Revisionary Westerns? The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, Unforgiven

Evolution of genre

-      primitive phase

-      classical phase

-      revisionary phase

-      parodic phase

Primitive phase: see The Great Train Robbery and possibly a host of silent and early sound westerns that confused genre expectations. Perhaps the most infamous are Phantom Empire (1935) and The Terror of Tiny Town (1938).

Classical phase: represented by the westerns of John Ford, Henry King, Raoul Walsh, and others. This phase sets the conventions, and works with these in a celebratory manner. Themes of justice, honour, and protection appear in film after film. Ride the High Country serves as an example, as do the films by Ford and Hawks. ‘Myth” is a word that applies to the classic western. This western functions as an expression of the ‘mythic west.’ This is the west presented as a geography of freedom and enterprise. It celebrates America as the land of the free, as the land peopled with strong and independent people, especially men. In the classic western, women play relatively small roles. The land is open and ready for settlement, as if it were a “virgin land.”

         -conventions include: a high mimetic hero, a quest of some sort, a valuation of the natural, a masculinity associated with strength, responsibility, judgment, honour, loyalty, resolve, courage, and self-reliance/independence. The hero more often than not chooses the companionship of horse or sidekick to that of a woman; he chooses the life of a wanderer instead of the domestic life. He chooses duty over desire. The good guys are always small ranchers or pioneers or newspapermen, and they find themselves threatened by representatives of Big Business. The classic western supports small business – a classic form of capitalism that frowns on monopoly. Monopoly often finds itself allegorized in the figure of the gambler, or at least the gambler who cheats. This is a figure of corruption who turns a game of chance into a rigged system. The open market is compromised by the marked cards or ace up the sleeve. Corruption and cheating in the classic western are signs of civilization’s failures. Civilization fails when one person can monopolize land or business. We have come a long way from this vision of capitalism.

         The hero protects the very people who represent the hero’s obsolescence. The hero is different from the average person because he can make a difference. His action results in betterment.

Revisionary phase: reassessment of conventions and themes. ‘Revision’ suggests a re-seeing, a seeing from another angle or perspective. It also suggests a revising; a revisionary work revises what we have come to take for granted, asking us to see again for the first time familiar conventions. Defamiliarization is a term from literary studies that may apply here. What has become all too familiar is given a new look, made new, as it were.

         Another way of describing revisionary westerns is for us to say that these are westerns that debunk the myths of the west that the classic phase films construct. Instead of heroes, we get anti-heroes. Instead of noble deeds, we get petty action and dubious motivation. Instead of romantic landscapes, we get closed spaces, crowded spaces. Instead of perfunctory killing, we get brutal death. Instead of sartorial neatness, we get scruffy and dirty clothing, greasy hair, unshaven faces, and dust everywhere. Instead of a world that is thoroughly masculine, we meet strong women who sometimes are the equal of men. At the very least, we meet women who have independent lives.

         Casting might also mark the revisionary western. Actors we have come to know as a certain kind of character, take roles unusual for them. An example might be Joseph Mankiewicz’s There Was A Crooked Man (1970), in which both Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas play to and against type. The obvious example in the films we have watched, is the casting of Henry Fonda as the cold-blooded Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West. We also have the case where the anti-type becomes the type – I am thinking of Eastwood’s man with no name character in his first westerns for Leone, and then in several of his later westerns.

Parodic phase: revisionary work continues to take a form seriously. It may turn familiar conventions on their heads, but it does so not to trivialize a form or genre, but rather to reinvigorate the form or genre. The parody, on the other hand, may or may not trivialize. I think films such as The Villain (1979), The Three Amigos (1986), Rustler’s Rhapsody (1985), maybe even Ride ‘Em Cowboy (1942) are examples of parodies that trivialize. They do not take the western seriously; they debunk the myth of the west. On the other hand, the parody that we find in the Italian western can celebrate as much as it burlesques – see for example, My Name is Nobody (dir. Tony Valerii/prod. Sergio Leone).

         One thing is certain, the parody western has fun with the genre by rendering its conventions in an exaggerated manner.

-the phases that a genre is supposed to go through appear chronological, and for the most part I guess they are. But it is crucial to note that each of these phases can occur at any time. In other words, we can have parodic westerns from the beginning – and we do. Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and others made comedy/parody westerns. We might also find revisionary westerns in the classic period. One obvious example is Ford’s The Searchers, but we might go back 10 years to King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) for another example.

Question: are The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Unforgiven classic westerns, revisionary westerns, or parodic westerns?

Answer: ultimately, the question for me is: what position vis a vis the western myth does a film take? If the answer is that the film ends with a feeling that the west and its iconic figure – the cowboy hero – are somehow great beyond the common order of men, then the film participates in the classic western’s “myth-building,” rather than myth dismantling.

-The Wild Bunch: Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch brothers take that heroic walk at the end of the film, a walk reminiscent of the gunman’s walk (the title of a film, by the way – Gunman’s Walk 1958). Given the epic proportions of the film, and the echo of the Greeks dragging Hector’s body around the walls of Troy, and the iconic backdrop to the action, we can have little doubt that these guys are the last of a noble breed. Elegy, as always, elevates. It lets us know that we are the poorer for what we have lost.

-Once Upon a Time in the West: need I say more? This film has a conflicted relationship with the western – for obvious reasons. It derives from a leftist culture at variance with the central concern of the western – individualism. The final panoramic crane shot (the shot missing from the screened version in class) lets us know two things: 1) the days of the individual (people like Harmonica and Cheyenne) are over, and 2) what matters in the future is not the railroad moguls (men like Morton who are “crippled” by their greed), but rather the collective, the workers, the men to whom Jill brings water, the men who might pat her on the behind, but who don’t mean anything by this gesture (ha!). But this film too cannot resist the elegiac content, as clear in the sound track as in what we see. Men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are the stuff of myth, and as the stuff of myth they are celebrated. Harmonica’s motive is revenge (a familiar theme in westerns), but we know that he is on the side of right, and he knows he is not a man for the future (“I gotta go.”). Cheyenne says Harmonica has “something to do with death.” Cheyenne’s motive is less clear, but we know that he is a man’s man, a fellow who rides with a gang who all wear the same kind of coat. He is a sign of the working together that will be important in the future, even though he will not be a part of this future. The scene in which Harmonica measures out the station, and the men begin to build it is important because it shows us the way to the future (the building of a town and civilization), and it also shows us how out of place in this future men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are. They quite simply do not look like carpenters.

         The Italian western often has a political edge – more often than not Marxist (see Corbucci’s The Companeros  1970 or Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown 1966 or Leone’s Duck, You Sucker 1971).  The political content may be seen as revisionary of the American western that is more often than not conservative or only obliquely political.

         The Italian western is also operatic or baroque. By this I mean that it delights in excess. It moves in the direction of camp. The music is an obvious aspect of this operatic quality. Then the films have baroque touches – Woody Strode’s sawed off Winchester in Once Upon a Time in the West, the harmonica in the same film, Sabata’s arsenal in the ‘Sabata’ series, Ringo’s golden pistol in the film of the same name, Django’s gattling gun that he drags around the west in a coffin in Corbucci’s Django (1966), and other crazy stuff like a rifle inside a banjo or a pony whose farts are like “cherry blossoms.” The ritualistic and drawn-out gun duels are an obvious extension and hence parody of the American western. And yet these same gun duels very much participate in the mythic west and take it seriously. Such content veers toward parody of the American western, but a parody that celebrates rather than deflates. We get what I might call serious parody. And so I conclude that the Italian western (generally) both parodies and celebrates the American western. Revisionary parody, maybe.

-Unforgiven: the western just cannot seem to get away from its own myth, here the myth of the lone gunman who cleans up a rotten place and leaves it for others to populate. This film consciously accepts the myth of the classic western while at the same time it attempts to re-see the classic western. Like Ride the High Country, it has three main protagonists, two of whom are aging gunfighters and the third is a young untried, but cocky, kid who will learn the truth about killing during his travels with his two aged partners. But unlike Ride the High Country, Unforgiven foregrounds race. In Ride the High Country, the main characters eat in a Chinese restaurant, but not much is made of this. The restaurant is a reminder of changing times. In Eastwood’s film, the two aging gunfighters are a black man and a white man. The black man has a Native American wife. Nothing obvious is made of this racial mix. It is taken for granted. Then we have English Bob who is hired by the railroad to shoot Chinese people. As he enters Big Whiskey in the stagecoach, English Bob mockingly pretends to shoot two Chinese men he sees walking in the town. Little Bill asks him if he has run out of Chinese to shoot. Such gestures are, in one way, small. But in another way, these gestures to race are large. They remind us that the west was not peopled only by whites or only by whites and Native Americans who provide canon fodder. And they remind us that racism was alive and well in the west, and they remind us that the west was peopled by a variety of people.

         Age is an issue in both Ride the High Country and Unforgiven, but it becomes more of an impediment in the latter film. William Munny (Eastwood) can’t shoot the way he once could. Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) no longer has the will to shoot at all. Munny cannot mount his horse easily, although we know this is partly his lack of practice and his horse’s lack of practice. Even the young gunsel, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) can’t shoot well because his eyesight is poor. These guys may be professionals or may have been professionals at one time, but now they are a rag-tag trio who work rather inefficiently.

         That is until the end when Munny reverts to his younger self after the news that Little Bill (Gene Hackman) his killed his friend. He becomes a killer again to avenge his friend who has been cruelly murdered. He takes to the bottle and regains both the nerve and the steady hand and eye of his younger crazier days. Here is where the film takes its classic turn.

         Before I comment on this classic turn, I note the revisionary examination of violence. In the early westerns, we have violence. But this violence is more often than not bloodless and painless. We may have spectacular falls from horseback or from roofs, but we rarely hear gasps of pain or thuds of bullets into flesh. We rarely see grimaces on the faces of those shot. We hear a gunshot, then we see someone fall down. That’s it. Then Peckinpah came along and slowed the action down, allowed us to see the impact of a bullet upon flesh, and the opening of the body and the release of blood in an arc of anguish. Eastwood shows the brutality of gun violence both orally and visually. First we have a story such as the one Munny recalls to Ned; remember, he says, the time he shot some drover in the mouth, and his teeth came out the back of his head. This guy did little or nothing, and yet he dies this horrid death. Then we have the shooting of the young cowboy who was with his partner who cut the prostitute. This shooting leads to a drawn out scene that allows us to know the pain of a stomach wound. The scene draws on an earlier one in Howard Hawks’s El Dorado, another film about pain and violence. The beatings Little Bill gives both English Bob and William Munny are also meant to suggest the ugliness of violence. The terrible nature of this violence registers on the faces of those who witness the violence. Late in the film, Little Bill whips Ned in a scene that registers the pain of violence both in the grimaces on Ned’s face and the blood running down his back, and also in the faces of the townspeople who stand outside the jail listening to what is happening inside. Finally, we have the scars on William Munny and on the prostitute, Delilah. These are reminders of the physical effect of violence – its lasting mark on both the body and mind.

         But violence has its heroic and romantic side. It is an aspect of the myth of the west. We see this in the presence of W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), the western writer who chronicles the exploits of English Bob, aka The Duke (or the Duck) of Death. Beauchamp is a writer of dime novels, popular fiction that romanticizes the west and makes the figure of the gun fighter a popular hero. Ned Buntline is perhaps the most famous of these writers; Buntline chronicled the exploits of Buffalo Bill and was, for a time, the wealthiest author in America. The film means to expose such writing for what it is: fiction parading as history, sensationalism and a pack if lies. The kind of heroic violence chronicled in the dime novel is held up to scrutiny when it is contrasted with the actual violence of people like Little Bill and William Munny. At the end, Beauchamp slinks out of the saloon without his interview with the wild William Munny. He does not have a new gunfighter to follow about. But the film is not so simple. What Beauchamp does is turn history into myth, and the film does something the same with William Munny. And Munny himself speaks his own myth.

         For most of the film, William Munny is an aging pig farmer who used to be a killer and a drunk – or a drunken killer. Now he is a family man, a widower who vows to remain true to his wife’s memory. As a gunfighter, he is bumbling and ineffective. He can no longer shoot a pistol with any accuracy, and he is no great shakes with a Sharpes Rifle either. His ability as a horseman is questionable too. But when it comes to avenging a friend, William Munny is as efficient and cold as they come. He enters the saloon and dispatches the bad guys one by one. Once the smoke has cleared, W. W. Beauchamp begins to question him, but Munny will have none of this. He takes his own myth under his own control. He tells those waiting for him outside the saloon that he is coming out and that if anyone tries to shoot him, he will kill them, then he will kill their wives, then their friends, and then he will burn down their homes. He enters the street, mounts his pale horse (see. Revelations 6:8 – and he who sat upon the pale horse was Death), and rides into the night. No one dares shoot at him. He defeats his enemies, ultimately, by the force of his myth. Like Ulysses in Homer’s epic, Munny is a scourge. He comes to rid a place of its bad element.

         The mythic dimension to William Munny is clear from his horse and his words. But we also have this final scene played out in a thunderstorm, at night, in pouring rain. As so often, this scene echoes the opening scene which is also in the rain. In the opening scene, it is Little Bill who arrives like thunder to deal with the two cowboys who have cut the prostitute. Little Bill is a version of Munny. At the film’s end, Munny enters the saloon as a loud clap of thunder sounds. He is, in effect, a force of nature, a scourge of the gods. He comes from the thunder itself. And he comes to cleanse, to wash away the evil in Big Whiskey. Here is the heroic and enigmatic character Eastwood has played in such films as Pale Rider (1985) and High Plains Drifter (1973). In all three films, Eastwood plays a semi-mystical character – one reminiscent of Shane in George Stevens’s 1953 film. In Unforgiven, note the opening and closing shots. Both are elegiac in lighting (as is the film itself in its use of autumn and winter settings). The opening shot gives us the sense of a place out of time, and the closing shot accentuates this feeling by having the clothes on the line, and the figure of the man disappear from sight, just disappear. We read that William Munny may have ended up in San Francisco as a dry goods dealer. But this is the stuff of rumour and hearsay, a way to underscore the mysterious nature of this powerful force. William Munny exists in a state of limbo, neither of this world nor the next. He is what he is because of a bottle of whiskey (Eastwood’s insistence on the whiskey and on the empty whiskey bottle near the end of the film brings into focus all the drinking we have seen in earlier films, especially The Wild Bunch). He is William Munny the Killer only when he is drinking. When sober, he is William Munny dry goods dealer or hog farmer. The point is that the mythic William Munny lives outside normal, sober, quotidian reality.

         Finally elegy again. Unforgiven contains a dedication to Sergio and Don, that is Sergio Leone and Don Siegal, both directors who worked with Clint Eastwood in his early days, and both directors who made westerns. They are also both dead when Unforgiven is released in 1992. Eastwood’s invoking of both Leone and Siegal signals the past, the tradition, the connection with both directors and a form that is passing, that has seen its day. Eastwood has always known that the lone figure on horseback, the protector of the innocent and defender of the poor and disenfranchised, the man loyal to the code of honour and friendship exists only in myth, not in reality. And so we have two William Munnys, the one who is father and provider, and the other who is an inebriated killing machine. The former is hardly of interest; the latter captures our imaginations, just as he has captured the Schofield Kid’s imagination. What the kid learns is that imagination is not life. Life is raw and fearful; myth is quick, nimble, and beyond reach.

Property and Literacy:

         -before we leave the western, I note the recurring themes of property and literacy. In Unforgiven, for example, we have clear references to property in the prostitutes. Skinny Dubois (Anthony James) claims he has a paper that indicates he owns the prostitutes; they are his property. Little Bill, of course, has a house (“I don’t deserve this. I’m building a house.”). The two cowboys who cut the prostitute bring horses (property of a sort) to pay for their crime. Property in westerns is a burden. Someone is always trying to take it away or to gain control over it. The cowboy hero is, as often as not, without property. When William Munny has property, he is in the dirt with the hogs; when he rides free from property, he rides into myth.

         As for literacy, we see this in the figure of W. W. Beauchamp, a writer not just of letters (both Little Bill and William Munny make this mistake), but of books. In all the westerns we have seen, letters in the form of writing (most often writing on buildings or on signs, but sometimes in letters or newspapers indicates a new time, a change from a frontier existence to a modern urban existence with its technological changes.

Question: can a film be all three (classic, revisionary, and parodic) at once?

The Western and the Samurai Film

-The White, the Yellow and the Black (aka Samurai), directed by Sergio Corbucci (1975)

1.   Historical material:

-both the samurai film and the western locate their action at the end of an era – the closing of the frontier in America and the end of the clan system in late 19^th century Japan.

-both have mythic dimension, but the samurai genre stretches its mythic content to the extreme. For example, an element of the supernatural can pervade the samurai film, but rarely (and rarely successfully) does the supernatural pervade the western.

-the samurai film is, in some ways, a response to the post-atomic moment in 1945.

2.   The hero:

-the lone hero who wanders a land in search of injustices to combat.

-the maimed hero – one-armed samurai or blind samurai (e.g. Zatoichi). This aspect of the samurai film is not prevalent in the American western; however, it does inform the Italian western (e.g. Blindman dir. Ferdinando Baldi 1971 or The Great Silence dir. Sergio Corbucci 1968). One early American film that does draw on the maimed hero tradition of the samurai film is John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). This is a modern day western. (Note: Sturges also directed the more famous western based on a samurai film, The Magnificent Seven 1960.)

-aversion to guns in samurai films. The samurai hero disdains the gun. The gun is anti-traditional, a sign of encroaching industrialization and mechanization.

-the duel: two swordsmen must fight, although neither is necessarily evil. These fights taker place in private, often in an open field – something the Italian western picks up. The American western more often than not has its duels in public (see Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead, for example or Henry King’s famous film, The Gunfighter.

-honour and the conflict between inclination (desire) and duty (responsibility)

-from Stuart Kaminsky’s American Film Genres (1974): “The western hero has a great sense of self; the samurai has a great sense of subordination of self” (54).

-western hero is alone (mostly), but the samurai is alone only because he has been cut off from a master.

-pride and shame: the western gunman is often wary of his own prowess (see for example, Shane or The Gunfighter); the samuarai is proud of his ability with a sword. There is, perhaps, more art in being a samurai than in being a fast gun.

-the samurai film presupposes a knowledge of a great many fictional and historical characters. The American western has some of this, but to a much smaller extent.

Ritual:

     -both samurai films and westerns are ritualistic. However, the rituals in the western are often broken (“Put an A-men to it,” in The Searchers or the bad guys’ willingness to cheat in a duel or Cole Thornton’s ruse in El Dorado). Rituals in the samurai films are, for the most part, adhered to.

The Seven Samurai (1954)

     Why end with this film?

1.   Kurosawa has stated that he admired the American western films, especially those of John Ford.

2.   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.

3.   The film uses techniques we see elsewhere: the slow motion violence of Peckinpah, the frenetic cutting also of Peckinpah, the noble close-up for both the heroic characters and for the peasants, ritual in battles, funerals, food, etc., themes of friendship and honour, visual cues to themes such as the water wheel, the flowers, the forest undergrowth, the rain, fire, the guns, deep focus to create a full mise en scene, fast tracking shots of horses racing through the forest or across the landscape.

4.   Unlike the western, The Seven Samurai does not personalize the villains. They remain without character, nearly faceless. They say little other than grunts and yells. They are a force of nature that the peasant has to contend with.

5.   Unlike the western, horses are merely functional. If they serve to signify anything (I speak as a western viewer), then they signify necessity itself. They are a sign of an energy which is inevitable, natural, and powerful. The scene in which Mifune rides the horse through the covered bridge, and then has to chase the horse is both a comic moment and also a reminder of failure, perhaps a premonition of the end. This character 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. He is a doomed character.

6.   The samurai take up the cause of the peasants for food and lodging, not for money or glory or even for justice.

7.   The Seven Samurai, like The Wild Bunch, has a rhythmic quality both in the story with its rhythms of calm and action and in the technique in which we see the camera weave establishing shots with medium and close-up shots. One example of the work the camera does is in an early scene in which one of the peasants wants to kill the bandits any way he can, but the other villagers refuse to accept his hot-headedness. From a crane shot, we see him leave the group and walk away from the foreground. He slumps to the ground. We cut to a shot closer to ground level in which we see the slumped figure in the foreground with the group of villagers behind him. The camera lens flattens the visual field so that we the figure in the foreground not so much isolated from the group as blending with the group. What follows is his re-integration into the group.

8.   Careful framing that gives each shot a pictorial look.

9.   Sound: the film uses sound carefully. Music is sparing, but important. Natural sounds – wind and rain, the sound of fire, the chopping of wood, the pounding of hoofs – all these intensify the emotional impact of the film.

10.                 The international nature of filmic art.

11.                 Because I like it. I like the characters. For me, this is a film of faces. Much of what the film communicates is through faces. I read that the dialogue in the film is often nearly indecipherable, and that the subtitles cannot capture this quality. We have seen this before in Godard’s Weekend. I especially like the peasant faces, and of course the face of Toshiro Mifune. 

Top Hat (1935)

 These notes are for movie night, March 1, 2013.

Top Hat is the 4^th film with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In total, they made 10 films. Top Hat is probably the best known of these films. As the lyrics to the title song indicate, this is a film that simply "reeks with class," in more than one sense of that word. ‘Class’ indicates that the people who populate this film are not only classy, they are also of the upper classes, wealthy and artsy. They have servants. ‘Class’ also refers to style. These people have style as their clothes and their surroundings indicate.  In other words, this is a film about the well-to-do and the sophisticated. It takes its place alongside a long tradition of comedy that goes back at least to the society plays in the Restoration and 18^th Century, plays by the likes of Congreve, Sheridan, and others. Like those long-ago comedies, the plot of Top Hat is baroque; it is convoluted, turning on misunderstandings. These misunderstandings have to do with relations between the sexes, and the plot turns on sexual dalliance and suggestions of transgression. It has its naughty side. This film is playful in its dealings with husbands and wives and those who deviate from the norms of society. One example is Erik Rhodes as Alberto Beddini. Beddini is clearly a gay man. His “marriage” to Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) amounts to an act of chivalry, not an act of love.

Comedy is a social mode. It begins with a breakdown in a community and ends with a restoration of order in the community. The restoration of order often takes the form of a marriage or a dance. In dance, everything is executed with skill, grace, and timing. Dance communicates order. So too does marriage. After a plot that has played with marriage breakdown (divorce and infidelity), the action rounds to a marriage that signals good breeding and sound morality. Society once again assumes its acceptable form. Beginning and ending with feet, the film is about dance and soulful. The feet keep us grounded, fleet, fast, and flourishing.

The combining of drawing room comedy with show business people is also noteworthy. This is America and in America show business is not necessarily a dubious profession. These show people are also society people. They inhabit a fantasy world that gathers America and Italy together. Venice becomes a fantasy space where class comes together. People who work in the entertainment business can represent working people, yet they are also members of an elite group. The fantasy is that just plain folk can be rich, elegant, sophisticated, and successful.

The fantasy resonates because of the film’s location smack in the middle of the Great Depression. This is a film to lift the spirits. It presents a wish fulfillment world in which love triumphs. In other words, this is the world we might dream about, but never experience in reality. As a dream, the film takes the viewer out of reality for the 100 or so minutes of its running time. For this time, make believe wins the day.

The clothes and make-up and hairstyles, as well as the sets communicate this make believe. No one has hair as smooth and perfectly set as Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. No man has lips as smoothly drawn with lipstick as Fred Astaire. No one wears clothes like Ginger Rogers. The people are live versions of the Art Deco sets. Art Deco exhibits smooth, uncluttered, soft and rounded and long lines. The sinuous lines of dancers are examples of Art Deco. Some of Fred Astaire’s poses during his dances exhibit the Art Deco lines, as do his top hat and tails that accentuate the long lean line and along with the lighting sometimes present a silhouette effect. The Art Deco geometric shapes and lavish decoration have something of a futuristic look, accentuating the unreality of the action. No gondola in the actual Venice looks exactly like the gondolas we see in Top Hat. Art Deco is a style of art that communicates elegance, luxury, and exuberance. It is clean and clear. It is an expression of freshness; it looks forward to a utopian future. This may explain its rise during the Depression years. Art Deco counters the brute facts of reality with a dream of better times.

For Gabby Goo Goo: Bob Dylan Children’s Troubadour

What follows is the text of a paper I delivered in June 2012, a the ChLA conference in Boston. It really needs accompanying illustrations and perhaps a tune or two, but copyright restricts me from uploading these. Not knowing what else to do with this paper, I place it here. A list of works cited is missing.

“when asked what you think of gene autry singing of hard rains gonna fall say that nobody can sing it as good as peter. paul and mary” (Lyrics 1962-1985, 124)

“I hate oppression, especially on children.” (Biograph, Liner Notes)

1. Dylan and kids

Bob Dylan’s 1990 album Under the Red Sky has the dedication, “For Gabby Goo Goo.” This Gabby is apparently Dylan’s (at the time) four-year-old granddaughter, and the album, as many have noted, contains a number of songs that adapt and rework familiar nursery rhymes. Oliver Trager notes that Dylan “had often mentioned recording an album for children,” and he goes on to suggest that Under the Red Sky “was as close as [Dylan’s critics] were likely to come to hearing one” (648).  Two years later, in 1992, Dylan released the familiar children’s song “Froggy Went A-Courtin” on the album Good As I Been To You, and in 1999 he recorded a version of “This Old Man.” Three of his songs have been transformed into picture books: Forever Young (2008, illus. Paul Rogers), Man Gave Names to All the Animals (2010, illus. Jim Arnosky), and Blowin’ in the Wind (2011, illus. Jon J. Muth). An earlier version of Man Gave Names to All the Animals appeared in 1999 (illus. Scott Menchin). Another picture book tells the story of Dylan’s early years, When Bob Met Woody: The Story of the Young Bob Dylan, written by Gary Golio and illustrated by Marc Burckhardt (2011). These picture books target a young audience, but a graphic work for adults and young adults also exists: Bob Dylan Revisited (2008; first American edition 2009). This book consists of “13 graphic interpretations of Bob Dylan’s Songs” (Book Cover), by artists such as Dave McKean, Christopher, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Thierry Murat. Finally, I note that the Kid’s Page of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ website contains the lyrics to “Blowing in the Wind” [sic] (http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/games/songs/favorites/blowingmid.htm). Clearly, we have Dylan admirers who make the connection between Dylan and kids.

            Dylan has also been photographed with children. Barry Feinstein’s photographs are perhaps the most well known. Here [I had prepared a PowerPoint for the oral presentation of this paper] we have two photographs taken in Liverpool, England, in 1966. The one shows Dylan sitting in a doorway surrounded by children, and the other is a wistful shot of him watching children watching Dylan on a mostly empty street. Dylan and the children nicely reflect each other. These photographs deliver a sense of nostalgia worthy of the bard who sang (and sings) prophetic songs about humanity’s endangered future. In November 1975, Dylan and Allan Ginsberg are photographed with children from the Franco American School in Lowell, Massachusetts. The picture captures something of the youthful energy of the Rolling Thunder Review that Dylan was taking on the road that year. And of course we have Elliott Landry’s photographs of Dylan with his children in Woodstock, New York, in the late 1960s.

            In October 2011, Universal Children’s Audio in Wellington, New Zealand, released a CD that makes the argument that Dylan’s songs are relevant and appeal to children: Kids Sing Bob Dylan by The Starbugs. The Starbugs are five young New Zealanders who, when the album was released, ranged in age from 7 to 15. They are Jessie Hillel, Rebecca Jenkins (the youngest), Sarah Whitaker, Ben Anderson, and Roisin Anderson. The album’s producers are David Anthony Clark and Radha Sahar. Clark says that he saw a “doco” (documentary) in which 14-year-olds were asked, “if they had heard of Bob Dylan,” and they had not. He set out to rectify this situation. As for the Starbugs, they express enthusiasm for Dylan’s songs. 10-year-old Jessie says, “Hearing and listening to him [Dylan] was really fun,” and 7-year-old Rebecca says the songs “made her want to dance.” Roisin noted that, “there was a lot of action in Dylan’s music.”  The kids noted the emotion “that he puts into his songs” (Ben Anderson – quotations from Dallas and Tuckey).

            And what of the choices for this album by and for children? Clark included a couple of “Dylan’s folk songs [that] have long been the stuff of classroom sing-alongs, such as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’” (Dallas and Tuckey), but he also included “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “I Shall Be Released,” described in a press story on the album as “world weary” songs (Dallas and Tuckey). But perhaps the most surprising inclusion is the song, “Mozambique.” When the kids sing “it’s so unique to be/Among the lovely people living free/Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique,” they are most likely unaware that in 1975, when the song was first released, the long war against the Portuguese colonial masters had just ended and a long Civil War was about to begin. Mozambique was hardly a “magical land.” It was a land in turmoil.

            In any case, “Mozambique,” along with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “I Shall Be Released” accompany songs that had previously been connected with children – “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Forever Young,” and “Man Gave Names to All the Animals.” The Universal Children’s Audio web site says the album contains “songs appropriate to children’s lives,” and that they are “perfect for a family sing-along, the classroom, or a long car ride.” Visitors to the web site are encouraged to, “Let Dylan inspire your kids as he inspired you!”

            Okay, it is time for a bit of autobiography. Was I inspired? You bet. In the fall of 1963, my friend Donnie Knapp came to school with the news that he had joined the Columbia Record Club, and that he had received a record by some guy that had some good songs on it, but that the guy couldn’t sing worth a damn. When pressed, Donnie said one song was about “going down the road, with a suitcase in my hand, bling bling bling.” He reiterated that the guy – he could not recall his name - just could not sing and that he (Donnie) was going to return the record to Columbia. For reasons I can no longer remember, I asked Donnie if I could listen to the record before he sent it back. Donnie just lived around the corner from me on Winnifred Street, and so I went to his place after school and listened to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. I was 18 years old. I was not a child, but when I heard those songs I felt as if I had been hearing them all my relatively short life. That was the year I began to read. That was my last year in high school. That was when I began to write this paper. If you had asked me back then what I thought of that singer who could not sing, I would have said that Donnie Knapp was half right – the songs were great – but that his evaluation of the singing was way off in the circle of hell devoted to tin ears. That voice struck me as a voice for the ages; what I could not say back then was that Dylan “had the blood of the land” in his voice, but that is the best description of his voice that I have heard.

2. Hard Rain: Kids Can Take it

And so along with Bob Dylan singer/songwriter, painter and visual artist, and author, we have Bob Dylan children’s artist. The question is: what does Bob Dylan’s work contain that makes it suitable as work for children? According to the folks at Universal Children’s Audio, the songs express the “energy and spontaneity” of a youthful era – “the spirit of the 60s and 70s.” I get the sense that for these folks the songs contain something of Benjamin’s “aura,” something rich and elusive, something somehow connected to a youthful exuberance that does not age. And I suppose this is true. We can, however, be more precise. My argument is that in both form and content, many of Dylan’s songs speak directly to, or may speak directly to, children. They do this because they call on traditional forms and traditional subjects familiar to the genre of children’s literature. In a nutshell, Dylan’s songs delight in language play and parody; they also manifest a sensitivity to childhood as that complicated construction of adult concerns that children are expected to explore: identity, environment, and human rights. Dylan put this succinctly in his Oscar acceptance comments in March 2001when he closed his thank-you speech with the words, “peace, tranquility, and good will.” His work promotes peace, tranquility, and good will. He is liberal to a degree; he wants everybody to be free.

But more particularly, the concerns of early songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” not only contain elements familiar to children and their literature, but also contain a vision of humanity vital to a continuing tradition of imaginative possibility – dare I say of imaginative freedom? Imaginative possibility functions both conservatively, in what Frye called a “myth of concern,” and more progressively, in what Frye called a “myth of freedom.” For our purposes, the myth of concern is that which socializes and keeps things running smoothly for a political group, and the myth of freedom is that which energizes desire for the world we want. I might locate the myth of concern in social cohesion organized by the law of the father and the myth of freedom in the pivotal moment of the Imaginary, that moment when we recognize for the first time choice emanating from separation and difference. Children’s literature crucially balances these two myths.

We know, for example, that “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a catchy song that serves to gather people together in a robust sing-a-long. Jon Muth, the illustrator of the recent picture book version of the song, and Greil Marcus, who wrote the Note at the end of this picture book, both write about the song as if it was a sentimental call for maturity, as if the song is about the importance of understanding that “we are the world, we are the children” and we can make a brighter day. This sense of the song fits easily into the myth of concern, the myth that we are all “God’s children.” But the song has a harder edge. We do not need to historicize the song to grasp its call to action. If the answer is blowing in the wind, then we need to get out there and take the buffets that the wind has to offer. We need to stand in the wind. Only this way can the sound of people crying penetrate. In other words, the song is both contained within its musical and literary world, separate from actuality, a safe call to our liberal humanist sensibilities, and also the trumpet that calls to action, that topples walls, and that connects the musical and the literary with material conditions.

Perry Nodelman has convincingly demonstrated an “essential doubleness” to children’s literature (59-68). We can see doubleness, an appeal to both child and adult, an ideological pull both left and right, in Dylan’s work. As a test case, I offer a song that has not appeared as one of Dylan’s works that appeals to children: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna to Fall” (Freewheelin’, 1963). Here is a song suited to audiences both old and young. Older audiences hear the song’s fear of nuclear night; its cold war politics and warning of nuclear devastation. For the younger audience, however, what we have is a ballad with its familiar story of quest and perhaps even triumph. Christopher Ricks terms the virtue of the quest as “fortitude.” In any case, we have a story redolent of the nostalgia children can understand and maybe even appreciate, the nostalgia that renovates and rebuilds. I think this is what I heard when Donnie Knapp played Dylan’s second album for me back in 1963. That was a revelatory moment.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” consists of five stanzas nicely structured on the motif of the journey. The stanzas vary in length from 16 lines to 9 lines. The lack of symmetry in stanza length finds counter balance in the first 2 and final two lines of each stanza that offer repetitions. These repetitions serve to package each stanza so that each stanza is a self-contained unit. Repetitions of words appear throughout the song, giving it an incantatory sound. The first two lines of each stanza echo the traditional ballad “Lord Randal” and also the traditional nursery song, “Billy Boy.” “Oh where have you been charming Billy?” Or, “O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son!/And where ha you been, my handsome young man!" The echo of these two traditional works connects Dylan’s song with the folk tradition, with a tradition of song and rhyme that speaks across generations. Like the nursery rhyme, the ballad, and the fairy tale, this song is not age specific. It has the haunting quality of the ballad. Its imagery is familiar from such traditional material: misty mountains (sounds like Tolkien), sad forests (what is a sad forest if not either a fairy tale forest or one about to be chopped down?), babies and wolves, the poet who died in the gutter (a figure we might meet in an Oscar Wilde story), white man and black dog. Then we have the curiously elusive imagery: bleeding hammers, a white ladder covered with water, a black branch bleeding, and a highway of diamonds with nobody on it. We have here the uncanny. The imagery is both familiar and strange; something calls for us in these images, something that encourages us to leave our stepping-stones behind.

As uncanny as these images may be, the children and young people in the song – the child beside a dead pony, the young woman whose body was burning, the newborn baby menaced by wolves, the young children holding guns and sharp swords, and the young girl who gives the blue-eyed boy a rainbow – are a composite of hope and despair. Children are vulnerable in their innocence. They are capable of violence and of generosity. They can be soldiers; they can be Samaritans. The blue-eyed son answers the father’s questions with anaphoric intensity, giving the song a prophetic insistence. The scattered rhyme – it is hit and miss throughout the song – captures the brokenness of the world the young boy has experienced. And so anaphora and rhyme counter balance, helping to give the song both its prophetic resonance and its pessimistic reportage. We can add alliteration to this brief list of rhetorical devices that elevate the register of the song’s language. Everything is broken, but we need not despair.

The song ends with resolution. When the singer, the blue-eyed son, asserts that he will “reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,” he gathers all experience. We have here a most intricate example of synesthesia, expressed in the word “reflects.” To reflect is to bend light, but it also may refer to an echo, the reflection of a voice or a sound. We might see or hear a reflection. To reflect is also to consider, to ponder, to contemplate something. The song, precisely, contemplates what I will call the mal de siècle. Further, a reflection signals the consequence of something – such and such reflects your decision to act in a beastly manner. Hard rain is a consequence of human failure to reflect on the state of things. And to reflect is to give back. The singer, the blue-eyed son, gives back what he experiences “so all souls can see it.” They see it because they hear it.  The synesthesia inherent in these lines reflects the song’s interest in unity and connection. Everything is broken, but we need not despair.

The message here is for the young. Experience the world, its deepest black forests, its polluted rivers, its empty-handed people, its damp dirty prisons, its hunger, its forgotten people, and having experienced this bleak place tell the story. Tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it.  The song ends with the image of the ocean, the ocean of time and space we also have in William Blake’s poetry and art. The resolve is to stand on this ocean until the sinking begins. The resolve is to take a hard look at a hard world weathered by hard rain. Who better to take such a hard look but those people who will have to live in this place for the foreseeable future? Who better to hear this song than the young who are setting out to explore the deepest dark forests? 

Samuel Fuller – The Big Red One (1980)

 Just another war move or a Samuel Fuller movie? The claim is that the 114 minute version released in 1980 is just another war movie with a studio-added musical score and voice-over, whereas the 160 minute film recently “reconstructed” from lost footage is a Samuel Fuller film. Be this as it may, we have the 114-minute version before us. And this gives us enough to see certain of the Fuller trademarks.

1. The film begins with an opening sequence that is stark and starkly allegoric. In this sequence, Fuller invokes All Quiet on the Western Front and World War 1. The sergeant, Lee Marvin, sees and hears a German soldier coming out of the fog. Marvin kills the man near a tall crucifix that stands in the middle of no-man’s-land. The scene is bleak and brutal and ironic. We soon learn that the war is actually over and that the German soldier was announcing the end to combat. Fuller allows his camera to close in on the figure of Christ on that tall cross. Christ’s face is haggard and his eyes are hollow. Here is an image of desperation and despair. The Christ on this cross sees nothing; instead, he is a reminder of the cruelty of the human species. 

2. A band of soldiers who somehow survive the entire war, from 1942 until 1945. They begin in North Africa, go on to Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Omaha Beach, France and Belgium, and finally Czechoslovakia where they liberate one of the death camps. The story is more representative than actual. 

3. Fuller’s constant theme of survival. Life’s a battleground and war is Fuller’s constant metaphor for life itself. 

4. The use of children to remind us of innocence. The helmet with woven flowers is a Fuller touch – hokey and sentimental. Then later, we have Lee Marvin befriending a scared child from the death camp, carrying him on his shoulders an hour or so after the child has died, and then burying him. As in The Naked Kiss, children are innocent, children are exploited by adults, children are a sign of human vulnerability and weakness.

5. Action and no long speeches.

6. The five protagonists are Fuller’s cowboys, American GIs who follow orders, fight because they have to fight (using the bodies of fallen soldiers to hide behind when necessary), struggle to survive, live for the most part without women, and liberate that which needs to be liberated.

7. A reminder that humans are nuts. The scene in the mental hospital tops off Fuller’s theme of human insanity. In war, who is sane and who is insane. A great Fuller moment is when one of the patients in this institution takes a machine gun, begins to shoot his fellow patients, and repeats over and over – “I am sane, I am sane.” Well in this world, he is. The sane ones are the ones shooting guns. Once again, Fuller’s irony is not subtle. 

8. The ending that rounds to its beginning, complete with the German announcing the end of the war, the tall crucifix, and Marvin killing his enemy four hours after the end of combat. But this time the German may live. And so Fuller offers hope, but faint hope.

9. Death pervades Fuller’s world. Marvin says to the German soldier at the end, that if he doesn’t live, he’ll beat him to death. This line is reminiscent of Moe’s assertion in Pickup on South Street that if she does not get the money for a good plot and headstone, she thinks it will just kill her.

10. Once again, we have little in the way of back story. We know about the Sergeant’s experience in the first war, but that’s all. Who is he? What did he do before and between wars? He seems to live for war. And the four young guys are equally without much in the way of back-story. We have some idea of ethnic background, but not much. Fuller’s characters live in the moment, struggling to survive in a dangerous world. 

11. The crudity of Fuller’s treatment of “symbol.” Guns in this film are obviously Freudian. The tank turret gun looks phallic. But if we did not get the connection, then Fuller is going to make sure we do. And so he has his soldiers use condoms to keep their rifles dry when they make a beachhead. 

The Big Red One is the First Infantry, formed in 1919. Fuller fought in this unit during World War 2, and this film is both his memory of battle and his idea of the war. Roger Ebert has said that the film is neutral when it comes to war, that it is apolitical. According to Ebert, the film is neither for nor against war; it simply records the battle experiences of its five protagonists. I’m not so sure. It seems to me that we have enough material here to mount a case against war. The opening and closing scenes, for example, suggest the absurdity of war. One minute a soldier will kill an enemy; the next minute, the same soldier will try to save that same enemy because the war is over. An enemy is an enemy in war, not in peace. We also have both the Americans and Germans making a distinction between murder and killing. Soldier kill, but they do not murder. If soldiers do not murder, then what does Griff do near the end of the film when he corners a German soldier in one of the incinerators? He empties his magazine into the German, and then begins on another one given to him by the sergeant before he finally stops. Is this action any less demented than the insane person shooting and yelling “I’m sane, I’m sane”? War may be hell, but it is also insanity. In a scene restored to the recent longer version, we have a child shot by a sniper as he is held in the arms of the sergeant. Scenes like this or the scene with the German officer hiding behind the figure of Christ on the cross must surely communicate the absurdity of war. Or take the scene on Omaha beach when the soldiers are trying to oust a German machine gun nest by planting tubular explosives near the German line. The sergeant sends out at least four (more, I think) soldiers to move the tubes closer. As one falls, shot by the Germans, the sergeant sends out another one. Finally Griff makes it. Griff (Mark Hamill) is the coward of the unit, but he’s the guy who succeeds here. Why? No reason. He is just the one who makes it. War holds no rhyme or reason; it is absurd. For Fuller, life is absurd.

The actors in Fuller’s films are, as often as not, forgettable. This film boasts Lee Marvin who was a well-known actor, but the others are relatively unknown (Mark Hamill had been in Star Wars and its two early sequels, but he was hardly a “star”). The actors are, however, young. Fuller wanted, I think, to stress just how young these guys were. War takes the young more often than it takes the middle-aged or the old. And the soldiers come and go anonymously. The soldiers we follow point out that they do not even know the names of replacements that arrive and then are killed. In Fuller’s world, death is everywhere. Fuller’s battle scenes are frenetic – lots of noise, dust, falling bodies, confusion. He anticipates Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan by about 20 years when he shows the shores of Omaha Beach running red with blood. The shot of the soldier’s arm and wristwatch nicely counterpoints life and death – the soldier’s life has come to an end, the watch continues to record ongoing time.

As we might expect with Fuller, this war film does not have a hero – no John Wayne or Robert Mitchum or Tom Hanks here to save the day. These are just 50-cents-a-day dog soldiers doing what they have to do to stay alive. That they manage to stay alive has as much to do with luck as it does with their training or professionalism. Hawks’s heroes are professionals; Fuller’s are just average Joes trying to get along.

Notes for a class - with questions

D.W. Griffith, Broken Blossoms (1919)

Griffith had been making films for ten years or more. In 1915, he made what is one of the most famous (and infamous) films in history when he made Birth of a Nation. The film uses white actors to play Black men, as Hollywood continued to do with various racial types right up until recently. Broken Blossoms does the same, using white actors to play Chinese people. Birth of a Nation depicts the Black men as ugly and violent. The film was (and continues to be) seen as racist. In 1916, Griffith made the lavish (like a Cecille B. DeMille extravaganza) film, Intolerance (some prints are as long as 208 minutes). This film seems in some way Griffith’s attempt to assuage his guilt for his portrayal of African American people in Birth of a Nation, the way John Ford tried to do something similar when he made Cheyenne Autumn in 1964 as a way of revising his earlier depiction of Native Americans. But Intolerance is both very long and structurally demanding, telling four stories from different historical times simultaneously with a recurring bridging scene of a mother rocking a cradle. Griffith might have thought that to make his point he needed to make a more straight -forward film, something simple such as Broken Blossoms. Did I say “simple”? Well, you know what I mean: the story unfolds sequentially.

Broken Blossoms is a melodrama with oversized villain and pint-sized victim.

Broken Blossoms is obviously about race. The story is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, but instead of two families feuding, we have two races. The lovers cannot come together happily precisely because of the intolerance of the society in which they live.

What do you make of the opening scenes in China?

This is a film about broken dreams and aspirations.

This is a film about entrapment. The scene in which Lucy retreats to the closet and cringes as her father hacks away at the door with a hatchet will serve as example (cf Kubrik's The Shining). But the entire shooting style communicates entrapment, from the opening shots inside a monastery, to the closed boxing ring, the soporific house of sin, the claustrophobic shop where the “Yellow Man” works, the short abrupt streets, the house where Lucy and Battling live, the enclosed space of the dock and work yard, the night shooting, the close-ups, the extreme narrowness of the bedroom above the shop. We seem unable to stretch in this film. For the most part, the camera cannot get distance from the actors or the action.

This is a film about love. But I wonder just how this film envisages love. Why does the Chinese man find Lucy attractive? Why does she find him attractive?

This is a film about inner struggle and turmoil. The camera locates much of the “meaning” in body language and, especially, eyes.

This is a film about the loss of innocence, its fragility, and its inevitable failure.

The intensity of such loss is, perhaps, nowhere  more  evident  than in the scene in which Lucy mends her father’s work socks. She does this carefully, and just before she puts the mended socks away, she briefly strokes them. What does this suggest? (See a similar gesture in Ford’s The Searchers)

And what about Battling? His body language more often than not suggests arrogance, anger, violence, and a huge reservoir of frustration. Why, I wonder?

This is a film about xenophobia. I wonder how successful Griffith is in presenting China and Chinese people sympathetically.

Birth of a Nation was technically advanced. Andrew Rausch’s book lists the many innovations this film introduced (see pp.34-35).

Some of these techniques appear in Broken Blossoms: cross-cutting, tinting, close-ups. In fact, we might call Broken Blossoms a film of close-ups. We have many instances of facial close-ups and mid-range close-ups (from torso up). The close-ups serve to intensify the emotional impact of the film.

The film gesture: perhaps the most famous feature of Broken Blossoms is the gesture Lucy (Lillian Gish) makes when her “Daddy” insists that she smile. She places her fingers to her mouth and pulls her lips into a smile. This gesture appears throughout the film, but most significantly in Lucy’s last close-up as she dies. Does this work?

Gesture: we have many instances of signature gestures in film (Bogart pulling on his ear in The Maltese Falcon, Wayne holding his forearm in The Searchers, Woody Allen‘s many ticks and mannerisms and those glasses, Henry Fonda’s play with the chair in My Darling Clementine). Can you think of others? The gesture reminds us of the body. It reminds us of non-verbal communication. It draws our attention to  character. The gesture reminds us of visual cueing. Not only do we have Lucy’s gesture in Broken Blossoms, but we also have Battling’s fists, various smoking apparatuses, and flowers. These serve as visual “symbols” or signs. Each of these signs communicates to the audience. What have I missed in the list below?

1. gesture of forced smile
2. clenched fists
3. flowers (used for various “gestures”)
4. the dolls and the one doll
5. smoking apparatuses
6. feet and foot
7. clothes
8. food
9. streets and sets
10. use of establishing shots (e.g. dark shots of night and ships, or dockside with workers sawing and  doing other things, shots with mist) 

Opening shots establish themes: we see various contrasts, and the film builds on contrasts:

1. children/sailors
2. east/west
3. young (children)/old (merchants)
4. Buddhists (peace)/sailors (rowdy and pugnacious)
5. Buddhist priests/American clergymen missionaries
6. Chinese part of town/dock side 

What do you make of the comment at the end of the film that this day has seen “40,000 casualties”?