Confession: I am a fanboy collector of Raymond Durgnat’s self-published, comic-book size Motion magazine.  In particular Motion #4, Companion to Violence and Sadism in the Cinema.  On its cheaply printed cover, an apparition appears.  Or should that be reappears?  The British Board of Film Censors had decided to ban an ingenue of unsettling beauty, or rather, to ban the Italian Gothic launching her star career, Black Sunday (1960). 

I won’t even attempt neutrality, a critical appreciation of the sacred image turning Raymond Durgnat’s paper bauble into my own personal Rosetta Stone.  Barbara Steele meets our gaze with eyes as glassy as the camera lens, face dotted with perforations black as her pupils, so it’s like being stared at by a dozen eyes at once, windows not of any soul, but of an obsidian emptiness.  Durgnat was hardly immune to those unnamable subtleties called presence. 

In the past, many Palestinians and Arabs followed Israeli elections closely.

They did so not because they entertained illusions that a Zionist leader would deliver peace and justice, dismantle the occupation or remove illegal settlements. Rather, they feared that some Israeli leaders were worse than others. They hoped to avert the worst-case scenario.

While living in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood in the 1920s, Henry Miller quit his job at Western Union and surrounded himself with all the trappings he felt were necessary to become a great writer. In the second-floor parlor of his Sixth Avenue brownstone, he had a roll-top desk, a sheaf of blank paper, several sharpened pencils, and a bunch of chairs surrounding the desk  where all his other writer friends would sit as they discussed literature. He also had a supportive (if crazy) taxi dancer of a wife in the form of June Smith, and no day Job to distract him from his more important work. Unfortunately, for all the trappings, he never found the spark he so desperately wanted to capture, and his early stabs at fiction were stale, clunky, and kind of embarrassing. 

In 1949, Mack McCormick, a blues historian and Smithsonian advisor, claimed to have seen musician and singer Henry Thomas on the street in Houston. Thomas would have been about 75 years old at the time. The disheveled character, McCormick said,  stood six-foot-three, just like Thomas, and was wearing several layers of clothes. He mentioned nothing about the tall stranger singing or even carrying a guitar, but he was pretty sure it was Thomas anyway.

For those of The Chiseler’s readers who’ve forgotten or don’t know, Clifford Odets and John Garfield – both many years dead now – had been subpoenaed to appear in Washington, DC before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950s to answer a now familiar barrage of questions about their political affiliations and such of their acquaintances as might have held similar beliefs.  They responded in significantly disparate ways – decisions that reconfigured their lives from that point on.

(This collage by André Breton, made up of phrases cut out from newspapers and assembled to make up a poem, was pasted into a copy of his book “Les Pas Perdus” which is now in private hands.)

Denise

Your eyes

The loveliest spot in France

Three stars on a

Submarine

Reveal

The harvest

Of turners

For love of you

                                                                        It seems

                                                                        These things exist

As friends growing up in the Bronx in the early ‘20s, Jules Garfinkel and Clifford Odets shared a number of things in common. Both were in the process of surviving stereotypically tough Bronx childhoods, neither received much by way of a formal education, and by the time they were in their teens, both had decided they wanted to be actors. In the end, despite their wild individual successes, a single play would link them, becoming a running subtext in both their lives.

In 1931, Odets became a charter member of Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford’s Group Theater, which for better or worse introduced The Method to far too many young New York actors. After appearing in a few small supporting roles in the troupe’s productions, however, it was gently suggested to Odets that he might be of more use to the troupe writing plays than actually appearing in them.

This essay intends to explore an axiom every cinephile will profess but few sincerely believe: Film is light.  

There are times, though, when that light may take on a Stygian cast, burning with a flamme noire severity, a weird and otherworldly keenness. Or it may burn lurid and loud — especially if it’s a very old film, acting like a séance that summons the unruly dead. The darkness in cinema best typified by that form we call film noir is in its essence an extension of the peculiarly American darkness of Edgar Allan Poe.  

What has Poe been to the movies — beyond a kind of literary convenience store where filmmakers can casually shoplift inspiration without penalty? Taken alone, the endless screen adaptations (Poe in Cinema) shortchange serious students of film history with a few impoverishing names and dates to guide them. Here, the writers propose a new cosmology of authorship within the porous nature of celluloid: we will examine Poe as the presiding intelligence over cinema itself (Poe as Cinema); shorthand to unify under one governing conceptual provenance a living medium previously victimized by autopsy scholarship. Taking for granted that motion pictures are pictures first and foremost, a spectacle above all else, we ask a few awkward questions: How, for instance, do movies absorb the written word? Do they, rather, absorb the author? To what extent should we worry about this mechanical creature, which seems to be parasitic — a replacement for the viewer’s brain?

“America, as a social and political organization, is committed to a cheerful view of life,” Robert Warshow wrote in his seminal 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Democracies depend on the conviction that they are making life better and happier for their citizens; only feudal and monarchical societies can enjoy the luxury of fatalism or a fundamentally pessimistic view of life. Praising the gangster genre as a form of modern tragedy, Warshow also accounts for film noir in his statement that, “There always exists a current of opposition, seeking to express by whatever means are available to it that sense of desperation and inevitable failure which optimism itself helps to create.” The gangster’s demise is the purest American tragedy because it is driven by his mania to climb the ladder of success. The end of his saga is inevitable, so in chasing success he is really chasing failure; his self-destructiveness expresses defiance at the inevitability of defeat, but also confirms it.

The credits of Hotel du Nord ripple on moving water; images of circulation and fluid connection flow through the film. It is set on the banks of the Canal St. Martin in Paris—not a river like those that run through Renoir’s work, but a quiet backwater, a workaday artery that offers passage and movement but not escape or purification. In the film’s opening scene, guests at a dinner party talk about blood transfusions, a subject brought up by Prosper (Bernard Blier), an overweight and comically self-serious man who picks up extra money by selling his blood. One woman says she would be disgusted by the thought of her blood in someone else’s body, while another retorts that blood is blood. With heavy irony, a third person objects that the topic is inappropriate conversation for a First Communion celebration. The communion hints at something no one in the film ever quite achieves: transformation.

The characters in Hotel du Nord (1938), all residents of the eponymous boarding house, are frustrated dreamers in cramped, confining quarters. But their lives and identities have fluidity and mutability; despite their tendencies toward suicide and romantic passivity, they’re not automatons of fate. Neither are they independent agents or authors of their own lives. They just muddle along.

At the center of the film lies a bungled double suicide. While the First Communion party grows livelier, a morose young couple, Pierre and Renée (Jean-Pierre Aumont and Annabella), check into the hotel intending to die together. Pallidly beautiful, they lie on the bed in an ecstasy of morbid romanticism, imagining their deaths as a honeymoon trip, an escape to freedom, a crossing over to “the other side.” Throughout the film, characters dream of travel and departure, but never go anywhere. The prostitute Raymonde (Arletty) says that the happiest day of her life was when she “embarked” on a boat ride on the Seine. Later, when she and her lover Edmond (Louis Jouvet) are packing for a trip to Toulouse, she tells the maid in lavish detail about the pleasures of traveling with Edmond—then reveals that she’s never been anywhere with him. Much later, Edmond travels to Marseilles with Renée, who survived the botched suicide attempt, and as they plan to take a boat to Port Saïd, she repeats the speech about escape and crossing over that her lover made before shooting her.

Throughout our history, we’ve always been instructed to be terrified of one diabolical  group of outsiders or another. Pick any era, and it can be identified in part by who or what we were fretting over—anarchists, communists, the Japanese, the Italians, Satanic child molesters, terrorists. But over that same period, as all those other fears came and went, one remained constant and true, and only one: we have always been absolutely terrified of our teenagers. Why do they act like that? Why do they talk like that? Why are they so rebellious and sullen? What the hell have they got to be sullen about? And that godawful music! Time was these were all undeniable symptoms that our kids were using drugs, experimenting with sex, or hanging out with a tough crowd. Nowadays the dominant unspoken question seems to be “When is my kid gonna shoot up his school?” The context has changed, the methodology has changed, but ultimately that question is merely a slight variation on the same question American adults have been asking all along.

If Mynona hadn’t existed, somebody would have had to invent him. And they did.

For more than 2,000 years leading up to Mynona (AKA Salomo Friedlaender, 1871-1946), since Moses and his tablets broke the bond between God (or the gods) and the world, leaving us only the Word, Western thought was on a collision course with…itself. Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, carefully studied by Mynona, was the ultimate attempt at damage control. He presented an intellectual system that accepted the mind’s divorce from phenomena (nature, to put it less technically) even as it built bridges among other minds via universal a priori concepts. Among them were certain capacities of the imagination. Indeed imagination was the only thing that could rescue objective reality from the status of an illusion. The independent truth of the world couldn’t be proven, but it could be intuited and expressed. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, poets and artists, as ministers of intuition and expression, had glorious and heroic work to do, and they took it on with gusto. For them, exploring the contours of feeling and translating their discoveries into language was like coming to a vast banquet.