This morning, in that twilight between sleep and wakefulness, when hallucinatory dreams are in full force, I started to hear the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. It was magical. Then I woke up.
A few hours later, I was still thinking about the incredible 9th when I remembered Leonard Bernstein’s performance in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It took only a few seconds of googling to be reminded that it was performed at Berlin’s Königliches Schauspielhaus exactly 20 years ago this evening, December 25, 1989.
It was an amazing performance. So much came together in one extraodinary moment – Bernstein’s career, the crumbling of the corrupt, authoritarian East German government, and a piece of music celebrating joy and freedom that culminates with the words of the poet Schiller, somewhat modified by Beethoven:
Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers, beyond the star-canopy
Must a loving Father dwell.
Be embraced,
This kiss for the whole world!
Joy, beautiful spark of divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
Joy, beautiful spark of divinity
The whole thing is available on You Tube. These are the last six minutes as they were performed 20 years ago this evening.
Music borrowed for use in a film does not remain unchanged in the process. Oh, the notes on the page stay the same, but the way the public perceives and hears a piece of music can be affected for decades by one high profile appearance in a film. Skilled filmmaking can fuse with great music in a way that elevates both.
On the other hand, great music can be diminished simply by its association with an atrocious film. I won’t tell you what atrocity of a film used Ravel’s Bolero, in the event that some of my younger students have been fortunate enough not to see it. It is a film that truly gets worse by the year.
I will, though, share with you this amazing outdoor performance of the piece by Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic. Part one is followed by part two. Watch how Barenboim lets the succession of soloists get ever so slightly bluesy. Watch the percussion section that, over the length of the piece, moves slowly from being virtually inaudible to all-out thunderous. Watch an audience that seems stunned into absolute stillness. And finally, watch Barenboim conduct with incredibly minimal movement of his body.
If film X buried Ravel’s Bolero, this 1998 performance is its rebirth. I just regret that it took me ten years to hear it.
P.S. Any comments naming the atrocious film will be deleted.
William Dieterle’s 1948 film Portrait of Jennie, starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, is one of my problem films.
As a kid I found it haunting and romantic before I even knew what the word “romantic” meant. For almost 50 years, I have “heard” the music of Claude Debussy that was borrowed for the film’s score, and adapted by Dimitri Tiomkin. It was perfect for a film about a man who falls in love with a ghost, a painting. Ghost music.
The problem is that I tried to watch it sometime this year and many, but not all, of the moments that gave me the shivers years ago had become trite. It did not hold up. It crumbled. It was dumb.
I was sorry I didn’t leave well enough alone and let the film remain a part of the magic of my childhood. But no: Mr. Smart Guy had to ask that riskiest of film questions: Did it hold up? I got my answer.
But the star, Jennifer Jones, was a beautiful, magnetic performer, and Song of Bernadette and Duel in the Sun are just two of the films in her considerable legacy.
But as I watch all the “Best of 2009” lists include Dave’s amazingly insightful and thoughtful book, I wanted to make sure that my students know just what is possible when an immensely talented journalist and scholar takes the time to understand an event sometimes dismissed as inexplicable.
Dave’s Columbine is the virtual opposite of the standard shlocky true-crime book. In fact, I hate to even mention it in the same breath as those overnight rush-jobs by self-styled criminologists who throw in every rumor and sensational news story and call it a book. Dave examines — with uncommon care and empathy — all of the many lives and social forces that came together at that horrible moment and the result is easily the best work about a sudden act of mass violence I have ever read.
I deal with enough difficult topics on Media and Mayhem that, to keep myself sane, I occasionally come up little features that are fun, all fun, and nothing but fun. Today I will start to occasionally share some of my favorite complete songs sung in films.
Warning: Very few of the songs come from musicals, but from films in which a full song with lyrics had a legitimate place in a script and moved a story forward.
My first choice is one of my favorites, maybe my favorite of all. “You Made Me Love You,” written for the musical The Honeymoon Express in 1913 by Jimmy Monaco and Joseph McCarthy. Judy Garland sings it to a photo of Clark Gable in Roy Del Ruth’s film, Broadway Melody of 1938. (MGM, 1937).
One of my undergraduate classes, Myths and Images in Mass Media, regularly explores the complex and extremely valuable structure of licensing, endorsements, tie-ins, and ancillary rights that can be built around some celebrities. At the same time that the celebrity’s image is created, nurtured, and protected, deal after deal is negotiated to exploit that image and profit from it.
This doesn’t require sainthood. There are celebrities cashing in whose carefully crafted and valuable image includes everything from outlaw to oddball. All that is required is that the celebrity outlaw or oddball have influence with some demographic group that a commercial interest would like to reach and exploit.
There are even a whole group of serious celebrity earners whose images are shaped and reshaped and exploited long after their absolutely final and irrevocable retirement, if you get my drift. In other words, Humphrey Bogart still does commercials.
Which of course leads to Tiger. Not much to say yet, but this will really be something to watch. How much will his personal problems tarnish the brand and how much of a price will he pay? Might we be on the verge of watching the ultimate case of celebrity brand fragility? Could his problems really bring down a brand this valuable?
Watch closely. There will be a lot to be learned here about celebrity, image, and commerce.
I see films depicting all sorts of human activity and culture and ritual. I see people engaging in incredibly diverse practices that they use to try and make sense of a sometimes confusing world.
And, while many good documentary films tell the stories of people who have acted nobly, sometimes they tell the stories of characters who engage in sense-making practices or rituals that seem to me to be everything from foolish to frivolous to downright despicable.
My bias, though, (and this is something that sometimes sets me apart from those who seem to dwell permanently in ridicule and cynicism), is that I always try to watch those practices from the standpoint of empathy, understanding, gentleness, and a serious attempt to see the world as the characters see it. And I also have a bias toward films that take this perspective. This is not the kind of empathy that condones actions, but the kind that struggles to see the world as someone else sees it.
I can think of many examples of films that resist using a sledgehammer and instead depict characters and their actions with empathy, even when most people would correctly find those actions to be unacceptable. I want to know why people do things, what world they see that makes those actions seem logical. I don’t mind an occasional film that ridicules the ridiculousness of some people’s actions, but for the most part I favorite insight over ridicule. In fact I find that filmmakers who strive for insight and empathy often end up with films that more completely and fairly condemn someone’s action than those filmmakers who set out simply to make fun.
Just off the top of my head, one recent example is Rose Rosenblatt’s and Marion Lipschutz’s marvelous The Educationof Shelby Knox. I love this film because it came to each character with humility, knowing that they each had constraints, responsibilities, and a whole life story that brought them to a given moment.
One fundamentalist minister, in particular, expressed views that could not be farther from my own. Yet because of the filmmaker’s attitude towards their subjects, and because they completely resisted making him look like a jerk, I was left with a real understanding of how this man sees the world and why he sees his fundamentalism as an antidote to forces that scare him. I still disagree with him, with more vehemence and anger than ever, but it seems to be a more informed and nuanced disagreement than the queasy feeling I had when Michael Moore ambushed Charles Heston.
Yes, Moore ambushed an impossibly foolish man and made him look — surprise! — impossibly foolish. Congratulations, Michael. But I did not find that to be even remotely insightful. I want to know more about the motivations and impulses, the historical and social contexts, that lead to such foolishness. And I am not saying that I want this in even a slightly didactic way. Audiences deserve this insight, and they deserve it in the context of an elegantly crafted and edited film.
You really should check out The Education of Shelby Knox. The forces that this courageous young woman confronts are considerable. Many of those who oppose her effort to disseminate good information about sex in secondary schools seem narrow and even venal. But this is the kind of extraordinary film in which even the actions of the ostensibly venal are presented with incredible insight and context.
However the new media economy shakes out, however the money is made, I am most hopeful that some successful format will be found that will allow the actual writers and creators to be paid for their labor. MBAs and assorted media gurus call this the monetization question: Who makes how much and how do they make it?
Snow of the northeast, how much do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.
Oh, I know. I’ve heard the speech for 35 winters.
“You’ve lived here all these years and California is in the distant past and the sun and waves and all that nonsense was a big illusion and you forgot that the California dream was a fantasy that hid all the ugliness and sprawl and freeways and earthquakes and you get to live in such an exciting place so why can’t you shut up about a place called Laguna Beach that was the center of the world and stop playing the darn Beach Boys music and just settle back and enjoy the:
Change of Seasons!
Yes, that is the much-touted pathetic alternative to sunshine back here. The change of seasons. I am told I should believe that the mystical “change of seasons” is actually something more profound than what it looks like — a depressing moment when we change from a warm and sunny and hopeful world to a cold and overcast and hopeless world.
So I ask again: Snow of the northeast, how much do I loathe thee?
You see, it really doesn’t matter that I have spent more than half my life in New York and New Jersey. Every year I try to get myself in the frame of mind for a real hot-chocolate, fire-place, and wool sweater winter. Every year I tell myself that I won’t just love the movie Fargo, but that I will also love traipsing around in ice and snow and even love the pitch black of night that comes at around 4:40 PM in the afternoon.
I will nest. I will turn on the stupid Crockpot and put on sox. Maybe I’ll even buy one of those idiotic zip up blankets they sell on the infomercials, the ones that look like straight-jackets. I will turn inward.
And every year I loathe it.
Thank goodness for one exception: We have friends down the block who punctuate winter with a beautiful and moving celebration of Christmas, an observance they center more on the lessons of the nativity than the crowds of the mall. But that’s not for a few weeks.
Today we are having our first snow.
So feel free to join me in welcoming the first snowfall with my traditional celebratory ritual, the viewing of the web cam.
This is Poipu Beach on the Island of Kauai, where the sun shines and the waves break , a place where you turn inward as a spiritual exercise and not because it’s too disgustingly wet and cold to open the front door.
That is why I want to call your attention to The Taxi Takes on Terror, an ambitious effort by a talented young artist to confront terror and find common ground between diverse people through the surprizing lens of a taxi in crowded Mumbai. Vandana Sood is a graduate student in our MFA program in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College. Her thesis project is a mesmerizing use of both video and other new media tools to examine the aftermath of the Mumbai massacre.
What makes the project so fascinating is that the “frame” she chooses for her exploration are the taxi cabs of Mumbai, spaces both public and private in which drivers and passengers — surrounded by the passing tumult of street life — try to make sense of such painful events. As Vandana asks on the home page of her web site:
“What happens when people from different class backgrounds, literacy levels or religious faiths sit across from each other in a taxi and take a journey together? Can this setting provide fertile ground for a rich dialogue about modern terrorism?”
The results of her journey through the tumultuous streets of Mumbai are at once profound and beautiful. And the temporary coming together of diverse people in a taxi does turn out to be an extraordinary moment for reflection and expression. She captures a number of these interactions on film and also gives us a fascinating glimpse at the taxis themselves, vehicles that — inside and out — are extraordinary objects of art.
I invite you to take a look at Vandana’s The Taxi Takes on Terror. It is a work intended to stimulate discussion and debate. Feel free to leave comments and engage in the discussion she has initiated.
And see just what is possible when a talented video-maker and digital artist — working in the aftermath of an epic act of terrorism — chooses the unique context of a taxi to explore matters of conflict, violence, hope, life, and death.
MEDIA AND MAYHEM 