very bottom of the page. Mostly, in this book the words balance the pictures both in terms of the space they occupy and in terms of the information they contain. Whereas in some picture books words and pictures are in tension, the words often providing information that differs from information in the pictures, here they are balanced. The surface remains unruffled; the connection is clear. And once again I am back to connectedness.

One final note: most of what I've considered here is what we refer to as paratext, that is, aspects of the book as object, not just the diegetic aspect of the book. Any book is more than that which it contains in its narrative. Books have covers, dedications, endpapers, introductions, afterwords, epigraphs, notes, and various other material extraneous to the story or the part that carries narrative or content in the normal sense, that part we usually turn to as we begin to read a book. My arguement in part is that a book such as Little Water and the Gift of the Animals is as much about how we read as it is a story; it is texture and to appreciate texture we need to run our hand or eye over surfaces, complete surfaces.

I'll end with one last example of what I am trying to express. In the double-page spread at the center of this book we have Wolf calling to his "brothers." I might note that females are not greatly in evidence in this book. But I'll not speculate farther on this. The creatures are "brothers," connected, kin, related. Anyhow, Wolf in his large picture occupies the extreme right. I find the drawing here as good as anything in the book. Wolf's mouth, snout, eyes and fur are not only naturalistic; they are also realistic. But the representation of Wolf is not realistic. Wolf rises out of the water, or maybe out of the ground. His fur is either rock or water at the bottom. His snout is a similar shade to the moon. It points to the sky as do the trees outlined in the moon. Wolf here is an elemental creature, of the earth, air, water and maybe fire. Nature and supernature connect. In this picture of Wolf we have a "natural supernaturalism." Perhaps the reason I end by liking this book is that it expresses a deeply felt Romanticism, and this Romantic spirit is nowhere more evident than in this double-paged spread.